Justice

I KNOW two things about juries: I don't want my life or my liberty decided by one, and I don't want my sense of justice in the hands of one.

I don't think anyone with a sense of the history of this country imagined that justice was going to come out of that Florida jury. Put another way, Trayvon Martin received the full measure of American justice. Yesterday completed it. George Zimmerman is the model American. George Zimmerman is the fucking walking embodiment of America: we've got the gun, and the guy we don't like the looks of is supposed to jump when we say jump. And then, we it all goes wrong, we change the rules, congratulate ourselves on a job well done, and pretend it never happened.

There was never going to be any justice for Trayvon Martin come out of that courtroom. His chance for justice was killed by some mope who wanted to assume the moral superiority of the small-town bully cop, with none of the restraints. If he didn't die a mean and meaningless death, let that be for the one reason that's left him, and his parents: that what should die with him is the witless song and dance about this country being "over" its racist "past". 

Thursday Olio: 20 Years Ago Is Not Ancient History Edition

• So Monday Indianapolis was under terrorist attack, and the local news hairdos were beside themselves, so much so that it’s still difficult to straighten out what exactly happened from everything else that was reported, blurted, or thought out loud. In the early morning hours a security guard spotted a backpack, minus a back, at the Federal courthouse. (It's officially the Birch Bayh Federal Building and United States Courthouse, so named to remind us that at some point they're gonna start naming shit for Dick Lugar and Mitch Daniels, and it won't stop.) The Bomb and Backpack Squad blew it up. It was said to have contained legal fireworks and illegal marihuana, yet another mark of just how fucked our priorities are. I’m assuming they determined this before blowing it to smithereens, though this raises the question of why exactly you have to detonate legal fireworks in order to prevent them from going off.

Then, that very afternoon, a woman walked into the Federal building, which is distinct from the Birch Bayh Federal Building and United States Courthouse, which you know because this one was named for Sherman Minton and Homer Capehart. It was built in the 1960s because we were tired of having the Circle be the ugliest building in the world.

In case you think I was exaggerating.

The woman placed what was most likely a cardboard tube on the X-ray conveyor belt, though it has alternately been described as a package she placed in the little plastic trays that hold keys and such, and, of course, as a backpack. Security personnel thought the package was suspicious. Which it was, in a sense, since it too seems to’ve housed legal fireworks. The woman was taken into custody. The building was evacuated, including a daycare, and why th’ fuck do we still have daycare centers in Federal buildings? The package was detonated in the street by the Bomb Squad, on what must have capped their most exciting day ever.

This was in late afternoon; by the Five O’Clock News the teleprompter readers were as jumpy as if gas prices had gone up 10%. All of this (and more! and more!) was reported, except for the fireworks part. “Suspicious package” was all they were saying. The woman had not been charged. The fact that she had not been charged, along with the fact that she had evidently of her own free will placed this Suspicious Object or Terror Tote on the X-Ray conveyor, and the fact that the cops had rather summarily detonated the thing in the public streets did not register with any of the hairdos. Somehow no consequential part of a story ever does if it might have an anodyne effect on Pure Fucking We’re Under Attack Panic Reporting.

News that the second object was, yet again, the sort of legal terrorist device the World’s Third-Worst State Legislature™ made more plentiful and more powerful in the wake of 9/11, because Freedom, sorta came out later. By the next day the whole Incident was forgotten, except to the extent that Channel 8 did a close-up examination of just what the Bomb Squad does, and how they make 800 runs a year, which means we need more of ‘em. This was how you knew that somewhere up the chain of command someone is in charge of making sure that no one ever starts thinking seriously about any of this.

The Perp was simply forgotten at this point, evidently still uncharged with carrying the sort of explosive device the state doesn’t want anywhere near our public officials, but doesn’t mind you being forced to listen to every fucking night of the week, 365 days a year. Why it is no one asked her what was in the tube, or why she wanted to bring it into the Federal building, or why she couldn’t have simply explained this to the security personnel and everyone gone on about his or her day was of absolutely no interest. How many of those 800 runs involved grocery sacks left on picnic tables or purses left in airport waiting areas (all of them) was never revealed, even though, y’know, if any of them (2.1918 per day) did actually involve explosive devices it presumably would be on the fucking news.

I’m going to say this once again: the reason Barbara Walters, a real estate hucksterix with a serious speech impediment, was placed in the anchor chair of a major network news program, back when the country actually watched the news, was so they could see just how much they could get away with. And the answer was a resounding Anything.

• I know I’m supposed to concern myself with serious things, for the most part anyway, but 1) the bile is still rising over the Voting Rights Act decision; ask me again next week; and 2) DOMA was a piece of crap, Prop 8 was a procedural decision; I’m thrilled for anyone who now can marry the person of his or her choice, the way God intended. Those people will not be in Indiana, at present, and the Jim Rockford 180º the Indiana Republican party is about to do as a result will be about as much fun as one can have as long as there is an Indiana Republican party running things. (In fact, if you wanna know just what sort of political fix they're running at the Court these days, consider that the Indiana General Assembly, and newly-minted Governor Mike "Deacon" Pence, punted on putting the No Homo Nups amendment in front of voters this year because they needed to wait for the Court to rule. Meaning, of course, that even Indiana Republicans knew how the Court was going to rule.) But this is my point. DOMA, bad as it was, was a goddam skin ulcer caused by what’s really wrong in this country. What the Court did began to correct the sort of shenanigans the Democratic party is complicit in. When we start excising the source of all this I’ll dance in the streets. If you knew me you’d realize that’s no idle threat.

• So, instead: someone first tell me what exactly Paula Deen has to be all weepy about? Loss of contracts and damage to a brand. What th’ hell touched her otherwise? Not the sort of thing casual, mindlessly-accepted racism has done to millions of her fellow human beings in her lifetime. What are the waterworks for? It’s not fair to hold her accountable because she was born in 1947? “In my defense, I was only twenty years old when Martin Luther King was murdered?” It’s only reasonable to give her thirty or forty years to’ve realized racism was wrong?

And I don’t care; the whole thing’s a question for the people who made her a public figure, then profited on it, and those people are worse than backwoods racists: they’re utterly amoral privateers. She’s a pure creation of the Jab It In Your Eye mentality, the same thing that markets .22s to five year olds, or Rick Perry (et. al.) to primary voters. The Food Network was hoist with its own petard. Leave us pray for a world in which being butt ignorant is not a mark of pride, where racism is unthinkable, where debasing regional cuisine is a criminal act, and where the Food Network isn’t presently in meeting trying to figure out how to make a buck out of all the racist commenters it attracted with her firing.

Praeteritio

LOOK, first: would I be upset if the Boston bombings turn out to be the work of one of Roger Ailes' disgruntled minions, or some Sidewalk Second Amendment Expert, or the good Christians of Westboro? I'll be piling on, same as everybody. The major difference between my side and their side is that we didn't have anyone screaming Mooslems Mooslems Mooslems between the two blasts.

Well, that's one difference, anyway. Another is that the Right has to resurrect Bill Ayers to accuse the Left of domestic terrorism, while we need only harken back to the Murrah building. (Take a moment today to remember the nearly 900 victims of that one, including the 168 who never got out. I won't ask you to remember Bob Dole announcing immediately that the bombing had to be the work of "Arabs".  I won't mention which party resisted giving additional investigative powers to the FBI.)

We could (but won't) point out that interest in the Anthrax Attacks plummeted the minute it became obvious to everyone but Judith Miller that the source was domestic. Allah is Great! We could go further, if that was what we were up to, and point out that that's pretty much the direction of American law enforcement since the days when the Pinkertons were conducting it. Or point out that the US has been bombing women and children, on a regular basis and without a declaration of war, for seven decades now.

For that matter, someone in my little Midwestern burg might remember that two people died last year when the house next door exploded, in a plot to turn insurance payments into fucking Ferraris and fucking tokens for fucking slot machines.

I'm not gonna mention that any or all of that went through my head once the initial shock subsided.

I will tell you, though, that I examined all that in myself, and decided that none of it motivated me.

