This week, J Street is expected to land one of its biggest names when it announces its endorsement of Senator Dianne Feinstein, the veteran Democrat from California who sits on the Senate intelligence committee, an important forum for Middle East intelligence. With Ms. Feinstein’s acceptance of J Street’s endorsement, the group’s PAC plans to raise at least $100,000 in support of her re-election bid, the officials said.
Founded in 2008, J Street’s political action committee is on pace to set a fund-raising record this election. By November, it expects to raise nearly $2 million in support of more than 60 [all Democratic] Congressional candidates whose views on Israel are aligned with its own, said Alexandra Stanton, a co-chairwoman of the PAC, and she said it had tapped into pro-Israel donors who had no real political outlet before now.
J Street's passionate moderation on Israel and the two-state solution does not exactly reflect my views, which are more at the Peace Now end of the spectrum, but it's heartening that any kind of non-hawk standpoint is rising at this time when the discourse in Israel itself seems to have gotten so badly lost.
Three day weekends are the best. Offers plenty of time to spend with family and friends. And this one was fabulous!
Friday, Doug and I took it easy- and spent the evening with some of his co-workers- playing cornhole and video games. Saturday morning, I headed down to the HC to spend time with my mom for the day and then made our way to Wooster for a campout/cookout with a group we used to go to church camp with. The whole group had fallen out of touch for about 5-6 years, and last year we decided to plan a get together. It was the best decision ever and in the last year, we have hung out a few times.
Love these girls!! The three of us have been friends for almost 10 years (though I have known the girl in the middle longer)
I headed back to Cleveland on Sunday morning after a long evening of drinking and chatting. And basically spent the next two days thinking my niece was the cutest baby in the world. She loves being outside...and it's even cuter now that she can be out in all of her adorable summer outfits.
Helping with the yardwork
Hanging out at the beach with grandma
Shoving ice cream into her face
Yep, pretty damn cute.
This is only a 2 day work week...and we're leaving Thursday morning to head to New Jersey/New York for a mini vacation and a wedding! Should be a fun weekend :)
Now we are told that the men who fought there must watch quietly while American lives are lost so that we can exercise the incredible arrogance of Vietnamizing the Vietnamese.
Each day to facilitate the process by which the United States washes her hands of Vietnam someone has to give up his life so that the United States doesn't have to admit something that the entire world already knows, so that we can't say that we have made a mistake.
Someone has to die so that President Nixon won't be, and these are his words, 'the first President to lose a war.'
We are asking Americans to think about that because how do you ask a man to be the last man to die in Vietnam? How do you ask a man to be the last man to die for a mistake?... (John Kerry, in testimony before the US Senate Foreign Relations Committee, April 23, 1971)
The colonialist faction of the conservative movement—the what?—Well, Dinesh D'Souza and crypto-Belgian wannabe terrorist Newt Gingrich charge Barack Obama with being an "anti-colonialist" as if that were a particularly bad thing, so I guess their own stance must be pro-colonialist. Anyway they're back in the news, as D'Souza's 2010 Regnery best-seller The Roots of Obama's Rage gets filmed, in a production by Gerald Molen and with some financing from Joe Ricketts (the one who runs one campaign to cut wasteful government spending and another to raise $200 million in state-backed bonds for renovations to his family's own Wrigley Field, at the same time), for release this summer. Go ahead and watch the trailer:
You wouldn't necessarily think, in the second decade of the 20th century, that colonialism was going to be a very high-stakes issue. Colonialism where? Nobody ever refers to the occupied West Bank as a colony because HOLOCAUST! IRAN! SHUT UP! so are we talking about American Samoa? Gibraltar? the Galápagos? Alberta? That's what made it funny in the first place, like Ron Paul's fixation on the gold standard—Republicans earnestly worrying about the concepts of Captain Mahan and Colonel Roosevelt, as if they were still waxing their mustaches and knocking back oysters three dozen at a go.
What I wasn't thinking of was the mysterious ability of the Republican mind to conceptualize an inverse time, from future through present to past, in what I have called the retroactionary tendency. Republicans can imagine the Obama of 2016, proposing himself as a socialist dictator of the world, inveighing against colonialism, as the direct cause of the independence of Kenya in 1963. Worse yet, that independence, continuing backwards, leads inexorably to the horrors of the Mau Mau insurgency of 1952-59, etc., etc.
By the same token, they themselves are the optimists, looking forward to the conquest of the Philippines and Hawaii! It's morning in America, if the sun rises in the west!
