Democrat Mary Burke released a new ad Friday accusing Wisconsin Gov. Scott Walker (R) of using a Republican county chairman's "lies to attack" her. The ad includes images of swastikas, it says, the county chair posted to his Facebook page.You can watch the whole ad at the link, but here's a screen shot of the part where swastikas float across the screen and have whatever subliminal effect they're supposed to have:
Burke's ad seeks to tie Walker to Gary Ellerman, the Jefferson County Republican Party chairman and a former human resources director at Trek Bicycle, the Burke family company where the Democrat used to work.
Ellerman was quoted in a report on the conservative Web site Wisconsin Reporter that cited sources saying Burke was fired from the company. In the report, Ellerman said, “She was not performing. She was (in) so far over her head. She didn’t understand the bike business." Burke denies being fired.
The city of Houston has issued subpoenas demanding a group of pastors turn over any sermons dealing with homosexuality, gender identity or Annise Parker, the city’s first openly lesbian mayor. And those ministers who fail to comply could be held in contempt of court.
Democrats are nervously counting on an enduring edge among female voters....So that's the idea in the NYT headline.
Yet... some are second-guessing the party’s strategy of focusing more on issues like abortion and birth control than on jobs and the economy.And that's the part Drudge extracted.
Yet [Greenberg] and other Democratic strategists complain their party has not effectively espoused a broader economic agenda, when women tell pollsters their top concern is jobs and the economy.And there's the Drudge take on the meaning of the article, buried at the bottom of the article, with no direct quotes and no names for the "other Democratic strategists" who, apparently, "complain."
These are treacherous times for women’s reproductive rights and access to essential health care. House Republicans mistakenly believe they have a mandate to drastically scale back both even as abortion warfare is accelerating in the states. To stop them, President Obama’s firm leadership will be crucial. So will the rising voices of alarmed Americans.UPDATE: The "Democrats Count on Edge" story now — at 4 Eastern Time, November 1 — has no link on the front page at all, and when I got to the page of links on "U.S. Politics," I have to scroll down the space of 2 screens before I see the story.
The incumbent, Scott Walker, was elected in the Republican wave of 2010 and embarked in 2011 on a serious, substantive program of reform. He succeeded in his effort to eliminate “collective bargaining” for most government employees, a boon to the state fisc and a blow to politicians, mostly Democrats, who benefit from public-sector electioneering at taxpayer expense.Taranto delves into the did-Trek-fire-Mary-Burke controversy that we've been discussing on this blog and wonders why Burke relied so heavily on the "biographical campaign" that makes her vulnerable to an attack like that.
Why isn’t Burke running a substantive campaign? As Collin Roth... observed in February: “Mary Burke has been largely incoherent on Act 10,” the collective-bargaining reform law. “Sometimes she opposes, sometimes she likes the healthcare and pension provisions, sometimes she wants to reinstate collective bargaining rights, and sometimes she simply didn’t like that the law was divisive.”I don't see how refraining from full-throated opposition means Walker's reforms are secure. We've often seen moderation in a campaign followed by something much more skewed after the election is won. I know back in 2011, many Wisconsinites felt Scott Walker did too much, too harshly when he got elected.
One possible answer is that she doesn’t think a full-throated campaign of opposition would win the election.... Yet even if Walker’s reforms are secure, a loss for him next Tuesday would be a huge victory for Big Labor—a show of union power that would discourage other governors from undertaking similar reforms by sending the message that success is politically fatal.
I could think of some other ways to interpret those 3 words and don't like being told to think of Justice Thomas as complacent and stiff. A person might like formality without being content with the way things are. A preference for formality can arise out of discomfort and mistrust. What kind of person shies away from free-wheeling banter and wants things put in writing?I dropped a rare footnote: "There is Critical Race Theory scholarship connecting a preference for formality to race. Citation to come." That was 3 days ago, and at least one commenter has signaled he's still waiting. Did I think he'd forget?
