I completely agree with OFG, the Wisconsin State Senators who ran off to a nearby state rather than to allow really bad laws to be passed were on our side, but as the minority, they had to undertake really strenuous efforts to prevent those bad laws. In other words, the burden was on the proper party, the minority party. If the majority had been trying to pass something reasonable, the minority wouldn’t have felt obliged to take such extreme actions.

Yeah, I live in a Northern suburb of Philadelphia, so I have to drive a lot (Takes about an hour to get to downtown Philly from where I am), but I’ve always preferred public transportation or a bicycle. Actually, I was informed by the book Nine Nation of North America that my preference is inbred into me from being a native son of New England. According to the book, Texans are the opposite. Apparently, Texans love to drive. ‘Sfunny, when I started assembling web pages, just to learn how to do it and to document parts of my life, I did a web page of all of the various bicycles I’ve owned and ridden from way back when. Never did do one of cars. Pretty sure I have photos of all the cars I’ve owned, but I’ve never felt any desire to collect them all into one web page.

Yeah, Lucifer from Vertigo/DC Comics tried that strategy too. It worked pretty well for him. On the one hand, you had The Devil, on the other hand, a villain or set of villains who were even worse. Fun stuff! Nah, I don’t put Obama in the evil column, even though I have lots of problems with him on civil liberties, drones, warrantless surveillance, treatment of whistle-blowers, etc.

From my local paper’s letters page:

Posted 2:35 PM, 03/03/2012
I volunteer my time and financially support a crisis pregnancy center. I can says this for a fact. Of the women that have ‘already made up their mind’, nearly 95% of them change their mind once they see an ultrasound of their baby and see the beating heart. Most start to cry immediately.

You see Mike. In this current day culture of darkness and death, every little opportunity to see God’s miracle in the womb often brings light to a previously darkened mind and results in a beating heart coming to term! Joy abounds!
— Jimmyjammsjames

Obviously, JJJ thinks he’s doing women a favor. I doubt that anyone gets back to him to complain of being manipulated as hey, it’s ultimately their decision to keep the baby they can’t afford.

Never heard of the word “flabbergastation.” I’ve heard the phrase “I was flabbergasted to hear…”

I love how the letter starts by saying “We have no evidence…” and then says “We have abundant evidence…” that the GSA is somehow connected to PP through some mysterious, unexplained linkage. Funny how the guy never explains exactly how he “knows” all this. Oh, wait a sec, that’s right “Internet research.” Yeah, that explains it!

Problem with McArdle comparing sticking a plastic vaginal probe up a woman’s vagina with having an abortion is that consent very deeply matters. It’s like the argument comparing being “tortured” as a military trainee and really being tortured.
When you’re a military trainee, you’re informed as to what will happen, you’re told the day and time it will happen, you’re surrounded by friends. Yes, the physical pain may be precisely the same as what you’d get in a real torture session, but the context of being kidnapped, flown to the US, stuck in a cramped cell, called all sorts of insulting names and seeing your co-prisoners being abused makes the pain vastly greater and more traumatizing.
I had a medical procedure done many years ago. It was extraordinarily painful and left me sore in that spot for the rest of the day. It had no ill psychological effects, I never had flashbacks, etc. Why? Because I knew that the doctor was trying to help me, there were no bad intentions on his part. It would have resulted in trauma and flashbacks had the doctor been visibly enjoying my pain and calling me an evil terrorist.

Y’see, when New Orleans got flooded in 2005, nobody needed to tell folks that, because there was water all over the streets. When unemployment is high, no one needs to be told that because they can see that shops are closed down, there are more people hanging around with nothing to do, etc. When the deficit gets lowered, the only way people know about that is that people on the TeeVee tell people “The deficit is lower!”
You’re right, the people who said Obama needed to pivot to the deficit need to have been fired in disgrace a long, long time ago.

So Allen West will be on CBS’ Face the Nation, eh? The same guy who said “Take your message of equality of achievement, take your message of economic dependency, take your message of enslaving the entrepreneurial will and spirit of the American people somewhere else. You can take it to Europe, you can take it to the bottom of the sea, you can take it to the North Pole, but get the hell out of the United States of America,”

Obviously, CBS wouldn’t DREAM of kicking West off of their show because he’s a complete SOB, oh noes, obviously, CBS will probably just glide over this disagreeable statement very quickly and do its best to make nice to the guy. $#%@ “liberal media”!!! %$%^#@

