November 11

Two QOTDs:

Jacob Levy:

A Veteran's/ Armistice/ Remembrance Day observed on November 11 in particular shouldn't just mean a gauzy and somber honoring of live veterans and fallen soldiers. It should be in part a day of anger and horror about the particular war that ended on this day, the stupid brutality of it, and the evil that followed in its wake. Of course, no continuously-existing government (US, UK, Canada) is likely to create a day officially dedicated to pointing out that its predecessor contributed to the deaths of millions for no good cause. But we have the capacity to remember lessons other than the official ones.

Taking a step back, Randolph Bourne:

In a republic the Government is obeyed grumblingly, because it has no bedazzlements or sanctities to gild it. If you are a good old-fashioned democrat, you rejoice at this fact, you glory in the plainness of a system where every citizen has become a king. If you are more sophisticated you bemoan the passing of dignity and honor from affairs of State. But in practice, the democrat does not in the least treat his elected citizen with the respect due to a king, nor does the sophisticated citizen pay tribute to the dignity even when he finds it. The republican State has almost no trappings to appeal to the common man's emotions. What it has are of military origin, and in an unmilitary era such as we have passed through since the Civil War, even military trappings have been scarcely seen. In such an era the sense of the State almost fades out of the consciousness of men.

With the shock of war, however, the State comes into its own again. The Government, with no mandate from the people, without consultation of the people, conducts all the negotiations, the backing and filling, the menaces and explanations, which slowly bring it into collision with some other Government, and gently and irresistibly slides the country into war. For the benefit of proud and haughty citizens, it is fortified with a list of the intolerable insults which have been hurled toward us by the other nations; for the benefit of the liberal and beneficent, it has a convincing set of moral purposes which our going to war will achieve; for the ambitious and aggressive classes, it can gently whisper of a bigger role in the destiny of the world. The result is that, even in those countries where the business of declaring war is theoretically in the hands of representatives of the people, no legislature has ever been known to decline the request of an Executive, which has conducted all foreign affairs in utter privacy and irresponsibility, that it order the nation into battle. Good democrats are wont to feel the crucial difference between a State in which the popular Parliament or Congress declares war, and the State in which an absolute monarch or ruling class declares war. But, put to the stern pragmatic test, the difference is not striking. In the freest of republics as well as in the most tyrannical of empires, all foreign policy, the diplomatic negotiations which produce or forestall war, are equally the private property of the Executive part of the Government, and are equally exposed to no check whatever from popular bodies, or the people voting as a mass themselves.

The moment war is declared, however, the mass of the people, through some spiritual alchemy, become convinced that they have willed and executed the deed themselves. They then, with the exception of a few malcontents, proceed to allow themselves to be regimented, coerced, deranged in all the environments of their lives, and turned into a solid manufactory of destruction toward whatever other people may have, in the appointed scheme of things, come within the range of the Government's disapprobation. The citizen throws off his contempt and indifference to Government, identifies himself with its purposes, revives all his military memories and symbols, and the State once more walks, an august presence, through the imaginations of men. Patriotism becomes the dominant feeling, and produces immediately that intense and hopeless confusion between the relations which the individual bears and should bear toward the society of which he is a part.

The patriot loses all sense of the distinction between State, nation, and government.

As Bourne wrote these words in the Winter 1917-1918, he was facing severe poverty due to the loss his primary source of income, writing for journals of opinion. Pro-War members of editorial boards, including his former teacher and mentor John Dewey at (of course!) The New Republic, had him blacklisted. At The Seven Arts, the editor continued to publish him and other anti-war voices, which lead to left-Wilsonian backers to withdraw financial support, making it impossible to continue publication. This is trivial compared to the statist attack on rights and liberties that came with WWI, all of which must be understood as costs of war in addition to blood and fortune. Bourne's unforgivable sin was not merely to oppose the war but to point out the staggering stupidity that was Left-Wilsonianism. Whatever one thinks about the American decision to enter WWI, his critique was surely correct. Robert Westbrook*:

Moved by Wilson's rhetoric, these progressives defended American intervention in the war on the grounds that it would provide a unique opportunity to reorganize the world into a radically democratic social order. "Industrial democracy is on the way," Dewey told a New York World reporter in July 1917. "The rule of the Workmen and the Soldiers will not be confined to Russia; it will spread through Europe; and this means that the domination of all upper classes, even of what we have been knowing as 'respectable society,' is at an end." This was, to say the least, poor prophecy—the result not of the informed judgment that Dewey's ethics required but of what he himself called "footless desires."

Bourne's posthumously published essay "The State" is the source of famous 'War is the health of the State' line, and has long been a favorite of libertarians, paleo-conservatives, anarchists, socialists, and other disreputable characters. The rest of us should give it a second look.

