Thursday Olio: Must Be The Contrails Edition

•Krishna H. Vishnu, Ed Rogers, "The Insider: Why do they hate Bush?"

All the vitriol directed at him bewilders me. Why all the personal animus? It wasn’t because of what he said. Bush never called anyone a name.

Not anyone who wasn't a major league asshole.

His most controversial decisions surrounding the invasion of Iraq were almost universally supported by Democrats at the time.

The majority who didn't believe a President would lie the country into a war, maybe.

Bush brought character to his decision-making. He must have believed what he was doing was right because so many of the decisions he made avoided taking the easy way out and were, at best, politically risky.

Class?  Anyone?

I don’t understand the level of contempt his critics have for him. The only thing I can see is that the left hates much of what he still stands for and how he has lived his life.

You hit the nail of the head there, Ed. Just not the one you were aiming for.

Bush went to church and he was not shy about his Christian faith.  He is a southerner, a Christian, a family man, a conservative and a white Texan, and he beat the Democrats at the ballot box — twice.

Oh, you mean in Texas. Had me goin' there for a minute.

• No finer family than the Lawrence Coonrods.

Lawrence police were called to an apartment at 5766 Devers Drive on Saturday, where they were flagged down by Curtis Coonrod, 58. 

He told police he had been robbed at gunpoint by a man who kidnapped his girlfriend, Cheyenne Poole, 21, and stole his car. 

Coonrod said he and Poole were in the apartment, which he leases for her, when a man burst through the door with a gun, demanding money and saying, "I don't know you. I don't care about you. I will kill you," according to the police report. 

Coonrod told police the man taped him to a chair while forcing Poole to go to an ATM and withdraw $500 using his bank card. 

The man then left with the alarm code to Coonrod's house, taking Poole with him, Coonrod told police. 

Investigators traced Poole's cellphone to Indianapolis' south side, where they spotted her driving Coonrod's stolen car, according to the police report. Poole then led police on a high-speed chase, running stop lights before blowing a tire on stop sticks and eventually stopping, police said. 

Poole and her passenger, Ralph Lopez, 24, were taken into custody. 

Police said Poole then admitted to orchestrating the robbery and kidnapping plot with Lopez, her new boyfriend. 

Poole told police she had met Coonrod on a dating website, "something like SugarDaddy.com," police said, and that he had been supporting her financially for about five months.

Time passes. Two days, anyway.

The woman accused of robbing former Marion County politician Curtis Coonrod plotted against him after feeling overwhelmed by his repeated sexual advances, she told The Indianapolis Star on Wednesday. 

“He wanted kissing and feeling, and that was something that did not interest me at all,” Cheyenne Poole, 21, said in an exclusive interview from the Marion County Jail. “But I never wanted to tell him that, just because I didn’t want him to be angry.” 

Poole confessed to organizing an armed robbery Friday against Coonrod, a former Marion County auditor and City-County Council member. Coonrod has insisted the two were just friends, but Poole said Coonrod wanted something more not long after meeting her on the “SeekingArrangement.com” dating website. Its motto is the “Elite Sugar Daddy Dating Site for those Seeking".

A gentleman never tells:

Coonrod, who is single, told The Star he could not recall having a profile on the dating site but did not deny meeting Poole there. 

“I’ve heard of that site, and I’ve seen it,” said Coonrod, 58, Lawrence. “So I just don’t remember if that’s where I met her. But she says it was, so I’m not disputing that.”… 

“I don’t think it’s appropriate to talk about what we may or may not have done,” Coonrod said. “But I certainly never got the impression that we did anything that made her feel uncomfortable.”

True love waits:

But Coonrod remains convinced Poole is innocent, even saying he feels confident the charges will be dropped. He is furious, he said, that he hasn’t been able to speak to Poole since the robbery. That is because of an order of protection the court placed on Poole, which bans suspects from talking to victims. 

“They are bullies, the Lawrence police detectives,” Coonrod said. “I don’t detect that they are interested in justice. They are interested in proving themselves right, and they decided before there was any evidence that she was guilty.”

Curtis Coonrod is the former Marion country Auditor and two-term City/County councilman. I'll check on his party affiliation and get back to you.

•Damn. I've got me one a' them HD washing machines rotates like a turbojet, and it don't spin like that. Your Weekly Standard:

After being read Miranda rights, the Boston bombing suspect in custody, Dzhokhar Tsarnaev, has stopped talking to authorities, officials tell the Associated Press. 

"The surviving suspect in the Boston Marathon bombings acknowledged to the FBI his role in the attacks but did so before he was advised of his constitutional right to keep quiet and seek a lawyer, U.S. officials said Wednesday," reports the Associated Press.

Good thing he was goin' down anyway, huh? Though in fairness I think we have to admit that the Times We Live In do call for waving your balls around in public, rather than being 10% smarter than your average perp.

But, then, you didn't think I chose Bill Kristol's Monthly Hot Flash as a news source for nothin', did you?

But while it might not "matter in court," it will likely matter in the intelligence gathering process, which will likely be hampered.

And, somewhere, al-Qaeda's Latest #2 Man breathes a little easier.

Thursday Olio: Dark-Skinned Like Me Edition

• Explain to me how ABC let Jake Tapper get away.

I switched on CNN mid-afternoon yesterday, having just been alerted that the world record for running backwards was in danger of being broken. I got there in time to see 1) John "Scoop" King claim that everybody had been doing it, not just he; 2) another reporter insist that the "really important thing" was that the police make a solid case; and 3) King, again, noting that now, he emphasized now, the FBI was saying officially that no one had been arrested.

To which I may have shouted 1) "Not sure if everyone was claiming to have an exclusive, but you sure were"; 2) "Now you tell us"; and 3) "What was the official story all along, John?" The FBI certainly hadn't announced an arrest while you were scooping all the other idiots.

Speaking of which, this was followed by the Jake Tapper Goodtime Hour. Jake was joined by comedian Tom Ridge. This is a question:

We know, of course, Secretary Ridge, that the London marathon, they are now taking extra precautions because of what happened here, just a block or so away, uh, here in Boston, and in the very near future we're going to see huge crowds at the Indy 500, at the Kentucky Derby; how do we, as a society, and how does the Federal government keep people safe at these massive events?

I guess everybody's been asking that question. It's just that most of us used six or seven words, tops.

Here was the sign-off:

All right, former Pennsylvania governor, veteran, and Secretary of Homeland Security Tom Ridge, thanks so much for joining us.

I know, I suffer from buffo italic incontinence, but that's really the way he said "veteran". Th' hell was responsible for that? Do Ridge's people insist it be included in his litany of honoraria and sinecures? Is that just part of Tapper's oral sex technique? Were they too short to fit "member of the Home Depot Board of Directors" in there? A few glazing techniques for all those blown-out windows couldn't hurt, could it?

• When last we viewed the historic grain silo in Carmel, Indiana, Indianapolis' neighbor to the Great White North, it was a pile of rubble lying next to the Monon Trail, whence it had been knocked, in such a hurry (over fears that the local Save Our Silo movement might actually interfere with development) that no one bothered to notice the large quantity of pesticides that had once been stored inside, and now was stored, rather more randomly, in the vicinity. This put the ki-bosh on the development deal the mayor and his pals had made with some of his other pals, so they had to find some different pals to make a deal with, after cleaning the site up. Possibly.

The new deal is with Pedcor Development, which reportedly has done a lot of development work in Carmel over the last decade, but which, it turns out, might have a hint of the tar brush:

Pedcor, the city’s partner in much of its redevelopment over the past decade, is known to be a developer of Section 42 projects, which use tax credits to provide for rent-controlled, affordable housing.

Saying "affordable" in Carmel is a lot like saying "radioactive" elsewhere. So the City council, which, in fairness, does have a black friend, wants more information before signing off on Industrial Recovery Tax Credits, a state program that sluices the redevelopment of old industrial areas via local kingpins.

Such as, wonder of wonders, the  one piece of real estate along the Monon Trail that Carmel hasn't developed already.

[Councilwoman Lucy] Snyder [said] at a council meeting Monday night, “My concerns, for this or any other project in this area — just north of City Center and the Palladium, and south of the Arts and Design District — is that whatever is proposed is of high quality both in design and materials.

I guess it's lucky you built the water tower next door, and the adjacent Public Works sheds, a while back. Before the price of gold skyrocketed.

Snyder said she thinks a Section 42 proposal might be questionable, given the location. She said she is not opposed to such a project in Carmel but said it might be better suited for another area, such as the Old Meridian corridor.

Right. Or Dumptown. Or the Historic Lead Paint Quarter. Or Somewhere Th' Hell Out of Hamilton County. 

Tax support is best used, Snyder said, for major projects that will bring more jobs to the city. 

“You tell me,” she said. “How is a project like that considered a job-producing project?”

These are the same people who signed a blank check to build an Arts Palace, which so far has produced a half-million-a-year job for Michael Feinstein, some gainful, if temporary, employment for the former mistress of the former CEO, plus some ticket takers and concessionaires, who live god knows where. They're the same people who signed off on millions of dollars of roundabout construction, because stoplights are for little people. And "construction jobs" were part of the sales pitch. They're $250 million in debt, that they admit to, and the official position on that is "Who cares? We're rich!" I'm not making that up.

