There was a sign in a psychologist's office: "Schizophrenics pay double." Or, try this one — "Q: What is the best thing about schizophrenia? A: You're never alone." If bad jokes and rimshots aren't your style, try a pair of panels from "Candorville." For the past two days, the artist/author of "Candorville" — Darrin Bell — has been plumbing The Hillster's psyche. While viewing the latest pair of "Candorville" strips, play Young@Heart's rendition of "Schizophrenia." In the two strips, The Hillster is trying to convince Clyde (C-Dog), who is Candorville's Donkey superdelegate (Remember, this is the comics.) to vote for her, not The Hopester. If this is a (fair & balanced) personality disorder (DSM-IV 295.1), so be it. [x YouTube/Channel akf2000] Young@Heart Sings "Schizophrenia" By Sonic Youth
[Darrin Bell writes and illustrates the syndicated comic strip "Candorville" (collected in Another Stereotype Bites the Dust), in addition to illustrating the comic strip "Rudy Park."
Bell, who is Black and Jewish, was born in Los Angeles, California. He started drawing when he was 3. He's been published in the Daily Californian since 1993, during his freshman year at the University of California-Berkeley, and in major papers across the country. He is the first African American to have two strips syndicated nationally. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, graduating with a BA in Political Science in 1999.
He currently resides in Los Angeles, California, with his wife, film performer Laura Bustamante.]
Play the Louis Armstong clip from YouTube while reading The Flatster's latest cheerful meditation on our trip in the handbasket to the Hot Place. The Flatster, aka Tom Friedman, proclaimed a shift in paradigms with The World Is Flat (2005). That title is not to be confused with The Flat Earth Society, a band of know-nothings who will cast their votes for The Geezer in '08. To the contrary, The Flatster does not have his head buried in the sands of ignorance. He tells the truth and it isn't pleasant. (Cue Louis Armstrong again.) The Flatster's projection of $200/bbl oil is not wild conjecture; just today the NY Fishwrap contained a piece about Arjun N. Murti, a Goldman Sachs analyst who predicted $100/bbl oil a few years ago and now predicts a "super-spike" shortly in oil prices. (Cue Louis Armstrong again.) If this is a (fair & balanced) silent scream, so be it.
[x YouTube/Geneticc Channel] What A Wonderful World — Louis Armsrong, 1968
[x NY Fishwrap] Imbalances Of Power By Thomas L. Friedman
There has been much debate in this campaign about which of our enemies the next U.S. president should deign to talk to. The real story, the next president may discover, though, is how few countries are waiting around for us to call. It is hard to remember a time when more shifts in the global balance of power are happening at once — with so few in America’s favor.
Let’s start with the most profound one: More and more, I am convinced that the big foreign policy failure that will be pinned on this administration is not the failure to make Iraq work, as devastating as that has been. It will be one with much broader balance-of-power implications — the failure after 9/11 to put in place an effective energy policy.
It baffles me that President Bush would rather go to Saudi Arabia twice in four months and beg the Saudi king for an oil price break than ask the American people to drive 55 miles an hour, buy more fuel-efficient cars or accept a carbon tax or gasoline tax that might actually help free us from what he called our “addiction to oil.”
The failure of Mr. Bush to fully mobilize the most powerful innovation engine in the world — the U.S. economy — to produce a scalable alternative to oil has helped to fuel the rise of a collection of petro-authoritarian states — from Russia to Venezuela to Iran — that are reshaping global politics in their own image.
If this huge transfer of wealth to the petro-authoritarians continues, power will follow. According to Congressional testimony Wednesday by the energy expert Gal Luft, with oil at $200 a barrel, OPEC could “potentially buy Bank of America in one month worth of production, Apple computers in a week and General Motors in just three days.”
But that’s not all. Two compelling new books have just been published that describe two other big power shifts: The Post-American World, by Fareed Zakaria, the editor of Newsweek International, and Superclass by David Rothkopf, a visiting scholar at the Carnegie Endowment.
Mr. Zakaria’s central thesis is that while the U.S. still has many unique assets, “the rise of the rest” — the Chinas, the Indias, the Brazils and even smaller nonstate actors — is creating a world where many other countries are slowly moving up to America’s level of economic clout and self-assertion, in every realm. “Today, India has 18 all-news channels of its own,” notes Zakaria. “And the perspectives they provide are very different from those you will get in the Western media. The rest now has the confidence to present its own narrative, where it is at the center.”
For too long, argues Zakaria, America has taken its many natural assets — its research universities, free markets and diversity of human talent — and assumed that they will always compensate for our low savings rate or absence of a health care system or any strategic plan to improve our competitiveness.
