Liza Sabater

Barack Obama was there on 1 May 2006. Will you join in on 2008?

AfterDowningStreet.org has an amazing historical overview on why tomorrow there will be massive demonstrations and labor union strikes all across the country : 122 years of the 8 hour week and end of child labor, 5 years of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, 3 years since the discovery of the Downing Street Minutes, 2 years since the nation-wide immigration rallies of 2006, almost 2 years ago when Nanci Pelosi and Democrats in Congress and the Senate took the impeachment of George Bush for misleading the country to war, "off the table". Yet in one of the most mindboggling examples of the Bush Administration's information war against Americans, May 1st has been declared Loyalty Day.

And here's the thing : You and I know that when it comes down to it, the war against immigrants is a war against labor which is part of a larger attack from the only people who benefit from the other kind of corporate-led violence like the occupation of Iraq.

As my friend Roberto Lovato said earlier, paraphrasing ActUP, "Silence = Death". If you are like me, you hate marches but you go to them because you know that as a symbol of solidarity in dissent you need to go.

So dust off your walking shoes and get your arse to the streets and square.

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AfterDowningStreet.org has an amazing historical overview on why tomorrow there will be massive demonstrations and labor union strikes all across the country : 122 years of the 8 hour week and end of child labor, 5 years of "Mission Accomplished" in Iraq, 3 years since the discovery of the Downing Street Minutes, 2 years since the

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There's going to be a lot of noise here in the next week to ten days. We're doing some major repairs and upgrades on the site that will fix the comment and posting problems we've been having in the last month.

And with that, I leave you with a time-lapse video of a construction site of 1 Bryant Park, on 4nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

Enjoy.

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There's going to be a lot of noise here in the next week to ten days. We're doing some major repairs and upgrades on the site that will fix the comment and posting problems we've been having in the last month.

And with that, I leave you with a time-lapse video of a construction site of 1 Bryant Park, on 4nd Street and Sixth Avenue.

Enjoy.

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In the immortal words of Team America, Fuck yeah!

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Yesterday I wrote about getting Lost In Hillaryland while driving down to Philadelphia to volunteer for the Obama campaign. In that post at Kenneth Cole’s Awearness Blog, I write about how after the mini-adventure of the day, my oldest came to the same conclusion as Joe Trippi : that Obama was going to lose.

My son’s observation was the most interesting part of the whole trip because it lent credit to my recent thinking of “politics as interface”.

Let’s look quickly at the definition of interface :

in·ter·face  
 (ĭn'tər-fās')  Pronunciation Key 
n.  
1. A surface forming a common boundary between adjacent regions, bodies, substances, or phases.

2. A point at which independent systems or diverse groups interact: "the interface between crime and politics where much of our reality is to be found" (Jack Kroll).

3. Computer Science

1. The point of interaction or communication between a computer and any other entity, such as a printer or human operator.
2. The layout of an application's graphic or textual controls in conjunction with the way the application responds to user activity: an interface whose icons were hard to remember.

An interface is a “surface forming a common boundary”, a space that is not only a common space but a mesh of space and communication. As the Java handbook to object-oriented programming explains rather well, an interface is not just the end result of a design process. Interfaces don’t come from the outside of the software process. It is part of the process itself.

So the surface that creates a common boundary is not outside two distinctive people or two distinctive groups. An interface is not something that is given to a “user”. An interface is a meshing of actions or simply put, it’s a two way street.

“Politics as interface” would be the meshing of actions, states of beings and phases between individuals, groups or even systems negotiating power. As a space of communication and as a meshing of actions, states of beings, wills and desires for power, politics as interface is developed all the time.

Politics as interface in Hillaryland is in the box of buckshot lighters gracing the gas station attendant’s counter. Politics as interface in Hillaryland is the certainly the senior women holding posters saying “Honk for Hillary”.

Yet Politics as interface in Hillaryland was the absence of sidewalks down Cedar Road, the expansive manicured front lawns with their mansions in the background and the “Hillary” signs cleaving the dirt in the foreground. It was the absence of white people in the small crowds waiting with exhausted looks on their faces for the bus to come. And it was certainly the meshing sights on the road to Philly of million dollar mansions, to quaint family homes to the “We buy ugly houses” signs and the boarded up brownstones and the rows after row after row of building broken down and abandoned on North Broad Street.

When we got lost in Hillaryland, my son was very keen and very much aware of who had the upper hand in expressing power. And it became even more obvious to him when we went canvassing on the 14th Ward.

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Baratunde has been going to Philadelphia almost every weekend for the past weeks. So yesterday, thinking what I am going to do with the kids this week --they are in Spring Break. I decided to rent a car and drive down to Philadelphia to help out the Obama campaign any way we can and in the process, be a part of history.

