It's a tarp!
I got nothing but a question: Will outrage over Hilary Rosen’s infamous assertion that a gazillionaire with a household staff embedded in multiple mansions might not be the best economic adviser on the affairs of ordinary American women continue, or will the blind hogs find another acorn today?
Breitbart Big Ho editor / Hollywood flop John Nolte dislikes the film “Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close” because – get this – it “exploits 9/11:”
The film’s biggest problem is that, to put it bluntly, it exploits 9/11. Thomas could’ve died just as easily in a plane crash or boat accident without a single element of the story having to change. For Daldry (working off a novel by Jonathan Safran Foer) to use one of the biggest crimes ever committed against this country as a “device” is truly repulsive and a symptom of a Hollywood bubble so impenetrable that a group of people with the power to make a multi-million dollar film actually thought it was okay to say 9/11 is all about …. me.
God, that’s funny, in a “Union Carbide Bhopal executive complains about worker flatulence” kind of way. Has there ever been a group that has exploited a national tragedy to silence opponents and enact a radical, ruinous agenda as efficiently as the modern GOP humped 9/11 for fun and profit? If so, I was mercifully not alive for it.
John Nolte, whose writing recalls the elegance of Nick Nolte’s mug shot, goes on:
According to [Director Stephen] Daldry and company, what 9/11 is about, though, is the opportunity for a nine-year-old “amateur inventor, Francophile, and pacifist” to trot off on a narcissistic journey of self-discovery while banging his precious tambourine and providing his precious voice over and meeting all the precious people in the precious city of New York. And in the film’s most racially patronizing scene, meeting a group of precious Christians who are of course, Black.
And there you have it in a nutshell, ladies and gents. Wingnuts despised New York City before 9/11 for the same reasons they hate Hollywood, and their grievances against it would match up point-for-point with the Talibans’. Except the Taliban probably don’t hate “the Blacks” as much.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
I haven’t written anything about the Trayvon Martin murder, because I have nothing to say that hasn’t been said. TNC’s been powerful on this, and I found James Fallows’ take exactly on point, and what’s been said here speaks for me as well. If I have any thought it is that if this isn’t our Emmet Till moment, we’re even more desolate as a society than I had feared on my worst nights. (And yes, Charlie Pierce went there, but I was thinking along this line before reading him. It’s hardly an unlikely remembrance.)
Yesterday, though, I couldn’t help but think about Martin’s death after one session of a conference on the future of documentary. There, I got the chance to hear, and later to talk to two of the collaborators behind Question Bridge—co-founder Chris Johnson and one of his colleagues, Bayeté Ross Smith.
That project turns on a deceptively simple idea:* find Black men with a question they want another Black man to answer, someone they may not know, someone of a different age, class, location, experience. Have them ask whatever it is while staring straight into a video camera. The film makers then bring those questions to other men—strangers turned into confidants, who answer. Again, they speak straight into the lens—or rather, through the camera directly to both the questioner and any eavesdroppers, you, me, whoever decides to click “play.”
Here’s a sample:
There are a couple of things to note about the project from in the context of a new media conference. More »
It is fine for journalists to have an opinion, but outside of FOX you usually do not expect them to make things up out of whole cloth. So why would CBS Radio keep an Obama-hating wingnut who pulls facts out of his ass as their White House correspondant?
Maybe someone should phone them and ask.
As GOP sage Sarah Palin recently noted, President Obama and his terrorist pals were allowed to waltz right into the Oval Office unscrutinized in 2008 while white people Republicans like Ms. Palin were pelted with gotcha questions such as, “What newspapers do you read?”
Andrew Breitbart vowed to address the blatant unfairness of this situation by subjecting all African-American Obama Administration officials to a thorough vetting. After Breitbart’s untimely death, his underlings—the Breitbrats—announced that they would continue Dead Leader’s legacy by presenting an occasional series entitled Negros Said the Darnedest Things On Video in the 90s The Vetting.
