You’ll Never Believe It

“I don’t read Reason magazine.”

-Mitch “Cut and Paste” Daniels

NO, that’s not Reason’s ad campaign for this fall, though the way things are going they might consider it; it’s former genius Mitch Daniels trying to extricate himself from the plagiarism scandal he started while trying to extricate himself from last week’s book burning scandal.

Evidently Daniels released a statement last week which seems to’ve borrowed copiously from two publications: yet another anti-Zinn obit from 2010 in Reason, and a  press release from Stanford concerning Professor Sam Wineburg critique of Zinn. The Wineburg quote was later excised from Daniels’ statement, after Wineburg complained, saying, “I have criticized Zinn but will defend to my death the right to teach him. Shame on Mitch Daniels,” on the Twitter thing.

Excerpt of Daniels’ first statement defending his criticism of history Howard Zinn, sent to reporters on July 17: 
“No one need take my word that my concerns were well-founded. Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren. 
“Arthur M. Schlesinger said, ‘I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.’ Socialist historian Michael Kazin judged Zinn’s work as ‘bad history, albeit tilted with virtuous intentions’ and said the book was more suited to a ‘conspiracy monger’s website than to a work of scholarship.’ Reviewing the text in The American Scholar, Harvard University professor Oscar Handlin denounced ‘the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history.’ 
“Stanford history education expert Sam Wineburg cautioned that exposing children to a heavily filtered and weighted interpretation such as Zinn’s work is irresponsible when ‘we are talking about how we educate the young, those who do not yet get the interpretive game.’ 
“Many more such condemnations by persons of political viewpoints different from my own are available on request.” 
 

Excerpt of Michael Moynihan’s Reason magazine article 2010: 
“Much of the criticism of Zinn has come from dissenters on the left. Arthur M. Schlesinger Jr. once remarked that ‘I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.’ Last year, the liberal historian Sean Wilentz referred to the ‘balefully influential works of Howard Zinn.’ Reviewing A People’s History in The American Scholar, Harvard University professor Oscar Handlin denounced ‘the deranged quality of his fairy tale, in which the incidents are made to fit the legend, no matter how intractable the evidence of American history.’ Socialist historian Michael Kazin judged Zinn’s most famous work ‘bad history, albeit gilded with virtuous intentions.’” 


Excerpt from 2012 Stanford University press release quoting Stanford education professor Sam Wineburg on Howard Zinn’s work: 
“Wineburg writes that a heavily filtered and weighted interpretation becomes dangerous when ‘we are talking about how we educate the young, those who do not yet get the interpretive game.’”  


Excerpt of Daniels’ statement, still dated July 17, as it appeared on Purdue University’s website Tuesday: 
“No one need take my word that my concerns were well founded. Respected scholars and communicators of all ideologies agree that the work of Howard Zinn was irredeemably slanted and unsuited for teaching to schoolchildren. Arthur M. Schlesinger said, “I don’t take him very seriously. He’s a polemicist, not a historian.” Many more such condemnations by persons of political viewpoints different from my own are available on request.”

Anyone who’s ever graded a paper recognizes the technique. It’s not even a question. It’s sloppy, at best, and it wasn’t at the service of convincing the paper-grader you’d read the assignment; this was the President of a major uni…, I mean, Purdue, trying to defend an idea he shouldn’t have had in the first place. (Not to mention one which, as we noted last week, he rather obviously didn’t have before he read Sneering Haberdashery Republican Roger Kimball’s Zinn obit in the National Review. That led Daniels to tell his henchmen that there were “errors on every page” of A People’s History.)

So we had Mitch Daniels trying to use the power of the state to censor teachers, and professors, over a book he’d only heard described, and which wasn’t in use anywhere among Indiana public schools, insisting, first, that he was only speaking of secondary schools even though the entire conversation revolved around changing standards for an education degree, then taking examples from two pieces in order to prove that Zinn had been criticized. By Even the Liberal Arthur Schlessinger, Jr. Of course he had to swipe examples. How was he supposed to sound like he knew what he was talking about?

By the way, this is the eight-year history of the state of Indiana under Daniels’ governorship. Except for the part where he gets called out for what he said and did.

The Sorry State Of American Public Relations

OKAY, fine, so maybe you don't have much to work with with Paula Deen (you might still have taken care of this before it came to people pounding her line of cookware into worthless hunks of metal in the aisles of Target). But Mike Allen's office?

No one thought to blame this on Clinton staffers?

It's Okay America, The Guy Who Killed Cameron Todd Willingham And Then Tried To Impede The Investigation Is On The Case

VIA Pierce we hear that  the investigation of the West Fertilizer explosion has definitely concluded that something or other sparked the explosion. Quite possibly some sort of ignition:

WEST (May 16, 2013)—The State Fire Marshal's Office and Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives have identified three possible causes of the fire that caused the deadly April 17 fertilizer plant explosion in West, two accidental and the third intentional, officials said during a late afternoon news conference Thursday.

Investigators determined that the fire that led to the powerful explosion was caused either by a battery-powered golf cart that was kept in the fertilizer and seed building in which the fire started, the building’s 120-volt electrical system or by an intentional criminal act, said Robert Champion, special agent in charge of the Dallas office of the ATF.

Good news if you had "Either an Accident, or Arson" in the office pool.

Guess it might be good news, or as good as you're going to get, if you're trying to prosecute that West paramedic for making pipe bombs, also.

The total amount of ammonium nitrate on the site was about 150 tons, less than 270 tons that federal records indicated was stored at the plant.

Ah, so only 750 times the amount that was supposed to trigger the federal reporting they didn't do. Not the 1350 times reported earlier by the lying Media. What was all the fuss about?

By the way, the owner of West Fertilizer, Donald Adair, didn't get any mention at all. Damed Media; always ignoring the Jobs Creators.

Look, Don't Do Me Any Favors. Fucking Shut Up As A Favor To Yourself.

IT'S cold and snowy, and I've been forced to ride the indoor bike for too long now. And the only way to get in anything like enough milage is to find some teevee entertainment while I ride. Music, well, that'll cover it once in a while, but you tend to pick up rhythms, so you try to program all up-tempo stuff, and man will that make you sick of your music collection before spring.

So I keep looking for things that might be moderately interesting, and last month The History Channel, with whom I am barely on speaking terms, ran a five-or-eight-part series on the American Presidency. I recorded all of 'em, except the last; I wanted to see whether it was safe to risk their Reagan coverage.

That answer was No, as The Great Communicator made something like sixteen appearances in the Washington-to-Monroe segment. And, look, you don't have to share my opinion of Reagan, but if, in 2013, you're still talking as though the guy led a Revolution that Saved the American Economy or somethin', you are either delusional or you think I am.

The thing was, at best, a sort of community-college survey of American history, heavy on the Amusing Anecdote. It didn't exactly risk breaking any plow blades on new ground. But the opening episode did have Jack Rakove, which beats the hell out of the usual den of Kagans, and Jonathan Alter in place of V.D. Hanson is like Arthur Schlesinger instead of Hal Lindsey. I kept at it, and the Civil War episode did not contain the standard History/Military Channel panel discussion of whether Sherman was a war criminal or just a mass murderer. So I kept going.

Then it got to be 1920. And who turned up as an expert?

Amity Schlaes, the noted historian and best-selling economist.

"What th' hell are you shouting at?" my Poor Wife asked from upstairs.

Here, as nothing like a public service, is as complete a record of Ms Schlaes' contributions as I could stand transcribing. If anyone is offended by my [sic]ing her I want to offer an apology, as well as a reminder that her degree is in English.

(And, listen: if you haven't experienced her Aging Debutante With Tourette's speaking style, I apologize for the ALL CAPS routine. I started out using italics, but realized that you just don't get the flavor that way.)

They [the Harding administration] put people out of work. Their unemployment rose terribly, [sic] in fact it was 20% in some cities in some weeks. [sic]. It was a BAD recession, the recession of the early 20s.

He [Harding] besmirched the Presidency through his association with corrupt people. But he was not an evil man himself. He was just weak.

