Tea Party

I'm spreading the word.

.

Rockford Files

Not bad, but I think they missed a detail.



H/T to my favorite James Garner fan.

.

WTH?!? Friday, Pt 3 - In Which I Berate Adam Ozimek

Again.

Over at Modeled Behavior, he says this, regarding smoking, the use of salt and sugar, slippery slopes, and, by implication, serrano peppers and meat thermometers.

I left him this comment.

This is an epic – and you’ll have to convince me that it’s not willful, if you even care – failure to see the point.

1) Where does this slippery slope lead? To fewer instances of high blood pressure, ergo fewer heart attacks and strokes. Wow – that’s tragic!

2) Nobody is impinging on your freedom to use salt. Have they come for your salt shaker? Controlling the Na content of packaged products, in fact gives you MORE freedom to make your own sodium decisions, since the food stuff OVER THE CONTENT OF WHICH YOU HAVE ABSOLUTELY NO CONTROL will have a LOWER sodium content. Do the math, and add salt to taste.

3) Re smoking: Nobody has ever said you can’t smoke in the privacy of your own home, or in a variety of open air venues. Smoking bans give non-smokers the freedom to not be exposed to smokers’ effluents.

Remember the old argument that your freedom to swing your arms ends at some distance from my nose?

If that makes no sense to you, then consider that I move my bowels regularly, but I almost never do it in your office.

4) Slippery Slope arguments are inherently fallacious.
http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/slippery-slope.html

For shame.

Really.

Tsk, tsk.

Cheers!
JzB

What the Hell? Friday -- Part 2

Now THIS is more like it!

Visit msnbc.com for breaking news, world news, and news about the economy

It's not the first time a zebra has been spotted along a metro Atlanta highway. In April 2008, a 2- to 3-month old zebra was found injured along Interstate 75. Authorities said at the time they thought the young zebra had likely fallen from a truck passing through Georgia and was then hit by a car.


Police who worked that incident kept referring to the animal as "Evidence," and that becoming his name.


Evidence was rushed to the veterinary school at Auburn University in Alabama, where he underwent several operations. He was then taken to the Noah's Ark animal rescue center in Locust Grove, Ga., where he still lives.

As if the traffic on I-75 in Atlanta weren't bad enough already!

What the Hell?!? Friday

Even after the Cheney-Bush administration was appointed our overlords, protectors, and deciders by judicial over reach in 2000, I was willing to give them the benefit of the doubt.  But after Bush's 7 minutes of catatonia on 9/11, the resulting lie-based decision to wage an unjust and unjustifiable war against an uninvolved country, the unsuccessful attack on Social Security, etc., I gradually came to the realization that when thinking about them it was virtually impossible for a reasonable person to be cynical enough.

Here are some more impossibilities.  It is impossible to overstate:

The sheer terrible awfulness of yesterday's Supreme Court decision.

The destructive effect it will have on the tattered remains of our shattered democracy.

The degree to which international corporate interests already dominate both political parties.

How much people who call themselves "conservative" hate democracy, the Constitution, and what the U.S. is supposed to stand for.

The extent to which the Republican Party is dedicated, as Rich Limplow demanded, to making Obama fail - no matter what the consequences are for the country.

The contempt of the religious right for the separation of church and state.

The stupidity of that subsection of the Massachusetts electorate who voted for Obama in '08 and Scott Brown this week.

The insanity of teabaggers, birtherers, 12ers, and their ilk.

How far we have devolved toward fascism.

How thoroughly we now are screwed.

Did I miss anything?

Why I Have Hope

Lyndon Baines Johnson had a checkered record on the civil rights issue. But ultimately he imposed integration on a nation that was, at best, only semi-willing.  Johnson was not above political expediance, but he knew this activity would drive southern white racists into the open arms of the Republican party.

As Clarence Page reported:

Southern Democrats played the race card to win and hold the South against the party of Abraham Lincoln. Conservative Republicans played the race card in the name of "state's rights" to win the South in 1964. On the night President Johnson signed the Civil Rights Act of 1964, he told his young aide Bill Moyers, "I think we just delivered the South to the Republican Party for a long time to come."

We can see now, almost 5 decades later, the harvest of what Johnson sowed.  On the one hand, the Republicans held the white house for 28 of the 40 years from 1968 through 2008, a legacy of political divisiveness, fiscal elitism, and economic irresponsibility from which the country may never recover.

On the other hand, we now can find pictures like the one above.  To hate, you must dehumanize.  And you can't dehumanize after you are given the opportunity day after day, in the classroom, the playground, and musical performances to see and appreciate the fundamental human dignity of those who do not look like you.

Update:
Make what you will of this counterpoint by kevinearick posting at Naked Capitalism.  I have no idea what the connections might be between the comments and the picture in the post.

Sunday Music Blogging

Yeah - I know - It's Tuesday.

I was busy on Sunday.

Here is familiar music that YouTube trombonists have a special affinity for.

Bush Bashing

I don't know anything about Doug Casey; but, based on this link, I take him to be a free-market libertarian (fml), in the mold of Robert Prechter.

Though not of the fml mindset, I have to agree with Casey on a few things.

