And as usual, Stewart makes it al…. ehh, a little tiny bit of it better.
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Summit’s Eve | ||||
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(typical broken TDS embed… clicky clicky because as usual I fail at blog)
At least I’m pre-equipped with music as bleak as the political landscape.
ps. Don’t you love the way foreigners (Russian in this case) use the English language? There’s a toolbox and a stack of lumber and you go away for lunch expecting to come back to a toolshed and instead you look around and holy shit would you ever look at the beautiful abomination they’ve constructed.
me reading politico.com
Via my angerbuddies at BJ I see that Politico has a fucking story up right now that breathlessly relates — as a breaking exclusive no less — the fact that Obama plans to seek re-election. In 2012. As a sitting President. After his first term. Without being named Lyndon Johnson. I’m asleep right? Hallucinating? The world is fucking with me? Something? Because if not then I can only conclude that the half-lives on the ability to convince myself that specific iterations of the ol’ ” no for serious: this time things are really as insane as they can ever possibly get” affirmations hold weight are shrinking rapidly.
I used to consider that topic on a generational level: this made sense to my parents, but instead this makes sense to me, etc.
More recently it became a yearly — and then a seasonal — concept. I’ll sure be glad when the Bush years are behind us … Boy those teabaggers really went nuts last summer.
That was a little more troubling but whatever, a year is a long time. In light of evidence collected in the last couple days’ blogging however,1 I think I’m going to have to slow things down and — somewhat like every pro athlete in history — just take it all one collective rhetorical mindset at a time because if the lesson here isn’t that it just gets worse and worse and you either tune it out or become infinitely more cynical and eventually die then I just don’t know anymore. Kick the football Charlie Brown.
1 Argh where does the comma belong in this construction? #grammarfail
It is abundantly clear that the New York Times is attempting to use its journalistic resources to destroy the conservative movement.
Despite the Times’ repeatedly misreporting that O’Keefe was dressed or posed as a “pimp” while meeting with ACORN employees in those videos, and even after being shown in no uncertain terms that he did not, the Times’ Public Editor has declined to recommend the paper retract its reporting on this story.
…
At the end of the remarkable email exchange between Hoyt and myself (published in full at the end of this article), he says he recommended only that “Times editors …avoid language that says or suggests that O’Keefe was dressed as a pimp when he captured the ACORN employees on camera.”
That, even though…
- former MA Attorney General Scott Harshbarger, whose investigation [PDF] of the edited versions of the videos found no illegal conduct by ACORN staff and observed that “at each and every” ACORN office visited by O’Keefe with his partner Hannah Giles (who was dressed as a “prostitute”) he was “dressed like a college student – in slacks and a button down shirt,” and;
- ACORN has stated on the record, based on interviews with their employees, that [emphasis in original] “O’Keefe was not wearing that absurd costume when he visited our offices,” and;
- Giles herself has now twice admitted on the record (once on video tape), that O’Keefe never wore his 70’s-era blaxploitation pimp costume in those offices, and;
- O’Keefe and Giles’ benefactor, Andrew Breitbart, who published and promoted the videos (and misrepresented them himself in his own Washington Times column) also finally acknowledged the pimp outfit was only used as a marketing gimmick, and;
- while the Times’ Scott Shane first reported on September 15th of last year that O’Keefe “visited Acorn offices…dressed so outlandishly that he might have been playing in a risqué high school play” and, on September 18th, as traveling in “the gaudy guise of pimp and prostitute through various offices of Acorn,” and;
- the paper had reported similarly time after time since then (without noting the existence of Harshbarger’s report even once), and;
- even though I directly debunked several pieces of “evidence” that Hoyt originally proffered for his original assessment that he “would not recommend a correction, based on the available evidence,” and offered him much more corroborated evidence along with it, and;
- even though he acknowledges his original evidence was, indeed, inaccurate, and;
- even though Congress voted to defund ACORN just days after the New York Times’ first inaccurate report;
…Hoyt nonetheless wrote in his final communication to me: “I still don’t see that a correction is in order, because that would require conclusive evidence that The Times was wrong, which I haven’t seen.”
Then NYT throws in a little Clintonian parsing just in case this isn’t completely absurd already.
The most recent article in dispute, a January 30th feature article by Jim Rutenberg and Campbell Robertson, following on O’Keefe’s recent federal felony arrest for allegedly attempted to “maliciously interfere” with the phone system of Senator Mary Landrieu (D-LA), described O’Keefe as having “made his biggest national splash last year when he dressed up as a pimp and trained his secret camera on counselors with the liberal community group Acorn.”
Hoyt appears to have looked at only that one article initially, and stood behind it because, as he wrote [emphasis his]: “The story says O’Keefe dressed up as a pimp and trained his hidden camera on Acorn counselors. It does not say he did those two things at the same time.”
After a week or two of back-and-forth in which Brad Friedman drops a metric fuckton of ACORN reporting right in the ombudsman’s lap, Clark finally concedes that it may have been “journalistically unethical” of O’Keefe to fabricate his story and doctor the evidence to support it — but at any rate he still won’t be recommending a correction.
As is typical of the BRAD BLOG the post is so ridiculously long and detailed that it would make Glenn Greenwald red with envy. The lunacy I’ve quoted is just the tip of the iceberg. If you have a couple years to kill take a look.
