Also: Haiti
Dios mio, El Presidente
I follow Jozy Altidore on Twitter. I don't know why; my attention is already divided enough and he's not exactly zinger-prone. About the only thing Jozy's feed does for me is alert me when he is terribly said for very good reasons I am ignorant of. A couple months ago he tweeted a series of frowny face emoticons and said he was going to sign off for a while; Charlie Davies had just gotten in a car accident. I didn't know, and momentarily thought he was having some sort of episode with a special lady friend. I feared for the future of the US strike corps, and felt heelish when that concern became real.
A couple days ago he said he didn't understand how anyone could talk about anything except Haiti—he's Haitian—and I thought to myself "why the hell would anyone talk about Haiti"?
[google interlude]
Oh.
[feeling terrible about lack of current events knowledge interlude]
Not a good couple months for Jozy. I envision him in a hospital waiting room trying to figure out how the hell to get the symbol key to deploy :-( over and over.
He's plugging folks to donate and I've gotten a couple of requests to do so as well. So here's that plug. Orson used to be tangentially associated with various charities that help horribly misfortunate people across the globe and has suggestions as to where your money would be best sent. Also, if you want to see someone rail against Rush Limbaugh re: Haiti at lengths you didn't think possible on Twitter, @ebertchicago is your guy.
January 14th, 2010 at 1:35 PM ^
For some reason, Jozy's one of the few people I follow on twitter and I found his sequence beyond heartbreaking. I think the brevity magnified the pain/worry he expressed.
January 14th, 2010 at 1:39 PM ^
I'm pretty sure you mean Sacre Bleu, Monsieur...uh, presidente. Sorry, I don't speak French. But they definitely do in Haiti.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:41 PM ^
Or, for a word-for-word translation: Mon Dieu, le Président !
January 14th, 2010 at 4:55 PM ^
Facepalm. In french... but Haitians speak creole almost exclusively.
January 14th, 2010 at 6:20 PM ^
The people who run the country (that's the presidential palace depicted in the photo) all speak French.
But if you insist, in Kréyol it would be Bondye mwen, prezidan an!
January 14th, 2010 at 1:43 PM ^
Thanks Brian. I appreciate you raising awareness about this through the front page of the site.
January 14th, 2010 at 1:45 PM ^
In response to the John U Bacon column, I would have had 2005 Penn State game over the Wisc game for an honorable mention...hell, just on the list itself!
January 14th, 2010 at 2:04 PM ^
"You serve no good. You serve no god. You inspire only stupidity and hatred. And, I would wish you to hell, but knowing how empty your soul must be for you to be able to say such things at a time of such pain, I suspect the vacant purposeless lives you live now are hell enough already."
January 14th, 2010 at 3:57 PM ^
Sorry.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:57 PM ^
Limbaugh started in the 80's and has been the same person since. Olbermann saw a void and has tried to fill it by being the liberal answer to Limbaugh. Based on his MSNBC ratings he is failing miserably, but you can still quote him... This site is much better when politics stays away from it.
January 14th, 2010 at 2:29 PM ^
donate? done, and done.
saw orson's post earlier - highly recommended if you wish to donate but don't know where to get bang for your buck.
concur on ebert's twitter feed - his personal blog is amazing as well. last week he wrote an absolutely remarkable essay on a life without eating, drinking, or speaking (he is unable to do these things due to cancer). pure columbian awesome.
January 14th, 2010 at 3:43 PM ^
Brian, I really enjoy reading your site when time permits. Correct me if I'm wrong but isn't there an unwritten rule for this site that commenters shouldn't veer into the political arena? My two cents and that will be all is that maybe if some would actually listen to Rush instead of taking the words of Olbermann, Huffington Post, Media Matters, et al as gospel then a more honest assessment can be made. I know how much flak I will get here but so be it. Still love the site though and look forward to more Michigan football insight and conversation.
PS - Yes, I have donated generously to the Haitian relief effort. May God help them.
