Star Wars on a subway:
Actors from Improv Everywhere re-enact the iconic scene of Leia and Vader's first meeting in Star Wars. Background and behind the scenes info here.
[H/T to RedSonja.]
You Know What You Need?
Actors from Improv Everywhere re-enact the iconic scene of Leia and Vader's first meeting in Star Wars. Background and behind the scenes info here.
[H/T to RedSonja.]
I Write Letters
Dear Andrew Corsello,
WHAT?!
And I thought Ben Stein's piece was going to be the stupidest heap of garbage I read all day. Clearly, I wildly underestimated your ability to pen such a spectacularly privileged piece of wankery. Well done, sir, and my apologies.
Awed,
Liss
Obama Will Sign Financial Reform Bill Today
Yay. That might have an exclamation point at the end of it if Senate Democrats hadn't "made lots of deals, which watered down the bill. For example, Wall Street banks will get wiggle room to make limited risky bets, which is tougher than the current law, but weaker than earlier drafts."
Still. Compared to doing nothing, it's something. Huzzah.
Wow
Andrew Breitbart, he of the mendaciously doctored video that got Shirley Sherrod shitcanned, is not apologizing for his role in the creating the deception that Sherrod is a racist. Instead, he's doubling-down on the assault on her character, now suggesting she may be lying:
You tell me as a reporter how CNN put on a person today who purported to be the farmer's wife? What did you do to find out whether or not that was the actual farmer's wife? I mean, if you're going to accuse me of a falsehood, tell me where you've confirmed that had this incident happened 24 years ago. [...]Just...wow.
You're going off of her word that the farmer's wife [who has come to her defense] is the farmer's wife [who she referenced in the story]?
[H/T to Spudsy.]
Pallas's Kittens Are Out and About
One of four Pallas's Cat kittens from the Wildlife Heritage Foundation stands outside the nesting box. Image is resized; the original is from ZooBorns.
Image description: a fluffy grey kitten with blue-green eyes and long claws stands beside a pale wooden box with its front paws up on the box's top edge.
ZooBorns has a great three part series about a litter of four Pallas's cats from the Wildlife Heritage Foundation in the UK. Born on May 28th, the kittens have now ventured forth from their nesting box. ZooBorns has many photos and videos. If you need an emergency dose of cute, this should do it.
The Pallas's Cat, or manul, is an endangered wild cat of Central Asia. High endemic toxoplasmosis in the cats makes successful reproduction difficult both in the wild and in captivity (here is but one example from the Denver Zoo). The Pallas Cat Study and Conservation Program has lots of information.
Sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender
...there's to be a sequel to Avatar: The Last Airbender.
No, not the hopeless drecky whitewashed mess of bullshit that M. Night spewed out this summer - a new animated series by the same creative team that produced the first series.
This one will feature a teenage girl Avatar, apparently a waterbender, who is described as "hotheaded, independent and ready to take on the world". Given their history of superbly progressive work, this looks like a Very Good Thing Indeed.
In fact, this is Awesomitude to the W00t-th power (Aww00t).
Tip of the CaitieCap to Racebending for the news.
The View from Mt. Bootstrap Is Beautiful This Time of Year
This is why I am not a conservative. Every single thing about this—every idea, every prejudice, every stereotype, every expression of unexamined privilege, every drop of oozing sanctimony—makes me want to barf.
Fuck you, Ben Stein. Fuck. You.
Craven and Contemptible
So, after Andrew Breitbart doctored a video to make her look as though she were biased against white people, Shirley Sherrod was pushed out of her job at the USDA, because, according to Sherrod, "you are going to be on Glenn Beck tonight." And how did that knee-jerk reactionism to avoid bad press (as if there's ever going to be any good press for the administration on the fucking Glenn Beck show, christ) work out for Obama & Co.?
Shirley Sherrod, ex-USDA worker: White House forced me to resign over fabricated racial controversy:
A black employee who resigned from the Agriculture Department on Monday said the White House forced her out after remarks that she says have sparked a fabricated racial controversy.Firing of USDA official highlights larger political problems involving race: "The sensitivity to Sherrod's comments—particularly in an agency that has a history of discrimination against minority farmers—was evidenced by the dispatch with which Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack ordered her to resign. Both Vilsack and an official at the White House denied Sherrod's assertion, in an interview on CNN, that her firing had come at the instigation of the White House. The decision, they insisted, was Vilsack's alone."
