I have angered Mayor Rock God

All I was trying to do was point out the irony in him complaining about the state regulating away his ability to regulate my behavior.

Can we elect Krugman to something?

In today's NYT:

But here’s the thing: If Wall Streeters are spoiled brats, they are spoiled brats with immense power and wealth at their disposal. And what they’re trying to do with that power and wealth right now is buy themselves not just policies that serve their interests, but immunity from criticism.

Actually, before I get to that, let me take a moment to debunk a fairy tale that we’ve been hearing a lot from Wall Street and its reliable defenders — a tale in which the incredible damage runaway finance inflicted on the U.S. economy gets flushed down the memory hole, and financiers instead become the heroes who saved America.

Once upon a time, this fairy tale tells us, America was a land of lazy managers and slacker workers. Productivity languished, and American industry was fading away in the face of foreign competition.

Then square-jawed, tough-minded buyout kings like Mitt Romney and the fictional Gordon Gekko came to the rescue, imposing financial and work discipline. Sure, some people didn’t like it, and, sure, they made a lot of money for themselves along the way. But the result was a great economic revival, whose benefits trickled down to everyone.

You can see why Wall Street likes this story. But none of it — except the bit about the Gekkos and the Romneys making lots of money — is true.

Krugman for Secretary of the Treasury, 2012!

My thoughts on the police investigation report

A few weeks ago, the City released the report on the investigation into last summer's pepper-spraying and accused roughing-up of a guy* on Green Street. This incident was unusual primarily in (a) that it was a video- and audio-taped by a squad car camera and microphone and (b) that the tape was anonymously leaked and posted online. Probably without this leak, no one would have given a damn about this. Here's a WILL article written after the leak, if you want the background.


Now, I've never had any law enforcement training or even contact with the police, good or bad, but I'm a blogger and am therefore an Expert on Everything™. One of the three findings from this report is that an unjustified amount of force was used to remove the guy from the squad car (i.e., grabbing the guy by the neck and pushing him out of the car onto the ground). But the concerns that I have are related to what happened earlier that evening. So here's my take on this. Numbers are timestamps from the video.

This stop was pretty clearly a pretext for hassling this guy. The report says that this guy had been loud and obnoxious earlier in the evening. Two officers are seen following him along Green Street, followed slowly by this squad car (02:24:45-02:25:33). It is only after the two officers turn away that the squad car quickly accelerates to catch up with this guy and this incident occurs.

In fact, the report pretty much comes out and admits this:

...officers and shift supervisors had been directed to focus their efforts on identify suspects and/or possible suspects in the aggravated batteries. Those efforts often involved the use of Terry Stops of problem individuals and the enforcement of ... "minor" offense such as loitering and pedestrian violations. [emphasis mine]

The problem I see with that is that a Terry Stop requires "reasonable suspicion" that the person being stopped has committed or is about to commit a crime.** This report mentions nothing about this guy being suspected of any crime other than the fact that, earlier in the evening, he had been yelling loudly. He was a "problem individual." The male and female companion of this guy, also jaywalking, were ignored.

I mean, arresting a guy for jaywalking? In Campustown? Really, if they start arresting people for jaywalking on campus, it will be empty. Half the population will be in jail and the other half will be bailing them out.

One of the things that really convinces me that it was predetermined that this was not going to go well -- and maybe this isn't fair -- is that you can hear the primary officer start to hum a little tune to himself as soon as he starts to pull his car forward to arrest this guy (02:26:43). It's not like the officer was humming to himself as he drove down the road. It starts as soon as the guy is in the street.

The thing that bothers me most about this incident is the pepper spraying. After seeing this guy jaywalk, the officer pulls his squad car into the middle of Fourth Street, jumps out of his car, crowd-sized can of pepper spray in hand.

After the guy and the officer stop walking (02:27:09), less than two seconds go by before the guy is pepper sprayed in the face (02:27:10).

I'm not suggesting this guy is anything other than an obnoxious drunk jerk. The report specifically draws attention to the fact that this guy moved his arm "to approximately shoulder level." But it's very obvious that he's just gesturing with both his hands in the same way he's been doing ever since the officer grabbed his arm and started marching him back to the squad car, protesting the whole way.

When talking about the unjustified removal of this guy from the squad car later that night, the report says officers are expected to "... use verbal persuasion, dialogue, and courtesy to gain voluntary compliance whenever possible".  So it seems to me that the immediate jump to a pain compliance technique is unwarranted (again, Expert in Everything™, see above). If this had been a different kind of force, but of roughly the same intensity, say a punch in the gut, would it still have been considered reasonable?