… I was raised to be acutely conscious of the likelihood that no matter what degree of professional I am, people will greet and dismiss my black femaleness as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerless, irrational, and probably destitute. Futility and despair are very real parts of my response. So it helps me to clarify boundary; to show that I can speak the language of lease is my way of enhancing trust in me in my business affairs. As black, I have been given by this society a strong sense of myself as already too familiar, personal, subordinate to white people. I am still evolving from being treated as three-fifths of a human, a subpart of the white estate. I grew up in a neighborhood where landlords would not sign leases with their poor black tenants, and demanded that the rent be paid in cash; although superficially resembling Peter's transactions, such informality in most white-on-black situations signals distrust, not trust. Unlike Peter, I am still engaged in the struggle to set up transactions at arm's length, as legitimately commercial, and to portray myself as a bargainer of separate worth, distinct power, sufficient rights to manipulate commerce.Now, take that observation and test out whether it could be similar to what Clarence Thomas was thinking when he said "I like formality."
Peter, I speculate, would say that a lease or any other formal mechanism would introduce distrust into his relationships and he would suffer alienation, leading to the commodification of his being and the degradation of his person to property. For me, in contrast, the lack of formal relation to the other would leave me estranged. It would risk figurative isolation from that creative commerce by which I may be recognized as whole, by which I may feed and clothe and shelter myself, by which I may be seen as equal — even if I am a stranger. For me, stranger-stranger relations are better than stranger-chattel.
George Washington, blue-gray eyes; John Adams, blue; Thomas Jefferson, hazel; James Madison, brown; James Monroe, blue-gray; John Quincy Adams, black; Andrew Jackson, blue (Old Stonewall-blue eyes?); Martin Van Buren, blue; William Henry Harrison, brown. John Tyler, blue; James Polk, gray; Zachary Taylor, hazel (it figures); Millard Fillmore, blue; Franklin Pierce, gray; James Buchanan, blue; Abraham Lincoln, gray (huh?); Andrew Johnson, black; Ulysses S. Grant, blue. Rutherford B. Hayes, blue; James Garfield, blue; Chester A. Arthur, black (of course); Grover Cleveland, blue (but only once); Benjamin Harrison, blue; William McKinley, blue-gray; Theodore Roosevelt, blue (come on); William Howard Taft, blue; Woodrow Wilson, blue-gray; Warren G. Harding, gray. Calvin Coolidge, blue; Herbert Hoover, hazel (stop laughing); Franklin D. Roosevelt, blue; Harry Truman, blue; Dwight D. Eisenhower, blue (I know, I didn`t believe it, either); John F. Kennedy, blue; Lyndon B. Johnson, brown; Richard Nixon, brown; Gerald Ford, blue; Jimmy Carter, hazel (don't say it); Ronald Reagan, blue.ADDED: I didn't really mean for this to be a separate post, but I accidentally published what was the draft of a comment to go in the "Eye Implants" thread, where I said something hyperbolic about blue eyes and got called on it. I don't delete posts. Ever. Not in 10+ years.
1. The debate seems to be largely one of semantics...If your father and brother decided they wanted to remove you from your position in the family company, they wouldn't label you "fired." They'd probably do what they could to shield you.
2. When asked for sales number from Burke’s European days by the Associated Press, John Burke said that he “did not have detailed financial records from that far back, but there was one year where the company had a loss.” The idea that a multimillion dollar corporation that operates around the world doesn’t keep financial records from 20 years ago is preposterous. If there are no records, then where does Mary Burke get the numbers that she raised sales from $3 million to $50 million? Further, how is it that Trek has enough institutional memory to trash its ex-employees who are named in the initial story, but can’t seem to remember why Mary Burke left the company?...These are Schneider's substantive points. Point 3 is just tweaking liberals for treating this one secretive big corporation differently from others. Point 4 refers to the assertion made (by whom?) that Burke "moved Trek’s European offices from Frankfurt, Germany to Amsterdam because she 'didn’t care for the German people' and because Amsterdam 'better reflected her lifestyle.'" I don't see what that has to do with whether Burke was fired, and Schneider seems to be repeating what he admits is "entirely hearsay" because it might offend the many people of German extraction who live in Milwaukee, "the most German city in America."
Swans have been the property of the Crown since around the twelfth century, but Edward IV’s Act Concerning Swans in 1482 clearly defined that ownership. To this day, Queen Elizabeth II participates in the yearly Swan Upping, in which the royal Swan Master counts and marks swans on the Thames, and the kidnapping and eating of swans can be considered a treasonous crime....But there are places in the United States where swans are considered pests, threatening other native species of birds. And the Queen is irrelevant here. Would you eat swan? If you want to know how it tastes, it's "delicious — deep red, lean, lightly gamey, moist, and succulent."
