mellicious: "I think the subtext here is rapidly becoming text." (subtext Buffy quote)
The Washington Post published a list of all the major investigations going on concerning the ex-president, sometime in the last week, and somehow seeing it in neat list form made me really happy. So I thought I would pass it along in case somebody else felt the same way.

The first two are most obvious, the ones being overseen by the independent prosecutor.

1. Mar-a-Lago documents
2. Justice Department probe of January 6 (separate from the
January 6 select committee, of course, but that one is now more or less disbanded, anyway)
3. Georgia elections probe (at the state & county level)
4. Trump business practices, in NY state, both civil and criminal
5. Investigations of Trump's Westchester golf club (also in NY, at the county level)

(And of course these are only the ones going forward at some level - there is practically no end to the list of more minor stuff.)

Merry Christmas!

mellicious: blinky holiday lights (holiday lights gif)
So, Warnock got reelected - whew. The idea of That Man (i.e., his opponent the football player) being in the Senate just made me shudder. (Plenty of football players are perfectly nice people. It's the part where some people presumably voted for him because of that - and despite his other issues - that bothers me.)


I haven't talked about reading yet, and I'm certainly capable of running on about that at some length. For now I'll just say that I have been reading Miss Marple, which I had never read before - I had read some Christie years ago but that was mostly the Poirot books. I guess I wasn't interested in reading about old people when I was young myself, but that's no longer the case and I'm enjoying Miss Marple. I read the first book a while back - that's The Murder at the Vicarage and I liked it but I had this sense I was missing something. I went on and read the second and third books, but what I finally figured out is that there are a bunch of short stories that were written first, which I guess accounts for my feeling that I was expected to know some of the characters ahead of time! And so I've gone back and I'm reading those, now.

(I don't know that Poirot is supposed to be all that young, either, but Miss Marple was always portrayed as a slightly-batty old lady, at least until Murder, She Wrote made her into a sort of icon. Now that I've read (some of) the books I see that that's just supposed to be people making assumptions.)




mellicious: Yoda: "Post every day you will" (yoda - nablopomo)
I counted, and I had some thirty-five messages with titles obviously referring to Roe v Wade in my inbox today (and even more that were not so obvious, I found when I started looking further). I suppose this mostly reflects how much e-mail I l allow various Democratic/liberal-leaning groups to send me, but still, that's a lot. I don't even want to get into the politics of the whole thing, I'd probably end up making myself ill and probably delete the whole thing in the end anyway. Let's just say I'm profoundly grateful to be past menopause. I always feel for the people who have to make that decision, and it's about to get much much worse, of course.

Hmm, is Yoda here really the only Star Wars icon I brought over from Livejournal? Apparently so. I usually only use that one during November or December, since I manifestly don't post every day for most of the year. I'm doing good to post a couple of times a month, usually. (In the geek realm, I have icons here for Marvel (Black Widow), DC (Wonder Woman), two Buffy quotes, Narnia, and Star Trek, in addition to Yoda.)

Yesterday was our 35th wedding anniversary. We didn't exactly do anything fantastically celebratory - we went out to eat Saturday (Mexican), went to a movie Sunday (The Northman), and dawdled around at home yesterday and picked out an old-favorite movie to watch in the evening. (I suppose it says a lot about us that this was Terminator 2, and.we enjoyed it tremendously. It had been quite a long time since I'd seen it.)

The Northman will not be on my list of favorite movies I've seen this year, but I'm sort of glad I saw it just the same. It was...weirdly old-fashioned. It wasn't actually as violent as I expected - although I'd say that it's still pretty violent unless you watch a lot of that kind of thing. "Well-made but incredibly gloomy" might be the short version of my review.

(And the movie we saw the previous weekend, The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent, was a hoot. I really enjoyed it. I'm not a huge Nick Cage fan, but Pedro Pascal made up for that, and they were great as a duo.)




