1. "Fighting about the war": From The Economist. Which somehow makes me think of this.
["The stage has been set for months for the showdown between Congress and the White House over Iraq. A bill on military spending, which calls for George Bush to start withdrawing American soldiers in October, has been in preparation for weeks. Mr Bush has repeatedly promised to veto it. Now, with deliberate timing, Congress’s Democratic leaders hope to get Mr Bush to use his veto on Tuesday May 1st, four years to the day after he proudly declared an end to big combat operations in Iraq."]
2. "'Shocking' Legoland coaster death": From CNN.
["A 21-year-old employee at the Legoland amusement park was killed in a roller coaster accident, police and park officials said Monday. The woman, who was not identified, died immediately Sunday after being hit by a coaster car, police said. She had apparently jumped over a security fence to pick up a wallet that a passenger had lost near the track when the accident happened."]
3. "Negative Space #15: OLD BOY RECUT": Peet Gelderblom, political cartoonist.
["To prevent future shooting incidents, censors went straight to the root of the problem."]
4. "Hollywood/Taiwan: Connections, Countercurrents, and Ang Lee’s "Hulk"": From FilmInt, a lengthy defense of Ang Lee's Bruce Banner saga.
["With Hulk, Lee brings what has been churning in his œuvre for a decade to a boil. In the commercial American film industry, it takes guts, after 9/11 and the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, to let a man of color (albeit green) take on the United States military in the desert and survive. Given Hollywood’s bottom line of profitability, the fact that Lee would let an out of control non-white “alien” rip army helicopters out of the sky and escape into the camouflage of a Third World jungle needs to be given credit. The A-bomb be damned— the Hulk condenses the Viet Cong and Osama Bin Laden/Saddam Hussein into one gargantuan challenge to the U.S. military-industrial complex."]
5. "Governor declares state of emergency in freeway collapse": From the Contra Costa Times. See our Clip of the Day, posted on YouTube by user baconmonkey. A larger version of the clip can be found here.
["Gov. Arnold Schwarzenegger declared an emergency after Sunday's freeway collapse in the MacArthur Maze, paving a quicker path for emergency repairs and at least one day of free public transit for Bay Area commuters. The declaration may also mean more commercial trucks on local roads, including some places where they have long been restricted."]
Clip of the Day
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"Links for the Day": Each morning, the House editors post a series of weblinks that we think will spark discussion. Comments encouraged.
Monday, April 30, 2007
Links for the Day (April 30th, 2007)
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3 comments:
#1: Of course he'll veto it. The president's goal isn't to win the war, which was lost from the moment he and his administration decided to avoid asking for a huge long-term sacrifice from the (voting) public, and instead sell it on the basis of half-truths, wishful thinking and fearmongering, and then wage it with too few, badly overburdened, generally fucked-over troops. At this point it's all about ego and the preservation of delusion; it's about the president being able to slink through the last couple of years of his second term without having to be rebuked for his catastrophic foreign policy fuckup, while leaving his successor -- Democrat or Republican -- with a mess to clean up, and a hard, unglamorous, inevitable decision to make: not whether to pull out, but how quickly.
#3. Peet pretty much nails it, i think.
#4. An overreaching but still rather amazing piece of criticism -- though maybe I'm just saying that because I'm predisposed to root for movies that took big stylistic risks and got their asses kicked for it.
Thanks for linking, guys!
Political cartoonist, moi? The next Negative Space gag will be covering the decidedly less lofty subject of torture porn, so don't count on it...
US President Tim Kalemkarian, US Senate Tim Kalemkarian, US House Tim Kalemkarian: best major candidate.
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