Cheap shots 8/17

Guardian:

The armed forces will take two years to recover from their involvement in the Olympic Games because so many personnel have been deployed at short notice and taken away from normal duties, the military's chief planner for the Games has said.

All right, people? Invading England between now and 2015 is not cricket, and anybody who tries it is an unspeakable cad. I'm looking at you, Ecuador. Verbum sap and all that.

British infantry uniforms. From Wikipedia.

Think Progress on Romney's Medicare plan:

Just a day after Mitt Romney told reporters, “my plan for Medicare is very similar to [Paul Ryan's] plan for Medicare,” former New Hampshire governor and Romney campaign chair John Sununu insisted on Tuesday morning that the former Massachusetts governor’s vision form Medicare reform is “very different” from Ryan’s proposal.

Thanks for setting us straight on that, Governor Sununu. Where'd you get a look at that plan, anyway? Any plans to let Romney see it?

Jennifer Rubin in the Washington Post:

During their travels the pair clearly had a ball. At one point, I was told, Ryan was busy in the car -- "eating cherry pie with the governor." In other words, this was a buddy movie in the making....

Ryan, a protégé of conservative intellectuals Bill Bennett and Jack Kemp, has always been a man in love with ideas.

One hardly knows where to start. You don't think "eating cherry pie" has some bizarre sexual reference? No, guess not. 

I was wondering which buddy movie: Easy Rider? Thelma and Louise? Never mind.

And don't fall in love with ideas!

If you fall in love with an idea, you won't notice all the other beautiful ideas you bump into, and you could miss some really spectacular dates. One of life's great pleasures is dumping a previously adored idea: then you're back in the game and free to flirt. What's the prettiest part of your idea's body?  Now, what's the ugliest part? Does your idea respect you?

From the businessy website Logic + Emotion, from which the above text is palimpsested.

As of this morning, members of the Russian punk group Pussy Riot have been given sentences of two years for "hooliganism" (Jeez, haven't heard that word since Andropov was party leader!) in Moscow's Cathedral of Christ the Savior. It seems like a pretty harsh sentence. Demonstrators arrested outside the courtroom included the great Garry Kasparov, said to have been beaten as they hustled him away. We'll see how Tsar Vladimir, who appears to have enjoyed looking magnanimous on the subject a couple of weeks ago, follows up.

They are musicians too. Here is the offending piece with moderately good sound. I think Musorgsky might have kind of liked it.

Obama made me do it!

Rick Santorum's latest sally, as Think Progress reports it:

We have a president who, for the first time in American history, is directly assaulting the First Amendment and freedom of religion. He is going to tell you what to do in the practice of your faith. He is forcing business people right now to do things that are against their conscience, that they will have to — if you’re a Catholic — you’ll have to go to confession … to confess that you are complying with a government program that is a sin in the Catholic Church.

Confession? Confession? The padre must be pretty horrified to know what you've been up to, too! Try breaking it gently: "Well, Father, I didn't exactly rape any altar boys, saving your presence... but I... You know I run this very large and Catholic business, and I have to get the employees health insurance, and they... Oh, God, Father, they made me get the kind with the birth control included! I was helpless in their fiendish grasp!" Long as you don't get in the booth with a bishop you should be OK...

Then again, if you look at the following, from a National Catholic Reporter survey of October 2011 (via Catholic Globe),  you might take an alternative view:

Mass attendance by "pre-Vatican II" Catholics, born in 1940 or before, slipped to 54 percent, down 10 percentage points from the high recorded in the 1999 survey, but it still topped all age groups. The rate for "Vatican II" Catholics, those born 1941-60, is 31 percent; for "post-Vatican II" Catholics born 1961-78, 29 percent; and for "millennial" Catholics born since 1979, 23 percent.

Older Catholics cited "I'm just not a religious person" as the reason they don't go to Mass more often, while younger Catholics cited family responsibilities as their principal reason.

Still, healthy majorities in all age groups agreed with the statements, "I cannot imagine being anything but a Catholic" and "being a Catholic is a very important part of who I am." But no majority in any age group agreed with the statement, "Church is among the most important influences on my life."

If Obama's really getting them into church, and confessing, that's a lot better than you all are doing. You owe him a vote of thanks, and if you ask me you should really canonize the guy. Santo Subito!

