not crazy enough for the freakshow

Why am I getting the sinking feeling that I'm going to be dedicating a nontrivial amount of time over the next 9-12 months defending Mitt Romney?

Stephanopoulos gets Bachmann to admit the validity of Obama's birth certificate

Watch Stephanopoulos show Michele Bachmann a copy of Obama's birth certificate, saying "so this story's over?" and her resignedly admit: "Yes, it's over." You can tell she saw this coming and was hedging on the birth certificate issue from the start of the interview (clearly George warned her before the interview that he would do this), but she'd been beating this drum earlier this week, so I don't think she is making a conscious attempt to make herself look more mainstream. To me, her body language is showing defeat.

So now the obvious question: Conservatives have been questioning Obama's birth certificate and drawing all manner of dark conclusions for four years. A significant percentage of the country has bought into this rubbish, and the number of dupes is rising.

Why did it take four years for someone in the press to confront Bachmann with a birth certificate that was made freely available by then-Senator Barack Obama early in the '08 campaign and expressly backed by the relevant officials in the state of Hawaii?

texting while talking

Old people think pulling out your smartphone while in conversation is rude, and wonder if young people feel the same way. From what I can tell, teens and twentysomethings do this constantly and show no hint of feeling slighted when others do it. In my opinion, pulling out your smartphone is essentially the same body language as looking at your watch. It's fine when you're standing in line, mostly okay when with a group of people but not participating in a conversation, and gauche when participating in a conversation.

living in the midwest

A former east coaster ruminates on life in the Midwest. Not sure how much I agree, but it's an interesting read for me as I consider the imminent end of our time in Indiana. My experience isn't exactly identical since I came from a different place, but I do remember being surprised at how rural South Bend isn't. Similarly, I had no idea a city could absolutely dwarf the sprawling metropolises of Dallas and Houston the way Chicago does.

This part rang out as absolutely true to me:

I continue to ask myself: What do I want from a hometown?

I want to support public schools without compromising my son's education (which, at least until the current governor wins his war, was a safe assumption). I want to regularly see good live music and movies and art exhibits without wrestling with crowds or competing for tickets. I want at any given time not to be the only lefty in the room; otherwise, life is stressful, especially in this time of no common ground. I want evenings and weekends to be devoted to family time. I want to not worry about money, fashion, or what kind of car I drive. I want to comfortably afford to travel and own a nice home and not feel at all times like we need more space. I want to my son to grow up spending time—not just holidays—with his aunts, uncles, cousins, and grandparents.

Of course there are people in coastal cities who have all of this—tons of them—but it's just easier here.

The greatest advantage of the Midwest, one that truly makes me wonder why it isn't a bigger draw, is that you don't have to choose between functional public schools and cheap real estate. That isn't true in most of the country.

falling for your own propaganda

House Republicans just passed a budget resolution to abolish Medicare. Seriously.

I'm honestly surprised about this. I know that the Republican party has been gunning for Medicare for decades, and I know that it's consistent with many predictions (included my own) that conservatives have been setting themselves up for this kind of catastrophic overreach since Obama's election. Nevertheless, it isn't like Republicans don't know Medicare is hugely popular and that voters punish parties that cut its funding, considering they hammered the Democrats among seniors just 5 short months ago primarily by charging Democrats with cutting Medicare funds. Nor is it likely that House Republicans believe this budget resolution has any chance of surviving the Senate, let alone a guaranteed presidential veto.

Do they really think they can keep this vote from being simplified to "Republicans voted to abolish Medicare?" Either I'm missing something huge, or House Republicans have convinced themselves, despite all evidence to the contrary, that Americans don't like Medicare.

say it ain't so, John

Jane Curtin on the "incredibly misogynistic" environment at Saturday Night Live: "[John Belushi] felt as if it were his duty to sabotage pieces that were written by women."

Video at the link.

Tuesday errands

Heading to Walgreens for some chewing gum, a pack of smokes, and a pap smear. Thanks Fox and Friends!

the legacy of Malcolm X

A wonderful article by Ta-Nehisi Coates in both style and substance. An example paragraph about black Americans experimenting with self-examination in the wake of Malcolm:

Conscious sects sprang up--some praising the creator sky god Damballah, some spouting Hebrew, and still others talking in Akan. Consciousness was inchoate and unorthodox--it made my father a vegetarian, but never moved him to wear dreadlocks or adopt an African name. What united us all was the hope of rebirth, of a serum to cure generational shame. What united us was our champion, who delivered us from self-hatred, who delivered my mother from burning lye, who was slaughtered high up in Harlem so that colored people could color themselves anew.

a quick clarification on Michael Floyd

Before the oncoming pile-on of Notre Dame for letting Michael Floyd off on probation for a DUI, I'd like to point out one very important fact: the punishment meted out to Floyd (probation, counseling, community service) is consistent with the punishment recommended by the student handbook for a first-time DUI to the letter.

