Norm Ornstein suggests a repair to the broken filibuster system currently stagnating the Senate. In the New York Times article, he suggests that perhaps a small change be made to revert the rules on filibuster to be more like they used to be. This would preserve the ability of a dedicated minority to affect legislation when they felt sufficiently motivated, and could still be abused by a rabid minority, but it wouldn’t be quite so easy for casual misuse. I llike the idea.
Asteroid Soup Movie
Time lapse realization of asteroid discovery in our solar system from 1980 to now.
Discuss this on slashdot, home of the other geeks who care.
Why I am having a problem finding work
This doesn’t make me feel any better about my current situation, but I can visualize it a bit better, at least.
The linked story, above, in the Sacramento Bee reports:
“If California’s unemployed residents banded together and formed a city, it would be the fifth-largest place in America, just behind Houston but ahead of Phoenix.”
So, on behalf of all my brother and sister unemployed here in the great state of California, I ask that the corporations that are sitting on large amounts of cash and hesitating to hire “Please start hiring.” Be brave, because your neighbors need you to be brave. There is only one way this economic slump ends, and that is if we start spending again, and if we can’t pay the rent, we can’t spend on anything else. Have a little faith in your ability to make the world a better place, and, in the words of Nike, Just Do It.
The GoP Is Really Trying. Really.
It isn’t their fault that they fail at funny, they just don’t have the skill set required. I am talking, of course, about the web site they launched for Barry Obama’s birthday. Perhaps if I were a hardcore Republican, or terribly impressed by Mitt Romney’s hair, I might find the prefab cards amusing. Robert Gibbs talking about an Oprah booking for the President’s future just isn’t that amusing, or even such a bad idea. Some of the cards are just a bit too esoteric to appeal to anyone but the most committed hater, and there isn’t even a preview button to show your card with the text message you add.
All of this makes me think it’s just an excuse for fund raising, which of course it is. I tried to give them the benefit of the doubt, but it just did not work out.
| A sampling of the cards at the GOP’s “Birthday Present To The President” web site. | |||
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| The captions are different, but this is how they sounded to me. | |||
| Something about jobs, motivated by bitterness about how President Obama’s policies have turned the nation away from the disaster the previous Republican administration had us guided towards. | A base and unbecoming attempt at humor aimed at Charlie Rangel and Maxine Waters who are being investigated for possible ethics violations. FUD imo. Google anything you don’t understand here. | I would have to spend time on google to figure out who these people are and what the caption at the site means, but I just don’t care that much. I doubt many people outside the DC Beltway will get this reference. | The health legislation was a big fucking deal. You can try to poke fun at the one guy in DC with the balls to say it out loud. Doing that = Epic Fail. Thank you for playing, come back when you have a real Idea. |
Better luck next time GOP. From here it looks like your party is over, or did I mean your Party is over?
Isn’t That Called A Press Release?
I have been a fan of comedy since I was very young. On my way home from Hanley Junior High in University City, Missouri I’d stop to check the vinyl record bin at a second hand shop on Delmar Boulevard almost every day as I walked home. In it I found used copies of Bob Newhart and Bill Cosby records, which I would then buy for a quarter, take home and memorize. Inspired by these, which included Cosby’s “The Chicken Heart That Ate New York City” and other routines I appeared in a school talent show with a 12 minute (more? less? WTF remembers at this point? That was about 1967) version of the old “Why did the chicken cross the road?” joke. In mine, the legendary chicken’s quest involved food, and it lasted as long as it did because the main narrative was interspersed with insights only a tween would understand on the current events of the time. I killed in the audition, but bombed at the performance, due to microphone placement issues, although a few people from the front row thought I was very funny. It killed my idea that I should be a comedian, but left a residual love of comedy that persists. This love of comedy has been fed quite well recently by the Republican Party.
The only angle that most news reports have seen on Sharron Angle’s run for Harry Reid’s’ seat in Congress is her backside as she literally runs away from reporters, and maintains a stony silence as the quicker ones draw up alongside and ask questions of her. She has been running away from reporters, but now she did an actual interview with Fox, and it seems to give some insight into why she has been avoiding actual news reporters. In the excerpt below you see that even the interviewer marvels at her explanation of how she believes news media in a free society should behave.
