The Sound of the Crowd

Here’s an article on how, as Amanda Marcotte from Pandagon describes it:

sexist demands from studio executives are making it nigh well impossible for screenwriters to create characters for romantic comedies that are anything resembling “characters” so that such films can be what used be called “funny” and “entertaining”. Apparently, if a female romantic lead is anything but clumsy, flighty, unambitious, with no wit or bite or ever a mean instinct, and functionally celibate, the script gets sent back for a rewrite.

Well. Good thing I don’t write characters with “wit or bite or ever a mean instinct,” or who like to fuck, isn’t it?

Continue below for more excerpts from the article itself (or if you want to see me get really depressed…), but you should really read the whole thing, and Amanda’s comments as well.
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Franklin Delano Roosevelt and Harry Truman, two Democratic presidents who smashed the axis and saved the world.

–From Oliver Willis

I am so a liberal. As defined in Hullabaloo thus:

lib.er.al

1. Not limited to or by established, traditional, orthodox, or authoritarian attitudes, views, or dogmas; free from bigotry.
2. Favoring proposals for reform, open to new ideas for progress, and tolerant of the ideas and behavior of others; broad-minded.

From the DNC; Rove is right: there are differences.

What better way to celebrate the founding of this country than with the July fourth BBC America Monty Python Viewer’s Choice Marathon?

They’re just rubbing it in now. Not only is our goverment run by crooks and liars (I mean, so is theirs, but ours really…), but they’ve got Graham Chapman (all right, not any more), John Cleese, Eric Idle, Terry Jones and the rest…and all we’ve got is Mel Gibson.

Who may be great at the action/thriller/crime drama, but he’s useless at sketch comedy.

…this answers a whole lot of nagging questions. Tom Cruise goes over to the dark side.

ETA: As I type this, Cruise’s first wife Mimi Rogers is on The Late Late Show With Craig Fergeson. He asked her about Cruise getting married again and she’s trying to spin it this way:

“So Tom & Katy fell in love and decided to get married, why is this headline news around the world?” (Approximate quote)

How about because he called a press conference at the Eiffel Tower?

Because he went on Oprah and acted like an idiot?

Rogers must be fufilling some obscure part of her prenuptial agreement.

The long:

Digby on Lieberman actually remembering which party he’s in for once and other things, including:

If Rove is crumbling publicly, I’d love to see what’s going on behind the scenes in the White House. Social Security privatization, a Rovian pet project, is dead. The polls are showing serious weakness only 6 months into his second term. Being a lame duck for three and a half years would be excruciating, particularly with a dead albatross named Iraq around your neck. Let’s just say I don’t think they are able to “compartmentalize” very well.

The short:

Kos on the notion that liberals are killing soldiers:

American politics has reached a new low these past two three days. And given the desperation of the war cheerleaders, it’s only going to get worse. It’s the only way they can cover their spectacular failures.

But that would require a level of competence utterly and completely absent in this administration.

…about Tennessee’s legalized gaybashing, why do I feel like Keitha’s swatting my ear?

“You went where two years ago?”

“Ow, cut it out, Keitha, I hadn’t written your story at the time, I hadn’t even created you..”

“Yes, but you should have known they were louses then.”

And it’s from some people who have more right than any of us to be outraged: The families of September 11 victims.

Believe it or not, that’s a credo that I try to live by. Most of you may know I don’t always succeed, but I do try. I’m thinking of it today because of the latest shitstorm that is flying around the liberal blogs because of Karl Rove having said:

“Liberals saw the savagery of the 9/11 attacks and wanted to prepare indictments and offer therapy and understanding for our attackers. Conservatives saw the savagery of 9/11 and the attacks and prepared for war.”

There is, understandably, quite a lot of rancor and I-know-you-are-but-what-Am-I responses to this smearing of liberal motives going on now. God knows I agree with most of this response, and most of it is impassioned, some of it is eloquent, and most of it is at length.

And I’m not linking to any of it. Because, to me, what it looks like (today, at least) is just a lot of hot air. Because nobody is saying the simple, unvarnished truth.

Karl Rove is a LIAR.
Donald Rumsfeld is a LIAR.
George W. Bush is a LIAR.

That’s it. That’s all. Just that and nothing more. They are big, fat, stinking filthy liars and right now, today, I don’t want to expend any more of whatever gifts I’ve got for impassioned eloquence on them.

Maybe tomorrow, but not today.