Showing posts with label chair. Show all posts
Showing posts with label chair. Show all posts

Saturday, October 18, 2014

Florida Gov Rick Scott Beclowned by #Fantrum

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Florida tried to have a debate of the real issues between Governor Rick Scott and his opponent Charlie Crist, but it was thwarted by a fan. No, not a human fan of either politician, but a mechanical fan under Charlie Crist's podium. The Scott campaign didn't want the fan to be there, so the Governor refused to come onstage for many minutes, leaving Crist to just smile at the audience while the question panel seemed in a quandary about what to do next. Finally Scott stumbled onto the stage with some lame excuse, but it was too late. The Twitterverse had coined #Fangate and #Fantrum, and the rest is part of Florida election history.

Basically, Governor Scott beclowned himself with a fan.



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From NPR
Viewers who tuned in Wednesday night to watch Florida Republican Gov. Rick Scott and former Gov. Crist (once a Republican, now a Democrat) instead saw an empty stage, with moderators explaining about "an extremely peculiar situation." Within seconds Crist strode out and spent the next several minutes lamenting Scott's absence, and how it was ridiculous to argue over the fan at the base of Crist's podium when Florida faced so many important issues, before Scott finally joined him and the debate began.

But what TV viewers didn't know was that Scott's campaign was so agitated about the fan that it was demanding the event be canceled and that the TV station providing the live feed not proceed with the broadcast.

"Why? Who knows? Your guess is as good as mine," Wendy Walker, head of one of the debate's co-sponsors, Leadership Florida, told NPR Friday. "They had a bee in their bonnets about the fan.... I said, guys, do you want the story to be the fan?"



From the Miami Herald
“It was a missed opportunity. It was very odd,” said Fort Lauderdale lawyer Ed Pozzuoli, a Scott ally and former Broward County GOP chairman who echoed numerous Republicans. “Gov. Scott has a record that he needs to extol at every opportunity, and the only thing being discussed now is the fan.”
. . . Scott didn’t show until 7:07. He told CNN’s Wolf BlitzerThursday that he was told not to go on stage by “organizers.”
Rather than staging a brief boycott, Pozzuoli said, Scott should have used humor to defuse the controversy: “He would have gotten a lot more mileage out of it,” he said.
Instead, the flap became a social media punch line and the talk of morning cable TV shows. On MSNBC’s Morning Joe, viewers saw the video and an incredulous Mike Barnicle asked: “What’s wrong with these people? The governor of Florida demanding no fan?”



Scott tries to Gov-splain, but Fails:















. . . Why should Crist get to cool himself with a fan, but Scott isn't allowed to control his
temperature by laying on a chilled rock?
~ Stephen Colbert on Comedy Central









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Sunday, September 1, 2013

Snowden Supporters Applaud his Empty Chair in Berlin

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From RT.com
Former NSA contractor Edward Snowden has been awarded the biennial “whistleblower prize” in Germany, worth some $3,900, in recognition of his “bold efforts” to expose the monitoring of communications data by his former employer.
The prize, last awarded in 2011, was officially bestowed upon the 30-year-old at a ceremony in Berlin which took place Friday, prompting a nine-minute congratulatory video message from Guardian journalist Glenn Greenwald on Saturday.

Transparency International Deutschland e.V. contributed towards the award, which is given every two years by the Vereinigung Deutscher Wissenschaftler (VDW e.V.) and the German Section of the International Association Of Lawyers Against Nuclear Arms (IALANA e.V.).
Persons are honored who reveal malpractices and dangerous developments for humans and society, and that affect democracy, peace and the environment.
~ Digital Journal



