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La Rubujo - LiveJournal.com
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What failure!
So, Mike Malloy predicted eons ago that Air America Radio was a freight train about to slam into a brick wall, and instead it has gotten someone elected a U.S. senator.
This must be one of those brick walls or mountains with a tunnel painted on it.
LJ post mortems
What is it about business downturns that people go straight into post mortems full of personal prejudices? LJ lays off some people (which tends to be very damaging in ways not usually accounted for, but that’s a different story), and not only are people talking as if LJ is already gone, but they are declaring on-line networking a stupid idea that could never make money.
Well, I’ll tell you what. First of all, the economy is bad. Second, the extended perm account sale meant ‘We don’t have the cash we want’. Third, Air America Radio didn’t die when the wingnuts were giving post mortems, nor did it later when a bitter Mike Malloy predicted it would slam into a brick wall imminently. The corpse isn’t a corpse until it’s a corpse. (And then it’s a corpse. It could happen at any time, but let’s hope not.)
Now let’s get back to our LJing. :)
If I were Obama (which is not the case)
Maybe I should put this in the form of a question.
How would I go about setting and executing policy that endangers the careers of people like Jay Rockefeller? Appointing Dawn Johnsen to OLC and Leon Panetta to CIA would be a good start, but how proceed from there, in such a way that Congress could not easily stop me?
Lose your lunch
See http://www.wztv.com/template/inews_wire/wires.international/3862026e-www.fox17.com.shtml
My opinion is no secret: we should more or less abandon this structure, which is a sign of Dick Cheney’s commitment to controlling the flow of petroleum to China.
How long can he hold out?
I wonder how long Norm Coleman can keep up the charade without conceding. He must know that we are waiting for him with pitchforks and torches, so all the bluster must have more to do with maintaining the bipartisan consensus in the Senate that the Democrats rule in name but Republicans get what they want. (In that regard, I saw a headline today that nearly voided my bladder for me. It’s an exercise for the reader to identify the headline.)
The amazing thing is that Harry Reid was once a young pugilist. On the other hand, maybe now the pieces fit together.
Revise that: Franken wins by 225
See http://www.startribune.com/politics/state/37047159.html
Josh Marshall didn’t understand how come Norm Coleman agreed to count the extra ballots, but Coleman was under orders to be nice about the ballots. I think that’s actually how Minnesota law is written.
A musical interlude: John McSherry playing 'Doinna'
Panarin
Does anyone know if this nut has been seen hanging around with white nationalist types?— http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123051100709638419.html
There’s a lot of that going on in Russia these days, with the encouragement of guys like David Duke. I’m curious just what Panarin’s angle is—is he a white nationalist? is he just your usual spy-agency kook? is he merely a propagandist who knows he is full of it? How much of each? Etc.
(BTW ‘white nationalist types’ includes Pat Buchanan and probably ought to include Lou Dobbs, as well, but I don’t expect either of these guys has been hanging out with Panarin. Please don’t make me be wrong.)
A major correction
Apparently I misheard Randi Rhodes’s advice to Melissa Etheridge, as to how to deal with Rick Warren. The anxious Ms. Etheridge was due to perform at an event where Rick Warren would be the keynote speaker, and wanted Randi to help her deal with that. (Ms. Etheridge eventually listened to Barack Obama’s implicity advice.) I had thought Randi told Melissa to disrupt the speech; actually what a supposedly devastated Randi suggested that Melissa and her partner ask Barack Obama for an invitation to the inauguration so they could use the event to disrespect Rick Warren.
I have the impression this quasi-supernal dissing would have been an offshoot of an anti-Warren protest that Air America’s David Bender has been promoting. With two-valued reasoning worthy of George W. Bush, Mr. Bender argues that the protest is not a protest because it is an affirmation; yeah, and by the same ‘logic’ my using the middle name ‘Hussein’ for a while was an affirmation of Barack Obama’s name and ‘therefore’ wasn’t a protest against the anti-Obama smear campaign. Mind you, I don’t say he shouldn’t take part in the protest, just that he shouldn’t ‘think’ in the manner of GWB.
Back to Randi. In the same show she boasted powerfully and without irony about her modesty and self-deprecation, and also she said that if Norm Coleman had asked her for dirt on Al Franken she would have given it.
