Category Archives: Video

People used to live their lives. Now they shoot video of other people shooting video of them…

I found this video of editor Colin Myler’s last address to News of the World staffers interesting — not so much for anything he said (the sound’s not great) — but for what it shows of what we’ve come to culturally in this century.

Nobody just goes ahead and experiences anything any more. They’re too busy shooting video and photos of it. Everybody is doing it — the central figures in the event, and the onlookers. The event itself is delayed while pictures are taken.

It’s pretty weird. Nobody looks at anybody, because they’re all looking at their viewfinders. It’s like the thing isn’t really happening. And when you go back and look at the video you shot, all you’re going to have is video of a bunch of people shooting video.

It’s beyond weird.

It wasn’t like this in the first century and a half of photography. Used to be there’d be a few people taking pictures, and everybody else experiencing the thing. Cell phones did this. Everybody always has a camera on hand now, so every moment has to be captured. Even when the fact that everybody is doing so sort of ruins the visual effect.

This struck me really powerfully last year when the Gamecocks won their first national baseball championship. During the parade, all of the players — or quite a few of them — were busy shooting video of the parade, rather than simply experiencing the moment.

It makes me wonder whether, in the future, anything of moment will ever just happen without all of this looking into a mirror image of a mirror image of a mirror image, etc.

Nikki Haley was at Rotary today, too

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OK, so Lee Bandy wasn’t the only person visiting Columbia Rotary today. He was just the one I enjoyed seeing the most. Nikki Haley made her first appearance at the club since back during the election.

As I said on Twitter, she gave a good speech, centered around her usual themes. She just gets smoother and stronger at that all the time. Guess I was wrong when I said she peaked that day with Sarah Palin; she has continued to maintain her speaking skills at a high level. So I guess it’s more accurate to say she reached a plateau on May 14, 2010. Either that, or this is another peak. If so, I’m not sure what put her in her Zone.

Certainly not audience reaction. The Rotarians applauded a couple of times — the biggest response was when she was sticking up for Boeing. But it was polite, not what anyone would call enthusiastic.

Speaking of polite, I thought you’d enjoy the above clip when our own Kathryn Fenner — who had publicly expressed uneasiness ahead of time about whether she would behave herself — challenged Nikki in a deeply respectful manner. Did it better than I would have. Whenever I’m confronted with any of Nikki’s bumper-sticker platitudes, which she pronounces with such deep conviction, I tend to go into pompous lecturing mode, as I did on this occasion (dang it; I can’t find a link to that video…) in response to her umpteenth repetition in my presence that the wanted to “run government like a business.”

What Kathryn responded to is, like the government-as-business thing (which tends to be spoken with the greatest enthusiasm by people who understand neither business nor government), a favorite of politicians of the libertarian-populist variety. It always goes something like, When families have a windfall, they save it rather than spending it. Which, of course, is nonsense. In hard times, families are more likely to spend a windfall on the necessities they’ve been deferring, such as that new roof on the house, or warm winter coats for the kids. Ditto with the related nostrum, When families fall on hard times, they tighten their belts. Yeah, of course they do — and at the same time they search frantically for ways to bring more revenue into the house. But people too seldom challenge these facile sayings, so it was good that Kathryn did so, and so very politely.

The speech itself, while well delivered, didn’t have anything in it that I found both new and interesting. I’ll be interested to see what the working media who were there lead with. I saw that Yvonne Wenger of The Post and Courier Tweeted this: “Haley unveils preliminary details on faith-based, community-based Neighbors Helping Neighbors program to get state engaged in meeting needs.” But there weren’t many such details. And that’s kind of a yawner. Republicans, even more mainstream Republicans than Nikki, are constantly trying to show they care by calling on churches to do what they don’t want government to do. You know, like maybe the churches aren’t actually trying now, and need the governor to tell them how.

Anyway, that was just in passing, in response to a question. Her main thrust was pretty much standard boilerplate, talking about what she saw as the main accomplishments of her first months in office — roll call voting, other stuff you’ve read about before.

It was interesting to see the rather substantial media contingent at the meeting — one of the larger such turnouts I’ve seen at South Carolina’s largest Rotary club. Their presence seemed to indicate they saw this as a bit of an event. I suppose the governor doesn’t get out much and speak to large groups here in the Midlands — I don’t know; I’ve never thought much about it. I know she talks to the media less than predecessors, which is probably why the press and broadcast types were dutifully lined up at the door waiting to catch her on her way out. (You’ll note on the video that she sort of promises to take questions from them later. I suppose she did. My ride left before that.)

