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Archive for December 2004
Maybe Snowball Is Only In Intensive Care
Posted by on 12/31/04 at 4:51 pm
Category: Politics
ra Glass, who originally produced The Santaland Diaries dropped by to leave a comment on the Snowball controversy that started here at Outside The Tent. Here’s what he had to say:
on Friday, December 31st, Ira Glass said:Hi everyone -
I produced this David Sedaris story for Morning Edition back in 1992, and broadcast a much longer, uncut version of the story this Christmas on the show I host, This American Life.
I understand everyone’s concern and alarm over this, believe me. Every week it seems, I have to call my attorney to ask if it’s still okay to say a phrase like “pissed off” or “god damn” in the current FCC environment.
But I’m guessing that the reason NPR cut Crumpet from David’s story had nothing to do with fear of the FCC, the right wing, or its own listeners.
When I first produced Santaland for Morning Edition, the show gave more time to feature stories. In the current news environment, NPR understandably wants to devote more time to news and analysis, so features get shoved in smaller segments at the end of the hour. To run Santaland today means running it shorter. So someone at NPR had to cut over two minutes. I urge you all to listen to the original story and ask you to think about what you’d cut. Every section of the story works; every section makes a different point. It’s really a judgment call.
I believe this was an entirely innocent editorial decision. I might’ve cut the same stuff myself.
As a longtime NPR producer, I think there’s a lot the network can be criticized for, but honestly, it’s a pretty gay-friendly news source.
Consider please: 490 public radio stations - which is to say, nearly the entire public radio system - ran our version of David’s story last week. The program directors are not shy about letting me know when I broadcast something that gives them heartache or heartburn or grief from their listeners. I’ve not gotten one complaint.
So … while I understand everyone’s alarm at Snowball’s excision … and while I think it’s vitally important to sound the sirens when something like this happens (I didn’t know about the cut till I read it here and thanks for that) … I think this case is not more proof of the Rising Tide of Badness that so many of us feel right now.
As for boycotting your local station at pledge time over this, I hope you’ll keep in mind that your local station probably RAN David’s story on our show this year, that your local station doesn’t control Morning Edition’s editorial decisions on this kind of thing in any case, and then do what you think is best.
I’m still not convinced that the NPR excision was entirely innocent, but Ira Glass is, in my view, one of the good guys and certainly his views on all this should be taken into account. And thanks, Ira, for taking the time to respond here.
It’s Good To Be The King
Posted by on 12/31/04 at 1:50 pm Category: Politics
reaking news on the corrupt bugkiller front. Of course, these two items are completely unrelated.
Item 1: Texas prosecutors today dropped charges against Sears for illegal campaign contributions in exchange for Sears’s cooperation in the on-going investigation into whether Delay (or others) solicited corporate contributions to a Delay-associated PAC in violation of Texas law.
Item 2: House GOP leaders urge elimination of ethics rule that allow discipline of a Member for bringing discredit on the House even if no specific rules were violated. The same leaders urge an additional change that would allow the Republican Chairman of the Ethics Committee to deep-six any investigation for any reason.
Let’s play Calvin Ball!
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Everybody Loves Clarence
Posted by on 12/31/04 at 8:41 am Category: Politicshy on earth would Justice Thomas’s former law clerks give him $1200 in batteries last year? Just wondering.
Second String Liar
Posted by on 12/31/04 at 8:13 am Category: Politics
rent Duffy took over the job of lying for the President from Scott McClellan at yesterday’s press gaggle. You might remember Trent as the guy who made up imaginary rain to explain W’s bike accident in Crawford. Here’s what Trent had to say yesterday about the upcoming coronation ceremonies:
Q Given the cost of aid to Asia, the cost of the war, is there any thought being given to toning down some of the lavish inaugural activities?MR. DUFFY: I think the inaugural activities are paid for out of private contributions, not governmental funds. I would refer you to the Inaugural Committee for an answer for that.
Wrong, Trent. The Inaugural Committee doesn’t pay for security, construction and all the governmental incidental expenses related to the inauguration. In 2001, Congress coughed up $6.2 million to reimburse inaugural expenses and $1 million to reimburse expenses incurred by the Joint Congressional Committee on Inaugural Ceremonies. Trent is destined to stay on the second string at the White House until he learns to lie better.
Peggy in Noonerland
Posted by on 12/30/04 at 8:30 am Category: Politics
eggy Noonan, herself a tsunoonanami of idiocy, was, of course, unable to resist offering her own xanax-drenched insights on the tsunami that devasted Indonesia, Sumatra, Sri Lanka, Thailand and other parts of Asia and Africa:
What to say of those who’ve latched on to the tragedy to promote their political agendas, from the U.N. official who raced to call the U.S. “stingy,” to the global-warming crowd, to administration critics who jumped at the chance to call the president insensitive because he was vacationing in Texas and didn’t voice his sympathy quickly enough? Such people are slyly asserting their own, higher sensitivity and getting credit for it, which is odd because what they’re actually doing is using dead people to make cheap points.
