Marc Ambinder at The Atlantic:

I will say one thing about journalists collectively: we will never, ever change people’s minds about the media except by practicing good journalism. So arguing – and even apologizing – is kind of useless and counterproductive.

I still think that some journalists were right to be skeptical of the doubters at the time. I think that some journalists were correct to question how they arrived at the beliefs they arrived at.

I believe I can be of assistance here.

Speaking for myself, it was simple to conclude that the Bush junta was lying about something.

First, I listened. I listened to the words and how they were strung together. I listened to who was talking and what was being said. I listened to a lot of spokespersons saying the same things over and over, knowing that people who try to persuade are doing something completely different than people describing facts. Salesmen and sociopaths persuade.

Second, I thought over what I’d heard. This is a crucial step in the process of forming an opinion, often overlooked. I mulled over not just what was said but what wasn’t. I considered what it would mean if what I heard were true, and what it would mean if it weren’t. I pondered what would be the possible actions, probable outcomes and who might benefit from them. I thought over what I was intended to conclude and why anyone would want me to conclude that. I even wondered why someone seemed so desperate for me to agree and fall in line. That, to me, is usually a tip off that someone’s getting his or her prevarication on.

Then, because I had the luxury of distance, time and no pressure, I did some further mullin’, ponderin’ and considerin’. It further helped that after 9/11, I didn’t piss my pants, develop a pathological fear of olive skin or take a paycheck from a conservative source, so I was free to surmise without ideological interference or goosebumps. I listeneded and I thinked. Then I decided the Bush people were lying.

Funny: during that entire presidency, this process never failed me.

Cross-posted at Brilliant @ Breakfast.

Tata: Frigging Connecticut!
Daria: On 95, are you?
Tata: Freaking Connecticut!
Daria: On the way home, I saw an eight-mile backup to get onto the Cape. I’ve never seen that before.
Tata: Fecking Connecticut! New Haven oughta be carpet-bombed. And don’t get me started on the roads around Bridgeport.
Daria: Even New Yorkers are like, “These people are crazy.” How do you like the stopping for no reason whatsoever?
Tata: Not as much as I hated stopping at a McDonald’s just inside the Connecticut border. I knew something was up when I saw someone had washed the floor with the wrong greasy mop and the floor was still wet. So I made the mistake of walking into the ladies room, where people in stalls were talking and stopped when I walked in. And the two open stalls? The toilets were full. I tapped the handles: disconnected. I walked right out into the restaurant, determined not to touch anything while I waited for Pete. The floor was still wet. You know what that means?
Daria: I could puke!
Tata: When I told Pete my story, we drove across the road to Stuckey’s, where the bathroom was only moderately gross. We got fake strombolis at the one and only Sbarro that doesn’t smell like burnt tomato sauce and sat down at a reasonably clean table. I have eaten about half of my lunch when this guy in a Stuckey’s uniform walks over to the garbage can behind Pete and sticks his arm into the can to smash down the garbage. Then he straightens up the used trays. I stopped chewing. The guy walks around behind me and does the same thing where Pete can see it. I said, “Did you see that?” He said, “I really did.” I said, “And now, we are leaving.“
Daria: A district manager would loooooove to see that.
Tata: I know, but what can you do when a whole town doesn’t know shit about basic hygiene?
Daria: Todd was just telling me about taking his kids to Chuck E. Cheese, which is the Land of All Things Contagious. I mean, what do you do? How do you scrub up after that?
Tata: You slather your kids in head-to-toe Purell? Yeah, so we’re never stopping there again.
Daria: Exit 93? I’ve never been there.
Tata: Howcum you just know that?
Daria: You know, people who are not you actually remember things.
Tata: Okay, so the gross isn’t just in Connecticut. On the way out of town, we stopped for bagels. Pete went around the corner to gas up the car and I went into the bagel shop. So I’m standing behind this young couple that just started sleeping together.
Daria: What? In the shop?
Tata: No, at his house. I get his newsletter. Doofus! Anyway, they order a bagel each and a cup of coffee each. The kid behind the counter seems to only exhale, and he’s wearing one glove.
Daria: One?
Tata: Yup, only one. I watch him slice two bagels in geologic time, spackle them lightly with cream cheese and eventually pour one cup of coffee. They correct him. He pours another. He handles their money and finally looks at me. Meanwhile, three people wandered into the bagel shop and are now standing behind me. One walks out.
Daria: Really? It was that long?
Tata: Absolutely. The kid’s obviously someone’s nephew. I’m almost sorry to ask him to slice three bagels, put cream cheese on all of them, and on one, slice tomato and lox, but I do. The woman behind me starts to deflate. He cuts everything crooked, he’s stingy with the cream cheese. It’s a disaster. He disappears into the kitchen and in line, we just look at each other. He comes back with a few scraps of lox. Finally, he slices a tomato with what might as well have been a spoon. By now, Pete’s waited so long he’s walking into the shop to threaten the kid, because Pete’s seen this dance number a few times already and he doesn’t care for the ending.
Daria: Oh Lord, here it comes! What’d Pete do?
Tata: Nothing, because just then the kid asked for money and handled it with both hands.
Daria: NO!
Tata: Yes.
Daria: What did you do?
Tata: I turned to the woman behind me and said, “If I were you, I’d ask for a new glove.”