===============================================

Movies seen in a theater in 2022:
  1. The Northman
  2. The Unbearable Weight of Massive Talent
  3. Fantastic Beasts: The Secrets of Dumbledore
  4. Everything Everywhere All At Once
  5. The Batman (twice)
  6. Cyrano
  7. Belfast
  8. Spider-Man: No Way Home (our third time seeing it)
  9. Ghostbusters: Afterlife (our second time seeing it) 
...and Rob also saw:
  • X
  • The Cursed
  • Scream
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Buffy quote - subtext)
There was an article once, about a political campaign event. This was in 1984. I think the article was in The Austin Chronicle, but I'm not sure about that, it was too long ago. (I might even have a copy of it somewhere, but I haven't looked for it.) The tone of the article was slightly mocking. It wasn't a very exciting event, that's for sure. Among other things it says that there was music. "Five people dance, " it said. You may have guessed by now that I was there. I was one of the five people who danced. I remember reading the article and saying, "Look, y'all, that's us!" and everybody else looked and laughed and agreed that, yeah, it definitely was. We were the only ones who danced.

In 1984 I was out of school and working at the libraries at UT. I would have been 23-going-on-24. Most of my friends were a little younger than me, some in grad school and some undergrads who were just dawdling - it wasn't at all uncommon to take 5 or even 6 years to finish your undergrad degree, if you had parents who would cooperate with that. If you've been reading here in past Decembers, you've seen me talk about going to concerts a lot - this was the period of my life when that most of that happened. I had a little group of friends I hung around with and we did a lot of going to concerts and going to clubs and eating out, the usual stuff for single people in their twenties. (And, if you're wondering about the five people dancing thing, we tended to dance as a group. We were mixed sexes and nobody was a couple. There wasn't always five of us, but when we went where there was dancing, we just all got up and danced without worrying about pairing off.) (I don't think that's unusual nowadays but thirty-odd years ago it still was.)

And we worked on Gary Hart's campaign in 1984. We didn't work on it very hard, mind you - we had jobs and school and all that. We weren't real campaign workers who were there all the time. Some of my friends may have been more involved, but I only remember doing two things - one of which was going to this event, which was at one of the big hotels down on Riverside Drive, and was on a weekend (at least I think it was a weekend) when Gary Hart was actually in Austin. He didn't come to the reception that I talked about above. I don't think we saw him talk or anything, either, because I think I would remember that, if it happened. But we did see him - we were on one walkway in the hotel and he was down below us. We waved and he waved back. That was it.

The other thing was that we gave out flyers or something on the day of the primary. I didn't enjoy that - I'm not good at talking to strangers, generally, much less accosting them with political stuff. Between that, and the way that Hart imploded later on (that happened in 1988, but I had to look it up because I had forgotten), I've never worked on a campaign again. I'm kind of a political junkie - I follow politics closely, and I donate money to various campaigns, but I've never quite been able to bring myself to volunteer again. These days I'm embarrassed to admit that, but it's true. Part of it is a deep-seated conviction that you can't trust individual politicians that came largely from having hitched my wagon to the Gary Hart train long ago.

(I don't know if I'll go see The Front Runner, the movie about Gary Hart. The reviews aren't that great, and I doubt that Rob would be thrilled to go. But it was because of the existence of the movie that it occurred to me to talk about this.)

45 years

Jun. 17th, 2017 03:50 am
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Buffy quote - bored)
 Forty-five years ago this week (it was Flag Day, that's the only reason I remember the exact date still) I had heart surgery to fix a heart murmur I was born with. I was 12. I saw that it was Flag Day this week and I did the math and came up with that rather staggering number - 45 - and so I also noticed it tonight on MSNBC when they said that the Watergate break-in was 45 years ago this week. I didn't remember that, but then it wasn't big news at the time, either. It only became big news later on. But that means that happened while I was in the hospital recovering - I was really bored sitting in the hospital for a whole week, at least after a couple of days when I started feeling better. I remember that well. I don't specifically remember watching the news, but everybody watched the evening news back then (usually referred to as "watching Walter Cronkite" the way I remember it) and it's possible I did. I do think I knew about that break-in pretty early on.

