That's WaPo columnist Richard Cohen, or as we call him around here: the never-slept-with-Althouse Richard Cohen.UPDATE: I wrote another post on this topic, here.
"But I don't want to go among mad people," Alice remarked....The White House....
Alice had not gone much farther before she came in sight of the house...
... it was so large a house that she did not like to go near till she had nibbled some more of the left-hand bit of mushroom.Yeah, we're calling that "the blue pill." Obama said you're going to need it.
There was a table set out under a tree in front of the house, and the March Hare and the Hatter were having tea at it; a Dormouse was sitting between them, fast asleep....So... find a better tea party.
"Take some more tea," the March Hare said to Alice, very earnestly.
"I've had nothing yet," Alice replied in an offended tone, "so I can't take more."
"You mean you can't take less," said the Hatter; "it's very easy to take more than nothing."...
"At any rate, I'll never go there again!" said Alice, as she picked her way through the wood. "It's the stupidest tea-party I ever was at in all my life!"
What does this have to do with Hillary? Quite a bit.So she read a line in a speech that was an utterly standard proposition of feminism, and she did that because she was the wife of a political leader, and... voila!... recognized and revered... therefore... ????
Rewinding the tape to 1995 at the U.N.’s Fourth World Conference on Women in Beijing, then-first lady Hillary Clinton empowered women as never before with just a few words: “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights, once and for all.”...
At the time, it was a revolutionary statement and helps explain why Hillary is one of the most recognized and revered individuals in the world.
While Americans obsess about Hillary’s hair and married life, others have been studying her for inspiration. To millions, she is a role model and a warrior for women’s right to self-determination.She's applying for the job of leading Americans, and we tend to take her married life into account when deciding whether to find her inspiring or not. But Parker tells us there are "millions," apparently not American millions, who would like to model themselves on her, who are inspired in some way that doesn't have to do with achieving prominence through marriage and enduring a husband's infidelity.
As secretary of state, she continued the work of predecessors Condoleezza Rice and Madeleine Albright, who first insisted that women’s rights be part of our foreign policy, and then pushed further. Under Hillary’s watch, Obama made permanent the Office of Global Women’s Issues and appointed longtime Hillary colleague Melanne Verveer as ambassador-at-large.So women's rights have been part of the work of the State Department for a long time, and Hillary was the third female Secretary of State.
Whether one likes or dislikes Hillary, few dispute that she has matured in her public role. Her résumé can be topped by few and the symbolic power of electing a woman president — especially this woman — can’t be overestimated.We just did the symbolic power of electing a black President. Did we overestimate that? I think we did. Isn't it time for substance and not mere symbolism? We've OD'd on symbolism. What are Hillary's achievements? Lines on a résumé aren't the same as accomplishments. In fact, when you've had powerful positions, the lack of specific achievements is the opposite of inspiring.
Many doubtless shudder at the prospect of Hillary Clinton as the most powerful person in the world, but we’ve done worse.Parker's argument has gone from "She can save the world" to "We could do worse." I can't believe how bad this column is! Why can't The Washington Post do better? Perhaps millions are inspired that a Woman has written a column in The Washington Post. The symbolic power cannot be overestimated!
In 2007 when I traveled through the Middle East with then-first lady Laura Bush, every woman I met was riveted by the U.S. presidential election and wanted to talk about only this question: Will Hillary win?Every woman was riveted by the question whether Hillary would win?
In 2008, it seemed possible. In 2016, barring a Benghazi surprise, it seems probable.Oh, wouldn't it be terrible, wouldn't hope for the world collapse, if Hillary doesn't win, which would be undermined if there were a "Benghazi surprise"? You mean if we actually found out what happened in Benghazi?!
He favors a nimble, loosely organized company in which “two-pizza teams” execute important corporate tasks, because a work group requiring three pizzas over a lunch meeting is inherently too cumbersome. And he often requires employees pitching new ideas to write mock news releases for their product’s imagined launch, a way of focusing their minds on what will most excite customers.Put it in writing. Don't blather with me for an hour, when you can crystallize your thoughts through the writing process, and I can read it all in a minute.
Bezos has said that he intends to keep his focus on Amazon and keep his home in the Seattle area rather than becoming a fixture in Washington, as four generations of The Post’s outgoing owners, the Graham family, have been.Good. Be the outsider. Be in it for us, the readers, not to be a part of some sick insider culture.
