PostBourgie

Don’t let Hillary Clinton’s optimism following her West Virginia win fool you: she knows it’s over.

But do her supporters? If you’re riding for HRC, what you’re essentially hoping for is that the Democratic party elite install her as the nominee even though she trails by every conceivable metric. It’s a move that would be so unpopular — even among fair-minded Clinton supporters — that it would fracture the party and guarantee she gets molly-whopped come November.

Is this what those folks are after?

I’ve been reading Ta-Nehisi since at least his days at the Village Voice back in the day. We’ve been linking to is blog for a hot minute now, because we sorta wanna be him when we grow up.  (We got the hip-hop-loving, hood-raised, left-tilting political junkie part down).

I finally got to meet him at a book reading* for his new memoir, The Beautiful Struggle, which is so gorgeously written it almost begs to be read aloud.

Couple things:

1) Dude is tall. Like, NBA 2-guard, tall.

2) Ta-Nehisi, after I told him I was a big fan of his blog: ‘I don’t know if you wanna know this, but I write that in the morning in my t-shirt and draws.’

3) He reads PostBourgie. Oh, word? Amped.

*I had my phone off at the reading, so Stacia was calling excitedly about Edwards endorsing Obama and I completely missed it. I was hating when I found out she was there; she was hating when I told her where I was. So it’s a push.

“The Democratic voters have made their choice. And so have I!” John Edwards bellowed at the podium inside Grand Rapids, Michigan’s Van Andel arena.

The declaration was met with eruptive cheers among the nearly 12,000 supporters in the stands—and sent a separate, personal bolt of electricity through this reporter’s spine.

More…

This is mind-bendingly awful.

Can you imagine how this pitch went?

Kourtney: “Hey! Let’s be, like, topical.”
Kim: “Yeah, let’s totally play with public perception of me as a vapid bimbo! I could say, like, smart stuff!”
Kourtney: *SQUEAAAAALS!*

Ugh.

(But also? Wow. Good googly moogly, that thang look juicy!)

Say what you will about embattled attorney-turned-entertainment-”personality” Star Jones (and the commenters at New York Magazine are saying plenty), but never say she lets folks keep her name in their mouths without a strong rebuttal.

More…

I finished the book Homicide by David Simon.

I only recently became a David Simon fan, but I’d been talking about The Wire a lot at work and my coworker, who was cleaning out his desk. He used to cover the cops and courts for my paper, and while he was cleaning out his desk before he left, he found an old copy of the book to let me borrow. It took me awhile to get into it. Simon has a very masculine voice and it took me awhile to get used to. But then, once I did, I almost couldn’t put it down. I haven’t cleaned my house in ages because I just wanted to read (and also because I’m lazy) and started missing those wonderful days when it took me an hour to get home on the subway after leaving work at 1 a.m. All the more time to read.

Amid the warm, glowing feeling that comes from finishing a really good book a darker mood began to take shape. Throughout the book, I believe I’d met the basis for most of the characters in The Wire, even some whose real names were used on the show. The premise of the entire series must have been gleaned from Simon’s time in the department, from the wiretap to the problems with focusing on individual quotas rather than the big picture. Some of the scenes were lifted from the book nearly word for word, including the opening of the first show of the first season, the death of Snot Boogie. More…

The other day, I walked in to my newspaper office expecting to cover a public board meeting, and my editors asked me to do a story on rising gas prices. A local station had started to charge $4.09 a gallon (this was before they all started doing that.) The transportation reporter is out on paternity leave, our news section is down about half the reporters it was a year ago, and gas prices are on reader’s minds. It was a fair assignment and turned into a not-bad story.

The story led with the expensive gas station, quoted a representative of big oil and an industry analyst, and was tied to a chart that showed prices around the city. The headline was “Pain at the Pump.” If you’ve lived in America for a chunk of your life, chances are you’ve seen that headline on every gas price news story in your local paper or on your local TV station every spring, summer, and most long-weekend holidays.

High gas prices are attributable to a range of economic factors: increased demand, decreased supply, conflicts in oil producing countries, and the declining value of the U.S. dollar. But what everyday people always want to complain about is taxes, the gas tax that funds most highway projects, and the corporate fat cats who are making off with the working man’s dollar, or credit card swipe. Or so politicians shilling the ridiculous gas tax holiday had hoped. More…