I watched part of the Georgia governor’s debate, and jesus tapdancing christ, two thirds of the candidates are too awful to even back bench members of the state legislature. The libertarian candidate may actually be insane, and his closing statement was basically a primal scream of “I GOT MINE FUCK YOU.” Apparently he is in favor of industrial hemp, and I went to find out more about him, and welp:
Kemp, on the other hand, appeared very uncomfortable to not be in his Klan robes, and his closing statement was basically a combination of Mad Libs Wingnut Edition and Trump tweets. I have no idea why anyone would vote for him if he were the only one running, because who would want to fucking encourage him? Between the two of them, they have the stupid-evil continuum covered.
And then you had Abrams, who just seemed like a decent person. She was friendly, warm, informed, and just radiated decency.
HOW IS THIS EVEN A RACE?
Wapiti
Er.. its all about the race. But we all know that and want to scream along with you.
Cheryl Rofer
guachi
It’s Georgia. I live here and white people are convinced any Democrat, especially a black woman, must be some raving loony lefty. Kemp will protect white people from the negro hordes.
guachi
By the way, anyone have a link to the debate so I can watch the “highlights”. I’ve spent most of the night watching season 2 of Perry Mason.
SiubhanDuinne
@guachi:
You can watch it on demand at The Atlanta Press Club on Facebook.
NotMax
Ahem.
(emphasis added)
Ben Cisco
She’s blek.
Omnes Omnibus
@guachi:
Peter O’Toole on Letterman here. I will continue doing what I can, but my choices have been made and are firm. The MSM does nothing for me. People should walk away and ignore it. Do what you can and fucking VOTE! There is nothing else.
“I must not fear. Fear is the mind-killer. Fear is the little-death that brings total obliteration. I will face my fear. I will permit it to pass over me and through me. And when it has gone past I will turn the inner eye to see its path. Where the fear has gone there will be nothing. Only I will remain.”
Martin
The average white person assumes the average black person hates and fears them as much as they are hated and feared. It only takes one party to jump down the mutually-assured destruction rabbit hole to fuck everything up. The key is having the self discipline to not be a fucking coward. Seems like we can count on 40% of the population to lack that self discipline.
guachi
@NotMax:
WV, ND, SD, WY at least have the excuse of being some of the whitest states in America. Montana, where I’m from, is also one of the whitest but (according to the article) they elected a non-white person (a Native American) to be Superintendent in 2016.
NotMax
“Race hate isn’t human nature; race hate is the abandonment of human nature.”
– Orson Welles
hellslittlestangel
Ah, little lad, you’re staring at my fingers. Would you like me to tell you the little story of right-hand/left-hand? The story of good and evil? H-A-T-E! It was with this left hand that old brother Cain struck the blow that laid his brother low. L-O-V-E! You see these fingers, dear hearts? These fingers has veins that run straight to the soul of man. The right hand, friends, the hand of love. Now watch, and I’ll show you the story of life. Those fingers, dear hearts, is always a-warring and a-tugging, one agin t’other. Now watch ’em! Old brother left hand, left hand he’s a fighting, and it looks like love’s a goner. But wait a minute! Hot dog, love’s a winning! Yessirree! It’s love that’s won, and old left hand hate is down for the count!
Mnemosyne
@Ben Cisco:
She also has a vagina. So, doubly scary to insecure whites. ?
I heard a bit of Ari Berman (reporter for “Mother Jones”) on “Fresh Air” today and he made a point that Georgia’s election is literally a clash of voting philosophies, because Abrams has been fighting to improve voting rights while Kemp has been throwing as many people off the rolls as he possibly can.
Mnemosyne
@hellslittlestangel:
Still one of the greatest American films of all time.
Steeplejack
@guachi:
Hey, I’m the tri-state area’s leading expert on Perry Mason. (Maybe the only one.) You can catch episodes every weekday at 9:00 a.m. and 11:30 p.m. ET on MeTV (if you have that channel). They show them in chronological order, but the morning and evening runs are at different places in the series.
Tonight: “The Case of the Pint-Sized Client” (season 2, episode 3).
Tomorrow morning: “The Case of the Brazen Bequest” (season 5, episode 12).
I find the show a nice tonic for these troubled times. Perry preserves the order of the universe and exposes the miscreants in a very satisfying way. And the guest stars are a gallery of ’50s-60s TV actors.
John Cole
@NotMax: There are no black people here to run.
guachi
@Steeplejack: I’ve recorded almost every Perry Mason episode off of MeTV with my PC’s tuner card and we were watching them again from the beginning.
