The Governor of Arizona using a Kermit the Frog impersonator to mock critics of Arizona's new "Papiere, bitte!" immigration law for not having read the law in full (which is not remotely unusual, either among Democratic or Republican politicians, who typically receive summaries from aides).
[Transcript below.]
So, by my calculation, Governor Jan Brewer is against "illegals stealing jobs from Americans" but all the fuck for elected officials stealing intellectual property from Americans. Got it.
Text Onscreen: OK, kids. Ready? Let's sing along!!!!
Kermit the Frog impersonator [singing]: Reading is really super swell. Reading's great, so let's all shout out loud. Reading helps you know what you're talking about. Let's see what these folks have to say about reading.
Video clip of Rep. Ted Poe (R-Texas) asking Attorney General Eric Holder: Have you read the Arizona law?
Holder: Uh, I have not had a chance— [clip abruptly ends]
Video clip of Fox News anchor Sean Hannity asking State Department Spokesperson PJ Crowley: Have you read the law?
Crowley: Have I read the law? No.
Video clip of Senator John McCain (R-AZ) asking Secretary of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano: Have you had a chance to review the new law that was passed in the State of Arizona?
"Yeah, I thought that they—basically, in the very beginning—should stuff every member of NBC News in that hole."—World Champion Fuckdrip Bill O'Reilly, offering up a charming bit of eliminationism as a suggestion for stopping the oil leak in the Gulf.
See Deeky's archive of all previous Conniving & Sinister strips here.
[In which Liss reimagines the long-running comic "Frank & Ernest," about two old straight white guys "telling it like it is," as a fat feminist white woman (Liss) and a biracial queerbait (Deeky) telling it like it actually is from their perspectives. Hilarity ensues.]
Five women tried qualifying for the Indianapolis 500 this weekend and four of them made it. Danica Patrick, Ana Beatriz of Brazil, Simona de Silvestro of Switzerland, and American Sarah Fisher will all race this year.
It is a generally accepted bit of conventional wisdom that women are more likely to: A) Seek medical care, including routine preventative tests; and B) Talk to their friends about intimate subjects like preventative tests, bonding over horror stories of embarrassing pap smears or boob-crushing mammograms. There are studies to back up this conventional wisdom: Women are more likely to do these things.
And though evo-psych fans will almost certainly provide some cis-centric, biological determinist, gender binaryriffic explanation about how that's woven into our DNA because caveladies had to hunter-gather garbanzo beans for some elaborate prehistoric cervix ritual or whatever, it's probably more likely to be attributable to the fact that most female people are socialized to be caregivers, encouraged to seek and accept help (including medical care), exhorted to express a wide spectrum of emotion, and allowed casual intimacies with other female people—which is pretty much the diametrical opposite of how most male people are socialized.
All of which I note as a preface to my insightful commentary about the below advert: This advert is a stupid, sexist mess.
[Four men—two black men (Vida Blue and Rosey Grier), one white man, and a man who may be Latino, but I'm not certain, so I will refer to him as the mustachioed man—who are in their 50s or 60s are sitting in a conservatively-appointed living room, working on knitting or needlepoint projects while quiet string music plays.]
Rosey Grier: How'd that prostate exam go today?
White Man: Very well, thank you for asking. [turns to mustachioed man] Hey, aren't you due for one pretty soon?
Mustachioed Man: I guess.
Vida Blue: Whoa, there, big guy.
Mustachioed Man: I'll get around to it sooner or later.
Grier: Sooner or later? One in six are diagnosed with prostate cancer.
[They all look at Mustachioed Man in silence.]
Mustachioed Man: All right! I'll do it!
Blue: [pats Mustachioed Man's leg] That's all we wanted to hear.
[A fifth man walks in, wearing an apron and carrying a tray with tea service and cookies.]
Fifth Man: Dessert is served.
[The men mumble appreciatively.]
Text Onscreen, done as if needlepointed: Why cant [sic] men express themselves more like women? Talk to your friends about prostate cancer. Prostate Cancer Foundation. www.pcf.org.
This blgoaround brought to you by Shaxco, publishers of Deeky and Liss' Guide to Watching Lost, each page now also a usable tissue for use while blubbing your face off.
ARGH Disqus: Comments are showing as zero for new posts today in Firefox and IE, and the timestamps are way off. There are comments in the threads, but the comment link isn't updating, for reasons known only to Disqus (and frustratingly out of our control).
And individual comment links, which appeared to be working for a short time this weekend, now aren't working again. Also: I'm still getting complaints about people being repeatedly logged out.
I don't know what to say, except that I'm truly embarrassed that these problems, in addition to the minuscule text size in comments, have remained unresolved for so long, and I offer my apologies.
Krugman uses today's column to talk about corporations' crescendoing fury at the Obama administration:
Corporate America, however, really, truly hates the current administration. Wall Street, for example, is in "a state of bitter, seething, hysterical fury" toward the president, writes John Heilemann of New York magazine. What's going on?
One answer is taxes — not so much on corporations themselves as on the people who run them. The Obama administration plans to raise tax rates on upper brackets back to Clinton-era levels. …[T]hey'll still be doing extremely well, and by and large they'll be paying little more as a percentage of their income than they did in the 1990s. Yet the fact that the tax increases they're facing are reasonable doesn't stop them from being very, very angry.
Nor are taxes the whole story.
Many Obama supporters have been disappointed by what they see as the administration's mildness on regulatory issues — its embrace of limited financial reform that doesn't break up the biggest banks, its support for offshore drilling, and so on. Yet corporate interests are balking at even modest changes from the permissiveness of the Bush era.
