The Daily Aneurysm

I Voted for It Before I Voted Against It, Part Deux
I called Herb Kohl's office this morning to ask why, if he planned to vote against Samuel Alito's nomination today, he voted to kill the filibuster yesterday. "The senator felt that further debate was not necessary," said the aide who answered the phone. Well, the necessity for more debate wasn't the point. The filibuster wasn't debate--it was a last-ditch parliamentary maneuver to stop a bad nomination. In the name of comity, or bipartisanship, or cluelessness, or some other damn thing, Kohl and 16 other Democrats chose not to support the only strategy that had a chance of working.

I was disappointed in Kohl, but not surprised. Kohl is a nominally progressive Democrat, but he's an old-school patrician Democrat, and not a people's liberal in the mold of Russ Feingold and Tammy Baldwin. So he has to be prodded occasionally to find his courage and do the right thing. Yesterday, he didn't have it, preferring instead to take a position on Alito that is intellectually incoherent. If the filibuster had no chance and therefore wasn't worth supporting, then he might just as well have voted for Alito this morning, too.

(Honesty compels me to report that his mild-mannered, get-along-to-go-along style is working for him. Wisconsin Republicans can't find anyone serious who wants to take the kamikaze mission of running against him this fall. The only Republican who'd have a chance of winning, former governor Tommy Thompson, is nowhere to be found. Tim Michels, who ran against Feingold in 2004, has said he won't make the race this time unless the party pays for it.)

But while we're smarting over Kohl's vote up here today, we shouldn't lose sight of the bigger picture. Digby observed this morning that 25 votes for a filibuster of a Supreme Court nominee is a very big deal. It may represent a major change in attitude on the part of prominent Democrats, who have had a habit of screwing the base to pander to the wishy-washy middle. Yesterday, all of the senators who want to be president voted against cloture in the end, rather than throwing in with the majority to prove to the Fox News crowd that they aren't really all that liberal. Imagine, voting with your base when the chips are down. What a concept.

(Note: I think the last time we had four posts on this blog in a single day was during Hurricane Katrina last fall. Don't get used to it.)

And Now, We Present the Single Dumbest Thing You Will Ever Read in Your Entire Life, Even if You Live to Be 100
Warning: The following article may lower your IQ simply by making its way through your eyeballs and into your brain. You have been warned. Click here.

The State of the Union Is Blotto
If you're planning on watching the State of the Union tonight (and I'm not--I'll be watching a basketball game, and I don't even like basketball), you might wish to make it more tolerable with the Daily Aneurysm's State of the Union Drinking Game.

Every time he says "freedom" or "liberty," take one drink. If mentioned in the same sentence, take three drinks.

When he says "the state of our union is strong," pour a second drink for your other hand.

Every time he refers to "spreading democracy," take one drink. If he says that Iraqi elections are spreading democracy, take two drinks.

When he praises Justice Alito, take one drink in honor of Harriet Miers, who was more qualified.

Every time he says "terrorist surveillance program" or "protect the American people," take one drink. If he says that his terrorist surveillance program is protecting the American people, take three drinks.

At the first mention of health savings accounts, light one cigarette and inhale deeply, but only if you already have private health insurance. Otherwise, take one drink. Of milk or soda.

Every time he mentions 9/11, take two drinks.

Every time he mentions that the administration is careful to protect Americans' civil rights, take two drinks.

When he professes to be "very concerned" about Iran's nuclear program, chug remainder of bottle and open next bottle.

If he mentions "fiscal responsibility" or says anything complimentary about the United Nations, throw empty bottle at TV.

If he says "fight them there so we don't have to fight them here" or a close approximation thereof, throw all remaining bottles at TV. Spark up joint.

Following the speech, count the number of conservatives commenting for whatever channel you're watching. Subtract the number of liberals commenting on all channels combined. Take drinks equal to the resulting number. (This can be calcuated with the sound down, which is the only way I'd do it.)

Your suggestions for other reasons to drink are welcome.

Recommended Reading: Maybe you're thinking of ordering a Seahawks or Steelers jersey from the NFL before the Super Bowl this weekend. Remember, you can have it personalized. Most people put their names on the back. But naughty people like to put other things on their backs. The NFL knows what they are, and they won't stand for it. (Link not safe for work.)

Gathering of the Tribes
It's a common phenomenon in the blogosphere--you sometimes have to wade through a deep pool of sludge to get to the golden nugget of wisdom floating in the middle. A blog (for example, this one) can be filled largely with garbage, but every once in a while contain a bit of good thinking. Or, to take a broader view, you can read a lot of blogs that are little more than narcissistic blather (again, like this one) before you find one that's consistently informative and wise.

That's not supposed to happen in newspapers, however--as newspaper folk are constantly reminding us. Pick up a newspaper and you are guaranteed a quality reading/journalistic experience. Newspapers are superior because they have editors, who check facts and monitor writers to make sure everything in their pages is fit for public consumption. As opposed to bloggers, who just rave on with no accountability to anyone, and if some poor reader gets brain cooties from something they write, they don't care.

So I wonder what happened in the Chicago Tribune yesterday, where veteran columnist Jon Margolis hacked up the single most incoherent column I've seen in a major newspaper in a long time. (The link goes to Smirking Chimp, where you won't have to go through the Trib's obnoxious registration process.) I have no idea how Margolis intended for Ted Nugent's opposition to anti-hunting groups to explain why intelligent design is so popular among Americans. I've read it three times, and I still haven't got a clue. It's so confusing that I'm tempted to think there's text missing.

What makes the column even more frustrating is that Margolis buried a fairly good observation near the end: We Americans are endlessly separating ourselves into like-minded tribes, which helps account for our polarized politics. Polarization, then, has something to do with our diversity.

Americans lack common ethnicity or religion, and while most of us speak the same language, our grandparents didn't. We get to choose our tribal loyalties and hostilities. Some choose one sociopolitical subculture to join, and others to find objectionable. Whatever the objectionable guys support is to be opposed, and vice versa.

Americans are like everyone else, in that we want to belong to something. We used to find it largely sufficient to be an American, we the people, united we stand, all that. But America is growing ever more amorphous and wide-open, and as a result, it's harder to feel as though we can be at home with people who seem so much different than ourselves. It's easier to feel comfortable in a group that has clear rules for what (and who) is included, and excluded. Which might be why America is looking more and more each year like a fractious collection of self-interested groups jockeying for position against one another in a zero-sum game. The idea that "we're all in this together" is mostly for marketing purposes, and has no relationship to reality.

Perhaps this is what Margolis meant to say. Then again, he might have meant to say only that Cat Scratch Fever is a really cool album. Whatever it was, I'm sure his editor knows.

Recommended Reading: There's a better-argued column in the Boston Globe today by James Carroll. He contemplates the likelihood that tomorrow night's State of the Union address will contain many references to the war we're supposedly fighting, but what kind of a war is this, anyhow? "Iraq is not a war, because, though we have savage assault, we have no enemy. The war on terrorism is not a war because, though we have an enemy, the muscle-bound Pentagon offers no authentic means of assault." Even though American soldiers and Iraqis are dying--real deaths, not theoretical ones--the war seems to be taking place some plane of the theoretical, or the metaphorical, or the metaphysical. (Or some other word Bush couldn't define if you gave him a dictionary.)

Empty Streets
Last week, I reread Rads by Tom Bates, about the 1970 bombing of the Army Math Research Center (AMRC) at the University of Wisconsin. For three years, from Dow Day in 1967 to the August day Sterling Hall was bombed, Madison was the "third coast," a national center of student protest against the Vietnam War. After the bombing, which George Will called "the Hiroshima of the American left," the movement largely died, not just here, but on campuses across the country.

There was a sense among many students at the UW back then that because the war was an intolerable crime against innocent civilians, and because the University would not respond to demands to disengage from the war machine, direct action was justified. Karl Armstrong, leader of the conspiracy that bombed Sterling Hall, took more action than most--setting fire to the UW's Red Gym in an attempt to take out the ROTC, burning the UW Primate Lab (mistakenly thinking it was Selective Service Headquarters), and attempting to drop gasoline bombs on the Badger Army Ammunition Plant north of Madison. The "New Year's Gang" that took credit for the attacks over the holidays in 1969-70 was primarily Armstrong, although he had help from his brother, Dwight, and a couple of others. The University steadfastly refused to close the AMRC, and over the summer of 1970, Armstrong hatched the plan to blow up the building in which it was housed.

Armstrong was captured in Canada in 1972 and pleaded guilty to second-degree murder. (A researcher working in the building was killed in the blast.) At his sentencing hearing, various all-stars from the American left came to Madison to argue that his sentence should be mitigated--in effect, that the bombing was a justifiable response to the illegal war in Vietnam. It didn't work--the judge gave Armstrong the maximum. Armstrong didn't help himself much. Bates portrays him as a rather low-key revolutionary until his arrest, when he became a megalomaniac who seemed to be thoroughly enjoying his notoriety, and so his sentencing hearing had more than its share of circuslike moments, which helped his credibility and that of his supporters not a whit.

