hard headed woman

Video: Wanda Jackson sings Hard Headed Woman

Well, in response to asking, 'Hey, you want me to make a positive difference and fight for all our children's future from outside the governor's office?' It was four yeses and one 'Hell, yeah!" And the 'Hell, yeah' sealed it.

What Alaskan Governor Sarah Palin's kids reportedly said, when she announced to them, with the same ambiguity and lack of meaningful detail about her future plans that she spooned out to the press, that she plans to step down from her governorship on July 26th. As reported by the Associated Press.

That woman's up to no good.

on edge

Atari bling ring
by Sakurako Shimizu

It is connectivity, more than money or stature, that determines individual power.

Ann-Maria Slaughter paraphrasing David Rothkopf in America's Edge: Power in the Networked Century in the January/February 2009 issue of Foreign Affairs.

all class.

Directly behind the stage at Xcel Energy Center, they're working feverishly in an 8-by-10-foot room that boasts a cow skull over the door, a deer head on the wall, an oriental rug and a poster of Barack Obama smoking a cigarette (there are plans to add big photos of Paris Hilton and Britney Spears).

AdAge reporting on the stagecraft that's being pulled together for the Republican National Convention in St. Paul, MN.

straight talk

Video: Barack Obama's A More Perfect Union adddress

As far as I know, he's the first politician since the Civil War to recognize how deeply embedded slavery and race have been in our Constitution. That's a profoundly important thing to say.

Professor Paul Finkelman of Albany Law School, commenting in this morning's New York Times on Senator Barack Obama's We The People speech, delivered yesterday in Philadelphia.

& p.s.: baby quoted Faulkner in his speech. WILLIAM FRICKIN' FAULKNER.

You wanna win my heart forever? Quote friggin' Faulkner. (Or Borges.)

The Past isn't Dead and Buried. In fact it isn't even past.
—W.F.

oh, &p.p.s. The author of the speech that Barack Obama delivered yesterday in Philadelphia? Barack Obama.

taxation with representation

It's the reason we dumped that tea into the sea so many years back -- so we could hire our OWN hooligans, thank you very much, and have a say in how our pennies, dimes and dollars are spent.

Polls open early here in the U.S. -- I'll race ya.

diplomacy is in the details

This evening, As It Happens -- a news show out of Canada that runs every night in Chicago on WBEZ -- reported on the reaction of US Ambassador to the UN, John Bolton, to Hugo Chávez’s derision of George W. Bush as a demon whose sulfuric stench still hung in the air of the room that he left shortly before.

They played a sound bite of Bolton as he refused to comment -- other than to say that Mr. Chavez was fortunate to have made his statement on US soil, where freedom of speech is tolerated. (I can’t cite the exact quote here because I had my hands full of kale and kielbasa – I was busy making dinner. But I suspect a good listen over at the As It Happens Archive will turn it up.)

Here’s what struck me as odd: The UN isn’t on US soil. Not really. It’s an international territory.

Isn’t John Bolton supposed to know that?

(Or maybe I’m just being picky.)