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| (photo: John Gabree) |
City to Parkers: "You can't say we didn't warn you."
Santa Monica municipal signage is too often confusing, obscure or absent. Except, of course, when it comes to parking.
(heh heh)
See? We're not going to miss Michele Bachmann after all. Or Sarah Palin, for that matter.
Joni Ernst more than makes up for both of them.
As Andy Borowitz just said, she brings the "nation the greatest gift of all: the gift of laughter."
Joni Ernst more than makes up for both of them.
As Andy Borowitz just said, she brings the "nation the greatest gift of all: the gift of laughter."
Fake Poll #6,580,222
Democracy for America wants you to choose your top three picks to replace Senator Barbara Boxer from this list:
Being located in VT, DFA can perhaps be forgiven for not knowing CA politics, for not knowing, for example, that Tony Villaraigosa was pretty much a failure as LA mayor or that Kamala Harris runs the AG's office like every day is Be Kind to Corporations Day. But they should know something about goings-on in Washington. John Garamendi? Jane Harman? Ellen Tauscher? Do they think party hacks and corporate shills will lift a finger to advance DFA's agenda to rejuvenate the Democrats as an instrument of change? Dave Jones? Tom Steyer? Adam Freaking Schiff? Are they kidding?Karen Bass
Xavier Becerra
John Chiang
John Garamendi
Jane Harman
Kamala Harris
Kevin Johnson
Dave Jones
Loretta Sanchez
Adam Schiff
Jackie Speier
Hilda Solis
Tom Steyer
Ellen Tauscher
Antonio Villaraigosa
Or is this just a convenient cover for a chance to hit us up for spare change one more time before the serious fundraising starts up later this year?
Who's counting?
Here's a factoid for you: Accounting for inflation, we have spent nearly as much on Afghan reconstruction as we did on the Marshall Plan.
We're all French
I have yet to see a sensible explanation of why the United States alone among its peers was absent from the Paris march. If the Secret Service was quaking in its government-issued brogans over the prospect of losing the president in a crowd, surely they can't be worried that anyone will waste ordnance on Joe Biden. Instead of the president or the vice-president, the U.S. dispatched our ambassador to Paris, Obama fundraiser Jane Hartley, who happens to live down the street.
After 9/11, the world lined up in solidarity with us; it is at the least very poor taste for us, when our oldest ally suffers the same fate, to send as our delegate a political hack with no stature here or in Europe. But there is a bigger picture, too. The attack on Charlie Hebdo, the murders of artists exercising one of the fundamental values of American and western political thought, was a blow against all our freedoms, not just freedom of expression (and, indeed, in the west, in Britain and the United States especially, there were immediate calls to save freedom by increasing the grasp and reach of the surveillance state).
Despite all the ups and downs of the relationship between the two nations (and the downs have to do mostly with right-wing politics in the U.S., anyway), the French are our friends and our allies. The day after the attack on the World Trade Center, the headline in Le Monde was "Nous sommes tous Américains;” this week, Muslims in France risked their lives to demonstrate fraternity with their fellow citizens; American leaders couldn't be bothered to show up. Obama has revealed himself, once again, to be politically tone deaf -- he was quoted in European papers as saying something to the effect that the murders were an assault on a universal value; but free speech and liberty in general are anything but "universal" values -- not only did millions of people have to give their lives to achieve them, but they are under perpetual attack, even in the western democracies where they are rhetorically enshrined, and must be constantly and rigorously defended.
When leaders of the free world gathered in the streets of the French capital this week to link arms in defense of freedom, everyone in the world could see at a glance that we were not among them. That the president doesn't appear to know that for reasons both practical and symbolic we should have been there is not just a cause for embarrassment and sorrow; it throws into silhouette the continuing question of the quality of his leadership in the two long years remaining in his term.
After 9/11, the world lined up in solidarity with us; it is at the least very poor taste for us, when our oldest ally suffers the same fate, to send as our delegate a political hack with no stature here or in Europe. But there is a bigger picture, too. The attack on Charlie Hebdo, the murders of artists exercising one of the fundamental values of American and western political thought, was a blow against all our freedoms, not just freedom of expression (and, indeed, in the west, in Britain and the United States especially, there were immediate calls to save freedom by increasing the grasp and reach of the surveillance state).
Despite all the ups and downs of the relationship between the two nations (and the downs have to do mostly with right-wing politics in the U.S., anyway), the French are our friends and our allies. The day after the attack on the World Trade Center, the headline in Le Monde was "Nous sommes tous Américains;” this week, Muslims in France risked their lives to demonstrate fraternity with their fellow citizens; American leaders couldn't be bothered to show up. Obama has revealed himself, once again, to be politically tone deaf -- he was quoted in European papers as saying something to the effect that the murders were an assault on a universal value; but free speech and liberty in general are anything but "universal" values -- not only did millions of people have to give their lives to achieve them, but they are under perpetual attack, even in the western democracies where they are rhetorically enshrined, and must be constantly and rigorously defended.
When leaders of the free world gathered in the streets of the French capital this week to link arms in defense of freedom, everyone in the world could see at a glance that we were not among them. That the president doesn't appear to know that for reasons both practical and symbolic we should have been there is not just a cause for embarrassment and sorrow; it throws into silhouette the continuing question of the quality of his leadership in the two long years remaining in his term.
Moi Aussi
Eighty-seven-year-old Albert Uderzo, the creator of Asterix and France's most famous cartoonist, comes out of retirement to honor dead comrades.
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