While exploring a new (to me) social media site, Tapiture, I ran across this video, which tells some home truths about what may have been the most overhyped film of the past decade.
There are other movies that get the “honest” treatment by the same outfit, but none deserved it so much as “Avatar.”
Probably everybody else out there saw this last year, but since I’m not much of one to follow sports, I missed it.
The way I ran across it was… bizarre. Trying to do research for this previous post, I was watching this excruciatingly boring video, and when it was done, YouTube took pity on me and suggested the Michelle Jenneke clip.
At first, I thought it was just a music video. Then, I realized that it was actual footage of an actual athlete warming up.
It really made me smile. And I don’t mean in a dirty old man way. After all, this girl is younger than any of my daughters.
No, I shared it with my wife, and she saw it, too. What an amazing endorsement of life.
The only bad feeling it engenders is envy. Look at her. What would it be like to feel that good, that young, that fit, that strong, that ready — even for a moment? I don’t think I ever felt like that, including when I was her age.
But setting the envy aside, she’s inspiring. Makes you want to embrace life. I may actually get on my elliptical trainer (which sits, neglected, a few feet away as I type this) before the day is out, and see it I can get enough endorphins flowing to feel one fraction of the way she seems to feel in that video.
But I’m not going to try to warm up like that first. I would probably hurt myself. Besides, it wouldn’t look as good on me…
Actually, I don’t think I shared their previous ad with you. Here it is. It was also pretty hard-hitting, reminding us of things that GOP voters in the 1st District seem to have forgotten.
South Forward is a PAC dedicated to electing Democrats in the South…
OK, so now, supposedly, what Sanford said on TV this morning was a joke:
CHARLESTON, SC — Remember those pigs former Gov. Mark Sanford brought into the State House nine years ago to protest “pork barrel spending” in the state budget?
Appearing on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” Wednesday morning, fresh off of his victory in Tuesday’s Republican primary in the 1st congressional district, Sanford said the pigs were “barbecued.”
“Unfortunately, they were barbecued,” Sanford said. “They were great little guys.”
A Sanford spokesman later clarified that Sanford was joking, adding that Sanford did not eat the pigs. (An earlier version of this story said that Sanford did eat them.)
And an earlier version of this blog post said the same, because, well, silly me, I figured the ex-governor was telling the truth to the world. This belief prompted me to say the following:
So… The piglets were supposed to symbolize government waste. Do they no longer qualify as “waste” if you make a meal out of them?
Presumably, he changed clothes — since the pigs had daubed him with literal waste — before firing up the grill.
Twice now, Mark Sanford has huffed and puffed and blown the house down, eating the thoughtless little pigs within.
It remains to be seen whether Elizabeth Colbert Busch can build a house out of bricks before he does it a third time.
I was on a roll there for a minute. But now… well, never mind. I especially like Joel’s attempt to be all self-righteous over this:
“The governor made a joke that apparently was lost on members of the media, who seem unable or unwilling to write about issues that voters actually care about,” Joel Sawyer said.
Yeah, right, Joel. It’s the media who have a penchant for silly, distracting stunts. He says this on behalf of a man who, in the name of fiscal responsibility, hauled two squealing, defecating piglets into the lobby to ruin a new carpet (OK, sort of new — see below) that was part of a multi-million-dollar restoration of the State House.
HuffPost has been talking to the bartender who shot the infamous “47 percent” footage that did so much to undermine Mitt Romney last year.
Here’s what he said about how it happened:
The man, who tended bar for a company that catered to a high-end clientele, had previously worked at a fundraiser at a home where [Bill] Clinton spoke. After Clinton addressed guests, the man recalled, the former president came back to the kitchen and thanked the staff, the waiters, the bartenders, the busboys, and everyone else involved in putting the event together. He shook hands, took photos, signed autographs, and praised the meal—all characteristic of the former president.
