Serendipity for an Insomniac

Two nights ago, I was stuck in front of the teevee after watching the baseball. While surfing around looking for more South Park reruns, I happened across a movie, just starting, that I had never seen and always kinda, sorta thought I wanted to see.

Whoa.

I'm here to tell you that if you haven't ever seen Fight Club, and the reason is, like mine was, because you don't think there's all that much appeal in watching Brad Pitt and Edward Norton box, it is a whole lot more than that. I don't want to say anything more, because if you don't know anything about it, you should have the pleasure of being as surprised as I was. But, assuming you're not too squeamish about some moments of violence, do give it a shot. Netflix it or something, but I will state that even with commercial interruptions and annoying censorship [1], I was entranced. Powerfully strange and at times, delightfully playful.

---

[1] It is an enduring mystery to me why it is still considered impermissible to say fuck and shit on late night basic cable, but it is fine to say goddam as often as you like. I would think if I were a Tony Perkins/Brent Bozell-type of tightass, I would care at least as much about goddam as I would about any Anglo-Saxon monosyllables. I mean, in light of that Third Commandment [2] and all.

[2] Or Second, if you're one of those papists, which … hey, look! All this time, I thought Bozo was a Baptist, like Perkins. Fight, fight!

More on Journalists in Handcuffs

Following up on the Joe Miller story from a couple of days ago, and related to the comment Twin left under it, Eric Boehlert has some thoughts, in "Memo to the media: The Tea Party is coming for you." Here's an excerpt from Eric's post:

Sorry folks, but we left the working-the-refs realm a long, long time ago. The Tea Party movement, and the press-hating frenzy that’s helping to fuel the uprising, doesn’t want better political coverage. It wants no political press coverage. It wants the Fourth Estate destroyed. And it wants its movement leaders not to be held accountable.

By anyone.

In order to achieve that open playing field, journalists and the idea of journalism has to be completely vilified so right-wing supporters no longer even see the pursuit as a legitimate one. So Tea Party media leaders cheer when reporters are handcuffed and subject to phony citizen “arrests,” and unleash lots of other vile attacks, portraying them as unpatriotic and treasonous.

The instinct for many of you, I suspect, will be to read Eric's and Twin's words as overreaction. I used to feel this way, too. Now I'm not so sure. I'm now leaning more toward the idea that they're being prescient about a scenario that all too many right-wingers in this country think they want to see unfold.

I'd also remind everyone of another aspect of this problem, which worries me more than the howling from the teabaggers, the bedwetters, the proudly ignorant Beck/Palin/Bachmann/Limbaugh fans: a lot of these handcuffs have been placed on the media by themselves. Partly, to be sure, in response to the wingnuts' nonstop ref-working, not to mention their hate mail, demonization, outright threats, and so on. But a large part of the problem among the most prominent members and organizations in the mainstream media is self-imposed. Even after the jaw-dropping amounts of anti-Obama and anti-Democratic vitriol, racism, paranoia, and outright lies over the past two or three years, it remains a rare occasion indeed where you see any sort of news story about the loony right where there isn't a big chunk of "balance" and "both sides do it" shoehorned in.

I wonder sometimes how much this is due to these senior people not wanting to mess up their cushy lifestyles and "access," and how much is simple ignorance of the extent of the foaming at the mouth that is going on out there.

"Conventional Wisdom" ...

... says JJ in the subject of his email. He continues:

Well, who are we to argue.

Perfectly done.

(previously)

Heard about Officer Bubbles?

He takes respect my authoritah to a whole new low.

It all started when Toronto Police Const. Adam Josephs was assigned crowd control duty at a G20-related protest, where he arrested a young woman (only slightly older than pictured at left) for assault; i.e., for for blowing soap bubbles. Next, a few people on the Internet heard about this and made "Officer Bubbles" cartoons and posted them on YouTube. And then a few more people made comments on those video pages. And then Josephs picked up his shovel and really started digging.

He began by filing a $1.2-million lawsuit against YouTube, apparently finding the only lawyer on the planet who could say with a straight face, "This level of ridicule goes beyond what is reasonable." He demanded that YouTube take the cartoons down. He demanded YouTube reveal the identity of the person who posted them. Oh, and it doesn't end there. He also demanded to know the real names of twenty-four commenters, so he can sue them, too.