Wilson had very high taxes [sic] in World War I. Harding started to bring them down, then Coolidge came along and said, "That's not enough. It must be much lower."

Before the radio, how did you give a speech before the mic [sic]? You BELLOWED. And Coolidge was not a bellower. And there was this great, sudden surprise [sic] which is the radio was coming in [sic] and the voice that was poor for the lecture hall was ideal for radio.

Coolidge sometimes didn't put [sic] a CHAIR in his office because then his guests would sit down [sic] and have more time to ask a favor. It was CRUEL, it was RUDE, but he was saving the American people money.

The Presidency is supposed to be about policy but of course it's really about TEMPERAMENT, isn't it? It's about who you are and how you react under pressure. Coolidge reacted by stopping, halting, preventing. Coolidge was the Great REFRAINER.

When he was President his son Calvin died very suddenly from A BLISTER from playing tennis. Calvin didn't show his mother his blister early enough, and it went SEPTIC. He [sic] said of Calvin his son that "When he died the glory of the Presidency went with him."

Roosevelt * believed in action for the sake of action. Even if it's WRONG! it's OKAY. [sic]. The humorist Will Rogers [oh, that Will Rogers!] said, "Y'know, if he'd burned down the Capitol or the White House we would have said "Good! At least he got a fire started, anyhow." That's how cold and bad it felt [BA in English, magna cum laude, Yale, 1982] in 1932.

.

Roosevelt had that [the end of Prohibition] cheered as a leader [sic] and that was important to the voter [sic], especially in the Depression [sic].

There was abiding unemployment, double-digit unemployment, most of the 1930s. Instead of a recovery there was a Depression within the Depression. **

Roosevelt was good at war [sic]. He was a great sailor [sic]. He knew every crack and crevice [sic] of the East Coast, and could sail it personally not matter what SIZE the craft. And he was turning away from economics to foreign policy, which he was a master of.

FAR MORE was spent in the war than was spent on the New Deal projects of the 1930s (oh, those New Deal projects). You see the government becoming more [sic] than 30% of the economy, which was STUNNING.

QUIZ next Wednesday, class. NONE of this will be on it.
______________

* She unvaryingly pronounces it Roe-za-velt. Which is a mistake a lot of us make, at least sometimes, but a lot of us didn't write respected, best-selling tomes about the man.

** No. In case you're blissfully unaware of Ms Schlaes claim to economic literacy, here it is for you. She managed to take some fourth-generation class resentment about the New Deal and turn it into a best-seller for the already persuaded. And the whole fucking thing hinges on the Recession (not Depression) of 1937, which is frequently, if not universally, thought to have occurred because the administration tightened the money supply prematurely, and reduced stimulus spending. Not exactly a ringing endorsement of Professor Schlaes' position, but enough, apparently, to get her a sinecure with the George W. Bush Institute. †

† No, really.  There's a George W. Bush Institute.

Here's Your Enormous Campaign War Chest, What's Your Hurry?

DEAR me, now Senatorial Gangster of Six Saxby Chambliss is leaving Congress because we just can't be bipartisan, like the old days.

The good news is that, so long as Tom Coburn's staying, the average ACU rating for Bipartisan Republicans will remain above 97%.

The bad news is that, with so many disgruntled bipartisans retiring, we'll no longer be able to give each one a piece of the True Cross as a parting gift.

Buck Up. You're The Party Of Tradition. So Wait Two Months And Then Act Like Nothing Happened, The Way You Always Do.

George Eff Will, "A reformed Republican party". November 9

Jennifer Rubin, "What went wrong? Lots." November 9

Kathleen Parker, "The party that doomed its nominee". November 9

LEAVE us dispense with "Pulitzer" Parker first:  the idea that Poor Mitt was driven too far right by the crazies in the primaries is, by now, an old man with a long beard. Not ten or eleven months old; four years and eleven months old. After 2007's Most Blatant Pandering Operation Ever Seen in American Politics almost got him the prize in spite of himself, and 2010's midterms, which proved once and for all time that the country is one big seething Teabag, was there really some expectation that Mitt Romney was going to be anything else this time? If moving toward the Even Less Hinged end of the Republican spectrum was such an awful idea, then Mitt Romney was twice an awful candidate. Similarly, if pointing out something this trite, at this late a date, constitutes Republican punditasting, then your party is even awfuller. I'll be happy to agree that the Republican primaries may've cost Mitt Romney the election. Except it was the 1980 primaries that did it.

Rubin, we need not mention, is eminently disposable, sorry that the Brilliant CEO's people let him down, and eager that we all know that the Obama campaign ran "really nasty ads in Spanish" which were apparently too shocking to translate and too numerous to need citation. Plus, there was a hurricane which lasted eight or nine days, and threw the challenger off so much more than the incumbent, who might've lost instantly had he been one-quarter as incompetent as the last Republican president. Whatever his name was.

[And, by the way, how many Republicans now complaining that Obama "unfairly looked good" after Sandy complained when George W. Bush finally crawled out from under his desk on 9/15, and posed with a bullhorn and a prop fireman? Answer: zero.]

Rubin is, or was, a Romney campaign stovepipe, merely, though she has some helpful advice for Paul Ryan there at the end, and, no, it's not "find another line of work". But George Eff Will, of course, is our leading right-wing intellectual.

The election’s outcome was foreshadowed by Mitt Romney struggling as long as he did to surmount a notably weak field of Republican rivals.

[Full non-disclosure: including one advised by your wife]

You say "notably weak", I say "typical".  That field didn't get there by happenstance. It wasn't an historical aberration. That was the Republican party on display in the primaries, the one you've cultivated since 1980, if not 1964.

He struggled because he wasn't much stronger than the rest of that crowd, because he wasn't liked or trusted by the rank-and-file, and because, whether you like it or not, there are serious reasons why normal people do not care for Mitt Romney.

His salient deficiency was not of character but of chemistry, that indefinable something suggested by the term empathy.

Bosh. Empathy doesn't require personal chemistry. It actually requires character. Something which is not measured in net worth. Usually the opposite.

And fer cryin' out loud, Mitt Romney made so many 180º turns between 2007 and 2012 we now say that Jim Rockford "pulled a Romney", instead of vice-versa.

Many voters who thought he lacked this did not trust him to employ on their behalf what he does not lack, economic understanding.

Somebody call me when the Republican party figures out that working people not trusting capitalists to operate in other people's interest is not a paradox.

On Feb. 11, 2011, the person who should have been the Republican nominee

Sure, the first step in reformulating a defeated political party is to demonstrate your separation from reality.

laconically warned conservatives about a prerequisite for persuading people to make painful adjustments to a rickety entitlement state. Said Indiana’s Gov. Mitch Daniels: “A more affirmative, ‘better angels’ approach to voters is really less an aesthetic than a practical one. With apologies for the banality, I submit that, as we ask Americans to join us on such a boldly different course, it would help if they liked us, just a bit.”

I've had plenty to say here over the years about the PR bullshit, and the voodoo, behind Mitch Daniels' Indiana Miracle. You can choose to still believe in it--but act fast, it's crumbling as we speak--but no one can possibly imagine he could pull those tricks at the national level. Daniels didn't have to close any military bases or mothball six carriers. He could--with a fully compliant legislature--cut Indiana departments by whatever percentage he chose (and get away with it, in the short term, by laying off that debt on local governments). Had he stood on the national stage (I mean, had he stood on a box on the national stage) he'd have done so with the same hocus-pocus and lack of specificity that Romney tried to get away with. I'm not convinced he'd have beaten Romney, for that matter, let alone been a better nominee in the general.

But forget that; this call for "being liked" is just an attempt at conjuring Zombie Ronald Reagan as the solution to your problems. Mitt made clear what your problem with most Americans is--you don't like 'em. You don't think they're smart enough to understand this. Likeability is not merely a question of your score on a personality inventory.

And (the party needs a nominee) who tilts toward the libertarian side of the Republican Party’s fusion of social and laissez-faire conservatism.

Good luck with that one. All you need is a Republican nominee who overtly disagrees with the majority of your electorate? George, maybe what you need is a different electorate.

