Hard News: Effectively Friday
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Meanwhile no WTF-age over Tom Daschle having to withdraw his nomination for Health and Human Services Secretary, over $140K unpaid taxes on a car and driver loaned to him by a big-ticket corporate donor?
Did anyone in the transition actually bother vetting Daschle's financial and tax records before his name was put forward?
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RevoLucian also created one of the better remixes of the infamous Bill O'Reilly nutting-off tape. You can find his YouTube stuff here.
So Gil Scott Heron was wrong.
It will not only be televised, it'll be you-tubed.
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And thanks for introducing me to Big Hollywood. I now need a big bottle of pain-killers and a big bucket of gin, followed by a big power-chunder. Am I the only person for whom the phrase 'culture war' -- i.e. nothing but nothing can exist without being strained through some ideological filter or other -- conjures the image of slithering out of slimy, poo-coloured mud as Christopher Lee rants away in the background? Degraded and degrading.
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I was thinking what a shame it was to have to hang on to Republican is the New Punk until Friday,
Not a new idea.
I can remember running an argument that Muldoon was a punk politician. OK, it was after several vodka lime and lemonades in the Whakatane Commercial Hotel's garden bar, back in '83, and, yeah, I never got round to actually writing the idea up, but still...
Oh, and several people have suggested Maggie Thatcher had a lot of the punk ethos.
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So Gil Scott Heron was wrong.
It will not only be televised, it'll be you-tubed.
As soon as they work out the copyright issues, yeah.
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Meanwhile no WTF-age over Tom Daschle
Damn, I read a really funny parody piece about Daschle and I can't find it now.
There's some Greenwaldage on it:
Due to traveling, I've been subjected to far more cable news over the last 24 hours than I typically endure in an entire month. The consensus regarding Tom Daschle seems to be that his withdrawal was necessitated due to (a) Obama's incessant nattering about ethical reform during the election; (b) the poor political imagery from having someone fail to pay his taxes on his chauffered car in a time of such economic turmoil; and (c) the unlucky confluence of similar scandals surrounding Obama nominees with tax problems.
The notion that Daschle would make a poor HHS Secretary because he has so hungrily fed on the legalized sleaze and corruption that drives Washington literally doesn't seem to occur to them
Hey, interesting times for your gal Olympia Snowe. She might buck the refusenik party line and vote for the stimulus package.
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Kung Fu Monkey had this to say about Big Hollywood a while back:
It's a crack pinata. It's a garden of crack pinatas, and I'm spinning and spinning -- half the site is triumphantly noting that Hollywood is finally making conservative or secretly conservative big budget mega-hits (Dark Knight! Iron Man! Transformers!) while the other half bemoans how Hollywood keeps making anti-war/anti-American movies mega-flops. Somehow the massive hits made by mega-corporations are happy subversive accidents, while flops are the direct product of these exact same mega-corporations' self-destructive liberal agendas.
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Jon Stewart on last night's Daily Show.
"I do want to say a quick word for anyone out there who wants to bring change and hope to a divided and suffering nation ... pay your fucking taxes."
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Mmm, I think I can use that.
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The Daily Show had a funny piece on Daschle the other night...but framed a good question; if the tax on the driver/car was $140K, how much was actually spent...was he being driven around in a Space Shuttle/KITT hybrid or something?
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Dang, just pipped by RB...
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Anyway, who fancies a "we won't buy music" day to try a send a message to the Legacy Media Companies that, well, they can just sod off with their primitive C20th business model.
I want to pay artists, not fat old white men sitting around pools in Vegas.
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the RevoLucian remix of the leaked Christian Bale nutting-off tape is awesome
Heh. My Facebook status update last night was something like 'Danielle just danced around the house to the Christian Bale freakout remix'.
'What don't you FUCKING understand... bleep blip bloop oonst...'
Breitbart wants to beat it at its own game by hiring some cool Hollywood right-wingers to write for his new site
This kinda reminds me of Thomas Frank's theory in The Conquest of Cool. That admen not only coopted 'coolness' from Teh Youth in the early 60s, but actually also created some of that coolness with their ads - it was a dialogue between the two parties, rather than an imposition from 'above'. ( Although in this case it seems that they'd prefer *not* to have a dialogue. Dialogues are for commies!)
