But he is Richard Nixon.
Stuart, longtime friend to S&R, is a veteran stage actor who portrays the former president in the Longmont (Colorado) Theatre Company‘s ambitious take on Frost/Nixon.
 I had the great pleasure of recently seeing the production. As a politics junkie and student of American political history, particularly of the Watergate debacle, I couldn’t pass it up. And I anticipated from having seen Stuart’s remarkable performance as Robert Scott in 2009′s Terra Nova that he would surely immerse himself in this unique role as well.
My high expectations were Full story »
by Richard A. Lee
 The topics dominating the discussion about the Republican primary for president – Rick Perry’s inability to recall the details of his own campaign proposal and the sexual harassment allegations against Herman Cain – may be captivating, but they don’t tell us what we need to determine who is best equipped to serve in the Oval Office.
Sure, we’d like our leaders to be pillars of virtue, but there have been some very effective presidents, governors and mayors whose personal lives were not exactly role models. Likewise, Perry’s gaffe in the CNBC debate was downright embarrassing, but should our judgments on the next leader of the free world be based on a 53-second YouTube moment? There must be better ways to gauge who would be a good president.
Mitt Romney would have us believe that a proven track record of running a successful business will produce similar results in the White House. It’s a message that resonates well with voters who often lament that government should run more like a business. It sounds good in theory, but how it plays out in practice is a different story.
Full story »
THE ELECTRIC STAIRS
Gary Marmorstein
While Ed Ritter was on the land line with the manager of Mobility Lift and Elevator, he had to keep a finger in his other ear so he could hear above the noise of the giant vacuum cleaner upstairs.
“I’m sorry, sir, could you repeat that?”
“I asked, if I’m not being invasive or anything, what’s your father got?”
“He’s got lymphoma,” Ed said, then immediately regretted splashing the emphasis back in the manager’s face. In the months he’d been coming to New Jersey to see his father Joel through doctors’ appointments and visits with friends—visits that had recently acquired a valedictory tone—he was learning to forgive the awkward questions and comments of people who meant well. “He believes he’s going to die in the next few days. I was hoping to get you guys out here before that.” The first time Ed had called Mobility, he had followed the manager’s instructions and measured the width of the staircase in the mock Tudor house, and the manager had pronounced it too narrow for the brackets they had in stock to hold the chair’s track in place; the manager would call as soon as the special bracket came in from the supplier. But no one from Mobility had called again, and Joel was becoming impatient. “I want to die upstairs,” his father had been repeating at least twice a day. Full story »
 OK.
I, and most people who think they know something about football, have been pretty vocal about the fact that Tebow sucks as a quarterback. The people who disagree with us insist his intangibles make up for his lack of tangibles, an argument so absurd that we have trouble getting our heads around it. If tangibles don’t matter, maybe I should not have been so quick to dismiss a career as a porn star.
Of course, what drives most of us crazy is that the people who are making the argument for Tebow happen to be not only white, but bat-shit crazy evangelicals, raising the suspicion in our minds that maybe this isn’t about football and logic at all, but about racism or religion. After all, for years after blacks were finally allowed to play professional football they weren’t allowed to play quarterback because they lacked intangibles like intelligence, unlike white quarterbacks like Terry Bradshaw and Kerry Collins, the latter of whom was so smart that he thought his offensive line (the guys charged with protecting him) would enjoy hearing racist jokes. But Kerry failed to notice his O-line was black, and the next game they looked less like football players and more like matadors letting bulls rush by. In other words, the intelligence thing was yet another bit of back door discrimination. Full story »
Props, yo. (And thanks to Wendy Redal for passing it along….)
 Tony Medina sweeps into the Japanese steak house with the old Vapors song on his lips: “I think I’m turning Japanese, I think I’m turning Japanese, I really think so.” Even as he sings, he swoops around the end of our long table to hug his former mentor, the poet Maria Gillan, sitting at the far end. In the background, a fireball fwooshes up from one of the other grills across the room.
Our own chef has not yet started to cook. We’ve been waiting for Medina, the guest of honor, who’s back here in Binghamton, New York, for a brief writing residency at his alma mater. “He needed pants,” Gillan had told us a few minutes earlier, when Medina called to let us know he was running late. “He’s at Boscov’s, trying on pants.”
This is how Medina’s homecoming gets announced, with great good humor and the smell of sizzle in the air. Full story »
Sitting before Congress — and a dozen stalwarts of opposing political ideologies — is the opportunity to question the economic and moral wisdom of what author Andrew Bacevich calls the Washington rules — a “sacred trinity: an abiding conviction that the minimum essentials of international peace and order require the United States to maintain a global military presence, to configure its forces for global power projection, and to counter existing or anticipated threats by relying on a policy of global interventionism.”
