One of the blogs hosed when Soapblox was hacked was my pad, Pam’s House Blend. Soapblox.net is the host of almost all of the state-focused blogs. A few “rogue” progressive sites like mine are also in there and were affected. If you want to catch up on the day of disaster, here are a few diaries:
Also, see this DKos diary for the chronology and to see people trading notes during the panic. Most of the sites are up, we don’t know for how long, or what the future holds for the Soapblox platform. Needless to say, I have been working to download my archives (via client-side), once I saw that my site was back up, but I don’t have—and really need—a copy of the db itself that could be migrated in a disaster. Sigh.
I’m with Scott: Please, right wing nuts, let’s talk about Terri Schiavo. Even better if you can outdo yourself this time around and suggest that keeping a brain dead woman’s body alive against her stated wishes is more important than keeping thousands of American troops and Iraqi citizens alive. My main objection to reviving this debacle is that it will prolong the suffering of Michael Schiavo, and if any man has suffered enough, it’s him. Even though the hard right sees Terri Schiavo as the perfect woman, as if she was an overgrown fetus with her inability to speak or think, in reality she was, before her heart attack, exactly the sort of human being the hard right doesn’t think has a right to really live---a thinking, breathing, feeling woman. Who probably had sex and liked it. Gasp! And we know from Michael Schiavo’s testimony that she had opinions. She only got the love of the hard right when all that was gone, which is a point worth pondering. It’s a real shame that she’ll be remembered as a vegetable because of their hard work, and not so much as a woman with a real personality and life. Makes me shudder to think they’d do to the rest of us, if they had a shot.
Anyway, why bring this up? Because the wingnutteria is trying to make hay out of the fact that Obama is appointing Michael Schiavo’s lawyer to the Department of Justice. Which is fucking stupid, because public opinion is mostly against the anti-choicers who want to meddle with your end of life decisions, especially if they can get the double whammy of screwing with someone’s private romantic life at the same time. (I have very little doubt that making sure that they crippled Michael Schiavo’s ability to move on with his life was part of the motivation of keeping Terri’s body alive.) It’s really unwise to remind the public time and time again that, for the right wing base, sticking your nose in other people’s business for no other reason than to make their lives as bleak and miserable as possible is priority number one. It’s clear that this entire strategy is part of the larger right wing “let’s make hay over every little thing with hopes that something sticks” strategy that may actually be self-defeating.
For instance, why do they give a shit if Roland Burris does or doesn’t get a seat? If you’d asked me a month ago that you’d have Pat Buchanan on TV lying his ass off in order to get a Democrat seated in the Senate, and a black man at that, I would have told you to lay off the PCP. It’s nakedly cynical for Republicans to root for Burris, because it’s clear that their thinking begins and ends with, “If the Senate Democrats want X, we must sell our daughters into slavery if that will prevent X from happening.” They’re ready to slide into the oppose-and-obstruct-at-all-costs mode.
I wonder if there’s a way for congressional Democrats to get the Republicans to the point where they’re grandstanding against bills that honor puppies and rainbows. Probably won’t go that far---everyone congressperson worth her weight knows how to vote yes on a feel good bill, no matter how asinine. But surely there’s a way to exploit this oppose-and-obstruct tendency that’s clearly taken hold to the point where the wingnuts can’t even see their own self-interest anymore. Ideas?
Joe The Plumber is putting down his wrenches and picking up a reporter’s notebook.
The Ohio man who became a household name during the presidential campaign says he is heading to Israel as a war correspondent for the conservative Web site pjtv.com.
As a reminder of Joe the Plumber’s nuanced and considered views, you can either hit yourself in the face with a meat tenderizer or let your mind drift all the way back to this:
When the McCain supporter asked him if he believed “a vote for Obama is a vote for the death of Israel,” Mr. Wurzelbacher replied, “I’ll go ahead and agree with you on that.” He didn’t elaborate on how Mr. Obama, who has said his commitment to Israeli security is “nonnegotiable,” would be bad for the Jewish state.
I look forward to literal hours of embarrassing dispatches before Pajamas Media runs away from this like they set it on fire. I can just imagine the first interview:
Pajamas Media Special Correspondent Joe Wurzelbacher: So, is that a gun?
IDF Soldier: Yes, it is.
JW: Can I use it?
