The Daily Aneurysm

Tootsie Rolls: the Devil's Tool
It's been noted by better writers than me that one of the problems with Christianity is that you, as a human being, can't really win. If you succeed at something, God is responsible for your success, but if you fail, you failed, or you let God down in some way. And the whole enterprise is pretty tricky, too: Sometimes, even when you think you're doing good, you're doing wrong, and maybe without even knowing it.

Imagine that you are a hardcore fundie, and that you believe Halloween is evil, sick, bad, and wrong. But because you live in a neighborhood with lots of other families, many of whom do not share your beliefs and who will permit their kids to go trick-or-treating tonight, you decide to participate in the Halloween fun by handing out anti-Halloween religious tracts. Jesus gives you brownie points for that, right?

Wrong.

Giving any kind of treat when someone knocks at your door on Halloween night is participating in Halloween. Just because you add a tract to the treat (or give only a tract) does not sanctify this Halloween activity. Giving a tract while you engage in the ritual that Satan takes very seriously (the trick-or-treating ritual is a satanic ritual no matter how cute it looks or how much fun it is) will not give your or your child automatic protection from evil spirit contact. You are sinning and thereby breaking God's protective hedge. The serpent will bite you and your children, tract or no tract.

Or, as World O'Crap observes, giving out tracts "is just as bad as sacrificing virgins to Lucifer." For your Halloween-morning reading pleasure, World O'Crap has an extensive takedown of anti-Halloween fundies, featuring the unparallelled unintentional hilarity of Jack Chick tracts.

Recommended Reading: Orcinus, on "liberal fascism," which is neither, and on Michelle Malkin, clever simulation of professional journalist.

On the Subject of Things We Do Just Because
Quick followup here on Friday's post: Madison officials will not characterize what went down on State Street early this morning as a riot, but they did have to break out the pepper spray and cart about 250 people off to jail. They carted off about 125 the night before, but did not have to use pepper spray to break up the crowd at bartime.

Key excerpt from the Wisconsin State Journal story linked above, which gets at the problem of students feeling as though they have a right to riot:

Matt Sokol, 19, a UW-Whitewater student, said the chanting [of a soccer-hooligan cheer thought to be an "anthem" of those wishing to riot] "is a Madison thing. You do it because you are in Madison."

Sokol and his friends, including Kristi Prokop, 18, said they didn't want to see anyone hurt. But they appeared to feel that to get the full effect of Halloween in Madison, it would include "a riot."

The reporter did not note whether Sokol and Prokop were wearing bib overalls and staring up in wonder at the tall buildings, but they might as well have been--their attitude is precisely that of small-town, small-college kids who perceive themselves as walking on the wild side simply by leaving Whitewater (population 14,000, enrollment, 10,000) behind for the decadent big city. What's worse is that they believe that simply being in the decadent big city entitles them to engage in the kind of behavior in which they would never engage in their own town. It would have been interesting had the reporter pursued the line of questioning further--just what makes you think, Matt and Kristi, that people like to riot here, but not in Whitewater? What makes you think it's OK for you to riot here, but not in Whitewater--or for people to riot anywhere? It's doubtful that either of them had thought through the consequences of what they say they believe. But if they did, I'd hope that neither of them would like what it says about them.

Matt, Kristi, a piece of advice: Next year, stay away from Madison on Halloween. You can't handle it here--but not for the reasons you think.

Sunday Ritual: As soon as I post this, I'll be settling down to watch the Green Bay Packers, season record 1-and-5, meet the Cincinnati Bengals, season record 5-and-2. The Packers, decimated by injuries, aren't likely to win this game, or any of the following four (three of which are against teams that made it to the NFL's conference championship games last season), and may be lucky to win four games all season. Fan reaction up here is breaking down along predictable lines: Younger fans, who have known only the successes of the last 15 years, are freaking out, talking about firing the coach, and even about trading Brett Favre. Some of them are giving up entirely, switching allegiances to other teams. Older fans, however, those who were weaned on the awful teams of the 1970s and 1980s, are more sanguine. We've known this was coming; now that it's here, we're disappointed, but we'll continue to watch, even if it gets as bad as we fear that it might. This is Wisconsin. It's what we do.

Trick or Trick
I greet you on this Friday afternoon from a little coffee shop on State Street in Madison. State Street runs from the Capitol Square to the campus, and is lined with restaurants, bars, and stores. It contributes to one of the most vibrant college-town scenes in the country. In short, it's what lots of people think of when they think of "Madison." And sometime within the next 36 hours, it's going to be the scene of a riot.

Halloween at UW-Madison has been pretty wild since the 1970s--weird costumes, strange behavior, and lots of public intoxication, with tens of thousands of revelers packing the lower State Street area. It was at its early peak around 1980, while I was a student at UW-Platteville, about 75 minutes away. I knew lots of eminent Plattevillians who traved to Madison for Halloween (although I never did myself). That wasn't unusual--I knew of students who came from as far away as Carbondale, Illinois, to make the scene, and thousands of students from Minnesota have made the trip in recent years. In 1982, a 19-year-old student died of a fall--his accident was complicated by the fact that while paramedics were loading him into the ambulance, somebody stole the keys from the ignition. The student's death seemed to tame the celebrations, which stayed raucous but under control for a long time thereafter.

In 2002, after the downtown bars closed, a student arrested for allegedly assaulting another partygoer resisted arrest, and people in the crowd started throwing bottles at the cops. Despite the addition of more cops and giant floodlights, the after-bar riot was repeated in 2003, on a larger scale. Windows were broken, and at least one store, vandalized and partially looted, was forced out of business. Last year, despite the scheduling of alternate Halloween events and massive anti-riot publicity beforehand, it happened again, complete with cops on horseback and teargas.

Since the morning after the riot last year, city and UW officials have been mixing stern warnings with draconian measures in hopes of stopping the riot this year. No out-of-town guests will be permitted in dorms; cops will be busting off-campus house parties that don't have permits; pedestrian flow is being regulated on lower State Street; there will be even more cops, barricades, and floodlights. Still, it seems doubtful to me that rioting can be avoided--because lots of students want it to happen. Most of those arrested in past years have been out-of-towners, but campus newspapers have published quotes from UW students who seem to view the riot as something they're entitled to as part of their college experiendce, like a football game or fraternity mixer. And when it starts to go down, they're no more likely to leave the area than they would be to leave the football game in the second quarter.

One of the brilliant ideas floated by city officials is to close bars early--at 1:30 instead of 2:30. Bar owners, already stung by the city's smoking ban, have refused. And it seems to me that city officials have it precisely backward--the rioting breaks out after bar time, so why not let the bars stay open all night? If 75,000 Halloween night partiers straggled home between 2 and 8AM, whenever they ran out of money or got too drunk to stand, instead of being shunted out into the night en masse at bar time, wouldn't the chances of a riot drop quite a bit? The cost of police overtime is cited as one reason why it won't work to keep the bars open, but the money would be well spent if the riot were prevented.

But that's not the biggest obstacle. The liberal bluenoses (and I say this as a liberal myself) in and out of city government who back the smoking ban get the fantods over student alcohol consumption too, and so they're constitutionally unable to abide the lesser vice, a little more alcohol consumption, in the name of preventing the greater one--a riot that costs the city and property owners hundreds of thousands of dollars. It seems clear to me that someone else is going to have to die before Halloween gets back under control, before the student revelers tone down the action, before the city decides to take a counterintuitive step that might actually work.

