0:00 — in the Assembly chamber 0:37 — in the rotunda, a Democratic legislator slips on a pile of peace signs 1:14 — a woman has a dog in the Capitol, and the vibration is freaking her out 2:12 — our Assemblyman Brett Hulsey calls it the "Budget Despair Bill" 2:35 — "Oh, oh, freedom..." 3:16 — "Which door do I go out if I don't want to be replaced?" 4:06 — "Is there a door I can go out where someone else won't come in because I went out?" 4:35 — boombox duct taped to a stand made of cross-country skis 5:06 — Meade inquires about a child labeled "planted troublemaker" 5:21 — folkie guy plays "When the Ship Comes In" 6:26 — the folkie switches to rap 7:50 — "I'll be growin' food with all my friends and we'll be livin' on a big farm somewhere."
That's a comment on my YouTube video about the salt trucks that circled the Wisconsin Capitol yesterday, blowing horns, apparently in support of the protesters. (I blogged the video here.)
Coincidentally, last night, one of my readers sent this email to the Madison Street Superintendent:
I work in Madison, so I was delighted to read on madison.com this morning that the snow plows were out "the moment" precipitation began today.
You might want to double check whether those plows were pouring salt, however, or whether the drivers were more interested in showing their support for anti-Walker ralliers:
I want to thank you for bringing this to my attention. While it was necessary with the storm system we had yesterday to have crews working the overtime to be salting and plowing our main streets, we never should have had the trucks involved in the rally around the Capitol.
We are checking our GPS and determining the what operators were involved and will be dealing with this.
While people are free to rally and support whatever cause they believe in, it should not be done at the expense of the taxpayers such as you and I.
I thank you again,
Al Schumacher Street Superintendent 1501 W. Badger Rd. Madison, WI 53713 (608) 266-4681
ADDED: This, of course, make O'Reilly look very rude, but I didn't watch the interview and I don't know how rude it actually was. To some extent, I like interruptions. I like the back and forth of overlapping conversation with someone who does it well and isn't actually trying to dominate. Overtalking can be an important component of flowing conversations. It's no good when one person holds forth and the other one, instead of listening, is distracted thinking about when it's going to be his turn.
That said, an interview of the President is different. He commands respect. But he can abuse that. Obama could have pursued the strategy of running out the clock, blathering tediously and preventing good pointed probing by the interviewer he perceived as an opponent (if not an enemy). He'd have played O'Reilly, I suspect, if O'Reilly hadn't broken in with questions. The YouTube montage is effective at making O'Reilly look brutish, but that's not necessarily so, and if O'Reilly had patiently waited for Obama to bring each meandering answer in for a landing, it would not have been possible to make a YouTube montage that would show Obama's running out the clock to avoid serious questions.
Many hospitals allow and even encourage recording because modern cameras, particularly those taking video, are so unobtrusive. But that same technology has introduced a wild card into a fraught scene that could shock a jury — with the mother screaming and staff responding (or not) to what may look like an emergency — all of which can be edited to misrepresent what actually took place....
“When we had people videotaping, it got to be a bit of a media circus,” Dr. Tracy said, adding that the banning of cameras evolved through general practice rather than a written policy. “I want to be 100 percent focused on the medical care, and in this litigious atmosphere, where ads are on TV every 30 seconds about suing, it makes physicians gun shy.”...
Dr. Elliott Main, chairman of obstetrics and gynecology at California Pacific Medical Center in San Francisco, which also allows filming of births, said, “The modern approach is not to ban cameras but to do drills and practice.”
“Where you get into trouble is where people panic or don’t know what to do next and have blank looks on their faces,” he said. Videotaping simulated births, he said, can help the medical staff adjust their behavior.
Now, part of medical training is: Acting!
Look like you're doing the right thing, even when you're confused and you know you're hurting someone. That would be a good approach even without the cameras, but medical personnel — like politicians — need to adjust their demeanor and expression for the world of YouTube.
