22 posts tagged “america”
And can we just take a moment to appreciate that America is now a country where minorities have to do their own work discouraging the tyranny of the majority? Have we conceded to the right on the 'activist judges' thing? The entire reason we have the Supreme Court is to prevent the drooling majority from imposing its will on the blacks, the Latinos, the goths, the gays, the midgets, the left-handers. If we had this proposition-palsy at a national level, I'd still be using the higher drinking fountain, for fuck's sake.
So we've clearly entered the period of election season where you just concoct shit to pundit-slap your opponent.
'Learning about sex before learning to read? Barack Obama: Wrong on education, wrong for your family.'
The best accusations are the ones that are so cartoonishly false they can't be refuted. The only way to plead innocent to this one, for example, is with a soundbite saying 'I do think children should learn to read before they learn about sex.' Which is like declaring 'No one should be forced to sit down to pee.' It's so un-disagreeable it's a nonsequitor in every context, and you sound like Oliver Obvious for saying it in public.
What we've learned this week is that Politician Training Wheels entail:
1. Find a reasonable or benign statement by your opponent that sounds bad if you hear it a certain way. This is called Beavis and Buttheading. ("Heh. Heh. He said 'lipstick.'")
2. Remove all context, like an Ebert quote on an Adam Sandler movie poster.
3.
React to the most outrageous imaginable interpretation of the
statement, as if it was blurted in the middle of a long silence or
worn on a T-shirt.
"You can put lipstick on a pig. It's still a pig. You can wrap up an old fish in a piece of paper and call it change. It's still going to stink after eight years. We've had enough," [Obama said].
[...]
Soon after Mr Obama's comments, McCain aides produced an election campaign ad referring to "sexism in American life", and accusing the Illinois senator of "smearing" Mrs Palin, governor of Alaska.
Do you think McCain acts like this in real life?
Republo-friend: Yeah, my girlfriend's sick. She wanted to go to work, but I told her she should probably just stay in bed.
McCain: So you think that women should be locked up and given prison-noogies until their male captors allow them to limp toward wellness and freedom? You: Wrong on the flu, wrong for American women.
B&Bing
can work for the good guys too, though. McCain is a teetering old man,
surely there's some shit we can mangle into a decent baritone voiceover.
McCain: 'The traditional definition of marriage is between a man and a woman.'
Advertisement: John McCain wants to trade your wife for a goat.
McCain: 'Drilling in Alaska is a way to ensure our future.'
Advertisement: McCain will feed crude oil to your newborn baby.
McCain: 'I served more than 12 years in the United States Navy.'
Advertisement: John McCain fucked your sister.
As of today, stores in Denmark will no longer accept the 25 øre coin. This has happened with a minimum of fanfare, and the population seems to regard the disappearance of their country's worthlessest metal with the resignation of a pensioner being told he can't go waterskiing anymore.
The 25 øre coin is worth somewhere between 'woodchip' and 'whatever'. A good sign that it's time to phase out a denomination is when you routinely decide that it's not worth the effort to reach up to the cash register for your change. I have left dozens of these things paperweighting receipts because I can't be bothered, after bagging my groceries, to go fetch them from the register-teen.
Meanwhile, in my humble homeland, the penny-protecting Americans for Common Cents ("The penny plays an important role in our everyday lives and in our nation’s economy") is still competing for World's Most Useless Cause.
"The penny enjoys overwhelming support from the majority of Americans. Eliminating the penny is a losing proposition because it will result in rounding to the nearest nickel and higher prices for America’s working families."
This smells like the same goblins who tried to
keep Pluto designated as a planet out of sheer nostalgia. There's something almost admirable about groups that are opposed to any kind of progress whatsoever. It's like being anti-sunrise. Never mind that this has happened in dozens of other countries in the past 20 years, to no remote effect. Down with inevitability!
So way to go, Denmark. You disappeared a piece of pocket detritus and made my life incrementally less inconvenient. And when, tomorrow, the streets are paved with the sunken faces of Denmark's working families, the cruel victims of rounding, I will know exactly what policy to thank.
From the Economist this week:
There is a genuine chance that, even after almost eight years of George Bush’s calamitous presidency, the voters may actually opt for another stint of Republican administration. In part this reflects the weaknesses that lie alongside the charismatic skills paraded by Mr Obama in Denver this week: his inexperience, especially in foreign affairs, at a time when the world looks more and more complex and troubling, and a certain cerebral aloofness that seems to make it hard for him to connect with Middle America.
Obama has a 'cerebral aloofness'? That's clearly Economese for 'intelligence'. When did America become a country where being smarter than you is a disqualification for office? This Obama knucklehead better be smarter than me, dammit, and I sure hope he's smarter than the McRibs in the square states.
I've been trying to shush the Snob Devil on my shoulder this campaign, but it's disheartening to see two grown men pander to the spectres and scapegoats of idiots for so long.
One of the major missed opportunities of the post-primary months, from my stink-cheese-munching vantage point, has been the refusal of both candidates to elevate their base, rather than pander to it.
It would have been great if John McCain had said 'Look, you have to pick one of us. We both believe in evolution. We both believe that waging a War on Terrorism is like waging a war on sports, or cursive handwriting. Gas prices are not going to go down. Europe is our friend. Muslims are not scary, only their wedding parties are. People in cities have problems too. Mexicans didn't take your job, GM took your job. Oh, and someone saying 'happy holidays' on the Macy's intercom does not mean that there's a 'war on Christmas'. Fuck.
'The previous facts are the retardation-baseline for this particular election. We invite you to join the rest of the educated world and debate how we are going to solve our actual problems. Or, you could just write in Romney.'
Note to journalism: When trying to convey the tragedy of a young person's sexual exploitation, it's probably best not to insert incredible hilarity into the top half of your story.
