I read Phil Robertson's autobiography.

1. Here, you can buy it on Amazon, as I did.

2. I have no idea how accurate it is, but I know that the GQ article calls it "a ghostwritten book he says he has never read." I assume he talked to the ghostwriter and didn't check the ghost's work by sitting down and reading through the book. I'd be interested to know what books Phil does read. He reads the Bible. I got that. Phil purports to be such a godly man that I feel entitled to believe the book is accurate, but it has the feeling of PR, and I took it in that spirit.

3. My favorite part of the book was the first chapter, his boyhood, especially all the stuff about living off the land:

Melissa Harris-Perry apologizes, again, this time with tears.

Transcript here. Key lines:

My intention was not malicious, but I broke the ground rule that families are off-limits, and for that I am sorry.

Also, allow me to apologize to other families formed through transracial adoption, because I am deeply sorry that we suggested that interracial families are in any way funny or deserving of ridicule. On this program we are dedicated to advocating for a wide diversity of families. It is one of our core principles....

Here's my post from New Year's Eve covering the controversy. I said: "Quite aside from racial politics, I thought children were off limits. Here you have an MSNBC panel segment planned around laughing at a baby. We scrupulously avoid using Obama's daughters as raw material for jokes. Why didn't anyone at MSNBC nix this?"

Speaking of "core principles," balanced journalism should also be a core principle. If you find you forget your core principles when you see ways to take shots at political candidates you oppose, then you're also forgetting the core principle of balanced journalism. You're doubling up on the forgetting of core principles. And it's so easy to test yourself: Imagine that conservative is a liberal (or vice versa).

"A rejuvenated al-Qaeda-affiliated force asserted control over the western Iraqi city of Fallujah on Friday..."

Reports The Washington Post.

“At the moment, there is no presence of the Iraqi state in Fallujah,” said a local journalist who asked not to be named because he fears for his safety. “The police and the army have abandoned the city, al-Qaeda has taken down all the Iraqi flags and burned them, and it has raised its own flag on all the buildings.”

At Friday prayers, held outdoors and attended by thousands of people, a masked ISIS fighter took the podium and addressed the crowd, declaring the establishment of an “Islamic emirate” in Fallujah and promising to help residents fight the government of Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki and his Iranian allies....

"We will live in a 'society of enforced leisure,' and 'the most glorious single word in the vocabulary will have become work!'"

From the "Incorrect Predictions" section of an article titled: "Isaac Asimov's Predictions For 2014 From 50 Years Ago Are Eerily Accurate."

"Ronan Farrow has "assiduously avoided" publicity "for much of his life," according to The NYT Magazine, arduously aching to bestow publicity upon him.

The 26-year-old son of Mia Farrow and Woody-Allen-or-Frank-Sinatra has also had an MSNBC show thrust upon him.

His public persona is friendly but guarded.... So working as a television personality seems a strange choice; it’s likely to foreground all the things he has been so keen to leave in the background — his looks, his family, his private life. 

Oh, no, no, no, no, don't speak about how beautiful I am. Do put that in the background. I'm so keen to put that in the background. And in the foreground, please put... what? What the hell else is there? Why is this lad on television and in The New York Times?

12 posts written before dawn.

What a strange morning of blogging!

I see the light beginning to come up at last. Time to back away from the lit screen and absorb the soft gray of the morning.

This is the 13th post, written in the late stages of cabin fever from my remote outpost in The North.

And the nominees for Worst Playing of the Race Card in the Year 2014 are...

#1:

Conservatives Are Awfully Silent About Jahi McMath

After Terri Schiavo, you’d think more conservatives would be lining up to side with the 13-year-old’s family....

For some reason, Jahi’s condition doesn’t seem to resonate the same way. The silence from the right is rather deafening, with almost no political movement—other than the Schiavo family’s personal outreach—for Jahi. It's easier, apparently, to move legislative mountains for a white woman in conservative Florida precincts than it is for a black girl from ardently liberal, urban Oakland, Calif.

The Schiavo case involved a conflict between parents who wanted to keep their daughter alive and a husband with the legal power to procure her departure.

"Only weeks before a chemistry experiment sent a plume of fire across a Manhattan high school science lab, engulfing two students and leaving one with life-threatening burns..."

"... a federal safety agency issued a video warning of the dangers of the very same experiment, a common one across the country."

"I don’t know one intersex individual who is happy with the treatment they have received from the physicians they have consulted with over the years — not one."

"One’s sexual feeling, ability to feel like they can couple with another human being, is literally destroyed by some doctor’s idea of how genitals are supposed to look."