Anyway, it's late and I want to wrap this up. This guy was clearly a jerk. He was obnoxious to start with and increasingly obstreperous as the night went on (though who wouldn't be pissed off after having been pepper sprayed in the face, reasonably or not?). I couldn't care less that the secondary officer told him to "shut the fuck up". Hell, just while watching this video, I wanted the guy to shut the fuck up. But it doesn't seem to be that being an obnoxious jerk is enough to get a face full of pepper spray.

[*] For lack of a better term, I'm just going to call the guy that was pepper sprayed and arrested "the guy."

[**] IANAL, but I can read Wikipedia.

SQL Developer needs better font support

Warning: nerdom ahead...

SQL Developer is a pretty damn good tool for Oracle development. It has one problem that I find rather jarring, though: its text display in the editor is terrible. I've finally figured out what it is. Text isn't anti-aliased in the editor. That's a pretty significant oversight for any software written since, oh, Windows 95 or thereabouts.
Here's an example of what I mean:

That's the same two queries in SQL Developer and Notepad++ (great little text editor; if you're not using it, you should be). They look very different even though they're using the same font. Without antialiasing, SQLDev is displaying the "m" in the "from" in the second query as a freakin' square! And look at the difference in the asterisk. So moving from one program where text is nicely rendered to SQL Dev where it's, well, not, is jarring and annoying.

To be fair, I suspect this is not a limitation of SQL Developer itself, but of the Java component being used to render the text. But really, Oracle owns both. If they want SQL Dev to be the IDE for an enterprise-grade database, really, it shouldn't make my eyes hurt.

And a shout-out to @thatjeffsmith for his interesting talk on SQL Developer this week.

(In Windows XP or so, Microsoft introduced support for ClearType fonts, which is a really cool technology that provides sub-pixel antialiasing at the cost of some chromatic distortion. Since then, Consolas has been my go-to font for when I need a fixed-width font. I originally thought this was that SQL Dev didn't have support for ClearType fonts, but it's more basic than that, even.)

Update:

Kris Rice shows how to enable AA fonts. Awesome, thanks! (I didn't even realize there was a .conf file.)

A self-defeating tax?

A couple of weeks back, the Champaign City Council supported a resolution to force retailers to charge for disposable plastic bags, about $0.05 per bag. Personally, I think this is a really bad idea in support of a laudable goal.

Sure, it's good to reduce waste and litter in our community. But the only way a tax like this would work is if the fee is large enough to actually cause people to change their behavior. I don't know about you, but five or six bags adding up to an extra $0.25 on my grocery bill isn't going to make me go out of my way. (I do normally use reusable bags, but occasionally forget to bring them.) Anything under a buck, maybe $0.50 isn't going to register on my radar.

But then I noticed this quote from the mayor:

I don't know where we get extra money for education, unless we charge five cents for plastic bags, I guess.

So if the point of this tax is not to change people's behavior, but to raise money, maybe the whole point of placing the per-bag fee so low is so that it doesn't cause people to change their behavior, raising the amount of revenue.

Or am I just being paranoid?

The News-Gazette discovers women are a bunch of dirty sluts

I was thinking about coming off my long blog hiatus by bitching about the News-Gazette's recent editorial approving of the new Presidential power to assassinate American citizens he has declared to be terrorists, when they came up with an even more annoying one. In this case, it's one about how unmarried, teen girls are having all these babies and that's why you can't have nice things.

I'm certainly not going to disagree with the notion that becoming a teenage mother can have severely negative consequences for a woman. Not to mention the difficulty it places on a young woman trying to finish high school, let alone college, childbirth is a significant financial cost when it comes to health care.

After a long series of statistics about the high cost of maternity, the News-Gazette's main complaint in their editorial is that Obama has made it difficult to kick these girls off of Medicaid.

What can the state do about reducing its cost for Medicaid births? Thanks to President Barack Obama's national health care plan, the answer is nothing.

Obamacare rules forbid any reductions in eligibility requirements that might cut the Medicaid rolls. Indeed, over the new few years, many thousands more Illinois residents are expected to be added to the Medicaid rolls under Obamacare.

So, really, this editorial has nothing to with teen mothers at all. After discussing the impact teen pregnancy has to a young woman's future, the core message to their editorial is that society shouldn't be paying for the cost of their health care. After all, what an unemployed, 16-year old mother needs to go with her newborn is a $10,000 medical bill.

