Hide the Children

Holy crap. The horror. The horror.

If you were on the fence, this may tip you over — with a painful crash.

I first saw this over at Skippy's, who's been forced to reconsider his choice. Meanwhile, Blue Gal, who also had it, wrote, "Betcha can't watch the whooole thing. Click here. But I betcha. Even my friends who support...oh nevermind."



I don't think "hat tip" to either Skip or BG is appropriate in this case, since I can only assign blame. The same goes for me, because as Edmund Burke said, "All that is needed for the forces of evil to triumph is for enough good men to do nothing," and here I am, spreading a truly "viral" video like the flu that's been hitting Southern California. Feel free to fling your curses and rotten fruit at me, evil sod that I am — that is, if you can hit me after pulling out the salad forks you've plunged into your eyes.

(I'm having flashbacks to all those school performing arts shows I worked where I had to play rhythm police. Or then there were the annual parent shows, with many an entry that consisted of, as my very pale Irish Catholic colleague called them, a "bad white people dance.")

Look, folks, I know it may be a bit much to expect Sharon Jones and the Dap-Kings, but Springsteen and Mellencamp certainly rocked it out, and the "Up With People" comparisons I've been reading for this video are pretty damn apt.

To keep it in perspective, John McCain can't carry a tune in a bucket (and Blue Gal's to blame for that one, too! I ask you, BG, is this behavior Christian? How can I turn the other cheek without exposing another ear to this stuff, huh?)

As I commented at the other posts, at least the Dem national conventions don't need to pan over the same black guy over and over again (ah, I have such fond memories of watching those 80s conventions as a kid). The RNC is more likely to provide "a modern spiritual" of clueless, blinding whiteness like this:



Honestly, I don't think it's entirely fair to judge a candidate by his or her supporters' musical talent (or painful lack thereof). Still, via Sifu Tweety comes one more selection, for your consideration:



(Just sayin'.)

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Student Grills Karl Rove

Hat tip to Drew for sending me this Think Progress post, about a Choate student grilling Karl Rove on gay marriage. Here's a more extensive excerpt from the original article:

[Marla] Spivak, a senior from Hamden, was one of the students invited to have lunch earlier with Rove. That left her somewhat emboldened as she stood before the crowd and asked Rove to explain how giving gay people the right to marry would endanger other people.

Rove took issue with the way the first gay marriages came about, through the Massachusetts Supreme Court. An issue as important as the definition of marriage should be resolved by a legislature or a referendum, not a court, he said.

Gay couples could gain the legal rights of married couples through legislation without actually getting married, he said.

But wouldn't creating a separate body of legislation for gay people be creating a separate but equal system, a step back?, Spivak asked.

Rove replied with an answer about Mormons changing their views on marriage to conform with the nation's laws.

Spivak kept pressing. "You never actually answered, how does it threaten anyone?" she asked.

Rove asked, what's the compelling reason to throw out 5,000 years of understanding the institution of marriage as between a man and a woman?

What, Spivak countered, was the compelling reason for society to allow interracial relationships when they had once been outlawed.

Then Rove invoked the Declaration of Independence before Spivak interjected that its reference to "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" seemed to support her claims.

Their verbal pingpong match tapered off after Rove brought up polygamy and Spivak acknowledged that she did not know enough about polygamy to answer. Rove later asked when she planned to run for political office.

I'll give Rove credit for two things — praising the importance of studying Shakespeare, even for non-English majors a bit later, and recommending The Looming Tower. However, he ducked Spivak's question, and brought up polygamy, a slippery slope argument, to derail her. Spivak did well, but she was going up against a pretty slick hack who was able to escape with a classic logical fallacy and some other tricks. Realistically, it's doubtful he would have answered honestly. Still, just imagine if the media always pressed political figures like this. Some do, but many are content to be suck-ups and apologists for even the most authoritarian, dangerous BS.

