2009 archive
Missing Persons Alert 0
StevenD sounds an all points bulletin, then answers his own question:
And his answer surprises us how?
A Vote against Small-Minded Silliness 0
Of course, anyone who comes here knows that English is the lingua franca, as it were.
Passing a law declaring English the “official language” of a city, town, or state is nothing more that legislating xenophobia. Such laws have no practical value except to say to those who come looking for a better life, “Get off my lawn.”
The citizens of Nashville figured that out.
A Liberal Nation 0
Yesterday, I received an email in response to this post.
The email was from someone in the Netherlands.
(As usual, I was mildly surprised to find that someone other than the two or three friends and relatives that I know about actually reads this thing.)
The writer told me of watching the inauguration of the President of the United States on the telly vision, because
the inauguration of Mr. Obama was and is something very very moving.
One of my friends tried to claim that the writer was trying to blame his country’s problems on the United States.
That could not have been farther from the writer’s intentions.
His country doesn’t have problems to blame on the United States (other than the venality of Wall Street and the corruption of Republican Economic Theory, which has poisoned the financial system of the world and which richly deserves opprobrium).
As I have mentioned from time to time, the United States of America is the only nation founded on an idea: the idea of freedom under the rule of law.
That idea is a real thing, not just for those of us who, like me, can trace their ancestry in this land to before the French and Indian War, not just for all those who since then have come here, believing in that idea and looking for a better life, but also for persons who have never left their home countries to come here, but who still treasure the idea of freedom under the rule of law.
This has never been a perfect country.
It is a nation that has done really bad things.
Just for a moment, think of the Trail of Tears.
Indeed, I have ancestors who were slaveholders.
One of my relatives signed John Brown’s death warrant (not that John Brown was a prince among men).
But, all the while, one of the core beliefs of America has been the idea of perfectibility.
This does not mean a belief that the United States or, indeed, mankind, can ever become perfect (only the wingnuts and the nutcases believe that we have achieved perfection, whatever the hell that is), but rather the belief that a free people working together can continually find a better way.
And, with many failures and false steps and mistakes, throughout the two and a half centuries of its history as a nation, the United States of America has, with all it faults, encouraged others that the world could become better, because the United States believed that it could become better.
To paraphrase the Grateful Dead, it’s been a long, strange trip, but somehow, with each meandering, the United States has managed to get a little closer to getting it right.
With much bumbling and fumbling and with many sidetrips and false starts, over the years, the United States has faced its failures, faced its injustices, faced its darkest impulses, and tried to fix them. Yes, often with great struggle, but getting it right a little more often than getting it wrong.
As I have pointed out from time to time, I grew up under Jim Crow.
Those who you did not, whether it was because of where you grew up or because of when you grew up, cannot imagine what it was like.
And, as I look back on it, the scary thing was that, as I was growing up, it seemed normal. Because it was what we were used to.
It seemed normal to have separate schools, separate bathrooms, separate water fountains, based on the amount of carotene in the skin.
Indeed, I remember taking the bus with my mother to visit my grandmother in the red clay country of South Carolina sometime in the late 1950s. Somewhere in North Carolina, I think in Raleigh, the bus made a rest stop. I remember walking into the wrong–into the “colored”–waiting room.
Never in my life, and I am old and have made many mistakes, have I felt so out of place. I can only imagine from that experience what it was like to be black in a white world.
And I know my imaginings cannot approach the reality that black persons have dealt with for 300 years on these shores.
I would not wish the feeling I had at that moment on anyone.
For the last eight years, I have had that a similar feeling in my own country, in the country my ancestors fought to found.
Under a mad leadership, the United States of America has been insane for eight years.
Horrible, evil things, deeds which betrayed the blood and the ideals and the beliefs and the sacrifices of the Founders, have been done in our name by persons who are yet and will remain unrepentant.
And, as we look at those persons, we see that evil is banal, for they are ultimately banal, small, weak persons who, having no character, no principles, no understanding of the meaning of the ideals upon which this country was founded, seized on force as the only value.
They are gone from governance.
Not merely gone. Repudiated.
In their own way, the American people, sometimes sooner, too often later, have managed to figure out the right thing to do.