Most voters already favor less punitive immigration policies than the ones angrily advocated by clenched-fist Republicans...

Y'know, the unfortunate thing there is that this isn't just a cockeyed policy favored by hotheaded Republican activists. It's the Republican national platform, and it's inextricably joined to any number of racial and class-warfare stances which are the main attraction of your party for a big chunk of those voters.

By the way, wasn't this what the Teabaggers were supposed to be all about?  No more culture war, just metaphysically proven economic policies?

The speed with which civil unions and same-sex marriage have become debatable topics and even mainstream policies is astonishing. As is conservatives’ failure to recognize this: They need not endorse such policies, but neither need they despise those, such as young people, who favor them.

So hate the sin but love the sinner? Yeah, why don't you try that?

Once again, you're not talking about some accidentally unpopular policy choice; you're talking about a cherished tenet of people who believe with Divine intensity that they are right, no matter what. They're an important Republican constituency, and you're not going back to the days of St. Ronnie when you could just take them for granted. Tell us how you do this. Tell us which Republican stands up and tells the religious right to stuff it.

And it is strange for conservatives to turn a stony face toward any reconsideration of drug policies, particularly concerning marijuana, which confirm conservatism’s warnings about government persistence in the teeth of evidence.

Really? I must've hallucinated Nancy Reagan. And hippie punching.

Listen, neither party has been reasonable about drug decriminalization. And both have been wholly wrong, and utterly misguided. Neither party is going to collect any chips on marijuana.

With much work — the most painful sort: thinking — to be done, conservatives should squander no energy on recriminations.

The Republican party will be doing plenty of thinking; problem is that what it needs to do plenty of is re-thinking. Which ain't gonna happen. Money talks.

And by the way, what're all the complaints about the weak primary field and the damage culture warriors do the party if not recriminations?

Liberals have an inherent but not insuperable advantage: As enthusiasts of government, to which many of them are related as employees or clients,

Oh, snap!

they are more motivated for political activity than are conservatives, who prefer private spaces. Never mind. Conservatives have a commensurate advantage: Americans still find congenial conservatism’s vocabulary of skepticism about statism. And events — ongoing economic anemia; the regulatory state’s metabolic urge to bully — will deepen this vocabulary’s resonance.

Problem with that is that every so often you get the opportunity to expand the vocabulary, and instead you expand the state. That part of it you approve of.

As the stakes of politics increase with government’s size, so does voter engagement. And 2012 redundantly proved what 2010 demonstrated. The 2010 elections, the first after the Supreme Court’s excellent Citizens United decision liberalized the rules about funding political advocacy, were especially competitive. Social science confirms what common sense suggests: More spending on political advocacy means more voter information and interest. The approximately $2 billion spent in support of this year’s presidential candidates — only about two-thirds as much as Procter & Gamble spent on U.S. advertising last year — surely contributed to the high turnout in targeted states.

Y'know, George, I love that Proctor & Gamble routine nearly as much as you do, but unlike you I sat through in twice now in Indiana, and lemme just tell ya, if this is the sort of thing that increases interest in voter information you can fucking have it. It's pure shit-slinging and simple-minded sloganeering with no fear of analysis or consequence. On both sides. It enriches local media, and so makes it even less interested in free, fair, and open discussion. Which is the sort of thing I thought principled conservatism was in favor of.

Media and other “nonpartisan” — please, no chortling —

Oh, snap!

dismay about “too much money in politics” waned as seven of the 10 highest-spending political entities supported Democrats and outspent the three supporting Republicans, according to the Wall Street Journal.

Citation? Who complained about "too much money in politics" then changed his tune because the Democrats were the ones being bought off? According to the Wall St. Journal, I mean.

The advocacy infrastructure being developed by both sides in the post-Citizens United world will, over time, favor the most plausible side, which conservatives know is theirs.

So, why were you soul-searching, again?

Another Titanic Idea

SOMEHOW Roy manages to do more work while taking two weeks off for his honeymoon than I can manage in full repose. But the suggestion of a Creators' Day, to counterbalance Parasites' Day just past, has lifted my topor just a bit. I mean, when you think about it, it's absolutely true.  Where would we be without Jobs Creators? We'd all be serfs.

So, c'mon Thalidomide babies. Raise your hands for Grünenthal.

You citizens of Bophal, stand up for Union Carbide.

Kids! Yell and scream for Dow Chemical!

Americans of African descent, don't turn your backs on your economic masters.

Don't be a shut-in, Triangle Shirwaist workers! Come on down and join the parade!

Light a candle, Ford Pinto owners!

In fact, everybody. From Love Canal

to the Gulf of Mexico.

From Prince William Sound

to Centralia, PA.

Hell, let's teach the world to sing. From Portsall Rocks

to Minimata

Let's raise a glass of wine and propylene glycol to our betters, to the people who don't mind if we draw oxygen provided it's not too inconvenient and they don't have to watch. Let us sit down to the traditional meal of Bon Vivant ™ Vichyssoise, Pink Slime burgers, Wright County™ Egg Salad, and Thousand Year Old Twinkies. And give thanks that fully one of those items is a joke.

The Fuck You Society

SHORTER Elizabeth MacDonald: Of course the Fed finds the median US household net worth has plummeted. The economy sucks! This proves that the government should not support the economy. Besides, the data is so 18 months ago.

And yet the Fox Branch of Government, along with its subsidiaries in Congress and elsewhere, insist that this November's election should be about the economy.

Because we desperately need a government that realizes it can't do anything. Or, put another way, after thirty years through the Looking Glass, the Republican party has discovered that its economic wing is more metaphysically zonked than its religious nuts.

Last Sunday, Absentee Governor and Retired Lawn Ornament Mitch Daniels went on FOXNews to call for an end to public-sector unions. Sorta. Daniels is from the wing of the party which doesn't like to say that sort of thing without the required hemming and hawing necessary to prevent it from being held accountable for the crazy shit it's going to do anyway.

It should be noted here that 1) Daniels claims to be a Randian, of the Christian division; 2) Daniels "took a year" to decide whether he supported Indiana's Right to Work bill, or whether the people who were paying him to "run" for "President" were against it; and 3) to my knowledge, the term "public sector unions", as opposed to the unionized state employees he screwed back in 2005, has never crossed the man's lyin' lips, not while he was within the state of Indiana and eligible for reelection. Not in public, anyway. Because public sector unions comprises, among others, police and fire unions. Because Hoosiers may not have much use for teachers, or road crews, but they sure want cops around to keep the coloreds from burning their houses down.

Is this really what this election should come down to? Is it really someone's definition of "economy"? Eliminate public unions, and our wealthy job creators will be free to create jobs, namely, security guards and private bucket brigades.

Was the 2012 election really decided when Big Donors chose up sides in 2010?

Is this really the United States of America in the 21st century? Don't tell me.

Do we really have to relive the excesses of the fucking Gilded Age just because rich people won the 1980 Presidential election?

This is the program which has failed, publicly and demonstrably, time and again, since. Incontinent tax cutting and irresponsible regulation are precisely what got us here. And they are promoted by the likes of Mitch Daniels, public liars, political cowards, and "principled" men who won't actually do anything except accompanied by a new moon, and the sort of massive PR campaign which convinces Americans to eat pig anus stuffed with bacon and cheese.

If it's so wise then let's go all in. Let's begin by eliminating corporate welfare, sweetheart oil and gas leasing, foreign investment credits, securities regulation, the public prop under markets, the insurance game, medical and scientific research, corn subsidies, NASA, interstate highways, and the featherbedding benefits of US military and government employees, whose health and retirement benefits are an order of magnitude beyond what the poor private sector worker is handed. Let's finish turning our schools over to anybody who'll teach for minimum wage, and let's return the ancient right to capture anything that flies over your property to the people. How much have we saved so far? Surely an economy based on big-ticket military gadgets, Starbuck's, and private space travel is just what the Founders envisioned.

And let's see who survives.

