"It's 3 a.m. -- There's too much Noise ...

Don't you People ever want to go to Bed?"

 -------------
My new place is very quiet, but..

I know those lines above. By heart.
Could even recite em in my sleep.

R.I.P. -- C. Everett Koop

C. Everett Koop, the former surgeon general who brought frank talk about AIDS into U.S. homes, has died at his home in Hanover, N.H., officials at the Geisel School of Medicine at Dartmouth said Monday. He was 96.

He spoke at Northwestern's graduation ceremonies in 1990; we got a good one.  He served in the Reagan administration in the fight against AIDS, and by all accounts, did the country a tremendous service.

Surgeon General Koop had an especially busy year in 1986:

"Dr. Koop will be remembered for his colossal contributions to the health and well-being of patients and communities in the U.S. and around the world," said a statement released by Chip Souba, dean of the Geisel School of Medicine and Joseph O'Donnell, senior scholar at the C. Everett Koop Institute. "As one of our country's greatest surgeons general, he effectively promoted health and the prevention of disease, thereby improving millions of lives in our nation and across the globe."

Koop may best remembered for his official 1986 report on AIDS – a plain-spoken 36-page document that talked about the way AIDS spread (through sex, needles and blood), the ways it did not spread (through casual contact in homes, schools and workplaces) and how people could protect themselves.

The report advocated condom use for the sexually active and sex education for schoolchildren, pleasantly surprising liberals and upsetting many of Koop's former supporters. An eight-page version was mailed to every American household in 1988.

The brochure came in a sealed packet with the warning that "some of the issues involved in this brochure may not be things you are used to discussing openly.In interviews and speeches, Koop always stressed that sexual abstinence and monogamy were the best protection against AIDS, but that medical experts had a duty to tell people who did not choose those paths how they could stay healthy.

"My position on AIDS was dictated by scientific integrity and Christian compassion," Koop wrote in his 1991 biography, Koop: The Memoirs of America's Family Doctor.

At one point, Koop was the second-most recognized public official in the United States, after President Reagan, says Alexandra Lord, a former Public Health Service historian and author of Condom Nation: The US Government's Sex Education Campaign from World War I to the Internet. He was one of the most high-profile surgeons general, before or since, she says -- though she says people under age 35 or so may not know his name today.

In his time, "Koop was very effective," so much so that he made some subsequent administrations "very nervous" about the potential power of the men and women occupying the office, Lord says.

...

At a time when AIDS was new, though, and the nation needed someone to give it the facts straight up, Koop filled the bill, says Woodie Kessel, a former assistant surgeon general who was a longtime friend and a Koop Institute fellow. "Every time there's a new threat to our well-being, it takes somebody to calm our fears... He worked to address those fears with facts, with science and with great compassion."

Fauci, who also became friends with Koop and worked with him on his AIDS report, says: "He was an amazing champion of treating it as a disease, not as a stigma. He understood it was a public health disaster in the making. ... I remember he would say, 'Tony, you do the science, I'll do the education for the public.'"

Surgeon General Regina Benjamin said in a statement that when she took office, in 2010, "Dr. Koop sat down with me on what would become the first of numerous occasions to offer guidance and support. We often prayed together."

Following yesterday's echo chamber thread "discussion"...

Coates... clarifies:

"... I should have made it clear that the direct victims of terrorism are even weaker, and that "weakness," itself, is not noble. In other words, it needs to be clear the victims of white terrorism were not rich white developers, but black people who -- at that time -- existed almost beyond the protections of the state.  

During Chicago's race riots, police often arrested victims instead of offenders, and at times would put up only faint resistance to terrorist action. I think bringing Al Qaeda into this muddies the waters.  

The white terrorists of Chicago were not stateless -- they were often operating on of the same motives and working toward the same ends as people further up the class ladder. Indeed, what is so striking in Hirsch's work is that he demonstrates that the anti-black violence of mid-20th century Chicago was near total. The rioters were not only neighborhood toughs, but old men, working men, women with children."

Hmm...

When once [sic] considers the actions of developers and the actions of office-holders, what is revealed is every sector of the city -- its business interests, its government, its people, and sometimes even its churches -- employing its particular weaponry to effect a single goal: the subjugation of black people.

