Good for a grin

You know, he's right: let's not go to Houston -- Tom DeLay, June 22, probably not on the same page with the local chamber of commerce: "You know, if Houston, Texas, was held to the same standard as Iraq is held to, nobody'd go to Houston, because all this reporting coming out of the local press in Houston is violence, murders, robberies, deaths on the highways."

That's what I'm talking about -- Overheard in New York

Hipster: Did the train just pass 28th street?
Woman: Yes, it went express, but you could get off at 14th and switch to the uptown train.
Homeboy: Or you could take your chances, break the window with a crowbar and jump out now.
--1 train
Overheard by: Hayley

Man: This won't do. All bad smelling people get the hell off the train.
At the next stop most of the car clears out.
Man: That's what I'm talking about.
--A train

It just gets better and better. Via "Mrs. Coulter" of the "Republic of Heaven."

Fish and chip shop joke -- by Grace, who claims "This one never gets old":

A Benedictine and a Franciscan open a fish-and-chip shop. A customer asks the Benedictine, "Are you the fish friar?" The Benedictine replies, "No, I'm the chip monk."

So I'm easily amused, so what.

Lileks (James) Screechblog -- as imagined by Ted Barlow, guest blogging at The Poor Man

I’m sorry, but I haven’t forgotten. Every morning starts out fine- I get up, shave, start to cook breakfast- and then a car backfires and it’s September 12th again. All the rage, all the fury, all the anger comes back. I spent last night holding Gnat close, going through our 9/11 flash cards again, and making sure she doesn’t forget, either. Not for One. God. Damned. Minute.

The Torturers Accept Your Apology -- Fafblog

On behalf of all the torturers working hard today in the United States military, the Medium Lobster would like to say: apology accepted, Senator Durbin.

The boys in the 101st Thumbscrew Division would accept your heartfelt concession personally, but they're busy serving the highest ideals of their country, beating a young Afghan man tied to the floor in his own feces. He is believed to be either a steadfast and vicious enemy of freedom intent on the murder of thousands of American citizens, or another cab driver. It's so hard to keep track these days.

Good for a particular, sickly kind of grin; guess I can't break the irony habit either.

posted by Thomas Nephew at 2:50:00 PM -- |  

 
London terror attacks
My heart goes out to the victims of the London terror attacks, and to the citizens of London and the United Kingdom. The BBC is reporting 33 dead now, with many more critically injured.

BBC News coverage
Washington Post coverage

Timothy Burke expresses my feelings well:

Everybody sensible and decent agrees on the basics.

That the people who put those bombs in London are bastards. That they should be caught and punished.

That there is no excuse or justification for what they have done.

That by placing those bombs they have set themselves against the rights of free people everywhere, and in doing so, are against freedom itself. That they may hold other beliefs and ideologies in mind as they kill innocent people does not cancel out the fact that they stand against the rights of free people to go about their daily business as free people will.

That the ideologies, creeds, institutions, organizations or leaders which methodically justify, plan and direct such actions are incompatible with a world dedicated to justice and freedom. That we are in a state of absolute conflict with such beliefs and with such organizations, a state of conflict which could reasonably be described as “war”, even if a war against ideas and non-state organizations is different in its nature than what “war” has previously meant to humanity.

That in such a conflict we should defend ourselves resolutely and where possible strike back meaningfully and effectively.

But he also has more to say about how not to go about that; it's worth reading. See also Stygius, interrupting a break from blogging to gather links about the attack on a city he used to live in.



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UPDATE, 7/7: Over at "Unqualified Offerings," reader Ross Smith passes along a comment "from an old Londoner who lived through the Blitz and the IRA bombs: "I’ve been blown up by a better class of bastard than this."
posted by Thomas Nephew at 10:37:00 AM -- |  

 
Miller goes to jail. Good.
I will get a bias out of the way right away: I have a prior (and disappointed) disdain for the New York Times' Judith Miller from her role in selling (Ahmed Chalabi's) Iraqi WMD story to myself and the world. But I would not have been any less unsympathetic to TIME Magazine's Matthew Cooper were he in a jail cell tonight.

I'll let the federal judge handling the case demolish Miller's ostensible crusade for freedom of the press. As the Washington Post's Carol Leonnig reported (N.Y. Times Reporter Jailed):

[Chief U.S. District Judge Thomas F.] Hogan said Miller was mistaken in her belief that she was defending a free press. He stressed that the government source she 'alleges she is protecting' had already waived her promise of confidentiality. He said her source may have been providing information not to shed light on government secrets but to try to discredit an administration critic.

'This is not a case of a whistle-blower' revealing secret information to Miller about 'dangers at a nuclear power plant,' Hogan said. 'It's a case in which the information she was given and her potential use of it was a crime. . . . This is very different than a whistle-blower outing government misconduct. (emphases added)

(Mark A. R. Kleiman also stresses this Hogan quote.) I'm willing to pull my chin with Kevin Drum and ponder whether there should be a federal "shield law" explicitly protecting journalists* from revealing their confidential sources. But just as with other professions, there would likely be either statutory exceptions or ones worked out in case law. Like Judge Hogan, I think we're seeing an excellent exception right now -- were there a federal shield law to have an exception to. Which, to repeat, there isn't.

