I’m still recovering from a May Day marathon in Prospect Park, not to mention a turn through Owl’s Head in the neighborhood this morning, where it looked like a lot more birds were on the move than yesterday. To protect myself from the incredulous I got a new 12X image stabilized camera, which I am in the process of figuring out how to use. It’s possible to capture images of small songbirds, if you can manage to focus on them. Here are a few for May…
Commentator, author and bird lover Julie Zickefoose provides an update on the birds of spring — and how they fared during an unseasonable cold snap a few weeks ago, when temperatures dropped to the 20s at night and 30s by day at her home in Whipple, Ohio.
Zickefoose was concerned that the migratory birds might not be able to find enough food during the cold spell.
But she tells Melissa Block that the birds stayed put down south — and followed the re-emerging leaves north. The birds are arriving now in one great front, albeit later than usual.
She discusses the many birds she has spotted and photographed in recent days, including the blue-winged warbler, and shares a sad story with a happy ending about a bluebird nest on her property.
yglesias at tnr in a rebuttal to the chait piece mentions the townhouse listserv which serves as a backchannel clearinghouse for the liberal netroots. he downplays its influence but i thought id note it here. as for smackdowns of chait check the usual suspects: digby, atrios, yglesias.
Townhouse is a by-invitation-only liberal listserv begun by blogger and Democratic campaign consultant Matt Stoller.
Participants agree to keep their information exchanges confidential or risk being removed from the private listserv. Townhouse provides the web equivalent of a political backroom where self-selected liberal bloggers including Glenn Greenwald, Markos Moulitsas and Atrios, leaders of liberal think tanks including Campaign for America's Future, liberal journalists and pundits, advocacy groups such as MoveOn, and Democratic campaign and PR consultants can all discuss and debate their common concerns, strategies and tactics.
An article on Salon.com reports "Townhouse began after the disastrous 2004 election, when young Democratic activists began meeting on Sundays for beers at Townhouse Tavern, a subterranean watering hole in Washington's Dupont Circle neighborhood. ... Here was the next generation of would-be D.C. power brokers, kids in their 20s and 30s who planned to mold the political future. At some point, Matt Stoller, the preppy enforcer of liberal blogging, helped organize the group into a formal e-mail list. ... Over time, the e-mail list and the Sunday afternoon boozefests grew. ... Through it all, Stoller controlled the membership. If you stayed in his graces, and met the group's qualifications, you got yourself a ticket to both the electronic and the alcoholic conversations. At all times, the whole enterprise was declared off the record, to be spoken of in hushed tones only with others who knew the proverbial secret handshake. ... the public introduction of Townhouse now presents the big-name bloggers and online activists with a transparency dilemma. On the one hand, bloggers like to talk of themselves as a democratic, grass-roots movement. (Moulitsas often conflates himself with the entire 'people-powered movement' in his blog posts.) On the other hand, the blogosphere boasts an emerging leadership elite, which is increasingly profiting on its insider status in both the Democratic Party and among one another." [1]
this looks interesting but its behind the times select firewall :
In Nixon’s Tricks, Rove’s Roots
David Greenberg on how the Bush presidency grew from the soil of Nixon’s.
Tom Poston, one of the classic veterans of TV comedy, died earlier today at his home in Los Angeles. He appeared on The Steve Allen Show in the 1950s and Newhart in the 1980s.
Poston played handyman George Utley on Newhart, and was also a regular on another Bob Newhart series, Bob. And to keep the connection to Newhart going, he played Cliff "The Peeper" Murdock on The Bob Newhart Show in the 70s. Poston also appeared on Grace Under Fire, Mork & Mindy, The Simpsons, Will & Grace, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Get Smart, Coach, The Love Boat, Studio One, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Just Shoot Me, That 70s Show, and dozens of other shows over the years.
Poston was married to actress Suzanne Pleshette, who played Newhart's wife Emily on The Bob Newhart Show.
Poston played handyman George Utley on Newhart, and was also a regular on another Bob Newhart series, Bob. And to keep the connection to Newhart going, he played Cliff "The Peeper" Murdock on The Bob Newhart Show in the 70s. Poston also appeared on Grace Under Fire, Mork & Mindy, The Simpsons, Will & Grace, Home Improvement, Murphy Brown, Get Smart, Coach, The Love Boat, Studio One, The Suite Life of Zack & Cody, Just Shoot Me, That 70s Show, and dozens of other shows over the years.
Poston was married to actress Suzanne Pleshette, who played Newhart's wife Emily on The Bob Newhart Show.
