Further explication from Ted Rall’s blog: “Want to Support Free Expression After Charlie Hebdo? Hire a Political Cartoonist“:
… After the massacre of four cartoonists at Charlie Hebdo last week, 25 remain on staff at the French publication, whose circulation ranges between 30,000 and 60,000 per week.
In the United States, a total of 25 staff political cartoonists are employed by the nation’s 1,350 newspapers, which have a combined circulation of 44,000,000 daily in print, plus 113,000,000 unique online visitors…
In other news, political cartoonist Jeff Danziger goes to the Washington Post with a fantastic idea for improving our political process:
Vermont should have a primary at the same time as New Hampshire’s. Naturally, New Hampshire, in its spiteful and vicious cupidity, would set its primary before any specific date announced by Vermont. So Vermont’s law has to be framed as follows: “The Vermont primary will be the same day as the New Hampshire primary.” Hah! No matter what date they select, ours will be the same. They can fuss and sue and throw Sununu fits, but whatever day they choose will automatically be Vermont’s, too.
That would mean that the millions in additional trade that goes to New Hampshire would be shared by Vermont. It would also mean that the beggar-thy-neighbor, hard-fisted, poor-mouthing, unchivalrous and ungenerous attitude of New Hampshire would be tempered by the kinder, warmer, more humane Vermont. No matter how much New Hampshire voters forced primary candidates to twist their taxation and social stances into the crabbed demands so common east of the Connecticut River, a countervailing attitude of fair play and friendly persuasion would prevail to the west…
And for us Massholes on the saltwater side of the state, this fine plan would have the additional advantage of reducing the number of attack ads that bombard the local media, because New Hampshire leaches most of its top-dollar media (along with so much else) from the Boston market. Of course, those Bay Staters on the other side of Springfield would see a comparable uptick on their airwave-annoyance scale…
***********
Besides wishing for nice things that will never happen, what’s on the agenda for the day?
Mustang Bobby
The Miami Herald still has their cartoonist: Jim Morin, who’s pretty good. Too bad the opinion page is behind a pay wall.
Awakened at 1:30 a.m. by a heavy thunderstorm, which parallels a segment in my never-ending novel-in-progress that I just completed. Weather follows art.
Another Holocene Human
I’d almost be sympathetic if it was anybody but Ted Rall. He is a joke.
Anyway, I’m posting because I’m wondering if any engineers on here can tell me why we actually hook up metal leads to live electrical leads in our houses. That causes sparks which can cause a fire. Couldn’t we, IDK, use an induction plug?
Also, is it likely that homes in the future will be wired with 5V DC (or is it 3 or 1.5, I can never keep up) like an airport waiting room along side those 110/120V AC at 60Hz to power the vacuum cleaner?
OzarkHillbilly
Odds and ends for my day. Supposed to be fairly nice: sunny, high of 25, winds of 5-7 mph. Seeing as it’s gonna hit the 50s Fri, Sat and Sunday, I think I’ll prep for some of the digging I’m gonna do then.
Another Holocene Human
Also, fucking horrified and disgusted by the WMATA subway “accident”. The arcing was an accident, everything that happened afterwards was human fucking error. Nobody should be dying in subway tunnels due to the actions of transit workers and 40min waits for first responders. The worst has finally, actually come to pass. I feel terrible for that woman’s family. My god.
Carolinus
Is this really as clever as Danziger seems to think it is? Don’t the parties usually punish states that try and legislate around party approved scheduling? As I recall unsanctioned primaries caused a lot of trouble in 2008, with Florida and Michigan being punished, and was the source of a major PUMA rallying cry.
MattF
Via the very helpful Wonkette-not-Newsmax ad:
http://wonkette.com/572033/ben-carson-shilled-scam-aids-and-cancer-cures-for-10-years-will-be-your-next-president-obvs
Looks like Ben Carson was a shill for a snake-oil company. Add his plagiarized ‘book’ and he looks like quite a piece of work.
