This November New Yorkers will go to the polls to vote for a replacement for incumbent mayor Michael Bloomberg. Scandals and controversy have blighted the mayoral race so far but for the normal person on the outside looking in, the most interesting candidate is Christine Quinn.
Lo, it is I, Lawr’nce von Haelstrom, High Wizard of the Eighth Order of Torabon. I am loathe to state that the signs of the Shagallath Prophecy are now apparent in the Clouds on the Wind. The Dark Lord Vargaalen has taken command of the Armies of the Tortured Plains and is set to cast the Third Realm into a thousand years of darkness.
Last night I had a nightmare about donuts. In the dream I was very hungry and I was eating donuts, lots of donuts. Every donut I ate, I got hungrier. I poured down glass after glass of milk, tearing apart glazed donuts and swallowing huge chunks of them, barely chewing. Then sort of half asleep, half awake, I realized it was just a dream. It was like when I quit smoking and then dreamed I had started smoking again. I felt the same emotions–horror, disgust, self-loathing.
25 years ago this April Sonny Bono was elected mayor of Palm Springs. He wasn’t the first and most certainly wont be the last in a long line of celebrities who chose to give up the day job to enter the world of politics.
People, including children, suffer and die in unspeakable ways every hour of the day all over the world. That doesn’t make the Newtown, Connecticut tragedy any smaller. Nor does the fact that it happened in this country make it any larger or more significant in some way. Any event in which innocent lives, especially the lives of children, are lost forever because of some monstrous, almost unimaginable sickness, is something that should be mourned and recognized. You don’t have to memorize the names of every human being who dies in a tragic way, but we sometimes forget the faces and names a little too quickly.
There’s a shooting. There are multiple fatalities, most of them children. You’re in the media. Or perhaps you’re a politician. What do you do? What if you’re part of an organization that calls for as much gun legalization as possible, or maybe just an average citizen who isn’t too well-informed on current events? What do you do? If you answered “act sensibly” to any of these scenarios then you’re not playing your part.
At the beginning of 2012, Citizen’s United, a Supreme Court ruling with an Orwellian name, was thought to be one of the most destructive forces at work in the political world as the nation headed towards the presidential election. Many thought Super PACs would run amok and the candidates would be answering to their donors, not to the peopl. Comedians Bill Maher and Stephen Colbert both made a show of mocking Super PACs and using them for their own benefit. Cable new stations asked what effect Super PACs would end up having on the election. Hell, FOX News even had “analysts” who ran their own Super PACs.
11:05pm and no one does it better than CNN. The intro to its election night special looks like a trailer for a Hollywood action blockbuster while reliable Wolf Blitzer keeps his emotionless face fixed on. I could turn over to Fox news or the BBC but they don’t have the level headed Wolf Blitzer. There’s no better man to have in a crisis than good old uncle Wolf!
I guess the only thing that truly disappointed me about last night’s election was waking up this morning to find that Donald Trump’s call for “revolution” did not come to fruition. Some people took the news of Obama’s victory last night a little harder than others. But, in fact, it seems as if the world is roughly the same out there.
Four years ago, I was a nervous wreck. The polls showed my guy, Barack Hussein Obama, with a commanding lead, but what did the polls know? What about the Bradley Effect? What about the conservatives and their voting machines and their lying, cheating ways? Diebold was a thing, right?