IDF: No.
JW: Please? I’ll only aim at Palestinians.
IDF: Uh...no. You should go now.
JW: Can I join you on your next mission? I brought my own grenades.
IDF: You’re walking around...in the middle of Israel...with your own grenades?
JW: Yeah! I used to be a plumber, see. Well, not really, I worked for a plumbing company, but I learned how to work with pipes and stuff, and so, you know...I just want to fight for the cause, really get in there and get my hands dirty…
IDF: You...have grenades. In the middle of this busy street. In front of me.
JW: ...I mean, I wanted to own the company, but that kind of got shot to shit when I started talking about how the dude running for President would kill Israel, and well, gosh, I just really love you guys, I’m totally babbling!
IDF: Do you want to meet more of my squadmates? They’d love to talk to you.
JW: I could hug you!
IDF: And I could shoot you, so I would advise you not to do that.
Apple gave the record labels that flexibility on pricing as it got them to agree to sell all songs free of “digital rights management,” or DRM, technology that limits people’s ability to copy songs or move them to multiple computers. Apple had been offering a limited selection of songs without DRM, but by the end of this quarter, the company said, all 10 million songs in its library will be available that way.
Great news for consumers. One thing that’s interesting about the choice is I think it highlights a relevant issue for the thinking liberal, namely the difference between the free market and capitalism (which are erroneously conflated in our culture). It also shows why conservatives who squall about how liberals are closet socialists who want to nationalize every part of our economy are wrong.
On the first part, it’s a real shame to me that people think that capitalism is the same thing as a free market, which perversely means that a large percentage of Americans, probably the majority at this point, would think that a monopoly is acceptable in a free market. In truth, the free market ideal is one where anyone is free to enter into the market and compete, and the natural tendency of corporations to stake out a monopoly is actively resisted by the government for the good of the consumer. This example shows why. I’m sure Apple would love to have a monopoly on music distribution, and then they could set it up so there’s not only DRM on every song, but that your account deletes it after a week, and you have to buy it again. But they made this decision solely because they were facing competition, legitimate (Amazon) or not (file-sharing), and they didn’t have much of a choice. Because they were working in a free market and not in the ideal capitalist situation (where they have a monopoly), they had to cater to consumer demand.
For instance, did you know that a Christian minister in Michigan was imprisoned for writing an article about how God would punish the judge presiding over his case? Of course not, because the ACLU is involved. But no, certainly an ESPN anchor saying “Fuck Jesus” is more damaging to Christians nationwide than Christians being imprisoned for opining on God’s will. It’s really sad they edited out the Gospel of Stuart Scott, wherein Jesus converts rogue sports anchor Jepthoah Blakeman after scoring nine points on a single drive in Madden 28 AD. It was moving.
(By the way, how often has WND covered the above-mentioned case? Never.)
I’ve reread this Michael Gerson column three times, and I have to marvel at just how incredibly safe a columnist for a major newspaper is. Gerson writes a piece that pretty much admits he paid no attention whatsoever to the past two years of presidential politics whatsoever...and is apparently still employed.
Barack Obama was elected, in part, as the antidote to ambition. Unlike John F. Kennedy, who campaigned against the golf-playing complacency of the Eisenhower era, Obama appealed to a nation weary of large national exertions—a nation longing for a normality beyond the wars, hurricanes, floods and assorted plagues of the Bush years.
This is pretty much exactly wrong. You know how I know this? Because Obama made nearly two years worth of speeches about changing shit, and transforming things. We’re not so much weary of large national exertions as we are of every exertion being invariably screwed up beyond belief, coupled with an ensuing several-year debate wherein everyone who’s got a problem is called a traitor.
Yet headed toward the inauguration, the scale of Obama’s ambition is becoming evident.
So, Obama was elected as the antidote to ambition on an ambitious platform whose ambition is only now becoming evident despite it being the exact thing he ambitiously proposed for nearly two years. What?
After dividing Obama’s proposals into “ambitious” (read: things Republicans oppose for reasons Gerson can articulate) and “non-ambitious” (read: the types of proposals that Republicans signed onto in some way during the Bush administration and would therefore be hypocritical to oppose, which won’t actually stop them), Gerson ends with this:
During the campaign, I sometimes criticized Obama for lacking specificity and ambition. But as the specifics emerge, the ambitions of his campaign pledges are ever more clear.