OzarkHillbilly
More evidence that climate change is not real while promoting Islamic extremism: Saudi cleric issues fatwa on snowmen (or something like that)
Munajjid had some supporters however. “It (building snowmen) is imitating the infidels, it promotes lustiness and eroticism,” one wrote. “May God preserve the scholars, for they enjoy sharp vision and recognise matters that even Satan does not think about.”
I know I can’t resist beating off every time I see a lusty snow wench.
Phylllis
The State paper in Columbia SC is bringing Ariail back after several years.
Mustang Bobby
@OzarkHillbilly: Not going to be a problem here in Miami.
Schlemazel
@OzarkHillbilly:
There is someone around here who will occasionally shape large snow penii near the freeway exit. Perhaps they have seen these & they inspire lust in Munajjid’s loins?
Schlemazel
@Another Holocene Human:
When introduce to home use the concept of induction was not fully formed & the hardware was not available. Now plugs are just the way of life.
The amount of current needed to run a lot of things at 5v would be substantial & that could be a much bigger problem.
But these sorts of things could happen. There just needs to be a market for it. Imagine the upheaval of trying to switch all this out.
EconWatcher
Seems like the definition of hypocrisy has been lost, as irony was long ago. How is it hypocritical for newspapers that previously cut their cartoonists, for business reasons, to protest the brutal murder of cartoonists?
(Similarly, as a friend of mine always points out, all of Alanis Morrissette’s examples of the ironic are in fact just bummers, not really instances or irony.
Tpmmy
@MattF: Yeah he is “toast.” The spotlight of national attention and maybe a run for the POTUS is something most folks couldn’t handle (I know I wouldn’t last a minute) and it seems Ben is yet another one that couldn’t.. The plagiarizing thing doesn’t bother me too much because I don’t think for a second he wrote most if of his book. Some intern most likely cut and pasted something from their research and it ended up in the book without a citation.
But that snake oil company he worked for, and he worked for them for more than a decade, is damning to say the least. When the AG of Texas, a Republican, goes after them and puts the owner in jail for basically fraud and false advertising, well you know they must stink to high heaven.
Lurking Canadian
@Schlemazel: I suspect there might also be efficiency reasons. I don’t think you could inductively couple a load with as low impedance as a copper/copper contact. (NB: I am the wrong kind of electrical engineer, so I could very well be quite wrong.)
Lurking Canadian
@EconWatcher: I still think there’s irony in the story of the guy getting over his fear of flying only to crash.
FridayNext
@EconWatcher:
You beat me to it. I would love to see more cartoonists myself, but I really don’t see how rallying around the murdered cartoonists (were they really all cartoonists?No comedy writers? Janitors?) while eschewing them for your own publication. And the numbers between journalists and cartoonists at newspapers will always be out of whack won’t it? A good newspaper needs one political cartoonist, two tops, but dozens of journalists. I don’t know what the ideal ratio might be to cartoon advocates, but I’d always expect the number to be grotesquely lopsided toward journalists even if all cartoonists were happily employed.
I also rallied around the 9/11 victims. Does that mean I am a hypocrite if I think we should have less bloat at the Pentagon? I don’t think so.
Baud
Wait, the WSJ editorial page isn’t a political cartoon?
OzarkHillbilly
@Baud: No, it’s Fantasy bordering on the absurd.
Baud
@EconWatcher:
“Hypocrisy” has been the goto word for “things I don’t like” for some time now.
Tpmmy
@FridayNext: I wonder if cartoons is another generational thing the “younger” folks don’t “get.” I know as a kid (I am 45) that when my parents would open up the paper each morning (and my grandfather as well when we were at his house) the first section they went to was either sports or the cartoon. Cartoons were read daily. I read them daily as a kid.
I see a site like Daily Kos that seems to be trying pretty hard to bring cartoons along with the commentary and news to their front page. I think that is pretty flipping cool. But I wonder how much they pay the artist (if anything to be honest) and how much traffic (both in comments and page views) they actually generate.
Tpmmy
Can I even comment here. Everything I write is hitting moderation. Little test, will this?
Betty Cracker
@Another Holocene Human: Agreed. Rall is a sanctimonious, unfunny prick, and the tens of thousands of media organizations that decline to hire him are making a wise decision.
