"What most people do when they see a law being broken: go get a cop."

That's a line from a piece by Arianna Huffington, which complains about the sting that got Larry Craig arrested in an airport men's room.

Don't get me wrong, I'm not wild about walking into a public restroom and seeing a couple using the a stall for something other than, as Sgt. Dave Karsnia, the arresting officer in the Craig case put it, "its intended use."

But that is not what Larry Craig did. If he had, someone in the restroom could have done what most people do when they see a law being broken: go get a cop.

So -- in Arianna's world -- if you have an airport bathroom that's become a notorious place for gay sex, you don't need to station an undercover cop inside to catch anybody and deter the behavior, you can just hang back and wait for the bathroom-goers to see the sexual beharior and to do what "most people do." These busy travelers will officiously run around the airport looking for a cop. That doesn't sound to me like the way "most people" react to sleazy quality-of-life crimes. I think most people would be disgusted, immediately leave the bathroom and plan to avoid that bathroom -- and maybe that airport -- in the future.

Even assuming that men going to the Minneapolis airport bathroom would go searching for a cop, the cops in the airport should be a paying attention to other things, not dealing with a very particular problem that has nothing to do with airport security. Yet Arianna says:

And as it happens, since Craig was arrested in an airport, presumably there were plenty of law enforcement officers nearby looking for, you know, real threats -- like explosives or folks on a Watch List.

And you want to take them off that task to go after some guys having sex in the bathroom (who'd probably be gone by the time he arrived)? How on earth is that better than using a police officer like Karsnia who is trained for a specialized task?

But Huffington thinks Karsnia's job is simply ridiculous:

It's unsettling that more people here in the land of the free aren't at all discomfited at leaving it up to the prognostication skills of Sgt. Karsnia and his crack team of B-men to determine what crimes people might have committed if not for the mind-reading and daring-do [sic] of Minneapolis' Special Forces Bathroom Unit.

What other public servants with difficult jobs -- imagine training to be a cop and then getting assigned to sit on a toilet all day -- does the imperious Arianna Huffington think deserving of her mockery?

Is sending Sgt. Karsnia into the men's room to spend all day trying to get other men to look at him and tap his foot really the best way to use our limited law enforcement resources?

And just how much money is Minneapolis/St. Paul spending on sting operations like this one? Just since May, 40 men have been arrested on allegations of illegal sexual activity at the same airport. And how much taxpayer money in total is being allocated across the country by local police to protect us from people whom the Sgt. Karsnias of the world think might, at some point, commit a crime?

I'm not an economist, but it seems to me that the sting is cost effective. One police officer, carrying out very few arrests, ruins the reputation of this bathroom as a place for sex encounters. That bathroom is in the state's most important airport, a hub of commercial activity. Minnesotans have a huge interest in maintaining the quality of their international airport, and travelers have endless opportunities to choose other routes when they dislike an airport. I would speculate that Karsnia's work probably produced a large net benefit to taxpayers.

"You'd have to be an idiot to fall off... If anyone can make a pig's ear of riding a sophisticated, self-balancing machine like this, Dubya can."

You'd have to be an idiot to attempt to ride a self-balancing machine like this after saying a thing like that, because if you should happen to fall, you'd be the laughingstock of the world.

WaPo columnist overwhelmed with meaninglessness....

... on contemplating the death of Princess Diana. It seems that Anne Applebaum, being English, felt she had to write something about the 10 year anniversary of the death of Diana.

[T]he genuinely bizarre aspect of the all-consuming Dianamania that gripped Britain a decade ago this week is how slight a trace it has left. The royal family is pretty much the same, only quieter...

Nor have there been political repercussions. It didn't take long for Britons to tire of Blair's Diana-like emotionalism (some would say Diana-like manipulativeness).

10 years is not long? Here in America, we're committed in advance to being sick of every President after 8 years. We can't consider putting up with a leader for 10 years even hypothetically.

His sober replacement, Gordon Brown -- a man whose name rarely appears in print without the adjective "dour" -- is already more popular. Brown's government is dominated by technocratic types with furrowed brows and by sensible centrists, such as his plain-jane home secretary, Jacqui Smith: No sign of touchy-feeliness there.

Jacqui Smith! The last time I heard about her, WaPo fashion columnist Robin Givhan was comparing her show of cleavage to Hillary Clinton's -- and finding it "a full-fledged come-on." Now, I don't know what to think of Jacqui Smith -- or the U.K. Is it a place where an exuberant show of cleavage is regarded as staid?

