"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Wednesday, July 31, 2013

The national scourge that is white violence
Posted by Jill | 4:53 AM
Chris Hayes is hilariously deadpan here. Priceless:

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Monday, September 24, 2012

How Very French Of Us
Posted by Jill | 5:50 AM
Mr. Brilliant and I have an agreement. It's the kind of agreement couples usually don't make unless they are French politicians, but we have agreed to it. It might not be right for you, but it's right for us. The agreement is this: I don't say anything about his Age-Inappropriate TV Girlfriend and he doesn't say anything about my Age-Inappropriate TV Boyfriend.

If your husband has to have an Age-Inappropriate Girlfriend, a TV one is the best kind to have, because she's not likely to call your house and pretend you don't exist, or burn your child's bunnyrabbit. And she's only around for an hour or two a day, if that, because she has your own life. And if the TV Girlfriend is not just pretty but also smart, snarky, and on a compatible side of the political fence, it's kind of hard to object.

That MSNBC's Alex Wagner is five years younger than Linda Ellerbee, who was Mr. Brilliant's original TV girlfriend back in 1983 when we met, was at the time, is somewhat troubling. But being the tolerant person I am, I'm not going to sweat it, even though Wagner is age-inappropriate in the opposite direction of what Linda Ellerbee was when Mr. B. was twenty-eight. Because I kinda like Alex Wagner too (though in a very different way), and because it's clear that Wagner's crush on former Pandagon blogger and current WaPo Broderian Wonk Ezra Klein is strong and true*, and because for four hours on weekends, we both spend time with MY Age-Inappropriate TV Boyfriend, Chris Hayes.

Here's just an example of why:



*I like to tease Mr. B. about the judgment of any good progressive female who can't recognize Ezra Klein's creeping hacktacularness and resulting obvious lust for the roundtable of George Stephanopoulos' weekly Mouse Circus (™ Driftglass).

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Monday, June 25, 2012

Does writing for the New York Times turn you into David Brooks?
Posted by Jill | 6:08 AM
I'd expect David Brooks to write an article about Chris Hayes that sounds as if he were an archaeologist studying a newly-discovered species of bonobo monkeys. Alex Williams is a Styles section writer, and hardly an old geezer. So why does this article about the small phenomenon that Up With Chris Hayes has become, read like one of David Brooks' more annoying and clueless examinations of What The Young Folks Are Thinking?

Word of “Up w/Chris Hayes” has spread beyond a few hundred punk fans. In less than a year on television (and with a chirpy voice, a weakness for gesticulation and a tendency to drop honors-thesis words like “signifier” into casual conversation), Mr. Hayes has established himself as Generation Y’s wonk prince of the morning political talk-show circuit.

But even with his grad-student sensibility and a program that resembles a dorm-room bull session, Mr. Hayes has attracted a cult following, particularly among frustrated hyper-educated members of the Occupy Wall Street generation who are seemingly fed up with the partisan bickering that prevails in Washington and passes as political discourse on the airwaves.

“He is never doctrinaire,” Mr. Leo said in an interview. Both punk fans and “Up” fans are “suspicious of any authority,” he said, and appreciate that Mr. Hayes “is always willing to challenge his own assumptions, and the received wisdom on both sides of the aisle.”

Like Deadheads or Trekkies, fans of the program cluster under a common nickname: Uppers.

Credit for the nickname goes to Wyeth Ruthven, a public relations consultant in Washington, who coined the #uppers Twitter hashtag as a joke about the program’s early broadcast time last October, a couple of weeks after it began. The term quickly went viral after Mr. Hayes (who monitors his Twitter feed on a MacBook Pro beside him as cameras roll, and often invokes viewer tweets on air) retweeted Mr. Ruthven. Within weeks, hundreds were joining the spirited #uppers debates on issues like gay marriage and industrial farming. Viewers now post more than 6,000 comments every weekend.

Social media, in fact, have played an unusually important role in driving traffic to the program, an MSNBC spokeswoman said. About 45 percent of the visitors to the program’s Web site, which contains complete episodes, linked through sites like Facebook and Twitter. In April, those users spent an average of 51 minutes on the site each visit.

