But the content suggests neither “massive” nor “ring,” in the Don Corelone sense of the word, anyway. First, lets talk weight:

Police seized 41 bags of crack, 230 bags of marijuana, and smaller amounts of heroin and Oxycontin.

That’s referred to as “a decent weekend” here Where Todd P Won’t Be HQ. As for personnel:

Officers cuffed 45 suspects including members of the Bloods, Crips, and Money Over Bitches gangs.

So what’s happened is, NYPD — after a protracted investigation that I’m pretty sure I could’ve handled over the course of an afternoon — has managed to find 45 dime-bag dealers in the Hammel Houses, a public housing complex in The Rockaways. Its a lot of people, in terms of sheer numbers, but not really all that noteworthy considering the Hammel Houses are essentially a miniature city unto themselves:

Hammel Houses on the Rockaway peninsula in Queens consists of 14 buildings, 6 and 7-stories high with 712 apartments housing some 1,994 residents. Completed April 30, 1955, the 14.16-acre complex is bordered by Beach 81st and Beach 86th Streets, Hammels and Rockaway Beach Boulevards.

So 45 small time crooks in a community of nearly 2,000 people… that’s the approximate rate of return police get running drug dogs up and down the hallways of my high school on the west side of Milwaukee. The difference is, as far as I can tell, that there is no shit tabloid equivalent to the Post/Daily News in Milwaukee, and the real newspaper, such as it is, doesn’t have time or inclination to cover non-entities like this.

So why all the fuss here in the Big Apple? The Post/Daily News emphasize this trash because they emphasize every piece of trash that vilifies poor people or can somehow stir the “us vs. them” pot, where “us” equals their readership which informal observation suggests mainly consists of overweight moustached white men, aged 40-70 and “them” equals anyone who lacks the means to buy a paper. The perfect venue for some good old fashioned scare-mongering. The Post is second to none in that department, and, as always, readers swarm to lap that shit up. One comment, from the Post:

Sharpton, where are you, your brothers need you. Why is it your never around when your people need you, but only when whites are involved?

You’ll find similarly ignorant, though less venomous, commentary in the Daily News.

So, to recap: innocuous drug bust –> victory trumpeting by police –> picked up by crummy daily –> hyperbolized –> misinformed readers figure everyone in the projects deals drugs (which is really code for minorities dealing drugs) –> racism lives another day.

IVINS then inquired about SSA [redacted] present state of health and proceeded to state the gross facts regarding a motor vehicle accident (MVA) writer was involved in back in August 2004. SSA [redacted] has never disclosed the facts or circumstances of this accident with IVINS on any occasion, or any other individual at  USAMRIID [U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Diseases, where Ivins worked].

If I’m understanding this correctly, Ivins researched and memorized a dossier of his interrogator before or during the course of questioning (which, I gather, took place over a number of sessions). To what end, one wonders. It seems to me that Ivins was aware, at least to some extent, of his eccentricities. Did he do it just to fuck with them? Did he, perhaps, hold himself up against Kevin Spacey’s ultra-brilliant but severely disturbed character in Seven, who commits a vile, heinous murder in accordance with each of the seven deadly sins? The comparison alone is enough to make the skin crawl.

One wonders what the interrogator must have felt at that moment, having what sounds as though might have been one of the most disturbing moments of his life retold to him by a mad scientist with a God complex.

That’s all fine, unless one of those fingers is an obsessive, depressed sexual deviant who also happened to be a cross-dresser (not that there’s anything wrong with that).