His initial abuse of his police powers is bad enough, but you really have to wonder how anyone living in the Western world in the year 2010 does not get how everything he has done since then is even stupider. Both of the newspaper articles cited above report that the cartoons have been taken down by YouTube. That may have even been true for five or six minutes, but of course it is not any longer. And of course, there is now a "Fire Officer Bubbles" Facebook group. (Now with new and improved name!)

I don't know whether this clown is looking to cash in on his infamy by scoring his own reality teevee show, or if he is just bucking for a job with Joe Miller's securitah forces, but in any case, let's all teach Officer Bubbles the real meaning of the words Streisand Effect.

(h/t: Substance McGravitas || pic. sources: assassin | WMD)

You run for Senate in Alaska with the security goons you have, not the security goons you wish you had

Pictured below: "security" guards hired by Sarah Palin-endorsed candidate and teabagger darling Joe Miller, and the journalist they handcuffed to a chair for asking Miller questions.

(embiggen)

Not to worry. I'm sure this doesn't portend anything for America once the Republicans return to power.

Story (and pic. source): Anchorage Daily News.

(h/t: Riley Waggaman)

[Added] And then there's Kentucky ...

Another reminder for pissed-off lefties

Yes, you don't like your choices, and yes, you're mad about not having gotten everything you wanted over the past couple of years. But you still do have a choice, and here's a stark illustration of how significant it is:

Former Vice President Dick Cheney has to be smiling. With one exception, none of the Republicans running for the Senate — including the 20 or so with a serious chance of winning — accept the scientific consensus that humans are largely responsible for global warming.

The candidates are not simply rejecting solutions, like putting a price on carbon, though these, too, are demonized. They are re-running the strategy of denial perfected by Mr. Cheney a decade ago, repudiating years of peer-reviewed findings about global warming and creating an alternative reality in which climate change is a hoax or conspiracy.

[...]

Nowadays, it is almost impossible to recall that in 2000, George W. Bush promised to cap carbon dioxide, encouraging some to believe that he would break through the partisan divide on global warming. Until the end of the 1990s, Republicans could be counted on to join bipartisan solutions to environmental problems. Now they’ve disappeared in a fog of disinformation, an entire political party parroting the Cheney line.

Dyslexia of the Day

Nice catch by someone, passed along by David Brown, regarding last night's Phils' starting pitcher's nemesis:

Eerie NLCS wordplay: Cody Ross spelled backward is 'Ssory Doc'

While you're waiting for tonight's Giants/Phils Game 2 ...

... here is a pretty great eight-minute interview of Brian Wilson, the Giants' closer, conducted a few weeks ago. Cliché count is just about zero, believe it or not, a rarity and a treasure in this age.

(alt. video link)

More sports talk like that, please.

(h/t: graz, via email)

I smell a rat. Oh, 'scuse me, Willard. That's just you.

How did Willard "Mitt" Romney make it to the top of the NYT bestseller list?

Soon-to-be-pulped fiction, is how.

But wait. Didn't Mormons swear off buying more than one book at a time? Must be thinking of something else.

The real comedy: Commenters at Conservatives4Palin are OUTRAGED.

(pic. source)

Fear and Loathing Low Expectations in Las Vegas

Apparently, last night we had yet another Republican declared the "winner" of a debate because he or she -- she, in this case -- managed not to respond to any questions by drooling, dropping trou, and doing the Funky Chicken.

What?

Oops. Sorry. Wrong picture. Try this one instead:

"Fourteen million dollars in one quarter. Raised
by a candidate who carries on like a mental patient."

Continues Mark Warren:

We need to at last call this for what it is: This is America in retrograde, thoroughly engaged in a spasm of exaltation of the stupid and the mediocre. Now, there is a significant cohort of the population that recoils at this notion, and, led by its priestess Sarah Palin, calls this the viewpoint of an American "elite." Well, yes. We have always been called to greatness — we have always been exhorted to excellence. America is an elite nation, and it didn't get that way by being led by people who didn't know that Africa was a continent and not a country. We did not become the greatest power the world has ever known, the shining city on a hill, by being determinedly dumber than the generation that came before, by surrendering (for long) to our most vile nativist passions, or allowing ourselves to be led (for long) by the morons and the fearful. People who wander into each new day, misunderstanding it as thoroughly as they had the day before, did not make this country great. In fact, it is this kind of ignoramus that has always — always — been nothing but a drag on American progress.

