jaymill: February 2008 Archives

The United States now has one percent of its adult population in prison. That's one out of every 100 adults -- more than any other nation in the world.

More than China, North Korea, Cuba, Iraq, Iran, Libya, Mexico, Russia, and all of those other countries that you hear so many horrible things about.

Dead baby found in hospital driveway.

This isn't a CNN story but it has a prominent place on CNN's front page above the fold as of 9 AM today.

Check out CNN Family Horror Vol. 1.

Any blogger or journalist who labels the Obama/Clinton health insurance plans "socialized medicine" is either incredibly deceitful or incredibly stupid. A massive gift to the health insurance industry that does not provide free health care for all is most certainly not socialized medicine, nationalized health care, a Canadian-style single payer plan, or whatever else the pundits and journalists want to call it.

It's certainly fair to criticize their health insurance plans on their merits but misrepresenting them as some kind of European-style socialized medicine plans is simply dishonest. Or ignorant.

Conservatives say Obama is insufficiently patriotic

So here's the question: Are they really saying this because they believe the empty rituals of patriotism (flag lapel pins, hand over heart, etc.) are more important than actual patriotism, or is this just a cynical Swift-Boat ploy without real feeling behind it?

I would say that among the conservative rank-and-file as well as most of the leadership, it is quite definitely the former. The latter would only be true among a minority of conservative intellectuals. For conservatives, appearances are everything.

Boy, the Courier-Journal's Saturday Scene section has really gone downhill. It used to be mostly articles; now it's mostly "reviews" (unpaid, enthusiastic advertisements) of products. There are relatively few entertainment-related products like movies or music, and pages and pages of knickknacks, furniture, electronics and accessories. Today's Scene was no exception.

I guess they've moved all of the actual articles to Veloshitty.

Another regular feature of this blog will be links to certain kinds of stories that are regularly featured on the front page of CNN.com. They are always above the fold, so to speak, in their "latest news" link section. These stories always involve something horrible happening to small children. They are not newsworthy by any definition of the word; they are human interest stories that are interesting solely because they tug at deep-seated emotions. I call these "family horror stories." My wife reads them all the time and I suspect that she is representative of the main audience for these types of stories: middle-class parents who like to worry a lot about highly unlikely tragedies.

Here's today's example:

We have throwback clothing and throwback music, why not throwback punditry too? You may have thought that the days of seeing Communists under every rock were long gone -- especially now that the Soviet Union is no more and Castro has stepped down -- but you would be wrong.

I remember seeing the covers of paranoid, racist, anti-Communist books and tracts (like "Jew-Communists Behind Race Mixing") that were published around half a century ago. They seemed ludicrous and outdated to me when I was a teenager and even more so today. But we can thank the illustrious National Review for providing a modern version of this tale.

You see, since Barack Obama's parents were a mixed-race couple in the 1950s, they must have been Communists because only Communists promoted mixing races back then.

Next thing you know, the National Review will run an article about how fluoride is sapping our precious bodily fluids or something.

Last week Velocity published an article about local rockers Dead Child. The article wasn't really that bad as long as you know nothing about Louisville music (past or present). That's OK, because apparently the author isn't all that familiar with local music either.

The article takes great pains to describe a Louisville that does not exist. For example:

The attitude, powerful riffs and -- yes! -- guitar solos immediately caught on with Louisville music fans longing for a little pure rock in this math rock-loving city.

Don Caballero is not selling out huge venues in Louisville. There are few to no local bands openly imitating Slint anymore. Did this guy just step out of a time machine from 1994? Not likely, given his later generalizations.

Surely you've seen all those bloggers pontificating about the TUCC statement on its website:

http://www.tucc.org/about.htm

"What if WE substituted 'white' for 'black' in those statements?!" the bloggers bellow. "WE would be accused of racism! And rightly so!"

Well, I hope those same pundits will pile onto this church that I've discovered. They explicitly cater to whites only!

http://holytrinitygerman.org

Right there on their website they proclaim that they were "Founded to meet the spiritual and cultural needs of German immigrants"! And since Germans=Europeans, and Europeans are white, well ... I think we can draw the obvious conclusion. The church is racist! Quick, alert the blogosphere! We need someone to make hysterical distortions and leap to irrational, ahistorical conclusions!