December, 2013 archive
“An Armed Society Is a Polite Society” 0
Politeness must start young.
Police say an Arizona toddler is dead after accidentally shooting himself with his parent’s gun.
Award of the State 0
Dan Casey hands out the “2013 Dano Awards for Glaring Stupidity awards” and the Regent is one of the winners. A nugget:
This year’s winner of the former is the first family of Virginia. Gov. Bob McDonnell, his wife Maureen, their offspring and (indirectly) the governor’s sister received something like $165,000 worth of stuff.
See the rest of the winners at the link.
The Ghost of Christmas Past 0
Robyn Blumner ruminates on the real meaning of A Christmas Carol.
It’s not what the “Christmas Special” complex would have you think.
Privilege 0
The privileged are, for the most part, unconscious of their privilege, until something shakes them awake.
But in between the important cases, I found myself spending most of my time prosecuting people of color for things we white kids did with impunity growing up in the suburbs. As our office handed down arrest records and probation terms for riding dirt bikes in the street, cutting through a neighbor’s yard, hosting loud parties, fighting, or smoking weed – shenanigans that had rarely earned my own classmates anything more than raised eyebrows and scoldings – I often wondered if there was a side of the justice system that we never saw in the suburbs. Last year, I got myself arrested in New York City and found out.
Find out how the criminal “justice” system retaliated.
H/T to Thoreau.
Ducked 0
I promised myself that I was not going to spend more than one post on Duck Dynasty, but this is too good (and too true) to pass up.
Warning: Language, every bit of which is deserved.
Republican Economics 0
Steve Shepard has found the rules for Republican Musical Chairs. After summarizing the rules for musical chairs, explaining how, at the end of each round, one child is left standing, he gets to the Republican variants.
We’ll pick up the story there.
As you can see, one child misses out each round until one wins.
Republicans would say the standing child was too lazy, too unmotivated, too reliant on their parents for food and clothing, therefore deserving of this ouster.
Sen. Rand Paul goes a step further. He believes that after two rounds of playing, all chairs should be removed and the children should be left on their own to go into the woods, ax and hammer in hand, to build their own chairs.
All the News that Fits 0
Media Matters looks back at news coverage of the Affordable Care Act during 2013 and finds it wanting:
The Voter Fraud Fraud 0
And this surprises you how?
“We looked at proposed and passage over this period, and we looked at just 2011 specifically,” Bentele told TPM in an interview this week. “And you have this consistent emergence — over and over and over — these partisan and racial factors are the most strongly associated with these outcomes.”
More at the link.
Droning On 0
I remember diagrams like this from when I was young.
Those showed Russian aircraft.
Click the image to learn more.
“Magical Money-Machine” 3
From time to time, George Smith blogs about the lunacy of bitcoin mania and the type of glibertarian geek who buys into it at his place. I know what bitcoins are and how they purportedly work because I move in geeky circles, which can make one dizzy at times.
Last night, at LQ, one of the regulars there delivered a masterful takedown of bitcoins. A nugget:
I’m a Southern Boy 0
I know bigotry when I see it.
I grew up surrounded by it and I’m too old to have patience with it any more.
The Booman is a Yankee boy. He also knows bigotry when he sees it.
Hate is hate, regardless of the fancy words with which some would try to cloak it.
The Party of Random Offensiveness 0
This is little more than being nasty just for the sake of being nasty and cornering the nastiness vote.
Walker’s action rewrites a 2010 law — the first of its kind in the nation — that made it extremely difficult for schools to keep their Indian team names if they had complaints filed against them.
Tribes fought the effort to scale back that law and had urged Walker to veto it.
Nastiness: A Republican family value.
Stray Thought 0
When you build a television show on glorifying rednecks, don’t be surprised when the rednecks act like, well, rednecks.
