Links and Thoughts
h, that pesky Bill of Rights! — Two provisions of the USA Patriot Act are unconstitutional because they allow search warrants to be issued without a showing of probable cause, a federal judge ruled Wednesday.
I expect we’re going to see a lot more of this in the next couple of years. Since we can’t get our asinine, useless representatives to do any part of the job we sent them to Washington to do — IE, get the bad legislation rolled back — a lot of people are going to start turning to the court system to get things changed.
Remember what it was like to have a Democrat with a set of balls in the White House? Good times, good times. — “Oh yeah. That’s right. “I don’t have to deal with Iraq. I don’t have to tell anybody what I’m going to do. Everything we do in Iraq is obviously right because they said this about Petraeus,” as if it was the only issue in the whole wide world. Come on, these Republicans were all upset about Petraeus-this was one newspaper ad-these are the people that ran a television ad in Georgia with Max Cleland, who lost half his body in Vietnam, in the same ad with Osama bin Laden and Saddam Hussein.”
I don’t care if the dude got his wiener waxed in the Oval Office or not, I still miss him.
I caught this about Bill O’Reilly on CNN the other night. Media Matters has the transcript and audio of O’Reilly’s broadcast — you know the one I mean:
I couldn’t get over the fact that there was no difference between Sylvia’s restaurant and any other restaurant in New York City. I mean, it was exactly the same, even though it’s run by blacks, primarily black patronship.
Yeah, that one.
Here’s where you expect me to blast O’Reilly, isn’t it? I have bad news . . . what he said may have been ignorant, it may have been poorly said, but I don’t think it’s particularly racist. The context of the conversation, as I’m reading and listening to it over at Media Matters, was basically that real black life is not like rap videos; that a lot of white people, white kids in particular, may think that a black person’s life is like rap videos, and that rap videos lead black kids to want to live that “gangsta” life. Where O’Reilly gets himself into trouble is in saying that he was surprised that his experiences with black people were not like rap videos. (For the record, none of my experiences with black folks have been like rap videos, either. 
) This is the “ignorant and/or poorly stated” part.
Maybe O’Reilly’s audience is made up of the kind of white folks who think black people are all living the “gangsta life”. Maybe this was an educational experience for them. Heh. Honestly though, this series of comments from O’Reilly is a tempest in a tea kettle. Seriously, he gives people enough to work with, as far as bashing him goes, that we don’t really need to seize on every single statement out of his mouth.
Here’s something that’s a lot more interesting and relevant than anything O’Reilly has to say. Hold on to your socks, folks, this will shock you: Remember how the Democrats scrambled to vote in the new FISA changes? As it turns out, the Bush Administration may have lied and used false intelligence to scare them into doing that. No! Say it isn’t so! Bush? Lying? Can’t be! 
Yeah. Fucking A. And still, no one is in jail for this. I’m at a loss.
A recent study about acupuncture came out, and all the headlines were blaring that “Acupuncture Works!! OMFG!!” Skeptico has something to say about that, and I do to. I think that the vast majority of back pain — the kind that isn’t caused by actual problems like ruptured discs and real injuries — comes from things like working for a living. I know that at the end of a shift at the Restaurant, my back is screaming. I also know that after I get home and relax for a bit, I’ll be fine. I think things like acupuncture, chiropractics, massage, etc, all work because they’re relaxing. You get to go into a nice office and have a very concerned and soothing person pay an awful lot of attention to you for a reasonable length of time, and for some reason, you feel better after that. I think someone should do a study comparing chiropractics, massage, etc to a nice hot bath and a comfortable night on the couch with a warm blanket. I suspect the results would be revealing.
And on that note, I’m out.
September 27th, 2007 at 3:07 pm
re: the restuarant comment. Despite the fact that we live in a pluralistic society, we still tend to self segregate. Left to themselves, people tend to socialize with others like themselves,in their peer group or neighborhood.
This means that despite all changes which have occured in the last 40 years–many people still have no idea what the day to day life of someone outside their circle might be like. This applies to religion and social class as well as race.
Americans are incredibly provincial, overall.
How many times, Java, at the restaurant has someone expressed astonishment at your education? People are clue less in the real sense of the word–they have no clue what other peoples lives might be like–they lack the experience and the imagination to place themselves into someone elses world.
This tv personality just expressed a common phenomenon–tho you’d think he’d have perhaps been a bit more erudite/eloquent in expressing the idea.