It's a tarp!
Anyone else watching this bizarre closing ceremony?
And apparently, Canada is the home of giant beavers. There are jokes a plenty to be made with that one.
I guess this is what passes for Republican he-manism in Massachusetts:
“We’re in the famous truck,” he pointed out, needlessly. “It’s a regular truck.” Yes and no. As Arianna, the younger of his two daughters, told me, he originally purchased it not so he could haul lumber but so he could attach it to a trailer bearing her horse. He soon abandoned that plan. “It’s scary pulling a trailer,” he said…
[....]
Arianna told me that he showed up for his first real date with her mother, Gail Huff, a TV newscaster to whom he has been married for more than 23 years, in pink leather shorts. It’s family lore.
The pinkish color drained from his face when I asked him about it during a conversation in his campaign office just before we took off in the truck. He clarified that the shorts weren’t something that he went out and purchased — it wasn’t like that at all. “I did the couture shows, and instead of paying in cash, they paid in clothes,” he said. “And one of the things I had to wear were leather shorts. And these happened to be pink.”
As he told the story, he seemed, almost in spite of himself, to get into it. “If I wore these now,” he said, “I’d get shot. But it was the ’80s. Pastels were in. It was all pastel-y.”
As you might have guessed from reading my posts, I am also an extremely neurotic person who doesn’t like the idea of driving with a trailer attached to my car. So I sympathize with Scott Brown.
But I also have to wonder: is there anything that disqualifies a Republican from being a straight-arrow regular-guy macho daddy you’d like to have a beer with? Here’s a partial list of things that aren’t disqualifications: owning more houses than you can count, being a tee-totaler, publicly proclaiming your problems with erectile dysfunction, dressing in drag, talking about varmint guns…and now, wearing pink leather shorts, using the word “pastel-y”, and appearing in couture shows.
Not that there’s anything wrong with doing any of those things.
I still have to wonder how the Sunday shows could not find a moment to mention that Senator Jim Bunning is obstructing 1.2 million Americans from getting unemployment benefits just to be a dick. One would have thought that this might merit a comment somewhere. On ABC there was ample time to discuss the departure of the White House Party Planner, but not the real world impact of obstructionism on so many people’s lives. I guess important ‘journalists’ can’t be bothered with things like news when catty Georgetown gossip is at hand.
It might have been a good question to ask Gramps McCain as he guest hosted another one of these shows, but it didn’t happen. (I think it was on the Network that has a funny show on Thursday night, but he is on so many of these Sunday shows it is hard to tell which network will toss the old fella softballs on any given weekend).
Yes, I already know why. And yet, I thought I would ask the question regardless of that.
I recently watched “The Most Dangerous Man in America“, a documentary film in theatres these days. It is the story of Daniel Ellsberg and the release of the Pentagon Papers. It is pretty amazing film and reminds one that there was a time—not so long ago—when people actually practiced journalism in America.
Now we just get MC Rove’s back-up dancers.
***sigh***
Feel free to treat this as an open thread.
Cheers
dengre
Wow.
And for those of you who do not care about hockey, let me bitch about something else trivial while people all over the world suffer from hurricanes and earthquakes and I lose all perspective about how good my life is, but I just broke another DAMNED CAN OPENER. Link me to the mother of all hand held can openers. I’ve tried ‘em all. Impress me. Thank god I have a bunch of P-38’s still, or Lily would be eating only kibble tonight.
I will never, ever, ever understand the American gun fetish, and I spent a number of years in the military:
A gun instructor accidently shot a student in the foot Saturday during an NRA class to receive certification to carry a concealed weapon, Orlando police said.Robert Frauman Jr., 50, was taken to Florida Hospital after instructor Michael Phillips’ firearm discharged about 11:45 a.m., police said.
Phillips, 32, could not be reached for comment. The accident happened at Summit Church, located in a former movie theater near the Fashion Square mall.
Probably a bunch of people getting guns because Obama is going to take ‘em all away.
(via)
Steve Benen flags what he calls a “a surprisingly long chat about Desiree Rogers” on whatever Stuffy’s old Sunday morning is called now. Here’s a brief summary (I’m leaving out the parts where Cokie Roberts sounds reasonable because I don’t believe they’re real):
DONALDSON: People who work for the president understand or should understand their place, which is to be spear-carriers. There are two stars in anyone’s White House, the president and the president’s spouse. After that, this passion for anonymity that once was a hallmark of people who worked for a president, has been lost. She wanted to be a star herself…
[....]
KRUGMAN: Can I say that 20 million Americans unemployed, the fact that we’re worrying about the status of the White House social secretary…
VARGAS: It’s our light way to end, Paul.
DONALDSON: Paul, welcome to Washington.
It’s good to see Krugman call them on their bullshit. Along those lines, Michael Scherer deserves credit for this:
But change, as the Obamas have learned, does not become of Washington—whether one is talking about influence brokering or party planning. Rogers had come to make waves, she made waves, and then she got wiped out. If there is any consolation to this whole sorry tale, it is that the crooked viciousness of the social set does not spare anyone. Earlier this week, Sally Quinn lost her column in the Washington Post, after using it to write a particularly petty and catty piece about an internal squabble in her own family regarding wedding dates. The tall poppy tyranny plays no favorites, you see. Our nation’s capital is imbued with the same social silliness as a middle school. You can’t just walk in and sit at any lunch table you choose. If you do, they will find a way to get you.
My God. If Barry Melrose and Liberace were to mate, the spawn would look like Don Cherry just did a moment ago.
The Washington Monthly did an excellent, ultimately sympathetic portrayal of Niall Ferguson a few years back that is well worth reading. It sums up the general “conservative intellectual” thing quite well.
