First Draft

Weekend Question Thread

What was your favorite childhood TV show?

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Saturday Blogwhoring Thread

Post away.

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Taxes are Theft

This guy was just doing his patriotic duty, no doubt:

According to documents obtained by Teablogging by running a goddamned simple Nexis search on the internets, national Tea Party organizer, Top Conservatives on Twitter cofounder and TCOTReport.comMichael P. Leahy has, over the past 16 years, amassed nearly $150,000 in state and federal tax liens, small claims court judgments and civil suits.

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Quitting Time Booster Shot

Welcome back to the QTBS, where we, like the Russians, identify talent early...

- The kid in the picture was in a home depot store when the Midget and I were picking up some supplies. His father was chewing tobacco and swallowing the juice while the kid jumped from mower to mower, screaming. When he landed on the orange one, he screamed about how it matched his hair. Dad ignored him while the Mom looked around as if to say, "He's not mine. Please don't let him hit me again." Not to rip on anyone's parenting, but when you're kid's got a mohawk that's Husqvarna orange, maybe it's a sign this kid will need some extra attention.

- Speaking of the Midget, she got sick this week with a slight fever that caused the daycare to send her home. Upon hearing that she was being sent home early, she explained, “No. Daddy comes after I have snack.” They said, no, you need to go home because you’ve got some germies, to which she replied, “NO. I get SNACK before I go HOME.” Translation: “You fuckers aren’t screwing me out of my snack.” Now I no longer need to take a paternity test…

- Speaking of families, this Web site is worth its weight in gold. Enjoy the awkwardness...

- I bought a pack of undershirts yesterday that had the selling point of “Now in a RESEALABLE BAG!” How is that a marketing point? Does anyone keep their undershirts in a plastic bag after they open them? Is there a good secondary use for a T-shirt bag? Anyone help me out here?

- Hang on Jimmy… don’t move… This is for science…

- Question: How bad is the recession killing the U.S.? Answer: We’re being shunned by Mexicans…

- Was in a Target store the other day when I noticed the place smelled like smoke. I sniffed a bit and said to the cashier, “Does it smell like smoke to you?” Without missing a beat, the kid said, “Where?” Sigh…

- If you want to watch another bad movie that keeps landing on AMC, catch Death Wish 3. For a less violent reaction to thugs, check out this lady's response...

- And finally, on this day in 1981, Lenny Barker of the Cleveland Indians tossed a perfect game. If you like this concept, you'll love next week's post. I've been working on this for about a month...

Thanks for letting me share your air. Be back next week.

Doc

Doin' Work

"Today's technology means athletes don't need a middleman anymore… I see a day when the following sequence will be routine: Player demands trade on blog; team obliges and announces deal on Twitter; player thanks old fans, takes shots at old team and gushes about new team on Facebook. We will not need anyone to report this, just someone to recap it. Preferably with links."
- Bill Simmons, ESPN the Magazine

I remember George Carlin once defining irony as a man with diabetes going to buy insulin and being killed by a runaway truck full of diabetic supplies. I had that flashback in reading Bill Simmons recently.

In his last few columns, Simmons has bemoaned the democratization of the Web and the way in which we’re seeing more and more use of it by non-media types. I don’t disagree with him to a certain extent. In this piece on Kobe Bryant’s biopic “Doin’ Work,” he noted that we’ve lost the sense of reporting and have found ourselves rolling down a hill toward punditry and commentary.

I find it humorous that Simmons of all people is noting this. He’s made his career on the Web, finding ways to turn a biting sense of sarcasm and a wealth of knowledge about six things into a media fiefdom. It’s like the people who bemoan the loss of newspapers but end up reading most of their content at HuffPo or those who bitch about the death of the American auto industry while driving a Mercedes. It’s not their fault, but they’re not helping things.

To be fair, I don’t disagree with him. We’re seeing too much in the way of commentary and not enough in the way of news (I note the irony here…). We’re killing off the goose that laid the golden egg of content and then wondering why we’re bereft of information.  Except we didn’t kill the goose with an axe: We bled it to death, noting that, “Hey, it’s still alive and nothing bad has happened yet.” First it was the one-newspaper town, then it was the shuttering of foreign bureaus, national bureaus and now state bureaus. Certain papers have stopped delivering to “outlying” areas such as up the road from the printing press.

No, it’s not entirely the fault of the Internet, which has become the requisite scapegoat for anything that goes wrong at a newspaper these days. However, the ability for more and more people to say whatever they want to means news organizations are being more akin to stenographers than minstrels: They’re not telling stories, they’re taking dictation. Still, as much as we talk about journalists not doing their jobs, they’ve been conditioned over time to think of their work as a lesser part of the whole.

