Cold Cold Cold Weather Music
A.
The problem is that the Blue Dog coalition in the House has largely served to fuck over progressive Democrats at every turn and hump on Bush's leg, and so while I'm hopeful the magic of Obama will overcome the tendencies of Bayh and Landrieu and the like to cower before anyone who threatens to call them a pussy on TV, I cannot see anything modeled on the House's Bush Dogs as anything other than a giant "oh shit this again" moment.
It seems sick that we have to figure out who among our own party is most likely to screw us, but it looks like Bayh's getting them all together in a room so they can reinforce each other's paranoid delusions. While on any other day a block of Democrats working together would be a good thing, on the whole I'd rather they stay in Gen Pop where they can be peeled off and given stern talkings-to by Feingold and Kerry and Teddy as the need arises.
A.
Good morning, fellow travelers! It's time to get suited up and plunge in to deepest darkest Freeperville.
Just don't make eye contact, and everything will be ok.
Let's open up the first drum of insanity and see what bubbles up, shall we?
Believe it or not, they're still flogging the birth certificate non-issue.
Presented for your approval -
(Excerpt) Read more at littlegreenfootballs.com ...
Continue reading "Today on Tommy T's Obsession With The Freeperati - the company you creep" »
We here at First Draft would be remiss if we did not mention the recent death of Ms. Bettie Page. Ms. Page had the guts to say, way back in the tight-assed 1950's, that people--and especially women--shouldn't be ashamed of their sexuality. Now that was a pretty radical thing to do back then.
And we thank you for it.
Post away.
A.
Headline this morning: Obama nominates Donovan for housing post.
Oh, well. I guess it's change and all. And this way, we won't need cars. So that's a plus.
Granted, I think the car czar idea is bullshit because we should be able to handle overseeing stuff like this with the approximately 50 billion people Congress employs right now without going out and finding someone new. I hate this pervasive attitude of: "Something needs doing; instead of doing it, let's spend six months on a search committee with multiple meetings catered in while we talk over various candidates for doing it, decide none of them suit, open up the search again, fucking WRITE A JOB DESCRIPTION and haggle over its approval, line up all the processes and lines of communication and make a manual and have it collated and bound in red alligator skin and OH MY FUCKING GOD CAN WE NOT JUST DO THE JOB ALREADY? IT WILL TAKE LESS TIME AND AS AN ADDED BONUS NOT MAKE ME WANT TO KILL PEOPLE WITH A BLUNT AXE."
It's not the oversight aspect that bothers me, it's the total waste of time and money aspect. Remember when Bush appointed a war czar and everybody was like, "Erm, fucko, that's like YOU last we checked?" Sort of like that. How's about Congress try overseeing some of this shit for a change? They're about to go on a three-week break, a break not available to any of the workers they're talking about, how about they be forced to take a few phone calls along the way?
But this thing where the UAW is somehow responsible for the downfall of American industry is absolutely enraging, and not just because I grew up the granddaughter of somebody who wore coveralls and carried a black lunch box to work every day and came home deaf, big hands black with grease, from the days on the line. It's enraging because SERIOUSLY, this is what we're doing?
For forty years the Republican party has been assraping the American manufacturing base because demonizing American cities and screwing American workers is good politics for them. For forty years we've seen the results of this, as weeds grow up in the cracks in the asphalt of rusting steel mill lots. For forty years this has been true. And now that it's coming home to kick them in the nuts, they've decided that what was wrong all along was that the people on whose backs are made their chewy little jokes get paid too much money.
With that in mind, hey anybody in Tennessee, how's about you run against this son of a bitch and I give you some money:
If we do not and I mean completely level this party even worse than we already have there is absolutely no hope for this goddamn country.
A.
Ran across this today in an email chain and I think this guy found the Rosetta Stone of newspaper catastrophe…
He makes a great argument: Newspapers hate their audiences. I know I did. I didn’t want to be told by some housewife in slippers who couldn’t form a coherent sentence that she knew better than me. It’s the arrogance that comes with having your name seen by thousands of people each day and believing that you are in some way changing the world (or the city or town or whatever). Unless it’s a pat on the back, shut the hell up. I’m not telling you how to feed your 35 housecats, so don’t tell me how to interpret the city budget.
Of course, that’s wrong, but it’s a hard mentality to change. When you stand in line at Wal-Mart and you see the guy with three teeth talking about what he’d do if he ran the “gumament” or if there wasn’t this damned 5-day waiting period on handguns… Yeah, you shudder and think everyone’s like that. This is my audience. The folks with a collective IQ of a fruit salad.