I did have one small moment of epiphany during the Q and A, something that perhaps shed a light on why I don’t see things her way more often: “I’m a reality TV nut,” she said. Suddenly, a lot of stuff fell into place for me…

Seriously, though, I look forward to seeing what the reporters who were there get out of it.

Video: IED exercise at Fort Jackson (WARNING — lots of simulated blood)

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I mentioned this the other day in my post about the Fort Jackson tour. I shot a lot of video that day — and if I could figure out how to edit iPhone video (when I call it up in my PC-based editing software, the sound drops out), I’d give you a video overview of the tour.

Instead, here is one unedited scene from the tour (I can upload a complete clip directly to YouTube; I just can’t edit it). It’s the most dramatic.

We were warned before we went in that we would see a lot of fake blood — particularly flowing from the sophisticated mannequin. There were two real soldiers in there with fake wounds, and you’ll hear them moaning over the recorded sounds of battle. But the mannequin had the most horrific wounds — both legs missing. The mannequin moves as well as bleeding. We were also told not to be surprised that it was “anatomically correct,” and was wounded in that area, too. There were ladies in our group. Of course, there were ladies among the soldiers going through the exercise, as well.

The scenario was that three soldiers’ humvee had just hit an IED. The mission of the recruits was to secure the site, treat the wounded, and prepare them for evacuation. One of the main challenges was to stop the mannequin’s profuse bleeding with tourniquets.

The trainees had learned about such situations in the classroom, but this was their first hands-on simulation of this kind, with all the sights and sounds. One of the recruits was appointed to be squad leader, and they were thrown into this under the watchful eyes of instructors. You will see four soldiers assume defensive positions with their rifles (the challenge for them was to keep their eyes looking outward, since they were staring at blank walls) while the rest of the squad deals with the wounded. I assume the soldier you see moving about among the group checking on everything was the squad leader.

One thing you can’t see — it was pretty hot in there. We were indoors, but there was no air-conditioning. A little added stress for the exercise.

And yeah, we were standing right on top of them. The room wasn’t very big. We just tried not to get in the way.

“The Brad Show:” SC GOP Chairman Chad Connelly

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Welcome to another guerrilla edition (as in, shot by me out in the field rather than the studio) of “The Brad Show.”

Our guest today: Chad Connelly, the new chairman of the South Carolina Republican Party.

I spoke with Chad over at the party HQ this morning. Since this was my first sit-down with him, I wanted to cover the bases — ask him to talk a bit about his background, etc. So we did.

But the hot topic — and if you can’t wait to get to it, it starts at 4:15 on the clip — was Gov. Nikki Haley’s threatened veto of funding for the SC GOP presidential primary in January.

Some highlights of that discussion:

He said there will be a presidential primary here, “no matter what.”
He said presidential primaries are so important that next time the Democrats have one, he’d be the first to support their bid for similar funding.
Total cost is a million dollars. Or maybe 1.5 million.
He expects to speak with the governor about it, and try to impress upon her the importance of the funding, this week. He’ll also be talking with legislative leaders.
Can General Assembly override a veto? “Yes,” he said.

Enjoy the show. This one is actually a bit shorter than most, which I hope you will appreciate. I asked about as many question as usual, but Mr. Connelly is a very focused speaker, which I guess adds up since that is his profession. It’s not that his answers were so short. It’s just that he said what he had to say to answer me, and stopped. Not many people do that.

Why can’t we let her stay over there? No, really; what would be wrong with that?

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Notice how all of my posts the last couple of days are either about Dick Harpootlian or Jon Huntsman? What’s up with that?

Anyway, right when I got back from the Huntsman thing, Dick sends out this video. He’s big on videos. Well, he missed the mark on this one.

It makes two dubious points — the rather painfully populist one about how YOU, the taxpayer, paid for Nikki’s trip to Paris, and his point that the gov should come back and tend to South Carolina business, or as he put it, “the people of South Carolina would rather her worry more about the unemployment rate and the education sector in our state.”

Here are my thoughts on those, in reverse order:

You really think that if she were here, she’d be doing anything for our schools? Anything at all?
She is far more likely to stumble on something of economic use to our state, something to create jobs in SC, over there than she is here. I can far better see her charming some air industry exec who doesn’t know her very well (she makes a great first impression) than I can see her pursuing policies back here that boost our prosperity. After all, the one thing Mark Sanford accomplished in that sphere in 8 years was landing Boeing, and he did that, at least in part, by going to the air show.

