Last night, we got a taste of our very first taste of a debate night duel. On one side, we had our typical, Fox News-facilitated pageantry of foot-stomping candidates vying for our love. On the other side, we got Trump. As for you—well, you had questions.
Do you have burning questions about Gawker.TV? Are you new to the site? Want to see your work on Gawker.TV? Ever wonder how you can also share TV clips with your friends? All of these answers, inside.
Do your current obsessions include television, pop-culture, viral video, or social media? Then we want you to be a Gawker Media Video intern.
We here at Gawker.TV want to give a voice to anyone who's in love with TV, Movies, and online video as much as we are. Details on how to make that happen and an explanation of sydnication inside.
Not everyone is an expert at the Gawker.TV commenting system. Find out what it means to be a starred commenter, how to make friends, what HTML works in the comments, and how to use our tagging system.
1. His Name is No, Dr. No - Some hippie was once so enthralled by his resistance to the word "yes" that s/he sent him a giant "NO" in gratitude. He loves it so.
Nationally, Barack Obama is between 5 and 10 points ahead in the polls. In the states defined by Rasmussen as battlegrounds, Obama ranges from a tie in North Carolina (North Carolina!) to slight leads in all the rest of them. Also Bush announced the nationalization of the banks or something today, prompting the Dow to jump in early trading. So Matt Drudge, who controls your news with an iron opera glove, is leading today with the news that ACORN registered Mickey Mouse to vote. Ha ha ha. Honestly, what the hell's the deal with the ACORN story and why are right-wingers already clinging to it like guns and religion? Sigh. We'll try to explain. What is ACORN?? An evil group that exists to organize poor people into a violent militia and overthrow the government via "voting." Or basically a lobbying group for low- and middle-income families, either one. Oh no, lobbyists! Right? ACORN is in some respects a lobbying group like, say, the oil or pharmaceutical lobbies. Except they represent poor people instead of profitable corporations so they're a much less successful lobbying group. What do they do? They started as a radical group dedicated to getting welfare recipients and underemployed non-welfare recipients together to demand socialist things like free lunches for kids and emergency room care. Now they lobby Democrats for terrorist things like raising the minimum wage and forcing the government to subsidize affordable housing. Also they organize voter registration drives. But what about all these crimes they're committing?? ACORN pays local losers in Florida $8 an hour to gather 20 voter registrations a day. So some of these losers are lazy, like all employees, and just make up the registrations. ACORN does try to find these made-up registrations and fire the employees who submit them, but, you know, sometimes they miss a couple. Also the law seems to say that ACORN has to submit all the registrations they gather no matter what, and even though the law is a little bit vague, they're still trying to follow it. Why do Republicans need to attack and delegitimize a damn voter registration drive?? Because a certain amount of passive voter suppression is built in to the Republican campaign strategy. If all the disenfranchised and disenchanted voters were organized and registered and informed, we'd probably be a crazy socialist 10-party country like Italy or something. The GOP engages in active voter suppression—voter ID laws and legal challenges—and the more passive kind built into the democratic process, like engendering cynicism about the democratic process. Obviously convincing the guys who disagree with you to not vote is part of any party's campaign strategy, but the GOP's by necessity targets poor people and minorities, and the vast history of suppressing the votes of poor people and minorities is way grosser than any history of disenfranchising white protestants. To us! Maybe you have some totally oppressed landed gentry in your family tree so you may feel differently. Quite honestly the very heart of the utter bullshitness of this anti-ACORN campaign can be found in one incredibly telling quote from a spokesman for the RNC: "Cairncross accused ACORN of engaging in a 'systematic effort to undermine the election process' through its voter-registration drives." Do you see the problem with that statement? And basically there is a CERTAIN CLASS of Republican voter that does not think that the poors, the Blacks, the homelesses, and so on honestly really deserve the same power to choose our rulers as a guy who's worked his whole life to get where he is. The politics of resentment are the last, most powerful weapon the McCain campaign has left this cycle. The details of the charges don't matter, actual proof of fraud doesn't matter, any evidence whatsoever of voter fraud being a real problem with a measurable effect on elections certainly doesn't matter, because the "fraud" is just that, you know, no-good hoodlum welfare recipients are being handed voter registration forms, and one type of person sees that as the point of democracy and the other type sees it as an utter perversion of democracy. Didn't McCain used to totally be in the tank for ACORN? Well Republicans have been bitching about ACORN and voter fraud for years now, but McCain definitely didn't used to be one of those Republicans. In 2006 McCain did give a keynote address, about immigration rights, at a rally co-sponsored by ACORN. Can you maybe use a little more false equivalence to explain this in a way I understand? Sure. ACORN's voter registration drives are to conservatives what Diebold voting machines are the liberals. The possibility of abuse is present and clear, but no one's yet convincingly proved that any abuse has occurred. OK so what's up with everyone suddenly talking about ACORN? As we said, nuttier conservatives have been on the ACORN-bashing bandwagon for years now. That it's finally trickled up to Drudge and Fox means they're scared they're losing the election and they need to preemptively delegitimize Obama. What are my talking points for when crazy relatives argue that ACORN stole the election? What we're dealing with so far is minor voter registration fraud. The questionable registrations number in the double digits in most states, and most of them have been flagged and caught by either ACORN themselves or election officials. Furthermore in many places the false registrations are required by law to be submitted anyway, so that ACORN isn't guilty of, say, tossing out the forms of Republicans they sign up. They do try to flag the fake ones as fake, but regardless, the fake ones are still being caught. Also: voter registration fraud does not coherently lead to voter fraud, because if you register one man 75 times, how will he vote 75 times, exactly? More importantly, the election can't be stolen if it hasn't happened yet, and voter registration fraud does not explain in any way a double digit lead for a candidate in national tracking polls. Like, wtf, how are you making this argument, are you slow? ACORN registering Mickey Mouse is why Barack Obama is up 12 in Pennsylvania? Ok, sure, whatever you say.