A successful strike on AMRC might have further energized the American Left, if the bombing hadn't killed the researcher, Robert Fassnacht. That act cost the movement many of its supporters, young and old, and hardened the attitudes of those already opposed to student protest. And the movement, which had been seething with energy a few months before, in the wake of Cambodia and Kent State, withered away in a matter of weeks.

I'm not the only person who thinks that this country needs more of the spirit of the 1960s at this moment--the willingness not just to stand up and but to take action against the illegal actions of an immoral government. We've got more reason now than in the 1960s, because the United States is not just waging an illegal war for a dubious purpose, but its government is consolidating power at home in a Constitution-nullifying fashion that would make Zombie Nixon smile from his perch in Hell. If this were 1967, people would be in the streets. Some of that same energetic impulse exists in people who huddle behind computers and write, but if they stay huddled, it's not the same thing. And so it seems highly unlikely that anybody will be moved to blow stuff up anytime soon in response to what the current administration is doing. Thus, we may finally end up with the fascist state that the students saw coming in the 1960s--not through the application of hobnailed boots to the collective groin of the citizenry, but with docile acquiescence. Go ahead, take my rights, just don't tell me I'll have to give up my cable.

Let me be clear, so my name doesn't end up in some Homeland Security database (if it isn't already there): I'm not suggesting that things need to be blown up here in 2006. I am suggesting only that perhaps, the lack of organized protest today is itself a legacy of Sterling Hall. By tarring all of the student protesters of the 1960s with a brush wielded by a few murdering bombers, Sterling Hall may have hastened and strengthened the attempts by conservatives, from the 1970s to now, to discredit the politics of the entire 1960s generation--and anything that looks like it. If you tell people that it's time to turn off their iPods and get into the streets, you're a relic who has missed the history of the last 35 years. The protesters were fools, because they accomplished nothing, and some of them were murderers. Don't you remember?

Warning Bells
January 28, 1986, 20 years ago yesterday, was a fairly normal day around the radio station. I'd wrapped up my morning show at 10AM, and all morning, when we hadn't been talking about the Chicago Bears winning the Super Bowl the day before, we'd been reading news stories about the pending launch of the space shuttle Challenger, the excitement surrounding the teacher-in-space, Christa McAuliffe--and the cold temperatures at Cape Canaveral.

Out in the long hallway behind the studios, a UPI wire machine chugged away, day and night, printing news stories, weather forecasts, and sports scores. (Computerized, paperless news delivery was still a few years away--we still had to load the wire machine with fat rolls of paper, and one of the greatest sins you could commit was to let the paper run out.) From time to time, a bell on the machine would ring. Most of the time, it was just a ding or two, to alert you to a sports score or an update to a breaking story. For something really big, it might ring three times.

After 10:00, I usually stayed in the studio, recording commercials, which is what I was doing on that day. I happened to be in the hallway when the alert bell rang--four or five times, I don't remember how many, but more than I'd ever heard before. (It may have been what the wire services call a "flash"--and I think it would have been the first flash sent on the wire since the Kennedy assassination.) The news director came out of the newsroom at the other end of the hall on a dead sprint, but I got to the machine first, so I was the one to rip the bulletin. It read: "There has been an explosion aboard the space shuttle Challenger. The fate of the crew is unknown." And that was it.

I was transfixed, rooted in one spot like I was a tree or something. "The fate of the crew is unknown?" How long I stood there, I don't know. Maybe only five seconds, but I remember that I needed to actually, physically rouse myself to action. I said, aloud I think, "I'd better go and put this on the air." I went into the FM studio, broke into the automated programming, and read the bulletin. I presumably ad-libbed a bit about how we would have more information when we knew it, because at that moment, we knew nothing.

About half-an-hour after the first bulletin came in, I went on the air again to report what we'd learned in the interim. Just as I keyed the microphone to speak, the listener line started to blink. It blinked all the while I was talking, and was still blinking when I finished, so I answered it. It was a listener who proceeded to go off, angrily asking why my station wasn't saying anything about the Challenger explosion. "Ma'am, didn't you hear the bulletin I just read?" I asked. She hadn't, of course, because she'd been on the phone. But it occurs to me that she was probably right to complain--imagine hearing that there's been some sort of unspeakable disaster and tuning in your local radio station, only to hear the usual diet of Madonna and Huey Lewis. Down the hall, the AM station hadn't been carrying the launch live, but the jock on the air had been listening to it off the air. He had the presence of mind to put the network broadcast on right away. I should probably have done the same thing on the FM, but I don't recall doing so, even after the woman's phone call.

The rest of the morning passed in a blur. My day was generally done around 1:00, and I went home to watch the coverage on TV. That was Ronald Reagan's greatest day, remember--when he went on the air and quoted that poem, saying how the astronauts had "slipped the surly bonds of Earth and touched the face of God," he performed the single greatest public service of his presidency. It expressed the grief we all felt, and in a unique and appropriate way. I'd been too busy for grief while I was at the station, but it hit me once I got home.

The Mrs. had been making radio sales calls in a little town 30 miles down the road, and had learned of the disaster from a client. She kept making her calls, although at one point in the afternoon, she says she had to pull off to the side of the road and weep. And as afternoon turned into evening, I started feeling worse and worse myself. First there was the shock of it--nobody could have imagined something so horrid. Next, I started imagining myself as part of it--in the spectator stands with the McAuliffes, looking at the exploded vehicle in the sky and not really understanding what it meant, or worse, in the cockpit as the thing blew up. We took some comfort in those early hours in the widely reported story that the astronauts would never have known what hit them. It wasn't until weeks later that we learned they really did know, and that they were probably alive until the crew compartment hit the water.

Investigations showed that the Challenger probably shouldn't have been launched in such cold weather--and although it was never proven, I have suspected ever after that the launch was rushed so that Reagan could talk to the astronauts live during his State of the Union message, scheduled for that night. And if it's true that people knew it shouldn't have been launched, then somebody, either at NASA or at the company that built the rocket, killed those seven astronauts as surely as if they'd blown their heads off with a gun.

The next morning, life began again, although a lot different than it had been the day before. The Challenger explosion was the end of an era--the era in which NASA moved from success to success. Since then, NASA has looked like just another government agency, bumbling along with the lowest bidder. The agency would lose another shuttle in 2003, and while it was a surprise and a terrible loss, it wasn't one-tenth the shock Challenger had been.

(Edited, because on further reflection, I think we had a UPI machine, not an AP wire.)

Hail to the Resistance
So John Kerry (remember him?) intends to lead a filibuster against Samuel Alito. The New York Times called for it in an editorial today, and lots of people on the left have been doing so too, even if there's little chance of success, just to make the point that this guy is way, way out of the mainstream. I'm in favor of it, too, but we all need to understand the following:

A) We're not stopping Alito. With 55 Repug votes in the bag, they only need five more to achieve cloture, and a couple of Democrats, Salazar of Colorado and Landrieu of Louisiana, are already saying they will vote for cloture.

(Mary Landrieu--what a terrible excuse for a Democrat. Really. "Because we have such a full plate of pressing issues before Congress, a filibuster would be, in my view, very, very counterproductive." Well, then, why not do all that first before confirming Alito? She even gets in the obligatory Repug talking point: "It is important that we have an up-or-down vote." Peter Daou's ears are ringing.)

The Repugs are claiming they already have 60 votes for cloture, and they're probably right, given that Nelson of Nebraska, Johnson of North Dakota, and Byrd of West Virginia say they'll vote for confirmation. If they favor the guy, it doesn't make much sense for them to vote against cloture--although Salazar says he will vote against Alito and for cloture, so anything's possible. (It's even possible that it might dawn on Salazar how stupid his position is.)

B) We're going to get killed by the media. The cruising-to-confirmation storyline has been agreed upon for a couple of weeks now, so this will be played like the obstructionist tactic of a few sore losers. We see it as another way for Democrats to get across the idea that Alito represents a serious turn to the right for the Court, one that's likely to empower the presidency and the corporations at the expense of the other two branches and average Americans. Nobody at the networks is interested in that, however, because it takes an adult attention span to understand it. The story will either be the eminently qualified Judge Alito versus anti-Bush bitter-enders who Hate America, or as Democrats engaging in frivolous self-aggrandizement. Given that Nurse Frist is vowing to call for a cloture vote early on to slap the opposition down, bet on frivolity being the preferred frame. The Times has already gotten the party started in the story linked above, calling Kerry's plan "a quixotic attempt to stop" the nomination.

