frailamerica

November 09, 2009

Break Free

The 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall should be a reminder that there are still “walls” in this world that need to come down.

About the photo: “Break Free” is a sculpture by Edwina Sandys, the granddaughter of Winston Churchill. Located at the Franklin D. Roosevelt Presidential Library, in Hyde Park, New York, it depicts a man and a woman cut from a concrete section of the Berlin wall. Its sister sculpture, “Breakthrough,” includes the section of the wall from which the “Break Free” figures were cut. It’s located at Westminster College, in Fulton, Missouri, the site of Churchill’s “Iron Curtain” speech.

August 26, 2009

Congressman Pallone's Health Care Town Hall in Red Bank, NJ

I missed the health care town hall Congressman Frank Pallone held in Piscataway on Monday, so I had to schlep to Red Bank on Tuesday after work. Arriving a little before 7pm, the line was wrapped around the block, while inside the auditorium was already full. I’m really no good at guessing crowd sizes, but I would say there were about 800 people outside. There was no way I was waiting in line for however many hours it took for the end of the line to get in, so I just walked around and took photos of the people with their homemade arts & crafts.

clicking on a photo makes it bigger!

And this was only about a third of the line.

This guy thought I was recording video, so he was telling me about some kind of “Obama deception.” I mean really, you’ll have to be more specific than that, neatly-groomed Santa Claus.

This guy was all about torturing his children.

It’s still not clear to me how you get to the cradle if you’ve been aborted.

The contradiction is self-evident.

SOCIALISM!

ACORN!

The real trouble with socialism is that apostrophes will be put in the wrong place.

This lady has a lot to learn about making provocative and wildly inaccurate slogans.

First, apostrophe abuse. Second, I get that she’s against “Cash for Clunkers,” but I don’t understand the “‘you can keep your health Ins.’ President OBAMA” part. Is she against the President’s quote about keeping your own insurance, or is she against keeping her own insurance. It’s unclear.

This sign is so stupid it was abandoned by its owner.

If the USA is awesome, wouldn’t adding another “S” make us more awesome? Check and Mate.

There was also a right-wing youth contingent. SWING HEIL, PETER!

This kid needs to learn that no one is going spend 5 minutes trying understand your sign—even if they’re stuck next to you in line for 12 hours.

What part of, “If you like your health care plan, you can keep your health care plan.” don’t people get?

James Carville?

Poor quality, but at least it’s pithy.

And the pro-reform people banded together to better their chances when if it came to fisticuffs.

Except this little old lady. It looked like her crew was only two people deep. But she maximized her signage space well.

AMERICA! FUCK YEAH!

May 03, 2009

Justice Souter's House

Here, at the dead end of Cilley Hill Road, is home. The crooked, rusty mailbox and the metal horse-and-buggy sign on the red barn door bear the name Souter. The brown paint on the wooden colonial farmhouse is peeling away, the second-floor curtains are drawn, and the windows are sagging with age.

A rusted wheelbarrow sits out back, and a bird’s nest rests atop a lantern on the shadowy bare-wood porch. The creaking, unkempt house looks so haunted that some people who passed by said they assumed it had been abandoned. The only sign of cultivation is five daffodils blooming alongside the weeds.

But Souter’s home is tranquil, with the quiet broken only by the buzzing of insects, the chirping of birds and the whistling of wind through the soaring pine and maple trees. Souter once wrote in a letter to the late Supreme Court justice Harry A. Blackmun that he is at peace here during the court’s recesses.

I do like how the Washington Post gives people the option of buying a copy of this photo, for those of you that collect photographs of palatial estates.

Quiet N.H. Home Is Where Souter’s Heart Has Always Been [Washington Post]

January 22, 2009

Inauguration 2009

Photos of the We Are One concert and the inauguration President Obama.

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December 19, 2008

The Real Problem With Rick Warren

Sure Rick Warren has some repulsive beliefs, and he has vocalized them in the some fairly offensive ways, but so does every other mainstream Christian leader. Whether it’s believing the Earth is 6,000 years old and dinosaur fossils were put here to test us, or that the son of God was born of a virgin birth, died some thirty years later and three days after that rose from the dead.

The fact that Rick Warren wants to deny basic civil rights to a specific group of Americans doesn’t shock or anger me any more than his answer to the question, Do you believe Creation happened in the way Genesis describes it?

If you’re asking me do I believe in evolution, the answer is no, I don’t. I believe that God, at a moment, created man. I do believe Genesis is literal, but I do also know metaphorical terms are used. Did God come down and blow in man’s nose? If you believe in God, you don’t have a problem accepting miracles. So if God wants to do it that way, it’s fine with me.

