Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
The first thing I thought about when I read this Politihoe piece on Hilary Clinton’s alleged “hit list” or, should you go the Hill route, the much more Nixonian “traitor list,” was this:
This comment DougJ from 2009 will never be wrong:
I’m watching Monica Crowley and Pat Buchanan on the McLaughlin group and so help me God, I am praying for a dirty bomb in Georgetown.
These people will destroy us all.
Don’t be fooled by Obama — we are fucked.
I hate these people.
Apropos of dpm’s post on Bill Keller’s latest…Keller just doubled down with the condescension:
I think some readers have misread my point, and some – the most vociferous – seem to believe that anything short of an unqualified “right on, Lisa!” is inhumane or sacrilegious.
This shouldn’t have to be said, but…cut her a little fucking slack, she might be dying. Yes, anything short of “good luck to you” is indeed inhumane and sacrilegious.
Corey Robin points out that Keller had quite a different reaction to his buddy Chris Hitchens’ very public battle with cancer:
[H]e is dying of esophageal cancer, a fact he has faced with exceptional aplomb. [….]Christopher Hitchens: American patriot. We’ve done a lot worse.
Anyway, every time our overlords tell us “Shut the fuck up and die, plebe”, the guillotines get closer.
I love local politics. The angles people are taking are more complicated and the reporting is much better (because it’s done by hard-working middle-class journalists not millionaire corporate shills). Things don’t break down as neatly into liberal versus conservative, and there are a lot of people in both parties who are genuinely interested in helping their communities. On the other hand, it can be depressing, especially the level of corruption and the realization that some of your fellow travelers are irredeemable assholes.
From what I’ve seen with various projects around Rochester, I’d say it’s not unlikely that Bridgegate had something do with the billion-dollar Hudson lights project taking place near the GWB:
One of the top Democrats in New Jersey told TPM on Monday that it’s “absolutely” possible a billion-dollar redevelopment project is at the root of the scandal that has consumed Gov. Chris Christie (R) in recent days.
[….]“Would these developments play a role in this and be sort of a typical Jersey political story? Absolutely,” Weinberg said. “It could have been to show this developer: ‘You want a piece of the action? I want — I’m making something up here — I want to be the traffic consultant, I want to be the attorney who rents out the property,’ or, you know, whatever.”
He drove off to his local, where he felt anti-socialPost + Comments (88)
The Columbia Journalism Review did some digging, and it turns out that blurb (as many of you expected and I had hoped) was the result of an idiotic copy editor:
On Sunday, John Cole at the blog Balloon Juice posted a photo of the item along with some sarcastic commentary:
ATTN: EVERY BLACK MAN IN MORGANTOWN! Don’t be suspicious, because we are onto your shit.
Cole’s blog post didn’t cite a date for the paper or link to an online version of the brief, so at first I thought the whole thing might be a hoax. Or perhaps something that appeared in the paper decades ago. No one at the paper responded to calls or emails Sunday, so I called a Morgantown gas station that sells The Dominion Post and asked a young-sounding clerk if he might have a copy of yesterday’s edition lying around. He did, and he turned to page A2 and read the item aloud to me. (I’m not going to repeat the word the young man used to describe his assessment of the news item, but it was a derogatory term for someone with an intellectual disability.)
Later Sunday afternoon I got in touch with Deputy Morgan at the sheriff’s office. Unlike the gas station clerk, he was not so amused.
“You have no idea,” he told me. “I’ve been taking flak over that for two days now.”
The deputy says he stopped by the newspaper and dropped off a short news release with two photographs days ago. He says the person in the photos–a black man–isn’t a suspect in any case, but is someone authorities want to talk to about some credit card transactions. The department was hoping anyone with information about the man would call.
The sheriff’s department has been hearing from area residents since the item appeared in the paper, though not with the response they’d hoped for.
“It’s been constant day and night since yesterday morning,” Morgan said. People have come in to complain. Oh, and the phone calls.