Remember this motherfucker?

“I think it’s hard to argue that families that can contribute to their shelter cost shouldn’t,” Robert V. Hess, the city’s commissioner of homeless services, said in a telephone interview Friday. “I don’t see this playing out in an adverse way. Our objective is not for families to remain in shelter. Our objective is to move families back into their own homes and into the community.”

But Ta, you say, the world is full of motherfuckers. Remind me: who was this guy and what mothers was he fucking?

Mr. Hess acknowledged that if a family does not pay the required rent, it could be told to leave the shelter, but he noted that residents can contest the rent required through a state hearing.

Oh. Right. Those mothers. Thank you, New York Times. Anyway, Mr. Hess isn’t through making the homeless more homelesser:

The new policy gives the city greater latitude to push families out of the shelter system, which had swelled to a near-high of 9,720 families as of Sunday. Families could always be evicted for illegal behavior like bringing in drugs or weapons, but they can now be ousted for any of 28 violations, including failing to sign in and out or not keeping an active case file with city welfare agencies.

The new policy is also meant to encourage families to more readily accept permanent housing, even if it is not to their liking.

“We would only expect to use this process in the most egregious of situations,” said Robert V. Hess, the commissioner for homeless services, in an interview on Monday. “We do have a small number of families where temporary emergency shelter is really being used as permanent housing.”

Evictions are for a 30-day period.

I’ve read those four paragraphs about ten times, and if those words make sense in that order I need a new native language. And watch this exhilarating turn of phrase:

Mr. Hess said it was not clear where families removed from shelter might turn. “The most likely outcome is that the family would demonstrate that they do have a place to go,” he said.

Or…they might be homeless and have nowhere but the sidewalk, which by this motherfucker’s definition is a place to go. But it’s only for 30 days, right?

An instructional guide provided to shelter operators appears to leave open the possibility that families will be subject to the elements. It instructs shelter operators that no families should be ejected during a “Code Blue Winter Weather Alert,” or when the temperature drops to 32 degrees.

Compassion like that brings a tear to the eye it does.

Robert Hess, Commissioner of Homeless Services:
212-361-8000
email

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City:
212-639-9675
email

Government agencies sever parental rights over shit like failing to provide shelter. So why is the city doing it?

So I’m watching the Today Show this morning and something – I can’t quite put my finger on it – is making me very uncomfortable. What –

Last night, the president of the United States said nothing surprising when he observed that members of the Cambridge police “acted stupidly” in arresting a man in his own home after he had identified himself as the owner. Even the whitest and rightest of morans could figure out that’s a stupid, outrageous, disgraceful way for cops to behave. Talk about government overreach!

No, the real shocker was the audible gasp from the mostly white press corps as Obama said it. They don’t seem to understand, truly understand, that the United States elected a black man to be its president.

That’s close, but no cigar. When Matt Lauer asks rhetorically if it’s appropriate for the President of the United States to comment on his friend’s racially motivated false arrest, he’s not asking an etiquette question. Nope, he’s asking if it’s appropriate for a Black man to mention Black men have problems specific to being Black men, because the dominant paradigm says they don’t. I stopped huffing my breakfast polenta when I heard the word appropriate which was bad enough, but I got up, shut off the TV and brushed my teeth when I saw Michael Smerconish was going to discuss race with Michael Eric Dyson, and I knew Dyson was going to be told by two white guys that Mr. Obama had no right to mention racism.

