Shockingly, Republicans Have No Plans To Compromise
“Look, there will be no compromise on stopping runaway spending, deficits and debt. There will be no compromise on repealing Obamacare. There will be no compromise on stopping Democrats from growing government and raising taxes. And if I haven’t been clear enough yet, let me say again: No compromise.”
— House Republican Conference chair Mike Pence of Indiana shows his party understands that one of President Obama’s biggest mistakes was trying to transcend the partisan divide. They won’t be that foolish.
'Nipsey Russell,' A Novel
by Richard Yates
This is my book.
This is the book I am writing.
This is a book about me, Peter.
I am an ambivalent twentysomething who is nostalgic for my childhood and still grappling with what it means to be an adult in these times.
I spend a lot of time on gchat with my friends.
Here is a conversation:
I fucked this girl and I don’t know how I feel about it.
Dude was she hot?
I guess she was hot in the way that you think girls should be hot but then after you’re empty and you don’t know if hotness is enough.
Hotness is something though.
But what?
Well, whatever, give me her number.
I have weird feelings about rape, even though I think rape is wrong.
I’ll see you at the n+1 thing later, okay?
Okay.
That was me and my friend Hans Christian Andersen. He is dating a girl named Nick Denton, although they have a troubled relationship.
I am also dating a girl named Nick Denton, although she is no relation to my friend Hans Christian Andersen’s girlfriend Nick Denton. She is also not the pretty girl I spoke of earlier, who is named Zoe Lofgren. Nick Denton and I also have a troubled relationship, although our troubles are very different than those between Hans Christian Andersen and his Nick Denton. Still, in many ways they are the same.
I wonder a lot about modern life.
Imagine a gratuitous, dryly written sex scene here that does not really try very hard but makes a point of its lack of effort as some kind of definition of anomie and expressionlessness. Insert that here. In your mind.
Things will change for me, or they might not.
I don’t learn lessons, because that is not the way things happen.
My Nick Denton is a unicorn. This is not a metaphor. She is a horse with a horn in the center of her head. She also suffers from the disease of consumerism. Sometimes I shop for things without much reason as well, but I am not as diseased by consumerism as unicorn Nick Denton, my girlfriend. But maybe I am and just don’t know.
“There are things that happen and we think about them and feel them but they don’t really sink in,” says unicorn Nick Denton, my girlfriend. I think I know what she means.
This is my book. Thank you for reading it. My name was Peter. I had concerns. I probably still do. They may be in another book. My new girlfriend Warren Christopher is calling me now. We’re going to freebase Axe bodyspray and have boring sex. This is my book. Please do not comment on the frame of the narrative, although it is deliberately without affect. It would make me feel uncomfortable. I don’t want to feel uncomfortable.
My book is over. I think we are both a little changed and yet the same from it. This was my book.
The End
The End
The End End End End End
My book this was.
End, The.
End.
E
N
D
Britain's Navy Defeated By Rocks
Britain’s Channel 4 News reports: “There’s no getting away from the comedic value of the grounding of Britain’s supposedly most stealthy submarine. The HMS Astute is not living up to its name, stuck off the Isle of Skye waiting for high tide to refloat, hopefully while we’re on air tonight. If that doesn’t work it could take days. We don’t know what happened — did they misread the tide? Were they in a cloud of ‘morning after the night before’ the day after Trafalgar Day traditionally sees naval celebrations? An investigation will follow, possibly punishments. It couldn’t have come at a worse time of course — amid aircraft carrier controversy, massive military cutbacks and now submarine ridicule.”
Architectural Modernism as Evil in the Movies -- The Magazine!

“I don’t think that any iteration of modernism was ever intended to convey coldness, though it’s certainly been codified that way in various pop cultural vehicles, Hollywood movies among them. I suppose it’s funny, in the end, that even these happy, vibey California homes can somehow be retrofitted to house vice. And that the filmmakers would deem them appropriate containers for villainy in the first place is something I can’t help but smile at.”
— Benjamin Critton discusses his “tabloid treatise,” Evil People in Modern Homes in Popular Films, now on sale at Printed Matter. (via, via)
Now You Can Be A Social Media DB All Over The Galaxy
The future is now: “There’s a new first in the realm of outer space social media activity: a Foursquare checkin. Moments ago NASA astronaut Doug Wheelock checked in to the international space station, hence unlocking the ‘NASA Explorer Badge.’” Up next: Rex Sorgatz opens a burger joint on the moon.
NPR Should Have Let Juan Williams Go Years Ago
by Abe Sauer

Juan Williams had been warned. The move by NPR to terminate the contract of news analyst Williams has thrown the usual suspects into the expected histrionics of victimization. Karl Rove managed to keep a straight face when he went on Fox News and exclaimed “Shame on NPR” while actually wagging his finger. That Williams hasn’t been challenged to specify what he meant by “Muslim garb” is just another journalistic failing in a human centipede of journalistic failings around this story. Williams’ fear of Muslims (since overcome or not) as terrorists is not the problem; it’s that he thinks he can easily identify “Muslim garb.” (Anyway, as The LA Times’ Meghan Daum pointed out, “Personally, when I see Muslim garb on an airplane I feel LESS nervous. The 9/11 hijackers were wearing Dockers.”) Williams’ real problem is that he made these comments on Fox News. For those appearances alone, his contract should have lapsed years ago.
