'Best of TBH Politoons'
Baron Dave Romm
The Exact Opposite Part III
By Baron Dave Romm
KFAI-FM released their new schedule, to be implimented July 1, and Shockwave is not on it! I'm submitting a proposal to fill one of the empty slots, but I need your support!
Call the station during our Plege Drive, especially when Shockwave is on the air 3:30-4:00pm Central, Saturday April 14 (and possibly the 21st if the drive lasts). 612-375-9030. You can also go to the Fresh Air Radio's web site. A pledge would be ideal (we have good premiums!) but simply telling them how much Shockwave means to you, who listen on podcasts or read reviews and commentary on the web, would be greatly appreciated!
I'm trying to convince the station that Shockwave, in all its ramifications, extends well beyond the broadcast show, and that it should contine as one of the fine programs on a very eclectic schedule. We've been on the air since 1979, and are a fixture in many circles, not all of which are traditional broadcast media.
Thanks in advance!
Wingnuts on parade
In Part I, I covered some Republican claims that weren't simply wrong, but where the exact opposite was true. In Part II, I used up most of the leftovers. But it's been getting worse and worse, and most of these are recent, and many from this week.
Nuclear holocaust preferable to disloyalty
George W. Bush keeps saying that the war in Iraq was about weapons of mass destruction, and that Iran is possibly the greatest threat since it's developing a nuclear capability. But his actions say that the exact opposite is the case. He is more concerned about 'loyal Bushies' than in the safety of the United States. When it turned out that Bush lied about Iraq's potential threat and that our brave soldiers were dying because of those lies, Bush/Rove/Cheney et al did the only thing they're capable of.
Admit mistakes? No way.
Change plans so we have some exit strategy? Of course not.
Make sure the best people are in the right position to make the US safer? Not even close.
No, in response to the truth coming out, they illegally and recklessly revealed the covert status of CIA agent who was an expert in the nuclear capabilities of our potential enemies. Valerie Plame, wife of Joe Wilson who outed Bush, was outed by people looking for a Permanent Republican Majority. Rove nor Cheney cared that Plame was working under cover in the Counterproliferation Division of the CIA (story, links and video). Vital intelligence was lost. All they cared about was protecting themselves.
At first, Bush simply denied everything,
claiming he was going after the real
killers would fire anyone who was
involved with the incident. Turning his back on
the traitorous actions didn't get him anywhere,
so he just sent stooges to take the fall, notably
Scooter Libby.
As always, Bush's first impulse was to run away, and his second impulse was to lie.
The world isn't safer because Saddam's gone as long as we have W.
Bush continually says the world is safer because of the War on Terror In fact, the exact opposite is the case: The world is more deadly, more scary, because of conservative Republicans.
Bush said that "you're either with us or with the terrorists (look up)", but when it comes to safety, the only thing he can talk about is the lack of a military attack on the US. Spain, England and Iraq would disagree very much they are safer. And here in the US, the terrorists have won: We have to take off our shoes to get on an airplane, innocent people are on the no-fly list, US civil rights are gone, habeas corpus is gone. Bush has done everything Osama bin Laden wanted, up to leaving Saudi Arabia and failing to investigate 9/11.
He's only fooling a smaller and smaller (and more vocal and more scatological) group of sphincter conservatives. Real Americans understand that incompetence is a threat: Bush 'fails' in anti-terror job: "a whopping 48.9 percent of respondents giving the president the thumbs down" with another 10.7% saying he was only "fair". And this is supposedly the one issue Bush was "strong" about. Mainstream America doesn't like to be lied to. They were fooled long enough. The US is now catching up with Europe, who knew long ago. Financial Times Report 6/19/06: US still main threat to stability in European eye: "36 per cent of respondents identify the US as the greatest threat to global stability" while "Thirty per cent of respondents named Iran".
McCain's armored stroll through Baghdad
Don't these people know we have videotape?
