I think we need to see that they are not. They have one issue. One question. They have suspicion about one thing, and that suspicion notably hasn't led them into other theories. There's one factual issue — the immensely important matter of the President's qualification — that hasn't been nailed down to their satisfaction.
It's perfectly rational to take as your working theory that evidence that isn't produced would run counter to the interest of the party who could produce it and does not. In legal cases, if a party fails to produce a document requested in discovery, the judge can deem that the fact is established to be what the party seeking discovery is trying to prove. (See Federal Rules of Civil Procedure 37(b)2)(A)(i)).
All I'm saying is that it's not paranoid to answer the question the way the majority did in that poll. I haven't followed the so-called "birthers" that much. Presumably, some of them branch out into other theories and cross over into conspiracy thinking and paranoia. But it's absurd to read the poll results as a sign that the GOP is full of folks like that. If you really wanted to gauge the nuttiness of Republicans, you could do a much more fine-grained poll about what Republicans believe and how strongly the birther issue correlates to other beliefs.
Christina was an A student and was interested in politics, so her mother accepted the offer by her friend Susan Hileman to take Christina to the congresswoman’s town hall meeting. John Green told the Arizona Star-News that Christina was such a good speaker, “I could have easily seen her as a politician.”
But Christina also seems to have inherited her family’s baseball genes. She was on the Little League baseball team, its only girl, her mother said.
“She was an athlete, a good dancer, a good gymnast, a good swimmer,” her mother said. “She belonged to Kids Helping Kids charity and tried to help children less fortunate.”
Christina, a slender girl with brownish blonde hair, brown eyes and a gentle smile, also sang in the choir at St. Odilia Roman Catholic Church. At home she took care of pet geckos, but loved frolicking with the dogs and cats of neighbors and friends. In the big-dreams way of children, she told her mother she wanted to be a veterinarian and study at an eastern school like New York University.
He was 91. His name is attached to some of the greatest films ever — notably "La Strada" and "Nights of Cabiria" — and some all-out trashy pop entertainment — like "Bararella" and "Mandingo."
Here's a list of his 166 movies. How many of them have you seen? I've got to say I've managed to steer clear of de Laurentiis films. Other than "La Strada" and "Nights of Cabiria" — 2 of my favorite films, directed by Fellini — the only one I've seen — and we watched it for a laugh — is "Conan the Barbarian."
I never saw the de Laurentiis remake of "King Kong," which was filmed in New York City in 1976. I was living there then, and I remember the open invitation to anyone to come down to Lower Manhattan to be in the crowd scene. I considered going but didn't. I read this article in the NYT on June 22, 1976:
Drawn by 1930's nostalgia and 1976 excitement, a horrified crowd of more than 5,000 New Yorkers surged past police lines at the World Trade Center last night on cue and fought its way to the spot where a giant gorilla lay dead after a 110-story fall from the North Tower.
The ape, constructed of styrofoam covered with horse hair and bleeding a mixture of Karo syrup and vegetable coloring was of course King Kong, the resurrected star of the 1933 thriller being remade by Dino de Laurentiis.
Ah! The unreachable past! When the the death was fake and not even human. What absurd fun we had!
The extras cheered when a technician climbed on the chest of the fallen 40-foot ape to replenish its oozing "blood."
Suggest a form of physical suffering you'd rather endure this weeken than spending $10+ to watch James Franco reenact what hiker Aron Ralston did....
I feel like we've had a bunch of films like this lately -- United 93, A Mighty Heart (the Daniel Pearl story), World Trade Center and others I'm sure you can name -- dramatic films based on real-life events where I can understand why filmmakers believed this was a story worth telling, but where the story itself is not one I have any interest in spending my entertainment dollars/time to see. And yet we (pretty much) all saw Schindler's List, which somehow became a cultural obligation in a way that none of the others -- not even the remarkable story of United 93 -- did.
