I can only post headlines, Blogger's eating the copy

But that won't make me stop

First I'll write it out it longhand (however sloppily)

And post it bottom-to-top

Burma Shave

Friday Filler? Or Just Another Excuse for Some Internet Smut?

The Daily Mirror's "Jane" comic was a great favorite of The Lads in the dark days of the Blitz; Jane would generally manage to lose most of her clothing over the course of four panels, which met with much approval among His Majesty's armed forces. Advance copies would be put on board submarines so the crew wouldn't have to do without.

Jane was modeled by Christabel Leighton-Porter (the renderng above is a bit more detailed than the comic was) who was an artists' model and later appeared as a showgirl in the West End (quite bravely; most theatre companies fled the area during the war) and made personal appearances as her comic strip persona.

During one of those appearances she met the Lord Chamberlain, who asked her what she did in her act. "Well," she explained, "at one stage I turn my back to the audience, take off my bra, and then cover my breasts with my hands as I turn 'round." After a moment's thoughtful silence the King's sidekick replied, "You must have very large hands."

Olio

• Your Indiana Pacers open the season 2-0 with back-to-back road wins, tonight in Miami, despite playing without their first and second string centers. That makes it 13 wins in their last 14 regular-season meetings with the Heat, contrary to the prognostications of a certain left-leaning Westerner, who shall remain nameless:

I don't see them making a quantum leap forward to challenge Detroit/Miami for tops in the conference.

And yes, I do realize there are 80 more games to go.

• And, okay, I know that Larry Brown coaching a team in a major market was enough to blow all other hoops news to page 2 yesterday. We in the sticks bow to your supreme importance, guys. But what's the excuse for ESPN headlining tonite's story "Shaq sprains ankle"? The Gold and Blue dominated the game until a late rally, then closed the deal. There's more than one O'Neal in the league.

• Speaking of the home team, I saw the local-government-channel produced story of the old three-time ABA champs a couple weeks ago, and I was reminded that not only were the four ABA teams which joined the NBA sexually molested (no draft picks or league revenue for three years) but unlike pro football and baseball, the career totals are not part of a player's official record. That includes Dr. J, Rick Berry, Artis Gilmore, and Pacer greats Mel Daniels, George McGinnis, Freddie Lewis, and Roger Brown. The Rajah belongs in the Hall. He was the finest one-on-one player ever, at least until Jordan. He could post up anybody, take anyone on the planet off the dribble, and drain the j. He was better off the dribble than Jordan, without the benefit of the NBA traveling rule, if any, and while he mightn't've had Jordan's range or leaping ability he never tried to sell me a pair of shoes made by slave laborers, either.

• Roger Ailes beat me to David Brooks' latest, but with a line so good ("You know this piece sucks, just from the headline") I had to sneak under the fence to read it, and it turns out to add a whole 'nother category to suckitude:

Harry Reid sits alone at his kitchen table at 4 a.m., writing important notes in crayon on the outside of envelopes. It's been four weeks since he launched his personal investigation into the Republican plot to manipulate intelligence to trick the American people into believing Saddam Hussein had weapons of mass destruction.

Reid had heard of the secret G.O.P. cabal bent on global empire, but he had no idea that he would find a conspiracy so immense.

Brooks proceeds to the "Clinton thought there were WMDs too" whine which has suddenly reappeared after, what? two years? I've been listening to these guys for thirty years and it's the first time I can remember them being so desperately short of bumper-sticker retorts.

• And Brooks was recycling his own "The Democrats are treating the Right like we're a bunch of tin-foil-hat wearers, and boy, don't they look silly" routine that had its off-off-Broadway tryout (on the News Hour) a couple weeks back. There, he said of Miers' replacement, "Oh, I hope the President will consult all us conservatives out in the desert looking for UFOs", or something like that, even though no one on the panel had said anything remotely approaching that (Mark Shields sure didn't), and he couldn't help snickering like some pocket-protector nerd who cracks himself up with a Star Trek reference in civics class, oblivious of the stony silence around him.

