Louisiana Republican Attorney General Buddy Caldwell told Think Progress how much he hates Obamacare:
I trust the government more than insurance companies. If the government wants to put forth a policy where they will pay for everything and you won’t have to go through an insurance policy, that’d be a whole lot better.
Hey, Buddy, where were you when your party needed you? That's such a great idea!*
*Scalia wouldn't even be able to call it unconstitutional. Wait, yes he would. But he'd feel funny about it.
The real Louisiana Red, Iverson Minter, 1932-2012. (He just passed away last month.)
In Eric Cantor's high school yearbook picture (h/t Kaili Joy Gray) he was already wearing his trademark sneer:
Doesn't it remind you of your mother saying, "Keep making that face and it's going to freeze that way." In Cantor's case it actually happened!*
*The yearbook quote is from Victor Herbert's 1905 hit Mlle. Modiste, text by Henry Blossom. You think young Eric might have been in a high school production, as the crotchety Uncle Henri? Sure wouldn't be where the sneer came from, though.
Non-cognitive Elites
Via Balloon Juice, that's what the National Organization for Marriage is recruitingfor the permanent campaign to keep marriage just like it is in the Bible, except with a couple of differences (for instance, nobody will be required to shtup his widowed older sister-in-law to provide her with sons to hold onto her share of the estate, as happened to poor Onan in Genesis 38:8-10*). NOM is looking for
a community of artists, athletes, writers, beauty queens and other glamorous non-cognitive elites...
John Cole thinks they mean stupid people, as in elites whose glamor is not connected to their cognitive capacities, but when I read it I think of Zombies!
*This story is really more outrageous than I remembered it, featuring YHWH at his inexplicably ill-tempered Kafka-father worst. Jacob's son Judah has a son called Er whom he marries off to a girl named Tamar, but when the kid commits some unspecified wickedness the Lord has him killed. Then Judah assigns the second brother, Onan, to provide Tamar with children, but the latter has obvious reasons for not wanting his dead brother to have heirs, so whenever he "goes in" to her he "spills his seed upon the ground". Whereupon the Lord has him killed as well. There's a third brother, Shelah, but Judah is beginning to see a discouraging pattern here, so he tells her the boy is too young and sends her back to her father's house to wait until he's older. Some time—possibly years—later, after Judah's own wife has died, he's on a sheep-shearing visit to Timnah when Tamar plants herself on the road disguised as a prostitute and tricks him into impregnating her. Not having recognized her, when he hears that his daughter-in-law has gotten pregnant he's about to have her executed when she proves to him that he's the father ("OMG, that babe on the road to Timnah was you?") and he has to take her and her twin boys in, though he does not lie with her a second time. The first twin, Perez, is the ancestor of King David, whose married life was likewise not exactly on the Santorum-approved model.
Quote from a campaign commercial (audio here: and you have to listen, there are errors in the transcript) by then candidate, now governor, Susana Martínez of New Mexico:
Criminals take advantage of weak laws by giving driver's licenses to illegal immigrants. As governor, that will not happen.
There's a lot of linguistic weirdness packed into a small space here. A straight parse of the first sentence suggests that the giving of licenses is a kind of technique for taking advantage of those unidentified laws, not the goal of it. And since her aim is to get rid of the laws that allow the DMV (i.e., not criminals) to give licenses to illegal immigrants, that's a very peculiar way to describe them.
But licenses for illegal immigrants are popular in New Mexico, and the legislature has refused to dump them three times. My guess would be that her story is just a spurious "problem" like voter fraud; that there are fewer criminally-provided licenses in illegal immigrant hands—since they can get legal ones—than there are New Mexico teenagers with fake birthdates. The grammatical twisting, though, makes it just all the harder to understand what she's up to, you're too busy translating it to hear it critically.
But the best bit is the other sentence, with its illustration of that special psychopathy of the Republican in authority, who has never entirely made it out of that infantile phase where self and other blend into one. After the election, she seems to be saying, the governor won't exactly be her; the governor will simply be, and the situation will be different.
Best historical commentary that was never made: When Zhou Enlai said of the French Revolution that it was "too soon to say". It turns out, according to Chas Freeman, who was there, he was only talking about the upheavals of 1968. Freeman added that
the misinterpretation “was too delightful to set straight” at the time.
Which I totally understand. If I have a beef it's that he ended up telling the truth after all. It's still too soon!
I just learned from Wikipedia that the Latter-Day Saints hold the Garden of Eden to have been located in Jackson County, Missouri, right around Independence. After the Flood, when Noah's family ended up in Mesopotamia, they named the local rivers Tigris and Euphrates and whatnot to remind themselves of back home in America, as a later generation of Americans would name bits of the New World after Utica and Montevideo and Cairo.*
Title page of Basilius Besler's Hortus Eystettensis (1613). From the Chicago Botanic Garden website.
