Open Thread
by Sarah, Proud and Tall| 58 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads, Looks Like I Picked the Wrong Week to Stop Sniffing Glue
Open Thread
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Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Accountability, motherfuckers.
Never entrust democracy to any process that requires republicans to act in good faith.
Tick tock motherfuckers!
When I decide to be condescending, you won’t have to dream up a fantasy about it.
Republican obstruction dressed up as bipartisanship. Again.
I was promised a recession.
It may be funny to you motherfucker, but it’s not funny to me.
Nothing worth doing is easy.
When do we start airlifting the women and children out of Texas?
A snarling mass of vitriolic jackals
You cannot shame the shameless.
It’s always darkest before the other shoe drops.
So it was an October Surprise A Day, like an Advent calendar but for crime.
I see no possible difficulties whatsoever with this fool-proof plan.
We are aware of all internet traditions.
When your entire life is steeped in white supremacy, equality feels like discrimination.
“Everybody’s entitled to be an idiot.”
Republicans don’t want a speaker to lead them; they want a hostage.
Republicans are the party of chaos and catastrophe.
Shallow, uninformed, and lacking identity
🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵
Despite his magical powers, I don’t think Trump is thinking this through, to be honest.
Authoritarian republicans are opposed to freedom for the rest of us.
A last alliance of elves and men. also pet photos.
Punchy
Got hit with 12″ of white stuff last Thursday, now expecting another 12″ or more tonite. Now I know how it feels to be a p0rn star….
Schlemizel
@Punchy:
Where about did that happen? We were projected to get a huge storm here in Minnesota but over the weekend they decided it was mostly going south of us.
I sure would love a snow day!
BTW – I am proud of myself that I didn’t make some comment about it leaving white stuff on your face. Damn, failed!
liberal
Another high-ranking Catholic anti-gay bishop who appears to be a self-hater.
TG Chicago
Not the Oscars, but similiar:
Ronald Reagan does the coin-flip for the 1985 Superbowl via satellite from the White House.
Robin G.
I think I’m supposed to turn in my feminist card for thinking the Onion’s Wallis c-word tweet was pretty funny.
Gin & Tonic
@Robin G.: I know you can’t explain jokes and all, but why do you think it was funny? I don’t see it. She’s just a kid.
Ash Can
@Robin G.: Why was it funny?
Schlemizel
@Robin G.:
I know its my fault for not checking before hand but I shall never forgive you for sending me on a link the the whorefinton post
Amir Khalid
@Robin G.:
For me, using the c-word on a nine-year-old kid is so far out of bounds that I just can’t see the funny in it.
Robin G.
@Gin & Tonic: @Ash Can: I liked the commentary on the behind the scenes fake-to-your-face Hollywood cattiness, wherein (in the joke, which Onion-like exaggerates) not even being nine makes you safe from being cut up in the most offensive ways.
Betty Cracker
@Gin & Tonic: I didn’t find it particularly funny and don’t like use of the c-word in general, but I’m not finding it as hideously offensive as many are. I see what they were trying to do: They’re making fun of Hollywood’s legendary backbiting by applying that to a sweet, beautiful, innocent kid. It’s like praising GWB’s towering intellect.
Robin G.
@Betty Cracker: You said it better than I did.
Ash Can
@Betty Cracker:
@Robin G.:
OK, I can understand that. The harshness of the joke combined with the limitations of Twitter (140 characters means no set-up, no context, and very little nuance) pretty much ensured that it would fall flat for most people, though.
max
@Schlemizel: BTW – I am proud of myself that I didn’t make some comment about it leaving white stuff on your face. Damn, failed!
The national weather service thinks we’re all in a prOno. (Warning: current as of 9:37 EST, soon to change.)
max
[‘And a kinky one, too.’]
JP7505A
Yep unless your really into the ‘Hollywood backstory/culture’ , it does come accross as offensive. Even the Onion misses sometimes
PurpleGirl
I finally looked at a picture of Anne Hathaway. Uh, guys, I hate to tell you this but part of the nipple thing are the dress’s darts. And the darts are very poorly sewn because of the way they peaked. Darts should be much, much more invisible. The dress fabric is too stiff to form a good, flat dart. For a custom made dress, the sewing should have been much better.
Anya
I am just so glad that Zero Dark Thirty didn’t win anything. But I am disappointed about Lincoln losing the Best Picture.
Robin G.
@Ash Can: Definitely true about Twitter. Seth MacFarlane told the same joke onstage last night in the final song, with more set-up “isn’t sha cu– Adorable!” The set up for that actually made it worse, I thought. I’m not sure why he’s not taking it, but the Onion is; people subscribed to the Onion should expect this style of humor (even if this particular joke didn’t work for them), but MacFarlane put it in a general broadcast.
Punchy
@Schlemizel: I’m in the burbs of KC. Now the prediction is up to 20 inches. As a original Chicagoan (Chicagi?), none of this fazes me. But my snow-adverse neighbors are in full on, Beck-style freakout mode. Amusing, actually.
Gin & Tonic
@Betty Cracker: Thanks for ‘splainin. I didn’t necessarily find it offensive, just completely unfunny.
Gin & Tonic
@PurpleGirl: Don’t go spoiling all the fun of people making sophomoric jokes about her nipples.
Betty Cracker
@Robin G.: I thought MacFarlane was pretty lame overall. Even so, I enjoyed the parts of the program I watched more than any other Oscars I’ve seen in years because I’d actually seen most of the movies for a change.
I enjoyed Lincoln and Argo, but I thought Lincoln was the better picture. Still, at least DDL won Best Actor; it would have been a crime if he hadn’t.
Ash Can
@Robin G.: It’s probably because MacFarlane’s crack came amid (as I understand from the commentary I saw on it) an ocean of real-time audio suckitude and kind of got lost in it, whereas a tweet can be screen-grabbed, pulled out of context, and preserved intact indefinitely. This alone made it a tactical error for the Onion. If there were a viral YouTube except going around the Interwebz this morning of MacFarlane’s crack, that would be the equivalent, but that takes time and effort to produce (not to mention the fact that you’d have to be somehow recording the proceedings in the first place).
Robin G.
@Betty Cracker: MacFarlane was awful, I thought. Just lousy delivery and bad timing. But Shirley Bassey and Jennifer Hudson made it worth it, and I liked the speeches overall.
Robin G.
@Ash Can: Very true. A retweet, in addition to being easily misconstrued for the aforementioned 140 characters issue, is a much quicker way to express outrage. Even a YouTube video requires a link. Also, I think a lot of people turned off their TVs after Argo won.
JP7505A
@Punchy: I’m sure as low tax/small gubbberment/layoff public employees types , they won’t mind that the roads will be impassable until sometime late in March when the sun melts the snow. Snowplows are such a waste of money
Betty Cracker
@Robin G.: Have you seen Silver Linings? That’s one I haven’t seen yet. Just wondering if Jennifer Lawrence deserved her award. She was absolutely terrific in “Winter’s Bone,” which was the first thing I’d ever seen her in.
YellowJournalism
@TG Chicago: Dont forget all those times politicians and presidents have thrown out the first ball at baseball games, although I think Michelle got crap before for speaking at a NASCAR event.
And let’s not forget that a former politician is head of the MPAA, and it was rumoured that Clinton would take over for Jack Valenti post-presidency when Valenti retired.
Schlemizel
@Punchy:
I can clearly remember one Thanksgiving week were Minneapolis was visited with a 24″ snowfall on Wednesday and almost as much on Thanksgiving day. I had an 8 foot high wall of snow at the end of my driveway.
bemused
The nutty and bitterly angry rightwingers have way too much time on their hands. They have to manufacture fantastical stories on anything and everything to exist in their alternate world.
My spouse attended the funeral of a 90 year old Army vet yesterday. He was talking to a guy there who said he had heard a story he was skeptical of that Obama had issued a directive to remove the words “On behalf of the President of the the United States” when presenting the flag to the family.