@Lurking Canadian: You are right, but most of the other “ironies” are, in fact, merely bummers.
raven
“Some” are saying the Obama snub of Paris is part of a wider strategy. Oh no!
Elizabelle
Yeah, budget cutters at newspapers have destroyed more cartoonists’ careers than Islamic extremists ever dreamed of.
(Not an original thought; a bitter Facebook comment the day of the Charlie Hebdo murders by a former newspaper staffer.)
JGabriel
Via OzarkHillbilly:
If the idea of sex with a frozen ball of ice makes one horny, I’d suggest they have bigger problems than snowmen.
Back to topic, can any VT’ers out there tell us, where does Vermont get more of its broadcast TV, and political advertising, from: NY, MA. NH, Montreal, or local VT stations?
OzarkHillbilly
@Tpmmy: Correct your name. that should fix it.
JGabriel
@raven:
All I can say is that it’s the first time I’ve ever seen Republicans concerned for the feelings of the French.
Tpmmy
@OzarkHillbilly: Yes it appears it did. Thanks!
forked tongue
Ted Rall is a great advertisement for hiring fewer political cartoonists.
Elizabelle
@forked tongue: Actually, I like a lot of Ted Rall’s cartoons. Not every single one, but I’m glad The Washington Post employs a cartoonist.
The late Herblock was beloved.
And has anyone mentioned The New Yorker? Love their covers and cartoons.
ThresherK
That hack Ramirez still has a job, doesn’t he?
At some point anyone who flunked out of the LATimes and is now at Investors’ Business Daily can stand in for Time magazine, WSJ, and NatRev.
I like Ted Rall enough, but I think he’s misstepped here.
Elizabelle
@JGabriel:
Oui. C’est incroyable!
Baud
@JGabriel:
To be fair, the French aren’t upset about this, so the Republicans don’t have to choose.
Elizabelle
Had Morning Joke (not a cartoonist) on as background noise, but Joe was railing too much about how wrong Obama is, time and time again. “He was wrong in 2011 about ISIS, he was wrong ….”
Remote. Click. No more braying.
debbie
@Baud:
All the more reason to hate them, n’est pas?
Southern Beale
Digging through the memory hole I found a little more information about Steve Emerson, the Fox News “expert” who claimed Sharia law had arrived in parts of Britain. He’s a professional grifter and hatemonger who was active in Middle Tennessee when we had our Murfreesboro mosque controversy.
JPL
@Elizabelle: When I stream Morning Joe, all I hear is wah,wah, wah.
debbie
I’m almost afraid to check out this hashtag:
http://talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/white-genocide-billboard-appears-alabama
OzarkHillbilly
@Tpmmy: I’m not sure you corrected the spelling of your name…
ThresherK
@JPL: Streaming Morning Joe? Isn’t that what happens after a fairly large caffeinated beverage at Starbucks, followed by a trip to the loo?
Belafon
@Tpmmy: It looks like you have no vowels in your name. When did you change the second letter from “o” to “p”?
Baud
@OzarkHillbilly:
Let Tpmmy be Tpmmy.
Elizabelle
@JPL: My viewing of Morning Joke never survives actual exposure to Scarborough. Particularly not in his “let me school you” voice.
MomSense
@ThresherK:
HA!
I think they have given up snowplowing up heah and now the plow drivers sit at the coffee shop and laugh their asses off as they watch us slip and slide on the roads.
Oh well. It’ll be mud season soon enough.
Puppy is now barking at the door to go out and go potty. I think my neighbors are enjoying my happy dances as I encourage her to go. Also, too puppies and snow are an adorable combination. I need to remember to keep a coat by the door because it is very cold outside.
Culture of Truth
You must have a staff cartoonist or you are a hypocrite for protesting murder? That’s just weird.
ThresherK
@MomSense: Where is “up heah”? I’m in CT, and the “easy winter” part of it. Are you in the part of New England where “the main roads are plowed and the side roads are groomed”?
