Back in Watergate and Viet Nam, many of us finally took it to the streets. It had to be done.

I’m sure many of us feel this “in our guts” and sense we are too old to do it again. There was a comment recently asking where the young people are.

It was the massive marches and demonstrations that could not be ignored.

WE ARE BEING IGNORED and we are beyond disheartened.

Just so you know, I read nearly everything but have lost the desire to post. I thought that challenging memes that are developed here might be healthy, but maybe I was wrong.

It might be interesting to break out the Doobie Brothers “Takin it to the Streets” and see what the temperature is of FDL.

swag @ 3

Don’t mean to be an ass, but “home in on” as opposed to “hone in on,” please.

Now to read the post. Happy Friday, all!

Actually, home is more appropriate, IMO. To hone is to sharpen or to whet, as hone one’s skills. To home is to proceed or draw attention toward a goal. Rule of thumb; if you use “in”, use home, rather than hone.

Which, I will add before reading skills decline further, was precisely the point of my post. So your post is to emphasize this point?

Robert Chapman @ 215

On the other hand — and there is always another hand — maybe this line just indicates the potential equivocation in phrases like “adult supervision.” Inherent slippage in language. Differance. Republicans are from Mars, Dems from Venus. Whatever.

Getting a neat mental image of a many-handed monster! Not sure I completely follow your comment, but this has always been about language; the repub tactic of ‘defining’ goes back at least to Dukakis’ rejection of the term ‘liberal’, which the repigs had made into a curse. [Emphasis mine: rbc] The late Lee Atwater honed the use of emotionally-charged attack language to a fine weapon, and Rove is his unworthy successor.

Restatement of argument: My first reaction to the WSJ call for “adult supervision from the DOJ” was some version of “hmm, unintended irony” or “there’s the pot calling the kettle black” because as we all know DOJ has not recently proven itself capable of anything even remotely like “adult supervision” in the sense that most of us use the term.

I thought next that the WSJ was engaged in cynical and Atwater-esque perversions of language for political purposes. After all, only the grossest Machiavellian in some uber-Orwellian dystopia could use the terms “adult supervision” and “DOJ” connected by the preposition “by” rather than “of.” It’s a consipracy of Republican dirty tricks directed at the very core of meaning!!!

Then I wondered: maybe when the WSJ calls for “adult supervision by the DOJ,” they do in fact mean, in an honest and straightforward way, that the DOJ should be charged with doing to special prosecutors and independent counsels (even though I’m a lawyer, I can’t keep the difference between the two straight in my head) exactly what it does for US Attorneys: make them subordinate to politics. Maybe in WSJ language, “adult” simply means “responsible to the governing party.”
So, maybe (MAYBE: I am not certain about this at all) there isn’t really a cynical ploy to turn language upside down at all. There are two languages that share a false cognate –words in different languages that look the same and are wrongly thought to be related in origin (German haben and Latin habere) or in meaning (French avertissement and English advertisement). Maybe the WSJ’s call for “adult supervision” not an attempt to corrupt our language at all — any more than Anglophones are trying to mess with French by “misusing” advertisement — so much as a normal use of their language. Anglophones aren’t doing anything to French and aren’t “making” the French word anything at all. And maybe my first two reactions were the result of my not realizing that outside of the liberal circles in which I run, that is considered the “normal” meaning.
In other words, maybe the reason some of us were shocked by the WSJ’s language is the same reason an English-speaker with only one year of high school French would be shocked by a Francophone’s use of the verb “blesser” to mean “to wound or injure” rather than “make happy or give a benediction to”: we aren’t fluent in conservativese.

Sorry no link. The recipe is my own. But I’d be happy to share. Though not sure how to send it to you.

If the general public could only be honestly, openly, and frequently told what Valerie Wilson did, and what she worked on and how she risked her life to keep the world safe, maybe then they would see the extent of the damage done by this administration by outing her and then begin to realize how drastically that may affect them personally in the future.

Libby is but a crumb in this story, and he needs to be sentenced accordingly. He is not a nice guy.

Hey Rayne – glad we’re seeing the same patterns!

Sheldon Rampton and John Staubers’ great book Trust Us, We’re Experts provides the user’s guide to this – makes recognizing the disruption patters (and IDing the agents of chaos) far easier.

They also wrote Toxic Sludge is Good For You – another fave.

In their book, Trust Us, We’re Experts: How Industry Manipulates Science and Gambles with Your Future, Sheldon Rampton and John Stauber offer a chilling expos on the manufacturing of “independent experts.” Public relations firms and corporations have seized upon a slick new way of getting you to buy what they have to sell: Let you hear it from a neutral “third party,” like a professor or a pediatrician or a soccer mom or a watchdog group. The problem is, these third parties are usually anything but neutral. They have been handpicked, cultivated, and meticulously packaged to make you believe what they have to say–preferably in an “objective” format like a news show or a letter to the editor. And in some cases, they have been paid handsomely for their “opinions.”

For example:

* You think that you’re witnessing a spontaneous public debate over a national issue? When the Justice Department began antitrust investigations of the Microsoft Corporation in 1998, Microsoft’s public relations firm countered with a plan to plant pro-Microsoft articles, letters to the editor, and opinion pieces all across the nation, crafted by professional media handlers but meant to be perceived as off-the-cuff, heart-felt testimonials by “people out there.”

* You think that all grassroots organizations are truly grassroots? In 1993, a group called Mothers Opposing Pollution (MOP) appeared, calling itself “the largest women’s environmental group in Australia, with thousands of supporters across the country.” Their cause: A campaign against plastic milk bottles. It turned out that the group’s spokesperson, Alana Maloney, was in truth a woman named Janet Rundle, the business partner of a man who did P.R. for the Association of Liquidpaperboard Carton Manufacturers-the makers of paper milk cartons.

One additional point, a lot of us thought our country was in trouble at some level. Now many are realizing that our country is really, really in deep trouble. It does make one angry. I passed thru my white heat of anger a couple years ago, but recognize the symptoms in others.

We will survive, and we will conquer.