Bezos also has agreed to keep the newspaper’s top executives in place, though they may need to work without a popular corporate management tool: PowerPoint presentations.Take away their crutches.
Bezos all but banned such presentations at Amazon around the time Edward Tufte, a computer science professor at Yale, wrote an essay saying that their bullet points encouraged lazy thinking. Amazon employees are required to write papers, known as “narratives,” that are no longer than six pages.So Bezos has been about writing. Writing, marketing, efficiency... Okay. Show us the newspaper.
The idea for Bezos, former employees say, is that the act of writing forces people to focus their thoughts and think them through.
President George W. Bush backed down, halting secret foreign-intelligence-gathering operations that had crossed into domestic terrain. That morning marked the beginning of the end of STELLARWIND, the cover name for a set of four surveillance programs that brought Americans and American territory within the domain of the National Security Agency for the first time in decades. It was also a prelude to new legal structures that allowed Bush and then President Obama to reproduce each of those programs and expand their reach.Much more at the link.
They are hung from skeletal trees denuded of leaves and bark, stuck in the doors of cars turned upside down and draped over pieces of twisted metal embedded in the ground.ADDED: That prose is a far cry from "A View From Mrs. Thompson's."
The shot of red, white and blue flying in a landscape of ashen brown is startling and powerfully defiant, seeming to embody the mettle of the national anthem.
“I’m a political agnostic,” she says. “I don’t think about who’s good and who’s bad. I just go where the story leads.... People can say what they want about me, I don’t care. I just want to get the information out there.”The lady is irked! Irked! She stomps her well-shod foot and looks pretty when angry, I presume. What nonsense! Where was the WaPo's once-legendary investigative reporting? Why the hell are we looking at the Benghazi story today from the perspective of Sharyl Attkisson?
But Attkisson, who holds a third-degree black belt in taekwondo, takes a fighting stance when she feels she’s being stonewalled. Which is exactly what she thinks the White House has done to her on Benghazi. In particular, she is irked by the administration’s non-response to a petition for documents that she filed in November under the Freedom of Information Act.
The story has made Attkisson — strong-willed, supremely confident and often controversial — a kind of Rorschach test among journalists.Oh? She's a Rorschach test? Well, then let me unload my brain — my female and presumably wedding-fashion-gifts-ridden brain — on this WaPo article. I think they're saying hey, look at this lady so we won't look at that other lady: Hillary Clinton, whose actions in the Benghazi affair really do need looking into.
To Democrats, the efforts amount to a baseless and less-than-subtle crusade to tarnish the credentials of Clinton, one of the country’s most popular political figures and the overwhelming favorite for the 2016 Democratic presidential nomination....Nothing to see here. Just those terrible Republicans being terrible again, trying to get the jump on 2016, and as for what happened in 2012, well, what difference, at this point, does it make? And take a look: Sharyl Attkisson!!!!
Clinton also emerged largely unscathed in January when she testified before Congress about Benghazi.
“She was very smart — at some level because she’s been through so many of these kinds of situations in the past — not to say or do anything that was inaccurate or would in any way be inconsistent with the enormous credibility she earned as secretary of state,” Democratic strategist Chris Lehane said. “Because she protected her credibility, their ability to make a bigger issue out of it is very limited.”
Did you know that helium was endangered or threatened? What, is the Hunt family trying to make a run on helium like they did silver? Or maybe the Koch brothers? The Koch brothers are trying to corner helium. That's what it is, so that kids can't have birthday parties. That's what it is. The Koch brothers are doing it! The Koch brothers are trying to corner the helium market. And Hank here was saying that he supported the Responsible Helium Administration and Stewardship Act. He's from Georgia.Well, every single Republican in the House who voted, voted yes, and the vote was 391-1, so you might want to educate yourself about what this program is about. When I blogged a Washington Post item about it — "Congress finds it hard to let Federal Helium Program run out of gas" — I got called out by a number of commenters, notably Carl, who said:
The issue is not nearly as picayune as this asinine article suggests. In the first place, helium is essential stuff for a number of high-tech, scientific, and medical uses. I said essential, as in completely irreplaceable, at least with present or foreseeable technology.I am pushed back. What seems dumb may not be dumb. It may be dumb to accept the prompt that something is dumb.
