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great article about dennis miller

Check it here. The author basically talks about how Miller was his hero but has fallen from grace. I too cannot stand to hear the man continue to defend Bush and come off as generally unfunny and wrong. A quote to give you a taste:

Instead, in 2004, Miller made the cardinal sin when it comes to being a topical comic. Here's what he said about doing jokes about Dubya.



I like him. I'm going to give him a pass. I take care of my friends.



While some might see this as being a standup guy, in the stand-up world of the topical comedian, you can't take the President off the radar. It's like unilaterally disarming. How can I respect the guy's views, when he isn't calling the game with even a modicum of criticism for the President?

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For the sake of our democracy, i beg you, check out Bill Richardson

The more I listen to Bill Richardson, the more I fear we are all (big media, new media, citizens et al) jumping too quickly to conclusion about who the "legitimate" presidential candidates are. If we continue to focus exclusively on Obama, Clinton, Edwards, McCain and Giulliani, the "A-List" becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy. That is simply not healthy.

I'm reminded of a story Barry Crimmins tells about being asked to write for NPR (buy his book for this and more). They were doing a piece on how many Democrats were running for president. The hook was "isn't it just ridiculous! Look at all these different people trying to be president. When will it end?!"

His response, essentially, was "that's a GOOD thing you assholes." We want many different points of view. We want a wide candidate field. We want a broad based debate. Limiting choice is not democratic.

Today, we've got a situation where there are again, a lot of Democrats (and Republicans) who've declared their candidacies, yet we are being pressured to limit our conversations (if not the candidates themselves) to a chosen few. The result is the same as cutting the field prematurely. I'm not against Obama or Clinton or Edwards, but neither am I for them at the expense of a well-rounded exchange of ideas.

Of course in the end, we've got to settle on just one, but right now we're very much at the beginning.

In the spirit of showing some love to other candidates, check out these two videos featuring Richardson. This is one smart, experienced cat, and he may have the best perspective on energy of the candidates I've seen so far. Isn't it better to spend your time on this than agonizing over John Edwards' $400 hair cut?


And here's a longer interview by CitizenTube with Richardson.

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See my video on a site about Wal-Mart

A video clip of one of my Wal-Mart jokes was just added to a blog called The Beauty in Wal-Mart.

The site describes itself as follows:

The Beauty In Wal-Mart was created to show how amazing everyone is, by providing an outlet for the good and bad feelings about Wal-Mart. Just look at how creative and powerful the posts have been so far, and you'll see what we're after.

Why Wal-Mart? Because it's at the top of the mountain. Just about everyone is affected by Wal-Mart, and it's time we found out who they are—who we all are—so we can do away with the impersonal nature of so many things in our world.

I like that they've put this together. I generally dislike Wal-Mart for its healthcare practices, anti-union thuggery, destruction of local economies and promotion of unsustainable consumer culture. If our society is racing toward armageddon, then Wal-Mart is our flux capacitor, but there are some interesting perspectives on the positive side as well. Many of the positive stories on that site focus on how affordable Wal-Mart is and how people barely getting by have no other options for essential services like prescription drugs.

Check it.

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Princeton Conversations and a Big STFU to George Tenet

Sorry to miss blogging yesterday. I had been on a good run with daily posts, and while I did twitter, for most of you, that doesn't count.

I had a super-impressive weekend. It was my fourth straight weekend out of town starting with NYC to DC to Iowa/Chicago to NYC/NJ. Every day this past weekend was jam packed with shows, meetings, and incredibly cool conversations. I spent a good amount of time on the campus of Princeton University (my first time ever) hanging with a friend at the Woodrow Wilson School of international relations and public affairs. Talk about deep chatter.

You ever have such a good conversation with a friend that you had to take notes? Yeah, it was that good. Here are just some of the things we talked about this weekend:

I'll try to save some of the notes for this week's podcast. I have some smart ass friends yall.

Oh, and all weekend I've been screaming about this (just like I did about Colin Powell): George Tenet needs to STFU!! (Note: for those who don't follow politics and war as obsessively as I do, this punk ass wrote a book blaming the war on Cheney manipulating the intelligence. Hello??? Mr. head of the central INTELLIGENCE agency? WTF?).

I am so sick of these former administration people whining after the fact. How can the head of the CIA act like he didn't know what was up? Why do I care that he feels bad now? I cannot take it. When he had the power to complain, the power to stop a war, he did not, but now that things are irreversibly jacked, he wants to point fingers at everyone but himself.

Mr. Tenet, you are not helping. None of the American people had the information you had at the time, though many had justifiable suspicions. It was your responsibility to pull the plug. Don't come at me years later saying you were wronged and no one listened. Did you try to tell the American people? Did you resign? No. You did not, Mr. Slam Dunk! So I don't want to hear your whining, Mr. Congressional Medal of Freedom! And I damn sure don't want you making millions off this wack book and the lecture circuit acting like you weren't as wrong as everyone else who started this war.

YOU CANNOT BE A MONDAY MORNING QUARTERBACK IF YOU PLAYED IN THE GODDAMNED GAME!!!

and that's that. Oooooh, just let me get on one of those Sunday morning talk shows. I'll show em what's up.

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On Rudy

A brief comment on Rudy Giuliani because he deserves it. Two days ago, he said we should elect a Republican for president (preferably him) in 2008 because we'll be safer from terror than if the Dems were in charge. Under Democrats, he argued, more Americans would die.

Really? Tell that to the 3,334 Americans killed in Iraq under a Republican president or the 2,602 New Yorkers who died under a Republican mayor -- a mayor who insisted on locating the emergency command center in the World Trade Center even after it was bombed the first time in the 1990s. Keith Olbermann does a better job of getting him than I have time or space to devote to this jackass.

We can only pray that President Giuliani is as good at protecting the nation as Mayor Giuliani was at protecting Lower Manhattan.

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Gov. Patrick to Feds: Take your abstinence-only education...

... and shove it up your ass since that's what those abstinence-only kids are doing along with everything else short of vaginal intercourse. From today's Boston Globe:
Governor Deval Patrick wants to end state-sponsored , abstinence-only sex education in Massachusetts, a year after Governor Mitt Romney ordered the Department of Public Health to redirect a long-standing federal abstinence grant to classes that focus exclusively on encouraging teenagers to avoid sexual encounters. Patrick proposed forgoing the $700,000 grant, which the state has received since 1998, joining at least six other states in rebelling against increasingly restrictive federal mandates about how the money can be used. The Patrick administration points to the federal government's study of abstinence-education programs, released this month, which found that students in programs focusing solely on abstinence are just as likely to have sex as those not in such programs. At the same time, health officials say, the programs' emphasis on the failure rate of condoms and other birth control, without providing instruction about their benefits, may confuse young people and discourage them from using protection. "We don't believe that the science of public health is pointing in the direction of very specific and narrowly defined behavioral approaches like the one that is mandated by this funding," said John Auerbach, the state commissioner of public health.

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