Recommended

I waited long enough to tout emptywheel's six-part examination, "What Judy Miller Did as an Embed" at The Next Hurrah that it's now concluded, but that seems as good a time as any. The final installment contains links to all the earlier pieces.

Um, No.

AP: Harvard to Investigate Origins of Life

Mon Aug 15, 9:03 AM ET

CAMBRIDGE, Mass. - Harvard University is joining the long-running debate over the theory of evolution by launching a research project to study how life began.

The team of researchers will receive $1 million in funding annually from Harvard over the next few years. The project begins with an admission that some mysteries about life's origins cannot be explained.

"My expectation is that we will be able to reduce this to a very simple series of logical events that could have taken place with no divine intervention," said David R. Liu, a professor of chemistry and chemical biology at Harvard.

My wife has a soap opera. This is my primary reason for blogging anonymously.

No, really, The Young and the Restless, "Y&R" to the headline writers at TV Guide™, was the slog of choice of her crowd at college, and she tunes in now and then out of incontinent nostalgia. Or it may be she only turns it on when I'm also at home just to hear me hoot at the thing, or do my Victor Newman/Eric Braeden/Hans Gudegast monotone--the man reads every goddam line exactly the same, plus he's been in this country for forty years and his accent is now thicker than it was on The Rat Patrol. Anyway, the point is, I've watched this nonsense over the years, and it frequently is moved along in its glacial fashion by writing which is so utterly, incomprehensibly stupid as to defy explanation. Forget the fact that toddlers are regularly packed off to "boarding school", forgotten about for two years, and return old enough to vote. The silly manipulations of bedrock reality based on the dictates of soap peddling I understand. It's when jaw-droppingly idiotic events take place which could just as easily have been written to conform to a non-delusional view of the world that I begin to despair for the future of the race. Like the time Paul Williams, PI, found a cassette tape containing vital evidence and there was a two-day delay while he found a guy he knew who owned a cassette player. Or the Abbott family, who took their privately-held international cosmetics giant public and managed to sell 51% of the stock.

This AP story is right out of that same stable. Evolution is a theory, yes; it is also an observable fact. There is no "debate" over the theory of evolution which Harvard is joining, let alone one it has been standing on the sidelines of until now. The announced project concerns abiogenesis, which, while no where near as established as evolution, is considerably less controversial than creationists try to portray it. And evolution does not rise or fall based on what Harvard may or may not discover; evolution is established whether the ultimate source of self-replicating molecules was primordial soup, a cosmic Thunderer in long white beard and sandals, or two giant turtles humping.

So just how difficult could it have been to write this story in accordance with the facts?

Mitch Mitch Mitch

You may recall that one of the ways Indiana's CEO tried to deflect criticism, not to mention legal questions, about his refusal to live in the Governor's mansion was by turning the place into a catering hall for hire, which is just the sort of entrepreneurial spirit we need at the top: just because the product isn't good enough for me doesn't mean I can't make a buck off of it. But it's a move which might have caused an itchy rash last week when Planned Parenthood rented the place for an appreciation dinner and drew protesters led by Republican State Senator and former VP of Indiana Right to Life Jeff Drozda.

The protest itself is of zero interest--even the Star buried the story and took issue with some of the group's claims, though I did note they counted 50 sign carriers while when I drove by there were 18, four of them children, and there didn't look to be any more than that when Drozda was interviewed on local news. Be that as it may there were a couple of interesting items. One: Drozda tried to make hay out of State AG Steve Carter's raid on Planned Parenthood files and seemed to forget that he was actually out in public. He said something about "criminal indictments" before realizing he was on tape, then tried to remember the official spin: "under investigation for possible criminal activity." No such criminal activity has even been alleged at this point, and in fact Carter's raid was explicitly a fishing expedition, pure and simple: he went after records of any patients under 14 on the grounds that if there was any evidence of sexual activity failure to report it could be a crime.

A Class B misdemeanor.

I'm waiting to see if Drozda will protest if the Catholic Archdiocese of Indianapolis decides to rent the place. After all, that's one organization we know hid evidence of child abuse.

