The Republic of T.

Todd Gitlin over at TPM Cafe has an interesting post up about Bernie Madoff’s smile.

Take a look at the NYT photo of Bernard Madoff arriving at court to hear a Federal judge uphold a lower-court decision that he may stay in his splendid apartment while out on $10 million bail.

…It’s his triumphant smile that interests me. Most Madoff photos display that same smile of controlled geniality. He knows all the angles. He knows how the game is played, that is, rigged. This is the smile of a man who knows. He knows the game. He knows you and he knows me. When he was ahead of the game, he basked in the glow of esteem. He relished the chance to grant favors. He prided himself in making his friends richer. When the house of cards collapsed, he was left standing. He believes that he will remain standing. He knows his good fortune has been to live in the right place at the right time to get his name engraved in cornerstones. He has probably worked out a way to feel like a martyr. Losers are schmucks. What he knows is what George W. Bush knows: God bless America, a country where he’s going to land on his feet.

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[Source.]

Normally I post these without much comment. But I this time I couldn’t help it.

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This picture jumped out at me yesterday, during my morning news reading

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The image and the story behind it rang a bell for me. (And not just because it’s a story from my home state.)

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It seems that, in the waning days of his presidency, George W. Bush has at least one friend left in the world, when it comes to Italiian prime minister Silvio Berlsconi.

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This was too cute not to share; children dressed up like Gandhi to celebrate his 139th birthday.

Now we’re on to HIV/AIDS, and I’m waiting to see if any of the candidates will mention the failure of “abstinence-only” and it’s devastating impact in Africa.

Oh. My. God. I guess I have to eat some of my previous words.

Obama actually said the word “homophobia” in his answer on HIV/AIDS, and the riffed for a minute on the metaphor that “we are infected” with a number of other things that make us susceptible to the epidemic. But he didn’t make the natural leap that we’re infected with homophobia. Black ministers are spreading it from the pulpit and that’s one of the reasons why it’s taken 25 years for the Black Baptist Convention to even mention HIV/AIDS.

But I guess I should be somewhat pleased that homophobia even came up at a forum on issues for the African American women.

Oh, and Hillary, it was gay communities that addressed the epidemic first, when nobody else in government cared. That was the Reagan era, and things did get better in the ’90s. Thank you.

Biden, you didn’t get tested for AIDS you got tested for HIV antibodies. Geez.

Technorati Tags: 2008 election, current events, elections, gay, gay rights, health, hiv, homophobia, politics, race

I wrote earlier that author David Kuo seems to have stumbled through Washington politics wearing a major set of faith-based blinders. Now he says he didn't know about Virginia's anti-gay marriage amendment. Literally didn't know if was on the ballot until election day. You gotta be fucking kidding me. I mean to live in Virginia and not know that? You either have to be working very hard at not paying attention or just not giving a shit. Given his comment in the same post that it "doesn't look like bigotry," suggests that it's probably a case of the latter as much as the former. 

If you think that previous pic was a bit much, here's the one I didn't post. [Via Feministe.]

This is all kinds of wrong, and definitely NSFW. But I can’t help myself.

If you’re drinking your morning coffee, or some other beverage, you might want to finish swallowing and set it down right about now.

You’ve been warned.

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