Foggy and unbloggy

Just five more minutes! Please.

Required focus continues on hiatus. But soliders in Afghanistan can’t do that, because it’s the 122nd day of hte ninth year of the war there.

Friday night oldies (on Sunday)

Maybe when I get a little older I’ll get the hang of this Friday night thing. Enjoy.

Good evening

Not a bloggy day. What it is, though, is the 121st day of the ninth year of the War in Afghanistan.

My mouse has wanderlust

I’ve got an odd problem. My mouse acts odd but only when I’m online. AND I keep getting this situation where whatever page I’m on – on its own – starts scrolling to the top and no matter what I do I can’t scroll down. If I have four tabs open, the problem is on each one. A few times, if I wait 10 minutes, the problem disappears. Sometimes if I  wait an hour, it doesn’t. Mostly I close my browser and start all  over, which can be very annoying when I’m in the middle of something.

If it were a mouse problem, it should apply to programs or Outlook. Right? I have already switched mice. Didn’t fix it.

I use Mozilla Firefox. Anybody have any ideas?

Good morning

The action this week seems to have been in Pakistan, with bombings in populated areas (one killed three American soldiers). So perhaps it’s a good thing that talks with the Taliban are being pursued in Afghanistan, where it is the 120th day of the ninth year of the war there.

It. is. not. the. same.

There’s a rather long  thread below about media – well, it started out about media – the tone, the quality, the bias. All of it. I’ve always thought that we come at this conversation about media bias from the wrong direction entirely. There’s a perfectly normal way to determine, for instance, what the mainstream of Americans consider to be mainstream media. Let’s measure it the way we measure all other products.

So here -  in that most American of ways, I pose a few simple questions:

• Where do Americans put their money?
• What are they willing to pay for.

Looking at print media:
(That most frequent target of conservative media, The New York Times, reported a circulation (March 2009) of 1,039,031 copies on weekdays and 1,451,233 copies on Sundays. And the venerable Wall Street Journal has equivalent if not higher weekday numbers. But since the Times is perceived to be ‘liberal’ throughout and the Journal is perceived to be conservative only in its editorial pages, they’re not politically opposite. The Journal is a hybrid. So a comparison would not be useful.)

NEWSPAPERS
The Washington Post – A publicly traded company
Daily audience 1,599,900

The Washington Times - A privately held company owned by the Rev. Sun Young Moon
Daily audience 83,511

MAGAZINES
The Weekly Standard - a privately held company
Can’t find circulation numbers, even at their own website, so to keep it fair(ish)
National Review - a privately held company
Weekly circulation 183,000

Time Magazine – A publicly traded company
Weekly circulation 3,400,000

I draw the reader’s attention to which of these publications thrive in the free market and which are rich men’s hobbies.

And note also which of these publications Americans pay good money to read. Keep that in mind the next time politicians and pundits employ their equivalency trick and claim that these sources carry the same weight. Americans are choosing to buy and read what far too many people call liberally biased. So is mainstream America liberal?

Good morning

Because I was out of the house with a dozen stops/appointments yesterday, I was very glad for the warmer weather. Felt so celebratory about it that I got a car wash – the big-time, the in AND out wash. Makes me feel like a kid to see someone else clean up my mess.

I notice that The Hurt Locker has been nominated for Best Picture Oscar. I predicted it.*

And of course that movie brings home the fact that today is the 119th day of the ninth year of the War in Afghanistan.

UPDATE*: Saying “I predicted it” is too self congratulatory. I feel like Rush Limbaugh.

Good morning

In The NY Times this morning, a letter writer contemplates the difficult decision regarding Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell.

• One possibility would be to form a commission that could select a committee that could study the situation and report back to the commission every three months. After five years, the committee could publish its findings, and Congress could debate how to formulate a policy acceptable to Max Baucus, Ben Nelson and Olympia J. Snowe.
• The other possibility would be to ban discrimination based on sexual orientation.