Also about the genius crank and sometime small-time rock idol David Rohl, who places it in eastern Iran, in the plain below the Caucasus near Tabriz, a more fragrant and evocative theory to this old helpless Orientalist (I normally manage to hold this disgracefully [jump]
*Which they obviously didn't, come to think of it; they named all these towns after places they had never been and of which they cannot have had any very precise ideas. I mean, not Plymouth or Boston perhaps, but Alexandria? Lebanon, PA?
colonial and old-fashioned attitude back, but the name "Tabriz" just makes me feel a little faint; if I can admit to it, is that a sign that it's not so bad?).
So, "West of Eden" for that part of the world where the departure from the Garden seems closest and most catastrophic...
Baghdad is hosting the Arab League summit for the first time since we blew it up, a sign of the return of Iraq to the community of nations, or partway; Juan Cole says Prime Minister al-Maliki is being snubbed by about half the members, led by Saudi Arabia and Qatar, who sent only ambassadors, not foreign ministers, as a sign of their displeasure that nothing is going to be done about Syria.
Iraq seems to have taken on the responsibility of representing Shi'a to the League, of Iran (which of course is not Arab) and the Alawites ruling Syria (which has been suspended), and maybe the Shi'ite revolutionaries of Bahrain as well—Maliki is said to want to call for discussions of the treatment of minorities in the Arab League states, Berbers, Kurds, Christians, and of course those Shi'ites. I wonder how old Wolfowitz and Kristol and the other "intellectuals" of the Bush years are enjoying the spectacle of Iraq as a proxy for Iran, made in the USA.
Meanwhile, the Times has painted a really spooky picture of Israel's Prime Minister and Defense Minister locked in a ghastly embrace, forming a tiny subcabinet for the planning of the attack on Iran and its imaginary nuclear weapons program, depressive Necessity and cheery Sufficiency nourishing their folie à deux in the opposition of the IDF, Mossad, and much of their own cabinet, not to mention the governments of virtually all their allies.
In my fantasy, the Israeli right is all located in some kind of gloomy Andalusian palace, in a play by some French, or more likely Belgian writer I haven't actually read (Montherlant? Ghelderode?)—a Montsalvat, where they mutter their way through the rituals of a religion none of them believe in and wait for doom: Ariel Sharon lies in a coffin surrounded by lit wax tapers, his gigantic body swelling and receding with his breath, stuck round with IVs delivering his food and drugs, Lieberman gibbers madly, hallucinating, and Netanyahu cowers in a dark corner from which Barak tries to tempt him with little treats: "Bibi, want a candy bar? Bibi, want to look at dirty pictures?" And Sara Netanyahu is there as well, screaming her way down enormous halls, freezing the blood of everyone who hears. As for Barak himself, "que diable est-il allé faire dans cette galère?"
And Haaretz notes that President Abbas, who had been expected to threaten to disband the Palestinian Authority with a letter that would
include an ultimatum on the part of the Palestinians, saying that if their demands were not met, they intended to turn to the international community, urge that Israel uphold international law, and demand that Israel take direct responsibility for the situation in the West Bank
has decided not to after all, after pleas from Obama.
And Shaul Mofaz beat Tzipi Livni in the Kadima primary: Haaretz, again, says
Livni was portrayed as an honest leader, who wasn't prepared to compromise and abandon her principles. But in the end, she paid a heavy price for this.
(This is in an editorial supporting Mofaz! As in, Vote for Shaul, he's dishonest enough!)
There is just too much going on this week for me to focus my thoughts into one coherent blog post.
Work has been a struggle this week...I'm kind of between projects, but also know that things are about to get borderline insane. So it feels a little like the calm before the storm. Today is also a 10-11 hour day for me, which makes concentration and motivation slightly difficult.
Wedding planning has been at a bit of a stand still. I know there are things we need to get done; but I'm not really sure where to start and I still have so many ideas, I just need to pin things down and make decisions. Seriously...I already discussed my indecisiveness in a previous post. Oh but hello Pinterest, and hello beautiful wedding blogs, I love your ideas. But we're 6 months out (as of today!) and I just need to stop looking and get down to business.
Oh and seriously, since when has it been OK to invite yourself to someone elses wedding? Or assume you're invited and make comments about coming to the bride? And how in the world is the bride supposed to respond to that without pissing people off?
Then there is moving. Quite possibly my least favorite thing to do. Ever. We get our keys in about a week and a half. We purchased a couch and love seat last night. But we have nothing packed. And we're still planning on sleeping on a mattress on the floor until we can afford a nicer mattress. I'm so unbelievably excited to just get into our own place, but the stresses of a move are never enjoyable.
On a more positive note- round 2 of engagement pics this weekend. The weather is looking fabulous. Annnd I get to have one of the best bloody marys in the world on Saturday when we head back down to Athens :)
That old Bain Capital (Wall Street Journal, via ThinkProgress) when Willard Mitt Romney was running it was such a sweet place to work, always thinking of the employees—especially the CEO. When they acquired a new company they'd issue special "high-risk" shares that you could dump in your IRA, where they would magically increase to as much as almost 600 times their original value, with any and all taxes deferred as the funds grew or as you reinvested them somewhere else:
So Willard himself in this way amassed an IRA of $100 million, which is some basket of eggs. But doesn't every silver lining have a cloud? Now if he wants to withdraw that money it counts as income, not capital gains, and he'll have to pay a top marginal tax rate of 35%—just like ordinary people have to do with their money! Talk about adding insult to injury, this is doing it at compound rates!
