Petards Are For Hoisting

HERE'S the thing about D'ines'h D'Souza: he found himself a nice little sinecure in America defending the Raj. That comes with a price, of course. Not in swallowing the understandable anger and disgust the Anglo-American Man's Burden must engender in its erstwhile subjects; that sort of thing seems to go down easy with second or fifth-generation mandarins. It's just that, inevitably, someone with D'Souza's rh'torical gifts has got to figure (and rightly so) that These People Are Dumb As Stumps, and go looking for further fields of plunder. 

Lacking Hitchens gifts, D'inesh had to settle for life as a Toolbelt to the neocons, and pan for gold among the evangelical dross, jettisoning his Catholicism somewhere along the way. Sorta.  (Again, fortunately for D'Souza, in those circles one can now be a best-selling Christian apologist without taking sides on the Reformation, which has apparently been relegated to the intellectual dung pit alongside the Trinitarian debate, the question of translation, and the George W. Bush administration.)

However, as you probably already know, this seems to've gotten D'Souza in a spot of bother when some of the more morally inflexible members of the flock objected to his apparent dalliance with his new, mid-twenty-something "fiancée". 

Finally, near 11 p.m., event organizer Tony Beam escorted D’Souza and Joseph to the nearby Comfort Suites. Beam noted that they checked in together and were apparently sharing a room for the night in the sold-out hotel. The next morning, around 6 a.m., Beam arrived back at the hotel and called up to D’Souza’s room. “We’ll be down in 10 minutes,” D’Souza told Beam. D’Souza and Joseph came down together, and Beam took them to the airport.

This information eventually gets to Warren Cole Smith at World ("Todays News/Christian Views"), and all H-E-Double-Hockey-Sticks breaks loose. Yesterday D'Souza resigned from his post as President of Kings College (Manhattan) after its board met for two days drafting his resignation. ("So it could move on," of course. Nothing to do with his time in the limelight.)

Then, of course, began the CYA Tour (FOX, Christianity Today); one wishes at such times to have Jesus's super-hearing, or ability to change into a fly on the wall, in order to've checked in on the rebranding efforts. ("Look, it's not too late to change your name to Bobby.") D'Souza came out swinging, calling Smith, World, the event organizer, the attendant event-roving moralists, and the hotel night clerk a pack of liars out to destroy his career. Because that's what Christians do; the Bible tells 'em so. Oh, wait, I mean "Conservatives". 

The really fun part of that was his interview with CT:

When CT asked D'Souza directly for his response to charges of infidelity, he responded: "It's absolutely not the case that [pause] . … Look, the issue here is that World is attributing to me an admission that I never made—is attributing to me a quotation that I never said. That to me is the problem. … They are just claiming based upon my non-assertion that I did something that I didn't do."

This naturally led Christianity Today to headline the article "CT Exclusive: Dinesh D'Souza Denies Infidelity."  

There's also this bit for those of us who're terminally amused by the work of theologians:

D'Souza, a former CT columnist, said he did not know that Christians generally do not approve of engagements prior to divorces being finalized.

"I asked a lawyer whether there was anything wrong in being engaged while separated but prior to being divorced," he said. "I was told there's no problem with that and actually that happens all the time. I proposed to Denise and we became engaged."

"I believe I have good biblical grounds for divorce and was going through the legitimate process," said D'Souza. "The thing I will admit: I did not have any idea that it is seen as wrong in Christian circles to be engaged prior to being divorced even though separated. … That was a true error of judgment, but it was truly a case where I didn't know better."

The man was raised a Catholic. I guess that means he'd be more familiar with the etiquette of annulments. 

Anyway, look: when you were thoroughly intellectually depantsed by Stephen Colbert it was a warning to invest soundly and keep your head down. 

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Just too much money to be made on the Obama: Voodoo Anti-Colonialist trail, I guess. Well, we're not morally judgmental in these parts, or not so much, but we do like to get to the truth, Dinesh. So, Exhibit A--that thing on your head:

Totally doing her, weren't cha? Jumble up your theology anyway you like, it's still a sin to tell a lie.

1) You're Confusing The First Amendment With The Fifth. 2) If You're Going To Do So, Opt For Silence.

"Reddit will not ban 'distasteful' content, chief executive says". October 17

THAT would be Reddit CEO Yishan Wong, who is described as a former Facebook engineer. The optimist in me had previously imagined that "former Facebook engineer" was mostly seen on autopsy reports as a contributing cause of death.

Oh well. Can we just note here that the distressing thing about the Michael Brutsch affair, which is, otherwise, just a marginally entertaining diversion for the First Amendment absolutist with a well-developed sense of poetic justice, has been the bullshit First Amendment defense? If you wanna defend the First Amendment, try telling the fucking truth:

"We also think that if someday, in the far future, we do become a universal platform for human discourse, it would not do if in our youth, we decided to censor things simply because they were distasteful."

Apart from the things you already censored when widespread public exposure--the sort of thing Free Speech is supposed to encourage--threatened your corporate asses? Oh, and:

However, Mr Wong - who used to be an engineer at Facebook - said the website would continue to enforce a policy to not allow "doxxing", a term given to the process of outing a member by posting personal details online.

"We will ban the posting of personal information, because it incites violence and harassment against specific individuals," Mr Wong said.

Some Speech is freer than others.

