(Ahem)
>> Tuesday, January 31
"In politics, looks matter."
-Ezra Klein
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Please check in with eRobin, the hardest-working blogger in Blogostan, today, and learn about the Fitzgerald Amendment, the Coalition for Voting Integrity, and what you can do to help. Because, difficult as it may be to believe, sometimes snark is just not enough.
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Burke and Hobbes and...
"Conservative" Philosophers in the News:
• Debbie Schlussel (link via TBogg; please do not click the first one if you suffer from heart disease, tender digestion, are pregnant or nursing or nursing a hangover, or have a mouthful of liquid and a monitor or keyboard nearby) gets tricked into reading a NY Times science feature because the phrase "Ear Wax" appears in the headline, and concludes that Europeans couldn't have stolen the Americas from Native Americans--whom she refers to as "Native" Americans--because they came from Asia.
I know, I know. The idea is so incredibly stupid it's practically impossible to convey it in words. Just for the hell of it I tried without success putting it in grunts, wacking it out on the seat of my chair with a yardstick, and finally ramming it directly into my skull via a brick wall. Nothing worked. This single post may wind up requiring us to scrap the totality of Post-War linguistic theory.
There's much humor, if you can stand it, to be gleaned from her repeated defense that saying:
So whom did THEY steal the land from? Somebody else, obviously.
doesn't mean she's claiming there was somebody else. But for me the real howler sorta got lost in the shuffle:
But the paper glosses over the most important finding. The study found that Europeans and Africans tend to have wet ear wax, sweat more, and have more under arm body odor than Asians, who have dry ear wax and don't sweat much. But the study also found that "Native" Americans have dry ear wax and body odor similar to Asians, proving they migrated here from Asia.
The paper glosses over the important point that this is further proof of what has been an accepted explanation for at least a century, except in parts of Utah! Meanwhile, Debs has sorta glossed over her own collision with Aristotelian logic (he rides on blithely, she suffers a massive head wound, which fortunately in her case is a trifling matter): the Asian/Native American ear wax connection doesn't prove anything whatever about settlement of the New World; the two could be unrelated, a point which is actually made in the article, though not overtly because, well, it was of necessity written for the literate.
And these are the people who want to tell us how to teach science.
• Dennis Prager explains that the Palestinian elections "reveal more about the left than about Palestine", because, you know, he always knew the Palestinians were bloodthirsty Muslims who won't rest until Israel is destroyed, but this business about the Left equivocating around the point caught him by surprise.
This is the spot where I'd normally lead into a quote roughly outlining Dennis' thesis, but there doesn't seem to be one. He seems actually to believe that the elections do reveal more about the Palestinians than about the Left. Hell, let's just cut to the cognitive dissonance:
So the Palestinian vote reveals the falsity of the worldwide Left's view of the Palestinians as committed to peace. It likewise reveals the falsity of the Left's belief that Palestinian terror is supported by a small minority of the Palestinian population.
That is one reason why the Bush doctrine -- we need to spread democracy everywhere possible, including, or even especially, in the Arab world -- is so valid. You cannot deal with any problem in life -- from the most personal to the most macro -- by engaging in wishful thinking and denying reality.
I gotta tell ya, when I got through that second paragraph I immediately went back and reread Schlussel just to bask in her superior reasoning skills for a moment.
It seems that Den's on the cutting edge of a new wingnut talking point regarding Hammas, namely that the elections prove the Bush doctrine is working; now, whenever there are democratic elections in the Middle East we'll know from the results whether we need to kill them all or not. But my real reason for bringing up the soon-to-be-available Mr. Prager was his handy-dandy guide to the beliefs of one Norbizness:
On just about every issue, the Left lives in a childlike fantasy realm. Their views are expressions of what they wish for, not what actually is.
Here is a small sample:
-- Support for terror represents a tiny sliver of the Muslim world.
-- All cultures are essentially morally equivalent.
-- The United Nations is a wonderful institution and the best hope of mankind.
-- Men and women are basically the same.
-- It makes no difference whether children are raised by a loving man and woman or by two loving parents of the same sex.
-- Violent criminals in our society are pushed into crime by socioeconomic circumstances, not because of their own flawed characters and values.
-- War is not the answer.
The list of leftist positions based on a rejection of reality is as long as a list of leftist positions.
War is the answer, Mr. Left. How many more missions do we have to accomplish before you just fucking admit it? Read more...
WaPoop
>> Monday, January 30
Jim VandeHei, "Blogs Attack From Left as Democrats Reach for Center"
Democrats are getting an early glimpse of an intraparty rift that could complicate efforts to win back the White House: fiery liberals raising their voices on Web sites and in interest groups vs. elected officials trying to appeal to a much broader audience.
Hey, Jim, I got an early glimpse of that intraparty rift, too. It was called the year 1951. What's up next for you, "Spring Training Crowds Suggest Some Fans Don't Like the Yankees"?
These activists -- spearheaded by battle-ready bloggers and making their influence felt through relentless e-mail campaigns -- have denounced what they regard as a flaccid Democratic response to the Supreme Court fight, President Bush's upcoming State of the Union address and the Iraq war. In every case, they have portrayed party leaders as gutless sellouts.
Imagine that.
First, liberal Web logs went after Democrats for selecting Virginia Gov. Timothy M. Kaine to deliver the response to Bush's speech next Tuesday. Kaine's political sins: He was too willing to drape his candidacy in references to religion and too unwilling to speak out aggressively against Bush on the Iraq war. Kaine has been lauded by party officials for finding a victory formula in Bush country by running on faith, values and fiscal discipline.
Because remember, Democrats, the Republicans have already shown the intraparty rift which will complicate efforts to retain control of the White House with that Harriet Meiers business. Or Schiavo. Sheesh, I thought VandeHei would never shut up about it, whichever one it was.
Really, now: why is this a story? Is there a prize out there somewhere for the One Millionth Rehash of the Lefties Obstruct Democratic Electoral Success story? 'Cause I'm not sure why anyone got lathered up over Tim Kaine, or who it was, for that matter, but I assume they were voicing their own opinions. As for Alito, I'd like to hear from someone who doesn't regard the Democratic response as flaccid, which by the way is pronounced "flak' sid", not "flassid". Sorry, pet peeve.
That leaves us with Iraq, where, if I understand correctly, moving to the right will not actually connect with some untouched central core of the poll-responding populace.
"The bloggers and online donors represent an important resource for the party, but they are not representative of the majority you need to win elections," said Steve Elmendorf, a Democratic lobbyist who advised Kerry's 2004 presidential campaign. "The trick will be to harness their energy and their money without looking like you are a captive of the activist left."
Man, that is what I love about the Democratic party. It's the real party of opportunity, the only one where a Kerry advisor can still lecture the country on what it takes to win elections.
The blogs-vs.-establishment fight represents the latest version of a familiar Democratic dispute. It boils down to how much national candidates should compromise on what are considered core Democratic values -- such as abortion rights, gun control and opposition to conservative judges -- to win national elections.
Either I need a shower or VandeHei just plopped an unrefrigerated week-old mackerel in the middle of page six. I've got no problem with calling "abortion rights" a core Democratic value, excepting that the battle is more properly over reproductive rights, which itself grows out of the actual core value of privacy, or placing personal liberty over state intrusion. But gun control? Is gun control properly a core Democratic value? And "opposition to conservative judges" just convinces me that VandeHei was typing so fast he'd forgotten how the sentence began.
[Blah blah, Web emerges as powerful political force, blah blah Howard Dean.]
The closest historic parallel would be the talk-radio phenomenon of the early 1980s, when conservatives -- like liberals now -- felt powerless and certain they did not have a way to voice their views because the mainstream media and many of their own leaders considered them out of touch. Through talk radio, often aired in rural parts of the country on the AM dial, conservatives pushed the party to the right on social issues and tax cuts
Or, The Sketch Book of Rip Van VandeHei. If you want to rewrite history it's generally best to choose a period the majority of your readers have no knowledge of. Ronald Reagan was president in the 80s, Jim; he's the guy they renamed one of your airports for. The Press was already behaving like a good lapdog, and the Moral Majority was all the rage. "Conservatives" didn't feel powerless; they played powerless on the radio, on teevee, and in the papers, something they'd been doing at least since Nixon's "Silent Majority" speech. And it's difficult to understand how one is out of touch on abortion rights, the war in Iraq, and, for that matter, gun control when one holds essentially the same positions as the majority of Americans. But I guess that's why I don't write analysis for the Post. Read more...
Mailbag
1) Name one battle we lost in the Vietnam war?
You mean after the major influx of US combat troops? Tan Canh.
It's something of a trick question, of course, one that ignores the reality of the conflict and treats war as a very deadly form of football decided by a scorekeeper. Vietnam was not the Eastern front of WWII. There weren't many pitched battles; the Viet Minh had no interest in conquering territory or slugging it out with a superior foe with absolute air superiority. War rarely if ever begins with a level playing field and equal objectives. Too bad we refuse to learn that lesson.
US forces fought extremely well in Vietnam. They were poorly commanded, and their mission was a huge mistake. If you intend to blame The Media for the US defeat then you first need to defend how three Administrations, and a succession of military commanders, mishandled the war for the sake of positive press.
2) Why did it take until 1975 for North Vietnam to conquer South Vietnam when the U.S. had pulled its troops in 1973?
One million ARVN troops, with modern equipment. They fell rather quickly, actually. The North invaded in March '75; Vietnam was officially unified on July 2.
3) Why are pictures of John Kerry and Jane Fonda hanging in Vietnamese war museums?
If you intend to come to this blog and slag off men who served honorably in Vietnam, you send us your verifiable service record first. For starters.
4) Why do records of the former USSR talk about paying agitators within the US peace movement?
Why did the FBI? Why do the Israelis spy on us? Let me clue you to something: anybody who took part in a large anti-war demonstration knew who those people were. There wasn't a massive Communist attack after the war ended. Your fellow citizens protested the war because they were against it, not because they were the dupes of some J. Edgar Hoover fantasy that didn't involve women's garments.
5) Why did the US media refer to battles such as the Tet Offensive as defeats when they were overwhelming US military victories?
Citation? Funny, I was fifteen years old, and I knew the outcome of Tet at the time.
But the "overwhelming victory" thing is another body-count canard. Tet clearly demonstrated that the continual drumbeat of light at the end of the tunnel was just the latest in a series of official lies about imminent victory dating to 1962, when Paul Harkins said it would be over in six months to a year. The Tet Offensive ended the so-called Viet Cong as an effective fighting force, but the ARVN was still plenty capable. It's the difference between "tactics" and "strategy", an effective understanding of which is required for discussion.
Happy Birthday
>> Sunday, January 29
William Claude Dukenfield
January 29, 1880--December 25, 1946
My favorite Fields story is said to be apocryphal, but that doesn't stop us at BLTR. As Fields lay dying, fading in and out of consciousness, he opened his eyes and croaked to his gathered friends, "The little newsies...sole support of their mothers...working in all sorts of weather...I'd like to do something for them."
"That's very nice, Bill," replied one, and Fields closed his eyes and sank back into his pillow. All was quiet for a moment, til he opened his eyes again and said, "On second thought, fuck 'em."
What, That Old War Again?
Consider this the quick dump of a pilot before Sweeps Month starts Wednesday. I was struck with the idea that once I'd reached the fifth paragraph or 30 minute mark writing a reply on someone else's blog it may be time to post it on my own. And so it was as Daily Pepper covers the Joel Stein tsimmis.
In case you missed it, a quick rundown: Stein writes an opinion column in the LA Times in which he says he doesn't support the troops, because he's against the war; while he's got no problem with the war's supporters supporting the troops, for opponents it's "one of the wussiest positions the pacifists have ever taken..." Mount St. Malkins immediately erupts, assuming we can distinguish between activity and quiescence in that quarter. In a freak occurance, Al Franken and Atrios also take offense.
I happened to have read the thing the day it was published. It was strained, lazy, and to top it off, unfunny. As Pepper says, the VH-1 regular should stick to covering the Dancing With the Stars Master P controversy. Or I take her word for it, anyway, since I'm not quite sure what it is.
Still, Stein has a point. He mostly missed it himself, and he compounded the whiff by displaying his ignorance on a couple of levels. And I can't quite understand why Malkins would take offense rather than trumpet the thing, since Stein seems to be saying exactly what she/they imagine to be the case, but I leave that to her/them. Maybe there was some concern that newer readers thought she/they possess actual reading comprehension.
But as for Stein: "I support the troops but I don't support the war" is a fertile ground for some digging, but he just broadcasts a couple handfuls of seed in a strong breeze. In the first couple hundred words he's equated supporting the troops with bumperstickers and magnetic yellow ribbons, before equating opposition to the war with pacifism. Those are the sort of blasé mistakes that get you invited back to VH-1 for another round of ridiculing the crap commerical culture of your youth, and they might slide as a feature piece somewhere, assuming someone could have applied some genuine humor to the thing. But they shouldn't qualify as an Op-Ed piece in a major metropolitan daily, though god knows it hardly sinks below what else actually does these days.
There's no excuse for Stein not understanding he was shortchanging everyone he wrote about; this is the sorry state of editorial opinion writing in the heyday of Truthiness. Would that the Malkins take a lesson. But what's more interesting, I think, is the casual repetition of history as Dimly Remembered High School Filmstrip:
It's as if the one lesson they [the "pacifists"] took away from Vietnam wasn't to avoid foreign conflicts with no pressing national interest but to remember to throw a parade afterward.
or:
I'm not advocating that we spit on returning veterans like they did after the Vietnam War, but we shouldn't be celebrating people for doing something we don't think was a good idea.
The spitting thing is just pure laziness; that sorry wad of phlegm has been as thoroughly debunked as is theoretically possible. And just the tiniest amount of interest in what the actual troops think about Iraq--here's a hint, Joel: it's roughly as diverse as the general population back home--might have served to open his eyes and maybe even shut his mouth. But so help me, I'm never going to get over the sheer laziness of so many of Stein's contemporaries when it comes to Vietnam. From the "Why are we still talking about that after thirty years?" in blog comments to the idea that an evil cabal of smelly hippies and the Librul Media kept us from winning, the astonishing lack of concern with one's own history, the easy dismissal of the war as something as relevant today as bell-bottoms and rotary phones, the sheer self-indulgence of, not just willful ignorance, but gleefully willful ignorance is just jaw-dropping. What Stein seems to "know" about Vietnam is largely a product of how the war's defenders marketed our defeat a decade after the fact. Which hardly explains his ignorance, since he obviously knows the war was controversial. How is it you come to trust what you're told?
The reason many people opposing the war now see fit to acknowledge their support for the troops is precisely the sort of historical rewrite Stein can't distinguish from the truth. It's precisely because of that spitting story. It's precisely because so many people are so lazy about facts and so easily hoodwinked by urban legends and bullshit on the LA Times editorial pages. You know, there are several people still alive today who lived through Vietnam, Joel. Maybe you could ask them. I think you'd probably find there's a lot more pissed off about the treatment they and their buddies received from the government during and after their service than you'll find pissed off because they didn't get to march through Manhattan. The only guys I know who ever hewed to that line were gung-ho officers and careerist noncoms. Of course their arguments found your ear somehow, while the guys who handled the Agent Orange never got the chance.
And just one more question, Joel. If you think only the war's supporters should display their support for the troops, how is it you now blame the anti-war faction for the lack of parades back then?
This might bring us to the case of one Dough E. Pantload and his vast knowledge of what some other guy told him about Sacco and Vanzetti. But then we already know why Jonah trusts what he's been told. Read more...
God Help Us, The Indiana Legislature Used To Meet Only Every Other Year
>> Saturday, January 28
Okay, the big legislative news in what is supposed to be Indiana's biennial short session, is Governor Mitch "Honorary CEO of Munchkinland" Daniels' headlong rush to gain the statutory right to sell off any piece of state property a private concern covets, under the guise of approving the really, really great deal he got by peddling our childrens' and grandchildrens' birthrights to the highest bidder for ten years worth of roadbuilding. (A Spanish-Australian consortium won the Double Secret bidding for a 75-year lease on the Indiana Toll Road for $3.8 billion, subject to legislative approval. But somehow that deal can't be struck without a bill handing the Guv the right to sell off anything related to transportation, including Indiana's two harbors and its airports, all without further legislative review.)
More about that next week, but I thought you might enjoy a taste of what Indiana's citizen legislators get up to when they're on a tight schedule:
DIGEST OF HB1172 (Updated January 26, 2006 1:51 pm - DI 14)
Information on pain and anesthetic for a fetus. Provides that informed consent to an abortion includes the requirement that a physician inform a pregnant woman that: (1) a fetus may feel pain; (2) an anesthetic or other painkilling medication may be provided during an abortion to a fetus with a probable gestational age of at least 20 weeks; and (3) insurance may or may not cover the service. Provides further that notice must be given in writing at least 18 hours before an abortion concerning the availability of adoptions, physical risks to the woman in having an abortion, and that human life begins when a human ovum is fertilized by a human sperm.
Yes, indeed, metaphysical certitude about When Life Begins from the gang that can't decide what time it is.
DIGEST OF HB 1247 (Updated January 26, 2006 1:46 pm - DI 14)
Wrongful death or injury of a child. Specifies that the law concerning the wrongful death or injury of a child applies to a fetus that has attained viability. Provides that a wrongful death action may not be maintained against a person for: (1) conduct relating to an abortion if the physician in good faith medical judgment believed that the consent of the woman was express or implied; or (2) a lawful medical treatment. Provides that a wrongful death action may not be maintained against a woman for behavior or conduct with respect to her fetus.
I haven't read the relevant statutes, but I'm pretty sure this means a woman who's five months pregnant can walk unbidden up my driveway with the intention of converting me to Jesus, trip over a tree branch her Savior caused to fall thirty seconds earlier, and sue me for the wrongful death of her "child" if she miscarries. And I suppose she could also do so to an amusement park operator after she willingly boards a roller coaster. But she couldn't be sued for downing a fifth of Jim Beam every night.