Didn't there used to be some sort of Federal regulation about housing discrimination?

• Speaking of things blowing up, West Fertilizer Co. did, taking West, Texas, with it, despite the fact that its EPA report said the greatest risk at the plant was a worker improperly refrigerating an egg salad sandwich.

This morning CBS had on Bill Flores, Texas Congressman, which is a nice way of saying "Insane". And Norah O'Donnell, which is a nice way of saying "Hairdo", sorta asked him about it, kinda. You know, leaving out that if it were up to Bill Flores there'd be no EPA, an' stuff:

Well, y'know, those estimates are based on systems operating as they should, and you never know, uh, what mechanical problem may have occurred or if there was a human mistake, a human error that caused, uh, some, uh, uh, mix of chemicals to get together to start this fire. Once the fire starts then uh, uh, any EP, any estimate made to the EPA is not gonna necessarily be valid.

Yes, estimates of potential risk assumes everything functioning perfectly. Tell us something we don't know.

Flores was generous enough to thank John Boehner for sending in FEMA, despite Texas' aversion to Federal assistance.

• Speaking of broadcasting pictures of your naked ass, it appears now that much hinges on who owns the ox, and who the pike:

Three Fairfax County high school students made cellphone videos of drunken sex acts with fellow teens and shared them among themselves, authorities said. When they go on trial Thursday, they face a charge usually reserved for adult predators: child pornography. 

The case is one of a number in Virginia where teens caught “sexting” have been charged with a felony that can carry a sentence of 20 years in prison and could require registry as a sex offender. 

In Virginia, Maryland and many other states, the law has not caught up with the combustible mix of teens, technology and sex that has made sexting an issue. Prosecutors must rely on a patchwork of laws created before the rise of smart­phones to handle such cases.

I'm sorry; caught up with?

Some parents and rights groups are calling for a new law that would distinguish sexting from child pornography, create lesser punishments and focus on educating teenagers, not punishing them. But they also acknowledge that young victims can be devastated when embarrassing photos or videos are spread among their peers.

Well, that's big of 'em. Especially since it's "parents and rights groups" which pushed for strict child pornography laws in the first place, because of the victims.

This is why we have a juvenile justice system. It's also why our laws are designed to protect the innocent. No judge should sentence a teen sexter to 20 years for something innocent and kid-foolish. But no 15 or 16 year-old doesn't understand that taking surreptitious nude photos, or broadcasting them all over, is wrong, and criminally so. Cell phones don't make it any different. A cell phone is not a defense. Its what the courts ought to make those parents eat. In public.

At Least We Now Know What It Takes To Get Some Of The Nation's Top Conservative Intellectuals To Mention Gun Restrictions

Charles Krauthammer, "The roots of mass murder". December 20

Jennifer Rubin, "Dear Commission: About those guns…" December 20

WE'RE going to cover this in more detail in a bit, but, first, let's just correct the willful misrepresentation of legislative efficaciousness: it is true that the 1994 so-called Assault Weapons so-called ban did not appreciably reduce the national gun homicide rate. This is less surprising, perhaps, if one recalls that 1985's Gramm-Rudman act did nothing to prevent Phil Gramm or Warren Rudman. And their names were right there on the bill.

Anyway, today Chuckles Krauthammer's trying to be reasonable, and Jennifer Rubin is trying to be smart. Let's look in. Chuck?

Every mass shooting has three elements: the killer, the weapon and the cultural climate. As soon as the shooting stops, partisans immediately pick their preferred root cause with corresponding pet panacea. Names are hurled, scapegoats paraded, prejudices vented. The argument goes nowhere.

I dunno; like the man said, even the truly worthless can serve as a bad example.

Let's begin with Columbine. The screaming about "The Culture" began there before anyone knew anything about Harris and Klebold, and it went on long, strong, and without regard for facts. It gave all the impression, in fact, of being a pat and partisan response to the entire question of gun violence.

Japanese culture is stomach-churningly violent. No one there ever kills anybody. The rest of the world watches our movies and plays our video games; we have four times the homicide rate, and four times the firearms-homicide rate, of comparably-developed countries.

And while we're at it, leave us just point out that the argument over "culture" is a partisan political talking point which got appended to the issue of school violence just because it was handy, and just because cultural arguments are made incontinently, without full consideration. The violence in American culture isn't just Tarantino and Peckinpah movies, and thrill-kill video game anarchy. We lead the globe in martial glorification, too. More innocents died at Fallujah than at Newtown. Our somber reflection on the hopeless, needless, and utterly worthless global slaughter that was the First World War, once known as Armistice Day, is now demonstrated by putting a few of our surplus hi-tech bombers to work wowing the rubes down below.

The killer? Are we actually proposing to control human psychology now? All the babbling about the Motive of Adam Lanza seems like carnival rubbernecking.

Weapons, on the other hand, well, time hasn't diminished that argument any. Guns kill. Assault-styled weapons kill massively.

I have no problem in principle with gun control. Congress enacted (and I supported) an assault weapons ban in 1994. The problem was: It didn’t work. (So concluded a University of Pennsylvania study commissioned by the Justice Department.) The reason is simple. Unless you are prepared to confiscate all existing firearms, disarm the citizenry and repeal the Second Amendment, it’s almost impossible to craft a law that will be effective.

And unless we are prepared to eliminate, or ameliorate, the money that flows into both parties from those who profit on firearm sales, such laws will always be watered-down, and subject to repeal as soon as the heat's off. This crap about how the Assault Weapon ban "didn't work" is just that. It wasn't comprehensive enough, and it wasn't in place long enough to begin to dent the supply.

Although, yes, it's entirely correct that a solution would require us to confiscate guns, at least for inspection (the way many states do motor vehicles). And, yes, the attempt would probably be met with gunplay. Which kinda proves the point.

Monsters shall always be with us, but in earlier days they did not roam free. As a psychiatrist in Massachusetts in the 1970s, I committed people — often right out of the emergency room — as a danger to themselves or to others. I never did so lightly, but I labored under none of the crushing bureaucratic and legal constraints that make involuntary commitment infinitely more difficult today.

Why do you think we have so many homeless? Destitution? Poverty has declined since the 1950s. The majority of those sleeping on grates are mentally ill. In the name of civil liberties, we let them die with their rights on.

We didn't turn 'em out in the first place because of civil liberties. We did so so that Ronald Reagan could prove that cutting budgets saved money.

If we’re serious about curtailing future Columbines and Newtowns, everything — guns, commitment, culture — must be on the table. It’s not hard for President Obama to call out the NRA. But will he call out the ACLU? And will he call out his Hollywood friends?

Well, assuming that at some point you actually demonstrate some causative connection between cartoon violence and real violence, th' fuck happened to the argument about it taking 100 years to get rid of things?

And, once more: this "Hollywood lefties" thing is just an old wingnut stalking horse trotted out so it sounds like you have something to add to the conversation. Just how much Hollywood violence is there, these days? I doubt it compares to the ultraviolence of video games, which dwarf the amount of time and attention young males spend on blockbuster theatrical releases. Who's supposed to talk to the techie libertoonians who market those, eh?

And by the way: it's common knowledge that over the last forty years, sex would earn a movie a restricted rating a lot faster than violence would. Which end of the political spectrum is responsible for that? You're the guys making fun of hippies for banning toy guns.

I'm sorry, Ms Rubin; you were trying to sound serious for once?

3. Criminal and civil liability. Parents, relatives and guardians who knowingly allow persons with diagnosed mentally illness access to firearms should bear legal responsibility. That might get the attention of some homeowners and drive the discussion of gun safety and security.

Has your party been keeping its platform from you the last forty years? Were you overseas, or in a worse coma than usual, in 2004, when a Republican administration with effective control of both Houses exempted gun manufacturers and retailers from all liability for firearms use, in perpetuity? Which end of the political spectrum of the Court ruled fucking trigger locks un-Constitutional?

7. [sic] Voluntary advanced certification program for principals. If school principals want to undergo specific training and be qualified to handle a gun and respond in an emergency that should be an option for schools and those principals. Even if not all (or even most) do the deterrent effect (like air marshals) will have some effect.

Understand that I speak from some expertise in the field: nobody who knows anything about school administrators in this country would ever suggest such a thing. Hell, nobody who actually knows school administrators will recommend they administer schools, let alone while packing.

8. Fund some studies on the impact of media coverage of mass shootings. Do they contribute to other such crimes? Let’s look.

While we're at it, how 'bout we study where the PR campaign to absolve weapons of all blame has gotten us?

9. Study the impact of the 1994 assault weapons ban.

Actually, the assumption here is that such weapons facilitate the sort of mass slaughter we saw a week ago, and that they have little if any legal justification for ownership. Which makes them a prime target for the sort of incremental change such a law might begin to affect.

Meanwhile, you'll have to excuse the assumption that anyone looking for opportunities to nit-pick such a ban has a political agenda, not a practical one. I suppose it beats assuming that you just dislike school children.

