Fun With Monogamy, The Kitchen Remodeling Years

I LIKE to imagine that the one thing this blog has accomplished is bringing together thousands of people who, like me, deal everyday with the strains of a beloved spouse, a dedicated educator, who talks to them like they're just another idiot 10-year-old holding an incomplete assignment. Hey, you're not alone.

So Friday I was outside applying a third coat of paint to one of the cabinet boxes, and my Poor Wife--under the weather recently--was making a rare outdoor appearance and an impression on a deck chair ten feet away. And she says to me:

Did you wash those before you started painting?

Now, my wife is not just a painter of some artistic merit, she also once earned her living as a house painter, so I value her opinions above my own. I, on the contrary, am a mediocre hand who has learned over the years to rely on preparation and sound practices to turn out a reasonably decent product. It was I who argued, briefly, for the use of oil rather than latex paints for the cabinet, and it is I who has done the work of preparing the chosen latex to look as good and last as long as possible. So by this time (my fourth cabinet box) I had already gotten into a rhythm of 1) Coarse wash with green soap and scrub pad, and use of Goo remover and razor blade where needed; 2) Two scrubbings with environmentally-correct phosphate-free TSP substitute; 3) Wood putty; 4) Two coats of primer; and 5) Three coats of paint. It was the last of these I was applying when she asked the question.

I am, as you know, pretty much used to being spoken to as if I were an errant fifteen-year-old sneaking out of class without having cleaned up his mess. Still, I have my good days and my bad days. And so rather without thinking I replied, "Gee, I'm glad you happened to be out here, because it never would have occurred to me that something needed to be cleaned before it was painted. How could they have gotten dirty just by hanging in a kitchen for thirty years? I suppose I would have asked, but I guess I thought that wiping half the cobwebs off the things with my face as I removed them was cleaning enough."

We glared at each other for a moment. Rather, I mock-glared. I never turn on the full glare, which has been known--I swear this is the truth--to chase off snarling dogs almost instantaneously. It's a gift. I'm not sure my wife even knows about it.

I had realized as I was speaking that I'd probably gone a step too far, even for the anything-goes world of the Matrimonial Roast, so I said, in a voice that tried to avoid both sarcasm and any sign of culpability, "Yes, honey. I've washed everything twice, with TSP substitute."

She looked at me like she'd've spit if it weren't so windy.

"Is the box handy? 'Cos I need to know if it cleans up blood spatter as well as the real TSP does."

How Macho!

I WAS on my fourth or fifth Lowe's trip of the weekend, headed back to my truck when I noticed the bumper sticker on the SUV parked next to me.

If You Can Read This, Thank A Teacher. If You Can Read This In English, Thank A Soldier

I was losing the light (even in Indiana, Land of the Midnight Sun Since 2006™), and had more painting to do, so I quickly passed on the urge to stick around and engage the owner in some linguistic fencing.

"You admire soldiers? Thank the French; it's their word. Marine, too. Maybe you should be thanking the Celts, for the poor soldiering that made way for the Angles and the Saxons and the Jutes, the much-less cultured invaders whose language proved flexible enough to evolve into modern English. Or the Vikings, the fearsome raiders from the north who left you the ability to lift your leg or take a husband. They came back two centuries later as Normans, and brought with them 10,000 items from Old French and a spur for the shift from Old to Middle English. For that matter, you might thank them if you didn't have to read Beowulf. While you're at it you can doff (contraction of do + off, both French) your hat (Old Norse) to Charlemagne for keeping literacy alive, and if you can count the number of words on your bumper sticker, hug an Arab. If there's a zero involved, hug an Indian, too. As in native of the Subcontinent, but go ahead and thank aboriginal North and South Americans for corn, beans, potatoes, tomatoes, chocolate, squash...and the land your Family Panzer was parked on.

"Y'see, that's the best thing about English, I think: the way it was able to take both high and low, from conquerer and subject, trading partner and scorned captive alike. English is wonderfully egalitarian; excepting a few dialects that Thou and You stuff died out before the Declaration of Independence ever switched on its beacon. With all due respect to Jonah Goldberg (thanks again, Subcontinent!) English has never had need of that Official Language and Culture crap because it's naturally resilient, and it's naturally resilient because of its openness. Ever tried to buy a French copy of Roget's Thesaurus? Or Dutch, Portuguese, Lap? You can't, because those vocabularies are tiny. They're closed. English is open to the world.

