Natter .38 Special
Off-topic discussion. Wanna talk about corsets, duct tape, or physics? This is the place. Detailed discussion of any current-season TV must be whitefonted.
I have a MI-5 quesiton. I'm sure the answer is "tom quinn is the world's worst spy" or "Handwave!" or both.
I just finished watching the episode with ASH (great episode) and Tom tells Ellie and Maisey that he's not Matthew, but really Tom, the spy. Maisey happily tells her Mum that they can call him Tom now.
Do they actually switch to call him Tom out places like the restaurant or is this just glossed over? I'm trying to figure out why Tom would say to call him Tom and not continue being called Matthew since he's been introduced to Ellie's friends that way.
I like that the reporter persists in trying to get a yes/no answer, in that excerpt. It just makes the press guy look more and more like a complete idiot.
We need to see whole long 10-minute excerpts of this on the evening news. Preferably, with a picture-in-picture window with closeups of what the Superdome looks like on the inside. Ted Koppel, I am counting on you!!
In other news, I read David Brooks's op-ed piece today, against my own wisdom. How do people with that poor a grasp of rhetoric get to be editorialists?? And why don't republican apparatchiks read recent history? (He's proposing that poor people not be allowed back into New Orleans, ever, and that they be forcibly "integrated" into middle-class housing tracts in other cities/states, to "teach them" how not to be poor. Not only does it all come off as coded racism, it's also a blurry photocopy of early Great Society programs, which were miserable failures.)
I think she just wants to punch the Bush administration in the head, one politico at a time.
(edited to add above context)
They're only going to have success if they keep their heads out of his ass, and their own, for good.
I was glad to read the McLellan press conference transcript, but am tempted to wager I could hold my breath for about as long as it's going to last.
Also? They boil things down to the simplest form, and give McLellan et al the out they need. In the case of this hurricane, the city *did* screw up, and so did the state, on the front end. But that's not the issue now, and those aren't issues so much for a national audience. Those are issues for Louisianans, and New Orleanders. My concern as a non-Louisianan (political that is, humanitarian-wise, it's all my concern) -- my concern is how the
Federal
government did their job, because their job is the job they're supposed to be doing for me.
If I were a member of Bush & Co. I wouldn't want to play the blame game either, because I would be the all-time winner and champion.
Like you needed an excuse.
It just hadn't occured to me before now. All our mayoral candidates are
boring.
I now have snippets of a song called "Who's to blame?" stuck on loop. Thanks!
there was an interesting opinion piece in Salon today that opines that the press was pretty damn slow to start asking the tough questions, as well.
[link]
Limbaugh on New Orleans:
"If you, as a mayor, or if you, as a city council, run a city based on the welfare and entitlement thinking of government -- bammo! -- you're going to get poor citizens! If you run a city that believes in entrepreneurialism and growth and so forth, you're not going to have as much of that.
But if your city believes that it's entitled, if that's, if that's the worldview of the leaders of a community, then I don't care what their race is -- if their worldview is that this is a welfare state -- "the government needs to protect us. The government needs to feed us. The government needs to transport us. The government" -- well, guess what? The government needs to build the levees. The government needs to make sure the levees are -- the government. You're passing the buck all over the place and accepting all the money that the government's sending in to you, ah, and then something like this happens and then you start, you know, wringing your hands.
"Oh, look how poor the population --" Well, what do you expect when you have a welfare state mentality as your city government? I mean, I'm not even being critical. I'm just trying to point out something obvious here! That -- talking about this for 18 years, folks -- socialism versus capitalism; entrepreneurialism and self-reliance versus the entitlement mentality -- so much on display here. That's what nobody's got the guts to say.
Dammit, all those people should have had their own private levees instead of having the government take care of it. Ah, what can you expect from a socialist city state like New Orleans.
It would be so awesome if the media brought in shot glasses and bottles of Jack to the next briefing and just started taking shots everytime McClellan says, "blame game."
Holy FUCK.
[link]
Even on Tuesday, as still-rising waters covered most of New Orleans, FEMA official Bill Lokey sounded a reassuring note in a Baton Rouge briefing.
"I don't want to alarm everybody that, you know, New Orleans is filling up like a bowl," Lokey said. "That's just not happening."
