A photograph taken for a very specific reason.

"With Paterson, the Simple Facts Can Get Complicated."

Okay, who wrote that NYT headline? I read it, and my brain plays (the greatest single of all time) The Who's "Substitute":

But I'm a substitute for another guy
I look pretty tall but my heels are high
The simple things you see are all complicated...

But they couldn't write "With Paterson, the simple things you see are all complicated"... because Governor Paterson is blind.

"Simpson is not only a misogynistic old geezer, he's a plagiarizing old geezer."

My dear, it's called an allusion. The error isn't stealing, it's assuming people get it.

A superior expanse of roadway.

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... somewhere in Cincinnati. This is the kind of thing you know isn't pretty and you'd hate to have in your neighborhood but you have the feeling that if it were a photograph, it would take on a strange, evocative grandeur. Is it wrong to feel that way? Should I be ashamed of myself to find this scene beautiful... but only because I'm not there?

Liberty Tire.

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... a building we rolled by ... as we left Cincinnati yesterday.

IN THE COMMENTS: Pogo said:

Classic racist American building.

No doubt the tires had smallpox.

Noting the "Liberty" clue, I interpret the Indian character as a Tea Party protester (of the original Boston Tea Party ilk).

Meade says:

Tired of getting rolled? Assert your naturally endowed rights to Life, Liberty, and Freedom From Being Trod Upon!

The manly mosaic men of Union Terminal.

"German-born artist Winold Reiss was commissioned in 1932 to design murals for the Cincinnati’s railroad station, called Union Terminal.... The 12-foot foreground figures illustrate the workings of people in the developing country.... Winold Reiss drew the portraits from life, and many of his subjects were Cincinnatians."

Lovely Cincinnatians!


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"How could a bunch of people who ran such a brilliant campaign be doing such a lousy job at the politics of governing?"

6 theories are presented. Rank them.

The theories are smart, but the columnist, Michael Tomasky, has laughable ideas about what Obama should have done:

Send the president out to rural white areas to talk about his national broadband policy....

White areas... This from a British paper, but still, Tomasky is purporting to have the line on how America works. He imagines the man in the "white area" saying:

"Well, Martha..."

... hicks have wives named Martha...

"... they say he's a socialist, but I don't know, if he's out here in our little town in central Nebraska where we voted 80% McCain and he's promoting rural internet, that doesn't seem too socialist to me."

What?! Is that a socialist joke? The rubes say they hate something with the label "socialist," but when you given them something they like they don't even understand how the label applies (because they really don't hate socialism at all, they're just dumb) — is that a socialist joke?

And, out here in my little city in the middle of the midwest, I think when a man writes dialogue like that, I have a hard time taking anything he says seriously.

Peter Berkowitz collects quotes from 2008 saying conservatism in America is over forever.

And:

The credit for galvanizing ordinary people and placing individual freedom and limited government back on the national agenda principally belongs to President Obama, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi and Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid. Their heedless pursuit of progressive transformation reinvigorated a moribund conservative spirit, just as in 1993 and 1994 the Clintons' overreaching on health care sparked a popular uprising resulting in a Republican takeover of Congress.

So it wasn't that conservative principles caught hold of America. It was that the progressives scared the hell out of us.

"They have a right to rally. But what they don't have the right [to] do is distort what Dr. King's dream was about."

Said Al Sharpton, narrowly defining rights. It's so close to the time when everyone was talking about the mosque near Ground Zero and even the staunch opponents assured us that there was a right to build the mosque, but that didn't mean it was a good thing to do.

I haven't been following this controversy, and I don't really know what Glenn Beck and his cohort are doing that could be construed as "distort[ing] what Dr. King's dream was about." But it's quite obvious that we all do have a right to distort King's ideas or any other ideas as much as we damned well please. And Sharpton and the rest of us also have a right to say that there is no such right, but it's not good to say that. Because it's not true. And it's anti-freedom. Ironically.

Boys and their water animals.

From the base of a fountain in downtown Cincinnati.

Let's take a closer look at those 310 million tits.

