Several days after the election, while my in-laws were at their local gym, someone slipped this under their windshield wiper:
That’s right, some industrious jerk in Parker, Colorado, took it upon himself to create and print these little flyers, and walk around putting them on his neighbors’ cars. Getting an early start on the 2016 GOP Campaign to Win Votes through Random Insults.
Who knows?
Just last Sunday, Mitt Romney was touting the benefits of Universal Emergency Room Healthcare. Yesterday, he apparently decided that sounded too crass, not to mention thoroughly ineffective. Via Risking Conservative Ire, Romney Touts Romneycare | TPM2012.
“[D]on’t forget — I got everybody in my state insured,” Romney told NBC. “One hundred percent of the kids in our state had health insurance. I don’t think there’s anything that shows more empathy and care about the people of this country than that kind of record.”
In other words, “message: I care,” . . . every third day until November 6.
I’m sure this has been covered more thoroughly, eloquently, and learnedly elsewhere, but how the hell can Romney say this with a straight face:
In the 60 Minutes interview, Romney protested the idea that government doesn’t already provide health care to the uninsured: “Well, we do provide care for people who don’t have insurance,” he said. “If someone has a heart attack, they don’t sit in their apartment and die. We pick them up in an ambulance, and take them to the hospital, and give them care. And different states have different ways of providing for that care.”
So no mammograms, but once the cancer has metastasized to your lungs and you stop breathing, an ambulance will take you to the emergency room.
No dialysis, but when your kidneys fail, an ambulance will take you to the emergency room.
No annual physical, but when you have a heart attack, the ambulance is ready!
This isn’t about those grabby poor people Romney has clearly written off. It’s about people who are too rich for Medicaid but too poor to buy their own health insurance. And THAT category includes many hourly workers, independent contractors, and people who are starting their own businesses. Future job creators rather than current job destroyers.
And how on earth is his plan pro-life? Seriously — you can defend this approach on doctrinaire libertarian grounds, but how can you square it with the position that life is sacred and that the government has a legitimate role in protecting it?
Scalia Suggests ‘Hand-Held Rocket Launchers’ Are Protected Under Second Amendment | ThinkProgress.
Can you guess why Scalia suggests hand-held rocket launchers are protected under the Second Amendment? Because you can “bear” them. That is, you can, theoretically, lift them onto your shoulder. So for this reason, “it does not apply to cannons.” I swear this is not The Onion. Seriously, folks, if we’re going for originalism, we can’t stop with the bright line between hand-held rocket launchers and cannons. Clearly your Second Amendment rights, per Scalia, are calibrated to the amount of weight you can bench press. Clearly this guy’s
constitutional rights are greater than mine, given that I’m not sure I could heft a Saturday Night Special. But this, too, is flawed as originalism goes because at the time the Second Amendment was drafted, wasn’t the average body size smaller? Shouldn’t we all be limited to the weapons that the average late 18th Century constitution-drafter could heft? And if “bear” means only what it meant in 1781, how can freedom of the “press” apply to the internet?
Of which, of course, I’d be Chief.
Our jurisdiction would be broad: grammar; punctuation; semantics. But our most important task would be punishing language abuse. Today’s perp: The NYT. The charges are based on a sentence fragment in today’s Times that is superficially just crappy writing, but is in fact stunningly offensive. In an article discussing Michelle Obama’s white ancestors, the writer makes clear that the family of the First Lady’s white great-great-great-grandfather owned her great-great-great grandmother. At the time their child — Mrs. Obama’s great-great-grandfather, Dolphus T. Shields — was conceived, the white slave-owner was 20; his slave only 15. The article continues:
Such forbidden liaisons across the racial divide inevitably bring to mind the story of Thomas Jefferson and his slave Sally Hemings. Mrs. Obama’s ancestors, however, lived in a world far removed from the elegance of Jefferson’s Monticello, his 5,000-acre mountain estate with 200 slaves. They were much more typical of the ordinary people who became entangled in America’s entrenched system of servitude.