MomSense
@ThresherK:
I live in Maine and for some reason our town has become sort of relaxed about plowing. They used to live for storms so they could plow all day and night but even this last just 4 inch snow was ignored and now we have semi frozen snow and ruts on the roads covered by a light dusting of sand.
And the sidewalks–forget it.
ThresherK
@MomSense: Our central CT town’s sidewalks are few and in the middle of it, so I hope they take care of them, especially for the elderly housing areas–near the town offices, library, and pharmacies, naturally.
I gave away our snow shovel when we moved into a condo in November, leaving us with only the collapsible “trunk models”. So far they’ve really done the job there. And that opens onto a state route, which goes up to a notch (or at least the CT river valley version of it), so the State DOT is in charge of that; they don’t skimp on the plowing and sanding.
Amir Khalid
The screen on my two-year-old Lenovo laptop has begun flickering in an alarming fashion. Is it fixable, or do I need a new one?
Buddy H
This, from the Onion:
With Republicans formally taking over the House and Senate for the remainder of Obama’s term and looking forward to the future, leading candidates for the party’s 2016 presidential nomination are starting to emerge. Here’s a look at potential GOP frontrunners:
Mitt Romney: Is betting that the U.S. electorate is ready for bold leadership from someone on his knees begging to be president
Chris Christie: With only his political views, personality, appearance, and a massive federal corruption case holding him back, Christie is a natural frontrunner for the nomination
Jeb Bush: Is hoping to distance himself from the embarrassing legacy of his sister and literacy activist Dorothy Bush Koch
Marco Rubio: The Florida senator is perfectly poised to help the GOP appeal to a demographic it is actively trying to shrink
Rand Paul: While benefiting from his father’s fan base of 20- to 22-year-old males, Paul will be challenged to expand his reach to 23- and even 24-year-old males
Ben Carson: The retired neurosurgeon will be relying on voters on whom he has operated in the past, and who are now suddenly and inexplicably galvanized in feverish support for him
Bobby Jindal: If the Louisiana governor wants a serious shot at the White House, he’ll have to make himself better known to voters, and ultimately, to himself
Someone Whose Father Was A Prominent Conservative Leader: With a recognizable last name and a ready source of funding, Someone Whose Father Was A Prominent Conservative Leader looks to be the clear choice for the Republicans in next year’s election
bemused
@Elizabelle:
Haven’t lingered at Joe’s dive for quite awhile but saw Susie Essman was a guest this morning so it was worth watching that segment. Turns out Mika is a big fan of Curb and Susie.
Roger Moore
@Another Holocene Human:
I’m not an engineer, just an interested layman, but I have a couple of comments. Our current plugs are a well established technology that is going to be hard to get rid of because of the need for backward compatibility with existing appliances. Even if some alternative were practical, we’d need to keep the existing ones for a long time.
As an alternative to replacing our plugs, newer versions of the electrical code require arc fault protection for most household wiring. That is supposed to protect against the kind of danger you’re worried about as well as other dangers from damaged cords and in-the-wall wiring, which can also cause sparks. Our plug designs could be safer in other ways, though. For example, British plugs have insulation around the base of the pins, and the sockets don’t make a live connection until the insulation is the only exposed part; that protects against shock from touching the pins when inserting or removing the plug.
rikyrah
not one ounce of sympathy for those in Kansas. You had the chance to get rid of him and you didn’t.
too bad for you
………..
Kansas lawmakers open session amid massive budget shortfalls
THE ASSOCIATED PRESS
01/12/2015 9:23 AM
TOPEKA – Kansas legislators open a critical annual session Monday that will require them to wade through massive budget shortfalls and deal with a court mandate to boost spending on public schools.
The shortfalls, totaling more than $710 million in the current budget and the budget for the fiscal year beginning in July, arose after aggressive personal income tax cuts were enacted at Gov. Sam Brownback’s urging.
The budget situation was further complicated when a Shawnee County District Court panel declared last month that the current level of education funding is “inadequate from any rational perspective of the evidence.” The decision, which could lead to funding increases of more than $550 million a year, is expected to be appealed to the Kansas Supreme Court.
