News Trifecta

Free Stim-Packs

Fucking Congress. I can't post a lot with my current schedule, but once March rolls around and I have the time organize my views on the world through the peerless medium of the written word, my imaginary readers will realize that I have a bone to pick with Congress. This hardly makes me unique; Congressional Approval ratings have been in the single-digits for awhile now. But their actions lately have been indefensible. I'll put this as bluntly as I can.

CONGRESS IS STEALING FROM YOU. Not taxing you. Not just 'burdening the economy.' They are flat out stealing, giving your money to the Boards of Directors of giant financial firms so that these Boards can then bonus the money to themselves. Examples:

Merrill Lynch, the Bank of America subsidiary given $20 billion of your money two weeks ago, lost $15.3 billion in the fourth quarter of 2008, and yet bonused its senior managers $4 Billion dollars. Billion. With a B.

A.I.G. the ailing mortgage-backed security insurer that received $152 Billion in federal subsidies, bonuses it's managers $400 million.

These bonuses, mind you, come at time when these managers were so hopelessly corrupt and incompetent that they managed not only to crash their own firms, but also play key roles in collapsing the global economy. Yet they reward themselves with obscene amounts of money that were forcibly removed from your paychecks, and Congress does nothing.

Why is Congress doing nothing? Because they intentionally omitted fraud clauses from the stimulus package. At a time when they had maximum leverage over the financial industry, they gave the money without strings. Naturally, the thieves originally responsible for the crash simply stole the money.

We must all hope that President Obama has the good sense to tie fraud clauses onto his proposed $825 Billion dollar stimulus and that he instructs the U.S. Attorney to crucify anyone who dares mismanaged these gifts from the citizens' pockets.


100-0

Sports serve as fascinating microcosms for all manner of serious life events. George Orwell once wrote that sports are "bound up with hatred, jealousy, boastfulness, disregard of all rules and sadistic pleasure in witnessing violence. In other words, it is war minus the shooting." Yet sports can also reflect our fundamental human decencies and sense of honor and fair play, such as when a golfer loses a match (and several hundred thousand dollars) by calling a penalty on himself. American sports are dress rehearsal for almost anything, sports allow us to experiment with our human condition without lasting consequence. But the experiment reveals the worse angels of our nature just as often as the better. Consider the following headline:

"Covenant Christian defeats tiny Dallas Academy 100-0 in girl's basketball."

Covenant Christian is a nationally ranked high school basketball powerhouse. Dallas Academy has a student population of 20: it's a school for troubled youth. From accounts of the game, the Covenant girls were still using full-court press defense and jacking up threes in the 4th quarter. Having already defeated a hopelessly over-matched opponent, the Covenant coach ordered his charges to continue to run up the score.

I tried to imagine myself as the coach of Dallas Academy immediately after the game. These poor girls who, try as they might, couldn't manage a single basket, or even a free throw, the entire game. How powerless and weak they must have felt, not even free to surrender once defeat became inevitable, forced to play out the remainder of the game while bigger, stronger, faster kids mercilessly poured on gratuitous punishment. What words can a coach offer to console such profound humiliation?

Luckily, there is SOME humanity in this story. The principal of Covenant Christian promptly fired the coach responsible for this disgrace. In his apology to Dallas Academy, the Covenant principal admitted his school's team was guilty of "victory without honor." There is no satisfaction in obliterating the feeble. May the many, many other prep schools who beat up on cupcake opponents take heed.

