Whining: Still For Losers

Mr. Brian Cowen is the Prime Minister of Ireland

I might be able to forgive saying something dumb in the immediate aftermath of an important game in which an official blew an important call -- maybe even Joe Nathan's recent impulse to bitch and moan about the egregious missed call in a game in which the call wouldn't have happened at all if he had done his job. But it's both hilarious and pathetic that actual political leaders in Ireland still seem, days later, to be advocating the idea of a replay with a straight face. I can imagine some narrow circumstances -- ineligible players, demonstrably corrupt officials -- that could warrant a replay, but I assume that it doesn't require elaborate argument to point out that an honest official making a garden-variety bad call isn't one of them. Bad calls are part of the sport; if every team that loses a close game got a replay because a bad call theoretically could have turned the game in their favor is entitled to a replay, we would just keep replaying close games forever. Moreover, in this case waving off the goal wouldn't have even been decisive from Ireland's perspective. It would be farcical enough to call for a replay in a case in which an official's getting a call right actually, all things being equal, would have handed you a championship (as with Game 6 of the 2004 Stanley Cup finals.) But in this case, getting the call right would almost certainly have given Ireland the opportunity to win a coin flip in the shootout.

To give the point broader applicability, this should also be pointed out:

Wednesday's infamous goal -- Mr. Henry's "Hand of Gaul," as London's Daily Telegraph called it -- overshadowed several complicating realities in the match. Ireland led 1-0 and had at least three very strong chances to add another goal which would have almost certainly assured victory.

But the French goal tied the score 1-1. Since France had won 1-0 in Dublin, with the tie it prevailed, 2-1, on aggregate.

The blame for being eliminated from the World Cup belongs, in its entirety, to the players of the Irish team. They put themselves in the place in which a single bad break could eliminate them by 1)losing the first game and 2)blowing failing to extend a lead in the second game. This is why I have absolutely no patience for, say, Cardinals fans still whining about Don Denkinger. Yep, awful call, no question. But there is actual precedent for teams with a lead in the 9th inning allowing a leadoff runner and still winning the game. Denkinger didn't cause Jack Clark to muff a pop-up, Porter to allow a passed ball, or for the Cardinals to be outscore 12-0 the rest of the Series. If you can't overcome a single bad call, you aren't a champion.

I'd have compared her to Edward Gibbon, but then again I'm prone to wild and ignorant exaggeration...

Americaneoclown is seeing starbursts through the pages of his book:

I should add that I'm reading the book now, and I'm finding it as an extremely satisfying account of the everywoman's tale of American exceptionalism. That is, Sarah Palin is our 21st century Frederick Jackson Turner, who was the author of the seminal account of the American political culture, "The Significance of the Frontier in American History." With Palin we have our modern-day political scribe of the frontier existence, the rugged pioneer of traditionalism who rejoices in the Alaskan harvest of the great remaining bounty of the nation's magnificent destiny.

Wow. That's a mighty chain of prepositions there. But has Donald even read the Turner essays? I have no idea what a phrase like "the pioneer of traditionalism" is supposed to mean, but Turner's argument -- which historians and political scientists have pretty much rejected for the past half century -- is that "the frontier" destroyed tradition, particularly the cultural inheritances that European settlers brought with them to the perimeter of settlement (e.g., western Massachusetts, the Ohio Valley, the Mississippi Valley, etc.)

In any event, Turner's argument is that the social life of the frontier produces a laboratory of sorts in which democratic ideals can be rejuvenated and then retained as the frontier becomes progressively more "civilized." For the frontier thesis to work, in other words, the frontier in question needs to produce democratic modes of life that are actually worth emulating. Given that Alaska's entire political and social order depends upon gobbling up more federal resources than the state can deliver in tax revenues, I doubt there are altogether that many Americans who would find this an agreeable model. Palin's notion that the state can wean itself from the federal teat by drilling from now until the End of Days is also a decidedly non-Turnerian fantasy, unless I missed the parts in which he celebrated the massive transfer of real estate and political power into the hands of corporate speculators.

You don't need to know what the science means to establish what the words mean to scientists.

Global warming skeptics are attacking climate scientist Phil Jones for encouraging trickery in an email recently stolen off the webmail server at the University of East Anglia in which he wrote:

I've just completed Mike's Nature trick of adding in the real temps to each series for the last 20 years (ie from 1981 onwards) amd from 1961 for Keith's to hide the decline.

Over at RealClimate, the skeptical response to the word "trick" is to treat it as a colloquial:

Trick:
“a cunning or deceitful action or device; “he played a trick on me”; “he pulled a fast one and got away with it”
“Something designed to fool or swindle; ”
“flim-flam: deceive somebody; “We tricked the teacher into thinking that class would be cancelled next week”

To which one of the hosts, Gavin A. Schmidt, responds:

Wrong. Wrong and wrong.

The skeptics reply:

[S]ince this happens “often”, it would be good to see a couple of examples of the word’s usage from other fields to understand why it is not problematic.

Schmidt obliges:

Sure. It's mostly used in mathematics, for instance in decomposing partial fractions, or deciding whether a number is divisible by 9 etc.etc.etc.

The skeptics rejoinder:

This is nonsense. Both are examples of teaching or explaining concepts to lay people. The first intentionally places “tricks” in quotations marks to emphasize its non-technical use.

The problem with nonspecialists reading the private correspondence of experts is that their ignorance transforms all the technical points into nefarious inkblots. To continue with the example above, skeptical nonspecialists encounter the word "trick" and ask for clarification. Schmidt provides evidence that the word is innocuous, but because nonspecialists can interpret neither the context of the original nor that of the further examples, they redouble their efforts: now the rhetorical situation in which the word "trick" is uttered matters; now the appearance of quotation marks matters, etc. They are convincing themselves that those black blobs represent what they insist they represent, and when experts inform them that those are not Rorschach blots to be subjectively interpreted—that they are, in fact, statements written in a language that skeptics simply do not understand—the nonspecialists look over them again and declare that it could be a butterfly, or maybe a bat.

To my mind, the only way to convince them that the word "trick" operates innocuously in the particular linguistic community of climate scientists would be to demonstrate that the word "trick" operates innocuously in the particular linguistic community of climate scientists. Show the skeptics that on 11 July 2001, Jean-Charles Hourcade wrote:

This passes first through ... a macroeconomic framework insuring the consistency between prices and quantities at any point in time without necessarily resorting to the modeling tricks relying on the conventional neo-classical growth theory; these 'tricks' assume indeed perfect foresight, efficient markets and the absence of strategic or routine behaviours; new conceptual frameworks about endogenous growth theory allow for such a move, but there is a gap between advances in pure theory and empirical modeling[.]