I know, I know, I'm hardly the first to revel in the hypocrisy. Reddit has bravely stood up for the integrity of the cow it milks, and fuck the people who own the pasture they're grazing it on. Its habitués defend the sacred right of anonymity--which ain't anywhere in the Bill of Rights, kids--without which they'd face consequences or something. As one prominent over-ripe juvenile just did.

From Wong's memo to the troops:

"We stand for free speech," he wrote. "This means we are not going to ban distasteful subreddits. We will not ban legal content even if we find it odious or if we personally condemn it. Not because that's the law in the United States - because as many people have pointed out, privately-owned forums are under no obligation to uphold it - but because we believe in that ideal independently, and that's what we want to promote on our platform.

"We are clarifying that now because in the past it wasn't clear, and (to be honest) in the past we were not completely independent and there were other pressures acting on reddit. Now it's just reddit, and we serve the community, we serve the ideals of free speech, and we hope to ultimately be a universal platform for human discourse (cat pictures are a form of discourse)."

The only possible sense in which some future world will be better off for free sharing of information is if that includes all types of information. And that includes identity. If you wanna defend a principle then live by it.

Also, sir, the only way to defend the First Amendment is to understand it. All content is legal. If you're simply the publisher, or the agitator, or the provocateur, then you've no First Amendment excuse for banning anything. Just potential legal fallout to protect the delicate tissues of your rectum from. You're not fighting for free speech. You're fighting for the scheme you came up with to make a buck off it. Otherwise you'd dig in your heels with Creepshow. This is the standard, and sad, libertoonian routine:  proclaim your undying support for absolute freedom, but don't return your Social Security checks.

And, y'know, if you really think this is a fight (or that yet another organization with corporate megalomania is going to remain "true" to its "values" when there's a breech in the vicinity of the bottom line), champion the right to privacy, in the Constitutional sense, and fund the fight against the sort of economic tyranny which allowed Mr. Brutsch's employer to fire him for exercising his God-given right to invade the privacy of young girls, and make anonymous racist comments because he found them amusing. And because you find them so uplifting to the Human Condition.

Oh, and above all: thanks for bravely making this stuff available on the internet. Dunno what I'd do without ya.

Fun With Monogamy, Vol. MDLVI

MY Poor Wife is home for Fall Vacation. It fell to me to keep her entertained yesterday morning, and in desperation I hit upon VH-1's Totally 80s, just in time for "Push It". 

Me: Which was your favorite, Salt, or Pepa?

PW: I don't remember. Which one is the lyricist?

Political Science Discovers Problem For Which "Non-functioning Third Nipple" Is The Solution!

William Saletan, "Foreign Exchange: On defense and foreign policy, Democrats talk like conservatives, and Republicans talk like liberals".  October 12

OKAY, maybe you accept Slate's double-special-triple-reverse wrong-footed contrarianism as something resembling a marketing idea on some theoretical planet (if you do, kindly explain it to me). Maybe you accept it as a continuation of the sort of blithering nonsense teevee leftists like Michael Kinsley started spouting in the 80s after their party suffered two disheartening loses to a transparent half-witted huckster like Ronald Reagan. And/or  after they'd listened to the half of their party which cooperated with "Psycho Dick" Nixon blame '68 and '72 on the other half.  Dishwater centrism apparently seemed like a decent place to tread water in those days, at least to a certain brand of careerist. Admit your sin, boy! Just confess a grudging admiration for all that the Gipper has accomplished, and you'll be drawin' paychecks from one billionaire or another forever.

So maybe you're a lot more generous than I. That still doesn't explain Saletan. Nothing does. For the life of me, "Republicans talk like this, Democrats talk like this" had to be getting tiresome to college sophomores by the mid-80s, didn't it? How did it come to be so ingrained in so many people? I don't get it. I mean, it's not like you're still listening to Night Ranger or something. It's not like there was some special Huey Lewis Fan cachet that got you laid, and you still wear as an amulet. You should have been questioning that Faux Balance bullshit then. You would at least have understood it was a political construct, not a philosophical one. You would at least have understood that the reason the American right wasn't given coequal status in our political debate before Nixon was that it was clinically insane, then as now. It was dead wrong about Civil Rights, it was dead wrong about the Cold War and Vietnam, it was dead wrong about the Culture War. Then as now. In the 70s people surveyed the wreckage of America's grand idea of Itself, the flotsam and jetsam of Jim Crow, Watergate, and the enormity of our attempt to reinstate colonialism, and said "Let's run for cover at Ozzie and Harriet's place." Or just elect Ronald Reagan.

I don't get it. I understood what they were up to then; I sure expected the following generation to call bullshit. One fucking look was enough to tell you who was on the wrong side of Civil Rights. And why, and why they still are. One fucking look tells you all you need to know about the history of the US in Indochina; why does the fabulous version still hold sway? (Why does one of those POW/MIA flags fly over my local post office, a monument to cheap political theatrics and zero attention spans?) I'm sorry to go all Old Joe Biden on you, but look: you were supposed to outgrow your fascination with Ayn Rand before you turned 21, and by the time you were 22 you were supposed to understand that the proper response, in retrospect, was embarrassment over the whole thing. If you didn't, for some reason (serious concussion, brown acid, bad potty training), then you were at least supposed to understand you were reading an atheist, not wait until you were a 40-year-old dairy cowtown Congressman to have it explained to you. And I do not believe that, as an adult, you take a critical look at the question of reproductive rights and conclude that the answer is to split the difference. It isn't. That's the one thing we do know. You believe one thing, or you believe another. If you're gonna turn out this sort of drivel insisting on some faux intellectual consistency in entire political parties, then kindly display some yourself. Either abortion is murder, or it ain't, and if you believe it is, then make arguments about exemptions to murder. Everyone who says "Abortions should be available, but there should be some restrictions to make them difficult or impossible to obtain"--the majority of Americans, so say the pollsters--is, simply, ill- or un-informed, and/or a liar. Anyone encouraging the idea as an objective compromise is that, and worse.