Cheap shots 8/3

Rick Santorum is back! At least for a visit. And commenting on the Jerry Sandusky case, about which as you can imagine he knows quite a lot. Or at least as he can imagine, and does. Via Minjae Park at Washington Monthly,

In an interview with Dallas-Ft. Worth’s KSKY 660 AM on Friday, Santorum, a Penn State alum, called the evidence “pretty darn thin” and said, “I’m sort of sitting back and waiting for the facts to out as opposed to, at least as I’m being told, a version of the facts.”

Speculation is that he thought Sandusky was a priest.

Romney, explaining why Jewish Israelis are more prosperous than Palestinian Palestinians, at breakfast in Jerusalem:

"And as I come here and I look out over this city and consider the accomplishments of the people of this nation, I recognise the power of at least culture and a few other things," the presumptive Republican candidate told his audience. He cited a climate of innovation, the Jewish history of thriving in adversity and the "hand of providence".

Sounds an awful lot to me like, "You people are just so good with money." But it took the Arabs to call him out for racism.

"Not so sure about those krep--those krep--those dumpling thingies, they wouldn't have any chopped Christian baby in that, would they? Get 'em at 7-11?"

Attack of the killer snails: the giant African land snail, achatina fulica, has been invading the Americas—well, South America and Florida, anyway—according to BBC News.

In one Colombian town alone, Buenaventura, more than eight tonnes of snails have been collected since an invasion began two years ago. In Ecuador the problem is so widespread that they have been found in half of the country's 24 provinces, including the Galapagos Islands.

In the fields, they are an agricultural nuisance. In the cities, they clutter up the sidewalks and rip the stucco off houses. Such is the density with which they congregate at the height of an invasion, that they have even been known to cause slicks on highways.

The good news would be that they are not likely to give you eosinophilic meningitis—

The parasite that causes eosinophilic meningitis is called rat lungworm (angiostrongylus cantonensis). It has evolved to use snails as hosts and also spends part of its life cycle in a rat's blood system and brain.

After a rat eats an infected snail, thousands of worms - up to 60mm long - may grow in its brain. In human brains, it seems the worms cannot find their way out again. The worms soon die, but this causes a huge immune reaction and brain swelling.

—unless you hunker down and eat one. The bad news is, we already have rat lungworms anyway, in tiny slugs that can hide out in inadequately washed lettuce.

The BBC says you don't see them this big any more—just an inch or two. Photo from Wikimedia Commons by Ruy Almeida.

I don't feel as sorry as I might for Jonah Lehrer, the youthful science writer at the New Yorker who was busted for making up Bob Dylan quotations and lost his job, horrible as that must be, because if you want to fabricate Dylan you should at least make it sound interesting:

“But then,” Mr. Lehrer wrote, “just when Dylan was most determined to stop creating music, he was overcome with a strange feeling. ‘It’s a hard thing to describe,’ Dylan would later remember. ‘It’s just this sense that you got something to say.’ ”

I mean, what the hell kind of Dylan quote is that? That's not Dylan, that's any soulful guitar player in Long Island showing up on NPR to pimp his first album. Dylan doesn't say he finds something "hard to describe," and if he has something to say he doesn't talk about saying it.

"Yaz," said Bobby, looking up innocently, "it would be a hard thing for you to describe, but that's only because you're so fucked up. Do you realize that man in the only animal that looks in the mirror and sees something that isn't there?"

Like, gnomic.

Psychopath Watch

Santorum Not Yet Toasted

At least, grammatically speaking. You read it here first:

“We made a decision over the weekend that while this presidential race for us is over, for me, and we will suspend our campaign today, we are not done fighting,” Mr. Santorum said as tears welled in the reddened eyes of his wife and the aides and friends who ringed the room.

That is "we are not done fighting" is the decision, and "the presidential race is over" is a kind of part of the environment, as in "we made a decision that while it's too cold to go to the beach, we are making a Rick Santorum sand sculpture."

It's a good example of how a thought expresses itself almost automatically in the form of a lie: a less twisted politician just says, "I'm not a quitter" as he or she is quitting, Santorum makes not quitting the subject of his announcement, while suggesting that the campaign just sort of quit on its own, when nobody was looking.

The likeness of Rick Santorum is demolished as the Democratic Women of Horry County secured the rights to demolish the Republican 2012 Primary Debate Sand Sculpture dubbed "Mount Myrtle," in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina. Steve Jessmore/Myrtle Beach Sun-News.

