We're Not The Only Ones Out There

As scientists from NASA reported this week, there's a strange gaseous phenomenon occuring on Venus, with a strange bright cloud formation moving from Venus' south pole to its equator, and then back again, over a period of weeks.

As we keep bullshitting ourselves with self-righteousness, the reality can only be that we are not the only ones in the galaxy. The fact that no one has stopped by to visit from any of the planets in our known history doesn't mean they aren't; they're probably trying to reach us too. But like us, they don't have a clue that they're not the only ones out here either. But life and the universe keep on going and growing. As evidence, I post this beautiful picture of new stars, and thus new life, forming in the heavens:

Pour Vous Les Blagues Cochonne (Dirty Jokes 4 U)

Here's some funnies a friend passed on to my cell the other day:

A vampire goes into a bar and asks for boiling water. The bartender says 'I thought you guys only drank blood'. The vampire pulls out a used tampon and says 'I'm making tea'.

And here's a brain-twista fo' ya:

Q of the Day: If you have sex with a hooker against her will, is it rape or is it shoplifting?
A: Shoplifitng. You were in the store, right?

new zeland - a nice place to visit

here are some hot hotties from new zealand's formula one competitions:

she is sooooo cute!

outstandingly delicious

yummy...congratulations are in order.....

the winner's circle is where the action is....

i see they have some chocolate mixed in with their vanilla down there...

a sexy asian mix with vanilla here...

she's got legs...and assz for dayz...

and if this ass doesn't make you want to visit new zealand....

this should do it all.

lock 'n load, babay...

Guest Editorial: Frank Rich Discusses The Evolving New Century

Op-Ed Columnist

The Grand Old White Party Confronts Obama

By FRANK RICH

Published: February 17, 2008

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Barry Blitt

THE curse continues. Regardless of party, it’s hara-kiri for a politician to step into the shadow of even a mediocre speech by Barack Obama.

Senator Obama’s televised victory oration celebrating his Chesapeake primary trifecta on Tuesday night was a mechanical rehash. No matter. When the networks cut from the 17,000-plus Obama fans cheering at a Wisconsin arena to John McCain’s victory tableaubefore a few hundred spectators in the Old Town district of Alexandria, Va., it was a rerun of what happened to Hillary Clinton the night she lost Iowa. Senator McCain, backed by a collection of sallow-faced old Beltway pols, played the past to Mr. Obama’s here and now. Mr. McCain looked like a loser even though he, unlike Senator Clinton, had actually won.

But he has it even worse than Mrs. Clinton. What distinguished his posse from Mr. Obama’s throng was not just its age but its demographic monotony: all white and nearly all male. Such has been the inescapable Republican brand throughout this campaign, ever since David Letterman memorably pegged its lineup of presidential contenders last spring as “guys waiting to tee off at a restricted country club.”

For Mr. McCain, this albatross may be harder to shake than George W. Bush and Iraq, particularly in a faceoff with Mr. Obama. When Mr. McCain jokingly invoked the Obama slogan “I am fired up and ready to go” in his speech Tuesday night, it was as cringe-inducing as the white covers of R & B songs in the 1950s — or Mitt Romney’s stab at communing with his inner hip-hop on Martin Luther King’s birthday. Trapped in an archaic black-and-white newsreel, the G.O.P. looks more like a nostalgic relic than a national political party in contemporary America. A cultural sea change has passed it by.

The 2008 primary campaign has been so fast and furious that we haven’t paused to register just how spectacular that change is. All the fretful debate about whether voters would turn out for a candidate who is a black or a woman seems a century ago. Mrs. Clinton and Mr. Obama vanquished the Democratic field, including a presidential-looking Southern white man with an enthusiastic following, John Edwards. What was only months ago an exotic political experiment is now almost ho-hum.

Given that the American story has been so inextricable from the struggle over race, the Obama triumph has been the bigger surprise to many. Perhaps because I came of age in the racially divided Washington public schools of the 1960s and had one of my first newspaper jobs in Richmond in the early 1970s, I almost had to pinch myself when Mr. Obama took 52 percent of Virginia’s white vote last week. The Old Dominion continues to astonish those who remember it when.

Here’s one of my memories. In 1970, Linwood Holton, the state’s first Republican governor since Reconstruction and a Richard Nixon supporter, responded to court-ordered busing by voluntarily placing his own children in largely black Richmond public schools. For this symbolic gesture, he was marginalized by his own party, which was hellbent on pursuing the emergent Strom Thurmond-patented Southern strategy of exploiting white racism for political gain. After Mr. Holton, Virginia restored to office the previous governor, Mills Godwin, a champion of the state’s “massive resistance” to desegregation.