Just sickening what a job creator has to go through these days, isn't it? No wonder he's so anxious to reform the system.
ROMNEY: Well, if they are 45 years old and they show up and say I want insurance because I have heart disease, it’s like, ‘Hey guys. We can’t play the game like that. You’ve got to get insurance when you are well and then if you get ill, you are going to be covered. [...]
Hey, that's the individual mandate argument, isn't it? Well, no, it can't be, because Romney's against the individual mandate, except in Massachusetts, of course, where it's the coolest thing since sliced bread. No, this is the argument against insuring persons with pre-existing conditions. This is why they're against the individual mandate: because under that system if you don't get insurance you just have to pay a fine, whereas this way if you don't get insurance it kills you. It's the American way!
There was the strangest little panic swarm of emoprogs—I think—over at Kos this morning, around an extremely well-made guide by Armando to today's Supreme Court arguments. They all seemed to have just heard for the first time about the Republican theory of the individual health insurance mandate being unconstitutional because what part of the interstate commerce clause says government can force everybody to buy stuff? and to have been totally taken in by it, thunderstruck and terrorized.
Schrödingers Katze. By Niklas Pix Bodin, at Kunstnet.
It could be one of those beyond-left-and-right things I'm too old to understand, where there's some similarity that escapes me between bombing Afghan wedding parties and providing universal health insurance; but then they seemed to have a pretty weak understanding of the Constitution—one of them wrote,
Bill of RightsWas not part of original Constitution. Any understanding of Congressional limits has to apply pre-amendment
under the apparent impression that the amendments were just added to confuse us; and another,
There has to be a rational basis for all laws. Unless a state or the federal government can articulate one, the law is unconstitutional
which is a remarkable theory indeed.
Anyhow, it struck me that this is another of those crypto-Heisenbergian cases where we may be observing things faster than they are actually happening, in ways that could tend to have unpredictable effects on the way they turn out.
Indeed, as the day wore on, it was fun to watch the interpretations bend, starting with this morning's inexplicable Times fluff piece on Randy Barnett, the originator of the most idiotic argument against the mandate (that Congress has no power to "regulate inactivity") biasing the punters in his favor (they're thinking, if Cheryl Gay Stolberg and Charlie Savage both take him seriously, won't Kennedy take him seriously too?). Through the afternoon, the pro-mandaters were sinking gradually into despair, as Kennedy seemed to vibrate, so to speak, at a Barnettian frequency, but by the end of the day Think Progress had found a classically sour liberal compromise between hope and rage: Kennedy was going to vote for the mandate, they figured, but for completely wrong reasons.
But the Times is still dubious as bedtime approaches, and wonders whether there's a plan B. My plan B is, we know it's constitutional for the government to force people to buy insurance if it's government-run insurance (unemployment, workmen's comp, Medicare, social security), so if Justice Kennedy really wants us to go with the German plan, that's fine with me. Bend that observer's paradox my way!
Welcome to your New York City Education Department, where they are developing what you might call political correctness for clowns:
In an effort to eliminate potential "unpleasant emotions" among students, the New York Department of Education has placed a ban on mentions of "birthdays," "dinosaurs," "Halloween," and "dancing," in city-issued tests, the New York Post reports. (h/t Huffington Post)
This isn't your idea of eliminating test bias in favor of well-off white students, alas. This is just idiocy;
the mandate is meant to curb fear that references to those topics might stir controversy among students. Dinosaurs, officials said, could bring up evolution, Halloween could suggest paganism, and birthdays might create animosity among students who are Jehovah's witnesses, since they don't celebrate them.
CBS New York reports the word "poverty" is also not allowed, as "words that suggest wealth" might cause some students to feel excluded.... The department is also banning mentions of "divorce" and "disease," in case students have loved ones who are separated or suffering from an illness. "Slavery" is also flagged and "terrorism" is considered too scary.
And in tertiary education news, remember the ransom extracted from college students by the House Republicans last summer in return for allowing the national debt ceiling to be raised? Eliminating subsidized loans for graduate and professional students, and eliminating incentive programs for graduates to pay their loans back on time?
Remember that they decided to change the calculation of eligibility for Pell grants so you only qualify for maximum aid with a family income of $23,000 or less, instead of $32,000? And so on up the line, disqualifying hundreds of thousands of students altogether? A-and a cap of 12 semesters per student? Remember the fixed rate on Stafford loans, 3.4% since 2007, is scheduled to go back up to 6.8% on July 1 if Congress doesn't do something.