He’s obviously a rank dummy and isn’t worth his weight in piss, but he wasn’t asked to to give the invocation at Obama’s inauguration because he’s an intellectual powerhouse—he was asked because he is an expert in prayer. That is, asking for things from an entity whose existence is entirely based on faith.

Which brings us to my problem with Rick Warren giving the invocation. I have none. I do have a problem with there being invocation at all. The idea of God being invoked to bless, protect or do anything else on behalf of the United States makes me cringe.

I get that it’s tradition, and an invocation “neither picks my pocket nor breaks my leg,” so I don’t really care. But of all things Rick Warren believes, it seems to me his opposition to same-sex marriage is one of the more “traditional” beliefs he holds. That being said, to borrow a quote, tradition is the illusion of permanence.

November 19, 2008

Don’t you motherfuckers ever tire of getting bombed?

So, in a video posted on the Internets, Al-Qaeda’s second in command, Ayman al-Zawahri, called Barack Obama a “house negro.”

Of course the video is also full of the morbidly colorful poetry we’ve come to expect from people who ban books instead of reading them.

Be aware that the dogs of Afghanistan have found the flesh of your soldiers to be delicious, so send thousands after thousands to them.

Wonkette has what should be the official U.S. response:

Don’t you motherfuckers ever tire of getting bombed? Oh right, it’s never you dudes who get bombed, as you’re all off fucking goats in your gold-encrusted caves between YouTube sessions. It’s the poor fools you convince to run away from home and blow themselves up in 1976 Datsun pickups or whatever, and it’s the poor people unlucky enough to live in some Shiite v. Shia battlezone ghetto ‘hood, and basically the entire 80% of the global population who lives on less (usually far less) than $10 a day and are easily susceptible to every dingbat religious crusade, because they can’t afford the real World of Warcraft, they’re the ones who die, forever, while jackholes like you people and Dick Cheney play ping-pong, with Earth. Fucks.

Al Qaeda Twat Is Also Racist Against Our New Black President [Wonkette]

November 14, 2008

Benjamin Netanyahu Is A Thief

Stealing a site’s design is nothing new, but rarely does the offending site feature a photo of the person the design was stolen from.

“Imitation is the greatest form of flattery,” noted Ron Dermer, one of Mr. Netanyahu’s top campaign advisers. “We’re all in the same business, so we took a close look at a guy who has been the most successful and tried to learn from him. And while we will not use the word ‘change’ in the same way in our campaign, we believe Netanyahu is the real candidate of change for Israel.”

If I were one of the good people over at Blue State Digital, I would be more than a little miffed that my design was being used by the Likud party.

Barack Obama:

Benjamin Netanyahu:

(click on the thumbnails to show the full-size images)

In Israel, a Click Away From ‘Yes We Can’ [New York Time]

November 05, 2008

Have A Great Day

This is the stuff that makes me love Christopher Hitchens’s writing.

“Have a great day,” I said semi-automatically to the lady bus-driver as I dismounted in Washington DC having just cast my first presidential vote. She smilingly wished me the same. Hoping to rise above the semi-automatic, I then added: “Actually, it already is a great day.”

Call me fanciful and sentimental if you will, but the atmosphere on the bus seemed to undergo a slight but measurable change. More than just a mobile slow-moving slum where poor people who can’t afford taxis and cars get from place to place, it felt for a brief moment – I won’t say a shining moment – as if it was a part of something larger than itself.

Of course, by the end of the week that same bus will be grinding through the dead leaves and slush again, and keeping people waiting at rush hour and on the late-night and early-morning shifts. But this morning, among the turning leaves and in the winter sunshine, the line of voters that I joined was an experience worth having.

It seemed as if, without overdoing it or exaggerating it, people were making a very slight effort to say “after you”, or “can I help you?” Again without strain, the poll-watchers and the canvassers for each candidate appeared to be happy in their coexistence.

Have a great day [Mirror]

October 31, 2008

Roe vs. Wade

(click on the thumbnail to show the full-size image)

Roe vs. Wade [Woot]

October 08, 2008

That One '08

(click on the thumbnail to show the full-size image)

October 07, 2008

AIG Has Some Serious Balls

Less than a week after the federal government offered an $85 billion bailout to insurance giant AIG, the company held a week-long retreat for its executives at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., running up a tab of $440,000, Rep. Henry Waxman (D-Calif.) said today at the the opening of a House committee hearing about the near-failure of the insurance giant.

After Bailout, AIG Executives Head to Resort [Washington Post]