Rosie
Sarah Palin:: An Offensive Choice | Real Time W/ Bill Maher
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Michael Moore on Maher | We Need A Landslide Tuesday
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New Rules From Bill Maher For October 31, 2008
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Studs Terkel, Dead at 96
Studs TerkelStuds Terkel, writer and radio personality, dies at 96
The Chicago fixture used his knack for conversation to capture oral histories on World War II, the Great Depression and more.
By Stephanie Simon
2:54 PM PDT, October 31, 2008
Studs Terkel, who made his name listening to ordinary folks talk about their ordinary lives — and who turned that knack for conversation into a much-honored literary career — died today. He was 96.
Terkel died at his home in Chicago, his son said.
“He lived a long, eventful, satisfying, though sometimes tempestuous, life,” Dan Terkel said. “I think that pretty well sums it up.”
The author of blockbuster oral histories on World War II, the Great Depression, and contemporary attitudes toward work, Terkel roamed the country engaging an astounding cross-section of Americans in tape-recorded chats — about their dreams, their fears, their chewing gum, about racism, courage, dirty floors, the Beatles.
With his loud laugh and raspy voice, plus his inept fumbles with his tape recorder, he set his subjects at ease and tugged from them memories, predictions and simple truths about their everyday existence. Terkel transcribed and edited the interviews, then compiled them into books at once intimate and sweeping, among them “Division Street,” “Hard Times,” “Working,” and “The Good War,” which won the Pulitzer Prize in 1984.
Terkel was also a legendary radio personality, hosting a daily music and interview show on Chicago’s WFMT for 45 years.
He never prepared his questions in advance. He interrupted his guests often. Yet Terkel was known as a master interviewer, able to establish an easy rapport with just about anyone. His secret, he once said, was simple: “It’s listening.”
And listen he did: to sultry jazz singers and insecure housewives; to a repentant Ku Klux Klan leader; to Bob Dylan, the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr., Marlene Dietrich, Bertrand Russell; to a parking lot attendant and a lesbian grandmother; to a piano tuner; to a barber.
As the late CBS newsman Charles Kuralt once said: “When Studs Terkel listens, everybody talks.”
Reviewers called Terkel’s oral histories accessible, powerful and deeply moving. “Readers will experience emotions they didn’t know they had,” the Cleveland Plain Dealer wrote of his World War II book. Though they were lengthy — some more than 600 pages — most of Terkel’s books shot straight to the best-seller list and much of his work was translated for publication abroad.
“I think he was the most extraordinary social observer this country has produced,” said Dr. Robert Coles, a Harvard professor of psychiatry who considered Terkel a friend and inspiration.
Though Terkel did interview the rich and famous, “he recognized the need to pay attention to the poor, the vulnerable, the ordinary people,” Coles said. “I pray for the day when American universities will understand that Studs Terkel is worth many departments of sociology. He’s an institution in himself.”
Louis “Studs” Terkel was born May 16, 1912, in New York City. His family moved to Chicago when he was a boy, and he quickly grew to love the city.
“It’s not that Chicago is that great,” he once said. “In fact, it’s horrible. But living here is like being married to a woman with a broken nose. There may be lovelier lovelies, but never a lovely so real.”
Real was what Terkel always wanted to get at: real people, real lives, real emotions.
He did not claim to be a social scientist. He did not seek to conduct a statistically valid poll. He simply talked to people he found interesting. He didn’t hide his liberal politics, and at times his cross-sections seemed tilted heavily to the left. In general, though, Terkel sought to reach across lines of politics, race, class, education and geography to coax America’s history from its varied voices.
” ‘Statistics’ become persons, each one unique,” he once wrote. “I am constantly astonished.”
Terkel developed his taste for gabbing as a child hanging out with the blue-collar workers who lived in his family’s Chicago rooming house. The men would get drunk on a Saturday night and talk to young Terkel for hours.
His father, a tailor, died when Terkel was 19. His mother, Anna, was able to put him through the University of Chicago for both an undergraduate and a law-school education. Yet Terkel graduated disillusioned with the law. So he worked for a time as a federal statistician. He acted in radio soap operas (usually playing a gangster, with lines of “stunning banality,” he later recalled).
