If you get a chance, I recommend watching Good Hair, Chris Rock’s documentary on black hair. I had no idea of the size and reach of the black hair industry ($9 billion/year, the majority of money spent on hair in the US), or the link between hair extensions and Hindu sacrifice.
Commenter Emily L. Hauser (ellaesther) has posted her take on it over at ABL’s place.
Bradley Manning is in prison in part because of some chats between him and Wired source Adrian Lamo. As John posted on Monday, Wired has refused to release those logs in full. Last night, Wired responded with two lengthy posts that hinge on this point:
We have already published substantial excerpts from the logs, but critics continue to challenge us to reveal all, ostensibly to fact-check some statements that Lamo has made in the press summarizing portions of the logs from memory (his computer hard drive was confiscated, and he no longer has has a copy).
Our position has been and remains that the logs include sensitive personal information with no bearing on Wikileaks, and it would serve no purpose to publish them at this time.
The other sketchy part of this response is that it spends most of its time bemoaning Glenn Greenwald’s lack of journalistic ethics and touting Wired’s sterling grasp of the canons of the Society of Professional Journalists. Let’s just stipulate assume that Glenn Greenwald is a non-journalist and a complete asshole. Wired has a golden opportunity to make him look like even more of a jackass by releasing the rest of the logs, and they passed it up. That, in itself, is the biggest tell of the whole story.
From commentor Jude B:
Meet Mac. He is a now four year old black Lab. He is our scared-y dog. He is frightened by noises, both either loud or just unexpected like a dropped paper bag. He is also frightened by new things: a new pillow on the bed, a new desk in the front room. Overhead fans and lights frighten him also. He is a rescue dog from the shelter one county over. I met him out-of-doors at the shelter where he is the closest to calm, as long as the number of new people is far exceeded by his own people and there
are no loud or unexpected noises. I could see that the car ride home from the shelter bothered him tremendously but was still taken aback by how very afraid he was of most of life. When he joined our family a year ago, he was very, very frightened by all of these things and would not drink from anything but an outdoor water puddle or stream for three weeks and would not eat any food for two days. With love, patience, encouragement and generic Prozac, he has come a long way. He even let me bathe him indoors two weeks ago. He lives to play fetch. He has bed and sofa privileges and has learned from me that the only reasonable response to a nighttime thunder storms is to burrow under the blankets and cuddle.
The little cocker is Bella, also a rescue dog. She spent six years as a mom-dog in a puppy mill, popping out litter after litter, never getting much chance at a life like she has now. She loves to hunt and explore on our new small farm in her huge fenced backyard. When she is on the trail of something, nothing, not even meal time, will get her to come inside. She is also an escape artist of unparalelled accomplishment. She escaped from our new backyard when we moved to the farm six times in the first three weeks, one time returning after a dip in the sewage lagoon and once after rolling in the neighbor’s horse pasture. After each escape, my husband would walk the fence to find the latest escape hole and then he would patch it closed. Once the fence had been rendered impenetrable, she discovered the area under the back porch, tore the lattice work from the crawl space and got stuck under the porch, not being able to find the way back out. My husband had to cut an eight by eleven inch square in the porch floor in order to free her. She got four baths in five days, two of them in under twelve hours, because of repeat trips to the under porch area. The baths were the result of my husband muttering something about “rat feces” after her first trip under the porch. You can’t hear that phrase without plopping the dog into the shower and cleaning her. And, we thought that after each time, we had patched up the latest place she had clawed a way in. It was not until my husband bought thick plywood, cut it to size and nailed it all around the bottom of the porch that her under porch trips stopped. She also has bed and comfy chair privileges. When we come home she greets my husband but she will not leave the front door until I come in. It’s me she wants to welcome home and I love having her greet me.
On Christmas Eve Salon published a list of Wingnutopia’s most crazy made-up Obama scandals for 2010.
It was a pretty comprehensive list although some big wingnut freakouts like the so-called ‘Climate-Gate’ didn’t make the list—I guess because it didn’t have an “Obama-did-it” angle to sell. Still, it looks like the list was published a week too early as today two new new freakouts entered the mighty Wurlitzer playlist.
One, as Tom Levenson pointed out, is the batshit crazy idea that President Obama is getting ready to give New York back to Native Americans just because his Administration will reverse a Bush Jr. decision and support the United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People.
That fact that the Right is launching this freakout on the eve of the 120th Anniversary of the Massacre at Wounded Knee is just par for the course—especially when the latest freakout comes with an anti-Native American point of view that could have been shared by the US soldiers who gunned down the sick and cold back in 1890. The wingnuts are also outraged that one year ago today President Obama signed an Apology to Native Americans passed by the 111th Congress.