Every sector...  I suspect he thinks even the nuns teaching in Catholic schools in the "ghetto" were in on it, too.

I wish I could say I was being hyperbolic. Except that I'm in the middle of Beryl Satter's Family Properties, and I am seeing the same thing all again. This is not the talk of Illuminati or the Tri-Lateral Commission. This is rigorous scholarly history. And yet here is Hirsch again...

See, this is the trouble with being uneducated, or undereducated:

Mr. Coates reminds me of a college freshman, taking his daily language lab in French, and then being exposed to what he sees in his sociology readings.  Sometimes it does indeed take a more learned person -- perhaps a professor -- to help one understand what exactly he is reading.

And sometimes it does indeed take four years of study to shake the freshman mindset that one author, one  scholar somehow holds all the answers, and the rest are just rubbish.  At first, you want to double down, perhaps, on seeing what you want to see, as a victim of history.  Next, you want to toss the history books, thinking you hold all the answers yourself --  a self-discoverer of all the wrongs done to your own people.

I hope Coates makes time to finish the Satter book, or even checks out this one:  The Middle Americans (1971, Little Brown), put out by the Atlantic back in the day*.  His mind might expand a little to perhaps consider other conclusions, other viewpoints than those in his familar stomping grounds.

 In the end, though, Coates reveals his career template, and why mess with what's paying the private-school bills?

How is it, after all our study and exploration; after all our theories of differing conscience, of labor, of capitol, of class struggle, of agrarianism, and industrialism, of plutocrats and workers, we end up where we started? How are we, again, employed in this same small talk, on this same damn corner? How can it be that in any serious investigation of American domestic policy, knowing nothing of the specifics, you can walk into a room, yell "White Supremacy," and have a 50/50 shot at being right?

History is absurd.

With what The Atlantic has invested in his career, 

I wish one of his older mentors on the staff might encourage him to go back to school and earn his undergraduate degree.  Being surrounded by a critical mass of others tackling such material for the first time, might aid his critical thinking skills and allow him to consider other diverse viewpoints.

You don't gain much understanding in an echo chamber, afterall.

----------
ADDED:  Sometimes in these comments threads though, you do see a minority viewpoint push back on the generalized assumptions:

Bill Harshaw 

I shouldn't comment without reading the book, but when I get to it, Prof. Hirsch will have a big job in convincing me there was a "single goal". That's very hard for me to believe of people at any time in our history. Americans having been shouting conspiracy ever since the whites settled on the continent, and very few have proved out.

This is the difference, perhaps, between the intellectual growth of critical reasoning skills between a freshman and a graduating senior.  Read... read... and then read some more...
--------
*  by Robert Martin Coles, with photos by Jon Erickson.

David Riesman stressed in his evaluation of Coles: "There is one important theme he has contributed: antistereotype. Policemen are not pigs, white Southerners are not rednecks, and African Americans are not all suffering in exotic misery. What he is saying is 'People are more complicated, more varied, more interesting, have more resiliency and more survivability than you might think!"

...

Coles was an enormously prolific writer; by the early 1980s there were more than thirty books and more than five hundred articles. By early 1997, that number climbed to over 53 books. Many of them carried on the same conception and approach. 

They are about miners in Appalachia, children in strife-torn Belfast and apartheid-ridden South Africa, middle Americans, the elderly Spanish-speaking of the Southwest, troubled adolescents. Throughout there is a steady vision of what is wanted, a "method," as Coles was careful to say in quotes.

"Eventually we pull together the words of others and our own observations into what (we can only pray) is a reasonably coherent and suggestive series of portraits, comments, reflections." The technique is by no means new. The books of the anthropologist Oscar Lewis, in the same vein, predated Coles's work by a decade. But Coles's psychiatric background deepened the portraits. And the connection of personal lives to oppressive social conditions was made more explicit. We must not only record how the miners talk about the terrible devastation of "black lung"; we must get rid of black lung. 