By the way, Steve, you were given the first dozen or so records you asked for, and Planned Parenthood only filed suit after you went back for seventy-three more, and they were shot down in court two months ago. How long does it take to read a medical record, anyway?

Daniels, the Master of the Photo Op, was really interesting in all this. Instead of the fiesty yapping attack spaniel we're used to seeing when anyone calls his judgment into question, the interview I saw found Mitch in a blue shirt practically huddled in the corner of a blue room, just a comb-over on the bottom right corner of the screen, apparently hoping a timely tornado warning would cover him over entirely, and he mumbled. Mitch mumbled. Jesus wept. He squeezed out something about "innocent until proven guilty", which was really inspiring considering nobody's been charged with anything. And just to show my good faith, Mitch, I'm going to start thinking of you in the same way.

And The Blind Shall See, And Then Lamely Write About It

If memory serves I was the sixth person in my elementary class to be sentenced to a lifetime of wearing glasses, the first being some girl who had apparently been born wearing them and was permanently excused from kickball and other forms of violence. The two boys who had preceded me to this doom were both at the nerdy end of the Playground Pecking Order, which furthered my anxiety. But I was a reasonably robust youth, good glove man, fair range on my jumper, owner of one of the first Schwinn Stingrays with a passable wheelie distance. It was a couple years yet before those cheaters became an issue, in my introduction to the pubescent poolside mating ritual when some hot little number in a two-piece (girls my age always wore pastel-colored two-piece suits in those days with a sort of Tactical Décolletage Prevention System of extra material flopping around the top) would come up to me and say, "I waved at you and you just ignored me." Explaining that without my glasses her location on the other side of the pool effectively rendered her a fuzzy blob was worse than worthless. I was slow to catch on to the fact that I should just play along. Fortunately we changed school districts when I was fourteen and I got to start over again.

I didn't have to think much about glasses until about three years ago when, having sailed along in its wake for a few years my age-related hyperopia suddenly pulled out and overtook my myopia like it was standing still, creating a condition known as dystopia. No more than six months after I'd got new glasses, and turned down bifocals, I found myself holding newspapers at arm's length and adjusting the attitude of anything with small print like I was trying to dock a space capsule.

It's only marginally annoying. I've never worn glasses to read, and my closeup vision is still sharp, it's just hard to find the focal point. I worked one summer at the Coca-Cola plant and I read the Louisiana state motto off the seal on a bottle cap that came down the return line. None of my co-workers would believe it, until the guy who took one home to read it under magnification reported the next day that I was right. I wasn't about to buy new glasses so soon, and I eventually solved the problem, at least temporarily, by buying one of those eyeglass-holding cords so I can just let 'em fall to my chest when I need to read something close up.

I wear my shades for driving, because they're polarized, and I'm not about to switch glasses in the parking lot, so I'm sure there are several local businesses where the employees know me as The Crazy Older Guy Who's Always Wearing Shades, except that now they're always hanging from my neck. I was in the produce section this afternoon and my attention was commanded by an infant, maybe just over the toddler line, sitting in a cart about twenty yards away making happy baby sounds. Mom came walking up talking baby talk back at her. I thought I recognized her as a young woman of marginal acquaintance who shops there and has a child in that demographic. And, well, you know me; something took hold and I decided to walk up behind her and say, "Boy, that's the ugliest baby I've ever seen."

I guess it's a good thing that three steps before I blurted this out I realized the Mommy in question was about four inches too short to be my acquaintance.

Back To School

Yes, it's that time again, the time when, in my youth, I had three more weeks of vacation time left, the time when my wife comes home with eight-page handouts from her principal and the Superintendent, outlining their "vision" for the coming year in what can best be described as a race between platitudes and exclamation points.

The school year's already started off with a bang! and for once that wasn't the sound of a drive-by shooting or a meth lab blowing up. Down Franklin Township way the district's PR man got himself suspended indefinitely without pay, and it was the finest piece of reality television ever seen in these parts, unless you're old enough to remember the six hours of live will-he-or-won't-he coverage of Tony Kiritsis with his shotgun wired to a mortgage executive's neck.