"Whazzat? Oh, you didn't mean that nativist crap? Just trying to celebrate the American citizen soldier? Well, you ought to be careful about that sort of thing, since The Liberals have a field day with that whole warflogger/anti-brown person bigot thing, y'know. But if you want to put it that way, I might suggest that while you're thanking the teacher who taught you to read you might look up the history teacher for a refresher course. The only time we were anything more than vaguely, theoretically in danger of being conquered our opponent spoke English, too, probably better than we did, unless you want to add some Newt Gingrich wet dream of a War of the Late Rebellion that would have resulted in the whole country pronouncing grits like it has three syllables, like that woman on the Food Network does. We could thank Russian soldiers that we don't speak German, I suppose; they'd beaten Hitler before we got off the transports. I don't think US conquest was ever considered a real possibility in Tokyo, but even so I don't think avoiding Kanji class is the real reason to remember the men who died on Tarawa or the nurses who lived in Japanese captivity on Luzon. If we avoided some real chance that we might be reading bumper stickers in Cyrillic or Chinese by now, you can thank diplomacy and the cooler heads who avoided war, not the sons and daughters of America who sacrificed in stupid, worthless, proxy wars, although that's not their fault, of course.

"No harm ever in remembering those who serve. That's what those three magnetic yellow ribbons on your hatch do. But twisting history--and glorifying bigotry in the process--is not what they fought and died for, and nothing we need send anyone else to die for, either."

Weapons of Mass Marketing

I see...you are...a sailor...

NEARLY lost in the shuffle of Cabinet-level gastro-intestinal seers and the resurgence of the al-Qaeda Division of SPECTRE (it was simply amazing to hear how this news was received and relayed by the same teevee hairdos who have been dutifully using "al-Qaeda" as a generic term for "anyone in Iraq we're shooting at who shoots back" since the beginning of The Surge. Of course they're resurgent. We've been helping them with branding for the last six years. My god, don't we even understand the things we do well in this country anymore? ) was the GAO "Dirty Bomb" sting of the Nuclear Regulatory Commission. It's a shame, too. The damn story has it all: the ham-fisted conflation of "dirty bomb" with "nuclear device", the solemn intonation about terrorists "expressing an interest in obtaining nuclear material" (from the US, now that they've been thwarted in Niger), the seeming afterthought-mention that such a bomb wouldn't actually damage anything or contaminate anyone, followed by that but... ("but it could have serious economic consequences"). I remind you that this is a country which had a long "serious" debate over the reality of second-hand smoke.

The GAO created a dummy company, got the NRC to approve the purchase of industrial equipment containing americium-241 and cesium-137, forged the security-free documents to permit the purchase of dozens of the gizmos, then arranged for purchase from two suppliers.

Now might be a good time to mention that this is same NRC which, prior to that little misunderstanding at Three Mile Island, wanted to put a nuclear power plant at the end of your block. It's the successor to the Atomic Energy Commission, the guys who, in the days of above-ground testing, used to assure us in the Midwest that no radiation had been detected east of the Mississippi, without adding that no detectors had been detected there, either. I would also add that in these post-9/11 times, when you can buy pre-urine stained pants at Sears ("look for the Perma-Pist™ label"), it might be helpful if the American Industrial Equipment Sales and Rental industry took it upon itself to examine security-challenged typewritten sheets authorizing the sale of potential terror bombs for, I dunno, signs of tampering? Hell, we've been known to throw bartenders in jail in this state for accepting fake IDs. Don't businesses tend to ask who's placing the order? Set up new account information? I can't even put money into my bank account without showing my driver's license.

But then, of course, the point wasn't to examine a potential terror problem which ranks right up there with shooting laser pointers into pilots' eyes or toppling the Sears Tower with a couple of Roman candles. It was to scare people who read only headlines into incontinence.

And I dunno about you, but what it did for me was make me wonder if there was anyone out there who still imagines that Karl Rove is an evil genius or that this stuff comes out specifically timed to counteract bad news (say, for instance, last weekend's revelation that Rummy prevented a black-op against al-Qaeda, Div. of SPECTRE, Ltd.? As if our intel has been picture-perfect in that area? Damn, we had 'em!). You might care to argue that, well, it's just all gone to hell for them (who could've predicted?), but I suggest it points out that there's so much love and such enormous profits involved that most professionals, and a passel of dedicated amateurs, no doubt, don't even have to think twice about it. Which, of course, is the real problem: these are the people who've been running the War on Drugs for forty years. It would no more occur to them to ask why a potential baddie would want to go through all that rigamarole--for what turned out to be a 50% chance at getting a coveted NRC permission slip--in order to accomplish little if anything beyond what the explosives themselves would do than it would occur to the Coca-Cola™ board to ask themselves if Pepsi™ really does taste better. The money's in sales, kid. Reality's for chumps.

May You Live In Interesting Times, And May You Be Required To Have Them Reported To You By People Who Aren't, Even Remotely.

I had the opportunity to catch some local news Wednesday. I'm now considering giving it up altogether.

No matter how many times you go through it, no matter how inured you imagine you've managed to become, it's a mouthful of rue to recognize that modern local news never, ever, transcends the bourgeois worldview of the hopeful careerists who read it off teleprompters for you, something no amount of "diversity" at the news desk seems capable of budging, and when you add in a story their monied masters wish to tell--like the joys of inventory tax elimination--it's gall and wormwood. And a Coke.

