This is very interesting, but doesn't posting of videos of mental hospital group therapy sessions violate doctor-patient confidentiality?
This is going to be one of those "how long can you watch" things, isn't it?
I started trying to tally up the ways this makes me uncomfortable to watch.
-VJ's singing
-VJ's stupidity
-VJ's lack of self-awareness
-The co-panelists' obvious awareness of how horrible VJ is
-The co-panelists' knowledge that they can't interrupt VJ no matter what because she's, in a sad and wilted way, famous
-The co-panelists' knowledge taht they can't interrupt VJ no matter what because they're all supposed to be on the same side
-Ukuleles
-The embarrassing shoddyness of the, er, program such as it is
-The fact that I really liked a VJ SNL skit once where she sang a song called "Where do you draw the line (between friendship and adultery)?"
and that's as far as I got in the three minutes I watched.
Not exactly a source if discomfort but still weird, I was watching Twin Peaks episodes last night and remembered it took me a long time to figure out that Kimmy Robertson was not Victoria Jackson.
3.last: Oh, right. The assistant/ Officer Andy's ladyfriend?
4: Yep, Lucy.
Oh, ETA:
-pronouncing literature "LIT-rachur."
I think they wanted to call the show PoliChicks, but weren't sure their audience would understand.
Don't let Jackson ruin the whole "cute song accompanied by ukulele" genre. Both Stephin Merritt and Nellie McKay are quite brilliant.
Motivated by the worst sort of morbid curiosity, I'm now watching episode 2, and and incredibly it's even worse. This episodes hot topic: Obama's birth certificate. (Spoiler: It's fake.)
Best "fact" so far from V.J.: "He [Obama] has a passport from Connecticut with different aliases on it."
6: Poly Chicks is a different show.
I saw this on Videogum and couldn't bring myself to watch it, but it's actually pretty hilarious.
So are there actually people who like VJ and think she's funny? Is it some triumph of group solidarity?
I go back and forth wondering if VJ is on something or on all sorts of things.
Why aren't any of them wearing pants?
At 10:45, "Getting back to gay marriage...," the purported topic of the show that has not yet been addressed at all?
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Has anyone seen credible reporting on this rumor that Bloomberg has the power, under the PATRIOT Act, to prevent news orgs from disseminating pictures of injured OWS demonstrators, and that he is now exercising it?
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Wow, the black woman comes across like the brain surgeon in that group. Seriously, did they have a contest to find the three stupidest women in America to flank VJ? Everything not said by VJ was "Isn't it like totally ironic that they call us intolerant? But like they're the ones who are intolerant?"
14: Who knows what they've stuffed into the Patriot Act, but there's no way that they could get that past the Supreme Court without one more nut-Justice.
He can do all kinds of things to keep the media from taking pictures, but it's almost impossible under current Constitutional law to keep people from disseminating them.
Photos of injured protesters? The censorship isn't working, if that rumor were so.
Here's what's bouncing around on FB:
Quoting Friend and Comrade Chris Kasper of the NY OWS movement: "Friends, you need to know this. Yesterday we had 32,000 non-violent protestors in the street. NYPD shut down press chopper air access, as they had done two nights before with the raid of Zuccotti. Also, Mayor Bloomberg has ordered press not to release images of injured protestors, beaten bloody or with broken arms- until he has the chance to review the material,and approves its release , or not. The Patriot Act grants him the right. You need to know this and get involved. This is a crucial moment in our history. Please,get involved. As the 84 year old woman in Seattle, who was pepper-sprayed by police says, we all need to take one more step out of our comfort zone. Do we need to start wittnessing people vanish and finding mass graves before we realize how precious,if fleeting, our right to speech and assembly is? Please, get involved."
There is an awful lot of "folk" PATRIOT Act learning in the air, and a great deal of it comes from mayors, sheriffs and cops. I think that awful Arizona sheriff asserted a right under the PATRIOT Act to arrest suspected illegal immigrants outside his jurisdiction, for example.
Mayor Bloomberg has ordered press not to release images of injured protestors, beaten bloody or with broken arms- until he has the chance to review the material,and approves its release , or not.
This is a prior restraint that is absolutely and obviously unconstitutional (not just in a "it should be" sense, but in a "it clearly is" sense). I strongly doubt that there is any such provision in the Patriot Act, though I don't know the Patriot Act well at all, but if there is it wouldn't be enforced by a court. Moreover, if Bloomberg wanted to assert such a right, any media outlet who wanted to run these photos could very quickly get a federal court to prevent Bloomberg from acting in this way, or just run the photos without consequence. It sounds like a totally b.s. rumor to me, but maybe there's some retelling of what's going on that brings it closer to plausible reality.
Maybe "the right to steal everyone's camera and smash it" is being conflated with "the right to censor the distribution of images".
20: Yeah, it sounded fantastical to me too, although there was a post up somewhere about how few news orgs were interested in publishing the picture of that former chief of police getting arrested. That's totally the Ideology Of American Journalism at work though.
Around 2:40:
"I just found out that Snopes is owned by George Soros."
A quick Google doesn't have a Snopes rebuttal to this, but apparently it's been sufficiently widely circulated that there's an about.com Urban Legends entry on it.
Also, all I had to do was type "Is Snopes owned" and Google offered the choice "by George Soros."
I can often be amused by this sort of thing, but this evening I'm finding it evil and hateful and even scary.
Are you sure this isn't an SNL skit? I'm only a few minutes in, but...