Miss America Pageant Finally Sets the Right Example

So, as a guy, for the most part, I have little right to comment on female body-image issues, but plenty of self-interest. However, one thing that has always annoyed me is the idiotic polarization in the debate between fat and "skinny." On the one hand, the media quite wrongfully portrays the "ideal" image as the emaciated Hollywood dieter, thin but without appreciable muscle tone. Naturally, the Oprah Winfreys and Women Studies Professors of the world jump on their soap box and decry this artificial image. "Real woman have curves," they say. They point to Renaissance paintings of fat women and claim that's how a woman is "supposed" to look. And naturally, the overweight American populace uses this view to rationalize their couch surfing cheeto habits.
The problem here is that the debate creates a false dichotomy. Neither waifish nor chunky is the "ideal" body type, but they seem to be the only options presented by the media. Enter Miss America 2009.
Now, I've never watched a Miss America pageant. But I saw some photos from this year's contest and was immediately elated. No, not because the women were gorgeous and scantily clad. But because, for once, they were fit.
In years past, the contest has paraded out 50 super-thin starving model types and purported to crown one of them as the most "attractive." But not his year. These contestants were sculpted and muscular, appearing to spend as much time in the weight room as the fashion-model types spend puking up their breakfast. These girls looked hot and could kick your ass. Or mine.
Why is this cause for joyous social commentary? Because for once, American girls could see strong, healthy women exalted as the physical ideal, instead of the rail-thin Angelina-types. American boys could see healthy women as desirable, instead of being conditioned to chase the anorexics. Being strong and fit as a woman was finally shown as beautiful.
Presenting buff Amazonians as a positive body image also helps reverse the artificial aversion to resistance training for girls. Fearing that they'll "get buff," image conscious women resign themselves to spinning class, yoga or incomparably boring elliptical machines. But the reality is that women simply lack the testosterone to create large, bulky, masculine muscles no matter how much they lift. Lifting weights has unique and incomparable health benefits, some of which would greatly ameliorate serious women's health issues (osteoporosis springs to mind). It's also more time efficient than other forms of exercise; offering a great way for busy women to stay in top shape.
Hats off to the Miss America Pageant for finally helping to deconstruct the unhealthy 'ideal' that it helped to create.

Karl Rove is Full of Shit

Yes, I understand that the title of this blog is tantamount to exclaiming the profound blueness of the sky or the wet quality of rain. In his position as a political strategist, campaign tactician and all-around evil world domination genius, one would expect Karl Rove to be full of shit.

But Mr. Rove is currently employed by the Wall Street Journal's Editorial page. Relatively recently, the Wall Street Journal was purchased by an equally full of shit neocon lunatic, Australian media titan Rupert Murdoch. Yes, the same Rupert Murdoch who owns Fox News. On the surface, it seems to make sense that Murdoch would re-make the Journal in his own image and hire a first class false counselor like Rove. But not so fast.

When the Bancroft family sold the Journal to Murdoch as part of a merger between Dow Jones and Co. and Murdoch's News Corporation, they had but one stipulation: that the editorial page, helmed by the always restrained Paul Gigot, would retain complete independance. And so it has.

So why does Gigot allow Rove to use his precious pages to masturbate openly about the virtues of George W. Bush? Certainly even the most dedicated supporter of our second shrub president cannot agree with this gem, published this morning:

"Mr. Bush was right to match tax cuts with spending restraint. This is a source of dispute, especially among conservatives, but the record is there to see. Bill Clinton's last budget increased domestic nonsecurity discretionary spending by 16%. Mr. Bush cut that to 6.2% growth in his first budget, 5.5% in his second, 4.3% in his third, 2.2% in his fourth, and then below inflation, on average, since. That isn't the sum total of the fiscal record, of course -- but it's a key part of it."


Spending restraint? Bush spent like a drunken sailor, turning a budget surplus into a record deficit, driving us into debt that our children's children will be paying off most of their lives. Rove pretends that "nondiscretionary domestic" spending is some kind of yardstick of restraint. Let me translate that for you: Bush spend trillions in Iraq in a semi-private military operation so rife with corruption and waste that American taxpayers were blowing $200 on a load of soldier's laundry. But because he CUT the rate of spending growth here at home, on roads, schools and hospitals, we're supposed to belief he was a spendthrift conservative with our fiscal interest at heart? Spare me.

Try this other piece of ridiculous hyperbole:

"Mr. Bush was right to pass No Child Left Behind (NCLB), requiring states to set up tough accountability systems that measure every child's progress at school. As a result, reading and math scores have risen more in the last five years since NCLB than in the prior 28 years.

He was right to stand for a culture of life. And he was right to appoint conservative judges who strictly interpret the Constitution."

No Child Left Behind should have been called the "All Children Driven to Mediocrity." The Act, in short, forces schools to improve standardized test scores each year or face a cut in Title I funding.