And so we begin once again with the Property Tax crisis, which I swore I was done talking about for a couple of days at least, except that my nose has been rubbed in it for the last five days now. Yesterday morning the Star suddenly discovered the disparity in assessment increases for business vs. residential property. Maybe with a few more years' shoveling, or a Republican mayor, it'll discover that the new assessments, ordered by the state Supreme Court in 1998 in response to a blatantly unfair system, had always assessed business properties at closer to market value than private residences. When the die-hard anti-New Dealers at the Star start sounding like raging populists it's best to keep a firm grip on your wallet, unlock the gun cabinet, and check the facts, in that order. (Another rule of thumb: when dyed-in-the-wool partisans start urging people to "stop finger pointing" you can take any odds offered their side is to blame.)

The teevee folks aimed their cameras at former Speaker of the House, now minority leader Brian Bosma, so he could propose that "certain localities" (namely, those Indiana state capitals with Democratic mayors) agree to no spending increases for the next year. The really remarkable thing about this call for other people to sacrifice their way out of his mess is that Bosma was eventually persuaded to give up the microphone. I've forwarded my own proposal--that the city charge all former Speakers of the House $14,500 a day for parking--to his office.

Then the eye that never blinks was turned onto the tragic plight of Evil Landlords who just learned the price of Evil went up another 85%. It was the sort of investigative reporting you rarely see anymore, as the hairdo turned up two landlords whose properties were within a few blocks of each other, thereby avoiding any unfortunate lack of similarity in their stories, plus she scored a real coup in getting an industry lobbyist to admit the whole thing was unfair to her constituents, who mostly missed out on the big boondoggle of inventory tax elimination and have therefore been forced to eke out a living by taking accelerated depreciation and passing cost increases on to renters, who receive a state income tax credit for their share. Then, I suppose, it was time for lunch.

Channel 8, my choice only because it has fewer "personalities" whose voices induce blackouts, does have the distinction of being the station which does five minutes on Iraq every day. Today's story told of Democrats' efforts (this is a state whose Republican senator recently called for a troop redeployment, remember) to "effect an early withdrawal" from Iraq. An early withdrawal! Compared to what? The Crusades? This was followed by a toss to CBS' Lisa Myers, so she could inform us that "al-Qaeda will likely react to American gains", thereby packing four fictions into seven words. There's a real pro. At that rate I'd have time to watch and still get the kitchen remodeled.

It's 2007? Wow, Good Weed.

Michael Scherer, "Hilary is from Mars, Obama is from Venus: In the Democratic presidential pack, the leading man is a woman and the leading woman is a man." Salon, July 12

JEEZ Louise, is there a truck somewhere missing its turnip? Do they let Camille Paglia drink right from the spigot at the Salon water cooler?

Throughout history, American presidents have been men's men who puff their out chests against evil. Think Teddy Roosevelt on safari, Jack Kennedy in PT-109, Ronald Reagan on his horse, or George W. Bush with a chain saw clearing brush. If leaders show any slackening of testosterone, especially in wartime, they are quickly derided as wimps (George H.W. Bush), a Frenchmen (John Kerry) or weaklings (Jimmy Carter). But on the Democratic campaign trail these days, where the first woman in U.S. history is making a serious run at the White House, gender roles are being swapped.

Throughout history, people who've begun sentences with "Throughout history..." have mostly sought to convey something about history in the following lines. Something, I dunno, verifiable. Accurate. More-or-less reality-based. At the very least they did the audience the courtesy of trying to lie convincingly.

Even assuming that Scherer knows no more of history than to spout off about "wimpy" George H. W. Bush or Jimmy Carter, you'd think the bit about George "Sis, Boom, Bah!" Walker Bush, brush-clearin' he-man, would have, at this late date, at least have given him pause, fer chrissakes.

As I recall it, we've had a goodly number of lawyers in the White House, a gentleman planter or two, a couple of backwoods ruffians, a haberdasher, a fuller, and at least one closet queen, in addition to a number of military men. The common thread seems to be a successful political career, sometimes replaced by dumb luck, rather than acute chest-puffery. But if we have to make the point, of our post-war Presidents, both Eisenhower and Ford were college football stars. So Scherer, naturally, chooses the guy who rode horsies in the movies.

Clara Oleson, an Iowa Democrat and former labor lawyer, explained all these distinctions on a riverbank in Iowa City last week, while waiting to hear Clinton speak to a crowd of about 1,000. "Obama is the female candidate. Obama is the woman," she said, after admitting that she was one of his supporters. "He is the warm candidate, self-deprecating, soft, tender, sad eyes, great smile."

So what does that make Hillary Clinton? "She is the male candidate -- in your face, authoritative, know-it-all." To be clear, Oleson was not doubting the symbolic power that Clinton retains as a woman. But she was calling it as she saw it, using the language of Iowa City, a university town. "It's what the academes would call the difference between sex and gender," Oleson explained.

