Phil Campbell party on
Posted on 6 August 2010 | No responses
The Real Phil Campbell
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 1 response
Grassroots: what’s the name of the band?
Posted on 31 July 2010 | 1 response
Explaining None Wall Street Reform
Posted on 28 July 2010 | No responses
Obama may have entered the White House with the intention of assembling a Lincolnesque “team of rivals,” but Summers subverted that notion by making himself chief packager and gatekeeper for any dissenting arguments about economic policy—all, he claimed, to spare the President from meeting with “long-winded people.” Lincoln’s “team of rivals” reported directly to Lincoln, but, as one source told Alter, Summers so skewed the process in this White House that it was like “a team of rivals reporting to Edwin Stanton, Lincoln’s prideful secretary of war.” Even Warren Buffett, a supporter who had spoken to Obama weekly during the fall of 2008, “found himself mysteriously out of touch with the new president” once he took office.
Obama was now imprisoned within the cozy Summers-Geithner group “and it would be increasingly difficult for him to see beyond its borders.” This “disconnection from the world,” Alter concludes, was not due to ideology or the clout of special interests but was instead “the malign consequence of the American love of expertise, which, with the help of citadels of the meritocracy, had moved from a mere culture to something approaching a cult.” For all Obama’s skepticism of cant, he was “in thrall to the idea that with enough analysis, there was a ‘right answer’ to everything. But a right answer for whom?”
From: “Why Has He Fallen So Short” by Frank Rich in The New York Review of Books
Pebbles and Eye-Lines
Posted on 27 July 2010 | No responses
Grant musings: Watching it from the Roof
Posted on 26 July 2010 | No responses
Your ex wife’s tits
Posted on 26 July 2010 | No responses
Move over BP
Posted on 24 July 2010 | 1 response
Billionaire candidate Jeff Greene, who’s facing-off against Rep. Kendrick Meek in Florida’s Democratic Senate primary, has found himself embroiled in controversy over damages caused by his 145-foot luxury yacht.
The St. Petersburg Times reports that Greene’s 350-ton vessel, Summerwind, severely tore up a coral reef system off the coast of Belize during an ocean voyage five years ago:
There it dropped anchor — and plunged into controversy over severe damage to a coral reef system officially recognized by the United Nations as one of the world’s most magnificent and irreplaceable treasures.
“The guys from the area told me they were beside the boat before it dropped anchor, and they were yelling and waving their hands, shouting, ‘No! No, don’t drop here,’ ” recounted Melanie McField, a marine scientist with the Smithsonian Institution who surveyed the Central American reef shortly after the incident. “It was bad. There was a lot of damage.”
Greene denies the incident ever happened. If the Florida Democrat were to return to Belize, he would reportedly face fines of up to $1.87 million given the extent of the damage caused by his vessel.
According to a 2008 Forbes profile, Greene purchased the yacht for $6 million back in 2002. It reportedly costs $100,000 to fill with fuel and burns 50 gallons of gas per hour.
(The Orlando Sentinel reports that Greene’s assets in stock, bonds, and real estate are worth between $827 million and $2.8 billion, according to financial disclosure documents.)
Cedric The Entertainer: Bear With Us
Posted on 23 July 2010 | 1 response
While Shooting…
Posted on 23 July 2010 | 1 response
A quick note while shooting…
That nothing that matters is easy to do. Actually most things that don’t matter aren’t easy to do either. Pretty much everything takes work from where I stand right now. Just to stand still takes work. Even to sleep takes work. Sometimes I find myself waking up out of a night’s sleep, more exhausted than when I woke up…
So if everything is so hard to do, why not just try to do something that does some – I don’t know – good, I guess? Or try, at least?
And then there’s just this thing called humor. Just laughing. This movie has taken a hell of a lot of work (on many, many people’s parts now). It’s just wild to see Cedric and Joel (in the video below) goofing around (rapping, no less) in the City offices of Seattle. Laughing! If you’ve been following this website for the past few months (or for the past year – it’s now officially a year) you’ve been able to follow this wild, wobbly, unexpected journey to a movie actually happening and Cedric and Joel (and Jason, Emily, DC and so many others) playing and working and working and playing…
Not easy. But fun. Not easy. But hopefully really about something. And then there’s Grant Cogswell (the real guy that the movie’s based on) — so thoughtful, so clear. I think his piece on The Tunnel (a few videos back) makes clear why it was so easy (plus a lot of hard, hard work) to make a movie about him.
What a journey so far! Two weeks and two days to go till the shoot is finished and then the editing starts in earnest. A big day today. The last scene of the movie. A whole bunch of extras. Gotta go…
