Archives for June 2011

Late night comedians feast on Palin and take a bite out of Weiner.

Sam Seder: Taxpayer-funded helicopter takes Gov. Chris Christie (R-NJ) to son’s little league game.

SCTV: The Maria Shriver make-up makeover.

Rep. Jim McDermott (D-WA-07): Republicans want to destroy Medicare to save it?!?:

Young Turks: KKK protests Westboro Baptist Church (Darryl: Anyone wanna pitch in to contribute a case of hand grenades to each side?).

Stephen on G.P.P. pandering debt ceiling game (via TalkingPointsMemo).

Ann Telnaes: Unofficial photos from Obama’s trip.

Seattle attorney arrested for keying cars.

Sam Seder: Republicans would fund a reality show before food safety.

Sen. Paul Goes All Nazi On Us:

• Newsy: Rand Paul calls for prison for LISTENING to radical speech?!?
• Young Turks: Rand Paul’s fascist side.
• Thom: Senator Rand Paul & his new McCarthy-esque witch hunt

Mitt 2.0 (via TalkingPointsMemo).

Congressional candidate Roger Goodman wants to legalize medical marijuana dispensaries.

Obama: A resurgent auto industry.

Mark Fiore: Snuggly new friend Autopen signs the Patriot Act.

Pap: Teabaggers try to rewrite history.

Thom: Republican budget cuts lead to a man drowning as first responders stand by helplessly.

Stephen on Cell phone radiation (via TalkingPointsMemo).

White House: West Wing Week.

Cenk: Serial job killiers hypocrite Republicans blame Obama after opposing virtually everything he introduces.

Wisconsin G.O.P. caught on tape planning to run ‘Spoiler Candidates’ in June recall elections.

Weiner’s Wiener’s Woes:

• Newsy: Weiner “Can’t say with certitude….”
• Young Turks: Weinergate is B.S.
• Jon does Weiner’s wiener (via Political Wire):
• FAUX News and friends phallus fun (via TalkingPointsMemo).
• Young Turks: Weinergate? No…Breitbart is a fraud.
• NYC Reporter has “altercation” in Weiner’s office (via TalkingPointsMemo).
• Newsy: Weiner calls Twitter hack a distraction.
• Maddow does Rep. Weiner
• Lawrence O’Donnell: Takes Bill-O to task over sex scandal.
• Young Turks: Evidence Rep. Weiner was hacked.

Thom: Fighting back in the Republican War on Workers™.

Ed and Pap: Dimwit Republicans follow dimwit leaders.

Newsy: Rudy!

Obama speaks at Memorial Day Service.

Young Turks: Republican’s skewed ideas about taxes.

Florida’s Teabaggy Gov. Rick Scott Stimulus Flippity Floppy:

• Maddow: Gov. Scott stimulus hypocrisy.
• Cenk: Governor Scott busted on stimulus hypocrisy.

Rep. Jay Inslee (D-WA-01) offers wounded warrior amendment.

Thom: Who is killing net neutrality?

Young Turks: Donald Trump might be back in!!!

Romney: Same candidate, different positions?!?

Thom: Break up California!

ONN: Nation’s problems caused by being built on ancient Indian burial ground.

Maddow: Thaddeus McCotter resurrects REO Speedwagen.

Young Turks: Hollywood’s liberal bias.

The Caucus: The week in politics.

Cenk: Republicans double down on Ryan’s disastrous Medicare “transformation” program (via TalkingPointsMemo).

Gov. Chris Christie’s very busy week.

DNC Chair: Romney’s failed jobs record.

Palin Around with Crazy:

• Young Turks: Sarah Palin steals Mitt Romney’s thunder.
• Jon: Driving Miss Crazy (via OneGoodMove).
• Sarah Palin makes another deposit in her Stoopid Statement Bank About Paul Revere’s Midnight Ride (via Political Wire):
• Tweety: Sarah Palin’s version of the midnight ride.
• Young Turks: Who funds Sarah’s tour bus?
• Maddow: Sarah Palin channels Vladimir Putin.
• What just happened to The Mittster in NH?
• Cenk: Palin takes Mitt’s lunch money.
• Ann Telnaes: smellin’ The Emissions.
• Young Turks: A pair of quitters share some Pizza
• Palintology: Sarah Palins debt ceiling theory is stupid and uninformed
• Cenk: The Mommy Grizzlys versus the Plastic Man.

Cenk: Of Course Senator bought by Goldman Sachs.

Thom: “Buy our Republican plan or we’ll shoot Grandma!”.

Maddow: Wingnuts out extreming each other on abortion.

SCTV: Can you WHO me now?

Young Turks: Teabaggers try to kill Medicare.

Last week’s Friday Night Multimedia Extravaganza can be found here.