That’s sure a tough one.

I bet we could get to the second possibility pretty quickly by just asking the folks currently in the military. A lot of them can be found in Afghanisan where it is the 118th day of the ninth year of the War there.

Message: we is not them

For well over 20 years, conservative voices have dominated radio. Their message has not been “conservatism is good”. Their message has been “liberalism is bad“; it’s anti-American and will destroy the Republic. I finally lost a brother to this near-seditious drumbeat and that hurt a lot. It still does. Then, FOX News joined the noise machine in 1996,  just in time to leap into the relentless drumbeat against Bill Clinton.

Now conservative media figures claim that the ‘mainstream media’ is liberally biased and that’s why they had to come into being. I guess they see themselves as out of the mainstream of American life, fighting the mainstream,  since most Americans turn to newspapers, magazines, local TV, network news, public radio and TV for their information. In other words, mainstream Americans turn to the mainstream media. And since those media are not liberal bashers (except maybe the Wall St Journal editorial page!),  conservatives say they therefore are liberal. This is nonsense of course. 

Nevertheless, when Keith Olbermann showed up on MSNBC a few years back, it was pretty exciting for this liberal. I hadn’t heard that kind of talk anywhere outside the pages of liberal magazines (and maybe on Bill Moyers – who speaks, however, in soft and even tones). So it was a thrill.

And he brought many of the bright emerging stars from the blogesphere into the conversation. That made his show fresh and dynamic. Worst Person in the World was fun. The very earliest ‘special comments’ were water in the desert. They were ‘yeah, yeah’ moments, especially when he said the things about Bush we all wanted to hear said publicly. For a change. And he made Rachel Maddow a liberal star.

He mocked Fox News relentlessly, especially Bill O’Reilly. And then, he became Fox News.  Now liberals like me aren’t listening anymore. Thehe Fox style is not our style. (I know he’s going after Dems too. It’s the consant outrage that’s wearisome.)

Today, the LA Times tells us (rather jubilantly) that Keith’s number are slipping. He’s losing his audience. I wonder if he knows why. I wonder if he’ll figure out that we is not them.

Good morning

For the first time in decades, and because I’m seriously overdue for a haircut, I rolled curlers into my newly shampooed hair this morning. It’s been so long that I had some difficulty doing it. (Why hadn’t I tossed them out after ten years? fifteen years? twenty years?)

What are you looking at?

How the lives of American women have changed! As a young woman (when, ironically, I probably had the best figure of my life) I wore a girdle. I ’set’ my hair every night. I laid out my next-day clothes the night before, freshly ironed of course. I was, after all, merchandise on the market. In those days newspapers separated their help wanted classified ads into Help Wanted WOMEN and Help Wanted MEN. Often the same jobs, but of course the pay scale was quite different. And until the 70’s, we considered this to be normal. In fact, many of us didn’t even think about it.

I like today much better. Those curlers brought back many memories, and triggered thoughts of the future. By the time my great nieces and nephews are adult, gender should have ceased to be of much import (except in terms of reproduction and/or its attendant delights).

Back when I was sleeping on metal rollers every night, many in today’s military hadn’t even been born. Their lives have changed too, because thousands of them are in Afghanistan, where it is the 117th day of the ninth year of the War there.

And now we are asked to endure this?

Apparently there was a Miss America pageant recently. (once upon a time in a place far far away, young girls like me – um, me – were utterly entranced by the whole spectacle of what was then a huge event. And very magical.)

Anyway, it’s 2010 and they had this contest thingee and it’s not really on tv anymore, it’s on TMZ and shows up on some cable channel. Among the judges, Rush Limbaugh.  Sacrilege really.

A provocative question

If it were up to you, which of these outcomes would you chose in the event of a terrorist attack on the United States?

• A bomb destroys the venerable Capital building in Washington DC. The dome collapses into the ruins. An American architectural masterpiece is gone along with a huge chunk of our history. One hundred die.
• A bomb destroys an office park in suburban Pennsylvania. Two hundred people die with the attendant suffering of families and loved ones.