Well, what the hell is her game? Is she the victim of horrific TSA intrusion or a fame-seeker seizing the viral video route to celebrity? She's awfully carefully coiffed and made-up for the occasion of her humiliation....
... Jason King, a music professor at NYU was quoted by NPR as saying "It's catchy. It has a really good hook, but it's problematic, too. There's a way in which the aesthetics of black poverty—the way they talk and they speak and they look — sort of becomes this fodder for humor without any interest in the context of the conditions in which people actually live." Baratunde Thurston of The Onion told NPR:
"As the remix took off, I became increasingly uncomfortable with its separation from the underlying situation. A woman was sexually assaulted and her brother was rightfully upset. People online seemed to be laughing at him and not with him (because he wasn't laughing), as Dodson fulfilled multiple stereotypes in one short news segment. Watching the wider Web jump on this meme, all but forgetting why Dodson was upset, seemed like a form of ‘class tourism.’ Folks with no exposure to the projects could dip their toes into YouTube and get a taste. [...] The creativity unleashed has been amazing, and what mitigates my fears of people minimizing the gravity of the situation is how Antoine himself has responded and taken charge of his own meme."
The original interviewee, Antoine Dodson also has a Wikipedia entry. He was chosen "Meme of the Year" in the 2010 Urlie awards. Here's a Washington Post piece declaring that Dodson "is one of the strongest people we’ve seen in a while," that he has "an inner strength that is worthy of awe and respect."
I watched the video "Head of the State" because the Times sent me there, and now — in addition to fighting nausea — I'm marveling at the embarrassing writing made possible by the newspaper's perversely politically correct need to appreciate rap music and culture:
It’s first-rate parody, and also untested waters. Mr. Obama was a favorite of comedians even before he was elected president, but typically his stiffness and aloofness are their targets. In reimagining the President as an off-duty, fun-chasing tough guy, Baracka Flacka Flames is a different proposition.
On the one hand, it’s witty and incisive parody, as fluent in Mr. Obama’s tics as in hip-hop manners. The clip was filmed in front of an abandoned house in South Central Los Angeles and echoes the video of Waka Flocka Flame’s original song.
As well, it’s seemingly an acknowledgment by the filmmakers that racial stereotypes still shape how some people perceive the first couple, and that many divergent stripes of blackness can be collapsed into one idea.
How can Congressman Bob Etheridge (D-NC2) think he can lay hands on someone for asking a question like that? Why did that question make him so angry? Look how much he believes in his own capacity and right to intimidate! Quite aside from the manhandling, where does Etheridge get the idea that someone who asks a question is required to divulge his name? Is he completely deranged? Does he not remember what a camera is? Has he never heard of YouTube? I bet he has now.
But without any name or organizational support, just by riling up a member of Congress, the students have created the first conservative meme of the week. They seem to have learned from organizations such as ThinkProgress that any video of a member acting strangely, no matter how grainy, is grist for the Web.
And Weigel is aptly embarrassed by the first comment:
You refer to this dismissively as "video of a member acting strangely." Sorry, this isn't so easily dismissed. It's video of a member acting thuggishly, committing an assault and battery. And it's video of a member who has the arrogance to claim he has a right to know the identity of someone who asked me a question on the street. He doesn't have any such right. What he has is the dangerous notion that he's exempt from the laws of the District of Columbia and from the dictates of a civil society. And by your so cavalierly dismissing his outrageous behavior, you're complicit.
Posted by: Rob_ | June 14, 2010 10:52 AM...
Of course, the big question now — for anyone with a Weigel-y mentality — is: Who's Rob_?