at least someone's willing to fight

Nancy Pelosi's perpetually low approval ratings are a constant reminder that I'm well outside of the American mainstream. I found her to be an extremely effective Speaker of the House. She was generally honest about her opinions and intentions, including being unapologetically liberal, but wasn't a blowhard yelling into the mic on MSNBC. She was known neither for Harry Reid's cowering gunshy-ness nor Barbara Boxer's gavel-waving bravado. She let the opposition talk and put their bills up for votes, but in the end she always passed what she wanted and torpedoed what she didn't. Note for comparison the speakers on either side of her: Dennis Hastert, a Delay puppet with a flagrantly undemocratic "majority of the majority" policy, and John Boehner, a dissembler who's already lost control of the chamber not even three months on the job.

I'd also like to point to this story about her leadership during Bush's war on Social Security:

When Bush announced his Social Security plan last year, Pelosi told House Democrats they could never beat him in a straight-ahead, policy-against-policy debate because he had the megaphone of the presidency and was just coming off re-election. So the Democrats would thunderously attack Bush and argue there was no Social Security crisis and therefore no need for them to put out their own proposal. Some members were leery, concerned that Pelosi would make the Democrats look like the Party of No. As the spring of 2005 wore on, some pestered her every week, asking when they were going to release a rival plan. "Never. Is never good enough for you?" Pelosi defiantly said to one member. When Florida Democrat Robert Wexler publicly suggested raising Social Security taxes as the solution, Pelosi immediately chewed him out over the phone. Only one other Democrat signed on to his plan.

She was, of course, absolutely right and almost unique among Washington Democrats in understanding this very simple point.

People bitch about how Democrats don't have any backbone, but that Italian grandmother running the House Democrats is f**king iron. I'd take Pelosi over any other clown in Congress right now, and I'm starting to think I prefer her to Obama as well.

some helpful information

One keg of beer is 15 1/2 gallons. After careful scientific examination from these fine people, that translates to:

141 red plastic cups
6 1/2 cases of canned beer
165 cans of beer

Happy party planning!

Republicans vs. Medicare

I'm in a pretty low place right now as far as my belief in the judgment of American voters goes. Nevertheless, there's a more hopeful voice in my mind arguing that the privatization of Medicare in Ryan's budget is an insane overreach that's going to cost Republicans dearly in the next election. It's just hard to see how their advocates will be able to sustain any coherent argument that they're doing anything other than abolishing one of the two most popular programs in the government.

Of course, in order for that to happen, someone has to fight them on it.

Limitless

[Duh, spoiler alert]

The movie irritated me for a lot of reasons. It continues a trend I've noticed with surprising frequency lately, which is for films to set up a morality tale or tragic hero, and then fail to pull the trigger on them in the climax, instead spinning some wildly improbable sequence that saves the protagonist at the clutch moment and completely undercuts the rest of the story. This is a story about cheating, right? About performance-enhancing drugs?

But the truth is I wanted Eddie Morra, the protagonist, to die for reasons beyond simply fulfilling an anti-drug morality tale. Eddie isn't a sympathetic character; he's a narcissistic asshole who uses everyone he knows but never gives anything back. The beginning of the film establishes that he's supporting his failing writer lifestyle mainly by using his girlfriend as a "maid" and a "bank." When he gets his hands on NZT, his miracle drug, instead of trying to better humankind or repay all the people he's been leeching on for the last 20 years or even just furthering his art form by becoming a great writer, he tosses aside all that writer-ly philosophizing for the lifestyle of How I Met Your Mother's Barney Stinson. He takes out a loan from a Russian shark and makes a boatload of cash on it, yet doesn't bother to repay the loan for reasons that are left unexplained. He meets his ex-wife, "the one that got away," only to discover that NZT destroyed her life. While he commiserates with her at a diner for all of 10 minutes, he never lifts a finger to help her despite already being stupidly rich by this point. She exists only to warn him of the hazards of the drug, apparently.

Instead, he uses his newfound super-smarts to charm his way back into his girlfriend's heart, but continues to engage in 18 hour benders complete with disappearing for entire nights and nailing multitudes of underwear models on the side. Funny story: one of those models ends up dead in his hotel room that night, and he has no memory of the night's events since fugue is apparently a side effect of the drug. He wonders if he killed her, the cops believe he did, and indeed he may well have, but that little incident is never resolved either way. Over the rest of the movie, he leaves a trail of corpses including his own two bodyguards, puts his girlfriend in mortal danger and forces her to take NZT, and almost certainly destroys the career of the guy at the day-trading agency who stuck his neck out to get him an interview with the head of the company.