I don't know what that means any more than I know the science behind Phil Jones's statement, but I do know that this email demonstrates that the word "trick" is used both with and without quotation marks in this particular language community. Moreover, I know that even though the information leaked was designed to be do maximal damage to that community, there is still evidence internal to it that resists attempts to mischaracterize the intent of its members. Should skeptics insist that "trick" doesn't mean a quick-and-dirty way to explore some possibility, show them that on 12 January 2008, John Lanzante noted that

a quick-and-dirty way to explore this possibility using a "trick" used with precipitation data is to apply a square root transformation to the rejection rates, average these, then reverse transform the average. The square root transformation should yield data that is more nearly Gaussian than the untransformed data.

If, by some miracle, that satisfies them on the matter of "tricks," they will start complaining about the phrase "hide the decline," which was, of course, the real object of their objection in the first place.

Needless to say, I don't envy climate scientists the tsunami of stupid they're about to suffer.

Lynn Vincent Could be God's Ghostwriter...

Via SN:

So what if Sarah Palin didn't write this book? Even God used earthly scribes to write the Bible.

This was better than any of the Harlequins I've read so far this year. I only found two spelling errors in the whole thing.

Literal Symbolism: The Commonsense Conservative History of American Idiocy, from Reagan to the Politics of Nonsense

The following exchange between Bill O'Reilly and Sarah Palin would, were we talking about any other politician, mark the end of a career. The emphasis is mine:

PALIN: With Israel, we cannot get into Israel, for instance, and say we're going to tell you whether the Jewish community can expand or not expand within your borders. Instead, what we need to do is tell Israel that we will—we'll go to bat for them.

O'REILLY: Well, what does that mean though? Look, say Israel, say Netanyahu says—calls you up and says, I'm bombing them, I'm bombing Iran, they're too close, I'm not going to let it happen. What do you say? You say go ahead, Netanyahu, go bomb them? What do you say?

PALIN: Oh my gosh, any kind of war strike is the absolute last option.

O'REILLY: All right, so you, you say no.

PALIN: That anybody would …

O'REILLY: But he's saying to you, you guys aren't going to be able to stop him.

PALIN: That's why we cannot let the world get to the place that you're talking about right now.

O'REILLY: Well, we're already there.

PALIN: No, we're not. We're not quite there yet. There is still hope. But what we have to do is exert the pressure that America can put on our allies and on those who are not so friendly.

O'REILLY: Obama says he's doing all that.

PALIN: He's bowing to world leaders and I think any other president in our country …

O'REILLY: Do you mean that literally, the Japanese emperor?

PALIN: I mean that literally.

O'REILLY: Do you think Obama's weak abroad?

PALIN: I believe that his approach to diplomacy is not what history has shown us works. What works in my mind, reading the history book, is what Reagan did.

As to the first embarrassment—her insistence that symbolic gestures are literal—all I can say is that I believe her. She honestly has no idea that she literalized a cliché and then condemned Obama on account of it. She honestly believes that Obama can no longer exert political pressure on reluctant allies because he bowed to the Japanese emperor. She sees not symbolism but causality there. That symbolic gesture is literal proof that Obama is not "exert[ing] the pressure that America can put on our allies and on those who are not so friendly." The mind boggles.

As to the second embarrassment—her belief that there is one history book and it conforms to her ideological predisposition—that is the sort of statement only uttered by people who never read books.* I'm not making a judgment here: I'm saying that the locution "reading the history book" is grammatically foreign to anyone who has read more than one book.** If you ask anyone who regularly reads any question at all that requires reference to a source, you would receive a response that indicated an engagement with a scholarly community. It might be vague ("some have argued"), or it might indicate ignorance of the larger conversation ("the only book I've read on the subject"), but it would acknowledge the existence of competing ideas and conflicting opinions. Put differently: even Jonah Goldberg talks this way.

*That or no one told her Reagan isn't in the Bible.

**The one exception would be Tom Tango, Mitchel Lichtman and Andrew Dolphin's The Book were the title itself not an arch reference to 1) conventional baseball wisdom and 2) the decades the authors spent talking about their unwritten book.

Going Rogue, Chapter 3

I realize this is a pedantic complaint, but would it be possible for Sarah Palin to launch her chapters with epigraphs that aren't of dubious origin?

The first chapter, for example, opens with a quotation from Lou Holtz that the former football coach apparently wrote exclusively for this book. (Alas, as it turns out, Palin and her ghostwriter were simply mangling a nearly identical aphorism that -- while always attributed to Holtz -- never leads back to an actual source and only appears in "inspirational" books of quotations.)

Chapter Two is introduced by a fake quote from Aristotle, who never in fact wrote that "Criticism is something we can avoid by saying nothing, doing nothing, being nothing." Instead, such banalities are more properly credited to a book called Seeds of Change Greatness by Denis Waitley, a hack motivational speaker and author who once served as an executive for a skin-care Ponzi scheme.

So far as bungled epigraphs go, the third chapter is arguably the winner so far, attributing this nugget of wisdom to the renowned former UCLA basketball coach John Wooden:

Our land is everything to us.... I will tell you one of the things we remember on our land. We remember than our grandfathers paid for it -- with their lives.

Now, if that's not the sort of thing you'd expect a hall of fame basketball coach to say, that's because, of course, he didn't. Students of American Indian history might recognize that passage as belonging instead to John Wooden Legs, the post-WWII Northern Cheyenne tribal leader who -- though a contemporary of John Wooden's -- was not the same guy.

Yes, yes -- it's absurd to expect much from Sarah Palin, but imagine if these sorts of gaffes had appeared in books by Hillary Clinton or Obama himself.

***

OK, moving onward.

In brief, chapter 3 is a cumbersome, hundred-page turd that covers Palin's campaign for the governor's office; her first 18 months as chief executive, including her push for ethics reform and a natural gas pipeline; all the people who were mean to her for one reason or another; her last pregnancy, including the letter Palin wrote to her family in which she pretended to be God; and her family's random exploits from 2006-2008, including Todd's 4th place finish in the Iron Dog snowmachine race and Bristol's 1st place finish in getting knocked up.

Like much of the book so far, there's almost nothing in this chapter that readers wouldn't already have known if they'd closely followed the campaign last fall. With the exception of Palin's gossipy, adolescent snark about colleagues she now hates (e.g., her first legislative director, whom she describes, with devastating wit, as a "BlackBerry games addict who couldn't seem to keep his lunch off his tie"), there's not much news about Palin's public record. She warbles at length about her own mavericity -- taking on "Big Oil," deleting line items from the state budget, clucking her tongue as one state legislator after another was loaded into the paddy wagon -- but we've suffered through this exaggerated folktale too many times already. The overriding lesson from this chapter is quite simple:

• Alaskan politics was a Roman orgy of corruption before 2007
• Sarah Palin (and the few people who remained loyal to her) restored purity to state government.
  
