Crossposted to MyDD
Just when you think, RNC, and the Republicans in general, have realized that this country have moved on and left them in the dust. No more appeals to our worst and base instincts with racism, sexism and homophobia are going to work with majority of the folks. RNC releases this misogynistic video to make their point about Nancy Pelosi.
(cross-posted at kickin it with cg)
I’m pissed. And for that reason I cannot really formulate a coherent response to this pile of fail:
[partial transcript starting about 1:45] Mohr: I’d like to talk about the basketball playoffs, I’d like to talk about “King” [LeBron] James, this guy could actually be greater than Michael Jordan. I’d like to talk about Kevin Garnett. This guy’s the Michelle Obama of the Celtics: he doesn’t really do anything, but damn, he looks good, doesn’t he, Jim? Michelle Obama-that is a big dude. When Barack plays pick-up games at the White House, you know he picks Michelle as at least his forward, maybe his [center], depending on who’s in Congress that day. That has to be like being married to Elton Brand. She is a big. dude. I like when she put her arm around the Queen of England and she put her in a headlock and told her, “I’ve been waiting 200 years to put my arms around you, lady!” I love that. I like how she shaved off all her eyebrows, and then drew them back way too high into an arch and then straight back down, so she always looks super surprised. She kinda-Michelle Obama kinda looks like the Count on Sesame Street, that’s great. [mimicking the Count] “One, ah, ah, ah. One black President, ah, ah, ah.”
Luckily though, there are a couple of people that have an appropriate reaction.
Holly over at Feminste writes:
Real classy way to treat the First Lady – but if you ask me, Jay Mohr has always been about as funny as a week-old sack of dead rats. He’s clearly whipping out his most tired material for Rome’s sports-radio army of clones, too. Scott Madin noted over at Shakesville that there are even more racist, transphobic jokes (somehow related to steroids and gynecomastia, I guess?) later on in the clip, at about 3:30.
Over at Shakesville Madin handily notes:
Rome’s website is here, and it looks like at least one of his features is sponsored by Chevy. According to Wikipedia, he’s syndicated by “Premiere Radio Networks, a subsidiary of Clear Channel Communications,” and also hosts a show on ESPN. Judging from the clip, I’m guessing writing to Rome’s show will not be productive, but contacting Clear Channel, ESPN, and/or advertisers (in a quick search I wasn’t able to find out anything about other advertisers, but Chevy’s contact page is here) might be more effective.
Nothing funnier than a dash of transphobic misogyny?
It was the best of times, it was the worst of times; it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness; it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity; it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness; it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair; we had everything before us, we had nothing before us; we were all going directly to Heaven, we were all going the other way.
Other than that, President Obama and Dick Cheney were in complete agreement in their speeches yesterday on torture and Guantanamo Bay.
Lieutenant-Colonel Yvonne Bradley is an attorney.
She is a life-long Republican. She is a Christian conservative (her description of herself)
Though her name is probably familiar to readers of the British press, where she took London by storm a few months back, her recent interview on CNN will probably make a lot of waves in the US, if it doesn’t get buried. So pass it on.
A few months ago I would not have been aware of the late economist, Hyman Minsky (1919-1996.) His theory, known as the “Financial Instability Hypothesis (FIH)” was not a matter of public discussion as we watched our economy go directly into the toilet and the recession grow and get more dismal.
Had I known about Minsky, however, I would have seen this coming in the 1980s when the Reaganites began to dismantle government regulation of banks and the investment markets. FIH says hat stability is inherently unstable.
Yes, I’m talking it about here. Why? Well, I feel like we are an open community. So, this has nothing to do with torture, taxes, or Rush Limbaugh, but I posted this at my private blog and I wanted to share with all of you this little piece of me…
As soon as I saw the DialIdol.com stats this morning, I knew that Adam Lambert wasn’t going to win. And that’s okay. Last week, few votes separated the top 3 and Danny Gokey’s fans were more likely to go to Kris Allen than Adam Lambert. But still…
I had a very personal reason for hoping that Adam would win. And it was actually very selfish. I grew up in rural WV, raised in a conservative church were gay is bad. I remember being told in church that many of the Nazis were homosexuals. At the some time, I love and revered the church leaders. So for me, the idea that somebody could be labeled “gay” and still win a popularity contest astounds me. If America can choose between a gay and straight, why would America ever vote for the gay? I guess that for me and perhaps for so many others, homosexuality is still so wedded to shame that I cannot see it as mainstream. We still live in a country where THIS is mainstream.
Yeah, Will and Grace was funny. And every body laughed at the Fab Five (Queer Eye for a Straight Guy). But even if you are amused by and tolerate gays, can a gay still be the American Idol? Even if he’s gay, he could win?
I cried last night during Adam’s performance because I just could not fathom that the gay community had gone from “me being beat up in the locker room” to Adam Lambert in LA. Wow. I mean, I know gays and lesbians who still have to pretend to be straight when they go home for Christmas. Roll your eyes and laugh, but WOW.
Still, it’s not fair that we put this on Adam or Kris. From a career perspective, it’s probably a good thing that Adam didn’t win American Idol. He won’t have to do all of the obligatory winner bullshit and he can release his first album on his own timetable, not the “Oh my god, you won, we have to get something out there now before America forgets you” timetable. And many of his “fuck the establishment” fans will probably appreciate that he isn’t mainstream enough for the conservative Idol crowd.
