Aim at the car, hit your own foot.

I'd have to guess that somebody actually got paid money to come up with this...

"The Associated Press
HARRISBURG, Pa.—A conservative advocacy group is inviting candidates for Pennsylvania governor and U.S. Senate to a shooting range to fire bullets into a junker that represents policy ideas it opposes."

The other side wants voters to think people who share your views are dangerous hot-heads, and you're going to publicize those views by inviting politicians to shoot up and old car? They'd have to go out of their way to host an event that plays more directly into the caricature that their opponents paint of them. The AP says they'll be smoking cigars during the event, for the perfect photo op maybe they can pay underage minority kids to light them with flaming $100 bills.

casual Friday

I realize there's no bright line defining when grown-ups need to stop dressing like trendy kids, but maybe we can settle on some general guidelines. How about if we start with the idea that you might want to refrain from wearing faux python skin stiletto heel pumps to the office if you're old enough that you look like you borrowed them from your granddaughter who wears them when she goes out clubbing?

Built to last

A BP official was being interviewed on NPR this morning about what they're doing to clean up the big oil spill in the Gulf of Mexico. In the midst of talking about all the high tech goodies they're using he mentioned that they're using C-130s and DC-3s to drop dispersants on the floating oil. The C-130s didn't surprise me since they're still in common usage by the US military. The DC-3, on the other hand, has been around for 75 years (holy crap!!!!!!!!!!) and I didn't think was being flown by anybody but third world cargo fleets.

I'm not sure exactly when they stopped building them, and I realized that anything that's still flying commercially has been heavily refurbished and upgraded, but still, that's some kind of longevity they built into that plane.

The least sincere words in the English language

You just know when you hear people say "...with all due respect..." or some variation thereof, it's really just a weak apology in advance for whatever they're about to say that reveals an utter lack of respect. I'm sure this isn't exactly an earthshaking, original observation, but I had to roll my eyes at a particularly egregious example of it in the news today.

``I certainly meant no disrespect and apologized..." said Miami Dolphins general manager Jeff Ireland.

Ireland apparently didn't understand that it might be considered disrespectful to ask a prospective draft choice whether his mom had ever been a prostitute. Seriously.

On the one hand, if he's so dense he didn't understand that question was inherently insulting I think the Dolphins might need to fire him because he has no judgment at all. On the other hand, maybe he's stumbled onto a valuable tool for evaluating character. Look into players backgrounds, find something that should really set them off, ask them the most insulting question possible, and if they don't pound your pasty middle-aged ass through the floor maybe they have enough maturity and self-control not to turn into the next Ben Roethlisberger.

I wonder who died

Among the things in mom's house in San Antonio that we wanted to make sure stayed in the family when she moved was her dining room table. It was solid and gorgeous and even without inserting the leafs it was bigger than she'd needed for quite some time. Extended as far as it would go I doubt that it even would have fit in her dining room. She'd inherited it when her parents died, and they'd held onto it from the days they'd owned a farm.

Mom had grown up on a working farm with her four sisters, but they didn't need a table that size to feed a family of seven. When harvest time came around though they needed to drop all five leafs into the table to stretch it out far enough to fit their seasonal help around it. How's that for a sign of how times have changed over just a couple of generations - it's hard to even imagine a migrant farm crew these days being invited to come in to dinner with a farm owner's family, but I didn't get the impression that it was out of the ordinary when mom's folks did it.

One day she was reminiscing about the burly farmhands packed in shoulder to shoulder after a long day in the fields. Libraries could be filled with what I don't know about farming, so mom began filling me in on life before the invention of the combine. As I understand it, they used to have to cut and bundle wheat as individual steps, then leave it out to dry before they could separate the grain. When the time came for that, crews hauled it in to where the thrashing machine was set up and threw the bundles down onto a conveyer that fed into the machinery that ground and pummeled the wheat until the grain was separated from the straw. The little lesson in old farm technology prompted another memory for mom...

"I was in the yard with mom when she saw smoke coming up from the direction of the neighbors field where the thrashing crew was working, and she said 'I wonder who died.'"

"You mean they'd set a fire to signal for help?" I asked, figuring I had it all figured out.

"No, sometimes one of the men feeding the thrasher would fall in, and there was no way to find all the pieces of him that got mixed in with the straw. They just had to burn the whole straw pile."