It seems important to say that Edward Snowden is a person of high moral character. I can't really imagine who would be better fitting for this award, not just this year, but almost any year. That isn't to forget about Chelsea Manning, that isn't to forget that other people have not done great service for humanity.
But when I spoke with him this evening, his first question was not about how things would go. He asked me if I had slept. He asked me how I was feeling. And, uh, I told him that I was fine and he said, 'Are you sure?' (laughter in audience) This is a person who really cares about other people.
This is the person who, while he has been attacked and relentlessly smeared by the propaganda machines, he is the person who has thrown himself onto the very gears of that machine. And he has done it for each and every one of us.
~ Wikileaks Internet Activist Jacob Appelbaum while presenting the Whistle-Blower award to Snowden





If I ran the committee, making the choice of who was to receive this award, it would take me probably one and a half seconds at most to have come to the conclusion that he is the only person deserving of the award this year.
. . . I've written a lot about whistle-blowing and thought a lot about it, and there's two real components to whistle-blowing: One is the disclosure of wrongdoing, serious wrongdoing on the part of factions; and the second one is to disclose that wrongdoing at some risk to yourself. . . . (Snowden) embodies both of those as purely as you can imagine.
. . . Really, a single individual who just on his own made a choice that had extreme ripple effects on all sorts of realms that I think to this day are still underappreciated and unknown. And this lesson that any individual, no matter how formidable the adversary seems, no matter entrenched the oppressive institution appears to be, can stand up to that institution and challenge it and shine light on it and bring about real change, I think is a lesson that all kinds of people around the world, from very young to very old, on every continent of the Earth, will take from this.
~ Glenn Greenwald



















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Wednesday, September 19, 2012

Clint Eastwood Blames Mitt for Stupid Chair Skit

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Other Posts on this Topic:
Clint Eastwood Talks to an Empty Chair in Tampa
Romney Advisers on Hotseat Over Chair Debacle
Media Turn Clint Eastwood Every Which Way but Loose
Clint Eastwood Blames Mitt for Stupid Chair Skit


Clint Eastwood in an interview with Extra:
In one of the most memorable moments of the RNC, Clint Eastwood’s speech definitely left an impression. Eastwood told Penacoli, “People loved it or hated it, and that’s fine. I figure if somebody’s dumb enough to ask me to go to a political convention and say something, they’re gonna have to take what they get.”

Penacoli asked if he would do it again, and Clint responded, “I never look backward. It’s done and it’s done. I probably would, I wouldn’t be afraid of it.” The 82-year-old added that he was inspired by acting and comedy legends with the chair act.
“Actually, I did a funeral speech for a friend of mine and I started talking to mythical people imitating him and I sorta stole that for myself," he said. "But it reminds me of the days of Shelly Berman… Bob Newhart, all those guys who used to do those phone conversations, all that sort of stuff.”


video platformvideo managementvideo solutionsvideo player



























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Sunday, September 2, 2012

The Media Turn Clint Eastwood Every Which Way but Loose

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Clint and the Great Gazoo from the Flintstones 
via cracked.com


Other Posts on this Topic:
Clint Eastwood Talks to an Empty Chair in Tampa
Romney Advisers on Hotseat Over Chair Debacle
Media Turn Clint Eastwood Every Which Way but Loose
Clint Eastwood Blames Mitt for Stupid Chair Skit

The media, naturally, is furious. They don’t like to see Their Precious One mocked and they also understand the power of mockery -- which is why they keep Stewart and Colbert on such a tight leash. This is why the media has already written 25 stories (5 from Politico) mocking Eastwood.
. . . All I can say in response is: Go to hell you Obama-shilling crybabies. Eastwood showed more grit and honestly in those few minutes than you water carriers have during your entire propaganda-for-the-collective careers.
~ John Nolte on Breitbart