Last November, first-year teacher and newspaper advisor Chad Tuley got in hot water when the Franklin Central paper printed a front page story about a student arrested at the school on suspicion of murder. Principal Kevin Koers went ballistic, suspended Tuley and told the press he had ordered him not to print the story, a charge Tuley denied. In a later meeting officials decided there had been a misunderstanding, and Tuley returned to teaching though he was barred from the newspaper.

In April Tuley received a poor evaluation and was told he would be transferred to middle school to make room for the new journalism advisor the school had hired. He filed suit. Last week WISH-TV 8 sent its education reporter Leslie Olsen (or, as she pronounces it, "Lethly Olthen") to catch up with Tuley as he unpacked his stuff at his new assignment. Olsen had received permission from the principal to tape inside the school. In the middle of the report in barges the PR guy, former Star reporter Scott Miley, yelling at her to get out NOW! Miley was a print journalist, so it's understandable that he didn't quite catch the reason a camera was there. Olsen rather calmly tried to explain that she had permission to be in the building. Miley at one point informed her that she was "on private property", thereby explaining how he got his job with the Star. At another point Miley turned to Tuley, who was off camera, and shouted, "Do you understand me? Don't just stand there, say Yes or No!"

Eight ran the tape that evening, and like clockwork the Superintendent of Franklin Schools issued a public apology and suspended Miley. The Star coverage the next day said he'd been suspeded for "raising his voice" and noted Olsen had "challenged (his) request that she not conduct interviews on school property" while failing to mention she already had permission to do so.

I don't know if my wife has any contacts in Franklin Township, but there are two burning questions local media isn't going to answer for me. One, who ratted on Olsen to the admistration offices? And two, why does a public school system need a PR director, let alone one who imagines he outranks teachers?

The Good News From Iraq

10) Contrary to pre-war fears, our troops were not slowed down by throngs of cheering Iraqis or buried under tons of proffered bouquets.

9) Just as we proved in WWII with the Sherman tank, the American fighting man does not need armor to win battles.

8) Whatever the dosage, no amount of hard reality can shake the faith of one-third of our populace.

7) Similarly, our cadres of Television Experts can withstand a direct hit on their credibility without having the wind knocked out of them.

6) No matter how much complicity, co-operation, and cheerleading the mass market media engages in, blaming them when things go south is still a viable option.

5) Similarly, now that it's generally understood that administration and Pentagon officials are lying through their teeth it is no longer necessary to declare previous statements "inoperative".

4) Calling Saddam Hussein "Sodom", once explained by George Herbert Walker Aloyisus Bush I as necessary to distinguish him from King Hussein of Jordan, has proven more popular than Vanilla Coke™.

3) Next time, General Ripper promises he will personally oversee collection of digital cameras and picture phones.

2) Turns out they're used to going without electricity.

1) The shining example of Iraqi democracy will serve as a Beacon of Freedom for the rest of the region. Or else.

Try David Brooks Today. Now YOU Can Nod Off In Your Bowl Of Soup Just Like Your Favorite Rock Stars, But Without Dangerous Narcotics.

World O'Crap's cosmically amusing Ultimate Wingnut Challenge has entered the critical stage. A couple days ago it was necessary for me to plead against the wholesale elimination of the "Conservative Thinker" Team. It was a close-run thing, and even so David Brooks was almost voted off the Island as an individual.

It's a conundrum, all right. Who is the biggest wingnut? The slaveringly unhinged self-promoter or the simply unhinged drooler? It seems that the "Thinker" team faces an uphill battle: their Oxford shirt and bowtie uniforms are not as marketable to today's hip-hop demographic; the eschewing of trash-talking for the subtler pleasures of middlebrow obfuscation, and a more ecumenical approach to religious bigotry, just don't put the meat in the seats. Brooks, especially, finds himself in the position of one of Marge Schott's pet Negroes of the 1970s, not allowed to grow his Afro out more than 2-1/2 inches, sideburns no longer than the bottom of the earlobe, only one religious medal around the neck, and that tucked discreetly inside the undershirt. Sure, those are mostly self-imposed restrictions, and without them David Brooks would be wearing Frank Gorshin's old Joker suit while peddling books of his funny captions to pictures of 70s hairdos on late-night teevee like James Lileks instead of dressing up in William Safir(e)'s moth-eaten purple mantle for appearances on News Hour. Brooks' inner wingnut should not be underestimated just because for him taking a paragraph to say "Islamofascist" is preferable to incontinent blurting.