And it's what others of us would call "sorry-assed gender stereotyping in the guise of progressive politics." Women can be tough. Men can be gentle. And we can select a candidate based on the issues, instead of turning everything in life into a bad reality show.

But then whatever would we write about?

Is Indiana Ready for Self-Government?

ITEM: Indiana Governor Mitch "Hello Up There" Daniels wants to suspend state law to give homeowners socked by rapid property tax increases more time to pay (thank you, Guv'nor, and God bless). Daniels, whose muscular suction is at the center of the power vacuum responsible for the increases, has also not ruled out calling a special session of the State Legislature, which is like summoning The Human Torch to help you find a gas leak.

The Indianapolis Star meanwhile, traditionally the state's largest employer of free-range wingnuts, gave over the above-the-fold space in Sunday's Op-Ed section to a debate on the issue between the Republican who was the Speaker of the House when this mess was enacted, and the perennial leader of the Indiana Coalition to End Taxes on White People, whose keen nose has caught the odor of burning property tax resentment to the extent that he proposes raising other taxes as a solution. (Guess which one goes up the most? That's right, sales taxes! Did you peek ahead?) The former Speaker, now just House minority leader after the one chamber which fluctuates between Indiana's Republican and Republican-Democratic parties went back to the latter, blames House Democrats for their failure to fully reverse what total Republican control had wrought the previous two years, while Governor "Cheshire Mitch" Daniels smirked his smirk about "balancing" the state budget.

To recap: property taxes zoomed because the ideologues of the GOP, given statehouse and legislative control in 2002 for the first time in over a decade, couldn't wait to repeal the business inventory tax. That is, they couldn't wait long enough to explain just where the replacement funds would be coming from, unless "Jesus" was the answer here, too. And since they wouldn't have dared raise other taxes (sales, income) and ruin their reputations as fiscal "conservatives", everyone knew at the time where the increases would land.

The second portion of the raise comes from the fact that Indiana kept property tax rates and, especially, assessments, artificially low for decades, mostly due to the farm and business lobbies. It's no surprise the locus of the public protests has been the Governor's Governorless Mansion, which just happens to be in the old-old money section of Indianapolis, where years of ridiculously low assessments led to booming increases when assessments began approaching "reality". The first-day protests at Not The Governor's Residence Exactly included the street (Meridian Street, that is, aka US 31) reportedly being blocked for two hours--this in a city where a couple years back mostly young mostly environmental activists protesting the proposed building of a new toll road mostly through southern Indiana farmland were mostly preemptively arrested for looking like they might cross against the green.

Local news has positively reveled in the story. Every night now kicks off with video of outraged white people holding up signs. And don't get me wrong. I'm thrilled at the thought of democracy in action. It's just that I'm more than a little perturbed that the coverage a) completely avoids any mention of how those taxes got there, which could not have been a surprise to anyone who'd been paying attention, meaning that either the tax revolters are led by the clueless or by people who kept their mouths shut when the Republicans responsible ran for re-election last year ; b) has ignored all suggestions of a return of the business inventory tax, which is not exactly favored by the people who bring you the people who bring you "the news"; and c) the focus on the Governor, or rather on where he's supposed to be residing, which ignores the fact that up until last week his role in all this has been to actively promote dumping tax liabilities on local governments so he'd look good, and that in this he was ably assisted by the very people who now "cover" the issue.

The Lottery Song

OF the four times I heard the London Underground derailment (aka, Darn, It Wasn't Terrorism) story on teevee yesterday (CNN, NBC, two locals) roughly 100% mentioned the fact that it was just two days from the anniversary of the Tube bombings as one of the many excellent reasons widespread panic should jump the Pond and infect a bunch of people who've never even seen a subway. Are terrorists a particularly superstitious lot? Or heavy into numerology? Is this the sort of useful tidbit we picked up at Gitmo, or from reading everybody's emails? If we're going to go in for the whole News Via Nostradamus bit, can't we come up with something better than "two days before?" Divide by 7-7? Find a planet with a mean orbit of 9-11 days? "Well, Bob, authorities point out that while it turned out to be a car backfiring, it wouldn't have been surprising if it had been a terrorist attack, since 911 squared plus the number of letters in Saddam Hussein's name, divided by...oh, this just in. Lincoln had a secretary named Kennedy, and Kennedy had a secretary named Lincoln."

Fun With Monogamy: You Call That Working With Wood? Edition

THE first casualty of the kitchen remodel--three weeks ago or something, now--was the cabinet over the refrigerator, after the new Kenmore Trio (French doors, freezer on the bottom, satinéed steel finish) proved taller than anticipated. Those cabinets were practically useless anyway, nearly impossible to reach, storage for stuff carefully chosen as to be needed only once or twice a decade. At 32" plus they were too wide to be relocated over the sink (not that I wanted them there; it's just the only possible spot). Stood upright they could have gone in between the floor cabinetry we're rearranging, but my Poor Wife's idea was to create a plate rack to sit atop the new fridge.