Look, David, Pat Buchanan is making more sense these days than you and the rest of your Great Books club. That's a sign. And I believe it was Otto Rank who said, "Just because you can point out a mental patient, it doesn't mean you aren't a fucking nutjob."

Friday Shuffle, I Got Nothin'

Brook Benton and Dinah Washington: You've Got What It Takes
Southside Johnny and the Asbury Jukes: Got To Be A Better Way Home
James Brown: I Got The Feelin'
Fountains of Wayne: She's Got A Problem
Muddy Waters: Got My Mojo Workin'
Boz Scaggs: You Got My Letter
Fats Waller: I Ain't Got Noboby
Patsy Cline: She's Got You
Little Feat: Got No Shadow
Allison Krauss: I've Got That Old Feeling

History Lesson

The Indianapolis Star ran the story of All Hallows Eve at the Governor's mansion (see below) as part of a feature on how local celebrities dealt with the hoi polloi ringing the bell and demanding socialized desserts. This devolved into a discussion of popular/unpopular treat items, and closed with a quote from one moocher of suspiciously advanced age:

"Pennies and raisins and apples are the worst thing to give out to a kid," said Sean McManus, a 14-year-old version of Charlie Brown. "And no Almond Joys. Those are old-people candy."

Look, kid, first, if you're trick-or-treating and you're over 13 and below the legal drinking age with at least one of your party being a hot chick, don't come to my door unless you have something to trade. And yes, we card. Because we care.

Is this the one day of the year you leave your Playstation? Coconut, almonds, and simulated chocolate are not old people candy. You don't know old people candy!

Try out the sour green/yellow spheres you could never really tell the color of because they'd developed a patina. Sample the candied orange slice things or the little pillow-shaped white mint deals. Marzipan centers, kid. Little square things with brick-red edges and an off-off-white top with a floweresque garnish. Son, you have not even glimpsed the portals of Hell, let alone stared into its gaping maw. The only thing you could eat out of my grandma's candy dish was the caramels, and if you took more than two you lived to regret it. Which was still better than special occasions, when the Whitman sampler came out and you stared death right in the face. I had a cousin who was at Khe Sanh and he still wakes up screaming thinking about grandma's candies, you little punk.

Mitch Update

It's been a while since we caught up with Indiana Governor Mitch "How's The Weather Down There?" Daniels, but that's not for want of shenanigans.

In Indiana's continuing saga of trying to figure out what time it is, which used to be a sort of quaint Hoosier quirk until Mitch and his entrepreneurial spirit gang turned it into a constitutional crisis, last week the USDOT posted its proposed rule change which would move five Indiana counties from Eastern to Central time. That's out of the fourteen which had petitioned for the change after Daniels punted the matter to localities rather than make his own recommendations to the DOT. And after he had predicted that any body that petitioned for the change would get it.

On its own this would actually count as a success on the Mitch Daniels Grading Curve, and Daniels actually did try to finagle a passing grade, saying that "we now had a simpler map, two time zones instead of three."

But that much had been accomplished when he rammed Daylight Savings Time through the legislature last spring. All the DOT did was add to the Central Time glob of counties in the northwest and southwest corners of the state. And one of the counties it approved was St. Joseph (where South Bend is), but not its eastern neighbor Elkhart. Elkhart, in fact, hadn't petitioned for Central Time. Elkhart wants to remain on Eastern Time. Daniels pronounced this "unworkable". So it turns out that Mitch wanted localities to make the call, and so long as the call was fine with him it was fine with him.

This is a cautionary tale. People who think the business model is somehow a better, or more efficient, way to run a government simply have not worked for a large enough sample of bosses in their lives to have an appreciation of what that really means. Bear in mind that before George W. Bush called him to Washington to solve our nation's budget surplus problem, Mitch ran a global pharmaceutical concern. Before that, while still in college, he ran a smaller, more localized operation, but that's another story.

It tends to give you pause, or it would if you knew where to set the clock.

