Judge not, lest ye be Friedman

Yes, it's Thomas P. Friedman, more frequently addressed as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Cholericus, with yet another insight to offer to an astounded public.

Aireekah at regretsy.

This one has to do with his wrath, for the Mustache is wrathful today. He is downright sparked off, in fact. We haven't seen him so indignantly quivering since the Iraq War ended in May 2003.

Yes, of course, May 2003. When did you think the war ended? He took his mustache onto the Charlie Rose show to announce it, on the very same day, May 29, as [jump]

Nerdpron, er, prom, with swagbag of Tweets

Nerd Judy Holliday in Born Yesterday. From also smarter-than-she-looks romance novelist Sarah MacLean.

That #WHCD was pathetic. The rest of America is out there working our asses off while these DC assclowns throw themselves a #nerdprom
— Sarah Palin (@SarahPalinUSA) April 28, 2013

No kidding, man. Why, as far as I could tell, nobody mentioned Sarah even once.* [jump]

Beyond the wacky rich

Video: White House Correspondents' Dinner: What it's like to walk the red carpet

Oh, Mikey! You're so—big!

Image from FamousDC.

Before turning to national politics, he covered schools and local governments in rural counties outside Fredericksburg, Va., for The Free Lance-Star, then wrote about Doug Wilder, Oliver North, Chuck Robb and the Bobbitts for the Richmond Times-Dispatch, where he nurtured police sources on overnight ride-alongs through housing projects. Allen also covered Mayor Giuliani, the Connecticut statehouse and the wacky rich of Greenwich for The New York Times.

George W driven to Rehab

Uncredited image from Esquire.

Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street Monsignor Ross Douthat joins the choruses of "He couldn't have been that bad":

a lot of liberal criticism of Bush’s record (and especially his domestic record) looks not only misguided but absurd — and I think many liberals know it. Look at Yglesias’s piece, for instance, listing “positive aspects of the Bush presidency that often get overlooked.” It includes signature Bush-era legislation like No Child Left Behind Medicare Part D, plus smaller initiatives like the AIDS-in-Africa push and the “housing first” approach to homelessness, plus the emergency responses to the financial crash, plus some praise for Bush’s failed immigration push and his overridden farm bill veto. That’s almost his entire domestic policy!

First, whatever Yglesias says about No Child Left Behind and Medicare Part D (you can tell he's neither a parent nor retired) they were disasters. (And yes, I do know Teddy's sacred name was on the former.) Second,

 That’s almost his entire domestic policy!

I just about rest my case. Third,

True, the list doesn’t include the Bush tax cuts...

Now it's his entire domestic policy. I.e., he had virtually none except to bring the country to fiscal ruin. And to note that Democratic legislators have not been very eager to close the cuts in an attempt to spread the Plame, I mean blame, is pretty disingenuous even by the young Monsignor's standards:

but you may have noticed that the Democratic Party showed no enthusiasm for repealing them for anyone except the wealthy. 

The Bush tax cuts didn't especially benefit anybody except the wealthy.

I don’t really think there are a lot of serious Obama-era liberals ready to argue that, say, Bush’s deficits were actually the grave threat to the republic Bush-era liberals made them out to be...

No, they were much worse—Bush's deficits were what above all made it politically impossible to enact an adequate stimulus after the 2008 crash...

Call for Signatures

Via Echidne of the Snakes:

Beatriz wants to live. She's 22 years old and the mother of an infant, but the 18 week pregnancy she's carrying is killing her -- right now as you read this -- and the government of El Salvador has refused to permit an exception to their abortion ban to save her life.

The fetus Beatriz is carrying is anencephalic; it has no brain and won't survive birth even if her health allowed her to carry to full term. More to the point, Beatriz has lupus, worsened by a kidney malfunction, and it's very dangerous for her to be pregnant. But under El Salvador's abortion ban, both Beatriz and any medical staff involved in providing a therapeutic abortion would face criminal charges, carrying penalties as high as 50 years in jail for her and 12 years in jail for her doctors.

El Salvador's minister of health and the attorney general for human rights both support making an exception to the law for this case, but the supreme court is slow-walking it. There's a petition you can sign, here.

Photo Credit: Courtesy of Agrupación Ciudadana por la despenalización del aborto Terapéutico, Ético y Eugénesico.  Via  Amnesty USA.

Cheap shots and expensive lifestyles

De Sacha Guitry à Diane Arnaud.

Please tell me David Petraeus with his visiting professor gig at the Macaulay Honors College, City University of New York, isn't burnishing his academic credentials for that presidential run (perhaps it could be a bipartisan Joint ticket with Anthony Wiener). Washington Post:

Petraeus has a doctorate from Princeton University and has written widely on international relations, military strategy and tactics and national security issues.

He says in a statement released by Macaulay he’s pleased to teach at the college, where most students are children of immigrants. He says he looks forward to leading a seminar on the global economic slowdown.

