YCT says the work, ”Tornado of Ideas” by Tom Otterness, commits sacrilege against the Masked Rider, a revered Texas Tech idol, depicting Him using a javelin to commit gross indecencies on a police officer. The work is also said to show two lesbians actually sitting together.
Arizona has a new law. Now police can stop you just because you look like your family lived there before Arizona was the USA. People everywhere are upset:
Mike DeBonis, Washington City Paper’s “Loose Lips,” is moving to the Washington Post. His WCP farewell is here. Jason Cherkis is temporarily pinch-hitting at the LL position. Is Mr. Cherkis sufficiently compulsive to aggregate the Loose Lips Daily morning link-fest? Dunno. He only tweets a dozen times a day ….
Former temp-Washingtonian Alex Pareene is moving fromGawker toSalon. Pareene (like Zorro, he goes by one name) spent 18 months as editor of Wonkette. Will he turn the snark down at Salon? Can he? Should he?
Comments are welcome if they are on-topic, substantive, concise, and not boring or obscene. Comments may be edited for clarity and length.
Arizona’s new “Support Law Enforcement & Safe Neighborhoods for Paranoid White People” law was originally based on a simple-minded concept of “trespassing.” Now it preempts federal law under a dubious claim of “concurrent enforcement.” In practice it means local police can stop people who speak with accents or have tan complexions without cause and demand documents proving their legal right to tread on Arizona soil. You can buy a gun in the state without a permit, but carry your passport in Arizona if your skin is tawny.
Actually, in the name of fairness, everyone in The Grand Canyon State may be asked to show their papers. Arizona could pitch this as a tourist attraction:
”So Near and Yet So Totalitarian.”
Now that Governor Jan Brewer has signed this racist absurdity into law, four things are sure to happen:
Laura Martinez informs us that Mexico’s Cámara de Diputados officially approved AEXA, the Mexican Space Agency (Agencia Espacial Mexicana) last week. Supporters included two space contractors and former NASA astronaut José Moreno Hernández. Chewy Pulido provides an artist’s concept of the first Mexican spaceship.
– “‘PowerPoint makes us stupid,’ Gen. James N. Mattis of the Marine Corps, the Joint Forces commander, said this month at a military conference in North Carolina. (He spoke without PowerPoint.) Brig. Gen. H. R. McMaster, who banned PowerPoint presentations when he led the successful effort to secure the northern Iraqi city of Tal Afar in 2005, followed up at the same conference by likening PowerPoint to an internal threat.
‘It’s dangerous because it can create the illusion of understanding and the illusion of control,’ General McMaster said in a telephone interview afterward. ‘Some problems in the world are not bullet[point]-izable.’”
“We Have Met the Enemy and He Is PowerPoint,” Elisabeth Bumiller, New York Times.
Congress recently denied a single House vote to the 600,000 American citizens of the Nation’s Capital, inserting a Poison Pill amendment into the bill, a measure repealing local safety laws regulating firearms in this densely populated city. Senators John McCain (R-AZ) and Jon Tester (D-MT) would now shove that pill down DC’s gullet without the House vote sweetener.
Unsurprisingly, both senators are up for re-election. Mr. McCain needs to butch up his conservative cred and thinks guns will help. Guns are certainly helping his opponent , J.D. Hayworth; conservative gun apostles endorse him. Senator Tester, a former music teacher, seems like a nice guy forced by politics to pretend he thinks Washington (population 600,000) is Big Sandy, Montana (population 614).
“Over the last decade, the wealthiest Americans got richer by trading in the unregulated financial casinos on Wall Street.” — Senator Tom Harkin (D-IA).
“Once Congress deregulated the swaps market in 1999 it became a $600 trillion high-stakes casino for Wall Street to take big risks and bring our economy to the brink.”– Senator Maria Cantwell (D-WA).
” … without action, we’ll continue to see what amounts to highly-leveraged, loosely-monitored gambling in our financial system, putting taxpayers and the economy in jeopardy.” – President Barack Obama.
“Wall Street’s a casino, so maybe state gambling laws apply,” Les Blumenthal, McClatchy Newspapers. (See an opposing view here).
