Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No one could have predicted…

Come on, man.

Sitting here in limbo waiting for the dice to roll

Peak wingnut was a lie.

Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

I’d like to think you all would remain faithful to me if i ever tried to have some of you killed.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

They fucked up the fucking up of the fuckup!

Why is it so hard for them to condemn hate?

Republicans do not pay their debts.

The cruelty is the point; the law be damned.

Optimism opens the door to great things.

Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity

The truth is, these are not very bright guys, and things got out of hand.

New McCarthy, same old McCarthyism.

I like you, you’re my kind of trouble.

A sufficient plurality of insane, greedy people can tank any democratic system ever devised, apparently.

Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.

You cannot shame the shameless.

You can’t attract Republican voters. You can only out organize them.

I’ve spoken to my cat about this, but it doesn’t seem to do any good.

When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?

Russian mouthpiece, go fuck yourself.

This really is a full service blog.

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Biggest Dump Ever

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Wikileaks is preparing to publish a set of Iraq War documents that’s three times larger than the Afghanistan leak.

Overton says that media organizations participating in the project will be making financial contributions to “help meet production costs” and that each media organization will likely come up with its own, at least partly original, take on the material because “everyone wants their exclusive.”

Our noble media — the “real journalists” — are paying a source for information? I thought only the National Enquirer did that. And they’re paying a source that they have tried to specifically exclude from shield laws? Hypocritical fucks.

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20Comments

  4. 4.

    geg6

    The emessem are vying with the GOP and the Christianists to see who can be the biggest hypocrites in the nation. Same as it ever was.

  5. 5.

    El Cid

    According to the link, the main ones who seem to be helping WikiLeaks is not directly the news media but a non-profit UK organization called the ‘Bureau of Investigative Journalism,’ run by many former news media employees who apparently were frustrated at what was not being done.

    Bureau launch attracts further coverage
    __
    April 28th, 2010
    __
    After a successful launch party last Monday, media journalists across the country have reported on the Bureau and its commitment to rigorous investigative journalism.
    __
    Roy Greenslade, writing on his Guardian Blog, outlined the ambitions of the Bureau and applauded its commitment to taking on journalism graduates. “What a chance they have,” he said, “working for an avowedly independent body dedicated exclusively to the craft of investigative journalism.”
    __
    Press Gazette editor, Dominic Ponsford, focused on the Bureau’s invitation for anyone with a great un-published investigation to pitch their story and, if successful, receive funding and support.
    __
    Laura Oliver, editor of Journalism.co.uk, had a slightly different take. She reported on the announcement from James Lee, the Bureau’s chair, that the £2 million grant from the Potter foundation is just the start of its ambitions and that the Bureau aims to explore new funding models for investigative journalism.

    The editor mentioned, Iane Overton:

    Editor: Iain Overton
    __
    Iain is the Editor of the Bureau. Prior to this, he was a commissioning executive at ITN and a senior producer at the BBC.
    __
    His previous work includes investigations into the international trade in counterfeit pharmaceuticals, corporate killings in Iraq, human rights abuses by the Brazilian police and Glasgow gang-land murders linked to security contracts.
    __
    He has worked in over 85 countries around the world and his films have been awarded a Peabody Award, a OneWorld Award and a BAFTA Scotland, amongst others.

    There have been various similar organizations in the US.

    For example, the Fund for Investigative Journalism:

    The Fund for Investigative Journalism was founded in 1969 by the late Philip M. Stern, a public-spirited philanthropist who devoted his life “to balancing the scales of justice,” in the words of a friend.
    __
    Stern was convinced small amounts of money invested in the work of determined journalists would yield enormous results in the fight against racism, poverty, corporate greed and governmental corruption. Stern’s theory proved true in the Fund’s first year, when a tiny grant of $250 enabled reporter Seymour Hersh to begin investigating a tip concerning a U.S. Army massacre at the Vietnamese village of My Lai. A subsequent Fund grant of $2,000 allowed Hersh to finish reporting the story.
    __
    “Think of it,” Stern later wrote, “a mere $2,250 in Fund grants enabled Seymour Hersh to leverage a whiff into a colossal stink and contribute mightily to the change in how Americans viewed the war in Vietnam.”

