Random Saturday Thoughts

It's a blustery, chilly day here in New Orleans.  Yesterday my ensemble included capri pants and flipflops while today it features a sweatshirt and Uggs!  Pepper's out of town doing a speaking engagement, so I figure this is a pretty good time to be worthless, catch up on my blogstalking, and maybe curl up on the couch with Bouie and a good movie.  I can be productive another day.

But, before I sink into a luxurious, hedonistic stupor punctuated with cocktails and barbecued ribs, I'd like to share a few things that have caught my eye lately.

New Orleans experienced an officer-involved shooting following a routine traffic stop a few days ago.  Two cops suffered critical gunshot wounds, the driver of the stopped car (a Mr. Sipps) was injured, and his passenger (also his younger brother) was killed by returned fire.  An internal investigation is, of course, underway with the assistance of federal agents.  The NAACP is demanding that an independent investigation be conducted by federal authorities with no connection to the region.  This might not be such a bad idea, considering the NOPD's poor showing of internal housekeeping since Katrina.  Anyway, in today's Times-Picayune, an attorney for one of the officers was sort of quoted, one would assume to pre-rebut an allegation of racial animus as a motivation for the stop/shooting, as follows (there are no quotation marks, and I'm not really sure what that means in today's journalism -- is it a direct quote, or is it something the "staff writer" would have liked the speaker to have said?):

[Officer] Giroir also wasn't aware of the Sipps' race -- they are black -- because he couldn't see them in the darkness of the early morning hour, he said.

Huh?  Wha. . . ??  Does anyone else think that perhaps Officer Giroir's attorney kinda stepped in it there?  *sigh*

Then, there is this take on racism and presidential wordsmithing:

And there is this:

I'm getting a bad feeling about this election.  And the future.  Maybe the Mayans were right.

Sorry.  Doom and gloom, Part Deux, is over now.

On to the couch!