That is, that none of it motivates me to hope that Boston will be the lesson I'd hope it to be. Because I don't hope. It's senseless, stupid, ugly violence. It is, as Pierce says, a political act, and it has political ramifications we can't ignore. And like Zhou Enlai and the French Revolution, I guess someday we'll see. I'm glad for Patton Oswalt if he can find solace in human altruism. Humans are the only animals that will knowingly rush into a bombing site to help total strangers. They're also the only animal that needs to.

So lemme tell ya, for real: anyone who shed a tear for an eight-year-old boy who died waiting to see his Daddy finish a race should be reminded that eight-year-olds die all the time while we fucking dick around about gun violence. They should remember Fallujah, and the Christmas Bombings, and the torture that's been done in their names, right out in the open. Sorta. Not because they have any political axe to grind, but because senseless violence is senseless violence. And excusing any of it is a political act.

Me, I'll be satisfied if there's a closet in Hell somewhere where Chuck Todd gets to say "The President did not use the word 'Terrorism'" over and over, for Eternity, while he watches his paycheck shrink.

Tuesday Olio: I'm Not In The Office At This Time Edition

• Evangelical disk jockey and Attempted Governor of Indiana Mike "Choirboy" Pence closed his office Friday for "out of office staff meetings". Which seems to have caught every professional and semi-pro observer of the Indiana statehouse by surprise. A Pence nuncio later announced that the meetings had long been scheduled, and blamed the confusion on a Post-It Note falling off the door, or something.

The great risk here, perhaps not readily apparent to the non-Hoosier, is that local political reporters might get into the habit of noticing what the governor is doing, and reporting on it, without having his office explain it all to them first, the way it's been done for the past eight years.

• Pence did stick his head out long enough to gripe about his 10% tax cut (which he is not getting, a fact known to anyone who's been awake at any time during the past month except, apparently, Mike Pence). He pointed out that the previous General Assembly had given tax breaks to estates and businesses, and none to "average" Hoosiers. And he said it as though it was an oversight, rather than their intention. Somebody really needs to pull the man aside and explain things. Or give him a road map to Kansas.

• I ♡ Pierce:

It is a capital mistake of analysis to believe that the reckless, self-destructive vandalism of the Republican base is a function of the country's twice having elected the current president. Certainly, there are things about this president that, ahem, sharpened the anger and gave a tight focus for the abandoned wrath. But it did no start with him nor will it end with him, and I think Rothenberg knows it.

Except for the rancid race-baiting and manic xenophobia, nothing has been aimed at this president that wasn't aimed for nine years at Bill Clinton. In place of birtherism, we had Vince Foster and the Mena airport. The insular conservative media within which people today talk about the president's Kenyan roots and his disguised Muslimhood was formed around the hot central core of conspiracy theorizing and preposterous slander that shaped the reaction to the Clinton presidency.

Let's note, first, that you aren't gonna throw the Teabag "wing" out of Mississippi, nor Indiana, goddam it, no matter how much money Karl Rove can still scrape up. But how much longer is anyone going to be able to pretend that this party isn't in the hands of abject lunatics, a condition which has obtained for decades? And not just from the first whiff of Bill Clinton's musk, but from the Presidency of Jimmy Carter. It's beyond laughable to see Karl Rove's doughy pink phiz makin' with the "unelectable conservatives" routine. What fucking party has Karl Rove been a member of his entire, Nixon-minus-the-genius career? What fucking Republican party did Karl Rove belly up to in 1969, at the University of Utah? Now he doesn't like yahoos, misogynists, and overt racists?

• Andrew Hartman:

The liberals of the education reform movement, often more surreptitiously than the overstated former Washington D.C. Chancellor of Schools during Democratic Mayor Adrian Fenty’s term in office Michelle Rhee, have for decades advanced negative assumptions about public school teachers that now power the attacks by Christie, Walker, Kasich and their ilk. This is particularly true of Teach for America (TFA), the prototypical liberal education reform organization, where Rhee first made her mark. The history of TFA reveals the ironies of contemporary education reform. In its mission to deliver justice to underprivileged children, TFA and the liberal education reform movement have advanced an agenda that advances conservative attempts to undercut teacher’s unions. More broadly, TFA has been in the vanguard in forming a neoliberal consensus about the role of public education—and the role of public school teachers—in a deeply unequal society.

TFA goals derive, in theory, from laudable—if misguided—impulses. But each, in practice, has demonstrated to be deeply problematic. TFA, suitably representative of the liberal education reform more generally, underwrites, intentionally or not, the conservative assumptions of the education reform movement: that teacher’s unions serve as barriers to quality education; that testing is the best way to assess quality education; that educating poor children is best done by institutionalizing them; that meritocracy is an end-in-itself; that social class is an unimportant variable in education reform; that education policy is best made by evading politics proper; and that faith in public school teachers is misplaced.
Lemme tell ya, "misguided" is a nice word.

For Teach for America, the Sinn Féin of TFA, and Michelle Rhee's first big tax exempt/taxpayer assisted scam, which now "advises" those Indianapolis public schools the state didn't take over directly (then hand to Mayor Gomer F. Ballard when Republicans lost control of the Superintendent of Public Instruction's office last November) the word is "clueless".

If these people have liberal impulses (Even the Democrat Michelle Rhee!), it's the impulse to give the help an hour off to vote, after patiently explaining to them how they ought to go about it.

Laurels

I HEART Charlie Pierce:

First, though, Woodward needed to establish order, because some actual human interaction had broken out between Gingrich and MSNBC's Lawrence O'Donnell over who had said what about the Clinton tax hikes back in 1993.

MR. GINGRICH: When we balanced the — when we balanced the budget, we balanced the budget with a tax cut not a tax — four consecutive balanced budgets with a tax cut, not a tax increase. 

MR. O'DONNELL: A tiny tax cut compared to the biggest tax increase in history which is what Bill Clinton did. You didn't dismantle it.
(Cross talk)

MR. BOB WOODWARD: ...to re-litigate the 1990s.

Yes, because it takes a guy who steadily turns out gigantic doorstops full of establishment stenography to remind us that historical parallels are basically worthless because history basically ends and then starts again, like it's got carbureator trouble, and nothing in the past ever teaches us anything worth knowing now. Besides, there is the terror of The Cliff to confront.

And never more than when I try to watch a single one of the Sundays, let alone all of them, Jesus save me. I haven't made more than ten minutes in decades.

That's about what I managed this week with This Week, with a panel that included Paul Krugman and Mary Matlin, the political equivalent of a comedy panel including Louis C.K. and a drunken Greta van Susteren. Matlin responded to something Krugman said with "Are you an economist or a polemicist?" and, apparently because she'd been practicing it all week, used it six more times, a couple of times out loud before the rest were muttered under her breath.

I lasted until Stephanopoulos threatened to return to talk about the Court and gay marriage with the same bunch.

Here is what I learned. Maybe "learned" is overdoing it:

The last Presidential Press Secretary worth a shit was Bill Moyers.

Consider that Mary Matlin, David Gergen, James Carville, Stephanopoulos, Pat Buchanan, Bay Buchanan, Peggy Noonan, Diane Sawyer, and Dana Perino (!) once worked for U.S. Presidents.

Am I leaving out someone who could turn either list to gold?

Thursday Olio: Seasonal Affective Disorder Edition

Disney's Copyright Lawyer Battalions have finally gone too far.

• Pierce dispatches Douthat's amplified and clarified excuse for that Sunday piece of his. Which, as usual, is all that needs to be said about it. So let me add:

• Douthat:  "(For now, Megan McArdle’s extended post on the subject deserves your attention.) The second group agreed with Matt Yglesias…"

For cryin' out loud, these people have sex with each other more often than the Manson Family did.

