Monday Morn...Thinking of Ben Franklin

People d i e , taxes go up, life goes on.

Sanford as discussed on All Things Considered

hy⋅poc⋅ri⋅sy

  [hi-pok-ruh-see]

Dear ATC,

Being from South Carolina, I listened with interest to EJ Dion and David Brooks discuss Governor Sanford’s predicament on the radio and thought they totally missed the point. Though I think they correctly concluded that the Governor is not up to the task of governing anything, much less, god forbid, this nation, they kept emphasizing the love affair and the governor’s clumsy attempts at contrition as if these did not exist within a context. The context is that Sanford has been making the people of South Carolina suffer for months now while parading his high moral ground as he gunned for the top position in the Republican Party; the party that claims ownership of any and all “family values”. The hypocrisy is the story, not the fall from grace.

Sincerely,

Katya Cohen

Some days, they "just be" very good days!!!!!

...And then there are those not so great men, who come to power at the wrong time, to do the wrong thing...

Not being a fan of our notorious governor, today I rejoice at the news of his fall from grace! Heck, news from South Carolina's Grand Old Party has been nothing but fun lately.

Taking father's day off to go see your mistress in Argentina?

...So that's what you republicans mean by "family values", now I understand! Way to go Guv'nuh!

Man, you just can't make this stuff up (-;

...And now, maybe the picture of Sanford that hangs in the administrative offices of the SC Governor's School for the Arts and Humanities can come down. Although both South Carolina Governor Schools are under the jurisdiction of the Governor of this state and examplify the best that public education can achieve given people with imagination and, yes, a bit of funding, being the anti-public education governor, Sanford never much cared for the place. Though given his lack of creativity during the past few days, maybe he should come to school, take some art classes with the kids, and learn something... or perhaps he could get a few pointers from our acting teachers!

Ahhh, this is a very good day indeed.

Every Once in a Very While...

...a great man is born, at the right time, so that he can do the right thing...

riddle me this

the health insurance thing again

let's take a closer look, shall we:

what does this mean.

I mean, what does it really mean.

whimsical accounting?

Spring Cleaning

A Seriously Great Read

Fountain by Duchamp by Steiglitz

Print it and sit with it. Worth the ink, the paper, and the time:

http://www.distributedhistory.com/Dispersion2008.pdf

Email to Katarina

This bit of SC news probably did not make it to the national airwaves in a big way, so you might not have heard it. ...Though it should have made the news in a big way for oh-so-many reasons.

...So last week a gorilla escapes from its cage in the Columbia zoo. He gets out and injures, not lethally, a man who worked in the food service business, and then goes back to his cage. No one knows which gorilla did it because, well, he went back to his cage... This in itself is interesting; but what ensues is, if not more interesting, a lot sadder.

Right after the incident, one of the morons who runs this state, a dude from the legislature called Rusty DePass: Grand Old Party member from Richland County, being far less smart than said gorilla, gets the urge to go onto his Facebook book page and write the following: "I'm sure it's just one of Michelle's ancestors - probably harmless." Michelle being Michelle Obama.

Can you fucking believe this?!!! ...Sad thing is that, yeah one can... The republicans in this state might actually be the proof they’ve been searching for all along to disprove Darwin’s theory of evolution...

The guy apologized to the NAACP--- fuck, I would say, “fuck you, apology not accepted”--- dude should resign! This is fucking unacceptable! ...but there you go, the Facebook thing: a tool in the hands of another moron laying bare his stupid soul.... ...and more action with no consequences... asshole will probably get re-elected even though the damned county is only 50% white, and they can’t possibly be all bigot believers in -hah- intelligent design (an oxymoron if ever I've seen one), can they?...

...His Facebook page has been deleted à big whoopee. Ugh.

Tattoos (one more again) and Truth.

as an art teacher to young minds, I should make more of an effort to appreciate this crap; but I just can't, it displeases me even to soil my blog with it... but I digress

...In gym locker room; about to go take a shower... I ask the lady who is sitting on the bench in front of the only available stall if she is done with it. She answers yes and then asks about my tattoo. I tell her it is a rose and show it to her. She proudly shows me hers, a small butterfly on the side of her calf. I ask her when she got it. “Four years ago,” she responds proudly. I told her mine was thirty years old, and smiled at the thought of having a body organ, a part of which is older than that of a 76 year old woman... She told me about her 86 year old friend who also got new tattoos together with a bunch of body piercings. We then discussed the weather in New England...

