The Real-Life Entourage
Top Hollywood talent agent and inspiration for Jeremy Piven’s character, Ari Gold, in the HBO series, Entourage, Ari Emanual, will no longer need big development deals to have his influence on the country’s most popular narrative. Emanual’s brother, Rahm Emanual, is going to be President-elect Barack Obama’s Chief of Staff. This will make the two [...]
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PoliticsEnd of an Era: Now What?
Transitioning from a President George W. Bush to President Barack Obama is going to be a huge deal for this country, but Bush is still in office for another two-and-a-half months. In the meantime, we all have the opportunity to practice our ability to transition from chaos and fear to peace-of-mind by taking the proper [...]
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Politics11/4: The Aftermath
The last time I felt my own heart beat along with the emotional pulse of the country was also on a sunny, fall Tuesday, seven years ago. A phone call from my then boyfriend, who was working in the International Herald Tribune newsroom in Paris, woke me up shortly before 9 a.m., (an ungodly hour [...]
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PoliticsPresident-elect Obama Faces Challenge of a “Planet in Peril”
WASHINGTON, DC, November 5, 2008 (ENS) – In a landslide, Americans Tuesday elected Barack Obama as the first African-American president in the nation’s history. The Democratic senator from Illinois won 338 electoral college votes – far beyond the 270 needed to win election to the White House. With 81% of all precincts nationwide reporting, votes [...]
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GreenA Mixed Blessing
Last night the United States of America elected its first African American president. It also elected its first mixed-race president, which to me, holds a very special significance. When I was 18 and worked as a hostess in an Italian restaurant on the Upper East Side all the servers and busboys there called me “Tiger [...]
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PoliticsVictory Dance
The problem with historic moments such as this is that they are so awe-inspiring, so humbling, that it’s easy to be confused by the jubilation that should come with such events. Any outburst of elation or feelings of personal satisfaction that the contest went your side’s way feel almost out of place. Showboating in the [...]
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PoliticsDecision 2008: Not All Rainbows and Unicorns
The election this year forced down a wall of racial discrimination. For the first time, an African American family will be living in the White House and man born to a father from Kenya and a white mother from Kansas and who who grew up outside of the continental United States will be our president. [...]
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PoliticsIn the Age of Cynicism
At 9:45pm Tuesday night, an old friend from my hometown called me from London, where he has been living for the past several years. Since he expatriated himself our communication has been confined to annual visits in Berkeley during the holidays, occasional emails and every-now-and-then spontaneous chats on Facebook. But I made him promise to [...]
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PoliticsVirginia is for Levers
Polls just closed in Virginia, but this is not the end to what we’ll be hearing about this state. The get-out-the-vote slogan here should have been “Rock the Vote (but not too much!)” Polls were not prepared for high voter turnout in the state this election. Voting machines broke down in northern Virginia (but that’s [...]
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PoliticsElection Day: Just Bring It
This is where the rubber meets the road. After the dizzying drama of the last 12 months – John McCain’s campaign left for dead in the early primaries before pulling off the comeback; the epic struggle between the two historic candidacies of Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama – we are hours away from the thrilling [...]
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PoliticsGore in Florida, Again
Al Gore has returned to the campaign trail in Florida, the state he lost to George W. Bush by 500 votes in 2000 after the Supreme Court stopped the ballot recount. The New York Times [thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com] reports this time Gore was speaking on behalf of Barack Obama, and was doing so sans Powerpoint. The vice-president [...]
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Politics76 U.S. Nobel Laureates in Science Endorse Obama for President
WASHINGTON, DC, October 29, 2008 (ENS) – In an open letter to the American people released Tuesday, 76 American Nobel Laureates in science endorsed Democratic Senator Barack Obama of Illinois for president of the United States. This is the largest number of Nobel prize winners ever to endorse a candidate for office. Presidential candidate Senator [...]
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GreenAsking Biden the “Hard Questions”
A popular right-wing complaint about Barack Obama is that the Democratic frontrunner is in a protective bubble, insulated from the press. This bit of Bushian – or Palinesque, if you prefer – projection is demonstrably false; Obama has given dozens of high-profile interviews and hundreds of local ones, as has Joe Biden. But that’s not [...]
