Frost/Nixon

Watergate has always been a fascinating piece of American history. Watching Frost/Nixon was a great treat as these interviews were viewed by many as Nixon's confession, even though he never fully grasped it or stated such. There were several interesting elements to the movie: the background that it provided about how Frost and his team scored the interview and their prep work before and during the interviews; the way Nixon was depicted, and how he turned "on" during the interviews and turned "off" when they were done revealed a great deal about Nixon himself; and most of all, the way Nixon was firmly convinced this was "his world" with "his rules" and we were just living in it. Langella's overall performance as Nixon was fantastic and is definitely Oscar worthy. If you are a Watergate junkie, this is required viewing.

Labels: movies, politics, watergate

Go Vote!

Hope you are going to vote today. Everyone is doing it.

Track the news, results, and idle banter here:

• Twitter's Election 2008
  
• ABC News Election Coverage
  
• CNN Election 2008
  

And there is always Comedy Central's site: Indecision 2008

Labels: election, politics

Blue State

On the day the NY Times endorses Barak Obama, they also posted an interesting interactive display of their Presidential endorsements through the ages. What were they thinking endorsing Wendell Willkie over FDR back in 1940? Also interesting, but not at all surprising, that they have not endorsed a Republican since 1956.

Labels: election, endorsements, nytimes, politics

Worse or Dead Worse

Interesting article by Jim Cramer in NY Magazine this week about the sorry state of the economy today and what could possibly happen a year from now:

What will New York look like a year from now? The answer: bad and probably worse, and perhaps downright catastrophic. Three degrees of awful. The first step was passing the bank-bailout legislation. Now that it’s done—and if it didn’t get done we would have been looking at a guaranteed economic collapse—the critical issue will be presidential leadership. And while any president will be an improvement over the current one, there is a growing belief on Wall Street that Barack Obama has the capacity to lead us out of this wilderness while John McCain does not. I’ll go a step further: Obama is a recession. McCain is a depression.

No matter how we cut it, things are just screwed up.

Labels: crisis, economy, politics

VP Debate Drinking Game

If you are a little bored heading into tonight's critical VP debate, consider spicing things up with the Official Vice Presidential Debate Drinking Game. This is just laugh out loud funny, against both candidates. Several more can be found here.

Labels: beer, drinking, politics, veep

Holy Crap

Wow, not a good day in the business world. This country is in some serious trouble. What would Sarah Palin do? Probably phone a friend. (screen grab from NYT)

Labels: economy, politics, screwed, stocks

Pick Your Bimbo

Why does this answer...



remind me of this answer?



We could be in a heap of trouble. Wait, we already are in a heap of trouble.

Labels: comedy, politics

Tina Fey Does A Dead On Palin

Labels: comedy, politics

Bubba

Man, Bubba loves the spotlight of politics (posting this after watching him at the DNC in Denver this evening). I think if Bill Clinton had his way, he would have repealed the two term limits on Presidents and ran for a third term. Hell, he could be onto a 4th term by now, unless of course his "slick little Willy" got him in more trouble than the Lewinsky/cigar episode.

Labels: politics

Will There Be Blood?

I'm not one to get on my soapbox to blog politics or the like, but I heard something today that really made me sit back and think about the state of this great nation, and how far down the tubes its been sent in the past 8 years.

What got me was an interview on the APM/NPR show Marketplace about the price of oil/gas and what could be done to deflate the oil bubble. Now I'm not one to believe everything I hear and/or read, but in this interview, Michael Greenberger from the University of Maryland Law School, basically stated that we're still paying for Enron and commodity speculators:

Kai Ryssdal: You're not really telling me that seven years on, we're still paying the price for Enron, are you?

Michael Greenberger: Well, this has been called the "Enron Loophole" and there are many legislators working very hard to close that loophole. There is tremendous concern about this on Capitol Hill and on a bipartisan basis, people are drafting legislation to try and get a handle on this and not eliminate speculation, but bring the speculation under the kind of time-tested controls that were used until Enron had its way and amended the law to escape traditional tested regulation on speculative activities.

Greenberger went on to say that he thought that we were in a "bubble" situation with the oil market because of these speculators driving up prices. And with every bubble, there is a POP. So the next question is inevitable:

Ryssdal: How long is it going to take then if we are, as you say, in a bubble, for it to work its way through and us to get back to something more realistic for the price of a barrel of oil, whether its 50 bucks or 80 bucks?

Greenberger: From my own experience as a commodity regulator, I believe that if the Bush Administration were serious about its regulation, we could begin seeing prices drop within a month. If we don't get the kind of regulation that has been done for decades and the market proceeds along the pace its proceeding, we will have to go through a very, very serious recession. The question is do you want to deflate the bubble by that kind of suffering or do you want to deflate the bubble by applying tight U.S. regulatory controls?

A month...it would take a flippin' month to bring this back to some level of relative sanity. Do I fully buy that estimate? Not really. But the point is that if the administration had a clue, they could do what is needed quickly to bring prices back to some level of normalcy in fairly short order and turn this around before things get in really serious, serious trouble. If anything, the silver lining is that the country is now being forced to think about alternate energy sources.

Is it November yet?

I step off my soapbox and will get back to more entertaining posts.

Labels: economy, oil, politics

Wesley Clark

since we share the same sirname, i am hoping to find some "clark for president" t-shirts and banners to keep for posterity. i'm in no way endorsing Wesley Clark's candidacy for president, but it is not often that a guy with your name runs for the top office in the land. :-)

Labels: politics