Rove's stepfather was gay, and he was quite close with him by most accounts. It appears he even lied to the Choate students when he claimed he didn't know whether his stepfather had been gay or not, since that contradicts several public accounts of his contact with gay friends of his stepfather after his stepfather's death. In any case, his stepfather's sexuality didn't stop Rove from using a 2004 campaign strategy that depended in large part on exploiting homophobia (Al Franken sharply called the campaign "Fear, Smears, and Queers"). Rove's approach was very similar to Reagan's consistent race-baiting, even if Reagan was rather clever about it, using code words like "welfare queens." There are apologists who maddeningly claim that Reagan wasn't personally racist (I don't know if you caught the NYT editorials back and forth on this). Perhaps Reagan wasn't, although I'm not convinced — he certainly seemed both ignorant and biased, and just because that was the social norm for his crowd doesn't mean they weren't bigoted, even if Reagan was no David Duke. In Rove's case, I'd imagine he's not personally a raging homophobe. But really, who cares? Does it really matter if Rove or Reagan weren't personally bigoted when they pressed bigoted policies and exploited bigotry? Why should they get any points for that? Isn't that even worse? A Klansman is a bigoted scumbag, but at least one knows where he stands, and most of society will condemn him. But Reagan and Rove are somehow respectable because when they did something they knew if wrong, their hearts supposedly weren't in it? Aww, poor dears! Realistically, such disingenuousness is common to politics, but especially since we're talking about demonizing an entire group of people, if we're talking ethics, that's clearly wrong, or even evil.

But back to Ms. Spivak. Her conduct was fantastic. This is why I loved working with teenagers, who are consistently undersold by adults, the press, and much of our society. Yes, there's plenty of immaturity and self-absorption in the demographic as a whole, but there's also some really sharp, well-informed, conscientious young adults out there. (I certainly remember a hell of a lot of condescension when I was that age.) This election season has seen a record youth turnout, including teenagers of 17 who will be 18 in the fall coming out to vote in the primaries. That's profoundly exciting. Meanwhile, adults have been complaining about how horrible the kids are today are and how they won't listen since at least Socrates' time. Those periodic, stock pieces slamming the wastrel youth of today always lack insight, and are partially to completely full of crap. I'm not saying the young don't have a great deal to learn about the world and life, and wise mentors are always welcome, but at their best, young people have great bullshit detectors and try to keep the older, complacent and corrupt folks honest.

So good for Marla Spivak, who as a senior should be voting this fall with many others her age for the first time in a national election. (I hope it's as exciting and successful as my first voting experience was.) Welcome aboard, and keep up the good work!

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Eclectic Jukebox 2/14/08

In, um, honor of Valentine's Day, here's a super-sized, three track edition.



Ben Folds Five — "Song for the Dumped"

We'll kick if off with one fiery breakup song!



The Bird and the Bee — "Fcking Boyfriend" (live)

Really, what sensitive (available) gent could deny the charming Miss Inara George here? (Here's the studio version, for comparison.)



Marvin Gaye — "Let's Get It On" (live)

We'll close with the master. (Here's the studio version, and here's another live version, this one with a prominent horn section.) As Harlan Ellison once quipped, "Love ain't nothing but sex misspelled."

If you want more, NPR has both more anti-Valentine's Day songs and a bunch of other stories for you more touchy-feely saps. Ehh, whatever.

Valentine's Day (The Death of True Love)

I detest cheap sentiment.

— Margo Channing (Bette Davis) in All About Eve

Ever since I found out in 6th grade that Valentine's Day was largely invented by a greeting card company, I've thought it was complete bullshit, because, well, it is. I mean, Kwanzaa is invented too, and its critics have some good points, but at least it's about honoring your ancestors and stuff. Valentine's Day is about buying a bunch of crap. Red, white and pink crap. But mostly pink. I mean, for chrissake, there are gay rallies in the Castro with less goddam pink.

Sure, I'm a misanthropic bastard, curmudgeony beyond my increasingly untender years. But deep down in your he- *gack* blood-pumper, you know I'm goddam right.