1) George W. Bush appears to be a serious contender for worst president ever, tempered only by the nagging suspicion that he was fundamentally irrelevant to his own presidency. Oh, Wait - that, in itself, might make him the worst ever . . .

2) This beautiful and elegant assertion: "It’s unclear to me what, if any, philosophical foundation conservatism, by whatever definition, rests on."

3) Conservatives* like GWB "because Bush liked to talk a lot about freedom and traditional American values, and did so in such an ungrammatical way that it made him seem sincere."

There is much in Casey's note that a thinking non-libertarian can disagree with. But it's kind of a fun read.

Comments?

Evening Update: DeLong grasps Bush reality with both hands, something faux-conservatives still are not, and in fact will never be willing to do. Click through to Ambinder's woefully lame non-apology. Or just click here. Be sure to read the comments. Seeing how his readers brutally dismember him is, literally, priceless.
_____________________________
* Here, Casey and I are referring to the modern brand of faux-conservatives. No real conservative** would have anything but contempt for the vacuous, ignorant liar who was our 43rd president.
** Nor True Scotsman either, for that matter.

In Which I Feel Touched by Pride and Patriotism

I am feeling conflicted at the end of the Summer concert season. Happy to have more free time - for a while, but -- NO MUSIC in August. (gasp)

Thursday night we closed with Sousa's Stars and Stripes Forever. In the last strain, when the flutes are twittering (in an archaic sense) the t-bones lay out until the repeat. I looked out across the park and EVERYBODY was standing. Hundreds of people. Standing. Very touching. It was a genuine WOW! moment

Stranger at the Gates, Part 2

Back at Crooked Timber, they have a guest post on the Gates matter by Brandon del Pozo, "a captain in the NYPD (now working for Internal Affairs on internal police corruption cases, but with plenty of experience as a beat cop in Brooklyn and Manhattan, and as a police instructor too). He is also a Ph.D. candidate in philosophy at CUNY."

I found this post to be, at first, reasonable, then unsettling, and finally disturbing.

I can't remember ever using the word sophistry in a sentence before; but as I read del Pozo's post, the word was echoing in my brain. The first few commenters at CT do a pretty thorough job of dismantling his argument.

First, he speaks of abstractions, as if they apply in this case. Then, he misstates the time line. Then he channels both Prof. Gates' and Sergeant Crowley's thoughts, in ways that are unfavorable to the one, but favorable to the other. Then he constructs an invalid set of responsibilities for each of the participants, all the while cleverly building a deceitful house of cards, with a particularly disturbing sidetrack into police control.

Prof. Gates' responsibility consisted of showing the Sergeant 1) his identification, and 2) his right to be in his residence. No one disputes that he did those things. Sergeant Crowley's first responsibility was to determine if a crime was in progress. Having determined that there was not, his responsibility was to 1) defuse any heated situation, and/or 2) leave.

At the very least, Sergeant Crowley failed to do his job properly. At worst, he lured Prof. Gates out of his house, so he could perpetrate a false arrest. Unfortunately, both appear to be true.

It is worth emphasizing that, aside from the Sergeant's successful determination that there had been no crime, whatever else happened between the two men inside the house (since there is no allegation of assault) is of absolutely no relevance. Anything that Prof. Gates said, in any tone of voice or choice of vocabulary that you can think of, is of no legal consequence.

In short, President Obama had it right. The Police handled this stupidly.

Update: Here FWIW, is the police report.

I reads like an ex-post contrived piece of fiction.

Update 2: (7/26, 4:15 p.m.) A deconstruction of a portion if the police report.

Stranger at the Gates

Oh, wait. It's my own house!

The incident involving Professor Gates and an over-zealous police officer has garnered a lot of attention. I am highly critical of the arresting officer. This is not in any way a defense of Gates. This is a situation where there is plenty of wrong to go around.

We will never know exactly what transpired between the two. Both were heated, and probably fatigued when the incident took place. In the high emotional charge, I'm sure they have very different recollections.

But there are degrees of wrong. Being unreasonable, belligerent and offensive are not crimes. Insulting a policeman who is inside your home is not a crime.

For a cop to arrest somebody because he pissed him off is an inexcusable breach of authority by someone who's motto is "To protect and to serve." Remember - they work for us!

Urbino nails it.

The dropping of the charges is a near-certain indication that the cop was wrong. The intransigence of the officer, and the victimized stance of the police union in the wake of Obama's comment do nothing to change my view.

The Boston Globe had the police report up on their web site, but then took it down. An excerpt can be found here.

Update: I want to draw attention to a conservative (probably libertarian) take on this. As the commenter goes off topic and draws broader conclusions, he loses his way, in my opinion. But that's because I'm a progressive!

I'd like to make a Cone Head Joke . . .

. . .but somehow, can't quite bring it together.

I don't have this blog to simply construct links to other blogs.*

But this is just so gob-stoppingly stupid, I can't stop myself.

Now, I must go hug a squid.

______________________________
*That is, after all, Glenn Reynolds' job

Memorial Day

(click here to view)

John Sherffius May 23, 2009 EditorialCartoonists.com