When the bartender learned he would be working at Romney’s fundraiser, his first thought was to bring his camera, in case he had a chance to get a photo with the presidential candidate. Romney, of course, did not speak to any of the staff, bussers or waiters. He was late to the event, and rushed out. He told his dinner guests that the event was off the record, but never bothered to repeat the admonition to the people working there.
One of them had brought along a Canon camera. He set it on the bar and hit the record button.
The bartender said he never planned to distribute the video. But after Romney spoke, the man said he felt he had no choice.
“I felt it was a civic duty. I couldn’t sleep after I watched it,” he said. “I felt like I had a duty to expose it.”
As Huffington suggests, Obama owes Clinton on this one…
Looked at from this distance, the contest for the 1st Congressional District GOP nomination has looked like a case of Sanford sitting atop the name-recognition hill, and Larry Grooms exerting the most energy trying to take it from him.
A third candidate I keep hearing from (and let me remind you that my perspective is skewed by the fact that I keep hearing from this guy and Grooms; others could be running just as hard but not making the effort to let me know about it) is Jonathan Hoffman.
No, I hadn’t heard of him, either, so of course he’s running a standard “I’m not a politician” campaign. To the extent that is appealing, he certainly has an advantage over Sanford and Grooms.
But this new TV ad tells me next to nothing. It shows him in uniform, and I thank him for his service. It shows him with the last Republican president. He uses the word “conservative” only once in 30 seconds, which by Republican primary standards shows extraordinary restraint. Of course, he uses other phrases that suggest such values to the base, such as “small business owner.”
And he makes the usual dubious claims that Republicans in SC tend to believe as gospel, such as:
Mind you, I’m not being critical of Mr. Hoffman. He’s not doing a thing that pols of both parties don’t do in this ridiculously facile medium, the 30-second ad. It would be practically impossible for him to answer the questions he raises in my mind within that format.
But these ads aren’t meant to answer questions. They are meant to communicate, in the most minimalist, Gestalten flicker, a set of emotions along the lines of “he’s like me,” or “I trust that man.” So they deal not in facts, but in presumptions, ones that are shared, even if they fly in the face of reality.
Grooms’ ads are the same. Sanford’s go a bit farther, because so much is known about him, and some of what is known is problematic and has to be addressed. But it is of course addressed in the most emotional, simplistic kind of way, merely communicating, “You must not hold it against him.” Why? Because “I trust that man, despite all.”
But it is on these extremely thin, grossly inadequate bases that we decide elections in this country.
From where I sit, up here in Columbia (admittedly not the best vantage point), the person who seems to be running the hardest to catch Mark Sanford in the 1st Congressional District GOP primary is state Sen. Larry Grooms.
A day doesn’t pass that Hogan Gidley — last seen in these parts acting as spokesman for Rick Santorum — doesn’t send me a release or two on his behalf. Several in recent days have boasted about Tea Party congressmen Mick Mulvaney and Jeff Duncan endorsing him.
And this is the second TV ad for Grooms I’ve seen. Here’s the first.
Of course, it doesn’t really say anything to distinguish Grooms from anyone else (typical line from the ad: “I’m a pro-life Christian conservative who knows DC spends too much”), but when’s the last time you saw originality in one of these things?
To hundreds of millions of Americans, today is the day after Super Sunday. To me, it’s Monday. (Hey, if I were a football fan I’d use those Roman numbers instead of “2013” in my headline.)
Still, I took some time this morning to look at the ads from the big event last night for the ADCO blog, and following are the ones I put in my Top Ten. (“Top Ten” may not sound very selective, until you reflect that there were 47 of them. Really.)
Here were my admittedly simplistic, off-the-top-of-my-head criteria:
Anyway, here’s my list:
My favorite celebrity Twitter follower, Adam Baldwin, brings my attention to the above video, which is an answer to the below video, in which various Hollywood types demand a plan for ending gun violence.
