Letters to the Editor
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"Our Insane Torte System" aka English Common Law
It's well worth noting the striking resemblance between nabalzbbfr and a juke box. You punch the buttons, and you know exactly what will come out.
Of course I knew that praising Edwards' intellect by pointing to his success as a lawyer would produce an automatic tirade against our system of civil litagation.
Which, of course, we can now, finally, see in its true light, thanks to Bush's frontal attack on the Magna Charta: The so-called "conservatives" are out to destroy every shred of the Anglo-American legal and political tradition they can get their hands on.
nabalzbbfr can babble on all he wants about "the intellect and character we expect from our Commander in Chief" (eat your heart out Steven Colbert!) but the real issue here has become unmistakable: what BushCo is up to is nothing short of the destruction of Western Civilization.
Long before representative government had developed as a bulwark for holding rulers responsible, the English common law had elaborated a complex web of precedents (precisely the sort of thing that conservatives used to celebrate--at least in theory) that served to provide a framework of common consequences. Yes, it favored the wealthy over the poor, but within set limits. It served to curb the concentration of excessive and arbitrary power. It recognized grievances under law, and thus relieved the pressure to resort to lawlessness. And it evolved over time.
As the US Attorneys scandal--and the scandals hidden behind it--so clearly show, all of those virtues are now on the chopping block, if BushCo gets its way.
Suddenly, decades of demonizing lawyers doesn't seem quite as simple and straight-forward as it did just a few short years ago. It's not just about lining the wallets of large corporations while ordinary citizens get sick and die. It's not just about locking up folks with the wrong skin color and throwing away the key. It's not just about the institutionalization of injustice--after all, we've had plenty of that in the past.
No, this is about something really evil. It's about doing away with Western Civilization as we know it.
After all, we know that conservatives only attack liberals for the things they do or want to do themselves. And we know that conservatives have spent the last 15-20 years accusing liberals of trying to destroy Western Civilization. So what could possibly be more logical than to discover that conservatives want to utterly destroy Western Civilization?
After all. Look what they've done already to Christianity.
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The David & Crow News Hour
How did it come that the only reporters in the room on Saturday evening were Laurie 'I'm married to the Seinfeld guy' David & Sheryl 'Leaving Las Vegas' Crow?
Isn't this old fashioned, go get 'em journalism? Refusing to take talking point answers and asserting the right to ask questions of our officials?
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Re: Where is Ann Coulter
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/eat-the-press/wwwdowd.jpg
Well, maybe it's like Casy says. A Queen bee ain't got a soul of her own, just a little piece of a big buzz - the one big buzz that torments ever'body. Then...then, it don't matter. She'll be all around in the dark. She'll be ever'-where - wherever you can look. Wherever there's a fight so hungry people can eat, She'll be there, snickerin'. Wherever there's a cop beatin' up a guy, She'll be there, chortlin' . . . An' when the people are eatin' the stuff they raise, and livin' in the houses they build - She'll be there, too, gettin' ready to send out the swarm to sting 'em.
Or as Somerby says, when you're reading Dowd, you're riding with Coulter.
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Excellent Point BobFred!
Schmitt also covered the exceptional circumstanes that enabled "temporary" suspension of normal constitutional rule, over and over and over again.
Interesting, isn't it, how BushCo has managed to combine Schmitt and Strauss together?
It's such a tight fit, there's scarcely any room for Machiavelli, who seems rather quaint by comparison.
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Retreat of the Grammarians and Syntacticians!
dismilin:
Glenn, if you're going to make your prose so thick, cut us a break and at least make complete sentences. So, when I read it for the third time, it will make sense.
They've got no place left to go.
"One dark night a dervish was passing a dry well when he heard a cry for help from below. 'What is the matter?' he called down.
'I am a grammarian, and I have unfortunately fallen, due to my ignorance of the path, into this deep well, in which I am now all but immobilized.' responded the other.
'Hold, friend, and I'll fetch a ladder and rope,' said the dervish.
'One moment please!' said the grammarian. 'Your grammar and diction are faulty; be good enough to amend them.'
'If that is so much more important than the essentials,' shouted the dervish, 'you had best stay where you are until I have learned to speak properly.'
And he went his way."
Considering Glenn's background in writing legalese, I think we have all been spared a "prose so thick" and Glenn is in no danger of producing an entry worthy of submission in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Writing contest.
"It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents--except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the housetops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness."
--Edward George Bulwer-Lytton, Paul Clifford (1830)
http://www.bulwer-lytton.com/
Coming from a background in writing legalese like Glenn I think Glenn has
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I meant to add...
...has done rather well in crossing over.
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What's this about "torte systems"?
I haven't had my supper yet. Is it already time for dessert?
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Gossip and Rumors
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chaff_(radar_countermeasure)
The idea of using chaff was independently developed in the UK, Germany, and the United States. As far back as 1937, R. V. Jones had suggested that a piece of metal foil falling through the air might create radar echoes. In early 1942, a TRE researcher named Joan Curran had investigated the idea and come up with a scheme for dumping packets of aluminum strips from aircraft to generate a cloud of false echoes. The British referred to the idea as Window. Meanwhile in Germany, similar research had led to the development of Düppel. In the US, Fred Whipple developed a similar system for the USAAF. The systems were all essentially identical in concept, small aluminum strips cut to one-half of the target radar's wavelength. When dropped, the strips would give a strong echo, appearing as a bomber on radar screens. Opposing defenses would find it almost impossible to pick out the "real" bombers from the false echos.
Back in the days of JFK, most of the White House staff didn't know anything about JFK's personal life. A few reporters knew, but they kept mum. Nowadays, reporters don't keep mum (except about important foreign policy stuff), but reporters can be confused and bewildered into silence via chaff.
On a totally unrelated note, there are rumors of the first lady secretly taking up residence at several different places around town.