A former youth minister was sentenced this afternoon to 120 days in the Manatee County jail and two years of probation for secretly videotaping girls as they undressed in his homes in Bradenton and Ellenton over a two-year period.
Matthew Porter, 31, was found guilty of nine counts of voyeurism, a misdemeanor. He had admitted to hiding video cameras in his bathroom and bedroom and taping girls between the ages of 12 and 16 changing clothes. Porter was a pastor at Bethel Baptist Church in Bradenton.
“It has hurt her very bad,” said the mother of one girl. “I saw that she posted on her MySpace page she would never trust a pastor again.”
No offense, but ell-oh-ell, seriously.
The only actual news contained in this story is:
1. Parents now check their children’s social-networking pages for news of their post-violation moods (‘What emoticon are you right now, Jessica!?') and
2. There are still people who trust youth pastors.
A group of university and college presidents in California and across the country this week pushed for a national debate over whether the drinking age should be lowered from 21 to 18.
The current limit ignores the reality of drinking during college years and drives it underground, making binge drinking more dangerous and students less likely to seek help in an emergency, according to a petition signed by more than 100 campus presidents. Though they don't call for an outright age rollback, the campus chiefs said they support "an informed and dispassionate public debate over the effects of the 21-year-old drinking age."Their statement provoked some controversy as critics contend that a lower drinking age will cause an increase in drunk driving deaths.
Steven Hirsch is a photographer who stands outside the New York City Courthouse and asks people coming out what they were on trial for. The answers are like watching a monster die in a strobe light.
Evan Munoz. I was in Stuyvesant apartment complex when these cops where harassing my girlfriend. They threw her against the wall and put her in cuffs and bruised her so I kicked one of the cops in the nuts three times and then spat in another another cops face and then they beat the shit out of me. Bloody and took me off to jail.
My name is Cori DeSilva. They said that I was in possession of stolen property, of a cell phone. So, you know. I bought it off a guy in the street for $10, and I went to return the phone, and got arrested for it. I called the person up, she said she wanted to meet me, I went to meet her, and she was a undercover officer, and they locked me up for it. Yeah, she called me first. She said "do you have my phone?" I said "yes, I have your phone." She said "how much did you pay for the phone?" I told her "ten dollars." She said "well, I'll give you double the amount for the phone back," and I agreed, and she wanted a place to meet, and we met, and it was undercover officers there, and they arrested me, locked me up for possession of stolen property.
I like the idea of an artist sitting outside each of America's institutional landfills -- schools, jails, social services, INS -- and just asking all the comers and goers what they're doing there. I want to see how many anecdotes it will take to capsize the USS Complacency.
Apparently it's all part of a child labor scam, and it's totally illegal, and sketchy, and untaxed, and just Naples as fuck.
I was reading a report on child labour in the U.S. today (Yes, I'm writing a human rights risk assessment of my own country. I'm a traitorous, homosexual Merkel-hugger. Deal with it.) and there's a whole warning website (called 'Sweatshop on the Streets') about those kids.
The Child Labor Coalition estimates that as many as 50,000 children work as youth peddlers on any given day of the year. They sell magazine subscriptions, candy, and other consumer items door-to-door in residential neighborhoods and on city street corners. The CLC estimates that this industry makes as much as $1 billion annually in untaxed sales revenue.
I had no idea.
It's all coming together now. It was always the ghettoest kids that came to my house with the cardboard box full of candy, and the recipient charity always had a not-quite-right quality about it, like those Nikes you buy off a street-blanket.
It was always doubly awkward for me, since a lot of times the Pol Pot Youth standing on my porch in a polo shirt went to my school, and had been bullying me just hours before. I usually took advantage of the slight home-team advantage to say something like, 'No I don't want to buy a Snickers, Trevor. Maybe I should call your boss and tell him that you spent second-recess throwing lunch trays at me like Frisbees.' This unfailingly resulted in combat escalation the next day, and I eventually started peephole-screening visitors after 6.
Anyway, thank you, Child Labor Coalition, for making me feel a little less guilty about saving my smug, teenage 35 cents. Maybe now I can find something to exonerate my family of giving trick-or-treaters handfuls of pennies instead of candy...
In Denmark, I spend a lot of conversations defending America from derisive laughter, eye-rolling, and assorted other cheese-fueled scoffery. Whenever I'm back here, though, I'm almost constantly reminded of the myriad ways in which my country is broken. I came across all of this in my first 48 hours back:
A survey of Americans' attitudes toward, among other things, religion:
58% of respondents support teacher-led prayers and 43% favor school holiday programs that are entirely Christian. Moreover, 50% would allow schools to teach the Bible as a factual text in a history class.
An article about American obesity:
The average American consumer eats three burgers and four orders of fries each week. A typical American child now gets one-fourth of his or her vegetables in the form of French fries or potato chips. Half our nation's family food budgets are spent in restaurants.
U.S. life expectancy data:
Despite the upward trend, the United States still has a lower life expectancy than some 40 other countries, according to the U.S. Census Bureau. The country with the longest life expectancy is Andorra at 83.5 years, followed by Japan, Macau, San Marino and Singapore.
The retirement of the head of the Federal Aviation Administration due to the continuing breakdown of American air travel:
Almost everything about flying is worse than [in 2002,] when she arrived. Greater are the risks, the passenger headaches, and the costs in lost productivity. Almost everyone has a horror story about missed connections, lost baggage, and wasted hours on the tarmac. More than 909,000 flights were late through June of this year, twice the level of 2002.
And this isn't even counting all the problems with health care, prisons, education and corruption I didn't come across in the last two days. How much worse does all this shit have to get before it gets better?
