Month: July 2009

The Gates 911 Call

Gotcha Media has it. The NY Post has a transcript. You will notice that the caller did not call the alleged burglars black or even mention race until the dispatcher asked her, and even mentioned the possibility that it might have been one of their homes. But then James Crowley decided he had some authoritah to be respected:

911 OPERATOR: 9-1-1, what is the exact location of your emergency?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Hi, I’m actually at (inaudible) street in Cambridge, the house number is 7 Ware Street.

911 OPERATOR: OK ma’am, your cell phone cut out, what’s the address again? FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Sorry, it’s 7 Ware Street. That’s W-A-R-E Street. 911 OPERATOR: The emergency is at 7 Ware Street, right? FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Well no, I’m sorry. 17. Some other woman is talking next to me but it’s 17, 1-7 Ware Street. 911 OPERATOR: What’s the phone number you’re calling me from? FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: I’m calling you from my cell phone number. 911 OPERATOR: All right, tell me exactly what happened?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Um, I don’t know what’s happening. I just had an older woman standing here and she had noticed two gentlemen trying to get in a house at that number, 17 Ware Street. And they kind of had to barge in and they broke the screen door and they finally got in. When I had looked, I went further, closer to the house a little bit after the gentlemen were already in the house. I noticed two suitcases. So, I’m not sure if this is two individuals who actually work there, I mean, who live there.

911 OPERATOR: You think they might have been breaking in?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: I don’t know ’cause I have no idea. I just noticed.

911 OPERATOR: So you’re saying you think the possibility might have been there? What do you mean by barged in? You mean they kicked the door in?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: No, they were pushing the door in. Like, umm, the screen part of the front door was kind of like cut.

911 OPERATOR: How did they open the door itself with the lock?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: They, I didn’t see a key or anything ’cause I was a little bit away from the door. But I did notice that they pushed their (interrupted).

911 OPERATOR: And what do the suitcases have to do with anything?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: I don’t know, I’m just saying that’s what I saw.

911 OPERATOR: Do you know what apartment they broke into?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: No, they’re just they first floor. I don’t even think that it’s an apartment. It’s 17 Ware Street. It’s a house, it’s a yellow house. Number 17. I don’t know if they live there and they just had a hard time with their key but I did notice that they kind of used their shoulder to kind of barge in and they got in. I don’t know if they had a key or not because I couldn’t see from my angle. But, you know, when I looked a little closely that’s what I saw.

911 OPERATOR: (inaudible) guy or Hispanic?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Umm.

911 OPERATOR: Are they still in the house?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: They’re still in the house, I believe, yeah.

911 OPERATOR: Were they white, black or Hispanic?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Umm, well there were two larger men, one looked kind of Hispanic but I’m not really sure. And the other one entered and I didn’t see what he looked like at all. I just saw it from a distance and this older woman was worried thinking someone’s breaking in someone’s house, they’ve been barging in. And she interrupted me and that’s when I had noticed otherwise I probably wouldn’t have noticed it at all, to be honest with you. So, I was just calling ’cause she was a concerned neighbor, I guess.

911 OPERATOR: OK, are you standing outside?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: I’m standing outside, yes.

911 OPERATOR: All right, the police are on the way, you can meet them then they get there. What’s your name?

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Yeah, my name is (deleted).

911 OPERATOR: All right, we’re on the way.

FEMALE WITNESS CALLER: Ok. All right, I guess I’ll wait. Thanks.

Feeling For The Bottom

No, it's not a throwback to the Mineshaft's glory days. The new housing numbers were better than projected. Here's Free Exchange's take:

[W]hile the establishment of a price floor in most markets will help secure economic recovery, housing isn't out of the woods yet. Like much of the rest of the economy it's in the early stages of a very vulnerable positive turn, which might not prove to be sustainable.

Calculated Risk warns that there will be two bottoms. My experience is that bottoms are rarely under-counted.

Who Was President Before Obama?

Frum, peace be upon him, Tcs2 the people and the country than this. We should also have more charity to our political opponents – who after all are contending with hideous problems bequeathed to them by … by … well suddenly we Republicans cannot seem to remember who preceded Barack Obama in office. To listen to us, you’d think that the bailouts and takeovers started on January 20, 2009, not the previous March. You’d never know that TARP was supported by almost every Republican commentator, including the editors of National Review. Or that Vice President Cheney argued urgently in favor of the rescue of the Detroit automakers. Or that Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac enjoyed the backing of Republican as well as Democratic lawmakers.

One bad election converts us from ardent admirers of the American people to glum declinists who can see only a miserable moldering of a once great nation. I should have thought that conservative patriotism was made of stronger stuff.

Conor Friedersdorf is thinking along the same lines. David is roughly where I was about four years ago. But catching up very fast.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"The attention paid to President Obama’s place of birth is not unprecedented. In fact, it may be the only thing President Obama has in common with Pres. Chester Arthur, whose opponents whispered that he had been born in Canada. A number of unsuccessful presidential candidates—George Romney, Barry Goldwater, and Lowell Weicker among them—actually were born outside of the United States (in Mexico, the Arizona Territory, and Paris, respectively) to American parents and thereby into American citizenship. If the conspiracy theorists have evidence that President Obama went through the naturalization process, let them show it.

But there is no such evidence, because this theory is based on unreality, as two minutes’ examining the claims of its proponents reveals. The hallmark of a conspiracy theory is that a lack of evidence for the theory is taken as yet more evidence for the theory. Indeed, the maddening thing about dealing with conspiracy hobbyists of this or any sort is the ever-shifting nature of their argument and their alleged evidence: Never mind the birth certificate, his step-grandmother said he was born in Kenya! (No, she didn’t.)" – National Review.

Don’t Dance On Russia’s Grave Just Yet

This sort of analysis may prove premature should we be unable to stop global warming:

Enthusiasm for global warming in Russia, if that's the right way to put it, goes beyond simple household concerns or national economic interests. For the Russians, who regard the Arctic as essentially their rightful territory, shrinking ice floes will ease access to the bounty of natural resources around the polar ice cap, including large reserves of oil, gas, gold, diamonds, nickel and tungsten.

Bradford Plumer has more. So does Ryan Avent, who thinks warming might not be such a boon to the bear. Canada bears watching too. You know what evil megalomaniacs lurk north of the border.

No Race Specified

James "I didn't vote for Obama" Crowley had heard no reports that the alleged burglars were black when he got into a dick-swinging contest with Skip Gates. The woman who made the 911 call said she couldn't racially identify anyone but one of the men could have been Hispanic. So the first racial leap to suspect a diminutive black man with a cane in his own home was Crowley's, the expert in racial profiling. The balance of this interaction now swings back in Gates' favor, I'd say.