Here’s what we learned from last night’s vice-presidential debate. On domestic policy, Mitt Romney and Paul Ryan stand for self-sufficiency, compromise, and reducing the government’s rate of growth. Barack Obama and Joe Biden stand for generosity, firmness, and maintaining projected spending. On foreign and defense policy, it’s exactly the opposite. Obama and Biden stand for self-sufficiency, compromise, and cutting back budgetary increases. Romney and Ryan stand for generosity, firmness, and higher spending growth.

So fucking what? People who believe that everything ought to proceed according to some supposed truism (who have been known as ideologues since the 19th century) are often the first to abandon those ideas when there's a buck to be made. Is there really anyone who argues this way? No. Is there really anyone whose argument can be fairly characterized this way? No. There are Republicans who want to eliminate all social spending, at least ideologically. Are there any Democrats who want to eliminate all Defense spending?

Good Lord, it's as if, having excised Hypocrisy from the list of sins, lest the modern-day parishioner take his money and go home, we find some cartoon version to make fun of when we're pressed for a topic for this week's sermon. What intellectual difference is there between this and Rick Santorum's notion about gay marriage and sex with household pets? There are clear, substantive arguments about social spending and about defense. It's possible to want to raise one and lower the other, and remain consistent. And th' fuck are we explaining inconsistency to the Reverse Corkscrew Non-Contrarian Contrarians at Slate?

If you watched the debate to find out where the candidates stand on specific issues, the exchange was informative.

I take it that's some sort of journalism in-joke?

But if you hoped to find out which ticket shares your values, good luck. You can vote for the party of self-sufficiency, flexibility, and slower spending growth, or you can vote for the party of compassion, clarity, and sustained financial commitments. But first you’ll have to decide whether you want those principles at home or abroad.

"Principles". What distinguishes the beliefs of the self-described moderate Republican from stupid shit the party he votes for actually does.

A Thousand Words

Gregg Segal for TIME

OKAY, look, I don't disparage anyone's workout program, unless it involves simultaneous phone usage or sudden dead halts on the trail ten yards in front of my bike while I'm doing 22 mph. (And the evidence suggests that both of those things are important parts of somebody's patented informercial program.)

But, really, nice legs, Congressman Stork. Did Time-Life ship the workout DVDs one per month, and you cancelled after thirty days so you'd owe nothing? And keep the free gift? And it didn't occur to you you were sitting down all the time?

You'll forgive me; I've been subjected to not one but two of Governor Schwarzenegger's book tour blabfests lately, and the man's an idiot. And I was reminded of a time when men didn't pose like this, let alone do curls all day, unless they were auditioning for Italian gladiator flicks. Joe DiMaggio didn't look like that. Neither did Joe Louis. You could barely tell that Wilt Chamberlain had muscles, and he was one of the strongest men in the world in his prime. I still don't know how Ahnuld went from laughing stock to Grade-A Hollywood beef, but I know this: it severed the connection between working out and athletic grace, and guys like you came along, guys who apparently were carried everywhere until age eighteen, and decided that doing a few sets of curls made you "buff". 

You wanna work out in order to look like you work out, fine. It's a perfect match for your ideology. It's just too bad you can't use some of that Koch brothers juice to buy yourself a pair of Double Ds. And if your staff is too busy reading Atlas Shrugged to stop you from doing things like this photo shoot, well, good. But shut th' fuck up about it already, Birdlegs. Working out doesn't deserve any more praise than brushing your teeth does. 

The March Of Science

SADLY, word comes too late for me, but maybe you can use it:

Why Sex Doesn’t Gross You Out When You’re Aroused

Getting turned on overrides women's natural disgust response, a study suggests, making them more willing to do things they otherwise wouldn't

By ALEXANDRA SIFFERLIN  September 14, 2012 | If you think about it, sex is actually sort of disgusting, what with all the sweat, saliva, fluids and smells. So much so that a group of researchers from the Netherlands got to thinking, How do people enjoy sex at all?

According to their small new study, people — at least women — may be able to get over the “ick” factor associated with sex by getting turned on. Sexual arousal overrides the natural disgust response, the researchers found, and allows women to willingly engage in behaviors that they might normally find repugnant.

Model Citizens

IT seems depressingly familiar to anyone who lived through the Reagan administration--but then I've long urged future historians to dub the past thirty years The Era of Depressing Familiarity--to consider how Mitch Daniels became a budget hardliner, an economic genius, even, by massively increasing public indebtedness. It's also telling that he didn't get away with it during the first Bush administration, but soon figured out how--and where--he wouldn't get called to account: Indiana! Daniels will leave state government with accounts at best no better than they were when he arrived (though so rearranged that no one will ever be able to tell the difference), and at worst, well...

