Local news

Guido Fawkes and the Gunpowder plotters, by Crispijn van de Passe, 17th century. Wikipedia.

In local news, as you've probably heard, New York State Senate Majority Leader Dean Skelos (R) and his son Adam have been arrested for corruption—specifically, with doing favors in Albany for an environmental contracting firm and a real estate developer in return for their paying Adam a hefty, work-free salary (eventually, $10,000 a month).

In a statement, Senator Skelos said: “I am innocent of the charges leveled against me. I am not saying I am just not guilty, I am saying that I am innocent. I fully expect to be exonerated by a public jury trial.”

Uh-huh:

Cheap shots and Mom's spaghetti vomit

The first rule of Neophyte Club is:

And incidentally, if you want to know what a tech-savvy businessperson Carly is, check it out! (Thanks, Tengrain!)

At long last, Pam, have you no—Jeez, what am I thinking?

Joseph Welch addresses Senator McCarthy. Via FilmFanatic.

Just learned from Steven D at the Frogpond that the Da'esh has claimed "responsibility" for the bloody stupidity in Garland, Texas, at the Pamela Geller–sponsored, Geert Wilders–consecrated hatefest and "Cartoon Contest", where a couple of gunsels, at least one of them now reportedly well known to the FBI's counterterrorism operations, tried to shoot up the security outside the event and got themselves killed. I'm glad the guard appears not to have been badly hurt.

Whatever goal the Da'esh thinks it may have attained by this waste of time and its own adherents' lives, whether or not they actually had anything to do with it, or why they'd like to have the "credit", is unclear. It may be that for these conservatives as for our own the important thing is just to keep drawing that line between Them and Us.

Geller, of course, is thrilled, because her whole life at this point is drawing that same line and this is making her look like such a Serious person. Things couldn't have gone more according to plan:

It's the conservatism, stupid

#NotAllBlueWalls. Just saying. Photo by Bonnie Hull.

Monsignor Ross Douthat, Apostolic Nuncio to 42nd Street, writes:

Last December, my colleague David Brooks noted that police unions are resisting change on every issue where police reform might be contemplated, from body cameras for officers to reversing the militarization of local law enforcement.

Running the gamut from paragraph 7 to paragraph 8, as it were. Brooks wasn't "noting" anything. Everybody knows that Police Benevolent Associations and Fraternal Orders of Police are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters. What Brooks was actually doing in that column, of course, was taking advantage of our horror at the New York PBA treatment of Mayor De Blasio at the time of the Eric Garner and Akai Gurley killings to make the case that public sector unions such as the American Federation of Teachers and the American Federation of State, County & Municipal Employees are out-of-control, retrogressive monsters—by asserting that the police associations were a typical case (which they aren't) of the public sector union in general:

Call 911, honey, and I'll put on the popcorn.

Steve M brings to our attention the case of Sheriff David Clarke of Milwaukee County, Wisconsin, who

declared the charges brought against six police officers in the death of Freddie Gray “George Zimmerman and the Duke Lacrosse case all over again” and said “these cops are political prisoners,” offered up as human sacrifices, thrown like red meat to an angry mob” on Friday’s “Your World with Neil Cavuto” on the Fox News Channel.

The name sounded familiar, and, sure enough, I had run across him before, in January 2013. And because he is such a piece of work, and also a possible mayoral candidate, I thought I'd run this post again.

"Mickey Clarke". Image from Milwaukee County First.

Sometimes you run across a character so compelling that you just don't want to let him go, as in the case of Milwaukee County Sheriff David Clarke, via ThinkProgress:

I’m Sheriff David Clarke, and I want to talk to you about something personal…your safety. It’s no longer a spectator sport; I need you in the game, but are you ready?

With officers laid-off and furloughed, simply calling 9-1-1 and waiting is no longer your best option. You can beg for mercy from a violent criminal, hide under the bed, or you can fight back; but are you prepared? Consider taking a certified safety course in handling a firearm so you can defend yourself until we get there. You have a duty to protect yourself and your family. We’re partners now. Can I count on you?