The editorial characterizes the problems with Medicaid funding as the "high cost of social collapse", that it's "social disintegration", and that these young women have a "dangerous social pathology." I'm honestly surprised this editorial doesn't call these girls "welfare queens."

Of course, there's one way to make sure that teenagers don't become mothers and fathers, and that's comprehensive sex education. Information about and access to birth control does, shockingly, prevent unwanted pregnancy. (Now, I swear there was another recent editorial where the N-G approved of employers being allowed the "religious freedom" to restrict their employees access to birth control, but I can't seem to find it now.) In fact, any discussion of how to prevent what the N-G claims is a scourge upon our society is conspicuous in in its absence.

It is a standard trope of the right-wing that America is deteriorating and if only we went back to 1950s social policy/enforced mandatory prayer in schools/put gays back in the closet/slut-shamed women more, everything would get better. So this teenage-pregnancy-cum-Medicaid-collapse scandal is, of course, part of that:

It's a seemingly intractable problem that reflects a slow and steady cultural decline.

Except that's not true! According to the National Campaign to Prevent Teen and Unplanned Pregnancy, the teenage pregnancy rate in Illinois dropped 40% between 1988 and 2005. (That's the most recent data I could find.) According to this article in The Economist, not only are a lot of other factors about American life better than they have been in the past, but the teenage pregnancy rate is the lowest it's been in 40 years.

Upstaged

Did you know there was an event this Memorial Day to remember veterans, POWs, and MIAs?

If not, did you know that Sarah Palin made a big ruckus when she showed up at a biker event?

I knew about one of these things, but not the other. And that is what's wrong with our media.

Interesting blog synergy

Oh yeah, I have a blog.

In just the past few days, there's been an interesting overlap in several of the blogs I read. It all started when Believe Out Loud, a Christian group that encourages churches to become "fully inclusive of all people, regardless of sexual orientation or gender identity" tried to place an innocuous ad on the Sojourners website (a large network of progressive Christians) and was refused. Here's the ad:

This prompted two posts over at slactivist, "My hope is built on nothing less" and "Jim Wallis and Believe Out Loud, Part 2" and over at Obsidian Wings, "Authoritarianism and the Slut Who Walks", which sort of a follow up to "The Women Men Don't See", which was a really interesting response to the Jewish newspaper that edited out Hillary Clinton and another female White House staffer out of a photo because of their (Stalinesque?) "respect" for women. The slactivist posts are more about the intersection of homosexuality and Christian identity, while the OW posts are more about authoritarianism and strict gender roles. Good posts all.

I was just struct at the quality of the points raised by Fred at slactivist as well as the civility (and coherence) of the commenters. I think Fred's main points can be summed up as:

For now let me just reiterate what I’ve said above about evangelical identity in America’s evangelical subculture. It is marked, above all else, by the proper “stance” on homosexuality and abortion. Those who meet that test are regarded as insiders with a voice that will be listened to. Those who fail that test are regarded as outsiders..

The point here is that there are many, many people besides Jim Wallis who inhabit the terrain that Tony Jones describes as "conservative on issues of human sexuality" while "theologically thoughtful and progressive on other biblical and social issues." I think that Tony is right that such a position is, in the long run, untenable.

I find his first point more interesting. Abortion and anti-gay-rights are, as raised by both slactivist and OW, shibboleths for right-wing Christians. In other words, those two beliefs are almost mandatory and universal markers for inclusion in that community, which also largely defines the modern GOP.

I've often said that (and bored both readers of this blog by saying so often), current politics is driven by identity as much as it is policy. More so for the Right; there are virtually no pro-gay, or pro-choice Republicans, but plenty anti-gay-marriage Democrats. For example, Barack Obama.

I don't really have a point, but many of the commenters at slacitivst do. Many of them are excellent and it's sad that they're going not going to get attention because they're comments in some guy's blog. So I'd like to highlight a few here:

Jessica_R:

[T]his is why evangelicals are losing numbers in droves. They've made it a zero sum game where you can either be a Christian or you can love your neighbor as yourself.

Semperfiona, on whether Jim Wallis's decision not to run the ad was a choice between "the lesser of two evils:"

It's hard to be charitable toward a choice that paints "respecting my civil rights" as the greater evil... it sounds an awful lot like "I'm not a bigot but my customers are, so your kind are not welcome here" which is just a mealy-mouthed species of bigotry and reinforces the opinions of other bigots, comforting the comfortable.