A part of me actually feels sorry for Kris Allen. He may be doomed to be plagued with the “Do you think you won because Adam Lambert is gay?” question. He is going to be asked that repeatedly over the next few months, and that is a shame because he is a damn good artist. There will be an astrix next to his name on the American Idol Wikipedia page.
So, it’s not really fair that I attach my hopes and dreams to Adam Lambert. He’s just an artist. He deserves the opportunity to pursue a career without anyone trying to attach some symbolic meaning to his run on American Idol. He should be able to live his life and pursue the career he wants without being tagged as “the gay almost-Idol.”
But still, imagine if we lived in a country where identity didn’t matter.
What a beautiful thing.
Came to Baltimore to present a paper at a conference. Baltimore remained this city which I always drove through, on I-95 up and down, never bothering to stop. From the highway, the city looks rundown with the industrial section dominated by ugly looking tankers anchored at the harbor. In my own biased mind, Baltimore ranked way up there with Detroit as the city of murders and robbery. I had a friend who went to Johns Hopkins Medical School in the early 90s. He did his residency in the ER (like our Spiffy friend). Stories of gunshot wounds in scary Baltimore deeply ingrained back in my mind. I thought what’s up with the conference organizers this year? Would anybody sane organize a conference at Baltimore?
The downtown today looked awesome during the sunny day. Actually there’s a beautiful skywalk followed by a boardwalk to the harbor. The day was sunny and bright, and even the dark corners of Baltimore lit up. The hotels are humming, the malls and the Pratt St restaurants looked busy, and the convention center was packed with audience. I took a walk to eat at a seafood place called Rusty..it had a great view of the waters. It was dark when I trudged back to the hotel. Nobody mugged me nor did I run into a street ruffian who was looking to rob me. Am I ashamed of my illogical prejudices?
I’ve been slowly getting up to speed on all the blogosphere biz but still not quite there yet. By pure luck or coincidence I got to see DailyKos at its worst. I read many blogs and remember very few authors. Over at Kos I read all of Meteor Blade’s stuff and that’s about it (the Kos frontpage is a joke). Imagine my surprise when I read a diary about the banning of a very well known diarist who uses TocqueDeville as his/her handle.
I’ll let a part of TocqueDeville’s GBCW diary do the talking.
http://www.dailykos.com/storyo…
Community
Lastly, a lot of people have been suggesting that I must have been warned. Let me be clear: I was never warned. I was just suddenly locked out.
If Markos had simply asked me I would have been more than happy to clarify my position on the record. I would have explained my true intent and the whole bit about gross negligence and put all this conspiracy business aside. But instead I was just locked out. That is a lot of power for one individual to have over another. And that’s one of the reasons I haven’t asked to be reinstated and would not accept it if it was offered. I will never allow someone to have that kind of power over me again.
This point offers a nice segue to something I’ve been wanting to say at Daily Kos for a long time though: Don’t call this a community.
Imagine if everyone were to have gotten together 6 years ago and said, we need a community website for progressive Democrats that we can use to organize, raise money for our candidates, and spread our message. How do we want to do it?
Now imagine someone stood up and said, “I have an idea. Why don’t we create this website. I will run it and provide the servers. For doing so, I will run ads and get all the ad revenue. Sound fair?”
“We’re still listening”, someone replies.
“I would also, of course, have complete and absolute authority over who can come, and who can stay. I will set the terms of the site, and I will set the rules. If someone breaks my rules, or even if I just get the sense that someone has broken the rules, I will banish them into the aether, never to be seen again. Still listening?”
[Silence]
“And most importantly, I will decide what gets printed on the home page. It will be my sole discretion who gets to speak and who does not. And to top it all off, since I will be the owner of the site, the site will be named after me – “Daily Me”.”
What do you think the response would have been? I’m pretty sure that people would reject that proposal and secondly, I’m pretty sure that this individual would be excluded from any future meetings of the steering committee.
That is what Daily Kos turned out to be. It is a disturbing model for a progressive community. I’ve always had a problem with it. But my abrupt banning draws it into focus for me again. At some point, progressives need to think about a truly open source model for online community organization. One that reflects the values and principles of democracy and fairness that all progressives share.
Heh.
I’m struck by two votes the Senate took recently that the liberal blogsphere has been absolutely FREAKING out about.
The first vote was for an amendment to the Credit Cardholder’s Bill of Rights, which not only passed the Senate 67-29, but later passed the House as well. To their credit, Democrats in the House did try to strip the amendment, but it passed anyway. The amendment, sponsored by Tom Coburn of Oklahoma, was to allow loaded guns into National Parks.
The other amendment, sponsored by Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, an amendment to the Iraq/Afghanistan supplemental that would bar any funding to be used to transport or release Gitmo prisoners into the United States.
The conservadems strike again, right?
Cross-posted at River Twice Research.
Each month, the Federal Reserve releases its latest minutes of its last meeting along with its projections of economic activity (www.federalreserve.gov). The minutes just released indicate that its prior forecasts have been tweaked a bit, with update projections for unemployment over the next two years, GDP growth, and inflation. As new data become available, the hundreds of economists at the Fed revise and recalculate numbers, which means that any forecast rarely lasts more than a few months.
And yet, the Fed’s forecasts – along with the World Bank, the International Monetary Fund, the Office of Management and Budget, the Congressional Budget Office and various others – are used to frame every single meaningful discussion about the economy. They become the fodder for media reports, for budgetary decisions made by companies, and for individuals who digest the sound-bites – “Fed predicts unemployment will level off at 9% next year” – that shapes their sentiment. Investors also turn to these signposts as markers to navigate a complex world.