@chicanafalsa: Yeah, it's 13% in Michigan. It blows my mind that 13% of adults are unemployed and actively searching for work here. (I have no idea how high the number would go if you included people who have been out of work so long that they're no longer counted. I know a few of those myself.)
@Megan: You mean that two-line item with one link to a NYT story? Or did I miss something? I guess I was hoping for a recap of reaction from the cable news talking heads or the blogosphere. I guess you have more important matters to discuss, like Blago or Speidi. Sorry to criticize, really. But I'm in shock.
@westvillagegirl (exiled in chicago): You have noticed, right, that the entire morning news post has been like this since January? Since I got cut to part time after everyone stopped reading about politics as much?
Did anyone see Tom Brokaw interview Obama this morning? Obama's great-uncle was one of the liberators of Buchenwald. Although it's still too tramatic for him to go back to the camp, he will be at the D-Day celebration.
I think I may cozy up to my Band of Brothers DVDs this weekend. Seems appropriate.
I saw a clip of Glenn Beck's comedy tour and it consisted of him reading off a piece of notebook paper, things like: "I looked on the side of my coffee cup and it said this beverage may be hot....really? My hot coffee is hot?!"
@morninggloria: One of the problems with conservative media is that they aren't very good with humor. Their representatives always seem serious and dour, if not outright angry (and anger tends to sell among the conservative base). I think this will only succeed in making Beck more of a joke to other cable commentator's and media outlets than help to change the tone of the party.
It's things like the term "Glenn Beck's "comedy" tour" that make me think the paranoia over 2012 may be justified after all. I mean, if that is not a harbinger of doom, what is?
@lilbobbytables is a la-di-da feminist: I don't know if it was on here or on Gawker but I saw a still from I'm a Celebrity ... Get Me Out of Here. It was a picture of "Speidi" and Blagojevich standing together. I literally cringed and then wondered who the last horseman of the apocalypse is going to be.
@lilbobbytables is a la-di-da feminist: They were offering in the movie theater closest to my house just in case you couldn't make it to St. Louis or wherever he went on this tour. Thank God for technology, right?
I won't be surprised if Speidi move to Chicago after "I'm A Celebrity..." is over. They'll bail out the Blagojevich's and Spencer will begin his political career.
@AthertonMerriweather: Except absolutely no one in Chicago except for like 5 black ministers (everything is racial here!) hate Rob Blagojevich. And Blago is a Democrat, and I thought that Jesus told Speidi to be Republicans?
@morninggloria: Hey, I think you mean "No one LIKES" or "Everyone HATES" ... right? Or did I wake up in Bizarro Chicago, where the Cubs always win and there's delicious pizza everywhere?
Unemployment is leveling off and Angelo Mozilo (former CEO of Countrywide) was arrested. All of the other data is terrible and the financial markets are behaving in a way that I would describe as "side-eye worthy." But at least fewer people are losing their jobs and The Great Orange Hype may have to oil his cuticles in prison for awhile.
@morninggloria: I understand he was charged in civil court not criminal. I could be wrong but I think prison is off the table for now unless criminal charges are next.
@sshacker: Insider trading is serious shit. The penalty can be up to three times the value of the profit the subject received from the inside information and you can spend up to ten years in prison. The SEC doesn't have the ability to prosecute in criminal proceedings, but the DOJ does.
Also interesting, if you turn someone in for insider trading and that person is found to have dirty hands, the government may pay you a (fairly large) bounty. I wonder if anyone collected a bounty on Mozilo.
What is it with Republicans and radio shows? In my understanding, the vast majority of talk radio is extremely conservative. Aren't there late-night liberal shows to keep those truck drivers riveted? Or are lefties like me stuck with NPR, which on many stations (here's lookin at you, WNYC) switches off of talk at night anyway?
I have always wondered about this, and frankly it seems to me to give a little credence (though not much) to this trope of "liberal elite media." Radio shows are relatively inexpensive to produce and they are easily available, and generally out of the mainstream (until someone like O'Reilly or Limbaugh gets picked up).
Does this have to do with the fundamentalist move of starting radio shows when the movement went "underground" after the Scopes trial?
@kithkin: I have a theory that conservative talk radio is huge because the people with craze-servative ideas can't really keep a straight face when they spew ridiculousness.
You really should check out Minnesota Public Radio's The Current. Great ecclectic music, no playlist, and very decent music talk shows.
