Here’s my weekly piece on Super Tuesday, as promised — and a snip from the Washington Post about Super Delegates that you won’t like.
Super, huh?? Pffffft!
But listen — if you haven’t voted yet, BY ALL MEANS, DO.
INTENTION is everything — some SD’s will look for the public pulse in so tight a race, even if they’ve already made a decision. It’s still in flux and YOU can make the difference!
Jude
Handicapped at the Track
by Judith Gayle, Political Waves
Nearly impossible for Hillary or Obama to win without SuperDelegates
John Aravosis, Washington Post
Thursday, February 07, 2008
Get ready for a bunch of congressmen and DNC officials to pick our nominee for us. Via Taegan Goddard:
The Washington Post’s Paul Kane:
“We’ve done a bad job of explaining this, but it is now basically mathematically impossible for either Clinton or Obama to win the nomination through the regular voting process (meaning the super-delegates decide this one, baby!).
“Here’s the math. There are 3,253 pledged delegates, those doled out based on actual voting in primaries and caucuses. And you need 2,025 to win the nomination. To date, about 55% of those 3,253 delegates have been pledged in the voting process — with Clinton and Obamb roughly splitting them at about 900 delegates a piece. That means there are now only about 1,400 delegates left up for grabs in the remaining states and territories voting.
“So, do the math. If they both have about 900 pledged delegates so far, they need to win more than 1,100 of the remaining 1,400 delegates to win the nomination through actual voting.
“Ain’t gonna happen, barring a stunning scandal or some new crazy revelation. So, they’ll keep fighting this thing out, each accumulating their chunk of delegates, one of them holding a slight edge and both finishing the voting process with 1,600 or so delegates. And then the super delegates decide this thing. That’s the math.”
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes.
February 8th, 2008
That Was The Week That Was … full of politics and blood, wicked weather and wonders of the illogical kind. Interesting how many mentions of food this week, from chicken wings to mud cookies [and just sit with the cookie factoid for a bit and wonder where our humanity went, not to mention the US footprint that contributed to it.]
Reminds me that Jupiter and Pluto in Cappy are bouncing off their opposite, food-obsessive Cancer — and the health oddities, including kidney-napping, are so very Saturn in Virgo. Food and health will be major challenges in the coming years, so consider these mentions a heads up.
By the way, here’s a bit to note — first it was bees, then birds … now its bats. Sigh. We’d better get a handle on this “colony collapse disorder” thing before it’s US!
Your bonus read is from Morford, because he tickles me — and this one strikes me as a “prover” of all things astrological; who among us has done a Uranus transit [the dreaded mid-life crisis] and not been blown sky high to land, like Dorothy with our skirt up around our ears, in some other version of Oz? The whole business of ‘aging gracefully’ comes under scrutiny in this piece, and aligns with my own thoughts on this — keep your wits about you, your humor in place and be discriminating about the consciousness you keep … or wizzle up like a raisin in the sun. The choice is yours.
Have a good weekend.
Jude
HARPER’S WEEKLY REVIEW
February 5, 2008
President George W. Bush unveiled a $3.1 trillion spending
package that would increase military funding while
protecting tax cuts, and Wal-Mart announced an economic
“stimulus plan” that offers steep discounts on thousands
of items, including a five-pound bag of Tyson frozen
chicken wings ($8.88) and two Hillshire Farms Cocktail
Smokies or Ropes ($5). Mississippi lawmakers introduced a
bill that would make it illegal for restaurants in the
state to serve obese people, and an unidentified robber
killed five women in a Chicago-area branch of the
plus-sized clothing store Lane Bryant. A camping-goods
website was selling a cheeseburger in a can. Police in
India uncovered a kidney-napping ring that preyed upon
impoverished laborers, farmers, and rickshaw drivers. “I
had no idea about kidney transplants,” said Shakeel Ahmed,
a laborer from Uttar Pradesh state. “I knew that these
people meant to do evil to me. When I woke up, a doctor
said I would be shot if I ever told anyone what happened.”
An unidentified donor gave $130 million to Bangladesh to
repair cyclone damage, and hungry Haitians were eating
cookies made of mud.
