Saturday Sampler

-        Swiss banker Rudolph Elmer, former chief of the office of the Julius Baer Bank in the Cayman Islands, is facing charges for disclosing confidential offshore client information.  Elmer also provided two discs containing information on 2,000 clients to WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange, who said he will spend a few weeks reviewing the information before deciding to whether to release the confidential information.  Funny, I don’t hear the same outcry from commentators about this possible disclosure compared to his previous release of US cables.  Illegal is illegal, though I guess fat cat tax avoiding multimillionaires shouldn’t expect much sympathy.
-        Holy Morgan Spurlock.  I think Taco Bell’s decision to pull its advertising from MTV’s Skins won’t have much of an impact on the company’s real PR problem.  Last week a class action suit was filed claiming the fast food company falsely advertised its product, labeled "seasoned beef.", when in reality it uses a meat mixture with binders and extenders that don't meet requirements to be called beef.  Drop the chalupa.
-        The U.S. has abandoned its plans to deploy a virtual fence along the border with Mexico. The $1 billion Boeing run project was designed to pull together video cameras, radar, sensors and other technologies to catch illegal immigrants and smugglers trying to cross the border.  On the other side of the border Mexican officials confiscated a medieval-style catapult used to hurl bales of marijuana across the border.  We waste $1Billion on a high tech disaster, while the drug smugglers use about $50 worth of Home Depot materials to circumvent our Maginot Line.  Brilliant.
-        Just read that Craig T. Nelson turned the offer to play Jay Pritchett on Modern Family because he was insulted by the pay offered.  Hard to see anybody but Ed O’Neill in that role now.  While Nelson did receive higher salary for his role in soon-to-be cancelled NBC’s Parenthood, he also traded sidling up next to the super sexy Sofia Vergara for being the estranged husband of Bonnie Bedilia.  Can you say lose-lose.
-        Marriott announced it will be eliminating its skin flicks from its in room entertainment offering.  The Mormon faith Marriott family may be trying to establish itself as a family values hotel chain.  The good news, it is one less thing to skeeve, now can we win the bedbug battle?
-        In a widely under-reported news story, Russian President Dmitry Medvedev signed the START Treaty on January 28th.  Yes the same START Treaty that Jon Kyl and his GOP cronies tried to kill in December.
-        George Soros would be proud.  It seems some enterprising Vietnamese have found a nice arbitrage opportunity by crossing the border into Cambodia and withdrawing dollars and then returning to Vietnam and selling the greenbacks for Vietnamese dongs at the 5% premium black market rate.  In a childish way I also think it’s funny that the Vietnamese currency is the dong; “Dong, where is Grandpa’s automobile?”
-        Watching 2004’s Garden State.  Natalie Portman was great in that film also.

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

A Secular American Jew and a Love for Israel

As many of you know, I have dedicated many postings to the State of Israel on a range of topics including: it’s history, the present day government, the Jewish-Palestinian question, and the region in general.   Growing up in a liberal conservative Jewish household (the oxymoron is quite common as American Jews were almost exclusively political liberals and the conservative branch of Judaism the most common) and attending Hebrew school as a kid you obviously build an affinity for the State of Israel.   I do not remember the Six-Day War of 1967, but I have vivid memories of celebrating Israel’s 25 th anniversary in 1973 and the Yom Kippur War later that year.   As a ten year old attending Yom Kippur services I saw the worried looks on my parents and the other adults at the shul as members of the congregation would periodically step outside to get news reports from car radios and transistor radios (We still drove and used electrical appliances during the high holidays, though several fam
Read more

September 10, 2001 was a Monday

Where were you on September 10, 2001?   What were you worried about?   What occupied your thoughts, worries, hopes, and dreams?   What were you excited about?   What were you interested in? September 10, 2001 was a Monday. Cindy and I were still laughing about the recent visit from the Three Amigas: Leah, Roseanne, and Valerie, and the adventures of Sedona, a certain screen door, a forgotten carrot cake, and breakfast for champions.   We were also dealing with a 1995 Chevy Blazer that seemed to be on its last legs, surviving our first Arizona summer, thinking about what to remodel in the house, dealing with the concept of a Home Owners Association, thinking that my best shot at a World Series game maybe with the fledgling Arizona Diamondbacks, and looking forward to a visit from Scott, Lori, and the boys. But what about America?   We knew nothing about a tiny town in Pennsylvania called Shanksville; Guantanamo Bay was the setting for A Few Good Men, and we still taped shows and listene
Read more

Sunni and Shia: So who are the bad guys again?

Baby faces vs. heals?   Cowboys vs Indians?   Good guy always where the white hat.   “Dig is he a good guy or bad guy?”   Bad guys always, looked, well, bad. You’re either with us or you’re against us.   Iraq, Iran, and North Korea are the axis of evil. Americans, for the most part, have a pretty simple outlook on conflict: just tell us who the bad guys are and we’ll know who to root against.   We tend to lump similar races and peoples into larger buckets, mostly due to the media’s inclination to treat us like potential Jeff Foxworthy competitors.   But the world is anything but simple and as I have written previously, the Middle East is as confusing and confounding place as you can find.   During the Iran and Iraq war of the 1980’s most Americans took the position that “…as long as they kill each other, I’m good.”   When civil war ravaged Afghanistan, we joined the side of the Mujahedeen because they were fighting the Soviets and the Soviets were our archenemy, a position they occupie
Read more