The Perpetual Adoration of the Dysfunctional

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I’m at Barnes & Noble, engaged in my favorite leisure activity of getting a cup of coffee and wandering among the books and maybe blogging a bit. And moments ago I got a text from my wife. She is out of town, has been for several days. She’s somewhere in the Ozarks having a reunion with her high school friends from St. Agnes Academy in Memphis (37 in the graduating class, all girls). Here’s what she texted:

Who directed & starred in easy rider & supported andy warhol?

This is my function in the world. Perhaps it is why she married me. Anyway, I quickly responded, “Dennis Hopper. Why?” That was an easy one. We just saw him in that Warhol thing last week.

It was at Spoleto. There was this show that was very, um, Warhol. It was called, “13 Most Beautiful…Songs for Andy Warhol’s Screen Tests.” We went with my artist daughter and a friend of hers. It was enjoyable, even artistically impressive. But if you thought about it too much, it was disturbing. And I tend to do that. That’s the other thing I do. I keep trivia in my head, and I think about stuff until I ruin it.

Warhol did these things he called “screen tests” in which he had various people in his orbit sit in front of a camera loaded with a short piece of film — I want to say about 100 feet; in any case, it would last exactly four minutes. In this way, the artist fulfilled his own prophecy to a certain extent — immortalizing these people for at least four minutes of their allotted 15. He shot people he thought were beautiful in one way or another. Some were quite conventionally beautiful the way I would use the word, such as this one (who bizarrely kept her eyes open the whole time, causing tears to flow). But all were interesting.

You had Dennis Hopper doing his thing. Jane Holzer brushing her teeth. Lou Reed drinking a Coke. Edie Sedgwick being big-eyed and lovely. The live, original music performed on the stage below the screen was very engaging. The hall was pretty full, and the crowd seemed engrossed. On the row in front of me I thought I recognized Allison Skipper from the Ports Authority. And sure enough, after we exchanged Tweets about it, she was to share this account with me:

13 MOST BEAUTIFUL…SONGS FOR ANDY WARHOL’S SCREEN TESTS

Call Andy Warhol what you will – genius, whack job, or some combination of the two – the man certainly had an eye for pretty people.

In 13 Most Beautiful, indie rock/pop musicians Dean Wareham and Britta Phillips pair hypnotic musical compositions against a backdrop of black and white projections of some of Warhol’s famous (or infamous) screen subjects. The footage itself is grainy and subjects range from the familiar (Lou Reed, Edie Sedgwick, Dennis Hopper, Nico) to the obscure. You can imagine Warhol himself off-screen, directing the subject to spontaneously cry, drink a Coca-Cola, look melancholy, or choreographing a slow curl of cigarette smoke or light reflected from the lens of sunglasses. Wareham and Phillips give an understated performance, demonstrating a conscious effort to take a backseat to the screen stars. The music serves to connect the audience with the subjects, in doing so achieving what they wanted all along. We love them, we adore them, we are fascinated by them. They are all famous, for at least 13 songs.

Our arty barometer says: It’s Warhol. It’s weird. Embrace it – with or without some mind-altering substance.

While the screen is dark for the show’s run at Spoleto, a recorded version is available to Watch Instantly on Netflix. Happy viewing.

–Allison Skipper

I pretty much agree with that. But at first, I didn’t think I would be able to sit through it. The very first “test” consisted of the totally impassive, androgynous Richard Rheem doing nothing but staring at the camera for the full four minutes. The band had not yet come out, so I didn’t have them to watch (of course, when they did come out, the stage was dark enough that all you could see really clearly was the whiteness of Britta Phillips’ shapely legs below her very short black dress as she played guitar and sang, but that was quite enough to make up for anything lacking on the screen), and this period was extremely tedious.

But it got better. Lots better. We weren’t bored again. And the experience was greatly enhanced by Dean Wareham’s narration, telling us a bit about the subject we were to see or had just seen.

And we watched, and were fascinated, as master showman Warhol had intended us to be.