• Well, OK, Jesus Christ -- whose spirit was conveyed through the righteous work of Sarah Palin -- restored purity to state government.

What's more interesting, certainly, are the details about her early governorship that Palin decides not to mention. Though she discusses the "reassignment" and resignation of Walt Monegan, for example, she neglects to explain why she and her husband had been badgering the commissioner about State Trooper Mike Wooten (Palin's former brother-in-law) since the day she came into office. Though she defends her decision to leave Juneau at the start of the '08 legislative session to attend her son's graduation from boot camp, she chooses not to address the matter of why she stayed away from the capital city for nearly half of the days the legislature was in sesssion during her first two years in office.

Indeed, anyone halfway connected to Alaskan politics will read this chapter with slackened jaws, stunned by Palin's ability to claim for herself a leadership role that she doesn't actually deserve. It's the sort of performance that left the boys from the Weekly Standard squirming uncomfortably in their chairs -- for which, I suppose, in a strange way we should all be grateful -- but it's still quite maddening to watch.


....and here's some bonus material from chapter the third, in which Palin suggests that the Obama folks ripped off her campaign theme:

Every part of our campaign shouted "Change!" A change in campaign financing: we ran on small donations from all over the states, mostly from first-time political donors, and we turned back some large checks from big donors if we perceived conflicts of interest. A change from photo-op stops to honest conversation with actual voters. A change from emphasizing politics to emphasizing people. A change from smooth talk to straight talk -- even then.

We were amused a couple of years later when Barack Obama--one of whose senior advisers (come to think of it) had roots in Alaska -- adopted the same theme. Kris [Perry, her campaign manager] and I joked about it: "Hey! We were change when change wasn't cool!"

Because really -- after six years of George W. Bush, no one was really thinking a change of direction would be a good idea.

Friday cat blogging: Beau

...update from davenoon, inspired by comments...

Pishtacos

From the "subplot excised from The Road for being too disturbing and creepy" file:

Four people have been arrested in Peru on suspicion of killing dozens of people in order to sell their fat and tissue for cosmetic uses in Europe.

The gang allegedly targeted people on remote roads, luring them with fake job offers before killing them and extracting their fat.

The liquidised product fetched $15,000 (£9,000) a litre and police suspect it was sold on to companies in Europe.

At least five other suspects, including two Italian nationals, remain at large.

Police said the gang could be behind the disappearances of up to 60 people in Peru's Huanuco and Pasco regions.

One of those arrested told police the ringleader had been killing people for their fat for more than three decades.

The gang has been referred to as the Pishtacos, after an ancient Peruvian legend of killers who attack people on lonely roads and murder them for their fat.

Many, many questions remain. For one, what on earth did these cosmetics manufacturers think they were buying? What were they told? What did they think they were paying 15 grand a litre for? And if this theory of the crime isn't accurate, what the hell were these people doing?

(And yes, I know these are lousy tags. I wish we could add more tags)

Friday Daddy Blogging

Miriam and Elisha.

Tenure and Equity

Via Berube, Dean Dad uses the fact that a recent Supreme Court decision has been interpreted by lower courts in ways that have undermined the academic freedom of public university professors to...argue against tenure. Now, there are certainly good arguments to be made against the tenure system (especially in high schools, where research generally isn't an issue), but it must be said that Dean Dad doesn't really make them. The idea that the AAUP's positions on academic freedom lead to this position is a transparent non-sequitur, and with respect to DD's silliest argument -- that "[t]he accountability built in to a renewable-contract system would go a long way towards defusing the cheap political shots to which higher ed is now routinely subject" -- Michael shows more restraint that I would have:

I keep trying to imagine Roger Kimball saying, “I used to get all squicky about queer theory, but now that universities have scrapped tenure, bring on the fabulous challenges to heteronormativity.” Or Daniel Pipes saying, “I used to target anyone who didn’t toe the Likud line, but now that universities have scrapped tenure, let a hundred critiques of Israel bloom.” Or my old friend David Horowitz saying, “I used to have a list of dangerous professors, but now that universities have scrapped tenure, Bill Ayers is just all right with me, whoa yeah.” But alas, I have to admit that I’m just not that imaginative.

DD's alternative to tenure is to have (after a 3-year probation) all academics on renewable 5-year contracts that would contain language protecting academic freedom. To expand on one of Michael's other points a little bit, I think we need to return here to a point long ago made by James Madison -- institutional protections tend to be vastly more effective than parchment rights. Tenure protects academic freedom not so much because of contractual language protecting academic freedom but because it places the burden of proof for termination on the institution. Except for academics that exceed a university's standards for re-appointment to such a degree that their academic freedom is unlikely to be a practical problem anyway, proving that the neutral justifications used to justify a non-renewal were actually just pretexts for punishing someone for expressing unpopular views would be exceptionally difficult. Particularly since academics can't be assumed to be sitting on a bankroll sufficient to hire an attorney and fund very complex litigation. I wouldn't say that language protecting academic freedom for all academics would be useless, exactly, but any gain in security would be very marginal.

Perhaps recognizing that his argument that abolishing tenure could actually increase academic freedom is unserious, DD smuggles in a better argument: equity. It is true that a system in which only a quarter of academics are tenure-track is highly unattractive. A central problem here, though, is that DD's response is a classic my-utopia-versus-your-grubby-reality asymmetry. I'm not sure why we should assume that abolishing tenure would lead to everyone on 5-year contracts, rather than people on 5-year contracts existing alongside adjuncts without any security or contractual protections at all. Even if we do, such a system wouldn't necessarily address the more fundamental inequities, with are about money. For many adjuncts, the problem isn't so much finding work as the fact that the work has abysmal pay and benefits -- something that a multi-year contract inherently does nothing to alleviate. (And if we assume this particular can opener, there's no reason that adjunct pay and benefits can't be improved without abolishing tenure, or that more lines can't be made tenure-track again.)

There's a final problem we can see from looking at it in the other direction: what happens when a university (especially one that isn't among the most prestigious and/or in the most desirable locations) wants to attract a strong scholar to help build up a program? Obviously, if you can't offer job security, the only way of doing so is money: large signing bonuses, high salaries, perhaps punitive buyouts for non-renewal. And this money has to come from somewhere. So...I think the idea that abolishing tenure would significantly improve inequities in academic jobs where it counts most is pretty naive.

Track? Mat? Court?

The esteemed Dr. Noon is not the only blogger to be studying Going Rogue in depth. See also Going Commando, who supplies indispensable detail on the naming conventions within the Palin family...

The Christian Values Spokeswoman Competition

I'm assuming that she failed to fulfill all of the duties of the position at the high standard demanded by the National Organization for Marriage, and that the crown will now pass to the first runner-up...

