Cheap Linens Basically Shot Somebody
Many wise commentators have noticed the way that Sarah Palin directly caused Rep. Gabrielle Gifford to be shot by using the graphic image of the crosshairs of a rifle scope to “target” her in an act of political speech. Indeed, Palin might as well have just pulled the trigger herself, and I propose we let [...]
Our Top Three Enemies Are Drugs, Terrorism, and Human Dignity
In 1991, a police officer in Wareham, Massachusetts thought a 14 year-old girl might be hiding some marijuana. So he told her to unbutton her pants, standing out in the open next to a cranberry bog, and he conducted a long and very attentive search inside her underwear. Going through the places where a dude [...]
pretty much
freedom: it just put your ass in a biometric database
I don’t know if I’ve ever loved a news story the way that I love this one from USA Today. See, the U.S. military needs to identify insurgents in Afghanistan, so it’s using retina scanners and fingerprint scanners to build a database encompassing “all Afghan males of fighting age.” Then they lift fingerprints from a [...]
max boot, shameless lying asshole
“Above all, the terrible fear of Saddam and his secret police, of the knock in the night, has been lifted. Numerous radio and TV shows, newspapers and magazines air a variety of viewpoints, and politicians from a multiplicity of parties compete in free and fair elections.” — Max Boot, Winning the Peace in Iraq, the [...]
Getting a Clue
Marc Grisham was hired in 2004 to be the city manager in Pittsburg, California, a working class city of 65,000 people. His contract is below. Grisham’s starting salary was $169,000 a year. His contract was amended five times in the years since. By 2008, he was making a base salary of $231,938 a year (see [...]
how to show the limits of your humanity in one easy step
Over the last year, the Los Angeles Times has reported a long investigative series on abused children who died while under the protection of the LA County Department of Child Protective Services. On Wednesday, the county Board of Supervisors voted to open an investigation…
…to catch the county employees who are leaking documents to the Los [...]
the empire has a glitch
I left one thing out of my post on Todd Purdum’s empire worship, yesterday: the main point. I got distracted by the glorious awfulness of Purdum’s ponderous paragraphs, and lost track of the indescribable blindness that he shares with the subjects of his worshipful journalism.
Purdum argues that Washington is “broken,” that procedural disfunction prevents the [...]
let’s just eat the whole thing (II)
Between 2000 and 2010, the cost of living went up by about 30%.
In the same period in the city where I live — West Hollywood, California — government salaries went up by rates that, in many instances, come remarkably close to 100%. (The city manager’s salary growth actually topped 100%, as I’ve already noted.)
The proof [...]
i’m empty without something to obey
Ron Burgundy, royal retainer. Todd Purdum has just written the most perfect self-parody of late-imperial ruling class thought in, like, forever. Teasing Purdum’s 10,000-word Vanity Fair slopfest on its website, the magazine’s editors introduce the effort with these terrifying words: “Using history as his backdrop, Purdum spends a day inside the West Wing…”
Oh dear.
“It used to [...]