C) We're going to get killed by members of our own party. At some point in the next couple of days, either Nelson, Johnson, Landrieu, or Salazar will stand up in front of a camera and start pounding lumps into their own party for filibustering the nom, and it'll get played on TV like it was the winning play of the Super Bowl. This will be seen as proof that the Democrats are a bunch of pussies who can't keep their own people in line. (Which is largely true.) And if they can't even do that with their own people, then how, Mr. and Mrs. America, can you dare trust them to protect your precious bodily fluids from Osama?

(I expect Byrd to keep quiet. His statement on Alito says his vote is in response to the wishes of his constituents, and he appears to buy the assurances Alito gave during the confirmation process--alas. I didn't get the sense from his statement that he will want to scold his colleagues. If he hadn't been challenged by a well-funded opponent just yesterday, he might not be voting like he is.)

D) We have to beat the hell out of a handful of talking points and keep repeating them until we're blue in the face no matter what anyone says in response to them. Every senator who speaks needs to be speaking from the same script, over and over like an endless loop, inside the Senate and outside on various TV and radio shows. This is part of the wider war that's left to be fought, in which we have to change the subject from what the Repugs want to talk about to what we want to talk about.

E) John Kerry has grown testicles 18 months too late. He gave a fine speech on the floor of the Senate yesterday, in which he made clear that the issue with Alito is not whether he's qualified, but what his ideology is, and how much that ideology stands to screw with what Americans find important. How nice of him to take the lead in a fight that's doomed to fail, as opposed to the fight he should have won rather easily in 2004. And with a story appearing just hours before the filibuster announcement that he hasn't ruled out a presidential run in 2008, it doesn't take a genius to tell you that the filibuster is going to be diminished by suggestions that it's a campaign ploy.

So even though it's going down hard and fast, we need to filibuster anyway, if only to get ourselves used to fighting. As the Rude Pundit said so well last week:

Democrats need to think of themselves as an organized resistance, an insurgency against a dictatorial government, an uprising with popular support among the citizens of the United States. A resistance doesn't succeed unless it actually, you know, resists. And if not on Alito, then what? Dianne Feinstein-leaning Democrats need to take a page from the anti-abortion movement: if you believe it's about life and death, then act like you wanna save lives.

What he said.

The Queen Is Dead
"Alas, poor Wonkette! I knew it, Horatio: a blog of infinite jest, of most excellent fancy: it hath cracked my shit up a thousand times; and now, how abhorred in my imagination it is! My gorge rims at it. And who made better rimjob jests than thee? Here hung that snark that I have partaken I know not how oft. Where be your gibes now? Your gambols? Your Butterstick? Your jokes about buggery, that were wont to set the table on a roar? Not one now, to mock your own grinning?

Yes, Wonkette is dead. Well, not dead, but it jumped the shark for good this week. Between Ana Marie Cox's departure for multimedia stardom and the arrival of the new guy, we're being treated to various bigfoot bloggers (Ezra Klein Tuesday, Glenn "Instapundit" Reynolds yesterday--who's a Republican, for chrissakes) who are trying on Ana Marie's thong and finding it an uncomfortable fit. Klein's posts read like he was ashamed to be posting on such a frivolous site, while Reynolds committed the cardinal sin of thinking he's funnier than he really is. And for Wonkette to be Wonkette, it's got to bring the funny. Ana Marie could bring the funny. Several of her guests, like the pseudonymous "Joe Klein" and "Holly Martins," could bring the funny. Henry the Intern could bring the funny some of the time. DCeiver, who filled in a few weeks ago, could bring the funny like nobody this side of The Onion. But they're all gone, and we're left with people who, excellent writers though they be, can't summon up the combination of rapier wit and over-the-top snark that made Wonkette what it once was.

From its birth in 2003, Wonkette was never really a blog like other blogs (including this blog) are blogs. It was part of a large online media empire, yet despite its corporate origins, it retained an outlaw edge, thanks to the anal-sex jokes and the Cult of Butterstick. But now that it's safe enough to accommodate writers like Klein and Reynolds (and its coming transfer into the hands of a male blogger, David Lat), its days on the cutting edge are over.

Make no mistake--the change in Wonkette's blogger gender is going to matter. While Ana Marie wasn't a delicate flower of womanhood or anything, her take was uniquely female in many ways. (Would a male blogger have embraced Butterstick to such an extent?) The blogosphere is enough of a boys' club as it is. So I guess this means it's time to start reading Pandagon more often now.

Recommended Reading: One of the reasons Bush seems largely bulletproof no matter what he says or does is because the default position of the media is to defend him. Peter Daou has some thoughts on the media triangle that props him up, and Steve Soto at the Left Coaster has some worthwhile thoughts on what Daou said.

Sunset on Pennsylvania Avenue
You may have heard over the weekend that NBC has made official what we've suspected for a long time--this will be the final season of The West Wing. It's not going to be all that hard to see it go, given that it's been creatively moribund for the last three seasons. The campaign storyline of the last two seasons (which will be resolved in a two-parter on April 2 and 9) has morphed the show into something like those rock bands from the 60s that play county fairs every summer. You know the ones--one original member and four hired guns making music that is supposed to be like the real thing, but has something missing at its core.

I'd be perfectly happy to fast-forward through the campaign stuff, because it's been as perfectly free of drama as the channel that scrolls public service announcements. The only reason I'm still watching is to see the stories of the people The West Wing has always been about--Jed and Abby Bartlet, Leo McGarry, C.J. Cregg, Toby Ziegler, and the rest. (And Charlie--what have they done with him?) And Josh Lyman, too--senior-aide Josh, not Pod Josh, who's supposed to be the confident manager of a presidential campaign, but who looks as though he's seen the same thing the rest of us have--that his candidate isn't ready to be a senator, let alone president. The final episode on May 14 will involve the inauguration of the new president--but let's hope, now that the producers now know it's the final episode of the series, that it will focus on the characters who are leaving, and not on the ciphers coming in, whose lives we won't see and about whom we don't care.

Salon asked some of its writers whether they'll miss The West Wing. Some will, some won't. A couple of them get at a critical point--when the show debuted in 1999, it was still possible to imagine the White House as a place where the people's business got done in the people's interest. No longer. And that, as much as anything, might explain it's why time for The West Wing to go.

Forget Your Troubles, Come on, Get Happy
Headline from the Washington Times' Insight Magazine: "Impeachment hearings: White House prepares for worst." That's the Washington Times, folks--the house organ of the Bush fluffers--so you can assume that it represents something close to the official view of Republican insiders, which is that hearings into the illegal wiretap scandal are a serious threat to the continuation in office of He Who Shall Not Be Named.

The article is behind a subscribers-only wall, but Steve Gilliard has it, and makes a good point about possible impeachment hearings, one you might even characterize as happy: All it would take to drive HWSNBN from office would be the prospect of hearings, which he wouldn't stick around for. "Bush could NEVER take the brutal questioning which would start with wiretaps and end with Iraq and Niger." He'd resign first. Cheney, too. So we'd end up with President Rice, which would be bad, but I'd take my chances for a while.

There are lots of reasons why hearings won't happen, starting with the spinelessness of Dems in Congress and the unfortunate tendency of Repugs to stand by their man when they should join in on the nut-cutting. But on this frigid January day, let the simple facts that hearings might happen, and that they might happen as soon as this spring, and that Repugs are scared shitless over them, wash over you like warm waves on a tropical beach.

Oh Canada: I don't think there's much reason to get too worried about the Conservatives winning the election in Canada yesterday. For one thing, they didn't get a majority, so they'll have to form a coalition with parties that don't share their ideology. For another, party leader Stephen Harper spent the last several months moderating his positions to look more like a centrist, but now that he's in office--if he's like an American conservative--the mask will come off, and he'll be revealed to hold positions far out of step with Canadian public opinion. Up there, the Conservative Party is an uncomfortable coalition of various interests--kind of like the Democrats down here--and just like the Democrats down here, it's hard to see them enforcing the sort of ideological discipline American conservatives have used to keep their varying interests marching in lockstep. And that means that the Harper government's lifespan probably won't be much different than its conservative predecessors, led by Joe Clark and Kim Campbell. Neither of them could keep the PM gig for more than a few months.

We Have Found a Witch--May We Burn Her?
It's a whole month's worth of Quote of the Day in a single article--yes, the long-awaited Most Loathsome People of 2005 from the Buffalo Beast. Hat tip to contributors Allan Uthman, Paul Jones, Ian Murphy, and Chris Riordan--who are not very nice people, but in a very good way.

Tom DeLay: "A politician so horrible, his prior career as an exterminator constitutes fratricide."

Scooter Libby: "A high-level fall guy, responsible for leaking what was in the interest of profit, not leaking what wasn’t, and barking on cue to produce the noise of governance without the drawbacks of actual governance."

("The noise of governance without the drawbacks of actual governance" might be the single greatest description of the Bush Administration ever coined.)

Paris Hilton: "Her continued success as a celebrity famous for nothing, despite the eerie resemblance she bears to the inbred banjoist from Deliverance and a lack of talent so profound that others become duller as they approach her, indicates that something is fundamentally wrong with humanity."