But that might just be in my head. I do know I remember being mad about the Watergate hearings being all that was on on the TV - this was during the summer, I'm assuming that was in 1974. And I remember Nixon resigning and I know I knew the basics about it at the time, at least, but it's hard to be sure how much of all the stuff that happened in that two-year time period I really remember from the time it was happening and how much I learned later, from All the President's Men (both the movie and the book) and so forth. I do think now that all of that may be a lot of the reason I'm so interested in politics today, though.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Dr Who - giant robot)
This kind of thing just pisses me off, so I'm using Holidailies today to vent my anger. The Senate voted today to kill (that is, against ratifying) the Convention on the Rights of Persons with Disabilities. I mean, are the Republicans just trying to see how big of a grinch they can be, collectively?

(Added: apparently everybody's favorite failed presidential candidate/dirty word Rick Santorum had something to do with this whole thing.)


This list came from the official Senate website, but I edited it down to the naysayers, so any mistakes are likely to be mine.

38 senators (all Republicans) voted no - enough to vote it down, since this is a treaty and takes a 2/3 majority:
Alexander (R-TN), Nay 
Blunt (R-MO), Nay 
Boozman (R-AR), Nay 
Burr (R-NC), Nay 
Chambliss (R-GA), Nay 
Coats (R-IN), Nay 
Coburn (R-OK), Nay 
Cochran (R-MS), Nay 
Corker (R-TN), Nay 
Cornyn (R-TX), Nay 
Crapo (R-ID), Nay 
DeMint (R-SC), Nay 
Enzi (R-WY), Nay 
Graham (R-SC), Nay 
Grassley (R-IA), Nay 
Hatch (R-UT), Nay 
Heller (R-NV), Nay 
Hoeven (R-ND), Nay 
Hutchison (R-TX), Nay 
Inhofe (R-OK), Nay 
Isakson (R-GA), Nay 
Johanns (R-NE), Nay 
Johnson (R-WI), Nay 
Kyl (R-AZ), Nay 
Lee (R-UT), Nay 
McConnell (R-KY), Nay 
Moran (R-KS), Nay 
Paul (R-KY), Nay 
Portman (R-OH), Nay 
Risch (R-ID), Nay 
Roberts (R-KS), Nay 
Rubio (R-FL), Nay 
Sessions (R-AL), Nay 
Shelby (R-AL), Nay 
Thune (R-SD), Nay 
Toomey (R-PA), Nay 
Vitter (R-LA), Nay 
Wicker (R-MS), Nay

These R's (and Lieberman) voted Yes (and I may have missed at least 1 R in there):
Ayotte (R-NH), Yea 
Barrasso (R-WY), Yea 
Brown (R-MA), Yea
Collins (R-ME), Yea 
Lieberman (ID-CT), Yea 
Lugar (R-IN), Yea 
McCain (R-AZ), Yea 
Snowe (R-ME), Yea

(And I don't know what's up with this guy:
Kirk (R-IL), Not Voting)
(What I'm not sure about is what "not voting" means, exactly? Abstained? Absent?) (Note: see answer to this in the comments.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (vote)
I am having to hit the mute button whenever a Rick Perry commercial comes on; he babbles on about intrusive federal government and the 10th amendment, and it just sends me into a rage. I guess I shouldn't be surprised that he's apparently going to win the Republican nomination for re-election quite handily - I am unsure if a Democratic candidate is thought to have a chance in hell of unseating him. (I know Bill White, the very popular former mayor of Houston, is running on the D. side, but I have no idea if White has any kind of statewide name recognition at all, or who else is running. I think he (White) is rich, though, so that might help some.) The last R. poll I saw had something like Perry 40%, Senator Hutchison 22%, and the crazy tea-party woman whose name I can't remember at something like 19%. So that gives you an idea what we're looking at on the Republican side.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (winter trees)
Do the Republicans really think that what Harry Reid said is equivalent to what Trent Lott said back in the day, or are they just grabbing at straws? I mean, clearly what Reid said was tactless, but that it's the same as making pro-segregationist remarks? Are they really that stupid, that they don't see the difference? or are they just trying to make trouble? They're so crazy these days that I honestly don't know.


