Why Fred Thompson won’t get the GOP nod:

1) He really is lazy

2) His press staff is mediocre

The Politico’s Roger Simon attended Thompson’s attempt at “retail politics” in Waverly, Iowa today, where the candidate had a reportedly dull editorial board meeting, made an awkward trip to a firehouse, and canceled a walk down mainstreet because of “unsafe” conditions.

I can only imagine how many vacation days President Thompson would take.

No matter what their PR folks say, it’s basically impossible for an oil company to “go green”. Oil companies have jumped on the green bandwagon along with seemingly everyone else this past year, promoting their investments in renewable energy and claiming that they are really at the forefront of next-generation energy technology.

According to The Guardian’s Terry Macalister:

“Shell and BP are among the biggest producers of greenhouse gases in the world, but both have been keen to paint themselves green through a series of clean fuel initiatives.

BP, under its former chief executive, John Browne, promised to go “beyond petroleum” while Shell has spent millions advertising its serious interest in the future of the environment.”

I actually remember someone once saying to me, “But isn’t BP more environmentally friendly than the other oil companies?”

This would be a fair assumption from anyone viewing BP’s marketing materials. It would be easy to mistake the official BP Web site for an environmental non-profit. The color scheme is green and yellow and there is a whole section called “environment and society.”
More from Macalister:

“BP has been accused by Greenpeace Canada of lining itself up to help commit ‘the biggest environmental crime in history’. This follows its decision to swap assets with Husky Oil, giving it an entrance ticket to the Alberta tar sands, which are said to be five times more energy-intensive to extract compared to traditional oil.”

That sounds less like “beyond petroleum” and more like “big pollution”.

On a related note, George Monbiot argues for why we need to stop using fossil fuels instead of only relying on the development of renewable energy.

Have you been going through Tommy Thompson withdrawal since he bowed out of the presidential race after the Iowa straw poll?  Of course you are, no one gaffes better that TGT.   You’re in luck, because HotlineTV has a recap of the greatest moments from Tommy’s historic run for the leader of the free world.

HotlineTV - A Tommy Thompson Send Off 

I’ve been away for a few weeks, but I haven’t stopped blogging. I just got back to Madison and began work as the communications aide for Governor Doyle’s re-election campaign and I’ve been blogging over at the Doyle-Lawton blog.

Feel free to head over to the blog and leave your comments on the issues like law enforcement, stem cell research, and prescription drugs.

I’ll try to keep up the commentary and analysis here, but the campaign will be taking up most of my time. Once that’s over… look for TNV to return Bruce Willis style - with a vengeance.

Doyle-Lawton Blog

Stephen Colbert targeted President Bush and largely gave the press a pass during his monologue at last night’s White House Correspondent’s Dinner.

Editor and Publisher is reporting that the president didn’t seem to be laughing at the barbs about low polling numbers, wiretapping, and the president’s role as a “decider”.

Some highlights:

“I believe democracy is our greatest export. At least until China figures out a way to stamp it out in plastic for three cents a unit. ”

“And though I am a committed Christian, I believe that everyone has the right to their own religion, be it Hindu, Jewish or Muslim. I believe our infinite paths to accepting Jesus Christ as your personal savior.”

“The greatest thing about this man is he’s steady. You know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday, that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday. Events can change, this man’s beliefs never will.”

“And as excited as I am to be here with the president, I am appalled to be surrounded by the liberal media that is destroying America, with the exception of Fox News.
Fox News gives you both sides of every story, the President’s side and the Vice President’s side.

But the rest of you, what are you thinking, reporting on N.S.A. wiretapping or secret prisons in Eastern Europe? Those things are secret for a very important reason, they’re superdepressing. And if that’s your goal, well, misery accomplished.”

As one reader over at Crooks and Liars commented, it took “big brass balls” for Colbert to go out and essentially roast the president to his face. Colbert hit him on nearly every issue plaguing the administration, attacked Fox News, and didn’t say a word about the Democrats.

YouTube has the video in three parts.

Editor and Publisher recaps Colbert’s performance.

Dumbosaurus has a transcript.

Download the C-SPAN broadcast on BitTorrent.

Update: Crooks and Liars has Colbert (not in character!) on 60 minutes in an interview with Morley Safer. LINK

This is amazing: “For the first time ever, CBS along with the NCAA will stream the first 56 games the March Madness tournament for free.”

source: Lost Remote

It’s exam season, so posting will likely be sparse for the next couple weeks. Here’s some del.icio.us linkage in the meantime:

Wisconsin State Journal: WIBA sells name of its newsroom to a business
Comprimising journalistic integrity or harmless capitalism?