May I have more please

A line from Obama today in New Hampshire acknowledging voters’ anger:

“You want us to worry less about our jobs and more about your jobs”

Now that’s a concise thought that needs no explanation at all. That’s a very good line. More please.

Oh damn

A shadow was seen today in Puxatawny. And I fully expect to find Groundhog Day on my teevee tonight. Watching it, though, is out of the question. LOST returns to confuse us all for a final season.

Rinse and repeat: Is Texas still seceeding?

I’m registered into a two hour EPA webcast seminar on preparing RFP’s for local project. (I volunteer with a civic organization working on estuary waters and storm runoff – subjects about which I know exactly nothing.) Scintillating it is not. So I’m multi-tasking and listening with only one ear.

From Washington Monthly just now:

Markos Moulitsas commissioned a fascinating poll in January, getting a better sense of exactly what rank-and-file Republicans are thinking nationwide.

…I’m putting the finishing touches on my new book, American Taliban, which catalogues the ways in which modern-day conservatives share the same agenda as radical Jihadists in the Islamic world. But I found myself making certain claims about Republicans that I didn’t know if they could be backed up. So I thought, “why don’t we ask them directly?” And so, this massive poll, by non-partisan independent pollster Research 2000 of over 2,000 self-identified Republicans, was born.

The results are nothing short of startling.

Quite right. A plurality of rank-and-file Republicans wants to see President Obama impeached. More than a third of self-identified Republicans believe he wasn’t born in the United States. A 63% majority is convinced the president is a socialist, about a fourth believe he wants terrorists to be successful, and about a third think Obama is a racist who hates white people.

Nearly a third of Republicans think contraceptive use should be outlawed.

More than three-quarters of Republicans want public schools to teach children that the book of Genesis “explains how God created the world.”

A third of Southern Republicans want to see their state secede from the union.

Now where are they getting those ideas?

Good morning

Sen. Bernie Sanders is on C-Span being interesting, provocative and challenging. And telling a caller that being a citizen is hard work. Back in the 80’s, I spent a lot of time visiting around Burlington VT and in the Champlain Islands. At that time, Bernie was the long time mayor of Burlington, or – as it was then called – the People’s Republic of Burlington. It was a great city – smart, rich, educated, full of energy and fun.

Sen. Bernie Sanders

I had a few opportunities to meet him then. His hair always needed combing. His shirt always needed to be tucked in. Often, his socks didn’t match. And he smelled like soap. Bernie was always in a hurry and didn’t bother with anything that didn’t contribute to the common good of his beloved city. Oh, and he had more hair.

This morning, he’s talking about his sincere commitment to veterans and to the families of those currently serving. He is clear to callers that he has serious problems with the war(s), but honors the obligations we have to our military.

I hope that word reaches the troops in Afghanistan, where it is the 116th day of the ninth year of the War in Afghanistan.

The newfound movie critic

I just read something touching and remarkable by a man who is himself remarkable. Who knew? All those years watching or listening to Roger Ebert tell us about movies, and the whole time, hiding in plain sight, there was a philosopher, a raconteur, an acute observer of life. A few weeks ago, I posted a link to a letter he’d written to Rush Limbaugh. (Whether he actually sent it or not who knows, but Ebert was pretty fed up with the nonsense.) As soon as my post was up, I forgot about Roger Ebert.

But just now, following a stray link, I found myself back there. And this time I found the man himself. A man who’s been fighting cancer, has had endless surgeries, has lost his speech and oddly, his ability to eat and drink. Life is a different place for him now, and I just read a long post about eating and drinking – and not eating and drinking. Not an appealing subject matter, but in his hands . . . His writing is elegant in its simplicity. His voice is true and honest and humble and makes me wish I knew the guy. This passage makes me think we would get along very well indeed.