Finally, in the 1940s, he moved into radio full time, first as a newscaster, then as a disc jockey and variety-show host on Chicago’s WFMT. By this time, he had thrown off his given name in favor of Studs — a tribute to the fictional Studs Lonigan, a rough-and-ready character created by novelist James T. Farrell.
Well on his way to becoming a Chicago institution, Terkel expanded into television in 1949 with “Studs’ Place.” An informal mix of banter and jazz, the show was set in a restaurant. “It was kind of like a ‘Cheers.’ But better,” Terkel said years later.
The breezy-but-smart informality of his programs won Terkel a devoted audience on both radio and TV.
“Studs’ Place” ran for four years, from 1949 to 1953 — and was only canceled, Terkel later maintained, because he was blacklisted by Sen. Joseph McCarthy for his liberal leanings. (He supported causes like rent control, desegregation and the abolition of the poll tax. “In those days, it was all quite radical,” he recalled.)
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Terkel continued to broadcast his radio interviews while writing newspaper columns, acting in Chicago theaters and even penning plays of his own.
He hit upon oral history as an outlet for his insatiable curiosity in 1967, when at the age of 55 he published “Division Street: America” — a series of conversations about race with Chicago residents. The New York Times praised the book as “a modern morality play, a drama with as many conflicts as life itself.”
Terkel had a new career.
Blending journalism, history, sociology and literature, Terkel traipsed across the country, tape recorder at the ready, for the next three and half decades.
“I tape, therefore I am,” Terkel used to say. “Only one other man has used the tape recorder with as much fervor as I — Richard Nixon.”
Terkel’s techniques came in for some criticism, especially after “The Good War” won a Pulitzer Prize. Some called his work overly sentimental. Others accused him of letting his liberal politics taint both his selection of interview subjects and his editing of conversations. Still others wondered aloud how Terkel could be considered a master author when he did little more than transcribe other people’s memories.
In response, Terkel said he had but one goal for each of his books: to open new worlds for his readers. He wanted them to feel what it was like to be a laid-off factory hand during the Depression. Or a soldier facing his first enemy fire. Or a black businessman, or a poor Latino. Or a Miss USA.
“If I can get that in a book,” Terkel said, “that’s what it’s all about.”
Thus, in “Hard Times,” he probed the guilt many senior citizens felt for having survived the Great Depression. In “Working,” he let Americans vent about their jobs — and found a depressing majority saw themselves as automatons. In “The Good War,” he got his subjects to discuss racism, officers shot in the back by their own troops, and other topics that mainstream historians had shied away from.
“No one has done more to expand the American library of voices,” President Clinton said upon awarding Terkel a National Arts Medal in 1997.
“People would say the truth to him even when they had lied to themselves for their [whole] lives,” Terkel’s longtime editor, Andre Schiffrin, added. “The key thing was his respect for them. He wasn’t there to use them. He wasn’t there to make a point. He really wanted to hear what they had to say, and he respected them.”
Terkel, his editor added, was “a true democrat.”
Editing his interviews into book-ready segments took great discipline; often, Terkel had room for less than 10% of his material. Exchanging draft after draft with Schiffrin — who published all his books at New Press — Terkel would struggle to distill an evening’s conversation into an essential, honest portrait of just five or six pages.
In his later years, Terkel returned to his original tapes to mine material for new books — and to catalog reel after dusty reel in the Chicago Historical Society archive. (The society has put excerpts from those interviews online at www.studsterkel.org.) The exercise was his way of combating what he described as “national Alzheimer’s disease” — the rush-rush, live-for-the-minute pace he deplored as both irreverent and dangerous.
“We don’t remember anything. There’s no yesterday in this country,” he often complained. “I want to recreate those yesterdays.”
Despite his passion for the past, Terkel didn’t live in it; he kept a hectic schedule of travel, interviews and writing even after signing off from his daily radio show on Jan. 1, 1988. That same year he appeared in “Eight Men Out,” a film about the Black Sox scandal of 1919, in the role of a savvy newspaperman.