So I've come to approach Brooks' recent columns in a slightly different frame of mind, and if I may say so, it doesn't make him anymore entertaining. Take last Wednesday's "All Cultures Are Not Created Equal". Please. In it Brooks urges imaginary students to undertake an imaginary course of study: Cultural Geography.

Mind you, that's not because Cultural Geography doesn't exist, but because what Brooks limns with his golden Sharpie is something else: explaining the inherent superiority of Western white people by adopting the trappings of science.

Oh but now I'm behaving like a culture thug:

This is the line of inquiry that is now impolite to pursue. The gospel of multiculturalism preaches that all groups and cultures are equally wonderful. There are a certain number of close-minded thugs, especially on university campuses, who accuse anybody who asks intelligent questions about groups and enduring traits of being racist or sexist. The economists and scientists tend to assume that material factors drive history - resources and brain chemistry - because that's what they can measure and count.

Of course, this is the David Brooks who informed us that "conservatives" were superior to their liberal brethren because of their deep and abiding devotion to an intellectual tradition, so once again it's befuddling to note how that tradition has managed to miss the most basic truth of the scientific method and its two centuries of dominance: Science is not materialist out of an assumption that the material is all that exists. Science is materialist because that's the only way we can know we know something to the limitations of our knowing anything whatever. And that dominance has continued because of results, not because of the quirks of history and social control by which, say, modern Christianity maintains its place.

I've watched this over thirty years now and I have to confess a grudging admiration. It really is all but impossible to tell whether this is actual willful ignorance or very accomplished lying. Does Brooks actually believe these are "intelligent questions", or that they are somehow repressed by an academic elite? Anyone with a passing familiarity of the sciences, hard or soft, knows that this is simply not the case. What Brooks repeats here is nothing more than the superstition-trumps-science argument of the Biblical literalists repackaged for the upscale market: we can simply will away millions of pieces of evidence which have been constantly debated since the days of Malinowski and Bloomfield, and can return to the gentlemanly armchair pursuits of The Golden Bough and dust-choked Classicism because the political program of Bobo and his ilk would fare so much better if we did.

And check out the standard of proof:

Not long ago, people said that globalization and the revolution in communications technology would bring us all together. But the opposite is true. People are taking advantage of freedom and technology to create new groups and cultural zones. Old national identities and behavior patterns are proving surprisingly durable. People are moving into self-segregating communities with people like themselves, and building invisible and sometimes visible barriers to keep strangers out.

Pay no attention to that strawman in the opening sentence. This is the First Axiom of Wingnut Science, high and low: history began five years ago, or ten, or sixty, but no more than that. America stands outside history's currents apart from the mystic chords which connect her to her "Judeo Christian" heritage and whatever Greek and Roman ideas it chooses to co-opt, once again because ignoring unpleasant realities is vital to making the argument work. Bobo makes his bones with that silly sidewalk sociology, yet we're supposed to believe he stumbled upon it in some sort of plastic bubble. The American suburbanites of his sloppy sketches, with their gas-guzzling bottomless consumerism and vague awareness of the rest of the planet are somehow inerrant in their slightest whim and unfailing in their selection of what wind to blow with this week. We can unearth the socio-geographic explanation for why the cultural backwater of Islam denies rights to women, because after all we gave them the right to vote in 1920, not to mention the fact that they control their own reproductive systems so long as the choose a pharmacist who agrees with them. We can lecture the world about freedom, because we get around to solving the murder of civil rights workers within four decades, tops. Surely we can discover the hidden geographical and cultural forces which drove us to the very pinnacle of human perfection, and why it is those same forces prevent us from providing health care to one-third of our Hispanics or granting same-sex partners the right to marry, not to mention how it is that those same cultural-geographic forces wouldn't have worked if we'd left the land in the hands of the people who were here first.