“Usually it’s just sarcasm from people,” the deputy said. “‘Hey, I’ve seen a black guy walking and he looks suspicious, I hear you’re looking for him.'”
It got bad enough, Morgan said, that he went over to The Dominion Post and asked if the paper could issue some kind of clarification. Late Saturday, the Post published on its website this item, which includes the photos, a more detailed description of the man, and a mention of stolen credit cards.
That’s probably what Morgan was expecting to see in the first place–though the deputy says he was hoping the update would offer a little more clarity about how the original item had made it into print.
I bet this will go down as one of those teachable moments everyone seems to want to have about race.
Lisa Adams is a mother of three who was diagnosed with breast cancer at age 36 and is now, in her early forties, dealing with a recurrence in her bones. Bill Keller and his wife seem to be irritated by the fact that she’s bogging and tweeting “copiously” about her illness. In the Times today, Bill wonders if it wouldn’t be better for her to choose, like his father-in-law, to be “unplugged from everything but painkillers” and die already. Bill’s wife has also weighed in at the Guardian but I don’t feel like vomiting so I won’t read her column. Bill’s was enough.
There’s a lot to be said about the way that this country deals with cancer, but Bill Keller’s ham-fisted, condescending attempt isn’t the way to do it. As far as I can tell from reading Lisa’s blog, he gets a lot wrong. She’s not buying into the “I’m at war with cancer” metaphor Keller tries to foist on her. And, she’s not near the point where one wants to “unplug” (mainly because as far as I can tell from her detailed description of her disease and treatment, she’s not “plugged”, just getting reasonable palliative radiation, chemo and other procedures to ease the pain of her cancer and to address easily treated complications like her chest filling up with fluid.) Bill is also concerned that she’s a “proselytizer” for Sloan-Kettering, where he says she’s “bedridden”. Perhaps if Bill is overly concerned about that, he can be treated in Bangladesh or Zimbabwe if he’s unlucky enough to have cancer, just to be sure he’s far away from the questionable ethics of his city’s leading cancer institution.
I’ll outsource the remainder of my rage to Wonkette.
My many enablers in DPM’s thread have noted that news of McArdle’s upcoming volume might be “worth” reviewing. One even suggested a basic format.
First: you all are horrible people, wishing upon me or anyone the evils of (a) reading McArdle at book-length and (b) spending the time it would take to disembowel the work honorably.
Second: I’ve already completed my review, along the precise lines recommended within that last comment thread:
Please suggest other one line/haiku McArdle reviews, and/or jabber among yourselves
One of the perks of working at home is that you can play a musical instrument for relaxation when you take a break. I am a very bad ukulele player, but playing relaxes me.
Unless a fucking lizard leaps up out of the sound hole, that is; then, it’s not relaxing at all but actually terrifying for the millisecond it takes to realize that the organic life form that has just hurled itself from the interior to the surface of the instrument you’re cradling isn’t something scary like a snake or tarantula but just a small lizard, but shit, now that you’ve bellowed like a ruptured cow in fright, the dogs are racing to see what’s wrong, and they’ll eat the poor lizard, so damn, you’ve got to find a way to expel the intruder before they notice it, so maybe if you just sprint to the door holding the uke straight out, the lizard will stay where it is until you get on the porch, but fuck no, of course it runs up the neck of the uke and jumps onto your torso as if you were a tree trunk, but goddamnit, at least now you’re outside, so you can attempt to shake it off as it runs from your shoulder to your boob to your side then onto your back, presumably, since you can’t see it anymore, so you just jump around on the front porch while flailing your limbs (still clutching the uke in one hand) and pray to jeebus that no one happens to drive by and see you having an apparent seizure while holding a ukulele.
Then it’s not relaxing at all. Especially when you get back inside and prop the instrument against the wall – your practice session now irretrievably interrupted – and the fucking lizard comes back out of the sound hole. Or perhaps that’s its mate or one of an entire colony of goddamn lizards who have taken up residence in your ukulele. Fuck.