One could argue that Diana's truest legacy is the screaming emotionalism of the British tabloids -- except that it long predates Diana and actually helped create her in the first place....

Ironically, nowhere does Dianamania seem more irrelevant than in the place that was meant to be its shrine. Last summer I happened to find myself at the Diana memorial at Althorp, her family's estate....

There was the original, handwritten version of the speech her brother, Charles, gave at her funeral -- framed behind glass and lit as if it were the Magna Carta.

Visitor numbers are way down from 1997, and no wonder: The whole thing feels rather irrelevant. Human beings naturally try to give deeper meaning to pointless tragedies -- even where no meaning is to be found.

Did the columnist trek to Althorp and feel cold and grouchy, or is it really true that the death of Diana caused a fever, which spiked and died away?

CORRECTION: Applebaum is not British! She did, however, write "Like most Britons, I can remember where I was when the BBC announced...."

The dog.

What is this amazing creature?



Spotted underneath the Manhattan Bridge today.



ADDED: I'm told this is a Great Dane. Unusual color, isn't it? Amba tells me it's called "blue merle." Who's Merle? The dictionary says it may come from the word "merle," meaning "blackbird." Are we supposed to see the spots as birds? And for those who noticed -- of all things -- that the woman is using a laptop, let me point this out:

Readers, commenters...

Do you think we could get together a group meet-up here in Brooklyn?

New York blue.

John Edwards: "you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years."

Edwards' universal health care proposal ignores individual autonomy:

"It requires that everybody be covered. It requires that everybody get preventive care," he told a crowd sitting in lawn chairs in front of the Cedar County Courthouse. "If you are going to be in the system, you can't choose not to go to the doctor for 20 years. You have to go in and be checked and make sure that you are OK."...

Edwards said his mandatory health care plan would cover preventive, chronic and long-term health care. The plan would include mental health care as well as dental and vision coverage for all Americans.

So, the mental health check is mandatory too? Why does he not even realize how bad that sounds? He's so warmed up about the generous benefits he's promising that he doesn't even hear the repressiveness in his own statements. I'm sure he won't be able to deliver on these promises. I'm just wondering about a person with so little sensitivity toward personal freedom.

Somehow, this reminds me of a sign I saw the other day:



For more commentary, start here. And I predict Edwards will, within a day, chide us for misunderstanding what he meant by "require" and that "require" doesn't mean you'll be forced, only that the big bad medical establishment will be required to provide.

ADDED: This idea of screening everyone's mental health reminds me of the proposal we were just talking about to screen military personnel. There was a NYT editorial:

It is an eminently good thing that the anti-suicide measure would require medical specialists to keep track of veterans found to be high risks for suicide. But that’s to care for them as human beings, under that other constitutional right — to life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

I'll ignore that goof about the Constitution this time and just quote this reaction of mine:

Why stop at soldiers? Let's have the government come around and check on everyone's sanity and then track those of us who don't meet the standard! To show we care for them as human beings.

That was my sarcasm, but Edwards is talking about really doing it!

MORE: Concurring Opinions has some sort of pincer theory that attacks me. Whatever. The real question is who ought to be worried if the government starts tracking our mental health.

"Selecting Daddy's top foreign-policy guru ran counter to message. It was worse than a safe pick -- it was needy."

Karl Rove said to George Bush about Dick Cheney -- according to Robert Draper's new book "Dead Certain: The Presidency of George Bush." So much for Rove being Bush's brain.

When Rove, President Bush's top political adviser, expressed concerns about the [nomination of Harriet Miers for the Supreme Court], he was "shouted down" and subsequently muted his objections, Draper writes, while other advisers did not realize the outcry the nomination would cause within the president's conservative political base.

Now, this is surprising:

It was John G. Roberts Jr., now the chief justice of the United States, who suggested Miers to Bush as a possible Supreme Court justice, according to the book. Miers, the White House counsel and a Bush loyalist from Texas, did not want the job, but Bush and first lady Laura Bush prevailed on her to accept the nomination, Draper writes.

But a spokesperson for Roberts denies the report. And there's no clear source for this in the book's footnotes. Seems like a juicy but dubious book. I'm going to guess that Roberts said something about Miers but that it was far from a recommendation that she get the position.

"Her atheism was not like mine."

Christopher Hitchens versus Bill Donohue re Mother Teresa.

