Murrey Jacobson, writing in Dave Chappelle says Michelle Wolf ‘nailed it’ at White House Correspondents Dinner for the PBS News Hour, testifies:

Forty-eight hours out from Michelle Wolf’s biting comedy routine at the White House Correspondents Dinner, there’s been plenty of backlash among some journalists and political figures in Washington, D.C.

Several people—including journalists Mike Allen of Axios and Maggie Haberman of the New York Times—criticized Wolf on Twitter, saying some of her jokes had gone too far, and that she had personally and inappropriately insulted White House press secretary Sarah Huckabee Sanders and Kellyanne Conway, senior counselor to the president. Matt Schlapp, chair of the American Conservative Union and organizer of the annual Conservative Political Action Conference, said on Twitter that he and his wife, Mercedes, a Trump Administration official, walked out of the event. Margaret Talev, the head of the White House Correspondents Association, said Wolf’s comments undercut the spirit of the evening.

But a number of comedians—including Jimmy Kimmel, Seth Meyers and Kathy Griffin—have come to Wolf’s defense, saying she is a comedian and did what she was paid to do. In an interview with the PBS NewsHour’s Jeffrey Brown in San Francisco, comedian Dave Chappelle also backed Wolf, saying he “really respected” what he saw, and that there was both levity and truth in her routine.

Clearly, Wolf did her job with excellence…

Special Counsel Robert Mueller has a few questions for President Donald John Trump:

What did you know about phone calls that Mr. Flynn made with the Russian ambassador, Sergey I. Kislyak, in late December 2016?

What was your reaction to news reports on Jan. 12, 2017, and Feb. 8-9, 2017?

What did you know about Sally Yates’s meetings about Mr. Flynn?

How was the decision made to fire Mr. Flynn on Feb. 13, 2017?

After the resignations, what efforts were made to reach out to Mr. Flynn about seeking immunity or possible pardon?

Follow the link above for the rest…

President Donald John Trump once again skipped the annual White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, but his staff minions were there and they, along with others, aren’t happy.

Writing in White House correspondents’ dinner: Michelle Wolf shocks media with Sarah Sanders attack for The Guardian, David Smith explains:

The comedian Michelle Wolf stunned guests at a prestigious media dinner in Washington with a risque speech that eviscerated members of Donald Trump’s administration, some of whom were in the room.

Sean Spicer, the former White House press secretary, told the Guardian he thought the performance was “absolutely disgusting”, but others praised Wolf for pulling no punches about the president and his aides.

She drew gasps from some in the 3,000-strong audience at the Hilton hotel on Saturday when she turned her fire on Spicer’s secretary, Sarah Sanders, sitting just a few feet away at the head table. “Every time Sarah steps up to the podium, I get excited,” the comedian said. “I’m not really sure what we’re going to get, you know? A press briefing, a bunch of lies or divided into softball teams. ‘It’s shirts and skins, and this time don’t be such a little bitch, Jim Acosta,” – a reference to a CNN correspondent who has clashed with Sanders.

Wolf continued: “I actually really like Sarah. I think she’s very resourceful. But she burns facts and then she uses that ash to create a perfect smokey eye. Like maybe she’s born with it, maybe it’s lies. It’s probably lies.”

Sanders looked stony faced and there were both laughs and groans. But Wolf was not done: “I’m never really sure what to call Sarah Huckabee Sanders. Is it Sarah Sanders, is it Sarah Huckabee Sanders, is it Cousin Huckabee, is it Aunt Huckabee Sanders? What’s Uncle Tom but for white women who disappoint other white women? Ah I Know, Aunt Coulter,”–referring to the rightwing pundit Ann Coulter.

As a journalist I oppose the very idea of The White House Correspondents’ Association. Covering the White House ought not to be a collegial matter and hosting an annual dinner/roast definitely sends the wrong message on a relationship that must be adversarial to be credible.

