The Republic of T.

If this doesn’t bring a smile to your face and/or a tear to your eye… Well, I don’t know what to say.

Playing For Change | Song Around The World “Stand By Me” from Concord Music Group on Vimeo.

More after the jump.

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• How to Be a Better Writer in the Next 10 Minutes — Copyblogger
  Step away from the keyboard.
  (tags: writing)
• How to Be A Writer With Principles | eHow.com
  Anyone can be a writer, but being a writer with principles means that you avoid stepping on others whether you are successful or not. It means that you're not a writer with a big ego.
  (tags: writing)
• So, you want to be a writer? Here's how. – The Boston Globe
  If you don't value your own time, other people won't either. Trust me, you can't write a novel in stolen minutes outside your daughter's tap class.
  (tags: writing)
• A Guide to Becoming a Better Writer: 15 Practical Tips – Stepcase Lifehack
  Start typing away — it doesn’t matter what you write — and get the fingers moving.
  (tags: writing)
• How To Become a Writer | How To Do Things.com
  If others have told you they enjoy reading your emails, editorials, or work-related communications then it's possible you have a natural writing knack.
  (tags: writing)
• How to Become a Writer Or, Have You Earned This Cliche?
  First, try to be something, anything, else.
  (tags: writing)
• How to Become a Writer – wikiHow
  Think about what you want to write, instead of what you want to get from writing. You won't get anywhere if all you're after is money.
  (tags: writing)
• How to Become a Writer Who Writes
  Until you name yourself Writer, you will never be a writer who writes (and keeps writing).
  (tags: writing)
• So You Want to Be a Writer – The Atlantic (August 14, 2006)
  Since the magazine's early years, other Atlantic authors have taken up the same challenge, advising young writers on developing what is essentially an inborn gift.
  (tags: writing)
• How to Be a Writer | eHow.com
  To be a professional writer, you will need to do more than just rent a cabin for a month!
  (tags: writing)

Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 29th through May 1st:

• Do Conservatives Understand Torture? –
• The End of the Middle Class as We Know It –
• Bob Cesca: 100 Days of Competence Versus Crazy –
• Why Arlen Specter’s defection should terrify the GOP. –
• House Passes Matthew Shepard Act –
• Dick Cheney’s Torture Hypocrisy –
• US Torture and Consequences? –
• How Republicans Can Regain Power –

It’s been pointed out by many — including the president himself — how absurd it is to Obama’s success in cleaning up messes that were decades in the making, based on his first 100 days in office. It’s equally absurd to expect that 100 days in the administration of our first African American president to even begin to address 390 years of racial history in this country. But it’s at least an opportunity to assess where we really are, where we’re headed, and how far we’ve yet to go.

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 28th through April 29th:

• More Ironic Statements on Torture –
• Editorial: A Challenge to Voting Rights –
• Bush Administration Got the Guantanamo it Wanted –
• Waterboarding the Rule of Law –
• The Privatization of the English Language –
• New Evidence of Torture Prison in Poland –
• Torture and Lies –
• Mainely Marriage: The Way Life Should Be –
• The He-Cession –

I just want to point out what specter — the word, not the party-switching Senator — means.

spec·ter (spěk’tər) n. 

   1. A ghostly apparition; a phantom.
   2. A haunting or disturbing image or prospect: the terrible specter of nuclear war.

Not that different, if you as me, that what this means.

Veteran Sen. Arlen Specter, R-Pennsylvania, intends to switch from the Republican to the Democratic Party on Tuesday, multiple sources said.

A Specter party switch would give Democrats a filibuster-proof Senate majority of 60 seats if Al Franken holds his current lead in the disputed Minnesota Senate race.

Specter, a five-term Senate veteran, was expected to face a very tough primary challenge in 2010 from former Rep. Pat Toomey, who nearly defeated Specter in the Pennsylvania GOP Senate primary in 2004.

Numerous Republicans are angry with Specter over his recent vote in support of President Obama’s $787 billion stimulus plan.

Specter was one of only three GOP senators who voted for the measure.

Filibuster-proof majority? Bwaaaaaaaaaahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahahah!!!!

That’s funny. As a co-worker of mine aptly put it, “To get a filibuster proof majority we really need about 80 Democrats in the Senate,” because some of them vote with Republicans often enough that real party affiliation is at least a subject of some debate. Unless his voting record significantly and suddenly changes, This doesn’t change much.

Anyway, he’s already been welcomed aboard, though I think there should be a probationary period or something, like when you start a new job. Because, we don’t have to take him. Right?

