Turns Out He's Not a Muslim Afterall.

‘We are all Jews’
-----------------------

The hallmark of manifest illegality is that it must wave like a black flag over the given order, a warning that says: "forbidden!" Not formal illegality, obscure or partially obscure, not illegality that can be discerned only by legal scholars, is important here, but rather, the clear and obvious violation of law .... Illegality that pierces the eye and revolts the heart, if the eye is not blind and the heart is not impenetrable or corrupt—this is the measure of manifest illegality needed to override the soldier's duty to obey and to impose on him criminal liability for his action.

~ Judge Benjamin Halevy

Legos on Wheels.

Quentin Kenihan @qkenihan
Culturally this is more important than you'd think for #pwd!
 #Lego unveils first ever minifigure in wheelchair
http://gu.com/p/4g7ag/stw

Emily Bett Rickards ✔ @EmilyBett

Lego for the win! They see me ridin

NYT: We Endorse the Broad.

Really? That didn't jump out at anyone else?

Hillary Clinton for the Democratic Nomination
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Voters have the chance to choose one of the most broadly and deeply qualified presidential candidates in modern history.

Wait... Kasich is Still Running?

A Chance to Reset the Republican Race
By THE EDITORIAL BOARD

Gov. John Kasich is the only plausible choice for Republicans tired of the extremist front-runners in the primary contest.

I thought he dropped out after being demoted to the undercard debate a few weeks back, when Carson too began plummeting in the polls...

Nebraskan, right? He might do well in Iowa at least, if I'm placing him correctly. (Or was it the Dakotas?) He never stuck out. Like Gephardt from Missouri.
----------------------

But Watch the Other Push for Bush:
Pretty sure the NYT knows that if it's not Trump, the establishment/businessman/money choice in Republican country is to put another Bush back in the bunker.

As a family of insider politicians,
they've proven malleable, and nevermind the deaths, refugees created, or the grounds scorched other places in the world -- the Americans who matter prosper when markets and skies open, and there are less boundaries between countries restricting trade. regulating health and safety, or otherwise guiding aspirations.

(And if we have to put up with the facade of a diversity candidate every few cycles to pass modest social welfare programs for the multiplying numbers of poor, and split the costs and expenses up amongst the workers and masses, while preserving the tax breaks for the wealthy, that's tolerable.) 

Because Money and Might Make the Right.
~ Jeb!

Saturday's Child

Works Hard for a Living...

That makes me smile, because I really like my work.

"Oh, the Places You'll Go."
10-hour shift coming up going wherever the documents take us...

It's like an adventure every day:
What could be wrong with that?

Some days you're crawling in traffic;
some days you're batting cleanup.

Go Team.
Make it a personal best Saturday.*

---------------------------------
Public Service Announcement

*Just be like Me.
O:-)


(inspired by Marco Rubio *cough*, but all glory and praise to those bigger up the chain...)

Here's Another Book

in My Personal Library.*

I haven't read it all the way through: not my cup of tea, and not the type of thing you'd bring to the beach, or be reading on the bus in. Just know, it's there... Have you read it?

Review by Polly Toynbee
Friday 12 October 2012 17.55 EDT

Lady Cholmondeley certainly got more than she bargained for when she asked for "a few of your ideas of socialism". George Bernard Shaw's sister-in-law expected a brief summary, a simple user's manual on his political and ethical beliefs. Instead, in 1928 she was presented with a great tome that encompasses the meaning of life and just about everything from marriage and bringing up children to how to run industry.

What she got was The Intelligent Woman's Guide to Socialism, Capitalism, Sovietism and Fascism, one of the great, passionate and indignant expositions of how social injustice destroys human lives. Class and inequality create a rich and a poor – equal only in the obnoxiousness of both their stations – causing both the degradation of poverty and the idleness of wealth. Shaw has no truck with sentimentalists who romanticise the poor: "The blunt truth is that ill-used people are worse than well-used people." "I hate the poor and look forward eagerly to their extermination. I pity the rich a little, but am equally bent on their extermination." All classes are "each more odious than the other: they have no right to live". Nor has he any truck with Rousseauian romantic views of nature. It is the tyrant to be vanquished by civilisation: "We are not born free."

He begins as he ends: the only way to live is in a society where everyone earns and owns exactly the same, regardless of skill, effort, age, gender, character, intelligence, inheritance, merit or power. Women would at last be free of dependence on men: even now the gap between women's and men's earnings and wealth leaves most mothers with a choice between relying on a man or bringing up children considerably poorer without one. Absolute parity of income would mean merit and moral worth would be rewarded with esteem and not with cash. He has high hopes of humanity's capability for moral improvement: "In a socialist state, economic selfishness would probably stand on a moral level now occupied by card-sharping." The rosy prospect of his socialist future stands in stark contrast to his miserabilist view of present humans: "We have to confess it: capitalist mankind in the lump is detestable."

It is capitalism that debases character and all human relationships, reducing everything to monetary value while misunderstanding the extent to which humans are not motivated purely by greed or acquisitiveness. This suddenly looks fresh in our post-2008 crash world, when conventional economics have come under attack for making exactly that error. What the economists got wrong in all their models and forecasts was their reliance on the odd notion that people are entirely driven by money. Look around you and it's immediately obvious how many other forces and other choices people make. Humans are not perfect calculating machines making rational getting-and-spending decisions to extract maximum monetary gain out of all their transactions. Shaw's call for the nationalisation of the banks and his highlighting of the need for local municipal banks has a pleasingly contemporary ring, too.

However, few would turn to Shaw's Guide for a lesson in practical economics. Nor, alas, would this book make for a course in winning modern-day elections – though how our political discourse would be brightened up with platform speeches of Shavian quality. What you get here is as fine a debunking of all the myriad excuses for inequality as you will ever find. Give each what they deserve? That is what the well-off think they get, but once you try to devise a total audit of each person's merits or faults, the idea is rendered absurd. Let everyone have what they can grab? That is partly what happens, but traders need law and justice to operate, and themselves need the collective state to mitigate brute force. How much is enough, he asks. His wise reply is that there is never enough: "Nobody can ever have enough of everything. But it is possible to give everyone the same."

"Why do we put up with it?" That question has perpetually perplexed the left. Why is rebellion by the poor so rare? In this recession era of austerity and shrinking household incomes, Shaw's answer is much the same as observers might give now. People earning so much less than others are kept going in the illusory hope of "pageantry", winning the lottery or inheriting a fortune from a mystery relative. Charity, the dole – or nowadays the ever-diminishing top-ups to low pay from the welfare state – are kept just high enough to prevent destitution and revolution. The problem, Shaw says, is that the poor are kept ignorant, and without "trained minds capable of public affairs", so they cannot see how "the evils of the system are great national evils". Or if a few are plucked out and sent to university, they are "de-classed" and captured by capitalist thinking. Most people "tolerate the evils of inequality of income literally through want of thought". That, I suppose, is what the communists used to call "false consciousness" as an explanation for the disappointing docility of the masses.
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What makes Shaw so likeable and readable is the odd blend of soaring idealism and no-nonsense realism. He is a Fabian, a believer in the parliamentary route to socialism, yet has no illusions about the unsatisfactory deficits in democracy. "The millennial hopes based on every extension of the franchise from the reform bill of 1832 to votes for women have been disappointed." He is disgusted at how women voters failed to vote for women candidates or for those on the left who had fought to give them the vote in the first place. Indeed, women's votes, leaning more to the right than men's until 1997, helped keep Conservatives in power through most of the last century. As for the candidates themselves, despairing of their quality, he suggests, half-seriously, that their qualifications for office be vetted before they stand.

