New frontiers in the passive voice.
BART officials have said only that his handgun discharged at about 2:15 a.m. Thursday at the Fruitvale Station in Oakland and that the bullet struck the unarmed Grant, who had been detained with several others.
—the San Francisco Chronicle, on an incident in which a BART police officer may have fatally shot an unarmed man lying on a station platform with his gun instead of his Taser®
“I can no longer sit back and allow Communist infiltration, Communist indoctrination, Communist subversion and the international Communist conspiracy to sap and impurify all of our precious bodily fluids.”
Forget the Quakers: those zealots in the Maryland State Police labeled cycling advocates as terrorists! [via]
Our demon lover.
These people willingly send their own children to their deaths simply to make a statement—to accomplish nothing but the murder of two Israeli civilians and signal their commitment to the fight. The fight against Islamic radicals always seems to come around to whether or not they can, in fact, be deterred, because it’s not clear that they are rational, at least not like us. But to wipe out a man’s entire family, it’s hard to imagine that doesn’t give his colleagues at least a moment’s pause. Perhaps it will make the leadership of Hamas rethink the wisdom of sparking an open confrontation with Israel under the current conditions.
That’s Michael Goldfarb, an editor of conservative organ The Weekly Standard, expressing his full-throated support of terrorism: so long, of course, as the victims of terror are people who do not reason like us, and willingly send children to their deaths, simply to signal their will to fight. —Can we do the right thing, and add his name to the ultra-top-secret terrorism watch list, along with those Quakers from Maryland? Can we train our BDOs to recognize and react to such dangerous levels of blind self-righteous smugness?
Not so sharp as a serpent’s tooth, perhaps.
RedState’s own Erick Erickson on Greg Sargent’s move from TPM to the Washington Post—
Well, we really don’t need any reminder as to the liberal bias of the mainstream media, but I’ll remind you anyway.
Greg Sargent was with the left-wing Talking Points Memo. Now he is with the Washington Post.
I’m sure Greg Sargent is good at what he does, but I’m also sure the Washington Post would not even consider hiring someone directly from the right-of-center blogosphere.
Of course the Washington Post is connected to both Newsweek and Slate, so its biases are pretty well established and no doubt considers TPM to be right in line with the mainstream.
Apparently, former WaPo blogger Ben Domenech, one of the and I can’t stress this enough founders of RedState, was therefore himself to the left of the ever-lovin’ center. Who knew? (The title of his storied WaPo blog, Red America—perhaps it was some devilish trick to conceal the MSM’s well-known liberal bias?)
But I really shouldn’t be too hard on Mr. Erickson; he is, after all, the mastermind behind Operation Leper. —Which means we share the same goal: I, too, dream of a day when the Republican Party is cut down to the size where we can drown it in the bathtub.
Stay toasty.
I’ve got to share with you, it’s like kinda providential, yesterday what happened to me. I can use this today, after that introduction from Shelly. I’m reading on my Starbucks mocha cup, okay, the quote of the day? You’ll never believe what the quote was. It was Madeleine Albright, former Secretary of State and UN Ambassador, and Madeleine has as her quote of the day for Starbucks—now she said it, I didn’t—she said, “There’s a place in hell reserved for women who don’t support other women.”
—Gov. Sarah Palin, Carson, California rally, 4 Oct. 2008
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin’s hometown required women to pay for their own rape examinations while she was mayor, a practice her police chief fought to keep as late as 2000.
Former state Rep. Eric Croft, a Democrat, sponsored a state law requiring cities to provide the examinations free of charge to victims. He said the only ongoing resistance he met was from Wasilla, where Palin was mayor from 1996 to 2002.
“It was one of those things everyone could agree on except Wasilla,” Croft told CNN. “We couldn’t convince the chief of police to stop charging them.”
Alaska’s Legislature in 2000 banned the practice of charging women for rape exam kits—which experts said could cost up to $1,000.
—“Palin’s town charged women for rape exams”
Andy, are you goofing on Reagan?
I swear to God, between the Sarah Palin pick (and its resulting flop-sweat fall-out) and the majestically unrepentant “Message: We Care” approach to Gustav, I’m fully expecting John McCain to accept his nomination on Thursday or whenever by reaching up and pulling off his full-face latex Tony Clifton mask to reveal Andy Kaufman, wide-eyed, blinking cherubically at the culmination of his decades-long masterstroke. —Or maybe he’s Dick Cheney. Explains a lot, don’t it.
