www.dailyitch.com

grab it here

This is going to sound absurd given she was on the radio rather than television — but she was radiant — you could hear it in her voice.

Anyhow, I did miss a few seconds in terms of recording at the very beginning of the show, but at least I got the rest of it, and this should be a quick download — let me know if it’s not.

.

Randi is back, and the live streams work perfectly, unlike Air America’s which never did — and Nova M’s new website — launched in a single weekend — is stunning.

Anyhow, that’s all I’ve got time for, the Goddess is on.

Listen here!

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Catch the YouTube Video here:

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Air America — it was nice while it lasted.

Replacing Randi Rhodes, at least all next week: Richard Belzer.

Yeah, I’m a sucker for Law & Order. And judging from his HuffPost blog, Belzer’s probably on the right side of most issues. But so what?

Belzer’s steady gig is as an Actor.

He doesn’t have the time, or likely, the desire, to watch CSPAN around the clock, monitor the European papers, or ferret out important stories corporate media missed by poring through hours of Congressional testimony transcripts.

Randi dug up the truth beneath the spin, and made herself into a lightening rod for it. Even Sam Seder, much as I respect him, cannot meet that standard. (Rachel Maddow comes close).

Moreover, Richard Belzer, unlike Sam, is a celebrity, who doesn’t need this job (and a good thing, too, cause knowing Air America he ain’t getting paid).
A column for Huffington Post, an appearance on Jon Stewart, a gig on Air America — Belzer can command any forum he wants.

Unlike say, Sam Seder, or any number of other journalists or bloggers tirelessly investigating the current administration to preserve what’s left of our freedoms.
I mean, somebody like Barbara Ehrenreich springs to my mind, immediately — or Katha Pollitt –but Richard Belzer???

I don’t know what Mark Green and Charlie Kireker were thinking, but if there’s room up one of their asses for my head, too, I’ll give you an update.

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Air America’s Management: No Business Sense, No Vision

Of all the sorry programming moves Air America has made, this is the worst.

While I understand that Randi Rhode’s crass remarks — made during a stand-up comedy act to benefit an AA affiliate — were a short-term liability for AA, long-term, the absence of her voice there is a terrible loss to the Progressive Movement.
As the Right Wing well knows but the Left never learns, it takes extreme voices at the end of the spectrum to shift the middle where you want it.

The side that defines ‘Centrist’ is the side that wins. It’s that simple.

Charlie Kireker and Mark Green’s graceless statement, leaving out the the setting of Randi’s lapse, reducing her central role in AA’s survival to ‘past services,’ underscores their lack of vision.

Abusive? Randi? Hell, yeah, in terms of language.

But let’s not lose sight of the real abuses, and abusers, she railed against, and the left’s collaboration with them:

Mark Green’s long strange trip from Nader’s Raider to flakking for the Pro-Foreclosure, Pro- Cluster Bomb candidate is just one tragic example. (see Hillary Clinton’s Hawkish Record and Why Pretend That Hillary Clinton Is Progressive?)

Funny, aint it? Green entitled his latest book, in 2006, “Losing Our Democracy”.

Guess that’s what they mean when they say the one who smelt it, dealt it.

Love & Peace,
Amy Pagnozzi

PS — You can catch Randi live on 960am via Internet Stream, or over the radio if you live in greater San Francisco.

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Fifty (50!) Tools which can help you in Writing

Obama Camp Sees Fine Line in Hitting Back



Hiroko Masuike for The New York Times

Samantha Power shown at a rally last month in New York for Senator Barack Obama, Democrat of Illinois. Ms. Power has resigned as a senior foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama.

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By JEFF ZELENY

Published: March 8, 2008

CASPER, Wyo. — Since opening his presidential bid 14 months ago, Senator Barack Obama of Illinois has answered many questions about his candidacy.

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Can he turn inspiration into votes? Yes. Can he raise money? Yes. Can his organization compete with the political muscle of one of the best-known families in Democratic politics? Yes.

But after his defeats this week at the hands of Senator Hillary Rodham Clinton, there is frustration and anger among his supporters, advisers and contributors about the Clinton campaign’s attacks on him — and still-unresolved tension about how far he can go in striking back without sacrificing his claim to be practicing a new brand of politics.