By the time he revised the book for the 1937 edition, he was writing with fascism rampant in Italy and Spain. Though he was ambivalent and contorted on Russia, undemocratic communism looked unappealing to his Fabian mind. Without doubt a vote is better than no vote, for all its maddening deficiencies. "I advise you stick to your vote as hard as you can," he tells his lady reader. "Meanwhile, heaven help us! We must do the best we can" – which was, more or less, also Winston Churchill's conclusion on parliamentary democracy.

A great glory of this book is its grand peroration. With the lyrical eye of the playwright he casts all relationships – whether with lawyers, doctors, tradesmen, relatives, children or colleagues – as fatally tainted by everyone's need to get money from one another. Only liberate money motives from the world by giving everyone the same, and imagine how people's "natural virtues" would be set free from "trade union and governing class corruption and tyranny". Human nature would be "good enough for all your reasonable purposes".

Misanthropic visions in books such as Gulliver's Travels or Candide, "which under capitalism are unanswerable indictments of mankind as the wickedest of all known species", would be looked back on as "clinical lectures on extinct moral diseases which were formerly produced by inequality, as smallpox and typhus were produced by dirt".

Shaw writes in a fine tradition of utopian optimism. His image of a world under socialism renders humans as unrecognisable (and maybe undesirable) as in those religious visions of harp-plucking human souls cleansed of sin and transported to heaven. All that holds us back from bliss is "pecuniary temptation".

But people will believe what they want to believe. "The moment we want to believe something, we suddenly see all the arguments for it and become blind to the arguments against it." How true that rings in our depressed era bleached of political idealism, imbued with a "nothing works" despondency. Shaw's clarity of argument and caustic wit prod and question the weary old reasons why markets are immutable, the world must always be as it is and nothing can ever change. Here are all the reasons why the way we live now, as then, is insupportable, inexcusable, immoral and unhappy for too many. All it would take, he says, is enough people who want to change it. All writers can do is keep making the case for something better.

---------------------------------------
* $209.25? Lol, where do they get this stuff?
(Call me, if interested: we'll find a satisfactory price for both...
First edition too.)

When the Journalist Becomes the Story.

The American media is missing it.
Instead of trying to determine why Donald Trump has caught fire with the voters, they are still busy trying to smear him and label his supporters haters and bigots. Still.
I support candidate Trump's position not to be a pawn in the latest entertainment debate.
At one time, candidates were controlled by media exposure, and the entertainment/political/news industry had the upper hand. But now?
There are more than enough media outlets for a presidential candidate to put his voice out there. The media needs content more than content needs placement in this slot or that.
Who is Megyn Kelly, how many people have heard of her before she became international news following an earlier debate, when she herself becamc the big news story?
I don't think Donald Trump was referring to the woman's menstrual cycle when he criticized her campaign coverage and questioning of him. I don't think she was unprofessional, just amateur. With all the important issues out there, only a little mind would care about Donald Trump's reputation with women.
Women who vote a pet issue are free to make up their own minds without wasting serious debate time that is better spent discussing bigger issues of the day: wars, economy, tax code, immigration policy.

I hope Donald Trump's campaign sticks to the idea of not appearing as entertainment fodder at the debate. If we want the system changed, the feeder (or scavenger) industries need to be tamed too. No more artificiality. You want to play like that, the good candidates will walk and take their campaign discussions with them. Voters will seek them out.

Everyone who wants to tune into the Republican presidential debate to watch Ms. Megyn Kelly remains free to do so. I wish she would have put the job first, and stepped aside. She's become too much the story, and there really are important issues that need asking about, not this junior high school boys v. girls environment we've got going in the black v. white mentality the media is trying to create in our country today. That's not diversity. Assimilation is, honestly. There's no denying the spices brought to the stew, even if they are subsumed into the whole, and not called out individually, as Megyn Kelly has become: a Spice Girl to enliven the Republican debate. You don't have to consume that though, if you just want a simple nourishing stew palatable to all.

On her program Tuesday night, Ms. Kelly observed that “what’s interesting here is Trump is not used to not controlling things, as the chief executive of a large organization.”

“But the truth is, he doesn’t get to control the media,” she added.

Ms. Kelly..., in the first presidential primary debate, ...questioned him about his past comments allegedly denigrating women. Afterward, he suggested that Ms. Kelly had been angry at him.

Where you going? What you looking for?
You know those boys don't want to play
no more with you... It's true.

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

ADDED: The reason wise American media people fear Donald Trump's candidacy? Because they understand how electable he is. David Brooks this weekend made a comment that he just does not see Donald Trump in the White House, taking the job that once belonged to Lincoln, the Roosevelts, and Kennedy.

But he forgets Jackson!

(and more importantly, more recent government executives: Gov. Jesse Ventura in Minnesota and Arnold Schwarzenegger in California. It's very do-able in reality.)

Workers have been displaced, the world is coping with change, and Americans are not immune. It's not entertainment, really. It's the news of what happens when the self-declared best and brightest are plotting strategies, making promises, and predicting outcomes while life is marching on, outside of their bubbles.

You'd think curious media minds would be trying to understand it, at least.

Obama's War on the Dark Continent.

or, Into Africa...

Meanwhile, back in the real world,
as America devotes her media resources to the make-believe coverage of a presidential campaign, our country is considering opening a third front in the ongoing war against terrorism.

A new military intervention in Libya would represent a significant progression of a war that could easily spread to other countries on the continent. It is being planned as the American military burrows more deeply into battlegrounds in Syria and Iraq, where American ground troops are being asked to play an increasingly hands-on role in the fight.
,,,
This significant escalation is being planned without a meaningful debate in Congress about the merits and risks of a military campaign that is expected to include airstrikes and raids by elite American troops.

The president we elected to stay sane, to bring America troops home from ill-defined and unwinnable missions abroad is writing his legacy today and in the weeks to come....

America has already attacked Africa, and helped overthrow leaders, creating regions where ISIS will rule.  By sending in American troops and continuing airstrikes, we will soon be in over our soldiers' heads in another war the country cannot afford.  The anti-American hatred will grow.

Michael Bloomberg will not be elected to disarm us here at home.

If you want change, nevermind tomorrow. Start thinking about what the Sanders (and Clinton?) supporters and former Obama voters could do with the government currently in power to create Change here at home.

No wonder all the elites want to pretend the economy is back at full steam. 

Fish!

That's the answer then, to the latest 70s legend to pass...
David Bowie, Glenn Frey, and Fish!  aka Abe Vigoda.

On a dark deserted highway:
cool winds nip my ears...
Sharp smell of nostaglia,
wafting up through the years...
In the American heartland,
I heard the radio sing!
Turned on my free tv set,
saw New York and everything...

Then again, maybe Vigoda is the final third of the Jack Soo/Steve Landesberg death trio?  Remember them.
-------------------------------

Vigoda once remarked: "When I was a young man, I was told success had to come in my youth. I found this to be a myth. My experiences have taught me that if you deeply believe in what you are doing, success can come at any age."