Here’s a short list — culled from his FBI file published by The Smoking Gun — of reasons Dr. Bruce Ivins probably shouldn’t have been allowed to hang around labs with Bacillus anthracis inside. Now, the case could be made that none of these things taken alone is enough to condemn the man’s personality (who doesn’t like to slip on some ladies panties from time to time?), but the volume of Ivins’s peculiar habits is a little much to ignore:

• He had a decades-long “obsession” with the Kappa Kappa Gamma sorority, because he was turned down for a date by one of its members in the early 1960s, while doing his undergraduate work at the University of Cincinnati.
• He “[did] hold grudges” including one against the New York Yankees, for no particular reason, and was a bit of a sports conspiracy theorist, having commented several times that he thought most soccer injuries were “dives” for penalties.
• He had a weird sex life, such as it was — into bondage, blindfolds, etc. and had a stream of pornographic materials and “stained” — nahmean? — underpants flowing through his home, landing in the trash, where they were picked up by FBI agents (I’d hate to be the sucker on that detail).

I’ve been reading Malcolm Gladwell’s “The Tipping Point,” which posits (and I apologize for butchering Gladwell’s work by way of brevity) that a small number of individuals command a great degree of clout when it comes to shaping dialogue, fashion, disseminating information and even spreading disease. The argument applies, though imperfectly, here: the concern should never have been how much Anthrax there was around, or how many people had access to it, but who, precisely, those people were. Obsessive sex-freaks, perhaps, need not apply.

So I was less than surprised to find this blight on the brink of going under. Here’s an article about its long, steady decline.

Can’t say I’ll be sad to see it go. Still, a St. Vincent’s-sized hole (much larger than a St. Vincent-sized one) in the village probably will be noticed, so the fledging hospital is searching for a buyer to keep the lights on. Earlier this week, they thought they had one. Now? Not so.

I get the feeling we’re going to see several rounds of half in/half outs as St. Vincent’s looks for a buyer — it all looks great on paper, until Joe Inspector comes along and finds out how much money you’d have to plow into this albatross to turn it back into the “beacon of Greenwich Village” it was.

This would be one of those things that I’ll invariably click on Huffington Post, knowing full well its going to be somehow awful, gross, disappointing, or wrong. Turns out AlterNet is the true predator here. Either way, it wouldn’t be worth posting at all if it weren’t for this quip (filed under problem number 4, “Your Vagina is Ugly”):

Because your labia are  “unequal,” “elongated,” “large,” “irregular,” “floppy,” and “unfeminine.” (emphasis mine)

I’ve seen a lot of stuff in my day, but I have never, ever come across a vagina that is unfeminine. You could give it a crew cut and it’d still just be a tomboy. Feminity, to me, comes with the package — er, the vagina. And even more to the point — and this is one for those of us attracted to women — have any of you ever looked at a vagina and been all, “Nope, no sir. Too ugly”?

I didn’t think so. Because lets face it: sex is scarce. Not once-a-year scarce or even once-a-month scarce, but I think most of us (certainly most of this blog’s readership), given the means, would elect to get down more frequently, not less. And the likelihood of getting all the way to the part where vaginas come out and calling it off because of — what? aesthetics? — is pretty slim. In my experience.

The solution to this non-problem is a little procedure called labiaplasty, which is a facelift for your privates. Those run around $5,000 for, as one surgeon’s Web site apparently puts it, “the true Playboy aesthetic look.”

Every editorial news outlet seem to conveniently omit themselves from the ‘media’ that is irresponsibly perpetuating her nonsense, thus creating the impression, even in the eyes of her most ardent skeptics, that Sarah Palin is important enough to counter. The cycle for responding to Palin seems to have taken a concrete form:

1. Read the new Palin op-ed/tweet/facebook note/book/etc.

2. Find the sections of the piece where her logical thought process and factual accuracy are at their worst (this is probably the easiest part)

3. Bitch and whine about how her points are factually wrong (obviously), while explaining these fallicies to a group of elite literary folks, deemed such by their willingness to sit through an entire article, paragraph, or sentence. Clearly this is not the demographic that needs converting.

After coming out with her new op-ed this morning, Gawker, the Atlantic, Media Matters, and a host of others have spit out this same formulaic, predictable retort to her inane Bachman-esque psycho-babble.