...to be clear, I value this more as an occasion for mocking NOM, and of the various conservative organizations and pundits that undertook the lionization of Ms. Prejean, than of criticizing Prejean personally. I think that she deserves some opprobrium for embracing the most hateful groups in our society, but I also think that she's been dealt a difficult and unfair hand.

Who?

The European Union selected its President and High Representative for Foreign and Security Policy and Vice President for External Affairs. In the classic stereotype of the dull gray bureaucrat, they've selected a couple of relative lightweights (given the nature and stature of the position) whom nobody outside of their jobs, families, and closest work colleagues know anything about. I'll admit to having "fleshed out" my knowledge of the two appointees just this morning.

The President is the Belgian Prime Minister, Herman Van Rompuy. He's only been Belgian Prime Minister since December 30 of last year, and then, he was reluctant to take up the position following the political collapse of the imagined state of Belgium. The King had to cajole him.

The High Representative for a Number of Important Things is Catherine Ashton, life peer since 1999 so commonly referred to as Baroness Ashton of Upholland, or Lady Ashton here in the UK. She has had a proper lefty background, studied Sociology at University, worked for the CND for a couple years, had a stint working with businesses about issues of social inequality, before entering politics. I'll admit to gleaning most of her pre-politics background from her Wiki as well as a couple other sources.

I'll try to imagine some strengths of these appointments before discussing the obvious weaknesses. Van Rompuy has held a country together that by all accounts should not be a country, and nearly ceased being a country in 2007-08, a crisis that I exploited for its humor value early and often in class. By all accounts, his success in holding Belgium together was more than mere competence; he was able to rebuild a modicum of trust between Flanders and Wallonia. These skills should serve him well in trying to keep the 27 member states of the European Union on the same page. Of course, there is fear that Belgium has lost its healer and will once again descend into chaos.

Lady Ashton was the Leader of the House of Lords for a bit over a year, has held the post of EU Trade Commissioner (replacing Peter Mandelson) for a bit over a year, has a reputation for . . . well, hell, I really don't know anything about her.

I wrote about this on Halloween. While my post was primarily a befuddled questioning of Tory tactics on several issues, I had this to say about the positions:

Second, I don't see the value in European leaders wanting a "chairman rather than a chief". A recognizable, public face as the putative leader or figurehead representing the EU will help not only abroad, but within the EU itself. Not noted for its democratic transparency, distrusted by more than just the British, and perceived to be run by faceless Eurocrats in Brussels, such a "president" would help raise the profile of the EU within the EU.

These appointments will help the image or profile of the EU neither abroad nor within. What they do suggest is that the 27 member states, especially the leaders of the large leading countries (e.g. Germany, France, the UK, Spain, and . . . Italy? Poland?) did not want these posts to have a higher profile than they. So, we get a perhaps diplomatically and politically gifted Belgian Prime Minister whom nobody outside of Brussels or Antwerp has really heard of, and a British politician who, as The Guardian argues, is as obscure as she is unelected. Can you even be a politician in a democracy if you've never stood for election?

Critics of the EU will have a field day with this, indeed already are here in the UK. The leader of UKIP (and an MEP), Nigel Farage, argued

We've got the appointment of two political pygmies. In terms of a global voice, the European Union will now be much derided by the rest of the world. Baroness Ashton is ideal for the role. She has never had a proper job and never been elected to public office.

But then we would expect UKIP to say that.

A greater problem will be the legacy that they establish in designing their positions. The descriptions are suitably vague enough that a strong political force could have developed them into something useful vis-a-vis the various heads of government in the EU. However, George Washington they ain't.

Speaking of American Presidents, Obama did claim that these appointments would make the EU an "even stronger partner" to the United States.

Did he say this before, or after, looking them up on wikipedia?

Note: while I may appear to be overly critical of Belgium, I rather love that country, and spent a lot of time in it when I lived in the Netherlands. In fact, one of my top five beer bars on the planet is in Antwerp.

Going Rogue, Chapter 2

The funniest sentence thus far in Going Rogue occurs about a third of the way through the second chapter when our heroine -- speaking through the Palinese translator Lynn Vincent -- declares that "life is too short to hold a grudge." This is a warm piece of advice that Sarah Palin predictably spends much of her time ignoring as she recounts her contentious early years in local and state politics. Few pages are allowed to turn without our deposed governor reminding us of the bêtes noires who interfered with her efforts to bring "common-sense conservatism" -- a phrase she's been loading into the wingnut beer bong for the past few days -- to the people of Wasilla and, soon enough, their fellow Alaskans. As Palin revealed in her first chapter, the first "big word" she learned how to spell was "different." And because different people are sometimes scary -- perhaps not President Black Man Terrorist scary, but scary in that ordinary, non-Negro way -- Palin knows that she'll have to deal with resistance along the road to glory.

Among the roster of liberal fascists, "good ol' boys," and uncooperative, low-level public employees with who find their way into Palin's esurient maw, we find the former Wasilla mayor John Stein, a man whose name Palin admits she can't pronounce and whose terrifying agenda seems to have rested entirely on the well-known communist wedge of building codes and land-use restrictions. Palin, by contrast, envisions Wasilla as a Hayekian paradise, where "laissez-faire principles" might crush liberalism as surely as her husband Todd scotched small woodland creatures with his snowmachine. Though she neglects to mention her campaign's emphasis on gun control, abortion and the cleansing magic of Christ's blood, Palin describes her eventual victory as a mandate for "no more politics-as-usual" -- by which I suppose she means badgering librarians, firing museum directors and police chiefs, and initiating regressive sales taxes to fund a costly sports complex on land for which the city had no clear title (land titles presumably being a big-government conspiracy to deprive The People of their squatters' rights). Along the way, Palin helps to turn her town into the "Honorary Duct Tape Capital of the World," an award bestowed by Wal-Mart in recognition of Wasilla's bone-deep commitment to not paying overbearing, know-it-all liberals to fix your shit. (Wasilla, you see, is an independent-minded place. "No community organizers necessary," she explains. Which is funny, because she's talking about President Barack Fanon Senghor!)

The rest of the chapter proceeds in the manner of skeet shoot, with Palin bitching about nearly everyone she encounters in public service, including her fellow candidates for the lieutenant governor's office in 2002, Frank Murkowski (her predecessor in the Governor's office), fellow commissioners on the oil and gas commission, and an unnamed array of "good ol' boys," corporate lobbyists and fat cats who would forever serve as foils for Palin's simulated populist tirades. Along the way, she wears her contempt for legislators proudly. Brutalizing the English language to convey her disdain, she describes them as people who "scratch disagreeable backs" for a living and who work in an environment where "the trading of favors [seems] to run through the ventilation system as a substitute for air." Indeed, for someone who professes several times in the book to having "Jeffersonian" views of government, she's awfully dismissive of republican institutions; with her belief that only the "lead dog" is able to have a clear view of public affairs, Palin unwittingly reveals herself in this chapter as someone who actually loathes collaborative public service. When fellow officials are unwilling to "get on board," she fires them (as she does in Wasilla) or shits on the floor and goes home (as she does with the oil and gas commission).