“Nobody has ever requested swan,” says Mark Lahm, chef and owner of Henry’s End in Brooklyn. Lahm’s restaurant is one of the few in New York to focus on wild game and has claimed to serve every meat imaginable: bear, turtle, kangaroo—everything, except swan. “Swan is not an animal that is hunted and besides it has the ‘cute’ factor going for it,” Lahm says. “I cannot imagine it on my menu.”
"You could hug me. You could shake my hand. I would not give you Ebola... I’m not willing to stand here and let my civil rights be violated when it’s not science-based... I’m fighting for something much more than myself. There are so many aid workers coming back and it scares me to think of how they are going to be treated, how they are going to feel."
"The phone starts ringing, you know, the first day after Labor Day, and I sort of joke that I'm like legal 911," Perkins says. The schools are "stressed like you cannot believe," [said Djuna Perkins is a former prosecutor who is now an investigator-for-hire]. They would rather have someone else handle the investigations, she adds, "because they, at a certain point, might feel a little bit out of their element."...Perkins interrogates the students:
That means asking questions like, "Well, when you did this particular thing was she making pleasurable moans? Was she lifting her pelvis to get clothes off? That all sort of goes into the mix," Perkins explains...
Perkins has had several cases that involved S&M that was at least initially consensual; she says it takes a lot of experience and training to remain consistently fair and nonjudgmental.
"'Cause my real reaction when students are talking about stuff like that — I'm like, 'oh my God, these kids, what are they doing?' " Perkins says with a laugh.
Democratic gubernatorial candidate Mary Burke was forced out of her job at her family’s company, Trek Bicycle, in 1993, a top-ranking company executive at the time said Wednesday. However, Trek CEO John Burke rejected that assertion, saying his sister left on her own and that allegations she was fired are “a highly orchestrated move by Gov. Scott Walker’s campaign.”What's the evidence of orchestration by the Walker campaign? It's strange to lob an allegation like that as you're trying to cast doubt on another allegation. I haven't seen anything tying the Trek-fired-Burke story to Walker, and considering the years of harassment Walker has received from the John Doe investigation, it's hard to understand why he'd risk engaging in some "highly orchestrated move."
“We were losing a significant amount of money,” Albers said. “A lot of the people that reported to her in Europe were threatening to leave because of her management style. She wanted things done her way and people said that she wasn’t listening to them, that she didn’t value their input.”...John Burke purports not to remember that meeting, though Albers says he was there. Do Mary and John Burke want to say that Albers is lying? Albers has contributed to Republican candidates, including a paltry $50 to Walker. He left Trek, we're told "on good terms in 1997 to become CEO of Specialized Bicycle Components," and he had something nice to say about Mary Burke: "I’ve always thought she was very bright. She has an outstanding education." But "I just don’t think she was ready for that job in Europe."
Albers, who oversaw finances and manufacturing, said Richard Burke sent him to Europe to evaluate Mary Burke’s performance after John Burke had determined that a change was needed. Albers said he later organized a meeting in Waterloo at which Burke had to explain the company’s poor performance to about 35 executives....
In the final days before the election, Democrats in the closest Senate races across the South are turning to racially charged messages — invoking Trayvon Martin’s death, the unrest in Ferguson, Mo., and Jim Crow-era segregation — to jolt African-Americans into voting and stop a Republican takeover in Washington....Why would the NYT push what seems to be a Republican talking point? Why would the NYT direct the entire country to look at ads that the Democratic Party supposedly only wants black people to see? It's possible that the NYT is simply following neutral journalistic principles, but I find it hard to believe that, on the eve of the election, the NYT isn't trying to help Democrats.
In North Carolina, the “super PAC” started by Senator Harry Reid of Nevada, the majority leader, ran an ad on black radio that accused the Republican candidate, Thom Tillis, of leading an effort to pass the kind of gun law that “caused the shooting death of Trayvon Martin.”
