Caution: Planet At Work

A really cool picture of Mount Saint Helens from a passing plane. (from the Seattle P-I).

Cheers to Canadian Reporters

Apparently Canadian political reporters are already sick of Stephen Harper's bullying, Bush-like tactics. From the L.A. Times:

Since Harper's minority government took office after the Jan. 23 elections, his relations with the national media have become more and more strained. Determined to impose order on the traditionally chaotic press scrum in which reporters shout out questions, Harper said he would choose questioners from a pre-screened list.

The parliamentary media corps, which includes broadcast and print reporters from all over the country, worried that the new protocol would freeze out journalists perceived to be tough on the prime minister. After journalists refused to sign on to the list, Harper refused to take any questions.

On Tuesday, when Harper's press secretary announced there would be no questions after his announcement of aid to the Darfur region of Sudan, nearly two dozen reporters walked out, leaving the prime minister to make his statement in front of a single camera in a nearly empty room.

"We are responsible for asking questions, and he is responsible for answering them," said Yves Malo, the president of the Parliament's press gallery.

Nice.

Don't Make McCain Come Back There

Courtesy of Brendan Nyhan, here's John McCain's "fresh, daring, original!" (Kevin Thomas, Los Angeles Times) answer to our problems in Iraq:

"One of the things I would do if I were President would be to sit the Shiites and the Sunnis down and say, 'Stop the bullshit,'" said Mr. McCain, according to Shirley Cloyes DioGuardi, an invitee, and two other guests.

The first obvious question is, "Was he sober when he said this?" I'll take it that the answer to that question is yes until someone proves otherwise. The second question, sadder than the first is, "Has McCain reached the conclusion that the press train following him is so in the tank that he can get away with saying anything?" The third question is whether McCain is so glib and shallow that he takes the nonsense he sprays from his face seriously.

These three questions have been asked about a politician before (Hint: he's the twit with the smirk and the 30% job approval rating), and they lead me to a fourth question. Have we as a nation become locked in some horrible sisyphean matrix of eternal recurrance? Will we push Bush out of our lives only to turn around and find McCain? Will we still be sitting here ten years from now, listening to pundits tell us about how we've reached a turning point on [Iraq/the economy/energy/"American Idol"] and how we'll know in six months whether [the insurgents/interest rates/oil prices/Ryan Seacrest] will rise or fall.

To quote either Tom Servo or Crow, "What is it about the gates of hell that compels people to walk through them?"

Suharto Suffers Internal Bleeding

Considering how much internal bleeding he caused in Indonesia, I'll save my pity.

McGavick: His Elbow Is Firmly On the Pulse of the World

Mike McGavick, the Republican senate candidate from these parts, wants to bar Iran from the World Cup unless they give up their nuclear ambitions.

Yeah, that'll quell the Islamic Republic's ambitions of building a bomb to deter U.S. and Isreali military action against them. And if they don't get the message that way, we'll take away Iran's UN ambassador's pool privileges. With foreign policy thinking like this, why do we have a nuclear proliferation problem at all?

If McGavick existed, I'd laugh at him.

Bush On Iraq Today

If we don't flail around uselessly, wasting money and lives in a futile struggle against centuries of deep seated religious animosity, terrorists who had nothing to do with Iraq in the first place will win.

I wonder if anyone bothered to catalog all of Bush's turning point assertions, as was done for Tom Friedman.

In News From the Lord

Pat Roberston apparently got a fax from the Deity indicating that I'm dead. My question: could God not provide a date, or is Robertson not telling us because he wants us to suffer the wrath with the drowning and the burbling and the little shrimps going up my nose?

I'll make a note to be scared.

Eternal Return

Matt Yglesias finds an example of it in the rhetoric of Flat-Earther and NY Times columnist Thomas Friedman.

While I'm On the Subject

While I'm on the subject of portentous bunk, I checked out the trailer for the remake of The Omen. I wonder if people working on all these horror remakes (going all the way back to the remake of Psycho) understand what it means to try too hard. Horror and humor are pretty closely related in structure (in one the payoff is a scream; in the other, a laugh). These remakes, as well as a lot of contemporary horror pictures, are like someone who repeats a well-loved joke and then spends the next ten minutes elbowing you in the ribs going "Get it? Get it?"