Here’s the problem: our audience knows more than we do, but we just don't see it that way when we're in a newspaper newsroom. We forget as reporters that we don’t know everything. That’s why we REPORT the news, not make the stuff up. We’re required to call the mayor because he knows more about the budget than we do. We need to meet the person who just turned 100 that we’re profiling because we don’t know what it’s like to have lived through both World Wars. We’re not there when a fire starts, so we need to talk to the fire chief and the people who just lost all their stuff in the blaze. Parents and teachers know what's going on at a school a lot more than we do. If instead of coming at this from the mentality that we’re giving a papal blessing to the fawning masses, we viewed ourselves as conduits for information, maybe every five days some newspaper wouldn’t be executing staff in the parking lot Russian Revolution style just to keep a profit margin.
What will happen to the media in this country, I believe, will depend greatly upon whether papers begin to show a little love. For my part, I’m training the next generation to get used to feedback they don’t want to hear.
It’s called final grades.
Doc
PS - Watch about a third of the way in for the NYT’s view on what email will do to us, circa 1995. If you love looking at photo albums of people who were completely into the worst fashion of the 1960s, 1970s and 1980s, you’ll find particular joy in that segment
“Trees will tap dance, elephants will drive in the Indianapolis 500 and Orson Welles will skip breakfast, lunch and dinner before North Carolina State finds a way to beat Houston.”
-Washington Post, April 4, 1983
“Call up the elephants, baby. Teach them how to drive.”
- NC State Coach Jim Valvano after his team’s 54-52 NCAA Championship win
Each year about this time, I find myself thinking about Jim Valvano. It’s ESPN’s fault and I’m mad and grateful at the same time. The sports network runs its annual Jimmy V Foundation tournament at the front end of the college basketball season to commemorate the late NC State coach who died 15 years ago this May.
Along with that tournament, the proceeds of which go to Valvano’s cancer research group, the network plays for all of us Jimmy V’s defining moment. It’s not the highlights from the 1983 tourney in which Valvano took a rag-tag group of also-rans who were in danger of not even making the NIT through a NCAA tournament run for the ages. It’s not Valvano’s finals performance, in which he bested a Houston squad that boasted two players who would eventually be named to the NBA’s top 50 of all time squad. It wasn’t his mad dash around the court, looking for someone to hug after Derrick Whittenburg’s desperation 30-footer landed short, but in the hands of Lorenzo Charles, who slammed it home for the win.
It was this: the final act of a frail man facing his own mortality.
If you don’t believe it’s been 15 years since he was taken from us, I’d only ask that you look at the bad fashion and mall hair sprinkled through the deeply saddened crowd at the 1993 ESPY awards. On unsteady legs and with a dying body, Valvano gave us a 10-minute glimpse into his soul. He challenged us to laugh every day, to think every day and let our emotions move us to tears every day. Each time I watch it, I find myself doing all three simultaneously.
I laughed when he chided the tech kid at the back of the room for trying to wave him off the stage (“I’ve got tumors all over my body,” he joked. “Like I’m worried about some guy in the back going “30 seconds.”) and when he told the story of how he tried to inspire his Rutgers basketball team but couldn’t get into the locker room.
I thought about how hard it must have been for him to say he wanted to be back next year to present the Arthur Ashe Courage Award to the next winner, knowing full well he wouldn’t last a few more weeks. I wondered if I would have been so brave or so strong, knowing that the end was so painfully near.
I was moved to tears when he told me “don’t give up. Don’t ever give up” because it was clear he hadn’t. Instead of taking a chance to put the spotlight on himself, he used the speech as an opportunity to launch the cancer foundation. He did it as a selfless act, telling the audience that it was clear this wouldn’t save his life, but it might help save someone else’s. I cried when he said, “I know I’ve got to go” because even though it was 15 years ago and he’s long gone and buried, I wanted to reach out and say, “No, please stay. Just a few more minutes…”
If we are nothing but the sum of our accomplishments and achievements and faults and failures, Jim Valvano was a mixed bag. He was accused of rule-breaking at NC State and Iona during his coaching days. He took one team on an improbable run and etched his picture on our minds for years to come. He was an adequate broadcaster who used a self-depreciating wit to distract us from his shortcomings.
