My bro just sent me a whole new disk of old family color photos that prompted my husband to note, "Holy shit. I married Harry Potter."
But the restoration of old color pictures of the early twentieth century really does help clear the historical air. I don't think we fully appreciate how black-and-white images always somehow distance the recent past from the present – so we see events like the Second World War or the First World War as further away than they really are in the sweep of human history. I thought of this when looking through this album of rare color photos from Michael Ryan Shaughnessy. They are of sleepy German locales from 1906, more than a century ago. I stopped short at this one:
A bucolic, restful idyll – that would one day become something utterly different.
Human Transit reports that the city will soon have "the most aggressive free market parking policy in the nation."
The goal is to ensure that there's always a space available, so that people stop endlessly driving in circles looking for parking. People will be able to check online to find out the current parking cost in the place they intend to visit. Parking garages will have a better chance of undercutting on-street rates, so that those garages can fill. If you've ever driven in San Francisco, you know that it's hard to decide to use a garage because, well, if you just drive around the block once more, you might get lucky. Under SF Park, if you just drive around the block once more, you'll probably find a space, but it will cost more than a garage, especially if you'll be there for a while. So drivers are more likely to fill up the garages.
If the program fails, which I hope it doesn't, it will be as a result of being too timid. There will inevitably be pressure to set a maximum parking price, at which prices will stop rising, which means that space will fill up, which means that everyone will be driving around the block again. Andrew Price at Good asks: Could parking costs reach $10/hour? Conceivably yes, for a few high-demand hours, which are almost certainly also hours when transit is abundant. What's wrong with that?
A sign of how radical and extremist the GOP now is: on the question of the war on terror (and immigration), some of us are beginning to see the relative moderation and sophistication of George W. Bush.
I believe the supportive evidence that you did not initially notice the phallic resemblances lies in the fact that the penises in question have obviously been circumcised.
I've never seen so much facial hair on so many young dudes as I have this summer in Provincetown. Most encouraging. But titi monkeys getting in on the trend?
When there was a debate in South Carolina over whether its statehouse should fly the Confederate battle flag, African-Americans said they were offended by the state’s honoring a flag that stood for the enslavement of their ancestors. Many white southerners responded by saying that they should not be held responsible for the misdeeds of their predecessors, that not all southerners were racist, and that they had a right to honor their heritage, even if some chose to be offended. In this case, as with the case of the NYC mosque, the right-wing of the GOP stood with … white Christians.
And that appears to be the sole remaining principle of today's Dixie Republicanism: the rationalization of white evangelical paranoia.
There is some bizarre notion among the punditocracy that the Obama administration cannot and should not blame Bush and the GOP for the awful recession, looming tax rises and entitlement cuts, endless wars, tainted moral standing, crumbling infrastructure and massive debt that Obama inherited. I think this is foolish. Because it means this president not only has to take responsibility for his own policies, but for the legacy that has made his job close to impossible.
This is a recession caused by a collapse in a too-lightly regulated financial sector and a huge housing bubble sustained by the last administration. We have a debt fueled overwhelmingly by unaffordable tax cuts, two disastrous unfunded wars, and a new Medicare entitlement that was never paid for. None of this was Obama’s doing. None of it. He came into the White House facing the worst legacy since Carter bequeathed the Oval Office to Reagan. And the great difficulty of moving out of this wasteland of unemployment is due, in part, to the extreme fiscal irresponsibility of the Bush-Cheney GOP.
Now, the Tories have only just gotten into office, while Obama has had a year and a half to be accountable. But they are doing what Obama should, in my view, have done from the start: relentlessly remind people of what the GOP did to this country. Obama allowed the hacks on the right to pivot immediately to pinning the entire deficit and debt on Obama – and, amplified by the FNC, they have somehow managed to turn the debate back into the exhausted big-government vs little-guy choice – rather than debating exactly what, if anything, we can do to rescue ourselves from the Bush-Cheney hangover.
Here’s an alternative approach – aggressively blaming even future bleakness on the GOP, matching their refusal to take any responsibility for the worst period of governance in modern times with a no-holds-barred assault on their brand. It will soon be time for Obama to go on the offensive against these nihilists and amnesiacs and to remind people of the difference between the arsonist and the fire-fighter.
The Dish 