As the years went by, Coles came to emphasize more and more his role as a writer, a creative writer, with a particular interest in the life of the spirit as well as the mind. His was a broadly religious outlook, a sense of the Judaic-Christian ethic at work rather than a formal elaboration of a given theology. His many biographies—of the psychiatrist Erik Erikson (1970), of the poet William Carlos Williams (1975), of the writers Flannery O'Connor (1980), James Agee (1985), and Walker Percy (1978)—engaged Coles in this contest, as did the collections of essays, whose titles provide a clue to Coles's central concern: Harvard Diary: Reflections on the Sacred and Secular (1988); A Spectacle unto the World: the Catholic Worker Movement (1973); The Moral Life of Children (1986); The Call of Stories: Teaching and the Moral Imagination (1989), and so on. 

The Moral Intelligence of Children hopes to further the idea that moral development is every bit as important as intellectual and emotional growth. "It's interesting how we make these generalizations about ghetto children and forget the parallels among the privileged. In some privileged precincts of America, you have well-educated parents with plenty of money who give their children toys and travel and credit cards. What they don't offer them is moral attention, a sense of connection to the community. The result can be staggering morally. And teachers are left to pick up the pieces."  

...

 Coles stands out as one of a diminishing group of scholars who refute the destructive and anti-democratic specialization that has nearly eliminated the general intellectual—once found in the hard sciences as well as in the history and English departments of the great universities—from public and political life. 

Pat Buchanan Does Media Criticism...

and defends the idea of knowing which fights need to be fought, now, and which conflicts are ginned  up to the advantage of others.  Let's hope both parties have learned something from the plethora of previous American mistakes:
 -----------------------

On Monday, Rubin declared that America’s “greatest national security threat is Iran.” Do conservatives really believe this?

How is America, with thousands of strategic and tactical nuclear weapons, scores of warships in the Med, Persian Gulf, Arabian Sea and Indian Ocean, bombers and nuclear subs and land-based missiles able to strike and incinerate Iran within half an hour, threatened by Iran?

Iran has no missile that can reach us, no air force or navy that would survive the first days of war, no nuclear weapons, no bomb-grade uranium from which to build one. All of her nuclear facilities are under constant United Nations surveillance and inspection.

And if this Iran is the “greatest national security threat” faced by the world’s last superpower, why do Iran’s nearest neighbors—Turkey, Iraq, Azerbaijan, Afghanistan, Pakistan—seem so unafraid of her?
...
Twice Rubin describes our situation today as “scary.”

Remarkable. Our uncles and fathers turned the Empire of the Sun and Third Reich into cinders in four years, and this generation is all wee-weed up over Mahmoud Ahmadinejad.

“For all intents and purposes, (Bibi) Netanyahu is now the West’s protector,” says Rubin. How so? Because Obama and Chuck Hagel seem to lack the testosterone “to execute a military strike on Iran.”
Yet according to the Christian Science Monitor, Bibi first warned in 1992 that Iran was on course to get the bomb—in three to five years! And still no bomb.

And Bibi has since been prime minister twice. Why has our Lord Protector not manned up and dealt with Iran himself? 

Answer: He wants us to do it—and us to take the consequences.

“With regard to Afghanistan, the president is pulling up stakes prematurely,” says Rubin. As we are now in the 12th year of war in Afghanistan, and about to leave thousands of troops behind when we depart in 2014, what is she talking about?

“In Iraq, the absence of U.S. forces on the ground has ushered in a new round of sectarian violence and opened the door for Iran’s growing violence.”

Where to begin. Shia Iran has influence in Iraq because we invaded Iraq, dethroned Sunni Saddam, disbanded his Sunni-led army that had defeated Iran in an eight-year war and presided over the rise to power of the Iraqi Shia majority that now tilts to Iran.

Today’s Iraq is a direct consequence of our war, our invasion, our occupation. That’s our crowd in Baghdad, cozying up to Iran.

And the cost of that war to strip Iraq of weapons it did not have? Four thousand five hundred American dead, 35,000 wounded, $1 trillion and 100,000 Iraqi dead. Half a million widows and orphans. A centuries-old Christian community ravaged. And, yes, an Iraq tilting to Iran and descending into sectarian, civil and ethnic war. A disaster of epochal proportions.