Mano Singham, writing in Michelle Wolf at the WHCD, agrees:

The annual White House Correspondents Dinner is an event that should cease to exist. It represents the worst kind of schmoozing between journalists, the people they cover, and celebrities and only serves to cement their sense of insider solidarity against all of us yahoos on the outside. One of the good things that Donald Trump has done is boycott the event since he became president. It is true that he likely did it because he is thin-skinned and could not take the inevitable jokes at his expense, but I hope his action leads to the event being canceled.

Wolfe’s performance was neither collegial nor politically correct.

Why is it that comedians are doing a better job of covering politics than, you know, actual journalists?

[Update on 30 April @ 0454: Of course the Resistance Raccoons have and opinion.]

[Update on 30 April @ 0332: Even the National Review is defending Wolf.]

Shots of information, not coffee, unfortunately. Sitting here this week I’m looking at six pieces that I’ve been trying to read, and blog, for some time. I’m not going to get around to doing in-depth, individual, posts, but in the tradition of my Time To Shovel Out The Blog Pile posts, here are quick reflections on the fifth of the six articles.

No. 5: On to a Guardian Long Read that is far more recent. In The male glance: how we fail to take women’s stories seriously, Lili Loofbourow’s 6 March piece begins:

In spring 2013, HBO conducted a sly experiment on the “elite” TV-viewing public. It aired two new shows—both buddy dramas—back to back. Each was conceived as a short, self-contained season. Each had a single talented and idiosyncratic director for the entire season, and each dispensed with the convention of having a large team of writers in favour of a unified authorial vision. Both shows appeared to belong to one genre, but gestured at several others. Both used excellent actors to anchor a meandering, semi-disciplined style. And both ended by reasserting the romantic bonds of friendship. Those shows were True Detective, and Doll and Em.

Their critical reception was drastically different. One was analysed and investigated to the point of parody. The other show – a much tighter work of art – was breezily and inaccurately labeled a “satire” and forgotten. To be explicit, the show about boys got way too much credit, and the show about girls got way too little.

This is how we approach “male” versus “female” work. Let’s call it the “male glance”– a narrative corollary to the “male gaze”. We all do it, and it is ruining our ability to see good art. The effects are poisonous and cumulative, and have resulted in a huge talent drain. We have been hemorrhaging great work for decades, partly because we are so bad at seeing it.

First, I liked True Detective’s first season and found season two so bad I watched only about 1.5 episodes. Second, I never heard of Doll and Em, which makes Loofbourow’s point. (I watch HBO shows only on DVD and the show doesn’t appear to be available in the U.S., but holy fuck, Harvey Weinstein appears as Harvey in in the season two premiere. That couldn’t have gone well.)

More tomorrow…

Previously…

So, this morning I was shopping at Heinan’s in Strongsville and I stopped, as I usually do, to chat with an employee who is both the daughter of a WW II destroyer sailor—the USS Melvin DD 680— and the mother of a Navy officer now serving onboard the USS Michael Murphy DDG 112. Her son had just passed a milestone in his career by earning his Surface Warfare Officer badge and she was rightly proud of her son’s accomplishment.

I really didn’t know anything about the Murphy, but I had assumed based on my friend’s earlier descriptions that she is an Arleigh-Burke class guided missile destroyer (think USS Nathan James DDG 67). I put the statistics from the Murphy side-by-side with those of my own ship, the USS Bainbridge CGN (nee DLG) 25 and I was surprised at a number of points.

First, the Murphy is 100 tons heavier than the Billy B. That surprises me because she was powered by twin nuclear reactor and we were 819 tons heavier than the conventional Leahy class frigates.

Second, the Murphy is shorter (510 v. 565 feet) and broader of beam (66 v. 58 feet) than the Billy B.

Third, even though we were only a tad lighter, the Billy B drew significantly less water—10 feet v. 33 feet—than the Murphy.

Clearly, there is a lot going on below the Murphy’s waterline.