Suffern ACE
@YellowJournalism: Yes. But opening the baseball season is practically an American holiday for a an American sport. Whereas a lot of the pioneering work in movies took place in New York, Hollywood and France.
The Golux
@Robin G.: I thought Shirley Bassey really hit it out of the park. What a great idea to have her reprise the quintessential Bond song. (I was also glad they didn’t feature McCartney’s dreadful “Live And Let Die”.) Adele’s song was pretty meh in my opinion. And who was at the mixing console during her performance? You could hardly hear her at times.
Robin G.
@Betty Cracker: I saw Silver Linings Playbook yesterday and thought it was terrible. It picked up about ten different themes at various points, then dropped them all about halfway to resolving them. The ending was contrived and the entire thing was nowhere near funny enough (either im classic humor or Neil Simon style) to hold it together. Lawrence was as good as ever, but the role was beneath her. (Believe it or not, I actually thought The Hunger Games challenged her more.) I’m very happy for her, she’s one of my favorite actresses, but Wallis was robbed.
Of course, Moonrise Kingdom not being nominated for Best Picture renders the Oscars entirely invalid. Hmph.
Robin G.
@The Golux: Adele is Queen, but the mixing sucked on that, you’re right. And she didn’t really exercise her voice the way I expected. A disappointing followup to Bassey and Hudson.
ruemara
Kinda glad I missed everything. Decided this is the year to finish sets of animations so I can be up there one day and tell everyone who got in my way to suck it.
jibeaux
Didn’t like the Onion tweet at all, and unfollowed them from Twitter so as to really show them. There’s good targets for sarcasm, such as anyone powerful, and there’s bad targets, and then there’s phenomenally bad targets like adorable & talented children. It was out of bounds and wasn’t funny. And Q’s dress was better than 75% of the ones there.
Violet
@PurpleGirl: I really didn’t like Anne Hathaway’s dress. It was a mess. The very wrong darts up front, the sideboob, the apron style, the weird apron/bra strap back, the high slit in the back so most of her leg was visible. Just a complete mess.
jibeaux
@Violet: The description “like a penis in a ballet slipper” came to me from the twitters and will stay with me always.
jibeaux
Interestingly, the Onion seems to have taken down the “joke” from its twitter and facebook feeds. Comments do not appear to be running positively.
Ash Can
@jibeaux: All they have to do is to say, “Look, we were going after the smarmy Hollywood gossips with that crack, not the kid herself. We went about it the wrong way, though, and not only failed to get the joke across but offended a lot of people in the process. We apologize.” And that would be that.
Robin G.
@Ash Can: It’s only been a few (daylight) hours since it happened. I wouldn’t be surprised if an apology came after their people got together and decided on the best wording and method of distribution.
Villago Delenda Est
@Betty Cracker:
For what it’s worth, I think you’ve nailed (and explained well) what The Onion was trying to do. The problem is, we live in a country where some people don’t get that Stephen Colbert is acting the part of a wingnut. If anyone doubts that, recall he broke character and teared up when the networks announced Obama’s election on 4 November 2008. The Onion was definitely going waaaaay over the top in taking on the Hollywood backbiter meme, and it’s a sad testimony to the gullibility of a lot of people that they took that tweet seriously.
Sometimes they have to take into account (particularly on a medium such as twitter) that a lot of people are just not wired properly to understand precisely who they were aiming the dig at. It wasn’t the kid.
Ash Can
@Villago Delenda Est: I had no idea what The Onion was getting at with that tweet myself, and understood only after Robin and Betty explained it. Of course, you can take what I know about contemporary Hollywood and put it in your eye and it wouldn’t make you blink, so my first thought wasn’t “Hollywood backbiters” as soon as I read the tweet, it was “bwa-huh?” But I evidently have a lot of company (e.g., everyone at LGF is losing their shit over the tweet, and no one has even mentioned the actual target of the tweet). The tweet may have hit the actual target, but it was a messy hit and splattered a lot of nasty around. For its own sake, The Onion should at least acknowledge what happened.
