brainrow

Yet another lost verse from the Woody Guthrie song This Land is Your Land:

As I was walkin’ — I saw a sign there
And that sign said —

But on the other side … it didn’t say nothin!
Now that side was made for you and me!

Yeah! We’re born free!

(With thanks to A Blog Around the Clock.)

The Daily Show has the best analysis of the Petraeus hearings, because they cut through the crap.

Aasif Mandvi:

You know what they say on the Arab street, Jon? “It is not an ethno-sectarian competition unless you break a couple of eggs.”

There was another campaign shakeup earlier this week:

“After the events of the last few days, Mark Penn has asked to give up his role as chief strategist of the Clinton Campaign,” campaign manager Maggie Williams said in a statement released Sunday. “Mark, and Penn, Schoen and Berland Associates, Inc. will continue to provide polling and advice to the campaign.”

Communications director Howard Wolfson and pollster Geoff Garin will craft strategy for the campaign going forward, Williams said.

Yes, the Clinton campaign is going all the way to the convention.

It may be an uphill battle, but Hillary’s no quitter.

Atrios asks:

Didn’t Apollo Creed beat Rocky?

Well, yeah.

That’s why I assumed Hillary was comparing herself to the indomitable Rocky, the Flying Squirrel, not the punch-drunk palooka played by Sylvester Stallone. Stallone has endorsed John McCain and the use of Human Growth Hormone. I don’t understand why so many people are confused about this.

Another MLB screw-up:

Major League Baseball’s opening day turned into a frustrating affair for many subscribers to its fee-based MLB.TV live game video-streaming service.

Subscribers encountered disruptive technical problems on Monday that included slow response times at the MLB.com site and problems with an upgraded media player.

For starters, the new version of MLB.com’s Mosaic media player remained unavailable until around 4 p.m. Eastern Time, although six games had started between 1:05 p.m. and 3:05 p.m.

…

Frustration was high among premium-level MLB.TV subscribers, who pay either $19.95 per month or $119.95 per year. They were promised an improved “TV-quality” picture this year, thanks to enhancements to Mosaic and to the service in general.

Nick Mavro, a premium subscriber since 2006, is getting tired of MLB.TV opening-day glitches, and the current problems had him questioning whether he should have signed up for this season. “When they cannot get it right on clearly their most ‘glorious’ day, it is very frustrating. In hindsight, I would opt against signing up again,” Mavro, a Toronto businessman, said via e-mail.

Steroids, censorship, and technical foul-ups that stiff paying customers.

Strike three! You’re out!

Hillary is Rocky:

Hillary Clinton has vowed to fight on in the contest to be the Democrats’ presidential candidate, comparing herself to the film character Rocky.

Rocky was always tough. Spunky. Never gave up.

In this scenario, I’m guessing Bill Clinton is supposed to be Bullwinkle?

The video of Bush being booed at a baseball game has been removed by YouTube. They’ve posted a message saying “This video is no longer available due to a copyright claim by MLB Advanced Media.”

Interesting. President of the United States goes to a baseball game at a stadium paid for with taxpayer money and the crowd boos him. But we have no right to see that without “express written permission of Major League Baseball.”

Congress, while you’re rooting around in the steroid scandal, maybe you should make some adjustments to copyright law, too. Bush’s performance was not part of the game, and cannot possibly be “intellectual property” of Major League Baseball under any reasonable standard of fair play.

This is why I could never be president. I was never any good at sports.

Update: Major League Baseball claimed copyright and made YouTube take the video down. Way to go, Major League Baseball!

These folks claim to run a test of the amount of cussing on a website, but I don’t think this score truly captures the seething rage that fuels this blog. I guess I’m keeping it bottled up. I could blow sky-high at any moment.

(Via A Blog Around the Clock.)

Via Cartoon Brew, this may be the real story of humanity.

It’s tough to break the cycle. Just look at Mr. Gandhi, Dr. King, Mr. Christ…

At the end of a PBS American Experience program about photographer Ansel Adams, Sierra Club Executive Director Carl Pope summed up:

Well, Ansel’s life encompasses the long national debate — the debate that, I think, began ten years before he was born with the release of the Census of 1890, the declaration that the frontier had closed, and Frederick Jackson Turner’s famous challenge to the American people: who were we going to be now that we didn’t have a frontier anymore?

And Ansel’s life occupied almost exactly a century in which Americans debated that question, and at the end of the century came to Ansel’s answer, which was that while the frontier as a statistically measured artifact of the Census Bureau might have ended, wildness did not end with the frontier, and that what it was to be an American was to respect and cherish wildness.

…

I think Ansel captured in film that opportunity, that possibility which Americans spent all of his lifetime debating whether to value. And then, really almost at the end of his life, Americans decided that we wanted to be Americans. We did not want a second Europe. We wanted a place that was still wild.

The difficulty with protecting wild places is that you can’t win the victory once and for all. Every day, there is pressure to allow logging or drilling or other exploitation of wilderness lands. We can turn the developers away a hundred times, but they’ll be back, over and over, until there are no wild places anywhere.

Such things, once lost, can never be recovered. Never.

Sometimes you have to laugh to keep from crying. The Daily Show reviews the first five years of the War in Iraq:

Perhaps, to view this war as a success, we have to look at it the way the president does: backwards.

And they bring us “Dick Cheney, International Man of Misery.”

Obama calls for a national dialogue on race. Jon Stewart looks at how the cable news channels respond.

This video contains bad language. Normally, I wouldn’t post it on this blog, but in this case, the bad language is used to make a serious point about 90% of our political discourse.

As everyone knows, all wisdom is contained in the movie The Empire Strikes Back. Naturally — it’s got Yoda.

One of the big slam-bang wisdom scenes in the movie occurs when Luke Skywalker tries to levitate his crashed spaceship out of a swamp. Luke grimaces and strains, and manages to raise the ship a few inches, but then he collapses and the ship sinks even deeper into the muck. “It’s too big,” he gasps.

Yoda tells Luke that size doesn’t matter. “My ally is the Force,” he says. It is a field created by all living things. It’s particularly strong in the swamp, which teems with life. “And a powerful ally it is,” collectively much bigger and more powerful than Luke, or Yoda, or the sunken spaceship. Then he raises the ship and moves it to dry land.

Luke failed because he thought he was doing it himself.

In last week’s debate, Hillary Clinton said, “The question that I have been posing is, who can actually change the country?” She says she can.

Remember Hillary’s tongue-in-cheek Christmas campaign ad, where she was wrapping up “universal health care,” “alternative energy,” “bring troops home,” and “middle-class tax breaks” as the gifts she was giving to the American people? It bothered me. I still like to imagine we have government by the people, not by the president.

In a speech last month, she said, “It’s about picking a president who relies not just on words but on work, hard work, to get America back to work.”

Just words? Obama has inspired millions of Americans who were sitting on the sidelines to get involved in building a stronger and better America — an involvement that doesn’t end on Election Day, but only begins then.

If Clinton thinks that doesn’t matter — that his message is “just words” — if she thinks that solutions to the country’s problems can be her gift to us; if she thinks she can grimace and strain and make the change America needs by the force of her will, then I think she is not a Jedi yet.