Words Fail Me category archive

Eric Zorn reports in the Chicago Trib:

(University of Chicago law professor Todd Henderson) posted a now world-famous jeremiad to his blog griping that he and his wife, a physician, “are just getting by” on a combined income that “exceeds the $250,000 threshold for the super-rich” who will owe more in taxes under Obama’s plan.

The nanny, the lawn service, the maid service, the private school for their three children, the cable TV … “If these cuts don’t work, we will sell our house,” he bleated.

I am somehow unable to feel Professor Henderson’s pain. Never having been elevated to ranks of the privileged, I cannot grasp the horror of having to vacuum one’s own floors, of having to rear one’s own children, or of having to push one’s own lawn mower.

Offered without comment:

Gucci, the Italian brand owned by Paris-based PPR SA, and Burberry Group Plc, the U.K.’s largest luxury retailer, are targeting status-conscious parents with $340 fur-lined suede infant boots, a $375 baby cashmere outfit and a girl’s double- breasted gabardine trench coat retailing for $750.

Children’s wear accounted for 5 percent of Burberry’s 1.28 billion-pound ($2 billion) sales last year and may double to 10 percent “over time” . . . .

Bet you can’t watch it all the way through:

I don’t think that even Krafft-Ebbing had a word for this.

And it is getting creepy.

Emphasis added.

Filipino teenage singer Charice Pempengco says she prepared for her debut on the hit TV show “Glee” by getting Botox and an anti-aging procedure “to look fresh on camera.”

The 18-year-old Charice, whose singing career rocketed after appearing on Ellen DeGeneres’ and Oprah Winfrey’s talk shows, underwent a 30-minute Thermage skin-tightening procedure and Botox to make her “naturally round face” more narrow, celebrity cosmetic surgeon Vicki Belo told ABS-CBN television.

Mithras reports.

Gosh, I hope he’s wrong. But the track record indicates that Buccaneer Petroleum pretty much can’t find its rear end with both hands.

And John Boehheadner wants no more regulation.

The Republican Party–the Party of “Thank you, Mistress, may I have a please have another.”

Furrfu.

Addendum, a Day Later:

So far, holding on.

In Colorado.

Steve Benen explains.

Much criticism of Obama does not contain an undercurrent of racism.

It contains an undertow. In the eyes of some, he will never get anything right.

So do did others.

Via Shaun Mullen.

Addendum:

Brendan (warning: language).

Apparently, British Airways considers every man to be a child molester.

The Revolutionary War was clearly justified.

Oh, my.

Republicans defend BP’s wild well.

I guess they like oiled pelicans.

Words fail me.

This is just macabre.

It is also most disrespectful to make such an announcement above one’s smiley-faced campaign picture.

One can argue that the subject of the twit deserved no respect (he was a pretty lousy human being by all indications), but somewhere he has family who do not share his guilt.

Follow the link. Read the whole thing.

R.E. Wall, director of Prescott’s Downtown Mural Project, said he and other artists were subjected to slurs from motorists as they worked on the painting at one of the town’s most prominent intersections.

“We consistently, for two months, had people shouting racial slander from their cars,” Wall said. “We had children painting with us, and here come these yells of (epithet for Blacks) and (epithet for Hispanics).”

Wall said school Principal Jeff Lane pressed him to make the children’s faces appear happier and brighter.

“It is being lightened because of the controversy,” Wall said, adding that “they want it to look like the children are coming into light.”

Lane said that he received only three complaints about the mural and that his request for a touch-up had nothing to do with political pressure. “We asked them to fix the shading on the children’s faces,” he said. “We were looking at it from an artistic view. Nothing at all to do with race.”

City Councilman Steve Blair spearheaded a public campaign on his talk show at Prescott radio station KYCA-AM (1490) to remove the mural.

In a broadcast last month, according to the Daily Courier in Prescott, Blair mistakenly complained that the most prominent child in the painting is African-American, saying: “To depict the biggest picture on the building as a Black person, I would have to ask the question: Why?”

The excuses of those who claim this is not bigotry are lame. They lie, to others and to themselves.

This is all about bigotry.

I’m a Southern Boy. I know the damned code, for Christ’s sake.

Via Jamelle Bouie.

The Boston Globe:

It was back in 1998 that Wakefield, who now stands accused of unethical and irresponsible research, published a medical article suggesting a link between autism and the measles, mumps, and rubella (MMR) vaccine. Since then, the research has been discredited by follow-up studies that failed to find a link between the vaccine and the disease. As far back as 2004, 10 of Wakefield’s original co-authors retracted the findings of the article in a letter to The Lancet, the prestigious medical journal where it was initially published. Puzzlingly, it took the journal six more years to issue its own official retraction, which came out in February.

In the meantime, persons have died because of the anti-vaccination hysteria that this bozo started.

Yeah.

Right.

The state health department is investigating 10 cases of mercury exposure linked to a homemade “skin lightening” cream imported from Mexico.

26,000 chicks in one building.

I remember going with my father to meet the train to pick up a shipment of peepers. It was nothing like 26,000 or even 2600. Maybe 260:

Authorities say 26,000 birds were lost after an electrical malfunction caused a fire that destroyed a poultry house west of Bridgeville.

I’ve driven past hundreds of those things.

26,000.

Wow.

My brother works for Ag, but I don’t know that he’s seen the inside of one of those places. His branch has to do with conservation, not chickens.

Attracting questionable company.

It is difficult not to think that there is a screw loose:

Plastic human fetus dolls – soft, in pink and brown, and about 4 inches long – have been handed out at Oakwood Elementary School by an employee who was put on administrative leave Thursday over the situation.

The dolls, which were distributed over weeks or months, are not authorized by the division as instructional materials, spokeswoman Elizabeth Thiel Mather said Thursday.

The employee has been sent home pending investigation.

Read more »

The country slants to the southwest. Everything loose rolls to California.