If you’re looking for some lazy Sunday reading, James Berardinelli’s take on the state of the multiplex, 3D and the release window is a good summing-up of the slow decline of the movie theater over the last few years. Here’s an open thread.
Read a fucking book.
mistermix has been a Balloon Juice writer since 2010.
Credulous to a Fault
I’m catching up on my reading, and I realized I missed this gem from Young Conor Fridersdorf on Kucinich’s Libya resolution:
If the resolution passes, it’ll be partly because House Republicans, who rely on the Tea Party for their majority, cannot defend supporting a president of the opposite party through a costly, constitutionally dubious war. It isn’t so long ago that parts of the GOP rebelled against President Clinton’s war-making. Is the post-9/11 dominance of hawks in the GOP finally coming to an end?
I’m sure it’s merely narrow-minded, shrill partisanship on my part to point out that the surfacing of principled GOP anti-war sentiment coincides with the party affiliation of the chief executive, but it’s an obvious point that Conor goes out of his way to avoid. Does anyone seriously doubt that Ron Paul would be the only Republican voting for the Kucinich amendment if a Republican were in charge of the Libyan imbroglio?
I swore off Sully a few weeks ago and have been reading Conor and OTB regularly. Generally, I think both have a lot of good posts, but one of the recurring themes in both blogs is that their smart, incisive writers often play dumb about Republican partisanship. (John caught another good example on Friday from OTB). In a political era where Republicans have consistently pushed partisanship to a point that we haven’t seen in modern history (prime example: the debt ceiling), that failing is a fatal flaw.
Another Hothouse Flower
I just watched Chris Wallace interview Sarah Palin from her Arizona home (apparently the bus tour is over?), and her poor grasp of Paul Revere’s ride is the least of her problems:
- She said that she “tried as much as possible” to get the government out of healthcare in Alaska. Here’s the Anchorage Daily News two weeks before she quit:
State programs intended to help disabled and elderly Alaskans with daily life — taking a bath, eating dinner, getting to the bathroom — are so poorly managed, the state cannot assure the health and well-being of the people they are supposed to serve, a new federal review found.
The situation is so bad the federal government has forbidden the state to sign up new people until the state makes necessary improvements.
No other state in the nation is under such a moratorium, according to a spokeswoman for the federal Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services.
- When asked about the 250,000 emails that are about to be released, and about Frank Bailey’s book based on 50,000+ emails he has, she said that nobody can understand the context of the first set of emails, and that Bailey was a bad, bad man. One reviewer:
“Blind Allegiance” is so full of Palin’s pettiness and incompetence that it defines her as little more than a small-town politician at a loss on the larger stage.
- She referenced her “years” of executive experience.
Wallace is playing under Fox rules, so he just asks the initial question and moves on, but none of Palin’s answers would have lasted past a well-informed follow-up. Since she has Mitt Romney in her sights, he at least will provide those follow-ups if this diva ever participates in a debate. But she won’t — her line is that she’s going to spend the next “weeks and months” deciding about a run for President. The nominee will be decided well before her charade ends.
Slouching Towards Mediocrity
DougJ has a point when he says that most Republican candidates couldn’t run a pizza company, but let’s take a little closer look at what Cain did at Godfather’s. The chain started in the midwest in the 70’s and was sold to Pillsbury in the 80’s. Cain led it as a Pillsbury unit, took it private back in the 90’s and stepped down in 2002.
Presumably, one of the things Cain did to finance a buyout of the chain was licensing the name to Hess gas stations so an attendant who also sells gas, condoms and twinkies can keep a few reheated frozen Godfather’s pizzas sitting under a warming light for any customer desperate enough to buy one. I’m sure the private equity holders were happy when the Hess deal closed, since it “monetized the brand”, but the current state of Godfather’s isn’t anything that Dagny Taggart or Howard Roark would feel good about.
Putting the ‘I’ in ‘I Love You’
I’d have guessed that “The Selfish Path to Romance” was an overgrown trail not marked on any maps, but it’s actually a book applying the lessons of Atlas Shrugged and the Fountainhead to relationships. I assume the longest chapter is on rape, but maybe masturbation is front-and-center. Anyone brave enough to read a copy should report back.
Also, too: there’s a Facebook for Randians?
(via Slog)
Kevorkian Dead
Peacefully, in a hospital bed. He obviously had his issues, but it was what was really crazy is that people suffering and in pain had nobody other than an obvious crackpot to help them end their lives with a tiny bit of dignity. Here’s an open thread in memory of a very strange man who did some good.
A Word About Anthony’s Weiner
There’s been a lot of noise and very little real reporting about the Weiner story, so this is worth noting:
The truth, though, is that it is possible that the Weiner-wiener incident was pulled off by pranksters who knew how to manipulate yFrog into posting a photo to Weiner’s account. yFrog, like many other image services, allows users to send a photo to a specialized e-mail address made for that person’s account; when the service receives the message, it gets posted automatically and then tweeted out to the world.
The yFrog e-mail addresses given to users aren’t public, but they also aren’t hard to crack with some patience and some brute force. As noted by the Daily Dot, the format includes the user’s twitter name, a period, and a random word between five and six characters @yfrog.com (for example, mine might be something like [email protected]). And because yFrog apparently accepts submissions to those secret e-mail addresses from any account, any prankster who has guessed the random dictionary word could send a photo to Weiner’s account as if it were from Weiner himself.
In other words, it’s very easy to spoof the imaging service that was used to distribute the Weiner dick pic. I hesitate to use the word “hack” in this context, because it implies that some skill is involved, when all that’s required is a grudge and some perserverence.
Since “hacking” yfrog is clearly very easy, I’m at a loss as to why Weiner is being so goddam evasive and mealy-mouthed about the whole incident, instead of just trotting out a couple of nerds to explain the weakness of yfrog to the press. I’m not saying the story would have gone away, but it would have gone down a different path entirely, one that’s a hell of a lot less interesting than “I can’t say with certitude” that it isn’t me.