Look, I'm a threadbare woodsman with a rusted axe in the groves of academe, but I find it a little hard to believe that this stuff can even find much purchase outside the strictures of science, no matter how often you name-check Max Weber. I'm not sure I think Brooks is the nuttiest of wingnuts, but I hope this little masquerade will be seen in the broad light of day.

Don't Look In The Basement

Above: Most of the button collection (there's about half as many on the back), stuck to an old satin smoking jacket, now residing in a covered clothes rack in the basement. At one time it graced the dining room, but then my wife decided she wanted the rescued department-store mannequin that wore it to take to school for some reason.

Sometime in 1968, shortly after putting on my manly gown, I saw a two-page feature on buttons in a magazine and was immediately hooked. Buttons seemed like the very pinnacle of East Village smartass cool, which was all I aspired to be. Then that summer my best friend came back from the Auto Show with posters! Posters, we knew from other magazines, were also very cool, in more of a West Coast psychedelia way. I conned my dad into thinking I wanted to go look at cars. Instead I immediately went looking for the poster guy, and when I found him he also had...buttons!

My dad's a very sweet guy, and he always rather encouraged idiosyncratic behavior in his children. So he didn't even ask to see what I'd bought, and I'm not sure how he'd have reacted. My allowance money had covered three: a Peace symbol, "Where is Lee Harvey Oswald Now That We Really Need Him?", and "Marcel Proust is a Yenta." I didn't know what that last one meant, exactly, but I was pretty sure it was funny.

Buttons, sadly, disappeared sometime after that, as did the three I bought that evening, but they made a comeback in the 80s, which is what most of that collection dates to. I worked downtown in those days, and generally stuck a button on my lapel to entertain my co-workers (never more than one at a time, which I consider the height of gaucherie). I used to pop over to O'Malia's grocery for lunch, and as I approached the entrance one sunny afternoon, there stood then-Indiana First Lady Susan Bayh, wife of Evan, who ironically enough is cute as a button. She was collecting for some charity. She was standing there by her cheery self, no visible police guards or flunkies, greeting people walking into the store and telling them about whatever her cause was. I dropped a fin in the collection box, because at least her father-in-law was a real Democrat, making sure she saw it the way you do with charitable giving that you'd rather not give. "That's very nice of you," she said. "Oh, what's your button say?" I was slow to react.

It was one of the more scabrous ones. I don't remember which one exactly; maybe one from the list below. All I remember is she moved her head in long enough to read it, turned even whiter, and took a step back in a sort of unobtrustive, wife-of-a-politician way. I wished her good luck.

The basement's now fairly kitten-proof, but I'm still moving stuff around, and I pulled out the smoking jacket this evening. Thought you might enjoy some of the highlights:

• General Philosophy:

"It's never too late to have a happy childhood"

"Every day is a blind date"

"Live Each Day as if You Gave a Shit"

• Human Sexuality:

"Are you using your mouth for anything important right now?"

"Do you give good head or are all my friends lying to me?"

"Guess How Many Donuts Can Fit On My Dick"

• Theology:

"God Revealed Himself to Me, and Boy, Is He Hung"

"Jerry Falwell Can Suck My Dick"

• Economics:

"Money is how people with no talent keep score"

"We Cheat The Other Guy & Pass the Savings On to YOU!"

• Popular Culture:

"Ward, You've Been Awfully Hard on the Beaver Lately!"

"Are you going to come quietly or do I have to use earplugs?"

"TV Made Me What I Am Today"

• Personal Growth:

"I Don't Speak English"

"10 Cents A Dance"

"Cheerful People Are Just Ignorant"

"I Take Drugs Seriously"

• National Politics

In the I-thought-it-couldn't-get-any-more-depressing elections of '80, '84, and '88 I relied on antiques: "I Like Ike" and "No Third Term"

'92: "Shit happened" with picture of Bush/Quayle; "Schwarzkopf for President. Let's Just Get It Over With"

'96: "You're Just Mad Because You Aren't Getting Any"

• Best of Show

Belongs to my wife: "If They Can Send a Man to the Moon, Why Can't They Send Them All?"