As it turned out, the fire was just caused by friction in the machinery, but it doesn't make the story all that much less disturbing. I've had some dangerous jobs before, but I have a hard time getting my head around a job where gruesome death was routine enough that the default assumption when you saw a fire in the workplace was that they were disposing of somebody's mutilated remains.

empathy

I tend not to read a lot of the political commentary on Supreme Court nominations because it's generally too predictable to be interesting. Unfortunately I was stuck in the dentist's waiting room with a choice of parenting magazines (sorry, no room here for my opinion of the very narrow targeted market audience for parenting magazines), celebrity gossip magazines and Newsweek, so I ended up reading Dahlia Lithwick's piece on the Justice Stephen's retirement...

Stevens’s Real Legacy

Like I said, generally predictable, but there were two points that I found noteworthy.

Point one, Lithwick claims "...Americans now begin the ritual clamor for a court that looks more like them..." I think she's painting with a pretty broad brush. Beyond the echo chamber of the punditry, I doubt seriously if "looks like me" ranks anywhere close to the top of most people's list of qualifications for a lifetime appointment to the nation's highest court.

Point two, Lithwick opens her last paragraph with this...
"Empathy isn't emotional incontinence and it isn't fudging the law to help the little guy. Empathy is the power to imagine a world outside your experience, and to map that understanding onto the law."

Now I'm a little baffled (get used to it, it'll be a recurring theme). What exactly could "map that understanding onto the law" mean other than to read something into the law that isn't explicitly there in order to favor the individual with whom the justice is empathizing? If not, what's the point? 'I understand your perspective and feel for you, but the law still says you don't get your way?' It's more than a little absurd the lengths to which leftists will go to talk around the fact that they want justices to legislate from the bench.

I'd like to close with a little thought exercise. Try to picture Lithwick's reaction if she was party to a lawsuit, and during jury selection her lawyer chose not to challenge the inclusion of any jurors who admitted that rather than evaluating the evidence and testimony in light of the black letter of the law they'd imagine the world of her opposition's experience and map that understanding onto the case. You think she'd realize that maybe empathy has no place in a court of law after all?

"...Kernell was politically opposed to Palin."

Bristol Palin says e-mail hack led to scary calls

This got a good bit of play when it actually happened, but kind of fell off the radar pretty quickly. I hadn't even been aware the trial was in progress now until I saw this headline, it's just not the kind of thing I obsess over. You just accept that there are jerks operating on the periphery of politics and get on with your life. The only reason I'm bringing it up at all isn't because of the case itself, but because of how it's being presented.

Conservatives frequently complain about liberal bias in the press and here's a perfect illustration. The AP is supposed to be a straight news agency but it's interesting what Bill Poovey doesn't think we need to know about this case. We learn that David Kernell is a 22-year-old former college student. We learn that he majored in economics. And although we learn that he was politically opposed to Palin, his college roommate says Kernell never said anything about wanting to hurt Palin or McCain. Now without heading for google, does everybody remember (assuming you ever saw it in the news to begin with) what we don't learn from Poovey about Kernell?

Do you think that maybe if Poovey had mentioned that the defendant's father is a democratic state representative, he wouldn't have had to tell us that he was politically opposed to Palin? Do you think that maybe if this case involved the child of a republican state representative posting the contents of Joe Biden's personal e-mail account on the web Poovey wouldn't be quite so reticent to inform his readers about the accused lineage?

Bias isn't always about what you say and do, it's also about what you choose to not say and do. All of us - not just conservatives - should be disappointed in the political press when they decline to pass along the whole story in hopes that the public will be trusting enough not to look into what they're not telling us.

Some people's kids...

I feel like a bit of an ingrate complaining about this. A while back I was in the car flipping through the CDs that had been left in the stereo when I came to one that had been burned for my youngest, and to my pleasant surprise I found one of my all time favorite songs on it. I know he sometimes shares my eclectic tastes, but this one caught me completely off guard...



I think it's a great arrangement and I can absolutely see how the little rocker in him would prefer it to most of the classic country versions, but as I sat there in the parking lot listening to the end something started nagging at me. I listened again to make sure nothing distracted me, then listened one more time just to be sure I wasn't just being dense. Sure enough, they left off the entire last verse.

For those of you unfamiliar, here's another version...



Now Cash seems to just append the last verse to the end of the second verse, but you're not really missing anything when he leaves out an extra round of yipie i oh's. When The Outlaws just skip the entire last verse though, it's not even the same song. They pretty much take a haunting ballad about the hope of redemption and turn it into Monster Mash with a western twang. I'll keep listening to it anyway since the instrumentation really is amazing, but I always get a bit bummed when they get to the part where the most important lyrics are supposed to be.