Today Anne Holton, the young daughter sent by her father to a black school in Richmond, is the first lady of Virginia, the wife of the Democratic governor, Tim Kaine. Mr. Kaine’s early endorsement of Mr. Obama was a potent factor in his remarkable 28-point landslide on Tuesday.

For all the changes in Virginia and elsewhere, vestiges of the Southern strategy persist in some Republican quarters. Mr. McCain, however, has been a victim, rather than a practitioner, of the old racial gamesmanship. In his brutal 2000 South Carolina primary battle against Mr. Bush and Karl Rove, Mr. McCain’s adopted Bangladeshi daughter was the target of a smear campaign. He was also pilloried for accurately describing the Confederate flag as a “symbol of racism and slavery.” (Sadly, he started to bend this straight talk the very next day.) He is still paying for correctly describing Jerry Falwell, once an ardent segregationist, and Pat Robertson, a longtime defender of South African apartheid, as “agents of intolerance.” And of course Mr. McCain remains public enemy No. 1 to some in his party for resisting nativist overkill on illegal immigration.

Though Mr. Bush ran for president on “compassionate conservatism,” he diversified only his party’s window dressing: a 2000 Republican National Convention that had more African-Americans onstage than on the floor and the incessant photo-ops with black schoolchildren to sell No Child Left Behind. There are no black Republicans in the House or the Senate to stand with the party’s 2008 nominee. Exit polls tell us that African-Americans voting in this year’s G.O.P. primaries account for at most 2 to 4 percent of its electorate even in states with large black populations.

Mr. Obama’s ascension hardly means that racism is kaput in America, or that the country is “postracial” or “transcending race.” But it’s impossible to deny that another barrier has been surmounted. Bill Clinton’s attempt to minimize Mr. Obama as a niche candidate in South Carolina by comparing him to Jesse Jackson looks more ludicrous by the day. Even when winning five Southern states (Virginia included) on Super Tuesday in 1988, Mr. Jackson received only 7 to 10 percent of white votes, depending on the exit poll.

Whatever the potency of his political skills and message, Mr. Obama is also riding a demographic wave. The authors of the new book “Millennial Makeover,” Morley Winograd and Michael D. Hais, point out that the so-called millennial generation (dating from 1982) is the largest in American history, boomers included, and that roughly 40 percent of it is African-American, Latino, Asian or racially mixed. One in five millennials has an immigrant parent. It’s this generation that is fueling the excitement and some of the record turnout of the Democratic primary campaign, and not just for Mr. Obama.

Even by the low standards of his party, Mr. McCain has underperformed at reaching millennials in the thriving culture where they live. His campaign’s effort to create a MySpace-like Web site flopped. His most-viewed appearances on YouTube are not viral videos extolling him or replaying his best speeches but are instead sendups of his most reckless foreign-policy improvisations — his threat to stay in Iraq for 100 years and his jokey warning (sung to the tune of the Beach Boys’ version of “Barbara Ann”) that he will bomb Iran. In the vast arena of the Internet he has been shrunk to Grumpy Old White Guy, the G.O.P. brand incarnate.

The theory of the McCain candidacy is that his “maverick” image will bring independents (approaching a third of all voters) to the rescue. But a New York Times-CBS News poll last month found that independents have even a lower opinion of Mr. Bush, the war, the surge and the economy than the total electorate and skew slightly younger. Though the independents in this survey went 44 percent to 32 percent for Mr. Bush over John Kerry in 2004, they now prefer a Democratic presidential candidate over a Republican by 44 percent to 27 percent.

Mr. McCain could get lucky, especially if Mrs. Clinton gets the Democratic nomination and unites the G.O.P., and definitely if she tosses her party into civil war by grabbing ghost delegates from Michigan and Florida. But those odds are dwindling. More likely, the Republican Party will face Mr. Obama with a candidate who reeks even more of the past and less of change than Mrs. Clinton does. I was startled to hear last week from a friend in California, a staunch anti-Clinton Republican businessman, that he was wavering. Though he regards Mr. McCain as a hero, he wrote me: “I am tired of fighting the Vietnam war. I have drifted toward Obama.”

Similarly, Mark McKinnon, the Bush media maven who has played a comparable role for Mr. McCain in this campaign, reaffirmed to Evan Smith of Texas Monthly weeks ago that he would not work for his own candidate in a race with Mr. Obama. Elaborating to NPR last week, Mr. McKinnon said that while he is “100 percent” for Mr. McCain and disagrees with Mr. Obama “on very fundamental issues,” he likes Mr. Obama and what he’s doing for the country enough to stay on the sidelines rather than fire off attack ads.

