Monday’s Mini-Report

January 29, 2007

Today’s edition of quick hits.

* If you haven’t already, be sure to check out The Real McCain, a new website created by Robert Greenwald and Brave New Films to highlight the Arizona senator’s flip-flops, equivocations, and general lack of principles. My good friend Cliff Schecter will even be hosting a blog at the site, and I might contribute a guest item or two over there from time to time. It’s already off to a great start with a terrific video compilation. Take a look.

* Speaking of videos that are worth watching, I don’t know who VoteVets.org hired as a media/advertising consultant, but the group hired wisely. The organization’s latest ad is as powerful as its previous spots. Take a look.

* I’ll report on the subject in more detail tomorrow, but let’s just say Ari Fleischer’s testimony today in the Scooter Libby trial was more bad news for the defendant, and more bad news for the White House. (thanks to K.Z. for the tip)

* Good news for fans of Air America Radio (of which I am one): Manhattan real estate developer Stephen L. Green has agreed to buy the radio network.

* Bad news for fans of Air America Radio: Al Franken is leaving his radio program in advance of his U.S. Senate campaign in Minnesota in 2008. (Franken will be replaced on the air by Thom Hartmann.)

* Bush: Cheney is a “glass-half full kind of guy.” Is that some kind of new euphemism for dishonest demagogue?

* Is it possible that 13% of Americans have never heard of global warming? I find that hard to believe.

* Which science fiction writer are you? (I took the quiz and it told me I’m Gregory Benford. Gregory Benford took the same quiz and it told him he’s Arthur C. Clarke.)

* Great quote from John Dean: “No wonder that with each appearance he makes on Capitol Hill, [Attorney General Alberto] Gonzales increases his standing as one of the least respected Attorney Generals ever, in the eyes of both Congressional cognoscenti and the legal community. His most recent appearance bordered on the pathetic.” (thanks to E.T. for the tip)

* WaPo ombud Deborah Howell addressed John Solomon’s “controversial” (read: awful) article about John Edwards and did a solid job criticizing it. The article “seemed like a ‘gotcha’ without the gotcha,” Howell said.

* No Googlebombs for you: “A favored online tactic to mock the president — altering the Google search engine so the words ‘miserable failure’ lead to President Bush’s home page at the White House — has been neutralized.”

* Have I mentioned Florida lately? “Hundreds of criminals were able to obtain concealed-weapons permits in Florida because of loopholes, errors and miscommunication, a newspaper reported yesterday…. ‘I had no idea,’ said Baker County Sheriff Joey B. Dobson, who sits on an advisory panel for the state Division of Licensing, which issues permits for carrying concealed weapons. ‘I think the system, somewhere down the line, is broken. I guarantee you the ordinary person doesn’t know [that] … and I’d venture to guess that 160 legislators in Florida don’t know that, either.'”

* Cully Stimson’s ridiculous shot at law firms representing Guantanamo Bay detainees continues to reverberate: “Two weeks after a senior Pentagon official suggested that corporations should pressure their law firms to stop assisting detainees at Guantanamo Bay, major companies have turned the tables on the Pentagon and issued statements supporting the law firms’ work on behalf of terrorism suspects.”

* O’Reilly thinks Sunnis and Shia are killing each other for “fun“?

* Molly Ivins, who had hoped to write a column a week on the issue of ending the war in Iraq, may not have the chance — Ivins has been hospitalized again, as she continues to struggle with breast cancer.

* And finally, be sure to check out the bizarre run-in between Arianna Huffington and John McCain at Davos. One gets the impression the GOP candidate is more than a little thin-skinned.

If none of these particular items are of interest, consider this an end-of-the-day open thread.

Bad news for fans of Air America Radio: Al Franken is leaving his radio program…

Wouldn’t most Air America fans welcome the prospect of having Al Franken in the US Senate??

  • Wow, William Gibson. “The Difference Engine” always did intrigue me, that whole “steampunk” genre.

  • 1. The actual quote from ShrubBrat was “Half glass full.” Given his pronuciation he could have meant Half Assed Fool. I bet the Deciderer is getting mighty sick of Uncle Dick sticking his hand up his butt to work his jaws.

