Greek Tragedy: hard knock life

Enough politics. This is about life....Greek Tragedy is New York writer Stephanie Klein's enormously successful blog-- like electronic chick lit, but usually better written. Some of the stuff recalls Candace Bushnell (Sex and the City) but with more originality and less pretension. This is Fat passing for thin:

"You see it in the stitching or the way the logo is clipped near the zipper, and you know it's a knock-off of a pricey must-have. It was a good impersonation, but you're onto them now. Some people are knock-offs, too, and sometimes I worry I'm one of them. I diet all day long to find a guy who'll love me even if I ever get fat. That's called fat, passing for thin, and I worry it's just as bad as Canal Street."

I Like to Watch: Wannabe TV

From Salon.com Arts & Entertainment I Like to Watch, Heather Havrilesky's brilliant take on drunken, whoring sea donkeys and other denizens of reality tv:

"Suicide blondes
Of course, the most pathetic denizens of the wannabe genre populate 'The Real World.' These are dreamers who don't dream of becoming chefs or models or even male strippers, they dream of becoming ... stars of 'The Real World.' Since the producers have long since abandoned the original goal of enlightening rednecks about gays and blacks about whites and so on (all the kids in the house know about that stuff already anyway, from watching every season of 'The Real World' ever), the show is free to focus full-time on following the kids around as they get drunk, get naked, and get
into fist-fights with the locals, not necessarily in that order. "

Bush Approval Rating at Lowest Point

Salon.com - War Room: "A new AP-Ipsos poll puts George W. Bush's approval rating at its lowest point yet.
Only 42 percent of the public approve of the president's job performance; 55 percent don't. The same poll shows that, by a 50-48 percent margin, Americans now believe that their president is dishonest. Only 38 percent of them approve of the way in which he's handling the war in Iraq.
As bad as those numbers are, it's important to keep them in perspective. Things could be worse. Iraq could be, say, Plamegate. According to the latest CBS News poll, 77 percent of the American public believe that the Bush administration is either lying or hiding something about the outing of Valerie Plame. Only 12 percent say the White House is telling 'the entire truth.' "

FOXNews.com - Politics - Report: Plame Gave Money to Anti-Bush Group

This is their smoking gun?
FOXNews.com - Politics - Report: Plame Gave Money to Anti-Bush Group: "WASHINGTON � Outed CIA spy Valerie Plame last fall gave a campaign contribution to go toward an anti-Bush fund-raising concert starring Bruce Springsteen, it was revealed Tuesday night.
It's the first revelation that Plame participated in anti-Bush political activity while working for the CIA."

Those Evil Springsteen Fans: Salon.com - Daou Report

Salon.com - Daou Report: "Intelligence Agency - Dear Director X, NY Post columnist Deborah Orin has discovered a serious threat to the CIA's security. It seems that some of your covert agents attend Bruce Springsteen concerts. Naturally, fans of the Boss are not to be trusted. That, says Orin, justifies their betrayal--at least it did in Valerie Plame's case. It's imperative that you act quickly to purge your ranks of other Springsteen fans before Karl Rove is forced to betray them as well.'"

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Gay Child Left Behind

The New York Times > Opinion > Op-Ed Contributor: The Gay Child Left Behind: "But there was one bright spot this week. On Monday, Maya Keyes, the daughter of Alan Keyes, officially declared herself a lesbian at a gay rights rally in Annapolis, Md. It was a bit of good news for gays and lesbians, particularly those who are connoisseurs of schadenfreude. "

Frank Rich: The Plot Against Sex in America

New York Times> Just Chilling...Frank Rich documents the self censorship that is infecting American culture post election (read the full article):

The 'Kinsey' distributor, Fox Searchlight, let the press see an e-mail from a National Public Broadcasting media manager stating that the real problem was 'the content of this movie' and 'controversial press re: groups speaking out against the movie/subject matter' that might bring 'viewer complaints.'

Maybe in the end Channel 13 got too many complaints about its own cowardice because by last week, in response to my inquiries, it had a new story: that e-mail was all a big mistake - an 'unfortunate' miscommunication hatched by some poor unnamed flunky in marketing. This would be funny if it were not so serious - and if it were an anomaly. Yet even as the 'Kinsey' spot was barred in New York, a public radio station in North Carolina, WUNC-FM, told an international women's rights organization based in Chapel Hill that it could not use the phrase 'reproductive rights' in an on-air announcement."

The New York Times > National > Death Sentences in Texas Cases Try Supreme Court's Patience

The New York Times > National > Death Sentences in Texas Cases Try Supreme Court's Patience: "Writing for the majority in the Supreme Court's 8-to-1 decision last year, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy discussed evidence that prosecutors had acted improperly. Among other things, he noted, prosecutors questioned black potential jurors more aggressively about their views on the death penalty than they did white jurors.

Only Justice Thomas dissented from the decision, saying that none of the factors cited by Justice Kennedy 'presented anything remotely resembling clear and convincing evidence of purposeful discrimination.'"

The New Republic Online: The Elect

The New Republic Online: The Elect: "The belief in God does not guarantee the knowledge of God's wishes. This is the most elementary lesson of the history of religious faith. The believer lives in the darkness more than he lives in the light. He does not wallow in God's guidance, he thirsts for it. And when God's guidance comes, it does not take the form of policy recommendations, unless he has created his God in the image of his desire. What deity is this, that has opinions about preemption and taxation and Quentin Tarantino? In this regard, there is no more ringing refutation of the religion of George W. Bush than the religion of Abraham Lincoln. 'Both read the same Bible, and pray to the same God; and each invokes his aid against the other,' Lincoln proclaimed at the beginning of his second term, and in the middle of a war. 'The prayers of both could not be answered--that of neither has been answered fully.' For Lincoln, his party was not God's party; or rather, the other party was as much God's party as his party was. And he explained this repudiation of human certainty this way: 'The Almighty has his own purposes.' He did not know what they were, he knew only that they were. Beware the politicians, and the politics, that know more."

The New Republic Online: The Elect

The New Republic Online: The Elect:

Best thing I've read on this issue. Leon Wieseltier explains why it's really not the economy that's at issue and why you don't need to feign faith to have morality:

"liberals have once again been harshly taught that homo economicus--more concretely, homo Shrumicus--is a fiction. Money is often not the most important thing in the world for poor people, perhaps because they have so little of it. They do not define themselves only, or mainly, by what they lack; whereas they are rich in loves and principles, and so the communal and national and cultural and spiritual dimensions of their identity may loom larger than the economic dimension. (The Bush administration has demonstrated, by contrast, that economic man is more likely to be found among the wealthy, for whom money often does seem to be the most important thing in the world, perhaps because they have so much of it.)

So liberals must indeed develop a fuller and more vivid comprehension of the Americans whom they rightly wish to help; but that is all the intellectual contrition that they need muster. For they have values even when they do not have faith; and they should not contrive to have faith so as to gain values, unless they wish to degrade faith by promoting it mainly for its political utility, as some conservatives do."