Temporary fencing, no-parking signs, and floodlights are already up in the downtown, along State and other nearby streets. It's going to be a bumpy weekend. I hope that wherever you are, it's an enjoyable weekend. Merry Fitzmas to all and to all a good night.

Unlikely, But True
(Edited to add link to Salon report.)
So Scooter gets his and Karl twists in the wind. Not exactly the socko Fitzmas Morning we'd hoped for, but good enough for now, as Salon observes. By the time you read this, we'll know exactly what special prosecutor Patrick Fitzgerald has got, and what the counterattack will be like. (Eric Muller at Is That Legal suggests--jokingly, I think--that He Who Shall Not Be Named might try appointing Fitzgerald to the Supreme Court.)

It occurred to me this morning just how unlikely it is that we ever got to this point. After passage of the post-Watergate Ethics in Government Act in 1978 (with a brief lapse in the early 1990s), the DC Circuit Court of Appeals could appoint independent counsels to investigate the executive or legislative branch--which is how we got Grand Inquisitor Ken Starr during the Clinton years. The act lapsed again in 1999 and was not renewed, thus putting the authority to create special prosecutors back in the hands of the Justice Department, where it had been in days of yore. In other words, the sole authority to investigate the executive branch returned to the executive branch--a bad idea under the best circumstances, and even worse under an administration led by a guy who can out-Louis XIV Louis XIV. (It's one reason I've referred to He Who Shall Not Be Named as the luckiest politician in American history.) When the Plamegate probe was first announced nearly two years ago, then-Attorney General John Ashcroft was going to lead it, but he recused himself and appointed Fitzgerald, probably to avoid conflict-of-interest accusations--which was pretty unlikely for an administration (and an AG) so convinced of its inherent rectitude. Nevertheless, if not for Ashcroft's action, we might never have gotten here.

Other Unlikely Events: On the current jazz record charts, saxophone legend John Coltrane holds down two of the top three positions, even though he's been dead since 1967. And Lonnie Nielsen has the first round lead at the PGA Champions Tour Charles Schwab Cup tournament in California. Why should you care? Well, he's first cousin to The Mrs--which means we'll be flipping between football and the Golf Channel all weekend.

Ann, You Ignorant Slut
No indictments today, apparently, but the announcement of Harriet Miers' withdrawal probably has something to do with the Plamegate story anyhow. Since last summer, on several occasions when He Who Shall Not Be Named has found himself in political trouble, whether it was over Plamegate or Hurricane Katrina, he's used court appointments to direct attention away from it. Salon has the timeline.

As for the rest of the early commentary on Miers, better take the rest of the day off to read it. Salon also blows the smoke away from the Miers cover story, that she withdrew because the administration was unwilling to release certain documents about her tenure. At the Gadflyer, Sarah Posner discusses the damage the Miers debacle does to women, and to female lawyers. (Remember that slogan from last year: "W" stands for women? Yeah, right.) And John at AMERICABlog has nine reasons to be happy about the Miers withdrawal.

One big reason to be happy is that the mask is finally off the beast. Most savvy observers know that the wingnuts want, more than anything else in the whole wide world, judges who will vote to overturn Roe v. Wade. But they can't come right out and say it, because that would be committing the cardinal sin of asking nominees to prejudge cases that may come before them. So they usually couch that wish in language that's vague and neutral. But even if they try to go back to that now, nobody should buy it. They've made clear that if they don't know in advance that you're going to vote to overture Roe, they don't want you--and there's no way for them to run from it. If Harriet Miers had been precisely the same inept, sloppy, undistinguished candidate she turned out to be, but was on record opposing Roe, they would have touted her as one of America's finest jurists. As it is, however, the only person who believed that nonsense was her boss.

Atrios notes that Ann Coulter was on Fox this morning, gleefully celebrating Miers' withdrawal. Her objection to Miers is that Harriet was not opposed to the Griswold v. Connecticut ruling, which, in 1965, made contraception legal for married couples. That's right, kids. If you don't want to risk babies every time you do the nasty, you Hate America. But it seems strange to me that Coulter herself would want to make contraception harder to get, given that she looks to be the sort of woman who (channeling Dan Aykroyd), hops from bed to bed with the frequency of a cheap ham radio.

Quote of the Year? Daily Kos noted yesterday a recent Saturday Night Live parody of the teleconference between He Who Shall Not Be Named and soldiers in Iraq. It contained the following, which might be the Iraq War Quote of the Year: "The Iraqi people are so full of freedom they could burst. Sometimes an Iraqi will be so full of democracy they'll walk into a crowded area and explode."

Cranks in the Crosshairs
The Mrs. and I finally caught up last night on our backlog of episodes of The West Wing--the most recent of which gave us a look inside a White House under investigation. (Former Clinton aide Paul Begala takes a similar look inside at TPM Cafe this morning.) People inside a White House under this kind of siege aren't just threatened from the outside; they're also threatened by one another, as Begala notes and The West Wing demonstrated. The most innocuous phone call, e-mail, or meeting note can become evidence of wrongdoing, and merely speaking to the wrong person at the wrong time can put you in the crosshairs, too.

I suppose that's what Repugs were trying to say last week by test-driving the talking point that any indictment for perjury or obstruction of justice in Plamegate would be "minor." However, knowing what we know about the people surrounding He Who Shall Not Be Named, it's doubtful that their wrongdoing involves only the misinterpretation of innocent phone calls. Although we'll be hearing that a lot, along with lots of other dubious bilgewater, once the deal is done. (And it looks now like it might be tomorrow before the indictments come down.)

Recommended Reading: At Orcinus, David Neiwart gets Quote of the Day for his crack about a calendar featuring "attractive" Republican women such as Michelle Malkin and Ann Coulter: "These are indeed true visions of superior womanhood, so long as your taste runs towards soulless harpies for whom the word 'crank' has multiple meanings."

Also be sure to check this, from the Atlanta Journal-Constitution's Mike Luckovich, and this, from BuzzFlash via AMERICABlog. Powerful stuff.

We're Special
With the Repugs melting down in scandal and splintering along their faultlines, there's a hope maybe Democrats can reclaim one or both houses of Congress in the elections a year from now. Democratic leaders in the House are gearing up. They've already settled on a slogan for 2006: "Together, America Can Do Better."

Oh, for chrissakes. As Shakespeare's Sister put it:

Why oh why oh why oh why are the Democrats allowing their own message to reinforce the notion that the GOP is “the norm,” so inescapable that the Dems’ own party identity must even abstractly reference the GOP, in answer to the question of whom, exactly, they can do better than.

Or, as the title of her post asked, "Who's getting paid for this shit?"

The only way Democrats lose next year is if we beat ourselves--which we are more than capable of doing. It seems to me that House Democrats work with House Repugs every day of the week, and some of those personal relationships are genuine friendships. It's as if the Democratic leadership as individuals really doesn't want to unload on people they like, hence dishwater like "We can do better."

Your suggested campaign slogans for the Democrats are welcome in the comments.

