President Barack Obama was awarded the Nobel Peace Prize on Friday, a decision that instantly created controversy. For one thing, Tina Fey wasn’t even nominated. For another, Obama’s been president less than nine months, and had only been in office for 12 days when his nomination was submitted.
In case you’re wondering who nominated him, NobelPrize.org states, “The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed until 50 years later.” So if you’re an anti-birther or anti-taxer or anti-tolerater, the answer is: the Forces of Evil. (And if you’re wondering how I know about Tina Fey, sorry, but I’m not sharing my peyote with you.)
The Norwegian Nobel Committee, which chooses the winner each year, explained that “Obama has as a president created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play.” According to the Associated Press, committee member and Norwegian politician Aagot Valle added that this year’s prize should be seen as “support and a commitment for Obama.”
The president, for his part, was humble about his victory. “I do not feel that I deserve to be in the company of so many transformative figures that have been honored by this prize,” he said. “I will accept this award as a call to action.”
But just a few hours before Obama’s victory was announced, he stood idly by as NASA tried to blow up the moon! From what I can gather, the U.S. space agency’s $79 million rocket was supposed to poke a giant hole in the Alan Shepard Memorial Golf Course, at which point all the water inside the moon would rain down on Earth — because the moon is up above and we’re down below and that’s how gravity works — thereby solving our planet’s impending water crisis.
Muntadhar al-Zeidi, the Iraqi TV reporter who threw his shoes at President George W. Bush during a press conference in Baghdad last December, was released from prison on September 15 after serving nine months of a one-year sentence. (Throwing a shoe at a person is considered highly disrespectful in Islamic culture.) Immediately hailed as a hero in the Arab, Muslim, and NPR-listening worlds last winter for his act of defiance — he yelled “This is your farewell kiss, you dog!” and “This is from the widows, the orphans, and those who were killed in Iraq!” as he hurled each shoe at Bush — al-Zeidi emerged from prison into a world with a new American president and a decreased U.S. military presence in his home country. Now, in a loosely translated Popdose exclusive, he speaks out about his experience.
When I went into prison last year, I was 29 years old. Now I am 30 years old. I am a man now, and in prison I was the man, as you Americans say. People made T-shirts. A game on the Internet called Sock and Awe was created by people with much time on their hands. (It is fun. Play it. You could waste your life in worse ways.) And the video of me throwing my shoes at President George Bush “went viral,” I was told. My prison guards even threw me a birthday party in January. They gave me bright green shoes with holes on the top side that are called Crocs. It was amusing at first.
Many things can change in a short amount of time, however. The zeitgeist — it has shifted. The world has moved on. My people say to me, “The sectarian violence is not like it was, Muntadhar, and this new American president, unlike the previous one, he has a brain.”
Now there is a very bad crime wave, however, and it is led by the same people who almost pushed Iraq into a civil war. They cannot find jobs, so they kidnap and demand ransoms instead. Learn new skills, gentlemen. Take computer classes. Oh, that is right, I have forgotten — there is no electricity to run the computers! Carry on then, sectarian thugs.
The outburst heard ’round the nation, at least until Kanye West co-opted the mike: South Carolina Representative Joe Wilson’s interjection during President Obama’s health care pitch to Congress. A million would-be pundits and chat show hosts have ruminated on it, the masses have reviled him as well as lauded him, backing their positions up with donations to electoral funds, and even former President Jimmy Carter has weighed in. Carter’s belief that “You lie!” was racially motivated seems genuine but, at the same time, heavily influenced by Maureen Dowd’s column on the subject, titled “Boy Oh Boy.”
I’m split down the middle on the racism of the comment. Standing alone, it bears zero indication of racial prejudice. It can be interpreted in a thousand ways, and has, but itself is not inflammatory. It’s all in how the listener interprets it that gives it the bulk of the controversy, and so there’s no way of crying racism beyond a shadow of doubt. As two words stitched together, intention is loaded with nothing but doubt. At the same time, though, the fact that the very white Congressman Wilson felt he could just blurt this out while the very black President was giving a speech, a disrespect he might not have shown were it a good-ol’-boy fellow in Obama’s stead, is one that would cause people to see prejudice.