But that disaster was not the doing of Barack Obama, but of people of the same semi-hysterical mindset as Ms. Rubin.
...
Is Israel our security blanket, or is it maybe the other way around? And if America spends as much on defense as all other nations combined, and is sheltered behind the world’s largest oceans, why should we Americans be as frightened as Rubin appears to be?

Undeniably we face challenges. A debt-deficit crisis that could sink our economy. ...
.
But does Iran, a Shia island in a Sunni sea, a Persian-dominated land where half the population is non-Persian, a country whose major exports, once we get past fossil fuels, are pistachio nuts, carpets and caviar, really pose the greatest national security threat to the world’s greatest nation?

No Compromise in Reality.

Greg Sargent:

"The battle over the sequester has sparked a corollary argument over the proper role of pundits in assigning blame in political standoffs of this type. A number of us have argued that the facts plainly reveal that Republicans are far more to blame than Obama and Democrats for the current crisis. The GOP’s explicit position is that no compromise solution of any kind is acceptable — this must be resolved only with 100% of the concessions being made by Democrats — which means any compromise Dems put forth is by definition a nonstarter at the outset."

Funny. I thought the sequester was the compromise...

This is a very amusing thread ...

coming from the son of a Black Panther.*

"The goal of post-war white Chicago was to keep African Americans sealed in the ghetto. Working-class and ethnic whites worked toward this goal through what Hirsch calls "communal violence," which is to say entire communities angling toward terrrorism."

Entire, eh?   Terrorism, huh?
You sure about that?

He continues on, concluding:

"The ghetto is not a mistake. The racism of white ethnics in Chicago was not due to brainwashing, false consciousness or otherwise being too stupid to recognize their interests. On the contrary, it was the political strategy of one community, attempting to subvert the ambitions of another. The strategy was successful."

- 30 -

 

People forget -- maybe they were too far away to even see it then :
the very legitimate fear of violence to their own families (the "white flight" areas of Chicago's Side South are now amongst the nation's most murderous -- did the white ethnics do that?) ;

the drop in school quality/property values;

 the increase in petty crime (ie/theft of property);

and absolute lack of choice most ethnic whites had in staying/maintaining their own  community values once it became clear their neighborhoods were being sacrificed to expand the black belt.

Would you want to live on there today?
Did the separatist blacks of the times want white immigrants to remain there, or did they want them to ... move along as the territorial blocks changed hands?

Has he spoken to his father about those times, or anyone with even minimal recollections of those times?

Where did Coates get his history/sociology degree, since such issues are obviously not so simple at first glance without further study to be making such broad generalizations? 

-----------------------

*Ironically, Coates' son attends a private country day school.
Presumably very safe...

Perhaps one day he will see the common ground between the non-violent of all races.


Added:
I'd say the goal of  much of post-war white Chicago was to put a roof over one's head, provide for one's family (singular, not multiples), and to stay employed 5 or 6 days a week, banking the paycheck and advancing the next generation through education.

Dare I say many non-Panther working-class blacks shared/share the same desire? or does that not fit into the liberals' modern-day template?


And:
Who really/also lost from the fast displacement and need to start over  and successfully rebuild elsewhere? 

Not everyone benefits by playing the "history's victims" card...
thankfully. 

 I suspect it's more a learned behavior than genetic.

Wiki:
In 1966, the Panthers defined Oakland’s ghetto as a territory, the police as interlopers, and the Panther mission as the defense of community. The Panthers' famous “policing the police” drew attention to the spatial remove that White Americans enjoyed from the state violence that had come to characterize life in black urban communities.”

In his book Shadow of the Panther: Huey Newton and the Price of Black Power in America journalist Hugh Pearson takes a more jaundiced view, linking Panther criminality and violence to worsening conditions in America's black ghettos as their influence spread nationwide.