Unfortunately for the rest of us, Palin continues to believe that she has an open WATS line to Jesus, and when Chapter 2 ends, she's rocking her latest seedling and yammering away in prayer, asking for a sign from on high that she should return to public life and fuck some more things up.

Words to Make Policy By...

Stephen Walt, following a rundown of ten "scary monsters" of foreign policy:

First, we are often told that international politics is a dangerous business, and that it makes sense to prepare for the worst case. This is nonsense, because there are real costs to exaggerating various potential threats. Not only may this policy lead us to ignore more likely and more legitimate problems and to waste resources addressing fantasies, but it can also lead a country to take active steps that either make minor problems worse or lead to enormous self-inflicted wounds (see under: Iraq). Fixating on scary monsters can leave you ill-prepared when real problems arise.

This point cannot be emphasized enough. In conversation, associating preparation for the worst case with responsibility makes a certain amount of sense. The risk, however, is that the costs of "worst case preparedness" will be ignored. As John Mueller put in in Atomic Obsession, the 1% Doctrine is sensible insofar as in preparing for high cost, low probability events is often a good idea. Unfortunately, we often de-emphasize the low probability in favor of the high cost. We then run the risk of suffering much higher costs than warranted. As Walt notes, paying higher costs isn't even the "worst case" of "worst case thinking"; sometimes, effort to prepare for low probability events actively makes the world more dangerous (invasion of Iraq).

Then, of course, there are the "worst cases" that really aren't that bad at all. I very much doubt that Al Qaeda will attempt to mount some kind of attack on New York during Khalid Sheikh Mohammed's trial, but damn, I hope that they do. There is very little that would make me happier than for the rump Al Qaeda to devote its time, manpower, and resources to attacking the United States at the point of its highest preparedness; indeed, if I really believed that Al Qaeda would try to attack New York because of KSM, I'd be even more heavily in favor of the trials. Terrorist attacks succeed because they're unexpected, and an attack straight into the teeth of the security and intelligence services of the United States is highly likely to result in nothing at all, apart from the death and destruction of whatever remaining assets Al Qaeda can call upon. Let's hope that the rump AQ is as stupid as the average contributor to NRO.

La main de Dieu, for a New Generation

France 1 (1) - 1 (0) Ireland. AET.

France qualify for the 2010 World Cup.

I recall watching the 1986 World Cup on TV, which was a rarity at the time from the United States. I vaguely recall watching the Argentina v England quarter final match as well. However, not being an England fan, and only an 18 year old American at that, the infamous Hand of God goal by Maradona didn't resonate at the time as it did on the island where I now reside. Living six + years here, and being a soccer fan, I quickly learned just how fantastically lame that was. In my mind, the so-called "goal of the century" that Maradona scored a few minutes later didn't absolve him of that central sin. For all of his greatness as a player, his reputation is also blighted for being a cheat.

Thierry Henry's glorious career, likewise, took an unrecoverable turn last night:

(UPDATE: I originally included a clip from youtube, but Sportsfive, who own the rights to the broadcast from the match, have been busy scouring the intertubes for copyright infringements. Or something like that. Did I mention that they are French? Anyway, check out the comments for an active clip).

Granted, it's not a World Cup quarter final, but it was the final few minutes of qualification, and the match looked to be heading ineluctably towards penalties. It also was not the fifth round of the FA Cup in 1999, either.

I was in the pub for this match (technically only the second half). While Henry claims that he did not do it on purpose, I strongly disagree. The first hand ball was incidental -- still a foul, but not purposeful. The second hand ball he appears to direct the ball with intent. Before the replays, we knew something was up: virtually every Republic player had their hands raised, and Shay Given storms out to first the referee, then the linesman, to protest. The replays made the foul plain.

It's difficult to blame the referee for this; in the main he had a good match. The Anelka dive may have led to a penalty against Given, but that was a judgment call; the hand ball was not. The linesman should have spotted it, and either didn't, or didn't believe his eyes. But then he also failed to spot the clear offsides at the same time.

I'm not buying into any of the conspiracy theories -- while FIFA and UEFA have a clear preference for large nations to qualify, they sorted this out in the playoff draw. If there was a conspiracy involving the ref, he would have called that penalty against Given, not waited for a few minutes remaining in stoppage time to ignore a hand ball.

As my English club has always been Arsenal, even before the Wenger years, I should be inclined to give Henry the benefit of the doubt and wax eloquent about how any player would have done the same thing.

But I'm not. That hand ball was intentional, and should be called what it is: cheating. And Henry's legacy will forever be tied to this moment, which is a shame.

UPDATE: The Irish Justice Minister is calling for a replay. I heard rumblings about this on both BBC Radio 4 and 5 Live last night and this morning, which is why I cited the Sheffield United - Arsenal FA Cup Fifth Round tie in the above.

It's not going to happen. How would it? Any such match has to happen soon, but the next international window is months away, so the players would have to be coaxed from their clubs. While FIFA and UEFA can pry players from their clubs during international breaks, to the best of my knowledge they have no leverage outside of international windows. The current French squad play for such clubs as Chelsea, Real Madrid, Barcelona, Arsenal, Manchester United, Lyon . . . when these clubs say no, and they would within a second of receiving the request, the French players have no incentive to challenge the club position: they've already been handed their trip to South Africa (sorry for the dreadful pun, but about half the newspaper headlines today make the obvious easy play).

Truly, academics lead enviable lives.

Proffer theories as to the avocation I undertook presently. You guessed it! I spent the day marking papers, which, means I had, many reminders of why teaching Writingstudents, even at the Universitylevel, can make even the most mild-mannered academic want to JAB IN EYES JAB IN EYES.

Actual posts to recommence when the noises in my head resemble English more than English as she is spoke.

ALSO: Because it's always best to make this plain from the beginning, on the issue of whether my students know what I'm writing:

With the exception of the text adventure, [what I post is] written to be used in class, then repurposed for the blog. I show them videos of Shatner and ask them if that's what they want to sound like; I have them write blog posts (for their course blogs) in which they're required to substitute every noun and verb with suggestions from Microsoft Word's thesaurus, etc. Whenever I write about conversations in the classroom (for example), I ask the students if they're alright with that ... and as I'm typically the butt of those posts, they always are. In fact, by the end of the quarter, they're actually demanding I write up what happened in a given class (for example). Even the most notorious bit of student writing I've parodied was done with the student's consent. (It was years ago, and he wrote me out of the blue to apologize for writing it.)