Senator Russ Feingold at TPMcafe.com: Fixing The Patriot Act — Fighting Terrorism While Protecting Our Freedoms

Lifehacker.com: Download of the Day: Yahoo! Widget Engine 3.0

Wired News: The Firefox Hacks You Must Have

The Motley Fool: Yahoo! aquired del.icio.us

It’s unbelievable. Some people actually have the audacity to demean the most important Christian holiday by using the phrase “Happy Holiday” instead of “Merry Christmas”. When I receive cards in the mail this time of year, I expect them to say what they mean: “Merry Christmas”. Forget people of other religions, it’s not their holiday, they don’t need to be included… in greeting cards or advertising or capitalism or anything else that has to do with this time of year. December belongs to those who celebrate Christmas… and it needs to stay that way.

Milwaukee blogger Jessica McBride of McBride’s Media Matters is on the case. She astutely observed that Governor Jim Doyle called the large evergreen that sits in the Capitol rotunda a “holiday tree” instead of a “Christmas tree”. Forget that Tommy Thompson and Scott McCallum did the same thing! That’s not the point.

McBride articulates the reasoning better than I can:

From “Arnold, where are you when we need you? Doyle Renames Christmas“

Can’t we just call a Christmas Tree a Christmas Tree? In order to be sensitive to people of different faiths, let’s put up other things to represent their beliefs too. But why can’t Christians be represented too? Let’s leave the Christmas trees be.

***short break from sarcasm***
I actually do agree with the argument that an evergreen tree covered in ornaments in December should be called a Christmas tree in a situation when it is obviously is such. It’s insulting to people’s intelligence and beliefs to do otherwise. That being said, I respect the desire to be inclusive, and on no terms do I think that either title is significant enough to make a fuss about. Especially not in four different blog posts, as McBride has done. We’ve all got our own beliefs… just make sure you take the time to respect others. Done and done.
***and we’re back***

It looks like McBride has gotten a classy new photo on her site and is sticking with her extremely professional-looking blogger layout.

And she’s working on a mystery novel, set in Milwaukee. It sounds great so far.

Thankfully, noble patriot Bill O’Reilly is leading the charge nationally with his “Christmas Under Siege” campaign.

From BillOReilly.com:

The Yule-tide has turned and the anti-Christmas forces are retreating all over the USA. In Wichita, Kansas it used to be called a ‘community’ tree. Now it’s called a Christmas tree thanks to the city council. In Deerfield, New Hampshire the cops and firefighters say they are putting up a Nativity scene, and you can talk to them if you don’t like it. Walgreen’s now says it made a mistake banning ‘Merry Christmas’ from its advertising and next year Christmas will be back. Lowe’s home improvement centers now say they are selling Christmas trees, not holiday trees. And the biggest victory of all–Macy’s. Last year it would not advertise using Christmas but this year it will.

As I said in my newspaper column this week, three wise men showed up to honor the baby Jesus way back when. And if corporate executives are not wise enough to emulate that, well, those of us who respect Christmas might look elsewhere. Talking points is proud to be a part of the pro-Christmas movement and things are moving our way. But eternal vigilance is the price of freedom and over the next three weeks we will be vigilant on this subject, believe me.

Only you can save Christmas from utter destruction and moral decay this year. Avoid the phrases “season’s greetings” and “happy holidays” at all costs, for they demean everything the season is about. Christians in America are being discriminated against, and it’s not right.

It’s blasphemy that Adam Cohen (hmmm, he could be Jewish) of the New York Times would write an op-ed pointing out the hypocracy of a movement meant to save Christmas. The NYT is all lies anyway:

Excerpt from Cohen’s article “This Season’s War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else”:

Religious conservatives have a cause this holiday season: the commercialization of Christmas. They’re for it.

The American Family Association is leading a boycott of Target for not using the words “Merry Christmas” in its advertising. (Target denies it has an anti-Merry-Christmas policy.) The Catholic League boycotted Wal-Mart in part over the way its Web site treated searches for “Christmas.” Bill O’Reilly, the Fox anchor who last year started a “Christmas Under Siege” campaign, has a chart on his Web site of stores that use the phrase “Happy Holidays,” along with a poll that asks, “Will you shop at stores that do not say ‘Merry Christmas’?”

This campaign - which is being hyped on Fox and conservative talk radio - is an odd one. Christmas remains ubiquitous, and with its celebrators in control of the White House, Congress, the Supreme Court and every state supreme court and legislature, it hardly lacks for powerful supporters. There is also something perverse, when Christians are being jailed for discussing the Bible in Saudi Arabia and slaughtered in Sudan, about spending so much energy on stores that sell “holiday trees.”

