I always find these stories to be endlessly fascinating. And make no mistake, they are living the good life.
Excellent Links
The Mighty Shadow of St. Breitbart (More Schadenfreude)
Mad props to Wonkette‘s Doktor Zoom for a brilliant summary about the sorry state of “Ghost Breitbart’s ‘Happy Cult’“:
As we all know from the plot of virtually every big Hollywood gangster movie ever made, when there’s a gang of loutish thugs and the head lout is removed, the remaining loutish thugs invariably turn on each other in a frenzy of loutishness and thuggery. This is apparently what is going on at rightwing internet concern Breitbart.com following the sudden death of Andrew Breitbart on March 1 of this year, according to this juicy Buzzfeed story by McKay Coppins, which says the late lout’s “web empire” is now “plagued by an unusual degree of disorganization and rampant infighting as his disciples battle for ownership of his legacy.” Golly. No one could have seen THAT coming!…
Actual quote from an actual former Breitbrat:
“We were running a kind of happy cult when Andrew was in charge, and when Andrew died everyone had an incentive to spin what they thought he was up to,” said one former employee. “If he knew he was going to die, I’m sure he would have called a dinner the night before and given us the tablets or something…. But he didn’t.”
The original Buzzfeed article (in case it’s blocked at your company, or you have some kind of principled objection to political journamalism supported by kitten videos) contains a wealth of he-said, they-said details, plus a photoshopped Last Breitbart Supper which is moderately hilarious but probably not something you want to click on while eating. Probably the key to unraveling the whole mess:
One pressing consequence of the company’s organizational challenges: Questions from inside the organization about how the finances are being handled. Shortly before Breitbart’s death, Bannon helped bring in $10 million in capital, which was meant to fund the site’s relaunch and expand its staff. But when Breitbart died, he left a wife and four young children who could benefit from a financial return — and two sources familiar with the situation say the widow has been asking about the money….
This hasn’t exactly been the greatest year to be a leftist, but at least we can feel secure that Andrew Breitbart is still dead.
The Mighty Shadow of St. Breitbart (More Schadenfreude)Post + Comments (51)
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Don’t Trip Over the Spin
(Keith Knight via GoComics.com)
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Jonathan Chait at NYMag points out that, when Romney’s people say he’s winning, “It’s A Bluff“:
In recent days, the vibe emanating from Mitt Romney’s campaign has grown downright giddy. Despite a lack of any evident positive momentum over the last week — indeed, in the face of a slight decline from its post-Denver high — the Romney camp is suddenly bursting with talk that it will not only win but win handily. (“We’re going to win,” said one of the former Massachusetts governor’s closest advisers. “Seriously, 305 electoral votes.”)
This is a bluff. Romney is carefully attempting to project an atmosphere of momentum, in the hopes of winning positive media coverage and, thus, creating a self-fulfilling prophecy…
Karl Rove employed exactly this strategy in 2000. As we now know, the race was excruciatingly close, and Al Gore won the national vote by half a percentage point. But at the time, Bush projected a jaunty air of confidence. Rove publicly predicted Bush would win 320 electoral votes. Bush even spent the final days stumping in California, supposedly because he was so sure of victory he wanted an icing-on-the-cake win in a deep blue state. Campaign reporters generally fell for Bush’s spin, portraying him as riding the winds of momentum and likewise presenting Al Gore as desperate.
The current landscape is slightly different. The race is also very close, but Obama enjoys a clear electoral college lead. He is ahead by at least a couple points in enough states to make him president. Adding to his base of uncontested states, Nevada, Ohio, and Wisconsin would give Obama 271 electoral votes. According to the current polling averages compiled at fivethirtyeight.com, Obama leads Nevada by 3.5 percent, Ohio by 2.9 percent, and Wisconsin by 4 percent. Should any of those fail, Virginia and Colorado are nearly dead even. (Obama leads by 0.7 percent and 1.0 percent, respectively.) If you don’t want to rely on Nate Silver — and you should rely on him! — the polling averages at realclearpolitics, the conservative-leaning site, don’t differ much, either…
Obama’s lead is narrow — narrow enough that the polling might well be wrong and Romney could win. But he is leading, his lead is not declining, and the widespread perception that Romney is pulling ahead is Romney’s campaign suckering the press corps with a confidence game.
