White People Amusing Themselves With Tax Money

Lose 10 lbs. This Weekend, Guaranteed: The Sweat and Spasm Diet. I think it's got potential. In the event I doubt I lost more than five; I weigh myself about once a decade just to see where the new baseline is. Thanks for all the good wishes in the meantime.

I felt well enough yesterday to spend 120 bucks at the nursery, actually enjoy a meal (dinner, romaine-and-red-leaf with chicken breast), and read the Sunday paper:

Just north of the extent to which our fair city could annex property in the 60s lies The County Named Appropriately for Alexander Hamilton. It is serving, at only a moderate cost, as an open-air laboratory of Republicanism, something which isn't publicized much; for all I know this puny blog may be the outside world's only source of its progress. Thirty years ago the county was a large pasture speckled with old farming communities, a solid Lincoln Republican land. Noblesville, the county seat, was notable for the two-story chicken that stood on the edge of town. Oh, and there's Geist Reservoir, Indianapolis' Chinatown. There's the remains of a village underneath the water. We don't know where all the other bodies are buried.

In the late 60s the Army Corps of Engineers wanted to flood half the county to increase the size of the reservoir. Personally, I'd like to see them bring that up again.

One of those little villages is Fishers. We lived there for awhile in the late 70s, just at the beginning of the housing boom. The population was just under 2,000. It's twenty-five times that now, nearly wall-to-wall strip malls and McMansion "communities". I used to ride my bike all over that place and the only dangers were the occasional farm dog and excessive bucolic cheeriness. Today you take your life in your hands just driving on those roads. Fishers is also the location of the municipal airport, which is how it found its way into the Sunday paper.

Thanks to Fishers' laissez-faire (French for "greedheads devouring each other") development "program", that airport now sits smack in the middle of "town", meaning on 450 acres of prime strip-mall fodder. Last December Hamilton County asked the Indianapolis Airport Authority, which owns the airport, for permission to move it, which was granted, supposedly provided everyone agree on a new location by June.

Behind closed doors (where else?) they settled on a 1000 acre site in an unincorporated part of the county. The Fishers board agreed. The Hamilton County Commissioners okayed it. The Noblesville City Council votes tomorrow night. Noblesville gets to vote on the grounds that it's the closest annexing (French for "tie down and consume like a roasted pig") authority. Meanwhile, the actual current owners of the land are up in arms and have hired an attorney to fight the takeover.

I thought you might enjoy the dueling quotes:

"This is all about Fishers sitting on beachfront property smack in the middle of their town where the airport is. If this airport is such a great thing, then why isn't Fishers moving the airport to another location in their town?"

--Noblesville Council President Terry Busby

"If this is such a big problem, then why doesn't Noblesville let us annex [the land]? "We'd be happy to put the airport in Fishers and wouldn't think twice about it."
--Fishers Council President Scott Faultless

Meanwhile, the veritable font of Hamilton County incontinent Republican civic boosterism and unchecked economic rapine, Carmel--somewhat quiet on the liebenstraum (German for "obtain the water rights to in exchange for other considerations") front since it got its ass kicked by a bunch of toothless hillibilies*--has decided to arm "stay at home moms and part-time community activists" with radar guns in an effort to combat speeding. Violators aren't ticketed; they receive a friendly letter from the Carmel PD.

No word yet on whether the volunteers are provided with grocery bags in the fight against Carmel's other long-term traffic problem.**

That's it for today. Remember, you can't run an open-air laboratory without the chance a few rats will escape.

* I kid. Home Place, a small unincorporated area now surrounded by Carmel. One of Carmel's actual legal arguments was, "But they get to drive on our streets!"

