The Great Awokening

Drawing by Carl Newman (1858-1932), Smithsonian Museum of American Art via Wikimedia Commons.

Headline courtesy of Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, who has decided to take on the job of defining "woke" ("What It Means to be Woke") in a style that really looks intended in a kind of admirable way, attempting to get inside the viewpoint of people who might be called "woke" themselves, of "the left" with its traditional aims of transforming the ideals of liberty and equality into "lived realities", and with a certain amount of initial respect. It's just a fantasy, of course, he isn't asking any members of the "woke left" to tell him what they think, he's just making it up out of his own expert punditry, but does sound as if he means to understand it: 

Lemon, Aid

 

Drawing via Antarctica Journal.

Roy at his Substack and others are understandably feeling heated about the people who aren't feeling heated at all, who call themselves liberals but seem more concerned about the comfort and quiet of Supreme Court justices in their upscale neighborhoods than the 50-odd percent of the population with wombs whose rights are being snatched away by those same justices

It’s pretty wild to see how easily leaders from both sides of the aisle accepted this fraudulent crisis at face value when the engineers of the assault on our rights were the alleged targets.  At the same time, when you talk about the very real danger the draft Dobbs decision poses to not only the right to abortion but also other unenumerated rights such as gay marriage and contraception — as can be clearly read in Alito’s opinion — not to mention the dead certainty that Republicans will use the decision to try and ban abortion outright nationwide, the toffs don’t seem nearly as exercised.

Part of the reason, I think, is because conservatives are loudly declaring that they won’t do any such thing, and the Very Serious Democrats cannot bring themselves to suggest they’re lying.

I'm wondering if the Very Serious Democrats—TV civility Democrats like Paul Begala and Chris Coons, are worth the attention. For one thing,

China

 

Nine-Dragon Wall, Beihai Park, Beijing, via Wikimedia Commons.

This is a very fraught time in the history of Chinese-American relations, as I hardly need to point out, with everybody needing to recover from the distortions of the Trumpery, when the US was ruled by an ignorant emperor whose mind was entirely focused on the irrelevant—nice playdates with their emperor, fighting over the balance of trade, and blaming them for the coronavirus—leaving them a more or less free hand in stealing intellectual property, militarizing the South China Sea, competing with the US for allies in the Asia-Pacific, Africa, and Latin America, and violating human rights around the country's perimeter. While their rulers must be relieved at the prospect of a period of predictable stability, they know they will be coming in for harsher trade conditions

“Despite Trump’s claim that “trade wars are good, and easy to win,” the ultimate results of the phase one trade deal between China and the United States — and the trade war that preceded it — have significantly hurt the American economy without solving the underlying economic concerns that the trade war was meant to resolve. The effects of the trade war go beyond economics, though. Trump’s prioritization on the trade deal and de-prioritization of all other dimensions of the relationship produced a more permissive environment for China to advance its interests abroad and oppress its own people at home, secure in the knowledge that American responses would be muted by a president who was reluctant to risk losing the deal.” 

and heavy criticism from the Biden administration, as in reaction to this week's news stories from culturocide in Xinjiang, where they are breaking up families of Uighurs, Kazakhs, and other Muslim minority groups by shipping young people to jobs thousands of miles away where they won't be able to speak their languages or practice their religion, to killing democracy in Honk Kong.

Lectiones: American Historiography

 

Stamp Act riots, Boston, 1765. Can't find a decent credit, but I think it's from Britain.

Reading a truly remarkable essay in The New Republic by William Hogeland, "Against the Consensus Approach to History" taking on the lofty historians after World War II who developed the myth of the revolutionary founding of the United States as a unified product of the Enlightenment and the belief in innate rights; in particular Edmund Morgan:

Throwing out elder historians’ prevailing focus on the founding generation’s self-interest (Clarence Alvord had said that George Washington became a patriot to defend speculations in Indian land) and on its class conflicts (Carl Becker had said that the Revolution was not only over British rule but also over the rule of elite Americans), Morgan sought to identify the grand principles that the revolutionary generation agreed on. “What the colonists had to say about Parliamentary power and about their own rights deserved to be taken seriously,” he explained later.

As the U.S. began to exercise new power around the world, Morgan set out to show that the protests in the 1760s and ’70s against the Stamp Act and other British policies offered slam-dunk evidence of a founding American consensus on principles of rights. Inherent to the American character, that consensus unified the colonists, he said, inspired the Revolution, and brought about the United States. In the larger context of his work, and the work of similarly minded colleagues, the lesson was that the founding American commitment to rights persisted in postwar U.S. commitments to modern liberal democracy.