Newsbusters highlights the part where Donohue asks if Hitchens wants to "take it outside" because it's missing from the MSNBC transcript. Also missing from the transcript is the last word out of Hitchens mouth, which amused me. At the end of the whole heated debate, Donohue gets off his last line "The only people that do not have doubts today are dogmatic atheists, people like you, Chris." Hitchens mutters "Christopher."

I enjoyed watching this exchange, not only because I'd listen to Hitchens talk about anything, but because Donohue keeps up the pressure, baiting Hitchens. Hitchens always seems angry, but he keeps it at a controlled seethe, and Donohue is doing his damnedest to get him to boil over. Twice, Donohue taunts him about the physical dimensions of Hitchens' book about Mother Teresa: "the thing against her, five and a half inches by eight and a half inches long, 98 pages, not a single endnote, not a single footnote, not a single citation," "your 98 page book, five and a half by eight and a half inches long—you have no citations." And, although it only appears once in the transcript, Donohue repeatedly says "an Englishman has to be quiet when an Irishman talks." Twice, Donohue pulls out the old line about how it's the atheists who are dogmatic.

Hitchens maintains his seething control and won't get distracted into reciting citations or explaining why atheists are not dogmatic. He keeps the focus on Mother Teresa, and his new approach is to claim her as a fellow atheist and to express sympathy for her as a victim of the church:

She tried her best to believe. Her atheism was not like mine. I can't believe it and I am glad to think that it is not true, that there is a dictator in the heavens. So the fact that there is no evidence for it pleases me. She really wished it was true. She tried to live her life as if it was true.

She failed. And she was encouraged by cynical old men to carry on doing so because she was a great marketing tool for her church, and I think that they should answer for what they did to her and what they have been doing to us. I think it has been fraud and exploitation yet again....

Because of the opportunist chance that Mother Teresa offered them for publicity, [the Church] failed to restrain someone who really should have been seeking proper help that she never got. Instead, they exploited her to the very end and even gave her an exorcism, as you know. The archbishop of Calcutta has admitted it. He even had to give her an exorcism in 1997, because they had so much despair of her state of mind. It‘s a cruel exploitation of a simple and honest woman....

[The C]hurch... has an answer for everything. If you can‘t believe it, if it all seems to be radically untrue, nonetheless, faith will square that settle for you. She was trying for that. But as we now know, she failed. It can‘t be done. You can‘t make people believe in the impossible. All you can do is make people feel very guilty that they can‘t make themselves believe it.

Bush in Iraq.

A surprise visit.

ADDED: More here:

Administration officials said that Mr. Bush had made the decision to travel to Iraq along with Secretary of State Condoleeza Rice and Defense Secretary Robert M. Gates to meet face-to-face with General Patraeus and Iraqi Prime Minister Nuri Kamal al-Maliki because it was his last chance to do so before completing a review of his Iraq strategy.

"He has assembled essentially his war cabinet here, and they are all convening with the Iraqi leadership to discuss the way forward," said the Pentagon Press Secretary, Geoff Morrell. "This will be the last big gathering of the president before the president makes a decision on the way forward."...

Though Mr. Bush and General Petraeus had met as recently as last week by video hookup, the seemingly last-minute nature of the trip and the array of top officials from both governments who attended did not mean there were deep disagreements among President Bush’s top advisers about strategy in Iraq, they said....

Mr. Bush has been touting developments in Anbar recently and wanted to meet with Sunni sheiks who have formed alliances with the United States this year. Some of the tribal leaders he is expected to meet with were likely involved in operations against American forces before switching their allegiences.

Eating cat.

For the good.

ADDED: Some people in the comments are quite upset by the idea of eating feral cats -- in Australia, where these animals do tremendous ecological damage. It seems to me that if you accept meat-eating and have no problem with Australians eating, for example, rabbits, that you should want to encourage the eating of feral cats. We're not talking about eating anyone's pet. If the animal isn't a pet, it's like other wild game. And since these cats are nonnative and effective predators of native species, these should be the first animals you should want Australians to use for food.

At the junk shop.

I love a good junk shop, with items expressively arranged. This one, found in Williamsburg, in Brooklyn, expressed something unsettling:



Disturbing:



Much of the store was full of furniture that looked like the things that seemed elegant to my mother-in-law in the 1970s. I had to try to imagine someone who didn't have those associations putting this items in a hip, ironic context, and yet... maybe that was more depressing.

But I got extremely absorbed by a stack of Life magazines from 1960. Each issue plunged me into an amazing, weird world that I'm old enough to remember as real and normal. I found it endlessly entertaining. This -- comparing "old" and "new" creamed corn -- made me laugh hysterically:



(Enlarge.)