Similarly, journalist Kate Coleman writes regarding a 2003 Panther conference at Boston's Wheelock College, "If the Wheelock conference wanted to examine the real legacy of the Panthers, its participants should have pored over the cold statistics showing a spike in drive-by shooting deaths and gang warfare that took place in Oakland in the decade following the Panthers' demise. The Black Panther Party had so fetishized the gun as part of its mystique that young men in the ghetto felt incomplete without one.  ... The Panther fetish of the gun, worshiped by impressionable young black males, maimed hundreds of black citizens in Oakland more surely than any bully cops."
...
In October 1967, Huey Newton was arrested for the murder of Oakland Police Officer John Frey, a murder he later admitted and pointed to with pride.  At the time, Newton claimed that he had been falsely accused, leading to the "Free Huey" campaign. On February 17, 1968, at the "Free Huey" birthday rally in the Oakland Auditorium, several Black Panther Party leaders spoke.

H. Rap Brown, Black Panther Party Minister of Justice, declared:

Huey Newton is our only living revolutionary in this country today...He has paid his dues. He has paid his dues. How many white folks did you kill today?

The mostly black crowd erupted in applause. James Forman, Black Panther Party Minister of Foreign Affairs, followed with:

We must serve notice on our oppressors that we as a people are not going to be frightened by the attempted assassination of our leaders. For my assassination—and I'm the low man on the totem pole—I want 30 police stations blown up, one southern governor, two mayors, and 500 cops, dead. If they assassinate Brother Carmichael, Brother Brown...Brother Seale, this price is tripled. And if Huey is not set free and dies, the sky is the limit!

Referring to the 1967–68 period, black historian Curtis Austin states: "During this period of development, black nationalism became part of the party's philosophy." 

During the months following the "Free Huey" birthday rallies, one in Oakland and another in Los Angeles, the Party's violent, anti-white rhetoric attracted a huge following and Black Panther Party membership exploded.**

^{------------------------------}
**Our Chicago block at 77th and Wolcott changed hands in October of 1972;  I was freshly 4.

No liberal guilt here. We too have paid our dues, as newcomers, for America's origin sin. 

If tomorrow all the things were gone,
I'd worked for all my life,
and I had to start again,
with just my children and my wife...

I'd thank my lucky stars,
to be livin here today,
‘cause the flag still stands for freedom,
and they can't take that away...

And I'm proud to be an American,
where at least I know I'm free.
And I won't forget the men who died,
who gave that right to me.

And I'll gladly stand up...
next to you and defend her still today...
‘cause there ain't no doubt I love this land,
God bless the USA.

Cheerleading is not an Athletic Sport?

Oh you fools...

That's
upside down, and in a skirt...

---------------
ADDED:
She even survived that hug!

Practicing Faith in the Future.

If you just go by what current writers keep on recycling,
you might think the Democratic party has a lock on the forseeable future. Depends on how far-ranging is your eyesight, I guess...

True thinkers -- not writers who read up on what's hot the day before a column or blog post is due -- wondered way back when what might happen when the young people of the country realized
Obamacare just essentially bought them off:

Under 26?
You're gonna love this plan, kiddo.
No worries -- we got something special for you in there
provided you're at school, or live at home, and are covered
under a working mother or father's plan...

But what, I wondered back in the day,
happens when these children eventually 'age out' of such coverage. We all eventually grow up, as even little Jackie Paper learned...

Here's what will happen to the boys and girls of this new Millennial generation, those without wealthy parents, or extremely well paying jobs, anyways:
------
"Many young, healthy Americans could soon see a jump in their health insurance costs, and insurance companies are saying: It’s not our fault.

The nation’s insurers are engaged in an all-out, last-ditch effort to shield themselves from blame for what they predict will be rate increases on policies they must unveil this spring to comply with President Obama’s health-care law.

Insurers point to several reasons that premiums will rise. They will soon be required to offer more-comprehensive coverage than many currently provide. Also, their costs will increase because they will be barred from rejecting the sick, and they will no longer be allowed to charge older customers sharply higher premiums than younger ones."
-----

The above underlining in the story is mine: how exactly did you think Sandra Fluke's 'free' birth control would be covered, or any other goodies loaded into that lousy bill?  Correction: not bill, law.

Remember, there's no opt out for those of you who don't need to use birth control, no break for the thrifties who would choose a lesser method, like a condom -- even two -- to provide for your particular health 'needs'.

