Guys who work are tacky

It's difficult to have any other take-away from this piece in last week's New York Times:

HORSEHEADS, N.Y. — At the Glamour and Glow boutique in the local mall here, crystal necklaces and fake fur vests have been hot-ticket items the last year.

When the drilling workers head home between long stretches of work in this gas-rich region, explained Christy Spreng, the shop’s owner, they need gifts for their wives and girlfriends. “They know what they want,” she said. “They’ll say: ‘Looks good. Wrap it up.’ ”

Sales are up 60 percent at the boutique this year. At the two Holiday Inns here in Chemung County, occupancy has been at or near capacity for months at a time. And in the nearby town of Big Flats, the regional airport has added flights, parking spaces and restrooms, and is extending a runway to accommodate larger jets.

Hoping its sophisticated readers won't miss the point, the Times thoughtfully provides a link to Glamour and Glow's website, permitting a titillating frolic for virtual slummers.

While even the Times can't miss the economic boomlet, the article mostly tut-tuts about pollution, rising home prices, and dirty hands. Thus this:

Mr. Santulli, the Chemung County executive, attributes at least half of its tax revenue growth to the increased activity of the extracting industry on both sides of the border.

He said 28 gas-related companies employing more than 1,000 had leased or bought more than one million square feet of commercial space in the county as a staging area for current and future drilling operations in the region.

Many businesses provide support and technological services for gas fields. One of the biggest, Schlumberger Technologies, is completing a 400,000-square-foot plant in Horseheads that will employ 400 people by next year.

is dizzyingly juxtaposed with this:

Ann Crook, the manager of Elmira Corning Regional Airport in Big Flats, estimates one of five passengers flying in or out has some tie to the gas industry. Some are workers who head straight to the airport after working their final shift, which has prompted her to invest in some degreasing soap for the restrooms. “They do some serious cleanup here,” Ms. Crook said.

This is nothing new, and it's all about class. People with advanced degrees and clean hands who churn out incoherent dreck have never been comfortable with guys who work for a living, get dirty, and are concerned about momma bein' happy.

We'll be on the lookout for the next thoughty Times piece about the economics of food stamps, where the lede is a similarly condescending critique of the fashion sense of welfare queens.

No

Could Liquid Nitrogen Help Build Tasty Burgers?

New York Times Corrections: I'm Glad We've Got That Straight

(click image to embiggen)

New York Times Eats Another Onion

From the New York Times corrections page:

A series of pictures last Sunday of covers of the magazine Tiger Beat, with an article about how the original teen-girl tabloid has remained virtually unchanged since its inception in 1965, erroneously included a parody cover, produced by the satiric newspaper The Onion, that featured a picture of President Obama.

All those editors and fact-checkers and professional staff. I'm sure they pay closer attention to important stuff, right? Right?!?

Tedium

Your ageing Uncle Bill sits by the fire, rocking gently, sipping Bourbon, reading obscure history, and not saying much.  You suspect that his mind is failing -- not catastrophically, but subtly -- because he doesn't show his former energy and loud indignation about the thieves in Washington and the idiots on Wall Street.

But you're wrong, you know.  It's just that indignation and astonishment have given way to resignation to the tedium of lying, cheating, stealing, and blazing hypocrisy from the entitled classes of America.

Nevertheless, spurred by some odd notion of duty, we today report that the New York Times has published an entirely predictable editorial calling for an end to Republican use of evil tactics (once righteous when used by Democrats, of course) to delay confirmation of the President's judicial nominees.  Same old arguments, adding nothing to a nonexistent non-debate.  Vote; don't vote; who cares.

One such stalled nominee is Susan L. Carney, who received an equivocal rating from the ABA, and who appears otherwise to be a standard Ivy League lefty.    She's also the wife of Lincoln Caplan, a member of the Editorial Board of the New York Times who "writes about the U.S. Supreme Court and other subjects related to legal affairs."

Predictably, the Times doesn't mention this fact.  For all we know, daddy wrote the thing to help out his little pooky-poo.

Please feel free to construct your own amusing bed-time dialogue at the Caplan/Carney home, involving a promise of his favorite blueberry muffins and that thing she does with her toes that he likes so much.

Corporations Have No Right to Free Speech

Unless they're the New York Times Company.

Sorry, We Can't Tell Anymore

Christmas gifts for black people? This is a joke, right? Has to be:

Somali fashion, do-it-yourself henna kits, children's books that draw inspiration from the lives of Barack Obama and Sonia Sotomayor: it's not hard to find gifts created for and by people of color this holiday season. Here are some possibilities.

