OMG Blog gets psyched:
Teenage, a new film by Matt Wolf based on the book by Jon Savage, explores the "invention of the teenager," and maybe explains why many of the best TV shows from the past forty or fifty years have all revolved around high school students.
A small example. In my blog surfing this morning, I saw the headline that Bill Ayers had confessed to writing Barack Obama's "Dreams From My Father." Of course, I clicked only to find an obvious piece of sarcasm from Ayers designed to mock the conspiracy theorists, rather than confirm them. You can see this derangement here and at WND. When even the blog editor at the American Thinker noted how nuts this was (in a blog called, pricelessly, the Right Wing Nut House), you really began to enter Wonderland. The response to this piece of the bleeding obvious was:
It’s nice to see that Rick Moran is still counseling us on how to look refined and in the know while we’re being bent over the setee for our “historical” buggering. How’d that work out for McCain again?
Newsbusters dutifully repeated the false headline. Mercifully, not every wingnut was ready to fly:
Did you use a pole vault to jump that shark? Heh!
And this:
From super-edumacated Jeff Goldstein to the shortbus commuters Weasel Zippers, nine out of 10 wingnuts agree: It's not a joke unless it's about Michael Moore being fat. Sadder still is Freedom Eden, who seems to sense that something's amiss but won't say so, and goes for the bank shot in desperation ("Ayers had to know that bringing up the controversy at all was not something that would help Obama").
I have to say I find the pushback from the likes of John Hawkins to be a relief. Which shows just how far we've come.
A reader makes a mighty fine suggestion:
I read your item on Bob Herbert's resignation with interest, as you summarized my sentiments precisely. As way of replacement, I hope the Times considers Ta-Nehisi Coates, even though I have no idea whether he's even interested in the perch. It's not because they're both African-American; Ta-Nehisi writes about similar issues with twice the wit and grace that Herbert could muster. It would be a shame to see those issues drop off the table with Herbert's resignation, and it would represent a real promotion to one of the most talented American pundits out there.
Photo by Axel Schmidt/AP. Context:
German chancellor Angela Merkel's conservatives have suffered a historic defeat in a state ballot after almost six decades in power there, partial results showed Sunday, in an election that amounted to a referendum on the party's stance on nuclear power. The opposition anti-nuclear Greens doubled their voter share in Baden-Wuerttemberg state and seemed poised to win their first-ever state governorship…. Representatives of all parties said the elections were overshadowed by Japan's nuclear crisis, turning them into a popular vote on the country's future use of nuclear power – which a majority of Germans oppose as they view it as inherently dangerous.
(Rough translation: "We're having a moratorium!"/"Then we'll continue again!!!"/"We choose nuclear power". And in case you weren't aware, Merkel has a thing for the Mr. Burns pose.)
"When I see this, I wonder whether Bin Laden had a point," – an Italian commenter on a web page dedicated to Jersey Shore's arrival on Italian television.
Ann Friedman parodies the second NYT story to profile young, male DC bloggers:
One sweltering DC evening many months ago, Ann Friedman, 29, then an editor for The American Prospect, sat with her friends Annie Lowrey, a reporter for Slate; Suzy Khimm and Kate Sheppard, reporters for Mother Jones; Marin Cogan, a reporter for Politico; Phoebe Connelly, a freelance writer and former web editor for The American Prospect; Britt Peterson, an editor at Foreign Policy; Dayo Olopade, a writer for The Daily Beast, Kay Steiger and Shani Hilton, editors at Campus Progress; Kat Aaron, a reporter for the Investigative Reporting Workshop; Monica Potts, a blogger for The American Prospect; Amanda Terkel, a reporter for The Huffington Post; and Laura McGann and Sara Libby, editors for Politico, at a bar on U Street. Ms. Friedman spoke about her younger — well, relatively younger — days in the city. “Everyone’s gotten a little bit older and a little more tired of being constantly rendered invisible,” Ms. Friedman said, speaking of a wave of Washington women journalists who have come of age together.
“Four years ago, we were fact-checking and editing these male pundits, along with creating award-winning work of our own. None of that has changed.” In only a few years, these young women and others like them have become part of the journalistic establishment in Washington — but you wouldn't know it from reading The New York Times.
Freddie takes a harsher line against the new anti-establishment establishment. I'm just adjusting to reading in the NYT the words: Sullivan, 47.
This is a huge deal:
Cases of foreign partners who are married to am American same-sex partner and would otherwise be eligible for a green card are on hold in light of questions about the continued validity of the Defense of Marriage Act.
Christopher Bentley, the spokesman for the U.S. Citizenship and Immigration Services, writes, "USCIS has issued guidance to the field asking that related cases be held in abeyance while awaiting final guidance related to distinct legal issues." He notes, however, "USCIS has not implemented any change in policy and intends to follow the President's directive to continue enforcing the law."
For all those gay married couples torn apart by immigration law, this means more than I can express.
Greg Scoblete asks:
[W]ould it be better for U.S. and Western interests to have a Somalia-style failed state in Libya following the violent overthrow of Colonel Gaddafi, or would it be preferable to have Gaddafi slaughter his way back to unified control over Libya?
(Photo: Libyan rebels celebrate outside deserted government offices in the village of Harawa as they advance towards Moamer Kadhafi's hometown of Sirte on March 28, 2011 as NATO finally agreed to take over full command of military operations to enforce a no-fly zone in Libya from a US-led coalition. By Aris Messinis/AFP/Getty Images)
Sans hardware:
Try OnLive, an Internet-gaming service that I've praised a couple times. OnLive lets you run high-def games—the kind that once required a monster PC or console—on rinky-dink hardware. OnLive does this by processing all of the video on very fast computers, then shuttling the images back to your machine over the Internet. This doesn't sound as if it should work, but it does, and very well, too. Now imagine the same process happening for other apps: You'd could edit video, crunch data sets, create music, or do other computationally complex tasks on your tablet or netbook—all the processing would take place far away, so seamlessly that you wouldn't notice anything amiss. This sounds fantastical. It's not. It's closer than you think.
Jackson Diehl isn't even pretending any more.
The Dish 