Deadpan is one word I could use. Intelligent to a fault. Angst ridden. Passionate. Searching. Always reading something. Jimmy was a guy who had been through the worst that life could throw at him, but still maintained a finely-honed sense of humor.
Jim was, as Susie notes, a founding member of the liberal blogosphere, and a central figure in the Philadelphia scene. I always enjoyed seeing him at Philadelphia’s Drinking Liberally. He was, in fact, one of the first people I met there in late 2004, and I’ll always remember the generous words of advice that he gave me.
Jim is survived by his family, by Mildred (the bulldog that he loved), and by a multitude of fellow bloggers and readers who mourn the loss of his distinctively pithy and sardonic voice. May he rest in peace.
I never met Steve, but I did have some run-ins with him over the years, most notably over the Downing Street Memo. I was pushing for blogstorms; Steve thought the whole thing was a waste of time.
In response to the people who disagreed with him about the DSM and a few other issues, Steve wrote an important post titled “Why We Fight.” In it, he exemplified the pugnacious, take-no-prisoners approach to political blogging that made him such a star:
What people have to understand is that we’re going to have a lot of fights, internally, externally and we need to make sure that it’s the other side which doesn’t want to take us on. We have to make sure that when they want to lie on us or attack us unfairly that the world comes down on them.. We have to be a very different kind of liberal/progressive/democrat/leftist, which is to say, we have to be the kind not only willing to stand up for ourselves, but the kind who takes the fight to the opposition effectively.
When I dismissed the Downing Street Memos out of hand, some people were pissed. Well, they missed the point. Congress doesn’t care. They need Bush or think they do, and short of being caught with his dick in Jim Guckert’s mouth, impeachment ain’t gonna happen. People need to take this fight local. To start bringing the war home to the chickenhawk Congressmen and Senators who voted for this war then didn’t support the troops. It means standing outside their local offices questioning their votes. You have to go to them at home, you have to make them squirm. Not talk about memos, but people, their constituents. You have to move from the Beltway to the home district. You have to endanger their seats, not speak nicely to them about something they don’t take seriously.
It’s not about being right, being right is easy. John Kerry was right. It’s about being effective. It’s about getting out your message and stomping the shit out of people who fuck with you. If Carol Darr wants to fuck with Kos, then her mailbox should be flooded. If they want to run their mouths about Dean, not only do they get the same treatment, they find out he’s raising money hand over fist from regular folks.
If some weenie wants to start shit with you, he can be humiliated on two of the most read blogs on the Internet.
This isn’t about agreement. This is about power and using it. We have to basically make people pay a price for starting in with us. Because we know their motives are not about policy. They want us to go away. So we have to show them two things, we’re here to stay and we can hurt them if we have to. And people get squeamish when power is used. Anyone think Kos is making an idle threat? No? Then shit, let’s back his ass up. We agree with him, so let’s act like it for God’s sake. Let’s not play the Judean People’s Front/People’s Front of Judea game,. where we argue over minor differences.
[. . .]
Politics is a hard business and you have to impress upon some people that you can fuck up their plans before they respect you, especially when you can execute your own.
posted by Steve @ 8:10:00 PM
[emphasis added]
Steve understood, before most of us, that Karl Rove and the Bush Administration had changed the playing field. All the heartfelt pieties and rational arguments in the world were moot; we had to learn how to fight, and Steve was the one who taught us how to do it.
Again and again, I’d watch Steve argue with his readers in his comment section. He’d debate them for a while before finally telling them to go start their own damn blogs.
I bet he launched a hundred bloggers that way.
If you want to remember Steve and honor his legacy, get the hell off of my damn blog and go start your own. Then go fuck up the other side’s plans, even if you piss off a few people along the way.
Whatever you do, don’t stop fighting. Steve never did.
Update 3:The News Blog now has a PayPal link up to collect donations to defray expenses for Steve’s funeral.
Update 4: (6/7/07) I knew — or, rather, I hoped — this was coming: the inimitable Driftglass, whose blog took flight under SG’s wing, lays down the best tribute to SG that I’ve seen so far.
If, like me, you think that Bill Donohue’s recent intervention in the Edwards’ Campaign constitutes a violation of the nonprofit status of The Catholic League, please read Phoenix Woman’s post on Mercury Rising to find out how you can help bring this matter to the attention of the IRS (via Agitprop).
Also be sure to check out Don Qui-who? on Pandagon.
After all, it’s not as if Donohue has been secretive about his motives or desires. In a recent Women’s Wear Daily profile , Donohue bragged about his ability to manufacture controversy:
BILL DONOHUE: THE CATHOLIC LEAGUE’S ATTACK DOG
In December 2005, a reporter from the Washington Post asked the Catholic League’s president, William Donohue, if he was offended that President Bush’s season’s greetings card did not specifically mention Christmas.
“At first, it didn’t bother me,” Donohue recalled in a recent interview. “I said, ‘So what. All presidents have had cards like this.’”
