If you did not catch this on HBO tonight, you missed out.
Golden Globes Open Thread
Anybody watching on NBC?
I missed the Fug Girls’ red carpet live-blogging, but I look forward with real anticipation to their blog coverage tomorrow.
Must’ve been some excellent globes on view, or else the Blogmaster would’ve remembered to put up an Open Thread earlier…
Walk in Beauty, Carter Camp
Via commentor Aji, a beautiful tribute by Kossack ‘Navajo’ honoring a beautiful warrior:
… Much has been written about Carter, but many have not heard of him. He was one of the original organizers of the American Indian Movement, a pan-Indian movement sparked in part by the civil rights movement of African Americans. He led our people on the Trail of Broken Treaties caravan in 1972 from the West Coast to Washington, D.C., to protest the hundreds of broken treaties and other agreements the U.S. Government forced the tribes or their chiefs to sign. Nixon officials refused to meet with them. That led to AIM’s seven-day takeover of the BIA headquarters in Washington, D.C., which ended with some government concessions. It also led, as Meteor Blades recalls, to the liberation of BIA documents that were passed along to journalists and lawyers. “We carried out box after box of documents,” inspired by the people who “stole documents from the FBI office in Media, Pennsylvania,” in March 1971.
In the winter of 1973, Carter and other AIM leaders took over the small town of Wounded Knee on the Pine Ridge reservation. Gun battles during the 71-day stand-off with federal officers left three dead. Wounded Knee was chosen for the takeover because it is the location of a massacre of at least 150 Miniconjou and Hunkpapa Lakota Indians in 1890. After their bodies had lain on the frozen ground for days, they were dumped into a mass grave by the 7th Cavalry. It was a historically appropriate site for the American Indian Movement to bring national attention to the struggles of the Lakota and all Native peoples…
Carter’s sister, Casey Camp-Horinek said that unlike other AIM leaders, Carter remained at Wounded Knee throughout the entire siege with his warriors. He was also the only leader to spend two years at Leavenworth federal prison for disputed actions during the siege. For him there would be no book deals, no film roles, no adoring groupies just service to the Indian people and the respect of those who knew of his sacrifice…
In 1973 the fires of our traditional peoples were burning low and everyone thought they would soon die out. But a “Movement” happened across the USA led by young people who were determined not to allow that to happen. It took many years and plenty of fighting and struggle with a determined enemy who wanted our disappearance to solve his own “Indian Problem.” But quitting or stopping was not an option when so much was at stake.
We won, and our ways are no longer endangered with extinction. Our people have many battles yet to fight as you [Meteor Blades] and Navajo outline each week in this powerful series. But the flames of our fires now burn from shore to shore on this, our turtle island, and they will never go out.
At Wounded Knee in 1890 the Americans thought they had won a final solution. But, at Wounded Knee in 1973 we showed the world how wrong they were as we relit the ancient fires of the Nations. I’m proud of that.
Much more at the link.
Bridgeghazigate: Drip… Drip… Drip…
Thanks to commentor Smiling Mortician.