A Friday Free

T.Bogg is on fire, even for him. Same with Wolcott. World O'Crap continues to hide her subtle brilliance beneath her overt brilliance with Wingnut Island. Tom Burka says everything that needs to be said with a headline. Fact-esque is on top of everything. Patrick Smith, Salon's Pilot you can Ask, shows just how sloppy and hysterical the mass media are even when there's no reason to be.

Chris Clarke brings a tear to my eye, and then he does it again, and then Professor Bérubé does it for good measure, all in a twenty-four hour period.

And one brave woman in Crawford, TX, reduces George W. Bush from a prick to a pinprick.

Me? I'm crackin' wise about Fried Twinkies and tossin' paperwads for a kitten.

I'm too old. I'm too comfortable. And I've got the love of a woman too good for me. I grew up in the birthplace of the John Birch Society, reading the crackpot-before-its-time Puliam family newspaper. I had tracts and letters from the corpulent and hate-filled bully Gregg Dixon, one of the founding licensed beggars of The Moral Majority, stuffed in my mailbox at the school newspaper on a weekly basis because I wrote against the war, against racism, and for rock and roll. I watched the descent of network news, the willful choice of comforting fiction over complex and mystifying fact, the ready acquiescence to the idea that reality needed to be balanced by appending the thoughts of the unhinged to every topic. I watched the glorification of a second-rate actor and dim-witted phony the way Ionesco watches his fellow citizens in "The Rhinoceros". I saw the shitty Soviet Heroic-Realist scupture the Right insisted on erecting next to The Wall because fake piety is preferable to real piety in its book.

Special pleading? Well, TBogg is nearly as old as I am, and he still walks into that alley every day to take on the likes of Malkin and Goldberg and Coulter. God bless 'im. But I'm just too tired of these fifteenth generation photocopies, they and the sorry gas-filled lawyers and basement dwellers who've turned xenophobia and poor potty training into a political crusade, who will gladly fight to the last drop of someone else's blood, who bravely pound the virtual lectern so long as they believe there's a mob at their backs to do the dirty work.

Well, it only takes one strong man to face down a mob. And today her name is Cindy Sheehan.

Friday Shuffle, Auto Parts

Commander Cody and the Lost Planet Airmen: Hot Rod Lincoln
Dead Milkmen: Bitchin' Camaro
Wilson Pickett: Mustang Sally
Jackie Lomax: The Eagle Laughs At You
ABC: Poison Arrow
Box Tops: Neon Rainbow
Leroy "Stuff" Smith: If You're A Viper
Mink Deville: Cadillac Walk (with apologies to Corndog; it's the version I have)
Townes van Zandt: Talkin' Thunderbird Blues
The Dictators: (I Live For) Cars And Girls

Olio

• I go to the grocery at least once every three days, not counting the longer, once or twice weekly trip to the natural foods store. It occurred to me today that if I changed the schedule so I went every day I could start a grocery-shopping blog with no shortage of material, ever.

• Today: What is the deal with baggers? Is there some sort of industry-standard hand/eye coordination testing scale, and if you score above "Glacial" you're disqualified? I just don't get it. I've done plenty of menial labor in my life and it always seemed to me that the faster you worked the faster the hours flew by. And the "Paper or plastic?" tap dance, which has now become an attempt to intimidate you into taking plastic--"Is plastic okay?" "Only if you're making my eyeglass lenses, sonny."--has become, somehow, a separate transaction of its own. You express your preference, and there's something like a two minute delay before the actual bagging begins, like the kid has to fill out a form first. At least they don't introduce themselves by name. The one I drew today was the poster boy for inertia. I loaded the milk, laundry detergent, Pepsi, three bags of cat litter, and wrote the check and he's still working on the second bag (of two). And the cashier now gets impatient and starts ringing up the next customer, and sort of shunts her stuff to the inside rail, like that's gonna keep this kid from getting things mixed up. Naturally when I got to the car I found that 97% of the total weight was in one of the bags. Which, in fairness, at least he double-bagged.

• Preliminary word has it that the big Fair semi-edible food treat this year is creampuffs the size of WNBA basketballs.