Are we ghoulish to want to see more than the mental picture we had when we read about it in the press? Is there something different about a filmed depiction of an incident in which human beings did something evil to other human beings — "Schindler's List," "United 93" — and man-against-nature survival tales?
One of my favorite TV shows is "I Shouldn't Be Alive," which features reenacted survival stories like "Trapped Under a Boulder." And one of my favorite movies, "Touching the Void," is the same thing. In these stories, individuals have made a decision to go out into the wilderness or climb mountains and they get into trouble because of their own bad decisions or over-optimistic ideas about the dangers that are out there. Then they need to deal with the consequences. I think it's kind of right-wing to watch dramas like that. What if you leave the comforts of civilization and go out where you will have to be self-reliant? In many of these scenarios, the characters begin with the idea that they want to prove something to themselves by doing something difficult out where there will be no one to help them if things go bad.
And that's the story in the movie ALOTT5MA is talking about, "127 Hours."
That's the new movie by the director of "Slumdog Millionaire," which was a fictional story showing terrible things happening to children. Why do we make up stories of causing children to suffer and entertain ourselves with that? ALOTT5MA seems to think there's something very different about subjecting ourselves to a story where we know what the terrible thing is. Now, in fiction or nonfiction stories, we might know or not know what's going to happen. Are you more willing to watch movies and TV shows where you don't know what the particular horrors are? Would I have avoided seeing "Slumdog Millionaire" if I knew the exact torture that I'd see inflicted on children? Does my answer change if I know that things like that are really done to children in India?
And then there are the movies that depict real historical events, like the Holocaust and 9/11. We know the horrors, but in a rough, general sense. The point of these movies is to allow us to enter the individual experience of the human beings whose lives were part of the familiar history. We see those movies, if they are good enough, because of the way they give us deep psychic understanding of what happened. There's that quote (attributed to Stalin), "A single death is a tragedy; a million deaths is a statistic." A good movie might get you to the tragedy by putting you inside one person within the millions. But it might not be good. It might be a commercial exploitation of the emotions you already have. You may feel that you're obligated to care about these phony scenes full of actors because this really happened to real people. There will be celebrities in Nazi uniforms hamming up how evil they are. Then it's a travesty. Frankly, that's how I felt about "Schindler's List."
It's the big story. I haven't written about it yet. I didn't know what to say as the story was unfolding yesterday. I had the thought — and I immediately censored myself — what does this have to do with Election Day? I cut myself off from that line of thinking because, of course, the war on terrorism transcends the petty vicissitudes of partisan politics. I readjusted my consciousness to suit an image of myself as a decent person.
No matter how you look at these packages-on-the-airplane stories, it's either done by terrorists as a dry run or all of this is being hyped by our government. If it's the terrorists, then who are they trying to help right before the election? What are they trying to affect here? And if it's the government hyping it, then it's clear the administration thinks that this will help them, that this will help Democrats.
I mean, this is being the done the weekend before the election. Who would Al-Qaeda being trying to help here? Clearly they're imposing themselves on our election. If it's the government hyping it, then it is clear the administration thinks this will help them. Right? One way or another, this is being hyped real big. All of the cable nets have gone wall-to-wall with this. Somebody is trying to say something here, and somebody is trying to affect the outcome of something.
This is thrilling radio, people. Completely unplanned. We get to watch — hear — the gears turn. This is bold thinking out loud, and he doesn't know where he's going.
The question is: Who's trying to help who? If the terrorists are doing this, are they trying to stop the Republican progress or guarantee it? If it's the administration, then they must think that this ultimately would help them.
He's using the classic "who benefits?" approach to reasoning. Why would it help the administration? Or, as Rush says, why would they think it would help them? I'd say that the 2010 elections have been focused on the economy and domestic policy. If we refocus on foreign threats, that at least keeps us from looking at what's hurting the Democrats the most. Even if generally, people think the GOP is stronger on national security, if we suddenly feel very threatened, the reaction would be to unite behind the President, whoever he is, and to want to protect him from any weakening forces, like, perhaps, a hostile Congress.
