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SV5678: I actually think the ending of the show was complete and as it should be – however I’d be the first in line at a midnight screening if they ever did a movie – so this is...
MsJoanne: Judicial Watch Distorts Obama Administra tion Email About Fox – http://bit .ly/qecSNm
Jim Z.: Two years ago such a revelation might have been interestin g, but by now there is no one who actually considers Fox to be a legitimate news organizati on. So whatever the Obama adminis...
John Sonntag: RT @ronchusid : Judicial Watch Distorts Obama Administra tion Email About Fox #p2 #p21 #topprog http://t.c o/RmHIxu6
Ron Chusid: It was amusing to look at all the conservati ve blogs which linked to the bogus poll. They are getting excited about how easy it will be to defeat Obama with the loss of traditiona l...
Mauigirl: Ron, you’ ve got that right! They have to be dreaming.
John Sonntag: RT @ronchusid : During Budget Battle, Remember The Republican s Are Primarily At Fault For Spending Increases #p2 #p21 http://t.c o/l4xcVAk
John Sonntag: RT @ronchusid : Once Again: Jews Are Not Going To Vote Republican #p2 #p21 #topprog http://t.c o/K5zXZxb
Maurice Ross: RT @ronchusid : During Budget Battle, Remember The Republican s Are Primarily At Fault For Spending Increases #p2 #p21 http://t.c o/VOV5cev
Ron Chusid: Ron Paul might have his faults, but he has been consistent ly against the Patriot Act, both when first passed and on votes to reenact it.
Annette Carter: During Budget Battle, Remember The Republican s Are Primarily At …: In other words, federal government spending&# 8230; http://bit .ly/oboRb5
Mugwumpie: During Budget Battle, Remember The Republican s Are Primarily At Fault For Spending Increases #p2 #p21 #topprog http://t.c o/AcVSIqJ
KathyO: During Budget Battle, Remember The Republican s Are Primarily At Fault For Spending Increases #p2 #p21 #topprog http://t.c o/AcVSIqJ
Dr Who News: SciFi Weekend: Torchwood: Miracle Day & Doctor Who: Let's Kill … http://bit .ly/nTDwlr #Torchwood
Gigi: Not to worry! I have emailed MB with an offer of Conversion Therapy to rid her of her choice to be a christian. After all, it IS a choice and it interferes with my relationsh ip with the...
Bob: Michele Bachmann First To Sign Pledge Banning Pornograph y And Calling Homosexual ity An Unhealthy Choice – http://t.c o/lBIgE3P
…when Barack Obama got into power, you’d have expected that traffic on the Right side of the blogosphere would have surged just as it did on the Left side of the blogosphere in the early Bush years.
That didn’t happen.
Hawkins has five explanations which I’ll condense from the longer discussions in the full post:
The right has more avenues for people to get involved with, such as talk radio and the Tea Parties. (He apparently is putting aside the common view on the right that people on the left are all getting involved with dangerous organizations such as ACORN, the New Black Panthers, and NPR.)
Social networking has taken off and people are spending more time on Facebook and Twitter. I’ll discuss this point more later.
The market has become more mature, and people are more likely to read the big blogs such as Michelle Malkin or Instapundit as opposed to a small brand new blog.
The market has become more professional, making it harder for someone who is not known to compete with names like Ann Coulter or the big blogs with large staffs.
Bloggers are poor at marketing, and eventually have difficulty putting in long hours for a project which they are not likely to make money off of.
Other than the first, which claims that structural differences on the right are responsible, each of these other arguments are more general statements about the difficulties of a small, independent blog, regardless of ideology. If the right is withering more than the left, it must be for other reasons–perhaps such as the weakness of their viewpoints. If conservative bloggers are getting depressed by all of this, I will point out that a good Republican primary battle followed by a general election will do wonders to increase blog readership.
The argument based upon social networks is partially true, but also misses an important point. My interest is in using the internet to promote pro-freedom liberal values to counter the authoritarian right, and to promote reason over the anti-science view of the right. This does not have to be limited to blogs, and social networking has become a useful tool.
Facebook has pretty much killed off the discussion section here, but does it matter? There is often more discussion of blog posts when posted on Facebook than there was here on the blog. Facebook adds many additional readers. Less people might come directly to the blog, but there are many new readers who read the posts directly on Facebook. Sharing of the posts provides links which attract additional readers. Twitter also provides a number of comments, as well as additional links to the posts.
