Midterms

Lots of marking. See you when I surface. Could be a couple of weeks.

Holy Crap

I can't believe this sort of thing is still happening.

A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Indeed

Calvin Trillin writes the definitive, withering statement on the Polanski defenders.

Sanctions Time

Twenty grand.

Update: I'm sure this surprises no one.

On the Other Hand

Maddow makes a good argument.

Obama's Nobel Prize

So I've spent much of the morning thinking about the news that Barack Obama is the winner of the 2009 Nobel Peace Prize, and I have to say I have mixed feelings about it. From a purely partisan point of view, of course, I'm happy; and because I am a bad bad man, I'm enjoying the Schadenfreude of watching the latest bit of freakout on the starboard side of the media. Also, I understand the Nobel Committee's reasoning, which reads, in part, thusly:

Obama has as President created a new climate in international politics. Multilateral diplomacy has regained a central position, with emphasis on the role that the United Nations and other international institutions can play. Dialogue and negotiations are preferred as instruments for resolving even the most difficult international conflicts. The vision of a world free from nuclear arms has powerfully stimulated disarmament and arms control negotiations. Thanks to Obama's initiative, the USA is now playing a more constructive role in meeting the great climatic challenges the world is confronting.

All of this is no doubt true, and those who are saying today that Obama has no accomplishments to show in these areas are overstating things. Glenn Greenwald, who has been and remains a staunch critic of Obama's human rights record, notes the following achievements in foreign policy, the area for which this prize is, after all, awarded:

Obama has changed the tone America uses to speak to the world generally and the Muslim world specifically. His speech in Cairo, his first-week interview on al-Arabiya, and the extraordinarily conciliatory holiday video he sent to Iran are all substantial illustrations of that. His willingness to sit down and negotiate with Iran -- rather than threaten and berate them -- has already produced tangible results. He has at least preliminarily broken from Bush's full-scale subservience to Israel and has applied steadfast pressure on the Israelis to cease settlement activities, even though it's subjected him to the sorts of domestic political risks and vicious smears that have made prior Presidents afraid to do so. His decision to use his first full day in office to issue Executive Orders to close Guantanamo, ostensibly ban torture, and bar CIA black sites was an important symbol offered to the world (even though it's been followed by actions that make those commitments little more than empty symbols). He refused to reflexively support the right-wing, civil-liberty-crushing coup leaders in Honduras merely because they were "pro-American" and "anti-Chavez," thus siding with the vast bulk of Latin America's governments -- a move George Bush, or John McCain, never would have made. And as a result of all of that, the U.S. -- in a worldwide survey released just this week -- rose from seventh to first on the list of "most admired countries."

That is certainly not nothing.

Yet, as Greenwald rightly notes, all of these accomplishments at this point amount only to seeds that have been planted. Obama has, after all, been in office for less than a year; how could it be otherwise? Also, there's plenty on the other side; it seems strange and even perverse, for example, to award a prize for peace to a leader whose administration is currently fighting two wars, neither of which he shows any sign of bringing to a speedy end, and one of which he is significantly escalating. Granted that Obama inherited both of those wars and initiated neither, it still seems to me that a minimum requirement for a prize for peace ought to be a sincere and swift effort to bring these wars to an end (Compare this to Lester Pearson, who won the Nobel Prize for inventing UN peacekeeping, preventing an all-out Suez war from happening in the first place).

The Globe's Doug Saunders argues that, here in North America, we have a hard time understanding the impact that Obama has had in Europe; and the Nobel, after all, is a European prize. That's a fair point, but it underscores another problem: although it is true that the Nobel Committee is European, the Peace Prize is an award with global implications and has long been understood as such. Insofar as it reflects European hopes and aspirations, even while discounting the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan (and the Nobel Committee's statement makes no mention of either of these), it is playing the old game of mistaking Europe's ideals and goals for those of the world as a whole. Of course, placing European interests ahead of the lives of non-Europeans is the oldest game in town, but it's still disappointing to see.

On the whole, then, count me in the camp that thinks that, while there's a case to be made for this award, it's premature at best. Maybe in a few years it will all seem to make sense, but for now, it's just strange.

Speechless

Just go read JJ. Me, I really don't know what to say anymore.

Conservative Bible Project

Talk about grand historical ambitions:

Exclude Later-Inserted Liberal Passages: excluding the later-inserted liberal passages that are not authentic, such as the adulteress story [John 8:2-11].