I put that last word in quotes, as we all know of people whose 'needs' vary greatly from our own.  Not to be uncompassionate, but if you're grossly obese and snore when you sleep, some might first try to lose weight before requiring a machine hook-up to help you breathe better at bedtime. Maybe if you smoke, first consider quitting?

Ditto those who visit the doc regularly to wonder why their bodies are sore, yet refuse to make a lifestyle adjustment the doc recommends to slow down... let the body have time to heal, particularly post-surgery.

I read recently, for example, of a woman -- purportedly a smart woman -- who refused doc's orders/requests to go easy on the x-country skiing post leg surgery, even as the stitches remained in. She wonders how come her back has now gone out, yet seems to think the constant activity somehow makes her a healthy specimen... Hello?

I don't wish to criticize the medical/lifestyle choices of others. Really I don't.

But why -- with medical costs soaring -- should one not have the ability to opt out of paying for pills, procedures, and office visits they would never consume themselves, even if provided gratis under an all-inclusive plan. (no question mark -- that's rhetorical)

When did personal choice -- and being conservative financially -- become such bad things?

My parents -- 70 and 80 -- raised us five to practice medical conservatism. Immunizations, twice yearly dental checkups and appropriate doctor visits, on the regular youth cycle, sure. (But really modern parents: you need not go running to the doctor to x-ray every childhood bruise, or help cure every little runny nose and case of the sniffles...)  Antibiotics when they're truly needed, the rare surgery or hospitalization...

But even now, for example, like me, they're not big on flu shots.

If you rarely eat out in the winter, eat simple but healthily, get rest, and limit your exposure to public crowds -- wash hands and practice Purell regularly -- you really can limit your exposure, especially if it turns out the flu shot is only 7 or 8 percent effective in older adults.

It's common sense -- there's no magic pill.

If you march around outside in a foreign country in the winter, without a jacket covering the skin, thinking yourself to be a fine healthy specimen say, it wouldn't surprise me a bit if you're laid low with a bug a week after your return. The body might work overtime to keep one warm, but you really do need to think holistically -- how is such a move taxing the overall system, particularly those chronically restless?

Sometimes, less really can prove better.

I return to the Millennials -- like the Boomers, a generation with the numbers to create true change...

If the Republicans truly are wandering in the wilderness with no clue as to home,if both parties really are entrenched in the same sick priority-less system, well ... they're young.

We've always relied on brighter, better, yes younger minds to come up with the creative solutions to meet society's needs.    If we must toss the template politically to meet the obvious needs America needs to survive into the future, well I have faith they'll be up for the challenge, as have the diverse generations who came before.

Fresh is good, choice is better, and in some ways, indeed we are all in this together.

and,
Divided, we're falling...

"Penn State town limits booze on St. Patty's Day"

Another lousy headline, this one from yahoo news;
a common error, but the wrong word nonetheless:

Folks, it's St. Patrick's Day -- or St. Paddy's Day, for short.
Now, if you're a hardcore femme, and celebrating St. Patricia's Day on March 17, well o.k. then...

but if you're just too lazy to bother getting it right...
then off to the paddy wagon* with you.

 (You see how these seemingly little word things relate?  Can we just take a bit more care out there, please?  Words do matter, and distinctions indeed can save/cost a life...)

----------------------

* the "patty wagon" sounds like a Schwan's truck somewhere out there, hawking peppermint mints.

"In a split second, Iwo Jima captured" *

What a lousy headline *...
that was one long hard slog in the stinking sulfur sands / hot rock.
and not expected since the higher-ups thought the intensive bombing had cleared the way,  not counting on the extensive tunnel systems and pillboxes our boys would face...

I get the story is about raising the bigger flag to be seen across the island, but the fight went on well after that...

Lousy headline.
and Iwo was much more than that iconic flag raising...

------------------
* on the WaPo's online frontpage.


Try this one, if you want to know better what it was really like:

From the Volcano to the Gorge: Getting the Job Done on Iwo Jima -- by Howard N. McLaughlin Jr. and Raymond C. Miller.
 

