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The Real Reason McCain’s Age Might Matter. →
All joking aside — and I know how hard it is to resist — the fact is, John McCain is old. Seventy-one years old. The Daily Intel has the most sober assessment of that fact that I’ve yet to read. A few talking points:
• Twenty-two percent of Americans 71 and older are affected by mild cognitive impairment, a decline in brain function that causes memory loss and can lead to dementia.
• 35 to 40 percent of older adults have neural deficits that lead to poor decision making.
• Gerontologists and retirement planners have learned that aging brains compensate for cognitive decline by relying on templates of familiar knowledge more than problem solving. This phenomenon, called confabulation, rather than being random, often takes the form of untrue “facts” that make them feel better — giving them what scientists have called “the pleasantness of false beliefs.”
What worries me is not that John McCain is 71. It’s that John McCain will be 72 if he is elected, 76 if he wins a second term, and 80 if he runs through eight years in the White House. Now I love octogenarians — especially cool ones that sing Coldplay songs — but this concerns me on, like, so many levels.
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Fair is fair: Democrats are hypocrites, too. →
John Edwards on Bill Clinton in 1999:
“I think this President has shown a remarkable disrespect for his office, for the moral dimensions of leadership, for his friends, for his wife, for his precious daughter. It is breathtaking to me the level to which that disrespect has risen.”
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Toby Keith is pro-America. And pro-lynching?
In 2002, Keith became a millionaire many times over with the release of “Courtesy of the Red, White, and Blue (The Angry American.” (Sample lyric: “We’ll put a boot in your ass / It’s the American way.”) Now he’s back with a song called “Beer For My Horses” to expand upon his patriotism:
Grandpappy told my pappy back in my day, son
A man had to answer for the wicked that he’d done
Take all the rope in Texas
Find a tall oak tree, round up all of them bad boys
Hang them high in the street
For all the people to see
It reminded me of a band called The Klansmen, featuring Skrewdriver’s Ian Stuart. Stuart, a British white supremacist, made a handful of fairly awful rockabilly albums in the early ’90s under the pseudonym “Jeb Stuart” — the first of which he called Fetch The Rope. From the title track:
Them good old boys they kept their trust despite the rising crime
Clean white robes, good strong ropes, they’re just doing fine
Law and order really died, the Klansmen didn’t flinch
If somebody broke the law he was likely to get lynched
I said, don’t give up hope
Fetch that rope
Which is kind of the same thing. (In fact, I feel dirty having to point it out.) But that’s not all: In a bizarre twist, Keith is stumping for Barack Obama.
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Grand opening in Beirut: Fast-food Terrorism. →
At Buns ‘n’ Guns — a war-themed café in Beirut — you can place an order for a Grenade (grilled chicken with fries) or a Kalashnikov (beef burger on “terrorist” bread) — cooked by chefs in military fatigues and served with a soundtrack of explosions and gun fire over the PA. Their marketing slogan? “A Sandwich Can Kill You.”Link
McCain Makes Historic First Visit to Internet. →
“I can’t get this [expletive] thing to work,” Sen. McCain said as he struggled with his computer’s mouse, causing his wife Cindy to prompt him to add that he was “just kidding.”Photo
The Boiling Point.
Mikhaela Reid is a political cartoonist whose work has appeared in the L.A. Times, Boston Phoenix, and the Advocate, among others. She’s got an entire collection posted on Flickr that is well worth checking out. Unless you’re a conservative Republican, in which case I can’t really help you.
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The economics of "sounding black." →
New research suggests that how you speak relates to how much you earn. For example:
“Blacks who ‘sound black’ earn salaries that are 10 percent lower than blacks who do not ‘sound black,’ even after controlling for measures of intelligence, experience in the work force, and other factors that influence how much people earn.”
Interestingly, this form of racism actually transcends the racial divide: white dudes who “sound black” earn six percent less than anyone who sounds like Fonzworth Bentley.
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Gay Man Sues Bible Publishers For $70 Million. →
The Bible has been altered in almost every translation in some way. (This is the problem with basing your entire life on a book that you can’t read in its original languages.) Bradley Fowler, however, has been keeping up with one version of the Bible and now he’s suing — alleging that these changes, which include inserting the word “homosexual” into a passage about the wicked, will incite “verbal abuse, discrimination, episodes of hate, and physical violence including murder.” You can’t really argue that there isn’t a precedent to his allegation.Link
Heterosexuals finally earn the right to flaunt their sexuality. →
In what is seen by some as a groundbreaking move for men who love women, a group of heterosexual reggae artists will band together for the first annual Straight Pride Parade in Brooklyn.”The Straight Pride Parade is a chance for heterosexuals to gather together and proudly embrace their sexuality,” says reggae artist Jango Fresh. Unlike, say, every other day everywhere in the world.Link
Army Veteran Refuses Call To Deploy To Iraq. →
At this point in the war, a conscientious objector story is to be expected. What I didn’t expect, however, was to find out that the Army’s pitch to disadvantaged teens — We’ll pay for college! — doesn’t actually add up:
After the Army, Matthis Chiroux assumed the GI Bill benefits he earned would help pay for college but was “horrified” to learn in January that because of his salary in the Army and his stationing overseas, he was going to be denied federal and state tuition assistance. He also found out that he was not eligible for subsidized student loans because of his GI Bill benefits.
In the end, his benefits as a veteran totaled around $1,000 a month, not even enough to pay for his apartment in Brooklyn. If Chiroux had not served in the military, he said he would have been eligible for Pell Grants that might have helped him pay the $7,500 he laid out in January for school. A Veterans Administration representative at his college told him that his struggle to pay tuition was a typical story for young veterans.
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Rite-Aid does not want you to feel uncomfortable.
A reader at Queerty sent in this image, which was reportedly taken outside of the Chelsea drugstore over the weekend, but employee Kularee Kamhal swears “it’s a lie.” To boost its credibility, however, I noticed that — like most ad hoc drugstore signs — this one has a typo.
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Jesse Helms Dies at 86. →
I know you’re not supposed to speak ill of the dead and all, but fuck it: He was an idiot. (Thankfully, Dan Savage is less censored than I am.)Page 1 of 4