I’m done with this shit. I’m done with walking on eggshells when I talk to my Jewish friends about Palestine. I’m done with listening to the myriad of personal prerogatives from every conceivable Muslim and Christian Arab Levantine sect. And I’m especially done with any Biblical/Quranic/Talmudic references justifying violence against one tribe or another. I’m done with Jews saying everything is about “security”. It isn’t. I’m done with Palestinians blaming everything on Israel. I’m done with it!
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Since our apartment complex is a tight-knit bunch of people, we all decided to get together and have a pre-Thanksgiving potluck before everyone flew to the four winds for the holiday. Last night we all got together in the courtyard, each of us bearing delicious trays that we had prepared for the occasion. Since we have a huge ethnic diversity in the complex, we had everything from Hungarian food to Filipino food to Mexican and even good, old-fashioned gumbo, a Louisiana favorite. I ladled up a spoonful of the hot, savory stew over some brown rice and inhaled deeply; the aroma is something I haven’t smelled since I was a teenager in the deep South. Continue reading
In news that I’m sure is shocking to absolutely no one, when last night’s election results are compared to the polls conducted by Rasmussen Reports, it turns out that Scott Rasmussen put a sweaty, slab-like, thumb on the scale in favour of Republican candidates at both the Presidential and US Senate levels. I decided to do a comparison between last night’s results and Rasmussen’s final polls so that I could quantify for all of our information just how much bullshit Rasmussen is shoveling.
Before I get into the meat of the subject, a few ground rules for this comparison. I looked at states for which Rasmussen Reports published polls with field dates falling within the last three weeks (for the vote for President) or the last four weeks (for the Senate races) before the election. If Rasmussen published more than one poll during that period, I looked only at the most recent one. I have calculated what I refer to as a “net miss”, which is stated as either R+X or O+X. That number is calculated by adding or subtracting the amount by which the Rasmussen poll number for each candidate differed from the final result for that candidate. If Rasmussen showed a given race with Romney five points over his final result and Obama three points under his final result, that would be noted as R+8. Continue reading
One of the things you get used to living in the deep South is kudzu. The stuff’s everywhere; it’s probably the hardiest plant in existence, surviving periods of intense heat and cold, all manner of chewing bug and animal, and it creeps up to three feet a day. I imagine if there were a camera in space over a long enough period of time, you could string together a time-lapse video of the stuff actually expanding outward. Continue reading
Twelve months of campaigning, billions of dollars in campaign spending and enough enough hacktastic advertising to shame even the slimiest local used car dealer finally comes to a head tonight. Based on the stories already coming out of the several states, fraught with reports of broken down voting machines and attempts at disenfranchisement, this is shaping up to be a long, painful night for all those involved.
As your intrepid live-blogger is a full-on masochist (he is a Cleveland Browns fan, after all), he will bring you all of tonight’s punditry, pontification and premature fapping at Florida going for Romney.
The polls start closing down at 7:30, but it seems plausible that many states will have voters going well past that based on them getting in line ahead of poll closings. We’ll start the party around 8:30, but feel free to bathe in your own vodka-glow in the comments before that. Continue reading
If it were the late 1960’s and we were existing in a time when Kings of the Universe, like the Don Draper type, reigned would we acknowledge the only jobs that would be considered respectable and acceptable for a woman outside of helping the war effort in times of dire need, would be either secretary, teacher, or nurse, but never the subversive desire to write barn-burning articles for the local newspaper about inequality between the sexes and how few really seem to care about the concerns of the so-called fairer sex. Mostly. Continue reading
A very special thank you to Ornery Babe and Cletar who helped put this endorsement together.
Listen, if Michael Bloomberg can take time out from hurricane recovery to endorse a Presidential candidate, it’s only fair for the wise and occasionally sober scribes of Crasstalk to do the same.
Admittedly, the path to this Election Day has been long-six years long for one candidate, in fact. The cost, has been excessive-more than $2.5 billion, to be precise. And on the eve of that election, through the speeches, the conventions and the ads-Good God- the ads, we must decide between two men for the opportunity to occupy the White House for the next four years.
Who do we, the brilliant minds at Crasstalk, believe best to lead this nation through the next four years of corporate pillaging?
It was often hard to remember, but I was one of the lucky ones. Very lucky ones, in fact.
My sole issue was that I didn’t have power. While I did have a generator for keeping my fridge cold and sump pumps working, it did not connect to my hardwired furnace. So the house was bone chillingly cold. So cold that despite having power and heat for over 18 hours now, I cannot shake the shiver in my bones. Steaming baths, hot showers and a trip to my health club’s sauna have not helped. Still, I know how lucky I am. Continue reading
Today’s topic: redrawing the battle lines. Continue reading
The madness has subsided. We’re safe and comfortable, which I realize is more than I can say for a lot of people in New Jersey, Queens, and elsewhere. We were far from the worst of it, I know. But I figured I might as well set everything down now before it washes away like so many trees and debris.
I would hope that those of my friends who thought it was ‘all a bunch of hype, just like Irene’ are now sufficiently chastened. But I don’t think even those of us who took it seriously expected something on this scale. As of Monday evening I was envisioning something like the following: staying in while drinking wine and eating all the snacks we’d stocked up on and playing Settlers of Catan by candlelight until the power went back on in a day or so, at which point we’d switch to watching movies until the subways came back in another day or so and I no longer had an excuse to stay home from work. Continue reading