According to the tabloid US Magazine, Britney Spears' obituary has already been cooked up by the Associated Press:

The Associated Press began preparing Britney Spears’ obituary within the past month, Usmagazine.com has learned.

"We are not wishing it, but if Britney passed away, it’s easily one of the biggest stories in a long time," AP entertainment editor Jesse Washington tells Us.

"I think one would agree that Britney seems at risk right now," Washington adds. "Of course, we would never wish any type of misfortune on anybody and hope that we would never have to use it until 50 years from now…but if something were to happen, we would have to be prepared."

I usually wouldn't weigh in on a celebrity spectacle like what's going on with Britney Spears, but the urgency of this article really caught my eye:

(CBS) Celebrity addiction expert Dr. Drew Pinsky is weighing in on Britney Spears' problems, saying that the pop star could die if she doesn't get the help she needs.

Although the doctor has never treated Spears personally, he told Ellen DeGeneres on her talk show Tuesday, "We are watching somebody who is following the Anna Nicole Smith blueprint to the letter. She's keeping people around her that allow her to keep using and that supports her denial.

The ancient Romans had gladiators which they would watch fighting to the death in a stadium with wild animals that could easily tear apart human flesh. I can't help but feel like what we're witnessing with Britney Spears is a modern day version of that, with the tabloid magazines, TV shows and websites selling death to a bloodthirsty public. I would hope that when Spears dies, some of the writers and photographers that stalk people for a living would rethink their lives, but if Anna Nicole, Courtney Love, Tupac Shakur, Kurt Cobain, River Pheonix, Princess Diana, Michael Jackson and a myriad of others serve as any example, people don't seem to have alot of problems with watching celebrities deteriorate before their eyes.

From his Slate column:

I was in Des Moines and Ames in the early fall, and I must say that, as small and landlocked and white and rural as Iowa is, I would be happy to give an opening bid in our electoral process to its warm and generous and serious people. But this is not what the caucus racket actually does. What it does is give the whip hand to the moneyed political professionals, to the full-time party hacks and manipulators, to the shady pollsters and the cynical media boosters, and to the supporters of fringe and crackpot candidates. It is impossible that the Republican Party could be saddled with a clown like Huckabee if there were a serious primary in Iowa, let alone if the process were kicked off in Chicago or Los Angeles or Atlanta. (Remember that not Iowa but its "caucuses" put Pat Robertson ahead of George H.W. Bush in the race for the GOP nomination in 1988.) The process might be a good way for Iowa to pick its party convention delegates, though I frankly doubt even that. It is an absolutely terrible way in which to select candidates for the presidency, and it makes the United States look and feel like a banana republic both at home and overseas.

I went to a Washington state caucus back in 2004, and found it more like some sort of school assembly than what I had ever imagined (or later learned) voting to be like. People became pressured to go with the flow as people often do, and would end up voting for the same candidate as their friend or relative. It's not the process by which I believe this country should pick its two main candidates for the most powerful office. A national primary would make much more sense.

I guess in an era of YouTube and wi-fi, these scrapped campaign videos ineivetably end up on the internet:

I think some publishing company down the line might make quite a few dollars republishing some of the great photos taken during the Iraq war, including this one of a soldier playing the oud for Iraqi children, from the Slate article "Home Thoughts From Abroad:"

B/W of Meryl Yourish, here is an article by Fatima Bhutto, a neice of Benazir Bhutto who alleges that rampant corruption and assasinations were part of Bhutto's tenure as Prime Minister:

And I am suspicious of her talk of ensuring peace. My father was a member of Parliament and a vocal critic of his sister’s politics. He was killed outside our home in 1996 in a carefully planned police assassination while she was prime minister. There were 70 to 100 policemen at the scene, all the streetlights had been shut off and the roads were cordoned off. Six men were killed with my father. They were shot at point-blank range, suffered multiple bullet wounds and were left to bleed on the streets.

My father was Benazir’s younger brother. To this day, her role in his assassination has never been adequately answered, although the tribunal convened after his death under the leadership of three respected judges concluded that it could not have taken place without approval from a “much higher” political authority.

