The Daily Aneurysm

2007-01-23T21:11:00.000-06:00

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2006-12-30T14:30:00.000-06:00

Posts of the Year, 2006

This year represented my third full calendar year of blogging. It was also the year I suspended the Daily Aneurysm in favor of doing all my current-events blogging at Best of the Blogs because the traffic is higher there. The switch to BotB cost us the contributions of Tom Herbst, who posted occasionally in this space for about a year. We haven't heard from Tom, either via e-mail or in the comments, for a good long while, but I'm hoping he's still out there somewhere, flying his liberal flag in Pennsylvania, where it's needed: After all, Pennsylvania is a place James Carville once described as Pittsburgh on one end and Philadelphia on the other with Alabama in the middle. A couple of Tom's nuggets of wisdom appear on this list of my favorite posts of 2006:

January 12: "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.)"

January 16: "[T]he 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."

January 30: "It's striking that every event that 'changes everything' involves waking us from our national complacency, rather than ushering in a bold era of societal enlightenment. 'Where were you when society as a whole realized that everyone deserves a living wage?' That would be a moment worth remembering." (by Tom Herbst)

March 7: "Honestly, I have no problem linking Dubya to Reagan, since in my view Dubya is the only thing keeping Reagan from being the worst President since Nixon, so right off the bat they're in the same genre. But to stuff Dubya's empty skull and Reagan's corpse full of gold, frankincense, and myrrh seems, well, a little over the top. . . . One can't help note that [Professor Paul Kengor, author of God and Ronald Reagan and God and George W. Bush] has bounced right over our 41st and 42nd Presidents. Presumably that's because there's little money to be made on the piety of Bush the Elder, and even less on the divinity of Clinton. Of course, Clinton has that certain Zeus-like priapic vibe going for him, so maybe there's a book to be had there after all." (by Tom Herbst)

March 19: "Bush can give all the speeches he wants talking about victory, but there are certain facts of history at work here, and more rhetorical dishwater, no matter how vigorously applied, is not going to change them. Not counting the Revolutionary War, every war the United States has ever won was largely over by the three-year mark. The first Gulf War lasted 100 days; the Mexican War lasted two years; the Spanish-American War, three months. Official American involvement in World War I lasted about 18 months. Three years after Pearl Harbor, the forces that invaded Europe on D-Day were rolling up the Germans; victory, while not entirely secure, was in sight. The three-year benchmark even holds for the Civil War. Three years after the war's first major battle, Bull Run in July 1861, Union armies commanded by Ulysses S. Grant were irrevocably on the offensive, an offensive that would end at Appomattox Court House. Even the wars that ended inconclusively, such as the War of 1812 and the Korean War, didn't last three years. Only in Vietnam--the war we lost--did the war drag on for more than three years. (Of course, the list lengthens if you count other losing wars, like the war on drugs or the war on poverty.) Fact: It doesn't take us this long to win wars we're going to win."

March 22: "Cops in Texas have begun going into bars undercover to arrest people who are drunk. I suppose you gotta give them credit for picking the berries where the bushes are the thickest, but this seems a wee bit off. . . . [I]f cops can go into bars looking for drunks, it doesn't seem all that far-fetched that they could, if they chose, drop by your house whenever they wanted to, just to make sure you're not sitting in front of the TV ripped to the tits on $3 chardonnay."

April 13: "[Y]ou already know the argument: Liberals are out to take Easter away from honest, God-fearing Americans who want to celebrate the torture killing of a shadowy figure from first-century Palestine by hiding chocolate eggs and Marshmallow Peeps for their children to find, all the while telling the kids that the candy has been hidden by a giant rabbit."

April 16: "When cable TV news producers dream, they dream of weekends like this: On Thursday, a little girl gets eaten by a bear. On Friday, a suspected cannibal is arrested in Oklahoma. On the same day, the cat trapped in a New York City building for two weeks is rescued. Yesterday, there's an arrest in the Natalee Holloway case. If Angelina Jolie or Katie Holmes gives birth today, the Rapture could happen and they'd never notice."

April 26: "[Republican candidate for Wisconsin Attorney General J.B. Van Hollen says] 'There are terrorists training in Wisconsin, except that they're not physically training, or doing anything you would hear or see, and they aren't doing anything illegal.' Well, by that definition, if you're standing in the bathroom scratching your ass, you're doing more evil than the terrorists are."

June 6: "If you think that you're going to be raptured out of here any minute, you'd treat this planet about like we're treating it now. You wouldn't care all that much about the environment, because what's the point in preserving it if it's going to be burnt to a cinder pretty soon anyhow? Why not use it up? You'd oppose energy conservation for the same reason. Why worry about leaving oil in the tank? You wouldn't worry about rising national debts or your country's image in the world. You might even push hysterical social programs like same-sex marriage bans and moral indoctrination masquerading as sex education, caring not a whit about the long-term social damage they do to your fellow humans, because you want your ducks in a row when Jesus comes back." (This post was featured at the Carnival of the Godless.)

June 19: "[C]ertain overarching facts do not change. There is always going to be a percentage of the population that wants to medicate itself illegally, and 80 years of throwing their asses in jail hasn't changed a thing. If you think that might suggest the wisdom of taking a different approach to the problem of drug abuse, you'd be right. If you think that such wisdom is likely to prevail in the United States anytime soon, you're probably smoking crack right now."

July 14: "The broad philosophical outline of the House debate essentially shook down to the stand taken by Georgia representative Lynn Westmoreland, who argued that in the Voting Rights Act, Southern states are still being punished for their sins of 40 years ago, and that times have changed. Except they haven't. Just yesterday, Georgia's controversial voter ID law was tossed by a judge again. The law is a thinly-disguised poll tax, because people would be required to pay for an acceptable form of ID. Plus, the attitudes that made the Voting Rights Act necessary haven't gone away. I know it; you know it. We're not past the Civil Rights Era yet. Hell, we're not past the Civil War era yet."

(A server crash at BotB in early December caused about three months' worth of archives to vanish into the ozone, so I can't link to the original versions of the following several posts. Instead of admiring my rhetorical mojo in its entirety, you'll have to settle for excerpts.)

August 11: "When you're standing in line at the airport today, and when they take your bottle of water away from you--because they consider you a potential terrorist until you prove otherwise--the reason you're in that line is because the terrorists really are winning. Instead of taking [strategic long-term steps] to make us safer . . . our leaders, our self-proclaimed tough and pragmatic fighters of evil, are wetting their pants with fear like five-year-old girls."

August 21: "One woman quoted in the story [about the switch from country to R&B at KZLA, Los Angeles] said, 'I think it's racist. This is becoming a nation of minorities. I'm not going to turn on my radio anymore. Country music promotes patriotism and family values, and they've replaced it with something that just promotes money and hate.' You'd be hard-pressed to find four sentences that better encapsulate our current culture wars. You've got A) a white person claiming to be the victim of racism; B) the demonstrably correct statement that the country is becoming a nation of minorities, but made with the conviction that the situation is highly regrettable; C) the insistence that country music is a bastion of 'patriotism and family values,' as if non-whites are incapable of valuing their families; and D) the insistence, likely without having heard note one of it, that beat-heavy R&B and dance tunes automatically promote materialism and hatred. That part is true, to a point: some R&B/dance songs do indeed promote values that run counter to what some people believe in--just as some country songs glorify alcohol, adultery, and anti-intellectualism, which runs counter to the values of others." (A somewhat different version of this post appeared at The Hits Just Keep On Comin'.)

August 22: "My town (Madison, Wisconsin) is all abuzz over a Nazi rally coming to the steps of the State Capitol this Saturday. When The Mrs. first mentioned this to me, I asked, 'Real Nazis, or just Republicans?' But it's real Nazis, or what passes for them these days, and the rally has become a very big deal. . . . The rally is being organized by the Madison, Green Bay, and Milwaukee branches of a Minnesota-based Nazi group. So they're not merely Nazis--they're MINNESOTA Nazis. To paraphrase Elwood Blues, I hate Minnesota Nazis."

August 25: "In Colorado, it's not enough for the American flag savers to preserve the American flag--it's apparently necessary for them to hide the flags of other countries, as if love of country were a zero-sum game, or as if some kid pledging allegiance to the American flag would accidentally pledge allegiance to the Chinese flag and become a Communist."

August 30: "[T]he religious and cultural stupidity [of railing against the phrase 'happy holidays'] is one thing--the linguistic stupidity is another. There's more than one holiday at the end of the year, even for Christians. (Coming next: the War on Plurals.)"

October 22: "Many Americans confuse things with what they represent. So the act of burning a flag, for instance, is perceived as doing actual damage to the country. Independence Hall and the Liberty Bell are important symbols of this country's ideals, but they are, after all, just symbols. Even if the symbols were destroyed, the ideals would endure. But in the United States at this moment, as The Mrs. deftly put it this morning, 'We're preserving the symbols but destroying the ideals.'"

November 1: "A friend e-mails this morning: 'What can we do to get John Kerry to go away?' My response: 'Two percent in the 2008 Iowa caucuses ought to do it.'"

November 19: "When historians start writing the history of this era, George W. Bush will get all the attention James Buchanan gets in histories of the Civil War--he'll be remembered as someone badly out of his depth, a placeholder who had little impact, and what impact he had was generally for the worse. Cheney's the figure who will fascinate historians 100 years hence. His malevolent spirit will preside over this era in memory like Lincoln's presides over the Civil War Era. Like Lincoln, Cheney will be studied as the one who had the brains, the philosophical grounding, and most of all, the necessary chutzpah to frame the enterprise for everyone else. Like Lincoln, he's the indispensable personality of the era--the one without whom nothing happens the way it did."

December 18: "The greatest pleasures of this life come from our relationships with other people, and it's not wrong to celebrate that and that alone. And not only that: Christmas is the time of year when we are most like the people we want to be--and given the way we are the other 11 months of the year, the mere fact that our aspiration to be better people still exists is worth celebrating, too."

Some other posts I'm especially proud of this year include:

Empty Streets

Oversimplifications-R-Us

Left Behind

We Say It, You Learn It, That Settles It

Some favorite post titles this year include:

The State of the Union Is Blotto

Cub Scouts Unbuckle, Open Fire

Jesus Doesn't Love You, He Thinks You're a Jerk

If Everyone Hates You, You're Not Necessarily Right--Maybe You're Just Really, Really Wrong

My favorite post of the year, however, is one I can't link you to directly--it, too, perished in the server crash at Best of the Blogs. It's about my favorite historical figure, Abraham Lincoln, and this summer's Lincoln-centric presidential reading list. The post, which appeared at BotB on August 5, was called "Two Presidents, Talking."

Today, the White House released Bush's reading list for his vacation. It reportedly includes the following:
Polio: An American Story by David M. Oshinsky

Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard Carwardine

Lincoln's Greatest Speech: The Second Inaugural, by Ronald C. White Jr.
I''m guessing that Bush is reading Lincoln's Greatest Speech first. After all, it's the shortest. That the least-eloquent president of our lifetimes is reading about the most eloquent president in history is intriguing--but that he's reading about the Second Inaugural is even more interesting. Lincoln's Second Inaugural, after all, is the most fearsome speech ever given by an American politician. It's a speech no modern American politician would have the stones to give--especially not George W. Bush.

In the speech, delivered as a war nobody expected to be so hard ground toward the end of its fourth year, Lincoln did urge his audience to "stay the course," in his way: "let us strive on to finish the work we are in." But his speech was not a rehash of the same platitudes he'd been repeating since the war began; neither did it promise that "striving on to finish the work we are in" would automatically result in victory. In fact, he told his audience that victory was by no means assured. The end, whatever the end was going to be, was beyond his--or any American's--control. He even went so far as to say that if it were God's will that the United States be destroyed as expiation for its sins, then there was nothing anyone could or should do but accept the punishment, for it was surely just.

It is likely that Bush's interest in the Second Inaugural is sparked by the rich religious language of the speech. Although Lincoln frequently used religious language and imagery in public addresses, the Second Inaugural is the most theologically loaded of his major speeches. But unlike Bush's theology, which is based on simple certainties, Lincoln's theology was ambiguous at best. As a young man, Lincoln famously scoffed at religion. As president, he came to believe that a cataclysm like the Civil War could not happen by accident--that there must be a divine purpose for it (as the Second Inaugural makes clear). So Lincoln became a religious seeker. As his search continued, he frequently said that he hoped to be an instrument of God. He possessed nothing like Bush's certainty that he is an instrument of God. Lincoln's belief in a higher power made him resolute, but his uncertainty about that power's intentions made him adaptable. As a result, he could believe in happy endings, but did not promise them.

And in that, Lincoln and Bush couldn't be more different.

My thanks to all of you who bother with this bilge on a regular basis. I am grateful for your attention and your devotion. I hope that the small steps we've recently taken as a nation toward restoring what we're all about will pick up steam in 2007. And I wish you a happy new year.

(A selection of my favorite quotes of the year is here.)

2006-12-24T10:33:00.000-06:00

Quotes of the Year, 2006

This year represented my third full calendar year of blogging. It was also the year I suspended the Daily Aneurysm in favor of doing all my current-events blogging at Best of the Blogs because the traffic is higher there. As usual, the funniest, most pointed, most revealing, and/or truest stuff to appear on my blog came from the mouths, pens, and/or word processors of others. Here are the Quotes of the Year, in chronological order.

The Buffalo Beast, suggesting an appropriate punishment for Barbara Bush, Number 12 on its list of the 50 Most Loathsome Americans of 2005, for downplaying the significance of Hurricane Katrina: "Bound and thrown into Lake Pontchartrain. If she floats, burned at the stake. If she drowns, even better."

P.Z. Myers of Pharyngula, on Bush's opposition to human/animal hybrids, announced in the State of the Union address: "It's pure political calculus. He throws away the mad scientist and pig-man vote, and wins the religious ignoramus vote . . . and we know which one has the majority here."

Russ Feingold: "This administration reacts to any questions about spying on American citizens by saying that those of us who stand up for our rights and freedoms are somehow living in a 'pre-September 11th, 2001 world.' In fact, the President is living in a pre-1776 world."

Journalist Michelle Goldberg, contemplating the march of theocracy: "A feeling that the world is falling apart is usually associated with neurosis; now, it's possible that it's a sign of sanity."

The Rude Pundit, on the mysterious "they" who have promised that further terror attacks on the United States are only a matter of time: "Who the fuck is the 'they' there? Intelligence analysts? His cabinet? Or are 'they' the terrorists themselves? 'Cause, like, that'd mean that a bunch of sexually repressed crazed religious fundamentalists are setting our foreign policy and dictating massive spending and loss of life on the part of the United States and . . . oh, fuck, the irony just made the Rude Pundit's nuts retreat into his body cavity in fear."

Stephen Colbert, at the White House Correspondents' Dinner: "Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!"

Daily Kos diarist WorldCan'tWait on the culture wars: "At its most basic level it's a lot of lazy fucking parents who need the government to bring up their kids for them. Too bad they don't get a clue and take personal responsibility for it. Hint. If you don't want your kids being 'manipulated' by junk mass culture, take them to a museum, buy them copies of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, take them camping. You don't need a theocracy because American Idol sucks."

Tom DeLay, explaining the Columbine massacre: "Guns have little or nothing to do with juvenile violence. The causes of youth violence are working parents who put their kids into daycare, the teaching of evolution in the schools, and working mothers who take birth control pills."

Anonymous Liberal at Glenn Greenwald's Unclaimed Territory (which is quite likely the best blog on the Internet--either that or Pandagon): "[A]ccording to one study, there were only 45 reported flag burning incidents in the first 200 years of the republic. . . . That means there are probably more historical incidents of witch-burning than flag-burning. Maybe we should start debating the Witch Protection Amendment."

Daily Kos contributor Thereisnospoon on Ned Lamont's primary victory: "In one corner, you had a bunch of unpaid volunteers, Internet rabble-rousers, and an inexperienced politician whose highest post had been County Selectman. In the other, you had the three-time Senator, former vice-presidential candidate, visible party statesman, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Harry Reid, Barbara Boxer . . . the slick ad money, the top DLC consultants, and a 3 to 1 budget gap. I'm sorry. That's not David vs. Goliath. This isn't even the NBA champions versus a rec league team. That's more like an ant vs. my shoe."

Garrett Epps, in Salon: "George W. Bush is Lincoln the way Dan Quayle is Jack Kennedy."

Charlie Crist, Republican candidate for Florida governor, in a debate: Marriage is a sacred institution "like I had, before I got divorced."

Tristero at Hullabaloo, on the difficulty many American leaders seem to have with the concept of traveling abroad: "[W]hy on earth would you want to do that? Something wrong with the USA? You're in the best country in the world! And you want Italian, hey, we got Domino's Pizza, fine American pizza just as good as that fancy stuff they make over in Rome or Barcelona or wherever. And Domino's delivers."

The top Quote of the Year--the one that encapsulates the year just past better than any other--comes from journalist David Samuels, in Harper's, backstage at the Super Bowl: "[The] free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempt to make us seem like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality."

We may have to retire the title of "top quote of the year"--Samuels' observation is likely to resonate for many years to come.

(A roundup of my favorite posts of the year is coming later this week.)

2006-11-08T12:02:00.000-06:00

Gone Blue

Just a few comments on the races in Wisconsin, where I live now, and Iowa, where I lived for most of the 80s and 90s:

Republican J.B. Van Hollen pulled out the attorney general's race up here by 9,000 votes out of 2.1 million cast, beating Dane County executive Kathleen Falk in a race that wasn't called officially until 6:15 this morning. Van Hollen, a 2002 Bush appointee to the U.S. attorney's office for western Wisconsin, paints himself as a tough prosecutor--which, coming from a Republican, means lock 'em all up and throw away the key, even it if mean we have to build prisons on every street corner to do it, with money borrowed from the Chinese because the state doesn't have enough. From Van Hollen, it also means extra vigilance against terrorists, who want to contaminate the precious bodily fluids of Wisconsin's children, or something. What it means most of all is that every decision Van Hollen makes as AG, every press conference he holds, will be with an eye toward the 2010 governor's race.

The advisory referendum on the death penalty passed here also, by something like 59-41 percent. Because newly reelected Governor Doyle would have to sign the law, and he won't, capital punishment will not be reinstated here until at least 2011--but there will be plenty of demagoguery about "the will of the people" before then, and how Doyle is subverting it. The referendum stipulates that conclusive DNA evidence would be required in order for a death sentence to be passed. That probably made many yes voters feel more comfortable with capital punishment--because using DNA means the punishment will be backed by science--yet I wonder how many of the same yes voters share the general Republican anti-science attitude. How come evolution is a crock but DNA evidence isn't?

Iowa's gone blue again. Not only did Democrats hold the governor's mansion, but they picked up two seats in the House. Dave Loebsack beat Jim Leach, who had served something like 15 terms. Leach's district was redrawn in 2000, removing the more conservative Quad-Cities area and adding the more liberal Iowa City area, and as a result, Leach has been on the bubble for the last three elections. The bubble burst last night. Congressman Jim Nussle left Congress to run for governor--and his seat went Democratic also.

As I write this, news has come down that Donald Rumsfeld is quitting as Secretary of Defense. This is probably at least in part an attempt to shift the news cycle, as Karl Rove likes to do--but you can bet it's also got something to do with the Democratic sweep of the House last night.

2006-10-29T12:25:00.000-06:00

Stamps of Approval

Hello again, Best of the Blogs readers. Welcome to Page Two.

I shook hands with Governor Jim Doyle yesterday, as he pressed the flesh outside Camp Randall Stadium before the Badger game. You can't help feeling for Doyle a little bit, if only because the man wears an expression of smiling through pain, as though he'd been suffering from hemorrhoids for 10 years. But he had to be heartened by the long line of people waiting, many of whom wished him luck, which he's going to need.

Doyle got the Wisconsin State Journal's endorsement today, which didn't surprise me all that much. The Journal is pretty Republican most of the time, but they're also prone to occasional bouts of good sense. Doyle's opponent, Green Bay Congressman Mark Green, would have to be a lot more moderate than he's trying to seem on TV to have been a plausible contender for their endorsement.

Although he was one of Tom DeLay's loyal soldiers in Congress, Green has spent a lot of time trying to portray himself as a regular guy with regular views. Example: His new TV ad has gone live in the last couple of days, and I expect to see it a lot during the Packer game this afternoon. It features former gov Tommy Thompson against a white background, describing Wisconsin during his term as a free-market paradise in which jobs went begging because the economy was so prosperous, and where all those welfare freeloaders had been made productive members of society at bayonet point. (Welfare reform was one of Thompson's major accomplishments in office.) The only text that appears in the ad is this: "Green supports stem-cell research." Which is true, except it's the kind of stem-cell research that is the least promising--he opposes embryonic stem-cell research, which brings him straight in line with the wingnuts.

The WSJ also endorsed Repug Dave Magnum over incumbent Tammy Baldwin in the Second Congressional District. They endorsed Magnum in 2004 also, and he lost by nearly 30 points. This year's endorsement, which touts Magnum's centrism (he favors embryonic stem-cell research, for example, and opposes a harsh crackdown on illegal immigration) and criticizes Baldwin as ineffective because she's so far left-of-center. But if Magnum were elected, he'd be just as ineffective, precisely because his views are so far left-of-center in today's Republican Party. Plus, as I've already said, he'd be a backbencher in what could be the minority party.

I am a huge fan of Baldwin's, because I've never been represented by a legislator whose votes so consistenly reflect my own views. But then again, I'm a goddamn pinko atheist.

Also: I've heard from Iowa that the Des Moines Register, the state's largest newspaper, has endorsed Democrat Chet Culver over Congressman Jim Nussle, and in my old Congressional district, Jim Leach over Dave Loebsack. In just as head-scratching a way as the WSJ did with Magnum, the Register touts Leach's moderation, even though as far as the GOP caucus in the House is concerned, moderation went out with high-button shoes. The paper does drop the hammer on Steve King, though, saying it was wrong to have endorsed him in 2002 and 2004, and calling him "an embarrassment to Iowa." Yeah, I'd say so.

2006-10-27T08:16:00.000-05:00

As I Was Saying . . .
Welcome to those of you who have clicked over from Best of the Blogs, and to those of you who have stumbled upon this blog by accident. Because not everybody at BotB gives a rip about Wisconsin politics, it seems wise to use the bandwidth over here to handicap the statewide races, based on scattered poll data, good old fashioned hunches, my biennial survey of yard signs, and liberal amounts of bullshit.

Attorney General: We had primaries in both parties for AG this year, which makes this the most consistently entertaining race of 2006 in Wisconsin. The Repug nominee is J.B. Van Hollen, the U.S. attorney for the western district of Wisconsin. Van Hollen is a standard-issue conservative Republican--just pull the string on his back and listen to the stupid. Last summer, he announced that terrorist groups were recruiting and training in Wisconsin, only to backpedal when reporters asked for specifics. He told his primary opponent "you suck," during a live radio debate, and later apologized--for sinking to his opponent's level. The "suck" incident and smirking non-apology apology points up Van Hollen essential immaturity and gross unfitness for prime time. He's way out of his league at the level of statewide politics. His opponent is Dane County (Madison) Executive Kathleen Falk, who was absolutely destroying Van Hollen in early polling, based entirely on her name recognition--she ran unsuccessfully for governor in 2002, and held the highly publicized post of "public intervenor" for the state Department of Natural Resources before becoming county exec--a position later abolished by the governor in part, it's said, because of Falk's success in fighting corporations who wanted to ravage the environment for the sake of economic growth. But the latest polling shows Falk's lead down to six points, and I expect Van Hollen to win. If so, his campaign for governor will begin the day he's sworn in as attorney general.

U.S. Senate: Herb Kohl is running mostly unopposed, although perennial candidate Robert Gerald Lorge, whose big issue is the threat of Communist China, got the Republican nomination when nobody else wanted it. Green Party nominee Rae Vogeler made news when she was excluded from Wisconsin Public Television's recent debate, even though she's arguably a more serious candidate than Lorge. The only question is whether Kohl breaks 60 percent or not. That, and what the hell anybody sees in Lorge.

Second Congressional District: Democrat Tammy Baldwin is running for a fifth term; radio station owner Dave Magnum--not his real name, which is Weiss--is running again this time. In 2004, Magnum had the stones to criticize Congress, and Baldwin by extension, for four years of deficit spending, which was actually driven by the Republican majority; this time, he's criticized Baldwin for a recent ranking showing her 424th of 438 members of Congress in influence--and then suggesting he could do better as a first-term backbencher, and in what is likely to be the minority party at that. Recently, he's been running an incoherent and amateurish TV ad criticizing Baldwin for, apparently, being in favor of sexual predators, or something. It's hard to tell. On the other hand, Baldwin has spent nearly nothing on TV ads and avoided appearing with Magnum until relatively recently. She won last time by nearly 30 points; she'll win again by about that much.

Death Penalty Referendum: A poll a couple of weeks ago showed this advisory referendum on restoring it leading by only 50-45, a result promptly blasted by the state senator who's spent his entire legislative career trying to revive capital punishment here. I'm guessing the poll is wrong, too--and I think it will pass by about 60-40 when the votes are actually counted. Whether it becomes law after that depends on the governor's race. If Green wins, it will. If Doyle wins, it won't.

For regular blog posts from me, keep reading Best of the Blogs.

2006-06-28T08:03:00.000-05:00

Hello, Now Go Away
Thanks for visiting this blog. There is, however, nothing to see here anymore, so move along. For the latest posts by the author of this blog, click here. Please change your bookmarks.

2006-06-04T17:59:00.000-05:00

Moving Day
This is the 1,238th post at the Daily Aneurysm since it moved to Blogspot in October 2003.

It is also the last one for a while. Maybe a long while. Maybe forever.

I have been an occasional contributor at Best of the Blogs for a couple of years now. That site has now been redesigned as a blog portal. Each contributor will have his own page, and each post will be linked from the main page. (The model for the system is the diaries at Daily Kos, although BotB has far fewer "diarists.") And because the daily traffic at Best of the Blogs dwarfs what I receive here, I've decided to do my regular blogging there in hopes of reaching more readers.

Hey, I'm a whore like everyone else.

You will still be able to find me if you click this link and bookmark it. If you use an aggregator, there will be an RSS feed for my BotB page, but it's not live yet. The original Daily Aneurysm site will stay live, because there's a pretty significant part of my writing life stored over here, but also because I'm reserving the right to return to the old homestead at some future time if I want to. I will continue to write about pop music and radio at The Hits Just Keep On Comin' as always.

My thanks to all who have made regular visits to this quiet corner of the Internet since 2003. Hope you will be part of the crowd at the new place.

2006-06-03T17:17:00.000-05:00

Can I Have a Little Taste of That?
I wasn't planning to blog again today, but a comment to this morning's post made it necessary. The comment:

Objectivity went out the window a quarter-of-a-century ago. It is no longer necessary to provide both sides to a story. Just pick a side and try to back it up with lame commentary and half-baked truths.

That's waht bloggers do. They give their opinion based on their beliefs. Few, if any, conduct even a modicum of investigative reporting. It is easier for them to make up a bunch of crap instead of finding out the real story. Sadly, too many ill-informed people buy into it.

This next started off as my own comment to the comment, but when it got too long, I decided to put it here.

Let's not be quite so dismissive of bloggers. I don't purport to be a journalist--however, I also don't think I am guilty of making up a bunch of crap. A guy like Josh Marshall at Talking Points Memo is clearly a investigative journalist, and a good one. Many of the top blogs are offshoots of respected political journals, such as Tapped and Political Animal. Do they come from a particular viewpoint? Yes. Does that invalidate their work? Not at all.

Providing "both sides of a story" is a fine idea, but as we have noted here before, that ideal falls apart when one side of the story is a lie. In that case, reporting both sides and "letting the viewer decide" is a disservice, because the viewer is not properly equipped to make an informed decision. That's part of what's making us a dumber nation by the day--the inability or unwillingness of journalists to report the difference between chicken shit and chicken salad. Of course, the ignorance of a public unwilling to think critically--in other words, to taste both the shit and the salad first to find out which is which before ordering a whole plate of the stuff--doesn't help. It's a self-perpetuating cycle in which both journalists and news consumers are guilty. Seems to me that in that light, bloggers like those mentioned above represent a solution, while the old-fashioned mainstream media outlets on which we're apparently supposed to rely only perpetuate the problem.

As far as the major opinion sites are concerned, those not primarily journalistic--Eschaton and Kos are two of the biggest, and the people who write for the Kos front page would likely dispute that they're "not primarily journalistic"--are self-correcting, to a degree. If the blogger, a contributor, or even a commenter gets something wrong, readers help them get it right. When it comes to how best to run the country, I'd trust the readers of those two blogs in the aggregate a lot more than I'd trust the judgment of the two million who watched O'Reilly last night.

Are there blogs that are fantastically full of it? Sure, on both sides of the political divide. To dismiss all blogs and bloggers as lame and half-baked displays a depth of cynicism even I can't sink to.

Of course, this blog really is lame and half-baked, but at least we know we are.

2006-06-03T07:53:00.000-05:00

Maybe If They'd Actually Read a Book Once in a While. . . .
There's more at Daily Kos today jumping off from a list of specific programs that would be affected by a Republican tax cut in Nebraska, about which I wrote yesterday. Whenever Democrats talk about spending money, Repugs demand to know where it's going to come from and then screech about the answers. According to Susan G, here's how Democrats should handle the issue of how they'd pay for public services.

There's a simple way to respond for these gotcha games of details. When asked where money for proposed programs will come from, Democrats need to go ahead and say, We don't know. And the reason we don't know is because the cesspool of lies, secrecy, corruption and overspending is so rampant in Republican-run Washington that nobody has a clue about the real state of our fiscal affairs.

The post also speaks to the depressing point made by a commenter to my original post, who observes that many red-state voters don't give a damn about parks, libraries, and swimming pools, but if you talk to them in terms of what tax cuts do to schools and jobs, they might listen.

What Democrats can say is that once they're elected, they plan to move in the direction of providing universal health coverage, shoring up our failing infrastructure, improving our schools, securing our ports and borders, and protecting the environment. The hope would be that doing away with corporate giveaways and tax loopholes, crony contract awards and wasteful weapons systems would help. Using diplomacy instead of military invasion every time a country looks at us funny would probably save a few cents as well.

