I have been to New York, Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington in recent weeks. In those cities, at least, you cannot watch the news, pass street vendors selling T-shirts, or browse magazine racks at the grocery store and not feel good about our next president, his family, and our nation’s future.There is an air of something big, something grand, something electric about to explode upon us. Barack Obama’s visage is everywhere. His relaxed and reassuring – even beatific – smile is omnipresent. So are his irrepressibly cute girls and their together mom. 

Next thing you know, Hugh Hewitt will be taking a bong hit at a George Soros charity event.

(woman squirting water bottle in -21 degree fahrenheit weather)

hat tip: Boing Boing

For some reason, Top Chef decided to rid its judging process of beautiful and knowledgeable Gail Simmons to make way for a braying foetus with thick glasses who lives to bait Graydon Carter. The people who make New York City uninhabitable — media people; people who need to get their JanSport strings tooken — won. Was Graham Norton unavailable?

The trouble with Toby Young is obvious and oughtn’t be belabored. He chews the scenery; adds nothing to an understanding of a meal; and isn’t funny. A bad meal isn’t a weapon of mass destruction. Watching him sully Top Chef makes it clear that heaven would be a place where Toby Young is hit by a car for all of eternity.

If it makes Spencer feel any better, the lovely Ms. Simmons has not left the show for good. She got married during production and went on leave.

Cornyn: I just want to propose a hypothetical for you, lets say that as Attorney General you find out there are terrorists who have access to chemical, biological, or nuclear weapons and that you have a detainee who is in possession of information that if disclose would prevent those weapons from being detonated in the United States and thousands, maybe tens of thousands, of innocent people being killed. You would still refuse to condone aggressive interrogation techniques like waterboarding which, under my hypothetical, would save tens of thousands of lives?

Holder replies that waterboarding is not the only interrogation technique. Hilarity ensues:

Cornyn: Assume that it was.

HOLDER: I think your hypothetical assumes a premise that I’m not willing to concede.

CORNYN: I know you don’t like my hypothetical.

HOLDER: No, the hypothetical’s fine; the premise that underlies it I’m not willing to accept, and that is that waterboarding is the only way that I could get that information from those people.

CORNYN: Assume that it was.

HOLDER: Given the knowledge that I have about other techniques and what I’ve heard from retired admirals and generals and FBI agents, there are other ways in a timely fashion that you can get information out of people that is accurate and will produce useable intelligence. And so it’s hard for me to accept or to answer your hypothetical without accepting your premise. And in fact, I don’t think I can do that.

Words do not do this exchange justice. You simply must watch it for yourself:

Highlight of the video: everyone in the chamber laughs after Cornyn asks, for a second time, that Holder except his hypothetical that waterboarding is the only interrogation technique that could save lives in a ticking time bomb scenario. 

They’re not laughing with you Senator. They’re laughing at you.

The most tempting and most flawed argument suggests that drug legalization can free us from drug violence. Drug violence, we are told, is mostly the result of the legal ban on drugs. Eliminate the ban, and drug prices plummet. The financial incentive for violence vanishes. A legal trade in narcotics brings daylight to a black market. As an additional benefit, it eliminates the need to incarcerate so many drug criminals.

This argument is at least prima facie credible. Laws make criminals and illegal markets attract lawlessness. Disputes in the drug trade are settled through violent, extra-legal means because there exists no legitimate authority to enforce drug contracts, set industry standards or guarantee fair business practices in drug deals. Transactions are, as a rule, designed to be untraceable.

But these facts, which bolster the legalizers’ argument, can also become very inconvenient for them in a way they fail to address. For the realities of the black market are timeless. They have nothing to do with illegal drugs per se, and they will persist if drugs are legalized. The black market in drugs is not and has never been the ultimate rationale behind drug violence, any more than the black market in alcohol was the cause of violence during Prohibition. 

The cause of criminal violence is not drugs or alcohol but rather criminals. To believe otherwise is to expect every drug dealer in America to give up and apply for a job at McDonald’s or WalMart the day legalization occurs. Every society contains a sizable element whose members refuse to make an honest living under any circumstances. The legalization of drugs will not change this large-scale reality of human behavior. 

Lost in David’s argument are the thousands of drug users–not large-scale dealers–who clog our nation’s courts and prison systems.  These are not, for the most part, violent offenders, yet their lives are ruined after a cop pulls a stop-and-frisk and catches them with a few grams of crack. 

Think the job market is tough right now? Just try applying for a job at even the local Arby’s with a rap sheet.

This is the best distinguished Harvard Law Professor Noah Feldman could come up with:

What may American military and law enforcement do to extract information from terrorists, especially in a “ticking time-bomb” case?

Come! On! Really?! Isn’t it common wisdom at this point that the scenario imagined by the ticking time bomb thought experiment virtually never occurs in real life? It would be laughable that something so wildly implausible keeps getting dredged up by America’s purported “top minds” were it not the fact that it has been used to justify acts of evil at Abu Ghraib, at Guantanamo, and at other U.S. military prisons. 

Seems Feldman got a little too excited about the 4-hour series premier of 24 and was jerking off to Jack while writing his question. 

It’s a bit belated I know, but I still can’t get over how incredible it was that all passengers survived the horrific water landing in the Hudson. What most blows my mind is that two equally implausible events–one which might have caused unimaginable catastrophe (birds simultaneously flying into both engines) and another that preempted the catastrophe (a seasoned pilot crash-landing his bird perfectly, an unbelievably capable flight crew preparing the cabin for landing and evacuation, an instantaneous and overwhelming coordinated response which prevented sure death through hypothermia)–converged today by an act of God and gave 155 fathers and mothers, husbands and wives, brothers and sisters, the greatest miracle of all. The gift of life. 

Miracles

by Walt Whitman

Why, who makes much of a miracle? 

As to me I know of nothing else but miracles, 
Whether I walk the streets of Manhattan, 
Or dart my sight over the roofs of houses toward the sky, 
Or wade with naked feet along the beach just in the edge of the water, 
Or stand under trees in the woods, 
Or talk by day with any one I love, or sleep in the bed at night 
with any one I love, 
Or sit at table at dinner with the rest, 
Or look at strangers opposite me riding in the car, 
Or watch honey-bees busy around the hive of a summer forenoon, 
Or animals feeding in the fields, 
Or birds, or the wonderfulness of insects in the air, 
Or the wonderfulness of the sundown, or of stars shining so quiet 
and bright, 
Or the exquisite delicate thin curve of the new moon in spring; 
These with the rest, one and all, are to me miracles, 
The whole referring, yet each distinct and in its place. 

To me every hour of the light and dark is a miracle, 
Every cubic inch of space is a miracle, 
Every square yard of the surface of the earth is spread with the same, 
Every foot of the interior swarms with the same. 
To me the sea is a continual miracle, 
The fishes that swim–the rocks–the motion of the waves–the 
ships with men in them, 
What stranger miracles are there?

So, how long do you think it will be before this appears on MSNBC’s Lock Up? The Daily Mail reports:

A toy helicopter is believed to have been used in an attempt to smuggle drugs into a prison.

Guards at Elmley Prison in Sheerness, Kent, spotted the remote control miniature aircraft flying over the walls of the jail and heading for the accommodation blocks one night after it was picked up by CCTV cameras.

It had a small load beneath the fuselage, thought to contain drugs.

The toy or its cargo was not found.