John Joseph Bachir’s blog
A few photos from when I went to the Media Ecology Association conference a few months ago.
A couple bumper stickers on a truck in Manhattan. A closeup of the facial features of the terrorist depicted in the bumper sticker. My friend Emily, who let me crash in her place.
The Supreme Court agreed yesterday to consider the legality of Texas’s 2003 congressional redistricting plan, which was engineered by then-House Majority Leader Tom DeLay (R-Tex.) and helped cement GOP control of the House.
The court will hear challenges from Democrats and minority groups who say that the mid-decade redistricting unlawfully diluted the strength of minority voters, injected undue partisanship into the congressional map and violated the concept of one person, one vote by drawing district lines with outdated census data.
Saw this on boingboing:
(Noam Chomsky speaking about Bush)
So therefore you have… George Bush… this pampered kid who came from a rich family and went to prep school and an elite university. And you have to present him as an ordinary guy who makes grammatical errors, which I’m sure he’s trained to make–he didn’t talk that way at Yale–and a fake Texas twang, and he’s off to his ranch to cut brush or something. It’s like a toothpaste ad. And I think a lot of people know it.
This is the kind of thing that annoys me about Chomsky. Most of the time he is so well researched, and then other times he is so anecdotal, making vague references to non-falsifiable conspiracy theories. Does he have any proof that George Bush makes grammatical errors on purpose? Furthermore, Chomsky has been hanging out at pretty fancy institutions his entire life, hasn’t he seen the rich and privileged barely-literate idiots that go in and out of those places?
Don’t get me wrong, there is certainly an elaborate plan to sell Bush as the President that you can relate to, the President who doesn’t talk too fancy.
If there is one thing Bush is great at, even when on the spot in public, it’s completely undermining the question that was asked and either not addressing anything, or steering the dialogue toward what he wants to talk about. He performs this pretty much flawlessly.
Which makes me see Chomsky’s point more. Hmmm.
I don’t know. I ask you, Dear Reader, is Bush’s idiocy an elaborate show?
Here are some photos I took off of my phone back in May and have been meaning to put up.
A kid in the mall sitting in the lap of a statue of a kid in a wheelchair. Inside my car at night. Chris. Dogs playing in the fountain in front of the baker institute. sister Natalie in a store in Green Bay. sister Julie in same store. coworker from former employer Center Line Productions Meredith with out-of-town sister Virginia. camera-lit bar photography of Virginia, Dave B (another Center Line coworker), me.
“Mr. President,” one aide in the meeting said. “There is a valid case that the provisions in [The Patriot Act] undermine the Constitution.”
“Stop throwing the Constitution in my face,” Bush screamed back. “It’s just a goddamned piece of paper!”
I’ve talked to three people present for the meeting that day and they all confirm that the President of the United States called the Constitution “a goddamned piece of paper.”
As the creator (and lazy maintainer) of Deathdata, I have a great appreciation for worldmeters.
Caught this in Reading the Encyclopedia Britannica, a blog of a brave man who is going to read through the entire Enclopedia Britanica and blog about what he learns and experiences:
[an excerpt from the EB that his blog post quoted]
Among Bacon’s papers a notebook has survived, the Commentarius Solututs (”Loose Commentary”), which is revealing. It is a jotting pad “like a Marchant’s wast booke where to enter all maner or remembrance of matter, fourme, business, study, towching my self, service, others, eyther sparsim or in schedules, without any manner of restraint.” This book reveals Bacon reminding himself to flatter a possible patron, to study the weaknesses of a rival, to set intelligent noblemen in the Tower to work on servicable experiments. It displays the multiplicity of his concerns: his income and debts, the King’s business, his own garden and plans for building, philosophical speculations, his health, including his symptoms and medications, and an admonition to learn to control his breathing and not to interrupt in conversation.
My buddy Brenn has made a couple cafepress shirt stores with his original artwork. Skeletons Can Dance and Bob the Battle Lizard.
Justice Department lawyers concluded that the landmark Texas congressional redistricting plan spearheaded by Rep. Tom DeLay (R) violated the Voting Rights Act, according to a previously undisclosed memo obtained by The Washington Post. But senior officials overruled them and approved the plan.
The memo, unanimously endorsed by six lawyers and two analysts in the department’s voting section, said the redistricting plan illegally diluted black and Hispanic voting power in two congressional districts. It also said the plan eliminated several other districts in which minorities had a substantial, though not necessarily decisive, influence in elections.
My buddy Dakota Smith’s current band is Peel. I am listening to a prerelease of their upcoming album and it is absolutely great. There are some sample mp3s on their website. Check them out.