...Was at the Barnes and Nobel, sitting on the floor in front of the philosophy shelf, trying to decide if I wanted to plunk a bunch of money on a book on Rorty and his critics... Behind me, reading a book from the New Age section of the store[1], sat what at the time I perceived to be a young boy whose age I would have put at maybe fourteen. We were both wearing Bermuda shorts. My legs old, freckled and bruised; his, smooth and young, imprinted with big Manga characters, together with letters of some language, real or invented, that I could not decipher, and taking up the whole of his calves’ skin real estate.

...I kept on reading. The boy left, only to come back later with an older girl/woman dressed in a Victorian-looking maroon dress with black lace and matching gloves. They kept talking about Nostradamus and werewolves. I remember thinking it creepy that such a young boy should be having deep conversations about such things with an older woman who did not appear to be his mother or sister. I then remembered that you had to be at least eighteen to get a tattoo. I took a closer look and noticed that “the boy” was actually a girl, and that she had car keys in her left pocket. The two girls did not seem like lovers, but friends who were getting to know each other through their shared interest in New Age...

...I kept reading Rorty’s theory on the relativity of truth. And yeah, I ended up plunking down a bunch of money for it...

---

[1] ...that seems to be the section on vampires, werewolves, Nostradamus and who the fuck knows what else

happiness

...could this be it's secret?

Declaration of Conformity

...I read it in the literature that came with a light fixture I bought from China...

Update

Recession shmeesession: Downturn or not, and lack of housing starts or not, the transformation of Clemson into one more indistinguishable blip in the stultefying landscape that constitutes suburban America continues unabated.

There goes any dream some of us had that this place might developed into something different. Not that the dream ever had any chance of becoming reality; but one likes to dream.

Despite this being a college town, its human capital is relatively low, and with that comes a singular (or maybe, given the its prevalence, not so singular) lack of vision for a town that might be different than the ones that surround it. At the ballot box, the same kinds of good ol' boys with a "let's develop cheap, fast and dirty" attitude were again elected to the city council. And with them, any dream (there's that word again) of legislating intelligent, sustainable, and from the point of view of this artist, aethetically pleasing developnment is hereby nullified.

Hello suburban desert.

Current deficit: at the moment, not Obama's fault

I heard on the news today that Obama’s worst ratings have to do with his (in)ability to curtail the deficit. In reaction to these poll numbers, the man has mentioned that he wants to institute a “pay as you go” policy. That is, he wants to either cut spending or raise taxes to pay for government programs in order to curtail our growing deficit; a policy that was in place when Clinton (the democrats) ran the executive branch and Gingrich (the republicans, at a time when they still seemed to have a brain cell to share amongst them; that is, they were fiscally responsible without being overly religiously fanatical) ran the legislative branch of our schizoid government. The policy, coupled with the mix of nuts running the place at the time, did result in a balanced budget and even in a surplus!

Granted, Obama seems to have big government projects in the works that if implemented will, probably, cost a lot of money. But let’s face it, this deficit we are talking about, and for which the people polled blame Obama, is purely the result of a government of the republicans, by the republicans, and for the republicans--- actually of and by the republicans, but for all of us to pay and keep paying for...

This current national deficit reached its zenith under the eight years of the Cheney, I mean, Bush administration. “Pay as you go” was left by the wayside in order to cut taxes. And as we were cutting taxes, we started spending more on Medicare and other types of social programs. In addition to more social expenditures, we also got ourselves embroiled in two seemingly eternal neo-crusades, I mean, wars. We, under the Cheney, I mean, Bush administration, did all this with no plans on how to pay for all this fun: the exact opposite of the “pay as you go” policy of the Clinton-Gingrich era.

Obama might be made of the same stuff that the ol’ big spending type democrats that America loves to love and hate are made of; but regardless of future expenditures and future deficits, the current ones, the ones that are impacting the poll ratings of our seated president, are most definitely not of his doing.