In 1996, Terkel had quintuple bypass surgery — and emerged hale as ever, still dedicated to his daily routine of two martinis, two cigars, and too many hours at the electric typewriter. His book of interviews about death and dying, “Hope Dies Last,” was released in 2004, when he was 92.
In 2005, at the age of 93, Terkel had another round of open-heart surgery, which doctors described as terribly risky for a man his age. He was back at work within weeks, promoting his 16th book, “And They All Sang,” an eclectic collection of interviews from his half-century on the radio.
When officials from Rutgers University knocked on Terkel’s door in May 2007 to present him with the Stephen E. Ambrose Oral History Award, they could hear furious typing inside. At the age of 95, he was polishing his memoir.
Though he was nearly deaf by then, Terkel’s memory for names, dates and bawdy anecdotes was impeccable.
Dressed in his trademark red-and-white-checked shirt and red socks, Terkel would entertain visitors at his Chicago home with long rants against President George W. Bush. His monologues were sprinkled with a dizzying array of allusions: He’d quote Shakespeare and Henry Kissinger and “Ode on a Grecian Urn” — and then, moments later, delve into the details of the 1920s Teapot Dome scandal.
Though rarely given to introspection, Terkel did tell one interviewer that he felt he had shortchanged his family by being so absorbed in his work. His wife of 60 years, Ida, died in 1999. He is survived by their son.
Terkel planned his funeral years in advance. He wanted readings from Mark Twain and George Bernard Shaw; music from Schubert and Mississippi bluesman Big Bill Broonzy. He wanted his ashes — and Ida’s — to be scattered in the Chicago square where, as a young man, he’d stand atop a soapbox and shout out his leftist views.
And Studs Terkel wanted this as his epitaph: “Curiosity did not kill this cat.”
Simon is a former Times staff writer.
Wassup? 2008 | Old and New
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Brand New Channel | Tullycast 3
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Hackoff Anyone?
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YouTube – April 28, 2008 Bill Maher O V E R T I M E
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What Modern Conservatism Is Really All About
9/11, Bin Laden, Rove
THEY ARE US May 27, 2007
The Sociopathic Disease of Conservatism
By F. Vyan Walton
I’ve made this argument – that Conservatism is a Disease – for quite sometime, but this will be one of the first times I really get down to the nitty gritty of it. It’s been my feeling that the modern day conservative cult that thrives in America is fueled by a low-grade form of anti-social pathology and compulsive-addictive disorder. They’re like Hate-Junkies. And the number one thing they hate are Liberals.
Recently the following screed was posted as a comment on my lonely little blog.
Anonymously – of course.
It began with “Liberalism is a Mental Disorder” – and went downhill from there.
Liberalism is a mental disorder,
This is the agenda of the Left. And they don’t even try to hide it:1. Re-establish the “Fairness Doctrine” to silence Conservative Talk Radio
2. Insure the success of the Mexican (and other Third World) invasion and conquest of White America.
3. Disarm all law-abiding citizens
4. Silence all speech of which they disaprove by expanding the definition of “Hate Speech”, and pass laws to make such speech punishable by imprisonment.
5. Immediately surrender to the enemy in the Islamic War.
6. Establish Islam as a State-Protected Religion with assistance by CAIR and government schools.My immediate response was the following.
If they “don’t try to hide it” could you find any single respected “Liberal” who openly, or even on the sly – endorses any of that crap?My own view is…
1. Re-establish the “Fairness Doctrine” to silence Conservative Talk Radio.
The Fairness Doctrine would do no such thing. It would actually require that the News, be the News – while Equal Time for Commentary and Editorialism would be enforced.
2. Insure the success of the Mexican (and other Third World) invasion and conquest of White America.
By what – making them American too? I’d say that’s America conquering them.
3. Disarm all law-abiding citizens
Short 2nd Amendment Lesson, there’s nothing in there about law abiding citizens, law enforcement or even hunting. The 2nd Amendment is directed specifically at “a well regulated militia” being neccesary for the maintainance of freedom from tyranny. You in a Militia? No? Then it doesn’t apply to you.
