War over tits…

photo: BBC

All that hot sweaty bother. After 4 years, an appeals court has decided to toss the fine levied on CBS for the quick flash of Janet Jackson’s right tit…

WASHINGTON (Reuters) – The U.S. government’s campaign against television indecency was dealt a blow on Monday when a court overturned a $550,000 fine against CBS Corp television stations for airing a glimpse of pop singer Janet Jackson’s breast during the 2004 Super Bowl broadcast.

The U.S. Court of Appeals for the Third Circuit said the Federal Communications Commission had “arbitrarily and capriciously departed from its prior policy” that exempted fleeting broadcast material from actionable indecency violations.

Four years? Think they will be ending any war, anywhere?, anytime? When consideration of a brief flash of breast took 4 years?

There were a couple of interesting aspects back when it happened… it was, not readily apparent in the above photo, a real, un-enhanced breast. And, I figured right away that Alabama lit up like a cranky christian christmas tree at the sight of her flower design pastie. Must’ve driven them crazy. IIRC that is one of the states that bans sex toys. I-L-L-E-G-A-L. If only they’d ban Jeeeeeeeeeeeesuhs. But tassel decorated pasties, I am sure, are the Great Evil in Alabama.

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Other than that, I suggest we call him Barack of AfPak. Or, maybe, Barack of the Whirled.

SPIEGEL: Critics say the trip is nothing but a PR stunt to strengthen his foreign-policy credentials and that he has only rarely been to Europe before.

Rice: Senator Obama has travelled to Europe, Africa, the Middle East and South Asia many times before. He lived in Asia. He bows to nobody in his understanding of this world.

My, but these people are ahead of themselves. The Fall, when it comes, should be interesting.

They are careful to advertise continuing war, at all times:

Rice: Obama’s view is that circumstances in Pakistan and Afghanistan pose the most dangerous threat to Europe and the US right now. Al-Qaida is regrouping and reconstituting their safe haven; the Taliban are gaining strength. Europe is closer to that threat than we are. Yet, we all have to take it very seriously. The US has to put more resources and troops into Afghanistan, and NATO should do the same, while — to the greatest extent possible — lifting operational restrictions.

He and his are so earnest. It is just gagworthy.

The interview Lara Logan did with Obama * is being picked apart here and there, but this at the close still blows me away, a day later:

Logan: OK, last question. There is a perception that you lack experience in world affairs.

Obama: Right.

Logan: Is this trip partly aimed at overcoming that perception that, you know, there is doubt among some Americans that you could lead a country at war as commander in chief from day one?

Obama: You know, the interesting thing is that the people who are very experienced in foreign affairs I don’t think have those doubts. The troops that I’ve been meeting with over the last several days, they don’t seem to have those doubts.
So the objective of this trip was to have substantive discussions with people like President Karzai or Prime Minister Maliki or President Sarkozy or others who I expect to be dealing with over the next eight to 10 years.
And it’s important for me to have a relationship with them early, that I start listening to them now, getting a sense of what their interests and concerns are.
Because one of the shifts in foreign policy that I want to execute as president is giving the world a clear message that America intends to continue to show leadership but our style of leadership is going to be less unilateral, that we’re going to see our role as building partnerships around the world that are of mutual interest to the parties involved.
And I think this gives me a head start in that process.

Logan: Do you have any doubts?

Obama: Never.

He will direct us, re double us, in our war efforts to the geographical location that sinks empires. And he will be fearless in that act.

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* Until it popped up, via Google, ahead of the CBS transcript of Lara Logan, I had no idea there was a Fox News coin called “Major Garrett’s Bourbon Room”. So reeks of the Old Confederacy, doesn’t it? Reminds me of the slices of pecan pie in Georgia, they were divine, crushed pecans forming the crust, and not some slosh of a jelly masquerading as pecan filling, thick with pecan, thru and thru… But riding atop thoe pie slices … often a little paper Confederate Flag… And nearby a rendering of that near religious myth, Grant surrendering to Lee.

Not to worry! Pulling the level for Barack of AfPak will wipe all that messiness away. Forever.

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Couple of comments that were at the end of the last thread:

NYCee

Last Saturday I was brunching on a bunch of these pieces from the Black Agenda Report’s Obama File. There were a lot of cogent and pungent morsels within. One I found, The Audacity of Imperial Airbrushing: Barack Obama’s Whitewashed History of U.S. Foreign Policy, by Paul Street, is excellent – truly deserving of a full read and worth the time taken.

He pulls a chain of our government’s imperialist dirty deeds from the memory hole (Think a briefer strain of Stephen Kinzer’s Overthrow: America’s Century of Regime Change from Hawaii to Iraq ) and deftly weaves in the words of our “progressive” change agent extraordinare, Candidate Obama, exposing his foreign policy take as less than refreshing or reassuring or new direction.

So what makes it so sparkling, then, so newer than nouvelle cuisine, when served up by Obama?

The saying, presentation is everything, comes to mind.

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AND

bayprairie

McCain and Obama Agree to Attend Megachurch Forum

It has taken a man of God, perhaps, to do what nobody else has been able to do since the general election season began: Get Barack Obama and John McCain together on the same stage before their party conventions later this summer.

The Rev. Rick Warren has persuaded the candidates to attend a forum at his Saddleback Church, in Lake Forest, Calif., on Aug. 16. In an interview, Mr. Warren said over the weekend that the presidential candidates would appear together for a moment but that he would interview them in succession at his megachurch.

:::snip:::

He (warren) said that both had readily agreed, perhaps reflecting how each candidate is courting the evangelical audience to whom Mr. Warren ministers.

The F-Word

…Rick Warren, Joel Osteen, and the business-friendly fundamentalism of the post-Christian Right era don’t set off liberal alarms the way the pulpit pounders such as John Hagee, Pat Robertson, and James Dobson do. The irony is that the agenda of this new lifestyle evangelicalism is more far-reaching than that of the traditional Christian Right: the Christian Right wanted a seat at the table; lifestyle evangelicalism wants to build the table. It wants to set the very terms in which we imagine what’s possible, and to that end it dispenses with terms that might scare off liberals. It’s big tent fundamentalism – everybody in.

But the ultimate goals remain the same. True, Osteen steers clear of abortion for the most part, and Warren, every bit as opposed to homosexuality as Jerry Falwell was, prefers to talk about AIDS relief. But both men — and the new evangelicalism as a movement — continue to preach the merger of Christianity and capitalism pioneered three quarters of a century ago. On the surface, it’s self-help; scratch, and it’s revealed as a profoundly conservative ideology that conflates church and state, scripture and currency, faith and finance…

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