Personal Musings category archive

Reports of the wreckage of the Republican Party, such as this one from Andrew Sullivan, are no doubt premature.

Nevertheless, it is difficult not to take some pleasure in the discomfiture of the Party of Privilege. Dick Polman recalls some history while predicting:

. . .10 years from now, Americans may well be amazed that the new normal was resisted so vociferously by the Republican opposition. All the current talk about “socialism” and “the death of freedom” and the onset of “Armageddon” (House GOP leader John Boehner, yesterday: “We are 24 hours from Armageddon”) is likely to seem quaint – much like actor Ronald Reagan’s 1961 warning about the health-care-for-seniors concept that would soon be known as Medicare (“one of these days, you and I are going to spend our sunset years telling our children, and our children’s children, what it once was like in America when men were free”); and much like the GOP attacks on the 1935 Social Security proposal to fashion a safety net for old folks (New Jersey GOP Senator A. Harry Moore: “It would take all the romance out of life. We might as well take a child from the nursery, give him a nurse, and protect him from every experience that life affords”).

In the comments to that post, Gee1971 reacts with bafflement (I don’t usually read comments because there’s not enough time, but Polman does attract some interesting ones):

Did Something happen last night? I turned off the TV and sat with my most special loved ones enjoying our last moments together as The End approached. I was stunned when I opened my eyes this morning and St. Peter was not standing before me.

Thomas Jefferson was a good man, even as he was a man of his times, as we are a men and women of our times.

He struggled with the idea of slavery, and he lost the struggle, not being able to deal with its ultimate evil.

But he was moral enough to struggle with it–something many of his (and our) contemporaries refused to do–and to reveal those struggles in writing, even as he was unable rise above his times.

And now Thomas Jefferson no longer exists in Texas.

Blue Commonweath sums it up.

As long as it wasn’t filled with mixed nuts.

Embarrassing because it mirrors the way we were.

I was listening to an episode of The Man Called X here (just to be clear, the show was before my time–not much before my time, but still before my time).

The episode is set in the Congo (called the “Belgian Congo” when I was young, now the Democratic Republic of the Congo).

The “native miners” are not showing up for work (turns out that the “native miners” are being duped by duplicitous white men, because, being natives who are Not White, they are incapable of thinking for themselves) and Ken Thurston, “the Man Called X,” delivers this line:

“No matter how much you offered them in trinkets and money, they wouldn’t come back?”

Trinkets and money.

It is not a very flattering mirror, is it?

The Federal Third Circuit Court of Appeals declined to consider free speech issues, but still ruled that a prosecutor could not charge a teen-aged girl with child porn because a revealing picture of her was on (several) someone else’s cell phone(s).

The prosecutor wanted to turn childhood dumbness into a felony because the girl refused to attend an “education program” of the his choosing (several other girls were involved, but only one took the prosecutor to court).

The court avoided ruling that the case involved a Constitutional issue (judges usually try to avoid ruling on Constitutional issues unless they can find no other way out). Instead, they ruled that the prosecutor acted in an arbitrary and capricious manner:

The court did rule that the district attorney had been wrong to threaten to charge the teen merely for refusing to attend the program.

The court said the girl, then 16 and identified as the daughter of “Jane Doe,” had “a likelihood of success” on the claim that the threatened prosecution was based not on probable cause of a crime but “instead in retaliation for Doe’s exercise of her constitutional rights not to attend the education program.”

Clearly, the girls were silly, stupid, and thoughtless. Teenagers are often silly, stupid, and thoughtless (as I recall, “thoughtless” was one of my mother’s favorite adjectives).

Threatening a felony charge was using a sledge hammer to clean a kitchen counter. (I suspect that any the pornographic content was not in the picture, but in the prosecutor’s head.)

On the block for scrap:

On its maiden voyage in 1952, the SS United States set a transatlantic speed record – New York to Bishop Rock, England, in three days, 10 hours, and 40 minutes – eclipsing by 10 hours the mark set by the Queen Mary in 1938.