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Don't you wish all history lessons were like an Eddie Izzard standup bit? Because that's the genius of his act. There's nothing too far off the historical record in anything he says. It's just the way he puts it that's hilarious. And the fact he can make people laugh about Hitler, Lenin and Pol Pot all the while declaring us accomplices to their atrocities ... well, that's something beyond genius.

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About 10 minutes past 1:00pm but the post is but nevertheless:

The formal act of endorsing a candidate is generally (and properly)limited to editorial pages and elected officials whose constituents might be influenced by their choice. The rest of us shouldn't assume anyone cares. My avoidance of offering a formal endorsement until now has also been affected by the pull of old friendships and my reluctance as a teacher and commentator to be openly partisan. But my conscience won't let me be silent any longer.

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This is just so unbelievable it feels like I am in an episode of the Twilight Zone's rendition of Lord Of The Flies.

The fact that the accusation has been published in a few newspaper blogs makes it even worse : LA Times and Chicago Tribune are both alleging that Obama flipped the middle finger to Clinton during the course of a speech in North Carolina.

This.
Insanity.
Has To.
STOP!

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John Heilmann helps Robert Reich drop a bomb on the Clinton campaign :

Reich insists that the endorsement does indeed come as a surprise — to him. As we chatted in Washington, where Reich had come from Berkeley, where he teaches, to give a speech and meet with some Democrats on Capitol Hill, he explained that, despite the criticisms he's made of the Clintons ("I call it as I see it"), he had planned to refrain from offering an official backing for Obama out of respect for Hillary. "She's an old friend," Reich said, "I've known her 40 years. I was absolutely dead set against getting into the whole endorsement thing. I've struggled with it. I've not wanted to do it. Out of loyalty to her, I just felt it would be inappropriate."

So what's changed? I asked Reich.

"I saw the ads" — the negative man-on-street commercials that the Clinton campaign put up in Pennsylvania in the wake of Obama's bitter/cling comments a week ago — "and I was appalled, frankly. I thought it represented the nadir of mean-spirited, negative politics. And also of the politics of distraction, of gotcha politics. It's the worst of all worlds. We have three terrible traditions that we've developed in American campaigns. One is outright meanness and negativity. The second is taking out of context something your opponent said, maybe inartfully, and blowing it up into something your opponent doesn't possibly believe and doesn't possibly represent. And third is a kind of tradition of distraction, of getting off the big subject with sideshows that have nothing to do with what matters. And these three aspects of the old politics I've seen growing in Hillary's campaign. And I've come to the point, after seeing those ads, where I can't in good conscience not say out loud what I believe about who should be president. Those ads are nothing but Republicanism. They're lending legitimacy to a Republican message that's wrong to begin with, and they harken back to the past 20 years of demagoguery on guns and religion. It's old politics at its worst — and old Republican politics, not even old Democratic politics. It's just so deeply cynical."

To have tossed aside a 40 year-old friendship and business relationship is beyond serious. It's a brutally honest repudiation from a man who has become a sort of oddball superstar in the academic wonkosphere with such ponderings as Is Capitalism Always Good For Democracy? and the nature of Supercapitalism. Especially since Reich happens to be from ... ahem ... Scranton, Pensylvania.

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Does someone know why would Drupal would start blanking out pages when you try to post to the site? I am running on 4.7 AND I KNOW I HAVE TO UPGRADE. That's coming soon, but I need to solve this issue now.

Any leads?

I have been playing quite a lot with Twitter, but feel empty inside. For one, I have and awful lot of things to say that do not quite fit there (for they take up more than 140 characters) yet neither at culturekitchen, since they have to do more with the minutiae of the blogosphere.

So, here I am. Let the ranting begin.

Robert Shales is right on the money when he says, To this observer, ABC's coverage seemed slanted against Obama. Memeorandum exploded in posts from irate liberals and journalists who saw nothing but a thinly vieled hatchet job against the front-runner of the Democratic Party.

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Error: the chat cannot be loaded! two possibilities: your browser doesn't support javascript or you didn't setup correctly the server directories rights - don't hesitate to ask some help on the forum www.phpfreechat.net/forum

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I found Steve Harvey, one of the Kings of Comedy, unleashing his inner sexy beast over at Oh No They Didn't; which was in turn sourced from Bossip.

Oh no they didn't indeed.

There are no words to describe this photograph, and this is not even the best of them. Check out tiny after the jump :

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I don't know why they are broken, but we're looking into it.
Sorry for the inconvenience.

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That is all.

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