Course correction
Some of y’all may remember how I was traumatized in 2006 when I was bullied into voting for Lincoln Fucking Chafee for Senate — after the party utterly shat upon and just squeaked a win over his conservative rival in the primaries. I HAD to vote for him because it was the most important election ever and the Northeast simply won’t support a conservative and what are you, some kinda whiny baby?
Oh, and puuuuuuurity tessssssst!
You know what happened: Chafee lost to a genuine Democrat, quit the party in a cloud of sulfur, and all the fingers on my voting hand turned black, shriveled up and fell off.
I swore my remaining hand would never pull the lever for a politician I hate and no amount of, “be reasonable, Wingnut” would change my mind. (John McCain doesn’t count — I voted for Sarah Palin and he happened to be on the ticket).
Others may come to other conclusions, and I understand their reasoning. I sure as shit don’t want any part of the red-on-red smashmouth slap-fest rolling around the right-o-sphere today.
But for me, I’ve decided that every election can’t be the most important win ever and moving the party to the right is more important than winning. More important even than a majority, with all the controls and committee chairmanships and other legislative goodies that go with.
But I still felt pretty uneasy about that conclusion until I read this excellent piece by Ben Domenech:
Conservatives should not tolerate the likes of Mike Castle because of the simple fact that a 51 member Senate with Mike Castle is a Senate where Mike Castle is the most important vote in the room. As Specter and others before him, that Senator will set the terms of policy debates, determining in advance what can succeed and fail. Those who advance the argument that a majority with Castle is better than being in the minority tend to place priorities on Senate committee chairmanships and staff ratios and lobbyist cash… a list which pales in comparison to the power they would wield as the broker for both sides.
Do read the whole thing.
September 15, 2010 — 6:05 pm
Comments: 40
Never trust an artard
I’ve designed publications for a living, too — magazines and brochures and stuff. I can tell you, when pictures are chosen, they are always the ones that best support the narrative.
I mean, duh, right? You run a story about Obama’s falling poll numbers, you’re going to run it under a picture of Obama looking all cross and grumpy. If you ran it with with a picture of him all sunny and happy, it would look stupid. Even if he was actually in a terrific mood when today’s pictures were taken, you have to comb through and find one where he’s blinking or looking down or something.
I know this isn’t a profound revelation. But it’s worth bearing in mind, because we react to images way down at the lizard level. Even when they aren’t actually meaningful.
Drudge ran the headline, “Thousands Riot in Afghanistan” or something with the picture above left. I count three guys, two of them are grinning like raccoons. The dude with the knife and the stupid red beard (no really — it was an awful henna job with gray roots) grabs our eyeballs and won’t let go, so we don’t see the smilies on either side.
When you look for it, it’s amazing how many people in these angry mobs look happy to be there. Most wire services ran the picture at right. Uncropped, I count ten men, about half of whom are smiling (a bit hard to see at this size, sorry). Yeah, you know why — that big white hand against that big black cloud. Pure sex to a photo editor.
I’m not suggesting angry third-world mobs are happy funtime carnivals. Or that thousands didn’t pour out in protest this weekend. Apparently they did, with some fatal results. But nobody seems to have gotten any good pictures of it, so they had to run with small bands of yoohoos (mugging directly into the camera!) and crop it to look like legions.
News photos like this aren’t wrong, but they’re often the most contrived, least informative part of the information we get.
September 13, 2010 — 9:44 pm
Comments: 20
Bad, BAD dog!
“Some powerful interests who had been dominating the agenda in Washington for a very long time and they’re not always happy with me. They talk about me like a dog. That’s not in my prepared remarks, but it’s true,” he told a crowd largely consisting of union members.
Any idea what President Sissybaby is on about here?
September 6, 2010 — 9:42 pm
Comments: 30
Quantum of stupid
I don’t know why Cindy Sheehan popped into my head this afternoon (her presence somehow made it emptier up there). Turns out, she’s got a radio show. And, while I’m sure it’s full of all kinds of comedic gems, I got as far as Tommy Chong and my brain exploded.
Cindy Sheehan interviews Tommy Chong.
BANG!
I kind of hate myself for posting this. I feel more than a little sorry for both these characters — two fundamentally damaged people who were badly and very publicly used (if not quite in the way they believe they were).
On the other hand — Cindy Sheehan interviews Tommy Chong.
BANG!
Transcript here. Or listen here (skip ten minutes in; the first lady has a voice — no shit — even more annoying than Cindy’s).
Or — you know what? Don’t. I don’t want a bunch of nukular cerebrums on my conscience.
September 1, 2010 — 10:07 pm
Comments: 20
Just trying to get some of that sweet, sweet image search traffic
Y’all know what you’re looking at here, right? Thanks to Pablo for the suggestion.
Speaking of nicking pictures off the internet (you don’t think I keep surplus day-old chicks in the kitchen, do you?), they set Shepard Fairey‘s trial date today.
He’s the dude who created the HOPE poster that went viral during the Obama campaign. Problem is, he pinched his photo reference from AP.
There’s much about this case I don’t get. Fairey sued AP first, to establish himself as the author of the work — why would he do that? — so this is the AP countersuit. In the initial case, Fairey claimed it was some other photo he used — but that also belonged to AP, so I don’t get why a) he used that as a defense and b) the fact he was wrong is a legal problem for him.
