Bullet Points: Chuck Rangel Is Old, Obama Is a Muslim, and Meg Whitman Is a Liar

I'm gonna discuss a few issues relating to politics and I'll organize them by bullet points.
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On Sarah Palin's Effectiveness

Is Sarah Palin as "Dangerous" as Some Liberals Think She Is?
My uncle recently related an anecdote about watching the news with my great-grandmother during the 2008 election. They had just seen Sarah Palin give her speech at the Republican National Convention and my grandma, who was 97 at the time, turned to my uncle and said, "She's dangerous." While that may have been an appropriate appraisal in the Fall of 2008, when she was the third most likely person to become the President of the United States, it is no longer an accurate description of her potential impact.

A number of my liberal friends and family still consider Palin to be a powerful, dangerous political entity. They fear both the extreme, conservative beliefs she represents and her potential to motivate and organize large groups who share those same views. And while those concerns are valid, I feel that my friends (and others) are overestimating her. I don't think she is a significant political figure but is rather a very high-profile political celebrity.
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Jay-Z, Michael Jordan, and Unretiring

The Black Album is my favorite Jay-Z album and one of my favorite rap albums of all time. In fact, analyzing this album is one of the original reasons why I wanted to start a music blog. I'm not entirely sure why, but something about this album stimulates the critical portion of my brain. One of the reasons why this album is so ripe for analysis is because of its underlying concept as Jay-Z's farewell to rap.

Like most rappers, Jay-Z's favorite subject throughout his career has been himself. His songs are so full of auto-biographical details that even casual fans can tell his life story (or at least the life story he wants to present to the public), and this supposed final album is the perfect summation of that narrative. Of course, this artistic statement ultimately was not an accurate depiction of his career path, and his short-lived retirement drew the inevitable comparisons to Michael Jordan, the Patron Saint of Unretirement (though Brett Farve could also lay claim to that designation). Though the comparisons are apt, there is a critical distinction to be made between each man's botched attempt at retirement: Jay-Z's should-have-been-final-statement retains a greater semblance of its aura and significance than Jordan's specifically because it was an artistic statement rather than an athletic one.
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An Albatross- Blessphemy (of the Peace-Beast Feastgiver and the Bear Warp Kumite) (2006)

In the second post of my series discussing my favorite albums from the decade spanning 2000 to 2009, I'm going to write about An Albatross' aptly-named Blessphemy (of the Peace-Beast Feastgiver and the Bear Warp Kumite). For some reason, I remember listening to this album a lot while riding various buses around the City and the East Bay about 3 years ago. I also listened to it quite a bit during a figure drawing class I took at Berkeley around the same time.* This is an awesomely weird, noisy mess of an album that can be sometimes grating to listen to but can also be a lot of fun.

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This is on my refridgerator

Why Didn't the Defense Mount a Real Defense During the Prop. 8 Trial?

I assume everybody has heard the news, but I might as well reiterate it: Chief U.S. District Judge Vaughn Walker declared Proposition 8, California's voter-approved same-sex-marriage ban, to be unconstitutional. This is, of course, good news, but there are still a number of questions to be answered, including one in particular that is bugging me.
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The Mountain Goats- Tallahassee (2002)

Ok, so I realized that I have this blog, which I started to fulfill an assignment for my 4D Visual Dynamics class at CCA. I made one (sort of ridiculous) post 4 years ago, and I haven't really though of it much since then. I think it's time to change that. In what will be (hopefully) the first of many, many posts, I will discuss some of the things that are important to me. In this particular case, I will discuss music.

This is the first post in a series that will discuss, in no particular order, my favorite albums of the decade from 2000 to 2009. This particular post will be about the album Tallahassee by The Mountain Goats.

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