(This, by the way, ignores the $8.8 billion effect of Federal stimulus money, which doesn't count against a 63-year-old Rand fanboy the way a closetful of methed-up male prostitutes don't count against a televangelist: if you're theologically opposed to a thing, practical experience is inconsequential.)

Daniels left OMB in 2003, having presided over the worst recession in American history since the last Republican administration, with a "popular" "wartime" President and a Vice-President ineligible to succeed him (due to that special copy of the Constitution only he could read specifying that the President must be human). I have nothing beyond blind contention to prove that Daniels saw an opportunity to take his rightful Randian command of the planet, but it was clear from the beginning that there was going to be a determined PR effort to "balance" Indiana's budget, beginning with declaring the state in debt, which it wasn't. * It was, mirabile dictu, all solved in a single session of the Indiana General Assembly (and by the way, if any problem can be "solved" in a single session of the Indiana General Assembly it cannot rightly be described as having been a problem). Daniels and his henchlegislators examined state accounts, and determined the amount of shin that needed to be amputated to fit the bed. This is, of course, something you can try at home, except you might find that in your case lying won't get you through missing meals. But if you manage to get through that, say, if Barack Obama gives you $8.8 billion, and you find a few million "misplaced" by your own budget office, you might rely on the fact that signs of mismanagement and inadequate nutrition often don't show up until your two terms are over.

Anyway, now we've reached that tricky little point where Daniels' fan base, fer instance the cremains of the Indianapolis Star, are forced to point out a few shortcomings here and there (without blaming the Guv) so that incoming Governor by Acclamation Mike "Choirboy" Pence has some wriggle room. So all the sudden now we don't have the money required to actually build I-69, and that coal gasification plant might not actually make money for anyone not already on the Republican Train O' Gravy, and such. It's even possible our $2 billion arrears to the Feds will turn back up on the spreadsheet next spring, just in time for the legislature to declare ketchup a vegetable, declare vegetables a luxury item, and sell our share of Lake Michigan. And cut taxes.

Meanwhile, though, a couple matters have come across the wire. Indianapolis turns out to be the eighth-most expensive city for tourists, thanks to all the taxes we've put on hotel rooms, restaurant meals, rental cars, and the like (y'know, things actual residents never, ever use). The news brought Indiana Senate budget czar Luke Kenley out long enough to explain that this was really good news, because revenue. Kenley did not explain how it was that any American in his right mind, if there is such a thing anymore, absent a case of NFL fandom crossing into psychosis, couldn't find at least thirty cities he'd rather visit that the mere tax savings wouldn't get him to.

The second was a report on the indebtedness of Indiana cities, led by Indianapolis' $1.8 billion ("that's billion with a 'B'", one helpful local teleprompter reader explained), followed by our neighbors-to-the-Solid-White-North, Carmel, at $895,135,486. The talking hairdo did not point out how close this came to A Billion With A Bee, nor that it belongs to a Land of Dreams with 10% of Indianapolis' population. The matter did come to the attention of the Carmel city fathers though--and we do mean "fathers"--who pointed out that debt was just ducky in Carmel's case because "we can afford it". I am not making that up. They also claimed that the debt calculation program was flawed, as it mixed in all sorts of things (like "water improvements" and "huge White Elephant Performing Arts Centers designed to attract Sheryl Crow and--I am not making this up, either--'Supertramp's Roger Hodgson'") which aren't paid for by taxpayers, just people who choose to use water.

I just wanna point out that I've been watching this for forty years, in the Reddest of Red States north of Dixie** and east of the Great American Desert, and I've yet to see any area under complete or essentially complete Republican control that has any problem whatsoever with deficit spending. Just other people's ideas about deficit spending. Not news, I know. I just wish they'd fucking admit it.

___________

* Not according to the way the books had been kept for at least a generation, and may I remind you that the first of two Democratic administrations which had a hand it that was Evan Fucking Bayh's. This is Indiana, fer chrissakes. People had not been flocking here for the plush interiors of our Welfare Cadillacs and our featherbed socialist unemployment "benefits". Or the quality of our schools, for that matter.

** Depending on your definition.

Yesterday's News Today

SO in the past week What's Left of the Indianapolis Star suddenly noticed, at the 7-3/4 year mark, what the Daniels administration has really been up to.  Sunday brought the shocking news that Daniels will leave for Purdue in a couple months having spent the $3.8 billion dollars the "state" "received" for leasing the Indiana Toll Road for the next 75 years. And that money has managed to build well over half the program's centerpiece, paving over all the wasted farmland, wetlands, woodlands, and backyards between Evansville and Indianapolis to complete the unfortunately named I-69, unfortunate not for the sexual connotation, but because it suggests a consensual type of sodomy, and one which is pretty much the opposite of what was actually involved.

All that's left, really, is to figure out how to get the thing to Bloomington, so we can be completely flummoxed finding the $1.2 billion needed to complete it from there.

But fear not, children, your Master speaketh:

"The entire history of this project -- I'm talking about since we got started -- is of cost reduction and underestimates," Daniels said. "My instruction was, 'Build a road, but don't overbuild a road.' And so the cost of whatever remains, will, I think, be quite manageable."