MORE: This came in the email:
I'm Rob_
I know your question at the end of the Etheridge post was facetious, but I figured I'd answer it anyway. I'm Robert Cantor, a retired lawyer and amateur photographer in Rockville, Maryland, unaffiliated with Andrew Breitbart or any other political or journalistic operation but fascinated both by Etheridge's outrageous behavior and the way it was covered in the media. Not only did Weigel mischaracterize it and treat it dismissively, but others like CBS chose to edit down the battery to eliminate Etheridge's very rough grabbing of the young man's neck as well as the repeated requests from the young man that Etheridge let him go. The New York Times, following the pattern of its coverage of Van Jones and Helen Thomas, waited to report anything about the incident until Etheridge had apologized, then made his apology the story and reported little about the incident itself. Thank goodness for Glenn Greenwald, who had the integrity to call for Etheridge to be arrested and the courage to call out the commenters to his post who defended Etheridge.
But that is not the case. Upload your file to YouTube, then download it, then upload it, then download it, etc. etc., and see what happens. After 775 ups and downs — I know, who has the time? — it looks like this:
It's #2 in a series that is up to #56. Why haven't I noticed this YouTube channel before? This adorable reenactment is quite brilliant (with the familiar "Goodfellas" language):
I'm not going to watch the other 54 videos all at once, but I'm going to get to all of them. I was going to watch the "Fight Club" one, but I see that it's the scene that reveals the key secret, and I can't play it while Meade is in the room. He's never watched "Fight Club," though we've started the DVD a couple times.
(How long is it supposed to take to get your new lover/spouse to get through all of the DVDs you deem essential? I don't think we're going to live that long.)
ADDED: That link doesn't rickroll you. It's an article about how the video was deleted and everyone got mad. It contains a link to the video though, so watch out for that.
Here are some excerpts... that is: everything she said about blogs:
Blogs, emails, social networks, and text messages have opened up new forums for exchanging ideas, and created new targets for censorship....
[V]iral videos and blog posts are becoming the samizdat of our day....
Some nations.... have co-opted the internet as a tool to target and silence people of faith. Last year, for example, in Saudi Arabia, a man spent months in prison for blogging about Christianity....
QUESTION: Dr. Nguyen Dinh Thang with BPSOS. We serve Vietnamese Americans and work with Vietnamese in Vietnam. While your initiative will take some time to take effect, just recently, in recent months, the Vietnamese Government sentenced several bloggers to five years all the way to 16 years in prison. So what does your office plan to do, and how the U.S. Government can confront such an emergency situation in Vietnam?
SECRETARY CLINTON: Well, we have publicly spoken out against the detention, conviction, and imprisonment of not only the bloggers in Vietnam, but some of the Buddhist monks and nuns and others who have been subjected to harassment.
Vietnam has made so much progress, and it’s just moving with great alacrity into the future, raising the standard of living of their people. And we don’t believe they should be afraid of commentary that is internal. In fact, I would like to see more governments, if you disagree with what a blogger or a website is saying, get in and argue with them. Explain what it is you’re doing. Put out contrary information. Point out what the pitfalls are of the position that a blogger might be taking.
So I hope that Vietnam will move more in that direction, because I think it goes hand in hand with the progress that we’ve seen in the last few years there. ...
Governments should not be afraid of commentary that is internal. If government doesn't like what people are saying get in and argue with them. Explain what it is you’re doing. Put out contrary information.
Yes. We not only have a First Amendment here in America, we believe in the rights it guarantees. We think other countries' governments ought to embrace the same principles. Come on, everybody! It's great! The marketplace of ideas.
With its ruling today, the Supreme Court has given a green light to a new stampede of special interest money in our politics. It is a major victory for big oil, Wall Street banks, health insurance companies and the other powerful interests that marshal their power every day in Washington to drown out the voices of everyday Americans. This ruling gives the special interests and their lobbyists even more power in Washington--while undermining the influence of average Americans who make small contributions to support their preferred candidates. That's why I am instructing my Administration to get to work immediately with Congress on this issue. We are going to talk with bipartisan Congressional leaders to develop a forceful response to this decision. The public interest requires nothing less.