In Georgia, Democrats are circulating a flier warning that voting is the only way “to prevent another Ferguson.” It shows two black children holding cardboard signs that say “Don’t shoot.”
The messages are coursing through the campaigns like a riptide, powerful and under the surface, largely avoiding television and out of view of white voters. That has led Republicans to accuse Democrats of turning to race-baiting in a desperate bid to win at the polls next Tuesday.
I never give you my pillowI guess when you're a Beatle you get invitations that you pass along to boys you don't sleep with. But what are the celebrations in the middle of which you break down if you've given your invitation to somebody else?
I only send you my invitations
And in the middle of the celebrations
I break down
Music critic Ian MacDonald interpreted the lyric as an acknowledgment by the group that nothing they would do as individual artists would equal what they had achieved together, and they would always carry the weight of their Beatle past. McCartney said the song was about the Beatles' business difficulties and the atmosphere at Apple at the time. In the film Imagine: John Lennon, Lennon says that McCartney was "singing about all of us."Ah, well, now the lyric about the struggles of some males who voluntarily joined together, achieved a happy congress, and then felt burdened by the requirements of groupdom has been appropriated by females who agonize over the involuntarily juncture with males and now feel burdened by the aftereffects of something that was never good.
In the new poll, Walker enjoys a significant lead among independents, who have bounced around more than partisan voters in this race. Among likely voters, Walker leads among independents 52% to 37%.What has changed? Well, there were 2 debates. Burke seemed able to stand with equal weight next to Walker. She tended to attack him and call him not good enough, perhaps without explaining what she could do better, and he tended to speak optimistically about accomplishments. Maybe that made a difference. The other thing that changed is that Burke has identified herself strongly with the Obama administration with 2 big appearances alongside Michelle Obama.
One other shift in the new poll: Burke's personal ratings have worsened, while Walker's haven't changed much.
Among registered voters, 38% view Burke favorably while 45% view her unfavorably. Among likely voters, 39% view her favorably while 49% view her unfavorably.
"It's the first time we've seen her that far upside down or under water on favorability ratings," said poll director Charles Franklin.
The event was at North Division High School, in a ward where Obama outpolled Republican Mitt Romney 843 to 5 in the 2012 presidential election, according to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel. The somewhat risky bet that Burke is making is that Obama, polarizing as he is, will help turn out Wisconsin’s urban Democratic base for her next Tuesday....And I'm a little skeptical of October surprises — why are we getting this one week before the election? — but I feel compelled to acknowledge this new item in Wisconsin Reporter by M.D. Kittle, "Trek sources: Mary Burke’s family fired her for incompetence."
Burke is one of the very few candidates to welcome Obama, whose unpopularity in the polls has made him somewhat of a pariah amongst vulnerable Democrats in tight races. But Wisconsin’s labor-heavy, populist base hasn’t always loved Burke, a millionaire former executive at her family’s company, Trek Bicycle. Thus the gamble with Obama, whose presence risks putting off independent and suburban voters....
“I think it reflects the fact that she’s the candidate of Washington. We’re not bringing Washington surrogates in,” Walker told reporters after an event Tuesday in Wausau.
The [European sales staff] threatened to quit if Burke was not removed from her position as director of European Operations, according to Gary Ellerman, who served as Trek’s human resources director for 12 years. His account was confirmed by three other former employees....You know, she could spin that in her favor. Some of us might like a "pit bull on crack" or "Attila the Hun" standing up to the entrenched interest groups here in Wisconsin.
A former employee with the company told Wisconsin Reporter that John Burke, Mary’s brother and current Trek president, had to let his sister go. The former employee, who asked not to be identified for fear of reprisal from the Burke family, said Mary Burke was made to return to Wisconsin and apologize to a group of about 35 Trek executives for her treatment of employees and for the plummeting European bottom line.
Managers in Europe used to call Burke “pit bull on crack” or “Attila the Hun,” one source said.
“There is a dark side to Mary that the people at Trek have seen … She can explode on people. She can be the most cruel person you ever met,” said Ellerman, who started a consulting business after he was “asked to leave” Trek in 2004 over a difference in hiring philosophy.Come on! "She can be the most cruel person you ever met"... that could be a great political slogan.
