Check out this video of the St. Tammany Parish sheriff going on a rant about the “trash” coming in to St. Tammany from NOLA.
First he says, “If you’re gonna walk the streets of St. Tammany Parish with dreadlocks and ‘Chee Wee’ hairstyles, then you can expect to be getting a visit from a sheriff’s deputy,” and then he goes off on defense attorneys who “make a good living” getting “trash” off, saying that won’t happen in St. Tammany Parish, and the defense attorneys ought to be run out of town, too.
What a charming idea. Arrest people and try them without a defense in front of juries who apparently need no more evidence of guilt than suspicious hairstyles.
Yep. Racism is a thing of the past in modern America.
Racism-a-Go-Go
Who needs Nostradamus when you’ve got Dick Cheney?
If you want to know where our economy is headed, just follow Cheney’s investments.
Cheney has dumped another (estimated) $10 to $25 million in a European bond fund which tells us that he is counting on a steadily weakening dollar. So, while working class Americans are loosing ground to inflation and rising energy costs, Darth Cheney will be enhancing his wealth in "Old Europe"…This administration is just one big Bad News Buffet. In the future, when our descendents refer to the hijackers of the early twenty-first century, they aren’t going to be talking about 15 men in airplanes. They’re going to be talking about the Bush administration, who hijacked our country.
This should put to rest once and for all the foolish notion that the "Bush Economic Plan" is anything more than a scam aimed at looting the public till. The whole deal is intended to shift the nation's wealth from one class to another. It's also clear that Bush-Cheney couldn't have carried this off without the tacit approval of the thieves at the Federal Reserve who engineered the low-interest rate boondoggle to put the American people to sleep while they picked their pockets.
(Hat tip to Michael.)
60
Happy Birthday, you sweaty prick.
I've got 60 words for Dubya on his 60th birthday:
1. Avaricious 2. Arrogant 3. Bellicose 4. Belligerent 5. Condescending 6. Conniving 7. Corrupt 8. Dangerous 9. Devious 10. Dogmatic 11. Egotistical 12. Execrable 13. Flawed 14. Foolish 15. Foul 16. Greedy 17. Gutless 18. Hateful 19. Heinous 20. Hostile 21. Ideological 22. Ignorant 23. Impertinent 24. Incompetent 25. Inflexible 26. Jejune 27. Kindless 28. Knavish 29. Loathsome 30. Lying 31. Mean 32. Mendacious 33. Mordant 34. Nasty 35. Obnoxious 36. Odious 37. Patronizing 38. Perfidious 39. Pugnacious 40. Puerile 41. Quarrelsome 42. Queer-bashing 43. Racist 44. Rude 45. Sexist 46. Snide 47. Spoiled 48. Thoughtless 49. Unctuous 50. Untrustworthy 51. Vicious 52. Vile 53. Warmongering 54. Wicked 55. Wretched 56. Xenophobic 57. Yammering 58. Yucky 59. Zealot 60. Zero
Got any birthday greetings for Dubya?
In which I declare Jeff Jacoby a wanker
Jeff Jacoby, you are a wanker. A useless, jejune, dullard of a wanker, whose wanktastic brain has long waved adieu to the capacity for nuanced thought. That is the only explanation of which I can conceive for this column, in which you dismiss George Bush’s eminent pretensions of authoritarianism by citing as evidence of his reasonableness a typically limp response, wholly emblematic of his efforts to appear as though he doesn’t consider himself above the law, to a SCOTUS decision that attempts to rein in his wanton disregard for it.
According to Jacoby, because Bush said that he takes the court’s decision regarding torture “seriously” and that “We've got people looking at it right now to determine how we can work with Congress, if that's available, to solve the problem,” it definitively proves the president has no nefarious agenda, that America remains “a nation of laws, not of men.” Concludes Jacoby with a sniff, “For all the promiscuous talk about dictatorship, was that ever really in doubt?”
That “promiscuous talk” according to Jacoby emanates, of course, from a “kind of paranoia [which] is routine in the ideological fever swamps . But you can hear such things said about Bush even in respectable precincts far from the fringe,” like CNN's Jack Cafferty, Judge Guido Calabresi of the US Court of Appeals, Slate’s Michael Kinsley, Newsweek’s Jonathan Alter, and The American Prospect's Robert Kuttner. Bloody hysterics, one and all. It is, evidently, utterly implausible in Jacoby’s world that a rational person might logically construe the Bush administration’s open and vociferous support of the Unitary Executive principle as the first peeking shadows of a dictatorship.