I could go on for several more paragraphs about how George W. Bush was soundly boo’ed at the last few congressional speeches he made, but then I would have to weigh the emotional impact of the sound ‘boo’ versus implying the President is a liar. For some, they’re equally insulting; for others, the two hardly compare. I speculate that your take on it will depend on what side of the aisle you choose to sit on (and perhaps your willingness to reach across said aisle would play into the equation as well.) (more…)
With pure obviousness, the U.S. Census Bureau reported that median household income in the United States fell to $50,303 in 2008, a 3.6 percent decline from 2007. Adjusted for inflation, that is the biggest one-year decline in 40 years. Also, 39.8 million Americans now live in poverty, and 46.3 million Americans lack health insurance. The poor getting poorer, alas, does not make news. What’s interesting is that the rich got poorer, dragging the numbers down more than might otherwise be expected and reversing a decades-long trend.
To put it another way: the Bush tax cuts did not trickle down, nor did they create a rising tide that lifted all the boats. All they did was increase the Federal deficit. (And people think Franklin Delano Roosevelt was a class traitor? FDR had nothing on GWB.)
Professor Richard Green at the University of Southern California, who follows the real estate market, combined the census data with his knowledge of the housing market, and he reached an interesting conclusion: Americans can’t afford the houses on the market now, so real estate prices have further to fall.
One trope trotted out at the beginning of every recession is the idea that certain businesses will do just fine either because the customers are so rich that they won’t be affected by the recession or that the price is so low that people will always be able to fit it into their budget. As the millions of American children who now eat store-brand macaroni and cheese with Hunt’s ketchup can attest, this is not always the case. Price is not always in line with value.
Some high-end customers never were rich; they were spending money they did not have, possibly borrowed against their houses. Some rich people are not so rich anymore, and not just because they invested with Bernie Madoff. Some rich people are also very smart, so even though they have the money, they know that the Mercedes dealer is hurting and median housing values are falling and thus expect a deal. And some rich people don’t think it is wise to flaunt their wealth during a time when so many people are hurting.
Meanwhile, the tax cuts that were supposed to cure all, that many persist in believing will cure all, didn’t. The so-called Laffer Curve, known as the taxable income effect, says that at some increased level of taxation, government revenues fall because people have no incentive to work. But what tax level is that? Since the 2003 tax cut, the highest rate in the United States is 35%. In 1980, it was 70%.
One way to think about taxes is that it is the price of being employed in America. Of course there is a price; we want things that the government provides, ranging from national defense to national parks. This nation has more opportunities for employees and entrepreneurs than many others, and that comes with some cost. But what is that price? If you owned a retail store that sold jeans, you might try pricing them at $1000 per pair. But at that price, no one would buy them and your revenue would be zero. You could give the jeans away, but then your revenue would also be zero. But what price within that range would not only cover your costs, but maximize your profits? Is it $30 per pair? $300? Who knows? It will depend on who your customers are and what they want.
I’m not arguing that a tax increase would increase incomes, but I can’t rule it out. It’s possible that higher taxes might force people to work harder so that they have enough money to buy what they want after the government gets its cut. It’s also possible that a tax increase would trample on the tiny green shoots of recovery that we may be seeing now. But I do know this: the Bush tax cuts did not lead to prosperity. We are saddled with a deficit from the tax cuts and spending on two wars, made worse by a stimulus package needed to bring us out of a nasty recession.
Spike Lee’s Do the Right Thing opened in theaters on June 30, 1989, and as he told the Associated Press recently about the film’s controversial climax, “White people still ask me why Mookie threw the [trash] can through the window. Twenty years later, they’re still asking me that. No black person ever, in 20 years, no person of color has ever asked me why.”
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
It didn’t have to be O.J., who wasn’t exactly a shining beacon of black pride. And it wasn’t that every black person in America thought he was innocent. But, as Boyd noted on ESPN.com two years ago when discussing Barry Bonds’s home-run record, “acquittal in a court of law was trumped by conviction in the court of public opinion” in the following decade. Now Simpson is behind bars, for armed robbery and kidnapping — the verdict in that 2007 case was handed down exactly 13 years after he was acquitted for the murders of Nicole Brown Simpson and Ron Goldman — and it’d be difficult to believe that the jury wasn’t influenced by the general perception that Simpson had gotten off scot-free in the ’90s.