Whole thing is worth reading, even as it will only make you sadder about the next couple of years.

(pic. sources: Joe Dator/New Yorker | Las Vegas Gleaner | Heather Roddy)

---

Oh, HST, where are you when we need you?

The Real Revelation in Todd Palin's Email

Probably you already heard about this masterpiece of prose, in which the guy Greta Van Susteren moistly refers to as The First Dude flips out on teabagger and Republican Senate candidate Joe Miller for Miller's disinclination to characterize his erstwhile half-governor as qualified to be president, but though I am getting to it late, I think it deserves to be preserved for posterity.

> Joe and Tim,
>
>
> Hold off on any letter for Joe. Sarah put her ass on the line for Joe
> and yet he can't answer a simple question " is Sarah Palin Qualified
> to be President". I DON'T KNOW IF SHE IS.
>
> Joe, please explain how this endorsement stuff works, is it to be
> completely one sided.
>
> Sarah spent all morning working on a Face book post for Joe, she won't
> use it, not now.
>
> Put yourself in her shoe's Joe for one day.
>
> Todd
> Sent via BlackBerry by AT&T

Now, quite apart from recommending a device I think would be more suitable than a Blackberry for Mr. Palin …

… I think another observation is in order. There may still remain some doubt in minds beyond Andrew Sullivan's about who the mother really is, but I believe the question of Trig's paternity has now been settled forever.

(h/t: Jack Stuef | pic. source)

Line of the Day: 2010-10-14

In her famous essay on Hollywood, Pauline Kael described it as a place where you could die of encouragement. That may still be true of Tinseltown; in Tumortown you sometimes feel that you may expire from sheer advice.
    -- Christopher Hitchens

The whole thing is worth reading, especially (1) if you like you a little gallows humor and (2) if you want to hear of a real-life consequence of letting wingnuts decide science policy.

(h/t: TC, via email)

Not, actually, a movie review; i.e., shallower

Is it too late to harsh on a movie (Random Hearts) that came out last millennium, that mostly got panned back when it came out?

MORE »

Some other baseball notes, also from the opening round

• Okay, first. Baseball, please. Get a better name than "The Division Series." ALDS, especially, sounds like the worst set of initials to anyone who cares about baseball.

Other random thoughts about that past week or so, that started assembling during the great game 5 between Texas and Tampa Bay, just concluded. (Which among other things made me wish, once again, I'd taken notes while things were actually happening):

MORE »

Baseball Note

I hate to be rooting for the team once owned by George W. Bush, but boy, I have to tell you, I am loving the way the Texas Rangers are running the bases here in game 5. [1]

When was the last time you saw two different runs scored from second base, on slow ground balls, fielded cleanly?

Not to mention that one of those two was by Vlady Guerrero, whose physical presence, on the bases as at bat, can most politely be described as "hulking?" The real old pros never miss the spots. You wait a whole season for a chance like this, and when you do not miss it, that's where we most sincerely tip our caps.

And further: after Nelson Cruz ended up on second with a double on what should have been an easy triple (due to posing at home plate after his I'm-sure-that's-gone swing), how fabulous was that steal of third on the very next pitch (and then the score on the bad throw)?

Antlers. I do like the antlers.

And over in the National League, I'm still wondering why no one told me before about Tim Lincecum? What a joy he was to watch pitch. And to watch him leaping up and down in the dugout in a game he wasn't pitching, like a pure and unadulterated high school kid? Gotta love that. (Almost as much as you do hearing Geezer Stockton call Tim's team "the New York Giants." ← we may have found something older than John McCain.)

__________

↵ [1] Credit here is due largely to manager Ron Washington, and decidedly not to W, whose only other baseball accomplishment besides getting Daddy's rich friends to buy him out at a fat personal profit appears to have been trading Sammy Sosa, about 600 dingers prematurely.)

Conan Fail

While watching the MLB playoffs, I've been enjoying the Conan blimp ads promoting his new show, but earlier tonight, there was a moment of cringe.

Don't say "knots per hour," okay? Knots is a unit of speed. One knot is one nautical mile per hour. Look it up.

Yeah, there is every chance someone said, "Let's say that, to see how many geeks we can get to write in, so we'll know our commercial worked!" We know about the bunny.

But just in case it wasn't just bait: noted.