Just a bunch of random, ordinary people of, you know, a couple of different skin colors, who — passive voice! — became entangled, you know, like you do when you are charging too many electrical devices and the cords end up on the floor, or your dog puts one too many rope toys in front of the back door and, you just, you know, become entangled. No one’s fault. That lethal system of violently-asserted racial superiority, oppression, and death was just lying around entangling ordinary people.
Rachel L. Swarns, you are under arrest for First Degree Language Abuse.
Ms. Swarns — who has apparently written a book about Ms. Obama’s multiracial ancestors — goes on to perpetrate this egregious sentence, which may form the basis of a referral to my colleagues with the Journalism Police or possibly the History Police.
[Ms. Obama’s great-great-great grandmother] had more biracial children after the Civil War, giving some of the white Shieldses hope that her relationship with [the white slave-owner] was consensual.
W.T.F. There is no universe in which the sexual relationship between a master and a slave can be consensual. Nor did the end of the Civil War magically turn former slaves and their former owners into free agents.
I get the motive for this: we don’t want to offend the tender feelings of Mrs. Joan Tribble — “a retired bookkeeper who delights in her two grandchildren and her Sunday church mornings” — by suggesting that perhaps some of her distant ancestors were, um …. how can I say this delicately yet factually? … slaveowners. Because of course “[s]ome of Mrs. Tribble’s relatives have declined to discuss the matter beyond the closed doors of their homes, fearful that they might be vilified as racists or forced to publicly atone for their forebears.”
How the hell can we teach history if we’re unwilling to just tell it like it is?
That’s how the headline should have read in the center, front, above-the-fold article in today’s Denver Post. I wish I were kidding.
Douglas Bruce went to jail for 104 days and faced cruel and unusual punishment: the rolls were cold and the gravy tasted funny. And he’s gonna sue.
I don’t know who to be more furious with: Bruce for being a selfish jerk, or the Denver Post for devoting so much space on its front page to a middle class white guy who goes to jail for just over three months and fails to receive gourmet-level cooking.
Denver Post, Mr. Bruce, I’d like you to meet Troy Anderson. Mr. Anderson has been in solitary confinement at the Colorado State Penitentiary for 12 years. In those 12 years, he has not been allowed to exercise outdoors.
I’d have loved to introduce you to Shawn Vigil but, sorry to say, he’s dead. He committed suicide at the Denver County Jail in 2005 — after being locked up for a month in solitary without a sign language interpreter. You see, Mr. Vigil was deaf. He was in solitary with no way to communicate with his jailers. Wonder what he thought of the gravy? Perhaps the Denver Post will write a front page story about that.
Actually, the Denver Post did write about Mr. Vigil’s case when we filed. This many words. Though I don’t have the print edition, I’m confident it wasn’t on page one. Former Post columnist Susan Greene* also wrote about it in more detail, but of course she’s not there any more. Can’t have someone providing nuanced coverage of marginalized people.
Back in the day, Spy Magazine had an equation for how many column inches a story would get in the New York Times based primarily on the number of people killed and the distance of the event from Times Square.** Although I’m not a math major, there has to be some sort of equation at work here: R x C x L x G where R = race, C = class, L = length of sentence, and G = quality of gravy. In the newspaper world, being white (r = 100) and middle class (c=100) will completely outweigh the length of your sentence and other conditions.
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* Full disclosure: Susie is a friend. And also a kick-ass journalist. The lack of her voice (and other recent departures) in the Post makes it not much more than People Magazine: Denver Edition.
** Yes, of course it’s on the internet: the November 1989 issue of Spy Magazine. The equation is on page 56. Check out page 55 for proof that Donald Trump has been annoying us for a long, long time. And generally peruse the issue to take yourself back to a time when being a smart-ass, sarcastic, irony-appreciating young law grad felt fresh and new. Or maybe that was just me.
[June 2: Edited for accuracy.]
This billboard appeared in an African-American neighborhood of Harrisburg, PA. Did no one’s WTF Alarm go off?