The conflict was given new life on Friday when Samantha Power, a close friend and a senior foreign policy adviser to Mr. Obama, resigned after referring to Mrs. Clinton, of New York, as “a monster.”

While Ms. Power, a Pulitzer Prize-winning writer, apologized for remarks she called “inexcusable,” the incident underscored the hard feelings that have developed over a long primary race that is probably months from ending.

Mr. Obama, who did not publicly acknowledge Ms. Power’s comment when he arrived here Friday on the eve of the Democratic caucuses in Wyoming, privately admonished members of his staff to avoid being drawn into an unnecessary negative back-and-forth with rivals.

Asked about the incident by a reporter at a campaign stop here, he said he had not “been drawn into a knife fight.”

Yet after losing in Ohio, Rhode Island and Texas — following days of being pummeled — advisers to Mr. Obama conceded they had to take a sharper tack as the Democratic nominating fight slogs forward in a delegate-by-delegate battle.

While still calibrating how to challenge Mrs. Clinton, advisers to Mr. Obama seemed to settle on an approach by seizing on her delay in releasing income tax returns and the slow pace at which papers from the Clinton White House are being made public.

The Obama campaign manager, David Plouffe, told reporters that Mrs. Clinton was “one of the most secretive politicians in America today.”

The Clinton campaign has, since Bill Clinton ran for president, mastered the art of the “war room.” And this week, suddenly smelling blood, it seemed on full alert. On Friday alone, Mrs. Clinton and her aides held forth with telephone calls and news conferences hitting Mr. Obama on Iraq, Ms. Power and trade.

Even as they counterpunched, Mr. Obama’s aides cast themselves as reluctant participants in the brawl.

“There are people that will always do politics as usual better than we will,” said Robert Gibbs, the communications director for Mr. Obama. “That’s why people want something different.”

The comments from Ms. Power came in an interview with a Scottish newspaper in which she characterized Mrs. Clinton as a desperate candidate. “She is a monster, too — that is off the record — she is stooping to anything,” Ms. Power was quoted as saying.

While the comments were unauthorized and immediately condemned, they also drew attention to other remarks Ms. Power made in an interview with the British Broadcasting Corporation, saying that as president, Mr. Obama would not necessarily follow through on the plan of withdrawing from Iraq that he had presented as a candidate.

It is the second time in two weeks that the actions of a top aide have forced Mr. Obama to defend the idea that he means what he says — hardly the ideal situation for a candidate who asks voters to trust his judgment and integrity.

“While Senator Obama campaigns on his plan to end the war, his top advisers tell people abroad that he will not rely on his own plan should he become president,” Mrs. Clinton told reporters on Friday in Mississippi. “This is the latest example of promising the American people one thing on the campaign trail and telling people in other countries another.”

Here in Wyoming, Mr. Obama forcefully defended his stance on the Iraq war, reminding voters that he had opposed it from the beginning.

“I just have to mention this because I don’t want anybody here to be confused,” Mr. Obama said. “I was opposed to this war in 2002. If it had been up to me we would have never been in this war. It was because of George Bush with an assist from Hillary Clinton and John McCain that we entered into this war.”

Under Mr. Obama’s rules, the attack does not violate his pledge to wage a new type of politics because it revolves around a specific issue, like Iraq. At another point during a town-hall-style meeting here, he resorted to humor when he invoked the Clinton television advertisement of the telephone ringing in the White House at 3 a.m.

“What do people think I’m going to do? I’m going to answer the phone,” he said, speaking over laughter from the crowd. “I’m going to find out what’s going on.”

At a rally Friday evening in Laramie, Wyo., he hailed Mrs. Clinton as “a fine public servant.” He said her approach in Washington was not to unify but “to beat the other side into submission.”

Still, in what the campaign hoped would be the final days of the primary fight, Mr. Obama continues to grapple with some of the same challenges he faced in the opening weeks of the campaign. It was a year ago when Mr. Obama rebuked his staff for how they responded when David Geffen, a Hollywood executive and former fund-raiser to the Clintons, sharply criticized Mrs. Clinton.

“I told my staff that I don’t want us to be a party to these kinds of distractions because I want to make sure that we’re spending time talking about issues,” Mr. Obama said in an interview at the time. “My preference going forward is that we have to be careful not to slip into playing the game as it customarily is played.”

