Pardon the interruption, but the harsh realities of life pre-baby have spoiled what was once a thriving blog site. Once I figure things out, I’ll jump back on this train and begin typing feverishly to provide updates on what’s been going on with me, as well as the always-biting social commentary you have all come to know and love. Until then, I have nothing for ya.
Jon Stewart is right. It’s just a fucking cartoon.
Watch:
Anyone who lives, as I have for years, in the Hudson River villages — Nyack, Piermont, Grandview, Palisades — knows how obnoxious local E-List celebrity Stephen Baldwin can be. Whether he’s trying to shut down adult-video boutiques or making multiple trips to the Starbucks on the corner of Main and Broadway, the star of such Hollywood classics as Bio-Dome and The Flintstones in Viva Rock Vegas is simply an annoying presence in an otherwise decent community.
Sure, everyone loves them some Alec. And Billy seems content to keep to himself. Hell, even Daniel has been fun to watch in his latest stint as a manic celeb-reality TV star. But holy hell is Stephen irritating. It’s probably the whole insane, right-wing Jesus-loving shit he’s into that drives me most crazy, but even if he wasn’t a Jesus Nazi he’d still bug me. He’s a slimeball and just sort of creeps me out. I think most people who’ve observed him around town would agree, as well.
And that is why I was so happy to hear little Stevie Baldwin pledge to move out of the country if Barack Obama wins the election in November, as if Obama needed any more help winning this uber-liberal portion of New York State. No one man has done more to mobilize support for Obama in the Hudson River Valley than Baldwin did this afternoon. Right now, there are legions of villagers pledging financial and organizational support to the Democratic nominee. It’s not the politics. We just want Stephen Baldwin to go far, far away.
Watch:
Note to Laura Ingraham: Stephen Baldwin only barely counts as an “actor,” and he certainly is not to be considered a “celebrity” guest or Hollywood insider.
I think I’ve asked this question every time Coldplay has put out a new album, and after listening to a few tracks off their latest offering, Viva la Vida, I must do so once again: Why do people go crazy for this band?
On recordings, they’re OK at best. The band plays well enough, but their lyrics don’t make a lot of sense and sound more or less like something a decent high-school songwriter could pen. Chris Martin’s vocals are alright, but his fluttering falsetto annoys the piss out of me after more than two listenings of any song. At least he sings on key and in the proper pitch, though, which is more than I can say of his live performances.
When not aided by a skilled engineer, Martin’s vocals are a total mess. I’ve never once heard a live cut from Coldplay where Martin’s voice is as rich and melodic as it is on records. It sounds more like a wet fart on a hot day, to be honest. I don’t understand why he doesn’t sing in a lower key, because he sure as hell can’t hit the high notes you hear on recordings consistently enough to prove his voice doesn’t get a generous polishing from the engineer. And if a band is supposed to be one of the top acts around, I expect that its singer be able to drop vocals without any electronic modification.
So what is it about Coldplay that drives people to a frenzy? If anyone can explain it to me, I’d be forever grateful.
I apologize for my lack of blogging lately, but I’ve been dealing with something personal that I am just now prepared to make public. I am going to be a father. To another human. That I created, at least in part, quite accidentally but I suspect perfectly. Or so we’ve been told by the doctors.
The weight of those words — I am going to be a father — even now as I type and read them, and go over them again and again in my head, is staggering. To say Nicole and I are happy would do absolutely no justice to the totality of emotion we are now feeling. The only way I’ve been able to describe it to anyone who has yet to experience it for themselves has been to say it feels like running around barefoot in a thunderstorm. It’s kind of terrifying, the raw power of it all surrounding you. But there is also this ethereal joy that comes along with the terror and makes it impossible to stop even though you know it’s probably wiser to go inside and take cover.
That’s the best I can do right now, and if it doesn’t make sense I guess that’s because it’s not supposed to. For a long time I’ve had an odd relationship with words, depending on them to express whatever is floating around inside me yet understanding all along that they are, at best, an incomplete description of what is really going on, not reality themselves but a metaphor for reality. It’s times like these I wish we just communicated with each other through thoughts and ideas. You’d get a much better picture of what I’ve been trying to say.
And speaking of better pictures, this is what an eight-week-old fetus looks like. Developing baby? Kidney bean? You be the judge.