^~~~~~

In acknowledging that Landesberg was actually nine years older, his daughter Elizabeth said he had provided varying birth dates over the years. "He got kind of a late start in show business," she explained, "so he tried to straddle the generations. He fooled the whole world. People were surprised to think he was even 65." Landesberg commented on the issue in a 1979 Washington Post profile for which he refused to give his age:

"Let's just say I started late. It hurts you with casting directors.… If you tell them your age—let's say you're middle-aged—and they've never heard of you, they figure you're no good, or else they would've heard of you already. I tell my friends not to tell their ages." 

~~~~

Jack Soo was born Goro Suzuki on a ship traveling from Japan to the United States in 1917. He lived in Oakland, California, and was caught up in the Japanese American internment during World War II. He was sent to the Topaz War Relocation Center in Utah; and fellow internees recalled him as a "camp favorite", an entertainer singing at dances and numerous events.

Soo's career as an entertainer began in earnest at the end of the war, first as a stand-up nightclub performer primarily in the Midwestern United States. He changed his name to Soo after working at a Chinese night club. During his years playing the nightclub circuit, he met and became friends with future Barney Miller producer Danny Arnold, who was also a performer at the time.
...
Soo was diagnosed with esophageal cancer during Barney Miller's fifth season (1978–79). The cancer spread quickly, and Soo died on January 11, 1979, at age 61, at the University of California at Los Angeles Medical Center. His last appearance on the show was in the episode entitled "The Vandal," which aired on November 9, 1978.

...

Soo's last words came after being given a truly thankless chore by Captain Miller (which Nick always seemed to be the beneficiary of in the series), Barney senses Nick's desire to complain and invites him to do so. On the wall, in the background during the entire episode is a spray-painted obscenity aimed at Captain Miller courtesy of the vandal (and which everyone feels the need to comment on during the episode). Nick, having been given the open invitation by Barney for a retort, glances at the obscenity on the wall and then simply says to Barney: "I have nothing to add".

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

BUT BACK TO VIGODA, who died today at 94:

He liked to tell the story of how he won the role of Detective Fish. An exercise enthusiast, Vigoda had just returned from a five-mile jog when his agent called and told him to report immediately to the office of Danny Arnold, who was producing a pilot for a police station comedy.

Arnold remarked that Vigoda looked tired, and the actor explained about his jog. "You know, you look like you might have hemorrhoids," Arnold said. "What are you - a doctor or a producer?" Vigoda asked. He was cast on the spot.

"The Complete Directory to Prime Time Network and Cable TV Shows," a reference book, commented that Vigoda was the hit of "Barney Miller."

"Not only did he look incredible, he sounded and acted like every breath might be his last," it said. "Fish was always on the verge of retirement, and his worst day was when the station house toilet broke down."

Vigoda remained a regular on "Barney Miller" until 1977 when he took the character to his own series, "Fish." The storyline dealt with the detective's domestic life and his relations with five street kids that he and his wife took into their home.

The show lasted a season and a half. Vigoda continued making occasional guest appearances on "Barney Miller," quitting over billing and salary differences.

The Last Word...

"I'm the same Abe Vigoda," he told an interviewer. "I have the same friends, but the difference now is that I can buy the things I never could afford before. I have never had a house before, so now I would like a house with a nice garden and a pool. Hollywood has been very kind to me."

In the Long Run...

When It All Comes Down,
We Will Still Come Through...

Who needs Nate Silver...

When You've Got Matt Drudge?
I trust Drudge's poll of readers is a fair sampling:

**DRUDGE SUPER POLL** WHO IS YOUR PICK FOR PRESIDENT?

SANDERS  32.66%  (335,933 votes)  

 

TRUMP  31.66%  (325,584 votes)  

 

CRUZ  19.96%  (205,280 votes)  

 

RUBIO  5.15%  (53,010 votes)  

 

PAUL  3.38%  (34,800 votes)  

 

CARSON  1.48%  (15,262 votes)  

 

KASICH  1.38%  (14,215 votes)  

 

FIORINA  1.07%  (10,975 votes)  

 

CHRISTIE  1.06%  (10,896 votes)  

 

BUSH  0.94%  (9,636 votes)  

 

CLINTON  0.92%  (9,499 votes)  

 

SANTORUM  0.21%  (2,123 votes)  

 

O'MALLEY  0.13%  (1,287 votes)   

Lots of living to do between now and next Halloween... which is when election season really starts to crank up in these parts, the year of a presidential election. 

Autumn is election season. 
We're not in Iowa.

Never really did support the idea of concentrating on one season, year round, and dropping all your other sports to over-compensate.  Life is too short to miss out on baseball in the spring and summer because you've got ice-time year-round, say.  Conversely, it can burn out summer players who live in a climate where they're expected to compete year-round. Younger athletes can find it harder to find life balance by specializing so intensely they miss out on other opportunities in other games.

More and more, I think of life as a long-term race, not a sprint, you just have to know when to accelerate to pass.

"Who can go the distance?

We'll find out, in the long run.

We can handle some resistance

if our love is a strong one.

Scared? But we ain't shakin'.

Kinda bent, but we ain't breakin'

IN the long run..."

John McWhorter to Ta-Nehisi Coates.

An educated response:

Affirmative action has been reparations. No one denies it has transformed the lives of countless black people -- if it hadn't, there wouldn't be so many people so furious at the prospect of its demise.

In the late 1960s, welfare payments to poor black women were expanded, made easier to get, and subject to less oversight over time. This was explicitly intended by its advocates as reparations. 

The Community Reinvestment Act of 1977 was reparations, beyond the Fair Housing Act of 1968, for redlining practices that denied blacks the opportunity to own homes outside of slums.

Scholarships nationwide for black students are reparations. Museum exhibits about slavery and the horrors of the black experience represent a nation deeply concerned with psychological reparation.

Educated white Americans' focus of late on atoning for white privilege is reparations. The American intelligentsia's reception of Coates' book is reparations.

The idea that America is a country callously blind to the horrors of the black past is fiction. Yes, the educated tend to be more aware than others, but the notion that nothing significant has happened until every average Joe on every barstool is exquisitely sensitive to black concerns is needless utopianism.

And he's just getting started...

Now, an objection here will be that despite the reparations I have noted, black America still has a great many serious problems. That is, the old reparations -- and this is what they were -- didn't work, and so apparently we need new ones. 

But to insist on this as if anyone who disagrees is either stupid or morally callous is, again, oversimplification.

Let's say Congress somehow granted large sums of money to black people. 

• Just what evidence do we have that this would create significant change in black America in contrast to the reparations we had before? 
• If the money were granted to organizations, which ones, and for what purpose? 
• Given the myriad conflicting visions as to what black America needs, who would decide? 
• Who would decide who would be among the deciders? 

And something else. I venture a guess: 

• Wouldn't the response after reparations happened, among certain people, be, "Now, they better not think they can just pay us off" -- or more tactfully, "Reparations is a beginning, not an end"? 

• Why not just work on doing the things these very people would insist still hadn't been done -- police reform, fixing schools, ending the drug war -- especially since, again, reparations have already happened?

I love big hits like that so much better than a simple physical athletic game, and if you knew how I love me my hockey games, you'd understand how I weight these words...  I can't do it myself (here, because it needed to come from a black man), but I love to see others perform at this level.

Writing Ugly, let's call it...
Pretty boys need not apply.

Coates' attack on Sanders is premised on a weakness in his general take on black history, which, while charismatically expressed, is vastly oversimplified.

Coates' version of black history is that black problems, including anything others might see as problems with our culture, are traceable to evils that whites imposed on us in the past.  If not lynching, then slavery, Jim Crow, redlining, and so on. Surely legacies matter, but this analysis wears decidedly thin in places. 

Coates is hardly alone, for example, in demanding that America accept that when legions of black teenagers shoot each other over sneakers and turf, the real reason, on some level, is white racism. However, the onus is on Coates and his confreres to make that case and make it stick.

It never seems to work in terms of creating a meaningful consensus, and racism is not the sole reason for that. Social history -- including for the descendants of African slaves -- is complicated.

