everybody loves jasmine

"Shredding a phone book and throwing the scraps out the window is a pretty effective way to make modern-day ticker tape in huge quantities. The best line we heard all day came as someone was throwing an inordinate amount of paper into the Canyon of Heroes: ‘That’s a lot of shredded paper. He must have something to hide.’ At least, it was funny until we realized that we weren’t all that far from Wall Street, and it was probably true."

"What troubles me about the right at the moment is that they are becoming a pure protest movement. They know what they are against, and they keep describing one issue after another as a Manichean contest - freedom or slavery, good or evil, Muslim or American, libruls and “real Americans” - in ways that do nothing practically to move the country forward. It is pure rhetoric, talk-radio politics, and dangerously contemptuous of its social consequences. When they offer us plans to balance the budget, plans to insure the uninsured, strategies to defeat Islamism, we should listen with all ears. Until then … it’s painfully immature."