And yes, it also occurs to me (again, absent any actual knowledge) that she'd also be able to sue the water company if there's anything coming out the tap that might cause birth defects, or any of the pollution manufacturers in this state or whichever way the winds blows. That's not only cold comfort, I expect it's also a loophole that'll close faster'n a legislator's wallet when the per diem's been used up.
I will be erecting "No Access to Pregnant Women" signs on the edge of my property if the second one becomes law, but I'm mostly interested in the first. Despite our legislators' abiding concerns for the rights of Blastocyst-Americans, there's a curious refusal to make the law consistent. They're horrified that a fetus feels pain, for example, but where's the bill requiring anesthesia in infant surgeries, including circumcision (might get some religious objections to that one)? Or for that matter the sorely needed requirement that parents seek medical attention for minors regardless of the parents' religious beliefs (in Indiana, faith healing is an acceptable substitute for, say, going to a hospital when your child's temperature is 108º)? How about the one classifying all miscarriages as homicides? We can go on like this for hours. Hoosiers--trust me on this one--are intellectually overmatched by the concept of the Four Way Stop. T-bone a pregnant woman who runs a stop sign, find yourself up on vehicular manslaughter charges when she miscarries. Time to invest in a videotape system for the dashboard.
This is part and parcel of our having allowed, for thirty years, the anti-rights crowd to simply babble about their superior moral beliefs, rather than demanding answers to the tough questions. I was astonished last Sunday to come across a spokeswoman for National Right to Life rejecting the idea that the Court overturning Roe meant an end to safe and legal abortion. "It would return the issue to the states, where it belongs," she said. This, now that they're faced with the possibility of losing the issue as a national cash cow, is the new talking point. "Yes, my morally-superior belief is that abortion is murder, but I've always felt that's a matter to be decided along jurisdictional boundaries largely established in 18th century England." Y'know, it's one thing to be the party that opposes deficit spending until it's within your power to balance the budget, and you're more than welcome to equate criticism of military action with treason except when Bill Clinton is commander-in-chief, but when your moral values go on the auction block the minute it looks like you'll have to answer for them, that's something else again. Read more...
Happy Birthday
>> Friday, January 27
Charles Lutwidge Dodgson
January 27, 1832--January 14, 1898
Wish I'd Said That, Part MMDCCXLVI
>> Thursday, January 26
The Editors on Howellapalooza:
When one is an Elder Statesman of the American media, and when one can’t be bothered to look into the particular details of some issue, it is never a bad idea to fall back on Ecclesiastes, and remind the readers - in a tone as wise and weary as you can muster - that the seasons change and the winds blow now this way, now that, turn turn turn, but there is nothing new under the Sun. As there was a time of saying Clinton was a coke-dealing Commie and a serial rapist, now comes the time of saying that George W. Bush shouldn’t run secret torture prisons. Men of Principle lament both of these equally, for they are just two sides of the same lamentable coin. Vanity of vanity, all of it. Can’t we just play nice?
Happy Birthday Coincidence
Stéphane Grappelli Jan 26, 1908--Dec. 1, 1997
UPDATE: I forgot to mention that when he and Django were reuinted in New York after the War, they opened for Duke Ellington. Sheesh, and I thought Elvis Costello/Rockpile/Mink Deville was an untoppable bill.
Taking One Six For The Team
I've been checking in on Wonkette for the past week wondering when our friend Alex Pareene was going to turn up for his new gig, which meant that yesterday I ran into guest blogger Glenn Reynolds, and this:
Over at my own blog, I do podcasts, along with my wife, who’s a blogger, too. We’ve got an interview with Norah Vincent, author of Self Made Man: One Woman’s Journey into Manhood and Back. I thought it was pretty interesting.
Undaunted by dial-up, I listened to the whole thing. And it was pretty interesting. Especially Glenn's contributions, which I'll highlight right off the bat, in case you lack my
• "I seem to remember a science fiction story where everybody had to spend some time in the opposite gender."
• "That's Scott Adams' point in one of his Dilbert books."
• "It kind of reminds me of the scene in the old teevee shows from the 60s where some well-intentioned but ignorant white guy would sit a black guy down and ask him, "What's it like to be black?"
• "But of course we had Black Like Me," which is sort of a predecessor to your book..."
The link to the podcast is in the Wonkette post, and while I don't really wish it on anybody else, the more demented among you might want to listen to it long enough to hear Mrs. Insty, "Dr. Helen", as she's styled, speak. I've noted before than on occasion my wife will come home and speak to me as to a room full of fifteen-year-olds; Dr. Helen has the same overlapping professional demeanor.
(I like to think I'm a fair man, so I'm not gonna mention the ever-lengthening chain of right-wing pundits who use "Doctor" like it's their given name, despite having a Ph.D. in Whatever. Dr. Laura, Dr. Mike Adams, Dr. Judith Reisman, Dr. Duane Gish, all bandy the thing about regardless of subject. Dr. Helen is the only psychologist in the bunch, and I think she may simply believe she's practicing all the time.)
The really interesting part of the show was the unrelenting tension between the two women, as Dr. Helen kept driving the "poor mistreated men" theme beyond the point where Norah was probably comfortable about it. Of course, Norah's trying to sell a book, and the libertarian feminism hater is her prime, if not her only, audience. But this conflicted with the sales pitch that the book is her insights based on her little charade, free of any preconceived notions. She had to do a couple of backbends to agree with everything Dr. Helen put to her, but it all turned out the way Ozzy and Harriet would have liked it, assuming you ignore what their real homelife was like.
Still, the contradictions are obvious. I stand by my offer of a bowl-off to convince me that Norah spent eight months on the lanes, and let's just say I retain a healthy skepticism about the whole enterprise otherwise. But the other mask--that this is a meditation based on experience and not a rehash of libertarian anti-feminist talking points targeted at those easily impressed by anything they agree with--slips repeatedly.
NORAH, on her dates with women: I could feel them deferring to me, you know, wanting me to take control...they wanted to lean on me and have the sort of traditional male virtues of stoicism and control.
DR. HELEN: So women want somebody who looks like a guy but acts like a woman?
NORAH: See, that's what I went in thinking, but I think that's not the case...there are a lot of women, it surprised me to find out how many, many do appreciate these male virtues and want a manly man.
Come now. How long have we been hearing that? "But women really want a manly man" is a response to Feminism as old as Feminism. This is the first time our lesbian libertarian contrarian ran into the concept?
Oh, maybe not. Later:
There was an upside to being a [stay-at-home] woman--and that's still basically true. I know a lot of women who depend on their husbands to make the money, their husbands bear all the pressure of having to get up at 5 in the morning and do half the baby work, but also go to the office in the morning and write a legal brief, and I feel as thought it's gotta be legitimate to say, hey, you know, being the guy who is the safety net for the entire family, who has to go out there and perform no questions asked, and you can't show weakness, you can't show need, that's really hard, and it should be okay to complain about that, to say, hey, listen to me for once.
So she knows a lot of women who depend on the "traditional" male, but she was surprised to find out they existed when "Ned" proved insufficiently butch. Did I miss something?
Or there's this:
DR. HELEN: Why do you think women have such a hard time seeing men just as human?
NORAH: Well, I think there's a lot of baggage left over from feminism. I think that we've all had our Feminism 101 course, Women's Studies 101, and so we have these notions about the Patriarchy.
Then:
It's not an anti-feminist book. It assumes everything from Betty Friedan to Naomi Wolf has been absorbed into the culture.
So it's about how we've assimilated the lessons of Feminism 101, which now sit like used motor oil on the pure spring water of the culture?
Even granting that everything reported in the book happened exactly as she says it did, this still smells like scam. Millions of people have actually lived the life she put on, and if there's some insight here that comes from chromosomal differences rather than political slant I'm still waiting to hear it. My college years coincide with the rise of feminism. Women's Studies were an established major program, Our Bodies, Ourselves and The Female Eunuch were on every bookshelf. I don't recall any personal relationships with women being anything other than personal. Dating and relationships weren't political acts.
I wouldn't dispute that Vincent appreciates that the lessons of everyone from Betty Friedan to Naomi Wolf are important, and far be it from me to deny her the opportunity to discuss how successfully their effect on the culture. I doubt she'd have found much agreement from Dr. Helen if it hadn't been such a gosh-all festival of perfect accord, and that amounts to pandering on her part, if not theirs too. Maybe now she needs to take a look at some of "those old teevee shows from the 60s" to remind herself of the Traditional Male Attitudes that are now so oppressed. The real shows, I mean, not the ones bouncing around in that fantasyland inside Glenn's head. Or better yet, a leisurely stroll through those comments on Dr. Helen's site. Read more...
Good Thing Western Civilization Has Already Collapsed
[Headline:] Model Kate Moss Plans Tell-All Memoir
Title contest, anyone? Is This Blows taken?
He May Be A Mutt, But He's R. Mutt
>> Wednesday, January 25
Just keep him away from the Rembrandts on ironing day.
Attacker of Duchamp's Urinal Sentenced
- - - - - - - - - - - -
By PIERRE-ANTOINE SOUCHARD Associated Press Writer
January 24,2006 | PARIS -- A court has convicted a 77-year-old French man for attacking artist Marcel Duchamp's famed porcelain urinal with a hammer, rejecting the defendant's contention that he had increased the value of the art work by making it an "original."
The court gave Pierre Pinoncelli a three-month suspended prison sentence Tuesday and ordered him to pay a $245,490 fine.
Pinoncelli also was ordered to pay $17,616 to repair "Fountain," a work worth millions of dollars that was chipped in the Jan. 4 hammer attack at the Pompidou Center. The work was part of an exhibit of the early 20th century's avant-garde Dada movement.
The Pompidou Center had sought more than $523,930 for the damage.
The January urinal attack was not the first for Pinoncelli. He urinated on the piece during a 1993 exhibition in Nimes in southern France.
Howl
• Jack Shafer in Slate on Ombudsmangate:
The mass mau-mauing of Howell may seem like something that could only happen on the Web, but conventional instigators have been known to boost displeasure for media outlets into the stratosphere. Back in 1986, a local radio broadcaster organized a protest against the Washington Post because she thought the debut issue of its relaunched Sunday magazine treated African Americans unfairly. She directed her irate listeners to trek to the Post 's offices once a week to dump stacks of the magazine on its doorstep in protest.
In 1992, politicians and activists convinced about 200 people to picket the Reader, a Chicago alternative weekly, following its publication of what they thought was a racist cartoon of an alderman. In 1990, ACT UP vilified New York Times reporter Gina Kolata by plastering Manhattan with stickers denouncing her as "the worst AIDS reporter in America" and continuing their protest through the U.S. mail by sending her 200 angry Christmas cards. During the great Detroit newspaper strike of the mid-'90s, which was marked by violence and property damage, union organizers attached signs urging shoppers not to buy the struck papers to 30 mice and loosed them in a department store. See also any one of the letter-writing campaigns sponsored over the decades by Accuracy in Media or the perennial Christian protests against the godless TV networks.
Thanks for managing, after you finished with the coloreds and the queers and the unions, to squeeze the Right in there, Jack. They've been at it for only thirty-five years, and one direct result is the very sort of faux-balance that Howell employed in the first place. It shouldn't require any sort of reaction to make reporters tell the truth, but until they stop hiding behind this "both sides attack us" bullshit and actually address the problem, by, say, calling a lie a lie instead of an alternative opinion, then I'm glad people get out of hand about it. Same with Matthews, same with Russert. You guys in the mass media don't seem to want to face up to just how much you have to answer for over the past fifteen years or more. I don't personally think personal attacks are a great idea, but as it is piles of angry, obscenity-laden emails is the least that Wapo, et. al., should expect to endure when they continue to refuse to do their jobs.
Take Newsweek's Richard Wolffe on Countdown Monday night. Keith tosses him a bit about Rove's speech, asking who the Democrats are that Rove implies don't want us to wiretap al-Qaeda:
"Of course those Democrats don't exist...but whether it's truthful or not is another question."
• Juan Cole: "Top Ten Mistakes of the Bush Administration in Reacting to Al-Qaeda"
On September 11, 2001, the question was whether we had underestimated al-Qaeda. It appeared to be a Muslim version of the radical seventies groups like the Baader Meinhoff gang or the Japanese Red Army. It was small, only a few hundred really committed members who had sworn fealty to Bin Laden and would actually kill themselves in suicide attacks. There were a few thousand close sympathizers, who had passed through the Afghanistan training camps or otherwise been inducted into the world view. But could a small terrorist group commit mayhem on that scale? Might there be something more to it? Was this the beginning of a new political force in the Middle East that could hope to roll in and take over, the way the Taliban had taken over Afghanistan in the 1990s? People asked such questions.
Over four years later, there is no doubt. Al-Qaeda is a small terrorist network that has spawned a few copy-cats and wannabes. Its breakthrough was to recruit some high-powered engineers in Hamburg, which it immediately used up. Most al-Qaeda recruits are marginal people, people like Zacarias Moussawi and Richard Reid, who would be mere cranks if they hadn't been manipulated into trying something dangerous. Muhammad al-Amir (a.k.a Atta) and Ziad Jarrah were highly competent scientists, who could figure the kinetic energy of a jet plane loaded with fuel. There don't seem to be significant numbers of such people in the organization. They are left mostly with cranks, petty thieves, drug smugglers, bored bank tellers, shopkeepers, and so forth, persons who could pull off a bombing of trains in Madrid or London, but who could not for the life of them do a really big operation.
• Study: Army Stretched to Breaking Point
By ROBERT BURNS AP Military Writer
January 24,2006 | WASHINGTON -- Stretched by frequent troop rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan, the Army has become a "thin green line" that could snap unless relief comes soon, according to a study for the Pentagon.
Andrew Krepinevich, a retired Army officer who wrote the report under a Pentagon contract, concluded that the Army cannot sustain the pace of troop deployments to Iraq long enough to break the back of the insurgency. He also suggested that the Pentagon's decision, announced in December, to begin reducing the force in Iraq this year was driven in part by a realization that the Army was overextended.
As evidence, Krepinevich points to the Army's 2005 recruiting slump -- missing its recruiting goal for the first time since 1999 -- and its decision to offer much bigger enlistment bonuses and other incentives.
"You really begin to wonder just how much stress and strain there is on the Army, how much longer it can continue," he said in an interview. He added that the Army is still a highly effective fighting force and is implementing a plan that will expand the number of combat brigades available for rotations to Iraq and Afghanistan.
The 136-page report represents a more sobering picture of the Army's condition than military officials offer in public. While not released publicly, a copy of the report was provided in response to an Associated Press inquiry.
Illustrating his level of concern about strain on the Army, Krepinevich titled one of his report's chapters, "The Thin Green Line."
He wrote that the Army is "in a race against time" to adjust to the demands of war "or risk `breaking' the force in the form of a catastrophic decline" in recruitment and re-enlistment.
• Take the two items above. They are 1) the central question of the supposed WoT, and 2) the central question about our continued presence in Iraq, and the most serious, from a purely national security perspective, condemnation of what we've done there to this point. So how many times have you seen or heard either discussed in the news? Neither is a new point. Yet when Jack Murtha told the nation that we were about to break the Army, what was the timbre of the reporting? "Calls for immediate withdrawl." "Bush stays the course." Sometimes the only reason I don't send obscene emails to mass-market media types is that there's no obscenity strong enough. Read more...
Gutter Balls
>> Tuesday, January 24
Wow, where did Norah go?
Is there possibly some cosmic significance to the fact that David Kamp, who reviewed Norah Vincent's Self-Made Man for the Times was also the reviewer of A Million Little Pieces?
There's your premise in a nutshell: assertive, opinionated Vincent, best known as a contrarian columnist for The Los Angeles Times, goes undercover as a man to learn how the fellas think and act when them pesky broads ain't around.
Hold it right there. Norah Vincent is assertive, "opinionated", and a "contrarian" the way McDonald's is a fast "food" "restaurant". That is, she's the one-out-of-three which disproves any claim to the other two. Being a lesbian doesn't make her tired "I'm a libertarian with very little use for civil liberties" schtick any fresher. As far as I can tell, it's just what makes it marketable. It sure isn't her prose stylings.
(Here's a little secret for ya. Aside, perhaps, from the Young, Dumb, and Full of Cum crowd that no self-respecting "fellah" wants to be around unless he's a) one of them, and b) dead drunk, we pretty much think and act exactly the same whether the pesky broads is or ain't around. Have any of you broads noticed a particular layer of masculine refinement you imagine comes off when you're not around? Really? Because the only Behavior Formerly Known As Stag I know of is the occasional kneeing each other in the testicles, which is another strike against Norah. But thanks, David, for droppin' in t' th' Beverly Hillbillies dialect.)
And how much longer, O Lord, do we have to endure this contrarian crap? (And isn't it time we start insisting that anyone so-called demonstrate a smattering of familiarity with the arguments they're being contrary to?) The only thing that distinguishes Norah Vincent's work from any of the hackery at the Corner is that she's apparently capable of satisfying a woman.
Okay, enough about Norah, because no amount of money could possibly get me to feign interest in anything she has to say, and God knows I'd never review a book I didn't read and make Kathryn Jean Lopez cry, but apparently being a White Heterosexual Male who supports civil rights for Non-Whites and the Differently Oriented makes me a contrarian, so here's some opinionated assertiveness: being a Lesbian in 2006 does not make you de facto interesting. On the other hand, being a self-promoting Camille Paglia impersonator makes you recursively, almost vertiginously, boring.
Though not, it seems, to David Kamp:
But "Self-Made Man" turns out not to be what it threatens to be, a men-are-scum diatribe destined for best-seller status in the more militant alternative bookstores of Berkeley and Ann Arbor.
See my earlier piece, "Can We Stop With the Contrarian Crap Already?"