All these disastrous changes are effective in July (h/t jonnym at Kos). Obama has always had great ideas for federal student loan programs, but they mostly depend on a congress that doesn't respond; meanwhile, though, Bloomberg informs us today that
With $67 billion of student loans in default, the Education Department is turning to an army of private debt-collection companies to put the squeeze on borrowers. Working on commissions that totaled about $1 billion last year, these government contractors face growing complaints that they are violating federal laws by insisting on stiff payments, even when borrowers’ incomes make them eligible for leniency.
This information needs to spread around. I can't believe Obama and most House members of both parties want to go into the election without doing something about this, but I guess the Tea Party caucus, now apparently the Santorum caucus, represents voters who don't think people ought to go to college.
Remember this?
Back when I was obsessed with John Boehner, and his inability to do his job, I meant to say but never did that what Obama really needs to do is find some procedural way of not needing him—like naming a Republican prime minister who could call on support for some modest legislation from Democrats and those Republicans susceptible to the idea of being sane—I bet Eric Cantor would gladly take the job, he's greedy and dishonest enough, but I'm imagining somebody kind of like Boehner but capable of keeping his word, one of those old Rotary Club–type Republicans, lovers of earmarks and little constituent favors and whiskey, who still believe in voters, conservative or whatever. You mean there aren't any?
For any of you who have gotten married in the Catholic church, you have had to go through some kind of marriage prep. From what I have heard, there are many different ways to do this- from multiple meetings with the priest, to full weekend gatherings, to a number of small meetings with married couples. Ours was an 11 hour day, where we heard from 9 different married couples about all different aspects of marriage.
Going in to this day, I'm not going to lie and say that I was looking forward to it. Even though I had heard positive things about different Pre Cana experiences, I just knew that it was going to be an incredibly long day. Spending 11 hours doing ANYthing is difficult.
Arriving at 8:30 in the morning was a little rough. We may have been up too late/drinking a little too much the night before due to the Ohio-UNC basketball game, in which my beloved Bobcat's unfortunately lost in overtime. But damn that was a good game!
Back to Saturday though. It was definitely an early morning, but the day went by quickly. The day was broken down into multiple sections- including finances, every day life, and defining who you are as an individual and as a couple. There were also the super uncomfortable ones...sex and sexuality and natural family planning (not bashing it in any way...just not the right decision for us!). For each section, the married couple would talk for about 20 minutes. We then had 10 minutes to reflect on the topic on our own, and another 15 to discuss with our partner.
So we've been dating a little over 5 years, talking marriage (though maybe not super seriously...but still knowing that it was going to happen at some point) for the last 2. So we have talked...about a lot of things. The day brought up some new points for discussion, but for the most part, we had already discussed these things. And it honestly made me feel even better about our relationship to know that we had already had open discussions about our goals for life and how many kids we want and what we plan to do with our finance- before we were prompted to do so at Pre Cana.
It was a long day. But we both came out it feeling confident about our relationship and our upcoming marriage. We also came out of it stuffed! Our Pre Cana day was held at Holy Rosary Church, located in Little Italy. Dinner consisted of lots of Italian food, some good wine and a giant heart shaped chocolate cake- all served to us by the married couples who had been leading us throughout the day.
Our cute little candlelit dinner for 2, which a much appreciated glass of wine after a long day!
Personal heart shaped cake with raspberries and whipped cream..yummm
Last week Richard Cohen retold a quaint story in the Washington Post: Rabbi saves x many Jewish lives from a tyrant by promising the tyrant that if he leaves these Jews alone the rabbi will teach the tyrant's dog to talk, within a year. Rebbitzin reproaches him: "How are you going to do that? We'll all be killed!" Rabbi replies, "Well, a lot of things could happen in a year; the tyrant could die, or I could die... Or maybe the dog could start talking?"
Dog that looks like a lawyer. From freethinker.co.uk, and you should check out the link because there's a story attached to it.
Now, you will note that the rabbi in this story does not propose to flush out the tyrant's underground Jew-murdering facilities with GBU-28s, or anything like that. But this is [jump] the use to which Cohen puts the story. He's talking about Iran's nuclear program, and he says attacking Iran is exactly the same thing the old rabbi is up to, "playing for time". Just like the IDF did with Iraq when they destroyed the Osirak reactor back in 1981.
Go see Media Matters for the essential poop on how the Osirak bombing did not delay Iraq's work on building a nuclear weapon and indeed probably stimulated it; how a strike on Iran would likewise be the most certain way of making sure that Iran will build one; and how Israelis themselves overwhelmingly oppose the idea of such a strike.*
What I'm pissed off about is that this apparently cute little parable means exactly the opposite of what Cohen is trying to make it mean, and like a lot of cute little parables it goes pretty deep. In fact damn if I don't feel a sermon coming on... Let's back up a little bit...
*And Atrios for the original moment of outrage that got me here.
Something I've been thinking about a long time (and by no means alone, lots of people have the same idea) is how the best bet for Palestinians if they are ever to achieve a state is to go the full Gandhi, a campaign of nonviolent resistance like the First Intifada only more by the book, so to speak, not just because of the moral satisfaction but still more because of the practical effectiveness: it's the technique that is by far most likely to get them what they want. (What doomed the First Intifada was the violence not so much of Arab kids throwing stones at IDF troops as between Arabs, fomented by the Israeli policy of nurturing Islamist organizations as a "counterweight" to the then sort of Marxist PLO.)