As I told my correspondent from the Netherlands, it is good to have my country back.
God be with President Barack Hussein Obama as he leads us back to sanity.
“A Return to Rational Governance” 0
A submission from a reader over at TPM.
The Plain Light of Day 0
Bushes wither in the plain light of day.
Lancing the Boil of Republican Rule 0
Let the healing begin.
“First, I can say without exception or equivocation that the United States will not torture,” he said. “Second, we will close the Guantanamo Bay detention camp and determine how to deal with those who have been held there.”
Christian Terrorism 0
Yes, right here in River City:
(snip)
“We think it’s intentional because of Roe vs. Wade,” Panos said. “He’s not saying much. He was praying or chanting when the officers arrived.”
Via Glomarization.
Now, He Has No Life 0
’nuff said:
After 26 years of trying, Parker finally managed to solve the Rubik’s cube that confounded him. Now, you may be thinking that he only occasionally picked up the puzzle, slowing his progress—but the reality is that he obsessed over it day after day, night after night.
Via Wait! Wait!
Hitting the Ground Running 0
Acting to address several promises he made during his campaign, Obama met with top generals about speeding the withdrawal from Iraq and gathered his senior economic advisers as he continued to push for a massive spending bill to create jobs.
He also signed a series of executive orders and directives intended to slow the revolving door between government service and lobbying, and ordered his administration to share information more freely with the public.
But wait! There’s more! Dan Froomkin.
Parallels 1
Bill Shein review compares the lives of Lincoln and Obama:
But it’s less-well-known that both Obama and Lincoln named their children Sasha and Malia, something that Lincoln biographer Doris Kearns Goodwin says is “absolutely not true.” At least when she’s asked during repeated late-night prank phone calls to her home.
There are countless other links between 1861 and 2009. It’s been widely reported that President Obama used Lincoln’s Bible while taking the oath of office. But did you know that thanks to special arrangement with the Smithsonian Institution, on Tuesday, soul legend Aretha Franklin wore the actual hat worn by Mary Todd Lincoln during her husband’s first swearing-in?
One hopes that his column will do to such comparisons what Airplane did to the loathsome and hackneyed Airport series.
End them.
Stray Thought: Ettiquet Dept. 1
If you don’t tell me why you’re calling me in the message you leave, I’m not calling you back.
Splitsville 0
I was saying this in an email just last week. Glad the Toimes caught up with me in theorizing that the Chief Justice flubbed to oath because he doesn’t understand English grammar:
Among these fetishes is the prohibition against “split verbs,” in which an adverb comes between an infinitive marker like “to,” or an auxiliary like “will,” and the main verb of the sentence. According to this superstition, Captain Kirk made a grammatical error when he declared that the five-year mission of the starship Enterprise was “to boldly go where no man has gone before”; it should have been “to go boldly.” Likewise, Dolly Parton should not have declared that “I will always love you” but “I always will love you” or “I will love you always.”
Any speaker who has not been brainwashed by the split-verb myth can sense that these corrections go against the rhythm and logic of English phrasing. The myth originated centuries ago in a thick-witted analogy to Latin, in which it is impossible to split an infinitive because it consists of a single word, like dicere, “to say.” But in English, infinitives like “to go” and future-tense forms like “will go” are two words, not one, and there is not the slightest reason to interdict adverbs from the position between them.
Not all he doesn’t understand either.
Bushonomics: The Hangover 0
“The evil that men do lives after them”:
And the ripple effect:
Despite paying lower benefits to its jobless residents than other Northeastern states, the state’s unemployment fund has been borrowing about $90 million a week from the federal unemployment trust fund, state officials said. The deficit has already reached $212 million and is expected to exceed $2.5 billion by the end of 2010, they said.
I Me a River 8
In my quest for a media player that supports OGG (the open source audio format) because some of my favorite podcasts no longer do mp3, I finally settled on an iRiver E200 from JR’s via Amazon. I stuck it in my shopping cart at Amazon to think about for a couple of days and, in that period, the price went down 25%.
I have it working under Linux. Here’s how.
Stray Question 3
Why does every device that comes with a USB cable say, “Use only the cable that came with this [device name]”?