Ouch. As a demonstration of just how pervasive gun violence is in our popular culture, the answering video packs a lot of punch…
Here’s something you don’t see every day:
Gov. Chris Christie of New Jersey took an unscheduled break from partisan attacks on the President Obama on Tuesday to praise him, repeatedly and effusively, for leading the federal government’s response to the storm.
“Wonderful,” “excellent” and “outstanding” were among the adjectives Mr. Christie chose, a change-up from his remarks last week that Mr. Obama was “blindly walking around the White House looking for a clue.”
Some of Mr. Christie’s Republican brethren have already begun grumbling about his gusher of praise at such a crucial time in the election.
But the governor seemed unconcerned. When Fox News asked him about the possibility that Mitt Romney might take a disaster tour of New Jersey, Mr. Christie replied:
I have no idea, nor am I the least bit concerned or interested. I have a job to do in New Jersey that is much bigger than presidential politics. If you think right now I give a damn about presidential politics, then you don’t know me.
A governor who cares more about serving his (or her) state more than national partisan politics? Imagine that. If you live in South Carolina, you might find that difficult, but try…
Just thought I’d share this new ad Clint Eastwood did for the American Crossroads Super PAC.
He says, among other things:
Obama’s second term would be a rerun of the first, and our country just couldn’t survive that.
Really, Clint? Couldn’t survive it?
I think he has a greater sense of perspective and proportion in his movies. (Particularly “Gran Torino,” which is awesome.)
Anyway, if you want to see the PRO-Obama the Hollywood legend did not so long ago, I include that below…
Samuel Tenenbaum shared this with me today, and I share it with you. It’s quite short, and worthwhile.
Speaking of words, I need to warn you of the use of offensive language in this video. Which, like the one I posted earlier, I cannot embed. (All together now: I. Hate. Facebook.)
But since all sorts of strong opinions are being expressed back and forth on the violence in Five Points, I thought I’d share this one, which is… very passionate, to say the least.
I’d not agreeing with this guy, and I’m not disagreeing with him. I just thought this was one of the most interesting comments I’d heard so far. I like it because it’s idiosyncratic. It doesn’t fit into any boxes, at all. Just a man with a very strong opinion.
I apologize again, in advance, for his language, which is of a sort that I don’t normally allow here. But I thought I’d point you to a part of the dialogue you might have missed…
This would be a good moment to remember the thing about partisan politics stopping at the water’s edge.
I got a release from Lindsey Graham last night — I’m just now getting to it in my email — that quoted the senator as saying the following:
South Carolina Sen. Lindsey Graham, a leading Republican voice on foreign policy, launched a sharp attack against the Obama administration on Wednesday, saying the president’s lack of leadership would “lead to an explosion in the Middle East.” … The American disengagement, lack of leadership, and leading from behind is leading to uncertainty and doubt on all fronts. … There is no substitute for leadership by the United States and every group within the region is uncertain about who we are and what we believe.”
The thing is, when I watched the accompanying video, for the first few minutes I didn’t hear that sort of tone. Instead, the senator said the sorts of things I would expect a politician who cares about foreign policy to say. He talked about how this should not be allowed to weaken our strong ties to the new democratic leadership of Libya. He stressed that the attack — whether calculated or spontaneous — was the work of a tiny minority who do not reflect our relationship with that country.
He even expressed agreement with what Secretary of State Clinton had to say. And I like that, even though part of it may be the longtime mutual admiration society that Hillary and Lindsey have going.
Then, toward the end, he launched into the GOP talking points about the administration’s alleged failures. About the only thing I might agree with him on is that I wish we were acting more effectively to keep Assad from killing his own people in Syria.
But in his eagerness to criticize, the senator implied, if he did not exactly say, two things he should know are not true:
Given his respectful ties to some of the key people in the administration’s national security team, and the many areas of agreement he has with them, I would think Senator Graham would be hesitant to throw out the people he knows in favor of the uncertainties Romney would bring.
