…misguided Ren and Stimpy “adult” revival show was a flop, but he’s still a great scholar of cartooning and animation. His personal blog provides an ongoing lesson in these deceptively simple looking art forms. A recent entry on the Chuck Jones short Inki and the Minah Bird lauds Jones for having “the idea to constantly try new things and experiment and always be restless and never satisfied with anything. I might be the last person on earth who remembers the concept of ‘progress’ as a positive thing, a concept that just a few decades ago was the American philosophy that made the country the greatest, most influential and fastest moving nation in history.”

Of course, that same idea of “progress” has caused the film in question to become banned from authorized screenings and TV showings, due to the questionable racial portrayal of the African hunter boy Inki.

…why females, including female politicians, should not be slandered with demeaning references to sex organs and sexual activity: “I don’t understand why I should regard vaginas with the negative attitude that the metaphorical use suggests…. every interaction that I have had with a vagina in my life has been a positive one.”

…at the exhibit of gingerbread houses at the City Center building downtown. This year’s display is a highly appropriate benefit for the Juvenile Diabetes Foundation.

…save the printed newspaper? They wouldn’t.

…really loves old-time American toys and board games. So do I.

“Fence of toilets along Soap Lake course upsets golfers.” Yeah, it’s an art installation. And a neighborhood dispute.

Feel free to chatter simultaneously amongst yourselves.

“Doctors say how we taste affects health.” The Colbertian response: Yes. If we weren’t so delicious, bears wouldn’t stalk us.

…carefully dissects the fatal contradictions of today’s political dichotomy in “Liberalism is the True Conservatism.”

(via Talking Points Memo): “Was anyone besides me delighted to note that the last two Republican senators to concede were Burns and Allen?

Say goodnight, Gracie.”

It’s two days after The Day America Came Back. There’s still much, much to say.

The tactics of the right wing sleaze machine have been repudiated thoroughly and completely. For good? We’ll see. The only place fear-n’-smear worked was against Harold Ford in Tennessee. (And that might have worked in part because Ford was a DLC near-right candidate, who offered few substantial differences from the incumbent beside his personality and his party affiliation.)

Some pundits are pondering whether the “Netroots” really played a decisive role. Yeah, the bloggers’ #1 national poster boy, Ned Lamont, and their #1 local poster girl, Darcy Burner, lost. But many other blogger-beloved candidates won–including the two who flipped the Senate, John Tester and Jim Webb.

And the original Netroots candidate, Howard Dean, used his current post as DNC chair to implement his 50 State Strategy, running viable campaigns in almost every jurisdiction. This is different from the Dems’ old strategy of holding on to the coasts and vying for a limited number of “swing” districts elsewhere.

More importantly, it was the culture, the aesethetic of Internet Nation, that supplanted and whupped the GOPpers’ centralized, top-down campaign structure.

As I’ve been saying all this time, the Repubs’ incessant moralistic posturing has belied the only four things they really believe in: power, money, more power, and more money. The neocon schtick has been to further the concentration of wealth and influence within a small privileged elite, and to impose a culture of passive-aggressive obedience upon the rest of us.

Karl Rove’s Republican Party has become increasingly extremist, yes. But so has a lot of the national fabric this past quarter century.

From “X-treme” sports to ultra-violent video games, from gaudy condos to McMansions, from superstores to megachurches, from downsizing and outsourcing to vanishing pensions and unaffordable health care, from stock-price obsessions and celebrity CEOs to wage-slashing and union-busting, from gruesome gangsta rap (produced, we must remember, for mostly white audiences) to “gonzo” porn videos, from talk-radio goons to cable “news” goons, to the puerile tragedy that is Iraq, so much of the U.S. has steadily gotten bigger, bolder, louder, dumber, more manipulative, and more brutal.

So, when the Repubs were in trouble this election, they could think of nothing to do except get even more brutal; thus again proving Santayana’s oft-quoted remark about a fanatic being “one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim.”

But, just as the Democrats in the 1980s and 1990s didn’t realize we weren’t in the old media universe of three networks and two news magazines anymore, the Republicans in 2006 didn’t realize we weren’t in the more recent media universe of the gilded right and the gelded left anymore. No longer could they get away with every abuse of power and expect a pacified mainstream media to underplay it.

