On October 10, 2007 Brzezinski along with other influential signatories sent a letter to President George W. Bush and Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice titled 'Failure Risks Devastating Consequences'. The letter was partly an advice and a warning of the failure of an upcoming
US sponsored Middle East conference scheduled for Nov 2007 between
Israelis and Palestinians. The letter also suggested to engage in "a
genuine dialogue with Hamas" than to isolate it further.
Roy Edroso posts his "top 10 stupid right-blogger tricks" for 2008 at The Village Voice. An excerpt:
Pop stars made a video for Obama and the American Spectatorcompared it to Triumph of the Will. National Review called Obama's national service plan the "Obama Youth." Obama spoke in Germany, and Melissa Clouthier compared his signage to that of the Third Reich.
Jonah Goldberg said liberals only liked Obama because they didn't know any real (that is, poor and dangerous) black people; Taranto
said Democrats were intimidated into nominating him, as an old lady
might be intimidated into surrendering her purse to a mugger.
And as he says, and we agree, it was a very odd year. For example,
It was the year when it finally became apparent that the West's economy
was entirely based upon the ruling class's willingness to believe in
the literal existence of golden unicorns that shoot rubies out of their
eyes and gold bricks out of their arses, leading to massive government
investment to shore up the ruby-shooting, gold-shitting unicorn
industry...
...And it was a year in which the great and the
good leapt to their feet in spirited defence of lowly Georgia, finally
opening their mouths to righteously denounce the mighty Russian
bastards, before slowly sitting back down, opening their newspapers and
pretending they'd never spoken as it emerged that the Russo-Georgian
War was a bit more of a level-bastardry field than we had initially been led to believe.
Here are a few specifics (he worked backwards starting with December 2008) from Part 1:
The HuffPost has Daniel Kurtzman's list with a whole string of videos. We posted quite a few of these here, but it's so nice to have them all lined up in one place.
I think this deadpan (東京オンリーピック 開会式＜フルバージョン＞) animated take-off of the Olympics may be one of the subversively funniest videos of the year....
As he says, "the giant motorized pigeons feasting on acrobats [and]...[t]he giant Buddha sweeping teams of competitors off his tongue into the Olympic pool" are alone worth the time. But there so much more.
HuffPost has a whole slideshow of presidents OTHER than President-elect Obama whose pecs became public domain. (Reagan frightened us, and we were sad to see that when he isn't leveling his razor-like stare at the camera, Putin is kind of a....well, a hottie.)
Even more shirtless presidents (American) here at Gawker. And if that ain't enough, go here.
We are talking about rhetorical courage, the
puffed-chest bravado and keyboard-rattling grandiloquence from which
true heros are made. Whether they are warning off the Moorish hordes,
threatening to start a civil war if they don’t get their way,
fearlessly yelling racial slurs from behind a pseudonym on the
internet, or steadfastly proclaiming their indomitable will to continue
blabbing on about all the super-butch things they’d do if only they
hadn’t already made plans to play Starcraft, these Warriors of Words are truly our last line of defense against not having to listen to them.(The Poor Man)
Though it was nominated for a Grammy, we just don't think there's been nearly enough screaming about Harry Shearer's musical send-up of the Bush administration's main players. If you've had all the peace and good will you can handle, you might enjoy a bit of black comedy, in diverse musical stylings.
If you're looking for a last-minute Christmas gift for a progressive friend, we don't see how you could do better than this album (available at I-Tunes):
The zoo separated them because they kept stealing other penguins' eggs---"they were caught
placing stones at the feet of parents before waddling away with their
eggs." (MailOnline) This is the sweet part:
But angry visitors to Polar Land in Harbin, northern
China, complained it wasn't fair to stop the couple from becoming
surrogate fathers and urged zoo bosses to give them a chance.
Colbert fights in the war against the war against Christmas. "Christmas really burns atheists up, which they can think of as a preview of their afterlife.".
Via expert hair deconstructor Princess Sparkle Pony---which gets a special mention---this CNN video comments on the probable role of Blagojevich's hair in the current scandal.
In an interview with Fareed Zakaria, Powell slams Palin and Limbaugh and says the military should rethink its "don't ask--don't tell" policies. HuffPost has relevant portions of the conversation here.
Keith Olbermann hits "the conservative trifecta," says Danny Shea, with O'Reilly winning the gold medal, Hannity winning the silver, and Will coming in last with the bronze.
Conservative Andrew Breitbart intends to start a new website on which conservatives will review films. Derrierism, a new school of film criticism that Jon Swift identified in August 2007---and a tag which made its way into the Urban Dictionary--- has evolved from "an esoteric school of film criticism championed by a few forward-thinking critics." (Swift 12-9-2008). Quoting extensively from Mr. Swift, the Urban Dictionary defines derrierism as follows:
The critical method of judging movies by whether your buttocks moves in
the seat while watching them. Derrièrists dispense with such niceties
as subtlety and thought in movie criticism, believing that
intellectuals, relativists, existentialists, pacifists, and no doubt
the Communist Left have had the upper hand in film-making for too long.
In short, a "derrierist" is a film reviewer who pulls film reviews out of his---or indeed her---ass.
I posted the video in its original form ages ago at my first blog, but here it is with the musical accompaniment that---pace HuffPost--- has caused it to go viral.
Among us are a couple of religious people---even one very religious person---and we all agree that when Jesus said "Give what belongs to Caesar to Caesar and what belongs to God to God", he was endorsing the view that mixing religion with politics just makes everyone mad.
John Cole has an excellent post on why citing God as your authority never really persuades anyone.
As they're
big on displacement, whenever some atrocity occurs wingers accuse
liberals of showing insufficient outrage. It's not so much a policy
prescription as an accusation of psychological unfitness because,
though we agree that we would rather kill terrorists than let them kill
us, we don't express it in blood-curdling howls...