I must say I kind of like the idea of my safety as a spectator sport. Could I get a beer? Who did the national anthem? Were there special days when everybody got a free towel? Alas, no more, according to Sheriff Clarke, an African American Rush Limbaugh Democrat, if you know what I mean, and no, neither do I:

Annals of derp: The poverty of poverty studies

Updated 5/6/2015

Marion Davies and William Haines in King Vidor's 1928 Show People. Via MoviesSilently.

World-famous poverty expert David Brooks:

Since 1980 federal antipoverty spending has exploded. As Robert Samuelson of The Washington Post has pointed out, in 2013 the federal government spent nearly $14,000 per poor person. If you simply took that money and handed it to the poor, a family of four would have a household income roughly twice the poverty rate.

At least if by 2013 you mean 2011, and some other details. Robert Samuelson, at the cited link:

If could be worse. In fact it was.

April 1968. Via Ghosts of Baltimore.

Michel Martin at NPR remembers the riots following the 1968 murder of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., personally, from when she was a little girl in New York City: her father was that rare bird, an African American firefighter, so she has a wonderfully round perspective. It made her think to interview some veterans of 1968, a Baltimore cop and a Washington firefighter, both white, to put the current Baltimore disturbance in context.

One thing that stands out is how small-scale this disturbance seems in contrast to those days, when it was whole neighborhoods, not a few individual buildings, that were burning, and went on for much longer; there are areas in Baltimore that still haven't recovered from the property damage of 40-odd years ago, it's one of the urban-rot problems that makes the city such a mess. The current disturbance is awful, but it's nothing like the awfulness of back in the day. I think we really need to recognize this.

Courting

Musée de Cluny.

Roberts:

“You’re not seeking to join the institution, you’re seeking to change what the institution is."

How do you join an institution without changing it? When Jews wanted into the country club, couldn't it be argued that they were changing it from its identity as an institution without any Jews? "It's not that I don't like Jews, it's just that I like a place where I feel comfortable." No, of course, they didn't say that. Gentleman's agreement. They only said it out loud when it was about black people. And women—they still say it about women. "I can't really be myself if there are women all over the place. I can't really relax."

People who seem icky and situations that are distasteful

Dove and snake in Canterbury Cathedral. Probably not intended as a representation of the ideal politician's mind.

World famous political scientist David Brooks is intrigued by the data:

There was an interesting poll result about Hillary Clinton last week. According to a Quinnipiac poll, 60 percent of independent voters believe that she has strong leadership qualities. But when these same voters were asked if she is honest and trustworthy, the evaluations flipped. Sixty-one percent said she is not honest and trustworthy. Apparently there are a lot of Americans who believe that Hillary Clinton is dishonest and untrustworthy but also a strong leader.

I'd say it's rather more interesting that only 51% of the independents had an unfavorable opinion of HRC (43% favorable, 3% don't know). This pattern is rather stronger over the sample as a whole (Democrats, Republicans, and independents), where she scores 46% to 47% on favorability, and an appalling 38% to 54% on honesty. Thus there would seem to be a lot more Americans who feel that she is dishonest but don't see that as a reason to have an unfavorable opinion. "Sure she's dishonest, but does that make her a bad person?"

You can come fisking too

A 30% increase in hurricane damage over the rest of the century. Via Jeff Masters.

BooMan made me look at PowerLine, so you can blame this on him.

There has been quite a bit of news coverage of this year’s White House Correspondents’ Dinner. Don’t ask me why.

Just let me get on with giving it some more, huh?

Spies on the Prize

Image from Gabriel Knight: Sins of the Fathers by flamedrake.

Mark Mazzetti and Matt Apuzzo in the Times:

When Ms. Feinstein was asked in a meeting with reporters in 2013 why she was so sure she was getting the truth about the drone program while she accused the C.I.A. of lying to her about torture, she seemed surprised.

“That’s a good question, actually,” she said.

But she's just had so much on her mind in the intervening months. The answer is probably somewhere in there too, but who knows where she stashed it?