Class warfare.
The last stop in Fareless Square on the west-bound MAX line is a city-owned Smart Park parking garage. There’s a convenience store on the first floor of the garage—one of three Peterson’s in downtown Portland.
Over across the street there’s one of those renovations where they tried gutting an old office building and turning it into a downtown shopping mall; never all that terribly successful, it recently landed a Brooks Bros. outlet as an anchor store—something hailed as genuinely “rejuvenating” by downtown business types.
Ever since, the downtown business types have been pressuring the city to evict the convenience store.
It’s a successful convenience store that makes a pretty penny for the city, holding its space for years now while other spaces about it have been rented out to fly-by-night shoe and luggage outfits and the sort of art galleries that subsidize those massive art-by-the-foot shows in Shilo Inns out by the airport. (To be fair, the Japanese restaurant and the arty-crafty gallery have been around as long as the Peterson’s.) —But in a spectacular confusion of correlation and causation, the downtown business types (who’ve hired their own private police force, and who back the reprehesible Sit-Lie Ordinance) looked at the yes, colorful and yes, occasionally noisy welter of folks that congregate about the convenience store under a parking garage at the edge of free-ride Fareless Square on the main light-rail line, and rather than—
- realizing that gutterpunks and shiftless kids and those between engagements and even the housing-deprived (among other types similarly declassé) will naturally tend to congregate in semi-public un-chaperoned roofed-over areas (like a parking garage) on or near public thoroughfares (such as a light-rail stop on the edge of a free-as-in-beer–travel zone)—where they might also purchase soda or jerky or a magazine or a newspaper, should they be so inclined;
—the downtown business types have instead decided that—
- the yes, colorful and yes, occasionally noisy welter of folks must congregate here solely for the soda and the jerky and the reading selection that’s not quite as impressive as Richardson’s or that of the public library just across the street, and the parking garage and the MAX do not factor at all in this equation, so: if the convenience store is evicted, then the colorful welter etc. will follow, and all will once more be well for the rejuvenatin’ Brooks Bros. and co.
—How heartening to discover that this “troublesome convenience store” is all that has stood between the Galleria and success. Would that all our economic woes could be salved so readily!
In addition to such spectacularly faulty logic, the downtown business types have completely forgotten everyone else who shops at Peterson’s: everyone who rides the MAX in from Goose Hollow and the west hills to shop or work downtown, and who picks up some refreshment or something to read on their way in or out. —Rather literally and demonstrably forgotten: an assistant manager of the aforementioned Brooks Bros. wrote an email to the mayor, from which we lift the following quote:
I fail to see why a disgusting store such as Peterson’s is allowed to stay open. . . . They cater to the dregs of the streets of our city.
What’s sad is, despite the money made for the city by its successful lessee, and despite the unsurprising lack of specificity in the recent flurry of complaints listed against Peterson’s (which cite only “various dates,” “various times,” and, yes, “various complaints”), the city actually seriously contemplated kicking them out—until all those “dregs of the streets” stood up and said, rather pointedly, “Hell no.” (What would the city have done had they kicked out the convenience store and noticed no drop in the noisy, colorful welter? Would afternoon commuters have sighed and blown five hundred bucks on a new blazer when they could no longer blow five bucks on a Snapple and a Wired?)
So the good guys won one, with a concession or two. Yay! —Meanwhile, if you’ve ever stepped off a bus or a subway or a trolley line and bought something at a bodega or a Plaid Pantry or a 7-11, be sure to write to Brooks Bros. and let them know what a dreg of the street thinks of their general attitude.
What do you jump after the shark?
I suppose it’s the new first you’ll never forget: your first post noting that Instapundit has egregiously burst the bounds of rational discourse. This one’s mine.
SO NOW THAT WE KNOW THAT THE PRESS COVERED FOR EDWARDS—just as, pre-invasion, they covered for Saddam—that raises a question: What else are they not telling us for fear it will hurt the Democrats’ prospects?
He’d rather fight than switch.