I was going on about Devil Wears Prada and stuff yesterday, and I completely forgot to say that we went to see Zombieland at the Dollar Cinema yesterday. (Which is actually $1.50 nowadays, even for a matinee. I hadn't been there in ages.) Rob had convinced me that I would like it, and I did. Apparently I only like zombie movies when they're comedies. It wasn't as good as Shawn of the Dead, but it was good. Bit gross in places, but not too bad, considering.

And I'm beginning to think that I am going to have to reconsider hating Woody Harrelson. It's very disconcerting, really, suddenly finding somebody you've hated for years turn tolerable.


It's finally getting warmer here. We've had freezing temps at night for days and days, which is very unusual for us. I've had a sheet over my plants all weekend. (It was the Norfolk pine I was mostly worried about.) I think I can go take it off tomorrow, because apparently it's not actually freezing tonight, although it's still pretty chilly.

Good lord, it's 2:00 already. I gotta go get some studying done before bedtime.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (winter trees)
Inevitably, conservatives are pissed off at the political/religious messages in Avatar. I'm still pissed off at the bad plot, myself. (It sure is making a godawful amount of money, though. You can't help but be impressed.)

Holidailies is over, and as always, I forgot to say thanks to Jette and Chip for doing it. Thanks guys, if you're reading! (Also, I posted at 11-something last night, and the only person who posted after me was [livejournal.com profile] kymmz , meaning (I guess) that our posts will be sitting at the top of the main Holidailies page for the next 11 months. Which is sort of cool. Procrastinators unite!)

Ooh, Rachel Maddow is on Letterman tonight. I totally have a girl-crush on her, have you noticed?

Rob reported that there were people out buying groceries in a panic yesterday. I never even went outside yesterday because my back was hurting and also because I decided to take my respiratory system test right at the time I normally go out, but the Weather Channel reports that it is 43 degrees outside right now. Which is pretty cold by our standards for the middle of the day. As [livejournal.com profile] cleolinda discussed yesterday, cold snap panics in the south are usually less about snow, really, and more about ice and falling branches/trees and associated power outages. Now I'm wondering a bit if there's anything I ought to stock up on, just in case.

Alright, I have to go study - I have sworn to set myself daily goals and if I don't meet them (or well, at least come reasonably close) then no LOTRO. [livejournal.com profile] columbina has even volunteered to nag me about it. (Oh, and I made an 88 on my test.)

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (m15m - polarbear)
Funny for today: Ricky Gervais singing a lullaby to Elmo:

[That link is bad, but try here. Or just google it!]


(That is Elmo, right? You can tell I don't have kids.) (Found on The Daily Dish.)

Also from the Daily Dish, the crazies are out and they're all running for public office:
"To think that we can save the Constitution without God's help when the government of the United States is corrupt is absurdity. We are in America's second Revolutionary War to save our freedom, which we paid for with blood. We need God's help and I'm not ashamed to ask for it,"  - Rex Rammel, Idaho gubernatorial candidate.

(That's not the first example of this I've seen. There was also the guy who said we ought to be more worried about Democrats than about terrorists - I think that one is running for Congress.)


I've been reading [livejournal.com profile] yuki_onna 's The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland in a Ship of Her Own Making - it's very entertaining. It's a long YA story (in 24 chapters) which is entirely up online. (There's even audio!)


