Too good not to front-page (h/t commentor Trollhattan). Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly got together with filmmaker Bill Simmon to remind us what’s at stake. Great clip for email forwarding to the faint of heart:
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This post is in: Election 2010, Excellent Links, Open Threads, Assholes, Bring on the Brawndo!, Clap Louder!, Flash Mob of Hate, Seriously
Too good not to front-page (h/t commentor Trollhattan). Steve Benen at the Washington Monthly got together with filmmaker Bill Simmon to remind us what’s at stake. Great clip for email forwarding to the faint of heart:
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This post is in: Excellent Links, Foreign Affairs, Daydream Believers, Seriously
From the NYTimes, “Chinese Dissident Awarded Nobel Peace Prize“:
BEIJING — Liu Xiaobo, an impassioned literary critic, political essayist and democracy advocate repeatedly jailed by the Chinese government for his writings, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize on Friday in recognition of his pursuit of nonviolent political reform in the world’s most populous country.
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Mr. Liu, 54, perhaps China’s best known dissident, is currently serving an 11-year term on charges of “inciting the subversion of state power.” He is the first Chinese citizen to win the Peace Prize.
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In awarding the prize to Mr. Liu, the Norwegian Nobel Committee delivered an unmistakable rebuke to Beijing’s authoritarian leaders at a time of growing intolerance for domestic dissent and spreading unease internationally over the muscular diplomacy that has accompanied China’s economic rise.
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The prize is an enormous boost for China’s beleaguered reform movement and an affirmation of the two decades Mr. Liu has spent advocating peaceful political change in the face of unremitting hostility from the ruling Chinese Community Party. Blacklisted from academia and barred from publishing in China, Mr. Liu has been harassed and detained repeatedly since 1989, when he stepped into the drama playing out on Tiananmen Square by staging a hunger strike and then negotiating the peaceful retreat of student demonstrators as thousands of soldiers stood by with rifles at the ready.
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“If not for the work of Liu and the others to broker a peaceful withdrawal from the square, Tiananmen Square would have been a field of blood on June 4,” said Gao Yu, a veteran journalist who was arrested in the hours before the tanks began moving through the city.
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by $8 blue check mistermix| 47 Comments
This post is in: Seriously
The creator of “The Rockford Files” and “The A-Team” was incredibly prolific:
Indeed, in the spring of 1986, he had six hourlong shows on in primetime: “The A-Team,” “Hunter,” “Stingray,” “Riptide,” “The Last Precinct” on NBC and “Hardcastle & McCormick” on ABC.
I remember watching “The Rockford Files” as a kid and being impressed with how smart and sophisticated it was, compared to the other programs of the time.
This post is in: C.R.E.A.M., Election 2010, Excellent Links, Popular Culture, Seriously
Let’s everybody go buy at least one copy of the October 15 issue of Rolling Stone, and see if we can stealth-seed them into the waiting rooms at the dentist, Jiffy-Lube, Gymboree, the break room at the office, and wherever “low information” voters might be in need of an easily palatable update on How The World Works. It has a nice tasteful Newsweek–worthy cover, three-quarters profile of Our President, nothing that might hint of naughty thoughts or profane words to even the most tender sensibility. And there are two great long-form articles that deserve to be widely read.
First, Jann Wenner’s interview with “Obama in Command“, which includes a lot of the details people need to be reminded about, starting right on the first page:
How do you feel about the fact that day after day, there’s this really destructive attack on whatever you propose? Does that bother you? Has it shocked you?
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I don’t think it’s a shock. I had served in the United States Senate; I had seen how the filibuster had become a routine tool to slow things down, as opposed to what it used to be, which was a selective tool — although often a very destructive one, because it was typically targeted at civil rights and the aspirations of African-Americans who were trying to be freed up from Jim Crow. But I’d been in the Senate long enough to know that the machinery there was breaking down…
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But the delays, the cloture votes, the unprecedented obstruction that has taken place in the Senate took its toll. Even if you eventually got something done, it would take so long and it would be so contentious, that it sent a message to the public that “Gosh, Obama said he was going to come in and change Washington, and it’s exactly the same, it’s more contentious than ever.” Everything just seems to drag on — even what should be routine activities, like appointments, aren’t happening. So it created an atmosphere in which a public that is already very skeptical of government, but was maybe feeling hopeful right after my election, felt deflated and sort of felt, “We’re just seeing more of the same.”
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How do you personally feel about hedge-fund managers who are making $200 million a year and paying a 15 percent tax rate? Or the guy who made $700 million one year and compared you to Hitler for trying to raise his taxes above 15 percent — does that gall you?
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I’ve gotta say that I have been surprised by some of the rhetoric in the business press… I know a lot of these guys who started hedge funds. They are making large profits, taking home large incomes, but because of a rule called “carried interest,” they are paying lower tax rates than their secretaries, or the janitor that cleans up the building. Or folks who are out there as police officers and teachers and small-business people. So all we’ve said is that it makes sense for them to pay taxes on it like on ordinary income….