Advertisements for Myself

I don't retweet mentions of me, but this post on NYT's David Brooks's (mis)use of my wk on conditionality is spot on: http://t.co/q6lnFZS6LA
— Alfie Kohn (@alfiekohn) April 26, 2015

Just saying, hem-hem.

Cheap shots and a side of matzoh brei

Giant Head in Window.

Via Driftglass, a detail not reported at his place: David Brooks did a book-promo interview with The Forward, in the Times offices on West 42nd Street. On the third day of Passover, America's noted Jewish thought leader offered the representative of America's preeminent Jewish newspaper a toasted bagel.

For Armenia

Not in the mood today, but don't want to miss what might be the only time I ever get a chance to agree with noted foreign policy wonk Kim Kardashian. Yes, it was genocide, by any plausible criterion, and I wish President Obama would use the word (as Bundeskänzlerin Merkel and Papissimo Francesco, both of whom have tenser and more fraught relations with the Turkish government than we do, have done).

Kanye, Khloe, Kim, and Knorth at the Kardashians' ancestral home in Gyumri, north of Yerevan. Hello Magazine.

Also clicks.

Love and Merit, Love and Merit

Go together like a Stick and Carrot?

Lon Chaney and Mary Philibin in The Phantom of the Opera (1925). Via PaxRomano.

The Sage of Cleveland Park may have arrived at the stage of blaming Dad, who always liked you better than me, for why he's so fucked up:

Verbatim David Brooks, "Love and Merit", New York Times, April 24 2015:

Parents unconsciously shape their smiles and frowns to steer their children toward behavior they think will lead to achievement. Parents glow with extra fervor when their child studies hard, practices hard, wins first place, gets into a prestigious college. This sort of love is merit based. It is not simply: I love you. It is, I love you when you stay on my balance beam. I shower you with praise and care when you’re on my beam. The wolf of conditional love is lurking in these homes.

Or maybe he's having a fight with his own kids who complain that he always made them feel worthless by not praising them and he's trying to make an argument that it was for good reasons, not that he just wasn't paying attention. (The acknowledgments to The Road to Character say "My ex-wife, Sarah, has done and continues to do an amazing job raising our three children", suggesting he himself has rarely seen them at all, at least until they started showing up dressed for dinner instead of being put to bed during the cocktail hour.)

Y, Carly?

Via the Orange Juice Blog.

Just shoot me.

Republican voters aren’t yet excited about their candidates because not one of them has broken out with a lead in the polls. Considering this, counting out Carly Fiorina would be pretty stupid.

And why, A.B. Stoddard at The Ineffable Hill, would I want to not count out old Demon Sheep?

West of Eden: Imagine

Displaced people from the Yarmouk Palestinian refugee camp queue to receive aid in Syria on 16 April 2015. Photograph: AFP/Getty Images.

In September 2013 I issued a proposal for a nonviolent approach to ending the war in Syria: Just get the civilian population out of danger, massively, four or five million in decent refugee accommodations, and leave the Assad government forces and the Caliphate and the other bad Sunni actors with nobody to bully and exploit and destroy but each other.

This was back when it still seemed possible to many otherwise rational observers (as opposed to Senator McCain and his drooling companions, who still believe or affect to believe) that a "moderate Sunni" military force could play a significant role, when Sunni extremists were dominated by the Qa'eda-affiliated al-Nusra front and the Caliphate was just beginning to be a thing. Now it should be clear to almost everybody not a Republican or a "fighter" with the FSA that that alternative is hopeless.

While it so happens that a similar proposal is circulating for a different objective, solving the Mediterranean refugee crisis, in particular from the UN Special Rapporteur for migrant rights, François Crépeau:

Note on Yemen

Photo by NAIYF RAHMA/REUTERS via Al Jazeera.

That was weird yesterday. NPR was telling me about how Saudi Arabia had finished its operations in Yemen on the radio, while the Times was claiming online that they'd already started bombing again. Both, as it eventually turned out, were true: KSA continues to insist it has won:

The talented Mr.—I beg your pardon?