But seriously: They don't care about parks, libraries, and swimming pools?

Recommended Reading: Last Sunday, the Washington Post carried a column which purports to be part of a commencement address the columnist delivered at a journalism school. It contains several lines worthy of Quote of the Day, too many to steal here, so go read it.

2006-06-02T08:12:00.000-05:00

As Good as it Gets for a Geek
I am a little slow this morning after a little too much fun last night. Isthmus, our local alt-weekly newspaper, has held a jazz festival for the last several years. It used to be mostly a one-night affair, at the Civic Center downtown, in October. Last year, it moved to June, at the new Overture Center--which was not as well-suited a venue. Attendance was down, and the Overture Center yanked its funding from the fest. For a while, it looked as if the festival was dead. However, it found a new home, at the University of Wisconsin Memorial Union Terrace, on the shore of Lake Mendota--and last night was opening night. The place was packed, the night was gorgeous, the music was tremendous, and the beer was flowing--much of it into me. Isthmus has smacked a home run with the new location. Who needs the Overture Center? As Ben Sidran noted from the stage last night, this is where it should have been all along.

So anyway, I'm still waking up, so here are some random and disconnected bits that have captured my attention while I wait for the caffeine to kick in:

--The National Spelling Bee finals were last night. I was pleased to see that the eventual winner just stood up there and spelled the word instead of showboating, as some past winners have done. I know, youthful enthusiasm and all that--and believe me, as a former school and city spelling champion myself, I also know that winning a bee is as good as it gets for a geek. But I'm old school. Score a touchdown, hand the ball to the referee, act like you've been there before.

--The Stanley Cup hockey finals are now set: Edmonton versus Carolina. Didn't know they were still playing hockey? Don't worry. Few people do. The national cable coverage (on the Outdoor Life Network) has rated lower than fishing shows and poker shows, and with a Canadian team in the finals, NBC's network ratings are likely to be lower than some infomercials. The NHL is still reeling from the lost season of 2004-2005, and although it took some steps to win back fans, the thing it really needs to do it will never do: dump teams to increase the quality of play across the league, then shorten the regular season and playoff schedules so the season doesn't run into freaking June.

--OK, politics: Great post at Daily Kos this morning about what Repug tax cuts really look like. Most people like the idea of paying less taxes, and millions of Americans slavishly vote Republican because they think it will mean lower taxes. But the voters don't know, because the Repugs don't say, what those tax cuts actually represent in the real world. One Nebraska Republican accidentally did, however--and the fallout was predictable. Guess what, Mr. and Mrs. GOP Voter--there is such a thing as the public good, and you like it, too.

--And finally: the National Review got laughed out of the building with its list of the Top 50 Conservative Rock Songs a couple of weeks ago, but that didn't stop one of the magazine's writers from penning a list of 50 more. Remember the kid in high school who tried desperately to be cool but simply couldn't sell it? Amanda at Pandagon reports on the ugly spectacle that results when the congenitally unhip try to sit at the cool kids' table.

As I look back over this post, I see that it's not a bad effort, all things considered. But I really need a nap now.

2006-06-01T10:59:00.000-05:00

No, Wait . . .
A comment on this morning's post directed me to a Media Matters analysis of the poll I wrote about--and according to that analysis, ABC and the Washington Post misreported what the poll said in order to play up Hillary's presumed unelectability.

As usual, Media Matters' analysis is persuasive, at least about the misrepresentation of the data. (In my defense, I went looking for raw poll data before I wrote the post and couldn't find it, but there's no guarantee that if I'd found it, I'd have written a better post, because I suck, really.) However, the point that Hillary would in fact be competitive with McCain doesn't make me feel much better. The mere fact that ABC misrepresented the poll at Hillary's expense is evidence for my contention that she will have to fight a hostile media in any election campaign.

And let me be clear: I count myself among the percentage of Americans who admire Hillary. I think she's eminently qualified to be president, and I am confident that she could handle the demands of the job--even before the current Resident of the United States lowered the bar for competency. But a national campaign involving Hillary would be about many, many other things before it got down to questions of qualifications and competency, if it ever got down to those things at all. If, knowing this, Democrats rush to nominate Hillary anyhow, nobody should be surprised if the campaign becomes Swift Boats on Parade, or complain if few voters seem to be deciding based on pocketbook issues, or security issues, or whatever. True, the campaign might not descend to a referendum on personality. But if it does, anyone who's surprised or upset by it deserves a smack upside the head.

That voters might choose their leaders on the basis of their electability isn't exactly what the Founders had in mind when they designed the system. And honesty compels me to admit that I criticized those who supported John Kerry in the 2004 primary season largely for his electability (compared to my guy, Howard Dean, who was perceived by many as unelectable). But Hillary Clinton is a special case. She inspires what blackdogred calls "pure genuine primal hate" on a scale that makes Repug disdain for Kerry and Gore seem like sweet Christian love. That's a factor Democrats cannot afford to ignore. In the 2008 campaign, Hillary's electability is an issue. Perhaps the issue. Even if things aren't as dark as ABC and the Post have painted them this week.

2006-06-01T07:47:00.000-05:00

Hillary's Handicaps
(Edited to add Quote of the Day.)

ABC News/Washington Post poll, published yesterday: 42 percent of those surveyed said they would "never" vote for Hillary Clinton for president. Some of that is gender-related--an earlier poll found that 27 percent of voters wouldn't vote for a woman no matter who it was, and no matter what party she represented. (One third of that group said it was because "women are not up to the job"; one tenth said that the presidency is "a man's job." What year is this again?) But Hillary, in addition to being female, approaches a presidential run with some of the most significant negatives any candidate has ever been stuck with.

The Post wrote about Hillary yesterday under the headline "Clinton is a politician not easily defined," and the polling shows it. For example, she's more popular among self-described liberal Democrats--despite the blogstorm of opposition to her--than among self-described Democratic moderates.

But those negatives: 73 percent of Repugs have an unfavorable view of her, while 50 percent of Democrats have a favorable view of John McCain, a likely rival in 2008. She's viewed as more liberal than John Kerry. And there's the 42 percent "never" figure. Campaigns are about shaping and changing perceptions, but it seems clear right now Hillary would be starting in a deep, deep hole. Not only will a hard nut of the electorate resist hearing her message no matter what it is, but the media will be against her--especially if her opponent were McCain, a media darling.

Earlier this week over at Best of the Blogs, blackdogred said:

I waver bipolarly on all aspects of Political Hillaryism except on this one very critical issue: Anyone who can make wingnut heads explode in a froth of rabid sexism and pure genuine primal hate has tremendous potential political power. What that means and whether it goes and where it goes if it does and whether it should and what will result are of course debatable, endlessly.

I agree that Hillary has tremendous political power. My fear is that it will be used to force Democrats into a landslide electoral defeat at a moment in history where a landslide victory was equally possible but for the candidate at the top of the ticket.

Quote of the Day: From World O'Crap, on what wingnut pundits keep saying about Iraq: "[T]he problem isn’t that we’re losing the war in Iraq, the problem is that America doesn’t believe the people who keep telling us that we’re not losing the war in Iraq. In other words, the issue isn’t product performance, it’s spokesmodel credibility."

2006-05-31T08:50:00.000-05:00

Same Stuff, Different Box, So What
My thanks to those who have commented to last night's post about Howard Dean and religious voters.

If the key to winning elections in this country is now finding an effective way to speak in coded religious language, we're screwed. If, in 2006, the only way we can get people to do what is self-evidently right is by appealing to their irrational beliefs in invisible powers, I find myself wondering what the precise purpose of the Enlightenment was. Democrats are not going to be able to turn people away from an affinity for theocracy if our main argument is going to be "Our Jesus is better than their Jesus."

I have to confess that when the subject is mixing religion and politics, the dogmatic atheist in me comes roaring to the surface. I don't want religion shoved down my throat by anybody. History shows, again and again, that religion is responsible for as much trouble and strife as it purportedly cures. There's really no need for the United States to prove it anew. A truly progressive politics would try to achieve some progress on this front--to try and do better than merely substituting a differently packaged form of Christian belief for the one that's gotten us in such trouble since Reagan rode in from the ranch.

2006-05-30T18:43:00.000-05:00

Who Loves Ya, Baby?
Longtime readers of this blog will know that I love me some Howard Dean. I first heard of him sometime in 2002, and decided to support him for president in June 2003. Even after his campaign had imploded, I voted for him in the Wisconsin primary anyhow. And I was thrilled when he became chairman of the Democratic National Committee. However, as far as Dean's ongoing crusade to convince evangelical Christians to vote Democratic is concerned--dammit, Howard, cut it out.

Because I love me some Howard Dean, I have to defend him a little bit. He's got the right idea to suggest that Democrats can't let the Repugs monopolize what it means to be "moral," and that core Democratic beliefs are in fact deeply moral, in a way average Americans instinctively understand. But when he talks about peeling off members of the Repug base as a strategy for winning elections, he's simply out of touch with reality. It ain't gonna happen. Plus, there's no need.

As we approach the 2006 elections, there are millions of voters with a bad case of buyer's remorse over their choice in 2004. Many of them aren't firmly or consistently identified with either party, and make their choices based not on ideology, but on a gut-level feeling of identification--"this person/this party will do a better job of standing up for me." Sometimes they find they were wrong, as a significant percentage of the 59 million Bush voters now know they were. Once they decide they were wrong, their weakly ideological or nonideological reason for choosing one candidate over another makes them people Democrats can realistically hope to capture.

The place to find Democratic voters is not among people who are being told from the pulpit on Sundays that Democrats are the spawn of Satan. Even if Bush is demonstrated with evidence to be wrong on absolutely everything, including what to order for lunch, his base will stay with him no matter what. Howard Dean could go on the 700 Club and start speaking in tongues, and the show's core viewers still wouldn't vote Democratic. For Dean to do so is a waste of time and effort--and given that Dean is still a bit of a loose cannon, it will probably do more harm than good in the long run.

So, Howard--Mr. Chairman--I still love ya, buddy. But you gotta stop it.

2006-05-30T11:47:00.000-05:00

How to Avoid Getting Back to Work After the Holiday Weekend Is Over
It's easy: Don't stop drinking. The amount of high-quality beer being made within a few miles of where I'm sitting is positively astounding. Those of us who live up here know it. Those of us who like beer try hard never to take it for granted. Just in the last couple of weeks, several of our local breweries have made news that reminds us how fortunate we are.

--Middleton's Capital Brewery is just a few blocks away, and Friday it won another national award, this time as a Grand Champion at the U.S. Beer Tasting Championships in Chicago, for its Winter Skal. At the same event, Milwaukee's Sprecher Brewery won a similar honor for its Black Bavarian. (Black Bavarian apparently did not win for its ability to heal the sick and raise the dead, although it can.)

--The New Glarus Brewing Company, just 20 miles down the road, broke ground a couple of weeks ago on a new facility that will allow it to more than double its production capacity, thus bringing more Spotted Cow, Fat Squirrel, and Raspberry Tart to the masses. A couple of years ago, New Glarus Brewing pulled back its distribution to a smaller area, although this expansion may permit them to widen it again. If so, it will be the happiest thing to happen in Chicago since last year's World Series, at least.

--My hometown brewery, the Joseph Huber Brewing Company (50 miles from here, tops), was featured in a Capital Times article over the weekend. The brewery has been a fixture in Monroe since 1848, but it's only within the last 10 years that it's developed a variety of beers beyond yer basic Huber beer, and Huber Bock in the spring. They mostly appear under the Berghoff label.

--Now that summer's here, it's wheat beer season. Wheat beer was the first variety I got into when I first became a beer snob, and it's a great place to start your own adventure in snobbery. Although I like other styles better now, a wheat beer still hits the spot on a hot day better than most. The Wisconsin State Journal recently lined up several wheat beers and taste-tested them. I won't give away the results here, but let's just say the old hometown brewery knows what it's doing wheatwise.

--A new brewpub, Ale Asylum, has just opened on Madison's East Side, becoming the first brewpub on that side of town. Before the summer is out, local legend the Great Dane will open a third location on the near west side to go along with its downtown and south locations, and Granite City Food and Brewery, a regional chain brewpub, will open out here on my side of town.

Beer. It's what's for dinner. And lunch. And breakfast if we can manage it, all summer long.

Recommended Reading: One week from today, voters in Iowa will select a Democratic nominee for governor. The contenders are Chet Culver, current Secretary of State and son of longtime U.S. Senator John Culver; Mike Blouin, former state economic development director (who was a Dubuque County pol of some sort when I lived there nearly 25 years ago); and state representative Ed Fallon, whose longshot candidacy has captured not just progressives but a few Republicans, too. Culver is purportedly the front-runner, mostly on name recognition, but there's a perception among some voters that he's not very bright. He is bright enough to have a blog, though--which you will appreciate even if you care nothing about Iowa politics.

2006-05-29T08:52:00.000-05:00

Life Is a Carnival
An AP story appearing in lots of newspapers this weekend talks about Katie Couric's adios from Today, which will happen on Wednesday of this week. Jeff Zucker of NBC has already gotten the festivities off to a ridiculous start, calling Couric "one of the great news broadcasters in history." Jeff, buddy, hosting a morning TV news show in the modern era is not exactly Edward R. Murrow doing battle with Joe McCarthy. Even taking that into account, however, a couple of facts in the story revealed just how much of a lightweight Couric is.

Fact 1: Her alarm clock goes off at 5AM. Her show begins at 7. I can't imagine how she gets to the office, goes through makeup and wardrobe, attends a rundown meeting, and does any significant preparation in such a limited amount of time, unless she's sleeping under her desk. By way of comparison, when Bob Edwards was doing NPR's Morning Edition, which airs live from 6 to 8AM, his alarm clock went off at 1:05. It takes more time to know what you're talking about than it does to sound like you know what you're talking about. Couric's talent as a quick study is useful in her job, but it's also a sort of carnival trick, like juggling six plates at once: "Beyonce, best of luck with your new workout video and thanks for stopping by. Coming up next, Senator Russ Feingold discusses the NSA wiretapping program."

Fact 2: The AP's David Bauder writes, "Couric is most proud of giving her all to make each segment a positive experience, whether it's a newsy interview or a cooking segment." Well, that's lovely. Unfortunately, if you're a journalist, making viewers feel good is not your job, and it certainly shouldn't be your goal. And that's the sort of thing that makes me wonder what will become of the CBS Evening News with Couric at the anchor desk. Remember, she once said an especially proud moment of her career was interviewing the Runaway Bride. It's one thing for breakfast TV (as the British call it--a term that captures the triviality of the form extremely well) to always end up perky and positive. It's another thing entirely if the "newscast of record" at the end of the day is going to try to leave a viewer with that same positive vibe. The only way to do it is to distort or ignore what's really going on in the world.

Recommended Reading: The latest Carnival of the Godless, a biweekly compilation of worthwhile posts about atheism, is up. Hell's Handmaiden addresses the idea of America as a Christian nation, and notes that most of the documents Christians use to support this claim are colonial documents, such as the Mayflower Compact, the Massachusetts Bay Charter, and William Penn's frame of government for the Pennsylvania colony--which are not so much about the founding of the modern United States as they are about the founding of the local branches of the government that was overthrown in the 1770s. Post-1776 founding documents speaking in similarly religious terms are much harder to find. (I remember reading something a few years back in which a writer cited the use of "A.D" dating in the Declaration of Independence and the Constitution as proof the Founders were Christians, which is weak even by fundie standards of proof.) We shouldn't be surprised by this, though: relying on old texts and ignoring the way newer ones have replaced them is a lot like preferring the Old Testament to the New.

2006-05-26T19:03:00.000-05:00

Late Update
The Duke women's lacrosse team is not wearing "innocent" sweatbands in their NCAA tournament game tonight, in solidarity with their male counterparts--some are wearing sweatbands with the numbers of the three men's players indicted in the rape/assault scandal. Other players were seen warming up in sweatbands that read, "No excuses, no regrets." Which is even more hideously inappropriate than "innocent." Never mind that it may refer to the women's team's sense of commitment in the NCAA tournament--when people are watching to see what they're wearing, "no excuses, no regrets" sounds an awful lot like, "Yeah, the boys did it, but they shouldn't have to apologize, and if they did it again, it would be OK with us. What are you gonna do about it?"

I don't care if that's not what they mean--that's how it looks. By going forward with this, they've clearly gotten some horrible advices from their coaches, their parents, their friends, and whomever else gave it to them, only they're incapable of seeing it.

If there's any justice, they'll get blown off the field tonight. They deserve it.

We now return to the weekend, already in progress.

2006-05-26T16:12:00.000-05:00

This, That, and the Other Thing
We're in pre-holiday mode here at the Daily Aneurysm. That means we've been doing our regular amount of screwing around in lieu of working, but we don't feel guilty about it. It looks like the first official weekend of summer is going to be summery here in Wisconsin, with the thermometer headed for 90 by Sunday. We're ready. The World's Largest Brat Fest starts today in Madison, in which over 175,000 bratwurst will be consumed by Monday evening, such that simply breathing the air in Dane County will raise your cholesterol level. We're ready for that, too. Who wants to live forever?

We were highly entertained last week when Deadspin, our favorite sports blog, put up a list of the strangest, weirdest, or most pathetic sports team nicknames. Today, Deadspin has topped even that: Ladies and gentlemen, the hockey team at the Rhode Island School of Design is called the Nads. And here is their mascot.

This could only happen in hockey.

We were entertained earlier this week by an article in the June Harper's by David Samuels. It's a sort of ethnographic study of the Super Bowl in Detroit last February, in which Samuels hung out with pregame entertainer Stevie Wonder, watched the halftime show featuring the Stones roll onto the field, visited with officials, talked to fans, and attended postgame player press conferences. In the apparent fact that Wonder's inspiration for his funky, synthesizer-driven 70s sound was Switched-On Bach, the famous 1968 album of classical interpretations on the Moog synthesizer recorded by Walter Carlos, Samuels finds a metaphor for American life that's worthy of being not just Quote of the Day, but Quote of the Week: "[the] free-floating weirdness of American life will always escape any attempt to make us seem like a normal country rather than a furious human-wave assault on the farthest shores of reality."

That may end up adorning the top of this blog before very long.

And so we welcome the Memorial Day weekend. As we are sticking close to home this year, there may be new posts here between now and Tuesday, and there may not be. Don't worry about it. Turn your damn computer off and go outside to play. Drive carefully. Eat a brat.

The Other Thing: Some worthwhile MP3 downloads at The Hits Just Keep On Comin'.

2006-05-26T10:55:00.000-05:00

Innocence and Irony
Lacrosse is not very big here, despite the fact that there's a major Wisconsin city called La Crosse, best known as the home of the World's Largest Six Pack. Few would pay attention to the game of lacrosse at all were it not for the Duke scandal. Today, the Duke women's team plays in the NCAA tournament in Boston. The team members will wear wristbands printed with the word "innocent," to show solidarity with the scandal-plagued men's team. And they really are solid--the women's team invited the ousted men's coach to give them a pre-tournament pep talk.

In the United States, we rarely talk about social class, even though it's often the most important thing that divides us. The Duke lacrosse scandal gives us a fine opportunity to confront it, although we'll spill barrels of ink and millions of pixels discussing the race and gender implications before we'll deal with the class aspect of the case. But the Duke women's "innocent" wristbands are evidence that class is not just an issue in the case, it's the issue.

Under normal circumstances, you'd expect gender to trump everything else here, because it often does. If members of the football team had thrown a party and invited strippers in, how many of the women's lacrosse players would have protested the insult to their gender? If the stripper had been raped and beaten by some of the football players, how many of the women's lacrosse players would have stood in solidarity with the victim? Yet that's not happening here.

Why not? Here's my guess. The members of the Duke women's lacrosse team come from the same privileged backgrounds as the men. Thus, they have the same understanding of how much the accused players have to lose. They have a similar view of the world--what they're entitled to, and who isn't entitled to the same things. So, if the men's team members felt that the stripper was less human than they, because of her race and her job, why wouldn't the women's team share that attitude? The men's team has closed around its members, forming a blue wall of silence, with players accused of nothing trying to obstruct the investigation, and the Duke women have chosen to stand along that wall with them. (One wonders: Are any of the women law students? Does their prejudging of a case before the legal system has weighed in strike them as ironic at all?)

The idea that we share a common humanity, a common destiny, a common good, is growing more outmoded by the day in America. All we share, in many people's eyes, is a common marketplace, a socioeconomic shark tank in which everybody has to compete with everybody else, best of luck and the devil take the hindmost. When we blindly assume conditions in the shark tank are equal for everybody--in other words, when we ignore the implications of social class--it's easy to assume those who don't share our class have only themselves to blame for it. And because they must have "failed," they're less worthy of respect than we are. And from that perception of inequality comes events such as the Duke scandal--and the weird solidarity of the women's players in a situation where we wouldn't expect to find it.

Short version: The men's lacrosse team is their kind of people, and a black woman who strips for a living is not. And that's the only thing that matters to them.

2006-05-25T07:41:00.000-05:00

The Thing That Came Out of the GLOP
There was a little squib in the Capital Times yesterday about how the local chapter of GLSEN, the Gay, Lesbian and Straight Education Network, is changing its name to the Gay-Straight Alliance for Safe Schools. This post has nothing to do with either of those organizations. It's about something I thought of while reading the story--something I hadn't thought about in years.

In the fall of 1980, the University of Wisconsin at Platteville got its first gay and lesbian organization. When the group tried to get official sanction and funding from student fees, controversy erupted. Platteville was small-town Wisconsin, and UWP a school attended largely by small-town and rural kids. A good bit of the opposition to the gay group was of the "icky icky eww gross" variety, as it dawned on the small-town and rural kids that there were gay people in their midst. That unfamiliarity with gay people plunged the campus into a swirl of misinformation and bigotry. Some students argued that if gays and lesbians were granted official university recognition, "witch covens, cults, and anti-American organizations" would be next. A few students formed an organization designed to protect heterosexual rights. (And probably grew up to become Republicans.)

The gay-student organization made a critical misstep at the beginning that made it easier for people to think of them as icky. They called themselves "Gays and Lesbians of Platteville," which was quickly condensed to its acronym: "GLOP."

A certain campus newspaper columnist whose regular beat was music thought the anti-gay students were way out of line. So he wrote an impassioned screed about the GLOP affair, defending the right of gay and lesbian students to organize, and criticizing those who criticized them. He waited until just before deadline to turn it in, in place of his usual music column. He figured this would force the editors to run the thing, even though he had been told several times to stick to music and leave the politics to other writers. He was right. The columnist wrote:

Although I wouldn't want my kid to be homosexual (were such a thing up to me), the fact remains that some people are. And as far as I'm concerned, so what? These folks (known far and wide, it seems, as the G.L.O.P.) aren't likely to set up a table in the Student Center hallway and hold a recruiting drive. I don't expect them to enter a float in the Homecoming parade, but they have the right to if they want to. . . .

In the past month or so, at times the ignorance on this campus and in the Platteville community has been so thick you could cut it with the proverbial knife. There's been a great over abundance of bigoted, close-minded rhetoric, which is disappointing coming from an institution that is supposed to be a place of education and enlightenment. In the face of all that, it takes a hell of a lot of courage to admit to a taboo like homosexuality, and it is mighty admirable to try and improve the lot of those who are [gay], even in a small way.

I was a rural kid from a small-town high school, and I'd never met a gay person in my life as far as I knew--but the position I took in that column was the only one that made sense to me, even though homosexuality was as foreign to me as Sanskrit. As I wrote last winter at The Hits Just Keep on Comin', I'm not especially proud of many columns I wrote for the paper between 1979 and 1981. The rhetorical tics I had back then make me squirm with embarrassment now; neither do I agree today with every opinion I held then. In fact, I often wonder what the hell I could have been thinking.

Not this time.

Recommended Reading: The day Al Jazeera (and paranoia) came to North Dakota and God wants you to beat your children.

2006-05-24T14:08:00.000-05:00

Sex! Evil Mexicans! Bad Writing!
CNN hit the daily double of wingnuttia last night, with Lou Dobbs citing the racist Council of Conservative Citizens as a source on immigration, and Paula Zahn spending an uncritical segment with a guy who claims to be able to "cure" homosexuals. It's hard to pick which one is more egregious. Although I'd be tempted to give the prize to Dobbs for hyping racist propaganda about Mexican intentions for the Southwestern U.S. that reads like a bad alternate-history short story, Zahn deserves it too, for failing to recognize an obvious quack when it's sitting right in front of her.

Meanwhile, over at Headline News, Nancy Grace ran one of her typical segments, about some tragically spectacular murder somewhere involving people you don't know. The on-screen graphic accompanying the report read, "Parents and Quadriplegic Son Murdered!" It's a subtle thing, but that simple exclamation point had the effect of raising the temperature of the story. Of course, more heat didn't necessarily mean more light. In fact, that one little punctuation mark served to both hype the story and to trivialize it at the same time.

An old editor of my acquaintance used to say that you should write as if you're given 11 exclamation points for your entire writing life, and when they're gone, you can't have any more. He might have added that if you're writing graphics for TV, you should type as if the exclamation-point key is broken.

One More Thing: Tonight's season finale of American Idol is such an enormous pop-cultural event that even this blog, which does not officially care who wins, can't ignore it. Whether you officially care or don't, you might be interested in a few half-baked thoughts about it over at The Hits Just Keep On Comin'.

2006-05-24T08:09:00.000-05:00

The Lineup
Congress.org is out with a list of Congressional power rankings, based on 15 characteristics of power the organization finds in the following categories: position, influence, and legislative activity. They stress that their ranks are strictly about legislative effectiveness. A lot of what makes members of Congress seem effective to their constituents--local visibility, communication with voters, and constituent services--aren't measured at all. The rankings do include a touch of what Congress.org calls the "sizzle/fizzle" factor, which accounts for personal popularity (or, in the case of scandal-plagued members, unpopularity) and other subjective factors. Examples of members with "sizzle" include McCain, Hillary, and Obama, so you get the idea.

Wisconsin's two senators rank at Number 54 and Number 82. The surprise here is that Herb Kohl is 54 and Russ Feingold is 82. Kohl ranks 18th overall among Democratic senators; Feingold 32nd. Kohl gets his highest marks for his position, Feingold for his legislative activity. It appears that Feingold lost points due to his purported interest in running for president, "which usually translates into reduced resources and ability to exercise power in the legislative process." He also ranks low in influence, which is surprising to me, and probably to you too. He's been nothing less than the conscience of the Senate in the last year or so. If his colleagues had the courage to support and vote for the censure resolution, he might rank higher.

My representative, Tammy Baldwin, ranks 424th of 438 members ranked (including delegates from DC, Guam, American Samoa, and the Virgin Islands). This is because "Member has weak committee assignment or lacks significant committee influence due to member's minority party status." (They said that about Feingold, too--but not about Kohl, even though they both serve on the Judiciary Committee and the Special Committee on Aging. Kohl is on Appropriations, Feingold on Foreign Relations and the Budget Committee. Which makes the two senators' respective rankings even more mysterious.) Baldwin's opponents in the last couple of elections have tried to make an issue of her lack of legislative accomplishments, but without success. Her personal popularity is fabulously high here, as is her visibility, such that it's hard to see her losing her reelection bid this fall. The Repugs haven't run a viable candidate against her since 2000, and it looks as if her challenger this year will be the same guy she dispatched in 2004.

Other people who've represented me over the years rank like this: Iowa Senators Grassley and Harkin rank 4th and 35th respectively; Iowa representative Jim Leach is 69th; Illinois representative Lane Evans is 282nd. (I've been gone from Illinois a long time, but Lane Evans soldiers on.)

You can find out where your senators and representative rank by clicking here.

2006-05-23T16:43:00.000-05:00

Breaking the Bank
At Thanksgiving 2004, The Mrs. and I did some sightseeing in Washington, D.C. I wrote the following about the National World War II Memorial:

Its soaring columns and iron wreaths are as overblown as the black granite of the Vietnam Memorial is understated, and having one festooned column for each of the 50 states, DC, and various territories is overkill. As several historians have noted, public memorials say as much about the times in which they are erected as they do about the past events or people they commemorate. Even though the World War II Memorial was designed in the late 1990s, it's clearly an artifact of America's 21st Century empire.

In New York, they're still hassling over the World Trade Center Memorial. Recent reports indicated that the cost of the memorial could run anywhere from 500 million to one billion dollars. Billion, with a B. Tom Engelhardt wrote a great post at TomDispatch last week, in which he compared that cost to other memorials, and found that the World Trade Center Memorial will cost more than all the other famous American memorials combined. Far, far more.

Ain't that America? Everything's bigger here. Our hamburgers, our movie stars--and our sense of violation when something bad happens to us. When homegrown terrorists blew up the Federal Building in Oklahoma City, we built our first inflated memorial for $29 million. The World War II Memorial was the next one built. We weren't necessarily salving open wounds with that one, but we were surely conscious of the way our victory (and we always consider it "our victory," never mind the British or the Free French or the Russians) did nothing short of creating the modern world. And at the precise moment in history when "the greatest generation" was being venerated, anything less than what we built would have been perceived as too little. (Try not to think about the irony of the WWII Memorial looking like something Mussolini would have built for himself if he'd been on the winning side.)

Now comes the World Trade Center Memorial. As Engelhardt notes, our desire to spend a billion on a 1776-foot tower and reflecting pools is more about glorifying our suffering as Americans than about remembering those who died. But that's in keeping with who we are, too--21st century Americans are the most egotistical race of people who've ever walked the planet. So we're going to break the bank for an obscenely elaborate monument to the most psychologically wounding day in our history, the events of which started us on our current spiral down history's drain.

Perhaps the World Trade Center Memorial is fitting, then, but not in the way it's supposed to fit.

2006-05-22T22:02:00.000-05:00

Day Is Done
(Warning: If you taped or TiVoed the season finale of 24, spoilers are ahead.)

Jack Bauer saved California from terrorists, brought down the President of the United States, got to kiss his beloved Audrey--and ended up in more trouble than he'd been in all day. Day Five ended with Bauer in Chinese custody, presumably about to pay for his personal invasion of the Chinese consulate on Day Four, 18 months earlier.

In other words, the day that began with Bauer brought out of hiding because his cover was about to be blown ended with his cover being blown. It's like everybody at CTU forgot the Chinese might have an interest in Jack to begin with. Jack certainly forgot about it. Yeah, he's had a busy day, and stuff slips your mind when you get busy, but remember--but he was in hiding until yesterday.