For Sally McKay, a Branch of May, full of Cowbirds.
they write letters...
has anyone used a vacuum coffeemaker?
because being a mormon wasnt creepy enough...
no shortage of us engineers, just excess of corporate greed.
the scope of their treachery is boundless.
final month to spay your pets.
Tucked inside Frank Rich's Sunday column in the New York Times is indication that the newspaper will no longer play ball with the annual White House Correspondents Association dinners in Washington, which he calls "a crystallization of the press's failures in the post-9/11 era." He writes that the event "illustrates how easily a propaganda-driven White House can enlist the Washington news media in its shows....
you are what you eat. (file under crossfiled)
So Vaynerchuk, 31, has taken over the liquor store his father started and built a 40,000-square-foot store in Springfield, N.J., devoted mostly to wine. He also started Wine Library TV, an almost-daily video blog featuring his wine tastings that he posts on his Web site.
"Bush is seeking "outputs" as a means of ensuring eventual "outcomes" that will, he hopes, in the end, lead to "signs of success." It's not exactly Churchillian: We will fight for every output and we will never surrender! In the meantime, Bush will be content with any "sign of activity." And as we've seen before from Bush, in the morbid spectacle he made of Terri Schiavo, any sign of activity, no matter how remote, justifies not pulling the plug.
The somber, measured tone of Sanger's piece in the The Times, without a hint of irony in it, conveys that we are all supposed to just play along with what everyone--from congressional Republicans to Petraeus to the poor grunts on the streets of Baghdad--knows to be a huge charade."
The somber, measured tone of Sanger's piece in the The Times, without a hint of irony in it, conveys that we are all supposed to just play along with what everyone--from congressional Republicans to Petraeus to the poor grunts on the streets of Baghdad--knows to be a huge charade."
fucking enabling eunuchs.
"The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it," Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Wednesday when talking on the Senate floor about the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002.
"I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn't do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy.
We can't walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress."
The Senate's No. 2 Democrat sayshe knew that the American public was being misled into the Iraq war but remained silent because he was sworn to secrecy as a member of the intelligence committee.
"The information we had in the intelligence committee was not the same information being given to the American people. I couldn't believe it," Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, said Wednesday when talking on the Senate floor about the run-up to the Iraq war in 2002.
"I was angry about it. [But] frankly, I couldn't do much about it because, in the intelligence committee, we are sworn to secrecy.
We can't walk outside the door and say the statement made yesterday by the White House is in direct contradiction to classified information that is being given to this Congress."
were #15!
as the man himself might say, teh stupid, it burns!
If only these two excerpts had been sequential, perhaps the absurdity would have been apparent:
While mainstream reporters must sign their names to news stories and submit to the editors and ethical guidelines of their organizations, the bloggers -- many operating freelance -- often write under anonymous sign-ons and without the bureaucracy or controls of a mainstream media organization.
...
But one key state Democratic strategist, speaking on the condition of anonymity because of concern for riling the netroots crowd, warns that such efforts are potentially positive and negative.
Netroots commentary can frequently be intensely personal, even "totally mean and irrational," the strategist said, with some bloggers finding power in their ability "to assassinate political characters online."
"It's amplified by the anonymity, and it can be scary that it's so irresponsible," the insider said. "And it's pulling the mainstream media in that direction."
-Atrios 15:10
juan cole / how to get out of iraq
Bush's ineptitude has made a regional proxy war a real possibility, so the question is how to avoid it. One Saudi official admitted that if the United States withdrew and Iraq's Sunnis seemed in danger, Riyadh would likely intervene. Turkish Foreign Minister Abdullah Gul has threatened to invade if Iraq's Kurds declare independence. And Iran would surely try to rescue Iraqi Shiites if they seemed on the verge of being massacred.
But Bush is profoundly in error to think that continued US military occupation can forestall further warfare. Sunni Arabs perceive the Americans to have tortured them, destroyed several of their cities and to be keeping them under siege at the behest of the joint Shiite-Kurdish government of Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki. American missteps have steadily driven more and more Sunnis to violence and the support of violence. The Pentagon's own polling shows that between 2003 and 2006 the percentage of Sunni Arabs who thought attacking US troops was legitimate grew from 14 to more than 70.
The US repression of Sunnis has allowed Shiites and Kurds to avoid compromise. The Sunnis in Parliament have demanded that the excesses of de-Baathification be reversed (thousands of Sunnis have been fired from jobs just because they belonged to the Baath Party). They have been rebuffed. Sunnis rejected the formation of a Shiite super-province in the south. Shiites nevertheless pushed it through Parliament. The Kurdish leadership has also dismissed Sunni objections to their plans to annex the oil-rich province of Kirkuk, which has a significant Arab population.
