Don we now our gay apparel even though I'm relentlessly 'tro and can hardly believe I had to explain what that means the other day. Shows I spend too much time on the 'net I suppose, where my infamy and notoriety precede me, I'm admired for my detestability, and have reached a level of obnoxiousness that many only envy and aspire to.
Yes ek'smas brings out my egotistical and cynical side in ways that other, less dark, holidays don't. Not that there isn't room at the inn for you, only it's likely to be 2014 before you can get your licks as next week is straight pre-emptions until the eve of New Year's mocking Eve and likely to remain that or repeats until the 6th.
So, vacation. I ought to book a Gulfstream to Vail.
Haifaa Al Mansour is a Saudi film director and controversial for other things than being female. For instance, there are no theaters in the whole country which seems a shame since air conditioning was such a great driver for the business in the U.S.
She actually lives in Bahrain where Sunni rulers ruthlessly oppress the Shia majority about which I expect Jon will ask her exactly nothing. Her film Wadjda tells the story of an 11-year-old girl growing up in the suburbs of Riyadh, who dreams of owning and riding a green bicycle and is the first Saudi film nominated for an Oscar.
Hate the 'share' button? I know I do and Jonah Peretti is the inventor. What you may not know is that he's the co-founder of HuffPo which is a visual sewer where it's impossible to find anything and where the content is rated by how famous you are and not how fatuous it is. I do in fact have an account there which I never use. I don't even visit for story leads anymore unless they're suggested by other writers (though they do have interesting coverage of the NSA today- NSA Phone Program Likely Unconstitutional, Federal Judge Rules, Obama Meeting With Tech CEOs Amid NSA Surveillance Concerns, Tone-Deaf at the Listening Post).
Gahhhhh! Every moment I spend there makes me feel dirty and frustrated. They also have Ron Burgundy and The New Republic above the fold.
The Question at the Heart of the Democratic Schism Should the burden of proof be on reformers—or on vested interests?
BY NOAM SCHEIBER, The New Repblic
DECEMBER 15, 2013
Throughout the summer and fall, a group of writers (including me) began documenting the growing appeal of economic populism and the rising influence of its practitioners. We populist-boosters mostly had the field to ourselves for several months. But in the last few weeks, the skeptics have gotten vocal, culminating with a Wall Street Journal op-ed two weeks ago by the centrist group Third Way. The Third Way piece decried “the economic populism of New York Mayor-elect Bill de Blasio and Massachusetts Sen. Elizabeth Warren,” which it labeled a “dead end for Democrats.”
...
Weigel’s piece on the flare-up between Third Way and the party’s populist wing was a useful case study in the dangers of defining our terms too loosely. Several times in the piece Weigel quotes Third Way’s co-founder and communications chief, Matt Bennett, who suggests everyone has gotten hung up over a mangy little label (never mind that his group wielded it like an epithet). If you set aide the loaded lingo, Bennett insists, we Democrats are mostly on the same side, with the exception of a few policy quibbles. “The idea of the op-ed was … [d]o we grapple with the entitlement crisis or not?” Bennett said. “[W]e’ve taken very progressive views on financial reform. We’ve featured lectures by people like Paul Volcker and Sheila Bair who are not, shall we say, running dogs for the banks.” Hey, some of my best friends are populists!
These characterizations are highly misleading. Populism can’t be ghettoized in a single issue like entitlements or financial reform. It touches pretty much every economic issue that divides Democrats.
...
What I mean—and what I think most liberals today mean—by the term “populist” is rather literal: a politician or interest group whose power derives primarily from their appeal to lots of ordinary (read: non-wealthy, not especially connected) individuals rather than a handful of powerful (usually corporate) patrons, or the interest groups that represent them. The current incarnation of populism isn’t a matter of ideology per se, though it has obvious ideological implications. It’s about the extent to which a politician or group courts (or at least imagines herself to be courting) outsiders rather than insiders.
...
But when you actually try to reform the status quo, any approach that relies on courting insiders (lobbyists and businessman, often regulators and Washington think tankers) rather than ginning up public support typically stalls out before long. The oil-state Democrats cave to energy companies; northeastern Democrats cave to the financial industry; coastal Dems cave to the tech sector; farm-state Dems cave to Big Ag. There are defense-contractor Dems; big-box retailer Dems; health insurer Dems (one reason for the Rube-Goldberg contraption we know as Obamacare). And any number of them who will parrot the Beltway editorial page consensus about the urgency of hacking away at Medicare and Social Security, a view just about every respectable corporate executive and financier subscribes to.
I'm a proud
anarcho-syndicalist and don't you forget it.
The rest of the final week of original episodes in 2013 looks like this-
The Daily Show
* Tuesday 12/17: Erik Prince
* Wednesday 12/18: Steve Carell, Will Ferrell, David Koechner, Paul Rudd
* Thursday 12/19: Jonah Hill
The Colbert Report
* Tuesday 12/17: Garry Trudeau
* Wednesday 12/18: Keanu Reeves
* Thursday 12/19: Ben Stiller
Depending on my desperation for content I may or may not publish the Internet exclusives at my other enterprises, The Stars Hollow Gazette and DocuDharma, where you're more than welcome to drop by.