But then what advice would you give, in turn, to Israel in the Palestinian question? Nonviolence belongs to the weak: it's speaking truth (Sanskrit satyagraha means something like "obstinacy in truth") to power. You don't imagine the Knesset leadership marching to Ramallah and sitting down, cross-legged, on the sidewalk outside PLO headquarters. Acting all humble would not hide the fact that they have all the money, and the army, and a sure veto from their uncle in the Security Council, and the 400-odd nukes—it would just make them look silly.
(When Sharon marched his thugs up Temple Mount in 2000 the meaning was unmistakeably violent, even though he said, "What provocation is there when Jews come to visit the place with a message of peace? I am sorry about the injured, but it is the right of Jews in Israel to visit the Temple Mount." Of course the Guardian pointed out at the time that the only enemy he was really thinking about was Binyamin Netanyahu, then girding himself up for a fight over the Likud leadership as the Labor government lay moribund, and his chosen weapon was TV time and sound bites.)
Nevertheless, it's not as if "obstinacy in truth" is a concept in principle foreign to Jews, you know. The Israeli government could practice non-retaliation:
No one...is so bad as to continue "taking advantage indefinitely of the opening given to him and his own impunity", and even those mad with rage have been known to stop "as if thunderstruck when you do not retaliate". The reason for behaving this way, for accepting self-suffering rather than retaliating, is that "your enemy is a man". In fights the enemy is generally dehumanised, is seen as a beast or monster, and "that is the moment and not now when you must stick to the hard truth that he is a man a man like yourself", and "if he is a man, the spirit of justice dwells in him as it dwells in you". (From Thomas Weber on Interpersonal Conflict at mkgandhi.org)
This does not mean giving up the right to self-defense: if we are attacked, or if we see someone else being attacked, we are permitted and indeed obliged to try to stop it. It means that if we fail to stop an attack we don't turn around and attack back.
I'm thinking here, obviously, of a way of dealing with the Palestinians in the first place: of not trying to extract a punishment for a suicide bombing (isn't that horrible enough for the bomber's family already?—No matter what they say about the glory of martyrdom and blah blah blah), still less a rocket from Gaza or southern Lebanon whose trajectory is more or less random. And again, I'm not saying anything original: there are plenty of people who want to apply a nonviolent approach to this problem, right now.
But that rabbi story seems to me to be about nonviolence in a way that applies particularly to the Iran situation: and about Lanza del Vasto's strictures
against using..."extreme, exceptional, and overpowering" imaginary circumstances for formulating general rules or drawing conclusions from them concerning legitimacy of action. The striving for nonviolence, instead of planning for such possible eventualities, accepts that if they did occur they would be still taken care of somehow (just as if they had been planned for), while during the rest of one's life other almost daily conflicts could be solved in more cooperative ways. (Weber, as above)
The rabbi's approach is neither to weep and wail over his impotence in the face of hatred, nor to insist on mounting a violent resistance that is certain to fail. He doesn't allow his conduct to be guided by the expectation of such extreme circumstances. He begins by "disarming" his oppressor with his unpredictable proposal, and then moves on to acceptance that the disaster may have been averted only for a limited time—with the confidence that it has been averted for now.
And Iran? The rabbi says, "And so you want to start a nuclear power industry? Excellent! Figured out the oil's not going to last forever. And nuclear medicine is a life saver. And you've decided not to build one of those bombs? Good move, they're nothing but trouble, believe me. If you need to borrow one, give me a call, maybe we can work something out..." I'm not trying to be flip, this stuff really works...
If you're interested in the situation of the US education system, you need to read this: "a test you need to fail". It's short and sweet (really sweet) and says more in a few paragraphs than a dozen academic studies.
In Positive Economic Sign, Republicans Starting to Say Obama Wasn’t Born in US Again I often confuse Andy Borowitz with the Onion and think once I've seen the headline I have the whole joke already, but this is not necessarily the case: this one just kept getting deeper.
Also, if you care about Chinese workers who make Apple products and Mike Daisey who reported on them for This American Life and then had to withdraw the report and Ira Glass sort of went Oprah on him on the air and... No, it actually doesn't matter whether you care about all of them as long as you've just heard about them, and you can even be fairly vague about that, then you should read the text of an interview between Ira Glass and Rumproast's Gil Mann that won't be going on the radio. (No, because it's imaginary.)
MosesZD in comments at Balloon Juice adverted to a 2007 story about the economist Rick Nevin, who argued on the basis of some incredibly persuasive data that the ups and downs of crime rates in the United States have had nothing to do with Rudolph Giuliani--it's all about lead poisoning, with the declining crime of the last couple of decades connected to the elimination of lead from automobile fuel. A more recent paper updating the data to nearly the present and the new frontier of lead abatement by replacing windows is here.