Recommended Reading: John Dean explains why he thinks we could find our Fitzmas stockings empty. But what if we don't, and evidence of wrongdoing reaches as high as the vice-president's office? James Ridgeway of the Village Voice says that even if Cheney were under indictment, there is no constitutional reason why he would have to leave office, and he could, theoretically, preside over his own impeachment trial. But assume that Cheney leaves office, one way or another. Over at the News Blog, Steve Gilliard explains the specialness of our vice-president-in-waiting, Condi Rice.

Two Thousand Dead, But At Least The Buildings Look Nice
Remember Paul Hackett, the Iraq war veteran who ran for Congress in an Ohio district that had historically gone for the Repugs by 40-point margins, and ended up losing 52-48? He's decided to run for the Senate next year, against incumbent Repug Mike DeWine.

Salon interviewer: "When you ran for Congress, you favored better training for Iraqi forces. Now you're saying we should get out?"

Hackett: "There are two options: Increase troop strength or train the Iraqi military with a match of one American soldier for every Iraqi soldier. That's not going to happen. Everybody knows that, so if we're not going to train the Iraqi military, let's quit spending our money and spending our lives.

"Here's the problem: We've been there two-plus years and there's nothing objective this country can point at and say, 'This is what we've improved since we've been over there.' The infrastructure is worse -- the electrical grid, the water grid, the sewage grid, the road system. All that infrastructure is worse today than when we got there two-plus years ago."

Interviewer: "The Bush administration says there's progress."

Hackett: "Bullshit. I've been there. There's no success unless you call painting schools success. We've painted a lot of schools."

I can scarcely describe my glee when I read that succinct "bullshit"--the kind of thing DLC Democrats wouldn't say if they were covered in it.

Hackett will have to get through a primary against Ohio Congressman Sherrod Brown, who dithered about getting into the race, decided not to run, and then changed his mind about the same time Hackett got in. But no worries--if Hackett loses the primary, the Democrats ought to run him for president in 2008.

Merry Fitzmas: It just keeps getting worse for He Who Shall Not Be Named. Even if today isn't the day the Fitz hits the fan, news that it may have been Dick Cheney himself who outed Valerie Plame to his staff is like getting a present early. But the threat of indictments hasn't paralyzed the White House. Administration officials found time this week to demand that The Onion stop using the presidential seal in parodies. Dave Pell at Davenetics gets Quote of the Day: "That is the modern-day equivalent of trying to heckle Don Rickles."

Looming Evil, Flaming Death, Yeah, Whatever
You may remember the speech He Who Shall Not Be Named gave earlier this month in which he spoke of 10 terrorist plots that had been foiled. Oooh, very scary. The list of actual plots was released last week--and it's not quite what was advertised.

Intelligence officials who spoke on the condition of anonymity said the White House overstated the gravity of the plots by saying that they had been foiled, when most were far from ready to be executed. Others noted that the nation's color-coded threat index was not raised from yellow, or "elevated" risk of attack, to orange, or "high" risk, for most of the time covered by the incidents on the list.

So they exaggerated. Yawn. What's weirder is that several famous foiled plots we know about, including shoe bomber Richard Reid, and whatever led to the famous Christmas orange alert of 2003, are missing from the list.

It's one thing to screw up the big stuff, as I believe I have noted before. Anybody can screw up the big stuff. It's another thing entirely to be unable to get smaller things right. Surely, assembling a list of high-profile terror alerts, even if it's hot air deployed in the service of public relations, is a small thing that should be easy to do. Unless you really don't give a damn anymore--or didn't give a damn to begin with.

Recommended Reading: In a wired world, everyone's a critic. Over at Amazon.com, everyone can be a book critic. A website called The Morning News was inspired by Time's recent list of the 100 best novels to cruise the Amazon user reviews of some of those books, and put together what it calls "a compilation of the best of the worst . . . about the best." I found it highly educational. I learned that Harry Potter is irrefutably better than George Orwell, that four pages of Henry Miller is enough, and that at least one reader thinks Slaughterhouse-Five is nonfiction.

PS: Comments are working again. Or so it seems.

To Say He Sucks Is an Insult to Everything That Sucks
There was a funny exchange in the comments at AMERICABlog this afternoon, even though it was off the topic of the original post. Somebody referred to Bush as a cowboy, which prompted the following:

Commenter 1: "I really wish liberals would quit using 'cowboy' as a word with a negative connotation, and quit referring to teh Chimp as one. He's as far from being a cowboy as [AMERICABlog creator John] Aravosis is."

Commenter 2: "It is not only a slur on cowboys, but on chimps. Hard to come up with a reference to the Liar in Chief that doesn't denegrate other living beings. Heck... even calling him the Liar in Chief is an unnecessary slur on liars."

Commenter 3: "Not to mention chiefs and prepositions."

Another commenter suggested that, as they do with Voldemort in the Harry Potter novels, perhaps we should start calling Bush "he who shall not be named." Not a bad idea, really. If we don't say the name, perhaps we don't empower the evil it embodies. Well, if it's good enough for Harry, Ron, and Hermione, it ought to be good enough for us.

Evil Thought: He Who Shall Not Be Named is already the luckiest politician, if not the luckiest man, in American history. So: You don't suppose the special prosecutor will announce the indictments tomorrow, when the TV networks will be obsessed with the hurricane, do you?

Quite Possibly the Dumbest Thing I've Ever Heard From the Wingnuts
And now, from the people who told you that satellite photos of Hurricane Katrina looked like a fetus, comes the request that Christians pray for Hurricane Wilma to wipe out abortion clinics in Florida, Georgia, and South Carolina. But only the clinics and nothing else.

You can pray for God to destroy the bricks and mortar of these government-protected death camps, without praying for harm to human life, even that of the child-murders themselves (the abortionists), or the accessories before-and-after-the-fact (the other abortion center workers, and relatives of the unborn child advocating his/her death).

Yea verily, let the mighty winds of Wilma perform targeted demolitions in the middle of city blocks, whilst leaving the adjacent Waffle Houses and auto parts stores intact.

Tim Grieve of Salon calls it "the reverse-neutron-bomb theory of divine retribution." Which is surely the quote of the day.

You really should download the group's press release just to see it verbatim. Apart from being purple in a way only hardcore Christian entreaties can be, it really gives Microsoft Word a workout, with underlining, boldface, and sometimes, underlined boldface. But no italics. Maybe italics are Satan's font. (Italics = Italy = Rome = Home of the pope = antichrist, etc. Hey, it's no less loony than the press release itself.)

Would anyone like to speculate why these people think God would need the almighty bludgeon of a hurricane to do what he could just as easily do with a few well-targeted sinkholes? Or why "true Christians," whoever and whatever they are, shouldn't condemn such nonsense? Wilma is going to destroy property and kill people, regardless of whether those people are believers, infidels, abortionists, or Waffle House waitresses. The hurricane doesn't care. And neither do these anti-abortion nutjobs. How Christian is that?

Strumpets and Slatterns and Trollops, Oh My
It happens every year around Halloween--fundamentalist churches getting all up in the grill of people who decorate their houses for the scary season, calling Halloween a pagan observance that encourages devil worship. (Instead of putting a jack-o-lantern in the window and an inflatable ghost on your lawn, it would be much better if you took your kids to the local church-sponsored Hell House, where they could learn that God loves them so much that he's willing to burn them for all eternity.)

