Steve Benen is probably the busiest guy in America on Fridays. That’s when he posts his weekly list of Mitt Romney’s lies. He added 20 more lies today, and is up to Volume XXI. There’s still a long way to go until November.
Steve is hardly alone in chronicling Romney’s lies. Jonathan Chait had a post entitled Romney Just Making Stuff Up Now. Now? What does he mean by now? That’s been going on for quite, but we do need more people exposing all of Romney’s lies.
Yesterday I pointed out how Fox was trying to twist the news with unfounded suggestions of a connection between the bombing plot broken up yesterday and the Occupy Wall Street movement. The suggestion was made with a subtle comment that “It is unknown if the bridge incident was connected to Occupy Wall Street’s plans for nationwide protests Tuesday.” Such a formula would allow Fox to tie any unrelated groups together this way. Not surprisingly, the right wing blogs and Twitter have considerable chatter today falsely claiming Occupy Wall Street was involved in the plot to blow up the bridge.
Further reports on the arrest clarify the lack of a real relationship between those arrested and Occupy Wall Street. USA Today reports:
What sets the alleged Ohio operation apart is its link to self-proclaimed anarchists — with no connections to international terrorist organizations — who believed that members of the ubiquitous Occupy protest movement had not gone far enough to express their displeasure with high-flying corporate America.
More recent plots disrupted by the FBI have focused on traditional terrorist targets — military facilities and crowded public places — with the goal of inflicting mass casualties.
The operation outlined Tuesday in federal court papers described a poorly financed operation by inexperienced players who at times joked about their lack of terror savvy but sought to use the cover of the Occupy campaign in Cleveland to strike a violent blow against U.S. corporate properties and interests.
From the earliest point in a seven-month undercover inquiry starting in October, an FBI informant said the group of suspects expressed “displeasure at the (Occupy) crowd’s unwillingness to act violently.”
Almost immediately after the charges were announced, the Occupy campaign moved to distance itself from the allegations.
Acknowledging that the suspects — Douglas Wright, 26; Brandon Baxter, 20; Anthony Hayne, 35; Connor Stevens, 20; and Joshua Stafford, 23 — were “associated with Occupy Cleveland,” the group said in a statement that the five were “in no way representing or acting on behalf of Occupy Cleveland.”
Four of the suspects are from the Cleveland area; Wright is from Indianapolis.
Citing the arrests, Occupy Cleveland canceled a scheduled May Day rally Tuesday.
Ed Needham, a spokesman for Occupy Wall Street, said the alleged Cleveland plot “goes against the very fabric of the Occupy Movement.”
“The Occupy Movement is a social movement rooted in compassion as well as social justice,” he said.
U.S. authorities also sought to separate the criminal case against the five men from a blanket indictment of the protest movement.
“The FBI and the Department of Justice do not investigate groups or movements,” U.S. Attorney Steven Dettelbach said. “The defendants stand charged based not upon any words or beliefs they might espouse, but based upon their own plans and actions.”
While violence is far more often associated with right wing extremism, there are extremists on both the left and right who will resort to violence. This demonstrates a key difference between the left and right. The right is dominated far more by their more radical elements as compared to the left, with many on the right willing to ignore the problem of right wing violence. Occupy Wall Street is to the left of the Democratic Party and many liberal groups but has not shown the degree of extremism seen on the right. As noted above, the local Occupy group immediately repudiated the use of violence and did not try to defend those who promoted violence. Many liberals have also shown concern about the violence occurring at the Occupy demonstrations. Other liberal bloggers join me in having concerns about the tactics of Occupy Wall Street and want a clearer repudiation of the use of violence in demonstrations nation-wide.
In contrast, when there have been discussions of right wing violence, it has been common for many in the conservative movement to show reluctance to dissociate themselves from those who promote violence. We saw this in the reaction of conservative bloggers to a report from the Department of Homeland Security on far right extremists. We were reminded of the frequent use of violent rhetoric by the conservative movement following the shooting of Gabrielle Giffords. Ron Paul has pandered to neo-Nazis and white supremacists to raise money, bringing in elements to the conservative movement which would have been ostracized in past years before the move by the conservative movement to the extreme right. Will the conservative bloggers who falsely accuse Occupy Wall Street of being involved in a bomb plot speak out against the real problem of right wing violence?