Finishing the card:

A passage in Coates' "Between the World and Me" illuminates the kind of problem in historiography we are dealing with. Coates depicts belligerent young black men committing crimes as "girding themselves against the ghost of the bad old days when the Mississippi mob gathered 'round their grandfathers so that the branches of the black body might be torched, then cut away."

This may be good literature, but it fails as history or psychology.

The idea that the guys Coates depicts are doing what they do as a response to the lynching of ancestors they didn't even know is abstract at best, and at worst, dehumanizing.  Where's the evidence that these men are thinking about what happened to their ancestors eons ago? 

It implies that the descendants of African slaves are the only humans in history incapable of moving beyond their past.

Of course, I may be taking Coates too literally, lacking what we might call "soul" on the matter. Opinions will differ on these matters, and legitimately. 

However, to declare a socialist who has spent his life committed to helping the poor to be someone who gives comfort to "white supremacy" because he doesn't support as fragile and unpromising a notion as a new round of reparations for black America is hasty, uncivil, and bordering on slander, reminiscent more of Fox News than James Baldwin.

 Waka-kaka-kanda indeed!

But We're Not Really "At War"...

Obama Relaxes Rules for Striking ISIS in Afghanistan

The change reflects growing concerns within the government about the militant group’s emerging role in Afghanistan.

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

We'll just put more and more control into situational calls by those on the ground.  Hope we don't hit no hospitals!

(and the administration wonders why nobody buys the tears about the cost of violence here at home, and the need to respect life and win ethically.  USA, USA!  The bigger the better the bombier ... Mr. Obama, take your bows.  "This is ourselves... under Pressure."  or, "We're not in Hawaii anymore!" )

Lol, what a legacy...

Party on, Wayne!

* If we really were that concerned about the ... enemy,
wouldn't we just drop a real bomb, or scorch the earth quickly,
and get it over this?  This is like smoking cigarettes to commit suicide. Isn't the ground pretty much devoid of worthwhile life at this point anyway? That's what our wars are saying, and doing.  Why are we still pulling off the band-aid slowly, and prolonging what realists have concluded must come?  

Yes We Can Kissinger.

The New Legacy, built by a man without one to fall back on...

Bluffing on the Double Down.

You shouldn't bet hard unless you think you've built a winning hand because when the Dealer shows his cards a few times, he's gonna wise up to any habitual bluffing...

*Mary's Humpday Words of Wisdom,
Sorely Earned @ 47 Years at Play.
~Discovering America since 1968.

Oh No You Didn't.

Oh yes she did.
Aunt Viv spanks the Frensh Prince...

{F}or you to ask other actors, and other black actresses and actors, too, to jeopardize their career and their standing in a town that you know damn well you don't do that. And here's the other thing -- they don't care. They don't care! And I find it ironic that somebody who has made their living, made their living and made millions and millions of dollars from the very people you're talking about boycotting just because you didn't get a nomination, just because you didn't win."
...
"Well karma must be a bitch, cause now here you are. Here you are, you've had a few flops and you know there are those out there who really deserved a nod," she said.

Ouch.
Maybe I can skip that hockey game tomorrow night, reading that was watching aggression released...
-----------------------

ADDED:  It's actually a big thing, in the organized effort to re-image Hollywood to make it more palatable for politically correct audiences.  Expect to see more hiring and diversifying in the entertainment news industry, too, like we've seen recently in publishing and education. 

Academy president Cheryl Boone Isaacs released the following statement tonight:

"I'd like to acknowledge the wonderful work of this year's nominees," she said. "While we celebrate their extraordinary achievements, I am both heartbroken and frustrated about the lack of inclusion. This is a difficult but important conversation, and it's time for big changes.

"The Academy is taking dramatic steps to alter the makeup of our membership. In the coming days and weeks we will conduct a review of our membership recruitment in order to bring about much-needed diversity in our 2016 class and beyond," Boone Isaacs said in what amounted to a rare and unusual move on the part of the Academy.

"As many of you know," she continued, "we have implemented changes to diversify our membership in the last four years. But the change is not coming as fast as we would like. We need to do more, and better and more quickly."

"This isn't unprecedented for the Academy," Isaacs added. "In the ‘60s and ‘70s, it was about recruiting younger members to stay vital and relevant. In 2016, the mandate is inclusion in all of its facets: gender, race, ethnicity and sexual orientation. We recognize the very real concerns of our community, and I so appreciate all of you who have reached out to me in our effort to move forward together."

PUSH tactics.
(Hey, maybe Bernie will give Ta-Nehisi that VP nod afterall.  Scott Walker isn't a college grad either, and look at how far he's ridden his pony... )

Anonymous Reporting.

Everytime I read a story where a source allegedly refuses to be identified and speaks only out of anonymity, I stop reading.  It saves me a great deal of time these days!

No one has taught the next generation of reporters how to take information given to them off the record, and to independently verify it.  They can't do it on the political stories, they can't do it on the little stories, and they can't do it on the big stories either, it seems.  They're addicted to being fed.

Again, weaning newspapers and now the news stories from my life has not been as difficult as I thought, with a plethora of sources to read.  The newsmakers and the media are no longer monopolies in shaping opinions.  Looks like... they have not figured that out yet.

Sometimes the kids come slow to things, especially when they have to figure it out themselves.

 

 

Bitter Cold Means Harder Bodies.

Really!  You have to burn more -- I am eating like a horse, myself *-- and everything internal constricts.

Think of it as a helpful hint to tighten up.  Sit up straight.  Carry your own weight...

We've been getting away from that in recent years, but America is not naturally fat.

Really.
----------------------------------
* strawberries, tomatoes, beans, venison... the freezer stock is going down.

#HopeForAnEarlySpring
#WakeMeWhenWeThaw

Jeb Bush and Dan Quayle.

Bernie Sanders and Ta-Nehisi Coates.
Donald Trump and Sarah Palin.
Hillary and Bill.

Vote your interests, people!  Lol.
Who said politics doesn't make for funny bedfellows?

(The Hispanic coalition is holding out for Cheech and George Lopez, and pushing to get over that citizens-only voting thang...  "Why you hate the brown people?")

People,people:  There's plenty of distrust and division to go around, really...  It's only January;  you'll get your fill, Americans always do!  (It's a processed food thing;  you wouldn't understand...  Did someone say, "out of the package, ready to eat?"  Ah, progress, eh?  Lol.)

The Socialist and the Reparations Thang.

You wouldn't understand...
I think Ta-Nehisi Coates is throwing his weight around here.

Mr. Coates, whose “Between the World and Me,” about his experience as a black man in America, won the National Book Award for nonfiction last year, also more broadly criticized what he called Mr. Sanders’s “class first” approach to racial inequality.

While Mr. Sanders, in the same response in Iowa, said the answer, instead of reparations, was creating jobs, making public colleges free and directing more resources to poor communities, Mr. Coates wrote that this view addresses “black people not so much as a class specifically injured by white supremacy, but rather, as a group which magically suffers from disproportionate poverty.”

Mr. Coates wrote that Mr. Sanders “should be directly confronted and asked why his political imagination is so active against plutocracy, but so limited against white supremacy.”

It must be a tough slog for Mr. Coates, earning that undergraduate degree for himself as a black man.  He doesn't seem to respect education much in his family or to be working to change the culture he was raised under...

Raising the minimum wage doesn’t really address the fact that black men without criminal records have about the same shot at low-wage work as white men with them; nor can making college free address the wage gap between black and white graduates,” Mr. Coates wrote. 

...

Mr. Coates wrote that he had hoped to talk directly with Mr. Sanders before publishing and that he had reached out to Mr. Sanders’s campaign over the last three days but did not receive a response.

 

If you can't convince an East Coast Jewish socialist with no party loyalties to fund your anti-education crusade, who can you count on? Perhaps Coates has another black presidential candidate waiting in the wings, one who has signed on to the equality-for-all platform of equal distribution based not on needs but on skin color.  Maybe, a black WOMAN even... does he think he's holding a trump card here, or is he just bluffing on his double down??

