A couple of the teenagers at our Thanksgiving dinner told me they were going out a midnight just to watch the Black Friday madness. I wondered what could be entertaining about a bunch of shoppers, until I saw this video of the ruckus over $2 waffle makers at some Wal-Mart. As a bonus, it shows what the kids mean by “crack kills”. Here’s an open thread.
Obsession, Your Obsession
What is it with conservatives and the USPS? George Will:
The fact that delivering the mail is one of the very few things the federal government does that the Constitution specifically authorizes (Article I, Section 8: “The Congress shall have power to . . . establish post offices and post roads”) does not mean it must do it. Surely the government could cede this function to the private sector, which probably could have a satisfactory substitute system functioning quicker than you can say “FedEx,” “UPS” and “Wal-Mart.”
The first two are good at delivering things; the third, supplemented by other ubiquitous retailers, could house post offices. All three are for-profit enterprises, so they have an incentive to practice bourgeois civility — to be helpful, even polite. These attributes are not always found at post offices.
Unfortunately, privatization collides with a belief sometimes deemed reactionary but nowadays characteristic of progressives. The belief is: In government, whatever is should forever be. […]
George Will was always the low-rent William F. Buckley, but apparently he’s reached the point where even the mildest acquaintance with the facts needn’t intrude when he hits his Underwood manual to pound out a column. I went to the UPS website, and quicker than you can say “free market wanker”, found what UPS wants to charge me to send a letter to the neighboring town by Monday, something the USPS will do for 44 cents:
The “ubiquitous” Wal-Mart has 8,500 stores in the world. The Post Office has 36,000 locations in the US. You have to live in a double-reinforced titanium echo chamber not to see the difference between the USPS and UPS, FedEx and Wal-Mart.
Keep Your Enemies Close, Keep Pakistan Closer
Pakistan is pretty pissed off right now as a NATO gunship assault on a border checkpoint near Afghanistan has resulted in at least 26 dead Pakistani soldiers so far.
Pakistani Prime Minister Yousuf Raza Gilani has called an emergency meeting of military services chiefs to formulate his country’s response, his spokesman said. The Defense Committee of the Cabinet will meet later Saturday.
In a statement, Gilani said he “strongly condemned the NATO/ISAF attack on the Pakistani” checkpoint.
The matter is being taken up by the Foreign Ministry “in the strongest possible terms” with NATO and the United States, the statement from his office said.
NATO’s commander in Afghanistan said he is committed to a thorough investigation.
Yeah, this isn’t good in any way. Pakistan has already closed supply routes for NATO convoys through the country and that’s just for starters, all this happening less than 48 hours or so after another NATO airstrike supposedly killed seven civilians in Afghanistan. It looks like NATO troops were performing a cross-border raid from Afghanistan, chasing insurgents into Pakistan when the incident took place. Pakistan’s military is calling this an “unprovoked attack” on Pakistan’s “sovereignty” and at this point it’s still unclear just exactly what happened. It’s hard to imagine things getting too much worse:
“I think we should go to the United Nations Security Council against this,” said retired Brigadier Mahmood Shah, former chief of security in the tribal areas. “So far, Pakistan is being blamed for all that is happening in Afghanistan, and Pakistan’s point of view has not been shown in the international media.”
Other analysts, including Rustam Shah Mohmand, a former ambassador to Afghanistan, said Pakistan would protest and close the supply lines for some time, but that ultimately “things will get back to normal.”
Paul Beaver, a British security analyst, said relations were so bad that this incident might have no noticeable impact.
“I’m not sure U.S.-Pakistan relations could sink much lower than they are now,” he said.
President Obama’s foreign policy has been excellent so far, but this is going to require some kid gloves. We’ll see what the State Department has to say in response.
Keep Your Enemies Close, Keep Pakistan CloserPost + Comments (145)
Friday Night Open Thread
(Signe Wilkinson via GoComics.com)
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There’s always that one huge container of Well-Intentioned Horror from a dear friend or relative who only meant the very best. In my youth it was anything involving green jello, shredded coconut or miniature marshmallows; today it’s more liable to be a demonstration that producing a low-fat, vegan, gluten-free, no-sodium entree that’s also edible is a task best left to experts…
#OWS: The Shocking Truth about Naomi Wolf’s Journalistic Hackery [updated]
Rumormongering at its most despicable.
Two weeks ago, a rumor circulated that the Department of Homeland Security was “behind” the crackdown at Zuccotti Park. The rumor originated with Michael Moore who got it from a thinly-sourced article in Examiner.com. I wrote about it here and here.
The author of the Examiner.com article, Rick Ellis, published multiple updates to his thinly-sourced post, and promised that he would provide more information once he had it. That was on November 15. No further information has been provided.
I figured it had been settled. As Joshua Holland, writing for Alternet noted, “There’s a lot of speculation, but very little substance to the tale of the “nationwide” crackdown on the Occupy movement. ”
So I figured this rumor would be put to bed. I was wrong.
Today — ten days after the rumor had been debunked — Naomi Wolf saw fit to write an article so fraught with hyperbole — “what happened this week is the first battle in a civil war” — and so utterly fact-free that its publication should hang like an albatross around Naomi Wolf’s neck for the rest of her career. It is Judith Miller-style hackery, and it is shameless.
Karoli has the story in a post aptly titled “How Bullshit Magically Turns into Fact“:
Naomi Wolf wrote a nonsensical piece today that’s being spammed all over Twitter. It asserts that there is a deliberate plot afoot via collusion by the United States Congress, the Department of Homeland Security and our oligarchical overlords to undermine the very populist, leaderless Occupy Wall Street movement. One of her key pieces of evidence is an unsupported and unverified report that 18 mayors coordinated their crackdowns with the Department of Homeland Security. There’s only one problem with that: It’s nothing more than innuendo. Here, let me show you.
#OWS: The Shocking Truth about Naomi Wolf’s Journalistic Hackery [updated]Post + Comments (407)
Hard-hitting political commentary
Backyard Brawl Open Thread
Five minutes into the game and the refs have already declared this is all about them. How many of you have ever seen a chop block called in the scrum that is the line during a field goal attempt? Utter fucking bullshit.