Karl Rove: "[H]e is simply missing the part of his soul that prevents the rest of us from kicking elderly women in the face."

Martha Stewart: "Only in America could a plutocrat convicted of insider trading find sympathy among her social inferiors--people she would have either sterilized or mustard gassed, if the law permitted her."

Each of the people cited on the list gets an appropriate sentence as punishment for being who they are. For God (#13 on the list), the Beast proposes: "Forever listening to an unending stream of idiotic, mundane prayers uttered by the dumbest, most inarticulate people in His creation." For Barbara Bush (#12): "Bound and thrown into Lake Pontchartrain. If she floats, burned at the stake. If she drowns, even better."

Flagpoles and Booyah
I have begun again my twice-yearly traveling season, with a quick trip last Thursday and Friday. I tend to visit a lot of the same places year after year, which can make the trips rather tedious--but as I wrote last September, only a failure of curiosity or imagination requires a person to think of a trip as dull. So Thursday afternoon I headed northeast from Madison, up U.S. 151, to Wisconsin's eastern shore.

The first interesting place you hit on 151 is Beaver Dam. Beaver Dam used to be the home of the Monarch Range Company. A Monarch range was the centerpiece of a lot of Wisconsin kitchens--including my grandmother's--from the turn of the 20th century into the 1980s, until the company sold out and its successor went bankrupt.

The next stop along 151 is Waupun. In 1851, three years after Wisconsin became a state, Waupun (pronounced waw-PONN) was selected as the site of the state prison. Some of today's prisoners reside in the first building erected, in 1854. Newly constructed prisons--and Wisconsin has its share, because, like other states, prison construction was much of what passed for economic development here during the 1980s--look like industrial plants, apart from the razor wire. But old prisons, like Waupun, with those forbidding stone walls and towers, look like prisons. Waupun's prison is on the National Register of Historic Places, but it's safe to say you don't want to visit there.

Fond du Lac is where U.S. 151, Interstate 43, U.S. 45, U.S. 41, and Wisconsin 23 (the road to Sheboygan) intersect. Thus, you can't go anywhere in eastern Wisconsin, including to heaven or hell, without going through Fond du Lac first. It's a city of 42,000 that seems to sprawl on for miles. When I first started traveling that way regularly a couple of years ago, I suggested that what they really needed to do was unleash a fleet of bulldozers to straighten out the byzantine curves of 151 that wound you through the city's downtown. Fortunately, they've finally opened a bypass--although it still requires you to negotiate an urban streetscape for a while. Old habits die hard, apparently.

I made a quick convenience-store stop in Fond du Lac, and saw a store across the street called National Flagpole. It occurred to me that while I've seen dozens of places selling flags, this was the first one I'd ever seen selling the poles.

My destination Thursday night was Manitowoc, a lakeside industrial town that, like many industrial towns, ain't entirely what it used to be. The giant Mirro cookware plant closed a couple of years ago (you could use a Mirro pot to cook on your Monarch range for most of 100 years). Manitowoc remains a shipbuilding town, however, and has been for a long time. The sports teams at Lincoln High are nicknamed the Shipbuilders, or Ships for short.

Friday I had to head up to Mishicot, a town 15 miles north of Manitowoc notable primarily for a resort with a 45-hole golf course. On the way, I went past a grocery store with a sign out front advertising its hours as 6:06AM to 10:33PM. On my way home, I went through little Francis Creek, Wisconsin, where one of the local bars was advertising its upcoming booyah bash on an outdoor sign. Booyah is a chicken stew loaded with vegetables, created by the Belgians who settled that part of northeastern Wisconsin. The stuff is sometime called Belgian penicillin, and typical booyah recipe is meant to feed dozens or hundreds.

On the return trip, I hit Fond du Lac in a snowstorm, which dropped travel speeds to 30 or 40 the rest of the way home, and turned a three-hour trip into a four-hour trip. It meant I had to concentrate more on the road than the sights along it, but I'd seen enough on the way up. Because only a failure of curiosity or imagination requires you to think of a trip as dull.

About the Football: I have no real idea who's going to win today. As the week has unfolded, I've convinced myself at one time or another that every possible combination of winners and losers was absolutely the right the way to pick. I can make a perfectly good case for any one of those combinations, which in the aggregate would add up to "jeez, I don't know." So here, without further comment, are my picks. Thank goodness there's no money riding on this.

Denver 27, Pittsburgh 21
Carolina 28, Seattle 27

But it just as easily could be one of the other possible combinations. Jeez, I don't know.

Talk Amongst Yourselves
Work and travel are keeping me off the blog today, but I'm barely an improvement over nothing anyhow, so you don't need me. We've had some interesting threads going below that you can feel free to pick up on.

--Handicap the Repug presidential race for 2008. Who's the man--or woman? Who would be the easiest for your favorite Democrat to beat? And who is your favorite Democrat, by the way?

--Explain why CNN and MSNBC seem so eager to keep hiring right-wing nutjobs for on-air slots when Fox News has the wingnut demographic locked up. Are they just dumb, or is there something else going on?

Or contribute an entirely new topic. I want you to do whatever makes you happy, because your happiness is what I'm all about.

I'll also be out of blogging range on Friday and Saturday, but I am hoping the Sage will serve something for you to nibble on in my absence. Coming Sunday: more football predictions sure to be wrong.

Things That Are Good for the Spirit
It's been an extraordinarily busy day here at my dining-room table, as all of my clients seem to have awakened from a long winter's slumber at the same time, so I have been forced to do remunerative labor instead of blogging--which is not a bad thing. I need the money, and the glorious benefit of blowing the dust out of certain cobwebbed regions of my brain can't be understated, either.

I had to drop in this afternoon, however, to point you to a most unusual news article from the Associated Press, written by Nedra Pickler, about the White House response to Al Gore's criticisms of the illegal spying program. Pickler is often highly critical of Democrats in stories that are not intended to be opinion pieces--for which she became infamous during the 2004 nomination fight. But note the ninth paragraph of her story today, in which she takes an uncharacteristic whack at Scotty McClellan, essentially calling him out for distorting Bill Clinton's record on domestic spying. It's a beautiful thing, really, and utterly unlike not just Pickler, but mainstreamers in general. Imagine providing context for a remark instead of just parroting whatever the administration says and leaving it to the reader, ill-equipped though he may be, to decide.

Mmmm, smells like journalism.

Amongst the other stuff I've done today, I did find time to visit a blog called Unqualified Offerings, which I suggest you visit also. The post that brought me there is a discussion of the fabled "ticking time bomb" scenario, which is often used as a justification for torture. The scenario goes like this: If you knew that a terrorist was going to blow up a city full of white women and babies and make Jesus cry, wouldn't you be justified in torturing the terrorist to get information on the attack? The answer is usually yes, and that's how lots of people justify the use of torture. But Jim Henley's twist on the scenario is so simple that a simpleton such as I should have been able to think of it, and well worth the click.

On a completely different matter, Henley's also got a list of free software that does some of the same things Microsoft and others make you pay for, or replaces stuff by Microsoft and others that doesn't work as well. (For what it's worth, I used ZoneAlarm's free firewall on my old desktop computer, and found it to be better than the McAfee firewall I am paying for on the laptop. I also use AdAware anti-spyware and recommend it, along with Spybot and Spyware Blaster, which are not on the list, but are also good and easy to use. And yes, I suggest you use them all, as they tend to catch different things.)

Another thing I like about Unqualified Offerings is that Henley calls his wife "Mrs. Offering." I'd ask my Mrs. if she'd like to be "Mrs. Aneurysm," if I didn't know the answer already.

I have also been spending time at mp3 blogs (and I wrote about a couple of my favorites last week at The Hits Just Keep On Comin'). Today, The Number One Songs in Heaven has posted a breathtakingly gorgeous Southern soul tune called "Nothing Takes the Place of You" by Toussaint McCall. It's soul music in the most uplifting, good-for-the-spirit sense of the word. In fact, I am convinced that it could heal the sick and raise the dead. Even if you don't feel like you need it now, download it anyway. In a world such as this, you'll need it eventually.

Hatin' on Headline News
A year or two ago, CNN Headline News dumped news entirely from primetime, putting on an hourlong showbiz show (gee, there's an underserved subject area), and an hour featuring Court TV's Nancy Grace, whose show might be the greatest waste of electricity in the history of American broadcasting. Sooner or later, every missing persons case in the country is going to get its turn on the show--brides gone from their honeymoons, grandmothers vanished on the way to the market, and Natalee Holloway as the Beaver. It's the worst kind of exploitation, as families and friends of the missing display their pain for CNN's profit and Grace's personal glorification. (Why anybody would want to spend any time at all with Grace, who has all the charm of a wounded alligator, is a mystery.) If you didn't know it was a real show, you might mistake it for a parody of bad cable news. The people involved in it should be embarrassed.