It's especially dangerous for a film like The Omen to go over the top. The story is at bottom an Idiot Plot. There would be no story if the antagonist (Spoiler alert for people who live in caves or haven't seen the movie poster: the antagonist is the Devil) weren't a total idiot. The Devil doesn't make sensible moves given his goal of keeping Damien Thorn's identity a secret. He lets key figures in his conspiracy continue breathing long enough to spill their guts, and then kills them in ways guaranteed to maximize exposure instead of minimizing it. Even at the end, instead of killing Robert Thorn with an easily arranged plane crash, the Devil has to wait until R.T. has dragged the devil's sprog to a church so that the cops can shoot him, thus fulfilling the poorly known prophecy found in the appendix to the gnostic apocrypha, "And so it shall come to pass, that Thorn the Elder shall take his son unto an unlocked church to pierce him with many piercings. And yea, verily at that time, the constabularies shall follow after him, aiming their guns and gnashing their teeth. And it shall come to pass that they shall warn him with many warnings to lay down his gun so they can quietly hush this up anon, yet Thorn the Elder, well versed in the rules of diplomatic immunity, does prepare to slay the Child Beast but is himself slain anon by many bullets. And there shall be much paperwork and covering up."

That's a direct quote.

Getting back to my original point, and I did have one, The Omen is an idiot plot, and much depends on the audience failing to notice this. Consequently, the filmmaker must get the viewer to identify strongly with the Thorns and their problem--"What would you do if you discovered that your little boy might be the Beast of the Apocalypse?" But it's hard for viewers to identify with characters when the movie keeps pulling the audience to one side and telling them "See how scary this is? See how weird all this is? Isn't that little boy freaky looking? Check out all that CGI slow-motion breaking glass! That just screams scary, doesn't it?" How can the audience reach fear, or forget the flaws in the plot, when the movie keeps reminding them that what they're watching is only a movie? Richard Donner, who directed the original film, understood this, and he worked hard to maintain a feeling of verisimilitude. The makers of the new film, based on the trailer, don't seem to get it. Not that I'll shed a tear. I root for remakes to fail. If enough of them eat it, maybe producers will spend some bucks on something new (preferably by me).

I Can't Wait Until the Da Vinci Code Opens!

Because that will bring me one day closer to its closing. Now that this weak compilation of text-based computer game plots has elbowed its way into the national dialog, I'm now certain I can feel us all getting lamer.

Could the fans of The Da Vinci Code and the fans of the Left Behind books please sit the fuck down and shut the fuck up? Neither of your books is credible! Their plots are silly. Their popularity, and the respect their popularity accords them is further evidence that humanity needs to evolve a better organ for distinguishing shit from shinola. The arguments between you are pointless and they're giving me a fucking headache. You people are worse than trekkies! Yes, trekkies engage in brainless fights over Kirk vs. Picard, but they don't take the fight to "Nightline". The things you're squabbling over don't matter to life as we know it on this planet. You people aren't news. Stop pretending that you are!

Sorry I went off there, gang. It's just that seeing the umpteenth "Da Vinci Code" book-and-soundtrack TV ad (the most impressive story of this era my ass) put me off my feed. There are good books out there, people. Pass the display stands for these bound and wrapped bundles of offal, find these good books, and read them. There are genuine mysteries in the universe--is there life under the ice sheet of Europa, will we be able to employ negative energy to travel faster than light or backward in time one day? Once you start fiddling with these, tales of what Jesus did with whom after he died and what hokey secret code leads to which imaginary relic start to look small and sad and silly.

Things You Can Do With Phone Records

From Josh Marshall:

Isn't this the other shoe dropping?

The piece is written in a roundabout sort of way. But if I understand it, Brian Ross is reporting at ABC news that the US government is tracking the calling patterns of political reporters to further their leak investigations.

If that's true, then I think we can set aside any pretense that administration policy on all manner of electronic surveillance isn't being brought to bear on political opponents, media critics, the press, everybody.

I need a drink.

Holy Joe and the Bloggers of Doom

Majikthise, Atrios, Bullmoose, Kos, and Drum are in a war over Jon Chait's column. The column recommends that the Democrats in Connecticut vote for Lieberman even though he's a terrible senator with whom most of them disagree. Apparently Chait feels this is a way to beat back the angry lefties in the world of blogs who want Holy Joe to sleep with the fishes and to drag the party back to 1972. Not that anyone's asking me, but I don't see how one has anything to do with the other.

