Now you or your loved ones can sleep forever with angels inside Obama’s head. This handy Obama urn will cost you $2,600.

You can thank me later for helping out with your last minute holiday gift.

Cremation Solutions: Tomorrows Traditions

(via Nerdcore)

 
“Black Dynamite I wanna be just like you.” Based on a true story…
 
Thanks Elvin Estela!

 
Since April, a persistent Internet meme (reported on today’s Huffington Post, in fact) has to do with ecstasy tabs pressed in the shape of President Obama’s head. Sounds plausible, there are even photographs of the items in question, but were they really ecstasy?

Probably not, according to a “pill reviewer” going under the pseudonym “dezmon” on a website called Pill Reports. Dezmon seems to think the Obama pills are nothing more than caffeine:

“went to a rave ... last saturday and took a red and yellow one of these. took three hours and never kicked in at all. i think they were straight caffeine or something cause i was dancing a lot but no high. after these failed i turned to a quad stack yellow lacoste with mescaline and molly.”

Another report on a website called Ecstasy Data seems to confirm dezmond’s “findings”:

“The North Carolina State Bureau of Investigation, Western Regional Laboratory (Asheville, North Carolina) received five tablets shaped like the heads of Ninja Turtles, Snoopy, and Barack Obama, suspected Ecstasy (see Photo 1). Analysis of the tablets by GC/MS revealed that the tablets contained BZP, TFMPP, and caffeine (the predominant compound). Clandestine tablet preparations containing BZP are common submissions; however, these were the first tablets of their kind to be submitted to the laboratory. Most tablets submitted are round and vary in imprint/stamps. These tablets were quite detailed.”

Just a head’s up, kids. And stay away from drugs!

Cross posting this from Brand X

Earlier this week, L.A. Times advertising columnist Dan Neil asked his readers if the controversial commemorative Chia Obama was a sincere tribute or racist scorn. Neil seems to think not and based his opinion on his measure of the man behind the product:

The staggering truth: Chia Obama is a real product, and its creator—77-year-old San Francisco ad man and Chia Pet magnate Joseph Pedott, a lifelong Republican—means it to be a sincere tribute to Obama, who he says has inherited “the biggest can of worms ever put on a president.”

“I remember the Great Depression,” Pedott says. “It wasn’t very nice.” In November, after the election, Pedott was deeply worried about Obama, the first Democrat Pedott had ever voted for. With the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, the banking crisis, unemployment and more, says Pedott, “it’s almost inhuman to put all that on a president.”

Neil goes on to write:

Pedott awoke one winter night with a thought. “Is it possible to take a brand that nobody thinks seriously about and do something good for the country?” And—veteran adman that he is—he started to think about how to sell it. “Can I create a commercial that will help Obama do the things that I want done? To give Americans something to hope for, hold on to.”

These may seem unduly noble aspirations for a man who sells mossy clay figurines, but for Pedott, the Chia is no joke. “It’s the biggest asset I have,” he says.

The short version of events is as follows: Pedott commissioned several prototypes—a three-president series (Washington, Lincoln, Obama), a smiling Obama and the determined Obama, and even an Obama-and-Hillary set. In March, the Chia Obama—“It’s not a ‘pet,’ ” notes Pedott—was test-marketed at Walgreens in Chicago and Tampa and was almost immediately pulled from shelves after the stores received complaints that the Chia Obama was racist (the big green ‘fro, don’t you know). Pedott was stunned and disheartened.

“All I tried to do was something positive,” he says. “I never even thought about the hair.”

Well, he certainly sounds sincere enough to me. Why wouldn’t Neil—or anyone else for that matter—take Pedott’s word at face value? Maybe, just maybe, it’s the well-intentioned folks who claim to find racism in the Chia Obama who are seeing something that’s not even there? After all, did anyone accuse the Jerry Garcia commemorative Chia of being anti-hippie? Is the Homer Simpson Chia meant to disparage baldies?

And furthermore, no one said “boo” when Pedott released the Mr. T Chia in 2000, so what gives? Even that bastion of political correctness himself, the Rev. Jesse Jackson, was amused by the Obama Chia. Haven’t we gotten past this stuff?

Apparently the president himself was delighted (“I’ve got green hair!” he said) with the tribute when presented with a Chia Obama in May: “He’s as warm as he can be,” Pedott told Neil. “I was so damn impressed.”

Now the Obama Chia, shunned by most major retailers, is being sold on television via direct response ads and the Chia Obama website.
 

Cross posting this from Brand X

 
After flying well below the radar for the last few years, Barack Obama’s younger brother, Mark Okoth Obama Ndesandjo, surfaced yesterday—his first public speaking event—to promote his new, autobiographical novel, Nairobi to Shenzhen.