From the eleventh paragraph (of sixty-two) of Orson Scott Card’s most recent online column for the Mormon Times:
This is a term that was invented to describe people with a pathological fear of homosexuals—the kind of people who engage in acts of violence against gays.
“This term,” of course, being “homophobe.” From paragraph sixty-one:
How long before married people answer the dictators thus: Regardless of law, marriage has only one definition, and any government that attempts to change it is my mortal enemy. I will act to destroy that government and bring it down, so it can be replaced with a government that will respect and support marriage, and help me raise my children in a society where they will expect to marry in their turn.
Emphases added. —The rest is a mish-mash of embarrassing evolutionary psychology and patently false assertions of the dictatorial rôle played by dictator-judges in dictating that the legislatures and executives of Massachusetts and California (to say nothing of the popular vote itself) must accept same-sex marriage.
I can only say what I’ve said before, to other homophobes: Mr. Card, do you not dare to presume to defend our marriage. Same-sex couples have been getting married all around us for decades, and they’ll keep on doing it, whether you manage to hold the line or not: men will kiss their husbands as you write your brave polemics; wives will continue to feed each other cake, whatever you think is right. They’ve always had the love and the cherish and the honor, and the recognition of their friends and family, and nothing you can do will take that from them. Nothing. All you can manage is to rewrite the tax code. Make it more of a grinding hassle to deal with insurance and wills. Keep loving families apart at times of illness and accident and death. Condemn children to needless, nightmarish legal quagmires. For this you would tarnish the rings on our fingers, and turn our vows into ashes.
Look to your own marriage, sir, and defend it if you must.
But leave ours the hell out of it.
There’s no real evidence for it, but it is scientific fact.
I dunno, maybe my opinion will 180 on or about Hallowe’en of this year, but Stop Child Predators’ current campaign seems to be a bit of an overreaction.
A special focus of the campaign is devoted to a particularly alarming technology provided by Google maps. As part of the launch, Ms. Rumenap is featured in a video on http://www.StopInternetPredators.org, which shows how the Google “Street View” application allows Internet users to view high resolution pictures of homes, schools, and in some cases, children playing outside, simply by typing in a local address.
I do not think that word means what you think it means.
Editorial cartoonist Scott Stantis apparently thinks his offering on the death of George Carlin is “irreverent.”
I did, indeed, mean George Carlin at the Pearly Gates as an irreverent commentary within the cartoon. I readily admit I have drawn my fair share of pearly gates and crying mascots in the past. But recently I have tried to take my inspiration from the obit cartoons of Pat Oliphant. When he does do them he places them in some kind of context of the persons life and impact. With George Carlin, (of whom I consider myself a fan), his contribution to comedy and social discourse was to tear down the walls of conformity and ridicule the overly serious. His anti-religion screeds grew longer and more serious near the end.
Hence, a cartoon I hoped would be viewed as irreverent. At least to those familiar with the subject.
Which, okay, I suppose it’s irreverent enough to speak some truth to power and all, you take Roy’s perspective into account:
—try to imagine being so utterly blind to your surroundings that you think George Carlin’s “most famous work,” which is decades old, “coarsened American culture,” rather than, “is American culture.”
Myself, I’d call the cartoon “obscene,” but I’ve always had a problem with perspective. The last few days I haven’t been able to get this couplet out of my head:
how do you like your blueeyed boy
You Cocksucker
A nightmare from which etc.
Also, I’d like to join my wingnut brethren in demanding to know why Google insists on slighting Western civilization everywhere by not honoring Bloomsday with one of those special little squiggly cartoon things. (Is a stately plump Buck Milligan too much to ask?)
Five million ways to kill a CEO.
One should keep in mind that directly eating the rich is much more efficient than rendering them for biofuel.
I fought the war, but the war won.
Last Friday, Dick Cheney was in Saudi Arabia for high-level meetings with the Saudi king and his ministers. On Saturday, it was revealed that the Saudi Shura Council—the elite group that implements the decisions of the autocratic inner circle—is preparing “national plans to deal with any sudden nuclear and radioactive hazards that may affect the kingdom following experts’ warnings of possible attacks on Iran’s Bushehr nuclear reactors,” one of the kingdom’s leading newspapers, Okaz, reports.
