This is one of the funniest pieces of social/political writing I’ve read in a long time, and something I wish I was smart enough to have written myself. My favorite so far:
SEAN HANNITY Aesthetic: Repressed kid from Long Island who got to college, was scared of sex, discovered other repressed white kids in conservative student group, joined them, devoted rest of life to blasting people who didn’t.
A small town newspaper with a really funny, well-written police report.
Cool websites:
Peacefire: Open Access for the Net Generation.
Also: Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting.
Also, the Michael Moore book – Stupid White Men: And Other Sorry Excuses for the State of the Nation! my brother Todd recommended really rocks. I’m about half-way through. Good stuff.
If you needed more evidence that Fox News isn’t exactly “news” and is more right-wing hysterical polemic: Fox news mistakes a parody site for a right-wing news site, has founder of parody site on show to comment on “real” news.
Parody site founder deliberately doesn’t tell Fox he’s a humorist so that he can savor the irony of making them look dumb: “In a shocking, somewhat frightening example of the glaring research vacuum that plagues television news” and “All anyone at the network would have had to do is actually have read the first paragraph of the piece to discover that it was 100-percent crap.”
“Brain Drain” by Mark Crispin Miller:
For reasons too complex for us to hazard here, the anti‑intellectuals are finally on the side of power at its most unforgiving and voracious. And so they give a pass to those professors who are at the service of such power, while jeering anyone–inside or outside the Academy–who thinks to raise a fuss about how wrong it is. For them, this isn’t something to discuss, because discussion is itself suspicious, even dangerous–the sport of jerk‑offs and Prevaricators. Thus there is no point in arguing with them–and yet no wisdom in attempting to ignore them. And such is true not only of the Bush regime’s most unrestrained supporters, but of the Bush regime itself–a fact that now requires a lot of careful thought, and something more.
And yet it’s just such thinking that has all but disappeared since 9/11–as it always disappears in time of war. In bringing down the World Trade Center (a mile from where I sit right now) and ravaging the Pentagon, the terrorists not only murdered thousands, and left tens of thousands more bereft, and devastated lower Manhattan, and sparked the wreckage of the local and the national economy. Through that spectacular atrocity, the killers also managed, at one blow, to knock the brains clean out of countless good Americans. Although those citizens had started out that day with all their wits intact, by dinner‑time they sounded way much like Fred–a terroristic consequence a lot less hideous, surely, than what happened in the air and on the ground, and yet even more destructive in the long run. For while we can and will no doubt rebuild beyond the shattered lives and property, the prospects aren’t as upbeat for our frail democracy, which cannot function if too many people think like Bill O’Reilly and his fans.
I’ve always said there are a significant number of Americans that are dumber than a box of hammers. And now there’s more proof.
Oh holy crap. Timothy McVeigh decided to release as his “final words” before execution the poem “Invictus” which I’ve had on my website in my favorite poem section for five years. I come up at the top of some search engines, so I’ve had almost two hundred thousand hits on this page since this afternoon. If you’re looking for right-wing conspiracy theories and paranoia, don’t look for them here; I believe in logic, reason, and ‘government of the people, by the people and for the people.’
Joan Walsh says in regards to Andrew Sullivan: “It seems as if there’s a brand-new, very simple standard for when the private behavior of a public figure is news: when he or she writes something that makes enemies.”
No, that’s not a fair characterization of what Signorile or others said.
Your private behavior becomes newsworthy when that private behavior is at odds with your publicly expressed views, especially when those views, like Sullivan’s, critique and condemn in others the very sort of behavior that you are secretly practicing.
Practice what you preach, preach what you practice, and above all to thine ownself be true, and you’ll never end up in hot water with Michaelangelo Signorile.
I love Michelangelo Signorile. I wish I had a girlfriend just like him. Only she would be a girl, of course.
Despite the presence of gay characters on TV, there are still no openly gay actors on television, and that’s a problem. The real problem with Ellen wasn’t that her character was gay, or that there were too many gay themed shows, as some people claimed.
It was that Ellen Degeneres, not the character Ellen Morgan, was gay. During the debate over ratings and issues that surrounded the cancellation of her show, the example that proves that point, the real reason the show was no longer on the air, got overlooked.
During Ellen’s last season, there was an evening in which Ellen show aired at 9 p.m. Airing that same night at 8 p.m. there was an episode of Spin City. On that show, the gay character Carter, (played by a heterosexual man) kisses the heterosexual character Mike Flaherty as a joke. The fact that it happened was practially ignored, except that it aired as the promo for the show for days before hand.
That same evening on Ellen at 9 p.m., Ellen Morgan, a gay character, kisses her heterosexual friend Paige as a joke. Not only was it a big deal, it was given a warning prior to the show, and was universally criticized afterwards.
What was the difference between the two events? Both featured a gay character kissing a straight character in a romantic way, but as a joke. The only difference was that one of the real-life actors in the second show was gay in real life.