Smeared By A Murderer

A great catch by Cole, who notes that a new CNN special should remind us that one of the chief witnesses in the extremely thin and frequently illogical witchhunt against Scott Beauchamp, First Sergeant John Hatleywas convicted of killing Iraqi civilians in cold blood:

1SG Hatley and the other NCOs executed these men in March of 2007. Scott Beauchamp wrote Shock Troops in July 2007. Hatley wrote this letter after July of 2007, insisting that Beauchamp was disturbed because he wrote about making fun of someone in a cafeteria or running over a dog. He wrote that letter attacking Beauchamp, knowing that just a few weeks earlier, he and others had taken it upon themselves to put a gun to the back of several detainee’s heads, pull the trigger, and dump their bodies into a canal.

But they would have you believe that no one in their unit would run over a dog.

Or play with bones.

By the way, Scott Beauchamp is still in uniform serving his country honorably. None of the wingnuts who freaked out about him at the Weekly Standard or elsewhere have gotten around to enlisting.

Call me crazy, but I'm not inclined to put a lot of stock into Hatley's evalutions of other people's integrity.

I'd Rather See Keanu Reeves in the Lead Role in Going Rogue

Keanu Reeves is something that should never mix with the 47 Ronin.

On the Bedwetter Caucus

I assume that the fact that the latest ad hoc conservative arguments that following the rule of law is a luxury the United States just can't afford are illogical isn't news to most of you, but Lithwick provides an excellent summary:

Opposition to the Obama administration's plan to try alleged 9/11 mastermind Khalid Sheikh Mohammed and his confederates in a federal court in New York City is hardening into two camps. One is concerned that we may be unwittingly playing into the terrorists' hands. The other is incensed that we already have. What both camps share, besides a kind of unhinged logic and complete disregard for the legal process, is an obsessive fascination with the accused. The result is a broad willingness to sacrifice our commitment to legal principles in favor of the symbolic satisfaction of crushing the hopes and dreams of a motley group of criminals.

Of course, the idea that the alleged desires of terrorists should be of paramount importance to our own decisions is a long-running feature of the perpetual bedwetter set.

Going Rogue: The Index

Thought I'd help Dave out a little bit here by noting this...

But She Has 8 ranks in the "Bluff" Skill...

This comment from Dave's thread (also appearing here) deserves the full blog treatment:

First let me say, great blog! Second, let me say I wish I had read it first before buying this book.

I stood in line to get my copy of this book from the local bookstore fearing it might be sold out early. Hot chick on the cover, so far so good. Then I opened it and started reading.

To my chagrin it didn't start out well. I thought well at some point this has to get better. But guess what it doesn't! There's nothing at all about dex rolls, dps builds, searching for traps, sneak attacks, assassins, +4 daggers or anything!

All it is some woman whining about how everyone in her party wouldn't let her make any decisions, about how something called a Couric made her look like a complete idiot (I couldn't find it in the monster manual but, I'm guessing it must be like a Sphinx), and how her group leader McCain wouldn't let her be rogue enough.

Well, I don't even know where to start addressing this stuff. She doesn't even have any daggers! I mean, that's hardly the group leader's fault! She should have loaded out before the quest started!

Plus, on every single page she bemoans her 8 INT build and blames her horrible playing on everyone else! It's her fault for putting all her stat points into Charisma!

To sum up, this book is terrible. It's anti-rogue if anything. If you want a book on how not to be a rogue this has got to be the bible.

I'm going back to the store now to see if I can get my hard earned cash back for this awful drek.

Going Rogue, Chapter 1

I should note at the outset that Going Rogue is substantially worse than even I could have predicted. The opening chapter is clearly supposed to bear several loads, including (1) establishing Palin's geographic and cultural bona fides; and (2) conveying her abiding love for Jeebus, family and Ronald Reagan. In each case, the results are pretty unimpressive.

For starters, Palin's ghost-polished descriptions of Alaska's landscape and cultural peculiarities are delivered with roughly the same verve as I'd expect to find in a mediocre historical novel written by someone who, at most, had visited the state on a cruise ship. We learn for example, the astonishing and widely-underpublicized fact that Alaskan nights are incredibly short during the summertime,

creating a euphoria that runs through our veins. Hour after hour, there is still more time and more daylight to accomplish one more thing. If we told our kids to be home before dark, we wouldn't see them for weeks.

Perhaps I haven't had enough experience with the "euphoria" of "accomplish[ing] one more thing" recently, but there's something really underwhelming about Palin's trek through the list of Generically Oddball Stuff about Alaska. Yes, people up here shoot a lot of megafauna; yes, people up here chop a lot of firewood; yes, people up here can grow gigantic heads of cabbage; yes, people up here are impressed by grazing sheep. But people up here also do tons of meth, beat the shit out of their kids, and half-purposely ram their cars into trees. When you remember that Sarah Palin is earning well over $1 million for this book, it's hard not to feel cheated when she reminds everyone that Alaska has glaciers bigger than Delaware.

Moving beyond the scenic and cultural moorings of chapter 1, we learn a bit -- all of it vaguely detailed -- about the roots of Palin's political beliefs. In a passage whose goofiness resists description, for example, we read about Palin's childhood immersion in the minutia of the Watergate investigation:

It amazed me that the whole country seemed riveted, unified by watching the events unfold. It was the first time since the moon landing that I'd seen that, so I knew Watergate had to be big. When Gerald Ford took over, I knew who he was because I remembered reading about him and seeing him a picture in a scholastic magazine. He'd been America's vice president then, sitting parade-style atop the backseat of a convertible, waving at the crowd. Now he was our president!

I'll concede that Sarah Palin was ten years old when Nixon resigned, but this is a brainless waste of a paragraph. When we consider that Palin traces her awareness of "the skewed priorities of government" to a ticket she received for underage snow-machining, one has to marvel at Sarah Palin's inability to say anything interesting about the most grotesque political conspiracy in the nation's history. She manages to write as if she's responding to a question from Charles Gibson, except that Charles Gibson is nowhere to be found.

Her ode to Reagan is similarly inept, larded with bog-standard wingnuttia like "[he] won the Cold War without firing a shot" and "[he] restored our faith" in America after the Carter interregnum. Reagan, we learn, "radiated confidence and optimism" and "had a steel spine." He believed in "ideas" like "cutting taxes" and "building a strong national defense." It's pretty vacant stuff all around, but I'm sure the second chapter will be a thousand times better.

"In Any Meaningful Sense"

I endorse most of what Gian Gentile says here about the Vietnam War, especially in the context of this quote from George Herring:

…the war could [not] have been ‘won’ in any meaningful sense at a moral or material cost most Americans deemed acceptable.