Though there's plenty of humor in "Self-Made Man," Vincent - like her spiritual forebear John Howard Griffin, the white journalist who colored his skin and lived as a black man in the South for his 1961 book "Black Like Me" - treats her self-imposed assignment seriously, not as a stunt.
Honest to God. Y'know, if it weren't for the internets and the large number of very smart young people I read and converse with on a regular basis, I would really consider simply willing every white person born in America after 1970 back to Alabama 1955 and make them tour the place like a zoo before allowing them to return, assuming they could pass a quiz.
In fact, that tears it. I'm switching over to Andrew O'Hehir's "My life as a man" in Salon (you know the drill if you want to read it):
I'd be surprised if these culture-war ideas about the ingrained and inflexible nature of gender weren't views Vincent has long held, and which she summons up at the end of "Self-Made Man" to explain, and depersonalize, the pain and difficulty she experienced as Ned. Vincent's compassion, sympathy and friendship for the men Ned bowls with, works with and drinks with are real; the last thing you can call her is a man-hater.
Okay, sure, I've got plenty of other stuff to call her. And if someone will do me the courtesy of diagramming that first sentence maybe we've got another point of agreement. I'm pretty well convinced that the idea of Homo americanus bowlaramus as a basically swell guy with bedrock values an' all that is a long-held view of Norah's, at least in print. In fact, I'd be shocked to learn she'd come up with something, I dunno, contrarian in her little experiment.
Which I'm here to tell you she might, in the event she meets some. Let's just say I'd make it even money the gang at The Smoking Gun has picked up a copy of the book. Because, look, I'm not sure what passes for quasi-Neanderthal in New York. And I guess we'll never quite know:
In the wake of recent publishing news, and considering Vincent's refusal to name names or identify places (not even cities, or states, or regions of the country), I suppose one has to ask whether the details of Ned's life are invented or embellished. It makes me profoundly uncomfortable that "Self-Made Man" is so thoroughly unverifiable, but I don't think it's a con job. Vincent's moments of sharpest perception -- into the intricacies of male camaraderie, or the dreary, mutually hostile gamesmanship of heterosexual dating -- feel unfakable, and if she were making it all up the material would probably be both more explosive and less ambiguous.As opposed to predictable and stilted. Let's give the woman some credit.
I wasn't accusing Kamp earlier of missing anything in the Frey book he should have caught, because, again, not only have I not read it, but nothing whatever could get me to read one of Oprah's recommendations, to the extent that I'm considering forgetting I've read Faulkner and One Hundred Years of Solitude now that I've learned she's profaning real literature. But it seems that he ought to be the one mentioning it, certainly if O'Hehir does. And if that earlier experience doesn't make us a bit less credulous than we were, maybe a glance at that picture would do it.
C'mon. Stage makeup works on the stage, sometimes. If a disguise is convincing you'd imagine it would be even more so in a reproduction of a reproduction of a photograph. We've even heard of gaydar out here in the vast emptiness between the oceans. Do you think we imagine it to be the exclusive province of homosexual males? Pah. To begin with, let's just ignore the stylistic points. She looks like k.d. lang made up for an Ed Wood film. Maybe it's different on the coasts, but out here, where we get sunlight, a man's beard does not end at his jawline. In fact, you might try this if you're not repulsed by the idea: choose a clean-shaven man over twenty-five at random and look at him. Even one with Miami Vice stubble. A few years of shaving chews up the neck. You can't fake that anymore than you could fake the hands of a master carpenter. But Norah fools the Quintessential Troglodyte Trio--the plumber, the appliance repairman, and the construction worker who welcome a hapless non-bowler onto their highly competitive squad:
Her bowling chapter ("Friendship") is a mini-masterpiece of sympathetic reporting, and there's no question that it took enormous courage for this New York lesbian intellectual to walk into a highly competitive bowling league somewhere in the American heartland, one of the most male of all male sanctums. Ned completely sucked as a bowler, and as Vincent ruefully admits, by the standards of this working-class environment, even the butchest woman in drag comes off as a girlie man.(By the way, could we have oh, maybe, a century where the Coasters either find out what they're talking about or shut the hell up about Middle America? Lots of women bowl. Lots.)
So, three regular Joes in a highly-competitive league take an inexperienced gutter-baller under their protective wing. Maybe--but not in any highly-competitive league I've ever known.
Ever, uh, been to a bowling alley? They're brightly lit. Two four-man teams on two lanes take up all the seating. But nobody notices that the new guy just stepped out of a dinner theatre production of Victor/Victoria.
Ever, uh, do any bowling? Full-court hoops it ain't, but it is athletic. Men generally use 16 pound balls. They're not light, not when they're lugged around and hurled over the course of thirty frames in a night.
Ever, uh, play sports? American men grow up throwing and catching balls. My sister is a superb athlete. She played baseball in the backyard with my Dad and me her whole life. My dad was a bowler, and we grew up doing that too. But her arm mechanics are not a man's. The best women bowlers might be able to fool a man who pays some attention. But someone who just picked up a ball for the first time? Prove it.
Norah eventually owns up to her teammates. So why, exactly, has she "changed the names of the characters and obscured the locations to protect the identities of her subjects"? Why do so regardless? Did they sleep with her thinking she was a man? Did they reveal some deep-seated Red state male fear of being fooled by a New York lesbian intellectual in drag? Ever watch the way people behave when they know they're on teevee? Christ, these guys would be braggin' all over town how they were in a book.
If the males sound like stereotypes, check out the women she dated:
the 30-ish single women Ned dates in the "Love" chapter come off as aggressively hostile and profoundly confused creatures -- on one hand, they want sensitive men capable of emotional communication, while on the other they want a take-charge guy who can pay for dinner, open doors and then, a bit later, "pin them to the bed." Wounded in previous relationships, they transformed each new man (even when he wasn't a man) "into the malignancy they were expecting him to be," thereby fueling a "self-perpetuating cycle of unkindness and discontent."
Boy, I bet you weren't ready for that bit of contrarian insight.
Is there something here that couldn't have been written without the masquerade? Is there anything that sounds like genuine insight from a successful charade? Maybe the Smoking Gunsels will tell us; I'm not buying the thing to find out. But, Norah Ned, if you make it back to the heartland, the lane fees are on me. Read more...
Happy Birthday
>> Monday, January 23
Jean Baptiste "Django" Reinhardt
January 23, 1910--May 16, 1953
No Fighting In The War Room
David Brooks, "Hating the Bomb", January 22.
The Iraq debate split the country into two partisan camps, but the Iran debate is much more complicated. It's opening up a rift between conservatives and the Bush administration. It's dividing Democrats into rival factions: those who can contemplate the eventual use of force against Iran and those who can't.
Every so often reading Brooks I'm reminded that the Russians hurling a tin can into space in October, 1957, split the country into two partisan camps: those who flew into a screaming panic at the sound of a discouraging word, and those who didn't. Unfortunately, then as now, the former frequently includes people with their hands on the national purse strings or New York Times columns.
It's amazing how, back when we lived with the real threat of Global Thermonuclear war, we did so. Not that we weren't given to panics, sabre-rattling, bad decisions (the atomic-powered bomber, anyone?) or outright bullshit for domestic consumption (phony "missile gaps" and "Soviet superiority in land-based missiles"), but we carried on as though our cherished Us vs. Them was so vital that the danger was an acceptable, if unfortunate, by-product of that weltanschauung. Now everytime somebody says something we don't like we pull the bedclothes over our heads.
By the way, in case I don't get around to mentioning it, this column is dishonest, and Brooks has fallen in love with the whole "conservatives vs. the administration" thing on the grounds that it distances him from the disaster in Iraq.
It's an anguished debate because all the options are terrible. But this will be the major foreign policy controversy of the 2008 presidential election, and you can already see four different schools emerging:Pre-emptors would work with Europe and the U.N. to step up pressure on Iran.
THE PRE-EMPTIONISTS John McCain and most American conservatives believe the situation reeks of Nazi Germany in 1933. An anti-Semitic demagogue is breaking treaties and threatening to wipe Israel off the map. The madman means what he says and can't be restrained by normal economic or diplomatic incentives....
Got that? This is not
Let's face a fact or two here, just for the novelty of it. Everybody in Washington knows John Murtha was right. We don't have the troops to invade Iran, or anybody else with something resembling an army, without a massive, multi-year rebuilding program. That would include a draft, and it would include some serious tax increases. When you've named me the "conservative" with the honesty and guts to stand up and say that--and get Murthaed for his trouble, ending the Presidential bid Brooks mentions for Democrats but not McCain--I'll listen.
Absent an invasion force our pre-emptive options are limited. We can try air strikes. We can let the Israelis try air strikes. If the Iranians were unaware of this before we invaded Iraq, they certainly know it now.
And let's review our Current Events, shall we, class? "Pre-emption" and "appealing to Europe and the U.N." are, if not mutually exclusive, certainly a complicated juggling act. As we saw with our phony U.N. consultation in February, 2003, the Pre-emption boys tend to have minimal patience.
THE SANCTIONISTS Democratic presidential contenders like Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh have begun hitting the Bush administration from the right. But as Ivo Daalder of the Brookings Institution notes, this is not just campaign posturing. Centrist Democrats also believe Iranian nukes are unacceptable. Such nukes would set off a regional arms race. They would lead to Cuban missile crisis standoffs in the world's most unstable region. If Iran completes its program, that would completely delegitimize the international system.
The Sanctionists don't rule out a pre-emptive strike, but they don't emphasize it. Instead, they say the U.S. should be directly involved in negotiating with Iran...
Forgive me, but Ivo Daalder, frequently mentioned as a possible national security advisor, or even Secretary of State, in a DLC cabinet, is not a disinterested observer. That's not to say he isn't speaking the truth as he sees it, just that Brooks and I have very different notions of what constitutes a good wet dream.
A DLC President faces the same issues a Pre-emptor does, with or without emphasizing military action. You wanna keep throwing around military threats you're gonna have to rebuild the Army, pronto. The smoke and mirrors that are so effective domestically don't impress the international community quite so much. Not any more, they don't, thanks in no small part to the war-sanctioning votes of Hillary Clinton and Evan Bayh.
THE REFORMISTS Oddly, the Bush administration finds itself on the cautious, noninterventionist side. Bush officials have been walking away from broad economic sanctions and pre-emptive strikes (while not formally ruling them out). Blustery threats may sound good, they say, but when you are governing you have to consider the consequences; you have to hold the global coalition together; you have to make sure Iran isn't provoked into really dismantling Iraq.
In all my conversations with with senior administration officials, I have never heard them be so cautious about what they can know and tentative about what they can achieve....
Privately, some administration officials believe there is no way to prevent Iran from getting the bomb; we might as well try to make the regime as palatable as possible.
Leave us remember, anytime Mr. Brooks quotes his pals in the administration, his "Multiple Reality Syndrome" piece last month, where he told us how he'd often walk away from conversations with administration officials on Iraq "feeling my intelligence had been insulted," despite the fact that all he wrote about in that period was how honest and candid they were.
I'm not really interested in uplifting tales of the sudden lucidity experienced by habitual drunkards after they've lost everything. Tell it to Oprah. "Blustery threats sound good, but we have to govern?" When does that start?
THE SILENT FATALISTS Mainstream Democrats have been remarkably quiet on this issue. Their main conviction is that American-led military action would be disastrous. This shapes their definition of the problem. A nuclear Iran may no be so cataclysmic, they privately say. Why shouldn't Iran have as much right to the bomb as any other nation? The regime may be nasty, but it's containable with deterrence and engagement.
These liberals argue that if we weren't in Iraq, we'd have a lot more freedom to act against Iran, though you could also say the crisis would be worse if Saddam were still in power.
As always, Brooks' third-chair-trombone insights into Bartok's String Quartets are remarkably convincing, but they'd be even more so with, I dunno, some evidence. No lack of names in the first three, after acknowledging that Bush administration officials do not, in actuality, have names. None here. I'd like to know who's saying "Iran should have as much right to the bomb as everyone else does," thereby implying that they think a nuclear-armed globe would just be a minor irritant? I'm not surprised that these people would be talking to Brooks in private; private is where they ought to be talking to someone like Brooks who imagines the potential for military disaster shouldn't shape your thinking. My problem is that wherever it is they're holding these conversations seems to provide insufficeint nursing care and inadequate security.
Two things should be noted here, on the grounds that our earlier little excursion into fact was rather satisfying. One is the Cuban Missile Crisis Dilemma. A moment's reflection will tell us that Russian missiles in Cuba were a political dodge. They couldn't be used. Either the missiles in Cuba would have been fired first, which would have meant immediate retaliation against Cuba and the assumption that the Soviets were about to fire theirs, or the Soviets would have had to launch first, in which case we would have destroyed Cuba in a minute. An Iranian nuke program suffers from the same problem. They can launch against a much-better armed Israel, and say their prayers, or they can hand some off to the Global Terrorists, in which case they won't be destroyed until several seconds after one gets used. As with Cuba, nukes are a bargaining chip and they're a defensive move against vastly superior forces. As such they're a sound argument for the use of diplomacy, international co-operation, and a dedicated seach for peace in the Middle East. And as such, it's much better to confuse the issue in public if you're not really in favor of those things.
Second, I suppose it's just an unfortunate coincidence for Bobo, but on the same day his column comes out the Washington Post reports that our latest intelligence review puts the Iranians ten years away from getting a bomb, which brings us in line with British and Israeli estimates. The Post, not having Brooks' entrée into the upper reaches of anonymous Bush administration officials, seems to imagine this "contrast[s] with forceful public statements by the White House." Read more...
Safety Equipment Required
>> Friday, January 20
Roy at alicublog staked out the territory. I was too busy to get at it last night, but there's enough here (warning: Mrs. Instapundit site) to keep a dedicated team of insanity miners busy for years.
Read more...Puppet Theatre
Olbermann, last night. For those times when one terrorism expert just isn't enough.
Expert #1
Name: Steve Emerson
Graphic: "NBC News Terrorism Analyst"
Day Job: Head of the Investigative Project on Terrorism, author of American Jihad: Terrorists Living Among Us, "spellbing" speaker [per the Harry Walker Agency]
So Why the Truce Business? Keith Asks:
"[He] (bin Laden) wants to appear reasonable. He feels he has the ability to appeal to half the American public. And so he thinks that if he talks about a truce, and appeals to what their sense of the truce is, he can basically sew a tremendous amount of dissention in the American body politic."
Comments, Mr. Riley?
Where does that "half" business come from? Do you really imagine that 50% of the American public is going to be swayed by something in a bin Laden tape? And hasn't Bush been doing a bang-up job of sewing dissention in the body politic these last thirteen months without any help? Why waste a perfectly good audio tape?
Bio:
"• Foremost Terrorism Expert
Steven Emerson is an internationally recognized expert on terrorism and national security and considered one of the leading world authorities on Islamic extremist networks, financing and operations. He now serves as the Executive Director of The Investigative Project, one of the world's largest archival data and intelligence on Islamic and Middle Eastern terrorist groups." [Harry Walker Agency]
Achievements:
• Won Polk award for his documentary "Jihad in America" (PBS).
• Best-selling author
• "Mr. Emerson is recognized as having been the first and only terrorist expert to have testified and warned about the threat of Islamic militant networks operating in the United States and their connections worldwide. He specifically warned about the threat of Osama Bin Laden's network in pioneering Congressional testimony delivered in 1998. " [Harry Walker Agency]
Slight Omissions:
Was dropped by CBS after he said the Oklahoma City bombing showed "a Middle Eastern trait" because it was carried out "with the intent to inflict as many casualties as possible."
Told CNN the Yugoslavs were the likely suspects in the 1993 WTC bombing.
Said TWA flight 800 was brought down by a bomb.
Principal hounder of Sami Al-Arian.
Multi-million dollar suit against John Sugg (who calls Emerson a self-styled terrorism expert" and "a pseudo-journalist") and FAIR over an article which was highly critical of him was dismissed when he couldn't prove any of his charges. "He ran, " Sugg said.
Bravery Under Fire:
Claims to have received death threats. "Mr. Emerson now lives under false cover in the United States." [Harry Walker Agency]. A CBS "48 Hours" segment showed visitors to the Investigative Project's headquarters being blindfolded before being led through the building. Yet he still shows up at NBC and Fox studios. We could use a man like him in the military.
Anything To Add, Mr. Riley?:
Yeah, even forgetting the "pseudo", the world's top terrorism expert is a journalist?
Expert #2
Name: Ben Venzke
Graphic: "Terrorism Expert"
Day Job: CEO of Tempest Publishing and its intelligence group Intel Center
So Why the Truce Business? Keith Asks:
"It's al-Qaeda giving an opportunity to whatever its targets may be, in this case the United States, the opportunity to change, the opportunity to follow their advice, and what it does, it allows them after an attack, if there's a mass casualty event, many Muslims or other Arabs killed, it gives them the opportunity to say, 'Look, we gave them a chance to change, we gave them numerous opportunities, we can't help it if they don't follow our advice.' And then they move forward and execute an attack. So it fits into the justification and warning process for attacks."
Comments, Mr. Riley?
Yeah, I haven't been able to find out just what makes Mr. Venzke a "terrorism expert"; he's edited a book for first responders and co-wrote The al-Qaeda Threat: An Analytical Guide to al-Qaeda's Tactics & Targets (Tempest Publishing), but that "mass casualty event" and the repeated inability to come up with a synonym for "opportunity" suggest he trained as a teevee meteorologist.
Available in the Lobby: The Intel Center's catalogue includes five pages of Terrorism DVDs ("Raw Terrorist Video Indexed and Formatted for Briefers, Analysts, Operators and Trainers"), audio enhanced in Dolby™ Digital, for $39.95 each. Or get the complete set of 24 for $1,015, a savings of over $23! Or, if you've happen to be a military, law enforcement, or intelligence agency in the US or allied country, why not spring for the government restricted set, 30 quality titles for only $1,315?
Slight omission: The name of Mr. Venzke's co-author is left off The al-Qaeda Threat page, though he wrote the blub himself.