But even if the GOP-dominated Legislature isn’t forced to address education this session because of the appeals process, several Republican leaders said lawmakers must make significant spending cuts to shrink the shortfalls. Key senators said they want to avoid measures – such as reversing cuts in income tax rates or raising the sales tax rate – that clearly can be labeled as tax increases.
http://www.kansascity.com/news/government-politics/article6060393.html#
rikyrah
Little recourse seen for Democrats on Social Security rule change
By David Lawder
…The new legislative rule, pushed through with little notice last week,
would prohibit a routine transfer to the Social Security Disability
Trust Fund, which is expected to be depleted by late 2016.
Without an injection from the main Social Security retirement fund, the disability program would have to cut benefits by some 20 percent, only paying out what it can collect from payroll taxes.
Congress approved the last such “reallocation” transfer in 1994 after several in the 1980s under President Ronald Reagan.
Republicans say they passed the rule change to force reforms to the disability program, which they claim is rife with fraud and mismanagement. Democrats, unable to stop the shift, have called it a “stealth” move to cut benefits.
http://news.yahoo.com/little-recourse-seen-democrats-social-security-rule-change-233948421–business.html
mainmati
@Another Holocene Human: Agreed. The Washington Metro has become the second largest in the country (#s of passengers) but it has had terrible management and underinvestment in rolling stock and rail maintenance for years. I am a regular user of Metro but it has a lot of problems that go directly back to management.
Ruckus
Speaking of cartoons, here’s one that’s appropriate, today’s Non Sequitur.
Betty Cracker
@Amir Khalid: I’m no expert, but we had a similar flicker on my kiddo’s laptop awhile back that turned out to be an easily / cheaply fixable loose connection. Does the flicker seem related to screen position?
Origuy
@Amir Khalid: Sounds like the video processor. A lot of laptops these days have them integrated with the CPU, so you’d need to replace both. If the CPU chip is soldered in, might be cheaper to get a new laptop. If it’s socketed, maybe not. If you have a separate video processor chip, you might be able to replace just that.
My HP has two video processors, one integrated with the CPU and one separate. The separate one is better but draws more power. Running on battery, I can switch to the other one. Booting up uses the integrated one until Windows starts. However, it’s gone bad, so I get an unreadable screen until Windows does the switch. Mine’s almost five years old, though.
Edit: Betty’s got a point. Always suspect the connections first.
Amir Khalid
@Betty Cracker:
No. It’s some kind of intermittent problem, which I guess I can live with for now. If it gets worse to the point where my laptop becomes unusable, I guess I’ll take it in to the people who sold it to me, and if they say it’s not fixable then I guess a new machine is in order.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Another Holocene Human: Losses are massive. We’re not there yet, but that tech is getting better.
The reason your home is wired with 120VAC is that line-length losses with AC are pretty minimal. Not the case for DC. The max you can run 5VDC USB is about 15 feet without a repeater. You could just slam a transformer/rectifier in a double-wide AC plug box and have one side 120VAC and a few USB 5VDC connectors on the other, but those transformers don’t seem to last too long, and I personally don’t think homeowners should be tearing into their wall sockets unless they know basic electrical safety. Most don’t.
ETA: plus I’m very sure that code doesn’t allow for line and low-voltage in the same box.
Debbie(aussie)
@Buddy H:
Is it true that a Bush married a Koch? Or is that an onion joke too?
Gin & Tonic
@CONGRATULATIONS!: Yet these are very popular now.
askew
Ted Rall is a racist asshole and I hope we don’t have to pretend otherwise because of Charlie.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@Gin & Tonic: That’s a fine idea. All 120VAC to the box and easy to switch when it fails.
CONGRATULATIONS!
@askew: Of all the guys to be carrying the torch for editorial cartoons, he’s pretty much the very last one I wanted to see.
kindness
Vermont should one up NH. They should declare they will have their primary on the same day as Iowa. Let the wingnutz heads explode.
Mnemosyne (iPad Mini)
@OzarkHillbilly:
I think that one commenter quoted gives the game away, though — building snowmen is bad because you’re doing the same thing as your infidel neighbors rather than holding yourself separate from them.