However, if we are to be judged as to what we do in our time of greatest despair, then the singularity of a courageous act can redeem us all and give hope to those we leave behind.
Each year when ESPN shows that speech, I’m grateful to be reminded of that.
A.
This is so small and sad and lame:
Trib Tout
A couple of readers tell me they saw a TV commercial this morning for the Tribune
showing clips of Patrick Fitzgerald praising them for holding off on
printing a story (or stories) at Fitzgerald's request, followed by
"Subscribe to the Tribune."
Now edited by Patrick Fitzgerald.
*
That's just a joke. I have no particular reason to think the Tribune erred in its decision to acquiesce to Fitzgerald; I simply do not have the facts. But geez, using it as an advertisement? Beyond tacky. Totally inappropriate.
Erm, YEAH.
A.
+
=
The Bush White House finds Rod Blagojevich's actions and behavior "astounding." Okay....
And, to change the topic completely: to pass along some out-of-the-ordinary "news," The Gret Stet has a bit of the white stuff today, and I don't mean Peruvian marching powder (though I'm sure that could be found if one wants to look for it.) Nope, it's a real snowstorm, the first around these parts in I'd guess about six years.
Yeah, those above the snow line might well be saying "yeah, big deal," and personally, having done significant winter time in the Badger State, my reaction was one of grim resignation as opposed to thrill (geez--gotta brush the snow off the car--grrr...) Anyway, I took some pictures of Loosiana under the white blanket, which I'll be posting at my own blog, if anyone's interested. They say it's going to melt away before the day's out...which I don't mind at all--though I DO mind the leak in my roof (a delayed reaction from Hurricane Gustav)...I'll be examining that a bit more closely today from the relatively safe confines of the attic. Grrr, again.
But first, more hot coffee. Have a good one, y'all...
You know I love Anthony Bourdain like I love my own left breast but every time on his show that he whips out some sweetbreads or boar intestine or whatever and talks about how tasty it is fried with some testicles I start screaming at the TV. We don't need to eat that stuff anymore. Though we're not quite at flying cars yet I think most of us can probably safely stop gnawing on the assholes of various mammals for amusement. I feel the same way about this: There is a KFC almost everywhere now and we don't need to make creme bruleé out of come.
On a similar note, my mother recently gave me a cook book put out by what appears to have been the entirety of the 1950s home cooking school of thought. The way I know it was the 50s is that under "appetizers" it lists margaritas, brandy slushes, and Long Island iced teas.
I think those are listed in the hopes that you slam a few down before the meal and don't notice the selections of salads: Strawberry Congealed Salad. Mystery Salad. Quickie Salad. Frosted Raspberry Jello. I'm sure somewhere in here is that weirdly filthy alleged salad of a pineapple ring with a banana stuck through it. Then there's the beef dishes, the cooking instructions for which are almost always "put all ingredients in dish and bake:" Dreamy Spaghetti Casserole. Taste-of-Taco Spaghetti. Lazy Man's Meat Rolls. Magical Mushroom Pot Roast. MOCK FILET MIGNON. What on earth was going on back then that we needed to resort to that?
The fish dishes are even better: Salmon Loaf and on the next page, Super Salmon Loaf. Something called "On The Wharf" which in addition to a fish dish is also a musical and a porno. Dockside Delights, same deal. The whole thing scared the shit out of me. I read some of them to my father as he was driving us down the road the other night, and he nearly drove into a ditch when I got to something called, simply, "Puppy Chow."
There's also recipes for useful things like German potato salad which I love and could eat by the gallon but have never made myself, and pot roast which really is best when made by someone who remembers the 50s personally, but I was tempted to pull out a few of the weirder ones in here and send them to whoever makes up the challenges for Iron Chef. Your secret ingredient is ... The Eisenhower Years!
A.
Aparently the future of journalism is full of people being lied to a lot and pretending to like it:
Newspapers don't need buyouts to be solvent. They need buyouts to be profitable. More often, they need buyouts to be MORE profitable. I think somewhere along the line we decided that it was okay to lie to ourselves and (should we have grown up to be newspaper owners) our employees about what "losing money" actually means. Profits declining means there's still profit. It's just not ENOUGH profit. More and more I think any news outlet operating as a for-profit business is doomed to failure because the definition of failure right now is so broad that it takes in papers making a 20 percent profit as well as those actually losing money, and even then, if you lose money but you still have your savings, aren't you okay?