It’s good for him, I understand. But I don’t see how it’s good for progressives. Rats always leave a sinking ship. It’s good for the rats. But they have to go somewhere after they hit the water, which is not so good for you, if you if they end up at your house.

Know what I mean?

It was five years ago today that we first glimpsed the pictures from Abu Ghraib.

We were told that it was all the fault of “a few bad apples.”

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 23rd through April 27th:

• GOP Stripped Flu Pandemic Preparedness From Stimulus [UPDATED] –
• Maude, Golden Girls actress Bea Arthur dies –
• Congratulations to Iowan Newly Weds –
• More Atheists Shout It From the Rooftops –
• Reagan’s Convention Against Torture –
• William Fisher: Happy Anniversary, Abu Ghraib! –
• Iraq Anti-Gay Torture, Murders Continue –
• Defending the Torture Memos –
• Op-Ed Columnist: The Banality of Bush White House Evil –
• Op-Ed Columnist: Time to Come Clean –
• Torture by Any Other Name –
• How Torture Worked to Sell the Iraq War –
• The Sick Logic of the CIA Memos: Abuse Isn’t Torture If a Doctor Is There –
• Republicans Threaten to Become Bigger Assh*les –
• Growing Up at Gitmo –
• Demanding Accountability for Bush-era Torture –

This is getting ridiculous. Now conservatives are volunteering to be waterboarded. Now? Seriously? Where were they for the past eight years, when we were doing that and much, much more to people, many of whom weren’t guilty of more than jaywalking, let alone of terrorism against the United States?

Now, here comes Sean Hannity, belatedly offering himself up to be waterboarded.

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I’ve been spending my evenings pouring over the torture memos. I’m not sure what I’m looking for, or what I expect to find, but I want to get an idea of how bad it got. (Besides, you can find amazing things in the footnotes. Ask Marcy Wheeler a/k/a EmptyWheel. Though if I found something, it’d be days before I actually had time to post about it. Maybe even a week. Unless I just did a quick copy-and-paste. Otherwise, I’m pretty much left with analysis long after the story has broken.)

It won’t make headlines, but I have given the “torture memos” a nickname, if only in my own head: “The Not-So-Funny Papers” or the “Un-Funny Papers.”

Anyway, while researching material for a possibly upcoming post, I came across all kinds of editorial cartoons about the Bush administrations torture policies. “The Not-So-Funny Papers” popped into my head again, and this post was born as a means of sharing them.

Enjoy.

She meant well, I know.

Years ago, after I got a letter from my mom. Also in the envelope was a newspaper clipping. I unfolded it to find it was an article about a company that made lifts for short men to wear in their shoes, in order to achieve a few inches of height. When I spoke with her on the phone, she asked me if I got the clipping, and I confirmed that I did. I didn’t have the heart to tell her that, as a gay man, I’d never hear the end of it if I got caught wearing lifts. I’d be better off just wearing heels or platform shoes.

That wasn’t the first such exchnge between my mom and I. When I was in college and home for a weekend visit, she handed me a newspaper clipping about fashion tips for short men. (One that I remembered was to avoid wearing cuffed pants. Reason: the cuff breaks the line of the leg, shortening it even further.) Again, she meant well. My guess is that she knew men of less-than-average height are generally at a disadvantage, and wanted to help me out if she could. (Studies have documented heightism in employment and politics. Plus, short kids are more likely to be bullied.)

And once, while watching television, we came across a 20/20 program about how short men get, well, short shrift.

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She did it to me again. Every time, I tell myself that I’m not going to let the mindless blather that dribbles from Peggy Noonan’s lips set me off. Every time, I tell myself it’s going to be the last time. Every time, I tell myself there’s nothing more to say, because she couldn’t possibly get any more nonsensical without someone (maybe her editors at the Wall Street Journal) making sure the woman gets the help she so obviously needs.

And every time, she does it to me again.

This time — channeling either Patsy Cline or Nancy Sinatra — in response to the release of the administrations torture memos and other documents, Peggy Noonan wants to “just keep walking.”

While most of the nonsense came from the usual suspects (Rove, Armey, Kristol), perhaps the most striking argument came from Peggy Noonan, the Reagan speechwriter turned Wall Street Journal columnist.

“Sometimes in life you want to just keep walking,” Noonan said, adding, “Sometimes, I think, just keep walking…. Some of life just has to be mysterious.”

It was, to be sure, one of the more ridiculous arguments of the debate. Noonan wasn’t prepared to defend the Bush administration’s abuses, but she suggested accountability is necessarily a bad idea because … well, apparently it has something to do with walking.

Where to begin?