*Westbrook, "Bourne over Baghdad," Raritan 27:1 (Summer 2007), pp. 106-107.

How To Be A Hack

The Weekly Kristol does indeed set the gold standard, among other things usefully demonstrating the distinction between a conservative publication and a straightforward extension of the Republican Party. My personal favorite:

McCain should feel vindicated. His choice of Palin as his running mate has turned out extraordinarily well. There's never been a national candidate like her, a mother of five from the boondocks who grins as she skewers her opponents. More important, she's given a significant gift to McCain. She's improved his chances of winning.

Not-sadly, no! Which, in fairness, does demonstrate that their Republican hackery has some limits. After all, writers actually concerned with the electoral fortunes of the Republican Party would be trying to make Palin a pariah, but the Standard is still fully in the tank.

Unlikely Obsession?

I had the honor on Monday of Blogging Heads with Professor John Mueller, Woody Hayes Chair of National Security Studies at the Mershon Center at THE Ohio State University. The topic was Mueller's latest book, Atomic Obsession, which argues that the historical importance of nuclear weapons has been overstated, and that the threat of a nuclear terrorist attack is wildly implausible:

Armistice Day

There are now only three survivors of the Great War; this may be the very last Armistice Day to honor actual veterans of the conflict. It will be, I think, a very strange thing to live in a world with no veterans of the First World War.

Let the circle be unbroken.

From a thread about Michael Steele's "white Republicans are afraid of me" remarks on Sunday:

I’m terrified of Michael Steele the same way Mary Jo Kopechne was terrified of Teddy Kennedy.

This ride is flat scary, and I want off.

In less than 30 words, this commenter compresses the conservative response to white liberals and all blacks into the singular image of a threatened white woman. I would stop and note that the white female martyr in question worked with the man who supposedly terrified her and willingly entered a vehicle with him on that unfortunate evening, but that would be beside the point. It is not the woman herself to whom conservatives appeal when they utter her name, but what happened to her as imagined through their eyes.

Their horror at Kopechne's death (and their subsequent insistence that in it can be found the root of all ideological evil) reminds me of nothing so much as the origin story of Rorschach in Alan Moore's Watchmen. (Such obsessions happens when writing a book.) His moment of decision—the moment he became, a la Bérubé, outraged by Chappaquiddick—was when he discovered some fabric that had been purchased by Kitty Genovese shortly before her murder:

What turns Rorschach into the misogynistic psychopath deplored by a witless Anthony Lane but beloved by many a conservative? The seventh and eighth panels tell you all you need to know. They are not presented from Genovese's perspective: the scene-to-scene transition from panel six to panel seven clearly indicates that they're Rorschach's reconstruction of the indifference she witnessed as she bled out before the eyes of friends and neighbors. She is no more a person to him that Kopechne is to those who claim to speak for her and yet, like conservatives, Rorschach claims her death for his own purposes.

I would continue, but I don't feel comfortable speaking for the dead. Would that others shared my discomfort ...

Missing the Point

There's something very depressing about the oral arguments on juvenile sentencing yesterday. It's not just that, at best, the court seems headed towards a content fre...er, "minimalist" balancing test. In theory, I don't even have a problem with proportionality review in these cases; it's true enough that it doesn't make much sense to say that a 17-year-old could never get l-w-p for 1st degree murder while a 19-year-old could get l-w-p for armed robbery. The problem is that balancing tests are exactly as good as the courts applying them, and given the current composition of both the Florida courts and the federal courts...there's not a lot of room for optimism. One suspects that, aside from maybe 1 or 2 egregious cases involving adolescents, we'll get a Kennedy special in which the Court holds open the theoretical possibility that a sentence could be unconstitutional while in practice never finding a non-capital sentence disproportionate.

But it really goes beyond that. There's something jarring about these cases -- which in the Sullivan case involved not only a draconian sentence but procedural defects that should be unacceptable if he was 40 -- being addressed at an angle that will have the least impact. That's not the fault of the lawyers -- their job is to shock the consciences of Kennedy and/or Roberts, and for their clients the lower the impact the better their chances. But even if the prisoners here end up with more reasonable sentences, it fundamentally seems like an evasion of the real issues. For the same reason, I can't imagine why people got so exercised about Roper v. Simmons. I suppose it's nice that zero rather than maybe one or two 17-year-olds will get executed per decade, and the outcome of the case is defensible (even if Kennedy's opinion is typically shaky.) But it allows the Court to pat itself on the back for its humanity, while leaving in place a system in which innocent people with buffoonishly inept counsel can get railroaded to the death chamber based on tarot card readings. Window dressing doesn't make this structure much less ugly.

That Word "Young" I Do Not Think It Means...