Book Description:
No moment in American military history is more deeply stamped into our national memory than the flag-raising that marked the capture by U.S. Marines of Mount Suribachi, on the tiny Pacific island of Iwo Jima, in February 1945. The famous photograph of that moment, widely reproduced in magazines, books, films, and statuary, has for nearly two-thirds of a century stood as the quintessential symbol of American patriotism and Marine valor. This is as it should be. The gallantry of the small band of Marines who first made it to the top and raised the flag was undeniably crucial to the success of the invasion.   But that moment, which took place on the fourth day after the initial landing, was far from the end of the battle. It would take another month of fierce fighting, covering 5,000 rocky acres and claiming the lives of 17,000 more Japanese soldiers and 6,000 more Marines, before full victory was achieved. The capture of Suribachi, militarily and psychologically important as it was, was only the end of the beginning. This book combines narratives by two Marines who landed on the beaches on the first day of the invasion and took part in the grinding combat to the bitter end. These two men lived through the most intense weeks of their lives within a mile of each other, but never knew of each other's existence until this book began to take shape. Each writes vividly and memorably about achievements they can be proud of and traumatic experiences that made them into different men than they would have been without the war.

Up...Up...Up...

Rise and at 'em...

products to shill, provisions to put up...
negatives outside the window, but the smell of snow is in the air...
pure and white, cleansing like.

Spring will come, after this winter of our discontent:
the last shall be first, the young reborn, and the poorly constructed will fall away...

February 21 -- one month to spring -- Ruth's birthday,
and then a lucky 7 to October 21...
Fall / the Golden days.

**stretching**
Who's in?

-------------------------

Make it a great day out there,
and look out for yourself...

We really do need you to shine on...
(and on...and on...and on...and on...and on...and on...and on...)

*coffee calls.*

"Read 'em and weep..." *

Two strong columns in today's WaPo, not to miss.

Kathleen Parker :
... There are now so many RINOs wandering the barren plains that, banded together, they might even form a critical mass. A base, if you will. If only they weren’t so attractively independent. The individualist nature of those most likely to be drawn to the Republican Party is such that they tend not to gather in groups. Ostracized by their own tribe, they feel alone in their exile.
...
[T]hey lack the necessary grandiosity to recognize how fabulous they are. Ever seen a RINO in one of those silly hats that screams: “I Belong! I Am A Member Of The Party!”? No. They tend to be discreet — strangers in a strange land, keeping a low profile and an eye cracked for signs of fellow travelers.
...
We fetishize politics and political display in this country, or at least the media do. But The Normals really are not so interested in politics as guerrilla theater as programmers, consultants and spinners seem to think they are. Most would like the country to rock along without drama — operating within a reasonable budget, with respect for privacy and the rule of law, compassion for the disadvantaged and an abundance of concern for national security, including border control but not necessarily drone attacks on citizens.
...
Thus, what has become glaringly clear is that RINOs need to stop being so normal and grant their better angels a sabbatical. Forget taking back the country. Start by taking back your party. Do it for your country.


Ruth Marcus :
Will President Obama say to the Supreme Court what he said to the American people in his second inaugural address about same-sex marriage?

Obama’s remarks were striking, on several levels. First, that he dared to broach what was once a hot-button issue in such a high-stakes venue. Second, that he phrased the argument for same-sex marriage so passionately. Third, and perhaps most important, that he did so in a way that conflicted with his previous discussion of the issue.

Even as he completed his evolution in favor of same-sex marriage, Obama had earlier framed the issue as a matter of democratic choice: a right he supports but one that should be left to individual states.
...
Second-inaugural Obama sounded far different. “Our journey is not complete,” he said, “until our gay brothers and sisters are treated like anyone else under the law — for if we are truly created equal, then surely the love we commit to one another must be equal as well.”

The law professor-turned-president understood full well the constitutional implications of this statement. Obama could have spoken about gay rights generally. Instead, he used language that directly implicates the question of marriage equality.

And language that is hard to reconcile with his previous, leave-it-to-the-states approach. The 14th Amendment guarantee of equal protection of the laws means mandating the same treatment in Mississippi as in Massachusetts, whatever those states might do on their own.

Obama knew this, and something else: The Supreme Court is about to confront the constitutional right to same-sex marriage. The case involves California’s Proposition 8, the voter referendum overturning the state Supreme Court’s ruling in favor of same-sex marriage.

