Becoming Elizabeth Warren

In The Washington Spectator, Myra MacPherson reviews Warren's book:

It is hard to remain dry-eyed reading Elizabeth Warren’s description of the pivotal moment that she considers the day she grew up. She was 12, watching her mother rubbing tissue over a tear-drenched face, then stuffing herself into the only good dress she had, struggling to get the dress “across her belly, and pulled down over her hips.” As she tugged and pulled to close the zipper, “tears dropped off her chin and onto the floor.”

She asked her daughter, “How do I look? Is the dress too tight?” Elizabeth looked at a dress ready to burst, the ripples and rolls gathering the material. “You look great,” she said. “Really.”

Her mother was off to save the family’s small house. After a heart attack, Elizabeth’s father had lost his job selling carpets at Sears, Roebuck and the family car had already been repossessed. That day, Elizabeth’s mother applied for and got a minimum-wage job answering phones at Sears, Roebuck.

“That was the moment I crossed the threshold,” Warren wrote. “I wasn’t a little girl anymore”...

Who is really "standing up for the injured" on city streets?

Bay Area Global Health Film Festival

As of last night, the Bay Guardian has stopped accepting comments to its politics blog:

There’s a tipping point between constructive criticism and destructive disparagement, and when the latter category is layered with an onslaught of spam from spellcasters, solicitors, and scammers---well, those scales have now tipped for us at the Bay Guardian. We’ve decided to indefinitely suspend comments on SFBG.com.

That's a problem I also have, though the ugly, anonymous comments I get are usually from supporters of the city's bike movement. All the Guardian has to do is monitor the comments and delete the spam and the ugly stuff, which, in my experience, is always anonymous. 

My substantive, not anonymous, comment to a subject that's supposedly of interest to the folks who wrote the article I was commenting on, was dumped with the rest. 

My message this morning to Steve Jones, the editor of the Guardian:

Steve:

Funny but your decision to shut down comments was made shortly after I posted a comment that linked both the abstract and the full text of that UC study you and the rest of the city's media have been trying to ignore. Just a coincidence, right? 

My comment was made to an article by representatives of UC Medical Center and SF General about "how all-too-common accidents can permanently injure pedestrians and bicyclists."

That study by their colleagues shows that the city has been radically under-counting cycling accidents by ignoring a lot of those injury accidents treated at SF General Hospital, the city's primary trauma center. The study shows that riding a bike in San Francisco is a lot more dangerous than the Guardian and the Bicycle Coalition have been telling us---and that "cyclist-only" accidents that don't involve cars are the most under-reported and just as serious as "auto-versus-bicycle" accidents.

"But the anonymity that Guardian commenters enjoy on our current website has poisoned the well and rendered this forum a poor place for respectful public debate." 

Like all my comments, my comment was not made anonymously, by the way. Why not just ban anonymous comments?

Regards,

Rob Anderson

Islamic fascists behead American

From today's NY Times (In Retaking of Iraqi Dam, Evidence of American Impact):

Muhammad Karim, one of the soldiers, said that when they arrived at the first abandoned militant checkpoint, they discovered a woman, naked and bound, who had been repeatedly raped. Farther into the neighborhood, the Iraqi forces discovered another woman in the same state...Stories of women kidnapped by the militants have filtered through various minority communities, but Mr. Karim’s firsthand account, corroborated by colleagues interviewed separately, seemed to confirm the troubling rumors.

President Obama should accept the challenge by increasing the air attacks on ISIS whenever that can be done without civilian casualties. Bring on the drones!

Since the executioner had a British accent, Brits are now talking about how they are allowing the export of Jihadists.

Christopher Hitchens: "The battle will go on for the rest of our lives. Those who plan our destruction know what they want, and they are prepared to kill and die for it."