I’m not going to lie and say I never had a negative word to say about Tim Russert’s work, because while I enjoyed “Meet the Press” more than most TV news programs, I always felt Russert treated some of his more prominent guests with more reverence than they deserved. I would often turn off the TV at 11:30 on Sunday morning feeling a little piqued, the journalist in me wishing Russert had taken advantage of a hole left open by a dodgy, prevaricating politico and asked the really tough follow-up that would have delivered a knockout blow to the bullshit being laid on the collective doorstep of the American people. In that way, Russert had become the tribal elder in a Washington press corp that now seems content appeasing and working alongside, instead of in direct opposition to, the wheelers and dealers that are steering this country headfirst down a path littered with the remains of fallen empires.
Yet every week I tuned in to watch Russert do his thing. He seemed to be a fan of politics the way the best sportscasters come off as diehard fans of the games they cover. And like the best in the sportscasting business, Russert was able to entertain and inform without manipulating the emotional swells of his audience, the difference between a class act like Vin Scully and a hack like John Sterling. Russert was affable yet dignified, composed but never without an air of intellectual mischief common to all news geeks. He often embodied the best of the worst in his field, balancing a Chris Matthews-like bombast and chicanery with a solemnity that shows up only occasionally these days, when relics like Tom Brokaw and Dan Rather sit in for something big.
I first became aware of Russert’s approach to political coverage when, as an innocent and still-malleable seventeen-year-old, I watched unprecedented madness unfold on Election Night 2000. Sure, the absurdity of Bush-Gore went a long way in peeking my interest in politics, as did the discovery of Hunter Thompson’s more serious work, but it was Russert madly scribbling on his dry-erase board, breaking down all the electoral possibilities, that first made me realize politics could be fun in the way baseball and football are fun. My relationship with politics, and the news in general, escalated from a flirtation to an obsession quickly thereafter. I’m not sure I’d be as interested or informed as I am now had it not been for the excitement Russert brought to an event that was otherwise depressing and bleak.
In the last year or so, however, I had grown annoyed with Russert, the final straw coming when he proclaimed, in the wake of the Scooter Libby trial in which he was called as a witness, that he considered all talks with sources off-the-record unless the source stated otherwise. This runs counter to every notion I and many others hold dear about a journalist’s relationship with his sources. Journalists are not in the business of protecting their sources from unintentionally loose lips, and when Russert made his approach public I felt betrayed. I had a hard time taking him seriously from that point on. No matter what he said or did in any interview or commentary, it always lingered in the back of my mind that he cared more about coddling his sources to ensure access than he did about disseminating the truth.
As is too often the case, though, it took a man’s death to bring to light the enormity of his influence. I ask myself now, Where would I be had I not seen Russert’s monstrous cranium bobbing about as he jotted illegible figures on that white board, eyes wide and crazy-looking, in the days before wars on terror and $4 gasloline? If not Russert, who else could have gotten me interested in this dirty game with which I am now obsessed?
And that is why I was so saddened to hear of his sudden passing Friday afternoon. Right now, there is some seventeen-year-old kid only marginally interested in politics who would love to pay attention if only it didn’t seem so boring. That kid needs a journalist like Tim Russert to make him tune in or pick up a paper, to get him involved in the process that will shape the social context in which he will grow, to make something as infuriatingly crooked and irremediable as national politics seem like a good way to spend a Sunday morning.
Dennis Kucinich read thirty-five lengthy, detailed articles of impeachment against President Bush on the House floor Tuesday night (video below), a move that proves once again that he is a total political badass. The balls it took for Kucinich to introduce those charges into the Congressional record have made me stand by my assessment of Dennis Kucinich as the most important political figure in the United States.
When I made the claim the first time, most people laughed. However, to all those who mock the Ohio Congressman and former presidential candidate, Denny K once again did the country proud by taking this symbolic, yet likely fruitless, stand against the president. It’s his overriding courage, though, that I envy most. He stands up there and does what is right, even as his colleagues jeer and openly mock him. Way to be, Denny. Way to be.
Kucinich introduces Bush impeachment resolution, from CNN.com
WASHINGTON (CNN) — Rep. Dennis Kucinich, a former Democratic presidential candidate from Ohio, introduced a resolution to impeach President Bush into the House of Representatives on Tuesday.
Kucinich announced his intention to seek Bush’s impeachment Monday night, when he read the lengthy document into the record.
House Speaker Nancy Pelosi has repeatedly said she would not support a resolution calling for Bush’s impeachment, saying such a move was unlikely to succeed and would be divisive.
Most of the congressman’s resolution deals with the Iraq war, contending that the president manufactured a false case for the war, violated U.S. and international law to invade Iraq, failed to provide troops with proper equipment and falsified casualty reports for political purposes.