Read more here: http://www.thestate.com/2012/01/24/2126449/snap-a-mcclatchy-photo-gallery.html?KeepThis=true&TB_iframe=true&height=515&width=910#storylink=cpy

Betcha David Brooks won't be reporting on this one:

Berkeley psychologists Paul Piff and Dacher Keltner ran several studies looking at whether social class (as measured by wealth, occupational prestige, and education) influences how much we care about the feelings of others. (Scientific American, via Huffington Post)

For instance,

luxury car drivers were more likely to cut off other motorists instead of waiting for their turn at the intersection. This was true for both men and women upper-class drivers, regardless of the time of day or the amount of traffic at the intersection. In a different study they found that luxury car drivers were also more likely to speed past a pedestrian trying to use a crosswalk, even after making eye contact with the pedestrian. 

And so on, through four more studies showing that "as people climb the social ladder, their compassionate feelings towards other people decline." Toward the end, the reporter asks, a little plaintively,

But why would wealth and status decrease our feelings of compassion for others? After all, it seems more likely that having few resources would lead to selfishness. Piff and his colleagues suspect that the answer may have something to do with how wealth and abundance give us a sense of freedom and independence from others. The less we have to rely on others, the less we may care about their feelings.

Or couldn't it just as easily be the other way around? I mean, the more psychopathic a person is to start with, the more likely to claw her-or-his way up that ladder?

From All about Eve.

Rum, Romanism, and Ridiculous

Something else I called attention to a while back (in mid-January) is the curious relationship developing on the US right between the Roman Catholic hierarchy and our ancient Know-Nothing community, which traditionally identified the Pope as Antichrist and Rome as the Scarlet Woman who rides that seven-headed beast in the book of Revelation.

The Whore of Bablylon. From Sacred Texts.

Now the Times religion columnist, Samuel G. Freedman, has caught onto the same thing, with a very interesting nuance that has apparently been showing up in the primaries: while Evangelical Protestants have adopted Rick "Sanctum" Santorum as the standard-bearer of "religious" conservatism, Catholics haven't—Catholic Republicans are mostly voting for Romney. Freedman comments, primly,

Through a critical reading of the data, Mr. Santorum’s base of evangelical Protestants and conservative Catholics could be seen by cynics as a coalition of zealots, held together by intolerance. By another way of thinking, however, his candidacy offers proof of a growing tolerance on the part of evangelical Christians, a willingness to shed ancestral religious prejudices.

And then the Catholics who won't vote for Santorum are more tolerant still? (They are voting for somebody who believes God has plural wives, except, of course, for the Democrats, whose tolerance is not under discussion.) Forgive me, but if you think it's a big deal that evangelicals now recognize white Catholics as white people, I realize that wasn't always true, but color me less than impressed—I think Freedman's cynic idea works better.

Cheap shots and chasers 3/16

Santorum lets out his inner Islamofascist:

Santorum had the opportunity to make an uninterrupted case, calling out Newt Gingrich for two-timing the Republican party in a 2008 anti-global warming video (“I didn’t sit on a couch with any other woman. I sit on a couch with my wife, not Nancy Pelosi.”)

He's accusing the Newtster of khalwat!

Two Lovers, by Reza Abbasi, 1630 (A.H. 1039). Metropolitan Museum of Art.

Republican physics:

Avant-garde opinionist James Poulos, doing some classically styled concern trolling for the President's poll numbers during the 15 minutes or so that it looked as if he was losing this week:

Inertia — the tendency of an object to resist any change in its motion — is the momentum of incumbency, and inertia favors the president right now, on the economy, on foreign policy, even on the deficit.

Also, centrifugal force is the Republican gravity--I picked that up from David Brooks.
Recycled from comments at Rumproast.

Inertia demonstration. From Educational Technology Clearinghouse, Florida.

Panty-sniffing is the fifth freedom:

Arizona House Bill 2625, authored by Majority Whip Debbie Lesko, R-Glendale, would permit employers to ask their employees for proof of medical prescription if they seek contraceptives for non-reproductive purposes, such as hormone control or acne treatment.
“I believe we live in America. We don’t live in the Soviet Union,” Lesko said. 

Oh, right—in the Soviet Union only the government was supposed to pry into your personal life. Here, your boss is free to do it too. That's why he loves this country!