I just wish we'd talk about this shit honestly. Talk about it in terms of what we're willing to do and what we're not willing to do. Continuing to bullshit everybody doesn't solve the problem. And if one more fucking person talks about how the future of newspapers is all online and how that will eliminate costs, I'm gonna scream.
If First Draft ran like a paper, even a parsimonious one, covering, say, a small town instead of cat macros and Chris Dodd, we'd need salaries at the federal minimum wage and budgets for freelancers, three computers, cameras, notebooks because I refuse to depend on a voice recorder, cell phones and accounts, and you can configure that any way you want but it will still cost money which means we'd need to pay somebody to make us money.
Most of the time it's that last piece that papers fall down on; they sit around and say, "But the money's not there online" without allocating the resources to go and get it. The money's not anywhere you're not beating it out of these days, you can't just sit there and get pissed off when it doesn't come to you. Somebody invested in Flake.com, which was a portal for breakfast cereal. I mean, people pay for stupid shit all the time. But for so long newspaper owners could just sit back and rake in the cash that now they're confused by having to work for it.
So they fuck over the people who actually are working for it, by feeding them this halfwitted bullshit about how if they just get a few more buyouts, they'll be okay. Just one more hit, baby, I promise. Then I'll clean up my act. And their enablers in every academic forum continue to not stand up and say, "Take your buyout, fold it four ways, dip it in gold and shove it up your ass. Go home to your McMansion in your Lexus and whine about how there's just no money in newspapers anymore, since it's already sent your three kids to college, you chewy little clown. Doesn't matter to you anymore, you got yours, right, you greedy lying bastard? Go fuck yourself. Fucking child."
Lord knows the panels might be better attended, if that kind of thing started happening.
A.
"Band Queers."
That's what they called us. And to be totally fair, some of us were, even if we didn't realize at the time. However, in my high school,if you played an instrument other than a guitar and were in the band, you were a Band Queer, regardless of your orientation.
I've said before that I learned the meaning of irony in high school marching band. You see, there's something about marching, the act of declarative, deliberate, ritualized walking, that is revelatory. Those who haven't ever marched in any capacity, be it military, musical, or in protest, just don't get it. The other kids in high school certainly didn't, that's for sure.
But we did. All the weeks of sweaty August nights, practicing on that muddy, bumpy field behind the band hall, slathered with Off to protect against the clouds of mosquitoes that feasted on us, trying and failing, and trying again till suddenly it all clicked: the intricacies of the music embedded in our brains, the mathematical complexity of the formations understood and mastered, turns and counter marches exquisitely snapped off, and a hundred and eight awkward geek adolescents moved as one proud accomplished entity.
We knew how good we were and we knew that the others would never get it and we knew that didn't matter. We had a job to do, a show to put on, and a school to represent, whether they liked us or not. We were Band Queers. We kicked ass.
All of that, and of course so much more, was why I was in tears when I saw this news day before yesterday:
We are extremely pleased to announce that the Lesbian and Gay Band Association will be included as a marching contingent in the Inaugural Parade. This is the first time that an LGBT group will be represented in a Presidential Inaugural Parade, truly our chance to make history.
So Rove has been directing a Bush Legacy Project and today we learn via Think Progress that the White House has sent out a 2 page memo with the talking points on the "unalloyed success" of the Bush presidency.
I tackled a Bush Legacy Project almost 2 years ago with the following video and the thought that the Bush Legacy will be seen in 2 cities--New Orleans and Baghdad.
I still stand by that today. Though I would encourage you to also watch a video accompanying this Stars and Stripes story on a helicopter medevac platoon operating in Afghanistan. It is their job to go into landing zones and bring out the wounded. Towards the end of the video, (~ 7:00 minute mark) one medic talks of the need to leave the dead body of a soldier behind and though he was 99.5% certain that the soldier was dead, in the back of his mind was a sliver of.... what if?
Just one of so very many 'what ifs' behind the Bush Legacy.
The Times Picayune has more on what's next for the GOP's newest shooting star, Representative-elect Joseph Cao. (Some of the following T-P quotes have been excerpted out of order. It's pronounced "Gow", btw.)
Anh "Joseph" Cao, R-New Orleans, spent Monday accepting congratulations for his stunning victory over nine-term Democratic incumbent Rep. William Jefferson, and planning his first trip to Washington this week for an orientation session for new members of Congress offered by the conservative Heritage Foundation and featuring such enticing workshop titles as, "Dealing With the Entitlement Tsunami."
