"All Hands On Deck" Goes Down With Ship

Last weekend, the D.C. police chief implemented an initiative increasing the police presence on the streets. The results:

Violence in the District continued to rise last weekend despite an increase in arrests and police presence during the department's latest "All Hands on Deck" crime-fighting initiative, police data show.

Most available officers were working the streets Friday to Sunday, making 481 arrests, many for minor offenses. Yet the city recorded two homicides, three sexual abuse cases, 31 robberies and 26 assaults over the three days -- a total of 62 violent crimes, compared with 34 for the same three-day stretch last year.

"The numbers aren't looking good," said D.C. Council member Phil Mendelson (D-At Large), head of the public safety committee. "This says that 'All Hands on Deck' is more about catching law breakers than deterring crime."

Of the 481 arrests, made between 12:01 a.m. Friday and 7 a.m. Sunday -- the time period for the "All Hands on Deck" effort -- 119 arrests involved drug offenses, 101 were for traffic violations, 58 for disorderly conduct and 43 for prostitution. There was one arrest after a homicide, four in connection with robberies or carjackings, and 15 involving assaults.

...

Crime is on the rise in the District, with 165 homicides so far this year -- just four fewer than the homicide total for all of 2006.

Less than 13% of the arrests made this weekend were for violent crimes, whereas more than a third were arrested for completely voluntary recreational activity (drugs and prostitution).

In a city as violent as this one, you would think that arresting people for the sake of "being tough on crime" should take a back seat to actually concentrating on bringing the violators of others' rights to justice. Instead, however, the police concentrate on "moral" violations which reflect the upstanding nature of this pious capital of ours.

WV Parents: Shield Our Children from...The Prince of Tides?

Add this to the growing number of imbecilic attempts at censorship in schools:

A student group is vowing to sue the Kanawha County Board of Education if the removal of ''Beach Music'' and ''The Prince of Tides'' from two Nitro High School classes is made permanent and expanded countywide.

Apparently, the offended parents would rather retard their child's education than let him read about the less pleasant aspects of life:

Parents Ken and Leona Tyree found certain scenes in ''The Prince of Tides'' ''obscene and offensive.'' Leona Tyree said she was unable to finish the book. Their son has since left Shamblin's Advanced Placement literature class.

[Insert cheap West Virginia literacy joke here.]

Neither [of the complaining parents cited] have listed phone numbers.

[Insert cheaper West Virginia indoor plumbing joke here.]

The main complaints of the parents revolve around violence, sexual assault and suicide. Which makes one wonder, why would author Pat Conroy write about such horrible things?:

Conroy referred to the books as ''two of my darlings, which I would place before the altar of God and say, 'Lord, this is how I found the world you made.'''

He said his late father fought in three wars and turned violent on his wife and seven children; his youngest brother committed suicide; a female relative was raped; eight classmates at the Citadel were killed in Vietnam, and his best friend died last summer in a car accident.

What are they going to ban next? The newspaper?

Schumer Chokes...But For Good Reason

God forbid I ever agree with Chuck Schumer on anything, but I have to back him on his confirmation of Judge Mukasey. Money quote:

Should we reject Judge Mukasey, President Bush has said he would install an acting, caretaker attorney general who could serve for the rest of his term without the advice and consent of the Senate.

We all thought it couldn't get worse than Ashcroft, and we were WRONG. Seriously, how bad do you have to be to make John Ashcroft appear to be a brave defender of the Constitution? Gonzales proved the adage that the devil you know is better than the one you don't.

The Dems were in a bad spot here. Either confirm someone imperfect but qualified or get force-fed another Bush lackey. I'll (reluctantly) take Mukasey.

Over at the Kos, of course, they want their cake and eat it too.

Day-after Update: Kos, STILL whining.

Typing Faster Than He Thinks

Before a modification to cover for his absurd assertion, NRO's David Frum posted this:

Update: Howard Dean in 2004 attracted 318,000 individual donors who donated 454,000 times for a total of almost $40 million. That's approximately ten times Paul's haul in every dimension. True, Dean did not do it in one day. But almost all that money arrived in a single quarter. My conclusion from this is that Ron Paul is actually underperforming his potential. He could probably raise a lot more - and gain many, many more votes - if he dropped the gold standard and New World Order stuff, and ran as a straightforward anti-war leftist. (emphasis mine)

Any friend of mine knows I'm no Ron Paul fan, despite his libertarian credentials. But "straightforward anti-war leftist"? Who the hell does Frum think he's kidding? Just because someone isn't a socialist war hawk (a.k.a. NEO-CON) does not make them a leftist.

Frum quickly changed his tune:

I'd guess that he would do much better if he dropped the gold standard stuff, and ran a pure anti-war campaign, spicily seasoned with 9/11 paranoia.

Of course Frum would prefer that! If Paul ran as strictly anti-war, it would help continue the charade that the GOP has not completely lost its mind and moorings betraying the mantles of Goldwater and Reagan for a bastardized combination of TR's foreign policy and FDR's domestic policy.

Schmuck.

Conflicting Standards

Thankfully, more black people are fed up with the portrayals of the race in the media:

Wearing white T-shirts with red stop signs and chanting “BET does not reflect me, MTV does not reflect me,” protesters have been gathering every Saturday outside the homes of Viacom executives in Washington and New York City. The orderly, mostly black crowds are protesting music videos that they say degrade women, and black and Latino men.