If the goal is to compete with the bigger blogs or to make lots of money, small independent bloggers will be disappointed. Small bloggers can still get their views out before a significant number of people–and effectively utilizing social networks will help to increase this number.
Google+ is the hot new social networking site, with Google probably hoping to do to Facebook what Facebook did to MySpace. In design, Google+ looks a lot like Facebook. It does have some good features such as the ability to edit a post and easily decide on a post-by- post basis whether people can share it or comment on it.
In some ways Google+ is more like Twitter (without the 140 character limit) than like Facebook. A user follows who ever they want, but the person does not need to follow back in the way that friending people on Facebook must be a mutual proposition. This is like Twitter, where people you follow may or may not follow back. There is a notification that someone has started to follow you on Google+ (or in their lingo, added you to one of their circles).
The circles are a key feature of Google+. You can have circles for certain groups of people, making it suitable to limit material to certain groups of friends, you can post things to the world, or you can exercise other controls over who can see what you post. Facebook can also do this, but the controls are not buried on Google+ as they are on Facebook. On the other hand, a lot of people like mixing up personal posts with political comments on Facebook and assigning posts to specific circles on Google+ might make the site less interesting.
A key difference between Google+ and Facebook is that Google is more realistic and flexible in how the site will be used. Facebook is set up for people who actually know each other in the real world as opposed to more public posting and discussions. They continue to ignore the fact that many use Facebook for more public discussions. Facebook has a 5000 friend limit, and even has messages suggesting people are doing something wrong by friending someone they don’t really know. Google+ doesn’t expect people to move to a fan page if they want to have a larger number of people following like on Facebook.
Google doesn’t seem to care how you use Google+. Perhaps after seeing so few people adopt Buzz, they just want people to use it any way they want to. They are open to what is essentially public tweets without the 140 character limit, while also being able to handle closed discussions among friends.
Facebook has lists which can serve the function of circles to some degree. I use them when on a pc to choose between a newsfeed with more public comments versus reading personal items from people I actually know. Unfortunately none of the Droid apps can handle reading a list (short of using the browser to go to the full site). I’m currently using Friendcaster, a third party Droid app for Facebook, which allows users to limit posts to a specific list. It still can’t handle limiting the newsfeed to specific lists. The iPhone app does allow reading of lists, so I am hoping the Droid version adds this. I haven’t tried the mobile version of Google+ yet, but from what I’ve heard I’d be shocked if it doesn’t include the benefits of circles.
That said, despite what I like about how Google+ is set up, I wonder if it can compete with Facebook. I already have well over 4000 Facebook friends, so a post over there will generally get responses, while only a few people are following me so far on Google+. Many people I know in the real world are on Facebook and we use it for more private functions along with my public posting, but I don’t think any of them are on Google+. If I want to find someone I know on line, at the moment the best shot of finding them is via Facebook. Perhaps people will migrate to Google+ over time, but I bet that Facebook will adopt many of the advantages of Google+ before they let that happen.
If anyone wants to get onto Google+ and needs an invitation, let me know. Setting up a Google+ account is pretty easy, especially if you already have a gmail account. There was one thing about the set-up which I found curious. Why does Go0gle have users type in all that persona information when it can easily populate the fields with the information Google already has on us? I’m not saying that Google knows too much about us all, but today they sent me gmail alerting me that the loaf of bread on our counter is starting to get stale and that the flowers on the front porch could use a little more water. (Ok, not everything in the last paragraph is completely true).
Torchwood: Miracle Day Episode 2, Rendition, continued where the first episode ended. Major spoilers for UK readers who won’t receive the episode on the BBC until Thursday. (I wonder how many really wait as opposed to downloading. Despite talk of different scenes in each version, the first episode was the same on both Starz and the BBC. The only difference is that the BBC had a longer trailer for upcoming episodes.)
While the first episode had bigger movie-type action scenes, possibly using up more than its share of the show’s budget, this episode had more of the feeling of a television show such as 24 (although not limited to twenty-four hours). The episode established that the same group which was after Torchwood, and presumably behind the “miracle,” has infiltrated the CIA. They handled the attempted poisoning of Jack by Dichen Lachman from Dollhouse very well, requiring some ingenuity to come up with an antidote. This helped make up for some of the other junk science introduced in the episode. I’ll let them get away with this because, face it, the show would not be possible if they stuck to established science.