Okay, So What Have We Refused To Learn So Far?

DOES it matter the subject, or the day?

I'm an asshole. I'm a shit-flinger. I haven't really tried to hide it, for all the good that would do.

But let me assure you, I do have a positive suggestion: every network that uses the public airwaves, every cable outlet that went wall-to-wall about Newtown, every post-facto enlightened spokesman like Joe Scarborough should, from this day, broadcast pictures of the twenty-six victims at Sandy Hook, individually on their birthdays, collectively on December 14. Followed by a demonstration of the capabilities of a Bushmaster brand M16 on a child-sized block of ballistics gelatin.

By the way, in case I haven't mentioned it, I Heart Pierce:

But if Senator Joe [Manchin] wants to convince me this change of mind is anything but a tentative nod toward what he thinks might be a changing political reality regarding guns — and, to me, that's still really up in the air — then here's what he can do. He can call a press conference today and announce that he is resigning from the NRA unless and until Wayne LaPierre and the rest of the executive board is fired, and unless and until the organization ceases to create through its mailings and its rhetoric a universe of armed paranoia in the land, and unless and until the NRA stops aiding and abetting — and profiting from — the continued existence and propagation of that paranoia. Then I'll believe him. Oh, and if he publicly apologized for that idiotic commercial wherein he shot cap-and-trade legislation with his personal shootin' 'arn, that would be nice, too. 

As for Scarborough, well, it seems he's offering a little Beltway horse trading here. If you crack down on video games, I'll consider cracking down on guns. Nice to have you aboard, Joe. Now sit down. examine your conscience for past sins, and then shut up while the people who have been doing the real work on this issue for the 20 years in which you were carrying water for the gun industry go about their business again.

There's one other thing they can do for me: spend every night for the rest of their lives haunted in their dreams.

Too harsh? Did either one of these guys really not understand what doing the bidding of the NRA meant?

[Manchin, by the way, claimed, belatedly, that "nobody goes hunting with these sorts of weapons", which, as anyone who's ever been in the woods in Southern Indiana on the first day of squirrel season can tell you, is just plain disingenuous.]

As for the attendant discussions, the main thing they demonstrate to me is that the ability to reason, or even to understand the distinction between Law and Oprah reruns, is in serious jeopardy. Mental health? The Mental Health Establishment is like the modern aircraft carrier: good at pushing around defenseless targets, but in a real war it has to drop all its offensive operations and scramble to keep afloat. What's kept you guys from solving the problem before now? Where were you when Reagan eviscerated the public mental health program? Busy exploring the market in telling parents there was something wrong with their children for smoking marihuana the same as the parents did? How'd that work out? Great, if you market Adderall.

Video games and violence in the culture? Sheesh, ask the Mental Health Establishment to back you up on this one. You do realize that a lot of those kids are playing first-person military shooters, right? What we just sent another generation of Americans to do for realz? Except the kids' enemies are more realistically portrayed. The goddam culture thrives on lying to these young people, and insists they swallow it whole, and then, when it comes down to it, lies to their faces again, in ways that not only do the kids know isn't true, but in ways they know the people saying it know isn't true. I was listening to NPR in the car yesterday, and some mental health professional--clincal psychiatrist or neurologist or something, not some chopped liver psych major--was bemoaning the legalization of maryjane in her home state. It was an updated version of Harry Anslinger's rap, minus the Mexicans and Chinese; weed is still a Gateway drug, but now (now that that claim is too laughable to make, that is), it's a Gateway to Dropping Out. The role of the modern psych professional is to make sure everyone realizes his full potential in IT somewhere.

Farhad Manjoo explains why we don't have smart guns. Control of killing machines is waaaay overdue, but I caution that Looking Hard at Problems and Attempting to Solve Them is something Slate should undertake very slowly, like an abdominal surgery patient approaches solid food. There are 200 million guns in this country. How long would it take all of them to be replaced by smart tech? Maybe we should legislate an upgrade? Let's announce the recall in Slate.

Fer chrissakes. No, we cannot legislate human nature, cannot legislate Evil out of existence, can't even be sure Dawn will arrive on schedule. None of that changes the capacity of automatic (semi-; who gives a shit) weapons, large volume clips, and high-velocity shells to inflict enormities, like the most recent one, like the next one. Sure, bombs can, too. I remind you, it's illegal to own those.

Nancy Lanza was 52. That means she was forty years old when the Columbine massacre screamed across the headlines. Yet she had an emotionally disturbed child, semi-automatic weapons, and she taught him to shoot. Our Precious Freedoms are too fragile for society at large to've demanded she keep them under lock and key. We can't legislate sanity, or common sense, and it's too late to discuss either with her. We can stop looking for easy answers, and start holding people accountable for facilitating this sort of thing in the name of profit.

And we can show those pictures, and make sure no one forgets, until things get better.

Principles, Not Principals

I TUNED in This Week yesterday morning, excited that, according to my U-verse info button, they'd coaxed the elusive John McCain out of hiding. 

He was, sadly, bumped. The Roundtable began when Georgie S. tossed to George Eff:

STEPHANOPOULOS: And, George, let me begin with you. And I watched those clips from earlier this week and Friday and Saturday, and there's a depressing sameness to the conversation coming out of these tragedies.

WILL: Yes. And our response is always to think that there's some defect in the social system or some prompting in the social atmosphere that causes this and, therefore, we assume, we can tailor a law to correct the defect.

Okay, let's hit Pause right there (as I did) and regard this. Hold it up to the light and admire the patina. This was the Conservative answer fifty years ago, when George Eff was a Goldwater supporter, and it's still the answer today, thirty years since the Republican party started tailoring the laws to its own vision of social defects. It sounds like principle; in practice it acts like anything but.

That's not your take on reproductive rights, George. Not for the last forty years, anyway, forty years of social disruption based on nothing but the idea that we could tailor the law to assuage your moral qualms (in some still unspecified fashion).  

I didn't think that when I hit pause, the better to hear exactly what was said. What I thought was "Th' fuck's wrong with that?  Why wouldn't a sane people recoil from this slaughter, and want to do everything in its power to prevent another?" I'll wager that for a sizable number of our fellow citizens obeying the legal niceties was not the first thing on their minds.

Any legislation which restricts access to the tools of mass killing is going to be strenuously opposed, and subject to, you should pardon the expression, judicial review. It isn't like the Second amendment is going to be overturned tomorrow morning by a mob of angry mommies. 

Millions of Americans support sane gun laws. Every day of the year. My own feelings about the easy availability of weapons designed to slaughter, like my feelings about the facile Constitutional arguments which have brought that about, or the money which has bought legislative complacency, or the sham arguments about video games, goth fashions, and backward messages in Judas Priest songs which accompany every such occurrence, are not the product of headlines, or of fire in the blood. Maybe Sandy Hook changed some people's minds in a way that Virginia Tech or Paducah, or Columbine didn't. That's for those people to explain. 

What there is for the Right to explain--at long last, George, at long last--is why every single instance until now was accompanied by explanations that ignored the implements of mass slaughter. Let alone why the theoretical ought to trump the practical. In certain cases only, of course.

A Note On Usage

IF we can't quite grasp the concept of "clause" where the 2nd amendment is concerned, can we try "phrase", or should we head straight to orthography?

"Well regulated". It means, first of all, regulated. And well. If you want to argue that "not at all" constitutes the wellest form of regulation, okay. But that's not the same thing as unfettered. 

Incidentally, you might mention to your grandchildren, since the best-case scenario is that they might finally be able to do something about this, that civil liability would eliminate machines for killing people. It seems damned sure that body counts won't. 

By the way, can anyone tell me what th' fuck Clint Van Zandt has ever done? Aside from his uncanny prediction that the Unabomber would be a married suburbanite middle manager? 

Olio: And The Definition Of Contemporary American Optimist Is Someone Who Believes Things Are Only Getting Worse Edition

•Hey, we always knew they didn't lock up enough people in the Likens case:

[Eighty-seven-year-old psychologist Edward] Strain is not surprised Paula Baniszewski changed her name after the murder. Asked if he would do the same, he replied: "Oh hell yeah." Several surviving jurors from the case also agreed this week.

"I think she needed space to move on frankly," Strain said. "She wanted to live."

Oh, yeah. As one would.

They caught up with Paula  this week, forty-seven years later, working in Iowa as a teacher's aide for the last fourteen years. Seems she'd left "Felonies? Well, there was that one time I helped torture a sixteen-year-old girl to death in Indiana, but I did my three years" off her job application.

Some anonymous tipster phoned police. Someone who couldn't live with the knowledge anymore. Someone unlike Paula.

She'd been registered to vote in Iowa for the last fifteen years. Quite possibly feloniously; I'm sure the state's Republican majority will be chasing that one down with vigor. This blog's No Praeteritio Rule prevents us from mentioning that Paula was herself a Republican.

We don't have a rule against linking to ourselves, though, so here's my piece on the fortieth anniversary of the death of Sylvia Likens, at the hands of many, and the plaster-cast of Paula Pace, née  Baniszewski, placed on the hand she'd broken in the daily ritual of beating her rival.