Amaryllis, on gender roles:

What bothers [fundamentalists] the most about gay couples is not what they may be doing in bed; it's much more about "who wears the pants" when both wear pants. Or skirts and heels.

Because, in their view, the entire basis of social relationships, from the most private to the nation as a whole, is based on Authority. And trying to ignore the "natural" or "God-given" hierarchy is just asking for trouble, for individuals and for society as whole.

And not to bury the lede, but these are the best of the bunch:

Morgan Guyton: (emphasis mine)

[T]he reason why "conservative" views of sexuality don't have long-term viability for a Christian who's serious about the Biblical perspective on poverty is because the primary function of sexual "conservativism" is to excuse middle-class Christians from being concerned about poverty since we can label it a moral failing of welfare mamas who need to learn how to close their legs.

bad Jim, on why a conservative (wide) stance on sexuality is such a shibboleth for evangelicals:

[A] focus on sexuality doesn't threaten things that really matter, like wealth and power. Preaching that looks benignly upon getting and spending is more likely to prosper, and the ideal of self-control lends itself nicely to material pursuits. If a display of virtue and self-denial is required, what better than to condemn sins to which one is not attracted or of which one is incapable, which for most men would include homosexuality and abortion.

How often...

Out of curiosity, I was looking up how often Americans eat out, on average. Before I got that far, I found this:

Yeah, as a society, we're pretty much fucked.

Mayoral race speculation

This may be a bit incoherent, but it's late and I want to get this down.

First, there may be some shennanigans going on in the Champaign mayoral race. I forget who originally pointed this out, possibly on Twitter, but Smile Politely has an article up, "Local officials mum on alleged Schweighart campaign violation" about Schweighart campaign work possibly being done on City time and by City employees. Naughty.

I've never worked for the City, but at the later years when I was at the University, we had to go through rather silly, yet mandatory, annual ethics training that made it pretty darn clear that things like this were not appropriate. Is that true of state and city employees as well? Anyway you'd think anyone involved with a political office would be doubly sensitive to it. And then someone involved with a political office and a political campaign would be triply sensitive to it. But, then again, perhaps it's the abuse of the vast purchasing powers and powerful influence grad students and postdocs hold that is the real ethical threat.

Secondly, I've heard speculation that, if elected, Mayor Schweighart may not serve out his entire four-year term, but instead, retire and some other Republican would be appointed to finish his term. On one hand, I don't think it's fair to judge the mayor's suitability for election solely on his age. On the other hand, he is, shall we say, of a certain age and (I hear) has had some fairly serious health problems in the past. And any appointee going into an election as an incumbent would have a pretty significant advantage.

The mayoral debate is Wednesday. I mused about the idea of livetweeting the debate, then someone heard about that, and now I've learned that People Have Been Told I will be doing that, so now there's all this pressure. People, don't get your hopes up. Also, don't assume I have any idea what I'm doing.

Also, the first mayoral debate in how many decades is two days away, and still, no clue about the format, who's going to be asking questions, whether the questions will be coming from the audience, or what. But, hey, at least it's being put together by a legitimate organization, right?

Craaaazy!

Some time ago and I'm not sure how, I got put on an email list of local left-leaning bloggers and the like. It's low traffic. For example, there were a dozen messages or so about Rahm winning in Chicago, another few about anti-Wisconsin protests in Springfield the other week.

Then there's this one guy. He sends out about one email a week. It's not specific to this list, but includes around a hundred email addresses including those @foxnews.com, @sfchronicle.com. He's got a real hardon for the Dallas County News, because about half of the addresses are people there.

And these emails ... they're just nuts. Not Sarah-Palin-nuts, but a-few-Crayons-short-of-a-full-box nuts. So, of course I find them fascinating. Not working in the medical field, I don't have a lot of contact with schizophrenics, so this is very novel to me.

Here's one from December, with the formatting replicated as accurately as I can:

Loving Alphas, heaven on earth - the perfection of capitalism [the fusion of entertainment and enlightenment and innovative acts of love demonstrated are the new currencies of LIFE ] 1. Transparency a. Test b. Part 1 (Budget, etc.) c. Part 2 (Social Security, etc.) 2. three million dollarnaires club 2020 OBJECTIVES 1. Oprah Winfrey - $1 trillion personal net worth 2. Mr. Rupert Murdoch - $1 trillion personal net worth 3. 333 million three million dollarnaires 3. Lawsuit resolution 1. United States government facilitates resolution of personal injury lawsuit - President has power to pardon (healing) 2. $30 million settlement 3. pursuit of heaven on earth 4. Project Alpha - ???? [How much more powerful... Even more threatening... Let MANKIND substantiate...] - Are you smart enough and strong enough to be an Intellectual Marine? - What are WE doing to PRAXIS heaven on earth? 5. Hillary Clinton/Susan Rice 2012 vs. Condaleeza Rice/Liz Cheney 2012 - 44 male Presidents of the United States of America - 0 female Presidents of the United States of America - 0 female Vice Presidents of the United States of America 6. 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative - 40% of global business owners, politicians, CEOs, directors, and producers are female Sarah Palin Global SELF-ESTEEM champion Keli Goff Strategic link to Africa Megyn Kelly Strategic link to Europe Soledad O'Brien Strategic link to Latin America Michelle Malkin Strategic link to Asia Fran Townsend Synergy maximization Michelle Obama Synergy maximization 7. Bill Gates/Warren Buffett giving challenge - $100 billion immediate strategic development fund [suggestion] - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 8. United States economic development recommendation - global interconnected impact - suggestion of additional analysis and recommendation of euro-inspired financial model for developing countries in Africa, Europe, Latin America, and Asia - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 9. Inheritance/healing initiative - Slavemaster offspring Family reunions - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative 10. Cry - original collection of poetry - 2nd short story written by Tony Evans will be a ONE word eBook [ LOVE ] PhoenixRising - Global list of "slumlords" - Global list of [Intellectual contradictionS] - Link to 2020 EMPOWERMENT initiative Future LOVE "state" - merger of TV/Internet/TIVO/Visual Phone in ONE "application" Sincerely, [ name redacted, --Narc ] Ebony & Ivory PRAXIS - Up Where We Belong

The Internet: Enabling schizophrenics since giant lizard aliens gave it to us in 1996.

Some unofficial thoughts on Unofficial

I'm back. Blog apathy strikes again. I'm sorry, it's nothing personal.

Unofficial was this past Friday. I don't really have much to say about that subject. Most of my experience with Unofficial involved riding a bus home after work that smelled like stale beer.

Gerry Schweighart, the mayor of Champaign, and therefore the city government, appear to very much disapprove of Unofficial. They ramp up alcohol enforcement before and during the event. The News-Gazette's front article today calls the ticketed students "scofflaws", Unofficial a "bacchanal" that is "the most dreaded annual event on the UI campus."

This year, however, a 21-year-old UIUC student was struck by two cars while crossing the street Friday night and remains in critical condition. I don't know if this was Unofficial-related or not, but for the sake of pontificating, I will assume so.

This is the second significant injury that's happened during Unofficial in my time here. In 2006, a student was killed after falling off the back of a motorcycle.

I think it's time this stopped. I don't mean Unofficial; I'm not sure how you could stop that without giving the mayor dictatorial control over the city. I mean, I think it's time the city embraced Unofficial and made it safer. There are plenty of other communities that host crazy events; maybe we should look into how they do it. There's South Padre Island during Spring Break, for one. I assure you that Unofficial is the pale shadow of Mardi Gras's little brother's second banana.

For starters, I think that Campustown and possibly the roads around the main quad should be closed to street traffic.

It's important to remember that Unofficial isn't a creation of University students. It's a creation of a Campustown bar owner. It's the goal of Unofficial to get students into the bars to drink. That being said, allowing 18 to 20-year olds into bars on this weekend is just stupid. Of course they're there to drink.

I'm less concerned with creating a moral hazard involving alcohol and more interested in creating an environment where students can be their stupid selves and not be killed doing it.

UPDATE: Someone over at today's N-G article suggested making it a parents weekend. I think that's a great idea. I think the presence of a lot of students' parents would tone down the no-holds-barred partying. (Not to mention the possible expectation that they'd have to be awake before noon the next day.)

7,884,326

Posted without further comment...

My trip in billboards

I went down south to visit the family over Christmas. Here's the summary of my trip as told by billboards I saw on the way:

Number of billboards...

• calling President Obama a socialist: 1
• asking if President Bush was missed (no, seriously): 1
• against abortion: 2
• advertising a feral hog hotline: 1

Stay classy, Tea Party. Oh, too late.

I really wanted to avoid commenting on today's shooting of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords for a day or so. It's too easy to quickly politicize these things, which are often perpetrated by lone nutjobs. Then, I saw that Illinois Review saw fit in their only post on the subject so far to quote this:

Tea Party Nation founder Judson Phillips condemned the attack on Giffords, but warned supporters that the Tea Party movement would be blamed by political opponents.

