Chris Magazine

Happy Thanksgiving....oh wait... I said that. Screw all of you then.

The worst thing about getting up at 1:30 to go to work...it's about a half hour before I go to bed. I'm actually losing thirty minutes every night I work. It's possible I'm creating some sort of a rift in a time space thingy... so, if anything goes terribly wrong any time soon and it seems like that might be the cause... sorry about that.

It's kind of nice that we can all focus on Conde Rice as being a tunnel vision lemming who acts with little regard for how our actions impact the rest of the world and the fact that as secretary of state she will have to work very hard to get any respect from allies who see her as one of the key cogs in our imperialistic march towards war and not as simply someone who will likely be our first black female secretary of state. We've come so far. I'm really proud of you USA!

The Fog of War... great documentary by Errol Morris. He's talking to Robert MacNamara, who was the secretary of defense under Kennedy and Johnson and he helmed the Vietnam War. While I had not really believed the cry of Iraq being another Vietnam as anything more than sensationalistic, after watching this movie I might have shifted my views a bit. Well worth checking out.

Looks like I accidently got a job. Damn. Gonna miss lounging by the pool.

Today we lament the passing of Russell Jones. You probably know him better as ODB or Ol' Dirty Bastard from Wu Tang Clan. He died in the studio Friday at the age of 35. He was a pioneer in the field of "keepin' it real". He not only sang about the thug life, he lived it.

Over the years, he was wounded in shootings and arrested on a veritable laundry list of charges, including menacing security officers, illegally possessing body armor, driving with a suspended license, shoplifting and threatening a former girlfriend. Heck, he just got out of jail not to long ago. And not only that, he had tons of kids, each with different mothers.

His mom called him Rusty, but to me he'll always be Big Baby Jesus. I think that psuedonym suited him best.

ODB, or BBJ or Rusty, you'll all be missed.

See now, this sort of thing wouldn't happen if there wasn't gay marriage. It's screwing up everything.

There was a time
when I had hope
hope for the future
hope for my future
I believed I could do as I wished
that I could use what skills I have
to accomplish anything
I had hope for the world
that things would turn out for the best
that there was no choice but to have that happen
I had hope for love
but not anymore
I question it all
it's been taken from me
I'm not even hopeless now
I'm without hope
now, I am simply
less

You have to love the new crackdown on bad language and inappropriate material by the FCC, it's now led to this.

Yes, there are profanities and extreme violence in Saving Private Ryan, but that's what the movie is about. War is not a pretty, clean, sterile thing and shouldn't be portrayed that way. The material in this film is all in context, it's not meant to titillate or for shock value, but that may not matter to the FCC. The film is a tribute to those who sacrificed for others, it's what Veterans Day is supposed to be about, but then again maybe Veterans Day is really about shopping and sales since I see a whole lot more about that than I do about Veterans.

As with every other holiday that was supposed to remember a certain incident or group this one too has been hijacked, over-commercialized and obfuscated. Kids get the day off, instead of spending the day talking about the day itself. So we can all hope that while they are shopping with their parents and buy Halo 2, they look at the soldiers on the box and maybe ask what veterans day is all about...though since they're shopping they'll probably have already surmised that it's about 35-50% off and half-yearly sales.

By the way, since this isn't regulated... Fuck you FCC.

About becoming a useful member of societ, but then I realized that would take work. I'd rather stay at home and sulk...plus, I'm getting really good at it.

After hearing about this, I'm sure the newly re-elected administration will do the right thing and step down.

I was really concerned when I heard that George W. had a mandate...first thing I thought to myself was, "wow, he didn't take long to throw the fact that he doesn't have to work to get re-elected in the face of the evangelicals", but then someone explained to me that a "mandate" was different from a man-date. My bad.

And it appears that Bush will be our President for another four years. Certainly I am disappointed. I think this will be bad for the country, bad for our foreign relations, bad for the environment, bad for the poor, bad for education, bad for social security and bad for equal rights. It will be good for the Republicans, the rich, the Christian right, Air America, corporations and the Democrats.

It's about time the Democrats got a wake up call. It's the second consecutive election in which they threw up what they hoped was the lesser of two evils. They need to reassess what they stand for and then decided to actually stand for it as opposed to co-opting the Republican positions and trying to split hairs to show the difference. They better hope that Barak Obama matures quickly and that he brings a new generation of leaders with him because otherwise they are in real trouble.

The next four years will be the most interesting of my lifetime. We'll see the fruition of the Bush vision for the world and I suspect that many won't be welcome there. The war in Iraq will still worsen before it gets better and we'll remain very alone. We'll see more terrorist actions against the United States and our allies. The economy will continue it's slow growth, but we'll see a rise in corporate profits while average wages continue to fall. We'll see a new Supreme Court overturn laws that have stood for decades, removing or at least restricting severely a woman's right to choose. Gays will find themselves relegated to second class status. The religious right will exert their pressures upon the United States and we'll see a moral police the likes of which we've not dealt with since the Puritans were in charge. We will lose more of our national forests to clear cuts, to drilling and development. Our skies will darken with pollutants as companies use lowered EPA standards as a means of saving money on safety improvements to raise their bottom lines. Our smug, tight lipped administration will continue to rule with a secrecy never seen before in the White House.