Yeah, sure, buying a goddam Hallmark card is a sign of love, just like wearing a flag lapel pin means you're a goddam patriot, and wearing a cross makes you a Christian, and being a think tank "scholar" means you're a fucking genius like Mike O'Hanlon or Doug Feith or Dinesh D'Souza, and being George W. Bush means you're actually running the country versus Dick "Richelieu" Cheney and you're touched by the great God almighty and as infallible as bejeezus himself and just all-around, goddam fucking brilliant.

(At least the Japanese Festival of the Steel Phallus encourages costumes, dancing and has a myth behind it.)

Just to be clear, I have nothing against twue wove. Nor against True Romance. (Although I'm not a fan of Patricia Arquette.) I rather admire the real thing. But honestly, do you think Hallmark, Madison Avenue and most of Hollywood are going to teach you anything about love? Do you think their cloying, materialistic bullshit with a soft filter close-up on a big hair chick with Celine Dion screeching away in the background brings you anywhere except one step closer to Hell?

The Wiki entry on Valentine's Day reports that the Greeting Card Association, not content with the evil it already sows, has since 2001 given out an "Esther Howland Award for a Greeting Card Visionary." No offense to Ms. Esther Howland, but there are no goddam "visionaries" in the greeting card business. If Joan of Arc were alive today, I'm pretty sure she wouldn't be spending her time designing fucking greeting cards. It's almost as ridiculous as fashion industry wankers sporadically pretending they're doing the Lord's Own Work, which normally entails them talking about how awful things are in the world, and how they give people a much needed distraction, because heaven knows we're all not shallow enough and shouldn't bother our pretty, coiffed little heads over genocide in Darfur. Don't think about Iraq and feel bad — watch this skinny blonde in an ugly trash bag of a frock designed by a heroin-addicted misogynist and feel bad for not being anorexic instead, you damn fatty.

Because it's all about image, kids. I'm still gobsmacked by how many people I run into who really, truly buy into this sappy, saccharine, unrealistic view of love. That includes people who really should know better — although if they're the type terrified to be uncoupled for longer than two weeks, it's a not a big goddam surprise if they're addicted to bad luv and 'but slenderly know themselves.'

I wonder how many couples have broken up over the years just because of all of society's bullshit pressure over an impending Valentine's Day. I'll bet the number over the past thirty years exceeds the number of people who think well of Dick Cheney today. (Speaking of bad heart trouble, and Cheney valentines.)

Sigh. Well, in any case, here's a valuable piece of advice from Gene Weingarten's chat this week, for a few of the gents out there:

Boston, Mass.: Gene - I have a question which I believe only you are qualified to answer. My girlfriend is telling me "I don't want anything for Valentine's Day." Does that mean I REALLY don't have to get her anything? Or does it actually mean "I'm going to say I don't want anything, but if he doesn't do something, he's a big fat pig?"

Women are so confusing. I stand by your word - if you tell me not to do anything, and I get dumped, it'll be all your fault.

Gene Weingarten: Do something, moron.

Were you born yesterday?

Weingarten's right, here. There are exceptions. But generally speaking, gents, if a woman tells you Valentine's Day doesn't matter to her, or that she doesn't want anything, she is lying. Even if she swears it on a stack of Bibles or flag lapel pins or Dick Cheney's pacemaker, she's lying. She may be lying to herself also about how much it means to her, but that factor will be irrelevant in the carnage to follow. And even if she's not (since again, there are some exceptions out there), you'd best play it like Pascal's Wager on this one.

(I don't know to what degree gay and lesbian couples ignore all this bullshit, but if they do, it's one more reason to legalize gay marriage posthaste.)

There's a saying that a second marriage is the triumph of hope over experience. Or there's what Pete (Paul Rudd) says in Knocked Up: "Marriage is like a tense, unfunny version of Everybody Loves Raymond, only it doesn't last 22 minutes. It lasts forever." Hey, I can keep dishing 'em out. Sure, I've got some touching, inspirational, romantic prose I could quote to ya. But why string you along?

Oh, all right. Here's something.

