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Top 10 Videos of 2011: 7. “Matt Damon Defends Teachers”

January 4, 2012 | 1 comment

7Lesson #1 for agenda-driven interviewers: don’t fuck with Matt Damon. If you do, it’ll probably end up on YouTube. Case in point: Damon took time out from making a film to fly to Washington D.C. and give a speech at the Save Our Schools March on July 30, 2011. He was introduced by his mother Nancy Carlsson-Paige, a professor of early childhood education. Among the media covering the event was a libertarian outlet called Reason.tv, whose reporter and cameraman made the ill-advised choice to (you guessed it) fuck with Matt Damon. The result:

That, my friends, is what they call getting pwned. Read the rest of this entry »


Rape With an R

February 3, 2011 | Comment

Over the last year or two, my most oft-considered theme on this blog may well be the vital necessity of humor to cope with the world around us. As the adage goes, sometimes there are no words — no literal words, that is. No direct response. There is first the intermediary of wit, whose words are oblique enough to make the matter minimally tolerable. Without this humorous buffer, my unfiltered response would be nothing but screams of rage and despair. That might be cathartic for me, but it would definitely not be constructive. To put it another way: if you ask me a ridiculous question, you’ll get a ridiculous answer.

Titian-Lucretia

“Sorry Lucretia, no way is that covered.
I mean… you were already naked.”

For the last decade plus, the agenda and tone of the exchange in Washington (or as I call it, our national miscourse) has been set by the Republicans, largely via their hyper-successful media arm at FOX News.1 As the feckless Democrats stood by, the effective GOP creed has degenerated from Bush-era exclusionism (“We are the party of patriotism; we don’t work with Democrats for the same reason we don’t negotiate with terrorists”) to reactionary, teabagger-style xenophobia (“If it has Obama-cooties on it, KILL IT!”).

Yesterday, the trusty comedy filter The Onion produced what struck me as a perfectly timed all-purpose riposte, headlined “Republicans Vote to Repeal Obama-Backed Bill That Would Destroy Asteroid Headed for Earth.” Unfortunately, it turns out that even this wasn’t quite enough to address the day’s most egregious Obama-phobic extreme: the new GOP majority in the House, as part of their absurdly childish insistence on a do-over of the health care reform act, have declared it necessary to redefine the crime of rape.

“Are you fucking kidding me?” I wondered. Read the rest of this entry »


No Government Takeover of Public Safety!

April 24, 2010 | Permalink

You remember Richard Clarke. He was the counter-terrorism adviser to Presidents George H.W. Bush, Bill Clinton, and (briefly) George W. Bush. He’s the guy who implored the second Bush Administration in January of 2001 to keep a close eye on Al Qaeda, and move forward with measures to that effect which were still in place from the recently departed Clinton administration. In response, the Bush administration blew off Clarke’s warnings and demoted him to non-cabinet level status.

Richard-Clarke

photo: Aude/Wikimedia Commons

He was later made Special Adviser to the President on cybersecurity, but resigned from the G.W. Bush administration in 2003. A year later Clarke testified before the 9/11 Commission; the Bush White House, knowing that his testimony would reveal their fuck-ups, undertook one of their trademark Karl Rove-style campaigns of character assassination. Some would disagree, but I believe an objective eye would conclude that the smear tactics damaged the Bush administration’s credibility far more than Clarke’s.

These days, Clarke runs a security consulting firm and serves as an adjunct lecturer at Harvard’s Kennedy School of Government. This past Monday he was interviewed by Terry Gross on Fresh Air, principally about his new book Cyber War: The Next Threat to National Security and What to Do About It.1 After describing the serious threat posed by internet-based attacks, Clarke had this to say about the present state of our defenses against such attacks:

CLARKE: …Now, who’s defending us? Who’s defending those pipelines and those railroads and the banks? The Obama Administration’s answer pretty much is, “You’re on your own.” [The Pentagon's] Cyber Command will defend our military. Homeland Security will someday have the capability to defend the rest of the civilian government — it doesn’t today. But everybody else will have to do their own defense.

That is a formula that will not work in the face of sophisticated threats.

GROSS: When you’re saying everybody else is on their own, does that include the electricity grid, the power grid, banking…? Read the rest of this entry »


Joe Biden Said Something Naughty

March 24, 2010 | Permalink

OMG, listen to what he says to Obama during the applause!

Really, I am flabbergasted. That is just plain inappropriate, and I can’t imagine what possessed him to say it. I know Biden is prone to gaffes, but this is major. Think about it: after scratching and clawing through the fetid political muck for well over a year, Obama signed the historic health care reform bill into law, and Biden says it’s “A big fucking deal?”

No I say, NO! Ho-ly FUCKING shit, it is a HUGE fucking deal! I mean, fuck me running, that is ass-kickingly goddamned big. Suck it, FOX News punditiots, because Yes We Did! Read the rest of this entry »