The episode also introduced Jilly Kitzenger, played by Lauren Ambrose of Six Feet Under. So far it looks like Oswald Danes is doing fine on his own without her help. I did not find it realistic that one appearance on television would have been so effective in changing public opinion of him.
Best scene of the episode was seeing Gwen Cooper explain that, “I’m Welch.” (Included in the extended trailer above). Rex Matheson also did well, after warned about the conspiracy by Esther Drummond, using some bullshit to distract the rogue CIA agents in order to set Jack and Gwen free. The episode made it clear how the four will turn into the new Torchwood (at least for this season) while being on the run.
The first episode raised the question of how they investigate intangible such as nobody dying, which is like investigating nothing. I would assume that the conspiracy involving the CIA would provide something to begin investigating. In order to investigate “nothing,” they might check out a character who previously appeared in a show about “nothing.” The conspiracy at the CIA is led by Wayne Night, who played Newman on Seinfeld
Following is the synopsis released for Episode 3:
Torchwood goes on the run – and finds a new enemy. But as they launch a raid on PhiCorp headquarters, Jack must confront the mysterious Oswald Danes.
Episode three includes guest stars Wayne Knight (Jurassic Park, Seinfeld), Dillon Casey (The Vampire Diaries) and Richard Gilliland (Desperate Housewives).
Will Ricky Gervais be the next Doctor, or just steal a Tardis. Check out this report.
A new trailer for Season Six of Dexter. The next season is going to skip ahead so that Dexter can be past the death of Rita and Lumen moving away, allowing him to get back to being Dexter.
Friday Night Lights concluded its series, but now there is talk (and tweets) of filming a movie. Sometimes that works (Firefly/Serenity) and other times such movies have failed to materialize (Arrested Development and Veronica Mars). The idea is to continue from where the series left off. This would work well with Kyle Chandler and Connie Britton, and it would be easy to work in some other characters, but unless the movie shows the Taylors moving back to Dillon, it would be hard for it to be a direct continuation of the series.
Last season Thursday night featured two genre comedies up against each other. Alison Brie and Gillian Jacobs of Community got kinky for Esquire in the video above. What will Kaley Cuoco and Melissa Raunch of Big Bang Theory do to match this? For more on the sex life of Alison Brie (of both Community and Mad Men) check out this essay she wrote.
David Letterman: “Top Ten Signs the United States Is Running Out of Money”
10. For $10,000, you get your face on the dollar
9. The White House now has a two-drink minimum
8. There’s a listing on eBay for North Dakota
7. Barack Obama sold his Nobel Prize to ‘Cash4Gold’
6. Americans now attempting to sneak into Mexico
5. Renting Biden’s house to backpacking German tourists
4. Costs $25 for each bag the president wants to check on Air Force One
3. John Boehner getting paid in beach bum tanning gift cards
2. Country is moving in with England until we get back on our feet
1. Applied for a $40 billion loan from Oprah
Judicial Watch, a right wing group whose primary function is to foment right wing hysteria by spreading misinformation, issued a press release regarding White House emails obtained under the Freedom of Information Act. These were from the first year of the Obama administration, when the White House was more open about its contempt for Fox than in subsequent years.
Hostility towards Fox is hardly unjustified considering how Fox regularly disregards normal standards of journalism to advocate for the opposing political party and regularly spreads falsehoods about the Obama administration. We might expect members of the Obama administration to have an opinion of Fox comparable to what we would expect them to have for a mouthpiece for the Republican Party–which for all practical purposes is the actual purpose of Fox.
Judicial Watch performed the usual right wing distortions of the email which we have seen many times before, such as in the bogus “Climategate” affair in which right wingers made claims about emails stolen from climate researchers which did not hold up when the actual emails were reviewed. Chris Good summarized the email, with one notable example of how Judicial Watch distorted the content in the first paragraph:
In its summation, Judicial Watch also includes a seemingly damning quote from communications aide Josh Earnest, “We’ve demonstrated our willingness and ability to exclude Fox News from significant interviews…” but omits the rest: “… — but yesterday, we didn’t.”