"the Ministry of Propaganda has, in effect, seized control of the Politburo"

Fun fact, from Paul Krugman's latest column on the billionaire-financed wingnut welfare program we still, for reasons of tradition, call the GOP:

As Politico recently pointed out, every major contender for the 2012 Republican presidential nomination who isn’t currently holding office and isn’t named Mitt Romney is now a paid contributor to Fox News.

Ah, well. This democracy and free press thing was fun while it lasted, wasn't it?

From that rePubOLITICO link, there's also this bit of inadvertent comedy toward the end, where they've got Pat Buchanan as their go-to guy to ask about whether the above might be a problem.

No, wait, that's not the really funny part. This is:

Buchanan said the Fox reporters had no choice but treating those on the payroll as if they weren’t. “If you’re an objective journalist, you bring [the candidates] on and ask them tough questions.”

Hmmm! Tough Questions™! Yes, please tell us more.

While the commentators who have their own Fox programs have largely offered friendly forums for the four contributors, some of the reporters who have covered the group have not. When Palin appeared in Iowa recently, for example, political correspondent Carl Cameron reported that she had failed to meet with local officials and didn’t solicit any advice from Republicans in the state — basic steps traditionally taken by presidential candidates.

As you'll note, that's not asking a question. And no, there are no other "examples."

"Stuff Crazy White People Like"

Remember that Village Voice piece by Steven Thrasher that I recommended late last week? You know, the one with the drooly pix of Beck, Palin, "Dr." Laura, Rush, and Breitbart in strait jackets, that was headlined, "White America Has Lost Its Mind."

Apparently, there was some consternation among the denizens of the wingnutosphere about this. And, of course, it's all of a piece with what they've been yelling about for the past two years. (Or forty, but the last two especially loudly.)

Wouldn't you like some sort of comprehensive assessment of all this craziness? Of course you would!

Let Roy Edroso's latest column be your guide.

Hey, Catholics: Time To Denouce Bill Donohue Once And For All

Seriously, current adherents of my former faith and upbringing: is this who you want speaking for you?

“Not All Sexual Abuse Is Equal,” headlines this appalling apologist.

"Here's what we know. We know that this case, like most of them, was the work of a homosexual, not a pedophile," he burbles a few paragraphs down.

__________

"The work of a homosexual."   "Like most of them."

Contemplate those smears for a few minutes, if you will.

__________

And if you can't see how wrong those are, then at least pray on this: Donohue says this shit when speaking of an adult abusing a child. Forget the genders involved. We are talking about someone whose description as "convicted sex offender" even Himself does not dispute.

Do you, good Catholic that you are, want to stand by that evil spin-doctoring from Bill Donohue? Do you want to be identified with it? And if not, ask yourself this: have you ever made a statement beginning like this: "If only those {Muslims | Jews | Protestants | atheists | etc.} would reign in their extremists …?"

Averting your eyes and murmuring incoherently is no longer an option when scum like this says he speaks for you. So do something about it. For the love of God. Please.

__________

P.S. By the way, the child-abuser's name is McCormack, not "McCormick," as Bill Donohue would have it. According to his own source, the Chicago Tribune. And confirmation here, no pun intended.

Evidently, you cannot trust this low-life Bill Donohue even to cut and paste.

(pic source: Joe. My. God.)

"Donald Duck Meets Glenn Beck in Right Wing Radio Duck"

It takes a little while to get good, but then it gets very good.

(alt. video link)

Still thinking about not voting because the Democrats and Obama blarghblarghblargh? Please remember that there are many Donald Ducks out there. You want these people making your decisions for you?

(h/t: @jccherry)

Have a look at "thump and whip"

I happened across thump and whip last week when Googling for the original version of some heinous document that some heinous Republican had once written. Of course Jim Russell, like so many Republicans these days, thought that once he came to the attention of people beyond the echo chamber, he could direct with a snap of his talons fingers that his earlier efforts at building cred with the wingnut base could be shoved down the memory hole.

Not so.

And I was especially pleased when I went looking that a top hit pointed to a blog I had never heard of prior to that moment. Evidently, another no-initiative lazy-waiting-at-home-for-his-Stalinist-welfare-handout lib-blogger had been working this case from the get-go, and had grabbed a copy, and had put it out there, on the Internet, for people just like me. Just in case. Just because. Just because it is important to document the atrocities. Because your Villagers sure t'fuck aren't going to do it.

So, a shoutout for that, all by itself.