• And Emperor Governor Mitch "Just Who Is That Comb-Over Supposed To Fool?" Daniels has got himself his own exhibit at this year's shindig: "Governor Daniels' Sports Spot" is located just east of the Dickies' FFA pavilion, and features rope jumpers, gymnasts, and that ilk. There will also be a celebrity basketball game which First Lady Cheri Daniels is scheduled to coach, assuming no one lets her know ahead of time she'll have to move to Indianapolis to do so.

• As usual, my deficit-reducing suggestion (have him sit over one of those water tank deals while people paid money to try to dunk him with baseballs) was ignored.

• Mitch, by the way, recently launched INShape Indiana, a program designed to encourage Hoosiers to eat healthier and improve their physical conditioning by providing web links. When Daniels is fresh out of photo ops we get shots of him jogging on an indoor track, prompting this irresponsible speculation from one observer (me): "That weenie-arm never did a day of athletics in his life, until sometime around 40 his internist suggested he'd be able to overcharge seniors for their Lily medications several years longer if he started working out."

• Oh, and speaking of Mitch, he also announced that he will no longer be taking RV One, the governor's mansion he does deign to live in, to partisan political gatherings, despite the fact that it was perfectly okay for him to do so two weeks ago and the Democrats are just a bunch of whiners. This blog apologizes if it got anyone's hopes up about getting to view the state's most popular tourist attraction.

Pork

This evening the tiniest of brownouts ate my longish piece on Bush signing the new Highway spending bill. I blame local teevee. Not for the Highway bill, although last week they were touting the fact that Indiana's share was going to rise from 92 cents on the dollar to 94--they said it like it represented a major coup--but because the Indiana State Fair opened Wednesday, which means the news hairdos redouble their efforts to tell you just how unbearably hot it is. They do this every frickin' year, like it's news that it's hot in August. "Will the heat affect Fair attendance?" has got to be among the top five reported stories of the year. Every year. I'm not sure why anyone is supposed to give a rat's ass about Fair attendence. Is there some danger they'll just decide not to have one next year? I'm not sure why I should care about that either. You've seen one cow, you've basically seen 'em all, has always been my motto.

I'll grant you, the last time I was actually in attendance at the Indiana State Fair was 1964, and I was in custody. I think that after about an hour I tried to get my dad to give me the car keys and let me pick up the rest of the family later. I was only half joking. I knew even then that 10-year-olds couldn't drive. But I still feel pretty current with all the goings-on, because the damn thing gets wall-to-wall coverage on local news. This started about a decade ago. The Fair had hit hard times, much like similar bucolic enterprises such as Hee-Haw, to name just one. Somebody must have induced the locals to fluff the thing, because suddenly, besides the one hapless cub reporter they used to send to eat cotton candy on camera and interview children who'd already had far too much sugar, they started sending a weather person, who informed you it was hot. Now it's like the whole crew camps there for two weeks. And there's been a big image makeover. The Fair is no longer the grandaddy of all 4-H meetings with a supermarket parking lot carnival on the side. Now it's a celebration of cuisine with a pig barn attached. The big story each year--I am not making this up--is what commercial piece of shit candy or confection somebody is deep frying. Deep fried Twinkies. Deep fried Snickers. I'm not sure this stuff is even approved for human consumption, even when it isn't prepared for you by someone in a trailer with no running water or toilet facilities, and it's all anybody can talk about for two weeks. It's a fortnight of all the unbridled enthusiasm of a Star Trek convention applied to melted and re-congealed Cheez Whiz served on a stick.

The whole thing does make for a nice respite from all the Health Beat stories about obesity and the dangers of sunburn, though.

And that Highway bill? Boondoggle. Sixty-three hundred earmarked projects, or roughly one dozen for each Congressman. A nine-billion dollar rescission so that Bush could claim it met his tough fiscal stance, which apparently amounted to a threat to veto the thing (like he even knows how to do that) if it held so much gravy that Don Young literally burst before the signing. This is the candidate Bush who vowed in 2000 to appoint a commission to investigate pork barrel spending. The Republican party of the Contract With America. The small government, decisions are best made at the local level guys. I suppose we should be thankful we aren't building a highway to Mars, although maybe I shouldn't have said that out loud.