Gabe loves this guy:
[S]ociety has drawn an unspoken line in the age-sand, and once you cross that line you are invisible to people on the other side. But you are still there. And sometimes you have to cross that line for a couple of minutes and BUST SOME SERIOUS MOVES UP IN EVERYONE’S FACE to let them know that YOU ARE ALIVE and YOU ARE AMAZING. Then it’s back to your side of the line, where hopefully there is a comfortable chair, or a hospital bed to lie in.
Contra Gerson, Byron York doesn't see what all the fuss is about:
No, we are not confronted by actors with heavy German accents demanding our papers. We are instead confronted routinely by people of all stripes asking to see our driver's license. When we board an airplane, we are asked to produce a government-issued photo ID, usually a driver's license. When we make some credit- or debit-card purchases in department stores, we are asked to produce a driver's license. When we enter many office buildings, both private and government, security guards often ask us to produce a driver's license. When we go to doctors' offices and hospitals, we are asked to produce a driver's license. When we check into hotels, we are asked to produce a driver's license. When we purchase some over-the-counter drugs, we are asked to produce a driver's license. If we go to a bar or nightclub, anyone who looks at all young is asked to produce a driver's license. And needless to say, if we have any encounter with police or other authorities, we are asked to produce a driver's license.
A reader writes:
It's already federal law that all legal immigrants must carry papers and produce them upon demand, no? The new law may be ridiculous, but if this is the provision that makes you think Arizona has become a police state, then the entire nation has been a federal police state since at least June 27, 1952, when the federal law was passed.
And, speaking of which, do you have your papers on you, dear sir?
Not always. I try to keep them at home so I don't lose them. But, yes, whenever I go into the mini police-states with shopping malls we now call airports, I clutch my papers close. And I've taken the long legal route. Perhaps this helps me see things more from the immigrants' point of view.
I'm not defending entering this country illegally. But I do think that making an entire sub-population afraid of all cops is unfair to the population and to the cops. It's corrupting of a free society. And I think the "reasonable suspicion" clause is reminiscent of Jim Crow: Arizonans are demanding that their police officers deem every Hispanic guilty until proven innocent. I think this should end any faint chance the GOP ever had of winning back Latino voters. And rightly so.
The Sunni-backed Iraqiya political bloc, which won the most seats in recent parliamentary elections, said Wednesday that it might call for the establishment of a caretaker government to oversee a new election — escalating a political crisis. …Adding to the political tension, Human Rights Watch released a report late Tuesday saying that members of a military unit under Maliki's command systemically tortured and sexually abused hundreds of Sunni Arab prisoners.
Part of me thinks that we've entered into a period similar to 2004-2005, where brewing trouble inside Iraq is either dismissed or ignored. Just as conservatives and the Bush administration pooh-poohed the insurgency right up until the point that it exploded, now (if they're even paying attention) it's to again dismiss the political violence and declare Bush a world-historical figure for the Surge.
Eceabat, Turkey, 8.30 am
This is devastating for both major parties:
I'll leave you with this chilling reading for the Labour Party – a Guardian/ICM poll of marginal seats shows them down on just 18 per cent, a drop of five, while the Liberal Democrats are in first on a whopping 39. The Conservatives have dropped down by one to 35.
It was carried out on Tuesday night, before the whole BigotGate business even kicked off.
If Labour slips below 20 points nationally, they will do worse next week than in their collapse of 1983.
Andrew Rawnsley on the mask slipping:
Brown's problem is that this episode shows him acting not out of character, but entirely in it. It will be rightly taken as evidence of the less attractive dimensions of his personality. Note that it happens because he stresses over the trivial and becomes infuriated by anything or anybody that disturbs his idea of himself as a man in iron control….
We see also a glimpse of Brown's tendency to instantly assign fault for a
setback to someone else.
"You should never have put me with that woman," he complains to his aides. "Whose idea was that?" This too fits a pattern common to many of the temper episodes that I revealed in The End of the Party. When he was accused of plagiarising Al Gore and Bill Clinton, he turned on his advisers. "How could you do this to me?" he raged. When Revenue & Customs lost the notorious data disks, the prime minister instantly saw himself as the victim. He grabbed his startled deputy chief of staff by the lapels and snarled: "They're out to get me!" …
I found a constant theme among interviewees for the book, whether ministers, civil servants or No 10 officials. Those who work closely with the prime minister often feel too intimidated to be honest with him, too fearful of an ugly reaction to confront him with difficult truths.
A reader writes:
I missed South Park 201 when it aired, so I just watched it via your reader's link to a Chinese site. I noticed that there were Chinese subtitles during Kyle's final speech. Perhaps a Chinese-speaking Dish reader can translate for the rest of us so we can know what was said. I did see the words "Theo Van Gogh" in Western characters among the subtitles, so I'm guessing they do actually correspond to the actual speech. Interestingly, this would mean that the Chinese production got the full original script in order to make the subtitles, yet the episode still contained the censoring bleeps.
Hard to beat the glibertarian position on Arizona:
A reader says he’s suprised to see me support the Arizona bill. Well, I really don’t — that is, I don’t know if I’d have voted for it if I were in Arizona. I’m mostly reacting to the fact that — as demonstrated by Linda Greenhouse — the opposition displays that special combination of self-righteous outrage and bone-deep ignorance that really sets me off.
Just because someone to his left opposes something outrageous, Glenn Reynolds supports it. Kinda. But not really. Well, yes. It's pretty easy to push Reynolds around.
Daniel Altman reports on the de facto end of sovereignty.
The Dish 