Maine health officials have said they expect Hickox to agree to be quarantined at her home until 21 days have passed since her last potential exposure to the virus. Twenty-one days is the maximum incubation period for the Ebola virus....Hickox is certainly advancing the debate about quarantine. Her essay was extremely effective in making New Jersey look oppressive and abusive putting her into custody. She made a lot of people think differently about what's right and wrong, but now she's resisting the home-based quarantine, which seemed to many of us to be a respectful and safe enough middle ground.
Another attorney representing Hickox, New York civil rights lawyer Norman Siegel, said she would contest any potential court order requiring her quarantine at home. “The conditions that the state of Maine is now requiring Kaci to comply with are unconstitutional and illegal and there is no justification for the state of Maine to infringe on her liberty,” he said.
Dr. Craig Spencer at first told officials that he isolated himself in his Harlem apartment — and didn’t admit he rode the subways, dined out and went bowling until cops looked at his MetroCard the sources said.
It's really hard to say, because screen names don't always come across as gendered and one might pose as the other sex, and most readers don't comment.Then I decide to do a poll:
I think readers of political blogs and the large number of readers who've come here by way of Instapundit tend to be male.
I assume the readership here is majority male, though it probably doesn't skew male as much as most political blogs, not that I see this as mainly a political blog.
I think I've been subjected to criticism for years from the feminist blogs, and I'm sure this means that many potential female readers are lost. I'm very familiar with the way people who lean left get the idea that those who don't signal acceptance of their ideology are toxic.
1. Only some see you as a big liberal, most see you as a big fool, who was conned by Obama and will be conned again, or as a cock-tease who pretends to get the male/conservo-libertarian concerns, but returns privately to predictable female/collectivist tendencies.
2. For a wide swathe of traditional men, the judicial/law professor temperament is distasteful in a woman: it reminds them unpleasantly of manipulation, deception, or disloyalty in women close to them -- one they may have trusted to their regret. Indeed, I would argue it is attractive to a fairly narrow range of men in general (aside from outright betas who agree they need sensitivity training to be aware of when they leave hairs in the bathroom sink and who wouldn't dream of fondling an ass without politely asking permission first). Men don't mind reserve in a woman, but when it starts to seem calculating (which it has to be in the professor/judge role) it tends to trigger unease, ranging to paranoia in some cases.
3. There's tension between your occasional Woman/Womanhood As Victim ruminations and Instapundit's Men/Manhood As Victim ruminations. It's a very unusual person who can be neutral in the ancient battle of the sexes to win the Most Misunderstood And Exploited prize, or even see the merit that there might be in both sides of the endless argument.
4. There's blood in the water. After eight long years of a baffling preference of the majority of their fellow citizens for a smooth-talking prissy sleazebot and mealy-mouthed collectivist nostrums, there's the sense that now the red-blooded God-fearin' straight-shootin' black-coffee-drinkin' American they thought they lived amongst has finally woken up and is about to throw these changelings and cuckoos the hell out -- and the anticipation raises the blood pressure, while the possibility of a slip 'twixt cup and lip jangles the nerves. Result, partisan fervor.
5. Instapundit himself has changed (perhaps partly because of 4 above). There is less moderation and reflection, less non-political stuff, less independent libertarian stuff, and much more reflexive Obama hate.
6. Most bloggers and persistent commentariats tend to fossilize over time (and the comments in that thread are highly stereotyped). I think it's because it's extremely hard after a while for either the principal or the dinner guests to back down from an iffy and misguided thought -- you get savaged. So after time people tend to be less intellectually adventurous and open. This is a well-known effect in business: the larger the meeting, the more fossilized and traditional the positions. You only really get true experimentation and adventure in the ideas people express when the discussion is small, intimate, and private -- three adjectives that cannot possibly describe public blogging and commenting.
7. You also have a streak of provacateur or the intellectual flirt: you say things sometimes just (or mostly just) to provoke reaction and hot discussion. That makes all kinds of sense in your profession, of course. But, again, in a woman it can make many men uneasy -- few like a tease, which is kind of what this is.
But she admitted she couldn't say which of his titles she preferred because she hadn't had time to read his books - or indeed any others - since taking up a ministerial post two years ago.MORE: At the NYT:
"I admit without any problem that I have had no time to read over the past two years," she said, adding: "I read a lot of notes, and legislative documents. I read a lot of news. But I read [for pleasure] very little."
