Baron Dave Romm
Campaign 2010: Returning the Favor
By Baron Dave Romm
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The right can dish it out, but they can't take it
Continuing from last week, The Campaign Begins: Now it the time to get excited.
I don't really like to go negative, but after 30+ years of an unceasing stream of lies, insults and put downs from the right, the left is getting tired. I tried to start off positively, and asked over at Daily Kos about Suggestions for talking points, and only got mud to sling.
Okay, I give. I never was particularly good at suffering fools gladly. Bush was a divider, not a uniter, and his poison is deeply ingrained.
I won't sink as low as Rush or Drudge or Fox, but when they sling mud, they're going to have mud slung back. And our mud will stick better, since it will be based on reality.
It's time to come out swinging. Hard. The whiners on the right will just complain about the tone of politics, too stupid to realize that they're getting just a fraction of the hateful lies they've been spewing for decades. They just don't get it. They never will. The moral relativists are lost.
Tough love; call bullshit on anyone who tries to tell you that you're not being civil. Where were they the last forty years of hatred and lies from the right?
The rhetorical gloves are off.
Remind people of what the alternative was... and is
Returning the jabs
Here are some sound bit-sized counter-arguments to drop into discussions/arguments aimed squarely back at the right and the far right. Some of these come from DKos and other sources, but mostly I've just been taking notes.
Soundbites
Hmm... this is more fun than I thought it would be. I can go on making links and finding more dirt on the goppies for a loooong time. Further suggestions from you are welcome.
Next week: More on making the case for the Democrats and other campaign tactics.
Baron Dave Romm is a conceptual artist and a noble of Ladonia who produces Shockwave Radio Theater, writes in a Live Journal demi-blog maintains a Facebook Page, 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. A nascent collection of videos are on Baron Dave's YouTube channel. 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
Michael Moore: If That 'Mosque' ISN'T Built, This Is No Longer America (michaelmoore.com)
I am opposed to the building of the "mosque" two blocks from Ground Zero. I want it built on Ground Zero.
Of mind and matter: David Attenborough meets Richard Dawkins (guardian.co.uk)
'We are living in the most exciting intellectual time in history' - David Attenborough discusses science with Richard Dawkins.
Gods of science: Stephen Hawking and Brian Cox discuss mind over matter (guardian.co.uk)
'I used the word "God" like Einstein did as a shorthand for the laws of physics' - Stephen Hawking talks science with Brian Cox.
Oliver Burkeman: The Protestant Work Ethic (guardian.co.uk)
No pain, no gain? Not if you want to get some real work done.
Jessica Gelt: Finding beauty in the punk movement (latimes.com)
'The Beautiful and the Damned' exhibition in Santa Monica, made up of Ann Summa's images from L.A.'s vibrant scene, stays away from the grubby.
Susan King: "Classic Hollywood: Composer Charles Fox" (latimes.com)
The still-active Emmy and Grammy winner has just penned his autobiography, 'Killing Me Softly: My Life in Music,' as well as Beverly Hills' new theme song.
Quincy Jones: 'I knew how to handle Michael' (guardian.co.uk)
The legendary Quincy Jones talks to Johnny Davis about Lady Gaga, Naomi Campbell, his last chat with Michael Jackson - and the fun he had at his own funeral.
Tim Jonze: "Strictly lowercase: a beginner's guide to the xx" (guardian.co.uk)
Everything you need to know about this week's Mercury prize winners.
RAOUL HERNANDEZ: Stairway to Cleveland (austinchronicle.com)
My dinner with Harvey Pekar.
LOUIS BLACK: "Page Two: Work and Splendor" (austinchronicle.com)
Harvey Pekar, 1939-2010.
Rachel Whiteread: Through the eyes of a child (guardian.co.uk)
She is famous for her grand sculptures. But Rachel Whiteread's smaller works - from her doll's house furniture to a cast of Peter Sellers's nose - delight Adrian Searle.
Roger Ebert: Review of "I'M STILL HERE" (UNRATED; 3 stars)
A mind is a terrible thing to waste. The tragedy of Joaquin Phoenix's self-destruction has been made into "I'm Still Here," a sad and painful documentary that serves little useful purpose other than to pound another nail into the coffin.
The Weekly Poll
New Question
The 'Odd Bedfellows?' Edition...
On Labor Day, the Michigan's largest construction trade union (Carpenters and Millwrights with 18,000 members) broke ranks with other major unions (UAW, AFL-CIO, AFSCME) and endorsed the GOP candidate, Rick Snyder, for governor instead of the Democratic candidate, Virg Bernero.