While we're on the education subject, TPM invites us to note that President Obama has been making a campaign theme of the idea that Willard Mitt Romney wants to expand public school class sizes without apparently realizing that his own education secretary, Arne Duncan, takes a position that's hardly different from Romney's.
It isn't the first time he is attacking his own education policy, either. Remember what he had to say about high-stakes testing a little over a year ago at a Univision-sponsored town hall: [jump]
Too often what we've been doing is using these tests to punish students or to, in some cases, punish schools. And so what we've said is let's find a test that everybody agrees makes sense; let's apply it in a less pressured-packed atmosphere; let's figure out whether we have to do it every year or whether we can do it maybe every several years; and let's make sure that that's not the only way we're judging whether a school is doing well....
one thing I never want to see happen is schools that are just teaching to the test. Because then you're not learning about the world; you're not learning about different cultures, you're not learning about science, you're not learning about math. All you're learning about is how to fill out a little bubble on an exam and the little tricks that you need to do in order to take a test. And that's not going to make education interesting to you. And young people do well in stuff that they're interested in. They're not going to do as well if it's boring.
Sounds pretty sincere, doesn't it? I certainly couldn't put it any better. And yet "No Child Left Behind" with its absolute reliance on test scores remains in effect, and the "Race to the Top" doubles down on it. Yo, Duncan, why aren't you telling the president the truth about your evil plans?
No, I don't think Obama is the mythical little-father tsar who would be running out to protect us if he knew what is being done to our kids in his name. I'd really expect him to have a very clear idea of what his own educational policy is. But in that case doesn't the whole thing start to seem a little downright spooky?
Do you suppose it's another case of evolution—of a gap between the intentions of Citizen Barack and the abilities of Chairman Obama, being narrowed by tugboat Obama out there as he maneuvers the enormous ship of state around the harbor?
Actually I prefer an earlier favored metaphor, not so much of Obama as of us watching him, in the pseudo-Heisenbergian picture of how our observation can affect what he does. That is, we can observe his position at any precise point in spacetime, but this precludes observing in what direction and at what velocity he is moving; or we can observe the direction and velocity, but this prevents us from knowing his position. As before, the upshot is that the choice we make as observers—position or trajectory, snapshot or movie—has a direct bearing on the experimental outcome.
And it seems pretty generally to be the same effect every time. If we focus on position—where does he stand, right now?—it is always a disappointment: he doesn't believe the same things as we believe, or he says he believes them but his behavior falls short. But if we stretch out the observation frame as wide as we can, so that we have only the most approximate idea of where he is at a given moment but a precise sense of what points he's between and how long it will take him to cover the distance—it turns out to have been worth the wait: here's your Affordable Care Act, not exactly what you ordered but pretty nifty in its own way, and alterable should you see the need; here's the end to war in Iraq and Afghanistan, not very pretty but what did you expect; and so on.
I'm going to keep betting on Obama on this account; in particular, I'm betting that his views on education are going to influence his education policy in the end, however remote it may seem at the moment.
Schrödinger's cat is alive, and contemplating vengeance. From Lega Nerd.
Update 5/30 Yes, indeed. It's not a huge thing, but New York State just got its waiver from the most brutally punitive provision of NCLB, the one that requires every student to be "proficient" in math and English (as measured by the usual testing) in 2014, along with seven other states in this batch, bringing the total waived states to 19 so far this year.
The waivers, like the Race to the Top competition for federal money, have allowed the Obama administration to enact parts of its education agenda without sweeping legislation, prompting some conservatives to complain that it is overstepping its authority.
In a conference call with journalists, Mr. Duncan insisted that he would much rather Congress amended the law.
It's not just conservatives that are complaining about the Obama administration's increasing fascination with what the executive can do on its own; Digby, for instance, has had a good deal to say about it. But let's face it: congress just isn't there, and life goes on. What's a poor president to do?
The New York Times has been commemorating the 58th anniversary (May 17) of Brown v. Board of Education with a series of articles dealing with the fact that American schools are still segregated by race (in a beautifully written thick-description feature by N.R. Kleinfield describing the consequences of segregation at a charter middle school in Flatbush, Brooklyn), the apparent fact that the authorities don't seem to see any reason for doing anything about it (David L. Kirk's op-ed asking why school reformers have abandoned desegregation as a way of narrowing the school achievement gaps between racial groupings), and the widespread belief that it really isn't a problem anyway (in an 8-way debate—"Jim Crow is dead, segregation lives on. Is it time to bring back busing? "—about what needs to be done).