** For you younger readers, a reference to Driving While Black.

Happy Birthday

Thomas Wright Waller
May 21, 1904--December 15, 1943

Later

Woke up ten minutes ago. Everything drenched in sweat. I'd been asleep for about an hour, the longest stretch since yesterday afternoon. I don't quite feel the mental clarity that usually accompanies a fever break, and the thermometer's battery is dead and I have no idea where my wife put the real one. But I got out of bed okay--peeling off the cover wasn't like plunging into a tub of ice water--and I'm sitting down awright. I can bend over, sorta; it no longer feels like someone's just kicked me in the right nut, more like someone did that yesterday. I'm hungry. I'll probably stick with the surgery diet for awhile, just in case; diverticulosis can mimic appendicitis.

Cool Papa Bell's birthday reminded me of William Wallace's poem "Anthem", which you can download here (.pdf file) along with a key to the nicknames, although "Ducky" should be Joe "Ducky" Medwick, not Robert "Ducky" Detweiler if you ask me, and a section on the Negro leagues is certainly in order. Read in out loud, unless it hurts when you laugh, too. I'm going back to bed. If I wake up later I'll let you know.

Slog

Okay, so I check in with this week's Nooners column, "Out of Touch: What the president's immigration speech and "The DaVinci Code" have in common," which--you're not going to believe this--never actually makes the case that either is Out of Touch. She does manage to use "detached elites" as a segue, but it's tacked on, unsatisfying, almost as if she'd merely slapped out her contractual 850 words by glancing at a couple of headlines, though of course we know better.

There's not much more to be said for the rest of the thing, either, except a) What the hell happened to religion over the past twenty years that its most vocal adherents can't handle a figurative accidental jostle on the bus without breaking into hysterics? b) would you please quit quoting that "85% to 90% of Americans identify themselves as Christian"? They don't. (It might have been 85% twenty years ago, but it's been dropping ever since and was below 80% a couple years back.) c) if you've got to make (up) those raw number arguments, kindly bear in mind that nearly that many Americans say they believe in ghosts or ESP, which should at least give you pause, plus a solid minority admit to believing in the predictive power of astrology, and many others attend Bi-Monthly Science Fiction Conventions in costumes they made themselves.

As for the Bush/Immigration part of the equation, it's turned out to be a celebrity marriage reality program between Bush and the Right, hasn't it? The aging drama queen and the no-longer-young stud who fills out a flightsuit but isn't too much in the imagination department? Can somebody explain this to me? Four years ago he was a Colossus, the Solitary Warrior, the man who'd single-handedly saved Civilization Herself from the dastardly Moor. Now he's a bum.

Of course no one puts it quite like that, but how are we to understand it? Nobody asked Noonan or Hinderocket back then to slather on the praise in a way that would make a Scientologist PR flack blush. But having done so, wouldn't you expect they'd stand by him now, instead of griping that he didn't update MacArthur's plan to salt the 38th Parallel with cobalt?

Oh, and one more thing, Peggy. If you're occupationally unable at this point to write about politics without telling us what "the people" want, move to Omaha and shut up for five years.

Speaking of Hiney, he's the second person I'd seen praise this from Wretchard at The Belmont Club:

However that may be, Jaynes' theory intriguingly suggests that hunches, guesses and intuition may hold some validity. They are the end result of a logical process inaccessible to the waking mind. My own hunch is that in the last two or three months there's been a change in the tone of the blogosphere. Nothing definite, simply a change in atmosphere in proportion to the degree of abstract tendencies of the blogger....

My own theory is that all the old divisions so sharply erected between September 11, 2001 and April, 2003 have been slowly eroded by the uncertainties of the world. The Left and the Right have seen their champions turn out to be all too human, and are confounded. Issues which are a wedge on both sides of the spectrum -- like immigration or Darfur -- have scattered interest groups around like balls after a billiard break. New issues like the resurgence of a hostile Russia, the spread of Marxism in Latin America -- even the malicious buffoonery of the Iranian President -- are crowding at the fringes of the now comforting world of the War on Terror. The old play is ending and yet the new one has not yet begun. And this bothers abstract intellectuals far more than it does the men in the field. A soldier can write with perfect conviction that "the world was a slightly better place every time I pulled the trigger" because he lives in a world of specificity, but the agonized thinker can find no such comfort in cold abstractions; abstractions now in need of repair under the weight of experience.

