“I was listening to your show this morning asking for data or ‘studies’ to show that global warming is not happening. One of your listeners was correct in saying that the al gore camp no longer uses the term ‘global warming’ and has now changed the term to ‘climate change’...In 1780 it was possible to walk from Manhattan to Ellis Island (over the frozen NY harbor) if you compare our climate from then to now it has clearly warmed, but when and who decides what the date that is the ‘normal’ temperature to base the argument on?"
"I think you inadvertently hit on a very important point," Post blogger Jerry Bovino tells
Sue Gray in comment #31. "I agree with you that the Palestinians in Gaza may think that it's ok to sacrifice some of their own citizens to highlight their political concerns. In contrast, the Israelis would never knowingly sacrifice even ONE of their citizens for any political statement. The Hamas led Palestinians think it's some kind of great honor to die for their cause and become a martyr. The Israelis would rather keep their citizens alive. In Israel, life is precious. Sadly, in many of the Muslim countries, life is cheap. I will let the American readers of this blog decide if they would strap a bomb to their own children to make a point. The Jewish mothers certainly wouldn't."
The conversation turns from football players to football fans as Michael Conniff writes, “Because Elway's team won not once but twice, back-to-back, the typical Broncos fan EXPECTS a Super Bowl every year and kvetches when it inevitably doesn't happen. I find that obnoxious beyond belief.” Kit O’Carra responds, “The years I lived in SoCal I tried to get to every game the Broncos played there, whether it was at the Coliseum with the Raiders (before they moved back to Oakland) or to San Diego. This was back in the 80's, when most people assumed the nastiest fans belonged to the Raiders and we were risking life and limb attending a game decked out in orange and blue. Not so....by far, the most obnoxious and nastiest fans were in San Diego.”
Posts filed under 'United Post'
On Aug. 26, 1920, the 19th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, guaranteeing women the right to vote, was declared in effect.
My husband and I had an argument just this morning concerning whether activism really works to effect change and whether it really even matters. As an activist myself, I’m personally invested in the belief that it does work and it does matter. My husband is of the opposite opinion. In these all too frequent arguments (usually spurred by the publication of one of my letters to the editor) I often cite the women’s suffrage movement along with the civil rights movement as examples of how grassroots activism leads to changes in social attitudes and government policy.
Continue Reading August 26th, 2008
A question for today’s class: in the history of television advertising, has any private citizen ever ponyed up $50 million-plus for the greater good of the American people, with no strings attached?
The answer, of course, is no—not ever—maybe because it’s just not the American way. There’s always an angle to be had, most especially when we’re talking about oil.
This just in: as the chief bottle-washer at both a radio talk show and blog called “Con Games,” I consider it my particular duty in our unprecedented republic to keep a close eye out for the con, especially when it arrives right here in my adopted hometown of Aspen, where I keep my first, second, and third homes.
Thus T, Boone Pickens, the billionaire oil man who has now turned his attention to the Pickens Plan (pickensplan.com), an energy revamp that will accelerate our wing-flapping when it comes to wind—ramping it up to 20 percent or so starting with Sweetwater, Texas, and then points north—and cleverly deploying the freed-up capacity to replace imported oil with natural gas in the transportation sector. The goal, as he said in Aspen last week: to fix “our $700 billion problem”—the $700 billion in imported oil that we need per annum to keep the economy pumping like, well, like an oil well in Texas. The Pickens Plan includes spending $58 million of his own T. Boone coin on advertising to get the point across.
Continue Reading August 18th, 2008
Well, my friends, if John McCain calls his audience “my friends” one more time I will never say the words “missing in action” again. If he refers to “my fellow Americans” again I will force-feed the Republican nominee with quotations from Chairman LBJ about marital fidelity.
The Straight Talker his ownself made his way to the rock-ribbed Republican Rocky Mountains Thursday for a late-summer idyll, stopping to shake the money tree in Vail and then again in Aspen, going home on the Straight Talk Express with something like $500,000 minimum—not so bad for half-a-day’s work and no ad hominem attacks. In between, under the gentle aegis of the Aspen Institute, he did what pols do when they come to the place where power speaks to power: they sit back like movie stars accepting lifetime achievement interviews on AMC, albeit without the kettle corn and film clips.
The moneyed interests hereabouts in Aspen and thereabouts in Vail long ago made their peace with the erstwhile maverick, deciding they could live with him and his melanoma in the face of Obama Nation. And why not? There was much to like about McCain in person on the stump—he was a war hero, my fellow Americans—including his Surging references to integrity, his faux-more-years liberalism, and his cornball jokes about turning his nose up on ethanol in Iowa.
Continue Reading August 14th, 2008
Eat local! Has a nice ring, doesn’t it? Indeed, for millions of environmentally concerned eaters the allure of this mantra has been irresistible. Due largely to the impassioned literary efforts of an exclusive cadre of savvy food writers, buying locally grown food—and all that it entails—has quickly evolved into nothing less than an expression of earnest environmental virtue.
Continue Reading August 13th, 2008
National and international radio talk show host George Noory on his world famous “Coast to Coast” show will interview six continent world bicycle adventurer Frosty Wooldridge, author of “THE NEXT ADDED 100 MILLION AMERICANS: Nation on the Brink”.