So, basically, Obama was non-specific and unambitious, but now that he’s articulating the same specifics he was discussing before, he’s both specific and ambitious...and needs to curtail that ambition to please Republicans. I really hope he spent all that time he wasn’t paying attention to the campaign doing something productive, like lowering his Wii Fit age.
I knew going into this video (hat tip) that dishes like chop suey, General Tso’s chicken, and beef and broccoli weren’t native Chinese dishes, but Americanized dishes, but this 16 minute lecture on the history of “Chinese” food by Jennifer 8 Lee was absolutely riveting. Check it out:
It kind of made me hungry, though, even though the trends she talks about (sweetening and frying everything in sight) mostly disgust me. The trends she’s examining fall across many genres of American food, including those we call Mexican and Italian food. With Chinese food, it’s got another, more disturbing angle, which is the way the food got associated with racist attitudes towards Chinese-Americans.
I haven’t seen the movie “Revolutionary Road” yet (I don’t think it’s even opened in Austin), but I have recently finished the book, figuring I’d want to see and probably review the movie when it came out. So I was intrigued to read this piece at the Bitch blog about the differences between the movie and the book, which are numerous, and seem to be oriented mainly around making the Wheelers a slightly more tolerable pair of people than they were in the book. This is, as the reviewer says, an especially problematic choice when it comes to Frank Wheeler, who is---I think---the villain of his own story, a petty, stupid man who throws his wife’s very life away in service of his own bullshit, even though it’s obviously an accident. As Tammy says, it’s a clear-cut critique of 1950s masculinity. Frank is a joke, ranting about the suburban lifestyle he’s loathe to abandon, fancying himself as an emotional libertine and yet unable to take the basic step of realizing that his wife’s pregnancies aren’t a comment on his manhood, a cheater who is more concerned with being cool than the feelings of others, and prone to psychoanalyzing his wife to shut down her criticisms of him, an open display of masculine power. It’s not just a little hinted at, either, that he’s one step shy of toying with the idea of institutionalizing a sane if sad April if that’s what it will take to force her not to have an abortion. He sucks.
But I was surprised to see Tammy’s assessment of Yates’ portrayal of April.
In the novel, April has a devastating childhood lacking any positive parental figures, a psychological dimension that enables Yates to paint her as a woman too neurotic and emotionally disabled to accept her role as wife and mother. If Yates seems to capture some of malaise Betty Friedan articulated in The Feminine Mystique, which was published two years after the novel, it was certainly not in the service of social criticism about women’s oppression. Instead, Yates is more concerned with depicting April’s disappointment that her self-deluded fantasies about adult life did not come true. She is by no means a feminist character, but she is a coherent one.
Well, I think I can shed some light on why I think the advice feels right, even if the writer Wendy Atterberry is wrong on her reasons. A quote from it:
I appreciate both arguments and understand the sentiments behind them, but at the risk of having my feminist card revoked, I think it’s naïve for a woman to utter those three little words before a man does.
Unlike asking a man out, making a move on him, or even proposing, there’s no action-based response to the first “I love you.” It’s all words, it’s all emotion. In that moment, he either loves you back or he doesn’t—you only hear the black or white of a ‘yes’ or ‘no,’ not the gray of “Well, I like you a whole lot and I could see myself falling in love with you, but I’m just not quite there yet.”
And the truth is, it often takes men longer to get there than it does for women. Men process their emotions more slowly, they’re usually more cautious about taking their feelings and relationships to the next level.
So her reasoning is flawed, because it’s based in incorrect and insulting gender stereotypes. Plus, she does that irritating thing where she pretends she’s being brave for getting her “feminist card” revoked, when in reality it’s braver to wear the feminist card proudly and face up to the insecurity and anger that generates in many people, men and women both. Her entire argument is bunk. Men are not emotionally retarded, and frankly I’ve seen more men than women fall fast and hard in love in my time. Plus, her entire argument is based on the idea that it’s a woman’s duty to catch and keep a man, and hanging onto a man is a priority over things like hanging onto your dignity or being true to your feelings. The reason not to say, “I love you,” is fear that he will bolt because you wounded his ego or scared him, but as Sarah says, if such a man bolts, you learned you were, at best, not a good fit and quite possibly that he’s a jerk.
