Tuesday, October 8, 2013

Hugh and Cry

Powerline thought this meant we should keep trying to pay it down. Come to think of it, maybe the cartoonist did too. 
Astounding stupidity—well, maybe not that astounding—from Hugh Hewitt:
to get the gears engaged and the city moving again, an infusion of third party trust is needed.... I think it starts with a phone call from the president –to Williamsburg. The Hon. Robert Gates is the Chancellor of the College of William and Mary and of course the esteemed former Secretary of Defense under both Presidents Obama and Bush. Gates was also the former CIA director and Deputy National Security Advisor. He probably ran the the Parks Service and NIH at one point or another. He certainly ran during Texas A&M during one of his breaks from D.C., which is like running a couple or three agencies at once. Point is, he is one of those guys, one of the fabled “wise men. [missing close quotes mark and "during Texas A&M" as if it were not a university but a Chinese imperial dynasty* and italics in the original—the entire post is in italics, no doubt the entire website, to emphasize the urgent importance of everything Hewitt has to say.]
Hewitt's idea is that Gates, a certified Wise Man who has served government by both parties and negotiated with North Korea, is the man to meet with the President and the four senior leaders in Congress, perhaps with their whips and certainly with their staffs, to "forge" a "deal" in the Roosevelt room and and commit himself to the process when needed for the final blessing.  Then he lists the 20 or so provisions including a complete new proposal for immigration reform that the well-forged deal must contain, I guess because these are busy men and it would be silly to ask them to come up with any ideas when Hugh is ready to supply all the ideas they need. What Gates himself is meant to do is still not clear to me; Hugh's description makes it sound as if he's just to sit quietly as the other five guys fill in the details point by point on the Hewitt List and then, at a crucial moment, shout "Into thy hands, Process, I commend my spirit!" upon which the clouds will part in the Tiepolo sky and a Hollywood soul chorus start to sing.

Left unsaid is how this whole thing is supposed to impress the Republican Teddy Boys (named for Cruz and Yoho**). Gates is commonly referred to by Hewitt's comrades in low-information anarchism as "R.I.N.O. in chief", an "Obama flunkie", a "traitor or fool". Worst of all, he's called them names too: on the subject of BENGHAZI! BENGHAZI! he says they're "cartoonish". Which is such a well-chosen word I'm surprised Hugh's not on the anti-Gates train screaming Gatesgate! or something of the kind.
Conservative humor. Funnier now than when it was published on March 12 2012.
*And Gates was not "former Secretary of Defense under both Presidents..."; he's former Secretary of Defense now.
**Yoho is of course the congressman (Birther-FL) who has decried the 10% tax on tanning beds as racist and suggested that defaulting on the national debt would improve our country's credit rating:
I think the creditors that we owe money to around the world would say, "you know what, they're getting their house in order." And I think our credit rating would do better, if we did that than face the mass [sic] program we've been up to ... There are several of us that we're not raising the debt ceiling; don't ask us.
Actually I believe that happened in the Florida real estate market. How we got the mortgage crisis. What Yoho really wants, of course, is classic Florida: a Yoho ho and a bottle of rum.

Monday, October 7, 2013

News aggravators: Postscript

After signing off on the great Shutdown Martyrdom and Mass-Acre Event, I was too annoyed to stop and clocked in at NRO to complain some more, leading to the following sort of amusing exchange:

And another reminder that there are real Catholics you wouldn't mind knowing; here, the Sisters of the Most Precious Blood of Dayton, Ohio, celebrating their 175th anniversary mass and picnic in 2009 and having a lot more fun than those wingnuts at Quantico.

Flourishing-Like-Ours and the Philosopher's Stones

Saint Jerome Extracting a Thorn from a Lion's Paw, second quarter of 15th century. Master of the Murano Gradual (Italian, active about 1430–1460). Tempera and gold leaf on parchment. The J. Paul Getty Museum, Los Angeles, Ms. 106, recto.
Did you know that if you were a large and distinguished Roman Catholic educational institution providing health insurance to 1,700 employees and 9,369 students, and that insurance included coverage not just for family planning but also abortion, God might not instantly condemn you to an eternity of punishment?

Well, I thought so too (indeed I have sometimes thought it might be the other way around), but I didn't have any proof until I read in today's Times about Loyola Marymount University in Los Angeles, a great Jesuit school whose trustees are currently debating whether to eliminate that abortion coverage (not the contraception coverage, which they must provide by law, thanks to Obamacare and no thanks to the US bishops).
“Part of the university’s mission is to promote justice,” Professor [Christopher] Kaczor said. “And in the Catholic tradition, abortion is considered a justice issue. So to say the university supports justice and then also pay for abortions is a contradiction.”
That certainly sounds pretty Jesuitical to me; it's true, though, that the Catholic tradition considers abortion a justice issue, if by "the Catholic tradition" you mean Christopher Kaczor's 2010 book

The Ethics of Abortion: Women's Rights, Human Life, and the Question of Justice (Routledge Annals of Bioethics)

because according to the publisher's blurb the idea of making abortion a justice issue is not what you might call a tradition but a whole new thing Appealing to reason rather than religious belief"; and a short version of the argument is nothing but the symbol-soup of philosophical Ratzingerism:
I develop a rational justification for the view that all human beings, including the unborn, should be respected and accorded equal basic rights by virtue of sharing in flourishing-like-ours with other normal adult human beings, because of our genetic orientation to rational agency, and in light of the kind of being that we are rather than simply the sort of activity we are capable of at this time or that. 
Just saying, New York Times, that even when interviewing professors of philosophical ethics you need to ask whether they have an agenda.

