Free meta-advice: Heavily discount advice containing the phrase "high on life."
Slate's Emily Yoffe completely misses the point in her counsel to a guy who wants to know whether it's okay for him to obtain marijuana for his infirm sister-in-law (SIL). The letter-writer (LW) tells Prudie (Yoffe's alter ego) that he is close to both his brother and his sister-in-law, a woman in her mid-sixties who suffers from obesity and diabetes and who is nearly housebound from the pain of diabetic neuropathy.
According to LW, SIL has fond memories of marijuana from her youth
and asked if he might be able to use his connections to get her some.
It's not clear whether she wants the drug as medicine, but LW
clearly hopes that the pot will help her neuropathic pain.
LW is very clear about the moral dilemma: SIL wants to keep her drug use a secret from her husband who is "very closed minded" and who would never approve of her using marijuana.
Mark Silva writes on the Chicago Tribune's blog, "The attempted equation of a health-care overhaul with
Nazism, fascism or any such oppressive political mechanism probably
defines the outer boundaries of the debate."
Great, Silva thinks that Nazi analogies are the "outer boundary" of debate. I.e., a fringe and minority view, but still part of the debate.
It's not. It's demagoguery trivializing the Holocaust. If Sarah Palin and the Republican establishment weren't encouraging the Nazi talk, Silva wouldn't set up the following video as a "debate" between Jewish Rep. Barney Frank's and a protester who accused him of supporting Nazism:
You know, Chris Matthews is pretty smart when he remembers to take his Ritalin. Watch him demolish G. Gordon Liddy, the Watergate burglar turned "birther" (a term for those conspiracy theorists who believe that president Barack Obama is an illegal alien from Mombassa, Kenya).
For more on the birther phenom, check out my friend Dave Weigel's recent appearance on Rachel Maddow:
Buffy the Vampire Slayer takes on creepy Edward Cullen the panty-sniffing vampire from Twilight in this mashup by Rebellious Pixels. Pure genius. This clip encapsulates everything that's awesome about Buffy and everything that's wrong with Twilight.
In this clip you will see a series of real ads for Wilkins Coffee starring real Muppets. The puppetmaster is the late great Jim Henson who did 179 commercials for Wilkins products between 1957 and 1961.
These ads are riveted on message: Bad things happen to people who don't drink Wilkins Coffee, up to and including decapitation by guillotine, Ignorance is no excuse. You're either with Wilkins or against it. So, drink up for your own good. If you substitute "democracy for "coffee" you get a pretty good metaphor for US foreign policy.
Via Democracy Arsenal. A clip of Welsh shepherds who dress their sheep up on LED-studded vests and herd them in elaborate formations that resemble fireworks displays from above. I'm waiting for a follow-up post from DA on how this remarkable achievement can be harnessed for national security.
Last night conservative TV host Bill O'Reilly called Think Progress blogger Amanda Terkel a "villain" on the air for obliquely noting the irony that, he was been invited to headline a benefit for a non-profit that benefits rape survivors.
Terkel didn't even mention the much more ironic fact that O'Reilly was invited to a benefit for the survivors of sexual assault despite having been forced to pay over $2 million to settle a sex harassment suit brought against him by his former producer, Andrea Mackris in 2004.
Instead, Terkel mentioned in her Mar 1 post that O'Reilly had made deeply offensive on-air comments about 18-year-old rape and murder victim Jennifer Moore in 2006.
O'Reilly called Moore a "moronic girl" and suggested that she was responsible for her own grisly death. Moore was kidnapped after she ended up drunk and stranded on the West Side Highway having wandered away from her friend after a night of clubbing.
Here's what Bill O'Reilly had to say shortly after Moore's badly beaten body was found in a dumpster:
O'REILLY: So anyway, these two
girls come in from the suburbs and they get bombed, and their car is towed
because they're moronic girls and, you know, they don't have a car.
So they're standing there in the middle of the night with no car. And
then they separate because they're drunk. They separate, which you never
do. All right.
Now Moore, Jennifer Moore, 18, on
her way to college. She was 5-foot-2, 105
pounds, wearing a miniskirt and a halter top with a bare midriff. Now, again,
there you go. So every predator in the world is gonna pick that up at two in
the morning. She's walking by herself on the West Side Highway,
and she gets picked up by a thug. All right. Now she's out of her mind,
drunk.
And the thug takes her over to New Jersey in the cab
and kills her and rapes her and does all these terrible things to her. And the
thug is so stupid, he uses her cell phone, and the cops trace it back to him
and they -- and they arrest him and charge him with murder. He had a prostitute
girlfriend with him, and she's charged as an accessory to murder. But
Jennifer Moore is in the ground. She's dead.
Imagine if Jennifer Moore's parents heard O'Reilly tarnishing their dead daughter's memory. O'Reilly even excoriated the parents for not keeping their daughter under curfew, Adele Stan writes at HuffPo.
To illustrate his point about Moore's "culpability," O'Reilly brought up disgraced actor Mel Gibson as another example of a person who
deserved what was coming to him because he got drunk. O'Reilly implied that Moore's death was analogous to Gibson's recent DUI arrest during which the actor had called the arresting officer "sugar tits" and screamed antisemitic slurs at police.
Over the weekend, O'Reilly sent two men to confront Terkel about her post--producer Jesse Watters and an unnamed camera operator. The two approached Terkel on the street in Virginia, having apparently tailed her on the two-hour drive from her home in Washington, D.C.
As you'll see in the video clip, Watters tries to insinuate that Terkel is lying when she says that she listened to O'Reilly's remarks before commenting on them. Watters demands to know the significance of O'Reilly's remarks about Mel Gibson. Terkel doesn't answer.
The producer demanded that Terkel apologize for causing pain and suffering to a rape victim and her family. Which rape victim? Jennifer Moore? No, O'Reilly was referring to Alexa Branchini of Alexa Foundation. However, Terkel never criticized the Alexa Foundation, and never mentioned Ms. Branchini. The idea that Terkel deliberately inflicted distress upon the Alexa Foundation is laughable.
Why was Amanda Terkel, a young female blogger, singled out for an ambush from the O'Reilly goons? Her post was based on link to another blog, Newshounds. Many other websites and TVs shows covered the controversy. Earlier this month an anti-rape group with no ties to Terkel circulated a petition requesting that the Alexa Foundation disinvite O'Reilly on the grounds that his blame-the-victim comments disqualified him from addressing a benefit for rape survivors. (Bizarrely, according to Keith Olbermann, the Alexa Foundation issued a statement stressing that O'Reilly was invited to speak about his book, not rape victims.)
The 2006 attack on the recently-deceased Jennifer Moore wasn't an isolated incident. O'Reilly also insinuated that Sean Hornbeck, a boy who was held captive by a child molester for years, stayed because he liked the abuse, according to noted rightwing watcher Dave Neiwert.
As if this saga wasn't sordid enough, O'Reilly Factor appears to have broken its own rules for ambush interviews by confronting Terkel. O'Reilly previously pledged only to ambush public servants and to confront targets only after contacting them and either inviting them to appear on the show, or giving them an opportunity to explain themselves in a statement.