It will be a fun race, I think.
A real cultural clash between the doers of all races and the talkers/protesters artificially pumped up with all their young hopes and youthful demands...
Waka-kaka-kanda! Oooo-whee!

Two for Tuesday.

Instead of frontloading this week (putting in da big hours early),
circumstances forced me to readjust, so that I'm now ... downloading. Not my cup of tea having my workweek rearranged...  No Friday afternoon free now... Le sigh.
Only got 5.25 Monday, which does not work in my dependency-free independent not-under-40 lifestyle...
(I think somebody forgot that while it might be cool to upgrade the computers on the holiday, we were working it still... )

#BustinChops
#LifeLifeLong
#Freedom
#40hrwrkwk

Larry Fitzgerald, Jr. and his Minnesota Roots.

It's a nice story: his father played basketball at Indiana State with Larry Bird ("I was the other Larry...") and became a Minnesota sportswriter, where he raised Larry Jr., who was a Vikings ballball.

He started in training camp and eventually would work the games, and sometimes, if there was no school on a Friday, Fitzgerald would head over to practice. Cris Carter, Randy Moss and Jake Reed would sometimes let Fitzgerald Jr. run drills with them.

“It was every child’s dream and I was living it,” Fitzgerald said.

Fitzgerald would earn big tips washing the cars of players. He’d work with the JUGS machine after practice, catching ball after ball. He’d talk to Coach Dennis Green and offensive coordinator Brian Billick. And he grew close to Carter, who thinks of Fitzgerald like a nephew and remains close to him to this day.

“Even if he grew up to be a pianist or something else, I would have still played a role because we spent so much time off the field together,” said Carter, now an analyst for ESPN. “He wasn’t just a ballboy to me. As he got older, we became more friends than mentor and protégé.”

Nice story.
Hail Larry.

David Bowie... Glenn Frey...

Take it easy, take it easy...
Don't let the sound of your own wheels drive you crazy.
Lighten up, while you still can...
Don't even try to understand...
Just find a place to make your stand,
and take it easy.

RIP Glenn.

Somebody's gonna hurt someone, before the night is through.
Somebody's gonna come undone; there's nothin' we can do.
Everybody wants to touch somebody, if it takes all night.
Everybody wants to take a little chance ...make it come out right.

There's gonna be a heartache tonight,
a heartache tonight, I know.
There's gonna be a heartache tonight,
a heartache tonight, I know.

Let's go.

We can beat around the bushes.
We can get down to the bone.
We can leave it in the parking lot,
but either way, there's gonna be a heartache tonight.
A heartache tonight, I know...
Aw, I know.
There'll be a heartache tonight
A heartache tonight, I know...

Trump: No More Justice Roberts' !

Trump promises, he won't appoint a man like the man who teamed with President Obama to bring us "Obamacare".

GWB appointed him, and Ted Cruz pushed like hell to get him appointed...

Beauty* is Where You Find It...

Make it a great Friday, friends!

* Inspired by David Brooks' lede, whereupon he finds an arousing romantic beauty in the women working out across the street, above the CVS.

Across the street from my apartment building in Washington there’s a gigantic supermarket and a CVS. Above the supermarket there had been a large empty space with floor-to-ceiling windows. The space was recently taken by a ballet school, so now when I step outside in the evenings I see dozens of dancers framed against the windows, doing their exercises — gracefully and often in unison.

It can be arrestingly beautiful. The unexpected beauty exposes the limitations of the normal, banal streetscape I take for granted every day. But it also reminds me of a worldview, which was more common in eras more romantic than our own.

This is the view that beauty is a big, transformational thing, the proper goal of art and maybe civilization itself. This humanistic worldview holds that beauty conquers the deadening aspects of routine; it educates the emotions and connects us to the eternal.

By arousing the senses, beauty arouses thought and spirit. A person who has appreciated physical grace may have a finer sense of how to move with graciousness through the tribulations of life. A person who has appreciated the Pietà has a greater capacity for empathy, a more refined sense of the different forms of sadness and a wider awareness of the repertoire of emotions.

ADDED:  I have a wonderful book in my possession, a trade paperback, of all views of the Pieta, taken from so many different angles. 150 photos.  I'll likely never make it to Italy, but I agree with Brooks on that one:  the Pieta is absolutely beautiful... 

Pick up the book, because even if you visit in person, you'll never get to see Michaelangelo's work at this level.  The photographer was given special access.  Mary's humanism in mourning her dead child simply does not compare to women and girls working out privately above the neighborhood CVS.

(I wonder if David meant this as a tribute to his friend Rahm Emmanuel, a former ballet dancer trying to move gracefully through life now through his tribulations and scenes of other mothers mourning their dead sons ?)

Click that link for Amazon's Look Inside feature...  That's eternal beauty, and lives on long after the mortal women on display end their ballet class.  Makes you appreciate the ugliness of broken bodies too, and the heartbreaking loss of human sons that mothers loved...

You might end up investing in a copy for yourself too.

Hillary Clinton and the Minnesota Vikings.

Now stay with me here...

Minnesota's loss Sunday was a heartbreaker, in a game they coulda/shoulda won.  But they played conservatively in the end and Team Purple lost.

Mal and I were watching the Vikings drive up the field -- Teddy Bridgewater's confidence was strong -- when Coach Zimmer called the time out.  You could see it in Teddy's face, he wanted to keep moving the ball...

The Vikings (11-6) took the ball at their 39-yard line for the deciding drive with 1:42 left and, aided by a pass interference penalty on Kam Chancellor, drove deep into Seattle's territory. After the Vikings drained the clock for a seemingly inevitable win, Walsh missed the winner after making all three of his earlier attempts.

Mal wondered why they take that timeout -- what the sideline saw in the defensive set up -- but I think it was just basic coaching rudiments.  So close... you keep the ball on the ground, and don't risk throwing.  Even with Adrian Peterson's earlier fumble, it was safer to keep running and not put the ball in the air.  They thought they could just run out the clock and kick it in for the win.

But...  there's no guarantees about making field goals, even at close yardage, in frigid weather.

In my gut, I am convinced that if the Vikings did not try to conservatively settle for the field goal in securing the win, Teddy Bridgewater and his crew would have worked that ball into the endzone for 6.

They wanted it bad enough, they had the skills and could have taken the risk.  The momentum favored them, not to mention the Seahawks' earlier poor play and the support of the home crowd.

There's no looking back, no do-overs though.
It was a smart coaching move to play it conservatively, the playbooks tell us, because there's usually not a great risk that a kicker like Walsh -- who has come through for the team many times -- misses that kick.

But he did.

Next year, as Bridgewater gains in his own confidence and continues to earn the respect of his teammates and fans, I predict they would let him keep working that drive... Dance with who brung ya.

Michael Frayn’s ‘Noises Off’ Returns to Broadway

I would go see that one.
The movie, with an all-star cast*, is LOL hilarious.**  Very fast, very funny.  (and I'm not even a play person, really.)

"It was funnier from behind than in front, and I thought that one day I must write a farce from behind."
--------------------
*  John Ritter, Marilu Henner, Christopher Reeve, Michael Caine, Carol Burnett, Mark-Lin Baker, Nicolette Sheridan, Julie Hagerty... and the wonderful old Denholm Elliott.  The latter really stole the show as Selsdon!, in his last role...

"Never act with children, dogs, or Denholm Elliott."
~ Gabriel Byrne

** Bogdanovich's best work, imho.

"If you can't laugh at this, then you're probably all dead... Can't touch this!"

de Valera is Dead.

RIP Rickman.

Rickman publicly spoke of his unhappiness about the “Hollywood ending” of Michael Collins, and expressed his belief that art ought to help educate as well as entertain.

“Talent is an accident of genes, and a responsibility,” he once said.

"I will gladly accept the mantle of anger."

Smart man.  There's an awful lot to be angry about, really.

"I did not have sexual relations with that woman..."

Rahm had his own finger-wagging denial moment in the spotlight today:

"The answer, which is consistent with, and also what I've said before, at that point, the Federal Bureau of Investigation, the U.S. attorney and the state's attorney are looking into it, and that's exactly where it should be so they can get to the bottom of it," Emanuel said.
...
The comments came after the Tribune on Thursday detailed how emails, interviews and copies of public calendars for the mayor and his Corporation Counsel Stephen Patton raised questions about when Emanuel learned key facts about the October 2014 McDonald shooting, which has become the biggest challenge of his time in office.