After revealing 10 days ago the scandalous footage of a young Barack Obama hugging a black Harvard Law School professor back when Phil Collins was king of the Billboard Hot 100, Breitbrat Joel Pollak unleashes another bombshell sure to rock the Obama Administration to its very foundations. Attorney General Holder was caught on tape intimating that it might be a good idea to convince young people that it’s not cool to “pack heat” or whatever quaint expression they used back when Boyz II Men topped the charts:
“What we need to do is change the way in which people think about guns, especially young people, and make it something that’s not cool, that it’s not acceptable, it’s not hip to carry a gun anymore, in the way in which we changed our attitudes about cigarettes.”
Translation: jack-booted DoJ thugs will kick down your door to collect your shootin’ arn in 3…2…1…. Stay tuned next week, when sinister Obama consigliere Valerie Jarrett will be revealed as the winner of the 1992 Black Panthers Ladies Auxiliary Brownie Bake-Off!
I started high school around 1990, when the standard way for a miserable teenager to express himself fell somwhere between modern emo and a John Cusack movie. At one point I had so miserabilism swirling around my belly button (where my head spent most of its time) that I had to get it out somehow, so I wrote a short story about the last shark swimming around a polluted ocean after an environmental apocalypse. It ends when he gets hauled in by a long line boat. I sent it to the school lit mag but mostly I just had to get a little bit of the black cloud of doom out of my head and onto paper.
All of that means to say that I can understand a bit if post-apocalypse stories resonate with the teenage set.
Nick Denton, who runs Gawker, Lifehacker and Gizmodo, on comments:
“The idea of capturing the intelligence of the readership—that’s a joke.” [...]
“I don’t like going into the comments. ... For every two comments that are interesting—even if they’re critical, you want to engage with them—there will be eight that are off-topic or just toxic,” he said.
Denton says that writers can’t engage because they need to work on the next story, mainly because he treats them as assembly line workers at a word factory. Not to worry, though, Nick has a solution, and like another Internet savant, Arianna Huffington, as usual his genius plan involves paying nothing for people to contribute to his site:
The answer? Denton said his sites are planning to post some stories that allow only a hand-picked, pre-approved group of people to comment on them.
I can’t read all the comments here, but I read a lot of them, and my take is pretty much the opposite of Denton’s. I learn from reading comments, engaging isn’t a waste of time, and it would kill the comments section to have gold star commenters running the roost. But I do agree with one of his observations: having people use their real names is not the solution. Idiots don’t know they’re embarrassing themselves online, so they’re proud to use their real names.
By the way, if my sitemeter math is right, his “smaller sites” get traffic that’s about on-par with ours (2 million visitors/month).
Via Dave Weigel, news from the old-media world: Jack Shafer (now at Reuters) is not (officially) looking for a job at TNR:
Chris Hughes joins the pantheon of vanity press moguls with the announcement today of his purchase of a majority interest in the New Republic. The 28-year-old Hughes, a co-founder of Facebook, commands a net worth that Forbes put “in the $700 million range” last year. Based on this portfolio, Hughes should be able to sustain the magazine’s annual losses — which Anne Peretz, the ex-wife of former owner Martin Peretz put at $3 million a year — for a couple of hundred years after his death…
The rich often buy vanity publications when they learn quickly that having a lot of money doesn’t necessarily make them “players.” They want that sort of influence and are crestfallen by the fact that the only reliable way to get people to do as you say — or even nod in agreement — is to put them on the payroll. Purchasing a publication, even a down-on-its-heels magazine like the New Republic, conveys some of that status, providing entree into certain salons and cabals of influence. (Although it still publishes many worthy articles, I rarely hear it cited as often as its competitors — the Atlantic, Mother Jones, the Weekly Standard — but that’s just anecdotal evidence.)