EBERT:  [driving around town] I never look at a trendy new restaurant and wish I could eat there. I peer into little storefront places, diners, ethnic places, and then I feel envy. After a movie we’ll drive past a formica restaurant with only two tables occupied, and I’ll wish I could be at one of them, having ordered something familiar and reading a book. I never felt alone in a situation like that. I was a soloist.

He wrote the post recently and it has nearly 700 comments. One doesn’t see those kinds of comment numbers outside the rarified atmosphere of the blog giants. I will explore his blog a bit more now – I’m sure it’ll be worth it.  While he still does movie stuff, his writing often veers toward this new journey he finds himself on.

Here’s another gem, from another post. First, he quotes Brendan Behan:
I respect kindness in human beings first of all, and kindness to animals. I don’t respect the law; I have a total irreverence for anything connected with society except that which makes the roads safer, the beer stronger, the food cheaper and the old men and old women warmer in the winter and happier in the summer.
And he adds, speaking for himself:
For 57 words, that does a pretty good job of summing it up. “Kindness” covers all of my political beliefs. “

Nice stuff.

UPDATE: Just added a link to Roger Ebert’s Journal to the blogroll on the right.

Well, isn’t that special

They are running for office. They want to uphold the great American tradition of “‘privatize the profit, socialize the losses.”

Someone had to do it.

A sweet racket

You’re a pundit, or a political reporter, or a columnist. And you write a book.  All your buds and peers on cable TV have you on three or four times to make sure your book moves in the stores. Then you have them on your show when they write their book. Don’t have a show? Plug it when you’re a guest, plug it in a column. Tit for tat, folks, tit for tat. Keep the circle moving, pick up the speed and pretty soon you think you’re going somewhere!  Adore at each other’s altars. Cable masturbation.

But I’m sure they never chat

Why is Alan Greenspan’s wife always on my teevee talking about the economy?

What the hell are we waiting for?

Here in this nation, we keep insisting that we do everything better than everyone else because we’re the USA. And this in spite of the facts – an economy that nearly collapsed, infrastructure that’s beyond the point of affordable repair, wars fought on borrowed money and off-budget, unwillingness to go for the most cost efficient health care to protect profit, educational decline, unaffordable universities. We keep being the Ferengi.

Today Paul Krugman takes a look at why Canada came through the banking crisis with very few scars (if any). Of course, that’s only one area in which we refuse to notice if anyone else has invented the very wheels we need.

2012

Will he or won't he?

How’s Obama doing? Are we moving forward? Standing still? Falling back even? Where’s his presidency going? Is it getting better? Worse? Can you tell?

Go read this, then come on back and let me know what you think.

Good morning

The weather here in south Florida continues to be odd, odd, odd. I got my electric bill – for heat mostly – and it’s double the previous high. It’s been cold all month. I don’t even own enough cold weather clothing any more to go that long! But it’s not like I’m stuck outside somewhere in a tent. Oh, and it’s the 115th day of the ninth year of the War in Afghanistan.

Good afternoon

Grey and rainy outside, windy enough to hear it inside. Love a day like this. Especially here in Florida, where it’s a rare treat. Just spent 45 minutes on the phone with a long lost publishing friend in New York. It’s great fun to suddenly be in touch like this – after almost 20 years, because the conversation begins with “as I was saying.”

It’s also the 114th day of the ninth year of the War in Afghanistan.

Who doesn’t like being right?

On September 27, I said , speaking of my brother in law:

I often call him in distress over such essential things as the Supreme Court and how it’s about to legitimize corporate control of the political life of this nation.

Good afternoon

Well, lookee here, we seem to have ourselves the 113th day of the ninth year of the  War in Afghanistan.

Before it goes away

The BBC could proably pull this from YouTube any moment, so I hope it’s still here. A delightful take down, British style, of television news.