Rattled and bitter that they could not knock the Romney-Ryan ticket off-message, the Obama team and its allies in the blogosphere fixated on Clint Eastwood. Listen, I was there and it was darn weird. But at times it was funny and devastating in its dismissal of the president’s excuses. And in clips and sound bites the day after the live performance, the oddness is diminished and the punch lines seem more biting. In simple terms, the movie icon encapsulated the message of the convention: If someone is doing a bad job, you have to fire him.
Eastwood apparently so annoyed the egomaniacal president that the leader of the Free World felt compelled to hit back via Twitter (“this seat is taken”) at the movie star. Talk about losing your presidential aura. Empty chair = Obama is now a powerful association. Will the chair be in ads?
~ Jennifer Rubin on Washington Post

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Was he offended?
"One thing about being president or running for president — if you're easily offended, you should probably choose another profession." Obama said with a smile. He said there would be no effort to counter with a similar stunt at the Democratic National Convention, which opens in Charlotte Tuesday.
"I think we'll be playing this pretty straight," he said.
~ President Obama aboard Air Force One to USA Today

We're all Clint Eastwood fans here in the White House.
~ Senior Adviser David Plouffe on ABC's This Week

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You see these excerpts and you think, ‘What’s going on? He’s talking to a chair? What is this? But once you actually watch it you go, ‘Yeah, I get what he’s doing.’ Look, everyone knows Clint is a Republican. He’s 82 years old. He’s old enough where you don’t expect Obama up there, you know? He’s got a right to speak his mind. He didn’t kill with the speech, but I by no means thought it was a huge embarrassment.
~ Actor Ben Affleck on Daily Beast

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He was doing an improv. That's an improv; it's ad lib. In an improv, you needed a partner. So he created one for himself. Now look, George Bernard Shaw, the great playwright, was great because he always gave the best lines to the antagonists. Actors know, "I want to play the bad guy; he gets the best lines;" the reason being that the stronger the antagonist, the stronger the protagonist because he's got something to fight against.
What he gave to Barack Obama was, well, not the best lines. It was a couple vulgarities. First of all, "shut up," and then "go blank yourself;" a word we can't utter here, of course, and shouldn't have been uttered there. Certainly, not before the candidate was going to come out and impress us with what a wonderful person he was. The result was that it was ... Let me say this, in my opinion, Obama is incapable of saying "shut up and go blank yourself" in any normal circumstance and is capable, in fact, of uttering much more eloquent and I think proper replies. He was not given that opportunity. The words were put in his mouth. The words were vulgar and worse, they were disrespectful. I mean, I can remember a number of presidential campaigns where presidents who were running for reelection were not treated quite this disrespectfully.
~ James Lipton of The Actor's Studio in a discussion on MSNBC

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The Ryans Watch the Chair Skit

Nonsense from Clint Eastwood, anti-people Hollywood actor, in defense of Mitt Romney, the Right's candidate for the U.S. elections.
For friends who know English, if you understand what this guy said, let me know too.
~ Iranian Facebook Post translated from Farsi

Hollywood strongman Clint Eastwood appeared at the Republican National Convention today to support and warm the auditorium for Romney, and he was welcomed with enthusiasm. He excited the crowd with a famous line from Dirty Harry [the Chinese translation for this movie literally means "an urgent arresting order"] and made the audience very high.
~ Translation of the official Chinese Government Statement about Eastwood's Speech


The Chair Responds to Eastwood:

Chair: What did people say when you said you were going to talk to an empty chair?
Eastwood: You're absolutely crazy.


Colbert Interviews Eastwood's Chair:

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Saturday, September 1, 2012

Romney Advisers on the Hotseat Over Chair Debacle



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Other Posts on this Topic:
Clint Eastwood Talks to an Empty Chair in Tampa
Romney Advisers on Hotseat Over Chair Debacle
Media Turn Clint Eastwood Every Which Way but Loose
Clint Eastwood Blames Mitt for Stupid Chair Skit

He spoke from the heart with a classic improv sketch, which everyone at the convention loved.
~ Romney top adviser Stuart Stevens