I love the Simpson "tit" flap. Even as the "Ground Zero Mosque" saved us from having to talk about the economy, that giant udder with 310 million tits has saved us from further discussion of that damned mosque. This is good, from Jacob Sullum:

The mention of outraged feminists suggests that Simpson stands accused of sexist vulgarity. I have to admit that I was shocked the first time I saw my mother use tit in a Scrabble game, but I was about 12 at the time, and she explained that the word is a perfectly acceptable variation of teat. Webster's New Universal Unabridged Dictionary backs her up, saying tit is deemed "vulgar" only when it refers to a woman's breast. The New Shorter Oxford English Dictionary likewise lists "teat" as the first definition for tit, although it notes that the usage is "now obscure" except in certain dialects (such as Alan Simpson's, evidently). So even by the arbitrary standards that make certain words unacceptable in polite company, in  family newspapers, and on broadcast television between 6 a.m. and 10 p.m (though that last rule may be a thing of of the past), Simpson need not apologize for his use of tit.

Ha. That reminds me of this part of one of George Carlin's "7 Dirty Words" routines:

Shit, Piss, Fuck, Cunt, Cocksucker, Motherfucker, and Tits, wow. Tits doesn't even belong on the list, you know. It's such a friendly sounding word. It sounds like a nickname. 'Hey, Tits, come here. Tits, meet Toots, Toots, Tits, Tits, Toots.' It sounds like a snack doesn't it? Yes, I know, it is, right. But I don't mean the sexist snack, I mean, New Nabisco Tits. The new Cheese Tits, and Corn Tits and Pizza Tits, Sesame Tits Onion Tits, Tater Tits, Yeah. Betcha can't eat just one. That's true I usually switch off. But I mean that word does not belong on the list.

Or this — not about "tits," but conceptually more apt:

[C]ocksucker is a compound word and neither half of that is really dirty. The word - the half suckercock is a half-way dirty word, 50% dirty - dirty half the time, depending on what you mean by it. Uh, remember when you first heard it, like in 6th grade, you used to giggle. And the cock crowed three times, heh, the cock - three times. It's in the Bible, cock in the Bible. ...
Now the word twat is an interesting word. Twat! Yeh, right in the twat. Twat is an interesting word because it's the only one I know of, the only slang word applying to the, a part of the sexual anatomy that doesn't have another meaning to it. Like, ah, snatch, box and pussy all have other meanings, man. Even in a Walt Disney movie, you can say, We're going to snatch that pussy and put him in a box and bring him on the airplane.

AND: Could someone digitally alter this scene and replace Woody Allen with Alan Simpson?

Timothy Egan's NYT column "Building a Nation of Know-Nothings" requires fisking...

... and I'm relieved to see that John Hinderaker has already done the grisly task.

"Alan Simpson Didn't Need to Apologize."

Says Professor Bainbridge, via Instapundit ... and, as you know, I agree.

Well, you know, now, there is a solution for your apology mistakes. Levi Johnston is leading the way. Take back your apology.

IN THE COMMENTS: Meade writes:

Un-apology for Non-apology Tips for Teens of All Ages:

1. Take responsibility for having non-apologized.
2. Acknowledge that, no, you really did mean to insult, hurt, damage the other person.
3. Determine the frivolousness of the offense for which you mistakenly non-apologized.
4. Decide the best time to un-apologize for your non-apology.
5. Choose a method of un-apology.
6. Equivocate with sincere insincerity.
7. Remember this un-apology is about you and your charming dysfunctional non-apology, not the other person.
8. Go beyond "I'm sorry if my non-apology failed to fully offend you," to make the un-apology as personal and humiliating as possible.

The 33 Chilean miners, who know they will be trapped below ground for months, display their living conditions to the world...

... and sing the national anthem to express their appreciation that people have the courage to go to all the trouble of rescuing them.

Think of all the miners in the past who have been trapped and were not rescued. Imagine knowing even one human being was buried alive and not making the effort — whatever the expense — to get them out.

ADDED:

"This is our casino," the miner says at one point, showing a table where the miners, he says, had made some makeshift dominoes.

It is the best thing to do, under the circumstances. In the above-ground world casinos are deliberately constructed without windows.

Transparencies.

Lunching alone.