Every 2.5 Days A Construction Worker Dies in Texas
{Image description: Photo of a large banner displayed in front of a (government?) building. The banner reads “Every 2.5 Days A Construction Worker Dies in Texas.” The foreground of the photo is entirely occupied by black coffins.}
As I’ve previously blogged, I’m not a big fan of the racist name of Washington’s football team. I’m pleased to report that more and more publications are taking this stand and not using the name, including Slate, The New Republic, The Washington City Paper, and Mother Jones. I’ve also enjoyed some of the suggestions for new names, including Pigskins, Griffins,
“Washington’s pro football team” or, if we get sassy, “the Washington [Redacted].”
My favorite, apparently from Huffington Post reporter Arthur Delaney:
This team should be called the Washington Department of Football. . . . At least two former Skins players were known as secretaries of defense, including Dexter Manley and David Deacon Jones. So clearly, this is a name that would honor local tradition much better than ‘Redskins’ does.
Go Bureaucrats!*
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* Defined, my Dad always said, as a Democrat who has a job a Republican wants.
First, a confession: I am the farthest thing from a cyclist.* I own a clunky purple bicycle with upright handle bars and two scruffy panniers. I ride not in spandex but in dorky jeans with one cuff rolled up or — even more fashionistically — rubber-banded. My cycling is limited to a one mile radius of my house, and consists 90% of biking to meet with my co-counsel at the University of Denver law school (.5 miles) in good weather.**
I’m providing this long-winded disclaimer because I’m about to go ballistic in defense of cycling.
WTF is it about cycling that makes conservatives so irrational? I mean, more irrational than usual.*** I blogged earlier about one Dorothy Rabinowitz who believed that a privately-sponsored bike-share program was a totalitarian plot to “begrime” the city of New York.
After Ms. Rabinowitz was widely ridiculed — including a Daily Show segment — she responded. As I’m sure you’ll be shocked to learn, the rationality quotient was not noticeably higher than in her earlier rant. Ask the police, she said, “[t]hey know the . . . helpless screams.” Helpless screams? Of bicycle victims? As my cousin Sproule pointed out — in my first guest post!**** —
of the 136 pedestrians killed in NYC in 2012, NONE were reportedly killed by cyclists, but all of the 155 pedestrians and cyclists killed in NYC traffic in the same year (15,465 were injured) were killed by motorists
But Sproule is probably just one of those cyclists “careening down the sidewalk in all of his splendid self-affirming environmental helpist mood . . .” “Helpist?” “Helpist???” You know when a conservative puts an “ist” on the end of a word, that means it’s a bad thing, so we’ve reached the apotheosis of Randian libertarianism, I guess, when helping is a bad thing.
“Hi. Can I give you a hand with that?”
“Back off, helpist scum! Stop trying to spread your insidious helpism. It’s a slippery slope to thoughtfulism and considerationism.”
But The Divine Ms. R isn’t alone in her irrational anti-bike freak out. Apparently L.A. is thinking of creating bike lanes. Cue right wing talk radio:
Look at these bicyclists, as if they belong to a bizarre cult that worships two-wheel transportation, not a traditional God, not Jesus or Allah, or Jehova, not the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, they’re like a pagan group, but they don’t even worship trees. Or nature. But they worship two-wheel transportation. And they have their vestments that they wear, their skintight brightly colored clothing, that you don’t see anywhere else, just like in church … you only see this kind of clothing when they’re on the bike in the midst of their worship. They want to be in a special cult.
…
This is oppressive. I mean, we’re being held hostage by a minority. It’s the tyranny of the micro-minority here.
Luckily
there comes a tipping point where drivers are going to stop putting up with this garbage. Toll lanes. Carpool lanes. Bike lanes. Everything but lanes for cars where we can drive freely.
That’s right, let’s stop the fascistic imposition of bike lanes and carpool lanes on our naturally-occurring, capitalistically-financed, individualistically-maintained, Ayn-Rand-approved, wtf-are-you-talking-about public fucking streets. We made a series of public decisions that we would all pay to create and maintain streets and highways for these assholes and their cars (and, um, my car too – thanks!), that we’d pay police to monitor them, and that we’d all get to breathe their exhaust whether we like it or not. We’re now making public decisions to accommodate and promote other, less dangerous, less noxious forms of transportation, and it’s totalitarianism and hostage-taking?