Gentile is a pretty harsh critic of the COIN turn in the US Army, and is pushing back against some of the more aggressive claims made by COINdistas about how the Vietnam War might have been won with better tactics. This dovetails, of course, with revisionist right wing accounts of the Vietnam War. This, in turn, has the potential to create some odd bedfellows; while COINdistas blame both the Army and the dirty hippies for losing the war (with the bulk of blame, in fairness, falling on the Army), right revisionists prefer to reserve responsibility for perfidy of the flower children. I'm sure that Ralph Peters has an opinion, and I'm sure that I don't want to know what it is.

At the same time, I think it's fair to say that the Vietnam War, like the Iraq War, involved both strategic and tactical errors. Both wars were stupidly conceived and ineptly conducted. The difference between 2007 and 1968, I think, is the disappearance of the Red Army. The need to prepare for war against an actual peer competitor made the "COIN turn" impossible; David Petraeus could not have found purchase in the US Army of the Vietnam era. So, while many of the tactical errors could be resolved in Iraq (even as the strategic error could not be remedied), such was never a possibility in Vietnam.

Incidentally, I just finished Tom Ricks' The Gamble, and he makes a connection that I hadn't previously understood between Petraeus' fitness obsession and his professional success. Ricks argues that Petraeus outstanding performance on the physical indicators helped promotion boards ignore some of the more troubling aspects of his career, such as the overt intellectualism and the focus on COIN.

Not Going Anywhere

I'm guessing that this is going to make it hard to treat the settlements as "bargaining chips."

Gatsby on Madison Avenue

My wife and I started watching Mad Men on DVD about three weeks ago, and are now thoroughly addicted. We're about midway through the second season, and just viewed the episode that features Mr. and Mrs. Donald Draper on a family picnic, during which Don tosses a beer can into the woods and Betsy cleans off the blanket on which they ate by simply tossing all the wrappers, napkins etc. onto the grass.

This scene reminded me of how when I was a child in the late 60s and early 70s there was what in retrospect seems like an intense anti-littering campaign, featuring among other things this famous PSA, that everyone of a certain age remembers.



I don't know anything about the genesis or ultimate efficacy of that campaign, but if a scene from a period piece TV show counts as compelling evidence, it seems to have worked.

Seriously, did lots of Americans -- including privileged people highly conscious of what was considered socially correct upper class public behavior -- just use the outdoors as a wastebasket 50 years ago? Anyone know of any studies of the issue?

Sportswriters Descend to the Level of Political Pundits

Somerby notes the unfortunate parallels:

Undying love of conventional wisdom: Many sports pundits have seemed genuinely angry about the fact that Belichick did something unconventional. (Trent Dilfer, come on down! And take your meds!) In political journalism, the pundit class is often happiest when They All Get To Say The Same Thing. In this case, many sports pundits came unhinged because one of the NFL’s coaches didn’t do The Thoroughly Typical Thing. This reaction seemed quite familiar.

The instant recourse to mind-reading: Many sports pundits instantly turned to mind-reading, thus “explaining” the motive behind Belichick’s unconventional move. (Kill the pig! For one especially foolish example, just click here.) Of course, this is also a common, numb-nutted approach among our political pundits.

The inability to conduct an analysis: Finally, we were struck by how weakly many sports pundits were able to reason about Belichick’s decision. They complained that he didn’t do the conventional thing—and then, they began explaining his motives. But had he done the smart thing—made the right decision? Many pundits showed no sign of knowing how to approach such a question. To them, Belichick’s decision was unusual. Automatically, this made it wrong.

In addition, there seem to be two other major arguments:

• Credentialism is everything, meaning that those stat geeks and their math who probably got cut from their high school football teams should be ridiculed. Hence, sports pundits and mediocre ex-players can be justified in calling a coach with 5 Super Bowl rings an idiot based on no actual evidence.*
  
• The coach's most important job a coach has is not to maximize his team's chances of winning but to "show confidence in his defense." The best way to demonstrate this confidence is to assume that the Colts have a 105% chance of scoring if they get the ball on the Pats' 30.
  

As I've said in comments, I should make clear that -- as with many such tactical decisions -- the percentages are within a range that makes it impossible to know what the best call was there. I think the best evidence carefully considered supports Belichick, but it's close enough that it's possible that in this individual case punting was a slightly better option, and I wouldn't be inclined to criticize him either way. But to say that the decision couldn't have been right is silly.

*To be clear, I don't agree with the credentialism -- Belichick is a great coach, but obviously it's possible for him to do dumb things, and I think his play-calling and clock management leading up to his defensible 4th-and-2 call was shaky. But if your football experience matters more than the evidence, then given that Belichick has vastly superior credentials to the Michael Wilbons and Trent Dilfers of the world we can end the debate immediately.

Wallis: Wrong on the Policy, Wrong on the Politics

It's hard to even know where to begin with what is -- despite some hemming and hawing about "both sides" being at fault that always seems to end up with the pro-choice majority being at fault -- a rousing defense of the Stupak Amendment. [HT, I think, to Dr. Black.] First, on the policy, welcome to non-sequitur theater:

The now-famous Stupak amendment is clearly closer to the pro-life community's understanding of what "neutrality" means than the pro-choice community's. But it is clearly not the caricature it is now being made into by the losing side of the vote, some of whom are now referring to it as "the coat hanger amendment" suggesting that it is designed to push women into back alleys again for illegal abortions by denying them access to legal abortion; it certainly is not.

What it does do is exclude health-care plans in the public option from covering elective abortions; it also disallows any public subsidies from being used for plans in the new exchange which offer elective abortions.

Um, what? I hate to break this to Wallis, but the thing about denying people the money to pay for things is that it denies them access to them if they lack the resources. This is true of his beloved Hyde Amendment, and this is true in a more limited way of the Stupak Amendment. The latter denies women access to legal abortion if they have to buy insurance and couldn't do so without the subsidies. That's why people opposed to abortion rights favor them. You would think that a progressive "pro-lifer" would care that abortion access is being selectively denied for a class of relatively powerless women, but of course Wallis doesn't seem to care at all about such inequities. At any rate, Wallis' argument is like saying that if welfare was abolished, it wouldn't deny many poor people access to adequate sustenance; it would just prevent them from using public money to purchase food. Unless we've suddenly entered a world in which all women have solid middle-class incomes without me noticing, it's a distinction without a difference.

On the politics, he gives the same line anti-choicers fed a credulous Amy Sullivan:

But somewhere along the line, the process broke down. Instead of building on the initial common ground of neutrality and bringing both sides together to hammer out compromises, many pro-life Democrats felt excluded from the conversation about how abortion would be addressed in the bill. Ultimately, they felt they were presented with a final "compromise" on abortion drafted by a predominantly pro-choice committee. Although the Capps Amendment was meant as a good faith effort to find common ground, it was drafted and finalized without enough substantive input from the pro-life community, and it failed to address many pro-life concerns. (In several situations, it even made things worse instead of better.)

