More reason for Feinstein and Rocky to soil their armor

6 januaro 2009, 22.55

See http://digbysblog.blogspot.com/2009/01/not-so-fast-immunity-granters-by-dday.html

What failure!

6 januaro 2009, 20.17

So, Mike Malloy predicted eons ago that Air America Radio was a freight train about to slam into a brick wall, and instead it has gotten someone elected a U.S. senator.

This must be one of those brick walls or mountains with a tunnel painted on it.

LJ post mortems

6 januaro 2009, 16.04

What is it about business downturns that people go straight into post mortems full of personal prejudices? LJ lays off some people (which tends to be very damaging in ways not usually accounted for, but that’s a different story), and not only are people talking as if LJ is already gone, but they are declaring on-line networking a stupid idea that could never make money.

Well, I’ll tell you what. First of all, the economy is bad. Second, the extended perm account sale meant ‘We don’t have the cash we want’. Third, Air America Radio didn’t die when the wingnuts were giving post mortems, nor did it later when a bitter Mike Malloy predicted it would slam into a brick wall imminently. The corpse isn’t a corpse until it’s a corpse. (And then it’s a corpse. It could happen at any time, but let’s hope not.)

Now let’s get back to our LJing. :)

If I were Obama (which is not the case)

5 januaro 2009, 21.39

Maybe I should put this in the form of a question.

How would I go about setting and executing policy that endangers the careers of people like Jay Rockefeller? Appointing Dawn Johnsen to OLC and Leon Panetta to CIA would be a good start, but how proceed from there, in such a way that Congress could not easily stop me?

Lose your lunch

5 januaro 2009, 11.44

See http://www.wztv.com/template/inews_wire/wires.international/3862026e-www.fox17.com.shtml

My opinion is no secret: we should more or less abandon this structure, which is a sign of Dick Cheney’s commitment to controlling the flow of petroleum to China.

How long can he hold out?

5 januaro 2009, 01.19

I wonder how long Norm Coleman can keep up the charade without conceding. He must know that we are waiting for him with pitchforks and torches, so all the bluster must have more to do with maintaining the bipartisan consensus in the Senate that the Democrats rule in name but Republicans get what they want. (In that regard, I saw a headline today that nearly voided my bladder for me. It’s an exercise for the reader to identify the headline.)

The amazing thing is that Harry Reid was once a young pugilist. On the other hand, maybe now the pieces fit together.

Revise that: Franken wins by 225

3 januaro 2009, 20.38

See http://www.startribune.com/politics/state/37047159.html

Josh Marshall didn’t understand how come Norm Coleman agreed to count the extra ballots, but Coleman was under orders to be nice about the ballots. I think that’s actually how Minnesota law is written.

A musical interlude: John McSherry playing 'Doinna'

3 januaro 2009, 01.15

Panarin

2 januaro 2009, 20.29

Does anyone know if this nut has been seen hanging around with white nationalist types?— http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html

There’s a lot of that going on in Russia these days, with the encouragement of guys like David Duke. I’m curious just what Panarin’s angle is—is he a white nationalist? is he just your usual spy-agency kook? is he merely a propagandist who knows he is full of it? How much of each? Etc.

(BTW ‘white nationalist types’ includes Pat Buchanan and probably ought to include Lou Dobbs, as well, but I don’t expect either of these guys has been hanging out with Panarin. Please don’t make me be wrong.)

A major correction

2 januaro 2009, 18.55

Apparently I misheard Randi Rhodes’s advice to Melissa Etheridge, as to how to deal with Rick Warren. The anxious Ms. Etheridge was due to perform at an event where Rick Warren would be the keynote speaker, and wanted Randi to help her deal with that. (Ms. Etheridge eventually listened to Barack Obama’s implicity advice.) I had thought Randi told Melissa to disrupt the speech; actually what a supposedly devastated Randi suggested that Melissa and her partner ask Barack Obama for an invitation to the inauguration so they could use the event to disrespect Rick Warren.

I have the impression this quasi-supernal dissing would have been an offshoot of an anti-Warren protest that Air America’s David Bender has been promoting. With two-valued reasoning worthy of George W. Bush, Mr. Bender argues that the protest is not a protest because it is an affirmation; yeah, and by the same ‘logic’ my using the middle name ‘Hussein’ for a while was an affirmation of Barack Obama’s name and ‘therefore’ wasn’t a protest against the anti-Obama smear campaign. Mind you, I don’t say he shouldn’t take part in the protest, just that he shouldn’t ‘think’ in the manner of GWB.

Back to Randi. In the same show she boasted powerfully and without irony about her modesty and self-deprecation, and also she said that if Norm Coleman had asked her for dirt on Al Franken she would have given it.