But when told by the reporter that everyone from Franklin Delano Roosevelt to Bill Clinton had at least one Christmas card where they mentioned something religious, Donohue pounced.
The following day, in the Post’s page-one story, Donohue rebuked the most conspicuously Christian president in 25 years for not being Christian enough. “This clearly demonstrates that the Bush administration has suffered a loss of will and that they have capitulated to the worst elements in our culture,” he said in the article.
“Good Morning America” booked Donohue for an interview. And the next year, the Catholic League’s president received an invitation to the White House Christmas party.
“Basically, I got rewarded for attacking him,” Donohue happily concluded. “Here at the Catholic League, we’ll give you an opinion on the weather if you want it.”
It’s this ability to manufacture controversy that has brought a moribund advocacy group firmly into the black and turned Donohue into catnip for the press. For talk show bookers and reporters on deadline, he’s a never-ending sideshow who comes ever ready to hurl expressions of indignation and opprobrium at anyone who might have offended him. As prejudice against individual Catholics has receded, Donohue has simply turned up the volume, taking aim at everyone who questions the church’s official positions on homosexuality, abortion and birth control, lapsed Catholics included.
Last year, Donohue urged Sony to put a disclaimer at the beginning of “The Da Vinci Code.” Then came Madonna - “Just when I thought we’d gotten rid of her,” he lamented - who yanked his chain when she decided to sing part of her concert against a cross. Just before Christmas, Donohue chewed out the film producers Harvey and Bob Weinstein yet again for their decision to open the horror film “Black Christmas” on Jesus’ birthday. It’s at least the third time he’s attacked the filmmakers, the others being for the movies “Priest” and “Dogma.”
“It’s not so much the plot of ‘Black Christmas’ that bothers us,” Donohue told the New York Post’s Page Six. “It’s the fact that the Weinstein boys are back again, choosing a title and an opening date to make their latest statement.”
Matthew Hiltzik, a spokesman for the Weinsteins, said of Donohue: “He’s helpful to have. He raises money by getting his name in the paper, the movie gets press and the columnist gets an item. Everyone wins.”
But the same thing that keeps Donohue in the press prevents him from becoming truly respectable within the religious community, where his antics are a source of frequent consternation.
Mark Silk, director of the Center for the Study of Religion in Public Life at Trinity College said, “He’s a thug. He reverts to bullying because he thinks that’s what the job entails.”
Rev. Mark Massa, a Jesuit priest and co-director of the Curran Center for American Catholic Studies at Fordham University, accused Donohue of being unable to differentiate between healthy debate and real religious bigotry. “Not everyone who criticizes the church is anti-Catholic,” he said.
The editors at the Catholic weekly magazine America seem to agree. In 2000, they chastised Donohue for denouncing movies he hadn’t even watched. “While being first may increase one’s chances of attracting media attention, there is a danger that the Catholic League reinforces the stereotype that the Catholic Church is at best unreflective and at worst unfairly biased and paranoid,” wrote Rev. James Martin. “In the long run, this may do more harm to the church’s reputation than a short-lived movie or play.”
Bitch Ph.D. argues that Donohue’s bullying tactics constitute abuse, and I’m inclined to agree: this episode has all the trappings of a Salem witch-hunt.
At the Frameshop Jeffrey Feldman has some specific suggestions about what we can do to prevent this from happening again the future:
Effective immediately, Frameshop is calling for the following actions to be taken against Bill Donohue and his followers:
All Democratic and Republican Party leaders should jointly condemn the threats to sodomize, rape and murder of Amanda Marcotte by Bill Donohue and his followers.
The IRS should immediately investigate the non-profit status of Bill Donohue’s Catholic League under the suspicion that his organization has violated its 501(c)(3) status.
The Attorney General of the City of the New York should immediately inquire as to the connection between Bill Donohue’s and his followers who threatened to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte.
The FBI should track down the men who issued the threats to sodomize, rape and murder Amanda Marcotte .
All media outlets must cease to invite Bill Donohue on the air.
As Richard Blair points out at The All-Spin Zone, “Republican smear attacks against one Democratic candidate are attacks against all Democratic candidates.”
That this particular attack involved a widespread, misleading, defamatory personal campaign of harassment against two women whose positions Donohue routinely distorted, and that mass media outlets publicized without correction or contextualization, is an outrage.
Only days after the sweeping election victories by Democrats, the pundit class has attempted to frame those victories as the fruit of centrist politics rather than as the result of netroots-supported progressive politics.
Need proof? Just take a gander at this comparison, put together by Media Matters, of two Time Magazine covers: one following the Republican sweep in 1994, and one that’s about to be published on the Demoratic sweep of ‘06 (via Atrios).
A few steak dinners from now, a couple of Meet the Press’s, and some tough hearings in January and Joe Lieberman will be safely back inside the ruling Democratic majority on Capitol Hill. That’s fine. But he should never forget that it was Ned Lamont - the challenger he churlishly demonized - who pushed a lazy, safe, back-bencher, ossified party leadership to take on George Bush and Karl Rove and George Allen and Donald Rumsfeld. It was Ned Lamont who made the Democrats make this election about the failed war in Iraq, and thereby opened the door to a wider discussion that brought Congress back.
