ForenameSurname's blog

Two years ago, I fell in love with Jon Stewart. I stayed up late to watch reruns of "The Daily Show" and I partially blame him for my obsession with politics. Stewart, who was, at the time, funny, took me to impossible places. When he skewered Kerry's speech at the DNC in 2004, I laughed so hard I almost fell. My sides hurt. When Stephen Colbert, on the same episode, went through the "multicultural press conference" ("No, Jew, it's the gay's turn to answer now"), I couldn't breathe. Before there was a stampede into political involvement, before Jon Stewart became the brackish voice of liberal Hollywood, I watched "The Daily Show," sans interruptions or forgetfulness. I also read his first book, by the way, which I found to be a lot funnier than America (I didn't read through America; I skimmed, and it wasn't that moving).  Read More »

These thoughts pollute me - possibly because I am sans religion - but I think they're worth extracting from my brain.

I think we should legalize prostitution!

Think of the tax revenue! Think of the higher awareness by our own government of Sexually Transmitted Diseases! Think of the halt of brutalization of women who were forced into this profession by circumstances!  Read More »

The post I am about to write is going to be incredibly ironic if it's under the heading of "effective government."

I know that it's not in anyone's nature, on this site, to be concerned with politics that take place outside of the soft, trangressible borders of the United States (and possibly Mexico, so let's just say all countries of NAFTA and CAFTA). I know this, because I read blogs on this site and most of them reflect some portion of the American zeitgeist.  Read More »

I was going to write about something completely different, but CNN sent me a Breaking News e-mail with the following text inside:

Rush Limbaugh arrested on prescription drug charges and released on bail, law enforcement officials in Florida, tell AP.

Always one for schadenfreude, especially when it concerns people with a brain permanently positioned in the second stage of embryonic development, I'd like to say that this makes me a little happy inside. See, the Right is unflinchingly convinced that it can get away with quite a bit. There was numerical evidence (congressional and presidential approval ratings) to back this theory until very, very recently, and now that it's gone, I'm just watching the ship sink. How many more scandals can this party withstand until it gets wiped out into persona non grata status?  Read More »

When I first heard about Scott McLellan's resignation, I felt very good. On my nether blog (find it here), I was ecstatic, jubilant, unreasonably happy. To me, watching McLellan was excruciating. It was like getting electroshock therapy, to the genitals, circa 1972 ('Nam flashbacks, anyone?). It was like getting each bone in the body, from the hamate to the sella turcica, crushed with tiny hammers. The pain defied description, it transgressed the English language.  Read More »

Today is the twenty-year anniversary of the Chernobyl power plant catastrophe. For dark, inexplicable reasons, I feel a special sense of pride knowing this, probably because this is the only significant event in Ukrainian history, the only reason that the Ukraine might ever appear in a textbook or on the news. This is a tad unsettling: our public raison d'etre is a nuclear disaster that, Greenpeace estimates, will claim one hundred thousand lives with cancer. From the Urals to Lukashenko, the Motherland hath crafted a curious thesis for the twenty-first century: what to do with nuclear waste?  Read More »

I was reading a beautiful article this morning in today's Gazeta.ru (it's in Russian, folks; enter at your own risk) where it described Putin's rerouting of the trans-Siberian pipeline. Personally, I haven't seen such choreography since I attended "The Swan Lake" in Kiev in 2001. The move was so obviously carefully plotted and so gracefully executed that you'd think Putin was a ballet dancer, not a politician.  Read More »