All The News . . . .

Tsk, tsk.

All The News That's WHAT?!

Special from Judith Warner at The New York Times.

Yuck:

The other night I dreamt of Barack Obama. He was taking a shower right when I needed to get into the bathroom to shave my legs, and then he was being yelled at by my husband, Max, for smoking in the house. It was not clear whether Max was feeling protective of the president’s health or jealous because of the cigarette.

[snip]

Many women — not too surprisingly — were dreaming about sex with the president. In these dreams, the women replaced Michelle with greater or lesser guilt or, in the case of a 62-year-old woman in North Florida, whose dream was reported to me by her daughter, found a fully above-board solution: “Michelle had divorced Barack because he had become ‘too much of a star.’ He then married my mother, who was oh so proud to be the first lady,” the daughter wrote me.

Read the whole thing, but take care not to do so while enjoying a beverage -- you'll find yourself beset by the whole coffee out of your nose thing. And don't miss the comments.

It's That "Lips Moving" Thing

That's how you can tell when Paul Krugman is lying to you.

Not Swaying the Electorate One Way or the Other

Nope, no sir. Just giving you the latest news as it comes, with no tilt, explicit or otherwise. Yep, that's your NYT. Still, something strikes me as bizarre about this choice of photo to accompany the afternoon's campaign story, about the primary where Hillary is running against Jesus:

Monsters Among Us

"Answers are elusive, but the ever-increasing toll of violent crimes committed by journalists has led some experts to warn that without programs for intensive mental health care, the nation faces a potential bloodbath at the hands of psychopathic media vets."

Certainly you'd not want your daughter to marry one. More from Iowahawk.

The Twilight Zone

Apparently even the reality-challenged editors at the New York Times have begun to realize that we're now winning the war in Iraq. How can we tell? Because they're tacking to windward.

Instead of filling their front page with bad news, while hiding the good back with the truss ads, they are now publishing a series (no less) on troops returning home. Not troops who return from combat to open a daycare center; not veterans who run for office; not soldiers returning to their loved ones: but troops who return and commit murder:

Town by town across the country, headlines have been telling similar stories. Lakewood, Wash.: “Family Blames Iraq After Son Kills Wife.” Pierre, S.D.: “Soldier Charged With Murder Testifies About Postwar Stress.” Colorado Springs: “Iraq War Vets Suspected in Two Slayings, Crime Ring.”

Individually, these are stories of local crimes, gut-wrenching postscripts to the war for the military men, their victims and their communities. Taken together, they paint the patchwork picture of a quiet phenomenon, tracing a cross-country trail of death and heartbreak.

The New York Times found 121 cases in which veterans of Iraq and Afghanistan committed a killing in this country, or were charged with one, after their return from war. In many of those cases, combat trauma and the stress of deployment — along with alcohol abuse, family discord and other attendant problems — appear to have set the stage for a tragedy that was part destruction, part self-destruction.

Three-quarters of these veterans were still in the military at the time of the killing. More than half the killings involved guns, and the rest were stabbings, beatings, strangulations and bathtub drownings. Twenty-five offenders faced murder, manslaughter or homicide charges for fatal car crashes resulting from drunken, reckless or suicidal driving.

The Times, you see, has uncovered a previously unknown fact -- veterans (unlike the rest of us) sometimes commit crimes, or engage in other dangerous behavior. Perhaps after this series, we will be favored with further revelatory tales documenting tax evasion, salad bar grazing, double parking and elevator flatulence.

There is, of course, no story at all if veterans, as a group, commit no greater number of crimes than a similar number of Americans of the same age. Thus, the lede should be something like, "Veterans Murder at Twice National Rate." But it's not, of course, and you'll strain your eyes in vain searching in the Times for any such statistical analysis. This fellow has taken a stab at it, but I'm not entirely sure that he's closed the deal.

Times story HERE.

[UPDATE] More comment HERE, HERE and HERE.

Unhinged

Can you say

Over
The
Top?

Don't miss today's year-end editorial in your New York Times. The President of the United States, who has kept the incompetent whiners in lower Manhattan safe for the past six years, is without integrity, principle or decency, and uses the powers of the presidency dishonorably.

While we suppose that various psychoactive medications might provide some relief, we are of a mind to take up a collection to purchase airline tickets to someplace more amenable to the editorialists. Caracas perhaps?

Unfit to Print

If you search the New York Times for "Michael Murphy," HERE's what you get. Nothing.

