Come for the politics, stay for the snark.
Translated from dog: “Look. It isn’t my fault you fell asleep on the couch for a few hours and I discovered the comforter while the duvet cover was still drying. Plus, look how cute I am. Don’t you want to rub my belly? Do you have any treats? Kisses!”
I seriously would be the worst dad ever. I would be simply incapable of disciplining my brood. Also, since this is late night:
It’s a little raw and the like, but it still makes me smile.
TNC on the execution of Cameron Todd Willingham:
The death penalty promotes our sense of order–it offers assurance that those who savagely violate our most cherished morals will be harshly penalized. The question, for me, is what will we tolerate to preserve that assurance? What I hope will come out of this case is a more honest debate about the death penalty. I strongly suspect that Rick Perry–at this point–knows that something went badly wrong in Willingham’s execution, and yet still believes in the death penalty. What I hope will emerge is death penalty advocates honest enough to admit that no system of state-sponsored execution can be infallible, because people are fallible. I want them to come out and say what’s clear–innocent people will be executed. I want them to stop treating us like children, and make the argument.
Unfortunately, this is not what will happen. Death penalty advocates will simply argue that we can’t say for sure that Willingham was innocent and so on. The burden of proof will shift, or has already shifted: it now must be proved, beyond reasonable doubt, that an innocent man has been executed.
Americans’ support for the death penalty is not isolated. It is of a piece with Americans’ (negative) attitudes about evolution, just to cite one example (I’m sure I could find others but I find the topic depressing); that is to say, it has more to do with superstitions and conceptions of good and evil than with reason. Probably the most we could ask for right now is to have the people administering the lethal injections dress as pimps so that in the event of another wrongful execution the New York Times and Washington Post treat it as an important story.
I think it’s important to highlight what happened in Texas, both with the conviction and with the cover-up. Because — not but — when it comes to reversing attitudes about the death penalty, it’s a long, long road.
It appears the turf wars of 2009 are finally over, and Lily has ceded the futon to his royal highness Tunch, and now has made this old hand-me-down chair (every family has a chair like this- it was in my house as a toddler, then in my mom’s office for decades, then when she retired I didn’t say no quick enough when she asked if I wanted it):
At any rate, don’t forget to vote for Bitsy. We are doing well this week- over 1600 already. I know we can crack three k.
Also, this:
Michael Steele, hamburger helper.
This post by Megan McCardle and the comments that follow fascinated me:
Yesterday, more than one commenter accused me of liberal bias in my suspicion that Rick Perry’s actions in the Willingham case smacked of trying to derail the investigation. The Dallas Morning News, hardly a liberal rag, is also suspicious….
This is fairly typical of the comments:
Well Megan, I really don’t see any smoking gun in this case. We know you’re anti death-penalty but this is grasping at straws.
There is no smoking gun that the guy is innocent, so the state was right to execute him.
I realize this is nut-picking but it blows my mind to think that now only hippies believe that we shouldn’t execute people unless we’re at least somewhat certain they’re guilty.
And kudos to McMegan for not being a glibertarian here.
The other night at dinner, our seminar speaker started to explain to us about how the Community Reinvestment Act caused the subprime crisis. There was a new twist in the story, he claimed there was a flawed study (which he surely made up or at least misrepresented) that had showed that whether or not people made their mortgage payments, and, as a result, the courts/federal government (he didn’t explain the mechanism) forced banks to lend to anyone who wanted it. He had all of this on very good authority from his father-in-law at Morgan Stanley. May FSM strike me dead if I am not relating his story accurately. I thought of that when I saw this from Atrios:
5 years from now it will probably be a “fact” that ACORN and the Community Reinvestment Act caused the housing bubble.
And I thought of that again when I saw (on Fallows) that the Washington Post still hasn’t amended its Nobel for Neda piece to note that Nobel prizes are not awarded posthumously. And again when I saw this bizarre explanation of it all from Howie Kurtz:
Fairfax County, Va.: Hi Howard, This Sunday, I read the editorials in The Post and The New York Times about the surprise Peace Prize. I liked the NYT editorial (which was pro), but like most of us, including Obama, I could certainly have handled an editorial that was anti this choice.
When I read The Washington Post editorial, I felt so sad for what this paper has become. Their whole idea was that the prize should have gone to Neda, the woman who was murdered by the Iranian police. Nobel Peace Prizes can’t be given posthumously. It’s a basic, easy factcheck. There are other fact problems, too (the protests hadn’t happened by the nomination date, Neda may not have been a protester).
So the idea that the committee made a careless or inappropriate choice is refuted by a slapdash editorial “choice” that nobody bothered to check? It just screamed out to me “we laid off almost all the copy editors.” I feel so sad for The Post I grew up with. It’s great to have an opinion. It’s bad to look dumb.
washingtonpost.com: Post Editorial: Our Laureate: Neda of Iran (Post, Oct. 10) andTimes Editorial: The Peace Prize (The New York Times, Oct. 9)
Howard Kurtz: I take your point about no posthumous awards, though by that standard Martin Luther King couldn’t have won after being assassinated (yes, I know he won the prize earlier). My reading of the piece was that Neda was being used more as a symbol (though the rule should have been mentioned). But it’s an editorial. It is by definition opinion. Of course some readers are going to disagree.
It’s not “by that reasoning”, it’s a rule the Nobel Prize committee has! How hard is it to understand that?
Were things always like this? Did newspapers always fill their editorial pages with factual inaccuracies they refused to correct? Were criticisms of the inaccuracies always defended with non sequiturs about other events? Was it always common for ostensibly reasonable, intelligent people to go around repeating stories that are not only not true but couldn’t possibly be true?
Update. I see that Mediactive wrote about Kurtz’s strange answer as well. There are some good points there.
I heard that we need one.
I’ve been reading a bit of this panel discussion thing about conservatism’s future. It’s mostly an epic wankfest and it’s remarkable how much Larison stands out. I liked this especially:
Conservatism rebels against the concentration of power and wealth, temperamental conservatism teaches that power corrupts, while the movement concentrates in acquiring political gain particularly on national security.
Reminds me of one of my favorite quotes from Moby Dick:
The urbane activity with which a man receives money is really marvelous, considering that we so earnestly believe money to be the root of all earthly ills, and that on no account can a monied man enter heaven. Ah! How cheerfully we consign ourselves to perdition!
I’m sure there are also all kinds of paradoxes in liberalism or progressivism or whatever it is that people like me are supposed to have as a philosophy. And this is why I think it’s a mistake to think that pondering Burke and Hume or their liberal equivalents, whoever that would be, will lead to any kind of clarity.