Much Ado about Nothing is probably my favorite Shakespeare comedy. It's got all the wit of Taming of the Shew with much less sexism. (Keep in mind that "nothing" was pronounced "noting" in Elizabethan England and the play's about misperceptions, and that "nothing" was also slang for female genitalia, and you've got a triple entendre). Here's the great wisdom of the play.

Shakespeare presents us with a pair of young lovers, Claudio and Hero, for whom it's love at first sight, who swoon, get jealous and spout flowery sentiments about love. They're supposedly our ideal.


(And let's face it, if they're pretty like Kate Beckinsale and Robert Sean Leonard, a little swooning is understandable.)

But Shakespeare also gives us Benedick and Beatrice, an older couple with the wit, banter and sexual tension of a screwball comedy. They constantly undercut the sappiness of Claudio and Hero. And they're just much more fun to watch.


(Not that Emma Thompson or Kenneth Branagh are hard to look at, either.)

So Shakespeare gives us what we think we want, but also what we really want. Add in a few brilliantly written comedy scenes, and that's true genius.

Shakespeare also pokes gentle fun at all the characters, most of all the proud Benedick and Beatrice, but laughs with rather than at them. He wryly mocks their vanities, but ultimately celebrates their foibles. As in The Marriage of Figaro (or even Cosi Fan Tutti, or The Master and Margarita, Crime and Punishment and Gawain and the Green Knight, for that matter), it's a very forgiving, wise work.

So if you must celebrate Valentine's Day, keep that in mind.

You can also do it in a slightly subversive, sincere style, like Gene Weingarten, who adores his wife:

I like any day that affords us another chance to buy presents for our women. Because our women are SO grateful for SO minor a fact. Because they are SO certain we will forget. Yes, it was invented by the chocolate and florist industry, which is why I never gives chocolates and flowers for Valentine's Day.

So that's one route. If you're going the film-and-cooking-dinner route, I'd keep in mind that with the exception of a few films like Casablanca, Hollywood doesn't do romance that well — or at least, treat love honestly. Maybe watch Annie Hall, Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind, possibly the B story in Knocked Up, maybe even There's Something About Mary, The Fisher King, The Apartment or The Graduate. And for god's sake, see Scenes From a Marriage before you stop shacking up together, living in sin, and finally get married, you filthy heathens. But if you need a more romantic flick, there's Sense and Sensibilty with the aforementioned Ms. Thompson (plus the divine Kate Winslet), the Colin Firth-Jennifer Ehle miniseries of Pride and Prejudice, and A Room with a View. Hell, there's even Mann's Last of the Mohicans and Rob Roy if you want some action and drama with a dash of period romance. There's Much Ado... and other good Shakespeare films, of course. But you may do still better with the 1990 Rappeneau-Depardieu version of Cyrano, Amélie or The Princess Bride.

So take that, Hallmark. Beyond the reach of you and your bourgeois, unimaginative compulsion to reduce everything truly beautiful, wild, erotic, wonderful, spiritual, passionate, and transcendent to some trite little homily or cliché you can comfortably handle lies the real thing.

Of course, Shakespeare said it all better, many times, and in many ways. But that's why he was Shakespeare.

And if he were alive today, the Immortal Bard wouldn't be writing fucking greeting cards, either.

Petition the House on Telecom Amnesty

I don't know about anyone else, but the Senate vote to grant telecoms immunity today is the most depressing vote I've seen since the Military Commissions Act of 2006 stripping habeas corpus, and before that, the Authorization for Use of Military Force against Iraq in 2002. Not that any of them were terribly surprising, and it's probably a good thing to still have the capacity to feel disgusted, but none of that changes how repulsive such an immoral, unnecessary and unconstitutional act this was.

Wouldn't it be nice to know who Cheney was spying on?

Glenn Greenwald has his characteristic comprehensive rundown, and I'm sure will continue to follow this. Two key quotations:

Isn't that the very definition of a police state: that companies should do whatever the government asks, even if they know it's illegal?

— Dan Froomkin

While one can't discount legalized bribery campaign dollars entirely, I do think too often we assume they're the reason lawmakers do the "wrong thing" when the simpler explanation that they believe the wrong thing is in fact the right thing is the answer.