But they're not, and they're about to embarrass themselves even more. Headline News announced today that it intends to hire right-wing radio host Glenn Beck for a primetime hour starting in April. Beck's a lovely example of wingnuttia, as Media Matters ably summarizes here. Beck looks all boyish and innocent, but he's as nasty a wingnut as wingnuts come----racist, sadistic, turned on by war, and a genuinely bad guy. We can only hope that this hire might go the way of MSNBC's unfortunate experience with Michael Savage, whose TV career ended after four months in 2003, as soon as the suits at the network began to understand what they'd signed on for. But then again, Savage looked like a spittle-flecked maniac when he got rolling. Beck, who's on about 200 radio stations, mostly in red-leaning areas of the country, will likely come across as a lot more conventional--if no less hateful.

What the hire says is that CNN will put on every available right-wing nutjob before they'd even consider hiring somebody who remotely skews left. Liberal media, my ass.

Go, Al, Go
Like many, I was blown away by Al Gore's speech yesterday--both by the speech itself, and by the sad predictablity of the Bush humpers' response to it. It says a lot, and none of it good, about the state of political discourse in this country when the instant response to such a speech has nothing to do with the content and everything to do with ad hominem attacks on the speaker. "Oh, Al's just running for president" or "Everybody knows Al Gore is mentally ill." (Honesty compels me to report I haven't seen anybody criticize Gore's mental state this time, although conservative mouthpieces said so frequently after one of his earlier speeches.) And after the administration has had a couple of hours to formulate a response, what they do is predictable, too: They send out an official--last night it was Attorney General Alberto Gonzales--to A) distort and B) lie about Gore and his record.

It seems to me that responding to legitimate criticisms and accusations by defaulting immediately to dishonesty, or childish "nanny nanny boo boo" behavior, is its own form of mental illness, but I'm not a doctor. And if Al Gore is running for president--the new-model, post-2000 version of Al Gore, the one who talks plainly and passionately about stuff that really matters--then go Al. I love me some Russ Feingold, but I could easily love me some Al, too.

One Fine Day in Kuwait, and Iowa
I would have forgotten it entirely if it hadn't been for the Today in History box in the right-hand column, but tonight is the 15th anniversary of the start of the Persian Gulf War. On that day, we'd known for weeks that there was going to be a war in the Gulf. We didn't know exactly when it would start, although Saddam Hussein had been given a January 15 deadline to pull out of Kuwait, and when he didn't do it, we knew the war couldn't be more than hours away.

We forget now how profoundly scary it was to anticipate that war, before we found out that Saddam's vaunted Republican Guard was going to fold up like a cheap card table. We'd heard that the military had ordered 40,000 body bags, for example, and Saddam had promised "the mother of all battles." We suspected that he might try to widen the war into a conflagration embroiling the entire Middle East, and he tried, by hitting Israel with his infamous Scud missiles. (In early January, I had listened to a talk show--a thorougly secular, non-wacky talk show--that discussed, in all seriousness, whether Armageddon was at hand.)

On January 16, 1991, I was working at a radio station in Clinton, Iowa. In those days, Clinton wasn't exactly Paris in the 1920s--it was a hanging-by-a-thread industrial town where the top employers were an animal carcass rendering plant and a grain processor, both of which blanketed the city with an indescribable stench, and a chemical plant that produced god-knew-what. It was a shot-and-a-beer town, albeit more in the what's-the-use, who-gives-a-shit sense than in the salt-of-the-earth sense. (That's partly why The Mrs. and I never lived there--I commuted from 30 miles away for three-plus years.) Despite all that, however, the station was run by the best owner I ever worked for, and it became a place where you could plant little seeds of good radio and be given the time necessary for them to grow.

So on that day, I am on the air in the afternoon, my regular timeslot. Around the office, war talk has been secondary to the fact that Jane Pauley of NBC News is in town shooting a feature for one of her shows. At the end of the 3:30 local newscast, my reporter, Christy, mentions this to me on the air. We happen to know that the owner of the local limousine service usually plays our station in his limo, so I make a little speech: "Jane, if you're listening and you have a few minutes, stop by the radio station. Your driver knows how to find it. We promise it will be the easiest interview you ever had. Nothing but softball questions. You can plug your new show all you want." I repeat the invitation a few more times over the next couple of hours.

About 5:45, Christy suddenly bursts into the studio yelling, "This is it! This is it!"

She is talking about the first bulletins of bombers over Baghdad. For a few seconds, I think she is telling me Jane Pauley has showed up.

I wasn't in favor of that war. All the talk about liberating the poor Kuwaitis, and all the talk about Saddam being worse than Hitler, all of it sounded to me like PR nonsense. It was a war to control the flow of oil, nothing more. The fact that an international coalition was working together on the effort made it only a little easier to swallow. Yet when the war actually began--in the first 10 minutes after Christy barreled into the studio--I remember feeling a rush of excitement, and a euphoria so powerful my knees almost buckled when I stood up. Visions of B-52s flying wing-to-wing, tanks and trucks roaring over the border, endless lines of soldiers marching into the distance, flags snapping in the breeze, my country, of thee I sing. This is it. This is it.

There's not much to tell after that. We put on ABC Radio's wall-to-wall coverage, fired up the TV set in the newsroom, and settled in for the evening. And over the next few hours, the course of American history began to change, in ways we're still working out now, 15 years later.

Black Ink, White Page
On this MLK Day, let me say first that I am not sure a white guy should be pontificating about race relations. Especially not a white guy of Norwegian ancestry who lives in a suburb that's 98 to 99 percent white (albeit in the most racially diverse neighborhood of that suburb). In fact, the opinions of the general run of white people--who know about black American life on a second-hand basis at best--are not entirely reliable. So when you hear that 78 percent of white Americans think that significant progress has been made toward racial equality in the United States, consider the source--and then take note that among black Americans, the figure is 66 percent.

The same poll notes, interestingly enough, that more suburbanites believe in progress than urbanites, and more Republicans than Democrats. In other words--if you neither are, nor live with, nor make common cause politically with black Americans, you are more likely to believe progress is being made toward racial equality. You probably could have predicted that without a poll. (The good thing, at least, is that majorities in all demographic groups see progress.)

I am not sure that agreement with a statement that the country has "made progress toward racial equality," which is what the AP/IPSOS poll asked about, is the same as agreement with a statement that "race relations are better." On one level, of course they are--race relations are a lot better now than they were 50 years ago. But what about a comparison between now and 25 years ago, or 10? Somewhere there are probably objective standards by which it can be measured, but I don't know what they are. What I suspect is this: Despite living in a politically correct age, we talk about racial issues in much harsher terms now than we used to. I'm not talking about white people throwing around the word "nigger"--I'm talking about white people's opinions about black culture, black employment and career aspirations, black family structure, and so on. White people are a lot more blunt about expressing themselves on those issues now, whereas a generation ago we might have thought the same things, but would have taken care to whisper about them.

You can argue that talking out loud is more honest than whispering, and thereby better--and it is, when the talk is constructive. But when it's the same old stereotyped nonsense, about black people who don't want to work, can't be educated, have bad habits, or whose culture threatens white values, then what have we gained? My point is that open hostility between races seems more common now than it was when I was growing up. But remember--I'm a white guy of Norwegian ancestry who lives in a suburb that's 98 to 99 percent white (albeit in the most racially diverse neighborhood of that suburb). So I could be wrong.

Recommended Reading: Salon's Andrew O'Hehir writes about the post-Civil War period of Reconstruction, and how a leading historian believes its failure is the key to our unhappy racial history. And the Rude Pundit compares and contrasts the words of Martin Luther King, Thomas Jefferson, and James Dobson on religion in public life.

A Late Word About the Football
Four extremely good games this weekend, as most everyone expected. Divisional playoff weekend is usually the best NFL weekend of the year.

Sunday: a classic finish for Colts/Steelers, one you'd scarcely believe without seeing it. How sick are the Colts about this, their best chance to make the Super Bowl? Their nemesis, New England, is no longer in their way--and they can't get past the number-six seed in the AFC. Their kicker is probably the second-most reliable in the NFL, but he missed with all the money on the table--although the game was lost before then, when Peyton Manning, the best QB in the NFL not named Tom Brady, couldn't do his usual magic.

Bears/Panthers: also a great game with a breathless finish. Rex Grossman played a better game than I expected, but when he needed to pull it out at the end, he didn't. Both this game and the Colts/Steelers games were poorly officiated, by the way--at one point, I remarked to The Mrs. that Bears fans have been complaining for 25 years about getting jobbed by the refs, but that as of today, it was now time for them to shut up, although a few minutes later, the refs missed calling a delay-of-game penalty on the Bears, and the resulting play ended up in Carolina intercepting a pass. So after a quarter-century of bitching about penalties called, I am guessing that somewhere, they started bitching about the one that didn't get called.

Losers. Shut up and go home.

