Hola Coca-Colas, tonight wonderful Kossak AdvisorJim will be doing a reading at the Barnes & Noble in the West Village at 395 Avenue of the Americas(the one that's near all the shoe stores on 8th Street). For those who aren't big shoe shoppers, it's also near the West 4th/Wash. Sq. subway stop. He will be appearing at 7:00 and hopefully there will be TONS of New York Kossaks there to buy his book and support the heck out of him.

More below

I should have put this diary up days and days ago, but I lazed out like a Lays Potato Chip. But anyway, for those of you who don't know, Markos and Jerome will be appearing at the Pioneer Bar tonight from 5:30-7:30 to promote their wonderful book, "Crashing the Damn Gate, Which Appears to be Triply Reinforced by Concrete and Steel Barriers."

Drinking Liberally is organizing the event and they want you to go to the book site to register in advance for the site. (Though I'll bet they won't turn you away if you forget to do that--heh, just tell them JaneKnowles sent you. NOT!)

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Hi everybody. Don't forget that this coming Saturday, McJoan and Armando will be in the Big Apple so we are having a meetup in their honor. Here are the details about where we're meeting:

Mo Pitkins
34 Avenue A
Telephone: 212-777-5660

The meetup time is 5:30 on the 2nd floor. The reservation is in my real-life name, Lois, so if you get there and are feeling lost, ask the staff where to send you to get to us. (I may actually be late cause my son has a baseball game so wonderful Kossak and longtime meetup attendee TheMaven has agreed to play early-arrival host.)

Email me (see profile) if you want me to put you on the list for future meetups. Note: I do not use the email list for any other purpose.

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Hi New York Kossaks:

A few things are coming up this month (which I'll detail below), but the most important and immediate one is that front-page Kossak McJoan is going to be in the City next week. Coincidentally (or perhaps not....) Armando will be in New York that weekend as well so natch, a meetup is in order.

All are welcome. Kossaks, friends of Kossaks, etc. etc. Please come! You will have fun...whether you want to or not! I kid! We're a friendly bunch and I love to show McJoan a very warm welcome to our beautiful city. Besides, would you actually miss out on the opportunity to find out what Armando looks like and sounds like in real life??

See below for details

NOTE: If you want to post images from the event, feel free to do so, however, please don't identify anyone unless you are certain that they don't mind. I think it's safe to say that Markos and Jerome won't mind be identified.

As promised yesterday, I present you the follow-up to the NYC Kossak meetup. First off, good lord were there a TON of people. When I was emailing with Kossak JBilger, trying to figure out how many people we should tell Yaffa would come, we estimated about 30. We ended up with more like 75. Nothing like the power of Markos to pull the crowd.

More copy and the images you have all been waiting for below

Hi everybody. I just wanted to post this diary to remind those of you I haven't already repeatedly hounded that tomorrow, yes 3/22, New York Kossaks will be meeting at Yaffa cafe to drink, eat cous-cous and talk about what a fucking doofus the chimp is.

Here are the details:

Yaffa's Tea Room (in TriBeCa NOT the East Village)
353 Greenwich Street (at Harrison)
Take the 1 or 9 to Franklin or the 2 or 3 to Chambers.
March 22 (solstice!)
6:30 until whenever

If you can't come until later, email me (see my profile) and I'll send you my cell phone so you can check and see if the party is still hopping. And if you haven't yet, email me so that I can add your name to the list for future meetups.

If your hesitating, don't. These events are pretty much just for fun and we won't make you sign a commitment to communism card until you attend at least three meetings. ; )

Here's the first reminder diary about the meetup set for this coming Wednesday, the 22nd. Here's the diary it was first announced in. (It was the "Welcome to the Big Apple" diary and you should read it just for the tips on restaurants and off-the-beaten-path tourist spots.)

Here are the basic details:

Yaffa's Tea Room*
353 Greenwich Street (at Harrison)
Take the 1 or 9 to Franklin or the 2 or 3 to Chambers.
March 22 (solstice!)
6:30 until whenever

*Please note: this is the Yaffa's in TriBeCa NOT the East Village.

Who is welcome? EVERYBODY! Rabble rousers, lurkers, liberals, centrists, your friends, you name it, we want all of you. It'll be great to see old faces and some new ones as well. I have a list of email addresses from past meetups, but if I don't have yours now and you want me to send any updates on this meetup or ones in the future, please email me at janeknowles@gmail.com.

Read on...

Hi New Yorkers, how's it going? Beautiful weather today, no? How about another meetup? It's been beyond eons since the last one and I've been getting gentle nudges that it's time for another one goddamit!

I figured we could meet at Yafa again, the very place where we had our first meetup. Yes, being in TriBeCa, it's sort of out of the way, but there's a meeting room in the back that suits the number of people who usually come, there's food and alcohol and Yaffa herself is friendly with a Kossak (who helped her build the joint).

More below

While visiting Venezuela earlier this year, Harry Belafonte gave a speech in which he called George Bush "the world's greatest terrorist." The press naturally went into freak out mode and dismissed Belafonte as being nothing more or less than a wacko extremist. Even lefty bloggers were outraged that Barack Obama was asked to comment on Belafonte's quote in an appearance on Meet the Press not long after the statement was made. And while the outrage was over the racist nature of asking Obama about Belafonte simply because they are both black, the implication was that Belafonte is an extremist, whose views are far outside of the mainstream.