• Is there really an audience for Brooks' pensées ? How long would it take you to drop his course once he started lecturing? (My personal record was 15 minutes, the time spent by a macroeconomics professor to describe in practiced and apocalyptic terms the horrible, crushing workload he was going to inflict on the class, and anyone who didn't like it "should leave now." So I did. I thought it might make him feel a little better about himself, which he obviously needed. Besides, I had the syllabus handout in front of me, and it was about half the reading of the average humanities course, so I suspected that the shit he was full of was half the result of Biz School students' work habits, and half that he didn't know what he was talking about. And I wasn't having either.)

First, let me describe what moderation is not. It is not just finding the midpoint between two opposing poles and opportunistically planting yourself there. Only people who know nothing about moderation think it means that.

Moderates start with a political vision, but they get it from history books, not philosophy books. That is, a moderate isn't ultimately committed to an abstract idea. Instead, she has a deep reverence for the way people live in her country and the animating principle behind that way of life. In America, moderates revere the fact that we are a nation of immigrants dedicated to the American dream -- committed to the idea that each person should be able to work hard and rise.

Yeah, she.  Leave us note, here that a) no one with any sense thinks self-described political moderates in this country are anything other than Rockefeller Republicans. The position is "historical" in the sense of "long dead", but it's not an historical movement, and it sure ain't a movement based on History. The American Dream is just another Fifties-era fantasy Reagantots like Brooks were sold in infancy, and now they're trying to unload while there's still some value left.

Not to mention that a lot of immigrants didn't come to this country willingly, didn't have an opportunity to accumulate possessions, or look at white women. And we'll quit mentioning this when guys like Brooks show the slightest sign of understanding it.

• God help me, I had to read this Weigel codswallop twice, because the first time I thought it was whomever wrote the headline ("Finally, a Winning Benghazi Argument") deserved killin', and that's not the sort of mistake you wanna make.

Republicans spent a month arguing that Barack Obama had lied about the circumstances at the Benghazi consulate on September 11. That was a heavy carry, because it wasn't really true -- Obama had referred multiple times to "acts of terror." But the new criticism of the Obama response dials the clock back to the day of the attack, and it's compelling. Charles Woods, the father of Benghazi victim Tyrone Woods, has been calling up conservative talk radio to explain how his sun rushed into the fray and was denied back-up.

Let's say this again, Reader: suppose you were trying to make a decision about something you planned to keep for a couple of years: car, exterior paint, a spouse. Wouldn't "it wasn't really true" be the end of your deliberations? In fact, if you were being objective, or honest, god help you, wouldn't you just say "wasn't true", not "really wasn't true"?

What's the difference between Brooks and Weigel? Neither can keep their Republican peckers in their pants when there's an election, or a Big Issue nearby. (Unless a loss is a forgone conclusion, when they become sudden bipartisans). Their "moderation" is of the Springsteen Poster or No Real Objection to Gay Marriage type; that is, it's a personal affability, not a political stance. The most you ever hear from them is the sound of a sad head-shake when John "Missing In Action" Boehner is forced to say something really kooky. And, professionally, this allows them to a) pretend they're not Republicans and b) pretend that they are Republicans, but it's possible to be a Republican in the current century and not be sullied by the base. At one and the same time.

The major difference, I think, is that Brooks has the aura of a lifelong third-chair school band trombonist who's been convinced by Ronald Reagan that he's the really smart, hip one, not those hippies with their vans, and bongs, and all-night sex orgies, and Weigel is the guy who grew up imagining Bill Clinton as an ultra-liberal, and shag carpeting as a rhetorical argument against All Things Sixties.

Um, No.

LAURA Miller, high on some primo Errol Morris:

MacDonald claimed that he has been sleeping on the living room sofa because his half of the marital bed had been wet by one of his daughters. He woke up to find four intruders at his feet, three men and a woman. Two of them assaulted him. After a struggle, he lost consciousness for a while. He came to in the hallway and called the police. The intruders, he said, looked like hippies. The woman had long blond hair, a floppy hat and boots, and was carrying a candle. They were, he claimed, chanting “Kill the pigs. Acid’s groovy.”

As outlandish as MacDonald’s account sounds today, it seemed plausible at the time, less than a year after followers of Charles Manson had committed the Tate-LaBianca murders in Los Angeles. 

Trust me, darlin'; it sounded just as ridiculous then. In some ways even more so, since your notion of the "outlandishness" of such of claim is based on the benign stupidity of shag carpeting and on a complete absence of insane, homicidal, acid-gobbling hippie avengers in the ensuing forty years. Whereas at the time it was based on, oh, the absurdity of the story. 

We know who murders families, particularly when "intruders" beat the wife to a bloody pulque and give the husband a first-degree paper cut. We knew it then.

And we knew--at least a lot of us did--that LSD didn't make people kill people, or jump out windows thinking they could fly, or stare at the sun until their eyeballs melted. It was an easy, shoddy, risible cover story. It was more apparent then than it seems to you today, and it underlined more at the time than now, even, that MacDonald was a liar and a con man. Blaming the murder on hippies was like Susan Smith blaming her carjacking on a large colored man. It could've been true, in the sense that it described something physically possible, but once you determined that it almost certainly did not you understand immediately how deep the lie went.

Did you happen to see Morris on Colbert? Colbert is someone wise enough to understand what a laughable pile of horseshit MacDonald's story is. Morris, on the other hand, is old enough to've understood what an obvious lie it was on the face of it, at the time. And when Stephen hit him with the Acid is Groovy quote Morris had the look of a fighter who's been hit on the button, in the millisecond between recognition and falling flat.

Nevertheless, as Morris details, there was evidence supporting MacDonald’s version of events. An MP responding to the call saw a woman matching the description of one of the attackers (long, light-colored hair, floppy hat, boots) standing on a nearby street corner. A narcotics detective for the local police had an informant, Helena Stoeckley, who sometimes wore a long blond wig, floppy hat and boots, and he had seen her get into a car with three men several hours before the murders. He sought out Stoeckley the next day and alerted the MPs that she was available for questioning, but no one was sent to interview her or examine her belongings. Stoeckley later destroyed her wig and hat, and until her death in 1983, she would often talk of being present during the murders, although when called upon to testify to this in court in 1979, she denied it.

So there was someone who might've matched the description who possibly existed in the general vicinity in the hours beforehand. Y'know, we do not require apodictic certainty or metaphysical assurance to convict anyone. Beyond a reasonable doubt.

I will admit that, had I been on the jury, the fact that someone in the early 1970s did actually wear a floppy hat, outside the pages of Vogue or one of those awful Hollywood Generation Gap misadventures starring Jimmy Stewart, cast against type as a befuddled middle-ager, I might've had a moment's reconsideration. (Now if you, or Morris, could have proven that anyone in those days said "Groovy", unless they were singing backup at a Holiday Inn lounge in a band covering "The 59th St. Bridge Song", I would have held out for acquittal.)

MacDonald was the most logical suspect for the crime, but he had no discernible motive and no history of violent behavior or mental illness.

Which are not required to file charges, let alone grounds for a reversal.

As a result, the case against him — first examined in a military hearing — relied entirely on physical evidence.

That sentence is so remarkably insensate I double-checked the logo to make sure I wasn't reading Slate.

However, the crime scene had been hopelessly contaminated by inexperienced MPs and incompetent investigators. Key pieces of evidence were moved, lost, destroyed, mislabeled, stolen, overlooked or simply uncollected.

None of which, none of it, manages to suggest in any way that MacDonald's story could be true. Inexperienced and incompetent investigators did not manage to erase evidence of a cadre of psychedelic assassins tripping balls and awash in pig blood. Military investigators did not plant evidence under Mrs. MacDonald's fingernails, nor accidentally erase all evidence of the life and death struggle MacDonald claimed happened downstairs.

Morris is careful to state that he does not know whether MacDonald is the killer.

Yeah, for good reason. Does MacDonald deserve a new trial, something no one's seen fit to agree to in the last thirty years (since an appellate decision, later reversed, that his right to a speedy trial had been violated) ? Maybe. That can, and should, be argued before the bar at this point. Is there any reason, after all this time, to question the wisdom of the original decision? To be "open-minded" enough to reconsider it?

Nope.

Asshole Culture

DAVE "Apolitical" Weigel works the Rolodex:

[Patrick] Beck [the Top Teabagger in Mojave County] wasn't looking forward to the coming "finger-pointing" over this incident, which has definitely claimed the life of a judge, John Roll, who'd been protested over an immigration ruling. "People blame the right for Oklahoma City," said Beck. "People blame the left for the Pentagon being bombed. I don't know this guy who did this, but there are crazy people in all walks of life. One rotten apple does not make a bad batch."

An on and on and on; the first member of the Indiana Congressional delegation to announce he moderately deplored the shooting of Rep. Giffords was Danny Lee Burton. The Arizona Teabaggers are resolute; Weigel himself, their Boswell, is just covering the story. They're all against shooting political opponents in the head. Afterwards. Sorry if the occasional lone nut got the wrong impression.