[...]


First Example - Liberal Falsehood: The earliest, most authentic manuscripts lack this verse set forth at Luke 23:34: Jesus said, "Father, forgive them, for they do not know what they are doing." Is this a liberal corruption of the original? This does not appear in any other Gospel, and the simple fact is that some of the persecutors of Jesus did know what they were doing. This quotation is a favorite of liberals but should not appear in a conservative Bible.

There's a grain of truth here: any good study Bible (I'm looking at the Oxford Annotated at the moment) will bracket these two passages because they aren't in all of the ancient manuscripts. Still, these "later-inserted liberal passages" aren't exactly new. They appear in several (though not all) ancient texts; they appeared in the 4th century Latin Vulgate; and they have appeared in English translations since Wycliffe's in the 14th century. They have, in short, been part of the tradition for pretty much ever. Also, they don't really have much to do with the modern political phenomenon known as "liberalism"; they're illustrations of mercy, which is a concept known in all manner of traditions, including the most ancient. To describe them as "later-inserted liberal passages" is to imply that "liberalism" is not a modern political philosophy but a conspiracy that has been around since before Jerome -- one that the editors of Conservapedia will now eradicate. You've got to be impressed by the sweep of it.

(via)

Oh My

Oh, dear. Oh, dear.

Oh dear oh dear oh dear.

Orly filed a Motion to Recuse Judge Land. It is truly one of the most amazing things I have ever seen filed by an attorney, anywhere, in my 27 years of practice.

It is vintage Orly, in that it contains a myriad of wacky legal theories, such as a judge has no power to impose Rule 11 sanctions. She takes particular umbrage at Land's having referred to her as a de facto leader of the birther movement, stating that he in essence called her "batshit crazy". (Yes, that's really in there).

Orly also complains mightily that Judge Land issued his decisions with great speed, accusing him of never having read the lawsuit. I guess she thought she was being clever when she used the term "blitzkrieg speed", implying that he was a Nazi brownshirt without really saying it.

Orly also accuses Judge Land of having ex parte contact with Eric Holder, (who of course threatened and unduly influenced the Judge to rule against her) but her promised affidavit to support that claim seems not to have materialized (surprise, surprise).

My Blog Personality

Try it out here.

Repealing Modernity, Redux

Um, wow. So the Derb, as we've seen, would like to go back to before the 1920s, before women had the vote in the USA. Apparently, that's about a century too late for some people:

Erick Erickson, the managing editor of RedState.com and a city councilor in Macon, Georgia, has called for the abolition of Macon's police force if it votes to unionize. [...]

"I’m thinking I’ll have the City Attorney draft me legislation to dissolve the police department and contract with the Sheriff to provide public safety services," Erickson wrote on the blog Peach Pundit.

There have been police forces in the United States since the 1830s.

What Litbrit Said

What Litbrit said.

Away With You, Odious Bluestockings!

The National Review's John Derbyshire has coughed up a book. He explains part of it thusly:

The conservative case against [women's voting rights] is that women lean hard to the left.... They want someone to nurture, they want someone to help raise their kids, and if men aren’t inclined to do it — and in the present days, they’re not much — then they’d like the state to do it for them.

Honestly, where do you even start? How do you even begin dealing with this sort of rot? People like Derbyshire aren't content with looking at specific problems and coming up with specific solutions; no, they basically want to repeal the entire modern era and start all over again (later on in the same interview he says there's a case for repealing the 1964 Civil Rights Act too). What on earth can you do other than shake your head and groan?

Begging for the Coup

It was inevitable, I suppose:

Military intervention is what Obama's exponentially accelerating agenda for "fundamental change" toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama's radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don't shrug and say, "We can always worry about that later."

Two points here: first of all, the US military is, as a group, far too disciplined and honourable ever to contemplate such a thing. Second, at this point I never want to hear about the angry left again. Not ever.

Update: And down the memory hole we go.

Let's ... Be Careful Out There

Exhibit A:

On Saturday, a user on Facebook posted a poll asking, “Should Obama be killed?” The blogger GottaLaff spotted the poll yesterday and called the Secret Service, which has now launched an investigation. “

Exhibit B:

If we had our guns, we would have fought a bloody battle. So, keep your guns, and buy more guns, and buy ammunition. [...] Take back America.

Things are getting scary.