Schoolhouse Rocked by Avenger41. Fan art by Videl Gohan.
Something else I called attention to a while back (in mid-January) is the curious relationship developing on the US right between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and our ancient Know-Nothing community, which traditionally identified the Pope as Antichrist and Rome as the Scarlet Woman who rides that seven-headed beast in the book of Revelation.
Now the Times religion columnist, Samuel G. Freedman, has caught onto the same thing, with a very interesting nuance that has apparently been showing up in the primaries: while Evangelical Protestants have adopted Rick "Sanctum" Santorum as the standard-bearer of "religious" conservatism, Catholics haven't—Catholic Republicans are mostly voting for Romney. Freedman comments, primly,
Through a critical reading of the data, Mr. Santorum’s base of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics could be seen by cynics as a coalition of zealots, held together by intolerance. By another way of thinking, however, his candidacy offers proof of a growing tolerance on the part of evangelical Christians, a willingness to shed ancestral religious prejudices.
And then the Catholics who won't vote for Santorum are more tolerant still? (They are voting for somebody who believes God has plural wives, except, of course, for the Democrats, whose tolerance is not under discussion.) Forgive me, but if you think it's a big deal that evangelicals now recognize white Catholics as white people, I realize that wasn't always true, but color me less than impressed—I think Freedman's cynic idea works better.
Today's visitation from the things that go bump in Thomas P. Friedman's night is our old friend the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, whose officials are telling the Times that they have been telling their daughter organization Hamas to moderate its stances a bit and try to find more common ground with the atheist Fatah, by way of forming more of a common front in negotiations with Israel.
Brotherhood officials say that they are pulling back from their previous embrace of Hamas and its commitment to armed struggle against Israel in order to open new channels of communications with Fatah, which the Brotherhood had [jump] previously denounced for collaborating with Israel and accused of selling out the Palestinian cause. Brotherhood leaders argue that if they persuade the Palestinians to work together with a newly assertive Egypt, they will have far more success forcing Israel to bargain in earnest over the terms of statehood.
They had already—long since, at this point—agreed that as part of Egypt's government they would honor the 1979 Egyptian peace treaty with Israel, now they are moving right into the Israel-Palestine peace process. The Times notes that the development
may unnerve Israel, because it is a move away from former President Hosni Mubarak’s exclusive support for the Western-backed Fatah movement and its commitment to the peace process. Israeli officials have said they will not negotiate with a Palestinian government that includes Hamas.
I'd say it may unnerve PM Netanyahu for another reason—bringing closer the day when he'll have no excuses left for saying no.
We all like wind and solar, but you can’t drive a car with a windmill on it.
Actually gas is just as bad. We tried putting an oil refinery on top of our old car, but then there was no room for the dog. How about ammonia, though?
Bishop trivia: The Bishop of Vienna from 1541 to 1552 was named Friedrich Nausea, a latinization of the original German family name, Grau (from grauen, to inspire dread, and cognate with the root of English gruesome). In 1551 he went to the Council of Trent, where he stood proudly for the congregation taking Holy Communion in both kinds and revocation of the rule of priestly celibacy, but died there without making it home. In 1897, they named a street in the Ottakring after him, Nauseagasse.
I can't blame you if you don't remember, but a couple of weeks ago I said something about how a movie about James O'Keeffe would have to be one of those teen implausible-schemes-for-getting-laid farces? This turns out to be so much truer than I could possibly have imagined! Down to the date-rape drugs and purloined panties to show the guys!
Click the link to get the full story, but I want to note that in his suit to prevent the publication of the emails documenting his antics, he alleges
The Information further includes proprietary ideas for future video work and e-mail communication of a highly private nature including those concerning Plaintiffs romantic relationships. Plaintiffs statements on Twitter claim that the material is so provocative that it caused Andrew Breitbart to suffer a fatal heart attack.
Attaturk got the scoop on this yesterday, the swine. My version has more emotional depth, though.
Our NYPD at work, insinuating itself into the company of some suspiciously pious college students with suspiciously healthy ideas of what to do for fun. From documents of the undercover surveillance of area Muslims put on line by AP, via ThinkProgress, the adventures of one intrepid agent.
Fiendish, those Muslims, aren't they, orchestrating and stuff?
I love how the agent's training seems to have made him aware that the number of times per day you pray is significant in Islam, but not what the actual number is.
I hadn't realized that Syrians in opposition to the murderous government are still bravely coming out for regularly scheduled Friday demonstrations, today's under the slogan "Damascus, here we come."
Protests in Tripoli, Syria. Photo by AFP from Dawn.
The protests are going on all over the country, in spite of snipers and helicopter buzzing, in the most dangerous and already beat up places as well as Damascus itself, where something like a thousand people are doing something like Occupying the capital tonight, according to the BBC, after marching up King Faisal Street chanting, "Peaceful, peaceful, God, Syria, Freedom."