But Mitch wasn't done. He has a weekly Press Availability, which is a lot like the President's weekly radio address in that I haven't the slightest interest in what he has to say. When he trotted out his dissatisfaction with the St. Joe/Elkhart scheme, someone asked him if he hadn't, in fact, campaigned on moving Indiana to Central Time. Mitch said, "Pardon me, I did not."

Now, when most Hoosiers use that expression they mean, "excuse my walking in front of you," or "Sorry I belched," but when Mitch says it, even in print, he manages to sound like Margaret Dumont. I'm not sure whether it was the tone, or the audacity of the lie, but every major metropolitan daily in the state responded by printing fifteen or so quotes from his campaign of him saying precisely that.

The other story is of more local interest, but I include it because it's so heartwarming. The Daniels clan showed up, in costume, on Halloween to pass out treats to the kiddies who made it through the metal detectors and the gauntlet of State Police. This was at the Governor's Mansion, which prior to the PR roll-out about the event two weeks ago had been pronounced unfit for human habitation and hopelessly dated in decor. Readers with better memories than mine may recall that Daniels first declined to live there, preferring to remain in the Republican suburbs while he built himself a McCastle in a gated community close by. When it was pointed out that state law requires he reside "in the seat of government" Mitch allowed as how he might sleep there some night, sometime, if that would make all you bastards happy.

But now, with a SurveyUSA poll giving him approval numbers in the mid-40s, suddenly he and Cheri will be moving in. As I noted elsewhere, I've got $20 for the first non-photo-op pic of the First Lady walking the dog on the mean streets of the Northside.

Cheri made the Guv dress as the Cowardly Lion, part of a Wizard of Oz set piece. When he tossed that tidbit to the press a couple weeks ago, Daniels felt compelled to add, "I've never thought of myself as cowardly."

We get it, Mitch. You're short.

Now That's What I Call Hubris! Volume 5

Lesee, so "realist" warfloggers urge us into war, then write books explaining what went wrong, and get reviewed by other "realist" warfloggers. It's peer review for foreign policy.

New York Times Book Review:

"Everybody Is A Realist Now," by James Traub, review of The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq Edited by Gary Rosen, and A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq. Edited by Thomas Cushman.

"Occupational Hazards," by Fareed Zakaria, review of George Packer's The Assassin's Gate: America in Iraq.

James Traub starts his review of two essay collections with a charming story of losing a bet over U.S. casualties in Iraq. He doesn't tell us what the stakes were, but I think we can safely eliminate "Swearing off treating war as a spectator sport" or gambling with other people's lives.

Like any gentlemanly handicapper, Traub pays off before he lets us know that the winner was just lucky:

She's been vindicated as well on the W.M.D. front, for, like quite a few people with no apparent access to intelligence data, she "always knew" that Saddam Hussein no longer had his weapons of mass destruction, just as she always knew the whole venture would miscarry. Well, I tip my hat to her foresight; the news from Iraq has in fact been so hellish that many doubtful supporters of the war - the 55-45ers, as I like to call us - have been forced to rethink their calculus.

Lefties, y'see, just put all their chips on Red every time, so the occasional win is just blind luck. The real sharpers like Traub, the guys who know all the angles, can lose their shirts and still walk away knowing they were right. Because they were playing with somebody else's money.

Of course that's one of the attractions of language: you can make anything turn out the way you wanted it to. It's no coincidence that we were led into this war with words, we screwed up the planning with words, and words now ride to our rescue.

Care to take the same tone about Scott Ritter, Mr. Traub? Or Hans Blix?

There are an awful lot of people around who are absolutely certain about things they can't possibly know; otherwise our churches would be empty. It's not an argument about anything. And it's far beyond the time when you "55-45" warfloggers faced the real arguments--and your own culpability. Like every non-expert I had no idea whether Hussein had weapons of mass destruction, or chemical or biological weapons stockpiles. What I did know, and what you knew, and the neocons knew, and everybody else knew, was that he didn't have an intercontinental delivery system. And he wasn't ever going to get one. His weapons programs, had they existed, posed no threat to the United States. That was the argument against going to war. Answer it, and quit shouting down the peaceniks and hippies in your imaginary debating class.