This may come as a surprise to those of you who are new to politics or the Northwest: for a while, The Seattle Times was by far the local newspaper that did online content the best. Sure, it was mostly that they had a guy (Postman) who was willing to do a regularly updated, well written blog. It wasn’t like they had a brilliant strategy, they just sort of lucked into it, as evidenced by the fact that (a) it was just one guy and not the whole newsroom (b) they let him go and (c) since he left they haven’t come close to recreating it.

Still, when The Stranger and The P-I’s online content was just their articles, there was a lot of breaking news on the Times’ website mostly from Postman. The Seattle Times could have built on their lead. Instead, I go to what should be (and sadly, maybe is) their premier blog, Ed Cetera and it’s awful. It hasn’t been updated since May 28, so almost a week. Their supposedly weekly feature (that, yes, I was only on their blog looking for something to make fun of) was last written in April.

And look, it’s a rather different skill set, writing for a newspaper and writing online. While I think the general quality of the columns leaves something lacking, I fully admit that what they do isn’t in my wheelhouse. And nobody is asking them to do what we bloggers do, really. They still write for a family newspaper, so they don’t need to say “fuck” as much as me, and can deploy snark less frequently. Still, I don’t know how newspapers are going to survive if they neglect online content as much as The Seattle Times has.

And ultimately, I want The Seattle Times to survive. There’s no other outlet for investigative journalism of the same magnitude in the region. There’s nowhere else that can spark the same conversation across the region like the front page of The Seattle Times (not even TV, and certainly not blogs). But for that to survive in an increasingly online world, I think they have to adapt, and they haven’t yet.

Dr. Jack Kevorkian’s life was controversial, but never should have been. It takes an extraordinary amount of courage to risk your livelihood simply because you know you’re right and you feel compelled to stand up for the freedom of others. Kevorkian was a giant among men – and as many extraordinary men did before him, he ended up sacrificing his own freedom so that others may one day have more of it for themselves.

It was June 3rd, 2008 when Barack and Michelle took part in something destined to be call “the fist bump heard ’round the world.”

Conservative reporters, commentators, pundits, and comment thread trolls attributed all sorts of nefarious meanings to the simple act. Clearly, it was some kind of sign of the future first couple’s radical Black Panther-esque militancy. Or was it a Terrorist Fist Jab™ asked a FAUX News infotainer? She then brings on a “body language expert” to get to the bottom of it:

But my favorite comes from a FAUX affiliate in Detroit whose expert found much to be admired in the Obamas doing “a lot of touching, kissing, even fisting with one another…” (skip to 1:50):

So…happy Fist Bump Day to all friends of HA.

Oh…and try to take a little time today for fisting your friends.

– Norm Dicks is calling for a quicker end to the war in Afghanistan (h/t, although “lost” may be too strong a word (yes, I caught the reference to Walter Cronkite)).

– While, obviously, you want lower unemployment, 7.2% seems like a cherry pick as something a president needs to get reelected. But people smarter than me seem to think it’s meaningful.

– I’m not one much for signing online petitions, but yes, the Space Needle should fly the rainbow flag during pride week.

– Maybe David Brooks just wants to have Syria torture Canadians.

– I’ve never had a problem riding this section of the Burke-Gilman Trail, but I suppose Stefanie Frease hadn’t either until the crash that prompted the editorial.

– As I’ll explain tomorrow, I did an open thread Wednesday, Thursday, and now Friday, but there’s less other front page content. Any thoughts on if this is positive or negative?

Oh look, I’m still doing this nonsense.

Bad, old science fiction is the best. There was a time when I went to used bookstores frequently, and would always look for science fiction anthologies from like the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s. The thing about them is that they tell you more about the 40’s, 50’s, and 60’s than they do about whatever future the author invented. Women were secretaries, aliens were savages, etc. So, I’m not sure what the next chapter tells us about Guzzo. It starts with Quixby returning a phone call from General Alexander Bennett:

“Hello, George. Glad to hear from you so soon. Say, I need you to go to Madison, Wisconsin, to straighten things out at out Department of Science and Education. Since you left there last year, the laboratory experiments seem to have encountered a few bugs that need ironing out. I don’t have to detail the problem for you now. Can you leave right away?”

First, either they iron bugs in the future, or that’s a pretty serious mixed metaphor. Second “I don’t have to detail the problem for you now” is sure suspenseful. Third, what? Quixby agrees, so it’s not like we learned anything from the call.

Quixby, a pilot and flying device designer had apparently done brain experiments in Madison. And the whole place can’t function with him gone, even though an actual brain surgeon, Dr. Oliver Maxwell, was in charge. There are “brain cartridges” that give people knowledge, but nobody knows what to put on the cartridges. So don’t rely on doctors, medial ethicists, the patients themselves, or whatever: let “the Mr. Fixit of the American scientific community” figure that out.