Publications aren’t always “rich people things,” to pinch the wonderful Chris Lehmann’s construction. But for every man who spent part of his fortune on publications and got it all back when he sold to the next sucker, there are a dozen department store owners, real estate operators, trust fund kids, tech tycoons and hedge fund whizzes who haven’t. From the outside, owning a publication looks like a lot of fun, but there are only two guaranteed ways to have fun at a publication: writing and editing. Even if you’re lucky enough to make money off your publication, pocketing profits aren’t anywhere near as fun as producing stories…
From the 2009 Fast Company story:
...[A]t the age of 25, Hughes has helped create two of the most successful startups in modern history, Facebook and the campaign apparatus that got Barack Obama elected. Both were dedicated to the proposition that communities, and the way we share and interact within them, are vitally important. As he recounts his two years as director of online organizing for the man who put community organizing on the map, the existential reverie is understandable. He doesn’t know what community means? Really? “Well, I just never think of myself as being in the business of building an online community.” ...
From the embedded NYTimes link:
[Mr. Hughes’s] focus, he said in an interview in advance of the announcement, will be on distributing the magazine’s long-form journalism through tablet computers like the iPad. Though he does not intend to end the printed publication, “five to 10 years from now, if not sooner, the vast majority of The New Republic readers are likely to be reading it on a tablet,” he said.
Shafer has his precious reputation as a contrarian media ninja to protect, but we here are JustABlog. Rupert Murdoch famously started his international media criminal career with a couple of downmarket local newspapers in his native Australia. Are we allowed to fantasize that a younger billionaire from a less antiquated medium might provide a spark for those of with less retrograde political leanings?
After viewing the movie version of “Game Change,” WaPo putz Richard Cohen channels the late David Broder to draw this curious conclusion about “the Palin effect” on US politics:
So far, the Palin effect has been limited to the GOP. Surely, though, there lurks in the Democratic Party potential candidates who have seen Palin and taken note. Experience, knowledge, accomplishment — these no longer may matter. They will come roaring out of the left proclaiming a hatred of all things Washington, including compromise. The movie had it right. Sarah Palin changed the game.
What a steaming load of horseshit. While the left has its share of dunderheads, I’m afraid the Republicans have pretty much cornered the market on prideful ignorance. When was the last time a Democrat on the national stage appealed to the base via anti-intellectualism? William Jennings Bryant maybe? We ceded the Know-Nothing vote for good when the Dixiecrats finally got over Reconstruction and switched party allegiance to the GOP a few generations ago.
As for “a hatred of all things Washington,” all politicians rail against Washington because of its dysfunction, but Democrats aren’t the ones peddling the notion that “government” in the abstract is an evil thing. We have tedious purity ponies who’d rather go hungry than take half a loaf, but they don’t run the party. And Democrats have to compromise because our liberal base is smaller than the GOP’s conservative base; most people in positions of actual power get that.
The Democrats are an exasperating, contentious lot who push me past my patience a hundred times a day. But one of the reasons I stick with them is because the Democratic Party, at least in its current incarnation, is incapable of producing a Sarah Palin.
Former McCain campaign strategist Steve Schmidt has been making the rounds since “Game Change” debuted, frankly admitting his own complicity in putting forth a “manifestly unprepared” candidate. Schmidt claims the Democrats did something similar when John Edwards became John Kerry’s running mate in 2004.
Edwards certainly was a lightweight and a smarmy, shape-shifting asshole to boot. But if you put aside the sex scandal (and lord knows that’s a bipartisan failing), Edwards belongs in the Romney class of entitled, ambitious jerks rather than in the Palin category of frighteningly ignorant dangers to the republic. Sorry, Republicans: you own Palinism.
[X-Posted at Rumproast]
This was the headline at The Drudge Report all morning—all weekend, for all I know:
If you happened on the Drudge site by accident, knowing that it drives mainstream media coverage without also knowing that it is a wingnut propaganda outfit run by an inveterate liar and fraud, it would be easy to conclude from that screaming headline that Tel Aviv had been reduced to rubble. The misleading headline is more disingenuous—even by subterranean Drudge standards—if you bother to click through.
The link leads to a Lesley Stahl interview with a former Mossad chief, Meir Dagan, who is speaking out publicly against the drumbeat of preemptive war with Iran. Perhaps the Drudge intern in charge of neo-con propaganda failed to read the whole piece, or at least this part:
Lesley Stahl: You have said publicly that bombing Iran now is the stupidest idea you’ve ever heard. That’s a direct quote.Dagan: An attack on Iran before you are exploring all other approaches is not the right way how to do it.