The emails show White House staff discussing the official response statement to White-House-vs.-Fox stories being written and contemplated by members of the Washington media.
Taken out of context, the emails sound kind of incendiary, revealing a deep disdain for Fox News and its reporters. Flipping through the pages of emails, they reveal something more instructive: How a political press shop works, behind the scenes.
“Michele Bachmann says that if she’s elected, she’ll ban pornography. We have multiple wars, skyrocketing debts, a recession, unemployment . . . Yeah, let’s ban pornography.” –David Letterman
Bonus Quote
“Bachmann says she wants to end things that are ‘vulgar and a detriment to society.’ She’s talking about me, right?” –David Letterman
The right wing operates under many delusions, including:
Their policies promote capitalism, as opposed to acting to destroy the free market system and replace it with plutocracy
They promote limited government despite their social polices which increase the amount of government intrusion in the lives of individuals and fiscal policies which have led to more growth of government under Reagan and Bush than seen under Democrats
Creationism is a plausible alternative to evolution to explain the development of complex organisms
The strong scientific evidence for climate change is all a hoax
Jews will vote Republican if they claim to be stronger supporters of Israel
Their delusion that Republicans can pick up Jewish votes was most recently seen with claims from conservative sources such as the National Review that a recent poll shows that only 43 percent of Jewish voters will vote to reelect Barack Obama. This finding is just too absurd to spend much time debunking, but Adam Serwer described how bogus the poll was to save everyone else the trouble.
Despite their delusions about attracting other voters with their bogus claims, Republicans primarily remain the party of white, Christian, male voters–especially if they have no heart and no brain.
As I previously wrote on this topic, “Jewish voters are not going to support a fundamentalist Christian theocratic political party.” It is easy to predict the results of a poll asking Jewish voters whether they would ever consider voting for Michele Bachmann, Sarah Palin, or even the more mainstream (but still extreme right wing) potential Republican candidates.
The September issue of Playboy is running a profile of Sarah Palin written by George Gurley, based upon interviews with others. While Sarah Palin did not participate in the article, Playboy has found a way to ensure that the issue will receive plenty of attention. There will be a four page spread of nude pictures of Mercede Johnston. Her better known brother, Levi, has previously posed nude in Playgirl. Rumor has it that Mercede received under $25,000 for posing. She also runs a blog which exposes Palin family dishonesty.
NPR’s Morning Edition reported on the opposition to the Medicare Independent Payment Advisory Board (IPAB) from Republicans and a growing number of Democrats. The problems with the IPAB in the Senate version of the Affordable Care Act were one of the reasons that the original House version of the bill was preferable. Some House Democrats who never supported this structure of the IPAB which eventually passed are now supporting repeal of the board.
Morning Edition reports that Republicans have been attacking the IPAB with their usual hyperbole while Democrats have had more reasoned criticism:
Democrats don’t use such hyperbole, but more than half a dozen have signed on as cosponsors of a bill that would repeal the board. And many more, particularly Democrats in the House, never supported creating the board in the first place.
What the law actually calls for is a board of 15 health experts, to be appointed by the president and confirmed by the Senate. Their task is to make recommendations for ways to reduce Medicare payments without cutting benefits or increasing costs to Medicare beneficiaries.
That’s not much different from an existing panel of expert Medicare advisers, the Medicare Payment Advisory Commission, or MedPAC. Except for one thing. Congress is free to ignore MedPAC’s recommendations. And it does, routinely.
That won’t be the case with the new IPAB. Its recommendations will take effect unless both houses of Congress override them with a two-thirds vote. Republicans – and more than a few Democrats – find that excessive.
“Even if the Congress could muster up, both the House and the Senate, a two-thirds vote, which is virtually impossible, but in the remote possibility that we could; we would have to find cuts somewhere else other than what they recommended in the Medicare program, said Rep. Phil Gingrey (R-GA), co-chair of the GOP Doctors Caucus.
Jay Rockefeller, who supports the IPAB, argues:
You want to have the Gail Wilenskys…and the Bruce Vladecks,” he said, referring to former heads of the agency that runs Medicare. “People who have broad health care policy experience making those decisions.”
