Month: November 2009

A reader writes:

When I first heard that Hannity was offering up an apology (confession?) for his video lie, I was impressed. I honestly didn't think he had it in him. And then I watched the damn thing. Turns out I was right. Forget the tone, which I found gratingly smug. Or the final punchline thanking Stewart's writers for watching, a lame attempt to diffuse the troubling transgression with humor. What keeps nagging at me is his claim that it was some sort of accident. That no one meant for it to happen. Sorry, but I don't buy that for a second. Those sorts of things don't simply "happen".

Let me explain.

I have been working in television for the past 15 years. I know in detail how these things work: 1) you are assigned a story, 2) you send out a crew to shoot the necessary footage, 3) the footage is brought back to the studio and loaded into the Avid, or whatever editing system you are using, 4) you cut together your piece based on THE FOOTAGE AT

HAND.

For footage from a different event that took place months earlier to find its way into an entirely new piece, well, someone had to: 1) make the decision to lie in the first place (and lets be clear, it IS a lie), 2) locate the old footage, 3) cut the footage into the new piece, 4) a producer or the like had to approve the clip for air.

Yes, accidents can happen. But I guarantee you someone on his show said, "Man, we need to make those crowds look bigger" (don't get me started on the ethical quagmire of that decision) and a writer, producer or editor said, "I know, we can use some stuff from Glenn's rally. No one will ever notice." True, Hannity may not have been aware  of that editorial decision (he cannot supervise every piece of footage that airs on his show) but let's be clear: contrary to what he said, someone DID mean for it to happen, they simply did not mean to get caught. And his lame apology is covering someone's ass. It also leads me to wonder how often this is being done on his network.

Twisting words for political gain is one thing; manipulating video to deceive millions of viewers is another, and one that makes your Pravda reference all the more prescient.

As Cartman might say: "I'm just asking questions".

Yes, but not enough to swing an election.

Sources with access to Palin have indeed told to me that the Wasilla whack-job was an obsessive reader of this blog as it dared to ask factual questions about her past that could be easily answered. I have no way of knowing this myself, and regard it as odd that a vice-presidential candidate would be hell-bent on suing a blogger who, presumably, was merely making a total ass of himself in wondering if Palin's surreal account of her last pregnancy was factually accurate.

Or is there something there – of some unknown sort – that she desperately wanted to intimidate and suppress? As Bubble would note: "Who can say?" What can Levi possibly mean that "she knows what I got on her?"

The MSM won't touch this, of course.

But here's the WSJ piece. Money quote:

Ms. Palin was particularly angry at bloggers and the media, associates said, for speculation that her baby Trig was really the child of Bristol, her daughter.

At one point, according to people familiar with the discussions, Ms. Palin considered pursuing a libel suit against at least one blogger, the Atlantic's Andrew Sullivan. Ms. Palin decided against such a move because of the publicity it would bring.

Mr. Sullivan, in response, said asking "factually verifiable questions is obviously not libel."

A spokeswoman for Ms. Palin didn't respond to email requests seeking comment.

And so the pattern of refusing to be accountable on anything continues.

Best of Wikipedia:

Redshirt is a slang term for a minor stock character in an adventure drama who dies violently  soon after being introduced to dramatize the dangerous situation faced by the main characters. The term originated with the science fiction television series Star Trek, from the red shirts worn by Starfleet security officers, who frequently beamed down with a landing party, only to become the first, and sometimes only, victims within the party.

Blogawiki:

Nutraloaf, sometimes called prison loaf, confinement loaf, seg loaf, or special management meal,^[1] is a food served in United States prisons to inmates who have demonstrated significant behavioral issues.^[2] It is similar to meatloaf in texture, but has a wider variety of ingredients. Prisoners may be served nutraloaf if they have assaulted prison guards or fellow prisoners with sharpened utensils. Prison loaf is usually exceedingly bland in taste, perhaps even unpleasant, but prison wardens argue that nutraloaf provides enough nutrition to keep prisoners healthy without requiring utensils to be issued.^[3]

Although prison loaf has been employed in many United States prisons, its use is controversial.

The standards of the American Correctional Association, which accredits prisons, discourage the use of food as a disciplinary measure, but adherence to the organization’s food standards is voluntary.^[4][5] Denying inmates food as punishment has been found to be unconstitutional by the courts,^[6] but because the loaf is generally nutritionally complete, it is sometimes justified as a “dietary adjustment” rather than a denial of proper meals.^[4]

Lawsuits have taken place in several states regarding nutraloaf, including Illinois,^[7] Maryland, Nebraska, New York, Pennsylvania, Washington, and West Virginia.^[2] In March 2008, prisoners brought their case before the Vermont Supreme Court, arguing that, since Vermont state l aw does not allow food to be used as punishment, nutraloaf must be removed from the menu.^[8]

Petrelis pushes HRC to open itself up to the public:

Imagine if [HRC executive director Joe] Solmonese began holding regular monthly town halls at HRC's state-of-the-art media center at their DC headquarters, with any member of the gay public allowed to ask direct questions and questions submitted from gays around the country via email, YouTube and Twitter, and all of it streamed on HRC's web site.

Why, we'd have some genuine transparency and utilization of modern communication tools to better mobilize and organize the community to move forward more cohesively on a gay agenda. HRC would also be seen less as a monarchy given to ruling from an ivory tower with a rainbow hued foundation. Just as with Obama's town halls, there are great things to come of Solmonese's town halls, if they ever occur.