Republican candidates and pundits are calling President Obama a naive appeaser for not jumping on the Bomb Iran bandwagon, and the same people who promoted hysteria during the run-up to the disastrous war with Iraq are shouting from the rooftops that we must bomb early and often. It’s interesting that the dude who was charged with degrading Iran’s nuclear program for eight years takes a more nuanced view.
The right’s capacity for lies, recklessness and stupidity should surprise exactly no one who remembers the George W. Bush administration. Still, I’m occasionally caught off guard by just how brazen the bastards are. And it’s disheartening to realize that no matter which saber-rattling idiot eventually gets the GOP nomination, north of 50 million people will vote for the lying prick, no matter how eager he is to jump into another Middle Eastern war. The rest of the planet must think we’re as dumb as dirt. They would be about half right.
[X-posted at Rumproast]
I could hate HBO for making me feel any sympathy for a vicious campaign weasel like Steve Schmidt. Still, I can hardly blame the network for giving me exactly the sort of program I pay them for. It hits two of the themes HBO programmers love to death: social torture porn (Larry David, Eastbound and Down, Life’s too short) and true stories of capable people fighting to manage a situation that keeps mounting over their head (Too Big to Fail).
Around the half hour mark Julianne Moore gets her mojo back and it turns into a much more entertaining Frankenstein story. In one scene that defines this half of the movie Woody Harrelson as Schmidt sits down with Ed Harris and begs the campaign’s front man to get her in line. No can do, Ed says. “She might turn on me”.
A Hollywood studio will film the Obama portion of Game Change in five or six years. On the other hand Sarah Palin’s book has shut and this one-hour TV movie is all the coda she deserves.
So, the #StopKony Invisible Children YouTube video has gone sufficiently viral to attract the attention of even the infotainment television shows, because SO MANY celebrities!!:
... In the film, Mr. Russell explains the social media strategy, which includes getting people to enlist celebrities on Twitter, including Oprah Winfrey and others with large followings, to help get out the word about the film and Mr. Kony. The group also specifically asked people who viewed the film to share it with their personal networks on social media platforms so that “Kony’s name is everywhere.”... Soon, celebrities from the film and music worlds, including Rihanna, Taylor Swift, Diddy, Alec Baldwin and Olivia Wilde were joining in and posting links to the film on Facebook and Twitter. Many did so at the urging of their fans. And the hashtags #kony2012 #stopkony began to trend worldwide on Twitter….
Surely we can all agree (with Kim Kardashian and Justin Beiber, not to mention the International Criminal Court)that Joseph Kony is a bad, bad man. The problem is, what “we” should do next. “We”—the U.S. government—has 100 military advisors in the area, and the Invisible Children producers say there should be more American Special Ops sharing better weapons with the Ugandan Army, even though Kony’s Lord’s Resistance Army is mostly located in DRC or South Sudan these days. (Those of us who remember Vietnam, or even Iraq, have an immediate aversion to any political argument that starts “It’s just a handful of advisors, some overstock weapons, and nobody in that part of the world pays attention to national borders anyways”.) The Ugandan Army has a reputation for “politically motivated abuses” of its own. Also, the “billions of barrels of oil reserves” discovered in Uganda in the last few years have raised understandable suspicions about Westerners’ sudden interest in redeeming the country from itself.
But that’s why the Internet Is Awesome: It gives reporters the chance, not just to document the mechanics of “How the Koney Video Went Viral” or to explain its techniques, however cutting-edge:
...[T]he real pipeline to big numbers was the Kony 2012 website, which features “The Culturemakers,” a slick, visual chart of twenty celebrities, including Oprah, Justin Bieber, Jay-Z, Angelina Jolie, Bill Gates, Bono, and more. “When they speak, the world listens,” the website says. And to encourage them to speak, clicking on any of the celebs’ photos automatically crafts a tweet directed at the Culturemaker, complete with the Kony 2012 web address and two related hashtags. The interface is easy, it’s quick — messaging all twenty celebs would take less than two minutes — and most importantly, it allows anyone to feel like they’re making a difference.
