Love American Style

You just gotta love this article by David Michael Green. Excerpt:

"I guess it won’t be a huge surprise to anybody that the US spends more on ‘defense’ than any other country in the world. Maybe that’s not so completely absurd, given that we have the third largest population on the planet. (At least it’s not entirely out of line if you set aside the slightly inconvenient fact that the two larger countries are about four times bigger than we are). But here’s the truly scary part: The United States not only outspends every other country in the world on military goodies, it outspends ALL other countries of the world. Combined. That’s right. Take all 190-plus countries out there and add together their defense budgets and you still won’t equal America’s alone. What’s more, that doesn’t even include the $100 billion or so that we’re dropping each year in Iraq and Afghanistan, nor the additional costs in veterans’ (so-called) care, munitions replacement and economic losses we have been hemorrhaging for those wars, and will continue to, for decades to come, estimated to run up toward two trillion bucks total. (Oh, and did I mention that one-sixth of our population doesn’t have healthcare coverage? Never mind. I’m sure those are completely unrelated facts.) Anyhow, does that sound like a peace-loving country to you? We love it so much that we outspend nearly 200 other countries in the world – combined! – in buying shit for war? And think about this for a second: How absolutely disastrous does your diplomacy have to get so that you need to be able to fight off every other country of the world, all at once?!"

Read the rest here.

Happy Easter?

While you're dipping those hard boiled goodies for the kids, consider that 85% of eggs produced in the US are from "battery caged" hens. This type of confinement is considered the cruelest form of commercial agriculture. Example:

“After six weeks in the incredibly crowded cages of this facility, you could not recognize the poor creatures as chickens, ” writes an internet commentator of a summer he worked on a egg farm. “Missing most of their feathers, eyes, bloody, broken and unable to walk, our job was to grab these birds, by any means necessary, and throw them into a truck. Where did the truck go? To a chicken soup plant a few towns over. Unable to sell these bruised and battered chickens as whole chickens, the egg plant owners would sell them to be made into soup base. As if their lives were not hellish enough to that point, these birds would be flung, often after being battered against the pillars of the plant and kicked a few times for fun by the sadistic workers, who were mainly teenagers and weird illiterate country bumpkins. The chickens, nearly dead, would be transported in unheated trucks to the soup plant to be battered and likely boiled alive to make soup . . .”

Yum.

OMG - Pedicures for the Pre-school Set?

Recent article in the New York Times on cosmetic services for the rich and precocious. Obviously we are not experiencing economic meltdown when folks can fork over American dollars to let a seven year old de-stress with a mani-pedi makeover combo platter complete with glitter hearts and a limo ride.

But as a much admired Bitch pointed out - let's pay a woman of color to literally sit at the feet of our little Paris-in-training....

This nail artist is lucky enough to be able to just say no.

Blackface in 2008

Here we are in 2008 - poised to be the year that a black man will be the Democratic nominee for President of the United States. A year that will go down in history, because we have finally, FINALLY transcended race here in the good ol' U S of A and can say we are truly "color blind." Opportunities are available to everyone, equally, regardless of the color of their skin (maybe we'll deal with gender later...)

And that is why Robert Downey, Jr. can play a black man.

That's right. In Tropic Thunder, the next Ben Stiller comedy sensation due out this summer, Robert Downey, Jr. plays a spoiled, pompous black actor accidentally dropped into a real combat zone with other spoiled, pompous actors. Well, he had the spoiled and pompous down so all they really had to add was the blackface. Seems logical, no?

You don't think they could've found someone, I don't know, maybe BLACK to play a spoiled, pompous black actor? I imagine Jamie Fox could've handled that, or maybe Chris Rock or Don Cheadle or Eddie Murphy(who does spoiled really, REALLY well) or Lawrence Martin... or does RDJ just have spoiled and pompous locked? No genuine black guy could handle spoiled and pompous like him! Or maybe all the good black actors were just way too busy since there are so many roles out there for fine black comedic actors. So many that they have to be picky and turn down roles to play fat, black women.

It's just such a shame that Robert Downey, Jr. isn't really black. Then he could be doing life for all those little indiscretions of his, just like his homeboys....