Again I think Air America is better off without Randi. The Nova M Radio network (that is, Mike Malloy and Randi Rhodes) seems to be a dumping ground for Air America hosts who have inferiority complexes that manifest as public disrespect for their colleagues, including former co-workers, but also Ed Schultz, and in the case of Malloy also Jerry Springer when they both were employed by Air America.

Randi’s show is funny, however, and she isn’t deliberately dense—just someone moderately ‘neurotic’—so I shall go on listening and loving.

The kind of thinking that won Hillary Clinton the presidency

2 januaro 2009, 14.45

Air America is replaying the Randi Rhodes broadcast from a couple of Fridays ago (she’s on vacation), and here’s what happened.

A caller told Randi proudly that she had gone down to Florida to help get out the vote. The correct response, of course, is ‘That’s great!’; instead, Randi blandly asks what county. The caller says Broward. Randi puts the caller on the defensive, asking why Broward, given that Obama was guaranteed to win there. The caller, sounding hurt, says she had friends there.

Of course, in Florida, in a presidential election, the county is irrelevant; indeed, Broward is a very good place to go for Democratic get-out-the-vote, because you will get a good reception. Thus, Randi made someone feel bad and futile for doing GOTV in a particularly good place to do GOTV.

Think how much similarly weak reasoning we have endured; it takes some effort not to fall into the intellectual traps. There was, for example, Big Tent Democrat concerned that Obama couldn’t win in big states, because Hillary did better there; so, how many of those big states did Obama lose in the general, eh? Obama concentrated on winning little states, because he was not distracted by falsehoods and irrelevancies; he saw he could net more delegates that way than Hillary could by trying to ‘win’ big states.

It is said that Hillary’s campaign manager didn’t even know that ‘winning’ a state was practically meaningless, and that delegates were to be divided proportionally. That’s astoundingly lazy behavior for a campaign manager, if true. But there was also the supposed ‘momentum’ the candidates got from their ‘wins’, which got discussed by quite brainy people despite that Obama’s ‘winning’ of a long string of little states didn’t stop Clinton from ‘winning’ in places where she was favored.

(‘Momentum’ is IMO way overrated; sure, winning begets winning, losing begets losing, but commentators are using the phenomenon as a mental crutch. It occurs to me that perhaps barking_iguana’s efforts towards a political sabremetrics will help future commentators and campaign managers put their brains to work.)

Hartmann doesn't see the problem with seating Burris

2 januaro 2009, 13.56

After all, says Thom, David Vitter continues to serve despite scandal and nobody makes a big deal about it.

Apparently Thom Hartmann has trouble distinguishing the letters ‘D’ and ‘R’.

Playing Thom like a fiddle

2 januaro 2009, 12.26

I’m listening to Thom Hartmann interviewing his JFK-assassination conspiracy theory co-author, and it’s like listening to Paul Wolfowitz interview Ahmad Chalabi. This guy sounds like a con, and Thom Hartmann sounds like a mark.

Oh BTW they say that the actual murder of JFK was covered up to prevent World War III. Well, I guess it is true that JFK was murdered by a communist.... At least they got that part right.

And, um, they slandered RFK but good. He was in on the cover-up, you see.

Cognitive dissonance in the field of book design

1 januaro 2009, 15.57

On p. 27 of ‘On Book Design’, by Richard Hendel, it says:

In a legendary essay, ‘The Crystal Goblet’, Beatrice Warde wrote that book typography should be as plain as a crystal goblet. She assumed that anyone drinking from an excessively designed jeweled cup would pay more attention to the cup itself than to the wine therein. Extending the idea, she claimed that excessive design would be just as destracting in a book. Extravagant typography would intrude between the author and the reader.

Book designers who prefer doing timeless crystal-goblet typography know precisely what Beatrice Warde meant. They are on typographic good behavior and would prefer never to violate [Stanley] Morison’s ‘first principles of typography’. They would agree with the type designer Fred Goudy, who (it is alleged) said that anyone who would letterspace lowercase letters would steal sheep. These folks know the rules.

This is supposed to be the same Fred Goudy who designed a zillion eccentric typefaces, book faces among them.

The quotation is a bowdlerization distorted according to one or another person’s pet peeves. In fact lowercase is letterspaced all the time, particularly in narrow magazine columns, where it can become damn near unavoidable; you don’t have to be a typographer to notice this, just a reader. What actually is alleged to have happened is that Mr. Goudy was given an award, and on the award there was amply letterspaced, all-capitals blackletter. Upon receiving the award and looking at it, Mr. Goudy remarked, in front of everyone, that someone who would do such letterspacing probably would shag sheep.

I am guessing that the typeface was Goudy Text, and that somewhere in the history of the distortion ‘text’ meaning blackletter got converted to ‘text’ meaning running text.

Roland Burris is well prepared

1 januaro 2009, 01.34

See http://www.flickr.com/photos/southbound_07/2750018934/sizes/o/

I think he also has a column in Rome.