Granted, I suppose if you evaluate it by Yankees standards:

Maybe the Yankees were the better team this year, but the Phillies, with Ryan Howard, Chase Utley, Jimmy Rollins, Pedro Feliz, Raoul Ibanez, Jayson Werth, et al, have the best nucleus of young talent in baseball and should be odds-on favorites to win the NL pennant and probably more next year.

Um...well, to start, Feliz isn't young or good. Rollins will be 31 -- old for a shortstop -- and wasn't good at all last year, although there's a reasonable expectation that he'll be better. Ibanez will be 38, Werth 31. Utley is one of the best players in baseball, but is nearing the end of his prime. Howard is an outstanding (if slightly overrated) slugger, but was trapped behind Thome and will be 30 next year, and he's the kind of player who normally doesn't age well.

So to say the Phils have a young core fails to understand what they do well. They don't have a very good young core, they have a very good "win now" core that they've filled out very well with useful veterans. And the key is that they're always looking to improve. My snark aside, Feliz was actually a good signing, taking what was a black hole and at least getting some defense out of the spot. But by all accounts Amaro is trying to upgrade the spot to get a two-way player, whereas the Mets have a black hole at first base and by all accounts think that's plenty good. Which is why the Phils figure to be no worse than co-favorites with the Braves while the Mets may well continue to drift out of contention despite a nucleus that's of similar quality but younger.

Some of My Best Friends...

Ye Gods, Diaz is a tool. However, I still have to agree with Peter Beinart that the failure of New York courts to act in defense of the equality and dignity of the state's gay and lesbian citizens was the best thing to ever happen to the cause, because with legislative leaders like Diaz how could legislation granting same-sex marriage rights fail to pass?

With Friends Like These . . .

The Sun (of all papers) manufactures a controversy about . . . Gordon Brown.

The time line is telling. Brown, blind in one eye and of notoriously illegible handwriting (something I can say that I understand), pens a letter to the mother of a fallen soldier expressing sorrow over her son. The illegible scrawl could be interpreted as clumsy, hasty, and riven with sloppy spelling (including, allegedly, her surname). Jacqui Janes, the mother, with the help of The Sun, decry the obviously anti-military inclinations of the PM.

The story leads the news for a day. The PM phones the mum. The mum has a rant.

And it's conveniently on tape.

What is lost in this furor is the more important issue: the British services are under-equipped, and it's entirely possible that more helicopters in the theatre might have increased the probability that her son's life was saved.

Rather, what we have is a typically shrill manufactured tabloid critique of a Prime Minister that The Sun is already on record as not supporting.

But at least Rupert Murdoch regrets his papers' anti-Brown stance, a man he considers his friend.

In a Desperate Search for Connections . . .

Sesame Street turns 40, the Berlin Wall fell 20 years ago.

Discuss.

Politics as punting on fourth and one

One explanation for why people who advocate transparently idiotic policies that result in national disasters (the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, our current health care system, our drug laws, our prisons, our current financial crisis) generally don't lose their pundit credentials is that what gets you fired isn't being wrong: it's being perceived to be wrong while bucking the conventional wisdom. Indeed being wrong while repeating the conventional wisdom is generally more profitable than being right while resisting it.

That's why football coaches punt on fourth and one. It's idiotic and loses lots of games, but what gets them fired is doing something unconventional that doesn't work 100% of the time. And since nothing works 100% of the time they generally prefer to "manage by the book" as the baseball expression goes.

In American politics today, managing by the book means always being "strong on defense," which in turn means spending insane sums of money on wars and the weapons to fight them, and "tough on crime," which means throwing millions of people in prison at immense cost, often for behavior which in a more rational society wouldn't even be illegal, let alone grounds for incarceration. It also means doing nothing that would upset the economic status quo; hence bankers must receive immense bonuses 15 minutes after their firms were saved from extinction by the timely transfer of hundreds of billions of taxpayer dollars. (This is known as "letting the market reward success.").

The conventional wisdom is the conventional wisdom because the establishment deems it to be simply the truth, and therefore not subject to question by serious people, such as themselves. This is why failed football coaches and baseball managers keep getting re-hired; this is why Bill Kristol now writes a column for the Washington Post, and Iraq war advocates aren't immediately laughed out of the room when they give their opinions on what "we" should do next in Afghanistan.

Of course eventually things get too ridiculous, and the Red Sox hire Bill James. I don't think Obama is Bill James. At best he might be Brian Cashman. Lets hope he doesn't end up working with a hard salary cap. (What brings this whole post together, which to less discerning eyes might appear to consist of a disjointed ramble of mixed metaphors, is that Christina Romer is David Romer's wife.)

3.9%!

Lesson of the day: Things are always fine if you're a white male with a college degree, age 25-44. I suspect that if it had asked how many college degrees I have, the unemployment rate would have gone up...