Many more details at the link, which you should go read. Chait’s seconded by Ed Kilgore at the Washington Monthly:
… As a deep skeptic about the importance of “momentum” in sports or in politics, I keep looking for evidence that the belief a candidate is ahead will add to his or her vote. Yes, obviously, a small but significant number of voters may need to think their candidate has a realistic chance to win in order to find the motivation to vote. But do any pick a president based on who they perceive as being ahead in a close race? Nobody but Dick Morris has been predicting a Romney landslide. But nonetheless, a remarkable number of conservative gabbers and a growing number of liberals seem to think media horse-race perceptions are the ball game.
Maybe that’s so, but I wouldn’t be so sure about it. You can make the argument that an achingly close race in which Obama desperately needs a fantastic GOTV effort might be a “self-fulfillling prophecy” as well, which adds to the zeal and effectiveness of that effort. Yes, conservative “enthusiasm” has always depended on the perception that Mitt wasn’t a stone loser; one he crossed that threshold (one set by the polls rather than any perceived “moderation” or “Etch-a-Sketch Moment”), there was no doubt the GOP “base” would turn out impressively, given the hate frenzy they’ve been in towards Obama for four years now. Beyond that, though, it’s not clear all the spin matters—no matter how deeply annoying and dishonest it is for the MSM to buy it.
Karl Rove and the rest of the GOP’s unindicted co-conspirators are busy spreading fear, uncertainty and doubt. Don’t let them trick your facebook friends and low-information relatives. Save the scary stories for the Halloween parties, be like Keith Knight, and treat the GOP’s ever-shifting UNLIMITED CORPORATE VICTORY with the contempt it so richly deserves.
Wednesday Morning Open Thread: Don’t Trip Over the SpinPost + Comments (102)
Open Thread: Good News, Bad News
First, Doghouse Riley in the Midwest:
THE Freedom Defenders at Clear Channel have announced that dozens of the [VOTER FRAUD IS A FELONY!] billboards will be removed immediately, since the Freedom Defenders at Whatever Anonymous Family Foundation Which Was Accidentally Permitted To Fund Them Contrary To Clear Channel’s Own Rules has–wisely, we think–decided it would rather remain anonymous than further its voter education efforts in the open.
The billboards have been erected in Cleveland, Milwaukee, Columbus, Ohio, and elsewhere, in what the headline writers described as “predominantly poor neighborhoods”, which is the faux-balanced way of pretending the targeting might not have been racist.
And, since our own No Preteritio policy is enforced by the same legal team that vets Clear Channel Outdoor Holdings’ contracts, we’re not going to mention that the odds of Clear Channel accidentally contracting to put up anonymous political billboards targeted at You Know Who are identical to the odds of Clear Channel accidentally revealing the name of the foundation in question. It’s just math. Contracts are hard. I’m sure they don’t understand what they’re signing half the time…
Next, Rebecca Schoenkopf at Wonkette reports that “This Is Not The Voter Fraud Virginia Republicans Are Looking For“:
Guys, guys, calm down now. You may have thought you finally found some voter fraud after all these years of searching far and wide and under every ACORN, but it is pretty clear to the Virginia attorney general, registrar and Board of Elections that you didn’t. To them, it is quite obvious that a guy working for the RNC conducting voter registrations, who was caught blocks from their office shadily throwing completed voter registration forms in someone else’s Dumpster, simply cannot be guilty of voter registration fraud, despite working for the company widely known to commit voter registration fraud for the RNC. How do they know this? Because nowhere on Virginia’s voter registration applications does it list party affiliation! Therefore, dude would have no way of knowing the forms he was throwing away belonged to Democrats. And there are so many other reasons he might have thrown away people’s applications! Investigation closed! Wait, really, the investigation’s closed? Sho nuff.