Incidentally, illustrators nick photos all the time to use as reference (and Photoshoppists live to nick photos). In the days before Google, most professional illustrators kept a clip file — thousands of book and magazine photos cut out and filed away for future reference.
I inherited the kernel of mine from the RISD library, which was clearing out some of its gigantic room-sized clipfile. Mine filled four filing cabinets in its final glory, and it hurt like a bastiche to throw it away.
You’re only supposed to refresh your memory from a file photo, though. If the resemblance of your final illo is recognizably close to the reference, the original owner has a case against you. I don’t think there’s ever been much actual suin’ going on, but it’s a sort of squidgy area of law.
Me, I cheerfully nick photos for blog posts, but never, EVER for something I’m going to sell. That’s not actual legal advice — unless you’re covered under parody or something, it’s equally illegal whether you make money or not — but I figure: no moneys, no incentive.
My general sympathies might be with Fairey on this one — and not just because we went to the same art school — but it turns out he’s a real asshole when other people copy HIS stuff. So I hope he gets his pansy ass kicked.
Final question: with a name like Shepard Fairey, did this guy pretty much have to go to art school?
August 23, 2010 — 10:01 pm
Comments: 23
No, that getup doesn’t make your point stupid at all
At first, nicking Sarah Palin’s “mama grizzly” imagery to make a contrary point seems like standard political repartee.
But…ummm…Emily’s List is a single-issue pro-abortion pressure group.
Mothers who fiercely protect their young. Women who demand the unrestricted right to abort babies. See, these two ideas are just not happy together. It’s what the ladies in the Human Resources department at my old company would call a “job mismatch” — HR-speak for, “wow, you really suck at this.”
It explains the costumes, anyhow. These girls have a much better chance being mistaken for bears than protective mothers.
Exit question: why is it when lefties really, really want to persuade the rest of us, they always dress up, strip naked or use puppets?
August 17, 2010 — 9:31 pm
Comments: 31
‘Nuff said
I think our trainee president has really put his foot in it this time.
August 16, 2010 — 11:30 pm
Comments: 13
Quick! Poke him in the tummy…!
I have never seen such a display of political incompetence — accelerating political incompetence — than the Obama administration is treating us to at the moment. It’s like they’re fucking up logarithmically now.
The golfing, the vacationing, the lavish entertaining — all in the teeth of an electorate that is broke, scared and spitting mad, on the eve of a crucial election that is looking historically awful for Democrats.
And then Gibbs goes and takes a swipe at his own base.
I honestly don’t know what we’re looking at here.
I don’t know what to call this.
So I’m going with “epic incompetence,” because I can’t quite wrap my head around “death wish.”
The Gibbs-as-Pillsbury-Doughboy idea has been floating around HotAir for a while, incidentally (I’d give credit if I knew who to). It doesn’t speak to his personality at all, but it perfectly describes his huge, pale, doughy melon.
August 13, 2010 — 10:39 pm
Comments: 34
It’s a fifty-foot cyborg Scalia. Why?
The reader formerly known as Skeptic wrote to tell me that Frank J. over at IMAO had posted about a fifty foot cyborg Scalia and he — the reader formerly known as Skeptic — could not rest until he had seen a P’shop representation of this wondrous machine.
Now, I generally don’t do requests — not because y’all don’t come up with some corking ideas, but because I’m lousy at visualizing somebody else’s pictures. This is why I gave up on freelance illustration after a couple of angry, drunken years.
But a fifty-foot rampaging cyborg Antonin Scalia? Well, who doesn’t fantasize about that?
Click the picture to embiggen and becolor.
August 9, 2010 — 11:41 pm
Comments: 27
Mary Poppins was a commie
I was four when Mary Poppins was released, and I was obsessed with it. I made my mother take me to see it, like, five times — and I might have gotten a sixth out of her, if I hadn’t made the grandmama of all mother/daughter faux pas.
“Mother,” I asked dreamily, “if you died, what are the chances Papa would marry Julie Andrews?”
Ow.
Oh, don’t worry. I paid. Yes, I did.
Anyhow.
I watched Mary Poppins again last week, and it…really, really doesn’t hold up. The special effects are horrible, the dream sequence in the middle is long and boring and…I didn’t remember it as an anti-capitalist message movie. Three years before the Summer of Love, while the Beatles were singing I Wanna Hold Your Hand, the movie gives off a definite whiff of “fuck this Victorian work ethic shit — let’s get high and fly kites.”
Take the tuppence sequence, where Michael’s father and Mary P offer competing visions of what a little boy could do with two pennies.
Mister Banks the banker advises him to put it in the bank (ooooh…subtle):
You see, Michael, you’ll be part of
Railways through Africa
Dams across the Nile
Fleets of ocean greyhounds
Majestic, self-amortizing canals
Plantations of ripening tea
Mary Poppins offers him a bag of crumbs.
See…even at four, I wasn’t sure Michael chose well.
Many years later, I lived the tuppence-a-bag experience, sitting in London’s Victoria Station flipping bits of my sandwich to the pigeons. “Technically,” Uncle B told me, “those are vermin. You could get arrested if anybody sees you doing that.”
Everything looks sparklier in the movies.
Anyhow, the point is, bad ideas are like bad diseases — you usually have to go WAY back further in time than you think to find Patient Zero.
July 12, 2010 — 10:37 pm
Comments: 65