Today in Meganpoop

it was way too nice out today to deal with her crap till now. Marathon shorters, mostly.

The End of An Era:

Apparently ACORN has to be held to a higher standard than the Republican Party and conservative movement. If Joe Wilson had been caught starting a brothel Megan would be writing about how she thinks prostitution should be legal so long as wealthy white men are the ones profiting from it.

The Party's Over:

Conor Friedersdorf and I share an aversion to protests, on the grounds that they rarely work. But he adds: "If you're going to have a big protest -- or even a mid-sized family reunion -- you can't help it that some loonies are gonna show up. This is part of why I am averse to big protests, but it's also why no one should judge the average protester by the looniest signs that surrounded them."

Yep, this post is as obnoxious as you expect. Unfortunately, it demands a closer look.

To me, this is why protests are a bad idea. You will always be judged by your looniest adherents, in part because badly hand-lettered signs with ho-hum slogans at a PTA level of anger are just not very photogenic. Unless you can police your movement as effectively as, say, the Civil Rights marchers did, you will likely end up giving your political enemies ammunition. And of course, the Civil Rights movement was more easily able to present a united front because people who acted anything but saintly in their Sunday best were very likely to be beaten by the actual police.

But did those protesters ever thank the police for that help? Ungrateful wretches.
And the point is that just because the entire crowd behaved in a certain manner doesn't mean that represents the entire crowd. When will the left stop slandering the right with the things the right says to tv cameras?

That said, I confess I am surprised--though I probably shouldn't be--to see a respected anti-war libertarian site, whose proprietor got quite testy when people lumped him in with the ANSWER goons and the puppeteers, embracing the notion that the worst signs you can photograph from an event represent the collective point-of-view of everyone who attended the protest. One knows this will happen, which is why, as I say, protests are generally a bad idea. But one doesn't expect this sort of gross generalization from every quarter.

How dare someone she sometimes agrees with be intellectually honest? Just because these signs accurately represent the views of the people in those crowds (and Megan, unlike you I've been to a tea party, they really do believe those things) doesn't justify reporting the content of those signs and beliefs. It makes Megan sad to know these are the people who agree with her.

On a side note, I find the question of how many people attended quite interesting. I don't see how you can make these photos jibe with the low-tens-of-thousands estimates left-wing blogs are pushing. I also don't know how anyone ever thought millions were possible, when the inauguration involved months of planning and millions of dollars to pack people onto the mall like sardines. But what I really don't understand is how a New York Times headline writer got to "thousands", which is the size of the crowd at a decent high school football game.

Again, Megan, you'd be helped if you had actually gone to this newsworthy event happeneing in the city you fucking live in. She skipped the inauguration, and the 9/12 protests, because she's contractually obligated to never behave like a genuine journalist. But hell, if she'd been at one or both she'd be unable to make vague lies implying there had to have been soooooooo many people there. Intentional ignorance enables all kinds of lies.

Stepping Up the Heat:

How dare the DNC very mildly distort the actions and views of Republicans? Have they no decency? Republicans are allowed to lie because they're doing so in the service of maintaining the privileges of wealth, the means only justify MY ends, dammit.

Why Not Extend Health Benefits to Illegal Immigrants?:

No, I don't find it distasteful to discuss millions of lives as so many numbers on a ledger, why do you ask?

The Future of Finance:

Your best shot is at trying to structure firms that can withstand a crisis, and quickly shutter those that can't. The problem with that is that this was the mandate we gave our regulators before September 2008.

In other words, the standard conservative argument against regulation; we made it meaningless and ineffective, therefore all regulation is meaningless and ineffective. Just let the rich be rich, then maybe they'll give us more crumbs.

Right to Death:

I'm in favor of me having a choice about what occurs in my womb, but other people... ehhh, I dunno. Besides, I can always go to Canada in the worst case scenario.

Parsing the Polls, Part II:

Pretty much every poll that's come out since the speech has shown a quite sizeable bounce, proving me utterly wrong about the speech's appeal. (Which is not surprising, since what would really appeal to me is if Obama had brought a laptop, a copy of STATS and a few Oracle databases worth of data . . . )

Wow... I'd say let's give credit when it's due, but I'm also reminded of Lou Gehrig's quote about how he knew it was time to sit when his teammates were congratulating him for making routine plays.

Patrick Swayze Dead At 57:

He's not Heath Ledger, so it's tragic, not comic. The worth of a man is measured by how Megan felt about him at age 13, after all.

I might take tomorrow off, my snark-fu is weakened by nice days spent lounging in a park.