Shirley Sherrod, the former Georgia director of Rural Development, said she received a phone call from the USDA's deputy undersecretary Cheryl Cook on Monday while she was in a car. Cook told her that the White House wanted her to call it quits.
"They called me twice," Sherrod told the Associated Press. "The last time they asked me to pull over the side of the road and submit my resignation on my Blackberry, and that's what I did."
The firing of Shirley Sherrod—and the cowardice of Tom Vilsack: "[The firing of Sherrod] is mostly about cowardice. The coward in question is Agriculture Secretary Tom Vilsack who, even though from Iowa, fired Sherrod in a New York minute, and by extension and tradition—"The buck stops here," remember?—Barack Obama himself. Where do they get off treating anyone so shabbily?"
Ousted USDA official: I'm not sure I'd take job back: "The woman ousted from the Agriculture Department over racially tinged remarks that sparked a firestorm in the media said she was uncertain if she would return to her job if invited back. … 'I am just not sure how I would be treated there,' she said, adding that she couldn't get coworkers to listen to her side of the story." Who could blame her?
Yeah, this is much better than having Glenn Beck—whom no one expects to ever say anything favorable, nor even truthful, about the Obama administration anyway—babbling stupidly about the story for a night or two. It's always preferable to take the bait in the most reactionary and panicky way possible and then be (quite rightly) regarded as craven amateurs who can be bullied into behaving in the most ghastly, contemptible way toward decent people just because some mendacious hack says so.
Digby wonders:
I also have to wonder if they know what the optics of this are. If [Breitbart et. al.] can scare them to this extent with obviously doctored videos, what happens when they see a real threat? Are they going to flap their arms like penguins and run around in circles screaming "they're coming to get us, run for your lives!!?" At this point, that doesn't seem entirely ridiculous.This entire situation is emblematic of the biggest problem with the Obama administration: Their priority isn't what's right. Their priority is what's politic.
Seriously, this shows tremendous weakness. Andrew Brietbart is a con artist and right wing entertainer whose antics should always be met with a cynical laugh and a shake of the head. To fall for his schtick more than once is political malpractice.
…They are telling [right wingers] everywhere that all they have to do is gin up a phony controversy (especially about a black person, apparently) and the administration will fire them so as not to shake confidence that they are "fair service providers."
This is sheer cowardice.
Meanwhile, the NAACP says they were "snookered by Fox News and Tea Party Activist Andrew Breitbart into believing she had harmed white farmers because of racial bias," but will learn from this "teachable moment." If the NAACP still needed to be taught that Breitbart is a professional liar after the ACORN bullshit, something has gone terribly wrong at the NAACP.
Still. At least they admitted they fucked up. Which is more than anyone can say for the administration.
[Sherrod's full speech can be seen here.]
Local Cultural News
Due to important Phil Collins related work, Genesis Rewired (featuring Daryl Stuermer, the creative force behind Genesis) has canceled its August 4th concert in Syracuse.
They will be replaced by Dokken.
Tickets are free.
Question of the Day
What's the best investment you've ever made?
It doesn't have to be a financial investment; it could be an investment of time or trust or something else of value to you.
Quote of the Day
[Trigger warning for stalking and disablism.]
"He'll comply with all the conditions and hopefully put this matter behind him and hopefully get back to work."—Philip Friedman, attorney for Pennsylvania North East District Judge Gerard Alonge, who was "suspended without pay Tuesday for two months for behavior that included calling female lawyers repeatedly and making uninvited visits to their homes or offices." Friedman also helpfully explained that Alonge is merely "socially inept and challenged with women," but never meant them any harm.
Vaccine recommendations changed in California
If you live in California, the Dept. of Public Health has recently changed vaccine recommendations for the Tdap (tetanus-diphtheria-pertussis) booster (emphasis mine):
The Department of Public Health on Monday expanded its vaccination recommendation to include children age 7 and older; adults age 64 and older; women before, during and immediately after pregnancy; and anyone who may have contact with pregnant women or infants.You can inquire at your doctor's office or your local health department branch.
Why the expansion? Well:
A third Los Angeles County infant has died of whooping cough, public health officials announced Tuesday.From an interview with Dr. Cynthia Cristofani:
The confirmation of the death -- the sixth pertussis-related death this year in the state -- comes a day after the California Department of Public Health expanded criteria for those who should be vaccinated against the highly contagious disease amid what is shaping up to be the worst outbreak in 50 years.
“This expanded set of recommendations is an appropriate response to the epidemic in Los Angeles County and statewide,” Dr. Jonathan E. Fielding, the county’s public health director, said in a statement. “Vaccination is our best defense against pertussis. This is a disease that is especially dangerous for infants under six months of age, who are not old enough to have received the number of vaccine doses needed to be protected against whooping cough.”