4. Silence all speech of which they disaprove by expanding the definition of “Hate Speech”, and pass laws to make such speech punishable by imprisonment.
I do support enforcement and some moderate expansion of Hate Speech and FCC regulation of same. But not to stop such speech, simply to make it painful to be an asshole in public. If we can fine ABC for Janet Jackson’s titty we could fine Imus or Limbuagh, but they’d both still be on the air.
5. Immediately surrender to the enemy in the Islamic War.
Which Islamic War? – the one between the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq or the one in Afghanistan and Pakistan aginst Al Qaeda? In the former case, we’ve got no hunt in that fight. Do we side with the Sunni or the Shia? In the later case I’ve heard NO ONE suggest we should surrender to Al-Qeada or Hezbollah for that matter, in fact Democrats have been struggling to get Bush to send more troops to Afghanistan by taking them out of Iraq..
6. Establish Islam as a State-Protected Religion with assistance by CAIR and government schools.
Ok, that’s just ridiculous. Liberals and Progresses want protection from a state sponsored religion, y’know like the Pilgrims and the Quakers who were trying to escape the persecution of Henry VIII’s Anglican Church. Or for that matter – the Taliban.
Now I’d like to take my response a bit further, and rather than address the tit-for-tat points of Mr. Anonymous, consider exactly how anyone could come to believe such drivel. I understand of course, that these were merely boiler-plate cut-and-paste straw-man B.S. right-wing talking points. In understand that this person clearly hasn’t been reading my blog, or it’s crossposts on Dkos, Democratic Underground or OpedNews and hasn’t seen what I’ve already discussed concerning The I-Mess or Immigration or Hate Crimes Legislation. (Cuz y’know… Facts are for Pussies!) It’s clear that this just typical right-wing radio blather. I know that this is a form of Projection, making accusations of others that are simply fun-house mirror reflections of their own actual positions. (Liberlism is accused of being a “mental disorder”, when in all likelyhood it is Rabid Neo-Conservatism that is based on abnormal pathology),
I know he’s just a troll!.
I understand all this, but what I’ve always felt disturbing is how many people are more than willing to eat this stuff up and spew it right back out. Normally I wouldn’t care, except for one thing – I’m pretty sure all these deeply deluded people vote!
As I’ve written before on Hating the Enemy, (namely Liberals) the leaders of the right-wing movement are not at all shy about telling us how they feel and who we should be hating.
Let’s do a quick review (thanks to Media Matters) of some of the things that Republicans, including Hannity, regularly say about Democrats and Liberals.
Sean Hannity suggested that the DNC may have been behind the Abu Ghraib prison abuse photos, asking: “Was that a DNC plot too?” (The Sean Hannity Show, 9/10/04)
Laura Ingraham stated that Democratic Sens. John Kerry (MA), Joseph R. Biden Jr. (DE), and Barbara Boxer (CA) are “on the side of” North Korea leader Kim Jong Il because they were opposed to John R. Bolton’s nomination as U.S. ambassador to the United Nations. (Hannity & Colmes, 4/11/05).
Ann Coulter on Bill Clinton, “he was a very good rapist” and “molested the help” and on Al Gore, “Before we knew he was clinically insane” – “He seemed kinda gay”
Bill O’Reilly says he doesn’t do “personal attacks”, except of course for when he does.
On The O’Reilly Factor, O’Reilly has referred to media writer and Fox News Watch panelist Neal Gabler as a “rabid dog” and said of New York Times columnist Nicholas Kristof, “How nuts is this guy?” O’Reilly also said guest Christopher Murray “sounds like a fascist” for saying that that public institutions should not display religious symbols and called former Public Broadcasting System host Bill Moyers a “totalitarian.” Students at the University of Connecticut who heckled right-wing pundit Ann Coulter during her campus appearance there earned the title of “far-left Nazis” from O’Reilly. He’s also called John Kerry a “sissy”, and claimed that Bill Clinton would be welcomed as president by Osama bin Laden.
