Stretches, Non-Seventh-Inning Version

Caryn Rose, who is metsgrrl.com, is also Jukebox Graduate, and she went to see Patti Smith last month in the Hamptons and was amazed, and not for the usual reason!

Morn, Matey

And speaking of needing some more baseball: Cleveland has been eliminated, as has Houston.

"Smackdown"

Talking Points Memo, via Making Light, posts the decision in Rhodes v. MacDonald et al., otherwise known as Orly Taitz v. Sanity, which runs for seven pages and quotes Yogi Berra.

Almost Sunset!

L'shana Tova!

So…

We have links. Yes.

1. Pickpockets and distraction. Via Brilliant at Breakfast, and remember, all this is metaphor. Metaphor that will destroy your life.
2. Also from B@B, the forced-birth bunch. Most of whom will never give birth (or be able to) themselves. Thank God. Reading stuff like this makes me want to issue tasers to all women and girls and indeed everyone with a uterus.
3. A meditation on marketing and the fears of middle aged white men, with three videos (one with rude language suggesting suicide), from Driftglass.
4. Shark-fu reports that Tyler Perry has been chosen to adapt and direct Ntozake Shange's For Colored Girls Who Have Considered Suicide when the Rainbow is Enuf, and she is Not Happy with that, and lays out her reasons. (Her source, Thembi Ford [guestblogging at The Black Snob, first link in previous sentence], presents different reasons, but also remarks on the probable dilemma of whether it should be seen because people of color produced it or boycotted because done badly, if it's done badly.)
   

And that's the truttttthhhhhhhhhh.

And He Looked Upon The Letters, and He Said "This Ain't Bad."

Ur-fandom.

And Furthermore

The Daily Howler on levels of vitriol directed at Democratic presidents and what not having health insurance means.

Beautiful Illusions

Why facts don't matter.

(Crossposted.)

In Memoriam

It is noted by The New York Times that there have been celebrity deaths this summer. Baby boomers blamed (for, I guess, paying attention).

Meanwhile:

1. Mary Travers, singer.
2. Henry Gibson, actor/comedian, and did you know that wasn't his name?
3. Paul Burke, actor.
4. Trevor Rhone, playwright.

Not an Explanation

Yesterday, probably due to perversity, the entries on my Dreamwidth journal pertained to politics and the entries here...did not.

This may happen again someday. Just so you know.

Speaking of which, I have a couple of loose invite codes that I keep forgetting about. Comments here are not screened, but I'll respect you in the morning.

Yahrzeit.

In Memoriam

Zakes Mokae, actor.

I saw him in Blood Knot (the playbill is in one of the boxes).

All Around the Cobbler's Bench

Sorry for not keeping track, but my team was making every effort to compile a worse record than the '62 Mets.

Eliminated, NL: San Diego, Arizona, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, New York (Mets), Washington.

Eliminated, AL: Oakland, Kansas City, Tampa Bay, Toronto, Baltimore.

Just here to help.

In Memoriam

Patrick Swayze, actor and dancer.

Embedding was disabled on the clips from Dirty Dancing, so you'll have to click on this link, which is highlights with "Hungry Eyes" playing. You'll live.

Organ Attack

Sara Robinson goes to the hospital. In Vancouver, B.C.

Also, for all our much-vaunted individualism, we have surprisingly flimsy privacy protections, compared to Canada.

Just saying. Go read the article.

Privileging the Narrative

Storytime.

(very small smile. Because it is the Fafblog.)

One Rant of Many

In Jon Carroll's column this morning, reader Ray Welch writes:

"We live in a country where many people think it's great, even imperative, for the federal government to snoop on our phone calls, e-mail and library records, to deploy a private militia accountable to no one (Blackwater, or whatever it calls itself now), to give the president "unitary" powers during a state of perpetual war, to hold people under arrest indefinitely without charge and torture them in undisclosed locations, to search without a warrant (using so-called national security letters) and to disseminate internal propaganda, but bad, even evil, for the federal government to manage health care, because that might give it too much power, which it would abuse.

"My government can detain me indefinitely without a warrant and turn me over to Blackwater to be tortured, and lie to my family about where I am, but a federal health care program - now that is verging on totalitarianism."

Eight Years

"This is New York. We'll find a place to dance."

--John M. Ford, "110 Stories," copyright 2001

Cries of Pain

Daisy of Daisy's Dead Air on what happened when progressives wrote off her state. Because that's what's really wrong with South Carolina.

Terrance of Republic of T reports on the murders of gays in Iraq and reposts his entry from 9/11/2006.