And, what Robin G. said.
Robin G.
@Villago Delenda Est: Side note: I think Colbert would be an amazing Oscar host.
Violet
@jibeaux: That’s hilarious. Hadn’t seen that description. Now will never forget it. That’s perfect.
Violet
@Robin G.: I think Colbert would be an amazing host too. He can sing and dance. And he’s just so smart and quick witted.
Origuy
@bemused:
Snopes knows about this one. (Summary: FALSE)
Villago Delenda Est
@Violet:
Which terrifies The Academy (all rights reserved, MPAA) no end.
They saw what he did to WHCA a few years back, and unlike Ed Henry, they’re smart enough to know he’d to the same to them. Because while Colbert did get some jabs in at the deserting coward, the vast majority of his ire was directed at the vermin of the Village, like the insufferable twit Richard Cohen.
Villago Delenda Est
@Ash Can:
If you don’t follow any of the Hollywood gossip types (and I don’t encourage anyone to take it up) you’d never get the reference…you’d take it on face value. I remember sitting through a screening of The Player in Tacoma when it first came out and I was the only one in the audience getting some of the insider jokes, if only because I had read enough about Hollywood to have an appreciation of who Altman was skewering, particularly with the cameos.
Robin G.
@Ash Can: And here’s the apology.
Mnemosyne
@Robin G.:
I’m guessing it was one of those tweets that sounded like a really good idea after your third gin-and-tonic.
Also, too, there is a certain group of white guys who are bound and determined to make the c-word as “inoffensive” in the US as it is in Great Britain. I’m not sure why, and they seem to vastly underestimate how offensive the word actually is even in GB, but they’re bound and determined to do it.
Robin G.
@Mnemosyne: Okay, I’ll be perfectly honest: I’ve never understood why the c-word is so much worse than all the other insults that refer to being a woman as a bad thing. I’m not being glib; I genuinely don’t get it. Is it something about the clipped sound of the word? Is there a historical reference I’m not aware of?
Ash Can
@Robin G.: Wow, that goes even farther than I thought it would. That just reinforces that, fundamentally, The Onion is a decent outfit.
Robin G.
@Ash Can: I was surprised too. I think the TPM headline “Crude Joke Directed At 9 Year Old” is unfair (because I think “at” should be replaced with “about” or “involving”) but the apology itself was very sincere.
The fact is, if you have to explain your joke to the majority of people, then you failed at telling it — and in this case the failure meant implying something really awful. Good on them for expressing so much regret.
Mnemosyne
@Robin G.:
I think it’s because it’s such a specific reference to genitalia, which none of the other insults are, and it’s still considered rude to discuss genitalia in mixed company. But it’s also the worst because it’s the worst, IYKWIM — there’s not really a rational reason for it, any more than there’s a rational reason why the n-word is the worst insult a non-black person can direct at an African-American.
Another Halocene Human
Appropriate place to bring up Jen Rubin’s freakout over Ms. Obama’s Oscars appearance?
Rubin sounds like the mean girl in 5th grade who just got foiled by the teachers/parents and can’t let it go.
Robin G.
@Mnemosyne: That’s true, I guess. But “pu–y” (trying to dodge moderation here) also refers to genitalia, and while in most circumstances it’s offensive, it doesn’t seem to garner the same reaction. (Maybe because you can claim you’re referring to a cat?) And “dick” doesn’t even rank as a word you can only say on post-primetime shows. So you’re right, it’s probably just the worst because it’s the worst.
Language is a strange thing.
Bruce S
We don’t have to rationalize Michelle’s appearance by reference to FDR, Reagan or Laura Bush. Michelle on the Oscars was cool. No apologies – let the haters heads explode and fuck them.
That said, I’m mystified by folks who get panties twisted by Onion tweets. That’s just fucking weird. Incidentally, the Onion apologiy was initiated by a guy who bought it and will probably ruin it. I’d much rather that they edge into bad taste periodically than have some prudish dick reining them in.