"Government Center" - Modern Lovers
What can I say -- I'm in a Boston kind of mood these days. (That's David Robinson, later drummer for the Cars and Jerry Harrison, later of Talking Heads, next to Jonathan Richman in the front row.)
- Like many people I was aghast at Cory Booker attacking Obama for attacking Romneyand Bain Capital. It seemed like one of those moments where being a Democrat feels utterly hopeless. I am heartened to find that Booker's betrayal was not the result of terminal naivete or being a squish, but rather prior and evidently superceding loyalties. What a phony putz.
- I actually thought the thirty day sentence for Darhun Ravi was about right. Being a jerk is not a criminal offense. If it were, our already overcrowded prisons would likely need to be expanded ten fold. Anyone interested in the case should check out this excellent New Yorker article, which leaves more questions than answers.
- I am not sure how people can read about the many wrongful convictions that take place in the United States -- for the most serious of crimes -- and still favor the death penalty. Essentially it indicates that one believes it is acceptable for an innocent person to be put to death from time to time. And this strikes me as monstrous.
- Speaking of monstrous, what is wrong with these people? It's depressing that certain aspects of the American political dialogue are unchanged over forty years.
- Update: I meant to link to this excellent article by Katha Pollitt in The Nation regarding "attachment parenting." Once again, these trends and inflammatory cover stories like that recently featured in Time all seem geared to manipulating women, to spreading guilt and promoting division, all the while remaining grossly unrepresentative of the population writ large. Men remain totally immune to this sort of thing -- basically anything we do in this sphere is seen as above and beyond the call. (From the time that our son was four months old until he was about 12 I did most of the dropping off and picking up from day care and school because we were a one car family and my wife took the subway to work while our son was in Metro inaccessible places. As a result I also did a lot of the mid-day school functions and the like. When you do this sort of thing as a man, you get treated like some kind of hero. I used to laugh about this a lot to my wife, who strangely was less amused about it than I was.) The day that a man who says he is going to "babysit" his kids gets ostracized will be the day when you know that progress has been made on this score.
Trying to get a couple of posts done on Tim Noah's The Great Divergence and a recent Wall Street Journal travesty attacking union-sponsored pension plans. In the meantime, I turn it over to you.
