That Gov. Nikki Haley (R- Appalachian Trail) says you don’t care about contraceptives or birth control. So you can scratch that off your list of concerns.
Late Night Open Thread: Games of GRRMartin
I know that some Balloon Juicers are extremely enthusiastic about HBO’s Game of Thrones, but I don’t know how many of you read Laura Miller’s pre-first-season New Yorker report on “A fantasy writer and his impatient fans“:
The writer George R. R. Martin left Hollywood in 1994, determined to do what he wanted for a change. He’d had some success in television, working on a new version of “The Twilight Zone” and on the fantasy series “Beauty and the Beast.” But the pilot for “Doorways,” a series he’d developed, hadn’t been picked up, and he was tired of the medium’s limitations. “Everything I did was too big and too expensive in the first draft,” he told me recently. He wanted castles and vistas and armies, and producers always made him cut that stuff. A line producer for “The Twilight Zone” once explained to him, “You can have horses or you can have Stonehenge. But you can’t have horses and Stonehenge.”
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On the printed page, however, he could have it all. He recalls telling himself, “I’m going to write a fantasy and it’s going to be huge. I’m going to have all the characters I want and all the battles I want.” In 1996, he published a novel of seven hundred pages, “A Game of Thrones,” the first volume of a projected trilogy called “A Song of Ice and Fire.” The series chronicles the struggle for power among several aristocratic families in the Seven Kingdoms, an imaginary medieval nation. In a genre crowded with stale variations on what Joseph Campbell called “the hero’s journey,” with plots distilled from ancient legends, Martin took his inspiration from history instead of from mythology; he based his tale, loosely, on the Wars of the Roses, the bloody dynastic struggles in medieval England. Compared with most epic fantasy fiction, Martin’s story contained relatively little magic, and it felt dangerous, lusty, and real…
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The days when nobody showed up for a Martin signing are long gone. In January, at a hastily scheduled appearance at Vroman’s Bookstore, in Pasadena, hundreds of fans waited in a line that coiled around the store. They presented Martin with volumes from “A Song of Ice and Fire” and works from his early years as a science-fiction writer, as well as with calendars, posters, e-readers, yellowing pulp magazines, and replica swords. Three young women wore handmade T-shirts emblazoned with the coats of arms of their favorite clans from the series. Martin was unflaggingly attentive to his supplicants, including the couple who asked him to pose for a photograph with their infant daughter, who was named Daenerys, for one of his heroines…
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A typical post-Tolkien epic fantasy is the best-selling “Wheel of Time” series, by Robert Jordan. David McCaman, a marketing executive and one of the founding members of the Brotherhood Without Banners, dismissively summarizes the genre this way: “The young kid on the farm discovers he has powers, and no one dies, and they find the magic to rule the world.” He calls it “Nerf fantasy,” meaning that “it’s really safe.” By contrast, “A Song of Ice and Fire” doesn’t truck with “orcs and goblins and dark lords and bad and good. It revolves around people, really gritty people, and real situations, things that you don’t see in fantasy—sex and language and betrayal.” Benioff once told New York that “Game of Thrones” was “ ‘The Sopranos’ in Middle-earth,” and although he now winces at the formulation, it remains sound; the book’s intricate, racy narrative practically feels custom-built for HBO. The series especially resembles “Rome” and “Deadwood,” although, unlike them, it’s free from even the most perfunctory obligation to be historically accurate…
Miller’s story mostly covers the fandom that grew up around the “Song of Ice & Fire” books, which developed (like Martin himself) out of an established sf fandom / community. I haven’t yet read the books, nor watched the HBO series, but I was part of another corner of that larger fannish community from the mid-1970s to the early 1990s. So were some of the early, daring progressive political bloggers — people like Avedon Carol and Gary Farber and Teresa Nielsen Hayden. It sometimes fascinates me how much the current political-blogging subculture seems to be recapitulating the post-Star Trek, pre-millenial fannish era, as an influx of newbies attracted by big new shiny popcult “fads” threatens to overwhelm the original self-sufficient (if somewhat inbred) community…
Late Night Open Thread: Games of GRRMartinPost + Comments (61)
Monday Evening Open Thread: American Select
Because it’s never a bad time to point out what a horrible idea Americans Elect is, here’s Gail Collins on “the worst new trend of the political season“:
…Perhaps you have not yet focused on Americans Elect. It’s a new-generation political movement that aims to rise above the petty forces of partisan bickering and choose a presidential candidate, along with a running mate from a different party, at an online convention in June. As a reward, the winning team will receive a presidential ballot line in every state, along with some very cool online technology with which to run their campaign. It’s similar to “Project Runway” except for the most-powerful-job-on-the-globe part…
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[T]he whole Americans Elect concept is delusional, in a deeply flattering way: We the people are good and pure, and if only we were allowed to just pick the best person, everything else would fall into place. And, of course, the best person cannot be the choice of one of the parties, since the parties are … the problem.