Added: I dug further down the Daily Dish website and found the other quote I was talking about:
“Our country is being destroyed. Every generation has had to fight the fight for freedom… Terrorism? Yes. That’s not the big battle. The big battle is in D.C. with the radicals. They aren’t liberals. They are radicals. Obama, Pelosi, Walz: They’re not liberals, they’re radicals. They are destroying our country ... This [health insurance bill] is the most insidious, evil piece of legislation I have ever seen in my life… Every one of us has to be totally committed to killing this travesty… I have to kill this bill,” - congressional candidate Allan Quist.

"Walz" is the poor schmuck this fundamentalist is running against.

mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (winter berries)
I have said before that I usually get asked to bring the rolls (store-bought) to Christmas dinner, or fruit for a fruit salad. My aunt has told me before that this is because we live out of town, but my mom lived out of town too, and that didn't get her out of being asked to bring her famous gumbo to everything. (Which meant if you rode with her, you got to smell it for two or three hours, and half the time some of it would end up on the floorboard of the car. Ew.) So clearly, the real reason is not that I live out of town, but that I am famously not much of a cook. Somebody on some blog I was reading said lately that everybody bakes something at Christmas. Um, no. Maybe every five years I will get on a roll and bake cookies or something - and there was that time my mother guilted me into making fudge. (Actually I think she guilted me into making fudge twice. But it's no-bake fudge, anyway - the recipe is in that entry, if you're interested - so that's still not baking, technically.)

All that said, I am sort of baking something - or rather taking something that will be baked - to the family Christmas. But it's lasagna, of all things, rather than anything sweet. It's not actually for the big Christmas dinner; it will be eaten either Thursday night or Friday night. And I'm taking it assembled but unbaked, and we will bake it later. I've done that before, a number of years ago, and it worked out well. It's not actually that I can't cook, but that I don't usually bother. Rob and I don't really eat the same food (he lives on spaghetti and fish, generally) and we each cook our own, but for me that usually ends up being something frozen. I just don't care much about cooking, but when I bother to cook, I do pretty well at it. (As long as I set timers. I can burn anything.)



Linkage:
Possibly the funniest LJ thread I've ever read. I can't say I ever thought a whole lot about the lyrics to "Do You Hear What I Hear?" but I will now.

I thought everybody knew about the GOP military-funding filibuster, but TPM is treating it as news and TPM knows everything (politically speaking), so I guess not. Politically speaking, here's the question I want answered: what made Lieberman change his mind on the healthcare bill? It's very clear what made Ben Nelson change his mind, but I haven't heard a word about Lieberman. If I find out the answer to this, I'll report back.

I did find out the answer to why Al Franken has been presiding so much - he's the low man on the totem pole, so he gets the duty at fun times like the all-night sessions. (I knew he was the low man, of course, I just hadn't made the connection.)

Wow. I'm suddenly much happier that I've never been much of a Prairie Home Companion fan.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (WoW - rampage)
I have C-SPAN on (which, for all my interest in politics, I only very rarely watch) and Minority Leader Mitch McConnell is currently enumerating the "faults" of the healthcare bill. I see plenty of faults in it but I don't think most of the ones he sees are the same ones I see. In any case, I have been saying for a while that some sort of healthcare bill is going to pass because the Democratic Party knows it's screwed if it doesn't - I could still be proven wrong when it comes down to the conference committee but I gather the Senate is supposed to have the votes to pass this tonight.

I have been trying to figure out all day what to say about Avatar, and I can't say my thoughts are too coherent about it, still, so here are my rather disjointed ones. I did enjoy it quite a lot, but I think its mindblowing effects are overstated, on the whole. (Or at least, it failed to blow mine too thoroughly.) I did not particularly see it as racist - see here if you're not already aware of that debate. I felt like Cameron thought that the Na'vi, the blue-skinned natives, were superior to the humans not because they were noble savages or anything like that but more because of the way they were connected with nature. I think this movie is to a great degree a treatise on the "rape of the land" and concepts like that, and how many people are going to disagree with that? And I rather agree with [livejournal.com profile] cleolinda  that its attitude towards the disabled bothered me as much as the other stuff (although I apparently liked it considerably more than she did, overall). It was certainly a pretty thing to look at - and I also have to admit that I continue to think Sam Worthington is really pretty to look at, just as I did in Terminator: Salvation. I suspect there are technical ways, if nothing else, in which this movie will genuinely be groundbreaking, but comparing it with Star Wars as a game-changer? Not hardly.