Thanks, Fred

Fred Hiatt on the immorality of health care reform:

Yet neither should a civilized nation saddle its coming generations with a lower standard of living, a likely effect of U.S. profligacy if unchecked. No civilized nation should leave its government too bankrupt to help the poor.

Huh. Seems to be the kind of thing you'd want to keep in mind while advocating the invasion and indefinite occupation of an endless series of random countries, Fred.

Unreliable Narration

Amy Sullivan asserts that the Stupak-Pitts amendment was the result of "political malpractice:"

Despite the fact that anyone who has followed U.S. politics over the last thirty years could have told you that abortion would be a controversial aspect of health reform, no one tried to preemptively address the concerns of pro-life Democrats by sitting down with them early in the process. The White House didn't reach out to some of the more good-faith players on the pro-life side until early September. And Pelosi didn't sit down with Stupak until September 29. This despite the fact that 19 Democratic members sent her a letter in June expressing their concerns with abortion coverage in health reform.

I know many in the Democratic caucus tend to see their pro-life colleagues as a pesky but ultimately insignificant faction. But this sort of leadership strategy isn't just inexcusable, it's malpractice. It appears that Pelosi thought Stupak et al were bluffing and would come around in the end rather than oppose health reform. That assumption also depended on a scenario in which the Catholic bishops may not have supported health reform but also didn't vigorously oppose it.

Is there some truth here? Possibly, yes. Certainly, there are many potential criticisms of how Democratic leadership has dealt with health care, although when you actually care about expanding access to health care it's hard to negotiate with the Stupaks of the world who don't, but want to use other people's progressive impulses to attack women. I am, however, very skeptical about this particular narrative, given that it seems intended to salvage Sullivan's own political position on such issues. As you may remember, Sullivan's longstanding niche among the "Democrats need to do much more pandering to cultural reactionaries" set has been to argue that there's a free ride, that Democrats can appeal to an allegedly significant number of cultural conservatives looking for subtle rhetorical shifts rather than substantive concessions. The most obvious lesson of Stupak is that this is nonsense: broadening the Democratic coalition to include more anti-choicers carries real political risks, for the obvious reason that they generally want to use laws to restrict access to abortion rather than having Democratic leaders "acknowledge abortion as a moral issue" or some such.

So I'm not willing to accept at face value Sullivan's assumption that Stupak was willing to make a deal for legislation that wouldn't really change the status quo but was offended by the fact that the Democratic leadership was focused on providing health care to more people rather than taking it away from women. As her prior cited article concedes, the Conference of Catholic Bishops and many of their cat's paws in Congress spent the summer negotiating in bad faith. You have to be optimistic bordering on delusional to think that Stupak would have surrendered his leverage if only the Democratic leadership had given him more access. It seems much more plausible that he and his followers would have kept pulling away the football until we ended up in the same place.

Essentially Sullivan is asking us to believe that Stupak and anti-choice colleagues wanted some friendly acknowledgment from the Democratic leadership, but when they didn't get it they were willing to settle for major substantive concessions instead. I don't buy this list of priorities in general, and I'm not persuaded by the analysis in this particular case.

Adventures in ill-advised medical contrarianism

Over at Science-Based Medicine, Mark Crislip offers a long, detailed and highly-informed critique of this cover story in The Atlantic that speculates (sloppily) about the efficacy and safety of the vaccine for H1N1/09. Unlike Crislip, I'm not an infectious disease doctor and I don't intent to play one in the blogosphere, but this is an issue that gets me torqued for all sorts of reasons, so I'll offer a few thoughts of my own.

The problems in the article are numerous, but its central flaws stem directly from the authors' aggressively contrarian reading of the data on seasonal flu vaccination -- dubious interpretations which they proceed to apply inappropriately to the H1N1 vaccine, which has already inspired unprecedented heights of stupidity in recent months. At the bottom of it all, Brownlee and Lenzer seem to believe that because influenza viruses circulate each year in spite of efforts to vaccinate as many people as possible, the seasonal flu vaccine is somehow worthless; and because the seasonal flu vaccine is ineffective, the H1N1 vaccine will prove to be similarly disappointing. The simplest analogy I can come up with is that it's like complaining that because apples don't taste like bananas, you're probably going to hate the pears you just bought.

It's a dubious argument. As Crislip has noted before, the seasonal flu vaccine is "sub-optimal" for a variety of reasons. It's based on highly-educated guesswork about what the possible varieties of influenza A&B will do in a given year; response to the vaccine is hard to predict (in part because of the possibility of mismatch between the virus and the vaccine, and in part because influenza B mutates a lot during flu season, further compounding the mismatch problem); and people generally don't receive the vaccination at high enough rates for effective herd immunity to kick in. Nevertheless, while Brownlee and Lenzer insist that empirical support for vaccination is "thin at best," the collective evidence on flu vaccination strongly suggests that it does provide moderate to high levels of efficacy against the flu, including protections against transmitting the virus to others, which is arguably the most important reason to accept the jab in the first place. Moreover, studies also demonstrate pretty convincingly that when the vaccine matches the strains of influenza that circulate in the general population, efficacy increases dramatically -- evidence that would lend obvious ballast to the idea that we should expect H1N1 vaccine to achieve better results than the seasonal flu vaccine, given that it's derived from the very strain being targeted.