March 27, 2007, Senator and Republican presidential hopeful John McCain told Wolf Blitzer on CNN: "You know that's where you ought to catch up on things, Wolf. General Petraeus goes out there almost every day in an unarmed Humvee. I think you ought to catch up."
As it turned out, the exact opposite was the case. The streets of Baghdad are not safe to walk unarmed, and it was McCain who had to catch up.
Military Sources Respond To McCain'Äôs Escalation Remark With 'ÄòLaughter Down The Line'Äô, (one of many sites linking to a video of CNN Baghdad reporter Michael Ware's response). He repeated the assertion on Bill Bennett's radio show (text and audio). Another video of Ware's comments: Honestly, Wolf, you'll barely last twenty minutes out there. I don't know what part of Neverland Senator McCain is talking about when he says we can go strolling in Baghdad."
It gets worse for McCain
And it gets even worse. Attempting to brazen out his lie, McCain visited Iraq and walked those streets of Baghdad. I'll give him credit for chutzpah, but his lies were evident. Even McCain, surrounded by 100 soldiers and 3 Blackhawk helicopters, wore armor. (Link to video) Even John McCain doesn't believe John McCain.
And it gets still worse. Less then 30 minutes after McCain wrapped up, a barrage of half a dozen mortars peppered the boundaries of the Green Zone, where the senators held their press conference.. McCain's sabre rattling has made a bad situation more dangerous.
Sitting Duck Republicans
By way of Glenn Greenwald in salon.com Will National Review correct Cliff May's false Iraq claims? (Premium membership required) Cliff May in the National Review claims:
Those high times are here. Pew Poll released march 26, 2007:
Indeed, by the charts in the release, the exact opposite of May's wishful thinking has been the case since 2004. The country has been almost evenly divided, with fewer than 10% difference in support in either direction, until the middle of 2006 when a large majority of the country realized just how badly things were going.
Cliff May and many right-wing pundits just want our troops in harms way so they can justify years of dunderheaded incompetence. Soldiers are fighting bravely, but they are being betrayed by the Bush Administration's "Sitting Duck" mentality. It's time to honor the sacrifices made by our men and women in uniform, and actually make the US and Iraq safer by putting adults in charge.
Jesus dies for these people?
It's Easter as I write this, and finding examples of conservative Republicans expecting you to believe the exact opposite of the truth is as easy as a kid finding Easter Eggs on the White House lawn. So easy, that I have many more examples left over.
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia who produces Shockwave Radio Theater, writes in a Live Journal demi-blog, plays with a very weird CD collection and an ever growing list of political links. Dave Romm reviews things at random for obscure web sites. You can read all his music recommendations from Bartcop-E. Podcasts of Shockwave Radio Theater. Permanent archive. More radio programs, interviews and science fiction humor plays can be accessed on the Shockwave Radio audio page.
Thanks to everyone who has sent me music to play on the air.
"." -- --////
Recommended Reading
from Bruce
Nat Hentoff: Joe Frederick, First Amendment Idol (villagevoice.com)
Will the Supreme Court hold high the banner 'Bong Hits 4 Jesus,' or crush free speech?
Rod McCullom: Behind the gay-friendly faces (advocate.com)
The opening battle in the war between 2008 Democratic presidential front-runners Hillary Rodham Clinton, the junior senator from New York, and Barack Obama, the junior senator from Illinois, was surely fought the last week in February, after David Geffen-the out billionaire, entertainment mogul, and onetime friend of Bill-told New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd that Republicans thought Clinton was the "easiest to beat" and that she and her husband "lie with such ease it's troubling."
Linda Villarosa: Outside the Lines: Too Much Beyoncé (afterellen.com)
Can pop culture and gay parents make kids queer?
Jimmy Carter: A Simple Sunday School Teacher (beliefnet.com)
The former president on why he believes Jesus will save everyone, and how his faith complicated--and sustained--his presidency.
Jonathan Rosenblum: Confessions of a "smart kid" (jewishworldreview.com)
How not to motivate children.