[Forgive me for sleeping as much as I could, but I could swear that during the great Toll Road Swindle of Aught Five we were told that I-69--which sane people have been fighting (and stopping) for thirty years, opposed only by Republicans and Democrats--was going to be completed for just a fraction of what we pocketed on the Toll Road Deal. And then it was insisted that the sudden stop the project made was intentional, and that money was really only for materials, aside from that part of it which was missing due to falling interest rates, which no one could have foreseen, especially an economics genius and Rand fanboy like the Bantam Menace. Now it's "Well, my boys have given you a great start"???]

This follows last weekend's astonishing revelation that the state's natural gas ratepayers are likely going to wind up another $1.2 billion in the hole on the big Coal Gasification Plant deal that was just too lucrative for the state to pass up. And one which wouldn't have existed without the state signing a 30-year deal to buy natural gas from Leucadia at $6.60 (2008 dollars) per million BTU, because Leucadia sure didn't wanna use its own money building the plant, and no sane people would loan it any. Natural gas now goes for three bucks, and is projected to remain below $5 until 2023.

It's okay, though; any Hoosiers who manage to stay alive for thirty more years will be reaping in big bucks, according to former Daniels adviser, premier Indiana Republican fixer, and, yes, Indiana project director for Indiana Gasification LLC, Leucadia's "subsidiary", Mark Lubbers:

"You can find price forecasters across the board," he said. "That's why the [Indiana Utility Regulator Commission] said the only thing certain is the uncertainty of the price.

And the certainty of the deal being rammed through.

But virtually all of the recent evidence weighs heavily on the side of gas prices above $7 when the (substitute natural gas) plant comes on line in 2017."

Yeah, what a shame for you, then, that they're so unreliable.

Lubbers said the debate about Vectren's "absurd" estimates ignores other factors, such as Indiana Gasification's commitment to cover up to $150 million of any losses. The company also "guarantees" $100 million in savings by the end of the 30 years, Lubbers said.

If those savings aren't realized, Indiana Gasification can cover the shortfall in cash or extend its contract with the state at a lower price. Absent those two things, the state could force a sale of the plant to make up the difference.

Oh, man, I guess I was gettin' all excited over nothin'.

I'd just like to mention, once again, that the state remains in arrears over its (badly managed) unemployment insurance program, and still owes the feds $2 billion, so far as I can tell; it sure wasn't addressed in this year's Double Plus Good and Union Busting budget, which nevertheless managed to achieve a surplus somehow; these guys are good. Much like the one we're so confident of for next year that Daniels and Republican lawmakers have already been thinking out loud about how best to return it to this year's voters.

As for Indiana's largest Ag college, I know they recently stopped an already completed renovation of Daniels' office, right after he noticed the public got wind of it. I sure hope someone took the opportunity to count the spoons.

Bummer

I ADMIT it, as a guilty pleasure;  I read Gregg Easterbrook's "football" column at ESPN, especially now that he's decided to sneak a little football in every week.

Okay, truth is that I was a little flummoxed when Easterbrook cut his workload a few years back, from "commenting on every game played that week" to "mentioning three or four marquee games, in-between libertoonian 'government waste' snark, This Week in Illogical Movie or Teevee plots, and Reader Mail. Oh, Plus "Obscure College Score of the Week", your sennightly reminder that Pierre Garçon attended Mount Union. The goddam thing is still 7000 words long.

Then there's "Christmas  (now 'Unified') Creep", in which the observation that retailers push the opening of whatever moneymaking idiocy is next on the calendar earlier and earlier, until Xmas starts in September, Washington's Birthday sales occur the previous August, and nobody's sure when Tet is. This is such a wellspring of Funny it's been going on for like five years now, despite the fact that the concept was already ancient back when Easterbrook and I were hippies.

We'll get to that in a moment, Reader. In the meantime, let me just note that this is precisely what I find so incomprehensible about facile libertoonianism. This is precisely the way "Enlightened" self interest works. It's what Capital, large and small, does: it gobbles up whatever's handy, and bulldozes whatever's inconvenient. Old growth forests and common sense are just obstacles. The only difference is that you think ass-raping logic is just kind of amusing, while doing the same to the Gulf of Mexico is defensible.

And don't get me wrong; I'm glad, thrilled, even, that Easterbrook decided to admit Global Warming is real, and largely man-made, a good twenty-four months ago. And, personally, if you really wanna spend time arguing that CFLs are no better than incandescent bulbs, be my guest. Just a) do the rest of us the courtesy to recognize which side you're on, and how strange your bedfellows (see under Hitchens, C.). That Jim Inhofe was on your side should have been enough. And b) if you're smart enough to believe in technology, then you're smart enough to realize what its real track record is. Saying that technical innovation is our best hope for reversing climate change, or ameliorating disaster, is functionally the same thing as saying it doesn't exist in the first place.

Anyway:

These Kids Today! No. 1: The mainstream media are run by graying Baby Boomers. When young, they viewed themselves as extremely open-minded, in addition to being the first generation ever to discover sex. Now their collective attitude toward today's young, the Millennials, may be described with the technical term "harrumph."

Gregg Easterbrook was born in March of 1953, which makes him even older than I. And which should have given him some perspective on the Sexual Revolution, including the fact that it was led by people from the previous generation.

Of course the true timetable, as with civil rights, gender equality, gay rights, and opposition to US military adventurism, doesn't work for today's social moralist (or social immoralist, apparently). Beatnik punching just never caught on.