Content used to have value, but somewhere along the way, it became a vehicle for selling ads. Thus, we started seeing places giving away the content (cheap magazine subscriptions, free newspapers to NIE programs) to help bolster circulation for the ad folk. Now, the ad folk don’t need us anymore to reach the audience, just like the jocks don’t need the writers. To borrow a Simmons-ism, newspapers became like the high school junior who started putting out for her boyfriend because he was going to college in a few months: we sold out to hang on to something we were going to lose anyway and we lost ourselves in the process.

So What?

I don't get this idea that if Pelosi knew about torture it makes torture okay. It doesn't. It just makes Pelosi suck. You do not get a free pass if you knew about it and did nothing as a Democrat. You do not get a free pass if you knew about it and approved as a Republican. You do not get a free pass AT ALL. The stupid right-wing fuckmooks pushing this argument can't comprehend that this isn't a partisan issue to those of us who truly give a shit about the rule of law.

If Pelosi knew about torture and did nothing to stop it that doesn't mean anybody arguing against torture loses the argument and should go home and we should keep torturing. It isn't about Republicans torturing, it's about America torturing, and anybody who approved of it and/or knew and didn't stop it should be drummed out of public life forever.

Any other stupid bullshit need dealing with today? Oh, yeah, there's this:

The tribunal system — set up after the military began sweeping detainees off the battlefields of Afghanistan in late 2001 — has been under repeated challenges from human rights and legal organizations because it denied defendants many of the rights they would be granted in a civilian courtroom.

In a statement late Thursday, Sen. Lindsey Graham, R-S.C., called Obama's decision to revamp and restart the tribunals a step toward strengthening U.S. detention policies that have been derided worldwide.

"I continue to believe it is in our own national security interests to separate ourselves from the past problems of Guantanamo," said Graham, who has been working with the administration on issues related to detainees. "I agree with the president and our military commanders that now is the time to start over and strengthen our detention policies. I applaud the president's actions today."

Graham was an Air Force lawyer and is a member of the Senate Armed Services Committee.

Another member of the panel, Sen. Joe Lieberman, I-Conn., welcomed Obama's decision, saying the president "has reinforced that we are at war, and that the laws of war should apply to these prisoners."

You know, in the reality-based community, when you've pleased Linds and Holy Joe, you're having a pretty shitty week.

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Friday Ferretblogging

The box of packing peanuts has moved from being a playground to being a sleeping spot for Puck.

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Strong Written and Verbal Communication Skills

You know you wanna go work for Glenn Beck, you know you do.

Key responsibilities will include contributing original content to GlennBeck.com and to Glenn’s radio program and magazine. Writing will include a mix of short pieces and long articles, fact-based commentary on the news of the day, etc.

Requirements:

• Strong written and verbal communication skills
• Research skills
• At least 2 years of journalism experience

Interested candidates, please send resume, cover letter, and at least 3 writing samples. Cover letters must include salary requirements to be eligible for consideration.

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Today on Athenae's Obsession with the Wonkette Comments

Morons in Yellowstone:

Death penalty for ALL of them. And melt down their slob-cycles to make gay-marriage double-headed dildo vibrators.

Amen, hallelujah. ExceptI say we first make them all get gay married to each other and then we give them death via sodomy using said slob-cycles turned into dildo vibrators as the instruments of their execution.

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Torquecheney

 

No matter what rock--or "secure, undisclosed location"--Dick Cheney crawls out from to spin like a Battling Top with regards to torture, he, and those who side with him, are omitting one key, critical element.

It's not about "them," i.e., Al Qaeda...or Iraq, or anyone else. It's about US.

And, we can discern a clear difference--some, like Dick Cheney, support and endorse torture, while some of us don't.

Aside from the fact that it's becoming more and more clear that torture was NOT used for any non-existent ticking time bomb scenario, or high level "unknown unknown" nonsense but instead was a convenient tool for someone trying to concoct a fable about links between Al Qaeda and Saddam Hussein (i.e., to repeat something I mentioned a few weeks back, obtaining a false confession was a feature, not a bug, in this particular program)...anyway, despite all this, torture proponents consistently fail to note that it's NOT about Al Qaeda, or Abu Zubaydah, or Khalid Sheikh Mohammed.

Hell, I wouldn't piss on either one of them if they were on fire. Both are in custody for good reasons...however, instead of receiving their fair trial, appropriate punishment (assuming they are guilty, which I don't think is too much of a stretch) and consignment to the dustbin of history (along with Ramzi Yousef, among others)...anyway, instead of the justice they and we deserve, they will be forever known as 'victims of United States Government sanctioned torture.'

Way to go, Dick. You've managed to dirty ALL of our hands, and the little spittle flecked whining about Nancy Pelosi and what she did or didn't know hardly matters. The line was crossed, to the nation's shame.

And your shame too, Dick, if you weren't utterly shameless.

Speaking of Suck and Fail Day

What year is it again? 1938?

