Pressure cooker.

NYPD says video shows male with a shopping cart placing pressure cooker on upper and lower levels at Fulton Street subway station. Watch press conference live: https://t.co/p0wrspdcs9 pic.twitter.com/HI81uNG25L

— NBC New York (@NBCNewYork) August 16, 2019

"Authorities are looking to question a tall, thin white man seen pushing a shopping cart near the Fulton Street subway station, where two rice cookers were found Friday morning. A third rice cooker was found next to a trash can in Chelsea.... All three devices were stainless steel, silver commerical [sic] grade rice cookers with black handles; all three were empty."

IN THE COMMENTS: rehajm:

That John Mackey...

mccullough:

Wants to be able to make steel cut oats

Ha ha. I thought about that too. (For context, see this post from 7:08 AM about Whole Foods CEO John Mackey, who "typically packs a rice cooker with him (to make his morning steel-cut oats)."

MikeR said:

Performance art. Old tradition at subway stations.

Yes, I remember this story from 2002:

Clinton Boisvert, a newly enrolled student at the School of Visual Arts in Manhattan, was arrested this week and charged with reckless endangerment after dreaming up one of the more provocative art projects of the post-September 11 era: placing 38 black boxes, bearing the word "fear" in white lettering, around the Union Square station, a crucial hub where six lines intersect. The bomb squad was called in and the station was shut for five hours last Thursday, causing a ripple effect of chaos on the network, as panicked commuters and transit workers feared a terrorist attack.

But in a city still especially alert to people behaving suspiciously in potential target zones, witnesses soon came forward to report seeing two "artsy types" distributing the boxes, a police source was quoted as saying. Police canvassed art schools, and Mr Boisvert turned himself in.... The NYPD said nobody had immediately reported the boxes when Mr Boisvert was seen distributing them, and that the art student had planned to bring friends to witness the installation the following day. If convicted, Mr Boisvert could receive up to a year in jail - and a useful boost to his profile as an up-and-coming conceptual artist.

I can't find anything on the later career of Clinton Boisvert.

"Everyone seems to be mourning your exit from office... I'm glad you're gone. I'm not delusional — you're not a saint."

"You were a mediocre president with unoriginal ideas.... I thought you would finally right this wrong..."

This wrong = the conviction of former Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich.

"You didn't have to pardon him, only commute the sentence. You just had to let him come home. You didn't. You released others, like Chelsea Manning or FALN terrorists, who actually committed reprehensible crimes, but you failed to release an innocent man.... I am shocked at how bitter and full of hate I have become.... I truly thought you were a good person. I guess I was just as brainwashed as everyone else. At least now I can see the blood on your hands."

Wrote Rod Blagojevich's 20-year-old daughter, Amy Blagojevich.

Adding tags to this post, I see I have an old tag Blagosmear on Obama. That goes back to a time when I pictured Blagojevich dragging Obama down. That didn't happen, and I think Obama figured out how to keep Blagojevichishness off of him.

Here's my original "Blagosmear on Obama" post, from December 14, 2008, before Obama even took office. The GOP had put out this video, obviously intended to wreck Obama before he got started:



I'm not surprised Obama never did anything to help Rod Blagojevich. I feel sorry for the man's daughter, but look how her father undercut Obama on the eve of his honeymoon.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

Blagojevich's sentence was ridiculously long. Trump should commute to 6.5 years, which is what George Ryan's sentence was. The judge is an asshole who was pissed that Blagojevich got a hung jury on the first trial.

A few comments later, mccullough came back and said:

Trump fired Blagojevich on Celebrity Apprentice. It would be awkward for him to get involved now. So he'll probably get involved.

Ha ha. That made me go look up the old "Apprentice" scene:



Trump does fire him, but he also expresses respect for his tenacity and shakes his hand and wishes him well.

More "Apprentice" with Blagojevich (and Joan Rivers too):



"I'll do anything [PAUSE] legal and ethical and [PAUSE] honest."

"The Supreme Court took a pass Thursday on its first chance to decide whether there is a constitutional right for same-sex couples to marry."

Writes Robert Barnes in The Washington Post, making the non-news seem more exciting than it is.

The court is considering cases from Virginia, Utah, Oklahoma, Indiana and Wisconsin where federal appeals courts struck down state prohibitions on same-sex marriages.... But those who study the court and even the lawyers making the requests have said they expect it will take weeks or even months for the justices to decide which of the cases provides the best vehicle for a decision....

The Court didn't reject any of these cases yet.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said: "I just read the linked article and it says 'took no action.'" Ha. I assure you I cut and pasted. I don't know if this blog post is the reason for the change in wording. There's no notation at the link that this change was made.

The New Yorker's lame effort at un-embarrassing Jeffrey Toobin.

Yesterday, I trashed Jeffrey Toobin's write-up of the oral argument in the Hobby Lobby case. I wrote:

The stupidest sentence in the article is this:

Solicitor General Donald Verrilli, who was defending the law, invested heavily in the argument that for-profit companies like Hobby Lobby simply do not have rights to religious expression under the First Amendment.