Ooh, they are voting on cloture. This seems like a pretty big moment.

I have a jewelry class tomorrow night - [livejournal.com profile] columbina  take note. I keep forgetting about it. I signed up for it about a month ago and promptly forgot all about it. It's a good thing I wrote it down in the datebook I keep in my purse. And the girl who signed me up for it wrote my name and address down on a loose piece of paper, so I hope it got written down somewhere more permanent because I doubt that I know where my receipt from a month ago is.

Cloture passes, 60-40. And huh, they are now having a roll-call. Is somebody missing, is that what that's about? I saw them wheel Byrd in at the beginning so I know he's there. Interesting.

I better go get some beads together for this class. I know me, I'll be running late tomorrow. And if I walk in that store without a pretty good selection I'll end up buying a whole lot of stuff. Happens every time.

(The Senate just adjourned; I'm still not sure what that roll-call business was. The ways of the Senate seem to be exceedingly mysterious.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Xmas light gif)
(This is not my official Holidailies entry, which was earlier - be sure not to miss it, though, as it's all about movie scores and the question of whether James Horner is a hack.)

With apologies to Col, who said he didn't want to hear any more about the L-word, I just have to link to this great NYT times article, which floats a number of theories about just what the hell is going on with the whole healthcare thing, my favorite being that "Joe's just not very smart." (The article is a couple of days old, so many of you have probably seen it already, but presumably I'm not the only one in the world who hadn't!)

I have finally "let" iTunes fully rotate the Christmas music in. I had forgotten that I bought a number of classical Christmas albums last year and the year before - mostly vocal music - so my Christmas music is dominated by lovely antiphonal choral pieces rather than by Bing Crosby - although he's in the mix somewhere too.

I have given up on studying for the evening. I listened to the lecture on the respiratory system three times because I kept looking at scrapbooking supplies and losing track of what the lecturer was talking about. (I apologize to her in advance if she happens to be reading here, but the lecturer in my class just plain lacks oomph. Losing track is a very easy thing to do.)wanna hear more about crafts? )
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Xmas - CB tree)
There was a high-school kid in Starbucks earnestly explaining to the girl with him that the Bush administration wasn't as bad as their reputation, because, you see, the Democrats controlled Congress and all those bad bills that got passed during the Bush administration were all their fault. I really had to bite my lip. Of course the problems with this are numerous - I suppose the kid's probably not even old enough to remember the first SIX YEARS of the Bush administration during which the Democrats did NOT control Congress in any way, shape or form. And I don't really think controlling half of Congress during the last two count, either, do you? (Hmm, I think it's possible I am a little tetchy on the subject of Congress right now, anyway. They all need to get lumps of coal for Christmas. Whether they celebrate Christmas or not.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (brain leaking)
Rather baffling exchange on tonight's "Hardball":
Matthews is interviewing Haley Barbour, who is the Republican governor of... some state. I'm resisting the urge to go look it up, because I don't much care. Maybe Michigan, maybe Mississippi. (I think maybe it's the latter, actually.)

Matthews: Is Sarah Palin qualified to be president?
Barbour: Well.... she's certainly constitutionally qualified.
Matthews: You're not answering my question. Is Sarah Palin qualified to be president?
Barbour (without too much enthusiasm): Sure, she's qualified. Why not?
Matthews: Why won't you answer my question?