Saturday: I'm reluctant to say that Denver beat New England--it was more a case of New England losing to Denver, with all the mistakes and turnovers New England committed. In retrospect, it may be that New England's late-season run was destined to end like that--they probably lacked the talent of previous teams, and momentum, luck, and guts can only take you so far. Now that Denver has beaten the champs, it may be time for me to start believing in them. But I don't have to say just yet.

Redskins/Seahawks: a better game than I expected, although it was the result I expected. Not the dominating Seahawk performance I expected, though, even though the Redskins were lucky to be in the playoffs to begin with, and Cinderella's coach usually turns into a pumpkin more or less on time. Seattle will need a more thorough effort than that to beat Carolina next weekend.

I was 2-and-2 on the weekend (right on the Seahawks and Panthers, wrong on New England and Indianapolis), and now I'm 5-and-3 overall. Predictions for the coming weekend's games will be up Friday or Saturday.

Where Rosy Scenarios Fall Victim to Gut Instincts, and the Tom Brady Love Fest Continues
Once again this weekend, I intend to watch football until my eyes fall out. I'll get to my picks in a moment, but first, I've got a few thoughts about my team, which was anything but elite this year.

The Packers fired head coach Mike Sherman on January 2, even though he had four winning seasons in five years and won three straight division titles. Although his firing was unjust and probably unwarranted, Sherman got caught in the switches with a new boss--general manager Ted Thompson, who took over Sherman's GM duties before last season--and a record of 4-and-12. In pro sports, you don't survive that deadly double.

This week, the Packers replaced Sherman with Mike McCarthy, a former Packers assistant who'd been offensive coordinator with San Francisco. The 49ers had one of the NFL's worst offenses this past year. Before that, he was offensive coordinator in New Orleans, which never rose above the level of mediocrity while he was there. And before that, in the single year McCarthy was the Packers quarterback coach (1999), Brett Favre had one of the worst seasons of his career. None of these is entirely McCarthy's fault--but then again, going 4-and-12 wasn't entirely Sherman's fault, either, but he was held responsible nevertheless.

One immediate positive folks are finding in the McCarthy hiring is that McCarthy's familiarity with Favre--or to put it more precisely, Favre's familiarity with McCarthy--might persuade Favre to return for the 2006 season. However, in the two weeks since the season's end, I've made my peace with the idea that Favre may not return, and lots of other Packer fans have, too. So if bringing Favre back is the best thing McCarthy can do, it isn't going to be enough.

Coaching changes in pro sports are often made on gut instinct, and it seems likely that's how Ted Thompson decided to fire Sherman and hire McCarthy. But unless Thompson's gut is especially golden, it's hard to see McCarthy as an improvement, at least not right away. Sherman won 65 percent of his games--there are coaches enshrined in the Pro Football Hall of Fame who were less successful. (Note to McCarthy: 11-and-5 next year would be 65 percent.) Now, maybe McCarthy is like Andy Reid, a previously unknown Packers assistant who's become a great success with Philadelphia, or maybe he's like Mike Holmgren, a former 49ers offensive coordinator who took the Packers to two Super Bowls, winning one (and is in the playoffs with the Seattle Seahawks this weekend). But right now, there's no evidence that he's either one of those. There's not even much evidence that he could be one of those. All we know for sure is what we can see right now--that the Packers, who were a big question mark for 2006 after the disaster of 2005, remain just as big a question mark as they were before. With an unproven coach and the team just embarking on an offseason of upheaval, maybe bigger.

Playoff Picks: Last week, I went 3-and-1, only going wrong on Carolina/New York, which was the hardest game to pick anyhow. So now the pressure is on to do equally well this weekend, so that my picks are demonstrably better than what I might have gotten by tossing a coin.

Washington Redskins at Seattle Seahawks. The Redskins are a fashionable pick, partially because pundits are in love with the Skins' Hall-of-Fame coach Joe Gibbs, partially because the Redskins are the hottest team still playing, and partially because half of Americans think Seattle is located somewhere in Canada. Pundits also think this game will be close, and it could be. But I think it's also the most likely of the four this weekend to have viewers flipping to the Food Network in the second half. As the week has gone on, I've kept lowering the margin I expect the Seahawks to win by. But they'll win. Seahawks 29, Redskins 14.

New England Patriots at Denver Broncos. Denver quarterback Jake Plummer has had a season in which his vast potential finally turned to performance, the Broncos' running game is its usual solid self, and their defense stopped opponents consistently all year on the way to a 13-and-3 record. But I've seen them lose big games over the years just often enough to pick against them tonight. New England has veteran players and coaches who know how to win playoff games. They also have superior talent at quarterback, where Plummer is far more likely to have an off game than Tom Brady is. Patriots 24, Broncos 19.

Pittsburgh Steelers at Indianapolis Colts. The Colts haven't played a meaningful game since early December. Will they be rusty after their long layoff? Will they be affected by the terrible Christmas-week suicide of their coach's son? Are the Steelers on a sufficient roll right now to beat the Super Bowl favorite? Answers: Maybe; yes, but in a good way; and yes, but it won't be enough. I expect this to be like a great heavyweight fight, at least for a while. Colts 28, Steelers 14.

Carolina Panthers at Chicago Bears. The hardest game of the weekend to pick. As a Packer fan, I am genetically programmed to pick against the Bears, so to compensate, I have been looking for reasons to take them all week. And they do have the league's best defense. They beat Carolina earlier this season. But there are legitimate reasons to pick against them, too. Carolina has multiple weapons on offense, and they're rolling, after disposing of the Giants last week. The Bears benched QB Kyle Orton for ineffectiveness even though they went 10-and-4 with him, and reinstalled the oft-injured Rex Grossman, then benched him again for the meaningless final game of the season--so he's played six quarters of football all year. The last big game Grossman played was at the University of Florida, and this is bigger. In addition, the December Bears were not as dominant on defense as they were during the first three-quarters of the season. Nevertheless, lots of Bears fans believe they're a mortal lock for the Super Bowl. Not so fast there, flatlanders--that's the mass hypnosis talking. If the Panthers manage at least two touchdowns, they'll win. If they get three, that's a mortal lock. Panthers 17, Bears 13.

Token Political Links: Here's a great rant from Steve Gilliard about the chickenhawks who are fighting the Iraq War and policing the bounds of acceptable discourse from behind their computers. And if you're wondering whether filibustering Alito would be a good idea or not, Salon's War Room is wondering, too.

At Last, a Story That Comments on Itself With No Need for a Single Damn Word From Me
Click it. (Thanks to Ted Remington over at The Counterpoint, who blogged on it first.)

Reality--Who Needs It?
On a day when the media has declared Sam Alito confirmed, thus making a perfectly justifiable filibuster into the petulant act of dead-enders who want only to obstruct the good and perfect plans of Our Dear Leader, I need a day off from all the trouble in the world, so I'm taking it.

If you want something to read, there's James Wolcott's elegant smackdown of a critic. You don't have to know anything about the issues he's discussing, or about the tedious history of Pajamas Media, to enjoy the mightiness of his snark.

Or you could read this article about the sleazy power of the "jack" radio format, which is coming soon to a station near you, if it hasn't already. ("Jack" stations in Chicago, New York, Los Angeles, Minneapolis, and Dallas are partnering with Fox this Sunday in a 24-hour commercial-free promotion of the season premiere of 24, the continuing adventures of special agent Jack Bauer. There's no end to corporate synergy, apparently.)

Or you could go to The Hits Just Keep On Comin' for today's Friday Random 10.

Tomorrow: More avoidance of the real, in favor of my NFL playoff predictions, and a few stray thoughts about the new coach of my beloved Green Bay Packers.

Swan Dive
We may have reached a new low in American dumbitude, given that the big story to come out of the Alito hearings yesterday was that the mean Democrats made Mrs. Alito cry. Except they didn't. It was South Carolina Repug Senator Lindsey Graham who did, by repeating something a Democrat had said about her husband, or some such damn thing. (I confess I haven't spent a lot of time investigating this story on my own because I am afraid that if I get too close to it, I will get stupidity cooties.)

As Mr. Dooley said a hundred years ago, "Politics ain't beanbag," and anybody who thinks it is, or that it should be, is simply naive. Several other bloggers have made the point that it's too bad Mrs. Alito is having a hard time with the hearings--but there will be millions of people who will have harder times than she could ever conceive of if her husband is confirmed to the Supreme Court, and nobody will care when they cry. But in our touchy-feely Oprah-ized culture, one privileged woman's tears end up being far more significant to far more people. And that, folks, is grade-A American dumbitude, the sort of thing that will eventually result in this country not just ending up in history's dumpster, but doing a joyful swan dive into history's dumpster with both eyes wide open.