Barack Obama is on the cover of Rolling Stone. The interview started out with Obama making a point which I think many Democrats have missed. Obama has been criticized for trying to attract Republicans when it is obvious that Republican politicians have no intention to compromise. They prefer to block anything proposed by Obama for political gain, regardless of how much harm they do to the country. However, in trying to make his policies attractive to Republicans, it is Republican voters, not politicians, who Obama wants to attract. Many are brainwashed by Fox and the right wing noise machine, but Obama showed in 2008 that he can attract enough former Republican voters to win in states where Democrats had not won recently.
Let’s talk about the campaign. Given all we’ve heard about and learned during the GOP primaries, what’s your take on the state of the Republican Party, and what do you think they stand for?
First of all, I think it’s important to distinguish between Republican politicians and people around the country who consider themselves Republicans. I don’t think there’s been a huge change in the country. If you talk to a lot of Republicans, they’d like to see us balance the budget, but in a balanced way. A lot of them are concerned about jobs and economic growth and favor market-based solutions, but they don’t think we should be getting rid of every regulation on the books. There are a lot of Republican voters out there who are frustrated with Wall Street and think that they acted irresponsibly and should be held to account, so they don’t want to roll back regulations on Wall Street.But what’s happened, I think, in the Republican caucus in Congress, and what clearly happened with respect to Republican candidates, was a shift to an agenda that is far out of the mainstream – and, in fact, is contrary to a lot of Republican precepts. I said recently that Ronald Reagan couldn’t get through a Republican primary today, and I genuinely think that’s true. You have every candidate onstage during one of the primary debates rejecting a deficit-reduction plan that involved $10 in cuts for every $1 of revenue increases. You have a Republican front-runner who rejects the Dream Act, which would help young people who, through no fault of their own, are undocumented, but who have, for all intents and purposes, been raised as Americans. You’ve got a Republican Congress whose centerpiece, when it comes to economic development, is getting rid of the Environmental Protection Agency.
If you want to lower the deficit, reduce government intrusion in individual’s personal lives, have lower taxes on the middle class, and a stronger defense against al Qaeda, all things I would expect Republican voters to support, Obama has been the one to offer more sensible positions on these issues.
Given all that, what do you think the general election is going to look like, and what do you think of Mitt Romney?
I think the general election will be as sharp a contrast between the two parties as we’ve seen in a generation. You have a Republican Party, and a presumptive Republican nominee, that believes in drastically rolling back environmental regulations, that believes in drastically rolling back collective-bargaining rights, that believes in an approach to deficit reduction in which taxes are cut further for the wealthiest Americans, and spending cuts are entirely borne by things like education or basic research or care for the vulnerable. All this will be presumably written into their platform and reflected in their convention. I don’t think that their nominee is going to be able to suddenly say, “Everything I’ve said for the last six months, I didn’t mean.” I’m assuming that he meant it. When you’re running for president, people are paying attention to what you’re saying.
Let me ask you about the War on Drugs. You vowed in 2008, when you were running for election, that you would not “use Justice Department resources to try and circumvent state laws about medical marijuana.” Yet we just ran a story that shows your administration is launching more raids on medical pot than the Bush administration did. What’s up with that?
Here’s what’s up: What I specifically said was that we were not going to prioritize prosecutions of persons who are using medical marijuana. I never made a commitment that somehow we were going to give carte blanche to large-scale producers and operators of marijuana – and the reason is, because it’s against federal law. I can’t nullify congressional law. I can’t ask the Justice Department to say, “Ignore completely a federal law that’s on the books.” What I can say is, “Use your prosecutorial discretion and properly prioritize your resources to go after things that are really doing folks damage.” As a consequence, there haven’t been prosecutions of users of marijuana for medical purposes.