If the threat of terrorism is present in our minds, then we place a much higher value on continuity and stability. Our hostility to things as they are suddenly flip,s and we love what we have and become vigilant lest anyone tear it away from us. Let's coalesce behind our President and help. I know that's what I felt on 9/11. I had never supported President Bush before that day, but then all I wanted was for him to do well, and I couldn't tolerate the carping and the criticism that made his work more difficult than it already was.
The rest of Rush...
Now, is it a coincidence? The Democrats have always said that "cargo" was a weak spot, that our ports and things like this were the weak spots, and that was the reason they wanted to kill the Dubai Ports Deal, because cargo is our weak spot. So the thing they have always claimed is being shown to be true, so how does this help them? The only way it can be shown to help them if you have a press conference from Obama saying, "We caught it, we stopped it, we're vigilant, we care. (chuckles) I'm not a Muslim, I wouldn't allow this." Whatever he says. We'll just have to wait and see how the regime handles this.
Fortunately, folks, we don't have to worry about the Obama regime using fear of terrorism to help him in the elections like the Bush team did, right? That was always the charge. Every time we got an increased threat level near an election, the charge always was, "It's not true. This is just Bush trying to help himself in the election." Okay. We don't have to worry about this with this bunch, right? They're clean and pure as the wind-driven snow. They would never politicize something like this, right? So, you don't need to have a bomb to commit terrorism. That's what all this shows. Closing down and disrupting so much air travel without a bomb. This is terrorism, in a sense. They got everybody terrorized. Everybody's scared now. What's going on here? We're talking about it. Everybody's wondering about it. So clearly somebody is sending a message for some outcome. Somebody's trying to affect something. So we'll see.
In those first years after Sexual Personae, Paglia seemed to turn up everyplace. By 1992 she had churned out enough irreverent, entertaining essays for a sizable collection, Sex, Art, and American Culture. Two years later along came another grab-bag, Vamps and Tramps. For a while, the pieces just seemed to pour out of her.
But Paglia was too hot not to cool down. As the years went by, her output declined. And what she did turn out seemed increasingly familiar. She was repeating herself. What had once been provocative was now stale. And her determination to inject herself and her personal history into everything she wrote grew tiresome....
And then came 9/11.... On this all-important subject, Paglia was all but silent....
For some years now, Paglia’s chief forum has been a monthly column on the salon.com website in which she’s combined pop-culture commentary with political opinions. Though she continues to try to sound boldly irreverent, her schtick is old, her voice is tired, and her politics are more consistent with the official liberal line than any Paglia enthusiast of twenty years ago would ever have expected...
Then, on the Sunday before last, the London Times ran what seems to be the longest essay Paglia has published in years. It was touted by the newspaper as “explosive.” What was it about? Banning burkas? Suicide bombing? Female genital mutilation? No, it was about Lady Gaga.... her Lady Gaga piece accomplished was to affirm her irrelevance.
As a consequence of his proposal to build a mosque 2 blocks from Ground Zero, Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf has become quite famous — specifically famous for his assurances of moderation and his asserted desire to promote intercultural connection and harmony. You can doubt his motives or be suspicious of whether he's really at heart all that moderate. But the fact remains: He's world famous for his moderation now, and he's going to have to stick to it. That's great, isn't it?
Imam Feisal Abdul Rauf promised on Monday to resolve the fierce dispute around plans to build a Muslim community center and mosque two blocks from ground zero, while noting that he does not believe the spot chosen for the center is “hallowed ground.”
Speaking at the Council on Foreign Relations, he promised to find a way out of the current impasse around the planned center, which opponents say is insensitive to the memory of 9/11 and which supporters say sends the opposite message, that Muslims, like other Americans, object to and were victims of the attacks.
“Everything is on the table,” he said. “We really are focused on solving it” in a way that will be best for everyone concerned, he added. “I give you my pledge.”