Cao's father survived a
re-education camp in N. Vietnam, so hopefully he can give his son some
pointers on how to deal with this Heritage Foundation workshop.
"Congressman Steve Scalise [who has been in office 9 months] has offered to be my mentor," Cao said.
Steve "the mentor" Scalise
can probably impart all his useful Congressional wisdom to Cao in a
five minute meeting. So after that takes place, to which senior GOP figure will
Cao look for further direction?
"My recommendations to any freshman member is not forget what they did to be elected and remember the folks back at home," said Rep. Rodney Alexander, R-Quitman. "Just don't stay in Washington any longer than you have to and go back to Louisiana as much as you can."
Guh! Not Rodney! Take advice from anyone but Rodney!
By midmorning Cao was interrupting an interview to take a call from former House Speaker Newt Gingrich, who offered good wishes and, Cao said, counseled him "to reach out to the African-American community." Cao said Gingrich offered to act as a go-between.
Perhaps I spoke to soon.
Did I read that correctly? Newt Gingrich wants to be Cao's ambassador to the African-American community of Greater New Orleans? Really? Umm, don't Cao and Gingrich have some other things to sort out before Gingrich becomes Cao's point man in New Orleans? For example, on Cao's pet issue of bilingual education, Gingrich has previously said that:
"The American people believe English should be the official language of the government. ... We should replace bilingual education with immersion in English so people learn the common language of the country and they learn the language of prosperity, not the language of living in a ghetto,"
and
"[bilingualism poses] long term dangers to the fabric of our nation"
and
"allowing bilingualism to continue to grow is very dangerous."
Why
does Gingrich want to work with Cao, when he has made it plain that
Cao's views are "dangerous" to the "fabric of our nation"?
Anyway, the T-P article has more:
Had [Cao] heard from House Minority Leader John Boehner? Probably, he said, but he'd heard from so many members of Congress he wasn't sure.
"Probably"?
That's pretty funny. He wasn't sure if he'd heard from GOP House
Minority leader John Boehner, who is already saying "the future is Cao". I'm sure that wasn't an intentional slight, but it almost sounded like one.
[Cao] had not yet heard from [Rep. Bill Jefferson] whose career he cut short.
"Do you have a number for him?" asked Cao, who said he wanted to call and offer words of solace and sympathy. He said he knows Jefferson, who faces trial on corruption charges next year, has a tough road ahead.
"He's been around a long time. I feel happy for myself but bad for him," Cao said.
Asked Sunday about the possibility of a transition meeting, Jefferson, who has never met Cao, said it's not like a presidential transition in which the incoming and outgoing officials get together.
Jefferson's refusal to congratulate or help Cao is so lacking in class. What a selfish prick.
However, because of his late election, which came after the lottery for House office space, Cao will inherit Jefferson's prime spot in the Rayburn House Office Building for the next two years.
Ooh, plum digs!
On Monday his wife, Hieu Phuong Hoang, who goes by Kate, celebrated Cao's victory by calling Walgreens, where she worked as a pharmacist, and quitting her job.
Let's not get ahead of ourselves.
Cao, who has two young daughters, said "I'm planning to move my family up [to D.C.]" and make solo trips home to New Orleans. That way they will have more time together and his wife "can keep an eye on me and keep me in line."
Don't
forget Vitty-cent, Cao. He'll be up there too, and can keep you on
the straight and narrow so that you won't embarrass yourself with any
unfortunate encounters.
[Sen. Vitter, by the way, has resumed his active role as lector at his
church in Old Metairie-- standing by the altar, reading the Bible
to the sinful masses below.]
This week, Cao said, he will stay with his sister and her husband in Falls Church, Va., outside Washington and, he suggested, maybe ride a bike into the city. Warned that could be a cold trip this time of year, he agreed to a more conventional approach. "Maybe I'll take mass transit."
Earlier, I mentioned
a "babe in the wilderness" quality to Cao, and that concern is perhaps
growing. As a (likely one term) Congressman, will he begin to view the
GOP, rather than Congress, as the key to his professional future? What yucky unforeseen
consequences will eventuate from that? How naive is this guy? That's
the big question. Is it naive or cool that he wants to bike into D.C.
from Falls Church in December? Is it naive or cool that his immediate
Plan B is "mass transit"?
The T-P tries to reassure us that Cao's a discerning, thoughtful chap.