Here’s the clip. Maybe you have more nerve than I do.

Via Pam’s House Blend, about which I am only a teeeeeensy bit obsessive, comes this suspicious tidbit:

No one is talking on the record, but here’s what happened:

“OLTL” was taping scenes in late-June concerning roommates Cristian, Layla and Fish. (They’ll air in September.) Cristian and Layla suspect that sweet cop Fish is gay, but aren’t sure how to approach him about it. So they buy a book about how to tell if you’re gay and plan to give it to him.

Cristian’s mom, Carlotta, was supposed to find the book and assume Cristian is gay. Her reaction was scripted to be very accepting and even amused, citing his love of art and fondness for going shirtless as signs she should have recognized.

But Mauceri, who has played diner purveyor Carlotta Vega for 14 years, refused to play the story as written, saying a Latina mother would not be so accepting. Rather, Mauceri rewrote the scenes to make Carlotta confused and troubled, and submitted them to “OLTL” execs.

“That’s not the story we’re telling,” responded an exec.

Mauceri then said she could not play the scenes as written, so the show called [Saundra] Santiago.

I don’t know about you, but when I read a story I am aware of things moving in the background. Sometimes I can see what they might be; sometimes not. Here, it’s possible Mauceri is an artist with some integrity, in which case working on the soaps may not be her best bet for avoiding cognitive dissonance. Listen: One Life To Life has underground cities, stolen babies, secret twins, visitations by the series’ creator, burn victims without scars, bullies with bags of lightly chilled blood we’re supposed to believe just came from a donor, folks rising from the dead so often crypts should have ejector seats, time travel, cowboy industrialists with lawyers named “Beaver,” multiple personality disorder described through hair and makeup choices, newspaper magnates lingering in modest kitchens over coffee, people cough a few times after stuff blows up, serial killers get their own European kingdoms, nobody ever goes to jail unless their contract’s up and not even I would plan a double wedding with my ex-husband. We’re not going to get much in the way of real life here. Or dignity. Even so, it must be said that recently OLTL has been a little weird in its treatment of Latin peoples, with a moment that made me cringe and turn off the TV. This one:

A character that supposedly lived for years in Puerto Rico and Europe is throwing a party and mistakes her guests for “the help” because they speak with a heavy accent. I threw myself at my remote and found something else to do for a while. So I could understand if someone had absolutely had it with this show on this topic and decided to give the script writers a little tough love. Unfortunately for Mauceri, writers are big users of strong words. Let’s go back to the article and weigh the words:

No one is talking on the record, but here’s what happened:

Omigod, I can’t tell you what happened but this is what happened.

“OLTL” was taping scenes in late-June concerning roommates Cristian, Layla and Fish. (They’ll air in September.) Cristian and Layla suspect that sweet cop Fish is gay, but aren’t sure how to approach him about it. So they buy a book about how to tell if you’re gay and plan to give it to him.

There are no gay people in Pennsylvania so you can get manuals that tell you how to be gay and only straight people know where to buy them.

Cristian’s mom, Carlotta, was supposed to find the book and assume Cristian is gay. Her reaction was scripted to be very accepting and even amused, citing his love of art and fondness for going shirtless as signs she should have recognized.

What could my son’s love of Post-Its and fondness for going to grocery stores mean? Perhaps I should have recognized his penchant for being Latvian.

But Mauceri, who has played diner purveyor Carlotta Vega for 14 years, refused to play the story as written, saying a Latina mother would not be so accepting. Rather, Mauceri rewrote the scenes to make Carlotta confused and troubled, and submitted them to “OLTL” execs.

If I can’t write caricatures based on my prejudices I don’t know what the world is coming to!

“That’s not the story we’re telling,” responded an exec.

Don’t think: it weakens the team.

Mauceri then said she could not play the scenes as written, so the show called Santiago.

I’ll overlook the fact that some people are still mad about Carmen Miranda’s Chiquita banana thing because Latin people are just so darned temperamental. You can’t work with ’em.

