Last night, I hosed my laptop (laptop + juice = so not a good idea). I don’t think it’s going to recover.
So. I’m in the market for a new laptop, and I happen to have enough money saved for one, since I’d been planning to replace the one I have in a few months anyhow.
Suggestions? I’ve been considering something from Apple, but I’d need to know if I can just plug in my cable modem, camera, etc., and whether the Word available for Macs is compatible with law firm usage.
Is that the sound of scales falling from eyes I hear?
Seems that a few of the Big Boi Bloggers who have wholeheartedly and uncritically embraced Barack Obama* are a wee bit upset that he appeared on Faux this Sunday and didn’t “take them on” as one of his advisers had told Greg Sargent he would, in order to silence the critics (on the blogs) who were taking him to task for appearing on the network and thus legitimizing it.
Sargent (all emphasis mine):
To be clear, Obama wasn’t obliged to go after Fox. But a senior adviser said Obama would, as a way of quieting criticism of him. And he didn’t.
This will likely further dismay liberal bloggers who had worked very hard to get Dems to boycott Fox as a way of deligitimizing the network and who already criticized Obama for agreeing to appear in the first place.
Obama turned in a perfectly solid performance. He probably succeeded in making a positive impression on many voters he might otherwise not have reached. But the broadcast was clearly a big victory for Fox and Chris Wallace, too.
Greg Sargent’s blog post ‘Obama Doesn’t “Take Fox On,” After All’ kind of says it all. Obama is sucking up to Fox News, and beyond that, the campaign operative who said he would just out and out gave false information.
You can’t trust the Obama campaign, they will lie to you to promote right-wing institutions.
And later, in another diary:
It is very difficult to acknowledge that your candidate deals with you in bad faith, and so I understand the emotional inability of Obama’s most ardent supporters to realize that is what happened. I am an Obama supporter, but I don’t think he’s particularly trustworthy. The issue at hand is that Obama’s campaign simply gave out false information to Greg Sargent to placate bloggers. . . .
I think lost in all this nonsense is just how weakened we [Liberal blogs] have become in all this. When we accept lies from our leaders and openly dismissive knocks from them, it destroys our core argument that Democrats need to have integrity and to stand up for themselves. No they don’t. We don’t stand up for ourselves and we let them lie to us without consequence
Why should they listen to us when we ask them to do something we won’t do for ourselves? There’s probably no point in making this argument, but if I reach one person hopefully it will be useful. When you say that your voice doesn’t matter, it doesn’t. When you enable bad behavior, unethical behavior, it continues. I’m sorry, but the Iraq war happened for this reason. Silence.
If you don’t like that Obama steps on you, speak out. Clinton at least has a reason to step on us since many of us have openly called her a Republican. It’s a fight, and we didn’t back her. Instead we back someone that openly lies to us and thinks nothing of it. Worse still, there are no consequences, only criticism of people who are Obama backers but are frustrated at being lied to. I remember this situation during the Clark campaign, when I was attacked for speaking out about the campaign’s mistakes, until he lost a campaign run with ghoulish incompetence.
It was a mistake for us to endorse Obama, just as it was a mistake for us to do nothing against Clinton after she accused Moveon of intimating her supporters at caucuses. We should be stuffing ads discussing her Bosnia sniper fire in Indiana. But we don’t believe in standing up for ourselves.
So go ahead, accept the lies. It seems to be what we want from our leaders, and so I suppose it’s what we are going to continue to get.
Aw. He sounds so dejected to find out that Obama is, in fact, a politician. I could almost feel sorry for him. Except that he’s been one of the main contributors to the toxic environment on liberal blogs in the past few months, in which anyone who raises criticism of Obama gets shouted down, astroturfed, threatened, mocked, driven out. And you’ll note that even in his depressed and disillusioned state, he manages to get a few digs in at Clinton.
In an update, Stoller links to this post by Lambert at Correntewire which points out that during the interview, Obama specifically threw Daily Kos under the bus. Which shouldn’t be such a shock to these guys, since he’s done it before.