This seemed a fairly straightforward project (make cleats, drill holes, insert dowels). Whenever anything seems fairly straightforward what little experience I have kicks in, and I start to consider things carefully. I knew, for example, that drilling several dozen holes which needed to be more or less perpendicular and more or less evenly spaced was beyond my ability to freehand, so I went looking for a drill guide. This proved to be more of an adventure than I anticipated; even the guy at The Hardware Dump (motto: "If You Can't Find It Here You Haven't Knocked Over the Right Pile of Shit Yet") looked at me like I'd asked where they keep the spat grommets. My concern that it all seemed too simple led me to check for plans on the internet (motto: "Home of Expert Commentary from People Who Know Even Less than You Do"). The results confirmed my basic plan, but I found someone whose measurements seemed authoritative and I used that as my starting point.

Which, as you already have figured out, was my first big mistake.

I had actually figured the first attempt would be mere rehearsal, which it proved to be as the 1.75 inch on-center plan met our roughly 2.0 inch Target Moderne black dinner plates. No problem, I thought cheerfully, as I headed for the back door for more drill guide practice, only to discover that the May/June rain deficit was about to be corrected by 24 solid hours of the stuff.

(Oh, the drill guide. Found one at Sears. Shortly thereafter my wife referred to it as my "new toy". Goddam Suffragette.)

So there was a slight delay while I frantically ran around collecting every tool I own and shuttling them all into the garage, which is too full of junk to try to do accurate work in, so I waited the storms out, cut new cleats, drilled fifty-six holes 2.25 inches on center, went to dry-fit everything in the kitchen and discovered the roll of double-sided tape which appeared to contain four inches of tape in fact contained 3.75 inches of single-sided tape stuck to the cardboard roll, and 0.25 inches of usable tape. Off to Lowe's. Pick up some more dowels, and cut them 1/4 inch longer this time, since the original measurement seemed a touch wobbly. Put it all together and...

now the fucking plates are too tall. Shit. This is genuinely a problem, since a) finding lumber thinner than a nominal 1x2 is unlikely; b) there may be some molding out there which would work, but it'd be a ridiculously expensive solution; c) one could rout little plate beds into the cleats, but this would turn putting plates away into something approaching the docking of Gemini 8 with the Agena Target Vehicle; d) the difficulty would only be increased by the fact that I don't own a router.

Ultimately I bought a cheap table saw and ripped the cleats to 5/16" while losing fewer than three fingers. The new width necessitated buying another batch of dowels to cut to the new length. My Poor Wife was savvy enough not to refer to the latest purchase as "my newest toy". The fuckin' plate rack was her idea, after all.

Still, one knows too much to underestimate her. With all the pieces cut, dry-fitted, sanded, degreased, and being painted she stopped by for a progress assessment.

"You know, honey," she purred, "if this plate rack thing doesn't work out you can always use it to store your dowels in."

The Idiot's Guide to Idiocy

SCOTT C points us to Jonah Goldberg's column in USAToday (motto: "The Nation's High School Newspaper"), which in turn points us to that paper's Op-Ed section (motto: "Whadda You Lookin' At? That Fish Ain't Gonna Wrap Itself Now, Is It?").

Let's deal with Jonah first. The author guy of the forthcoming something book something, Liberal Fascism is upset that people on his side of the immigration debate have been labeled "bigots". I'm not sure how this sort of thing gets published. I mean, I know the only possible reason Jonah is or was ever published, but either the American Right contains sufficient numbers of the rational and near-rational to demand the removal of The Doughy Pantload from their midst, or they're incompetent, mentally, to communicate with the outside world, let alone to form political parties. The only way to be charitable about this is to assume that hubris acted upon the Right the way slowly increasing water temperature acts on an embeakered frog, and the last conscious thought in the Collective Anti-Collectivist brain was, "Oh my God, we left Jonah out there." Too late. Cut to close up as the first bubble shimmers briefly on the surface before bursting.

Jonah's piece is so pathetic that I'm gonna argue with the subhead and forget the article:

In many countries, citizens can have a candid dialogue about preserving national identity.

Yeah, they do that sort of thing constantly in France, where it's led to the unceasing admiration for all things French that makes The Corner smell like croissants au chocolat and stale Gauloises. The Germans, not so much anymore, but boy, they had it goin' for a while there. (Though some think they may have taken it a bit too far.) And who can forget the fun we had following the ethnic discussions in Yugoslavia? Or admiring the debating techniques of the Igbo and the Hausa, the spirited give-and-take in the Congo and South Africa? Oh, how many nights we stayed up late over flavored coffees, wishing we had the sort of national identity that led the Russians into Chechnya, or sparked the good-natured ribbing the Kurds took from Saddam Hussein! But, alas, in this PC culture of ours, some people actually frown on this sort of thing, and they just have to ruin it for the rest of us.

