I’ve been trying not to say anything bad about Andrew Ross Sorkin. I even made a point of not watching Too Big To Fail so as not to get upset — and when I heard from friends that the film turned Hank Paulson into Joan of Arc, that decision seemed to have been validated.
The “Good Boys” are all the white guy journalists and pundits one sees trotted out for the news and opinion shows on TV. They all have great agents, great book deals, the best paying gigs at the best real estate. And they all look and sound the same, of generally liberal persuasion but always smiling and giggling their way through segments on MSNBC or CNN. Yes, the f—— country may be coming apart at the seams but it’s never so bad they can’t say something clever and meant to sound gnomic for the cameras.
Republicans can’t be “Good Boys.” Ugly pricks from the far right are immune to “Good Boy-ism.”
It’s only the fellows on MSNBC, everyone who’s a guest on Chris Matthews or the Rachel Maddow Show, everyone who writes for the Atlantic or the Nation — the cream of the crop.
If another war is declared or the US defaults on its debts and plunges the world into the economic abyss, they’ll still be on hand to provide wisdom and entertainment. Never showing upset or dyspepsia, they’re always the perfect fiddlers for the burning and sacking of Rome.
Don’t leave the girls out. Megan McCardle, Joan Walsh, Melissa Harris Perry Jonathan Capehart, Dana Milbank (oh wait, the last two aren’t women) etc. I know you can think of so many more.
The song lends itself to a pastiche of glued together video segments.
Update: I started gathering news clips for this and realized I’d have to look at them all over again, hundreds of times, to get the editing for any video right. That was a great recipe for a blinding headache and I couldn’t face it. Someone else want to jump on the grenade?
Assorted includes: Gene Robinson, the guy from the Nation who is always on Maddow, Marc Ambinder, Howard Fineman, Jonathan Alter, Bill Maher (who pretends to be a malcontent but hosts a “good boy” show masquerading as comedy and criticism), Arianna Huffington …
Hollywood studios, record labels and other U.S. copyright and trademark owners are pushing Congress to give them more protection against parasitical foreign websites that are profiting from counterfeit or bootlegged goods. The Senate Judiciary Committee has responded with a bill (S 968) that would force online advertising networks, credit card companies and search engines to cut off support for any site found by the courts to be “dedicated” to copyright or trademark infringement. It’s goals are laudable, but its details are problematic.
The global nature of the Internet has spawned a profusion of websites in countries that can’t or won’t enforce intellectual property law. Under S 968, if a website were deemed by a court to be dedicated to infringing activities, federal agents could then tell the U.S. companies that direct traffic, process payments, serve advertisements and locate information online to end their support for the site in question. Copyright and trademark owners would be able to follow up those court orders by seeking injunctions against payment processors and advertising networks that do not comply.
Cutting off the financial lifeblood of companies dedicated to piracy and counterfeiting makes sense …
Only to the powdered special people writing editorials at the Los Angeles Times.
Arf! Arf! Here’s Funkadelic’s Maggot Brain album, in what looks like its entirety, to the right. In fact, if you dig around a bit you find what seems like the whole catalog. On YouTube!
“Once a court determines that a site is dedicated to infringing, the measure would require the companies that operate domain-name servers to steer Internet users away from it,” explains the Times.
A real rib-tickler, that one.
Those who use YouTube a lot know the site provides loads of baldly infringing content. Part of its business model of bringing in eyes and ears depends upon it.
The real impetus here is to get those dirty not-US infringers off the playing field.
There’s no crying allowed when you’re from the privileged caste and caught soiling yourself, no coming back from tears of humiliation.
Having said that, this next excerpt — from Politico — seems the standard in celebrity coverage of the ruling class (no link):
[Huma Abedin] has long been considered one of world’s most intriguing women. Stunning, smart, fluent in Arabic and notoriously discreet, she has for the past 15 years had held a firm place in the Clintons powerful orbit, mostly as Hillary Clinton’s “body person.”
There was never a shortage of powerful men drooling over her, and she was considered quite the catch …
Fifth-generation Georgia farmer Gary Paulk told local paper The Daily Journal that he has only been able to find half of the 300 workers he needs to pick his blueberry fields, and that’s after hiking wages 20 percent. Another farmer said he had to switch to (less efficient) machines when he couldn’t find enough workers for his fields this spring …
Anti-illegal immigration groups like FAIR argue that if illegal immigration goes down, wages would go up for farm jobs, and then native-born Americans and legal immigrants would want them. Farmers say they can’t afford to pay more.
The agricultural work done by many illegals in California is back-breaking. The living conditions are very harsh, you get sprayed with pesticides, and there is substantial risk for dehydration and heat stroke and/or heat exhaustion.
When farmers raise wages to levels commensurate with the risk, in a harsh economy, US workers may begin to take the jobs.
Farmers may be compelled to make the work less hazardous to the health to see that. But maybe they won’t.
In any case, it’s hard to be sympathetic.
If the US government hadn’t made a policy of blindly accepting slave labor conditions and wages in farming for decades, we might not be where we are now.
Steve Colbert, who couldn’t do the work but made a big issue of signing up for it for the sake of entertainment value last year turned the issue into unfunny joke material before Congress.
Wage compression and economic failure in the US middle class has made it necessary for food to remain cheap. In response, the food stamp program has exploded.
