NEXT- – - A cubicle!!! :>)

NEXT- – - A cubicle!!! :>)

http://www.dailykos.com/story/2009/7/4/20369/40...

July 4th, 2009 at 5:38 pm gbear

if she’d served her full term, she would have been freed up a little more than a year from now, and she’d have been in a position to spend every minute between now and then using her office as a forum and as a means for showing how well she could get things done. That’s the kind of problem that real politicians yearn for, but for someone like Palin, who was in the habit of using her office to give jobs to her friends, scam free stuff, and terrorize anyone she was cheesed at, it must have looked too much like work. Throw in the way that national press scrutiny must have been cramping her style in the cronying-scamming-terrorizing departments, and it must have begun to seem as if every minute she had to spend on the job was nothing more to her than time that she could be cleaning up on the lecture circuit or appearing on TV. When she declared that staying in office and doing her job while others said mean things about her would be “the worthless, easy path; that’s a quitter’s way out,” what she seemed to really mean was that it was the path of a loser. Losers do shit work and shrug off insults; that’s never been the movie that she’s starring in inside her head.

http://www.balloon-juice.com/?p=23610#comments

“Absolute garbage,” another said.

“Like a bad ‘Dynasty’ episode,” a third said, adding reluctantly, “Everybody’s a little fascinated.”

Behold a sampling of the reaction to “NYC Prep,” the new Bravo reality show chronicling the energetic clubbing, dining and dating habits of a half-dozen New York prep school teenagers.

Only two episodes in, the show has set off a wave of outrage, contempt and sheer mortification among parents in the world of private schools in New York, already no stranger to bad press.

“ ‘Horrified’ is totally the word,” said Sandy Bass, the editor of the Private School Insider, a newsletter that covers private schools in the New York City area. When the first episode was shown on June 23, parents and their teenagers watched as Camille, a 17-year-old from the Upper West Side, complained that her teachers want her “to, like, study during Christmas break.”

Sebastian, a 16-year-old self-professed Lothario with floppy blond hair, asked the camera, “Why date one girl when you can, like, date a bunch?”

And PC, a senior with no apparent plans to go to college, professed that to be a prep-schooler in New York is to be “the elite of the elite.”

All of which contradicted an unspoken rule at many private schools: to be showy or prideful is not only culturally inappropriate, but also in supremely bad taste. To be showy or prideful on reality television appears to be even worse. As a measure of how strongly private schools discourage students and families from drawing attention to themselves, none of the more than a dozen parents contacted for this article would consent to be identified. Several said they feared the wrath of administrators.

All references to the names of the schools the students attend have been edited out by the producers, and with the exception of one public school, there was no filming allowed behind their doors. But online, word quickly surfaced that they are the Nightingale-Bamford School; the Dwight School; the Birch Wathen Lenox School; the Ross School in East Hampton; and the only public school in the bunch, Stuyvesant High School.

The private schools’ administrators, in a few crisply written paragraphs, have made their displeasure known.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/fashion/05nyc...

IN July 2006, Ron James’s marriage of 13 years ended, and that same month, he joined JDate, an online matchmaking site for Jewish singles. “I’d fallen off the horse and felt the best strategy was trying to get right back on,” he said.

Mr. James, 48, was a social worker at a nursing home, and he threw himself into JDating as if he were one of his clients in need of intensive case management. He signed up to meet all women ages 30 to 50 who lived within 50 miles of his Westchester apartment, including Manhattan. “I was maximizing my search,” he said. “I’d work at it two to three hours a night.” He described himself in his Web profile as “warm, honest and authentic,” as striving to exercise his body and mind, and as wanting marriage, “but no game players please.”

On his first JDate, he was sure he’d found Miss Right. They met at a diner. She was attractive, artistic, easy to talk to. “I was so excited, I thought ‘My JDate days are over.’ ” Their second date, “she turned on me, snapped at me, I didn’t even know what I did wrong.”

“I was discouraged but not discouraged,” he said. “That was part of managing this like a business. Never put all your eggs in one basket.”

In 18 months, he e-mailed 500 to 600 women and dated 40 to 50. On a social worker’s salary, it became expensive: the train to Grand Central Terminal, the dates, a $39.99 monthly JDate fee.

So he used economies of scale. He’d do as many as three dates on a Sunday at three Starbucks within a few blocks of Grand Central. “I was trying to make it affordable, yet retain some sense of integrity,” Mr. James said. “I’d do the first one at 10 or 11, then break for lunch.” He’d eat alone to hold down costs, then go to a second Starbucks for a second date. “I didn’t want to bump into the first woman again,” he said. “I didn’t want anyone feeling bad.”

He followed this routine every other week. “I needed time off for rejuvenation,” he said. “It was pretty stressful.”

Over that year and a half, he said, there were women he met who lied about their age, posted photos that were 10 years old, misrepresented their jobs and pretended to be more successful than they were. “A lot of the photos didn’t look like them,” he said. “I learned to watch out for sunglasses.”

He dated one woman several times. “She was funny, reasonably attractive, we did a lot of Starbucks. I kept hoping a bolt of lightning might strike and I’d be in love.”

A few became friends. “Internet dating in the 21st century is a hard process,” he said. “We’d communicate and support each other.” Through the worst, he never let his JDate membership lapse. “I was addicted,” he said. “I kept getting back on the horse.”

Spark Networks, the owner of JDate, runs 32 dating sites — for Greek singles, Catholics, African-Americans, Asians, Seventh-day Adventists — but none does as well as JDate. In the first quarter of 2009, JDate’s national and international sites accounted for $7.6 million of the company’s $12 million revenue.