So let me see if I have this right: people who say that first world countries should spend more to help the victims of tragedy are using dead people to make cheap points whereas right wing hack columnists who accuse them of using dead people to make cheap points aren’t using dead people to make cheap points? Peggy, please, put down your pen and the xanax bottle before someone gets hurt.
S.Z. at World O’Crap elegantly finishes off the rest of the Pegger’s preposterous musings on this horrible tragedy.
The folks at Amazon have made it easy for you to contribute to the Red Cross tsunami relief effort. Just click here.
Gathering the wagons
Posted by on 12/29/04 at 10:26 am Category: Politics
heez, does DeLay have pictures of Coach Hastert nude wrestling with Ed Shrock or what? That is the only reasonable explanation for the lengths to which Hastert and his fellow Republicanists will go to protect the corrupt bug killer:
House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert is leaning toward removing the House ethics committee chairman, who admonished House Majority Leader Tom DeLay this fall and has said he will treat DeLay like any other member, several Republican aides said yesterday.Although Hastert (Ill.) has not made a decision, the expectation among leadership aides is that the chairman, Rep. Joel Hefley (R-Colo.), long at odds with party leaders because of his independence, will be replaced when Congress convenes next week.
The aides said a likely replacement is Rep. Lamar S. Smith, one of DeLay’s fellow Texans, who held the job from 1999 to 2001. Smith wrote a check this year to DeLay’s defense fund.
How To Win Friends and Influence People
Posted by on 12/28/04 at 8:59 am Category: Politics
he White House has pledged $15 million in aid to the victims of the tsunami tragedy with a death toll already in excess of 40,000. Let’s put that figure in perspective.
The cost of the inaugural proceedings in January for George W. Bush is estimated to be $30 million.
The Federal Government, under Bush and the GOP, has authorized or spent:
Oh, and $15 million pays for about 79 minutes of the War in Iraq.
Disgraceful.
They Killed Snowball! Those Bastards!!
Posted by on 12/26/04 at 1:17 pm Category: Politics
ased on comments on my original post, at Atrios, AMERICAblog and other blogs that also linked to my post, a number of people have said that they heard the uncensored version of Santaland Diaries on their local NPR affiliates. And many of them would have heard it because This American Life from WBEZ ran the entire, uncensored version on its show for December 24-26.
But This American Life is a Public Radio International production, not an NPR production. Some NPR affiliates (like WAMU in DC) air it, while other NPR affiliates (like WETA in DC) do not. So my claim that NPR censored Sedaris for the first time this year stands.
A troll dropped by on the original post to comment that the Snowball excerpt never should have aired in the first place because it was inappropriate. But we all know that trolls hate elves, principally because elves get laid and trolls don’t.
The Liars’ Club: Sunday Morning Edition
Posted by on 12/26/04 at 10:57 am Category: Politics
itch McConnell, GOP Senate Whip, barely pushed himself away from his Christmas roast before he was on CNN this morning lying again. With a straight face McConnell took a swipe at the Democrats when saying this:
Well, I’m sorry that we started filibustering judges in the last few years. It had not happened in the previous 200 years history of our country.
That is, of course, false. The Republicans filibustered Abe Fortas’s proposed Supreme Court appointment in 1968.
Christmas Dog-Blogging
Posted by on 12/25/04 at 9:12 am Category: Politics
anny guards the new blue ball that Santa put under the tree for her. A few pieces of beef tenderloin and her Christmas will be complete.
She wishes a Merry Christmas to one and all (except for a few squirrels and, of course, a few Republicans).
Alas, poor Snowball!
Posted by Clif on 12/24/04 at 9:15 am Category: Politics
ational Public Radio, the last bastion of the so-called liberal media, former ground zero of liberal commentary on the airwaves, and target of wingnut abuse for more than thirty years, has finally caved and gone to the dark side. The “moral values” voters, and perhaps Michael Powell, have invaded NPR’s Mass Ave offices and have censored a Christmas classic - David Sedaris reading from his Santaland Diaries, where Sedaris describes a month he spent as a Christmas elf for Macy’s.
When Santaland Diaries was first aired 12 years ago, it was more than a little daring because of its description of a flirtation with Snowball, another male elf. It became one of the most requested tapes from NPR. Six months later, the New York Times had this to say about the Snowball business:
Before the broadcast . . ., which told of a brief and disappointing flirtation with another elf named Snowball, the “Morning Edition” producers worried about Mr. Sedaris’s discussing his homosexuality. “You very seldom hear a gay man on the radio,” Mr. Glass said. “I mean one who isn’t talking about being a gay man with AIDS or discussing gays in the military. We got a lot of letters that said, ‘Thanks for letting David Sedaris on the radio, not as a gay person, but just as he is.’ “
Well, what worried the NPR producers in 1992 has them scared shitless in 2004. Snowball was cut from this morning’s rebroadcast.