But for the last 14 years, the pride of a nation has gone nowhere, rusting away at a pier in South Philadelphia, a fading landmark seemingly destined for one last journey: to the scrapyard.

Its owner, Norwegian Cruise Line, which spends about $700,000 a year to moor and maintain the ship, appears ready to pull the plug

When any falling down junker of a building can attract hordes of “historic preservationists” to protect its existence, even though it has no claim to being “historical” other than being old, unpainted, and unmaintained, to allow this ship, holds stuffed with history, to be sold and dismembered, is a damned shame.

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My father loved Fred Allen’s humor.

Now I can listen to it also.

Philadelphia School DIstrict considers banning “hoodies”:

Hooded sweats are now so linked to all things nefarious that last week, retired federal judge James T. Giles recommended banning them from South Philadelphia High School in response to the racial violence that occurred there in December between Asian and African American students.

The word hoodie was used five times in his 31-page report, which suggested outlawing the apparel because it hides kids’ faces, making it hard to identify them. Philadelphia School Superintendent Arlene Ackerman later said she agreed with the suggestion, and would consider banning the hooded sweatshirts districtwide.

The article goes on to describe students puling up their hoods to escape surveillance cameras, even when the students aren’t doing anything questionable.

When I was a young ‘un, there were no surveillance cameras (or metal detectors or web spycams) in schools and we had hooded sweatshirts, not “hoodies.” The hoods on hooded sweatshirts fit the head; they didn’t cascade loosely over the face.

Supporters of surveillance cameras claim that they deter misbehavior; the evidence of that is inconclusive, at best. Others argue that they lead to faster capture of malefactors; that also appears questionable, despite what you might see on shows such as NCIS.

I suspect it’s another case of treating a symptom rather than fixing the cause.

I’d like to have the post-halftime Bengay concession for the band.

Afterthought:

It’s a blinking CSI commercial!

The rumors of lawlessness in New Orleans following Katrina were lies (and, yes, I fell for them, too).

Just sayin’.

Remember that Martin Luther King, Jr., was hated, reviled, investigated by the guvmint, called “Communist” (and worse), and murdered because he spoke against the established way of doing things.

The earthquake in Haiti has caused persons to open their hearts (except for Pat Robertson and Rush Limbaugh) and wallets to help, much as they did after the Pacifid sunami several years ago.

Before you give, you might want to check out the charities at Charity Watch dot org. You might be surprised at who gets rated highly and at who doesn’t.

Via TOTN.

There’s almost nothing worth watching on television anyway. Why watch it in 3-D?

Turn on the dishwasher and drown them out.

To read not one “year in review” article.

I expect kids to do stupid stuff to show off–showing off is inherently stupid and so are kids.

But when I see 40-year-old men wearing shorts in under-40-Fahrenheit weather, I despair of the older generation.

You snow it’s snowing hard when this happens.

In other news, I called my brother in Delaware on the telly phone to tell him about hard it’s been raining in Virginia Beach.

And I’m not sure Afghanistan does, at least not any more; it was quite one thing to look for a bad guy, quite another to occupy a country.

Shaun Mullen summarizes just war doctrine.

Anyone who thought that Obama was going to attempt to govern as a doctrinaire anything was not paying attention during the campaign.

Seems to me that a lot of frustrated (like myself) lefties have projected their own policy preferences onto Obama (unlike myself).

I heard Hamsher on the radio recently (I think on the Diane Rehm Show, but I can’t find the link). She seemed bitter that Obama has not accomplished everything he promised on the campaign single-handedly in ten months.

(With apologies to Leslie Gore, who’s still cute as a button.)

It’s my comment to the Booman’s post. Please read that first.

Now you may continue

To go looking for a fight in a spirit of love and brotherhood.

I have figured it out.

In fact, I figured it out long ago, but only just connected it to the wingnut fantasies of a War on Christmas. (Hell, if there’s a War on Christmas in these parts, Christmas won long ago.)

Some folks just ain’t happy unless they’re hatin’ on something or someone. Nothing to hate, they make something up.

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