The thing that I find baffling is that Matthews considers that to be a non-answer (or maybe he was really trying to get Barbour to say something bad about her - that seems somewhat more plausible). To me that first answer is very very clear - it's practically the textbook definition of "damning with faint praise," isn't it? She's constitutionally qualified? Well, yeah. So is my dad, but I wouldn't vote for him for president, either.

(OK, I looked: it's Mississippi. And here's the video. My version above is a paraphrase, of course, but upon listening again, it's fairly accurate as a quick summary of that exchange.)


I think I've mentioned before that I watch a lot of MSNBC at night. I love Rachel Maddow unreservedly, and I love Keith Olbermann when he's not doing his "funny" voices. I love Chris Matthews some of the time. I like "The Ed Show" on the rare occasions when Ed quits yelling. But mostly I'm watching for Rachel and Keith. Luckily MSNBC knows where their bread is buttered, and during the overnight hours they rerun Keith three times, Rachel twice, and Chris and Ed once each. (I noticed a similar pattern on CNN a while back: Anderson Cooper was getting rerun a whopping four times, Larry King twice, and Lou Dobbs once. At 3am. I was pretty sure even then that Lou's days on CNN were numbered.) I usually watch my two favorites all the way through at least once, and I will go back and find them on iTunes' podcasts if I somehow manage to miss them completely. I don't ever bother with podcasts for the others. I often don't make it through Ed even once if he's really in shouty mode. And at 4am my time, when they go to live news, I more often turn it off, if I've made it that far. I usually feel like I'm caught up enough on the news by that point - not that much generally happens in the overnight hours, anyway. (And after the 4am news, they go into their more conservative mode with "Morning Joe" and such and I can't usually tolerate that for long.)
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Halloween kitten)
Dick Cheney is apparently supporting Kay Bailey Hutchison (the current Senator and challenger to Rick Perry, Mr. Secession's-Not-So-Bad) in the Texas governor's race next spring. Sarah Palin is said to be supporting Perry. I still think Perry's going to win, unless something changes more radically than just this, but this ought to make things a bit more interesting, at least.

*jaw drop*

Sep. 24th, 2009 01:07 am
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (Astros - retro)
Sarah Palin on what caused the financial crisis:

Lack of government wasn’t the problem. Government policies were the problem. The marketplace didn’t fail. It became exactly as common sense would expect it to. The government ordered the loosening of lending standards. The Federal Reserve kept interest rates low. The government forced lending institutions to give loans to people who, as I say, couldn’t afford them. Speculators spotted new investment vehicles, jumped on board and rating agencies underestimated risks.

Now, I know expecting realism from the woman is, well, unrealistic, but really: the financial crisis happened because the government forced the lenders to give loans to the wrong people? This is a new one on me. I have always had the impression that lenders were falling all over themselves to give loans to practically anybody they could talk into taking a house, and whether the buyers could actually afford it was the least of their worries. Silly me.

Excerpts from the speech here. Other bits that caught my eye:

"You can call me a common-sense conservative."

"If you want real job growth, you cut taxes!" (Oh yeah, cause that's worked so well in the past.)

"...we are going to survive, and we’re going to thrive and expand and roar back to life. And as the world sees this, the world will be a healthier, more secure, safer and more prosperous place when this happens."

"I seem to have acquired notoriety in national debate."

(On China) "I’m not talking about a U.S.-led democracy crusade. [We’re] not going to impose our values on other countries. We don’t seek to do that. But the ideas of freedom and liberty and respect for human rights, it’s not just a U.S. idea. They’re very much more than that. They’re enshrined in the Universal Declaration of Human Rights and many other international covenants and treaties." (Among other things, I don't believe for a minute that she knows or cares a damn thing about any Universal Declaration of Human Rights.)

The crazy

Sep. 3rd, 2009 02:27 am
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (brain leaking)
Random "town-hall" type on TV:
"Obama is a radical communist who's going to take over and turn us into communists like Hitler did in Germany."