Failure to even mention in passing the rigorous endeavors of the Bush administration to undermine checks and imbalance the three branches of government is the least of his omissions, however. Perhaps the most important person who Jacoby fails to mention in his list of “D-word” spouting lunatics, is Bush himself.
"You don't get everything you want. A dictatorship would be a lot easier." (Governing Magazine 7/98) — From Paul Begala's "Is Our Children Learning?"Just some good-natured joshing from a man with no aspirations of dictatorship.
"I told all four that there are going to be some times where we don't agree with each other, but that's OK. If this were a dictatorship, it would be a heck of a lot easier, just so long as I'm the dictator.” — CNN.com, December 18, 2000
"A dictatorship would be a heck of a lot easier, there's no question about it. " — Business Week, July 30, 2001
If the notion that we are a nation of laws and not men is to be undoubted, it is our president who needs to lead the way to such certainty. As for me, I’d prefer to let the doubters speak their pieces, which will better ensure we remain a nation of laws than any diaphanous protestations to the contrary ever will.
R U FN kidding me with this shit?
The Orwellian-named American Literacy Council wants to revamp the entire English language to be spelled phonetically, which they claim will help children learn to read more quickly and drop rates of illiteracy.
They even picket the national spelling bee finals, held every year in Washington, costumed as bumble bees and hoisting signs that say “Enuf is enuf but enough is too much” or “I’m thru with through.”First of all, whoever wrote that piece of rubbish article for the AP and thought it was immensely clever to use phonetic spellings throughout is an asshole.
Thae sae th bee selebraets th ability of a fue stoodents to master a dificult sistem that stumps meny utherz hoo cuud do just as wel if speling were simpler.
“It’s a very difficult thing to get something accepted like this,” says Alan Mole, president of the American Literacy Council, which favors an end to “illogical spelling.” The group says English has 42 sounds spelled in a bewildering 400 ways.
Secondly, I may be an inveterate intellectual snob, but I find this entire idea completely repellent. What’s next?—getting rid of synonyms because it would be easier on everyone if we all used happy instead of jubilant, convivial, or exultant, all of which are better descriptors for how I feel about knowing those words than a simple old happy? Harrumph.
I understand the practical concerns about making language accessible, which is why I support things like public schooling. As education professor Donald Bear points out in the article, even basic comprehension is undermined by phonetics, since words derive meaning from their prefixes, suffixes, and roots, which are not necessarily pronounced uniformly as they are tacked on to different words, so I’m not convinced that phonetic spelling will solve more problems that it would cause.
And aside from that—and back to my conceit—use of language is also an art, and it seems to me that just because not everyone can be Picasso doesn’t mean we decide that everyone can only use blue paint.
Both practically and aesthetically, I don’t like this idea. The American Literacy Council can shuv it.
Odd Pieces
Mannion has a pair of lovely posts about human connection and its being one of the great mysteries of the universe. Connection is one of my favorite topics; I could endlessly discuss the many ways that humans find to connect, and all the little intricacies of connection—what love feels like, how love between friends feels different than love between a couple, coincidences of meeting, the strange things that happen among people of like minds and souls. I love stories of meeting, of how great friendships and affairs and marriages came to be, because they are so often rich with mystery and providence, gilded with an intangible promise to abide, the inducement of which cannot be recognized.
Perhaps my fascination is driven by whatever it is that makes me identify with something once expressed by Oddjob, who said, "The repeating story of my life is never quite fitting," which reminded me of something I hadn’t thought about in many years. It was just a faded old coffee canister in my grandmother’s house, but, for me, it held within an understanding of myself.
My grandmother was a passionate jigsaw-puzzler, with hundreds of the things crookedly lining overstuffed shelves in her cellar. I can't see a jigsaw puzzle without thinking of her, recalling the ever-present card table with a semi-completed puzzle on its top that she would carry from room to room. I have in my closet a 500-piece panorama of the skyline of New York City—the city she called home her whole life—that I bought her the Christmas just before she died. It’s so many years ago now that the skyline still includes the World Trade Center, but when I look at the box, still in its wrapper, it’s my grandmother that I miss.
Sometimes her puzzles would have an extra piece that didn't go anywhere; the puzzle would be done, but there would be this one odd piece. It was almost always a middle piece, instead of an edge, so it wasn’t until the puzzle was complete that the odd piece out revealed itself. She kept these odd pieces, throwing them all into an old canister, as if one day, perhaps, they'd all make a puzzle of their own.