Wooldridge discusses the ramifications of the United States adding 100 million people in the next 30 years. This blockbuster interview shows the United States on a collision path with immigration and overpopulation. www.frostywooldridge.com
Wooldridge emphatically states, “Overpopulation will become THE single greatest/gravest issue facing America and the world in the 21st century. We either solve it gracefully ourselves or nature will solve it brutally for us.”
Continue Reading August 11th, 2008
Nope—not me, no way, no how was I going to leap to my feet in the Benedict Music Tent here in Aspen for any one of the multiple standing O’s which the putatively liberal crowd was giving away to Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice: one for yakking with Aspen Institute president Walter Isaacson, the other for playing Brahms and Dvorak on the Steinway with four worthies from the Aspen Music Festival and School.
I know, I know: either I should have stood for something or I should have stood in bed.
Continue Reading August 3rd, 2008
"Crimes of the Heart," the black comedy by Beth Henley presented by Theatre Aspen and now underway under the tent in Rio Grande Park, finds horror in comedy and comedy in horror. Nobody--neither actors nor audience--gets cheated in the Aspen production directed by Michael Unger with a confidence that embraces Southern gothic chaos without losing control of the proceedings for a single moment.
The cast is part of the continuing Theatre Aspen upgrade of talent: director Unger and all six actors in the show are members of Actors Equity, generally a good sign. (All four Theatre Aspen shows continue throughout August.) In the theatrical equivalent of a chick flick, the three McGrath sisters--playing with astonishing pugnacity by Janet Metz, Lisa Datz, and Sandy Rustin--and their cousin Chick Boyle, played by Sally Mae Dunn, who embraces reprehensibility with a brio that borders on the illegal--manage to laugh and cry and stomp their way to a conclusion that becomes maniacly cheerful despite the odds. Both Richard Gallagher and Kevin Stapleton, the stars of the guy comedy "Rounding Third" at Theatre Aspen this summer, again display their wily versatility and easy humanity in supporting roles they could easily have phoned in.
The story is about family dysfunction risen to the level of art. You see, Babe (Rustin) has just shot her husband Zachary, an oily and awful big-shot lawyer in Haselhurst, Mississippi. She makes bail and comes back to the home that her sister (Lenny) is keeping for Old Grandaddy, an overbearing force now unseen because he has been dispatched to the hospital with a stroke. The play takes place on Lenny's 30th birthday--and one day later--and the event is not a happy one, in part because of her "shrunken ovary," a condition that is oft-remarked upon. Meg (Datz) is a failed singer with on-again, off-again mental problems who is so godawful ashamed of her life she has to lie about it to Old Grandaddy. Doc Porter (Stapleton) is the boyfriend she loved but left after the roof literally fell in, and Barnette Lloyd (Gallagher) is Babe's lawyer bent on revenge against her husband, the man with a bullet in his belly.
Got that? One other thing: the mother of the stanky McGraths not only hung herself in the basement of their house, but also hung the family cat with her, a decision that brought "national" attention to the wonder of Babe, who contemplates same. Why hang the cat when you're killing yourself. The whole play hinges on the answer to that question.
Maybe you've seen the movie with Diane Keaton, Jessica Lange, and Sissy Spacek, but the stage version at Theatre Aspen surpasses those performances in my opinion. The actors almost seem to bust out of their seems with talent: toward the end of the evening the three McGrath sisters also show you that they can all sing beautifully--to go with their mastery of comedy, drama, and that place in between where most of life goes down. You hear their beautiful voice after all the comedy and carnage that has transpired, and you know from that point on, there's nothing these actresses can't do.
Continue Reading August 1st, 2008
In America, with hundreds of different ethnic groups, especially black, white, brown, red and yellow, we exist in a tenuous but tolerant dance guaranteed by the U.S. Constitution.
It’s not been easy with Jim Crow Laws, the KKK, Watts Riots, separate but equal, anger of Malcolm X, white flight to the suburbs, smoldering and seething ghettoes and Pastor Jeremiah Wright in Chicago with “God D*** America….”
In 1965, Senator Teddy Kennedy created an even more tense society by immigrating millions from incompatible cultures that now call America home: Muslims, Hmongs, Koreans, Somalians, Ethiopians, etc. Additionally, he created even greater racial tension from competing and growing cultures that fail to assimilate into America as Americans.
We now designate Muslim-Americans, African-Americans, Russian-Americans, Mexican-Americans, while our national identity drains into confusion and tension.
This week, in D Magazine, Texas journalist Trey Garrison wrote a piece titled: “Why I don't want diversity in my neighborhood.”
Continue Reading July 31st, 2008
The Con Man talks about his meeting with "The Dark Knight" at the multiplex, and his flap with Uma Thurman's father, Professor Robert Thurman of Columbia, about the violence in Quentin Tarantino's movies. Also: handicapping McCain-Obama.
Click here for the complete "Con Games with Michael Conniff" for Monday July 28, 2008.
July 28th, 2008
Dorothy was right, but admittedly spoiled DrBill, like the rest of us Valley residents, know that it's not about Kansas. Jeez, it gets hot here. Humid too but that has been relatively inconsistent, the humid part anyway. I've settled in a bit, have stopped complaining about the insanely aggressive KC drivers, though I just got one more "dig" in, didn't I? I've gotten lost or at least disoriented a few times driving without mountains or a river as reference point. Pretty embarrassing for a guy who claims an innate sense of direction no matter where he is. Must be the Lyme.
Continue Reading July 24th, 2008
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