"While we need to take a moment to extend our sympathies to the families of those who died, we cannot allow the hard left to do what it tried to do in 1995 after the Oklahoma City bombing," he said.

Yeah, because clearly, the "hard left" really enjoys it when someone tries to assassinate one of their own.

Republicans have a culturetiger by the tail

Ames makes an interesting point over at Submitted to a Candid World, about how Republican Rep. Steve King has proposed a "truce" on "culture war issues" in favor of productive governing and is gathering flak for it from his peers.

I simply don't think it's going to happen. The culture war is like an addictive drug, you may know it would be good for you in the long term to give it up, but not only does it just feel so damn good, it's so damn easy. You don't have to come up with ideas on how to fix the economy, just drop buzzwords like "anchor baby," "welfare queen,", and "the lazy unemployed," and, *bam*, you've got a campaign. You don't have to worry about complicated economic proposals -- those are for the intellectual "elites" -- just what sounds good as a soundbite on FOX News.

The GOP and their unholy spawn, the Tea Party, has successfully merged culture, religion and nationalism into one monolithic force. Sarah Palin's latest book is subtitled "Reflections on Family, Faith and Flag." (I shall leave the absence of the socialist, European Oxford comma without further remark.) Along with American exceptionalism, another touchstone of the Right, you've got a political philosophy that makes America synonomous with goodness and Truth.

You can't just get up one day to decide to abandon that. With the inclusion of religion in the mix, what Rep. King is asking Republicans to do is make a literal, not metaphorical, deal with the Devil. (There can be no truce with the Shadow.)

The Republicans have grabbed the tail a tiger made up of those three forces: culture, religion, and nationalism. Once you grab that tiger, you can't let go, or it will eat you. The really scary part is that, when that frenzy gets control of a nation, especially one already under economic stress, the results are usually catastrophic.

OMG so cute!

I have no idea where I found this image, but squeeeeee!

Soylent Baby?

Really, all I have to say is, "WTF, Amazon?"

The right wing wants a religious war

My mother apparently gets a lot of emails sent to her from Texas redneck relatives/coworkers/acquaintances. Occasionally, she forwards them on to me, in what I assume is so far a futile attempt to make my head explode. (Kidding, Mom.) The latest one is an email purportedly by Jeff Foxworthy listing his opinions of Muslims. It's quite offensive, and quite racist. Highlights:

• You have more wives than teeth.
  You may be a Muslim [Or a Mormon.]
• You wipe your butt with your bare hand, but consider bacon unclean.
  You may be a Muslim
• You think vests come in two styles: bullet-proof and suicide.
  You may be a Muslim

... etc.

Not long after I got this, Snopes labeled it false. But here's what I find interesting:

This collection of one-liners is an updating of a earlier version of a list which is several years old (dating back at least as far as October 2007), was originally about the Taliban specifically (rather than Muslims in general), and was not in its original incarnation attributed to Jeff Foxworthy (or anyone else)..."

I've found the list in all sorts of places. It's on a community site for US Marines, a gun enthusiast forum, another gun enthusiast forum, and some weird discussion forum for some weird Christian combat-training company.

What I find so interesting is that the list was originally about the Taliban, but some clever conservative reworked it to apply to all Muslims and it started circulating. Google returns about ten times as many hits for the "You may be a Muslim" version than the "You may be a Taliban version". Making fun of the Taliban is certainly understandable; they basically are our enemy in at least one of the wars we're currently fighting. But the right wing has expanded the definition to include anyone any racial or religious characteristic with them.

Conservatives pundits and politicians in this country are now openly calling for racial profiling. Rep. Pete Hoekstra of the House Select Committee on Intelligence says that profiling "make sense." Sean Hannity and disgraced former-NPR bigot Juan Williams have also both called for racial profiling. In their minds, Muslim, Middle Eastern, and terrorist are all synonymous.

I'm told that one of the things to George W. Bush's credit is that he made it clear that the wars he started were not wars against religion, but against extremists. "The face of terror is not the true faith of Islam."

No longer are conservatives happy with that statement. It seems that once, we were at war against people that attacked us. But anger and bigotry need an enemy, and now that those wars are winding down (or at least no longer visible in the 24-hour news cycle), they are turning against anyone that shares even superficial characteristics with Middle Eastern terrorists.

The sort of thing that can ruin your whole day

This summer there was a lot of road construction. The apparently happened about a block from my workplace.

Ouch.