I'm a bit of an odd puzzle piece. But I don’t mind. My life has become a canister for collecting other odd puzzle pieces, and if we don’t fit perfectly anywhere else, we are nonetheless joined by the inscrutability of how such odd pieces came to be. Among odd pieces, the awkwardness of not fitting anywhere else takes a new shape, a sort of sameness, a warm familiarity. Or so it seems to me.
In his posts, Mannion isn’t necessarily talking about odd pieces, but he does mention a friend who he met online, which has a peculiar but wonderful way of connecting people, many of whom probably consider themselves odd pieces. “Before it happened to me,” says Mannion, “even for a long time after, I'd have said it was impossible to become real friends with someone you never touched.” I was once as dubious as he was about the ability to forge friendships via the internet, also before it happened to me, but the man who herein has been dubbed my Londoner Andy and I have now been friends in almost-daily contact for seven years. The frustrating distance that separates us means we don’t get to see each other very often; in fact, it has been four years since we last spent a languid evening talking nonsense over dinner together.
We didn’t need to touch each other to form a fast and enduring friendship, although, now that we have, I miss it. I miss the scratch of his five o’clock shadow against my cheek as I hug him. I miss our bumping into each other as we walk down the street, like two pinballs bouncing back and forth. I miss his reaching for me, or me for him, in a tiny, cramped London bookshop, pulling the other toward ourselves gently with lingering touches and leaning our heads together as we look at the same book, standing more closely than the confined space really demands.
Meeting someone in person after connecting with them online heightens the corporeal once it’s finally available. If the connection persists offline, there’s an urgency to touch, to make it solid. The surrounding air feels electric when you do. It’s magic, that first time you lay eyes upon, smell, touch the skin of someone about whom you already, inexplicably, care. Though we may not need that physical presence to make a connection, we miss it nonetheless, even if we don’t realize it.
And once we’ve had it, we can’t help but miss it actively, consciously, and desire more.
To this day, Mr. Shakes and I hate speaking to one another on the phone, as the sound of our voices over wires reminds us too evocatively of the time when those wires were all we had for so very long. The sound of his voice on the phone conjures a memory of longing that I cannot bear.
It’s this—this human craving for the sensual, for presence—which makes Mannion say that before he knew people who fell in love online, and whose love persisted in the real world, he believed that “If it's love, we love all the time and everywhere. This means that love is dependent on circumstances. In order to love someone, we have to love their circumstances. We love them for where they are and we love them for the people around them, even, sometimes, for the things around them.” That’s what he would have said. Wouldn’t we all?
But the truth is that humans are adaptable creatures, and if you give them a new way to make a connection, even one that lacks a lens into precise circumstance or physical contact, they will find a way to make a connection. Not all of them. Surely there are people for whom falling in love with someone the way I did, before I ever even saw his picture, or forging a lasting friendship, is simply not possible, for one reason or another. Maybe such things are dependent on a transcendent imagination. Maybe they bloom in the soil of need.
Odd pieces tend to struggle with connection, which can be brutal—watching the beauty of connection lay itself across the faces of people to whom it comes so easily, over and over, and always just out of your reach. But the experience can be informative. Odd pieces uniquely appreciate connection, and thusly connect in a different way.
The surrounding air feels electric when you do.
I was maybe six when I tried putting all my grandmother’s odd puzzle pieces together. “If you stick those together,” she told me, “they might not come apart, because they weren’t designed to fit.” She was right. They were tough to connect together, but even tougher to break apart again.
Zuh?
Looks like we've found something to rival Bush's bald head fetish in sheer "WTF??" weight. (Whole text blockquoted; the article's short.)
Putin Kisses Boy on Stomach
MOSCOW, Russia (Reuters) -- Russian President Vladimir Putin on Wednesday stopped on a walk through the Kremlin to speak to a young boy before lifting up the boy's shirt and kissing the astonished youth on his stomach.This is listed under "Offbeat News," which could be the understatement of the year.
Putin was shown by state television chatting to graduates of military academies before he took a walk through one of the Kremlin's courtyards, often full of tourists.He stopped and spoke to a young boy who appeared to be aged four or five and turned away shyly when asked his name. (Watch Putin and the boy -- :45)
"What is your name?" Putin asked, kneeling down in front of the fair-haired boy and holding him by the waist.
"Nikita," the clearly shocked boy answered, looking from side to side.
Putin then lifted the boy's shirt and kissed him on his stomach. The Russian president then patted the boy on the head and walked off through a crowd of astonished tourists.