Jonah Goldberg has distorted comments by Sen. John Kerry (D-MA), called syndicated columnist Helen Thomas a “thespian carbuncle of bile,” and accused former President Jimmy Carter of engaging in a “mildly ghoulish exploitation of Coretta Scott King’s funeral.”
Then of course there’s Michelle Malkin whose has claimed that “the vast majority of Hispanic politicians” believe that “the American Southwest belongs to Mexico;” has referred to certain Californian politicians as “Latino supremacists;” and characterized recent immigration protests as “militant racism” marked by “virulent anti-American hatred.”
All of these people, are playing The Fear Card. Fear the brown-skins and the darkies. Fear the muslims. Fear the fags. Fear the ACLU. And Fear the Liberals who somehow have this crazy idea that America is supposed to be somekind of “Land of the Free” where all kinds of weird and different and disgusting people are supposed to be able to “Seek the American Dream” or some such nonesense.John Dean has written about this strategic re-writing of Americas History in his book “Conservatives without Conscience”
In their efforts to present conservatism as an American tradition, conservatives have also reinterpreted the U.S. Constitution. One of the key elements of the Constitution is the establishment of a unique republic, in that a federal system would coexist with state and local governments. Before it was ratified many opponents attacked its progressive and innovative nature, for far from representing teh status quo, the Constitution was dramatically liberal.
James Madison defended it in The Federalist Papers by explaining that the founders “have not suffered a blind veneration for antiquity, for custom” but rather employed “numerous innovations… in favor of private rights and public happiness.” Madison sid that “precedent could not be discovered,” for there was no other government” on the face of the globe” that provided a model. Madison, the father of the Constitution, clearly saw his work as the opposite of conseratism.
Yet conservatives today continue to exploit xenophobia and paranoia of all things “progressive” all tucked up in nice neat American Flag wrapper of gingoism. Dean also argued that what currently drives the conservative movement is nothing less than Totalitarian Authoritarism. From his appearance on the Daily Show with John Stewart.
Dean: In dealing with that, in the Milgram experiments, where he brought people in off the street, and indeed found that he could get them to administer high voltage — what they thought was high voltage, and it wasn’t. I deal with that to show how people can set their conscience aside. In other words, how do people go into the CIA every day and carry out some of the orders for torture? How do people go into NSA and turn that incredible apparatus against Americans? This is a typical Milgram situation. I actually go beyond that to find the nature of the authoritarian personality that will follow a leader who is an authoritarian.
In Milgram it was shown that otherwise normal people would submit their own conscience to the will of an authority figure and would, if continually pushed to do so, administer a lethal level electric shocks despite the screams and protests of the intended victim. Compare this with the definition of a Sociapath.
Sociopaths are very egocentric individuals that lack a sense of personal responsibility and morality. They may be impulsive, manipulative, reckless, quarrelsome, and consistent liars. Sociopaths are usually unable to sustain relationships and have a total lack of remorse for their actions. The sociopath may also be very prone to aggressive, hostile, and sometimes violent behavior. This aggression may or may not lead to criminal behavior and often takes the form of domestic violence. Along with these other actions, sociopaths often engage in self-destructive behavior such as alcoholism or addiction to drugs. This, of course, usually worsens many aspects of the sociopathic behavior. Despite these previous symptoms, the sociopath may be an excellent actor, always appearing charming, calm, and collected. They usually have a normal or above normal intelligence level and good verbal fluency. It is these qualities that sometimes place the sociopath in leadership positions within their social groups and often make it hard to spot their “black side”.
Essentially Sociopaths have no conscience, no morality as we would describe it. Whereas Dean discusses the ability for ones conscience to be selectively suppressed under specific situations and in regards to specifics types or groups of individuals when directed by a “trusted authority”. Clearly, a true sociopath doesn’t need to be directed by others – and frankly wouldn’t allow it – yet their behaviors remain markedly similar.