The weird part is that these pieces tend to take on tones as petty and childlike as Palin’s original argument.  It’s sort of like if a little kid calls you a phooey-head. Your two options are to either explain that they are the one that is a phooey-head, or walk away and ignore them, because they are a little kid. And while it should be shame on Marcus Broccoli and the Washington Post for publishing this in the first place, blame should also be thrown on all these media outlets for making people think that what Sarah Palin says is serious enough to be refuted.

Crashergate Hearing: Secret Service Learned About Breach from Facebook

Countdown to assassination of First Black President begins… NOW.

On the other hand, if you’re a disgruntled, semi-employed Indianan, you needn’t do any of those things and, judging by the crowd in Noblesville, you assume is that nobody else does, either. Here’s what Jordan Harris of the latter camp had to say about his experience waiting for Sarah Palin to sign his copy of Going Rogue at the local Barnes and Noble:

I just spent 9 hours of my day, $40 of my hard earned money on two of your books, and took the whole day off work to watch you jump on a bus and throw a half-heated wave to the crowd you were avoiding.

Well Jordan, there’s your first mistake three mistakes right there. Apparently, a lot of looney toon Repubs were vewy angwy with Ms. Palin yesterday, because she didn’t have time to sit around with them and sign books for a way, way over-capacity crowd, many of whom — like Jordan — waited hours and hours to see her. She had, you see, another stop to make. So they booed a lot, which you can watch here. Then they went online and bitched a lot.

That seems to be the formula these days, for the wingnuts. Its sort of, come to think of it, the same charicature the right wing drew of the left, before we stole all of their power and totally ruined the party. Goes something like this:

1. Get a big crowd.
2. Make lots of noise.
3. Become disgruntled.
4. Go on the internet.

Trouble is, its a little bit difficult to take seriosuly those who apply the same vitriol to, say, the health care debate as they do a missed opportunity to meet the single-handed destructor of the GOP’s national ticket. But whatever, as long as they’re having fun.

It doesn’t.

But if not for that premise, why publish it at all? Is it, indeed, a new phenomenon that bicycles are the mode of transportation du jour for the hip, liberal 18-and-ups? Surely not. Definitely not in northern California. The weather’s too nice. Says so right in the article.

So why — WHY? — would a writer, editor, copy editor, managing editor, or anyone else up the line think we, the supposed intellectual elite, we who follow pop culture like fiends, we who read, we who live and breathe, need another article about bike hipsters?

And what aids the differencing is that few people wear helmets, and everyone is wearing ordinary clothes — none of the sleek and gaudy costumes you see on cyclists pumping through the peninsular hills and whistling down Sand Hill Road to the Caltrain station. They are themselves on wheels.

There is a deeply pleasing randomness about the campus cyclists, as though one morning university officials had assigned a bicycle to every member of the Stanford community, come as you are, without considering for a moment matters of fit — or fitness.

What a rush! Some mouth-breathing yokel in Pennsatucky just dropped a jaw, packed his bags, tightened his belt and went west. Tally-ho!

Except, probably not. Because the guy who read this phone-in on the bikes, the youngs, and the hips probably read yesterday’s piece on the bikes, the youngs, and the hips as well. Probably the one from the day before, too. Might’ve even re-blogged it.

They’re called “newspapers”, or at least they used to be. Now I think its all mostly referred to as “content”. Its a mediocre word that, with alarming regularity, excuses mediocrity in form. It has no value because its supply is unlimited. You can get it for free. You can consume it forever and never be satiated. A steady diet of nothing.

Still, one might assume that news — specifically, the difference between that which is and that which is not — might cross someone’s mind from time to time. But slash the street names, the quip about the weather, and the word “Stanford” and you could cycle this as an article about Brooklyn. Or Portland. Or Seattle. Austin. Chicago. D.C.

Everyone rides the goddamn bike.

So whats your angle, NYT? Who is this for? Was that even a consideration? Is this a money thing? A cheap attempt at marrying your coastal audiences?

Why are you doing this to me?

[New York Times]