Olio: There's A Surprise, Vol. MMMCCCVI Edition

• Mitch "My Five Favorite Authors are Ayn Rand" Daniels' second-biggest gift to untold future generations of Hoosiers is the Rockport Coal Gasification plant deal, in which "we" agree to buy $7 billion in natural gas from Leucadia, and the insider holding company (but I repeat myself) agrees to build a plant the market has no need for. Two things we should about Leucadia. First, its market cap is about $8 billion, and its total assets around $9.3 billion, so we might as well have just bought the whole shebang if it was such a great fucking deal. Of course that's not the way the Free Market works.

The second is that its point man in Indiana is Mark Lubbers, the ultimate Indiana Republican fixer. This takes me back to the days when his boy Mitch Roob was an IBM insider, just before the Daniels administration bought a billion-dollars worth of failure for the Family and Social Services Administration, Mitch Roob, executive director. It's great having an economic genius like Daniels for governor; he can get you so many great deals just from knowing the right people.

Anyway, golly, we voted, or "voted", Leucadia a bunch of tax breaks, back when the Indiana General Assembly was doing all it could to make Mitch Daniels a viable Presidential candidate, because assuming all the business risk for the venture didn't quite make it profitable enough.

And now, four years later the thing's still sitting on the drawing board, cost overruns have nearly doubled the price of the plant (a Daniels specialty; he practiced on the Iraq War, and jumped in on the construction of the new Football Barn just in time to lose the emergency operating fund under the cushions), and the price of natural gas--the locus of the "$4 billion in savings" future Hoosiers would receive, minus, probably, a few incidental fees owed to the resellers--has continued to plummet. Who knew? asks the man who, when his last big multi-generation scheme, the peddling of the Indiana Toll Road, didn't earn the interest he'd already spent because the bond markets tanked, asked "Who knew?"

When the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™, which now has no further use for Daniels, and has spent the last two sessions pre-ingratiating itself with Choirboy Mike Pence, balked on continuing to help fund the boondoggle it helped create three years ago, Daniels pretty much announced he'd continue the tax breaks anyway, by the Indiana equivalent of a Bush signing statement.

It's actually gonna work out fine, though, as Lubbers points out:

Lubbers said the gas industry is about to undergo a huge consolidation, with 10 large companies dominating the market. That will end the long slide in natural gas prices, as big players get more pricing power.

"That will bring enormous stability to the price for natural gas," Lubbers said. "When that happens, this project and this contract will be great for Indiana consumers."

The Free Market. Solving Problems Rational People Don't Even Have. ™

• Speaking of the General Assembly, now Indiana's most exclusive psych ward for sufferers of religious mania, there was a big flap during the "short" session this year over a state specialty license plate going to the Indiana Youth Group, a support group for gay and lesbian teenagers. Our wise counsellors tried to yank the permission, tried to end the incontinent granting of specialty plates which had been created by, I've got it here somewhere…oh, the Indiana General Assembly, then saw those efforts fail. The short session--we used to have a biennial Legislature, just in case anyone tries to tell you that things are better nowadays--is generally not the time for Maximum Insanity, but, y'know, the End Times are upon us. So when this one failed the spokesmen for the One True Religion weren't satisfied to Wait Til Next Year, since they may've been Raptured by then; they pulled strings at the BMV, which discovered that the Indiana Youth Group had shockingly offered lower-numbered plates to donors, a clear breech of the public decorum engaged in only by Nazis, and every other organization with specialty plates.

So, now, the group's plate has been yanked, along with that of 4-H and the Greenways Foundation, a couple of other violators who got caught in the desire to make this seem fair.

The effort also exposed the criminal intents of now-former BMV spokesman Graig Lubsen, who maliciously told a reporter last week that the cancellation of the group's contract came after someone from the Indiana Senate contacted the BMV about it. Because, of course, there's no way that sort of thing goes on.

•

Don't the idiot progeny of Idiot Senator James Imhofe have an obligation to die of heat stroke now or something?

• I ♥ Charles Pierce, who, while I've been out enjoying the impending climatic doom of human civilization--on thirty-year-old bicycles--does something I wish I'd done: object to the pre-defense tone of the coverage of Robert Bales in the land of My Lai. Meanwhile, loc. cit., Scott Raab remembers the shameless railroading of John Demjanjuk in the land of Operation Paperclip.

Sins of the Fathers. I'm too young to know, really know, how much of the Red Scare was due to genuine fear. Obviously a lot was ginned-up political gamesmanship, the most successful American political con-game of the century. But I can say this: the publication of the evidence of the Son My massacres--not the publication of the Pentagon Papers, which required reading--was the high point of public honesty about the war, or anything else, probably; by the time Richard Nixon was elected a half-year later the blame had been reassigned to the dirty hippies of Chicago. Two years later, and one day after Calley's life sentence for being the American military's worst mass murderer, Nixon commuted Calley's sentence to three years in his room.

After a moment of shock when Life published the pictures,

the public exploded in outrage that we were criticizing an American soldier. A war which had been politicized for five years, a conflict which had been lied about for more than a decade, and one as redolent of racism as the Birmingham Transit Company had reached the pinnacle of facile cold-bloodedness, of the sort of thing we accused our enemies of, the sort of thing we'd fought the Nazis for.

Happy Talk News was not far behind.

•Speaking of which, it's been interesting, by which I mean "about as nauseating as usual", to watch local coverage of the Peyton Manning saga. Manning single-handedly took the franchise from 1-15 to one of the most valuable sports franchises on the globe. If you think "single-handedly" is an exaggeration, take a look at what they did last year without him.

There's a fucking Children's Hospital here named for him, Mandrake.

Then he senselessly gets older, and gets injured, requiring a slow rehab. And, meanwhile, giving the Colts the opportunity to draft Andrew Luck, the Next Payton Manning. So Jim "Lucky in Owning Shit, Unlucky in I.Q." Irsay cuts him loose.

This was partly due to the structure of Manning's deal, and largely due to the cap rules of the NFL, the folks for whom we built a billion-dollar barn which was a half-billion dollar barn before Mitch Daniels rescued the project. Manning's deal crushed the Colts' cap room, not this year but the next. Though, again, that happened because of the deal Irsay negotiated in the first place.

Anyway, the man cuts the Jesus of Football, a guy without whom Irsay is making his own hillbilly heroin and sewing his own atrocious suits, and the universal local media response is "Well, it's a business."

Fuck you. So's shooting Afghanis. I'm not saying the Colts should've kept Manning. I'm not saying Irsay was just trying to get out from under a $28 million payout he owed Manning this year. But if it's "just business" to cut a guy who meant everything to you for more than a decade, then what fucking meaning is there in anything, other than profit? The value of everything is now determined by who has the most expansive free bar in the media tent. Rick Santorum, take note.

Who Knew?

ITEM: Fukushima nuclear disaster raised to highest level on international scale. It turns out the highest point of the international scale is Level 7, known, variously, as "Major Accident", "Chernobyl", or "Uh-oh". At the same time, officials insisted that this in no way implies that the Fukushima accident is as serious as Chernobyl, thereby assuring the world community that Japanese officials are just like anyone else's.

I'll admit that when I read that I momentarily wondered why the scale only goes up to 7, before it dawned on me that you really don't need anything further. Also, a seven-point scale limits the number of times nuclear power shills have to rewrite their "We must not let hysterical overreaction to this accident interfere with the reasonable use of nuclear power, vigorously regulated" pieces. To seven. Or eight, since for some reason there's a Level 0.

I do wonder about the scale, and since it turns out the numbers can be assigned by just about anyone--plant operator, national panel, celebrity judges--I'm working on my own:

Level 0: Nope. We haven't heard anything unusual.

Level 1: Just a few dings. These babies are built to the highest safety standards and governed by strict regulations.

Level 2: The Level 1 Alert is now inoperative.

Level 3: The Level 2 Alert is now inoperative.

Level 4: Listen, the middle of a crisis is no time to be pointing fingers.

Level 5: With any luck this'll hold for a week.

And so on.

ITEM: Libyan stalemate putting stress on NATO alliance.

I think that's Level 3.