Abu Laith al Libi, alleged to be a high-ranking Libyan
member of Al Qaeda, was killed in a missile strike in
Pakistan. An Indonesian housewife became the 103rd person
to die from bird flu in that country, and an Iowa outbreak
of the rare lung disease histoplasmosis, a fungal
infection often spread by bird or bat droppings, was
traced back to a November 29 2007 American Lung
Association event at the governor’s mansion. Two
earthquakes killed 30 people in Rwanda and the Democratic
Republic of the Congo, thousands of Chadians fleeing
skirmishes in the capital N’Djamena sought refuge in
Cameroon, and UN peacekeepers in the disputed African
territory of Western Sahara were reprimanded for defacing
ancient rock paintings on Devil Mountain. Remnants of a
7,000-year-old city were found in Egypt’s Fayyum
oasis. Egypt and India were afflicted with limited
Internet service, and power failures in South Africa
closed mines and shopping centers for several days. In
China, where hundreds of thousands of people traveling for
the Lunar New Year remained stranded by winter storms, a
woman was trampled to death in a stampede to board a
train. Groundhog Punxsutawney Phil saw his shadow,
signalling six more weeks of winter, and John Edwards
pulled out of the presidential race, saying he would step
aside “so that history can blaze its path.” California
Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger endorsed Republican
candidate John McCain, while Schwarzenegger’s wife, Maria
Shriver, the niece of John F. Kennedy, endorsed Barack
Obama.
The Pentagon said that nine Iraqi civilians had been
killed in a strike intended for militants of Al Qaeda in
Mesopotamia. West Virginia was considering a bill that
would require gym classes to teach middle-schoolers how to
handle a gun. In Pennsylvania a woman locked her
ten-year-old grandson in a dog crate and threatened to
bury him alive in the backyard after he disclosed that he
had been spiking his family’s drinks with lamp oil and
household cleaner, and in Britain retail chain Woolworths
withdrew from sale a bed for six-year-old girls called the
Lolita Midsleeper Combi after receiving complaints from
parents. “We had to look it up on Wikipedia,” said a store
spokesman. “But we certainly know who she is now.” It was
reported that a sedentary lifestyle speeds aging, and new
pictures of Mercury revealed the elderly planet’s
spider-shaped birthmark, shrinkage, wrinkles, and
scars. The New York Giants beat the New England Patriots
to win Superbowl XLII, while the NFL refused to allow
churches to show the game on big-screen televisions.
Seventeen Russian tourists visiting a spa in the Caucasus
were hospitalized after a nurse accidentally administered
hydrogen-peroxide enemas, and a Japanese urologist noted
an increase in “vaginal ejaculation disorder, or an
inability to ejaculate inside the vagina,” among Japanese
men, crediting it to “incredible progress made in
masturbation goods.” British scientists announced that it
would soon be possible to convert female bone marrow into
viable sperm cells, hastening the obsolescence of men.
– Gemma Sieff
http://harpers.org/archive/2008/02/WeeklyReview2008-02-05
Meet my hot new stripper wife
Turns out the mid-life crisis is a cruel global phenomenon. Can it be stopped?
Mark Morford, SF Gate
Friday, February 8, 2008
Maybe I should start a war. Or a cult. Or a cult about war, with T-shirts and headscarves and a big glowing gold-rimmed messiah with fangs and guns and red spiders for eyes. I will call it something wicked like “Serpents of the Devouring Void” or “Warriors of the Crimson Misery” or maybe just “the Republican Party.”
Would it help? Will I feel younger and more vibrant and important, like I’ve accomplished something noteworthy and fulfilled my destiny and can therefore pass through middle age more gracefully, foregoing regular fistfuls of Prozac and lots of piss-water light beer and slumped shoulders and long miserable stretches of “Tell Me You Love Me” on HBO?
Will it, in short, help me skip over the next decade or so wherein I might otherwise be doomed to suffer the tepid, ignoble hell known as the mid-life crisis because, well, that’s just what happens?
Here is the bad news: It might be unavoidable. Turns out researchers compiled data from a couple million people across 80 nations and every income level and social status and gender and demographic and hairstyle, and the conclusion was pretty much irrefutable: The famed mid-life crisis, that feeling of depression and angst and what-the-hell-happened-to-my-dreams, is universal.
It’s true. No matter where you live or how much money you make or how much of your mortgage payment you spend on lap dances in Las Vegas, somewhere between ages 40 and 50 (closer to 40 for women, 50 for men) feelings of futility and spiritual barrenness peak, and you feel like it’s all been for naught because you’re suddenly on the slippery slope toward cold, beckoning death and you never got around to writing that novel or opening that combo porn shop/laundromat/tattoo parlor or having 2.1 perfect kids or hang-gliding naked over the Swiss Alps.
And now, well, now it’s just too damn late, because you’re all paunchy and sagging and hair is growing where it shouldn’t be and you have mysterious shooting pains in your colon and an inexplicable fondness for televised gardening shows, and no one under 30 wants to have sex with you ever again. You know?