I can't count the number of links I've chased because somebody said, "X is a really good writer," or "Here's a thought-provoking piece for both sides," and he or it turn out merely to reinforce the blurbist's own prejudices. It's not a right-wing-only phenomenon, but the above is--that popping pressure-value of political angst, the wisp of comradeliness, the assertion that Right and Left have been equally misguided--you can only find that sort of thing on the Right, and then only because they've spent four years blaming the Left and the Media for everything and now find themselves out of ammunition and cover.

So in the spirit of our shared sacrifice, with the now comforting world of the War on Terror receding into the background, let me just say this: What the fuck you talkin' about?

I'm obliged, too, to mention that as it goes with the rest of the world, so it goes with Julian Jaynes and The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind: please do not try to operate it without reading the manual first. Jaynes' discussion of what consciousness is is a delight. The stuff about myth suffers from Academic Out of his Element Syndrome. Jaynes' theory is not reversible, the "bicameral mind" is not something quaintly assigned to "primitive" peoples, and it's not a defense of "intuitive thinking," nor an excuse to toss around "unconscious mind" like it's a scientific term. I think you were probably reaching for Jung, but at times like these, like most times, it's best to keep your hands in your lap.

Happy Birthday

James Thomas "Cool Papa" Bell
May 17, 1903--March 7, 1991

Adding My .00035 to the Sum Total of Left Blogosphere Nastiness

In my defense, I had to go to the mall today...

A) Waterworks

So, a television reporter just happened to notice Tony Snow's yellow bracelet and asked him about it. Uh-huh. Sure. Right.

I'm not even gonna bother with the "Oh, I'm not bashing Tony Snow and his brave fight against cancer" bizness. I don't really care if this gets misconstrued somewhere, and anyway, so what else is new? Lots of people fight the brave fight with cancer, and a lot of 'em don't have the health care benefits Tony Snow and the White House Press Corps types have. Snow, regardless of whether he once was brave enough, or firmly in grasp of the obvious enough, or desperate enough for attention to call his new boss "a double-digit IQ'd frat boy" is a card-carrying member of the party which has shot down public health care and cheap Canadian prescription drugs. When he weeps openly for everybody who's left out, lemme know.

But mostly it's the fact of this phony fucking set-up on Day One. Oh, looky, the new WH Press Secretary is human! Screw that noise. You people want to have a little party have it on your own time. Tony Snow is the replacement mouthpiece. Ari Fleischer was not the problem. Scott McClellan was not the problem. The people they work for are the problem, and it makes no difference who's doing their lying for them. I'm sure Tony Snow once had a beloved puppy, and may have saved a small Mexican child from drowning once. Give him a cake. Don't give him five minutes of the people's time for his Emmy highlight reel.

B) The Popular Bush

Nora Ephron at HuffPo gives Laura Bush points for saying "Yes" when asked if she's a feminist, even if that's full of shit. It's a point well taken. But someone tell me how the Washable Synthetic First Lady rates a 73% personal approval rating when all she's done is trot out onto the public stage when required and deliver a bunch of mealy-mouthed crap about The Wonderful Man She Married? Okay, and one time, one time, she told a joke about masturbating livestock. So she's got a highlight reel, too.

Oh, and she's in favor of reading. Great. She also took two days longer than her husband to wake up to the fact of Katrina, and once they finally got her up for a couple of walking-three-paces-behind-him photo ops it was so she could inform people who'd actually been paying attention to the thing for a full week that television was misleading them. You know, by showing pictures of people who'd been through the worst natural disaster in American history an' stuff, instead of focusing on the number of schools we'd be repainting.

The worst natural disaster in US history, and she stayed in Crawford to oversee the packing. She couldn't say, "Get me a fucking camera crew down here now so I can film a Red Cross appeal"?