Breaking with Dems, carpenters union planning to back Snyder | freep.com | Detroit Free Press
Is it ever appropriate for a Union to back a GOP candidate?
(Please feel free to comment with yer response)
1.) No! Never! _________
2.) Yes, sometimes _______
Send your response to
wrote:
answered:
From The Creator of 'Avery Ant'
Link from RJ
Rock Balancing
Hi there...
A possible link perhaps?
Selected Readings
from that Mad Cat, JD
In The Chaos Household
Last Night
Sunny but much cooler than seasonal.
Takes Over 'Family Feud'
Steve Harvey
Steve Harvey says he's bringing change to "Family Feud" and viewers better get ready to laugh.
Harvey, who debuts as the game show's new host Monday, is calling on his decades in comedy to take the program in a new direction. He's already taped 100 episodes.
He's keeping the humor strictly G-rated for the syndicated show, the comic said.
He replaces actor John O'Hurley, host of "Family Feud" for four seasons, who left to focus on stage work and a variety of business ventures.
Steve Harvey
$39 Million Donation
British Museum
The British Museum has received a 25-million-pound ($38.52 million) donation from the former head of the J Sainsbury supermarket chain to help pay for a new extension, a museum spokeswoman said on Sunday.
The gift from John Sainsbury, 82, is one of the biggest known single donations to the arts in Britain.
It will go toward a new gallery for temporary exhibitions, a conservation center and new storage space at what is Britain's most popular cultural attraction.
The donation comes against a backdrop of big public spending cuts. Funding for museums and galleries is expected to be trimmed by 25 percent in a spending review to be outlined on October 20 by the finance minister, George Osborne.
British Museum
NYC Auction
Blue Diamond
A two-stone ring with a rare triangular blue diamond the size of a quarter on a gold band with baguette-cut diamonds could bring at least $15 million when it is offered at auction in New York next month.
At 10.95 carats, the stone is the largest triangular-shaped fancy vivid blue diamond ever to come to auction, Christie's told The Associated Press in advance of the Oct. 20 sale. It is paired with a 9.87-carat white diamond cut in the same shape.
"Vivid blue is the strongest and purest saturation in any colored diamond," said Rahul Kadakia, Christie's jewelry expert. "As a vivid, this is as good as it gets."
The two diamonds were cut to be together.
Blue Diamond
Record Broken
Pumpkin Launch
A team that shoots pumpkins from a giant air cannon says it achieved the holy grail of the sport - chucking a pumpkin a distance of more than one mile.
The "Big 10 Inch Team" from Pennsylvania, Delaware and New Jersey says it launched the 9.5-pound pumpkin at Moab's old airport on Friday.
The team used a 90-foot, compressed-air cannon and traveled to southern Utah hoping the high elevation and thin air would help the vegetable sail farther.
The group launched a pumpkin near Moab last year that traveled short of a mile, or 4,623 feet, but still set a Guinness World Record.
Pumpkin Launch
Granted 3-Year Restraining Order
Leonardo DiCaprio
A judge has granted Leonardo DiCaprio a three-year restraining order from a woman who he said claims to be his wife and carrying his baby.
During a brief hearing Friday, a Los Angeles judge ordered that Livia Bistriceanu stay 100 yards away from the actor. Court filings state Bistriceanu traveled from Chicago to Los Angeles and acted aggressively when she showed up at DiCaprio's home and business offices recently.
Bistriceanu, who has been twice placed on psychiatric hold, was notified of a temporary restraining order but did not appear in court.
DiCaprio stated in court filings that he was frightened of the 41-year-old woman and that she presented a threat to his personal safety.
Leonardo DiCaprio
Europe's Last
Primeval Forest
Deep in the forest, along a dirt road off-limits to tourists, the trunks of centuries-old fir trees lie waiting to be hauled to a sawmill -- felled giants from Europe's last primeval forest.
Further in, old oak and ash trunks wait to be turned into planks, furniture or matchsticks: proof, say ecologists, of illicit logging that is endangering the ancient Bialowieza forest in eastern Poland.
"Some of the trees have been cut down illegally by Poland's National Forests service, in violation of European Union legislation," contends Polish environmentalist Adam Bohdan, who with other campaigners has raised the alarm in Warsaw and Brussels.
State forestry officials deny any logging for commercial purposes in Bialowieza, saying only diseased or infested trees are being felled in the vast woodland area which is home to wild bison, lynx and wolves.