It's becoming clear that the Democrats have pretty much failed in these hearings to make any headway on Alito's greatest weaknesses--especially the whole Concerned Alumni of Princeton thing. On Roe v. Wade, he says his lines and the Democrats say theirs, but almost everybody knows it's as ritualized as a Japanese tea ceremony. He's leaving the impression that he might not vote to overturn Roe, while everyone in the country, except for some of the Democrats on the panel, knows he will, and at the first chance he gets, or else he wouldn't be sitting in the damn chair to begin with. And on the scariest stuff of all--that he has no problem with expansive, unilaterally exercised, and largely unchecked presidential power--nobody's laid a glove on him since Tuesday.

After hitting his personal nadir of stupidity earlier in the week (but never say never--he could always go lower, I suppose), Joe Biden said something sensible on TV this morning: that maybe such hearings are a waste of time. These certainly are. They don't generate anything meaningful, except the sure and certain knowledge that the average United States Senator, despite the likelihood that he has a law degree, lacks both the legal and rhetorical acumen necessary to argue his way out of a traffic ticket, let alone vet a candidate for a lifetime appointment to the high court.

Although it pains me to say so, Wolf Blitzer had it right yesterday, although in his usual brainless fashion, he made it a slam on Democrats: That Democrats had made up their minds before the hearings began, and weren't really trying to assess Alito's fitness for the court. He didn't say that the Repugs have similarly made up their minds--and that if it were Harriet Miers sitting at that little red table, they'd be just as deferential to her as they've been to Alito. And so the whole thing is a sham and an embarrassment, and I'm done writing about it. At least for now.

Safety Net
There's an interesting article on the front page of the Wisconsin State Journal up here today about college students and their "helicopter parents," so named because they are, as the story's headline has it, "Always hovering nearby." The article features a photo of a 21-year old junior at UW-Whitewater who calls her parents in the Chicago suburbs five times a day, and lives in a house her parents bought for her. It also relates some other tales of parental involvement in the lives of today's college students.

No one should turn to me for parenting advice. The Mrs. and I are childless by choice, although if we'd gotten pregnant back in the day, we'd have kids on the brink of college right now. (The horror, the horror.) But I think I know how the world works--and I know how I was when I was a 21-year-old junior. And I could imagine no pit of hell deeper than one that would have my parents expecting me to call home five times a day.

Not that I didn't love my parents--I loved 'em then (love them now), I never really went through that period when I thought they were idiots and was ashamed to be seen with them, and I wasn't counting the minutes until I could move out of their house. But when I went off to college at age 18, it was with an expectation that I would have to function almost entirely on my own. Call them for help or advice, absolutely, when appropriate. Call them for money, sometimes. But check in with them hour-by-hour? If I'd wanted to, they'd have thought something was wrong with me. I'd chosen to go away to school, and "away" meant a change in our relationship. The Mrs. got an even more definite message from her parents. Raised mostly in the Milwaukee suburbs, she wanted to attend UW-Milwaukee after high school, but her parents told her she had to go somewhere away from home, precisely so she could learn some independence.

We have some friends whose two kids are both in college now, but when they were both in high school and living at home, we were amazed at how the four of them used their cell phones to keep in contact. Another couple talks to their daughter at college on her cell at least once a day, no matter where they (or she) might be. So the cell phone makes a critical difference from the way it was back when Mom would ring your dorm room early in the morning or late at night because that was the best chance to catch you. But it also leads to the phenomenon of students encountering some difficulty with a professor or in registering for a class, and whipping out the phone to get Mom or Dad to deal with it. To me, this looks like the backyard whine, "I'm tellin' Mom!" whenever things don't go your way. Why it doesn't look like that to today's students, I can't imagine.

I have often said that given my personality, as a father I would have lived in a constant state of fear, from the moment they first put the child into my arms until death released me from my obligations. So I understand the impulse to be protective of your children. But a mother quoted in the article says, "She's the baby of the family. Being the baby means we're very, very on top of things with her." That seems kind of creepy, really, given that her baby is 21--but staying very, very on top of things is not a new phenomenon, either. When I was student teaching back in the late 90s, a definite change had come in the way parents related to teachers versus their children. There was a time--and I knew this well from my own experience--that if a kid got in trouble with a teacher, that was it. The kid was assumed guilty unless he proved himself innocent. By the 90s, however, the default was different. I had to be extremely diplomatic when talking to parents about their misbehaving or underperforming students, because the odds were good that the parent might view me as an adversary out to "get" their kid. And that seems like a precursor to the kind of micromanagement of your child's life that's going to interfere with their ability to gain real adult independence.

It wasn't long ago that Harper's Index reported that when young people were asked to name the age at which adulthood begins, the most common answer was 26. This answer seems to correlate with the sort of protective parenting described in the WSJ article, and the vast numbers of students moving back home after college. That parenting style also accounts, in part, for the stories you sometimes see about how college graduates, in the workforce for the first time, have trouble dealing with performance-based job evaluations in the corporate world. It's a tough adjustment, going from a world in which the big things in life are taken care of for you, to a world in which all of the responsibility is on you. And helicopter parents don't help. The beautiful thing about college is that it offers you the chance to succeed on your own, but with a safety net below you in case you stumble. But you'll never learn how not to need it if you're going to fall back on it all the time.

If you're a student, or you have children who are students, I'd appreciate your opinions on the phenomenon of protective parenting. Is there something I'm missing?

Dude, I Saw God . . . No, Wait, It May Have Been Russ Feingold
From the Associated Press and Yahoo News, the least surprising headline of the year so far: "Alito Pleases GOP Senators, Not Democrats." You coulda wrote it last week and put it in a box until today. The AP's David Espo makes a good point, though, saying it's like Alito is testifying at parallel hearings, one with tough questions by Democrats and one with softballs by Repugs. Of course, he also coulda wrote that last week and put it in a box until today.

The best place for minute-by-minute, issue-by-issue analysis of the hearings is at Daily Kos, where Armando, a lawyer by trade, is breaking down the questions and the answers in great detail--and proving, even though there's nothing we can do about it, that the confirmation of a Supreme Court justice in the modern era is too important to be left to politicians whose primary purpose is to posture. Orrin Hatch: "Let me just ask you directly, on the record, are you against women and minorities attending colleges?" Alito: "Absolutely not, Senator. No." (Well, hallelujah--at least we don't have THAT to worry about, although the devil is in the details.) Hatch, in response: "You know, I felt that that would be your answer. I really did."

No shit, Sherlock.

Fairness compels me to report that stupidity was bipartisan today, however. Joe Biden's ramble, in which he invoked his Grandfather Finnegan and recapped Sandra Day O'Connor's employment history after graduating from college, is precisely what you'd expect from a guy more interested in hearing the sound of his own voice than in asking substantive questions of the nominee.

It shouldn't surprise anybody that one of the toughest questioners so far has been Russ Feingold.

Recommended Reading: Here's a news story that won't get reported much of anywhere today--the Plamegate prosecutor offered Karl Rove a plea deal last month in exchange for rolling over. Rove said no, and so the likelihood remains high that he'll get his ass indicted eventually. Really, there's no reason for him to take the deal. As Steve Soto at the Left Coaster observes, no matter what happens, he's got a pardon in his pocket. Also in the news, Albert Hofman, the inventor of LSD, turns 100 years old today. What I'd like to know is who put it in the whole country's water supply.

Quote of the Day: Gordon Atkinson, a Baptist preacher/blogger (there's a combination you probably never dreamed would actually exist) reviewed NBC's new series The Book of Daniel for Salon. That's the one that has religious groups freaking out, in part because Jesus is one of the characters. Atkinson says the uproar disturbs him because of the growing number of Christians who think that "affirmation from our culture is where they will find their power." He suggests that they'd be better off practicing their devotion and letting their lives be an example to the culture. Here's the best part, though: "And I've got news for you, Christian. If your faith isn't changing your life enough to make a difference in the world, you've got bigger problems than NBC."

Squawk
Rick Santorum, on Samuel Alito: "The only way to restore this Republic our founders envisioned is to elevate honorable jurists like Samuel Alito." Translation: "Ooga booga booga." Both the quote and my translation have an equal relationship to any objective reality. But given that Santorum was speaking at another Justice Sunday event, in front of an audience of religious twits to whom cause, effect, evidence, and proof are just words in the dictionary, I'm not all that surprised. They could have put a talking parrot or a trained giraffe up there and gotten similarly erudite commentary. The parrot analogy is actually pretty good, when you consider the rhetoric that came out of the event: "homosexual agenda," "Alito good," "pretty bird," "moral values," "original intent," "Polly want a cracker." See?

If you have been paying attention to the debate over Alito, it seems clear that the "Republic" Santorum is talking about Alito restoring is not so much a Republic as it is Merry Olde England before the Glorious Revolution. And the fact that the American Bar Association has given Alito its highest rating means nothing, despite what you saw on TV all weekend: He's undoubtedly qualified to be a justice, in the sense of having the appropriate legal education, training, and experience, which is important, given the Harriet Miers fiasco. His bare qualifications to serve have got nothing to do with his problems: a paper trail proving he'd vote to overturn Roe (despite disingenuous comments to the contrary to a few senators on the Judiciary Committee), and some dangerously un-American ideas on presidential power. That's the real issue at stake in his hearings: How will he rule, and will it be in keeping with the Supreme Court's historic norms?