Now that the season's over, the suspension of disbelief that's required to fully enjoy 24's video thrill ride starts falling away, and questions arise for which there are no good answers.

It was mighty clever of Jack to bug President Logan--but how could he know Logan would confess in time to save the lot of them from going up for treason? Presumably Jack and Mrs. Logan cooked up the plan for her to provoke him into confessing, but they did it off-camera, so we never saw it. And that's a dramatic cheat.

You've gotta wonder, too, why Logan didn't tip the Chinese to Bauer 18 hours ago, when he first realized Bauer was onto him. Surely that would have been easier than co-opting the Army, Navy, Air Force, and Secret Service into his plot.

And who was that omnipotent guy with the black eyeglasses who seemed to be giving orders to Logan for the second half of the day? He turned up in the first five minutes tonight, then disappeared.

(One thing we learned tonight about Logan--he may fancy himself a man of action, but he's not much of one. Exhibit A: At the end of the first hour, 6:00AM in the show's universe, he and the First Lady were getting ready to hit the rack. No more than five minutes later, they were getting dressed. Not much of a salute from the little soldier, apparently.)

For all the political meaning people try to hang on 24--how Logan parallels Bush, whether last season's explicit torture sequences were some kind of commentary on our reality, that the show represents a Republican fantasy of how the war on terror should work--it really can't support any of it for very long. I've been one of those people hanging meaning on it. Earlier this season, I wrote that 24 had become the darkest entertainment show ever seen on American TV, providing a sense of looming horror that could only be more dire if they started killing random viewers at home. It didn't maintain that--and there's a persuasive argument that for the second season in a row, the whole thing fell apart at the end.

But here's the thing about 24. When we sit down in front of the tube, we do it to be entertained, and the people who make 24 do that as well as anyone in the history of TV. If only they could manage it without leaving half-a-dozen loose ends hanging every year.

(Get much, much more from viewers at Television Without Pity.)

2006-05-22T13:01:00.000-05:00

Carry Me Back to Old Californy
As noted this morning, our Wisconsin Republicans were busy this weekend. They took a straw poll at their state convention and favored Virginia Senator George Allen for president in 2008 by one vote over Rudy Giuliani. Newt Gingrich and Condoleezza Rice were close behind. Honesty compels me to report the straw poll had only a little over 300 participants. Nevertheless, the ideological fissure that threatens to divide the Repug party is nicely captured by the Allen/Giuliani split. Rudy would be utterly unacceptable to the culture warriors, who would make up Allen's base. (For what it's worth, Giuliani placed second a year ago, behind Rice; Allen had run fifth last time. Jeb Bush, who placed third in 2005, didn't get a single vote this time.)

I don't know whether you caught it or not, but last month, The New Republic brought to national attention the fact that Allen, despite claiming a full set of shitkicker bona fides--bolo ties, country music, NASCAR--actually grew up privileged in California. He adopted Confederate sympathies while in high school there, and never set foot in the South until he was a sophomore in college. So that means he's an even phonier cowboy than Bush. However, since lots of voters (Repug and otherwise) either can't tell or don't care about the difference between talking the talk and walking the walk, Allen's fake Confederate act would make him a formidable candidate in 2008. (The original New Republic article is behind a subscription wall. Digby captured some of the highlights.)

Recommended Reading: Wisconsin will be voting on a referendum question this November regarding a state Constitutional amendment forbidding same-sex marriage. Pandagon reports that the wingers are test-driving their newest talking point on the issue, designed to keep them from being accused of bigotry. They apparently plan to talk about how it has nothing to do with homosexuality and everything to do with nurturing the family unit. (No word on whether they'd talk about our death penalty referendum question in a similar way: "It has nothing to do with the prisoner; it's all about helping the victim's family.")

I'm concerned about the marriage amendment for two reasons. The possibility that it will lose is bad enough. Even worse is the certainty that it will unleash unparalleled ugliness into Wisconsin politics, especially given that the tide of public acceptance is slowly turning toward same-sex marriage. Clearly, only one antidote could possibly be strong enough for this ugliness: Before then, the Milwaukee Brewers must trade for Boof Bonser.

2006-05-22T08:35:00.000-05:00

Dimwit Jamboree
Time for another installment of Those Wacky Republicans, our intermittent look at how Wisconsin's wingnuts are entertaining the whole state by being themselves.

Item: The governor has until the end of the month to sign a stack of bills passed by the legislature. One of them would mandate abstinence education as the best choice for sex education in schools.

Comment: State Senator Mary Lazich, last seen at this blog co-sponsoring a bill that would forbid school districts from adopting textbooks that referred to dates with C.E. and B.C.E instead of A.D. and B.C, gave our local NBC affiliate a lovely quote: "I think the bill, at the end of the day, what it does is require that students be armed with more information, information that they are not being armed with now." That's as neat an example of conservative doublespeak as you're ever likely to hear--because to people like Lazich, "more information" about sex, as provided by abstinence education, equals "no information" about sex.

Item: Tommy Thompson isn't going to run for governor this fall.

Comment: Tommy gave a good old political stemwinder at the state Repug convention this weekend, but ultimately for other people. It's not a surprise he passed on the governor's race. Congressman Mark Green has had the money locked up for months, which is why Scott Walker got out of the race earlier in the spring. But Thompson didn't say anything about running for the Senate against Herb Kohl. His speech would have been the place to do it--it would have brought the house down and energized the party faithful so much that they'd glow in the dark. But he said nothing about the Senate, and he ducked questions afterward.

The Repugs didn't run a serious candidate against Kohl in 2000, and they've got nobody this time, either. They've stacked the November ballot with a same-sex Constitutional amendment and an advisory referendum on the death penalty, so you'd think that even a rich dimwit with nothing to offer (like Tim Michels, who got stomped by Russ Feingold in 2004 and who is considering another run if somebody else would pay for it) would be competitive. With a big-name candidate like Thompson running against Kohl, it would be hard for them to lose. Perhaps if He Who Shall Not Be Named didn't have an approval rating in the same range with brussels sprouts and diarrhea, he might call on Thompson to run for the good of the party. As it is, the decision is entirely up to Tommy, and he will supposedly make it this week. I won't be surprised no matter what he decides.

2006-05-21T14:55:00.000-05:00

Another Excuse to Type the Words "Boof Bonser"
We haven't done a sports-themed post here for a while, and Sunday afternoon seems like a good excuse to do one. So here we go.

Item: Barry Bonds finally hit his 714th career home run yesterday, tying Babe Ruth for second on the all-time list.

Comment: A sports-talk host I was listening to this morning suggests that Bonds' achievement, steroid accustions or not, outshines Ruth's because Ruth played in a time when major league baseball was made up entirely of white Americans, while Bonds' opponents have come from all over the world, and in an era when athletes are more physically talented to boot. That may be true, but we can't rely only on the numbers to prove it, and in a sport that venerates numbers like no other, that matters. Barry Bonds may deserve a far higher pedestal than many people are willing to put him on, but we'll never know for sure--and it's nobody's fault but his.

Item: Kentucky Derby winner Barbaro breaks a leg at the Preakness Stakes; Sam Hornish wins the pole position for this year's Indianapolis 500.

Comment: Every year in May, we're reminded that the Triple Crown of horse racing and the Indy 500 are mere shadows of their former selves. The Triple Crown is being done in by demographics, in the United States, at least. Where's the new generation of American horse-racing fans coming from? Answer: nowhere. The new power base in the sport is Middle Eastern money--and in the world we live in right now, it's hard to imagine Americans embracing a sport where the big winners are people from Dubai and Bahrain. If Barbaro hadn't been seriously, perhaps terminally, injured yesterday, a fraction of the people who are aware of the race today would have noticed the result. The demise of the Indy 500, like Boof Bonser's first name, is self-inflicted. At the precise moment in the early 90s when NASCAR stock-car racing took off, the people who own the Indianapolis Motor Speedway made the idiotic decision to start their own racing league for open-wheel cars, and anyone who wanted to compete at Indy had to run in several other no-name races. As a result, the major stars of the sport--the Unsers, the Andrettis, and others--stopped running at Indy, and the race became as compelling to the national audience as minor-league baseball. Since then, the Indy Racing League has developed its own stars--Hornish, Helio Castroneves, and most famously right now, Danica Patrick--and has lured a few of the older stars back. But the Indianapolis 500 has now become the second-most popular race at its own track, overshadowed by NASCAR's Brickyard 400 every August.

Item: The NBA playoffs still have a month to go.

Comment: When the Milwaukee Bucks won their lone NBA title in 1971, they wrapped it up in late April. The NBA has expanded its roster of teams and the size of its playoffs since then, and now the season ends around Father's Day. It's an easy argument to make that in general, the playoffs would be far more compelling with half the teams and half the games. However, three of the four conference semifinal series this year will go to a deciding seventh game, one today and two tomorrow, and each one has had a storyline to snare even the casual fan: the rise of Lebron James to Jordan-like stature as he attempts to lead the underdog Cleveland Cavaliers over the favored Detroit Pistons; the struggle of the Dallas Mavericks to finally get past their arch-rival, the defending champion San Antonio Spurs; and the stunning performance of the Los Angeles Clippers, long the most mismanaged franchise in sports, having to prove quarter-by-quarter than they're not a fluke, and largely succeeding. Not that I'm going to actually watch any of these games or anything--but I won't automatically turn off the sports talk shows when they start talking about them, either.

2006-05-21T11:13:00.000-05:00

His Fastball Is Mighty and Will Not Be Denied
You may have noticed the news stories this past week about the growing popularity of "Nevaeh" as a first name. I did. Over the years, I have collected odd names. It's easier now than it used to be. Some of the names parents hang on kids today seem so strange, and sometimes so flatly cruel, that you can't help but notice them. I am thinking here of the parents wanted to name their son "Tim," but for whom "Tim" was simply too pedestrian, so they named him "Tymme," or the parents who created future strippers by naming their daughters "Wytnee" or "Lynzi." (Until I write something based on my bad-names archive, Baby's Named a Bad, Bad Thing will have to do if you want more.)

I was collecting athlete names first, however. It started way back in the 60s and 70s, with names like Pedro Borbon and Cepheus Witherspoon. But despite my experience with odd names, nothing prepared me for the latest one I found: Boof Bonser. Boof is a pitcher who will make his major-league debut for the Minnesota Twins today against the Milwaukee Brewers.

In defense of his parents, Boof's name is self-inflicted. His parents named him "John Paul." ("John Paul Bonser" isn't a bad rock-star name, actually--a chainsaw lead guitarist in a heavy-metal band, maybe.) Somebody nicknamed him "Boof" at some point, and he legally changed his name to "Boof" a few years ago. The people at I Dislike Your Favorite Team brought some grade-A snark about Boof on Friday, and I laughed along with them. But that was before I realized this name has magical powers. When you speak the name "Boof Bonser" aloud, something happens. You have to smile. Endorphins are released. I am convinced that merely speaking the name "Boof Bonser" aloud can reduce stress and will improve your attitude. All the trouble in the world seems mitigated by the fact that there's a guy named "Boof" walking around and sharing it with us. Perhaps, if spoken often enough, "Boof Bonser" could change your life.

Try it.

Later today: Items and comments from the non-Boof (Boof-free? sans Boof? Boofless?) pages of the sports section.

2006-05-19T08:10:00.000-05:00

It's Not a Lie If You Believe It
These are the kind of headlines that greet us online and in the paper this morning, headlines which say things that we know are untrue:

"Hayden Insists NSA Surveillance Is Legal" (No word on whether he also insisted that the Cubs will contend for the pennant, that donuts won't make you fat, or that Paris Hilton is a virgin.)

"Bush Says Border Fencing Makes Sense" (Of course, abstinence education, tax cuts, and Iraq make sense to him too, so what the hell do you expect?)

Let's see if we can make up some headlines that are just as likely to be true:

"Harry Potter Author: 'I Want Your Kids to Worship Satan'"

"New Leads in Jimmy Hoffa Disappearance" (No, wait, that's real.)

"Donuts Won't Make You Fat" (Nah, maybe that's not so good. There are probably a few people around who believe it. Skeptical? Hey, there are people who believe this.)

"Barry Bonds Retires, Admits Steroid Use"

And so on. You can probably think of your own.

On the subject of lies, brouhaha has been swirling around reporter Jason Leopold, who wrote last Friday that Karl Rove had told White House colleagues he was going to be indicted and that he planned to step down as soon as he was. The story swept the blogs last weekend, but was treated with more skepticism than you'd expect from people who have been dying to see Rove's perp walk. The muted response seemed odd to me, although I didn't investigate the reason why. Here's why. First, absolutely nobody else had the story. Second, Leopold's credibility is apparently less than completely solid--Salon sacked him a few years back for using unsubstantiated material in a story. Capitol Hill Blue has the details.

Whether Leopold is ethical or credible or something less than both, the bottom line on Rove this morning seems to be this: Given past patterns in the special prosecutor's office, chances are good that if Rove is going to get his, it will come today.

To be on the safe side, however, don't hold your breath.

Recommended Reading: Once again, I love me some News Blog, which picked up a Huffington Post post (post post post) from Kevin Phillips, author of American Theocracy and former high Republican thinker, about the likelihood of Bush and Cheney surviving the summer in office, let alone the full 977 days remaining in their term. Phillips suggests that House speaker Dennis Hastert, third in line, is manifestly unqualified to be president, so the Repugs might consider appointing someone else to be speaker--and that someone doesn't have to be a sitting member of the House. It could be a senator. Phillips suggests Lugar of Indiana or Warner of Virginia--either of whom, though they are Republicans, would be a vast improvement over HWSNBN and Dick Him Before He Dicks You. (Good nickname--credit to Jerry Bowles at Best of the Blogs for it--but too long. Henceforth, we shall refer to the vice president as "Himby.") Except here's the thing--House Repugs, who elect the speaker, won't do anything without White House marching orders, and they surely won't mess with the presidential succession. And besides, everybody knows that if Himby drops dead or resigns, Condoleezza Rice gets the VP gig. And she makes Hastert look like Lincoln.

Also, Mark Morford has been playing around with Google Trends, a new web tool that unveils all sorts of information about who's googling what and where they're googling from. Just what the Internet needs--another great time-waster.

2006-05-17T18:33:00.000-05:00

You Were There
On May 17, 1973, the Senate Watergate hearings began. I was in seventh grade that spring, already a news junkie, so if anybody in my school besides the teachers knew about Watergate, it was me. Our social studies teachers, Miss Alt and Miss Odell, made us watch the hearings in class. I am not sure how many students really understood what they meant--and I don't remembver how much I understood about the hearings, either. But I knew major news events when I saw them, so I was interested.

No matter what's on the front page, above the fold, like the Watergate hearings 33 years ago, life goes on in countless other ways, with events that leave lighter footprints on time. Over at my other blog, The Hits Just Keep On Comin', we do an occasional feature called "One Day in Your Life," focusing on the events and popular music of one single day. Just for kicks, let's try something similar here, and see if we can find a theme or some significance in the juxtaposition of events.

May 17, 1973, was a Thursday. The biggest event on Richard Nixon's official calendar (apart from the hearings) was the signing of an executive order regarding the "Inspection of Income, Excess-Profits, Estate, Gift, and Excise Tax Returns" by the Senate Commerce Committee. He also talked to his lawyer, Fred Buzhardt--a conversation that would be taped on the famous White House taping system to be revealed at the Watergate hearings later that summer. The conversation was about the existence of the Huston Plan, a domestic spying operation devised in 1970 to disrupt student protest movements. (Domestic spying. Mmmm, smells like history.) Nixon was concerned that the Watergate committee knew about the plan, and was concocting a strategy to contain the political damage if the plan, which was never carried out over objections from the FBI, was revealed by the committee. The Reverend Sun Myung Moon gave a famous speech in which he declared, among other things, "The whole world is in my hand, I will conquer and subjugate the world."

The energy crisis hadn't officially arrived yet, but government officials were trying to find energy wherever they could, and on this day, three nuclear weapons were exploded underground in Colorado. The nuking, code-named Rio Bravo, was part of something called Operation Plowshare, which was intended to release hard-to-get natural gas resources in the area. (Don't tell Bush or Cheney about this.) It worked, except that the gas became so radioactive that it was unusable. Quelle surprise. The first three astronauts were supposed to be launched on their mission to Skylab, but the launch was postponed until the 25th. Their job--fix severe damage to the orbiter that had occurred at launch on May 14.

Football player Jay Riemersma (tight end, Buffalo Bills) was born. So was actor Hill Harper (CSI: New York and Lackawanna Blues), in Iowa City. Also born on that day was 7-foot-6 inch actor Matthew McGrory (The Devil's Rejects). McGrory, who died last summer, is in the Guinness Book of World Records for having the world's biggest feet--size 29 1/2.

David Bowie, playing a concert in Dundee, Scotland, was mobbed by fans on the way to his limo after the show. In London, the Rolling Stones wrapped up 11 days of work on their forthcoming album, Goat's Head Soup. (That's the one with "Angie" on it.) Then-unknown Canadian rock band Bachman-Turner Overdrive released its first album. Los Angeles radio personality Hal Goodwin died after having a heart attack on the air. The New York Review of Books published a review of the controversial movie Last Tango in Paris.

The old Lake County Courthouse in Crown Point, Indiana, was placed on the National Register of Historic Places. In sports, California Angels outfielder Bobby Valentine got his leg caught in the outfield fence and broke it--his leg, not the fence--trying to keep a home run from going over the wall in the Angels' 4-0 loss to Oakland. The team I followed, the Chicago Cubs, lost to their arch-rivals, the St. Louis Cardinals, 6-4.

And that was the day. You were probably there, too, somewhere.

2006-05-17T07:54:00.000-05:00

Corrections and Additions
Last weekend I wrote about the excellent excerpt from Michelle Goldberg's book Kingdom Coming: The Rise of Christian Nationalism that appeared at Salon. In that post, I was fuzzy on the distinction between Christian Reconstructionists, who'd like to reconfigure all of society on an Old Testament basis, and Dominionists, who don't go as far in advocating things like stoning sinners in the public square. My pal kn, who is reading Goldberg's book, reminded me of the distinction. David Neiwart discussed the distinction at Orcinus yesterday--just what should we call those people? He originally suggested "Christianists," derived from the word "Christianism":

Christianism is a theocratic form of Christianity which is anti-pluralistic, designed to impose conservative Christian beliefs on American society (and eventually the world) through the use of the political system (or sometimes outright force). Christianism is a domestic crusade designed to change the country from the inside into one in which (nominally) Christian beliefs are the guiding societal force.

Implicit in the term is Christianism's status as political ideology distinct from religious belief. But he also says "dominionist" is a good choice, and for an interesting reason: People don't know what it means, which requires us to explain it every time we use it. When Mr. and Mrs. All-Christians-Are-The-Same hear what Dominionists stand for, they sit up and say "Well, that's crazy." Which is exactly the reaction we want.

ITMFA: Last week, the Rude Pundit suggested that Democrats should run this fall on the platform that voting Democrat means getting rid of Bush. They ought to come right out and say that if elected, Democrats will impeach him. (And, I would add, see that the bastard is turned over to the International War Crimes Tribunal). This will never happen, of course. But Zachary Roth at Washington Monthly has a less inflammatory suggestion--Repugs are already telling their supporters that if the Democrats take Congress, they'll launch "politically motivated" investigations of everything. The frame is in place, so why not use it? Why not say, "If you vote Democratic, you'll get real Congressional oversight, the way the Constitution intends it?" As Roth notes, the case will have to be skillfully made--and more skillfully than you might imagine, given that the media has already accepted the Repug frame, and that any post-election investigations will be reported as political payback rather than the lawful reassertion of Congressional responsibility.

It can't be done in a timid bleat--but honesty compels me to report that since this is the Democratic Party we're talking about, timid bleating is what we'll probably get. Talking about impeachment, Washington insiders like to put on their frowny faces and say, "Oh, we just had the Clinton impeachment, and the country couldn't stand another one." Nonsense. The Clinton impeachment was a joke--a partisan circus that had very little support outside the Repug base. The crimes of George W. Bush and Dick Cheney make Nixon look like a shoplifter. A worse crime would be letting them get away with it.

2006-05-16T11:03:00.000-05:00

Go Fish
In announcing its fall schedule for 2006, ABC has also announced the official cancellation of Commander in Chief, its highly-touted series starring Geena Davis as the President of the United States. There are lessons in this for aspiring television producers everywhere.

First of all, there's a difference between an intriguing concept and an intriguing show. Commander in Chief was the most intriguing concept of the past several TV seasons, but the producers never had a clue about what to do with it. Instead, they merely grafted generic plots on top of it. And not even generic TV plots--plots that were generic long before the invention of television: the powerful enemy lying in wait for the eager young hero to stumble, and the fish out of water tale. While it may be true that all stories are a variation on two plots ("you go on a journey" and "a stranger comes to town"), stories worth hearing generally dig a little deeper.

Second of all, if your goal is to craft intelligent, thoughtful adult drama, do not focus attention on children. As soon as Commander in Chief did its first episode about the kids having trouble adjusting to President Mom, I was off the bus. Even when otherwise intelligent and thoughtful adult dramas try to morph into family drama, it never works. Take the story arc on The West Wing in which Bartlet temporarily resigns the presidency when his daughter is kidnapped, and the episode where C.J. goes home to bond with her distant and ailing father, which represent the worst story arc and single episode of the series. Take the melodramatic storyline in the next-to-last season of NYPD Blue, in which Andy and Connie nearly lose the baby they're trying to adopt. Take the monumentally stupid Kim Bauer on 24. Someday, somebody's going to prove me wrong about this--but it isn't going to be a show where the youngest daughter is wide-eyed and precocious beyond her years, the middle daughter is sullen and maladjusted, and the oldest son is an amiable overachiever trying not to seem like one.

However, the simplistic family dynamic of Commander in Chief was in keeping with the general simplicity of the show. The conflict between Davis and her nemesis, Donald Sutherland, was so broad that the only thing missing was the hero's white hat and the villain's black one. And while The West Wing, even at its lowest point, always presented the mechanics of governing as they really work, Commander in Chief presented the back-of-the-cereal-box version, in which problems are simple and so are the solutions. The irony of this is that it's a vision of politics that conservatives should love--especially the part where President Mom sends American troops stomping all over the globe to prove she's got balls enough to lead--but they were so spooked by imaginary visions of Hillary Clinton in Davis' character that they didn't notice.

My guess is that between the standard set by The West Wing and the high-profile failure of Commander in Chief, it will be a long while before anybody tries a president series again. Unless somebody figures out that a much more interesting idea has been under their noses all this while: a series about the husband of the first female president. Now that's a fish-out-of-water tale worth the effort.

Quote of the Day: From Daily Kos contributor WorldCan'tWait, who reported on a Christian youth rally called BattleCry, recently held in Philadelphia. In response to a comment made on the report, WorldCan'tWait provides an interesting take on the culture war:

At its most basic level it's a lot of lazy fucking parents who need the government to bring up their kids for them. Too bad they don't get a clue and take personal responsibility for it. Hint. If you don't want your kids being "manipulated" by junk mass culture, take them to a museum, buy them copies of Emily Dickinson and Shakespeare, take them camping. You don't need a theocracy because American Idol sucks.

Very well put.

2006-05-15T08:27:00.000-05:00

Bartlet for America One Last Time
I may have to take back some of the bad things I've said about John Wells and The West Wing. Wells took the writing credit for last night's series finale--and it was as fine a piece of work as he's ever turned in, one that ended the series on a completely appropriate note, and in thoroughly satisfying fashion. The episode gave us the right balance of old and new, and of looking back and looking forward. After 2 1/2 seasons of hit-or-miss TV, The West Wing got it right at the end.

The final episode of a long-running series should be written for and be true to the people who have watched it religiously. This is where some other series finales have failed. Take the last episode of Seinfeld, which abandoned the style that fans adored for an episode with a conventional storyline that ended up being untrue to the spirit of the entire series. Or the 1983 finale of MASH, which was clearly written, produced, and acted with the knowledge that the whole world would be watching, and thus ended up so unlike the rest of the series in look, tone, and spirit that it played like an inferior remake. But The West Wing didn't fall into either of these traps. The final episode contained some great nods to the series' history--the framed napkin with the words "Bartlet for America," which dates back to the episode explaining how Bartlet came to run for president in the first place; and Santos, in the Oval Office, asking his chief of staff Josh, "What's next?" They brought the funny, as in Debbie Fiderer's advice to her successor as presidential secretary. They reminded us, as show so often did, of just how awesome and important the office of the presidency is. The show has often done this through the eyes of the characters who are most like viewers. In the first season, Charlie Young, newly hired as the president's "body man," watches him preparing to give a televised address and whispers to Josh, "I've never felt like this before." Josh responds, "It never ends." Last night, it was Donna Moss, who began the series as an aide's gopher but now appointed chief of staff to the new First Lady, getting a look at her office.

It might have been otherwise for The West Wing. As Matt Santos walked to the platform to be inaugurated, I imagined for a moment that we might hear shots ringing out or something--after all, John Wells is the same guy who ends each season of ER with mayhem. I would like to have seen Toby Ziegler find out about his pardon--and that it was Bartlet's idea to give it to him--but that's a minor quibble for which Wells compensated by thinking to do something else. At the inauguration, we saw various characters watching Keb' Mo' singing "America the Beautiful." The single unfamilar face in the crowd was series creator Aaron Sorkin.

Although it's fun to imagine how Sorkin might have written the finale, Wells did it well enough. And if you're a West Wing fan, you had to get pumped by the promo for Sorkin's new Studio 60, right?

2006-05-14T12:00:00.000-05:00

A Dumb, Mechanical Universe of Random Fortune and Tragedy, and How I Learned to Live Here
Every once in a while I devote a Sunday morning to visiting Internet precincts I don't get to regularly. This morning, it was The Secular Web, and specifically an article by Richard Carrier called "Why I Am Not a Christian." If any single individual is responsible for the fact that I am not a Christian, it's probably Carrier. His copious work at that site helped me straighten out the religious muddle cluttering my head in the mid 1990s and turned me into the well-adjusted hellbound atheist puke I am today. "Why I'm Not a Christian," posted earlier this spring, pulls together a lot of themes from stuff he's written over the years. The desire to quote the good bits puts me at direct risk of quoting the whole thing, but I'll try to restrain myself to topics that have been addressed at this blog in the past.

Last year, we got into a lovely rumble about free will--the idea that God created people with the right to make mistakes or do wrong, rather than creating us so that we would always do what's good and right. The argument goes that we can choose to accept the good or reject it, which is why not everyone is good, as you would expect in a universe designed by a loving God who wanted his creations to be happy. But that argument is actually a contortion made necessary by the fact that when it comes to having told us clearly how we're supposed to live, God has done no such thing--at least not in ways that aren't open to widely diverging interpretation.

The Christian proposes that a supremely powerful being exists who wants us to set things right, and therefore doesn't want us to get things even more wrong. This is an intelligible hypothesis, which predicts there should be no more confusion about which religion or doctrine is true than there is about the fundamentals of medicine, engineering, physics, chemistry, or even meteorology. It should be indisputably clear what God wants us to do, and what he doesn't want us to do. Any disputes that might still arise about that would be as easily and decisively resolved as any dispute between two doctors, chemists, or engineers as to the right course to follow in curing a patient, identifying a chemical, or designing a bridge. Yet this is not what we observe. Instead, we observe exactly the opposite: unresolvable disagreement and confusion. That is clearly a failed prediction.

Shorter Carrier: If the Christian God existed, there would be no need for free-will theories.

Over at the Secular Outpost, a blog maintained by several major contributors to the Secular Web, somebody commented on an article from Christianity Today about a preteen girl who learned to believe in the power of prayer after it helped her cure her teacher's cold and get permission to have a sleepover. The blogger wondered if the girl would have such a strong belief in prayer if she'd chosen different things to pray for--like an end to suffering in Darfur. One of the things that boggles the non-Christian mind is the way Christians accept the kind of suffering we're seeing in Darfur without blaming God for failing to help. Many rely on more contorted reasoning to explain it--the variation on free will that says humans must choose to help, or that humans must be tested by adversity like Job. Or least satisfying of all, that "God moves in mysterious ways": Despite the definition of him as a God of love, there's a reason he lets starving babies have their eyeballs eaten by flies while their mothers watch helplessly, and it's not his fault that we can't understand why. However:

A Christian can rightly claim he is unable to predict exactly what things his God would choose to do. But the Christian hypothesis still entails that God would do something. Therefore, the fact that God does nothing is a decisive refutation of the Christian hypothesis. Once again, a prediction is made that consistently fails to pan out. Instead, we observe the exact opposite: a dumb, mechanical universe that blindly treats everyone with the same random fortune and tragedy regardless of merit or purpose. . . .

A tsunami approaches and will soon devastate the lives of millions. A loving person warns them, and tells them how best to protect themselves and their children. And a loving person with godlike powers could simply calm the sea, or grant everyone's bodies the power to resist serious injury, so the only tragedy they must come together to overcome is temporary pain and the loss of worldly goods. We would have done these things, if we could--and God can. Therefore, either God would have done them, too--or God is worse than us. Far worse. Either way, Christianity is false.

The most interesting part of this lengthy article is where Carrier takes on intelligent design, specifically the argument that the universe is designed precisely so we can survive in it, and therefore, God exists.

Even the Christian proposal that God designed the universe, indeed "finely tuned" it to be the perfect mechanism for producing life, fails to predict the universe we see. A universe perfectly designed for life would easily, readily, and abundantly produce and sustain it. Most of the contents of that universe would be conducive to life or benefit life. Yet that is not what we see. Instead, almost the entire universe is lethal to life--in fact, if we put all the lethal vacuum of outer space swamped with deadly radiation into an area the size of a house, you would never find the comparably microscopic speck of area that sustains life. Would you conclude that the house was built to serve and benefit that subatomic speck? Hardly. Yet that is the house we live in. The Christian theory completely fails to predict this--while atheism predicts exactly this.

The fact that our existence seems unlikely is the farthest thing from evidence that a god created us. That we exist at all in a cosmos so vast and inhospitable is more persuasive as evidence of an accident. If we'd been created deliberately, the universe would look a lot different than it does. How would it look?