The authors, however -- one of whom has written a well-regarded book on the high cost of medical "overtreatment" -- deliberately ignore the preponderance of evidence suggesting that flu vaccinations provide a safe, inexpensive means of reducing the effects of a virus that we know will kill around 30,000 Americans each year. They brush off that latter fact by pointing that most of those who die from the flu have underlying health problems already; they actually seem to believe this strengthens their case against the seasonal vaccine. In any event, I don't know how someone who writes about the high cost of medical (over)treatment could possibly believe that reducing vaccination levels in the US -- and thus increasing morbidity and mortality -- could possibly be a good thing.

What's worse, the authors raise evidence-free suspicions about the safety of the H1N1 vaccine. Obviously, the actual performance of the vaccine is going to be difficult to measure, given a whole array of factors including the gross overconfidence of its manufacturers, who have delivered less than 20 percent of the promised number of doses to market. But that's an entirely different problem that has nothing to do with (a) the general evidence in support of flu vaccination or (b) the overall safety of the newest vaccine. Brownlee and Lenzer don't elaborate on their suspicions in the article itself. However, in a Q&A that claims to offer "Facts about Swine Flu," the authors warn -- contra the evidence -- that flu vaccines pose a small risk of Guillain-Barre Syndrome (which the authors don't even bother to spell correctly). While there's a plausible hypothetical relationship between GBS and flu vaccines, the data are really inconclusive, and the authors should have said so. Meantime, they sink even deeper into the muck by mentioning squalene and thimerosal, two of the central components of anti-vaccination hysteria. Not only are these two chemicals irrelevant to the origins of GBS, but there's absolutely no causal evidence (much less a convincing hypothesis) that would link autoimmune or neurological disorders with either one. When the authors write that while "many doctors believe [thimerosal] is safe but others believe may be responsible for effects on the brain and nervous system," they are participating in Opinions-of-the-Shape-of-the-Earth-Differ journalism, and they're mainstreaming bullshit pseudoscience. It underscores the problems with the main article, which is is pretty weak tea to begin with.

Mad Men

The classic Sopranos pattern: big events in the penultimate episode, final episode sets up the next season. But the finale was richly entertaining in itself...

What percentage of abortion costs are reimbursed by insurance companies?

It turns out this is a difficult question to answer. Two recent studies came to quite different conclusions in regard to the related issue of how many employer-based private insurance plans offer coverage for abortion. The first study concluded that 87% of "typical" employer-based insurance plans cover abortion. The second concluded that 46% of covered workers had abortion coverage.

Obviously part of the explanation for the difference may be that the two questions aren't identical. The first study tried to determine what was offered by typical plans, and increasingly workers are being pushed into high-deductible/limited coverge plans that don't offer the same benefits as the supposedly "typical" plan. The second study surveyed HR people, who often may have not been familiar with their employers' insurance coverage at this level of detail.

Of course the question of whether abortion is theoretically a reimbursable medical expense is different from the question of how much reimbursement takes place. A 2003 study found that in 2001 the costs of 13% of abortions were directly billed to private insurance companies. This number reflects, among other things, that lots of people are uninsured or under-insured, that some state Medicaid programs cover abortion, and that it's likely a significant percentage of women who are covered by private insurance plans that reimburse abortion expenses choose not to seek reimbursement.

Relatedly, the median cost of an abortion in the U.S. is around $400, which itself indicates that private insurance plays a limited role. By way of comparison, simple outpatient procedures that are usually reinbursed by private insurance, such as ear tubes and tonsil removal, are billed out at thousands of dollars per surgery.

Responding to Stupak-Pitts

Via ema in comments, some crucial info about Stupak's handiwork:

• The Stupak-Pitts amendment forbids any plan offering abortion coverage in the new system from accepting even one subsidized customer. Since more than 80 percent of the participants in the exchange will be subsidized, it seems certain that all health plans will seek and accept these individuals. In other words, the Stupak-Pitts amendment forces plans in the exchange to make a difficult choice: either offer their product to 80 percent of consumers in the marketplace or offer abortion services in their benefits package. It seems clear which choice they will make.
• Stupak-Pitts supporters claim that women who require subsidies to help pay for their insurance plan will have abortion access through the option of purchasing a "rider," but this is a false promise. According to the respected National Women's Law Center, the five states that require a separate rider for abortion coverage, there is no evidence that plans offer these riders. In fact, in North Dakota, which has this policy, the private plan that holds the state's overwhelming share of the health-insurance market (91 percent) does not offer such a rider. Furthermore, the state insurance department has no record of abortion riders from any of the five leading individual insurance plans from at least the past decade. Nothing in this amendment would ensure that rider policies are available or affordable to the more than 80 percent of individuals who will receive federal subsidies in order to help purchase coverage in the new exchange.