Too many Democrats simply don't have the values we imagine they do, and it lets them off the hook too much to assume they're simply craven people who need to get re-elected instead of bad people who don't share our values.

— Atrios

They're not all gutless. Some are just scoundrels.

That's why it's all the more essential to Petition the House to Stand Firm Behind the RESTORE Act, the House's far superior version of the same bill.

The authoritarians conjure spectres of evil terrorists, but the real horror is Cheney's wet dream: an unaccountable, Orwellian police state of proven malice.

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

The Unrelenting Tapper

(Ace ABC reporter Jake Tapper, hot on a lead.)

While I nodded, nearly napping, suddenly there came a tapping,
As of someone gently rapping, rapping at my chamber door.
" 'Tis some visitor," I muttered, "tapping at my chamber door;
Only this, and nothing more."

Poe's "The Raven."

What the MSM lacks in accuracy, it makes up for in persistence.

You may have caught Jake Tapper's atrocious rewriting of Bill Clinton not long ago. Sadly, No! has the best write-up I've seen, and I'd recommend reading it first, but I'll provide a basic recap. Tapper's headline was "What Did Bill Clinton Mean By "We Just Have to Slow Down Our Economy" to Fight Global Warming?" Tapper wrote:

In a long, and interesting speech, [Bill Clinton] characterized what the U.S. and other industrialized nations need to do to combat global warming this way: “We just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.” At a time that the nation is worried about a recession is that really the characterization his wife would want him making? “Slow down our economy”? I don’t really think there’s much debate that, at least initially, a full commitment to reduce greenhouse gases would slow down the economy….So was this a moment of candor?

Well, actually, there's plenty of argument that going "green" would help the economy, even in the short term (Seattle's prospered by adopting Kyoto protocols), but Jake's pretty content to run with the Republican line. Still, the "slow down our economy" was obviously the real eye-grabber of Tapper's piece. Meanwhile, here's what Clinton actually said (emphasis added):

“Everybody knows that global warming is real,” Mr. Clinton said, giving a shout-out to Al Gore’s Nobel Peace Prize, “but we cannot solve it alone.”

“And maybe America, and Europe, and Japan, and Canada — the rich counties — would say, ‘OK, we just have to slow down our economy and cut back our greenhouse gas emissions ’cause we have to save the planet for our grandchildren.’ We could do that.

“But if we did that, you know as well as I do, China and India and Indonesia and Vietnam and Mexico and Brazil and the Ukraine, and all the other countries will never agree to stay poor to save the planet for our grandchildren. The only way we can do this is if we get back in the world’s fight against global warming and prove it is good economics that we will create more jobs to build a sustainable economy that saves the planet for our children and grandchildren. It is the only way it will work.

That's really bad journalism by Tapper, who's a "Senior National Correspondent" for ABC. He claimed Clinton said the opposite of what he actually said.

What's worse is that Tapper then offered an astonishing lame, defensive response when the Clinton campaign and several bloggers contacted him, when he should have just owned up to his gaffe, apologized and corrected the record. Here's that apology (and yet again, here's the Sadly, No! post critiquing Tapper).

Hilzoy provided a great dissection of Tapper, with a fun contest to invent one's own Tapper Rules™. But the bigger problem with this whole debacle is that it didn't stop. Greg Sargent noted that ABC kept up Tapper's original, false headline. Steve Benen observed that even some right-wing bloggers were defending Clinton on this one — while the RNC and TownHall.com spread the lie (as did a conservative "comedy" video — watch it at your own risk).

It didn't stop there. Crooks and Liars reported that Drudge and Limbaugh ran with it. Greg Sargent noted that a Philadelphia newspaper picked it up, as well as Investor's Business Daily.

Nor did Tapper stop. He also wrote about Obama (falsely) being the most liberal Senator (at least he could point to an article there, although he didn't bother to verify it, not that there's anything wrong with being liberal). Tapper has also since written about Obama supporters being a cult, and he had to update that one, too.