The records show Emanuel's top staffers became aware the McDonald shooting could become a legal and political quagmire in December 2014 -- more than three months before the mayor has said he was fully briefed on the issue. And lawyers for McDonald's family informed Emanuel's Law Department in March that police officers' version of what happened differed dramatically from the shooting video -- more than eight months before the mayor said he found out about the discrepancy.

Asked Thursday if top aides weren't telling him even though they were aware of the inconsistencies, Emanuel stuck to the same talking point.

"The answer to it is because if you're going to get to the bottom of something, and get to justice, is exactly with the U.S. attorney, FBI and state's attorney," Emanuel said.

On Oct. 20, 2014, Chicago police Officer Jason Van Dyke shot McDonald 16 times as the teenager walked down Pulaski Road with a knife in his hand. In April, the city reached a $5 million settlement with McDonald's family before a lawsuit was ever filed.

McDonald's death became a major scandal in November after a Cook County judge ordered the video be made public despite the Emanuel administration's efforts to block the release...

~ Chicago Tribune
------------------------------
 WaPo:

Emanuel, who was fighting for re-election at the time, has said he had not been aware that police reports about the McDonald shooting differed so dramatically from the now-infamous video until long after the incident. The city settled with McDonald’s family last spring.
...
Thursday’s news came as a federal judge in Chicago ordered the release of video footage in another case that shows police fatally shooting an unarmed black teenager.

U.S. District Judge Robert Gettleman called the city “irresponsible” for fighting to keep the video under wraps for so long. “I went to a lot of trouble to decide this issue, and then I get this motion last night saying that ‘this is the age of enlightenment with the city and we’re going to be transparent’,” Gettleman said.

After months of opposing the release of the video in the 2013 shooting death of 17-year-old Cedrick Chatman, city officials on Wednesday did an abrupt about-face, asking the judge to rescind a protective order and make public the video, which shows a white officer fatally shooting the teenager as he fled from police in Chicago’s South Shore neighborhood. Chatman had been suspected of car theft.

The city had insisted previously that the video should remain under seal while a wrongful-death suit in the case went forward. But Chicago officials, who have faced withering criticism in recent months, said this week that their reversal was part of an effort “to be as transparent as possible.”

The video was released hours after Gettleman’s order Thursday.

See, the thing is, Chicago rules only work in Chicago.  You really can't hide the truth from all the people, all the time.  Not when news travels outside the city to more questioning environments.

Emanuel's comments Thursday followed an appearance at the opening of a risk management company downtown in which his staff had advised reporters he would not be taking questions.  But as Emanuel headed for the elevators after cutting the ribbon with the company's CEO, reporters followed him, yelling questions as TV cameras rolled.

After standing in the elevator bank for several seconds not responding, Emanuel said, "How about this, let's go back," and returned to the podium set up in the office for the event and took a handful of questions.

Does he really think that's going to be the end of it?  He deigned to answer questions, stuck to his statement of denial, and now it's all going to go away?  Ask Mr. Bill Clinton how well that one worked out...
----------------------

Song for the Night:

I'm alright because, despite the laws,
You cannot hide the truth.
And although you will say
I am still too naive
Yet I have not lost faith
In the things I believe...
And if I don't have a this all worked out
Still I'm getting closer, getting closer.

I still have far to go, no doubt,
But I'm getting closer, getting close...

~ Billy Joel
-------------------------------
There's More. Interested?:

The case of Cedrick Chatman, 17, is particularly noteworthy in Chicago because his 2013 death was ruled as justified by the Independent Police Review Authority (IPRA), the embattled agency criticized as performing toothless investigations of police misconduct cases.

Since 2007, only two Chicago police officers involved in the shootings of civilians have been disciplined under its authority.

In September, IPRA investigator Lorenzo Davis said he was fired after refusing to change findings in three police shootings that showed officers were liable for wrongdoing.

One of those was the Chatman case.

At the time, Davis said officer Kevin Fry was not justified in shooting the teenager and refused to sign a report that arrived at the opposite conclusion. “If Officer Fry believed his life was in danger, then his fear was unreasonable. (He) should not have taken this young man’s life,” he told CNN.
...

According to data compiled by the Invisible Institute, a Chicago watchdog group, the officer who shot Chatman has had 30 civilian complaints of misconduct filed against him, including 12 involving excessive use of force.

He remains on active duty in the department.

Chatman family attorney Brian Coffman told The Post that the Chatman shooting represents “a cover-up from the very start, from the false police report to the IPRA investigation to the city of Chicago itself…. Everyone is following up as if nothing happened, and that’s the problem.

"There is no accountability anymore from any level for these types of matters. No one is being disciplined anymore.” ...

Last month, amid the ongoing uproar, the mayor also fired Chicago’s police superintendent, Garry F. McCarthy, saying, “He has become an issue, rather than dealing with the issue, and a distraction.”

...
More protests are planned for Friday, beginning with a morning boycott by nearly 60 ministers of the mayor’s annual breakfast with local pastors to commemorate the birthday of Martin Luther King Jr.

A march also is set to take place, heading through the city’s downtown financial district to Emanuel’s home on the North Side.

Lorenzo Davis, a former Supervising Investigator who was fired from his position at the Independent Police Review Authority poses for a portrait at his home

On January 17, 1984, Davis and several other officers were executing a search warrant in the 6th District, which includes the Gresham neighborhood where Davis served as a tactical officer for half a decade. With him that day was Officer Fred Eckles, a 10-year veteran of the force who died from multiple gunshot wounds after a drug dealer fired on the 41-year-old.

Davis returned fire, killing the offender.

Now, the 65-year-old police veteran has risked alienating himself among current cops who face similar dangers each day.

“Do you decide that an officer’s belief that he was in fear for his life was reasonable just because he says so? Or does the evidence and the witness statements lead you to believe that this was an excuse?” Davis said of his time leading IPRA investigations.

“If we don’t stand back and have some skepticism, than any time some police officer says ‘I was in danger,’ that’s the end of your investigation.

“That’s not the way it should be.”

 That's the man who should be serving as Chicago's mayor today...  He gets it.

Davis said a culture of bravado within the police department may be making cops’ decision to pull the trigger more acceptable.

“I know people coming out of the training academy telling me that it’s a badge of honor to shoot somebody, particularly a gangbanger,” Davis said.

[D]uring a particularly chaotic night in Chicago, officers fired on a shooting suspect but missed. When asked for the condition of a nearby shooting victim, a cop on the scene became confused, thinking the dispatcher had referred to the target of police gunfire.

“If they’re shot by police, they’re not victims; they’re offenders.”

Reread that last line and let it sink in...

While that mentality may make sense in the heat of the night, investigative minds are supposed to be cooler. Davis brought that approach to IPRA, until Ando decided that the veteran cop had to go.

“He should have known that I might go out and talk to people.”

 Getting closer, getting close ...

Kangaroo Reality.

"The evidence is here sticking out from behind the scrotum."

Shameful.

Nobody wants to see our American military in poses like this. The poor female, who had to hide her hair, according to the cultural traditions where she was...

Just one question:
How did the sailors get themselves in that position to be apprehended in Iranian waters?
Why were they there, what was the mission, and why weren't they far out enough to avoid detection and capture?

I'm sure, when the commander-in-chief is back from taking his latest victory laps on the PR circuit, he'll get to the bottom of this and fill us in.

The last thing America needs now is to be provoking another war that we cannot afford.

Let's make certain our sailors never put themselves, or get put, in a situation like this.

We ought to do the same thing to the next group of Iranian sailors we catch in our waters, trolling off our coasts!

Turnabout is fair play.

ADDED:  Comments from the thinking masses:

Best comment I have seen "Two Navy warships were captured by a couple of bass boats" captioning a picture of the US and Iranian boats side by side.

These boats were unarmed and unescorted in hostile or potentially hostile waters. They were also undermanned with 5 persons each.

they did have some machine guns but apparently no ammunition, so unarmed. See Cdr Salamanders analysis here http://blog.usni.org/2016/01/13/the-strategic-everyone also see the comments for more.

Why did our sailors kneel? They should have been trained to sit, regardless of what the captors commanded.

Why did the woman submit to a headscarf? She does not look happy about it but she does have it on. One more reason for no women on combat ships.

Why did the Navy boat break down? Has it been getting adequate maintenance?

Why could the other boat not tow the broken down one?

Why were they there unescorted? We have plenty of warships in the area. One could have been keeping an eye on things with the mission of rapid assistance if needed. Helicopter, for instance.

It is embarrassing enough to be captured by Iranians but it could have been worse. It could have been pirates.

The response from the Navy both local commands and civilian chain of command all the way up to Commander in Chief was shameful.

We apparently did not get back all of the boats. The Iranians kept with the GPS system and may have kept the radio/encryption systems.

Biden and Kerrey's responses in particular were shameful. They should both resign over this but they won't. Biden actually thanked the Iranians for taking the sailors and boats into custody. Just helping out, he called it.

The weather was fine, our guys could call for help with the broken boat. They could have towed the broken boat. If the Iranians wanted to be helpful, they would have just hung about to offer assistance if needed. Boarding under arms is not offering assistance and is not something the VP should be thankful for.

Trump is right. This is a huge deal.

Give the People What They Want...

If you truly believe in democracy here at home...
If you honestly trust your fellow citizens...
if there is to be any Change, real and long-lasting,
It has to come from Us, We the People.

So, please, stop all this silly fantasizing about a rich white knight like Michael Bloomberg riding in at the final hour to save the American people from themselves...

What would happen if the Donald won on the Republican side and you had Bernie Sanders as the Democratic opponent? Bloomberg. Not the television network but the billionaire trans-party former mayor of New York, Michael Bloomberg, who would run with his own money (the only way to do it quickly enough) and his own lawyers and most of the operatives in both parties.

I don't hear anyone calling for Michael Bloomberg to get in the race. His buying in at a late date is not like Donald Trump, who is putting in the work and self-financing. He's obviously thought things through, and seems to be delivering on his plan.

President Obama's supporters told us that his leadership skills were in winning the campaign, working with others, bringing us together to elect him. People had faith, but hopes were dashed in the end performance. There's a greater racial divide than 8 years ago, and the economic gap continues growing...

Can you imagine how the presidency might be harmed if a Michael Bloomberg is able to buy his way in, over the votes of the American people. What the Supreme Court did, in taking the election case that ought to have been settled by Florida law, almost undermined us. But we survived the Bush years, and had such great hope for Change...

Let's not mix our political fantasies with realities anymore, ok? There really are costs and consequences to not letting the American people have their say.
-----------------------

Remember: Donald Trump has never disrespected hard-working immigrants who came here legally, and went through the official process of becoming a citizen. He believes, like Israel, that America too can secure her borders by building a security wall with technology helping monitor. If there is the will, there is a way. That's the American spirit.

If we had only legal citizens in this country, secure in their own rights and equality just as much as those more well-known names with capital and roots for hundreds of years, think of the world we could create together!

When we continue to assemble a tiered system of workers though, we risk becoming like Israel -- discriminating based on ethnic ties, not citizenship.

Doesn't anyone have faith that Americans can fix our immigration system, stop shoving so much off on the state and local governments, and address the issue on a federal level?* Listen to the American people.


* We just need some effective political leaders who understand the importance of getting the job done, and who have the proven people skills to pull it off.

Mercy comes through Might.
Power comes from Strength.
Words should spur Actions.
We still need the promised Change, we're just looking elsewhere now... shopping around so to speak.

Erik Wemple is White Privileged Too!

No wonder Coates believes the world owes him something...
Look at what he's learned in Washington, from his self-selected stable of "alternative" white men.

Here's a story, from back in 2003, about a white woman who now works for Mother Jones magazine, who allegedly flung doggie-do-do at the owner of a neighboring business that she apparently objected to. NIMBY, and all that.

(You'll never guess who she's married to!)

Stephanie Mencimer, a freelance writer, works in a carriage house behind her Victorian rowhouse in the Logan Circle area of Northwest. About 12:30 Friday afternoon, she went home for lunch. Stepping across her small brick patio, she noticed a plastic supermarket bag on the ground. She picked it up and realized it contained dog waste.

The only neighbor bordering on Mencimer's patio is a just-opened dog day-care facility called Wagtime. One day before her unpleasant discovery, Mencimer had called the 311 non-emergency police line to complain about loud barking coming from the kennel -- the latest in a long stream of complaints by Wagtime's neighbors on Q Street. Police did not respond.

Ticked by what she took as a message from the business next door, Mencimer said, she walked the bag over to Wagtime and placed it on the front counter. She said she firmly asked the owner, Lisa Schreiber, not to dump any more waste in her yard. Schreiber and two of her employees said Mencimer didn't place the bag on the counter, but rather flung it at the owner and shouted at her.

Mencimer went home. Schreiber called 911. "I don't know where that bag came from, but she was out of control," Schreiber told me. "Why would I take any chance of dealing with her? I told her to calm down and leave, and then I called the police."

"Assault with a dangerous weapon -- animal feces," came the reply. That is a felony.

Mencimer told the detective her version, in which it was Schreiber who was out of control, but the officer said that he had taken a course in biometrics and could tell that Mencimer was lying. He called for backup, and within minutes, Mencimer, who is five months pregnant, was handcuffed in her kitchen, taken to the police station and locked in a cell.

She spent the rest of the day in custody, without food or water. Her husband, Erik Wemple, was refused permission to see her or bring her reading materials. Then, when police learned that she is married to the editor of the Washington City Paper, Mencimer said, "all of a sudden, people were a lot nicer to me." Suddenly, the felony that the detective told her she would be charged with was reduced to simple assault, a misdemeanor, which allowed her to go home.

Isn't that special?
It's not the same as calling a judge up on the weekend to pop your buddy out of the slammer for assaulting a cop, but oh boy, those white boys know how to work their privileges, eh Mr. Coates? (By the way, are they gonna make you wear a cape when you debut that black superhero comic for 'em? Lol... )

So ends the story of the poor white woman married to Erik Wemple:

Mencimer, who faces an Aug. 14 court date, also sees no way out. "It looks like Wagtime is here to stay," she said. "The city says it can't do anything. And we can't move. With the noise and the stench, who would want this house?"

How I Learned To Love "Alternative" White Men.

or, David Carr was the embodiment of White Privilege
by Ta-Nehisi Coates.
* whereby Coates acknowledges the journalistic lights of the late David Carr, and Erik Wemple of the Erik Wemple blog, in helping to create his prize-winning genius.

I had just turned 20 years old. And -- geez, I was so close to school -- I mean high school, that’s the crazy thing about it. I was still very much a child in many ways. In some ways I was more mature than other people, in other ways I was very, very immature. One way that I was mature is that I really cared about writing, I cared a lot about it. And I would have written David Carr a letter expressing my interest, and I think I sent him this little chapbook of poetry and three or four articles that I had written for the school newspaper.
...
There were no black people in the office. Like none. This is immediately the whitest place I had ever been in my life. Right away. So I get in and culturally, you know, it’s like a different world. I’m looking at these folks, and they’re not even professional, or corporate, like what you see in the movies or on TV. You know, these are like alternative white people, and I had no exposure to alternative white people, like none. I didn’t know what that was. They were all dressed down; I think it was March and they had on shorts. I was like, God, everybody’s in shorts. What’s going on here?