Yeah, I took a look at the NYT Ombuds piece (I am totally in sympathy with Froomkin’s earnest query) and agree with him that we cannot peer into Thomas’ dark soul and determine with confidence what he was thinking. Heck, even courts of law can’t do that, all they can do is judge people by their actions and then make educated guesses as to what people were thinking.
I suggested that if we wrote down the facts of the case, describing Thomas as just “a judge,” Ginni Thomas as “his wife” and the Heritage Foundation as “a think tank that’s deeply involved in political issues and with a close alliance to only one of the two main political parties” and then allowed random people to weigh in, I think we’d end up with 100% of the respondents declaring Thomas to be absolutely guilty beyond the slightest shadow of a doubt.
Yes, certainly, there are indeed shades and degrees and variations of “Is he a lying sack of #### or is he just being cute and dodgy?” Are those reasons to ignore the questions and just be stenograpers? Of course not.

I remain convinced, convinced, I tell you!, that Sarah Palin’s popularity owes everything to the demographic she’s always appealed to, middle-aged and elder white, conservative males. They’re the ones who run just about all the newsrooms and they “saw stars” when she appeared. She has no appeal to most of the country, but boy, that demographic thinks she’s so-o-o-o hot! It became obvious when we saw so much of Palin and at the same time, poll numbers on her that just plain stunk.

VERY happy to see that Santorum is going nowhere! *Whew*! Gee, I guess his balancing of the double message “Gays are ze untermenschen who deserve no rights!” along with “Who me? I love gays!” just doesn’t seem to be working for him.

Heh! Well, I never actually read Peyton Place, but hey, I saw the porno parody with Jesie St. James! Does that count?

On a more serious note, yeah, I’m reminded of an advice column written by a right-wing pastor. The pastor was told about a businessman who was being distracted by an attractive secretary. In order to remain faithful to his wife, the businessman was advised to fire the secretary. Problem solved, right? Whoa! Hold on a sec! Why in the bloody hell was the attractive secretary being made to suffer for the fact that the businessman never heard of cold showers or other types of self-control?

The government wisely stopped printing useless and unnecessary $1 coins

I was very puzzled back in 1998. I had just spent two years in Europe where coins are worth from 0.0something cents to $5 or even $10 (Heh! I once made the error of giving a young Romanian girl what I thought was a 10,000 Lira piece (About a buck) and saw to my horror that it was actually a 10 Franc piece (About $7, I think)! Fortunately, she wasn’t sure what it was that I had given her, so I apologized and switched it out and gave her a 10,000 Lira piece instead, which she recognized and happily accepted) and the US was spending money to advertise the Sacajawea dollar coin. I was like “Why are we spending money to advertise such an obviously useful and necessary thing?!?!?!”
Oh well, I was clearly wrong and Americans didn’t find such a coin useful at all. Still very puzzling when I’m using vending machines and laundromats.

Yeah, I think I was about 6 or 7 when I decided I had no use for TV news. I found it very annoying when I had heard/seen a story, wanted to chew it over it in my mind, wanted to consider it for a bit and the TV would immediately zip on to another story. I was like “How can anybody understand anything if they don’t have time to think it over first?”
These days, I get the local paper and that keeps me in touch with right-wing/establishment thought, but frankly, I use it mainly as LTE fodder, so I can write critical LTEs.
Nah, you’re right. I’m perfectly happy getting the bulk of my news from the Internet.

Then we go to church for three hours

Heh! Rends me of the time when I was statoned in Italy and some Baptists on my ship wanted to get me t ogo to one of their servces. I’m like “Uh, yeah, sounds cool. Okay.” “Great, we’ll start off at this church, get luch, then go back for another rond of services…” “Oh, ah, uh, gee, fellas, I just remembered I hve another appointment for that day. Aw gee, sorry ’bout that!”
Actually, in fairness, one of their senior petty officers came down to the office a few weeks later and asked a question. I thought for a bit and recomended he ask his department’s POIC (Petty Office In Charge) about that. He replied “Well, I am the POIC for that and I asked myself and I didn’t know, so I figured I’d come down here and ask.”
I mentally took him off of the list of irredeemable fanatics and marked him down as a reasonably cool guy.

Just to give them proper shout-outs, both the Friends Center and the Arch Street Methodist Church palyed crtical roles in Occupy Phily. The Friends Center provided meetig spaces and food and bathrooms with showers, the Methodists provided theri sanctuary for a few mass meetings and emergency medical services after we were evicted fro Dilworth Plaza.

I just got word that police are massing at Occupy Philly to break up the encampment. I did a piece earlier today showing the camp is pretty dispersed, not a whole lot there.

As of midnight, no sign of Occupy Philadelphia getting shut down.