Cheap shots and hot swing

Tire swing installation, Motu Viget, by Mark de Suevero, 1973, Grand Rapids; Photo by Paul L. Newby.

Dana Milbank (via Mark Sumner at Kos) assesses Elizabeth Warren's chances of running for president, based on her conduct of a Senate committee hearing:

Boil, bubble, Brooks makes trouble

"I'd like to help you, son, but Res. 242."

Hey la, hey la, my Brooksie's back; he took two weeks and he had a fine vacation, but he didn't see what the United Nations had to do with it:

It’s amazing how much of the discussion of the Gaza war is based on the supposition that it is still 1979.

Whoa, what have you been reading? I want to be amazed too.

Phenomenal success

Photo by Clément Ciocca.

Andrew Cuomo starting to sound a little like Donald Trump, in Buffalo:

"Moreland Commission was a phenomenal success, it generated all sorts of interest in the behavior of the legislature," Cuomo said.

Also about how he never interfered with the commission's functioning:

“The best evidence of independence is when someone from the second floor says, ‘Why don’t you do this?’ The chairman says, ‘Let me think about.’ And then the chairman says, ‘I disagree, I don’t want to do that.’ That’s not a sign of interference. That is demonstrable proof of independence.”

He's got proof that his interference wasn't always successful, so obviously it wasn't interference.

And finally the bit I woke up to, on WNYC this morning:

“Is it perfect? No. Is there more to do? Yes,” the governor said. “But it worked. And the commission members should feel very, very good about what they did.” The governor says he ended the commission, even though it was in the midst of probes, because he doesn’t “believe the state needs another expensive prosecutor’s office."

The real reason he shut it down: it was just so successful it wasn't fair to all the other commissions. He put it hors concours.

Give war a chance?

Via Steven D, vintage 2006.

Is Israel justified in exercising its inherent right of self defense against Hamas? https://t.co/OqsCOdxaZt
— John Bolton (@AmbJohnBolton) July 23, 2014

Classic, like the inverse of "Have you stopped beating your wife?" Here's this thing I define as universally, intrinsically justified, and my question is if Israel does it is Israel justified in particular?

Our literary triumphs

Thalia, Muse of Comedy. Playing card, Ferrara, ca. 1465, Chatsworth House.

The gods gave me a joke yesterday, an amazing Franco-American pun, which I'll never possibly get an opportunity to use again, over at Lawyers, Guns, and Money, where Scott Lemieux was in especially grand form mocking Ezra Klein's opinion that pundits (of the really respectable kind, like Ezra Klein) must have a really crucial, possibly intimidating (or voxtimidating) influence on the Supreme Court. Reproduced without comment:

Poor little rich populist

Monsignor Ross Douthat, the Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, has always seemed to me to be smarter than David Brooks, but he may be equally challenged when it comes to simple mathematics.

In Sunday's Times, he writes:

Netanyahu lies, outed

'The first eye-witness accounts of the war by serving Israeli reservists and conscripts describes the Israeli use of Palestinian civilians as "human shields". They detail the killing of at least two civilians, the vandalism, looting and wholesale destruction of Palestinian houses, the use of deadly white phosphorus, bellicose religious advice from army rabbis and what another battalion commander described to his troops as "insane firepower with artillery and air force".' (Independent)

Via Richard Silverstein:

After Israel's top leadership exhaustively blamed Hamas for kidnap of 3 teens, they've now admitted killers were acting as "lone cell."
— Sheera Frenkel (@sheeraf) July 25, 2014

I guess that puts the casus belli for the Gaza incursion up there with the 2003 US invasion of Iraq as one of those Big Lies.

Because the attack on Gaza has always been about the three Israeli kids, Eyal Yifrach, Gilad Shaar and Naftali Frenkel, who disappeared in the West Bank on the night of June 12,

Annals of Derp: Impeachy Keen

Impeaches and cream. Cornmeal shortcakes, via Foodland.

One of the rock-bottom silliest things about Speaker Boehner's little summer project of taking President Obama to court (for Subcriminal Neglect, I guess, or maybe it's just Alienation of Affections) is the alleged reason that he has to do it because our otherwise infinitely resourceful and perfect, God-given Constitution doesn't give him any options: as Forbes magazine's Transformational Humanitarian Populism correspondent, gold bug Ralph Benko, writes,

Those wacky Christianists

Welcoming the forthcoming Aaron McGruder comedy series Black Jesus on Adult Swim:

Focal Point host Bryan Fischer put out an “action alert” on his show yesterday because Black Jesus will depict Christ “in the hood,” where he will be “handing out booze to people on the street, homeless people, it looks like to me.” He went on to note that he believes the show “plays to the worst stereotypes of the black community,” and expressed surprise that “black leaders in the NAACP” weren’t already “outraged” by it. (Raw Story)

In the hood.

