As much as I love the internet....

 

...I still find the death of large book stores depressing. The Borders shown here was always emailing me 40 percent off coupons, and I was wondering how long that could be sustained. Not very long, apparently.

Anti-tax rally in Austin

"Tax Day Tea Party" rallies were held across America today as part of a protest against the federal stimulus bill and the budget. Sometimes Austin feels a progressive bubble, but then you stumble across events like these and remember you're smack dab in the middle of Texas. I walked away wondering what Dee Snider thinks of them using We're Not Gonna Take It.

Sorry for the shaky video, but hopefully you get some sense of the event. I love the guy with the cigar towards the end of this one.



This was the view from the stage, kind of panoramic perspective.

Holy Fucking Shit!

Here is reaction from the Driskill Hotel in Austin just moments after Barack Obama was declared the victor in the Presidential election. The Driskill was where Travis County Democrats traditionally hold their election night parties. It was insane!

Clinton campaign mailer

One of the benefits of living in a state that could decide the Democratic presidential race is receiving negative campaign mailers. This attack from Hillary Clinton arrived in our mailbox on Saturday, just three days before the Texas primary on Tuesday, March 4th. Click on the images to get a closer look. I find it interesting.

She's attacking Obama's healthcare plan because it doesn't force people to buy coverage if they don't want it. Even though I think everyone should have coverage, mandating that every American buy it and threatening to garnish their wages if they don't is exactly the kind of government intervention the Republicans are ready to pounce on to prevent a Democrat from winning office. I can already imagine the attack ads assailing Hillary and her plan to have the government garnish your paycheck. That's going to freak a lot of people out.

This comes down the fundamental difference in the approaches of Obama and Clinton. Obama is probably more to the left than Clinton but realizes that to accomplish policy goals you have to be willing to compromise. Clinton promises to fight by the old rules. It's a matter of transcending partisanship versus fulfilling it.

A noun and a verb and 9/11

In last night's Democratic debate on MSNBC, Joe Biden -- my favorite drunk uncle -- delivered the best line of the night when he spoke about Rudy Giuliani's lack of experience. Check it out in the clip above.

I've been especially disturbed about the prospect of Giuliani winning the presidency, and not just because he's a Republican.

- His foreign policy team is made up of neoconservative hawks who helped push the U.S. into war with Iraq and now think bombing Iran is a great idea.
- The crazy fucker not only would continue raids on the sick and dying users of medical marijuana, but also insists the drug is "dangerously addictive", unlike - say - Oxycontin!
- Giuliani's racist worker ID card proposal (making all foreigners carry biometric ID cards) was once described by one of his own economic advisers as "totalitarian".
- He routinely cites misleading statistics to forward his argument that the U.S. health care system is "the greatest in the world."
- He even goes so far as to suggest the U.S. might have gone to war with Iraq if Bush and Cheney weren't in office!
- Just do a Google News search of Giuliani and you're bound to find some reason to hate the fucker.

But hey, if GOP voters elect a pro-choice, anti-gun, former mayor of New York City as their man in the White House, I guess the world is kind of fucked up already.

The Cost of Wealth

I liked James Carroll's column in the Boston Globe today on how the Iraq war is not only a fucked up Bush policy but also a reflection of the expansionist forces of the American economy, and that makes most of us implicated in one way or another. It's too easy just to blame Bush and throw up hands in despair and absolve oneself from US foreign policy. Anyway, he describes it far more eloquently.