I will concede I know very little about the Pakistani situation, but I am led to believe that she and other moderates in Pakistan are infinitely better alternatives to the brutal rule of Islamic radicals. In my estimation, this kind of overanalyzing is pointless, when dirt can be dug up on any figure largely accepted as courageous in the face of overwhelming odds. Martin Luther King was a serial adulterer, Malcolm X was a former hoodlum, Gandhi had a tense relationship with his son, and so on and so on.

For a contrasting viewpoint from the one above, read Christopher Hitchens' article, "Daughter of Destiny," published today in Slate:

The sternest critic of Benazir Bhutto would not have been able to deny that she possessed an extraordinary degree of physical courage. When her father was lying in prison under sentence of death from Pakistan's military dictatorship in 1979, and other members of her family were trying to escape the country, she boldly flew back in. Her subsequent confrontation with the brutal Gen. Zia-ul-Haq cost her five years of her life, spent in prison. She seemed merely to disdain the experience, as she did the vicious little man who had inflicted it upon her.

Benazir saw one of her brothers, Shahnawaz, die in mysterious circumstances in the south of France in 1985, and the other, Mir Murtaza, shot down outside the family home in Karachi by uniformed police in 1996. It was at that famous address—70 Clifton Road—that I went to meet her in November 1988, on the last night of the election campaign, and I found out firsthand how brave she was. Taking the wheel of a jeep and scorning all bodyguards, she set off with me on a hair-raising tour of the Karachi slums. Every now and then, she would get out, climb on the roof of the jeep with a bullhorn, and harangue the mob that pressed in close enough to turn the vehicle over. On the following day, her Pakistan Peoples Party won in a landslide, making her, at the age of 35, the first woman to be elected the leader of a Muslim country.

Now this is pretty interesting. According to John Edwards, he was first on Musharaff's rol-o-dex in the occasion of increased instability:

“He called me,” Edwards said, “because I told the ambassador I’d like to speak to him. I met him a few years ago, which I think I told you earlier, and we had a conversation in which I urged him to continue the democratization process. He told me, he gave me his assurances that he intended to do that, and we also spoke about having international independent investigators allowed into the country for transparency purposes, for credibility purposes, and we spoke briefly about the elections.”

I just want to say that as evil and hideous as groups like Al Qaeda are, we should try our hardest to find ways to satirize them. Through acts like assasination, slaughter and execution, they hope to instill fear in people and control their lives. We can't let them do that, and since we know there's nothing they hate more than being laughed at (take the Mohammed cartoon bruhaha), we should ridicule them for the bizarre, barbaric, developmentally retarded freaks that they are.

That is a tough task, but it can be done.

Bruce Bartlett has a lengthy article in the Opinion Journal that lays out a list of quite offensive racist remarks from prominent Democratic party leaders over the last 200 years. A couple of them stood out above the rest, including the following from the liberal icon, Franklin Delano Roosevelt:

"Anyone who has traveled to the Far East knows that the mingling of Asiatic blood with European or American blood produces, in nine cases out of ten, the most unfortunate results. . . . The argument works both ways. I know a great many cultivated, highly educated and delightful Japanese. They have all told me that they would feel the same repugnance and objection to have thousands of Americans settle in Japan and intermarry with the Japanese as I would feel in having large numbers of Japanese coming over here and intermarry with the American population. In this question, then, of Japanese exclusion from the United States it is necessary only to advance the true reason--the undesirability of mixing the blood of the two peoples. . . . The Japanese people and the American people are both opposed to intermarriage of the two races--there can be no quarrel there."

--Franklin D. Roosevelt, 1925
President, 1933-45

Senator Robert "Barbaric!" Byrd also makes an appearance with his 1946 call for nationwide Ku Klux Klan membership:

"I am a former Kleagle [recruiter] of the Ku Klux Klan in Raleigh County. . . . The Klan is needed today as never before and I am anxious to see its rebirth here in West Virginia. It is necessary that the order be promoted immediately and in every state in the union."

--Robert C. Byrd, 1946
Democratic Senator from West Virginia, 1959-present
Senate Majority Leader, 1977-80 and 1987-88
Senate President Pro Tempore, 1989-95, 2001-03, 2007-present
His portrait stands in the U.S. Capitol.

