Notes on a Saturday night
April 30, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments Off
- Hope one and all have enjoyed their weekend so far. Waveflux spent all of last night at the track with friends, and so needed some time this morning to recover. When you reach my age, you’ll need some recoup time yourself. Early bets did not pay off last night, but the night’s final wager made everything copacetic.
- Yes, Terrell Owens is a punk. This is news?
- Drove to the local FedEx depot to pick up my preordered copy of Tiger; installed it immediately. Nothing to report so far, except that Norton AV’s Auto-Protect doesn’t want to play with the new OS. Had I not shelled out thirty-nine bucks for the upgrade to NAV 9.0, I’d find an alternative antivirus program. Maybe I should do that anyway,
- Oooh. Safari now fortified with RSS. A reader, that is. Cute.
- Actually, the success of that final bet at the track had nothing to do with me. The young lady at the counter told me my initial pick was scratched, so I chose another horse. It turned out that my initial pick wasn’t scratched after all, but it was too late to change the bet, but my replacement horse won, so it was all good. And strangely fated.
- Yes, of course I tipped the young lady when I cashed out. What did you expect?
- Update to Safari RSS reader note above: Well, it’s no NetNewsWire, is it?
He wanted headlines, he got ‘em
April 29, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments
These clippings and more assembled by georgia10 at DailyKos, who sums it all up nicely:
OUCH. For all his bumbling talk of nookular energy, ownership society, and faith, the curtain has finally been pulled away on his “plan” for Social Security. What he tried to hide for 60 days in 60 cities has been revealed: splashed across the front pages, exposing his Achilles’ heel, and making readers around the nation think, “Oh, hell no!”
Bush’s presser: Hittin’ the highlights, such as they are
April 29, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments Off
These good folks commented on Bush’s press conference and its fallout so I don’t have to:
Oliver Willis: Shorter Bush On Social Security: “Privatization? Still gonna do it!”
Oh well. He had his chance, and he has failed.
Talking Points Memo: What did I miss? The president offered no specifics at all. He still says some portion of Social Security must be phased out and replaced with private accounts. And just as it has been since the beginning of Bamboozlepalooza, pretty much everything he said was meant to deceive his listeners.
Start with his three principles from the beginning of the news conference. The first two principles used coded language which translates into massive Social Security benefit cuts for the entire middle class. I bet it didn’t sound like that when he said it, did it? His plan would turn Social Security — the sheet anchor of the American middle class — into old age welfare.
Principle number three was just the same old demand for private accounts dandied up in different clothes.
Basically, from this president, it’s phase-out today, phase-out tomorrow, phase-out forever.
Talk Left: The Washington Post article on the speech (not an oped, but a news article) bears the headline, “Bush Social Security Plan Would Cut Future Benefits.”
Brilliant at Breakfast: Watching a blotchy-faced Bush, hunched over like — well, if the shoe fits — a chimpanzee, clutching the podium as if it were life preserver, babbling the same talking points about Social Security is failing, freedom is on the march in Iraq, and his good friend Vladimurr, it was actually hard to feel contempt for him; it was more like embarrassment that enough Americans, most of whom will never set foot NEAR the hole in the ground where the World Trade Center used to stand, were still so scared shitless of terrorism coming to their small towns that they gave this guy another four years to wreak havoc on not just this country, but the entire world.
DailyKos: For those of you on the west coast, there was an interesting segment on NIGHTLINE. Ted Koppel is analyzing the press conference & had on Dana Milbank of the Washington Post, John Harwood of the Wall Street Journal, & a British journalist with the Financial Times, Lionell Barber. Barber said that these press conferences are stage craft, with assigned seating & assigned questions, that don’t say or do anything. Koppel then compared the way the BBC & the British media ask question of Tony Blair, where the media gives Blair “a going over”. Koppel then turned to Milbank & Harwood, and asked why no reporter has the guts to stand up & tell Bush that he isn’t answering their questions, & it isn’t sufficient to regurgitate his speech from his traveling tour.
Milbank & Harwood’s response tells you everything you need to know about what’s wrong with the media. Both said that you can’t be ‘too hard’ with Bush. That if you ask a hard question of Bush, you won’t get an answer. Dana Milbank said you need to ask it “as an essay question” to him. Koppel then asked both of them “which question” asked as an essay tonight, did the reporters get a substanitive answer to? Neither one of them had an answer for Ted Koppel.
Well. I don’t see much changing as a result, do you?
So how many seasons until the Rapture?
April 28, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments Off
I understand that NBC’s Omen-flavored end o’days drama, Revelations, is off to a strong start, even against the demonic Simon Cowell and American Idol. I imagine they’re strutting with unseemly pride in the hallways of the old Peacock Network, but there is a real problem with Revelations. We’ll call it “the dilemma of putting off the payoff.” One good example of a show with this problem is (or, rather, was) Moonlighting, the Bruce Willis/Cybill Shepherd vehicle from ye olden times. Ostensibly a detective show, Moonlighting really had just one basic premise: sexual tension. The show’s popularity began and ended with one question: would David and Maddie, you know, do it? Which they eventually, you know, did. The producers could hardly put it off any longer; sooner or later, anticipation must be, ah, relieved. And the show pretty much went to hell shortly afterwards…not in terms of the writing or acting, but (I think) in terms of viewer expectation. Once a show that is built on two characters’ “mutually sublimated hotsies” satisfies that anticipation - and after everyone has a cigarette - people get bored. The chase is over and it’s just another relationship, just another show.