Really! That is, some of the debaters thought desegregation was a pretty good thing and worth reviving, of course, but others seemed not to understand why it was even an issue; according to Lance Izumi of the Pacific Research Institute, for instance,
Falling back to 1970s-style desegregation policies like busing ignores new schooling options that weren’t available decades ago and which offer better educational opportunities for minority students.
As if the original desegregation policies had merely been techniques for wringing inefficiencies out of the system. It's like arguing that there's no point in enforcing anti-slavery laws because there are better ways of maximizing profit for cotton cultivators. School segregation is illegal, according to the law of the land as established in Brown in 1954, and it is illegal because it is wrong—because it deprives people of certain rights guaranteed them in our constitution.
It was amazing to me to see in these essays, as also in the reader comments, how many apparently respectable people don't seem to know that Plessy v. Ferguson (1896) was decided wrongly; that separate can never be equal. Kirk's article makes it seem, in fact, as if the Supreme Court has effectively overruled Brown and restored Plessy to its original status, in the sense that it has been gradually disallowing all the means for desegregating. (Indeed, the reputedly evil Michelle Rhee was actually on the left side of this one, since she argues in the Times debate for "socioeconomic integration", i.e., for a method of achieving racial integration without mentioning race, which might make it acceptable to the Court and effective at the same time.)
In particular the proponents of various kinds of "school choice" and charter school approaches appear genuinely to believe that separate but equal institutions are possible. They emphasize the spiffiness and modernity of the charter school or Small School of Choice, its advanced electronic equipment, its youthful (underpaid) teachers. Izumi even cites a fraudulent "proof" of the high quality of the new schools in terms of what a spiffy study it was
The study used the most rigorous experimental design, randomized control trial...
(It may be a rigorous design, but it's not very rigorously applied; in fact, an absolutely crappy study—I've discussed the work in question at some length here.)
But if you look at the typical features of these new schools—the high ratio of administrators to teaching staff, the focus on high-stakes test scores and test prep, the elaborate discipline and dress codes, the de-skilling of teachers who are often required to stick to a script—you can see that they are not at all equal to the kind of school you want for your own children, in spite of the bells and whistles. They're not meant to instill habits of critical thinking but of swift obedience. They're not meant for "our kids" but for "their kids". And Brown has not yet become irrelevant.
I just made a huge mistake. Which I am fully blaming on the fact that I have bride brain and can't think clearly.
For future reference....yard does not equal foot. So 100 yards...does not equal 100 feet. More like 300 feet. And when you need 180 feet of something, do not order 200 yards. Of three different colors of ribbon. Which equals 600 yards. Otherwise known as 1800 feet. NOT the same.
So I now need to figure out what I'm going to do with the extra 1300 feet of bright yellow, purple and gold ribbon. And I need to figure out how to explain to my fiance why I have more ribbon than anyone in their entire life will need.
This weekend was pretty awesome. Just the right amount of busyness and relaxation, not to mention 80 degree weather and sunshine :)
On Friday, we had full intentions of going to the Indians game. Instead, we opted for cheaper beer and the game on TV, spending most of the game at The Clevelander and moving to the Thirsty Parrot patio to watch the post-game fireworks. Thankfully, the RTA makes going downtown for events like this so easy! Especially because we have a stop less than a mile from our apartment.
I spent all day Saturday at my brothers spending time with him, my sister-in-law, niece and our host brother from the Czech Republic and his wife. The day was mostly spent walking and talking and lazing, and ended with a few bottles of wine and insanely large steaks from the West Side Market...mmm.
Sunday, my fiance and his brother, as well as some work friends ran the Cleveland 10K (which was part of the Cleveland full and half-marathon). A large breakfast at Jack's Deli for the runners, an afternoon showing of the Avengers, and my favorite part of the day: registering.
This is a screen shot of the top of our Macy's registry page. First...holy crap 131 days! Getting so close- and I am SO EXCITED! But honestly- registering was awesome. We had to give the saleswoman all our information (which only took about 5 minutes), and then we were handed the gun and left on our own (which I totally loved). I might have gotten a little out of control with random kitchen gadgets- but come on! I have been dreaming about having my own kitchen with all the cool gadgets forever!
Except for the pasta maker attachment for the Kitchen Aid (which I already own...I just need all the fun attachments). NO ONE makes enough pasta to justify a $200 attachment, not even this carb loving Italian girl. I'll just keep borrowing my parents :)
My wedding dress (and alterations), which was on a ridiculous David's Bridal credit card (it was silver and sparkly), which I only opened because it was interest free for 6 months, IS PAID OFF! With a whole 6 days to spare until I got slammed with all the interest and fees from the last 6 months. So that's a good feeling.