Have a look at some of the great things that have happened recently at the multiplex. Spider-Man 3, a pro-American, pro-responsibility film with deeply Christian overtones topped the box office in 2007. 300, which said a lot that needed to be said about the war on terror, came in at number ten. Even more amazing, the Oscar winner for the year was No Country for Old Men, a decidedly conservative film that linked the evil of its nihilist serial killer to the decline of morals since the 1960’s. “Once you stop hearing sir or ma’am,” says the film’s lone moral voice, “the rest [of the evil] will follow.”
It was pretty much the same this year. Top of the box office so far: the blatantly pro-war on terror Dark Knight. The Christian Prince Caspian is at number eleven. The pro-abstinence Twilight is currently at sixteen and still hot. And perhaps most delightfully, and of course most ignored by the MSM: the Christian pro-marriage film Fireproof, despite suffering from its shoestring budget, still out-performed such favorites of our media elites as W, Religulous and Stop-Loss.
I’m not really sure you want to claim as a conservative triumph a movie that has teenager girls mutilating themselves in order to prove their devotion to it. Or hell, maybe that’s your thing.
You can’t both claim that Hollywood is producing tons of great conservatives movies that are massively marketed and highly successful, and then claim that you’re also facing McCarthy-style oppression that puts your very livelihood at risk for being conservative in Hollywood. There’s really only three possible explanations for this:
1.) Hollywood is inadvertently letting conservative productions costing hundreds of millions of dollars and entailing huge financial risk through the pipeline, because they’re so busy ensuring that any star who’s ever visited the Heritage Foundation’s website is stuck doing direct-to-video until they contribute to the DNC.
2.) Hollywood is actually nowhere near as liberal as conservatives claim, and the whining over the new Hollywood Gestapo is just a bunch of pampered assholes preemptively complaining in order to provide another negotiating tool: if you choose “liberal” X over me, I’ll make a federal case out of it. I may be 5’3”, balding and paunchy, but I can play a great Larry Bird, dammit!
3.) Conservatives are so desperate to find conservative art that they’d claim Seven Poundings and The Curious Case of Benjamin’s Fuckin’ as conservative statements if they had an American flag on the cover.
Matt Drudge claims that NBC has instituted a ban on Ann Coulter in favor of America’s Second Worst Public Figure, Perez Hilton.
The most damning quote comes from this obviously very, very real Today Show insider who I’m very sure said exactly this, which is entirely reflective of the mindset of the show’s producers:
One network insider claims it was the book’s theme—a brutal examination of liberal bias in the new era—that got executives to dis-invite the controversialist.
“We are just not interested in anyone so highly critical of President-elect Obama, right now,” a TODAY insider reveals. “It’s such a downer. It’s just not the time, and it’s not what our audience wants, either.”
Others inside the peacock network strongly deny the book’s theme is at issue.
I’m pretty sure that’s been the theme of everything she’s ever written. Now, one has to wonder how there’s a person at NBC who says, in a perfect capsule, the exact thing that summarizes every conservative complaint about the librul MSM. One should probably instead wonder how much I have to pay a gopher to anonymously say whatever I want about whomever I want. For twenty bucks, I got the coffee guy for TV’s Extreme Makeover: Home Edition to tell me, “We keep putting these growhouses in the new homes we build, right over the asbestos mounds. Everyone here hates black people. Fuck damn bitch.”
Now, I don’t mind Ann Coulter being cut from Today, not out of any sense of righteous indignation at her opposition to the New Nubian Fascism, but because she’s roughly akin to a novelty act that you keep inviting back on because maybe the novelty will get slightly bigger or slightly more dangerous. She’s like the guy who can eat a hamburger in one bite - oddly fascinating the first couple of time times, but when his act gets down to putting extra mayo on the thing, it’s sort of run its course. It would be more entertaining to have the Swift Kids for Truth reenact an Ann Coulter interview than to actually have her on. Simply put, she sucks. She’s boring. She’s stupid. I don’t think there’s a politically aware person in America who can’t make predictable fag and woman jokes about Democrats to their heart’s content without giving this idiot more play.
I’ve reread this 
Warning: Massive fucking spoilage.
Hollywood conservatives, 
Matt Drudge claims that NBC has instituted a ban on