Can't Stop Making Snow Angels

Today's quote is part of Jim Treacher's post on the continuing fallout from National Public Radio's purging of Juan Williams.

Steve Lindbeck, president and general manager of Alaska station KSKA, expressed similar sentiments. “It struck me as an overreaction,” he told Fox News from Anchorage. “And then I listened online to his comment in context [on the October 18 edition of "The O'Reilly Factor"]…And it didn’t strike me as [being as] difficult as it originally appeared….That’s a problem, where people occasionally don’t look at the context.” Lindbeck said KSKA exceeded its fundraising goals last week, which saw the Williams controversy coinciding with pledge drives at most NPR stations, but added: “I doubt that it was good [for fundraising]….I don’t think it was the most deft handling of the situation.”

No, “deft” is not the first word that springs to mind. [NPR's] Vivian Schiller has thrown herself face-first into an identity politics minefield and can’t stop making snow angels.

Highway 20 Ride

"Highway 20 Ride," Zac Brown Band.

Scratch Hard Enough

Walter Russell Mead, "Blogging Through Georgia,":

The huge dachas of the leadership on the Black Sea coast contrasted with the miserable hovels of the peasants on the road to Tiblisi. The facade of ethnic friendship among the fraternal peoples of the Soviet Union contrasted with feverish, paranoid hatreds festering just under the surface. As in Yugoslavia, I got to know people who were nerving themselves up to massacre their neighbors and drive innocent people out of their homes. I saw how the worst nationalistic paranoias and chauvinisms raged unchecked under Soviet rule — while in the capitalist west most Europeans had left that murderous claptrap behind long ago. Communism, it seemed to me then and still seems to me now, is not the opposite of fascism: it is fascism’s blood-brother, its complementary twin. The two live together in a vicious symbiotic relationship; scratch a Red and you’ll find a Brown. Better yet, scratch either one deeply enough and you will find a Black: someone so caught up in the will to power that crimes and atrocities don’t even count anymore.

Remember When We Built Things, Fast?

Overheard:

"It took 410 days to build the Empire State Building; four years to erect the Golden Gate Bridge. The Pentagon took two years; the Alaska Highway just nine months. These days it takes longer to build an overpass."

Jonah Goldberg