wut? i've heard lots of good things about this film (apparently naomi klein and jeremy scahill are backing it), but this trailer has to be the worst possible trailer that could have been done for it...

Quoted: War Inc: Opening May 23rd in New York and Los Angeles

I just found out about a recent push in city government for an "Events Promoters" ordinance that would force competely unrealistic criteria upon small events promotors. The effects of this ordinance are potentially disastrous for local and independent music and theater.

Quoted: Imagine a Chicago with no Metro or Double Door...

a decent analysis of the dem situation

Rad May Day demonstration. You don't see them here, but there were also giant communist-themed flags all about and an anarchist contingent that I chatted with before the march. In Paris, May Day is an occasion for varying groups to assemble together and collectively demonstrate for their various issues and causes. Such groups include legal and illegal (sans papiers) workers alike and highlight concrete contemporary social problems like the recent sky rocketing of housing costs, access to working papers, the recent moves under Sarkozy to re-privatize the healthcare industry, and the state's attempt to cut education budgets throughout France (which has led to a number of recent student strikes over the past few months). Being the 40th anniversary of May '68, of the few people I talked to, almost all of them seemed ambivalent toward its contemporary legacy--the idea being that when conservatives today attempt to disparage the history of French radicalism, you know that it still serves as a touchstone for today's militancy. However, on the other hand, even more important than this is the rejection of nostalgia in favor of the will to create new strategies and alliances that work towards solving the contemporary crises mentioned above.

One such tactic that has become important is the move on the part of the sans papiers to seek work permits, as opposed to the traditional movement towards naturalization. With work permits, asserting the right to exist in French territories without naturalized status or a visa becomes much easier and it provides an alternative to the citizen/non-citizen binary that tends to make immigrant struggles difficult. More on this later...

Quoted: http://www.humanite.fr/Un-premier-Mai-de-ripostes-sociales

My sentiments exactly:
Quoted: Indeed, the entire trajectory of Clinton's campaign can be traced as a kind of reification of phallic power as a sad and unnecessary means of attempting to legitimize a female candidate to those enmeshed with the dominant patriarchy, those who might find such a candidate weak simply because of her sex. Such a tactic is bound to fail because by reifying such power, the female candidate merely justifies the perceived and false weakness. In other words, those who live by the Penn, die by the Penn.

...So there you go, Clinton supporters. Your candidate has told you what she believes about military force. She is willing to make the United States a target for nuclear retaliation and massive terrorist acts should Israel be attacked. Now that's a fuckin' way to tell people to take their hope and shove it up their asses.

How the fuck could Berlusconi get re-elected? Oh yeah, i forgot--he owns like 90% of the fucking media. Ugh. And then HE compromises with the even further right-wing!

An extract from his new book on Sarkozy. Apparently it won some French award recently and has sold over 30,000 copies and whatnot and Badiou was recently on a French TV show talking about it.

Quoted: ALAIN BADIOU
THE COMMUNIST HYPOTHESIS

though i don't think that campaign rhetoric necessarily has any bearing on the policy realities of the candidate (should they be nominated and eventually elected into office), the source of the categories a nominee weaves into their rhetoric is nonetheless decisive (just look at edwards' mimicry of bush's faith-based militarism and with its articulate, slightly more diplomatic spin and you'll see what i mean). i think this article rightly points out that there is a difference between a campaign that deploys a rhetoric of hope and one that mobilizes a rhetoric of fear and security. while i wouldn't put my chips down on hope at the end of the day, it definitely doesn't mechanistically cause the bowel-spasms effected by the discourse of national security. hopefully, if obama is elected, that difference consisting of the attitude and cosmopolitanism of hope can be translated into concrete policies. (at least contemporary state politics would lessen its anachronisticity by stepping up to the level of Kant). but for now, i agree with the author here that clinton has already done the worst thing she could do, which is to couch the debate on leadership in terms of national security.

Damn. Why'd he go and do a thing like that when he has what Dick Cheney says is the only thing that matters--the confidence of the president?

Quoted: President Bush today praised Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales, whose tenure has been marred by accusations of perjury before Congress, as “a man of integrity, decency and principle.”