As I (and others) have noted before, it must be very difficult to be a fundie, and to be afraid of quite literally everything--Halloween, television, their own biological imperatives. The fear takes many forms, and it's not just Bible-thumpers who are consumed by it. For example, Leon Kass, a University of Chicago professor who heads the President's Committee on Bioethics, has published an astounding article at a Focus on the Family website in which he bemoans "the end of courtship." He seems to suggest that American society could be saved if men and women (mostly women) would turn the clock back to 1885 and behave as they did in Victorian days. While his language is not overtly fearful--he doesn't suggest that lack of female modesty makes Jesus cry--it's clear that he's intimidated by the social advances of the last 50 years to the point at which he can scarcely imagine how such a world continues without spinning off its axis.

There's a funny post at Crooked Timber responding to Kass' article. One of the commenters to the post reminds readers that Kass once wrote a book in which he criticized, among other things, the phenomenon of people licking ice-cream cones in public.

Afraid of both women and ice cream? How does he get out of bed in the morning?

The Velvet Rope
Most people are regular people: taxis and coach instead of limos and first-class, the bleachers instead of the skyboxes, the nine-dollar bottle of wine instead of the one that costs $35. But from time to time, we find ourselves on the other side of the velvet rope. When we know we're only going to be there for a short period, we enjoy it, but we're almost self-conscious about the way we act while we're there. Look at me, look where I am, hope I don't look out of place. (Spending time with a famous person can provoke a similar reaction.)

However, when regular people get the right to be inside the velvet rope all the time, not everybody reacts well. Think of lottery winners here, or Roseanne and Tom Arnold. Acquiring the credential that gets you inside does not automatically grant you the savoir faire to act gracefully once you're there. The nouveau riche really are different from those who are born to wealth, fame, and/or power, and from those who have learned over time what to do with the wealth, fame, and/or power it's been their good fortune to acquire.

(Wow, "savoir faire" and "nouveau riche" in back-to-back sentences. Welcome to the fuckin' Algonquin round table.)

So anyway--a FEMA official told Congress today that disgraced FEMA director Mike Brown was more concerned with his dinner arrangements than with responding to the unfolding Hurricane Katrina disaster. Which is exactly the kind of behavior you'd expect from a regular guy from outside the ropes who got a ticket inside and decided he liked the view. Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job. Have your people bring the dessert cart.

The Smart Money: It's been my position here for quite a while that once the Plamegate indictments come down, Karl Rove will get away clean. There's no reason why his skill at political combat, directed against his White House colleagues, shouldn't be able to save his ass, just as it's saved his boss's ass on so many occasions. Thus I believe others are likely to be indicted, but not Rove himself. You can find lots of people who'd debate that assumption, but there's a difference between those who are just talking and those who are willing to back it up. One way to back it up is to put money on it. According to the Financial Times, the website Sportsbook is taking wagers on Rove's fate, and 70 percent of those laying money down are betting Rove avoids indictment and keeps his job.

Greatest Hits, Volume One
I'm salvaging files from our ancient desktop computer before putting the old girl out on an ice floe. Among those files are six months of pre-Blogspot posts on this blog. Poking through some of them this morning, I found a piece titled "A Political Education," in which I explained how I became a liberal. Since we're apparently not getting any White House indictments today, I'm going to republish a bit of it to pass the time.

The post (from June 2003) is still relevant, because we're always concerned here with the proper role of government, whether it's in responding to disasters or ensuring physical and/or economic security at home. And I'm a liberal because conservatism is incapable of fulfilling those roles without doing far more harm than good.

I am a New Deal liberal. Classic American New Deal liberalism has a record of actually doing what modern conservatism claims it’s going to do but hasn’t yet--liberalism frees people to do their best by their own lights. I believe that there is a common good, a rising tide that can lift every boat, and that citizens have a shared responsibility to the perpetuation of that common good. From time to time, the health of the common good requires citizens to sacrifice a bit of their own liberty in the name of justice--to make sure that every boat can take advantage of the rising tide. Like many liberals before me, I believe that government is the fairest and most efficient agent we have for ensuring justice. Only government, as the expression of the informed collective will of the people, has the moral authority to do it.

Conservatism would hold the social fabric together by fulfilling every individual’s desires (except for appetites of the flesh, of course, which should be discouraged and where possible, criminalized) and failing that, by moral extortion--the promise that God will get you if you don’t conform. But it can never truthfully claim to lift all boats, and it doesn’t intend to. A conservative society is a zero-sum game. Some go to Heaven and many more to Hell, in both the temporal and the spiritual senses. It stands triumphant now because it appeals to the worst human impulses in an era when people are no longer ashamed of those impulses but celebrate them--everything from selfishness and self-righteousness to xenophobia and racism on up to a foolish desire for simplicity and the dangerous wish for kings. On such a foundation, conservatism can never build anything that will last. In fact, it’s questionable whether anything could be built for the common good on such a foundation. Enclaves, yes--a strong and unified society for all, almost certainly not.

I'd modify the last part a little bit: The one thing conservatism can build on such a foundation is the sort of fear-regulated culture of know-nothing conformity we've lived in for the last four years. It's going to take more than a few indictments to move us beyond it, but we gotta start somewhere.

What We Learn
Last night, PBS broadcast Two Days in October, a film based on David Maraniss' book They Marched Into Sunlight. The Dow Day protests in Madison and the ambush on the Black Lions infantry unit in Vietnam, chronicled in the book and the film, happened on the same two days, October 17 and 18, 1967.

One of the things that's happened since the protest days of the 1960s, at least here in Madison, is that many of those involved have come to regret some of their tactics, even though they stick firmly by their overarching reasons for doing what they did. In the film, many of the Black Lions find themselves in the opposite position, although a similar one. They question the overarching reason that put them in Vietnam to begin with--whether the war was right or wrong. What they don't question is the way they conducted themselves in the jungle. What these protesters and soldiers have in common is their willingness to question. Was it right? Was I right? Even though they (and we) will never be in the same situation again, the lessons to be learned from answering the questions are valuable in living on afterward.

It seems almost impossible to avoid this interrogation of your younger self as you age. Once you acquire some perspective, you sometimes find that you didn't have everything figured out like you thought you did. Even though your heart was in the right place, perhaps you could have done things differently. Or at least that's the way it happens to liberals. Many conservatives, as we've seen again just recently with the Harriet Miers nomination, seem to think that holding the same beliefs unchanged for years is the surest sign of virtue, and that a person who doesn't pledge in advance never to change those views is not to be trusted.

On Dow Day, university officials requested that City of Madison police officers clear students from the Commerce Building on campus, where they were staging a sit-in to stop Dow Chemical recruiters from using the building. The cops gave students two minutes' warning to clear the building, but then, according to eyewitness accounts, almost immediately began cracking heads with billy clubs. Over 60 students were hospitalized. Many who were beaten by the cops were trying to leave the building, but were trapped in the crush.

Two Madison cops involved on Dow Day were interviewed in Two Days in October. Unlike many others who were there that day, neither of these men seems to have moderated his views on the event one iota. They were both unapologetic for cracking heads, proud of what they did, and convinced that in the same situation today, they wouldn't do anything different. The contrast between them and others interviewed in the film couldn't be more stark. For them, on this issue at least, it's as if time stopped on October 18, 1967, and nothing they have done, seen, felt, or learned has reached them since.