But as for the disturbing part… well, look no further than “Ingrid Superstar’s” obsessive fingering of her face (and giving us the finger, but we don’t mind, the poor girl) throughout the four minutes, in which we see her with her hair cut to look like Edie Sedgwick. Right after we were told she was a junkie. And a sometime prostitute and temp (I liked the way he added “temp” anticlimactically). She was to go out for cigarettes years later and not come back — presumed dead, but her body never found. Her dysfunction is on display on the screen, we stare at it almost as unblinking as Ann Sheridan. Her being so obviously f___ed up is a source of entertainment for us, or of aesthetic edification if we choose to dignify it that way.

Then there was the guy who that same summer, deep in his own problems, was taking a bath at a friend’s house when he heard his favorite piece of music playing in the next room, upon which he leapt from the bath, ran into the room and danced about naked to the music, then jumped out a window to his death.

And here we were, staring at him making self-conscious faces for the camera. And I thought about this. Eventually, I was struck that what we were doing, sitting there so patiently, was a form of worship. Modern-day secular worship of celebrity, of hipness, of the various forms physical beauty can take, and of tragedy and dysfunction. I got to thinking of the Catholic practice of Perpetual Adoration of the Blessed Sacrament. This is a practice I’ve never been able to get into — not that I’ve ever tried. As a post Vatican II convert, it is alien to me, and smacks of idolatry. I recently heard that Pope Benedict wants it to make a comeback, which does not surprise me. But hey, I didn’t vote for him.

But while Perpetual Adoration to me seems strange and even vaguely wrong, here we were staring, for a period lasting longer than a Mass, at all these seriously messed up, self-involved people. And I found it fascinating, even enjoyable. What does that say about me, about us? I decry Reality TV, but I got into this.

It suggests that my priorities are seriously out of whack.

But at least it helps me keep the part of my brain devoted to cultural trivia sharp and active. My wife relies on me for that.

Meanwhile, some comic relief from the party out of power…

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Dick Harpootlian put out this video today with regard to the dispute between Gov. Nikki Haley and Sen. Glenn McConnell chronicled back here…

Here’s what the Democratic Party chair had to say about his video:

“It’s time to send adults to the Statehouse and get rid of the whiny children. Instead of the Governor worrying about her four pet projects, maybe she would be concerned with bringing news jobs to South Carolina and funding the education that will mold the true children of this state.”

A word about that, in the gov’s defense… what she was seeking was not the passage of “pet projects,” but substantive reforms. However, passing them was not an emergency worth overstepping constitutional bounds, or even exercising legitimate-but-extraordinary power…

Keynes & Hayek throw down, bust some rhymes

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Just got around to viewing this hilarious video, which my son sent me several days ago.

Nothing like economist humor.

By the way, I suspect that the makers of this video are Hayek fans. Nothing against Keynes (I suspect their theories both have their places, depending upon circumstances), but at least in the hip-hop format, Hayek seems to make more sense..

There. So much for y’all who think I’m such a big-spender type…

The math doesn’t quite work either way…

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Friend of mine shared this link with me today…

First, there’s plenty to be embarrassed about, as a South Carolinian, in this video — the main thing being that Sen. Mike Fair is struggling, and failing, to justify his concern about the “danger” of Sharia law being established in South Carolina. It sort of reminds me one of the first corny jokes I remember hearing as a little kid: Man stands on a street corner, snapping his fingers. Cop comes up and threatens to run him in for loitering. Man says, “I’m not loitering. I’m snapping my fingers to keep the elephants away.” Cop says, “There are no elephants around here!” Man says, “I’m doing a good job, aren’t I?”

Against the background of that, his hyperbolic statement that “99 percent probably” of all terrorist acts since the Lebanon Marine Barracks bombing have been carried out by Muslims seems unremarkable. It’s one of those things that “everyone knows,” and he’s just being sloppy. But since the folks doing this report saw fit to dispute it very explicitly, using figures that also seemed a bit dubious, I decided to take a closer look. The report says:

Fair’s calculation, that nearly every single act of terrorism for the past couple of decades was committed by Muslim men, is off base. In reality, in the last ten years alone, nearly twice as many terrorist plots were hatched by non-Muslims in America than by Muslims.

Hmmm. And that period doesn’t even include Oklahoma City. Follow that link and you go to a previous report, which says:

Since the attacks on the Twin Towers and Pentagon, Muslims have been involved in 45 domestic terrorist plots. Meanwhile, non-Muslims have been involved in 80 terrorist plots.

… and then in turn provides a link to this report, by the Muslim Public Affairs Council, that seems in a quick review to fairly assess the number of terror plots hatched by each group. It even gives nonMuslims a break by not counting eco-terrorism.

