Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

No one could have predicted…

Never give a known liar the benefit of the doubt.

Putting aside our relentless self-interest because the moral imperative is crystal clear.

He seems like a smart guy, but JFC, what a dick!

The republican caucus is covering themselves with something, and it is not glory.

rich, arrogant assholes who equate luck with genius

Dear media: perhaps we ought to let Donald Trump speak for himself!

The Giant Orange Man Baby is having a bad day.

I might just take the rest of the day off and do even more nothing than usual.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Many life forms that would benefit from greater intelligence, sadly, do not have it.

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

SCOTUS: It’s not “bribery” unless it comes from the Bribery region of France. Otherwise, it’s merely “sparkling malfeasance”.

I am pretty sure these ‘journalists’ were not always such a bootlicking sycophants.

Pessimism assures that nothing of any importance will change.

Anyone who bans teaching American history has no right to shape America’s future.

The Supreme Court cannot be allowed to become the ultimate, unaccountable arbiter of everything.

Thanks to your bullshit, we are now under siege.

The most dangerous place for a black man in America is in a white man’s imagination.

Celebrate the fucking wins.

Every one of the “Roberts Six” lied to get on the court.

Bad people in a position to do bad things will do bad things because they are bad people. End of story.

Conservatism: there are people the law protects but does not bind and others who the law binds but does not protect.

Boeing: repeatedly making the case for high speed rail.

You are here: Home / Open Threads / Open Thread

Reader Interactions

31Comments

  1. 1.

    cleek

    Ever have one of those days where as soon as you finish something it seems like two other things pop up?

    once. on the toilet. after some bad fish the night before.

  6. 6.

    Brachiator

    Ever have one of those days where as soon as you finish something it seems like two other things pop up?

    Oh,yeah, I can relate. Someone needs to invent a To Do List Pop Up Blocker.

    Have people seen the recent story about public TV station KCET (Los Angeles) deciding to go rogue? By pulling themselves out of the PBS network, they are leaving one of the largest public TV markets in the lurch.

    KCET, the Los Angeles PBS member station, has decided to break away from the public broadcasting network and become an independent station.
    __
    Starting in January, station officials intend to replace such iconic PBS fare as “Charlie Rose,” “NewsHour,” “Sesame Street” and “Masterpiece” with news and documentaries from Japan, Canada and elsewhere, along with old feature films. (KCET will continue to carry PBS programming through the end of December.)
    __
    The drastic move comes after a months-long battle over the dues KCET must pay the national organization. Last year, the dues totaled nearly $7 million, or almost one-fifth of the station’s $37-million net operating revenue. Station officials say that amount is far too high. PBS, fearing that a reduction in the sum could lead to demands for similar discounts from other member stations, refused to budge.

    Smaller stations in the area are promising to come to the rescue, meaning that kiddies won’t go without Sesame Street, and adults won’t go without Antiques Roadshow.

    But are the same technological pressures which are pushing various forms of old media aside, from magazines to newspapers to radio, also threatening the stability of public broadcasting? Do you need a public tv or radio station in every market if you can stream the major programs or get access to them via an iPhone or Android app? What happens to local reporting if the stations cannot depend on the infrastructure of a larger network?

  8. 8.

    New Yorker

    Having it right now. That’s life as a consultant: be on the ground where the operations are going on, and field sometimes inane requests from the bigwigs in the office 400 miles away….

  9. 9.

    BR

    @Brachiator:

    Oh,yeah, I can relate. Someone needs to invent a To Do List Pop Up Blocker.

    It’s called cannabis sativa (the subspecies, as opposed to indica).

  10. 10.

    TJ

    BTW, you got a response from emptywheel.

    Short form: We’re probably fucked big no matter what, but probably somewhat less fucked if we give the banksters a time-out.

  12. 12.

    Ross Hershberger

    No I do not. The universe that I live in is a 1D brane of your 3D universe. By definition things can only happen one at a time.

  13. 13.

    Morbo

    Having one’s furnace inspected only to find out that the gas had not been turned on despite the fact that the utility company had been sending bills for it does tend to result in that feeling, yes.

  14. 14.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    I’m having one of those days where all my jobs are very simple but very boring and too numerous and I can’t get motivated. So I went nut picking over at MyDD. This is from a front-pager who, I believe, is 25 years old. The subject is, honest and for true, Barack Obama’s iPod:

    Incidentally this entire episode helps me understand why so many people are caught up in Obamamania. He’s a cool fellow.

    For perspective, the post also contains some history

    On the morning after a particularly bruising debate with Hillary Rodham Clinton, then-Sen. Obama met with a throng of supporters, flipped off Sen. Clinton, and then brushed his shoulders off, a la Jay-Z.

    I eagerly await a reference to “thuggish supporters” and The Whitey Tape.
    Jerome Armstrong, the John McCain of the left blogosphere, actually invited this hump to post on his blog.

  15. 15.

    middlewest

    as soon as you finish something it seems like two other things pop up?

    You missed an obvious Chilean miner reference here.

  16. 16.

    Anya

    This migth be a stupid question, but is there a way for this blog to coordinate some sort of recruitment of voter protection volunteer lawyers for Illinois and Wisconsin? The GOP, it seems is more ruthless this election cycle and their sliminess and “White Voter Strategy” even more flagrant.