The situation seems horrible beyond horrible. The number killed has now mounted up to 9100, as if Assad were directly competing against his father (the famous 10,000 butchered at Hama in 1982) for a record of some kind. I can't imagine anything from the outside that could help, further sanctions or (illegal) military action, although the kinds of support provided across the border from Turkey are surely a lot better than nothing. Assad yesterday said he would consider dumping the 1963 emergency laws and will put some of the thugs from Deraa, where the movement began just a year ago, on trial; and is said to have ordered the freeing of everyone arrested during the "recent events", whatever "recent" means, but that's just in the BBC as far as I can tell. The protestors are still getting arrested and shot at, and serious warfighting is going on as well.
The image above caught my eye as something that might startle Thomas P. Friedman: the Israeli and Iranian flags as the Syrian rebellion sees them, to be burned as practically interchangeable symbols of oppression.
So the Fiance and I have both lived with roommates ever since we left home (minus our sophomore year of college when he lived in a tiny single dorm room, but that doesn't really count). We both have lived in multiple houses/apartments with a number of different roommates- I have had 9 different roommates since my freshman year of college.
Needless to say, neither of us have ANY furniture. Ok, well maybe not ANY. He has a mattress and box spring, that he bought from someone in college (after she had used it for 4 years already...) that he now sleeps on...on the floor. I have a pink recliner (which we WILL keep because it is the most comfortable thing ever), a maroon love seat and a blue gliding chair with a footrest. Oh and a twin bed with the frame I have had for the last 20 some years. My dresser is tiny. His is also tiny- and broken. Such a well matched set!
And tonight we are signing a lease for a 2 bedroom apartment with a large living room and dining room. And a balcony. That isn't really important in this conversation. I'm just really excited about having a balcony! So we need furniture. A lot of furniture in 3 weeks.
Our first stop on the furniture shopping trip was Fish Furniture. We had bought a Groupon for $200 a few months ago, in preparation of our need for furniture. We probably should have checked the prices at Fish Furniture before we bought the Groupon though...$200 doesn't go very far in that store! We have found a table with 4 chairs and a bench that are within our price range though. (sorry, I'm still getting used to this whole blogging thing and have no pictures).
Next stop was Value City Furniture- which after the prices in Fish Furniture made us feel like we could afford everything! Our top runner was this couch (I think...):
With either a matching love seat or over sized chair
So we're heading back to Value City this week...with the hope that we can get a good deal (no interest for 36 months? Seems too good to be true). A couch, loveseat or chair, bed including a frame- no more mattress on the floor, dining room table, TV stand and possibly a coffee table. Guess it's time to grow up and start making adult decisions!! No, we are NOT buying a car bed!
Thers found a gorgeous case in a column by Thomas Sowell which starts off from an old newspaper column reminding him how good the persons of color had it back in Ronald Reagan's day:
One of the front-page headlines said: "White-Black Disparity in Income Narrowed in 80's, Census Shows."
The 1980s? Wasn't that the years of the Reagan administration, the "decade of greed," the era of "neglect" of the poor and minorities, if not "covert racism"? [jump]
More recently, during the administration of America's first black president, a 2011 report from the Pew Research Center has the headline, "Wealth Gaps Rise to Record Highs Between Whites, Blacks and Hispanics."
While the median net worth of whites was ten times the median net worth of blacks in 1988, the last year of the Reagan administration, the ratio was nineteen to one in 2009, the first year of the Obama administration.
Wow, so Obama has made inequality almost twice as... Hey, wait a minute! There's something tricky going on here!
What it is is another case of retroactionary thinking, possibly the most complex we've encountered so far. Two different trajectories are compared: one captured going forward in time, the Reagan administration from 1981 to 1988, and the other going backward, the Obama administration from 2016 to 2009. At the end of Reagan's sunny morning-in-America march ahead, the nation is looking pretty good, right? While by the time Obama has clawed his way back from the brilliant Obama future of five years from now, where every valley shall be exalted and all the hills made low, if you know what I mean, to the scary times of three years ago—well, you remember.
But hang on, you protest—how can you compare a time-forward model of a presidency with a time-backward one? Isn't that putting together apples and oranges, or worse, apples and anti-apples? And I have to admit I don't really know.
One possibility would be that projecting a sequence of events into backward time is a way of normalizing an otherwise incoherent body of data. For instance, if you look at the Obama administration in forward time, it doesn't make any sense in terms of standard Republican theory: an evil Mau-Mau vegetable-eating president and decreasing inequality, increasing economic activity, Jeremy Lin, and so on. You might as well say George W. was responsible for the situation in 2009, for Christ's sake. But simply switch that one parameter—the time dimension—and everything falls neatly into place.
When I first started working on this concept, back in December, I meant it as a kind of pawky nerd joke. But now we've been seeing so much of it, I'm beginning to believe there must be something to it. On the kind of level we're starting to reach now, I mean, beyond Merlin and time travel and backwards film to something more realistic—I'm picturing a kind of neural-cognitive deficit where the patient has trouble distinguishing the conceptual time-direction between antecedent and consequent. The man who mistook his wife for a fiancée, as it were, and conversely, which is where it would get awkward. Update: I forgot to add: R. Porrofatto in comments at Whiskey Fire (link above) noted that the headline Sowell began his column with, from the Times of 24 July 1992, was misleading in any case: the article itself made it clear that there was hardly any change in the disparity between black and white families' financial circumstances during the Reagan years. As for the Obama administration, I'd be guessing there aren't any good numbers yet, and we'll just have to wait before we judge. Unless one of those Republicans heading back from the future wants to say something.
