For your viewing pleasure, the most abusive parts of 50’s and 60’s coffee commercials. For your commenting pleasure, an open thread.
Archives for September 2011
A Monkey Knows How You’ll React
While we’re hating on Boehner, Obama and Joe Walsh (the Teabagger not the Eagle), I’ll just point out that this kind of transgression is just catnip to the DC media, so we’re going to see a shitload more of it. It’s a guaranteed quick media hit to violate some supposedly venerated norm. By the time Obama’s SOTU rolls around, the gallery will probably be half-empty as every minor teabagger back-bencher decides to stage his own mini-walkout to show his independence or make whatever stupid point he thinks he’s making. His real intention — to get a story in his local paper — won’t be mentioned. Instead, we’ll have a hundred different villagers telling us this town just ain’t what it used to be.
And, fuck yes, there’s a racial undertone to it, and that makes it even more sexy to the beltway media. A story that requires no research and lets them talk about race without really talking about race? That Christmas tree is going to be coming out of the basement regularly.
Another shitty job reports
Wikileaks Opens Its Sphincter
Last night, Wikileaks published the last of 133,000 cables that it’s made public in the last 10 days. The revelation came in part because the whole file of cables had been released on filesharing networks, and the password for the encrypted file was made public in a Guardian book about Wikileaks. Wikileaks’ side of the story is that the release is the Guardian’s fault.
The Guardian, quoting Daniel Domscheit-Berg, the former Wikileaks technical lead and founder of Openleaks, says that the release is Assange’s fault because he re-used passwords instead of creating a separate encrypted file for each news organization. No matter how the Guardian excuses itself, and even if Assange was sloppy with his password handling, publishing a password given them in confidence was a stunningly stupid move.
It’s been pretty clear for a while that Assange’s legal troubles have tied him up and made him ineffective, and that he was such a control freak that Wikileaks was a compromised operation without him. My working assumption was that organizations like Openleaks would take over, but it’s been at least 6 months since Openleaks was announced and it still hasn’t hosted any leaks. Domscheit-Berg is another strange duck who deleted bank memos after Assange fired him, so it’s unclear that he would be a better guardian of secrets than Assange.
In the meantime, a bunch of cables, some of which could possibly compromise sources, have been dumped on the Internet, and neither the Guardian nor Wikileaks is looking very trustworthy.
Open Thread: Darth Cheney, Puppy-Kicker
(Mike Luckovich via GoComics.com)
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Srsly:
“From our first encounter,” writes Dick Cheney, “when I woke him up by stepping on him, Cyrano and I became close friends.” Cyrano is—sorry, was—a beloved family dog, a basset hound, accepted by the family when Cheney was working at President Richard Nixon’s Office of Economic Opportunity… “I think that Cyrano and I had an understanding.”
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The last time a retired vice president wrote a memoir, when Dan Quayle gifted the airport book-buyer with Standing Firm, the goal was to prove he was serious. That’s not Cheney’s problem. The purpose of Cheney’s memoir, In My Time, is to prove he is human.
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So the reader of In My Time gets a few stories about dogs. He gets snapshots of Cheney and his mentor, Donald Rumsfeld, having wacky adventures… These little stories are meant to humanize Cheney, which is necessary, because no one else is going to accept that mission…
You read it here first: Willard “Let me tell you a heartwarming story about strapping the family dog to the roof rack, and how it greatly reduces the annoying noise level from the kids in the back seat, too” Romney is going to solicit Mr. Cheney’s endorsement… big time.
Rep. Joe Walsh (Deadbeat-Ill.) Is Skipping President Obama’s Jobs Speech; Doesn’t See the Point
Apparently, President Obama is the Rodney Dangerfield of presidents.
Fresh off the heels of John Boehner’s unprecedented refusal to grant President Obama’s request for a joint session, here comes Joe Walsh to demonstrate how little respect President Obama gets:
Walsh, a tea party-backed freshman from McHenry, issued a statement today saying he’ll be in Illinois on the night of the speech to host a small-business forum. A Walsh aide said he expected details of the forum to be known Friday morning.
Talking about avoiding Obama’s address, Walsh said in his statement: “I don’t see the point of being a prop for another of the president’s speeches asking for more failed stimulus spending and more subsidies for his pet projects.”
He added: “The president needs to stop the speeches, get out of his office and away from all the White House academics and start talking to real people out there. They’re the ones who are going to create the jobs, not White House paper-pushers and bureaucrats.”
Joe Walsh is acting like a petulant child. Who does he think he is? If the President addresses Congress, and you are a member of Congress, you suck it up and you go. It’s really that simple. Could you imagine the outcry from the right if a Democrat up and decided he or she just didn’t feel like attending a Bush address?
It’s utterly ridiculous.
But hey — look on the bright side:
Open Thread: Thursday Garden Chat
From commentor TheOtherWA:
This spring was so cold and wet in the northwest, I just couldn’t get into gardening mode. Never planted the usual tomatoes and herbs. The raspberries did pretty well, they like cool weather (& were eaten before any photos were taken), but the grapevine is pathetic.
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The photo is a bunch of black table grapes in mid August. I should be munching a few of these by now, waiting for most of them to get nice and dark. It’s weird, we basically didn’t have a summer this year. Most of the country was sweltering in extreme heat and drought, we’ve hardly had enough. Only people with greenhouses are getting good produce.
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I’m not whining about our weather, really. Just explaining the situation.
There’s a feel of fall in the air here, and it’s not just the torn leaves & downed branches. The immediate microclime was very, very lucky with Hurricane Irene… and when I see video from places like Vermont, upstate NY, northern New Jersey or the Carolinas, I’m hardly gonna complain about my tomato towers leaning askew. (We didn’t even lose power, despite the half-splintered oak branch hanging over the powerline that Northern Grid has been refusing to remove for the past 18 months.)
What’s it like in your gardens, this week? Anybody have hurricane / wildfire / drought / plague-of-locusts stories to share?