Here’s the offending passage:
The overall cutest elf is a fellow from Queens named Snowball. Snowball tends to ham it up with the children, sometime literally tumbling down the path to Santa’s house. I tend to frown on that sort of behavior but Snowball is hands down adorable — you want to put him in your pocket. Yesterday we worked together as Santa Elves and I became excited when he started saying things like, “I’d follow you to Santa’s house any day, Crumpet!”It made me dizzy, this flirtation.
By mid-afternoon I was running into walls. At the end of our shift we were in the bathroom, changing clothes, when suddenly we were surrounded by three Santas and five other elves — all of them were guys that Snowball was flirting with.
Snowball just leads elves on, elves and Santas. He is playing a dangerous game.
So, when the next begathon comes around, call up your local NPR and ask them what the fuck they did with Snowball and then tell these craven cowards that you are not giving them another nickel until they bring Snowball back.
UPDATE: The audio of the original broadcast can be found here. Thanks to commenter MKT for the link. The Snowball story starts at 2:54. It differs only slightly from the passage quoted above which was the version printed in Barrel Fever.
FURTHER UPDATE: here.
THIRD UPDATE: Ira Glass weighs in on the disappearance of Snowball here.
The Least Sane Person . . . Ever
Posted by on 12/23/04 at 10:43 am Category: Politics
t’s Thursday, and as regularly and reliably as a Tourette’s Syndrome tic reappears, Peggy “Dolphin Lady” Noonan’s weekly musing graces the pages of the Wall Street Journal. Today Peggy peers back into her (quite distant) childhood and remembers Christmas when she was 7 years old:
I was 7 years old and what I wanted for Christmas was a desk. I don’t know why. I think I had it in my head that grown-up women who were glamorous had desks.
She wanted a desk? What seven year old, you ask, wants a desk? But this is Peggy we’re talking about and, for once, I believe her. Just as the Bad Seed would have wanted an axe for Christmas, Peggers wanted a desk, the instrument by which she too would begin her own criminal career as a writer if not stopped.
But I didn’t expect to get it because desks were huge and expensive and shiny and . . . well, it was unlikely.
That “well, it was unlikely” is rather ominous when you think about it. I suppose the Peggers had done something really, really bad, like drowning a classmate for winning the penmanship competition when everyone knew Peggy had the best handwriting. But, then it’s Christmas and shit unexpected things happen:
And yet that Christmas morning I ran to the tree with my sisters and over on the side was a desk. . . . It was small, maybe two feet high, and beige, and made of plywood. It had a drawer for pencils. The plywood wasn’t finished and if you rubbed against it the wrong way you’d get a splinter, but it was the most beautiful desk in human history.
An infected splinter could be fatal when Peggy was seven and antibiotics were unheard of. Now we can guess what Momma and Pappa Noonan were up to, but a century or so later it’s apparent that their original plan to have a filthy splinter save the world from Peggy didn’t quite work out.
I was overwhelmed. I got a kitchen chair and sat at it. It was fabulous. It is my favorite Christmas moment. What followed was better. I sat there, closed my eyes, put my hands over them, and tried to imagine the first Christmas. And I saw it. I saw it like a movie. It was a blue black night and . . . .
I’m not going to subject you to Peggy’s florid description of the nativity which involves a wooden shanty and some steamy cow breath.
And I thought: It’s all true. It’s not just a story, it’s true, it really happened. This struck me like a thunderbolt
Peggy gets a plywood desk and finds Jesus, all at once! Just imagine if she’d gotten, say, just a doll instead. She would have become a Hare Krishna, last seen dancing in a saffron robe and banging a tambourine in La Guardia before mercifully disappearing from public view. But Peggy got a desk and the rest, unfortunately, is history.
The Least Funny Woman Ever
Posted by on 12/23/04 at 6:21 am Category: Politics
ittle Poddie drops by The Corner to engage culture maven Jonah Goldberg on the subject of comic straight men and comes up with, well, Margaret Dumont:
She was the dowager type . . . with absolutely no sense of humor whatsoever. Never before, never since, never again will we see her like.
Oh, I dunno, Little Poddie, but Mommie Poddie comes to mind as another dowager type with absolutely no sense of humor. I mean Mamma Poddie, a/k/a/ Midge Decter, said this:
The right to legal marriage that [homosexual men] are demanding is not about them - it is about the rest of us. It is, and is meant to be, a spit in the eye of the way we live.
Uh-huh. All those gay men are getting married not for love, silverware or any of the other regular reasons; they’re doing it just to piss off Midge Decter and her ilk. I’d say it’s a safe bet that Mommie Poddie has a sense of humor as deficient as her sense of decency.