    2. Hey, I’m Benford too!

    3. From the article on Cully “Ethics R 2 Hard” Stimson:

    Brackett Denniston, senior vice president and general counsel of General Electric, said the company strongly disagrees with the suggestion that it discriminate against law firms that do such work. “Justice is served when there is quality representation even for the unpopular,” Denniston said in a statement.

    Emphasis mine.

    I’m not surprised the big guns are sending a big STFU to Stimson. They know that if they’re ever sued they will automatically be unpopular. Methinks C.S. will “resign” shortly because he has broken one of the ReThuglican Commandments: Thou Shalt Not Annoy the Rich.

  • Thom Hartmann will be a great replacdement for Al Franken. At the moement we get them both in Bellingham WA. I was frankly getting tired of Franken (plus, his rescheduling here didn’t help since it was taped delay). I wish him well in the Senate. Hartmann really knows his stuff … except how to pronounce Nevada City: nuh-VAD-uh, not nuh-VAH-duh. I know ’cause I played guitar there briefly years ago. I sent him an email to that effect and to his credit he corrected himself.

  • 2Manchu,
    I ended up “as” William Gibson, too. Odd as I never warmed up to Gibson’s work… I guess I’m the Ted Haggarty of Cyberpunk.

    Bush: Cheney is a “glass-half full kind of guy.”
    Nope. Just full of bullshit.

  • Cheney is a glass half-full kinda guy, though he just pounded the first half of the glass of scotch and he’s completely full of crap, so any comment that this evaluatiuon of Iraq is optimistic is more than a little off base.

  • Dick Cheney’s staff

    All I need is $80,000 per annum, three paid staff (researchers), office: two offices (one for the staff) and a meeting room (in the city of your choice) and I’ll be glad to go to work for the Dems, consulting on an ad hoc basis to pay for part of our funds, instead of going into my profession of choice.

    That’s my dream job / alternative to being a lawyer.

    Having met a lot of older liberals but not having any of them identify me as someone to single out and say of him, “Jesus, this guy is really smart. Why don’t I provide all my know-how about life and my occupation to him so he can be even stronger and we can keep him in the fold?” has left me feeling a little indisposed/prickly towards the idea of working in the social justice field.

  • I wonder if anyone thought my video today was kind of brusque- if I disagee with how much we’re doing, it’s just because if you look at, for example, the latest Newsweek poll, it seems like in the circumstances we’re facing we should be doing a lot better in terms of those raw numbers. So, no, I don’t think it’s enough to wait for later to start doing the kinds of things the Republicans are already doing and we could be doing now to help our chances in the campaign.

  • the vote vets ad was a masterpiece, kudos to whoever came up with the other hand no hand vet.

  • Anyone else notice the “user” who posted the VoteVets ad? You can bet I did.

    Vote Clark/Obama 2008!

  • CB: (I took the quiz and it told me I’m Gregory Benford.
    tAiO: 2. Hey, I’m Benford too!

    No, I’m Benford!

    Don’t you Benfords know the Benford between Benford and Benford????

    (with apologies to John Malkovich).

  • 1. The actual quote from ShrubBrat was “Half glass full.” taio

    Finally, Bush has revealed the truth: the Administration is only drinking with half a glass.

  • I’m another William Gibson. Pretty soon we’ll have enough Gibsons and Benfords to field 2 softball teams.

  • the latest Newsweek poll,

    I’m talking about the one that pitted various candidates for ’08 against each other, of course. People may say I don’t know what I’m talking about if I’m citing this for how we’re going to do in the ’08 presidential election, but considering the influence the conservatives exercise over the media, and that we’re underdogs since we lost ’04 and ’00, I think it should be taken into account.

    The midterm electorate is not the presidential electorate. Some may say that relative to each other, it’s the presidential electorate that favors us, but recent experience shows that this is not the case nowadays.

  • The writer’s quiz told me I was some chick who wrote under a man’s name.

    But I don’t wanna be transgendered.

    I wanna be Vonnegut.

  • I visited “The Real McCain” and viewed the video where he supposedly says “shut up.” It looks like maybe Fox News went back and edited that out, because I didn’t see it anywhere.

  • I got Benford, too. Guess I should read something of his, huh? 😉

    “Bush: Cheney is a “glass-half full kind of guy.” Is that some kind of new euphemism for dishonest demagogue?”