It's not a hopeless situation. It's possible that those who lost and who voted the other way will take this as a rallying cry, but right now I suspect that won't be the case immediately. For now it's all about the mourning...and hoping that there are 300,000 Democrats with valid provisional ballots in Ohio still waiting to be counted.

Get out there and vote today and remember, every vote counts...I mean, unless yours is successfully challenged by the opposing party because your signature has changed since you signed your voter registration card 15 years ago. Otherwise, every vote counts.

So here we are, on the cusp of what many believe is the most important election in a generation. Whether or not that is true is, for the moment, obfuscated in the fog of the here and now and will be bourne out by history. What we do know is that a decision affecting the future of our country comes tomorrow (or as soon as all the recounts and lawsuits are finished) and that by January we will have some idea of what the next four years will hold.

There is a lot of crap floating around this campaign season, much of it ugly and a great deal of it untrue. The candidates offered us are, at best, poor and the rhetoric has divided the country to the point where opposing sides can't even have any sort of a reasonable conversation. The environment of dogmatic sophistry has overwhelmed the middle ground and hopes for compromise on issues has fallen prey to the salt the earth attacks which have positioned the players where they currently stand.

A couple of things before I continue. I'm supporting Kerry, not because I'm thrilled with him, but because I believe Bush to be a poor President with poor policies. Bush, despite what some people may wish to believe, is not a moron. He may be intellectually lazy like so many wealthy playboys before him, but he's not stupid by any means. He's also not the worst president we've ever had. Has he been bad for the environment? Yes. Bad for the poor? Yes. Bad for foreign relations? So it would seem. But, Andrew Johnson will still reign as the worst president ever. He wasn't elected to the position, wasn't even qualified to be VP really and was only in the position to appease the south. He was a true moron.

Like everyone else this election season has made me pretty sick to my stomach. We've heard less about issues and more about useless, unimportant things than I can ever recall. Politics seems to have stumbled into this morass of single issue voters who are swayed more by marketing strategies than they are by real facts. Our politicians lie, just flat out lie every day on the campaign trail. They make things up and nuance their way around the truth. No one calls their statements lies of course, instead choosing to chock it all up to "politics". As if there should be a much lower standard for what is the truth when it comes to the political circle. We allow the misdirection and half-truths slip by because we know that they aren't true, as if that too makes it ok, but it's not ok.


Here are a couple of examples. The Kerry campaign is still talking about job losses during the Bush Administration. One of the consistent statements on the trail have been that Bush lost 800,000 jobs. Originally the cry was 3,000,000 jobs, but as things have improved nationally in the market that number has fallen and most of the jobs have been replaced. What the Kerry campaign did was focus on white collar jobs, of which, right now the country has lost about 800,000 in the last 4 years. The problem is that isn't how it's stated. The way Kerry talks, you'd think he was speaking about jobs in general, but that isn't the case. Is it a horrific thing? No, but it is a deceptive.

Bush, on the other hand, keeps dropping the 75% number when it comes to the amount of senior Al Queada leadership he's taken out. First couple of times he talked about it the number was 50%, but before too long it went up to 75%, probably because it sounds better. This is a great claim, but one with seemingly no quantifiable basis. Conde Rice was asked on one of the Sunday news shows about it and she admitted that they really don't know how many there were to begin with or how man leaders Al Queada now has. Not only that, but it's a completely unimportant figure considering all the terrorism experts claim that Al Queada's numbers are back up to where they were before we attacked Afghanistan. It's almost like claiming that you've taken out two thirds of the 2001 New York Yankees. That's wonderful, but when you took Aaron Boone they went and got A-Rod. I wouldn't call that a real victory. Never-the-less, it is acknowledged that the Bush Administration took out some of the bad guys so the claim stands and no one says anything.

We all sit about and bitch about the media and how they let people get away with things. We complain about the offered candidates or the tone of the campaigns, but in the end we are the problem.

Admittedly, it doesn't seem to me that the United States has an real leadership out there. No one who is able to step up and raise the collective consciousness of the nation. But we don't demand it. We've gotten what we asked for. George W. Bush is the perfect people person president. Is he a really good president? No. But he seems like the kind of guy you could hang out with, drink some beers, tell some dirty jokes to.

George Bush says you should vote for him because you know where he stands, but that's not true. We know what he says, where he stands is a completely different matter. Is Kerry any different? We don't know and won't know unless he's elected, but right now his words too are simply rhetoric and marketing devices.

If you really want a change, then engineer a change. Start paying attention to the issues. Start looking deeper into things and not just getting your talking points from Air America or Rush Limbaugh. Start trying to understand the implications of actions that we take as a nation. Start reading papers from other countries to see how they perceive what we are doing. Start looking outside the two traditional parties to see if anyone else out there speaks with a voice that rings true. Stop saying you hate mudslinging, but then react to that type of campaigning with all the resolve of a recovering alcoholic during a tour of the Jack Daniels distillery. Stop tearing down people who seek to do good simply because they mispeak or have made a mistake at some point. Good people don't run for office in the country because they know that there is no way to remain good in politics. We, the electorate, are the ones who let that happen. When someone starts personal attacks, start demanding a return to the issues. Get active in your own local politics. Demand more from your local news on the radio, newspapers and television. If you want this country to get better from what ails it, then take some responsibility.

The time is coming where someone will step up to lead this country forward, away from the partisan bickering towards a better place. The question is, when they come will you be ready to listen.