What is it about bicycles that makes conservatives lose their shit? I think New York Magazine has the answer, in a helpful Venn diagram:
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*What’s the proper term here? I said “biker” once and was informed that that term is limited to big hairy guys on motorcycles. “Bicyclist” seems sort of formal. “Cyclist”? “Badass mofos on two wheels?”
** In bad weather, I somehow always find a good excuse to drive, which is especially embarrassing because large numbers of students drive from somewhere else in the Denver metro area, park at the end of our street, and walk to the school.
*** OK, maybe not as irrational as killing abortion doctors in the name of defending life, or preventing loving couples from getting married in the name of defending marriage. But pretty damn irrational.
**** I love guest posts! Wanna be a guest blogger? Just ask!
A bakery near Denver is refusing to make a cake for a same-sex couple. While this is covered by the state’s anti-discrimination laws, it would also be an excellent case for my proposed Anti-Butthead Act. According to the Denver Post,
The shop’s owner, . . . [stated] that he has a strong stance toward the biblical view of marriage between one man and one woman.
I’m wondering if Mr. Phillips checks the Biblical-compliance status of his other customers. Does he ask his one-man/one-woman couples if they’ve had sex before the marriage. Awkward! Adultery and coveting of neighborhood wives? Also awkward! Theft? Does he do a criminal background check? How about honoring mom and dad? He needs to check on that, too, right?
This falls solidly within the black letter of the Anti-Butthead Act’s mandate: “Don’t be a Butthead.” Or, in the words of the colleague from whose Facebook post I blatantly stole this idea, “Just make the fucking cake, you dope!”
New York City recently started a bike-share program. It’s my understanding that the program is sponsored by Citibank — a capitalist institution last time I checked — and that participation is voluntary, that is, no one is being forced by brownshirts to ride borrowed bicycles.
According to Wall Street Journal editorial board member Dorothy Rabinowitz, I may have this all wrong.*
As helpfully transcribed by Talking Points Memo:
“Do not ask me to enter the mind of the totalitarians running this government of the city,” Rabinowitz said when asked what she thought was the motivation behind the program.
“Look, I represent the majority of citizens. . . .The majority of citizens of this city are appalled by what has happened and I would like to say to people who don’t live in New York that this means something much more than the specifics of this dreadful program. It means: envision what happens when you get a government that is run by an autocratic mayor or other leader and a government before which you are helpless. We now look at a city whose best neighborhoods are absolutely begrimed, is the word, by these blazing blue Citi Bank bikes — all of the finest, most picturesque parts of the city. It is shocking to walk around the city to see how much of this they have sneaked under the radar in the interest of the environment.”
“Begrimed”? Is that even a word? And here is the scene that Ms. Rabinowitz finds begrimy:
There are plenty of things in NYC that might properly be called grimy — though it’s possible that Ms. Rabinowitz does not encounter any of them between the limo and the doorman — but this does not seem to satisfy any common language definition of the term.
What this is, of course, is another example of Conservative Linguistic Debasement: “totalitarian” simply means “something a conservative does not like.” It doesn’t have to relate to “a political regime based on subordination of the individual to the state and strict control of all aspects of the life and productive capacity of the nation especially by coercive measures.” It just has to piss off a conservative.
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* Having sat through most of the video editorial, I agree with James Fallows: “Henceforth when you read the Journal‘s editorials, I invite you to hear this voice, expression, and tone. . . . Onion writers, watch and weep.”
In my newsfeed.
Love that it only has 837 likes, suggesting (1) that rank and file Colorado Republicans are not as bloodthirsty as their party; (2) that Colorado Republicans are so tech unsavvy that they aren’t on or don’t know how to use Facebook; or (3) that Colorado Republicans aren’t awake before 9:00 on a Sunday.
Following up on my post of a couple of days ago, I was very happy to learn that Gov. Hickenlooper granted an indefinite stay of execution to Nathan Dunlop. While I wish it had been a full commutation, this is a good result.
With fee shifting.