Y'know, somebody needs to explain to me how seeing ten fucking days into the future is too much to ask of the people we entrust with high explosives and blank checks.

Of course, that's not exactly what's happened here; we're just ten days further into things and the required miracle hasn't yet materialized.

ITEM: Budget deal won't cut military spending.

Well, in fairness, that's the 60% of the Federal budget we can afford.

So the Democrats vote against their constituencies, and it's the Republicans who are termed courageous.

We have two major political parties in this country. One of them, in my lifetime, has been led by: 1) an excessively solarized, anti-fluoridationist version of Herbert Hoover; 2) a raging paranoiac; 3) a guy who played football without a helmet; 4) a B-movie actor whose room-temperature IQ wasn't improved by terminal brain bubbles; 5) an effete East Coast Yalie whose impersonation of a Texas bidnessman was so pathetic it made the previous guy look competent; 6) a small-time, small-town Georgia courthouse lizard so slimy he still has to apologize to amphibians he meets; 7) Bob Dole; 8) the son of #5, a man whose own phony Texanism could be explained by the fact that it's the only state where he'd be judged mentally competent to hold a driver's license, in conjunction with possibly the most loathsome human on this side of the planet; 9) John McCain; 10) a brain-dead weekend weather reporter McCain raised to national prominence in one of his periodic fits of Fuck Youism; and 11) John Boehner.

And the other one not only manages to keep losing to them, but keeps telling itself it needs to be more like 'em. American Exceptionalism, indeed.

ITEM: Applebee's gets 15-month-old boy plastered. I'm always fascinated with how "It was a mistake" serves to explain any corporate PR disaster, from nuclear meltdown to serving margaritas to underage toddlers ("employees will be retrained" was one of the announced changes, presumably because someone forgot to salt the rim of the sippy cup). So far as I know, no one's bothered to ask Applebee's why a fully-mixed margarita would be hanging around in a storage container in the first place. Maybe all their drinks are pre-mixed. I don't know. Anybody got David Brooks' personal email?

The infant blowing a point-one-oh, and the subsequent explanation ("Accident") reminded me of last week's announced mix-up at a local medical testing concern, which mistakenly informed eight Hoosiers they'd tested positive for chlamydia ("Okay, but the good news is we first thought it was twenty-three").

I saw this story on two local channels, and both fell all over themselves assuring viewers it was just a mistake. ("Hello, honey? Well, it's a funny thing…When that lab said you gave me an STD it was just a mistake! So you can come home now. They forgot to clean it or something. I sewed all your suits back together.") Both stories interviewed the Vice President of the joint ("Very sensitive equipment. Gave it a good cleaning. Moved it to another room"); one of the two did bother, after that, to talk to a doctor who was a little perturbed that patients might have been told their lousy husbands gave 'em crabs, and who might now be looking for a little legal relief from anyone involved.

And nobody said "Aren't you supposed to've read the manual?"

And this is the sort of deference given to someone who doesn't buy teevee time.

Forget It, Jake. It's Slate.

KEVIN, in comments yesterday:

I don't know, I really don't see much problem with Weigel's piece here. I mean, did you expect him to be super-duper insightful or point out every flaw? If you want that, go to someone who actually *does* that. Weigel simply covers the conservative movement, and fairly well and with a bit of snark. I actually enjoy most of his work and it's nice to look into how the other side works. It could be a hell of a lot worse. He's not exactly Fox News material. I don't ever remember him being dishonest or even remotely evasive. I'm just not sure what the point of this was. That Weigel isn't perfect? I dunno, I usually enjoy your work, but I found this kind of pointless.

First, lemme just mention what every experienced woodsman knows: it takes a little experience, a little time, and a small amount of effort to put a keen edge on an axe. Dulling one, on the other hand, is hard fucking work.

Anyway, I'm from Indiana. My senior Senator--he was also my grandfather's senior Senator; we like our traditions--is a guy who made his bones as "Nixon's Favorite Mayor" (of Indianapolis), where he spearheaded Republican bills, state and local, which extended the city limits out to the county line, expressly for the purpose of diluting the growing African-American vote. (This is still working. I live in the Congressional district which serves the old city; my Representative is not only an African-American, he's a Muslim. The mayor and City-County council, on the other hand, are Republicans.)

Since he's been in the Senate he's voted with the increasingly radical Right (increasing, with Nixon as a starting point!) 80 some percent of the time. Never voted against a Defense appropriation (in other words, he's a Senator). This, of course, makes him a moderate, and a distinguished voice for nuclear disarmament.

Then there's my Governor, of whom you may have heard me speak at. As Bush the Dumber's first OMB Director he inherited a Federal budget which had shown a surplus for several years, and turned it into what we have today. He then came to Indiana, put on a plaid shirt and a seed cap, and was elected Governor. He announced that the state's budget shortfall was a Huge Big-Spendin' Democrat Evil, when, in fact, to the extent it existed (on paper) it was mostly due to the high unemployment ushered in and carefully husbanded by his previous employer. That shortfall has been variously estimated, depending on how heroic he needed to sound in overcoming it, but the general "consensus" is half a billion dollars. Keep that figure in mind. Using techniques he had apparently, and unfortunately, learned after helping destroy the national economy, he single-handedly slashed our way to solvency, such that today, despite the devastating effects of the Robber Baron Recession, Indiana is one of the few states in the nation, and the only one in the upper Midwest, whose budget is in the Black. Assuming, that is, that you ignore the $2 billion it owes the Federal government in loans, interest, and penalties. Combine that with the $1 billion in Stimulus money he reluctantly accepted, and the perpetually disgruntled might note that in six years he's run a deficit of a half-billion per year. He, of course, is known as "a competent fiscal manager".

We can go on, but don't get me started on Mitch Daniels, Tax Cutter, or Mitch Daniels, Champion of Property Tax Relief. My point is simply this: I'd pretty much had my fill of happy-face Republican liars before David Weigel was born, and every day I get to take another bite.

Better Blogs Than This One routinely take on, and demolish, the moronic Right. I can't compete with Roy, or Scott C. and s.z., or the Sadlys, to name three, and why would I? I barely have the stomach to read the excerpts. And besides, I really do feel that the weaselly enablers of everyone from Dick Nixon to the Competent Republican Managers and Beyond are a special class of Evil unto themselves. It doesn't matter to me that, given the power, David Brooks or David Frum would permit gay marriage. What matters to me is that they manage to come up with reasons to apologize for the party that makes banning gay marriage a battle cry. What matters to me is that, given the power, they'd install Zombie Ronald Reagan as Emperor for Life. What matters is that they continue to voice support for Defense Spending that's beyond Insanity, and the insertion of the US military into every region that looks at us crosswise, no matter the cost in other people's lives, and call it Self-Defense; they continue to champion the accelerated accumulation of this nation's vast wealth in the hands of very few, and call it Economic Freedom.

And it would work. And Centrist Democrats, and Ezra Klein, would still get to point to them--though not as much as they point to themselves--and say, See, not all Republicans are like that!

This isn't the beginning of the Reagan "Revolution". It's 2010, or 2011, or something. It's not even the goddam aftermath of the Reagan "Revolution", when you could at least understand someone lying to protect the legacy. Anybody defending this crap today has to poke his head out from under a foot of ash to do so. I don't give a shit if they're snarky, or cutesy, or seem like they'd make nice neighbors. They're blind, and they're fucking willfully blind, and unless it's a congenital defect, they're that way for money.

Y'know, it's easy to be a snarky libertarian. It's not just tennis with the net down, it's no lines on the court, and if your opponent still manages to hit one past you you get to pretend he didn't, or he's just an old hippie, so it doesn't count. The real trick is to be a smart one. I'll let you know if I see any.