"At the meeting I was attempting to explain that unlike Sen. Schumer, I believe in traditional values, like we used to see on The Andy Griffith Show. I made the mistake of referring to Sen. Schumer as ‘that Jew’ and I should not have put it that way as this took away from what I was trying to say," Hendren said.

That is it. I'mma make myself a sammich with some DIJON MUSTARD and then go back to bed. The FUCK?



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Department of Well This Had Better Be a Joke of Some Kind

It's not April Fool's and this shit isn't funny. What is it, Piss Off Everybody Week in the White House? We're celebrating International Suck and Fail Day? Seriously, this is even an option?

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration is weighing plans to detain some terror suspects on U.S. soil -- indefinitely and without trial -- as part of a plan to retool military commission trials that were conducted for prisoners held in Guantanamo Bay, Cuba.

The proposal being floated with members of Congress is another indication of President Barack Obama's struggles to establish his counter-terrorism policies, balancing security concerns against attempts to alter Bush-administration practices he has harshly criticized.

[snip]

Sen. Lindsey Graham (R., S.C.), who met this week with White House Counsel Greg Craig to discuss the administration's plans, said among the proposals being studied is seeking authority for indefinite detentions, with the imprimatur of some type of national-security court.

Sen. Graham said he wants to work with the administration to pass legislation to increase judicial oversight of military commissions, but noted the legal difficulties that would arise.

"This is a difficult question. How do you hold someone in prison without a trial indefinitely?" Sen. Graham said.

YOU DON'T YOU FUCKMOOK.

Any other questions?

Before the day is out somebody better nip this shit in the bud. What the hell is going on over there?

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America Needs Proof

This is particularly sad and pointless:

The Defense Department was set to release hundreds of photographs showing alleged abuse of prisoners in detention facilities in Afghanistan and Iraq.

"I want to emphasize that these photos that were requested in this case are not particularly sensational, especially when compared to the images we remember from Abu Ghraib," the president said on the South Lawn of the White House. "But they do represent conduct that didn't conform with the Army manual."

Obama said the publication of the photos would not add any additional benefit to investigations being carried out into detainee abuse -- and could put future inquires at risk.

"In fact, the most direct consequence of releasing them, I believe, would further flame anti-American opinion and to put our troops in greater danger. ... I fear the publication of these photos may only have a chilling effect on future investigations of detainee abuse," Obama said.

I'll say to this president what I would have said to the last one. Do you really think they don't know what we're doing? I'll grant you they haven't seen images, not the new ones, anyway, but since when was proof of monstrosity ever required to turn someone, something, somewhere, into a monster to frighten children? Do you really think keeping back the photos will keep back the hatred of America that power-hungry lunatics use to subvert poor and desperate people and turn them to violence? Do you really think this is going to make any difference at all?

Do you really think that, having seen proof after proof after proof in the past eight years that we are not remotely who we say we are that a bunch of new photos will be the straw that breaks it? I'm taking your argument at face value here, Mr. President, do you really believe this is how it works? That having heard there are terrible photos of terrible things, terrorists will only react and use such information if they actually see the photos released? You think this isn't already in the recruiting brochure, that they're holding the printing pending artwork? Seriously? Not for nothing, but if American commanders were so concerned about the consequences of images of brutality getting out, they might have worked a little harder to make sure that a) there was no brutality and b) people weren't taking snapshots of it like they were at fucking Disneyland.

I ask this in the face of all the experts with their expert knowledge, I ask this because to a girl with a web site who doesn't consider herself exceptionally intelligent or anything this is a really, really, really incredible argument to ask the American people to swallow. Maybe you're making it in all sincerity. I don't really care. It's a bullshit argument and it's insulting to all of us. I say this as someone who voted for you. I say this as someone who voted for you and fully expected to be disappointed by you, many times, and I expected to tell you so, loudly and often, because that's how this works. In some cases you've done better than I would have hoped, in some cases you've done worse. This isn't me saying OH WOE IS ME I WUZ BETRAYED BY DEMOCRAT SOCIALIST JESUS. This is me saying, you blew this fucking call.

Al Qaeda may not need proof of our perfidy to use our misdeeds against us; those predisposed to hate us may not need proof to be enraged. America needs proof of what's been done because our national capacity for self-delusion has not yet reached its zenith, and until you shove something in our faces a thousand times we're pretty damn happy to pretend it doesn't exist. America needs proof because until we see it we don't believe it, and we need to believe this if we're ever to stop it from happening again. You're not in the job of protecting people from the consequences of their country's history, you're in the business of serving this country, and we need to see what happened. Do you really think the Taliban are the ones that need the proof?

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Goodbye to Bud Shrake: Hipster, Sportswriter, Novelist, Mad Dog, First Guy

[For those wondering about my promised followup to the post on The Gay Place and Billy Brammer, rest assured Parts II and III are coming.  In the meantime, consider this highly relevant background material.]