Jonah Lehrer connects smell and memory:

Why is smell so sentimental? One possibility, which is supported by this recent experiment, is that the olfactory cortex has a direct neural link to the hippocampus. In contrast, all of our other senses (sight, touch and hearing) are first processed somewhere else – they go to the thalamus – and only then make their way to our memory center. This helps explain why we're so dependent on metaphors to describe taste and smell. We always describe foods by comparing them to something else, which we've tasted before. ("These madeleines taste just like my grandmother's madeleines!" Or: "These madeleines taste like the inside of a lemon poppy seed cake!") In contrast, we have a rich language of adjectives to describe what we see and hear, which allows us to define the sensory stimulus in lucid detail. As a result, we don't have to lean so heavily on simile and comparison.

Matt Steinglass argues that the American obsession with a falling dollar isn't irrational:

People have been reporting Americans’ discomfort with the idea of a falling dollar as if it were completely irrational and based on linguistic confusion, as if Americans just like the idea of “strength”.

Dan Drezner hypothesized in late October that Republicans were just looking for an anti-Obama economic talking point, and Ezra Klein advocated switching to the locutions “high dollar” and “low dollar”. But in fact, the short-term benefits of a strong dollar are much more widely shared than those of a weak dollar. Only 11.7 million Americans worked in manufacturing as of October 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics. (That has been falling relentlessly since 1979; it was at 17.3 million just 10 years ago.) Even fewer work in agriculture and resource extraction. People in knowledge-based industries with international or export components, like software or television, do benefit somewhat from a weaker dollar, but I’m not sure how strongly they benefit or even where to look for an analysis of that effect. 

Meanwhile, every consumer benefits from a strong dollar. It means cheaper gas, cheaper mobile phones, cheaper kids’ toys — in short, cheaper almost everything. Of course this is something of a vicious circle: because our manufacturing employment has shrunk and we buy so much from abroad, we don’t feel the effects of a boost to our manufacturing as strongly or as rapidly as we feel the effects of a blow to our import-purchasing power. And in the long run, the dollar has to fall, because we can’t keep importing more than we export forever. Gradually, the effects of more competitive American goods and a falling trade deficit will show up in increased prosperity. But the short-term impact runs in the other direction for most Americans, and to some extent the popular desire for a “strong dollar” is not so much irrational as shortsighted.

"I was very struck also by Janet Napolitano’s comment, I hadn’t read it before to see her say that, that the number one priority is to bring [Hasan] to justice is such a knee-jerk comment and such a stupid comment. He’s going to be brought to justice. He is not going to be innocent of murder. There are a lot of eyewitnesses to that. They should just go ahead and convict him and put him to death," – William Kristol, appearing on Fox News.

Let us be clear: this is a fascist statement.

You begin to understand now why these goons instituted torture. They have total contempt for the Western system of justice, utter contempt for the rule of law. Kristol here is all but calling for a lynching. This is what "conservatism" has come to: the worship of violence and revenge. It makes the Cheney years more comprehensible, doesn't it?

Newsweek makes a commemorative video.

A reader writes:

That e-mail you highlighted struck a chord. I am 39, straight and happily married for 21+ years to my high school sweetheart. Since my childhood I have always defended gays, even before I knew who among my close friends were gay.  For this I was ridiculed and rejected by many – including members of my family – but mostly I was myself labeled gay by these critics.  Being called effeminate and gay was something that, as a sensitive, artistic kid, I had dealt with plenty growing up.  Honestly, the label was meaningless to me since I didn't associate homosexuality with anything bad.  That and I knew who I was.

As a tenth-grader I met and fell in love with my soulmate.  It was a strange period, though, and shortly thereafter I dropped out of school to become a hairdresser.  At cosmetology school I met an incredibly gifted hairdresser with whom I clicked and left home to move in with.  That he was gay made no difference to me or my girlfriend, who was a regular fixture at our house.

Salon life surrounded me with gay men and women.  My bosses were gay.  Encircled by creative people I felt I had at last found my people; that most of them were gay, of course, didn't matter to me.  My dad, on the other hand, really struggled to understand my comfort in that scene.

A few of my early salon colleagues became very close friends to my then-fiancee and me.  In time I asked three of my closest friends, those whom I thought best understood what marriage represented, to be my groomsmen, regardless of the fact that two of them were gay.  That those fellows immediately and graciously accepted didn't strike me as exceptional at the time.  But as I look at my wedding pictures today and see these guys standing next to me (babyfaced, just a month after my 18th birthday), their hands on my shoulders and beaming smiles, it is bittersweet.  I will never accept that these men could participate in my wedding, but that I might never have the honor and privilege of participating in theirs.  Particularly since these men were the ones who so clearly illustrated for me the value of monogamous, supportive and positive relationships.  My own parents divorced before I was one year old.

To me this debate is about how comfortable America can pretend to be while marginalizing a group of its citizens on the basis of bigotry.  Arguments made in defense of traditional marriage are a type of sophistry designed to legitimize a repugnant view that we have otherwise worked so hard to shed.

As a man who has cherished his so-called traditional marriage for more than half his life, let me state clearly that shutting out gays from this essential cultural institution is out-and-out wrong.  I don't just know it; I live it.

(Image: Justin Sullivan/Getty)