(Energy dome tip to my friend Cliffie, who's as flabbergasted as I am. Yummy, yummy, yummy I got cross-posts in my tummy...)
The Green Knight Speaks
“I'm just an ordinary person who served.”
Six months after her return to the United States, [Nadine Beckford] lives in a homeless shelter in Brooklyn, sharing a room with eight other women and attending a job-training program. Her parents live in Jamaica and are barely making ends meet, she says.If you can and want to help, you can contribute to the National Coalition for Homeless Veterans here or find local places to volunteer or donate items or money here. If anyone is working with another organization you recommend, please let me know and I’ll add it to the post.
"I'm just an ordinary person who served. I'm not embarrassed about my homelessness, because the circumstances that created it were not my fault," says Beckford, 30, who was a military-supply specialist at a U.S. base in Iraq, a sitting duck for around-the-clock attacks "where hell was your home."
It was a "hell" familiar to [Herold Noel] during his eight months in Iraq. But it didn't stop when he returned home to New York last year and couldn't find a job to support his wife and three children. Without enough money to rent an apartment, he turned to the housing programs for vets, "but they were overbooked," Noel says.
…In New York, the family ended up in a Bronx shelter "with people who were just out of prison, and with roaches," Noel said. "I'm a young black man from the ghetto, but this was culture shock. This is not what I fought for, what I almost died for. This is not what I was supposed to come home to."
On Divided America
Billmon:
If I had to boil our modern kulturkampf down to two words, they wouldn't be blue and red, they would be "traditionalist" and "modern." On one side are the believers in the old ways -- patriarchy, hierarchy, faith, a reflexive nationalism, and a puritanical, if usually hypocritical, attitude towards sexual morality. On the other are the rootless cosmopolitians -- secular, skeptical (although at times susceptible to New Age mythology) libertine (although some of us aren't nearly as libertine as we'd like to be) and less willing to equate patriotism with blind allegiance, either to a flag or a government…Go read the whole thing.
The right, in particular, needs the culture war like a paralytic needs his iron lung. It reinforces a simplistic sense of tribal identity (us against the other) that is essential to the paranoid political style -- as Richard Hofstadter dubbed it -- but that increasingly doesn't exist in American society as a whole. The reality (and this brings me to my second point) is that there are not two cultural camps in America but three: the traditionalists, the modernists, and those in the middle, who may be pulled in one direction or another by their ethnic backgrounds, religious faiths, personal life histories or any or all of a thousand other factors.
But this too puts a premium on hot button politics -- in order to pull what would otherwise be a diverse collection of individuals with diverse interests and opinions (conservative on gun control, for example, or liberal on the environment) into one politico-cultural camp or the other. I don't think it's any coincidence that one of the biggest political success stories for the traditionalists lately has been the rise of the megachurches, which often draw from a broad cross section of suburban society, generally offer an extremely generic brand of Protestantism, but indoctrinate their members in a very specific brand of conservative politics, usually built around abortion, homophobia and hyper-patriotism.
The result of all this is a political conflict that grows steadily more vituperative, uncivil and tinged with overtones of violence -- a dynamic which, given the emotional and philosophical tendencies of the two camps, definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists.)
This jives very closely with two experiences I’ve had recently discussing politics with people in the late-Boomer demographic. In the first instance, the man to whom I was speaking is a NYC conservative, which makes him generally quite liberal socially and economically conservative. We spoke about a variety of issues, and what I found was that he started out from a position of conservative talking points, but was actually quite amenable to compromise. For example, he was in favor of the House’s hardline immigration reform, but when I explained why I thought that a road to citizenship was imperative, he said, easily, “Yeah, I could go along with that.”
My impression was that, in this “political conflict…[which] definitely favors the authoritarian right (i.e. the traditionalists),” he was granted greater access to conservative policy proposals and ideas, and, identifying as a conservative, he de facto supported them. The dearth of coverage of alternative ideas (whether from liberals or moderate conservatives), combined with the pervasiveness of the erroneous notion that progressives are unhinged and dangerous for America, left him little alternative. I also had the distinct impression that had he was rather surprised at how reasonable liberals could be.
In the second instance, the woman to whom I was speaking is a small town, red-state religious moderate, who I suspect generally leans slightly left. She may have been somewhat sympathetic to Bush brand conservatism on issues of national security, but lost all regard for this administration during the Katrina debacle and absolutely could not tolerate the GOP crusade for a Federal Marriage Amendment. The extremism of the Right has pushed her, at least in terms of her own self-definition, if not her actual politics, further Left.