Frankly, I might be smashing heads in the office photocopier, if that were me. It also can’t be overstated that treating your gay roommate like his homosexuality is an exotic disease makes you a big jerk.

Of course, it’s possible Mauceri is just a bigot, but it’s also possible we only caught a glimpse of what happened and this is a smear. Mauceri’s out of a job. Everything else is rumor and speculation.

The weather, I am under it today. Most of the morning, I couldn’t open my eyes. It’s not a big deal, but my patience wears thin when my body refuses to cooperate. I’d call a meeting with it but I’m sure it would hang up on me. Thus, now is the wrong time for me to notice that one of my soaps is about to step into a stinky mess. This child holding a child is the mother nearing the moment she decides to raise her baby rather than give that baby to a nearby adult. I’m neither an advocate for adoption nor a detractor. Most – not all but most – of the adults I know who were adopted are very fucked up about it. Adoption is better than foster care. Sometimes. Depends on the circumstances, the kid, the parents. But the soap saying that kids can raise kids is going too far, especially with the class issues packed – no, stuffed – into this particular scenario. It’s a bad scene, glossing over what this means in real life, like that the teenage characters are unable in any way to provide a home for themselves or the baby. So today, I shut off One Life To Live half an hour in, and I’ll come back when the show veers back to husband-stealing, underground cities and mental illness. That weirdness I can handle.

New York fucking Times:

Sotomayor’s Sharp Tongue Raises Issue of Temperament

What what what?

Judge Sonia Sotomayor, President Obama’s Supreme Court choice, has a blunt and even testy side, and it was on display in December during an argument before the federal appeals court in New York. The case concerned a Canadian man who said American officials had sent him to Syria to be tortured, and Judge Sotomayor peppered a government lawyer with skeptical questions.

“So the minute the executive raises the specter of foreign policy, national security,” Judge Sotomayor asked the lawyer, Jonathan F. Cohn, “it is the government’s position that that is a license to torture anyone?”

Mr. Cohn managed to get out two and a half words: “No, your hon- .”

Judge Sotomayor cut him off, then hit him with two more questions and a flat declaration of what she said was his position. The lawyer managed to say she was wrong, but could not clarify the point until the chief judge, Dennis G. Jacobs, stepped in, asking, “Why don’t we just get the position?”

This sounds really familiar, but I can’t fucking place it –

Other lawyers, though, are not so enamored. In the Almanac of the Federal Judiciary, which conducts anonymous interviews with lawyers to assess judges, she has gone from generally rave reviews to more tepid endorsements. Among the comments from lawyers was that she is a “terror on the bench” who “behaves in an out-of-control manner” and attacks “lawyers for making an argument she doesn’t like.”

Ringing a distant bell – so, so close –

“Some lawyers just don’t like to be questioned by a woman,” Judge Calabresi added. “It was sexist, plain and simple.”

I remember now! It was Mrs. Ornstein’s tenth grade English class.

BAPTISTA
Gentlemen, importune me no farther,
For how I firmly am resolved you know;
That is, not bestow my youngest daughter
Before I have a husband for the elder:
If either of you both love Katharina,
Because I know you well and love you well,
Leave shall you have to court her at your pleasure.

GREMIO
[Aside] To cart her rather: she’s too rough for me.
There, There, Hortensio, will you any wife?

KATHARINA
I pray you, sir, is it your will
To make a stale of me amongst these mates?

HORTENSIO
Mates, maid! how mean you that? no mates for you,
Unless you were of gentler, milder mould.

KATHARINA
I’faith, sir, you shall never need to fear:
I wis it is not half way to her heart;
But if it were, doubt not her care should be
To comb your noddle with a three-legg’d stool
And paint your face and use you like a fool.

HORTENSIA
From all such devils, good Lord deliver us!

GREMIO
And me too, good Lord!

TRANIO
Hush, master! here’s some good pastime toward:
That wench is stark mad or wonderful froward.

Nothing’s as fresh as seventeenth-century sexism. Also: they suck as theater critics if they don’t know what play they’re seeing. The least the New York fucking Times could do is demand that these fuckers write their poison-pen OpEds that pass for reporting in iambic pentameter. Truly: that’s the least it could do.

