Tag: Open Thread

When I used to watch a lot more TV I really liked to see the TLC station’s home improvement shows like Trading Spaces.  There was another show called Clean Sweep that always impressed me.  For those that haven’t seen it…   The Clean Sweep crew would show up at someone’s house where they would show us two rooms crammed full of junk.   With barely enough room to walk through.  And I would gawk at all that stuff and think I would never let my place get that bad.   The CS team would completely clear the rooms and then a designer and carpenter would come in and paint and redo the rooms with closet organizers and lableled bins, furniture, etc. and turn it into a functional space again.  Meanwhile the couple would be out on their lawn with all their piles of stuff.  The host and a professional organizer would then help them sort through all of it to Keep, Sell or Trash.  The organizer guy (with a cute Australian accent) would lay out a little section of tarp and allow them to keep only what could fit on it.   Then the homeowners go through excruciating distress trying to part with grandma’s treasures and all the unused wedding gifts they received…etc.   After they sort through it, they hold a yard sale.  What isn’t sold is donated to a charity.   In the end, the host brings them back into their house to see the new rooms: pristine and decluttered.  They are always stunned and delighted and most of them cry.   Sometimes I cried too.    

Yesterday was crazy…and today isnt looking much better.  Some days I just have no choice but to be in 2 places at once….being a single parent of 2 is like living in a zone defense.  And yesterday, it was ALL defense….

So, right now my one eye’s still closed and the other is only half open.  So I’m off to get the ‘skin-ponies’ (i decided that if LEP’s dogs can be ‘fur-people’, my kids can be ‘skin-ponies’….heeheehee) off to school, and then hopefully back here for a quick pony party post…a real one, not this drivel im typing right now….

…but if’n I dont make it, add some comments below so this place doesnt look so empty…..  😉

I’m fine!  There, that’s out of the way.

Our journey today takes us from In Grid to Sugar Blue.

From the ‘Be careful what you click on Department’

An Italian Pop-Soul Singer covers Dylan in Warsaw:

Okay, so that’s not too good, an enthusiastic, but possibly really, really drunk crowd…..but I got curious, she’s very popular in Poland

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/I…

So then you see one that says:  I Was a Ye Ye Girl.

Move to the ‘What’s New is Old Department’

(In Related Videos , there’s also Dracula Ye Ye  and Egyptian Reggae, but I’m trying to stay focused here on the Ye Ye Phenomenon)

Yé-yé was a style of pop music that emerged out of France and Québec in the early 1960s. Yeye means young, innocent, and cute.

le snip premier

The yeye movement had its origins in the radio programme “Salut les copains”, created by Lucien Morisse and hosted by Daniel Philippacci, which was first aired in December 1959. This program became an immediate success and one of its sections (“le chouchou de la semaine” / “this week’s sweetheart”) turned to be the starting point for most yeye singers. Any song that was presented as a chouchou went straight to the first places in the charts.

le snip deuxieme

Gainsbourg called France Gall the French Lolita, and, wanting to check to which extent her innocence was real, composed for her the song “Les sucettes” (“Lollipops”): “Annie loves lollipops, aniseed lollipops, when the sweet liquid runs down Annie’s throat, she is in paradise “. It is amazing to think that not even that video (with all those giant penis-like sucettes dancing around) rang a bell for poor France! She was finally told of the double meaning of the song and that is when her yeye period finished… Her innocence was gone and it took her some 5 years to sing again, now with a completely different style.

le snip troisieme

As mentioned above, the yeye movement was led by female singers, but that does not mean that there were not any yeye guys.

Link to France Gall doing Les sucettes due to content.  

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v…

DO NOT REC THIS   Go re-read ucc and get really horny, then come back.

Please follow the link to the Yahoo!News story about the bald eagle whose beak was shot off, and the efforts of those attempting to make a prosthetic to enable her to eat.  There are some pictures of the bird, named ‘Beauty’ (hence the cheesy title of this pony party).

Part of Beauty’s beak was shot off several years ago, leaving her with a stump that is useless for hunting food. A team of volunteers is working to attach an artificial beak to the disfigured bird, in an effort to keep her alive.

Glenn Greenwald

10 am 5 Who needs Dana Perino when you have the NYT’s Michael Gordon?

Glenn Greenwald @ Salon.com

Monday May 5, 2008 07:23 EDT

Like clockwork, the administration’s most stalwart surge supporter/journalist — the New York Times’ Michael Gordon — has a lengthy article today bolstering the administration’s war-justifying accusations against Iran. It claims in the lead sentence that “militants from the Lebanese group Hezbollah have been training Iraqi militia fighters at a camp near Tehran,” and that “the training, the Americans say, is carried out at several camps near Tehran that are overseen by the Quds Force of the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Command, and the instruction is carried out by militants from Hezbollah, which has long been supported by the Quds Force.”

As usual with Gordon’s articles, nothing is done here other than uncritically repeating Bush administration claims under the cover of anonymity. Virtually every paragraph in this article is nothing more a mindless recitation of uncorroborated assertions which he copies from Bush officials and then weaves into a news narrative, with the phrase “American officials say” tacked on at the end or the phrase “according to officials” unobtrusively interspersed in the middle…

…

The administration’s war-threatening rhetoric against Iran has plainly reached new heights in the last several weeks. Whether they really intend to follow through on those threats before Bush leaves office is unclear, though some commentators with a history of insight and prescience — such as Scott Ritter — are convinced they will. But what is clear is that the administration has no better ally in disseminating its war-provoking accusations than Michael Gordon and his NYT Editors, for whom “reporting” consists of repeating whatever Bush officials say — no matter how significant or dubious — and to do so without challenge and while baselessly granting them anonymity to do make their provocative accusations without accountability.

