I’ve had this song in my head ever since riding in Critical Mass on Friday, so here’s a corny video and an open thread.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
End-Times Rhetoric Has Consequences – Who Knew?
Dana Milbank makes the connection between Glenn Beck’s crazy bullshit and crazy people with guns inspired by it.
Beck has prophesied darkly to his millions of followers that we are reaching “a point where the people will have exhausted all their options. When that happens, look out.” One night on Fox, discussing the case of a man who killed 10 people, Beck suggested such things were inevitable. “If you’re a conservative, you are called a racist, you want to starve children,” he said. “And every time they do speak out, they are shut down by political correctness. How do you not have those people turn into that guy?”
Here’s one idea: Stop encouraging them.
Milbank has one of the most sensitive fingers to the wind of the DC status quo, so I’m betting on a bit of a backlash against the assignment editors at Fox from other media notables in the coming days.
End-Times Rhetoric Has Consequences – Who Knew?Post + Comments (34)
All In The Past
Digby on Shirley Sherrod, whose father was murdered in 1965 by a white man who wasn’t indicted:
Far too many people are acting as if this woman wasn’t a living witness to the horrors of Jim Crow and the fallout of 200 years of racist history and instead believe that she’s nursing ancient grievances. Her life is treated as the forgotten detritus on the trash heap of history, as if it’s all over, a museum exhibit.
It’s critical that 1965 become ancient history for a party that owes its current existence to a strategy of embracing those who were on the wrong side of the civil rights struggle. Similarly, it’s critical for them that a discussion of the fuckups of the last decade becomes a taboo subject. When your past is shameful, the faster it’s forgotten, the better.
The Obama administration’s promise to not dig into the past was politically smart in the short term, because the sound and fury that would accompany a careful investigation of the many follies of the last few years would be a diversion, and plenty of Democrats were complicit with the stupidity of the Iraq War and the financial meltdown. But it’s not good for the country, because it encourages revisionist history and the minimization of the authentic tragedies of people like Shirley Sherrod.
Also, too, this is a damn good question:
Here’s a little thought experiment: just imagine how this would have gone down if the white farmer and his wife hadn’t emerged to give testimony.
(via)
Why The Post Intelligence Series Flopped
Richard Posner has some good insights:
The report is, in fact, a disappointment. It is descriptive rather than analytic, and the description is based entirely on two types of data, neither of which contributes to an understanding of the nature and problems of the nation’s intelligence system. The two types are statistics indicating the size and organizational complexity of national security intelligence, and expressions of exasperation at that size and complexity by former or current insiders.
The statistics are not broken down by each of the principal domains of national security intelligence, and so the reader is given no sense of the actual structure of the intelligence system. […]
Merely counting the number of people, parking spaces, square feet of building space, and other countables lovingly recited in the Post‘s report conveys no useful information and will impress only naïve readers who have somehow failed to realize that the U.S. government and its major components are huge. […]
I don’t agree with much of what Posner writes in general, but his basic point that numbers without context are meaningless is well taken here. It’s easy to charge “apathy” on the part of readers, but if they’re supposed to care, they need context to know why they should care.
Why The Post Intelligence Series FloppedPost + Comments (37)
MoveOff
Perhaps my give-a-shitter is irreparably damaged, but I can’t manage much enthusiasm for a MoveOn.org petition drive to put NPR in Helen Thomas’ old seat in the White House briefing room. As far as I’m concerned, they can put a well-trained circus dog, a wax replica of the corpse of Chester A. Arthur, or a small bag of human feces in that chair, and it would make as much difference as putting NPR there. Why pick a battle that draws attention to one of the most self-important institutions in Washington?
Note: The “self-important institution” that I’m talking about is the White House Press Corpse, not NPR.
More of This, Please
Here’s some genuine rage about a real outrage. Consider this an open thread.
Quality Politico Journalism
Politico quotes a Forbes interview with Julian Assange of Wikileaks, where he says he didn’t give the Washington Post early access to their information for this reason:
[…]The Post recently did an article on WikiLeaks which was generally accurate but with one exception–a line in the story which stated that WikiLeaks had been compared to “Baghdad Bob.” That’s a reference to Saddam Hussein’s former information minister, who was a lying propagandist. I’d never heard this allegation before. So I looked for a reference to us being compared to Baghdad Bob and after 20 minutes of searching I found one right wing blogger who had mentioned that phrase on one occasion. That’s not quality journalism.[…]
Then they call him a liar: “But a search through the Post archives reveals no such story.”
Commenters point out that they are wrong (here’s the Post story.) But the article stays up without correction for going on three days.
That’s how you win the morning. (via)
Update: Finally corrected this morning after Glenn Greenwald rubbed their nose in it over the Twitter.