Does anybody have an example of Jonah Goldberg ever getting something like this unequivocally correct?

Being new to these parts I'm not sure whether you can actually just read the subhead and learn as much as you need to know about every USAToday (motto: "We Are To Journalism What Barbara Walters Is To Journalism") Op-Ed piece, but there it was again in a piece on The Scooter:

Our view on Justice and the White House: Libby uproar is hypocritical, but it doesn't pardon Bush

Care to guess who's being hypocritical? Or what makes them so? It's like trying to guess what that bottle with the skull-and-bones on the label would taste like. Oh, all right:

Many of the Democrats proclaiming outrage were muted in 2001 when Bill Clinton pardoned Marc Rich, a fugitive from justice, on his way out of the White House. Now, they've scheduled congressional hearings of dubious value.

This is, of course, "History" as she is practiced in the nation's Press: Clinton, Pardongate, Marc Rich. Memorizing just enough of the conventional wisdom to imagine you've got a shot at passing the quiz. And never bothering to fucking look thereafter. If "many Democrats" even had a voice in those heady days of Getting to Know That New Commander-in-Chief You'd Love To Have a Beer With it was used to point out that Clinton's exit pardons were roughly the same in number as his two predecessors, excepting that none seemed designed to keep him personally out of the witness box, where he in fact landed shortly thereafter. Not that those tiny voices were exactly being featured on the Nightly News (or in USAToday, one assumes, unless there was a pie chart involved).

What motivates someone to "think" this way? Pressing business? An urgent need to micturate, or nap? Gosh, there's a political uproar. Y'know, I'll bet Both Sides Do It! Uttering the name of Marc Rich in a discussion of The Scooter is shorthand for saying, "I don't care to understand this, so here's my opinion."

And we could ask how this sort of thing comes to be published, but instead we're gobsmacked by the fact that there's a fucking rebuttal, from Tony Snow, immediately following. This being an instance where you don't need to read anything beyond the byline (as with all of Mr. Snow's oeuvre) unless you're a particular fan of the tightly-reasoned argument:

The Constitution gives the president the power to grant clemency in a wide range of cases, at his discretion, with no restrictions. In the final hours of the Clinton administration, this unfettered authority was embodied in a mad rush to push through pardons with dizzying haste — 141 grants on Clinton's final day in office, part of 211 in the final nine weeks .

In contrast, no president in recent history has made more careful use of the pardoning power than George W. Bush: The president believes pardons and commutations should reflect a genuine determination to strengthen the rule of law and increase public faith in government

We're not even going to bother pointing out how respect for that sacred unrestricted Constitutional power of presidential pardons led, in Bill Clinton's case, to a Republican "Justice" Department investigation of possible criminal activity. Because, y'know, they really didn't mean it as a precedent or anything.

Instead, we leave the gang at USAToday (motto: "The News As Processed Cheese Food Product") to their endless game of flamingo croquet. Besides, we've got to finish nominating Jonah for the Nobel Peace Prize. And finally get to work on these law school applications.

Olios for Freedom!

• Dear Senator Obama re: Your Comments on the Libby Commutation Y'know what would be nice? What would be nice is if, whenever you play the "We Must Change the Politics of Division" card you acknowledged, in some small way--maybe a saucy wink, or a Renee Zellwinger face scrunch--that many of us on one side of this Evil Cancerous Partisanship got there by dint of fighting against the very things you're complaining about since, oh, I dunno, before your ass was born. We've been partisan about civil rights, American adventurism abroad, equality, justice, and personal freedom. Sorry that turned out to mess shit up so much for you. Do you really imagine that your policy stances--and they're largely pretty good, sir--are not going to be met with partisan opposition if you're elected? Or is partisanship supposed to vanish by then? Alternately, Senator, you're a Senator. Just introduce non-partisan legislation that solves all our problems. You'll be President by acclamation.

• Al-Qaeda? Maybe the British Car Bombers Should Have Trained in Hamilton County where the count as of July 2 was thirteen families burned out of their apartments and one barn burned to the ground by "errant" fireworks. Or errant "legal fireworks", as the Carmel fire department, recipient of some of the surcharge largesse (earmarked for "safety instruction and training", wink wink) that closed the deal that brought 1/4 sticks of dynamite Flaming Freedom sticks to neighborhoods, vacant lots, and tinderboxes statewide, would have it. The 19 year-old whose Roman candle spree left a dozen families homeless and bereft of possessions (most, as usual with apartment dwellers, sans insurance) faces a $25 fine.

