Thursday, September 20, 2007

Thursday Afternoon

The Senate just voted a symbolic vote to condemn an ad placed by MoveOn.org that attacked General Petraeus. This is wrong in so many ways.

First of all, the Senate (or the House or any government institution) has no business voting en masse — and using the bully pulpit that we entrust to them — to criticize how Americans exercise their Freedom of Speech. Everyone can all say whatever they want on their own time but it isn't the job of our deliberative bodies to pass judgment on how tasteful or accurate a political ad may be.

Secondly, the whole thing's a cheap political stunt. You introduce a resolution like this to try and put your opponents on the spot and force them to vote. If they vote to condemn it, they pretty much have to condemn the whole thing, including portions with which they might agree had those sentiments been more graciously expressed. If they don't vote to condemn it, then their opponents will try to hold them as responsible for it as if they'd written it themselves...which is another distortion of reality. Just because you don't condemn something doesn't mean you agree with every word of it. It's all a trick to move the debate off of whatever legitimate issues the ad raises and make it instead about the manners and ethics of people you're running against.

Thirdly, our Senate has a large pile of issues to deal with that are causing people to lose their lives, their homes, their health insurance, their jobs, etc. Why the hell are they spending time on a symbolic vote about anything?

Lastly, if they're serious that it's the job of our government to scold people for smear campaigns, they're setting themselves up for quite a workload. I'll bet every member of Congress can cite a hundred ads or editorials that they think are as lacking in decorum and truth as the backers of today's symbolic vote claimed the MoveOn ad was. If they're not hypocrites, they'll introduce resolutions calling for symbolic condemnations of all of them...but they won't because there's no political mileage in most cases. Frankly, I think there should just be a symbolic vote to condemn today's symbolic vote...and then they should (to borrow an appropriate phrase in this instance) move on.

• Posted at 1:58 PM · LINK

Today's Video Link

One of my favorite things to listen to are the CDs recorded by a band from Holland called The Beau Hunks. They named themselves after a Laurel and Hardy movie because their specialty is re-creating the great background music from the Hal Roach comedy shorts. It was primarily composed by a man named Leroy Shield and it's best known from the underscoring for the films of Stan Laurel and Oliver Hardy.

This article describes the extraordinary effort that went into reconstructing these tunes. Getting together an orchestra to play them was the easy part. The hard part was painstakingly re-creating the sheet music, which meant studying the films in minute detail. The output is utterly faithful to the originals except it's without the hisses and scratchiness and actors talking over it. Great stuff. If you'd like to try a CD, I'd recommend this one, which is mostly tunes from the Our Gang comedies but many of the same cues were used in the films of Stan and Ollie.

Here's two minutes of the Beau Hunks rehearsing for a live appearance...

• Posted at 12:40 AM · LINK