Giuliani: Worse Than Bush

"Rudy Giuliani is a true American hero, and we know this because he does all the things we expect of heroes these days -- like make $16 million a year, and lobby for Hugo Chávez and Rupert Murdoch, and promote wars without ever having served in the military, and hire a lawyer to call his second wife a 'stuck pig,' and organize absurd, grandstanding pogroms against minor foreign artists, and generally drift through life being a shameless opportunist with an outsize ego who doesn't even bother to conceal the fact that he's had a hard-on for the presidency since he was in diapers. In the media age, we can't have a hero humble enough to actually be one; what is needed is a tireless scoundrel, a cad willing to pose all day long for photos, who'll accept $100,000 to talk about heroism for an hour, who has the balls to take a $2.7 million advance to write a book about himself called Leadership. That's Rudy Giuliani. Our hero. And a perfect choice to uphold the legacy of George W. Bush.

Yes, Rudy is smarter than Bush. But his political strength -- and he knows it -- comes from America's unrelenting passion for never bothering to take that extra step to figure shit out. If you think you know it all already, Rudy agrees with you... "

from David Perry this Flickr set of Shanghai Trees

Harewood trees

happily received:

Monica Fauble TO PLACE TWO PALMS TOGETHER Philadelphia 2006 (excuse formatting)

I might be/a very bad/
Buddhist/but I
am an excellent/
ice skater

Michael Scharf FOR KID ROCK TOTAL FREEDOM Spectacular Red Hook 2007

"The contradictions produced by power are shared, and their
articulation, by poets and others, is a real, if unwanted, func-
tion within society, as is the modeling, in poems and other
media, of other possible modes of power, as on Saturdays on
Rain's tiny dancefloor on N 5 Street in Williamsburg, where I
was first brought by poets, and where the men of the neigh-
borhood admit me to a space of mutual movement that sub-
sumes in an explicit manner never approached on the street,
where I adjust my walk."