Guest Blogosphere self-correcting function: In November, doorguy at Kos asked just what sort of outfit openly advertises itself as "doing support work for the intelligence community"?
Mr. Riley, you look as though you have something to add?:
Yeah, well, aren't we spending enough on Homeland Security that military, law enforcement, and intelligence agencies can get their DVDs for free? Or, like, swap 'em out with each other?
Happy Birthday
>> Thursday, January 19
Dolly Rebecca Parton: born January 19, 1946
All right, there was an internal debate at BLTR over that picture, but I'm using it for a point of sorts, which is as good an excuse as any. We try to keep the Lileksian hilarity to a minimum here.
That's Dolly from the old Porter Wagoner Show, where she got her Big Break. We used to watch the thing for its mockery quotient: the faux Down Home set, Porter in his sequined Nudie suits and white Duck's Ass hair, and...Dolly, five feet of the what-the-hell is that? They did a can't-miss commercial for Breeze laundry detergent. Breeze came with a towel in every box. A washcloth in the smallest, up to a beach towel in the Jumbo Economy Size. People told me there wasn't much soap left in the box after you tugged the premium out.
Dolly was priceless. After Porter displayed the towel, Dolly elaborated: "A candy-striped towel!" Only with her accent it was more like "caindee stropped talle." "But you can't buy 'em," says Porter. "Ah cain't bahum?" she replied, momentarily nonplussed.
We never paid attention to the music. But then one day Dolly got a spotlight. She sang "Jolene." What a freakin' voice! How'd I miss that? And she wrote the damn thing, too, a remarkably good storyteller number in complete contrast to the dreck Wagoner usually did.
I never underestimated Dolly after that. I rooted for her. Still do. I was even glad when her pop dreck went platinum. Even Kenny Rogers couldn't change that. (Although Kenny's rehabilitated himself on Reno 911 lately.) Not to say I bought any, but still.
And Dolly had the smarts, and the gall, to tell Colonel Tom where he could insert his demand for 50% of the publishing rights to "I Will Always Love You" in exchange for Elvis recording it. (That was Elvis' standard deal, apparently. Great racket. The Colonel screwed him, and he and the Colonel screwed Arthur "Big Boy" Cruddup.) So she, not Lisa Marie, got the dough when Whitney hit with it.
Dolly, dammit, if all Christians were like you the world would be a much better place.
James Lileks in the Amazing Battery-Powered Foaming Bowl-a-Rama
Y'know, I will gladly leave the analysis of James Lileks' Third-Chair-Trombone-With-Asperations-To-First-Chair-By-Senior-Year political and cultural observations in the capable hands of Pepper and TBogg, but this was too good to pass up:
I picked up a cartridge for the Clorox Foamy Wand, or whatever it’s called – it’s a toilet brush that spews bowl cleaner at the touch of a button. I bought the item under the impression that the brush revolved. It did not. My disappointment was keen. Sharper than a daughter’s tooth, it was. But a few months ago I made my peace with the device and restocked the foamy tubes. Today I saw the unit on “CLEARANCE,” which is distinct from “SALE.” If it’s on CLEARANCE it’s on the way out. Do I stock up on foamy tubes and hold out, or just buy one and deal with the product’s end when the day comes?
TBogg's commenters had had plenty of fun psychoanalyzing Lileks need for a battery-operated foamy wand, so we don't have to go there. At least not directly. Instead I recalled the first time I'd seen that thing advertised, and how I immediately wondered what sort of maroon would get conned into buying an electric toothbrush for his toilet.
Now I've got my answer.
I'm not claiming any prescience about that gizmo; I gave up imagining I could point to the moment when the cultural/commercial auger struck the bedrock of stupidity many moons ago. Had it become the One Item on Everyone's Christmas List I wouldn't have been surprised. But what exactly was going on behind that fivehead of Jimmy's that caused him to shell out money to be a beta tester for the thing?
I think Camus said somewhere that America was the only culture which tries to prove that Life is not ultimately a tragedy. To which should to be added that we're the only one that routinely tries to cover the existential stench of death that hovers over every moment with a Glade Plug-In County Potpourri air freshener.
This is not just something that suddenly dawned on me. I remember back in 10th grade the audible gasp of my classmates when a Psych 1 & 2 student giving a report noted that prior to 1950 most Americans had no idea what deodorant was. I think they had visions of people dropping down dead on the sidewalks from B.O. I'm pretty sure I was the only one in class whose immediate reaction was "Cool!" I attend to the daily requirements of American hygiene standards. I do. That has never included aftershave or cologne. I buy my wife expensive perfume because she knows a drop is better than a half-cup. I have no idea what goes on in the heads of people so drenched in smelly stuff you can't breathe within five yards of 'em. Sexual asphyxia? Gangrene?
And the toilet thing. Toilet mints on a little wire hanger, which I think must have gone the way of rotary phones, okay. You have to clean a toilet, like anything else. Blue water never disturbed me, though I never found the Tidy-Bol man quite the font of hilarity they did on the Carson show. It was with the sudden nation-wide concern over Getting Under the Rim when I began to feel the national psyche had taken an unfortunate and possibly dangerous turn for something already so fragile. A few years ago, at the urging of commercial hucksters the, well, odd psycho-sexual obsession with excretory functions and their aftermath suddenly, um, exploded in a frenzy of ergonomically correct, uh, rim fixation. Suddenly every container of toilet bowl cleanser was shaped like a novelty Chianti bottle, and any new toilet brush came with a greenstick neck fracture. Get Under There! The Rim! You never noticed the Rim before? Your Family is at risk because of You! What exactly was lurking under there that was so important? That couldn't be eradicated with conventional weapons? How were you coming into contact with it, exactly? It reminded me of a bit by the late, lamented Dennis Wolfberg, that weird and wonderful hybrid of Robert Klein and Gilbert Gottfried (whose voice and inflections so matched Gottfried's that the first time I heard him, before I realized how funny he was, I thought he was a bad impressionist). Speaking of teaching sixth grade sex ed in the Bronx, he said he was told to answer all student questions truthfully and in detail. One of them was, "Is it true you can catch VD from kissing a toilet seat?" "Kissing a toilet seat? Young man, if you go around kissing toilet seats, getting VD is the last thing you should be worried about."
Rest in Peace, Dennis.
I don't know how to put this delicately. I shit there. It's how I was taught. All this time I've assumed everybody else did too. As such I expect the thing to be a toilet. If I was that concerned about it I'd put a cut flower arrangement in the bowl and build an outhouse.
This really came to a head (sorry) in the aftermath of 9/11. Remember in the months that followed all the Norman Rockwell advertisements, four generations in lambent light sitting down to some tomato soup? Soviet-heroic pans of cops and firemen doing nice, normal things, followed by Old Glory and a wholesome message like "Velveeta. We're Proud To Be Part of the American Grilled Cheese Experience."? The culture gurus and advertising swamis who told us that this was the face of the new, post WTC, irony-free environment? (They were, if I'm not mistaken, the same people who insisted that Silverado would usher in a rebirth of the Western, or Chicago presaged the return of the Big Movie Musical.) My personal favorite was the T.G.I. Friday's clone chain O'Charley's, which added the tag line, "The American Grill with the Irish Name," like they were afraid of losing business in some 9/12 IRA backlash.
Well, sometime after the Iraqi cakewalk got left out in the rain, I noticed a new trend in bathroom advertising: Daddy had made a big stinky mess. Call for mom, bring out the air freshener or the scented toilet paper or whatever. There were at least three of them. I wasn't quite convinced there was a semiotic message at work, at least not a conscious one, and I didn't want to make too much of it. But then these were the very people who eighteen months earlier had shown pictures of Dad breathing freedom air on a small but friendly and regular Maple Street. Who could say for sure?
As I thought back on it I became convinced of one thing: over the past couple decades it's become clear that America's collective subconscious is now more trustworthy than the things it blurts out in public conversation.
Back to that toilet brush thing: if Lileks had just said he bought the damn thing, maybe with an appropriate What Was I Thinking?, I'd have just chuckled at him. Winguts like Lileks are now stuck defending the second coming of the Robber Barons and the Panglossification of American commercial culture as if they can't see it any other way, as if they're not allowed to recognize that the one thing we're really good at these days is finding attractive, up-to-date packaging for the Same Old Useless Shit. That's doubly inexplicable in Lileks, with his flair for comically anachronistic advertisements. But it's that "I thought it rotated!" that really floored me. For what reason, exactly? So you wouldn't have to apply any arm strength? Or even look Down There? Just release the Hounds of Hygiene? From a man who's made a few shekles ridiculing the poshlost tastes of days gone by, how strongly does this resonate with leftover 50s Mass Futurism? It's like the atomic can-opener of the war on toilet terror. Read more...
Yeah, But It's No Travelgate
>> Wednesday, January 18
His lips are movin' again.
White House Silent on Abramoff Meetings
By Nedra Pickler, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON - The White House is refusing to reveal details of tainted lobbyist Jack Abramoff's visits with President Bush's staff.
Abramoff had "a few staff-level meetings" at the Bush White House, presidential spokesman Scott McClellan said Tuesday. But he would not say with whom Abramoff met, which interests he was representing or how he got access to the White House.
Since Abramoff pleaded guilty two weeks ago to conspiracy, mail fraud and tax evasion charges in an influence-peddling scandal, McClellan has told reporters he was checking into Abramoff's meetings. "I'm making sure that I have a thorough report back to you on that," he said in his press briefing Jan. 5. "And I'll get that to you, hopefully very soon."
McClellan said Tuesday that he checked on it at reporters' requests, but wouldn't discuss the private staff-level meetings. "We are not going to engage in a fishing expedition," he said
But that's not a "fishing expedition": it's a request for specific information. A fishing expedition is when...wait, who'm I talking to? Read more...
Them! Them!
Mail's here!
Believe I've mentioned before that we get some organization's magazines in an ever-revolving carousel of double-digit IQ nausea (okay, I actually read Rolling Stone, but only in the john). The name on the subscription tag doesn't provide enough information to track the owner down, there's no way to figure why our address would repeatedly turn up as theirs, and the mailman won't take 'em back. That was established when we were getting six TV Guides™ each week; he told me I could go to the Post Office and fill out a form. But driving to the local Post Office is a daredevil act, caught between elderly 15-mph-with-the-wrong-turn-signal-flashing motorists and two nearby sidestreets where shortcutting maniacs routinely blow the stop signs. I've had three very near misses. Besides, after the second one started arriving it got to be fun, in a perverse sort of way. But then, we're a perverse sort of couple.
Last week brought the bonanza of all time: Us Weekly, the celebrity rag for those who find People a bit stuffy. I meant to report on it at the time, but my wife managed to lose it some where. So I confiscated this one.
Sad to report, but Us, which really deserves an exclamation point, is something of a disappointment on the only magazine rating scale that means anything: there's no letters column. My lonely search for a TV Guide™ replacement goes on. So here's a quick rundown on Tinseltown anyway; just don't get too attached:
COVER: Lindsay Confesses Extreme Diet Dangers.
Some underage talent sausage who's been operating in public for far too long with or without adult supervision couldn't handle fame, and now we're supposed to be concerned. But then I guess if you read Us you probably are.
PULL QUOTES:
"You have to hit rock bottom sometimes to get yourself back up to the top,"-Lindsay
"She's not letting herself worry about weight anymore.
-Lohan's mom, Dina. In what I can only hope was a letter from prison.
SIDEBAR:
Is Peer Pressure To Blame? Thoughts from Dr. Joel Jahraus, eating disorders expert.
COVER ALSO-RANS:
Angelina: Her Big Secrets
Jessica: Crying As Nick Parties
SPLIT!: Hilary Swank and Chad Lowe.
HOW FAR INSIDE CAN RILEY GO?
Well, there's a two-page spread to start things off called "Red Carpet", which features six celebs in J. Mendel eveningware. The last one is Lauren Bush, whose gown and hair were both applied by pitchfork. But I didn't notice her on the first pass.
This is followed by a single page of three celebs in coats, who were rated by "100 people in NYC's Rockefeller Center." I'm hoping they were tourists. Managed to turn the page.
Then, some red meat, and a page with actual words: "Loose Talk: What The Stars Said This Week". A page too far, as it turns out:
"I was sick of me. But I'm over that now. I'm ready to return to your TV 24 hours a day!" -Justin Timberlake, On why he took a break from recording.
Look, I didn't get this old without learning anything, so I was careful to read the thing while lying on a futon, with no glass or sharp objects nearby. The spinning sensation abated in a couple of minutes, and by the time five had passed, and I'd tossed down some Booker Noe's, I was even able to wonder why Justin Timberlake's presence would be required at one of his recording sessions.
You're probably ahead of me at this point; I shouldn't have had that drink. It steadied me enough to flip the page, where I found "Hot Pics!" (I guess they save the exclamation points for inside.) Suitably warned, I pulled my sweatshirt sleeve over my hand before I handled any. Our first hottie was Sienna Miller, "munch[ing] on honeydew melon Jan. 9 on the Louisiana set of her upcoming Andy Warhol flick, Factory Girl, in which she plays 1960s drug addict Edie Sedgwick." 1960s drug addict! They said it like it's a bad thing, when the truth is there isn't a single celebrity in the damn magazine who wouldn't be improved by a serious scag habit. Read more...
Happy Birthday
>> Tuesday, January 17
Muhammad Ali: born January 17, 1942
In one of his fights (Zora Folley?) shortly before they stripped him of his title, he slips five straights punches to the head moving only his upper body, his hands held straight down at his sides. I've found tears rolling down my face just watching it, not for what too many fights have done to him but for the incredible beauty of the man in and out of the ring.
Gotta get those DVDs.
Final Exam
A big thank you to all our participants. After two days of cleansing, spleen-venting, freeform comments, today the monopoly reasserts itself and you get to answer my questions. In keeping with our liberal, touchy-feely, soft-bias-of-low-expectations mission, you may answer as many or as few as you like, and there'll be no self-esteem-damaging "grading" or "labeling". But do try to color within the lines:
1. What is the purpose of public education? a) exposure of students to the widest possible variety of learning and instilling lifelong habits; b) achieving student competence in "core" subjects; c) identifying student aptitude; d) gearing students towards the current job market; e) providing comfy slots for low-SAT scoring college students.
2. Tying teacher "merit" raises, or job retention, to standardized testing should include: a) simple comparison of raw test scores; b) only improvement over baseline scores; c) comparison to national averages adjusted for socio-economic factors, class size, and per-student spending; d) giving teachers the right to fire underperforming students.
3. Vouchers: a) are a union-busting canard; b) are a wealth-redistribution system akin to Lotto; c) amount to taxing individuals without school-aged children without representation when used to send children to private schools or outside their district; d) should be prorated to the amount the parent pays for his own student, not the full per-pupil cost; e) are peachy.
4. The "single manager" principal system: a) will introduce accountability into the public schools; b) will result in petty-tyrant bean counters following the safest possible course; c) will replace the collective wisdom of specialists in various subjects with the careerist decisions of a desk jockey; d) should do wonders for domestic bullhorn sales.
5. Art, music, athletics, and vocational training: a) should be maintained as full partners in the educational process; b) should be eliminated and left to the private sector; c) should be paid for by a tax on museums, CDs, and professional sports.
6) The high relative performance of US fourth graders on international tests suggests: a) comprehensive public education in the US works well but we need to understand the reasons scores fall off by age 15: b) our primary teachers aren't unionized; c) there must be some hidden competition in elementary schools the Liberal Media won't tell us about: d) now would be a good time for a clip from Fast Times at Ridgemont High.
Bonus questions:
1) The period during which an IPS teacher can be dismissed for incompetence is: a) his first six months; b) his first year; c) his first two years; d) never, without a union-mandated flow chart as long as your arm.
2) The period after which an IPS teacher has tenure is: a) three years; b) five years; c) dependent on the subject; e) no tenure.
3) I choose a barber or hairdresser based on: a) his algebra scores; b) his grammar; c) whether he makes my hair look the way I want; d) trade union affiliation.
Thanks again. There's apple juice and healthy snacks in the lobby.
Holiday Greetings
>> Monday, January 16
Robert Kennedy spoke to a mostly African-American crowd in Indianapolis the night Martin Luther King, Jr., was shot. You can download the audio here .
Happy Birthday
Jay (sometimes given as "Jerome") Hanna "Dizzy" Dean
January 16, 1910--July 17, 1974
The last National League pitcher to win thirty games, Diz and Peewee Reese doing the Saturday Game of the Week was a fixture of my childhood. Diz's English was not up to PISA standards: runners "slud" into base; good hitters had "parr" in their swings. "Nonchalant" was one of his favorite words. Players stood, knelt in the on-deck circle, swung or fielded nonchalant. Once after a play at first, when a cameraman was caught slightly off guard and the screen filled with a shot of Yogi from the knees down, Dizzy announced, "Here comes Berra's shin guards walkin' nonchalant back to the plate."
Diz was part natural philosopher. After remarking that somebody's bat "looked like a big ol' stump," he continued: "Now, some of you city people might not know what a stump is. Well, a stump is a wood thing...it's somethin' a tree has been cut down offa."
The End of Theological Debate
Next Week: The Tragic Plight of Americans With One-Dimensional Sense of Smell
On further review, Part II will begin where the first draft of Part I did: how did the American educational system fail John Stossel?
Which is a greater concern: that some fifteen year olds can't do algebra, a skill 90% of them will have no use for once the state stops testing them on it, or that a guy with a disproportionate hold on the nation's attention cannot, or cannot be bothered to, construct an honest argument?
Most of us, upon being told we needed a serious operation, major work on the foundation of our house, or a complete engine overhaul, would at least consider getting a second opinion. Who would we go to for that second opinion? John Stossel? On the grounds that he has plenty (or more accurately, because he has one for any occasion)?