It's the pathetic remorse of the sniveling habitual drunk who's finally managed to run down an elderly woman in a crosswalk.

And let's be clear about this. I'm not here to say it's Sarah Palin's fault. Quite the opposite. She, and her stupid asshole map, should be seen for what they are. She didn't intend to put Rep. Giffords in some literal crosshairs, and in a better world we'd all admit that.* She didn't cause an "unstable" 22-year-old with a history of run-ins with police to target Giffords, or spray a crowd with semi-automatic weapons fire. Nope. What she did, like any number of others, is help create and perpetuate a society where no one even bothers to ask how an unstable 22-year-old comes to be in possession of a weapon whose only purpose is to kill and maim human beings as efficiently as possible. Because he's an American.

We don't even ask. We don't have to.

So, you know, Mr. Weigel, just fucking spare me. Mr. Other Beck, don't ask "What can we [possibly] do to stop (the worst nutjobs of our 'movement')?" Twenty-four hours before Rep. Gifford took one in the brain Chuckles Krauthammer was blaming the Democratic party for some forty-five-year-old flag burning that still rages in his head. Let's just all play by the same rules for a while and see how we like the change. What Do We Do, Mr. Beck? To begin with, we can stop listening to people who think they can equate domestic right-wing terrorism with a patently hallucinated version of 9/11 and call it square. We can stop listening to people who manage to swallow their deep distress at the virulent sputum which has marked their movement since the beginning right up until the day they're forced to try to distance themselves. We can stop accepting translucent lies just because they're all one side has to hide behind.

What we can do is to expect people who hide behind subsistence hunting and traditional woodcraft while serving as the bagmen for gun nuts and arms traders to eat anything their dog trees. We can stop pretending that "we have enough gun laws on the books". We can stop pretending that dumdum bullets and automatic weapons are an unambiguous Constitutionally-protected right, and that every nutjob steeped in the cold-steel penis-replacement culture is just an unfortunate aberration.

(We can stop this "Oh my god, people on the internets blamed Sarah Palin!" shit, too. In other news, the sun rose in the East sometime this AM.)

As I've said here before, I own guns. I've never fired at anything but a target, in part because there's plenty of food in the supermarket. I don't impugn those who do. I've eaten game on occasion. Let's quit kidding about this. If you'd like to go on being a 2nd Amendment absolutist, do so, but stop hiding from the results.

And no, you ain't responsible for the actions of a nut. You are responsible for not bothering to distance yourself until some of the stink rubbed off on you.

_____________

* Just as, in a better world, she'd had never uttered the phrase "Death panels".

Drive-By

JUST in case there's anyone out there demanding to know when The Left will denounce the Obama administration's flagrant manipulation of Terror in order to deflect attention away from the looming NEA scandal, let us note, first, that The Left doesn't want anything to do with us, excepting the Wonkette comments section, and we miss him. And, second, that someone ought to step up, seeing how widespread the skepticism on the Right was whenever the Bush administration upped the Terra Alert Level for political gain. Okay, so at least they were widely skeptical when Tom Ridge admitted it. Which must count for something.

Anyway, okay. Acts of the Justice Department ought to be considered politically motivated, except where a supermajority of rational people agree that one most likely isn't. Provided we keep that as the standard, mmmkay?

But having said that, let's further stipulate that if this sort of thing causes Teabag-Americans to shut th' fuck up long enough to run off and mess themselves, then the Obama administration ought to make it a regular feature, and what took you so long? COINTELPRO ran for fifteen years, and that's if you believe the official timeline; we said we quit making weaponized anthrax in 1972, too. It seems like this ought to be the political equivalent of the defense jumping offsides: offense gets a free play. It could even be accomplished--this time--without violating anybody's rights, although I realize that takes at least half the fun out of it for some people. Just pay swarthy-looking guys to pretend to plot to blow up the Sears Tower or the Transamerica Building or the Mall of America, and whisk them off to the Bahamas for future questioning. Everybody wins.

But speaking of which:

1) An agent of SPECTRE is $50,000 in debt? Wow, this recession's hit everybody.

2) They're charged with making false statements? Okay, so call me a bleeding-heart liberal, but shouldn't "lying to the cops" be legal so long as "lying to suspects" is?

3) If you've got bomb-making instructions on your laptop, then my first impression is that your al-Qaeda training wasn't strenuous enough. I managed to swap out my hard drive by lugging my computer up to my Poor Wife's office so I could watch the instructional video on her machine while working on mine. This makes me a complete idiot who luckily did not fry his iMac, not a computer repair technician.

4) Never pretend you know what's going on inside an investigation by the sort of malarky that is released outside an investigation, but look: the FBI, fighting to keep us all safe in our beds, gets pissed-off enough at an informant (for allegedly tipping off someone he'd fingered) that it doesn't just charge him, which might be a bit of misdirection, but releases his identity out of spite? I think we know where this one's headed.

Oh, almost forgot: handwritten notes "consistent with the suspect's handwriting". But let's not call this one a slam-dunk until the boys from the Phrenology Lab weigh in.

Okay, But What If The Only Way To Make Terror Suspects Talk Turns Out To Be A Hummer From A White House Intern?

Jacob Weisberg, "All The President's Accomplices: How the country acquiesced to Bush's torture policy". May 2

Michael Kinsey, "Where the Buck Stops". May 1

JON Stewart, to Cliff May, last week's featured torture apologist: "Why can't they say 'We were scared'?"

I thought it was pretty sad--Please, oh please, Mr. Torture Apologist, won't you love pretty flowers, too, so we can be friends again?--but at the time I wasn't aware we were desperately searching for some new sort of jurisprudence that puts juries on trial first.

I don't live in New York. I don't actually live anywhere an invader would be interested in conquering, at least not directly, and a savvy one--i.e., one smart enough to have an entire plan of action designed ahead of time, and not wait for a few deadenders to fire up an insurgency--would realize early in the planning stages that a state government which has demonstrated time and again it can be bought off by pig farmers, beer distributors, and fireworks retailers cannot possibly be worth wasting actual ordnance on. A necklace made of shiny bullets would likely do the trick.

(And, okay, maybe it's just me, and maybe this required a certain number of miles on the odometer, but a couple decades ago thousands of Americans sent themselves to hospitals after receiving free samples of Sunlight Dishwashing Liquid, which, because of the pretty pretty lemon on the bottle they added to their iced teas and drank up, resulting in the largest mass outbreak of diarrhea not linked to Taco Bell in this nation's history. If you seriously wanted to bring this country to its knees, rather than just impressing the hell out of heavenly virgins, a manufacturing license and a decent-sized mailing list would beat the hell out of a squadron of 747s. Good Lord, if the old Soviet Union had simply been poised to take advantage of Janet Jackson's nipple slip we'd all be driving Zaporozhets now. Not that that wouldn't necessarily be an improvement.)

I didn't begrudge anyone his fears then (though plenty begrudged me mine, which concerned what sort of monster those monsters had released, and not if I'd be caught at Lowe's when SPECTRE hit the local mall). And, again unlike what generally travels down the pike in return, I'm willing to exclude hindsight, although the only thing about the Global War On Somebody To Exact Revenge On I didn't see the basic outline of--and this requires no psychic powers or lucky Leftist guessing, just a reasonably broad perspective on US foreign involvement since 1946--was how utterly incompetent the Bush administration could be in pursuing it.

So let's accept for the sake of argument that the truth of "After 9/11 may Americans were scared shitless" does not require the wholly permissible addition of "by professional chatterers, lapel-pin manufacturers, permanent-warfare buffs, mass-market 'news', and, especially, the Bush administration and the Republican party generally". I'm not sure how this comes to be regarded as a Lifetime Pass. "I was scared" is a legal defense in some instances, but not a Get Out of Jail Free card. There's a reckoning due even under the best of circumstances, and the era of 9/11 Changing Everything was rarely that. The threat was made out to be exponentially larger than anything short of complete derangement would have accepted, and this was used to justify short-sighted tactics which made things much, much worse. There's a reckoning due. It would have been best had it come once reality began to reassert itself, but no regular observer of human beings could imagine that was likely.

That reckoning wasn't going to come from the Bush administration, and, as it turned out, it wasn't going to come through empowering Congressional Democrats; it certainly wasn't going to come via acknowledgment of large-scale street protests of the Iraq War. It wasn't going to come in bunting-wrapped newscasts. To suggest, now, that the lack of some sort of official reaction or recognition of public oppositon then dooms us all to Eternal Unindicted Accomplicehood is to announce the News Script has acquired the patina of Holy Writ. It's vile. It's galling. It's what these people do, over and over. Kinsley:

Indignation comes cheap in our political culture. Polls give the impression that the proper role of voters is to sit like a king passing judgment on the issues as they pass by like dishes prepared for a feast. "No, I'm not in the mood for waterboarding today, thanks. But I think I'll have another dab of those delicious-looking executive-pay caps." Prosecuting a few former government officials for their role in putting our country into the torture business would not serve justice or historical memory. It would just let the real culprits off the hook.