I.e., something that sounds as if it had been designed by the CIA, in contrast to the more cynical and materialistic views, whether leftist or conservative, of the period from the Progressive Era to the New Deal (and views, I would add, that also recognize the diversity of the North American colonials, not quite the way we'd want to do it today with a focus on oppression and intersectional identity, but more compatible with that than the postwar picture).

For the Record: Stupid or Wicked?

Kin Ming Estates, Tseung Kwon O, Hong Kong, housing 22,000 people. Image by Baycrest via Wikipedia.

Roy (subscription) asks, on the subject of the contrast between helpless Jonah Goldberg and Rod Dreher and malevolent Tucker Carlson, where we draw the line for conservatives between stupid and evil. It generated a huge amount of very interesting commentary, from which my main contribution:

Yastreblyansky30 min

I'm enough of an old-school love-me-I'm-a-liberal, by upbringing and temperament, that the question makes me kind of uncomfortable. Am I implicitly wondering whether we in the progressive community are really, really smart, or just really, really good?

There's a classic liberal answer according to which stupid and evil are two sides of one coin. People are evil because they don't know any better, and they're stupid because they're too selfish to bother learning. Chicken and egg. Conservatives are evil because they're so unconscious of the exigencies of life outside their own tiny and comfy community that they can't conceive how anybody could get into trouble unless they were bad people, and therefore feel no pity. There's a parallel failure of perspective among liberals like Dickens's Mrs. Jellyby, whose emotions were wholly devoted to starting a mission in Africa while she lost track of her neglected children and suicidal husband, but at least Mrs. Jellyby has some moral imagination.

If conservatives are forced to find out, they might learn. I think David French truly learned something about what it's like to be a black kid when he adopted one and his ugly-white community turned on them. Everybody knows about Mrs. Reagan realizing that stem-cell research isn't immoral when she was caring 24/7 for an Alzheimer's patient and heard that the research could help. That's why we love stories like The Prince and the Pauper or Trading Places.

The thing that distinguishes Tucker from Jonah is the energy he's willing to put into staying ignorant or, if necessary, turning to ignorance on a 1984 dime, as he did with the subject of mask-wearing the other day, adopting the Trump view after weeks of telling his audience the (scientifically correct) opposite. Jonah doesn't have any energy and trusts his friends to make the decisions (David Brooks has a wider circle of friends and adopts three or four contradictory viewpoints without noticing the contradictions). Tucker actively looks for the view that will advance his power goals whether it's true or not, and I agree that's evil. But he doesn't think it's important because he's too stupid to imagine the real-world consequences; he's just a high school kid taking the side the debate coach assigned him, doing his best to win it for the team.

The conversation quickly fell into worrying about "DLC Democrats" or "establishment Democrats", and I had something to say about that as well:

Hopeful Family

Californian community activist Allen Hernandez, with the Sacred Heart of Jesus on his left arm and the Mayan god Kukulkan (Quetzalcoatl in Aztec) on the right, via Religion News.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, apostolic envoy to 42nd Street, has an interesting thought about the relation between religion and the current condition of the progressive movement in the US ("The Religious Roots of a New Progressive Era"), with a big hole in it just the right shape for me to crawl through, starting with a famous evasive remark from the 1952 presidential campaign:

“Our form of government has no sense unless it is founded in a deeply felt religious faith,” Dwight Eisenhower said in 1952, “and I don’t care what it is.”

Which is really nothing more than a hilariously Ikish way of recapitulating John Adams's wonderful explanation, in a letter to Jefferson of June 1813, of what he had meant in 1798 by telling the Massachusetts Militia that "our Constitution was made only for a moral and religious people"—

Liberalism

The hand-colored Voyage dans la Lune of Georges Méliès (1902), via Fritzi.

Shorter David Brooks, "What Pelosi Versus the Squad Really Means", New York Times, 16 July 2019:

Pay no attention to the contest between Democrats and Republicans. The real struggle is the civil war between the troops of Nancy Pelosi, representing liberalism,  and the legions of Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, representing illiberalism, who are probably going to win because (1) Americans have moved into lifestyle enclaves, (2) universities, media, and the Senate have degenerated, as people who put the rules of fair play above short-term partisan passion scarcely exist, and (3) Donald Trump is on their side. I am not a crank.