Lt. Murphy, a Navy SEAL, is to be awarded the Medal of Honor :

Lt. Michael P. Murphy, 29, from Patchogue, NY. Murphy was killed by enemy forces during a reconnaissance mission, Operation Redwing, June 28, 2005. Murphy lead a four-man team tasked with finding a key Taliban leader in the mountainous terrain near Asadabad, Afghanistan, when they came under fire from a much larger enemy force with superior tactical position. Mortally wounded while exposing himself to enemy fire, Murphy knowingly left his position of cover to get a clear signal in order to communicate with his headquarters. While being shot at repeatedly, Murphy calmly provided his unit’s location and requested immediate support for his element. He returned to his cover position to continue the fight until finally succumbing to his wounds.

We suppose the Times will get around to reporting this event some time or other. The Los Angeles Times found space to do so, as did the Washington Post, last Thursday.

All True

From the best website I discovered today - indexed.

H/T, the best website I discovered a while ago, the Freakonomics blog.

Sexual Ethics

From "The Ethicist" column in today's New York Times Magazine:

I am a lawyer. During a first date with another lawyer, we had sex, and I wore a condom. Days later, when I came down with a bad fever and couldn’t determine the cause, she revealed that she had genital herpes. A judgeship will soon open up in her county, and she’s a near lock for it. But if I report her lapse of sexual ethics, I doubt that the selection committee will pick her. Should I? — NAME WITHHELD

The sophisticated Randy Cohen, the Times ethics guru, responds that (of course) this "lapse" ought not to be disclosed since "being unscrupulous in bed does not presage being inept on the bench."

If only there were some agreed upon set of qualifications for judicial office, so that one might know that a particular candidate was likely to be "inept" or not. One might have thought that since judges, well, "judge," a function which sometimes involves the exercise of, er, uhmm, "judgment," it might follow that someone with the morals of a feral cat did not have precisely the optimal skill set.

But that's just us.

Of course, only the militantly atheist New York Times could have a regular feature on "ethics" entirely divorced from religion. We're pretty sure that, in that reality-free environment, the touchstone is whether something or someone is nice and, if so, then it's ethical. After all -- in the final analysis, as Mammy Yokum taught us, good is better than evil because it's nicer.

Figures Don't Lie . . .

. . . but . . .

You know where this is going: HERE.

This Should Be Good

Like many large organizations, the New York Times has an "ombudsman," the fellow to whom customers are supposed to complain about the product. Of course, since the Times isn't really a business -- but instead constitutes a religious calling with Constitutional overtones -- it has a "Public Editor."

[Would it be mere snarky-ness to ask whether or not all the editors a the Times don't think they are doing the public's business? Are they "private" editors, devoted to a not-so-secret agenda? Hmmmmm . . .]

And now they have a new one:

The New York Times today named its next public editor, Clark Hoyt, a former Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter and editor who oversaw the Knight Ridder newspaper chain’s coverage that questioned the Bush administration’s case for the Iraq war.

[snip]

Mr. Hoyt said that he could not predict what subjects he might focus on. “They are likely to be driven by what readers care about and complain about,” he said.

But over the last year, he has spoken publicly about his concerns about the future of the newspaper industry, arguing that weakening finances, a toxic partisan atmosphere and coziness with government officials threaten to undermine journalistic courage and integrity.

Yes, well: Certainly we can all agree that the primary problem with reporting in the New York Times can be traced to excessive "coziness" with Bush Administration officials. Fix that, and there's no telling where it might lead. And clearly the hiring of a person whose most important qualification is early infection with Bush Derangement Syndrome won't do anything to contribute to "a toxic partisan atmosphere." Nosiree.

Inquiring Minds Want to Know

Mickey Kaus asks: Could Martin Luther King Jr. get a job in Krugman's administration?

And implicitly answers his own question: Pretty much not. Krugman's latest computer-generated string of non sequiturs is HERE.

The problem isn't that the proposition that Krugman is an unhinged lunatic requires any additional proof amongst folks familiar with his work. It's that the great mass of unthinking bovines hears him and assumes there must be something to what he says, even when there's nothing. After all, he's at Princeton, he writes in the New York Times, and he has a beard. That's three for three in the credibility sweepstakes. Such thinking and analysis (both Krugman's and that of his lowing herd of readers) itself has long since crossed the line that separates fact-based discourse from reactionary faith-based revivalist rhetoric.

One wonders if, now that so much of Paul Samuelson's political agenda has been shown to be dangerous collectivist moonshine, Krugman still expects to get a reflexive laugh from his undergraduates every time his says, "Milton Friedman."

We know the answer, don't we?