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PoliticsMcCain Campaign Issues APB for “Rogue” Palin
The campaign of John McCain, in conjunction with the Republican National Committee, has issued an All Points Bulletin for vice presidential candidate Sarah Palin. Republicans nationwide are alerted to be on the lookout for this rogue politician who is suspected of brutally assaulting John McCain’s presidential aspirations [dyn.politico.com]. Should those aspirations die within the next [...]
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PoliticsObama and My Mama
Yesterday my mother texted me (yes, she’s in her late fifties and she texts, pretty cool), to say that the Obama campaign chose her and her friends to sit on stage behind Obama during his speech at a rally in Las Vegas. The matriarchs of my family have a legacy of visiting Sin City in [...]
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PoliticsNewspaper Endorsement: What is it Good For?
Sarah Palin’s hometown newspaper and the largest newspaper in Alaska, the Anchorage Daily News, has endorsed Barack Obama for president. [www.adn.com] …Yet despite her formidable gifts, few who have worked closely with the governor would argue she is truly ready to assume command of the most important, powerful nation on earth. To step in and [...]
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PoliticsObamacans at the Door
[The Scene: A rainy evening outside of Barack Obama’s national campaign headquarters. A hand pounds furiously on the door.] BARACK OBAMA: [ from inside ] Coming!….Who is it? SCOTT MCCLELLAN: Open up! It’s me! Scott McClellan! [politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com] OBAMA: [ opens door ] Oh, hey. Hi Scott. What, um, what can I do for you? MCCLELLAN: [...]
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PoliticsMen and the Big P, Women and the Big O
When John McCain’s campaign picked Sarah Palin to be the veteran Senator’s running mate, they hoped this move would snatch up votes from women—primarily white, working class women—from Barack Obama. From the outset, the campaign has tried to brand Palin as the hockey mom next door. She’s a working mother of five. She began her [...]
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PoliticsThe Hazards of Blogging
Blogging is a dangerous job, and not for the faint of heart. Not that it involves the physical risks of, say, coal mining or timber cutting, or the mental burnout that a surgeon or stock trader might experience. The hazard is more of a slow-acting moral poison, a soul-crushing spiritual vacuum brought on by repeated [...]
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PoliticsMcCain Campaign Puts Wright Back on the Table
The McCain campaign has officially run out of ideas. One week ago [www.politico.com]: Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin and several top campaign officials see a sharp attack on Wright as the best — and perhaps last — chance to rattle Sen. Barack Obama (D-Ill. ) and force voters to rethink their support of him. But McCain [...]
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PoliticsBreaking Records with Obama
Sometimes it’s hard to be a cynic. For years we’ve watched Democrats roll over for their GOP Daddies, cowed into jumping through Republican hoops and frames, either unable or unwilling to go out, grab the populace by the shirt and say, “Follow me!” This lack of spine and, more importantly, ability to be proactive has [...]
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PoliticsNitpickers: The Political Carrion Fowl
Everybody hates a nitpicker. On October 6th, following the Vice-Presidential debate, Foxnews.com ran an opinion piece by John R. Lott, Jr., entitled “Did Biden Get it Wrong? You Betcha,” [www.foxnews.com] in which Lott points out a laundry list of little mistakes Biden made during the debate and expresses his opinion that the media gave Biden [...]
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PoliticsPresident Bush Signs Obama’s Mercury Export Ban into Law
WASHINGTON, DC, October 15, 2008 (ENS) – A bill introduced by Senator Barack Obama that will help protect Americans and people around the world from mercury poisoning by banning the export of elemental mercury from the United States, was signed into law last night by President George W. Bush. Senator Obama, the Democratic presidential candidate, [...]
Read More »Debate Highlights: Part I
Barack Obama, in a display of wisdom and sanity that should alone qualify him for the presidency, declined John McCain’s offer earlier this summer to have 493 Town Hall debates, each one of which would have been the televised equivalent of poetry-themed refrigerator magnets; just mix the same set of words up in different orders [...]
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PoliticsAnger, Hate, and Frustration: This is America, 2008…
We are now in the most intense part of the most intense campaign season I have ever seen in my short 23-year long lifespan. In January, people were saying that Hillary Clinton would be the democratic nominee, and that John McCain’s campaign was dead in the water. In March, while Obama’s star was rising fast, [...]
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Politics