Second, it is a weirdly irreplaceable resource. When your liquid He boils off, it makes its way to the top of the atmosphere and drifts off into interplanetary space, because the Earth's gravity is too weak to hold it. It's gone for good. You will never be able to recycle it, the way you might think of recycling iron from scrap heaps, or even reconstituting oil from the CO2 and H2O in the atmosphere after it gets burnt.
Third, the only conceivable source is the underground decay of uranium and thorium, which verrrry slowly produce helium over millions of years, particle by particle. There is no way to hurry the process up, and the supply is obviously finite and decreasing remorselessly every year.
Fourth, the economics are stupid, because the 1990s Federal law said to sell off the reserve as fast as possible, so the Federal government has been dumping He at far less than the cost to actually supply it for years and years. Not surprisingly, all these wrong economic signals have built up a whole economic structure built on them -- built on sand, so that once those signals reset to reality, you are going to have significant disruption.
That's the difficult issue. There may be broad agreement that economic reality should take over, and the signals reset, but how and when to do that is a matter of debate, as well it should be, and for the admittedly narrow segments of tech for which this is relevant, hardly trivial. It is by no means something Senators and Representatives shouldn't be wasting their time upon. The Post could do its readers a better favor by explaining why this happened, and the strangely unique nature of helium, than by phoning in a cheap mindless story about how government programs live forever ha ha ha.
But that's modern journalism. It has decayed to formula so absurdly that I wonder whether someone with an actual original thought or story line could survive. I suppose it is conservatism born of their shrinking bottom line. Reminds me of Hollywood, similar[ly] threatened by cable and the Internet, which can only make Spiderman 8 and Star Trek: The Fourth Reboot because is timidity won't allow for any bolder essay.
This is a island that, at its widest level is, what, 12 miles from shore to shore, and at its smallest level, smallest location, it's 7 miles between one shore and the other. My fear is that the whole island will become so overly populated that it will tip over and, uh, and capsize.I say it was!
[A]t the same time the FBI was concluding that Tamerlan Tsarnaev was not a threat in 2011, it launched an elaborate sting operation in Boston against Rezwan Ferdaus, who eventually pleaded guilty to charges of plotting to attack the U.S. Capitol with a remote-controlled model airplane loaded with grenades. In his case as well as others, it’s not clear that a sometimes far-fetched plot would have gone forward without the encouragement and help of FBI informants.
Black Beauty is the prettiest young horse in the meadows, and spends many happy days under the apple trees with his friends Ginger and Merrylegs. But this easy life comes to an end when Beauty is sold and goes from farm to inn to cabhorse in London, enduring rough treatment from foolish and careless masters. Beauty remains faithful, hardworking, and full of spirit despite his trials, and through him we learn that all horses and humans alike deserve to be treated with kindness.Oddly enough, Black Beauty sounds like the Uncle Tom of horses.
Nearly all of the mass shootings in this country in recent years — not just Newtown, Aurora, Fort Hood, Tucson and Columbine — have been committed by white men and boys. Yet when the National Rifle Association (NRA), led by white men, held a news conference after the Newtown massacre to advise Americans on how to reduce gun violence, its leaders’ opinions were widely discussed.I would have thought white men were the one group that American elite media does feel free to single out... as evidenced by this article. And I didn't know we were calling the Fort Hood killer a "white man." But I'm sure you can find some other problems with this piece.
Unlike other groups, white men are not used to being singled out. So we expect that many of them will protest it is unfair if we talk about them. But our nation must correctly define their contribution to our problem of gun violence if it is to be solved....
[T]here may be an opening to argue for deep reductions in programs long in President Obama’s sights, and long resisted by Congress....The programs Obama has long longed to reduce are listed as: nuclear weapons, the military medical insurance, and next-generation warplanes (like the F-35).
[I]nside the Pentagon, even some senior officers are saying that the reductions, if done smartly, could easily exceed those mandated by sequestration, as the cuts are called, and leave room for the areas where the administration believes more money will be required.
These include building drones, developing offensive and defensive cyberweapons and focusing on Special Operations forces.