• Speaking of imaginary links to vaporous organizations, there's no reason, neither common-sensical nor in her track record, to expect NBC's Lisa Myers to buck popular trends and journalistic standards and reason anything out from the utter haplessness of the British car "bomb" attacks. But is it too much to ask that she learn to pronounce "GLAS-ko"? Or should we just be grateful it didn't happen in Edinburgh?

• Reasons to spend four years in Journalism school: so that you, like the Star's political pundit Matt Tully, can write an entire column about the reasons for massive Property Tax increases without ever mentioning, alluding to, or suggesting you've ever heard of the actual, unequivocal, accepted-without-objection explanation, the Ideologues Gone Wild repeal of the state's business inventory tax two sessions ago, which sorta conveniently left out any means for replacing the lost funds except having them fall to You Know Where. (Oh, sorry, Liberal Bias: the funds, of course, were replaced by the resultant upswing in sales--due to lowered prices--Indiana's exploding employment numbers, and excise taxes from the year-round low car prices we used to get only in February, when all the dealers tried to Beat the Tax Man by passing the savings On To You! Property tax increases are apparently an illusion.) Tully's employer, the primary-colored Pie-chart fans at Gannett were--givet me a minute to look it up--in favor of the repeal. Just in case you were holding your breath.

I Don't Believe in Nothin' No More. I'm Goin' to Law School!

I went for the wisecrack Monday morning at Roy's, mostly as a result of serious time pressure, as we say in big league chess, but the comment I wanted to write, a reiteration of my claim that the ascension of Barbara Walters to a million-dollar seat at the ABC news anchor desk officially marked the end of American greatness, came back to me later. It was the end of a day of painting, of general re-organization of the kitchen mess (it needs to be moved into successive types of mess now, lest one pile start to mount an expedition to the top of another). My Poor Wife is under the weather. Leo the 'Lectrician had discovered that the back wall of the kitchen was wired with a freaking piece of lamp cord, an imminent fire hazard hidden from view the past ten years by the island countertop. And here I'd assured him that nothing about the house could surprise me anymore. The discovery led to the complete dismantling of the island, a couple weeks ahead of schedule, whereupon I discovered...

Wait. You know what teevee show I really hate? It doesn't have anything to do with tee-shirted and bed-haired bum models painting someone's bedroom a color not found in nature, nor does it involve Howie Mandell. It's that show on HGTV where people with nothing better to do tell the story of how they researched their home's history and then present a completely boring monograph on someone whose sole claim to historic significance lies in building the house these current morons live in. I'd probably have just let it go--along with the rest of the once-occasionally-interesting HGTV--except that the first show I saw rather breathlessly detailed what the original owners of the stately restored plantation did when they weren't exhausted from whipping any of the human beings they owned who'd proved recalcitrant. I've had a chip on my shoulder about the whole network ever since, not to mention the fact that if I were to research my home's former owners it would be for the soul purpose of hunting them down and killing them for their godawful decorating choices and cheap-ass, code-ignoring repair work.

Anyway, don't ask what I found behind that island, but it was the reason I didn't hear about the Scooter business until Olbermann came on.

And to which my reaction was, I'm sure, much the same as yours: I can't believe it! I simply cannot believe that people are outraged by this! It's like getting upset if you found out that John Gotti had a drawer full of unpaid parking tickets.

Not that I wouldn't have enjoyed the idea of Tiny Irving makin' little ones out of big ones for a couple of years, but it's like glorying in the forty years Rudolph Hess spent at Spandau--the biggest criminals were always going to escape justice. Think about the time frame for a moment. It's remarkable anything got done at all. If the war had gone well, by American lights--and as we all realize by now, that could have been achieved only if the Iraqis had turned out to have no immunity to smallpox, or Coca-Cola--Scooter would be on a fuckin' stamp by now. Go ahead and call for Bush and Cheney to resign, Keith. It would be the honorable solution, by which I mean you already have your answer.

Me, I'm a lot more concerned with the 20-some-percent of Murricans who still support these guys, and who suggest that there is nothing whatsoever any PresiVicePresident identified as "conservative" could possibly do to lose the support of 1 in 5 of your fellow citizens. Not appear wearing the remains of teevee's beloved mongrel Benji as a hat. Not slowly remove it from his head, grinning like Jack Nicholson, and consume it. While wearing one of Goering's old light opera uniforms. 1 in 5. An American is more likely to have given up smoking than to have given up on George W. Bush. This despite the fact that nicotine is physically addicting. And relatively pleasant.

And then, as Roy pointed out, even the "anti-Bush" "conservatives:

...will give them the Nixon treatment. They'll quietly accede to the general negative opinion, while striking up the band for someone exactly like them.