Yes, listen to Gail Wilensky and Bruce Vladeck. Both oppose the IPAB as structured in the Senate version of the Affordable Care Act which became law:
Both Wilensky and Vladeck – the former a Republican and the latter a Democrat — think the IPAB is a bad idea.
Wilensky, who oversaw Medicare for the first President Bush, says she’s sympathetic to Congress’s desire to insulate itself from the lobbying onslaught. But she worries that the board is limited to looking only at payments to health providers, which she says “could fundamentally alter the incentives involved in physicians and providers participating in Medicare.”
In other words, it could end up driving Medicare payments so low that providers will simply leave the program, or else go bankrupt if they can’t.
Vladeck, meanwhile, who headed Medicare under President Clinton, has a different problem with the board. He worries that eventually the lobbyists who are now so influential with members of Congress will become equally influential with the unelected members of the board.
“In the short term, it might theoretically work,” he said. But the history with other independent regulatory agencies, like the Interstate Commerce Commission and the Civil Aeronautics Board is that over time “the regulated industries tend to capture them; and they tend to do more to protect the regulated industries than they do to protect consumers.”
The reality is that nobody knows for sure what the IPAB will do, which is why their decisions should at very least be subject to an up or down vote by Congress. An unelected board should not be able to make major decisions regarding a program as important as Medicare without the approval of our elected representatives.
The above chart tracks government spending (click on it if you need to increase its size). Business Insider explains:
As you can see, from 2000 to 2008, under President Bush, Federal spending rose by $1.3 trillion, from $1.9 trillion a year to $3.2 trillion a year.
From 2009 to 2011, meanwhile, under President Obama, federal spending has risen by $600 billion, from $3.2 trillion a year to $3.8 trillion a year. It has also now begun to decline.
In other words, federal government spending under President Bush increased 2X as much as it has under President Obama.
It is also important to remember that George Bush fought two wars off the books while passing tax cuts designed to place the greatest burden in later years, allowing Republicans to falsely blame his successor for the consequences. Bush also passed the unfunded Medicare prescription drug plan while threatening to fire the chief Medicare actuary if he testified before Congress about the plans true cost.
As Steve Benen and Adam Serwer pointed out today, it makes no sense to refer to the Republican Party as being fiscally conservative.
Torchwood: Miracle Day has now aired in the United States, Canada, and Australia, but will not be airing until Thursday in the U.K. This post does contain Spoilers, although virtually all of the major events in the fist episode where those revealed in reports prior to airing. Far less is known about the following episodes. The first episode primarily served to introduce Torchwood to American audiences who were not familiar with it, introduce some of the new characters known to appear this season, and set up the situation which the story is about. Miracle Day was the first day in which nobody dies, setting up a catastrophe for the planet as the population will explode beyond the numbers we can support. Length of stay will also increase dramatically in critical care units, creating a crisis for the insurance industry.
As with many science fiction stories, it is necessary to accept something which might not appear possible, and this is acceptable as long as the story remains plausible given the acceptance of the facts established in the story. I found it easier to accept the implausibility of a story where nobody dies when characters within the story also discussed how implausible this is, considering the wide variety of situations which might lead to death. Once the premise of the show was accepted, I had more difficulty believing another aspect– that Oswald Danes would be released because of not dying during his scheduled execution. While in a sense he did serve out his sentence, he was also a convicted child killer. Even if a governor was susceptible to bullying by someone such as Danes. any real governor would be far more concerned about the public’s response to releasing someone who killed a twelve year-old and then said, “She shoulda run faster.”
It was not necessary to know anything about Torchwood going into this episode as viewers learned about the organization as the CIA did. Viewers of the previous seasons would appreciate the references to previous seasons such as Jack going by the name of Dr. Owen Harper, a character from the first two seasons. Seeing how Jack retconned Esther was reminiscent of when Jack once did the same to Gwen in the first episode. The return of PC Andy also provided a little more continuity with the past. Is there a connection between the the 456 regulations mentioned in this episode and the aliens in Children of Earth being known as the 456?