I know, poll numbers are poll numbers, and she's the recipient of a sort of telephonic mercy hump, people saying they like her in a sort of act of contrition for hating her husband now when they know if they'd admitted he was an idiot six years ago and hated him then they wouldn't find themselves dealing with the fact that he's a criminally-inclined idiot now. Still, three-quarters of the population? For an act that bad? Maybe it's time for an Istar remake.

Michael Barone: Low Bush Approval Ratings "Merely Indicate Unpopularity"

Barone cheers up the Hindrocket who really needed it after this cab ride:

I rode home from the airport in a taxi a few minutes ago. My driver, as is almost always the case in Minnesota, was an African immigrant. No sooner had I gotten into the cab than he began talking about the speech and railing against Bush on the theory that the President is anti-immigrant. I patiently tried to explain that President Bush is in trouble because he is not just pro-immigrant, but pro-illegal immigrant. I explained that he has argued for a guest worker program and a path to citizenship, and has said repeatedly that it would be impossible to deport all the illegals.

My cab driver was completely disoriented by this. I could tell he didn't believe it. Like nearly all African cab drivers, he listens to public radio all day long. Twenty minutes with me wasn't enough to overcome years of liberal indoctrination. He simply wasn't able to absorb the idea that President Bush might not be a racist who hates immigrants. I'm sure he'd forgotten everything I said by the time he left my driveway.

Informal, Unscientific Poll. Is this:

A) Complete horseshit?

B) Utter bullshit?

C) Evidence that this was the driver's first day on the job, as no one working for tips would ever pick up John Hinderocket and imagine a good anti-Bush rant would snag 20%?

D) Evidence that the driver was extremely savvy, recognized immediately that nothing whatsoever would pry a decent tip loose from Mr. Powerline, and proceeded to make his trip as uncomfortable as possible?

So Hiney was damn near inconsolable after Bush's speech, until he read the "most grown-up of American political commentators":

When you look back at all these leaders' job ratings in office, you find an interesting thing. The transformational Thatcher and Reagan had negative to neutral job ratings during most of their longer years in power. Thatcher's peaked upward after the Falklands victory; Reagan peaked from his re-election until the Iran-Contra scandal broke two years later. Their divisiveness, the stark alternative they presented with the policies and conventional wisdom of the past -- all these held down their job ratings.

In contrast, Blair and Clinton for most of their years in office had quite high job ratings. Blair's ratings for his first eight years were probably the highest in British history. Clinton, after he got over his lurch to the left in 1993-94, also enjoyed high job ratings, especially when he was threatened with impeachment. The center-left alternative, by accepting most of the Thatcher and Reagan programs, was relatively uncontroversial, determinedly consensus-minded, widely acceptable to the left, center-left and much of the center-right segments of the electorate.

Thus, the crunchy, confrontational right was in its years in power not so widely popular as the soggy, consensus-minded center-left. Yet surely history will regard Thatcher and Reagan as more consequential leaders than Blair and Clinton.

Warmer than the bartender's smile at the airport Hilton when a grown man orders a Daquiri, Banana, frozen, (and then explains that he ordered it that way because that's how the cash register is set up) isn't it? So is this:

A) Total horseshit?

B) Near-total horseshit?

C) Remarkably horseshit-esque?

Did anyone else notice that the second paragraph seemed to declare war on itself about halfway through?

I'd like to be able to share the whole story with you, perhaps including some impressive four-color graph work, but that would require paying real currency to George Gallup when my religious convictions tell me I should be able to glean his field for free. So let's just point this out: Clinton and Reagan had roughly equal approval numbers over all. Clinton's tanked a year quicker than Reagan's (with Clinton's "lurch left"); they both remained fairly neutral until their second terms. Reagan dropped 20 points with Iran/Contra; Clinton zoomed when the Lewinsky scandal broke. So, sorry, no, America's most grown-up political commentator is doing what grown-ups frequently do: he's lying through his teeth. Just the sort of bedtime tale they prefer on the Line of Power:

Barone applies these lessons to today's political landscape:
It is in this context that we should consider George W. Bush's current poor job ratings. For all the high ratings for center-left leaders, it remains true in America and Britain that the policies of the right are more acceptable than the policies of the left -- and are capable of beating the center-left, too.