In the meantime, how fucking difficult is it to be a Republican while criticizing Sarah Palin? I guess it depends: if you're Mitch Daniels it must be really tough, because he's yet to do so; he did risk his combover long enough to suggest he might delay the culture wars a few months, after which he immediately reiterated his support for the culture wars. If you're David Brooks, or David Frum, or David Weigel, so what? All you've done is enhance your reputation with Centrists, who for some reason are easily impressed with a Republican who says something that doesn't sound like the party line, and you know the Yahoos are still going to vote for your tax cuts. I know that Weigel piece wasn't an in-depth analysis. What it was was the umpteenth fucking time I opened that Slate blog thing of his and found a sorry-assed excuse for why the really execrable element of his own party isn't really as bad as all that. And the simple response is, Yes, yes it fucking is. Forgive me, but I simply do not believe that you can look at that shit with one eye open and find any reason to say, "Y'know, maybe Newt helped himself with that really astute performance if you look at it right". Because the only angle from which it looks that way is the angle you take if you don't want any real questions to be asked about your party affiliation. It's entirely nonsensical. The ability to pretend to supplicate yourself and gain the approval of everybody else who's in on the scam is about 1800 years old now, not something Newt jes' thunk up. No adult can possibly believe that what Newt Gingrich did there was to bravely confront a problem! just as no one could actually believe that Andrew Ferguson and David Brody are busy getting us the real story by pretending to pitch softballs. The average, normal person with no agenda doesn't buy Jimmy Swaggert's tears. He knows that the whole thing's for show, and that it's only for show because the story was found out in the first place. This is as apodictically certain as anything in life. We know these things. The average person knows this. Newt would be convicted 9 times out of 10 on that testimony, and the exception would mean the jury had a delusional die-hard who couldn't be budged. How much more so does a professional journalist understand this? And yet, how often does one play it the other way?

The Dim Switch

Delroy Murdock, "The All-American Light Bulb Dims as Freedom Flickers". July 2

OUR story so far: over the last couple decades the façade of democratic deliberation has been ripped off the World's Third-Worst State Legislature™, revealing, well, revealing the façade underneath, and without anybody noticing. The shining example was Beer Baronage, the "right" of major (and out-of-state) breweries to designate a single Indiana distributor (by law, state-licensed and incorporated in Indiana, though, so far as I know, none is yet leading a crusade for the state to free them from the odious bonds of running an effective monopoly) for a particular region, allowing him to dictate prices for that product within his distributorship. Previously, any beer brought into the state had to be offered to every distributor who wanted it, at published prices. That didn't stop breweries from developing cosy relationships with particular distributors, but it did encourage at least the theoretical Competition which Lowers Prices.

Now, there are two salient features about this, aside from the fact that in Indiana, as in the nation at large, there is so little real choice between Our Two Parties that they can collude in raising the fucking price of beer in exchange for corporate largesse without much fear of voter retribution. First, the process took about a decade from first public calls to examine our "archaic" liquor laws to fait accompli; this was slowed, somewhat, by an unexpected veto from then-Governor Evan Bayh. Second, a big driving force behind this was the Coors Brewing Company, formerly Coors & Mengele, which refused to bring its special proprietary blend of fermented pig feed and mule piss into our fair state until it got exclusive distributorships. Coors insisted it needed this--and I admit, they deserved it for being able to say so with a straight face--because its Pure Mountain Brewed product requires such special handling that only someone with trucks and a proper attitude toward vendor analingus could hope to understand it. This is akin to the ebola virus refusing to cross your state's borders until your legislators adjust their views on vaccination.

This is the same pattern as followed by: the state Lottery; the subsequent expansion of gambling to "river" "boats"; the extension of that to horse racing and to horse-track slots; fireworks; bigger fucking fireworks; and the relaxation of strictures on the sale of liquor into, first, pharmacies, then big-box retailers and grocery stores, including convenience stores, and carry-out sales by state breweries and vintners, and now the proposal to legalize sales on Sunday and permit cold beer sales in groceries, gas stations, car trunks, and parochial schools.

There has not been enough time since the expansion into liquor sales for corporate benevolent associations like Wal*Mart and Kroger to fully show their appreciation for all the hard work our citizen legislators do two months of every year, so the cold beer thing got tabled this past session. And instead of, or in addition to, increasing the available slush levels by one twelvemonth, the retailers have gone on the offensive, trying to enlist John Q. Clueless into their Freedom crusade.

And, look, maybe it sounds here like I'm defending some archaic and rococo, unreasonable legal bondage just for the hell of it. Because I am. But mostly, there's this: I have a big fucking problem with hearing how this is All About Freedom, especially when I'm hearing it from some out-of-state corporate mouthpiece with huge profits at stake. I'm all for Sunday sales, but then I've lived here almost all my drinking life without it ever becoming an issue. Just shut up about the Freedom shit, already. Freedom does not mean the freedom of huge conglomerates to buy legislation increasing their profits enough to cover costs and then some.

Or does it?

Anyway, Ladies and Gentlemen, Delroy Murdock:

As American as the grand slam, the Mustang convertible, and the constitutional republic, Thomas Alva Edison’s incandescent light bulb is among this nation’s most enduring gifts to mankind.

Okay, just for the record: the artificial hoopla over the American-led Age of Invention really needs to be tempered at this point by some small recognition of the multiple quagmires it has led us into, Gulf-wise and elsewhere, and by the fact that nowadays we mostly invent attractive snack-food wrappers, cellphone aps, and excuses. Second, it's always a good idea to sorta look something up: Edison was not just a prolific inventor, but a vengeful reprobate and a borderline (at least) psychopath. Not to mention the fact that his original bulbs still burn; a far more important invention, as American as the Grand Slam breakfast, the King-sized cigarette, and the flexible definition of torture, was the planned obsolescence that made the things so profitable, and incidentally rescued our country's nascent landfill industry.

Today’s federal government, naturally, had to hammer something that has hummed along nicely for 130 years. In one of his most shameful moments, former president George W. Bush foolishly signed the Energy Independence and Security Act of 2007. EISA establishes performance criteria that Edisonian bulbs cannot meet. As the Federal Trade Commission (FTC) explains: “These standards, which begin in 2012, will eliminate low efficiency incandescent light bulbs from the market.”

1) The goddam story's three years old. 2) Could you please just fucking stop arguing like this? Or start making the argument and living by it? The telegraph, and the crank telephone, and the single-bladed razor all work as well as they ever did, too. Meanwhile, cigarettes, asbestos oven mitts, DDT bombs, and leaded gasoline have all developed quirky little hitches in their performance, based in no small measure on their unfettered use and pervasive marketing. Either we do something about this, or we don't.

Few Americans realize that federal busybodies plan to snatch their traditional bulbs. Sylvania’s December 2009 survey of 302 adults found that “awareness of the 2012 100-watt bulb phase-out” is just 18 percent (error margin: +/- 5.7 percent).

'Scuse me, but So fucking what? The Public resides a block down the street from Total Oblivion. It thinks Sadam Hussein planned 9/11, too; I don't recall that giving anyone on your side much pause, though it did give Dick Cheney an opening. Federal busybodies are presently trying to deprive decent Alabamans of their God-given beach tar, and I don't recall anyone saying anything other than "Hurry the fuck up!"

To discover CFLs’ negatives, try setting a romantic mood with a dimmer switch. This is, at best, a hit or miss proposition.

This is not what my father died for on Omaha Beach, or might've if he hadn't had that heart murmur.

Scarier still, just drop one onto your kitchen floor. Its internal mercury is highly toxic. If spilled, it requires something approximating a Superfund cleanup.

Nice fucking try, Chuckles, but maybe you should put it in a mass email and claim it happened to your neighbor's cousin.

Yeah, mercury's toxic--you can add thermometers to that list of 130-year-old gizmos that don't work so hot anymore--but there ain't much of it in a CFL bulb. There's more in a fluorescent tube, which I don't recall any of you guys complaining about before now. You shouldn't break one. You should not be casual about cleaning one up if you do, but "Superfund" is pure bullshit, not that that doesn't mean it matches the rest of your argument well.

CFLs should be discarded at recycling centers. Hundreds of millions of busy Americans, however, will toss these dangerous bulbs in the trash, atop table scraps and junk mail.

Y'know, who is it argues in favor of McDonald's right to scald old ladies, and screams about the unfair burden placed on poor manufacturers by oppressive demands they label their products honestly? That'd be you. In the next paragraph.

