"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

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"...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 25, 2012

Shorter Willard: "Only white people can relate to England"
Posted by Jill | 6:18 AM
Open mouth, insert foot:
As the Republican presidential challenger accused Barack Obama of appeasing America's enemies in his first foreign policy speech of the US general election campaign, advisers told The Daily Telegraph that he would abandon Mr Obama’s “Left-wing” coolness towards London.

In remarks that may prompt accusations of racial insensitivity, one suggested that Mr Romney was better placed to understand the depth of ties between the two countries than Mr Obama, whose father was from Africa.

“We are part of an Anglo-Saxon heritage, and he feels that the special relationship is special,” the adviser said of Mr Romney, adding: “The White House didn’t fully appreciate the shared history we have”.

Give Willard a microphone, and sooner or later he always shows his true colors. Whether it's "Corporations are people, my friend" or "I'm not concerned about the very poor...we have a safety net there", or "I should tell my story... I'm also unemployed." said to a group of actual unemployed people, or "I get speaker's fees from time to time, but not very much", said about the $374,000 in speaking fees he made in just one year, sooner or later (usually sooner), Romney always reveals what he is: a believer in the privilege of white males who inherited a name and money from their fathers, a rich asshole whose "job creation" record consists of sucking huge fees out of dying companies while decimating them interspersed with a very few instances of sustaining, not creating, a bunch of minimum-wage service jobs, a racist, elitist fuck for whom the presidency is nothing more than another thing he can amass in a vain effort to fill the giant black hole in his soul that nothing can ever fill.

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Monday, June 11, 2012

This is an actual column in a major metropolitan newspaper
Posted by Jill | 7:28 PM


Sally Quinn haz a sad:

In April, at the White House Correspondents’ Association dinner, my husband, Ben Bradlee, and I found ourselves sandwiched between the Kardashians and Newt and Callista Gingrich. Heavily made up and smiling for the cameras, the reality TV family and the political couple were swarmed over by the paparazzi, who were screaming and shouting the celebrities’ names to make them look toward the cameras for that million-dollar photograph.

I was shoved up against Callista’s hair and nearly broke my nose. It was scary. I felt as if I had been caught in a crowded theater and someone had yelled fire. Ben and I (he spouting expletives all the way), grabbed onto each other and managed to escape to the equally crowded hallway where desperate celebrity guests were heading toward the ballroom, murmuring to us as they passed, “Get me out of here.”

It was telling that Vanity Fair had bought more tables at the dinner than most of the Washington news organizations.

On the way home (we skipped the after-parties), I suddenly realized that this grotesque event signaled the end of power as we have known it. That dinner — which seemed to have more celebrities, clients and advertisers than journalists and politicians — was the tipping point.

As Tom Brokaw noted the next day on “Meet the Press,” it’s time to rethink the “glittering” annual dinner. The event, he said, “separates the press from the people they’re supposed to serve, symbolically.”

The decline of power has been happening for a while. In 1987, I wrote a piece for this magazine called “The Party’s Over.” In it, I chronicled the demise of the Washington hostess. That was 25 years ago, and people were complaining even then that Washington would never be the same.

But power still trumped money in those days. Today, money trumps power. If Katharine Graham, the late publisher of The Washington Post, were having a party today, and politicians or statesmen received a conflicting invitation to a party put together by Sheldon Adelson (Gingrich’s super PAC guy), where do you think people would go? Adelson. No question. Now, at a party, if you find people staring over your shoulder to see who’s more important in the room, they’re usually looking at someone rich, rather than someone powerful. (Or perhaps they’re staring at themselves in a mirror, as I once observed.)

Power in Washington used to be centered on the White House, the Congress, the Cabinet, the diplomatic corps and the journalists. Today, all of those groups depend on money for their very existence. The real power lies with the lobbyists, the money-raisers, the super PACs, the bundlers, the corporations and rich people. The hottest ticket on the planet is not an invitation to the White House but an invitation to the World Economic Forum in Davos.

The irony is that in New York, I’m told, people are interested in power. In Washington, people are interested in money.

Think about it. The White House’s power comes from the money people give the president. He wouldn’t be there if it weren’t for his big donors. He had a Hollywood fundraiser last month  at George Clooney’s house where he raised $15 million. Those are the people who count. If the president thought that there was real power in Washington, that the Congress, the diplomatic corps or the journalists could help him in any way, then he and the first lady would surely go out more often.

The Obamas have been roundly criticized for not being part of the Washington social scene. The question is, does it matter? Could Obama win or lose the presidency because he has dissed the Washington community? I suspect the answer is no. It doesn’t matter anymore.

It's about damn time, if you ask me. But someone had better tell David Gregory and Chuck Todd, who still think nibbling cocktail weenies (interpret that however you like) at the Sally Quinn Salon means something. (via TBogg. Also, too.)

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Sunday, May 22, 2011

The greatest thing in the history of television
Posted by Jill | 5:59 AM
In case you missed it, John Lithgow reads Newt Gingrich's bombastic press release:



It's disconcerting because Lithgow bears a striking facial resemblance to Andrew Breitbart the way he's lit here. And it's doubly hilarious if you saw Lithgow's chilling performance as the Trinity Killer in Dexter season 4.

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Thursday, November 25, 2010

Grab the shovel and backhoe
Posted by Jill | 3:34 PM
You're going to need it to dig out after reading this:
Four minutes into the Act I rehearsal, a “Spider-Man” crew member announced on his mic, “We’re gonna hold.” It was the first of several pauses to deal with technical glitches, mostly in transitions between scenes. By the dinner break, only 15 minutes of the two-and-a-half-hour show had unfolded. And the first scheduled performance (this Sunday at 6:30 p.m.) was just eight days away.

In the last week, the nervous creators of the show, the most expensive in Broadway history, have begun to see the hand-drawn sketches, the digitally animated videos, the comic-book-inspired costumes come to life — to see “Spider-Man” finally, literally, take flight.

“Creating art that has never been done before is the reason I get out of bed in the morning,” said Bono, leaning forward in Row A on the aisle, as Reeve Carney, playing Spidey, rehearsed onstage. “This feels like it.”

Yet time is running out.

At the creators’ last dinner on Friday night before Bono and the Edge left for a U2 tour in Australia, Bono said bluntly that the show “won’t get out of the gate” and have a chance to catch on with audiences if technical problems persist, as they have in rehearsals.

Still, he and the others did not dwell on mundane matters like flying harnesses. They are all artists who dream big, who compare the show’s themes to great literature and philosophy.

“We’re wrestling with the same stuff as Rilke, Blake, ‘Wings of Desire,’ Roy Lichtenstein, the Ramones — the cost of feeling feelings, the desire for connections when you’re separate from others,” Bono continued. “If the only wows you get from ‘Spider-Man’ are visual, special-effect, spectacular-type wows, and not wows from the soul or the heart, we will all think that we’ve failed.”

There you have it: Why I Hate Bono, despite all his good works.

And by the way, I heard a radio segment this morning on this show, where they played an audio snippet. It sounded like a high school kid trying to sound like Bono. "Creating art that has never been done before"? Is that why every U2 song sounds like every other U2 song?

Oh the humanity.

And the two and a half hours of sheer exhilaration that is Fela! is closing January 2.




There is no God.

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