Speaking from Shenzhen, where he lives with his Chinese wife, Ndesandjo said little about Barack, but he did say, “We are family.  I love my family and we are in touch.”  Seeing his brother win the Presidency helped Ndesandjo come to terms with his painful past—enough, anyway, to finish the book, what the Brown and Stanford-educated Ndesandjo calls a search for “identity and self.”

In the 255-page novel, self-published through Aventine Press, Ndesandjo’s character is called David.  He makes no reference to his brother, Barack.  But he depicts their Kenyan father as an abusive alcoholic who beats David, and David’s Jewish American mother.

Barack Obama Sr. married Mark’s mother, Ruth Nidesand, while he was studying at Harvard, after divorcing President Obama’s mother, Stanley Ann Dunham.  The elder Obama and Nidesand lived together in Nairobi, Kenya, where Mark spent much of his childhood.  How much of the book is true?

‘It’s a work of fiction, but there’s a lot going on in there that parallels my life,’ Ndesandjo said.

 
The Washington Post: Obama’s Brother Speaks Out For First Time

 
(Above, Gore Vidal visits “Mary Hartman” (Louise Lasser) in the mental hospital on the Mary Hartman, Mary Hartman soap opera)
 
I have revered Gore Vidal my entire life. He’s a great writer and he’s a great American, perhaps THE great American gadfly amongst men of letters. The older he gets, the more spiteful he becomes about the state of this country. Interviews with Vidal in recent years fall into one of two categories, sometimes they’re terribly amusing, but alarming, other times just alarming. Lately, he’s really letting it rip. He’s 83, why should he pull any punches? In this long interview from London, a cranky Vidal holds forth on the Obama presidency with a jaundiced eye:

Gore Vidal is not only grieving for his own dead circle and his fading life, but for his country. At 83, he has lived through one third of the lifespan of the United States. If anyone incarnates the American century that has ended, it is him. He was America’s greatest essayist, one of its best-selling novelists and the wit at every party. He holidayed with the Kennedys, cruised for men with Tennessee Williams, was urged to run for Congress by Eleanor Roosevelt, co-wrote some of the most iconic Hollywood films, damned US foreign policy from within, sued Truman Capote, got fellated by Jack Kerouac, watched his cousin Al Gore get elected President and still lose the White House, and ?

 
In what reads like something out of High Castle-era Philip K. Dick, David Swanson describes what the American landscape might have looked like under a third Bush administration.  More warrantless spying, escalating military budgets, formalizing policies of preventive detention, Swanson’s list is long—and grim.  That’s just the set-up, though, to a far scarier punchline:

This dark fantasy of a third Bush term is also an accurate portrait of Obama’s first term to date.  In following Bush, Obama was given the opportunity either to restore the rule of law and the balance of powers or to firmly establish in place what were otherwise aberrant abuses of power.  Thus far, President Obama has, in all the areas mentioned above, chosen the latter course.  Everything described, from the continuation of crimes to the efforts to hide them away, from the corruption of corporate power to the assertion of the executive power to legislate, is Obama’s presidency in its first seven months.

David Swanson is the author, most recently, of Daybreak: Undoing the Imperial Presidency and Forming a More Perfect Union.

Spotted via The Nation: Bush’s Third Term?

From one of our most astute (and hilarious) political observers (and a personal hero). I can’t believe I missed this when it was posted, but I hardly think it matters as it’s still entirely relevant today:

Other countries prefer a healthy workforce and are willing to pay for it. Here we stick our workforce with fat, greedy insurance companies who serve no purpose but to act as a tollbooth or a gatekeeper and charge exorbitant fees before a person can even see a doctor. The result, of course, is the most expensive healthcare system with the least benefit for the buck of any in the industrialized world. You say the big insurance companies “should have a place at the table.” Aren’t these companies the problem?

Other counties want their workforce to be as well-educated as possible to better care for themselves and compete in the global economy. So they are willing to pay to make sure this happens, instead of kicking them in the face with back-breaking student loans and cutting school funding to the bone.

Other countries want their children to grow up well-nourished and loved instead of dysfunctional. They are happy to pay welfare for single parents to stay home with their little ones, and for 12-18 months maternity leave with 80-90% pay for either parent to make sure no child is left behind.

Traveling overseas it is not hard to notice that many European countries, and not just Scandinavia, have a higher standard of living than we do, and the gap is widening. The reason is they are willing to pay for it.

OPEN LETTER TO BARACK OBAMA from Jello Biafra