Love the counterprotest at comic-con when the Westboro scum showed up. My favorite:
This Works
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Humorous
by John Cole| 46 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Humorous
Love the counterprotest at comic-con when the Westboro scum showed up. My favorite:
This post is in: Excellent Links, Post-racial America, Flash Mob of Hate, Our Failed Media Experiment
Forty-eight hours ago the story was another bad apple found on Obama’s cart. By yesterday morning it was another black eye for Obama and Tom Vilsack for rushing to dump a blameless woman on no good evidence and cravenly or cowardly or pusillanimously running for cover because Breitbart, Roger Ailes and whatever other gods of The Crazy said boo! For progressives mad at their president, at some level, that’s understandable. They have no relationship with and expect only the worst from the Breitbarts and Fox Newses of the world. But with Obama they expect more. And it’s personal.
Still, you just have to back up from that and realize that as disappointing as Tom Vilsack’s first crack at this was, the idea that he or Obama is the bad guy in this story is not only preposterous but verging on obscene. It’s like the NYPD as the bad guy in the Son of Sam saga because they didn’t catch David Berkowitz fast enough. Or perhaps that the real moral of the story is that the woman with the stalker should have been more focused on personal data security. Not for some time has something so captured the essential corruption of a big chunk of what passes as ‘right wing media’ (not all, by any means, but a sizable chunk along the Breitbart/Fox/Hannity continuum) and the corruption of the mainstream media itself as this episode.
Can a brother get an AMEN?
by $8 blue check mistermix| 19 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Science & Technology
Since I can only concentrate on one thing at a time, like everyone else who Loves America™ and whose vote really counts, I wasn’t able to post a couple of links that I found interesting while Shirleygate was going on. Now that we have begun our long national process of healing, perhaps a few of you may be ready to divert your attention from the tedium of race relations to the fascinating world of technology.
First, the FCC did another cool thing that pisses off the major wireless carriers. They approved a giant “wholesale” wireless network using the 4G LTE (that’s fourth generation, long-term evolution, the new faster communication standard that all US carriers will probably use). What’s given Verizon and AT&T butthurt is the FCC’s ruling that the #1 and #2 wireless carriers in the US can’t use it without FCC approval.
A “wholesale” network is one that sells bandwidth to everyone. The existence of a nationwide, wholesale network could spawn a bunch of non-traditional competitors (like retailers) who lease and resell bandwidth on the network. It also lessens the capital costs of also-rans like Sprint and T-Mobile, who will be able to use the wholesale network in places where they haven’t built towers. (Currently those companies use Verizon and AT&T’s networks, respectively, for roaming.)
Those of you looking for an update on the next generation of nuclear reactors will find one by atomicrod guest posting on the Oil Drum. He examines a few of the new, smaller designs, some of which feature complete passive cooling (no pumps to fail). They are designed to replace existing coal-fired plants.
by DougJ| 14 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Our Failed Media Experiment
I find this story fascinating in a Chinatown/Citizen Kane kind of way: a senile Sumner Redstone (head of Viacom and CBS) called reporter Peter Lauria and left a rambling voice message about trying to figure out who was bad-mouthing Redstone’s girl-band project the “Electric Barbarellas”. The reporter goes public with the call — along with a subsequent interview of Redstone — and is trashed by CNBC “journalist” Dennis Kneale for doing so. (It goes without saying that Kneale is a toady and an embarrassment to his so-called profession.)
What I really like is the content of Redstone’s voicemail message:
“You may be reluctant, but we have to have [for the lawsuit] the name of the person who gave you that story,” Redstone says in the voicemail, the “we” being himself and Viacom CEO Philippe Dauman. “We’re not going to kill him. We just want to talk to him. We’re not going to fire him. We just want to talk to him.” (As Frank Biondi, Mel Karmazin, Tom Freston, and even Tom Cruise can attest, Redstone is famous for such tolerance about opposing viewpoints, and would surely never fire someone just on a whim.)
