July 24th, 2009
Lou Dobbs, CNN’s resident xenophobe, has been riding the birther hobby horse lately — and his boss apparently DOESN’T LIKE IT.
POSTSCRIPT: My fellow RRStar blogger Chuck Sweeney raises a GOOD POINT about this birther nonsense:
”When Obama was born in 1961, his birth announcement was published in two Honolulu newspapers. I have never read one of these ‘birthers’ deal with the birth announcements.”
UPDATE: Speaking of birthers, G. Gordon Liddy, the notorious ex-con and political loony, got his head handed to him yesterday by Chris Matthews:
UPDATE II: Jon Stewart has a funny take on the birther crap:
“Oh my God! Barack Obama’s running the old Kenyan Prince Birth Announcement scam! Here’s how it goes: you want to destroy America from the inside but you can’t because you’re a foreigner. So first, you gotta find yourself a good ol’ American to reproduce for you. Then, you have that child on foreign soil, while simultaneously placing the birth announcement of that child in one of our “fringe” state’s local newspapers. … And then, you wait until this baby is a middle-aged man. Now the trap is set—you just sit back and let that child go out and win the election for President of the United States.
Now here’s where the scam gets tricky; they can’t just win the popular vote. He or she must have a strategy to win the electoral vote—that’s what trips up most grifters. But, if you pull it off, you and your puppet child can sit back and destroy the fabric of the country you both hate so much. It’s almost too easy.”
July 24th, 2009
As Sarah Palin prepares to vacate the governorship of Alaska, a Washington Post/ABC poll SHOWS that most Americans have an unfavorable opinion of her.
And while 70 percent of self-identified Republican respondents view Palin favorably, ”her support within the GOP has deteriorated from its pre-election levels, including a sharp drop in the number holding ’strongly favorable’ impressions of her.”
The Post also says this of Palin: “While she is still widely popular among those in her party, she has lost ground among Republicans generally and among the white evangelicals who are so critical in the early presidential primaries.”
UPDATE: Reuters REPORTS that Palin faces a “cloudy future.”
July 24th, 2009
My computer hassles of recent days distracted me from such matters as the controversy over the arrest of Harvard scholar Henry Louis Gates.
I find that THIS ACCOUNT of the incident brings me pretty much up to speed.
POSTSCRIPT: An Applesauce reader who identifies himself as “unmanager” also offers some good insights in this comment on an open-thread post from yesterday:
For an understanding of the specif issues on the incident…..
http://www.slate.com/id/2223379/
“…Gates repeatedly requested the arresting officer’s name and badge number. Gates says the officer provided neither, although the officer claims that he did, in fact, state his name. Was the officer required to provide this information?
Yes. Massachusetts law requires police officers to carry identification cards and present them upon request. Officers are also required to wear a “badge, tag, or label” with their name and/or identifying number. The law is aimed at precisely the situation in question—suspects who feel their rights are being violated. Few other states impose this requirement on their officers as a matter of law, but many individual police departments, such as the New York Police Department, have adopted it (PDF) as a matter of policy.
Gates initially refused to emerge from his home and provide identification. Was he required to?
No. There’s nothing to stop an officer from requesting your presence on the front porch or asking you questions, but he cannot force you to identify yourself or come out of your house without probable cause. (The rules are different for drivers and immigrants, who are required to provide identification upon request.) If you don’t feel like chatting, ask the officer whether you are free to go about your business. If he answers no, you are being detained, which means the officer must acknowledge and abide by your full menu of civil rights, including the famous Miranda warnings.
The arresting officer alleges that Gates shouted at him and threatened to speak to his “mama.” He then arrested Gates for disorderly conduct. What, exactly, is disorderly conduct?
Behavior that might cause a riot. Massachusetts courts have limited the definition of disorderly conduct to: fighting or threatening, violent or tumultuous behavior, or creating a hazardous or physically offensive condition for no legitimate purpose other than to cause public annoyance or alarm. (The statute, however, just says “idle and disorderly persons,” a formulation that is, on its own, patently unconstitutional.) Violators may be imprisoned for up to six months, fined a maximum of $200, or both.
The stilted language in the Gates police report is intended to mirror the courts’ awkward phrasing, but the state could never make the charge stick. The law is aimed not at mere irascibility but rather at unruly behavior likely to set off wider unrest. Accordingly, the behavior must take place in public or on private property where people tend to gather. While the police allege that a crowd had formed outside Gates’ property, it is rare to see a disorderly conduct conviction for behavior on the suspect’s own front porch. In addition, political speech is excluded from the statute because of the First Amendment. Alleging racial bias, as Gates was doing, and protesting arrest both represent core political speech.”
And, after reading the arrest report on “The Smoking Gun”, one could easily call the actions of the officer “STUPID.”
UPDATE: The arresting officer apparently is PLEASED with a phone call he received from President Obama and reportedly said he’d like to get together with Gates and the president for a beer at the White House.
July 24th, 2009
The reliably insightful Nate Silver observes that “this is almost certainly the most sustained stretch of bad coverage for Obama since back when Jeremiah Wright became a household name after the Ohio primary.”
But Silver otherwise SCOFFS AT the defeatism and paranoia recently expressed on some liberal blogs and says the delay in congressional action on health-care legislation is “about as likely to do the Democrats some good as some harm.”
July 24th, 2009
After an absence of several days (by far the longest since this blog was launched in January 2008), Applesauce is back in action.
The computer problems that necessitated this break wiped out all my files, but it could have been worse. Still, it’s going to take a while to get all my stuff back in comfortable working order, and therefore it might be a day or two yet before the previous pace of posting is resumed.
The one bright spot in these otherwise tragic travails is that I saw the final half-inning of Mark Buehrle’s perfect game yesterday. Under ordinary circumstances, I probably wouldn’t have found about the matter until after the fact.
In any event, I’m eager to get rolling again.