There's a word for that--arrogance--and it made me angry as I watched. But I also felt sorry for them. Sorry that they felt so threatened 38 years ago, sorry that they were physically assaulted (one of them took a brick in the face)--but sorry also that time, which can teach us a lot about ourselves and our world, hasn't taught them much of anything. Sorry that they've grown from young men to old with their arrogance intact.

Our local PBS affiliate followed the film with a panel discussion featuring four of the people interviewed in the film, including Clark Welch, who commanded a company of the Black Lions. I thought maybe one of the cops would be on the panel, but neither one was. And once the discussion began, I realized that neither of them would have had anything to offer. The very idea of the film--in fact, one of the reasons we study history in the first place--is to understand what the Vietnam Era has taught us, and how to use that knowledge in our own lives today and in the future. Now, I don't know the cops' politics, whether they're liberal or conservative, or even whether they supported the Vietnam War in 1967. And I have to confess that I don't know whether they, too, have questioned their actions and decided, with perspective, that they were right then and are still right today. But I rather doubt it. The 38 years we've lived through since Dow Day are among the lesson-rich in human history. It's a rare person who can claim to be the same today as they were then. And so I see in the cops' unchanged opinions an unwillingness to even begin questioning themselves, an unwillingness to listen to history. They believe what they believed, and that settles it, then, now, and forever.

Keep talkin' like that, guys, and each of you could become a Supreme Court justice.

I could go on, and I hope that if you agree or disagree, you'll pick up the thread in the comments. On this particular Madison day, more peaceful than the one 38 years ago, I'm off to watch my nephew play football.

The Winter of Our Discontent
It's a beautiful autumn day out my Wisconsin window, golden sunlight and infinitely blue skies. We've got as much color as we're getting this year, and every sidewalk and street crunches with the fallen leaves. We know, of course, that this is the way the world works--a few days, maybe a week, of fragile beauty before winter wins the battle, as it always does. Nevertheless, the simple fact that life provides us with days like these makes the possibility of decline and death seem slightly absurd.

But at the same time, this time, we seem to be heading for a winter that looks particularly dark: inflation at its highest levels in 15 years, home heating costs to soar (in Wisconsin, we're bracing for prices 61 percent higher than last year), the threat of bird flu, and the fates of Karl Rove, Scooter Libby, Tom DeLay, and Harriet Miers likely to ratchet up the level of partisan warfare beyond anything we've seen to date.

And who knows what else we might be dealing with before spring comes again? Salon is reporting this morning that there's evidence that Washington was the target of a biological attack late last month. On the same day thousands of antiwar protesters were marching on the National Mall, bioweapons sensors scattered at various points throughout the city picked up trace amounts of the bacteria that causes tularemia--amounts that are difficult to explain away either as sensor malfunctions or natural occurrences. The U.S. Centers for Disease Control dragged its feet on reporting the incident to public health officials nationwide, and is sticking to a story that the findings were due to soil containing the bacteria that was stirred up by dry weather. That's the way tularemia outbreaks have happened before, but that was in rural areas. It's less likely for an outbreak to happen that way in a city. What we know of what happened in Washington so far conforms to a likely bioterror scenario--hit a large city during an event that brings lots of people to town from across the country, then wait for the disease to spread.

One of the scariest bits in the article is the suggestion by one expert that what the sensors picked up could have been a terrorist's test, in preparation for another attack later. Scarier still is the slow response by the CDC, which, to be fair, isn't entirely the agency's fault. A large-scale biological attack would require several days before public-health officials in various places across the country could put the pieces together and figure out what had happened. A smaller incident, like this one, simply takes longer to identify. Unfortunately, any time that's lost, especially in a large-scale attack, equals lives lost, and lives lost equal public anger, outrage, panic--all things that can (and, inevitably, will) get in the way of effective response.

Scariest of all is the knowledge that it would be up to the Department of Homeland Security to coordinate that response. Given the agency's track record on stuff we can forecast and understand, and which are confined to a relatively small area, like a hurricane, it's hard to be optimistic when contemplating their likely response to something as unpredictable as a large-scale biological attack.

And don't get me started on bird flu.

Yes, it's quite a lovely morning, the sort of day we cherish each October. But there's darkness in the distance.

President Mom Saves the World
Even though I wrote a couple of weeks ago that the new ABC series Commander in Chief is going to be unfairly compared to The West Wing, I'm going to go ahead and do it anyhow.

The West Wing's producers rely on several former White House staffers to provide technical advice on how things work. Although Commander in Chief employs Hillary Clinton's former deputy communications director as head writer, three episodes in, the verdict seems to be that it's getting much of its technical advice from seventh-grade civics textbooks, seasoned with handfuls of Hollywood nonsense. The two major crises Mackenzie Allen has already faced--the execution of a high-profile dissident in Africa and the murder of several DEA agents in South America--have both been solved mostly by making her serious face and then sending in the troops. In other words, steely resolve and American firepower will make everything right.

And conservatives think President Allen is a plot to warm us up for President Hillary? Christ, she's Bush.

An independent president would never choose another political novice as her vice president, and if she tried to, that person would have no chance to be confirmed. And the writers seem to be setting us up for an attempt by the Speaker of the House (who, if he had a mustache, would twirl it like Snidely Whiplash) to force Allen from office. This, too, simply wouldn't happen. Assume, correctly, that with no political base in Congress, she will be nothing more than a caretaker until the next election, yes. Manipulate the system to screw her over politically, yes. Connive with her chief of staff to replace her with somebody else, no. Even Tom Delay would shrink from that.

Politics aside, the writers have some more fundamental problems. On two separate occasions, characters have delivered lines so precious that I was certain they were setups for jokes--only to have them be meant in earnest. The writers also seem to have a tin ear for the family dynamics of such a high-profile family--Allen has supposedly been vice president for two years, and her husband has been her chief of staff, and in that time, the family would certainly have discussed A) the possibility of Mom becoming president and B) how to live in a fishbowl. Yet the writers present the First Family, especially the kids, as if they'd been plucked off the street and installed in the White House out of the blue. From her first second on-screen, it was clear that the eldest daughter was going to be a problem, and three episodes in, she's already locked up the Kim Bauer Prize, named after superagent Jack Bauer's daughter on 24, whose main tasks in the first two seasons of that series were to look pouty, act stupid, and take up airtime better spent on more interesting characters. (Digression: Just once, can't somebody on TV write a family in which it's Older Brother who's maladjusted, Middle Child who's likable and popular, and in which Youngest Child isn't so cute she makes your teeth hurt?)

We know already that the entire first season of this show is going to be about Allen's adjustment to her office. However, a more interesting series would involve the adjustment of Kyle Secor's "first gentleman" to his position, trying to sublimate his take-charge instincts to a lower-profile role, and dealing with the former first lady's chief of staff, a chirpy protocol fanatic. Ultimately, Secor is a lot more believable in his role than Geena Davis is in hers. His advantage is that his character is a blank slate. Viewers have no expectations for him. Davis' disadvantage is that she has to be The First Female President, and carry all the baggage the audience--and the writers--associate with that role. She has a lot less space in which to maneuver, and so far, she's stayed in the box.

But: The Mrs. likes the show, and the third episode was far better than the second, so we're not giving up on it yet. Yet. (Am I being too hard it? Click "comments" and tell me, one way or the other.)

Later this week: I catch up on my backlog of West Wing episodes.

Name Three Things That Blow
We're still in shock up here over Wisconsin's miraculous 38-34 win over hated rival Minnesota yesterday afternoon--but I think I can pull myself together enough to talk about something else.