The other mini-freakout of the day is that in a call to Philadelphia Eagles owner Jeffrey Lurie about plans for the football stadium to convert to Green Energy the President also praise the team for giving a convict like Michael Vick a second chance:
Lurie said Mr. Obama was “passionate about it,” adding that the president said “it’s never a level playing field for prisoners when they get out of jail. And he was happy that we did something on such a national stage that showed our faith in giving someone a second chance after such a major downfall.’‘
I think Vick is an ass and I couldn’t care less about him, but the USA is number one when it comes to people behind bars, whether you measure by number (2.3 million) or per capita (715 per 100,000 people). Most of these people will get out one day and the possibility of a second chance needs to be there. That part of the Vick story is OK with me, but for wingnutopia it is all just another opportunity for a freakout.
In the coming year the list of freakouts and nonsense will be even longer. I expect that we should be hearing new ones at a rate of about 3-4 per week. I can’t wait for the one about Michelle Obama feeding her family a dead chicken and then using the bones for soup. I imagine Issa will hold hearings on that scandal when Fox breaks the news.
Cheers
dengre
And another good profile of someone who has deeply damaged our country, an excellent, sympathetic New York magazine piece about Marty Peretz. The short of it: he’s always been too emo for his own good but now he’s old, bitter, and recently divorced, and thus prone to saying excessively whack angry shit on his blog (which has recently been discontinued). He is no longer editor-in-chief of TNR.
Ultimately, it’s a story about how easy it is to buy some people’s loyalty:
From Harvard he brought E. J. Dionne Jr., Kinsley, Hertzberg, Wieseltier, and Andrew Sullivan. His joy in their ascent was palpable: When he hired Hertzberg the second time, Peretz impulsively took him to his own tailor and paid for a bespoke suit.
[....]
Peretz is famously generous—it is a quality as extreme as his partisanship. He has paid for medical treatments, found houses, coached careers. His close friend Michael Kinsley once told him, jokingly, that he should publish his collected letters of recommendation. Peretz has remained devoted to tarnished, even imprisoned friends, and he commands an outsize loyalty in return.
This is why it’s unfair to call journalists “whores”. A prostitute may spend a night doing as a client pleases in return for a cash payment, Hendrick Hertzberg (whose writing I like) will spend a lifetime doing the same for the gift of a bespoke suit.
You just can’t beat the London Review of Books. There’s nothing like it here:
In the book, as in his life, Bush the postmodernist is a simulacrum: a Connecticut blueblood who pretended to be a Texas cowboy, though he couldn’t ride a horse and lived on a ‘ranch’ with no cattle. He was, and is, happiest when surrounded by professionals in the three areas in which he was a notable failure: athletics, the military and business. He is like a sports fan who dresses up in the team jersey to watch the game. References to his ‘military service’ recur frequently throughout the book, as though it were actually more than a few months spent avoiding it. He was the only modern American president to appear in public in a military uniform – even Eisenhower never wore his while president – like a ribboned despot from a banana republic. He has said that one of his proudest moments was throwing out the ceremonial first pitch in a World Series game. The frontispiece to the book is the photo of Bush in his other proud moment, standing in the ruins of the Twin Towers with his cheerleader bullhorn, just one of the relief worker guys.
A pup in a valley of alpha males, inadequate compared to Dad, humiliated by Mother, he classically became a bully to compensate: an ass-brander, noted for what he calls verbal ‘needling’; a boss who cussed out his subordinates and invented demeaning nicknames for everyone around him; a president who taunted terrorists, most of them imaginary, and challenged them to ‘bring it on’.
The whole review is brilliant. I don’t usually like the whole “this is so post-modern thing” but it’s on the money here.
Apparently last night’s post went right over the Sully borg’s collective heads:
Do you think they understood the point of my post last night? Like, for example, the people on “teh left” who are all nominated for awards are basically folks with no institutional power, and whose grave sins range from saying fuck too much and pointing out that wingnuts are crazy? That it is absurd to equate a bunch of slightly obnoxious comments from random bloggers to the Malkin awards, which is a list of individuals who make up the institutional right. When was the last time Digby was on television? Or Tbogg? Or Amanda Marcotte? Do they understand that Markos is essentially blacklisted from NBC?
Do they even understand the concept of false equivalence?
Do they understand how silly it is to nominate someone for a Moore award for noting that the right-wing is fomenting violence, and then hosting an award for a dozen right-wingers fomenting violence?
Do they understand my comment was a riff on a well-known remark by Dave Wiegel?
Do you think there is even the slightest chance they understand we’re making fun of them? Probably. Which is why my post is now a nominee for “for divisive, bitter and intemperate left-wing rhetoric.”
