Les Mis-Obama Video--Powerful grandeur within a set piece

This is well done, see for yourself.



Props to the Ultimate Improv group. I still respond to grandeur like a kid. I get goosebumps from the awe of it all.

If you become VP, it's Canada for me--singalong

Brilliant.



The lyrics:

Hey Sarah Palin, do you tell them in Wasilla
That 4,000 years ago we roamed the planet with Godzilla
Is it true
I am so fucking scared of you
As number 2

Hey Sarah Palin, I think Alaska's very pretty
But just 100,000 people more than Oklahoma City
Yes it's true
Go look it up, Im telling you
Oh man, were through

Chorus
Oh, if you become VP, oh, its Canada for me (2x)
Its Canada for me

Hey Sarah Palin, did you really once inquire
Whether you could throw library books into a big bonfire
God, my eyes
This really might be our demise
This pack of lies

Hey Sarah Palin, just because you're good at shootin
Doesn't mean you have the ammo to negotiate with Putin
Are you on coke
This fucking countrys up in smoke
Oh what a joke

Chorus
Oh, if you become VP, oh what will it mean for me (2x)

Bridge
Just because I can see the moon
Doesn't make me an astronaut, you loon
Your foreign policy expertise is pooh
Do you really think a woman commits
To a candidate just because she has tits
Please tell me that this ticket is not true
I thought that there could be no worse
Than Cheney, but here you are, I curse
The madman who would cast a vote for you
And McCain too

Hey Sarah Palin, is it media distortion
Or would you tell a girl whos raped that she could not have an abortion
Its a new low
Who knows just how far you would go
Id rather vote for Ross Perot
Hey Sarah Palin I dont know
Where can we go

Chorus

Here's another:

The Bradley Effect: Have We Evolved?

Or is there a 21st century peasantry with an atavistic fear of the "other" who also know it's socially unacceptable and therefore hide it to pollsters?





Norm Solomon, over on Alternet warns progressives that any crystal ball that says it's in the bag for Obama is a fake. It's far from over.

Here's his take on the Bradley Effect:

There's also the matter of race -- and, more to the point, racism. "Many older Democrats quietly admit they will not vote for Mr. Obama because they fear he would put too many blacks in power, or be hamstrung in office by racial opposition," the New York Times reported from Florida on Oct. 4.

This fall, no one knows exactly how much we'll see of the "Bradley effect" -- named after the defeat of the black mayor of Los Angeles, Tom Bradley, who received conspicuously fewer votes from whites than election-eve polling had predicted when he ran for governor in 1982.

Polls involving a black nominee "have tended to undersell the level to which race negatively impacts voting -- particularly among whites," political reporter Chris Cillizza wrote on washingtonpost.com four months ago. "That is, a black candidate tends to underperform his or her polls on Election Day, as some voters who may have told a pollster they would support an African-American candidate ultimately decide against doing so."

The Bradley effect has a long history, Cillizza noted. "In other races involving a black candidate -- most notably Charlotte Mayor Harvey Gantt's candidacies against Sen. Jesse Helms in 1990 and 1996 as well as L. Douglas Wilder's victorious run for the Virginia governor's mansion in 1989 -- the Bradley effect came into play."

Some political analysts say that the Bradley effect has diminished and will have little or no impact on Obama. Maybe they're right. But I doubt it.

Then there's FiveTwentyEight, a site that's gained a large following for it's method of aggregating polls.

Here's the money quote from that article:

As we have described here before, polling numbers from the primaries suggested no presence of a Bradley Effect. On the contrary, it was Barack Obama -- not Hillary Clinton -- who somewhat outperformed his polls on Election Day.

What do you think? Have we evolved past our own dark hearts?

Science gets all mysticky and swears it's all true!

Quantum mechanics is inherently difficult to explain to the layladylay like me, but this outfit does a pretty good job of it. It's every bit as wild to contemplate as a fairy tale, but scientists swear it's what they've found.

Do I have to reinvent myself in every parallel universe? No wonder our psychic chatter is so loud. Enjoy. I'll be imagining my own reality.




Found at Ovablastic, a truly various experience.

No anti-government pretender should be elected dog-catcher

Frank Paynter of Listics fame is concerned, along with a lot of us. He left a sobering comment to my post about the conversation we'd been having on his blog. He wrote:

David Sirota says, "I fear for Barack Obama's safety in these final days. I really do. The conservative movement is not going to go down quietly - and with this upsurge in unbridled anger, I'm worried we're going to see some violence. I really hope I'm wrong - but I'm concerned."