So, in other words, 1)opponents of reproductive freedom injected abortion into a debate about health care, 2)the part of the Democratic Party that actually represents the party's core values made some compromises try to get health care passed, and 3)the minority of the party that opposes the party's core principles decided to hold health care hostage until they got the odious language they wanted. And this shows that...pro-choicers injected abortion politics into the health care debate and don't really care about health care reform (because they only way to really care about health care reform is to ensure that it doesn't cover crucial medical procedures for women that Jim Wallis finds icky.) Sure.

Look, I'll make this simple. It was opponents of abortion rights, not supporters, who decided to risk health care reform by introducing a wedge issue. (Note that the leadership didn't try to use health care reform to pursue the salutary goal of getting rid of the Hyde Amendment.) It was Stupak et al. that couldn't abide a bill written by a leadership that actually trued to represent the values of the vast majority of the party and threatened to take their balls and go home. If it fails, it's on them, end of story.

I suppose it should also go without saying that Wallis is also a major proponent of the idea that Democrats could court opponents of abortion rights without any substantive risks. I guess this is the end of that! Although since he seems to define restrictions on access to abortion as not actually being restrictions, maybe he'll keep saying it...

Pierce on Paglia

Seems like as good an explanation as any:

Part The Fifth: Being The Continuing Adventures Of Waldo, The Drunk Security Guard. Amazed at his continued employment at the home offices of Salon, Waldo celebrates by chasing 15 shots of Virginia Gentleman with a six-pack of Piels Real Draft. He sings two choruses of "Twist And Shout" and, while impersonating Ferris Bueller atop a desk, he falls, knocking himself unconscious. While he is out cold, a squirrel hops in through a window, downs the rest of the liquor, and starts tap-dancing on a KEYBOARD. "When as a Yale graduate student I ransacked that great temple, Sterling Library, in search of paradigms for reintegrating literary criticism with history, I found literally nothing in Levi-Strauss that I felt had scholarly solidity." And then I failed to find my ass with both hands and made a career out of it.

Well, I guess it's not very charitable to squirrels...

Time For Another...

...blogger ethics panel.

Shpadoinkle! Sarah Palin endorses cannibalism.

From the NRO's new shrine to Sarah Palin:

If any vegans came over for dinner, I could whip them up a salad, then explain my philosophy on being a carnivore: If God had not intended for us to eat animals, how come He made them out of meat?

Because He wanted everyone to have a shpadoinkle day? More seriously, Palin is calling Him a rank hypocrite, because He also said "You must not eat bats" and yet he made them out of meat.

Ignorance of the Original Testament hypocrisy is, I admit, the easiest hypocrisy to spot, but it's the least effective to mock on account of its profundity. If someone were to inform Palin that her beloved moose aren't kosher because they weren't properly shekhted and porged, she'd complain about "gotcha journalism" and question your love of America on account of her profound ignorance of the book she claims to live her life by.

Fortunately for semi-professional mockers such as myself, Palin set the standard demonstrably lower by claiming that God intended humans to eat anything made out of meat.

Kathryn Jean Lopez, Editor Extraordinaire!

When you read something like this:

From a $50 NRO Contributor [Kathryn Jean Lopez]

Great job NRO. Your holding down the fort until the conservative movement gets its act together.

Contribute to NRO here.

11/16 03:30 PM

It pays to remember that Kathryn Jean Lopez "has been ... praised for her 'editorial daring.'" That sentence slipped through multiple layers of possible editorial intervention, and the person who wrote it (and likely forwarded the link to that post to his or her friends and relatives) is now wincing with embarrassment at the error and wondering why an editor of Lopez's (self-professed) awesomeness couldn't be bothered to make a silent correction. After all, an editor of her talent surely noticed the mistake, but decided to post the email anyway in a deliberate attempt to embarrass its author. He or she must be so happy they paid $50 for the privilege of a public humiliation. I know I'd be.

Not All Bad Policy Is Unconstitutional

Attempts to use Pfzier pulling out of New London to argue that Kelo was wrong rather than using it to argue that the New London and Connecticut governments were involved in stupid public policy really gives away the "conservatives object to same-sex marriage because of teh judicial activism!!!1!1!" show. It's not just that it's obviously a policy argument, but in the vast majority of cases there's really no pretense otherwise.

Another thing to note is that eminent domain is just one instance of large corporate welfare scheme. Even had the development scheme that required eminent domain never gotten off the ground, New London would still be out the tax breaks, subsidies, and giveaways of public land, and the decentralization of economic regulation conservertarians like so much makes this kind of stuff more, not less, likely. The Courts are probably right not to use the commerce clause to stop these stupid subsidies, just as they were probably right in Kelo. Kelo deserves sympathy for having her house appropriated for a stupid project, but she was protected by the takings clause: she got compensation, while New London's other taxpayers weren't. (I do think Marty Lederman had a point that the courts would be better policing eminent domain abuse by ensuring that takings compensation is on the high side.)

Conceding That Abortion Is Icky -- Not An Effective Strategy

Lizardbreath is 100% right about this:

I can't help thinking of the Stupak amendment, prohibiting abortion coverage in any health insurance plan that's paid for in part by federal subsidies under the House health reform bill, as the payoff from all that talk about how pro-choice voters should be more respectful of pro-lifers' beliefs. If we just acknowledged that abortion was always tragic, and always kind of wrong somehow, and that prolifers' total opposition to anyone being able to get an abortion ever was a deeply held moral belief that pro-choice voters shouldn't hold against them, then they'd respect us more in return and abortion would stop being such a hotly contested political issue.

Turns out, no. What happens when you treat pro-life views with solicitous respect and make sure pro-life politicians feel completely welcomed in your big tent party is that sixty-four House Democrats vote for poor women to be unable to get abortions or, most likely, to in at least some cases get late-term rather than early abortions because they can't get the money together in time. Solicitious respect isn't just interpersonal decency that will make political conflict over abortion less intense, it's unilateral political disarmament, and it has real policy consequences.

The logic that by which "emphasizing that abortion is gross and women who get abortions are immoral" actually benefits the pro-choice position has never made any sense, and surely the Stupak amendment settles the question. The idea that anti-choicers don't actually want to legally restrict abortion for poor people but just want Democratic politicians to give them a pat on the head makes no sense in theory and is pretty clearly wrong in practice.

Yoo Defends Arbitrary Torture, Opposes Rule of Law, Makes Self-Refuting Argument

I suppose this is all a dog-bites-man story...

Equalized

Edward Woodward, RIP.