Again I think Air America is better off without Randi. The Nova M Radio network (that is, Mike Malloy and Randi Rhodes) seems to be a dumping ground for Air America hosts who have inferiority complexes that manifest as public disrespect for their colleagues, including former co-workers, but also Ed Schultz, and in the case of Malloy also Jerry Springer when they both were employed by Air America.
Randi’s show is funny, however, and she isn’t deliberately dense—just someone moderately ‘neurotic’—so I shall go on listening and loving.
The kind of thinking that won Hillary Clinton the presidency
Air America is replaying the Randi Rhodes broadcast from a couple of Fridays ago (she’s on vacation), and here’s what happened.
A caller told Randi proudly that she had gone down to Florida to help get out the vote. The correct response, of course, is ‘That’s great!’; instead, Randi blandly asks what county. The caller says Broward. Randi puts the caller on the defensive, asking why Broward, given that Obama was guaranteed to win there. The caller, sounding hurt, says she had friends there.
Of course, in Florida, in a presidential election, the county is irrelevant; indeed, Broward is a very good place to go for Democratic get-out-the-vote, because you will get a good reception. Thus, Randi made someone feel bad and futile for doing GOTV in a particularly good place to do GOTV.
Think how much similarly weak reasoning we have endured; it takes some effort not to fall into the intellectual traps. There was, for example, Big Tent Democrat concerned that Obama couldn’t win in big states, because Hillary did better there; so, how many of those big states did Obama lose in the general, eh? Obama concentrated on winning little states, because he was not distracted by falsehoods and irrelevancies; he saw he could net more delegates that way than Hillary could by trying to ‘win’ big states.
It is said that Hillary’s campaign manager didn’t even know that ‘winning’ a state was practically meaningless, and that delegates were to be divided proportionally. That’s astoundingly lazy behavior for a campaign manager, if true. But there was also the supposed ‘momentum’ the candidates got from their ‘wins’, which got discussed by quite brainy people despite that Obama’s ‘winning’ of a long string of little states didn’t stop Clinton from ‘winning’ in places where she was favored.
(‘Momentum’ is IMO way overrated; sure, winning begets winning, losing begets losing, but commentators are using the phenomenon as a mental crutch. It occurs to me that perhaps ![[info]](http://p-stat.livejournal.com/img/userinfo.gif) barking_iguana’s efforts towards a political sabremetrics will help future commentators and campaign managers put their brains to work.)
Hartmann doesn't see the problem with seating Burris
After all, says Thom, David Vitter continues to serve despite scandal and nobody makes a big deal about it.
Apparently Thom Hartmann has trouble distinguishing the letters ‘D’ and ‘R’.
Playing Thom like a fiddle
I’m listening to Thom Hartmann interviewing his JFK-assassination conspiracy theory co-author, and it’s like listening to Paul Wolfowitz interview Ahmad Chalabi. This guy sounds like a con, and Thom Hartmann sounds like a mark.
Oh BTW they say that the actual murder of JFK was covered up to prevent World War III. Well, I guess it is true that JFK was murdered by a communist.... At least they got that part right.
And, um, they slandered RFK but good. He was in on the cover-up, you see.
Cognitive dissonance in the field of book design
On p. 27 of ‘On Book Design’, by Richard Hendel, it says:
In a legendary essay, ‘The Crystal Goblet’, Beatrice Warde wrote that book typography should be as plain as a crystal goblet. She assumed that anyone drinking from an excessively designed jeweled cup would pay more attention to the cup itself than to the wine therein. Extending the idea, she claimed that excessive design would be just as destracting in a book. Extravagant typography would intrude between the author and the reader.
Book designers who prefer doing timeless crystal-goblet typography know precisely what Beatrice Warde meant. They are on typographic good behavior and would prefer never to violate [Stanley] Morison’s ‘first principles of typography’. They would agree with the type designer Fred Goudy, who (it is alleged) said that anyone who would letterspace lowercase letters would steal sheep. These folks know the rules.
This is supposed to be the same Fred Goudy who designed a zillion eccentric typefaces, book faces among them.
The quotation is a bowdlerization distorted according to one or another person’s pet peeves. In fact lowercase is letterspaced all the time, particularly in narrow magazine columns, where it can become damn near unavoidable; you don’t have to be a typographer to notice this, just a reader. What actually is alleged to have happened is that Mr. Goudy was given an award, and on the award there was amply letterspaced, all-capitals blackletter. Upon receiving the award and looking at it, Mr. Goudy remarked, in front of everyone, that someone who would do such letterspacing probably would shag sheep.