Wolf moon, I saw you shining alone

Jane alterted me. Tonight is the wolf moon – the biggest, bestest, brightest moon all year. And tonight Mars gets into the show too – sitting right to its left. Tonight, tonight. Just was out there with the binoculars and indeed it’s a lovely sight. Take a look.

Um. Wow.

Look what our friends over at Catch the Latest have brought to the table. (From US Bureau of Labor Statistics.)

I could swear that's going in the right direction . . .

Friday night oldies

They really were my favorite group back then.

A calm voice of reason

“subjective evaluations of Presidential speeches are notoriously useless.”

Nate Silver always sets things straight. He is the emperor of context and wears a full suit of clothes.

Plus he’s got some very very good analysis of what today’s economic growth numbers mean. Which you’d expect from a numbers guy. Catch the Latest put me on to this one.

Well lookee here!

My President has needed some good news. He’s needed some good news very badly.

In today’s media world, only headlines count, so here are a few headlines that will make it to the top of the newscasts. It’s not jobs, but it’s a welcome bit of good news.

WASHINGTON POST

U.S. economy soars in fourth quarter of 2009

WALL STREET JOURNAL

GDP Expands at 5.7% Rate

NEW YORK TIMES

U.S. Economy Grew at Fastest Pace in 6 Years Last Quarter

Good morning

The punditry is abuzz, the citizenry is getting on with it, the weather is getting mild (will it last?) and Elvis is still dead. Plus it’s the 112th day of the ninth year of the War in Afghanistan. Sigh.

Well h-e-l-l-o t-h-e-r-e . . .

Say Hi! to Lucas Daniel Luis. He showed up today in Seattle and demands our attention!

He’ll be called Luke, and someday he will come get me for posting this picture. But I’m a great aunt again and it’s all I’ve got.

UPDATE: In an email, his father said he looks forward to the day he can say “Luke, I am your father.”  Heh.

Maybe it would have been better with that Cherry Garcia

This was nice

I don’t think Obama’s speech last night moved things forward at all. Perhaps that’s not what the State of the Union is supposed to do. I’ve never really been clear about that. One thing I did notice is that he didn’t employ the standard line of the speech, usually at the end of the first paragraph: “The state of our Union is [strong, vibrant, sold, secure, pick a word].” He didn’t use that line at all. Instead he said that he personally was confident about the country’s future. Well, okay.

I wanted to hear urgency; I wanted of course to hear something new, something bold. I didn’t hear that.

I didn’t want to hear legislative laundry lists. And forgive me, but I didn’t want to hear any more tender cloying stories of heroic Americans facing hardship with spirit, which often come down to “my life is shit but it’ll get better”. I did hear a lot of that.

A line I didn’t like: “when I ran, I promised I wouldn’t do just what was popular”. Presidential boilerplate. George Bush said it standing in the same place.

A line I did like when he was talking about people who need health care: “I will not walk away from these Americans, and neither should the people in this chamber.“

There was a point when I felt a change in the mood, a point where my eyes were riveted on him and, I thought, so were the eyes of those  ‘in the chamber’. This excerpt has its share of clichés of course, but somehow, at this point, people seemed to be listening. I certainly was. (He was looking straight at the government of the United States.)

“Unfortunately, too many of our citizens have lost faith that our biggest institutions -– our corporations, our media, and, yes, our government –- still reflect these same values. Each of these institutions are full of honorable men and women doing important work that helps our country prosper. But each time a CEO rewards himself for failure, or a banker puts the rest of us at risk for his own selfish gain, people’s doubts grow. Each time lobbyists game the system or politicians tear each other down instead of lifting this country up, we lose faith. The more that TV pundits reduce serious debates to silly arguments, big issues into sound bites, our citizens turn away. . . But I also know this: If people had made that decision [to turn away from the hard decisions] 50 years ago, or 100 years ago, or 200 years ago, we wouldn’t be here tonight. The only reason we are here is because generations of Americans were unafraid to do what was hard; to do what was needed even when success was uncertain; to do what it took to keep the dream of this nation alive for their children and their grandchildren.”