Oh, I Get It

I've been noticing an obsession on the American right with Saul Alinsky recently, and was wondering where it came from. Maybe it's just me, but I'd never heard of this writer until progressives started getting accused all over the place of being his disciples. This sort of thing happens a lot, of course; a few years ago, people running little free blogs on their own time kept getting accused of being funded by George Soros, and before that we were all supposed to be disciples of Ward Churchill (whose name I had to think for a minute to remember just now). These days, it's Alinsky, whom I for one have never read.

In this interview, Dave Weigel says,

I'm usually loath to prescribe a lot of the movement's power to one book, but a lot of it comes from there. A lot of it comes from their discovery of Saul Alinsky's "Rules for Radicals," which they - and when I say they, I'm saying social conservatives, economic conservatives believe Barack Obama and liberals use successfully to tear their movement down.

They view that it's sort of an antithetical text. It's here are European socialists whose vision for America is not inspired by God but inspired by atheistic Marxism. Here is how they want to tear the institutions down. So they're trying to reverse-engineer that.

But why this Alinsky guy? And why now?

Then I looked up Alinsky and found that he was a community organizer. Ah. So then, I did something really simple and silly: I just Googled "community organizer," and yep, there at the top of the page is the Wikipedia entry on Alinsky, stating that he was an influence on Barack Obama (and for some of the fun food fights in the background of that entry, see for example this).

So maybe the reasoning has gone like this: the right-wing talking point about Obama is that he's regarded on the left as a religious figure (not true, but you knew that); the claim is made that Alinksy was a major influence on him (because they were both community organizers), and then the conclusion becomes that a book Alinsky wrote must be the left-wing Bible.

So this got me thinking: have at it, any progressives who care to -- what texts have been especially salient in shaping your politics? Is Alinsky really that important to you? If not, who is?

Dictionary

John Cole haz one.

Dingbattery

So, in responding to the recent report that American-style prisons are a really bad idea for Canada -- too expensive, abusive, contributing nothing to public safety -- here's how Peter Van Loan responds:

Their analysis was immediately dismissed by Public Safety Minister Peter Van Loan, who made a point of referring repeatedly to Mr. Jackson as “the professor.”

“The professor has a different philosophy than us,” Mr. Van Loan told CBC Newsworld. “We think the protection of society has to come first.”

The fact that "the professor" can be a term of abuse is pretty poor stuff. I say that not just because of what I do for a living, but because Van Loan's response amounts to dismissing someone who is an expert precisely because he is an expert. And apparently it works:

Ian Brodie, Harper's former chief of staff, told a McGill University symposium last March that criticism of the tough-on-crime policy by sociologists, lawyers and criminologists actually bolsters the Conservative case — because they are held in lower regard than politicians.

“Politically it helped us tremendously to be attacked by this coalition,” Mr. Brodie said. “So we never really had to engage in the question of what the evidence actually shows about various approaches to crime.”

In other words, enough people actually trust politicians (!) more than actual experts to make attacking the experts a winning strategy. That can't be anything but bad. Go down that path far enough, and you're into the sort of dingbattery that's gotten our neighbours into such a mess.

None of this is to say that actual experts can never be wrong. But when, as Brodie says, you don't try to prove them wrong or even really engage them, you're just practicing demagoguery. And as Dick Armey once said (and he's a man who knows), "Demagoguery doesn’t work unless it’s dumb."

Update: Or, for another example, there's this. As Noni Mausa puts it,

In [some government officials'] minds, "academic" means "someone who spends their whole working life studying, researching and teaching one specific topic, and who therefore knows less about it than the boyos down at the Salisbury House Saturday morning breakfast club."

Second Verse, Same as the First

I realize that polls are just snapshots, but when you've had a whole series of snapshots for five years that all look the same, you've got to conclude that what you're seeing is a snapshot of something pretty sturdy -- that is to say, with lots of inertia. So, here's the latest EKOS poll, and it's hauntingly familiar: Conservatives ahead but not in majority territory, Liberals in second, Bloc dominating in Quebec, NDP in the teens, Greens not breaking into Parliament any time soon. There's been a bit of movement compared to last time, but almost all of it within the margin of error. The big news -- that the Conservatives have allegedly got a 5-point lead in Toronto, for cripes' sake -- becomes less startling when you realize that EKOS defines "Toronto" as including the 905 belt. Something will happen at some point to change all this, but whatever it is doesn't seem to be happening right now.

Wahoo!!!

Oh, crazy dentist-Fraggle-person, I just can't quit you.

(h/t CC)