We can see it in the way the Bill O’Reilly can be so charming at one moment and then a raging lunatic the next. We can see it in Douglas Feith as smilingly twists reality and facts regarding Saddam and Al-Qaeda into logical linguini. We can see it with Bill Kriston, Michelle Malkin, Katie O’Beirn and Ann Coulter. These people are the standard bearers of the right-wing. The “Authorities” to which many for which many of our fellow citizens are willfully neutered their own conscience in aquiesence to. Here’s an example from Dr. Bob Altemeyer, one of Dean’s primary sources, intoducing his new book – The Authoritarians.
For example, take the following statement: “Once our government leaders and the authorities condemn the dangerous elements in our society, it will be the duty of every patriotic citizen to help stomp out the rot that is poisoning our country from within.” Sounds like something Hitler would say, right? Want to guess how many politicians, how many lawmakers in the United States agreed with it? Want to guess what they had in common?
Or how about a government program that persecutes political parties, or minorities, or journalists the authorities do not like, by putting them in jail, even torturing and killing them. Nobody would approve of that, right? Guess again.
The idea that “All Men are created equal, and are endowed by their creator with inalienable rights” is lost on these people. All rights become optional, based on whether that person passes the proper litmus test. Maintaining Habaes Corpus is “giving terrorists special rights.” Monica Goodling did “nothing wrong” when she attempted to achieve ideological purity within the Justice Dept, that’s the way it should be. Tim Griffin did nothing wrong by systematically caging the votes of African-American Troops while their were serving in Iraq. Who said their opinion and vote should matter? War Crimes and Torture are good for our intelligence, that is if we did do the torture. Karl Rove is just so misunderstood. I need my tax money for the down payment on my second condo. The poor are just lazy and deserve what they get. Iraq had it coming. The President has the “inherent power” to do any damn thing he feels like. That Vanity Fair Media Whore Valerie Plame-Wilson had it coming too. Good healthcare is for those who can afford it. Whose Bin Laden, that Obama guy running for President? Free Libby! Climate Change is just a hoax and even if it’s not we didn’t do it – it was sunspots, or volcanos, or maybe all the animals in the rain-forest farted – so there’s nothing we can do to stop it. Stop bugging me, I need to refill the tank on my new Cadillac Escrapade, anyone got change for $1000?See, I can do The Running-Man (from the 80’s) and the “Straw-man” too. I’m like Ambidextrous and stuff.
All of these arguements are about shifting blame and responsibility for all the ills of the world – to someone else. Anyone but us. It’s Them, always Them!
The real truth about being liberal is simply that you realize that we are all connected. Economically. Bio-chemically. Thermo-dynamically. What happens at the bottom of the ocean can change weather patterns across half the globe. What happens in a cave in Afghanistan can change an entire National pathology on the other side of the world. The truth about Liberals isn’t that we “Hate America First”, we love America’s promise and potential and are angered and disgusted when we see her fail to live up to that promise – that All Men Really Are Created Equal and that preserving and protecting those rights from government overreach – beside being “Really Hard Work” – is the primary goal of our nation,
With that view in mind we don’t fear or even really hate conservatives, we only hate what they’ve done to regress this nation back toward the type of totalitarian and repressives states that predated the Great Elightenment and the truly progressive vision that birthed this nation. Those regressive forces will always be there, but the tide of history is not on their side – it’s on ours.
We are the True Sons of Liberty (oh, look a Punk Rock reference!) – not them.
I don’t hate conservatives. I for one, pity them. They need help. (Treatment, Rehab, Deprogramming, a Colonic – anything!) Even if they don’t deserve it, certainly won’t seek it and won’t return it. If they honestly and openly ask for it, Liberals will provide it.
Does anyone believe conservatives would do the same?
Vyan
Authors Website: http://www.truth2powerproject.com
Authors Bio:
Born and Bred in South Central LA. I spent 12 years working in the IT Dept. for federal contractor Northrop-Grumman on classified and high security projects such as the B2 Bomber. After Northrop I became an IT consultant with the state of California in Sacramento and worked on projects with the Dept of Consumer Affairs and CalTrans, as well as projects for Kaiser Permanente in Oakland. Now living in Los Angeles on my own independant web design company.
The New York Herald Sun 