They buried Bud Shrake yesterday.  At the age of 77, cancer finally got him.  Willie sang at the funeral and Jerry Jeff sang at the graveside service in the Texas State Cemetery.  That's where we bury our war heroes, politicians, scoundrels, and other notables, or as the brochure says, "legendary Texans who have made the state what it is today." 

Given that a great deal of what he was best known for ran pretty much counter to what most people think Texas "is today," Shrake might have taken issue with that bit. Kind of like he questioned, rather famously, the demands of the muggers who accosted him one wild night in New York:

It was there that I heard the story of Bud being high on LSD walking around New York one night and being stuck up at gunpoint by two robbers. One of the gunmen demanded of Bud, “Give me all your money.” Bud said that the demand had seemed really comprehensive, and since the guy was so insistent, and he was in a highly sensitive state, he was cooperative. “All my money? All my money? Well, I can’t give you all my money right now. Some of it is at home. Some of it is in the bank. We can go to my house and I have several hundred dollars there, and I can get my checkbook and write you a check for the rest.” He looked at the robbers very earnestly with a wild-eyed acid stare. The gunman reportedly said, “This guy ain’t right.” And they promptly left him standing there with his billfold and the cash he had still on him.

Probably best known outside Texas as a staff writer for Sports Illustrated and co-author of the best selling sports book of all time, the golf bible Harvey Penick's Little Red Book,  Edwin "Bud" Shrake also wrote  11 novels, a slew of screenplays, and was working on a play (not his first) at the time of his death. He first made his writing bones at the Fort Worth Press, covering the police, in direct competition with his lifetime partner-in-crime Gary Cartwright, who worked the same beat for the Star-Telegram. The two worked in Dallas a few years later, shared an apartment there, and became well known for hosting parties where hipsters, musicians, bums off the street, local celebrities, strippers, polticians, athletes, and probably even cops mixed it up together after hours. It was during this time, in the early 60s, that Shrake came to know local club owner Jack Ruby. This is the backdrop for Shrake's wonderfully bent novel Strange Peaches. Don Graham describes the book:

Shrake's 1972 novel brings that world of big money, organized crime, right-wing politics, and prostitutes, all laced with booze and drugs, into sharp focus in the months leading up to November 22, 1963. The narrator, a tall, sardonic Texan named John Lee Wallace, is a TV actor, the star of Six Guns Across Texas. Based loosely on Shrake, who at that time was a well-known sportswriter in Dallas, John Lee drops out of stardom to return to Big D, where the parties never stop. His best friend is Buster Gregory, a wild-man photographer modeled on Shrake's friend Gary Cartwright (also a well-known sportswriter who is now a senior editor at Texas Monthly). Together they set out to make a documentary about modern Texas.

John Lee and Buster later end up along the motorcade route (as did Shrake and Cartwright), filming as JFK's assassination unfolds in front of them. Later in the novel, a goat eats the footage.

Shrake and Cartwright's greatest collaborative effort was probably "founding" Mad Dog.  What was Mad Dog, you ask?  A good question with a lot of answers, the best of them probably long, incoherent, or lost in a haze.

An attempt at definition: Mad Dog is the chosen name of a band of rebellious artists -- mainly writers and journalists but also musicians and painters -- who lived in Texas, mostly in Austin, in the late Sixties and early Seventies who partied and wrote in an identifiably Texan, outlaw manner.

In addition to Shrake and Cartwright, the core Mad Dogs were Cartwright's wife Phyllis, actors Dennis Hopper, Peter Boyle, and Warren Oates, film producer Marvin Schwarz, Willie Nelson, Jerry Jeff  and Susan Walker, North Dallas Forty author Peter Gent and wife Jody, Bill Brammer and first wife wife Nadine Eckhardt, painter and sculptor Fletcher Boone, civil rights lawyer David Richards and his wife Ann (yes, that Ann Richards), author Larry L. King, and select other movers and shakers from Austin, New York and Hollywood, but mostly Austin. True Mad Dogs were invited, given two pesos or a $2 bill and the Mad Dog calling card. According to Shrake, the last ever inducted Mad Dog was producer screenwriter writer David Milch, of NYPD Blue and Deadwood fame.

The Mad Dog motto was "doing indefinable services for mankind,"  their slogan: "anything that's not a mystery is guesswork." In addition to enjoying prodigious amounts of alcohol, drugs, and sex with each other's spouses, the original Mad Dogs created a fair portion of what would become the modern Texas literary canon, not to mention their impact on music, politics, and the Austin sensibility.