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 22nd through April 23rd:

• How Bush’s Torture Helped al-Qaeda –
• Chu wasn't the 'baffled' one –
• Bob Cesca: The Tortured Logic of the Torture Superfans –
• Hate Crimes Mark-Up…Round #1 –
• Sara Whitman: Another Dead Boy –
• Eben Esterhuizen: No More Mandelas: What America Can Learn From the ANC's Abuse of Hope –
• Torture’s Paradigm Shift –
• The Latest Republican Bigotry Roundup –
• 13 Breathtaking Effects of Cutting Back on Meat –

I’m digging through all the stuff I bookmarked to read later, and finally getting to some of it. (OK. I’m not bothering with anything that’s over a month old.). This video was near the top. You may have seen it, but give it a look if you haven’t.

I don’t know who this guy is, but he shreds the religious right’s arguments one by one, and isn’t afraid to say when they’re lying. He rocks.

See? Told ya.

Grey is the color of ghosts. Grey is the color of a dead garden. Grey is not darkness. It is the color of not-quite-dark, of just-enough-but-not-enough; just enough light to see the edges of your world, but not enough enough light to see way out; enough to see the edges of the world beyond yours, but not enough to see a way in. Grey is just enough, where the blinding nothingness of darkness would be a comfort. Grey is the color of giving up.

The darkest moment in HBO’s Grey Gardens — the hardest to see, and (for me) the hardest to watch — was appropriately grey.

WARNING: SPOILERS AFTER THE JUMP. If you haven’t seen it yet, and don’t want to know what happens in the “drama” part of the

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• Not Again! 24 Great Films Too Painful To Watch Twice | The Best Article Every day
  Why does a list like this make me want to update my Netflix queue?
  (tags: movies)

Because I’m not sure that I’m going to get around to doing any “real” writing today (though I’ve got a couple of things on tap to post tomorrow), this meme I came across via Liza looked like fun.

Eric and I recently discovered a shared fascination with the slew of impossibly named NPR hosts we listen to every day: Renee Montagne, Steve Inskeep, Corey Flintoff, Korva Coleman, Kai Ryssdal, Dina Temple-Raston.

In fact, we’ve often wondered what it would be like to be one of them. A Nina Totenberg or a Renita Jablonski. A David Kestenbaum or a Lakshmi Singh. Even (on our most ambitious days) a Cherry Glaser or a Sylvia Poggioli.

So finally, after years of Fresh Air sign-off ambitions, we came up with a system for creating our own NPR Names. Here’s how it works: You take your middle initial and insert it somewhere into your first name. Then you add on the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited.

Uh-oh. I knew there’d be a problem. “Then you add on the name of the smallest foreign town you’ve ever visited”?

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Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 21st through April 22nd:

• It’s the End of the World As They Know It –
• Mike Papantonio: The Real Tax Outrage –
• With Son in Remission, Family Looks for Coverage –
• "Daily Show" Takes On Torture Supporters (VIDEO) –
• Why It’s Necessary to Fast-Track Universal Health Care –
• Waterboarding: A Mental as Well as Physical Trauma –
• FT: Business Needs To Speak Out Against Greed –
• Op-Ed Columnist: Children in Peril –
• Bybee Must Go –

Here are some of the people writing about some of the stuff I wish I had time to write about, for April 16th through April 21st:

• Progressivism Goes Mainstream –
• Editorial: The Torturers’ Manifesto –
• ‘A New Era’ –
• The Bush Administration’s Stunning Geneva Hypocrisy –
• Op-Ed Columnist: The Bigots’ Last Hurrah –
• The Shipping News –
• US Future Depends on Torture Accountability –
• Reflections on Teabaggers –
• GOP to New Orleans: Liberals Did It –
• GOP Missed Opportunities Presented by Tea Parties –
• Hey, Economics Geniuses! What Happened? –
• Tempest In A Tea Party: The "Daily Show" Takes On Teabaggers (VIDEO) –
• Tea and Ignorance –

Shelly Palmer asks a rather disturbing question.

How many people are now looking for jobs that no longer exist? If you used to be a computer photo typesetter, you were replaced in the 1980′s with desktop publishing. Now, if you had that skill set, you probably could have opened a boutique desktop-based print pre-production house and done fine. Or, you could have looked for work in the transportation or food services industry. They are all about as related.

Perhaps you’d like to be a theme music composer for television or a graphic designer for the broadcast industry. How about a gig as a professional studio trombone player, or a cameraperson on a remote three-person news crew?

All of these jobs still exist in some form, but they are far from dream jobs. In fact, these production skills have been commoditized and practitioners can look forward to making about the same kind of money as they would waiting tables in a good restaurant.

So, what’s the right answer?

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