JDate is the oldest of the company’s services, which partly explains its success. But it has also been embraced by Jewish leaders, fearful of the high rate of intermarriage — 47 percent of Jews who married from 1996 to 2001 married outside their faith, according to the most recent figures available from the National Jewish Population Survey.

JDate offers group discounts to rabbis buying memberships in bulk.

http://www.nytimes.com/2009/07/05/fashion/05gen...

http://www.necn.com/Boston/Politics/2009/07/04/...

Gov. Sarah Palin’s surprise resignation Friday afternoon has turned Sunday talk show agendas upside down this week.
Tomorrow morning, expect a healthy serving of pundits divining Ms. Palin’s actions and her future.
In addition, guests will be analyzing the health care proposals moving through Congress and the week’s international headlines — North Korea’s decision to launch a barrage of missiles, defying a United Nations resolution and the withdrawal of American troops from Iraqi cities. Plus, President Obama heads to Moscow as part of a weeklong overseas trip.
CBS, Fox and CNN all have Adm. Mike Mullen, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff, to discuss the events on the military front. CNN’s John King also talks with former Secretary of State Colin Powell and Queen Noor of Jordan on “State of the Union.”
George Stephanopoulos, who has been traveling in Baghdad with Vice President Joseph R. Biden Jr. these last few days, will broadcast his interview with Mr. Biden on ABC’s “This Week.” The Times’s Sheryl Gay Stolberg has also been filing dispatches from the vice president’s trip.

http://thecaucus.blogs.nytimes.com/

Dowd on Palin is hilarious! Here are a few excerpts.

“Maybe, Kristol mused, she could use the 18 months she would have spent finishing her term to write her book and study up on the issues for 2012.

Why not? Palin/Sanford in 2012, with the slogan: “Save time — we’re already in Crazy Town.”

“She refuses to succumb to the “politics of personal destruction.” It’s no fun unless she’s the one aiming those poison darts, as she did when she accused Barack Obama of associating “with terrorists who targeted their own country.”

“Obama brightens up the White House

With modern tastes and a mission to promote diversity, the President's art collection signals a break with tradition. Arifa Akbar reports

With every new administration comes a new era and with it, a new art collection to reflect the shifting sands of American cultural politics. In the Clinton years, it was a frothy portrait of Mamie Eisenhower clad in a pink debutante ballgown that took pride of place on the imperial walls of the White House. George Bush fancied the more muscular patriotism of George Caitlin's “wild frontier” paintings.

Now, America's first black President has made clear that he wishes to add a splash of colour to the walls of Washington's First House. Barack Obama is extending his push for diversity to the White House's art collection, The Art Newspaper revealed this week, with the launch of a campaign that will replace the fustiness of the existing collection with works by “more diverse” artists.

Discreet approaches have been made to dealers and collectors who represent black, Hispanic and Asian artists as well as female painters to redress the current dearth; of the 400 pieces in the White House's permanent art collection purchased over the centuries, only five are by black artists.

The President has already shown that his artistic proclivities tend towards modern and contemporary painters such as Ed Ruscha and Jasper Johns: on inauguration day, the National Gallery of Art furnished the presidential living quarters with a wealth of loans, including John's 1969 lead relief, Numerals, 0 Through 9 and Ruscha's I Think I'll …

Now, the First Lady's office, which is handling the White House's art outreach effort, has enlisted the Hirshhorn Museum and Sculpture Garden to lend them paintings by modern artists, from Glenn Ligon, a Bronx-born artist whose work traces the experience of a gay African-American, to Alma Thomas, the first African American woman to have a solo art exhibition at the Whitney Museum of American Art in 1971.

The Obama's foray into acquiring artworks by female and non-white artists – much of it through long term loans – has been met by shock and enthusiasm in equal measures in America's artistic circles, and their choices to remove some of the older artworks is viewed as a deeply symbolic gesture.

Kinshasha Holman Conwill, deputy director of the National Museum of African American History and Culture, within the Smithsonian Institution, said the nation's art world was “abuzz” over the White House campaign. “Such a gesture from so influential a place has understandably had a catalytic effect, stirring conversation and raising expectations,” she said. “And that's a good thing.” The actions of the President and First Lady “evinced an ability to transform the bully pulpit into a poetic perch from which to suggest new strategies for broadening the conversation about art and culture in this country”.

The Hirshhorn Museum has lent the Obamas a 1992 text painting by Ligon entitled Black Like Me #2', and two works by Thomas, including Watusi (Hard Edge) and Sky Light. Kerry Brougher, the Hirshhorn's chief curator, who worked with the White House to arrange the loans, said he was impressed by the diversity on the list of choices the Obamas presented to him.

“I don't believe there's been any administration that has been as interested in contemporary art,” he said. “I was extremely impressed when they sent over the list of what they were interested in borrowing, because it showed a wide range of interests and a wide spectrum and understanding of both modern and contemporary art.”

Traditionally, the President's permanent collection of purchased works, which is funded by the White House Acquisition Trust, has tended to be decades-,if not centuries-old and focused its attentions on works by artists who are long dead. This recent change in direction has left some dealers and gallerists excited at the prospect of selling works by younger, black artists to the Obamas. One New York gallerist, Jeffrey Deitch, said he would like to place a “super-outstanding Basquiat” in the hands of the White House, given the opportunity.

Semonti Mustaphi, a spokeswoman for the First Lady's office, declined to comment on the effect on the careers, and market value, of the artists selected. The search for new work is still “very preliminary”, she added.”