Who is John Stossel? A concerned citizen advocating serious educational reform, or a teevee entertainer peddling intestinal gas remedies? He's certainly not someone on whose word you'd undergo a quadruple bypass. Why should we take his word on something as serious as public education? He might have managed to be somewhat convincing had he confronted any of the hundreds of available, reasonable, and knowledgeable spokespersons for points of view other than his own. Instead the sum total of the response from the so-called educational establishment was this: a 22-second clip, with Stossel talking half the time, of a South Carolina school board member saying "the more [money] the better"; a couple minutes of interview with the South Carolina superintendent of education as she responds to Stossel's every question with sunny platitudes; and three snippets of his interview with the head of the NYC teachers' union, totaling five sentences, one of which was interrupted by a Stossel voice-over.
Even if you agree with him you can't argue this is a fair or reasonable way of making a persuasive argument, let alone understanding public education. And that's being generous enough to ignore his personal history of difficulties with the truth, which are extensive enough to justify shutting him out altogether; why anyone wants the guy as a spokesman for his point of view just begs the question. You can get a monkey to fling shit, and much more cost effectively.
It's interesting to see that Voltaire's Prayer * works for the ideologically atheistic, and there'd be great comic relief in watching some of the ham-fisted propaganda if only ABC were still required to air the other side in exchange for using the public airwaves. But it isn't (where's the outrage, Mr. Stossel?). As we swing into the second half-hour, trailing unsourced anecdotes and specious reinactments of PISA, with the taunts of Belgians in our ears (pray tell, what insight does the Belgian On the Street have into the American education system?), we're treated to some theatre to balance the movie trailers from Act I. First, a Lilly Tomlin "Ernestine the Operator" routine shows us the hideous state of telecommunications service before deregulation and competition solved all our problems, and then shots of breadlines in the Soviet Union and some file footage of Stossel in a Russian restaurant mugging for the camera as his waiters ignored him. Yeah, I know, Moscow restaurants were notorious, and probably still are, but on the other hand, waiters the world over can smell a stiff at thirty yards.
So public education is "Communism"? If you just repeat the "education monopoly" mantra long enough, people who do not remember either Lily Tomlin nor Laugh In will equate the two? Again, even if you believe this stuff, how does it not insult your intelligence?
Naturally this was the lead-in to the Evil Unions portion of the program, the part which has the real money behind it since teachers' unions wield no small amount of political power and they allign themselves with Democrats. Before we move to the specifics of the program, the general response of this blog: your right to theological certitude is respected. It ends where others' rights begin. If you oppose trade unionism, fine. If you believe the government should provide no services, fine. You've got two Senators and a Representative to take it up with. But failure to acknowledge that the competition of the ballot box has routinely rejected your ideas means you are engaging in metaphysics. Disconnect yourself from the electric grid, get off the streets, stop paying taxes, find someone who cares, and tell them.
The program was pre-fluffed with the shocking story of how a NYC teacher who sent sexually-explicit emails to a sixteen-year-old student couldn't be fired because of union protection.
Urban legend? Unfortunately not.
Weaseling? Slight amount.
Grandstanding? Yes.
• by Joel Klein, Chancellor of New York City schools, who had been mired in negotiations with the union which was working with a contract that expired two years ago. A tentative agreement was reached last October. Stossel noted it was "a few months after our interview."
• by Stossel, for dramatically unfolding a two-and-a-half foot chart purporting to show the procedure required to fire a teacher.
Details? Hard to come by, since yet again, there was no citation. What Klein presented was this: a teacher admitted to sending sexually explicit email to a sixteen-year-old student, but could not be fired. Stossel: "You can't fire him?" Klein: "It's almost impossible."
That's the end of the clip.
Further weaseling? Yes. It was only five seconds short of two minutes later (which included a thirty-second hagiography of Jack Welch, for some reason) before we returned to Klein and learned the teacher had been removed from teaching for the six years it took to fire him.
Where does the blame lie? First and foremost, with the State of New York, which does not have a law making it a crime for a teacher to have that sort of sexual contact with a student. Teachers who are convicted of a sex crime in New York are fired. Period.
So the union isn't culpable? I wouldn't go that far. Considering the source I'm not willing to assume we have all the facts at hand, but I'd say it's certainly in everyone's interest to prevent any sort of sexual contact between teacher and student, however slight. But the union also has a responsibility to protect the rights of its members, just as we supporters of free speech have to defend Hustler at times. But that doesn't mean Hustler is always appropriate.
Anything you'd like to add? Sure, some less than expert testimony. In Indiana, state law dictates what conditions teachers' unions can collectively bargain for. And the grievance program, as I understand it, is this (my wife is not the grievance-filing type): a teacher can file a grievance for any circumstance covered in the contract, or over the results of an annual supervisory review. The administration can agree to hear the grievance or not (it generally does). If not, the teacher can appeal the decision. If the grievance is heard and the ruling goes against him, the teacher can appeal. The decision of the appeal board is final. The teacher then has recourse to the courts, like every other citizen, and may be represented by union counsel. That's it. I'm not sure how long a document I could produce from that, with circles and lines and recursive arrows, but I sure would have liked to been able to read Stossel's chart, or hear some details, or know who produced it.
What other outrages do teachers' unions perpetrate? Well, basically, they make Jack Welch cry, because you can't fire 10% of teachers on a regular basis just to motivate the rest. (We're ignoring here the successful extrapolation of the New York City situation to every other locality in the country.) I'd be curious to know whether GE fires 10% of its 21,000 union workers every year. And what the grievance procedures are.
(By the way, the sudden appearance of Jack Welch may be gratuitous, but it was hardly accidental. Welch is chairman of the advisory board of The Leadership Academy, the $70 million program to train new principals according to the precepts of GE, instead of the traditional promotion from within. As the Times reported on December 20, the program is now under fire, in part for the success rate of only 62% despite spending $160-180,000 per principal in training. Some of the administrators created through the program have less than a year of classroom experience.)
Is there some problem with a grievance procedure in general? Those of you in the private sector whose jobs hang in the balance daily over competition and performance, are you without recourse when rules are broken or rights violated? Is it the key to your success? Or is it just a good idea for your underlings?
Stossel also made cow eyes for the audience when the union president said the contract called for teachers to work 6-1/4 hours a day. "Do YOOOOU (in the audience) get to work 6-1/4 hours a day?
That's cheap thuggery and Stossel knows it. The union isn't calling for teachers to work 6-1/4 hours, punch out, and head for home. That's 6-1/4 hours of class instruction time. Full time teachers aren't punching a clock. They're there for the full school day. At IPS that includes a stint supervising a lunch period, monitoring halls between classes, and supervising students on and off buses before and after school. Plus one hour of teachers' meetings after school per week, and twice a semester parent nights. My wife never gets home in less than nine hours, frequently a couple more. Nine week grades, monthly progress reports, mentoring a first-year teacher, writing curriculum for the state, pursuing mandated post-grad work, and calling parents about disciplinary problems are on her own time, as are the half-dozen student shows she has to mount and remove over the year (Three hours mounting one today instead of watching football, plus 45 minutes going after supplies to frame next week's). Do YOOOOU work like that?
Want your child's teacher working another hour and a half a day on top of that? Wanna indemnify her from strangling little Susie when she mouths off at the end of an eighty-hour week?
* "I have made but one prayer to God, a very brief one: 'Lord, make my enemies ridiculous.' And God granted it."
Happy Birthday
>> Sunday, January 15
Don Van Vliet, born Don Glen Vliet
January 15, 1941
Response to Part I
1. Thanks to all first-time visitors, and especially to those who left comments. Stick around for Part II.
2. Regular readers of this little hole in the blogosphere know that my wife is a public school teacher. She's been one for over fifteen years. She's taught in a wealthy utopian "exburb" district and in the worst-performing inner city middle schools of IPS. She now teaches in the high school Magnet program, and is highly regarded. As an art teacher her direct experience has more to do with funding, or the lack of it, than the particulars of fad-of-the-month and political pressure on curricula of teachers in the "hard" subjects. Still she's plenty affected. She presently has a class (non-Magnet) of forty students in a room with thirty seats. I invite anyone interested to try it.
3. I've put my arm around her as she cried uncontrollably over the home life some students endure. I've stood beside her at the funeral of a sixteen-year-old who was shot by a crazy woman whose son he bumped on an apartment staircase. I've researched OSHA laws to prevent uncaring administrators from shutting her paint-and-solvent using classes in an unventilated room, and I've read Indiana employment laws to put a stop to a business using her students until 2AM on weekdays. I'm no mindless cheerleader for incompetent teachers, unions, administrators, and politicians. I think there are enormous structural problems with our Factory School programs in this country.
4. Be that as it may, I believe, from an admittedly limited and non-professional perspective colored by my unapologetic political biases, that the greater problem for our schools over the last thirty years has been political meddling which has sought to portray public schools in the worst possible light, and often a racist one at that. This is not to impugn the honesty or sincerity of everyone who disagrees with me. It is rather to say that the landscape must be cleared of half-truths and hidden agendas, and the case for public education made over and over.
5. This is just my web journal. I talk about whatever catches my fancy. This weekend that's the 20/20 report. I have a rough idea that after dealing with that I'll write another piece more descriptive of our public educational system. Or I might get distracted and rate some power tools. There are plenty of good professional education sites where people don't just talk off the top of their heads.
Let's go to the phones:
Chris:
There are those who will mischaracterize Stossel as being “anti-education.” This label is inaccurately conveyed, as it should be labeled “pro-education reform”. So to use “anti-education.” and denominate those is misinforming.
As my personal bodyguard D. Sidhe has pointed out, I didn't call him that. I'll have more to say about Stossel's motivation later, but the short answer is, you can't reform what you refuse to understand beyond a caricature.
The “War on Public Education” is a straw man. There has never been such a war.... [There] are simply observers, who pointedly remind us of the many facets of public education which can use serious reform....Part of the debate is calling a spade a spade, shining a light on egregious examples of the misdeeds of public educators, their union, administrators, and aspects of the system itself.
I'll talk about unions in the next part. But frankly, the denial that there's a war on public education doesn't jibe with the strong anti-union sentiments that so frequently accompany it. I never hear an opponent of teacher unions or the "educational establishment" discuss what these groups actually do, just offer horror stories and assertions that bad teachers can't be fired.
pebird:
The U.S. spent around $3,700 per student in 1970. Using the handy-dandy government inflation calculator...we find that would purchase $18,843 in 2005, pretty close to a private school tuition.
Interesting in that one of Mr. Stossel's informants claimed that education spending had doubled, adjusted for inflation, in that same period.
Parents for Competitive Education:
Your defensive tone, angry words, and shallow ranting proves unequivocally that Stossel and ABC are right on.
First time reader, I take it. Stossel should have had me on, I guess. Would have saved a trip to Belgium.
Introducing competition, and making schools and teachers accountable for student performance, would give the U.S. education system the intellectual and organizational reform it so badly needs.
[shallow rant alert] "The good news, Janie, is you passed into the fourth grade. The bad news is, we're downsizing it." Competition is a tool; you'll have to excuse me for passing whenever it's offered as a panacea. We have competition now, for the wealthy and a few lucky Lotto winners. And as Stossel pointed out last night, 57% of the public gives its own public school an A or B. When I hear the plan that takes care of the poorest of the poor, and the most hopeless, as its first priority, I'll listen.
Peter Jackson:
[T]he main question I have for the anti-reformers is this: if a universal voucher system destroyed public education, how would we tell?
Off the top o' me head: when the only students left in what remains of our public schools are the special needs children and disciplinary problems the private schools now routinely dump back on them, if they accept any in the first place. And when the rising price tag is used as an excuse to rejigger the system, as it will be.
Tango Man:
You quote Stossel as saying: "Here in Belgium the government spends less than American schools do per student..." and you offer some unlinked data to support your attempted falsification of his thesis. Because I couldn't easily find the data you were basing your analysis on, I searched and found better data. Here it is:Expenditure on educational institutions per student (2000)BelgiumPrimary education: - $4,310.15All Secondary education: - $6,889United StatesPrimary education: - $6,994.63All Secondary education: - $8,855.06Expenditure on educational institutions per student relative to GDP per capita (2000)BelgiumPrimary education: - $16.33All Secondary education: - $26.10 United StatesPrimary education: - $20.21All Secondary education: - $25.59So, Stossel is correct on his point. The only place you can find a technical violation is in regards to secondary education when analyzed on a per capita basis, and it's quite a minor quibble at that.Further, your choice of using % of GDP is inappropriate. What Stossel asked was who spent more on education.
Thanks. I'm an old guy. I quoted the study the figures came from and the page number, which was sufficient in the last century. I didn't link it in part because it's a 70-page .pdf file, and the citation was sufficient to check my accuracy. I'll dig up the link if you'd like it.
Why I used % of GDP: first, it's the method from the test study Stossel was (presumably) using. Second, the spending in actual dollar figures (I didn't avoid them, btw. I didn't look, partly for this reason.) is something of a canard. "What Stossel asked" was a loaded question; the only way to truly compare the two would be to look at services. Percent of GDP certainly offers a better way to compare government commitment to education, I think, but either that or actual dollars/student leave a lot of questions unanswered. What do we spend on athletics, say, vs. Belgium? Believe me, athletics has a lot to do with parental approval; we're planning a high school athletic Magnet program for IPS here despite a plummeting budget. But they don't test hand/eye coordination on the PISA. To use the car analogy, it's not a question of who spent what, but who got what. Korea and Japan, for example, spend less as a percent of GDP than the US does, but they pay their teachers more.
The OECD report found a slight correlation between expendature and performance. So there are obviously a number of other factors involved. It was wrong to say Stossel "fabricated" the numbers without an exhaustive search for evidence, but then he's the one doing the network television report. He had the time for a citation. And his "question" simply ignored all complexities.
So, let me get this straight. Your criticism is that he targeted these districts as being unrepresentative of the nation's school districts but you let stand his characterization of the facts unchallenged. Is that right? Everything Stossel said was accurate,but only for NYC and Washington?
Um, well, the only "facts" Stossel offered about either, besides the general drift of the report, was the final section about NYC unions. And that's in the next part.
...could you sketch out a cursory argument of the perils of choice?
My comment was that "choice" was a major theme of the first part of the report. I don't think that can be addressed in a cursory way; maybe later, more fully.
"Program impacts on school environments were considerably smaller than impacts on neighborhoods, suggesting that achievement-related benefits from improved neighborhood environments are alone small." So the parents are acting to separate their kids from whatever bad influences they perceive, whether justified or not, whether rational or not, whether moral or not. Those parents are making choices but have to go through a convoluted process, rather than a straightforward one.
The major predictors of academic achievement are socio-economic status and parent's educational level. If we're really serious about not Leaving Children Behind we'll concern ourselves more with getting them adequate nutrition and health care, and much less about how they compare with Poland.
What's the "straightforward" process? Everybody on the bus, we're going to the successful school?
Umm, it's pretty boring for a TV reporter to stand in front of a camera and hold a document and tell the audience the content of that document. It's quite a bit more engaging to create a situation that is dynamic, such as using real students, the students taking the test, the commentary from the students. As near I can tell your beef with Stossel is that the test results, which indeed supported his thesis, were unduly amplified by his selection bias. So, it's the amplification, not the binary truthfulness that is the problem.
The way it's boring to wait a couple minutes for the Pinto to actually catch fire? C'mon. What stopped him from reporting the actual results, and admitting his little teevee dynamic produced results worse than average? There was a lot of talking heads stuff in the report. In the NYC union bit he unfurled a diagram instead of dramatizing the process.
You're citing Middle School curricula as a mitigating circumstance to excuse the lowering of student performance because middle school is preparing the students with a good foundation for later study. Is that right? If so, please back it up.
What I said was that's one of the arguments offered in mitigation. And it is. That's all. Neither this blog nor that last post is my life's work. Read more...
All Knowledge Is Incomplete Knowledge, But Some Is More Incomplete Than Others
>> Saturday, January 14
Maybe it's the 'stache...
John Stossel, ABC-TV: "Stupid in America: How We Cheat Our Kids"
SO right off the bat you might be asking yourself just how balanced a report you're getting when it uses "Stupid" and "Cheat" in the title, but of course you don't ask because it's John Stossel. I know we repealed the Fairness Doctrine. When did we repeal fairness?
And I am not making this up, I've got it on tape. The show opened with successive clips of Fast Times at Ridgemont High, Bill and Ted's Excellent Adventure and Ferris Bueller's Day Off, the last featuring a clip of Ben Stein as a boring drone, the role he was born to play, followed by a Student on the Street interview with a young lady who said some of her teachers were boring. Oh, my god, it's worse than I even imagined!
I was certainly prepared for an hour of anecdotal or cherry-picked evidence. I was prepared to see vidclips of anyone who disagreed with Stossel's divine wisdom edited to make them look shrill or mendacious. I did expect there might actually be some reasonable doubt expressed reasonably, though I was prepared to be disappointed. But God help me, I'm not sure why it is I was unprepared for outright fabrication:
Here in Belgium the government spends less than American schools do per student..."
when that's easily checked using the figures from the very test program that Stossel is using (both in the sense of "to employ" and "to manipulate cheaply for one's own gain", though I'm not sure those don't mean the same thing to him), the Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development's Programme for International Student Assessment, or PISA, tests. "Expenditure on Educational Institutions", from the chart on page 67 of the 2004 report:
Belgium: % of GDP, Public Schools: 5.97
United States: % of GDP, Public Schools: 4.66
Maybe it's just that some of our adults have a little problem with advanced mathematics, too. But then, per the report, Belgian funding "follows the student" into the school of his choice, so perhaps the 6.36% of GDP spent on public and private schools combined is more apt.