Kucinich also charges that Bush has illegally detained without charge both U.S. citizens and “foreign captives” and violated numerous U.S. laws through the use of “signing statements” declaring his intention to do so. … Read more
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A recap of the primaries, courtesy of Keith Olbermann and Countdown.
It seems there is nothing new media loves to harass more than old media, and believe me I get as big a kick out of it as any in the blogging world. Call me biased — as you should know by now, I welcome the charge — but I honestly believe newspapers and magazines do a solid job, for the most part, the obvious exception being the industry-wide carte blanche given to the Bush administration after 9/11 and during the buildup to the Iraq War by every journalist other than those working for Knight Ridder.
Mainstream television journalism, on the other hand, is just awful and by far the most egregious in its tawdry coverage of news events and seeming inability to hire journalists willing and/or able to conduct real interviews and ask real questions. The worst part is that TV journalists know they do bad work. How obvious was their guilt when, in the wake of Scott McClellan’s charges that the media failed the American people before the invasion of Iraq, hacks like NBC News Chief White House Correspondent David Gregory got all twisted up and felt it necessary to defend the work he and his colleagues did at that time, over and over again? I think such defensiveness, and a complete rewriting of history, falls under the Whoever-Denied-It-Supplied-It banner.
However, I’ve had enough of media critics — mostly those who blog — ripping on cable-news pundits like Chris Matthews, Keith Olbermann, and, yes, even Bill O’Reilly and Sean Hannity for not upholding high journalistic standards on their programs. People like Matthews and O’Reilly aren’t newsmen. They’re not even in the business of reporting the news. They are commentators. They comment on the news. Their roles — which I agree are far too big and far too ambiguous — are to offer their opinions on politics and current events. They are allowed to have stupid opinions, to be base and obtuse, to be hardheaded, to be annoying, to be wrong, to be unfair.
The inability of the public to weed through all the hot air emitted by these blowhards is the fault of the public alone. There is real news readily available from multiple sources — those newspapers and magazines mentioned earlier, some websites, etc. The problem is people are either too lazy to look for it or too easily bored because it isn’t presented to them by a screaming maniac surrounded by bright lights and loud noises.
Instead of seeking out the news, most people come home from work, plop down on the couch, turn on Countdown or The O’Reilly Factor and take every word spoken during that hour as infallible, ironclad truth. It’s easier and more entertaining to listen to and then regurgitate whatever Olbermann or O’Reilly says than it is to read the facts of a probably nuanced story and form one’s own opinion. But that’s not Olbermann or O’Reilly’s fault, just as it is not Jon Stewart or Stephen Colbert’s fault for being the primary news source of so many young people. It is Stewart and Colbert’s job to tell the joke, not to make sure the audience gets it.
Of course, it is fair to say that Stewart and Colbert admit they are comedians and little else, while those filling up space on CNN, Fox News, and MSNBC stand by the assertion that they are actually journalists. But, again, just because they assert something doesn’t mean we, as viewers with brains, eyes, and ears, have to believe it. Yet no one blames the public for being willingly misinformed and easily fooled. Better not to insult your audience, after all.
I suspect the high-and-mighty journalists and bloggers who damn cable-news punditry as the plight of American journalism are just annoyed that the talking heads they hate are more successfully reaching the masses than their dying industry. If they were honest, though, and if they were really interested in telling the truth, they’d point their anger where it belongs and leave those of us able to distinguish news from entertainment alone so that we can not feel guilty for getting a kick out of another Worst Persons in the World segment.
Bill O’Reilly does this thing on his show where he sends out one of his producers — from what I have seen and from my experience sharing air with many of these types, they are all the lowest forms of humans, grubby weasels with no ethics and a thirst for fame alone — to ambush someone whom O’Reilly has labeled an enemy. The “interviews” that proceed from the sabotage are stupid, uninformative attack pieces that are further from real journalism than anything made up by Stephen Glass or Jayson Blair.
In the above clip, an O’Reilly Factor producer named (I shit you not) Porter Barry tries to ambush Bill Moyers, a frequent target of O’Reilly’s due to Moyers’ so-called liberal agenda (a.k.a he doesn’t fall in lockstep with the Bush administration and asks real questions) and failure to accept an invitation to appear on The Factor. Moyers gives Barry the what for and makes him look like the sniveling grub that he is. Real journalists then chase Barry down and treat him to an ambush-style interview. Great stuff.
Thanks to The UpTake for the video.