It is in the nature of things that the right, while sharply defining the issues and winning most serious arguments, should also stir more bitter opposition than the soothing, consensus-minded center-left. All the more so because Old Media in this country, more than in Britain, is dominated by a left that incessantly peppers the right with ridicule and criticism, while it lavishes the center-left with celebration and praise.

Even so, we continue to live in the world of Margaret Thatcher and Ronald Reagan, as we once lived in the world of Franklin D. Roosevelt.

As I say, a needed dose of far-sighted optimism on a dark day.

And that, my friends, is how you win most serious arguments. Hold 'em with yourself.

In parting, here's today's retro-Barone poll reading moment. My wife tells me all her kids are crazy for these:

It looks like Bush is headed toward the bright sunlit upland of public approval that Bill Clinton and Ronald Reagan enjoyed in the first two years of their second terms.

(Townhall, December 6, 2004)

"While Hurtling Over an Embankment to Certain Death" Is the Wrong Time To Decide You're in Favor of Guardrails

David Brooks, "From Freedom to Authority," NY Times, May 14

Psychologists joke that two sorts of people need therapy: those who need to be loosened up and those who need to be tightened up. Now, in the political world, we're moving from what you might call loose conservatism to tight conservatism. We're seeing a conservatism that emphasizes freedom give way to a conservatism that emphasizes authority. Many of George Bush's problems come from the fact that he's awkwardly straddling the transition point between the two.

So begins another in the weekly series "David Brooks Redefines 'Conservatism' According To This Week's Requirements", brought to you with rapidly decreasing justification by the Liberal New York Times.

It hasn't been pretty watching The Conservative Liberals Love yank desperately at a set of imaginary controls as he watches Commander Codpiece's irreversible death spiral, just as, pace the supposed Credo of Bush Hatred, it isn't pretty watching the Franco-like demise of Reaganaut "conservatism" from its admixture of hubris and self-serving delusion. This is not comeuppance; it's disaster. Yet still there's the hopeful spin each week, though it's become less and less anchored in talking points and more and more in the search for some enlightening, self-confidence restoring piece of psych-or-sociological wisdom that'll float in high seas.

So shut up and die like an aviator, already.

There are some forms of idiocy which, if they don't require a Ph.D to promulgate, are at least unavailable to the man who can't, or needn't, hide his copy of Maxim behind Burke's Reflections on the Revolution in France. You wouldn't keep going back to the transmission repairman who told you your car was fixed, then that might take years longer to fix and cost several hundred times the original estimate, then that things were looking much better, and finally that the car was supposed to run exclusively in reverse.

In the 1970's and 80's, conservatives felt the primary threat was the overweening nanny state. Ronald Reagan tried to loosen the structures that restricted individual initiative and led to national sclerosis.

Brooks is writing this on the cusp of the anniversary of Bloody Thursday. Reagan made his "conservative" bones as the anti-hippie, anti-student demonstrator, anti-civil-rights authoritarian. It's understandable that for there even to be Reagan hero worship a lot of unpleasant realities have to be ignored, but does Brooks even know this stuff?

Times change. Now the chief problem is not sclerosis but disorder. The biggest threats come not from nanny states but from failed states and rogue states. There is less popular fear of bureaucrats possessing too much control than of ungoverned forces surging out of control: immigration, the federal debt, Iraqi sectarianism, Islamic radicalism, Chinese mercantilism, domestic rage and polarization.

Times change. And how conveniently they change!

The chief challenge these days is to restore legitimate centers of authority.

Restore them from the hash the Bush administration has made of them? Or from the hash the Right tried to make of them because Clinton was president?

Middle-class suburbanites understood this shift far more quickly than the professional conservatives in Washington. What people wanted post-9/11 was Giuliani-ism on a global scale -- someone who was assertive and decisive enough to assume authority and take situations that seemed ungovernable and make them governable.