...the case for war did not actually depend on the threat of imminent attack - even if the White House said otherwise. Virtually all of the essays collected in "The Right War? The Conservative Debate on Iraq," edited by Gary Rosen, the managing editor of Commentary, and in "A Matter of Principle: Humanitarian Arguments for War in Iraq," edited by Thomas Cushman, the editor in chief of The Journal of Human Rights, were written after October 2003, when the weapons inspector David Kay put the kibosh on President Bush's prewar claims. And while several of the authors closest to the administration try to fudge the facts, and others have in fact changed their minds, most argue that Hussein's reckless expansionism, and his peerless brutality, justified the war even without vats of anthrax.

No, that's not an answer. It's another exercise in word play. With no imminent threat there was no reason for an invasion in March 2003. Inspections had done precisely what they were supposed to. If Hussein posed a real threat, gathering but not immediate, there was time to reach an international consensus about it, and not bear the costs, money and blood, by ourselves. That was the only sensible course. That the same group which assured us the war was in our vital interests had a fallback position ready when the whole thing fell apart proves nothing. What proves something is that it did fall apart.

And lest Saddam=Evil not sway all those leftist know-it-alls, Traub trots out that other demon with a mustache:

Could we afford to guess wrong, given the evidence of Hussein's intentions and capacities? Jeffrey Herf, a historian whose essay appears in "A Matter of Principle," a collection of articles making the "liberal internationalist" case for war, observes that a pre-emptive war against Germany in 1938 might have prevented World War II and the Holocaust, though it would have been roundly criticized since Hitler had not yet shown his hand.

Strangling him in his cradle would have worked, too. So what? Other than proving that Goodwin's Law operates only on the Internet I've never been able to figure out who was supposed to be swayed by this sort of argument. This isn't 1938. Hitler wasn't facing a world superpower with the capability of destroying him a thousand times over the minute he made an aggressive move. You'd think the great minds of international policy debate would recognize the distinction.

Like Traub, warfloggers Fareed Zakaria and George Packer, whom he reviews, now want to catalogue the Bush administration's failures to excuse their own. It's yet another way of avoiding the issue: argue that the disastrous handling of the war and its aftermath spoiled a perfectly good idea:

Hard as it is to believe, the Bush administration took on the largest foreign policy project in a generation with little planning or forethought. It occupied a foreign country of 25 million people in the heart of the Middle East pretty much on the fly. Packer, who was in favor of the war, reserves judgment and commentary in most of the book but finally cannot contain himself: "Swaddled in abstract ideas . . . indifferent to accountability," those in positions of highest responsibility for Iraq "turned a difficult undertaking into a needlessly deadly one," he writes. "When things went wrong, they found other people to blame." [ellipsis in original]

Again, why is that hard to believe? It happened right in front of our eyes, and you two gentlemen supported it as it occurred--and if not for "abstract ideas", for what?

That the Bush administration was hell-bent on invasion, on a pre-determined timetable which probably pre-dated the 2000 elections, was clear. There was little national debate and almost none in the Congress. It was obvious we were prepared for nothing but the rosiest of scenarios. There was no military buildup, no tax increase, no call for public sacrifice. Yet dozens of public citizens, liberals and "realists", supported the war and the rush to it, and now try to wash their hands of its aftermath.

SO the Army's original battle plan for 500,000 troops got whittled down to 160,000. If Gen. Tommy Franks "hadn't offered some resistance, the number would have dropped well below 100,000," Packer says. At one point, Franks's predecessor, Anthony Zinni, inquired into the status of "Desert Crossing," his elaborate postwar plan that covered the sealing of borders, securing of weapons sites, provision of order and so on. He was told that it had been discarded because its assumptions were "too negative."