From the outside, this rage against regulation seems bizarre. I mean, what did they expect? The financial industry, in particular, ran wild under deregulation, eventually bringing on a crisis that has left 15 million Americans unemployed, and required large-scale taxpayer-financed bailouts to avoid an even worse outcome. Did Wall Street expect to emerge from all that without facing some new restrictions? Apparently it did.
Given the SCOTUS ruling on corporate personhood mentioned in the post below, the notion that corporations will simply buy themselves a new president who will be more sympathetic to their miserable plight of minimal sacrifice is a chilling possibility.
Krugman ends his column by noting that Obama "wanted to transcend bipartisanship" but instead
finds himself very much in the position Franklin Roosevelt described in a famous 1936 speech, struggling with "the old enemies of peace—business and financial monopoly, speculation, reckless banking, class antagonism, sectionalism, war profiteering."
And that's not necessarily a bad thing. Roosevelt turned corporate opposition into a badge of honor: "I welcome their hatred," he declared. It's time for President Obama to find his inner F.D.R., and do the same.
That's a swell idea—provided Obama actually has an inner FDR, a likelihood of which I've seen precious little evidence.
Two brothers in their late sixties are setting out on a journey they hope will "restore democracy to America." Starting out from San Francisco, Robin and Laird Monahan have begun a 3000-mile hike that will take them across ten states to Washington, DC.
Along the way, the Monahans hope to rally opposition to the controversial U.S. Supreme Court ruling in the case of Citizens United v. FEC.
"The Citizens United decision was just a hammer blow to me," Laird Monahan told RAW STORY. "Frankly, I was despondent for a couple of days. I just thought the end of my country had come to pass."
After long talks with his wife, Laird was only growing angrier. "I just said, I gotta do something. I gotta do something physical, I gotta make a physical sacrifice to restore democracy to America."
The hike will total more than 3000 miles and the brothers plan to descend on the Lincoln Memorial before election day in November.
"The idea that appealed to me greatly was the idea of seeing the United States a much slower pace, perhaps three miles per hour as opposed to seventy miles per hour," said Robin. "For the most part, our route will follow very closely Highway 50. It goes through ten states, through middle America, and it gives us an opportunity to talk to people from the smaller towns in hopes of raising their awareness of the necessity of reducing corporate power by passing a constitutional amendment to abolish corporate personhood."
Good luck to them—a sentiment I offer with unadulterated optimism and hope, despite the evident reasons for cynicism, because I support their cause 100%, and because I expect more.
By request, an open thread for tonight's finale of Lost.
(Just FYI, there will be the usual postmortem thread tomorrow morning too.)
And if anyone wants to get warmed up, give the proverbial spin to the Lostcast. Download it here, or play it in a pop-up if you're inclined. The show is available on iTunes.
Text Onscreen: On September 22, 2004, the journey began.
Daniel Dae Kim (Jin): When we first started, we were all so happy to kind of, uh, meet one another, because we were excited to take this trip together...
Yunjin Kim (Sun): And us being away from our family, our friends, our familiar environment, really brought us really close right from the beginning...
Josh Holloway (Sawyer): I remember we all went to a, to a bar, the cast, after the numbers came out from the pilot, and we celebrated that night. That was really the first night that I believed I could throw away my boxes [laughs] and stick around...
Naveen Andrews (Sayid): It's rare for something to be critically acclaimed and, I guess, acclaimed by the public...
Jorge Garcia (Hurley): When I read the ending, I was, um, I was pretty moved. I actually got kind of emotional...
Matthew Fox (Jack): It's an incredibly rare and rewarding experience, and I feel very, very fortunate to have had it...
Evangeline Lilly (Kate): I came in one person and I'm going out another person, and I'll be forever grateful...
Terry O'Quinn (Locke): I'll miss it terribly. I'll miss John Locke like, like hell...
Lilly (Kate): We want the last frame of the last show to be about these people, who we introduced you to six years ago and carried you on journeys with, um, and leave you with them, and leave you with their stories, which I, I, I think is honorable.
D.D. Kim (Jin): I don't think you could have a conversation about television in the twenty-first century without mentioning Lost.
O'Quinn (Locke): You close a book, and you don't want the book to come to an end, but you close the book, and you go, "God, that was great."
Fox (Jack): I'm so honored and proud to have been a part of it, and I think that it, [pauses, nods] to me, I couldn't have imagined, uh, it coming to an end in a, in such a beautiful way.
Portly Dyke and I were watching this together on the phone the other day, and I said to her, "I get the feeling that after tonight, I'm never going to be able to hear that music again without blubbing." And she laughed and agreed. We are so doomed, lol.
(NB: This thread is NOT about any particular episode, and I'd appreciate some thoughtfulness around not putting spoilers in it - I've seen the two Angels eps, but not the Venice one)
So, here's the problem, and I don't know if this happened to US viewers or not.
It's a holiday weekend here in Canada (Victoria Day - yay, happy colonialism day!), and as a result, Space didn't show the new episode last night (Vampires of Venice, or whatever it's called). It's showing next week.
Which means that at least Canada, now, is three episodes behind the UK's broadcast.
So, having not seen "last night's" show, I can't (and don't want to, really) host an Open Thread about it.
So I don't know what to do. I can put the open thread here anyway, and you folk where it's been shown, or those who download, can chatter away about it, and then you can find someone else to do the open threads, because I'm not going to be downloading (for personal ethical reasons), and I'm not going to host threads I can't take part in (because I don't want to spoil my viewing just so y'all can chat about shows I've not seen yet!). Or we can wait another week, and expect weaker discussion because for most of you it'll have been a week (or three weeks) since the episode.
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