In the end, he pays for none of these transgressions and feels no regrets. He's even running for Senate and still enjoying his money, his girlfriend, and some residual enhancement from his NZT-popping days. How lovely for him.

veggie burgers

It's cool to see that veggie burgers are finally coming into their own, at least in NYC restaurants. As someone who does a lot of cooking out in the summer for people with varying diets, I've always found veggie burgers frustrating. Smart dogs are a perfectly fine substitute for the run o' the mill frankfurter, since hot dogs rely so heavily on strong condiments to deliver their flavor. I have several flashy recipes handy for making the vegetarians feel at home when I make more "serious" entrees, like brisket or pork tenderloin. When I go ethnic, there's always a variety of delicious vegetarian entrees at my disposal.

But veggie burgers, sigh. I have yet to find a veggie burger recipe that compares at all favorably to even the most boring, store-bought beef patty, certainly none that can be prepared economically and in a timely fashion. There are one or two palatable premade options availabe, but that means having fresh, homemade, juicy burgers for the meat eaters and the same frozen, manufactured patties for the vegetarians that they've eaten a hundred times. A grill may work magic with beef, but it's helpless against the mighty mediocrity of the Gardenburger.

I've been thinking about what my next grill project should be this summer after mostly successful forays into brisket, fajitas, and ribs. Perhaps I should consider veggie burger options. I'm intrigued by one of the burgers in the article that's basically a wide, thin felafel. Portabellas make a great sandwich, but I make the same stock version of them every time. I've never really experimented with them specifically as a burger filler. Potato pancake? Hmm, an interesting beginning...

Other ideas?

EDIT: Fixed the link and formatting weirdness. My bad.

balls

In other news, apparently the Serious People on the TV and internet have decided that the gender of Obama's advisors is relevant to discussion of his handling of the Libya situation. This is because our media is run by high school students.

Libya

I'm of two minds about our new incursion against Qaddafi, personally. One sympathizes with the rebels and would absolutely love to see a monster like Qaddafi driven from power. Furthermore, Clinton (I believe) claims that what really struck Obama about the no-fly zone was the opportunity to reorient American foreign policy in the Middle East to take more account of human rights abuses and take a step away from CIA-backed client states and toward support of democratic reform. That end, I think, is unimpeachable.

The problem, however, is in the means. First and foremost, as I've said for years, I believe peace is underrated in America. There is a general lack of recognition of the costs of war and of the difficulty of leashing "dogs of war" already loosed.

More specific to this situation, I have little confidence either that the limits of our intrusion were sufficiently spelled out, or that all the likely outcomes were considered. Can we be confident that our military will leave once "Qaddafi stops firing on his own people" even if it becomes clear that he will stay in power? If he is toppled and replaced by another dictator? Can we prevent this spectacle from providing autocrats in Yemen, Bahrain, and elsewhere the cover they need to fire on their own protesters?

If nothing else, Libya has given us an opportunity to discuss a particular problem with our status as the "world's police." On Saturday night the BBC was talking with an American pundit about the degree to which this was truly an international coalition vs. just another American intervention. He answered with an interesting point: to an extent every multi-partner intervention is an American-led one, not because America is more meddlesome or bellicose than other nations (though we might be) but because we have the only military force on the planet with the necessary infrastructure to manage a full-scale aerial and maritime force of any real size.

That is an astonishing statement. This was a war that Europe, and to some degree the Arab League, wanted, that Sarkozy went to the mat for. It has official UN sanction. In fact, most of the air "sorties" are now supposedly conducted by non-US actors according to NPR this morning. Even in this Europe-"led" UN humanitarian effort, however, they had to rely on our navy to control logistics and our planes to do some initial bombing while they got their ducks in a row. Yet neither the United Nations nor the "first world" have to contribute a single euro, yen, or loony to the upkeep of the obscenely oversized military apparatus that's busting the American budget and hardening our people to the sight of violence and suffering. Nor can we forget the disproportionate cost in blood that the United States also pays.

Those who believe that down the path of world military supremacy lies madness, that waging an arms race with the entire world is a fool's game, would do well to remember that if they ever succeed, it will be not with the support of the developed world, but over its protests.

"heh, yeah that's cra...wait wtf?"

That's going to be your reaction to this story, I guarantee it.

whites flying in, whites flying out

TNC's doing a nice series on Detroit and white flight.

Probably not a profound thought, but talking with Sap the other day, I was stricken by the catch-22 we're stuck in when it comes to buying a house. Being white, educated middle class (barely) people, if we buy in the city, we're immediately guilty of participating in gentrification. If we buy in the suburbs, we're participating in white flight.

war is always the answer

Josh Marshall:

I sit at my desk every morning listening to the sounds of cable television in the air. Now a lot of it is about Libya. And I'm just blown away by the constant, almost unanimous chorus in favor of some sort of active, military involvement in the country. At this moment, I'm listening to some person say that it just doesn't make sense -- that it's inconsistent -- for the President to announce that it is our national policy that Qaddafi should leave and yet not take military steps to make that happen. I've also heard numerous voices arguing that we 'didn't act' in the Balkans and then didn't act in Rwanda and that we should not make the same mistake today.