Revelations doesn’t have a sexual tension problem going on, even though it features Natascha McElhone as the hottest television nun since Sally Field. The show does have the Antichrist (a girl, interestingly enough) and the highly touted end o’days, however, and that’s trouble enough. As Tom Shales pointedly observed in a recent review, “It’s hard to imagine millions of viewers tuning in week after week to see the world not end.” You can wait just so long for the payoff when the stakes are the existence of everything. The network, lusting after ratings in a rather un-Christian fashion, is leaving open the option of bringing the show back next season, but what will they do with it?
One possible solution is to push the end of the world to the dramatic back burner and have the series focus instead on the everyday life of the little girl fished from the sea, the child destined to become the enemy of humankind. We could be treated to weekly glimpses of the trials and tribulations of a young woman just trying to grow up so that she can end the world. The show would become less Omen and more Jack and Bobby, with involved parties looking back from a world aflame to muse on the unlikely beginnings of it all.
“I remember one day near the beginning of the semester,” said science teacher Nancy McCafferty. “We were talking about hominid evolution, and how there were perhaps fourteen links between humans and our gorilla ‘cousins’ going back some five million years. Young Satana sort of jerked upright at that point. Her eyes because red like glowing coals, and her hair flared out from her head. The classroom filled with a great wind, scattering papers in the air. Finally all the windows blew out. The flying glass was just terrible. When I asked Satana if she disagreed with the inferences drawn from the fossil record, she pitched her head back and howled like ten thousand souls in eternal torment.
“Of course, that was the week of the big Sadie Hawkins dance, so I thought Satana might actually have been upset about that.”
Come to think of it, this sounds more and more like a WB show.
Boom, boom, out go the lights
April 28, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments Off
Kevin Drum notes that for a party with a firm grasp of all the levers of power, the Republicans are one angry, frustrated, tantrum-throwing bunch:
Republicans are just going insane with frustration these days. If they’re mad because their candidates are being filibustered, they threaten to change the filibuster rule by fiat. If they don’t like what the courts are doing, they threaten to defund the courts. If their candidate for UN ambassador is likely to get voted down in committee, they plan to report him out anyway. If they don’t like your amendments to their pet bill, they unilaterally rewrite them in a display of juvenile pique.
I can hardly wait to see what’s next. Are we going to have fistfights on the floor of Congress again? Or is the Republican caucus simply going to explode in purple cheeked rage?
That’ll be the next step. Ladies and gentlemen, your majority party: behaving like a bunch of Hamburg toads.
Deliberation and comity, indeed.
Spamarama
April 27, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments
Ever been held up on the street, beaten about the head, rolled for your wallet and left face down in the gutter? Well, I certainly hope not. But if you had been, then you’d know how this blog feels. Waveflux was conspicuous by its absence earlier today, victim of a particularly nasty comment spam assault that caused its alarmed ISP to suspend its account. Some quick negotiation and remedial measures have us up and running again, with a special wish for spammers everywhere: Be screwed to the lot of you.
Those antispam measures mentioned above may result in some small inconvenience for honest folk wishing to comment here, and I do apologize. The greater good and all that.
Topics that would have been discussed here today will be delayed, as you might expect.
Test post after downtime
April 27, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments
Testing, one, two, three…
“Hammer the Hammer”
April 26, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments
Because no one deserves it more.
(Via The Republic of T. Courtesy of Democracy Radio.)
An Amy Goodman reminder
April 26, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments Off
In case you were sleeping when I wrote last night that the Amy Goodman booksigning in St. Louis has been moved from tonight to May 13, I refer you to my earlier post.
This is what Tom Friedman would refer to as a tipping point
April 26, 2005 by Phil Barron · Comments
Editor & Publisher: Half of Americans, exactly 50%, now say the Bush administration deliberately misled Americans about whether Iraq had weapons of mass destruction, the Gallup Poll organization reported this morning.
“This is the highest percentage that Gallup has found on this measure since the question was first asked in late May 2003,” the pollsters observed. “At that time, 31% said the administration deliberately misled Americans. This sentiment has gradually increased over time, to 39% in July 2003, 43% in January/February 2004, and 47% in October 2004.”
Extra points for irony: The above comes out on the same day as the news that Charlie Duelfer’s Iraq Survey Group sadly concluded that no Iraqi WMD’s were smuggled to Syria under a cloak of invisibility, or (alternatively) teleported to the dark side of the moon. Because, you know, it’s hard to smuggle or teleport something that never existed.
Surprised much?