• And how many times now has Douthat taken to his supernumerary, third-nipple posts to explain something he tried to say in the most valuable political opinion mall space in America? And failed both times? Because, as Charlie has pointed out whenever he bothers with Cardinal Douthat (his construction, which I'm totally stealing), the man won't tell the truth about anything. This country paid an enormous price for the phony Reagan Revolution, followed by the Gingrich Revolution, and the Cheney House Revolt doubling down on the Crazy. Are we gonna spend another decade paying for the "Ah, but there are reasonable religious maniacs and thoughtful corporate mouthpieces" horseshit that centrist plutocrats and Beltway insiders try to console themselves with? The Times should insist that every Douthat missive be about abortion. It's all he has to talk about anyway.

• Wasn't Weigel supposed to be the ink-stained and diligent Post reporter who managed to get inside the Teabagger movement? Of course, he seemed to imagine, somehow, that it was a sui-generis, totally independent, totally fiscal-focused spontaneous political eruption, despite the fact that its astroturf roots were already exposed, and its connection to the obvious Birther Shit was, well, obvious.

Anyway, Dave's on top of the shocking story of how a couple of disruptive Teabagging nut cases got tossed from the House Budget Committee, and recommends you keep up with RedState for further developments. Meanwhile, a quote from Michigan Rep. Justin Amash, one of the two Holy Martyrs:

According to Amash, the party leaders were blaming the wrong people. They, not libertarian-leaning Republicans like him, were the ones who spent “$300 million on ads that didn’t work.”

Would this be a good time to remind you asshats that you got handed your hats, and your asses, in the Republican primaries, by committed "conservative" voters who had a smorgasbord of Crazy from which to select? And that that's why that $300 mil landed where it did?

• Joe "Like Sixteen Hours Every Morning Isn't Enough of You" Scarborough, in something called Politico:

By meeting more regularly with the leader of the opposition, President Obama may also learn what Bill Clinton and Newt Gingrich learned in the 1990s and what Ronald Reagan and Tip O’Neill learned in the 1980s: that American government works best when political opponents build personal relationships.

Y'know, not only is rightist Clinton Nostalgia touching, it's doubly so when it comes from someone who voted to impeach the guy. And not only might this country be better off today if Tip had sworn off the Scotch and The Gipper, and not only is this country better off because Bill Clinton gave Newt the Full Deliverance, but shut th' fuck up. Obama came to Boehner and the Republicans as a fucking supplicant in 2009. Were you following politics then, Joe? This time all he has to do is watch Boehner stew. If you want "leadership" from the President now, why didn't you call for it then?

• Forget it Jake, it's Slate: "The Rise of the Hipster Hunter".

Thursday Olio, "It's An Honor Just To Compete" Edition

• Join me August 15th for "Put a Razorblade in Your Chick-fil-A Sandwich and Threaten to Sue" Day. Void where prohibited.

• I've tried to ignore the Olympics, and especially NBC's "coverage" of the Olympics; I've tried to write about them three times now without ever finishing anything. Maybe I can do it by bullet point:

• Usain Bolt is the greatest Olympian since Aleksandr Karelin, and the greatest Track and Field champion since Al Oerter. And he gets no respect from the American media, for being insufficiently American. And for "showboating". This from a country so besotted with itself that every one of its winning athletes is required to parade around using Old Glory as a bath towel.

"He's up to his antics again," I heard someone voice over some video, and even if I remembered who or where I'd be too embarrassed to admit what I was watching, because there's an outside chance it was Today. The man left daylight between himself and the first 100 meter field in history where everybody broke ten seconds. And that's the second time he's done it. If you don't understand how astonishing that is then quit watching sports. Compare what Chad Ochocinco Johnson does every time he manages to catch a ball. Brandi-with-an-i Chastain rips off her uniform and it's a Hallmark moment. Fuck you people.

• Plus he's not 16 years old. For fuck's sake, it wasn't so many Quadrennial Games ago that Gymnastics started bleeding over into the second week. Now the damned thing goes on for a month.

• Goodbye, Lolo Jones, and please do not return as a lesbian, recovering drug addict, or Dancin' with the Stars crowd favorite.

The New York Times published this indictment of Jones' PR hype, which sent Deadspin and many of its commenters into Bud Light-redolent paroxysms. Because, you know, if we didn't manufacture bigger than Life sports "personalities", why have sports?

My favorite comments were the Leave Lolo Alone guy who opined that she had a right to earn a living and support her family, and the I'm A Christian guy, who said he didn't see anything wrong with her (tastefully) nude photo spread. The Mitt Romney Defense, and the Scriptures? I Don't Need No Scriptures! I Believe in the Bible! Gambit.

• And all of this traces to Roone Arledge, the Gene Roddenberry of Entertainment. (Where are these two buried, anyway? My prostate's not gettin' any younger.) I've been amused by all the complaints about NBC's coverage, since it's precisely what is deserved in a country where the question of Just How Sacred entrepreneurial resource gobbling is is a fucking Presidential campaign issue. Arledge was President of ABC Sports in '68, when satellite transmission first made live coverage feasible, and where Tommie Smith and John Carlos did their Black Power salute on the medals stand (and George Foreman waved a tiny flag).

People forget, now; it wasn't the case that Smith and Carlos were ostracized by people who didn't care for their style, or their politics. They were thrown out of the Olympic Village, and they and their families hounded in the US.

'72 was the Munich Massacre. Which has overshadowed everything about those Games, including that they were the first to feature an Official large stuffed mascot and tiny adorable gymnast beloved of an American audience. Which led directly to Montreal '76, the contrived perfection of adorable little Nadia Comaneci, the flag-waving of Bruce Jenner, and an opportunity for the wealthiest, best-placed, and most telegenic-by-the-standards-of-the-coveted-non-sports-viewer-demographic International Committees to make hundreds of millions from teevee rights at the expense of everything the Olympics is supposed to be about.

So of course NBC time-shifts everything to make a buck ("earn back its investment", which was basically designed to lose millions in order to keep the franchise). Of course they're only interested in crap storylines, and the promotion machine, and moving bran flakes. Of course if you're watching the Beeb you can chose from 100 simultaneous live feeds. Their people still have brains enough to spot shameless self-promotion (even if they don't always object).

And might I just point out: Tommie Smith and John Carlos, like Lee Evans, spent their lives helping young people. George Foreman perfected the waffle iron. Bruce Jenner was hit by one.

• And "Beach" "Volleyball" is neither, and it's not a sport. Catching a ball and throwing it over a net is not volleyball. And if you're too lazy to find the Maxim website to jerk off to, just go away. There, I said it, and I'm not taking it back.

• Closer to home, the Republican Tundra (the trees are all the right height, or recently bulldozed) that is Carmel, Indiana, finds itself $250 mil in the hole, somehow, from building a $40 million Arts palace. Don't ask me, I don't understand it any better than you do, or they, apparently. They had learned from Indianapolis how to create an un-elected, unaccountable, unsupervised body with tax powers in order to build shit on land owned by people who wanted to make a lot of money off it. Then, poof! they're in debt. Or "experiencing a temporary revenue shortfall" as their mayor put it. Apparently there is still hope that the hotel they've planned to go along with this will generate enough property taxes to pay for the infrastructure they have to build in order to build a hotel. I'm not making this up. This is Hamilton county, Indiana's most Republican political subdivision.

All this is right on the Monon Trail, which I ride every day, and which people in Carmel screamed bloody murder about, originally, because it would bring undesirables into their neighborhoods. Which it has. At least one.

And just a few blocks away sits the rubble of the old Grain elevator the city knocked down about as fast as Bob Irsay moved the Colts out of Baltimore, because 1) they had a buyer and 2) and maybe most importantly, there was public opposition building to the move. At first this was just an historical preservation deal; later people started asking questions about histoplasmosis. In the event those proved to be relatively minor, since the place was storing large quantities of a couple of pesticides, and no one bothered to check until the wrecking ball released it all into the atmosphere.

In fairness, they were in a hurry.

So now there's a particularly historic and toxic pile of broken concrete next to my daily ride, and the entrepreneurial (and anti-regulation) geniuses in the White North are reopening bids to have someone competent do the job.

Which just brings up one question: is there ever going to be enough evidence for the American voter to recognize the obvious?