What is less obvious, though, is that Christmas’s self-proclaimed defenders are rewriting the holiday’s history. They claim that the “traditional” American Christmas is under attack by what John Gibson, another Fox anchor, calls “professional atheists” and “Christian haters.” But America has a complicated history with Christmas, going back to the Puritans, who despised it. What the boycotters are doing is not defending America’s Christmas traditions, but creating a new version of the holiday that fits a political agenda.

The Puritans considered Christmas un-Christian, and hoped to keep it out of America. They could not find Dec. 25 in the Bible, their sole source of religious guidance, and insisted that the date derived from Saturnalia, the Roman heathens’ wintertime celebration. On their first Dec. 25 in the New World, in 1620, the Puritans worked on building projects and ostentatiously ignored the holiday. From 1659 to 1681 Massachusetts went further, making celebrating Christmas “by forbearing of labor, feasting or in any other way” a crime.

NYT: This Season’s War Cry: Commercialize Christmas, or Else

McBride: Arnold, where are you when we need you? Doyle Renames Christmas

O’Reilly: General Ass-backwards Craziness

Thanks to Jessica McBride for the picture, I snagged it from her site.

***My apolgies for the extreme sarcasm, but wow… is this really happening?***

Update: Journal Sentinel: A crusade over Christmas - Christian group slams secularization; others call issue ‘manufactured’

I’ve got a lot to do, so instead of posting I’ll just share a few things that caught my eye today:

• 
  Michael Kinsley of Slate.com contends that the abortion debate in this country is anything but substantial.
• Slashdot observes that the Federal Election Commission ruled yesterday that blogs qualify for the ‘press exemption’ to federal campaign finance laws.
• Miller Lite has a new ad campaign called Taste Trial. The web site, in combination with TV and print ads (I saw one in the NY Times today) used taste test results that show Miller Lite has more taste than Bud Light to create a legal case against their main competitor.

A group of zombies descended on Madison, demanding their rights last Saturday. The march of the undead began on the steps of the Capitol and continued down State Street to the Memorial Union. Living protestors from Advocates of Zombie Attack Preparedness (AZAP) were on the scene to show their concern over the rising zombie population.

Signs at the event displayed messages such as “the undead are people too”, “life is wasted on the living, ” and “got brains?”

Similar lurches have been spotted in Montreal, Vancouver, Austin, and San Francisco.

From TheDailyPage.com:

Variants of re-animated corpses included rocker zombies, dress ball zombies, child zombies, and even a Super Mario zombie. As remarked to me by one of the undead (in a moment of lucidity), it was a remarkably well-behaved lurch, particularly considering the vocal calls for flesh, brains, and other cellular ephemera. The zombies stuck to the sidewalks, apparently too shy for the middle of the street. Nevertheless, they did their best to conform to expectations as they made their way west, moaning at pedestrians, banging on restaurant and tavern windows, and even attempts at re-animation with more gameful of onlookers. Indeed, the lurch grew progressively larger as it progressed down State, resembling to a slight extent a zombie infection simulation.

The original Zombie Lurch press release on LiveJournal

Summary and photo galleries

According to A.J. Jacobs, editor for Esquire, pretty much anything we want. In his article, My Outsourced Life, Jacobs describes the month he hired several “remote executive assistants” from Asia to take care of most of his everyday tasks like writing e-mails, buying presents, and even calling his parents.

I first read the article in the September issue of Esquire and I’ve been waiting to find it online. I don’t know how much Jacobs’s parents enjoyed talking to an Asian representative instead of their son, but it seems like it went pretty well.

Every weekend, I place a dutiful call to my parents. It’s a nice thing to do, I figure — but it’s also a huge time vacuum. This weekend it’s Mom and Dad’s anniversary, so I can expect it to eat up even more of my day than usual. Mr. Naveen to the rescue. I email Mr. Naveen — the YMII employee who will be on duty at the time — a few concerned-sounding questions and a couple of filial sound bites. Next day, I get this email:

I made an out bound call to Jacob’s parents. They very happily received my call. I first introduced myself to them. Then I wished them Happy Anniversary they both told me thank you. . . . I asked them how is the weather in their place. They told me that it is pretty nice temperature here and the garden looks beautiful.

I won’t reproduce the whole transcript, but apparently my mom’s sprained foot has gotten better (though the rain does not help), and my dad’s law practice is going along very well. As for me, I had a good week, apparently. This was highly successful outsourcing, saving me at least half an hour of sweaty-eared phone time.

Hopefully my friends aren’t all thinking of buying this shirt.

Preshrunk post

Cultureshift Clothing

Earlier today I suggested to Rocketboom that they read my post, higher gas prices are exactly what we need, and they ended up linking to it from today’s show. It’s the most exciting thing that’s happened to The New Vernacular since I started it last year.

