Recently in Politics Category

There is a lot, and I mean A LOT going on right now. On the work front, the home front, the personal front, the crazy front. It's all good stuff, thus far, but I will share more soon.

In the meantime, how is this for poetic?

I work at a software company, where the majority of the office is composed of Apple nerds who follow one another's Twitter feeds. Sometimes, though, we join the rest of the world and act like normal people.

In honor of Obama's inauguration, a co-worker had the brilliant idea of streaming the video on her laptop and projecting the image on the wall, rather than have us eat up space by each secretly streaming the video on our individual computers. Excellent thinking! However, we tried four different sites and all the streams were choppy and kept cutting in and out. We sat around nervously for awhile, willing it to get better with our collective geekiness. No luck. As the time for the inauguration grew near, concern mounted that we may not really get to watch the ceremony at all.

Then, a different co-worker suggested we pull out the television. The old, retro TV that someone was keeping on his desk because it looks super groovy and he was going to do an art project with it. Yeah, technically, it works, but...

Within minutes, the TV was on the floor, the dials were tuned to a station that got reception, and the antenna was in a good spot. My coworkers and I crowded around the TV on the floor of the office, sitting cross-legged while watching the black-and-white image with smiles on our faces. A few of the girls cried.

I thought it a fitting and fabulous way to watch the inauguration. Rabbit ears and everything. Amidst all that technology and the noise that comes with it, we ended up participating in the inauguration in the same way I bet many did when Kennedy was sworn into office.

This is the French president, after coming out of a meeting with Vladimir Putin. I think they might have, um, indulged.

Tomorrow is the first round of the French elections, and I am really excited about it. Maybe not as excited as I get over American elections, but excited nonetheless. I have been sort of looking forward to this date (April 22) as a milestone of sorts, and it's absolutely insane to me to think that the day has finally arrived.

Round 2 takes place on May 6, and that's just around the corner. I just can't believe how quickly time is flying.

For the last election (2002), I went over to a friend of The Boy's, where he was having a sort of election loto thingie. We all put down our guesses as to what percentage all 16 candidates would receive. At the time, I was studying journalism and knew all of the candidates and their platforms pretty well, so I thought I might do ok. Wow, was I wrong. But then again, so was everybody else at the party. I don't think anybody there saw the Le Pen victory coming. Even worse, the host of the party was a devout socialist (his father is a socialist member of the Assemblée nationale or something) and the mood in the room went quickly from baffled to horrified to depressed, culminating in despair when Jospin announced his withdrawal from politics. I was interested in the outcome but not emotionally involved in any way. That clearly was not the case for many of the people at the party.

While I don't think this year is going to be anywhere half as exciting, I am still anxious to see the outcome. I definetly feel I have a firmer grasp on the range of French-ness out there in a way I maybe didn't in 2002. In the last few weeks, I have surveyed my French friends and ask them who they think The Big Two will be. The responses have been varied. The combinations thus far have been:

Sarko and Bayrou
Sarko and Le Pen
Le Pen and Bayrou

Not a single person I have asked has proposed the much hyped Sarko/Ségo split. I don't know where I stand this time around. What do you think?

UPDATE:

I wrote something but erased it, because I think the video needs to speak for itself.

And with that, I will bring you: Bush mocking a legally blind man for wearing sunglasses. I'm still digesting this one.

Stephen Colbert was invited to give the commencement speech at Knox College in Ilinois. You can read about it here. It's funny in the way Colbert is funny, but without the visuals or the delivery.

However, the closing paragraph of the article made me chuckle:

Every morning, I sit with a coffee and read the news. I also check up on the liberal "blogs" -- I know I should diversify my sources but so should everybody else. Like most lefties, I spend a lot of time gawking at the crazy things coming out of the mouths of our leaders, and often out of the mouths of our journalists and media.

Last month, I posted the Bill O'Reilly/Letterman interview. In that same vein, I'm posting a clip from "Countdown" that I saw via Crooks and Liars - probably my favorite left-wing site, if only because I don't have a television and at least this way I get some highlights.

I think it is important to spread around this type of thing, if only because regular viewers (not just of O'Reilly, but of any program) need to see how the facts are sometimes just flat out wrong. Lots of people look to O'Reilly for the truth, or for the "fair and balanced" facts, but this clip proves that to be a dangerous idea.

Keith Olbermann disrobes O'Reilly in a way that I really hope is simply not debatable: O'Reilly was wrong, never excused himself, repeated his error, and then changed the words of his transcript after the fact. This type of thing just cannot go unexplained - or unremarked - on a major news channel. Watch the clip - Olbermann at his best. (Quicktime required)