Which brings us back to Barbara Walters, professional drum majorette emeritus. I don't blame her personally, nor am I suggesting she was some sort of harbinger, or Cosmic Jinx, just because the odds of something good happening in American culture since her ascension have been no better than the odds of shooting boxcars. I'm just saying that a culture where a woman with a profound speech impediment, who had evinced no interest in politics in her fifty years, excepting the Office type, being elevated to one of three news anchor desks--a much larger proposition in those days of rabbit ears and a Vice President who was part of the Executive branch--should have been enough to let everyone know we were sledding downhill. Instead the damn thing took hold, and people actually celebrated the itchy scaliness of Ronald Reagan, even after it became a full body rash, followed by the festering lesions of Ken Starr, Henry Hyde, and the Eight Year Impeachment. And now that the body politic's been coughing up blood for several years I think we're beyond lancing a Boil Boy or two and reaching back for a satisfying smoke.

Big Weekend: Watching Gasoline and Paint Dry

THERE'S a small tug of melancholy in reading better informed bloggers when one's time has been directed away from The News, even for the thrill-a-minute world of wallpaper removal. It pulls even as one admits to oneself that they're better informed even when I am paying attention.

(This is what I have learned, or rather re-learned, from home improvement: had they convicted me back in '73, and given me Life, not only would I still be working on the opening of the tunnel, I would now be on my tenth color scheme and sixth sharpened spoon design, the preceding five having proven too wide or too long by millimeters.)

Of course the Big News still filters through, although I'm unable to explain whether it's personal experience or simple common sense that informs my certainty that the British "car bomb" stories have been misreported in a way that might, (coincidentally, I'm sure) enhance their marketability. Or, to be more precise, someone's idea of their marketability, since the public is well ahead of The Press on this one, as on most things.

Recurrent Transient News Irritation Syndrome. It began, as so often, with a localized rash, despite the Grim News from Overseas that utter incompetents had failed to blow up a Mercedes. On Friday Channel 8 sent its Chief Meteorologist/Tech Reporter out to cover the literally dozens of people lined up to buy an iPhone. I'm sure the other stations did as well, but they don't have someone assigned to the Geek beat. The only thing that stopped him from talking about The Hype was the requirement to mention the $500-600 price tag every two sentences. This might be termed "palindromic reportage"--wherever you start with it you wind up back where you began. A) The proper response to Hype is Inattention; B) $500 was a lot of money when I spent it on a (demo model) Betamax in 1977: today, it's not, except by comparison to the throwaway prices of consumer electronics; C) this is the same guy who's been actively hyping a different gadget or gizmo every week since they created the position as a sop to him for hiring a Weather Bunny to do the primetime chores. He's a teevee weatherman, fer chrissakes. He hypes rain. He hypes breezy for cryin' out loud. He tells people to be sure their dogs are properly hydrated. It was like listening to some guy rail about Perverted Homo Sex with another man's fist up his rectum.

Speaking of which--hype, I mean, not Perverted Homo Rectal Adventuring, which we'll be covering on Wednesday--at some point during the weekend I believe I stumbled onto video of the police blowing up a second car bomb on their own, something the Times confirms. (Once cable news goes wall-to-wall you can forget about figuring out any temporal relations without watching for thirty minutes or more. I have no idea if I saw the thing go up live, or the following day, or if it was, in fact, file footage of a soccer riot.) Has anyone explained why they did that, other than the really cool photos, I mean? It's a car full of gasoline. You can't just off-load it? Spring-cleaning my garage is a riskier act. (Note to self: spring-clean garage.) Or driving a Ford product.

Does this sort of thing actually qualify as terrorism? I'll grant you that, were I standing at an airport entrance--anywhere, actually--when I noticed a burning sedan and/or a couple of burning South Asians coming toward me, "terror" might, possibly, describe my reaction, but assuming the flames didn't spread, specifically to parts of my clothing, I'd get over it after a couple of drinks. Committing an act that more-or-less duplicates what one might conceivably face on any normal day with no political overtones at all--especially if one has frequent contact with the motorists of Illinois--whose life is this going to disrupt? Drunken teenagers with automobiles killed more people in Indianapolis this weekend than disgruntled Kurdish doctors did in the whole of Great Britain.

UPDATE: Her Majesty's government is now announcing the bombers had a link to al-Qaeda. Which, of course they did. It's the one the British government just announced.

Okay, okay, don't get me wrong. I do think Western governments should be concerning themselves with terrorism to the extent that major international plots involving shampoo, or groups of Middle-Eastern natives who plan to blow up the Sears Tower just as soon as they can find someone with the requisite money, explosives, expertise, and bus schedule, wind up in the nets. They should. But it'd be nice if The News figured out the difference between international terrorist threats and overgrown mailbox bombers, the same as everyone who can read and doesn't have a vested interest in amplifying the threat did so several years ago. Still, we watch as the story and the fires are fed, and the "car bomb" exploded (the iPhone! It's been hyped! It costs $500!) without even noticing that there's not so much as the half-assed frenzy that surrounded the Possible Toothpaste Bomb of less than one year ago. C'mon. Let's restrict purchases of gasoline and cell phones. Please?