Enough, already. You'd think the unmitigated disaster that's followed in the wake of this authoritarian yearning would at least slow down the Post-Nine-Eleven stuff, but no. If Middle America pined for more Giuliani-ism it was because it didn't know him. If it found the Runaway President's bullhorn moment "inspiring" it was because it desperately needed to. It was obvious at the time that America would respond with wrath untempered by the facts, and that we had the misfortune to have in power a particular set of politicians who would milk that for every advantage. Giuliani knew for weeks that the death toll he was using was twice the actual, but "twice as many deaths as Pearl Harbor" was a sexier rallying cry than "roughly the same." But rallying to do what? Bush's "retired fireman" was a Republican ward-heeler, and the police badge the dead man's mother wanted him to have was seized by the Secret Service. That Middle America you keep claiming to know, Mr. Brooks, was already united and already fear-stricken. What it needed was someone to calm, to explain, to establish national priorities and reestablish the democratic impulse. It's the authoritarians who strongly desired an Authority, apparently imagining they were getting a cross between Octavian, Peter the Great, and George Patton; what they, and we, got was Nero, Jr. And don't try to sell us on that Reluctant Caesar business. George Bush may have realized in his marrow that he'd faked his way to this point and was now way out of his depth, but is there any question about what side God was gonna come down on when He spoke up?

In many ways, President Bush was sensitive to the changing nature of the times. Bush had never believed that his job as president was to cut government to enhance freedom. He never promised to reduce the size of government. His education reforms didn't enhance personal choice; they turned the federal government into an accountability cop.

Yeah, yeah. Bush is not a conservative. Why were you guys so enthusiastic about him, then?

As Fred Barnes wrote in his book "Rebel-in-Chief," Bush and his team operate in Washington like an occupying army of insurgents, an "alien in the realm of the governing class." Ever the visionary, Bush told Barnes that his interest "is not the means, it is the results."

Y'know, reading those two sentences is a lot like watching one of those Hollywood Arabian Nights fantasies of the 40s or 50s, where everybody wore contemporary hairdos and Technicolor harem pants.

But statesmanship consists precisely of understanding the relationship between the means at your disposal and the ends you seek to pursue. Bush has had trouble exerting authority because he and some of his advisers have been aloof from or hostile to the inescapable and legitimate institutions of authority in this country.

How fortunate for all of us y'all could figure this out in less than six years.

Furthermore, Bush and his team have generally not shared information with the people with whom they share power. They've been slow to open reciprocal communication with people on Capitol Hill and elsewhere in Washington who could do them some good.

Now, here's the thing: this is the party Brooks claims superiority for on the grounds of its weekend Burke retreats and intellectual bullpen, yet every last time-honored conundrum known to Western Civilization sneaks up behind these guys and kicks 'em in the ass. Those people on Capitol Hill and elsewhere were makin' with the Hosannas as recently as last year, right up to the point that the poll numbers fell off the table and started rolling toward the basement stairs. Nobody went public, David. Nobody said Bush wasn't "conservative" enough until Bush was a dirty word. 'Course, you're the guy who recently told us how troubled all the insiders were about Iraq, the same ones that you had assured us earlier were uniformly optimistic.

Finally, members of the Bush administration did not respect government enough to understand that a strong one had to be established in postwar Iraq. They had too much faith in spontaneous social order, a libertarian myth from the 1980's that has been sadly refuted by events.

Only because, sadly, its refutation by easily understood rational argument was ignored.

For a hundred years we debated the economic reach of the state, but that debate's basically done. The next one will be over where the state should erect guardrails in a mobile and fragmented world.

How is it that the party of Burke seems to imagine that history began twenty years ago?

Happy Birthday

Diane Nash
born May 15, 1938

Happy Birthday

Ian Dury
May 12, 1942--March 27, 2000

Friday Frivolous Interruptus, Part One

To those of you out there who may be tempted to entertain the idea that we now have sufficient suspicions of high crimes and misdemeanors to initiate an impeachment investigation even in this House, or that, say, the GOP has one final chance, deserved or no, to show that it actually puts freedom, the law, and love of country above electoral success and criminal means of personal enrichment, or to those who might be wondering whether the Democratic party is intending to show up, like, ever again, I'd just like to ask you to think for one moment: the NSA has been logging the phone calls of practically everyone in the country for the past three years. I know, it sounds unconstitutional, and downright unAmerican, but just think for one minute how many terrorists we've caught in the interim.

