Posted on 07/02/2010 9:25:45 PM PDT by smokingfrog
I can't wait for Barack Obama's second term.
Oh I know, 2013 is a long time from now and it would be nice to have decisive leadership to help deal with the odd double dip recession, Iranian nuclear threat, massive fiscal imbalance, remaking of the world order, that sort of thing.
But honestly, I just don't expect it. It is clear from events of the past few weeks that while it's July in most of America, it's already November in Washington. Every decision is cast in the context of the mid-term elections. No risk is too small to sidestep. No decision is too trivial to triangulate.
Getting reports of growing unemployment rolls? Compounding them with signs of sluggish growth and appalling developments in the housing market? A time for action? You might think so. But instead this president and this Congress hem and haw and propose effectively nothing. It's not just the Republicans blocking with appalling callousness the extension of unemployment benefits (while also fighting hard to ensure that big banks don't have too much of a tax burden). It's that the Democratic leadership is content to let the Republicans beat back the bill figuring they can use it against them in the election.
Lost in all this? Oh, right, the 9.5 percent of Americans who are "officially" unemployed not to mention the almost equally large number who don't make it into government statistics.
Is the reason for this fear of the exploding budget deficit? While one can debate the merits of government intervention vs. battling that deficit, we know the president and his team are not letting the economically disenfranchised suffer purely for reasons of economic orthodoxy.
(Excerpt) Read more at rothkopf.foreignpolicy.com ...
Go ahead and tell DW what I *sound* like, in person.
People expect Shakespeare and get Ellie Mae Clampett, instead.
Ah, how I love the dichotomy...it freaks people out.
[if I wrote how I actually speak, none of you would understand a single damn thing I said]
“Laugh out loud”
;]
Anyhoo, I was painting something, and it felt off, wrong, bad...but also oddly right. I worked it and worked it, and it was just awful, but something told me it was going well on some level.
I finished it. It was hideous.
I looked at it, trying to figure out why i also felt it was good.
I turned it upside-down, and it was the best thing I'd painted up to that point. It took me all of half an hour to make it work in this position, and it's still one of the best things I've done.
On the writing side of things, I read a review of something of mine, and the reviewer loved it, saying it had something to say about the way we treat children in this country, and doggone it if he wasn't right.
I hadn't thought of that issue ONCE while I was actually writing it, but I think about it very often in my other writing. But he went on and on about it, and there it was.
In either case, had I known what I was doing, I couldn't have finished the work.
“I really quite sympathetic”
Bwahahahahahahahaaaaaaaa!
“sic”
I really quite amused, Tonto.
All we have to do is deem Baraq Sheik Obomba to be President For Life, and we will have his second term right away.
I can’t wait.
I have a strong accent from Dorchester, MA. I used to live in a house with several non-Americans, who’d love it when I’d get worked up about Clinton or whoever. They’d literally be on the floor laughing, saying they couldn’t understand a word I was saying when I was agitated.
This will spook you.
When an artist hits the wall on their piece, the “secret trick” is to turn the work _upside down_ so you “detach” from the “reality” of the object/subject and see ~only~ the shape, shadow, color and form.
Somehow, intuitively, you kicked the “right side of your brain” into overdrive and it rebelled against your left-brained -perception- of whatever you were painting and went into total instinctual mode, instead.
Cool.....:]
The writing version of that is to change the gender of a character.
In a story I worked on recently, I set up a character as the hero's best friend, who would be there thruoghout the story as his conscience. Then a disaster occurs, and another character reports "He's gone." I kept writing, waiting for that character's surprise return, but nope, he was done in.
That sort of thing happens a lot when writing, but in painting it's rare for me.
It’s the drugs. They make my fingers high.
What do you sound like?
Not like you look.
But that is the look you like.
But the look you sound likes differently.
(Try to imagine an intensely spiritual Minnie Pearl, with an IQ of 160 (or so) and an encyclopaedic knowledge of the arcane coupled with a voluminous vocabulary.)
.....and she’s so *cute* dressed up as Alice Cooper.
(A woman dressed up as a man dressed up like as a woman ..... think about it.....)
“Then a disaster occurs, and another character reports “He’s gone.” I kept writing, waiting for that character’s surprise return, but nope, he was done in.”
Thank God Cathy Bates isn’t your biggest fan....;^D
I can’t wait to hear, “Former President Obama.”
“(A woman dressed up as a man dressed up like as a woman ..... think about it.....)”
My head just exploded.
[but I coulda had my pick of the chicks, that night]
>:-]
Love.
It.
And, since nobody asked (or cares) I’ll volunteer that I sound exactly like where I’m from.
(But I can feign an accent from almost anywhere, and I’m told by native speakers of Spanish, Serbian and German that when I speak what little I know in their languages, I have no perceptible foreign accent. However, when I speak French, I am told that I have an Oriental accent. But the chicks still dig it.)
This is a good one and I saved it!
I have dealt with the Mass accent before.
Back in my teen years, the family went to Cape Cod on vacation.
*Naturally* I had cameras with me [photography nut] and at some local tourist trap, I tried to buy film.
I have no idea what y’all call film up there, but true as I’m sitting here, the woman kept hollering into the back of the store [a la Katherine Hepburn] “Do we have any ‘fillum’, Nawhmun?”
They had no idea to what I was referring.
I kid you not.
I never did get my ‘fillum’ but I did get to see some “Jennah Hannuhvuhs” hanging from the rafters.
[they reeked]
And then I went and married a RI guy who gets “idears” and then “drars” them on paper so he can go “foward” with his design.
Yeah...and *I* talk funny.
When he first came to live here, I had to act as an interpreter between him and my dad.
[I’m bilingual...fluent in both English *and* Hillbilly]
Just don’t call him in the middle of the night and expect a sane or normal phone greeting.
[it’s Mr Broad Vowels!]
;]
[but if you want a good Gregorian chant, he’s your huckleberry]
We call it film.
“Jennah Hannuhvuhs”
Never heard of that, or those.
I despise that phrase. Just sayin. :P
Disclaimer: Opinions posted on Free Republic are those of the individual posters and do not necessarily represent the opinion of Free Republic or its management. All materials posted herein are protected by copyright law and the exemption for fair use of copyrighted works.