Consider the following case:
This case, although likely tough to bring under current antidiscrimination law, would be resolved on a plaintiff’s summary judgment motion under the Anti-Butthead Act, the key provision of which reads, “Don’t be a butthead.” The high school, although fully entitled to implement whatever religious principles it wants,* is being buttheaded about a very simple thing. Let the kid wear whatever damn gown he wants.
His family says
they’re not expecting the school to change policy by next week, but hope the school would consider eventually having all students wear the same colored gowns to avoid the situation all together.
Laudable non-buttheaded thinking!
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*I am completely unqualified to opine on Christian doctrine, but I thought it had more to do with loving your fellow human than what color gown he’s wearing.
Arapahoe County DA George Brauchler lives in an upside down world where strapping someone to a gurney and injecting him with lethal chemicals is “courageous” and deciding not to do this is “cruel and unjust.”
In a letter to the governor supporting the execution of Nathan Dunlap, Mr. Brauchler
questioned the motives and ethics of those who have argued on Dunlap’s behalf, and those who diagnosed and treated him for mental illness.
“Questioned the motives”? Questioned? The motive is, um, to keep Colorado from executing Mr. Dunlap. Not sure what’s in question. It’s right out there in the open.
Pause for disclosure of my motive: My view is that the death penalty is wrong and that my state should not execute Mr. Dunlap. Even if you generally favor or are undecided on the death penalty in the abstract, however, there are many, many reasons why it would be wrong in this case. You can read the clemency petition here, write to Governor Hickenlooper, or call him at 303-866-2471. 5280 magazine published a long article in 2008 that spelled out the history of the case.
Back to snarking on the DA.
Mr. Brauchler decries the “abandonment of professional ethics.” The ethics of trying to keep someone alive? I don’t think that word means what he thinks it means. I have scoured the Colorado Rules of Professional Conduct and can find nothing suggesting it is unethical to urge the governor not to kill someone.
The DA characterizes as “convenient ‘scientific’ epiphanies” — the scare quotes around “scientific” are his — the now widely-accepted conclusion that Mr. Dunlap had a severe, undiagnosed mental illness when he committed the crime for which he is to be executed. The diagnosis at which Mr. Brauchler sneers is one that has, since Mr. Dunlap’s sentencing, been confirmed and treated by Department of Corrections doctors.
More scare quotes. Can’t you just see him wiggling the first two fingers of each hand when he complains that
our state’s leaders are asked to accept as ‘objective’ evidence the conclusions of the anti-death penalty movement’s ‘best and brightest’ experts, and to ignore their obvious collaborative biases . . .
Well, the movement does have some excellent (“best”) and very smart (“brightest”) people, who work together (“collaborate”) to do what they think is right (“bias”?). Ouch!
And his letter
called assertions by the defense that race plays a role in imposing the death penalty in Colorado “vile, disgusting and offensive.”
Those are the adjectives you use when you don’t have facts. In fact, as of 2010, 41% of prisoners under sentence of death in the US were black, while only 13.6% of the population as a whole is black. There are three people on Colorado’s death row; all three are black. Studies in other states have shown that blacks killing whites are much more likely to get the death penalty than any other permutation, and that prosecutors are much more likely to seek the death penalty for black defendants.
Ultimately, it is the racism in our criminal justice system that is vile, disgusting, and offensive; not the act of calling attention to that fact.
The clemency petition provides measured, fact-based arguments why it would be a very bad idea to execute Nathan Dunlop. Many people, of many different faiths and backgrounds, agree with this:
All the DA has to offer in return is a salad shooter of insults: cruel; unjust; slap in the face; questionable motives; unethical; “objective” “scientific” evidence; collaborative bias; vile; disgusting; offensive. And the unsupported pronouncement that Mr. Dunlap “took the lives of four Colorado citizens, and justice requires he now pays with his own.”
There is no good reason for this execution; just the satisfaction of the primitive desire for revenge. Guess that’s my bias.
I’ve grown comfortable with it. If anyone has a problem with that, they can see a psychiatrist and work on their problem.
In Vanity Fair, June 2013.
Reminds me of this excellent SNL parody ad. Homocil: Because it’s your problem, not theirs.
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* “Quote of the Randomly Selected Time Interval.” Because “Quote of the Day” would be too much pressure.
Thought Snax 