 

Up a slippery slope

The irrepressible Rick Santorum was chatting with folks at James Dobson's American Heartland Forum in Columbia, Miss., February 3, when he got to the subject of slippery slopes and the example of the Netherlands, where, he said, elderly people feel the need to wear bracelets saying "Do not euthanize me" to keep safe from the murderous medics prowling the cities:

Because they have voluntary euthanasia in the Netherlands, but half the people who are euthanized every year — and it’s 10 percent of all deaths for the Netherlands — half of those people are euthanized involuntarily, at hospitals, because they are older and sick. And so elderly people in the Netherlands don’t go to the hospital, they go to another country, because they’re afraid because of budget purposes that they will not come out of that hospital if they go into it with sickness.

You can hear the audience gasping in horror: Those poor old folks! But it's not true, [jump]

Insider poopology

Time Saving Truth from Falsehood. By François Lemoyne, 1737.

Just about the same time as I got the message from Mara Liasson that the new rules on insurance coverage for family planning were all part of Obama's 11-dimensional election strategy which involves getting Rick Santorum the Republican nomination—actually it's not her fault, I made most of it up—the august Markos was coming up with a similar idea: that Democrats should go vote for Santorum in the upcoming primaries and caucuses that allow it, starting with Michigan, by way of, if not actually nominating Santorum, at least making Romney's victory as painful and exhausting as possible; he called it Operation Hilarity.

High-minded Kossacks rose, however, in protest against the plan, which smacked [jump]

Call for retroaction!

Paleo at Daily Kos notes a speech where Rick Santorum more or less called for the abolition of public schools. You say you're not surprised? Fine, but what I want to call attention to is an unusually upfront example of what I have called "retroactionary" ideology, the place that's so far right it's physically impossible—the belief that rather than just reverting to the way things used to be (the reactionary way) we should literally aim backwards in time.

Aristotle as depicted in the 1493 Nürnberger Chronik, from Wikipedia's article on "Anachronism"

It was in a talk yesterday, in Columbus: [jump]

Cheap shots and chasers 2/17

Said the pediatrician: I'm afraid he's going to be severely conservative, Mrs. Romney—but with suitable care and a loving home environment there's no reason he shouldn't have a fulfilling life...

 Jeremy Lin and Landry Fields Special Nerd Handshake

Now that Michelle Bachmann's not running for president any more, she's back to her old job of making the other Congresspersons look sane by comparison. From Huffington Post:

The House and Senate both approved a payroll tax cut bill on Friday that would extend unemployment benefits through 2012.

But according to Rep. Michele Bachmann (R-Minn.), the extension is hardly the bill's crowning achievement.

"They're extending unemployment, too, but the big thing that we get is no longer can a welfare recipient walk into a strip club and get money out of an ATM machine to pay for a lap dance," she told conservative radio host Mark Levin on Thursday night. "Now, I'm not making this up. That's the big thing that we get out of this bill."

And remember these?

At a Santorum rally in Tacoma, Paul Constant (h/t Anne Laurie at Balloon Juice) reports a little crowd taunting a lone freedom-from-religion protester,

pinching their noses and miming as though they were swatting away flies. "I can't stand the smell of this guy," one fly-swatter said, adding, "it's like he's got garbage in his pockets." An old woman told the nose-pinchers, as she squeezed past the whole scene, "Watch out for the maggots." Another woman clucked her tongue, and told her friends, "If you're an atheist, you'll just believe in anything."

Just shoot me.

Insider Poop Watch

NPR sports analyst Mara Liasson, covering the "caucus-race" trial heats in the coveted White House Stakes competition, said something unexpected--I guess that's news in itself:

Talking Head Makes Original Observation

Effects on Market Uncertain

Anyway, she said President Obama is responsible for the recent froth in the candidacy of Rick Santorum; the announcement of new regulations on health coverage of birth control has brought the "social conservatives" to a boil and they're out in force, with their mistrust of the Mormon and longing for purity. So I'm like whoa, as the young folk say, could Obama be doing this on purpose? Keeping the Republicans undecided, or worse, trying to get Santorum the nomination? Some of that 11-dimensional chess?

Freedom of independence!

Album cover by Micah Buzan.