I admit, I’m having a schadenfreudelicious moment here. After having been pointedly and personally savaged for perceived support of Clinton just because I asked a few people to look at the rules they were insisting she was disregarding, let alone for pointing out that his rhetoric about choice and women’s autonomy makes me veryveryvery nervous, I have little sympathy for anyone who bought into the mass delusion that Obama was some kind of new politician (Everything you’d hoped for and more! Going to bring Unity and Change and Hope to the electorate in some undefined way!) and who, in defense of their delusion bullied and intimidated anyone who criticized Obama (or asked to see his progressive bona fides or who simply didn’t vote for him (damn those racist Archie Bunkers who want to hear about issues! There’s Hope and Change to be had!)).
Still, I’m glad to see that some of these guys are beginning to come to their senses. Hear-no-evil, See-no-evil and Speak-no-evil is not the way to handle legitimate criticism of your candidate, nor is attacking anyone who dares to criticize as out of touch, old, a bitch, a racist, what have you. Candidates *must* be evaluated on their merits, and you can’t evaluate someone on their merits if any and all criticism is greeted with, “LALALALA I CAN’T HEAR YOU, YOU OLD BITTER RACIST BITCH!!!!
The next few weeks should be interesting. I’ve been suspecting that the longer the primary dragged on, the less able some of the Big Boiz would be to maintain their unqualified and uncritical support of Obama, particularly if he wasn’t winning all the time. No wonder they’ve been in such a rush to put an end to the primary.
Edited for atrocious grammar and run-on sentences. _______
* Just to be clear: I’ve got no problem at all with people who support Obama. However, if they do so uncritically, and when asked for a reason why they support him, stammer something about hope and change and what a great progressive he is — and he promised a pony! — before launching into a diatribe about how awful Hillary Clinton is, then I reserve the right to mock their gullibility. As here.
So tonight, I’m walking down First Avenue in the East Village on my way to dinner, and I pass Lanza’s restaurant. “Oh,” I say to myself. “Lanza’s. That’s where I had my first date after I moved to New York.” My date was Bill, whom I met through the Village Voice personals, back when the ads were in print and you either wrote a physical letter* or called a voice mailbox (which I think is what I did). I dated Bill for a while after that, though he turned out to be a Nice Guy™ and put me on a pedestal. He also gaslighted me, which was a lot of fun.
And then I start thinking about Bill, and about how long ago that first date was, and it suddenly hits me: Bill is 53 now. I dated a man who’s now 53.
Which makes the fact that I’ve rejected several guys from OKCupid out of hand for being over 50 somewhat ironic. Well, if by “ironic,” I mean, “indicative of not quite coming to terms with my own age.”
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* In my first job out of college, I worked at a newspaper in Connecticut. One guy there had previously worked for the Springfield Advocate, which is not associated with the gay paper, but is part of a chain of alt-weeklies in Southern New England. He said that one of the traditional things to do at someone’s goodbye lunch was to take the box of unclaimed mail from the personals and make the person read the letters out loud. I’m kind of glad that technological advances have made this particular ritual obsolete.
And to make myself feel even older, I remembered that the daughter of another one of my coworkers, whom I used to babysit for extra cash, is now old enough to be starting college this year.
Ever since the end of January, when I had that lovely run-in with Scott and Rob at LGM over whether or not Hillary Clinton broke the rules when she asked that her pledged delegates seat the delegates from Florida and Michigan at the DNC this summer,* I’ve encountered a lot of people who insist, absolutely insist, that this or that action of Clinton’s, or this or that action of Florida or Michigan is in violation of The Rules and that therefore Clinton is evil and must be stopped and Florida and Michigan deserve the most severe penalty possible.
And ever since the end of January, I’ve been challenging people who make these arguments to find me one rule that Clinton has broken or wants changed in the middle of the process, or one rule that provides that last year’s decision to strip Florida and Michigan of 100% of their delegates is irrevocable.
Not one person has taken me up on this offer, even when I provide links to the rules themselves. Sometimes, they start gibbering about the four-state pledge, but it’s obvious they haven’t actually read the pledge (otherwise they might realize that a) it’s not binding on the DNC, who select the delegates; b) the only effective promise any of the candidates who signed the pledge made was to do what they were already obligated to do under DNC Rule 20.C.1.b; and c) it was all a political stunt anyway (as was Obama’s and Edwards’ removal of their names from the Michigan ballot)).