When food isn’t affordable, riots ensue. (See Egypt.)
So we’re in a downward spiral.
Farmers won’t pay more. Their labor face is impacted. Their bottom line shrinks.
It’s a tough problem. I suspect the system has to almost break down completely before it can be repaired.
Here’s a snapshot of the Sarah’s Little Helpers phenom, a small number of GOP/Tea Party/Palin fanboys or girls who seemingly rushed to Wikipedia for the purpose of editing the entry for Paul Revere in support of her — or at least to sow confusion.
And, of course, the editing count also includes Wikipedia troops changing it back while beating off the assault.
Note that statistically no one was really interested in Paul Revere’s bio page. Then — magically — a radical jump in revision for June just in line with Sarah Palin’s display of unrepentant and bellicose stupidity.
Palin’s Loyalists, locked in hand to hand combat at Wikipedia.
In recent decades northern Virginia has become an economic dynamo, driven by a private sector that feasts on government contracting. These counties are also home to corporate lobbyists, lawyers and consultants who work in or around the nation’s capital, soaking up federal government spending. And government-related hiring manages to keep the unemployment rate in places like Falls Church City down to 5.7%.
The places are Loudoun and Fairfax counties and the area around Falls Church.
Any place with a heavy concentration of military and security contracting has not suffered during the Great Recession.
San Diego, for example, has been largely spared much of the pain from the crash of 2008 do to the large amount of taxpayer dollars poured into military bases and the arms manufacturers and contractors in the region.
It’s an obvious picture — bloated military spending, state religiosity, abhorrence of homosexuality, very little taxation, little or no decent public education. And the right was probably howling about it all Sunday.
I’ve always made fun of these countries, but now I see echoes of that pattern of privatization of public services in America. Police budgets are being cut, but the wealthy take refuge in gated communities with private security guards. Their children are spared the impact of budget cuts at public schools and state universities because they attend private institutions.
Mass transit is underfinanced; after all, Mercedes-Benzes and private jets are much more practical, no?
“I sometimes see shiny tanks and fighter aircraft,” Kristof adds.
It’s not a coincidence that the “shiny tanks and fighter aircraft” of the pantywaist militaries of these nations are almost all American made.
It used to be the old Soviet Union that armed half of them. But our weapons shops and wars demonstrating the excellence of the goods drove them from the business. That was some progress,
Where growth is isolated and incomes are concentrated, those who are not directly involved do not benefit. On the contrary, growth necessarily entails environmental degradation and waste, and it is on the poor and the excluded that these burdens necessarily fall.
The spoils of growth — all concentrated in a few industries: financial, military, some but not all aspects of technology. Everything else is left to rot.
From yesterday:
” … [A] weird guilt-tripped reflexive genuflection to soldiering on holidays, remains.”
“Just call them what they are. Public schools? That’s a nice way of putting it. These are government-run schools,??? he said.
Santorum brought up the Head Start program, charging that the program is ineffective even as Democrats object strongly to congressional Republicans’ proposal to cut funding for it.
“They fund it more,??? he said of Democrats. “Why? Because it brings more children into their domain. It brings more children out of the household … Their agenda is to socialize your children with the thinking they want in those children’s minds.???
Santroum, who home-schools his own seven children, said he supports voucher programs that would allow parents to send their children to private schools.
D-day anniversary or not, Santorum would still be a joke candidate, an
unelectable pariah in any general election.
No amount of his quote about fighting to save America will erase this:
“It is very hard to see change,” said Capt. Tye Reedy. “It was very hard to get that across to my soldiers.”
Major General John F. Campbell described … losses in military lingo. “We had some very, very kinetic events,” he said after arriving home at Fort Campbell. But he said the hardships bonded the troops in an indelible way.
Very, very kinetic events.
One week after Memorial Day, DD notes that on AMC that weekend was dedicated to a loop of the movies Midway, Patton and The Longest Day, the latter which featured a running time, with commercials, of four hours.
Today’s endless counterinsurgency battles couldn’t be farther from them in subject matter.
They will generate books that nobody but journalists and the families of those who were there will read. If they make it to the occasional movie, they will generate some critical praise but have no star power, no box office and little if any public interest. (Like the most recent, The Battle for Marjah. Incidentally, that review was read thousands of times, generating as little enthusiasm in Facebook “likes” as the documentary then passing into the oblivion. Americans don’t even like to read the truth about documentaries on the Forever War.)
Here’s another quick framing question.
Can you even remember the title of HBO’s serial dramatization of the Iraq War? Didn’t think so. (See bottom for answer.)
Our national paradox, dripping in cynicism and marinated in bad faith, is one in which the military industrial complex has been so successful at removing the average citizen’s involvement in the Forever War, only complete indifference to it, along with a weird guilt-tripped reflexive genuflection to soldiering on holidays, remains.
Answer to HBO serial on Iraq War question: Generation Kill. Yes, what everyone wanted to watch was a movie on the first two weeks of a war launched on frauds five years after all the bunting from our Mission Accomplished moment had blown away.
HBO wasn’t running it over the Memorial Day weekend.
Of course, no one bats an eye at the spectacle. In the US, it’s a plus to be a great-looking obvious dumbshit. (For her trick, visiting Hawaii, “When we attacked the Japanese battleships at Pearl Harbor we showed we were ready to fight against tyranny and for freedom…”)