Everyone agrees, we need to throw book learnin’ onto people. But some disagree on if we should also add artistic, musical and other such “creative elements.” Quixby, who I can’t stress enough the book doesn’t mention any medical training, decides let’s do the book learnin’ for now and we can come back to the other stuff. So, compromise? Nothing?

Then, we hear about the things that Quixby worked on in the years when he was in Madison. I think this is Doctor Maxwell speaking, but it’s not entirely clear from the text:

“First of all, Colonel, let me bring up another topic. I think you already know about our success in promoting sign language as the world’s second language. It has take quite a while, as you know well, but we now have agreements by every nation in the world to teach a single form of sign language in all their schools. We have also made considerable headway in getting English adopted as the universal first language, with the added policy of each nation continuing to pursue its own historic language.

“Another program you set in motion when you were here is coming along at a surprisingly fast rate. That’s the program to translate all the world’s books into many languages, to revolutionize the world’s libraries by committing all books to electronic form, and to reflect these changes in schools at all levels.”

There is no explanation why sign language is the universal second language. I’m guessing to help deaf people. But it’s science fiction, and pretty loose on the actual science, so why not just make up a cure for deafness? And thank goodness in 2220, we’ll finally have electronic books.

Then Quixby agrees to stay in Madison until he’s ordered somewhere else. End of chapter 3, and no real explanation of what order is restored.

– Official or not, The Great Renaming is a hell of a title (h/t to Robby on Facebook).

– Bumbershoot Lineup.

– Another Washington State newspaper gone.

– Chart of the day.

– David Pauley has turned out to be pretty good.

– Mitt Romney is running on his business experience. For some reason.

I don’t mean to pick on Joni Balter here. Most people writing about a possible Dennis Kucinich Congressional run in Washington use the same dumbass term.

Republicans would love to run against Kucinich in a suburban congressional district because he is a fringe liberal sporting a carpetbagger label.

Look, if I still lived up North, I’d probably prefer Rodger Goodman or Marko Liias. I supported Ruderman before Inslee got in the race in 1998 and would certainly be willing to look at someone else. There’s a rich field of candidates to draw from, so it’s not like we need Kucinich. Nevertheless, I don’t think it’s necessarily bad to run from somewhere else.

And in fact the original carpetbaggers were pretty fucking awesome. After the Civil War, of course, many people from the North went South to seek out the new political climate of freedom and racial integration imposed by the Federal government. The people who went into elected office were smeared as carpetbaggers by their opponents. People like Adelbert Ames, a hero at Bull Run and Gettysburg who was appointed to the governorship of Mississippi during reconstruction before winning election to the US Senate and the governor’s office outright. While I probably wouldn’t agree with all of his policies, where it mattered the most, he was right: “he took several steps to advance the rights of freed slaves, appointing the first black office-holders in state history.”

But in the history of the Reconstruction South, the Carpetbaggers lost. After Ames won election as governor, political violence overtook the state. Appeals to the Federal government fell on deaf ears, and eventually he resigned under threat of impeachment and possible violence. And political violence won out throughout the South. The worst case was Colfax.

On April 13, 1873, violence erupted in Colfax, Louisiana. The White League, a paramilitary group intent on securing white rule in Louisiana, clashed with Louisiana’s almost all-black state militia. The resulting death toll was staggering. Only three members of the White League died. But some 100 black men were killed in the encounter. Of those, nearly half were murdered in cold blood after they had already surrendered. The incident once again showed President Ulysses S. Grant how hard it would be to guarantee the rights and the safety of blacks in the South.

…

Louisiana whites formed their own “shadow” government and their own army, the White League. The White League, similar to the Ku Klux Klan, intimidated and attacked Republicans and blacks all over the state. While the worst violence occurred in Colfax, other incidents were sparked in Coushatta, when the White League murdered six Republicans, and in New Orleans, when 30 were killed and 100 more wounded.

In response to these incidents and others throughout the South, President Grant ordered federal troops to restore order. But most of the relief was temporary. After Colfax, the federal government convicted only three whites for the murders. In the end, they were freed when the U.S. Supreme Court declared that they had been convicted unconstitutionally.

The plaque commemorating the incident, put up by the state of Louisiana, still says “On this site occurred the Colfax Riot in which three white men and 150 negroes were slain. This event on April 13, 1873 marked the end of carpetbag misrule in the South.”

So that’s in a nutshell my problem with using carpetbagger as an attack. While obviously Balter and other political commentators aren’t trying to evoke the political violence and racial hatred that ended reconstruction, it’s there in the word. It means something more than just an outsider.

– As a feminist man, I’m still sometimes amazed at things that pass me by. I was caught off guard that there would be harassment on trains bad enough to make someone switch cars.

– While there is always more to do, Obama has certainly earned HRC’s endorsement.

– Seattle has been driving less even before McGinn.

– Fox News sounds like a terrible place to work.

– RIP Gil Scott-Heron.