Williams seems to have sorely misunderstood his role at Fox News. Williams probably believes he was a contributor to real political discourse. More likely, Fox needed him to merely to show up and be African American, making doubly sure to identify himself as an NPR host (something NPR asked him to stop doing in 2009 after he went on O’Reilly and said Michelle Obama was “Stokely Carmichael in a designer dress”). Having an African American NPR host on Fox allowed the news leader to maintain lip-service to its “Fair and Balanced” branding. For another excellent example of how people get used, see gay former Clinton White House advisor Richard Socarides — now a Fox News contributor.
Displaying a weird lack of self-awareness, Williams complained to Bill O’Reilly, “I don’t fit in their box. I’m not a predictable, black liberal,” and then went on to call NPR’s management “vindictive.”
Juan needs only worry about fitting into one box now. Fox News immediately snatched up Williams, signing the star to a $2-million deal and freeing him to never again have to cleverly craft his bigotry ever again. I’m sure the Fox viewers are excited to hear Williams speak about his areas of expertise, such as the struggles faced by the Washington DC public schools and his history of America’s Civil Rights Years. Although, Williams’ Foxnews.com essay comparing his departure from NPR to “ being sent to the gulag” shows he might just have what it takes after all.
So as for his claim that NPR fired him because “I appear on Fox” — he’s right, or at least he should be. NPR, and any other news organizations that want to maintain their legacy as institutions of respectable journalism, should institute policies immediately that terminate the employment of any person under their umbrella that appears on Fox News. Fox only invites on guests that produce a veneer of impartiality. Without these sad dupes and willing accomplices, even Fox News would have a difficult time convincing its echo-chamber-partial viewers that they were watching real news.
Fox News itself has thrown (clean?) coal in the propaganda machine, accusing NPR of everything from the legitimate (Andrei Codrescu) to the absurd “National Palestine Radio.”
And now come the threats to terminate NPR’s government funding. NPR should respond by telling the blowhards to bring it on. Federal funding makes up about 2 percent of NPR’s budget. Even by the most extreme maximum estimates, including indirect sources, less than 10 percent of NPR’s annual budget is from the kind of federal funding its enemies like to say it depends on. Losing that (still-valuable) 10 percent might be worth finally being rid of the “publicly funded” albatross that has plagued the NPR brand.
It’s also possible that the anti-NPR activists are underestimating the number and devotion of NPR’s fans. Keep in mind, O’Reilly may pull just over 3 million viewers a show, but Prairie Home Companion bests that by a million. Even Wait Wait… Don’t Tell Me has as many listeners as Bill has viewers. Recently, O’Reilly’s audience surged to over 4 million following the hissy fit on “The View.” That’s a regular week for Car Talk, listened to and loved by 4.4 million. Even gratingly twee This American Life (1.7 million) pulls just about the same numbers as Fox News superstar Glenn Beck.
One of the leaders of a proposal taking away NPR’s federal allowance is Jim DeMint. DeMint, it seems, has proposed cutting a number of other things during his political tenure. The Republican Senator from South Carolina has proposed that openly gay Americans should be barred from teaching in public schools. DeMint has also proposed cutting teaching jobs for single mothers who live with men out of wedlock. Another proposed cut by DeMint? Access to adoption for gay couples. What a political legacy Mr. DeMint is constructing, opposing teachers, adoptive parents and The News from Lake Wobegon.
Air America and such “liberal” answers to right-wing radio and TV news have failed in part because that media outlet has always existed in NPR and its local public radio members. But the programming found there isn’t a “liberal” answer to right-wing outlets, it’s a intelligent and reasonable answer. It’s just that in the vacuum of sense represented by nearly every single other news source in modern America, that may seem “progressive.”
Abe Sauer listens to the radio and watches TV.
From Bikes To Buses
Britain’s Conservative party really has modernized! Twenty years ago they were telling the unemployed to get on their bikes to look for work. These days they suggest taking the bus. Progress!
This November, Vote Against The Chinese Takeover Of America
Wow, it looks like they actually went through with the remake of Red Dawn after all! Um, anyway… even in the context of China as the villain of the political season, this “slickly-produced new ad from Citizens Against Government Waste” leaves me speechless. And kind of angry. I just… well, I’ll repeat myself: Wow.
Governor Chomps Down On President
New Jersey governor Chris Christie, who has become his party’s great big hope since his election last November, sat around yesterday to chew the fat with Brian Williams. Christie — whose popularity seems to swell every time he blusters at a public servant — or anyone really; there’s no head Christie is afraid to bite off — is enormously displeased with President Obama and the menu of choices he has made since taking office. While taking care to pass around a plateful of blame, Christie really sticks a fork into the President, saying that as the big cheese it is his job to make sure everyone gathers around the table.
Christie also takes issue with Obama’s current rhetoric, making the rotund declaration that, “And now, he seems kind of angry about things when I see him out on the campaign trail. And I don’t think that President Obama does angry well. I don’t think that suits him well…”
Well, let’s just deal with the elephant in the room here: Chris Christie, a surprisingly unjolly man, is America’s most acrimonious politician. We’ve all seen the gargantuan tirades he unleashes at press conferences and town hall meetings. At times he seems devoured by anger, bellowing forth an oversize portion of rage which somehow seems to feed on itself. The man gorges on bitterness. So when this connoisseur of bile delivers his stout opinion that you aren’t good at being angry, you certainly need to take it under advisement. If Christie is dishing up this heaving helping of advice, the Administration needs to choke it down, no matter how bitter it tastes. Because, after all, who knows better? Also, how does that chair he’s sitting on not collapse?