Over the summer, TMQ noted the MSM have proclaimed a shocking, sweeping trend of "hooking up" that supposedly means out-of-control carnality among those of college age

Okey-dokey. I guess I spent my summer somewhere else. Not to mention wasting the time it took to scan the first eight pages of Google results for "hooking up" in the Dreaded Em Ess Em. (Nice tell, by the way.) Hanna Rosin wrote a piece the Atlantic carried; among the many things she and its publisher, Jay Lauf, are not, is "Boomers".  That was about it; everything else was on YouTube, unless Tom Wolfe got a mention somewhere. I sit through NBC News most weeknights, unless I can get the remote away from my Poor Wife, and if Brian was going on about this I must've missed it.

-- though studies show that sexual activity is in shallow decline among the young.

Though, as always, we might note that "studies of activities among the young" basically tell us what sort of shit lies The Young pull on the people who study them.

Assuming hooking up even exists as some new social phenomenon -- it sounds an awful lot like meeting at parties -- graying MSM editors view it as empty sex without commitment. And sex in a sleeping bag at Woodstock differed how, exactly?

And who said this, exactly? Maybe next summer you could take notes.

I'm all for exposing hypocrisy. Provided we can, y'know, attach it to a specific hypocrite. The real hypocrisy here is someone in my age group pretending that every Boomer was a "hippie", or that "hippie" and "free love" weren't gag lines and "Woodstock" a soundtrack. Maybe it was different in far-out Buffalo, but in the suburban midwest, if you were born in 1953, your coming of age took place in the metaphorical 50s, not Swinging London. I admit that the smattering of proto-hippiechicks at my high school lightened my own journey, but for most people it was backseats at the Drive-In and a clear distinction between Good girls and Easy. I went to one of the five largest high schools in Indiana, and in 1972 it was a big scandal when one of my fellow seniors got knocked up.

Which means that we haven't exactly proved either the hypocrisy or the underlying Hippiedom. Plenty of car Nazis and religious maniacs in my vicinity. Dunno if any of 'em grew up to control the Dreaded Em Ess Em, Gregg, and nice tell. The odds that people at the top of the MSM trade today were incontinent orgiasts are no better than even. I do know that most of the people I know who were, or are, stereotypically hippielike are still rather joyous sensualists, or seem to be, and have always been aware of the frictional play between parenting and admitting the adventures--and the tidal pulls--of one's youth.

It's the fucking religious bastids who're hypocritical about sex, Gregg.

And as for the Dreaded U No Whut, yeah, it sells adolescent sexual fantasies (much like your column sells juvenile cheerbabe T&A) as well as hypocritical outrage that can't wait to see the accompanying photos. This isn't something new. Neither is its hypocritical manipulation. It's just Jobs Creating at work. Try to be a little understanding.

I Think We Have Time For One More…

Ross Douthat, "Mitt Romney Should Be the Disingenuous New Republican I Talked About In My Book Four Years Ago and Promptly Abandoned". October 2

FOR yesterday's David Brooks, "Let Mitt Romney Be David Brooks", see The One and Only, in case you haven't already.

Going into Wednesday’s debate, there’s one poll number that Mitt Romney should be most worried about. It’s not the tracking polls, or the RealClearPolitics polling average, or any of the usual measurements. It’s the percentage of Americans who believe that his policies will favor the rich over the poor and the middle class.

Okay, Ross, so the "real" title of this thing is "What Mitt Should Tell the 47 Percent", and already you got him worrying about sixty percent. Not that I expect anything Republicans have to say to add up.

This assumption — that the wealthy Republican candidate is inevitably a candidate for the wealthy as well — is a big part of what’s been killing Romney’s campaign. Because of the president’s advantages with minority voters and younger voters, Romney has always needed to perform well with economically-anxious whites — and above all with non-college-educated white voters across the Midwest.

First of all, Ross, the fractured assumption here, if there is one, is the long-standing Republican one that the great swath of White Protestantism from the Alleghenies to the Rockies was, is, and always will be objectively pro-feudalism. And too, um, unsophisticated to ever figure it out. It is neither; we are about to get yet another chance to see if you "smart" Republicans are able to figure that out. My money, again, is on No.

A smarter Republican campaign would have recognized early that this would be Romney’s biggest problem, and showed a more populist side from the beginning. As I’ve argued before, Romney could have embraced the assistance for underwater homeowners sketched out by his own economic adviser, Glenn Hubbard, or the break-up-the-big-banks reform championed by the American Enterprise Institute’s James Pethokoukis, or the family-friendly tax reform promoted by National Review’s Ramesh Ponnuru.

Cripes, how many sides of his face do you think the man has available for talking out of? He was Mitt the Panderer in 2008; that's the tag your people stuck on him. This time he decided to be Mitt the Very Most Conservative You Can Be And Still Not Say Anything. Leave us remember, when this thing is over, that you, Brooks, and, well, the rest of your fucking party advised the man to be wholly malleable and 100% phony in order to win.

Here are some examples of what Romney might say tonight, if reassuring working class voters were actually his most important goal.

(It ain't)

On taxes, for instance, his argument should go something like this:

My goal is lower rates across the board, so that all Americans can keep more of their paycheck every month. But let me make this promise now: Whatever shape tax reform ultimately takes, under my administration, no middle or working class American will pay a penny more in taxes than they do today. Not a penny more. And to prove that I’m serious about protecting working families, tonight I’m calling for a four-year extension of the payroll tax cut, so that Americans don’t have to worry about seeing their tax bills go up an average of $1000 when the cut expires next year. President Obama hasn’t taken a position on this issue, because he doesn’t mind if your taxes go up so long as he gets to spend the money. But if I’m president, I’ll protect your paychecks, and stop this tax increase in its tracks.