Last night, we had our final meeting with the deacon who will be marrying us. He is also my dad's best friend and I have known him my entire life, so it's been great to see him pretty regularly over the past few months! We finalized all the reading selections for the wedding, and discussed some other details- and we're good to go!
We finalized the wording for our invitations, and I'm sending it over to our designer (otherwise known as my sister-in-laws sister...I really wish there was an easier way to say that...considering she has 3 sisters and they are all helping out with our wedding because they are awesome). So we will hopefully have our invites in a few weeks...ready to be sent by mid-July.
I ordered these adorable little business card kinda things called mini-moo cards (which any bride blogger/Weddingbee reader will know). Totally awesome. They have our engagement pics on one side and wedding website address on the other. We're including these with the invites, so people can go to the website- which has more information about wedding registry, hotels, and things to do in Holmes County.
As you will recall, Saddam Hussein had his own little camp of Iranian terrorists on the Iraqi side of the border, the Mujahedin-e-Khalq (MEK), acquired after Saddam's downfall by our dear JSOC and subsequently by Israeli intelligence, who used them to murder Iranian physicists. They've always had a big sad about everybody calling them terrorists, just because they do a lot of terroristic, um, stuff, but now we learn from emptywheel that the Obama administration is thoughtfully working to get them off that list. Great headline:
MEK to Be Delisted as Terrorists in Reward for Engaging in Terrorism
And guess where else they're showing up this week? In Hamburg, of all places, where they have provided Die Welt (summarized in English in Haaretz) with another one of their specialty packages detailing how Iran has intensified work on its nuclear weapons program, if it has, which is as usual far from clear; as in previous such packages of 2002 and 2008, MEK's assertions can't be independently assessed, and they don't have a very good track record. Not to mention the infamous Laptop of Death they hung around Colin Powell's neck in 2004.
Maybe they've moved up into specializing in metaterror: frightening us with the news that we're going to be frightened. Wonder if there's a list for that?
Meanwhile in Israel, amusingly enough, Iran seems to be virtually forgotten in the exuberance in the new political arrangement, in which Likud and Labor and Kadima have united in the common purpose of let's please just not have an election for a long while, revealing Binyamin Netanyahu's real top priority to be pretty much the same as that of his rival Shaul Mofaz.
What will really be interesting is if Iran's upcoming talks in Baghdad, conducted, for once, without Netanyahu standing outside waving his finger in everyone's face, actually got somewhere for a change. Thomas Erdbrink for the Times sketches out a really interesting picture of how this might happen with Iran declaring, essentially, victory—they've got the peaceful nuclear program they always said they wanted. This is the first really new-looking thing I've seen on the issue in a long time: read it.
So seriously...I'm sorry I suck at blogging lately. I keep having ideas for posts to write, and then my days are full and crazy at work (though my events are over! for now at least...) and then I get home and realize I need to make dinner and clean up. And then it's 9:00 and I'm ready to lie in bed and watch Scrubs with my fiance. And that's nice. But it leaves pretty much no time for blogging. I really need to figure out this real world thing...though I have been out of college for 3 years, now that I live with the boy- I don't have evenings to myself to just do nothing (err...I mean blog). And for the first time, I live in a place where I want to be able to take pride in how it looks- hence cleaning and tidying.
But no more excuses. I really will try to be a better blogger! We're sitting at a little over 100 days from the wedding...so there should be plenty to discuss.
More importantly though was this past weekend. This amazing, glorious past weekend in the best place on earth. Disneyland! Just kidding. Athens. But really, Athens is better. Cheep booze, great friends, gorgeous weather. It was fabulous.
To kick the weekend off though, my best friend got engaged!! Her now fiance had planned the whole thing and that was really the reason for our trip though she was convinced otherwise.
The moment he got down on one knee!!
He had ordered a custom made coozie that said Ashley, Will you Marry me? But it didn't get there in time, so he improvised. And please notice my fiance and her new fiance in the background...they love each other
Needless to say- we were all in celebration mode and in the perfect place to do it!
The girls celebrating with our champagne slushies
And the boys with whiskey
Saturday was another full day of celebration.Which featured a lot of this.
Serious day drinking on Courtside patio. perfection.
Overall- it was an amazing day in one of my favorite places in the world with a lot of my favorite people. Lots of drinks, lots of eating (mmmm O'Bettys, Souvlakis, Courtside, Casa, Miller's Chicken...no, I don't think I stopped eating all weekend).
