Great Britain has spoken, and they don't want Michael Savage in their country. I wish we didn't have to put up with him here, either. His complaints are amusing, coming from someone whose slogan is Border, Language, Culture, or as a friend of mine put it, "Keep the wetbacks out of my country, keep their language out of my ears, and tell them to eat a fucking cheeseburger." I guess in his world, a sovereign nation is only allowed to keep people out if they aren't white.

That he's mentioned in some of the articles on this story merely as a "conservative commentator" highlights once again the utter failure of Objectivity in journalism. That the same phrase be equally applicable to the likes of WIlliam F Buckley and the man who said this

...when you bring immigrants in from Europe -- whether they be Irish, whether they be Italian, whether they be English, whether they be Romanian, whether they be Czechoslovakian, whether they be Yugoslavian, whether they be German -- they're from Europe, and there is a melting pot possibility...When you start bringing in masses of immigrants from everywhere on Earth, you don't have a melting pot; they cannot be melted into an American, and that's what's going on in the country today. We're bringing in millions of people from countries that have no compatibility with the values of Europe, not any values whatsoever. And I will argue with you as long as you want on this, if you want. There was no history of the liberation of people in China for example, to choose one nation, there was no Magna Carta, there was no evolution. There's been no Middle Ages for the Muslims coming into America.

If you're the sort of person who gets a hard-on every time you hear phrases like "Fair and Balanced," or "No Bias, No Bull," referring to him as a lipstick-smeared white supremacist is out of the question. But if you're in the business of Truth, calling him anything less severe is a filthy fucking LIE. That we've come to hail these liars as moderates, and praise them for their sober commentary is a scandal. By not referring to Savage as what he is, they are implicitly defending his racism and xenophobia. By not calling our politicians liars when they pollute the public discourse with utter bullshit, they are short-selling the Truth.

Fuck this shit.

For the record, as a matter of practice I disagree with the tactic being used here. Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to speak before Columbia University despite being easily worse an offender than Savage in terms of hate speech. And he was laughed off the stage. Fred Phelps tours the country with his God Hates Fags crowd, and by so doing shines a spotlight on an ugly and hateful side of our body politic. Silencing the hater turns him into a martyr in the eyes of his followers. Letting him speak shows the world that he is a fool.

But Great Britain was right to put him under the same heading as the others. The Klansmen, the extremists, the hatemongers. He is Scum, and we shouldn't be afraid to say it.

I'm checking out Coveritlive for possible use in a future project. As an experiment, I'll be liveblogging today's White House press briefing.




Well, that was a fun exercise. I might do this again for the President's prime time press conference on the 29th, if anyone reading this is the sort of person who watches TV with a laptop by their side.

All in all, I was struck by Gibbs' shift in tone in terms of prosecution of torture. He didn't once say that the focus was on moving forward. He did mention a preference for reflection over retribution, but it was rather muted in comparison. It seems to be inevitable now with the release of the torture memos and the growing suspicion that the purpose of these torture programs was not to protect the country against terror but rather to advance the claim that there was an operational link between Saddam Hussein and Al-Queda that there will be legal proceedings on this matter. The dialogue has morphed from a question as to whether Yoo, Bybee, and their ilk will be prosecuted to a question of whether or not it could move so far up the line as to hit Rice, Rumsfeld, Cheney, and even Bush. The Obama administration has now committed to leaving this matter in the hands of Justice, where it belongs. All eyes are now on Eric Holder.

These are exciting times for those of us who wish we could, as a nation, call a mulligan on Gerald Ford's pardon of Richard Nixon. Gibbs left the podium in a hurry after that was brought up, and for good reason. The office of the Presidency is defined both by the Constitution and by precedent, and in pardoning Nixon, Ford set a rather dangerous precedent but an enduring one. That once a President leave office, he's effectively free from culpability in any legal sense for his actions as President. Hunter S Thompson claimed that this act haunted Ford for the rest of his life. That he was a man who believed strongly in Heaven and Hell and that he knew which direction he'd be headed, because he'd pardoned Nixon. What's known from his posthumously released musings is that he was no supporter of the Bush administration and were he alive today to hear this debate-- which in any other context would be absurd-- as to whether or not to bring charges against people who have clearly broken the law would likely have been agonizing for him, given his role in framing the issue. But despite any misgivings he may have had personally about it, his precedent stands unbroken. It's a line in the sand that anyone in Washington is going to be careful about even discussing, let alone crossing.