@morninggloria: Thanks for the recommendation. WBEZ is good too, and they don't turn off the serious stuff after 7, but the thing about NPR is it's not available in large swaths of the country. Talk radio caters to a mostly captive audience--most listeners are in their cars while tuning in--and so it's a question of market: what else is on the dial. If I'm a truck driver headed from New York to San Francisco and I'm on 80 in the middle of Utah, what is there around? Why is it only wackadoos? Is it because the kind of people who drive these long distances in rural areas out of reach of NPR broadcasts were conservative already and so a liberal or even moderate radio show wouldn't get a market? That doesn't seem like a satisfactory explanation to me, though, because the way you get so crazy conservative isn't just your parents (or I'd be a Young Republican right now), it's the media you consume too. So if there was a liberal show out there in the middle of Utah then people might listen and maybe maybe maybe there wouldn't be this polarization between red and blue states.
Boy am I ever pie in the sky for 930 in the morning.
@kithkin: Maybe anyone who has found themselves stuck in the middle of nowhere are angry and bitter and want to blame the city lib'ruls who are living the life that they'd always hoped they'd eventually have.
@morninggloria: I can see that. I'd be angry, too, but I'm a city librul myself.
I'm a religious studies person and I recently read an argument that religion is at least in part inherently conservative (in that it gives an explanation and justification for why things are the way things are) despite having the tools to enact progressive social change. I'm starting to think more and more this has to do with the disappearance of fundamentalism from the mainstream after the Scopes trial. These radio shows were on the air for decades railing against the mainstream which excluded "us" and mocked "us" for knowing the truth (about God and evolution and what's right) and then when they came onto the popular scene 40-50 years later liberals just couldn't catch up.
@kithkin: I swear to god, I fucking hate hearing about the "liberal media." Ignoring the New York TImes, and Maddow/Olbermann, the MEDIA IS DISGUSTINGLY CONSERVATIVE. We have Faux News masquerading as a network that provides unbiased facts. They put it on one of the TVs at work and I have a goddamn stroke every time I see fucking Laura Ingraham or Bill O'Reilly. The media reports shit like "Obama's Terrorist Fist Jab" and "Obama calls Terrorists Extremists instead of Terrorists" (headline on CNN last night). WHERE'S THE REAL GODDAMN NEWS?!
@onestrawplz: Preach! I hate that it's not on the radio, because if you listen to talk radio then you start to think that Fox News really is news because you've been fed such nonsense so constantly and while you're basically a captive audience. I know that if I had leanings that were a little less lefty, I'd probably prefer wackadoo radio over Katy Perry or whatever it is they're playing these days. And that's a problem in my opinion.
Isn't it a little extreme to compare Buchenwald to Abu Ghraib? Okay, I mean, the US has certainly done its fair share of atrocities in the name of war; I won't deny that. But I think there's a difference in order of magnitude here.
@tscheese: Yes. Thousands of prisoners were killed at Buchenwald and buried in mass graves. Horrible things were done at Abu Graib, but you just can't compare the two.
@tscheese: @pinkyBella: Yeah, there's no comparison at all--there were hundreds of thousands of people starved and tortured at Buchenwald, and over 50,000 deaths. That was a very flip and offensive statement.
@tscheese: As I pointed out above, Megan compared the Russians' later use of Buchenwald as a political prison to Abu Ghraib. Not really the same thing as calling Abu Ghraib a concentration camp, (though, again as I said above, just the immediate imagery conjured by the name "Buchenwald" may make the comparison inappropriate).
@tscheese: Yes. Buchenwald was part of a systematic campaign of destruction of people the Nazis considered to be destructive/useless elements of society. Abu Gharib was an Iraqi prison, converted into an American detention facility and used for illegal and unwarranted interrogation. Neither site is high on my list of holy sites, but in the case of the latter, we weren't trying to kill these people off en masse.
@NefariousNewt: As I stated, I was talking about the Russian use of it. And as for the Iraqi government not trying to kill entire ethnic groups en masse, I think the Kurds would take issue with that statement.
@morninggloria: For sure - it's a big state. This particular guys is so crazy he even thinks Obama caused the recession and bank failures. Come to think of it, he's both crazy AND stupid.
@elephantshoes: He thinks that Obama was a senator in 1999 when Glass-Steagall was repealed? He thinks that Obama mandated no oversight of the CDS market (which happened during the Bush administration)? He thinks that Obama was retroactively president in 2007, when two Bear Stearns hedge funds collapsed? He thinks that Obama caused the Office of Thrift Supervision to suck so badly at bank supervision during the last decade?
... the fuck?
I want to quit being a human. I seriously want to quit.
@morninggloria: ...and, I'd add, that on a "crazy-guy per captia basis", Utah is in the top 5...probably along with Kansas, Indiana, Oklahoma, and Alaska.
@spunkay: It's about political capital. Each politician has a limited amount of political capital to spend on getting their agenda passed. The more capital a politician has, the stronger the politician. The Republicans are trying to get Obama to spend as much capital as they can get him to spend on Sotomayor in order to make him weaker. It really has little to do with Sotomayor. If he nominated an upper-class white man there would still be attacks.
"He will likely not compare our re-purposing of Abu Ghraib to the Russian's post-war re-purposing of Buchenwald for political prisoners."
Are you actually comparing Buchenwald to Abu Ghraib? Seriously?
I'm no fan of Abu Ghraib and US war crimes, but to act as though the US is running a Nazi-style concentration camp at Abu Ghraib is ignorant and inflammatory. There were over 50,000 people killed at Buchenwald!
@BeckySharper: it's a very oddly structured sentence actually because it implies that Russia was responsible for Buchenwald in the first place as opposed to taking the camp over and then turning it into a camp for political prisoners.
@BeckySharper: The actual post item, though, compared Abu Ghraib to the Russians' use of Buchenwald. So, perhaps still too inflammatory, given all of the obvious connotations of the name "Buchenwald", but it's not like she called Abu Ghraib a concentration camp. (Which would obviously be over the line.)
@BeckySharper: I think the emphasis is on "POST-WAR". Abu Ghraib was already a prison. What I think Megan is correlating is how the Russians took the former concentration camp and used it to house political prisoners with ties to the Nazi party. Abu Ghraib is still not nearly as bad, since an estimated 7,000 people died in the Soviet camp, but again she's not talking about it as it was during the Holocaust.
@EkaterinaBallerina: @Laulau: yes but it still doesn't actually work because Buchenwald was run by two different countries. So I really don't see what the comparison is based on - unless the intention is to compare Bush's government to the Nazis and Obamas' to Stalinist Russia, which er just doesn't work for me really.
@EkaterinaBallerina: Right, but like you said 7,000 people were killed there and buried in mass graves. Yes, bad things happened at Abu Graib, but even when you're comparing the Soviet take over of Buchenwald, there's still no comparison. Thousands of people were not murdered at Abu Graib.
@emilyanne: Isn't the point clearly to compare American operation of Abu Ghraib to Russian operation of Buchenwald, both as horrific prisons for political prisoners? Again, the fact that Buchenwald had been a concentration camp originally makes the comparison problematic, because frankly even typing that name gives me chills, but the analogy itself seems pretty straightforward to me.
@Laulau: @EkaterinaBallerina: Comparing a US military detention prison--despite its many abuses--to a Nazi extermination camp is a huge comparison FAIL. And even if she was referring to the Russian's post-war reuse of it, it's still a death camp (and continued to be, albeit on a different scale, once the Soviets started putting people there). There's no comparison between Abu Ghraib and Buchenwald.
@Laulau: I honestly don't know because as I said I reread the sentence several times because I think it's awkwardly structured and simply doesn't work as a comparison. 7,000 people died in Buchenwald under the Stalinist regime - do you think that's what happened in Abu Ghraib? Because while i don't approve of Abu Ghraib I haven't yet seen the evidence to suggest that the US was carrying out purges of political prisoners. I think as a comparison it serves to reduce the horror of what happened in Stalin's Russia and I don't think it works as an analogy at all.
@BeckySharper: I didn't say I agreed with the comparison, I was pointing out that everyone was assuming she meant Nazi controlled-Buchenwald, when she meant Soviet-controlled Buchenwald. Trust me, it's a weak comparison. Also I don't even know why he'd bring it up. Buchenwald was a product of the Nazis and the Soviets and Abu Ghraib was a product of Bush. It'd just be out of line and completely unnecessary.
@BeckySharper: Actually, if you read the sentence, I said that it was similar to the Russian repurposing of the camp to torture political prisoners after they got Thuringia in the division of Germany after WWII. Kind of a big difference.
@emilyanne: This is a fair point, about not minimizing the evil of Stalin's regime. I do think there's some value in making the comparison - even though I know people here are outraged by U.S. actions under Bush II, it strikes me that as a country we're still pretty laidback about our treatment of foreign detainees (what with more than half of Americans being down with torture). Pointing out that we were putting ourselves in a camp with the likes of Stalin seems like a way to hopefully shock people out of their complacency. But you're right, not at the cost of downplaying the suffering of others.
@Megan: but Megan they didn't just torture the political prisoners, they killed them, approximately 7,000 of them. Sorry to be pedantic about this - it's on my mind at the moment because i'm reading Orlando Figes's The Whisperers which deals in part with this subject and while I agree that perhaps points should be raised about the torture at abu ghraib and that obama should talk about it, I don't think comparisons with Buchenwald, even in its days as a Soviet camp are valid.
@Megan: Actually, if you read the sentence, it compares Buchenwald to Abu Ghraib. Given that tens of thousands of people died at Buchenwald, under two different murderous regimes, it's a spectacularly poor comparison, no matter which similarity you were referring to.
@Megan: And Megan, if you read what people are saying, you'll understand that people think that's a false comparison that fails to do justice to the thousands of people tortured and killed by the Russians. Like many of have said ... we don't like Bush. At all. But even my bleeding liberal heart knows he was no Stalin.
@westvillagegirl (exiled in chicago): Technically, thousands of non-combatant Iraqis have died as a result of the war, and we have certainly tortured hundreds of people in Iraq. But scale is not the only deciding factor.
@Megan: That's an even more ridiculous comparison. Yes, tens of thousands of non-combatant Iraqis died as a result of the war. But there's a huge difference between casualties of war and concentration camp victims, who died because of genocide. Iraqi civilians are not victims of a US-led genocide.
A better comparison to Iraqi civilian deaths would be German civilian deaths at Dresden, or in Berlin during Russian occupation.
@emilyanne: Wasn't Abu Ghraib originally an Iraqi prison? Hence the comparison? Both were prisons run by fascist regimes, taken over and re-purposed by conquering forces post-war.
@BeckySharper: honey you can keep bringing up the concentration camp victims but since megan wasn't talking about the activities done while buchenwald was a concentration camp and was, in fact, replying to someone who was bs'ing about how russian solders rape and torture civilians unlike american soliders, it doesn't really make any sense in any context whatsoever.
@westvillagegirl (exiled in chicago): no, it's actually nothing like that if you can be bothered to think about things instead of knee jerking about how awful russians are what with their constant rapin' and torturin' and vodka-drinkin' but whatever.
@westvillagegirl (exiled in chicago): I wasn't saying they were equal by any stretch of the imagination; just clarifying that the comparison wasn't totally out of the blue.
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I think I may cozy up to my Band of Brothers DVDs this weekend. Seems appropriate.
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"I looked on the side of my coffee cup and it said this beverage may be hot....really? My hot coffee is hot?!"
He obviously doesn't know what comedy is.
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(If Carrie Prejean gave us anything, it's use of the word "opposite" as an accomplice to hilarity.)
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Also interesting, if you turn someone in for insider trading and that person is found to have dirty hands, the government may pay you a (fairly large) bounty. I wonder if anyone collected a bounty on Mozilo.
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I have always wondered about this, and frankly it seems to me to give a little credence (though not much) to this trope of "liberal elite media." Radio shows are relatively inexpensive to produce and they are easily available, and generally out of the mainstream (until someone like O'Reilly or Limbaugh gets picked up).
Does this have to do with the fundamentalist move of starting radio shows when the movement went "underground" after the Scopes trial?
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I have a theory that conservative talk radio is huge because the people with craze-servative ideas can't really keep a straight face when they spew ridiculousness.
You really should check out Minnesota Public Radio's The Current. Great ecclectic music, no playlist, and very decent music talk shows.
[minnesota.publicradio.org]
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Boy am I ever pie in the sky for 930 in the morning.
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@morninggloria: I can see that. I'd be angry, too, but I'm a city librul myself.
I'm a religious studies person and I recently read an argument that religion is at least in part inherently conservative (in that it gives an explanation and justification for why things are the way things are) despite having the tools to enact progressive social change. I'm starting to think more and more this has to do with the disappearance of fundamentalism from the mainstream after the Scopes trial. These radio shows were on the air for decades railing against the mainstream which excluded "us" and mocked "us" for knowing the truth (about God and evolution and what's right) and then when they came onto the popular scene 40-50 years later liberals just couldn't catch up.
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... the fuck?
I want to quit being a human. I seriously want to quit.
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Are you actually comparing Buchenwald to Abu Ghraib? Seriously?
I'm no fan of Abu Ghraib and US war crimes, but to act as though the US is running a Nazi-style concentration camp at Abu Ghraib is ignorant and inflammatory. There were over 50,000 people killed at Buchenwald!
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And I never compared Bush to Stalin.
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A better comparison to Iraqi civilian deaths would be German civilian deaths at Dresden, or in Berlin during Russian occupation.
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