Well, we watched many/most of them before and my wife wanted to start over from the beginning while she recovers from wrist surgery. As it happens, Amazon had the entire collection for a cheap price – $100 for all nine seasons. So we got that a few days ago and rewatched the first few episodes of season 1 that we had watched the day before. Not only is the picture quality very good for a sixty year-old show but the episodes are uncut. MeTV does a great job giving shows 46 minutes but most Perry Mason episodes were 52-53 minutes long so we get 6-7 more minutes. My wife remarked that several of the first season episodes she had watched the day prior actually made sense now.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Ever seen any of the six Mason movies from the 1930s? Most of them feature blog favorite Warren William as P. Mason.
Trivia: The first of Erle Stanley Gardner’s Mason novels includes zero courtroom scenes.
Steeplejack
@Mnemosyne:
Amen. I think Robert Mitchum is consistently underrated because he looks like a lunkhead—and frequently acted that way, apparently. But, jeez, he is good in a lot of movies.
Ella in New Mexico
It’s a race because Republicans entire playbook is lie and cheat. They don’t talk policy, they have no ideas, they’re just down to lying and cheating and they’re damn good at it.
OT but it was good:
This lifted my spirits a bit, ” How This Will End: Sooner or later, tyrants are always abandoned by their followers.”
“Those he commands move only in command,
Nothing in love. Now does he feel his title
Hang loose about him, like a giant’s robe
Upon a dwarfish thief.”-Macbeth
Cohen’s concepts also apply to the entire Republican Party as it exists in 2018.
zhena gogolia
My distraction tonight was Separate Tables on TCM. Wow, David Niven and Wendy Hiller really crushed it.
Honus
@guachi: WV only recently, say the last 30 years. Before that (when I grew up here) WV had a sizeable black population.
@hellslittlestangel: good old Davis Grubb
Honus
@John Cole: not anymore. Was a time when there were.
Steeplejack
@guachi:
Yeah, that’s my big beef with MeTV—they are ruthless in cutting intro/segue stuff to squeeze in more commercial time, sometimes to the edge of incoherence. Also don’t like that (at least on my system) they have defaulted to a widescreen 16:9 format for all the old shows. I don’t see what’s so bad about 4:3 with letterbox on the sides, but I’m a format purist.
Honus
@Mnemosyne: only film Charles Laughton ever directed. Filmed in my hometown. Cresaps Landing, WV.
Honus
@Steeplejack: he was the real thing. Left home as a teenager, rode the rails, turned up in Hollywood and became an accomplished musician as well as an actor.
Honus
@Mnemosyne: and Lillian Gish, too.
PaulWartenberg
Racism. >:(
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Do you even know me?! If you did, you would know that I am this blog’s preëminent supporter and promoter of Warren William, the definitive pre-Code horndog (among other talents).
And, yes, I’ve seen most, if not all, of his Perry Mason outings. They show up semi-regularly on TCM.
NotMax
@zhena gogolia
Was so starved for innocent entertainment this afternoon that watched an episode of The Colgate Summer Comedy Hour from the fifties on one of the nostalgia channels found on Roku. Chock full of the now forgotten Gene Sheldon, whom I enjoyed for his gentle style of comedy both then and now. Also the Will Mastin Trio (Sammy Davis Jr., his father and his uncle).
guachi
@Steeplejack: Thankfully, I got most of my stuff recorded from MeTV before the switch to widescreen, which is really low quality as it cuts off the sides and top.
The 46 minutes is better than you’ll get on almost any other channel. It’s just that the shows MeTV is showing are often so old that 46 minutes isn’t enough.
If you’re a Perry Mason fan, the DVDs really are nice. There’s even a hint of grain – at least as much as you can see on a DVD. It’d probably look fabulous on blu-ray.
Daniel'sBob
@Honus: Didn’t Mitchum’s career take a nosedive when he was busted for marijuana?
James E Powell
Because William Tecumseh Sherman was too soft.
Chet
Ted Metz’s website is back online. You didn’t miss much.
Mai Naem mobile
Kemp has what I call Charles Manson eyes. Just really creepy eyes. I wouldn’t vote for a candidate based on that alone.
Mnemosyne
@zhena gogolia:
I’m assuming you’ve seen I Know Where I’m Going! with Hiller, but if you haven’t, rush out and see it immediately. You will love it, I promise.
@Steeplejack:
He was apparently a pretty good guy to his fellow actors. Jean Simmons tells a great story about Mitchum protecting her from Otto Preminger, a director who was such a notorious asshole that his own crew tried to murder him. More than once.
Just Some Fuckhead
I’m in favor of smoking Kemp.
Ben Cisco
@Mnemosyne: Yes, that audio of him lamenting the ability of the people to actually CAST VOTES is a very bad look!
Steve m
Sherman stopped burning way too soon.
dww44
@Steeplejack: Years ago, I remember reading or hearing an interview with the actress Deborah Kerr in which she stated that the most favorite actor with whom she’d worked was Robert Mitchum. I think where it mattered artistically, he ranked quite high.