So the whole thing where he's addressing "Mr. President," the empty chair sitting next to him? Him interviewing the empty chair as if in the empty chair was President Obama, and then he was pretending that the invisible president in the chair yelled at Mr. Eastwood that he should go "eff himself" and to "shut up." That was the big joke of the riff.
So that's what the Romney campaign chose to broadcast to 25 million people about Mitt Romney's campaign for the presidency.
What they did last night is a political disaster. This is unheard of.
~ Rachel Maddow on MSNBC





From the New York Times
Behind the scenes, Mr. Eastwood’s convention cameo was cleared by Mr. Romney’s top message mavens, Russ Schriefer and Stuart Stevens, who drew up talking points that Mr. Eastwood included, in his own way. They gave him a time limit and flashed a blinking red light that told him his time was up. He ignored both. The actor’s decision to use a chair as a prop was last-minute, and his own. “The prop person probably thought he was going to sit in it,” a baffled senior aide said on Thursday night.
. . . It also startled and unsettled Mr. Romney’s top advisers and prompted a blame game among them. “Not me,” an exasperated-looking senior adviser said when asked who was responsible for Mr. Eastwood’s speech. In interviews, aides called the speech “strange” and “weird.” One described it as “theater of the absurd.”

















 
Mashable: Interview with Invisible Obama
Now that you have gained more than 50,000 followers, what do you plan to do with the account?
I can’t just disappear (well, any more than I already have), so I’m going to keep on observing without being observed. . . .

What happens when other people sit in the chair? Do they become invisible?
When other people sit in the chair they usually get freaked out by feeling like they are sitting on someone else’s lap (that they can’t see). The reactions are priceless. My “and what do YOU want for Christmas” jokes don’t go over too well at that point. Then I just bring up “Invisible Touch” on my Spotify, and say over it, “you just got @invisibleobama’d!”

If you were to become chairman of anything, what would it be?
Let me be clear. I don’t have time for that. I’m an invisible President. Plus, I’m still running Clint Eastwood’s questions through Google Translate. But I guess if I could be the Chairman of anything, it would be Ikea. It would be great to have a full line of invïsibleöbäma furniture. Plus, I bet I’d get unlimited swedish meatballs and access to the ball pit after hours (because during regular hours it would be way too creepy).

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Philadelphia Inquirer: Eastwood Unseats Romney
In this era of instant essays, Michael Moore of the Daily Beast called it "a performance that seemed to have been written by Timothy Leary and performed by Cheech and Chong," and CNN's Howard Kurtz and MSNBC's Rachel Maddow called it the most bizarre thing they'd ever seen.

Marc Eliot, author of American Rebel: The Life of Clint Eastwood, says the speech showed that the actor is "not that comfortable being spontaneous, being unscripted. As a producer/director, he's a control freak, and last night he did not show control." Eliot says it's "a very bad thing for a party looking to connect with younger voters," awkward for TV, since Eastwood, scripted for 3 to 4 minutes, overstayed, pushing Mitt Romney's acceptance speech over the far edge of prime time.

Ah, but . . . that chair. It ceased to be a chair, becoming instead . . . a meme, a word, phrase, image, or idea rocketed throughout the Web, ubiquitous, trenchant. . . . Andrew Beaujon of the Poynter Institute noted that the empty chair was already a multimedia meme. CNN's Piers Morgan and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell and Thomas Roberts all have interviewed vacant furniture lately. Morgan called his (standing in for beleaguered Senate candidate Todd Akin) "a gutless little twerp." The Smithsonian Institution, with hilarious seriousness, traced the tradition of politicians' interrogating empty chairs back to "at least 1924."


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Transcript of The Daily Show with John Stewart
Yes!!! Amidst the tired rhetoric and empty platitudes and overwrought attacks . . . A Fistful of Awesome emerged in the night where it spent twelve minutes on the most important night of Mitt Romney's life yelling at a chair! Yes!
(points upward and mouths "thank you Jesus")
And oh, how the Outlaw Josie Wailed.
(plays clip of Eastwood rambling)
Are you not entertained? This is the most joy I've gotten from an old man since Dick Cheney non-fatally shot one in the face. I mean . . . more! Give me more!
(plays clip of Eastwood arguing with chair)
'I'm here to endorse Mitt Romney in this crucial hour. You will not silence me, Invisible Barack Obama.' . . .