Redstone went on to say: “You will be thoroughly protected. We’re not going to hurt this guy. We just want to sit him down and find out why he did what he did. You will not in any way be revealed. You will be well-rewarded and well-protected.”
There’s something about the story that is perfect: crazy old billionaire falls in love with an all-girl band, launches scorched-earth campaign to find the person who has been bad-mouthing said band, then has his minions in the media trash the reporter who writes about the campaign. It’s a timeless American story of greed, cowardice, lust, and lunacy.
And the good guy in the story is named Peter Lauria! You can’t make this stuff up.
by John Cole| 93 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Assholes, Blogospheric Navel-Gazing, Flash Mob of Hate
Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy
The new lie is that this film wasn’t about Sherrod, it was about the “racist NAACP audience reaction.” None other than Rich Lowry puts this to bed:
Jonah, the problem with the audience defense made by your e-mailers is that Sherrod told her listeners this before launching into the white-farmer story:
When I made that commitment [to stay in the South], I was making that commitment to black people, and to black people only. But you know God will show you things, and he’ll put things in your path so that you realize that the struggle is really about poor people.
So, the audience knew what the up-shot of the story was going to be. In a disservice to everyone, Andrew’s source clipped the video to exclude this key introduction, which would have only added about 20 seconds more in length, but an entire world in additional context.
The audience knew from the beginning of the speech that this was a tale of redemption, and were in no way cheering racism. This bullshit about audience reaction is just shifting the smear from Sherrod to unknown black people.
Not that folks like Ed Morrisey won’t give it the old college try, anyway.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Flash Mob of Hate
There was one group of people who were immediately defending Sherrod from the Breitbart smears. Charles Johnson and the Lizardoids at LGF, yesterday:
Let me sum it up; Breitbart has EARTH-SHATTERING video of Shirley Sherrod, USDA Georgia Director of Rural Development, speaking at the 2009 NAACP Freedom Fund dinner in Georgia. But wait, it gets even worse.
Sherrod tells a story about a white farmer who patronizes and condescends to her, which leads to her not wanting to go out of her way to help the guy. She ends up referring him to a white lawyer to continue pursuing his case.
Can you BELIEVE IT! I don’t know how the NAACP will ever recover from Andrew Breitbart’s devastating master stroke.
OK, I’m being a little sarcastic. This is actually really really stupid and inconsequential.
CJ then consistently defended her the last 24 hours.
by John Cole| 86 Comments
This post is in: Excellent Links, Popular Culture
Hitchens may have cancer, but he can still kick Braveheart’s ass:
Every time Mel Gibson unburdens himself of a tirade against Jews or “n______s” or uncooperative females, there are commentators on hand to create a mystery where none exists. When he produced The Passion of the Christ, which lovingly and in detail recycled the bloody myth that all Jews are historically and collectively responsible for the murder of Jesus, it was argued by many mainstream Christians that his zeal for the faith might be a touch lurid but that the film itself was mainly devotional. When he was arrested on the Malibu freeway and screamed abuse at a police officer to the effect that Jews were responsible for all the wars in the world, pundits convened on page and screen to speculate whether our Mel had too much to drink that evening. Not long ago, I watched him go completely bug-eyed on television at a Jewish interviewer who asked him about the latter incident. “You’ve got a dog in this fight, haven’t you?” he hissed. And now, in the wake of a Niagara of cloacal abuse directed at the mother of his youngest child, in which we were spared nothing by way of obscenity and menace and nothing by way of paranoid and sexualized racism, there have been those who diagnose Gibson’s problem as a lack of anger management skills, combined perhaps with a touch of narcissistic personality disorder.
This is extraordinary. We live in a culture where the terms fascist and racist are thrown about, if anything, too easily and too frequently. Yet here is a man whose every word and deed is easily explicable once you know the single essential thing about him: He is a member of a fascist splinter group that believes it is the salvation of the Catholic Church.
Gibson is no Mother Teresa, that’s for sure.