With an ear-ringing roar, the matte-gray fighter jet streaked down Runway 12 and sliced into a cloudless afternoon sky over the Florida Panhandle. To those watching on the ground, the sleek, bat-winged fuselage soon shrank into a speck, and then nothing at all, as Marine Capt. Brendan Walsh arced northward in America’s newest warplane, the F-35 Lightning II.It streaked and sliced and — they must be thinking — if only it would shrink into nothing at all.
When the F-35 finishes testing, “there will be no yes-or-no, up-or-down decision point,” said Pierre Sprey, who was a chief architect of the Air Force’s F-16 Fighting Falcon. “That’s totally deliberate. It was all in the name of ensuring it couldn’t be canceled.”When... but we're not there yet.
How does North Dakota do it? “It’s not by having such great sex ed, contraception access, and abortion providers,” Guttmacher senior researcher Laura Lindberg told me, listing off solutions favored in more liberal states. No—North Dakota has one Planned Parenthood in a 700,000 square-mile state. Seventy-five percent of North Dakotans live in counties with no abortion provider. State law mandates abstinence-only education in its schools....The scare is for progressives who want to believe their anti-teen-pregnancy policies work best. So it can't be that all the policies they've opposed — abstinence only education! — actually work. The theory is presented that North Dakota — with all that fracking — has a booming economy and females delay pregnancy when economic prospects are high (and when there's a plentiful supply of men to choose from).
Add it all up—a sparsely-populated state heavy in white men, low in sex education, and bursting with oil—and you don’t find many helpful clues for crafting national policy....It's important for progressives to exclude the good results in North Dakota, which call into question whether the progressive policies are the correct policies. Time to quote a professor:
“North Dakota is just off-the-charts, demographically,” says June Carbone, a law professor at the University of Missouri-Kansas City and co-author of Red Families vs. Blue Families: Legal Polarization and the Creation of Culture. The state may prove that white, middle-class teens will probably do OK in the absence of comprehensive sex ed and well-funded reproductive health centers, as “they’ll learn from their families, their peers, their doctors, and the internet.” But that doesn’t change the fact that “the pernicious impact of abstinence-only education is its combination with poverty,” Carbone says. “The best contraceptive has always been a promising future, and North Dakota is one of the few places in the United States right now that is booming."Off-the-charts, demographically... white, middle-class teens will probably do OK... I can think of a way to translate that into blunter language that would — speaking of scary — sound really awful.
The 76-year-old will be 80 when he is again up for reelection in Arizona in 2016. “I have seen a number of occasions around here where people have stayed too long,” McCain said during a recent interview in his Russell Senate Building office. “I have seen people who were real giants in this institution deteriorate, and unfortunately, we remember them at the end.”Wow. That's heavy-handed! They're saying: The GOP is supposed to be dead, and you're at the grave's edge, old man. Old, old man. You look old. Old men when the say what they mean and they say it with passion seem like they're saying "get off my lawn." Har harr. Old man! You're going to die soon.
Endings matter in politics. If McCain is approaching the exit, this term could determine how he will be remembered. (“In the way people think of him,” former GOP Arizona senator Jon Kyl said, “in the near term, it matters a great deal.”)
Right now, like it or not, the five-term senator is stuck in “get off my lawn” territory, lashing out at his friend-turned-foe Chuck Hagel, President Obama’s nominee for defense secretary; incessantly tugging at what McCain is convinced is a coverup of the September attack on the U.S. mission in Benghazi, Libya; lambasting the president; and railing against indiscriminate defense cuts. If hard-core conservatives feel burned by McCain’s resurgent reform spirit, the media that he once called his “base” have essentially written him off as an angry and sour loser who once went through a maverick phase but has, in the words of “Daily Show” host Jon Stewart, gone on a “seven-year quest to negate every good thing he’d ever done.”
The hackles of a cock are erected when he is angry; hence with the hackles up, said also of a dog on the point of fighting when the hairs at the top of the neck stand up or of a hound when near the fox and on the point of killing him, also transf. of a man when aroused. Hence hackles is sometimes put for hair, whiskers, etc.I pictured the cock's comb, but reading more of the OED entry "hackle," I see:
The long shining feathers on the neck of certain birds, as the domestic cock, peacock, pigeon, etc. Also, the feathers on the saddle of a cock. a cock of a different hackle, an opponent of a different character.
