Disqus - Latest Comments for Ostromite

Re: Team of Rivals

Ostromite — Wed, 19 Nov 2008 12:35:30 -0000

I agree wholeheartedly with nearly everything you said, but I'm afraid I find the prospect of Obama potentially offering McCain a position in his cabinet more captivating at the moment. I don't believe for a second that he will, but the news networks - particularly Fox - have been throwing it around a lot in the past few days and I find it baffling and hilarious.

Re: Hillary Clinton for State?

Ostromite — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 11:04:34 -0000

I'd prefer Bill Richardson as Secretary of State, but as a New Yorker who loathes being represented by such a false harpy of a woman, I think I'd be rather happy if she gave up her seat in the Senate.

Re: The Face of Bigotry

Ostromite — Fri, 14 Nov 2008 10:58:47 -0000

The only thing that kept me from going into a queer Hulk rage and smashing through my office wall when I watched that video was knowing that assholes like Tony Perkins will one day be viewed as this generation's Theodore Bilbos and James Eastlands. Even though it's bumpy and slow, the history of America is one of constant progression and further recognition of individual liberties, and if state-sanctioned homophobia doesn't go the way of segregation, I won't just eat my hat, I'll eat my entire collection of hats.

(Of course, you could also make the argument that the history of America is one of stripping people of their individual liberties, i.e. income taxes, the socialization of public services, et cetera, but that's a whole different hornet's nest altogether)

Re: Seven-Year-Old Political Blogger Gets Letter from Obama

Ostromite — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 13:19:03 -0000

By "go the way of Bobby Fisher", do you mean they'll eventually ruin themselves because of massive egos, become lunatic conspiracy theorists, and expatriate disgracefully after renouncing everyone who had ever supported them?

Man, I hate Bobby Fisher. What a dickhead.

Re: Begich Closing on Stevens

Ostromite — Wed, 12 Nov 2008 20:43:15 -0000

That first paragraph had me in stitches.

Re: As if I Didn't Have Enough Reason to Dislike Joe the Plumber Already

Ostromite — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 19:54:06 -0000

This Joe the Plumber thing is just a practical joke, and everyone is in on it but me... right?

By the way, the AngelFire website I had eight years ago that I made in Front Page Express looked better than that.

Re: Veterans Day

Ostromite — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 18:28:29 -0000

I figured Veterans Day wasn't Veterans Day in Canada. While I'm certainly not a naive canadophile like Michael Moore, you guys tend to be a little less gooey about that sort of thing than we are.

Re: Sarah Palin's Good Will Tour

Ostromite — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:08:18 -0000

I'm going to have to hire a manservant to keep his thumbs in my ears for the next four years, it seems. After November 4th, I was hoping I would never have to hear about this dopey failure again. If she sincerely thinks she can be president in 2012, she's dumber than I thought.

Re: Veterans Day

Ostromite — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 17:05:44 -0000

Fuck Veterans Day. It's a phoney, feel-good holiday that doesn't mean anything. Why have it when we have Memorial Day and Flag Day (not that we should have either of those, anyway)?

Happy Armistice Day, damnit. Armistice Day means something, even if its remembrance didn't stop the second world war. Every time we celebrate "Veterans Day", we shed a few tears for our fallen heroes and kick a few nickels over to the local VFW, but we also lose a little bit of memory about World War I and what it meant.

I have a lot of respect for people who are willing to fight for their country, but its bullshit to replace the commemoration of the end of one of the world's worst conflicts with a bogus nod to veterans that could take place any day of the year - ideally, every day. We don't have days that celebrate police officers or firemen or, hell, even the field doctors with the Peace Corps and CDC, but yet we willingly abandon the anniversary of the 1918 armistice so we can spend the day watching interviews with local war heroes on the news?

Of course, that's precisely it: all the World War I veterans died - I believe there are four left in the United States - so the news networks have lost all the juiciness of tearful interviews and shots of old guys saluting their squad mates' graves. Veterans Day, though, is a vague, floating holiday, equally applicable to the trench warriors of Vemy Ridge as it is to the wheel greaser for a jet in the Persian Gulf. We'll never run out of wars, so as long as we don't anchor our feel-good holiday to one in particular, we'll never be short of patriotic sap to annually reminisce about. Veterans Day is as disgraceful to me as if, twenty years from now, September eleventh were celebrated as "Firemen's Day".

Re: The Problem With the GOP

Ostromite — Tue, 11 Nov 2008 16:52:50 -0000

That was sad. Is that really the best the Republicans can do? The thing that really stands out to me is the Arial font, a typeface never, ever used by real graphic designers because it's a soulless Microsoft ripoff of Helvetica. The fact that it's used in this video tells me two things: first, that this was made on a home computer and not a professional film editing station; and two, that whoever made it was either rushed or talentless. I feel embarrassed for the RNC.

Re: Joe Scarborough Drops F-Bomb

Ostromite — Mon, 10 Nov 2008 14:52:29 -0000

I agree completely. A few fucks and shits aren't going to hurt this country. At. All. To the best of my recollection, British television is full of profanity, and that country isn't going down the shitter - though, I suppose if you ask these conservative prudes about it, they'd probably say it was, so I guess that's a moot point. In any case, I loved watching those dorks squirm after he said it as if he had just whipped out his dick for a second or two and tucked it back in. People: chill. It's just a damn word. It's bad enough white people can't say "nigger" in any context in this country without a public relations fiasco, but when a universally loved, used, and abused word like "fuck" is banished from television stations that frequently show footage of buildings full of human beings getting blown up by terrorists, we really need to reassess our values.