But then I got to thinking… Muslims make up six-tenths of one percent of the U.S. population. So that means that there are more than 99 times as many non-Muslims as Muslims in the country. But only twice (actually, a little less than twice) as many “terror plots” are hatched by nonMuslims. So… less than 1 percent of the population, but hatch 36 percent of the terror plots. So that means … and my math may be wobbly here, because of assumptions I’m making to come up with a number … Muslims are involved in terror plots about 60 times as often as you would expect, all other things being equal.

It gets extra muddy after that. Fair is talking about worldwide, and the study is about U.S. threats. And it is counting Muslim incidents regardless of whether the plotters are U.S. residents or not.

But there does tend to be, apparently, a higher proportion of plots hatched by Muslims than non, as percentages of the population, in this country. Just way less than 99 percent.

I digress, though. Bottom line, even if Fair were right, taking preemptive action to prevent the establishment of Sharia law in South Carolina, or fretting about prayer shawls in public places, is ridiculous.

I just can’t prove that mathematically. But the burden should be on him to prove that what he’s talking about is an actual problem.

You and your “filter bubble,” and the impact on society

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This is a fascinating little spoken essay over at TED, and as the site boasts, is indeed an “idea worth spreading.” Actually, a bunch of ideas — ideas and observations I’ve made before — although neatly tied together.

Here are some of the things that it discusses:

The idea of the personal “filter bubble,” which is unique to you and yet — and this is critical — not chosen by you. It’s chosen by the algorithms with which you are interacting, based on information that has been gathered about you. I’m not just talking about the obvious ads you see. I’m talking about — to use the example Eli Pariser uses in the video — if you Google “Egypt,” you don’t get the same information that someone else gets when they Google “Egypt.” It’s like you’re in parallel universes.
That these algorithms are the things replacing editors like me — the people who made a profession out of filtering the vast amounts of information that is available into something digestible and understandable to a person in the real world with only one set of eyes and 24 hours in the day.
That instead of empowering you, though — which is the myth of the Internet, that regular folks have been all liberated from us wicked, manipulating editors controlling what they see and what is published — this new, impersonal mechanism is manipulating you, and doing it in isolation, and in a way that you are unlikely to notice. (As I type that, I start to think more and more of “The Matrix.”) Rather than being more connected to the world, it’s like you are being fed a personalized information flow in your own little solitary confinement cell.
There is, in other words, a dark side to the my-this and my-that way that websites are often marketed to you. I’ve always had a visceral, negative response to that stuff, but I always thought it was because of my communitarianism. And the fact that it spelled the death of the mass media in which I made my living, which depended upon a notion of common space, and common concerns. This has given me another reason to be bugged by it.
To explore that isolation thing further… back in the 80s, we MSM journalists decried the plethora of specialty magazines that were increasingly popular. People were more and more subscribing to “Left-Handed Gay Bicyclist Journal” rather than publications based in the notion that we’re all in a society together. The Web really exacerbated that tendency. (But that’s not what did in the newspaper industry. What did it in was the business side of that — the fact that businesses started marketing directly to customers and potential customers directly, first through direct mail, then through those little plastic tags on your keychain, then through the Web. That shut out mass media, media aimed at whole communities.) The reason, we kept telling people, that YOU should care was that representative democracy depended upon a sense of shared interests, or at least shared sources of information, to some extent. But at least we thought people were freely choosing this. The fascinating thing about the “filter bubble” is how software is choosing it for you, largely without your full realization.
This is like 1915 again. Early in the last century, as people started realizing how important newspapers were to democracy itself, you started to see the development of certain ethics about objectivity and fairness, etc. There started to be an assumption of SOME responsibility by editors, rather than just bulling along being shills for this or that political movement — which is what newspapers had been since the founding of the republic. As imperfect as that system of safeguards was, it was at least something. Now we don’t have it. The Internet is the Wild West. If democracy is to be well served, some sorts of standards also need to emerge on the Web.

Something he doesn’t directly address but I will. What’s going on right now — in a tiny way on this blog, in lots of other ways in thousands of other places — is that people are trying to figure out the new business model for news on the state and local level. The old model has collapsed, but there’s still a strong demand for the information and commentary — as strong as ever. The thing is, the old business model wasn’t related to that demand — newspapers were paid for by advertisers, not readers. I believe in markets enough that I believe a new model for paying for newsgathering in order to meet that demand will emerge. But will it be one that supports an informed electorate, the kind upon which a liberal representative democracy depends?