Clowns.
And I don’t want another hundred comments telling me you love Sullivan. Clearly, I love the blog, too. But the false equivalence between a couple of powerless bloggers and William Donohoe and Roger Ailes and comapny, who can get on tv with the snap of their fingers to spread their poisonous bile, is just absurd.
It seems that an honorary member of the Crow tribe has just signed on with the Black Helicopter brigade and is readying—now, as I write, in some secure undisclosed location (Berchtesgaden?)—the documents of transfer that will (at last!) restore its traditional owners to their rightful enjoyment of just a tiny piece of American soil.
That would be President Obama, getting ready to hand Manhattan back to the descendents of the Native Americans who first sold off the island to the Dutch.
No, seriously.
Via Jillian Rayfield at TPM, we learn that the Obama administration’s decision to reverse Bush era policy and support the U. N. Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous People has so terrified folks that the usual suspects on the right are ginning up the reverb chamber to declare that yes, our Black, Kenyan, Muslim, Crow Usurper has taken the next step to obliterate liberty and subdue Americans terrified and ill-informed elderly white people under the yoke of—who is it this time? Oh yeah, Native Americans (getting in line after African American teenagers on buses, Muslims, Democrats and the Zerg Swarm).*
Look, this is fun and all, and yes, people spending even seconds seriously considering the notion that Barack Obama could or would just hand over chunks of the US to whoever he wants need medical help (where are those damn meds, honey?), but as usual, this isn’t about what the folks weighing in so ponderously on Fox say it is.
The Republican Party has only one genuine political goal now: to destroy Obama’s presidency, and more generally the idea that the Democratic Party is a legitimate party of government. Which is to say that our Republican friends** view elections in which the other side might actually gain access to power—actual democracy—as an accessory. Such theater is fine as long it produces the desired result, the GOP on top. When it does not, then it is dispensible.
All of which to say that whatever the Republican party once was it is now a danger to the nation. It seeks not to govern but to rule for the benefit of its faction, not the country as a whole.
Factio Grandaeva Delenda Est.
*Yup. Proud parent of a ten year old boy…
**The actual party apparatus, of course. I’m willing to concede that not all Republican voters are thus convinced. Too many are, I think, but by no means every last one.
Image: Benjamin West, The Death of General Wolfe, 1770 (or 1771. Maybe).
A lot of people are surprised that George W. Bush’s book “Decision Points” is selling so well.
The next question, though, is how on earth sales have been this good. Or put another way, who’s actually buying the poorly-reviewed book of a failed former president?
[.....]
[C]onservative books nearly always outsell liberal books in large part because of bulk orders. A couple of months ago, for example, Mitt Romney boosted sales of his book by requiring various schools, think tanks, and institutions to buy thousands of copies in exchange for his speeches. Various conferences and Republican outlets do this all the time.
Without access to the data, it’s impossible to say just how much of this may have inflated “Decision Points” sales, but it seems like the most credible explanation. How else could it have sold so many copies?
I have no idea if conservative bulk orders are what’s going on here; I don’t have a good handle on how the right thinks of George W. Bush right now (failed RINO or Churchillian genius). I do think the media reaction to the book was a bit strange. There was a tendency to pretend the Bush presidency took place a long time ago, or never happened at all (that’s not so surprising, I think a lot in the media would like to forget that they fluffed the guy so much from 2001 to 2006). And this long ago, far away depiction of the book made it seem like something no one would want to read.
I personally would be interested in reading the book. I’m not going to buy it, because I don’t want to give my money to that clown and because I don’t have time, but given the choice between reading W’s book and reading memoirs by Obama or Clinton or Bush I, I’d go with W’s book in a heartbeat. With most recent presidents, the thought processes and political success make sense to me. George W. Bush’s do not. His presidency is Real Murkin mystery to me. Could he really have been as detached from reflective decision-making as he seemed to be? I’m sure the book is largely inaccurate but I wonder what you can learn from those inaccuracies.
The Bush presidency was a spectacular disaster that I hope someday to understand. There must be other people who feel the same way about it.
I notice a lot of folks poking fun at Chris Christie and his LT. Gov for being out of state:
Following up on an item from yesterday, New Jersey Gov. Chris Christie® and his lieutenant governor were told Sunday about the blizzard barreling down on the Garden State. Soon after, they left town at the same time, with Lt. Gov. Kim Guadagno® and her family flying to Mexico, and Christie and his family going to Disney World in Florida.It left state Senate President Stephen Sweeney (D) in charge as the acting governor, and by all appearances, he’s handling everything fine—he declared a state of emergency, dispatched road crews, coordinated with state agencies, and activated the National Guard. The response seems to have gone fairly well, and Sweeney lifted the state of emergency this morning.