Keep calm: Postscript

On December 6 2010 Tom Christina of the American Enterprise Institute gave a presentation detailing his hopes for overturning the Affordable Care Act by judicial means. In his PowerPoint presentation, he noted the main criteria:

He found himself gravitating to questions of the state and/or federal government-run health insurance exchanges as an "attractive target", wondered if religious exemptions could provide an issue, and noted, just in passing, an odd little missing thing in Section 1401:

Annals of derp: The Texas Criminal Alien caper

Texas Department of Public Safety.

The chart of total Texas alien (red and green) vs. non-alien (blue) arrests for the past 30 months put out by the Texas Department of Public Safety has some interesting properties. The most interesting, in my opinion, is the way it is not to scale, so that the blue part, with numbers representing about 92% of the total, looks like it's a little less than half. [jump]

Lectiones

Photo by Mike Groll/AP.

Merry Andrew

Today's story in the Times about Andrew Cuomo's Moreland Commission, which he set up a year ago to investigate corruption in the New York State government and then shut down last March with the unconvincing explanation that it wasn't needed because the legislature had promised to pass a bunch of reform bills (two days later they failed to pass the main items) is pretty shocking, even if you've had a bad feeling about Cuomo for quite a while (one of my first posts, in December 2011, expressed some distress).

Keep calm and karaoke!

Via Cosmo Orbüs.

There's a certain amount of outfreaking (German: Ausfreakung) going on in the Tubes over today's ruling by a three-judge panel of the DC Circuit Federal Court of Appeals that Affordable Care insurance clients can't get their premium subsidies in the 36 states whose Republican governors and/or legislators refused to set up a state exchange, because the law doesn't mention doing subsidies for the big federal exchange that these citizens are forced by their stupid rulers to use instead. "Omigod," I'm hearing, "they're going to murder Obamacare!"

I'm not buying it. Only a couple of hours later another ruling came down from a different panel and in the opposite direction (same link as above):

Big old tough guys

Pavel Gubarev, in gubernatorial regalia. Photo by lenta.ru via Kiyiv Post.

From Sabrina Tavernise's astounding reporting for the Times:

Four rebels in fatigues were wandering through the ruins, looking through people’s belongings and riffling through guidebooks and bags. When asked who was responsible for the crash, they looked incredulous and said that it had of course been the Ukrainian military.

The March of Democracy

$3.75 each from Zazzle.

As I was coming home with the groceries I met Michael J. Dilger on Broadway around 79th Street, where he was gathering signatures for his independent run for the 10th Congressional District, the Upper Left Side seat that has been occupied for 11 terms by Democrat Jerrold Nadler, generally regarded as so safe that it could have been designed by Volvo.

I signed his petition without hesitation, on principle, and only then asked him how his policy ideas were different from those of the incumbent. He came up with two [jump]

Professional Artists Reveal!

Take a look inside: #Hamas uses Shuja'iya as a fortress for its weapons. #ProtectiveEdge #IsraelUnderFire pic.twitter.com/XUnZ56cGwE
— PM of Israel (@IsraeliPM) July 20, 2014

Netanyahu office Twitter account releases an authentic artist's rendering of a situation that might, for all we know, actually exist, though it also might not! Israel may have massacred the right place! Because if you can imagine it, it could be true! And more to the point,

Israel's Pickle

Rafah border crossing. Photo by Reuters/Amr Abdallah Dalsh, Jerusalem Post.

This story, from the Jerusalem Post, with the above illustration, is grotesquely upsetting and yet in a very dark way unspeakably funny:

Don't look now, but your pyre is empurpled

Vital Update 7/19/2014

Beth has gone on beyond mere aesthetics to John C. Wright's HOT SEX ADVICE. There is nothing for me to add but you have to read it.

Note 7/19/2014

As Smut Clyde gently suggests in the comments, John C. Wright's name is actually John C. Wright. When I first hit "publish" on this piece, he was also referred to as "Spencer" a couple of times for reasons I will not attempt to analyze, and on reading it I felt it would be more effective if his name was the same throughout, so I got rid of "Wright", which was the wrong choice.

Cold Majesty. For a film project by Malado Francine Baldwin.

A hilarious manifesto of conservative aesthetics by one John C. Spencer Wright is arousing indignation over at LGM under the gleeful direction of bspencer, for its suggestion that these dreadful young Leftists like Marcel Duchamp have "raped beauty" from out of our midst:

The most precious, profound and important of the great ideas which the Left has raped from us is beauty. I need spend no time on the proposition that life without beauty is a nightmare..

Cheap shot: Just a little bit

What does Governor Christie want? According to Radio Iowa:

“Every time I come here to Iowa I get a great sense of affection and respect from the folks here, but that doesn’t mean that you’re going to be universally loved and if you want to be universally loved in this business, then you’re the absolute poster boy for being ineffective,” Christie said during this afternoon’s news conference. “I don’t care about being loved. I care about being respected.”

For example:

Tut, tut! It looks like an occupation?

Jodi Rudoren expanding in the Times: