Romney Press Conference Expressions Meme

SEK created a meme!

(That's a quote from Flanders&Swann, by the way. Classic!)

Picture: Fuzzy Moth

Picture: Drummer Jokes: Sometimes they just write themselves

Picture: Free Starbucks Coffee!

When I first read this, I parsed it wrong. "I didn't know Starbucks was imprisoned or restrained in any way, or that it had become a campus cause...."

Picture: Chorizo Man!

Comment Elsewhere: Texas Republican Platform

A friend suggested that we read the Texas Republican Party Platform [PDF]. Wow. Here's some selected comments from the experience. I skipped over most of the anti-abortion, anti-homosexual stuff because it's been widely reported. It's pretty bad, really. But there's even more odd stuff there.

There's some stuff in there that I kind of like:

The Government shall not, by rule or law, exempt any of its
members from the provisions of such rule or law.

This would mean that police officers would have to justify the use of force based on the same standards as the rest of us, and tasers would be considered assault with a deadly weapon.

We demand elimination of presidential authority to issue executive orders and other mandates lacking congressional approval, as well as repeal of all previous executive orders and mandates.

Oh, wow.

Affirmative action falsely casts those who advocate merit as racist.

If the shoe fits....

We support limiting the definition of eminent domain to exclude seizing private property for public or private economic development or for increased tax revenues.

Yup, capitalism can go too far.

The state should have no power over licensing or training of clergy.

I wasn't aware that any such restriction existed.

the Republican Party of Texas urges local government bodies to determine their own policies regarding religious clubs and meetings on all properties owned by the same without interference.

Didn't they want strict adherence to the Constitution earlier?

Either party in a criminal trial should have a right to inform jurors of their right to determine facts and render a verdict.

Jury nullification, yeah! Especially for prosecutors!

We urge Republican Senate leadership to ensure that a record vote is taken on every judicial nominee.

Ending the judicial filibuster? I'm there!

We support full disclosure of the amounts and sources of any campaign contributions to political candidates, whether contributed by individuals, political action committees, or other entities.

Transparency in politics? Not bad. But congressional Republicans just turned down a chance to do this, so the Texans must be DFHs.

We support repeal of all Motor Voter laws; re–registering voters every four years;

Because too many people just show up and vote!

We urge changing the Election Code date of filing for the March primary from January 2 to the second Monday in January.

Why?

OMG, I'm only on page 5. Time to start skimming....

We support adoption of American English as the official language of Texas and of the United States.

I've taught kids from Texas: this could be good!

We call upon governmental entities to protect all symbols of our American heritage from being altered in any way.

Yeah, like turning the Alamo into a theme park, and American Flag Swimsuits.

We believe that the practice of homosexuality tears at the fabric of society

That sounds painful: I think they're doing it wrong.

Also, they have clauses against both RU-486 and the Morning After Pill. Nobody there, apparently, realized that they were the same thing?

Hmm. They're against gambling, but they're in favor of individual retirement investment accounts -- stock market gambling -- instead of social security.

We support the availability of natural, unprocessed foods, which should be encouraged, and that the right to access raw milk directly from the farmer be protected.

Wouldn't you rather get it from the cow? Oh, the farmer and the cowman will be friends....

We advocate equal educational opportunity for all students and the requirement that children with special needs be educated commensurate with their abilities.

Except for the bit about removing learning disabilities from the ADA....

Here's one for the professors!
We support Texas’ colleges and universities use of the same or substitutable textbooks for ten or more years in order to bring costs to students down and maintain some residual value for used books. We oppose restrictions on use of textbooks for multiple years, such as requiring annual access codes.

Granted, the two-year replacement cycle for textbooks is a bit out of hand, but would you want to use textbooks from 10+ years ago in your field?

Also, later: We support the removal of the system of tenure in Texas state colleges and universities.

I have my doubts about tenure, mind you, but I think they're going to have a problem with contracts....

We urge Congress to repeal government-sponsored programs that deal with early childhood development.

There's something about 'self-sufficient families' earlier: I guess this is part of that.

As a prerequisite, we urge passage of a constitutional amendment
prohibiting imposition of state regulations on private and parochial schools

That's a level of school choice that goes well beyond anything I've ever seen before.

We strongly oppose Juvenile Daytime Curfews.

?

We support the parents’ right to choose, without penalty, which medications are administered to their minor children. We oppose medical clinics on school property except higher education and health care for students without parental consent

Aside from the grammatical hash of the last sentence, how much medical freedom are we talking about here? Also, I'm pretty sure there's no medical care for minors without parental consent already. At least based on the paperwork I've seen.

To help instill lifelong healthy eating habits, we support making only foods of nutritional value available in schools during school hours and served in appropriate serving sizes

So, they can take any medication their parents approve of, but they can't eat junk food.

We pledge our influence toward a return to the original intent of the First Amendment and toward dispelling the myth of separation of church and state.

That'll end well.

We support the individual right to enter into real estate contracts without Government interference or regulations.

You know that's about compacts and restrictions, right?

Child abusers should be severely prosecuted. However, we
oppose actions of social agencies to classify traditional methods of discipline as child abuse. We support enactment of a homicide-by-abuse statute that provides punishment for abusing a child to death without intent of killing.

Ick. What I can't tell from the platform is if "homicide by abuse" should be punished more or less severely than other forms of murder: is it more like involuntary manslaughter, or murder with special circumstances?

They also want to replace all taxation -- income, property, whatever -- with sales taxes, except for internet transactions (at least, I think that's what they mean. They might just be opposing those 'government will tax your email' chain letters, though).

Here's one of my favorites:
We strongly believe that the United States of America must protect and defend its national sovereignty as given in the Constitution to the people and remain free of external control or influence and be governed independently of any foreign power, especially with regard to the formation of the North American Union/Community as proposed by the Council of Foreign Relations (CFR). ... later: We oppose relinquishing United States supremacy to any foreign powers on our soil. We support prohibition of all foreign or international military bases within the United States.

Yes, the Texas Republican Party Platform is written by people who believe chain letters. Later, they oppose one-world government and one-world currency, along with withdrawl from the UN and expulsion of the UN from US territory. On the other hand, they want to reinvigorate NASA's moon program, so it's not all bad!

Recommittment to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, intervention into the MidEast (by declaring Jerusalem the capital of Israel) and Asia (by declaring Taiwan a sovereign nation) that are sure to get us even further into trouble. Gotta love the foundations of their foreign policy: "Our policy is based on God’s biblical promise to bless those who bless Israel and curse those who curse Israel and we further invite other nations
and organizations to enjoy the benefits of that promise."

There's a legislative summary at the end, which is oddly inconsistent with the body of the platform.

Wow.

Pop Quiz: Politics or Theology? Wait, there's a difference?

Trinitarian debate or Republican mythology?

He's nothing like the father! He doesn't share the epistemology of the father. He doesn't have the nature of his father, the knowledge -- he has nothing in common with the father.

This actually comes from a discussion of Pres. Ronald Reagan and what, in theory, he would think of Sarah Palin. [via] It's a member of the current conservative commentariat telling Ronald Reagan JR. that she has a better grasp on his father's political judgement than he does. At one point she seems to conflate Reagan with the Founding Fathers, and concludes by saying that Ron Reagan, JR. must never have really met his father. Politically speaking, presumably.

The metaphysical discussion of political legacy aside, what actually struck me about this exchange is that Ron Reagan, JR. seems to have a higher (and better supported by recent evidence) opinion of his father's abilities and judgement than the so-called conservative he's arguing with, who seems to have absorbed the common liberal opinion about Pres. Reagan's essentially emotional/anti-intellectual approach to governance.

Update: to make things more interesting, Michael Reagan is getting into the act, raising the possibility that the Reagan legacy could split into opposing camps....

Thursday Lyrics: I Want A Hippopotamus for Christmas

The Little Anachronism was watching a video purporting to teach some math and economics. I was mostly ignoring it, but I couldn't help overhearing something about having a thousand dollars, and the possibility of buying a pet hippo with that money. That struck me as a bit unrealistic: wouldn't a hippo cost more than that? Being a nerd, I decided to see if I could figure out quickly (i.e. with some google work) what a hippo would cost. I couldn't find much, honestly, but in the discussion thread for this song, I did find the claim that you could buy a hippo in 1953 for $3000. Based on purchasing power parity measurements, that's roughly the equivalent of $24,000 today. I still don't know how much a hippo actually costs now, but it's enough for now.

Apparently my spouse encountered this song at camp. I never did, but it's cute, and in honor of the question, here it is.

I WANT A HIPPOPOTAMUS FOR CHRISTMAS
Words and music by John Rox
performed by Gayla Peevey (1953)

I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
Don't want a doll, no dinky Tinker Toy
I want a hippopotamus to play with and enjoy

I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
I don't think Santa Claus will mind, do you?
He won't have to use our dirty chimney flue
Just bring him through the front door,
that's the easy thing to do

I can see me now on Christmas morning,
creeping down the stairs
Oh what joy and what surprise
when I open up my eyes
to see a hippo hero standing there

I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
No crocodiles, no rhinoceroses
I only like hippopotamuses
And hippopotamuses like me too

Mom says the hippo would eat me up, but then
Teacher says a hippo is a vegeterian

There's lots of room for him in our two-car garage
I'd feed him there and wash him there and give him his massage

I can see me now on Christmas morning,
creeping down the stairs
Oh what joy and what surprise
when I open up my eyes
to see a hippo hero standing there

I want a hippopotamus for Christmas
Only a hippopotamus will do
No crocodiles or rhinoceroseses
I only like hippopotamuseses
And hippopotamuses like me too!

Don't tell the kids....

I was reading detailed analysis of Sotomayor's past decisions and came across the following potentially explosive revelation [emphasis added]:

United States v. Santa, 180 F.3d 20 (1999), involved a question the Supreme Court eventually considered this term in Herring v. United States, No. 07-513. At one time, there had been an arrest warrant issued for Mr. Santa. That fact was put into a statewide computer database. The warrant was subsequently recalled, but that fact never made it into the database. When the police arrested Santa, wrongly believing there was still a warrant out for him, they searched him and found drugs. He moved to suppress the evidence as the result of an unconstitutional arrest (i.e., an arrest without probable cause or a warrant). Judge Sotomayor, writing for the majority, ruled that the evidence should not be suppressed under the exclusionary rule – the same conclusion reached by the Supreme Court in Herring. Judge Newman joined the opinion but wrote separately to voice his disquiet over the fact that the defendant had been arrested by the local police but was prosecuted in federal court because New York courts would have suppressed the evidence as a matter of state law had he been prosecuted locally.

Humor aside, as a matter of law, Sotomayor's decision was a correct application of a deeply disturbing existing precedent....

Comments Elsewhere: Quips

I got in a couple of good lines at Terry's place and elsewhere.

On the pandemic:

Since H1N1 includes both avian flu and swine flu material, we could call it the “pigs fly flu.”

On computer problems:

And backups? Like true love, you don’t really understand backups until you don’t have one….

On Souter's retirement:

don’t conservative justices ever get sick? And why do the liberal ones keep eating in the cafeteria?

The Bill of Commandments

John McKay has translated the Bill of Rights into King James English:

1. Thou shalt not make laws respecting an establishment of religion nor prohibiting the free exercise thereof.
   
2. Thou shalt not not make laws abridging the freedom of speech nor the freedom of the press.
   
3. Thou shalt respect the right of the people peaceably to assemble and the right to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.
   
4. Thou shalt not infringe upon the right of the people to keep and bear arms.
   
5. Thou shalt not quarter troops during peacetime in any house without the consent of the owner.
   
6. Thou shalt not perform unreasonable searches. Neither shall thou seize without warrant.
   
7. Thou shalt not hold a person to answer for any capital, or otherwise infamous crime, without first indicting by a Grand Jury. Neither shall thou twice put a person put in jeopardy of life or limb for the same offense. Neither shall thou compel self incrimination.
   
8. Thou shalt give speedy and public trial and preserve the right to trial by a jury of peers.
   
9. Thou shalt not impose excessive bail or fines. Neither shall thou inflict cruel and unusual punishments.
   
10. Thou shalt preserve for the States and the people those rights not delegated to the United States by the Constitution.

Awesome. Go ye and sin no more.

Thursday Lyrics: The John Birch Society

At some point last week, the line "To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks" started going through my head....



Chad Mitchell Trio : The John Birch Society
by Michael Brown

Oh, we're meetin' at the courthouse at eight o'clock tonight
You just walk in the door and take the first turn to the right
Be careful when you get there, we hate to be bereft
But we're taking down the names of everybody turning left

Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society
Here to save our country from a communistic plot
Join the John Birch Society, help us fill the ranks
To get this movement started we need lots of tools and cranks

Now there's no one that we're certain the Kremlin doesn't touch
We think that Westbrook Pegler doth protest a bit too much
We only hail the hero from whom we got our name
We're not sure what he did but he's our hero just the same

Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society
Socialism is the ism dismalest of all
Join the John Birch Society, there's so much to do
Have you heard they're serving vodka at the WCTU?

Well you've heard about the agents that we've already named
Well MPA has agents that are flauntedly unashamed
We're after Rosie Clooney, we've gotten Pinkie Lee
And the day we get Red Skelton won't that be a victory

Oh we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society
Norman Vincent Peale may think he's kidding us along
But the John Birch Society knows he spilled the beans
He keeps on preaching brotherhood, but we know what he means

We'll teach you how to spot 'em in the cities or the sticks
For even Jasper Junction is just full of Bolsheviks
The CIA's subversive and so's the FCC
There's no one left but thee and we, and we're not sure of thee

Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society
Here to save our country from a communistic plot
Join the John Birch Society holding off the Reds
We'll use our hand and hearts and if we must we'll use our heads

Do you want Justice Warren for your Commissar?
Do you want Mrs. Krushchev in there with the DAR?
You cannot trust your neighbor or even next of kin
If mommie is a commie then you gotta turn her in

Oh, we're the John Birch Society, the John Birch Society
Fighting for the right to fight the right fight for the Right
Join the John Birch Society as we're marching on
And we'll all be glad to see you when we're meeting in the John
In the John,
in the John Birch So- ci- i- teee.

Comment Elsewhere: underwear economics

In response to the news that underwear sales are down, I wrote

Actually, with population growth slowing, the steady sales of underwear were actually based on inflated expectations and overconsumption; the dip is a correction to a more appropriate level given the backlog of product in people's drawers. It's an underwear bubble, and it's been popped.

And I did my best to make that sound normal, not obscene, and I'm pretty sure I failed.

To be fair, I didn't try all that hard....

Guilty, Guilty, Guilty!

It's been a while since I bothered updating my Impeachment Index, partially out of exhaustion, attention to other matters, etc.

But the latest issue of Vanity Fair has An Oral History of the Bush White House which is a fairly extensive "greatest hits" based on interviews with a whole bunch of highly placed people. [via]

I'm too much of an historian not to say "take it with a grain of salt." But it's fundamentally consistent with the view we've had for years from the outside: they lied, and broke laws, and got most of the important stuff wrong over and over and over again.

My favorite two bits (though the whole thing is worth reading, despite its length):

Joschka Fischer, German foreign minister and vice-chancellor:
I was invited to a conference in Saudi Arabia on Iraq, and a Saudi said to me, Look, Mr. Fischer, when President Bush wants to visit Baghdad, it’s a state secret, and he has to enter the country in the middle of the night and through the back door. When President Ahmadinejad wants to visit Baghdad, it’s announced two weeks beforehand or three weeks. He arrives in the brightest sunshine and travels in an open car through a cheering crowd to downtown Baghdad. Now, tell me, Mr. Fischer, who is running the country?

Not only did they screw up the Middle East, they thought nothing of screwing over their own people:

Lawrence Wilkerson, top aide and later chief of staff to Secretary of State Colin Powell: The Cheney team had, for example, technological supremacy over the National Security Council staff. That is to say, they could read their e-mails. I remember one particular member of the N.S.C. staff wouldn’t use e-mail because he knew they were reading it. He did a test case, kind of like the Midway battle, when we’d broken the Japanese code. He thought he’d broken the code, so he sent a test e-mail out that he knew would rile Scooter [Libby], and within an hour Scooter was in his office.

Yeah, the VP's office was spying on the NSC. I actually laughed out loud at that one.

Why do we only psychoanalyze the misstatements of politicians we dislike? I don't know but we do.

"I'm telling you there's an enemy that would like to attack America, Americans, again. There just is. That's the reality of the world. And I wish him all the very best."
-- President George W. Bush, 12 January 2009

Comment Elsewhere and The Ten Rules of Poststructuralist Prose

In response to an Orac takedown of New Age pseudo-scientific quackery, I wrote

The challenge in studying semiotics or postmodernism is that, unlike studying literature, or history, or medicine, they are not first-order fields. Both of them are the study of the way in which we think, and as such have been very useful. Scholars like Pierre Bourdieu, Thomas Kuhn, Roland Barthes, Michel Foucault have really expanded our understanding of our own linguistic and cultural habits, the ways in which we both comprehend the world and limit our scope of action therein.

That said, there have been some truly awful intellectual and linguistic directions taken by postmodernism and semiotics: the former lends itself to a kind of nihilistic relativism which denies truth and meaning entirely; the latter to a kind of free-association in which things end up meaning rather the opposite of what everyone intuitively expects. There's junk science in every field, and these are relatively new fields; the ratio is still kind of high and both tend to attract "maverick" and "ooh, it's new and cool" types.

As I said before, the woo-use of semiotics draws on the way in which "signifier" and "signified" can be very different things: the way the flag stands for the nation, or "White House" stands for the presidency (or the nation). The wooists are taking that fairly straightforward process of unpacking meaning from language, and turning it into sympathetic magic. It's no different from their use of quantum mechanics, and you won't understand semiotics or postmodernism by reading Milgrom more than you'll understand Heisenberg.

One thing I didn't say is that postmodernists and semioticists have been responsible for some of the most opaque and bizarre prose in academic history, which is part of why they are so useful to voodoo peddlers. I remembered a piece I read back when post-modernism was just getting a foothold in US academia, and it was still called by its more linguistic term, "post-structuralism." It's a funny piece, still, for those of us who have to read this stuff:

TEN RULES FOR MAKING YOUR PROSE POSTSTRUCTURALIST:
Ruth and Kenny Mostern, Z Magazine, June 1991, p. 7.

1. Change all appearances of the verb "to be" to "can be represented as." Corrolary: Always refer to the word "is" as the copula.

2. Never "analyze"; always "deconstruct."

3. Never refer to "ideas" or "thoughts"; replace these concepts with "episteme," "habitus," or "ideological structure."

4. Actions are "always already overdetermined" by the categories in rule 3.

5. Feel free to add the following prefixes and suffixes to any word in your vocabulary: "post," "neo," "dis," "over," "quasi," "co," "de," "ism," "ize," "ify," "ness," "ology."

6. Use parentheses and dashes in the middle of words.

7. Every activity is "writing"; all things are "texts"; all people are "subject positions"; all collections of things are "structures"; all that is outside a structure is a "margin."

8. Conclude all discourse with several options and a question.

9. Call anything you don't understand "essentialist" and denounce it.

10. Refer to at least one of the following three French authors in everything you write: Foucault, Derrida, Lacan. Corollary: Appropriate all untranslated French words from your English versions of their texts.

Oh, that takes me back....

See also here and here and here.

Comment Elsewhere: Absurdity in motion

In response to goofy comments on an otherwise sober and informative discussion of New Deal economics, I wrote:

Both of you are ignoring the evidence: time-traveling islamofascists replaced the Founding Fathers with body doubles and revised the Declaration of Independence and Constitution — abandoning the Articles of Confederation for ideological reasons — creating a quantum causality wave that made the otherwise erudite and wise George W. Bush stupid just in time for the 9/11 attacks, which were coordinated through suicide wormhole technology. This is why we can’t find Osama bin Laden: he’s actually hiding in a parallel existence, playing pinochle with his parallel self and waiting for the final victory to come. Barack Obama is another time-traveller, from a future of racial harmony and socialized medicine, who is working against bin Laden, but who nonetheless is also working against the interests of the real Founders who wrote the Articles of Confederation and then time travelled foward to lead the Confederacy.

I'm pretty sure that I'm kidding. But someone objected, and I had to go on:

I’m sorry you feel that way, but the chauvinistic tunnel vision of single-timeline American specialists just doesn’t encompass the reality of the multiverse the way we World Historians understand it. Like Hitler, we have a vision of a world unified under a healthy, vigorous, expansive Historical hegemony, and like Hitler, we will keep invading your blogs until you appease us with internationalism, then we will invade your other blogs, conferences, textbooks and seminars, anyway.

To which the blog host responded, quite appropriately, "It’s funny because it’s true."

Time to settle up!

The long-running parlor debate is over. For years, political junkies both professional and amateur have amused themselves by arguing whether the US would first elect an African American, woman or Jew to the White House. It's over: an African American was first, and there's little doubt that a woman is much more likely than a Jew at this point. Jews now fall into the "miscellaneous Caucasian ethnic" category, probably less likely than Hispanics.

Anyone who had outstanding wagers on the subject is now required to hand over the money, booze, embarassing photographs, personal services or to undergo the appropriately noteworthy hair styling to which they committed themselves. I'm not much of a gambler myself, so I'm pretty sure I don't owe anyone anything.

Thursday Lyric: Going, Going, Gone

John McCutcheon's live version of this is infectiously joyous, not bitter.

Going, Going, Gone
by Si Kahn (1986)

Oh, the scene was so familiar with farmers all around
The auctioneer was standing there, he brought his hammer down
But when they started bidding the crowd let out a roar
For they heard something on that day they'd never heard before

CHORUS:
What am I bid for the White House? Come on, boys, don't be slow
They've overspent their credit so they'll just have to go
If they can't learn to manage it's time they're moving on
The leaders of this country are going, going gone!

Come on, let's start the bidding with that Congress on the hill
They're awful fond of spending, they just don't pay the bills
But with a little honest work we'll make them good as new
I hear they're handy on the farm if you show 'em what to do

CHORUS

Then the crowd grew silent you could hear a needle drop
They motioned up the White House and put it on the block
But no one bid a nickel, they just stared so hard and cold
'Cause you can't bid on something that's already bought and sold

CHORUS

And when the sale was over I sure did thank my luck
I paid for both my senators and loaded 'em on the truck
Now one has gone to milking and the other's gone to seed
By wintertime they'll understand just what the farmers need

CHORUS

Sold American!

Comments elsewhere: WTF?

I've been posting variations on this all over:

We’ve had presidential campaigns in wartime before (Civil, WWI, WWII, Korea, Vietnam), in the midst of the original Great Depression (wasn’t there a wave of bank failures in ‘32?), but we can’t have a campaign when Wall Street sneezes?

I realize the financial meltdown is serious — we’ve been living in a house of cards for at least a decade — but so’s the election.

As so often happens, Eric Rauchway had a similar thought at about the same time.

addendum: The Dow Ate My Homework.

Also, I wrote here

Oh, come on: you've had complicated financial issues before. Are you going to tell me you never said to yourself "All I need is two more senators, and I'll have it licked!"?

For a brief, dark moment I was afraid McCain had really pulled a sweet move, forcing Obama to be reactive and reinforcing his maverick-non-partisan-country-first narrative. Then he asked to move the debate so as to preempt the VP debate, and it turned into a whimper.

Then I had an idea

I was watching the Letterman bit posted over at Eschaton and a bright idea just popped into my 'ead: Obama should counter McCain's suggestion to move the first presidential debate to the date of the VP debate by suggesting that the VP debate should take place on Friday. Just switch 'em and let the VP candidates do what VP's should do: stand in for their bosses.