As June 25’s Washington Times detailed, 91 pages of brand-new FTC rules force manufacturers to label the front of CFL packages regarding brightness (in lumens) and annual energy cost (in dollars). Packages’ sides or rears must disclose bulbs’ lifespan, color appearance, wattage, voltage, and mercury content. This information may — but need not — appear in English, French, and Spanish.

My God! Forced to read 91 detailed pages in order to produce a merchantable item. Why, those bastids in Washington are almost suggesting someone might be dishonest somewhere without their oversight.

As page 86 of these June 18 draft regulations illustrates, the FTC knows precisely what these labels should say...

Y'know, lemme just say this: I've been replacing incandescent bulbs for at least two years now, as the old ones burned out; I think there's one, seldom used, in the basement still to go. I've yet to replace a CFL bulb, which should tell you something right there. I used to keep a stock of 40s and 60s on hand, bought in bulk; I don't keep any back-up now, because they don't fucking burn out. The original package ratings were wildly misleading; since they changed the requirements you can pretty much pick up a bulb and know what it'll do. So there was a small adjustment to lower lumination levels caused by inaccurate labeling. Problem solved, now, thanks to government busybodies. And yes, there's a small delay before they come on. I talked my family doctor out of some sedatives, though, and managed to live through those dark, terrifying days.

“I think the incandescent light bulb was one of the great contributions to the art of architecture in the 20th century,” says Howard M. Brandston, a legendary lighting designer renowned for relighting the Statute of Liberty before its rededication on July 4, 1986….

“If the federal government insists on banning the incandescent lamp, it significantly will decrease the quality of life in every home in America,”

Okay, Mr. Legendary Lighting Director; before I start running for my life, could you give me a hint about how?

“The CFLs cannot be dimmed properly."

Jesus Christ, again with the dimming! Did Paul Revere install one in the Old North Church or something?

"When you dim one, the spectral power distribution and color quality of the lamp make people look cadaverous. Most people who wear makeup will not need to do so to look like the Bride of Frankenstein.”

Dude, that look is hot right now. But stock up on fucking candles, already.

“Here we have the government entering all of our homes. Our homes are our castles,” says Brandston, a former adjunct professor of architecture at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute and a founder of its Lighting Research Center. “Now they are telling us how to light our homes, and they are putting onerous burdens on us in terms of handling these toxic CFLs. The government should not enter our homes, tell us how to live, endanger our health, and ruin our quality of life.”

I'm just glad no former adjunct professor of Chemistry at Rensselaer Polytech clued him in about fluoridation; the resultant explosion of his head would be a real Superfund cleanup site.

We'll Be Right Back

MORE Sports news (in my defense, it's pretty hard to ignore it when Your City, however dumpish, is Super Bowl Bound, Baby!): Colts To Rest Starters This Sunday. Huge Mistake or Colossal Blunder?

Yesterday I intended to mention that Manning is the only man in NFL history to have quarterbacked his team to a league championship despite being coached by Tony Dungy; today some unexpected dark-humorist at the Racist Beacon highlighted the fact that every team the Father Confessor of Pro Ball leaves makes it to the Super Bowl the following season. I say, forget the homo-bashing; never trust a former athlete who doesn't gain weight.

Second, Steve Politi of the Newark Star-Ledger with that rarest of rarities, the interesting Tweet:

Love this: Tailgating Colts fans, trying to shut up the chanting Jets fans, respond with "Jer-sey Shore! Jer-sey Shore!

It's damn near impossible to ignore this sort of thing, not that I want to. The Hoosiers went undefeated in '75 and '76 when I was at IU, and I remember how difficult it was to forget basketball and get back to concentrating on sex and drugs.

One thing professional fuhball does, better or more efficiently than almost anything else, is connect you with the rest of America, or with that virtual America which requires constant reassurance that its choice of carbonated beverage, counter-persperational stick, or brokerage firm is the one preferred by most other virtual Americans. And makes you sexier. In other words, the real America.

For one thing, it's always amusing to see what expertise multiple millions of dollars will buy you. Cialis™ Brand PDE5 Inhibitor, for example--fine local product, by the way--will direct you, via boilerplate, to its ad in Golf Digest. How much did Lilly pay for that advice, do you imagine, when it had to be staring them in the face at every Board meeting? Was there ever any discussion about Going Viral? But my favorite, for sentimental reasons dating back to Operation Arc Light, are the military recruitment, I mean, military lifestyle adverts, the latest of which--it's either the Army or the Post Office; who really listens?--promises that after all the parades held in your honor when you get back home--which time isn't specified--you'll have your choice of careers: Astronaut, Stock Car Pilot, or Dynamic Corporate Order Taker Who Doesn't Have To Wear Camouflaged Pajamas During The Daytime and 8000 Miles Away From Anyone You'd Need To Camouflage Yourself From, Aside From Your Fellow Soldiers, Occasionally.

How interesting is it that anyone with a truckload of cash can make anything sound reasonable? The military gave up on people actually serving their country by signing up thirty years ago; now the fact that they advertise like pheromone-scented body gels is simply taken for granted. Like, say, that Hero's Welcome.

I know, I know; this is not exactly a revelation. Still, that After the cheering has died down… routine raised my gorge a bit. First you get the wholly artificial "We're not spitting on our returning War Heroes like those hippies did" routine; then it's used to lure cannon fodder because, for one thing, none of the 18-40 year olds so busy patting themselves on the back for their patriotic spirit will stop long enough for a perpetual two-year hitch. If it wasn't for the Networks stopping every so often to pat themselves on the back for tossing to some Guardsman spending Super Bowl Fortnight risking his ass to salvage our domestic political bluster you'd almost forget we were at War. Wouldn't you?

Of Economics And Morality. Ha-ha, Just Kiddin'.

Kelly Riddell, "Fox-Time Warner Cable deal could mean billions for broadcasters". January 4

HERE'S a modest proposal: gimme back the fucking airspace over my own house, and then you fucks can do whatever the fuck you like with your precious Bones and House and all the other juvenilia America would have such a hard time replacing, apparently.

Y'know, the three great non-magical accomplishments of the Reagan administration were 1) bringing the fusty Savings & Loan industry into the 20th century; 2) solving the open revolt of the meat industry over stricter health and labeling laws--which it had met at that point by the simple expedient of thinking up new names for every cut of beef in existence so they weren't covered by the new regs--by cutting the number of food inspectors in half, putting representatives of the Slaughter industry in charge of what was left, and down-shifting the standards for beef grades, so that overnight "Choice" became "Prime", "Good" became "Choice", "Standard" became "Good" (which was renamed "Select"), and "Roadkill" became "Would you like Fries with that?". Reagan's first head of the USDA Food Marketing and Inspection Service was the Vice-President of the National Cattleman's Association. His second was the President. You can look this sort of shit up. The USDA then instituted something called the Streamlined Inspection System for Cattle (SIS-C), which efficiently replaced all those missing inspectors with the slaughterhouse employees themselves, on the grounds that they were already there anyway. If you can do this sort of thing and keep a straight face, or, better yet, one with a genial, more-or-less Out Of It smile on it, they name airports after you.

And 3) it (and the Windsock Court) solved the tricky problem of assuring that the nascent demimonopoly of cable television would remain insanely profitable enough for the likes of Time and Warner Brothers, provided the government looked the other way while they created the requisite chain of interlocking directorates and shell corporations required to assure a quality delivery system and shareholder value. And by removing your rights as Englishmen to capture, cook, and eat anything stupid enough to fly over your property unprotected.

Over the years we've managed to shrink the Minimal Requirement for Keeping the Rubes Happy and Dazed (MR-KRHD), too, but that was more-or-less an organic development. Anyway, "local" cable cartels were generally required to provide customers with feeds from all local broadcasters as part of the basic package.

As cynics may have already guessed, this, too, wound up before the Court (Contemptuous Multinational Greedheads v. Rapacious Local Brigands, 512 US 622 (1992); those of a humorous bent will have already figured out the majority opinion was written by Justice Kennedy, and the black-humored among them that both "free enterprise" and "the public good" were invoked numerous times without anyone cracking up enough to require anything more than a ten-minute recess. The right of local licensed broadcasters to a place on the cable menu was upheld; in the spirit of the Reconstruction Amendments, this right devolved to the broadcasters, not the public they "serve".