Is he gonna promise to cut discretionary spending across the board the 90% or whatever it takes to make these ridiculous "No Taxes. And No Deficit. And No Fences and No Rabbits" pledges actually work?

Yeah, I thought not. S'okay, maybe the President will just stand mute after that "he just wants to spend your money" jab.

tonight I want to speak to Americans who don’t have health insurance, or struggle to pay for it, and make this pledge: Under my administration, you will not be forgotten. I promise to create a tax credit, worth thousands of dollars, to help people who don’t get insurance through their employers. I promise to expand high-risk pools where people with pre-existing conditions could get coverage more cheaply than they do today. When I was governor of Massachusetts, we cut the number of uninsured by more than half.

Oh, Mitt, why did you hide your light under a bushel for so long?

Thousands of dollars in tax credits to the moochers who don't pay any taxes in the first place! Where do we sign?

(Ross, is this, really, the sort of shit they spend all day at AEI dreaming up strictly for use as talking points ?)

The reality is that Medicare is going broke, putting our promise to our parents and grandparents at risk,

Or all of them who're presently under the age of eighteen, anyway, assuming we do absolutely nothing with the healthcare system in this country ("We're number 37!") in the intervening forty-seven years.

and the Obama White House hasn’t done anything about it.

Snubbing, in the process, the Republican Plan.

But if you want the program saved, I promise to do exactly that. Not by cutting benefits for existing seniors, the way this president has done. Not by putting a team of bureaucrats in charge of figuring out who gets treatment and who doesn’t, as he wants to do.

Dear Lord, this man writes for what was once the New York Times.

But first, by asking wealthy Americans – the Warren Buffetts and Bill Gateses and others like them — to put a little more money toward their medical care, so that everyone else’s costs don’t have to rise.

Problem solved!

And second, by getting insurers to bid against one another to drive the cost of Medicare down, so that you can get the same benefits at a lower price.

Southwest, Your No-Frills Surgical Provider! ™

Let me be clear:

Well, so long as you're trying everything...

If my plan doesn’t work, the government will be on the hook, not seniors.

Bail Out General Hospital!

By the way, Mitt, I mean Ross, I do b'lieve the rest of the country has seen exactly who gets stuck with the bill when Republicans put the government "on the hook" for something.

Nobody, I repeat nobody, will be left without coverage. But I believe that it will work – and doing nothing, as the president prefers, is simply not an option.

Y'know, Ross, maybe this would work, except for the possibility of flimflam…

Is there some flimflam in these promises? Of course – but not any more than presidential candidates often offer. Do they clash with some of the statements Romney has already made? Here and there, but not in impossibly dramatic ways.

Leave us remember, Reader, October 2, 2012, the date that Ross Douthat announced he was so desperate to get Mitt Fucking Romney elected that he declared Fuck It, Nothing Means Anything anyway.

How far th' fuck gone do you have to be?

Monday Olio: Let Romney Be Romney!

• So at this point Mitt's gotten free advice from Karl Rove, Peggy Noonan, Newt Gingrich, Haley Barbour, Chris Christie, Sarah Palin, and Harold Stassen, probably, in addition to the millions of bucksworth he purchased on the open market. (And Jennifer Rubin, but that's not advice, it's a colonoscopy.) And leave us note here that all that talent accounts for one (1) actual victory in a national election. And that that one is the one which cemented George W. Bush's reputation with the RNC.

• Anyway, here's mine:  Hire a stand-in. Professor Irwin Corey's still kicking.

• And another, in the form of a general maxim: Whistling past the graveyard's never kept anybody out of one.

• Your man's a dog. And not a friendly, lovable mutt or a scary, throat-removal dog, but one of those prancing purebreds with its own special haircut. This race is over. Sure, sure, it ain't over til it's over, and Michael Dukakis was ahead at this point (ahem), and whatever else you wanna tell yourself, rather than tell yourself that your brand sucks, and is nowhere near as popular as you pretend it is, a conclusion which is based, apparently, on taking Reagan's approval ratings in 1982, comparing them to 1989, and assuming continued growth at that rate ever since.

You can keep telling yourself that Obama's vulnerable, that his domestic record is abysmal, and keep looking for reasons (in the main, Mitt Romney) you're not crushing him, but so long as you keep denying what thirty years of Republican rule actually brought to this country you're going to be caught in that endless spin cycle. He's the guy your own people judged the most electable from that crowd of mixed nuts of yours. And rightly so. Just not electable enough, because this time four years isn't enough time for everyone to forget just who screwed up the most, and who benefited.

• And another thing, maybe you shouldn't'a gone Full Metal Socialism three weeks into the Obama administration, and you'd have something more now than Paul Ryan claiming Librul Media bias, fee chrissakes. The Wake Up Call! It's coming from inside the house!

The Joke Is That "Mitt Romney: Fact Checker" Isn't The Funny Part

Kevin Robillard, "Romney to 'fact-check' Obama in debate". September 27

Karl Rove, "Obama's Biggest Opponent Is the Truth: Voters expect Mitt Romney to blow the whistle in the debates". September 25

NO. As you might've figured out from the above, the real joke is "Because Karl Rove is urging him to".