Interestingly, the fatwa itself seems to indicate that there’s a loophole: you can’t build snow figures of living things, but it’s A-OK to build snow cars, snow ships, etc. even the most conservative cleric doesn’t have an excuse to ban snow forts!
Roger Moore
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
To be technical, it’s actually the voltage that’s important for line losses, not whether the current is direct or alternating. The big advantage is the 120V rather than the AC. AC won over as the standard because it’s easy to change voltages with a transformer, so you can do long distance transmission at higher, more efficient voltages and then transform down to safer, easier to work with voltages locally. There are actually some technical advantages to using DC for extremely long distance (i.e. thousands of miles) transmission./pedant
Roger Moore
@Mnemosyne (iPad Mini):
Honestly, I think it’s the stupid commenters who deserve scorn, not the cleric who issued the fatwa. He was issuing a ruling because he was specifically asked to make one, not because he was trying to be a busybody, and AFAIK it’s one that’s well in line with established law. We may think the law is silly on that point, but it’s hard to argue that he’s just making stuff up. Perhaps more important, he didn’t leave it at that. Rather than just giving a flat no, he provided a list of possible legal alternatives that would still be fun.
Shakezula
What a stupid and self-centered tantrum. In other words, pure Rall.
askew
@CONGRATULATIONS!:
Yeah, he is definitely not the guy cartoonists want to rally around.
Elizabelle
I think I’m getting Ted Rall mixed up with Tom Toles. Who cartoons for the WaPost. (Drinking coffee now.) My bad.
But why the Ted Rall distaste? Examples? (Hunting some down now …)
burnspbesq
@JGabriel:
Thinking back to when my parents had a summer place in Danby (between Manchester and Rutland), if you had a good antenna in the southwestern part of the state you could pull in the Albany stations. In the southeast, it was Springfield. And Burlington has had its own station for a long time. Other than that, it’s cable or sattelite.
askew
@Elizabelle:
Read his meltdown at Daily Kos when he couldn’t explain why he drew Obama looking like a monkey. It’s an epic shitstorm of racism.
Bob In Portland
Provocations in Donbas. Expect the ceasefire to end soon. Then we can see what $350 million in military aid can do to bulk up the Ukrainian army.
Gin & Tonic
@Bob In Portland: Provocations in Donbas.
You mean the 10 civilians killed on a bus today because of a mis-aimed separatist artillery shell? Or the separatists’ ultimatum to the Ukrainians to leave their post in the Donetsk airport?
Provocations indeed.
Jamey
And it’s win/win for cartoonist-haters, really: Hire a political cartoonist, let her or him say what they please, watch as gunmen take down the cartoonist; lather, rinse, repeat.
Rand Careaga
I don’t have a lot of use for Rall, who continues to be a Nader 2000 denialist dead-ender, but the apparent belief that his drawings of Obama are somehow racist has me scratching my head. They’re no more grotesque than his depictions of Bush the Younger were: he does equal-opportunity ugly.
askew
@Rand Careaga:
I’d say you didn’t read Rall’s racism at Daily Kos about his Obama depiction. It was clearly intended to make Obama look like a monkey. And there is a lot more loaded history of comparing AA people to monkeys, which changes the issue for Obama as compared to Bush.
Villago Delenda Est
@Bob In Portland: HODOR!
lou
@Mustang Bobby:
Wonder how long he’ll last. In an ironic twist, the Herald’s competitor, the Sun-Sentinel, laid off their cartoonist the same day as the Charlie Hebdo massacre.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Roger Moore:
Part of the problem is that people seem to assume a fatwa is automatically bad when (as I understand it) it’s simply a ruling that can be good or bad, like any ruling. It’s like assuming that all decisions by a court are automatically bad because it’s called a “decision.” It’s more similar to the Pope announcing a change in doctrine than a death threat.
Another Holocene Human
@MattF: wow wow wow, you’re pretty bad when Texas GOP is investigating you
what is up with neurosurgeons, anybody remember Jack Kruse, his website and the snake oil crap he was expounding?
never mind the false police reports when he was about to have to give up the game?