Weekend Olio, Aw, Fuck It, Vol CCCXLIX Edition

• The Republican primary battle between desiccated Senate fixture Dick "Dick" Lugar and Some Guy With a 2x4 With a Nail in It just gets worse, by virtue of going on, and thanks to TeamLugar's palsy-fisted response to a Teabagger challenge. "Actual moderates" (oh, play along; we're grading on the current US political scale otherwise known as "Horrible Beyond Despondence", and, besides, it's just a bit) such as Ollie Snow and Lugar's former Senatorial co-mummer, Evan "Dick" Bayh, at least had the wisdom God gave the blind pig and floated off on a river of tears. Hell, Lisa Murkowski, another Senatorial Republican with a reputation for independent thought--though hers actually comes with a tiny bit of "evidence"--had the wit and political acumen to call the bluff of Teabaggers in an even Teabaggier state.

Lugar's pallid advisers, however, went right for the mudslinging and shit-stomping, beginning with "I hate Barack Hussein Obama as much as y'all" and working down from there. One of his latest series accuses Richard Mourdock of gleefully accepting out-of-state money.

Sure, sure, it's the same Dick Lugar who opposed McCain-Feingold, who wants union money out of elections, but lobbyist money delivered to his office on time, but I like to think of him as the same Dick Lugar who's headed an Indiana Republican delegation that for thirty fucking years included Dan "The Congressman From Bahamian Offshore Accounts" Burton, without his ever saying a word.

It's interesting; I recently saw someone chalk all this up to "election year politics", and I wondered--it's the eternal juvenile in me--why we expect politicians to behave even worse in such situations than the average divorcing parent? Lugar doesn't have to be 100% consistent. But shouldn't he have shown some previous objection to a thing he now, evidently, considers tantamount to piracy? Remember when the big uproar was over how Bill Clinton's hummer enthusiasm would influence Our Youth? What do they learn from the rest of these fucks?

• Speaking of Mourdock, the benighted state of which he deservingly is Treasurer just found another $200 million which had been lost to an accounting error, a near-twin bookend to the $300 million it found in December. That's $500 million, or roughly something between two-thirds and 2.5 times the "deficit" Mitch Daniels "inherited", depending on how much the teller needed to inflate it. The difference being that that was product of an accounting practice, and this is the product of accounting malfeasance. Daniels, who's off on a private trip to Israel, could not be reached for comment. Not that any of the local media would have bothered doing anything more than wait for the press handout. (The earlier discovery of $300 mil, still officially described as "a mistake", led to Daniels telling every microphone in the region "Well, it's better to've found the money than not have it." And this was the end of the story. Mitch and his hench legislature successfully fought off Democratic calls for an independent audit. Oh, I meant "laughed off".)

• In case you've missed this story, allow my to have my Poor Wife provide the quick overview:

"The reason we still fight over the Sixties is that these people hate women and minorities. That's it."

• I was on my way home from my morning bike ride yesterday when this semi-notorious and month-old David Brooks column ("No, the contraception frenzy in my party isn't just stunted and religiously-mazed sexuality on display. There's also an intellectual and economic quotient, provided you're careless with facts") jumped into my head for some reason. Actually, for one reason: so I could ask, "How come the perfect market solves all problems of human need, but gets flummoxed by birth rates?"

Surprise!

Benjamin H. Friedman and Caitlin Talmadge, "What Defense Cuts?" September 19

PUTS me in mind of the two middle-aged Midwestern sisters who skimped and saved and finally got to take a vacation to California and see the ocean for the first time.

"Look at all that water," says one.

"Yes," says the other. "And that's just the top of it."

...the Senate Appropriations Committee last week unveiled its spending caps for fiscal year 2013 — without a big defense cut. The appropriators proposed nonwar defense spending (“base” spending) just $2.9 billion below 2011. That cut, less than 1 percent, comes entirely from the military construction and family housing budget — not exactly the pointy end of the spear….

Compared with 2011 spending, the deal requires only a minor trim in security budgets: $4.5 billion in 2012 and $2.5 billion in 2013. And that reduction — pocket change in a $529 billion annual defense budget — need not even come from the Pentagon.

The legislation defines “security” spending as Defense, Homeland Security, Veterans, State and the National Nuclear Security Administration, a part of the Energy Department.

To get under the 2012 cap, Senate appropriators took $3.5 billion from State and around a half-billion from Homeland Security. Veterans and NNSA got small increases. Defense dodged the bullet — save for that military construction trim.

I was tempted to ask if anyone here was old enough to remember how well Gramm-Rudman worked, but, of course, that would be like marveling that Bernie Madoff would dare run a pyramid scheme even though Charles Ponzi went to prison.

Wednesday Olio: It's A Cookbook! Edition

• Okay, so my first thought was "This is news for whom, now? The five people who showed up at O'Donnell's book signing?" Then I realized that that might double Politico's readership without appreciably lowering its average IQ. Good move.





• And my first thought here was "Oh, Politico's management gave every employee the same Word-a-Day calendar last Christmas." But that doesn't work, since "panic" in the first instance consists of spokessentients for four "leftist" "special interests" (Women, Gun Violence, the Separation of Church and State, Al Sharpton) stating their dislike for the Governor's politics in what seem like fairly calm, and certainly complete, sentences (and apparently in response to a question some journalist asked); "not panic", in the second, describes being forced to kiss Jim DeMint's ass in public, and having your advisers, real and self-declared, urge you to start swinging at Perry real quick, before the Teabag Party appoints him President.

But even as the primary is fought on conservative turf, liberal leaders say they and their constituents see Perry as far worse than your average, hated Republican, and indeed as bad — if not worse — than his hated predecessor in Austin, George W. Bush.

Y'know, the median age in the United States is around 35, and the median age of voters adds another decade. This suggests that the typical "liberal" "leader" should have a passing familiarity with Richard Nixon and Ronald Reagan, and probably should have confronted the presidencies of one or more Bushes from a liberal perspective. Th' fuck is there left to panic about? Why would anyone in his right mind imagine that a Romney presidency would be "more moderate" on gun control just because Rick Perry is a pandering loon in a bandolier? What gun control? We fucked this country up royally in 1980. It is the year to which you can trace the decline of the middle class, the ascension of Property over Personal rights, the end of Fairness on the public airwaves, and the national agenda being set by slimy televangelists. The two centrist Democrat administrations in the interim have sought mainly to find a common ground between Reaganism and their own pollsters' notion of what wins elections; historical Democratic majorities in both Houses did nothing whatsoever for their supposed constituencies. I sure don't relish the idea of another Bush, but does that make me feel more confident about Mitt Fucking Romney? No it does not. I'll relax about it when this shit is thoroughly discredited, in the public debate and at the ballot box, the same as it has been in reality. Or else when the tainted Chinese catfood kills me. I'll panic about it never. The people who ought to panic about Rick Perry are the Mitch Danielses and the David Brookses and all the other fuckers who've been whistling past that graveyard for thirty years now.

Maybe Rick Perry is 8% worse than Romney, and 15% worse than Obama; if I had a serious alternative I'd be donating money to the cause. When we fuck up Social Security, Medicare, reproductive rights, the public schools--that is, when we fuck them up to Republican standards, not just Democratic Bargaining Position standards--and arm every citizen so we can gun down anyone who doesn't Pray in school, I'm not going to panic. I'm going to watch, and try to enjoy, as much as possible, as the slow dawning of what they've accomplished seeps over the Republican rank and file, aka the rightward part of the new permanent Serf class. We've had thirty years to wake up from this shit now. The continued slumber is not due to lack of evidence.

• Meanwhile, I hope you weren't too overcome by Perry Panic to enjoy the tour of The Opulent Digs of Aisha Gaddafi, the Uday and Qusay of Libya, as brought to you by teevee reporters outraged by the pretentiousness of Wealth and the stratification of someone else's society.

• South by Southwest Festival gets politicized; proposed lineup includes:

"Poli-Sci-Fi Punditry: Nerdy Political Bloggers," featuring Slate's David Weigel, The Washington Monthly's Steve Benen, The Washington Post's Ezra Klein, the American Prospect's Adam Serwer and the Center for American Progress's Alyssa Rosenberg.