But Twitter is still the hotbed of “Up” fandom. Even so, the program’s feed is not just an online clubhouse for New York media types like Lizz Winstead, a creator of “The Daily Show,” and members of Le Tigre, the too-cool electro-pop band. Cher and Chad Ochocinco have chimed in, too.

Whatever their political leanings, fans are responding out of frustration with the status quo, said Jim Rosenberg, a recruiting consultant in Greensboro, N.C., and frequent tweeter. “It’s the pent-up demand for voices other than the well-rehearsed and seasoned insider professionals who have dominated television delivering practiced meaninglessness for years,” he said.

“Up” comes off as a rebuke to traditional cable shout-fests like CNN’s late “Crossfire.” Thanks to its early weekend time slot, the program has the freedom to unwind over two hours each Saturday and Sunday. Guests are encouraged to go deep into the issues of the week, and not try to score cheap-shot points to win the debate

Maybe the hipsters at that peanut butter and jelly restaurant in the Village call themselves "Uppers", but frankly, I find it hard to believe that anyone outside the Times' newsroom calls them that. And to refer to them as being "Like Deadheads or Trekkies"? Pejorative much?

Not only do I watch Up With Chris Hayes, I knew who he was when he was just another one of those talking heads that appeared on The Rachel Maddow Show from time to time. Mr. Brilliant watches Chris Hayes. We are 57 years old. My 87-year-old father watches Chris Hayes. My 38-year-old Jamaican colleague watches Chris Hayes. Anyone who wants to actually KNOW about and UNDERSTAND what happened in the world the previous week either watches, or ought to watch, this show.

At first the rotating panel didn't rotate very much, and one had the sense that it was difficult to get people to come into the studio that early on a Saturday or Sunday morning. Back then, you could rely on Reihan Salam, one of that rare specimen known as "sane conservative", to show up every week. Salam has a special place in my heart not just because he's a conservative that actually lives in something approaching the real world, but because he has the distinction of being the only guest ever to actually eat, on camera, the pastries that sit, like a bowl of wax fruit, in the middle of the table, untouched until after the cameras are turned off. But back then the panel always consisted of an Old Guy (usually Bob Herbert or Jerry Nadler), a sane conservative, and two of the sort of people you'd expect to see on a show like this. Today, the number of people you'll see on this show is larger, but you can rely on two hours of intelligent and demanding dialogue. Get off the couch after watching this show, and not only will you know more than you did when you woke up, but you'll also be just a little bit tired, as if you'd just spend two hours in a particularly demanding political science class. It's an exhilarating experience, especially if when you think of Sunday morning talk shows, you think of smarmy David Gregory dry-humping his Chosen Republican of the Week or George Will and Cokie Roberts being wrong about almost everything just as they've been for the last thirty years.

But speaking of lazy, condescending, wrong-about-everything hack opinion journalism, let's get back to Alex Williams, shall we? Now granted, this is a guy who paints with an equally broad verbal brush aging Gen-X skateboarders, people who play Words With Friends, and the horrific plight of beleaguered would-be young authors trying to break into the publishing industry. OK, I'll give him that last one, as it IS kind of hilarious to attempt to feel sorry for struggling creative people who can regularly meet in an Upper East Side apartment to bitch about being shut out of the intelligentsia. But while Williams fancies himself to be some sort of anthropologist of American culture, he, like David Brooks, also remains completely apart from it, observing with a condescending distance what he believes to be the strange behaviors of people who just happen to like the same thing and find common ground in same.

Maybe Alex Williams is trying desperately to convey some sort of hipness of his own, in much the same way that David Brooks thinks he knows what "real Americans" -- you know, the ones who Brooks says go to the salad bar at Applebee's -- think. The problem with being an observer of group behavior is that you inevitably come across as setting yourself apart from it, and therefore treating it in a condescending manner. I realize that David Brooks makes a very good living spouting his nonsense, but he's hardly something to which a young journalist should aspire.

Maybe Williams should start watching Up With Chris Hayes on Sundays. He might actually learn something.