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Matt Tabibi on Daschle, way back in December when his name was announced:
Obviously there has been some dire news on that front already. When Obama picked Tom Daschle to be the HHS Secretary, I nearly shit my pants. In Washington there are whores and there are whores, and then there is Tom Daschle. Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger. True, he is probably only the second-biggest whore for the health care industry in American politics — the biggest being doctor/cat-torturer Bill Frist, whose visit to South Dakota on behalf of John Thune in 2004 was one of the factors in ending Daschle's tenure in the Senate.
But in picking Daschle — who as an adviser to the K Street law firm Alston and Bird has spent the last four years burning up the sheets with the nation's fattest insurance and pharmaceutical interests — Obama is essentially announcing that he has no intention of seriously reforming the health care industry. . . .
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Oh, and several people have suggested Maggie Thatcher had a lot of the punk ethos.
I think you've got her confused with Vivienne Westwood, but you're in very good company on that score.
Hey, interesting times for your gal Olympia Snowe. She might buck the refusenik party line and vote for the stimulus package.
Indeed -- but Snowe's actually got some credibility as a fiscal conservative left, so her support (and any qualifications she puts on the table) is going to mean something. If my memory serves, she opposed the Bush tax cuts because she's one of those cranks who didn't buy the idea you can cut government revenue while voting for the greatest expansion of federal spending since JBJ.
So her support (and any amendments she has a hand in) are worth taking seriously, as opposed to way too many of her colleagues, whose opposition to big spending Big Government over the last eight years was only detectable with an electron microscope.
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TVNZ seems to have grasped how you use breaking news video online.
Prime Minister assaulted on arrival at Waitangi -- they really don't seem to have it sorted out up there. Still.
The weirdest part is hearing Titewhai Harawira giving instructions to the PM afterwards: "Stand still John -- no, no, stand still ... "
I'm guessing this goes down in the debit column for Titewhai's mana.
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Rendition is now cool?
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Indeed -- but Snowe's actually got some credibility as a fiscal conservative left, so her support (and any qualifications she puts on the table) is going to mean something.
For sure. It would be nice if she was running things ...
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The Christian Bale remix is great, but I'm labeling this shirt as the best thing to come out of the stoush.
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Ooohh yes very nice.
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The weirdest part is hearing Titewhai Harawira giving instructions to the PM afterwards: "Stand still John -- no, no, stand still ... "
"...don't make eye contact, assume the foetal position and if you could piss yourself just a little that would be helpful."
Prime Minister assaulted on arrival at Waitangi -- they really don't seem to have it sorted out up there. Still.
But to be fair, I don't know WTF "they" are supposed to do, apart from locking the place up tighter than Washington on Inauguration Day. Still, I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how TVNZ spins that into "racial tension explodes at Waitangi"...
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labeling this shirt
Coincidentally, my *current* Facebook status update is 'Danielle and Christian Bale are done, professionally'! I am the zeitgeist. Or completely unoriginal...
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when Telecom shows you up on grounds of basic humanity, don't you think you might be doin' it wrong?
Xlunt.
AndI want to pay artists, not fat old white men sitting around pools in Vegas.
That, really, is all that needed to be said on the copyright thread instead of Robbery's constant dissagreement with, almost, everybody else.
Cher Cher -
Heh. My Facebook status update last night was something like 'Danielle just danced around the house to the Christian Bale freakout remix'.
What isn't quite as much fun is a wee bit of context, suggesting that it wasn't entirely a case of 'Man-Diva Gone Wild Because Someone Made Eye-Contact'.
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Still, I'm kind of looking forward to seeing how TVNZ spins that into "racial tension explodes at Waitangi"...
It's a relatively minor incident, for sure, but it does cast an interesting light on the Herald's recent suggestions to the the 'brave' new PM (and, indeed, the 'brave' new Leader of the Opposition) are willing to "return" to Waitangi, where Helen Clark feared to tread.
In addition to a slightly sexist undertone, such reporting rather downplays the idea that there's only so many times someone with a bit of self-respect will be willing to put up with this kind of shit.
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