Come for the politics, stay for the snark.

It’s easy to sit in safety and prescribe what other people should be doing.

Proof that we need a blogger ethics panel.

The willow is too close to the house.

In after Baud. Damn.

Incompetence, fear, or corruption? why not all three?

A democracy can’t function when people can’t distinguish facts from lies.

🎶 Those boots were made for mockin’ 🎵

One way or another, he’s a liar.

If you tweet it in all caps, that makes it true!

The party of Reagan has become the party of Putin.

“Alexa, change the president.”

T R E 4 5 O N

Let’s delete this post and never speak of this again.

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

Books are my comfort food!

“Loving your country does not mean lying about its history.”

Motto for the House: Flip 5 and lose none.

They want us to be overwhelmed and exhausted. Focus. Resist. Oppose.

Insiders who complain to politico: please report to the white house office of shut the fuck up.

Today in our ongoing national embarrassment…

Second rate reporter says what?

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

You know it’s bad when the Project 2025 people have to create training videos on “How To Be Normal”.

Wake up. Grow up. Get in the fight.

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Archives for 2014

Open Thread: Bernie’s Journey

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Vermont Sen. Bernie Sanders says he’ll make a decision by March on whether or not he wants to challenge for the Dem nomination in 2016.

Vermont independent Sen. Bernie Sanders says he’ll decide by March whether to launch a 2016 presidential campaign and, if so, whether he’ll seek the Democratic nomination. Either way, Sanders says he wouldn’t run just to nudge the debate to the left.

“I don’t want to do it unless I can do it well,” he told The Associated Press. “I don’t want to do it unless we can win this thing.”

That makes me think he won’t pull a Nader and run as a third party, if he runs, he’ll go after the Dem nomination.

Open thread otherwise.

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Saturday Morning Open Thread: Tone

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basic male compliments
(Scott Meyer’s website)
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Great Boomer line of the week, from Mr. Charles P. Pierce at his Grantland gig:

I can say I have lived from the time when museums put stuffed birds on display, through the time when they put actual birds on display, all the way to the time when kids play with animated birds on their telephones while the actual birds on display wonder whether they’re wasting their time flying around like that. It’s a wonderful world.

For further explication, you’re gonna have to click the link.

What’s on the agenda for the (official/ongoing) last weekend of 2014?

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A Worthy Choice

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CJR chooses Don Lemon as one of the worsts in journalism:

As one of the most recognizable anchors on CNN, Don Lemon has helped lead the cable network’s coverage of the biggest stories of the year. Live television is exceedingly difficult to produce, of course, but Lemon’s gaffes this year offer a case study in how to choose words wisely — or not.

On March 20, he asked guests whether Malaysia Airlines Flight 370 could have been swallowed by a black hole: “I know it’s preposterous, but is it preposterous?” He later compared spanking children to training dogs and probed similarities between the release of US Army POW Bowe Bergdahl and the Showtime series Homeland. When an alleged Bill Cosby rape victim appeared on his show on Nov. 18, he lectured, “You know, there are ways not to perform oral sex if you didn’t want to do it…Meaning the use of teeth, right?” Less than a week later, as protests turned violent in Ferguson, MO, he described the scene: “Obviously, there’s a smell of marijuana in the air.” Lemon’s job isn’t easy. But he’s earned a DART for going there. Obviously.

He’s just horrible.

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Long Read: “Scary Movie About Sex-Trafficking Based on a True Story—Or Was It?”

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(NSFW – no visuals, but many words liable to trip filters. Also, Trigger warning, for obvious reasons)

Women are chained to their sewing machines, young teenage migrants pick crops, but if you really want to massage American outrage glands you want to talk about sex. Or sexual abuse, which a great many people conflate with that loaded three-letter word. Weird but very worthwhile article by Jen Graves in Seattle’s The Stranger:

Eden is a 2012 film about a suburban teenage girl kidnapped from her hometown in New Mexico and taken into a warehouse outside Las Vegas, where she is forced into a factory of sex slaves headed by a crooked US Marshal. The girls live in punishing conditions. They’re lined up for mandatory pregnancy tests and mystery injections. Tracking cuffs are strapped to their ankles. Their clients come from every level of American society: businessmen, fraternity guys, politicians. Assigned the name Eden, the girl we follow is imprisoned, beaten, raped, whipped, and tortured. Her only route to escape is through the ultimate betrayal, convincing sex-trafficking ringleaders she is loyal to them by becoming their madam—selling other women to save herself.