    The point, of course, was that Hersh et al couldn’t get anyone in the big time news media to care about this story. Hell, none of them printed it until the tiny leftist “Dispatch News Service” and some other local alternative publications around the country did.

  6. 6.

    El Cid

    More importantly, David Brook once again uses his awesome ability to summarize all of world history and sociology to note that America’s problems are mainly that we’re all lazy and soft and not millions of Ben Franklinites any more.

    Then there’s the middle class. The emergence of a service economy created a large population of junior and midlevel office workers. These white-collar workers absorbed their lifestyle standards from the Huxtable family of “The Cosby Show,” not the Kramden family of “The Honeymooners.” As these information workers tried to build lifestyles that fit their station, consumption and debt levels soared. The trade deficit exploded. The economy adjusted to meet their demand — underinvesting in manufacturing and tradable goods and overinvesting in retail and housing.

    Right. Nothing to do with factors such as real individual wages and the explosion of easy credit, but that these lazy non-blue collar types paid too much attention to the wrong TV shows. And the ‘trade deficit’ too is the result of us consumer assholes, nothing to do with the trade and manufacturing policies and wage and regulation costs of the 3rd world nations acting as our companies’ factories.

  7. 7.

    El Cid

    Hersh, My Lai and the Dispatch News Service, from Time in 1969:

    Fantastic Story. When the story finally broke in some detail, it was largely because of the digging of a freelance writer who, to complete his research, had to get a $1,000 grant from a foundation.
    __
    Seymour M. Hersh, 32, had been a police reporter for Chicago’s City News Bureau, a Pentagon reporter for A.P. and a press secretary for Eugene McCarthy. Hersh had written a book on chemical and biological warfare, and he was working on another about the Pentagon when one of his contacts called him in Washington around Oct. 22.
    __
    “I’ve got a fantastic story,” the source said. “There’s a guy down in Benning who is being held on a charge of murdering 70 to 75 Vietnamese civilians.” Hersh put aside his book and started tracking down information that led to an interview with Calley on Nov. 9. He wrote the story the next day, and having failed to interest LIFE and Look when he began his research, decided to peddle it through a Washington outfit called Dispatch News Service.
    __
    D.N.S. was started a few months ago by two 23 year olds, David Obst, who has the title of general manager, and Michael Morrow, its only fulltime staff writer. Obst acknowledges that the service has a left-of-center tone, but he adds: “This is not an antiwar news service, but rather a pro-truth news service.”
    __
    The son of a Los Angeles advertising man, Obst marketed the Hersh story with chip-off-the-old-block hustle. He sat down with a copy of Literary Market Place, which carries the phone numbers of newspaper editors, and started making calls. The approach, Hersh jokingly told him at the time, was somewhat like selling Campbell’s soup.
    __
    “I’m David Obst of the Dispatch News Service, calling from Washington,” he told about 50 editors in the U.S. and Canada. “I’ve got a story I think you’ll be interested in.” Most of the editors responded with remarks like “What’s that agency again?”
    __
    Obst persisted, asking $100 if the story ran. Some 35 newspapers (including the Chicago Sun-Times, the Milwaukee Journal and the St. Louis Post-Dispatch) printed it Nov. 13.

    $100 to print one of the biggest US stories of our history. Our elite media. Other accounts I’ve read had Hersh contacting many more publications than Life and Look, including the New York Times.

    It’s not that no one else covered it — a number of regional newspapers did, much to their credit. And even those led reporting over the big dollar media for months, including interviews with close sources. But it was Hersh who provided the details that an investigative journalist would see as normal, and made the story ‘big news’.