So far this year, nearly 1,500 cases of whooping cough have been reported statewide, about 289 in Los Angeles County, including 184 laboratory-confirmed cases, officials said. All of those killed by the disease were infants.
Pertussis is the formal name for whooping cough, and it's a disease that is now preventable and unfortunately is still very much with us, and there's several reasons for that. One is that the original childhood vaccines didn't confer lifelong immunity, so the kids who got properly immunized in childhood because they had conscientious parents, by the time they were teenagers, forget it. They're a reservoir of continuing infection in the community.Which is what is happening in California.
[...]
Whooping cough is a particularly miserable disease. ... You cough and you cough and cough, and you cannot stop. Eventually you manage to inhale a little air, and that's the whoop. And if you don't inhale any air, you may pass out. If you do, you're likely to make the noise of the whoop and throw up, and then a few hours later or even an hour later you do it all over again. These spells happen many, many times a day, and they'll also wake you up in the middle of the night. So these people are sleep-deprived, miserable. They never know when the next attack is going to get them. ...
Just the mechanics of the cough will hurt. Adults get rib fractures. It takes a pretty brutal cough to break your ribs. Little kids will get hernias; they'll get rectal prolapse; they'll get bleeding around the eye; occasionally they get bleeding in their skull; they'll bite their tongues. They do all kinds of damage just from the mechanics of the cough, never mind the fact that these people are suffocating and miserable.
What about those who can't be vaccinated?
They are highly dependent on everyone around them to be immune, and certainly one of the major public health recommendations is that people who have contact with infants should get vaccinated because they're dependent on all of us not to give it to them. ...
But the real problem with young infants is they're too young to vaccinate themselves; they don't get a good response to the vaccine in the first several weeks of life. And of course most of their mothers have no immunity, because the average woman of childbearing age in this country has no immunity to whooping cough, so she has no antibodies to share across the placenta. And so those babies are completely vulnerable, and they're the ones who are most likely to die of whooping cough.
I'm Shocked…
…shocked, I tell you, to find out that conservative media blowhard Andrew Breitbart selectively and mendaciously edited video of a speech given by USDA employee Shirley Sherrod at an NAACP function in order to "prove" that the NAACP and the Obama administration is racist.
Breitbart cut the video to make it appear as though Sherrod, who is black, didn't do everything in her power to help a white farmer because he was white—which is indeed what Sherrod says, but as part of a larger anecdote, the context of which Breitbart edited out, about how she eventually did work with that farmer over a two-year period and eventually became friends with him and his wife, Eloise Spooner. She was telling a story about overcoming racism, and he edited it to cast her as a racist. Spooner, now 82, says: "She's the one I give credit to with helping us save our farm."
Breitbart, called out for his "creative" editing, responded, "I think the video speaks for itself. The way she's talking about white people ... is conveying a present tense racism in my opinion. But racism is in the eye of the beholder."
Bullshit it is.
Unfortunately, despite Breitbart's tactics being exposed as the manipulative, dishonest, unfair garbage that they are, Sherrod has still been forced out of her position at the USDA, because the administration did not even wait for context of the video before pushing her out the door. They took the word of known liar Andrew Breitbart over a two-decade employee of the US government, in order to avoid controversy.
Yeah, how's that working out for you?
Now the administration is pointing the finger at Tom Vilsack, and the USDA is pointing it back at the administration. Whatfuckingever. Who cares. They're all a goddamn disgrace—and if they had any decency, Sherrod would be given her job back with a hefty promotion and a humongous apology ASAP. Stop playing the blame game and fix it. Assholes.
Daily Dose o' Cute
Dudley going wild at the dog park last weekend. Set to Suede's "Moving."
We were the only ones at the dog park for most of the time we were there last weekend, so Dudz didn't have anyone to play with except us. And, as you'll see in the video, he still hasn't quite grasped the concept of "ball" yet, lol. So Iain and I would walk in the opposite direction to Dudz, and, once we were halfway across the park, he would go tearing by us at full speed, prompting us to then walk in a different direction. This immediately became the Most Funnest Game Evarrrr!—and we played it for about 40 minutes until Dudz was absolutely knackered. (And so were we!)
For those who prefer, and request, the more domestic videos of the girls and Dudz chillaxing at home, I've got more video from this weekend, and I'll try to get that edited and posted later this week.