Primeval Forest
1st Century Wall Paintings Restored
Jordan
British archeologists have completed conservation of rare wall paintings near the city of Petra, Jordan, that are more than 2,000 years old.
The World Heritage site is known for its city carved out of rose rock, but archeologists say the art is the best indication the city was once covered in paintings.
The paintings, unveiled last week after a three-year restoration, are believed to be the only surviving example of the art left behind by the Nabataeans, who lived in the mountainous region in the 1st to 5th century.
The Nabataeans were among the most successful merchants of their day and built the spectacular city of Petra as their capital.
Jordan
Losing Ground In U.S.
Carnivorous Plants
Decades ago, lush stands of Darlingtonia californica - emerald plants coiled like fanged cobras ready to pounce - grew at this spot in the northern reaches of the Sierra Nevada.
Deep in the ravine, the air is hot and dead. Pieces of bark that have sloughed off trees make every step a danger - nature's equivalent of a thousand forgotten skateboards cluttering a driveway. Slate tinkles underfoot, and the ground feels like stale angel-food cake: stiff yet porous.
Barry Rice, a botanist at UC Davis, is not the first to hunt the cobra lily here in Butterfly Valley. In 1875, amateur botanist Rebecca Austin fed the plants raw mutton and carefully observed how they digested it.
Near the bottom of the crevice, the ground becomes moist. The air cools and softens. This is where the cobra lilies would be. "When you see them, they look almost like animals," Rice says.
But there are none to be seen.
Carnivorous Plants
Weekend Box Office
'Resident Evil'
On a weekend that Hollywood was largely content to cede to football and late-summer barbecues, Sony-Screen Gems' "Resident Evil: Afterlife" led the box office.
The 3-D horror film earned $27.7 million over the weekend according to studio estimates Sunday, a total that exceeded expectations. It's the fourth "Resident Evil" film, all of which have starred Milla Jovovich. This installment opened better than the three previous movies.
"Resident Evil" was the only film in new release on the historically slow moviegoing weekend following Labor Day. With an estimated box-office total of $82 million, it was the lowest grossing weekend of the year.
Screen Gems' "Takers," in its third week of release, came in second with $6.1 million. Last weekend's top film, the George Clooney thriller "The American," took in $5.9 million for Focus Features.
Estimated ticket sales for Friday through Sunday at U.S. and Canadian theaters, according to Hollywood.com. Final figures will be released Monday.
1. "Resident Evil: Afterlife 3D," $27.7 million.
2. "Takers," $6.1 million.
3. "The American," $5.9 million.
4. "Machete," $4.2 million.
5. "Going the Distance," $3.8 million.
6. "The Other Guys," $3.6 million.
7. "The Last Exorcism," $3.5 million.
8. "The Expendables," $3.3 million.
9. "Inception," $3 million.
&10. "Eat Pray Love," $2.9 million.
'Resident Evil'
In Memory
Kevin McCarthy
Kevin McCarthy, the veteran stage and screen actor best known for his starring role as the panicked doctor who tried to warn the world about the alien "pod people" who were taking over in the 1956 science-fiction suspense classic "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," died Saturday. He was 96.
McCarthy died of natural causes at Cape Cod Hospital in Hyannis, Mass., said his daughter Lillah.
During a career that spanned more than 70 years, beginning on stage in New York in the late 1930s, McCarthy played Biff Loman opposite Paul Muni's Willy in the 1949 London production of "Death of a Salesman."
Reprising his role in the 1951 film version opposite Fredric March, he earned a supporting-actor Oscar nomination and won a Golden Globe as most promising male newcomer.
McCarthy had appeared in several other films and had a string of TV anthology-series credits behind him when he was cast as Dr. Miles Bennell in "Invasion of the Body Snatchers," director Don Siegel's thriller about an unsuspecting California town whose residents were being replaced by emotionless alien clones grown in oversized seed pods.
McCarthy dismissed assertions that "Invasion of the Body Snatchers" was an allegory about the communist infiltration of America or an indictment of McCarthyism.
"There was no assignment of political points of view when we were making the film," he told the Bangor Daily News in 1997. "People began to think of McCarthyism later.
"I thought it was really about the onset of a kind of life where the corporate people are trying to tell you how to live, what to do, how to behave. And you become puppets to these merchants that are somehow turning individuals into victims.
McCarthy's long career included numerous guest appearances on TV series including "The Twilight Zone," "Burke's Law," "Flamingo Road" and "Murder, She Wrote."