I bought two old issues, one with a cover photo of John Kennedy and Hubert Humphrey campaigning in Wisconsin and another with a smoldering closeup of Sal Mineo staring into the eyes of his "Exodus" co-star. Of course, Kennedy in Wisconsin appealed to me, but why the Sal Mineo? What tipped me toward the Sal Mineo issue was that there was an entire illustrated article about the guiche. And don't Google that word to find out what it means, because that's not what it meant in 1960.

ADDED: From the December 12, 1960 issue:

The Guiche

NOT A DANCE OR A DISH, IT'S THE NEWEST FRENCH CURL

Being on top of the new fashions this winter, at least in Paris, means literally starting at the top. The latest in hairdos is the guiche -- which means "curl" -- a sharp twist of hair curving forward over the cheek. Usually worn with smooth, short hair, sometimes so sort it is a shingle, the new style completely outdates last season's full, big-headed look....

The guiche must be set securely and separately from the rest of the hair... Clear nail polish is sometimes used to keep its razor edge and cellophane tape will keep it in place overnight. For those whose hair won't behave, false guiches cost only $6 a pair.

There was a shortage of hair products then. Nail polish... cellophane tape.... You know there is special hair tape now, but back then, we really did stick plain, shiny Scotch tape on our face to hold the piece of hair out over the cheek.

John Lennon's famous jukebox.

Here's a documentary about it. And a Metafilter discussion.

I was eager to see which singles Lennon chose. There are many interesting observations you could make about the list, but thing that most struck me is that -- with one exception -- there are no female singers. So who is the one woman who made it into John Lennon's Jukebox?

"Edward Gorey watched television for the first time this summer... and in the process the 53-year-old artist became a 'Star Trek' fan."

Shaenon K. Garrity reads an old newspaper article, which says the artist has taken to watching "Star Trek" reruns 11 times a week and has yet to catch "The Trouble With Tribbles." Inspired, Garrity draws "The Trouble With Tribbles" in the style of Edward Gorey. 

ample:



(Via Drawn!, via Metafilter.)

Dogs of Williamsburg.

"Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency. This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity."

President Bush said to Robert Draper, whose book "Dead Certain" comes out on Tuesday.

Telling Mr. Draper he likes to keep things “relatively light-hearted” around the White House, “I can’t let my own worries — I try not to wear my worries on my sleeve; I don’t want to burden them with that.”

“Self-pity is the worst thing that can happen to a presidency,” Mr. Bush told Mr. Draper, by way of saying he sought to avoid it. “This is a job where you can have a lot of self-pity.”

In the same interview, Mr. Bush seemed to indicate that he had his down moments at home, saying of his wife, Laura, “Back to the self-pity point — she reminds me that I decided to do this.”...

In response to Mr. Draper’s observance that Mr. Bush had nobody’s “shoulder to cry on,” the president said: “Of course I do, I’ve got God’s shoulder to cry on, and I cry a lot.” In what Mr. Draper interpreted as a reference to war casualties, Mr. Bush added, “I’ll bet I’ve shed more tears than you can count as president.”

Yes, a powerful person cannot express self-pity. It just doesn't play. It brings on -- as it should -- hoots of derision. It fuels satire and contempt. We know Bush contemplates the similarity between Iraq and Vietnam, and he must, then, think about whether he seems like Richard Nixon. Nixon was always trying to use self-pity in the public sphere, and it was always a ridiculous disaster.

In a newly released 11-page memorandum, Nixon plays self-pity to an absurd extreme:

... Nixon, in his own words, went "far beyond any previous president in this century in breaking our backs to be nicey-nice to the Cabinet, staff, the Congress, etc., around Christmastime in terms of activities that show personal concern, not only for them, but for their families."...

[T]his is a president who is troubled that his humanity is not being harnessed for his re-election campaign. "There are such little things, such as the treatment of household staff, the elevator operators, the office staff, the calls that I make to people when they are sick, even though they no longer mean anything to anybody," he writes...

"No president," he continues, "could have done more than I have done in this respect and particularly in the sense that I have treated them like dignified human beings, and not like dirt under my feet."...

"To sum up," he writes, "what is needed is to get across those fundamental decencies and virtues which the great majority of Americans like -- hard work, warmth, kindness, consideration for others, willingness to take the heat and not to pass the buck and, above all, a man who always does what he thinks is right, regardless of the consequences. ... In almost two years, none of this has gotten across ..."