Yesterday was a high point in terms of Rachel-geekdom. In the morning: Oscar nominations. Word up to Little Miss Sunshine! How awesome is that for little Abigail Breslin?
Then in the evening: the State of the Union.
There were so many things in last night's State of the Union with which to take exception: Bush's continuing insistence on viewing the world through a prism that dichotomizes our foreign policy into "good" and "evil"; the parade of shallow, meaningless, empty and ineffectual statements that will probably have no measurable impact on actual policy in the United States; the hideous neon yellow suit jacket and gray skirt worn by some poor pathetic member of Congress as shot from behind.
But surprisingly enough, the moment that made me yelp the loudest was the moment when Bush introduced Julie Aigner-Clark, the founder and CEO of the Baby Einstein company.
Slate explains it beautifully:
"Baby Einstein is part of what Alissa Quart, in an August 2006 piece in the Atlantic, called the Baby Genius Edutainment Complex, an industry that preys on the status anxiety of neurotic parents who, until Aigner-Clark and others told them otherwise, didn't sweat the meritocratic rat race until it was time to place their pint-sized strivers in preschool."
(The non-profit child advocacy group mentioned in the article that filed a complaint with the Federal Trade Commission about Baby Einstein's deceptive claims, by the way, is the Campaign for a Commercial-Free Childhood, which sponsored that Raffi event I attended in the fall.)
In other political news, I am reading The Audacity of Hope and it is awesome, in that wait-this-book-is-really-just-one-long-stump-speech kind of way. It's like: "I'm Barack Obama, and I sensitively see and address every side of every issue and still come out in the right! P.S. I kick ass."
Wednesday, January 24, 2007
The future of hope and opportunity?
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3 comments:
...except gay marriage.
I promise that's the last time I bring it up, because I know we both agree. I just watched Camp Out twice today for work, and it made me cry. It also made me glad that I'm not a Christian. But if I were, I am pretty damn sure that I would not support a church that didn't love its members equally.
Anyway. On a lighter note, did you see Obama's totally awesome senior page on Gawker??
He impressively skirts around gay marriage in the book by talking about how he doesn't understand how we can deny them basic rights blah blah blah, and I suppose by "basic" he means "very extremely basic, like civil unions but certainly not marriage."
I saw the senior portrait! "Barry" Obama, heehee. I love that I read somewhere that when he speaks to Jewish audiences, he points out that "Barack" means "blessed"...just like "baruch"! Maybe he can be America's first Jewish president in the same way that Clinton was America's first black president!
Ha! That would be awesome. I actually have a friend from Brandeis named Barak, and he's Ashkenazi even.
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