While googling around to satisfy my curiosity about the stalinist high-rise apartments mentioned in that eXile piece I found an example of the kind of efficient production that can be achieved in the absence of stifling big-government regulations.
If this guy didn’t want to be fixing 16th-story air conditioners shirtless with no safety equipment then tell me why the hell he doesn’t get a new job? That’s what I thought.
(Apparently this is either a common way to work on highrise buildings in the rest of the world or something the Brits find particularly amusing, because the Daily Mail has an entire article devoted to pictures of this phenomenon.)
His royal BrettFavreness is doing Leno in 10 days. I guess he’s kicking off the new decade by starting his shit nice and early.
(Lungs of Hell fly open)
CHENEY: If you strike me down, I shall become more powerful than you could possibly imagine.1
I’m not usually up for this level of hatred and I thought it would’ve been excessively ghoulish to actually say so while he was in the hospital, but nonetheless I just cannot work up the energy to be charitable about the prospects for the future health of Satan Himself. I still don’t see myself feeling comfortable celebrating his death when it happens, so if we don’t get around to declaring it a national holiday then just remember this post and picture me cheering a little on the inside.
WASHINGTON — Former Vice President Dick Cheney left a Washington hospital on Wednesday following a heart attack he suffered earlier in the week.
Spokesman Peter Long said Cheney was discharged from George Washington University Hospital and feeling good. “He will resume his normal schedule shortly,” Long said of Cheney, who has remained an active player in Republican politics.
The 69-year-old Cheney was hospitalized Monday after experiencing chest pains.
Aides say the heart attack was mild. It was his fifth since age 37, and he has undergone several heart procedures since.
via Former VP Cheney released from hospital – washingtonpost.com.
1and yes, for those of you keeping score at home that’s a quadfecta: The rare combination bankshot Megadeth+Kissing Suzy Kolber+Cheney-As-Satan+Star Wars reference that still makes sense in context. The degree of difficulty here is extreme. I win two complete copies of the entire internet.2
2and since we’re doing the footnote bit again this is also by default a Sadly, No! reference. What is that now, the quintecta? Fuck it, we’ll just call it the Hiroshima of all references.
I’m sorry but when it’s 4:45AM and I have 37 browser tabs open I’m going to need more help than this figuring out where the fucking soundtrack to “Planes Trains And Automobiles” is coming from.
Consider the title my protest against the oppressive anti-strikethrough-joke regime.1
1my references to this btw are not to be construed as a passive-aggressive attempt to get a different theme installed. I just found something to gripe about and I like running jokes2
2I also like footnote/asterik/postscript-oriented jokes3
3there is no third footnote, why are you reading this?4
4Oddly enough, there is a fourth footnote despite the lack of a third. It carries the text, “The fact that the inability to use strikethrough led me to discover how to use superscript to do footnote jokes makes this all worth it.”
Damn, that was exhausting. Anyway, bit of a hike for another corny-ass reference to your standard-issue liberal blogger meme dictionary, but holy shit I’m old enough to remember when this sort of behavior was confined to the DKos comment section:
Uh, really bro? Seriously? I’ve never heard of Tim Karr before this, but he’s going to have to write three — maybe four — extremely engaging blog posts before I’m able to forgive him this trespass. But I tell you what: if he pops off like this again he’s dead to me. As is he is totally no longer my best friend.5
5And if Tim Karr is really going to waste his time with this juvenile bullshit then maybe he should look into the concept of sockpuppets. It seems that he is trolling at a strictly amateur level. Loser.
Kinda funny that when I went searching my cranial cavity for something marginally-witty to title this post, the first thing that popped up was a distinction between jews and ‘white’ people huh? I mean, not “funny ha-ha” but “funny a ha-handred fifty years ago irish weren’t white.” So obviously my alternate title is intended to evoke that sort’ve “oh my god we suck so hard, but marginally less century by century” feeling of realizing what history ought to really be teaching us rather than the idea that teh jooze are somehow freaky or different.
At any rate… (aka: if I wasn’t such a fucking guilty liberal elitist this post would have been titled:)
A White Person’s Guide to Understanding Jewish Humor1
1. Hear Jon Stewart say funny word on Daily Show
2. Plug something that — at least vaguely — resembles phonetically-viable equivalent of word Stewart used into Google textbox
3. Hit enter
4. Click on apparent attempt at extraterrestrial communication that comes up in resulting “Did you mean…?” prompt
5. Add phrase “English translation” to odd arrangement of letters that now occupies google textbox
6. Hit enter
7. Plug resulting word back into joke Stewart originally told; laugh; later, grimace at potential implications of sudden vague realization that the only reason what he said was even considered “a joke” was because of the funny word he used
1if you live on the east coast feel free to disregard this post and pretend it was replaced with something about zany mexicans and — for optional Los Angeles-specific extra credit — Asian people driving poorly. Out here in smalltown Gullyvornia we aren’t so much with the dreidels and the meshugganah and the I’m not even going to try to spell “Bloyyven” so in my eyes the Jewish culture is still sorta novel and mysterious and lacking in fast-food representation.
Faux Populi 