Unfortunately, the remedies they propose are probably a bit much:

Among other things the protesters want media companies like Viacom to develop “universal creative standards” for video and music, including prohibitions on some language and images.

I, for one, am all for toning-down the 'gangsta' and other ignorant images prevalent in today's pop culture, but I cannot think of any "universal creative standard" which would serve any real purpose. Using the power of protest to show angry disapproval of the status quo on BET is a good thing -- assigning some arbitrary standard of how to portray black people is quite another.

That said, the protests, as some in the article incorrectly conclude, are not censorship. They are perfectly acceptable exercises of 1st Amendment rights to Free Speech and Free Association, just as the rappers have their right to say what they want. The conflict revolves around the over-abundance of airtime businesses have given the latter's messages. Bringing bad publicity and perhaps financial penalties-- through lost revenue, not fines -- can bring changes without involving government standards, which would be censorship.

Just because these protesters and people like me find a lot of the black caricatures on BET and MTV offensive and debasing, does not give anyone other than the owners of the companies the right to remove that material, no matter how much I believe a lot of that material deserves to be scrapped forever. Censorship, in the true sense, is an affront to the principles of America's founding, regardless of the nature of the material in question.

No one's standards of taste should be enforced by law.

If War, Then No Constitution

In yet another hint that our president didn't pay attention in Civics class -- he apparently has never heard of the "lame duck":

“In a time of war, it is vital for the president to have a full national security team in place, and a key member of that team is the attorney general,” [the president] said. “Yet the Senate Judiciary Committee has been holding up his nomination.”

Yes. This is what the Decider-in-Chief said to try and coax the Judiciary Committee to move on his AG nominee, Judge Mukasey. I'll translate into language he'd have written instead of a speech writer:

"Torture is bad, 'see. But terrorists are bad. heh heh. So, when fighting bad, gotta use bad. Let 'im through. Don't let that pesky Constitution get in the way."

No, W, we need an AG that will stand-up to your foreign policy and legal teams -- somebody has to.

The Most Ridiculous Op-Ed in the History of Journalism

Yesterday, the once-venerable New York Times printed this drivel:

THE house in which I grew up was haunted by a cloud of cold mist, a mysterious woman in white, and an entity we called “the conductor,” since he walked around wearing a mourning coat and carrying a baton in one hand.

...

The house, in Devon, Pa., was creepy, to be certain. Still, it wasn’t exactly the Amityville Horror. As a teenager in the 1970s, I found my house’s ghosts mostly a social embarrassment. It was humiliating to have to explain to my friends spending the night in the Haunted Room: “Now don’t worry if you see a blob come out of that closet. Usually it will go away if you whistle Beethoven’s Fifth Symphony. If that doesn’t work, try the Ninth.”

The 'newspaper of record' has apparently lowered its standards on what qualifies as "fit to print."

The most discouraging of our specters was the woman I called Mrs. Freeze. She appeared, occasionally, in the mirror of a third-floor lavatory. This was known as the Monkey Bathroom because the family who’d lived in the Coffin House before us, the Hunts, had kept a monkey in there.

The monkey’s name was Jesus.

One night, coming home late from a friend’s house, I looked into the mirror and saw her standing behind me. Mrs. Freeze was a middle-aged woman in a white nightgown. Her eyes were small red stars. Cold mist rose from her hair and shoulders.

I turned around, but of course there was no one there.

...

I went back to the Coffin House last year with someone whom I can only haplessly describe as a paranormal investigator. The woman, a cheerful, round Philadelphian named Shelly, was associated with an organization called Batty About Ghosts. When I asked her to check out the house, she’d said she’d be glad to. “Actually,” said Shelly, without a hint of sarcasm, “this is my dead season.”

Oh, it gets worse. MUCH WORSE:

Shelly raised a pair of copper divining rods, which immediately began to spin around wildly, like the blades of a helicopter. “Is there anybody there?” she asked, but I could already sense my father’s shy, gentle presence.

“It’s my father,” I told Shelly.

“Talk to him,” she said. “Talk to him just like you used to.”

This was more difficult than it sounded, since I’m transgendered, and had morphed, since my father’s death, from the entity known as James to the current one, known as Jennifer.

Perhaps the fact that the man is DEAD is the most troublesome hurdle? Just a thought.

I'm all for doing what you want with your own name, body, sexuality, and identity. That is your right. But I don't think this op-ed is any service to transgendered people -- in fact, if one were to take this as any kind of indication on the mental health of transgendered people it could be exactly the opposite:

Last summer, late one night while I was visiting [my mother], I went into the Monkey Bathroom to get ready for bed. It had been a long day, and I was filled with the usual rush of melancholy and nostalgia that always accompanies a visit to my boyhood home.

And then, as I looked into the mirror, I saw Mrs. Freeze, just as in days of old, a middle-aged woman in a white nightgown. For a moment I felt my skin crawl, wondering what disaster was now imminent.

But then it occurred to me that I was seeing my own reflection. After all this time, I was only haunting myself.

I realized then the thing that the stranger might have been trying to tell me, for all these years. Don’t worry, Jenny. It’s only me.

If this is some sort of allegory, then it missed the mark. Furthermore, since when has this sort of nonsense been op-ed material? The New York Times has a reputation of being one of the hardest newspapers to get an op-ed published in -- particularly if your opinion isn't in total congruence with the editorial staff -- and yet they publish this aimless hallucinatory rant to get some (clearly lost) point across about transgender identity?

I know they are having some problems there, but some standards should be maintained.