January 14th, 2010 at 4:13 PM ^
Rush is nice enough to post transcripts of his show online.
http://www.rushlimbaugh.com/home/daily/site_011310/content/01125106.gue…
To be honest, after reading it I'm not sure how one could take it any other way than Ebert did. There's a reason even Pat Robertson, in his own hot water over foot-in-mouth comments on the Haiti disaster, denounced what Rush said. Between "he's just trying to look good to the black voters", "we already donated to Haiti, it's called our income taxes", and the stuff Ebert tweeted about, it's pretty foul. He's got the right to say it, and the rest of us have a right to call him a complete jackass for saying it.
January 14th, 2010 at 7:40 PM ^
"I did not say, 'Don't make donations.' I said private donations are going to be much better than a government donation. Go to the Red Cross, do other things, but don't go through the government. Its just going to go through hands and bureacracies and $1 is going to end up being $0.30 by the time they get through with it." -Rush Limbaugh
I won't respond after this... If you don't listen to him, that's OK, but you truly wouldn't understand.
GO BLUE!
January 14th, 2010 at 7:56 PM ^
He should have just apologized or said nothing, because claiming "people should donate to the Red Cross" was what he meant is a complete lie when the text number donations and the whitehouse.gov link he ripped on go directly to... (drum roll)... The Red Cross!
Which people should donate to. The whole country looks like it's wrecked.
January 14th, 2010 at 9:21 PM ^
For those of you who are able to tune out current political tempests, the "light-skinned and dark skinned black community..." is a reference to Senator Harry Reid's statement, published in a recent book:
"Reid apologized on January 9, 2010, for racially charged comments he had made when President Obama was campaigning for president. In private conversations, Reid had remarked that Obama could win the Presidency because the country was ready to embrace a black presidential candidate, especially one such as Obama -- who he referred to as being "light-skinned" and "with no Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one". These comments had been recently revealed by journalists Mark Halperin and John Heilemann in Game Change, their book about the 2008 election."
Source: Wikipedia, http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2010/01/09/AR20100…
January 14th, 2010 at 5:53 PM ^
As you say yourself, it's Brian's site. He can post whatever he wants or delete what he wants. Political in nature or not.
January 14th, 2010 at 6:05 PM ^
Couldn't agree more KBLOW.
January 14th, 2010 at 7:54 PM ^
You are correct. Just as we have the right not to give him page views, beveled guilt or buy MgoShirts and the magazine. It's his call if he wants to risk losing his readers for breaking the content rules he not only created but has railed against.
January 15th, 2010 at 10:00 AM ^
You can go ahead and lead the revolution.
January 15th, 2010 at 11:41 AM ^
Nah...., I'm more Raul than Fidel. It's the beard...
Besides, a political discussion never really gets legs until someone mentions a slippery slope or questions your patriotism.
January 14th, 2010 at 7:20 PM ^
...not political
January 14th, 2010 at 7:24 PM ^
Also, if you want to see someone rail against Rush Limbaugh re: Haiti at lengths you didn't think possible on Twitter, @ebertchicago is your guy.
....not humanitarian
January 15th, 2010 at 12:45 AM ^
I'm not taking a side here, I just follow Ebert and the last couple days have been
here is my review of this movie
RUSH
RUSH
RUSH
RUSH
here is this blog post about making out
RUSH
RUSH
January 15th, 2010 at 1:15 AM ^
Now THAT's funny.
January 14th, 2010 at 6:55 PM ^
I am having trouble watching coverage of this disaster on the nightly news. As a journalist, I do not think I could cover this story. It breaks my heart.
January 15th, 2010 at 9:57 AM ^
I'm sure many people have seen this, but for those who don't watch CNN here's a video of Dr. Sanjay Gupta (UM grad and football fan) treating a newborn with a head laceration. http://www.cnn.com/video/#/video/health/2010/01/14/sot.gupta.treating.b…
CNN's website has some of the best video I've seen of the crisis. Their reports are worth watching if all you've caught are other cable networks or network news broadcasts. On a couple of occasions anchors have been there as people are pulled from the rubble.
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