Paradigms...where shift happens!

Cezanne

OK, it's a given that I know zip about art but just to annoy all of you readers who do, I'll add that I know what I like. Saturday morning found me shuffling through several rooms at the National Gallery of Art in Washington, trying earnestly to be impressed with the Cezanne exhibit there. I failed...miserably. I feel so inadequate. All those DC folk sitting in rapt attention, worshipfully looking at 5 paintings, side by side, all apparently of the same rocks or trees or some other feature of the French countryside. I'm looking too but I'm just not seeing the charm of all those repetitive images...a total of over a hundred paintings in the show and for me, four or five would have given the same impressions and I could have been out of that part of the gallery and seeing some variety in other parts of the museum.

There is good news though...the water colors were really nice, the exhibit was free and closer examination showed that he stayed pretty much inside the lines and had covered all the numbers as he filled in the pictures....

Tax Deductions

As we all know, politicians have a special knack for rationalizing their positions or in a more familiar phraseology, “putting lipstick on a pig”. It’s another way of saying that they are adept at making a dumb idea or program seem at least not so dumb and in the most extreme case, a smart thing to do. 

If that’s the bad news then the fact that it is a bi-partisan ability may be the good news. A radio news report about the tax deductions available for the purchase of certain kinds of vehicles caught my attention this morning. This was, it seems to me, a fairly reasonable concept when it was enacted since it was supposed to function as a stimulus to the economy right after the 9/11 attack. 

Now, over 4 years later, when the Administration tells us that the economy is booming again, we still have the deduction in place. If you buy a hybrid car, the deduction is $3,150 but if you buy an SUV that weighs over 3 tons the deduction is up to $25,000! Why, you may ask, are we still encouraging this kind of lunacy at a time when decreasing our dependency on foreign oil is a priority concern? I can see the continuation of the program for the hybrid cars and I could even sign on for a gradual reduction of the deduction on the gas guzzlers but why the big car deduction is still in place as it was originally enacted is mystifying to me. 

I think it might be fun to look for more examples of “pig make-up”. I’m going to set this post up in a special category on the blog and invite you to submit things that occur to you. I’ll publish them on the blog using fake initials to identify who they came from. Then we can see what kind of dialogue we can get going on this topic. E-mail them to me directly at paradigms@verizon.net and I’ll edit them to protect your privacy and then post them here.

The New York Daily News...

...said it but I wish I had. http://www.nydailynews.com/news/ideas_opinions/story/393408p-333578c.html

Bush has finally made good on his promise to be a uniter with this port sale business....both sides of the aisle think he's nuts...

If this really is "The Love Boat"...

...three guesses as to which one is "Gopher", the dim-witted crew member.

I heard this morning on the radio that the President didn't even know about the port deal until it had already been given a go ahead at the Cabinet level. Best not to open this can of worms, I thought, until there is a second report on it. Now it's on MSNBC so I feel safer asking, "What the hell were they thinking about?" Did it not occur to any of those drones that something like selling six major ports to the Arabs was Oval Office worthy? Do we actually pay them for this kind of thinking? 

Don't be surprised if Bush sends Chertoff and the crew of for a relaxing weekend...of quail hunting with the VP. Heck I'll bet he'll even spring for the keg!

The Love Boat!!

You really can’t make this stuff up!

I know I should let this one alone but it’s just too easy…let an Arab firm run our ports!!! Since 9/11/2001 one of the continuing themes of the national debate on the threat of terrorism has been the vulnerability of our ports. Hundreds of thousands of pieces of containerized cargo coming into the country annually and we aren’t even close to being able to inspect anything other than a small fraction of them and now the President wants to let a bunch from Dubai run the ports?

Isn’t this a bit like:

Dropping your kids off at the Michael Jackson Daycare Center or

The NRA naming Vice President Cheney as their new spokesperson for gun safety or 

Registering for a slot at a retirement planning conference sponsored by Enron or

Naming Bill Clinton as a chaperone for next year’s Miss America Pageant?

It is funny though, watching the neo-cons scrambling to try to spin this plan that the Speaker of the House isn’t on board with and the Secretary of Defense only found out about this past weekend, probably during a break in NBC’s broom-to-broom coverage of the Moroccan curling team’s “quest for the gold” in Torino.

Personal note to Michael Brown: I hear Mayor Ray Nagin is hiring a new Emergency Services Planner in New Orleans. Polish up that resume Brownie, looks like it could happen.....

Brokeback Mountain

 I don’t believe I am homophobic, at least not as I understand the meaning of the word, but until this weekend I just couldn’t quite make myself go to see Brokeback Mountain. Having finally seen the movie, it would be much easier if I could say that I came away feeling relieved that it wasn’t as graphic as I was afraid it would be or that I was immediately at ease by the story. Neither of those two is true.