What's sinking Joe Lieberman among Democrats isn't his voting record (which looks pretty good, though it seems so out of sync with his public image that I wonder whether the people keeping the tally included votes that don't really mean anything--like voting for a law raising the minimum wage but refusing to vote to end the filibuster on it), or even his bucking the party on the Iraq War (as such). It's that every time the Dems summon up some momentum against a President that pretty much every Democrat, leftist or centrist, dislikes, Lieberman throws himself between the Dems and the President and scolds the Dems for being so mean. It's very deflating to see Lieberman defend Bush on Abu Ghraib, or imply that dissent against the war in Iraq helps the terrorists because it brings down "the only President we've got." It's almost as deflating as Lieberman's chumming it up with Dick Cheney during the Vice-Presidential debate, or (even worse) kissing Bush on the floor of the House before the State of the Union. He makes nice with the other side so often that a lot of us wonder: shit, Joe, why don't you marry them?

Other centrists don't have Lieberman's problems (at least, not to his degree). Maria Cantwell, one of my senators, is up for re-election this year. She's taking some flak over Iraq, and is almost as unbending on the subject as Lieberman is; but Cantwell will get my vote anyway because she picked fights with Bush and Alaska Senator Ted Stevens over oil tankers and ANWAR, fought dirty, and won. There are some on the left who remain pissed and won't volunteer for Cantwell, but they'll come home by the election. (Fear of Ted Stevens's clone, Mike McGavick, will see to that.) I'm to the left of, well, just about everyone really; but Cantwell's my senator for as long as there isn't a more attractive alternative who can win the general election. I can figure that in a fight she'll mostly belt the Republicans, not her own voters.

What's not at stake in the Lieberman election is the question of taking the party back to 1972. I expect that Kos and Atrios, their ostensible liberalism aside, would back just about any Democrat over Holy Joe. Left, right, or mainstream, any Dem who could restrict himself to a firm, cold handshake when meeting the President would be enough. Any Dem who could keep his face off Fox News for a few consecutive days would be enough. Any Dem whose first instinct isn't to attack other Dems would be enough. Ideology isn't the issue here. Joe Lieberman's continued self-aggrandizement at the expense of his supposed friends is.

Senator Lieberman, maybe this experience will teach you something. The next time you feel an impulse to kiss President Bush, make sure it looks like the kiss that Michael gave Fredo.

Oh, and Speaking Of Bombing

Donald Rumsfeld, who bombs for a living, demonstrates how not to handle a heckler.

"Did not!" Rummy? Snappy.

Giggles

John Rogers cuts through all the noise surrounding Stephen Colbert's performance at the correspondent's dinner (the first comedian's performance I've seen at the dinner that was actually worth the bother of watching), to explain what made it a good comedy performance:

In various circumstances as a road comic, I have seen every comic you can imagine, at some point or another, suck it. Hard. Seinfeld, Leno, Belzer, Ellen*, Ray Romano, pick 'em. Sometimes you just don't gel with an audience, but at that point you've been doing it long enough not to suddenly think the five years of good shows were somehow flukes.

But I have seen plenty of people "bomb" who left me breathless with the genius of their writing. Larry David, who a fair number of even the conservative culture mavens love, was notorious for his spellbinding nightclub routines that comics standing in the back of the room marvelled at but audiences hated. Garry Shandling famously worked open-mike nights for something like SEVEN YEARS before he was able to meld his brilliant writing with something audiences could relate to.

If Colbert "bombed", it was because the audience didn't like him. And you know what -- they WEREN'T SUPPOSED TO. We have been treated to toothless feel-good comedy for so long, we have forgotten what the court jester's job was: he was the only guy who could mock the King. And, seeing as we now have a President who acts like a King, it's only fitting that Colbert revive the tradition in its truest form. If I remember correctly, the toady court followers were also fair game for the Jester, and we could hardly call the modern media anything less these days, can we?

He also got into the comic mind in a way that sounds true to me:

I hate to play into the stereotype of all comics being angry, but at the very least we are all in some small way sociopathic. We do not process emotions and emotional context like other people. At the same time some civilized part of me was horrified by the first 9/11 joke I heard, some other part of my brain was impressed by its structure and transgressive nature. I'm not particularly pround of that, but it was as reflexive as a musician hearing a song he hates, but instinctively picking out what key it's in.

Me too. Read the whole post.

Crazy As A Soup Sandwich

Just a quick shout-out to Larry Dahlke (on the blogroll, to your right), who happened upon the comic book version of Harlan Ellison's "Crazy As A Soup Sandwich" and sent it to your friend and humble blogger. Well spotted, ol' buddy, and much appreciated.