It is because a massive build-up of forces inevitably creates the “climate” of war. Troops and the public, on both sides, come to accept its inevitability. Standing down is difficult and can entail loss of “face.” Consequently, political leaders usually are carried forward by the flow of events. Having taken steps 1, 2 and 3, they find taking step number 4 logical, even necessary. In short, momentum rather than policy begins to control action. As Barbara Tuchman showed in her study of the origins of the First World War, The Guns of August, even though none of the parties really wanted to go to war, none could stop the process. It was the fact that President Kennedy had been reading Tuchman’s book just before the Cuban Missile Crisis, I believe, that made him so intent on not being “hijacked by events.” His restraint was unusual. More common is a surrender to “sequence” as was shown by the 1991 Gulf War and the 2003 invasion of Iraq. It would have taken a major reversal of policy—and considerable political bravery—to halt either invasion once the massive build-up was in place. No such effort was made then. Will it be now? I think the odds are against it.
We took impeachment off the table in 2006.
That means nuclear strikes are still on the table.
But Ms. Wolfe scoffs at the notion that her son causes or deserves the beatings he receives. She wonders why Billy is the only one getting beaten up, and why school officials are so reluctant to punish bullies and report assaults to the police.
Mr. Wilbourn said federal law protected the privacy of students, so parents of a bullied child should not assume that disciplinary action had not been taken. He also said it was left to the discretion of staff members to determine if an incident required police notification.
—Dan Barry, “A Boy the Bullies Love to Beat Up, Repeatedly”
Every ten years or so, the United States needs to pick up some small crappy little country and throw it against the wall, just to show the world we mean business.
—Goldberg’s formulation of the Ledeen Doctrine
Der Tod und das Mädchen.
Heather Corinna insouciantly tosses a head-slapper of an analogy into the sex-work debate.
Say nothing.
Sara reminded me of rickrolling, and got me to read the Wikipedia article, and—well, there’s just something about the po-faced seriousness of Wikipedia’s house style, you know?
In the “Never Gonna Give You Up” music video, directed by Simon West, a smiling Astley sings and dances to the song in various outfits and venues, sometimes accompanied by backup dancers. A bartender has a notable presence in the video, as his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves. The athletic exertion of many of the other dancers also becomes more intense over the course of Astley’s performance.
You’ve got to say something, but you can’t say something, or you’ll risk unleashing controversy—we assume, for the moment, that your goal isn’t to launch a flame war—and so you bend over backwards to say something about the thing in question without saying anything until that last sentence topples down a Zen navel of staggering uselessness, utterly indistinguishable from its hypothetical Onion parody.
I’d just gotten out of the shower, trying to sluice off the Bakersfield dust, and I stood there before the hotel TV set with the remote in my hand, gawping as the talking head said something like how unfair it was, how he couldn’t get over how unfair it was, that a white politician couldn’t survive something like this. This being Obama’s relationship with the storied Reverend Wright, his unfair survival of which has been only by dint of writing and delivering one of the most powerful speeches in the last, what, 40 years of American rhetoric? Can we make that call yet?
Thing being that it seems the talking head is blithely unaware of white politician John McCain’s relationships with snarlingly vicious anti-American Christianists such as John Hagee and Rod Parsley, that he’s managed to survive by dint of inviting the press corps to a barbecue at his wife’s summer house.
So I yelled at the TV and changed the channel. Alton Brown was showing us how to cook an omelette. —It was only later that it occurred to me: maybe when I was walking through the lobby and saw a giant TV screen full of TV screens full of pictures of Wolf Blitzer standing there, mildly puzzled, before a rank of giant TV screens in his glossy, empty Situation Room; or maybe it was while I was sitting in the Salt Lake City airport and some white-toothed boytoy surrounded by bobbing glossy headshots boasted about sending his Entertainment Tonight Truth Squad out on the thankless task of determining whether Will Smith was really a Scientologist now or what—the talking head had time to fill. He had to say something about the thing in question, but he couldn’t risk saying anything, and so.
…his behavior gradually shifts from casually noticing Astley’s singing to being fully engrossed in the song with energetic acrobatic moves.
It’ll help, I think, keeping this in mind. Whenever they say something stupid (which is, um), they’re just doing their job, which is to say something about the athletic exertions of the background dancers without saying anything at all.
—I’ll smile more, anyway, and yell less, which is as good as it gets these days.