The only tension that’s come up – and this gets hyped up a lot – is a murky area where you have large-scale, commercial operations that may supply medical marijuana users, but in some cases may also be supplying recreational users. In that situation, we put the Justice Department in a very difficult place if we’re telling them, “This is supposed to be against the law, but we want you to turn the other way.” That’s not something we’re going to do. I do think it’s important and useful to have a broader debate about our drug laws. One of the things we’ve done over the past three years was to make a sensible change when it came to the disparity in sentencing between crack cocaine and powder cocaine. We’ve had a discussion about how to focus on treatment, taking a public-health approach to drugs and lessening the overwhelming emphasis on criminal laws as a tool to deal with this issue. I think that’s an appropriate debate that we should have.
Occupy Wall Street seems to have influenced your rhetoric. Has it had a deeper impact on your thinking about America?
You know, I think that Occupy Wall Street was just one vivid expression of a broader anxiety that has been around in the United States for at least a decade or more. People have a sense the game is rigged, so just a few people can do well, and everybody else is left to scramble to get by.
The free market is the greatest generator of wealth in history. I’m a firm believer in the free market, and the capacity of Americans to start a business, pursue their dreams and strike it rich. But when you look at the history of how we became an economic superpower, that rugged individualism and private-sector dynamism was always coupled with government creating a platform so that everybody could succeed, so that consumers weren’t taken advantage of, so that the byproducts of capitalism, like pollution or worker injuries, were regulated. Creating that social safety net has not made us weaker – it’s made us stronger. It liberated people to say, “I can move to another state, but if I don’t find a job right away, my kids aren’t going to go hungry. I can start a business, but if it doesn’t work out, I’m going to be able to land on my feet.” Making those kinds of commitments to each other – to create safety nets, to invest in infrastructure and schools and basic research – is just like our collective investment in national security or fire departments or police. It has facilitated the kind of risk-taking that has made our economy so dynamic. This is what it means for us to live in a thriving, modern democracy.
One of the major arguments we’ll be having in this election season is a contrasting vision that says not just that government is part of the problem, but essentially that government is the entire problem. These guys, they don’t just want to roll back the New Deal – in some cases, they want to go back even further.
Do you read Paul Krugman?I read all of the New York Times columnists. Krugman’s obviously one of the smartest economic reporters out there, but I also read some of the conservative columnists, just to get a sense of where those arguments are going. There are a handful of blogs, Andrew Sullivan’s on the Daily Beast being an example, that combine thoughtful analysis with a sampling of lots of essays that are out there. The New Yorker and The Atlantic still do terrific work. Every once in a while, I sneak in a novel or a nonfiction book.
Doctor Who has been filming in New York City this week, including the Doctor running through Central Park (video above).
Karen Gillan got on Twitter last week. When I found about it two hours after she began on Thursday she already had over 27,000 followers and now has over 70,000. According to tweets by Arthur Darvill, Karen failed to adjust her email settings, burning out her phone battery with notifications of all the new followers. Today Karen tweeted a picture with Brent Spinner and below is a picture of her tweeting with Arthur Darvill looking on.
This week Awake failed to move further away from the police procedural as they did with last week’s penguins and other scenes questioning reality, but Ricky’s Taco’s did have its moment. While not as well done as last week’s That’s Not My Penguin, the voice at Ricky’s Tacos was more difficult to explain as Britten hadn’t been drugged before hearing them. Was this just something thrown into the story, is Britten going crazy and hearing things, or are there outside forces at work and communicating with him? The conspiracy which set up the accident has been disliked by fans writing about the show. I don’t mind if they have a subplot involving this, but not if it is just a random scene thrown into an episode as we’ve seen so far. It is interesting that Captain Harper tried to call off the hit on Britten after he resigned with plans to move away to Oregon.
The final episode of Titanic airs tonight, with ABC catching up the United States audience last night. While she did appear in the first two episodes, the third concentrates far more on Jenna-Louise Coleman’s character.
On Fringe, Family Man showed that, like our Walter, alt-Broyles was willing to go to great lengths to try to save his son. Before the change in the time lines his character was killed, and in the new time line he winds up in prison. At least he didn’t go through with the plot by David Robert Jones which might have collapsed both universes. I can’t help but wonder what Jones thinks would happen to him if he succeeded. Next week appears to be another Observer episode, this time in the future.
A sequel (or perhaps prequel) to Sin City is finally going ahead with casting now underway. Above are pictures of Jessica Alba and Alexis Bledel from the original.