Which is probably why today I feel like I ran a marathon over the weekend. The combination of tons of walking, excessive drinking, and loads of crappy food has not made my body happy. So worth it.
My own mother, Dorothy Bloom, born in 1924, died unexpectedly but very peacefully at the beginning of the month just a month short of her 88th birthday. She was in a hospital upstate (as I languished in my hospital in the city) for observation following an apparently minor cardiac event, had a fun evening of card playing and gossip with relatives and nurses, and then just passed sweetly and swiftly away without any sign of fear or confusion.
She was a greatly exceptional person in just about every way, and it was such good fortune for the five of us to be her child that it seems almost ill-mannered to mourn—like, you want more? Anyway, here's some music, dedicated to her.
As you all know by now President Obama has shed those silly-looking gills and taken his flashy new lungs up onto permanent land residency; his lengthily evolving position on marriage equality has evolved itself right up to where some cavilers will say it should have been a year or three ago. Not me! And I'll tell you why.
Fins to limbs, from shark to Eryops. From McGraw-Hill Access Science.*
*Note by the way that the bottom three species—shark, coelacanth, lungfish—all still exist, while the others are extinct (the natural selection process is not, as vulgarizers of the theory and Tom Friedmans and the like continually allege, about new species replacing old ones but rather about new species exploiting new ecological niches).
Entertaining the question of whether Vice President Biden had jumped the gun by endorsing marriage equality earlier in the week,
“I had already made a decision that we were going to take this position before the election and before the convention,” Obama said in his interview with ABC News that aired this morning. (via Think Progress)
Do you see that weird little pronoun shift in "I" decided that "we" would take the position? This is not a mistake; it reflects the complexity of what we are talking about when we talk about "the" president; the citizen Barack Obama, the institution that is President Barack Obama (with the special US wrinkle that that is two institutions, the Head of Government and the Head of State), the forests of committees that carry out the institution's functions, and the fact that Obama really is, as poor George W. pretended to be, the "decider"—the ultimate chair of all those committees. Citizen-chairman Obama decided not just that the views of the institution were going to evolve, but which direction they were going to evolve in and how far.
The Obama who favored same-sex marriage when running for the Illinois State Senate in 1996 was clearly Citizen Barack; and so was the one who rejected it in 2004, running for the US Senate and presumably thinking about voters black and white from outside his own sophisticated district (and not being very brave, perhaps, but not being exceptionally dishonest either).
The candidate, anyway, is never just presenting his citizen-self to the public, but is trying out for the role of the committee chair, whose speech must be more circumspect. This is a political thing, and it is not far removed from seeking out political positions that get votes, but it is not quite the same thing if the candidate is doing it the right way.
Willard Mitt Romney's Etch-a-Sketch approach is drawn from his corporate business background; it is basically applying for a job by offering to be a total toady for whatever your employer wants, personally or publicly. It's not very dignified, in comparison to applying on the basis of one's ability to carry forward the work of the firm, and it's really not wise to hire such a person, though I guess that's how the Masters of the Universe roll, recruiting their fellow psychopaths, measuring their ability to bully in the future by their ability to grovel today.
Obama's campaign technique is to sketch out a range of territory where he would be interested in acting, in such a way as to attract the most possible voters of course, often including some who are going to feel burned by what he actually does. Sometimes he cannot find a very broad range at all, as with closing down Guantánamo, and sometimes he can, as with the throwing together of all the different kinds of civil-union and marriage options.
After the inauguration, the citizen and the chair have to start negotiating their respective roles and contributions, which can get pretty complicated; it's here that the turning-round-an-ocean-liner metaphors come into play. The marriage equality issue was an especially easy one in some senses: Citizen Barack's views were on record (that would of course not bother Romney, who would simply deny that he had said anything of the sort), very important sectors of campaign money (Hollywood!) were for once on the radical side, and so were the rapidly moving trends of public opinion.
There was only one force arrayed against against marriage equality, but it was a very powerful one: the super-lagging indicator, Cokie's hairdresser, or the Village, or the Conventional Wisdom, or what I would like to start calling, after Flaubert, Received Opinion ("les idées reçues", from Bouvard et Pécuchet).These people were not themselves actually against marriage equality, or anything else for that matter—they never are—but they asserted without qualification that it couldn't be done, that it wasn't "politically possible", words that strike terror into the hearts of the Committee to Manage the President's Secret Identity.