I hope the school does keep its benefits as they are, but even if they don't, it was a beautiful experiment in how to be Catholic in the original sense.
Chart by Google.

Sunday, October 6, 2013

I get briefly caught in the trollery

Christopher Hayes wanted to know what he should ask Diane Ravitch in an interview. Yglesias had a suggestion:

Troll Bridge by Gido at DeviantArt.
Needless to say Yglesias did not respond. I personally doubt that teachers' salaries would provide enough money to make a significant dent in poverty anyway, in spite of the vast power of fanatical teachers' unions. But I'm not a famous economist.

We are polite to conservatives

Somehow made me imagine a sitcom pitch for "The Satans Next Door", a cross among the Beverly Hillbillies, Donna's family in the That 70s Show (without Donna), and the Lannisters in Game of Thrones (obviously named for Lanny Davis, now working for the football team formerly known as the Washington Epidermises). But writing it up wasn't as much fun as imagining it, so I gave up.
A lighter Lannister moment, via.
Otherwise spent a certain amount of time trying to treat conservatives as I would like to be treated, with varying degrees of success, first with respect to a partially rational shutdown commentary by Jim Geraghty of the National Review: [jump]

News aggravators

Priests' hole, from Historic UK.

I can't believe RedAlert Politics hasn't done the latest SCANDAL about the Muslim Obama adminstration being determined to make all the Christians generally stomp on the Cross and spit on the sacred image of Reverend Gantry I mean Senator Sanctorum I mean.... But credit where credit is due, congratulations to them for resisting it. As for the rest of the rightwing noise machine...

Saturday, October 5, 2013

Why is there Politico?

So the New Yorker Festival is on, and if you were a reasonably educated person of the Upper East Side with nothing better to spend $35 on this morning you could go over to Florence Gould Hall before Bloomingdales opened and hear Ken Auletta interview Jill Abramson, executive editor of the New York Times. So Politico sent their Media correspondent Hadas Gold there—don't know whether she had to get a ticket or not—to apparently think she was reporting a story about Abramson by writing down excerpts from the interview and posting them to Politico in the afternoon, as if she had done the interview herself. [jump]
Horse and jockey by Willard Mullin (1902-78), via CartoonSnap.

Ross has his pride...


Friday, October 4, 2013

Cheap shots and feuding cowgirls

Twerk not Twelfare. From baeblemusic.com.
And below the fold, Cheney's women and much, much more!

Thursday, October 3, 2013

Skeptic tank

Image from Reepicheep.
Glenn Greenwald (to be fair to a writer I'm about to disagree with in a pretty decided way) properly roasted the NBC News anchor Brian Williams the other day for his ignorance of the Iranian nuclear program—
"This is all part of a new leadership effort by Iran -suddenly claiming they don't want nuclear weapons! ; what they want is talks and transparency and good will. And while that would be enough to define a whole new era, skepticism is high and there's a good reason for it."
—as if the Iranian government had not been explaining very carefully and clearly for years and years that it has no intention of building a nuclear weapon. Not to mention no serious evidence to suggest that they weren't telling the truth (though the respectable media have been [jump]

Wednesday, October 2, 2013

Rough draft of history. I

It is not quite correct to say that "Journalism is the first draft of history." In a programmatic sense, they are really the opposite; journalism happens when people who (believe they) know what happened lay out the evidence; history, when people who know the evidence try to figure out what happened. I'm not entirely sure what I'm up to with the following, but it feels like fun, and I think I'll keep doing it for a while.

It remains unclear whether the "Conservative" movement of the late 20th and early 21st centuries in the then United States of America deliberately meant to restore the British constitution of the mid-18th—or whether Lord Cruz, the first Prime Minister, simply found himself in a position in the autumn of 2013 where the restoration was inevitable, and took advantage of it.

Proponents of the latter hypothesis point to the language used by the early Conservatives as evidence that they aimed at nothing more than reinforcing the terms of the 1787 American Constitution: they spoke of the Founding Fathers and the document [jump]

Fighting for freedom of money

Portrait of entitlement, peering somewhat myopically into the future. Photo by Cary Norton for the New York Times.
I was interested in the arguments of Shaun McCutcheon, whose lawsuit against the Federal Elections Commission will be heard in the Supreme Court next week, with [jump]

Tuesday, October 1, 2013

Looking for a 2% turnout...


Oh, New York? Before I forget, don't forget to cast your votes in today's runoff for the Democratic nomination for the public advocate position, between Letitia "Tish" James and Daniel Squadron. The latter is endorsed by the Times, and apparently pronounces his name in English, stress on the first syllable, instead of Spanish, which I regard as unfortunate, but outside of those details I don't know anything bad about him. On the other hand James, as I have mentioned before, is my candidate.

Johnny, we hardly know you

Weepy Irish drinker Speaker John Boehner grew up in one of those petit-bourgeois Catholic households, dozen kids, no doubt around the time he was in high school a photo of our martyred John F. Kennedy over the mantelpiece next to John XXIII:
“Growing up, we were probably Kennedy Catholics because we were a strong devout Catholic family,” said Bob Boehner, the congressman’s older brother, who like all his siblings eventually switched party allegiance. “But the first time you get a real job and get your paycheck, you look down and you wonder, where’s the rest of your money, and they explain to you that that’s the tax you have to pay to the government, you start thinking more and more about becoming a Republican.”
Of course some of it you get back in the refund of the following summer, and a great deal more you get back when you turn 65, and you can enjoy more of it when you use