After President Trump came to the "defense" of Pelosi ("But Cortez should treat Nancy Pelosi with respect.... She should not be doing what she’s doing. And I’ll tell you something about Nancy Pelosi that you know better than I do. She is not a racist, okay. She is not a racist. For them to call her a racist is a disgrace." [NARRATOR VOICE: Nobody called her a racist]) and announced that the members of the "Squad" (Reps. Ocasio-Córtez, Pressley, Tlaib, and Omar) ought to go back where they came from (Bronx, Boston, Detroit, and Somalia-via-Minneapolis respectively) and "fix" those places, and Pelosi responded appropriately with a tweet

Literary Corner: Tucker Face

Getty Photo via NBC.

A pungent lyric by former bowtie model Tucker Carlson, now enjoying a second career as a professional brow-knitter, the Man Who Looks Perplexed at Fox:

Song of Triumph 

by Tucker Carlson

When's the last time
you heard a liberal laugh?
And not sardonically or bitterly
or in rage but actual mirth.

Like, 'I'm amused hahaha
look at me I'm carefree.'
Have you seen that in the
last year and a half?

At a superficial level, it may seem unseemly for him to be taking so much pleasure in the idea that he and his political faction have destroyed the peace of mind of an entire class of people since the 2016 election, but I think there's something deeper going on in the alliteration—the leap of L's and rumble of H's surrounding the central "hahaha" as if to suggest a subtextual "lalala (I can't hear you [laughing])", a Tucker face of deep suspicion that those liberals may be laughing (in their non-actual, sardonic or bitter way) at him.

And a kind of endearing Martian-anthropologist sense of wonderment when he speculates on the mysteries of the human laughter mechanism, that it must be aimed at getting ("look at me") attention that isn't going to him.

The right is starting to get better at comedy and it's making lefties nervous. pic.twitter.com/8iRWwgtd7a

— Paul Joseph Watson (@PrisonPlanet) July 24, 2018

Fake interview with Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez by a "comedian" called Allie Beth Stuckie, posted without my realizing that, as I learn from Roy, there could be people online who don't realize it's fake. I'm leaving it here as the most pure and ghastly bitterness- and rage-fueled example I've ever seen of the rightwing fantasy of what "comedy" is probably like.

Who Shall Deliver Us?

From one of the Peter Jackson films, I guess, in somebody's Tumblr.

Shorter David Brooks, "Vladimir Putin, the Most Influential Man in the World", New York Times, 3 April 2018:

Vladimir Putin is the most influential human being on the planet today. He has established himself as one pole in the great global debate of the era, the debate between authoritarianism and democracy. And who's the opposite pole, the single leader of the global liberal democratic camp? I can't think of a name.

I don't know, maybe if you're lamenting the lack of a single man we can look up to as the commanding embodiment of our aspirations toward "faith in the capacities of individual citizens" and "loyalty to a constitution, a creed, and a set of democratic norms" rather than to "a person.... [t]he man himself", you could be doing it wrong.

It's time for a little Lord of the Rings reference, I think, because the trilogy really does illustrate in a precise way how a war of "liberalism" against authoritarianism is conducted, not by setting up a rival authority figure, but by mobilizing everybody in our amazing diversity, humans and hobbits, Elves and Dwarves, wizards, and ambulatory trees. Heroes are needed, and even a king, but not the king of everybody, just of the Dúnedain or Elf-Friends of Arnor and Gondor (who themselves represent a kind of anciently pluralist tradition, the men who are friends with Elves, which Aragorn doubles down on when he marries Arwen). And intellectuals too, of course, but not like Saruman, succumbing himself to the simplicity of authoritarianism. That's something David Brooks should watch out for. Longing for a Real Leader is going to the other side.

One of the great things about Gandalf, incidentally, is his appreciation of the requirements of identity politics: his understanding that groups have interests that can conflict—Elves vs. Dwarves have real issues with an ecological foundation—, and patience in allowing them to talk it out, even though the ancient history can get very annoying and sound pointless. That's another thing David Brooks needs to learn. Nationhood politics, the insistence that we all have the same interest inside our borders and constant demands for internal unity, leads to war, or at the least Putinism. Ethnic-cultural-moral politics, transcending and overlapping borders, leads to negotiation and balance. In information theory, difference is what yields meaning, and in political and religious life the suppression of difference is what leads to the loss of meaning that Brooks is always upset about.

Trading Places

Via Indusrtrial Workers of the World.