Sorry, I lost the source for this. Quotation here.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Talented Mr. Rubio", New York Times, April 21 2015:

Senator Marco Rubio is a handsome and charismatic young sociopath who would murder friends and lovers and anybody else who stands in his way to attain the easy, elegant, charmed life to which he aspires, and almost certainly get away with it. He clearly has all the qualities to be the Republicans' best choice for the 2016 presidential nomination.

Maybe not *all* roads lead to Rome...

...but you could think of it as a theorem in Traveling Salesman math, the Douthat Conjecture, that you can find an 800-word route to the US Conference of Catholic Bishops from any subject, however remote.

Shorter Ross Douthat, "Checking Charlie Hebdo's Privilege", New York Times, April 18 2015:

If Garry Trudeau really thinks satirists ought to punch up at the powerful and not down at the downtrodden, how come liberals are always making fun of millions of aborted fetuses?

Image by Kate Tiedrich via AwkwardZombie.

Tout le monde est Charlie, ça finira par ne plus être chic!

On March 8, Garry Trudeau's Doonesbury strip paid an eloquent tribute to the Charlie Hebdo cartoonists murdered on January 7, making a loving use of some of their own best images (Christ I love that Benedict XVI) and showing, incidentally, one way of taunting the murderers without strictly violating the Salafist rules against the visual depiction of the Prophet:

A softening in the moral sphere

Image of Louise Brooks as Lulu in the G.W. Pabst film of Die Büchse der Pandora (1929), from a time of moral softening, when a narcissistic and relativistic generation replaced the modest and self-sacrificing folks who brought us World War I. Or was that the 14th century? Who knows, I have a deadline.

Shorter David Brooks, "When Cultures Shift", New York Times, April 17 2015:

In the course of my research for THIS BOOK I'VE BEEN WRITING NOT THAT I CARE IF YOU LOOK AT IT OR ANYTHING BUT IT JUST CAME OUT I learned, surprisingly, that the 1960s actually started in the 1940s. That's just the kind of remarkable contrarian stuff that you can find out if you stick with me.

Loud Speaker

Don't know why they gave Israel a bishop, or a pawn down there among the Marsh Arabs. Via Gordon Campbell Plans to Bomb Iran's Nuclear Facilities. No, he didn't really, and it was 2009.

So BooMan gave his readers a challenge: to read what Mr. Speaker Boehner said this morning about the ongoing negotiations between Iran and the P5+1—

Speaker John Boehner (R-Ohio) on Friday said he hopes the Obama administration fails to reach a deal on Iran’s nuclear program.

Boehner said he did not believe Iran would ever live up to its side of a bargain that would lift U.S. sanctions on Tehran.

“I’ve never been optimistic that we’d get to an agreement, a real agreement that would stop the nuclear threat from Iran and I don’t think the Iranians have any intention of giving up their desire for a nuclear weapon,” Boehner told Fox Business Channel’s “Opening Bell with Maria Bartiromo.”

Asked whether he’s expecting an agreement, Boehner said: “I would hope not.”

“I don’t think we can get to agreement with people who have no intention of keeping the agreement,” he added.

—and then answer a question:

And if I ever go looking for a concrete moral vocabulary again

I won't go any further than my own back yard, because if it isn't there, um, then it's probably in the storm cellar or someplace. Or maybe I left it in the office.

Image via WikiQuote.

From the introduction to The Road to Character:

Populist vs. metapopulist

James Albert Wales, 1880: Senator Roscoe Conkling tries to work out the Republican presidential campaign. Image via Wikipedia.

So I'm listening to this piece on WNYC radio (locally produced, not NPR) about Clinton and Rubio introducing their campaign using the same "populist" language, and how savvy observers recognize that they're actually the same candidate, because we don't know what policies Clinton is going to propose (but we know she has Wall Street backers who aren't worried that it's going to be too radical) and we do know the Republicans aren't going to propose any policies at all, other than a rain dance imploring the money to trickle down from the stratosphere.

