For the Record: Don't Make a Federal Case of It (or Try If You Want to, But You'll Fail)

 

That's pretty ridiculous, right? The video is mocking January 6 organizers inside the House, like Madison Cawthorn, Marjorie Taylor Greene, and Paul Gosar!

Somebody on Gosar's staff is a regular Jonathan Swift!

— Toxic Positivity (@Yastreblyansky) November 18, 2021

Because personally, if I'm a member of Congress and somebody portrays me as a cartoon serial murderer, I'm not going to think it's making fun of somebody else. If I were involved in it, of course, I'd put it more in the old Warner Brothers style than anime—that looks more satirical to me—putting Gosar's face on Elmer Fudd. And he'd fail to get his kill, that's a lot funnier, trust me.

And in Sinemascope

System of Imbecility

Alexander Hamilton on the filibuster: “[I]ts real operation is to destroy the energy of the government and to substitute the pleasure, caprice, or artifices of an insignificant, turbulent, or corrupt junto, to the regular deliberations and decisions of a respectable majority.”

— Laurence Tribe (@tribelaw) March 21, 2021

That's perfect, I thought, but of course the filibuster hadn't been invented yet—what was Hamilton actually talking about? So I asked Dr. Google, and what I got was the single most useful comment on the Federalist Papers I've ever read, from The New Yorker's Hendrik Hertzberg, July 2013:

The Federalist Papers—so often quoted to rationalize governmental stasis and congressional gridlock—are almost always treated as secular scripture. They’re not. They’re newspaper op-ed pieces, written in haste to sell a particular set of compromises, some of which their authors had adamantly opposed and accepted only with the greatest reluctance.

Mr. Sandman

Photo by Walker Evans for Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, 1941, of folks being taken care of by the intimate, affectionate local authorities, free from the burdens of one-size-fits-all federal regulations.

Meanwhile, breaking news from Dreamland, where David F. "Sandman" Brooks has come into a fresh supply of that classic Russell Kirk sand to sprinkle into our stinging eyes ("The Localist Revolution"):

Localism is the belief that power should be wielded as much as possible at the neighborhood, city and state levels. Localism is thriving — as a philosophy and a way of doing things — because the national government is dysfunctional while many towns are reviving. Politicians in Washington are miserable, hurling ideological abstractions at one another, but mayors and governors are fulfilled, producing tangible results.

Bill de Blasio says thanks for the endorsement, but are you sure that's what you meant? There's no question but that the federal government is dysfunctional and has been since the 2010 midterm election gave the House of Representatives to the Republicans and reduced the Democrats' majority in the Senate from an almost-functioning 57 to a wholly impotent 51, and the conservatives began to use their renewed power, as they always will, to demonstrate the hypothesis that government can't do anything. And no question but that in some localities people are coping with losses in federal funding in creative ways. Good for them! But there are other localities where they aren't, lots of them, as always, where local elites refuse to help, because they want to hang on to their money. A lot of them are in what they call "Trump country".

Who invented the single market?

The Custom House, New York, 1799, via Wikimedia Commons.

The first time a continent-wide bunch of independent countries decided to form a single-market customs union, more than three decades before the various German statelets and principalities started toying with the concept of the Zollverein in ca. 1819, was in North America in 1787.

Because as everybody knows the War of Independence was not fought on behalf of one nation but 13 nations, which as the Declaration says "are, and of right ought to be, free and independent States", note the careful deployment of the plural there. As the dust settled after the war they worked out their Articles of Confederation under that assumption, giving each full autonomy in matters of taxation, after the fashion of the Dutch United Provinces.

Annals of Derp: Ted Cruz

Image via Wonkette.

Anointed future king and attention seeker Teodoro Cruz:

“For every politician — Democrat and Republican — who is tut-tutting that [bigoted Kentucky county clerk Kim] Davis must resign, they are defending a hypocritical standard. Where is the call for the mayor of San Francisco to resign for creating a sanctuary city — resulting in the murder of American citizens by criminal illegal aliens welcomed by his lawlessness?

“Where is the call for President Obama to resign for ignoring and defying our immigration laws, our welfare reform laws, and even his own Obamacare?"

1. The mayor of San Francisco, Ed Lee, should not resign for creating a sanctuary city because, in the first place, he didn't create one; that was done 21 years before he became mayor, under Art Agnos, in 1989:

Get happy! On the Edge of the World

What with the latest kerfuffle over Republican campaign music—Donald Trump somehow imagining he could have permission to use a song by Bernie Sanders supporter Neil Young—Scott Eric Kaufman at Salon has produced an elegant video history of conservative misappropriation of nonconservative musicians going back to the Reagan campaign's strange belief that Bruce Springsteen's 1984 anthem of despair "Born in the USA" could be used to articulate Reagan's message of sunny, childlike millionaire's greed, and wonders by the way if there's any popular music at all that's safe for Republicans to use.

Here's a suggestion for JEB!, anyhow, with a bright and optimistic message, traditional country club sound values, unifyingly bipartisan reference, and performers who might put up with it because of the high irony quotient:

Speaking of irony, Daniel Scotto at The Federalist (or as we call it here, with reference to its Patrick Henry–Jeff Davis ideology, The Confederalist) offers a remarkable piece of retroactionary music criticism demonstrating that "Born in the USA" is really an attack on the Obama presidency:

The Ratchet of the Earth

Via New York Magazine, counterclockwise: Beyoncé, Gaga, Ratchet.  “Ratchet Girl Anthem,” a parody track recorded by Philip and Emmanuel Houston, collected tens of millions of Youtube hits. In it, the Atlanta brothers pretend to be ratchet women describing their ilk: They carry outdated flip phones, go clubbing while pregnant, and try to punch other women in the face. “Ratchet is basically a lack of home training — being out in public and acting like you don’t have any sense,” Philip Houston told the Cut. “Putting a weave in the microwave just to curl it, that’s ratchet.”

Old George Will sez (and the National Review reproduces—never noticed it before, but they use as much syndicated material as the Tooterville Gazette, and much of it—this, and stupid Krauthammer—is from WaPo) that he is going to propose a kind of Unified Field Theory of politics in the form of