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08.08.06
Tom Watson has put up an excellent post, Anti-Feminism on the Left, that criticizes Maureen Dowd’s most recent NY Times column (TimesSelect) for its sniping, anti-feminist tone:
Well, you see Maureen, about that tone. You wouldn’t use it on a man. You used it because Mrs. Clinton is a woman, the first in U.S. history with a real shot at the Presidency. Now, the points she raises are mostly valid - to see how it’s done without snarling “bitch” in the gutter, read Bob Herbert’s column the next day. He nails Mrs. Clinton for her war positions, and hits damned hard. But there’s no gender implications in his prose. Herbert treats Mrs. Clinton as if she’s the real deal, someone worthy of detailed public attack. In other words, as a man.
As I wrote in Tom’s comments, I can’t bear to watch Dowd repeat her petty 2000 election act six years later. Perhaps the only saving grace here is that with the advent of TimesSelect, Times columnists have much less reach than they used to. Thank Arthur O. Sulzberger, Jr. for small favors.
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06.19.06
On the heels of the Philadelphia City Council’s new bill banning smoking in public workplaces, including bars and restaurants, people are freaking out. The percentage of Philly voters who identify themselves as libertarians has just increased tenfold.
My message to this prematurely wrinkled, scratchy-voiced contingent of would-be cons and wishful femme-fatales is simple: relax, people.
I left New York before the smoking ban took effect there, though I have returned since as both a smoker and a non-smoker. The truth is that once you get used to the idea, you hardly notice the ban: the smokers still smoke, only after taking fifteen steps out the door. The non-smokers still don’t smoke; they just smell better afterwards.
Despite my approval of the smoking ban, I do concede that some establishments lose an essential part of their identity when the clouds of smoke lift. One of my favorite bars in New York, for instance, Jimmy’s Corner — a midtown dive bar that is a haven for cast-outs from the boxing world — was never the same after the ban. It just felt too clean.
Philadelphia’s new law exempts “neighborhood bars” — defined as establishments that make more than 90% of their income from the sale of alcohol — from the ban. This, I think, is a great compromise — the places that make Philly the dirty town that it is will not lose their atmosphere. And while we’re sure to see a host of creative accounting changes in response to the law (burgers on the house!), it sounds like most bars in Philly will now be smoke-free.
The change will be painful for a lot of people. But, in the end, you’ve got to admit that a collection of over 4,000 chemicals, rolled up and sold to you by a group of unscrupulous crooks, is not worthy of your mournful tears.
Just huff some nicotine nasal spray along with me and we’ll all be fine.
UPDATE: My understanding is that “neighborhood bar” is defined by the percentage of money the bar makes on food vs. alcohol. At least ninety percent of the income has to come from alcohol for a bar to be exempt from the new regulations.
In fact, I think that the free burgers mentioned above might be one of the biggest, though most unintentional, effects of the law. I think we’ll see a fair number of bars stop selling food — or start giving it away for free — so that they can meet the exemption.
One thing they might do, if they want to keep smoking, is to offer lots of specials — like, “buy a beer for eight dollars and get a free burger and fries along with it!”
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11.01.05
“There’s our old ruin, Nick,” Marjorie said.
Nick, rowing, looked at the white stone in the green trees.
“There it is,” he said.
“Can you remember when it was a mill?” Marjorie asked.
“I can just remember,” Nick said.
“It seems more like a castle,” Marjorie said.
Nick said nothing. They rowed on out of sight of the mill, following the shore line. Then Nick cut across the bay.
– Ernest Hemingway, “The End of Something”
After fifty-one weeks of writing and almost 700 posts, I’ve come to understand that daily blogging is incompatible with several aspects of my life. Most notably, it’s impossible for me to finish my dissertation with the majority of my energy directed towards the blog.
And so, with great reluctance and much regret, I have decided to put The Tattered Coat on hold. I will leave the site up, but will not post anything for some time.
If you want to stay in touch, or hear from me when I start posting again, please send me an email.
I would like to give my deepest thanks to everyone who read, linked to, or commented on my posts here.
You made it all worthwhile.
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10.29.05
From Patrick Fitzgerald’s news conference yesterday:
Let me then ask your next question: Well, why is this a leak investigation that doesn’t result in a charge? I’ve been trying to think about how to explain this, so let me try. I know baseball analogies are the fad these days. Let me try something.
If you saw a baseball game and you saw a pitcher wind up and throw a fastball and hit a batter right smack in the head, and it really, really hurt them, you’d want to know why the pitcher did that. And you’d wonder whether or not the person just reared back and decided, I’ve got bad blood with this batter. He hit two home runs off me. I’m just going to hit him in the head as hard as I can.
You also might wonder whether or not the pitcher just let go of the ball or his foot slipped, and he had no idea to throw the ball anywhere near the batter’s head. And there’s lots of shades of gray in between.
You might learn that you wanted to hit the batter in the back and it hit him in the head because he moved. You might want to throw it under his chin, but it ended up hitting him on the head.
And what you’d want to do is have as much information as you could. You’d want to know: What happened in the dugout? Was this guy complaining about the person he threw at? Did he talk to anyone else? What was he thinking? How does he react? All those things you’d want to know.
And then you’d make a decision as to whether this person should be banned from baseball, whether they should be suspended, whether you should do nothing at all and just say, Hey, the person threw a bad pitch. Get over it.
In this case, it’s a lot more serious than baseball. And the damage wasn’t to one person. It wasn’t just Valerie Wilson. It was done to all of us.