As some Republicans drift away in a McCain-Obama race, who fills the vacuum? Among the white guys flanking Mr. McCain at his victory celebration on Tuesday, revealingly enough, was the once-golden George Allen, the Virginia Republican who lost his Senate seat and presidential hopes in 2006 after being caught on YouTube calling a young Indian-American Democratic campaign worker “macaca.”

In that incident, Mr. Allen added insult to injury by also telling the young man, “Welcome to America and the real world of Virginia.” As election results confirmed both in 2006 and last week, it is Mr. Allen who is the foreigner in 21st century America, Mr. Allen who is in the minority in the real world of Virginia. A national rout in 2008 just may be that Republican Party’s last stand.

Egg on my Face - The Giants Won!

Super Bowl XLIII Champion is - WHO???? Yes the Giants won an upset, a surprising one, with one of the best catches in football history from a 20-yard pass play from Eli Manning to Tyree, in what will be one to talk about for awhile. The parade is going right past my office building in Lower Manhattan now. Just can't believe it, but what can I say?

I predicted the Patriots all the way, instead I got a lethargic Tom Brady & Co. The Giants, who didn't necessarily play their best game, played a great playoffs series and frankly have been on a roll since December, when they almost beat the Pats in the last game of regular season play. All hats off to the Giants, their coaching staff and the city that never sleeps. They deserved it earned it and were without a doubt the better team. Bravo!




The Lombardi Trophy is yours, brothas!

Get Out and Vote Today! It's Super Duper Tuesday!


I doubt you'd read this unless it caught your eye. Perhaps this will catch your eye and motivate you. If you go out and vote, you'll get to see these Danish cyclers at the polls:



your vote is you and so revealing of who you are. . . .

and voting does much much more....

vote for who your heart and mind tells you to....

Vote for a leader that matters.

This election is so important, I ASK YOU TO VOTE LIKE IT'S YOUR LAST DAY TO GO TO A Tuborg Mongolian Barbecue. Hurry!!

2050: when we're there please let me know...

I'm listening to this Professor Swain on Lou Dobbs tonight, talking about the (i think) now-worn logo about "by 2050, the United States will be a predominantly minority population", as if when that happens, blacks and whites will live together in harmony like ebony and ivory. Not tryin' to diss the sista (she is more knowledgable than me) but I ask: So What?? What does that mean for the sons and daughters of Africa in America? Nothing good, I say. Why??

Because the way minorities will take over the United States (and more on why it may not mean much later) is through the Hispanic American population. Already, they are having children at 110% times the rate of white and black American families, even higher than that against Asian Americans. There will also be an explosion of the Hindu-Indian American population, which is already showing itself especially in its infusion into our financial, service and government industries, both through marriage and family building, and immigration. These 2 populations in particular will transform the way America looks and acts. This should concern us. It will likely affect the attitudes towards black Americans adversely, because there is already some dissent, prejudice and indifference towards African Americans by these groups. Will their children bring about negative or positive change in the future? A question with no clear answer; time will tell.

What is true is that the black population, barely growing 2-5% a year, and low birth rates rivaling whites and asians, will not be the new population with influence on future events. Their population will be about 8% of the population by 2050, down from 11% today. Therefore, Hispanics will have a much stronger say on events, especially as they will inherit the native son argument over anyone from India or Pakistan. But the Hindu-Indians will be more respected in the business community, which will propel this group to a high status and visibility.

What world will they inherit? Probably a nation with more vigourous intents to protect civil rights, but also one with both whites and blacks feeling weakened in power and living with more anxiety about their future. As whites will undoubtedly still have more money than blacks at that time, they may be able to weather and adapt to survive, while being in a position to protect their culture and wealth to some extent. Blacks, with less of both, will probably lose more of what they had, but may be more adaptable to the changing landscape.

It's likely not a cherries-and-cream future for us all. Black folks, take note, and get ready.

Hillary's Bio In Short From An Old Friend

i thought this was interesting, coming from someone we haven't heard from in awhile.....



like, this is so mid-1960s. the mod look. the afro look. i'd say this is 1969 .... Hillary was at Wellesley College from 1965 thru 69.

Professor Lani Guinier of Harvard Law School, who is supporting Mr. Obama, said the key distinction between Mr. Obama and Mrs. Clinton lies in how they view their relationship to power. In doing so, Ms. Guinier, whose nomination as assistant attorney general for civil rights in 1993 was pummeled by conservative groups and aborted by the White House, referred to their respective biographies:

"Mrs. Clinton is the talented lawyer serving her clients,” Ms. Guinier said. Mr. Obama is the organizer, she said, “who sees the source of his power as the ability to inspire people to mobilize.”

Referring to the possibility of the nation’s election of a historic first, a black or a woman, Mrs. Clinton said last week, “In a way, it’s a good problem to have. But it is a problem.”

just goes to show - you never know when or where those old college friends might pop up.