The key to preventing an intensified civil war is US withdrawal from the equation so as to force the parties to an accommodation. Therefore, the United States should announce its intention to withdraw its military forces from Iraq, which will bring Sunnis to the negotiating table and put pressure on Kurds and Shiites to seek a compromise with them. But a simple US departure would not be enough; the civil war must be negotiated to a settlement, on the model of the conflicts in Northern Ireland and Lebanon.
The New Orleans Jazz & Heritage Festival kicks off this weekend—good news from a city wracked by too much bad. Last year, the mounting of the event at its customary Mid-City Fair Grounds site was an inspiring triumph against odds. "Now, in a way, it's even harder," says festival producer Quint Davis, who has upped the ante for this year's event, packing its six days denser than last year, with stars ranging from Rod Stewart and Van Morrison to Gregg Stafford's Young Tuxedo Brass Band. "The euphoria of destruction has passed," he continues. "We're in the reality of the long-term recovery. None of this is going to get someone their check from the 'Road Home' program. None will rebuild their house or get their insurance straight. But it will do something important beyond all that."
Anyone in New Orleans will offer stern correction should you refer to Katrina as a natural disaster: Plenty of unnatural barriers and failures, a great many bureaucratic, are to blame beyond Mother Nature. And anyone involved in the city's culture will point out that new barriers, similarly unnatural, impede the city's ability to rebuild artistically as well as physically. You'd think that New Orleans would welcome back the communities and establishments that anchor its storied culture. But the message implicit in the post-Katrina skirmishes club owners, Mardi Gras Indians, and parade organizers have experienced with city officials is, "We don't want you back." Or at the very least, "We're not going to make it easy."
"There was a guerrilla documentation made of the Orange County phenomenon usually refereed to as "the Disneyland Locals". The video documentation started in 1995 as an alternative to the afterschool task of filming skate videos. Now over 10 years later over 100 hours of video (Hi-8) shot at the park between 1995 and 1997 serve as a glimpse into a piece of Southern California history overlooked by mainstream media but never forgotten by the Generation who experienced it. It always seems pretty hard to explain this to someone who wasn't there during this time period but everyone who was anyone used to hang out in the old broken down tomorrowland. Sort of like the zephyr surfers who would surf at the brokendown theme park "POP" in dogtown z boys. To hang out in tomorrowland you had to have an annual pass that would grant you admission for most if not all days of the year (depending on how fancy your pass was passes were gernerally $100-$200). Most of the people who would hang out in Disneyland grew up going to the park during their childhood in Orange County and to find this as the main hangout as teeagers was very unlikely. During the summer of 1996 security guards started revoking the passes from teens who would hang around most often siteing it as "loitering". There were a number of ways a Disneyland security guard could justify revoking your pass but most popular were "loitering" and using "illegal dance moves" on the tomorrowland dancefloor basically no touching the ground with your hands but pretty much any dance move they didnt agree with. At this point it was already to late to take away passes, the secret was out everyone knew the park like the back of their hands by now .As hundreds of passes were revoked in an attempt to put an end to Disneyland Local culture the locals would comically sneak right back in. As you can imagine the inapropriate clearence of Disneyland locals was sharply responded to by the angery teenagers....and that is when things really started to get interesting. This was the time period when the Disneyland Locals returned the lack of respect and took it out on the park...this would be anything from sneaking in a high volume of people through the re entry with used handstamps Transfered by a wide range of materials and damaging park property to getting off on the rides and re-arranging the puppets into differnt locations (ussually on "its a small world") and other restricted behaviours some more innocent than others. Mostly weak things that teenagers would think funny but still good for a laugh. You can mark the the removal of the peoplemover (the main make out point for all teeagers) as the start of the decline in the "Local Culture". As the groups grew there were Territorial spots that would sometimes move form one side of Tomorrowland to another like a pack of Gypsies. The most well known rivalry between The straight edge groups and the teen smokers would have confrontations often resulting in countless kids getting Maced. The renovation of a new more name fitting Tomorrowland came in 1997 at this time the thousands upon thousands of kids who had set up after school and summertime residency at tomorrowland rapidly declined until it completely seized to exist. Now you can walk through the new highly different tomorrowland as if these moments never happened. Enjoy a look into the past at www.youtube.com/profile?user=disneylandvideos where videos will be added as they are edited since myspace video sucks." [via supercentral and mbs]