And by the way, this is not about “that bad Internet.” The message is better summed up in his conclusion:

We really need the internet to be that thing that we all dreamed of it being… and it’s not going to do that, if it leaves us all isolated, in a web of one.

Anyway, that’s enough for me. Y’all are all empowered and everything now. Watch it yourself.

Wish I could figure out how to embed this

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Check out this video, which unfortunately I don’t know how to embed:

If you don’t do anything else the rest of the day, do yourself a favour now and just watch/listen to this totally awesome video. Read the stuff first so you can tell what’s going on….. It’s awesome!

This song and its title was the answer to one question of Final Jeopardy — only one person got it right. Question was (paraphrased): “What 1980’s song do history teachers praise for its educational value?”

I never could understand all the references on Billy Joel’s song — fortunately, with this VIDEO, given the pictures, now I can “see” what my “ears” couldn’t. Apparently, it’s Joel’s homage to the 40-years of historical headlines since his birth (1949). WAY TOO COOL — wish I could have appreciated the depths of this song when it was released. Twenty years later, I’m in awe of what Joel was able to put into music and lyrics lasting only a few minutes.

Whether you are a Billy Joel fan or not, you probably remember his great song, ‘We Didn’t Start the Fire.’ Here it is, set to pictures… Very, very cool. Had to share this one. It’s a neat flashback through the past half century. I never did know the words. Turn up the volume, sit back and en joy a review of 50 years of history in less than 3 minutes! Thanks to Billy Joel and some guy from the University of Chicago with a lot of spare time and Google.

Top left gives you full screen….top right lets you pause. Bottom left shows the year. The older you are, the more pictures you will recognize. Anyone over age 65 should remember over 90% of what they see. But it’s great at any age.

I don’t know who wrote that copy — I got it in an email — but I’m afraid I’m a bit older than he or she is, because almost none of the references were mysterious to me. Although I could always use a brush-up on, say, Dien Bien Phu. After all, Billy Joel IS four years older than I am.

Interesting thing to watch. And yes, each image is clickable, and takes you to Wikipedia.

New GOP chair with a video of his own

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Just got this a few minutes ago. Evidently, Chad Connelly is feeling the need to answer those videos his counterpart keeps pumping out, and was eager enough to do so that he didn’t wait for fancy production values (maybe he thought he had to send off to Texas for that), but went ahead and got out a quick-and-dirty clip.

My first impression is similar to the impression I formed when Mr. Connelly introduced himself to me today at the Capital City Club: Personable, upbeat. I thought for a moment that he was going to be, intentionally and strategically, more positive than attack dog Harpootlian.

But then he got into standard GOP talking points, such as the current silliest one of all, “the looming specter of Obamacare.”

Anyway, this is going to be lively…

Wait — didn’t I say earlier I was going to cut back on the party stuff? Oh, well…

Sweetness is in the eye of the beholder

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The Elephant In The Room from SCGOP on Vimeo.

First, sorry about all the posts the last few days about political parties. Such as this one and this one and this one and this one and this one. It’s a disagreeable subject, and one that I usually avoid rather scrupulously. But ever since I made the mistake of delving a bit into the Democrats’ intraparty politics, and then their convention, and then the Republicans’ convention, my attention has been drawn more than usual to this unseemly, depressing topic.

I’m sure I’ll climb out of this ditch soon. But in the meantime… my attention was drawn to the above “sweet video” — his words — by Wesley Donehue.

It generates in me several unpleasant thoughts:

My biggest question of all is, who are the “they” that the video repeatedly refers to? First, I don’t know ANYONE who said some of these things. And even if someone did say them, surely the same person/people didn’t say ALL of them? And who would pay any attention to anyone who DID say these things? Which pundits said the GOP was “heading backwards” two years ago? (Personally, I said — and still believe — that after the 2008 defeat that the NATIONAL party, not the SC one, was demoralized to the point that it left a vacuum that was being filled by extremists — and that has certainly had its effects here. But that’s not “heading backwards;” it’s heading somewhere I’d never seen the party go before.) Who on earth ever thought for a moment that Republicans “could never retain the governorship?” Whoever said, ungrammatically, that a “woman governor” was impossible? (For those who didn’t get my point about “ungrammatical” — and fewer and fewer people do these days — “woman” is a noun, not an adjective.) And who even CARED about when the GOP would pay off its mortgage? Talk about your esoteric insider concerns. And on and on.
The video illustrates, better than the recent ones Harpootlian has been pumping out, one of the main things that is wrong with political parties: It’s this assumption that because something wears Brand X, it is GOOD. It reminds me of those cars I see with multiple bumper stickers on them, and they are almost always (I could, if all such cars I’ve ever seen were to parade before me, count the exceptions on one hand, with fingers left over) all of one party. As though a thinking person could possibly get so worked up in favor of Candidate A as to deface his or her car with a bumper sticker, and then get so enraptured with another, and another, and another, and they would ALL be of the same party, when that’s the only “virtue” they share. The odds against that, if the voter THINKS about each candidate and makes a discerning choice, are astronomical. And yet that’s what one almost always sees. In this case, we are to embrace the election of Nikki Haley as a GOOD THING (which, deep down, a lot of Republicans do not), and the defeat of John Spratt as an equally good thing, and … this is the part that strains credulity… for the same reasons! When the only characteristics we are given for judging those phenomena are that Ms. Haley is a Ms., and Mr. Spratt has been in office 28 years. Well, those and the fact that the victor in each case happens to wear the Republican label, which is a most dubious unifying characteristic.
Finally, according to Wesley, this video about how wonderful it is that the Republican Party treads unopposed across the face of South Carolina was produced by Texans. Specifically, this one and this one. So… apparently the paradise that the GOP rules over here is incapable of producing anyone with the talent to produce a “sweet video.” Or so we are left to gather. Sorry, but ever since I went into the advertising/marketing/communications game I’ve learned to have a low opinion of those who insist on procuring such services from out of state. Like nobody here needs the business, or is good enough.

Well, I could go on, but I won’t. OK, one more point: “Sweet” is an odd thing to call such strident triumphalism. One practically hears the stamp of boots marching in the background, it is SO triumphalist.

OK, I get it; this is a love letter to Karen Floyd. But who saw it as worthwhile to spend money — OUT OF STATE — to produce such a thing? What is its worth to anyone, other than Karen, who is departing the stage?

I’ve just got to start ignoring all this party stuff and find something more pleasant to write about.

Yet ANOTHER video from Harpootlian

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Dick Harpootlian is really into video as an attack medium. This is like, what — one a week? I guess that’s what he’s spending that money he was so eager to raise on.

Can’t say I really agree with what he’s saying, though. I don’t think it an awful thing that the governor pays her staff decently. I DO have a question or two about her decision to essentially copy and paste her campaign staff into the governor’s office. It’s one thing to hire a guy like Trey Walker, who knows a thing or two about elective service in SC. But her chief of staff isn’t even from here, with his main SC experience being running her campaign. Her campaign that was, if you recall, NOT about SC, but about Barack Obama.

I realize that some of y’all — such as Doug — think lack of experience is a GOOD thing. I do not. If your elected official is not much more than a “fresh face,” you definitely need some experienced people running the staff. If you’re serious about doing the job, that is.

The salaries, though, don’t bother me. But I realize they make for an easy target for the Dems under the circumstances…

Anybody see anything good at GOP debate? (FYI, this post mentions Ron Paul)

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As I mentioned before, I didn’t go. To the GOP debate in Greenville, that is. And I didn’t even think to watch it on TV last night (was it even on live? I wouldn’t know). When I got home from the Five Points event, the fam was watching a 1944 musical comedy called “Bathing Beauty,” starring Red Skelton, Esther Williams, Basil Rathbone, Xavier Cugat and Harry James and his orchestra. Which caused me to realize something: When he was young, Red Skelton looked a lot like Conan O’Brien.

Anyway, I read the stories about the debate in The State today — this one and this one — and didn’t get the sense that I missed anything at all.

But perhaps some of my readers DID see it, and were impressed by something or other. If so, this would be a good time to share.

I’m sure it wasn’t as bad as this guy says:

Hollywood is reportedly at work on a remake of the 1991 film “Don’t Tell Mom the Babysitter’s Dead.” This, however, is unnecessary, because a remake is already playing. It’s called the Republican presidential primary.

In the original, a mom leaves her kids with a babysitter for three months, but after the babysitter dies of a heart attack, the children fend for themselves for the summer.

The GOP nominating contest so far follows a very similar plot. With the grown-ups (played by Jeb Bush and Mitch Daniels) out of town, the field has been left in the custody of caretakers (played by Mitt Romney, Donald Trump and Newt Gingrich). When even the babysitters fail to show up at the first debate of the season, the juveniles run the thing themselves.