For all intents and purposes, then, Stupak-Pitts prevents private insurance plans from offering coverage for abortions. Appalling stuff.

So, the wager-for-charity I owe Howard from the regular season will be going to Planned Parenthood in Stupak's name; I hope he and many other LGM readers will join me!

UDPATE: See also Amanda and Sarah.

The Dirty Four Dozen

For your convenience. Included are 26 Democrats now on the record as opposing expanded access to health care but who want to make sure that if health care passes despite them it should discriminate against women.

Sexist Reactionaries of the Day

Brad Ellsworth, Bart Stupak, and the U.S. Conference of Catholic Bishops.

I would hope that this amendment gets stripped out in conference. On the other hand, it's entirely possible that these people would rather have no health care reform than not be allowed to arbitrarily discriminate against women, creating a difficult dilemma.

In that moment, I knew I'd be accused of sexual harassment again.

Two of the "acquire an alternative skill set with real world application" assignments that we teach in composition are 1) how to build and manage a wiki and 2) how to compose a PowerPoint presentation that doesn't cause your audience to slit your throat or their wrists. I combine them into a single assignment in which students choose the text they found most compelling, develop a wiki based upon its rhetorical situation (author/auteur, historical context, themes, signature features, symbols and motifs, etc.) and then share their results with the class. On Tuesday, I stressed that their presentation must not consist of reading their wiki aloud (by virtue of emphasizing the difference in media, e.g. "How do you speak a link?") and we discussed strategies they can employ to prevent us from mass-suiciding on Thursday.

Yesterday, midway through an already engaging presentation, one of my students paused during her discussion of the contextual allusions present in her text.

"Also," she said as she made to forward her presentation, "I think there's an allusion to tentacle porn."

The class gasped.

Her mouse clicked.

I sat mute. Horrified into silence.

Time dilated as we approached the horizon of this career-ending event. I held that diphthong in "Wait!" so long it slid into a schwa.

Her mouse clicked again.

The screen brightened and . . .

Friday Daddy Blogging

Elisha.

Savage nation

I was stuck in a traffic jam yesterday afternoon and I happened onto the local right-wing talk radio station. Out of morbid curiosity I ended up spending about half an hour listening to Michael Savage, who advertises himself as the nation's third most-popular radio talk show host.

It's difficult to describe the flavor of the broadcast -- I suppose it's one of those things you have to experience yourself in order to appreciate. It's true that many of Savage's individual claims, such as that the leadership of the "Democrat" party is to Democratic voters as the leadership of Al Qaeda is to Islam, were laughably unhinged. But the really notable aspect of the thing was the air of apparently genuine paranoia that enveloped both Savage himself and his callers.

To listen to Savage is to enter a world in which the enemies of America are everywhere, and most especially at the center of our governmental, educational, and media institutions, which they control almost completely. These "mandarins" as Savage called them, are destroying the country by imposing their "psychotic" ideology on the American people, and implementing a program that is in the process of dismantling capitalism, disarming the populace, and eliminating America as we know it.

Yesterday Savage was obsessing on how nobody was going to be allowed to say that the army base shooter, Nidal Hasan, was an Islamic terrorist. He was particularly enraged with Fox News's Shepard Smith, who had just reported that Hasan's cousin had said that Hasan had been teased as a child for being of Middle Eastern ancestry. To Savage (and a couple of his callers), such a report was a typical exercise in PC rationalization, which requires blaming America for being a racist country that drives people like Hasan to commit terrorist acts.

The upshot of Hasan's attack, Savage predicted, would be more required sensitivity training courses for Army personnel, more pressure for diversity hiring throughout the military in particular and the country in general, and more calls for "understanding" the terrorists' perspective.

Again it's hard to capture the flavor of this stuff, but it was the political equivalent of hardcore pornography -- a kind of shameless wallowing in hatred, fear, and resentment. It was disgusting, and if you haven't listened to anything like this lately (I hadn't) I recommend doing so. Savage has by his own account a couple of million daily listeners -- this isn't some guy in a basement in Idaho with a web site that gets 12 visitors a week.