At the French site of The Huffington Post, Claude Askolovitch, a writer, said... “Barbarism is here.... If one can be culture minister without reading, then we are mere technocrats and budgeters." He chided her for prioritizing the reading of ministerial memos over the uplift provided by great literary works....Are we supposed to read novels? It used to seem so. Does it still?
“One can salute her frankness, understanding that the life of a minister leaves little time for the calm required for reading, and even salute the spontaneity of Fleur Pellerin,” noted an article in Le Point titled “Fleur Pellerin hasn’t read Modiano! So what?”...
God so many people who I generally respect or like are trying to pick this apart or go "oh so I'm not supposed to talk to people on the street? Ok" on social media and it just makes me want to delete them all from reality.
Students sit all day, and sitting is exhausting....
High school students are sitting passively and listening during approximately 90 percent of their classes....
You feel a little bit like a nuisance all day long. I lost count of how many times we were told be quiet and pay attention.... In addition, there was a good deal of sarcasm and snark directed at students.... Of course it feels ridiculous [to the teacher] to have to explain the same thing five times, but suddenly, when I was the one taking the tests, I was stressed. I was anxious. I had questions. And if the person teaching answered those questions by rolling their eyes at me, I would never want to ask another question again. I feel a great deal more empathy for students after shadowing, and I realize that sarcasm, impatience, and annoyance are a way of creating a barrier between me and them. They do not help learning.
For the first few months, Rob didn’t mind his job moderating videos at YouTube’s headquarters in San Bruno. His coworkers were mostly new graduates like himself, many of them liberal arts majors.... But as months dragged on, the rough stuff began to take a toll. The worst was the gore: brutal street fights, animal torture, suicide bombings, decapitations, and horrific traffic accidents...
[I]n hindsight, many conservatives acknowledged that the GOP’s obsession with that gaffe revealed more damaging truths about the Republican Party than the gaffe itself revealed about Obama."Gaffe" is not the right word. The point isn't: Ha ha, you made a ridiculous mistake. It's: You said what you really think in a revealing way and we're going to use that against you. That's obviously part of American politics, and in 2012, both the 47% thing and "You didn't build that" were revealing and useful. Both were used, and if Obama won, I doubt that it's because the Republicans shouldn't have exploited "You didn't build that." It's more likely that Democrats (and their media friends) jumped on the 47% remark and used it ruthlessly.
“One after another, [Republican businessowners] talked about the business they had built. But not a single—not a single—factory worker went out there,” Rick Santorum told activists at the Faith & Freedom Coalition conference last year. “Not a single janitor, waitress or person who worked in that company! We didn’t care about them. You know what? They built that company too! And we should have had them on that stage.”
The fixation on [Hillary's] gaffe foreshadows another Republican presidential campaign centered on the preeminence of the entrepreneur, to the exclusion of the wage worker and the trade unionist and the jobless.
I have returned to baking whole-wheat bread the way it is supposed to be made: water, yeast, flour, and salt. I will try to live without the magic wand. But I am certainly not going to live without gluten. That just seems silly.And by the way, I love the line "I know that I’m intolerant because I gave it up and I felt better" because it's funny to think of it out of context. Think of all the things one might say that about and how wrong you could be. Feel free to write a novel with that as a title.
Driving attitudes is a pervasive sense of a country in trouble. Overwhelming majorities say the country is badly off-track and give the economy negative ratings. Economic expectations are little better today than they were at this time four years ago.
Justice Thomas... He acknowledged being a “cynical and negative” law student, blaming immaturity and the unsettled political climate of the early 1970s. “I cannot say we were thinking straight about a lot of things, even if we were not using illegal substances,” he said. “I wish I came here at a time when I could have been more positive.... There is so much here that I walked right by.”...Alito is hilarious. There's also this:
The justices were questioned by Kate Stith, a law professor at Yale. She asked Justice Alito what he had been reading. “I have two books that are inspirational,” he responded. “I keep them on a table by my bed, and I try to read a little bit of them every night. It’s ‘My Grandfather’s Son’ and ‘My Beloved World.’ ”
Justice Sotomayor cited two reasons for the court’s reluctance to use technology [to communicate with each other]. One was tradition. “The other,” she said of some of her colleagues, “is they don’t know how.”I assumed that was a punchline from Alito, but Liptak signals that it's literally true that there are spittoons. It's still a humorous line, but less funny — less funny of Alito if there really are spittoons,* even though making the observations at that point is a concise, amusing way to say the Court is old-fashioned. And since it's funny if they have spittoons, the sum total of funniness is at least as good as if Alito made it up.