They were so, so relaxed.

And then I was brought in to talk to David Carr. And David was loud and boisterous, and he was in shorts, and he was charming, even if he was loud and boisterous and aggressive. He’s very likable instantly — kind of crude. He’d yell at you, but he yelled at everybody. I think the only other place you might get that experience is like in athletics. Maybe in the armed services.

He said, “Yeah, I got your stuff, and, you know, this poetry thing, we don’t do this, but, you know, I like this. I like that you did this.” And I think looking back on it, what he liked was that I had made it** -- I think he liked the fact that I had put it together into a book; it’s a little chapbook. That showed initiative. I wasn’t just sort of scribbling things in my room and sending them out.

And he said, “Yeah, man, you’re the shit, man. You’re the shit. Why don’t you come do this?”

--------------------------
*  Don't say "who?"  Everybody who is anybody in Washington knows those three, it seems...
Public intellectuals, power journalists, late critics and all.  Will be interesting to see if they are still remembered by the people, in the post-Obama years...  Does their work live beyond the daily pages?  Will their ideas hold?  Is "the shit" any good?

** I think too, David Carr liked the idea of adding racial and economic diversity to his staff.  Call it a hunch...and an understanding of the hiring freezes in the journalism industry of the early 1990s for candidates not of color, without connections.  I wonder if Coates is curious enough to ask questions about that...  lol.

(Like, did Coates reveal his father Paul's status as a former Panther? Carr likely would have eaten that shit up in the badass whiteboy role he was creating for himself...)

ADDED: "Night of the Gun" was Carr's autobiography.

For many, including Carr, the task of telling his story has always included sorting out the contradictions. While he acknowledged that sometimes he "didn't do a good job" of keeping his professional and private lives separate, he defended his ability to work as a reporter while high.

"Why don't you go back and read the clip?" he said. "I think I won a [journalism] award" for the story that the Perpich interview yielded. "I did things differently," he added.

Carr did do things differently, and has his regrets. In the book, he describes leaving his two infant daughters alone in a car, in the cold, as he went to buy drugs. "How long had it been, really?" he wrote. "It had not been ten minutes tops. Ten minutes times ten, probably, if not more. Hours not minutes."

His biggest champions in Minnesota, and there are many, prefer to dwell on the good times, and there were many of those, too.
...
{Former} Minneapolis Mayor R.T. Rybak said he did not live the details of Carr's darkest periods. Rybak said Carr coaxed him to become the publisher of the Twin Cities Reader, the now-defunct alternative weekly, when Carr was its editor in the mid-1990s.

"I saw him as a real hero who had overcome his demons," Rybak said. "It was a great time and, for a while, better than I thought we could ever get to."

Rybak had less to say about an incident in the book when Carr publicly referred to a female Reader staffer as having a "nice rack." Carr acknowledged he was "pulled into the publisher's office and told that I made some of the women in the office uncomfortable." Rybak declined to talk of the episode, other than to say "I applaud David's honesty."

{Former} Minnesota congressman Jim Ramstad, a recovering alcoholic who met Carr at a recovery meeting, also is a fan. "I deeply admire his courage," he said of the book.

Not everyone is as kind. "I couldn't understand why I was the only one who felt relieved when he was gone," said Cherie Parker, who worked briefly at the Reader and said "there was a ton" of hero worship of Carr at the paper. Parker said she cried when Carr harshly criticized her first story, and she will never forget her job interview: "He shouted at me, 'When I was your age, I was selling coke.' I'm, like, 'O-kaaay.' "

Rose Farley, another Reader reporter whom Carr hired, said he was a good editor and mentor, and someone who "knew how power worked in Minneapolis." He was also a mesmerizing storyteller who was not bashful about his past.

Farley recalled Carr taking his staff to dinner and holding forth about the time he left his girls in the car.

"It's such a horrible thing -- you can't believe he's sitting there telling us," she said. "He was entertaining you with it."
...
Bob Olander, a Hennepin County social services official who helped Carr get state-funded treatment, said his problems were frighteningly real. "I never sensed for a moment that the game was about a hustle," said Olander. He said Carr had been through a "pretty heavy coke thing and a booze deal" and was having a "moral struggle" over how to raise his daughters while still traversing his own personal mine field.

Some friends wonder: How much of that is in Carr's rear-view mirror, even as he reaches new professional heights? In an interview late last month, he talked of "coming up on three years sober" -- he started drinking again in 2002, then quit after a DWI arrest -- and being less of a jerk these days, though "probably not much less."

Twin Cities businessman Dave Cowley, who has known Carr since the 1970s, said he heard him talk recently about meeting megastars Mick Jagger, Gwyneth Paltrow and Paul McCartney in his role as New York Times columnist. It is a fast crowd for someone trying to conquer his own demons, Cowley said.

"I worry about him," he said. Carr's story is "a gripping story but, you know, it never has an end."

Tom Arnold, Roseanne's ex-husband, was a close friend of Carr's in the early days:

Arnold: We had this running fight about who owed who drugs, which, if you read his book, we got into a fistfight about, and, you know he lost, sadly, because he was bringing it up in front of this girl who I liked from Minneapolis. The local newspaper, the Star Tribune, had just written about how I was sober. I wasn't sober, but she thought I was sober. She liked sober people, so I said I was sober, because I wanted her to like me.

He came up when I was talking to her and said, "You owe me a gram of coke." And I was like, "Shut the fuck up. Get away from me." And he was fucked up. And I could tell he was gonna not shut up. He keeps coming up, and I'm like, "Dude, I'm going to fucking knock you out. I can tell you right now buddy, if you come up one more time, because you're fucking this up for me, I'm going to fucking hit you in the face."

He does it again, and I just had a feeling he wanted to get knocked out, you know, like he's in that mood. And I turn around and I blast him and I end up with a thumb in his eyeball. And the woman saw it and she was disgusted and horrified, so it fucked up that too. But he forgave me. He knew that he started it.

You know, he considered himself a bit of a badass. He was bigger then. We were both fat and we snorted cocaine, which makes no sense. But we both hoped for something better for ourselves. We both thought: If I get my shit together ever, I can make something out of this. I can be a writer, I can be a comic, I can be an actor.
T
Arnold: In 1987, Roseanne had become a big comedy star by then, and she was doing her first HBO special, and asked me to come to L.A. and be her husband on it, ironically. It was my big break. I mean that was big.

It's Saturday night and I'm doing a show in Rochester, Minnesota, and after the show we go to McDonald's. I get into a fight — a fistfight — with the cops, after getting kicked out of McDonald's. I end up in jail. It was my seventh time in jail so I was on a 30-day hold. A psych hold. You know, I'm in a padded cell. I have one call. I have to be in L.A. on Monday morning. I have to get on, at the very worst, a red eye on Sunday night. I have one call and I call Carr.

I was feeling so depressed. And this feeling I've had in my life, like, "Okay, I've gone too far this time. It is over." And [Carr] calls a lawyer in Minneapolis. He's like, "I got the guy." This fucking guy calls the judge on the golf course. The judge has them let me out of the psych hold. I get back to Minneapolis, get on the plane, and my life is completely different because of that.

If I had not showed up for that, and [Roseanne] would have found out I was in jail again, she would have just never spoken to me again. I wouldn't have been a writer on her show.

Tom Arnold, and Ta-Nehisi Coates... Carr was a kingmaker, truly.

I wonder what demons Carr was running from... what he buried deep, and used the drugs -- and tough, anti-woman pose -- to hide. Dead at 58. Rest in Peace; Life Goes On for the living, who choose the good life over stories, wealth and fame. Honesty helps heal. Carr never got that far, I don't think...

Reading those links can help you better understand Coates' literary disgust with white people, and his call for reparations from those who face no consequences for their actions because they are white and connected. David Carr was the embodiment of White Privilege.

Although his job has been left open at the Times since his death last February, today the Times named his replacement. He has a Wikipedia page up.

Jim Rutenberg is a political correspondent for The New York Times, for whom he has written 1600 articles.

Oh, and he's married to an actress...