“That was fine in a world when a lot of other countries were not performing,” argues Zakaria, but now the best of the rest are running fast, working hard, saving well and thinking long term. “They have adopted our lessons and are playing our game,” he said. If we don’t fix our political system and start thinking strategically about how to improve our competitiveness, he added, “the U.S. risks having its unique and advantageous position in the world erode as other countries rise.”
Mr. Rothkopf’s book argues that on many of the most critical issues of our time, the influence of all nation-states is waning, the system for addressing global issues among nation-states is more ineffective than ever, and therefore a power void is being created. This void is often being filled by a small group of players — “the superclass” — a new global elite, who are much better suited to operating on the global stage and influencing global outcomes than the vast majority of national political leaders.
Some of this new elite “are from business and finance,” says Rothkopf. “Some are members of a kind of shadow elite — criminals and terrorists. Some are masters of new or traditional media; some are religious leaders, and a few are top officials of those governments that do have the ability to project their influence globally.”
The next president will have to manage these new rising states and these new rising individuals and networks, while wearing the straightjacket left in the Oval Office by Mr. Bush.
“Call it the triple deficit,” said Mr. Rothkopf. “A fiscal deficit that will soon have us choosing between rationed health care, sufficient education, adequate infrastructure and traditional levels of defense spending, a trade deficit that has us borrowing from our rivals to the point of real vulnerability, and a geopolitical deficit that is a legacy of Iraq, which may result in hesitancy to take strong stands where we must.”
The first rule of holes is when you’re in one, stop digging. When you’re in three, bring a lot of shovels.
[Thomas L. Friedman won the 2002 Pulitzer Prize for commentary, his third Pulitzer for The New York Times. He became the paper's foreign-affairs columnist in 1995. Previously, he served as chief economic correspondent in the Washington bureau and before that he was the chief White House correspondent. In 2005, Friedman was elected as a member of the Pulitzer Prize Board.
Friedman joined The Times in 1981 and was appointed Beirut bureau chief in 1982. In 1984, Thomas Friedman was transferred from Beirut to Jerusalem, where he served as Israel bureau chief until 1988. Friedman was awarded the 1983 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Lebanon) and the 1988 Pulitzer Prize for international reporting (from Israel).
Thomas Friedman's latest book, The World is Flat: A Brief History of the 21st Century, was released in April 2005 and won the inaugural Goldman Sachs/Financial Times Business Book of the Year award. In 2004, he was awarded the Overseas Press Club Award for lifetime achievement and the honorary title, Order of the British Empire (OBE), by Queen Elizabeth II.
His book, From Beirut to Jerusalem (1989), won the National Book Award for non-fiction in 1989 and The Lexus and the Olive Tree (2000) won the 2000 Overseas Press Club award for best nonfiction book on foreign policy and has been published in 27 languages. Thomas Friedman also wrote Longitudes and Attitudes: The World in the Age of Terrorism (2002) and the text accompanying Micha Bar-Am's book, Israel: A Photobiography.
Born in Minneapolis on July 20, 1953, Friedman received a B.A. degree in Mediterranean studies from Brandeis University in 1975. In 1978 he received a Master of Philosophy degree in Modern Middle East studies from Oxford. Friedman is married and has two daughters.]
The Cobra has a grand time channeling the interior dialogues of both The Hillster and The Hopester in an imaginary last showdown. The Cobra's final stab gets to the heart of this blog's animus: The Hillster is just not likeable enough. If this is (fair & balanced) fatiga de Clintonista, so be it. [x NY Fishwrap] The Last Debate By Maureen Dowd
“What do you want? Please, Sweetie, would you just tell me what you want?”
“Don’t Sweetie me, Twiggy. You know what I want.”
“Besides that, Hillary. Seriously, you don’t want your delusion to put John McCain in the White House. Or maybe you do. You have no shot. I’m 60 delegates away from nomination nirvana. You should stop stalking me. I come down to Florida for a victory lap and you follow me down here and call for a recount. Look what that did for Al Gore. If you show a shred of common sense and take a powder now, the party will put you on a pedestal.”
“Pedestals are for losers. You’re on a pedestal. I’ve never been a loser. I refuse to lose. I won the West Virginia and Kentucky derbies, and I’m not going to end up like Eight Belles.”
“Hillary, you’ve been a great candidate, better than your train-wreck campaign. You’re Churchillian in your indomitable tenacity. You’ve inspired women all over the country. In fact, you’ve inspired some of them to hate me. But now it’s time for you to try to muster a gracious exit.”