I dared to address Loomis on this subject, for the first time since the TPP debacle, when he started suggesting that Democrats might be protesting against Trump's proposed tariffs on steel and aluminum for the wrong reason:

Does it strike you how etymologically bizarre that is, objecting to the way "liberals" "start" to defend "free trade"? I thought the simple problem with tariffs on solar cells and now iron and aluminum was that they'd clearly cost far more jobs than they saved, but.....

— YastronomicalOdds (@Yastreblyansky) March 3, 2018

With the thought that whatever "liberal" has meant from the 1850s until now has some kind of connecting thread in it, like the idea that there's an intrinsic value in generosity and offering others latitude, whether it's in poor relief or encouraging people from other countries to try to sell stuff in yours (Hayekian liberalism or neoliberalism in the strict sense being about being generous and latitudinarian with yourself, and the hell with other people).

Neutrocracy

The famous castrato singer Senesino, with the soprano Francesca Cuzzoni and alto castrato Gaetano Berenstadt in Händel's Flavio (London, 1723), in a caricature by John Vanderbank. Wikimedia Commons.

So David Brooks was begging Twitter to come and kill him yesterday morning ("Respect First, Then Gun Control") advising, as his title implies, that "we" need to get "our" priorities straight, and trying to stop America's schoolchildren from getting shot up with semi-automatic rifles must come second to stopping America's rightwingers from feeling less than wholly admired. Old white sumbitches have feelings too! If you'd just show them some of that R-E-S-P-E-C-T, effete liberal elitists, they'd ban those AR-15s in a heartbeat!

And Twitter obliged, as you can imagine. Don't know anybody who hit the appropriate note better than this:

other Great David Brooks Columns Of History pic.twitter.com/CkEPABACg5

— Current Affairs (@curaffairs) February 20, 2018

Which Driftglass also felt obliged to reproduce, because what else is there to say, really? But I like mine, to tell the truth:

David Brooks, man of respect: "Cute kid you got there. Shame if anybody was to blow his head off." https://t.co/JYcUNXJZIu

— Yas Over Elbow (@Yastreblyansky) February 21, 2018

The Main Cause of the Badness

From Sergei Eisenstein's ¡Qué Viva México!, 1933, via Screen Dance Studies.

Looking for David Brooks's column in yesterday morning's Times, I found a whimper with a headline so stale and dispirited ("How Democracies Perish") that I thought I must be looking at an old column I'd dealt with already, and figured he'd taken the whole Martin Luther King, Jr. weekend off.

As it turned out, of course, the title was so familiar because it was ripped off, from a book that's to be released on Tuesday and is already being talked about, Steven Levitsky's and Daniel Ziblatt's How Democracies Die, an assessment of the present danger to democracy, such as it is, in the United States. Brooks had written a new column—it merely looked like an old one, which isn't that unusual—and it's not totally boring, once you get down inside. Not that he's writing about Levitsky's and Ziblatt's book or even aware that he's indirectly referencing it; he's on the new book with a melancholy title that came out last week:

Nonvoters

Via.

BooMan was saying the other day,

I think the election of Donald Trump proves that substance is overrated as a political tool.

How depressing is that, if you believe in "liberal democracy" and the whole idea that the members of a community ought to choose its government on the basis of what they think the government should do?

In terms of presidential elections especially, where we always make fun of the people who voted for TV presidents like Reagan, W. Bush, and Trump, do we want to acknowledge that the same thing happened with Kennedy, Bill Clinton, and Obama? That they may have been smarter, kinder, and more skillful than their opponents, but the reason they kept winning was just their camera work?

And how can liberalism survive if we start believing that voters are stupid?

I have that same question with regard to the White Working Class theory of how the Democratic Party needs to cater to the idea of a discrete set of disappointed, ill-educated white dudes, whose prejudices and misconceptions mustn't be mocked, and hope our brothers and sisters of color don't take it too ill. That's a very elitist assumption, indeed, that there's a majority out there that is none too bright and needs to be deceived into supporting a progressive agenda, or simply a charismatic Progressive Guy, because they're not prepared to even deal with something as complex as an agenda, some Howard Beale figure who will directly express their inarticulate irritation as Trump does but in favor of the policy ideas we like.

If that's true, it's not just insulting the voters we're looking for, as the conservatives always do, it's a rejection of the whole idea of American liberalism as I understand it, which is that everybody, no matter how low in status and wealth, has a voice and a valuable role to play in the polity, and that the broadest of political goals is that of bringing all of them into the process and a share of the power. So anyway I have this alternative idea, that we need to start thinking of ourselves as going after, in addition to the rest of the traditional Democratic family, the smart white people.