Gawd. There are no words.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (brain leaking)
Col linked to this funny bit in the Daily Kos about all these supposed libertarians wandering around lately. In the comments, I expressed the opinion that we ought to fence off part of Nevada, say, and stick them all out there with no government services and see how they like it.

I am tired of idiots. I've been very quiet for the last month mostly because I am trying to avoid the healthcare rant I want to write - not because you guys wouldn't be interested, I'm sure, but because I am incapable of being rational about it. Now there's news that there are people in Texas who actually want to try to secede. I don't know why I'm surprised. Actually I guess I'm not surprised at all that they exist; I am just pissed off at their insistence on making idiots out of themselves in public. (Although admittedly, I ought not be surprised at that, either, especially with the abundance of evidence in the past month of people's willingness to do so.) I don't think this would have a chance in hell of passing even if it did somehow get on the ballot - among other things, wouldn't it be illegal? - but I've heard some people in other states who ought to know better act like all Texans feel like this and I'm tired of being tarred with that brush. Texas is only barely a Republican state any more, although I know it's hard to believe. Like a lot of places, it's divided sharply down the urban-vs-rural divide, but urban is winning, increasingly so. And I think maybe in Texas the urban-vs-rural divide is even sharper than in other states. There are a lot of people out there on the prairie and in the small towns who may not be far from me physically, but otherwise, they might as well be on another planet.
mellicious: Quote from Buffy the Vampire Slayer's 1st episode: "The earth is doomed." (no icon)
James Baker is on CNN (it's a repeat from earlier, I'm sure) saying he agrees with a lot of what Obama is doing about foreign policy. I always have thought - or, well, I've thought for a number of years, anyway - that Baker is generally a pretty reasonable guy, which probably makes him one of those moderates that the Republicans have famously been trying to drive out of the party, doesn't it? Bill Bennett was also on; he did not have as many nice things to say, unsurprisingly. I am almost to the point of having to turn the channel when Bennett comes on, because he's so smug it makes me want to scream. And it seems like he's always on, on one news channel or another.

I know "Bill Bennett is smug" is not exactly news. I think the point may be more that I'm in news overload, really. Except that I'm enjoying a lot of it. I am on an MSNBC tear lately, and am watching less CNN, generally. Politics interests me more than murders and much, much more than celebrity news, which makes MSNBC a much better fit for me. Especially at this moment in history, with the Republican Party pretty much in free-fall, MSNBC is a lot of fun to watch, since they are not at all shy about the mocking - in fact they tend sometimes to go overboard with the mockery, even for my taste. At least Keith Olbermann has recently given up doing his "funny" Sean Hannity voice, which was a relief, since I really like the guy otherwise. (Olbermann, I mean, not Hannity.)

I do most of my news-watching after Rob goes to bed. Before that we mostly watch baseball, this time of year. I've been watching Anderson Cooper for a while and then switching over to MSNBC when I get tired of that. Both networks fill most of the night on weeknights by repeating their prime-time shows. At 4am my time MSNBC switches back over to live news, and I think CNN does so around that same time, too - 5am Eastern is when people start getting up again, I guess. (CNN finally repeats Lou Dobbs' show at 3am, which I can't watch, thus I am unsure about what comes on after it!) I really haven't been going to bed before 4 at all lately, and often it's later than that. Everybody keeps telling me that I'm going to have trouble going back to a "normal" schedule when I get a job again, but my past history is that I slide right back to it pretty easily when I have to. But I am absolutely a natural night person, as you can tell!

I am watching CNN right now instead of MSNBC because the latter changes their late-night programming on the weekends and runs things like "Lockup" and various shows about murders. I can watch a certain amount of that but I definitely don't have the almost-endless taste for it that I do for politics. (One weekend I did get really interested in a series where they were following real-life forensic pathologists around, though.)

Bill Bennett is back on, and I just turned the TV off. I think I have a podcast of last night's "Countdown" I can watch.

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