  17. 17.

    mrmcd

    http://www.theatlantic.com/food/archive/2010/10/dont-ban-soda-purchases-a-better-way-to-put-food-stamps-on-a-diet/64412/

    I’m trying to figure out if the author of this post is a fascist, or just really, really dumb. For starters, there’s the practical implications of how different individuals have different calorie needs, and there’s a huge number of ways to game a system like this. What really blows my mind though, if why anyone would think a massive system of electronic surveillance to monitor the eating habits and slowly starve the poor would ever be a good idea on any level.

  18. 18.

    Anya

    Jerome Armstrong, the John McCain of the left blogosphere,

    In what respect Charlie? Seriously I want to know, cuz I’ve never read MyDD.

  19. 19.

    Ferd of the Nort

    Ever have one of those days in which everything seems to go right?

    Doesn’t it confuse the shit out of you?

  20. 20.

    Mnemosyne

    @Jim, Foolish Literalist:

    That’s the same guy who insists that he knows that Obama is exactly like Jimmy Carter despite, you know, not having actually been born until after Carter had been out of office for a decade.

  22. 22.

    Jim, Foolish Literalist

    @Anya: Embittered loser (major PUMA) making himself more ridiculous by giving in to his bitterness as his relevance shrinks.

  26. 26.

    Brachiator

    @Mnemosyne:

    That’s the same guy who insists that he knows that Obama is exactly like Jimmy Carter despite, you know, not having actually been born until after Carter had been out of office for a decade.

    Jimmy Carter and Obama were both born in Kenya.

  29. 29.

    Martin

    @Brachiator:

    But are the same technological pressures which are pushing various forms of old media aside, from magazines to newspapers to radio, also threatening the stability of public broadcasting? Do you need a public tv or radio station in every market if you can stream the major programs or get access to them via an iPhone or Android app? What happens to local reporting if the stations cannot depend on the infrastructure of a larger network?

    Some, but the problem here is different. We get 2 PBS stations on the most basic cable tier and 1 more on the next tier, so there’s a fair bit of redundancy in the market. Back when all this was broadcast, that made sense as SoCal is a big place, but cable allowed all three networks to have effectively the same market.

    As congress has continued to defund public broadcasting, the costs to produce and distribute shows has been shifted more to the networks. With channels like Discovery and NGC now covering more documentary content, fewer viewers are tuning into PBS, and Disney and Nick are siphoning off some of the educational viewership (though not necessarily into educational programming). So, by shifting the model from being more government supported to more viewer supported, and with fewer viewers, the system is somewhat imploding.

    KCET was the top-tier PBS station, and it’s sad that they’re the ones giving up since they did a fair bit of original producing. All of the Huell Howser shows and the like were produced and distributed out of KCET. The other two are smaller, don’t do as much producing, but have had lower operational costs as a result.

    Moving to the internet could be a model, but there’s still the matter of production costs, and there’s the other matter of a decent distribution model. Nobody has quite solved the on-demand to the TV via Internet with monetization problem yet. We’re close, and Netflix is closest, but online won’t be a realistic answer until that loop is closed, and I’m not sure who has the combination of skill/trust to pull it off. Apple has the technical bits and the monetization part, but they aren’t trusted due to their size. Netflix has a similar problem, but they’re more trusted. They don’t have the hardware, though to get you to the TV. Google doesn’t have the monetization part, nor do they appear to want to handle the back-end content hauling. They do everything by proxy, which leaves the really hard bits to everyone else. Microsoft would only fuck it up. Hulu doesn’t have the money or hardware part. Boxee and the other set-top guys are too small. And the cable companies are pulling out the stops to kill these efforts, so they need to be big enough to weather that.

  30. 30.

    Quicksand

    Ever have one of those days where as soon as you finish something it seems like two other things pop up?

    Yes. I call them “weekdays.”

  31. 31.

    Brachiator

    @Martin:

    Some, but the problem here is different. We get 2 PBS stations on the most basic cable tier and 1 more on the next tier, so there’s a fair bit of redundancy in the market. Back when all this was broadcast, that made sense as SoCal is a big place, but cable allowed all three networks to have effectively the same market.

    Not just cable, but broadcast digital TV. Remember that some poorer households without cable could not get the PBS stations like channel 24, 50 or even 58. But they could at least get channel 28 via a conventional TV set. With converter boxes, everything is much easier, but also more complicated.

    But also from what I understand, the sticking point between KCET and PBS were membership dues, not just the impact of Congressional funding.

    I agree with you that alternative channels like Discovery make it harder for public TV stations to justify their existence. And I remember when National Geographic specials were regularly shown on PBS, not on a separate cable channel. But with Internet streaming and other new methods to distribute programming, who needs cable anymore?

    Moving to the internet could be a model, but there’s still the matter of production costs, and there’s the other matter of a decent distribution model. Nobody has quite solved the on-demand to the TV via Internet with monetization problem yet.

    But public television and radio have an additional impediment: appealing to members and potential donors. And here again is where the multiplicity of outlets gets interesting. If I like Fresh Air and can stream it off the Internet, download the podcast or fire up the NPR app, while I might contribute to the originating public radio station, why should I contribute to my local public radio station since I am no longer depending on that station to provide me with the program content?

    The problem exists in a similar way for public TV. The distribution and contribution models aren’t in sync anymore.

Comments are closed.