I mean, I know, I know, it's Politico, but don't any of you aspire to sound kinda like journalists?

Mitt Romney plans to turn himself into a one-man truth squad during the first presidential debate next week, casting President Barack Obama as someone who can’t be trusted to stick to the facts or keep his promises.

Top Republicans are telegraphing Romney’s hard-line strategy for his faceoff with Obama, according to Mike Allen’s Playbook in POLITICO on Thursday. The debate plan comes during a presidential cycle where media fact-checkers have held a high profile and where an earlier effort by Democrats to cast GOP vice presidential nominee Paul Ryan as untrustworthy got results.

Okay, just a couple things here: first, Ryan did that to himself, by being a congenital liar, and the designated Republican base-fellator, which now requires blurting stupid shit out in public, instead of just in private. Second, if "fact-checking" was such a big deal, Ryan never would have been Romney's selection, because it's the same shit he's been saying for the duration of the Obama administration. He would have been a national disgrace, not a "nationally recognized budget expert". Finally, are you not allowed to fact-check your own stories as you type? I'm not really sure how anyone could say "Mitt Romney plans to turn himself into a one-man truth squad" and not bust out a line of LOLs immediately after. "Snooki plans to attend med school."

Romney himself was the first to signal the strategy.

“I think he’s going to say a lot of things that aren’t accurate,” Romney said on ABC’s “Good Morning America” earlier this month, adding he would have to choose between correcting Obama and delivering his own message.

“I’d be tempted to go back to that wonderful line by Ronald Reagan, ‘There you go again,’” Romney said.

Oh, please do.

And in another sign of the Republican strategy heading into the debate on Wednesday in Denver, Karl Rove used his Wall Street Journal column Thursday to advise Romney to call out Obama’s misstatements, without actually calling the president a liar.

“While Mr. Romney must point out the president’s misrepresentations, he can’t take on the role of fact-checker-in-chief,” wrote Rove, who runs a constellation of outside groups spending millions on ads attacking Obama and backing Romney. “He should deal comprehensively with several of Mr. Obama’s untruths and, having done so, dismiss the rest as more of the same. By carefully calling into question the president’s veracity, Mr. Romney will have the opportunity to provide context: Mr. Obama doesn’t shoot straight because he can’t defend his record and has no agenda for the future except the status quo, stay the course.”

Leave us note that the best Bush's Brain could do in that department was characterize a couple of Obama ads.

One Obama spot says, "To pay for huge, new tax breaks for millionaires like him, Romney would have to raise taxes on the middle class: $2,000 for a family with children."

That claim has been thoroughly discredited, including by PolitiFact Virginia and editorials in this newspaper. Mr. Romney, unlike the president, is committed to cutting taxes for everyone, including the middle class.

Go ahead, read the Politifact Virginia piece. Somebody involved in all this should. The "debunking" of the ad's claim amounts to "but Romney says he'll lower everyones taxes!" while being forced to admit that a) Romney hasn't actually gotten around to mentioning any specifics of his tax plan other than, y'know, letting Jobs Creators keep all the money, and b) well:

An August study by the nonpartisan Tax Policy Center concluded that, under the broad parameters Romney has set forth, the bottom-line tax bill for middle-class families would rise by about $2,000 in 2015. That’s because the loss of deductions for middle-class families would outweigh the gain of paying a lower tax rate, according to the research.

In contrast, the study concluded that wealthy families would see their tax bills go down because the benefit of paying lower rates would outweigh their loss of deductions.

Romney has disputed the findings, saying the Tax Policy Center made invalid assumptions about how he will fashion his tax plan.

Isn't fact-checking supposed to, oh, check facts? Isn't "disputing findings" more in the way of "disputing"?

Another ad says, "As a corporate raider, [Mr. Romney] shipped jobs to China and Mexico." In response, the Washington Post editorialized, "On just about every level, this ad is misleading, unfair and untrue."

Can't find the editorial right quick (thanks for the link, Karl), but the Fact Checker column that took the ad on relied on the "Mitt wasn't even in town for two or three of those deals, as he was busy saving the Olympics" argument, which is perhaps something less than an open-and-shut case. Particularly since it came out a few minutes ahead of the Washington Post story about Bain's investment in companies that specialized in jobs shipping.

But, again: go ahead. Please.

There is more. An Obama ad aimed at northern Virginia women intones, "Mitt Romney opposes requiring coverage for contraception." In fact, Mr. Romney opposes the president's unprecedented assault on religious liberties—in this case, the federal government forcing religious institutions (like church-sponsored hospitals, schools and charities) to provide insurance coverage for contraception in violation of their fundamental moral values and, incidentally, the First Amendment.

So to recap: the President a) refuses to acknowledge that insurance-paid contraception is actually abortion; b) refuses to admit that for-profit operations which receive federal funds but are owned by a particular cult are, in fact, churches, because 1) Karl Rove and 2) the Constitution clearly say so. And that c) this qualifies as "unprecedented", despite the fact that the identical thing has occurred in American history, and occurs today with some of those same institutions under state law, and has actually been topped, unquestionably, by other restrictions on religious expression (notably the anti-Mormon laws that preceded Utah statehood).

But yes, again, Mitt. Please listen to Karl Rove. The man's a genius.