To which we can only reply, "Th' fuck it would." Y'know, while all this was going on the national "news" outlets were falling all over themselves to atone for the treasonous reporting of facts they permitted to slip out during the Vietnam War. Americans were not only being told, repeatedly, that "We don't torture", they weren't about to hear any different when it actually counted. What did the pictures from Abu Ghraib--they ones we did get to see--do to public confidence in how our Great Freedom Mission was being conducted? What would an actual demonstration of what waterboarding really is have done? And if there's a network news executive somewhere brave enough to have put that on the air in 2003 I'd like you to introduce me to him. Was he hiding under the desk with Keith Olbermann, ripping and reading Pentagon-approved copy? Sure, there were brave souls, real journalists, out there covering the actual story, though none at Slate, as I recall. And God bless 'em. But this is the old "Story on Page One, retraction on Page Seventeen" tale. And y'know, Mike, we both grew up during Vietnam, so I'm sure you're as aware as I am that plenty of Americans would just as soon sweep this sort of thing under the rug the moment it becomes inconvenient (a sizable chunk of those would prefer to celebrate it, as they're doing now). That's the opposite of truth. Fer chrissakes, what does it take to get people to begin to realize this attitude always leads to disaster? I mean, how many more disasters?

Of course this is not so much an argument as it is a professional courtesy and a bit of special pleading: holding bad actors accountable, unless they're caught fucking the help, claiming to have written Love Story, or Windsurfing Without Proper Equipment would empty press rooms around the country quicker'n the internets have. And clam up unnamed sources, and dry up open bars into the bargain.

And, of course, that's just for the sake of argument. The fact is the Bush administration fanned those fears at every opportunity, with its characteristic regard for accuracy. The mayor of New York at the time, Rudy Somebody, purposefully kept the casualty toll over six thousand for weeks after he'd been told every last name on the list was duplicated. He kicked and screamed again when the official count threatened to dip below 3000. What public demand did that address? Giuliani didn't get re-elected, or even re-upped for the duration of our pants pissing. Can we throw him in the slam?

The fact is these people are supposed to react coolly and rationally. Especially in such times. The public is free to panic, or overreact, or watch Howie Mandel.

[Weisberg's just more of the same, but this paragraph still manages to explain things well beyond words, as well as make the practiced Googlenaut begin to consider just how much prison space we could scare up if we let all the drug offenders go:

The justification of torture was in the air soon after the Sept. 11 attacks. Time bombs began ticking on 24 in November 2001. That same month, my colleague Jonathan Alter wrote in a Newsweek column (which he has since regretted) that we should be open to the idea of "transferring some suspects to our less squeamish allies." Alan Dershowitz argued for legitimizing torture through a system of judicial warrants. "It is wise for American interrogators to employ whatever coercive methods work," Mark Bowden wrote a couple of years later in the Atlantic, referring specifically to the treatment of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed. And that's what liberals said.

His emphasis on liberals. My emphasis on who qualifies. Some universes can be bound in a nutshell.]

The public is an Ass. What else is new? It's never justified giving everyone with a functioning intellect head wounds just to even things out. It's a big country. Plenty of room for mass atonement ceremonies during Cheney's treason trial.

Don Marsh's Dating Tips

#6 Red: It's the Color of Romance.

Racist Star photo/Matt Kryger

SAD internet obsessives may recall a few mentions of Marsh Supermarkets, an Indianapolis-based regional grocery chain. In particular we've asked how it is that "normal", everyday Americans--let alone supposed beneficiaries of her fancier educational establishments, such as Meganjane McArdle-Galt--could follow a weekly regimen of grocery/drug store visits without understanding, and likely screaming about, the vast gulf between the high-school text version of How Your Economic System Works they're regularly fed--or regularly feed others--and the grade-school-playground shenanigans not just baldly pulled on them, aisle after aisle, but rubbed in their faces, in the name of Retail. Although with Meganjane we figure it involves "having The Help do the shopping".

One could not shop at Marsh for the better part of a month without understanding that the portion of Free Market Theorization which involves the Customer--namely, that the Business tries to please him by providing the product, or the choices of products, he votes for with his dollars, at the Lowest Possible Price--is in reality so far down the list that it qualifies as a sick joke. What determines 90% of what's on your grocers' shelves is vendor relations; either how much money national brands spend on advertising, or (and this was clearly of more importance at Marsh) what they're coughing up in terms of ducats, freebies, skybox invites, kickbacks, and free golf clubs, and what brand of golf clubs, in exchange for shelf space. My local Marsh has six framed head shots of the management team above the office window. The only time you ever see any of them is when they're out schmoozing some sales rep. If you see one engaging an actual customer in conversation it's either a friend, relative, or someone with some golf clubs to give away. You can't even get those guys to run a cash register for five minutes at Holiday time while one of their preternaturally cold-sensitive cashiers gets treated for chilblains.

Couple this with the fact that these guys know, or imagine they know, exactly what makes you buy something, how items sell in each and every shelf position in the store, the exact amount of aisle space, in millimeters, they can take up with "special" displays before people begin hurling jumbo bottles of ketchup at the apparently abandoned children who are taking up the rest of it. The last time You, the Customer, were given the slightest thought was back when they were scouting the real estate, and even then they were only interested in how much you paid for your house.

I've detailed some of the results at Marsh: the disappearance of national brands; the rapid transmogrification of a brand of deli products from The Greatest Ever Produced to Something We've Never Heard Of; the day I--then forbidden the dark and Arab delights of coffee, turned again into the tea aisle for my regular purchase of Twinings Prince of Wales, only to find a) English Breakfast, b) Earl Fucking Grey, and c) 72 cubic feet of flavored chais. Tell me, please, what sudden Free Market outpouring of Hoosier New Age Aquarian consumer demand was behind that one.

The other spur for bringing up Marsh was that, beginning in 2005 or so, its business problems (generally blamed, in the local press, on "outside Big-Box competition with its Unfairly Lower Prices"), which led to it seeking, in order, a White Knight, a Soiled Knight, a Desperate Suitor, an inheritor of vast larders of cash even more gullible than the Marshes, and, finally, a capital-investment firm willing to take the thing off their hands. It was during this time that the Big Secret leaked out: that the descendants of those Marshes who had founded the thing in the 30s, taken it public in the 50s, managed to survive the national-chain invasion of the 60s, and started one of the first convenience-store chains were lying so thick on the ground at company headquarters that you could walk across 'em, like the dead at the Somme. And a couple hundred of them were bailing out with parachutes made of million-dollar bills.

Full disclosure: a certain portion of my attitude, not large, is probably also due to the fact that Don Marsh, second-generation patriarch of the clan, is not merely a right-wing extremist--which is only to be expected--but an extremely loud one. He took the operation over in the late 70s, spent the 80s and 90s buying up regional businesses--an ice cream producer/retailer, a caterer, convenience stores, restaurants, and opening a pharmacy operation and various "concept" groceries designed to compete with various Vague Economic Threats like Cub foods or natural food stores. All this, of course, made Don Marsh an Heroic Reagan Entrepreneurial Achiever, and, like apparently every other one of those geniuses, the minute business conditions changed he was cooked.

So Marsh finally locates a buyer in leveraged-buyout specialist Sun Capital, and Central Indiana rests easy, secure in the knowledge it has seen the last of Don Marsh sniffing Larry Bird's or Peyton Manning's jocks in his own commercials. Until this week.

Indianapolis Racist Star, March 31:

The new owner of Marsh Supermarkets has hit the former CEO with a lawsuit, claiming Don E. Marsh improperly spent millions of dollars of the Indianapolis grocery chain’s money to pay for a luxury lifestyle before he retired in 2006.

Claiming the grocery executive spent as much as six months of every year traveling for pleasure, the lawsuit contends the former CEO ought to reimburse the grocery chain an unspecified amount for breaching his 1999 employment agreement with Marsh Supermarkets.

Indianapolis Racist Star, April 1:

According to the lawsuit, Don Marsh made personal use of the corporate jet for hunting trips, business meetings and jaunts to the four family vacation condominiums at Aspen, Colo.; La Romana, Dominican Republican [sic]; Naples, Fla.; and Saugatuck, Mich.

In addition to the Macy's 2005 parade, the lawsuit says, the CEO used company money to pay for his son's family excursions in 2004 and 2005 to Africa and New Zealand at a total cost of $149,000.

The CEO also attended what were called executive outings in Alaska that the lawsuit claims were fishing trips that involved few employees and cost $100,000 or more per outing.

According to the lawsuit, the CEO often flew on the company jet "to take female employees on vague business trips to places such as Chicago or New York City" and New Orleans, where he sometimes "spent significant amounts of money at various department stores.''

And it's been a rough week overall, but I gotta tell ya, when you live long enough to hear Don Marsh use "out-of-state venture capitalist group" as a pejorative, every day is just a little sunnier.