A couple of still shot of Dudz on a tear are below the fold.
Today in Transphobia
I'm not sure what to say about this one. I don't even know if it needs a trigger warning (just in case: TW, transphobia).
I look for the tiny bits of good in the article: that transgender women are able to find employment that they couldn't before. If it means someone's not forced into* the sex trade, this is good. The comment section is surprisingly not headdesky (as of this writing; there are only 19 comments as I write this). The post itself isn't horridly objectionable.
But at the same time, this practice simply reinforces the transphobia that makes it even slightly effective: it's only the "shame" of having a transgender person walk up to your door and knock that's in play here, and I have a hard time feeling that that's a good thing in a more general sense. And can it be long before one of the transgender women here comes into a situation of violence? Wouldn't be the first time tax collectors had run into that problem, nor trans people. Mixing the two seems like a recipe for disaster, particularly in a country in which Important People can get away with even more violent contempt for the "lesser" than many. Note that the article points out they stayed away from one tax defaulter, because the person happened to be an important minister.
I really, really don't blame any of the women getting involved. When one can't get work, one takes what comes, keeps one's head down, and one takes the damn money, because who knows where it can come from next time?
* As opposed to choosing to take part; while there can be a valuable conversation had on whether being a sex worker is something one can reasonably be said to "choose", please note that this post is not the place for that conversation.
Virtual Misogyny
[Trigger warning.]
I've never been much of a fan of Bret Easton Ellis. Reading about self-absorbed rich people has rarely appealed to me (see also), but I have read a couple of his books. I don't recall much about either of them, other than one started (and ended) in mid-sentence as some sort of stylistic conceit.
All of which is neither here nor there, and is just a preface to the news that Ellis has a new book out.
Imperial Bedrooms is described by Publishers Weekly as a "brutal sequel to Less Than Zero." Clay (AKA Andrew McCarthy) is "casting teenagers for his eighties period film" and "finds himself eyeing the sixteen-year-old actors dressed in the style of his youth." Anyway, "chains and mutilations", "creepy noirish bent", "mass graves", "tortured soul", "mysterious text messages", "betrayal and horror", blah blah blah. More transgressive, masturbatory bullshit from Ellis.
Ellis' publisher, Macmillan, has found the perfect way to promote the book. They've launched a site called The Devil In You which features a fun little "game," the sole purpose of which is to abuse and degrade an actress measure the player's morality. 
For example, the player can either "GIVE HER BOOZE" or "PROPOSITION HER" or "RIDICULE HER. Or "let her go." (See image above.) There is no other point to the game. Other than to promote the book through virulent misogyny.
Which may be appropriate for Ellis' book, but doesn't make it any less contemptible.
(Via.)
[Cross-posted.]
Today's Edition of "Conniving and Sinister"
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.]
Commenting Guidelines: Please refer to this post for Shakesville's policy on discussions of voting. Please use "I" language, and bear in mind that many local/state elections do not include candidates from parties other than the two major parties, so many US voters don't have the option to vote Green, for instance, in every election even if they want to.
Republicans Still Running the Show
So, basically, here's the deal: Democrats are spineless when they're not in the Congressional majority/White House because they need to get elected, and Democrats are spineless when they are in the Congressional majority/White House because they need to get reelected, so they never mount a vociferous challenge to conservatism because they have to get/stay in office in order to keep the Republicans from doing, uh, exactly what they're doing anyway, only more so.
Great politics. Great job.
Democrats are set to pass an extension of unemployment benefits today. ... But victory obscures defeat. Republicans managed to take a jobs bill, weaken it to an unemployment benefits and state and local relief bill, weaken that to an unemployment benefits bill, and then weaken that bill.Seriously, if the United States Congress can't even agree on extending unemployment benefits during the worst employment crisis in a generation, the United States Congress has truly ceased serving the United States and its people.
The bill does not include an extension of the $25-a-week Federal Additional Compensation funds, tacked onto many unemployment checks. It also does not include any of the other provisions originally included in or proposed for the jobs bill or extenders package: It does not close tax loopholes, or provide Medicaid funding to states, or include funds to keep teachers and other state employees working. It also does not create an additional fifth tier of benefits; federal extensions only continue in states with higher than an 8 percent unemployment rate, and the maximum weeks of state and federal benefits remains ninety-nine.Republicans in the Senate, in other words, have won the fight over further spending on job creation. The argument has narrowed to unemployment benefits, and Democrats can't even reliably win those votes.
We are officially a wholly-owned subsidiary of the highest corporate bidder.