A condescending remark by Lyndon Johnson about "quieting down" black people:

"These Negroes, they're getting pretty uppity these days and that's a problem for us since they've got something now they never had before, the political pull to back up their uppityness. Now we've got to do something about this, we've got to give them a little something, just enough to quiet them down, not enough to make a difference. For if we don't move at all, then their allies will line up against us and there'll be no way of stopping them, we'll lose the filibuster and there'll be no way of putting a brake on all sorts of wild legislation. It'll be Reconstruction all over again."

--Sen. Lyndon B. Johnson (D., Texas), 1957

Robert Byrd is still a sitting senator, and Johnson and Roosevelt are still seen as heroes and icons by young and old liberals. Why is this so when conservatives like Bill Bennett have been taken to the woodshed for making bizarre racial analogies? I guess that bumper sticker may be true: If it weren't for double standards, liberals wouldn't have any standards.

This is pretty funny stuff, though I didn't really get who the short black guy is supposed to be. Theodore?

I'm posting this pretty late, so chances are if you're interested in either Beck or Paul then you've already watched it. One thing that is very notable is that Ron Paul comes off almost as a different person when he's allowed to speak for an extended length of time and not pushed into the worthless presidential debate format.

Wow, just wow. You can just feel the liberal irrationality oozing from Good Morning America host Chirs Cuomo's lips as he asks Barack Obama which is a bigger obstacle, Hillary Clinton or "America's inherent racism." Good job, Barack, for not taking the race bait on this one.

This is a largely political blog, so I wasn't sure if I should repost this article here. Anyways, here goes nothing:

I've been noticing a stronger presence in jazz over the last year or so, with artists being more heavily promoted and talked about. I don't know what's causing this, and it could be that I haven't been paying attention, that there is a larger presence of jazz musicians or that record labels are jumping on the success of Norah Jones.

Slate has a pretty healthy article the best jazz albums of 2007, all good picks. I did feel like they left out two good albums, so I'll list those:

Robert Glasper - In My Element (Blue Note). This album struck me by surprise in its simplistic brilliance. Glasper, a jazz pianist, is assisted by only a bassist and a drum player throughout the album, which helps to highlight Glasper's unique talent. Released shortly after the death of hip-hop producer J Dilla (who passed due to a rare blood disease called TTP), Glasper and his group shine on the track "J Dillalude," where the trio adopts many of Dilla's songs into a jazz style, possibly creating a new hybrid-genre in the process. While far from a classic, Glasper does show that he is a pianist worth keeping an eye on.

Wynton Marsalis - From the Plantation to the Penitentiary (Wynton Marsalis Enterprises, Inc.). I have no idea why this album didn't make it onto Slate's list. Perhaps some of the politics of the album offended Fred Kaplan? The album is certainly packed with political provocation, as Marsalis, through his own spoken word and with the vocal aides of guest singer Jennifer Sanon, attacks gangsta rap as a "modern day minstrel show" and ridicules both liberal and conservative politicians. When many musicians turn their hand towards political messages, many of them come off seeming ignorant. Marsalis showed himself to be both intelligent and articulate, and From the Plantation to the Penitentiary brought a degree of sophistication to music that is not too common today.

Delta Saxophone Quartet - Dedicated to You But You Weren't Listening (MoonJune Records). Delta Saxophone Quartet is the official quartet of London's Kingston College, and the money that comes with being funded by an educational institution comes through strongly on this album. The quartet melds bebop-style saxophone stylings with sound effects and synthesizers in a style reminiscent of Pink Floyd. The first track, "Dedicated," brought out an atmosphere quality more common with electronic groups like Orbital than in jazz. The album unfortunately got a little too experimental for my tastes towards the middle.

Jazz releases are usually full of reissues and posthumous releases, and for not only a flood of new releases, but good ones, to come out is indeed a rare treat. 2007 was a year where we were lucky enough to witness this happen.

I found this great quote regarding the liberal assault on free expression, by way of the Patriot Post:

“At the summit of national power, politicians and bureaucrats are terrified at the idea of endorsing the religious views of the majority of Americans. Our First Amendment forbids the establishment of a state religion, but many of our governing elites are taking it a step further, outlawing its very existence from the public conversation.” —L. Brent Bozell