Hope you all have a good one.
Christmas Eve Open Thread
Made it home in one piece, and the puppies are so adorable that you just want to lie on the floor and roll around with them. Ginny is really quite the card, and is simply fearless. Lots of pics when I get home and have my editing software handy.
Some random thoughts:
1.) I ate a handful of pine nuts sitting in the kitchen. Is it just me, or do pine nuts have a distinctly bacon-like flavor?
2.) Speaking of nuts, at some point we were talking about crazy people who walk up and down city streets talking to themselves. Not sure what brought this up, but my brother noted that if we gave all those folks a blue tooth to wear, we would probably think there are far fewer crazy people on our streets.
3.) This is some classic Yglesias-speak:
My half-formed ability to make aesthetic judgments is telling me that this song has certain qualities that most people actually hate, but that I like.
That is Matt speak for “this sucks, but I like it anyway.”
4.) You were right. Season 2 of Heroes is ten pounds of suck in a five pound bag.
5.) Looks like Al Franken is good enough and smart enough to be a Senator.
Cya in the morning. And Merry Christmas!
Compare and Contrast
Matt Taibbi, a few years ago, discussing Tom Friedman’s The World is Flat:
This would be a small thing were it not for the overall pattern. Thomas Friedman does not get these things right even by accident. It’s not that he occasionally screws up and fails to make his metaphors and images agree. It’s that he always screws it up. He has an anti-ear, and it’s absolutely infallible; he is a Joyce or a Flaubert in reverse, incapable of rendering even the smallest details without genius. The difference between Friedman and an ordinary bad writer is that an ordinary bad writer will, say, call some businessman a shark and have him say some tired, uninspired piece of dialogue: Friedman will have him spout it. And that’s guaranteed, every single time. He never misses.
On an ideological level, Friedman’s new book is the worst, most boring kind of middlebrow horseshit. If its literary peculiarities could somehow be removed from the equation, The World Is Flat would appear as no more than an unusually long pamphlet replete with the kind of plug-filled, free-trader leg-humping that passes for thought in this country. It is a tale of a man who walks 10 feet in front of his house armed with a late-model Blackberry and comes back home five minutes later to gush to his wife that hospitals now use the internet to outsource the reading of CAT scans. Man flies on planes, observes the wonders of capitalism, says we’re not in Kansas anymore. (He actually says we’re not in Kansas anymore.) That’s the whole plot right there. If the underlying message is all that interests you, read no further, because that’s all there is.
And the opening paragraphs of Friedman’s column today:
I had a bad day last Friday, but it was an all-too-typical day for America.
It actually started well, on Kau Sai Chau, an island off Hong Kong, where I stood on a rocky hilltop overlooking the South China Sea and talked to my wife back in Maryland, static-free, using a friend’s Chinese cellphone. A few hours later, I took off from Hong Kong’s ultramodern airport after riding out there from downtown on a sleek high-speed train — with wireless connectivity that was so good I was able to surf the Web the whole way on my laptop.
Taibbi 1, Friedman 0.
Discuss.
On The Road Again
Heading to Cole High Command at an undisclosed location, so posting will be light today. On the upside, there will be plenty of photos of Jack Russell puppies in the near future. Also, been a while since we have had a pet pic, so here you go:
See you all this evening.
Speaking of Legacies
I just finished watching the TCU/Boise State Bowl game, which actually turned out to be much better than it looked like it was going to be at first, even considering you had to listen to Lou Holtz slur and suck on his dentures for three hours. At any rate, at some point they were babbling on about something and one of them mentioned that Notre Dame will be in a bowl game tomorrow.
Full Stop.
Notre Dame is in a bowl game? Why? How? Notre Dame has been the worst major football program in the nation for how many years running, and they are still going to a bowl game with a 6-6 record? And it will be televised?
Say what you want about Caroline Kennedy- she is better at what she does than Notre Dame is at football. At least the Kennedy legacy is still intact.
Give Him a Medal
I saw this on CNN yesterday, and forgot about it until someone mentioned it in the comments. Roland Martin deserves a damned medal for this response to the question as to whether Obama’s picks are diverse enough (it started specifically with a special report featuring Kim Gandy from NOW claiming there are not enough women):
ROLAND MARTIN, CNN CONTRIBUTOR: This is the most utterly useless conversations that exists every four years, because folks always do this, Republicans and Democrats.
I actually got an e-mail from somebody who complained that there were not enough dark-skinned African-Americans. Obama was only choosing light-skinned African-Americans. That’s how crazy this conversation is. How many women should he choose? Should it be 10 out of the 20? Should it be 50 percent, as opposed to 25 percent?
It is a ridiculous conversation. The focus of any of these groups, whether you’re women, African-American, Hispanic, whether you’re progressive, should be, what are the policies that are going to be initiated?
When President Bush, when he first made his appointments, you had Colin Powell, who obviously was secretary of state. But one of the things people never talked about, there were four African-Americans who were in the number-two positions at the various departments, they were the ones who operated as the chief operating officers. And so, this whole notion that you should only look at those folks it’s a policy position.
Look at Melanie Barnes. She’s over — when it comes to domestic policy. You got people in critical jobs. It’s not always just about the cabinet level jobs.
I honestly do not know how Democrats win as often as they do. With all the infighting and elbowing and whining and kicking and screaming, the fact that Clinton was elected twice and now Obama in the past 20 years just shows how bad the Republicans are. Otherwise, no party this fractious and petty and short-sighted could ever win anything, especially when they willingly feed a media environment that just LOVES this kind of BS story.
And yes, I am fully aware that I will get ten huffy emails saying I just can’t handle dissent and blah blah blah. Go air it in the damned grievances below. I’m cranky today.
This Will Get Ugly
After the crazy outrage over Rick Warren, I fear this is going to have a predictable outcome:
Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates is asking many of the Bush administration’s 250 Pentagon political appointees to remain on the job until the incoming Obama administration finds replacements — a move designed to prevent a leadership vacuum with U.S. troops engaged in wars in Iraq and Afghanistan.
The unusual request by Mr. Gates, whom President-elect Barack Obama has asked to continue in his Cabinet post, ensures that key policy positions will not be left to “acting” subordinates as typically occurs when political appointees are directed to resign during a presidential transition.
I am almost afraid to check my usual left-wing sites, because I am terrified I am going to see another idiot chorus of “OBAMA LIED! THAT’S NOT CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IN! OBAMA IS JUST ANOTHER BUSH.”
Unless someone can explain to me how it is responsible for us to run two wars while hundreds of key personnel positions remain vacant, I am going to say this is a responsible thing to do, and will not partake in this round of the vapors. I hope I am wrong about the response from certain quarters of the Democratic party, or wrong that these positions need to be filled. Right now, I am full on fed up with the whining.