Mike Diamond: Come and knock on her door-and buy her products (advocate.com)
Irrepressible TV legend Suzanne Somers is back in the spotlight, this time as purveyor of an eponymous line of food, jewelry, and beauty products. And gay men around the country are buying them up at private parties in the best Tupperware tradition. A look inside the strange new trend.
Interview with John Waters (afterelton.com)
AE: If people they watch this show, will they want to kill their spouse just to get on it?
JW: No, because they all get caught on our show. But you get 15 to life, which isn't so bad. Fifteen years for killing your wife. That's almost worth it Š if you had to pay alimony for the rest of your life. It depends, really.
Nathan Lee: Zombie Slasher Love (villagevoice.com)
Match made in grindhouse: Rodriguez's undead meet Tarantino's psychopath stuntman in splatter-fest double-header
Commentoon: Hillary Campaign Contributions (womensenews.org)
Tom Tomorrow: Inside the Darkest Heart of Blue America
Hubert's Poetry Corner
SWEDISH EYES
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Overcast and cool.
Talked to dear old Dad - there's 10" of snow on the ground, with more falling.
Didn't get some of the pictures for Sunday's page loaded til Sunday afternoon. Last night my FTP kept shutting itself down after each upload, and I gave up a little before 5am (pdt) with 7 left to go.
Don't know why it's acting like that. Did it this afternoon, too.
Usually it takes 6 minutes per upload - last night it was closer to 20 minutes (there were 18 items to upload for Sunday's page).
Hope it's healed itself - can't stay up that late again. Ack.
Navy Vet Protests
Midge Potts
When former CIA operative Valerie Plame testified at a congressional hearing bristling with TV cameras, Midge Potts was right there, a distracting figure in a shocking pink shirt emblazoned with "Impeach Bush Now."
She's been ejected, arrested and detained for protests demanding U.S. troops leave Iraq, but that hasn't deterred the Gulf War veteran, former Republican congressional candidate and transgender woman.
"We shouldn't be afraid to vocalise our opinion to our elected leaders," said Potts, one of several members of the Code Pink anti-war group who frequently show up for congressional hearings and debates on Iraq.
For the 38-year-old Potts, anti-war sentiments began to surface while serving in the U.S. Navy during the first Gulf War. She was Mitchell Eugene Potts then, and worked on the USS Yosemite, a destroyer tender, calibrating pressure gauges.
Midge Potts
Los Angeles Philharmonic Director Stepping Down
Esa-Pekka Salonen
The Los Angeles Philharmonic's music director, Esa-Pekka Salonen, announced Sunday he will step down at the end of the 2008-2009 season to concentrate on composing.
His successor will be Gustavo Dudamel, a 26-year-old Venezuelan conductor with limited experience conducting a professional orchestra.
The Finnish-born Salonen's scheduled resignation from the Philharmonic after 17 years would make him the nearly 90-year-old cultural institution's longest-serving director. He is credited with programing a creative lineup of performances and guiding the Philharmonic into its new home at the Frank Gehry-designed Walt Disney Concert Hall in 2003.
Esa-Pekka Salonen
Documentary Angers Latino Veterans
Ken Burns
Activists who believe Latinos deserve more recognition for their contributions during World War II have created an agonizing political problem for PBS and filmmaking star Ken Burns.
Several Latino leaders and military veterans, angry that Burns' high-profile documentary series "The War" includes no conversations with Latinos who fought, are demanding changes. PBS and Burns want to satisfy an important constituency, without the precedent of a filmmaker forced to change his vision due to a protest.
Burns' 14-hour documentary is scheduled to premiere in September. PBS hopes it becomes as definitive a record of the World War II experience as Burns' "The Civil War" was for that conflict, and as popular.
Even though the film hasn't been seen publicly, its lack of Latino representation was sniffed out by Maggie Rivas-Rodriguez, a former newspaper reporter who runs an oral history project about Latino World War II veterans at the University of Texas.
