Personal Musings category archive

I have it on good authority from within the center of an Illinois state government office yesterday that there was non-partisan rejoicing on the part of state workers and professional staff.

The exact sentence was, “. . . you’d think it was Bastille Day.”

Apparently, Blago was an equal-opportunity alienator.

Republican Economic Theory: Making nothing out of something.

Republican Political Tactics: Making something out of nothing.

It’s difficult for me to see this as a feminist-type issue.

I know a little bit about frat-boy type behavior (one reason I was never interested in joining a frat–why pay dues to get drunk?).

I can see the same thing happening had a male candidate been the subject.

But some persons do see it thus.

It looks to me more like a stupidity-out-of-control-type issue.

If you don’t want absolutely everyone to be able to see something, don’t show it to absolutely everyone.

H/T Karen for the link.

Christiane Amanpour on Fresh Air:

“Objectivity means reporting the truth.

“It doesn’t mean causing a false equivalence or saying ‘on the one hand this, on the other hand that,’ it doesn’t mean equating victim with aggressor. If we do that, we’re accomplices.”

Justice requires courts.

At every level.

Roger Cohen in the Toimes (no relation to Richard “I used to have a clue” Cohen):

I can think of no better place for President-elect Barack Obama to start in signaling a changed American approach to the world, and particularly its European allies, than the International Criminal Court. Even short of American membership, which would involve a tough battle in Congress, there is much he can do. But “re-signing” followed by ratification should be Obama’s aim.

The effect of U.S. rejection of the court, combined with the trashing of habeas corpus at Guantánamo Bay, has been devastating. Allies from Canada to Germany that are court members have been dismayed by the U.S. dismissal of an institution they see doing evident good.

H/T Alison for the link.

For your iPod or MP3 player.

How the hell can I manage to lose the cap from my Sharpie in ten seconds?

I’ve flown over West Virginia plenty of times.

The scars from the “mountaintop removal” type of mining are terrible. Hideous. Ugly beyond description.

(Go to YouTube to see the rest of the series.)

It is also destructive to the lives of West Virginians.

It has led to increasingly severe floods in West Virginia.

So this is beyond atrocious:

The Environmental Protection Agency on Tuesday approved a last-minute rule change by the Bush administration that will allow coal companies to bury streams under the rocks leftover from mining.

The 1983 rule prohibited dumping the fill from mountaintop removal mining within 100 feet of streams. In practice, the government hadn’t been enforcing the rule. Government figures show that 535 miles of streams were buried or diverted from 2001 to 2005, more than half of them in the mountains of Appalachia. Along with the loss of the streams has been an increase of erosion and flooding.

The Republican Party: Fellating the rich and buggering the poor since 1868.

Down: Dentist. He’s a really nice guy and very very skillful. But I’d rather just run into him in the Super Fresh.

Up: Super Fresh, to pick up some jalapenos.

Addendum:

First good report from a dentist that my few remaining teeth have gotten in 25 years.

Not apocalypse.

Apostrophe.

For, you see, every time the doomsayers predict the apocalypse, we get only an apostrophe.

Adam Gopnik on John Stuart Mill:

In a sense, social conservatives like Rick Santorum are right: there is a slippery slope leading from one banned practice to the next. Give rights to blacks, and the next thing you know you are giving rights to women and sodomites and then the sodomites are renting formal wear and ordering flowers for their weddings. The slippery slope is what Mill called liberty. Every time we slide a little farther down, what we find is not a descent toward Hell but more air, and more people breathing free.

H/T Alison for the quotation.

About three or four weeks late.

Usually, by this time in these parts, we’ve had a couple of frosts and Indian summer.

It was a gift. It is a nice sweater.

But, left to myself, I would never get a garment except for jeans with the label on the outside.

After listening to this, I wanted a beer.

Time to take that bath:

A “Male Beauty” survey of nearly 10,000 men and women in 12 countries conducted by market research firm Synovate found that good hygiene was actually the top requirement for men to being considered handsome.

Most persons like trains.

Trains are fun. The railroad is a fun place to work. Sometimes I miss it, though I do not miss the company that I used to work for.

Then there are train nuts, who make watching, writing about, maybe building model trains a hobby. It’s sort of like industrial bird watching.

Then there are what, on the railroad, we used to refer to as “foamers” or “FRNs” (loosely translated: “freaking rail nuts”). They are the persons who dress up in bib overalls and canvas steam-era engineer caps, go down to the train station whenever it’s open, watch the trains go by, and write down the consist of every train, even though all the cars look alike and were made by the same manufacturer within a few years of each other.

Somewhere along the line, they have lost any grip on basic reality.

You can get the same psychological breakdown in just about any line of endeavor; certainly, you can get it in politics, when persons lose sight of the concept that the purpose of a government is to govern and, in the United States, “provide for the general welfare.”

You can get persons who become so steeped in delusion and unreality that, frankly, they should not be let out without what used to be so graciously called in Victorian England a “companion.”

These people here are bleeding foamers. They illustrate why progressives started referring to themselves as the “reality-based” community:

When the justices of the U.S. Supreme Court meet on Dec. 5th, in their regular private conference to decide which cases to hear, two lawsuits that have captivated a segment of the blogosphere will be up for discussion.

Both urge the court to consider claims that President-elect Obama is not qualified to be president, because he is not a natural-born American citizen.

And why the term “wingnut” is not a misnomer.

The First Thanksgiving was in Virginia.

Just sayin’.

Everyone have a great Thanksgiving, remembering that, however bad things may look, there is still good.

If you have a large enough bottle of Frank’s Original Red-Hot, anything can be made to taste good.

Am I the only person expecting a wave of retirements from the Supremes subsequent to January 20, 2009?

I’m certain that some of the reality-based justices have been just hanging on waiting for sanity to return to the United States of America.

I don’t often visit the Great Orange Satan. I find that it, like New York, is so big as to be overwhelming.

But, this morning, I stumbled across a marvelous meditation on what constitutes American patriotism.

Not the “my-country-right-or-wrong and to-hell-with-you” jingoism of the xenophobes, bigots, and warmongers, but rather the patriotism of those who love the United States and what it can someday be.

Here’s a nugget. I would urge you to read the whole thing:

I, too, love America more than any other nation. And while not a global expert, I have traveled, to Canada and Mexico, and to numerous nations in Europe. For all our flaws, the possibilities open to me here, the grandson of immigrant Jews, are greater than in any other nation. I want those opportunities even greater, and open to all who come here, who aspire to better lives for them and their progeny.

I just heard punditress on NPR say of Mr. Obama, “We don’t know what his priorities will be.”

All I can say in reaction is where the hell has she been the last two years?

Apparently, not paying attention is a requisite for getting a gig on the radio.

Furrfu!