The really surprising comparison is in crew size. We had many more sailors on board—475 v. 323—but I think the number for the Bainbridge may be wrong on the Wikipedia page. The number I remember was 525 and the official Navy page lists a crew of 558.

(Comparing other numbers between the Wikipedia pages and the official Navy pages show other discrepancies. I may go back and edit the Billy B’s page once I pull up some of my own records.)

Also… But, what is “it” here? Yes!

So, conservatives, upset with companies that have turned their backs on conservative causes—even when they haven’t—are protesting by publicly destroying the products of the offending companies, that they already own!

First it was Keurig withdrawing advertising from Sean Hannity’s show, and just this past week National Rifle Association members started shooting holes (and blowing up) their
Yeti coolers

How clueless is that?

If they understood how the economy works (and clearly they don’t, because, well, they’re conservatives) they’d put their coffee makers and coolers on Craig’s List for free or for a nickel and undercut the sales of that company.

But conservatives like blowing shit up so, yeah.

(Note: I won’t buy a Keurig because of the tremendous amount of plastic waste the coffee maker produces, but I’m going to buy a Yeti product today.

One of the hardest challenges that I have with my students, especially seniors who could vote in the near future, is overcoming the whole “why should I waste my time? I can’t make a difference” attitude I so often find. The problem is so deeply ingrained that when I point to the students at Marjory Stoneman Douglas—and in so many other schools—standing up to say enough is enough I get serious pushback and special pleading that those examples can’t apply to them.

I wish I had a magic bullet (yeah, that’s a horrible metaphor, but whatever) to turn their light on, but I haven’t found the key yet, so I keep plugging away with the examples of how Margaret Mead is still right.

Ralph Nader provides yet another case for my students, and the rest of us, in Citizen-Mayor Gayle Roars through Richmond California. Nader writes:

Richmond, California—a city of 110,000 people, most of whom are minorities—is located on beautiful bays and coves next to San Francisco. Hovering over Richmond is the giant Chevron oil refinery. For decades, the city’s residents had to breathe air polluted by Chevron, endure the costs of Chevron’s careless spills, and surrender to Chevron’s gross underpayment of local taxes.

Chevron’s political muscle—even though few of its employees lived in Richmond—made Richmond into an oppressive company town.

Until, that is, Chicago-born Gayle McLaughlin decided, after years of Midwestern activism, to set down roots in Richmond. There, McLaughlin found a few like-minded progressives and started the Richmond Progressive Alliance. (Gayle had volunteered in the Green Party’s 2000 Presidential Campaign.)

With very little money, but many long overdue proposals for the Continue Reading »

The most revealing (for me) moment comes at timemark 2:21 in the second video. (Also pay close attention at timemark 8:46.)

At the end of chapter seven of Black Reconstruction In America, Looking Forward, W.E.B. Du Bois placed the last four lines (an anti-epigraph of sorts) from Oriflamme:

Symbolic mother, we thy myriad sons,
      Pounding our stubborn hearts on Freedom’s bars,
Clutching our birthright, fight with faces set,
      Still visioning the stars!

—Jessie Fauset, 1882-1961

Fauset wrote Oriflamme in 1922 and several copies I’ve found use the following quote from Sojourner Truth as an epigraph for the poem:

I can remember when I was a little, young girl, how my old mammy would sit out of doors in the evenings and look up at the stars and groan, and I would say, ‘Mammy, what makes you groan so?’ And she would say, ‘I am groaning to think of my poor children; they do not know where I be and I don’t know where they be. I look up at the stars and they look up at the stars!

I find myself pondering why Fauset chose to write myriad sons and not myriad children. I’m no poet, but I think the poem would still scan or perhaps she couldn’t think of a single-syllable word that was gender inclusive, or perhaps she simply didn’t feel a need to include her own gender.

Viewing history, even recent history, through a present lens is always difficult.