Ken Burns
New Novel
Pat Conroy
"The Prince of Tides" author Pat Conroy says he's finishing his first novel in more than a decade, and it will mark a return to the same dysfunctional characters he's known for.
Conroy's last book was a cookbook published in 2004.
"I loved writing that book. ... Now, of course, everybody in this new book is dying and driving themselves off cliffs," he told the Atlanta Journal-Constitution. "So I'm back to normal."
The new novel is set in Charleston and is already nearly 700 pages, Conroy said. "It drives me nuts. But long-windedness ... there's nothing you can do about it. I wanted to write a 250-page novel, but I realize I can't even write a prologue that's 250 pages."
Pat Conroy
More Movies To Be Offered
3-D
By the end of the decade, Darth Vader could be rattling sabers with his enemies above the heads of moviegoers, and Buzz Lightyear could be flying off the screen on his way to infinity and beyond.
For real - or at least the cinematic version of real: 3-D.
A growing number of blockbuster, live-action films and animated movies are expected to be offered in in-your-face 3-D in the next few years, as thousands of theaters are outfitted with the special projectors and screens needed to show the films.
For theater owners and studios, the technology could be a lifesaver, luring people back to multiplexes for an experience that cannot be matched by sophisticated home-theater systems or stolen by pirates with hidden camcorders.
3-D
'Official' Typeface Of The 20th Century
Helvetica
Open a newspaper, look at a street sign, type an e-mail and chances are a Swiss design icon is staring you in the face, though you'd be hard-pressed to identify it.
But peer closely at the shape of the letters: If they're easy to read and without unnecessary flourishes, then you might well be looking at an example of the Helvetica typeface, which turns 50 this year.
Helvetica lettering adorns images most people can conjure up instantly, from New York subway signs to the logos of Harley-Davidson, American Airlines and BMW. But much of the time it remains invisible in a sea of print, unobtrusively conveying the message the designer intended it to.
Unusually for the little-celebrated craft of typography - the design and arrangement of typed letters - the anniversary is being marked in grand fashion, with an exhibition at New York's Museum of Modern Art and the release of a film by Gary Hustwit paying homage to what the cult documentary maker calls "one of the most popular ways for us to communicate our words."
Helvetica
Seeks Amnesty Again
Gary Glitter
British ex-rocker Gary Glitter, jailed in Vietnam for sexually molesting two young girls, plans to seek an amnesty during Vietnam's Liberation Day celebrations this month, his lawyer said.
Glitter, 62, is due for release in August next year after an earlier bid for amnesty saw his sentence of nearly three years jail cut by three months.
The 1970s glam rocker -- who used to perform hits such as "Rock and Roll," "Do You Wanna Touch Me" with a bouffant hairstyle and platform boots -- denied molesting the 11-year-old girls while living in the southern resort town of Vung Tau.
The rocker, whose real name is Paul Francis Gadd, was convicted after a one-day trial last year.
Gary Glitter
Amazon Swimmer
Martin Strel
Slovenian Martin Strel, after braving crocodiles, piranhas, disease and the threat of an imminent heart attack, on Sunday completed a record-setting 66-day, 3,274-mile (5,268 km) swim down the Amazon River and was taken to a hospital.
Thousands of people were on hand in the Brazilian colonial city of Belem as an exhausted Strel, 52, made his final stroke, and was pulled from the water.
After arriving in Belem, Strel was placed in an ambulance and medics worked to stabilise his blood pressure, which was at near-heart attack levels, his support team said on the Web site.
Martin Strel
'Put Down Your Whip'
Xu Beihong
A Chinese artist's 1939 painting sold for $8.19 million at a Hong Kong auction Saturday, setting a new record price for Chinese oil paintings, an auction house said.
"Put Down Your Whip" by Xu Beihong was sold at more than double its earlier estimated price to a collector who bid by telephone, said Eliza Chan, a spokesman for the U.K.-based auction house Sotheby's.
The previous record price for a Chinese oil painting was set by another piece by Xu, a leading advocate of realist Chinese painting.