For those who don’t know what I’m talking about, Rocketboom is a video blog, or “vlog”, from New York that produces a short segment each weekday dealing with all sorts of news topics, from the highly important to the geeky and inane. Basically, all the stuff I care about.

Here are some articles that go into more detail about the Rocketboom phenomenon:

Rocketboom’s powerful lift-off (Business Week)

‘Rocketboom’ may be future of TV news (ABC)

‘Vlogger’ cyber-culls the news (CBS)

More information regarding refugees in Texas and Oklahoma. Both from today, September 8.

From BoingBoing:

Katrina: Astrodome lockdown report from blogger volunteer
A blogger who is volunteering at the Astrodome says:

They locked out the people out of the dome, evacuees and volunteers. we have not had volunteers able to come in all morning. people just screaming broke into the gate to get in and all the people and volunteers ran into the dome. hundreds, at least 200 or 300 people started pushing in. no one was on the other side of the locked gate, no traffic no guards, etc. my volunteer guy telling the story from the human rights campaign ran in too. finally one police officer tried to corral people and push them back out. and in ffact everyone was pushed out. except my guy who pretended he had been in all along. and the people who had been in were pushed out and locked out.

rumors: Bush is here or coming here any minute. and/or, FEMA is giving out debit cards and people got very rowdy and so fema locked everything down mega tight.

No reliant empolyees, no one , no officers, no one to ask, people screaming and panicking, locked out of what is now their home, their kids are in here, etc. no one in the dome knows what is happening

Katrina: Blog account from Oklahoma “FEMA Detainment Camp”

FEMA will not allow any of the kitchen facilities in any of the cabins to be used by the occupants due to fire hazards. FEMA will deliver meals to the cabins. The refugees will be given two meals per day by FEMA. They will not be able to cook. In fact, the “host” goes on to explain, some churches had already enquired about whether they could come in on weekends and fix meals for the people staying in their cabin. FEMA won’t allow it because there could be a situation where one cabin gets steaks and another gets hot dogs - and… it could cause a riot. It gets worse.

He then precedes to tell us that some churches had already enquired into whether they could send a van or bus on Sundays to pick up any occupants of their cabins who might be interested in attending church. FEMA will not allow this. The occupants of the camp cannot leave the camp for any reason. If they leave the camp they may never return. They will be issued FEMA identification cards and “a sum of money” and they will remain within the camp for the next 5 months.

Here’s some photos ad informatino of the aftermath of Katrina that you may not find in the mainstream media:

Photos from WLTV

Photos from the Astrodome - Flikr Feed

Note: I don’t know about the validity of these reports, but here they are:

From BoingBoing: Katrina: “Rape, murder, beatings” in Astrodome, say evacuees

Beloit College puts out a “mindset” list each year of things that are true for the current freshman class that haven’t been for their predecessors. Some examples from my class, the class of 2007:

1. Ricky Nelson, Richard Burton, Samantha Smith, Laura Ashley, Orson Welles, Karen Ann Quinlan, Benigno Aquino, and the U.S. Football League have always been dead.

3. Iraq has always been a problem.

22. They have never gotten excited over a telegram, a long distance call, or a fax.

23. The Osmonds are just talk show hosts.

24. Undergraduate college athletes have always been a part of the NBA and NFL draft.

33. Banana Republic has always been a store, not a puppet government in Latin America.

42. Michael Eisner has always been in charge of Disney.

I just got back from vacation, my new room still has boxes all over, I’m already back at work and I realized I forgot to bring towels and sheets to my new apartment. That being said, I’ve got all kinds of stuff to post. It may take a while, but there’s some good stuff coming. It’s just going to be in small doses, over the period of however long I feel like it should take.

So as not to shock you with too much amazing new content, I’ll start with a Dibert analysis of cable broadcast journalism.

Thanks to Lost Remote.

I’m moving over the next couple of days, then I’m heading out to Boston and NYC for vacation with my family next week, so I’ll be “out of the office” for a while. Posting will be non-existent for a couple weeks, but hopefully I’ll have plenty of pictures to post when I get back. We’ve got tickets to a Red Sox game and a Mets game, as well as visits to plenty of other places, so there should be plenty of photo opportunists.

I can’t wait to sit in a cafe in the North End, hang out at Fenway, see the Statue of Liberty and hopefully catch Jon Stewart in action. Should be a good trip.

Any suggestions of other things I should do or see?

I haven’t been posting much lately, mostly because I’ve actually been busy. But not today. Here’s some of the stuff I’ve been working on at the Wisconsin Historical Society:

• From Shell to Symbol: Art of the Ethnic Easter Egg
• Pottery by Frackelton
• Exhibits Portal
• Teachers and Students Portal
• Wisconsin History Portal

What are you waiting for? Go learn something already.