Updated to reflect common understandings of sentence structure and moral sloth.

It took me a whole day to stop hyperventilating.

The Bloomberg administration has quietly begun charging rent to homeless families who live in publicly run shelters but have income from jobs.

The new policy is based on a 1997 state law that was not enforced until last week, when shelter operators across the city began requiring residents to pay a certain portion of their income. The amount varies based on factors that include family size and what shelter is being used, but should not exceed 50 percent of a family’s income, a state official said.

I’m speechless.

Dear Ask.com,
What percentage of my budget should go to housing?
Signed,
Nauseous in New Brunswick

Dear Nauseous,
There’s a chart.

30% Housing
18% Transportation
16% Food
8% Miscellaneous
5% Clothing
5% Medical
5% Recreation
5% Utilities
4% Savings
4% Other Debts

This is if one’s situation is stable and one is looking to miraculously cut one’s medical costs to 5% and spend less on pizza delivery. Evidently, even numbers are different in New York.

Vanessa Dacosta, who earns $8.40 an hour as a cashier at Sbarro, received a notice under her door several weeks ago informing her that she had to give $336 of her approximately $800 per month in wages to the Clinton Family Inn, a shelter in Hell’s Kitchen where she has lived since March.

“It’s not right,” said Ms. Dacosta, a single mother of a 2-year-old who said she spends nearly $100 a week on child care. “I pay my baby sitter, I buy diapers, and I’m trying to save money so I can get out of here. I don’t want to be in the shelter forever.”

Still…speechless…

“I think it’s hard to argue that families that can contribute to their shelter cost shouldn’t,” Robert V. Hess, the city’s commissioner of homeless services, said in a telephone interview Friday. “I don’t see this playing out in an adverse way. Our objective is not for families to remain in shelter. Our objective is to move families back into their own homes and into the community.”

I think it would be hard to argue that there’s a bigger dick anywhere than Robert V. Hess, Commissioner of Homeless Services, who plainly has never missed an expensed meal in his life. His argument is precisely, on its face WRONG. Isn’t it fortunate that he has a public office from which to broadcast his dickishness, and you can call it?

Robert Hess, Commissioner of Homeless Services:
212-361-8000
email

Michael Bloomberg, Mayor of New York City:
212-639-9675
email

You can help Mr. Hess conclude that he is full of MATH FAIL. It’d practically be a good deed to get him fired. Maybe he’d develop some compassion!

A flier posted in one shelter last week warned residents in bold, underlined type, “Failure to make the required contributions could result in the loss of your family’s temporary housing.”

But advocates for the homeless said the new policy was punitive and counterproductive, and some shelter residents, in protest, have already refused to sign the documents acknowledging receipt of the rent notifications.

“Families have been told to pay up or get out,” said Steven Banks, the attorney in chief for the Legal Aid Society. “The policy is poorly conceived, but even more alarmingly, it’s being poorly executed. What is happening is that we have seen cases of families being unilaterally told, without any notice of how the rent was calculated, that they must pay certain amounts of rent or leave the shelter. We’ve already had a case of a survivor of domestic violence who was actually locked out of her room.”

Mr. Hess acknowledged that if a family does not pay the required rent, it could be told to leave the shelter, but he noted that residents can contest the rent required through a state hearing.

Ms. Dacosta, for one, said she had spoken with her caseworker and demanded a hearing. Martha Gonzalez, who is 49 and lives with her 19-year-old son in a rundown shelter in Fort Greene, Brooklyn, said she was informed last week that she owes $1,099 in monthly rent on a $1,700 monthly income as a security guard in Midtown. She said she planned to contest the rent demand in court.

…Because the working poor have plenty of time to take take off for pointless, dickish hearings pointing out that dickish New York City is extorting rent from the poor. If there’s one thing the homeless need it’s being told that unless they pay up they’ll be EVEN MORE HOMELESS. More homelesser. Man, I hope they splash those on superglam NY1! I still don’t know what to say, but it’s Limerick Day. That seems promising.

A homeless commissioner named Hess
thought the homeless should have even less
he charges them rent
dumb money spent
when saving up worries us hairless.

That sucks, but I write a blistering email. Hope you will, too.

Update: That guy is such a motherfucker I can’t believe I got through this post without saying motherfucker.