This is a wildly different standard for military action than we've ever heard before, even in an era where our interventions have become much more frequent and when they've often been wise and necessary.

"Wise and necessary?" Really? Even if we allow that the "era" he's describing covers the entire post-WWII period, I can think of the following military engagements off the top of my head:
Korea
Cuba (Bay of Pigs)
Vietnam
Lebanon
Granada
Nicaragua (Iran-Contra)
Panama
Iraq
Somalia
Haiti
Bosnia
Kosovo
Afghanistan
Iraq

How many of those were "wise and necessary?" Half? I very much doubt it.

That, by the way, is 14 wars over 60 years, roughly one war every 4.2 years, and a nearly constant state of war since the Carter Administration.

I offer that quibble about a post I otherwise very much agree with because I think it shows the level to which even Josh Marshall has internalized the ever-present drumbeat of war in the United States press. I call it "ever-present" because, frankly, it is. It seems like very time any attention is given to any kind of crisis in another country, an army of pro-war talking heads takes to the airwaves with the same message:

"Of course nobody "wants" war, but this time it's our moral imperative! We can't just leave them on their own! Their leader is a madman! History has taught us that we should always go to war in this situation! Dulce et decorum est! Cry havoc! For Gondor!"

And we usually go to war when this happens, which is all the time (or apparently every 4.2 years). Not only do we usually go to war, but after we go, people are shocked to find out that:

1. our soldiers are not, in fact, bulletproof ninja superheroes, and tend to die or get horribly injured when people shoot them. Also, they're not robots: being shot at and seeing people blown to bits and/or splattered all over the pavement often screws them up psychologically


2. all that shit we outfit them with and all those warplanes and missiles and tanks and subs cost a boatload of cash


3. all those freedom bombs we drop on the other country kill an absolute shit-ton of innocent people


4. the "happily ever after" story we go in there gunning for never seems to work out


5. it's much, much harder to end a war than begin one because politicians and really suck at avoiding the "sunk costs" fallacy. No matter how bad things look, they always think they can make up for it if they just up the ante [again].

And yet there's nary a pro-peace talking head to be seen, ever. I'm afraid, contra Josh, now is decidedly not different from the norm.

returning to "the South"

Very interesting post from TNC on the sizable and increasing immigration of blacks back to the South and how it is and is not a mirror image of the Great Migration.

Also interesting is the response from readers to some of the places named. Apparently there was some dispute as to whether eastern Maryland counts as "the South," and Matt Yglesias questioned the southern bonafides of Miami, and the inclusion of Texas as a "historic African American population center."

Any attempt to define the boundaries of an area steeped in mythology and wrapped up in political/historical baggage is almost inevitably going to prove difficult. I remember very recently being part of a discussion of "the West" that quickly ran aground when someone asked what states qualify. Is it just the west coast and Rocky Mountain states? What about New Mexico? What about Texas, which is a "southern" state but is nevertheless wrapped up in all the mythology of the West? What about the Great Plains states west of Iowa and Missouri? Surely they aren't "Midwest," right?

Similarly goes the problem of classing states as within or outside of "the South." Is the South essentially the states that had not abolished slavery by 1860? If so, we'd have to include Delaware, and possibly Missouri. Here's one that starts a lot of arguments: is it the states of the old Confederacy? That would exclude Maryland and muddy the cases of Kentucky and Missouri, two states with conflicted populations that enjoyed representation in both the Union and Confederate Congresses.

Is it a question divorced from history, and more about current tendencies in politics, food, sports, accent, and religion? This is the basis by which people vote Florida out of the Confederacy and question the southern pedigree of places like Research Triangle, Atlanta, and Northern Virginia (and by "northern Virginia" we of course mean "most of Virginia"). But hold on: if we're talking about areas full of socially conservative evangelicals who eat a lot of BBQ, watch football, and say "y'all," not only must we include Missouri, but also Oklahoma! And probably Kansas! And New Mexico! And maybe southern Ohio and Pennsyltucky!

I also question whether a place stops being "southern" just because it undergoes cultural and demographic shifts, even significant ones. Miami may have seen a major influx of New Yorkers and Cubans and Midwestern snow bunnies, but are they not allowed to be southern? What, a group of people can move to New York and within a generation or two be "New Yorkers," but they're forever black-balled from the southern club? What about all the people in Miami who are the descendants of slaves and slaveholders? Did they stop being Southern when their Yankee neighbors moved in?

And if the majority of Chicago's south side came during the Great Migration, does that mean the south now includes that part of Chicago?