Praise The Lord And Pass The Ammunition

SO: Xmas. My father's children were skimpy breeders, and it generally falls to the extended crew, the descendants of his 90-year-old sister, to host holiday festivities, since their seeming unfamiliarity with the work of Thomas Malthus, the concepts of home economics, or the advances of modern contraception (their average of 3.5 children, 3 marriages, and 2.5 divorces is actually dragged down by my once-married, childless first cousin) has necessitated each maintain a small banquet hall just to meet their daily feeding requirements.

The late patriarch of this clan, my Uncle Sam, was the CFO of a major international conglomerate who lived like a minor suburbanite rather than a prairie earl. This was not, so far as I could tell, due to miserliness, but a sort of Christian duty to frugality, one which passed into quaintness, became endangered, and finally as rare as ivory-billed woodpecker teeth, all within his lifetime. That current of Midwestern Calvinism still riffles and eddies along, somewhere, with his grandchildren, but their children cross dry-shod and oblivious; any future hints of frugality will no doubt be thrust upon them, by a world they seem connected to only electronically. This is not the grousing of a bitter old man, not this time: our neighbor's child is a beacon of social responsibility, and I have hopes for the eldest of my Poor Wife's younger brother's brood, the one who seems to have escaped serious brain bubbles. It's the young person who isn't at least partly frivolous who's suspect, and one unstuck to at least one electrical gadget is practically unthinkable. The disturbing fact is not addiction to consumer gizmos, nor a steady diet of crappy blockbuster movies consumed with relish, but the genealogical evidence of a startling decline: my uncle was a very smart man, and his eldest daughter, whose serial monogamy and slightly-excessive reproductive rate kick-started the whole business, is damn near brilliant, but they've managed to usher in somehow, in less than sixty years, an entire generation of aspiring cheerleaders. (Mind you, we've known a couple of smart cheerleaders in our time, and we regard Life Itself as an endless stream of surprises, some favorable. We're just saying that whatever that gang was doing with its cellphones Xmas Day, we think following current events can be safely ruled out.)

The day ended with the near-traditional invitation to the neighbor's holiday bash, which is always a source of decent drinks, entertaining conversation, and better dope than most Republicans will admit to owning, let alone share. And this led, indirectly, to The Greatest Gift of All, or at least the most fun I had all Season. I was ushered into the Secret Smoke Room (our hostess knows enough to grab me when the disapproving schoolmarm I married isn't looking) for a semi-annual lung capacity test, followed by the customary hanging and shooting the neighborhood shit. A couple people had come in, indulged, and gone out again when the room suddenly filled with Metaphorical Camouflage: the decidedly Republican husband, his usual three-man posse of twenty-somethings, which I find a tad odd, and a guy I didn't know, who turned out to be a former assistant chief of police, but who, in the parlance of The Day, was cool. The young guys started in to tokin', after which the conversation returned to the subject I believe it rarely left: Huntin'.

Now, the only thing I've ever shot at, or wanted to shoot at, is a target. I've done a little fishing, but only as part of a program to determine if there were levels of Boredom beyond Extreme and Mind-Numbing. I married into a family of hunters (the menfolk, that is), and I've known others, and I have to say I Don't Get It. I don't have a Bambi complex. I don't want to ban hunting. I just think the concerned citizen of the world today would put the vast majority of his available energies into protecting what's left of this natural world--including not peppering it with stray lead--so they and others might be able to hunt in the future.  But, like I say, this guy's a Republican, so his consideration for what you and I might call "the planet" begins and ends with himself (please, don't bother telling me there's such a thing as non-toxic shot. I know it, and I know the level of concern these guys have for the environment vs. their own pocketbooks or lethality ranges).

And these guys are bird hunters, like my father- and brother-in-law, which means that they don't hunt in any accepted definition of the word; they go sit by a lake at some guy's lodge, wait for whatever's in season to fly over, and shoot at it. I'm not attempting a psychology of the thing, nor impugning a native moral superiority; I'm just saying that, to me, the woods are a great place to hike in, explore, and observe, but if I want to sit for fourteen hours a chair, suitable light, and a good book seem like more the ticket. And my Poor Wife, who was regularly fed the spoils of this sort of thing while growing up, thinks that biting unexpecteldly into a piece of birdshot somewhat diminishes the pleasures of the table.

Anyway, the talk goes on at length about some prime spot a few miles north, a private lake between two cornfields, and drifts into just what conservation laws can be ignored or violated with impunity (a feature of every hunter's confab I've ever heard, with apologies to any scrupulous shooters out there. These are people who have a list of imaginary intrusions into their Rights a yard in length, and expecting self-policing is analogous to expecting Republicans to protect voting rights. Then there's a segue into grousing [pardon] about the possibility that Indiana might join the ever-growing list of Socialist States which unfairly require gun show peddlers to obey the law an' stuff). 

And this wakes the cop up, apparently, and he starts telling gun tales, either from his own casebook or some NRA fanboy site I'm not sure, but there's a couple in a row that end with the a) law-abiding homeowner and b) firearms-savvy storeowner putting one right between the eyes of a ne'er-do-well (the latter, I think, was Aarne-Thompson 961, "Shopkeeper saved by Hidden Piece"). That one evolved into a discussion of the trigger mechanism responsible for saving the merchant's life, then smart gun technology and the politicians who are just waiting for January 20 ("Black Tuesday") so they can ram it down our throats.

The growing audience enthusiasm triggered (sorry) the inevitable "when this Obama gets in" rant. (I'm a reasonable student of local culture and color, and the "this" construction is foreign. Is it military? The helicopter instructor in The Simpsons used it: "Another guy I like is this Leo Sayer".) "Although he seems to be moving more towards the center".

I should note here that when I drink, or treat my mind like a couple of fried eggs, I actually become unbearably charming; I'm sort of a reverse surly drunk. But there was some political contentiousness going on already (my Republican host saying at one point that "it's the gun nuts who make everyone else look bad", thereby, at least, recognizing that there was some reason), and one of the younger guys turned out to be some sort of libertarian Marxist, so I decided I could put in 2¢ without harshing the buzz.

So he paused for a moment, and I kinda looked at him sideways and said, "Y'own a credit card?"

And I'm not going to recount the rest of the conversation, which would sound like I was arguing with an imaginary cabbie. But he got it right away. His face went slack for a moment. And I went on for the sake of the younger guys, whom I was sure it had passed by. "You hand over more information about yourself five times a day; every time you buy razor blades or ball-point pens. Why is requiring fly-by-night weapon salesmen to keep records such an imposition on your rights when you give up those same rights, willingly, for the sake of some small convenience?"

It was a little unfair, because I knew he thought he'd had a completely simpatico audience, because he imagines that Barack Obama is as far to the Left as one can get, and because I hadn't jumped up with the Bambi Defense, but instead hit him right between the Rights. He kinda looked at me hopelessly for a moment.

Then he said "You're under arrest for possession of a controlled substance."

You gotta love cop humor.

Rest Easy

Indianapolis Racist Star:

Butler bulldog mascot costumes found; 4 men arrested

4 arrested in theft and abuse of Butler's bulldog costumes

By Kevin O'Neal
Posted: November 15, 2008

The battered remains of Butler University's pilfered bulldog costumes have been found, a mess of foam and fabric damaged beyond repair.

A team of investigators from three police agencies broke the case this week, and the four men they say are behind the mascot crimes face felony charges of burglary and theft....

Butler police, led by Sgt. Alan Criswell and assisted by the Indianapolis Metropolitan Police Department and the Indiana Department of Homeland Security's Indiana Intelligence Fusion Center, a consortium of law enforcement agencies, eventually cracked the case.

Emphasis mine, in case you were wondering.

Tuesday on Look, Here's The Thing!™

WaPo: "Anthrax Dryer A Key To Probe". August 5

Bruce E. Ivins, the government's leading suspect in the 2001 anthrax killings, borrowed from a bioweapons lab that fall freeze-drying equipment that allows scientists to quickly convert wet germ cultures into dry spores, according to sources briefed on the case.

Look, Here's the Thing!: it might be nice if, three days after word got around that Ivins did not work with dry anthrax, the "explanation" that surfaces comes with some acknowledgment of the fact. Was this why reporters asked? Was it why "sources briefed on the case"--th' fuck is that, by the way? Is it more or less than "familiarity"?--brought this up now? Did someone actually inside the investigation just now cough up that lil' lunger of evidence? If so, was it prompted by news reports? Does it confirm, to any extent, that Ivins had no contact with supplies of dry anthrax, and thus is suspected of having concocted his own? None of these is particularly damning, which is all the more reason it'd be refreshing if the niceties would be followed, for once.

The device was not commonly used by researchers at the Army's sprawling biodefense complex at Fort Detrick, Md., where Ivins worked as a scientist, employees at the base said. Instead, sources said, Ivins had to go through a formal process to check out the lyopholizer, creating a record on which authorities are now relying. He did at least one project for the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency that would have given him reason to use the drying equipment, according to a former colleague in his lab.