Fact: During the fall of 1998, after eight months of all-Monica, all-the-time, 36 percent of Americans supported holding hearings into the possibility of impeachment, while 26 percent supported the actual impeachment and removal of Bill Clinton. This past week, according to a poll commissioned by AfterDowningStreet.org, 50 percent of Americans would support impeaching George W. Bush if it were determined that he lied about the reasons for the Iraq war. Among Democrats, the number is 72 percent. Among independents, 56 percent. And you've seen this reported where? Quite possibly, here and only here, or elsewhere in the blogosphere. The mainstreamers won't touch those numbers--the same mainstreamers who started speculating on Clinton's impeachment the same week the Lewinsky scandal broke.

The AfterDowningStreet folks are trying to find a Democratic member of the House of Representatives--just one--to introduce an impeachment resolution. (Tammy, you listening?) But even if they do, it will go nowhere, of course. For now. But if it's true that Patrick Fitzgerald is looking beyond the Plame outing to the broader issue of Iraq, that could change, although it may be unduly optimistic to be unduly optimistic.

More on the poll and the preponderance of evidence for Bush's impeachment here. Something to think about on the anniversary of the executions at Nuremberg.

Fake Events, Real Stupidity
Bush's teleconference with soldiers in Iraq this week was even more phony than we thought. Despite the assertion that they were all combat soldiers, one of them was in fact a military flack. Now, military public relations officers are in about as much danger as people walking point, so I don't intend to demean that officer's service. But as cooked as the event was, it seems just that much more extreme to cook it to the point of including one person who would know exactly what to say and how to say it, as a last line of defense against going off the administration's script.

Disgusting. Not surprising, but disgusting.

And speaking of phony events, it appears that New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg was instrumental in getting the recent terror threat publicized and in raising the alert level, even though the evidence for the threat itself was pretty thin. He's in a tough reelection fight, so why not do what has worked so well for the Bush Administration? Orcinus analyzes the long-term damage of hoaxing for short-term advantage.

Quote of the Day
Kathleen Reardon over at the Huffington Post, writing about the anti-intellectual tide that seems to be on a never-ending crest in America, quoting John Stuart Mill in On Liberty: Humans "owe to each other help to distinguish the better from the worst and encouragement to choose the former and avoid the latter." Indeed we do, although lots of our fellow humans seem dedicated to precisely the opposite--which takes Reardon back to her original point.

Since one of our missions here (besides snarking at everything snarkable) is to help distinguish the better from the worst, I'm happy to announce that in the wake of his most recent relief appearance this past week, Tom Herbst will become a regular contributor to this blog, effective whenever he puts up his next post. This doesn't mean I'll be writing any less (in case you were hoping that's what it means), just that Tom will be adding his perspectives more often. If ever there were a case in which two heads are better than one, this should be it.

Friday Random 10: Just Can't Stop It
This list really is random, I swear, although if I'd picked 10 songs I wanted to hear this morning, I couldn't have done much better.

"More Today Than Yesterday"/Charles Earland/Charlie's Greatest Hits. This one came up on the Random 10 just two weeks ago--but I never mind hearing it again.

"Spanish Harlem"/Aretha Franklin/Billboard Top R&B Hits 1971. After a couple of lean years, Aretha roared back into fashion in 1971 with this cover of the Ben E. King standard. That's her on piano, with just as much soul as when she sings.

"Jimmy Loves Mary Anne"/Looking Glass/Super Hits of the 70s: Have a Nice Day, Vol. 10. An example of a classic one-hit wonder ("Brandy," 1972) that really isn't. I'd argue that this is actually better than "Brandy." More ambitious, at least.

"Fool to Cry"/Rolling Stones/Rewind (1971-1984). The Rolling Stones have a knack for making records that are recognizable within the first second--think "Start Me Up" or "Brown Sugar." And also this, although the way it begins is uncharacteristically quiet.

"They Just Can't Stop It (Games People Play)"/Spinners/Pick of the Litter. On the radio 30 years ago this week, this is, in fact, my favorite single record of all time, from one of the greatest Philadelphia soul albums ever made. It's far more complex, instrumentally and lyrically, than most Philly soul records, so it rewards repeated listening. When I'm alone in the car and it comes on, I've been known to rewind it a time or two.

"Make Me Smile"/Chicago/The Very Best of Chicago: Only the Beginning. The original "Make Me Smile" was edited from several segments of "Ballet for a Girl in Buchannon," a sidelong suite from Chicago II. This version is a longer edit, available for the first time on Only the Beginning.

"Philosopher's Stone"/Van Morrison/Back on Top. I wrote about this album just last week over at The Hits Just Keep On Comin'. It's an October essential.

"The Last Resort"/Eagles/Hotel California. Don Henley's meditation on Manifest Destiny, one of the more ambitious things the Eagles ever tried. If Hotel California is a concept album about life in the 1970s, this is an effective way to end it.

"Bonnie's Theme"/Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters/The Color of Love. Here's another group that's appeared on the Random 10 previously in its brief history, and another one that's always welcome. This tune gives Earl, on guitar, a chance to take back his own album from organist Bruce Katz, who steals it from the first track.

"So Beautiful"/Simply Red/Life. I own almost every album this group has made to date, and I think it's important to tell you that, so you don't go thinking I am entirely a 70s guy. (Simply Red's first hit was in 1985.) Mick Hucknall frequently writes songs about beautiful women with empty heads, and this is another one: "You're so beautiful/But oh so boring/I'm wondering/What am I doing here?"

Heading Out and Coming Home
I don't swim, I don't boat, I don't fish--but I love to vacation by the water. As The Mrs. and I watched the Lake Michigan waves hit the beach at Kewaunee, Wisconsin, yesterday morning, I thought again how the waves were rolling long before any of us arrived on the scene, and they'll be rolling long after we're gone. I suppose that bothers some people, but not me. It's actually a comfort, that no matter how badly humans screw things up, much will endure even though we may not.

Lake Michigan is there in the first place due to the glaciers that sculpted North America as recently as 10,000 years ago. On our way Monday, we drove through the Kettle Moraine State Forest, which also exists thanks to the glaciers. The area represents the southern extent of the Green Bay Lobe of the Wisconsinan Glacier, which left behind an unusual landscape of cigar-shaped hills called drumlins, sinuous ridges called eskers, and deep pools of water called kettles. ("Moraine" is term for the the soil found at the glacier's edge.) Autumn was just beginning to color the forest earlier this week--in another week or so, it ought to be spectacular.

Our destination Monday was Kewaunee, a little lakeshore town. Tuesday, we headed up to Door County, which is probably Wisconsin's most famous travel destination. The first town you hit on Highway 42 is Algoma, another lakeshore town that's more aggressive in luring tourists than Kewaunee, better-scrubbed, with a lakeside boardwalk and picturesque downtown. From there, you leave the lakeshore behind and head up to and through Sturgeon Bay, the biggest city in Door County. We went as far north as Egg Harbor, one of the more elite resort communities on the peninsula. All up and down Door County, funky fishing shacks co-exist with luxury condo developments, and the contrast is never more pronounced than in Egg Harbor. The fall colors were near their customary brilliance up there, which we found encouraging, since the color forecasts we've been hearing for southern Wisconsin are not too promising. It's good to know that autumn has arrived up north like it always does.

