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While Seth Rogen fans and trendinistas flock to the independent theatres on Thursday, should the Spousal Unit and I go to The Imitation Game or Theory of Everything at the big chain nearest our favorite Chinese restaurant?
Archives for 2014
Long Read Scroll: “Liking Jazz Is Not Enough”
This @HeerJeet ethering is the last word. "Liking jazz is not enough."https://t.co/aD4NJkeH37
— Ta-Nehisi Coates (@tanehisicoates) December 23, 2014
NERDFIGHT!
Yes, of interest only to specialists or fellow OCD sufferers: Blog favorite Ta-Nehisi Coates applauding Jeet Heer (who just took a job with the “new” TNR) bashing favorite blog-target Andrew Sullivan.
I’d forgotten (I did hate-read the original “Bell Curve” issue, which caused me to cancel my subscription for the first or second time) that all the TNR writers who were not Andrew Sullivan or Marty Perez had strong disagreements with that article.
You may now resume your regularly scheduled Balloon Juice.
I've been talking to lots of people excited to join @TNR & am thrilled about some of our upcoming contributors: pic.twitter.com/ipO1Rk7GVi
— Gabriel Snyder (@gabrielsnyder) December 22, 2014
Long <del>Read</del> Scroll: “Liking Jazz Is Not Enough”Post + Comments (160)
Tuesday Evening Open Thread
Bunny!
Sitting in the backyard drinking cider and thinking about all the shit I have to do to get ready for the holidays. It’s unusually warm here — 70s and 80s clean through New Year’s. What are you up to?
James Bond Thou Never Wert…
(Jim Morin via GoComics.com)
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Yes, of course, the ending of the Cuba embargo is a Very Serious topic, but the jokes remain irresistible. From the NYTimes, “How a Cuban Spy and His Wife Came to Be Expectant Parents“:
It was no easy feat to get a vial of frozen sperm from Gerardo Hernández, a Cuban spy serving two life sentences in California, to Panama, where his wife, desperate to have a baby, was artificially inseminated.
Yet the matter became an urgent priority over the past year for the small group of Cuban and American officials who were secretly working to broker a historic thaw in relations. Facilitating the pregnancy, one of the strangest subplots in the annals of secret negotiations between Washington and Havana, fell largely on the shoulders of a Senate staffer who had become central to laying the groundwork for the change in United States-Cuba policy.
Mr. Hernández was one of three Cuban spies who returned home last Wednesday to a hero’s welcome as part of a deal that included the release of Alan Gross, the American subcontractor imprisoned in Havana for five years. Photographs of Mr. Hernández, who had been in an American prison for 16 years, and his pregnant wife became the talk of the town in Havana. He meekly told reporters that the baby was his, but offered no details.
There are plenty of unsung heroes who helped bring about the shift President Obama and President Raúl Castro of Cuba announced last week. But no one seems to have delivered as much as Tim Rieser, a powerful yet unassuming Senate staffer who advises Senator Patrick Leahy, Democrat of Vermont, on foreign policy and helps put together the State Department budget each year. Besides taking on the unexpected sperm diplomacy task, Mr. Rieser worked tirelessly to improve the treatment of Mr. Gross, who had become despondent and suicidal…
Seriously, kudos to Mr. Rieser. Who’s already heard every possible variation on “not shaking your hand until I’m sure you’ve washed it”…
Grimm’s Fandango
To recap, Republican Rep. Mike Grimm of Staten Island pleads guilty to felony tax evasion, pulls a Trey Radel and refuses to resign.
House Speaker John Boehner’s spokesman Michael Steel said Boehner “won’t have any announcements until the Speaker discusses the matter with Mr. Grimm.”
Members of Congress do not automatically forfeit their office upon conviction of a felony.
It’s unclear whether Grimm will resign. At an Oct. 16 debate, when asked by the moderator whether he would resign if found guilty, Grimm said, “If I was not able to serve then, of course, I would step aside.”