At this point it looks like a landslide for Obama, and with that landslide a chance to begin to turn the country away from the oppression of a fascist corporatocracy. To do this though, we have to realize that the entire right wing -- from the deluded Ayn Rand fanatics to the Christian end-of-the-world cultists -- is essentially our "enemy." I hate that word, enemy. I would prefer to live in a world that isn't polarized in an us-or-them way. Sadly, we don't live in that world yet, so it pays to recognize the enemy and deal with them appropriately.

There is no reason an anti-government pretender should be elected dog-catcher in this country, much less President. Managing government, guiding decent policy creation is what government should be about. But these right-wing whack jobs have a different agenda, one that doesn't include democracy, one that gives away our common wealth to the most avaricious and power hungry.

Let's keep our fingers crossed that Palin's incitement (reflecting the McCain campaign's policy) doesn't create a situation where one of the people who actually believes in that right-wing b.s. takes it upon himself to rid the country of HIS enemy.

The power elite will do what it can to derail the electoral process and retain power. Let's just keep our fingers crossed that they will fail this fall.

I'm very worried at the high dudgeon the Republican "base" is in. I'm wary of them like one would be of a rabid dog, they are so adamantly out of touch with documented fact.

The pathological followers, and their outliers, are cause for real concern.

Republicans are angry and dangerous

These are the scariest people I've ever seen on public streets. Their only talking points seem to be Obama is a Muslim terrorist.

Were they all horribly mistreated as infants?

Donna Brazille Speaks to Racism and Says No Way

Donna Brazille rocks. She is conversationally eloquent and tells it to the people, all the people.

At The Yorker Festival: click here for video 4 min

Progressive Decay: St. Louis

Compassion: Scientifically Proven to Improve Health

Data from a new Emory University study suggests that individuals who engage in “compassion meditation” based on a thousand-year-old Tibetan Buddhist mind-training practice (called "lojong" in Tibetan), appears to effectively reduce the inflammatory and behavioral responses to stress that have been linked to depression and a number of physical illnesses. The practice revolves around fostering a sense of heightened compassion for others.

This is the best news I've heard in a long time. Finally, people can satisfy their own self interest by focusing on compassion rather than the judgment we usually run to for validation. Hmmm. This could be big.

Here's the link.

Frank Paynter and I talk scary shit

Frank Paynter is a comforting voice without the denial too many comforting thoughts demand of us these days. I mean, did we really just give our future GDP to fucking bankers? Has the road to martial law not been paved with 100% lawyer-certified goldshit bricks? Are there a million people on the homeland security watch list? Did we really kill a million Iraqisa? Torture? Disappearing? Held without charges? "Freedom Zones?"--it's just too much, especially in light of the presence of military crowd control specialists on US soil, tasked with putting down any civilian insurrection--not in so many words. Read it yourself.

Naomi Wolf has the naked and very raw sound of truth about her that's amplified by the very possible hazard that might await. The White House has absolute, unequivocable, disappeared-maybe-yes-you-too, power these days. When does power not get used?

I realize who haven't been following the low level chatter on this subject for as long as I have may think this is nuts as it gets, that I'm a whacked out conspiracy theorist with no tether on reality. Let's all hope so--those who partake, pray on it mightily, because nothing would please me more than being invade-Iraq wrong on this issue.

Why has Bush so thoroughly paved the way to declare martial law, built secret prisons, made it extra-legal to spy on Americans, hired his own army, reserved the "right" to detain who he wants without just cause, etc., etc., etc., when he's already taken over our children's tax dollars in a premature ejaculation of criminal largesse to proven and well-paid despoilers of the public good? Sorry, my sentences get long when I'm worried.

I don't sleep like I used to. Maybe I'm over-tired and overwrought. But I really am afraid that I'm not. I would love to spin myself into a little cocoon of magic in which this all went away, we have our lovely President Obama in January, and Bush, et al, slink into the ignominy and public humilation they labored so diligently to earn.

Let me know what you think after clicking the links and reading through all this.

Bremer, Bird and Fortune: Distraction for a Trying Day

British humor tends to the dry, but there's no escaping the funny in this lovely bit of British humor. Dinner party conversation turns to recycling and as though a truth serum is in the pasties, we hear how these upper crusters really feel about being put out to save the environment.

Favorite line? "The terrorists have won."