Cao, a refugee from Vietnam, is the unlikeliest of political figures: slight, soft-spoken and self-effacing, a seemingly guileless figure, yet one with a sharp sense of humor and degrees in physics, philosophy and law and six years of study to be a Jesuit priest that suggest he is nobody's fool.
Indeed, Cao has seen things you people
wouldn't believe. Saigon during the Vietnam war; the slums in Mexico
City and China; the ravages of hurricane flooding on Venetian Isles ...
C-beams glittering in the dark near Tannhäuser Gate.
So, with all due respect to the "spiritual warfare" waged by Louisiana's Governor, this dude has actually lived in a war. He willingly visited various pits of hell around this earth, to help the poor, and has struggled, philosophically, with that experience. He's not an idiot. I don't think he'll let the GOP mold him into something he isn't. But they could. I think, though, that it's equally likely that he could play the GOP as much as they play him. Consider:
Committee assignments will be made by the Republican leadership in January.
"I'm hoping to get onto the Appropriations Committee and Ways and Means," said Cao, listing two of the most powerful committees in Congress and unlikely perches for the most junior member of the minority party.
Was that a joke? Or is Cao trying to leverage his newfound celebrity?
He added that he would like to be on the committee to elect the first Vietnamese-American president. "That's a joke," he explained, helpfully.
Ok,
but was the first comment a joke? If not, it's either naive or
brilliant... or both. Hell, if he thinks he has the juice, he should
shoot for the moon. Ask Boehner for a chairmanship!
I would give my left testicle to see a C-Span clip where House Goopers are addressing a "Chairman Cao".*
But seriously, University of Virginia political scientist Larry Sabato said, "The House Republican leadership would be politically foolish if they didn't put Cao front and center, give him good committee assignments and make sure he gets some tasty pork for the district."
Cao was asked whether he was disappointed about anyone he hadn't heard from. Angelina Jolie, he said. And the pope.
That's funny, and it will clear up confusion among some folks who mistook Cao for a new pope. Cao's not a pope, he's a former community organizer... which makes him closer to the devil, I suppose, to many in the GOP.
The next two years will be interesting. I endorsed Cao over Dollar Bill Jefferson, and am glad he won. Despite my disagreement with Cao on perhaps many issues, removing Dollar Bill was the overriding concern. (I'm convinced that electing Cao was in the long term interests of the local and state Democratic parties, as well.)
===
* Dillyberto gets credit for that one.
Several hundred thousand.
It staggered the senators who were listening. After all, they were being told by the president and his deputies that the war with Iraq would be quick and easy, requiring a relatively small force. A cakewalk, the president's conservative pundit allies were saying. Easy-peasy. Now here was this guy, talking about how hard it would be.
"And so it takes a significant ground force presence to maintain a safe and secure environment, to ensure that people are fed, that water is distributed, all the normal responsibilities that go along with administering a situation like this," Shinseki told the Senate.
For his honesty and sound judgment, the lifelong army officer, the first American of Asian ancestry to become a four-star general, was attacked, marginalized and finally driven into retirement, the subject of mockery during the early days of the war. Deputy Defense Secretary Paul Wolfowitz said Shinseki's numbers were "wildly off the mark." The chairman of the Joint Chiefs called Shinseki's statement a "guestimate."
Four years later, with Iraq in flames, President Bush was finally forced to listen to the man he had his small-minded surrogates deride. In calling for what is now known as the "troop surge" to pacify the country, Bush said, "Our past efforts to secure Baghdad failed for two principal reasons: There were not enough Iraqi and American troops to secure neighborhoods that had been cleared of terrorists and insurgents. And there were too many restrictions on the troops we did have."
To which anybody paying attention when Shinseki spoke was shaking his head saying, "No kidding, pal."
A.
Indicted. I should be excited, but I'm having a hard time coming up with any kind of a reaction other than "feh." What a monumental dumbass this guy is:
Blagojevich and Harris conspired to demand the firing of Chicago Tribune editorial board members responsible for editorials critical of Blagojevich in exchange for state help with the sale of Wrigley Field, the Chicago Cubs baseball stadium owned by Tribune Co.
Blagojevich and Harris, along with others, obtained and sought to gain financial benefits for the governor, members of his family and his campaign fund in exchange for appointments to state boards and commissions, state jobs and state contracts.
Archpundit has more background.