When our office was downtown, many Fridays there was a group of people who would gather on the corner, literally wave Bibles, and yell at passersby to convert, be saved, etc. And not a “good news” sort of yelling; a “you’re gonna burn in hell” sort of yelling. I’d wonder, each time I saw them, “has anyone in the history of religion converted because they were yelled at?” I concluded that these people were not out on the corner to actually convert or save people, but to give themselves the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.
The atheists behind this sign and the “Imaginary Friend” sign I wrote about earlier are cut from the same cloth. They’re just yelling at the rest of us that they’re right and we’re wrong. It’s not going to convince anyone, but — like the corner-yellers — it will give them the warm fuzzy feeling of religious superiority.
Since I’m a gmail & Google Docs user, I signed up for Google +, immediately connected with six people, and am never motivated to check it once I’ve caught up with my peeps on Facebook. Apparently neither is anyone else. So Google dug deep into its vaunted stockpile of information about me — law nerd browsing habits, clothing orders from LL Bean and Lands End, Lifehacker addiction — and sent the following email designed to lure me back to Google +:
Uh, no. Thanks. Really, I’ll pass on another time sink, this one devoted to Victoria Justice’s new favorite hat, Britney Spears, and some random dude I’ve never heard of.
I’ve been percolating a post about religion and religious tolerance. It started around the time of Tebowmania, and each time I’d think I had just the right angle, something new and blogworthy would happen, like a panel of celibate dudes lecturing the world on contraception. That post may still occur, but this snippet (sorry!) was too good to wait:
Stephen Colbert on Thursday tackled the practice of posthumously baptizing Holocaust victims into the Mormon church. . . . But “Jews don’t baptize, so instead I will now proxy-circumcise all the dead Mormons,” Colbert said.
The practice of posthumous baptism is fascinating to me from a number of angles. Given that Jews don’t believe that baptism has any significance, our collective response should logically be “knock yourselves out, guys. Enjoy the swim.” But for sheer creepiness, it is really hard to outdo. If I got word that my Jewish ancestors were being, well, not “baptized,” because that is not a meaningful concept to me, but invoked during a Mormon pool party the upshot of which is to say that their religion is better than mine, I’d be good and annoyed. And creeped out.
Stephen Colbert has the answer. Posthumous conversion of Mormons to Jews!
(I couldn’t get the Comedy Central video clip to embed, and I’ve wasted just about enough jury-instruction-drafting time trying. For the full, hilarious, clip, click here.)
I’m thinking of proxy converting everyone, living or dead, to my religion: Unaffiliated Skeptic With A Working Hypothesis of Monotheism. Our main sacrament is Trying to Figure Out What It All Means. All of my new converts would wander around in the same state of religious confusion in which I dwell, engaging in the Sacrament by asking each other, “What do you think it all means?” and listening respectfully to the answer. No special clothing or food required. And most importantly, no oppressing, killing, or even legislating against anyone else’s faith.
Though what this judge thought it meant is beyond me. The awesome Barry Roseman posts a quote of the day for a bunch of us civil rights lawyer types. Here was today’s:
The commission says that the company fired [Donnica Venters] because she wanted to pump breast-milk. Discrimination because of pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical discrimination is unlawful. Related conditions can include cramping, dizziness, and nausea while pregnant.
Even if the company’s claim that she was fired for abandonment is meant to hide the real reason — she was wanted to pump breast-milk — lactation is not pregnancy, childbirth, or a related medical condition. She gave birth on December 11, 2009. After that day, she was no longer pregnant and her pregnancy-related conditions ended.
Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.*
Hold on. You may have missed the last line, so I’ll re-WordPress-special-quote-function it:
Firing someone because of lactation or breast-pumping is not sex discrimination.
Makes total sense: none of the men were permitted to lactate or pump breast milk at work either. QED!
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* EEOC v. Housing Funding II, Ltd., 11-cv-02442 (S.D. Tex. Feb. 2, 2012), slip op. at 2.
Thought Snax 