Re: Robert Gibbs to be Press Secretary

Ostromite — Thu, 06 Nov 2008 18:07:01 -0000

It pretty much goes without saying, but Sean Hannity is a disgrace to his profession. He's worse than anyone like Bill O'Reilly or Rush Limbaugh because he still fancies himself a "journalist", despite the fact that he's extremely biased and is more interested in putting his interview subjects on the spot than getting any actual reporting done.

Oh, Gibbs: excellent choice on Obama's part.

Re: Sarah Palin Mind-Bogglingly Stupid

Ostromite — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 23:45:46 -0000

Hopefully the next few months worth of newscasting will convince even the most die-hard Palin fanatics that she was as stupid as I've been saying she is. When two guys on Fox News are talking about how unbelievably ignorant a Republican politician is, something is up.

Re: BREAKING: Same-Sex Marriage Ban Passes in California

Ostromite — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 18:40:21 -0000

I'm so angry I want to punch something. It's not very often in this country that laws are passed that take rights away from people, and every time it happens, we all die a little as a nation. I hope something is done about this in the future because this really is a dangerous path for America to go down.

Re: Post-Election Liveblogging

Ostromite — Wed, 05 Nov 2008 00:22:28 -0000

John McCain's speech was gracious and tactful, but the audience was rude and embarrassing. The crowd at Grant Park cheered when Obama said he got a call from McCain, but the crowd in Phoenix booed when McCain even mentioned Obama.

Re: Election Liveblog

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 21:38:46 -0000

"West Virginia for McCain. Where white people love white people."

That's hitting below the belt. While I certainly won't deny that West Virginians are racists, by and large - my mother's family is from Clay County - to imply that that's the only reason the state went to McCain is insulting. Why not say the same for Georgia or any of the other states he's taken? I'm not really offended, but those are the sort of half-jokes that give liberals the bad reputation of being big city elitists.

Re: Election Liveblog

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 20:12:42 -0000

Okay, so... can we talk about something else now?

Seriously though, I doubt the next three months are going to be any less stupid media-wise than the last three. Expect vacuous documentary specials on the History Channel and A&E about the importance of our first black president and endless speculation on the American right about how far down the shitter we're going to go.

Re: Scary Black Men Steal Election

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 18:00:41 -0000

Criticizing Fox for leaning to the right is like criticizing the Leaning Tower of Pisa for the same thing, but what really troubles me about this is that they clearly selected this story for the express purpose of instilling white fear into racist voters. The Fox News Channel is fast becoming a caricature of itself, but I don't think it's going to go away for a long time. I wish I could just ignore them, but the sad fact is is that they have millions of viewers in this country, and it's simply impossible to avoid their impact if you even try to have a halfway decent conversation about politics.

Re: Hopeful // Resigned

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 17:56:39 -0000

I wrote "disappointed", though I didn't get a chance to qualify it there. I'm disappointed because, once again, the entirety of our political diversity has been boiled down to two candidates, and that - even according to this New York Times poll - you can only support one fully or the other. I'm disappointed because I was forced to choose between one candidate with whom I agree about 50% of the time and another one with whom I agree the other 50%. I'm disappointed because most of my major political concerns were barely addressed by either candidate throughout the entire campaign. I'm disappointed because no third party or independent candidate was able to even make a splash in the media coverage. I'm disappointed because, for all the piffle about "change" and "hope", I feel in my bones that this election is going to prove just as un-revolutionary as any other.

Maybe I'm just cynical, though. I am glad that the Bush administration is finally going to be swept out of office, and I believe that Obama is going to win and prove himself to be a capable leader, but I still can't shake the feeling that this is just the most recent in a centuries-long struggle between two political factions that the public at large has absolutely no hope of displacing or replacing.

Re: Nader

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 16:44:50 -0000

Out of support for independent candidates rather than his politics, I was going to vote for Nader - but he wasn't even on the damn ballot! Say what you will about Libertarians, but at least somebody's trying to get ballot status laws reformed.

Re: American Voting is Broken

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:42:54 -0000

Polling places in America are a joke. Why on earth should the town council of Frog's Balls, Kentucky be allowed to set up its polling place completely different from one in Manhattan? I realize the difference in population and architecture from area to area necessitates changes in organization, but voter eligibility and method of ballot casting should be nationally regulated. Anyone who thinks the elections are pointless because computers and human error undermine the whole process are paranoid drama queens, but anyone who thinks the disjointed and haphazard way elections are conducted on a national level isn't problematic at best and dangerous at worst is naive and uncritical.

Re: Don't Blame Me, I Voted for Kodos

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 15:37:59 -0000

God, people still use paper ballots? I mean, I know that they do, but it just seems so damn archaic. There are just so many things that can go wrong to invalidate it, I can't figure out why they still do it - or why Ralph Nader insists that it be the only way to vote. I know there's no sure-fire way to ensure that there's not possibility for error, and these Luddite technophobes who think computers can erase their votes whenever they want aren't 100% crazy, but, damn, there has to be a better way.

Oh, wait, there is! I just did it today when I voted in New York, the land of the mechanical lever. It's not perfect, but at least I can't get my chads pregnant.

Re: Who You Vote For

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 12:11:09 -0000

What the fuck. Five-year-olds aren't allowed to vote. Ballot fraud, damnit, ballot fraud!

Re: Palin Speaking to Reporters

Ostromite — Tue, 04 Nov 2008 11:47:30 -0000

This is as good of a place as any to pose a question I've been wondering for years:

When the presidential candidates vote, do the people at the polling place still ask what their names are?

Re: Cheney Endorses McCain

Ostromite — Sat, 01 Nov 2008 16:30:09 -0000

Psh. This is news? I'm still waiting for Anne Coulter to come out and say that she was just kidding a year ago when she said she'd rather vote for Barack Obama than John McCain.