The justices can decide the Prop 8 case without answering the ultimate question, either by deciding that those defending the measure lack legal standing or by focusing on the unusual facts of the case, that same-sex couples in California enjoyed the right to marriage before it was taken away. Indeed, at this stage in the fast-changing legal debate, a narrower ruling would probably be the wiser course.
...
A president who speaks so eloquently at his inaugural cannot allow his administration to remain silent before the court, where words are translated into reality.

-----------------------------

* Not literally.  It's a card-playing phrase.  Like "doubling down" ...

The pot calling the kettle black...

or,

The Belle-Adair, and her Commoner...
now dancing daily for your dollars
on the poop deck.

---------------------
upDATE:
*First came the racist comments... then the selected deletions pushing back against said racists... then, finally, this:

New comments have been disabled for this post by a blog administrator.

Darn, I thought for sure they'd be plugging multi-colored masking tape, or at least an amazon 6-pack white sheet special, after reading comments like this:



It's called bling. Blacks are into that shit.
2/20/13, 8:52 AM
---------
Althouse's question is, of course, entirely rhetorical and meaningless when it comes to blacks.

Blacks, in the liberal way of looking at things, are supposed to engage in corruption and wild materialism. This is the appropriate insult to the white man, and thus, part of that wonderful uppity-ness that exacts revenge against the white man.

The Democratic Party is organized around this principle. Blacks repay the favor by voting 95% for Democratic candidates.

2/20/13, 9:11 AM

-----------
You never heard the old stereotype...? Did you see the Dave Chappelle reparations sketch? It seems to fit here.

2/20/13, 9:41 AM

 

-----------

Mary said...

Looking down on the comments thread --I see white people.

(Lotsa useless crap bought by whitey too -- don't try to kid/justify yourself that this is just some black thang. ... Own it.)

;-)

2/20/13, 9:52 AM

 

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Sorry, but a niggah that came into real cheddar that bought 5 lbs of 14K bling to festoon himself in 1987 when gold was 400 an ounce and kept all that Mr T starter kit - is looking like a Warren Buffett level genius investor these days.

Which brings up Mr T.
Why hasn't he worked much in the last 10 years?

Ans: Because he doesn't need to.
2/20/13, 10:08 AM
-----------
If I were to say you (if you're black) don't know the correct definitions of English words while I do because I'm white and white people know more correct definitions than black people...THAT would be racist. Ridiculous, but correctly termed as racism, ie, the holding of one race over another.

Race, by the way, is a bullshit term that no serious biologist gives freight to. If you want to slam bigotry, feel free and more power to you. Just try not to double-down on stupid.

2/20/13, 10:37 AM

---------------

Race, by the way, is a bullshit term that no serious biologist gives freight to. If you want to slam bigotry, feel free and more power to you. Just try not to double-down on stupid.Actually, that's not true.

For example, the races each have a different basic smell. It's why the dogs go crazy if a black guy walks through an all white neighborhood.

Or vice versa.

Black people's skin is tougher (according to The Blonde, who's had to give shots, run IVs, etc.).

How far race goes beyond such externals is another matter.

2/20/13, 10:54 AM

--------------

At least they weren't niggardly...

And Mary: bitch, quit playing, we all know you're white as a sheet.

2/20/13, 11:02 AM
--------------

Mary said...

jesse j. jr. is my hometown rep.

white or not... I got a dog in this fight...

speaking of sheets, 6-pack special on white sheets only at amazon today. for all your ... many needs.

2/20/13, 11:05 AM

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

*Hell of a way to make your extra money, but I hear it's specially hard for a con  law professor these days...

From the In Box

A Chuckle, for you:

Farm kids in North Dakota

You can never underestimate the innovativeness of American Farm Boys:

At a high school in North Dakota, a group of male students played a prank. They let three goats loose inside the school. But before turning them loose, they painted numbers on the sides of the goats: 1, 2 and 4. 

School Administrators spent most of the day 

looking for No. 3...

Now that's funny, I don't care who you are...

And you thought there was nothing to do in North Dakota!