“There’s no way to tell by party when people fill out these forms, what party they’re affiliated with, so I don’t think there’s any political motivation,” Virginia Registrar Brandi Lilly said Friday.
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And this is why GOTV is key: We don’t just need to win, we need to stockpile enough votes to overcome the Rethugs’ broad-based, well-funded “margin of suppression”.
Open Thread and Artists in our midst
I’ve got nothin’ right now, so I will simply share this lovely picture by a late 19th-early 20th century painter called Bertram Hiles, who lost both his arms in a tramcar accident as a child, and who painted with his mouth.
There is more at Callum James and at Design. Decoration. Craft.
So what the hell, lets make this an open thread and an impromptu “Artists in our midst” thread.
Feel free to link to photos, painting, craft, music, writing (including gratuitous blog whoring) or indeed anything that you or your friends have made that you want to show off.
My Favorite Gangnam Style Parody to Date
Courtesy the United States Naval Academy:
As someone who spends every Army/Navy rooting for the Army, for once, let me say “GO NAVY!” Hilarious.
My Favorite Gangnam Style Parody to DatePost + Comments (103)
Late Night Open Thread: Movie Night Nots
Did you know that Atlas Shrugged, Pt. II had been released? Poor Paul Constant was forced to review it for Seattle’s Stranger:
Return to Assholes’ Paradise
… I went to the first Atlas Shrugged movie a year and a half ago, and it was an embarrassing cinematic experience. The sets were cheesy, the acting was awful, and the script was totally hambone. Because the first Atlas Shrugged movie did so poorly at the box office, the sequel bears almost no relation to the earlier film. It has a different director, a totally different cast, and, presumably, a different crew working behind the scenes. And the impossible happened as I watched Part II: I was nostalgic for part 1. As awful as the first Atlas Shrugged movie was—and make no mistake, it was incredibly boring—it had a kind of ratty soap operatic charm to it. It at least felt, with its romantic entanglements and fancy parties, like an off-brand episode of Dynasty.This movie is completely joyless. And the chintz levels go through the roof: The special effects are, bar none, the worst I’ve ever seen on a movie screen, with see-through fire effects layered over still shots and bad computer models of derailed train cars rubbing against each other with all the heft and weight of a bouquet of balloons at a kid’s birthday party. The set design is even cheaper than the first outing, too…
Before, the acting was at least passionate, in a sort of hilarious way. Now it’s grim, and the new actors don’t seem to understand what they’re saying half the time….
And that reminded me that I never got around to sharing Anthony Lane’s magisterially dismissive review of The Expendables 2:
It would be unkind, and possibly beyond the reach of statistical science, to calculate the combined ages of the stars who appear in Simon West’s new film. Suffice it to say that various mature gentlemen have gathered together—a larger team, indeed, than the one from the previous movie—to fight not merely a swarm of foreign foes but also the degrading prejudice that insists that only the young and unwrinkled have the right to administer savage violence. So it is that Sylvester Stallone, Dolph Lundgren, Bruce Willis, Randy Couture, Jet Li, Terry Crews, Chuck Norris, and Arnold Schwarzenegger gang up on Jean-Claude Van Damme, which does seem a little one-sided. Also present are Jason Statham, Nan Yu, and, in the role of a sniper, Liam Hemsworth, who seems like a babe in arms amid such company. The plot is plutonium-flavored, but the film exists for two reasons alone. First, to see how many times Schwarzenegger can say the words “I’m back” without inciting his co-stars to beat him senseless. (The dialogue is a procession of thudding bons mots: “Rest in pieces,” “I now pronounce you man and knife.”) And, second, to show blood being shed with astonishing and eruptive frequency, while still convincing audiences that what they are watching comes under the rubric of harmless fun. In English, more or less.
Come to think, “In English, more or less” would apply to the Randroid vanity project, too also…
Late Night Open Thread: Movie Night NotsPost + Comments (35)