Friday Frivolous Interruptus, Part Two

Or, that Roy is really too nice for his own good. Or maybe he just tuned in to The Corner a bit early:

SPEAKING OF RU 486 [Ramesh Ponnuru]

Judicial Watch's report on the topic has a lot of eye-opening information, but the letter from Ron Weddington, the co-counsel on Roe v. Wade , to President-elect Bill Clinton is especially worth checking out. It's on pages 61-64.

A sampling:

[Y]ou can start immediately to eliminate the barely educated, unhealthy and poor segment of our country. No, I'm not advocating some sort of mass extinction (sic) of these unfortunate people. Crime, drugs and disease are already doing that. The problem is that their numbers are not only replaced but increased by the birth of millions of babies to people who can't afford to have babies. There, I've said it. It's what we all know is true. . . .

I am not proposing that you send federal agents armed with Depo-Provera dart guns to the ghetto. You should use persuasion rather than coercion. . . . You made a good start when you appointed Dr. Elders, but she will need a lot of help. . . .

[G]overnment is also going to have to provide vasectomies, tubal ligations and abortions. . . . There have been about 30 million abortions in this country since Roe v. Wade. Think of all the poverty, crime and misery. . . and then add 30 million unwanted babies to the scenario. We lost a lot of ground during the Reagan-Bush religious orgy. We don't have a lot of time left.

We don't need more cannon fodder. We don't need more parishioners. We don't need more cheap labor. We don't need more poor babies

Now of course these sorts of sentiments aren't shared by all or even most supporters of legal abortion, but I suspect they are more widely thought than voiced.
Posted at 9:02 PM

Not shared by all or even most supporters of legal abortion. I guess that's the sort of keen insight and knowledge of your subject that gets you a book deal, huh?

Twit.

Y'know, you could walk outside the NRO offices and interview the first 100 people you see, and I betcha the most sophisticated psychological trap wouldn't catch too many people even thinking about eugenics, crackpot or otherwise, and it it did I'd put it at even money those thoughts were thunk by an abortion opponent, as their political commitment to life begins at conception and ends at birth.

Really, Ramesh, go pleasure yourself repeatedly with a thatch rake in a hot airless room. And that's an idea I voice more than think, and I suggest others join me.

But first...

Maybe the party of Obscure Kerning Samples could learn not to jump quite so far so fast. (In case you're interested, you can download the .pdf file here.) The letter from Mr. Weddington, which Judicial Watch apparently considers a "relevant document" fills the last four pages.

I wrote Mr. Weddington at his law office last evening asking whether he claims authorship. So perhaps we'll learn, and in the meantime, well, you read the "sampling". Only a low-grade commerical liar would try to pass that thing off as representative of anything other than some insane ramblings someone sent to the President. Maybe that's what they are. But at the risk of sounding like the Powerline boys on a corndog and Super Squishee bender, there's at least a few reasons to think for a moment:

1) It's a photocopy.

2) It's undated and without an inside address.

3) It addresses the President-elect as "Dear President-To-Be Clinton" (comma).

4) There are no typist initials.

5) The attitude ("hey, just between us liberals, we know we need to use RU-486 to decrease the number of poor people") looks suspiciously like it came from the same book of templates as the Anthrax Letters and the Jon Benet Ramsey kidnapping note.

6) Both Judicial Watch and Ramesh Ponnuru are trying to make hay out of it.

Is it a fake? I have no way of knowing one way or another, and that's just to debate which sort of meaninglessness it belongs under. I'm only suggesting that it gave me pause, and I wouldn't be staking a whole lot on its authenticity--unless I had no reputation to lose anyway.