I’m off to dinner with friends, and I leave you with this cat using a rather unconventional method of drinking water:
I think I tried that with beer as an undergrad a couple decades ago. I seriously hope that is an indoor cat, though.
Archives for 2009
Speak, mammary
Who knew? The FCC is still investigating NippleGate (via):
The FCC has reasserted its power to regulate fleeting nudity and says it wants to further investigate “whether CBS’ indecency violation [in the Janet Jackson/Justin Timberlake Super Bowl reveal] was willful.”
“The evidence in this case strongly suggests that CBS had access to video delay technology at the time of the 2004 Super Bowl,” the commission said Tuesday in a brief to the Third Circuit Appeals Court in the Janet Jackson Super Bowl reveal case. The FCC asked the court to remand the decision back to the FCC so it could investigate further its assertion that the violation was “willful.”
Maybe there was a second nipple on the grassy knoll.
Race to the bottom
I don’t want to obsess too much about the David Brooks piece about how the tea bagger anger is all the hippies’ fault, but Wonkette highlights one of Brooks’s particularly stupid claims: that the fact that tea baggers bought food from black merchants proves that they can’t be racist. Anyone who’s ever spent even a couple days in the south knows that you can eat plenty of food prepared by black people and still be a racist. I thought that Jim Sleeper’s arguments about why he thinks racism isn’t motivating the tea baggers was a bit more convincing. And, finally, since Ben Smith et al. have decided that Bill Cosby is the final arbiter of all things racial, I thought you might be interested in the Cos’s thoughts on tea baggers (actually, they’re pretty thoughtful, to be honest).
But, anyway, to keep things in perspective here, it doesn’t matter whether or not you or I or David Brooks or Jimmy Carter think that racism motivates the tea baggers. Jimmy Carter and I and most of you will vote Democrat in the next election regardless; Brooks will vote Republican regardless. But ask yourself this: do you think that a few years of images of Republicans carrying around signs of a president of color in white face and a president of color in a loin cloth will make voters of color more or less likely to vote Republican in the long term? Tea baggerism is a political dead end and if Republicans were smart, they’d get the hell away from it as fast as they could.
Little Nuts & ACORN
Latoya Peterson at Jezebel has the best concise explanation I’ve seen of the Great FOX News ACORN Scandal. She finds five key questions, and answers them, with an efficiency I can only wish the “established, professional” Media Village Idiots would use more often:
What does ACORN do?
Why did they come up in the 2008 election?
What’s happening with the current controversy?
Where have we seen James O’Keefe before?
What are the mitigating/aggravating factors here?
The comments are well worth reading, too. A number of people discuss their own history with ACORN, stressing the fact that a network of 1200 separate offices with a policy of hiring from the low-income neighborhoods they support, and the usual non-profit-organization tendency to underpay and overwork its staff, will inevitably offer a few soft targets for a right-wing Borat wanna-be with an unlimited budget and no more edifying hobbies to distract him. Since I, unlike Ms. Peterson, am not trying to be scrupulously unbiased, there was one comment I particularly enjoyed:
[T]here are two other “not-malice” possibilities that come to mind as well. 1) As has been pointed out, obvious real-life trolls were obvious and she was fucking with them. 2) When you work in community service in low-income and underprivileged communities, you are often helping people with various mental health problems and people who are just… off. You don’t want to just outright dismiss them, you want to welcome them and accept them, and you kind of develop an attitude of “let’s just hear this guy out.” You can wind up “hearing out” some genuinely messed up and terrible people, because you just kind of get used to folks coming in with very, very, very weird and sketchy claims.
I’m sure Mr. O’Keefe would appreciate the irony that he might just have been mistaken for a genuinely brain-damaged petty criminal looking for a sympathetic audience…
Irving Kristol RIP
Nothing negative to say here of the recently departed. I always find it interesting that he began as a Trotskyite. In my opinion, the Trotskyite notion of permanent revolution informs neoconservatism very strongly to this day. The J-curve, for example, seems to me to be nothing but a quasi-quantitative argument in favor of revolution.
Net neutrality
I’m one of those paranoid people who believes that, left to their own devices, broadband providers will eventually start degrading service to everything but Fox and Drudge, so I was happy to see this, though of course the devil is in the details:
Julius Genachowski, chairman of the Federal Communications Commission, plans to announce new so-called net neutrality rules Monday that would prevent wireless companies from blocking Internet applications, according to a source at the agency.
One principal would clearly state that operators of networks — including wireless firms — cannot discriminate what services and applications run on the Web, the source said.
Spitballs “R” Us
I just love this stuff:
In recent days both Democrat Vice President Joe Biden and the other fellow have begun to make the argument in public that from the point of view of the secure White House, they can somehow see the current dumpster economy smelling better, light at the end of the tunnel, the dawn of a new economic era just over the horizon.
This is based largely on scattered economic stats indicating that things are not so much really getting better; they’re just not getting bad as much as before. Back in those awful winter days when new blood and Aretha Franklin’s hat arrived with such promise and the new team inherited a terrible situation from you-know-who and his evil partner, you-know-him.
Also Fed chairman Ben Bernanke, who also still has a full-time job, sees the recession as virtually over.
But a new poll indicates it’s gonna take a whole lot more than repeated rhetoric to …
…convince skeptical Americans not feeling the $787-billion economic stimulus. The new CNN / Opinion Research poll finds an overwhelming majority of Americans see the country as good and stuck in a recession and have no doubts about it.
That is Andrew Malcolm, Laura Bush’s former press secretary, a man who cheerleaded every single Bush endeavor the last decade and who hasnever found a Republican talking point that didn’t get him excited, giddily blogging at the “liberal” LA Times. Malcolm was last seen mumbling that Obama’s press conference was too boring, and was the man behind the “OH NO THEY HAVE CELL PHONES AT THE SOUP KITCHEN” fauxtrage.
I seriously love this shit. It’s like the arsonist throwing spitballs at the fire department as they try to put out the five-alarm blaze. And if Obama said the economy was still crappy- Malcolm would be one of the first ones accusing him of “talking down the economy.”