And as you sit back, you want to learn: Why was this information going out? Why were people taking this information about Valerie Wilson and giving it to reporters? Why did Mr. Libby say what he did? Why did he tell Judith Miller three times? Why did he tell the press secretary on Monday? Why did he tell Mr. Cooper? And was this something where he intended to cause whatever damage was caused?
Or did they intend to do something else and where are the shades of gray?
And what we have when someone charges obstruction of justice, the umpire gets sand thrown in his eyes. He’s trying to figure what happened and somebody blocked their view.
As you sit here now, if you’re asking me what his motives were, I can’t tell you; we haven’t charged it.
So what you were saying is the harm in an obstruction investigation is it prevents us from making the fine judgments we want to make.
I also want to take away from the notion that somehow we should take an obstruction charge less seriously than a leak charge.
This is a very serious matter and compromising national security information is a very serious matter. But the need to get to the bottom of what happened and whether national security was compromised by inadvertence, by recklessness, by maliciousness is extremely important. We need to know the truth. And anyone who would go into a grand jury and lie, obstruct and impede the investigation has committed a serious crime.I will say this: Mr. Libby is presumed innocent. He would not be guilty unless and until a jury of 12 people came back and returned a verdict saying so.
But if what we allege in the indictment is true, then what is charged is a very, very serious crime that will vindicate the public interest in finding out what happened here.
Anyone who implies that charges of perjury, obstruction of justice, and making false statements to the grand jury are not extremely serious allegations needs to read the statements above one more time.
Anyone who argues that Libby was somehow vindicated, because he was not charged with leaking classified information, needs to revisit the baseball metaphor, and to ponder Fitzgerald’s tactics.
Anyone who thinks that Patrick Fitzgerald is anything other than a straight-arrow, apolitical prosecutor with iron-clad integrity, driven only by a deep desire for truth, needs to read more about him in The Washington Post, The New York Times, or USA Today.
And anyone who claims that the White House, or anyone in danger of being charged in this investigation, is not worried about a widening inquiry that is likely to destroy any remaining shreds of credibility that the administration retains, is spinning wildly and throwing sand in your eyes.
Make no mistake: this is the beginning of the end of the Bush Administration as we know it.
And I feel fine.
UDPATE: Obviously, there is a lot of speculation and tea-leaf reading taking place based on the text of the indictments and Fitzgerald’s press conference. It remains to be seen whether Fitzgerald will turn out to be Eliot Ness or Jennie Finch. Is he testing the resilience of the Cheney firewall or pulling his punches? I’m betting on the former — Big Time.
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10.13.05
So if you needed any more proof that the end of the world was nigh, here’s another Jeremiad for you: The Snakehead. Is it a fish? Is it a snake? Can it swim? Can it walk on land? Does it scare the shit out of me. Yes, yes, yes, yes and yes. Well, maybe it’s not exactly a snake. And maybe it doesn’t exactly walk. But the other answers are all still in the affirmative. This past Sunday at least 80 (that’s EIGHTY, EIGHT-ZERO) of the little devils were apprehended in the Potomac River, according to this story in the Washington Post, where the snakehead is referred to as a “top-line predator.” Nice. The thing I like perhaps the most about the story, apart from its apocalyptic overtones, is this sentence, referring to Mark Hammond, the protagonist of the story, a bass fisherman from Florida:
“I think we have the state record,” Hammond said of the catch behind the trailer lot where he and his friends drink beer and practice bow-hunting.
Um, drink beer and practice bow-hunting? At the same time? And you’re worried about snakeheads? Sir, I think you might have other problems, like the possibility that you will go William Burroughs on your pals and spear them with your bow and arrow while faced on longnecks.
Do you know that line from Shakespeare about horses eating each other in the streets being a sign that the natural order has gone seriously awry? Well, anyway, I think that when snakefish teem in rivers near our nation’s capital, and emerge from the streams to walk on land, only to be hunted by a drunkard with a crossbow, we might well be experiencing a similar kind of situation. By the way, I’m pretty sure that horse thing happened in one of Shakespeare’s tragedies, and not in one of the comedies, but you could probably already have figured that out for yourself.
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10.11.05
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NYC THREAT a hoax [story] And the timing of the threat after Bush said he stopped ten threats is um dubious. Is the scariest thing that these threats seem um manufactured? Or is it scary that Bush believes they work? Or has paranoia struck three?
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[Steve Soto/ The Left Coaster] Both the FBI and the DHS thought the threat was questionable, even though it was the CIA and the Pentagon that gathered the information from the Iraqi informant in the first place. A local TV news station had the information on Tuesday, the 4th, but held it at the request of federal officials until Thursday. I’d like to think that the federal officials wanted the story held until they could check it out, but with the sorry track record of this administration in manipulating terror threats for political advantage, who knows why the threat was held until after a string of bad political news came out last week? Bloomberg, in the middle of a reelection campaign, went with the information.
There are a number of ways to look at this. First, it could be Al Qaeda toying with us once again, just to see how they can make us jump. Second, what kind of credibility does military intelligence and the CIA have left after this, especially since the military had deemed this informant to be reliable?
FROM THE YOU CAN’T DISPROVE A NEGATIVE DEPARTMENT [Roger L. Simon] I should I feel chastened now that it has been disclosed this threat was a ‘hoax.’ I do not.
THE HERETIK SENDS out a note from the real world. The ‘hoax’ was a hoax, no quotation marks needed
The Heretik
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