Not that Romney didn't get a chance. I think he talked, too.
Romney: We Americans have always felt a special kinship with the future.
Yes, yes, we Americans, uniquely among Earth's people move forward in time.
Look - I don't care how many Marcos Rubio you put in between Clint Eastwood and Mitt Romney, Romney ain't outshining this little playlet I like to call "The Old Man and the Seat."

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And here's why it hurts - it hurt these Republicans bad because this convention like all conventions is a scripted and focused group fantasy. And the display of Eastwood's Gran Torino id was the very thing the Republicans had constructed the entire week to suppress.
This convention was the vision of a perfect America that used to exist until Barack Obama ruined it. And so what if that American had never actually existed.
(plays clip of Romney making glowing statements about American life)
Gee Whiz, Pops, that sounds awesome!
Yeah, that was the uncomplicated American you remember. I think in the early sixties there were some churches in Alabama that might disagree with your sports-team versus place-of-worship anecdote.

But the point is this: what this convention attempted to do is say that we could all live again in this nostalgic paradise if it weren't for this one f***in' guy.
(plays clips of Republicans bashing Obama) Hey, his wife is nice though. In four years one man, Barack Obama, has broken the greatest nation God has ever given us on this earth. The message of this convention is that apparently up until November of 2008 Americans lived in a utopian ideal ...
(shows clip of Andy Griffith and Opie going fishing)
... born of our own individual gumption and hard work. Sadly now, not four years later, it's a blighted socialist hell-scape where jackbooted thugs lock you up for thinking about Christmas.

And here is the most incredible part of the entire fiction: while convincing us that Barack Obama is destroying our country's future, the Republicans have also invented a past where they were trying to help him succeed.
Mitt: I wish President Obama would have succeeded because I want America to succeed. Holy effin' sh**!!! You . . . wanted . . . Obama . . . to succeed?

We may not remember that America was never really Mayberry, but we sure as sh** can remember back to 2009
(plays apocalypic clip from Sean Hannity).
Well, he did give him 100 days before queuing up the song from "The Omen."
. . . I can't believe he hasn't fixed in 8 days what our guy did in 8 years.


. . . Here's where Clint Eastwood has done a huge favor to us all. The Republican Party's irrationality that they've worked so hard at the convention trying to conceal was unleashed in a 12-minute improvised avant garde performance of one angry man.
 Eastwood finally revealed the cognitive dissonance that is the beating heart and soul and fiction of this party. They're so far gone, they're hammerin' Obama for things Bush did and Romney is.
(plays clip of Eastwood talking to chair about Afghanistan)
Oh Snap! You really gave it to the guy who didn't get us into that war!
(plays clip of Eastwood saying "It's not good for guys who are attorneys to be president anyway")
Yeah - take that Harvard lawyer, Barack Obama! You'll never be the man Harvard lawyer Mitt Romney is.

So we owe Clint Eastwood a debt of thanks. Not only because it was a truly hilarious 12 minutes of improvised awesome in a week of scripted blah. But because it advanced out understanding. This President has issues and there are very legitimate debates to be had about his policies and actions and successes and/or failures as President. I mean, tune in next week.
But I could never wrap my head around why the world and the President that Republicans describe bears so little resemblance to the world and the President that I experience. And now I know why.

There is a President Obama that only Republicans can see.
And . . . while the President the rest of us see has issues, apparently this President, invisible to many, is bent on our wholesale destruction. But look - invisible Obama is great for my business. I'm still sad that Trump's not running. But if you really want to make this election about this guy (shows pic of chair) let me see if I can paraphrase . . .
'Go ahead, make my day'



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