An interesting sidelight of the experience was listening to the ads run during the broadcast. A significant portion were for bankruptcy and other debt relief services. (There were also a couple for tattoo removal). The current outburst of right-wing populist rage is being channeled away from the Lords of Capital and towards all the usual suspects -- the minorities and the illegals and the feminazis who took your job and don't want to fight The Terrorists even assuming they don't actually sympathize with them which of course they do because they think America is a racist nation. (Savage had a long riff about how our cities are now full of firefighters who can't lift a hose, and San Francisco has a girl police chief who has destroyed the department's morale etc etc.)

Anyway if you want to dip a toe in this cesspool you can listen to Dr. Savage here.

Juvenile Sentencing and the Eighth Amendment

Lithwick does a good job of summarizing the issues surrounding upcoming oral arguments about whether the 8th Amendment proscribes life-without-parole sentences for juveniles, but one set of facts under consideration raises another set of questions:

Terrance Jamar Graham tried to rob a restaurant with two accomplices. He was charged as an adult and pled guilty. When he violated probation, Graham was sentenced, without trial, to life without parole. He was 17. In both cases the sentencing judges were certain these boys were beyond hope or help.

Even if Graham was 22, it would seem to me that the sentence could be plausibly argued to be disproportionate even under the Supreme Court's excessively narrow standards in Ewing (which still prohibits sentences that are "grossly disproportionate to the crime.") Florida's case looks a little stronger given that the parole violation Graham was accused of was an armed home invasion robbery, but giving him a life sentence on that basis should raise grave due process concerns. If Florida wants to sentence him based on the home invasion, it should prove that he committed the crime in a fair trial (or adduce a plea, which would presumably involve a lesser sentence.) As of now, Graham is getting life-without-parole sentence at a young age for a single robbery charge and a parole violation, which shouldn't be permitted under the 8th Amendment even if he was a little older.

The other thing to note here is the extreme nature of the cases under review (the other case involves a 13 year-old convicted -- on pretty flimsy evidence -- of a serious, but lesser than homicide, violent crime and receive l-w-p) raises the stakes considerably. One the one hand, they make it more likely that Anthony Kennedy's sporadic conscience will be shocked. On the other hand, if the Court upholds the convictions it would essentially send the message that states have almost unlimited authority to give draconian sentences to juveniles as long as they're not actually sentenced to death.

Shorter Bobo

What I...er, I mean, "(white male) independents in the suburbs (the only constituency in America whose views should matter)" want is for the government to acknowledge that Herbert Hoover's response to economic disaster was a little too activist and act accordingly.

...and at least one "Democratic" Senator agrees!

The Heart of the Matter

Weigel Ackerman gets there:

Hasan is alive. He will be interrogated and tried. We will presumably learn soon why he committed the cowardly actions he committed. Until then, those who speculate only reveal their own prejudices.

See also.

Title IX

Reflections from Mark Schmitt.

At least the yucking Fankees are unlikely to repeat.

Spencer "It's a good thing I'm a damn fine reporter or people might hate me for writing stuff like this" Ackerman:

Thank you merciless, remorseless, unforgiving, unblinking wealth. Thank you Evil. Thank you New York Fucking City.

To which I think there are two appropriate responses. The first, as epitomized by Joe Posnanski, is to lament the fact that the Yankees play with cheat mode enabled and still can't win all the time:

Baseball happens to be a sport where dominance can be obscured. It doesn’t look like dominance. What I mean is this: Baseball, for many reasons, is built in such a way that the best teams win less often than in other sports. A 13-win NFL team wins 81% of the time. A national championship contending football team might lose once or twice—or not at all. A 60-win NBA team wins 75% of the time, and a big time college basketball team will win closer to 90%. A 100-win baseball team wins 62% of the time . . .

And in that way the expanded playoffs have been genius for baseball—not only because they are milking television for every dime but because the short series have been baseball’s one Yankee-proofing defense against the ludicrous unfairness of the New York Yankees. Hey, if the game is rigged, rig the game. The Yankees spend a lot more money than any other team. As a direct result, they had the best record in the American League in 2002, 2003, 2004, 2006 and 2009. They made the playoffs every single year but one this decade (and going back to 1995). They are the best team with the best players every year—that sort of big money virtually guarantees it.

So, you create a system where the best team doesn’t always win.

The other, as embodied by my friend Andrew Seal, is to claim this victory a cosmic mistake unlikely to be repeated:

For awhile there (ca. Oct. 20, 2004 - Nov. 1, 2009), I honestly thought that the New York Yankees might never win another World Series in my lifetime. It was irrational and fairly dumb, but something during that time about how the internal logic of baseball seemed to be working allowed me to believe that the Yankees simply could not win a World Series under contemporary conditions . . .