Now we’ve got blogs. We’ve got YouTube. We’ve got cell-phone cameras and chat rooms email lists and text messaging and DVD screening parties and .pdf files and podcasts and meetups.

We’ve got the world’s fastest, most potent “rapid response machine.” Any local attack ad or fraudulant voter-suppression scheme can become a matter of national public knowledge within minutes.

We’ve got a publicity, fundraising, and get-out-the-vote apparatus that doesn’t rely on an insular DC party bureaucracy, with its corporate obligations and its poll-tested non-messages.

The neocons thrived on control, on ignorance, on fear, on darkness.

The progressives thrive on people power, on knowledge, on hope, on light.

This is more than an “off-year” election.

This is the day after the day after the end of the X-Treme Age. It’s the second day of the Interactive Age.

Postscript: Is there room for a Republican Party in the Interactive Age? Yes. But they’ll have to change. They’ll have to really be loving Christians, instead of pious hypocrites. They’ll have to really care about the needs of their rural and exurban voting base, instead of keeping it in line through “lizard brain” appeals to bigotry. They’ll have to learn to become human beings again, and to treat other human beings with common dignity and respect.

…many songs to play this morning if (1) I had a “podcast,” and (2) I wouldn’t be threatened with lawsuits if I played major-label music on it. But my mind keeps tracking back to Elvis Costello’s “Motel Matches,” for the line: “And you know what I’ll do/When the light outside changes from red to blue…”

Locally, almost everyone and everything I supported won. Sen. Cantwell sailed to re-election. The drives to trash land-use planning and the estate tax fell. Lap dances are legal again. County transit improvements and state incentives for renewable-energy development won. The Legislature’s even more solidly Dem.

WashState’s two big “Netroots Endorsed” Congressional candidates, Darcy Burner and Peter Goldmark, came in close but are currently behind. But they put up a good fight, and in doing so helped progressive candidates throughout the state.

Across the nation, the Dems are on the verge of controlling the Senate and took commanding control of the House. Not a single Dem Congressional incumbent lost. South Dakota’s proposed abortion ban went down.

Long and short commentaries about all of this can be found at Daily Kos, The Huffington Post, My DD, Talking Points Memo, Atrios, Hullabaloo, Horse’s Ass, Evergreen Politics, Blather Watch, and countless other places.

The new out-of-state management of Seattle Weekly is already failing miserably, just months after persuading all its top editors to quit.

The latest feces-storm: An unfunny “fake news” parody story alleging that Mayor Greg Nickels was spending $750,000 of city money on private soirees, starring big-name easy listening musicians.

The story, by chain-installed editor Mike Seely and filled with fabricated quotes from real political figures, doesn’t officially announce its ficticious status. The nightclubs it mentions (La Rustica and 5 West) are real businesses. Easy listening (or, under its more pretentious rubric, “smooth jazz”) is the known musical genre-of-choice for large swaths of the civic establishment (including several former Weekly editors). At least three people have asked me if the article was true; and, if so, why nobody else in the local news media has followed up on it.

In response to this childish, purposeless self-demolition of the paper’s 31-year journalistic reputation, two more longtime Weekly contributors have allegedly quit. (I haven’t confirmed the names yet.)

So why would Seely print something so simultaneously sophomoric and credibility-damaging? Either:

1) The New Times Publishing higher-ups thought it would be a great change-O-pace; or

2) Seely and/or his bosses felt desperate to get themselves some of that Stranger wacky-hip street cred.

The Weekly tried that before, albeit less severely, when it was first bought up by the chain that sold out to the chain that owns it now. Back then, it was sad, like a dowager dolled up like a young tart. Now, it’s closer to dangerous, like an elderly skier who can’t be persuaded away from the widowmaker slope.

…to be reading this who doesn’t know what to do on Tuesday, here’s a handy checklist of Republican scandals and failures.

In keeping with her well-contrived “hot mess” public image, it’s a disjointed scrapbook of images and random thoughts. Salon’s reviewer can’t seem to get out of the cookie-cutter mode of feminist analysis, spending paragraph after paragraph discussing whether the book proves or disproves Love as being some sort of role model for All Females Everywhere. Silly reviewer: Of course she’s not. That’s part of her appeal, or at least it used to be.