More tainted Chinese catfood, anyone?

American Exceptionalism: Building New Shit To Replace The Old Shit We Couldn't Afford The Maintenance On Because We Were Busy Building New Shit

Alec MacGillis, "Angry liberals seek silver lining in debt-limit deal". August 1

FIRST thing we do is add "vertebrate" to the requirements of office:

“It’s a surrender to Republican extortion,” said Rep. Jerrold Nadler (D-N.Y.), who voted against the deal. “It’s one thing to say we want this, we don’t want that as part of negotiations. It’s another to say we will destroy the country and the economy if you don’t do what we want.”

"Now, honey, you know you can't chop your sister up into little pieces and run her through the garbage disposal. Mommy and Daddy will buy you a cat instead."

So why in hell did your party "do what they wanted" anyway? You don't believe in negotiating with terrorists, just in giving in to their every demand so they'll go away?

Because it sure seems to me that Democratic concerns focused almost exclusively on the potential damage to markets. Which, agreed, was considerable. But we've suffered thirty-five years of real damage thanks to Republican shenanigans, though the markets have weathered that a helluva lot better than the average Americans who used to be the Dems bread-and-butter. Saying "they were holding us hostage" is pure melodrama. If Default was too serious to contemplate as a means of demonstrating to America just what loons the Republicans really are, then you should have solved the problem earlier. You could have caved in last March, or last December, just as easily. Now we're all going to share in a decade-long disaster, probably much, much worse, and none of us has any say in the matter any more. Except to vote you all out, and replace you with assholes of the same or even larger diameter.

Your Next President If It Isn't Michele Mitt Romney said yesterday that he wouldn't have stood for even a whisper of potential revenue increases on some future world, or any talk of reducing the Defense budget. And he's the sane and sensible one in the race, by Republican standards. So it ain't like you've even stopped the hemorrhaging. In a lot of ways, bleeding to death over a decade is worse than doing so in five minutes.

Yet again the default Democrat in me wants to ask how we got here in the first place, and that little voice answers back, "Because the Dems couldn't do a goddam thing with unprecedented majorities two elections running. Because, despite a hostage crisis, a center-right President wouldn't show half the audacity of his miserable predecessor and become a functioning emperor." It's always too late to go back.

I'm sorry, but I just don't fucking get it. Why does Barack Obama want to be President? For the perks? He acts for all the world like what I've long suspected him to be: a guy who thought he was running for Vice-President, who suddenly found himself unexpectedly in the driver's seat, with too much money at stake to back down. Barack Obama is like the goddam Hollywood vanity project a hundred yes men said yes to back when he was hot.

And why do the rest of these fucks want to be Democrats? Because they're more comfortable worshipping Ronald Reagan from afar? For chrissakes, if there's a real Democrat in this country who hasn't expected Republicans to act precisely this way for the last twenty-five years it's because he's not that old. But somehow Congressional Democrats just don't seem to see it. Somehow. The only things accomplished by Democratic presidents over the past twenty years were 1) not being convicted by the Senate; and 2) staring down the Republicans over a government shutdown. Maybe the circumstances are slightly different today, but a stare is still a stare. At the very least maybe you guys coulda been prepared to face the eventuality.

Look On The Bright Side. Now We Won't Need Death Panels.

Chris Cillizza,"The debt-ceiling deal: Winners and losers". July 31

Peter Wallsten and David Nakamura, "Did Obama capitulate--or is this a cagey move?" July 31

Ezra Klein, "Democrats will lose now. But they can win later." July 31

IF you'd like to forget for a moment what input you had into the Great Debt Ceiling Compromise, or "Compromise"--your choice of fries or cole slaw with your shitburger--I recommend casting about until you find The Cool Kids' Analyses. Because just think about it: which would you really rather do, get the 1500 calories a day you might manage in your golden years from premium cat food, or escape, without medical assistance, a world where Ezra Klein and Chris Cillizza don't just have jobs as political commentators and open-mike-night standup comics, but are charter members of the Liberal Media Emailers Club?

Wallsten and Nakamura:

But for a White House eager to improve its standing with centrist independents who have been fleeing Obama, even a losing deal can be a winning strategy.

Leaving aside for the moment the question of where, besides "inside the skulls of Beltway insiders", these centrist independents reside, let's ask exactly why they've been fleeing Obama. Because he was too centrist? Because the reasonable, middle-of-the-road Republican party pointed out his Socialist World Domination scheme? Because previously he just hasn't shown the leadership that utter whimpering capitulation signals to your average demanding Difference Splitter?

Cillizza:

Losers

Liberals: As the basic framework of the deal emerged, liberals began voicing their discontent about a bargain that left their side wanting more. With no revenue in the initial phase of the legislation and Medicare cuts on the table in the second phase, there’s not much for the ideological left to celebrate.

Same question, in reverse: where are these people, aside from the actual America none of these fucks knows anything about except how to fly over? The only liberal official I heard from during the whole mess was John McCain.

(Okay, I heard Chuck Schumer with David Gregory. Schumer made sense. Which meant nothing he had to say would be reflected in any final deal. As if we needed confirmation.)

Klein:

But Democrats will have their turn. On Dec. 31, 2012, three weeks before the end of President Barack Obama’s current term in office, the Bush tax cuts expire. Income tax rates will return to their Clinton-era levels. That amounts to a $3.6 trillion tax increase over 10 years, three or four times the $800 billion to $1.2 trillion in revenue increases that Obama and Speaker John Boehner were kicking around. And all Democrats need to do to secure that deal is...nothing.

Look, I don't give a fuck if you really are only 23-years-old. You've already had a lifetime's worth of proof that the Democratic party will never be able to take advantage of any hand it's dealt. Saying "oh, wait, the Dems will get it back in a lame-duck session when the Bush tax cuts expire" is like saying "Good news! The Democrats have a fillibuster-proof Senate majority!"

Olio: Default Edition

• Weigel:

[Ron] Paul will leave Congress next year as arguably the most intellectually influential member of the House of Representatives in a generation. (I write "arguably" even though trying to think of a runner-up is a deeply depressing task.)

Hell, it's a lot less depressing than parsing either "intellectual" or "influential", Dave. But, yeah: even if it were true it would be an honor on the level of being named KISS's greatest musical influence.

And none of that can match contemplation of those Too Smart To Be Republican Libertarian-Republicans who imagine they can praise Paul's influence one day and puzzle over how their party became too ideologically hidebound to maneuver the next.

• By the way, what is there in Eric Cantor's America that's worth saving, anyway? Not corporations; they've got no allegiance to America, or none beyond our willingness to provide Gunboat Diplomacy at little or no cost to the beneficiary. Not the people John Boehner called "jobs creators" the other day without turning red-orange. (It's funny: we can't tax Jobs Creators, and we can't expect them to create actual jobs in the US. This sorta leaves only one possible reason they even qualify as a category to Republican politicians.) It's been instructive to watch Murdock get piled on from all sides in Britain. Sure, sure, it's a mass outbreak of Captain Renault Syndrome, but how much Congressional Republican outrage do you think that'd garner over here? How much Democratic, for that matter? Y'know, if these fucks really were concerned about the Federal deficit the first thing they'd do is resign en masse.

• Michael Tomasky, "How Bachmann Could Win":

…when movements capture parties, strange things happen. The antiwar faction captured the Democratic Party in 1972, giving us the candidacy of George McGovern, and the tea party movement has captured the GOP now.

First, as a first step to finally ridding ourselves of the National Nightmare of Boomerdom, could people who don't know what th' fuck they're talking about quit talking about it? In terms of influencing the 1972 Democratic primaries, the "anti-war movement" "capturing" the Democratic party, in addition to Not Actually Happening, ranks behind 1) Chappaquiddick; 2) Ed Muskie, the Ur-John Kerry; 3) Ed Muskie's tears, the '72 replay of George Romney's Brainwashing for the Mass Market News; 4) George Wallace; 5) Arthur Bremer; 6) an excellent campaign organization run by some sharp cookies; 7) the democratization of the primary process after 1968; and 8) just about anything else you could dream up, provided your sense of history doesn't come from Happy Days reruns.