Only there's something I did notice about the language, that I think makes a big difference: Clinton's populist language is aimed at the concerns of the population of the United States, Rubio's at the Republican party.

Finesse continued

Art by Gilbert Shelton.

Just when I was bragging on the president's ability to make the Senate Foreign Relations Committee do the right thing, he went and got the Finance Committee to jump rather higher than many of us are going to be comfortable with:

The leaders of Congress’s tax-writing committees reached agreement Thursday on legislation to give President Obama “fast track” authority to negotiate an ambitious trade accord with 11 other Pacific nations, beginning what is sure to be one of the toughest legislative battles of his last 19 months in office.

Cheap Shot: First world problems

Jeff Gordinier, New York Times:

It is one of life’s nagging mysteries: Why is a sandwich you order at a restaurant so invariably and intensely better than a sandwich you make at home? 

I'd say it depends on what restaurants you go to. I hardly ever confront that problem.

Is there some immense secret realm of sandwich-master knowledge that mere mortals have no access to? Why do you find yourself in the kitchen, pressed for time, bereft of inspiration, staring slack-jawed into the refrigerator and succumbing to yet another bland slapped-together calorie blast of cold turkey and mealy tomatoes on supermarket white? With every bite, you taste only regret.

Then again, you might be an idiot.

Many grocery stores nowadays sell actual bread, and it will make a difference. This one, as it happens, is from a restaurant, Parsley in Denver. 

Executive finesse

Updated 4/18

Finesse and Reptile, via ComicVine.

Obama Yields, Allowing Congress Say on Iran Nuclear Deal

says the New York Times, but between you and me, BooMan captured the story a little more accurately: Senator Corker got rolled. I say "between you and me" because it wouldn't be really helpful for Corker to understand this just at present, or (more likely) be compelled to acknowledge in public that he understands it. A huge part of the art of negotiation as our president understands it is to leave the other person thinking that she or he has won, at least for the short term.

Let me, as Friedman would say, explain.

Half-formed thoughts and delicate emotions

Via BenSwann.

Oh, Brooksy. For some reason, possibly involving the fact that there is finally, as of last Tuesday, film of a policeman murdering an unarmed black man (Walter Scott of North Charleston, South Carolina, on April 4) so plainly brutally that it can't be dismissed or denied, he's on about cops wearing cameras, which he has decided to support (as does this page). Only the whole column is about what a bad idea it is, which makes it a tad confusing. He was for it before he was against it, but then he was for it again in the last paragraph.

Driftglass is way ahead of us on this one, and Roy Edroso has found it necessary to weigh in, so there's really not much left to say, but a couple of Brooksological points deserve consideration.

One is the problem of privacy in police-civilian interaction:

RIP Günter Grass

Photo via Lebendiges Museum Online

I saw Günter Grass in 1969 in the south German town where I was (in theory) studying, in a campaign appearance for the Sozialdemokratische Partei Deutschlands, which was, as I hardly understood at the time, about to end the 20-year reign of the Christian right with the chancellorship of the great Willi Brandt. He lectured all us soixante-huitards and hippies on the subject of revolution, with avuncular indulgence; we could talk about Marx and Mao and Marcuse all we wanted, but young Germans had to vote SPD, because nothing else would change things. His mustache was one of the most spectacular things I'd ever seen. I just wanted to say that. And that the dazzling radicalism of his writing made the bumpy pragmatism of his politics believable and, in the end, clearly right.

Superawkward audio: Interviewed by Patricia Marx on WNYC in 1964.

White House Fool Report: The Long Day Whines

The long day wanes; the slow moon climbs; the deep
Moans round with many voices. Come, my friends.
'T is not too late to seek a newer world...
(J.W.M Turner illustrating Tennyson's "Ulysses", image via gleamsthatuntravelledworld.)

I made up the headline (invoking Anthony Burgess) for Fox and the Breitbartlets and so on, but they frankly seem a little too stunned by the events in Panama City for any real whining. NRO literally has nothing! I think it's going to take them a few days to rev up.