    Curiously, some newspapers barely noted the alleged massacre or ignored it completely. Editorial page comment was even slower to develop. The best reporting continued from Hersh. He interviewed three eyewitnesses for a second D.N.S. story on Nov. 20, and he turned up Paul Meadlo for another numbing account last week.
    __
    D.N.S. passed Meadlo on to CBS for a television interview with Mike Wallace, for which D.N.S. received $10,000 and Meadlo got traveling expenses. For yet another story this week, again sold by D.N.S., Hersh has talked to a returned soldier who describes the killing of a Vietnamese woman by members of Lieutenant Calley’s platoon two days before My Lai.

    In all of the coverage and retrospectives about Hersh’s reporting on My Lai, how many people have ever heard of the Dispatch News Service or the Fund for Investigative Journalism, doing what they should have done, you know — investigating the story and busting their asses trying to get the information into the press?

    I think institutions like FIJ or BIJ might be a lot more needed now than ever.

  8. 8.

    georgia pig

    @El Cid: Yeah, and being a glib newspaper pundit is such a blue-collar move. Yeah, David Brooks is a regular Eric Hoffer. Fuck David Brooks.

  9. 9.

    Michael

    I’m still trying to figure out what the big deal is with getting the “scoop” – in the 24/7 news cycle, scoops don’t matter. I want clarity and accuracy instead.

    One other thing about reporting tweets – you can’t spell twitter without “twit”.

  10. 10.

    Michael

    @El Cid:

    I’m half-tempted to hunt him down and curb stomp him after first wrapping his lips around the curb over that article. Hopefully, all those service workers that he thinks deserve to live in stinking hovels will start treating him with the disdain and contempt he deserves.

    Fuck him in the ear with a rusty reciprocal saw.

  11. 11.

    beltane

    @El Cid: Has David Brooks ever held a real, i.e. non-glamorous sedentary, job at any point in his life? There is nothing I hate more in this world than these lazy-assed rich people lecturing the working class on how they live too well. Brooks and others want their working class to be malnourished, rag clothed, and scab covered so they can regard them as a species apart.

    One thing that can be said is that a nation of Ralph Kramdens is NOT what the David Brooks crowd should want as it would lead to a resurgence of the labor movement. Brooks is, I think, too stupid to realize this.

  13. 13.

    Michael

    @beltane:

    One thing that can be said is that a nation of Ralph Kramdens is NOT what the David Brooks crowd should want as it would lead to a resurgence of the labor movement. Brooks is, I think, too stupid to realize this.
    …
    One thing that can be said is that a nation of Ralph Kramdens is NOT what the David Brooks crowd should want as it would lead to a resurgence of the labor movement. Brooks is, I think, too stupid to realize this.

    Acquaintances gone over to wingnuttery seem to be confused every time I mention that what this country really needs is a return to some good old-fashioned union violence as a message, just so owners, managers, scabs and company thugs realize that there is some consequence to acting like assholes. It won’t make things perfect, but the notion that somebody is going to torch your car or beat you with a bat when you step out in public can go a long way toward inspiring more moderate behavior.

  15. 15.

    Punchy

    If this actually happens, expect the owner of Wikileaks to be tossed in the clink on trumped up charges. The Pentagon will not be made to look the chump more than once.

  17. 17.

    Catsy

    If this actually happens, expect the owner of Wikileaks to be tossed in the clink on trumped up charges.

    Assange is an Australian citizen. It is unclear to me on what grounds he could be extradited to the USA.

    The Pentagon will not be made to look the chump more than once.

    I hope that was snark. The Pentagon has been punked–and has punked itself–so many times at this point that they might as well change the official emblem to a mohawk.

  19. 19.

    Delia

    Maybe Wikileaks can buy a copy of this book. The Pentagon is planning to buy up the whole lot and burn it before anyone else can read it. Even though the Army previously cleared it for publication.

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