Doggie Love

Answer quick! How many options do you have, when your significant other disagrees with you about something?

There are a lot of us running around who could ponder this question all day long, and come up with no more than one answer, maybe two. Many more among us could make a longer list: change the subject, use the Icy Look of Doom, capitulate, compromise, blackmail, threaten, come up with an idea that makes the disagreement irrelevant, come up with an idea that gives both parties what they want, find common ground — but in real life, fail to put this beneficial assortment of options into practice.

You learn by doing. Some people simply don’t do. Our society discourages this; for all the arguing about politics we do, a lot of the time people simply don’t disagree with each other. We’ve erected a taboo on that, and enforce it harshly, especially toward women. After all the CALWWNTY that’s been going on (follow link for an explanation of the acronym), the modern woman finds herself empowered like never before to form her own opinions about things — but just as encumbered from constructively arguing with anyone, as she ever was before. Bear in mind, that being a loathesome, screeching bitch isn’t the same as constructively arguing.

So we have this ignorance about how to resolve a dispute, widespread in modern times, but encumbering to women especially. Women aren’t expected to disagree…except when they are, for the sake of manifesting their supposed independence, and if that’s the goal, then what? You’ve got to keep on manifesting, which means compromise is out of the question. So until the fairer sex has multiple children, or teaches kindergarten, the fine art of dispute resolution eludes them.

That’s my explanation for the results of this survey, in which 34 percent of dog-owning women are found to wish their mate was more like their dog. Desirable canine attributes cited included the “perennial good mood,” which seems understandable. A significant other who is in a good mood, usually means a good day. Who doesn’t want to have that every day? And yet…there was that movie that came out last year about what a great ol’ time the men had when the wives were put in that “perennial good mood.” The message of the movie seemed to be that this isn’t such a swell idea, so someone somewhere must be hip to the point I’m trying to make. People are people. If you want a good mood all the time, maybe a dog is the right idea.

There are some passages in this story that cross the line into cringe-worthy territory…

Other key qualities, says New York psychologist Joel Gavriele-Gold, are that “dogs don’t talk back and you don’t have to worry about their emotions.”

“In fact, you dont have to worry about what they are thinking either…This has not always been the case in many of my human…relationships. Something gets lost when the significant other is capable of speech.”

Step right up, studs! Get paired up with a desirable bachelorette who doesn’t care about your emotions, and doesn’t want to start caring.

This is highly amusing. You unattached guys out there, next time you get a serious relationship going just try this, and see how long things last. Be a dog. Never tell her what your thoughts really are about anything, don’t have any preferences, any objections, any opinions at all. Smile a lot — all the time, to the point where if anyone asks her what you think about anything, she won’t know. For bonus points, pee on anything that doesn’t move, and screw anything that does. Never, ever, ever make a dime doing anything.

Any experienced man knows these are qualities that women genuinely despise. Playful, cheerful, ready to go for a run? Pffffft. What the hell good is that, if the lady doesn’t know what you like and what you don’t?

Calling It

I’m not in the habit of calling out what’s going to happen so I can say, later on, “Ah hah! I told you this would happen!” This is a popular gimmick with talk radio hosts, particularly of the conservative variety. Where it succeeds, the point that is supported by the success is something I personally don’t endorse — that our country’s political theater has become so shallow, simple-minded and uninspired that it is flat-out predictable. Yes, it IS shallow and simple-minded. But not predictable. I’d be a lot happier if it was predictable. People’s actions are predictable when they think rationally and methodically, with a sincere desire for success. They become unpredictable when they ignore that goal of success in favor of an ulterior motive to please others.

Also, it’s somewhat disingenuous. Nobody cares about what someone else writes as much as they care about what they write themselves — or as much as that someone-else who did the writing. And that goes for everyone. Even for a living icon like Rush Limbaugh, as much as his transcripts are scrutinized by people who oppose everything he stands for in hopes of finding some kind of “gotcha” — Rush, being himself, is the primary authority on what-Rush-said. Once he makes a prediction, he will talk about the prediction more than anybody else. But only if it comes true. I would expect that as meticulous as he is about correcting misstatements of fact, if he ever gets a prediction wrong, then nobody will talk about it. A prediction is not a statement. Nothing to correct.

The same luxury of commenting on past predictions, only if they have since borne fruit, would be available to me if I chose to use it. That’s why I think the tactic says so little.

But this time I can’t resist. I’m going to call something, even though at this late date, I’m still waiting to see if the last thing I called has worked out the way I thought. This contradicts all of the above. I don’t think predictability is a big help in this area, and I wish to make a point that our political system is too predictable here. The politicians we elect to represent us, think we are stupid, and they must be right or else they wouldn’t be there. This is a bad thing.

Here is the prediction: Sometime around the third quarter of 2007, you’re going to see the following come out of our Democrats in Congress. I’ll put some money on all of it, but I’ll put more money on the words that are in bold.

• My fellow Americans…
• You sent (or returned) me to Washington to represent you, so that we could at long last put an end to the corrupt regime that is the Bush administration.
• “lied about Weapons of Mass Destruction in Iraq”
• Political cronies outed Valerie Plame Wilson.
• However, I am also mindful of the emotional burden under which Americans have been laboring since the administration’s misguided decision to invade Iraq in 2003
• We all know now that there never were any Weapons of Mass Destruction
• #### servicemen killed, ##### wounded, ##### Iraqis killed and ###### wounded, since hostilities began — and xxx much of this since Bush announced the Mission was Accomplished the following May
• Vietnam type of Quagmire
• We abandoned them in their time of need (if we have left by then, or) they want us to leave (if we haven’t)
• Mothers, like Cindy Sheehan, have been forced to send their children into battle, only to have those children return in a body bag.
• The nation needs a healing time
• As Abraham Lincoln said, “a house divided against itself cannot stand”
• We need to get back to the work of the people
• Make the minimum wage a living wage
• Shore up Social Security, mend it don’t end it, and save our labor unions (they may or may not use the word “unions”)
• We deserve an education system that will address the needs of all our children
• The constitutional crisis created by hearings (they won’t use the “I” word) would distract from this legislation, just as President Clinton was distracted from his important work eight years ago, and if President Bush is left in office he will stay there only (between 500 and 600) days before his term naturally expires. (You’ll hear lots of quotes about how many hundreds of days before President Bush’s term naturally expires.)
• Additionally, the issues involving the people President Bush has chosen to succeed him, are not to be ignored. (Insert a bunch of slander directed toward Vice President Cheney, here.) (Insert some ignorant and/or misleading comments about the President’s right to choose his own running mate, here) …womens’ right to choose.
• President Bush’s successor is likely to choose three Supreme Court justices, maybe more
• (Insert slander directed toward Justice Samuel Alito, here.)…womens’ reproductive freedom.

If you can read between the lines, you see where I’m going with that. They’ll run for election, or re-election, on a platform of throwing Bush out of office. And within a year of winning, they’ll tack to a different course. Aw gee…it’s such a gut-wrenching process, it’s just going to leave us with Dick Cheney in there. And, c’mon, we only have to put up with this guy for 500 days if we leave him in.

They aren’t playing to a crowd of reasonable moderates who simply want the country to change direction slightly to the left. That would necessitate an a mission of finding out what such an electorate would want, and then actually doing it. No, they’re playing to a crowd of leftist extremists. And extremists don’t really want their agendas to be enacted — not unless you re-define the word “want” to mean “they get to loudly complain and act all put-upon when it doesn’t actually happen.” Extremists thrive on noise. The noise of politicians promising to do what the extremists want done…and the noise of the extremists, themselves, as they complain that things weren’t actually done that way. Delivering on a campaign promise? That’s just something you do for the moderates. Moderates, as in, people who don’t give a rat’s ass whether Republicans or Democrats control something.

That is the definition of who used to decide elections for the rest of us. That no longer seems to be the case. That’s a good thing, in the sense extremist groups aren’t actually exercising as much control as they pretend to. But it’s bad in the sense that, whereas the delivery of our political figures traditionally falls short of their campain promises, but at least used to drift in the same direction…now those deliveries have become completely unhinged from that specified direction, or any other.

Too much CALWWNTY

“CALWWNTY” is my name for a time-honored and widely-exercised tactic of managing people. I actually touched briefly on the concept last month, throwing some compliments in the direction of — of all people — Former President Bill Clinton. The following exerpt captures the point I was making:

Bill Clinton, the guy who actually won a couple of times, almost never said “it is a neverending morass of muck and mire and surrounded by the putrid stench of failure and when one wades into it his eardrums swell with the sound of weeping, wailing and the gnashing of teeth and I know we can do better.” President Clinton nearly always found a little bit of sugar in the status quo…no Democrat who is big enough to get his name in the limelight seems capable of doing what Bill Clinton did. They can’t say “there is a lot that’s good about the status quo but there are shortfalls too, and we can do better.” If they said that, they’d do what Bill Clinton did: Win. This is such an intoxicating elixir, when you say “you done good — let’s see if we can improve some more.” People can’t get enough of that.

It is an acronym for “Come A Long Way, We’re Not There Yet.” The effective manager who strives to make his office a truly rewarding experience for those who report to him, is going to interpret this as an encapsulation of the messages that must be articulated. That is a productive and benign use of the concept, and it is outside of my intended meaning when I use this to criticize.

What I mean to criticize, is abuse of the concept. This is how the tactic is seen by shameless race- gender- and sexual-preference-panderers: It’s a cassette to be played as an endless-loop. This is like dangling a carrot in front of the donkey’s nose, while riding in the cart that he’s pulling, so that he never actually reaches the carrot. That this works, at least according to legend, is testament to the donkey’s lack of reasoning skills.

Well, CALWWNTY works great, especially when it’s being abused. And when it’s abused, it’s a testament to poor reasoning skills. Let’s review, shall we.

• Women: About 38 years, give or take, of bitching about unequal pay scales, glass ceilings, skimpy Hooters waitress uniforms, and being sent down the hall for coffee and slapped in the ass on the way back. Thirty-eight years of coming a long way. Making great strides. “You’ve come a long way, baby.” Those who lead the charge of the feminist movement, once summoned to comment on the issue, invariably take the position that no, not quite, we’ve still got a lot of work to do. Not there yet.
• People of Color: Forty-two years, plus a whole lot more — add another century if you want to capture what the Republican party did to abolish slavery. And if you want to add the tensions that led up to the civil war, you can tack on an additional couple of centuries. That’s a long time. Come a long way. Not there yet.
• Homosexuals: Okay, this is a somewhat legitimate use of the term, although “not there yet” has a lot to do with legalizing gay marriage, and allowing homosexual couples to adopt, efforts which I personally oppose. People are entitled to their own opinions about things, and if they see this as something that has to be done, I suppose they could say they’re “not there yet.” Nevertheless, isn’t it a little bit conceited to establish a political agenda that is contrary to the wishes of so many other people, who are equally entitled to vote against it — and regard it as an unfinished task, just because the agenda has not been imposed on those who don’t like it?
• Peace in the Middle East: Puh-leeze.

And this is why people like me get so frustrated. I’m an ordinary guy. I have no formal education beyond high school. Nobody in their right mind is going to pay twenty-five cents for my opinion about anything, let alone four hundred dollars an hour. And yet, in a distressing throwback to the Clint Eastwood problem, I could have easily predicted that comments like these, uttered at Coretta Scott King’s funeral, are bound to invite criticism from several different directions and renewed controversy about where to draw the line in eulogizing departed people who were politically active in life.

The criticism will ultimately be devastating because it will be offered by people who don’t give a rat’s ass about political parties. And, further, it will be devastating because it will be entirely valid:

Like speakers before him, former President Bill Clinton reminded those attending that the work the Kings set out to accomplish is not complete.

“What are we going to do for the rest of our lives?” he asked, urging others to follow in the footsteps of the Kings.
:
Some of the speakers took not-so-subtle stabs at the current White House.

The Rev. Joseph Lowery, former head of the Southern Christian Leadership, which King helped found in 1957, gave a playful reading of a poem in his eulogy:

She extended Martin’s message against poverty, racism and war
She deplored the terror inflicted by our smart bombs on missions way afar.

:
Former President Carter alluded to the hardship faced by the Kings in their struggle for civil rights, including — he added, pointedly — secret wiretapping and harassment by the FBI.

“The struggle for equal rights is not over,” Carter said. “We only have to recall the color of the faces of the people in Louisiana, Alabama and Mississippi � those who are most devastated by Katrina � to know that there are not equal opportunities for all Americans. It is our responsibility to continue.” — [emphasis mine]

Okay, so we’re about a half-century into this loathsome practice of defining special-interest demographic groups of people, shunting aside any hopes and dreams and ambitions they may have on an individual basis, and defining some perceived shortcoming they may be convinced they share as a group. There may once have been a valid reason for that, but read back to the previous sentence…HALF A GODDAMN CENTURY!

What the hell is the matter with you people?

What if your mechanic worked on your vapor-lock or your tune-up or your flat tire for fifty years and when you asked him how it’s going he said we’ve made GREAT strides…come a long way…we’ve still got a long way to go.

It just amazes me. Hundreds of thousands of women out there, might get a stopped up drain, maybe they’ll bust the garbage disposal. And before their poor husbands have had time to grab at the chicken bones that are stopping the thing up, they’ll be all “that’s taking way too long, you obviously don’t know what you’re doing, I’m calling the plumber.” But they can be told by race-movement activist overlords and feminist-movement activist overlords, “come a long way, not there quite yet, need to concentrate our energies for the struggle ahead” for freaking generations. Oh no, nothing wrong with that, I’m sure it’s all on the up-and-up. Just get back to me in five or ten years and let me know how the “struggle” is doing, okay?

You know why that little speech never changes? It has to do with defining the pain threshold downward. In the sixties, women really were treated like second-class citizens. A lot of people didn’t take them seriously…and you know, even that is a trivial complaint. Think about it. You’re a woman doctor in 1966 and everyone expects you to be a man, or they talk to you like you’re a nurse, or they look all surprised when you open your mouth and turn out to actually know something. That’s not abuse. That’s not being forced to work out in the cotton fields for fifteen to eighteen hours.

NOW, we’ve “come a long way” to the extent that a woman can end a guy’s career if she can walk into a room where he’s sitting, and tell someone “he made me feel uncomfortable.” Nobody’s being forced to sit in the back of a bus. In order to find grievances, we’ve got to send analysts out into the business world with their clipboards and see how the statistics look. No individuals can find anything to beef about, but the average woman makes 5% less than the average man, and the median woman makes 10% less than the median man…oh dear, we’ve got a long way to go.

The litmus test is this: Can the leaders of the activist movement articulate exactly what it is that has yet to be done? The answer is almost always no. For those exceptional cases where the mission of an activist movement really does include a measurable goal that has not yet been realized, it’s only natural to ask a second question: When the movement first started half a century ago, could you have sold this objective that, today, according to you, remains unrealized? And I can’t help noticing, the answer to that is always no.

So people are buying into something, years into some kind of struggle, that they would never have bought, had they not yet invested the effort and emotion into that struggle. That’s the equivalent of bringing home a puppy to see if you want to keep it. Or driving sixty miles to hear a pitch for a timeshare.

These are bad ideas.

And here’s another thing. One more thing that will ensure we can, with things left unchanged, hear the CALWWNTY drumbeat for another fifty, hundred, two hundred years without any change at all. It has to do with personal attitudes. Politically-incorrect personal attitudes. Listen real hard next time you hear someone say we’ve “made great strides, but still have a long way to go” or “we’ve come a long, long way, and should congratulate ourselves, but not pause long to do it because we’ve still got a long way to go.” Treat it as a special occasion when those cliche-masters define exactly what still has to be done. What do you hear? Is it what I hear? I’ll tell you what I hear…a lot of jawing about other people’s personal attitudes. The fact that some knuckle-dragging cretins, in that sacred space between their neanderthal ears where they have the God-given right to form whatever opinion they want — think that homosexuals complain a lot. Or that a woman isn’t as physically strong as a man. Or that certain ethnic groups eat a lot of certain kinds of food.

Horrors! We’ve got a long way to go!

That’s when things get scary. The fact that in a country that’s supposed to cherish free speech and freedom of choice, you can form certain thoughts in your own brain, and if you say something that betrays these thoughts and some uptight activist zealot doesn’t like it — it’s an incomplete political agenda. And off he toodles, to sell to his loyal followers, CALWWNTY — boy howdy we’ve come a long way, but you KNOW we’ve still got a long way to go because you know what I heard some guy say in the shopping mall today?

That’s not a grievance. That’s not a legitimate complaint. What that is, is people ripping each other off.

People taking other people for a ride, are always going to be among us. And people willing to be sold a bill of goods like this, are also always going to be among us. But must it be so popular to sell CALWWNTY in so many places and so many ways, so much of the time, with so little effort to disguise it? And must it work so often, and be exposed to so little challenge?

Clop clop, clop clop. Walk faster, little donkey. The carrot awaits…

Imitation is the Sincerest Form V

A couple months ago I made an observation about something really and truly bizarre that hasn’t gotten very much press at all since then. I would expect there would be a lot more eyebrow-raising and tongue-clucking about it, since I don’t like it. And failing that, if a whole lot of people disagree with me and like what I don’t like, I would hope there would be a lot more discussion about it. There hasn’t been any discussion. None.

I’m referring to the decision by a whole bunch of power-brokers in Washington, who know a great deal more about the inside political track than I do, that as the world’s oldest political party gears up to fight in the midterm elections and possibly take control of a chamber of congress, that party’s official position on what to do about Iraq will be — and you could never write this as fiction, no publisher would accept it — Nothing! Butkus! Did you know that? Did you know Democrats think, officially, that the time has come to get back to scaring old people with wildly implausible tales of Social Security payments being cut? Did you know they’re getting ready to run the campaigns you remember, “blah blah blah lock-box blah blah blah cost-of-living adjustment blah blah blah right-to-choose blah blah blah rich get richer, poor get poorer blah blah blah glass ceiling, make the minimum wage a living wage.”

It’s kind of stunning. A major political party is flailing around trying to find some issues, obviously having a tough time finding them…hundreds of weird-beard goat-molesters are trying to kill us in order to broadcast a political message. If you are travelling overseas, you may be kidnapped and killed. If that previous sentence was “if you are out walking too close to a power line, you might get cancer and die” — Democrats would know what to do about that. Whoa, try and stop ’em. Just don’t expect anything to actually be done to make things better for you if you’re the one with cancer! But when it comes to the mad mullahs, it’s a whole different kettle of fish. Our fearless Democrats who want to be our fearless leaders, are willing to come out and say that they’ve got nothing to say.

I don’t know if Congresswoman Ginny Brown-Waite, who represents the 5th Congressional District of Florida, reads my blog. I would expect hardly anybody does. But how then do you explain this gem which appeared in the St. Petersburg Times-online this morning.

Every time I meet with the liberal antiwar groups, the buttons always say, and are invariably the first words out of their mouths, “We support the troops.” I always wonder what liberals mean by “support” for the troops. And I have had quite a bit of difficulty finding out. These groups can never tell me.

As far as I can tell, when liberals say, “We support the troops,” they mean this time around they aren’t going to spit on our vets and they won’t protest welcome-home celebrations. When liberals say, “Support the troops,” as far as I can tell they mean refrain from personal attacks on our soldiers. This time around, liberals are hiding behind the rhetoric of a button and a slogan.

I disagree. Support is not a slogan. Support is more than wearing a button. Support is active. Supporting the troops is not saying things that encourage our enemies. Support is not saying things that make it harder for our troops to fight. Supporting the troops requires a commitment to win.

Let’s ask Rep. Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., about her support for the war on terror. I’m talking about her actions, not her rhetoric. The leader voted against funding for the Patriot Act and she voted against establishing the Department of Homeland Security. How about for our troops on the ground? The leader of the Democrats voted to cut intelligence funding by $500-million and voted to cut intelligence authorization by nearly 1 percent. This is how liberal Democrats support the troops.

Now, that’s solid gold stuff right there. But then Brown-Waite swooped in for the kill:

Anyone can criticize any aspect of the administration’s policy, but like it or not, it was a policy choice. Liberal Democrats have no policy and no vision for our security. Pelosi, the liberal leader in Congress, even said they would have an issue agenda for the 2006 elections, but it will not include a position on Iraq.

Are you kidding me? The minority party will not have a position on the biggest foreign policy challenge we face? Oh, I forgot Democrats’ position is they “support the troops.”

I’ve been robbed, but I’m not calling the police. I’m quite flattered.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… III

…and so I shan’t.

However, I do have an additional thought or two that I would like to put down in writing before the whole stupid controversy goes away…and Lord, I hope I’m just scoring these two points at that buzzer.

We have millions upon millions of bright, educated, otherwise-reasonable people in this country who are convinced…beyond the shadow of any doubt…that the whacko Islamic-militant embassy-burning goat-molesters are in the right on this one. Or, if they’re not in the right, certainly should be treated as if they are. That is to say, we should be looking all beady-eyed in the direction of Denmark, and between our ears we should have a thought or two kind of like “if you didn’t draw those damn cartoons, those embassies would still be standing.” In other words, the whacko goat-molesters are just doing what should be expected of them. They aren’t “responsible” in the true sense of the word, as responsibility is applied to thinking humans. They are about as culpable for torching those embassies…as a tornado is culpable for carrying away a mobile home.

I just figured out where I have seen that kind of thinking before.

Have you ever encountered one of those whacked-out families where one family member is just completely off his nut? Or her nut? Maybe the matriarch of the clan has a drinking problem. Or the baby-of-the-family is just spoiled rotten, jobless at 44, can do no wrong. Or the sister-in-law is manic-depressive and out-of-control.

Yeah, let’s say it’s the sister-in-law. Let’s say her name is Hannah. Haven’t you ever known about a family like this? Mark did something awful! What did he do? He made Hannah angry! Months pass…Oh my God, George did something terrible! What? He pissed off Hannah! Next year…that was the worst Christmas ever, Mary ruined it for everyone! How? She made Hannah upset!

After a few years, maybe someone will get married and a new member will join the family, perhaps saying something logical when he forgets to keep his mouth shut. “Excuse me, but…wouldn’t we all get along a little better if there was more of an expectation put on Hannah to take her goddam medication like she’s supposed to, and quit snapping off at everyone? How come it’s always Dave’s fault, or Mark’s fault, or Mary’s fault? How about we tell Hannah to put a cork in it, and if she can’t do that, just ignore her instead of snapping at whoever’s made her list?”

More often than not…the marriage that introduces this voice of reason into the fold, crumbles inside of two or three years. Then the dysfunctional family goes right back to the way it was. One crazy person, one or two enablers, and a whole crapload of weary people who would rather put up with the situation than do something about it. And so it goes.

The trouble is, though, the people who recognize the whacko weird-beard goat-molesters as being the problem — CANNOT just get a divorce to get out of the family. The enablers who like to make their overbearing — and wrong-headed — proclamations about who is to blame, who is a victim, and who is just a force of nature with no culpability for the awful things they do, are proclaiming this for EVERYONE. The WORLD. Not just a messed-up family.

This is one of those deals where evil will triumph when good men do nothing.

What can good men do? Plenty. Just seeing things as they really are, speaks volumes. Protesters burned down embassies. PROTESTERS burned down embassies. A Danish cartoonist did not. And the Danish cartoonist committed no blasphemy — not unless said Danish cartoonist happens to personally belong to a religion that regards this as blasphemy, which, I don’t think he does. And if that’s the case, I hope you weird-beard goat-molesters will shut your cakeholes and pay for the reconstruction of the embassies you burned. Not holding my breath, though.

But that is my opinion…and no amount of “Oh my God, what in the world did you say to HANNAH?!? SHE’S SO UPSET!!” is going to change my mind about that.

If we accept the argument that the Danish cartoonist is truly culpable, and the weird-beard goat-molesting building-burners are just non-sentient forces of nature, this will become true. The cartoonist will be punished, and in the next generation we will see many, many more burned embassies. Just like my metaphorical dysfunctional family can and will see many, many more temper tantrums out of Hannah.

Update 2-15-06: It’s awfully embarrassing for me to have to admit this, especially in a web forum visible to a whole bunch of strangers. Of course this is the blog that nobody ever reads, so how bad can it be. But it’s been asked of me if the previous rant about the reasonable person marrying into the dysfunctional family with Hannah the crazy whacked-out sister-in-law, is autobiographical.

Well, my marriage(s) history has been a rocky patch of road, and to tell you the truth, it was enough of a jarring educational experience about how the world works, which I desperately needed to learn, that…well, I just don’t know. Couldn’t tell ya. I can recall things that happened afterward with crystal clarity, but what happened before & during — really, it’s just a fog. I hesitate to call that “PTSD” because I haven’t seen combat, and I think this association would be a glaring disservice to people who’ve suffered from real PTSD. So as far as I’m concerned, I don’t have it. But I’ll admit, with the passage of time, I’ve noticed I can’t remember things like I rightfully should be able to.

Well, the trouble with Hannah has indeed been noticed by others, in fact, years before I was ever born. There’s a great illustration of it in a famous Twilight Zone episode that aired on November 3, 1961: It’s a Good Life, about that creepy kid who wished people into the cornfield. The episode starred Billy Mumy as Anthony Fremont, possessor of an (unexplained) omnipotent power, which he could use to do…anything, to anyone, anytime. As the episode worked onward, the story focused not so much on the genesis of this power, but on the reaction of those who had to exist in close proximity to the freaky kid.

Anthony had this power since infancy, if I recall right, and had matured into a young boy with a truly nightmarish personality, since, of course, he had developed without any disciplinary limits placed on him. Who could impose such limits, after all? What would happen to them? So Anthony had never been punished; indeed, Anthony had never even been criticized. His detachment from reality grew just as surely as his pant sizes grew.

It ended up being a very famous episode of Twilight Zone. It was one of the few episodes where there were no “central” characters. No “straight men.” No “ordinary” people. How in the world could there be? For Anthony, or anyone else, to conduct themselves in any “rational” way was declared to be a logical impossibility, so we, the audience, were left to supply the role of “rational” observer…watching this endless parade of strange people in front of us, one all-powerful and rude as holy hell, and the rest of them a quivering jello-like mass of puppets deathly afraid of saying the wrong thing at the wrong time.

Twilight Zone made a lot of mediocre, obscure episodes, recalled nostalgically by absolutely no one, swallowed entirely by the sands of time. This would surely have become one of them, if the scenario didn’t resonate in some disturbing way with lots of people. Sadly, I’m afraid it would have been quite difficult to imagine in 1961, what a quivering, jello-like mass of puppets we would have become in 2006, with the weird-beards filling in for the role of Anthony Fremont. Just as Anthony’s parents and other relatives became just as weird and comical as he was, so too are the rest of us about to become just as weird and comical as the goat-molesters.

He Had No Choice

Oh boy, that Julian Bond of the NAACP is in some real trouble, at least, he’s headed in that direction if conservative bloggers have any pull with the public-at-large. Which they don’t, of course. So he’s scot-free.

In fact, even today very few people are aware of, or can even find out about, the inflammatory statements made by the Chairman of the NAACP at Fayetteville State University on Wednesday. Sister Toldjah has captured the essence of what went on and I’m just going to link to her and quote her verbatim because, as it turns out, she lives right there. And I couldn’t say it better myself than the way she put it. And she looks much more appealing that I do, so here goes.

NAACP chairman makes GOP/Nazis comparison

Right here in North Carolina:

Civil rights activist and NAACP Chairman Julian Bond delivered a blistering partisan speech at Fayetteville State University in North Carolina last night, equating the Republican Party with the Nazi Party and characterizing Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and her predecessor, Colin Powell, as “tokens.”

“The Republican Party would have the American flag and the swastika flying side by side,” he charged.
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The harsh partisan rhetoric from Bond should not have surprised anyone who has followed him in recent years.

In July 2001, Bond said, “[Bush] has selected nominees from the Taliban wing of American politics, appeased the wretched appetites of the extreme right wing, and chosen Cabinet officials whose devotion to the Confederacy is nearly canine in its uncritical affection.”

Gee – and to think there were actually people who raised the roof on the fact that the President didn�t want to meet with the NAACP?

Update 8:31 PM: Well wadda ya know? A quick search of GoogleNews.com using the terms �Julian Bond� and �swastika� as of this writing yields exactly three, count �em, three entries with the mention of the swastika reference, and only one of them is from a semi-MSM website: World Net Daily, which is the piece I�ve got quoted in this post. Another search of GoogleNews – this time using the terms �Julian Bond� and �FSU� (where he was speaking) generated two MSM results, and neither of them (here nor here) mentioned the swastika reference.

Let�s give it up for our MSM, ladies and gents! As always, they are complicit in the racism of black Democrats to the point they won�t even report it. I guess it�s become so old hat to hear such comments from racist black Democrats that maybe the mediots don�t even consider it news anymore.

Now, what should be newsworthy about this is obvious. The “black vote” has come to be a critical resource to Democrats every single election cycle, kind of like pickled pigs’ feet is a critical resource to a redneck, except the redneck doesn’t have to pretend to respect the pigs’ feet. He just gnaws on them, whereas Democrats have to go through a ritual of fake respect before exploiting the black vote. So if the question did not stand before Julian Bond’s escapades, it sure as hell must be asked afterward: Can you be a Republican and support the NAACP?

As Sister Toldjah points out, President Bush is supposed to be receiving a lot of flak for his refusal to meet with the NAACP last year. One would have to presume, as one prepares to get all huffy-puffy about the deletion of the NAACP card from the White House rolodex, that NAACP membership is not mutually exclusive from being a Republican. But it appears Chairman Bond would disagree.

Well, the IRS would like to have a word or two with the NAACP about their new role as a Democratic National Committee satellite office. But to be realistic about it, Chairman Bond really has no choice but to drop to his knees and kiss the DNC’s ass. The sad fact of the matter is, that under Bond’s leadership, the NAACP can’t be friendly to Republicans — and it has nothing to do with “Advancement of Colored People,” it has to do with the way you talk to people when you try to convince them of something.

Earlier today I got all cheesed off about the State Department’s comments in response to the Danish “Muhammed with a bomb in his turban” cartoon. My point remains that when you skip past why people are supposed to think something, and hurry forward to the part about what you ultimately want them to think, you are affording yourself a luxury which cannot be purchased except for the expense of basic politeness. When the State Department says “inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this matter is not acceptable,” with the actual power to monitor Danish press content lying well outside of its jurisdiction, the State Department embraces a culture that is downright rude — and quite un-American.

Let’s take a really simplified example of what I’m talking about here. Let’s say there’s some guy named Bob and I think Bob’s a dolt, and I want to convince you that Bob’s a dolt. I could do it the Rush Limbaugh way, which is the American way. I could say “Snerdley, cue Cut #15. Here we go, folks, Bob commenting on (blah blah blah).” The cut runs. And immediately afterward I come on and say “so there you have it, folks! There is only ONE WAY that Bob could be actually believing the things he’s saying…he’s a dolt.”

You’re still free to believe Bob’s not a dolt. But as a courtesy to you, I have provided you with the foundation to determine why you and I disagree about Bob’s doltishness. Before I’m even aware that you disagree, you have all the pieces of the puzzle. You’ve got a good mapping of what convinced me that didn’t convince you, what convinced you that didn’t convince me, and where we fall into line with each other. In fact, until you reply, you know a little bit more than I do about some important stuff.

It’s politeness. It is nothing more than manners. It’s like when you’re standing in my way at a coffee shop, I say “excuse me, may I please get through here?” instead of “stand aside, you’re in my way.” Polite people take the first approach, even though they really don’t think they’re interrupting something important, and they’re really not open to being denied permission to cut through. Polite people go through the motions anyway. It’s a sign of respect. It shows that you consider the person you are addressing to be a peer, an equal — who might possibly know some things that you don’t.

What’s another example of this politeness? Well, Rev. Jesse Lee Peterson, who is the president of Brotherhood Organization of A New Destiny (BOND), seems to have a polite way of convincing people of his point. He’d like to have a word or two with Julian Bond, by the way.

NAACP President Bruce Gordon and the NAACP Board of Directors should repudiate the reprehensible remarks made by Julian Bond. Over the past several years, the NAACP Chairman has repeatedly made bigoted remarks about Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice and other black conservatives. It�s time that he�s held accountable for his words.

It�s no accident that Bond delivered his hate-filled speech at a historically black university during Black History Month. The NAACP Chairman is intentionally maligning the character of black conservatives in hopes of poisoning the minds of black Americans to keep them on the racist liberal Democrats plantation.

If the NAACP leadership does not repudiate Julian Bond�s remarks, then we can only assume Bruce Gordon and others are in agreement with Bond�s lies and hatred of black conservatives. [emphasis mine]

There ya go. What does Jesse Lee Peterson think about Bruce Gordon’s opinion? Why does he think that? It’s all crystal-clear. From Rev. Peterson, to anyone taking the time to read the BOND press release…a small but meaningful dose of simple, common, basic, God Damned baseline-level respect. Feels good, doesn’t it?

That’s what Rush does every hour of every day. It’s what Sister Toldjah did, above. If I disagreed with Sister Toldjah — and I don’t — I would have a clear-cut definition as to why. That’s nice.

Obviously, Chairman Bond is not nice that way. He talked down to his audience, according to the transcripts I saw, and simply commanded them from his high podium to incorporate his viewpoints about President Bush. Why does he think Bush is a Nazi? I don’t know; perhaps he gave a good foundation for this viewpoint in his speech, but I strongly doubt it. Nor do I think it’s really that big of a mystery what the reason is. Let’s just go waaaay out on a limb here, and just suppose Chairman Bond is a passionate Democrat who has found the NAACP to be a good recruiting vehicle. I don’t really know that for a fact. It doesn’t matter. The IRS is working on that case right now anyway, and it’s much more important to them than it is to me.

But the point is, with his style of speaking Chairman Bond has to support Democrats. HE HAS TO. He has no choice. Because when you talk down to people like that, telling them what to think — guess what? You can’t stop. You can’t go out on Mondays, Wednesdays and Fridays engaging in the courtesy of saying “okay, this is what somebody said, and this is my evidence that they know better, and that’s how I formed my opinion that they’re a liar, see?” — and then on Tuesdays and Thursdays, indulge in the purely High Priest mystic European tactic of “Bob’s a dolt, George is a Nazi, Kevin’s a fag, Barbara’s a slut. Get it? Got it? Good.”

It’s like oil and water. You can’t mix the two up.

Why? Because if I start accumulating a faithful audience that just believes everything I tell them like a bunch of simpletons, as Chairman Bond clearly expected his audience to do, and then I feed them my propaganda for an extended period of time — I’ve got to stick to that tactic. If I switch, and start explaining myself Rush-Limbaugh style, I have to give people my rationale. If I give them my rationale, they might find the conclusion is quite acceptable to them, but the process held some logical leap they can’t support.

And then, if you’re in that audience you have no choice but to start saying — “well, if you’ve got this prejudice that moved Argument A along, in a way I don’t find acceptable, how then did you arrive at Conclusion B?” Every little thing that I told them according to the European High Priest method, would now be opened to doubt. The bubble will have burst.

So it’s one or the other. Julian Bond, because of the way he talks down to his audiences, instead of addressing them as thinking, receptive, somewhat-intelligent people, can’t be a Republican and he can’t exist in the same ecosystem as Republicans. That other political party, which was built up on a history of union goons talking down to their union members and telling those members who to vote for and what initiatives to support, and now works day and night to convince us “Bush LIED!!!” without once specifically telling us what he lied about — that is the only comfortable home for the Julian Bond brand of agitprop.

He has to be a Democrat. And his organization has to be a Democrat party satellite. They have NO CHOICE.

Must-Tards IV

I have a number of comments to make about this worldwide dust-up over the Danish cartoon depicting the prophet Muhammad with a bomb in his turban. The first comment I’ll make without making any comment at all. I’m a great believer in the power of leaving things unsaid, when the time is right, and I think the time is right here. So no commentary for this comment. Just facts.

Muslims across the globe have been organizing protests to give voice to the outrage they have over this cartoon. I have been called upon, like all commoners, by the High Priests of diplomacy and journalism, to accept the meme that Islam is a religion of peace and that those who practice terror only claim to be Muslims, but aren’t really. In the front section of my Saturday paper, an Associated Press story appeared very prominently giving me the latest news about how angry the Muslim community really is over this blasphemous misrepresentation of Islam.

Clerics in Palestinian areas called in Friday prayers for a boycott of Danish and European goods and the severing of diplomatic ties. Tens of thousands of incensed Muslims marched through Palestinian cities, burning the Danish flag and calling for vengeance.

“Whoever defames our prophet should be executed,” said Ismail Hassan, a tailor who marched in the pouring rain with hundreds of other Muslims in the West Bank city of Ramallah. “Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up,” the protesters chanted. [emphasis mine]

Foreign diplomats, aid workers and journalists began pulling out of Palestinian areas Thursday because of kidnapping threats against some Europeans.

See? No commentary. Just facts. And yet, a representation of the Muslim faith has been made to me, and this representation has made an impression. I’ll leave unmentioned what that impression is. It should be obvious. I mean, Muslim protesters have gone out of their way to do that representing, and I feel it only fitting I should let their words speak for themselves.

Wouldn’t want to offend anyone.

Next commentary. The story continues to point out,

Islamic law, based on clerics’ interpretation of the Quran and the sayings of the prophet, forbids any depictions of the Prophet Muhammad, even positive ones, to prevent idolatry.
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The State Department (that’s ours, the U.S.) called the drawings “offensive to the beliefs of Muslims” and said the right to freedom of speech must be coupled with press responsibility.

“Inciting religious or ethnic hatred in this manner is not acceptable,” State Department press officer Janelle Hironimus said. [emphasis mine]

My commentary is simply this. It wasn’t quite so long ago we had a groundswell of left-wing weeping, wailing, and gnashing of teeth that someone from the government — specifically, the Joint Chiefs of Staff — had imposed a “chilling effect” on free speech simply by transmitting a written protest about something on Department of Defense letterhead. What was being protested? A cartoon! “As the joint chiefs, we rarely put our hand to one letter, but we cannot let this reprehensible cartoon go unanswered.” This earned a widespread rebuke from the liberal blogging community, which in my opinion was articulated most skillfully by “Atrios”:

The point is there’s a big difference between someone like Bill O’Reilly saying “people should watch what they say” and Ari Fleischer saying it. Both are meant to intimidate, but one is an agent of the government and one is not. Both can have a chilling effect on speech, but only one has the official government approval on doing so. Censorship? Not quite. But creeping close to it.

Calling Atrios, calling Atrios. I’m not bright enough to get your e-mail address to work right, but you need to know about this. The State Department is having a chilling effect upon free speech…it’s complaining about a cartoon. The State Department works for the Government.

I hope Atrios and people like him wake up about this. Whereas I thought the complaint about the Joint Chiefs of Staff was laughable, and said so, I’d support a protest over this latest issue.

This is America, and when you belong to a certain religion that deplores certain illustrations, and you see such an illustration in the press, the solution is for you to cease & desist looking at that illustration. You do have the right to give voice to your opinions about why the illustration is so deplorable, and if you have children under your care who are under 18 and not yet emancipated, you can control what they look at. IT STOPS THERE.

You may not assemble with others who are similarly offended, for the purpose of coercion, especially with violent acts or threats of violent acts. Our Constitution specifically addresses this by recognizing the “right of the people peaceably to assemble” [emphasis mine]. My dictionary defines “peaceably” as “Inclined or disposed to peace; promoting calm.” I do not recognize “Bin Laden our beloved, Denmark must be blown up,” and “Whoever defames our prophet should be executed,” as inclined to peace and promoting calm.

Granted, those protesting Muslims are no more bound to any interpretations of the United States Constitution than the Danish cartoonist is bound to interpretations of the Quran (ahem, ahem). But the State Department is obligated to promote the values of that Constitution in all things.

The State Department has failed in the discharge of that obligation here.

This is America. We may have kicked the world’s economic ass over the last hundred years plus, but you know what? We didn’t do it just by being mean, and we certainly didn’t do it by being fat, oblivious and lazy. Those Americans who contributed positively to the coveted posture which the country enjoys today, did so by bearing in mind the crucial distinction between “things the way I want them to be” and “things the way they are.”

We don’t obsess over the word “must” here. And we damn sure don’t tolerate our government giving European-style “must, ought, should, gotta gotta gotta” directives to the PRESS, whether that press is based here or somewhere else.

This is a very subtle distinction. A razor-thin distinction. The State Department could have issued a statement calling out the danger that has been imposed upon foreign nationals, particularly Danish foreign nationals, traveling in predominantly Muslim countries at the time the cartoon appeared. It could have issued a statement urging the Danish newspaper to express regret over publishing the cartoon. It could even have done what the Joint Chiefs of Staff did with that other cartoon, perhaps even blatantly ripping off their material, saying the newspaper and cartoonist “have done a disservice to readers and to [their] reputation by using such a callous depiction” of the prophet.

Instead, by using that highly charged word “must,” the State Department has sought to appease the Dynamite Muslim community — hey, now there’s a useful phrase — by jettisoning American values, in favor of theirs. The State Department has borrowed the Dynamite Muslim community’s “MUST”. Of necessity, therefore, the State Department has kept silent on what will happen if the Danish press refuses the counsel offered — as you always have to do, when you throw around that word “must.” That’s the whole problem with the word. It short-circuits any discussion of alternatives. It’s a my-way-or-the-highway word.

Well, here is my discussion of alternatives. The War on Terror, as much success as it may realize in the arena of good-guy casualties versus bad-guy casualties, or in the arena of taking control of land and countries, is at a critical juncture in the arena of ideas. Does the little guy have the right, anymore, to think for himself? Can he enjoy that unmolested right, Thomas-Jefferson style? The people our servicemembers are fighting, would like the ultimate answer to that question to be a big fat “no.” They would like a worldwide system of government to be adopted where, when a man marches toward the edge of a cliff, and his government tells him it’s safe to keep on going, he goes.

And that really sums up the alternatives. Who decides what reality is? The guy who will profit or suffer based on decisions based on that reality — or the ruling class to whom he owes some kind of fealty? Do individual cognitions matter? Does the little guy collect facts, form opinions, gauge his confidence in those opinions, and make decisions based on them? Or do High Priests tell us what to think?

What does it mean to be free, here in America? Are we sovereigns, or vassals? Grown-ups, or virtual-kids?

I’d like an answer to that question. Because I think everything depends on it.

And I’m looking at a news story where “Muslims” say they’re peaceful and then, in the very same breath, say Denmark ought to be blown up. My High Priests in journalism and in government are giving me these commands that I am to keep in mind the former, and not the latter. They’re telling me what to conclude about what I have seen; and these pre-digested opinions being pushed on me, are quite out-of-step with what I think common sense leads me to believe.

I’m pretty unimportant, so the directions being given to me, are being given to everybody.

This is America. We believe in the brains between our ears, here. We are supposed to believe in what we see and hear, subordinating our own senses to the authority of no one else, no matter what their station. Is that still the way it works today? Or has someone from half-a-world away, quite deliberately changed that for us?

The only other comment I have to make is that before we throw out newspapers for good and resolve to get all our news from the innernets, we should look well on this episode. A cartoon appearing on the innernets wouldn’t cause this kind of trouble because when the heat got above a certain temperature, down that cartoon would go. Already, with regard to this particular cartoon, I can show you one web location where it is right now and six more locations where it used to be but no longer is. Is that freedom of the press? Similarly, there are all kinds of hot-spots on the innernets dealing with news stories about how outraged the Dynamite Muslims are, but very few of them include this bit about executing whoever defames the prophet, or blowing up Denmark. I had to type in that little gem by hand from my printed copy.

Perhaps there is a copy of such problematic comments floating around in electronic form. But after a handful of fruitless Google searches, I have no reason to think so. What I have reason to think, is that it would be very difficult to overestimate the abundance and aggressiveness of “cleansing agents” out there sanitizing news we collect from other countries. And it’s the duty of every free man and woman to collect what news they can collect, as “raw” as that news can possibly be, and make up their own minds.

Their own minds. That is the key. I have so much more respect for someone who forms their own opinions based on what they can learn, even if they completely disagree with me, than I do for someone who deals with mindless High-Priest-to-pauper talking-points…whether they disseminate the talking points, absorb them, or pass them on.

Messianic Complex

Not that it’s any of my business — or maybe what’s becoming a vexing concern to me, is that it is being made my business — but it’s a challenge for me to piece together how Rock Star Bono spent Thursday of this week.

Appearances being any indication, he kicked it off schmoozing it up with President Bush, religious leaders, and members of Congress with a plea for “an extra once percent” of the federal budget to be spent on poverty in Africa, at a time when we just wiped out one-and-a-half percent of that budget that had been spent on programs for the poor in our own nation.

Bono used the “tithing” argument. Now there is something I wish would get a little bit more of an intensive debate. Is it just, proper, or even fitting with a consistent mission, when taxes are used for tithes? What does the word “tithe” mean in relation to the federal treasury? Does it even have a place? Does it make us better people when we are involuntarily taxed in order to salve Bono’s “messianic complex”?

U2’s Bono, citing the Koran, the Bible and rock band Dire Straits, urged President George W. Bush on Thursday to boost US aid to the world’s poor by about $25bn (about R150bn).

“This is not about charity, it’s about justice,” the singer and activist told an annual US national prayer breakfast, peering through orange-tinted glasses at Bush, US lawmakers, and Muslim, Christian, and Jewish leaders.
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“Mr President, Congress, people of faith, people of America, I want to suggest to you today that you see the flow of effective foreign assistance as tithing, which, to be truly meaningful, will need an additional 1% of the federal budget tithed to the poor,” said Bono.

Bush’s Office of Management and Budget estimated that the US government spent about $2.473 trillion in 2005, making the singer’s request roughly $25bn.
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“If you’re wondering what I’m doing here at a prayer breakfast, well, so am I. I’m certainly not here as a man of the cloth, unless that cloth is leather. I’m certainly not here because I’m a rock star. Which leaves only one possible explanation: I’ve got a messianic complex,” he quipped.

Well, before Thursday was out, Bono seems to have forgotten to dance with who brung him. He warmed up the crowd at a Democratic party event, in which famous presidential loser Al Gore got to get a few “extra” jabs in about domestic spying and global warming.

The annual retreat of the U.S. House Democratic caucus in Kingsmill featured the rock group U2’s singer Bono on Thursday, and former Vice President Al Gore was expected to speak today.

The retreat’s events were closed to both the media and public.

Bono’s speech Thursday night touched on themes of fighting AIDS and promoting debt relief in Africa, said a congressman’s press secretary, who was at the retreat but spoke on condition of anonymity.

Gore was expected to address global warming and the Bush administration’s domestic spying program – two issues he has recently criticized.

Interesting thing about that word “extra”: It pertains to Gore’s complaining about domestic spying and global warming, since Gore has complained about this before, and it also pertains to our proposed “tithe” since our federal coffers have already put out some cash to help the world’s poor, especially in Africa. “Extra” is used when something has already gone ahead of what’s proposed. I’d like to know: Does Bono even know how much has gone ahead of the events this last Thursday? Does he know how much sore-loser bellyaching Al Gore has been doing? Does he even know how much the United States has done in Africa?

Off the top of my head, I don’t know the answer to that last one, but I don’t have a messianic complex about Africa. You need to know that fact before you start making moral pronouncements on whether our “tithe” is adequate or not.

I cannot undertake to lay my finger on that article of the Constitution which granted a right to Congress of expending, on the objects of benevolence, the money of their constituents. — James Madison

Federal aid in such cases [federal aid to drought-stricken Texas farmers] encourages the expectation of paternal care on the part of the government and weakens the sturdiness of our national character, while it prevents the indulgence among our people of that kindly sentiment and conduct which strengthen the bond of a common brotherhood. — Grover Cleveland

Hey, Greenlight This

Here’s an interesting article from January 31 that touches on a lot of the left-wing stuff to come out of Hollywood lately. I think Hollywood’s doing the “Michaelangelo Virus” propaganda trick. That’s where you flood your propaganda while protesting “no, I’m not being liberal, no, I’m not being liberal, no, I’m not being liberal” until some pre-determined date, after which your tactic becomes “YES I’m flooding American cinema with liberal messages, and GODDAMN IT THAT’S MY RIGHT!” And of course anybody who’s taken the time to notice the liberal messages, is anti-freedom and anti-American.

The author has found quite a few examples, considering he’s only covering what came out late last year.

Hollywood sends a message?

After hearing the list of Oscar nominees Tuesday morning, you might have thought Hollywood was trying to send a message with its best-picture choices.

It’s not a stretch, given the increased criticism for liberal politics that movies and the entertainment industry in general have taken since the beginning of the millennium, some of it unwarranted, some of it completely justified.

Look at the best-picture category and you see “Brokeback Mountain,” a movie about two cowboys who carry on a decades-long love affair; “Crash,” a searing examination of racism in this country; “Good Night, and Good Luck,” which chastises the government and media using the battle between legendary CBS journalist Edward R. Murrow and Sen. Joseph McCarthy; and “Munich,” which filters the Israeli-Palestinian conundrum through the events after the Munich Olympics in 1972. Even the other nominee, “Capote,” could tweak a few noses because its title character, celebrity author Truman Capote, was gay.

We’re still in the “denial” stage of this liberal monotone, which means there are many industry-watchers who will challenge the assertion that Hollywood is even liberal — no doubt putting the blame for that perception on the eyes of the beholder. To them, I submit my list of movie projects I’d like to see sometime…although I’m not holding my breath.

1. September 11: A five-hour miniseries detailing the last days in the lives of the September 11 hijackers before their notorious attack on the United States. Includes over one full hour of footage that documents the actual hijacking, especially the agonizing decisions of victims who jumped to their deaths from the World Trade Center to avoid roasting alive. Starring Ben Kingsley with a realistic hairpiece as Mohammed Atta.

2. Without A Country: Two-hour miniseries discussing the decision of Franklin Roosevelt (James Woods) to violate the fifth-amendment rights of Japanese-American citizens, take them out of their homes, and lock them up in internment camps.

3. We Shall Never Surrender: A one-hour documentary examining the policy differences between Neville Chamberlin (Kelsey Grammar) and Winston Churchill (Wilford Brimley). Rich in commentary that some may think applies to our time.

4. Nine Old Men: A made-for-TV movie that recounts the days when Chief Justice Charles Evans Hughes (Sean Connery) bravely fought off the court-packing plan of the Roosevelt administration in 1937.

5. For The Next 200 Years: A gritty and jaded behind-the-scenes look at the plan of LBJ (Kelsey Grammar, again) to pass the Civil Rights Act in order to “have those n***ers voting Democrat for the next 200 years”.

6. Morning in America: A three-hour miniseries that begins with the Hostage Crisis of 1979, right up until the hostages were released the day Ronald Reagan became President. A subplot examines how the gas crisis and “stagflation” crisis continued to fester under the presidency of Jimmy Carter, only to be both miraculously solved, also by Reagan. Includes a half hour of epilogue documentary footage in which economic experts from The Cato Institute discuss why Reagan’s economic and foreign policies were so effective. Special commentary by Prof. Arthur Laffer.

7. Smite The Infidel In Their Necks: Two 60-minute installments examine, year-by-year, the rise of the radical Islamist threat, from the death of the Prophet Mohammed to the present time. Goes into special detail on the Achille Lauro hijacking, the Pan Am flight over Lockerbie, the USS Cole disaster and the September 11 attacks.

8. Wilson: A Jim Crow President. This three-hour miniseries follows President Woodrow Wilson (Robert Duvall) from his childhood until his death. The middle installment covers the segregationist policies of his administration during World War I in particularly specific detail.

9. Chappaquiddick: A True Story. Self-explanatory. Starring John Malkovich as a young Ted Kennedy.

10. Florida 2000: What Really Happened. A two-hour documentary recounting the Presidential Election of 2000 day by shameful day. Highlights include Al Gore’s retraction of his concession speech, and several narratives to correct the record as presented in “Fahrenheit 9/11,” Michael Moore’s 2004 “documentary.” DVD SPECIAL EDITION BONUS MATERIALS INCLUDE: An interactive, follow-up quiz.

11. Three Hundred Thirty-Six: Drawing on the 20th-Century Fox series “24” for inspiration, this non-anthology series examines the life of a fictitious Supreme Court nominee, played by Val Kilmer, slowing down time to the extent that each SEASON of the show is a DAY in the two weeks from his nomination to confirmation by the Senate. While being grilled by bloated liberal senators who demonstrate their staggering ignorance of constitutional principles and history, he must covertly learn all he can to stop an imminent terrorist attack, possibly involving a nuclear weapon. Inspired by the nomination of Justice Samuel Alito, who makes a cameo appearance as the President.

12. My Dinner With Warren And Tom: A liberal law professor (Robert Conrad), suffering a heart-attack in his sleep, hovers between the planes of life and death. He is given the chance to invite any two historical figures he desires, to a dinner which he imagines to take place in his own living room. He decides to dine with Thomas Jefferson (Ted Nugent) and the great Chief Justice Earl Warren (Ricky Schroeder). He is shocked — SHOCKED — to discover they don’t get along. Will he survive? And if so, with a radically new perspective on American law?

Hotmail: Someone Squealed

I’ve had a Hotmail account since 1998. Somewhere back in the early days, Hotmail began to entice me to click on this link called “MSN Today,” which is like an online version of those cutesy old magazines all crinkled-up and covered with dry baby slobber at Supercuts, which you start leafing through absent-mindedly right after they tell you there’s a twenty-minute wait. Except where the slobbery magazines presume I’m a teenage- or twenty-something-girl because their market research tells them to presume such a thing, MSN Today has always been emphatically convinced that’s what I am.

Until lately.

Yeah, they’ve figured out I’m a guy. I’m not sure how Microsoft has gotten ahold of the technology to tell girls apart from guys, but somehow they got it done.

So no longer, do links dangle in front of me, enticing me to read stories about what I have to do to get a bikini-ready bod by April. No more tips on how to figure out if my “fella” is commitment-phobic, how to shape him up if he is, how to plan for my June wedding if he’s not. And I’m just going to have to look elsewhere for the latest recipes for that wild peach-and-peanut-butter avacado salad, sure to be a hit at the picnic when I finally meet his parents.

But I still get some personality tests! Oh joy! Actually, I’m not being sarcastic. If you’re going to put out a womens’ magazine with that staple of womens’ magazines, the personality test, and address it to guys — I think the MSN Today (Match) columnist has done a bang-up job of customizing the content to the audience. Take a look.

Is Your Honey High-Maintenance?

Sure, you want to be in a relationship. And you�re prepared to accommodate a few of your new partner�s requirements. But how can you distinguish between a lady who knows what she wants and a prima donna who wants you to get it for her? Take this fun quiz to determine if your new honey�s high-maintenance before it�s too late!

1. You land a huge new account at work. Your lady friend�s response:
Fantastic. Pick up something extravagant for me at Tiffany�s on the way home. (Score = -1)
Great. I have some items on lay-away that I can pay off! (Score = 1)
Finally! More money for us to enjoy! Let�s hit the mall this weekend. (Score = 2)
Let�s go out to dinner to celebrate! (Score = 3)
I�m so proud of you! Tell me all about it. (Score = 4)

:
:
:

Scoring
Less than 0: Talk about a fixer-upper. This gal�s not only a money pit, but she�s going to require a lot of your time and attention. Unless you want to be henpecked for eternity, get out now.

0-5: She requires entirely too much attention to be any fun over the long haul. Life�s too short to suffer like this… Why not search for a new love?

6-10: She�s either self-centered or just plain rude. Maybe even both. You can do better. So cut your losses and look for someone who can focus on you now and then.

11-15: A little self-absorbed, but depending on your personality, you might not mind. Check your gut to see if you can deal with these behaviors.

16-20: Jackpot! This gal has high expectations, but low-maintenance needs.

I know this seems intellectually vapid, and many among those who read this, the blog that nobody reads, are going to protest that this is just another sortie in the never-ending mission to pussify American society. To make males into shemales.

They’re right.

But I find it awfully hard to condemn this…wasn’t so long ago, a quiz like this would have avoided me a whole world of grief. Guys don’t think about this kind of stuff. Especially young guys. They should.

Anti-Censorship

Now here is an interesting proposal for us to contemplate, although it’s not being presented as a theory subject to our private consideration, but as empirical truth. It goes like this: Disapproval expressed by an agent of the government has a surplus chilling effect upon the target, above & beyond the effect from a private entity expressing equivalent disapproval. Therefore, anyone who is part of the (Republican) government should be put on a much shorter leash in expressing disapproval than, say, radio talk show hosts liberal bloggers and smarmy newspaper cartoonists.

Eschaton, a.k.a Atrios, a.k.a Duncan Black has done a very thoughtful job of breaking this argument down for us.

It of course isn’t strictly censorship, but any time a member of the government complains in this way, behind a government podium or on official letterhead, it does indeed get closer to official censorship. The point is to have a chilling effect…The point is there’s a big difference between someone like Bill O’Reilly saying “people should watch what they say” and Ari Fleischer saying it. Both are meant to intimidate, but one is an agent of the government and one is not. Both can have a chilling effect on speech, but only one has the official government approval on doing so. Censorship? Not quite. But creeping close to it.

Got that? Proliferation of a chilling effect, or an attempt to cause this chilling effect, potent or not, creeps close to censorship.

Atrios thinks a venture into that direction is worth pointing out, whether the journey eventually crosses the line into the umbra of actual censorhip, or not. Therefore, it seems a logical inference that the direction of this journey is subject to all of the moral disdain that would be invoked in response to real censorship — just, maybe, not as much of that disdain. It is the coercive quality involved when someone like Ari Fleischer notes that people should watch what they say. The “chilling effect.” That is the test.

That, and the question of whether the “watch what you say” guy works for the government.

But wait! Isn’t there a chilling effect involved when someone who is not associated with the Government in any way says that people should watch what they say? There must be…or else, why do it? Atrios says “The point is to have a chilling effect.” That is his test. But Bill O’Reilly wants to have a chilling effect too, does he not?

I’m afraid the distinction between O’Reilly and Fleischer has escaped me. One works for the government and one does not, that I get…but how is this made meaningful? If Bill O’Reilly thinks I should watch what I say, here at the blog nobody reads, I just might listen to him. The potential is there. Similarly, if the White House Press Secretary tells me to watch what I say, I just might tell him to stick it and keep talking; bloggers do so all the time. So I guess I need a little more foundation to the argument that these two kinds of “censorship” reside in somewhat different neighborhoods. Having trouble seeing it, from where I sit.

Now, if the the White House uses some kind of police power over me, THEN we can talk. That would be categorically different, since, of course, Bill O’Reilly can’t do anything to me. So let’s go back to Chapter One Verse One. Let’s find out what was done. What did the Joint Chiefs of Staff do to drum up this cry about censorship? — Or, rather, this cry about creeping toward censorship?

They wrote a letter. All six of the Chiefs of Staff put their signatures on the letter, and the letter was written to protest a cartoon (right). The Washington Post, today, put up a slightly edited version of what they received from the Chiefs:

We were extremely disappointed to see the Jan. 29 editorial cartoon by Tom Toles.

Using the likeness of a service member who has lost his arms and legs in war as the central theme of a cartoon was beyond tasteless. Editorial cartoons are often designed to exaggerate issues, and The Post is obviously free to address any topic, including the state of readiness of the armed forces. However, The Post and Mr. Toles have done a disservice to readers and to The Post’s reputation by using such a callous depiction of those who volunteered to defend this nation and, as a result, suffered traumatic and life-altering wounds.

Those who visit wounded veterans in hospitals have found lives profoundly changed by pain and loss. They also have found brave men and women with a sense of purpose and selfless commitment that causes battle-hardened warriors to pause.

While The Post and some of its readers may not agree with the war or its conduct, these men and women and their families are owed the decency of not having a cartoon make light of their tremendous physical sacrifices.

As the joint chiefs, we rarely put our hand to one letter, but we cannot let this reprehensible cartoon go unanswered.

Now because the Joint Chiefs took the extraordinary step of signing off chief-by-chief on a letter on Department of Defense letterhead, we are being requested to accept this new rule from liberal-land that this creeps “closer to official censorship” and is therefore to be regarded as a clarion call. Our rights are in danger. The Washington Post evidently agrees, having stated in their comments about the episode that “a cartoonist works best if he or she doesn’t feel there’s someone breathing over their shoulder,” according to Editorial Page Editor Fred Hiatt. Now, that is an interesting perspective. A cartoonist puts into pictorial form an opinion that is solid enough to appear in the pages of a major newspaper that will ultimately be seen by millions. But in forming that opinion and translating it into pictorial form, the cartoonist works best if he doesn’t feel that it will be exposed to the harsh scrutiny of…anyone.

Best of the Web, today, makes exactly the same point I’m making.

The equation of criticism with censorship is a tiresomely common left-wing trope. Of course, if Black’s [Atrios’] own comments are meant to be hortatory, his “point is to have a chilling effect” too. He would like the Joint Chiefs to keep their views to themselves. Does it matter, as Black suggests it does, that the Joint Chiefs are government officials? Only if you think that they have some way of enforcing their views, or that the Post is going to be intimidated by them, which seems about as likely as the Joint Chiefs being intimidated by a left-wing blogger.

And therein lies the entire issue, since I’m sure Atrios’ response is going to be some variation of “well I don’t work for the government, and they do.” He has left himself in a poor position to take advantage of any other flavor of intellectual defense; The Joint Chiefs have engaged in “censorship” by deploring the cartoon, and Duncan Black & Co. have engaged in “anti-censorship” by sounding Chicken-Little alarms about what the Joint Chiefs wrote. It’s valid to hold the opinion that the association with the Government, is a critical and defining distinction. My beef with Atrios is, that he isn’t consistent with this distinction. He says the “point is to have a chilling effect.” Which is it? What’s the acid test? Working for the government, or engaging in an attempt to coerce someone to keep their point-of-view to themselves?

Actually, if the latter of the two has anything to do with “creeping toward censorship,” I would have to regard the Joint Chiefs of Staff as having failed in their mission, since the cartoon has already appeared and no coercing by anyone is ever going to make it go away. Protesting the political use made from the injured service members by this cartoon, however, seems to be in keeping with the mission of the Department of Defense, whether it’s in the “censorship” business or not. The Joint Chiefs are the generals who run the military. They have command authority over the general officers, and through them, over the senior enlisted personnel who are charged to look after the day-to-day well-being of the rank-and-file.

If I had lost four limbs in Iraq, and had someone specifically tasked with looking after my day-to-day well-being, I’d sure want them to engage in a “chilling effect” the first time a cartoon exploited my condition so cheaply for someone else’s political agenda. And had no chilling been forthcoming, I would want that person to resign and make room for someone else more effective. Obviously, the need is there. Would Duncan Black prefer that some private enterprise be put in charge of writing the protest letters that I would want written? If so, who would pay for that? And under what moral underpinning could the U.S. Government abdicate this responsibility to me, leaving it for another entity to handle, after having called me into the service that cost me my limbs? Would not the Government’s silence on the issue be interpreted as an endorsement of Mr. Toles’ cartoon and his illustration of my injuries? It would be awfully hard for me not to take it that way.

Moral of the story: Free speech means free speech for everyone, whether some of us work for a (Republican) government or not — since if any among us are denied it, then all of us are. Lately, that seems to be something that conservatives get, and liberals don’t. And it looks more and more as if that’s the case, the more I see of this “common left-wing trope.”

They Think They Scored A Win

During the State of the Union, President Bush commented that the Democrats in Congress stopped him from doing anything to fix the Social Security crisis. Privatization 0, Status Quo 1. Unexpectedly (?), the Democrats stood up and cheered. James Taranto touched on this briefly in the February 1 Best of the Web.

Now, it’s plain to see what this says about what Democrats think of Bush’s proposed solution: They don’t like it. And probably, they think it would have been harmful if it had been implemented. Valid opinions, although I disagree with them. But does it not say things about the status quo, and say those things with equal enthusiasm? Wouldn’t a responsible and reasonable spectator infer from their wild applause that with regard to Social Security, not only do they like things the way they are now, but they’re positively orgasmic about the way those things are? After all, this was a win for keeping those things unchanged, and here they are cheering like their team just won the Super Bowl.

How exactly are things the way they are, with regard to Social Security? The Democrat position, as I understand it — and this is only among the far-left, rabid, spittle-flinging Democrats — is “not that bad.” More centrist Democrats agree, with Republicans, that it does suck, they just don’t want the Republican plan implemented. Well, watch the video. You don’t cheer like that for “not that bad.” You don’t cheer like that for “let’s find a different solution.” You cheer like that if you’re running out of issues by which you can win elections (they are), you’ve been allowed to use a tired, fail-safe last-ditch issue in running for those elections (they have), and a threat against that tired, last-ditch issue was obstructed (it was). You might be inclined to cheer that way, even though people are being exploited shamelessly with campaign fearmongering in order to make this campaign issue work for you, and realizing dividends in their golden years far below what the private market would bear — if you’re one hideous, evil bastard.

Well, now. The Social Security status quo sucks — that isn’t really up for debate, what’s up for debate is how optimistic we should be about it. So cheering Democrats are either cheering for what sucks — pardon me, “is not that bad,” I guesss — or else they’re hideous evil bastards. Well, watch the video again. Which do you think it is?

Even better, read the thread under it. My GAWD. The spittle-flinging Far Left actually thinks their favorite political party scored a WIN!

Unbe-FREAKIN-lievable.

Yay!!! Status quo!!! Yay!!! Scaring old people in election season!!! Yay!!! A Republican didn’t fix the problem!!! Yay!!!

Vox Populi

We’re fortunate to live in a country where popular opinion is so important. In fact, of all the news stories that clamor for our attention, probably none is so important as the reaction of the public-at-large to all those news stories…that’s probably the biggest one of them all.

This creates an interesting dilemma for us, living as we do in a nation where we have the absolute God-given right to form whatever opinion we so choose to form, independent of outside coercion. Do we? Do we, really?

Two things happened yesterday. One, the attempted Senate filibuster against Samuel Alito, was permanently consigned to the mists of history as it became clear Democrats lacked the 41 votes needed to sustain it. This raises the question: What was that all about? It was not about popular will, because if it was, a filibuster would not have been needed. It was not about “loyal dissent,” since the threshold for obstructing Senate action through that loyal dissent, surpassed what could be ginned up by a margin of thirteen votes. Nor was it about the principle of the thing, because for every principle believed to be “defended” by the filibuster, even by the most intellectually reckless, there were two or three more principles to be defended by getting Samuel Alito on the Supreme Court where he belongs. The Judiciary Committee had a whole week to show us how Alito would fail us on the Supreme Court, and all they managed to show was how much Alito had to teach them about American constitutional law.

The other thing that happened, with the filibuster episode safely relegated to the sands of time for all eternity, was that the opinion poll machinery came out of hibernation, brushed its fur, scratched its back against a tree, and started looking for fish and honey. Extra! Extra! Bush support down to 42 percent in poll!

The rating is the worst for a president entering his sixth year in office since the Watergate scandal downed Richard Nixon and reflects war fatigue, persistent discontent on the economy, ethics concerns and rising interest in Democratic alternatives in a midterm election year, ABC reported.

Funny, I didn’t see one single opinion poll about whether the Democrats were on the right track filibustering against Alito.

I would argue that a filibuster poll is more newsworthy than a Presidential approval-ratings poll. If the filibuster is protecting the right of the minority to dissent…don’t we deserve to know what kind of minority that is? Shouldn’t we know whether it’s an almost-majority minority, or a moonbat-minority? Or a flat-earth, “we never landed on the moon” minority? Or…a “handful of senators who are worried sick about raising funds for the midterms” minority? Would that not have been an important thing to know?

President Bush, meanwhile, appears to be doing exactly the same thing about the War on Terror, and about the economy, that any responsible President would be doing, Republican or Democrat. Oh, I’m sure there are millions of people who disagree with me about that…but they’ve had four-years-plus to get their 527 groups started and make the case to me exactly what a better President would have been doing, and all I’ve heard is a lot of “YEEEEEEAAAAARRRGGGHHH!!!” and “Bush LIED!!!” and rumors about Haliburton and Skull-n-Bones. So if my opinion stands that the whole War on Terror is just something any President would do…after one discards the downright irresponsible Presidents we could be having, and thank God we don’t have one of those right now…how does the opinion poll even matter? To say nothing of the fact that, according to the Constitution, President Bush can’t be re-elected again.

We are supposed to be thinking for ourselves in this country. We have the right to do so. All established institutions, private and public, are supposed to be supportive of us in exercising that right — regardless of who disagrees with whom.

And we are supposed to be jealously guarding that right, to form opinions of our own. In fact, if & when we find ourselves agreeing with a great multitude, that’s supposed to be a coincidence…or what happens naturally, when self-evident facts are impressed upon a large number of intelligent, preceptive, independently-thinking conciousnesses.

And yet, our print media tells us when Vox Populi matters. Without much justification. How long do you really have to wait before the next Presidential approval-ratings poll? You’ll see dozens of them, before Memorial Day, and everybody knows this. We expect it. Nobody questions it anymore.

And by omission, it also tells us when Vox Populi is entirely irrelevant. Had we had a Democrat President, and a Republican Senator uttered the syllables “fili” — you would have seen an opinion poll, a la Clinton Impeachment, 1998, before he got to the “buster.” This go-round, however, the press somehow just didn’t find the time to get one going. Too sleepy. In effect, our media decides for us, when we are supposed to be concerned about what everybody else is thinking, and when we are not.

We let them.

Why?

Feelings First, Education Second II

I submit that this is being done by highly intelligent and ethical people who have accumulated vast amounts of experience in the print media…acting with the absolute best of intentions.

And yet.

On October 31, the Sacramento Bee printed a story called “Young Futures on the Line,” subtitled “First in an occasional series on the California High School Exit Exam and its impact on the class of 2006″ (link requires registration). The Bee began following around a handful of high school seniors with lukewarm gradepoint averages, and started to monitor how their school careers would be affected by the California State Exit Exam.

Page A1 above the fold, of course. What could be more important than the future of our children.

By January 25, the students, eagerly looking forward to the graduation ceremony, got back the results of the Exit Exam. Some passed, and some failed (link also requires registration). The Bee followed up with a special installment to the series, probing the emotional impact involved when young people are told their best isn’t good enough. An interesting leitmotif bubbling to the surface of this particular installment, several times, was that the conundrum was a consequence of California having an Exit Exam. It was not a consequence of kids screwing around, or a local education system failing to deliver the goods, or parents creating a home environments encouraging bad study habits. The test was the problem. Kill the messenger.

I note the following:

1. The January 25 installment really doesn’t have a lot to do with the young “futures.” It has to do with the present. As in, the feelings of disappointment involved when you fail to pass the Exit Exam. The implication is that the students have experienced, for the very first time, an episode in which they have failed to perform, and this has an impact on their prospects of getting something they want. This concept appears to pack a lot of novelty for students who are in their final year within the K-12 system. That is really, really disturbing.

2. The real concern that was addressed in the story, was the prospect of graduating with the class. That is not a “future” concern, except to say the actual commencement ceremonies are technical a few months into the “future”. Most of us, when we use the word “future” with regard to young people and their educational careers, refer to something quite different, and quite a bit more important.

3. Retaking the Exit Exam can be done in February and again in May. Should the students pass in February, they have a good shot at graduating with the rest of the class, which means nothing will have been changed by the Exit Exam except for the arrival of a momentary, perhaps well-needed little scare — permanently relegated to the past.

4. Should the February scores fail, the failing students will have yet another chance to take the Exam in May, at which time, should they then pass, they will receive an actual high school diploma — not a GED. They will suffer only to the extent that they will not receive this diploma with the rest of the class.

5. Should they take the Exam in May and fail at that time, then they’ll have to pursue diploma equivalents such as the General Educational Development (GED), or the California High School Proficiency Exam. The California State Exit Exam is needed only for the actual diploma, not for the diploma-equivalent alternatives.

6. As I recall, the way this story was actually printed on the paper, you became aware of #1, above, by reading the first page. You would not have been aware of #2, #3, #4 or #5 unless you took the time to complete the first page and break the newspaper open to pursue the story somewhere inside. I do not know if that was deliberate, nor does it very much matter.

7. The very first paragraph of this installment documents an incident of a named minor deliberately damaging public property. It appears the public is expected to take note of that only for purposes of identifying how frustrated the student is with the notice that he has failed the math portion of the Exam.

8. Further down in the story (and floating over the story in large, bold type, as I recall) is the quote “That ain’t my goal, to go to no night school and not walk the stage.” Someone working at the paper thought it was important for readers to become aware of this quote. The impression that this particular quote conveys to some of us, I suspect, is different from what was intended by whoever chose to include it.

9. As is always the case in the Sacramento Bee, I’m being summoned to feel sorry for poor people who wear much, much, much nicer clothes than I usually wear, especially the shoes which are top-of-the-line, brand-spanking new, and in this case even get a mention at the top of the story.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that people who work in the print media are stupid. Some of them are a lot smarter than I am. Probably, a whole lot of them. But their thinking is flat. It is insect-like; what one of them thinks, it appears that all of them think. That is a great pity, because one of the basic tenets long cherished by the “hive” is that diversity is a positive attribute and, heck, our hive is as diverse as anybody else’s, if not moreso.

But how diverse are they in the field of ideas? Nobody stopped to think that the quote, cited in #8, made the poor high school senior look like a dumbass.

Once you read between the lines, you see this is nothing more than a hit piece on the Exit Exam. We gotta get rid of it, it hurts the kids’ feelings. What this piece does to actually support the Exit Exam, potent as it may be, is unintentional. I’m going to go waaaay out on a limb, and just guess at that.

Such experienced, intelligent, and talented people can collaborate together and put so much effort into putting out Message A, and contrary to their intentions, end up broadcasting Message B. Message B, quite the opposite of A, specifically pointed out that we have these kids whose diplomas would have meant nothing, had the Exit Exam not rescued them by throwing a tiny little bit of personal accountability their way, probably for the first time in twelve years and maybe for the last time in decades. How is it that the experienced, intelligent, and talented people seem to be so oblivious to this? Our print media enjoys First Amendment protections well above-and-beyond what is enjoyed by people in the electronic media…certainly, above-and-beyond what is enjoyed by professionals in talk radio! They’re supposed to have this protection, and the reason for it is that we, their readers, should be introduced to ideas to which we otherwise would not have been exposed.

But we have this fire-ant thinking going on. In the print media, worse than what one hears on talk radio. Nobody in the newspapers, particularly in the large metropolitan areas like Sacramento, seems to be searcing for the salient point that nobody has made quite yet. Nobody’s going after the better-mousetrap. And based on what’s appeared in print in front of me, here, it doesn’t look like “diverse” mindsets are being herded into conference rooms to get into intellectual conflicts and emerge with products that offer robust, multi-directional viewpoints on the news that can offer the reader some perspective.

They just covered their front page with a bunch of doom-and-gloom about kids who feel bad because they might not be able to graduate with the rest of their class…kids who use “ain’t” when asked how they feel about failing the Exit Exam, and sprinkle so many multi-negatives into one sentence that you can’t interpret from the actual word structure what they’re trying to say.

If you read the whole story, you’re left thinking “Hooray for the California State Exit Exam.”

And the people who wrote the story, remain clueless. They think they just scored a big hit on it.

Amazing.

Feelings First, Education Second

A British school has passed a policy forbidding students from raising their hands, and forbidding the teachers from calling on those students if the students do raise their hands.

A school in London has banned children from raising their hands in class and teachers from calling on students with their hands raised.

“It is every child’s instinct and every teacher’s instinct as well because it is ingrained in us,” said Andrew Buck, the school’s principal.

“Some pupils are jiggling so much to attract the teacher’s attention that it sometimes looks as if they need the lavatory, then when it is their turn they often don’t know the answer. Boys — and it is usually boys — are seeking attention, so they put their hands up before they have had time to think about the question.”

Buck said the same children often wave their arms in the air, but when teachers try to involve less adventurous pupils by choosing them instead, it leads to feelings of victimization, the Daily Telegraph reported Saturday.

To spare embarrassment of the students who do not know the answer, the school has incorporated a “phone a friend” system, allowing one child to nominate another to take the question instead.

I don’t think I quite understand that last paragraph. The teacher calls on a student who did not raise his hand, and the student, in turn, calls on another student? This would be the egghead of the class every time, wouldn’t it? The brainy kid? Bob sits there all day answering questions while everyone else just redirects to Bob?

What a great bullying tactic that would be…with the force of school policy behind it. It would never cease to be a source of amusement.

Crank Up The Volume, Lose Your Car?

St. Louis is moving a bill along that, if it becomes law, would authorize the police to impound your car if you play the music too loud.

These things are always controversial, and I have a tough time understanding why, because I’m not inclined to appreciate music that makes my head throb. But I do try to understand the other side of things.

Impounding a car for playing loud music is too severe, opponents said, and ripe for abuse.

“It’s almost idiotic for us to take somebody’s car for something like that,” Alderman Stephen Conway said.
:
Bob Pfeiffer, who has been installing custom car stereos for 23 years in St. Louis, said the ordinance could destroy his business.

“I might as well lock my doors now,” said Pfeiffer, who operates Automotion Alarm and Car Stereo on North Broadway.

Not all “tricked out” stereos are used for cruising and thumping music, said Pfeiffer, whose his clients include jazz musicians.

“What a crock,” Pfeiffer said. “It’s really a bogus bill.”

Well, I understand the ripe-for-abuse argument, but it really all comes down to what the environment is like. And this is one of those situations where it’s probably a good thing that I don’t get to decide if this is good or bad, because I don’t live in St. Louis. As usual, though, if called upon to form an opinion, I look first toward the things one side alleges that nobody on the other side disputes, for whatever reason they choose not to. The article makes mention that previous ordinances have carried exactly the same definition of the “auditory graffiti,” as the councilman who wrote the new bill calls it, although the penalties have stopped short of confiscation. That councilman, Graig Schmid, makes mention of windows rattling.

Other aldermen said loud music coming from cars is among their top complaints from constituents. Nobody in the entire article bothered to say “naw, c’mon, it’s not that bad.” Maybe they would have, if asked. But I can only go by what I see here.

No, the opponents to this bill are focused on whining.

But the new measure would outlaw possessing or installing any car stereo with a speaker over a foot in diameter; having more than one speaker 10 inches in diameter; more than 10 speakers overall; more than two amplifiers; and any amplifier over 300 watts.
:
On Friday, some aldermen complained that the measure is heavy-handed. Stephen Gregali, who represents the 14th Ward, questioned whether police would get rulers to measure the length of speakers.

“It’s like killing an ant with a howitzer,” Alderman Charles Q. Troupe said of the measure.

Gosh, Alderman Troupe. Golly, Alderman Gregali. I’m not sure I understand what the complaint is. Ten inches? Police with rulers? City councils pass ordinances based on inches, feet, ounces, tons…all the time. When things are outlawed, there are measurements involved. That’s a good thing, too. You wouldn’t want to have a speed ordinance in your neighborhood that says “Don’t drive TOO FAST through here, m’kay,” leaving that up to the interpretation of whoever enforces or adjudicates every single violation of that ordinance. That would be a mess.

It would also be a mess to base it on decibels…which a lot of cities do nonetheless, and for all I know, maybe there’s some language about decibels in this ordinance too. Imagine coralling witnesses to a noise infraction, and having people who don’t even know what a decibel is, say “yeah, whatever it is you’re talking about, that guy was definitely over it.” Ten inch speakers on the equipment — that is about as measurable, and therefore about as fair, as you can get.

Again: nobody in the article is saying that’s too stringent. Nobody in the article is questioning whether that is a problem. They’re arguing against the concept of actually doing something about it…while constituents are complaining, and windows are rattling.

The Most Liberal Movies

About six months ago I took out a subscription to TOTALFARK, the premium service provided by the Fark.com website. FARK is so awesome, because it has a format that encourages participation from its users, and this has caused it to explode as a presence on the innernets over the last few years or so. Articles are linked from FARK — and web servers collapse. FARK has become an eight hundred pound gorilla.

The other cool thing about FARK is that it is flooded with liberals. Snotty, self-righteous liberals who think they’ve become political geniuses because they watch The Daily Show. Liberals who don’t know or care about the difference between a fact and an opinion. Liberals who patrol the innernets as self-appointed Thought Cops, looking for evidence of opinions different from their own, be they legitimate opinions or not, so they can “correct” those “wrong” ideas and make sure the “right” ideas always have The Last Word.

So as a paid subscriber, how in the world could I resist linking The Political Teen’s list of the 100 most liberal movies of all time. Political Teen compiled the list by tabulating the amounts of money contributed to liberal causes by each well-known actor in recent times, and then compiling a database of who appeared in what film. From this, a point system was devised where each liberal movie was assigned a negative number, and then the list was simply sorted — with “American President” on top.

The consensus came back rapidly: The list is stupid. The content was stupid, and the concept was stupid. One guy offered a comment, with which I had to agree, suggesting “what about judging the movie based on content, rather than the polictical affiliation of the actors or directors invovled? …me thinks someone has a small penis.”

I don’t know about the penis thing. Mine is anything but small, of course, but more to the point, I have to take similar issue with Political Teen’s list. If the object of the exercise is to keep money out of the pockets of Hollywood liberals, then by all means, the criteria is correct. But let’s be realistic. Robert Redford is not going to the poorhouse anytime soon…and if he ever does, I can guarantee nobody close to him is going to say “you’d be rolling in it if you were a Republican, Bob.” No, Hollywood stars go supernova when the plastic surgery stops working. When they make the wrong enemies. Besides, not that I know any movie stars personally, but I get the impression they’re not known for blaming themselves when things turn sour.

But if the goal is to protest Hollywood’s service as a satellite office of Liberal America, and its investiture as a self-annointed High Priesthood of Truth, presuming to tell the rest of us what opinions we’re supposed to have, a simple change to the criteria can help achieve this. And the FARK person quoted above is right on the money. Content is important. Much more difficult to monitor across thousands of movies, but still important.

Therefore, I offer, just as a rough draft, my own list of “liberal” movies. But just ten, instead of 100.

1. The Contender, which appears nowhere on Political Teen’s top 100.
2. Fahrenheit 9/11
3. American Beauty
4. Philadelphia
5. Fried Green Tomatoes
6. A Few Good Men
7. Dogma
8. The Rainmaker
9. The Pelican Brief
10. Star Wars: Episode II: Attack of the Clones

I don’t claim this to be scientific by any means, but it is based on some kind of a “point” system, processed by the computer that is my gut. I might easily have missed…several hundred.

Couldn’t Have Said It Better Myself… II

And so I shan’t.

Travsite.com: The “Impeach Bush” Van

What Big Brass Ones

Obviously, today is a Samuel Alito day.

Sean Hannity mentioned this just minutes ago, and it took lots of floundering around with Google to find a link to back it up. But here it is. Sen. Kerry calls for filibuster of Alito.

You’ve got to hand it to Kerry. He has got balls. He’s also living proof that that is not always a good thing.

Update: The clock was somewhat unkind to James Taranto, OpinionJournal.com. The New York Times editorial calling for this filibuster made his cut-off time, but Sen. Kerry jumped and asked “how high?” a little bit too late to make today’s Best of the Web. Nevertheless, “Best” is, as always, fresh, topical, enlightening reading.

Update: I’m instructed by my senator what opinion I’m supposed to have on a Wednesday, and on Thursday another senator announces his intent to filibuster just to make sure things happen the way the first senator said they should. Yeah that’s right. Agreements are violated without a second thought, elected representatives dispatch opinions down to their constituents rather than the other way around, dividers call themselves uniters while calling the uniters dividers.

Had to say something.

Dear Sen. Boxer,

Two weeks ago I wrote to you, pointing out how fractured our nation’s political discourse had become. I pointed out that since President Bush had sent to the Senate the nomination of Samuel Alito, Jr., who is acknowledged by everyone paying attention (including you) to be highly qualified for the Supreme Court — this was an historical opportunity to unify. Had you chosen to support this nominee, we would have seen our President and our Democrats in Congress putting aside their differences and finding common ground, to work together.

Your reply said many things, most notable among these things that 1) you chose to oppose Alito’s nomination, and 2) Bush’s nomination of this judge was the incident at fault for dividing us, and not uniting us. In short, you chose to embrace the concerns with which I had written to you, and the course you chose was one hundred and eighty degrees off from tne one I requested.

With all the respect due to you and the office you hold, Senator, I don’t know what you’re thinking. My logic was sound; when Republicans and Democrats put aside their differences and work together, reasonable minds may disagree about what’s being done, and I suppose some may say what’s being done is a bad thing. That’s a case of being entitled to your own opinion but not to your own facts. Division is division, and unity is unity. Obviously, you and I both prefer the latter of those two — but since you’ve chosen to oppose a candidate I have persuasively argued is a good fit for the Supreme Court and would be a unifying force, I am, or you are, terribly confused. It has to be one or the other.

Well, who is confused? You are the one who said “I do not deny Judge Alito’s judicial qualifications. He has been a government lawyer and judge for more than 20 years and the American Bar Association rated him well qualified. He is an intelligent and capable person.” You are also the one who said, “We certainly do not need Supreme Court justices who do not understand this fundamental [Fourth Amendment] constitutional protection.” When you call the same judge “well qualified,” “intelligent,” “capable” and then offer the opinion he does “not understand this fundamental constitutional protection” — I think most people would agree that looks like confusion.

You’re asking me to believe the President has shown himself to be a dividing force by nominating an intelligent, capable, and well qualified candidate — and you are uniting us by opposing that intelligent, capable, and well qualified candidate. Run that by me again?

Senator Kerry of Massachusetts has given you one more chance to unite the country, if this is the issue by which it is done, according to this CNN report posted just minutes ago: http://www.cnn.com/2006/POLITICS/01/26/alito/. Sen. Kerry has gone on record asking for a filibuster against Alito.

This constituent looks toward you, so he can find out if Democrats and Republicans can work together. President Bush has been highly encouraging; he could easily have nominated an intellectual lightweight, determined to swing the Supreme Court to the extreme right, “just because,” and intellectually incapable of answering any probing questions as to why. I think you’ll agree Judge Alito has exceeded that kind of performance, in spades. You, on the other hand, have been a disappointment. Please answer how you’ll handle the filibuster, should Democrats violate the agreement they signed and move to deny Alito an up-or-down vote. Now that you have specifically cited the Senate’s constitutional authority spelled out in Article II, will you make sure the Senate fulfills the obligation that is inextricably intertwined with that authority? Or will you show yourself to be among the senators who believe power can be removed from the associated responsibility, as a banana is removed from its peel?

Is your Article II power a weighty burden to be shouldered through thick and thin, in the spirit of public service — or just something you get to brag about to your constituents when they write in and try to convince you to do what’s right?

Since Article II confers on the Senate the power to advise and consent — I ask you to fulfill the constitutional obligation. Dislodge the Kerry bottleneck. Consent. I can’t think of anything more divisive than constitutional officers who refuse to lead, or follow, or get out of the way.

Sincerely,
Morgan K. Freeberg

Participating

Throughout several years, I’ve learned that people who offer opinions at the water cooler are far, far, far more numerous than people who contact their elected representatives who could actually do something about the issues that arouse their concern. I don’t understand why that is. Perhaps it’s because most people are more practical than I am, and figure out that when their representative is just a pinhead left-wing hippy — better to sound off to a co-worker with an open mind, but lacking any power to do anything about the issue, than someone with a closed mind, even if the latter person does have that power.

Maybe I just have a learning disability and can’t come to understand that. It seems that a lot of our representatives are, indeed, far more responsive to the internal machinations of their parties than they are to the desires of their constituents, but it also seems to me that that’s a self-fulfilling prophecy when those constituents fail to participate in the process. And I don’t mean “vote on election day” when I say participate. I mean take the time to let your representatives know of your concerns.

Hey look, the congressmen and senators will pretend they listened to you whether they did, or not; whether they’ll be honest when they do so, is up to the people who decide to speak up — or decide not to.

January 11:

Dear Sen. Feinstein,

As you are aware, there are several voters in California who, like me, are legitimately worried about innocent women and children being able to defend themselves when in close proximity to dangerous people.

We have reason to maintain this concern. Last week, Judge Edward Cashman of Vermont, suspended all but sixty days of the sentence of a habitual child molester. You read that right: A man sexually abused a little girl, at least three times over the last four years, and for this will be required to spend only two months in prison. This has been defended as a clever maneuver to make the offender eligible for “treatment,” but of course there is no guarantee that this treatment will be successful compared to the simple and time-honored recipe of simply keeping the perpetrator where he belongs. Away from children!

Because of this, and other legal wrangling by our legislatures and judicial officers, both at the state and federal level, we continue to view the task of defending oneself, and one’s dependents, as well as innocent bystanders, just as much a personal obligation as a function of government — if not even moreso. The reason this should be of concern to you, is simple: As a member of the Senate judiciary committee, you sit in judgment of the nomination of Judge Samuel Alito to our nation’s highest court.

The home page on your website indicates you have serious concerns about Judge Alito’s alleged reticence toward maintaining Congress’ traditional, yet unlegislated, authority to regulate firearms. As your constituent, I implore you to “throttle back” on this concern for two reasons:

a) To show your respect to the Bill of Rights, amendment by amendment, as each amendment was written. As you are aware, the text of the Second Amendment specifies the right of The People was not to be infringed. It does not prohibit any particular party from doing anything, nor does it extend any guarantee to any party except for The People. The meaning of this law is clear: We, the People, are to enjoy this guarantee, completely, in perpetuity. It is government’s sacred obligation to us to safeguard this guarantee, so historically, the government has not been lax in dismantling this right; if anything, it has been lax in maintaining it.

b) President Bush has presented to you, and by extension to the concerned voters of California, a unique opportunity to “heal the rift” between blue-staters and red-staters. The committee hearings have made it abundantly clear: Judge Alito would be a fair-minded jurist serving on our nation’s highest court. He would use his authority to do, essentially, what people of conservative and liberal leanings both say they want done on the bench: interpret law, as opposed to inventing new law (or unilaterally gutting old law).

Senator Feinstein, I implore you to do your part to heal our fractured nation. Recognize the excellent candidate who has been placed before you. Restore our confidence that our leaders, of different parties, can work together. Send Judge Alito’s nomination to the Senate floor for a full vote. Oppose any filibuster, be it actually initiated or merely suggested, and vote to confirm Judge Alito for the Supreme Court.

Thank you for your consideration,

Morgan K. Freeberg

January 12:

Dear Mr. Freeberg:

Thank you for writing to me about the nomination of Judge
Samuel Alito, Jr. to replace Justice Sandra Day O’Connor on the
Supreme Court. I appreciate hearing from you and welcome this
opportunity to respond.

Now that the President has put forth another nominee to succeed
Justice O’Connor, the Senate Judiciary Committee, of which I am a
member, must fulfill its obligation to thoroughly review his record, read
his opinions and evaluate his judicial philosophy.

This new justice will be critical in the balance with respect to
rulings on Congressional and Executive authority, as well as a woman’s
right to privacy, environmental protections, and many other aspects of
Constitutional law. Since Judge Alito has been nominated to fill Justice
O’Connor’s seat, the extraordinary importance of this nomination
cannot be overstated. Having said that, I intend to reserve judgment until
our due diligence and the formal hearings in January are completed.

Once again, thank you for sharing your views with me. I will be
sure to take them into consideration as the nomination process moves
forward. Should you have any additional comments or questions, please
feel free to contact my office in Washington, D.C. at (202) 224-3841.

Sincerely yours,

Dianne Feinstein
United States Senator

January 11:

Dear Sen. Boxer,

It appears likely that soon, the nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito to the Supreme Court will proceed to the floor of the Senate for a vote.

I’m sure you share the concerns that I, as one of your constituents, have about the fracturing of our country’s political dialog. It seems lately that very little of what a Republican political figure has to say anymore, has any intellectual applicability to any one of his constituents who “lean left,” nor does the material put out by a Democratic leader have any use to a constituent who favors the “right.” This has been getting worse in recent years.

President Bush has presented to you, and by extension to the concerned voters of California, a unique opportunity to heal the rift. The committee hearings have made it abundantly clear: Judge Alito would be a fair-minded jurist serving on our nation’s highest court. He would use his authority to do, essentially, what people of conservative and liberal leanings both say they want done on the bench: interpret law, as opposed to inventing new law (or unilaterally gutting old law).

Senator Boxer, I implore you to do your part to heal our fractured nation. Recognize the excellent candidate who has been placed before you. Restore our confidence that our leaders can work together. Oppose any filibuster, be it actually initiated or merely suggested, and vote to confirm Judge Alito for the Supreme Court.

Thank you for your consideration,

Morgan K. Freeberg

January 24:

Dear Mr. Freeberg:

Thank you for writing to me about President Bush’s nomination of Judge Samuel A. Alito to serve as Associate Justice of the U.S. Supreme Court.

As you may know, the Senate Judiciary Committee approved the nomination of Judge Alito on January 24, 2006. Below please find a statement that I delivered in opposition to Judge Alito’s nomination to the U.S. Supreme Court:

Following that Sen. Boxer attached, in total, a statement I found on her website through a search engine. You can read it here.

You Aren’t Kirk, And Kirk Wasn’t Always Right

How many times have we seen this…

Captain Kirk quickly determines that a planet must be explored, and takes two or three of the highest-ranking officers on his entire starship, plus a guy in a red shirt never seen before, to the surface. They happen to “beam down” to a point on that surface within fifty feet of the guy in charge of running the entire planet, some distinguished-looking caucasian geezer, who promptly introduces himself and speaks perfect English. The guy who runs the planet is a Viceroy, or a Proconsul, or a Tsar, or an Emperor, or an Ambassador, and wears Old-Testament style flowing robes. He has exactly one (1) gorgeous, nubile daughter who has never seen men before and finds Captain Kirk fascinating. The planet is completely lacking in old women, young men, and handrails. The guy in the red shirt dies a horrible, gruesome death. Kirk demands answers. Kirk teaches the nubile daughter how to kiss.

Then the show gets philosophical. Viceroy Flowing-Robes blames some monster, or underclass, or political dissident faction, for the plague, famine, drought, disease, lack of access to vital medicines, violence, or climate change. Kirk thinks it’s possible to reason with the monster/underclass/faction, and Viceroy Flowing-Robes insists that physical force is the only way to prevail. They argue. At this point of the show, there is some plot twist that varies from one episode to the next, culminating in some tricky situation Kirk and Spock can’t possibly survive. Break for commercial. After the commercial, Kirk and Spock triumph against the odds, and as frosting on the cake Kirk manages to negotiate a seemingly-impossible truce between Viceroy Flowing-Robes and the monster/underclass/faction. Viceroy Flowing-Robes bows to Kirk’s superior wisdom, and after Kirk and Spock beam up, McCoy makes some smartass remark. Credits roll.

I’m reading through the letters to the editor about the missile strike in Pakistan, and I’m also reading some of the postings in response to the film clips that show the things Saddam did before he was removed from power (shocking video, not safe for work, view in private, turn down volume, not for squeamish). When the events in our news get ugly, I’m seeing a common theme in the comments offered by those who take the “ostrich approach” to the ugliness. I can’t quite put my finger on it, but it has a lot to do with “not descending to their level.” Lots of finger-waggling. Lots of cluck-clucking. Lots of “catch more flies with honey than vinegar” sermonizing.

I think we need to round up all the old episodes of Star Trek, and do something with them. Bury them in a time capsule until we’re mature enough to watch them again. I’m not saying Captain Kirk’s message wasn’t good, for the time in which it was produced. Racial tensions, civil rights issues, war protests…in a climate like that, it has a beneficial effect on society when you can get the word out that “just because you don’t understand something, doesn’t make it automatically evil.” It’s a good message, one for the ages.

But probably not a good message for this age. Or more precisely, for the enemy we face. Call me nuts, but I’m having a hard time looking at a fellow with darker skin who is trying to secure the right to vote that was guaranteed to him a century before…or a jew trying to escape persecution, or a woman trying to earn a fair wage, or a homosexual who doesn’t want to be beaten up…and seeing them on equal footing with terrorists. I think since anything that’s a “dialog” by definition involves two parties, you need two votes to keep that dialog on a higher moral road. Pacifism on one side, isn’t good enough. One of the signs that you’ve fallen short of those two votes, is when the other guy is killing innocent civilians just to make a political point. There are other signs, too. Lack of participation in a higher dialog, or demonstrated lack of capacity. If this were not true, we wouldn’t order exterminators when we find termite damage or ant infestation. Sometimes you need two votes…or else, down to the “lower level” you go, and you shouldn’t lose sleep over it.

So yeah, in real life sometimes I think Captain Kirk is wrong and High Commissioner Flowing-Robes has the right idea. In fact, in real life, there would be more than a few episodes where Spock would take the side of Flowing-Robes, and lecture his peacenik boss about the folly of subordinating logic to emotion. We’re living in one of those episodes now…and the people who have obsessed too much about the social messages from Star Trek, are very likely to get some of us killed.

Healthcare Redux

Hopefully, the Republicans have already won the 2006 elections. Those won’t be happening for another eight months, but there is good reason to hope this. Powerful Democratic Senator Hillary Clinton, looking around for some reasons people might possibly have to vote for Democrats this year, has settled on bitching about our healthcare system.

She’s right to bitch, because our healthcare system certainly needs work. But two years ago Democrats learned that when you bitch, the bitching isn’t enough, and voters — damn those voters! — actually want to see a plan before you’ll get enough votes to put you over the top.

Maybe that will come later. For now, it’s just the bitching. It’s all pissing and moaning. It’s…

But she added, “Today, we’re making things worse with deliberate neglect and flawed policies that are diminishing the coverage that Americans have.”
:
Clinton’s comments on health care were the latest in a series of sharp criticisms of the White House. Last week, she took aim at the administration’s handling of the nuclear standoff in Iran, just two days after saying it would go down as “one of the worst” presidencies in U.S. history.

There are some awfully smart people who know more about politics than I do, and make good money managing campaigns, who obviously disagree with me with what I’m about to say — but history backs me up. If you want to take down the status quo and replace it with something else, badmouthing the status quo won’t get you there. In fact, you’re better off saying good things about the status quo you want to displace. It’s called “The Kiss of Death,” and Democrats, for whatever reason, can’t use it. George Bush wouldn’t even be President right now if Democrats had what it takes to say “the guy you got now is doing an okay job, heck, he’s better than okay, but I think we can do better.”

There is a movement afoot in the Democratic party to use the last four words of what I just wrote, “we can do better”. This is not new. “We can do better” has always been a powerful statement, because it appeals to instincts hard-wired into us: After we finish what seems to be a herculean effort today, we should refine things so that tomorrow the same work is second-nature, and the results much more assuredly positive. And, of course, once that is done, tomorrow we should find ways to do what seems impossible today.

Hillary obviously thinks we can do better, but a central theme going through all her speeches now is that this is the only direction where we can go, because things are so bad. Flawed policies. Deliberate neglect. One of the worst administrations in history.

It wasn’t always done this way. Take a look at how Hillary’s husband used “we can do better,” during, for example, his State of the Union addresses. You’ll notice he didn’t use “we can do better” in quite the same context that Democrats use the same phraseology today.

2000: We also can’t reward work and family unless men and women get equal pay for equal work. Today the female unemployment rate is the lowest it has been in 46 years. Yet, women still only earn about 75 cents for every dollar men earn. We must do better, by providing the resources to enforce present equal pay laws, training more women for high-paying, high-tech jobs, and passing the “Paycheck Fairness Act.”

1999: SAT scores are up. Math scores have risen in nearly all grades. But there’s a problem: While our fourth-graders outperform their peers in other countries in math and science, our eighth-graders are around average, and our 12th-graders rank near the bottom. We must do better.

1996: As workers increase their hours and their productivity, employers should make sure they get the skills they need and share the benefits of the good years, as well as the burdens of the bad ones. When companies and workers work as a team they do better, and so does America.

1995: We need to help move programs down to the point where States and communities and private citizens in the private sector can do a better job. If they can do it, we ought to let them do it. We should get out of the way and let them do what they can do better. Taking power away from Federal bureaucracies and giving it back to communities and individuals is something everyone should be able to be for.

1994: Every plan before the Congress proposes to slow the growth of Medicare. The difference is this: We believe those savings should be used to improve health care for senior citizens. Medicare must be protected, and it should cover prescription drugs, and we should take the first steps in covering long- term care. To those who would cut Medicare without protecting seniors, I say the solution to today’s squeeze on middle-class working people’s health care is not to put the squeeze on middle-class retired people’s health care. We can do better than that.

1993: Two decades of low productivity and stagnant wages; persistent unemployment and underemployment; years of huge government deficits and declining investment in our future; exploding health care costs, and lack of coverage; legions of poor children; educational and job training opportunities inadequate to the demands of a high wage, high growth economy. For too long we drifted without a strong sense of purpose, responsibility or community, and our political system too often was paralyzed by special interest groups, partisan bickering and the sheer complexity of our problems. I know we can do better, because ours remains the greatest nation on earth, the world’s strongest economy, and the world’s only military superpower.

Look at what you’ve got going on here. Bill Clinton, the guy who actually won a couple of times, almost never said “it is a neverending morass of muck and mire and surrounded by the putrid stench of failure and when one wades into it his eardrums swell with the sound of weeping, wailing and the gnashing of teeth and I know we can do better.” President Clinton nearly always found a little bit of sugar in the status quo. We had the world’s best military, our fourth graders were already outperforming other fourth graders in other countries, and the female unemployment rate was at a record low. (Look over those excerpts again; where Clinton says “do better” without commenting on the status quo, he’s commenting on the concept of doing better, which resonates with people just as well.)

I’m feeling much more optimistic now than I did after the special elections in California a couple of months ago, at least when it comes to my hopes and dreams of Democrats continually losing until they go away. Part of the reason for my optimism is that while Republicans remain disorganized and while the electorate nurtures an embryonic apetite for “a little bit of hammer-and-sickle redistributionism,” no Democrat who is big enough to get his name in the limelight seems capable of doing what Bill Clinton did. They can’t say “there is a lot that’s good about the status quo but there are shortfalls too, and we can do better.” If they said that, they’d do what Bill Clinton did: Win. This is such an intoxicating elixir, when you say “you done good — let’s see if we can improve some more.” People can’t get enough of that.

Hillary and crew simply cannot do this. When they use the word “flaw” in describing status quo, they aren’t talking about subtle defects that force that status quo to fall short of perfection; they’re talking about something that plunges that status quo into the depths of untreated human waste. What they don’t realize, or don’t care to respond to, is that this moves their criticism into an entirely different realm. If they can’t say anything nice about things the way they are, that means when they talk of “doing better” all they’re talking about is retreat.

People need to satisfy a much higher burden of proof before they support a strategy of retreat. Even in their depths of their subconsciousness, people realize when you talk about retreat, you’re talking about three big up-front costs: 1) stopping, which means whatever momentum you’ve built up, must be surrendered; 2) identifying a new course, which must mean identifying whatever factors led to the old, wrong course, and getting rid of them before a new bearing can be identified; 3) spending time and effort building momentum again, which otherwise would have been used on things you can do once the momentum is built up.

Result: When your clarion call is a strategy that involves retreat, you can prove to me beyond any doubt that a cul de sac is ahead and retreat is the only option — and I still might not be convinced of your strategy. Selling such a strategy is a real uphill battle. That’s why President Clinton almost never did it.

But the Bill Clinton way of organizing the Democratic party seems to be over. Anyone who finds a silver lining in the status quo will be fired! Look at what they have going on here: George W. Bush can’t do anything right, and everything is his fault. George W. Bush is a big stupid doo-doo-head who is too much of an imbecile to tie his own shoes. And yet, George W. Bush is an evil genius who has taken over the world by fooling us all.

Have they given any thought to what this would say about us? That we can be fooled so easily by a man too stupid to tie his own shoes?

Hillary, then, is gearing up to sell a healthcare plan, which is an echo from the past, in which her healthcare plan cost her husband a friendly Congress. Being “co-President” with a man who was smart enough to talk about “doing better” at least in somewhat glowing terms before describing his reforms, she talked healthcare, and gave her husband his one big black eye from all those years.

And now, she’s doing the same thing, except without talking about the status quo in glowing terms. It’s like someone on her staff decided it would be a great idea to take everything from the past that didn’t work, and carefully strip it from all the stuff that did work. This is insane. It’s like throwing out the baby and keeping all the dirty diapers.

Blame it on knuckleheaded advisors, or blame it on groups that weren’t around twelve years ago like Moveon.org. It’s clear that Democrats need maneuvering room in order to succeed, and they just don’t have it. Whether they know what they’re doing or not, their plan is to keep what doesn’t work, get rid of what does, and hope to do better than last time.

We want these guys to run our country?

What The Hell Happened?

The One For Whom My Affection Is Unlimited sent me an e-mail this morning. It was too good not to link, so I hit the search engines with the most remote hope that I could possibly correctly give credit where it is due.

I have failed. The oldest link I can find is to April Shenandoah, writing for the American Partisan in September 2003, and she as much as states she is not the original author. Interestingly, Shenandoah recites this in exactly the same politically-incorrect way I came across it this morning, although the newer recitations appear to have “spruced it up” for wider consumption — you’ll see how at the end.

Below is a list of our taxes that I received from the Internet — and recently heard on Rush Limbaugh’s radio show.

Accounts Receivable Tax
Building Permit Tax
Capital Gains Tax
CDL license Tax
Cigarette Tax
Corporate Income Tax
Court Fines (indirect taxes)
Dog License Tax
Federal Income tax
Federal Unemployment tax (FUTA)
Fishing License tax
Food License tax
Fuel Permit Tax
Gasoline Tax (42 cents per gallon)
Hunting License Tax
Inheritance Tax Interest expense (tax on the money)
Inventory tax IRS Interest Charges (tax on top of tax)
IRS Penalties (tax on top of tax)
Liquor Tax
Local Income Tax
Luxury Taxes
Marriage License Tax
Medicare Tax
Property Tax
Real Estate Tax
Pistol Permit Tax
Septic Permit Tax
Service Charge Taxes
Social Security Tax
Road Usage Taxes (Truckers)
Sales Taxes
Recreational Vehicle Tax
Road Toll Booth Taxes
School Tax
State Income Tax
State Unemployment Tax (SUTA)
Telephone federal excise tax
Telephone federal universal service fee tax
Telephone federal, state and local surcharge tax
Telephone recurring and non-recurring charges tax
Telephone state and local tax
Telephone usage charge tax
Toll Bridge Taxes
Toll Tunnel Taxes
Traffic Fines (indirect taxation)
Trailer registration tax
Utility Taxes
Vehicle Sales Tax
Watercraft registration Tax
Well Permit Tax
Workers Compensation Tax

In PA there is a “right to work tax.”

NOTE: Not one of these taxes existed 100 years ago and our nation was the most prosperous in the world, had absolutely no national debt, had the largest middle class in the world and Mom stayed home to raise the kids.

What the H— happened?

Now if you want to get philosophical about this, which most people don’t, the answer is a little complicated. The income tax came along years before women got the right to vote, which in turn happened generations before it became widely accepted for women to go out and work.

Women working didn’t cause anything to happen. Women working was a symptom of something else, and all these taxes, also, are a symptom of something else. It was the industrial revolution. Things just plain work differently in an industrialized world. And people come to be concerned about different things.

Prohibition is a great example. We didn’t give women the right to vote and then stand by and watch as they outlawed booze. The amendment was actually ratified before womens’ suffrage became effective. But — those who were allowed to vote on passing that amendment, and ratifying it, did what those in government always do: They foretold. They anticipated. They read the tea leaves.

And even that is different, since being an elected representative has different connotations in an industrial environment than it does in an agricultural one. Our Founding Fathers (whoops! — sorry, gals) did all kinds of stuff, once elected into the government they started, that no modern politician would do. These things would have been too “dangerous.”

Therefore — and this is just my opinion, I can’t prove it — it was pre-determined that if we were to outlaw booze through a constitutional amendment, it would happen inside of a year or two of women’s suffrage. We could somehow go back in time and start the whole experiment all over again, and it would happen that way. Again. And again. And again.

That’s because when society is modernized, people get uppity about their rights relative to the rights other groups of people have. And politicans start making a career out of being a politician. It’s human nature. When the republic started, if you served in the Senate, you served in the Senate and…went home and harvested cabbage and squash so your family would have something to eat. If you were a Supreme Court justice, you served on the Supreme Court and…harvested cabbage and squash. Thomas Jefferson invented stuff, founded colleges, served two terms as our President and…plowed. That’s just the way it worked.

You know, think about it. It’s February, and you have to worry about the October harvest. Maybe insects will eat your crops. You do have some fluidity…you could have a good year of sugarbeets and a lousy year for potatoes, and if your neighbor ends up with lots of potatoes and is short on his beets, you can swap. But maybe there won’t be any rain. What will you do then?

Some golf club isn’t admitting women? How is it you have time to worry about such things? If you need more work to do, I have extra plows. You wanna eat, right?

It’s a continuing source of amazement to me, as I read the biographies of people who were alive at that time, how immersed they were in the continuing practice of reading and writing. Today, we don’t have to spend any actual time actually doing much of anything. What would Thomas Jefferson give up for a luxury like that? You’d think we could read and write up the yin-yang.

And yet I can write 2,700 words, and people who somehow have time to scour the innernets “policing” everybody’s opinions to make sure nobody disagrees with them, see fit to bitch about the 2,700 words.

It just goes to show. Once a standard of living increases, you get this situation where you round up a hundred randomly-selected, widely repeated complaints — what you end up with is maybe one valid complaint and ninety-nine sacks of bullshit, minus the sacks.

Thing I Know #7. A lot of what passes for bad news in a technological society, wouldn’t be discussed in an agricultural one because it would be a waste of time.

Are You Up To The Challenge

See if you have what it takes to simply read the news, and figure out what’s really going on. And no, I’m not talking about “why don’t you go fishing with Michael Corleone’s bodyguard” means something else, or anything like that. I’m talking about simply reading the news, and figuring out what the stated truth is.

Item:
Interviewed by Wolf Blitzer on CNN, Democratic Party Chairman Howard Dean insisted there is no connection, whatsoever, between scandal catalyst Jack Abramoff and any Democrat, whatsoever. “There are no Democrats who took money from Jack Abramoff…not one. Not one single Democrat. … There is no evidence that Jack Abramoff ever gave any Democrat any money and we’ve looked through all those FEC reports to make sure that’s true.” BradBlog has video.

Item:
Clarence Page, writing for the Washington Times, does his homework and figures out Howard Dean is absolutely correct.

Unless you’ve been on the moon for a while, you probably have heard that Abramoff is a formerly well-connected Republican who has pleaded guilty to federal charges tied to his lobbying operations. Right-wing bloggers and others pounced on Dean and flailed away, since a number of Democratic senators and congressmen already have given Abramoff-associated money to charity. How, then, could Dean say otherwise? Right? But, I checked it out and, guess what? Dean was right.

Item:
Gateway Pundit reports, citing an article from PowerLine, which links back to the Republican National Senatorial Committee, that 40 of 45 Democratic senators took Abramoff money. (All these links are just bookmarking for posterity; if you somehow miss them, it really shouldn’t take much to hit a search engine and verify all of this.)

Item:
For issuing a 27-page government funded report called “Republican Abuse of Power,” and actually singling out 33 GOP senators, Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid issues a written apology.

“The document released by my office yesterday went too far and I want to convey to you my personal regrets,” Reid said in a letter. “I am writing to apologize for the tone of this document and the decision to single out individual senators for criticism in it.” Reid came under attack Wednesday over the report, which was issued by his staff on Senate letterhead, even as he and fellow Democrats released ethics overhaul proposals. “Researching, compiling and distributing what amounts to nothing more than a campaign ad on the taxpayers� dime raises serious ethical questions,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas, one of the lawmakers named.

COMMENT:
It has become awfully trendy lately to cast a jaundiced eye toward government. That is a good thing — or to state it more precisely, it would be a very bad thing to purge ourselves of this healthy cynicism. But if any particular agent must be present in one place to keep bad stuff from happening, that agent must be present in other places to keep bad stuff from happening too, no?

Have you exercised your healthy suspicion of people who actually bring you the news lately?

I’ve got four links up there. Two of them make Republicans look bad and two of them make Democrats look bad. Which ones do I endorse? None of them. They’re all lying by omission.

Your assignment, dear reader, should you choose to accept it, is to figure out which hairs are being split, and how. Who, if anyone, is guilty of technically lying, and who is committing the far more egregious violation of lying in spirit while carefully adhering to a meaningless truth word-for-word.

You could choose to pass this up, but be advised that there really is no other reason to vote for Democrats this fall — that’s not just my opinion, that party has steadfastly refused to trot out any other national agenda (“I hate Bush” doesn’t count). Therefore, in nine months we’re going to be arguing about “Abramoff is a Republican scandal!” “No it’s not!” “Yes it is!” “No it’s not!”

You’ll run into it at work. At the hardware store. At the Friday night block parties. At Thursday night bowling. You won’t hear it all the time, but it’ll be a little bit difficult to get away from it. So it pays to be informed.

Kind of an easy call.

Overwhelming Majority Of You

From a culture elsewhere on the planet where you apparently can’t even pick your nose or squeeze a zit without signaling your strength and/or weaknesses to anyone watching — Osama bin Laden sends two messages to us. a) He’s about to kick our asses, and 2) he offers a truce. Pretty freakin’ weird.

It’s the third message buried much further in the transcripts that raises my eyebrows a little:

Your President Bush has been misleading you. He has lied when he said that the people are behind him. Opinion polls have indicated that the overwhelming majority of you want him to pull the troops out of our land.

Okay, let’s noodle this one out. Who is bin Laden talking to about these opinion polls? Is it the “overwhelming majority” who want the President to pull out of Iraq and effectively surrender, or the underwhelming minority like me who are in favor of winning? Maybe he’s going after both?

To resolve that, let’s shift the topic to something else to help tone down the emotional glare. Suppose bin Laden sends a tape to us so he can let us know that, gee whiz, if we haven’t gotten around to seeing that new movie “The 40 Year Old Virgin” we should probably get with it because it’s a real hoot! Ha ha! That Steve Carell, he’s so funny that we don’t know what we’re missing. C’mon you old fuddy-duddies living in the Great Satan that is America, get the sticks out of your butts and have a good time for once. Besides, polls say the overwhelming majority of us have seen the movie and agree with bin Laden. Funny, funny, funny!

See, if you’re bin Laden you wouldn’t do that. Osama’s a sharp enough guy to realize that sure, we got some people here stateside who see things the way he does, and we got some people who don’t — and there really isn’t anyone ready to advance the argument that bin Laden’s a big dummy, although millions of people feel that way about their own President. But when it comes to persuading people to come ’round to Osama’s way of thinking, he doesn’t pack a lot of endorsement punch. Put another way, if I like to hang my toilet paper over the roll instead of under it, I’m not likely to change my mind because Osama bin Laden sends me a message, “I put it under the roll, and the vast majority of your fellow Great Satanists do the same.”

I’m not going to change my mind about a movie I decided not to watch, because bin Laden sent me a message saying hey, trust me, it’s a crack-up.

And the same principle applies for everything all the way down the list. I like to use a spoon to crack open hard-boiled eggs. I’m not going to start banging eggs against the side of the pan because Osama bin Laden cracks his against a rock, and the vast majority of Americans do, too. I like strong black coffee with no cream, and if Osama bin Laden tells me the vast majority of Americans prefer a Vanilla Latte Mocha Machiatto…you get the idea.

And the principle applies to the war in Iraq.

Osama bin Laden is politically astute enough to realize all this, so it’s pretty silly to take this part of the tape at face value and interpret it as a “c’mon, all you Americans who are opposed to pulling troops out…get with it. You’re in the minority.” He’s not using peer pressure to persuade the hostile audience, or even for that matter, to persuade the unconvinced.

This is a pep talk for Americans who already agree with him. The anti-war pinheads. Keep at it, guys. Don’t forget that you’re in the “overwhelming majority.” You might see some discouraging signs soon, so just keep your majority status in mind. Who ya gonna believe, CNN and your buddy Osama, or your lyin’ eyes?

A Ton of Cronkite’s Opinion

Two thousand pounds of Walter Cronkite’s opinion went sloshing around I-5 near my old stomping grounds of Everett, Washington, and got spilled.

It stunk to high heaven, according to nearby sources. Some of it sloshed over into the cab, oh what a glamorous job, and some of it spilled into the southbound lanes.

Seattle Post-Intelligencer has more.

If you think traffic stinks where you are, just be thankful you weren’t southbound Tuesday on Interstate 5.

About 2,000 pounds of treated human waste with the consistency of fresh cow manure spilled into freeway about 11 a.m. when the driver of a southbound tractor-trailer rig braked suddenly to avoid a stopped vehicle about 25 miles north of Seattle, Washington State Patrol investigators said.

The trailer had only a cloth top, and much of the waste sloshed over the truck cab and across a wide section of the road, patrol Sgt. Craig H. Johnson told The Herald of Everett.

“It stunk,” Johnson said.

It took until 4 p.m. — after the start of the evening commute — to finish vacuuming up the mucky waste, which was being hauled from a wastewater treatment plant on Fidalgo Island near Anacortes to be made into compost in Tenino, near Olympia.

You know how I would have worded the first sentence of that article? Instead of making reference to “if you think traffic stinks where you are,” I would have said something about “if you think you hate your job…”

Speaking Your Mind

Eight months ago this blog took a look at a much-lauded performance by Rosie O’Donnell on Geraldo Rivera’s show, which she somehow managed to get in while Rivera showered praise on her like a firehose of flattery. The transcript of this exchange disturbs me just as much today as it did back then. And it’s not because I disagree with O’Donnell’s comments, because I hear comments just like hers every day. It’s not because O’Donnell is an ugly woman, because I can & do hear comments from ugly women all the time. And it’s not because O’Donnell is a Hollywood pinhead with a big mouth and a tiny brain, because there are others in that camp as well.

What bugs me is this neverending adoration for “speaking your mind.” Just that and nothing more.

The time has come to revisit this, because now extravagant compliments are being shoveled out in Walter Cronkite’s direction, again for the simple act of “speaking your mind.” The final paragraph of this laudatory essay is “No wonder he’s some kind of hero” and up until that final sentence, you get to read about what makes Walter Cronkite a hero.

I’m dissatisfied. I don’t think the case has been made.

I want to be very precise in my criticism here. After all, writing a blog is all about “speaking your mind” but then again, nobody’s handed me any compliments just for doing that, neglecting the consideration of whether my opinion was actually valuable or not — nor would I accept such a compliment if it were handed to me.

An opinion is an opinion, nothing more, nothing less. By itself, the opinion proves nothing. We have no shortage of them. We really don’t. If opinions was gasoline, I could trade in my rice rocket for a Hummer and go traipsing around the wine country every damn day.

Here at the blog nobody reads, we have a very specific opinion about opinions, and this opinion about opinions runs afoul of the opinion the rest of the world has about opinions. That sentence, immediately preceding, is a real challenge; if you need to read it three times or more, go ahead and do it. Now that you understand what’s being said, I will explain.

We are entering a very dangerous time. A popular consensus has emerged about how we entertain opinions and measure the worthiness of those opinions before we repeat them, and before we act upon them. This consensus is problematic. The consensus that has emerged has something to do with identifying who stated the opinion and which political party that source identifies as being his/her own. Or…whether you have seen that source in a movie somewhere. We have other ways of evaluating opinions, independent of who presents them to us. We like to evaluate how the opinion makes us feel. Some of us give more weight to opinions that make us feel good. Some of us like to feel guilty, and therefore assign more weight to opinions that make us feel that way.

There is only ONE thing that makes an opinion worth anything, and that is a fact. Facts lead to opinions. Opinions resting upon something else, are…noise. That’s all. It doesn’t matter who says them.

It doesn’t matter.

The author of the article heaping praise upon Walter Cronkite, multiple times, for being “the most trusted man in America” doesn’t realize it but he’s wallowing in the Dark Ages. Walter Cronkite became the most trusted man in America during the “Daddy’s home!” generation of television news. If you’re my age, you were a young squirt during this generation. You would have been home from school for a few hours, you would have gone out and played if the weather was nice, it was getting on toward six o’clock, and Dad would come home. He’d get a drink, plop down in front of the TV, and watch the news. That meant everybody did.

And this is why I think even though the article is mistaken, it’s very important. During that entire generation, which ran on for forty years or more, this was the link between commoners and reality. Newspapers were not part of it. Newspapers were things your Grandpa read. Your immediate family tuned in at six o’clock, and after you went to bed, maybe they tuned in again at ten o’clock. That was it.

Do you feel good about that? Do you look back on these hours spent in your childhood, and the hours spent from the lives of your parents, all between six and seven in the evening — and say to yourself “that is when we really found out the important stuff that was happening in the world”?

Well, I don’t. I look back on those one-hour sessions with feelings best described as a mix of shame for how I chose to spend my time, and some measure of betrayal. I look back and I see a deadly faction of crazy Islamic extremists was rising up in the far east, while we argued back at home about whose proposed tax policy would soak the evil rich people among us to the extent “we” felt was just and proper. I see that when our government failed to protect innocent citizens from serial killers, rapists, kidnappers and sadists, we slaked our thirst for “justice” by watching make-believe movies about “vigilantes” gunning down “hoodlums,” usually in the subways of New York City, while we completely, utterly, overwhelmingly failed to bring this frustration into our judicial branch where it could have saved some lives.

In short, while pretending to be concerned about some very important domestic and overseas issues, we relied on this one-hour-an-evening to connect our intellects to reality. We were neglectful in settling for this. And the stewards of this umbilical connection, including “the most trusted man in America,” entirely failed us.

Two years ago we started a presidential election. The blogging community went to work on the “media” like a jackhammer on a porkchop. Dan Rather lost his job.

That happened because the media suddenly started having problems in 2004? I doubt that like hell. The media didn’t have a watchdog before 2004…not quite like what they had that year, anyway. Who knows how much stuff the blogging community missed, owing to the nacent phase that still enshrouds their collective development process, in that year? Who knows how much stuff the blogging community would have caught in decades previous, had they been around?

After the Tet Offensive, Cronkite went on television and said “the bloody experience of Vietnam is a stalemate.” America evaluated the worthiness of this sentiment not by the facts that had been presented just before it, but by who said it.

Now, some of Cronkite’s critics make the charge that at this time, the war was going well. Cronkite, therefore, used public opinion to sabotage a military operation on the political stage, that was actually succeeding out in the field. Vietnam has gone down in history as a failure, so it’s easy to offer the opinion that Vietnam was already getting fouled up and Cronkite was simply stating the obvious. Except I don’t see anyone with a reputation worth protecting (other than Cronkite himself, whose reputation seems to have been galvanized beyond any possible effective assault) actually putting their testicles on a block, so to speak, and attaching their own name to the statement that Cronkite was speaking a verifiable truth. Yeah, they call him a hero and they say he speaks his mind.

But nobody really debates on an intellectual and factual basis whether his words had verity. It would make great sense to do so. Here. Now.

Well, rest-of-world, you do whatever you want. This is the blog that nobody reads. And over here, I think opinions are opinions. Famous people offer good ones, and they offer stupid ones. Spoken opinions are good here, bad there, good somewhere else, bad somewhere else. Unpoken opinions are valid sometimes, invalid at other times.

There’s no correlation between whether a person is outspoken, and whether or not he/she makes sense.

But the connection between how much your opinion is worth, and how much you’ve researched the evidence upon which that opinion is based…is rock-hard.

The bottom line is, everybody has a right to their opinion — but how much that opinion is worth, is the unique, invididual responsibility of the person speaking it.

Even if that person’s name is Walter Cronkite.

I Support Anti-War People

There sure are a lot of people who think it’s a valid mindset to “support the troops, but oppose their mission.”

A recent letter to the Editor of the Ste. Petersburg Times makes the assertion that you can support the troops while opposing the war, expounding, “support the troops means letting them be safe and getting them home.”

The main web page for Veterans Against the Iraq War (VAIW) sports a masthead boldly intoning that people should “Support the Troops, Oppose the Policy.”

Last fall, on BobGeiger.com, a CBS poll was highlighted, which was extrapolated as “while the American people may support the troops, they do not want them in Iraq” and headlined, “Americans Support The Troops, But Not The War.”

An article that appeared in the online Bozeman Daily Chronicle shortly after the invasion of Iraq, identified a number of groups — including VAIW — “are, at least for now, drawing a fine line — support the troops, but not the mission.”

For thirty clams, you can buy a hooded sweatshirt proclaiming to all who see you wearing it, that you “support our troops, BUT NOT THE WAR”.

Someone somewhere made a proclamation about this that was opinionated, maybe biased, stated relative personal values in absolute terms, and I think it was on the radio. Notwithstanding those problems, assuming you think they’re really problems, his statement about “supporting the troops but opposing their mission” carried something that was, for me, an epiphany: “just wanting the troops to come out of this okay, is not enough!”

Maybe it’s not. This blog, which nobody reads anyway, shies away from instructing readers what opinions they’re supposed to be thinking — at least, here, we try to give you reasons for thinking what we want you to think. I’ll leave it to the readers to decide if that’s “enough” or not.

Some will say it is indeed enough. Some will agree with all the people quoted above, and insist they support the toops but oppose the war. They’ll insist they want the war to end A.S.A.P., regardless of the outcome, so that our troops can come home healthy and whole.

Let me just say this about those people. I support them. The same way.

I support our anti-war people. I want them to stay healthy. I want them to live, every single one of them.

And I oppose their mission — their mission of cut-and-run. I want the United States to win.

Yeah, I support the peaceniks, and I oppose their mission. It’s a perfectly valid mindset. I’d love to see one of these “support troops not war” pinheads argue that I’m cutting that too finely. It would make my day.

Unfit For The Gavel

The less-famous counter to Tookie Williams has now been executed. I associate Clarence Ray Allen to Stanley “Tookie” Williams for a number of reasons:

• He was executed;
• He was executed in my state, which is known for finding silly pussified reasons to avoid executing people who need executing;
• He was executed for ordering the murder of innocent people, with whom he had no beef, save for his narcissistic mission of eradicating witnesses.

Of course there are two things that make Allen substantially different from Williams. He was a Choctaw Indian, not a black man, and because he’s ineligible for the protections offered by certain advocacy groups, we haven’t been hearing his name lately even in the final hours before he stopped being the oldest prisoner on Death Row.

So there’s something that’s busted right there. The law, which I hold to have worked here just fine and dandy (albeit slowly), shows signs of having worked just fine and dandy because in the final analysis Williams and Allen were treated pretty much the same. The court of public opinion, or at least the chattering that goes on when said court is in session, is terribly diseased, disfunctional and wombat-rabies crazy. Assuming that Tookie Williams was a victim of cruel and unusual punishment, and therefore his case is a legitimate target of outrage, you would have to grant that Allen’s case is an equally legitimate target of outrage. A legitimate target of outrage is a compulsory target of outrage, since the outrage is based on moral indignation — so where is the outcry?

There’s no outcry here, for either one of these psychotics. Homicide, for the express purpose of eliminating witnesses, manifests a pressing danger to the innocent like no other brand of homicide possibly can. You catch a guy in bed with your wife and blow them both away with a shotgun, you’ll probably be entitled to certain protections and you’ll probably be allowed to plead mitigating circumstances. For the purpose of determining the residual danger you present to society by your continued existence, you probably should be entitled to these protections…maybe.

But reasonable people of all ideological stripes should be able to agree that this argument does not, and cannot, apply to a murderer who murders simply to get rid of witnesses.

Now, I don’t mean to imply that nobody has been talking about Clarence Allen. Since I live in the state where he was incarcerated, I’ve been able to read up about it. Allen, you see, was convicted for a handful of murders in 1980 — said murders winding up a string of tying-up-of-loose-ends from a robbery he and his son had committed six years earlier. He ordered the murder of a woman who was involved in his 1974 robbery, and then he got busted conspiring in her murder. He got LWOP’d for that (life without possibility of parole), and continued to conspire to eliminate witnesses, which is how the 1980 murders came about.

This should be talked about a lot more than it is. How many times have we heard the argument “so and so shouldn’t be executed because he represents no danger to society…he’s locked up…he’ll never get out, never, never, not ever.” We heard it a lot with Tookie Williams’ case. We’ll hear it again with other cases involving the stripped-gear set. Many times. But Clarence Ray Allen proved that this may not mean very much. While his heart kept beating, people-at-large were in danger. It’s about as simple as that.

But now we come to the part that really disturbs me — especially now, debating as intensely as we have been debating it lately, what it takes to “qualify” an Associate Supreme Court Justice to sit on our nation’s highest court. Unlike what I recounted above, you can read this anywhere, in any story that mentions a mere paragraph or two about Clarence Allen’s sordid tale.

Supreme Court Justice Stephen Breyer issued a dissenting statement, citing Allen’s age, bad health and the fact he had been on death row for 23 years as reasons to stay the execution.

“I believe that in the circumstances he raises a significant question as to whether his execution would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. I would grant the application for stay,” Breyer said.

Findlaw has captured a more complete quotation of what Breyer said (at this time, I cannot find the actual dissent document or the case number).

…Justice Stephen Breyer filed a dissent, saying: “Petitioner is 76 years old, blind, suffers from diabetes and is confined to a wheelchair, and has been on death row for 23 years. I believe that in the circumstances he raises a significant question as to whether his execution would constitute cruel and unusual punishment. I would grant the application for stay.”

Now, this is a very strange way for a Supreme Court Justice to announce his resignation, I must say. That is what Justice Breyer is doing here, is it not? After all, when the Supreme Court meddles in the God-given right of the people to protect themselves from the stripped-gear set, they derive their authority to do such meddling from one thing and one thing only: that the punishment needed to enforce this protection would show an irreonciliable inconsistency with the United States Constitution those justices have sworn to uphold and protect.

Breyer is asserting, here, that the execution of Clarence Allen violated the Eighth Amendment’s cruel-and-unusual clause — or, at least, that there is a lingering problematic question of whether there was a violation. Except he isn’t saying what a Justice would say if he really believed that.

Anyone believing what Stephen Breyer says he believes, would have to confer upon Allen the benefit of any doubt regarding the applicability of the Eighth Amendment. You’re sitting on the Supreme Court, you are approached by counsel for Allen saying “this execution would be cruel and/or unusual” — maybe it is, maybe it isn’t. Breyer says there is “question,” so there’s question. You don’t know. Clarence Allen deserves to be spared at least until the intricate details can be hashed out.

So you’d say you dissent from the majority opinion of the court, because the question of conformity with the Constitution is unacceptable. You would hold it to be your duty to grant the petition. My point is that if it is your duty, it is also the duty of the other eight justices. The Supreme Court failed to uphold its sworn obligation. You would believe this — because if you did not, then you would necessarily doubt your authority to hold up the execution.

How serious would that be?

Serious enough to entirely eclipse issues involving you, Clarence Ray Allen, or any one person. The Supreme Court is not on the job! That’s what you would have to talk about. So you wouldn’t say “I would grant the application for stay.” It’s not about you. Therefore, it’s my opinion this isn’t what’s on Justice Breyer’s mind. What he’s doing, is looking for an occasion by which he can manifest his sympathy. He isn’t applying logic to figure out if something’s going on that is inconsistent with the protections provided in the Constitution.

After all, if he were doing the latter instead of the former, what is it that does the trick, Justice Breyer? You cite the petitioner’s age of 76 years; his being blind; his diabetes; his use of a wheelchair; and his being on death row for a long time. What arouses the question? All of these factors? Some of them? One of them?

A caller to Armstrong & Getty made a great point a few minutes ago about this “blind” thing. Quoting from the San Francisco Chronicle article about Allen’s final minutes before the execution:

He was a burly man, but when he put his thin arms on the sides of the gurney, he had little difficulty hoisting himself up and laying flat. And once he’d been strapped down and fit with the needles that would inject poisons into his tattooed arms, he vigorously craned his head and made eye contact with several people in the room. [emphasis mine]

He smiled broadly, calling out first, “Where are you?” and then, “I love you,” as he raised his head several times to gaze at his former daughter-in-law, Kathy Allen, and four other supporters who came to watch him die. They smiled back, and when one of the women waved, he nodded his head.

What’s this deal about “eye contact”? We just had a sitting Supreme Court justice comment that his case should have been heard in the nation’s highest court because, or partially because, the dude is blind. Now, granting that Allen appeared to have trouble seeing if he has to ask where people were — how blind was he?

How blind does he have to be, anyway? There are a lot of people who, like me, don’t understand the argument.

Some guy with 20/20 vision blows you away with a shotgun (or orders your hit) — I want that guy dead.

Some blind guy does the same thing — I want him just as dead.

Not sure where Breyer was going with this. But it seems definite that he doesn’t have the stomach for doing what needs to be done in his office. His argument, as I read the excerpts provided to me, as an “Aw geez, c’mon” argument. There is no room for such thinking in the high office occupied by Justice Breyer. He should go.

Judging Sam Alito

One of the things that is a neverending fascination to me, perhaps to the neverending boredom of people kind enough to make the effort to read the stuff I write, is the continuous use of bourgeois ignorance as a communications device by the liberals to promote their agenda. I’m particularly fascinated in this method when its exercise can be easily calculated, in advance, to be unprofitable but is exercised anyway. For example, what possible long-term political benefits could Hillary Clinton, or her husband’s administration, have drawn from any insinuation that she was named after Sir Edmund Hillary? If I’m Hillary Clinton, what would be going through my head just before I decided to do this?

But that was over a decade ago. Nowadays, the charlatans no longer rely on ignorance on the part of the commoners. Not exclusively, anyway. It’s a new century, and more & more they seem to be relying on ignorance on the part of elitists who fancy themselves to be in charge of telling those commoners what those commoners’ opinions are supposed to be. It’s certainly not news to anyone paying attention that if you want to be informed, and well-informed, relying exclusively on the “Newspaper of Record” for your news is probably a step in the wrong direction.

Here, however, we have the Priesthood of News putting out verifiably false stuff (link requires registration). Do they know better, and figure they can get away with it? Are they wrong, and cognizant that they could be wrong, but figure the concern is irrelevant so why bother to double-check? Or do they think their reputation is so hammered and battered at this point, that little benefit has to be recognized before sacrificing what’s left of that reputation becomes a worthwhile enterprise?

Either way, they’re just plain wrong. And if it matters to the New York Times that its editorial page is wrong, in a way that makes its resulting position problematic at best, they haven’t done a lot to demonstrate that this really bothers them much.

The White House has tried to create an air of inevitability around Judge Alito’s confirmation. But the public is skeptical. In a new Harris poll, just 34 percent of those surveyed said they thought he should be confirmed, while 31 percent said he should not, and 34 percent were unsure. Nearly 70 percent said they would oppose Judge Alito’s nomination if they thought he would vote to make abortion illegal – which it appears he might well do. [emphasis mine]

Gosh, New York Times. Sorry to point this out, but Supreme Court justices cannot and do not “make abortion illegal”. It’s simply not the way our system works.

It’s just a fact.