Look, Here's the Thing!: if Ivins had a perfectly good, job-related excuse for requisitioning the thing, in his own name, then, at the very least, it's not a real key to the mystery that he checked one out, is it? He didn't ask Joe in shipping to look the other way while he "borrowed one for the weekend" so he could "freeze-dry his own coffee". This, then, may be a Key to the Probe in the same sense that a large, buoyant piece of flotsam may be a Key to Not Sinking in the Aftermath of a Shipwreck. (The simile is not a haphazard one.)  At any rate, maybe paragraph three is a tad tardy on the Rounding Out with Relevant but Ameliorating Information the Charges Made in the Headline scale.

Eventually, through more elaborate DNA testing of the power and tissue cultures from the victims, they determined that the powder probably came from supplies made by Ivins, to which about 10 other people had access. Authorities last week cited "new and sophisticated scientific tools" that helped advance the investigation.

Look, Here's the Thing!: We like to apply something we call the So Long, Mom! Test in these circumstances. That is, given this explanation with your dear gray-haired momma, mutatis mutandis, in the role of actual suspect, would you pick up the phone and promise her you'll see her every visiting day?

Similarly, CBS News reported last night that Ivins lived near the shop where the envelopes were purchased (the rest of the Fort Detrick staff commuted from Maine, evidently), and had "an obsession with Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority" (which, full disclosure, is the Hellenistic attachment favored by my own Poor Wife) which, perhaps suspicious enough in itself, becomes doubly compelling when one learns a chapter of that organization may be found in Princeton, New Jersey, where some of the anthrax bombs were mailed! We've got the goods on you, Rico! Don't do anything stupid!

The nature of this obsession has not been explained, though it is said to have gone back to Ivins' college days in Cincinnati, a city which accepts the same denomination of stamps! Someone really needs to begin explaining how this guy came to be heading The Nonexistent US Bioweapons Program, or, alternately, why he wasn't tapped as Paul Bremer's assistant.

"Dry anthrax is much harder to work with," said one scientist familiar with Ivins's lab. A lyopholizer would fit inside the ventilated "biosafety cabinet" at the lab and could have been used without drawing notice, the scientist said. The machine could have processed a few small batches of anthrax liquid in less than a day, he said.

Look, Here's the Thing!: If he had the thing to work on a project, wouldn't the other people involved in the project have noticed that it was nowhere to be seen? Okay, maybe nobody wanted to rat.  The Empiricists' Code.  Maybe they just figured it was another one of Crazy Bruce's sorority-obsessed pranks.  It's the weekend.  Dr. Ivins must be headed up to Princeton with another thermos of Ames Strain Cosmos again!  Then again, maybe you could do the same thing on a hot plate.

Other biodefense experts noted that the drying step could have been carried out with equipment no more complicated than a kitchen oven. "It is the simplest . . . but it is the least reproducible," said Sergei Popov, a former Soviet bioweapons scientist who now specializes in biodefense at George Mason University. "If you go too fast you get 'sand,' " he said, referring to the coarser anthrax powder used in the first attacks, in September 2001.

Okey dokey, now that we understand the evidence may point to the use of an ad-hoc, easily obtainable mechanism, the freeze-dryer with Ivins' prints really looms large as the Key to the Whole Fucking Mystery.

The Army issued final rules last week that would cover workers who act in an aggressive or threatening manner. Those employees would be denied access to toxic or lethal biological agents under the revised regulations. Other potentially disqualifying personality traits include "arrogance, inflexibility, suspiciousness, hostility . . . and extreme moods or mood swings," according to the document.

Now if we can just figure out a way to have that disqualify you from being in a position to order its use.

Today In History: December 4, 1969

AP/World Wide Photo
It's always nice to see public servants who enjoy their work.

I'VE been trying to do this story justice--okay, justice has nothing to do with it--for long enough now that I'm just gonna give up and let the jolly coppers above speak for themselves. No one's ever gonna do it better.

Fred Hampton was 21 years old when he died. Mark Clark was 22.

There was a big fight last year when a Chicago alderman tried to designate that block of Monroe Street "Fred Hampton Way". The FOP, after all these years, still clings to the idea that Fred Hampton's rhetoric made him a cop killer, and made his killers lawful. I propose a solution: let's take the name and the stain off J. Edgar Hoover off his federal building, and call it auld lang syne.

Just Explain One Thing To Me

HOW, in 2007, do we come to write "an all-white jury" acquitted eight defendants in the Michael Lee Anderson case?

Because, god help me, you don't have to explain the rest of it.

"No Wonder We're Going Down The Tubes,"

SEZ Sergeant Dave Karsnia, and it should be made clear at the start that he isn't talking about Larry Craig's penchant for bathroom sex, or Craig's scared silly lies, the ones he'd rehearsed so often for when--not if--they'd caught the bad, bad boy, when he was looking at the punishment he secretly knew he deserved, the explanations for the casual acts that wouldn't have an explanation if they really were casual--"I reached down to pick up a piece of paper"--or even his attempt to cling to a story that made no sense. Karsnia's used to those things. He's a cop. No, that "Embarrassing, embarrassing"--he'll repeat the word one more time in a moment, just before reading the date and time into the tape recorder, and telling it the interview is finished--refers to Craig's embracing the idea that a lie is the equal of the thing it's designed to dispute, and everyone in earshot is supposed to accept it. No, we aren't going down the tubes because Larry Craig is a hypocrite, or even because he's made himself into the poster boy for Republican entitlement (imagine the uproar if a similarly flimsy tale got someone a new trial in a capital murder case!). It's because the truth doesn't even enter into the equation anymore. It's because there's no reckoning with it required, even behind closed doors, even face to face with a man who knows for a fact that you know for a fact you're lying.

I have no way of knowing Sgt. Karsnia's politics, if any, but if he reads the paper every day I wonder if he could have followed that final "Embarrassing" with a "I suppose they'll be digging up Tom DeLay to defend you once this hits cable news."

That's the one thing that's interesting about Larry Craig, or, rather, it's the locus of what theoretical non-scurrilous interest that might lie beneath the tabloid news. Larry Craig, with his trolling dick suddenly caught in a law-enforcement wringer, squeals exactly like Larry Craig, outraged defender of public morality or steadfast defender of giving the surge time to work or outraged defender of outrage over the--it turns out--more traditional places Bill Clinton's wanger got stuck in. There's no fuckin' difference. Larry Craig might just as well have said he was looking for WMDs, or trying to reform Social Security, or blasting off to Mars. The Republican party lies as unashamedly as Craig did, no matter the evidence to the contrary, and it too imagines that merely offering up an excuse, however transparent, always beats trumps. Craig might as well have told the Sergeant, "Hey, it's okay if you're a Republican!"

This is why we're going down the tubes! Tom DeLay goes on Today, which is abomination enough right there, and says that the only important public point here is that Republicans get rid of such miscreants while Democrats re-elect them, and he doesn't have his mike cut by some Christian technician fearful of God's electronic Wrath. It was, indeed, the same Tom DeLay who, as leader of the most criminal House of Representatives in history, had his minions change the ethics rules so he could remain in office despite being indicted. And he's the spokesman. (The Hammer appears to have lost some weight, and we sincerely hope this is due to diet and an exercise regimen, and not some undisclosed wasting disease, by a 51-49 margin.)

This put me in mind of Fred Kaplan's piece in the Sunday Times Magazine, about rising manifest junior officer dissatisfaction with the Army senior command. I'm nothing if not a dilettante of military matters, but the more I read the more I thought, "This is why it takes a Luther." It requires that someone say, "If you try to fix this it will be worse than before. Tear it out and start over." This is well-nigh impossible for the corporate mindset, absent total disaster. It's why the so-called Powell Doctrine, the so-called realistic assessment of post-Vietnam use of US military force always had the air of the hungover recently-ex-fiancé who imagines a heartfelt letter will get him off the hook: My Darling Sharon, I'm sorry, I'll clean it up, and I promise never to hurl in your purse again. Because the Republican/military brass had no real problem with pointless bloodbaths; the only real problem they saw was the effect of public or press opposition. We'd still be in Vietnam if they could have gotten away with it. Even after the engagement ring comes back registered mail they're not going to do anything so reckless as to consider whether to stop drinking.

General officers today are not a product of the soul-searching post-Nam era. They're a product of the Reagan revisionism. We didn't take "necessary" actions in Libya, or Grenada, or the first Gulf war. We took steps towards reviving the brand. Check the histrionic victory celebrations after Grenada, when the Mighty Arsenal of Democracy managed to defeat two dozen Cubans after first contriving to wedge them between us and the people we supposedly were there to save. The hubris born of sheer firepower never left us. We were itching for more Vietnams, because the next Vietnam would prove that we lost only because of poor hippie hygiene patterns.

This is not to say there was a failure of professional responsibility in the military, only that the prevailing political attitude trumped it far too often. Yes, it's a shame more of the brass did not fulfill its obligation to tell the Bush administration to Go Fuck Itself, but to suppose that some sort of careerist cowardice is to blame is to get the thing wrong way 'round. We don't need general officers who'll consider telling Don Rumsfeld his ideas are simply, totally incompetent and risk disaster. We need general officers who couldn't consider not telling him so. Instead it's Larry Craig Nation: so long as we've got an excuse for what we want to do, all objections are just somebody else's opinion.