Still, perhaps my favorite aspect of this story is New York Times' Andrew Revkin blaming bloggers for all the hoopla — but why let those pesky facts get in the way of scolding the rabble? It fits perfectly with ABC deleting comments to Tapper's "correction," such as the one I left:

Boy, really impressive. You took a line out of context to suggest that Bill Clinton advocated a policy he clearly opposes. I have to agree with Gromit's comment above, and this take:

http://www.sadlyno.com/archives/8637.html

Mr. Tapper, this was simply horrible reporting. Why not own up to it, rather than pretending that people just didn't like your take? Why does the Clinton campaign need to "explain" a statement when you could have simply read it, rather than plucking a single sentence out of context? It really wasn't "confusing." Your lame defensiveness also isn't becoming of a professional journalist, let alone a "senior" national correspondent. As Moynihan said many times, everyone is entitled to their own opinion, but not their own facts. I would hope that ABC as a whole has higher standards than you apparently do. Of course, you still could issue a correction. I await with bated breath to see whether journalistic integrity or personal vanity holds more sway with you.

Now, that's pretty biting (or snotty), but it also raised serious issues, and I'd say (snottily) that Tapper's update was itself pretty insulting. ABC had no commenting policy that I could find (I was wondering if including a link had been the problem). But the critical-but-polite comment by Gromit I referred to had been removed as well. "You're an idiot," was deemed acceptable, but several more detailed critiques were deleted. Tapper wrote in a new post that he wasn't responsible for any deleted comments, but couldn't say what the ABC commenting policy was, although he suspected "personal attacks and cursing" were off-limits. You can decide whether my comment qualified, but Obsidian Wings reader KinDC had two comments deleted, as did Mark D, who claimed his "totally, 100%, profane-free, legitimate comment... was deleted a DOZEN times." I believe them, since I can attest that most other ObWi readers are far more classy than I.

So, in summary, Jake Tapper is a lousy reporter, he loves loaded and misleading headlines (browse his blog for more examples), he doesn't have the honesty to make a simple correction, and he or someone at ABC deletes on-target criticism. Now that's classy.

As Bob Somerby's often written, in other professions, people are fired for this sort of malfeasance. As Hilzoy writes, the episode is:

...A sad illustration of the costs of social promotion: one Jake Tapper. Tapper ought to be failing his second grade Language Arts class for the thirty-fourth consecutive year, but thanks to the soft bigotry of low expectations, he ended up as ABC's Senior National Correspondent instead. If he had gotten out of school without the ability to do basic math and had ended up as a NASA engineer, his ignorance would harm people in direct and obvious ways. The fact that he's a journalist without basic reading comprehension skills means that the damage he can do is less obvious than a rocket flaming out in mid-descent. But it does not make that damage less real.

Brad at Sadly, No! hits on motive in his response to Tapper's lame "apology":

No, you should apologize for taking what was an absurdly clear statement and intentionally mucking it up just to draw the oh-so-coveted Drudge Report traffic to your page. You should also apologize for giving the Republicans yet another set of bogus “Al-Gore-said-he-invented-the-Internet!!!11!!1!” talking points to use against Democratic candidates, which you dutifully reprinted on your blog shortly after they were posted.

And Sargent drives the point home further:

Let's not kid ourselves here. We all -- Tapper included -- know how the freak show works. If that quote hadn't been torn out of context like that, there wouldn't have been any story -- and no link on Drudge, either.

Bingo. Tapper's job, after all, isn't accurate reporting. He's practicing hatchet job journalism to get traffic from Drudge and his ilk. At best, he's delivering a commercial product with flecks of real news in it.

Tapper will continue to pen such horror stories as long as he gets positive attention from his bosses and crap merchants for doing so. Ah, remember if you can, a professional media where reporters corrected such glaring mistakes, or else earned a stern reprimand, perhaps a demotion or loss of job. Dream of a country where the press focused on accuracy and substance versus spreading gossip that isn't even true. Imagine if you will such a world. It shall come — nevermore.


Still from The Raven (1963).