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The average American out there who is my primary concern and is making 60 grand a year and paying taxes on all that income and trying to send their kids through school, and partly as a consequence of bad decisions on Wall Street, feels that their job is insecure and has seen their 401(k) decline by 30 percent, and has seen the value of their home decline — I don’t think they’re that sympathetic to these guys, and neither am I.
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This post is in: Clown Shoes, Seriously, WTF?
Some of you seriously need to get a grip:
John, do you have some kind of independent verification of this? Your word’s not much good on this. Couldn’t you have belonged under a different screen name? You were certainly beside yourself with offense when Journolist was finally brought down, and you’ve outed yourself as being fond of behind the scenes back and forth with other bloggers and public figures for which the eyes of your unwashed BJ regulars here are deemed unworthy.
You’ve got me dead to rights! I actually was a super secret member of JournOlist, using the pen name of “Dave Weigel.”
Seriously, people. I was never a member. And my problem with the publishing of the private emails had nothing to do with a fondness for behind the scenes chatter.
This post is in: Excellent Links, Media, Assholes, Seriously
Many thanks to commentor El Cid for his link to the brilliant Economist smackdown of Dinesh D’Souza’s weird racialist “Obama Derangment Syndrome“:
I DON’T find it at all difficult to understand how Barack Obama thinks, because most of his beliefs are part of the broad consensus in America’s centre or centre-left: greenhouse-gas emissions reductions, universal health insurance, financial-reform legislation, repealing the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy, and so forth. Dinesh D’Souza, on the other hand, appears to have met so few Democrats in recent decades that he finds such views shocking, and thinks they can only be explained by the fact that Mr Obama’s father was a Kenyan government economist who pushed for a non-aligned stance in the Cold War during the 1960s-70s.
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Most Americans wouldn’t have a hard time answering the question of why the government ought to guarantee all kids a good education. “Because it’s not the kids’ fault that their parents aren’t rich PhD’s” pretty much covers it… So why would Mr D’Souza perform the moral contortionist’s act necessary to justify elitism in education as integral to a “free society”? Well, here’s an explanation modeled on the one Mr D’Souza provides for Mr Obama’s views:
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If Mr D’Souza grew up amongst a tiny hereditary elite desperately trying to protect its privileged status in a huge and bitterly poor third-world country, that would explain why he wants to make sure disadvantaged children are denied the educational opportunities his daughter receives.
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What about his weird instinct to dredge up the irrelevant topic of anti-colonialism in explaining Barack Obama’s run-of-the-mill center-left political agenda? Using the same phrasing:
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If Mr D’Souza hailed from a tiny Westernised elite that allied itself with the European colonialist project against the national independence movement of his own country, that would explain his monomania about anti-colonialism.
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It would, however, be unfair to explain Mr D’Souza’s views this way. First of all, I’m no expert on Indian history or the caste system in Goa, and the description above may be just as shallow a caricature as the one Mr D’Souza provides of post-colonial East African politics in his inflammatory article. Specifically, I know no more about Mr D’Souza’s family’s political views than he does about Barack Obama’s father’s (about which he appears to know strikingly little, given the wealth of information available on the subject)… [A]nybody who wants to know “how D’Souza thinks” is free to look up what he’s written in books and articles over the years, just as Mr D’Souza could criticise the views of Barack Obama by referring to things Mr Obama has said and done.
By all means, read the whole thing, because it’s very cheering to know that there are still a few sane people with access to the levers of Respectable Major Media Access.
This post is in: Dog Blogging, Open Threads, Pet Rescue, Seriously
First things first — everybody send positive thoughts Soonergrunt‘s way, that his heart surgery (scheduled for this morning) is uneventful and his recovery swift!
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From commentor Daniel K:
Meet Tessie.
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When I found her six years ago, she was literally four days from being euthanized, and the folks at the shelter tried to talk me out of taking her. They said she’s nuts, shits and pisses like it’s her job, barks non-stop, etc. So I played with some of the other dogs at the kennel, but kept walking past her cage checking her out.
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When they agreed to let me play with her, she barked at me, took a leak on my shoe, and then ran in circles chasing her tail like a maniac. But then I thought, look at her – she’s a beauty! So I asked them if I could take her for a walk, and how far I could take her. They told me to leave my drivers license, and go as far as I wanted. And so initially she walked me, for a good 30 minutes, yanking and panting the entire way. Then she stopped, looked around, and realized she wasn’t at the shelter. I remember this look on her face, something like, holy shit I’m free. Then she looked up at me for the first time, jumped up, put both paws on my chest, and started to slobber all over my face.
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Aside from puking in the car on the drive home, she was the most amazing angel in the world. Loving, insta-house trained (literally no accidents evah), amazing disposition, fiercely loyal, snuggly. Here’s a link to a video I made of her (http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=FOEt_kxjebY), introducing her to a friend’s 4-year-old son who lived too far away to meet her in person.
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About a year ago, Tessie developed a bunch of mast cell tumors. She put up a pretty amazing fight, but ending up losing the battle to cancer. Good God, I miss that mutt!