“I learned to lie. I couldn’t tell other kids I went to the hospital and had my genitals chopped up again.” He lived with a plastic tube attached to his genitals so that he could stand to pee; his urinary opening came at the base, not the tip, of his penis. Cosmetic surgery should not be performed on infants, he insists. “If they choose, later, to have a surgery—if it’s their choice. If I’d had the chance to do that, I wouldn’t have gone quite so horrible an adolescence, quite so difficult an identify formation as an adult.”

“Remember: your kid is going to want his genitals. Your kid is going to want her genitals.... ”

The vortex.

"Astonishing."

"We must form their hearts. Otherwise we are creating little monsters. And then these little monsters mold the people of God."

 "This really gives [Pope Francis] goose bumps."

MEANWHILE: The Pope leaves a phone message: "What can the nuns be doing that stops them answering the phone?... This is Pope Francis... I wanted to give you New Year's greetings. I'll see if I can reach you later. God bless you."

Senators suing.

1. "U.S. Sen. Ron Johnson plans to file a lawsuit on Monday challenging a federal rule that allows members of Congress and their staffs to continue to receive health benefits similar to other federal employees."

2. "Sen. Rand Paul, R-Ky., is suing the Obama administration over the National Security Agency’s spying practices.... 'The question here is whether or not, constitutionally, you can have a single warrant apply to millions of people... So we thought, what better way to illustrate the point than having hundreds of thousands of Americans sign up for a class action suit.'"

"Mr Jack's death occurred shortly before he was due to demonstrate how heart implants could be hacked at the Black Hat security conference in Las Vegas."

So how did master-hacker Barnaby Jack — who was only 36 — die? The coroner's report is in, and it seems that the expert at computer hacking lacked comparable genius in mixing drugs. He died of "acute mixed drug intoxication... an accidental overdose of heroin, cocaine, and prescription drugs."

Maybe this will slap some sense into you.

Sometimes you have to slap them in the face just to get their attention.

"For progressives, there were a lot of inspiring things about Bill de Blasio’s formal swearing in as mayor on Wednesday.... Then there was President Clinton."

Jarrett Murphy, writing in The Nation:

[I]n spite of his rock-star status and brilliance as an orator, Clinton has questionable value as a symbol of the kind of progressive change de Blasio has promised. He’s more accurately a symbol of dashed progressive hopes....

In office, however, Bill Clinton pushed NAFTA over labor’s objections and sought Most Favored Nation trading status for China in the face of severe human rights concerns. He waived human rights requirements to facilitate Plan Colombia, which provided military aid to the Bogota government. He oversaw much of the financial deregulation that enabled the 2007–08 financial crisis. He widened federal authority to impose the death penalty. He signed into law the harsh 1996 immigration bill, backed measures that vastly expanded executive power to fight “terrorism” and supported the odious Defense of Marriage Act.

How could Murphy miss Bill Clinton's crushing of all the progress that had been made on sexual harassment awareness in the recent "they just don't get it" era?



Not one gender-related word even as this commentator of the left purports to enumerate Bill Clinton's sins against progressivism!

Obama's annual reunion with the group that still calls itself "The Choom Gang."

The NYT reports:

For a reputed loner, Mr. Obama has remained remarkably close to a trio he met as a teenager at Honolulu’s prestigious Punahou School — boys of Hawaii’s year-round summer with whom he played basketball, bodysurfed, drank beer and, like so many other young islanders in the 1970s, smoked pot, the “choom” of that long-ago nickname....

The annual gatherings perhaps speak to Mr. Obama’s greater need for their connection now that he has what is called the loneliest job in the world...

That first year, [Mike] Ramos said, “I remember coming home from a golf outing and literally starting to cry,” so emotional was the contrast he felt between their friendships and the “transactional” ones he said he had since formed as a businessman. “For me it’s the unconditional love, it’s the nontransactional nature of the relationship — that enduring quality — that is something that I really value,” he said.

Are your friendships so transactional you could cry?

IN THE COMMENTS: MayBee said:

They didn't start meeting annually unti 2004, when Obama decided to run for Senate and he needed a fresh group of friends for his biography....

It says something pretty funny about politics when an article about the Presidents's friends has a quote about the importance of friends from the "long time" political strategist. And yes, Axelrod was Obama's strategist when Obama decided to start the annual get together with them.

Doesn't that just scream "these friends are part of a political strategy! This article is part of that strategy!" 

The transactionality of nontransactional friends.