24: I'm increasingly convinced that most of modern conservatism is an elaborate dada-mindfuck performance art project. How else to explain things like Herman Cain's recent declaration "I'm not supposed to know anything about foreign policy"? It's like what Stephen Colbert does, but taken one step further: played earnestly, without a hint of irony.
The thing that keeps striking me about this is that everyone in this room has a look on her face like this is going really badly, that this little experiment has, in fact, failed, and yet someone decided to post this to the internet anyway.
I'm more impressed that AWB reported back from 10:45 into that video than I would be if she had reported back from 200 years into the future.
Was I supposed to die? I watched the whole thing. Riveting.
23: Another joke moves from XKCD to reality.
'So, um, like, I don't know... the liberals, they support gay marriage, and that's the homosexual agenda; but the islam people, they just want to cut off our heads, and that's the islamicisation of Amerca; and toleration of the gays plus murderous head-chopping-off of the homosexuals...well, that's liberal, right? [or is it actually conservative, in which case something I must support?] Am I right? Well, I must be right, of course, if somewhat confused...'
The man hisself!
A long Michael Hudson interview by Alan Minsky posted over at Naked Capitalism today. Long, long, but important. We have six months, he says.
Alan Minsky: I have one final question for you. Would you support programs that are put forward similar to what Randy Wray, an associate of yours, suggests in terms of government employment projects to guarantee full employment?Michael Hudson: Yes, of course I approve. In fact, it was I who introduced Randy, Pavlina Tchernova and others to Dennis Kucinich's staff to help write his full-employment proposal along these lines. My first caveat is to warn against letting the Obama administration turn these projects into a military giveaway. I think Randy and I are in agreement with that.
I thank the Lord there are people out there like these.
There's another Republican primary debate starting in half an hour! This time without the dampening presence of Mitt Romney.
I am going to watch this one--and expect that this will describe it perfectly:
everyone in this room has a look on [his or] her face like this is going really badly, that this little experiment has, in fact, failed, and yet someone decided to post this to the internet anyway.
Jesus Christ, Newt is now lecturing on the French Revolution. (Previously, he did an etymological study of "secularism.")
Ron Paul: "In this country, you're even free to be an atheist!"
Now Newt is name-checking Captain John Smith.
Is that the guy who tear gassed the old lady?
Huge Newt applause line to OWS: "Go get a job after you take a bath!"
The effort to demonize the Occupy movement as "dirty" continues apace.
Christian moderator now questioning Cain rather interestingly about federalism and civil rights. (Cain of course is being incoherent: "the federal government should get involved when the states are wrong!")
Next up: is there anything in your personal lives for which you would seek forgiveness?
Cain now talking about cancer, namechecks his "wife of 43 years, here tonight," is breaking up in tears.
Perry follows this emotional moment by repeating his "top ten of his class" joke.
What is the value proposition, now, of each additional Republican debate? What do the candidates, serious and not, disagree about?
Holy pandering: Ron Paul now talking about the moment he gave his life to Christ.
42.--This one is a little different: it's an Iowa "values" debate, and the two Mormons didn't attend. I haven't been watching many of the debates, so I'm watching primarlly for the masochism. It seems really possible that Not-Romney has a real shot, so I'd like to see these fuckers do their thing for the religious.
43: Ron Paul is Dog the Bounty Hunter?!
Ron Paul is Dog the Bounty Hunter and busted Santorum on meth possession with intent warrant in a Honolulu slum?!?!
You're doing yeoperson's viewing, Jm.
It's just surreal to watch Michele Bachmann talking about what she would do as Commander-in-Chief.
Okay, Santorum is now clearly insane: 1,000 years of radical Islam, which only matters now because of oil.
And now suggesting attacking Iran. Santorum: the candidate of the neo-cons!
Newt brings it all back to Augustine.
Who doesn't? Violence is the only language Floridians understand.
Madame, your power of endurance exceeds even that of Catherine the Great of Russia, whose hand in marriage I once had the honor to decline.
Say hello to my little candidate!
HA. I was about to leave comment 49 nearly word for word.
It's possible that one of the candidates screwed up by using language that was too obviously quotable as batshit. However, the whole event was conducted under batshit premises, and individual statements of insanity got lost in the general atmosphere of testimony.
This thing start at 5 est and ended before 7, so Perry didn't self-destruct.
Bachmann was wearing some sort of brown modal top-sleeved top, but they were all seated, so I couldn't check out the rest of it.
At the beginning of the event, there was a truly bizarre moment where Bachmann poured water for the moderator. They made a bit out of it, with her laughing about how she's done a lot of pouring water for her family, but it was still cringe-worthy. I was still fumbling with my sound--and with the other things I was doing while watching the debate--so I have no idea exactly how that moment started.
some sort of brown modal top-sleeved top
Ugh. Modal.
Palin would have brought sandwiches.
Palin Chris Christie would have brought sandwiches.
Chris Christie would have brought cargo.
I endeavor not to judge other people's fetishes, but the appeal of Chris Christie eludes me utterly.
Oh, somehow I managed to miss that the moderator was that Frank Luntz person.
fetishes usually originate in some primal moment of sexual realization as a young person. it could be that someone had a very special experience in 1994 after christie was elected to the morris county board of chosen freeholders. I say as long as you're willing to be ggg about your partner's chris christie fetish, things could still work out. maybe just start with something low-key first, by becoming an obese person from new jersey. you could move on to the latex mask later when you feel more comfortable about the whole thing.