Mad Dogs did what young artists and intellectuals in a notably conservative environment tend to do: They fought with and changed the culture. Mad Dog behavior generally fits in with what one hears about the Sixties counterculture that was being waged on a national level, but Mad Dog and the counterculture are not the same thing. The anti-Texas fervor that existed in the nation after the JFK assassination, coupled with the transformation that was happening in Texas from a rural to urban society, made Mad Dog artists acutely aware of their status as creative people from a place that most observers thought was deeply uncreative. "And when we greeted each other, we said, 'Haw yew,' just like Bill[y] Lee's characters did," Jay Dunston Milner, a novelist, journalist, and professor, writes in Confessions of a Maddog: A High-flying Romp Through the Texas Music and Literary Era of the Fifties to the Seventies (1998). "We exaggerated the cadence and flatness of our Texas accents and articulations, especially when in the company of those we somewhat snidely regarded as being on the pompous side." An example of how to push the envelope (which can be attributed to Bud Shrake, who is 6'6"): If you are invited to a party thrown in honor of Abe Rosenthal, then the editor of The New York Times, dress up as a giant Tampax and greet him at the door. (Sure! Why not?) This was the party David and Ann Richards threw at their home in Westlake, a "Mad Dog sanctuary," according to Cartwright, and even today, this is a party that people will not stop talking about.

In short, they kept it weird, and they kept it real.

Finally, it's not certain (at least not publicly) how and exactly when Shrake and Ann Richards became an item, but it was long after the glory days of Mad Dog.  Apparently it started innocently enough, during Richard's term as Governor - they were both voracious film goers and they liked going to movies together. Shrake was often referred to as "the First Guy" of Texas and the pair remained companions for the next 16 years, until Richards' death in 2006.

"They were both very mysterious about it, and when you would ask them, they said, 'We intend to grow old together,'"  according to Cartwright.

Shrake was buried next to Richards yesterday.

Bloggers Are Parasites Killing the Host

Congrats to Marcy (scroll down to the "blog" category)!

A.

It's Nobody's Fault

Michael Connelly, letting everybody off the hook:

The Wall Street Journal: In this book Jack is quite bitter about being pushed out of his job. Who is the villain?

Michael Connelly: I don't think there is a real villain, which is what makes it good to write about. Papers are losing money, which means measures have to be taken. You're seeing cutbacks in all phases. Because I'm an old reporter, I think the newsroom cutbacks have a larger ripple effect in terms of what the papers deliver to the community. In Los Angeles, the community isn't getting the paper it got even five years ago. The paper doesn't have the resources. You see it in the breadth and depth of the news reporting. Their commitment to the news has been a retreat because of economic constraints. But it doesn't make the company a villain. What can it do? We're seeing a societal change.

WSJ: How should the Chandler family, which sold the Los Angeles Times to the Tribune Co., be judged today? Were they smart to have sold when they did?

Mr. Connelly: It looks that way. Should they have gone down with a sinking ship? I don't think so. One of the great things about fiction is you can use an issue and describe it in human terms. Through this story you get a sense of what the disappearing newspaper will mean for a community. But you don't have to have an answer. You can initiate thought and debate on the subject. I don't want to be didactic. The newspaper corporation isn't the villain. You can focus on the guy at the top as many do. But you have to question what choices they have.

Okay. Fine. Let's question what choices they have. I know Connelly meant this as some kind of shrug, as sort of "oh, well, what can you do?" kind of excuse, but I don't, actually. It's amazing how that works. I can  question what choices they have because I know what choices they have and so does everybody else who possesses a functioning brain stem and the ability to read an income-expense statement.

The "choices" that were made, more often than not, were choices to give up rather than fight, to sit back and let others take the lead in innovation and invention rather than lead ourselves, to sacrifice the simple things readers wanted in favor of more and more and more profit, and to treat anyone with ideas about how to fix it like a cute little puppy yapping at their heels instead of listening and letting them help. The choice they had was to not suck anymore, and they chose to be paralyzed by fear and corporate assholitude and to do nothing, and now they want to blame "societal change." And plenty of otherwise intelligent people are so Stockholmed by years of their bosses' bullshit that they regurgitate it unthinkingly in interviews with the Wall Street Journal.

Goddammit, this pisses me off. It might be easier for Connelly and plenty of others to imagine this was the only way it could have gone. It might be easier for us all to think there was nothing we could have done, it's a "societal change" (again, blaming the consumers for your product sucking is SUCH a smart marketing strategy), it's all just out of our hands. Let's move on, watch Good Morning America together and get closure. Well, fuck that. I sat in too many of those meetings. They don't get to let themselves off the hook like that. It wasn't "society" and it wasn't the Internet and you can't shrug off what happened by saying they had no choice.

Sam Zell had a choice when he overburdened the Tribune Co. with debt. Conrad Black and David Radler (MAY THEY ROT IN HELL) had a choice when they used Hollinger as an ATM for their personal amusement. Dennis Fitzsimmons had a choice when he walked away from the Tribune Company — having gutted and skullfucked it — with millions of dollars in compensation. The publisher of the Boston Globe will get a $1.5 million severance package should he get himself shitcanned. And Gannett papers are pulling down double-digit profits while talking about downturns and layoffs. The Rocky had thousands of subscribers. What were the choices they made? Can we question those?