[T]he Yankees assumed a position of not just villainy but almost blasphemy, of satanism: this was an organization that, no matter whether it ever adopted sabermetrics and other related studies, did so still under the banner of the image, of fluidity (capital and labor moving in and out lubriciously), of what they looked like in the camera's eye or underneath the headline. Victories on the field were to be produced by victories in the press—boffo free agent signings, prima donna players, inter-family power struggles—in short, by dominating the attention of the media. It is of absolutely no relevance if the Yankees only differ in degree from the Red Sox or other big spenders in terms of how they ran their club; they always seem to wish to differ in kind, as if being a baseball team in a baseball league isn't all they are, as if what happens in the media has a reality beyond what happens on the field.

This strategy isn't supposed to win. Not now, not knowing what we know about how much of what defines and produces success isn't what the headlines cover. Baseball is a game about solid, unassuming middle relief, and the Yankees are Joba fucking Chamberlain. How can that possibly work out?

There are terabytes worth of reasons for hating the New York Yankees—historical, personal, ethical, spiritual, aesthetic, maybe sexual—but now there's one more: the metaphysical. Winning the World Series is a gash in the fabric of both justice and reality. This simply shouldn't have happened.

Fort Hood

Nothing to say right now, beyond the hope that the perpetrators are caught, and that there are no further injuries or deaths. A tragedy.

Laicite

I've always found the approach to religious neutrality employed by (amongst many other countries) France, which includes a ban on religious headscarves in public schools, to be deeply misguided and paternalistic at best, and thinly veiled racism at worst. This anecdote certainly doesn't do much to change my mind:

When (the Stasi Commission) looked for a discrete Muslim sign, which could be tolerated in schools like the Christian Cross of the Star of David, it came up with 'Fatima's hands.' The choice could not have been more inept. Fatima's hands are not religious signs but a kind of talisman traditionally called khomsa and worn by older Magrebi women. the khomsa was renamed 'Fatima's hand' by the French colonists, presumably because 'Fatima' was the homogenizing, depersonalizing, and racist name given indiscriminately to Algerian women. No doubt young French Muslims rejoiced at being officially allowed to wear what at best was a meaningless and non-Islamic sign, and at worst reminded them of colonial paternalism.

Cecile Laborde, Critical Republicanism: The Hijab Controversy and Political Philosophy (Oxford University Press, 2008), pp. 133-134.

Your Point Being?

You may remember, in one of the worst slippery slope arguments ever, school district lawyers objecting to the Supreme Court's salutary decision in Safford School District v. Redding because it might inhibit school administrators from conducting humiliating searches of young women based on pitifully weak evidence that they have committed trivial offenses. Uh, I think that was the point! Dahlia Lithwick identifies something similar in yesterday's oral arguments from lawyers arguing that prosecutors who locked two innocent people up for 25 years based on willfully fabricated evidence should have absolute immunity from suit:

Katyal clarifies that "absolute immunity doesn't exist to protect bad apples. It reflects a larger interest in protecting judicial information coming into the judicial process." He says, "If prosecutors have to worry at trial that every act they undertake will somehow open up the door to liability, then they will flinch in the performance of their duties and not introduce that evidence."

But Sotomayor retorts that you want a prosecutor to "flinch when he suspects evidence is perjured or fabricated." In fact you want him to do more than just flinch. You want him to stop. She adds that the two prosecutors in this case were never disciplined for their conduct.

Attempting to make prosecutors liable is, admittedly, a very knotty problem, for reasons the article states well. But to the extent that prosecutors will be inhibited from knowingly using illegal evidence, the argument against absolute immunity actually becomes pretty straightforward.

If There Must Be Aesthetic Stalinism, Let It Be This Unintentionally Hilarious

Absolutely classic Goldberg. I couldn't even make up someone who talks about the "moral superstructure" of shitty George Lucas movies, and goes on to discuss silly ideas with even more pompous prose than this implies. And yet, I;m still not sure that he beats J-Pod...

A Regular Guy Does Books

I know that Glenn Beck is a soft target, but holy crap, this has the potential for some serious hilarity, especially as the legendary author of The Christmas Sweater is in a position to shape the reading habits of a few million self-aware, open minded, critical thinkers.

There are some decent quotes in the story:

“Let me just say, it’s almost conservative porn,”

Almost conservative porn . . . which would be, what, showing an ankle? A little leg perhaps, but no higher than the calf?

“You’re on the liberal side of things, which is, you know, fine,”

While the porn remains conservative, the tepid support for that damned First Amendment is reassuring.

“Glenn is a regular guy, and regular Americans like thrillers,” said Mr. Balfe, an editor of Mr. Beck’s current nonfiction best seller, “Arguing With Idiots.”

The research for which could have been entirely based on tape recordings of Beck talking in his sleep. To himself.

While I doubt that anything appearing on his show, or on his bookcase for that matter, will be short-listed for the Man Booker Prize any time soon, at least this is evidence that Beck, unlike Michele Bachmann, might be able to read (if not well read, as Dave Noon pointed out a couple months back . . . )

Do tune in.