There are many mysteries to be solved beyond the obvious ones of who is preventing people from dying and how they are doing it. Were they the ones who sent out the email message saying “Torchwood” and why was this done? Jack quickly shut this down with malware destroying all mention of Torchwood, but if he really had this capability I would have expected him to use it after Torchwood was destroyed and Gwen went into hiding. While presumably there is some connection between all of this and Torchwood, it is less clear if Oswald Danes’ survival was coincidental or if triggering Miracle Day on the date of his scheduled execution was intentional. While I suspect that Rex Matheson’s automobile accident was no accident, it would have made more sense to try to harm him on a day when he would have stayed dead. It would have also made more sense to fire upon Gwen’s home prior to Miracle Day, but perhaps they thought she would have turned into a blown up blob who could not have gone after them despite remaining alive.
While nobody dies, they can be injured. The immortal Captain Jack Harkness was surprised to find he could now be injured, with the possibility of his death being one twist in the series which was revealed before the first episode aired. Seeing that he could be inured does not necessarily mean he could be killed. A plausible interpretation might be that Jack has become like everyone else, who can be injured but not die. The preview for the second episode shows that this question might be answered next week (video below):
Rex Matheson has some bizarre ideas in this episode, from obsessing over the charges for crossing a bridge to handling the situation by trying to take Jack and Gwen back to the United States by force. If there was reason to believe that there was a connection between Torchwood and the Miracle, it would make more sense to begin investigating this around Cardiff (even without knowing about the rift). It might also have made more sense to try to recruit them to voluntarily work with the CIA unless there was more reason to mistrust the two surviving members of Torchwood.
We saw with Children of Earth that a continuing story has advantages over trying to come up with a new threat to fight every week. We will have to watch over the course of this season how well they continue with this single storyline. Besides answering the basic questions raised, and solving other problems which come up over the next several weeks, I wonder what this will mean for Torchwood in the long run. Will the organization be reestablished in the U.K. or will next season again have Jack and Gwen interacting with others as free agents? Hopefully we will see the return of Torchwood. It makes much less sense to have an ongoing series named Torchwood about survivors of an organization which no longer exists. I also wonder if some of the characters introduced this season will become regulars for future seasons. In the case of Rex Matheson, this might depend upon whether those who are still living because of Miracle Day remain alive at the end. I would expect that those who would have died due to chronic diseases and aging will remain dead, as well as those who remain severely injured when death returns. Rex Matheson could conceivably survive, with Miracle Day having provided him a chance to heal from his wounds in a way which would not normally have been possible.
The cliff hanger after the first half of the season of Doctor Who, set up in A Good Man Goes To War, is to be continued in an episode named Let’s Kill Hitler. A synopsis for the episode has been released: “In the desperate search for Melody Pond, the TARDIS crash lands in 1930s Berlin, bringing the Doctor face to face with the greatest war criminal in the Universe. And Hitler. The Doctor must teach his adversaries that time travel has responsibilities – and in so doing, learns a harsh lesson in the cruellest warfare of all.”
Alex Kingston discussed her role as River Song on BBC Breakfast last week in the video above.
There was a time when there typically was a religious right candidate in the Republican primaries. Such candidates would inevitably be beaten by the establishment candidate. Today the religious right dominates the GOP, and almost all candidates promote social conservatism. It will be interesting to see how many candidates sign a pledge from Family Leader. Michele Bachmann was the first to sign this:
Presidential candidates who sign the pledge must agree to personal fidelity to his or her spouse, the appointment of “faithful constitutionalists” as judges, opposition to any redefinition of marriage, and prompt reform of uneconomic and anti-marriage aspects of welfare policy, tax policy and divorce law.
The Marriage Vow also outlines support for the legal advocacy for the federal Defense of Marriage Act, humane efforts to protect women and children, rejection of Sharia Islam, safeguards for all married and unmarried U.S. military service members, and commitment to downsizing government and the burden upon American families.
In addition, candidates are asked to recognize that “robust childrearing and reproduction is beneficial to U.S. demographic, economic, strategic and actuarial health and security.”
In addition, Think Progress reports that this calls for the banning of “all forms” of pornography and states that homosexuality is both a choice and a health risk. Undoubtedly conservatives will fail to see how these conflict with claims to support limited government, not to mention violating the First Amendment.
I would love to see Democratic candidates counter this with a pledge to support individual liberty, including each individual’s right to chose who to marry, uphold the First Amendment, and preserve a social safety net to protect families in need. Unfortunately we know that Democrats are not very likely to openly stand up for liberal principles in such a manner.
