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If you need a giggle, try Xinhua

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Official government news agencies are not famous for their whimsy, particularly those whose mission is to convey all the warmth and humanity of a dictatorial regime.  Yet China’s Xinhua agency delivered the goods when it reported that Jeff Bezos had purchased The Washington Post by mistake and was having trouble cancelling the transaction!

Poynter’s Andrew Beaujon reports that Xinhua came across this Andy Borowitz piece in The New Yorker and republished it as fact: Amazon founder Bezos inadvertently clicked on the Post’s website and ended up making a purchase, and customer service wasn’t being too helpful in straightening out the mistake.

Mr. Bezos said he had been on the phone with the Post’s customer service for the better part of the day trying to unwind his mistaken purchase, but so far “they’ve really been giving me the runaround.”

According to Mr. Bezos, “I keep telling them, I don’t know how it got in my cart. I don’t want it. It’s like they’re making it impossible to return it.”

Xinhua does not have an American sense of humor, clearly; it apparently does not have an American sense of plagiarism, either.

A day in the life

Pat Ryan 5 Comments

It’s one of those days…you know the kind I mean.  The details of my today aren’t important and I’m not trying to play on your sympathy; just saying we’ve all had those days when the universe makes it clear, again, that your well-laid plans are not binding on anyone else.  A day when you’d agree with the characterization offered by Ned Racine in Body Heat: “Sometimes the shit comes down so heavy I feel like I should wear a hat.”  A day when a lot of frustration gets vented, or distilled out, on the drive home.

If you are lucky enough, you stumble upon something coming out of the car radio that nudges aside the pall, at least for a few minutes, and reminds you that today is just today…there will be plenty of tomorrows that are not today.  For me, today, it was this story on NPR about the positive effect of organized baseball on some kids in a drug-infested neighborhood of Camden, New Jersey, creating safe pockets out of the despair where “kids can still be kids.”

Now, I know that just about any activity for kids that their parents and other adults in the neighborhood actively support could have the same impact on the kids as baseball is having for these particular kids today…and I try not to go all Ken-Burns-and-George-Will on the mystical healing powers of baseball…but on this day—All-Star Game day!—hearing about the mystical healing powers of baseball for some kids in Camden, New Jersey really hit the spot.

And then, there’s this:

Hu on 1

(apologies for the misspelling, Bud!)

I don’t care why he’s doing it, I’m just glad he’s gonna go‏!

Pat Ryan 2 Comments

…and I have confidence in you, America; I don’t have to worry about another Texas governor being elected president and screwing things up from that end.  (Don’t let me down!)

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Photo: Politico screen grab      Caption: HIPRB

The ACLU explains why even non-terrorists should care about NSA spying on Americans

Pat Ryan 1 Comment

Since the news broke last month about the domestic spying programs laid out in the secret documents Edward Snowden leaked I’ve tried to make the case why all of us should be angry that our government is spying on us. Some have argued, “but I’ve done nothing wrong so I don’t have anything to worry about.”  Well, you may not have done anything illegal…but do you really want the government knowing and storing information about everything you do?  The folks at Upworthy tweeted a link to this ACLU video that has an answer for those people.

The TV news is an ass, the sequel

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I failed to give credit where it was due when I wrote early yesterday about how television “news” ignored the dramatic events at the Texas state capitol.  There was a filibuster-to-adjournment over a bill that would drastically reduce the availability of abortions in Texas and that caused citizens to fill the galleries, and later to express their anger when they saw, plain as day, the lieutenant governor and his supporters try to railroad the process, and at one point saw that an official record of a vote had been changed.  I was annoyed that I couldn’t follow the story on television–it was not being covered on any of my local stations in Houston nor on any of the national cable “news” channels.  I was keeping up on Twitter.

What I neglected to do was to consult other avenues available on the Inter-Webs, and I was reminded of that today by Time and by Rachel Sklar.  The state senate was live-streaming itself, and the big show was available on other live streams, too, with some great work done by the Austin American-Statesman.  Congratulations to them all for recognizing a newsworthy event when they saw one and doing something to let the rest of us keep up.

Time: “As protesters massed in the gallery, the GOP majority attempted to close debate and bring a vote, and Democrats maneuvered to stall after their rivals forced [Senator Wendy] Davis to stop speaking on procedural grounds, well over 100,000 YouTube viewers were tuned to the channel–closer to 200,000 as zero hour approached. That’s a six-figure viewership, after primetime in most time zones, watching legislators argue over Robert’s Rules of Order and who properly held the floor.”

Sklar: “The clock struck midnight. Victory! They had run out the clock! The chants continued. Twitter exploded. But that was weird, it seemed like that vague roll call was still going on. What, exactly, was going on in that huddle by the Chair?

This is what was going on: They were taking the vote. It was after midnight, and suddenly that strict adherence to rules didn’t seem so strict anymore. Whispers were trickling out, confirmed by the AP: SB5 had passed, 17-12.

Twitter was going bananas. I checked the networks again. CNN was re-running Anderson Cooper. MSNBC was re-running Lawrence O’Donnell. Fox was re-running Greta van Susteren. Journalist Lizzie O’Leary tweeted, ‘Interesting choice you made tonight, cable news executives.'”

By now you’ve heard how it turned out: the good old boys intent on changing a law that most Texans thought didn’t need changing (and despite having failed in their effort to change the law during the regular session, by the way) were gobsmacked at the reaction of the crowd, yet tried to push ahead and took a vote on the bill after the deadline and declared victory, only to be confronted with not only the evidence of their failure to act within the rules of the chamber but evidence that someone messed with the records (Anthony De Rosa posted screenshots of the evidence, here and then here) and ultimately conceded defeat of the bill on other technical grounds.  And just as expected, Governor Haircut issued a call for another special session starting next week so legislators can have a third bite at the apple.

Yeah, but we didn’t need to see any of that live as it happened, did we…

UPDATE 6/28 8:00 am CT: Patti Kilday Hart at Houston’s Leading Information Source solves the mystery over the conflicting reports of when the Texas Senate voted on the abortion restriction bill, and it turns out there was no hanky-panky.  The respected secretary of the Senate Patsy Spaw explains that the vote started before the special session ended at midnight–she knows because it’s her job to check the clock before starting the roll call–and the rules allow such a vote to count; because of the noise in the chamber the staffer charged with recording the vote had to leave her desk to hear the result, and it was past midnight when she returned to her workstation to enter the result; someone later manually changed the date in the system to reflect the correct date of passage.  But the bill ultimately was not passed legally because, as Lt. Gov. Dewhurst said at the time, it hadn’t been signed by the presiding officer “in the presence of the Senate” as required by the state constitution: all official action of the special session ended the moment the senators left the chamber (because of the noise) after midnight, and could not resume when they returned some time later Wednesday morning.