Upholding My Reputation for Frivolity

An ambigram by Matt McInerney.

Pirate Treasure

And away we go!

1. Lisa Golden (That's Why) on fielding calls at AARP during the previous attempt to reform health care insurance:

   My colleague, the one who used to narrate her whole fucking day, turned and gaped at me. Then she actually laughed out loud, started holding her sides, wiping tears of laughter from her eyes and finished by falling out of her chair and onto the floor where she rolled around laughing until her ass fell off.

2. Shark-fu (Angry Black Bitch) on the upcoming presidential address:

   The partisans have been weighing in from jump, but a bitch overheard something this weekend that I think speaks to an under-covered factor impacting health care reform. I read an article about parents who intended to keep their chil’ren out of school rather than expose them to President Obama’s back-to-school message of staying in school and working hard. The thoughts of one father caught my attention – he said that America is the greatest nation in the world and he didn’t want his son to hear that there was something flawed about this nation.

   As if the kid won't find out anyway. But I digress.


3. Avedon Carol (The Sideshow) proposes agitating for reform directly to the media:

   The thing is, the media seems to be dominated not by people who want to cover issues or who consider the needs of the populace anything more than a side entertainment, but by people who truly seem to believe that the priorities of rich, influential people matter more than the literally millions of lives that are being lost to an increasingly bizarre system. ... But they care about themselves, and more than that, they think reporting on each other is actually hot stuff - they think people who are having to make the choice between going into massive debt that will cost them their homes or allowing their own children to die because the costs of medical care are really out of their grasp should care more about the concerns of overpaid celebrity journalists.

4. Lower Manhattanite (Group News Blog) on the former Vice-President:

   Cheney isn't worried about what you or I—crazy moonbats us—think of him. He is however sweating a little bit at how conservatives ultimately remember him. Oh yes, right now he's still for the most part the tough, fuck-the-world, J. Press-suited “Master Of The Universe” they slobber over...but the concern on his part is over what we'll find out he signed off on in terms of “exquisite rendering”...a.k.a. torture of anybody deemed if not dangerous, at the very least, questionable. Let me amend that. It's not over what we'll find out, but rather, what the whole world—especially the Muslim world finds out about just how crazy he was down for us to get “in the name of preserving America”. If the news breaks that the sick he urged on is documented...in detail, and those awful deeds (rape as leverage for information, willy-nilly torture and brutality for scraps of information that meant squat, etc.) become an obvious rallying point behind the likes of an upswing in recruiting for “Al Qaeda 2.1”...then that is the thing more than drunkenly shotgunning a buddy in the face that cracks his tough guy veneer like nothing else could. The flop-sweat on his brow during his reach-around “interview” with Chris Wallace on Fox News and his daughter's desperate keening on “This Week” is borne of his biggest fear. ... His fear is of his legacy being that of him cast as an idiot. A fool. An unthinking clod who fucked it all up and catalyzed terrorist hellfire thanks to his ill-conceived efforts.

   I'm so glad he's back.

Now That You're Sick of Politics...

No more questions are being accepted for the History of the Bagel feature at the NY Times City Room Blogs. However, here are some answers to submitted questions.

Thanks to Amygdala.

It's Not Soup, and It's Not a Bath, But It Is Hot.

Maggie Jochild of the Group News Blog smacks an inside-the-park homer. (Apparently I need some baseball...)

Sample:

During the 1980s, the activist group I worked with finally figured out how come the Klan and Nazis kept having rallies in places where they were absolutely going to be shouted down by the opposition. They didn't hope to persuade any of us to change our minds, and they knew they were pissing off the neighborhoods they intruded upon. But because of that antagonism, they had to be surrounded by cops two or three rows deep, cops who were facing screaming commies, Jews, lesbians, and POC. Those cops were the Klan's recruitment target.

Hitting a Double

Prof Susurro of Like a Whisper gets a two-bagger!

1. The President's speech (full text included) and the fearfulness of the opposition to it.

   I think we are all clear that claims of socialism and pied piper child thieves in the White House form a very thin veil for anxieties about the meaning of citizenship and American identity. More than that, the actions of parents and some school districts (including on the supposed Left Coast) are teaching students a very specific message not about nationalism, patriotism, or nation building, but instead about the darkest parts of our history.