It would be cool to have one of those certified Serious people out there recommending a fiscal Surge on the Sunday morning shows, though I guess around five years [jump]

Got paranoia? The aha moment

Vaughn Bode's The Man (1972), via Matt Seneca.

Via BooMan, a bit of very strong noticing from Walter Katz at The Week involving Tamerlan Tsarnaev and his mysterious Armenian friend.

in 2008 or 2009, Tamerlan met Misha, a slightly older, heavyset bald man with a long reddish beard. [Tamerlan's ex-brother-in-law] Khozhugov didn't know where they'd met but believed they attended a Boston-area mosque together. Misha was an Armenian native and a convert to Islam and quickly began influencing his new friend, family members said.

Misha, apparently, was the Salafizing influence, who convinced him to give up music, go to mosque regularly, read the Protocols of the Elders of Zion, and become a 9/11 truther, and who knows what else?

What occurred to Katz is that all the radical-Muslim conspiracies that our government has stopped since  2001 have had a Misha-like figure, a kind of teacher who explained [jump]

Shays' Longue Rebellion

Army of Lawyers, from Saratoga in Decline.

Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice notes the startling views of cartoonist Ted Rall, who accepts the need for some gun regulation even as he proclaims himself to be (who knew?) a member of the Water the Tree of Liberty Second Amendment Club. He says, [jump]

Got paranoia? Cui bono update

I don't so far see anybody outside Chechen nationalist propaganda organs (which can't by definition be believed, no matter how much you might favor one or another of them politically) sharing in my horrible feeling about the origins of the Boston bombing, with one exception: UK diplomat and human rights activist Craig Murray. Here, he outlines why Russian authorities might not be sorry to see Chechen terrorists attack the US:

Cui Bono? Putin. The alleged actions of the Tsarnaev brothers are a massive setback to the cause of Chechen nationalism. The Russian government have been trying for a decade to conflate the repression of Chechen nationalism with the western construct of “the global war on terror”, with very limited diplomatic success. Now expect to hear continually about “Al Qaeda in the Southern Caucasus” in the next few years. Events in Boston have been a massive diplomatic coup for Putin.

Thug-in-chief Ramzan Kadyrov, from Prague Watchdog. Chechens asked for self-government and Vladimir Vladimirovich gave them government by id.

Does distress make me look fat?

David Brooks writes:

I guess everybody has seen the Dove Real Beauty Sketches video five or six times by now, where the women undergo an experiment where they find out that in the eyes of other people they seem better looking than they actually are, if that's not oversimplifying.

I mean, not really an experiment in the sense of science, footnoted and peer-reviewed and so forth. In fact Gail and Frank and everybody up in New York is telling me that it's art, which is absurd. The guy doesn't even draw [jump]

Greetings, Earth Day

Just in time, the Times did something for Earth Day, and I heard about it from Gomez at Atrios:

Hipster fairy? Herbert, by Paulina Cassidy.

The Environmental Protection Agency again is raising objections to the proposed Keystone XL pipeline that would carry oil from western Canada to the Texas Gulf Coast. 

The EPA said that despite more than four years of study, the State Department still has not done sufficient analysis of the project's environmental impact.

Yes, it seems that what's been going on all this time with the Keystone is one of those Village turf wars: the EPA has the expertise to decide just how much of a disaster the pipeline is going to be, but State has the authority to make the decision—because it will cross the international border, apparently making it a Foreign Affair. And the EPA is raising its tiny, tinny, morally and scientifically authoritative voice. I want to believe it will make a difference, I want to believe it will make a difference, I want—clap your hands, children! This sometimes works!

The tale of little white Rambo

Update (error corrected, h/t Tim)

"Funny attractive Mr. Suicide bathtub plug".

Somebody dropped an annoying turd in the comments today, and here is the story.

Last May blogger Feministconservative, a PhD candidate in political science at an unnamed university, got her degree and then took a summer job at the university's admissions office.

I must say it doesn't look like a very substantial dissertation, and I wouldn't be too impressed with the school that gave her a degree for it, or too surprised if it [jump]

Every good big does fine

Thomas P. Friedman, better known as Thomas L. Friedman, Mystax Miraculi (Mustache of Wonder), is a Liberal (i.e. a worshiper in the cult of Father Liber and his consort Libera whose feast the Romans celebrated on the future St. Patrick's Day and in similar fashion except without dyeing the beer; then again it did feature a very large phallus image held aloft through a street parade, garlanded at the end by a virtuous matron), and therefore attached to certain ideas that you and I do not necessarily oppose, in spite of the [jump]

Liber and Libera. Drawing by Georg Friedric Creuzer (1771-1858) cited in The Pictorial Language of Hieronymus Bosch by Clement A. Wertheim Aymes (via hub pages)

Notes on Caucasians

Caucus race. By ArtSpark Theatre.