I just want to keep savoring that bit of word salad for a while as created in a collaborative effort by Rick Santorum, reporter Michael D. Shear, and a shamefully inattentive Times copy editor:

“It’s not about contraception,” Mr. Santorum said. “It’s about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of liberty. It’s about government control of your lives, and it’s got to stop.” [In fact, as noted in the previous post, the Times report is incorrect: Santorum said "freedom of religion", not "freedom of liberty".]

In the first place, if "it" is the government proposal for having health insurance plans cover contraception, exactly how is it not about contraception but is about freedom of speech?

Is it a new definition of speech, like the way in Buckley v. Valeo money is speech, [jump]

Cheap shots and chasers 2/10

Updated 2/11/2012

“I was a severely conservative Republican governor,” Mr. Romney said after listing his accomplishments in Massachusetts. (Times)

Gosh, sounds scary—and did his insurance cover it?

From the CNN transcripts:

PAUL: If you had an honest bailout, the people who owned those bonds would have been protected. But he turned ownership over to the unions. So, that is not fair. He used force to transfer -- he was wrong to break the contract.

 ....

MORGAN: ...would you honestly look at them in the eye and say they had to have that child if they were impregnated?

PAUL: No. If it's an honest rape, that individual should go immediately to the emergency room. I would give them a shot of estrogen or give them --

If it's a dishonest rape, you see—one where the cad starts out by taking her to an hotel and plying her with a small port wine--then it's her lookout. It's the same the whole world over, it's the poor what takes the blame; it's the rich what gets the pleasure, and that's why they call it conservative.

And you can't leave out Rick Santorum, at the CPAC:

... he hammered Mr. Obama for policies that he said had undermined the country’s future and the liberty of its citizens. As an example, Mr. Santorum cited the president’s recent decision requiring that health insurance plans offered by religious-affiliated hospitals, universities and charities provide female employees with access to free birth control.

“It’s not about contraception,” Mr. Santorum said. “It’s about economic liberty. It’s about freedom of speech. It’s about freedom of liberty. It’s about government control of your lives, and it’s got to stop.”

 Sure, Mr. S., and what about my unalienable right to entitlement? And the pursuit of following things?

Update:
I heard the sound on NPR: Santorum did not say "freedom of liberty" but "freedom of religion", which actually does make some sense—an argument I don't understand myself but which has been made by a lot of people.

The phrase was a mistranscription by the Times's Michael D. Shear writing for their online campaign diary The Caucus, and not noticed by any copy editors. I don't blame Shear, who is probably not getting much sleep, but the copy editor deserves a great big wag of the finger. I'm leaving this post as is in the name of copy editors everywhere (it's not a job, it's a vocation, and you keep doing it your whole life whatever your title may be).

Other people's money

I hate to spoil a good punch line by tacking on a commentary, but there was something I wanted say in the discussion of Rick Santorum (the magic link is back up to number 2!) and his views on the special needs of risk takers that the punch line didn't quite convey.

It's that Santorum wasn't just misspeaking in an amusing way, [jump]

Risky business

This quotation from Rick Santorum, pulled out from a Kos diary by Joe Ascanio with his highlighting, really made me think about something:

“The reason you see some sympathy among the American public for them is the grave concern,” he said, according to the Des Moines Register, “and it’s a legitimate one.” 

“They talk about income inequality. I’m for income inequality. I think some people should make more than other people, because some people work harder and have better ideas and take more risk, and they should be rewarded for it. I have no problem with income inequality.”

Wait a minute! Rewarding people for hard work? Sure. Rewarding people for better ideas? Why not? But rewarding people for taking risks? I beg your pardon? You get the reward if the risk pans out, you lose if it doesn't. That's what risk means! If you're not running an actual risk, then you're just playing Risk down in your well-renovated rumpus room, Mr. Master of the Universe.

Holy Alliances, Batman!

I love the developing story of the conservative Christians having a summit at a ranch outside Houston to agree on a Republican candidate as their Anointed One, getting snookered by the Catholic contingent, by a little sharp electoral practice, into naming Rick Santorum (don't forget to click, it's still down in fourth place).

The Sufi saint Ibrahim ibn Adham (c. 718–c. 789) in an 18th-century Indian miniature. This version found here. He is the subect, under a garbled name, of Leigh Hunt's poem "Abu ben Adhem".

It seems that after two indecisive ballots a number of the delegates had to leave to catch planes, so a rump cast a third ballot without them, or with (possibly kind of forged) proxies, and [jump]