I’ve heard that before; but it never resonated with me quite as it did last night.

Did he even mention it?

Does anyone remember Obama actually naming Afghanistan? I remember him talking about ‘wars’ but not by name. Correct me if I’m wrong. It matters to me because today is the 111th day of the ninth year of the War in Afghanistan.

Drinking games . . .

If I could still drink, I’d jump enthusiastically into the multitudinous SOU drinking games around the intertubes.  So in lieu of a sip of  Johnnie on the rocks, I’ll take a big spoonful of Cherry Garcia. Oh, wait! I don’t have any Cherry Garcia! In fact, it’s not looking too celebratory anywhere in the fridge (not that I’ll be celebrating unless he comes out with Ali and some gloves) – I don’t think grape tomatoes will do it. The spinach was so old it went into the pasta sauce concoction thingee in the skillet this evening. And that leaves V-8 and some arugala. Also some Brie. Lots of condiments. Ahh, eggs? Skim milk. Butter! Popcorn. It’s come down to popcorn. And so it will be.

Let the games begin.

Whadda we want? Taxes! When do we want them? Now!

Well. This is interesting.  Bucking a long long trend around the country, voters in Oregon have just said YES to new taxes. They don’t want their schools to close early. They don’t want to lay off their teachers.

They seem to have snapped out of that all-American certainty that all we’ll flourish if we just keep cutting those taxes. Could this, like Scott Brown in Massachusetts, signal a new trend in voters’ preferences? Could it be that the day approaches when we will accept that roads and bridges and armies and school and hospitals and ’stuff’ like that cost real money? A single vote does not a trend make, but perhaps a door has been cracked open.

“The double-barreled victory is the first voter-approved statewide income tax increase since the 1930s. Other states, facing similar budget woes, are watching the outcome closely because Oregon, after all, is a state that capped property taxes and locked a surplus tax rebate program into the constitution. “

That’s not unlike the situation California voted themselves into 25 or so years ago with Proposition 13, which began a nasty process that nearly took the job of governing out of legislative hands and into the hands of the ‘people’, allowing direct democracy, otherwise known as mob rule. That worked out so well for California, that it destroyed what was the finest public university system in the world. One they’ll not get back anytime soon.

Something to keep an eye on. If it happens again, expect all hell to break loose.

Good afternoon

Because there’s no hope for me, I had MSNBC on early this morning, listening to that table of silly talkers . . .

Altogether too much attention was being paid to that ultimate carpetbagger, flip-flopper extraordinaire, Harold Ford of Tennesse New York State. There was gossipy speculation about who Chuck Schumer would really support in the upcoming primary – Ford or the sitting Senator.

This is why we get the big bucks

But they couldn’t actually know, because, as the always-sharp-as-a-balloon Joe Scarborough asked “Where is the truth? We need some truth tellers out there.”

Out there??? Out there?

This clown thinks he’s staring at a camera on a news channel because millions want to look at him.  He may as well have said “Well I”m just going to sit right here and keep a sharp eye out for some of them thar truth tellers.”

Because it would be a distraction to look beyond his oddly oversized nose to see if  there’s anything going on in Afghanistan, where his nation is engaged in a War, as it has been for nine years. Today is the 110th day there.

No one, apparently, cares

And that is a very good thing. Makes my day. The Onion has written a faux self-loathing op-ed – by Rush Limbaugh and about Rush Limbaugh. The headline:  “I Don’t Even Want to be Alive Anymore.” Typical Onion.

Today, the Onion story makes it to memeorandum.com, a political news aggregator and one I check often. As with most aggregators, it grabs the original story and links to all those sites htat have picked up on the original story or the basic subject matter.

For the first time ever, today, I see an original story without any relevant links. No one cared enough to write about it. Enough people read it at The Onion, but no one wrote about it afterward.

Heh. Heh.