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Sunday, September 18, 2011

This morning I thought I'd died and gone to smart heaven
Posted by Jill | 2:42 PM

Four walls can barely contain this much smart


If you think you've seen Chris Hayes all over the place the last few weeks, it's because you have. Over the last year, Hayes has been doing the Rachel Maddow Training Path gig of subbing for as many MSNBC hosts as possible. When he first started appearing on television, Hayes was a walking argument against drinking too much of the Official Coffee of Morning Schmoe, but as he's become more comfortable in front of the camera, his overcaffeinated bounciness has largely been tamed into a kind of youthful puppylike enthusiasm -- or at least it was until MSNBC gave him his own show, which premiered yesterday morning at the ungodly hour of 7 AM, and today at the almost as ungodly hour of 8 AM.

It's really kind of disingenuous for MSNBC to on the one hand recognize just how ferociously smart (and yeah, ok, cute) Hayes is, clearly want to flog the show enough to make even Joe Scarborough have a REAL progressive on as a guest instead of calling that unctuous tool Mark Halperin one; and on the other hand bury him at a time when almost no one in his target audience is awake yet. But if you are one of our younger readers, and you don't yet have a DVR, get one. Or watch online. But even if you are older than the target audience, which I am, it's really worth your while to get up early and see what a Sunday morning news talk show can be when it's NOT completely populated by Beltway dinosaurs who have been spouting the same relentlessly wrong and misguided conventional wisdom for decades. I mean seriously -- does anyone still actually care what George Will says, or Cokie Roberts, or Doris Kearns Goodwin? It would be one thing if these people were using a lifetime of observation of Washington to provide insight and perspective into what's going on today. But if you've watched what Driftglass so charmingly and accurately calls the Mouse Circus lately, you've no doubt wanted to stick an icepick in your own eye and lobotomize yourself just to make Teh Moronic Platitudes stop.

It's clear that unlike conventional Sunday gasbag shows, which parade out the same Republicans week after week, followed by a panel of irrelevances primly having the vapors over President Obama daring to question his Republican Overlords, Up with Chris Hayes (a title which both snarks at and embraces Hayes' chirpy, bouncy overcaffeinated chipmunk persona) is going to be light on guests, perhaps because there are few political figures who are going to be willing to put on full makeup and go into a studio for a 7 AM live interview with a guy who sounds like he's been up all night drinking Starbucks and fueled by the tray of pastries prominently displayed on the interview table, still has another six hours in him. Still, Hayes managed to score an interview with House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi for his debut show, which was followed on Sunday by an expression of frustration to his special guest and BFF Rachel Maddow (who was resplendently geeky in full Nerdy McNerdlington regalia) at how you can't get these people to say anything beyond their talking points.

The panel looks like it's going to consist of a few young think-tankers and high-end bloggers, one libertarian-leaning conservative, and a token Old Guy. Saturday's panel consisted of the ubiquitous MSNBC correspondent/HuffPo political blogger Alex Wagner, liberal comic John Fugelsang, former New York Times columnist Bob Herbert, and American Conservative blogger Michael Dougherty. Sunday's panel included the equally overcaffeinated frequent Real Time with Bill Maher guest Reihan Salam, the aforementioned Rachel Maddow, New York Times correspondent and former Salon writer Rebecca Traister, and Pam Spaulding lookalike Heather McGhee of Demos. The Old Guy role was played today by Rep. Jerrold Nadler (NY-8) who surprisingly didn't seem at all out of place, perhaps because he is not among the gasbags to be invited to the Mouse Circus.

There's a ridiculous amount of content packed into these four hours of weekend television, which often seem paced as if they are running at 78rpm in a 33-1/3 rpm genre. But especially when you watch Chris Hayes banter with Rachel Maddow and his young panel, it makes you remember what intelligent political discourse used to look like, before Sally Quinn came along and conducted the unholy marriage between Washington politicians and the journalists who cover them. And as a special bonus? The show is executive-produced by original Morning Sedition producer Jonathan "Smartypants" Larsen.

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