Cue our favorite cowboy…

At the end of Chapter Six. of Black Reconstruction In America, Looking Backward, W.E.B. Du Bois placed the concluding stanza (an anti-epigraph of sorts) from Maurice Thompson’s To The South:

…I am a Southerner;
I love the South; I dared for her
To fight from Lookout to the sea,
With her proud banner over me.
But from my lips thanksgiving broke,
As God in battle-thunder spoke,
And that Black Idol, breeding drouth
And dearth of human sympathy
Throughout the sweet and sensuous South,
Was, with its chains and human yoke,
Blown hellward from the cannon’s mouth,
While Freedom cheered behind the smoke!

—Maurice Thompson, 1844-1901

Thompson was born in Indiana and moved to Georgia with his family before the Civil War. He and his brother both served in the Confederate Army.

From the Maurice Thompson Wikipedia page:

Thompson wrote the poem “To the South” that was reprinted in George Washington Cable’s influential and controversial essay, “The Freedmen’s Case in Equity” in 1885. This poem expressed Thompson’s reaction to the freeing of the slaves, and implied that some other Southerners were not as angry about the overturning of that institution as Northerners presumed

I have to think a great deal more about the poem in its entirety and why Du Bois chose the final stanza.

Shots of information, not coffee, unfortunately. Sitting here this week I’m looking at six pieces that I’ve been trying to read, and blog, for some time. I’m not going to get around to doing in-depth, individual, posts, but in the tradition of my Time To Shovel Out The Blog Pile posts, here are quick reflections on the fourth of the six articles.

No. 4: On to global unrest and Gwynn Guilford’s (clearly a fellow Welsh person—awkward, but the best I can do in the moment) Harvard research suggests that an entire global generation has lost faith in democracy. Her 30 November 2016—one must wonder what she thinks in March 2017—begins:

People everywhere are down on democracy. Especially young people. In fact, so rampant is democratic indifference and disengagement among millennials that a shocking share of them are open to trying something new—like, say, government by military coup.

That’s according to research by Yascha Mounk, a Harvard University researcher, and Roberto Stefan Foa, a political scientist at the University of Melbourne. The remit of their study, which the Journal of Democracy will publish in January, analyzes historical data on attitudes toward government that spans various generations in North America, Western Europe, Australia, and New Zealand. They find that, across the board, citizens of stable liberal democracies have grown jaded about their government, say Mounk and Foa—and worse.

Yeah we get that, but this was before the sweet potato Saddam invaded the White House. Those damn millenials. Why won’t they get off the lawn?

Guilford hammers away at millenials, complete with visual aids, for the balance of the article and finishes with:

It might be that since this particular generation of young people have grown up in highly stable democracies, they take democracy for granted. It would then stand to reason that, as Mounk and Foa found, millennials in the US and Europe are less likely to participate in conventional civic engagement.

But millennials aren’t doing much unconventional political action either. While one in 11 American baby-boomers had demonstrated in a political protest in the previous year, only one in 15 millennials had.

It’s not clear how this squares with real life. Sharp deteriorations in measures of democratic health presaged autocratic shifts in Poland and Venezuela, as the New York Times points out. But those were both much younger democracies than those in the US and Western Europe.

Still, recent events there aren’t exactly heartening. For instance, millennial Americans voted in far greater numbers for Hillary Clinton than her anti-democratic rival, Donald Trump. Then again, Clinton would have won in a landslide if Democratic-leaning millennials had voted. But too many of them simply didn’t.

Poor little bunnies…

More on 28 April…

Previously…

Shots of information, not coffee, unfortunately. Sitting here this week I’m looking at six pieces that I’ve been trying to read, and blog, for some time. I’m not going to get around to doing in-depth, individual, posts, but in the tradition of my Time Shovel Out The Blog Pile posts, here are quick reflections on the third of the six articles.