In case you missed it with her focus on her web site’s address, she said “We wanted them to ask the questions we want to answer, so that they report the news the way we want it to be reported.” Which is what the very best Press Relations people do, via the artifice of the Press Release. Typically, a Press Release is distributed to news organizations, and when the news organization is running short of content, they will run it, sometimes with minimal editing, often with no changes at all. This is common practice, and has been since your great great grandfather was younger than you are. She has, I expect unwittingly, exposed an aspect of Fox to the general public that has been apparent but involved analysis. Now it is more plainly apparent that Fox is the PR wing of the Republican party.
Seeing how poorly the Republican’s manage their own PR, this is probably a good thing for them, but having an organization that is presenting itself as a hard news organization while behaving like an obscenely well financed group of PR hacks is not good for the public discourse. It’s high time that Fox News Channel and the News Corporation that owns it get outed for what they are. Moving them to the front row of the White House Press Room is the opposite of what needed to happen last week. Not giving them Helen Thomas’ actual seat is scant consolation for the fact that a PR hack organization for partisan politics now has a front row seat in the White House Press Room.
Rather than reward Fox News Channel with better seat placement, the White House Correspondent’s Association ought to place their boot swiftly in the FNC seat, drop this charade that FNC is a news organization, and remove them from the room altogether. The American public deserves better. Sadly, the idea that this might happen is the real joke here.
Thank you, Sharon. This election season is likely to be even more entertaining than usual, and your (unwitting? witless? clueless?) comedy act is likely to be a big part of it.
BP Puts New Face in Ring
The impending announcement that Robert Dudley will replace Tony Hayward strikes me as being more akin to painting the front of a runaway train than slowing or diverting said train from the ruinous path it is on. As such, it shows no significant improvement in this British multinational corporation’s response to this disaster, though it will have the effect of creating the illusion of potential for improvement.
This is doubtless the desired effect, and this move will be more effective in that than any previous move has been. Americans love a scapegoat, and the feckless Mr. Hayward has been teed up quite effectively as the Deepwater Horizon martyr, thanks in great part to his own ineptitude with public relations. Which shouldn’t be too shocking; he is a geologist who got to where he is by being good at corporate politics, and then criticizing the previous CEO during an earlier BP incident that killed a different bunch of American oil industry workers.
So, according to this report in the New York Times, Mr. Hayward will get his life back in October, just in time to start training for the Governor’s Cup race from Cape Town to St. Helena Island. Mr. Hayward has in fact never lost any portion of his life, he simply found himself hoist with his own petard, dealing with the consequences of modern “business management” practices that involve cutting costs and crossing fingers, hoping nothing bad happens.
What it does for the hapless residents of the gulf, or anyone else who will ultimately see negative consequences from this spills after effects is less clear. BP’s efforts to date have focused more on public relations, attempting to contain the negative effects of their negligence on the public perception, than on either cleaning up the mess or preparing themselves for similar incidents in the future. From the over reliance on dispersants that simply spread the poisons in the oil, along with the poisons that the dispersants are, over a larger area to forbidding the cleanup workers from wearing protective face gear, entirely too much emphasis has been placed on making this disaster look nice on TV.
This strategy doesn’t originate at the CEO’s office, it comes from the boardroom. Replacing the guy that is taking orders from the Board of Directors will not change the nature of the orders coming down the pipeline from those noxious corridors where billions of dollars outweigh the need to for caution and safety on job sites. I am not saying that changing CEO’s is a bad move, just that it is part of the game this company has been playing since the 20th of April with renewed intensity, but for decades in reality. This is part of the corporate strategy, common in many areas, but exposed by increased media attention these past few months. If you think these people are going to suddenly start caring about the “small people” that allow them their money sodden lifestyles, guess again. In addition, the environment is just seen as God’s gift to the corporate world, created for them to rape as they see fit.
This latest move would is just more of the same. Throw one CEO to the wolves and the narrative has an end, so people not affected directly, or yet, can go back to what they were doing before, and BP can go back to printing thousand dollar bills and cutting corners. Which is what they will do, which is why it will only be a matter of time until we see another explosion somewhere on another BP project involving another bunch of dead workers who BP will again sweep under the rug as quickly as they can, for as little money as they can bully the victims families into accepting.
Unless something changes, like the American public waking up. Perhaps this could happen, if the oil reached Manhattan and were seen effecting everything between the broken well and there. Short of that, I expect it to be business as usual in oil exploration, i.e. Full Speed Ahead, and Damn the Torpedoes.
If we won’t get involved to try to change this, I guess we all better try to get used to it.
Cheney & Co.: The Administration That Keeps Giving
This link leads to a story about yet another mess that W and his mentor caused, which will take years to try to clean up.
Chances are it never gets clean. Doctors should be caregivers. Let them do that.