Egg Harbor is not very far north, though. You can go another 30 miles or so before reaching the end of the highway at Gills Rock--the last Highway 42 sign is a few yards from the pier where the ferry to Washington Island picks up. But even Washington Island isn't as far out as you can go. That would be Rock Island, which is so remote that one veteran camper I know says she was frightened by the brightness of the Milky Way the first time she saw it out there.

We'd have gone farther, but we didn't have time. And on Wednesday, we were heading in a different direction, straight west from Kewaunee on Highway 29 to Green Bay, to worship at the shrine that is Lambeau Field. Unlike many football stadiums, which are open to the public on only a handful of game days each year, Lambeau is open every day except Christmas and Easter--the newly built atrium, completed in 2003, houses several restaurants, a gift shop, and the Packers Hall of Fame. I've written here several times before about being a Packer fan, and how fandom here is different than fandom in any other NFL market. The popularity of the atrium is only the newest indication of it.

Coming home is what makes travel worthwhile. And with this trip, my fall travel season is over. Until late January, I'll be sticking close to home, and that's OK with me.

We're Going to Need a Bigger Bus: You need no more vivid evidence of the way things have changed for George W. Bush than to read the Associated Press piece on his talk with soldiers in Iraq today. Instead of solemnly allowing themseles to be played, and reporting the event as if it were real news, the AP's report is almost entirely about how the event was staged and ultimately phony. As recently as three months ago, they'd never have been so bold. If there's one thing the Bush gang has always been good at, it's photo ops. Now they can't even do that anymore. But the most amazing development of all is that the fakery has finally become the story, after more than 4 1/2 years. Nice to have you aboard, national media. What took you so long?

Third Basemen
Many thanks yet again to Tom Herbst for keeping the flame lit while I was away. He'll be back. I'm back myself, from a brief working vacation to the Lake Michigan side of Wisconsin. If it doesn't look like autumn where you are yet, fear not, for the season is on its way. The fall colors in Door County are as magnificent as ever.

I was able to keep up on the news from my lakeside vantage point somewhat, and have been quite amused by the kids-before-Christmas anticipation of various bloggers over the pending indictments in the Valerie Plame case. The biggest gift under the tree would be if Dick Cheney were mentioned. I'd settle for his inclusion as an "unindicted co-conspirator"--if only so we could hear that phrase a few thousand times in the next year or two, remembering how it was the stake through the heart of Richard Nixon a generation ago.

Several bigtime blogs mentioned it while I was gone, but I don't know if you caught it: Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News is guessing that Cheney's absence this summer has little to do with his fabled "undisclosed location," and much more to do either with his health, or that he's tired of playing chaperone to Junior and is letting Bush be president all by himself. Which would explain "Brownie, you're doing a great job," and Harriet Miers.

We are not the first country in history to be led by someone demonstrably too dim for the job. To read the history of medieval Europe, to take just one example, is to read a history plagued by leaders whose power vastly exceeded their capability to exercise it well. Our supposedly democratic, supposedly classless society was designed so it would not suffer the same fate, plagued by brainless aristocrats who rise to power by virtue of birth. Except now, it clearly is. A friend sent along a column by journalism professor Robert Jensen, originally published at Counterpunch, in which he suggests that Bush's biggest problem isn't what he believes in his heart, but who he is as a son of the privileged class.

In our president all we see is an extreme version of a more general problem in an affluent but highly unequal society, in which people on the top have convinced themselves they are special and therefore deserve their positions. . . .

That’s probably the most pressing race problem in the United States today -- a de facto affirmative-action program for mediocre middle- and upper-class white men that places a lot of undeserving people in positions of power, where their delusions of grandeur can have profound implications for others.

It's not just Bush, of course. Legislatures from the U.S. House and Senate on down are full of people who were, as Ann Richards once said of Daddy Bush, were born on third base and think they hit a triple. More than a few of them would have trouble figuring out which end of the bat to swing, if the playing field were truly level.

More Recommended Reading: Salon's interview with Russ Feingold from earlier this week. It's mostly about an exit strategy for Iraq, but also contains Feingold's explanation of why he voted for John Roberts. Was Roberts the best we were likely to get from a president like Bush, who is constitutionally entitled to his pick, even if it's from a galaxy of loons? (My phrase, not Feingold's.) Feingold thinks so, although to his credit, he also admits he could be wrong. Also, over at The American Prospect, Jack Hitt makes a proposal: Democrats in the Senate shouldn't fight the Miers nomination, they should just stay home, and let her be comfirmed 55-0 with 45 abstentions. While I agree with Hitt that such a vote would have powerful symbolic value, I'm not sure how valuable it would be in the long run. Who really remembers that Clarence Thomas was approved 52-47? And what difference does that make, really?

Recommended Reading
Last August, I wrote about the 1970 Sterling Hall bombing on the campus of the University of Wisconsin at Madison, how it seems now that events on campus were escalating to just that sort of climactic event, and how the bombing signaled the end of the student protest movement not just on the UW campus, but across the country. Thirty-eight years ago next week, the Madison movement began with an event known as "Dow Day." On the same day, a platoon of 142 American soldiers were ambushed by nearly 10 times as many Viet Cong in a remote area of South Vietnam. Journalist (and Madison native) David Maraniss wrote about the events in They Marched Into Sunlight. On October 17th, PBS will present an American Experience documentary based on the book. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel has an extensive piece about the events this morning. As I may have written here at some point, I started the Maraniss book but simply couldn't finish it--so I'm looking forward to the movie.

(Why does that make me feel a little bit like George Costanza?)

Also good today: Josh and Amanda.

With this brief post, I'm taking a few days off. But fear not--Tom Herbst, the Sage of Pennsylvania, will be sitting in. And just in time for Rove's indictment, too. . . .

Something to Be Happy About
Consult the Backwards Bush clock at the right--we're under 1200 days until the end of his reign.

At worst.

Maybe less, if there's still such a thing as justice.

And if the Democrats grow a spine.

Uh-oh.

Friday Random 10: I'm Drifting and Drifting
It's another Friday and another Random 10 from the laptop music stash. Lots of blues on this list, but just enough 70s music to remind you whose list this is.

"I'm Stone in Love With You"/Stylistics/The Best of the Stylistics. Man, I love me some Stylistics. Russell Thompkins' unbelievable falsetto is one of the most distinctive voices ever put on record, and you'd need a voice like his to keep a lyric like this from becoming intolerable.

"Monday Morning"/Fleetwood Mac/Fleetwood Mac. From the album with "Over My Head," "Rhiannon," and "Say You Love Me." How this was never released as a 45, I can't imagine.

"Waltz for Debby"/Bill Evans Trio/Smithsonian Collection of Jazz Piano, Vol. 4. Perhaps the quintessential Evans tune, originally appearing on Live at the Village Vanguard from 1961, with Evans' original trio of drummer Paul Motian and bassist Scott LaFaro. LaFaro would be killed in a traffic accident only a few days after the Village Vanguard date.

"Isabella"/Ronnie Earl and the Broadcasters/Grateful Heart: Blues and Ballads. Imagine a little jazz or blues club somewhere, the kind of place only a few people know about. It's after midnight, so up on the bandstand, a blues band is slipping into a mellow, late-night mode. In my imagination, they sound just like this.