As for the other theme here, the credit card issue, it's going to be interesting to see how this plays out. We're at a place right now where the banks have almost zero political capital, and are going to need to be co-operative with the government, in many instances, to ensure their basic survival. We are not going to see any significant preventative lobbying effort here. In fact, Barney Frank said on Maddow last night that after getting a letter from a constituent who'd been denied a credit card because she lived in a "problem neighborhood," he was able to get the restriction dropped with a phone call to that particular bank's lobbyist.

I for one welcome this new brand of lobbying. It also makes me a little more comfortable with the things I learned during the campaign about Obama's relationship with lobbyists.

But the real question here is how to ensure that these measures, whatever they end up being don't ever go the way of the Glass-Steagel Act, and I don't think there's a good answer available right now. For the moment I would be content to see some significant movement in creating a Credit Consumer's Bill of Rights that provides some real protection, including hopefully an end to the tactic of offering 0% interest specifically to people who have bad credit, only to balloon it to 30% once a single payment is missed, as well as an evisceration of those payday loan agencies. Loan sharking used to be illegal in this country. Nowadays all you need is a license.

Significant for Gibbs is that his tie (a sort of bright pink with an ugly speckled pattern that REALLY wasn't showing up well on camera) was the most embarrasing thing about today's briefing, and while I do appreciate the man, that isn't always the case.

Facts are stubborn things.

For instance, it's a fact that with proper condom use, pregnancy or transmission of HIV (even assuming that the person in question is HIV positive) in a single instance of intercourse is a statistical anomaly. Over a year the failure rate with proper use is 2%.

Condoms are a pretty fucking important invention. They are, in fact the answer to the question "what was the best thing to come before sliced bread?" Their utility in preventing pregnancy and the spread of STDs has been a matter of public record since the sixteenth century, when precursors to the condom made of chemical-treated linens and affixed with ribbon were discovered to be the best defence against syphilis.

So why are has our society been so fucking ambiguous about them? When I was in school, the failure rate of condom use over a one-year period was cited as 15%

This figure is, you may notice, in conflict with the one I cited at the beginning. It doesn't assume correct use, nor does it assume use upon every sexual encounter.

Let me repeat that: The figure for condom failure rate cited to demonstrate to kids that condoms don't always work? Includes pregnancies caused by non-use of condoms as instances of failure. As it happens, this is what was taught to me when I was in school, and I wasn't the recipient of abstinence-only (sic) sex ed. I mention this because we were taught how to make use of them. Not everyone is.

The fifteen percent number is used egregiously by the people who support abstinence-only indoctrination (as it will be henceforth called in this space and all others over which I have editorial control). Their tactics make this statistic self-sustaining. It's been demonstrated that the recipients of abstinence-only indoctrination make less frequent use of condoms, and simple logic would have it that those not taught how to use condoms will be less likely to know how to use them. Both of these are factors incorporated into the statistic, making its citation an argument against sex ed an exercise in circular logic.

Schools and politicians and religious organizations are being consciously misleading about condoms.

Two recent news items highlight what has come of it all.

The teen birth rate rose for the second year in a row in 2007. Condom use has fallen concurrently. The numbers during the presidential administrations of Ronald Reagan and Bush the First saw a more pronounced increase. Under Clinton, there was a marked decline in teen pregnancy.

There is a pattern here.

Meanwhile, the Pope is in Africa claiming that he doesn't see condoms as a solution for AIDS. In fact, he says that they aggravate the problems

Really?

REALLY‽

There is no room for equivocation here. A rational human being, when seeking advice in regards to sexual practice, does not look to the an eighty year old man who has never had sex in his life. A rational human being does not take seriously the opinions (vis a vis sex, or in fact anything at all) of a man who as a Cardinal decried the media for reporting on the child abuse scandal in the church. Especially given that he probably had a hand in the Vatican's policy of shuffling abusive priests from parish to parish.

Nor does a rational human being continue social policy that has been demonstrated to be ineffective.

Hopefully, we may one day soon be able to honestly call ourselves a country of rational people.

Hopefully.

Our President is due to announce whether or not he'll be continuing the Bush policy of denying federal money to the schools with the gall to educate their students on matters of health and safety.

It shouldn't be a tough call.

Jon Stewart is a man who doesn't fuck around.

Ok, that's not exactly true. He fucks around a lot. He's famous for it. Most days out of the year, he's mostly comedian, with a scant trace of journalist. And he's serious about comedy, no doubts, but he clearly has a lot of fun at his job and had a lot of fun in particular at the expense of one Jim Cramer.

And Cramer is an easy target. There's a reason why, of all of the financial news guys at CNBC, he was the one who they got to do a cameo in Iron Man upbraiding Tony Stark for what his decision to get out of the weapons game means for his shareholders. For the record? I enjoy Cramer's show immensely. But I don't ride any of my fucking money on his advice. His reporting style is a cross between that of Stewart's typical fare, and that of drive-time radio. He's a clown. And to his credit, he personally recognizes that. But not everyone who watches him does. CNBC certainly doesn't. And while he's not the one saying "In Cramer We Trust," I've yet to hear him complain. And it takes a special kind of ego to not be discomfited by that kind of messianic promotion. Personally, I have a fairly significant ego and nonetheless don't take praise very well.

But this isn't about Jim Cramer. It's not even about CNBC, who have a lot of people who did a lot of bad reporting leading up to the financial crisis. This is about journalism. This is about the responsibility that comes with access to movers and shakers; with the protection against being forced to reveal sources; with the podium and the audience and the respect and the paychecks. And Jim Cramer clearly came into the room thinking that this would end with him getting scuffed up, but in the end be a PR win, because Jon Stewart is bigger than him and in TV, eyeballs trickle down.

It didn't take long for him to know what he had really gotten himself into though.











Ana Marie Cox, who I have been following religiously on twitter and her Air America audioblog, had this to say.




This is, as Andrew Sullivan (hulu video of the broadcast can be found there, but above I've embedded the uncut interview, in case you haven't played it yet) noted, a "real cultural moment. It was a storming of the Bastille"

Specifically, it could be referred to as two sequels.

Before it aired, people were already drawing comparisons to the spate he had with Tucker Carlson and Paul Begala. And it is. I would submit that this time he did a far better job this time than he did last time. And last time, Paul and Tucker lost their jobs.

But this became something else. This became Part 2 of a day of reckoning for mass media. This financial disaster is for the business press what the Iraq War was for the rest of it


Our mainstream media has been fucking us since the nineties and has only recently started to come around.

...

Ok, I'm not going to rephrase that sentence, but I am going to say the implication there was something that only came after I read that line aloud to myself.

It started with the Lewinski scandal. Keith Olbermann, one of my heroes as a political commentator, quit his job at MSNBC because his job had become all Monica, all the time, while his producers were making him turn away experts who wanted DESPARATELY to go on the air and talk about Islamic terror groups. It also rendered it politically impossible to go after Bush for his actual abuses of power. They fucked us again when they bought into and re-sold the idea that Al Gore and George W Bush were interchangeable as candidates. To be fair, Al Gore had a non-trivial hand in the country's failure to see the distinction (even though I was quite able to recognize it at the time-- I was 14), but the story that America was desperate for a third option, whether it be Nader or McCain, both of whom have since showed themselves to be utter fuckwits at best and consciously nihilistic in terms of the public good at worst.

And then came the Bush presidency. At a time when everyone in the country was tuning in to watch the news after 9/11, the press at large was openly sycophantic to the Bushies and as a result, so was the public. A friend of mine lost his public speaking contests in high school not because he was a poor speaker or speechwriter, because he dared speak ill of the Patriot Act. Bill Mahr lost his job for making a politically incorrect statement on a show called Politically Incorrect. When it came time to begin the saber-rattling in Iraq, the media consciously failed to report on clear signs that the whole thing was bogus. They didn't think that We, the People would look favorably upon them if they told us the truth, so they didn't look for it. And while this was going on, the right wing dittoheads were still referring to the MSM as the "liberal media," to which they responded by allowing themselves to be further cowed.

On the financial side, well, does anyone remember watching financial news in the 90s? I sure as fuck do.

When I was a kid, my grandfather bought me three hundred dollars' worth of stock in AT&T. To help teach me the value of a dollar. I started to pay attention when my mother started having me sign the 20 and 30 cent dividend checks that they mailed me quarterly, and I saw the numbers on them increasing, eventually peaking at 3.3o.

From that point on my perusal of the newspaper moved from simply comics and sports to include the Business section, and occasionally the national section. I also watched the financial news on TV. As I watched my stock grow from the three hundred dollars to four thousand and beyond, splitting, spinning off, redoubling all the way, The TV was having me believe that there was no end in sight. For a long while I believed it. So did a lot of people.

Recognizing at a point that my gains were on paper only, and that by the very nature of the beast one needed to sell in order to make actual profit, I wondered to myself when, exactly, the time would come for me to cash in. I was told that AT&T was reliable. That I likely wouldn't have to until the time came when I needed the money for college, or a house, or a car.

But I was following the ebb and flow of the stock market every day. Not only AT&T and its spun-off companies, but also its competitors, and related stocks in the tech sector and elsewhere. I didn't have a nuanced or comprehensive knowledge of the markets, but I did have a highly developed sense of pattern recognition. And what I saw was that it was past its peak.

Which isn't at all what the networks were saying. And it was and is in their financial interest not to. The advertising on financial networks comes from brokerage services, who make their dollars on the premise that, as Stewart noted, that you can get rich without actually doing anything. This was always the case. But with the castration of regulatory bodies as overseen by Phil Gramm in the second half of the Clinton years, there was no one left guarding the henhouse but the fox. Which isn't to say Fox Business Channel, which has only come out of this unscathed because of its utter lack of relevance.

While the press at large were having their mea culpa moments about Iraq, the same fuckery that had always been going on in the financial news continued. As was illustrated by Stewart, people like Cramer knew what was going on, because they'd been on the inside. And yet they still didn't do the diligence when they sat down with their former employers (and then sponsors) to interview for stories, when they were abundantly aware that there was a motive for and a culture of foul play in the marketplace.

But now, this journalistic practice-- inept at its best and malignant at its worst-- can't help but be noticed. And Jon Stewart just fired the first notable salvo. This is, as it stands, the mark to beat in terms of confrontational interviews by journalists in 2009. It is the wit and outrage of an expert comedian put towards its best possible ends

Who's up next?

I need to warn you all that reading the following may have a palpable negative effect on your overall health

Because I have just learned that in few points in my life-- and I'm sure that this applies to most if not all of you as well-- am I more than about five minutes away from freshly made chocolate cake.

I know! Crazy! But true!

Here is the recipe that's been bouncing around the net

4Tbs cake flour
4Tbs sugar
2Tbs cocoa powder
3Tbs oil
1 egg
3Tbs Milk
3Tbs chocolate chips
splash vanilla extract

as for the method, you pretty much mix the ingredients in order in a coffee mug, with an eye on making sure that the powdery things are well-mixed before you add anything wet. Then cook for 5 minutes on high in a microwave.

I, however, have some notes on this recipe

For one, the chocolate chips were added by someone who was likely scandalized that the original recipe didn't use actual chocolate.

Dude, I agree.

I'm with you.

You haven't made a chocolate cake if you didn't use chocolate in the process. But you didn't go about this the right way.

Taken as read, the chocolate chips don't properly disperse themselves in the mixture. My fix messes with the simplicity of the whole deal, but I'm fairly ok with that.

mix the powder ingredients in a separate bowl. While you are doing so, have the chocolate chips in the mug in a pan filled halfway up the mug in water. Bring the water to a boil and keep the heat on until the chips are melted. add the powder, then the egg, then the oil, then the vanilla, mix and cook.

If you're lacking chocolate chips, chocolate syrup can also be used instead.

Also, it should be noted that any hot chocolate mix that you add milk to (I am specifically not referring to SwisMiss or any of its equivalents here) can work in place of the cocoa powder and sugar. I've personally used Ghirardelli chocolate mocha mix to delicious result.