Honus
@Mai Naem mobile: fun fact: Charlie Manson grew up about fifteen miles from where Night of the Hunter was filmed.
lamh36
@John Cole: but that wasn’t always the case was it. It makes for very interesting reading to find out why and when it became so low
Mike in DC
At least there’s more than a handful of white moderates and liberals in Georgia. Mississippi looks bleaker by comparison in that regard.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
Met Preminger once (not on a set) and he evinced a wickedly sly and clever sense of humor. He also maintained twin offices in L.A. and NYC. Same furnishings, laid out identically, same carpeting, same pictures on the walls, etc., down to identical desk tchotchkes.
There’s floating around on the ‘net and elsewhere one of the Playboy After Dark episodes with Preminger decked out in a violently electric blue stretch fabric leisure suit with a Nehru-inspired top. Not a good look. For anyone, at anytime.
dww44
@Ben Cisco: With the majority of my FB friends, that is considered a plus and not a minus. They’re all on board with the suppression. Of course, they don’t own up to or admit that, but they are. Politics on FB is the very worst of the worse. One’s opinions of lifelong friends and family tanks after seeing some of the posts. It is truly discouraging.
lamh36
Honus
@lamh36: West Virginia traditionally had a very diverse population to work the mines, mills and glass factories. Even a sizeable Arab population. And was welcoming as late as the 1970s (my cardiologist is a vietnamese refugee whose family settled in clarksburg after the fall of Saigon) now it’s just a bunch of old white people. I blame coal. Coal interests kept the economy from diversifying, and when they figured out how to strip mine with a hundred people instead of working a deep mine with thousands of union workers, they were in heaven.
McDowell county’s population was nearly 100,000 in 1970. Today I believe it’s less than ten thousand.
satby
I binged on all four episodes of Retribution on Netflix.
I loves me some British murder mysteries. Honestly didn’t intend to watch the whole thing in one night, but it was like a book you couldn’t put down.
Steeplejack
@guachi:
I probably should get the DVDs. Amazon sent me a promo e-mail a few months ago saying the whole series was available as a set, but I don’t think it was down in the $100 zone. I’ll check that out.
rikyrah
How is this a race?
Because, Stacey Abrams is Black.
Beginning, middle, end of the story.
dww44
@Mai Naem mobile: Which is why his most effective ads feature his wife attesting to his being the rock of their family and that the citizens of the state will love him if/when he’s elected governor. With me, it’s not just the eyes, it’s the way he moves his mouth that is so revealing of his character.
Amir Khalid
I could be wrong about this, but it strikes me as a distinct possibility that some American voters will vote for a candidate with the right party/race/whatever identity rather than for one who shows knowledge of issues, ability, empathy, a willingness to serve all people, and common decency.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Otto Preminger in blue right here. Bonus: Harry Nilsson.
seaboogie
Writing my postcards for Kendra Fershee in WV tonight. Fourth name on my list is a woman named “Mandolin”, so I’m pretty sure she’s a lock – and she’s going to get a pretty Monet postcard from me, also.
In another WV/CA link, possum is eating grapes off the fence and making *smacky* possum mouth noises, en route to the plate of sunflower seeds, where she just mouths them and spits them back out in pointy possum toothshapes. I have a soft spot for possums.
Mnemosyne
@NotMax:
Preminger was notorious for loudly berating the actresses on his sets, and Mitchum punched him out for doing it to Jean Simmons.
demz taters
Didn’t you get the memo? Being “too prepared” is apparently a liability. Being ignorant is the kind of authenticity that Real Murricans want.
seaboogie
@Steeplejack: I will check this out.
Ben Cisco
@dww44: Agreed. One of my childhood friends reposted a meme shortly after the 2017 inaugural celebrating the fact that a “Christian” was back in the White House. I called him out on it. My timeline cleaned up quickly after that.
Cacti
How is it a race?
Because “The sheriff is a n-CLANG!”.
Omnes Omnibus
Votng.
NotMax
@Mnemosyne
He was no pussycat when it came to actors, either, so it is said. Not to excuse it but certainly not the only director to fall into that slot.
Having done some directing (on the stage, not on films) know how easy it is to cross a line.
Anyway, I was interviewing him as part of a paper I was writing in high school and he couldn’t have been more pleasant.
J R in WV
@John Cole:
Wife’s Great Uncle was Superintendent of Schools in one of the border counties — I think McDowell, back in the 1940 and ’50s. There’s a family picture of him with the school board, he’s in the middle and there are 5 black members to one side and 5 white members to the other side.
In the southern WV coal field lots of black men were brought in as strike breakers, and they sent for their families as soon as they earned train fare. The UMWA has a no-segregation clause in the union constitution. The saying was that “We’re all black underground!”