Comedy is war

Cherry-picking at Stella Creek in the Adelaide Hills. Or maybe a stock photo.

I wanted to say something about that very long essay on liberal smugness or smug liberalism by Emmett Rensin (apparently an anagram, for "Eminent Terms", or maybe "Mr. E. Sentiment") in Vox, which I have not had a chance to read all the way through, as I was having my ironic smile straightened.

In fact I am not planning to read it all because there's too much of it, if you want to know the truth. I'm just going to cherry-fisk, so to speak, picking on the especially offensive sentences as they pop out at me and ignoring the no doubt very significant and judicious argument that Tem Tem Sinner worked so hard to assemble in favor of the stupid argument I discern from this superficial technique, and if you want to complain about it, why don't you just bring it up before the next Blogger Ethics Panel.

But first,

Q. How can you tell when National Review's famed Iraq combat attorney ("Cover me, Jack, I'm going in there as soon as the shelling lets up, with a motion to change venue") David French is lying?

A. When he claims to have had some human experience or other.

As in this contribution on the Rensinade, where he's discussing his own sad experience of the smugness of liberals:

Cuomo agua para chocolate

Corporate States of America. Via Rocky Mountain Media.

Way down toward the end of last week's Times overview of the South Carolina Confederate flag epic, a telling passage on the state's business community, which has long had problems with the cult of the Lost Cause:

After the killings in Charleston, the business leaders saw their chance. The chairman of the South Carolina Chamber of Commerce, an old friend of Ms. Haley’s named Mikee Johnson, polled his 56 board members about the future of the flag. Everyone who responded was of the same opinion. He called Ms. Haley and told her: If she was ready to bring down the Confederate banner, they were behind her.

So was the South Carolina Manufacturers Alliance, the muscular association that represents giant international companies like BMW and Bridgestone Tire. Over the weekend after the shootings, its president, Mr. Gossett, urged members to draw up a strategy for finally ridding the State House of the flag.

It's not, note, that they're especially anti-slavery, not that they favor it either, or have any special beef with the confederal states' rights ideology; it's that the flag has been bad for business.

Democrats

Updated 9/6/2012
Updated 9/10/2012
 
After we turned off the TV, all contented with the sense of being Democrats alongside Deval and Julián and Michelle and all these other extraordinarily warm and agreeable people, I moved on to bedtime reading--Trollope again, this time political (Phineas Finn, the Irish Member), and by some kind of special grace ran right into this, from Mr. Monk, the mellowing Radical:

Mr Monk was in the Cabinet, and of all the members of the Cabinet was the most advanced Liberal. "Lady Glencora was not so far wrong the other night," Mr Monk said to him. "Equality is an ugly word and shouldn't be used. It misleads, and frightens, and is a bugbear. And she, in using it, had not perhaps a clearly defined meaning for it in her own mind. But the wish of every honest man should be to assist in lifting up those below him, till they be something nearer his own level than he finds them." To this Phineas assented -- and by degrees he found himself assenting to a great many things that Mr Monk said to him.

Isn't that exactly right? And isn't it startling, given the way we've been given to understand 19th-century liberalism as an entirely different kind of animal, all about free trade? No, free trade was just a route, now outdated, to a principle, not a principle in its own right--at its deepest, liberalism has always been the same thing.

Nantyglo Ironworks, near Brynmawr, Wales, artist unknown. From Thomasgenweb.

Update 9/6
Note the subtle notice of what's wrong with liberalism: it's timid and anti-revolutionary, afraid of the word "equality" and asking you to take care of the person "beneath" you, not get your own from the idler above, it's focused on you, not on the needy; it invites you to get a little bit patronizing. So mock yourself! It's what we are...

Update 9/10
I mean timid, patronizing maybe, but not selfish. That's important.

Notes from the growing bifurcation

Shorter David Brooks:

The poors are very different from you and me.

No, really; David Brooks has been hearing about social inequality in America, what he calls a "growing bifurcation of American society," and he's very worried. He's been hearing about it from Robert Putnam, author of the famous Bowling Alone, and I figure he's been hearing about it at the Aspen Ideas Festival, where Putnam just gave a talk on his recent research.

The research is pretty hot, too, and nowhere near publication, but if like me you just couldn't make it to Aspen this year (oops! I forgot all about that gosh darn mortgage and all them credit card bills, and I didn't have anything to wear anyhow), you can still read about it in writing by someone who is not David Brooks; I found a very nice liveblog by David Weinberger at Joho the Blog, and I imagine there's more out there too.