No. 3: My third shot comes from Andrew Dickson’s 23 February piece for the Guardian (sense a pattern here?): Inside the OED: can the world’s biggest dictionary survive the internet? Dickson ledes:

In February 2009, a Twitter user called @popelizbet issued an apparently historic challenge to someone called Colin: she asked if he could “mansplain” a concept to her. History has not recorded if he did, indeed, proceed to mansplain. But the lexicographer Bernadette Paton, who excavated this exchange last summer, believed it was the first time anyone had used the word in recorded form. “It’s been deleted since, but we caught it,” Paton told me, with quiet satisfaction.

I gained a tremendous respect for dictionaries in general, and the OED specifically, after I read Simon Winchester’s The Professor and the Madman: A Tale of Murder, Insanity, and the Making of the Oxford English Dictionary back in the last millennium. While this is a lighter piece and the subject is vital, as Dickson writes:

At one level, few things are simpler than a dictionary: a list of the words people use or have used, with an explanation of what those words mean, or have meant. At the level that matters, though—the level that lexicographers fret and obsess about—few things could be more complex. Who used those words, where and when? How do you know? Which words do you include, and on what basis? How do you tease apart this sense from that? And what is “English” anyway?

In the case of a dictionary such as the OED—which claims to provide a “definitive” record of every single word in the language from 1000 AD to the present day—the question is even larger: can a living language be comprehensively mapped, surveyed and described?

This last bit in Dickson’s piece, his conclusion, has me scratching my head:

A few days ago, I emailed to see if “mansplain” had finally reached the OED. It had, but there was a snag – further research had pushed the word back a crucial six months, from February 2009 to August 2008. Then, no sooner had Paton’s entry gone live in January than someone emailed to point out that even this was inaccurate: they had spotted “mansplain” on a May 2008 blog post, just a month after the writer Rebecca Solnit had published her influential essay Men Explain Things to Me. The updated definition, Proffitt assured me, will be available as soon as possible.

I can date any post on Have Coffee Will Write anyway I like. If, for instance, I wanted to steal credit for mansplain, or any word for that matter, I could go back and edit a pre-2008 (HCWW went live in November 2004) post. In fact, I’ve just done precisely that. Now what OED?

Finally, there can be no discussion of dictionaries without recourse to Black Adder…

More tomorrow…

Previously…

Shots of information, not coffee, unfortunately. Sitting here this week I’m looking at six pieces that I’ve been trying to read, and blog, for some time. I’m not going to get around to doing in-depth, individual, posts, but in the tradition of my Time To Shovel Out The Blog Pile posts, here are quick reflections on the second of the six articles.

No. 2: Next up, also from 2 March in the Guardian, is Gavin Evans’ The unwelcome revival of ‘race science’ which opens:

One of the strangest ironies of our time is that a body of thoroughly debunked “science” is being revived by people who claim to be defending truth against a rising tide of ignorance. The idea that certain races are inherently more intelligent than others is being trumpeted by a small group of anthropologists, IQ researchers, psychologists and pundits who portray themselves as noble dissidents, standing up for inconvenient facts. Through a surprising mix of fringe and mainstream media sources, these ideas are reaching a new audience, which regards them as proof of the superiority of certain races.

This is, of course, the limp reasoning of the depowered and disentitled—like guest columnist Charles Kerr in my local news weekly—struggling to maintain their undeserved privilege. Evans gets to the point in his third paragraph:

Although race science has been repeatedly debunked by scholarly research, in recent years it has made a comeback. Many of the keenest promoters of race science today are stars of the “alt-right”, who like to use pseudoscience to lend intellectual justification to ethno-nationalist politics. If you believe that poor people are poor because they are inherently less intelligent, then it is easy to leap to the conclusion that liberal remedies, such as affirmative action or foreign aid, are doomed to fail.

Here is the unvarnished truth: race is a societal construct that has no relevance or fact in biology. Race is simply a feel-good lie told by white folk to justify their acting like malevolent assholes.