    Maybe, but it’s definitely a euphemism for a delusional, smirking, self-satisfied, steaming piece of crap. Ooooo, I can’t wait for the day of his come-uppence…..

  • They made a good choice with Hartmann. We have his program right before Franken’s here in his hometown of Portland and he’s the best guy they have on the air.

  • On The Real McCain site someone claims McCain, “called fellow Republican senators ‘shithead … fucking jerk … asshole’.” I thought this was anti-McCain. 🙂

    I really don’t mind politicians swearing and getting mad. I prefer that to them being Stepford candidates.

  • Doesn’t surprise me I came out as William Gibson. He’s a damn good writer and I’m glad he and I are members of the same organization of professional science fiction geeks. He’s fun to get drunk with (I can be, too) His vision of cyberpunk definitely had an influence on my own stuff.

    It does, however, surprise me at first blush that my good friend Former Dan came out the same, but on second thought it’s hardly surprising at all, guess that’s one of the reasons we’re friends.

  • I must say as an s-f writer that I am very glad to see so many “Benfords” and “Gibsons” and even a “Delaney.” I’m sure over at RedState they’re all Heinleins.

    But I really wanted to be Asimov. But then there was only ever one of Ike.

  • I got Olaf Stapledon. I read Last and First Men years ago and mostly remember it being thought-provoking and deep without being particularly entertaining.

  • ***No Googlebombs for you***

    Yeah—but “total disaster” will still take me to Donald Trump badmouthing Bush….

  • I’m a little tired of Franken, too. But not tired of his guests. That’s the real loss. Hartmann is good. But…

    That’s Mark Green who’s bought Air America with his brother. Interesting.

    I’m not a science fiction reader and wouldn’t know one from the other. But at least I know Isaac Asimov about whom I do know a thing or two!

  • I filled it with the output of a random number generator and it told me I was Frank Herbert. He was a lot of things, but random wasn’t one of them.

  • On the sci-fi quiz, I become Arthur C. Clarke, much to my surprise. I love his work, but I’m more of an Asimov fan, myself.

  • Of the 13% of Americans who have never heard of global warming, 100% are aware of the weather’s well known liberal bias.

  • My science fiction author? David Frum. I wonder what that means?

    Sometimes, anniversaries aren’t the happy affairs they’re cracked up to be. Today is my two-year anniversary of being a blogger yet I found that my ugly alter ego Cyril Blubberpuss came back with a vengenace.

    What brought him back? Well, perhaps it was the news that shitheel Jerry Corsi is now crowing atop the shithill called Vanguard.org. To my eternal embarrassment, Mr. Blubberpuss even registered with Vanguard and began leaving comments, forever damaging my reputation as a whacked-out liberal conspiracy theorist and neighborhood nut.

  • I’m Benford too, boohoo. I hoped to be Stanislaw Lem or Asimov — at least I had read some of their stuff (though I found Asimov mostly annoying)

  • I got Vonnegut. What screwed me up, though, was that first question–I had a lot of trouble picking just one answer.

    …sweet. Just tried it again, substituting “God” for “Individual vs. tyranny” (probably the two themes of the unpublished, un-shopped around novel I did write, though I’m not sure anyone else would conclude that it’s about looking for God–I’m just starting to believe that everything is basically that) and probably changing a couple other ones, and got Philip K. Dick.

    Vonnegut’s a better writer and probably a better guy than PKD was, but there’s something about that top bunch of PKD novels (The Man in the High Castle, A Scanner Darkly, Flow My Tears, Radio Free Albemuth) that I totally love.

  • Describing Cheney as a half-glass full sounds about right provided Bush was referring to the top half.

  • William Gibson. Great. Other than Neuromancer, I get to be some dead Catholic martyr-type guy who later invents a sci-fi genre worshipped by a bunch of people with enough body-piercings to qualify the whole lot of them as a collection of government surplus swiss cheese….

  • Cheney is a “glass-half full kind of guy.”

    More like a:
    “wallet-half full kind of guy”
    “brain-half working kind of guy”
    “heart-half black kind of guy”

    But on Iraq :
    “glass-half full of Kool Aid kind of guy”. To hear him talk about Iraq it’s like a little piece of heaven.

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