But that’s me engaging in wishful thinking, I guess. Just because Sen. Graham is occasionally an iconoclast, I like to tell myself he can be that all the time. Obviously, I’m not in charge of his re-election in two years…
Not only is Barack Obama enjoying a post-convention bounce, not only has he outstripped Mitt Romney in fund-raising for the first time in four months, he actually got a physical lift while visiting a pizza parlor in Florida.
No word on where the Secret Service was during this, but I suspect the president’s detail spent the next hour breathing through paper bags, trying to calm down…
Here’s one of those videos that proves that your memory is spot on — back in the day, everybody was really, really young.
You will see a 25-year-old Paul Ryan, early in his career as a, well, career politician, appearing on C-SPAN as legislative aide to then-Rep. Sam Brownback.
This is the sort of programming that people are talking about when they make fun of C-SPAN. If the date had been a decade or so earlier, I would have sworn all three of these kids — Ryan, the Democrat, and the moderator — were on Quaaludes. It’s like a contest to see which one can make the other two fall asleep first.
Of course, this is probably as excited as young Paul Ryan ever got, since the topics were the budget, Medicare and Medicaid. It’s… eerie to see him and these other two kids, dressed up like Daddy and looking and sounding every bit like participants in student government. I keep expecting the next topic to be the frat that’s on double-secret probation. Except that it never gets that interesting.
My favorite parts? When Master Ryan predicts Medicare will be “bankrupt” by 2001, and when he mentions a news story by “Knight Ridder,” which still existed then.
Enjoyed this blog post by Alexandra Petri over at the WashPost:
On Fox News, commenting on Joe Biden’s Danville “Put Y’all Back in Chains” gaffe, Sarah Palin observed: “If that’s not the nail in the coffin, really, the strategists there in the Obama campaign have got to look at a diplomatic way of replacing Joe Biden on the ticket with Hillary.”
It is seldom that you get such good quotes from the pot about the color of the kettle.
Then again, you know you’ve made a gaffe when Sarah Palin is suggesting you might have chosen your words more judiciously. That’s like Charlie Sheen suggesting you might have a substance problem.
But perhaps we should cut her some slack. Vice presidential candidates whose comments prompt everyone in the vicinity to wince uncontrollably for several minutes is a subject no one knows better than Palin. Maybe she and Biden were better matched than we thought.
After the selection of Paul Ryan to fill the VP slot on the ticket (prompting such exciting merchandise as this button!), it is hard not to think back to August 2008, when everyone was cheering Palin as a game-changer. And she was a game-changer, in the sense that Godzilla is a city-changer. Say what you will about Paul Ryan and the potential risks of having to engage in a Serious Mature Debate of his policies, everyone admits one thing about him: He’s no Sarah Palin. If anyone sets off the trademark “Mayday! Mayday! The Veep’s Saying Something” alarm this year, it’s Biden.
And yep, she oughta know. Onion Joe!
Screenshot from my 7th Pub Politics appearance, in October 2011, with Phil (left) and Joel (right).
Just got this Tweet from Pub Politics:
@BradWarthen any questions for @joeldavidsawyer or Phil Bailey for tonights #E122QA? Let them shower you with knowledge and wisdom.
Nothing comes to mind immediately, but I thought I’d check with y’all.
As you probably know, @joeldavidsawyer is the former Mark Sanford press secretary (post-Will Folks) who helped run the SC campaign of Jon Huntsman before going to work as a consultant with Wesley Donehue, for whom he sometimes subs on Pub Politics.
Phil Bailey, of course, is the other regular co-host, who also works for the SC Senate Democrats. He is no longer known by his Twitter handle because of, you know, the “Sikh Jesus” thing.
So… any questions?
Kathryn Fenner shares this ABCColumbia clip, in which her husband was quoted as an expert on what to do about the computer virus that caused yesterday’s stir.
I was particularly struck by the dramatic, under-the-coffee table shot of Dr. Stephen sitting on the sofa with his laptop.