And the décor is from another era. “We still have spittoons by our seats,” Justice Alito said.
Justice Thomas said he was content with the way things are. “I like formality,” he said.I could think of some other ways to interpret those 3 words and don't like being told to think of Justice Thomas as complacent and stiff. A person might like formality without being content with the way things are. A preference for formality can arise out of discomfort and mistrust.** What kind of person shies away from free-wheeling banter and wants things put in writing?
… I was raised to be acutely conscious of the likelihood that no matter what degree of professional I am, people will greet and dismiss my black femaleness as unreliable, untrustworthy, hostile, angry, powerless, irrational, and probably destitute. Futility and despair are very real parts of my response. So it helps me to clarify boundary; to show that I can speak the language of lease is my way of enhancing trust in me in my business affairs. As black, I have been given by this society a strong sense of myself as already too familiar, personal, subordinate to white people. I am still evolving from being treated as three-fifths of a human, a subpart of the white estate. I grew up in a neighborhood where landlords would not sign leases with their poor black tenants, and demanded that the rent be paid in cash; although superficially resembling Peter's transactions, such informality in most white-on-black situations signals distrust, not trust. Unlike Peter, I am still engaged in the struggle to set up transactions at arm's length, as legitimately commercial, and to portray myself as a bargainer of separate worth, distinct power, sufficient rights to manipulate commerce.
Peter, I speculate, would say that a lease or any other formal mechanism would introduce distrust into his relationships and he would suffer alienation, leading to the commodification of his being and the degradation of his person to property. For me, in contrast, the lack of formal relation to the other would leave me estranged. It would risk figurative isolation from that creative commerce by which I may be recognized as whole, by which I may feed and clothe and shelter myself, by which I may be seen as equal — even if I am a stranger. For me, stranger-stranger relations are better than stranger-chattel.
[Mary] Burke must win big there and in similarly liberal Madison to counter Walker's support among Republicans in the conservative Milwaukee suburbs and in rural areas....And here's a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel article where the money has come from. Excerpt:
"They're trying to drive up turnout figuring they're not having much impact of convincing any more persuadable independent voters and it's more about turnout," Walker said. Walker, who launched a bus tour Saturday for the final 10 days of the race, said he was trying to compete for undecided voters all across the state.
"We have a score to settle with Scott Walker," AFSCME President Lee Saunders told The Washington Post on Sept. 10... Eight days later... AFSCME dumped $1.1 million into the Greater Wisconsin Political Fund, a liberal Madison-based, tax-exempt outfit that has been pummeling Walker with TV ads this year, according to newly released federal records.
The D.C. union was not alone. New state records show Greater Wisconsin's political action committee received just under $1.3 million from the Wisconsin Education Association Council — the state teachers union — in early August. WEAC has, in general, kept a low profile so far in this election....
Leave it to [Rick Perlstein, author of "The Invisible Bridge"] to note that the WIN buttons peddled by Ford to promote a desperate “Whip Inflation Now” campaign were “designed by the same guy who invented the yellow ‘smiley face.’ ”I'm not believing that. What guy are we talking about? I thought the origins of the smiley face were shrouded in mystery. Speaking of "shrouded," I think the origins of the smiley face are as shrouded in mystery as the Shroud of Turin.
The White House had approached a Madison Avenue advertising agency...Would it kill him to name the ad agency?
... which came up with the slogan: Whip Inflation Now. WIN. Forty-two minutes into the address Ford explained how "a very simple enlistment form" would appear in the next day's newspapers. At that, the president pointed out in his lapel, next to his red-white-and-blue tie, the snazzy little button designed by the same guy who invented the yellow "smiley face."What guy?
