Wednesday Reads

 Good on South Carolina for standing for women athletes and common sense.

The bill now goes to the Senate, which will  pass, and then to the governor, who will sign it.

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Obituary:  Journalist and media critic Eric Boehlert, 57, died as a result of being struck and killed while riding a bicycle.  He died on Monday but the death was announced today.  He left behind a wife and two children:

Most recently, he was the founder of the reader-supported Press Run on Substack, which Boehlert started in 2020 with a mission of delivering “unfiltered, passionate, and proudly progressive critique of the political press in the age of Trump.” Subscribers of the thrice-weekly newsletter received “original media commentary, analysis, and reporting.”

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Another obituary:  Actor and later painter Nehemiah Persoff, 102, has reportedly died.  He was in arguably just about every television series in the 1950s and 1960s, plus films.  When he retired from acting, he turned his attention to painting.

Snip:

Born in Jerusalem, Palestine, Persoff and his family moved to the United States in 1929, and after serving in the U.S. Army in World War II he relocated to New York to pursue a career in theater. He became a member of the famed Actors Studio in the late 1940s, studying with Elia Kazan, who would pay him a reported $75 to play the silent cab driver in Waterfront.

Persoff was also performing in small roles on television during the early 1950s, a career that would flourish in the years to come. A small sampling of his early TV roles included such shows as Goodyear Playhouse, The Philco Television Playhouse, Appointment with Adventure, Armstrong Circle Theatre, Kraft Theatre, The United States Steel Hour, The Twilight Zone, Alfred Hitchcock Presents and Playhouse 90.

The Nutroots Chronicles

This link, among others, has a video an interview with writer Eric Boehlert talking about the joys of blogging and its (dubious) impact on political discourse.

I for one am very upset at the recent newspaper/traditional media downsizings or even closures. For all of the hype, "alternative" media can't possibly give readers the quality of traditional media. They also don't have the manpower or the resources to make the traditional media obsolete. At best alternative media is a supplement to traditional media.

Yes, the nutroots have a lot to answer for its mindless support for Barack Obama last year. Now that Obama is president and the Kool Aid has worn off, more than a few of them are shocked--SHOCKED--Obama is not the "progressive messiah" he was made out to be last year. He is just another politician, a neoliberal, just as he always was for those who bothered to look behind the 24/7 hype. And more of these people are pissed off at him.

As for me, blogging is merely an outlet for expressing my opinion on many things, as well as having a permanent document on personal matters. I used to have journals, but this more or less replaces them.