Booman:

I have been somewhat amused by the discussion of their ethnicity. Before we knew that they were literally from the Caucuses, and therefore quintessentially caucasian, there was debate about whether they were white or not. 

ProPublica:

The brothers are ethnic Chechens whose family moved around the war-torn Caucuses region when the boys were young.

[jump]

Grassley inappropriate

The melting of the polar icecaps? Nah, that's not a problem.

Eighty-seven gun deaths every day? Please, it's not like the victims haven't been born yet...

No, when you want to talk about serious problems, how about the fact that some potential foreign terrorists might be getting disability payments, or earned income tax relief. Or maybe not. But that's the thing, isn't it, there's nothing in the law that says they can't, and those precious dollars, if they exist, could be used to buy gallons and gallons of ethanol:

“...How do we ensure that people who wish to do us harm are not eligible for benefits under the immigration laws, including this new bill before us?” (Raw Story)

Glad you got your priorities all worked out, Chuckles.

Senator Charles Grassley, in his stylish cash-register-tape cravat. (When my Aunt Emma got to be his age she was, similarly, given to putting paper napkins on her head at odd moments.) No, wait, it's an optical illusion; actually a briefing paper the hot-under-the-collar senator is using as a fan. AP photo.

Cheap shots and copycat things

Dylan Byers contemplating the Boston Marathon in Politico has a rare moment of self-knowledge (via TenGrain):

We’re standing on the verge of a very important national conversation about something, and we have no idea what it is.

It's that recurrent nightmare where you're about to go on Stephanopoulos and an assistant comes into the green room to tell you McCain can't make it and you look in the mirror and your hair is like totally weird...

Politico staff ID.

[jump]

The latest news in humility

Saw this as a little boy, possibly with my grandmother.

I hope Brooks was wearing his helmet when he wrote today's column, because in attempting a rare triple troll somersault, he appears to have landed on his head.

Liberals are furious, but the gun issue will not significantly damage the Republican Party. Sure, it looks bad to oppose background checks, which have overwhelming popular support. Sure, the Republican position will further taint the party’s image in places like the suburbs of Philadelphia and Northern Virginia. Sure, the party looks extreme when it can’t accept a bill sponsored by the conservative Senator Joe Manchin and the very conservative Senator Pat Toomey.

But, let’s face it...

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... if the insurgent right defeats immigration reform, that will be a sign that the party’s self-marginalization will continue. The revolution devours its own.

Siebrand Circus, early 1950s. From The Circus Blog.

Or, in Shorter form:

The good news is, nothing can damage the Republican party. The bad news is, that's because it's already FUBAR.

Got paranoia?

I'm about to do something really irresponsible, improper, and generally out of line. But unlike others who have been doing the same thing this week, I'm doing it against the stereotype blaming of an ethnic or religious group. Also it's my blog.

Georgia near the Chechen border. Photo by cinto2.

Remember the apartment house bombings in Buynaksk, Moscow, and Volgodonsk in September 1999, killing 293 people and injuring 651? The Russian authorities blamed it on Chechen separatists (though none of the alleged leaders of the plot were brought to trial), and this was one of the two major pretexts for the Second Chechen War.

Not everybody agreed with the hypothesis, though. Two famous writers, Aleksandr Litvinenko and Anna Politkovskaya, believed the bombings were a wag-the-dog operation carried out by the FSB (successor agency to the Soviet KGB), and Litvinenko [jump]

Is conservatism a mental illness?

Mighty Typography, by Inde/AdventFont.

1. Edmund Burke on the sublime: God as terror

WHATEVER is fitted in any sort to excite the ideas of pain and danger, that is to say, whatever is in any sort terrible, or is conversant about terrible objects, or operates in a manner analogous to terror, is a source of the sublime; that is, it is productive of the strongest emotion which the mind is capable of feeling. I say the strongest emotion, because I am satisfied the ideas of pain are much more powerful than those which enter on the part of pleasure. Without all doubt, the torments which we may be made to suffer are much greater in their effect on the body and mind, than any pleasure which the most learned voluptuary could suggest, or than the liveliest imagination, and the most sound and exquisitely sensible body, could enjoy. (I/7) [jump]

Fool report

Barack Obama in the Rose Garden after the failure of gun control legislation in the Senate:

I’m going to speak plainly and honestly about what’s happened here because the American people are trying to figure out how can something have 90 percent support and yet not happen. 

Hey, you know what? Maybe you could try speaking plainly and honestly all the time. Because there's all sorts of stuff the American people are trying to figure out. Or for that matter just for the hell of it. And you're good at it, too.

Court Fool.--Fac-simile of a Woodcut in the "Cosmographie Universelle" of Munster: folio (Basle, 1552). Image date: ca. 1874. From Eon Images.