Josh Marshall considers the distinction Judge Hogan makes -- between whistleblowers revealing wrongdoing and "sources who are the wrongdoers themselves," as Marshall puts it -- to be "specious." He hasn't yet outlined his reasoning, but hints that real world difficulties arise. Maybe Marshall will argue that virtuous whistleblowing itself can all too easily be defined to be criminal, or maybe he'll argue that it's hard to make statutory distinctions between virtuous and nonvirtuous confidential communications. To the former, I'd say: we'll just have to not let that happen. And to the latter I'd say: just be specific -- outing a covert operative: bad. Until further notice, anything else: good.

The Washington Post editorializes that Miller's jailing is "a damaging blow to the press's ability to do its job." I agree that the health of journalism is at stake all right -- just not in the way the Post and so many journalists seem to think. What passes for Washington journalism these days is to run to a White House source, genuflect, possibly have a cocktail or two, scribble down whatever they say, dash back to the office, and "report" it -- taking care to stroke the ego of the White House source so "stories" continue to flow and the mortgage continues to get paid.

In Plamegate, this little arrangement seems to have blown up in a lot of faces. Good. Bill Keller's bleats of protest over at the New York Times notwithstanding, if that kind of "journalism" gets "chilled," it's high time and a welcome development.


=====
* Or, to broaden it as Matt Welch would, to writers and bloggers committing journalism.
UPDATE, 7/8: Judd Legum at ThinkProgress: "For the fourth straight time since his lawyer admitted that Rove was one of Matt Cooper’s sources, no member of the White House press corps asked a question about Rove’s role." Via Josh Marshall.
UPDATE, 7/11: Will wonders never cease? The White House press corps starts to make up for lost time -- today's press briefing via ThinkProgress.
UPDATE, 7/11: Welcome, AOLNews Blogzone readers -- your good comments are welcome. Click just below this update, where it says "[number] comments." (3 right now). For more links to others following this story, see "Never Mind Rove -- what about Bush?" posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:40:00 AM -- |  

 
Our sacred Honor

And for the support of this Declaration, with a firm reliance on the protection of divine Providence, we mutually pledge to each other our Lives, our Fortunes and our sacred Honor.

Our sacred honor. We mutually pledge to each other our sacred honor.

Two hundred and twenty nine years later, "honor" is not a word that's used much in America any more. It's hard not to think those final words of the Declaration of Independence are outdated and quaint. The word often isn't merited, of course, but it's often not even aspired to.


Some suspect we're returning to an age of irony -- it can seem the only defense against the repeated abuse or expropriation of important words like "freedom" or "democracy," whether by Presidents or car salesmen, or against acts that make a mockery of the values we supposedly believe in. Irony is useful; it serves the need to laugh, the need to avoid crushing earnestness.

But irony is inadequate to face anything important for long. It's inadequate to deal with revelations that your country was misled and lied to to goad it into war -- and too many of your country's citizens seem to shrug and call that "bad PR." It's inadequate to the knowledge that those liars would stoop to treason to smear their opponents. It doesn't help you as you learn that your country is guilty of torture, and that too many of your country's citizens seem not to care about that, either.

I'm trying to move beyond disappointment and irony to a kind of declaration of independence of my own. Were I to draft one, it might include a decent respect for the opinions of all mankind, but not an abject one. It would require me to thoroughly question every statement from my country's political and opinion leaders, especially ones supporting war or diminished civil and human rights. It would require I never shrug my shoulders and turn away when my country does wrong, even and especially when my countrymen cheer that wrong or make excuses for it.

But this being a personal declaration, it would also use personal terms. It would require that I choose honor over irony, over apathy, and over apprehension.

And it could conclude by pledging that honor to return this country to the ideals it chose so long ago, and that it once defended for so long. posted by Thomas Nephew at 1:00:00 PM -- |  

 
Sally Jenkins profiles Howard Dean
Sally Jenkins has a great profile of Howard Dean -- Return of the Angry Man -- in the Washington Post today. The piece has a lot of the familiar biographical details, but they're well told. Principally, though, it gets across Dean's 'fight for every state' approach. In Nashville, a young man asked him what he could do to help the Democratic Party. Dean's answer: "The number one thing you can do is run for office." There were giggles, but Dean continued:

Run, he urged the students. Run for county road commissioner. Run for city council. "If you don't have people running for offices like county commissioner, who do you think is going to run for Congress a generation from now?

"You may not win the first time," he said, "or the second time or the third time . . . If you lose, so what? It's worth the investment if we can have somebody there who gives the message, who's articulate and thoughtful, and respectful of the voters, because they'll get a better impression of Democrats than they would otherwise if there was no opposition whatsoever. That's the great failure, one of the great failures, of the party. Because we were in power for so long, we didn't think we had to appeal to places like that. Well, we do. And we will."

I'm interested in the writer here as well. Sally Jenkins has carved out an interesting niche in the Washington Post sports pages, both with good straight sports commentary and with a kind of hybrid sports/news writing. Recent examples include articles about Vladimir Putin scamming a Super Bowl ring off New England Patriots owner Bob Kraft, or about George Soros' bid for the Washington Nationals and the disgusting Republican reaction to that. Her articles are invariably interesting (and the Putin one is hilarious).

Anyway, I think it's interesting and telling that Howard Dean has got his fairest big media shot in a while from a sports writer, instead of the usual bigfoot journalists who generally get these stories. Good for Jenkins, and good for whoever agreed to give her the assignment. posted by Thomas Nephew at 7:00:00 AM -- |