The Daily Aneurysm

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

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

Posts of the Year, 2006

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

January 12: "We may have reached a new low in American dumbitude, given that the big story to come out of the Alito hearings yesterday was that the mean Democrats made Mrs. Alito cry. Except they didn't. It was South Carolina Repug Senator Lindsey Graham who did, by repeating something a Democrat had said about her husband, or some such damn thing. (I confess I haven't spent a lot of time investigating this story on my own because I am afraid that if I get too close to it, I will get stupidity cooties.)"

January 16: "[T]he opinions of the general run of white people--who know about black American life on a second-hand basis at best--are not entirely reliable. So when you hear that 78 percent of white Americans think that significant progress has been made toward racial equality in the United States, consider the source--and then take note that among black Americans, the figure is 66 percent. The same poll notes, interestingly enough, that more suburbanites believe in progress than urbanites, and more Republicans than Democrats. In other words--if you neither are, nor live with, nor make common cause politically with black Americans, you are more likely to believe progress is being made toward racial equality. You probably could have predicted that without a poll."

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Empty Streets

Oversimplifications-R-Us

Left Behind

We Say It, You Learn It, That Settles It

Some favorite post titles this year include:

The State of the Union Is Blotto

Cub Scouts Unbuckle, Open Fire

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

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

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

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

Lincoln: A Life of Purpose and Power by Richard Carwardine

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Quotes of the Year, 2006

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Gone Blue

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

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

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

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

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

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

Stamps of Approval

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Hey, I'm a whore like everyone else.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

We now return to the weekend, already in progress.

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

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

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

This could only happen in hockey.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Not this time.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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