Let's us say this again: in 1972 something like 50% of the American public opposed the continuation of the Vietnam War, then in its eleventh or sixteenth or fifty-fourth year, depending on who's counting. That number included George McGovern, and he benefitted from that support during the primaries, and was hurt by it (Abortion, Acid, and Amnesty!) in the general. His crackpot economic ideas gave us the EITC, one of the most important additions to the tax code in the Tax Lawyer Era. McGovern did not represent a "takeover" of the Democratic party by "The Left"; he represented the mood of the liberal half of the country at the time. (It's funny that one never finds the Early Middle Aged complaining about how anti-Iraq war sentiment gave us Barack Obama.) Finally, the tragedy of 1972 is not that the Democratic party nominated a Way Out Leftist Kook. It's that Richard Nixon won reelection. After, by the way, a team of burglars employed by the President of the United States broke into Democratic National headquarters. This made all the papers at the time, but seems to've been obscured in the interim by the Bill Ayers Era.

There really was an anti-war movement during the Vietnam war. It represented something of a break with the hyper-militarism of the Post-War era, though it also echoed domestic opposition to Korea. It came about only after the public had been lied to, nakedly and repeatedly. Its influence continues to be felt today, despite the concerted effort to rewrite the history and remilitarize the popular sentiment; it survives because the truth never quite goes away. Cf the Teabagging Revolution, which amounts to the latest in a long line of Republicans doubling down on anti-government insanity every time "reality" smacks 'em in the face, this time while pretending not to be Republicans. Michelle Bachmann may very well lead this Lunatics' Parade down Pennsylvania Avenue some benighted day, and it might change a lot of things, but not by virtue of being correct.

• My Poor Wife gave me the DVD set of The World At War some years ago, and I pull it out every now and then and watch a half-dozen episodes and marvel at it (and Olivier's narration). It's always interesting to be reminded that the Brits, while giving him his due as a wartime leader, never really lost sight of the fact that Churchill was a colossal asshole.

Olio: I'm Out Of It Edition

• How did the meeting go, say, at ABC News yesterday? Was there some debate over whether ten minutes at the top of the national news was sufficient coverage of the Casey Anthony trial? Did they decide against a Special Report for later in the evening? Was there one malcontent in the back asking if they couldn't find something more important to do? (I'm just kiddin' about that last one.)

I have absolutely no knowledge of this thing, aside from the fact that it involves a child who died in a bathtub or drowned in a pool (and, may I add, it took a considerable amount of steely-eyed reserve to limit it to that). Nevertheless, I feel I've lived a rich and rewarding life.

Despite the concerns of some of our best minds, Irony seems to've pulled through the Piss-Pants Era just fine. But Shame just dropped by the side of the highway sometime during Ronald Reagan's first press conference, and everyone just tiptoes around the rotting carcass and pretends he doesn't smell anything. Really: did someone at NBC figure that if they didn't lead with a regional murder story viewers would tune out in the millions?

And the worst of it from a personal perspective is that I absently turned to local Channel 8 at the news weather hour, and was met with Disgraced Former Marion County Prosecutor and Tim Durham Henchweasel Carl "Facetime" Brizzi, who's gone from grafterrific elected official making unwise and unethical comments on the local news at every opportunity, to 8's "legal analyst". Imagine turning on the teevee in your Houston hotel room and finding Tom DeLay on the Redistricting Beat.

• I'm spending entirely too much time on the bike trail, and starting to wonder how I'm gonna manage when it gets too cold to ride. (We've got a stationary bike, and last year I rode it longer than I rode outdoors, but last year my knees were much worse off and the stationary bike was easier on them. This year I'm gonna be fighting boredom.)

It's really tempting to see the Monon Trail as a microcosm of America Herself: a lot of basically nice, pleasantly mazed folks whose lives and well-being are constantly threatened by a dedicated cadre of high-tech Nazis in bike outfits.

But I won't; for now I'll just mention that 1) lactic acid is not your friend, unless you drink German wine and have more patience than most of your countrymen; 2) excessive solarization is not your friend if you plan on living past the age of 23; and 3) wicking teeshirts remove sweat more efficiently than going shirtless, so please fucking stop.

• Exercise Nazis, in general: I was fairly athletic, in my youth, which was long enough ago that my daily tennis outings were disturbed to the point of rage killing by the Tennis Boom of the early 70s, and the luster of a track career was dimmed by the Jogging Craze. (I got off easy; my friend Cowboy Clint, a real working cowboy, had to buy a complete new wardrobe when Urban Cowboy became a hit.) I've managed to avoid these people like the plague--precisely like the plague--for thirty some years now by the simple expedient of being lazy. I'm all for physical exertion. I love sport, and I'm still pretty competitive. I admire people I meet on the trail who are training hard--I'm particularly impressed that there are so many women out there who know how to run--and it's good to see people who, conversely, are having fun at it. But 40% give every impression that they're there as an excuse to buy outfits.

• On the other hand: foam rollers entered my cloistered reality about four days ago, and I'm 100% sold on them already. And weighted juggling balls are the next coolest thing to learning to use a speed bag.

• I'm not sure how long I overlooked it, but my local post office branch flies a POW/MIA flag right under Old Glory. I've written in to ask on who's authority, but you know how the mails are.

Another microcosm: apparently lost to the Mists of Time is the fact that this thing started out as a political argument: the US shouldn't recognize Vietnam--in fact, should go back and finish the job--because of the thousands of POWs still being held by the Commies. This, of course, was pure bullshit, essentially a road-show version of the Manchurian Candidate tales about Korea, and an offshoot of the whole We Weren't Allowed To Win business. The Vietnamese were extraordinarily forthcoming in the search for missing Americans, far more than any country which had expelled an invader could have been expected to be. As for now--who's missing, exactly? Who's got a hidden camp full of captured Americans? Nobody. We're the captors, not the captives, and it's been that way for forty years now. This is just another tic of excessive militarization. I'll let you know if I ever hear back.

Olio: The Bad News Is That Mayan Calendar Stuff Is Just Hooey Edition

• Okay, so I'm as glad as anyone that we've thwarted al-Qaeda's big Tenth Anniversary Plans, since that run of successful 9/11 anniversary surprise attacks was getting monotonous.

But "attacking America's commuter rail system?" Ten years, all that nefarious plotting, sleeper cells, and they still confuse us with Europe.

• As expected, Mike "Choirboy" Pence is running for Governor of Indiana, completing the Republican snail trail begun when he collected a dozen church-basement Presidential straw poll votes in Oiowa or Idahoma or someplace, and became the leading Republican Wholly Divorced From Reality candidate overnight. Those of us old enough to remember when that was merely a faction were caught off-balance when Team Daniels reacted swiftly and decisively by kicking Lt. Governor Becky "Night School" Skillman to the curb so Pence wouldn't have to soil his Sunday shoes.

Seems like a good time for a recap: well-heeled Candidate Daniels tapped the obscure (to say the least) Skillman as his running mate in 2004. The City of Lawrence, one of the towns outside Indianapolis, but inside Marion county, which Dick Lugar allowed to keep their identities while helping to vote white people into the Mayor's office for another generation, and which is probably the craziest burg in American not actively being invaded by bats, bees, or raw sewage, thereby lost the best damn Assistant Comptroller it ever had, but Daniels gained a diversity talking point.

This really just seemed like a standard, ham-fisted political maneuver, but then, at the time, those of us who hadn't lost our Water Company pensions to Mitch Daniels didn't really know the man. At the time the real chuckle was how the search for a woman candidate took the Indiana Republican party down to the end of the bench, back out the tunnel, up the stairs, into the stands, all the way up to the tuba section, where the fourth chair had invited his girlfriend.