But there’s still the political fallout to consider. Many are questioning why the Christie administration allowed both the governor and lieutenant governor to go on vacation at the same time, despite warnings about the impending storm. Others have noted that the governor isn’t bothering to rush home to deal with the situation.
This is just silliness. This is like the idiotic need for our President, whoever he may be, to be wearing hip-waders while filling sand bags whenever there is a flood, etc. There are large redundant systems in place to handle the snow removal, and there is no need for Christie or Guadagno to be anywhere near the state for things to function properly. Likewise, our military isn’t going to forget their mission while Obama vacations in Hawaii, and the world and the country will keep on keeping on.
Atrios writes of establishment media reaction to Wikileaks:
It isn’t exactly the same thing, but moments like this I’m reminded of a time years ago when I was talking at a conference about internets and stuff to a not entirely plugged in audience and a man stood up and said something like, “You mean, people can just say whatever they want on the internet? Don’t we need to do something about that?”
I think the Moore Awards/Hewitt Awards etc. that John rightly mocked come from the same place, they’re about deciding who should and who shouldn’t be taken seriously. It’s a way of maintaining status, a way of differentiating “serious” bloggers like those at the Atlantic from the vituperative, foul-mouthed masses. When you take into consideration that the Atlantic is essentially a neocon millionaire’s vanity project (and that Sullivan got his start at another neocon millionaire’s vanity project), this all starts to look pretty sinister.
Likewise, the establishment journalists who attack Wikileaks mostly work for media outfits that are owned by large companies that have their own interest in controlling dialogue. And of course these journalists are also interested in maintaining their own status and turf (which is inextricably linked with that of the companies they work for).
Shouting down outsiders with a large corporate megaphone should not be considered a honorable journalistic enterprise, not in my opinion.
Update. This isn’t about right/left. I’d prefer Erick Erickson not be shouted down either. I wouldn’t give him a CNN gig, but I support his right to be heard at RedState and I generally find him much less frightening than Bill Kristol (I read RedState and I find it silly and sometimes offensive but mostly not that bad).
I apparently went Galt this week without even knowing it, and I’ve been struggling to find things interesting enough to talk about. This, however, made me laugh:
Sad, but true.
Josh Marshall engages in some uncharacteristically dumb “snow journalism”:
In New York City, there seems to be some level of scandal brewing over the city being wholly unprepared for the storm.
I doubt that NYC was “wholly unprepared” for the storm. I suppose they are prepared for the average snowfall in the area, and they just experienced something way out of the ordinary (32 inches in less than a day, as shown on the video from nearby Belmar, NJ, is more than the average annual snowfall of 28 inches for New York City). Here in Rochester, we prepare for far worse, because we generally get far worse, but we also pay a lot more for plows, crews and salt.
Those are the ugly facts, but when the snow starts falling, they go out the window. The city is “unprepared”. It’s a “snowpocalypse”. No, it’s a “tradeoff”, something that even smart journalists like Josh Marshall seem incapable of reporting about.
That said, the way to get around stupid journalism is to get out a shovel, as one of the smarter urban politicians in the country, Cory Booker, demonstrates on his Twitter feed.
SPITZER: I want to ask Jeff a question though, because I want to come back to this Woodward distinction. You would agree with Clay and Naomi, I think, that Julian Assange would be precisely Bob Woodward if he had been the recipient of these documents, is that correct?
TOOBIN: I’d have to know a lot more.
SPITZER: But it might be the case.
TOOBIN: It well might be the case.
SPITZER: OK. So you’re sort of clear articulation of the beginning that he clearly violated something maybe not so much.
TOOBIN: I’m not sure. Certainly the attorney general of the United States seems to think criminal—criminal activity was involved here. But I think the wholesale taking of enormous quantities of classified information and putting it on the Internet, even if you don’t put all 250,000 documents on, I think that is a meaningful distinction from what Bob Woodward does.
SPITZER: It seems to me that Bob Woodward arguably did something much more egregious. He took real-time decisions about why we were going to war in Afghanistan, the discussions are rationale, where we would go spoke to the most senior political and military officials in the nation and blasted that out in the book. A clear distinction.
TOOBIN: Well, again, there is a distinction in part because the president of the United States and the vice president are allowed to declassify anything they want at any time for any reason. So if the president declassified—
SPITZER: A lot of people who didn’t have that power were sourced in that book. Seemed to be speaking in clear violation. They, in fact, should be subject to criminal investigations.
TOOBIN: I always wondered why—why Woodward gets away with it. It’s an interesting question.