And it was the netroots, so easily dismissed by the committees and their oak-paneled rooms in the District, so falsely mocked by intellectual lightweights like David Brooks, who made Ned Lamont possible. Ned Lamont and a couple of outsiders named Jim Webb and Jon Tester, the two Senators-elect who were entirely embraced by bloggers on the left even while they were ignored and under-funded by consultants in the center.
There’s a myth out there a-growin’ that this historic election of 2006 pushed the Democratic Party “back to the center,” that the big winners were Democratic “conservatives,” that Americans will only elect right-leaning candidates. It’s all as false as the south in George Allen’s twang, as empty as the pages in David Brooks’ reporters notebooks. Further, it tosses the economic underpinnings of the switch-over, particularly in the House races, where the big wave predictions came horribly true for the GOP. Reagan Democrats and their children are starting to peel away, move back to the party of their grandparents, finding the promises have all be broken.
As I commented on Tom’s post:
“The ability of the pundit class to absorb, distort, and misconstrue events frustrates and baffles me. It’s insane, really, to watch these memes, these faux-narratives, spring up out of nowhere and becoming controlling paradigms. And it happens over and over again.
“But, as this post and others like it prove, this is where blogs can and should come in as vital correctives to the group-think of media pundits.
“Someone’s got to do it, I guess . . . might as well be us.”
Mary Beth and Dwight, who have devoted countless hours to promoting the progressive blogosphere through the annual Koufax Awards, are in need of your help. As Susie of Suburban Guerrilla writes:
I just got off the phone with my friend MB and she’s in that really bad, desperate dark place where there’s no way out. I’ve been there. It’s awful, and the only thing that can pull you out of that pit is the kindness of others.
Mary Beth and husband Eric run Wampum (home of the Koufax awards) and they’re in dire financial straits right now, much worse than me. (And much worse than you can tell from their post. Trust me on this.)
They have four kids under ten, two of them autistic, and no heat at night. They’re living in an RV, and they’re cold all the time. The brake line on their RV just started leaking, and they can’t move out of Mendocino County with no brakes.
They’re applying for whatever aid they can, but they’re not eligible for much. I know what that’s like - to be so poor, and so desperate, but not quite poor enough to get help.
I’m asking every single one of you who’s in a position to help to please do so. Whether it’s $5 or $50, they really do need your help. (There’s that handy Amazon donation button up at the top of their left-hand column.)
If you live anywhere near Ft. Bragg (California) and can lend a hand (whether it’s housing, brake repairs or food), let me know and I’ll put you in touch.
If your blog has derived any benefit from the Koufax awards — a link, perhaps, that brought you new readers (and thus helped increase your advertising rates) — or even if you’ve just admired, from afar, the work that MB and Dwight have done to raise the profile of the progressive blogosphere, you can do no better than to give something back now. Please give what you can, and encourage others to do the same.
The “compromise” will, as I predicted, allow the “tough interrogations” by amending the war crimes act. And they will reportedly create a new JAG office to review classified information and determine if terrorist suspects can see it if it’s being used against them in a trial. We already know they have devised some habeas corpus loophole to keep innocent people imprisoned without any due process.
Democrats allowed this to happen by not calling attention to the fact that the McCain-Graham-Warner bill did away with habeas corpus for terror suspects. Interested more in the spectacle of Bush being handed a “defeat” by members of his own party than they were in critiquing the flaws in the actual piece of legislation M-G-W proposed, they stood silent. They forgot that Cheney-Bush-Rove never truly compromise: they ask for everything they want, knowing that they’ll wind up with most of what they want. And, as Digby notes, they look all the better for having “compromised” to get the legislation through.
The words “habeas corpus” were not even part of the public debate.
Now we are going to be, by fact and law, a nation of torturers. The day that bill passes will be a day of infamy not soon forgotten.
Update: Amid the despair we feel today, it’s important to remember this:
The Democrats have largely stood silent and allowed the trio of Republicans to do the lifting. It’s time for them to either try to fix this bill or delay it until after the election. The American people expect their leaders to clean up this mess without endangering U.S. troops, eviscerating American standards of justice, or further harming the nation’s severely damaged reputation.
The bill is not yet law. There is still time for action. What will Democrats do to stop it, and what will we do to support them?
This must be shared: a bit of witty editing (or, perhaps, just the addition of a new soundtrack) transforms a Jean-Claude Van Damme action sequence into a cheesy Mentos commercial:
And while we’re on the subject of re-editing movies, the winners of Trailer Park — the annual competition sponsored by AICE (Association of Independent Creative Editors) — will be announced in a few days. I’m hoping that they will make the winning films available online. Last year’s winner — Robert Ryang’s Shining — sparked a world-wide trend. It will be hard to beat.
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