This is where things stood in 2010 when Obama made his declaration that his own views on the subject were "evolving", and I think everybody should have understood exactly what he meant, instead of complaining about the coyness of the expression: that Citizen Obama had seized the tiller on this issue and would be leading it in his own preferred direction. There was only one direction in which it could be said to "evolve" in any case; bird species may on occasion stop using their wings, but they do not transform them into tiny velociraptor claw arms.
So for this week's announcement, it basically looks earlier than supporters had any right to hope—before the campaign even starts when I would have been betting on 2014. It's great news!
OK, Mr. P.? I've totally got your back on this one—now, can we start talking about holding prisoners without charges, and persecution of whistle blowers? Any evolution going on back there?
First reaction to the Hollande election, by Loïc Sécheresse for Libération.
"Chuis pu président" = "Je ne suis plus président" in Sarko's ugly swallowed-up diction. The joke turns on the difference between "faute de" ("mistake in" a given discipline) and "faute à" ("fault of" a given agent), with the suggestion that it's one of the subtleties where the (ex!) president tends to screw up. Goodbye, Sarko, in any case.
Bill Johnson, ex-politician (R-Alabama, sometime gubernatorial candidate) and current international humanitarian, discussed in a post here last December, resurfaced recently (via General Stuck in comments at Balloon Juice).
Possible recipients in the Rotorua mud baths. Picture from Fodors.
Johnson was the strange soul who went off to New Zealand to help with earthquake relief and while living in Christchurch took to the unusual hobby of sperm donation, [jump] donating his precious pakeha guy-gametes to some 10 or 11 Kiwi ladies all told, some of them said to be Lesbian ladies, which was the hook run with by the bloggerati in general—antigay Alabama ex-councilman involved in literally creating gay families. My own take was on another unexpected literalism. We are constantly using the metaphor of the wanker as epitomizing that greasy, fatuous self-regard of certain bloggists and paper pandits (I don't use the annoying spelling "pundit") who have never quite emerged from adolcescent solipsism and are therefore willing to condemn thousands at a time to starvation or war or illiteracy or what have you for the sake of a theoretical principle*—but here is the spectacle of a for-real wanker, apparently whacking it for the most selfless humanitarian reasons, to help women become moms.
The new news is a report from Mrs. Johnson according to which, sadly, five months of work to reconcile their marriage have not succeeded in keeping him away from the Land of the Long White Cloud**, where he hopes to spend a bit of daddy time with all his progeny.
Johnson, a former Birmingham city councilman and cabinet member for Gov. Bob Riley, said he was unable to have children with his wife and that the desire to father a child was “a need that I have.”
Kathy Johnson, a two-time Mrs America finalist with three children from a previous relationship, said the first baby is a girl and due to arrive this month. There are at least two others, also girls, who are due in June and July, she said....
"He doesn't really know how many pregnancies there are out there. Some women were so angry they didn't want to talk to him again," she said. He assured her that the donations were non-sexual, she said.
*Generally a pretty frail principle, too, like "My boss shouldn't have to pay higher taxes," or "University of Michigan didn't let me into law school." **Also known (chiefly in Australia) as the Land of the Wrong White Crowd.
What struck me this time round was how there is some kind of implicit theological argument here. Mr. Johnson may have argued himself into a whole new concept of what sexual intercourse consists of alongside what God wants it to be, via an abstraction of its vital parts down to just the two elements of the emission of semen and the availability of an egg. The emission is what makes it sex, and the egg is what makes it legitimate. It doesn't matter, though, where the egg is at the moment of emission—just a quick swim away across the Hellespont of the cervix or all the way into downtown Christchurch in an office that is at the moment not even open.
In this way, Mr. Johnson may have come to fear that shtupping Mrs. Johnson was a kind of wanking, in that there was no egg anywhere in that process hopefully waiting, but that wanking was not, if you happened to be in New Zealand and in touch with a welcoming egg or two. Mr. Johnson may have concluded that what looks like wanking to an unsympathetic observer is actually the only way he is ever going to have sex acceptable to the Lord for the rest of his life!
After the unmistakably weak employment report for April, it’s obvious that the economy will not heal itself without more government help.
Gosh, Sparky, ya think? And that oh so subtle line between "obvious to everybody not representing a major journalistic enterprise or the Republican Party" and obvious toutcourt, what does it specially have to do with this April's report as opposed to, oh, say, the report for April 2009?