We're all-too-familiar with how the administration and its echo chamber invented entire battalions out of vapor, and continued moving them across the situation maps long after the jig was up--Look out, Syria, you're next!--but it's particularly pathetic to find Bush's neo-critics adopting the same line. If it's not obvious now that we did not have 500,000 troops to send to Iraq in 2002 what will it take to prove it to you? We had to extend the tours of 20,000 troops this year just to keep 130,000 in the field. Is there any excuse for Packer, or Zakaria, not knowing this? Raising a half-million troops would have meant a massive readjustment of American forces worldwide. We've already undertaken the largest realignment in postwar history just to stay where we are. Or we could have instituted a draft, which of course would have changed the political equation completely. Either way we are talking about a year's delay at minimum, a delay which would have meant there was no reason not to accede to the wishes of Old Europe and continue the international containment program, a year which would have meant it would have become clear to all that Iraq did not possess WMDs. Goodbye, Munich analogy.

No sir. But me no buts about troop levels, de-Bathification, and crony politics from the Right. If you supported going to war when we did you got the war you wanted, a perfect laboratory of American interventionism. The administration made things worse, but we were always headed for disaster. I'm glad you were able to forgive yourselves so quickly. Perhaps someday you'll be able to credit the people who were right all along with something more than a lucky guess.

"Strip Search Sam"

Okay, here's the thing. I'm not only old enough to remember the days before Roe, I'm old enough to have been a sexually active teenager back then. I remember in particular one 1970 afternoon at my girlfriend's house when the joint passing and Dave Mason's first solo album were interrupted by banging and screaming from the second story, followed shortly by a girl I'd never seen before half-staggering half-falling down the stairs. She'd had an illegal abortion that afternoon and was bleeding severely. She survived.

Roe's opponents have benefited from a titled playing field almost from the start. The decision dates to the heyday of the Nixon administration war on the Librul Media, which was answered in part by giving the right wing access to every teevee discussion of the issues all out of proportion to public sentiment. They benefitted from the weight of the Catholic Church on the issue. The two came together for me in the late 70s one night watching the McNeil/Lehrer News Hour when a panel discussion included, among their usual gathering of white male insiders a Catholic priest. I wrote to them asking how they came to have a member of the priesthood on the show but couldn't find a single woman, let alone a representative of NOW, on the Rolodex, and why, as long as he was there, no one asked him whether the Church thought birth control should also be construed as murder. They wrote back thanking me for my interest and expressed the hope I'd continue watching the program.

You can add to that the fact that abortion clinic thuggery rarely made the news unless it involved actual explosions, and the media's (and the FBI's) curious disinterest in the criminal organization which bombed clinics and harrassed, threatened, even killed clinic workers. I worked as a volunteer escort during one anti-rights uprising, and if the public had seen the sort of things that went on during "peaceful" protests it would have given large numbers of their supporters pause. I never saw a teevee crew, and the only coverage I saw locally was when a few of the nuts chained themselves to a fence.

As I think I said after the Roberts nomination, the "Two Camps Gear Up For Battle" coverage of every Court nominee nauseates me. It's an excuse to continue the faux-balance, to refuse to cover the actual issue, to treat Roe v. Wade as if it were a piece of "unpopular" or "controversial" legislation rather than a civil right grounded firmly in Constitutional law. It's particularly galling coming as Rosa Parks lies in honor in the Capitol drenched in crocodile tears.

I'm with Norbizness and the Poor Man. Alito is a foregone conclusion. That was decided last November. My one hope is that we can find, at this late date, some Senate Democrats who will begin to make the case that reproductive rights are civil rights, and that the philosophically unsupportable "original intent" and "legislating from the bench" crapola is a cover for a different sort of judicial activism, one the country will come to rue just as it has every other example of unfettered right radicalism. The refusal to accept the simple solution: if you don't like abortions, don't have one; if you don't like other people having abortions, offer to adopt and care for every unwanted child, is not going to end abortions. Or the fight.