I am guessing that the typeface was Goudy Text, and that somewhere in the history of the distortion ‘text’ meaning blackletter got converted to ‘text’ meaning running text.
Roland Burris is well prepared
See http://www.flickr.com/photos/southbound_07/2750018934/sizes/o/
I think he also has a column in Rome.
A New Year's Eve musical interlude
Shorter Blagojevich-Burris-support talking point
Shorter talking point: Barack Obama leaving the Senate to become President is representative of the oppression of African-Americans.
I love vegetables
Yum!
That’s all; go back to what you were doing before.
Norm Coleman begs the Minnesota judiciary to do to him what it once did to members of the James gang
See http://tpmelectioncentral.talkingpointsmemo.com/2008/12/coleman_okays_counting_ballots.php
What does he think is going to happen? What an awful person Norm Coleman is; I hope his financial troubles multiply and he winds up in federal court for filing false disclosures, then that he should lose all his teeth except one, so it can ache. It’s going to be a pleasure to have someone in his place who is, on the other hand, very, very nice.
Something I just realized
Three of the four US presidential/vice-presidential candidates for 2008 were from the last three states to join our brotherly union of states.
Yeah, Obama hasn’t lived in Hawaii for some time, and Sarah Palin was born in Idaho, but cut me some slack. :)
Joe Biden wanted to cap the other end. Being from the 2nd state apparently was not good enough, so early in life he relocated to the 1st, happily and very wisely bypassing the 3rd.
It’s rubbing off of Bush
Shorter version of a statement by the former head coach: the Detroit Lions unfortunately were there when 16 games were lost.
A profound question
How much will it bring down property values to have George W. and Laura Bush move into your neighborhood?
OMG SCons is wonderful!
I’m in technerd heaven.
cmake sucks
The experience of converting my ant-dialect from building with OMake to building with CMake was difficult enough for me to decide that CMake sucks. I discovered and am switching to SCons, which seems very much to un-suck.
Not that I would use GNU Autotools instead of CMake; Autotools isn’t very platform independent and version changes tend to break older stuff.
(Of course I could have stuck with OMake, but it hid too much of the structure of the program from me, which I needed to understand, anyway. OMake knows Objective Caml too well. :) Really it’s mostly that I want something that is easily programmed and extended, which SCons is. I also wanted something that built in a very clean, out-of-source way, which CMake does, but it’s hard to extend or otherwise make capable of intelligently building anything not written in but a few simple languages. The programming facilities remind me of Fortran circa 1966. SCons you program in Python.)
The press blaming the public for not leading
Generally a good column, but I question Bob Herbert’s division of responsibility: ‘The general public, and to a great extent the press, closed its eyes to the increasingly complex and baffling machinations of the financial industry, which kept screaming that oversight would ruin everything.’
Randi Rhodes thinks Coleman was stealing the election
Listening to the Randi Rhodes retread, I just realized that Randi really thinks that she would be able to say ‘I told you so!’ to Al Franken about ending up in a recount, not realizing that Al might simply ask her, ‘What in the world are you talking about?’ She thinks she’d be able to get back at Al for a disagreement about the significance of vote-stealing in 2004.
Message to Randi Rhodes: Al Franken is in a recount, not because of Bushist Party shenanigans, but because he got about 50 more votes than Norm Coleman. It’s an amazingly close vote total, yes; these things happen. Norm Coleman still benefits from having leeched off of the DFL; Randi herself got a call the other day from some guy who voted for Coleman, thinking Coleman might switch parties back; Randi had to tell the guy, who seemed a little taken aback, that Coleman is a horrible person; and Al Franken isn’t as extroverted as Paul Wellstone was, and so didn’t make as many friends; so the vote was close; but that’s what happened. Al Franken may or may not owe an apology to Randi Rhodes, but in such a small way that it is perverse for Randi to make such a big deal four years later.
Also, she owes Al more than she realizes: having her show follow Franken’s did much to launch Randi’s career in nationwide radio, and Al did it even though the bosses (being bad bosses) weren’t paying him the gazillions they’d signed him up for.
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