From Tales from the Lou's Blog.

Putnam has been looking at children, and seeing hard class differences right from infancy, when more women who haven't finished college are giving birth than women who have, over the past 30 years, and more kids (obviously) are getting brought up in single-adult homes. The numbers are pretty much the same, by the way, for white Americans on their own as they are for people of all races (Putnam's study is limited to white people).

Parents from the upper level invest more money in their kids and they invest more time as well; up to an hour a day of additional quality time. Their kids are more active in sports, lessons, volunteering for the community. Kids from the lower level have fewer people they can trust, are less trusting anyway, and—of course—do worse on the reading and math tests.

Color me not terribly surprised by any of this, and why? I guess I always thought poverty was more of  a problem than teachers' unions. But Brooks is pretty shocked, almost to the point of understanding, briefly, what is going on: notice how he pulls back as if in terror at his own audacity from reality into surreality between paragraphs:

A long series of cultural, economic and social trends have merged to create this sad state of affairs. Traditional social norms were abandoned, meaning more children are born out of wedlock. Their single parents simply have less time and resources to prepare them for a more competitive world. Working-class jobs were decimated, meaning that many parents are too stressed to have the energy, time or money to devote to their children.

Affluent, intelligent people are now more likely to marry other energetic, intelligent people. They raise energetic, intelligent kids in self-segregated, cultural ghettoes where they know little about and have less influence upon people who do not share their blessings.

(Yes, it can't have that much to do with unemployment, can it? Must be those selfish intelligent people marrying their own kind and leaving the rest of us stranded.)

From The Final Edition (and a very funny though slow-starting Brooks parody from sometime last year).

And in the end, as he's trying to establish his left-right equivalence for the day, he really loses control:

Liberals are going to have to be willing to champion norms that say marriage should come before childrearing and be morally tough about it. Conservatives are going to have to be willing to accept tax increases or benefit cuts so that more can be spent on the earned-income tax credit and other programs that benefit the working class.

That's all he wants us to do? I'll take it! If you can't afford to get married you shouldn't have a baby. It would also help if Brooks's friends would loosen up some on abortion....
 

Bishopric watch

At one point in Anthony Trollope's Framley Parsonage,  the Liberals are out and the Conservatives are in, and considering reviving a failed Liberal bill to add two bishops to the C of E roster, much to the delight of Dr. Grantly, the High-Tory archdeacon of Barchester, though he thought it was devil's work when the Whigs were sponsoring it; as a Conservative bill, though, it might lead to a bishopric for himself! [jump]

Perpendicular fan vaulting, Peterborough Cathedral. From An Illustrated Dictionary of British Churches.

Airborne Elephant Watch: Egypt again

Well, Egypt is a pretty big country, after all. And a lot of things happen there, especially just now. And today's Thomas Friedman surrogate mashing up the distinct and mutually hostile parties into one terrifying "Islamist" majority is the normally unpanicked Soraya Sarhaddi Nelson, on Morning Edition:

The Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamist groups in Egypt are flexing their growing political muscle. They control the legislative agenda in parliament, and in recent weeks introduced controversial proposals to curb social freedoms and legal rights.

Islamist lawmakers also handpicked a 100-member panel that began meeting this week to write a new constitution, which is widely expected to enshrine Islamic law.

Clouds 2 Elephant. Uncredited photo from The Magnifying Glass.

Only not exactly. As usual. Because the controversial proposals—the revival of traditional punishments like cutting thieves' hands off,  elimination of foreign language instruction [jump]

Stockmen and bondsmen

Now that the Dow has closed above 13,000 for the first time since May 2008, I wonder if the Times is going to redo their famous chart showing the stock market difference between Democratic and Republican presidents from October 2008:

Given that it's already up 56% since Barack Obama took office three months after that, it might even lead a person to suspect that the Times has a liberal bias and is waiting till October 2012 to do it. If things carry on as they have been doing, that's going to be pretty graphic, as they say.

But speaking of liberal biases, I now have a new idea on the foundational difference between Democrats and Republicans that is directly related to this news. Like so many others who have grown to feel that the liberal-conservative classification doesn't apply any more, I have been talking for quite a while now in terms of a conservative party that we have to vote for and a crazy party that explains why we have to vote for the conservative party, but I'm not really satisfied with that either.

Partly because it's still fun to vote for Democrats, because they're still so truly forward-looking in so many little ways, whether we're talking about same-sex marriage or [jump]