The video, called "The Clang of Swords," by the notorious terrorist group Islamic State, was declared extremist by a court in Russia's southern Stavropol region in July.I'm impressed that the Wayback Machine lasted as long as it did. I'm sure it gets you too all sorts of things the Russian government would prefer its people not to read.
The state communications watchdog Roskomnadzor said on its website Friday that it had found 400 online copies of the video and requested their removal.
A handful of sites, including Wayback Machine's domain Archive.org, did not comply, leading to their blacklisting.
A notoriously outspoken Russian actor and former Orthodox priest who suggested last week that Ebola victims were coming back from the dead as zombies has been banned from entering Latvia over earlier incendiary comments he made about gay people.So his comments were literally incendiary.
In December 2013, [Ivan] Okhlobystin said that all homosexuals should be burned alive because they represent a "living danger" to his children.
Last week he suggested that some victims of the Ebola virus were turning into zombies, explaining that he had heard of many cases in which those who died from the virus were mysteriously resurrected several days later. In case there was any doubt, the actor added that he "was not joking" and that he had purchased a crossbow, "just in case."A crossbow? On a zombie? Does that even work?
Taveras, one of the game's elite prospects, had belted a tying home run in the seventh inning of Game 2 of the National League Championship Series, the only game the Cardinals won before being vanquished by the Giants in five.ADDED: I was alerted to this news by Clyde in the comments on last night's open thread. He wrote:
St. Louis Cardinals outfielder Oscar Taveras, 22, and his 18-year-old girlfriend, Edilia Arvelo, died in a car wreck yesterday in the Dominican Republic. Taveras was a talented young player and one of baseball's top prospects.
It just goes to show the fragility of life, and the role that circumstance often plays in people's fates. Often a split second can be the difference between a narrow escape and becoming a statistic. Recently, my brother's girlfriend's car was totaled when she was out driving and an old metal pole blew over and landed on the hood of her car, just missing the windshield. She wasn't seriously hurt, fortunately, but it was a close thing. Had she driven past that spot a second earlier or later and her car wouldn't have been hit at all. A split second later and it might have landed on the windshield or squarely on the roof, which would have been much worse.
In Oscar Taveras' case, it's not difficult to imagine circumstances where he would have been far away from the Dominican yesterday: Had the Cardinals won the NLCS rather than the Giants, Taveras would have been in St. Louis last night for Game 5 of the World Series, assuming the Series went five games, of course; but even if it had been a four-game sweep, he likely would have still been in St. Louis on Sunday, cleaning out his locker, etc. While the Giants won the NLCS in five games, in an alternative universe, it could easily have gone another way. In that alternative universe, Taveras might have had a long and productive major league career and lived a long life. Sadly, in this universe, he and his girlfriend are dead at tragically young ages.
As the Oxford English Dictionary points out, Scottish botanist H.F. Macmillan used the term in his 1910 Handbook of Tropical Gardening and Planting to refer to a lime found in Sri Lanka, the home of the ethnic group that refer to themselves proudly as the Kaffirs. Macmillan lived there for 30 years, and it was there that he wrote his botanical handbook. It is difficult to say how he, and the other people he heard using the term kaffir lime, understood the connotation of the word, but it seems at least possible that the name began innocuously....It seems to me that if you have a product with a name that some people will experience as offensive, you might want to change the name, even though there's a pleasant-enough explanation. (See: Pee Cola and Barf dishwashing detergent.)
University of California researcher David Karp has alerted me to an even earlier published instance of the name kaffir lime than H.F. Macmillan’s: In The Cultivated Oranges, Lemons Etc. of India and Ceylon, published in 1888, author Emanuel Bonavia briefly mentions the fruit, noting, “Europeans call it Caffre-lime.”...
Karp and his colleague Cara De Silva have posited a different explanation for the name, speculating in 1998 in the food journal Petits Propos Culinaires, “Indian Muslims most likely encountered the fruit as an import from lands such as Thailand and Sri Lanka, where Buddhists and other non-Muslims predominated. ... From this Indian usage, intended to convey otherness and exotic provenance, the term passed into English.” This theory suggests that the name’s roots lie closer to the original Arabic meaning of kafir than to the 20th-century racial slur, although of course the term’s potentially benign origins don’t invalidate modern-day concerns about the word’s offensiveness.
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