The movie did confirm my feeling that there was an important story to be told by the movie, a story that I probably will never fully understand at least in the superficial context of it being a story about two men in a relationship. The movie, though, is about more than just these two men. It’s about a lifetime of feelings that cannot be satisfied and so must be denied even as they live on. The core issue is not a great deal different then the unfulfilled relationship in “Lost In Translation” or in any love that must be denied. If the feelings would just cooperate with us and die or fade away then closure is possible, but they won’t….and so Brokeback Mountain is more than the story of these two men who cared more for each other than the world would allow, in a way Ennis and Jack’s dilemma is the same as mine and perhaps yours, as well as that of anyone who endures a lifetime of loss or denial.

 

More Winter Olympic coverage you won't see on NBC

Kudos to MSNBC for pre-empting Imus In The Morning yet again today. Yesterday was only a snooze of a re-hash of Olympic backgrounders but they hit the programming jackpot today...live coverage of an epic ice hockey battle between Sweden and Kazakhstan...I'm sure you were all on the edges of your respective seats watching this 7-2 battle.

This thriller displaced the coverage of the second of three demostration sports this year...bungee luge. That's where bungee cords are attached to the sled and the scoring is based on the total time from the start to the time the luger is dragged back up through the starting gate by the stretched bungee cords. The major moment of excitement in this event of course is usually watching the atheletes trying to actually stay on the sled through the reversal of direction at the bottom when the cords have reached S-2 (Insider's lingo for "those suckers have stretched about as far as they are going to). Rumor has it that the American team should medal in bungee luge since we are the first country to use duct tape as a sled retention device.

Winter Olympics news you probably won’t see on NBC…

…include the developing scandal around the IOC’s decision in the Ice Scrabble event.

Ice Scrabble ( a derivative of curling ) being one of the new demonstration sports has also become the focus of a heated debate. In Ice Scrabble, letters of the alphabet are painted on curling stones and the teams try to form words inside that circle. They get double points if they can bump their opponents stones into new positions that spell out a profanity of some sort.

This event has been fraught with controversy from the beginning. First, the Canadian team, the early favorites, almost pulled out when the IOC rules committee ruled the “eh” was not a legal word. Then Target Department Stores filed a trademark infringement suit, claiming that the concentric circles that define the scoring area are their intellectual property.

Just as it appeared those controversies had been resolved, a joint protest has been lodged by the Japanese, Chinese, Korean and Russian teams claimed that the stones should be multilingual. IOC officials have rejected the appeal, ruling that including all those characters on a stone would require an increase in the size and consequently the weight of the stones that would make them all but unmanageable to anyone except perhaps the Russian women’s team.

Vice-President Mistakes 78 year old lawyer for a quail...

...it could happen....

OK, OK, so the VP shot one Republican lawyer…it’s a start…

Other GOP politicians are writing so many Abramoff inspired refund checks they are getting carpal tunnel syndrome, Bush gives back a whopping six grand from his “Why Should I Worry About Re-election” fund but Cheney, takes no chances. He shoots contributors.

Could have been worse I suppose...he could have spilled his Bloody Mary as he climbed out of his SUV to take the shot. Nevertheless it might be wise to review your donations before you accept that hunting trip invitation. Could be this guy just didn't give enough...

Mr. Vice-President, you should know this will go in your permanent record…it will be right after the section documenting your five deferments.

Snow in "The Burg"

We had snow here last night...six soggy inches which is serious snow for us here in Central Virginia.  Inspired by Doug Thompson's excellent shots on today's Blue Ridge Muse, I went downtown and found this shot as a sort of copy cat shot for Doug's work. Check his blog for two great snow shots.

She get's it !

A few days ago I posted a piece here entitled "Presence". It was in January I believe and it was about missed opportunities. You should go and read Ellie's piece today on This is My Body

She get's it!

State of The Union Part 2

This was forwarded to me this morning:

This year, both Groundhog Day and the State of the Union Address fell in the same week.
As Air America Radio pointed out, "It is an ironic juxtaposition:
One involves a meaningless ritual in which we look to a creature of little intelligence for prognostication, and the other involves a
groundhog."

State of The Union

Talk about paradigms and shift happening...

Let me see if I have this straight. On Tuesday night in the State of the Union the President expounds on his desire for affordable health care and improvements in our educational system.

Within 24 hours, the Republican controlled House of Representatives is moved to pass a $40 billion deficit reduction measure covering, among other things, Medicaid and student loan guarantees which the President is expected to sign.

Note to Senator John Kerry:
Senator, file this one away under responses to future accusations of flip flopping.

Note to voters:
File this one under things to remember when the mid term elections come around this year.

Note to Accounting Department:
Make the check for $40 billion payable to Halliburton Corp.