There's some more curious business involving Belgium and the PISA testing, but let's start at the beginning. I nearly did a full Kreskin on the thing, putting the following prediction in a sealed envelope: the first thing Stossel's gonna do is focus on New York City and Washington DC public schools. Why? Because those massive urban districts are a great favorite of the anti-union crowd, which likes to extrapolate to the entire country by inference, since they can't do it by fact. Sure enough, after we got done (with no apparent recognition of the irony, by the way) with showing that our perception of public schools comes from comedies aimed at young adults, we find the Mustachioed Muckracker trying, and failing, to get his cameras into NYC schools. Then DC alows him to tape, but only in an exceptional class taught by the National Teacher of the Year. No fair. They finally manage to get DC to agree to giving students (Stossel emphasized the district "hand-picked" the students, thereby underscoring the fact that he doesn't understand the first thing about supervising children) video cameras to film inside their schools. The results were suitably shocking:
•We see a young man remove his shirt and do a little spastic dance as the teacher sits apathetically in the background.
•We visit a geography class where students are playing Monopoly™. A smirking, attempted-teenage-bearded wiseass of the sort my wife treasures but I'd put in the hospital within twenty minutes of the bell leans directly into the camera to say "We're going to ask Mr. Dryner what Monopoly™ has to do with World Geography." We get a longer shot of Wiseass with his sandals ostentatiously up on his desk, and other students behaving badly.
Aha! Just the sort of thing we all knew was going on in "real" classrooms that weren't being taught by National Teachers of the Year.
Except, no, not quite. Even Lyin' John is forced to acknowledge that this class was taking place after finals. Any of you go to public school by any chance? Did you sit in your seat quietly and study on the last day of school? Could any thing short of the imminent application of superior physical force have made you?
Now, don't get me wrong. This sort of stuff drives my wife crazy. There are teachers who spend the last several days of the school year showing videos. She makes her students work until the final day, and every year has to endure the "Mr. So-and-so let us play games" bit. In fairness to Mr. So-and-so, she's teaching Art, and that's a lot more like play, plus it's a Magnet program, and students must understand that they aren't getting out of her class; they're going on vacation and will return to their chosen field of study in a couple months. In fairness to all of them, it's hot, not all the building was air-conditioned until this year, and the students just want to be out. It's discipline hell.
So the last thing you'd want in your class is a freakin' video camera, and I have to wonder about the mental competence of whoever it was agreed to (or was tricked into) it. It's not actually clear that the teachers knew they were being taped, but it's clear the children did.
This, of course, is not the view we get of the Miracle Schools Stossel shows us. Well-behaved children, often in uniform, eager to learn, required to police the grounds and set up tables for lunch, all of them progressing at remarkable rates. No attempts here to go behind the scenes for a peek at what "really" goes on. No complaints that we're being given the official tour by a hands-on administrator. Nope, this is how it really works when you give parents a choice.
"Choice" was a big theme of Act I. Why can't parents choose what school they want their children to go to? Why do some parents go so far as to lie about their place of residence to get their children into "good" schools? Most of the countries that score higher than the US give parents choice.*
This is going to take us to Belgium shortly, but let's just note a couple things first, here. Stossel has already told us money isn't the answer. So why, then, are these schools of choice uniformly in wealthier districts? Parents aren't clamoring to get their children into schools with poorer equipment and fewer programs. Yes, there are a number of factors involved, but the inequalities in the American public education system are a national disgrace. Why isn't that a part of the show? And what exactly is the Libertarian theory that excuses it? We believe that Choice is a supreme good, but children don't choose to be poor.
But teevee producers can chose to fly to Belgium, and this segment was verrrrry curious:
"We gave parts of an international test to some high school students in Belgium, and in New Jersey."
Tonite on ABC it's the Belgian Waffles vs. Your New Jersey Barrens in a Texas Chain Saw Math Test! Whoa. I know it would violate standard Stossel practice, but is there some reason you don't cite the test? There's only one international test to speak of: PISA. And so is there some reason you give the test to two small groups of students, rather than use the results of the much larger sample of the real test? Yeah, probably.
This has a distinct Pepsi Challenge air about it already, but let's dig a bit deeper. We have no information as to who these Belgian students are; we do know that the Americans are a diverse group from a Jersey public school. That "parts of" thing is a little hinky, too. The PISA test comes in three parts: reading, science, and math literacy. But in a moment we'll reveal the average scores of our two competing teams, and it'll be a single number. So we didn't give two of the three parts; did we give selected portions of the math test?
Math is where American students in the tests for fifteen-year-olds score the poorest. Our ten-year-olds score above international averages, but the fifteen-year-olds trail the country mean by 3%. Which gives Stossel grounds for claiming "the longer kids spend in school the worse they get." But one of the factors that've been cited for our poor performance is that middle school, which these students have just completed, is in America something of a spin-your-wheels period. We tend to use those grades to reinforce what has been learned, to prepare for more advanced study ahead, and to separate students in terms of academic achievement. And it's the time when students expand into other areas of study and encounter their first elective courses. The countries which score highest tend to have a more conservative approach, spending more time on traditional subjects and having fewer areas of study available, and generally use testing at that level to determine a student's further academic opportunities.
So at the very least we gave a small sample of the test to two groups when we could have just looked up the results of the real test. I'm assuming here it was math. And the final score? Belgium in a walk 76-47. Way to go, Waffles! Especially impressive performance, seeing as how in the real test the USA scores were 91% of the Belgians'.
This may have been partly explained by the Jay Leno routine we did with the class (after showing a couple of real Jay clips, that's weeknights at 11:30, right here on this station; Jay befuddles one young couple by asking which state hosts the Kentucky Derby, and hilarity insues). One student couldn't name a major cause of the Civil War; another couldn't tell what the Bill of Rights was. A third opined that "we're not stupid. It must have something to do with teaching," but honey, and I mean this in a nice way, if you don't know enough to say "Slavery" when someone asks you about the Civil War I'm not sure it matters whether your teachers are even breathing or not.
NEXT: Unions support child molesters, Phonics work miracles, and John gets bad service in a Soviet restaurant.
* This is probably a matter of educational organization, but given Stossel's track record with the truth I intend to research this one, too. Read more...
Friday Boring Personal Stuff
>> Friday, January 13
• That's the fire hydrant next to my property. The amusing little chapeau came courtesy of the Water Co. we sold to private investors a few years back. I love the lime green; it hasn't at all been nauseating me for a decade now on every home makeover show I have the privilege of paying for each month. iz dis gonna b kewl 4 evah?
What happened is that we had our third major water main break in four years last November. The actual break occurs two blocks east up the big cross street to our south, but we're just one lot south of the (usually dry) creek bed it all runs into. As with the last two, it was fixed in a few hours. This one wasn't nearly as spectacular as the preceding ones.
But then a different break occurred on the other side of the street a couple weeks later, and that one just sort of bubbled and oozed away. It seemed to stop for awhile (nobody saw any repair crews), then rebounded early Christmas week. It was the following week before they showed up to fix that one.
Then last week I was driving home and a very large truck had our very small street all but blocked. I had to stop to let a car coming from his direction pass me. As I got to the other side I saw the guy who was supposed to be directing traffic, well, not directing traffic. There was an identical truck straight ahead, and sure enough it was parked blocking my driveway. They were running a line down a hole in my neighbor's yard.
Two days after they finished that, I noticed there was a sizable pool in my neighbor's yard. I waited a couple days, and when it was still there I called the company to report it. (My neighbor doesn't see his lawn in between the time he mows it for the third and last time of the season, usually in August, and the time one of his children gets lost in it the following June.)
They came out the next day and gave it a hat. That was Tuesday. I'm gonna remember this next summer when they ask me to water my lawn at night so the golf course sprinklers won't lose pressure.
• For those of you following my wife's room assignment saga...oh, first, yes, Kathy, I really did fart in that woman's general direction. It's not particularly a talent I've nurtured. I have diverticulosis, and one of the prized items on my diet is a tablespoon of peanut butter now and then, but I'm only a man, dammit, and sometimes it tastes good enough I have a little too much, and some evil crackers. So it was just fortuitous, only not for her.
Well, it won't come as much of a surprise that the Evil Cabal of "regular" art teachers actually reneged on the whole administration-mandated room assignments and just stayed where they wanted to, meaning that the largest, most desired room (it has storage) now sits empty all but two periods a day. This resulted in a nasty email from the Big Office, but no disciplinary action. My wife, however, is now so fed up she isn't even speaking to me, no doubt on the grounds that that's preferable to what she'd say if she did talk. If it continues over the weekend I'm suing somebody for alienation of affection and loss of marital services.
Courting Disaster
There's really only one reason I have no interest in blogging Court appointment hearings: disgust. The Court is the area where my ability to swallow large draughts of Democratic Party swill in exchange for the occasional shot of fine anti-GOP spirits (a sort of reverse Boilermaker) is tested and found wanting.
Before this really sets me off, three pieces which say what I would have said if I were 15% smarter and my patience was closer to the Book of Job than the Book of J◊B rolling papers:
Michael O'Hare: A Piece Missing
He doesn't have a screw loose; what he has is a piece missing, conspicuously, radiantly, displaying an apparent absence of any sense of, well, justice. Not a case came up for discussion in which he registered that one or another outcome was just wrong, outrageous to a sense of decency, or to him....It wasn't exactly Pilate washing his hands, but the man appears to be completely comfortable dealing with frightful social wrongs by moving the issue down the hall to another office. Sometimes the Court has to do this, but to Alito it's an especially good day's work, not a disappointment.
Mark Kleiman: The CAP flap
Alito's membership in CAP is an especially painful issue for his supporters because CAP revealed starkly a truth about conservatism that most contemporary conservatives prefer to hide. That dirty little secret is that, in addition to its intellectual content, conservatism as a political tendency and a movement has a social content. The social content of conservatism is partiality toward those of higher status and greater social centrality and hostility to those lower down the social scale and further toward the margins: rich over poor, white over black, Anglo over Latino, Christian over Jew, Muslim, Hindu, pagan, or atheist, straight over gay, male over female.
(Kleiman also decribed Alito's convenient memory lapse as a "subsequent attack of Waldheimer's Disease" for which, assuming it's his coinage, he deserves enshrinement in some Lexical Hall of Fame somewhere.)
And Peter Daou: The (Broken) Triangle: Progressive Bloggers in the Wilderness
But rather than a Democratic triumph, the Alito hearings have thrown the dichotomy between the netroots and the Democratic leadership into even starker relief, illustrating the profound dysfunction of the left’s triangle. As well, the depth and breadth of media complicity and the obliviousness of so many Democrats to it, is alarming. From the choreography of Specter and Alito creating the "open mind on abortion" soundbite that media outlets dutifully ran with, to the Sen. Graham/Mrs. Alito tear-fest that should have prompted Dems to slam the Republicans for bringing the Judge's wife to tears but instead turned into another Dem-bashing occasion, to the complete failure of the Democratic leadership to create the appropriate tone of outrage (in soundbite form), the chronic breakdown of the establishment and media sides of the left's triangle is apparent.
Maybe it's a function of chronology: I grew up thinking, and being taught, that the Court had, beginning in the late 40s, begun to enter the modern age and to correct the old imbalance between personal and property rights. I had teachers who told me, as a sort of Constitutional algebra, that as a man ascended to the high point of the legal world, and surveyed with proper solemnity the Shining City spread below him, he naturally became more liberal, more compassionate, more of a defender of the law's true spirit.
That all ended before I was able to vote, when Nixon managed to get segregation-apologist William Renchburg, er, Rehnquist, onto the Court. Illusions die a painful death at that age. And it's been basically downhill since then, despite the slim majority keeping reproductive rights alive, despite the defeat of the Abominable Bork.
It's a party of public liars and private thieves. In politics you do watch this as a slow-motion train wreck; granted enough years you see the Bush administration as the logical culmination of the criminality of Nixon and the Hollywood phoniness of Reagan. And the Democratic party facilitated it. They facilitated it at the end of the Watergate hearings when they refused to follow the money trail into the halls of Congress. They gunned down their own in Jimmy Carter, then waved the white flag for Reagan. Funny how it still required a power grab to complete the deal on Reaganism, despite their surrender, because like his idiot bastard cousin a quarter century later he didn't have enough occupying troops either. Funny how all those problems the Great Communicator used to communicate to us are with us still. Today there's no Reagan legacy except in hagiographies by the likes of Peggy Noonan, because it was all about power and nothing about principle. Reagan didn't have the guts to solve problems. He didn't lead, he ran around looking for parades to jump in front of. And the Democrats played along.
Then they finally break the cycle of Electoral College humiliations, and what do they do? Shoot Bill Clinton in the ass over health care. Health care! What Democratic party principle did that violate? The sacred belief in polls and campaign contributions? Republicans rile up their red-meat constituencies then take the money and largely ignore them. Democrats take the money, then run scared of their own constituencies. What did that get them? The chance to wave the same white flag twenty-five years later.
The Court has been tilted to the right for all that time. And because of that we sit here today conducting the same debate we did in the Eighties, namely, the debate over the Sixties. The right lost the culture war, but won the political battle. But the spoils of politics are money and power, not the ability to dictate how people think. The Mamon servers of the mass-market media have done what they could to help, but the fact is we have a polity which does not reflect its citizens, who do not want the return of back-alley abortions, do not want Christianity taught in public schools, do not want the government or its affiliated corporations laying waste to their neighborhoods in the name of profit. If I walk up and down my little Middle West middle-class suburban block with a lit joint, knocking on doors and saying, "Hi, I'm your neighbor, wanna toke?" 75% would let me in, and we're talking about largely white, somewhat above-average income earners. If I did the same thing with a Bible in my hand and announced I was there to talk about Jesus, at least that same percentage would shut the door in my face.
But we're about to enter into the era of the Right-Wing Catholic Court, the life-appointment version of the earlier Racist-Dixiecrats-Change-Parties Executive. The logical conclusion to the latter is the continuing disaster that is the Bush administration (interesting, last evening, to catch some of the News Hour as "experts" debated our next move in Iran, as though we're just gonna tidy up this little manpower problem in Iraq and get ready to shove someone else around). Will the long-term result of filling the Court with radical-right approved ideologues be a disaster of equal proportions, fluffed by the same mouthpieces of money and power? I don't know. The whole originalist/textualist sham that the right hasn't been able to resolve to its own satisfaction is probably going to come to a close, the same way Abolish the Department of Education became Let's Use the Department of Education once they had it back. Maybe there's a conversion in someone's Court future. What I do know is that whatever happens, it won't be because the politicians of the Democratic party did us any good. Read more...
Fashion Statement
>> Thursday, January 12
Apparently Jack Abramoff not only set back the cause of fedoras another thirty years, he also set off a minor storm of idiocy and the blogosphere's world-renowned self-correcting feature. JPod called it "the black hat of a very Orthodox Jew," and David Brooks' crack research squad came up with "pseudo-Hasidic homburg," which manages to be wrong three times in just three words, probably a record even for him. Howard Fineman and MoDo, those starry-eyed Romantics, spied a gangster thing going on.
It was left to Stepehn Hirsch in Salon to straighten things out with some expert testimony. It's a Borsalino Como:
What struck me was that Abramoff was wearing my hat, a Borsalino, the ne plus ultra of Yeshiva boy caps.
I couldn't pick that out from the teevee loop I saw a half-dozen times, or any of the still photos (I've lightened the one above to bring out the details). Not sure I could have, anyway, but ne plus ultra it is. Borsalinos are the best, and the Como is their best design. It was actually on my short list last time I made a hat purchase, but I got a summer and a winter porkpie instead. And saved a lot of money.
Abramoff is an Orthodox Jew. So the hat is neither pseudo-anything, nor is it Hasidic, and a homburg it most definitely ain't. Hirsch speculates that Abramoff might have been seeking his comfort zone. Okay. But how'd he screw up a $200 hat?
There's been some quibbling about crown height and brim width. I think he's a little shy on the width--it should have been available in increases of 1/8 inch, and the salesman should have told him his face required a little more of it. The crown seems okay to me.
But look at him--he looks like he took the thing out of the box and plopped it down on his head with a T-square. Work the thing first, man. The center crease is too deep; that might not have been amenable to to manhandling, but the haberdasher could have steamed it for you. And those side dents look like they were made by machine. It's your hat! Make it your own. Roll the brim, push it down, do something.
Looking at it, I can't help but think of the pseudo-style and pseudo-elegance of all the wealthy Reaganauts of a certain age I knew, the ones who bought Italian suits and silks and still looked like they shopped at Penney's. The guys who thought they were knowledgeable because they could say "Cohiba". The ones who read The Wine Spectator and bought up designer California cabernet and first-growth Bordeaux, then drank them five years before they were ready, after making sure their guests saw the label. The ones who thought money equalled quality equalled class, and class meant you were more worthy than the next guy.
Just where the hell have you gone, Joe DiMaggio? In the living memory of some of our older citizens, American culture, American food and wine, American style meant cornball. That wasn't always deserved, but we had a national inferiority complex about it. Sometime in the 70s we decided to change that (a direct result, if I may say so, of the evil Sixties countercultural interest in the handmade, the purely decorative, and the foreign). But somehow with Reagan we simply jumped to the self-congratulatory stage without ever paying any dues. Which is why we now turn out boatloads of halfway decent $15 wines that cost $50, and why we make superstars out of some guy who puts his hands all over your food before charging you $75 for a meal. Finesse and hucksterism do not mix. You think Fred Astaire would have worn his hat like that?
Ultimately, that damn thing just screams aging Yuppie scum. Which is fitting, I guess, even if the hat isn't. Read more...
Boob Tube
This is an Olympic year, a Winter Olympic year, that is; I think the Winter Games should always be followed by an asterisk. I may have more to say about that later.
But in the meantime the excitement is almost palpable around Chez Riley, so it was surprising that something could knock it off #1 on the Anticipation List, but if anything could it's the prospect of John Stossel explaining what's wrong with American public schools. Tomorrow on ABC's 20/20, check local listings. It's likely I'll have more to say about that one, too.