Or does that get in the way of a good cynicism session? Jesus tits.

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Moral Compasses and the Desire to Stay Lost

I was at an office lunch yesterday. We were at a large hotel and from my vantage point in the restaurant, looking across the expanse of the busy first floor and lobby, I could see three different televisions, all huge. I was somewhat cheered that only one was tuned to Fox but watching them during the hour and half we sat there, I couldn't push down one of the recurring depressing thoughts I can't ever seem to lose: It didn't have to come to this.

Two, three, even four years ago, what we needed to know was there, some of it at least, it was right in front of us. About the economy, certainly much of it was apparent to those who cared to know. Also about the war(s), about torture. It's not about lack of information, and it's not just about lack of curiosity, it's the fucking lack of the validity of curiosity.

You all know this. Of course this isn't wildly original thought on my part. But it's one of the places I revisit too often, like when I watched this interview with Eliot Spitzer.

Visit msnbc.com for Breaking News, World News, and News about the Economy

Hopscotch

 

I've been following the saga of what Nancy Pelosi knew and when she knew it, along with Jello Jay's contribution to the story today.  And the whole thing just reeks of CIA ass-covering.  The Republicans are too busy trying to claim torture is peachy to be spending any time dumping blame on Nancy and Co.  No, this sounds to me like the CIA trying to deflect blame.  In the slimiest manner possible.

Which gives me a very lame excuse to talk about my favorite movie of all time (well, excluding the Audrey Hepburn oeuvre):

Hopscotch.

There's a reason the Criterion Collection remastered it.  It has it all--comedy, adventure, romance (and A, if Edward James Olmos and Mary McDonnell didn't watch this movie to get inspiration, you coulda fooled me.  Best. Middle-aged sexy.  Evah.).  Walter Matthau, Glenda Jackson, Ned Beatty (as a CIA ass who needs covering), and Sam Waterston in the role that made me love him forever, even before I'll Fly Away.

Anyway, I'm thinking the CIA needs a Miles Kendig to do a little housecleaning.  Too bad he's just a fictional character...

Bloggers Have No Ethical Standards

And they uncritically churn out poorly sourced, inaccurate crap:

DUBLIN - When Dublin university student Shane Fitzgerald posted a poetic but phony quote on Wikipedia, he said he was testing how our globalized, increasingly Internet-dependent media was upholding accuracy and accountability in an age of instant news.

His report card: Wikipedia passed. Journalism flunked.

The sociology major's made-up quote — which he added to the Wikipedia page of Maurice Jarre hours after the French composer's death March 28 — flew straight on to dozens of U.S. blogs and newspaper Web sites in Britain, Australia and India.

They used the fabricated material, Fitzgerald said, even though administrators at the free online encyclopedia quickly caught the quote's lack of attribution and removed it, but not quickly enough to keep some journalists from cutting and pasting it first.

A full month went by and nobody noticed the editorial fraud.

[snip]

So far, The Guardian is the only publication to make a public mea culpa, while others have eliminated or amended their online obituaries without any reference to the original version — or in a few cases, still are citing Fitzgerald's florid prose weeks after he pointed out its true origin.

But the real problem with blogging is that there's no stylebook!

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Update: Hat tip to Dan who posted it in this comment thread long before Yahoo News was on the case. This is yet further proof of the erosion of credibility caused by blogging. *falls on journalism sword*

Some Other Mother's Son

Richard Cohen asks several stupid questions:

But where I reserve a soupçon of doubt is over the question of whether "enhanced interrogation techniques" actually work. That they do not is a matter of absolute conviction among those on the political left, who seem to think that the CIA tortured suspected terrorists just for the hell of it.

You comfortably situated loudmouthed ponce. The point wasn't that it worked or didn't work. The point wasn't that Jack Bauer sometimes had to torture people to stop a ticking time bomb. That was NEVER the point. It was, on occasion, an addendum to the point which is YOU DO NOT DO THIS EVER, whether it works or not. Not because your enemies don't deserve to get it but because you don't deserve to dish it out. Among "those on the political left," who by the way have been right about everything in the past eight years while you sat on your hands for fear of looking like a pussy, the point wasn't about the efficacy of torture, it was about the rule of law.

Dumbass. I don't care whether the CIA tortured people because they really thought it would work or they really thought there was a ticking time bomb or because it was Tuesday and they were bored and yes, they wanted to do it for the hell of it. I am supremely uninterested in the why of what they did. I'm interested in the what, and the who, and the when, because that's the sort of stuff you need to know to know if they BROKE THE LAW.

Cheney is a one-man credibility gap. In the past, he has said, "We know they [the Iraqis] have biological and chemical weapons," when it turned out we knew nothing of the sort. He insisted that "the evidence is overwhelming" that al-Qaeda had been in high-level contact with Saddam Hussein's regime when the "evidence" was virtually nonexistent. And he repeatedly asserted that Iraq had a menacing nuclear weapons program. As a used-car dealer, he would have no return customers.