I've never been much of a Blagojevich fan, and you've got to understand something about Illinois politics. We have three parties here: City Dems, Downstate Dems, and Republicans. Downstate Dems would rather fuck with a City Dem than with a Republican, City Dems have more fun poking the Downstaters than they do the "opposition," Republicans are pleased to sit back and watch the catfight, so nothing gets done.
Blago has all the charm, charisma, political capital and popularity of a bedbug infestation and so after a number of years of near-total Dem control of politics in the state (mostly because the face of the Republican party here vs. Obama was Alan Keyes, so that tells you how together the Republicans are) we still have a school funding system that was a national disgrace when Jonathan Kozol wrote about it in Savage Inequalities, and now would be a farce if there was anything remotely funny about it at all. I am a near one-issue voter on the schools issue here because I've seen firsthand how the kids get hosed in towns "we" don't care about, and Blago has had the courage to do exactly dick about it even when people did like him.
I don't want to live under a Republican governor especially but I have to tell you, lately? Hard to find a way anybody could possibly make it worse. (I'm so gonna regret typing those words.) What you have to understand is we're pretty okay in Chicago with a guy running something shady if he's effective at his job, which is why everybody in streets and san has the same last name but Daley keeps getting elected and will until he too is indicted or dies or decides he's sick of putting up wrought iron and Disney stores everywhere. What gets us pissed off is when you're trying to take us and giving us exactly nothing back.
Beachwood's gonna have a lot (and has had a lot) on the intersections between the Blago and Obama operations. All else aside, doubtless this is going to be some kind of a Whitewater for the right's cottage industry. An early Christmas gift for Regnery and Fux. Yays.
A.
Hey hey, everybody.
Sorry for my absence. I've been busy with things, and helping Athenae with her slaughtering of journalism.
That, plus the ice and snow.
Anyway, I just wanted to say how pleased I am that it's once again time for the War On Christmas. Really, it's my favorite time of the year. I just can't wait to go around, saying "Happy Holidays," and then watching civilization collapse. If I weren't so busy at the abortion mill, I'd take it up full time.
You know us liberal, queer-lovin' pussies. It's because of us that you can't have images like this anymore.
Anyway, it's good to be back.
Now, if you'll excuse me, I have a nativity scene to go light on fire.
WALLACE: Let me ask you this, did the Vice President say to you, “thank you so much for defending the president and yes I’m going to be giving you a special exit interview in a couple of weeks?”
GALLAGHER: Did he say all that to you?
WALLACE: Yes.
It was predictable, in hindsight. For years the right's been hammering them, first of all. For years the right's been hammering them that they're biased and horrible and hateful and OMG PAY ATTENTION TO WHAT WE THINK and for at least the last three decades there has been this constant drumbeat of angry Republicans in their ears. So that's what you start with, a baseline established that Republicans' good opinions of you are important, if for no other reason than that you need to get work done and they won't shut up until they're happy. That's what you're starting with here.
Couple that with the typical foxhole shit that goes on where people who hang out with each other all the time begin to identify with each other, and when you live next door to each other you tend to care about the same shit (which is why I've always violently opposed residency requirements for journalists as lazy management, but that's another post) and attach those two toxic train cars to an engine of privilege and obliviousness and starfucking and just drive it right off a cliff of collective Bush-crushing. The flaming wreckage you find down by the shoreline, that's Wallace up there.
Way back in April when I talked about this at EschaCon, why our national political press sucks so hard, I talked a little about the ongoing destruction of newsrooms being a part of it. Destroy the bonds between co-workers that keep you honest, the culture that tells you getting your sources mad at you is NOTHING compared to your colleagues thinking you're a chump, and you know what you end up with? This. This sad, small, Dick-Cheney-pissed-on-me-as-he-walked-by desperation. This my-contact-list-let-me-show-you-it narcissism. This idea that you are more beholden to, and have more in common with, the people you cover than the people you work with. Forget the people you work for.
What used to keep people from doing this in the places I worked was the vociferous mocking that went on the minute you even came close to bragging about whose party you got invited to last week. "Oooh, look at you, fancy fancy, remember us all when you're famous, go update your résumé" kind of thing, until you felt stupid for feeling special that the mayor knew your name and called on you first. What impressed people and made them treat you like a god was when a senator called you up and screamed at you for writing something that made him look bad, and you gave it right back. Getting somebody indicted, fired, forced to issue an apology, getting a law changed, getting the rules rewritten, those were the prizes. Almost everybody I've ever worked with in journalism, and I've been damn lucky, would be ashamed to be overheard saying something like what Wallace said.
A.
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