In the intervening seven years Skillman has spoken three times, and was chair of the Remember That Time President Reagan Changed Planes In Indianapolis? Centennial Commission. The last of those times was when she announced that Pence's strong showing in Wyomaha had reminded her she was overdue for her annual check-up, which, sadly, had discovered a chronic disease which would rob her of the strength required to conduct a campaign, though she promised to soldier on through 2012 cutting ribbons Mitch Daniels was too busy to fuck with any more. If any.

As for Pence, of course, his histrionic departure from his House leadership position signaled that his bugsplatter craziness runs deeper than just Jebus, and his quick fold from the Presidential race where he, right now, would be an answer to the complaints of the Republican faithful, even if that answer was more actuarial than actual, shows that he really does understand the value of a dollar, particularly when there's several million of 'em and Mitch Daniels has the key. And his willingness to return to Indiana to finish Daniels' crash landing shows, I think, a remarkable flexibility for one so religiously assured, and a heretofore unsuspected inability to think ahead in the slightest.

• David Brooks' chunk of prime New York real estate today features his meditation on how this is a republic, not a democracy. Really.

• Donald "The Donald" Trump has withdrawn as celebridriver of the pace car for the 95th running, and the Centennial year, of the Indianapolis 500, citing time constraints.

IMS, by the way, reportedly got suckered into using this sucker because NBC, the corporate giant that sees fit to foist Trump on a deserving public, is about to buy Versus, the cable bump that runs the Indy Car series.

In some wiser, but unspeakably sadder, future, Digging Up The Corpse of Ayn Rand And Desecrating It In Some Novel Fashion Day will be a legal, and much-anticipated, holiday.

• Cheer up, we're all gonna die: Riley Waggaman, "What is America, Anyway? Too bad Leni Riefenstahl wasn't there with her Flip Cam!

The Devil Has All The Good Tunes. But He Has To Outsource The Lyrics.

I'M NOT sure why I'm so adrift. I understand that the country at large is mazed by current events, accustomed, as it is, to the combination of "Japan" and "nuclear radiation" being automatic Big Box Office, and its periodic alarums and excursions bombing sand being preceded by a much better, and louder, trailer than the one it got this time. I'm not part of the intended audience for such things. I know, for example, that Barack Obama is, in fact, about six months late in starting his own war, given our post-WWII average. Somehow I'm not placated by this.

ITEM: It might be that I'm trying to figure out how, in 2007-2008, one could have designed the inevitable Democratic administration which would follow the worst, most venal, and least competent administration in the history of the Republic and yet manage to put the Pugs back in power within two years.

Look, you can think anything you want of the President: quiet, competent, embattled maker of tough decisions and godawful compromises, or Yet Another Corporate Democratic Centrist; you may even feel that, on a scale of Kosovo to Vietnam, enforcing yet another No Fly Zone is more Necessary Evil than Regular Evil. To me, if you profess an admiration for Ronald Reagan--however rephrased later--and you are not a) one of his legion of hagiographers, or b) too fucking young to have a clue, then you are suspect; if you profess an admiration for Ronald Reagan, gain the Presidency, and then behave as if an aura of competence is the way to recreate his legacy then I, like Donald Trump, would like to know where you grew up. Yes, indeed, Reagan had the advantage of knowing that there was little likelihood of a major conflict during his Presidency unless he himself created it, so he could sputter like Yosemite Sam on the international stage while killing off a few thousand Mexicans and US Marines to keep the faithful happy. But the point is he did it. I'm not quite sure how you manage to get this backwards, how you send in the Marines without conducting a victory parade first. Fer chrissakes, recall Ollie North, give him a helicopter, and send him in in a blaze of glory. At least you'd have Victor Davis Hanson on your side.

I'm a lefty. In American politics, to me, "bone" is a verb, not a noun. Maybe you could throw me one, Mr. President, just to see if I'd know what to do with it. Just fucking explain why we don't care about democracy in Bahrain, or Saudi Arabia, or Egypt. C'mon. We all know the answer. Just come out in public, one time, and say it. Th' fuck's it gonna matter?

ITEM: Do I have to? Is there some difference between this David Weigel piece ("Michele Bachmann for president? Among Republicans, she's more popular than you think.") and a Jonah Goldberg thunker that 5 IQ points doesn't explain? Really, the implied You here being smarty-pantsed liberal-on-social-issues Slate readers with a modicum of language competence, and the explicit Popularity being what twenty-six Iowans (likely future straw-casters, of course) told Frank Luntz when he went there on FOX News' dime. Oho! No answer for that, is there Mr. Rational?

She'll push the Republican field to the Right! which, from my perspective, anyway (full disclosure: Michelle Bachman is a fucking loon, and, furthermore, an ignorant fucking loon, and nothing whatsoever can change that) means they'd all take the stage in tinfoil hats and bandoliers while walking on Muslims. She'll fill the hole left by that is Sarah Palin! Y'ever play that game as a kid where you repeat a word or phrase until it lost all semantic meaning? Try repeating "But as that Luntz focus group showed, Bachmann is taken more seriously than Palin in some circles." and see if the reverse is possible.

Someone, please, explain to Dave Weigel just what it is that someone who's been conscious of American politics for more than his seventeen years would have to have acknowledged if the rubric "Seems popular with the idjits in Iowa" were applied across the board. And, look, I ain't kiddin': if "popular among Republican voters" were the arbiter, Martin Luther King Day would now be known as "another Monday in January".

ITEM: I couldn't figure out how to single this out yesterday; today I don't care:

To fund her cause, [Michelle] Rhee announced in December that she would create a counterbalancing interest group called StudentsFirst, modeled on the NRA, for which she is hoping to raise $1 billion.

I know I've mentioned this before, but in the perpetual Fast Food advertising war we've turned public education into (on the grounds that it's all we understand anymore) Indianapolis Public Schools was the only major metropolitan district which jumped feet first into the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation Small Schools Initiative. IPS completely reorganized every high school in the system over the course of a single summer to participate in a program which had, at its center, an untested and frankly absurd little homily about "small learning communities" (absurd because all the suburban schools IPS is compared unfavorably to are the size of blimp hangars). The thing lasted about two years before it was quietly done away with, but in the interim not a single dime of the Foundation's money found its way to the classroom. It went for teacher training, administrative junkets, and the costs of administering the program, which was done by a local college. Michelle Rhee wants a billion dollars, not for poor children, not for poor school districts, but for Michelle Rhee. That is the "cause" she's funding. How did we get here?

A Modest Fucking Proposal. Or Two.

ANNE Applebaum writes an entire thunk piece on the President's masterful handling of the PR campaign against Libya (by, basically, doing nothing, Obama assured that the French and the Brits would be on hand to hold our coats! This is, after all, Slate) while completely ignoring the question of whether we should be there at all, unless I dozed off and missed it. Meanwhile, best-selling author and worst-ever Secretary of War Donald Rumsfeld is offering free advice, John Boehner is demanding to know if we'll ask for Suddenly Evil Supplemental Funding of the Illegally Undeclared Not War (which, by the way, prompts the former newspaper known as The Washington Post to announce:

Unforeseen military operations that require expenditures such as those being made for the Libyan effort normally require supplemental appropriations since they are outside the core Pentagon budget. That is why funds for Afghanistan and Iraq are separate from the regular Defense Department budget.

And this is not some puppy with no inkling of anything that happened before 1998; it's Walter Fucking Pincus, Pulitizer Prize-winner Walter Fucking Pincus, who really might be expected to know that, prior to the Bush administration hiding the costs of Afghanistan and Iraq for as long as it could by extorting blank checks from a compliant Congress, those supplemental funds were expected to be paid back, the way your plumber is supposed to subsume his "Basic service fee" in the labor costs for that $600 project he winds up doing. He's not supposed to say, "Wait uhminnit. You didn't tell me I'd get shit on my hands." What exactly is the Navy for? Okay, fine, I agree, the real point of 330,000 naval personnel, a dozen aircraft carriers, 300 other warships, 3700 planes, and enough ordnance to put Japan back where it was two weeks ago is showing off. But it's like Tim Durham's car collection. Sure, it makes you swing like you've got a big dick, but if you need some bologna, and it's Armand's afternoon off, it's possible you might have to get in one and drive somewhere), all while Michelle Rhee is a respected educational reformer, Ron Paul is Presidential timber, Mitch Daniels is competent, and Donald Trump is interviewed.