As I have said before (partly as a reminder-to-self), most recently when I urged you to take a look at JABbering Stooge, there are a lot of good people out there about whom you have never heard, who are putting in a lot of effort every day to get the word out about the wingnuts who want to Take Their Country Back™.

(Back to the Dark Ages, that is.)

These people deserve your attention. You should try to spend a little time, every now and again, breaking out of your usual ten or twenty regular reads on the Internet, and see what some of the not-yet-A-listers have to say.

Okay, sermon off. But Toma is pretty good with a keyboard, so I would be remiss if I did not share what I serendipitously came across.

And please feel welcome to recommend other people who I have not heard about, but should, in the Comments.

"When the moon hits your eye, like a big ..."

Don McArthur has a picture of Io posted. This, apparently, is what it would look like if you were, I dunno, looking at it from the surface of Europa or something. With binoculars or something. (In the right conjunctions, phases, etc., etc. People, please. No need to nerdgas.)

I can't, in all honesty, say it's eye candy. Because that would be the wrong food group. And you know how I get about taxonomy.

Anyway, it's cool. Go see.

Line of the Day: 2010-10-03

Who knows how TBogg can stand to follow these people on the Twitter, but boy, am I glad he does.

Leave it to Ann Coulter to make Kathryn Jean Lopez’s twitter-twats sound like Confucian aphorisms.

And when you click the clicky below, you will not only see details that will make you stagger, no matter how much you think you are inured to wingnut stupidity, but you will also see a title that makes you think, for the nine hundred forty-eleventh time, dammit, why is TBogg always coming up with these things when I know I could have, too, given just a little more time?

(Answer: Because he is the master.)

Vin Scully

I've never understood the attraction many other baseball fans have for this long-time announcer. It may well be entirely due to the fact that he has always called the (ick) Dodgers games (among many other disturbances, I am unable to suppress the image of Steve Garvey's Family Values™ phiz whenever I say that team name), but for whatever reason, I've always found Scully … I guess competent would be how I'd put it. Unobtrusive in a very good way, sure, and comfortable like a treasured old shirt, as John D. MacDonald once put it in another context, but not more than that, for me.

Despite that, please allow me to recommend this appreciation by Joe Posnanski. It is a very fine piece of writing.

This bit, in the beginning, makes me like him more, and then, towards the end, is what I inevitably hear from Vin Scully fans when I am being all meh about him:

Vin Scully begins his stories with apologies these days. He’s reached that plateau of fame. “I’m sorry if I’m repeating myself,” he says. “I know you’ve probably already heard this,” he says. “I’ve told this many times before,” he says. It is a mark of the man’s grace that he is the one apologizing repeatedly and not the reporter who asks him precisely the same questions people have been asking for 50 years. Scully genuinely — and generously — wants to help the writer tell a good story.

“I know you’ve probably heard about the radio,” he says, and indeed I have heard it, but I ask if he will tell it again.

“When I was a little boy in New York, we had this radio that stood on four legs,” he says. “It was huge, or at least it seemed that way to me at the time. We lived in a little fifth-floor walk-up apartment then, and the radio was just about the biggest thing in there. I remember — I couldn’t have been older than 4 or 5 — I used to crawl under that radio with my pillow. There was no baseball on the radio then, but there were football games, and I remember I used to love listening even then to the crowd.”

I wait for it. Vin, I think, knows that I’m waiting for it.

“That sound of the crowd would just engulf me,” he says, and then (I’m almost mouthing the words with him now), “it was like water out of a shower head.”

Like water out of a shower head. No announcer in the history of sports has used crowd noise more musically than Scully. Can it be a coincidence? Sinatra used to say that his musical instrument was not his voice, it was the microphone. Scully uses crowd noise as his orchestra. When Henry Aaron hit his 715th home run, Scully was there, and he called the home run, and then he took off his headset, walked to the back of the room, and let people listen to the crowd cheer. Like water out of a shower head. “What could I have said that would have told the story any better?” he asks. And he pauses: “You know what? I still love listening to the sound of a crowd cheering. Don’t you? Don’t you just love that sound?”

And then there's a later bit, about Scully's refusal to Walter O'Malley to be more of an on-air cheerleader, that if not profoundly expressed, is nonetheless to be saluted. (Back in the day, I always liked Bill White and Frank Messer far better than Phil Rizzuto, if you're scoring at home.)

