Money for Afghanistan – and Halliburton doesn’t have a hand in it

To the Editor:

I read the article “Iran Is Seeking More Influence in Afghanistan” with a wry smile. Does Iran really think that road and construction projects, a rail line, and anti-drug efforts are going to help them win support in Afghanistan? As a mature world power, the U.S. government has a far more sensible plan to win support from the Afghani people:

1. Destroy infrastructure via air war. Continue to strafe the occasional wedding party long after victory has been declared.

2. Pay assorted warlords to announce that they’ve become good guys now.

3. Whittle away meager rebuilding funds on profits for private contractors.

4. Let the legitimate economy languish while the drug trade flourishes.

5. Forget country exists, except when the dashing Hamid Karzai models a flowing cape for American photojournalists.

How could Iran think they can beat us at this game by actually helping to rebuild the country?

I’ll take the soup!

In today’s NY Times, one of the best corrections I’ve seen in many hours spent on good old page A2 ove many years:

Because of an editing error, an obituary on Sunday about Sid Raymond, a comic actor, rendered one of his jokes incorrectly. It was about a son who sends a prostitute to his widowed father, still a self-proclaimed ladies’ man in his 90s. The prostitute tells the father that she is his birthday present and promises to give him “super sex” (not that she promises to give him whatever he’d like.) The father replies, “I’ll take the soup.”

I’d sure hate to be a copyeditor at the Times — their corrections editor is always blaming everything on “editing errors.”

But I do want to know — who’s the goofball who changed a joke in an obituary. Apparently, the same kind of goofball who thinks they can re-write a joke in an obituary, likely because they didn’t catch the pun on “super sex” vs. “soup or sex”.

Just imagine the angry fans who came upon a butchered joke where a prostitute said “I’ll give you whatever you like” and the elderly Cassanova replied “I’ll take the soup.” Nobody’s been that upset at a comedy routine since I unveiled my “dead milk” series of gags to no acclaim more than 20 years ago in New Jersey.

“under a pile of soggy rubbish”

God help us, Susan Paynter was back in the P-I again yesterday, waxing egocentric about her stolen car and the “nearly” 100 responses she had — “including [from] hardened cops” (though it’s not clear how she knew how hard the cops in question were) — asking about her loss of a child-made ceramic heart in the car theft she’s been obsessing over for more than a week now.

She reports on the odd accounting practices of a man with an unlikely name:

These are people such as Rainier Burgdorfer, who calculates the cost of thievery like this:

“I don’t know how much money you make,” he wrote me. “I can save about $100 per week. So, when the ass(bleep) stole my car, it took me about 15 weeks to make enough money to buy a new ski rack, tire chains, seat covers, music, first-aid kit, fire extinguisher, all-season tires and the rest of the stuff … my insurance didn’t cover.”

The way he sees it, the thief robbed him of 15 weeks of his life.

Come on now, does this really add up to “15 weeks of his life” being stolen? Because he decided he had to apply his savings to things like a “new ski rack”? Sure, something was stolen from him — but jeez, did he really have $1500 worth of “stuff” like seat covers? And is using 15 weeks of savings to buy new stuff really amount to being “robbed” of 15 weeks of your “life”? It’s a shame Enron isn’t hiring accountants anymore.

You know an article is going down a particularly rocky road when vague anti-union suggestions get thrown in there, such as:

“Who would be against stronger penalties?” asked Jack Miller. “The Amalgamated Brotherhood of Crack Heads and Speed Freaks International?”

P-I editors: no, I don’t want a family car to be stolen either. But neither do I want to hear a columnist obsess over it along with others. Yes, it sucks that her car was stolen. But should you really let your legislative agenda be dictated by a personal grievance like this? Come on now.

The article ends on a somewhat revealing note:

Almost every e-mail and phone call brought a bonus of support and sympathy. “I really hope you get the ceramic heart back that was made by your son,” wrote Lonnie McCarron, an auto-theft detective from the Colorado Springs Police Department.

I bet that’s our “hardened cop” right there! From Colorado Springs! And they work in auto-theft themselves.

Then, appropriately enough, this horrifyingly self-involved piece ends with a schmaltzy use of the metaphor of a lost heart.

I did, Detective, and thanks for asking. Even if the mechanical prognosis for my hospitalized Prelude turns out to be bleak, at least my heart is back where it belongs.

Jeezus.

Paulo Freire makes an appearance at seattlepi.com

Someone with the unlikley name of “Paulo Freire” managed to get the first comment in on the P-I online discussion about yet-another eminent domain editorial, this one on the Burien case (which frankly, doesn’t sound like the wisest use of eminent domain around.)

http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/soundoff/comment.asp?articleID=295500

Posted by paulofreire at 12/11/06 8:58 p.m.

What’s with the P-I’s recent obsession with eminent domain? Has the Institute for “Justice” kidnapped a member of the publisher’s family, demanding two letters and one editorial a week on eminent domain?

If your editorial board were dedicated to good urban planning with the same dedication you have to property rights, I’d have more sympathy. But come on already, enough with the eminent domain.

Institute for Justice takes a big case

Our good buddies at the Institute for Justice are hot on the heels of yet another critical case:

As the Akron Beacon-Journal reports, via the AP, Court to decide battle over ‘for sale’ sign

CINCINNATI – A federal appeals court will decide if an Ohio village violated a man’s freedom of speech when it forced him to remove a “for sale” sign on a car parked in front of his home.

Chris Pagan said Glendale police threatened to cite him in 2003 under an ordinance forbidding such signs on vehicles in public areas.

Pagan removed the sign from his 1970 Mercury Cougar and said it hurt his ability to sell the car.

“I sold it under market value, because it was the best deal I could get,” said Pagan, an attorney who later filed a federal lawsuit to challenge the village’s half-century-old sign regulation.

What’s astonishing about this to me is the way they manage to frame their commitment to freedom of commercial speech not in terms of free speech more generally, but rather in terms of a “taking”. The guy couldn’t put a proper for sale sign on his car, you see, and so he ended up having to sell for less than market value, he says. The horror!

(What *is* a 1970 Mercury Cougar worth, you ask? Well, in Kuwait, they apparently go for 8,000 Kuwaiti dollars — but that price is no doubt affected by the fact that this is the only 1970 Cougar in all of Kuwait.)

Damn over-regulated emirate must have laws barring the import of great free American cars, or something. Because everything can always be explained by referencing the freedom to buy, except when it’s all about freedom to sell, or freedom to exploit, or freedom to pollute, or the freedom to behave with utter social irresponsibility.

IJ lays it down this way:

“If they can ban totally harmless speech on a whim, what happens when more controversial speech comes along?” said Jeff Rowes, a lawyer for the institute who is helping Pagan with the case. “If we decide that putting someone in jail is the right way to deal with ordinary speech like a ‘for sale’ sign, the First Amendment is in grave jeopardy.”

But really, now, just how slippery a slope is it from purely commerical speech like “for sale” to political, religious, or some other kind of expressive speech? The line seems easy to draw: selling for the highest possible price just isn’t a critical speech right. And “I want to make more money more money more money” is tawdry selfishness, not protected political expression.

Of course, in my book, keeping suburbs clean of ugly signage isn’t a compelling government interest either — which is why this seems an entirely trivial case.