The black community had a similar, though more muted, reaction when Michael Jackson was found innocent of child molestation in 2005: “the powers that be” had failed to bring down another rich and famous black man who had risen to the top of his profession. (R&B star R. Kelly, who wrote Jackson’s 1995 hit “You Are Not Alone,” was acquitted of 14 counts of child pornography last year. So far, his career hasn’t been affected the way Jackson’s was.) But the biggest musical star of his generation wasn’t a symbol of black pride, either, at least not on the outside: since the mid-’80s his skin color had become lighter and lighter, his hair straighter and straighter, and his nose smaller and smaller due to an overabundance of plastic surgery. In 2002, when he accused his record label, Sony Music, of not supporting its black artists, the standard joke was “Who is this white woman and why is she calling Tommy Mottola a racist?”
Whilst reading Jack Feerick’s “How Bad Can It Be” column on Marilyn Manson’s new album, I was struck with an interesting thought. Parents have long feared Manson’s effect on their children, or at least they did when I was in school. Why do we choose to fear that which we have been told to fear?
This isn’t exactly a new thought. Franklin Delano Roosevelt famously said, “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself.” Yet we continue to be afraid for little reason other than we have been told to.
In fact, it seems as if every generation of parents has had a pop-culture influence to be frightened of. Elvis’ hips seem silly now, but at the time they caused a near panic from parents. For every generation of children that grows up under these evil influences, a new fear rises when they raise their own kids.
Movies exploit this concept extraordinarily well. What reason do you really have to fear a horror film? When I was young, I remember being frightened by seeing Freddy Krueger even on a TV commercial. In fact, I’ve never even seen any of the Nightmare on Elm Street movies, probably because I was so terrified of the killer as a child. (more…)
In February 2007 The New Yorker published “Whatever It Takes,” an article by Jane Mayer about the Fox series 24, and how the politically conservative views of the show’s creators, Joel Surnow and Robert Cochran, have influenced its use of torture scenes. “The truth is, there’s a certain amount of fatigue. It’s getting hard not to repeat the same torture techniques over and over,” said Howard Gordon, the show’s head writer, or “showrunner,” who described himself as a “moderate Democrat.”
In that same month, Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, announced he was running for president, while on 24 there was already a black president in the White House: Wayne Palmer, the brother of ex-president David Palmer, who was assassinated in season five. That’s right — two black presidents in a span of three fictional terms of office. Pretty liberal, huh? (Author and NPR favorite Sarah Vowell is a fan, and former Air America radio host Janeane Garofalo was a regular cast member this past season.) And how about all those scenes of indestructible government agent Jack Bauer using “enhanced interrogation techniques,” forcing terrorist suspects to talk so he can find whatever ticking time bomb is set to go off before the end of each season? Pretty right-wing, huh? (Rush Limbaugh’s a fan — and a good friend of Surnow’s — and Senator John McCain made a cameo in season five.)
24 is a bleeding-heart-liberal show soaked in the blood of our freedom-hating enemies. Everybody wins! Everybody except the show’s fans, who, regardless of their personal politics, know the once riveting show’s best days are behind it, and not just because the post-9/11 cultural zeitgeist can no longer lend 24 the kind of collective-unconscious off-screen urgency it used to. Garry Trudeau’s Doonesbury summed it up nicely in a strip earlier this month, in which a CIA applicant who asks about “ticking time-bomb exemptions” is told, “Everyone’s over ‘24.’” The truth is, there’s a certain amount of fatigue on both sides of the screen when it comes to the long-running series.
It’s been a rather apocalyptic year for conservative Christians. The virtual collapse of America’s economy and moral standing under their Chosen leader, George W. Bush, left their credibility as an influence on governing in tatters. Their preferred candidate in the Republican primaries, Mike Huckabee, won the rural South but lost the rest of the country to a guy who used to call their leaders “agents of intolerance.” They cozied up to John McCain eventually, but the fervently devout Church Lady he chose for a running mate turned into a national joke. And then the guy they love to deride as a Muslim, if not the Antichrist, won the presidency by a comfortable margin and led an electoral sweep that left right-wing Christians without a single significant champion in Washington.