He appeared in about 50 films, including "An Annapolis Story," "40 Pounds of Trouble," "The Prize," "The Best Man," "Kansas City Bomber," "Buffalo Bill and the Indians," "Piranha" and "The Howling."
In addition to his many Broadway and other stage credits, McCarthy toured for many years as President Truman in the one-man show "Give 'Em Hell, Harry."
He also was a footnote in the movie career of Marilyn Monroe, playing the husband Monroe divorced in Reno at the outset of "The Misfits," the Arthur Miller-written, John Huston-directed 1961 drama starring Monroe, Clark Gable and Montgomery Clift.
The son of a lawyer and his homemaker wife, McCarthy was born Feb. 15, 1914, in Seattle. He and his two brothers and sister - Mary McCarthy, who later became an author and wrote the bestselling novel "The Group" - were orphaned when both parents died in the 1918 flu epidemic, and were sent to live with relatives.
McCarthy began acting in the 1930s at the University of Minnesota, where, on a dare from a friend, he played a bit part in "Henry IV, Part 1."
After moving to New York, he made his Broadway debut in 1938 in a small role in "Abe Lincoln in Illinois," starring Raymond Massey. As Sgt. Kevin McCarthy during World War II, he appeared in Moss Hart's "Winged Victory," the Broadway play produced by the Army Air Forces.
McCarthy appeared in several Broadway plays in the years immediately after the war, including Maxwell Anderson's short-lived "Truckline Cafe" with Marlon Brando and Karl Malden. He was a founding member of the Actors Studio.
In addition to his daughter, he is survived by his wife of 31 years, Kate Crane McCarthy; children James Kevin McCarthy, Mary Dabney McCarthy, Tess McCarthy and Patrick McCarthy; stepdaughter Kara Lichtman; a brother, Preston; and three grandchildren. He was divorced from actress Augusta Dabney, who died in 2008.
Kevin McCarthy
In Memory
Claude Chabrol
French director Claude Chabrol, one of the founders of the New Wave movement whose films probed the latent malice beneath the placid surface of bourgeois life, died on Sunday. He was 80.
A prolific director, Chabrol made more than 70 films and TV productions during his more than half-century-long career. His first movie, 1958's "Le Beau Serge" won him considerable critical acclaim and was widely considered a sort of manifesto for the New Wave, or "Nouvelle vague" movement - which reinvented the codes of filmmaking and revolutionized cinema starting in the late 1950s. The vastly influential movement also included directors like Francois Truffaut and Jean-Luc Godard.
Chabrol's movies focused on the French bourgeoisie, lifting the facade of respectability to reveal the hypocrisy, violence and loathing simmering just below the surface. Often suspenseful, his work drew comparisons with that of Alfred Hitchcock.
Chabrol worked at a fast clip, churning out about a film every year. He wrote some original scripts, but also adapted classics of French literature, including "Madame Bovary" (1991) and stories by Guy de Maupassant, for the cinema and for television.
Chabrol's top films included "Les Biches," or "Bad Girls," from 1968 and 1970's "The Butcher," as well as the 2000 mystery "Merci pour le chocolat," with actress Isabelle Huppert, one of his favorite actresses - who starred early on in her career in Chabrol's "Violette Noiziere," (1978) and "Story of Women" (1988).
Chabrol's last feature film, "Bellamy" - featuring another giant of French cinema, Gerard Depardieu - came out last year.
Chabrol was born in Paris on June 24, 1930. The son of a pharmacist, he said he "completely" belonged to the sort of bourgeois social milieu that would become the fodder for his films - "otherwise I wouldn't have dared" depict it, Chabrol said in a 1987 interview.
As a young man, he studied literature and law before writing movie reviews in the respected French film magazine "Cahiers du cinema." He had not yet turned 30 when "Le Beau Serge," the story of a man's return to his native village after a long absence, was released to critical acclaim.
A bon vivant and longtime smoker, Chabrol was rarely seen without his trademark pipe or Cuban cigar - even on set. He was also a joker and liked to ham it up for the cameras, often making grimaces and funny faces while on the red carpet.
Chabrol also acted, making Hitchcock-style cameos in many of his own films, as well as those by other directors. He last appeared in this year's "Gainsbourg," playing a music producer in filmmaker Joann Sfar's biopic about singer Serge Gainsbourg.
Chabrol was married three times and had three sons. Funeral arrangements were not immediately known.
Claude Chabrol
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