Let's play a little hypothetical. Say you're the principle of Ghetto Elementary. Your students aren't scoring to the NCLB standards and you face a crippling funding cut that will make running your school nigh impossible. What do you do? You teach to the test. You focus on strategies to improve student test scores, instead of teaching them the subjects they need to advance to higher education.

And what about the smart kids? The gifted ones, who with proper instruction could grow to be the scientists and professors of tomorrow? Well, they're going to pass the NCLB tests no matter what, so you ignore them. Strategically, you have to ignore them so that you might funnel all of your teaching resources to raising the scores of the underperforming kids who are going to sink the school by failing the test. The smart kids, thus ignored, never get pushed, nor guided, nor inspired to be what society will someday need them to be. By trying to turn the future janitors into something they aren't, you ensure that the future physicians will never become what they should be.

These two examples, along with the dozens of others, illustrate that once Bush has what he thinks is a good idea in his head, no amount of evidence to the contrary can convince him of his mistake, especially after the policy has been implemented.

Paul Gigot already knows this about Bush. An editorial page should represent a range of ideas, but only so long as they are honest opinions, truly held by the author. Gigot shouldn't allow a unethical Bush stroke-boy to write articles that knowingly disregard fact in what was once regarded as the finest editorial page in the world.

The Blog Post

This post will explain the purpose of this blog. I have a name, but I'm not telling you. This is the internet people, anonymity is key. My pictures, also, will leave me more or less unidentifiable. I can't really be honest if anyone reading this knew who I was. Hell, I'd be surprised if anyone even reads this damn thing at all. I write it for myself more than anyone else. A journal. Here's what you need to know about me:

I'm a 26-year-old lawyer with a penchant for pained, angsty, impossible relationships. I graduated law school last year, having sailed all the way through from kindergarten. I'm currently studying for the bar exam in my spare hours outside work and am keenly aware of the competitive disadvantage I face against the full-time BarBri devotees. I work at a job with an ironclad expiration date and will soon join the unemployed masses to mire through this horrific economy, hoping to find a gig that pays the electric bill. Want to know more, read my profile when I get around to creating it. But you probably won't find anything that interesting. Really, who gives a fuck what my favorite movie is?

If you're bored enough to stumble across this page, here's what you can expect.

1. English. Not l337 speak, not nerd jargon. I will never replace the word 'you' with the letter 'U.' I think that if one can't bother to use proper spelling, grammar, and syntax in something he places in the public sphere then he shouldn't expect anyone to read his blithering blog.

2. Substance. I don't waste my keyboard or your time on my moods or feelings. When I do blog about my personal life, the post will have some kind of moral, message or theme. I'll write news analysis, book reviews, film reviews and on other current events or matters of interest of me.

Since I realize nobody will read this post until months from now (if ever), that's all I'm going to say at the moment. Bar study and ex-girlfriend angst awaits.

George Walking

He's leaving a mess. No nightmare is not over. In almost every conceivable way, George W. Bush leaves the United States in weaker position by his Presidency than it was in before he assumed (stole?) office. I'd prattle off the various ways in which he's damaged my country, but I don't all damn day. Suffice it say, the hangover begins now.

So why does it feel like one of the Wile E. Coyote's 100 ton ACME anvils will be lifted from my chest in a few short days? Why can't I help but crack a smile?

The most obstinate and overconfident man ever to assume the executive reigns will soon retire to a life of avoiding horseshit on his morning jog. For the first time in eight years, we won't listen to a President's weekly radio address wondering how many complete sentences he can successfully string together. We'll have a leader who doesn't force us to hang our heads in shame every time he opens his mouth. An eloquent man. A disciplined man. A man of intellectual gravity. A statesman.

Our lives may be worse. The world may be worse. Many of us wake each day to fear of protracted unemployment, knowing that if we ever manage to get a job, we'll spend the rest of our lives paying down the debt of eight years of irresponsibility. But I know that next Wednesday, I'll feel something that I haven't felt since the Fall of 2000. Pride in my country.

And for that, I think I actually have to thank George. He's given me a perspective that I never would have otherwise had. I now know that, for the rest of my life, I'll never have to endure the kind of deflating national shame that W wrought upon us all.