Don't Buy A Hangover Cure From A Guy Who Never Sobers Up
>> Tuesday, January 10
Joe Klein: "How to Stay Out of Power", Time Web Exclusive, Jan. 8
I'M not good at math. Actually, I was good at math, but circumstances and my natural indolence led to a lack of training. When I switched schools in the eighth grade the guidance counsellor mistakenly put me in the regular math class, and since I didn't know anybody I wasn't aware of the problem for months. "Oh," he later told me, "you should have been in the advanced class." That cleared that up. "Oh." You're now a year behind and there's nothing we can do about it. So I wound up taking algebra and geometry in high school in classes full of people who Just Couldn't Get It, and by the time I was free to take calculus or trigonometry I was old enough to realize that neither was likely to get me laid. I suppose my loco parents could have raised holy hell when the mess was discovered, but my stepfather held to the theory that any training for a young man which did not involve the risk of crushing or amputating body parts was suspect. Art, somehow, he was fine with. I think he was attracted to the fumes.
Anyway, as everyone knows, unless you actually need the stuff it's just a time-filler, and my one regret is that I'm thoroughly incompetent when it comes to theorem jokes. Because by now this "How the Democrats can stay out of power" business desperately cries out for an equation, and the best I can do is a title: the "Lieberman Absorption Hypothesis."
This, I know, falls far short, because in addition to the DLC-type critique there's the mirrored Republican Troll Advice Gambit, which more properly belongs to game theory, but they use the same raw data: Democrats, by doing x or ignoring bedrock Red-state value y are consigning themselves to permanent minority status. The main difference between the two is that the latter adds "Ha ha ha" at the end. Both suggest, jokingly or not, that Nascar Dads and Values Voters, two groups whose responses are so well known in advance it's not necessary to do any actual testing, are either dying to throw off their GOP masters, or at least wish they could demonstrate their own serious-minded concern about Issues by occasionally voting for a Democrat who was indistinguishable from his Republican opponent.
But the fact is that Klein's column actually has very little to do with the Absorption Hypothesis; it seems to be there like a tattoo he's not quite embarrassed enough by to cover up yet. The column starts with some sort of swipe at Nancy Pelosi which, honestly, was so lackluster I couldn't be bothered to look up the story to see what he was distorting about it. Assuming that it happened (go ahead, you look it up and tell me), am I supposed to be outraged in our current political climate because a Democrat used weasel words? Damn, Joe, you're threatening to become the Jerry Quarry Celebrity Casino Greeter of punditry. If not Norma Desmond.
Klein reports a weird response from Pelosi that makes me wonder just what context it was yanked from:
When I asked the Congresswoman about this, she said, "Some in the government have accused me of confusing apples and oranges. My response is, it's all fruit."
Except he's the one doing the accusing. I know, politicians change the subject all the time, but you'd think if this were an actual response to the actual lead-off of the piece he'd have pressed for something which at least sounded like they were having a conversation.
That's not the point. This is:
A dodgy response at best, but one invested with a larger truth. For too many liberals, all secret intelligence activities are "fruit," and bitter fruit at that. The government is presumed guilty of illegal electronic eavesdropping until proven innocent. This sort of civil-liberties fetishism is a hangover from the Vietnam era, when the Nixon Administration wildly exceeded all bounds of legality—spying on antiwar protesters and civil rights leaders.
It's funny. All these years I've imagined civil liberties fetishism was a hangover from the American Revolution.
But the "all fruit" assumption doesn't take into account the strict constraints placed on the intelligence community after the Nixon debacle, or the lethally elusive nature of the current terrorist threat. The liberal reaction is also an understandable consequence of the Bush Administration's tendency to play fast and loose on issues of war and peace—rushing to war after overhyping the intelligence on Saddam Hussein's nuclear-weapons program, appearing to tolerate torture, keeping secret prisons in foreign countries and denying prisoners basic rights. At the very least, the Administration should have acted, with alacrity, to update the federal intelligence laws to include the powerful new technologies developed by the NSA.
No, Joe, at the very least the administration should have obeyed the law. And the Doctrine of Elusive Lethality isn't a part of it. Serial killers are lethally elusive. So are domestic terrorists. What, in the course of human events, isn't an excuse for some Wild West justice? I'm ready to kill my neighbor for letting his elusive dog poop on my lawn.
I've got to squeeze in the bit that brought me there in the first place, a mention in the Daou Report of hip-hop "conservative" blogger Sister Toldja's take:
Make sure to note his information on how there is evidence that, thanks to the leaker as well as the reporting of this story in the NYTimes, that the terrorists are modifying their behavior, which obviously hampers our ability to track them.
So here's the amazing proof:
It would have been a scandal if the NSA had not been using these tools to track down the bad guys. There is evidence that the information harvested helped foil several plots and disrupt al-Qaeda operations.
There is also evidence, according to U.S. intelligence officials, that since the New York Times broke the story, the terrorists have modified their behavior, hampering our efforts to keep track of them—but also, on the plus side, hampering their ability to communicate with one another.
Yep, there's your evidence--a journalist says so. And that's always good enough for your right-wing blogosphere.
So excuse me for just waking up, but it seems like only yesterday when we were announcing specific terrorist threats to specific bridges, or generalized threats to shopping malls or Wall Street on specific days, but now, after the fact and presumably with no intelligence operatives at risk, since these were intercepts, we can't, I dunno, name one? Are we now somehow reticent to actually arrest people in this country with links to SPECTRE, or do we have to keep that quiet, too? Jeez, even Dervishes get tired of spinning at some point. Read more...
School Work
>> Monday, January 9
It's Doom and Gloom Monday here, aka Return to School Day, which comes quite late this year because the geniuses who run things at IPS decided that the first semester should end before vacation began, so final tests ran to December 23, when students were thinking about anything but. That sort of anal compulsiveness is the mark of far too many people who Run Things. Make it come out even! Get it done three days early! Fold it so the corners match! There's a lot of it everywhere, and education is no exception. Which, on the one hand, you'd think might not be the case. You're dealing with teenagers. Is there anything messier than teenagers, in the psychic sense, at least? On the other hand, I suppose there are plenty of people for whom the more officious teachers of their own youth were some sort of totem, in all likelihood sexualized.
I have to admit--please keep this quiet--that I probably defend teachers a bit more than their due, basically because there's been such a steady drum-beat of anti-union, the-sky-is-falling, unlettered nonsense over the past thirty years. Most any discussion that draws a crowd is sure to find at least one Right Wing Talking Point point talker who simply declares, "Public schools are failing" the way he declares that Iraq had connections to 9/11 or the media is librul. It's not long from there to the "unions prevent the best teachers from being rewarded" and the "vouchers would help the Poor" routines. If you can manage to get these people to answer questions you generally find that the last time they set foot in a public school was when they graduated, or if they happen to be parents of public school students they think their school is better than most, except there was one arrogant teacher who Just Wouldn't Listen. The single arrogant teacher is the Hook Man of educational urban legend; childless combatants often refer to the run-in a friend of their cousin had with him.
Of course, teachers are human, and some are spiteful, turf-protecting, petty tyrants. No doubt you matriculated under some. This distinguishes them somewhat from public school administrators in that, in my narrow experience at least, most of the latter are spiteful, turf-protecting, petty tyrants.
You may also be sure that most of the people who complain about teachers and unions would last about ten minutes trying to do the work themselves.
"Vacation" this time around meant moving my wife from her former classroom to one two flights above on the opposite side of the campus. It's the fourth time she's been moved in three semesters, and that doesn't count having to move everything out of the room she was in last winter break so they could work on the heating/cooling (actually bringing air conditioning to her room, only four years into the 21st century). It's an enormous amount of work. She's a pack rat, for one thing, but art teachers have to be. At least five-hundred books. Three-hundred pounds of magazines. Every sort of artists' medium, paper, easels and canvases. Materials that have been scrounged from every sort of local business in order to supplement her budget.
So why exactly was she forced to move yet again? Good question, to which the short answer is the people who run things must be seen as running them. Don't just stand there, do something that'll get you attention.
In the case of IPS this, most recently, meant signing on to the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation's Small Schools Initiative. What IPS did, under a lame-duck superintendent, was to agree to divide every one of its high schools into "small learning communities" each with some particular career focus, on the grounds that having learning populations of 400, rather than 1600 students in one big school, would lead to more teacher-pupil interaction. It is the only large urban district to jump into this with both feet.
(None of the money, by the way, goes into the classroom. It goes to the education school at the university which oversees the project, and from there pays for "teacher training" and seminars and the like. The teacher training last year amounted to people spending meeting hours going through paperwork, for which they were paid their regular salaries. The seminar part included a trip to Vegas--during the last school year--for two of the school's administrators.)
Each community has its own dean, and each has its own section of the building. So the first thing that happened, at the end of last year, was petty squabbling over territory and an attempt to settle personal scores. My wife and the other art teacher in the Magnet program took a double hit here, because the Magnet program is not a part of this Big Scheme, and the regular art department, which is, has a couple of petty-minded individuals who hate the Magnet program for its relatively small class sizes and large space requirements.
Unlike the other teachers, who were present at the meetings and got to vote on various proposals, my wife and her cohort were shut out, represented only by the director of the Magnet program, who was not available to attend every meeting. The first room my wife was sentenced to assigned had no ventilation, despite the fact that her advanced students are working with various solvents known to the state of California to cause cancer and birth defects. And this point was made plain before the vote. She and I had to spend an evening hunting down and printing out various OSHA regulations to put a stop to that one.
Let's note at this point that her school has three administrators, a Principal and two assistants, one of whom is responsible for Buildings and Grounds. They couldn't be bothered to get involved until this thing became a big freaking pre-teen slumber party catfight of a mess. This is known in administratin' circles as "delegating authority". By the time they were forced to do their jobs it was the end of the school year. My wife had to wait three weeks before she even knew what room she was going to be in this year, which meant that our shed, her office, and the dining room housed boxes of stuff most of the summer. I'll be writing the storage costs off my taxes come next month. The Principal, whose talent runs to getting himself on the local news and finding others to blame for shit, finally reprimanded the assistant principal for the chaos in an email he conveniently accidentally sent to a wide number of people.
They've both been pink-slipped for next year, by the way, which doesn't mean they're fired, but does mean they can be moved anywhere in the system, or maybe nowhere at all.
The latest move came about because the most offensive of the regular art teachers, a woman who reportedly is universally despised, filed a grievance about the room changes, and some functionary from the Home Office came in, talked to no one, and made new assignments two weeks before the semester's end. So that's how we spent our holidays.
I did what I could to help, but a lot of the stuff requires my wife's hands-on sorting. She was putting in eight-hour days. But I was there Thursday morning in time to meet the Nemesis. She came roaring into my wife's new room, demanding to know if that was "her table" she'd spied through the window of the closed door. "It has my purple mark on it!" she declared in a voice I considered altogether improper. She hadn't seen that I was there until I started to walk in her direction. If nothing else that reduced the volume by 90%.
"I had six of those tables and now they're gone!" she continued. My wife explained that this one was hers. It should be noted that these are large pieces of furniture which had been moved by the overworked custodial staff, not boosted by my wife personally. It should also be noted, though it's probably not necessary, that there was no mark, purple or otherwise, on the thing.
It was a little awkward; I certainly didn't want to do anything which would cause my wife any difficulties down the road, and she's more than capable of handling herself, but I knew she was tired and I just didn't like this woman or her boorish behavior. So I took my sunglasses off my hat and put them on as I walked, unthreateningly, over to the two of them. I cocked my head and gave her a Vince D'Onofrio Law & Order look. And then, drawing on my years of experience and circle of college associates, I farted audibly.
She left.
Dear readers, more money is thrown away on Big Schemes than is lost to all the union-supported goldbricking and internet time wasting of every wage earner throughout the globe. We need more people who care, more who know what they're talking about, and more who tighten nuts and bolts, and a lot fewer who dream up big ideas, in Washington or locally. If you know a good teacher and have the opportunity, give her a hug today. I know I will.
I Have Not Yet Begun To Nitpick!
>> Saturday, January 7
I've had a long week, one which is partly explained by one of the four or five unfinished posts sitting on my desktop, so forgive me for the delay in mentioning The Good Roger Ailes' textbook job of Crossing the T on "Captain Ed", hauling in her colors, and probably necessitating a quick change of breeches. Our English language is chock-a-block with 18th century sailing terms there, Ed. "Pricked and primed" and "touch hole" being just two examples.
It's worth a recap, and probably a Koufax:
1. The "Captain" decides to take a potshot at Kos for daring to quote Patrick Henry. In "Patrick Henry's Dirty Little Secret", Ed reveals that Henry was a chickenhawk! He never served in the Revolution!
2. In response, Ailes relays the story of the Gunpowder Incident, which began on April 20, 1775, in which Henry led the Hanover militia, the first colonists to arrive on the scene.
3. Ed replies with an UPDATE, acknowledging the error while simultaneously warping from the 18th century to the 21st, where the truth is more amenable to willful distortion:
Roger Ailes and CQ reader Duckman rightly point out that Patrick Henry did take part in one engagement, a raid to secure powder a few days after Lexington in May 1775 -- before he received his commission, in fact. Mea culpa. However -- and this is my point -- Patrick Henry's worth to the American Revolution has little or nothing to do with this one uncontested military effort on Henry's part. If that qualifies Henry as a hero in Kos' eyes, then why wouldn't flying two years of defense missions in a notoriously unreliable jet protecting the homeland qualify as well? Especially since the latter person requested a transfer to combat while the former resigned his commission just as the war started to heat up? Rather than "denigrating" Henry, as Duckman says I did, I pointed out that Henry's greatness had nothing to do with whether he served in a combat position at any point in his life, but in the work he did to push for the creation of this nation of freedom and liberty. He used his best skills to the fullest extent to perform great work. That isn't validated by his presence at one single engagement just as it isn't invalidated by his resignation of his commission after the war started -- as I argued.
The nitpickers get one fact right (and I got one wrong, of course) while managing to miss the entire point. Debating war policy based on the worthiness of one's prior service to the nation is a stupid, juvenile exercise, very much akin to measuring genitalia to determine manliness. Try focusing on the policy itself rather than the military experience of those who debate it. [Italics in original]
The Henry canard has been around forever. It has nothing whatever to do with any "chickenhawk" business; the Gunpowder Incident, and Henry's part in it, is widely known to anyone whose knowledge of the history of the Revolution runs deeper than our egregious high school texts. Rather, there are those who comment pointedly on the apparent contradiction between Henry's reputation as a revolutionary firebrand and his remaining as Governor of Virginia rather than taking the field during the war.
The idea undoubtedly does violence to the difference between 18th century warfare and that of the modern era. Henry took the lead in raising the militia that one month after the incident would help overthrow the Royal Governor. He was instrumental in raising militias throughout the war--something which meant "at personal expense" in those days. And as a revolutionary leader he certainly stood to be hanged if captured by the British.
But whatever the case of Henry's personal involvement, the Cap'n fouls his own lines in response. Nitpicking is a pathetic enough when your entire argument was resting on that particular nit, but the wise course would be to at least do a little reading before opening your mouth again, especially after you called your opponent's understanding of American history "facile". Henry wasn't "uncontested" at Williamsburg; the Royal Navy was in the harbor, and Governor Dunmore was threatening to destroy the city and Yorktown.
It's also wise not to accuse said nitpickers of "missing the point" and thus draw attention to the fact that you're trying to change it.
It's obvious a little further history can't hurt, so let's examine Chickenhawk, shall we? Its popularity traces to Al Franken's Rush Limbaugh Is A Big Fat Idiot And Other Observations, which took Limbaugh to task for his ever-changing (and never accurate) explanation for his failure to serve in the Vietnam War despite his outspoken support for it since. Franken goes on to name several leading Republicans of the day (1996) who also claimed both deferments and their support: Phil Gramm, George Will, Pat Buchanan, and Newt Gingrich, and added Dan Quayle, who got a coveted slot in the Indiana National Guard thanks to his father's string pulling.
As such that is, and remains, a sort of Patrick Henry argument, although none of the above approached Henry's involvement. It points to a certain, let's say, disconnect between the words and deeds. It raises questions about character. And it became something of a cottage industry afterwards, especially seeing how it's practically impossible to find a real veteran among administration warfloggers.
But it has nothing whatsoever to do with the idea that the military shouldn't be subject to civilian review if those civilians lacked combat experience. Franken was writing while Clinton was President, fer chrissakes.
And then 9/11 changed everything, but some things more than others. Facing a war between Civilization and Chaos apparently required more of us rhetorically and less of us in terms of personal sacrifice than wars of older, reality-based centuries. And Iraq (and the shameless attacks on politicians who actually did serve), put matters in an entirely new light: now the hawkishness preceeded the refusal to serve, and as our manpower shortage became so acute that even the Fighting 101st Keyboarders™ could no longer wish it away, the question, "Why aren't you in uniform?" became rather pointed. Some, like many of the Kippie Chickenhawk of the Year nominees, have better things to do. Others, like the Cap'n and VBen Shapiro have resorted to PsyOps. It's a fitting regiment for those for whom missing the point is something of a cri de guerre, if you'll pardon my French. Read more...
Never Mind The Bollocks, Jane, Here's The Real Bollocks
>> Friday, January 6
Wednesday was opening day of the short session of America's Third Worst State Legislature™ (Motto: "Kansas? Hah! We were frittering away the public's time and money on religious mumbo jumbo back when they were still wantonly killing Clint Eastwood's family in The Outlaw Josie Wales!"). And as befits a solidly Red Republican controlled state, we're already making WaPo's page A3 for a wholly manufactured squabble about Praising Jesus in story and song to open every House session. Question: aren't you guys the party of Small Government? Used to be we didn't even have a short session. Go home and pray all you want.
Should you happen to read all the way to the end of the Post story you'll find Speaker of the House and Lord High Deacon Brian Bosma delivering this piety:
But Bosma, a lawyer first elected in 1986, said he will not honor calls for defiance.
"Open defiance of the judge's order, I believe, would send the wrong message to every Hoosier and especially every young person, regarding obedience of the law, even laws you may disagree with personally," Bosma said.
which somehow left out the fact that the first call for defiance was from...wait for it...Bosma himself, who listed "ignoring it" as one of two options he was considering after losing in court.