Even false rumors can be revealing. It wasn't true that Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama was a secret Muslim, or that his wife hated white people, but the persistence of those claims in email chain letters, online comments and blog posts told you what a chunk of middle America feared, namely scary foreign terrorists in disguise. What to make, then, of the flood of conspiracy theories about Sarah Palin that are flooding the dark corners of the internet? We thought rumors about the Republican vice presidential candidate and her family were going to dry up last week, but since our last comprehensive factsheet they have just kept coming. There's some genuine scandal. But a fake pregnancy? Secret rehab stints? Maybe the Bush and Clinton years left the blue states dreading anyone who seems too country-fried. Or maybe the Palin's really do have this many skeletons in their closet! Trudge through the thickening swamp of Palin mud and decide for yourself, one rumor at a time, after the jump.
Sarah Palin! Do you know anything about her? Neither does John McCain! But now we must learn, because we will be hearing a lot of crazy things about her over the next month (unless she drops out). Which of these things are true? Which are false? WHO'S THE FATHER? We will tell you the TRUE things, below, and then we will speculate wildly as to the crazy conspiracy nonsense. It will be fun. It's All True! "Book burner." Not literally. Though as mayor of the tiny, presumably quirky little Alaska town of Wasilla, Palin did inject a bit of old-fashioned culture war politics into the local library. From Time, via Kos: "'She asked the library how she could go about banning books,' he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. 'The librarian was aghast.'" Hah. So much for the "sexy librarian" thing, right? She has a crazy preacher! Once again, sort of. Though this one is less likely to be relevant to anything, because it's a crazy right-wing white preacher, and we are quite used to seeing them on TV and not even bothering to be shocked by them anymore. Anyway. Sarah spoke before her old church in Wasilla a couple months ago. She grew up and was baptized there. The senior pastor there since 1999 is, obv, a crazy right-wing evangelical nutcase named Ed Kalnins. He once said Kerry voters will go to hell, and people who criticize the president will go to hell, and Iraq and 9/11 were wars of faith and other fairly doctrinaire beliefs for the modern-day Christian right, their recently scrubbed moderate-ish image notwithstanding. Anyway, crazy pastor! She is a secessionist! So yeah, there's a wacky political party in Alaska that wants to secede from the union. It's called the "Alaskan Independence Party" and Sarah Palin was a member back in the '90s, until she ran for mayor. They hate America! Sarah Palin hates America! Also, awesome logo. Conspiracies! Trig Still Not Hers Sarah Palin's most recent baby, four-month-old Trig, was rumored to actually be Palin's oldest daughter Bristol's baby, back until the campaign announced that Bristol is five months pregnant now. Some people are unconvinced! Read the entirely circumstantial evidence right here. The "real" story still has weird holes. Why was Bristol pulled out of school, is Levi the real father and does he actually intend to go through with this ridiculous wedding? But honestly we're inclined to believe the 44-year-old woman actually did give birth to the baby with Down Syndrome. But still, the timeline is weird. Now, finally, the Enquirer weighs in: they say the Bristol pregnancy was supposed to be announced after the RNC, at which point the shotgun wedding would've been finished. But Bristol rebelled! Or something! Myths She strangled a fucking bear to death once. There is no evidence to support this rumor. (Up top, the alleged cover of this week's Us Weekly.)
Recently, we explained how to make fun of Barack Obama. We thought that would be the end of it! But no, you people-you animals-have more questions, so many more questions. Questions we're obligated to answer. Don't thank us, we're just doing our job. Below: snappy answers to stupid questions about Barack Obama.
1. What is Valleywag?
Valleywag is a tech gossip rag, focusing mainly on the people and stories of San Francisco and Silicon Valley.
1. Who can leave comments on Valleywag?
Anyone who has been invited, either by us or by a friend. The invite system works like Gmail. We've invited a bunch of our favorite execs, bloggers, and friends to comment, then given them invitations to share with their friends and colleagues. That way, the burden of inclusion, and exclusion, is shared.
