Spontaneous ∂erivation

Beneath the cut, just a gathering of videos documenting the Stewart vs. CNBC struggle. Tuggage. I loves me my Daily Show dose.

This post is split into multiple pages by day, since an entire page of videos is a bit much.

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For people who want a smaller version of the Kindle text-to-speech demo and comparison against an amateur reader and a professional reader (Stephen Colbert, natch) of I Am America (And So Can You!), here’s a short, merged recording of all three.

No text is repeated.

Download [Merged Readings of I Am America]

And now I’m going to concentrate on New on Kindle and some other writing, because there’s a lot to catch up on.

So Amazon is backing off text-to-speech.

I recorded this podcast before I saw the news, finishing up the first round of editing literally seconds before. But hopefully this podcast—which is fortunately now legal, because had I recorded it in the future, it would have been illegal—will still be informative for those who wonder what Kindle’s text-to-speech is like, and why you should buy audiobooks anyways.

(Note: audiobooks are not available for every book. Because it takes so much effort to make a good one. So the loss of Kindle’s text-to-speech has really screwed the pooch for those of us who can see well enough to use a Kindle’s menus and suchlike, but not well enough to read for long periods of time.)

And now, coming in at around 10 minutes, the podcast.

ETA: The book being read is Stephen Colbert’s I Am America (And So Can You!).

Kindle: Text to Speech Demo [Download]

I love him so.

There are quite a few people upset at the House of Representatives’ Republican behavior with respect to the bill. All that wasted talk and compromise from Obama, seems to be the general thought on the left side of the line.

But I’m not upset, despite liking the bill.

First of all, it’s the House of Representatives. The House is like the LiveJournal community of the U.S. Government. I’d have been deeply impressed if the Stimulus Package vote had gone down without some kind of high school melodrama.

Secondly, the Republicans seem to have forgotten the rules to the blood sport of Washington. Yes, you can indeed ignore the rules of reciprocation and trust when you’re in the clear majority. But when you aren’t the majority, it’s easier to accumulate political debt than political interest.

Put plainly: Obama, by visiting the Hill rather than staying put in the White House, and having all of these successful talks with the Republicans, more or less invested his available political coinage (of which he has quite a bit of, being as popular as he is with the country right now). He gave the opportunity to the Republicans to do the same. But instead of investing, they decided to spend what little coinage they had left in cock-blocking the bill (and especially the way they spun it to the media).

This might have been worth something were they able to actually get something in return, like actually blocking the bill; but they didn’t and indeed they couldn’t. Obama’s investment, on the other hand, paid him dividends. He had little risk, which is not the same as having little to risk, which is what the House Republicans have. And thus Obama played his hand well, much better than most Presidents would have done, I think.

So, House Republicans: they’ve effectively blown their political brokerage account. They didn’t actually incur debt, because Obama came to them; they just cleaned themselves out with little leverage left to actually build up their accounts again. Such accounts do eventually gain interest as the memory of the public fades, but for the near future, Obama has them dead to rights.

And, you know. It wouldn’t be LiveJournal the House of Representatives without a little soap opera floating around.

The Daily Show and the Colbert Report don’t just have a following on YouTube (which clips and displays and shares and loves them both), but Comedy Central also provides online videos themselves—embeddable and all that. I’ll share with you four of my favorite clips:

Daily Show: McCain Returns to Washington

Jon Stewart covers the days before and the days after John McCain stood up David Letterman, revealing more behind the story than most of the “real media” would dare to say. As per the usual.

Favorite quote:

By the way, we’ve just heard about 10 minutes ago that the [bailout] is falling apart. So in between them accepting the deal and the deal falling apart… Senator John McCain came back to Washington.

The Daily Show: 10,000 McCainiacs

Remember all the fanatical and scary rallies that the McCain campaign encouraged and, at least on McCain’s part, seriously regretting? Oh, right, those haven’t gone away yet. I’m not sure when they’ll go away. Anyways, Jon Stewart’s got the goods:

Favorite bit:

If you’ve raised the monster to fear and despise fire, it’s awfully hard to convince the monster that fire can also be used in cooking…. [cuts to the aftermath of McCain telling his rally that Obama is a decent man, which is not pretty]

Colbert Report: The Word – Fantasyland

Not to be outdone (indeed, never to be outdone, at least not for very long), Stephen Colbert, in one of his best “The Word” segments, dissects the threat of ACORN:

Favorite:

McCain clip: We need to know the extent of Senator Obama’s relationship with ACORN…

Colbert: And we need to know it soon. Because if there’s nothing there, we’d like another week and a half to find something good.

Second-favorite:

And we all know that the fabric of democracy is very fragile. Because it is made out of the founding fathers’ pantyhose.

Really, there’s so much to like about this particular Word. Colbert covers the Help America Vote Act, what ACORN does, what actually counts as voter fraud, and also that John McCain was keynote speaker at one of ACORN’s conventions.

Colbert Report: John McCain’s Big Prank

Oh, and remember the time he picked Sarah Palin?

Really, it’s hard to quote from Steward and especially Colbert, because the delivery (not just body, but voice) is very much a part of both the information and the humor. (Of course, humor is information, so…)

Sometimes you need to go to the fake media to get the real news.

Blame game: GOP forms circular firing squad

“The cake is baked,” agreed a former McCain strategist. “We’re entering the finger-pointing and positioning-for-history part of the campaign. It’s every man for himself now.”

A circular firing squad is among the most familiar political rituals of a campaign when things aren’t going well. But it is rare for campaign aides to be so openly participating in it well before Election Day.

(I claim credit for DEPRESSION, POISON, CRAZY LADY #3, STRIPPERS, and SERIOUS BUSINESS.)

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