In both cases, people who would be, by Billmon’s construct, “people in the middle,” have found their way further Right and further Left, respectively, because the current dynamic favors the traditionalists. If it didn’t, the man to whom I spoke would not be exposed almost exclusively to the furthest Right policies and ideas, which he supports largely by default, and the GOP would not be able to get away with things like wholly ignoring the country’s infrastructure and social safety net or using homobigotry as a campaign issue, leaving the woman to whom I spoke feeling more Left by virtue of reaction.
That the traditionalists are favored by this political conflict, and exploit it at every turn, will continue to polarize those in the middle for precisely these reasons. And that should give us all pause—particularly as we gaze upon the maps Billmon provides for our consideration.
Kenneth Lay Dead
So, he's not going to prison after all. But this isn't exactly dodging a bullet.
HOUSTON - Enron Corp. founder Kenneth Lay, who was convicted of helping perpetuate one of the most sprawling business frauds in U.S. history, has died of a heart attack in Colorado. He was 64.
A secretary at his church and another secretary for his lead criminal lawyer, Michael Ramsey, both confirmed the death. Lay, who lived in Houston, frequently vacationed in Colorado.
Lay, who faced life in prison, was scheduled to be sentenced Oct. 23.
[...]
Lay had built Enron into a high-profile, widely admired company, the seventh-largest publicly traded in the country. But Enron collapsed after it was revealed the company's finances were based on a web of fraudulent partnerships and schemes, not the profits that it reported to investors and the public.
When Lay and Skilling went on trial in U.S. District Court Jan. 30, it had been expected that Lay, who enjoyed great popularity throughout Houston as chairman of the energy company, might be able to charm the jury. But during his testimony, Lay ended up coming across as irritable and combative.
He also sounded arrogant, defending his extravagant lifestyle, including a $200,000 yacht for wife Linda's birthday party, despite $100 million in personal debt and saying "it was difficult to turn off that lifestyle like a spigot."
Both he and Skilling maintained that there had been no wrongdoing at Enron, and that the company had been brought down by negative publicity that undermined investors' confidence.
So long, Kenny-Boy.
(I wonder if Bush will attend the funeral?)
North Korea fires 7th missile
In case anyone hasn’t heard already, North Korea test-fired six missiles yesterday—one long-range and five short-range. Now they have fired off another one, and CNN is reporting it was medium-range, according to Japanese officials.
The long-range missile is the one reported to have the capability to reach the US, but it failed after 40 seconds and landed in the Sea of Japan.
The U.N. Security Council is planning to meet Wednesday morning to discuss North Korea's actions.And in typical fashion, Bush met with U.S. National Security Adviser Stephen Hadley, Rumsfeld, and Condi Rice as the tests were going on, then “went ahead with plans to watch Independence Day fireworks and hold a gathering at the White House for his 60th birthday.”
U.S. Ambassador John Bolton said he was "urgently consulting" with other members of the 15-nation council.
The United States, Japan, South Korea and Australia were quick to condemn the tests. North Korea's close ally China, which last week urged North Korea to refrain from missile tests, urged all parties to remain calm.
Meanwhile, Hadley “described the missile launches as ‘provocative behavior,’ but said they posted no immediate threat to the United States.” In case anyone’s keeping score, that “provocative behavior” which only poses no immediate threat to the US because the long-range missile failed but not because the person launching it doesn’t want to pose a threat to the US, is nearly precisely the stated reason we went to war in Iraq, where said raison d'être was not actually true.
Awesome
“The Central Intelligence Agency has closed a unit that for a decade had the mission of hunting Osama bin Laden and his top lieutenants, intelligence officials confirmed Monday.
…The decision is a milestone for the agency, which formed the unit before Osama bin Laden became a household name and bolstered its ranks after the Sept. 11 attacks, when President Bush pledged to bring Mr. bin Laden to justice ‘dead or alive.’”
Happy Fourth
When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature's God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.
We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal, that they are endowed by their Creator with certain unalienable Rights, that among these are Life, Liberty and the pursuit of Happiness. — That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness. Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shewn that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. But when a long train of abuses and usurpations, pursuing invariably the same Object evinces a design to reduce them under absolute Despotism, it is their right, it is their duty, to throw off such Government, and to provide new Guards for their future security. — Such has been the patient sufferance of these Colonies; and such is now the necessity which constrains them to alter their former Systems of Government.
Celebrate safely and happily.