2. Finding appropriate action figures not as difficult as sometimes made out.

   Instead, I’m going to put up pics of some of my favorite action figures, found while responding to this woman. Because you see, while she was revealing her own bigotry and building walls to keep out anyone who rocked her sense of herself as “a good person” by daring to point out how her world not only erased people of color but her feminism didn’t even extend to seeing women as their own saviors, thus victimizing herself by narrowing the scope of her activism and her intellectual pursuits, I was happily collecting images of action figures that make me giggle with childish abandon like the dork that I am. I was imagining giddy run-on sentences to introduce a series of Torchwood figures, like Ianto in his oh-so-cute-three piece suit, with a nary a thought to the absence of LGBTQI figures in her post . . . ha.

   This article also brings up the unequal unemployment situation for women of color.

"the u.s. currently has a pay or die system."

Cookie Jill at skippy the bush kangaroo slaps Michigan Blue Cross with a dead fish. Yes, that title is a direct quote. (Michigan Blue Cross hiked premiums by up to 22%. Because everyone in Michigan is a millionaire, ya know.) Also she posted Marianne Faithfull's rendition of "Working Class Hero," which reminded me of Liverpool Lullaby, which was a sort of alternate history play in which McCartney plays Vegas and Lennon is unemployed and living in Liverpool amid the detritus of dreams. Lennon never really forgot, did he?

Happy Labor Day, and remember why you have weekends.

Déjà Vu

President Obama is being told (as Lyndon Johnson was told about Vietnam) that more resources will do the trick in Afghanistan — more troops, more materiel, more money. Even if it were true (I certainly don’t believe it), we don’t have those resources to give. It’s obscene what we’re doing to the men and women who have volunteered for the armed forces, sending them into the war zones for three, four and five tours.

Bob Herbert mentions Vietnam. (Joe Biden has apparently recommended against upping the ante in Afghanistan, and I wish there had been a direct link.)

Boxing Metaphors, Siiiigghhh

Joan Walsh (columnist for Salon, former sportswriter--what is it lately with former sportswriters?--at San Francisco Chronicle) pushed back against Terry Jeffrey on Hardball.

That said, Joan was very strong last night. We’ll let you watch the tape to see the things she said and did. But these are the things liberals should be saying to pimp/hustlers like Jeffrey. Joan came amazingly close:

This is pure crap—and you know it’s pure crap.

You and your movement have been inventing this crap for the past twenty years. You did the same thing to President Clinton with your goddamn murder lists.

You are disrespecting—and using—average Americans when you get them to believe this pure crap.

Something keeps Joan from that second statement. Due to our own treasured disrespect, we liberals often can’t bring ourselves to make the third statement. (We kill our interests in the process.) But Joan punched Jeffrey around the ring last night, exhibiting fully appropriate scorn; we rarely see liberals push back so hard. And she stressed her American values as she did so. Good for her!

Via the Daily Howler.

That Social-Network Stuff

New York Times article on users abandoning Facebook, several days late.

The disillusionment with Facebook has come in waves. An early faction lost faith in 2008, when Facebook’s beloved Scrabble application, Scrabulous, was pulled amid copyright issues. It was suddenly clear that Facebook was not just a social club but also an expanding force on the Web, beholden to corporate interests. A later group, Harmsen’s crowd, grew frustrated last winter when Facebook seemed to claim perpetual ownership of users’ contributions to the site. (Facebook later adjusted its membership contract, but it continues to integrate advertising, intellectual property and social life.) A third wave of dissenters appears to be bored with it, obscurely sore or just somehow creeped out.

There's a lot to be said for not being cool. For one thing, you don't have to spend a lot of time policing your coolness. For another, you don't have to give a rat's patoot, and that simplifies your life wonderfully.

(Crossposted by hand to Dreamwidth.)

Hello Vermont

What matters is not whom one loves; what matters is that one loves and then what one does with that love.

Morning Jeezly Crows

Anglachel highlights Bob Somerby's taking Paul Krugman to task for "kick[ing] down at little people."

Mr. Somerby:

One part of the answer to those questions is simple. Why are we so bad at messaging and pushing back? In part, it’s because we liberals see politics as a chance to name-call “working class people”—the people whose “anger and frustration” Nixon “successfully exploited.” Forty years later, we still love to do it! Indeed, it’s the shape of our modern politics. We love to call them dumb—and they love to see us lose.

Anglachel:

What benefit can come to liberalism by being constantly on an intellectual and cultural offensive against working class Americans? Somewhere between nothing and less than zero.

I'm glad to see this coming up more often. (Hi, Daisy!) It is, to use current clichés, the conversation we need to have. (ETA: One of Sara Robinson's prescriptions involves enlisting communities of faith. Here's the link again.)