{"id":1415,"date":"2010-05-22T11:04:45","date_gmt":"2010-05-22T18:04:45","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.backwoodshome.com\/blogs\/ClaireWolfe\/?p=1415"},"modified":"2010-05-22T11:04:45","modified_gmt":"2010-05-22T18:04:45","slug":"saturday-stuff","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/22\/saturday-stuff\/","title":{"rendered":"Saturday stuff"},"content":{"rendered":"<ul>\n<li>I don&#8217;t care what their stated intentions are, or how innocent the people involved. To call <a href=\"http:\/\/www.dailymail.co.uk\/news\/article-1278922\/Plans-mosque-Ground-Zero.html\" target=\"_blank\">this<\/a> tasteless would be like calling the <i>Titanic&#8217;s<\/i> iceberg encounter &#8220;a scratch.&#8221;\n<li>I&#8217;m no particular Rand Paul fan. But the flap over his &#8220;racism&#8221; is nothing but a nonsensical refusal by the media to recognize that public issues are subject to nuance. What kind of world is it in which &#8220;yes&#8221; or &#8220;no&#8221; are the only possible answers to every question? It&#8217;s good to see <a href=\"http:\/\/voices.washingtonpost.com\/right-now\/2010\/05\/defending_rand_paul_part_ii.html\" target=\"_blank\">David Weigel of the <i>Washington Post<\/i><\/a> defend Paul on exactly the right grounds.\n<li>Let me get this straight. Priests who molest children are entitled to years of defense (and even given new pastoral ministries) before the Church will even think about thinking about defrocking them. And church officials never even entertain a ghost of a notion of excommunicating even the worst serial offenders. But <a href=\"http:\/\/www.npr.org\/templates\/story\/story.php?storyId=126985072\" target=\"_blank\">a nun who allows an abortion<\/a> to save a mother&#8217;s life &#8230;?\n<li>You and I already know we&#8217;re chronic lawbreakers. <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cnn.com\/2010\/OPINION\/05\/18\/alexander.who.am.i\/\" target=\"_blank\">Some other folks are just waking up to the fact.<\/a>\n<li>From A.G. comes this creepy speculation about <a href=\"http:\/\/iowntheworld.com\/blog\/?p=23928\" target=\"_blank\">a military coup against Obama<\/a>. What&#8217;s scary is that the writer mentions the Constitution as a partial excuse for booting the Big O &#8212; then goes on to detail a grotesquely unconstitutional military-intelligence-security state far worse than anything the dreadful Obama is likely to come up with. And he (wink-wink-nod-nod) approves! Urk. And what&#8217;s with that line about Obama &#8220;waging war&#8221; on the &#8220;intelligence community&#8221;? And when in all hell did that &#8220;community&#8221; ever perform &#8220;rigorous and independent functions&#8221;? Um &#8230; aren&#8217;t those the folks who lied us into Vietnam and Iraq? The folks who totally missed 9\/11? The folks who haven&#8217;t found Osama bin Laden after a decade of looking? And yet who&#8217;ve recently been given the power to blast anybody into oblivion with their unmanned drones? From A.G. also comes a <a href=\"http:\/\/www.uwec.edu\/sfpj\/Origins.pdf\" target=\"_blank\">brilliant and well-researched, if kinda boring, 1992 analysis<\/a> (pdf) of just what a military coup in the U.S. might look like.\n<li>Oh yes, Obama is horrified, simply horrified <a href=\"http:\/\/www.cagle.com\/working\/100520\/asay.jpg\" target=\"_blank\">that big oil might have a cozy relationship<\/a> with government. (Cartoon. Hat tip to <a href=\"http:\/\/www.wendymcelroy.com\/news.php\" target=\"_blank\">Wendy McElroy<\/a>.)\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.thefreemanonline.org\/featured\/orient-express-to-hell\/\" target=\"_blank\">Bucharest: 1987<\/a>. We can be glad we&#8217;re not quite that bad yet.\n<li><a href=\"http:\/\/www.realclearpolitics.com\/articles\/2010\/05\/21\/political_preschool_105681.html\" target=\"_blank\">Politicians as children<\/a>. Yep, you nailed that one, Ruth Marcus.\n<li>From P.T. &#8212; and from the man who gave us Arizona&#8217;s new we-really-won&#8217;t-racially-profile-those-brown-people law (aka the we-really-won&#8217;t-ever-ask-you-white-folks-for-your-papers-please-only-those-other-folks&#8211;for-now law) &#8212; <a href=\"http:\/\/news.yahoo.com\/s\/ynews\/20100521\/pl_ynews\/ynews_pl2192\" target=\"_blank\">a proposal to eliminate citizenship-by-birth<\/a>. I hate to say it, but I sort of agree. And on the other hand don&#8217;t. Part of me thinks the whole notion of citizenship is absurd &#8212; all that should ever count when it comes to our place of residence is personal choice and merit, neither of which can be conferred by any government. But given that we have the institution of citizenship, accident of birth seems a poor grounds for granting it. I expect I&#8217;ll get in trouble for this one. Ah well.\n<\/ul>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>I don&#8217;t care what their stated intentions are, or how innocent the people involved. To call this tasteless would be like calling the Titanic&#8217;s iceberg encounter &#8220;a scratch.&#8221; I&#8217;m no particular Rand Paul fan. But the flap over his &#8220;racism&#8221; is nothing but a nonsensical refusal by the media to recognize that public issues are subject to nuance. What kind of world is it in which &#8220;yes&#8221; or &#8220;no&#8221; are the only possible answers to every question? It&#8217;s good to see David Weigel of the Washington Post defend Paul on exactly the right grounds. Let me get this straight. Priests&#8230;<\/p>\n<div class=\"more-link-wrapper\"><a class=\"more-link\" href=\"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/2010\/05\/22\/saturday-stuff\/\">Continue reading<span class=\"screen-reader-text\">Saturday stuff<\/span><\/a><\/div>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[19],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-1415","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-miscellaneous","ratio-natural","entry"],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1415"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1415\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1415"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1415"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.clairewolfe.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1415"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}