Cable companies are not permitted to charge the locals, but the locals can arrange deals for their consent, a sort of tacit admission that the monopolies in question were only meant to soak the general public. This has resulted--let's use a small Midwestern city resembling my own as an example--in periodic cat-spitting as contracts neared their sell-by dates, and often to short black-out periods which the resilient American teevee viewer has so far managed to survive. The last one here was a couple years ago, with Channel 8 news running nightly commentaries, and every-ten-minute refreshers, on the horrible threat posed to the Republic by Brighthouse, or Comcast, or whoever th' fuck it was they were a-feudin' with, after which the whole thing was forgotten and they went back to shilling electronic gizmos and canned the commentary routine altogether.

The salient benefit to John Q. Bedridden--the Ancient and Sacred owner of the airwaves these folks plunder, let's recall--in all this is that Channel 13 has finagled itself a Local Weather Channel, on which it broadcasts postage-stamp-sized reruns of its regular weather edutainment segment from as recently as four hours ago, or the (taxpayer-funded, just for the record) radar image from the airport, surrounded by more ad graphics than the average NASCAR driver.

News Corp. sought as much as $1 a month per Time Warner Cable subscriber for rights to Fox, home of "The Simpsons" and "American Idol," two people with knowledge of the matter said. If other networks seek similar terms, cable operators may have to fork out as much as $5 billion a year -- and would probably pass the cost on to subscribers, said Craig Moffett, an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York.

Wait. "They'd probably pass the cost on"? Does that mean it costs extra to get you to explain how you come to be an analyst at Sanford C. Bernstein in New York?

"The broadcast networks are really struggling to find a viable business model," Moffett said. "They're looking at the cable networks that make money both on advertising and the money that the cable operators pay them and saying, 'We need a dual revenue stream to survive, too.' "

And a pony. And we need the Freedom to direct that pony to stream on you.

Curious, ain't it, how the business model for graft-assisted government-awarded monopolies becomes the revenue model for private enterprise, rather than the old private-enterprise model (there's enough advertising money out there, given your control of our airwaves, for you to eat on and still provide the "service" for free) informing how the cable operators work? (Added local chuckle: the City of Indianapolis, under then-Mayor Dick "The St. Teresa of Avila of Washington, D.C." Lugar, awarded its cable monopoly to Indianapolis Cablevision, now part of the fine Comcast family of utility providers, before annexing the rest of the county in a legal voting-fraud scheme; it then fought Comcast in court for a decade so it could auction off the monopoly for the rest of the county to someone else.)

What's robbing a bank compared to founding a bank? Open season on cable transmissions would put thousands of aspiring young entrepreneurs to work and buttress the nation's Strategic Radio Shack Outlet reserves, while what's the worst that would happen? So You Think You Can Dance heads to YouTube? Rupert Murdock has a bake sale?

The Venn Diagram: The Cruise Missile Of Comedy's Defensive Arsenal.

A. Meat and Bones

1. Sign on Kroger fish counter, Friday, September 25: "Monkfish (Poor Man's Lobster): $10.99/lb."

2. Contemporaneous price of actual live Maine (or Rich Man's) Lobster: $17.99/lb.

2a. As has been pointed out, this yields far less than 1# lobster meat.

2b. As has not been pointed out, live lobster includes the liver, technically tomalley, unlike the monkfish, where it has been stripped and sold by commercial fishermen the way copper tubing from your air conditioner is stripped and sold to junkyards further inland. The live lobster may also contain roe, though in my experience gravid females rarely make it to Corn Belt supermarkets. Properly managed, the cooking liquid--or the shells and membrane, if the lobster is to be split first--become lobster stock. Thus the frugal man, Poor or no, can turn his purchase into two courses, at least, if not two meals.

3. Contemporaneous price of grill-ready ribeye steaks (aka, "the Reason God Invented the Cow"): $7.99/lb.

4. Contemporaneous price of farm-raised salmon: $9.99/lb.

5. Contemporaneous price of farm-raised tilapia: $4.99/lb.

6. I believe we have seen the dilemma of the Poor Man i' the adage.

7. There was, in addition, an intended sense of a corporate game of telephone, some aspects of which we will discuss below, which at no point in the line did any Kroger employee step up to remark upon.

B. Choice of Sides

1. There was, in the back of my mind, but certainly not intended as implicit in the post, the sense of the slack naming conventions, bordering on the criminal, and surpassing what qualifies as criminal should you or I engage in it, permitted the marketers of foodstuffs in the US of A.

1a. Where, for example, you can inject carbon dioxide into a steel vat of the indifferently-fermented pulp of substandard Thompson's Seedless grapes and call the result "Champagne" in as little as 48 hours, including bottling and shipping time.

1b. I'm not sure if laws "governing" trade even assure me the fish in question was what is commonly known as monkfish, or goosefish.

1c. I am, however, reasonably certain that "Poor Man's Lobster" is not a recognized cognomen for the species, except, perhaps, in some local area where it is a common trash fish, i.e., commonly netted but too ugly for commercial trade. Which suggests that either someone hailing from such a region rose to a position of prominence in the Kroger corporate marketing hierarchy and passed the name along innocently, or it was added in an attempt to improve the cachet of a trash fish they're attempting to peddle for eleven bucks a pound, and no one noticed the irony.

1d. My money's on the latter. In fact, the name almost certainly originated with the broker, who knew better.

2. I suggest that the term "Poor Man's Lobster" is, in common parlance, the name of a dish, or a cluster of dishes, designed to ape the flavor and texture of boiled Maine lobster in butter substituting inexpensive fish for expensive crustacean. Since the five seconds I put into Googling this back me up, I consider the matter settled.

3. Continuing in the recipe vein, the term was first brought to my attention thirty-years ago, on an ill-fated fishing trip on Lake Erie my father-in-law forced the rest of us into. The ship's captain's inamorata passed out loose-leaf copies of recipes designed to help you dispose of all the walleye and yellow perch you were sure to be sick of within three days of returning home, and "Poor Man's Lobster" was the one she singled out. I did not, however, get the chance to try it for myself, since by the time I had fully recovered from a heretofore unknown susceptibility to mal de mer, engendered by a couple hours spent on a small boat in the middle of a large lake which is no more than thirty feet deep, meaning that both the boat and I were heaving continually all afternoon, and which I foolishly braved a second time in the name of in-law bonhomie, accompanied by a marginally effective scopolamine patch, all the fish had spoiled.

4. As such we would note the typical inattention to concern over insult to person or intellect by the typical person with something to sell you and a conviction that such trumps all other concerns, which, as so often, borders on religious conviction in this country. It is one thing when some in-group, or collection of working persons, calls something "Poor Man's" this, that, or t'other; it is quite another when that is plucked up and plopped down half a continent away and used to move Product. The fisherman, processor, or charter operator who eats Poor Man's Lobster may, in fact, be wealthy, but is consuming what comes to him as surplus. The Hoosier who is a ninety-mile drive through Waving Fields of Soy from the tip of the nearest Great Lake who orders the dish in a restaurant may understand why it is so named. The supermarket shopper who sees it on the other side of the glass, applied to a species, not a pre-cooked meal, is the potential victim of an intended duping, and ought to be insulted by it, even if the brigand responsible is no closer than the home office in Cincinnati.

5. For that matter, there is no such thing as fresh fish in Indiana, unless you are desperate enough to pull a carp out of the Water Co. Canal, or suicidal enough to pull a dead carp out of the White River, aka "Indianapolis' Open Sewer Until Such Time As Pledging To Collect Justifiable Taxes And Spend The Revenues On Needed Infrastructure Benefitting The Entire Populace Becomes Anything Other Than A Guarantee Of Swift And Massive Electoral Defeat".

6. Rather ironically, a hundred years ago lobster was considered trash, and the only people who ate it were those who found themselves with no other means of disposal.