Here is a trailer of a Loopers, an upcoming science fiction movie with an interesting premise:
In the futuristic action thriller Looper, time travel will be invented — but it will be illegal and only available on the black market. When the mob wants to get rid of someone, they will send their target 30 years into the past, where a looper — a hired gun, like Joe — is waiting to mop up. Joe is getting rich and life is good… until the day the mob decides to “close the loop,” sending back Joe’s future self for assassination.
It doesn’t have the potential for a time paradox like going back in time to kill your own self or grand parent–unless Joe’s future self responds to the situation by trying to kill the person trying to kill him (his past self). Could be good, unless it is simply a chase/action movie with a science fiction back story.
Natalie Dormer, who often appeared nude on The Tudors, joins the rampant nudity on Game of Thrones starting tonight. She has certainly demonstrated that she can handle such a role well. But why is there so much nudity on Game of Thrones? Check out this video for an explanation from Saturday Night Live. HBO announced last week that Game of Thrones has been renewed for a third season and I think it is safe to predict it will be around for several years considering the success of the show and the amount of material present in the book series.
Maggie Smith, the Dowager Countess on Downton Abbey, has requested to leave the show after the third season so she can return to movies and the stage. There had already been talk of a funeral for next season and assuming that was written before Smith’s request this might mean a second. Her death would be the most plausible way to write her out of the series.
Nichelle Nichols tweeted the above picture, which was taken in the Oval Office on February 29.
Some people would prefer to list, and perhaps interact with, enemies than friends. A new Facebook app, entitled EnemyGraph, allows them to do so. If Facebook was around in Richard Nixon’s day, he could have listed all his enemies but would have had no need for listing friends.
The most common enemies are well deserving of this list:
The ten most popular enemies among EnemyGraph users currently include Senator Rick Santorum, Justin Bieber, Westboro Baptist Church, Internet Explorer, Fox News, Farmville, Racism, the Twilight Series, Nickelback, and Rush Limbaugh.
Apparently their attacks on sex and women moved Santorum and Limbaugh high up on the list.
At the moment the app is down, needing to move to new servers due to higher than expected demand.
The BBC has released an official picture of Jenna-Louise Coleman standing in front of the TARDIS. See extensive coverage about the new companion to the Doctor here, here, and here.
Even before she appears on Doctor Who, beginning with this year’s Christmas Special, Jenna will be appearing in Dancing On The Edge, a five-part drama on BBC2. There are pictures from the show here, and below is the BBC’s press release describing the show:
Dancing On The Edge is an explosive new drama series for BBC Two set in the early 1930s following a black jazz band in London during times of extraordinary change.
Written and directed by award-winning filmmaker Stephen Poliakoff (The Lost Prince, Shooting The Past), the five-part series follows the Louis Lester Band as they find fame amongst the parties and performances of upper class society in the capital. Initially shocked by black musicians performing in polite society, many recoil, but London’s progressive socialites take the band under their wing.
When the band’s manager Wesley becomes too demanding to the hotel in which the band performs he is deported, forcing the rest to move on without him. The musicians play for the Prince of Wales who elevates their status to the heights of early pop fame. But they become entangled in the shadowy world of socialites, which results in the suspected murder of the band’s singer Jessie. The walls begin to close in on Louis and the other members until they realise that escape from England may be their only chance for safety.
Janice Hadlow, Controller, BBC Two, says: “Stephen Poliakoff is a great distinctive talent and I’m thrilled to have his first long-form drama on BBC Two. In Dancing On The Edge I think you will see a very different voice from Stephen and I am delighted to be able to add this remarkable piece to the new dramas on the channel in 2012.”
Ben Stephenson, Controller, BBC Drama Commissioning, says: “Following the huge success of The Shadow Line where every episode consolidated with over two million viewers, the channel will continue its commitment to original British drama in 2012. I am thrilled to welcome Stephen Poliakoff back to BBC Two with the first series ever he has both written and directed for television.”