Something something Anthony Weiner’s penis. Oh, and Grimm won in November under 20 counts of indictment, and won by 13 points.
Kinda doubt there’s going to be a groundswell back home to kick the guy out of office.
Open Thread: Five Percenter
US third quarter GDP revised upwards to 5.0%, the best quarterly number in 11 years.
No biggie.
Open thread.
That’s The Sound Of The Police
Team WIN THE MORNING declares Bill de Blasio over or something, because Cops.
Just over a year after sailing into office with 72 percent of the vote on a message of transformational change, de Blasio found his mayoralty subsumed by a torrent of anger, unleashed by the murder of two police officers in Brooklyn Saturday by a troubled gunman who said he was killing “pigs” to avenge the deaths of two men by cops in Staten Island and Ferguson, Missouri. By Monday, de Blasio was lashing out at the press corps that covers him, trying to paper over public divisions with his own police commissioner and coping with what friends described as the emotional blow of facing public rejection by many in the nation’s biggest police force. “He’s pretty badly shaken” by the murders, one told us.
That a civic tragedy would so quickly devolve into a full-blown political crisis for the new mayor was testament to the vehemence of anti-de Blasio elements in the police union – and the mayor’s mistaken belief that his 2013 victory gave him the right to shred an old Gotham political playbook that dictated a mayor show deference to the NYPD.
You can’t be big-city mayor and alienate the cops – and that’s just as true now as it was under three-term New York City Mayor Ed Koch, or even a century ago.
And by “alienate the cops” they mean de Blasio remarking that maybe going around choking unarmed black men to death on smartphone video is something New York’s Finest might want to refrain from doing. You can’t do that, you see. Or at least de Blasio can’t. I wonder why?
But de Blasio’s unpopularity with the historically white-dominated NYPD parallels his increasing struggles with white New Yorkers, who now disapprove of him by a nearly two-to-one margin in public polling. When confronted with similar polling numbers over the last year, de Blasio allies have repeatedly said that the mayor retains the strong backing of non-white New Yorkers and the Democratic base – and claimed the mayor’s private polling showed a much more modest racial disparity.
The blue rage isn’t rooted in any one statement de Blasio has made against cops – in fact, he has been universally supportive of the rank-and-file in his public utterances. But in his past roles as a public official, he’s often sided with the victims of police brutality, and recently told an interviewer that he has told Dante, his teenaged mixed-race son, not to reach for a cellphone around officers because it might put him in danger as a “a young man of color.” He took the unusual step — unimaginable under the mayoralties of Rudy Giuliani or Michael Bloomberg — of inviting Sharpton to City Hall, seating him opposite Bratton at a table where the activist proceeded to strongly denounce the police. (“If Dante wasn’t your son, he’d be a candidate for a chokehold. And we got to deal with that reality,” Sharpton said to de Blasio as Bratton looked on.) Last week, de Blasio privately met with organizers of the Garner protests, another moment that antagonized police.
Gosh, Team WIN THE MORNING certainly is implying a number of reasons why the NYPD doesn’t like de Blasio, and very few have to do with the NYPD and everything to do with de Blasio’s family. The article starts out comparing de Blasio’s “mistakes” to Obama’s (as in treating the NYPD as rational actors the way Obama did with the GOP in his first year when they clearly wanted to destroy him from day one) and notes that de Blasio hasn’t actually said any “anti-police rhetoric” other than “Hey, there are laws you guys need to follow too, like not murdering people.”
I don’t like like the implication.
I like it less because I think for once Politico is right, and the awful part is the advice here of “Know your role and shut your mouth” would probably be best for the Mayor and his family. But it’s not the best advice for the people of New York and America. Somebody needs to remind the cops who they work for, and if de Blasio doesn’t stand up to these assholes, nobody else is going to do it for him.
That’s what being the mayor of a big city means.