CHICAGO, Illinois (AP) -- City officials hope there are people willing to pay plenty of money to own a vintage Playboy Bunny costume, toss green dye into the Chicago River or throw a dinner party prepared by Oprah Winfrey's chef.
The Chicago-related items and experiences -- Playboy Enterprises and Winfrey's show are both based in the city, and turning the Chicago River green for St. Patrick's Day is a hallowed city tradition -- will be up for sale December 2-16 on eBay.
The Chicago Department of Cultural Affairs, which is sponsoring the auction, has seen its budget from federal, state and city sources decline from $11.8 million in 2002 to a projected $8.8 million next year, said department spokeswoman Anne Dattulo.
Pruning Shears: Isn't it a little strange that no one mentions things like our two wars when looking at election results? Washington has for several years now been fully committed to disastrous policies.
In case anyone hadn’t noticed, there is a war on. And when this nation is at war it has a tradition of pulling together in support of the troops. But as far as the campaign in Afghanistan is concerned there is precious little sign of that. The death toll of British troops there this week is horrendous.
And yet the Government has been put under almost no pressure to explain what our soldiers are doing and when it expects their mission to be completed.
Gordon Brown does not appear to know whether this war is worth prosecuting with the full might of the nation’s military resources or not. He has already turned down a request from Barack Obama to send significant reinforcements, while the shameful inadequacy of the equipment supplied to our soldiers has already been well documented. After the losses of the past few days, this half-hearted approach has become utterly unsustainable. Britain and indeed the whole of Nato must now decide whether this fiendishly difficult bid to tame a hitherto untamable land is worth all the blood that is being spilt.
This newspaper’s assessment is that the chance of outright victory in Afghanistan vanished the moment US and British forces went into Iraq. The focus on Afghanistan was lost and the coalition against terror broke up. There is now little prospect of the rest of Nato committing wholeheartedly to the fight against the Taliban. In a war of attrition, such as is presently being fought, victory will not be achieved, but heavy losses will certainly be sustained. Our brave soldiers deserve far better than that.
Wow...some honest assessment. Of course, it's not coming from our country, where we still hang on these nebulous phrases like "victory" and "security" without actually explaining what that means. Cernig at Newshoggers:
It was always the conservative establishment who were most against Britain's continued enmiring in Bush's Iraq occupation - and now it appears that conservatives will lead the way in calling for an exit from Afghanistan too. There's certainly a part of that which is just the cynical politics of opposition, but there's also a part that's just good sense. The British populace are, if anything, more generally accepting of foreign wars than their American cousins but there's a limit to what even the "fighting Blitz spirit" will countenance when a military entanglement has no plan, no metrics for success and no end in sight. The Tories are just getting out ahead of the curve.
Update: As Gordon Brown defends the UK's involvement and insists the Afghan war is being won (the credibility of that claim being dependent on how credible you think Brown is in general), renowned British military historian Correlli Barnett has an op-ed in the pages of the very conservative Daily Mail in which he argues that Britain must unilaterally withdraw from Afghanistan.
Why won't an American journalist confront the Obama administration and simply ask them, "How will we know when we've won?" Unless they can answer that in tangible terms, all we're doing is condemning more troops to death.
I can appreciate how difficult it must be for a news outlet like the Associated Press to find new and interesting things to write about when it comes to the presidential campaign. For that matter, I can even appreciate that, once in a while, a story with a human-interest angle might help break things up a bit.
But as part of my ongoing fascination with the AP’s awful coverage of the campaign, I’m afraid this item is just silly.
If the presidential election goes to the dogs, John McCain is looking like best in show.
From George Washington’s foxhound “Drunkard” to George W. Bush’s terriers “Barney” and “Miss Beazley,” pets are a longtime presidential tradition for which the presumed Republican nominee seems well prepared, with more than a dozen.
The apparent Democratic nominee Barack Obama, on the other hand, doesn’t have a pet at home. The pet-owning public seems to have noticed the difference. An AP-Yahoo! News poll found that pet owners favor McCain over Obama 42 percent to 37 percent, with dog owners particularly in McCain’s corner.