A forceful response to a Supreme Court decision recognizing the importance of free speech. It would have been even more painfully funny if Hillary Clinton had also, in her speech yesterday, promoted the American values of separation of powers and an independent judiciary.
When word concerning the plot of the movie Mr. Smith Goes to Washington reached the circles of Government, some officials sought, by persuasion, to discourage its distribution.... Under Austin [the case the Court overrules], though, officials could have done more than discourage its distribution—they could have banned the film. After all, it, like Hillary, was speech funded by a corporation that was critical of Members of Congress. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington may be fiction and caricature; but fiction and caricature can be a powerful force.
Yes, ironically, the Citizens United case was about a movie called "Hillary" that criticized Hillary Clinton.
Modern day movies, television comedies, or skits on Youtube.com might portray public officials or public policies in unflattering ways. Yet if a covered transmission during the blackout period creates the background for candidate endorsement or opposition, a felony occurs solely because a corporation, other than an exempt media corporation, has made the “purchase, payment, distribution, loan, advance, deposit, or gift of money or anything of value” in order to engage in political speech. 2 U. S. C. §431(9)(A)(i).
Congress criminalized some political speech. But Hillary would like to apply moral pressure to countries like Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Vietnam who imprisoned people for political speech.
Speech would be suppressed in the realm where its necessity is most evident: in the public dialogue preceding a real election. Governments are often hostile to speech, but under our law and our tradition it seems stranger than fiction for our Government to make this political speech a crime. Yet this is the statute’s purpose and design.
I added that boldfacing.
Some members of the public might consider Hillary to be insightful and instructive; some might find it to be neither high art nor a fair discussion on how to set the Nation’s course; still others simply might suspend judgment on these points but decide to think more about issues and candidates. Those choices and assessments, however, are not for the Government to make. “The First Amendment underwrites the freedom to experiment and to create in the realm of thought and speech. Citizens must be free to use new forms, and new forums, for the expression of ideas. The civic discourse belongs to the people, and the Government may not prescribe the means used to conduct it.”....
And our government is developing a forceful response to that. Brilliant. Idiots.
The trial "has the potential to become a media circus," wrote attorney Charles Cooper. "The record is already replete with evidence showing that any publicizing of support for Prop. 8 has inevitably led to harassment, economic reprisal, threats, and even physical violence. In this atmosphere, witnesses are understandably quite distressed at the prospect of their testimony being broadcast worldwide on YouTube."...
"Those who want to ban gay marriage spent millions of dollars to reach the public with misleading ads, rallies and news conferences during the campaign to pass Prop. 8. We are curious why they now fear the publicity they once craved," said Chad Griffin, Board President of the American Foundation for Equal Rights.
"Apparently transparency is their enemy, but the people deserve to know exactly what it is they have to hide."
Arnold Stang was 91. I wish I could come up with some good video on YouTube. I wanted the old "What a chunk o' chocolate" Chunky commercial. (Great commercial, but it never tricked me into trying what was obviously a disgusting candy bar.) Or the garage destruction scene in "It's a Mad, Mad, Mad, Mad World." What is YouTube for if not for that?
ADDED: Out of the milquetoast persona, Stang was the voice of the cartoon character Top Cat. Watch episode #1 here. And here's Stang talking about "Top Cat":
Conservative advocates and broadcasters were gleeful about the success of the tactics in exposing Acorn workers...
The Acorn controversy came a week after the resignation of Van Jones, a White House environmental official attacked by conservatives, led by Glenn Beck of Fox News Channel, for once signing a petition suggesting that Bush administration officials might have deliberately permitted the Sept. 11 terrorist attacks.
There was more than that to the Van Jones story!
Even before Mr. Jones stepped down, Mr. Beck had sent a message to supporters on Twitter urging them to “find everything you can” on three other Obama appointees.
Conservatives believe that they have hit upon a winning formula for such attacks: mobilizing people to dig up dirt, trumpeting it on talk radio and television, prompting Congress to weigh in and demanding action from the Obama administration.