"Love Is Dangerous"/Fleetwood Mac/25 Years: The Chain. Originally from the 1990 album Behind the Mask, which is really the last album from Fleetwood Mac as we knew them in the 70s and 80s.

"Moritat"/Sonny Rollins/Saxophone Colossus. You know this tune by another title: "Mack the Knife." Saxophone Colossus, released in 1956, is the Rollins album to have if you're only having one, featuring his signature song "St. Thomas," a version of the standard "You Don't Know What Love Is," and "Blue Seven."

"Stingaree"/Charlie Musselwhite/The Alligator Records 25th Anniversary Collection. An ominous blues about a very dangerous character, delivered by a singer who usually sounds pretty amiable.

"Fly Like a Bird"/Boz Scaggs/Some Change. It takes some talent to turn such a pedestrian simile into a great song, but Boz has it. Great cajun feel, too--dig that accordion.

"Driftin'"/Eric Clapton/From the Cradle. A version of Charles Brown's "Drifting Blues," the first blues record ever to sell a million copies.

"Just Like Greta"/Van Morrison/Magic Time. One of Morrison's primary inspirations is his hatred of fame: On his latest CD, it results in a gorgeous tune with a sweet organ line and a spine-tingling choir backing him up. "Just like Greta Garbo, I want to be alone."

Quote of the Day: There's just something about this line that I can't shake. It's the Rude Pundit, who's often quoteworthy, writing yesterday about Crazy Ass George, the drunken, paranoid wacko at the end of the bar who sees imaginary threats everywhere: "[O]utside, where the rest of us are, there's only the cool breeze, smelling of rich autumn, blowing away the scent of summer decay, and stars, man, bright fuckin' stars, against a big, dark, endless sky, and earth under your feet that'll take you back home."

I'm Calling Bullshit
Geez, a big terror speech by Bush yesterday, and a big terror alert in New York City today. And it just so happens that Karl Rove is back before the grand jury today. Come on. It's a fraud, and you know it's a fraud. There's no terror threat. The only threat is to Bush, politically. And that's what really terrifies the White House.

Later today: the Friday Random 10.

My, My, Miss Harriet, I Do Declare, You're Moving Up in the World
To jump off from a comment by reader J (who has his own fine blog, Silent Speaking) about the Miers nomination--I think I agree that the primary motivation for Miss Harriet's selection is not about getting a stealth conservative on the court, although that may be the effect. After all, Miss Harriet is likely to be, as Cheney suggested this week, a conservative in the Scalia/Thomas mold, if only because she'll be depending on them to tell her how to vote, much as you or I would have to take direction from some other justice if we magically found ourselves appointed to the Supreme Court. And so maybe the administration doesn't need to name a more high-profile conservative if it's succeeded in cloning Scalia and Thomas.

But I don't think it's an ideological pick foremost. Like J, I think it's the pick of a guy who's just given up. He told the press the other day that she was the most qualified candidate in America, which is as indefensible as if he'd stood up and said two and two make five. That's the kind of answer you give if you can't think of anything else.

There are legitimate reasons for Democrats to oppose Miss Harriet's nomination, if only because she's clearly not qualified for such a post. And although there are political reasons for Democrats not to oppose her--i.e., the next nominee could be worse--the Senate's responsibility to advise and consent is clear, straight from the pen of no less a personage than Alexander Hamilton, in Federalist Number 76, quoted at Best of the Blogs the other day:.

[T]he necessity of their concurrence would have a powerful, though, in general, a silent operation. It would be an excellent check upon a spirit of favoritism in the President, and would tend greatly to prevent the appointment of unfit characters from State prejudice, from family connection, from personal attachment, or from a view to popularity.

Recommended Reading: If you're a cat owner, you'll want to visit CatsInSinks.com, which is all about cats in sinks. Cute cat pictures abound.

Talk Amongst Yourselves
Because I'm taking the day off.

Wing/Commander
Over the weekend, The Mrs. and I caught up on the TV we missed during the past week, including the 7th-season premiere of The West Wing and the series premiere of Commander in Chief. The verdict on both is that I'm giving each of them one more week.

The West Wing first: During its early years, The West Wing usually required more attention than most shows on TV due to its lightning pace, but if you paid attention, you were rewarded, because everything would make sense sooner or later, and often in dramatically satisfying ways. No longer. After taking the helm of the show two seasons back, executive producer John Wells mistook the show's speed and snap for adrenaline rush. His poorly plotted, badly executed presidential campaign is analogous to crashing an ambulance on ER, which he seems to do four or five times a year. It's big and loud and full of kinetic energy, but it's ultimately a stunt. Not that stunts don't have a place--The West Wing's season-ending episode a few years back in which an assassin opened up on the presidential party and we had to wait all summer to see who lived and who died was a stunt, too. But you can't do it every week. In trying to do it every week, Wells has wrought a hazy whirlwind of a presidential campaign in which two candidates won nominations for unclear reasons, and who are likely to fight the fall campaign on similarly unclear grounds. And since the show's already given away the identity of the winner--in a clever scene in the opening of the first episode--it's all pointless anyhow. All you really need to know about the campaign storyline is that the show's current B plot, involving which White House aide leaked the existence of a military space shuttle to the press, is far more interesting, primarily because it involves characters we've grown to care about--all but one of whom was created not by Wells, but by departed series creator Aaron Sorkin.

Now, Commander in Chief: This show is going to be unfairly compared to The West Wing--unfairly, because it's clear that C in C's reason for being is entirely different than The West Wing's. Sorkin created The West Wing to explore the drama surrounding a presidential administration--originally, the president was intended to be only a minor character. Issues and ideas were going to be a major source of the drama, and as important as the personal relationships among the characters. Commander in Chief, however, was created to show us a woman as president--the drama that grows from governing, as on The West Wing, is going to be secondary. So the shows don't really have much in common.

Based on the first episode of Commander in Chief, I'm not optimistic about it. There were some serious plausibility issues in the premiere: first and biggest, the implausibility of Mackenzie Allen getting to be vice president in the first place. In an era that's supposed to be approximately like our own, it's hard to imagine a Republican choosing an independent with no political experience (although Bush named Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court today, so I could be wrong). Also, it seems to me that if Allen were ready to resign while the president was still alive, his death doesn't change the equation all that much. In addition, I worry about Donald Sutherland's predatory Speaker of the House--he's going to have to be humanized pretty quickly if this show isn't going to become a comic book. And I'm extremely worried about the promos I've seen for the second episode, in which we see the Secret Service frightening the children (and, eventually, vice versa). If this show is going to become Mom Goes to the White House, that will be nice for people who dig that sort of thing, but I won't be watching it.

On Miers: Bush's choice of Harriet Miers would seem to confirm my guess that he would eventually get down to picking random dudes off the streets for various positions. After a quick spin around the major blogs, it looks as if a consensus is developing on the left that this nomination should make liberals fairly happy. It's pissing off the conservative base bigtime, because it doesn't represent the kind of red-meat nomination the religious hardcores have been dreaming of since 2001. (What's the use of having power if you can't rub peoples' noses in it?) The fact that many Democrats, including Harry Reid, are praising her, has them even further out on the edge. I don't mind seeing Repugs upset, but I do mind putting somebody on the court whose primary qualification seems to be that she thinks George W. Bush is the most brilliant man she's ever met. Girl needs to get out more, for damn sure.