Good thing the Fenners keep the underside of that table as neat and tidy as the rest of their home. I didn’t see any chewed gum stuck under there, or anything like that…
An old friend sent me the above video. When I got home last night, I asked my wife to watch it without telling her why. She looked at it only a second before saying “Michael!”
Yep. The guy playing the “English teacher” at the beginning is Michael Mercer. Michael and I started out as copy editors together at The Jackson (TN) Sun in 1975, soon after I graduated from Memphis State. Michael got out of the business long before I did, taking a teaching gig at Auburn. Now he’s at another college in San Antonio, as he explained when I asked about the video:
The young lady featured in the film is one of my student-advisees at the University of the Incarnate Word in San Antonio. She’s a communication arts major concentrating in journalism — although broadcast like most of them do today. She asked me at the last minute to be in the video that she and the filmmaker — her boyfriend from another school in San Antonio — were doing for a video contest promoting San Antonio park recreation.
They didn’t win the contest but I thought they, too, did an excellent job. I was only familiar with the classroom scene where they asked me to mouth a few words as an “English teacher.” Those other students in the video in the classroom are UIW students but not any of mine. We spent about an hour shooting various takes, angles, short bites. I was told it would only take about five minutes. Then a week later, my student asked me to wear the same shirt and pants for a scene they wanted to shoot minus the class in that same classroom showing me walking out the door after that “chill” comment.
No, most of my South Carolina readers won’t know Michael, but some of our former colleagues will see this, which is why I share it here. The fact that I can do so so easily — the fact that a student could even produce something like this — is testament to how the world has changed since Michael and I started out.
In those days, the copy desk was still a big horseshoe (or “elephant’s commode,” as one of my Tennessee colleagues referred to it), with the slot man (or woman) sitting in the center, distributing copy to those on the rim who would edit it and write headlines as assigned by the slot. The copy and headlines would then be passed back to the slot for checking before being sent to the composing room. Except that the editing wasn’t done on paper at this point. The text had been scanned and output onto a paper punchtape, which was clipped to the hard copy with a clothespin (without clothespins, we couldn’t have gotten the paper out). After an editor received the copy with attached tape from the slot, he or she would take it over to a Harris 1100 editing machine, and feed the punch tape into it. The copy would appear on a CRT screen, and the editor would use a keyboard to edit it. When done, the edited text would be output to another punch tape of a different color, which the editor would roll up the tape (using a little electrical device that was sort of like one of those handheld, flashlight-sized fans) and clip it back to the copy. That bundle is what the editor would pass back to the slot, along with a headline written in pencil on a hand-torn strip of paper.
A couple of months after I joined The Sun, I was pulling shifts in the slot, and I found I liked it so much that by the time I moved on from the desk, I was doing it most days. The job entailed what would have been three to five jobs at a paper the size of The State in those days. The slot not only supervised the editing process, but laid out the entire A section, monitored the wires and selected all wire copy, and oversaw the production process in the composing room. If a page was late, it was the slot’s fault. And in those days, things were so loose and informal at The Sun that an assertive slot (which, I confess, I was) could pretty much decide how all of the news in the paper was played, including local copy.
The day started at 5:30 a.m., and the whole first edition (which was more pages than you find today in The State) had to be out at 11. Then we’d grab a quick lunch before having the city edition out by 1:30.
Doing that job at the age of 22 gave me a lot of confidence that stood me in good stead in the years to come. And it gave me a taste for calling the shots. Which is why after that gig, I only spent a couple of years as a reporter before becoming a supervising editor. You can learn a lot by starting out in a small pond.
Michael followed a similar path, without being quite as power-mad as I was (you can probably tell in his brief appearance that Michael is a nicer guy than I am — which I’m betting is why he was cast in this film; I’m sure he’s the sort of teacher who might be students’ favorite). He was one of my assistant editors over the news reporters at The Sun in later years.
And now there he is, playing the “English teacher.”