Still, every dog has his day, and Cheney is barking up a storm on the efficacy of what can colloquially be called torture. He says he knows of two CIA memos that support his contention that the harsh interrogation methods worked and that many lives were saved. "That's what's in those memos," he told Schieffer. They talk "specifically about different attack planning that was underway and how it was stopped."

You know, I've met people who can't commit to a job, or a house, or a person. People who dither over the menu and fret about what to order at the bar. I know people with commitment issues but I swear to Peanut Butter Jesus that I have never seen anybody as unwilling to commit to a conviction as the premiere "liberal" columnist of the Washington Post.

Cheney sucks and has always been wrong about everything, but maybe he's right about this, so let's give him the benefit of the doubt I do not deign to extend to any of his dreadlocked pot-smoking protester critics, because they're not real men like Dick and me.

Inescapably, it is about life and death -- not ideology, but people hurling themselves from the burning World Trade Center. If Cheney is right, then let the debate begin: What to do about enhanced interrogation methods? Should they be banned across the board, always and forever?

YES.

Next?

In political terms, Cheney has been a free man ever since he eschewed any presidential ambitions. He became the most impolitic of politicians and continues in that role, taking neither a vow of penitence nor a vow of silence in his vice presidential afterlife.

How selfless of him. How kind of Dick to continue to favor us with his impartial insights now that all he has to care about is his immortal, noble soul. It's so sweet, it almost makes me forget how he GOT A LOT OF PEOPLE DEAD AND LIED ABOUT IT. And all he has to care about is that his reputation is now somewhere on the global scale of ick between chlamydia and genocide, so naturally he has no interest in anything but making America better with his magic words.

Kill me now. Really, what the fuck does he have to care? It won't be Richard Cohen's children being waterboarded. It won't be Dick Cheney's children under the lights, in a box with bugs, hooked up to electrodes and made to scream for his amusement and estimation of his manhood. It'll be other people, who they will never have to meet, so it will be perfectly all right for them to continue to talk about how it's noble to torture people and have them deported in secret because their imaginations make it okay. They'll never have to know the cost. I think even if you shoved the bill under their noses, they'd just push it away.

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A Little Congressional PEP

It's my least favorite time of year at work.  We have this fun thing called PEP.  Performance Excellence Plan.  It's exactly what you think it is.

PEP.  Of all the stupid acronyms.  So anyway, I'm bracing myself for the silliness that is the PEP review, where my boss gives me my little review packet, and I get to go through it and say, "Yep.  I'm average," and then I meet with him and we both say, "Yep, I'm average."  Because we've been told in no uncertain terms that there will be no "grade inflation" on the PEP.  (You have to walk on water, rescue a baby harp seal, clean up a Superfund site, and repair the Hubble telescope to get "above average.") Then my boss tells me I need to network more, and I think to myself, "Yeah, I'll get right on that.  Just as soon as I get through the four-foot deep pile of data requests I have on my desk."  (Don't get me wrong--I like my boss, he's great.  It's the PEP I have a problem with.)

But it got me to thinking...why don't we have PEPs for our Congresscritters?  After all, if I have to suffer through this, why don't they?  Yes, I know, the election is kind of a PEP, but why not give them feedback before the election, while they still have a chance to do something about it?  HR always says you have to offer opportunities for improvement before firing somebody, after all.

I was over at Kos the other day and they had a thing about the NY Legislature's new web site.  (Check out the post...it's really interesting.)  To have the ability to comment directly on pending legislation?  Wow.  I think Congress needs to take a hint.  Our president has gotten into the interactive government idea, too, guys.  How 'bout you put together something like this?  Give each congressperson a handy-dandy website where their constituents can rate them on their job performance, can offer suggestions on specific legislation, can get more directly involved.  It might even help dilute the influence of lobbyists (I know, call me Pollyanna...)

Obviously, that's not gonna happen anytime soon, so in the meantime, how's your congresscritter doing?  Mine, Congresswoman Betsy Markey, would have to work pretty hard to annoy me, since she replaced Marilyn Musgrave, but so far I'm not unhappy.  I didn't like her vote against the Conyers mortgage bill, and I sent her a note about that.  Other than that, she's keeping her head down, which is okay for now.  (I'm keeping an eye on her with regard to health care reform...)  So, Congresswoman Markey, yep, you're average.  Way to go!  Now, you need to network a little more...

(By the way, I checked up on my gal here: Project VoteSmart.  A very handy way to check up on your critter's voting record, stance on the issues, etc.  Y'all are probably well aware of it, but I like to remind people these tools exist.  Real tools, I mean.  Not the "he's a tool!" sort of tool.)

