born live love die

Thank you John McCain for bringing the Palins into the spot light.  They have been a never ending source of humor.  Got drugs?  It’s all in the family.    I am not a drop out.  I’m taking correspondence classes.

Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin says her future son-in-law is not a high school dropout as the press is reporting.

The former Republican vice presidential candidate told The Associated Press on Wednesday that 18-year-old Levi Johnston is enrolled in high school through a correspondence program.

I guess she thinks that not going to school, but taking classes by mail is not dropping out.

Love it.

Bush is double dog daring Democrats.  The Bush sycophants are pushing the meme that he will be well remembered.  To that end, Bush will not issue blanket pardons for the people that worked for him.  He is daring the Democrats to investigate the egregious lawbreaking that happened in the White House.

They should take his dare.

I have  been watching the conflict between Israel and Hamas.  The awful calculus is that Israel has a lower birthrate than the Arabs in the area.  In Israel, Israeli Jews want to be in the middle class and upper class and have fewer children because of the time it takes to establish that social and economic position.  Israeli Arabs are in the lower middle class and lower class.  They have children earlier and more of them.  At some point, the population imbalance will overwhelm Israeli Jews; at some point, military power will no longer be capbable of protecting the state of Israel.

There’s a department of pediatric pychopharmacology at Harvard Medical School?

Take the case of Dr. Joseph L. Biederman, professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School and chief of pediatric psychopharmacology at Harvard’s Massachusetts General Hospital. Thanks largely to him, children as young as two years old are now being diagnosed with bipolar disorder and treated with a cocktail of powerful drugs, many of which were not approved by the Food and Drug Administration FDA for that purpose and none of which were approved for children below ten years of age.

I got this quote via Kevin Drum:

It is simply no longer possible to believe much of the clinical research that is published, or to rely on the judgment of trusted physicians or authoritative medical guidelines. I take no pleasure in this conclusion, which I reached slowly and reluctantly over my two decades as an editor of TheNew England Journal of Medicine.

In some parts of our economy, we have a marriage of the public money and private interest that is similar to that in fascist systems.  Drug companies rely on research done at public universities (Harvard would dry up and blow away if not supported by government research grants) to validated their wares, which are then available only through government approved sales agents, doctors.  Feh.

I’ve been a fan of Barack Obama since I heard him speak at the Democratic Convention in 2004.  He spoke about America the way I felt about America.  I watched “60 Minutes” last night, an episode that told the story of Obama with interviews collected over the last two years.

Michelle Obama said something that keeps coming back to me.  When asked if she was more afraid of someone taking a shot at Barack, she said, “As a black man in America, he could get shot going to the gas station.”  This is the reality for black people in America.  On the wire this morning:

The number of young black men and teenagers who either killed or were killed in shootings has risen at an alarming rate since 2000, a new study shows.

After Barack Obama was elected, there was a run on guns in gun stores in some parts of the country as white people put a price on their fear and guns on their credit cards.  The reality is that black people are more likely to get shot.  Often, the perpetrators are also black.   But white people are the ones who are scared most?  Go figure.

Wapo says:  Premarital Abstinence Pledges Ineffective

Teenagers who pledge to remain virgins until marriage are just as likely to have premarital sex as those who do not promise abstinence and are significantly less likely to use condoms and other forms of birth control when they do, according to a study released today.

Whoa, didn’t see that coming.

Kings of Leon are making noise.

Good noise.

Sex on Fire.

I’m driving to the mall and I see a license plate frame that says:

“I love Jesus”

and all I could think of was:

“He’s not that into you.”

Yeah, I know that isn’t cool, but I laughed hard about it.

I’ve never been a Tom Cruise fan.  I don’t think he is a good actor.  I don’t like the parts of him that I can see.  Don’t get me wrong.  Acting well is a harrowing proposition.  Living the part, letting go of every thing you are,  is scary and most people can’t do it.  I watch Joaquin Phoenix and see him live the parts he plays.  The key is to have enough of your self so that you have some self to go back to.  Tom Cruise acts like a pretty pathological liar.  If he weren’t so pretty, he would be equally comfortable telling lies on Wall Street, but no less successful.

I’m not the only one who feels this way.

I can’t name another American icon who has been so popular, and for so long, and yet so hard to like, and for so long. (When the studio sent the then-mostly unknown Cruise to Paul Brickman, the writer-director of Risky Business, Brickman recoiled, saying, “This guy’s a killer. Let him do Amityville 3.”)

I don’t hate the guy.  I just find the movies that he is in to be uninteresting.

Hearts?  Minds?

Let’s go a little further south in human topography.

The Afghan chieftain looked older than his 60-odd years, and his bearded face bore the creases of a man burdened with duties as tribal patriarch and husband to four younger women. His visitor, a CIA officer, saw an opportunity, and reached into his bag for a small gift.

Four blue pills. Viagra.

“Take one of these. You’ll love it,” the officer said. Compliments of Uncle Sam.

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