Even their one major victory on Election Day, in California’s battle over Prop 8, was tempered by the fact that it was bankrolled and driven to victory largely by the Mormon church, which evangelical Christians still hold highly suspect. (A corollary fact – that most Californians harbor intense Buyer’s Remorse over Prop 8 – can’t sit well either.) Since November, gay-marriage opponents have been forced to swallow defeats in Connecticut, Vermont and Iowa (Iowa!), with more states likely to fall to the hedonists and infidels in the near future. Just yesterday, New York Gov. David Paterson announced he’s introducing a gay-marriage bill in the state’s heavily Democratic legislature.
Meanwhile, church attendance is down, atheism and non-affiliation are up, abortion is still legal, vocal prayer is still banned from public schools, evolution is totally kicking creationism’s ass, stem cell research is being funded by the government, that Ten Commandments monument is in a basement somewhere rather than on the courthouse lawn, Lil Wayne is #1 on the charts, and Terri Schiavo is still … well, you get the picture. Hell, Newsweek even celebrated Easter with a cover story touting “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Short of the Rapture arriving tomorrow – which, I recognize, many evangelicals would consider a blessing – could things get any worse for the Christian Right?
The fact is, the movement that began with Jerry Falwell’s Moral Majority, and expanded through Pat Robertson’s Christian Coalition, Donald Wildmon’s American Family Association, James Dobson’s Focus on the Family, and other groups, is just … about … wait for it … dead. Though we can expect the funeral to drag on for a while. (As Richard Pryor once famously quoted his father, “The dirt! Can we get to the part with the dirt?”) (more…)
The last couple weeks have served as a brilliant, if butt-ugly, reminder that governance should be judged not on the back and forth of day-to-day events, but on outcomes. When the history of President Obama’s first month in office is written, it will state that he moved swiftly and boldly (and perhaps “wisely”) to combat a calamitous economic crisis, pushing through stimulus legislation that emerged from Congress in pretty much the form and amount he requested, and in impressively short order. The sturm und drang over line items that came and went, honeymoons that supposedly ended early, and Bipartisanship: Impossible will be rendered mere footnotes to the end result.
That doesn’t mean, however, that the minutiae of this past month should be disregarded completely. Indeed, they offer an assortment of clues to the manner in which Obama’s administration will play out over the long term. As long as he continues to get what he wants, Obama will use both carrots and sticks to engage the Republicans and maintain the bipartisan high ground; the minority party, meanwhile, will likely play nice and talk up what a great guy Obama is, while offering little to no actual support for his agenda.
Note, however, that last phrase: “his agenda.” As I noted, historians will regard this stimulus as distinctly Obama’s package – and once the bill reaches his desk for signature he will take full ownership of it. But since the day after Inauguration, this legislation has hardly felt like it belonged to Obama. He made a big show of acceding to various GOP tax-cut proposals during the weeks before he took the oath, but once in the White House he left the bill almost entirely in Congressional leaders’ hands to shape, reshape and fight over. He seemed determined not to get his own hands dirty, not to demand specific items in specific amounts nor to reject specific Republican proposals out of hand.
He allowed the House to steer the bill too far to the left, then the Senate to over-correct to the right, before yesterday’s frenetic negotiations concluded with Harry Reid, Nancy Pelosi, Ben Nelson, Arlen Spector and the Ladies from Maine all smiling. (Here’s another clue to the next two years: As long as those six people are smiling, Obama’s agenda will sail through the legislative branch.) The president’s own arm’s-length embrace of this process wound up costing him only a few billion in education funding here, a few billion in aid to the states there…
…And about 25 percentage points of popular support for the legislation. That’s the extent of the disconnect between Obama’s approval rating and that of the stimulus package itself. Obama’s decision to allow Pelosi and Reid to shape and guide the bill not only made opposition less painful for the Republicans – it cost Obama considerable buy-in from a public that clearly wants him to seize his mandate and succeed with it, but is far less attached to the fortunes of the Democratic Congress. (more…)
When you weigh Lily Allen’s artistic output with how much tabloid-style press she gets, it’s safe to say that her personality has earned her just as much attention as her music, if not more. Increasingly known for her party-girl ways and her frank, sometimes harsh interviews and commentary, the big-eyed brunette from the UK spent two years as a media darling between the release of her debut, Alright, Still, and her latest album, It’s Not Me, It’s You.