He may not have meant to get himself into this position. But he's now the designated moderate imam. He's pretty much going to have to play out his role, and it's great to have someone in that role. Is he the one who deserves all this attention? Is he all that well suited to speak for others and follow through as a force for moderation? Who knows? But he's here now, and circumstances have bestowed this prominence and responsibility on him. It will be exceedingly difficult for him to back out of it now. He will have to be the man events have chosen him to be. And we need that man.
In the aftermath of the attacks on the Word Trade Center, many of the most famous authors of our time have weighed in on the attacks, depicting the ways large and small in which they altered people’s lives. Some hypothesized possible motivations behind the terrorists’ actions: John Updike in Terrorist (2006) and Martin Amis in the short story “The Last Days of Muhammad Atta” (2006). Others used the events as narrative bookends: Don DeLillo’s Falling Man (2007) and Claire Messud’s The Emperor’s Children (2006) are two examples. Some novels commented more indirectly: At the start of Ian McEwan’s Saturday (2005), the protagonist sees a plane flying low and fears a terrorist attack, while, in Jonathan Safran Foer’s Extremely Loud and Incredibly Close (2005), the main character’s quest to unravel a personal mystery is motivated by his father’s death in the World Trade Center.
Meanwhile, the literary response to Hurricane Katrina, the other great American disaster of the last decade, has been almost nonexistent. In the five years since Katrina, almost no major literary figure has similarly illustrated the effects of the hurricane.
Oh, good lord, this is so stupid I hate to have to point it out. Katrina was a hurricane. We don't have to try to figure out its motivations and come to terms with its evil. Yes, there were human failings in the aftermath of the storm, but novelists have been chewing through the routine failings of humankind since the novel was invented. They don't even need a real event that had real people screwing up to get them started. They'll make up stories and characters to show the way people do bad things. You know, fiction.
But the lack of a strong literary response to the hurricane appears to have consequences.... For centuries, novels have done the important job of making devastation more concrete for people by examining individual experience, real or fictional, with that devastation.
Ugh. Art subordinated to politics and social change. Great novelists should write about Katrina to help people. No. That's not how it works.
Novelists have done a commendable job exposing us to the dust and the rubble of September 11. It’s time for more of them to churn the mud, water, blood, and decay wrought by Katrina.
As if serious novelists take their marching orders from the political hacks of this world.
AFTERTHOUGHT: "It’s time for more of them to churn the mud, water, blood, and decay wrought by Katrina." Put mud, water, blood, and decay in in the blender and press "churn." Yummy Katrina art smoothie.
"... These acts of mass murder were intended to frighten our nation into chaos and retreat. But they have failed. Our country is strong."
"... Today, our nation saw evil -- the very worst of human nature -- and we responded with the best of America.... This is a day when all Americans from every walk of life unite in our resolve for justice and peace. America has stood down enemies before, and we will do so this time. None of us will ever forget this day, yet we go forward to defend freedom and all that is good and just in our world."
A photograph taken from my apartment in New York in the fall of 2007. Here's the post, not that I added words to it. And here is my post that morning, looking at the skyline in the fog. And here is the skyline on the evening of the 10th, with the memorial lights cut short by the low-hanging clouds:
They were mostly peaceful, and they didn't really disagree at a high level of abstract principle. All — or mostly all — believe in freedom of religion, respect for the WTC victims, and opposition to those who attacked us on 9/11.
Off the abstract level, we have our troubles... but can you feel the harmony... now and then?
"For some it would be the ultimate expression of the freedom of religion we enjoy in America; for others, a searing reminder of terrible deaths at the hands of murderers calling themselves Muslims. I suspect that the terrorists might celebrate its presence as a twisted victory over our society's freedoms. Rauf and his congregation are certainly free to locate their mosque near Ground Zero. But I hope and pray that they will show uncommon courtesy and decide not to."
ADDED: I almost feel sorry for Obama and the Democrats for their misfortune that this is the issue that has come to the fore at this time.