Colbert going to Iraq in June

From Stars and Stripes:

Stephen Colbert isn’t saying when he is going downrange to entertain U.S. troops.

He says the Pentagon has told him to keep quiet and he has made the fact that he can’t talk about his trip a recurring gag on his show.

Recently, he had a series of puzzles on an episode that allegedly reveal when and where he is going.

As it turns out, it didn’t take a puzzle master to find out that Colbert is headed to Iraq in June.

“The Colbert show asked for, and was given by [Multi-National Force-Iraq], some guidance on how they should do any advance notice of the shows -- they can speak in generics, specifying that shows would be next month/early June, but not mention specific dates,” said Air Force Maj. John Redfield, a spokesman for U.S. Central Command.

Sigh

You're either a starfucker or you think you might be able to fuck a star one day:

I mean, how can anyone look at a system where Cokie Roberts has two high-profile gigs, where Luke Russert it on tv solely by dint of his last name, where the “dean” of political reporters regularly talks about being bored by facts and figures, and not think to themselves “this is fucking ridiculous”? The thing I’d like to know, and I’ve asked a lot of political reporters but never gotten an honest reply, is: do many people in the media feel this way too? And if they don’t, what the hell is wrong with them?

In the first place, plenty of good reporters in small and mid-size markets think the TV/columnist/pundit star system is utter bullshit but are powerless to do anything about it being as they spend every goddamn second of their lives working their asses off in professional environments that would make most of us sick from stress.

In the second place, those higher up who might be able to credibly tell Cokie and Broder to suck it are delusional enough to think if they just keep kissing up and kicking down, they'll be able to one day join that august company of jackasses who make money yelling at each other on TV and getting invited to parties. So it's sort of like the class warfare argument. You're counting on people identifying with the rich because they aspire to be rich someday, and sadly, plenty of people are dumb enough to play that game.

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The Internet: Murder By Decree

Shit, I slipped, tripped, and killed journalism again.

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The Wingnuts' Cheeto Feast is Cancelled

Roxana Saberi to be freed.

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Today on The Freeperati's Obsession with Themselves

Tommy e-mailed me last night to say he was under the weather, couldn't possibly compound his pain with an excursion into the Internet's very own heart of darkness, and could I see if the cleaners had gotten my Haz-Mat suit back yet?

They hadn't, but I found about eight rolls of plastic wrap and a hockey stick and figured that would do. Let's head on in to see what we can see, okay?

First, from the White House Correspondents' Association dinner:

Comedian Wanda Sykes took a sharp swipe at Rush Limbaugh at tonight's White House Correspondent's Dinner:

"You've had your fair share of critics. ... Rush Limbaugh said this administration fails. ... He just wants the country to fail. To me that's treason. He's not saying anything different than what Osama Bin Laden is saying. You might want to look into this, sir, because I think Rush Limbaugh was the 20th hijacker but he was just so strung out on Oxycontin he missed his flight. ... Rush Limbaugh, I hope the country fails, I hope his kidneys fail, how about that? He needs a good waterboarding, that's what he needs."

1 posted on Sat May 9 22:05:46 2009 by Tessared

To: Tessared

That O thought it was hilariously funny is most offensive.

But then he has no class, NONE.

7 posted on Sat May 9 22:09:18 2009 by Carley (OBAMA IS A MALEVOLENT FORCE IN THE WORLD)

Well, it's good you all are here to teach us about class, right?

That ugly lesbian bitch needs to get a life.

12 posted on Sat May 9 22:11:41 2009 by JRochelle (Don't smoke the Hopium.)

Another unfunny, crude, black comedienne. I Just can’t get enough of them.

18 posted on Sat May 9 22:13:47 2009 by Nonstatist

I hope she chokes to death on one of her fried chicken bones or watermelon rinds....slowly

147 posted on Sun May 10 16:25:07 2009 by wheresmycheckbarry?

There is a reason that stereotypes become well.. stereotypes....

160 posted on Sun May 10 18:18:44 2009 by hatfieldmccoy (Satan has a new name and it is Islam)

A Dyke Called Wanda

108 posted on Sun May 10 10:46:45 2009 by A_Former_Democrat

A FILTH called Wanda.

114 posted on Sun May 10 11:44:47 2009 by Fudd Fan (Pres--dent 0zer0 is a train wreck. DON'T LOOK, ETHEL!)

Not only are they classy, they're original, too!

Happy Mother's Day, Mom

Thank you. You know what for.



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Not Completely Useless

The Nerd Prom:

Proceeds from this year's event go to feeding the hungry and funding journalism scholarships.

The correspondents' association donated $23,000 — some of it saved by skipping formal dessert at the dinner — and raised another $75,000 from several major media organizations for two food banks, So Others Might Eat and Share Our Strength.

Funding for the journalism scholarships remained at $132,000 a year, an expanded level set in 2008.

Michelle hands them out:



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