elfs | Brains, Now With Illustrations! (Reply)

Glenn Greenwald rips the Wall Street Journal a new one for lying about Bush & Obama: Like a bad moment from 1984, the WSJ tells you about a past that didn't happen and tries to compare it to a present they do not like. First, the WSJ complains that at his press conference Barack Obama had a list of reporters that he had decided to call upon, then adds: "We doubt that President Bush, who was notorious for being parsimonious with follow-ups, would have gotten away with prescreening his interlocutors."

Greenwald then points out that Ari Fliescher did the exact same thing for George Bush, and calls bullshit on the WSJ for its irresponsible editorializing.
Analyzing a single panel of The Watchmen: A long exegesis of a single page of Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons, describing the interaction of text and images, the framing, centering, and perspective choices used to highlight ideas or create mood. A lot more thinking goes into the good stuff than most of us are aware of. (via jaylake)
Analyzing P.D. Eastman's Sam and the Firefly: It's hard to tell if Todd Alcott is being sardonic or not, but his three-act analysis of Sam and the Firefly, a children's book by the author of Are You My Mother, lays out an uncompromising comparison of narrative and illustration in which the key elements of protagonists' desires and the crises those can create are front and center of a children's book. Alcott makes the case that writing children's books is a heck of a lot harder than it looks.
No whistleblower protection in stimulus bill: Senator Susan Collins (R-Maine) apparently stripped the provision from the bill out of fear that it would protect employees who divulged national security secrets. Rather than re-write the provision, however, it seems it was chucked altogether. Your tax dollars (not) working, folks. Talking Points memo points fingers.
Kansas legislator seeks to block netroots campaigns: Remember Sean Tevis, the guy who ran in Kansas seeking a seat, and used the Internet to raise funds at the rate of $8 a person? I even sent him eight bucks. Anyway, he lost. The incumbent, who won, is now seeking to force public disclosure on all citizens, even those who donate as little as a dollar, if the campaign successfully raises more than a $1000. Basically, he's trying to create a bookkeeping nightmare for netroots campaigners like Tevis, and wreck a funding stream that put his own under stress.
Republicans fail at "the twittering.": A few months ago, the chairman of the Republican National Convention said that "We have to get on with the facebook and the twittering," in order to reach out to young people. Since then, Pete Hoekstra (R-Mich) has twittered "Just landed in Baghdad," completely violating operational secrecy. Steve Benen now entertains us with a state-level party official letting out a secret early, giving the Democrats a chance to get a jump on their plan and avert it.