But back to Justice Sunday: Organizers claim 80 million people watched or listened to the show last night. Not a chance. It may have been available to 80 million viewers through Christian radio and TV outlets--which is not the same thing as all 80 million actually watching or listening. I am guessing that number presumes the Christian station here in Madison, for example, was listened-to by all 300,000 people in the metro area, which it clearly was not. And if there really are 80 million people in the United States who'd actually watch this nonsense--which would be nearly four times as many as watched the Rose Bowl last week, and in the neighborhood of what a low-rated Super Bowl draws--especially when there were new episodes of The West Wing and Desperate Housewives to watch, the rest of us should be on planes for Auckland tomorrow morning.

Recommended Reading: At Daily Kos, Georgia 10 discusses the the current civil war: not red vs. blue, not liberal vs. conservative, but citizens vs. the government.

The highly quotable DCeiver, who subbed a lot for Wonkette over the last few weeks, has his own blog.

And finally, the BBC reports on a talk-show caller who died while on the air. As an ex-radio host who died on the air lots of times, this is a refreshing switch.

It's a WTF Sunday at the Daily Aneurysm
We've seen so much in the political history of this country in the last five years that you'd think we'd be getting immune to scenes of high weirdness by now. Are you? Not me. Sometimes I page through the news and click through the blogs and I see things that make me feel like I'm going down the rabbit hole with Alice for the very first time. For example:

An article in the conservative Weekly Standard makes the case for why unchecked presidential power is good, and why we should want more. It's written not by some mouthbreathing Fox News pundit, but by a professor of law at Harvard. Short version: Our current enemy is so big and bad that only unchecked king-like power can save us, and if you think that's too much, you don't know jack about the Constitution.

WTF?

Glenn Greenwald, who subbed for Digby this past week, comments on the article at his own blog, Unclaimed Territory. (Read a few of the other posts while you're there--it's a blog so good that it makes me think about giving up blogging altogether.)

On the same subject, there's an article from the New York Times Sunday Magazine that traces the history of growing presidential power, and discusses if and how it's possible for Congress and the Supreme Court to curb it. If the author's analysis is right, it's clear that the Alito hearings, which begin tomorrow and were already going to be highly contentious even before the spy scandal erupted, are likely to become a bloody battleground over the issue of presidential power--if Democrats can get him to actually say anything about it.

More WTFs: Anybody who wants your cell phone records--anybody, for any reason--can get them by ponying up $110, no questions asked.

WTF?

And finally: You may have noticed that the cable channels are contributing to the public discourse this weekend by giving us minute-by-minute medical briefings on the condition of Ariel Sharon. It isn't like the guy is going to be up and persecuting Palestinians in a week or two--he's going to be going down for his dirt nap as soon as they pull out the tubes. And until they do that, there's no news--certainly not in the quantities it's been shoveled out this weekend.

WTF?

Beware the Pretzel
One thing we know: No president since Nixon has been as popular a subject for long-distance psychoanalysis as He Who Shall Not Be Named. Not even Bill Clinton, to whom the adjective "pathological" was frequently applied. (We pretty much knew what was going on in Bill's head to drive him--although sometimes, what was driving him was located somewhat farther down his body, and I say that as a person who likes him.)

Another thing we know: HWSNBN quit drinking in the 1980s after close encounters with A) Billy Graham and B) Jesus. He won't answer questions definitively about use of other drugs, although there was the famous-and-never-substantiated report of a hushed-up arrest for coke possession in 1972. Whether he was ever officially an addict or not, he has never, so far as we know, gone through any sort of 12-step program. So if he was actually an alcoholic, he's never treated it--he is likely what's known as a dry drunk. That's someone who's stopped drinking, but "whose behavior, mental habits and inclinations are still in line with the behaviors, habits and inclinations of alcoholics" and who possesses such behavior traits as "grandiose behavior, pomposity, exaggerated self-importance, a rigidly judgmental outlook, impatience, childish behavior, irresponsible behavior, irrational rationalization, projection, and overreaction."

(If you're scoring at home, several of those certainly seem to fit our boy. And if you're scoring at home at 11:00 on a Saturday morning, good for you.)

Another thing we know: The guy hurts himself a lot. The proprietor of Bottle of Blog saw the latest picture of Bush's latest facial injury, sustained last weekend at the ranch, and, using his vast experience as a drinker and bartender, diagnosed Bush as a drunk who's still drinking, and probably quite a lot during his isolated Crawford vacations. The seriousness of this possibility is infinite--but the post is funny nevertheless.

Bush once famously choked on a pretzel while watching a football game (an incident which also led to facial contusions, somehow), and he will no doubt be tempting the same fate again this weekend as the NFL playoffs get underway. Just for fun (please, no wagering on the basis of my advice), here are some predictions:

Washington Redskins at Tampa Bay Buccaneers. These teams played a classic in November, won by Tampa Bay 36-35 when, with less than a minute to play, they went for two points after a touchdown to win the game instead of kicking for one and playing for overtime. The Redskins needed to win their last five to make the playoffs, and they did. Tampa Bay, meanwhile, lost games this season to San Francisco and the New York Jets, who both finished 4-and-12. Pick: Redskins 24, Buccaneers 21.

Jacksonville Jaguars at New England Patriots. I don't believe in the Jaguars. They were 12-and-4 against an easy schedule. Two of their losses came to teams that didn't make the playoffs (and the other two came against Super Bowl favorite Indianapolis) and they often played down to the level of inferior competition. Meanwhile, New England is like the race car that nobody notices all day, but is on the lead lap at the end and in position to win if the leader stumbles. Quarterback Tom Brady has never lost a playoff game, and can surpass my man Bart Starr as the all-time winner if he wins tonight. Sorry, Bart. Pick: Patriots 31, Jaguars 17.

Carolina Panthers at New York Giants. The hardest game of the weekend to pick. I think it comes down to whether the Giants have to put it on quarterback Eli Manning. If all he has to do is hand the ball to Tiki Barber and throw the occasional pass, they'll win. If he's got to carry the offense himself, they'll lose. I'm with Tiki. Pick: Giants 17, Panthers 13.

Pittsburgh Steelers at Cincinnati Bengals. The easiest game of the weekend to pick. They've split two games this year, each winning at the other team's place. I've watched the Steelers a couple of times in the last month, and they look to me like the second-best team in the AFC behind Indianapolis. Cincinnati, meanwhile, has phoned it in the last two weeks, losing at home to a bad Buffalo team when a win would have given them a week off before the playoffs, and failing to show up against Kansas City last week. Pick: Pittsburgh 24, Cincinnati 7.

Washington/Tampa Bay and Jacksonville/New England are today; Carolina/New York and Pittsburgh/Cincinnati are tomorrow. Watching (and thus risking pretzel chokage) this weekend are the Seattle Seahawks, Chicago Bears, Indianapolis Colts, and Denver Broncos. And me.

Maybe I Should Have Had a Donut Instead
So, I am sitting in the bagel shop this morning, poaching Internet access from somewhere nearby (the shop does not officially have wifi), reading an excellent piece by Tom Engelhardt on the administration's pursuit of absolute power, when a sudden and simple question occurred to me.

What's the endgame?

I looked deep into my bagel and found no answer. A couple of hours later, I still don't have one.

There's a presidential election coming up in 2008 (1033 days from today, actually), an election in which He Who Shall Not Be Named is ineligible to run. Dick Cheney has said he won't run. It's hard to imagine the current cabal in the White House giving up power merely because the Constitution says they have to.

So what are they angling toward? Are they fairly certain that any Repug successor from the current field would continue their policies as if they were still in office?

A corollary question to that one: Do they feel as though they've got the 2008 election sufficiently wired already, no matter who runs on the Repug side, so the Democrats can't possibly win?

Or do they mean to accumulate so much power that they can simply refuse to leave when their time is up--whether on January 20, 2009, or sooner if impeached and convicted of something?

Worth remembering is that these are not the smartest people in the world, despite what they think of themselves. The Bush gang has, in fact, fucked up nearly everything they've touched since taking office. So it's hard to imagine that they'd be shrewd enough to implement a devious master plan that amounts to an overthrow of the existing American system of government without fucking that up, too.

Perhaps they have no plan, and they're merely accumulating all the power they can while they can because they can, and they'll use it as necessary for as long as they can. But what do they think they will use it for?

I am not merely fishing for comments here--I truly can't figure out where they see themselves in a year or two or three. Help a brother out. Tell me what you think they think.

Recommended Reading: From the Left Coaster, a complete list of Repug talking points on the spying scandal and how to refute them. Don't talk to a Bush supporter again before you read it.