A couple weeks back I flew out to Las Vegas and sat next to your basic winger (anti-gay marriage, wants bible story to stand next to the theory of evolution in science class, thinks it's more important to invest in Iraq than New Orleans, etc), who, amidst all his anti-this-that-and-the-other-thing rants, said something that sort of stuck in my head. He kept insisting that despite his viewpoints, he didn't identify as a Republican. He claimed he voted based on the candidate not the party(yeah right--if he's ever voted for a Dem then I'm Barbara Bush!), and that he viewed himself as a conservative.

And then for this past week of listening to The Majority Report, I've noticed that Sam Sedar has been driving home the same point. That's there's been a plethora of callers who say that the Republican party, as it stands, no longer represents them. That they consider themselves to be, you guessed it, conservatives.

Dave Chappelle appeared on Oprah today to explain why he walked away from the Chappelle Show. I heard about the appearance days ago, but like a schmuck, I remembered about an hour after it was over. Thank god for the Internet and YouTube, which makes life bearable for forgetful motherfuckers like myself.

In a nutshell, it sounds like Chappelle got fed up with the stress and the pressure of carrying the show. It also sounds like he started questioning how his racial humor was being interpreted. Something else is going on there too. I'm not sure what, but the level of paranoia he seems to exhibits sort of raises some yellow flags for me.

More Dave stuff on the flip...

I see a lot of people freaking out on this site, and, in a way, it was a good thing for me. I find the freak out annoying. It keeps me away from here, and the less time I spend internetting the better. So tonight I went to a man bar with my friend Mike and we watched his team, the Bulls, and my sort-of team, the Knicks, lose. We argued about A-Rod and Ortiz and other stupid stuff.

And I was thinking, as Democrats, the best thing we can do is embrace our craziness. We are always going to be sort of a mess. We're not ever going to be "on message." And I think that's okay. Contrary to what many people think, Americans are not total morons. The other team is in a shambles. So what if they have temprorarily grasped at the straw of our many opinions. They're still a fucking mess and everyone knows it.

For those who love hip-hop, the deaths of rap artists Tupac Shakur in 1997 and Notorious BIG aka Christopher Smalls in 1998 were the end of an era. All the warning signs were there, red flags that the beef between the two artists was escalating to dangerous levels, but the murder of Shakur still came as a heartbreaking shock. A year later, Biggie was also dead, and the hip-hop community was left reeling, wondering how these two immensely talented young men could be taken out of the game at the pinnacle of their careers.

To this day, despite numerous eye witnesses, their murders remain unsolved. As someone who followed the efforts to find their killers, I had always assumed that their cases were at least in part stymied by a reluctence by witnesses to come forward.  

It's funny, right after I read this article on Barack Obama, I clicked over to DailyKos to write a diary on whether or not Obama is looking to run for anything and low and behold, there was Markos' final straw poll for the year. Hmmm, coincidence? I think NOT.

Anyway, I've been noticing that since Obama became Senator, he's been hooked up with some pretty influential people and appeared at a lot of major events, starting with his helping Byrd's fundraising efforts to visiting with Katrina survivors with party heavy-hitters Bill and Hillary.

Well, if ever there were a doubt that many Americans are indeed lunatics around the topic of religion, here is some definitive proof.

I had been hearing about a recent episode of "Trading Spouses" (one of my favorite sitcoms) in which one of the wives totally lost it, but I never actually saw it. And then, while reading through ABC reporter Jake Tapper's blog, I came across a link to an Ebay auction of a bobblehead doll of the lunatic wife herself, aka "God Warrior."

Click onward for images.

Don't anyone yell. It's Friday night and this is only for chuckles.

WARNING: first one to use the word "pie" is a rotten egg!

I came across this press release trying to be an article last week and found it to be pretty entertaining. The theory is that the metrosexual is now passe. Far too femmy for the average red-blooded American male, he has been officically replaced by the "ubersexual."

[Aside: I swear. It's articles like this that make me realize that I wouldn't survive two minutes as a guy. Sure you have all the money and power, but the lane you have to live in is so narrow that it must hurt!]

Vice magazineis one of the most hateful publications on the planet. It's written by and for young hipsters, and its tone--highly cynical and anti-p.c.--while somewhat extreme, gives a nice window into the minds of some of our young folks.

I like Vice and I don't like Vice. They do this one dos-and-don'ts-type feature, in which they mercilessly mock people's fashion choices. Some of their captions are laugh-out-loud funny, while others are just play offensive.

This month, the theme of the magazine is hatred of all things boomer. It's called "We Hate YOur Parents Too." As usual it's wicked, mean and often very funny.

Almost everyone on this site will likely find something very offensive in the article so if you avoid hateful language like the plague, don't read this diary or click on the links to the mag.

Posted first at DailyGotham

For anyone who thinks NYC Mayor Mike Bloomberg is a Democrat at heart, hopefully this news story will set you straight once and for all. When asked to comment on Cindy Sheehan, Mike did his best version of the Harlem Shuffle and came out sounding like the Republican stooge that he is.

Pukeworthy:

"It's not a local issue, and I don't have anything to say," Bloomberg replied when asked about Sheehan's ongoing protests near President George W. Bush's ranch in Crawford, Texas. Sheehan's son Casey, 24, died in Iraq last year.