Nevertheless the editorial itself is not so ingenuous, and not disingenuous at all; it may start off all "nor is it clear where more growth will come from," but it's very clear about the source of the dissipating unclarity:
Election-year politics are bound to further confuse the economic picture and the way forward. On Friday, Mitt Romney blamed President Obama for the April jobs figures, saying that in a normal recovery “we should be seeing numbers in the 500,000 jobs created per month."
The truth is that the economy has not seen job growth like that in nearly 30 years. More to the point, the policies Mr. Romney espouses — notably deregulation and tax cuts for the rich — were the favored policies under President George W. Bush, years when job growth and wage gains were, at best, anemic.
The reason it's this April is that it's the April of the presidential campaign, and the reason it's newly obvious is that the policy debate for the campaign is taking on its definitive form, with its Democratic picture of job growth as something that can be done by anybody who can put some money together with a job description and a hire, and your Republican picture of "job creation" as some kind of quasi-ethnic property, like the ability to cure scrofula, remaining there even if it is unused, so that Willard Mitt Romney was still a job creator when his main job was slashing thousands upon thousands of actual jobs and in all the years he has been a simple rentier (with a hobby of political campaigning rather than RV travel and the like).
And even though what would really be nice is if it inspired somebody to say, "Hey, let's ship some money out to those state capitals," just taking that position is a help.
*We are selectively aware of certain Internet traditions.
It's my birthday week. And normally I make a much bigger deal about this, but the fact that I had to work last night and tonight has kind of dampered my week long celebrations. But tomorrow....tomorrow should be glorious. The great thing about a birthday on Cinco de Mayo is that everyone is out partying (and I just pretend it's all for me). But the weather is supposed to be nice; the sun shining; lots of good friends. And I plan to enjoy it all!
Birthday week has me reminiscing though about my past birthdays (at least since my 21st).
21
My 21st was a blast. However, since I'm a year older than all my college friends due to taking a year off after highschool, none of them were old enough to go out with me. But it was mom's weekend and a number of my brothers friends were still in Athens and they all took me out! It was a blast.
22
22 was a good year- had a party, got my roommates mom to do a keg stand, and celebrated another roommates 21st (on the right in this photo).
23
The 23rd was a little rough. The fiance (then boyfriend) had just left Athens to head to Columbus, where his father passed away the next day. It was hard for me to be out celebrating, and not being with him. My friends were amazing though, forced me into a tiara and made it a good night.
24
This was the first birthday up in Cleveland. And it was one of those freak 85 degree days in Cleveland. And we enjoyed every minute of it, but hanging out downtown, drinking Corona's and 1 too many shots of tequila. This picture was relatively early in the evening...things rapidly went downhill.
25
We had a mini Mexican feast at my brothers for my 25th. It was a pretty calm night as we were leaving two days later for California, which was my big birthday present. I just loved spending time with my niece- she even had an adorable little party dress on for my birthday :)
And now 26. I'm excited for what 26 has to hold. And not just this Saturday (which again...will be awesome). But the whole year. A new job, a new apartment, getting married. Can't wait!
I didn't really have anything I wanted to post except I had to get up a performance by the extraordinary Czech violinist and singer Iva Bittová before I lost her again in my memory hole. See below.
It's every time that Obama puts on a tux and does some standup, you know, it's like a sign that something's underfoot. Immediately after last year's WHC dinner, the killing of Osama bin Laden (on which coincidence this was a kind of great column); then after this year's, the signing of an agreement with President Karzai in Kabul. The Times is kvetching that Obama's speech for the occasion was "short on specifics" for how he planned to accomplish something that—as you'd think even they might have realized at this point—is just not likely to happen.
I expect Republicans to attack him on the basis that he only does it because he's oversensitive to criticism. "If somebody made fun of me for going on the Jimmy Fallon show would I just turn around and do something crazy like setting up the end of the Afghan War? Of course not! But that Obama just can't stand being second-guessed about anything!"
While from the Jerusalem office of the permanent campaign, the Times's Jodi Rudoren, writing less than penetrably a couple of days ago:
At the same time, there is a growing sense that Israeli elections will be called this fall rather than next year. And while Mr. Netanyahu’s popularity remains all but impenetrable, coalition politics means a robust campaign filled with charged language nonetheless.
I think she meant you can't poke holes in the popularity, not that you can't understand its causes and mechanisms. But then again, in the followup Tuesday, she added that most Israelis reject the prospect of an independent strike against Iran, but they love Netanyahu anyway:
“Israelis like the hawkish rhetoric,” said Mina Zemach, director of the Dahaf Polling Institute. “Netanyahu is very strong now. What the public hopes is that Netanyahu prepares us just in case, if no one will stop Iran, then we have to attack.”