As a topper, this is a headline in today's Indianapolis Star:


I'm not from the Apocalyptic wing of Protestantism, but I could swear "Woozy" and "Tweeter" are two of the Four Horsemen.

So, look, can't we all just get over this awful political divide and admit there's nothing left here worth saving? Let's go nuts. Let's all drop acid and go skinny dipping. Instead of Tomahawk missiles, let's just give Gaddafi his own teevee show. That goddam box is bristling with threats to the existence of humankind, and we ignore all of them with no problem.

Further, since we have established, beyond dispute--again--that Republicans will say absolutely anything, and that there is no national Democratic party, or at least none that has the efficacy of the Indiana state Democratic party, once thought extinct if not wholly illusory, I'm for handing the keys to Ron Paul, provided that every Federal position not specifically mentioned in the Constitution be eliminated before he can take the Oath. What could it hurt?

We Are All Centenarians

MARIA Schneider dies; William Grimes turns this into a Land O'Lakes commercial.

Really? The woman was assfucked, in a film, forty years ago, and that's all you can talk about? Twice? In an obituary? That wasn't just so you could say "anal intercourse" in the Times, was it? Or so you could pronounce audiences at the time "scandalized" by the behavior (whereas the modern audience would be fine with it, but troubled by the high fat content) instead of pointing out that the percentage of Philistines remains fairly constant, generation after generation?

Sheesh. And the poor woman was typecast, you say? However could that have happened?

This Week On As Succinct As Riley Ever Gets

A country which listens to anything George W. Bush has to say--about Kanye West, Sarah Palin, a pig's pickled fetus, or anything else--is clearly doomed. What, then, of one that listens to him simply because someone's paid to get him another five minutes of fame public idiocy?

Olio: Everything's Going To Be Fine, I'm Sure Edition

• You Want All This on Your Tombstone, Lady, You're Gonna Have To Order a Bigger One, or Why I Never Miss Blogginheads::

Maureen Tkacik, discussing the Olivia Munn tsimmes with Lizz Winstead:

I mean, it seems like it would be a very, um, specific and y'know like again I, I, I, I, I kinda don't really have a very strong opinion about this one way or the other, but, y'know I, I used to work at Talking Points Memo, that's a, y'know, a kind of um, geeky political wonky, I mean it's like Daily Show, the staff is like Daily Show without having had a sense of humor necessarily about, uh, what you're writing about, although a lot of people do, to their, um, to their credit. And y'know it was very, it, it was all dudes. And it's because they have these autistic brains fer, uh, y'know, like very obscure political facts and that kind of stuff can come in handy um, y'know or it's necessary for producing a show like the Daily Show to kind of have, um, photographic memory fer uh, y'know, really, y'know, arcana that sometimes I personally can't bother caring about, um, but I also think that, so I think that there's probably a little bit of that, um, which is just sort of like a way that the brain stores information, um, tends to be, y'know, the, uh, seems to be a disconnect and, and, uh, the way that I, uh, y'know, kind of process and absorb information, and, uh, uh, I've found in my career to be slightly different from your average, um, y'know, political, uh, wonk. Um, and I don't know, y'know, there's, there's just a lot, there's a lot to talk about there. But it doesn't have to do with that Christopher Hitchens question whether women are funny. I think that this tapped into that, y'know, vein of controversy and unfortunately, um, y'know, it, uh, y'know, what got lost was that I think that Olivia Munn is pretty funny actually, as it turns out.

Personally, y'know, I tend to typographical conservatism, but I have to admit after trying to transcribe that thing that 20th century punctuation is wholly inadequate for the demands of the 21st. Is there an emoticon for, like, incontinent eye-rolling?

• I was watching Tour de France coverage Monday night while riding the stationary bike--it's like getting a hummer while watching porn*, except sweatier and not fun--and there's a biggish flap because Contador grabbed the Yellow jersey by passing Andy Schleck when the latter's chain slipped, which is at minimum a racing faux pas; you're not supposed to take advantage of someone else's equipment failure. There's some hubbub afterwards, and Contador claimed he didn't realize what was going on, though he clearly did. And they toss back to the studio, and one of the yammerers--it wasn't Phil Liggett or Bob Root, is all I know--says something along the lines of:

The Euros have been slow to adopt American innovations, like being noisy, wearing garish colors, and chewing with your mouth open, and they insist on clinging to these outdated Marquis of Queensbury rules.

And all I could think of was This is precisely what has happened to this country; there's no goddam question that if it had happened to Lance Armstrong, in his prime or yesterday, when he was trying to win one last Stage, they'd've been screaming for instant replay, judicial review, and the judges' scalps. Conversely, I don't recall anyone complaining when the um, y'know, Euro-arcana of cycling rules worked in favor of Lance and his USPS hench-teammates, and I have no doubt that, given the opportunity, the same guy'd be complaining that NBA players travel all the time.

Einstein said that Piaget was obviously a great genius, because no lesser man would have noticed something so simple (as a child's notion of the conservation of matter). Piaget also noted that by age four most children have rejected the fanciful in Aristotle's Physics, which nevertheless ruled the West for 1600 years. Had Piaget's focus been the other way 'round, and had he lived long enough, perhaps he could have explained how the modern American adult comes to embrace, even celebrate, half-baked ideas which should have been driven out of his head by puberty. Oh, if only more shit blew up! the Tour would grab a bigger audience share in the USA! Wild Wild West, baby! Somehow it just never occurs to these fucks that you can't stop things at A Little, Highly Photogenic Cheating, or that bicycle racing would rather quickly become a combination of NASCAR, ice hockey, and mountaineering without that poncy Marquis gettin' in the way.

And when did this fucking start? We came out of WWII with a belief in Fair Play intact. Sure, we were fucking hypocrites about it, and international bullies, but it was still there, as a standard; today you'd have an entire screaming political party complaining about trampling the rights of Swiss bankers.

• I don't know which national news program my Poor Wife had on last night--or, as always, why--but I was treated to three minutes on how white people--now politically powerless--have been forced to endure, in rapid succession, an African-American AG blatantly refusing to indict a black man, and an Ag Dept. functionary admitting she might've made a race-based mistake 25 years ago. This, of course, on top of the NAACP ruling that all white Americans are crackers. Whatever reporter was "covering" the story--how come our comedy shows are written by y'know, a kind of um, geeky political wonky, and our political news is reported by hair care product pitchmen?--made sure to note that last week the NAACP had charged some Teabaggers with racism, which caused me, inadvertently, to yell back that if they though it was a story now, perhaps they could have covered the charges themselves, at some point, or even, like, y'know, now.

And, of course one is reasonably certain that at this very moment, stronger stomachs than mine are digesting numerous instances of the Right complaining that all this is being brought up to make it look racist.

• My favorite private chuckle last week was when Indiana State Auditor Tim Berry was sent out to spokesmodel the sheepish, Summer-doldrums-timed announcement that the state's Rainy Day Fund, Mitch Daniels, Savior, was down to its last half-billion and wouldn't survive next spring's crackpot fest known as the Indiana General Assembly. This is not a surprise, nor is it particularly funny, as people and institutions are both in real pain, but you had to love the sudden appearance of Berry--I'd never laid eyes on the man before--as the Bad News bearer in place of Presidential Hopeful Daniels (and you've got some mighty tiny shoes to fill there, Tim). It was Daniels who, just last spring, hijacked the legislative process (and a done deal) to "preserve" the "Surplus" he'd "created"; now, with no place left to hide, the campaign is on to Plan B ("Not his fault"), and some functionary is sent out to say, with a straight face:

"It's a Rainy Day fund. And in case no one's noticed, it's raining."

Y'know, Tim, the only person standing in the downpour last March and saying it looked pretty dry to him, and he could really go for a Tenderloin, was…your Boss.




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* I'm guessing.