Produced by Nicky Kentish Barnes (You Will Meet A Tall, Dark Stranger, About A Boy) and executive produced by Alison Owen (Case Histories, Toast), and Paul Trijbits (Toast, Five Minutes Of Heaven). Dancing on the Edge is a Ruby Film and Television production, commissioned by Ben Stephenson, BBC Controller of Drama Commissioning and Janice Hadlow, Controller BBC Two.
This is a five-part series with a 90-minute opening episode, expected to begin shooting in October 2011. The production is currently casting. Dancing On The Edge will join a raft of new drama series on BBC Two in 2012, including Paula Milne’s White Heat, Jed Mercurio’s Line Of Duty, Sir Tom Stoppard’s Parade’s End and Jane Campion’s Top Of The Lake, as well as a major new cycle of Shakespeare’s four most acclaimed historical works as part of a season based on the Bard’s life and works.
Naked Security found a scam in which links on Twitter which claimed to be to a sex-tape of Jenna turned out to be something different:
Human nature being what it is, you probably wouldn’t be that surprised if some sci-fi fans clicked on the links out of err.. curiousity.
However, the webpage you are taken to doesn’t have any content (pornographic or otherwise) related to the Time Lord’s latest sidekick. Instead, you’ll find what appears to be a portal for an Asian hardcore porn video website.
Clicking on the video thumbnails is definitely ill-advised. When I examined the page, I found that each of the videos were masking a secret Twitter follow button.
Unsuspecting site visitors are being tricked through a clickjacking exploit into unwittingly following a Twitter account.
Matt Smith has a message for those who would surf the internet looking for sex tapes of Jenna:
We already knew that right wingers were out of touch with reality based upon their views, but who knew they were so out of touch with reality that they had no idea that antagonizing a group making up over 50 percent of the population could backfire. From Radio-Info.com via Think Progress:
When it comes to advertisers avoiding controversial shows, it’s not just Rush From today’s TRI Newsletter: Premiere Networks is circulating a list of 98 advertisers who want to avoid “environments likely to stir negative sentiments.” The list includes carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm) and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway). As you’ll see in the note below, those “environments” go beyond the Rush Limbaugh show
“To all Traffic Managers: The information below applies to your Premiere Radio Networks commercial inventory...They’ve specifically asked that you schedule their commercials in dayparts or programs free of content that you know are deemed to be offensive or controversial (for example, Mark Levin, Rush Limbaugh, Tom Leykis, Michael Savage, Glenn Beck, Sean Hannity).’
This is an even dumber move than Rick Santorum losing Catholic votes by attacking John Kennedy and the First Amendment.
Think Progress notes the comparison to Glenn Beck:
The advertising flight is reminiscent of Glenn Beck’s Fox News program. After major companies refused to advertise on Beck’s show in light of racially insensitive comments, he was left with just fringe businesses like survival seed banks and gold sellers. Not long thereafter, he left Fox, reportedly under pressure.
John Avlon has more at The Daily Beast:
This is big. According to the radio-industry website Radio-Info.com, which first posted excerpts of the Premiere memo, among the 98 companies that have decided to no longer sponsor these programs are “carmakers (Ford, GM, Toyota), insurance companies (Allstate, Geico, Prudential, State Farm), and restaurants (McDonald’s, Subway).” Together, these talk-radio advertising staples represent millions of dollars in revenue.
Valerie Geller, an industry insider and author of Beyond Powerful Radio, confirmed the trend. “I have talked with several reps who report that they’re having conversations with their clients, who are asking not to be associated with specifically polarizing controversial hosts, particularly if those hosts are ‘mean-spirited.’ While most products and services offered on these shows have strong competitors, and enjoy purchasing the exposure that many of these shows and hosts can offer, they do not wish to be ‘tarred’ with the brush of anger, or endure customer anger, or, worse, product boycotts.”
There are already tangible signs that the three dozen national and local advertisers that have pulled their ads from The Rush Limbaugh Show are having a financial impact.
While many major businesses want nothing to do with Limbaugh or other right wing extremists, there are still people out there who defend people like Limbaugh. Despite all the awful things Rush Limbaugh has said and done, at least he has done one thing of value. Thanks to Rush it is now possible to determine within seconds whether a person is a scumbag by seeing if they are defending Limbaugh on their Facebook page.