So it's impenetrable in that sense after all. "I'm not voting for some clown who's only as crazy as I am, it has to be somebody considerably crazier than that!"
On the state math test, P.S. 30 did better in 2011, with 41 percent of students scoring proficient — a 3 or 4 — versus 29 percent for P.S. 179.
But on the state English test, P.S. 179 did better, with 36 percent of its students scoring proficient compared with 32 percent for P.S. 30.
And yet, when the department calculated the most recent progress report grades, P.S. 30 received an A. And P.S. 179 received an F.
Is P.S. 30 among the best schools in the city and P.S. 179 among the worst? Very hard to know.
No, you know, it's really not very hard to know at all. Or if you prefer, it's hard to know because it's a profoundly stupid and trivial question. Not so much hard to know as not worth knowing, because when distinctions are being made on this fine a metric then the difference between best and worst is not important.
I want you to understand this, Michael Winerip, because it's really making me crazy. If Schuyler sells slightly more cocktails on Thursday than Wednesday but fewer shrimp entrees, while Eugenie's cocktail sales decline a little between the two days but she does somewhat better on the shrimp front, do you ask if one of these persons is among the best waitresses in New York and the other the worst? Do you fire Schuyler and close down her section, replacing all the tables with tropical fish tanks? Or starting a "sharing" experiment with an avant-garde taco boutique?
The fact is that both these young women are very talented and commendable workers and the information gleaned in this little statistical observation is of no appreciable value in judging them. P.S. 179 and P.S. 30, in the same way, are both pretty dismal institutions, in spite of the Herculean efforts of many talented and compassionate people, not least the students and parents, and for reasons that are largely very well known that nobody appears to have any intention of doing anything about. One of these things would be support from institutions that seem instead determined to figure out ever more Byzantine ways of judging and condemning them.
Whether a principal is removed or receives a $25,000 bonus depends on the report card grade.
And yet, what appears to be a substantial difference in two schools’ achievement scores can come down to just a few correct answers per child.
Yes, you do need evaluation metrics in the New York school system, but the failure you need to focus on isn't on the teachers, or even the principals, but the effectiveness of the support given by the DOE, or withheld as the case may be in favor of schemes to make it look as if the DOE is carrying out its responsibility...
Teacher accountability taco designed by Mayor Michael Bloomberg. Photo from The Taste Spot.
Cerberus at Sadly, No suggests that Mrs. Romney really hasn't ever worked a day in her life:
Bitching at the help to do a better job cleaning your house and raising your children is so far removed from the notion of “work” by any interpretation of the word that… Well, frankly, I have to believe that brain-sucking parasites is the only reason that anyone is taking it halfway serious.
Are you kidding? In her class that's what the husbands do as well, except for the "house" and "children" part, and do you realize what they get paid? It's called "management", my dears. And "multitasking". And if they buy you for breakfast it gets their husband a tax break. That's called "job creation".
I say, give a man a fish and he will eat today, teach him to fish and he will eat a lifetime, give him a low-interest loan and he might stay alive through his fishing lessons. And lastly, give him a little Taj Mahal and... just give it to him. Does there have to be an economic reason for everything?
“But again, we’re very busy in Washington with a corrupt government, with a government that I said a year ago, because of the money, because of the TARP and stimulus funds, was going to be the most corrupt government in history, and it is proving to be that.”
In other celebrity news, Kermit the Frog complained that President Obama's skin is the greenest of any president's in history.
I have been a horrible blogger lately. I always swore to myself that when I finally started a blog, I wouldn't let weeks go by without a post! I thought how hard can it be? Just write some stuff and post it. HA. Yeah, not so much.
Life has happened and it is out of control right now. All good things...but all things to just make me crazed.
I recently got a promotion (woo!) to do all the events and marketing. Which is awesome, and I'm completely thrilled about. However, the promotion came abruptly when our events person left...in the middle of our largest fundraiser of the year- a series of bowling events. So I basically had to dive in head first, completely clueless...with four events to complete. One down, three to go. Two of which are this week and one next. Needless to say, I'm slightly pulling my hair out.
On top of still trying to settle into the new apartment. And plan a wedding...we still need to register, figure out invitations, favors, decorations, etc... And spend time with my family and friends.
AND it's my birthday week...of which I have not even been able to enjoy because of the craziness happening at work this week. Thankfully, with a Saturday birthday (and a forecast of 75 and sunny), I will be spending all day Saturday with friends hanging out in downtown Cle and enjoying the weather. And of course some cold beverages.
