The Story So Far

In his column in the Washington Post, Colbert I. King gives a succinct and chilling summary of our Iraq war, ending with this:

Afterward, Bush should close the doors, repair to a quiet place, and read from beginning to end Delaware Sen. Joe Biden’s speech Thursday before the Center for Strategic and International Studies, “Getting It Right in Iraq.”

Biden said: “Let me leave you with one thought. I come from Delaware. I have been to Dover many times. The men and women there who receive our soldiers and their families on that last long journey home know what this is about. When those planes fly over Delaware and land in the middle of the night, we are reminded that this is not about politics, about whether we believe with every fiber of our being that we are fundamentally right or that someone else is dangerously wrong. This is not about assigning blame or about partisanship. This is about that last journey home to Dover Air Base. It’s about those brave Americans who are doing everything in their power to get it right. We owe them no less than to get it right ourselves.”

The president should start handing out walking papers.

Battery Harris

I rode my bike down to Rockaway today, to the beach and Fort Tilden. During World War II the fort was part of New York City’s coastal defenses.
From atop Battery Harris, a defunct gun emplacement, you can look north to see the Manhattan skyline, and south to see the Atlantic Ocean and Sandy Hook, New Jersey. The dunes are full of birds and rabbits. At noon, when the sun heats up the flora, the air is heavy with the scent of scrub pine and juniper.
If you’re not a native, it’s hard to believe that this is part of New York City.

Point to Point

A great site for calculating surface distances and great circle routes.

Brooklyn, New York, to Easter Island (Rapa Nui): 5203.20 statute miles.
Baghdad, Iraq, to New York, New York: 5986.96 statute miles.
Seattle, Washington, to Zanzibar, Tanzania: 9369.19 statute miles.

Ask Not for Whom the FCC Trolls…

Today in Salon, newspaper editor and sex columnist Dan Savage talks about the FCC’s war on Howard Stern, and on sexual content in the media. Savage asks Why isn’t everyone who cares about free speech rallying around the embattled radio personality?:

We should be concerned because what’s being done to Howard Stern is part of a concerted effort by religious and cultural conservatives to stamp out the sexual openness that has come to define mainstream culture over the last 20 years.
…AIDS forced Americans to start having open, honest conversations about sex and desire. It was an adult conversation about sex, and like all adult conversations about sex it involved a lot of humor. Dying is easy, as the AIDS epidemic made clear. Talking about sex is hard — and the sudden need to talk about sex in the wake of AIDS opened the door not just to condom commercials on television and safe-sex pamphlets in our mailboxes, but sexually explicit humor on “Friends,” “Sex and the City,” and Howard Stern’s radio show.

Rapa Nui Daily Press Briefing

Stop Genuflecting and Start Reporting
Editor & Publisher reports that the press isn’t swallowing the White House’s characterization of the August 6, 2001 Presidential Daily Briefing as a historical document:

Many newspapers ran Scott Lindlaw’s Associated Press wrap-up which opened this way: “President Bush was told more than a month before the Sept. 11 attacks that al-Qaida had reached America’s shores, had a support system in place for its operatives and that the FBI had detected suspicious activity that might involve a hijacking plot.”

The Shame of the Cities
Sunday’s New York Times had an excellent Editorial Observer column by Adam Cohen on the corrupting influence of business on government:

What opened the door to public corruption, Steffens concluded, was the blurring of the line between business and government. The average American “deplores our politics and lauds our business,” Steffens wrote, and therefore wants more businessmen involved in government. But this impulse ignores what business is all about: generating profits. It is folly, Steffens argued, to expect businessmen to look after any interest broader than their own.

Why do editors keep throwing “The Boondocks” off the funnies page?
The New Yorker profile of “Boondocks” creator Aaron McGruder describes the cartoonist’s difficult relations with his would-be supporters on the left:

But what McGruder saw when he looked around at his approving audience was this: a lot of old, white faces. What followed was not quite a coronation. McGruder, who rarely prepares notes or speeches for events like this, began by thanking Thurman, “the most ass-kicking woman in America.” Then he lowered the boom. He was a twenty-nine-year-old black man, he said, who got invited to such functions all the time, so you could imagine how bored he was. He proceeded to ramble, at considerable length, and in a tone, as one listener put it, of “militant cynicism,” with a recurring theme: that the folks in the room (“courageous”? Please) were a sorry lot.