And if you'd read the Indianapolis Star article covering the "Prayer Protest" meeting these
Outside the House chamber, peering through a window at the proceedings and carrying a sign that said "In the name of Jesus Christ, Amen," 15-year-old Praise Jerusha Sharp, Crawfordsville, was among those who objects to Hamilton's ruling.
She took a day off from her private school to make her feelings known. "If they don't start praying in Jesus' name, our country is going to fall," she said. "I've asked (God), and he doesn't like it."
I think we can at least all thank our personal divinities we still live in a country where you are free to name your child "Praise Jerusha" and indoctrinate her to the point of schizophrenia by age 15. Amen.
The local news last night did manage to squeeze into its ten-minutes-out-of-every-half-hour coverage a brief clip of the Rotunda gang chanting, "Jesus! Jesus!" in a way that actually embarrassed me for Christianity. I can't wait for the Satanists to turn up for a good Beelzebub Pep Rally. Besides, they're a lot more telegenic.
There is a flip side to this. Shouting, "Save me, Jesus!" and "In the Name of the Great I Am" (which is apparently something the evangelicals think makes Jews imagine they're in solidarity), is pretty much the least damage these people can do. Maybe we should demand they pray 24/7 and leave us the hell alone. At least they wouldn't be able to pass Rep. Troy "I Fell On the Daylight Savings Grenade for Mitch Daniels and All I Got Was This Lousy Sucking Chest Wound" Woodruff's proposed legislation banning all abortions except where the mother's life is threatened--aka the "Let's spend a few hundred thousand tax dollars defending an empty gesture" Bill, or the proposal to fund Statehouse statues of every President or Vice President who was an Indiana resident, which I'll support only if Dan Quayle is holding a nine iron. That's the news from the sticks, folks. Wish I could send you back to saner climes. Read more...
Thursday Household Hints
>> Thursday, January 5
Grover Norquist, urging lobbying reform [sic], via Michael Scherer in Salon:
"If you put the birthday cake under the sink the cockroaches will find it," Norquist said, in a telephone interview Wednesday afternoon. "Get rid of the cake and you will get rid of the cockroaches."
Not surprisingly Mr. Riley, longtime cuisinier, disagrees: "First, turn the lights on. Step on all the cockroaches, beginning with the fattest, making sure to get every last one. Savor the crunch under your boot. Then put the cake where it belongs."
What's That Smell?
When he catches Newt Gingrich on the news lecturing Congressional Republicans from the DC Rotary Club podium on the need to get out in front of Republican Scandals, Inc., the wizened political observer instinctively grabs both ears to keep his head from spinning all the way around. At my age, whiplash is serious business.
Here's my favorite piece of advice from the man who never fails to have some and never once takes it:
Gingrich, who helped lead the Republican takeover of the House in 1994, called on his party to overhaul lobbying and campaign-finance rules. Both parties have created an environment that allows lobbyists like Abramoff to prosper, he said.
Hoo, boy, it was still a close call on the head-spinning thing. Some older readers may recall that Gingrich was at one time Speaker of the House of Representatives which, under his leadership, handed campaign finance reform the gas pipe. Newt was the first witness at the Oversight Committee's hearings on reform. Among other things, he said the call to campaign finance reform was a "nonsensical socialist analysis based on hatred of the free enterprise system."
They did pass a lobbyist gift "ban" in late November of '95, after Newt's famous handshake agreement with Bill Clinton and his and Dick Armey's attempts to push that boxcar onto the siding thereafter. It was pure political calculation, as demonstrated by the following, first reported in the Atlanta Constitution:
"For anybody not on board now, it's going to be the two coldest years in Washington."
The speaker was Newt Gingrich, a month short of the 1994 elections. The audience was a group of lobbyists and Gingrich reminding them that they owed the GOP for killing a lobby reform that session. In return, he expected campaign cash for his troops -- and lots of it.
The message was received: according to the Center for Responsive Politics: "In October alone ... Republican candidates enjoyed an almost unprecedented $4.2 million edge over their Democratic opponents in individual donations of $200 or more."
Of course no one knew better than Mr. GOPAC that campaign finance was the real ballgame, unless it was the fledgling fixer once nestled in his ample man-bosom, a Texan, name of DeLay.
The Republican-controlled Congress effectively eliminated the limits on lobbyists' gifts in 2003. Who does Gingrich think is responsible for toughening the standards now?
This is a helluva lot more than just another Claude Rains moment, and way beyond being explicable by Newt's desire to be President, though it's obvious he thinks he found an opening. It's a mark of just how far our politics have sunk that Newt Fucking Gingrich can make this sort of speech without being laughed into that Phantom Zone where Superman used to imprison intergalactic criminal masterminds. Read more...
Cue the Theme Music
>> Tuesday, January 3
Just as the unfortunate events of 2005 revived Randy Newman's "Louisiana 1927" [from Good Old Boys (1974), the first gift I ever gave the woman who was to become my Poor Wife], so should '06 bring back "Mr. President":
Maybe you've cheated,
Maybe you've lied.
Maybe you have lost your mind.
Maybe you only think about yourself.
Too late to run.
Too late to hide, now.
The time has come for us to say goodbye now.
Mr. President, have pity on the working man.
The Other Sixties Mythology
Paul "The Iron Mike Collins of Powerline" Mirengoff: "Forever Young"
I took advantage of the January Thaw this morning to repair part of the garage and the multiple trellises whose partial fall had caused the damage last summer when there was too much growing around it to attempt repairs. I had a horrible earworm which I'm not even going to mention lest some unfortunate among you remember it, but it came about because it had been used in an SCTV skit I'd watched the night before, and for some reason, working in the yard, it came back on me like stuffed peppers. And naturally I was trying to get it out before I had to quit using power tools. So I was thinking about something to write about and the Peggy Noonan post came back to me, and it suddenly dawned on me that she'd attributed the Katrina quotient of Bush's miserable year to "bad luck". And reading through it the first time I thought yeah, you wish the response was bad luck and not bad government, but this time I thought, wait, when things are going well for him, isn't it because Jesus is on his side? How does this work, exactly? When you're cruising along and everything purring it's a mark of your proper religious understanding, but if you pick up a nail and a tire goes flat we're back to Greek mythology.
This, of course, is no original insight, but it's rather obvious that it works for Noonan and her ilk on the political plane as well, and that was still on my mind when I sat down at my desk this evening, though thankfully the song had vanished.
I was closing down some browser windows, which I tend to accumulate, and I came to the Powerline boys still up from the final Ultimate Wingnut balloting at World O' Crap, and just for the hell of it I updated the page. And the first post was Paul "Zeppo" Mirengoff sort of congratulating himself for the response to a post entitled "Forever Young", which apparently dealt with "the danger posed by those who hadn't learned anything since 1974", but which some readers had found insufficiently incendiary, in the Napalm sense:
I take the point. It's difficult to defeat those who are out to destroy us when an influential political and cultural bloc sees those Americans who stand against political and social collectivsim and moral anarchy as the greatest threat to our country.
I couldn't clink the link to the original fast enough after that:
Vietnam and Watergate are seminal events for almost all liberals my age. Vietnam taught them to distrust the use of force by our military, and to despise leaders who aggressively use military force in the name of the national interest. Watergate confirmed that a leader who projects military force overseas for that purpose can be expected to usurp power at home.
Let's begin our response where I always like to: Mirengoff is a 1971 graduate of Dartmouth College. I do wish birthdates googled up as easily as graduation dates for the semi-obscure, but this is enough for our purposes. Intelligent guy, probably graduated from high school around 1967.
So first up, how is it that he comes to imagine Vietnam and Watergate are seminal events (no cracks, now. I've avoided them. You do the same.) ? I'll gladly admit Vietnam--though didn't its seed spill on both sides of the fence?--but Watergate is a curious running mate. If you came of age in the Sixties, and you presumably know enough liberals to make pronouncements about almost all of them, how, exactly, does the battle over civil rights slip your memory? Or the bright lost promise of John F. Kennedy, the Peace Corps, the threat of nuclear annihilation? Are we maybe stacking the deck just a teensy bit here? Watergate as the Lava Lamp of politics?
Well, yes, of course we are, but let's start at the top. I'm about five years younger, so the public awareness of our role in Vietnam rose pretty much right alongside my own increasing awareness of politics. It did not teach me "to distrust the use of force by our military". It did teach me that our military and political leaders lie, boldly and outright, in the service of cryptic aims, and that the commonly accepted narrative of the times is very often bunkum. But that's because they do and it was, and is, and I'd have figured that out for myself as soon as I escaped from my high school history lessons. That "distrust military force" canard is just an argument over Iraq in wolf's clothing. Vietnam was a ghastly mistake, politically, militarily, and spiritually, and it's not going to be redeemed by wrapping it in the Flag, the War on Terror, or the Lava Lamping of history. Supposing we want to make some grand statement of Vietnam's seminal influence, a more accurate one would concern a distrust of politicians sending Americans to die to no good purpose under the camouflage of the sort of Good vs. Evil crusades a political bloc which claims to be defending against political and social collectivism and moral anarchy is so fond of, so long as it has a law school deferment. And if you don't believe most Americans agree with that you need to answer for the curious omission of conscription as part of the War on Terror. The real sorrow here is that so many people didn't learn the real lesson and have been able to cling to a wholly fictive war for thirty-five years.
Watergate, on the other hand--what does Watergate have to do with Liberalism? McGovern had already lost; you could look that up, Mr. Mirengoff, but I'm reasonably sure it made the papers in Palo Alto at the time. And that "confirmed that a leader who projects military force overseas for that purpose can be expected to usurp power at home"? Please. Who's stuck in 1974 now? Watergate was precisely what it was, or at least that part of the iceberg we got to see. Nixon was using the power of the Presidency to spy on political opponents, and he got caught at it. Then, as now, there were some people whose allegiance is to their political viewpoint, not the fundamental rule of law, who apologized for it. In fact, they're often the same people. And the simple answer is, if you want to defeat that mistaken impression then you don't act in precisely that way. It isn't just liberals who are concerned about civil rights, but it is just a certain segment of the nit-witted Right which is willing to toss them on the trash heap so long as it's in their interests.
These "lessons" were rejected by most baby-boomers even at the time of Vietnam and Watergate. And despite the dominance of Vietnam and Watergate-obsessed boomers in academia, subsequent generations have found the lessons even less worth learning....
Many liberals seem not to dispute this. In fact, they acknowledge the "failure" of most Americans to embrace "harsh truths," and see this as further evidence that something is wrong with our country ("what's wrong with Kansas?").
Sure, because your "lessons" are just so much horseshit. Frankly, I've encountered very few Americans who dispute the lessons of Vietnam who have even an inkling of what went on there. But what's the cost of the public amnesia about Vietnam, or the struggle, ever since, to rewrite its history and demonize those who would look at the "harsh truths" of their own country just as we're encouraged to look at the Pure Evil in others? On whose say-so is US international adventurism a sacred trust? Who has exempted it from taking responsibility for its mistakes or paying the price for its miscalculation? You? Forgive me, but a self-serving view of history doesn't win the argument, and the idea that truth is amenable to ballot-box stuffing is just a recipe for further disaster, as it has now proven to be. Woodrow Wilson backhanded Ho Chi Minh at the end of WWI; Truman did it after WWII. Had we upheld what we used to proclaim as our abiding love of freedom and democratic principles then, all those "liberals" who learned your phony lessons wouldn't have seen them as current events. And if we hadn't been propping up the decayed remnants of 19th century Imperialism in the name of those who stand against political and social collectivism, maybe 57,000 Americans who didn't support the war from the comfort of their college libraries wouldn't have died so young. Read more...
Ward, You've Been Awfully Hard On The Beaver Lately
>> Monday, January 2
Daphne Merkin: "Our Vaginas, Ourselves", The New York Times Magazine
One evening last week I plopped down on the couch with a cup of tea. My Poor Wife was watching some Trashy Culture Is Fun program on Discovery, or The History Channel, or Bravo, and about the time I got situated came the commercial exit teaser, a rapidly spinning neo-retro-faux-Mod montage promising me if I stayed tuned I'd learn the history of the Lava Lamp. I knew what was up, but as usual, I didn't have the remote.
After a brief history of the development of the Lava Lamp (hereafter LL) came the obligatory Everybody in the Sixties was a Hippie and they all Tripped Out staring at Cosmically Undulating LLs in their Crash Pads, excepting the ones who took too much acid and stared directly at the Sun, thus melting their eyeballs. There was the obligatory shot of body-painted young nubiles frugging in a park somewhere. It's always in a park, leading me to believe I've been seeing snippets of the same thirty-second piece of film for thirty-five years now. The only time I ever saw anybody wearing body paint was on Laugh-In, and the only place I ever saw body paints on sale was in the back of Spencer's Gifts, with the other "adult" merchandise like the "Tonight's The Night" nightlight, aimed at married couples who did not speak to each other but still occasionally Had Sex, and the nude calendars featuring morbidly obese women. Wherever the counterculture was gathering in the late 60s, it wasn't in the back of Spenser's Gifts.
Needless to say there weren't any LLs visible in the park footage. So it was followed by a very dark, hand-held Super 8 pan of an actual Hippie Pad, or something, over which the narrator intoned "LLs could be found in every Hippie Pad, or something". And to make up for the notable lack of anything remotely resembling the ubiquitous LL in that shot either, they immediately cut to a still of an actual LL. Not to say they were trying to fool anyone--good thing, too, since the still was of a modern L, not vintage. It isn't supposed to matter. We're just all supposed to be in agreement that in the Sixties everyone under a certain age dressed funny, took drugs, and stared mindlessly at floating blobs of wax. And never mind that the actual spokesman for the actual LL company came on a bit later to say that the combined sales of the 60s, 70s, and 80s didn't match the numbers for the retro-chic of the 90s. Groovy and out.
(The only time I remember seeing a LL was at the home of a grade-school friend, and it belonged to his decidedly non-Hippie parents. It fascinated us for about ten minutes, after which the conversation naturally turned to what might be inside the thing, but my friend got squeamish before we did any empirical testing. The damned things were redolent of the Playboy After Dark circular bed vibe, if you ask me. And aside from getting high and trying to play ping-pong by strobe light--conveniently borrowed from the science lab at school--and a single Jefferson Airplane concert which featured that squirty-looking light show thing on a big screen behind the band, I don't remember much fascination with light at all. Dark was much better.)
Maybe that show was still in my head when this afternoon I sat on that same couch and opened the Times magazine to find Daphne riffing on the latest in vaginal fashions. (You may recall the last we saw of the Is That A Pen Name? Ms Merkin she was singing the praises of the "authentically unhip" Sam Alito, and the other brave souls who dared buck the John Sebastian/Roger McGuinn eyewear hegemony.) You didn't expect me to skip it, did you?
Okay, first, Ms Merkin is a fine writer from what I've seen, and I certainly share her distaste for plastic surgery and befuddlement at the supposed trend of hymen-reconstruction. I'd counsel just ignoring the whole matter myself; you can always go to that awful-plastic-surgery site if you want to wallow. But since the web is the enemy of the Gray Lady, and since there's a "The Way We Live Now" column to be filled every week, I'm not going to quibble. Okay, my sources tell me that pubic depilation as a trend is approaching its mid-teens, and that it is frequently engaged in not, as Daphne would have it, because the natural state is "an aesthetic hindrance to the unfettered male gaze", but for certain tactile benefits. I can only report that as a rumor.
But this...
Truth be told, I always considered myself lucky to have escaped coming of age at the height of the consciousness-raising era, when anatomical self-examination took on the aspect of a collective ritual. Those were the days when women felt obliged to convene in sisterly circles with mirrors and flashlights the better to study their bodies, themselves. Never having been one to enjoy group activities of any sort, the thought of becoming more closely acquainted with my private parts in a public setting seems potentially traumatizing rather than liberating or, God knows, celebratory.
deserves a peek through the moss for an unobstructed view. Ms Merkin (somebody, stop me before I have to type that again) is, presumably, about my age. She graduated from college in 1975 (Barnard, which may explain why she was innocent of the veritable battalions of authentically unhip, short-haired, Buddy-Holly-specs wearin' L7s on Midwestern campuses). She might have been an eight-year-old prodigy, but in the absence of such from her bio, I think something's fishy, and yes, an FCC fine is the least that should happen to me for that one. I'd like to suggest that she did, in fact, come of age precisely in the era of "consciousness raising", and that, in fact, her own consciousness was raised, if required, and that the process had nothing whatever to do with sitting in a circle passing around a mirror and a speculum. It had to do precisely with Our Bodies, Ourselves (1973), a book she seems to want to toss on the cultural trash heap with Steal This Book. I really don't care whether Daphne wants to look Down There or not. But the idea that women realizing their health had for too long been in the hands of "experts" who were largely male and largely clueless and uncaring is not a quaint cultural icon of a bygone era. It's those same experts who were telling women that the clitoris had nothing to do with orgasm. Better we spend every late night watching Girls Gone Wild ads than another generation be lied to by sexophobic guardians of decency.
I didn't ask my wife whether she ever participated in any Pudendum Parties. She went to summer camp. It's enough to note the etymology: Latin pudenda, used as the noun form of the neuter plural of pudendus, the gerundive of pudere, meaning to be ashamed. Read more...
Happy New Year*
>> Sunday, January 1
* offer void for anyone who wants to dictate the terms of "Happy" holiday greetings, plus my goddammed libertarian neighbor who had to celebrate the joyous occasion by setting off ten minutes of fireworks in the street, no doubt terrorizing all the other neighborhood pets as it did mine. Yours is coming. And for Karl Rove, "Scooter" Libby, Tom DeLay, "Duke" Cunningham, Jack Abramoff, Michael Scanlon, James Tobin, and all the others yet to be netted, an extra special 2006 of pleasant dreams, a nice, soft, pillow, and one hour of supervised exercise each day.
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