As the movie makes clear, Eden’s story is based on the life of a real woman. She is Chong Kim, a noted crusader against sex trafficking. The movie premiered at the South by Southwest Film Festival, where it won the Audience Award, and then played the Seattle International Film Festival, where its star Jamie Chung won the Golden Space Needle Award for best actress. At a film festival in Milan, Edem‘s producers and its director also won awards. For Eden‘s official theatrical release in May 2013, SIFF hosted a sold-out screening at SIFF Cinema Uptown. The lights went down, and the very first words to appear on-screen were “BASED ON A TRUE STORY.”…

Chong Kim, the person the movie was based on, had shared her story in writing before. She was known in the anti-sex-trafficking world, and she is a regular speaker on being a human trafficking survivor, represented by the global speaker’s agency American Program Bureau. Two years before this screening, she had e-mailed James Barnes, founder of the nonprofit organization Breaking Out, whose mission is “to identify, investigate, and rescue victims of human trafficking,” according to its Facebook page. Kim was contacting Barnes, according to Barnes, to offer to help raise money for Breaking Out. Barnes describes himself as a private investigator who was first exposed to sex trafficking when he was investigating a missing child case, and then made sex trafficking his cause…

Barnes remembers Kim talking about books and movies she was involved with that would raise money for his cause. She was “really a hero to me,” Barnes said, “because I rescue people but I never get to see what happens to them.”

But soon, Barnes said, Kim actually started asking him for money so that she could travel—with the promise that she would publicize Breaking Out in her travels—”which is kind of one of our red flags.” Then Barnes began looking into Kim’s own story. “It kind of changed every time we talked, and things didn’t make sense.”…

Mistress Matisse, a professional dominatrix and longtime Stranger contributor… sent an e-mail to her editors here in late June referring to a potential lawsuit. “You’re getting this e-mail from me because I want some answers,” Matisse began. “I believe that Seattle filmmakers Colin Plank and Megan Griffiths”—the producer and the director—”have perpetrated a fraud in their movie called Eden. Allegations have been made, and it’s time for them to either double down—or fess up. And as The Stranger played a role in promoting the film, it’s appropriate that The Stranger play a part [in] the truth being told about it.”

The e-mail was signed “Mistress Matisse, endorsed by the members of the Sex Workers Outreach Project of Seattle.” She wrote that she was discussing with a lawyer “the possibility of a class-action lawsuit against the makers of Eden, although I’d want to wait on that until [Plank and Griffiths] have responded to the initial allegations.” The class in question would be sex workers. “Eden is prominently allied with anti-trafficking NGOs that deny that any form of consensual adult sex work even exists,” Matisse wrote.

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Friday Evening Open Thread: Let the Year-End Thumbsuckers Begin!

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If we’re lucky, there’s not gonna be much actual capital-N News produced over the next week or so.

So… what’s on the agenda for the evening?

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Purity Police, Arrest this Man

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Kevin Drum has a piece on Jeb Bush’s dirty money-making activities, including working for a company that profited from Obamacare:

I can’t help but get a chuckle out of this. In normal times, Bush would have left Tenet because it’s a big, soulless corporation that’s paid fines for Medicare fraud and been criticized for dodgy tax practices at the same time it was beefing up executive pay. A man of the people who aspires to the Oval Office can’t afford to be associated with this kind of dirty money.

But no. At least if Politico is to be believed, this isn’t really an issue in the GOP primary. What is an issue is that Tenet might have profited from Obamacare, which in turn means that Jeb may have profited from Obamacare. Even if it’s a double bank shot, that’s dirty money in tea party land.

Kevin’s right that more will be made of the Obamacare connection than Jeb’s other money making schemes, but I’m skeptical about that swaying Republican primary voters. The true believers all hated Romney, for good reason: he had a squishy relationship with abortion, he was responsible for a version of Obamacare in Massachusetts, he was a Mormon, etc. Yet he won the nomination. Bush has a lot of the same negatives as Romney, plus he carries a name that will give Democrats a chance to run against his still-unpopular brother. Still, like Romney, he’s the candidate of the GOP monied elite. That makes him the prohibitive front-runner, no matter how much Obamacare cash has fallen into his pockets. That’s how the Republican Party worked before the advent of the noble Tea Party, and that’s how it works after.

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Boxing Day Open Thread

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I hope everyone who celebrates had a wonderful Christmas and those who don’t had an excellent not-holiday doing whatever while all the Christians (cultural and actual believers) were off the streets.

Our annual Christmas feast went well, except I cut my thumb badly trying to invert a heavy fluted pan containing monkey bread. That was first thing yesterday morning, which meant I had to orchestrate the rest of the dinner with only nine working digits.

We’re off to visit some relatives in the northern part of the state today when everyone else gets up. What are you up to?

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