As Richard Nixon could’ve told Christie, that’s the weak point in every professional bully’s armor — if your only talent is pushing people around, even the lickspittles and remoras who prosper by your rise are unlikely to stay loyal when you’re threatened…
ETA: More on that Fort Lee project, from NYMag:
… The project is question is the redevelopment of 16-acre piece of Fort Lee land located at the foot of the George Washington Bridge. Sokolich divided the space, which sat vacant for years, into two parts: The eastern portion is now occupied by two new residential towers that should be finished later this year. The western half is to serve as the site of Hudson Lights, a $218 million mix of residential, commercial, and parking space that, as Kornacki notes, used its proximity to the George Washington Bridge access lanes as a major selling point to potential investors and tenants. Groundbreaking on Hudson Lights was delayed this summer because of financing issues. However, the project’s developers announced that they had finally secured financing on September 16 — three days after New York Port Authority official Pat Foye put a stop to the access lane closures by questioning their legality in an e-mail to his New Jersey counterparts…
Also, since this is a lazy Sunday afternoon, something’s been niggling me about Christie distancing himself from David Wildstein, the “political appointee at the Port Authority.. [who] was Christie’s “eyes and ears” at the huge agency”. As reported by Alex MacGillis in TNR:
… [D]uring his two hours at the podium yesterday, Christie pushed back against this perception by telling the world that Wildstein was no chum of his:
Well, let me just clear something up, OK, about my childhood friend David Wildstein. It is true that I met David in 1977 in high school. He’s a year older than me. David and I were not friends in high school. We were not even acquaintances in high school. I mean, I had a high school in Livingston, a three-year high school that had 1,800 students in a three-year high school in the late ’70s, early 1980. I knew who David Wildstein was. I met David on the Tom Kean for governor campaign in 1977. He was a youth volunteer, and so was I. Really, after that time, I completely lost touch with David. We didn’t travel in the same circles in high school. You know, I was the class president and athlete. I don’t know what David was doing during that period of time…We went 23 years without seeing each other. And in the years we did see each other, we passed in the hallways.
In other words: David Wildstein, are you kidding me? Different lunch table, dudes…
Now, Christie Christie was the catcher on his high school’s varsity baseball team. So, yeah, an ‘athlete’, but still. Maybe it’s just because most of what I know about baseball I learned from Japanese anime, but isn’t ‘catcher on the baseball team’ roughly equivalent to ‘drummer in the rock band’ — i.e., the comic relief character?
Bridge<del>ghazi</del>gate: Drip… Drip… Drip…Post + Comments (193)
Mid Afternoon NFL Playoffs Open Thread
Your team sucks.
Unless your team is the Denver Broncos.
Talk about other things too, if you must.
Publishers: Stop Breaking Your Sites
The New York Times has a nice new redesign. One small problem: I can’t copy/paste quotes from stories there. It took me a couple of minutes of fucking around to get one quote into the post below this. Maybe “blogging is dead” and everybody is on the Twitter, but I’m sure we’ve sent a few million hits to the Times over the years, and this new redesign means we’ll be sending less.
Similarly, a few months after redesign, the Maddow Blog still hasn’t put out a RSS feed that lets someone follow Steven Benen’s posts. So I’m posting less of his (excellent) work, like this find: a New Jersey Pastafarian town councilman who wore his sacred colander when being sworn in.
Here’s an open thread to share your redesign nightmare stories.
Early Morning Open Thread: Sunday (Not So) Funnies
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Bridgeghazi has been a real gift to political cartoonists — there’s just soooo many cultural references to milk. Of course, as Martin Longman reminds us in Washington Monthly, when it comes to Chris Christie, WYSIWYG has always been the best guideline:
The dismissal of U.S. attorneys controversy of 2007 has been largely forgotten, but it was a very big deal at the time… It was a total disaster for the Bush administration that was the natural result of a conspiracy to deliberately politicize the Justice Department. The U.S. Attorneys who were fired were fired for insufficient partisan zeal. In some cases, they refused to open meritless voter fraud cases. In other cases, they wouldn’t open meritless investigations on Democratic politicians. In still other cases, they were actually investigating lawbreaking by Republicans.
So, one of the takeaways from the scandal was that the U.S. Attorneys who weren’t dismissed were incredibly suspect. The attorneys who were found acceptable to the Bush administration were the ones who would launch phony investigations against innocent people and who would cover up criminal activity if is was carried out by Bush’s allies. Chris Christie was a U.S. Attorney who passed that test. He was considered sufficiently corrupt (or corruptible) to remain a U.S. Attorney in Alberto Gonzales’s (and Karl Rove’s) Justice Department…
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Apart from waiting for the next shoe to drop, what’s on the agenda today?
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(Drew Sheneman via GoComics.com)
Early Morning Open Thread: Sunday (Not So) FunniesPost + Comments (84)