“Forget it, Bones. Once Harold Ickes works his dark magic on the delegate rules to count Michigan and Florida, I’ll have the popular vote. And then the superdelegates will grovel back. They know in their hearts that they don’t want to go on a blind date with a guy who’s going to be BFF with Cuba, Hamas, Iran and retired Weathermen. You can bet your white turban that I’m not raising the white flag.”
“Like hell you aren’t, sister.”
“Sexist!”
“Racist!”
“Speaking of whites, you can’t win without them. And if you think your Secretary of Hairdressing, John Edwards, is going to help, you’re more delusional than I am.”
“Hillary, when are you going to realize that these whites you consider your pawns are so sick of the Republicans that they’re going to vote for anybody who has the ‘D’ next to their name, and it’s going to be me. So cool it with the White Fright. Now what do you want? Debt relief?”
“Bill and I don’t need your Netroots arugula moolah. We don’t need your stinking $20 donors. We’ve got Burkle, the Saudis, the Kuwaitis and Kazakh uranium loot on tap.”
“Settle down, Hillary. What if I let you write the health care plank in the party platform?”
“Wow, you’re so-o-o generous. Can I also write the plank on switchgrass?”
“I switched from grass a long time ago.”
“Listen, rookie, we’re gonna have to share this thing.”
“Fine, you can have the 3 a.m. shift on the White House switchboard.”
“Oh, you’re so witty with all your stupid rallies with 75,000 people and spending $100 million on ads to promote one puny word: Change. I’ve made sacrifices in this campaign. While you’ve been fake-eating and losing weight, I’ve had to stuff myself with all that greasy working-class junk food and chase it with Boilermakers.”
“What about me? I’ve come from nowhere, with a single mother on food stamps and a funny name.”
“Oh, you’re so inspiring. For the first time in my adult lifetime, I’m really proud of my country.”
“Don’t mock Michelle. I would be polite and ask you to be my vice president, but you’d accept, just the same way Lyndon Johnson sandbagged Bobby Kennedy, so I can’t. You and Bill are just too much drama for me. Bill is off-the-charts crazy.”
“Tell me about it. But he’d be way over on Massachusetts Avenue, a completely different ZIP code than the White House. And Cheney built that underground bunker there, so we’d always have someplace to stash him. If you don’t put me on the ticket, I’ll signal my faithful to vote for John McCain. He’s more fun than you, anyhow.”
“Hillary, I don’t trust you. And Michelle hates your guts. Look, the Senate is a wonderful place. I enjoyed my two months there. You’ve never made the most of the experience because you were so busy using it as a launching pad.”
“Back at ya, Skeletor.”
“Can you stop talking, Hillary? Is that even possible?”
“No, I won’t, Mr. Never-Convened-Your-European-Affairs-Subcommittee. I don’t want to go back. It’s boring. And why should I work with all those self-hating, so-called feminists who stabbed me in the back, like Claire McCaskill and Amy Klobuchar?”
“Look, Hillary, a few years back in the Senate helping me move my world-changing agenda will help you repair some of those relationships. In Barack Obama’s Washington, there will be no more game-playing, mud-slinging or back-stabbing.”
“Hey, Señor Appeaser, there’s another primary in 2012. Bill and I are already gearing up for it.”
“You’re not likeable enough, Hillary.”
[Maureen Dowd, winner of the 1999 Pulitzer Prize for distinguished commentary (on the Clinton-Lewinsky scandal), became a columnist on The New York Times Op-Ed page in 1995.]
The Internet was still in its infancy in 2004 when the Swift Boat attackers toured the country to defame John Kerry. Now, thanks to the Internet, The Hopester has raised vast campign donations in small denominations and even The Troglodyte (Ron Paul) has used Web sites to raise more money than the presumptive Dumbo nominee, The Geezer. In late 2007, The Troglodyte gathered $4.3M in 24 hours! Beyond fund-raising, a gazillion hits were recorded on the YouTube video clip of The Hopester's former pastor invoking damnation on the nation. We ain't seen nothin' yet. Here is a preview of the Internet attack ads that will be the norm in 2008. The pair of examples go after 1The Dubster and 2The Geezer. Fasten your seat belts, it's going to be a bumpy campaign. If this is (fair & balanced) hatchet-work, so be it. [x Salon] By Scott Bateman
1George W. Bush Gives Up His Game
2McCain Picks Up A Key Endorsement
[Scott Bateman is a left-leaning cartoonist currently residing in New York City (he moved there from Portland, Oregon in 2005). For a number of years, his political cartoons were syndicated by King Features Syndicate. After his syndication deal ended, he began the Bateman 365 project to publish a flash animated short every day for one year. He is now a regular contributor to Salon. Bateman graduated from the University of Puget Sound in 1986.]
