“Back then, it was better to be a man because, before, a woman and an animal were considered the same thing,” says Keqi, who has a bellowing baritone voice, sits with her legs open wide like a man and relishes downing shots of Raki and smoking cigarettes. “Now, Albanian women have equal rights with men and are even more powerful, and I think today it would be fun to be a woman.”

She says:

“I was totally free as a man because no one knew I was a woman,” Keqi said. “I could go wherever I wanted to and no one would dare swear at me because I could beat them up. I was only with men. I don’t know how to do women’s talk. I am never scared.”

Well, I do think that it would serve women well to know how to defend ourselves. And, I’m not so sure about the ‘never scared’ part. But you know, she’s right. It is fun to be a woman. And it’s great to be alive in these times.

Americans who make between $24,000 and $36,000 a year smoke at twice the rate of those earning $90,000 or more. The same applies to Americans with a high school education rather than a college degree. Rural Americans smoke more than city dwellers. As for race, there’s a close correlation between states with high rates of white smokers and those where Mr. Obama polled worst in the primaries. Leading the pack of smoking states are Kentucky and West Virginia; industrial states like Ohio aren’t far behind.

Horwitz goes on to say that this will help Obama shed the kind of ‘perfectly-groomed’ metro-sexual image he has, it will help with Michelle Obama’s image, who will suddenly become another woman coping with a slightly naughty husband, and it will give him something in common with a beleaguered lot - the American smoker. The vice is still legal, but barely.

It doesn’t surprise me that poor people smoke so much - as a former smoker, and former poor, white American with rural roots and of the first generation to go to college - it’s one of those little vices that you can afford.

I have long called cigarettes the poor man’s anti-depressant. When did I smoke? When I was tired, when I was stressed, when I was hungry, and when I was bored. I have many family members who still smoke, and combine cigarettes with soft drinks - a day-long speedball of nicotine, caffeine, and sugar. Most are over-weight. Most have significant life stresses - financial difficulties, challenging family situations, medical problems. Most would benefit tremendously from prescription anti-depressants and talk therapy, but don’t have the means to pay for it.
Obama is one of us - he grew up as a poor white with all of our stresses and vices. Granted, his mixed ethnicity and short stays in Hawaii and Indonesia gave him some different experiences. But he’s from Kansas and Illinois. His mother is Polish-American. And he’s an (ex)smoker.

God, Republicans are saps. They think that they’re running against some academic liberal who wouldn’t wear flag pins on his lapel, whose wife isn’t proud of America and who went to some liberationist church where the pastor damned his own country. They think they’re running against some naïve university-town dreamer, the second coming of Adlai Stevenson.

While Obama might be able to win using public campaign financing (I think the Repubs are in the doghouse this year), I don’t mind that he is going to bypass public campaign financing. Why?

1. The Republican National Committee has much more money than the Democratic National Committee, which gives McCain the advantage.
2. Obama’s money comes from millions of individual donors, rather than 527’s or other large groups.
3. McCain has been running a privately-funded, unopposed campaign since February, which puts him in a better financial position
4. Obama and McCain lawyers couldn’t not come to agreements about how to limit the spending:

Obama campaign lawyer Robert Bauer said he had met with McCain lawyers to discuss terms for both campaigns operating in the public financing system, but he said they could not agree on how to limit spending by the campaigns and outside groups heading into the late summer party conventions.

The beauty of this move is that it appeals to Libertarians who Obama must appeal to in this election. No tax dollars. Millions of individual donors. Self-reliance. (take note, Hillary supporters).
Obama is playing to win. This move makes it quite obvious that he knows how and when to play hardball.
That’s what it takes to become President. That’s what it takes to lead.

What Hillary lovin’, McCain supportin’ voter can turn away from that?

Then, on June 1, he makes the New York Times Magazine Questions column by Deborah Solomon on June 1.

Do you see yourself as an alpha male? I don’t sit around and talk about alpha males and bravo males.

Of course not. (note, he did not say ‘beta’ male).

So, today Dan Payne weighs in, and I’m thinkin’ “dang I wish I’d written this up back in May…”

The Soldiers’ Candidate. Obama can’t compete with McCain on military experience. But he can do the next best thing: pick US Senator James Webb of Virginia as his running mate. Webb was secretary of the Navy under President Reagan. He’s a proud Scots-Irish son of the South with roots in Appalachia. He’s written several best-selling novels and won an Emmy for his coverage of the 1983 Marine barracks bombing in Beirut for PBS. He has a son in Iraq in the Marine infantry and wore a pair of his son’s combat boots while campaigning for the Senate.

He could become what Democrats have long needed: the soldiers’ candidate.

The Audacity of Webb. Meeting Bush in a receiving line for new senators, Webb was asked by Bush, “How’s your boy?” Webb shot back: “I’d like to get him out of Iraq.”

He delivered a forceful, polished, and much-applauded response to Bush’s state of the union speech in 2007. “The president took us into this war recklessly,” he declared. He condemned the Republicans for the huge gap in pay between CEOs and average workers.

Webb on Webb: “It’s pretty safe to say that I am the only person in the history of Virginia to be elected to statewide office with a union card, two Purple Hearts, and three tattoos.” White guys like talk like that.

Black women can wear great, bright colors that would make me look like a clown. They can wear fabulous jewelry that looks junky on me. Have you ever been in a room full of black women dressed to the nines? It’s like comparing a nice little pastel to a Picasso.

