Sherry Chandler

of the 800 plus people who died in Iraq in January from the NYTimes.

About Kentucky’s Underground Economy. I recommend that you take a look at thesse thoughts from people much more eloquent than I am.

Likewise about the cartoon issue

I will say this. When I venture out into politics, I can get people talking.

Also, long-time readers here may remember that I’m a great fan of BagNews. Well, Huffington Post has snatched him up to blog for Arianna, and I just now found this analysis of a photo of Kentucky’s own Jim Bunning with Sam Alito. I’ll admit to burying my head in the sand over the Alito business. Inevitable but painful.

This image, drenched in fame, nostalgia and Americana, is a perfect closing pitch. Except for one thing. Didn’t the Senator know it was a blue tie day? (

Michael Shaw is also doing some thought-provoking posts about the politics of iconography at the BagNews.

And I just broke my promise to sit down and shut up. Eeep.

I am not much of a thinker but I like to think I’m one, and I suspect that makes me dangerous. Things are complicated and I often have remorse after spouting off. This passage from Juan Cole made me look again at what I’d said yesterday morning:

Of course people are upset when their sacred figures are attacked! But the hurt is magnified many times when the party doing the injuring is first-world, and the injured have a long history of being ruled, oppressed and marginalized. Moreover, most Muslims live in societies with strong traditions of state censorship, so they often assume that if something appears in the press, the government allowed it to do so and is therefore culpable.
…
What Muslims are saying is that depicting Muhammad with a bomb in his turban is insupportable. It is often assumed that in the West we believe in free speech, so there is nothing that is insupportable.

But that simply is not true. Muslims mind caricatures of Muhammad because they view him as the exemplar of all that is good in human beings. Most Western taboos are instead negative ones, not disallowal of attacks on symbols of goodness but the questioning of symbols of evil.

Thus, it is insupportable to say that the Nazi ideology was right and to praise Hitler. In Germany if one took that sort of thing too far one would be breaking the law. Even in France, Bernard Lewis was fined for playing down the Armenian holocaust. It is insupportable to say that slavery was right, and if you proclaimed that in the wrong urban neighborhoods, you could count on a violent response.

I have long been sensitive to the fact that long-oppressed people sometimes have no other power than destructiveness, rioting that is often as destructive to themselves as to their oppressors. We’ve had enough of that kind of riot in this country.

But that fact complicates rather than negates what I said yesterday. Answering extremism with extremism, violence with violence is wrong, and it is wrong to give in to mob rule, no matter how just the cause might be. One thing I’ve learned, reading history (or just watching the Republican party operate), the mob is a favored tool of unscrupulous politicians.

One thing, at least this incident proves that there’s one segment of humanity for whom art still has the power to provoke riots.

[Addendum: This from Josh Marshall:

Following up on post below about the statue of Mohammed that used to be on the front of the Manhattan Appellate Courthouse, it seems there's also a likeness of Mohammed in the decorations on the front of the United States Supreme Court. In addition, there's also a statue of Mohammed inside the building.

Meanwhile Juan Cole points out that most Muslim protests have been peaceful.

A lot of Muslim countries saw no protests at all. In some places, as in Pakistan, they were anemic. The caricature protests are resonating with local politics and anti-imperialism in ways distinctive to each Muslim country. The protests therefore are probably not mostly purely about religion.

I recommend reading Dr. Cole for a run-down of the complexities of the situation.

For myself, this is it. I will now return to my regularly scheduled programming.]

Then there’s the cartoonist’s view.