This annoys me greatly, if for no other reason than that I am a pedant. And I know very well that if you’re going to make a rules-based argument, the first thing you have to do is read the damn rules. You can argue over their interpretation, or whether one action or another violates them, but when you have a set of controlling rules, those are the first and last stop on the argument train.
Just another way that the rabid, uncritical and vocal support of Obama (by some, not by all) is ruining my fun this election season. I love arguing rules! And nobody wants to play with me. Any attempts I make to argue rules just get me dismissed as an Obama-hating Hillary-apologist. By people with Ph.D.s, no less. You’d think they might have a clue about argumentation and proof.
Anyway, this is a long and rambling way to say that I am very, very glad to see that someone is making an attempt to explain the rules in detail. And I’m not just glad because it validates every. goddamn. thing. I’ve been arguing for the past few months. I’m just happy to see someone else rules-lawyering.
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* She didn’t. See the rules. Yet somehow, for asking that Scott, Rob and the rest of the motley crew over there actually consult the rules they claim were being flouted, I was compared to John Yoo and informed that I do not respect legal process.
Why do I not eat these more often? They’re like juicy little bombs of citrus delight.
I’ve made an appointment for Saturday to start transitioning to gray.
I admit, I hold out fantastic hopes of looking like Emmylou Harris, though I have neither as much gray in my hair nor did I start out with hair as dark as she had.
What with the four months or so of non-dyeing, it looks like I’ve got some cool streaks going on, and not of the Paulie Walnuts variety.
Not sure what else to call it, but the recipe is here.
I made only a couple of tweaks: after clarifying with Bruce via email that the word he was searching for in the directions was less “fiery” than “piquant” or “tangy,” I decided to throw in a few shakes of red pepper flakes, because why the hell not? Plus, instead of regular garlic, I used roasted garlic paste, because I happened to have some on hand.
Very, very happy with this. I like that it uses vinegar but not oil, so it’s flavorful without being greasy. Crispy, crunchy, flavorful, peppery. It will be very welcome in the summer months.
Recipe here, from Epicurious. Satisfyingly chewy. And do you have an immersion blender yet? For heaven’s sake, why not? They’re less than 20 bucks and useful as all getout.
a/k/a Tortilla Espagnola with Salsa Romesco.
This one is from Vegan With a Vengeance, Isa Chandra Moskowitz’s first vegan cookbook. Really, one day I’ll expand my horizons from Isa’s books, but dammit, they’re so good!
This one’s a little involved, but I made it last weekend and have been eating it for breakfast all week long. The sauce, in particular, is amazing. This is a very filling dish, and it’s not low-fat at all; there’s a good bit of oil in the omelet, since the idea is that you’re supposed to bake it and then invert it onto a plate. However, the only cast-iron skillet I have is 12″, so it’s too big for a plate. Recipe after the jump.
No, not how to look good shirtless. How to talk to, and about, working-class (and specifically white working-class) people.
Because Obama’s really screwed the pooch on that.
Mike Rowe hosts a show on the Discovery Channel called Dirty Jobs, in which he “explore[s] the country, looking for people who aren’t afraid to get dirty.” He’s been doing this since 2003 — and by his own admission, never expected the show to get past the pilot stage — and has done nearly 175 jobs at this point.
What’s very interesting about the jobs featured is that they’re a combination of pure blue-collar and multi-degreed scientific/engineering jobs. And one of the things that keeps the show going is that Mike, even though he’s had “six years of college” as he mentioned in a segment on septic-tank technicians* in Wisconsin, and has been a singer in the chorus in the Baltimore Opera for a few years, he (almost) never looks down on the people he’s working with (with a few exceptions, which always make for the most uncomfortable segments, such as Ruby the brick stacker). Usually, he makes himself into the fool, even if he spouts Shelley while doing so. And he’s gotten a really good reception from working people, who are eager to use his show to highlight how hard and/or dirty their jobs are in a way that doesn’t overly valorize them but also doesn’t condescend to them.
In other words, treats them like people.
Enjoy the following clips. Continue reading ‘What Barack Obama could learn from Mike Rowe’
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