But black women have always been gorgeous. What’s new is that black women are now trendy. Just as Ellen made being a lesbian hip and cool, Michelle Obama is making being a black woman fabulous. And, it’s great! About time, I must say - the culture hasn’t been so kind to black women over the years.

However, I must confess to a little nostalgia for the good old days when medium brown hair and pale skin weren’t so, well, blah. So, we straight, white girls will just keep plugging away.  We’ll cycle through black, latina, and asian periods of coolness; let the bi-sexual girls have their day; and just patiently wait, hoping that our day will return.

Now I understand that intelligence is rarely cut and tried.  You gather a lot of information and try to connect the dots.  You find people who are credible.  Many of them might have ulterior motives, checkered pasts, hidden agendas.  I acknowledge these problems.  However, to read this article about the person that is Curveball, one Rafid Ahmed Alwan, is to sit with your jaw dropped to the ground in amazement thinking “our government risked everything on the word of this bozo?”  I’m not kidding.  Some excerpts from the article:

“He was corrupt,” said a family friend who once employed him. 

“He always lied,” said a fellow Burger King worker.

And records reveal that when Alwan fled to Germany, one step ahead of the Iraq Justice Ministry, an arrest warrant had been issued alleging that he sold filched camera equipment on the Baghdad black market.

and…

Alwan didn’t share all his secrets. He didn’t disclose that he had been fired at least twice for dishonesty, or that he fled Iraq to avoid arrest. But he did tell some whoppers that should have raised warnings about his credibility.

He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif’s son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind. 

Oh my.  Oh my.

“The campaign of Barack Obama has had to rebut, not once but several times, the wild rumors that his wife Michelle used an insulting term for white people while railing from the pulpit of Trinity United Church in Chicago. His campaign has had to set up a website to refute the charge, and Obama himself has had to chastise mainstream reporters for spreading the lie.

What he hasn’t done—because he cannot if he wants to win the presidency—is roll out the clearest and most obvious knockdown of Whiteygate. Namely this: ‘When the hell was the last time you heard a black person call somebody ‘whitey?'’

I mean, come on. White man, please.

Speaking as a person who has been black all of my 40-plus years on the planet, I can say with some authority that no self-respecting black, African-American, Negro, colored or even ‘there’s only one race: the human race’ person I know would use the word.”

I can honestly say, the only people I ever hear saying the word ‘whitey’ are white people accusing black people of racism. And why are these people fixated on the word? Well, I happen to know a small number of these people, and they are still using the N-word in their private whites-only conversations.  So, maybe they can’t believe that black people aren’t at the same sorry, low level of existence as they are. Maybe they heard it on some tv show years ago. Who knows? But, I personally have not heard any black person, in all my years, use that term.

Which is not to say that there aren’t black people who look down on white people. They certainly exist. They just don’t call us ‘whitey.’

On my flight I was sitting next to a great guy from Costa Rica (went to school with Oscar Arias) who told me that this was one of the most dangerous and challenging airports to fly into, and that you should always hope the pilot is a local, because they are the most familiar with the flight path and the terrain.

I remember looking out the window and thinking, ‘my, that mountain is pretty close, I hope the pilot is paying attention,’ and then looking out the window on the other side and thinking, ‘WOW, WOW, that mountain is RIGHT there, RIGHT outside the window!!!’ Both frightening and exhilarating at the same time - one of life’s exciting experiences.
Here is some video of the path planes must take on landing - imagine doing this in the fog like the plane today.

Here is a link to The Airplane Blog with comments from those you’ve flown into this airport, including the following from ‘Nettie’:

I have been traveling to Honduras and arriving in Toncontin since I was 6 months old and I am now an adult. As far as what I think about Toncontin . . . of course I consider it dangerous. I have traveled all around the world and this is the only airport I have landed in and people clap when we land. It is not the most modern and there is truly no room for error. American Airlines takes its pilots there to take there final test, because basically if you can handel Toncontin you can handle any runway. A Boeing 757 is a large plane yet if the pilot executes the landing correctly then honestly there is enough room.

Also having Norwegian heritage, I wondered if I would have been brave enough to defy the Nazis in Norway, helping, for example, to transport Norwegian gold to ships waiting on the coast for safekeeping in U.S.  My family had a children’s book about this effort which actually involved children and mothers putting bricks hiding the gold on their sleds as they moved the gold, brick by brick, from a cave in the mountains to the coast.  How brave of the Norwegians, we thought!  How heroic, especially compared to the Swedes, who capitulated all too swiftly, we thought, smugly.

But now, it is clear that on our watch in this country, torture took place.  And we will have to answer for our lack of moral spine for generations to come.  While it is comforting to know that some law enforcement officials objected to the practices, it is disturbing to know that it took this long for the objections to take place:

“FBI agents assigned to interview key terrorism suspects repeatedly objected to harsh — and possibly illegal — interrogation tactics used by other U.S. officials two years before abuse of detainees at Iraq’s Abu Ghraib prison became public in 2004, a Justice Department review found.”  USA Today, May 21

“It says the controversial treatment of detainees by the military and U.S. intelligence officers persisted because of a view ‘at a very high level that this was a military situation and the military approach should prevail.’ The CIA has acknowledged using waterboarding.”