You might find that the resultant cake needs a little bit of help. Such is often the downfall of many things that you throw together in under ten minutes. However, there are solutions. A scoop of ice cream goes extremely well, as does whipped cream and fruit. Peppermint schnapps works as well. I'm relatively sure that Kaluha, Baliey's, or a splash of whiskey would also punch it up, but I have yet to test these variables. Surprisingly, it went quite well with the salty dogs that my friend and I made out of fresh grapefruit and Beefeater.

In any case, if you ever thought to yourself, "It's too bad I can't have chocolate cake right now," know that you were WRONG.

Watchmen could have been a travesty. Like I have for every single film I've seen based on a classic work I love, I walked into the theater prepared-- even expecting-- to be let down

I wasn't.

It managed to be an extremely faithful adaptation of one of the greatest and most significant graphic novels in the history of the medium, despite the fact that it would be absolutely impossible to capture all of it. Much of the pages upon pages of backstory that even Alan Moore couldn't script out when he wrote the book were masterfully compressed into the title credits, set to Dylan's The Times They Are a Changin'. It shares with its pulped dead tree predecessor the penchant for small details in the background that could easily be missed but which one who notices will appreciate.

There were some complaints about the sex scenes-- it seems because they weren't like sex scenes in other movies. I loved them. Awkward as hell, revealing of character, and tapping into the implicit sexualization of EVERY superhero's costume. And unlike most movies, they were perhaps a bit more familiar to anyone who has actually had sex.

The music was fantastic until the ending credits.

Fuck you, My Chemical Romance. Way to turn a timeless classic into something utterly indistinguishable from any other piece of shit that you've produced. The first person I hear refer to Desolation Row as your song will live to regret it.

Snyder managed to beautifully capture the brutality implicit in the novel that was never quite made visceral until now. Though for my taste he made use of far too much of the speed-up-then-slow-down shooting that worked quite well for 300, but here seemed to distract from the main premise of the work-- how the superman fits into the real world.

He also fell short in capturing the Comedian. It seemed like every other phrase that came out of the character's mouth was "It's all a joke." Absent, for instance, was perhaps the best line of his from the book: "Once you realize what a joke everything is, being the Comedian is the only thing that makes sense."

On the other hand, every other character was captured brilliantly, especially Rorscharch, whose every movement, gesture, and vocal cue fell exactly in line with how I imagined them to be from the static images in the book, with the caveat that his diction was made slightly more grammatically correct, which is a choice that I understand, though I disagree with it.

Dr. Manhattan was also quite well-done, and I'd been particularly worried about him. When reading the book, I heard a voice in my head whenever he spoke, but for the life of me I couldn't tell you what the voice was like. Billy Crudup's portrayal wasn't the voice I'd heard, but it may yet become it. A warning: If you watch the movie in a theater where you've been plagued by braindead loudmouths in the past, there WILL be people who can't get over the fact that the giant naked blue man has a penis.

Obviously, massive cuts had to be made, but they were handled in a way that made sense. It could be argued that it made better sense. Not wishing to spoil, I shall say this: It would have been impossible to include the backstory on the comics industry that thrived on pirate books (superhero books faded from the shelves, no longer being viable fantasy in a world inhabited by actual masked vigilantes) in the film. Zach Snyder managed to excise it without harming the plot points that hinged on it in a way that I found quite novel.

All in all, one of the better comic book adaptations. I would strongly recommend it. Though I'd suggest reading through the book beforehend.

Do it? Dan, I'm not a Republic serial villain. Do you seriously think I'd explain my master-stroke if there remained the slightest chance of you affecting its outcome? I did it thirty-five minutes ago.

There is going to be a movie called Pride and Predator.

No. Really. That is the actual name of an actual movie, and there is nothing misleading about the title. The central concept is "an alien invasion ensues in the middle of a Jane Austen novel."

The script had actually been kicking around Hollywood for some time. It gained traction due to success of pulped dead tree format Austen mashup Pride and Prejudice and Zombies, which is a reverse-engineering of the actual text. Austen is credited as "cowriter."

I, for one, welcome our new genre-subverting overlords.