Docudharma’s picks:

and ucc edges me out by picking the correct number of games for the stars/fins series….good job, ucc!!

Conference Championship Matchups:

Eastern Conference

Pittsburgh (2) vs. Philadelphia (6) (series begins Friday)

Western Conference

Detroit (1) vs. Dallas (5)  (series begins Thursday)

The All-White Elephant in the Room

By FRANK RICH, The New York Times

Published: May 4, 2008

BORED by those endless replays of the Rev. Jeremiah Wright? If so, go directly to YouTube, search for “John Hagee Roman Church Hitler,” and be recharged by a fresh jolt of clerical jive.

What you’ll find is a white televangelist, the Rev. John Hagee, lecturing in front of an enormous diorama. Wielding a pointer, he pokes at the image of a woman with Pamela Anderson-sized breasts, her hand raising a golden chalice. The woman is “the Great Whore,” Mr. Hagee explains, and she is drinking “the blood of the Jewish people.” That’s because the Great Whore represents “the Roman Church,” which, in his view, has thirsted for Jewish blood throughout history, from the Crusades to the Holocaust.

…

Mr. McCain says he does not endorse any of Mr. Hagee’s calumnies, any more than Barack Obama endorses Mr. Wright’s. But those who try to give Mr. McCain a pass for his embrace of a problematic preacher have a thin case. It boils down to this: Mr. McCain was not a parishioner for 20 years at Mr. Hagee’s church.

That defense implies, incorrectly, that Mr. McCain was a passive recipient of this bigot’s endorsement. In fact, by his own account, Mr. McCain sought out Mr. Hagee, who is perhaps best known for trying to drum up a pre-emptive “holy war” with Iran. (This preacher’s rantings may tell us more about Mr. McCain’s policy views than Mr. Wright’s tell us about Mr. Obama’s.) Even after Mr. Hagee’s Catholic bashing bubbled up in the mainstream media, Mr. McCain still did not reject and denounce him, as Mr. Obama did an unsolicited endorser, Louis Farrakhan, at the urging of Tim Russert and Hillary Clinton. Mr. McCain instead told George Stephanopoulos two Sundays ago that while he condemns any “anti-anything” remarks by Mr. Hagee, he is still “glad to have his endorsement.”

…

There is not just a double standard for black and white politicians at play in too much of the news media and political establishment, but there is also a glaring double standard for our political parties. The Clintons and Mr. Obama are always held accountable for their racial stands, as they should be, but the elephant in the room of our politics is rarely acknowledged: In the 21st century, the so-called party of Lincoln does not have a single African-American among its collective 247 senators and representatives in Washington. Yes, there are appointees like Clarence Thomas and Condi Rice, but, as we learned during the Mark Foley scandal, even gay men may hold more G.O.P. positions of power than blacks.

This is one of the most amazing pieces of video i’ve seen in a while.  If you dont like modern dance you may not enjoy the routine…but the dancers themselves are beyond belief….a dance team where the female lost an arm, the male lost a leg…

Glenn Greenwald

Brian Williams’ "response" to the military analyst story

After I wrote about Williams’ blog item yesterday, his blog was deluged with commenters angrily demanding to know why he has failed to address the NYT expose. In response, Williams wrote a new blog item last night in which he purports — finally — to respond to the story, and I can’t recommend highly enough that it be read by anyone wanting to understand how our establishment journalist class thinks and acts.

…

What makes all of this even more astounding — and what makes Williams’ glib dismissal of these issues yesterday all the more indefensible — is that all of these conflicts and all of this deceit was well-known long before the NYT article added more details. As I’ve repeatedly noted, concerns over the use by news networks of retired Generals masquerading as “independent analysts” were raised for years in multiple venues — including by the NYT and by the astoundingly prescient Colman McCarthy in The Washington Post, and the networks simply ignored those concerns, marching along with their pro-war parade of military analysts.

But far worse, the specific, undisclosed conflicts of both McCaffrey and Downing — the two Generals cited by Williams to prove NBC did nothing wrong — were disclosed more than four years ago by The Nation. And there is no way that NBC and Williams can claim not to have known about them, since The Nation described those ties as specifically as could be. Did NBC ask the Generals about these ties? Did they consider disclosing them to their viewers? Did the undislcosed ties violate NBC News policy? Does NBC have policies now to prevent this from happening again? Who knows? NBC refuses to comment on any of this.

…

Just consider what is going on here. The core credibility of war reporting by Brian Williams and NBC News has been severely undermined by a major NYT expose. That story involves likely illegal behavior by the Pentagon, in which NBC News appears to have been complicit, resulting in the deceitful presentation of highly biased and conflicted individuals as “independent” news analysts. Yet they refuse to tell their viewers about any of this, and refuse to address any of the questions that have been raised.

More amazingly still, when Brian Williams is forced by a virtual mob on his blog yesterday finally to address this issue — something he really couldn’t avoid doing given that, the day before, he found time to analyze seven other NYT articles — Williams cited McCaffrey and Downing as proof that they did nothing wrong, and insists that his and their credibility simply ought to be beyond reproach because they are good, patriotic men. But those two individuals in particular had all kinds of ties to the Government, the defense industry, and ideological groups which gave them vested interests in vigorous pro-war advocacy — ties which NBC News knew about and failed to disclose, all while presenting these individuals to their millions of viewers as “independent.” Is there anyone who thinks that behavior is anything other than deeply corrupt?