The answer is easy: the very universe early Christians like Paul actually believed they lived in. In other words, a universe with no evidence of such a vast age or of natural evolution, a universe that contained instead abundant evidence that it was created all at once just thousands of years ago. A universe that wasn't so enormous and that had no other star systems or galaxies, but was instead a single cosmos of seven planetary bodies and a sphere full of star lights that all revolve around an Earth at the center of God's creation--because that Earth is the center of God's love and attention. A complete cosmos whose marvelously intricate motions had no other explanation than God's will, rather than a solar system whose intricate motions are entirely the inevitable outcome of fixed and blind forces. A universe comprised of five basic elements, not over ninety elements, each in turn constructed from a dizzying array of subatomic particles. A universe governed by God's law, not a thoroughly amoral physics. A universe inhabited by animals and spirits whose activity could be confirmed everywhere, and who lived in and descended from outer space--which was not a vacuum, but literally the ethereal heavens, the hospitable home of countless of God's most marvelous creatures (both above and below the Moon)--a place Paul believed human beings could live and had actually visited without harm.

That is, indeed, exactly the universe we would expect if Christianity were true--which is why Christianity was contrived as it was, when it was. The first Christians truly believed the universe was exactly as Christian theism predicted it to be, and took that as confirmation of their theory. Lo and behold, they were wrong--about almost every single detail!

I warned you I could quote almost all of it. Rather than going further, I suggest you block out an hour and go read the whole thing. If I had to pick one summary to explain what I can believe and what I can't, this would be it. Thanks, Professor Carrier.

2006-05-13T17:25:00.000-05:00

The Flag and the Cross
The other day, I was out somewhere and saw the following bumper sticker, with a quote attributed to novelist Sinclair Lewis: "When fascism comes to America, it will be wrapped in a flag and carrying a cross."
(And, I might add, backed by a poll that says some percentage of the population is OK with it. There are dueling polls out right now suggesting that A) two-thirds of Americans are OK with the latest round of domestic wiretaps and B) that half of Americans are not OK with the latest round of domestic wiretaps. If ever there were a situation where you need to examine both the questionnaire and the methodology to determine the credibility of a poll, this is it. But the mighty Billmon has decloaked himself this weekend to make the point that the validity of our civil rights is not subject to approval or disapproval by a poll. That's what makes rights rights--we're entitled to them no matter what.)

Sinclair Lewis would recognize the thing he feared in the Christian Reconstructionists--a religiously inspired movement that wants to take control of every facet of American culture, society, and government under Old Testament principles. When I first started studying these people, in the mid 1990s, it was mostly because they seemed to be such entertaining loons. Back then, even they didn't think their kingdom was close at hand--one of their leading thinkers estimated it might be a thousand years away. But in the last 10 years, things have speeded up considerably.

Michelle Goldberg has written a book about the movement, and an excerpt appeared at Salon yesterday. It's the sort of thing that inspires open-mouthed, they-can't-be-serious awe--followed rather swiftly by the chilling realization that these people are absolutely serious, and on fire with the devotion of the truly committed.

I wonder, though, whether the United States, and specifically the great big squirming, wiggling, vibrating and vibrant bag that is our culture--art, science, education, socialization, money, sex, sports, commerce, the totality of it, however you'd like to describe it--is remotely containable on the scale the Reconstructionists suggest. It's possible to imagine Reconstructionists getting control of a state government--there's actually a formal movement to do just that in South Carolina--but even if they were to succeed in one state, the border would not be all that far away, and those who chose to flee could flee. To see them successful at clamping down on the entire country requires a flair for paranoid invention even I have trouble summoning up, and I'm a lot more paranoid about Christian nutbags than most people.

What would it take? Even the kind of surveillance of telephone calls that was revealed this week isn't likely to be enough. The Reconstructionists are, at bottom, thought police, and how they might get inside the heads of 298 million Americans to police what they're thinking, I'm not sure. Even George Orwell's telescreens couldn't tell what you were thinking. And short of putting half the population in uniform to police the activities of the other half, I can't seem them succeeding to the extent they imagine.

Of course, they won't need to succeed to that extent to make life difficult and unpleasant for millions of us. Their ethos--the idea that only they know what's right and moral, and that people who don't share their views are not fit to live in America--is already afoot in the ranks of conservative America. It may be in a somewhat dishwatery form compared to the Reconstructionists' 180-proof version of it, but it's there. And as long as they keep soldiering on, it's likely to get stronger. Maybe not strong enough to reach the critical mass they dream of, but strong enough to make this country even harder to live in than it is now.

Recommended Reading: You remember the Desiderata, of course ("Go placidly amid the noise and the haste"). And you may remember National Lampoon's "Deteriorata" ("You are a joke of the universe/you have no right to be here.") At Orcinus, David Neiwart presents Deciderata.

2006-05-12T20:45:00.000-05:00

Speeding Into the Weekend
Items and comments in 25 words or less:

Item: Fox News has figured out why the Dow went down 120 points today--because USA Today "made the country less safe" by revealing the latest round of illegal wiretaps.

Comment: Ow! Ow! Ow!

Item: Nancy Pelosi, who will be Speaker of the House if the Democrats retake Congress in November, told the Democratic caucus she is "not interested in pursuing" impeachment.

Comment: Maybe it's a tactic to defuse the issue for November, but don't rule out that she really means it. Ladies and gentlemen, your Democratic Party.

Item: An atheist candidate for the Democratic nomination for Alabama attorney general is also a white supremacist and a Holocaust denier.

Comment: Dude, you may be an atheist, but you're in the wrong party.

Item: Karl Rove has told his White House bosses that he is going to be indicted and will immediately resign as soon as he is.

Comment: Ohgod, ohgod, ohgod . . . I think I need a cigarette.

2006-05-12T08:27:00.000-05:00

Textbook Example
This blog gets its name from the fact that nearly every day, there's something in the news that makes you want to have a stroke. While I frequently find myself more entertained than pained by the Wisconsin legislature's wacky Republican membership, today even they are making my head hurt. The Wisconsin ACLU reported in its quarterly newsletter about a bill proposed during the last session by state senators Tom Reynolds of West Allis and Mary Lazich of New Berlin. The bill, SB506, would prohibit school boards in Wisconsin from adopting any textbook that uses the terms "CE" ("common era") and "BCE" ("before the common era") instead of "AD" and "BC" when referring to years.

Ow! Ow! Ow!

According to one online report, Reynolds told his colleagues, "[The] revision of well-established historical references is simply an attempt to sterilize educational materials from even the most innocuous religious references. This trend is unnecessary and should be discouraged."

What Reynolds doesn't know (although the list of things Reynolds doesn't know is undoubtedly a lengthy one) is that CE and BCE are not new terms. The Oxford English Dictionary says they date back to 1881. He also doesn't know that common-era notation is more accurate than BC and AD, given the hazy dating of the birth of Jesus. What Reynolds does know, however, is that CE and BCE have gained in usage precisely because they acknowledge that we live in a pluralistic world where not everybody's a Christian. So we're safe in assuming his bill is largely about showing non-Christians who's in charge. In other words--it's another, uh, textbook example of Christo-fascist bully tactics.

The true intent of Reynolds' bill is revealed in the penalty the bill would impose on those school boards that dared to violate the law--a fine of not less than $25 and not more than $100. So as a way of actually protecting the integrity of historical references (or protecting the Christian children of Wisconsin from evil secularism, whatever you want to call it), it's not exactly a deterrent. But as red meat for the wingnuts in Reynolds' district and around the state, it's top sirloin.

(In a legislative body filled with Republican nutjobs, Reynolds still manages to stand out, as former Madison mayor Paul Soglin pointed out at his blog last December. A website from one of the neighborhoods in Reynolds' district also keeps track of his antics. It headlined a squib on his legislative agenda, which includes knee-jerk support for the death penalty, by saying "Reynolds pushes bills to kill gas tax, people, textbook terms.")

SB506 actually got a public hearing in March, but failed to pass when the legislature adjourned earlier this week. My guess is it'll be back, as long as legislators like Reynolds come to Madison to represent their constituency of one--Republican Jesus.

(For more on common era notation, click here for the long version and here for the short.)

2006-05-11T17:33:00.000-05:00

And in Other News Today, the Sun Rose in the East
And now, the Daily Aneurysm's commentary on the news that the administration has illegally monitored the phone calls of millions of Americans who have nothing to do with Al Qaeda since just after September 11:

Well of course they have.

Thank you and good night.

2006-05-11T08:12:00.000-05:00

All Praise to the Invisible Blue Unicorn in the Sky for Helping Me Write This Blog
With few exceptions, the Christian faith of athletes is generally a mile wide and a half-inch deep. Highly proficient athletes live their lives on a ragged edge between success and failure. They often fail more than they succeed, their careers are short, and their grasp on them is often tenuous. Thus, they need every psychological advantage they can get. So, if they can get an advantage by believing that God is taking time out from curing somebody's cancer and finding somebody else's missing daughter to help them hit a critical three-pointer in overtime, they'll take it.

The phenomenon of athletes thanking Jesus for home runs, touchdowns, and championships jumped the shark years ago, but like other things that have jumped the shark (Desperate Housewives and the Bush Administration come to mind), it shows no sign of slowing down. Salon has an interesting article this week about about the prevalence of evangelical Christianity among athletes, especially in professional sports.

Even when I was still nominally a believer in God, those midfield prayer huddles after football games involving both teams seemed off to me--a bit like Pharisees praying on street corners to show how pious they were. The huddles were popularized by Reggie White, the Packers defensive lineman, who was also an ordained minister. But even White, who was widely thought to be the kind of Christian who put most other Christians to shame, seemed superficially religious to people who knew him well. A reporter who has covered the Packers for years and who regularly saw White in unguarded moments once told me that in his opinion, White was the biggest hypocrite he'd ever seen.

Nevertheless, people can believe what they need to believe to get them through the day. I don't care all that much, as long as their beliefs or the consequences of their beliefs don't get up in my grill. The only danger I see in the colonization of sports by fundies is that it makes their sort of religion seem like the norm to young fans who admire pro athletes. Anything else, Judaism, Islam, skepticism, or even keeping your mouth shut about religion, starts to seem abnormal. And in the testosterone-fueled, what-happens-here-stays-here world of the locker room, abnormal is a bad thing to be.

Recommended Reading: I haven't linked to Mark Morford at SFGate for a while. He's got a good one today, about what it would be like if gasoline went to $6 a gallon, or $10. It's clear that our country is headed for some kind of historic disaster--economic collapse or fascist dictatorship or wartime bloodshed on U.S. soil--and I've been half-wishing that it would just happen already so we can stop the waiting and get on with whatever's next. Morford observes that while $6 or $10 gas would be extremely difficult and disruptive in the short term, after a while, we'd adjust, and life would go on. Granted, it would be easier to adjust to $10 gas than it would be to adjust to 24-hour government surveillance. But we're even getting used to that.

2006-05-10T21:22:00.000-05:00

What's Next?
The West Wing's final episode is this Sunday night, but the night's not going to be what it could have been--NBC has decided not to air a tribute special, like they've done with almost every other high-profile series in recent memory, reportedly because some cast members wanted too much money to appear. Instead, NBC will repeat the first episode of the series at 7:00 before showing the series finale at 8. I understand the economics of TV, but we're talking about one of the most honored series in NBC's history, and it seems petty for them to balk at ponying up, especially at the last minute. You'd think they could take what they make from one episode of Deal or No Deal and throw it at the West Wing cast, but apparently not.

Fortunately, there will be nearly endless West Wing retrospectives in the media over the next several days, and they're already starting to appear. The Los Angeles Times had a story today about the formerly unrequited relationship between Josh and Donna. At BuzzFlash, guest writer Michael Winship reminisces about the show as a fantasy world for liberals who respect speaking in complete, humorous sentences, as epitomized by the late great Leo McGarry. And AP television columnist Frazier Moore writes a letter to Jed Bartlet.

I'm hopeful that the final episode will focus on the outgoing administration and not the incoming one. And I am eager to know what the final line of dialogue will be. If the writers have a solid grasp of the characters and the show's history--not a sure bet week-in and week-out, although they've been better about it this season--the final scene will go something like this:

Matt Santos has been inaugurated. We're in an underground garage, where Jed and Abbey Bartlet are getting into a limo for the ride to the airport and the flight back to Manchester, New Hampshire. They hold hands but don't speak. Their faces tell us that every memory they have of the last eight years is flooding back at once. Finally, the former president says, "Let's go." As the limo rolls away, they take one last look at the White House. Then Jed looks at Abbey and says: "What's next?"

Fade to black.

"What's next?" is a recurring Bartlet-ism, and ending the series with it would leave dedicated fans limp with closure.

If Aaron Sorkin were writing the script, he'd do it.

2006-05-09T21:12:00.000-05:00

The Vast Wasteland at 45
Newton Minow was appointed by John F. Kennedy to chair the Federal Communications Commission shortly after Kennedy took office in 1961. Forty-five years ago today, Minow spoke to the National Association of Broadcasters, and coined the phrase that will appear in the first sentence of his obituary.

When television is good, nothing -- not the theater, not the magazines or newspapers -- nothing is better. But when television is bad, nothing is worse. I invite you to sit down in front of your television set when your station goes on the air and stay there without a book, magazine, newspaper, profit and loss sheet or rating book to distract you -- and keep your eyes glued to that set until the station signs off. I can assure you that you will observe a vast wasteland.

Minow went on to describe what he meant:

You will see a procession of game shows, violence, audience participation shows, formula comedies about totally unbelievable families, blood and thunder, mayhem, violence, sadism, murder, western bad men, western good men, private eyes, gangsters, more violence, and cartoons. And, endlessly, commercials -- many screaming, cajoling, and offending. And most of all, boredom. True, you will see a few things you will enjoy. But they will be very, very few. And if you think I exaggerate, try it.

Minow spoke in an era that's so different from the multichannel, on-demand TV era we live in now that there's almost no comparison--except for the wasteland part. Today, the western is dead, the gangsters come from the 'hood instead of from Italy, and the audience participation shows are known as "reality TV," but everything else Minow criticizes is still taking up space on the dial. Commercials are still annoying and boredom is still a problem, epitomized by the lament that there's all those channels but still nothing on.

(That dreck would proliferate on television in 45 years is mostly a matter of mathematics. There's a whole lot more TV now than there was in Minow's day. In his speech, he refers to "79-and-a-half hours of prime evening time"--a week's total on three networks. If you have the typical 70 channels or so on your cable system, the equivalent number today is something like 1900 hours of "prime evening time" in a week. Perhaps the wonder is that there was so much dreck in Minow's time.)

Minow found it difficult to place blame on the viewers for the situation in 1961:

I do not accept the idea that the present over-all programming is aimed accurately at the public taste. The ratings tell us only that some people have their television sets turned on and of that number, so many are tuned to one channel and so many to another. They don't tell us what the public might watch if they were offered half-a-dozen additional choices. A rating, at best, is an indication of how many people saw what you gave them. Unfortunately, it does not reveal the depth of the penetration, or the intensity of reaction, and it never reveals what the acceptance would have been if what you gave them had been better -- if all the forces of art and creativity and daring and imagination had been unleashed. I believe in the people's good sense and good taste, and I am not convinced that the people's taste is as low as some of you assume.

Minow called upon the broadcasters to offer more balanced choices of viewing--not as easy to do then as now. But as time went by, we got much more than "half-a-dozen additional choices." Broadcasters have delivered the variety Minow sought. But that variety hasn't changed things the way Minow thought it might. We know now that mass taste is in reality every bit as grim as it looked to Minow in 1961. You can unleash "the forces of art and creativity and daring and imagination" and some people will watch the results, but many more will plan their entire week around American Idol.

It's easy to criticize broadcasters, as Minow did, for the poor quality of television. (His comments were not well-received in some quarters--the producers of Gilligan's Island named the S.S. Minnow as a slap at the chairman.) Today, we're a bit more realistic than Minow was in 1961. The problem in our country now isn't that people watch TV. It's how. Television, as a medium, is neither good nor bad. It's a conduit, like a garden hose. It's what we do with what we receive that makes the difference. We can water our lawn so it grows, or drown it so it doesn't.

2006-05-09T08:17:00.000-05:00

Much, Much Better Than You
I am not a violent person, really. Neither do I have much use for Nazis. But there's a quote attributed to Hermann Goering that comes to mind this morning: "Every time I hear the word 'culture' I reach for my gun." I am starting to feel that way about the word "moral." Every time I heard the word "moral" these days, it's coming out of the mouth of somebody whose morality disgusts me.

Charlotte, North Carolina, last Tuesday: the rock band Fall Out Boy plays a concert, during which lead singer Pete Wentz makes a few remarks from the stage about how the band considers racist, sexist, and homophobic behavior unacceptable. The next day, an aggrieved mother writes angrily to the band's record company. "I didn't spend over $200 on gas, food and, unfortunately, shirts for you to give your own personal political testimony. . . . This was a concert, not some liberal homosexual rally." And also: "I am not the only parent with morals that had children at this concert."

Lady, I am sick of hearing about your fucking "morals," and the precious "morals" of right-wing America, people whose idea of walking humbly with God is to insist on their superiority over the immoral rabble among which they're forced to live. Even though it's lunacy on any objective scale, people actually take seriously their insistence that there's a moral right to teach their children to be as ignorant and fearful as they are, and to express bigotry in the guise of "truth"--and furthermore, that such a right is somehow superior to the right of homosexuals simply to be left alone. (Which is all Wentz was asking for.)

Why are we even having a debate on this? Why aren't we suggesting that if their view of society is so warped that the entire future of the nation seems to rest on regulating who's fucking who, they should just go fuck themselves?

Perhaps I'm extra-sensitive to this kind of nonsense right now, this garbage about "morals" and how only some people (straight Republicans, natch) have good ones, as Wisconsin is about six months removed from a referendum vote on a constitutional amendment banning same-sex marriage. By the time the leaves turn, we'll scarcely be able to see them for all the moral blather coming from the cheesehead equivalents of this North Carolina paragon of virtue.

I don't believe in Hell, but if it turns out that there is such a place, I know I belong there. All these right-wing twits who think their "good morals" are going to get them to Heaven are going to be sizzling in the holes right next to mine. And I'll laugh.

2006-05-08T12:15:00.000-05:00

The Only Thing We Have to Fear Is Whatever He Decides to Do Next
You may have missed it over the weekend, but the Decider has decided to retitle the Global War on Terror. It's now World War III.

(Brief digression number one: There's practically no mention of this in the news that I can find, which is why the above link is from the Daily Times of Pakistan. This may indicate that the media thinks it's too stupid a comment for them to notice, or that they are too stupid to notice it. Take your pick.)

Coming next: Bush announces that he is changing his name from "George W." to "Franklin D," and that he will start using a wheelchair to get around the office. Don't laugh. He's already claimed he could have done better at Yalta. Of course, if he has the same level of success with wheelchairs that he has with bicycles, Cheney will be president within a couple of weeks.

(Brief digression number two: Is there any doubt that in a fight, Franklin D. Roosevelt could have kicked Bush's ass? You may never have thought about it, but Roosevelt was one tough hombre despite being a rich northeastern liberal. Denis Leary put it best: "FDR--a man stricken by polio, stuck in a wheelchair, fighting the Nazis all the while smoking 3-and-a-half packs a day."

2006-05-04T10:17:00.000-05:00

C Ya L8r
Quick note I should have appended to my earlier post today: It's hiatus time again. No new posts until Monday.

2006-05-04T09:24:00.000-05:00

Fictions
There's an absolute must-read at Salon today--a lengthy excerpt from Lapdogs, a new book by the inestimable Eric Boehlert, about the way the mainstream media utterly bungled the runup to the Iraq War. It's great for lots of reasons, but what strikes me hardest are some of the amazingly clueless quotes from media types about how they and why they covered the story.

Elizabeth Bumiller of the New York Times, on why nobody challenged Bush during the famously scripted press conference a couple of weeks before the war began:

"I think we were very deferential because ... it's live, it's very intense, it's frightening to stand up there. Think about it, you're standing up on prime-time live TV asking the president of the United States a question when the country's about to go to war," she told students at Towson University in Maryland. "There was a very serious, somber tone that evening, and no one wanted to get into an argument with the president at this very serious time."

Which explains why Bumiller's work reads like that of a stenographer to the powerful, rather than the observations of a seasoned and savvy watchdog. She's afraid to be anything else.

David Ignatius, Washington Post:

"The media were victims of their own professionalism. Because there was little criticism of the war from prominent Democrats and foreign policy analysts, journalistic rules meant we shouldn't create a debate on our own."

And why not? Because that wouldn't be fair and balanced. It's been one of the tenets of this blog for a long while that the concept of balanced coverage falls apart when one side is lying, as the administration quite clearly was at this time. Ignatius' cowardly quote proves the breakdown.

Dan Rather, September 2002:

"George Bush is the president, he makes the decisions. Wherever he wants me to line up, just tell me where. And he'll make the call."

Excuse me, sir---who are you and what have you done with the guy who took on Nixon during a live press conference?

The good news, if there is any, in Boehlert's article, is that some journalists seem to recognize that they blew it in 2002 and 2003. However, that doesn't mean they'll never blow it again. Yes, we're seeing a bit more critical and less credulous reporting these days--at least they checked into the ridiculous National-Anthem-in-Spanish "controversy" instead of merely reporting it. But at the same time, reporters are still showing a great deal of unwillingness to make the administration uncomfortable. Exhibit A: the mainstreamers' response to Stephen Colbert's speech the other night. They've decided that Colbert crossed the line and wasn't funny, when in fact he left the Emperor standing naked with no place to hide, and cracked up half the country doing it.

Journalism has come a long way since Woodstein helped chase Nixon back to San Clemente. It would take more time and space than I have and more psychoanalysis than I'm capable of to figure out how that happened. Apart from a few hacks at Fox News, none of the reporters who got things so badly wrong set out to be what they became. Colbert put it nicely:

Here's how it works: the president makes decisions. He's the Decider. The press secretary announces those decisions, and you people of the press type those decisions down. Make, announce, type. Just put 'em through a spell check and go home. Get to know your family again. Make love to your wife. Write that novel you got kicking around in your head. You know, the one about the intrepid Washington reporter with the courage to stand up to the administration. You know - fiction!

More Recommended Reading: At TPM Cafe, Mark Schmitt handicaps the 2008 Republican presidential field. Be sure to read the comments, too.

2006-05-03T22:40:00.000-05:00

Nobody Wins
Wisconsin's most magical political name, for those of you not from around here, is La Follette. The legendary Fighting Bob La Follette served as governor just after the turn of the 20th century, but made his fame as a progressive member of the U.S. Senate, and ran for president on the Progressive Party ticket in 1924. One of his sons, known as Young Bob, succeeded Fighting Bob in the Senate until he was defeated in a 1946 primary by then-little-known Joseph McCarthy. In 1953, Young Bob died, apparently a suicide. Some blame depression, but a few claim it was because McCarthy was ready to accuse him of having Communists on his Senate payroll, and would call him to testify. Another son of Fighting Bob, Philip, was Wisconsin's governor for two non-consecutive terms in the 1930s. The dynasty lasted into a third generation: Young Bob's son, Bronson, was Wisconsin attorney general for seven terms, ending in 1987. Wisconsin's current secretary of state, Doug La Follette, is a distant relative.

Second place on the list of magical political names isn't close--but if any other Wisconsin name makes people's hearts beat faster, it's probably Tommy Thompson, who was first elected governor in 1986 and would probably still have the job today if he hadn't been drafted into the Bush cabinet in 2001 as HHS secretary. Since leaving HHS after Bush's reelection, he's been lecturing and practicing law in Washington. Many Wisconsin Republicans dreamed that he might run against Russ Feingold for the Senate in 2004. When the party couldn't find anyone willing to sign onto what looked like a kamikaze mission against U.S. Senator Herb Kohl this fall, some started dreaming dreamy dreams of Thompson making that race.

Thompson is reportedly thinking about it--and a new poll is likely to keep him thinking. The Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reported that Thompson would have a 45-41 lead over Kohl if he were to run for the Senate. The poll also tosses Thompson's hat into the governor's race for him. It shows that if he were to get in, he'd thump the only remaining Republican candidate, Congressman Mark Green, by something like 69-20, and would beat incumbent Democrat Jim Doyle by 58 to 30.

I don't expect Thompson to run for governor. Although few politicians ever seemed to enjoy their jobs as much as Thompson enjoyed being governor, he's done that already. Although his family is opposed to him running for anything (his wife famously stayed home in Wisconsin when Thompson went to Washington in 2001), nobody would be surprised if he entered the Senate race. He's said he will announce his future plans at the state Repug convention later this month, so stay tuned.

Getting thrashed by a guy who isn't in the race is not all that big a deal. If Jim Doyle is losing any sleep tonight, it's over this: More than four months before the Republican primary that would presumably introduce him to the electorate, Mark Green is in a dead heat with Doyle. On top of that, only 12 percent are undecided.

That's awful news for Doyle. This blog predicted, as early as 2003 (but in pre-Blogspot days, so I can't link to anything that proves it), that Doyle would be a one-term governor. He's disappointed nearly everybody in the state--Democrats for being too willing to crawl in bed with the Repugs, and Repugs for being a Democrat to begin with. Even taking his weaknesses into account, however, I'd never have imagined he'd be in this much trouble already, even before his general election opponent has been definitively determined.

Politicians like to say you can't beat somebody with nobody, but that's more or less what's happening to Doyle right now.

2006-05-02T13:54:00.000-05:00

Blow Away
We've heard that Stephen Colbert's speech at the Correspondent's Dinner got under the skin of lots of people (click here to watch the Fox and Friends crew completely missing the point), but US News and World Report has a bit today from a former White House aide saying that while Colbert was speaking, Bush had "that look that he's ready to blow." We've heard from other sources that Bush can have a volcanic temper, although he's never blown up in public. But I wonder--what would happen if he did? What if Colbert had gone on a couple minutes longer, and the Boy Emperor had snapped?

Probably very little. (Probably a spate of aggrieved mainstream-media articles talking about how awful it was that Colbert pushed this good Christian man to anger.) But then again, it might shave another point or two from his approval rating. And with Bush at historically low levels, there's not all that much left to shave. And those levels really are historic. The last time a president had as high a disapproval rating as Bush has today (as distinct from an approval rating, which most widely reported polls discuss) was July 1974, when Dick Nixon was talking to the portraits on the White House walls.

Imagine what Bush's ratings would be if the mainstreamers were reporting the stuff that really matters: about ignoring 750 different laws, about his plans to nuke Iran, about the dozens of tales of corruptions big and small from five miserable years. Then you'd really see some gaskets blowing.

2006-05-01T23:10:00.000-05:00

Late at Night, Near the Interstate, Your Correspondent Rambles
Greetings from what I think is Milwaukee. I say that because it could be one of the suburbs, depending on whether the boundary line is Interstate 94, which is just outside my window, or Layton Avenue. I'm not from around here, so I don't know for sure.

Next to Madison and Iowa City, Milwaukee is probably my third-favorite city. Part of what I like about it is the odd sort of inferiority/superiority complex many residents of the city and its suburbs possess. Inferiority, because Milwaukee is forever comparing itself to Chicago and finding itself wanting. Superiority, because Milwaukee is also forever comparing itself to the rest of Wisconsin and finding itself, well, superior.

I'd met very few people from Milwaukee before I arrived at UW-Platteville, the small state university I attended right after high school. Milwaukee people were easy to spot there. For one thing, they had an accent all their own, one that's different from the standard Wisconsin accent. But even more noticeable was the Milwaukee vibe. Milwaukee kids seemed to breeze through life with a worldly outlook we didn't get in rural Wisconsin. They seemed faster, louder, more opinionated, and yes, far cooler than the rest of us. Small-town rituals that seemed normal to a lot of us, like obituaries on the radio and the crowning of community pork and beef queens in the summer, just made them laugh.

We didn't know about the self-belittling comparisons to Chicago some Milwaukeeans reflexively make, though. All we knew was that if you were going to hang with kids from Milwaukee, you'd better bring your A game. (I am convinced that part of what attracted me at first to the woman who is now The Mrs. is that she was from a Milwaukee suburb, and therefore quite exotic by farm-boy standards.)

That was then. In the nearly 30 years since, I've spent enough time in Milwaukee and with Milwaukeeans to know that the place is, like most places, a lot more subtly graded than it seems at first blush. And I feel quite at home here now. Once you get off the main streets, which are as clogged with Generica as any American city, the neighborhoods have a unique appearance, especially the older ones. The fabled Milwaukee bungalow, a popular style of house dating back to the 1920s, is everywhere. Lots of duplexes too, dating from the post-World War II era. And if you've got either a Milwaukee bungalow or a duplex in Cream City brick, you've really got something. (Although even the Milwaukee bungalow is, according to some experts, based on the Chicago bungalow.)

My favorite part of the area is the southern suburbs, not far from where I am right now. The northern and western 'burbs are the wealthy ones--the southern suburbs are working class. People who worked at the meat-packing plant or other factories built the homes and raised their families here--and despite the devastation of the factory economy in the last 30 years, these communities, Greenfield and Franklin and Oak Creek and South Milwaukee and Cudahy and the others, still feel solid in a way other suburbs don't.

I'll be here for a few days, and I'm glad of it. It's not a bad time to be in a place that's grounded during a time when the news is breathtakingly awful and likely to get worse.

2006-04-30T09:43:00.000-05:00

Speaking Truthiness to Power
I am de-hiatusing myself quickly to reiterate that I hate the White House Correspondents Dinner. It's unseemly for reporters to get all chummy with the people they're supposed to be covering, particularly in an era like this one. The failure of our current press corps to cover this administration honestly and effectively has had, is having, and will continue to have devastating consequences that result in nothing less than real people ending up real dead. The press corps should be boycotting the damn thing, not jockeying for seats.

The chumminess of the whole thing is summed up by this story, which is leading most of the online news sites this morning. Ha-ha-ha, they had a Bush impersonator up there alongside Bush. Isn't that funny. (Didn't they do the same thing with Will Ferrell a couple of years ago?) But the far more newsworthy event coming out of the dinner was Stephen Colbert's remarks. In the words of Steve Gilliard, "He said everything I would want to say if I could force George Bush to listen to me as a captive audience for 20 minutes." Colbert's liable to end up in Guantanamo for what he said, but just knowing that Bush had to listen to it brightens up a rainy Sunday.

Money quotes:

"The greatest thing about this President is you know where he stands. He believes the same thing Wednesday that he believed on Monday, no matter what happened Tuesday!"

"I believe that the government that governs best is a government that governs least, and by these standards we have set up a fabulous government in Iraq."

"[Jesse Jackson] is a very challenging interview... It's like boxing a glacier. Enjoy that metaphor by the way because your grandchildren will have no idea what a glacier is."

Ladies and gentlemen, please remember to tip your waiters and waitresses, and drive safely on the way home. Editor and Publisher has the details here; the video is here.

2006-04-27T17:32:00.000-05:00

Only You Can Prevent Spiraling Dumbitude
There's a link at Eschaton this afternoon to a funny story at Hotline. It's the transcript from a White House briefing today, in which Jim VandeHei of the Washington Post tries to find out if it's White House policy that every TV set in the White House must be tuned to Fox News. You may enjoy the spectacle of outgoing Press Secretary Scott McClellan talking a lot and saying nothing, for one of the last times.

We can't really do anything about the existence of Fox News, and if it was like Pravda before, it's going to be more so with the ascension of Tony Snow to Press Secretary. But we can take little steps to limit its hegemony--like asking if you can tune to something else when you see it on a public TV. I also program it out of the channel lineup on hotel TVs whenever possible, which seems like the least any of us can do to raise the collective IQ of the American citizenry.

This blog is now going on hiatus until Monday, unless our occasional guest poster Tom Herbst, the Sage of Pennsylvania, decides to check in. (We haven't heard anything from Tom for quite a while, either in the blog entries or the comments, so I am hoping that this mention will smoke him out.)

2006-04-26T17:14:00.000-05:00

Be Vewy Vewy Qwiet--I'm Hunting Tewwowists
Our most entertaining Republican candidate for Wisconsin attorney general, J.B. Van Hollen, is at it again. According to the Capital Times, Van Hollen told a press conference today, "We have in Wisconsin terrorists who are training and raising funds."

Holy crap, J.B.!

He declined to offer details (of course) although he'd like to (of course), but he's forbidden to do so by federal law (of course). Van Hollen claims he learned this startling news while he was U.S. attorney for the western half of Wisconsin. Later in his press conference, however, the situation was revealed to be not quite what J.B. made it out to be at first. Capital Times reporter David Callender writes,

But Van Hollen appeared to backtrack later, saying the training he was referring to "is not the physical training, not the things you would customarily hear or see, or anything that rises to the level of illegality."

He also acknowledged that there have been no terrorist acts in Wisconsin either before or since the Sept. 11 attacks, but he added that there are a number of potential terrorist targets, such as power plants and the Capitol.

"I assure you that if there are people who are active in terrorism in the state of Wisconsin and people are at risk of that, they will be taken down," he said. "But people can only be taken down once they have conspired and committed an act in furtherance of that conspiracy."

So let's review:

--There are terrorists training in Wisconsin, except that they're not physically training, or doing anything you would hear or see, and they aren't doing anything illegal. Well, by that definition, if you're standing in the bathroom scratching your ass, you're doing more evil than the terrorists are.

--There have been no terrorist acts in Wisconsin either before or after the September 11 attacks. Damn, J.B., nothing gets past you.

--There are a number of potential targets, such as power plants and the Capitol. And also Lambeau Field, Wisconsin Dells, my mom and dad's house, and the world's largest six-pack.

--If there are terrorists in Wisconsin, they will be taken down, but only after they've engaged in conspiracy. What does he mean, "if"? Confusion over their existence aside, apparently this means J.B. isn't down with the president's whole preemptive, stick-it-to-them-before-they-stick-it-to-us policy. Appearing to go against Dear Leader in any way, including what to order for lunch, will get you nowhere with Wisconsin's Republican faithful. So which is it, J.B? Are you with the president, or are you against him?

Van Hollen was last spotted on this blog bashing the Democratic candidates for AG, accusing them of celebrating lawlessness by speaking to immigrant rallies a couple of weeks ago, and has compared abortion to homicide. He's a Bush appointee to the U.S. attorney's office, and I was surprised to learn he lives in Waunakee, just up the road from here--because I'd never heard of him actually doing anything until he decided to run for AG. The only polling I can find on the race shows him trailing his primary opponent, Waukesha County DA Paul Bucher, by 26 to 7, but 49 percent are undecided, so it really doesn't mean anything. Van Hollen's strategy appears to be to hammer emotional Republican hot buttons as hard as possible--abortion is murder, immigrants are lawless, and terrorists want to kill your children in their beds right in Waunakee--in hopes of getting people to realize he exists.

But ooh, terrorists in Wisconsin. Very scary.

News Update: An amendment that would have preserved net neutrality lost in the House Energy and Commerce Committee this afternoon. The entire telecommunications bill containing provisions that would drastically reconfigure the Internet now goes to the Senate. It's unknown what will happen there, although a couple of senators are crafting a bill that's a lot like the amendment that was defeated today. Stay up to date by clicking the "Save the Internet" banner at the right.

2006-04-26T07:59:00.000-05:00

Circling the Drain
Here's something so stupid it causes me actual physical pain just thinking about the combination of synapses in the human brain that must fire to make a person think this is sensible: Infertility is an unhealthy situation. Because contraceptives cause infertility, they are unhealthy. Therefore, the state has a compelling interest in banning contraceptives to promote women's health.

Amanda and her readers at Pandagon do a nice job of demolishing the argument, showing that if contraception is somehow contradictory to "nature," so are cold medication, chemotherapy, and marriage. But the fact that somebody even has to rebut such a stone stupid argument indicates how speedily our society is circling the drain.

Lots of blogs are talking about the appointment of Fox talking head Tony Snow as White House Press Secretary. Best comment I've seen came from a reader at Political Animal, who suggested that the appointment is aimed straight at the Repug base. Since the 32 percent of Americans who still support He Who Shall Not Be Named are probably mainlining Fox News 18 to 20 hours a day, the Snow appointment is a message to them and to their wavering brethren that He Who is still their man, and they need to stick with him in November.

But neither of those is the big story of the day. Nope. Here in Wisconsin, our long statewide nightmare is over: Brett Favre has announced he will return for another season quarterbacking the Packers.

Favre has dithered over the decision since early January, but finally made up his mind yesterday. The great Canadian philosopher Geddy Lee once said, "If you choose not to decide, you still have made a choice." By taking four months to make up his mind, Favre told us a lot. He made it pretty clear that he wouldn't mind getting out of Green Bay by saying he felt like he could still play at a high level but wanted to be sure the Packers would be contenders before he made up his mind. So I wonder how committed he is to being in Green Bay at all. Even though he's saying this will be his last year, if he has an average season statistically by his standards (regardless of the Packers' eventual record), I am pretty sure he'll want to play somewhere else in 2007.

I have no empirical evidence for it, but I have a feeling that Favre has burned substantial goodwill among fans by jerking the team around all winter. My hope is that the second or third time he makes one of the stupid mistakes that helped ruin the 2005 season, he'll get booed. Last season, a quarterback who played as poorly as Favre did would have been benched, but Favre's legendary status kept him in the games beyond all rationality. That shouldn't happen this year. If the guy shows he can't play, he should sit, whether he's a Hall of Famer or not. It isn't like we have to worry about keeping him happy, which was why he played last year when he didn't deserve to.

Nobody's quite sure what Favre's seen recently that makes him think the Packers will be contenders in 2006. Only the most blindly optimistic, kool-aid drunk fans (32 percent, maybe?) believe they will be. So Favre should be on a mighty short leash this year. We've gone 4-and-12 with him, and we can go 4-and-12 without him.

2006-04-25T17:04:00.000-05:00

It's 5:00--Do You Know Where Your Testicles Are?
(This post requires a parental advisory for explicit language. Really: If you've got one of those Internet filters that blocks naughty sites, farewell--it's been good to know you.)

Here are a couple of candidates for Quotes of the Day. First, on the likely appointment of Fox News analyst Tony Snow as White House Press Secretary, from Joe in DC at AMERICABlog: "Tomorrow we'll see the actual morphing of FOX News into the White House. . . ."

It occurs to me that Snow's appointment is a remarkable fuck-you to quite nearly everybody, but especially "the liberal media." True, He Who Shall Not Be Named could have picked Hannity, which would have been an even bigger invitation to self-copulation, and the synergy between the White House and Fox was already clear, but still, as an example of how little the administration cares about how it's perceived, this is big.

Elsewhere, HWSNBN gave an embarrassing speech yesterday in which he yammered on about Iraq again, saying, "[T]he confluence of a terrorist network with weapons of mass destruction is the biggest threat the United States of America faces. They have said it's just a matter of time." The Rude Pundit asks:

"Who the fuck is the 'they' there? Intelligence analysts? His cabinet? Or are 'they' the terrorists themselves? 'Cause, like, that'd mean that a bunch of sexually repressed crazed religious fundamentalists are setting our foreign policy and dictating massive spending and loss of life on the part of the United States and . . . oh, fuck, the irony just made the Rude Pundit's nuts retreat into his body cavity in fear."

If irony and fear really make the Rude Pundit's nuts do that, they must be pretty far up after five years of similar nonsense. I know mine are.

2006-04-25T09:28:00.000-05:00

Dangerous Distortions
Those of us who have lived on the Internet for several years have seen this day coming, and now it's almost here--the day the Internet, which evolved in the ultimate small-D democratic manner to become the civilization-altering force it is today, is handed over wholesale to major telecommunications corporations, who will make it fit a business model that ensures they make as much money as possible from those willing to pay, and to hell with everybody else. A committee in the House of Reprsentatives is set to vote on a bill this week that would end the practice of "net neutrality" and permit corporations a greater role than ever before in determining what gets done online, and by whom.

I lack both the expertise and the attention span to fully explain the concept of net neutrality and why major telecommunications companies are opposed to it, but here's how I understand it: Right now, every communication on the Internet is treated like every other. My MP3 download of a song from your website goes through the pipeline right alongside a video download somebody is getting from a TV network's website. Your online order of two books from a tiny used book store in East Overshoe goes right alongside some right-wing foundation's order of 10,000 Ann Coulter books from Amazon. It happens that way because of net neutrality. But if neutrality is erased, and telecommunications companies are given the right to regulate traffic, Amazon and the TV network would have the right (and the dollars) to pay for the highest-speed access, while others would have to settle for the slow lane.

Some observers think the ultimate goal is to keep Internet users within the walls of a defined space, a la AOL, and charging them extra to go elsewhere. (In the old days of AOL, you couldn't get out of their network at all.) Limiting users to a private network not controlls user eyeballs that can be sold to advertisers, it also can keep "undesirable" content out--and "undesirable" can be defined any way the private controlling entity wants to define it. In Canada recently, users of AT&T's Internet service were kept from viewing the website of a company sympathetic to a union AT&T was negotiating with. There would be little to stop the telephone companies from refusing to permit their Internet customers to use voice-over-IP telephone services like Vonage, for example.

Of course, supporters of the bill that would end net neutrality are spinning it as a property rights issue--pity the poor corporations who are being denied their god-given right to do whatever is good for them. However, that's a dangerous distortion of not only the issue of net neutrality, but a dangerous distortion of what the Internet is. It's not merely a medium of communication--it's communication itself.

There's a thread at Political Animal that tries to explain the issue from the ground up; Steve Gilliard (who has been scary good the last couple of weeks on various issues) has a great essay on what the end of net neutrality will mean in practical terms. The House Energy and Commerce Committee is going to vote on the bill ending net neutrality this week--if your representative is a member of that committee, there's no time to write a letter and e-mails aren't worth very much. Call 'em. Find out who's on the committee and learn more about the issue here.

More Recommended Reading: As a history geek, I am forever trying to view current events through the lens of history. Distinguished historian Arthur Schlesinger Jr. takes a look today, comparing the Bush doctrine of preventive war to the Cold War doctrine of containment-plus-deterrence. Although he ends his column with a paragraph of absurdly wishful thinking about how Bush might be "moved by daily sorrows of death and destruction to forgo solo preventive war"--fat chance--it's still a worthwhile perspective.

2006-04-24T14:59:00.000-05:00

It's My Party and I'll Slack If I Want To
I have thought up a few slogans the Democrats could use for the fall elections. Here they are:

"Democrats--keeping the nuclear genie in the bottle since 1945."
"Vote Democratic--our Jesus is more peaceful than their Jesus."
"No more civilian casualties--vote Democratic."
"Vote Democratic--because red makes you look fat."

Your contributions are earnestly sought. Between Blogger's database problems today, the press of actual remunerative labor, and plain laziness, I'm taking the rest of the day off. (All except for writing this at The Hits Just Keep On Comin'.)

2006-04-23T15:39:00.000-05:00

If Everyone Hates You, You're Not Necessarily Right--Maybe You're Just Really, Really Wrong
From today's New York Daily News: "Taking her hardest line yet against illegal immigrants, Sen. Hillary Clinton told the Daily News she wants U.S. borders secured with a wall or fence, possibly surveillance drones and infrared cameras."

(Blogger sighs heavily, beats head against desk.)

This probably looks like clever triangulation to her and her people--position yourself, in true Big-Dog style, between the Democrats who would let everybody in and the Republicans who'd ship everyone of Mexican ancestry back over the border--but it's just stupid. There are millions of voters, even in the center she's trying to peel off, who will never vote for her no matter what she says. And by saying stuff like this, the net effect is mostly to piss off the Democratic base--most importantly, minority voters who already hate the Republicans for saying the same damn things.

Hillary's reelection to the Senate this November is as close to a sure thing as there is in politics, so this statement is really about 2008. And it's a play straight from Ye Olde Centrist Democrat Master Plan. But that book's been out of date since Hillary's husband strolled into history. If we run plays out of it in 2008, we're going to lose--again.

Recommended Reading: I'm late finding this, but it's still worth a look--an article from New York magazine on the conspiracy theorists developing their secret histories of September 11. Just describing them with the phrase "conspiracy theorists" makes them sound wacky, like the guys living in their mother's basements who've spent the last 40 years cooking up Kennedy assassination theories. And some of the 9/11 theorists are indeed wack, but others continue to raise plausible questions about exactly what happened that day, and continue to ask why. It's easy to get sucked into a speculative vortex if you take all of their theories seriously. However, it's easy to get out again if you remember that the same Bush Administration some theorists accuse of actively facilitating the whole thing is also the crowd of geniuses who've screwed up everything else they've touched since Inauguration Day. So that most extreme of possibilities is almost certainly wrong. But lots of other possibilities can't be ruled out.

2006-04-21T17:18:00.000-05:00

The Bottom of the Barrel
I hope you read the article I linked to yesterday by historian Sean Wilentz, writing in the latest Rolling Stone. His article, "The Worst President in History?", compares the personality traits and governing characteristics of He Who Shall Not Be Named to the presidents who are traditionally ranked among the worst: Buchanan, Harding, Grant, Hoover, Andrew Johnson. Because once you've read that, you'll be interested in reading John Dean's "If past is prologue, George Bush is becoming an increasingly dangerous president." Dean puts Bush on the couch using the work of political scientist James David Barber, whose analysis of character traits and attitudes toward the work of being president allowed him to predict Richard Nixon's second-term self-destruction two years before it happened.

By Barber's typography, Bush is an "active/negative" president--he does a lot, but he doesn't like the job very much. This is demonstrated, Dean says, by his inability to do the work of persuasion that presidents must do to govern effectively--demonstrated by earlier this week when he explained that Donald Rumsfeld would remain as defense secretary because "I'm the decider, and I decide."

Bush has never understood what presidential scholar Richard Neustadt discovered many years ago: In a democracy, the only real power the presidency commands is the power to persuade. Presidents have their bully pulpit, and the full attention of the news media, 24/7. In addition, they are given the benefit of the doubt when they go to the American people to ask for their support. But as effective as this power can be, it can be equally devastating when it languishes unused - or when a president pretends not to need to use it, as Bush has done.

Apparently, Bush does not realize that to lead he must continually renew his approval with the public. He is not, as he thinks, the decider. The public is the decider.

Bush is following the classic mistaken pattern of active/negative presidents: As Barber explained, they issue order after order, without public support, until they eventually dissipate the real powers they have -- until "nothing [is] left but the shell of the office." Woodrow Wilson, Herbert Hoover, Lyndon Johnson and Richard Nixon all followed this pattern.

Active/negative presidents are risk-takers, and once they've taken a risk, they stick with it beyond reason. Think Wilson, driving himself to a debilitating stroke on a whistle-stop speaking tour to sell his stillborn League of Nations. Think Nixon saying, "I want you to stonewall it . . . whatever it takes to save the plan." Think Iraq. Dean predicts that with his back against the wall and his presidency lost if the Democrats retake Congress, Bush will take yet another risk to save his bacon. Think Iran.

The Dean link comes from Smirking Chimp, which also contains a column today by Chris Floyd about the likely toll of a nuclear strike on Iran. It's probably not the kind of thing you'd like to read as you head into the weekend--according to the Pentagon's own estimates, a strike limited only to the main underground site at Esfahan would leave three million dead of radiation poisoning in two weeks, plus 35 million exposed to cancer-causing levels of radiation as far away as Afghanistan, India, and Pakistan.

Homework for the wekeend: In the wake of what would be the greatest crime in the history of mankind, what do you think Americans would do and say?

2006-04-20T16:53:00.000-05:00

A Veritable Cornucopia of Clickworthy Linkage
If you've got questions, we've got answers--provided these are the questions you have.

What if Republicans talked about guns the same way they talk about sex?

How would it turn out if one of America's leading historians compared He Who Shall Not Be Named with the worst presidents in American history?

When is a campaign called "Hands off the Internet" really about putting the Internet entirely in corporate hands? (If you're a member of MoveOn.org, watch your e-mail for more info on this.)

What if you spent your afternoons in your corporate cubicle following major-league baseball online while you were supposed to be working, and then bragged about it on your blog?

If you are a man over the age of 30, what are 59 things you shouldn't do? (This was apparently the subject of an article in Esquire last fall, but has now been turned into a book. My favorite: "Shout out a response to 'are you ready to rock?'")

How stupid do you have to be to say "yes" to a guy who knocks on your door and claims he's in the neighborhood conducting free breast exams?

Is the Capital Brewery Dark Doppelbock sitting in my refrigerator at this very moment one of the best beers in the world? I think it's time to go and taste for myself.

2006-04-20T11:00:00.000-05:00

Left Behind
You may have seen the story this morning about a survey of parents and teachers regarding the likelihood that the No Child Left Behind Act will succeed in getting all students up to state standards in reading and math by 2014. Parents are much more likely to believe this will happen than teachers are. If you're the kind of person who'd wager on such things, bet on the teachers being right.

No Child Left Behind has as its centerpiece the idea that the feds will allow states to maintain control over what students should know and be able to do. But state standards are a patchwork. What is expected of the average eighth grader in Texas is a lot different than what's expected of the average eighth grader in New York. This accounts for the vast discrepancies between the proficiency figures shown by state tests and those based on a national test, such as the NAEP (National Assessment of Educational Progress). Some state standards seem shockingly low. When I was developing test-prep materials for use in Texas schools, I found it hard to believe that anyone could fail the grade 8 tests, especially in language arts, given the simplistic reading passages and dead-easy questions on them. When California jumped into the state-testing pool with both feet back in the late 90s, its standards seemed fabulously high, especially in social studies. Sample objective for grade 7: "Describe the theological, political, and economic ideas of the major figures during the Reformation, e.g., Desiderius Erasmus, Martin Luther, John Calvin, William Tyndale." During precisely the same years, the only Calvin Texas seventh-graders were likely to know anything about owned a stuffed animal named Hobbes.

The goal of having all students at or above state standards is admirable, although it also can lead to something known in testing circles as the "Lake Wobegon effect"--the statistically impossible situation where everyone is above average. It is theoretically possible for every student to score at or above the established level for "proficiency." That's because state tests are "criterion-referenced," as contrasted with "norm-referenced" tests that grade on a curve, thus requiring some students to fail. However, even criterion-referenced tests are norm-referenced to a degree--if vast numbers of kids begin to pass, there follows a suspicion that the tests may be too easy, and they're tweaked so that some kids will fail. Some states adjust their standards and tests every couple of years, which makes me wonder how they can know whether their kids are really improving versus some standard that defines proficiency--the standard keeps moving.

Neither of these factors--the dubious rigor of state standards or the possibility that all students will be permitted to succeed in the first place--is readily apparent to parents, but they matter a great deal to teachers and to students. What parents are expressing about No Child Left Behind's likely success is mostly a hope. Teachers, who are generally better informed about what's going on in schools than the best-informed parent, understand the difficult reality. That's not to say they don't want every kid to succeed, only that they know how hard it's going to be, especially by government fiat and/or unfunded mandate.

In the end, the strong belief parents have in the eventual success of NCLB by 2014 is a bit like a patient's strong belief that cancer will be cured by 2014. "Sure, why not? It seems like we ought to be able to do it by then." But ask a physician or medical researcher, who knows a lot more about the field than the typical patient, and you'll find a different sort of optimism. "We're working hard and we'll make it someday, but it's unrealistic to give us a deadline like that."

2006-04-19T16:13:00.000-05:00

You Can Show Me the Money, But I Might Not Look
My favorite sports blog, Deadspin (part of the Gawker media empire, and thus a cousin to Wonkette), linked to a story this morning about the University of Georgia athletic department, which is the most profitable in the country. In fiscal year 2005, Georgia sports made a profit of $24.9 million. The story is notable to me because the Wisconsin Badgers are ranked third. The Badger athletic programs raked in $75.3 million last year. With expenses of $59.5 million, that leaves a profit of $15.8 million, behind Michigan and a little ahead of Texas and Alabama.

At Wisconsin, the money is coming primarily from three sports. Football is sold out on a season-ticket basis, as is men's basketball. Just to get on the waiting list for tickets requires a significant contribution to the Badger Fund, the athletic department's fundraising arm--$500 every year for football, and an astounding $2500 a year for men's basketball. That's not for season tickets, that's to maintain your place on the list for the right to buy season tickets should any become available. Men's hockey is the third revenue-producing sport--and the figures from the just-completed national championship season, which included several sellouts at the Kohl Center and thousands of dollars in championship merchandise, aren't included in the figures released this week. You might think trademark-licensed merchandising would contribute a big slice of the revenue pie, but it doesn't. It was reported a couple of weeks ago that licensing brought in about $800,000 last year--not much, given the amount of stuff you can buy up here bearing the trademarked images of Bucky Badger or the university's "motion W" logo.

The insane profitability of major-college sports is the elephant in the room that fans don't usually talk about. We don't talk about the fact that colleges make their enormous profits on the backs of athletes who don't get paid a dime for what they do. Yes, they get scholarships, but on a dollars-per-hour basis, even a four-year free ride works out to peanuts.

We also don't talk about the byzantine forest of regulations the NCAA has instituted to maintain the supposed amateur status of what it likes to call the "student athlete." Here's my favorite example: The son of a couple we know plays hockey for the Badgers. We met this couple several years ago, while their son was still in high school. But because their son is now an athlete and The Mrs. and I are season-ticket holders, it would be an NCAA violation if we bought his parents dinner, even if we'd been picking up dinner checks for years before. If The Mrs. and I had been sending their son birthday presents since he was a baby, that would become a violation too, as soon as he became a member of the team. These and other equally odd rules exist in large part to protect the system as it currently exists--to preserve the profitability of college sports.

Many fans don't think about this stuff at all, and those of us who do think about it don't dwell on it. We focus instead on the games themselves, or on the pageantry the games involve, or on our participation in the glorious history of the university, or on recapturing our undergraduate past, or on something else entirely. I'm as guilty as anyone on this score. I realize that the system is wack--that it's crazy for the UW's football coach and athletic director, who are public employees, after all, to be paid more than the governor of Wisconsin. But I also happily contribute to the system. You should see the cool hockey championship hat I bought.

What He Said: Michael Tomasky, writing at The American Prospect, thinks 2006 could be the year of a major political realignment, just as 1932 and 1980 were--provided that Democrats figure out what they stand for beyond a constellation of individual ideas. Tomasky's suggestion is something I've advocated here and elsewhere for a long time: the idea of the the common good. This is a great article, long and loaded with good stuff, so go read. Soon.

2006-04-19T08:23:00.000-05:00

Mapping Belief
Over at Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers put up a map showing "religious adherents as a percentage of population." The darker the color, the greater the percentage of people who identify themselves as a member of one of the 149 religious bodies that participated in a survey by something called the Association of Statisticians of American Religious Bodies. (Can't be a very big association, can it?) The most strongly affiliated regions are Utah, north Texas, western Oklahoma, northern Iowa, southwestern Minnesota, and much of the Dakotas. (It looks like North Dakota is the strongest of all.) The least affiliated region is the northwest, especially Oregon and northern California.

I'm intrigued by some of the ways in which this map doesn't at all match what seems to be our political reality. Take Ohio, for example, which is currently in the throes of a theocratic drive that would make an Iranian mullah proud. Based on that, you'd expect it to be one of the most heavily religious states in the Union. However, only two or three counties show up in the most heavily affiliated category--and the whole southern tier of the state shows up in the least affiliated category. West Virginia, Virginia, North Carolina, Georgia, Florida--all show less affiliation than you'd expect, whereas Massachusetts, despite its liberal reputation, looks comparable to Mississippi.

I'm intrigued also by my home region, at the micro level. If you look at the southernmost tier of counties in Wisconsin, from left to right, Grant and Lafayette counties are in the heaviest group. They're part of a broader swath of dark red that runs up the Mississippi on the Iowa side--a region that, despite its religiosity, contains several of the few rural counties in the country that went Democratic in the 2000 election, and was strong for John Kerry in 2004. The next county to the left, Green, is where I was born. It actually shows less religious affiliation than most of its neighbors, although I'm not sure why this should be true. Dane County, where I live now, is directly above Green, and despite the presence of so many godless liberal types in and around the University of Wisconsin, its figure is comparable to the rest of the counties in southern Wisconsin. The Fox Valley area, which sits at the base of the "thumb" formed by the Door Peninsula jutting out into Lake Michigan, is widely perceived as the most Republican area of the state, and this map backs it up. It's no surprise, then, that Mark Green, who is currently representing that region in Congress, is also the Republican candidate for governor this fall. However, the heavily Republican Milwaukee suburbs don't show the high percentage of religious affiliation you'd expect there--if religious affiliation equals stronger Republican support. Perhaps it doesn't, or not in the ways we often think.

The weirdest little spot is right in the center of Wisconsin, where Adams County shows the lowest percentage in the state. (Adams County is one of Wisconsin's more enigmatic places--it was the home of our famous cannibal, Ed Gein, and people whisper about its general weirdness.) Its eastern neighbors, Marquette and Waushara counties, show a little higher, but less than their surrounding neighbors. Green Lake County, right next door, is a little island of dark red. I have no idea how to explain this.

The map makes no distinction regarding denominations or types of religious belief--it only distinguishes the number of people who consider themselves affiliated, so it's difficult to draw any conclusions from it that have much to do with contemporary politics. It doesn't conform all that well with the red-state/blue-state map from the 2000 and 2004 elections, except in the most general way. I'd be interested in your thoughts as to why this is the case.

Recommended Reading: Orcinus on what Michelle Malkin's latest column has to do with the Rwandan genocide of 1994.

Quote of the Day: In the Pandagon story linked in my second paragraph above, Amanda contemplates Ohio's proposed law making it a felony for Ohioans to go out of state for an abortion. "I wonder if Congress will pass something like the Fugitive Slave Act, to assist Ohio in tracking down its female property and returning them to their rightful owners after they escaped mandatory pregnancy."

(Edited a bit since first being posted.)

2006-04-18T07:15:00.000-05:00

Lights Out, Man on Top, and Don't Enjoy It
Our American theocracy is marching on this morning. The Bush Administration is out with new guidelines for organizations seeking grants to fund abstinence-education programs. To get money, programs must define abstinence as "voluntarily choosing not to engage in sexual activity until marriage. Sexual activity refers to any type of genital contact or sexual stimulation between two persons including, but not limited to, sexual intercourse." (The way I read it, that means threesomes are OK, but that's probably not what they mean.) The programs must also define marriage as "only a legal union between one man and one woman as a husband and wife, and the word 'spouse' refers only to a person of the opposite sex who is a husband or a wife. (Consistent with Federal law)"

So this means, as Think Progress put it yesterday, gay people must be celibate. But it seems to me that the regulations also say that heterosexuals of any age must not boink one another without the benefit of clergy, either. The anti-gay stink of the guidelines aside, their focus on the proper place for sexual activity is utterly removed from reality. In America, marriage has never been a requirement for people to have sex. Not in the 1950s, not in the 1920s, not in the 1860s, not in 1776 or 1620 or 1492. By trying to shove this definition down the throats of American schoolchildren, the American Taliban are trying to do what the Puritans couldn't.

We can see in these guidelines the looming shape of a more distant wingnut goal. During the confirmation hearings for Chief Justice Roberts last year, a lot of pixels and ink were spilled over his belief in a Constitutional right to privacy. One of the cases on which the right to privacy rests is Eisenstadt v. Baird (1972), which established the right of unmarried couples to possess contraceptives--the same right established for married couples in Griswold v. Connecticut (1965). These guidelines, even though they're only for abstinence education programs at the moment, represent some sort of wingnut utopia--and it would clearly be a utopia where Eisenstadt is overturned. (The harder nuts wouldn't mind seeing Griswold tossed out, too, in the name of making sex entirely about babies. A year ago, I speculated that this was unlikely--but now I'm not so sure.)

Recommended Listening: I've written here and here in the last week about the need for popular music that addresses the political realities we live in, as popular music so often did in the 1960s. This record, by Pink featuring the Indigo Girls, is as fine an example as we're likely to get. As blunt as it is, few radio stations will have the stones to play it, but that's what the Internet is for. Disseminate it widely, please.

2006-04-17T16:04:00.000-05:00

Alternating Worldviews
Reader Mark, who blogs over at Truth Perceived (although not so much lately due to the presence of a new little person in the house, I am guessing), made an excellent point in his comments to this morning's post: "I believe I know what your problem is. Your anger is not righteous. Your anger is the product of your world view, where as the world view of an 'angry conservative Christian' is a product of his/her anger."

That made sense to me. And not three minutes after I read it, I came across a column by the inestimable James Carroll of the Boston Globe, which addresses the anger on both sides of the political divide as it relates to our threats against Iran.

An Iranian official dismissed the talk of imminent US military action as mere psychological warfare, but then he made a telling observation. Instead of attributing the escalations of threat to strategic impulses, the official labeled them a manifestation of "Americans' anger and despair."

The phrase leapt out of the news report, demanding to be taken seriously. I hadn't considered it before, but anger and despair so precisely define the broad American mood that those emotions may be the only things that President Bush and his circle have in common with the surrounding legions of his antagonists. We are in anger and despair because every nightmare of which we were warned has come to pass. Bush's team is in anger and despair because their grand and -- to them -- selfless ambitions have been thwarted at every turn. Indeed, anger and despair can seem universally inevitable responses to what America has done and what it faces now.

So everybody's hacked off, but as usual, for different and largely opposite reasons. Liberals are upset because of what the Bush Administration has done; Bush-humpers are upset because of what has been left undone. But Carroll doesn't track Mark's thesis exactly. He observes that the anger of both sides comes out of their worldview--the Bush gang's worldview includes the belief that its actions are self-evidently righteous and wise, and so it views its opponents at home and abroad as ungrateful, or as conspiring against it, or as irrationally recalcitrant, because its opponents refuse to acknowledge that every move they've ever made was precisely the right thing to do.

Carroll continues:

While the anger and despair of those on the margins of power only increase the experience of marginal powerlessness, the anger and despair of those who continue to shape national policy can be truly dangerous if such policy owes more to these emotions than to reasoned realism.

Indeed, what causes a great deal of liberal anger is the feeling of powerlessness that accompanies it: If the best minds in the country, regardless of political affiliation, can't make the Bush gang see reason, what hope do I have of making any difference? From there, it's a short leap to political apathy, and/or outright clinical depression. Carroll sees the danger, but counsels against falling into it:

Surely, something besides intelligent strategic theory is at work here. Yes. These are the policies of deeply frustrated, angry, and psychologically wounded people. Those of us who oppose them will yield to our own versions of anger and despair at our peril, and the world's. Fierce but reasoned opposition is more to the point than ever.

So buck up, liberal friends, if only--and this my depression talking, not James Carroll--if only so that when the shitrain begins to fall in earnest, we'll be able to stand out in it knowing we did our best to stop it.

I am presently auditioning alternate worldviews, by the way. One of them that's working out nicely is playing as I write this: an album by Jimmy Smith, master of the Hammond B3 organ, entitled Standards, smoky, after-hours jazz from the late 50s that can definintely soothe the savage breast. The other alternative I am considering may be more widely popular: drinking with both hands, starting well before 5:00, and continuing for as long as necessary.

Who's with me?

2006-04-17T08:57:00.000-05:00

On Being Angry and Tired
There's been another spike in the characterization of lefty bloggers as "angry," thanks to an article in the Washington Post on Friday. That right-wingers tut-tut about "the angry left" has always seemed crazy to me, because nobody's more angry, in the red-faced, saliva-spitting, vein-standing-out-on-the-forehead sense than the typical right-winger. Scratch one and you'll find he or she is motivated politically almost entirely by anger: at recalcitrant foreigners, at cultural rot, at paying taxes, at Hillary, you name it. If they ceased being angry, they'd lose their ability to engage politically.

So why they get away with criticizing us on the left for our anger is a mystery, but they're right about the fact that we're angry. In our position, it would be crazy not to be.

Because it's so much a part of who they are, right-wing anger seems inexhaustible. Even they win, they're not happy, because they don't always get 150 percent of what they want. In that, they're a lot like the kid on Christmas morning who, amidst a pile of gifts taller than he is, is upset because there was one thing he wanted that he didn't get. Exhibit A is the War on Christians conference held in Washington last month. Their kind controls two branches of government and is well on the way to controlling the third, but they still feel persecuted and on the defensive. (Elizabeth Castelli, a historian who specializes in Christian martrydom, attended the conference and wrote an interesting piece on it for the Revealer--which is a website that's going on my list for regular visits.)

But I am convinced that for lefty types such as myself, it's harder to maintain the same level of vinegar. Three years ago, I got an e-mail from a long-out-of-touch friend who had discovered this blog for the first time. My friend observed that it must take a lot of energy for me to be so angry every day. Three years ago, it did. So imagine how much more it takes now. I can still summon it up now and then, but not as consistently or as well as in days of yore. (Go back to the 2004 entries in this blog and you should be able to see the difference for yourself.) In fact, in the last year or so, out of sheer exhaustion at being angry, I've actually found myself wishing that one of the looming disasters in our future would just get here already: the next unprovoked attack on a foreign country, the economic crash sparked by high oil prices (perhaps caused by the next unprovoked attack on a foreign country), even the terrorist attack that leads to martial law and the suspension of the Constitution. As horrid as those would be, at least they would permit us to begin dealing with whatever the next phase of our country's history is going to be. Although that phase will certainly involve things to be angry at, perhaps they'll be different things. And perhaps, in whatever the next phase brings, lie the seeds of a society that will require less anger to navigate on a daily basis.

I'm not unsympathetic to the points Amanda Marcotte made at Pandagon yesterday, as she took on some of the myths about anger. One thing is certain--in the United States right now, all the cool kids are angry. But I suspect that means a lot of the cool kids are very, very tired, too.

2006-04-16T08:51:00.000-05:00

Still Stuck in Stupidville
When cable TV news producers dream, they dream of weekends like this:

On Thursday, a little girl gets eaten by a bear.

On Friday, a suspected cannibal is arrested in Oklahoma. On the same day, the cat trapped in a New York City building for two weeks is rescued.

Yesterday, there's an arrest in the Natalee Holloway case.

If Angelina Jolie or Katie Holmes gives birth today, the Rapture could happen and they'd never notice.

(When I was reciting this litany of stories to The Mrs. this morning, she added, "And they found those two missing boys in Milwaukee." To which I responded, "Yes, but nobody cares, because they're black." Sad and harsh, yes, but also true.)

So none of the issues at stake in the stories I've found on the Web today stand a chance in hell of breaking through, especially with all the cute Easter features that the cable channels need to run. But if you're reading this, chances are you'll be interested, so here you go:

A legal blog called Concurring Opinions analyzes an article in the New Republic by a Harvard Law School professor who argues that personal privacy and government transparency make it difficult for the government to function effectively. Yup--if the government could snoop more and reveal what it's doing less, we'd be better off. At Daily Kos, Armando notes that the professor is a specialist in Christian law theory and strong supporter of the Iraq War--and so it's not surprising to me that he'd argue, at this moment in history, that the government should be more obtrusive and less accountable. (Wonder what he'd think if John Kerry had won in 2004.) In the end, I'm with Atrios, because he's thinking along the same lines I was last Thursday: "I understand that September 11 drove a lot of people a bit nuts, but I really don't understand why they're still stuck in stupidville. . . ."

Also worth reading today is the post at Orcinus on "round 'em up and send 'em back" anti-immigrant rhetoric. One of the things people forget is that the Constitution protects everybody in the United States, even if they're not citizens of this country. Of course, you can't necessarily blame people for forgetting this, because the administration has ignored it since 2001.

The News Blog has an analysis of the Duke lacrosse scandal that cuts through the story that the stripper was already injured when she walked in the door of the house where the infamous party took place. Short version: Not likely, once you know how college jocks think--and the purpose of the post is to explain how college jocks think. The News Blog also found an interesting story last week that I haven't seen mentioned elsewhere--the one of the lacrosse team captains is the son of the vice president for government relations at Merrill Lynch, which may explain the sudden presence of high-powered Washington lawyer Bob Bennett defending the players.

For good measure, here's a story the cable channels probably will find time for: If the lame storylines on Desperate Housewives this season haven't already caused it to jump the shark for good, perhaps this will: the main street of a new real estate development in the Madison suburb of Verona will be called Wisteria Lane, with adjoining streets to be called Bree Circle, Gabrielle Circle, Hatcher Road, and Lynnette Drive. Columnist Susan Lampert Smith of the Wisconsin State Journal gets Quote of the Day for today: "As a cynical newspaper person, I must also point out that Wisteria Lane has a major crime problem. Recent episodes have featured murder, arson, adultery, embezzlement, statutory rape and hiding a fugitive. Hope the Verona cops are ready."

2006-04-15T09:27:00.000-05:00

The Look
One of the many, many obstacles right-wingers are trying to put in the way of abortion is federal legislation mandating that women be told that the fetus will suffer pain when it's aborted. Like a lot of right-wing "science," this supposition is made up of about one-third misinterpretation of the facts, one-third wishful thinking, and one-third arrant bullshit. Actually trying to find out whether what they believe is true would take too much time. Plus they might also find out that they're wrong, and what good would that do them?

They're wrong.

Over at Pharyngula, P.Z. Myers reports on a medical journal article that examines the concept of fetal pain. The article is not necessarily as definitive as it could be. Some of the commenters point out that the author is unclear about the distinction between feeling pain and being able to remember it. However, it seems clear nevertheless that the image the anti-abortion crowd wants to implant in women, dating back to the Reagan-era movie The Silent Scream, of a fetus reacting to being aborted, is politically convenient melodrama and not scientific fact.

Quote of the Day: Actually a couple of paragraphs from Molly Ivins, who starts her latest column talking about the administration's retrofitting of the lie about the mobile weapons labs, but then gets into the immigration demonstrations of the past few weeks.

There are just some things I know from living in Texas all my life. One is, don't bother to build a fence. Two is, if you want to stop illegal immigrants, stop the people who hire them -- quit punishing people who come because there are jobs. Three, this border has always been porous, and it has always worked to the advantage of the United States.

If you want to do the smart thing and look for a long-term solution, try fixing NAFTA and helping with economic development in Mexico. Meanwhile, I could do without the drivel about how these people are so different. Of course they're not. Try getting out a little more.

Immigrants must be different from us because they look do different and sound so different. Fetuses must be the same as us because they look so much the same. The older I get, the more convinced I become that the single greatest truth in life is that you can't trust the way things look.

2006-04-14T16:13:00.000-05:00

A Brilliant Show
A reader (glad to see you're still out there somewhere, Jason) wrote earlier today saying that to him, the trial of Zacarias Moussaoui looks a lot like a show trial, and wonders just why Moussaoui is on trial to begin with.

Well, to a certain degree, his trial is a show trial. Although he's been branded the "20th hijacker," there's no physical evidence linking him to the 9/11 attacks. We know he was involved with some of the hijackers in the years leading up to the attacks, and he was allegedly supposed to be on one of the planes that day. However, he wasn't on a plane--he was in jail in Minnesota on the day of the attacks. He's made many claims about who he is and what his mission was--some corroborated, some not. In the end, he's a thin reed, but he's all we've got (unless the wicked Osama has been caught since the last time I checked the news) and over the last several weeks, he's played the part of Unremittingly Evil Terrorist perfectly. If he had one of those long mustaches like the villains in the old TV westerns, I'm sure he'd have twirled it by now.

If Moussaoui wants to end up strapped to a death-chamber gurney, he's going about it the right way, because it would be too much to expect the jury to counterintuitively give him the one thing he must fear more than death--life in prison, wasting away in obscurity until he's a little old terrorist, never enjoying the martyr's death that will entitle him to 72 virgins in heaven, or whatever the hell he's hoping he'll get.

(Yesterday, I mentioned the Rude Pundit's impression of the Moussaoui penalty trial as "overwrought." He gets into more detail on it today, calling the horror show unleashed on the jury another chapter in "our ongoing fetishization of 9/11.")

Elsewhere: Bill O'Reilly wants you to know that there is no War on Easter. It's just something a liberal newspaper columnist thought up, based on O'REILLY'S OWN GODDAMN TV SHOW THE NIGHT BEFORE.

Excuse me.

And finallly, I am smackin' myself upside the head for not thinking of this: David Neiwart at Orcinus wrote about wingnuts who want the right to discriminate against gays and lesbians, and who justify themselves by saying, "This isn't discrimination. I am against race discrimination because race is inborn; being gay is a chosen behavior, and why should chosen behaviors get special protection?" Be careful, Mr. and Mrs. Much-Better-Than-Everybody-Else--don't ask that question if you don't really want to know the answer. Because David observes: Uhh, well, religion is a chosen behavior, too, and we protect that.

As the Guinness TV commercials say, "Brilliant!"

2006-04-14T10:04:00.000-05:00

Four Strong Winds
On May 4, 1970, four students were killed by National Guardsmen at Kent State University in Ohio. Six weeks later, Neil Young was on the radio with a song about it. "Ohio" is a roar of anger and a cry of disbelief that remains one of the most chilling artifacts of the 1960s. Although "Ohio" was released under the name Crosby Stills Nash and Young, it's a Young solo record--he wrote it, and the ominous, corrosive guitar on it is typical of his work around that time. (I suppose it's possible some readers of this blog may never have heard it, or might not be familiar with it. If that's you, hear it here. Be patient. The upload site seems a little slow this morning.)

Young has always been more engaged with the real world than a lot of rockers--at the height of MTV's cultural influence in the 1980s, he recorded "This Note's for You," a putdown of corporate rock that was extraordinary mainly because it dared to say what lots of people were thinking, but few had the stones to admit. And now, it seems, Neil Young is back and ready to say what needs to be said, in his usual no-nonsense style. At the recent SXSW music and film conference in Austin, Young revealed his next album will be called Life in War, and will feature a song called "Impeach the President." According to a blog called DownWithTyranny, the album took three days to finish, although when it will be released isn't clear.

"Ohio" was an important record at a time when the American people were turning against the Vietnam War. We live in a different era now, in a culture slivered into endless demographic fragments, so it's doubtful that Life in War will have the same reach in 2006 that "Ohio" had in 1970. Nevertheless, whenever the political realities we live with every day manage to pierce into our bubbleheaded pop culture, in whatever way it happens, it's an important thing. So go Neil.

Good Vibrations Required: Send good thoughts today toward my much-missed former home, Iowa City, which was hit by a tornado last night. There were no fatalities and few injuries in Iowa City itself, (although there was one death in a nearby county), but there's lots of damage.

2006-04-13T13:27:00.000-05:00

Two Worlds
You oughta go read Will Bunch today, as he reflects on the cockpit recording from United Flight 93. (That's the flight that crashed in Pennsylvania on September 11.) The tape was played for jurors in the penalty phase of the trial of "20th hijacker" Zacarias Moussaoui this week.

The point that sticks with me is one Bunch makes toward the end: There's a real world--in which the Bush Administration screwed up its response on September 11 itself, then took advantage of the attacks by lying us into a war and shredding the Constitution--but there's also "9/11 world." This is the place where we're still figuratively curled up in the fetal position, whimpering and traumatized by the attacks. It's a place where we continue to believe many, many things that aren't true and never were, where we ignore real-world truths that seem too complicated to understand or painful to face.

It seems to me that the chances of our entire experiment in democracy failing are proportional to the number of Americans who insist on living as though 9/11 world is the only world there is. Unless people can learn to get past their grief and fear, the danger is very real.

The penalty phase of the Moussaoui trial certainly isn't going to help. The Rude Pundit called it "overwrought" the other day, and that's precisely the right word. Four-plus years after the attacks, the parade of grieving witnesses deployed to make sure Moussaoui winds up dead, dead, dead, went past the point of overkill (so to speak) by the second day. And it's a sure bet the testimony ripped the stitches for a lot of Americans. But for an indication of how tender the wounds remain, you need look only toward the controversy over the trailer for the movie United 93 that's coming out later this spring. The trailer was reportedly so upsetting to New York audiences that one theater quit showing it. Even after living in the shadow of 9/11 every day for over four years, many New Yorkers--jaded and tough as nails though they claim themselves to be--still can't face the memory.

Grief is hard. Everybody responds to it differently, and it can take a long time for some people to get past it. But in order to get past it, a person has to resolve to try. The refusal of so many Americans to make that resolution is only speeding up the spiraling disaster in which we're caught.

2006-04-13T08:12:00.000-05:00

All Your Peeps Are Belong to Us
A reader sent me a link to a Think Progress report on Bill O'Reilly's attempt to whip up a war against the War on Easter, suggesting it might be good blog fodder. I confess I didn't watch the video, but it's really not necessary to watch it, because you already know the argument: Liberals are out to take Easter away from honest, God-fearing Americans who want to celebrate the torture killing of a shadowy figure from first-century Palestine by hiding chocolate eggs and Marshmallow Peeps for their children to find, all the while telling the kids that the candy has been hidden by a giant rabbit.

I get why some Christians might really think there's a "war on Christmas"--what with manger scenes, which are overtly religious, being barred from public places. However, it seems to have escaped the notice of these same Christians that the Easter Bunny is not a religious symbol. But in Wingnut World, that's no barrier: take one part incident and two parts bullshit, mix well, and presto! Another battle in the culture war erupts.

For what it's worth, there is an actual "war on Easter" being fought by a documentary filmmaker trying to hide 666 DVD copies of his film The God Who Wasn't There in churches across the country, to be discovered by parishioners. He's going on right-wing talk radio and offering frequent updates on his campaign on the Internet. (He's even received a visit from the FBI, apparently.) The whole thing seems a bit juvenile to me, although I guess it's clever PR. And the film itself includes some impressive figures: Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith; urban-legend busters Barbara and David Mikkelson of Snopes.com; and historian Richard Carrier, whose brilliant stuff at Infidels.org helped me figure out what I can believe and what I can't.

Here's the thing about the war on Easter, though--it just isn't getting any traction. Google the phrase "war on Christmas" and you get about 781,000 hits. Google "war on Easter" and you get about 67,000. Too bad, Bill--but there's always next year. Unless Jesus comes back before then, of course--although if he does, I'm guessing the Easter Bunny is going to have a hard time then, too.

2006-04-12T07:41:00.000-05:00

What If We Nuked Iran While American Idol Was On?
Earlier this week, I guessed that the decision to attack Iran has already been made, and that now we're going through the same "roll-out" period we did in late 2002, when the administration kept protesting that war against Iraq was not inevitable, all the while trolling for excuses to make it look like Saddam's fault--and fabricating them as necessary. The mighty Billmon thinks the same thing, although as usual, he says it better and in more detail.

Billmon's post is primarily about how American public opinion and the world might react to a nuclear strike on Iran. What Americans would think is especially interesting to me. It's natural for people like you and me to imagine that dropping a nuclear weapon, even a tactical bunker-buster in a surgical strike, would wake people up for good and all, and finally get Americans into the streets by the millions with ropes for the lampposts, ready to string up the perpetrators like Mussolini. Well, not so fast there, reality-based universe person:

What I'm suggesting here is that it is probably naive to expect the American public to react with horror, remorse or even shock to a U.S. nuclear sneak attack on Iran, even though it would be one of the most heinous war crimes imaginable, short of mass genocide. Iran has been demonized too successfully – thanks in no small part to the messianic delusions of its own end-times president – for most Americans to see it as a victim of aggression, even if they were inclined to admit that the United States could ever be an aggressor. And we know a not-so-small and extremely vocal minority of Americans would be cheering all the way, and lusting for more.

More to my point, though, I think it's possible that even something as monstrously insane as nuclear war could still be squeezed into the tiny rituals that pass for public debate in this country – the game of dueling TV sound bites that trivializes and then disposes of every issue.

Something buried in the Seymour Hersh New Yorker article over the weekend that hasn't been mentioned much was the suggestion that Bush feels he's the only president who can stop Iran--and that includes future presidents. It's clear, after yesterday's announcement about Iran having enriched uranium, that Bush will atttack Iran sooner rather than later--but what happens if, by the summer of 2008, he feels he hasn't finished the job? If he's the only person in American history, present or future, who can accomplish this holy task, what's to stop him from refusing to leave office when his time is up? Certainly not American public opinion. If Billmon's take is correct, Bush would be able to get away with that, too.

Yuck Yuck Icky Icky Eww Gross: P.Z. Myers at Pharyngula writes today about a Lutheran church in Minnesota that had a contract to provide social services for Anoka County in the Twin Cities' suburbs. However, it refused services to a male-to-female transsexual because "this person's outward behavior contradicts the church's teaching" (The Lutheran church has teaching on transsexuals?) and is "contrary to God's revealed will." Plus, they had some kind of problem with her using the bathroom, which is brain-rattlingly stupid, even for Minnesota. P.Z. comments with the Quote of the Day:

And this is exactly why I will always oppose any attempt to draft the godly into the business of supporting the social safety net. It is this pretense of knowing the will of an invisible being, which they freely use to give their bigotry the deity's imprimatur, which makes them untrustworthy. Anyone who makes untestable claims of a god's will, claims that can't be verified by anyone else, is suspect—it's simply too convenient an out. And when it's used to make an innocent suffer, it's simply contemptible.

Amen, brother.

2006-04-11T17:17:00.000-05:00

In Case of Rapture, Can I Have Your Car?
I first heard about the Rapture when I was in junior high, when my family's Methodist church had a weeklong revival with outside speakers, many of whom were on various evangelistic trips, including speaking in tongues and end-times prophecy. (I vividly remember one of them, a student about my age, who told our youth group that she thought it would be really cool to die, so she could see what Heaven would be like.) As far as my own parents went was to bring home Hal Lindsey's The Late Great Planet Earth, which I read with great interest. It had quite an effect on me--for years afterward, if it would get unexpectedly quiet in the house, I'd wonder if I'd been Left Behind. (I always just assumed I would be.) Lindsey's book is largely responsible for popularizing the idea of the Rapture, as part of his apocalyptic interpretation of world history--in fact, it was the single largest-selling title of the 1970s.

The doctrine of the Rapture itself is relatively new, only about 100 years old, and is based on a close reading of a handful of scattered Bible verses. From those scattered verses, however, gazillions of Rapture-based Internet sites have bloomed. The best-known is probably Rapture Ready, home of the famous Rapture Index. The site describes it as "a prophetic speedometer" indicating how fast we're moving toward the Rapture. As of yesterday, the index stands at 156, down from the all-time high of 182 reached a couple of weeks after September 11, but way up from the all-time low of 57 in December 1993--oddly enough, 11 months into the administration of Satan's henchman, Bill Clinton. According to the site, an index of 156 means "fasten your seat belts"--the Rapture could happen by the time you finish reading this sentence.

Another interesting Rapture-related website is The Rapture Letters. I can't describe it any better than the site describes itself. It will automatically e-mail your loved ones who have been Left Behind with whatever message you'd like to send--love, encouragement, advice, or nanny-nanny-boo-boo, if you're that kind of person.

We have written a computer program to do just that. It will send an Electronic Message (e-mail) to whomever you want after the rapture has taken place, and you and I have been taken to heaven. . . .

If you wish to do something now that will help your unbelieving friends and family after the rapture, you need to add those persons email address to our database. Their names will be stored indefinitely and a letter will be sent out to each of them on the first Friday after the rapture. Then they will receive another letter every friday after that.

This rapture letter service is FREE and will hopefully gain the person you send it to an eternity in heaven.

Of course, the Rapture Letters assumes that the Internet will continue to function after the Rapture--which is perhaps a subtle commentary on the people responsible for ISPs and the Internet backbone.

The trouble with Rapture-based theology is, as I have written at this blog and elsewhere, the way it lets people who believe in it off the hook. If the world is going to end in a few minutes, hours, days, weeks, or years, and if you're not going to be here anyhow when it does, where's your incentive to do anything for the world, as contrasted with your incentive to do things for yourself? Another Rapture-related problem we're having right now, with the most serious implications possible, is that our only president seems determined to actually provoke it, by causing an apocalypse in the Middle East. If he gets his apocalypse, I suppose there will be some entertainment value in the astounded disappointment of the wingnuts when they aren't Raptured away, and find themselves stuck down here in the shitstorm with the rest of the heathens, but it'll be hard to find much else to laugh about.

But we can still laugh now, so let's take the opportunity: Jumping off from an in-all-seriousness post by another blogger about what you should do if you get Left Behind in the Rapture, the inimitable Amanda Marcotte at Pandagon provides 14 additional things you should do. (And if you're reading this blog, you're going to be Left Behind, so don't claim nobody warned you.)

2006-04-11T08:45:00.000-05:00

Oversimplifications-R-Us
We got into a discussion here about immigration in the comments a couple of weeks ago. With a new round of immigration protests yesterday, it seems like a good time to revisit some of those comments, since similar statements are being launched across dinner and restaurant tables and around water coolers all over the country today.

Here's one: "Immigrating into the USA is sort of like becoming a season ticket holder at Lambeau Field for the Packers. You're put on a list and it might take years and years. Does that mean we should be allowed to crash the gates if it isn't fast enough for our liking? Try it and see how far you get."

Never mind the fact that our current immigration laws are essentially punitive in their molasses-like pace, and that it can take legal immigrants just short of forever to get in. The fact is that lots of people crash the gates every year, and that many of them are a lot more dangerous than the masses being demonized these days. Steve Gilliard at the News Blog:

Here's what I don't get, [Congressmen James] Sensenbrenner and [Tom] Tancredo want to turn law abiding residents into criminals, but remain mute about the Russian mafia, coyotes, MS-13 and snakeheads, people who really violate US law, create victims in the US and overseas,and are criminals.

The mexican guy who makes my pizza is not a threat, the coyotes on the border are.

Many of those opposed to draconian restrictions on immigrants from Latin America are not favoring open immigration for all. They'd merely like to see immigration laws enforced in a way that solves real problems--not by building walls, not by criminalizing the simple act of being here or helping those who are, but by addressing the actual root causes of real, solvable problems, instead of posturing.

Also on the subject of "illegals": "I have no problem with Mexicas, Cubans, Argentines, or anybody wanting to move to this country and start a new life...as long as it is done LEGALLY."

Nothing turns Americans into by-the-book law-abiders faster than the subject of immigration--"goddammit, those people should follow the law." Gilliard responds:

These people [immigrants] want to be Americans like the people who came here to Ellis Island. We need to stop hiding behind the excuse that they "broke the law". People gamble online and they "break the law" and no one is jailing them.

Contrary to popular belief, the legal system has operated selectively in this country since approximately 1607. We've always been selective in which laws we enforce, and in how we enforce them. And it's very popular to claim we should be cracking down on immigrants, who are among the least able to defend themselves within the legal system.

On the subject of assimilation, then and now: "[My immigrant forebears] worked hard to assimilate into the American culture and they certainly did not expect everyone else to learn their language."

Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez (who started the fun here a couple of weeks ago when I linked to her post on distorted media portrayals of the immigrant protests) put up another great post last week, which you should read in its entirety. She said this about the language issue:

The Pew Center for Hispanic research shows that by the third generation all immigrant grandchildren – NO MATTER WHERE THEY ARE FROM OR THE LEGAL STATUS OF THEIR ANCESTORS – are COMPLETELY ASSIMILATED ENGLISH SPEAKERS.

There is not a single third-generation Hispanic in the United States whose primary or dominant language is Spanish. NOT ONE.

This is precisely the same assimilation pattern followed by the Germans, Italians, French and every other linguistic minority immigrant group to this nation.

People who criticize immigrants for speaking their native languages "too long" seem to think that you can learn to speak English like a native in six months--but as another commenter to my original post noted, it can actually take up to seven years, and that's if new speakers are taught systematically in school.

Valdes-Rodriguez's point about language acquisition also speaks to a quote by Teddy Roosevelt that's been requoted and reprinted in lots of places recently, including in the comments here:

There can be no divided allegiance here. Any man who says he is an American, but something else also, isn't an American at all. We have room for but one flag, the American flag, and this excludes the red flag, which symbolizes all wars against liberty and civilization, just as much as it excludes any foreign flag of a nation to which we are hostile...We have room for but one language here, and that is the English language...and we have room for but one sole loyalty and that is a loyalty to the American people.

Far too much has been made of immigrants waving Mexican flags during protests. What else is someone who takes pride in his roots supposed to wave? Hell, various bloggers dug up footage of Jeb Bush, who is as Mexican as I am, waving the Mexican flag during one of his election campaigns. (Or maybe it was a Cuban flag. Either way, it makes my point.)

But there's a broader issue here. Once immigrants have the chance to assimilate--once they're given the time it requires, time that can't be shortened by Republican legislative fiat or wishful thinking (which are so often the same thing), they, too become loyal Americans. And some demonstrate their loyalty in far more meaningful ways than yammering from behind a keyboard. (I count myself amongst the yammerers, so don't take that personally.) A Korean immigrant who had come here legally wanted to do something to speed his citizenship, so he volunteered to serve in Iraq--and in February, he got killed. Our country is the only one in the world that inspires people to do things like this. Whether you think the Iraq War is right or wrong doesn't matter this time--how many people born in America would have done the same thing for another country?

Quote of the Day: J.B. Van Hollen is a Repug candidate for Wisconsin attorney general. Yesterday, both the incumbent Democrat AG, Peg Lautenschlager, and her primary opponent, Kathleen Falk, spoke to the immigration rally held in Madison. Pull the string on Van Hollen's back, and what he says is predictable: "Attending a rally that celebrates granting rights to those who break the law is absolutely ludicrous. As Attorney General, I will fight crime and restore integrity to the office. I will not celebrate lawlessness." Yep, whenever an issue is too complicated for effective demagoguery, you can count on the GOP to ride to the rescue.

2006-04-10T15:39:00.000-05:00

Santos by a Nose
The West Wing settled its election storyline last night, crowning a clear-cut successor to Jed Bartlet when Matt Santos defeated Arnold Vinick by an electoral college count of 272-266. It came down to Oregon and Nevada, and sometime after 4:00AM on Election Night, Santos got them both. The resolution was mildly surprising because last week's episode showed the stars aligning for a protracted Florida-style debacle that didn't happen. Vinick refused his staff's advice to pursue legal challenges, deciding instead to concede.

The producers revealed today that a Santos win wasn't their original plan. They say they intended for Vinick to win all along, but that plans changed after the death of John Spencer, who played Santos' running mate, former White House Chief of Staff Leo McGarry. According to an article in the New York Times, the producers thought it would be too much if Santos lost the election and his running mate, too.

I have my doubts about whether that's true, but it really doesn't matter now. Somebody noted on the Television Without Pity West Wing message board today that if the show were going on for another season, it would be more interesting to watch Vinick in office than it would be to watch Santos. But the show's last episode will be on May 14, and by electing Santos, the show will offer its dedicated viewers plenty of opportunities for closure. Opportunity number one is next week, when several characters unseen for years will return for Leo's funeral. The most buzzworthy one is Sam Seaborn, played by Rob Lowe. Seaborn was the White House deputy communications director and won a seat in Congress a few seasons back as a way of writing him out when Lowe left the show. He'll reportedly be one of the pallbearers at Leo's funeral, but I'm also guessing he'll be Santos' choice to replace Leo as vice president. It would offer another nice bit of closure, given that in an early episode of the series, Bartlet told Sam that he would be president one day.

I have to give a bit of love to the producers--I was ready, about the time of the live debate episode last fall, to quit watching The West Wing entirely. But since the show returned to the air after taking the month of February off, it's been mostly pretty good. It hasn't reached the level of the first four seasons or anything, but after the depths of the godawful fifth and sixth seasons, what we've seen in the last few weeks is a definite comeback.

2006-04-10T08:00:00.000-05:00

Nuke 'Em Til We Win
I can't add much to what other bloggers are saying about the New Yorker article that appeared over the weekend, in which journalist Seymour Hersh reported that He Who Shall Not Be Named and his administration are planning an attack on Iran, which will reportely include nuclear weapons. Hersh claims that senior military officials think the whole thing is crazy. There's a story out this morning, "U.S. Tries to Dampen Talk of Iran Strike," that represents an attempt to subvert the Hersh story, but don't buy it. The administration and its fluffers can claim all they want that an attack is still at the "if" stage, but based on the evidence of past experience, it clearly isn't. The only question left regarding an attack on Iran is a "when," and the answer is so simple that even an idiot like me can see it: The attack will be timed in such a way as to maximize the Republicans' chances in the November election. If Bush was willing to prosecute a war in Iraq to get reelected in 2004, there's no doubt he'll be perfectly happy to kill tens of thousands of Iranians (and as many American soldiers and pilots as required) to keep from getting impeached in 2007.

A thread at Think Progress, in response to Hersh's appearance on CNN this morning, is debating how military officers might respond to orders in such an attack. It's interesting to contemplate the spectacle of the senior generals who would give the initial orders telling Bush, "We won't do this." Presumably, such insubordination would require Bush to sack them publicly, thus opening the curtain on some mighty entertaining political theater. But as a mechanism for stopping the attacks, it wouldn't work--just as Nixon found somebody who would fire the Watergate prosecutor in 1973, Bush would find somebody further down the chain of command to execute his orders, no matter how bugfuck insane they might be. And so I say again: If the decision to attack Iran has been made, then Iran will be attacked, and it will be timed in such a way as to maximize the Republicans' chances in the November election. I'd bet my house on it.

2006-04-08T23:27:00.000-05:00

No Words
Wisconsin 2, Boston College 1.

2006-04-08T14:46:00.000-05:00

A Fan's Lifetime
I wonder what it's like to be a Yankees fan. Or a fan of Duke basketball. Every year when the season starts, they know their team has a chance to be champions. Must be nice. Of course, it's easy to be a fan of the Yankees or Duke, precisely because they win championships frequently. It's what makes them attractive, especially to people who aren't from New York or North Carolina. Walk around the average shopping mall where you live (outside of New York or North Carolina) and count the number of people wearing Yankees or Duke apparel. I'd wager practically none of them were Yankees fans in the early 90s, when the team was below .500 every year, or could tell you who coached Duke before Mike Krzyzewski. (Bill Foster, actually.) Such fans are not really fans in the traditional sense. They're consumers, and they maximize their emotional "buying power" by picking what looks like the highest-quality product--and they'll switch if something better comes along. That's a fine idea if you're buying a car or a brand of frozen peas, and it's actually a weird sort of ideal at this time in this country, when being a good American is defined by being a good consumer. However, when picking a sports team to follow, it's a betrayal of who you are.

Let's leave aside the broader question of why people come to care passionately about corporate entities such as the New York Yankees or Green Bay Packers, but not corporate entities such as General Motors or International Widget. Most of us become fans based on geography. Around here, we're Packers fans, Badger fans, Brewers fans, because our parents and friends are. (Although I grew up a Chicago Cubs fan, because when I discovered baseball, Milwaukee had no team, and the Cubs were what I could find on TV.) This fandom becomes part of who we are, and we could change it no more easily than we could change our appearance. Oh, it's possible to change it, like getting a face lift or a boob job is possible--but it's not something most folks can do without causing people to talk.

Being a Wisconsin sports fan builds character--because it's true that you can learn more from losing than from winning. We've had our successes in my fan's lifetime. The Packers won a Super Bowl in 1997, but--and this is the point--they lost out on the way to the top many more times than they made it to the top. The Brewers made it to the World Series in 1982--and lost. My Cubs won pennants in 1984, 1989, and 2003 but crashed spectacularly each time, falling short of ultimate victory.

Which is why today is a special day. Today marks one of the rare occasions in my fan's lifetime that my team has reached the pinnacle with a chance to win it all in one game, when the University of Wisconsin men's hockey team plays Boston College for the NCAA championship. As I wrote earlier this week, Wisconsin has won five hockey championships, two of which I remember. In 1977, my girlfriend and I watched the championship game in her parents' basement, although honesty compels me to report we weren't always paying attention to it. In 1981, I was at a party in college on the night of the game, but I was more interested in the contents of the beer keg than the game on the TV. The '77 and '81 Badgers were not my teams in the same sense that the '06 team is mine.

The Mrs. and I are hockey fans, and have been season ticket holders since we moved back home six years ago. But as Wisconsin sports fans--Badgers, Packers, Brewers, whatever--we know the bargain we've made. This ain't Duke. Being a Wisconsin sports fan means that you will win sometimes, but you will lose often, too. That's the way it is. As a Wisconsin sports fan, you know going in that you will rarely win it all because you will rarely have the chance. Tonight we do. And we are ready. We are ready. We are ready.

2006-04-08T08:30:00.000-05:00

Gomer and the Immigrants
Here's some stuff from the web worthwhile for your Saturday morning, on the subject of immigration:

David Neiwart of Orcinus guest-posts at Firedoglake, with a primer on how extreme right-wing ideas gradually morph into acceptable mainstream discourse. He's written about this on his own site extensively, but his post at FDL is a good summary, focusing on anti-immgrant sentiments.

Neiwart features an interesting quote. See if you can identify who said it:

Every new immigrant adds to our crime problems, our welfare rolls and unemployment of American citizens. . . . We are being invaded in the southwest as if a foreign army were coming over the border. . . . They’re going to take more and more hard-earned money from the productive middle class in the form of taxes and social programs.

Any guesses? It sounds like something Colorado Congressman Tom Tancredo, leader of the anti-immigrant forces in the House, might have said during debate last week. But it was actually David Duke, speaking in 1982--and at that time, Duke's position was considered far outside the boundaries of acceptable discourse. A generation later, it's a perfect illustration of the phenomenon Neiwart writes about. (According to the post, Duke was recently quoted as saying Tancredo would make a good president. To quote Gomer Pyle: "Surprise, surprise, surprise.")

On the subject of immigrants "adding to the unemployment of American citizens," Steve Gilliard of the News Blog blows that argument apart. The News Blog also has the horribly sad story of 14-year-old Anthony Saltano, who was banned from eighth-grade graduation and threatened with prison by his school principal for organizing a protest walkout against anti-immigration legislation last month. Two days later, young Saltano killed himself.

One Other Thing: On the subject of immigration, I have been thinking about the oft-heard "great-grandparent" argument, which goes something like this: "My great-grandparents came over here on the boat from __________, and they had to enter the country legally, learn English, and then work to make it on their own. Why shouldn't immigrants today do the same thing?" It occurs to me that the great-grandparent argument doesn't hold up today--that the situation modern immigrants face is much, much different than our Scandinavian or German or Italian or Irish forebears faced in the 19th century. Trouble is, I'm not sure why it doesn't hold. If you've got any ideas, let's hear 'em in the comments.

2006-04-07T13:28:00.000-05:00

It's a Mystery
I haven't read The DaVinci Code, although I know a little about the events that figure into it--the strange case of Father Berenger Sauniere, who is thought to have discovered something in his small parish church in the south of France during the 1800s. "Something" is about all we can safely call it, because nobody is entirely sure what Sauniere found. Whatever it was, it supposedly caused him to redecorate his church in strange, disturbing ways, and it supposedly made him rich. And, it is said, his deathbed confession of what he had discovered caused the priest hearing the confession to "never smile again." It's thought that he may have discovered evidence that Jesus survived the crucifixion, married Mary Magdalene, and fathered the dynasty of Merovingian kings, who ruled large parts of western Europe, including France, for 500 years. The bloodline--the "sang real," or "Holy Grail"--is said to exist yet today.

The case first came to light more than 20 years ago in a book called Holy Blood, Holy Grail, by three British authors who made their careers by examining the case, writing books, filming TV documentaries about it. (Dan Brown, author of The DaVinci Code, was exonerated this week of plagiarism charges made by two of the authors who claimed Brown stole his ideas from them.) I don't know how much of the tale to believe, but Holy Blood is quite a mindblowing book nevertheless. One of the authors, Michael Baigent, has written a new book, The Jesus Papers, which purports to examine the post-crucifixion survival of Jesus in more detail. (Salon was largely unimpressed; a review is here.)

My favorite book about the mystery might be Rat Scabies and the Holy Grail, which I believe I mentioned here last summer. It's by Christopher Dawes, a British music writer who lives next door to punk-rock pioneer Rat Scabies. Rat talks Dawes into making several road trips to the south of France to explore the mystery, and the book tells the story of what happened. In the end, Dawes doesn't find many answers, just more questions.

What the various books about the mystery reveal (as well as another book mentioned in the Salon review, The Jesus Dynasty by James D. Tabor) is how little we know, and how little it's possible for us to know, about this man Jesus. And by extension, they reveal how unlikely it is that the Bible can be anything like what millions of people worldwide believe it to be: a perfect, complete, and unchanging life guide appropriate for all times and places, handed down straight from the mind of God. Real life is always a lot messier and more ambiguous than we'd like it to be--even those things we'd most like to be clean and clear.

And Then There Were Four: So we're up to four government officials busted for child porn and soliciting sex from underage girls. Plus there's the guy who was involved in a shoplifting ring. (Remember the good old days, when government officials who got in trouble with the law were generally only involved in graft?) And, of course, "Heckuva Job" Brownie. There's no reason to believe the stories we've heard so far are going to be the last, either. Petty lawbreakers or rank incompetents in high places are what you get when cronyism is the most important qualification for a job. It's the kind of thing that used to be endemic in Russia during the bad old Soviet days. It wasn't what you did that got you a government job--qualifications couldn't matter less, as long as you knew the right people. And we all know how well things worked out over there.

As Yakov Smirnoff used to say, "What a country."

2006-04-06T15:44:00.000-05:00

Jesus Doesn't Love You, He Thinks You're a Jerk
If you're not into hockey and don't care about the NCAA Frozen Four, don't feel like a perverted freak who's a threat to everything Americans hold dear because of that. Know instead that if you're reading this blog, you're probably already a perverted freak who's a threat to everything Americans hold dear, at least according to the Americans who attended the "War on Christians" conference held last week in DC. People for the American Way has a full-length report on the conference--which offers mind-blowing detail on the current orthodoxy amongst the delusional clowns of the Christian Right. A few choice bits:

--Christians should stop worrying about tolerance because Jesus was the most intolerant person in the world.

--Same-sex marriage supporters = suicide bombers.

--Homos want to make Christianity illegal.

--Immigrants = Satan.

--If it weren't for the right's culture war, Al Qaeda would defeat Western civilization.

--A "values voter" cannot be a Democrat.

And so on. It's worth repeating that this isn't a collection of nuts living in fortified compounds--these are mainstream Republican voters, the constituents of, among others, Senators John Cornyn of Texas, Sam Brownback of Kansas (who wants to be president), and Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania. And this conference, hilarious though it seems to the non-Jesus-drunk, it has a very practical purpose: whipping up the faithful to ensure that votes and money go toward their candidates in the November elections. And with this crowd, fear is the most reliable motivator they've got.

Recommended Viewing: Britney Spears was a Mouseketeer. Elvis was a truck driver. Almost everybody who gets to be famous has to pay some dues, even if it's just putting up with being patronized by the American Idol judges. In 1964, the Rolling Stones paid some of their pre-stardom dues by recording the rockin'est cereal commercial of all time. They don't appear in it, but you can't mistake the Mick Jagger snarl, even when it's selling Rice Krispies.

2006-04-06T08:11:00.000-05:00

Five Golden Rings . . . and Counting
In the late 1960s, men's hockey returned to the University of Wisconsin for the first time since the 1920s. Games were first played at little Hartmeyer Arena on the city's east side, which seated maybe a thousand fans. The real home of Wisconsin hockey, however, was the Dane County Coliseum, a 10,000-seat barn that quickly became the most feared home-ice venue in all of college hockey. At the Coliseum, Badger hockey wasn't just a game, it was a happening, a rock concert, tent revival, and fraternity blowout rolled into one.

(Despite having moved to the more sedate Kohl Center on campus in 1998, hockey games retain that loose, rock-and-roll vibe. The Mrs. and I attended our first UW basketball games this past season, and we couldn't believe the difference--how even with the game on the line in the final minute, most fans sat on their hands; how the cheerleaders--which UW hockey doesn't have--actually tamped down the enthusiasm of the student section instead of whipping it up; and how, in general Wisconsin hockey fans get more excited by the between-periods entertainment than basketball fans do for their damn game.)

It helped that the Badgers got very good very quickly, qualifying for NCAA tournament play as early as 1970, and winning their first national championship in 1973. Championships followed frequently after that--1977, 1980, 1983, 1990--five golden rings in all. What made those glory years even more glorious was the fact that Wisconsin hockey was the top sport on campus. The basketball program had been awful since the 40s; football was up and down; women's sports had yet to make any impact at all. Hockey was the toughest ticket in town--and the fact that it drew paying customers was critical, especially in the late 80s, when the athletic department was millions of dollars in debt and several programs were on the brink.

The UW athletic program rebounded in the 1990s--three Rose Bowls in football, Big Ten championships in basketball (and an unlikely Final Four appearance in 2000). For the hockey faithful, that was all very nice, but until hockey returned to national prominence, something would be missing. It's back, starting tonight, when the Badgers return to the NCAA Frozen Four for the first time since 1992. In addition to the Badgers, the tournament features three other storied college hockey programs: Maine (Wisconsin's opponent tonight), Boston College, and North Dakota. Whoever wins the championship on Saturday night is going to have earned it--in terms of tradition and power, this is roughly equivalent to a basketball Final Four of Duke, North Carolina, Kentucky, and Kansas.

College hockey isn't bigtime like college football and basketball are bigtime. There are only about 60 schools playing in Division I, and many of those have joined Division I within the last five years. Those teams are almost exclusively in the Northeast and Midwest, except for outposts in Denver, Colorado Springs, Omaha, and Huntsville, Alabama. College hockey has no major national TV deal--it has to fight for airtime on a fifth-string ESPN channel, or on something called CSTV, or amidst the poker shows and infomercials on Fox's ad hoc network of low-rent regional sports channels. For most of its long season, October to April, it has trouble getting out of the agate type in the back of the sports section--if it gets into the sports section at all. Yet in the places where it matters most--New England, Michigan, Minnesota, North Dakota, and Wisconsin--college hockey is huge, and no weekend of the season is bigger than the one that starts today.

2006-04-04T08:47:00.000-05:00

How About "Falsehead"?
I opened my e-mail today and found this link from a friend, with the message: "Wow, Americans hate you worse than queers and ragheads." (Nice way to start the morning, yes?) The link goes to a post at The Volokh Conspiracy about a University of Minnesota study suggesting that public hostility toward atheists is higher than hostility directed toward any other religious group.

Yawn. I've seen studies like these before. I've read similar statistics about the number of Americans who wouldn't want their children to marry an atheist. (More than those who wouldn't want their children to marry a Muslim, for example.) Yawn. This study says more about the people who responded to it than it does about the atheists who are singled out by it--but more about that anon.

The Volokh Conspiracy tends right, so I couldn't read too far into the comments before my brain started to hurt from pseudo-intellectual winger moralizing. Many of the commenters view the study as vindication of their prejudice, and they play Coltrane-like changes on the theme that atheists are bad because they don't believe in a higher law. Example:

The athiest is fundamentally unpredictable, he might be a reasonable decent young man one moment, but then the bases by which he calculates may change, an opportunity worth taking may arise and he would do it. If, for example, adultery is not objectively wrong by some higher standard than how can we ever be sure that the athiest would follow a convention as such if he knew he could never be caught. We can't.

(For all this guy's supposed expertise, he can't seem to spell "atheist" correctly, but I digress.) Yup, we're all driven solely by our own needs and desires, and we live solely to maximize our personal advantage, like animals in the jungle, and we'll stomp our mothers (or step out on our spouses) if we need to, in order to accomplish our goals. Which should make us easy to spot, right? We'd be the ones stealing Hershey bars at the convenience store, pushing old ladies out of our way at bus stops, and laundering money through our Congressional offices.

And how much of that have you seen lately?

The study I'd like to see is one that asks the following: "Do you know an atheist personally?" I am convinced that many Americans--if not most Americans--believe that no one they know is an atheist. But that's almost certainly not true. As I have contended here before, the number of self-identified atheists in the United States is about 10 percent of the population. But the number of functional atheists--those Americans who don't believe in God but won't admit it publicly, and those completely secularized who do not attend a church, but who retain some fuzzy belief in a higher power or in spirituality sufficient to allow them to answer "yes" to the question "do you believe in God?"--must raise the actual number of atheists to around one-fifth of the population.

So yeah, even if you think you don't know any atheists, you probably do--although surveys like this one aren't going to help bring them out of the closet. Because, as another of the Volokh commenters observed, what this survey shows, unintentionally to be sure, is the amount of intolerance religious believers have for those who don't share their beliefs. He wonders how much intolerance for believers a survey of atheists would show.

Some, certainly. I've been accused of being intolerant of the religious. I'll cop to it up to a point, although what I'm most intolerant of is people who are made stupid by their religion. And I strongly believe that what the world, and especially the United States, needs is less religion, not more--especially less of the toxic, demonizing, categorizing variety ascendant today. Yet I also believe that we need less of the broader kind, religious belief that takes away from people their responsibility to better the lives of themselves and others here and now in favor of "saving" other people from a hell that doesn't exist.

The choice some religious believers force on us, that we must either be a religious country or an amoral one, is a false one. People who believe in a hazy god, in a fuzzy god, in a god who's a lot like Santa Claus, or in no god at all, are clearly capable of living peaceably with their neighbors--because they are your neighbors, and there's more of them than you realize.

And besides, how badly can people hate atheists if they don't have a derisive nickname for us, like "queer" or "raghead"?

2006-04-03T16:30:00.000-05:00

The Long Election Night
So they finally made it to Election Day on The West Wing last night. We don't know how it's going to turn out yet, of course--and with six episodes to go, we might not know for a while. There were lots of speeches by characters in both the Santos and Vinick camps about how the exit polls look screwy, which, given the sometimes-unsubtle plotting of the last three seasons, is probably an omen of a Florida 2000-style deadlock. (The producers are still being coy about the outcome, but I doubt there's anyone left who thinks Arnold Vinick has a chance to win, given that the series has been telegraphing a Santos win since the season's first episode.)

(Digression: If there is a deadlock in the fictional election, it will be interesting to see whether any mention is made of the Bush/Gore fight in 2000. Until this season, The West Wing has studiously avoided crossing its fictional universe with the real political universe of recent times. The most recent real presidency I can recall being mentioned is JFK's, and in an episode a couple of seasons back, we met two former presidents from the fictional universe. This season, however, starting with the live debate episode, the real and fictional universes have mingled to an extent never before seen. Since the debate, they've mentioned Bono's work on poverty and debt relief, and in the last two weeks we've seen Jon Bon Jovi and Foo Fighters in largely pointless cameos. So they'd be holding to form if they mentioned Florida 2000.)

The Mrs. and I have quit watching "scenes from next week" on our favorite shows, because the network promo monkeys are forever giving away too much. But from what I can gather from the web, it looks like next week's episode will involve Leo's former White House colleagues finding out about and reacting to his death. Also, the show will begin to address the fascinating question of what to do when a dead man is elected vice president, but that may not be resolved right away if the election is headed for overtime. We will also probably get more followup on Josh and Donna finally hitting the rack, a long-awaited boink following years of sexual tension, which was handled poorly by the writers--unless we were supposed to take bedroom discussions of exit-polling and get-out-the-vote efforts as geeky pillow talk.

As it happens, yesterday The Mrs. and I watched several of the series' first season episodes on DVD before switching over to the new episode. While the current episodes provide the occasional chuckle, we laughed out loud five or six times during each of the early episodes we watched--the quality of Aaron Sorkin's writing, even from the show's embryonic days, is astoundingly good. Not only that, the show portrays political life in a very realistic way from early on. One of the show's failures during the last three seasons, and especially during the recent campaign arc, is its largely simplistic and generally unreal view of how politics works. Recent seasons' attempts at patriotism or idealism have often seemed forced or false, but Sorkin could work those buttons as skillfully as he brought the funny. It's worth noting that the show won the Best Drama Emmy only during Sorkin's four years at the helm, and has never won again since he was forced off the show.

There was a rumor last winter that Sorkin would return to write the final episodes, but that wasn't to be. Last night's episode, pivotal as it was, was credited to Lauren Schmidt, who can't have written more than one or two others. (Some fans on the Internet think executive producer John Wells wrote it and put Schmidt's name on it--which, if true, would go a long way toward explaining a lot of what was wrong with it.) I'm hopeful that the six remaining episodes will be written by people who have more history with the show, or at least by those who have shown themselves capable of understanding the form of a good West Wing episode.

At the moment, Sorkin is working on a new show that will appear this fall called Studio 60, set behind the scenes at a Saturday Night Live-type variety show. Given the Internet buzz already surrounding this show, it may be the first one to qualify as must-see TV before it hits the air.

2006-04-03T08:05:00.000-05:00

Odds and Ends on Monday Morning
There's a fair amount of blogworthy stuff out there this morning. Here's what's bubbled to the surface in my world.

Item: Sun Prairie, an east-side suburb of Madison, is having a school bond referendum tomorrow--a big one, over 59 million dollars to build a second high school. Sun Prairie is the largest school district in the state with only one high school. Sun Prairie's high school is already crowded. (I taught a class there last Friday.) Ten years from now, the projections are that the district will have to accommodate 3,000 students. The district has decided to ask for the two-school plan, although some voters would rather see the district expand the existing school. They cite duplication of services with two schools, but also the idea that Sun Prairie will lose an important part of its identity if it has two high schools instead of one.

Comment: When The Mrs. and I lived in Illinois during the mid 80s, a new state superintendent of schools declared that no kid in the state should attend a high school with fewer than 500 students, and districts should be forced to consolidate to make that happen. Citizens of small towns in our area promptly began losing their minds. On the windswept Illinois prairies, it's not uncommon to see a town's high-school nickname painted on the community water tower. Without their high schools, these towns would lose their identities. Sun Prairie isn't like that. In fact, it's arguable that Sun Prairie lost its identity years ago, when the rural gap along Highway 151 that used to separate it from Madison was overgrown with office, retail, and housing developments. Indeed, the one-school sentiment seems to be coming from the town's old-timers. The new arrivals, who populate the new parts of town, don't have that attachment. The "one community, one school" people have hit upon an interesting emotional hook. However, it surely offers a convenient way for some referendum opponents--the kind of people who vote against all school referenda on general principles, as if a few bake sales could solve the problem--to ignore the demographic and economic realities of a growing suburban city.

Item: Another deadline passes, and still Brett Favre refuses to say whether he will return for another season in Green Bay. Favre said last week that he wanted to be sure the Packers would be winners this year before he decides to return, and that his decision is difficult because he's fairly sure he can still perform at a high level.

Comment: That sounds to me like he wants to play, but that he wouldn't necessarily mind if it were somewhere other than Green Bay. And you know what? I don't think it has to be in Green Bay, either. The Packers were awful in 2005, and there's little reason to believe they'll be better in 2006, either with Favre or without him. And so his public Hamlet act--giving interviews every couple of weeks in which he continues to dither over whether to come back--has started to look less like honest confusion over his future and more like a childish unwillingness to make up his mind, and a certain enjoyment of the spectacle of holding an entire state's football fans spellbound. I bow to no one in the intensity of my Packer devotion, but nobody's bigger than the team. Not even the most famous player in its storied history. If Favre thinks his reservoir of good will among Wisconsin fans is unlimited, he's mistaken.

2006-03-30T21:39:00.000-06:00

Don't Try to Lay No Boogie-Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll
Since I won't be posting much more until Monday, I'd best weigh in tonight with a few thoughts on today's immigration debate in the House of Representatives. "Debate" isn't actually the word, I suppose. "Foaming, rabid nonsense," maybe. But not really "debate."

The illogic on display by the Repugs quoted in the AP's story on the debate is classic. Iowa's Steve King went into a rap about how "this new ruling class of America" (translation: "Democrats, and Republicans who don't agree with me") is "expanding the servant class in America." The part I don't get, however, is the bit about the expansion of the servant class coming "at the expense of the middle class of America, the blue collar of America that used to be able to punch a time clock, buy a modest house and raise their families. . . . Those young people are cut out of this process."

So, Congressman--are you saying that guest workers from other countries are keeping young Americans from getting high-paying jobs as domestics, gardeners, and valets? And if not--what the hell are you talking about?

It's curious, too, to hear a Republican invoking class conflict in America. Usually such language gives them the fantods, especially if spoken by Democrats. Republicans are the ones who always say this is a classless society, where even the most humble domestic, gardener, or valet can rise to become . . . a domestic, gardener, or valet who owns his own house.

Word Association: OK, so that title really doesn't have much to do with this post. It's just that there's a DJ in Chicago--now a talk-show host--who, during his Top 40 days 30 years ago, used to start his shows with a snippet of Long John Baldry's song "Don't Try to Lay No Boogie-Woogie on the King of Rock and Roll." The DJ's name--Steve King.

2006-03-30T07:49:00.000-06:00

The Theory That Dares Not Speak Its Name
You already know about "the n-word," a word so terrible we can't permit ourselves to speak it or even to write it. Last December, we learned that certain federal air safety personnel refer to "the b-word". Down in Arkansas, there's another word so awful and terrible that it's referred to by letter only.

The Arkansas Times published an article this week about the struggles of the state's science teachers to meet a state standard requiring them to teach that the earth is approximately 4.5 billion years old. The challenge is to do it without offending the state's fundamentalist parents, many of whom believe the earth is approximately 6,000 years old. The article features a geologist who teaches as part of a science program used by several schools. He was disciplined recently by his employers for telling his elementary students a certain group of rocks was 300 million years old. Not that the program's administrators wanted to restrict him in that way, necessarily, but they had to--to stay in business, and to teach the good science they are capable of teaching in other areas, they have to avoid discussions of "deep time" and what they and other Arkansas teachers refer to as "the e-word"--evolution.

If it seems absurd that teachers might not even want to speak the word "evolution" aloud, consider the experience of another teacher working for a private science-education company:

Her story was that in preparation for teaching the students from that district, she had asked some of the teachers how they approached the state benchmarks for those items dealing with evolution. She said, “Oh, I later got in trouble for even asking,” but went on to describe their answers. Most teachers said that they did not know enough about evolution to teach it themselves, but one of them, after looking around to make sure they were safely out of anyone’s earshot, explained that the teachers are told by school administrators that it would be “good for their careers” not to mention such topics in their classes.

Or, to put it another way: You get in about as much trouble mentioning evolution in Arkansas as you would if you called one of your students a nigger.

Blue-state Yankees are always amazed at the pervasiveness of religion in the South, but it's time we quit being surprised. In lots of places, a de facto theocracy already exists, and if it's not as thoroughly implemented as some people would like it to be, perhaps it's only a matter of time. Whether the theocrats will achieve every one of their wet dreams remains to be seen. But they're victorious in one way already: Right now, on this morning, kids in Arkansas and other states, both Southern and not, are sitting down in science classes that will make them more ignorant, not less so.

2006-03-29T08:12:00.000-06:00

Pepto-Bismol Breakfast
The Mrs. and I have no children, so I don't have any direct experience with morning sickness. Or at least I didn't until this morning, when Political Animal mentioned ValuesVoter.org's Contract with Congress. I decided I'd go read it, and voila! The 7:00 barf arrived right on schedule.

The contract is, as Kevin Drum describes it, "the wingnut Bill of Rights." It's full of the usual misinterpretations of American history (that the Founders were Bible-thumpers), overheated rhetoric ("Moved by our faith in God and this republican creed we join together now to defend representative self-government against the greatest assault it has ever faced"), and bad legislative ideas (the Constitution Restoration Act, which would forbid the Supreme Court from ruling on anything that acknowledges God as "the sovereign source of life, liberty, or government"--which, if passed, would open the way for any governmental entity to set up a theocracy beyond the reach of law). Not only that, it reads like something written by people who haven't been out of their bunkers in five years. Never mind that they're already in control of two branches of the federal government and on their way to control of the third. Never mind that they control state governments from sea to shining sea. It's not enough, because it has yet to lead to everything they want--and when it comes to moderating their wants and controlling their impulses, these people have all the willpower of five-year-olds. And this manifesto isn't something fringe nutjobs came up with--these demands are squarely within the mainstream of the Republican Party now, to the point at which some of the party's prospective presidential candidates wouldn't look sideways at them.

When you're out of your mind on dope, bad ideas can seem good, bad choices can seem like smart things to do, and your own self-aggrandizement becomes the only meaningful priority. And, as we noted here not long ago, when you're out of your mind on religion, you make the same sort of selfish choices, and the rest of the world be damned.

Recommended Reading: The recent protests against immigration legislation pending in Congress represent some of the most impressive street action we've seen in the United States in a long time. At least since the prewar Iraq protests, maybe since the nuclear freeze marches in the early 80s, and possibly going back to the 1960s. (There ought to be that many people out every weekend in places from Gobbler's Knob to West Overshoe demanding impeachment, but I digress.) But the "debate" over immigration is being played in the media as if it's brown people from Mexico versus "Americans," who are never precisely defined. As Alisa Valdes-Rodriguez wrote this week, there's a lot more to the immigration issue than CNN and the rest are reporting--and the fact that they're getting it wrong is badly distorting the issue for the millions of Americans who only know what they see on TV.

2006-03-28T07:34:00.000-06:00

Walkout
Our Wisconsin Repugs are providing high-quality entertainment again. Last Friday, Milwaukee County Executive Scott Walker abandoned his campaign for the Repug nomination for governor, which took lots of people, including me, by surprise. Walker and Green Bay-area Congressman Mark Green were the only announced candidates for the nom, and Walker seemed to me be a far stronger candidate, mostly on the basis of his higher profile. But Green had locked up the early money, leaving Walker to troll for crumbs, and it apparently became clear that the crumbs weren't going to be enough.

Of course, it wasn't Walker himself who ultimately decided his campaign was over. It was--wait for it!--God. According to the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel: "I believe that it was God's will for me to run," Walker said. "After a great deal of prayer during the last week, it is clear that it is God's will for me to step out of the race." (Sounds like God is a flip-flopper, first telling Walker to run and then telling him to get out. I am not sure how God can continue to be a Republican if he's going to act so much like John Kerry, but I digress.)

A few Repugs apparently hoped that a deadlock between Walker and Green might bring former governor Tommy Thompson back into the picture, but that doesn't seem realistic. Thompson seems good and truly retired from politics, as his decision not to challenge Russ Feingold for the Senate last time indicates, but in spite of that, he remains as central a figure in Wisconsin Republican dreams as Angelina Jolie is in the dreams of adolescent boys. And so, God's intervention in the campaign clears the way for a straight-up match between Green and incumbent Democrat Jim Doyle.

The biggest advantage Walker's exit gives the Repugs is six extra months for them to bash Doyle as unfit to govern this Christian state, because Wisconsin's nutty political calendar postpones the statewide primary until September. Not that the Repugs were going to need much help in sinking Doyle. He's vulnerable on plenty of issues already. The big prize for Repugs would be to tie him to the ongoing Capitol corruption scandal, but even if they can't do that, he's plenty weak--too liberal for Republicans, not liberal enough for Democrats, who have watched him crawl into bed with the Repug legislative majority a few times too often. (This never works. The Repugs are always happy to get you into bed, but once the hookup is over, they think you're a slut and never call again.) Green and Walker had already been trying to out-Jesus each other, so we'll be hearing plenty of pious wankery on the campaign trail, plus, there's a marriage-defining Constitutional amendment on the November ballot to further energize the wingnuts. So Doyle's already climbing uphill. His likelihood of success will depend on how well he can portray Green and the Repugs as the extremists they are. And if he approaches that task with the same swift sharpness he's approached the task of governing, well, it may be time to move to Illinois.

Christ, what am I saying?

Say What?: The spring election is next week, which is mostly for county board and school board seats. There's also an advisory referendum on the ballot in several communities regarding withdrawal of troops from Iraq. Yard signs have sprouted in the last few days here in Madison, mostly favoring the referendum. The Repugs are also providing signs, which are a little confusing. They say, "No = cut and run." Given that the Madison referendum is worded "Resolved: The United States should bring all military personnel home from Iraq now," I wonder if they shouldn't have proofread their text a bit more carefully.

(Late note, 9:15AM: I got a closer look at one of the vote-no signs just now, and it turns out that they actually say "No to Cut and Run" and not "No = cut and run." Still, they're absurd. With large majorities believing the Iraq War is a mistake, the idea that such simplistic nonsense might persuade people to hold Bush's line goes beyond wishful thinking into blatant psychosis.)

2006-03-27T20:54:00.000-06:00

Heard You Missed Me
So I'm back with 10 Reasons Why Gay Marriage Is Wrong. Try to deny any of 'em.

But that's it. We're all still exhausted up here after the Wisconsin men's hockey team played 111 minutes and 13 seconds of hockey last night before winning 1-0 to make its first Frozen Four championship series since 1992--and that after the Wisconsin women won their Frozen Four, 3-0 over Minnesota. Tonight's welcome-home ceremony for the women's team was a thrill--and we're hoping we get to have another one in two weeks after the men's Frozen Four.

More tomorrow, perhaps.

2006-03-24T09:42:00.000-06:00

Basketball Would Be a Better Game if it Were Hockey
Links and notes from here and there, live from the bagel shop in the northern suburbs of Milwaukee:

All Your TVs Are Belong to Us: During the 1970s, people first became aware of something called the "tour rider," in which celebrities, mostly rock stars, made special requests of the arenas at which they performed and hotels at which they stayed. These commonly involve catering, but sometimes extend to furniture, entertainment options, and other requests. The most famous tour rider request was the one supposedly standard in the contract of Van Halen, who requested big bowls of M&Ms, but with the brown ones removed. Over at the Smoking Gun, they've gotten their hands on Dick Cheney's "tour rider", which is sent to all hotels at which Shooter will be staying. Most outrageous request: all TVs in the vice-president's suite must be pre-tuned to Fox News. I'd give a $50 tip to a chambermaid just to have her tune Shooter's TVs to Amy Goodman's Democracy Now instead. (When I stay in hotels, I use the add/delete channels feature on the TV or the remote to program out Fox News. You should do it, too. Maybe we'll start a trend.)

Drop the Puck: While most of the sports freaks in the country are focused on the NCAA men's basketball tournament, University of Wisconsin sports freaks are all about the hockey. This afternoon, the Badger women open NCAA Frozen Four play in Minneapolis against St. Lawrence. If they win, they play for the national championship tomorrow. Tomorrow, the top-seeded Badger men open NCAA first-round play in Green Bay against Bemidji State. If they win, they play for a Frozen Four bid of their own on Sunday. Take that, Canada: Madison is the hockey capital of the world.

Reclaim Your Purity: Abstinence-only sex education can change your life. In the hands of a master educator, it can make a left-wing lesbian into a pure young virgin fit to marry a Republican. Righteousbabe reports.

Talk Amongst Yourselves: If you're a Christian, riddle me this: Do you believe in Hell? And does it bother you that people you know and love may be going there?

2006-03-23T09:33:00.000-06:00

Damn Internets
You may have noticed that when you have visited this blog over the last 12 hours or so, an ad for a porn site has popped up. I apologize. I have no control over the content of these ads, and I've reported it to the company that serves them. They're good about taking off this kind of thing, but just to be on the safe side, I've disabled the ad function temporarily.

Again, I apologize.

2006-03-23T09:08:00.000-06:00

Off Base
In the spring and the fall, I teach classes to help students get ready for their ACT and SAT college entrance exams. (It's what I'm doing on the road this week.) Most of the kids are juniors. They're not exactly a representative sample of the entire junior population--they're college-bound, and their families have enough money to pony up $75 for the class. A lot of the groups I'm assigned to are in affluent suburbs and/or at private schools, which also tends to filter out the hoi polloi. So they're representative of the upper middle class--the favored children of America, who will grow up to be the same kind of people their parents are, and who will be anxious to raise their own families in the same affluent suburbs they grew up in.

At one point in the class, I demonstrate different types of test questions. One example goes like this:

Which president added a corollary to the Monroe Doctrine?
A. Ronald Reagan
B. Hillary Clinton
C. Theodore Roosevelt
D. George W. Bush

I ask the students which choices can't possibly be the right answer. The kids generally land on Hillary first, to which I respond, "Right--she's never been president." (One-beat pause.) "Not yet anyway." Then they land on Bush, because he's president now, and they can usually remember that the Monroe Doctrine goes way back in history.

I like to watch their reactions to Hillary and Bush. Nobody's ever said anything politically negative about Hillary--even when I'm in stone Republican areas, like the counties around Milwaukee, where I am again today. However, every once in a while some testosterone-addled boy will say that Hillary can't be the answer "because she's a woman." (One said it last night, and he did it with such a self-satisfied smirk that I stepped out of my usually affable teaching demeanor and responded coldly, "That has nothing to do with it.") Occasionally somebody, usually a boy sitting in the back of a large group, responds to the mention of Bush with a sort of cheer--"Bush, yeah!" But that response was more common a year or two ago then it is now. Today, I get a lot more eye-rolling, especially from girls, when Bush's name is mentioned. More than once this spring, when I have asked, "Why can't Bush be the right answer to the question?," somebody has said, "Because he's an idiot."

Well, I'll be damned. In the bright-red suburbs of Milwaukee, yet. Bush's base must be even shakier than we thought.

Recommended Reading: Several bigtime bloggers are noting a story from the Toronto Star this week reporting on a University of California study that suggests kids who are whiny and insecure grow up to be conservatives, while those who are confident, resilient, and self-reliant grow up to be liberals. (The article, by Kurt Kleiner, is fair and balanced--in a good way--by suggesting that the numbers are more ambiguous than they appear to both conservatives and liberals.) It's an interesting notion--that personality traits formed before we knew anything about politics may have more to do with our political opinions than rational choices made in adulthood.

But even if the numbers are more ambiguous than they seem, the idea that rigid, self-righteous adults were more likely to have been obnoxious kids seems plausible enough.

(A version of this post also appears at Best of the Blogs.)

2006-03-22T22:46:00.000-06:00

How to Stay Healthy, Whether You Want to or Not
I left home today, and the hotel I am in has rather balky Internet access, so this is going to be brief.

It has been the official position of this blog for a long time that we should give Texas back to the Mexicans and much of the Southeast back to the Cherokees, thereby saving the United States from having to deal with the various strange fevers that sweep the land starting in those places. Well, here's another reason: Cops in Texas have begun going into bars undercover to arrest people who are drunk. I suppose you gotta give them credit for picking the berries where the bushes are the thickest, but this seems a wee bit off.

The ostensible reason for the program is to keep people from getting into cars and driving drunk--a worthwhile goal, to be sure. State laws in Texas don't permit public intoxication anywhere, including in bars. But I somehow think that whatever statewide organization Texas bar owners can belong to will not be too crazy about this law as soon as it starts affecting business. Plus, if cops can go into bars looking for drunks, it doesn't seem all that far-fetched that they could, if they chose, drop by your house whenever they wanted to, just to make sure you're not sitting in front of the TV ripped to the tits on $3 chardonnay.

Speaking of legal maneuvers involving sin, Madison has modified its famous no-smoking-in-bars ordinance to let people smoke cigars in cigar bars. This wasn't without controversy. A UW student speaking against the modification said, "I worry that this is a slippery slope. This is one exemption but where do we draw the line?" Nothing slippery about it, really. It's a cigar bar. You'd have to be, well, drunk to go in there and not know that cigars are the main attraction.

And if you are drunk, watch out for the virtue police.

2006-03-21T21:57:00.000-06:00

Quote of the Day
In light of the comments to this morning's post, the quote with which Lewis Lapham heads his "Notebook" column in the current Harper's seems like a fine candidate for QotD. It's Edward Gibbon, writing in his monumental Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire: "The various modes of worship, which prevailed in the Roman world, were all considered by the people, as equally true; by the philosopher, as equally false; and by the magistrate, as equally useful."

This seems to speak nicely to the pitfalls of ecumenism, especially of the Christian variety. If the people consider all variations of Christianity equally true--and as we noted earlier today, many mainstreamers certainly seem to consider each denomination as legitimate as the others, be they traditional or loony--that's certainly useful to the magistrate. The magistrate can rely on the ecumenical impulses of mainstream religions to give cover to the extreme flavors of religion--which is an especially useful function when the magistrate is collectively beholden to those same extremists, if not entirely colonized by them.

As for the philosopher, he's left scratching his head--or banging it against the desk. But he's used to that.

2006-03-21T08:31:00.000-06:00

On the Similarity Between Crackpots and Crackheads
I hope you caught the comment from reader KN on yesterday's post about abstinence education. Referring to religiously inspired abstinence messages, she wrote: "If sex is sin, then planning to have sex is a sin, too. The shame, guilt, and fear these teachings create keep kids from making decisions that will guard their futures and cause mental issues that will affect their later relationships and marriages."

Abstinence education as it is practiced in schools isn't always, or even generally, overtly religious. But when you get down to its essence, it is undeniably based on religion, because it gets much of its authority from ideas about marriage and morality that derive ultimately from religious belief. Thus, it's no exaggeration to say that abstinence education, and the negative consequences that can result from it, are yet another example of the toxicity of religion. The Salon article I mentioned yesterday is yet another example of toxic religion run amok. Those who believe that the only proper role for women is the one they held in the 18th century are quite clearly addled, and it is in large measure their religious beliefs that are responsible for the addling.

Back in the early 90s, when I was going to church on a regular basis, one of my fellow congregants once remarked that what he liked about the United Methodist Church was that it didn't require you to get saved and re-saved every 10 minutes. Members of other mainstream liberal denominations often say something similar--that their belief is not focused entirely on their own individual souls, but on the broader work that religious believers are supposed to do in the world. It seems to me that conservative denominations are selfish by comparison, by focusing so much on individual salvation. Even their broader work in the world reflects back on themselves as individuals--they fight hard against anything they perceive to be Satanic, because if Satan gets a foothold in the world, he might be able to somehow tempt them away from God.

(Digression: I have said this before, but it bears repeating--the god of the fundies is supposed to be the most powerfulest and awesomest force in the universe, but at the same time, believers can be tempted away from him by such innocuous things as TV shows, rock music, and Halloween candy. That's sure some powerful awesomeness right there, bubba.)

All of this is by way of introduction to an interesting article by Bob Minor, who's working on a book called When Religion Is an Addiction. He points out that for fundies, religious belief functions a lot like crack cocaine or alcohol to an addict--it gives them a high and keeps them from thinking about how their addiction affects other people. Also, religious addiction, like substance abuse, tends to require ever-larger doses for the addict to get off--which explains the ever-ratcheting-upward demands of fundies for more, more, more. It's why it's not enough to simply teach kids to avoid sex until marriage; they also want to teach that condoms are bad and birth-control pills are harmful. It's why it's not enough to ban abortion; they want to restrict birth control and eventually ban non-procreative sex of all kinds. (The addiction metaphor also explains, to me at least, why religious believers so often turn on each other, as in the repeated schisms in the Christian Church during its history. When all the enemies are vanquished, addiction requires the creation of more from whatever is close at hand.)

As Minor observes, religion doesn't have to function this way. For a majority of Americans, it doesn't. But the minority for whom religion is an addiction have power out of all proportion to their numbers at the moment. Having such people in the driver's seat of our country is as dangerous as having a substance abuser behind the wheel of a bus or in the cockpit of an airliner. So nobody should be surprised when the thing crashes.

2006-03-20T08:12:00.000-06:00

Your Biological Destiny
Last Saturday I taught a class at a high school in a nearby town, and we happened to be in the health classroom. Remember health class? The one where you learned that smoking is bad, eating healthy food is good, and drinking alcohol is bad--often taught by an overweight football coach who could often be spotted having a smoke behind the building?

In the 21st century, health class is also where you learn that abstaining from sex is good. There were more abstinence posters on the walls of this particular classroom than anything else, splashed with colorful graphics and photos of obviously cool kids, all attractive and well-dressed, all happy and filled with purpose. (I'd like to think you could see behind their eyes a horniness that dared not speak its name, but that's a stretch.) One poster touted something called "2nd Virginity"--pledging not to do the deed again after having done it previously. Another text-heavy poster waxed lyrical about the wonderful gift you give your spouse when you wait for your wedding night. The most effective one was, "If you think it's hard talking to your parents about sex, try talking to them about grandchildren." That's one that would have worked on me back in the day.

You probably know enough about abstinence education to know that it doesn't work as well as its proponents think it does. That it gives kids strange ideas about what constitutes "sex"--there's so much focus on avoiding genital-to-genital contact that kids don't consider alternate uses of the equipmment to be sex at all. That it leaves kids who don't abstain without any useful information to keep from getting pregnant. That it is, in the end, the ultimate designed-by-clueless-adults program for kids, one that ignores the hormonal reality that human beings, especially young ones, live with every day.
What you might not know is that I'm for it, up to a point. When I was student teaching, I had a student in one of my classes who, at age 16, already had two babies. She wasn't in class very much--which was entirely understandable. The Mrs. has a cousin who raised a close-knit, churchgoing family of five kids in a rural area of the Midwest. Despite receiving the sort of classic Leave-it-to-Beaver upbringing that the wingnuts think we all should return to, two of her cousin's daughters got pregnant during high school. A little abstinence would have been a good thing for all of these kids. Of course, a little education about how to use a condom would have helped, too. The only mention of condoms in the classroom I was in last Saturday was a poster that said, "Condoms don't protect the heart." (That one strikes me as potentially rather effective, too, especially with teenage girls.)

Abstinence education proponents talk about "waiting until kids are ready," but that usually means "waiting until kids are married." Thus, abstinence education reinforces the cultural norm of marriage, and the idea that the only place in which sex is appropriate is within that institution. That was the prevailing view in the United States for a long time; it's only within the last 40 years or so that we've readily entertained alternate views. Lest you think that the norm of the last 40 years is here to stay, however, get this: There's a report at Salon this morning about a fledgling movement with the goal of eradicating birth control entirely, for everybody, as a means to an even more spectacular end: forcing women to fulfill their biological destiny as mothers, by banning abortion, banning birth control, and also putting obstacles in the way of families getting out-of-home child care. To these people, sex is for procreation only, and if you're not having babies, you shouldn't be having it at all. They're not interested in simply turning the clock back to the 1950s, they'd like to turn it back to the Victorian Era. And they're succeeding, in the same way the wingers have succeeded in putting Roe v. Wade on the brink--by taking incremental steps that remain out of the glare of the public spotlight until the project reaches critical mass. At that point, the deal is nearly done before most people know the deal is being made.

2006-03-19T20:14:00.000-06:00

Marching On
As I mentioned in my post this morning, I wasn't alone three years ago in feeling as though I knew that the Iraq War would be a complete disaster--that we couldn't turn the place into a sandy Connecticut, that we couldn't compel Iraqis to love us at gunpoint, that we couldn't trust people like Ahmed Chalabi, that we'd end up causing a civil war, etc., etc., etc. I knew it; you knew it; only the Bush gang and its fluffers did not. Three years later, all of us who knew it are saying "I told you so"--but at the same time, we're experiencing a certain feeling of amazed disappointment that we could have been so completely right. Subbing for Digby, Tristero writes: "I have never felt worse about knowing I was absolutely right than I did about the March of Folly. This was a lesson only incompetents unfit for public service needed to learn."

Yup, we have gotten what we predicted we would get out of this war--up to and including the continuing equation of dissent with disloyalty--and more, if you count things like the neutering of the Fourth Amendment. There's small comfort, maybe, in the fact that the rest of the country is realizing that war opponents were right (and are right), and that Bush was wrong then and remains wrong now--even though media coverage of the war and Congress' feeble response to events growing out of it, such as the manipulation of prewar intelligence or the warrantless wiretapping of innocent Americans, are still being driven by the opinions of the 33 percent of Americans who support Bush no matter what.

Bush can give all the speeches he wants talking about victory, but there are certain facts of history at work here, and more rhetorical dishwater, no matter how vigorously applied, is not going to change them. Not counting the Revolutionary War, every war the United States has ever won was largely over by the three-year mark. The first Gulf War lasted 100 days; the Mexican War lasted two years; the Spanish-American War, three months. Official American involvement in World War I lasted about 18 months. Three years after Pearl Harbor, the forces that invaded Europe on D-Day were rolling up the Germans; victory, while not entirely secure, was in sight. The three-year benchmark even holds for the Civil War. Three years after the war's first major battle, Bull Run in July 1861, Union armies commanded by Ulysses S. Grant were irrevocably on the offensive, an offensive that would end at Appomattox Court House. Even the wars that ended inconclusively, such as the War of 1812 and the Korean War, didn't last three years. Only in Vietnam--the war we lost--did the war drag on for more than three years. (Of course, the list lengthens if you count other losing wars, like the war on drugs or the war on poverty.) Fact: It doesn't take us this long to win wars we're going to win.

Bush-humpers might argue that Allied victory in World War II and the Union victory in the Civil War were not readily apparent at the three-year mark, and that it's only through the lens of history that those victories look inevitable. And so, they could claim, there might be some turning point yet to come (maybe even tomorrow if we clap our hands and wish harder). But anybody with a rudimentary grasp of Middle Eastern history, contemporary Iraqi politics, or memory enough to remember the course of the last three years, would be rightfully skeptical of such an argument. If we were going to win this one, there would be signs of it visible without resorting to rose-colored glasses. All the signs visible to the naked eye augur against it.

As of this morning, we've gotten 2,318 Americans and between 120 and 200 thousand Iraqis killed while Bush and the supporters of his war have been clapping and wishing. Bush's intransigence on the war--his failure to see the reality that we can't win--is going to get more Americans killed. He seems to me perfectly content to get every American under the age of 40 killed over there, if that's what it will take to maintain the appearance of resolve. But his resolve, far from being brave or principled, is the same kind of resolve that makes a four-year-old hold his breath in retaliation for some slight. We aren't winning this war, no matter how many more die, Americans or Iraqis. If Bush fears a pullout because of what history might think of him, it's too late. It's already easy to see what history's judgment is going to be.

Recommended Reading: Tristero's mention of "the march of folly," the title of a book by Barbara Tuchman that I've admired here previously, was appropriate this morning, given that Salon's Michelle Goldberg mentioned it earlier this week in a review of a forthcoming book by Kevin Phillips, American Theocracy: The Peril and Politics of Radical Religion, Oil, and Borrowed Money in the 21st Century. Phillips, a sober historian and journalist, puts the United States in the same boat with imperial Rome, 17th-century Spain, and Victorian Britain--all empires that seemed to rule the world, but which swiftly fell, in part due to their own hubris. I share Goldberg's feeling that depressing though it is to contemplate America's similar fall, it's also weirdly comforting to realize that the feeling of spiraling disaster is legitimate: "A feeling that the world is falling apart is usually associated with neurosis; now, it's possible that it's a sign of sanity."

2006-03-19T10:41:00.000-06:00

The Operative Ethic
Three years ago, the day the Iraq War started, I was on a business trip to Smithfield, Virginia. For what it's worth, here are some excerpts from my journal. First, from the morning of March 18, the day I left home, written while fogbound in Chicago, waiting for my flight to Norfolk:

The newspaper headlines are big and black today, although not as big and black as they’ll be on the Thursday or Friday when the war actually starts. It’s got to be on everyone’s mind as they walk through here. And people have to be wondering, as I am, what other shoes are going to drop, will it be here, or maybe where I’m going? The TV news trucks were thick on the ground as I walked through the terminals to my gate. There’s nothing to see out here—I have seen no cops or National Guardsmen, and I fly so seldom that I can’t tell whether there’s extra security or not. But we’re at Code Orange—Secretary Ridge gave us another “remain calm but prepare to die” speech last night—and unlike the last time, this Orange Alert might be permanent.

The fog makes for an interesting sight as planes take off—they soar up, a blast of mist seems to fly off the wings, and they vanish into the gray like a Star-Trek transporter. I remember how when I was a kid we would come to O’Hare just to watch the planes take off. In those days you could walk right to the gate where I am now without a ticket and stay all afternoon if you wanted to. Fewer things are deader and more gone than that.

I finally got to start reading Kingdom of Fear this morning. Dr. [Hunter S.] Thompson is a stiff drink so early in the morning, but worthwhile. I have a feeling I will be copying lines from the book into this journal all week long. “We are living in dangerously weird times now. Smart people just shrug and admit they’re dazed and confused. The only ones left with any confidence at all are the New Dumb. It is the beginning of the end of our world as we know it. Doom is the operative ethic.” The New Dumb—is there a better, more pungent, more accurate handle for the conservatives who rule us today? And the Doctor was writing in 2000, before what he might call the High Weirdness truly set in. “Guaranteed Fear and Loathing. Abandon all hope. Prepare for the Weirdness. Get familiar with Cannibalism.” Anything was possible thenb, and it’s even more possible now.

I finally made it to Norfolk that night, after being marooned at O'Hare for eight hours. The next morning, I wrote:

In the world at large, we are bracing ourselves for the whirlwind. The newscasts this morning are full of stories about increased security at home in fear of terrorist reprisals to the attack on Iraq, which will probably begin tomorrow. Why shouldn’t we expect them? If this is war, like the Repugs have been saying for 18 months, war means that both sides suffer. If Americans think we can rule the world with impunity, attacking anyone anytime for any reason, then we have to accept that the same will be our fate. We will also be attacked. While state and local governments are right to prepare, no one should be under the misapprehension that every attack will be stopped. It is not possible to achieve 100% security, Ridge and Ashcroft notwithstanding. So somewhere, something is going to happen. And with every Iraqi we kill, dozens of terrorists wanting to kill us will be born.

This is the thing the Bush gang doesn’t get. I have said it from day one. You cannot make people respect and love you by force. Only by other means can this be done—addressing the root causes of their dissatisfaction, for example. But this is seen as “caving in to terrorists,” so it won’t be done. Instead, we will fight perpetual war without result. Our children will never know peace. We were handed a moment of choice and we blew it.

The war that begins this week may look swift and decisive if it seems to end quickly. But that will be an illusion. It will never end until we learn to be braver than we are.

And that night, I wrote the following. I didn't know it, but I was writing at the precise instant the air assault on Baghdad was beginning:

No war yet, but it can’t be more than a few hours away. We have come a long way from the country we were three or four years ago, let alone four hundred. When I crossed the 4-mile-long James River Bridge tonight, I thought of those travelers of 1607 sailing up to what they called Jamestown. The ride across the bridge is quite striking--tall power line towers on one side, open water to the ocean on the other, with the Newport News shipyards on the oceanside coast. A strong wind was whipping whitecaps tonight--the river looked very wild, and maybe not much different than it looked 400 years ago--or how it will look 400 years from now, after we’re long gone. Makes me wonder what we’ll be leaving for those who come then.

I take a small amount of pleasure that commentators far smarter than I are feeling the same thing I am--a combination of incredulity and toldja-so, remembering how we could see, long before we started the war, that it was going to be a disaster for the United States. More on that later.

2006-03-16T13:02:00.000-06:00

Counting Candidates
Twenty years ago this week--this Saturday is the actual anniversary--Illinois experienced the most extraordinary election in its history, and it was only a primary.

After Republican incumbent Jim Thompson defeated Adlai Stevenson III for governor in 1982, Stevenson didn't promise to seek a rematch right away. He would have been justified, however--Thompson won in a recount by 5,000 votes out of 3.6 million cast. Stevenson was a former U.S. Senator and son of the Adlai who was a former governor and who ran for president in the 50s. While he sat on the sidelines, Neil Hartigan, the state attorney general, became the front-runner in the '86 race, and held that status for almost two years beforehand. But in mid-1985, Stevenson decided to get in. Such was the power of the Stevenson name that Hartigan bailed out within days of Stevenson's announcement, making the March primary just a formality.

Then they counted the votes. Stevenson got the Democratic nomination for governor as expected, but his chosen candidate for lieutenant governor, State Senator George Sangmeister, did not. Neither did Aurelia Pucinski, the party regulars' choice for secretary of state, Illinois' third-highest office. Sangmeister and Pucinski were beaten in the primary by Mark Fairchild and Janice Hart, respectably--followers of Lyndon LaRouche. They'd made no secret of their intentions, running on LaRouche's weird platform, described by one political scientist as "nuclear power, anti-Semitism, Star Wars, militarism, and the imposition of martial law to cope with such menaces as rock music and AIDS. Its arch villains, denounced by militant bands of airport panhandlers, include Jane Fonda, Ralph Nader, and Queen Elizabeth II." They had gone door-to-door in downstate areas, campaigning aggressively while the regular Democratic organization seemed unaware anybody else was running in the primary. Fairchild and Hart likely benefited from their bland, whitebread last names compared to those of their opponents, and in many places, their names appeared first on the ballot. Whatever the reasons for their victory (and several examined are at the link above) the result left the regular Illinois Democratic Party utterly screwed. Stevenson, Sangmeister, and Pucinski ran in November under the banner of the Illinois Solidarity Party, but never had a chance. Thompson was reelected by a wide margin.

Twenty years later, Illinois is having another gubernatorial primary on Tuesday. The action is on the Repug side this time, as five candidates tussle for the nomination. The Illinois Republican Party has its strongholds--and the area I'm visiting today, the collar of counties around Chicago, is probably the strongest--but statewide, it's pretty much a shell, exhibit A being the 2004 disaster, when U.S. Senate nominee Jack "I'm Not the Tom Clancy Hero, I'm the Guy Who Was Married to Seven-of-Nine on Star Trek" Ryan imploded in scandal over the summer, and the party flirted with former Bears coach Mike Ditka and Chicago broadcaster Orion Samuelson before importing Alan Keyes from his home planet to lose by a landslide to Barack Obama.

The lineup includes State Treasurer Judy Baar Topinka, who would have been the strongest Senate candidate to replace Ryan in 2004 if she'd chosen to step in. She's the front-runner. Topinka is being chased by two conservatives who seem to be splitting the hardcore vote. One is a state senator from Bloomington named Bill Brady, who told a talk-show audience last year that "bringing God into the classroom through the principles of the Founding Fathers' design is a good thing." The other is businessman Jim Oberweis, who's making his third straight bid for high office, after coming second in U.S. Senate primaries in 2002 and 2004. (He, too, declined to replace Ryan in 2004.) Oberweis runs a dairy that bears his name--his lawn signs say, "Got Guv?"--and an investment firm. Ron Gidwitz, a Republican insider and former state school board member, would likely give Blagojevich trouble on education, but he's running far behind the others. He and his running mate have a website with the address ILTurnaroundTeam.com--cute, but one wonders how much the policies of the national Republican administration have to do with the need for a "turnaround" in Illinois, and how likely a serious Republican insider like Gidwitz is to do anything about it. The fifth candidate is Andy Moore, a perennial office-seeking gadfly without a chance.

Topinka caused a fuss last week after a candidate debate by referring to her opponents as a "bunch of morons." She's been the target of negative advertising campaigns (accused of being a "liberal" by Oberweis, largely for her pro-choice position, although she supports restrictions on abortion rights and goes down the line with other conservative principles), and her margin is down from what it was earlier this winter, but the latest polling shows her in the lead still. But in Illinois, nothing is over until the votes are counted--and sometimes, that's when the fun really begins.