These Washington rules — America shall protect and, more importantly, project American values because they are derived from American exceptionalism — require great military expense born by you and me, the taxpayers. That expense now faces a congressionally mandated deficit reduction process.
Come the day before Thanksgiving, Nov. 23, six Democrats and six Republicans must identify at least $1.5 trillion in cuts in federal spending over the next decade. If they do, then Congress must vote yea or nay by Dec. 23. If they do not, the Budget Control Act triggers automatic cuts totaling $1.2 trillion in deficit reduction, slashing, among others, military spending. (Note that some folks are trying to detrigger the trigger.)
The so-called super committee, formally known as the Joint Select Committee on Deficit Reduction, exists because Congress demonstrated neither the political will nor moral courage to tackle deficit reduction in a rational, non-confrontational, non-ideological way. None of its members has the stomach to cut military spending; the political cost would be, they think, unbearably high.
Full story »
 I find myself in the uncomfortable position of waiting for someone to die–someone that I don’t know and will never meet. That person has to die so that someone I know can live. Because I don’t know the donor, it seems not a matter of 2-1=1, but rather it’s 1-1=1. That equation came to me and I can’t shake it. The anonymity of the “relationship” skews the math.
My mom’s friend, I’ll call her Joan, needs a kidney. About a week ago Joan got the phone call that she had moved to the top of the donation list. Mom is Joan’s transportation once the call comes that a kidney is available. Since the call we’ve been waiting and making plans: someone to take care of Joan’s cats, someone to get Mom’s beagle to the kennel, contingency plans for making the trip if it’s snowing. Mom has her bag packed—so does Joan. It’s rather like a pregnant woman getting ready for the trip to the hospital.
Except for that death part. Full story »
Running for the Republican nomination for president, Rick Perry has been prone to flubs that raise questions about his suitability for the office. (Hey, at least they draw attention away from the truly epic scale of his corruption, as chronicled by Matt Taibbi in Rolling Stone.) His worst may have occurred at the November 9th debate, when he expressed his wish to eliminate three federal agencies.
Apparently, though, he failed to write them down on the palm of his hand a la Sarah Palin and was only able to remember two. Fifteen minutes later, after referring to his notes, he informed those in attendance that the third federal agency he would target was the Department of Energy. In fact, he calls for its abolition on a regular basis.
Aside from strangling government in general, why is the DOE high on the list of agencies condemned by Republicans? First, it exists to advance energy technology and innovation, which includes wind and solar, of little use to a party dependent on the funding of legacy energy like oil and gas. Also, Republicans can’t resist kicking the dead horse of Solyndra, described by the Washington Post as “the now-shuttered California company [which] had been a poster child of President Obama’s initiative to invest in clean energies and received the administration’s first energy loan of $535 million.”
 Let’s blame Anne Rice
Or, more specifically, if we’re going to start bitching about teenie-bopper bloodsuckers (which, I agree, are a true scourge), then really, we need to blame Lestat, Rice’s tortured antihero from Interview with a Vampire, published in 1976.
In 2009, Entertainment Weekly cited Lestat as the most influential vampire ever. “Foppishly charming, endearingly tortured, and always trendy no matter what the century, he became the template for all culturally relevant vampires since,” the article said.
Make no mistake: this most recent plague of brat-packish vampires is more about “commercial viability” than “cultural relevance.” A quick look at Barnes & Noble’s shelves tonight showed no less than five shelf-segments—fifty four-foot shelves—of “teen paranormal romance.” Good god. Full story »
AP photo from Eldorado News-Times, Eldorado AR
In 1913, Colorado coal miners went on strike to demand enforcement of the 8 hour workday law, to secure payment for “dead work” such as laying railroad track and timbering, for which JD Rockefeller Sr and the other coal barons paid nothing, and to gain the right to live outside company towns, buy goods from non-company stores, and choose non-company doctors. Full story »
by Santana Questa
 The original vampire, long before people were writing about it, was not a sexy creature. It had ragged teeth; raw, red skin; long nails; and tangled hair — if it had any at all.
After writers like Bram Stoker and Anne Rice began writing about the vampire, it evolved into a charismatic being that seduced pop culture. Enter Stephenie Meyer, and the classical perception of the vampire dissolves.
The vampire once symbolized all macabre ideas, like death and violence. But thanks to the public’s new vision of this nocturnal creature, the vampire has transformed into a mopey adolescent.