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Getting a presidential ballot line in 50 states is really, really difficult. To do so, Americans Elect has already collected nearly 2.5 million signatures around the country, using the deeply American tactic of paying people to do it.
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The source of the money is a little murky. Some names have been made public. Some haven’t. Byrd says that’s not a problem because “the candidates don’t know who the donors are and the donors don’t know who the candidate is going to be.”
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If the Americans Elect candidate does make a big splash in November, we will have discovered yet another part of the presidential elections process that loopy billionaires could purchase out of their petty cash. Tired of financing right-wing contenders for the Republican nomination? Buy your own ballot line…
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The thing that makes our current politics particularly awful isn’t procedural. It’s that the Republican Party has become over-the-top extreme. You can try to fix that by working from within to groom a more sensible pack of future candidates, or from without by voting against the Republicans’ nominees until they agree to shape up.
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Otherwise, no Web site in the world will cure what ails us.
Apart from the political shenanigans of people with more money than sense, what’s on this evening’s agenda?
Monday Evening Open Thread: American SelectPost + Comments (54)
Monday afternoon open thread
A pic from our usual weekend morning hike. Max got in a footrace with another herd of deer this week. He lost, of course. Being a doberman he disappeared into the trees, screeched to a halt and sprinted back to make sure I was ok. Love this dog.
God knows what he would do if he ever caught one. A couple of times he cornered a baby squirrel or a very young sparrow, and both times he just bumped noses and waited for the terrified little thing to smooch him back. Not much of a killer my Max.
Chat about whatever.
Late morning open thread
For those who watched “Mad Men” instead of whatever that show is that John put up ten open threads about last night (via).
But talk about whatever.
Monday Morning Open Thread: “Pink Slime Economics”
(D.B. Echo at Another Monkey)
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Professor Krugman reminds us not to get so distracted by the SCOTUS anti-ACA antics that we forget to keep a sharp eye on zombie-eyed granny-starver[*] Paul Ryan:
… The Ryan budget is a fraud; Mr. Ryan talks loudly about the evils of debt and deficits, but his plan would actually make the deficit bigger even as it inflicted huge pain in the name of deficit reduction. But is his budget really the most fraudulent in American history? Yes, it is.
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To be sure, we’ve had irresponsible and/or deceptive budgets in the past. Ronald Reagan’s budgets relied on voodoo, on the claim that cutting taxes on the rich would somehow lead to an explosion of economic growth. George W. Bush’s budget officials liked to play bait and switch, low-balling the cost of tax cuts by pretending that they were only temporary, then demanding that they be made permanent. But has any major political figure ever premised his entire fiscal platform not just on totally implausible spending projections but on claims that he has a secret plan to raise trillions of dollars in revenue, a plan that he refuses to share with the public?
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What’s going on here? The answer, presumably, is that this is what happens when extremists gain complete control of a party’s discourse: all the rules get thrown out the window. Indeed, the hard right’s grip on the G.O.P. is now so strong that the party is sticking with Mr. Ryan even though it’s paying a significant political price for his assault on Medicare.
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Now, the House Republican budget isn’t about to become law as long as President Obama is sitting in the White House. But it has been endorsed by Mr. Romney. And even if Mr. Obama is reelected, the fraudulence of this budget has important implications for future political negotiations…
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[W]hat we learn from the latest Republican budget is that the whole pursuit of a Grand Bargain was a waste of time and political capital. For a lasting budget deal can only work if both parties can be counted on to be both responsible and honest — and House Republicans have just demonstrated, as clearly as anyone could wish, that they are neither.
[* h/t Charles Pierce]
Apart from empty-eyed GOP charlatans, what’s on the agenda for the new week?
Monday Morning Open Thread: “Pink Slime Economics”Post + Comments (51)
Grown a pair
It’s shocking to hear this from anyone other than Kthug:
Note how many deficit hawks regularly trash President Obama for not endorsing Simpson-Bowles while they continue to praise Ryan — even though Ryan voted to kill the initiative when he was a member of the commission. Here again is the double standard that benefits conservatives, proving that, contrary to establishment opinion, Obama was absolutely right not to embrace the Simpson-Bowles framework. If he had, a moderately conservative proposal would suddenly have defined the “left wing” of the debate, just because Obama endorsed it.
This is nuts. Yet mainstream journalism and mainstream moderates play right along.
[….]If our nation’s voters want to move government policy far to the right, they are entirely free to do so. But those who regard themselves as centrist have a moral obligation to make clear what the stakes are in the current debate. If supposed moderates refuse to call out the new conservatism for the radical creed it has become, their timidity will make them complicit in an intellectual coup they could have prevented.
And yet the public does seem to be getting the message about how radical the Republican party has become, at least the younger part of the public does, as evidenced by the move against the party among women under 50 immediately after the anti-contraception stuff got going.
How is it getting the message, given establishment media’s refusal to deliver it? My guess is that social media has provided an end-around conservative control of official news.