They say that, in terms of general psychological well-being, life is one big, ugly curve. The only times we are truly hopeful or mentally vibrant are closer to the beginning and closer to the end, when we’re either sucking the nipple or golfing in Florida (or if you’ve really lived your life right, both). The rest of life is pretty much a vacuous, drudging slog, interspersed with too many lattes and not enough therapy. I might be oversimplifying a bit. But not really.
For me, I suppose I should be happy. At least for the moment. Even though I’ve yet to marry, have kids or buy a house, I still have a number of years left before the bland misery swarms over me completely. I still feel pretty vibrant and connected and healthy even though I’m suddenly older than most movie stars and even older the mayor of my own city and I have no idea how that happened. But otherwise, I think I’ve developed some good tools, a juicy enough spiritual perspective to keep me afloat. Maybe I can make it through relatively unscathed?
Then again, maybe not. Because if I think about it, if I wallow and simmer and stare too long at my skin in one of those giant horrible makeup mirrors, if I ponder all the hours I’ve wasted cruising eBay and Notcot and supertangas.com instead of getting outside and reading more books and launching a progressive green movement to provide starving children in Ethiopia with organic tempeh salads and free iPods, I can begin to feel it coming.
The angst, the heavy sighing, the overwhelming need to accomplish, to Get More Done, to reclaim some vigor and maybe rush out and buy a ridiculous Corvette or a giant silly Harley and couple it with very bad taste in leather jackets and an expensive membership at Sports Club/LA, and top it all off with a gum-snapping semi-hottie 22-year-old girlfriend who loves her some Red Bull and who gets icked-out by sashimi and who says “like” a lot and doesn’t get a single one of my references to Spinal Tap or single-malt scotch or rec.arts.erotica, but who has an ass like Mary Magdalene’s banana creme pie and makes cute little purring sounds in bed and makes me Viagra smoothies while dancing pornographically in skimpy boy shorts to Justin Timberlake remixes. What, too much? Sorry.
Worse still, the misery could be happening already, and I don’t even realize it. Apparently, the crisis comes on very slowly, like some sort of creeping disease, like cancer or liver damage or conservatism, like a love of creamed foods and golf and pale yellow Polo shirts with the collar turned up. One day you’re alert and hip and tingly in all the right places, the next you realize you can’t read the tiny print on your bottle of Lipitor and you have nine cats and a nagging feeling you forgot to turn off the stove in the lost kitchen of your dreams. Damn.
Alas, there is no talk of prevention. Amid all the research and evidence, no one says what might alleviate or even eliminate the fear and the vague sense of doom, what might help you cruise over the mid-life hump with something resembling wisdom and gratitude and insight.
My guess is it starts with the usual combination, a personally customized admixture of regular, vigorous exercise, conscious food habits and minimal reality TV and great heaping doses of travel and nature and mental stimulation and truly excellent bedsheets, combined with absolute refusal to be fixed in time and place, to shrivel and hunker down and cling, as so many do, to one set of rules, one ideology, one notion of How It’s All Supposed To Be. It is the knowledge that real ecstasy has nothing to do with external accomplishment, and everything to do with internal awareness.
Oh yes, also: Lots of regular sex and yoga and meditation and the best wine you can afford as you realize that this little blip of an eyeblink of a gift of a life races by just impossibly fast, and therefore staring too long at the future or the past, at expectation and longing, memory and regret only means you don’t get to truly experience the moment you’re in right now.
Isn’t that the real secret? The simplest truth? Isn’t that what the gurus and wise ones have been saying since before Jesus was a tingle in the loins of God? To be so present, so hotly, divinely connected to the moment you are in that time loses all relevance and age means nothing and opportunity shows up exactly as it should, and the real accomplishment, the real sense of achievement comes from celebrating each and every breath like it was a shot glass of molten meaning?
Yes. I’m going with that. What a lovely, Zen-licked, tantra-soaked perspective. I hope to suck down great heaping gallons of it, before it’s too late.
“So keep fightin’ for freedom and justice, beloveds, but don’t you forget to have fun doin’ it. Lord, let your laughter ring forth. Be outrageous, ridicule the fraidy-cats, rejoice in all the oddities that freedom can produce. And when you get through kickin’ ass and celebratin’ the sheer joy of a good fight, be sure to tell those who come after how much fun it was.”
~ Molly Ivins, 1944 - 2007
In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, this material is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. beastiality porn galleries movieporn clips beastialityporn brazil beastiality fromporn beastiality torrentporn beastiality videosporn sex beastialitybeastially pornbeastilaity porn videos Map
February 8th, 2008