The classical vampire could be destroyed by one thing: the sun, a metaphor for life and opposite of death. When exposed to the sun, vampires burst into flame and crumpled into ash. Modern vampires have no need to fear the sun because it makes them glitter like diamonds. Vampires who glitter? Really?
Full story »
 I predicted months ago that there would be no 2011-12 NBA season. I hoped I was wrong (still do), but there were some fundamental structural issues that I felt were going to be hard to address in the collective bargaining process. While all hope isn’t yet completely dead, it looks very, very bad – so bad that at this stage I’m already beginning to wonder if there’s going to be a 2012-13 season. I’m wondering if the NBA as we know it is done.
Actually, the crux of the issue lies with the fact that, unlike most labor cycles, this one doesn’t feature two sides at odds. Full story »
Penn State students at a candlelight vigil in support of the victims.
Credit: Lawrence Weathers When I was in grad school at the University of Colorado, there was a riot in a part of Boulder known as The Hill. It’s just off campus and filled with houses that are rented to college students or have been converted to apartments. The riot was over the dumbest reason I could think of to riot over at the time – the supposed right of underage students to break the law and drink alcohol while underage. It was booze fueled, and before it was over the rioters got within a block of my apartment building, several miles from where they started. The result? No changes in police policy toward underage drinking (duh), but a ban on sofas on porches because sofas had been torched during the riots to make toxic bonfires. Brilliant, the rioters were not.
But compared to the Penn State rioters who went apeshit over Paterno’s firing, the CU rioters were brainiacs. Full story »
Twitter.com/LeeCamp
 A President Who Reads In a recent White House email, with “You Tell Me” in the subject line, Deputy Chief of Staff for Policy Nancy-Ann De Parle sent out an open request for ideas on ways the President can put Americans back to work without waiting for Congressional approval. Since Congress has refused to offer the President anything but hate-speech since the Koch Party took over, opening a dialogue with the American people directly seems like a reasonable strategy. Here’s what I suggested: Full story »
 With cover adornments like “Winner of the Pulitzer Prize for Poetry” and “Poet Laureate of the United States,” Ted Kooser’s Delights & Shadows (2004) lured me in like a will-o-wisp. Hell, there was even a single white streetlight—maybe a faerie light—in the painting used as cover art. I’m a sucker for that stuff.
But the book’s first poem, “Walking on Tiptoe,” offers a promise of seeing in the dark. In fact, through the whole book, Kooser seems very much concerned with what we see and how.
Full story »
I still can’t believe I got a dude with a harelip for a roommate. And his name is Roger. Fucking Roger. I walk in and he’s already claimed the top bunk, his computer the only thing up and running besides my blood.
He introduces himself as Roger F. McAlister the Third, son of douche bag blah blah blah blah. I stop listening.
I throw my bags on the bottom bunk – an old hockey bag with a faded Whalers team logo on the side, and my backpack, at this moment, full of flip flops and extra guitar strings. I prop my guitar case up against the side of the bunk.
The room’s not as claustrophobic as I expect. I thought it’d be a cinder block. The walls are white and no doubt concrete, but the beds take up only one corner, the built in wall-length desks only one side of the room. The rest is open, and the closets aren’t too bad. Full story »
“Iran regards utilizing nuclear weapons as forbidden in Islam,” Iran’s Supreme Leader, Ayatollah Ali Khamenei, once said. On another occasion, he declared: “The Islamic Republic of Iran, based on its fundamental religious and legal beliefs, would never resort to the use of weapons of mass destruction.”
In 2008 a WorldPublicOpinion.org poll revealed that, while 81% of Iranians favored nuclear energy, 58% agreed with the Supreme Leader’s statement, while only 23% supported a nuclear-weapons program. In fact 63% expressed approval that Iran was still party to the nuclear Non-Proliferation Treaty.
Presumably, those polled responded truthfully. But, in light of the International Atomic Energy Agency report presenting more evidence that Iran is acquiring the know-how and technology to build nuclear weapons, who — left or right — really believes the Supreme Leader’s avowals? Full story »
 See update at the end
I’ve been keeping my head down ever since the news broke that Jerry Sandusky, former defensive coordinator for the Penn State Nittany Lions football team, was arrested and charged with multiple accounts of child sexual abuse. I needed time to process how I felt about everything, and yet every time I seemed to get close to grasping onto something, events would send my thoughts and emotions careening beyond my reach again. The Penn State mess has made a stressful period of my life harder for a simple reason: between August of 1991 and May of 1995, I attended the Pennsylvania State University, aka Penn State. And when you spend the four most formative years of your life at a university that is under assault from all sides, it hits you in places and in ways that you’re not prepared for.
What follows is my attempt to make sense of a small part of what I’m feeling right now. Full story »
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