His influence comes from his dramatic, sweeping intellectual style, whose theme is, more or less, “Everything you thought you knew about history is wrong.” Ferguson’s genius is for counter-conventional thinking, urging radical reinterpretations of topics that everyone else had pretty much considered settled. Ferguson is out of sync with the academy in style, politics, and manner, but he has been a useful intellectual prod, the appeal of his radical theories forcing mainstream academics to refine their own thinking. Read Ferguson for any real stretch of time, and you begin to imagine what it might have been like had Andrew Sullivan chosen as his topic the entire breadth of human history.
[....]
Perhaps more than anyone else, Ferguson was responsible for inserting the notion of a formal American empire into the public debate. Professors of imperial history around America started turning to his texts. Washington hawks from Richard Perle to Dinesh D’Souza to Bill Kristol drew on Ferguson’s ideas and arguments to help make the case not only for the war in Iraq but also for a revolutionary, if vaguely articulated, new role for America in the world. Within two weeks of arriving in the United States in the fall of 2002, to take up a teaching post at New York University, Ferguson had been summoned to Washington twice, once each by the Departments of Treasury and State, where he explained his convictions to policymakers; in Foggy Bottom, he met with Colin Powell—rarified company for a young historian.
To be sure, Ferguson says some frankly stupid things during the course of the article. But I do think some of what happens with so-called conservative intellectuals isn’t their fault. They’re bound to be contrarian (because other intellectuals are liberal) so the Hiatt/Slate/Peretz industrial complex will drool all over what they write. And the Republican party is always looking for someone with academic credentials to give its crackpot ideas a veneer of respectability. I’m sure it’s easy to be seduced by all of this.
Have at it!
***Update***
Or maybe not. Comcast has now decided I no longer deserve CBS, either.
I’m now down to basically AMC, USA, SYFY, and HBO. And there is a thirty minute hold to get through.
I liked Cyndi Lauper when we were both pushing thirty, and I like her 25 years later:
She is still doing “All Through the Night” in concert, although not quite in the same style:
Fair warning: Unless you have made peace with your memories of the 80s, do not YouTube the search string ‘pipers pit cyndi lauper’.
Too bad it is only former Congressman John Sweeney and too bad that it is for drunk driving and not the crimes he committed in office. Still, the little weasel is behind bars and that can’t be bad.
Back in 2006 I wrote about Sweeney’s involvement with Abramoff over at the GOS. And later that year I helped a reporter get the story into the Albany Times Union as the race went into the final weeks. I like to think that it helped to run Sweeney out of office. Of course he was an asshat in so many other ways that it was only a contributing factor.
And yet, it is good to hear that the little bastard is locked up. I somehow feel safer knowing that this corruptionist is off the streets, even if it was a self-inflicted event and not for the real crimes he committed.
Cheers
dengre
and yes, feel free to use this as an Open Thread…
I’m never sure if it’s worth blogging about things like this, but sometimes I suddenly see commentators, usually conservative commentators, using a phrase I’ve never heard before and I wonder if it’s going to become part of their standard shtick.
A few weeks I read Jim Manzi argue that we shouldn’t try to do anything about global warming because our economy is a a complex adaptive system (I can’t find the article but he makes similar arguments here without using the phrase). I think the idea was that it was so complex that we can’t understand it and so adaptive that it will just modify its carbon-producing ways no matter what we do.
Today, David Ignatius is touting a Niall Ferguson article about how America is going to collapse because it’s a complex adaptive system. So apparently, it’s an all-purpose phrase, like Burkean gradualism.
Does this have legs? Is Bobo going to start using it to argue in favor of school vouchers?
Update. (I realize that “complex adaptive systems” are something that people actually study and this is not meant as any kind of a slight of the field.)
Just finished the New Yorker Krugman piece. I realize that what the world needs now is another Bob Somerby like I need a hole in my head, but I’m always struck by what a watershed event the 2000 election was:
It was the 2000 election campaign that finally radicalized him. He’d begun writing his column the year before, and although his mandate at the outset was economic and business matters, he began paying more attention to the world in general. During the campaign, he perceived the Bush people telling outright lies, and this shocked him. Reagan’s people had at least tried to justify their policies with economic models and rationalizations. Krugman hadn’t believed the models would work, but at least they were there.
Update. Speaking of Somerby, he’s writing a book about the 2000 election that you can read here (h/t Dennis G).
For some reason, Comcast has decided I do not need half of my channels, including all of the ones with the Olympics. I do have Sci-Fi, though, and was wondering if anyone had seen Beyond Sherwood Forest.
Also, here is another open thread.
An update on the Balloon Juice store:
I have just learned that the commissions generated from the Balloon Juice Online Store for Charlie’s Angels Animal Rescue (with Little Bitsy being one of our shining star rescues) have passed the $500 mark for the first two weeks of being online. Thanks to the loyal Balloon Juice followers and animal lovers that amount of money will vaccinate, spay/neuter and Heartworm test nine rescued shelter animals. Or will be used for Heartworm treatments so often needed in the rural areas of NC, for Parvo treatment also prevalent in our shelter puppies, and for other medical issues such as worm medicines, blood work, x-rays, antibiotics, and a multitude of other medical needs. We also at times have to help our local rescue volunteers with gas money for transports and overnight stays. This is a wonderful blessing for the animals in Transylvania County, NC.Wish I had adequate works to express my gratitude for this happening and your support for animal rescue.
And hopefully we will have more people enter the Charlie’s Angels logo contest. Lots of goodies for the winner…Evelyn Bridges
Charlie’s Angels Animal Rescue
Well done, folks! And I hope you enjoy your merchandise!
Thanks to Laura W., Ahab, and the many others who made this happen.