I will concede today's announcers could learn a thing or two from this veteran.

Okay, and this: The story later on about Ron Fairly and Vin's one game as manager … ah, now that's baseball at its finest. (Joe Posnanski here shows why he is both a good reporter and a great baseball essayist.)

Anyway, you might like.

More Teabagger Astroturfing Documented

Frank Rich's latest column is mostly about his worries concerning one Republican running for office: "The Very Useful Idiocy of Christine O’Donnell." But in the middle, there are some useful links concerning something that I see as a worse problem, longer-lasting by far than however this next election turns out.

In a typical example just three weeks ago, the influential publication National Journal delivered a breathless report on how the Tea Party functions as a “headless” movement where “no one gives orders.” To prove the point, a head of the headless Tea Party Patriots vouched that “75 percent of the group’s funding comes from small donations, $20 or less.”

In fact, local chapters of Tea Party Patriots routinely received early training and support from FreedomWorks, the moneyed libertarian outfit run by the former Republican House majority leader and corporate lobbyist Dick Armey. FreedomWorks is itself a spinoff from Citizens for a Sound Economy, a pseudo-grassroots group whose links to the billionaire Koch brothers were traced by Jane Mayer in her blockbuster August exposé in The New Yorker. Last week the same Tea Party Patriots leader who bragged to the National Journal about all those small donations announced a $1 million gift from a man she would identify only as an entrepreneur. The donor’s hidden identity speaks even louder than the size of the check. As long as we don’t know who he is, we won’t know what orders he’s giving either.

Such deep-pocketed mystery benefactors — not O’Donnell, whose reported income for this year and last is $5,800 — are the real indicators of what’s going on under the broad Tea Party rubric. Big money rains down on the “bottom up” Tea Party insurgency through phantom front organizations (Americans for Prosperity, Americans for Job Security) that exploit legal loopholes to keep their sugar daddies’ names secret. Reporters at The Times and The Washington Post, among others, have lately made real strides in explaining how the game works. But we still don’t know the identities of most of those anonymous donors.

From what we do know, it’s clear that some Tea Party groups and candidates like Sharron Angle, Paul and O’Donnell are being financed directly or indirectly not just by the Kochs (who share the No. 5 spot on the new Forbes 400) but by a remarkable coterie of fellow billionaires, led by oil barons like Robert Rowling (Forbes No. 69) and Trevor Rees-Jones (No. 110). Even their largess may be dwarfed by Rupert Murdoch (No. 38) and his News Corporation, whose known cash contributions ($2 million to Republican and Republican-tilting campaign groups) are dwarfed by the avalanche of free promotion they provide Tea Party causes and personalities daily at Fox and The Wall Street Journal.

I think it's worth clicking some of those.

A Few Thoughts on the Sanchez Unpleasantness

MPF wrote this on my Facebook wall:

http://www.mediaite.com/online/rick-sanchez-calls-jon-stewart-a-bigot-says-cnn-is-run-by-jews/

"Rick Sanchez calls Jon Stewart "a bigot" and says CNN is run by jews"

Please blog about this!

Any excuse to run my mouth! I always try to oblige a request from  M. Following is a repost of my response.

__________

Thanks for the link. I've read a few other posts about this, and so far, I'm not sure I have anything of use to add. (Not that this criterion has stopped me from blogging before, I grant.) I'll say this: I don't care for the sort of bigotry Sanchez displayed in that radio interview, nor do I care for someone who plays the all-too-convenient "I am held back because I am a minority" card, when there is considerable evidence in this specific case to suggest he has for years been demonstrating the validity of the Peter Principle.

I should add that with the exception of Rachel Maddow, I consider cable teevee news … not worth my attention, to put it politely … so up until this thing happened, I thought Rick Sanchez was about as much of a minority as, say, Luis Alvarez. So, okay, let's give Rick Sanchez the benefit of the doubt for a moment, and without accepting his claim that he was being held back due to his ethnicity, at least accept that he is sincere in believing that he has been. If that was the case, then I would say that there are other, better ways he could have dealt with this problem. We have legal mechanisms to address on-the-job discrimination, and I'm confident CNN has their own, in-house mechanisms as well.