At Thursday night’s debate in South Carolina, Libertarian Rep. Ron Paul explained why heroin and prostitution should be legal and why the Department of Homeland Security should be eliminated…

As I said, I’m pretty sure it wasn’t that bad. But… I don’t seem to have missed anything. There IS quite a bit of excitement among Ron Paul fans, partly because they’re always excited (which is why I put him in the headline — that’s always good for about 1,000 page views), and partly because apparently no one at the debate offered him any competition in attention-grabbing.

Bottom line, what’s going on here is… nothing. You might see some activity at some point in the future among some Republicans who, if they gain the nomination, just might have a chance of giving Barack “Hey, I Just Killed bin Laden” Obama a run for his money, but none of them were going to poke their heads out this week.

And I’m not going to bet that this ever gets competitive, with serious candidates really running hard. At least, not soon. (Which is a shame because, you know, I’d like to get some of those ad bucks here on the blog.)

The contrast to four years ago is palpable. In May 2007, there was a GOP presidential debate here in Columbia, and while I didn’t actually go to that one, either, I did watch it on TV. I watched it in a bar with Bob McAlister. The reason we were in the bar was that John McCain was supposed to show up there after. He did, and that’s when I shot my most popular candidate video ever — the one that has been viewed 62,671 times on YouTube — the one in which McCain refers to Lindsey Graham as “that little jerk.”

There were enough actual contenders for the nomination there that Ron Paul, while he attracted attention, was regarded as a curiosity, as the outlier he is. Not this time. Did you see that Rep. Paul had again raised a boatload of money? Don’t know exactly what he plans to do with it. Surely not even he believes he is ever likely to be president of the United States. I suppose it will be like last time — lots of posters and such, not all that many voters beyond the passionate core, who are sort of doing their own thing. Perhaps Doug can explain it to us…

The Harpootlian offensive begins

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I told you over the weekend that Dick Harpootlian said he was going to run right out and start raising money.

It seems he’s already spending it. The above video was just released. Not sure why NOW exactly, except that Dick couldn’t wait. Maybe it’s timed for the GOP debate tonight, or the convention this weekend. Regarding that debate, Harpootlian said,

The only candidates Republicans can get to show up for their debate tonight are a bunch of no-names and crazies.

Not so sure about THAT. But it’s definitely a B-team lineup. Maybe C-team. But hey, there will be a big crowd. After all, Ron Paul will be there, and you know how his fans are…

And no, I’m not going. I intend to go to the convention this weekend, though.

Vincent Sheheen turns 40

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Actually, he turned 40 on Friday. But tonight was when the day was celebrated, with a post-election fund-raiser at Rep. James Smith’s office.

There’s not a whole lot of content in this video; I’m posting it more as an experiment than anything else. I shot it with my iPhone instead of my Canon. You can see I had a bit of trouble with focus, etc. Also, I was unable to edit it with my PC editing software; I had to upload it raw to YouTube in order to get it here.

Oh, by the way, in case you wonder why Rep. Smith is so dressed up for the occasion: He was, as he explained to his guests, about to go “play some rock ‘n’ roll.” He’s got a new band, called The Project, which played at the Crawfish Festival over the weekend. I don’t know where they were playing tonight.

I left right after shooting this. The SC Radio Network was having an open house at their new digs. Busy night.

OK, I feel much better now

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This morning, Phillip was kind enough to console me for having typed “Obama” when I meant “Osama” by sending me a link about someone else who had done the same.

Later today, I saw the video above.

I feel SO much better.

Osama bin Laden is dead. So what happens now?

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I originally wrote this BEFORE the president’s announcement. As you can see, I’ve now updated it with the video…

Waiting for President Obama to make the announcement that Osama bin Laden is dead.

And wondering what happens now. I’ve wondered that for 10 years: If bin Laden is dead, what does it change? Does the struggle end? Of course not. He’s now a martyr. But it’s still a huge moment.

And what will the president tell us it means, as he sees it? This is so un-Obama — Under my leadership, we have killed our enemy — what will he say? And what will he tell us to expect next? What will he say HE intends to do?

What does this mean NOW, against the context of the turmoil, the rise of democracy, sweeping through the region?

If I were the president, I’m not sure what I would say. So I’m preparing to watch, and listen.

I expect you are, too.

If you’d like to react, here’s a place to do it…

bradwarthen.com

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