Since becoming engaged, I have become completely mildly obsessed with reading wedding blogs. This has been a bit of a double edged sword. While I have found some wonderful inspiration and wonderful people to bounce ideas off of, I have also found myself being more judgmental. And I mean judgmental of myself and our wedding.
Which is stupid. I love everything about our wedding. I am beyond excited for that day when I finally get to marry my best friend. All our friends and family will be there to support us on this day and to celebrate what I'm sure will be one of the best days of my life. We're having a hog roast...which is awesome. We're having a live band...who are awesome. I'll drink wine out of a plastic cup, he'll drink beer out of a bottle. There will be wildflowers and mason jars and sun flowers and burlap and it will all be, yep you guessed it, awesome.
So I need to take off my judgy pants and get over it. Our wedding isn't in the barn of my dreams- it's in a huge reception hall...that quite frankly is kind of ugly. We can't invite everyone to the ceremony because we're having it in a tiny church. On the other side of that, our guest list has ballooned out of control- and I feel horrible that we can't invite everyone to the ceremony. And I read these wedding blogs and drool over gorgeous photos and cry at amazing wedding videos and swoon over stunning invitation suites and details.
But none of it matters. I look down at my left hand, at the sparkle of my engagement ring and I get butterflies and excited all over again. I think about the man I'm going to marry and the feeling I got when he asked me to be his wife. And I realize that I just don't care that we won't have the most stylish, glamorous, vintage-chic wedding out there. It will be us. And it will be awesome.
I don't normally have a reason to mention television here, or even to watch it, but there is a lunatic soap opera that I sort of watch with my as yet somewhat teenaged daughter called Pretty Little Liars, featuring four high school girls dressed like society matrons (the skinny kind) who have been persecuted for some time by cell phone messages and other communications signed A, the pseudonym masking the identity of a cruel and demented supervillain who seems [jump]
to know every detail of their lives at all times and uses various kinds of blackmail to get them into different near-catastrophic situations from week to week.
Anyway there was an interesting case of language abuse in last night's episode, the season's dénouement and finale, when A was at last unmasked—she turned out to be Hannah's former best friend Mona, which I spotted at least three weeks ago, although my daughter pooh-poohed it as too obvious. The explanation for Mona's remarkable abilities was so bizarre I had to go online to see if I had really heard it correctly, and it seems I had; I quote Jacob Clifton at Television Without Pity:
the reason A seemed to be omniscient and omnipresent is because Mona is a mental genius whose adrenaline spikes were keeping her in a constant state of hyperreality.
YEAH! That's why! I am not making that up! The reason A is magic, the show explains, is because A IS LITERALLY MAGIC. I love that so freaking much. It puts me -- this show -- it puts me into a state of hyperreality. I can see you right now as you are reading this! I hid a doll under your bed that has instructions and a key to open a secret snowglobe in a storage locker off the interstate! I know what you did last Saturday!
Reading the lines at conman speed, they had unloaded on millions of fans what must be the worst mystery resolution since The Murders in the Rue Morgue. In fact far worse than that one, since it violated not only all the laws of biology but physics as well.
But there's more! Mona's secret supervillain lair is located in a dark and customer-free motel run by a shy and stammering but clearly psychopathic amateur taxidermist, where I began to realize that there are a lot of—umm—cultural appropriations in this script. Jacob caught the Hitchcock movie here (Hannah even took a shower, spied on by a menacing silhouette, though she did in fact survive), but missed, I think, a name in the motel's register: Vivian Darkbloom (this was, in fact, the fake-ID alias used by the murdered mean-girl Alison, but I either missed that episode or failed to hear). Which reminds me that I've definitely seen one of the girls carrying a copy of Lolita more than once, but can't remember which one, suggesting that it might have been two different girls.
And then where do you think that "hyperreality" came from—Star Trek? It comes from another text on the cusp between modern and postmodern ("a way of characterizing what our consciousness defines as 'real' in a world where a multitude of media can radically shape and filter an original event or experience", says Wikipedia), essays à la manière de Roland Barthes by the clown prince of semiotics, Umberto Eco, known in English as Travels in Hyperreality (1986).
So what's going on here? Do you suppose a good PhD candidate working her way through the scripts of Pretty Little Liars would find an intricate web of references to this-and-that central literary moment making the scripts themselves a monument of poststructural ludic intertextuality? Or is it just a bunch of hypermedicated Brown and Williams graduates throwing fragments of what they remember from comp. lit. like spaghetti against the wall to see if it sticks? Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I submit—both?
Hyperreal New York, in Las Vegas. From a really great example (click!) at disinfo.com.