The merits and/or sincerity of his claims aside, there's also this: I am kind of a maniac about free speech, and to be so, one has to accept the hard part: free speech means sometimes people will say terrible things.[1] In that light, were it up to me, and I was judging only on this one event, I would not have fired Sanchez. (I probably would suspended him for a bit and made a condition of his return that he apologize sincerely. And perhaps some other things -- counseling, sensitivity training, what have you.) However, I am getting a bit of a sense that this event may have been more of a final straw and/or a convenient excuse. See Steve Benen, for example.

On still another hand, this from John Cole is also worth contemplating.

From that last, I think it is fair to say that some problems of uneven standards exist in the cable teevee news biz, whether or not Sanchez was actually one of those suffering from them. I guess in the end I am sorry he lost his job and sorry he has some poison inside of him. I expect he will get another job, and I hope that he will do something about his inner problems.

Oh, hey, that's almost a blog post by now, isn't it? ;)

Welp, if you see something streaming past your eyes in a little bit and have that odd feeling of deja vu …

Thanks for asking.

---

↵ [1] More on the hard parts of loving free speech here.

Schoolhouse Rocked

Mr. Riley has a few words on what NBC's Brian Williams and the similarly-clad feign to Think™ for the cameras about Our Failing Schools.

Why isn't Mr. Riley czar of something? Or at least, holding down a slot on a prominent op-ed page somewhere on your Internet?

When you can answer that, you will also be able to explain why else we're in the state that we're in.

Death: Not So Easy On The Living, Either

A sad and beautiful piece about the indignities that obtain, from Mr. Riley.

I could go on for many paragraphs about what I am feeling for him right now, but I will respect what he wishes, and not. And truthfully? He has let me off the hook. Condolences, for someone you care about, cannot in any case be put into the words we would want.

Recent Examples of Conservative Values

The latest post on Wonkette as of this moment is from Cord Jefferson. Title pretty much says it all:

Teabagger Who Warned of DC Black People Celebrates Black Kid’s Death

Which reminded me of some items in yesterday's news, about which I was too discouraged to blog at the time.

First, there was fake pimp, liar-by-videotape, and tool of conservative billionaire Peter Thiel, James O'Keefe, whose latest stunt involved trying to lure a CNN reporter onto his boat, where he planned to "seduce" her, and yes, of course, secretly videotape it. (h/t: Jack Stuef)

One small upside: this "prank" means he has managed the unthinkable: embarrassing another one of his past benefactors, the perennial lout, Andrew Breitbart, to the point where the Big Ho man has disowned him and is threatening to sue for libel anyone who associates their two names on this one.

Next up, we heard of one Andrew Shirvell, an assistant attorney general in Michigan, who has spent the past half-year running a "Watch" blog under the identity "Concerned Michigan Alumnus." His "concern" appears entirely to have been "what can I post today, to smear Chris Armstrong?" Armstrong is the student assembly president at the University of Michigan, and he is openly gay. Yes, you read that right: a state AAG, harassing a college kid online. [Added: online and elsewhere, it now appears.]

After going on the teevee (h/t: Josh Fruhlinger) to assert that he did nothing wrong and he stood by what he posted, his next move was to flip the switch to make his big blog o' hate viewable by invitation only. Most of the posts, however, are still cached by Google, if you're interested.

Today, it has been announced that he has taken a leave of absence. Perhaps he will use this time to meet with some of the 11,000 new friends he has made on Facebook. (Oh, wait, those aren't friends? My bad, Mr. Shrivel. Shirvell. Whatever.)

Oh, and then there was news that Mark Foley is back at it again, e-stalking underage boys, this time on the Twitter. And Vox Day and Alex Knepper are having another race to the bottom, to see who can say the most offensive thing about that gay kid who killed himself. And then there's New York's Republican candidate for governor, teabagger hero Carl Paladino, who can't decide whether the best way to diffuse the attention he's been getting about his failed cover-up of his out-of-wedlock child is to make shit up about his opponent, Andrew Cuomo, or to physically threaten reporters ("I'll take you out, buddy!"). (h/t: Roy Edroso)

And then there was St. Sarah of Wasilla, whose latest graspy-grab for attention was to make sure the world knew that she'd taken out a restraining order against some kid in Pennsylvania, who, she and her lawyer claim, has been making "implied threats." Not that I condone creeps sending creepy letters to anybody, but still, here, I can't help but snort. Guess violent rhetoric is only fun when it's pointed the other way.

And so on. So you see why it gets a little discouraging from time to time.

"One Nation Working Together: 10.2.10"

(alt. video link)

More info here and here.