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Eclectic Jukebox 2/7/08

The Beatles discuss "Sexy Sadie"

With the recent death of Maharishi Mahesh Yogi, I couldn't help but think of the most famous (veiled) song about him, although some folks claim John's take was unfair. Here's more footage of the Beatles in India and a fan video of the full song. Michael Gerber has an interesting piece on how the Maharishi helped John to a certain (perhaps crucial) degree despite any animosity, and David Lynch is one of those mourning.

Tornado Aid

Blogger Monkeyfister lives in the area hit, is trying to get the word out and the donations flowing (thanks to Cernig of The Newshoggers for spreading the word).

Monkeyfister recommends:

American Red Cross
Mid-South Chapter
1400 Central Avenue
Memphis, TN 38104
901-726-1690

And:
United Way of the Mid-South phone in a donation at (901) 433-4300.

They take DIRECT donations, so you can skip all the National-level waste and delay, AND they serve nearly every community in the affected radius.

A large area was hit:


As the AP reports:

At least 55 people were killed and hundreds injured Tuesday and Wednesday by dozens of tornadoes that plowed across Mississippi, Arkansas, Tennessee, Kentucky and Alabama. It was the nation's deadliest barrage of twisters in almost 23 years.

"We had a beautiful neighborhood. Now it's hell," said Bonnie Brawner, 80...

The AP's slideshow is pretty harrowing.


Here's Monkeyfister's other key post:

Whilst we're waiting for George's Promised Prayers to roll in, down here in the Tornado-Stricken Mid-South, I might recommend some DIRECT HUMAN INTERACTION...

As Scout Prime is to NOLA, I am, suddenly, to the Mid-South area (I LIVE here, and was Live-Blogging these horrible storms all night), and have started to get the help-ball rolling down here. Some of you know where I work. I started a Food Drive there today for the Mid-South United Way Food Bank.

As the area affected is so broad and detached, and everyone in the Country was distracted by politics last night, as yet, there is no central assistance hub set-up. So, at the link, above, you'll find the two agencies with the broadest radius to help the area right now. Both take DIRECT donations.

A small-blog swarm on that post (or this comment) would be greatly appreciated by more people than just me. I can't describe how wide-spread the damage is down here. It's enormous. The Media, per usual, is only just now waking up to the situation, after their Super-Duper-Let's-All-Wet-Our-Pants-Together- Tuesday Political Hangover. Like NOLA, these are REALLY poor folks down here, and have nothing, and nowhere to go.

A short post about this at YOUR Blog, linking either to my post, above, or directly to the two Orgs mentioned in the post above, would sure be a big help, and would be greatly appreciated by many people who are relying on help. They are all that we have right now.

I just donated a deer's worth of ground venison, along with the 100 pounds of rice and quart-sized ziplock bags that they said that they needed at the United Way Mid-South Food Bank, when I phoned them this morning. Their pantry is BARE, and I'll be loading them up with all the potatoes, rice, veggies, bags, and other staples that I can fit in my truck tomorrow.

This is serious Red State country, and a flood of help from the DFH Left would REALLY make a big difference in a number of good ways.

I thank you all in advance...

Your humble peer,

Monkeyfister

Thanks.



(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Food Fight

Via Brave Sir Robin comes this short film by Stefan Nadelman. As Sir Robin writes:

This video is the history of modern war, (WWII to the present), with animated food representing the nations involved.

The Vietnam war sequence is wonderful, and the ending is fantastic.

Can you name all the countries (regions) and the dishes that are representing them?

This is very, very clever.

Very clever, often funny, sometimes a bit disturbing. Check it out:

AtomFilms.com: Funny Videos | Funny Cartoons | Comedy Central

(Cross-posted at The Blue Herald)

Eclectic Jukebox 2/5/08

Robert Plant and Alison Krauss – "Your Long Journey"

A fan video for what I think's the most gorgeous of the tunes on their new album together.

(This was my Club Blue pick subbing for Questiongirl a while back, but I'm a slacker getting it up here. Big surprise there.)