No, he didn't! Quite aside from the fact that he got nowhere with the argument that for-profit corporations should be treated differently from other corporations, the rights in question were not under the First Amendment. They came from a federal statute called the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, which Toobin never mentions in his article!

Today, there's a notation at the bottom of the article that says: "Due to an editing error, some words were omitted from one of Paul Verrilli’s quotes. They have been restored." [ADDED: The New Yorker's correction gets Verrilli's first name wrong, commenter mccullough catches.]

What's "restored" is a reference to the Religious Freedom Restoration Act, exactly the omission I'd pointed out. In the text of the article, the sentence after the sentence I called the stupidest now reads:

“It seems to me that it would be such a vast expansion of what Congress must—could have thought it was doing, in 1993, when it enacted R.F.R.A.—to say that for-profit corporations can make claims for religious exemptions to any laws of general application that they want to challenge,” he said, referring to a law on religious expression that Hobby Lobby had cited. 

Why would that quote have fit after the "stupidest sentence," the one that refers to "rights to religious expression under the First Amendment"? RFRA is not the First Amendment. It's a statute.

And that last clause, calling RFRA "a law on religious expression" seems like a desperate attempt to connect the quote to the "stupidest sentence." RFRA was an effort to undo a Supreme Court decision — Employment Division v. Smith — which was not about religious expression but "religiously motivated conduct." The opinion in Smith explicitly distinguished religious expression from religiously motivated conduct when it narrowed the interpretation of the First Amendment's Free Exercise Clause — which is what motivated Congress to retaliate with RFRA.

So I am not buying that this was "an editing error" or that something that was originally in Toobin's text got "restored."

Toobin degraded the reputation of The New Yorker, which apparently no longer has an editing process capable of catching egregious mistakes in characterizing what is in a transcript that is right there to be seen by anyone with access to the web. The New Yorker used to seek out hard-to-find sources in what was a famous fact-checking process. We the readers trusted that. Here, it was easy to do one's own checking, and the error was beyond obvious.

Why is Toobin writing for The New Yorker? The only answer that comes to me is that the magazine is pandering to its readers, and I am insulted by the assumption that this is what we want. 

UPDATE: More on the Donald/Paul screw up here. 

"Republican wins San Diego mayor special election. And in spite of a flood of public-union money in favor of the Democrat."

"Obama Turnout Machine Crashes in San Diego — Loses Mayor’s Race by 9 Points."

The polls were skin-tight leading into yesterday’s election, and unions poured in millions to keep control in the nation’s eighth-largest city. . . . Democrats were stunned at the margin.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

What justifies the "in spite" in the article? Pension and medical benefits of public employees are a hot issue. The more a Dem candidate looks like a union stooge, the worse it is for that candidate.

I think what we are seeing — and what we saw here in Wisconsin in 2011 — is a new visibility to the dysfunctional cycling of money between the public employee unions and the Democratic Party.

"Odd that there are only investigations into conservative groups breaking campaign finance laws. Sort of like the IRS only vetting conservative groups tax-exempt status."

Quoting mccullough the commenter in our conversation last night about the partisan-seeming judge in the Wisconsin John Doe investigation, Instapundit says: "The bureaucracy is a one-party state."

Obama, skeet-shooting last August.

The photographic evidence — responding to skepticism — uploaded at the presidential Flickr page today:



IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said: "Cool picture. I want a poster of it to put next to my poster of Nixon bowling."



ADDED: White House coins the term "skeeters" to make fun of people don't believe Obama goes skeet shooting all the time at Camp David.

Cain "reassessing."

"We have to do an assessment as to whether or not this is going to create too much of a cloud, in some people’s minds, as to whether or not they would be able to support us going forth...."

It’s also taken a toll on my wife and family, as you would imagine... Any time you put another cloud of doubt, unfortunately, in the court of public opinion, for some people, you’re guilty until proven innocent. And so, the public will have to decide whether they believe her or whether they believe me. That’s why we’re going to give it time, to see what type of response we get from our supporters.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough has a theory:

I'm guessing that Cain asked this woman to come forward and tell about their affair so he could have an excuse to get out of the race.

He never had any serious intention of being President.

"I feel like calling her back and smacking her around."

A Wisconsin recall candidate has a run-in with an overeager answering machine.

I don't know what's funnier. Clark's accidental recording or the gleeful exploitation of it by the other side:

“This disturbing and inappropriate comment gives us an unfortunate glimpse of what Representative Clark is like when he thinks no one is listening. Domestic violence is a devastating problem in our state , and abuse is on the rise. To be able to so freely threaten violence against a woman, even in jest, shows a tremendous lack of character.”

Everybody's a radical feminist.

IN THE COMMENTS: mccullough said:

Rule 4: Make opponents live up to their own book of rules.

"The journalists... gasped and then chanted a religious blessing."

Ha ha. Good one, mccullough.