She starts slinging sass from the very beginning with “Everyone’s At It,” about widespread drug use/abuse. “I’m not trying to say that I’m smelling of roses / but when will we tire of putting shit up our noses?” she asks over a power-electro-pop beat. It’s incredibly club friendly, though it’s hard to picture people on a dance floor jamming to a song about their own drug problem.
Kiss-offs to men abound. There’s “Not Fair,” where Allen rides a beat from a western riff while she complains about a guy who’s giving outside of the bedroom, but not giving in it. In “I Could Say” and “Never Gonna Happen,” she flippantly pushes aside relationships with guys who she finds pathetic or boring, but doesn’t pack much of that infamous attitude in either one.
When she does show anger, it feels misplaced. “22″ is an interesting commentary on women devaluing with age, partly because she agrees? Singing about a woman who’s “nearly 30,” she says, “It’s sad but it’s true how society says / her life is already over.” She treks into political territory with “Fuck You,” directed to former US President George W. Bush, but doesn’t have much to add beyond, “Fuck you / fuck you / fuck you very, very much.”
Allen is still an entertainer, though, and her one-liners provide plenty of amusement. In “The Fear,” she claims, “I want to be right and I want lots of money / I don’t care about clever, I don’t care about funny,” but the big joke is her tongue-in-cheek attitude that indicates she so obviously does.
It’s fun to see Allen exploring new musical territory, with blooping, sci-fi electronic beats, piano blues riffs, folky tones and even a dash of klezmer. However, the drawback of Greg Kurstin’s unusual production is a lack of anything as instantly sugary as her mega hit, “Smile.”
Allen’s superficial comments on heavy subjects make It’s Not Me, It’s You a featherweight affair, but while her youthful vibrancy hinders her in that way, her version of the life and attitudes of a modern-day 20-something are also part of the appeal. As she’s quick to point out in “I Could Say,” “I’ve got a life ahead of me / I’m only 22.”
In case you’re wondering who nominated him, NobelPrize.org states, “The names of the nominees and other information about the nominations cannot be revealed until 50 years later.” So if you’re an anti-birther or anti-taxer or anti-tolerater, the answer is: the Forces of Evil. (And if you’re wondering how I know about Tina Fey, sorry, but I’m not sharing my peyote with you.)
When I went into prison last year, I was 29 years old. Now I am 30 years old. I am a man now, and in prison I was the man, as you Americans say. People made T-shirts. A game on the Internet called 
Perhaps the white people who’ve asked Lee that question also wondered why black people across the United States celebrated the 1995 acquittal of O.J. Simpson, a famous black football player accused of murdering his white wife. As Todd Boyd, a professor of popular culture at the University of Southern California, noted in the HBO documentary O.J.: A Study in Black and White (2002), the gut reaction boiled down to psychological payback. In other words, for every black man in this country who’s been beaten, lynched, shot, or thrown behind bars for a crime he didn’t commit, you didn’t get this one.
Whilst reading Jack Feerick’s “How Bad Can It Be” column on Marilyn Manson’s new album, I was struck with an interesting thought. Parents have long feared Manson’s effect on their children, or at least they did when I was in school. Why do we choose to fear that which we have been told to fear?
Meanwhile, church attendance is down, atheism and non-affiliation are up, abortion is still legal, vocal prayer is still banned from public schools, evolution is totally kicking creationism’s ass, stem cell research is being funded by the government, that Ten Commandments monument is in a basement somewhere rather than on the courthouse lawn, Lil Wayne is #1 on the charts, and Terri Schiavo is still … well, you get the picture. Hell, Newsweek even celebrated Easter with a cover story touting “The Decline and Fall of Christian America.” Short of the Rapture arriving tomorrow – which, I recognize, many evangelicals would consider a blessing – could things get any worse for the Christian Right?
Note, however, that last phrase: “his agenda.” As I noted, historians will regard this stimulus as distinctly Obama’s package – and once the bill reaches his desk for signature he will take full ownership of it. But since the day after Inauguration, this legislation has hardly felt like it belonged to Obama. He made a big show of acceding to various GOP tax-cut proposals during the weeks before he took the oath, but once in the 
Lily Allen – It’s Not Me, It’s You (2009, Capitol)
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