More on Thursday…

Previously…

One man’s corruption is another man’s cost of doing business. That attitude is, I think, at the hear of what Ralph Nader considers in Bill Curry on the Move against Public Corruption. Nader writes:

Bill Curry is wondering why corruption is the center of debate or upheaval in every country but ours. He writes that, “Hardly a week goes by without a front-page report of a government toppled or convulsed by corruption scandals.”

Why not our country? Reasons abound. One is that corruption has been institutionalized. It is much more systematic than merely putting cash in an envelope to get a procurement contract from public officials.

Curry, a former Connecticut state Senator, elected state Comptroller, and counsellor to President Bill Clinton, argues that the people hate corruption but are not given its true costs. Curry says, “As Connecticut Comptroller I learned how to count it. An example: a single corrupt bargain struck with health insurers cost the state $1.5 billion, an amount equal to the record deficit our current governor faced on taking Continue Reading »

Shots of information, not coffee, unfortunately. Sitting here this week I’m looking at six pieces that I’ve been trying to read, and blog, for some time. I’m not going to get around to doing in-depth, individual, posts, but in the tradition of my Time Shovel Out The Blog Pile posts, here are quick reflections on the first of the six articles.

No. 1: from 2 March, Sharon Kelly’s How America’s clean coal dream unravelled for The Guardian. She begins:

High above the red dirt and evergreen trees of Kemper County, Mississippi, gleams a 15-story monolith of pipes surrounded by a town-sized array of steel towers and white buildings. The hi-tech industrial site juts out of the surrounding forest, its sharp silhouette out of place amid the gray crumbling roads, catfish stands and trailer homes of nearby De Kalb, population: 1,164.

The $7.5bn Kemper power plant once drew officials from as far as Saudi Arabia, Japan and Norway to marvel at a 21st-century power project so technologically complex its builder compared it to the moonshot of the 1960s. It’s promise? Energy from “clean coal”.

“I’m impressed,” said Jukka Uosukainen, the United Nations director for the Climate Technology Centre and Network, after a 2014 tour, citing Kemper as an example of how “maybe using coal in the future is possible”.

Kemper, its managers claimed, would harness dirt-cheap lignite coal—the world’s least efficient and most abundant form of coal—to power homes and businesses in America’s lowest-income state while causing the least climate-changing pollution of any fossil fuel. It was a promise they wouldn’t keep.

Last summer the plant’s owner, Southern Company, America’s second-largest utility company, announced it was abandoning construction after years of blown-out budgets and missed construction deadlines.

This is what happens when people get trapped in the echo chamber and start believing their own fantasies. What I found to be the most important paragraph—what Andrew Sullivan used to call the money shot until his mother asked him what he meant—comes high in the story:

Company officials have blamed the failure on factors ranging from competition from tumbling natural gas prices to bad weather, bad timing and plain old bad luck.

But a review by the Guardian of more than 5,000 pages of confidential company documents, internal emails, white papers, and other materials provided anonymously by several former Southern Co insiders, plus on- and off-record interviews with other former Kemper engineers and managers, found evidence that top executives covered up construction problems and fundamental design flaws at the plant and knew, years before they admitted it publicly, that their plans had gone awry.

This is why public relations and advertising folks make the big buck.

More tomorrow…

At the end of chapter five of Black Reconstruction In America, The Coming Of The Lord, W.E.B. Du Bois placed the first stanza of An die Freude (an anti-epigraph of sorts):

Freude, schoner Gotterfunken,
Tochter aus Elysium,
Wir betreten feuertrunken,
Himmlische, dein Heiligtum.
Deine Zauber binden wieder,
Was die Mode streng geteilt,
Alle Menschen werden Briider,
Wo dein sanfter Fliigel weilt.
Seid umschlungen, Millionen!

Alle Menschen …
Alle Menschen …

—Johann Schiller, 1759-1805

This was, of course, the inspiration for the 4th movement of the 9th symphony, in my opinion the greatest single piece of music in human history.

*I’m certain that our president’s statement does not apply to anyone reading this.