At least one Republican, former Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin, seized on the confusion. “Mr. President, should they or should they not build a mosque steps away from where radical Islamists killed 3,000 people? Please tell us your position. We all know that they have the right to do it, but should they? And, no, this is not above your pay grade,” Palin wrote on Facebook....
Democratic aides say that, at the very least, the president has again knocked his party's candidates off local messages and forced them to talk about a national issue that doesn't appear likely to play well with important swing voters.
These officials planned to spend this weekend talking about Social Security’s 75th anniversary....
"The main reaction is 'Why? Why now?’" said one House Democratic leadership aide. "It's just another day off message. There have been a lot of days off message.
The chief of staff to one politically vulnerable House Democrat said it "probably alienates a lot of independent voters" and "it's not a good issue to be talking about right now."
He said he suspects "there are a lot of (Democrats) who are spooked in tough districts today" and "a lot of Republicans licking their chops right now."
Almost. The Democrats would love to do the same thing to the Republicans. They wouldn't hesitate to exploit something that captures the public's attention and provides leverage for the political arguments they like to make. Remember the Mark Foley incident in 2006.
Speaking to reporters today, President Obama drew a sharp line under his comments last night, insisting that his defense of the right to build a mosque does not mean he supports the project.
"I was not commenting and I will not comment on the wisdom of making the decision to put a mosque there. I was commenting very specifically on the right people have that dates back to our founding," he said.
Obama's new stance is logically consistent with his words last night, if a bit less "clarion," as Mike Bloomberg called the first remarks.
I had to Google "Mike Bloomberg." Oh, Mayor Bloomberg. Do we call him Mike?
Anyway... Ben, Mike... everybody... could you possibly take the trouble to pay attention to words?
And read the Althouse blog. It was all always obvious, as I told you here and here.
Obama's new remarks, literally speaking, re-open the question of which side he's on.
Re-open the question only because you foolishly visualized a closed question.
"Literally speaking" ... what the hell does that mean? If you knew how to be literal, you wouldn't have read more into the old remarks than was there. You read subjectively. You let idiotically soaring hopes cloud your eyes.
Obama has made his brilliant career out of saying the most crashingly banal things to people who hear what they want to hear. Could everyone please wake up? Please!
Most of the mosque's foes recognize the legal right to build, and have asked the builders to reconsider.
But the clarification is, in political terms, puzzling. The signal Obama sent with his rhetoric last night wasn't that he had chosen to make a trivial, legal point about the First Amendment. He chose to make headlines in support of the mosque project, and he won't be able to walk them back now with this sprinkling of doubt. All he'll do is frustrate some of the people who so eagerly welcomed his words yesterday as a return to form.
Allow me to help you solve your little puzzle? You are a chump. You need to wake up, smarten up, and realize that words have meaning.
"But let me be clear: as a citizen, and as president, I believe that Muslims have the same right to practice their religion as anyone else in this country. That includes the right to build a place of worship and a community center on private property in lower Manhattan...
"This is America, and our commitment to religious freedom must be unshakable."
Look closely at what he said. It is actually unremarkable. Of course, there is freedom of religion in the United States and the idea of discriminating against a particular religion offends our fundamental values. But it is a separate question whether the plan to build a mosque is a good one that persons of good will should choose to pursue as they exercise the freedom they are most assuredly guaranteed. Did Obama say express an opinion about that?
Ah, here is the text. Let me answer my question: The answer is no.
... the trouble began with the advent of the rolling bag. The worst year I recall was 1997, before the 1+1 limits came on, and before the airlines increased the overhead bin size. The 727. MD-80, and 757 were ridiculous...
We got a break after 9/11, in fact despite the challenges of those events, it became SO much easier to fly, for those of us who still HAD jobs, with the more stringent enforcement of policies. Now it is again a free for all.
Air travel is horrible, but if it was 9/11 that made us more docile and obedient, it's nice that we've got our old edge back. Not that I want to be crammed into a metal tube with you selfish bastards.