Xu Beihong
Hatches On Catalina Island
3rd Eaglet
A bald eagle egg has hatched in the wild on Santa Catalina Island, only the third since chemical contamination there wiped out the iconic birds several decades ago, conservation officials said Sunday.
The eaglet emerged from its shell sometime late Friday or early Saturday, according to Catalina Island Conservancy officials. Its sex had yet to be determined.
The hatchling's egg was one of four laid last month on the east end of the 76-square-mile island located off the coast of Los Angeles County. Two hatched last week and the fourth could hatch at any time, officials said.
3rd Eaglet
Eagle Cam
Physicist Unlocks Secrets
Texas Hold 'Em
Clément Sire isn't just a statistical physicist-he's also a champion bridge player. Combining his love of physics and games, he has created a model of the poker variant Texas hold 'em that enables him to do everything from predicting the length of a tournament to figuring out his ranking simply by assessing the average size of his opponents' fortunes.
It may seem like an odd way to spend his time. After all, isn't physics supposed to be about particle colliders and superconductivity? "Physicists," Sire explains, "are now more than ever involved in the study of complex systems that do not belong to the traditional realm of their science."
Sire, of the Laboratory of Theoretical Physics, University of Toulouse, France, published his work Universal Statistical Properties of Poker Tournaments on arXiv.org. He used real data from online poker tournaments and found that it matched the results of his model.
Poker is an especially attractive subject, because it's one of the few truly isolated systems. Unlike, say, the stock market, which is often governed by factors such as politics, war and weather, poker tournaments are not affected by external phenomena. As a result, even Sire's simplified model of Texas hold 'em appears to mathematically express many features of the game that experienced players would recognize.
Texas Hold 'Em
In Memory
Mark St. John
Former Kiss guitarist Mark St. John died Thursday from an apparent brain hemorrhage. He was 51.
Born Mark Norton in Hollywood, St. John was Kiss' third official guitarist, having replaced Vinnie Vincent -- the substitute for Ace Frehley -- in 1984.
By this point, Kiss had done away with its trademark makeup and costumes, but the group was enjoying a career renaissance. The lone Kiss album on which St. John appeared, "Animalize," re-established the group as one of the world's top arena metal bands. The album spawned the popular MTV video, "Heaven's on Fire" (the only Kiss video to feature St. John).
St. John's flashy playing reflected the era's Van Halen-influenced rock guitarists, but it certainly helped spark the material on "Animalize," which many fans consider one of Kiss' strongest non-makeup releases. However, right around the time Kiss was to launch a worldwide tour in support of the album, St. John was diagnosed with a form of arthritis called Reiter's Syndrome, which caused his hands and arms to swell, and prevented him from playing guitar.
His medical condition improved after leaving Kiss, and St. John launched a pop/metal outfit, White Tiger, with ex-Black Sabbath singer David Donato. St. John briefly teamed up with original Kiss drummer Peter Criss in a group that didn't release any recordings, and appeared as a guest speaker at Kiss conventions. In 2001, he released an all-instrumental album, "Magic Bullet Theory."
Mark St. John
In Memory
Johnny Hart
Cartoonist Johnny Hart, whose award-winning "B.C." comic strip appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers worldwide, died Saturday while working at his home in Endicott. He was 76.
"He had a stroke," Hart's wife, Bobby, said Sunday. "He died at his storyboard."
"B.C.," populated by prehistoric cavemen and dinosaurs, was launched in 1958 and eventually appeared in more than 1,300 newspapers with an audience of 100 million, according to Creators Syndicate Inc., which distributes it.
After he graduated from Union-Endicott High School, Hart met Brant Parker, a young cartoonist who became a prime influence and co-creator with Hart of the "Wizard of Id" comic strip.
Besides his wife, Hart is survived by two daughters, Patti and Perri. He was a native of Endicott, about 135 miles northwest of New York City, and drew his comic strip at a studio in his home there until the day he died.
Johnny Hart
| CURRENT MOON lunar phases |