The AP quoted one person saying, “I think a person who owns a pet is a more compassionate person — caring, giving, trustworthy. I like pet owners,” and found another willing to argue on the record that if a person owns a pet that “tells you that they’re responsible at least for something, for the care of something.”
This poll and related story are even worse than the usual palaver. Mark Blumenthal has the definitive take-down.
The Real News Network: When John McCain took the podium Monday on the first day of the national conference for the American Israel Public Affairs Committee, his rhetoric was all-too familiar. Like George W. Bush, he ignored facts and opted for the kind of spurious charges that were made against Iraq in the run-up to that invasion. He's not called McSame for nothin'. On the other hand, Obama will apparently just continue the tradition of telling this most powerful of lobbies whatever they want to hear.
The Brad Blog: The most vigilant watchdog of our broken, illegal, corrupt voting system checks in with more on what has been an endless series of outrages against the electorate and democracy itself.
IntoxiNation: Email destruction, a Republican tradition
Words of Power: Those in the developed world who think what is happening in Kenya is something distant and peculiar to the African Continent are living in a dream.
Rudy Giuliani recently argued that U.S. military generals, by virtue of their service, necessarily have more credibility than practically anyone else. With that in mind, I wonder what Giuliani and others who share his approach to foreign policy have to say in response to the 20 generals who have defied tradition and rejected the Bush policy in Iraq.
The generals acted independently, coming in their own ways to the agonizing decision to defy military tradition and publicly criticize the Bush administration over its conduct of the war in Iraq.
What might be called The Revolt of the Generals has rarely happened in the nation’s history.
In op-ed pieces, interviews and TV ads, more than 20 retired U.S. generals have broken ranks with the culture of salute and keep it in the family. Instead, they are criticizing the commander in chief and other top civilian leaders who led the nation into what the generals believe is a misbegotten and tragic war.
It’s become fashionable in some circles to believe that patriotism demands uniformity. If you support the troops, the argument goes, then you support their mission. To even question the merit of a war while combat is ongoing is, to some, a sign of disloyalty.
These generals, thankfully, believe the opposite — they have a duty to speak out, and they will not shirk their responsibilities.
"All people are born alike-except Republicans and Democrats," quipped Groucho Marx, and in fact it turns out that personality differences between liberals and conservatives are evident in early childhood. In 1969, Berkeley professors Jack and Jeanne Block embarked on a study of childhood personality, asking nursery school teachers to rate children's temperaments. They weren't even thinking about political orientation.
Twenty years later, they decided to compare the subjects' childhood personalities with their political preferences as adults. They found arresting patterns. As kids, liberals had developed close relationships with peers and were rated by their teachers as self-reliant, energetic, impulsive, and resilient. People who were conservative at age 23 had been described by their teachers as easily victimized, easily offended, indecisive, fearful, rigid, inhibited, and vulnerable at age 3. The reason for the difference, the Blocks hypothesized, was that insecure kids most needed the reassurance of tradition and authority, and they found it in conservative politics.
I know our right wing commenters are going to think this is a cheap shot against conservatives, and that is sincerely not my intent. I just find this report fascinating in how different inclinations manifest themselves from childhood into adulthood. Certainly, everything I was exposed to in my childhood have informed my politics and worldview. And now part of what I do for my off line job is teach children. I know which children need structure and respond more to authoritarian commands from me and which kids like me being more casual and jokey with them. I'd love to catch up with my students again in 20 years to see if these hypotheses bear out on their political leanings.
WASHINGTON - Former Wisconsin governor and Republican presidential hopeful Tommy Thompson told Jewish activists Monday that making money is "part of the Jewish tradition," and something that he applauded.
Speaking to an audience at the Religious Action Center of Reform Judaism in Washington D.C., Thompson said that, "I'm in the private sector and for the first time in my life I'm earning money. You know that's sort of part of the Jewish tradition and I do not find anything wrong with that."
Thompson later apologized for the comments that had caused a stir in the audience, saying that he had meant it as a compliment, and had only wanted to highlight the "accomplishments" of the Jewish religion.
Law.com: A former Department of Justice attorney says that Alberto Gonzales has "shattered" the department's tradition of independence and politicized its operation