That’s all changed… most of the black community left for improved urban areas ASAP when integration happened, working as technicians and clerks and scientists in government jobs… like the black NASA “computers” who had math degrees.
I attended a wedding in Decatur GA, just east of the Atlanta beltway, at a very pretty Methodist church. Best man was one of my good friends… he was sitting with church members who were watching the rehearsal, and one of the “gentlemen” asked him “How do you all keep the black folks from trying to join your church up north?!” He was appalled and in disbelief, almost, but had a great poker face and just said I”‘m sure I don’t know, I’m not on the board…” or words to that effect.
I really haven’t been back much since then. To GA I mean. For a couple of bowl games when WVU was in the Peach Bowl, passing through to duty station in FLA, flying through ATL quite a bit. We donated to Ms Abrams though. One of many women we’ve donated to. Hoping she wins BIGLY!
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Not sure I feel good about voting advice from two people who died in freak accidents.
Also must post the definitive Peter, Paul and Mary version of “Leaving on a Jet Plane” as a palate-cleanser. I know John Denver wrote the song, but, damn, he butchered it in that clip.
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack:
Good point. Romantic advice from Otis Redding is without value. Same with Buddy Holly.
Steeplejack
@Omnes Omnibus:
Well, I see your sense of humor has gone away. Making a note.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
A rare Warren William short for your viewing pleasure – in color!
Omnes Omnibus
@Steeplejack: ????? Where does my sense of humor come into it? You are making a connection that I don’t reach. I do it with others. What did I miss?
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
Thanks. There’s a short they play on TCM occasionally of him getting a golf lesson from Bobby Jones.
NotMax
@Steeplejack
Those golf shorts are sumthin’ else. Jones has all the charisma on camera of a bag of wet laundry.
Steeplejack
@NotMax:
I think a lot of people were “stiff” on camera back then. Relatively new medium, and they hadn’t been immersed in thousands of hours of seeing how to do it. If you look at newsreels and such from that time, it’s noticeable how many people—officials and even ordinary people—go into a sort of stilted “public oratory” mode instead of just talking normally.
AnotherBruce
@Just Some Fuckhead: Is that really you? Where Ya been?
Ken Shabby
@Steeplejack:
Me and My Harrow.
Citizen Alan
@James E Powell:
One of my favorite writings from the Civil War era is Sherman’s 1864 letter to R.M. Sawyer in which he implied that if the Confederates did not wise up and surrender within the next three years, the war might well become outright genocidal in nature:
Citizen Alan
@NotMax:
Otto Preminger is one of the few people in history who actually had to tone his regular personality down a little in order to play a Batman villain.
Citizen Alan
@Mnemosyne:
IIRC, Dianne Cannon said she would quit acting forever before working with Preminger again. She also had the witty remark that Preminger couldn’t direct his nephew to the bathroom let alone a motion picture.
opiejeanne
@Mnemosyne: That movie scared the pee-waddin’ out of me.
Johannes
@zhena gogolia: Niv earned that Oscar!
Jado
@Martin:
Well, of course. After all, as a white male evangelical christian, I HATE black people with the heat of a thousand suns, and would gladly attack them physically if I wouldn’t get arrested for it. I still encourage and support those willing to be arrested for attacks, and I wait impatiently for the day when we can round all these kelered mongrels up in camps and kill them like the Jews in the 40s. In Jesus’ name, of course.
And if that’s the case, why would I ever think that they feel differently? They OBVIOUSLY want to round me up and do the same thing to me, so why would I ever vote for anyone but the white guy? So what if he’s a looney criminal who will steal my social security checks right from my mailbox, and dress up as me to cash them?
HE’S WHITE!! He’ll save us from the marauding black hordes. Cause there’s always marauding black hordes. Always.
tokyokie
@Mnemosyne:
The story, as I understand it, was that they were doing a scene in which Mitchum was supposed to hit Simmons, and every time he did, Preminger said he wasn’t hitting her hard enough. So Mitchum went up to Preminger and punched him as hard as could in the face. “Like that, Otto? Is that how hard you want me to hit her?”
That was the last time Preminger berated Simmons. And Simmons was a close friend of Mitchum’s the rest of his life.
Nevertheless, Angel Face remains a noir classic, maybe only second to Out of the Past among Mitchum’s œvre. Wish Warner would put it out on Blu-ray.
Sis
Canvassed for her last weekend, and I will this weekend, too. Cross your fingers for those of us in Georgia (and Democrats around the country, of course)!
blackcatsrule
@AnotherBruce: @Just Some Fuckhead: Seconded. How is your kitty?
Agorabum
Atlanta is the city that is too busy to hate – but the suburbs and just about everywhere has a slower pace of life, if you know what I mean.