It’s that an organization committed to genuine reporting—the Guardian, in this case—can institute an ongoing live-blog pulling together information from all over the world as it becomes available:
This Tumblr page is collecting criticism of the project and this blog sums up a lot of the questions.
This morning, Invisible Children issued a detailed response to the criticism here.
We want, with your help, to investigate this further. Our principle approach is to attempt to gather views from Uganda about whether this film is the right way to go about campaigning on the issue. I’m going to be working with John Vidal, our environment editor, who has travelled extensively in the region and is on the phone now to his contacts there.
Do you have any relevant information? Get in touch below the line, tweet #pollycurtis or email me at polly.curtis@guardian.co.uk…
I know just enough about the history of Central Africa to understand how much I don’t know. I’m grateful to live at a time in a place where better informed people (including those with much more at stake) are accessible with a few mouse-clicks.
(Footnote: Am I the only one here old enough to remember “buying pagan babies“? The annual campaigns were scheduled for Lent, when SAD and the failure to keep one’s personal New Years resolutions presumably conspired with religious guilt to remind all good parochial-school attendees of our obligations to the wider community. At our school, for every five dollars donated—an enormous commitment for a kid from a blue-collar family in the 1960s, so mostly each class pooled our sticky quarters and wrinkled singles—we got a beautiful certificate and the nominal right to choose a new baptismal name for “our” little orphan. I’m sure the donor foundation did just as much to alleviate Third-World suffering as the Komen Foundation does to cure breast cancer. Invisible Children’s glossy video brought back my memory of those certificates for the first time in decades, but that probably says more about my cynicism than it does about the video itself. )
Soooo, it turns out that short clip of President Obama praising Professor Bell at Harvard in 1991 IS the actual, unabridged Breitbartopocalypse video. Here it is straight from the horse’s ass:
Compare to the video BuzzFeed released earlier today, which I posted here. The production quality is infinitely better in the non-Breitbart version, but that’s about it, campers. And as many commenters noted, this is nothing new since it appeared in an Obama documentary years ago.
The “selective editing” the Breitbart minions are referencing turns out to be releasing a cleaner version of the same tape. This is the lamest reveal since Geraldo opened up Capone’s empty vault on live TV.
[X-POSTED at Rumproast]
Man, I sure hope Breitbart’s Big Heirs have something more than this harmless little clip to unleash on the world this week:
‘Cause if this is all they got, that’s kind of sad. Aside from the ‘fro, Mr. President hasn’t changed a bit, has he?
UPDATE: Just to clarify, I don’t know what the Breitbartlettes are planning to release. It’s pure speculation on my part that it’s something totally innocuous like this. But at his final CPAC, Breitbart did mention something about “racial division” and tape from the president’s college years. And given the BigBamboozle organization’s propensity for deceptive editing and outright lying, I wouldn’t be surprised if they were even now busily splicing this vid with Malcolm X clips and conflating “diversity” with “get honky.” It’s how they roll.
UPDATE THE 2ND: OMFG! I was kidding about this being THE Breitbartocalypse tape, but apparently ‘tis true! As JenJen in comments put it: “Oh, this is rich… Breitbart’s surviving minions are claiming the video Ben Smith released to Buzzfeed ‘has been selectively edited.’ Hahahahahaha.”
[H/T: TPM; X-POSTED at Rumproast.]
That big thing he was claiming to have that was going to change everything? The one kept going on about before he ragegasmed himself to death?
It seems to be a site redesign.
And not even a very good one. All of the sites, Big Government, Big Hollywood, Big Peace, all redirect to Breitbart.com It looks like the internet circa 1998 with a news aggravation aggregation feed.
So we have survived Breitbartocalypse II, The Reanimation.
Open Thread
UPDATE: H/T to commenter Dave that Breitbart’s site has hit the new redesign. It looks they stole CSS from Daily Kos’ advertising background thingamjig and stole Talking Points Memo’s CSS for the foreground. Still no video of Obama eating kittens at Harvard or whatever they were claiming to have. And yes, their big blockbuster story is that Barack Obama went to see a play about Saul Alinski 14 years ago.