But with the stakes of the nominating battle high, some of Mr. Obama’s supporters worry that his campaign has not found a way to deal strongly with criticism from Mrs. Clinton. On Thursday, her senior advisers accused Mr. Obama of acting like the former prosecutor Kenneth W. Starr for raising questions about releasing papers from her time in the White House.

Charles Lundgren drove 320 miles from Montana to see Mr. Obama here. He said he had grown worried in recent days about the back-and-forth between the Democratic rivals.

“He has to come out and reveal some of her negatives more,” said Mr. Lundgren, 80. “Negatives seem to pay off; they apparently did in Texas. I think he’s going to have to come back at her. You can’t let Bill and Hillary contribute that way with their negative stuff without coming back at them.”

Michael Powell contributed reporting from New York.

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   Pasted from <http://www.nytimes.com/2008/03/08/us/politics/08adviser.html?_r=1&hp&oref=slogin>

Update (24/07/2006): Replaced the links with archive.org.

Roy Peter Clark from Poynter Institute has posted up 50 tools that can help you when you do any kinds of writing. This is a extensive list of writing tools, but by no mean you need to apply all of them when you do any writing. There are the Writing Tool links:

… You will become handy with these tools over time. You will begin to recognize their use in the stories you read. You will see chances to apply them when you revise your own work. Eventually, they will become part of your flow, natural and automatic …

Links of 50 Writing Tool

1. Writing Tool #1: Branch to the Right
2. Writing Tool #2: Use Strong Verbs
3. Writing Tool #3: Beware of Adverbs
4. Writing Tool #4: Period As a Stop Sign
5. Writing Tool #5: Observe Word Territory
6. Writing Tool #6: Play with Words
7. Writing Tool #7: Dig for the Concrete and Specific
8. Writing Tool #8: Seek Original Images
9. Writing Tool #9: Prefer Simple to Technical
10. Writing Tool #10: Recognize Your Story’s Roots
11. Writing Tool #11 Back Off or Show Off
12. Writing Tool #12: Control the Pace
13. Writing Tool #13: Show and Tell
14. Writing Tool #14: Interesting Names
15. Writing Tool #15: Reveal Character Traits
16. Writing Tool #16: Odd and Interesting Things
17. Writing Tool #17: The Number of Elements
18. Writing Tool #18: Internal Cliffhangers
19. Writing Tool #19: Tune Your Voice
20. Writing Tool #20: Narrative Opportunities
21. Writing Tool #21: Quotes and Dialogue
22. Writing Tool #22: Get Ready
23. Writing Tool #23: Place Gold Coins Along the Path
24. Writing Tool #24: Name the Big Parts
25. Writing Tool #25: Repeat
26. Writing Tool #26: Fear Not the Long Sentence
27. Writing Tool #27: Riffing for Originality
28. Writing Tool #28: Writing Cinematically
29. Writing Tool #29: Report for Scenes
30. Writing Tool #30: Write Endings to Lock the Box
31. Writing Tool #31: Parallel Lines
32. Writing Tool #32: Let It Flow
33. Writing Tool #33: Rehearsal
34. Writing Tool #34: Cut Big, Then Small
35. Writing Tool #35: Use Punctuation
36. Writing Tool #36: Write A Mission Statement for Your Story
37. Writing Tool #37: Long Projects
38. Writing Tool #38: Polish Your Jewels
39. Writing Tool #39: The Voice of Verbs
40. Writing Tool #40: The Broken Line
41. Writing Tool #41: X-Ray Reading
42. Writing Tool #42: Paragraphs
43. Writing Tool #43: Self-criticism
44. Writing Tool #44: Save String
45. Writing Tool #45: Foreshadow
46. Writing Tool #46: Storytellers, Start Your Engines
47. Writing Tool #47: Collaboration
48. Writing Tool #48: Create An Editing Support Group
49. Writing Tool #49: Learn from Criticism
50. Writing Tool #50: The Writing Process

Fifty Writing Tools - Poynter Online

Pasted from <http://www.lifehack.org/articles/lifehack/fifty-50-tools-which-can-help-you-in-writing.html>

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I have installed an interesting application - BlogJet. It’s a cool Windows client for my blog tool (as well as for other tools). Get your copy here: http://blogjet.com

“Computers are incredibly fast, accurate and stupid; humans are incredibly slow, inaccurate and brilliant; together they are powerful beyond imagination.” — Albert Einstein

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