For my part I was very glad, obviously, to see Presidents Barack Obama and Raúl Castro having an amicable chat, but the biggest thing for me was the strange little cuckoo's egg in the words Obama addressed to the Civil Society Forum in Panama City, as he was defending their freedom of speech and assembly and explaining that the US would continue to have their back:

That was one long-ass arc!

Cheney and Rumsfeld next!

The [Blackwater] sentences were a long-fought diplomatic victory for the United States, which asked a skeptical Iraqi government and its people to be patient and trust the American criminal justice system. That faith was tested many times over the last eight years as the case suffered several setbacks, many of which were of the government’s own making.

In the end, the Justice Department said, the case showed the world that the United States judicial system worked, even in war zones, and even when the gunmen were Americans and the victims were Iraqis.

Image via Bend the Arc. Dr. King wasn't the only one to borrow from Theodore Parker; another famous guy liked his line about "of all the people, by all the people, for all the people".

Also,

Robert Charles Bates, the 73 year-old insurance-executive-turned-volunteer-cop who wascaught on video fatally shooting an unarmed black suspect wascharged with second degree manslaughter on Monday. The charges allege that Bates demonstrated “culpable negligence” when he shot and killed Eric Harris while Harris was fleeing police.

This does not constitute an endorsement...

But I found myself really liking the video, at the same time as I realized how manipulative it was. Kind of the way I feel about Puccini.

And the words devoted to the theme of inequality.

"The deck is still stacked in favor of those at the top. Everyday Americans need a champion." Clinton says announcing 2016 candidacy.
— Amy Chozick (@amychozick) April 12, 2015

There was a young woman called Hillary
Who deserved to be more than ancillary;
But when she essayed
To come out of the shade,
She always got put in the pillory.

Virent ova!

"Virent ova! Viret perna!" (The eggs are green! The ham is green!)

Politico headline:

GOP not arguing science on Iran

Apparently they're conceding that everything in the agreement framework the White House says will stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon will, in fact, stop Iran from building a nuclear weapon. Instead, the Republicans (and Chuck Schumer) will argue, in essence, that they don't like it anyway:

although key Republican critics— including Sen. Tom Cotton of Arkansas— are citing the work of David Albright, a physicist and former inspector of Iraq’s nuclear program, his new technical analysis only argues that some of its provisions should be stronger.

“We’re not going to say ‘chuck the deal’ or anything,” Albright said. “We’d like to see the framework strengthened, but we have to accept that the framework exists.”...

Instead, Republicans are planning to make their case on other grounds. They’ll keep insisting that Iran should just end its nuclear program (and rolling clips where President Barack Obama has said the same thing in the past).... Caroline Rabbitt, a spokeswoman for Cotton, said the White House “is pushing the science-heavy argument for the Iran deal because they know they have nothing else.” For example, the administration talks about the science of enriching uranium, but “that’s because Iran is still going to be enriching uranium—a major concession by the United States that shouldn’t be happening,” she said.

It's a classic rhetorical strategy, the Argumentum ad Sam-I-Amum.

Rich Little Poor Man

Mary Pickford in Maurice Tourneur's The Poor Little Rich Girl, 1917.

Shorter David Brooks, "The Moral Bucket List', New York Times, April 12 2015:

The people I admire most are leftist women (Dorothy Day, George Eliot, Frances Perkins) whose lives follow a pattern of stumbling, defeat, recognition, and redemption, and moments of pain that they turn into occasions of radical self-understanding, facing their imperfect nature with unvarnished honesty, with the opposite of squeamishness. These are the people we want to be.

Cheap shots: The gray divorcé

Well, that cat is out of that bag, as I learn from our genial comrade Driftglass (h/t Redhand). Our Mr. Brooks's amphibolic divorcery has disambiguated on national TV:

And I don't want to personally, I don't want to legally talk about it, but yes, I am divorced.

I guess that must mean he's been talking about it illegally all along, and that's why we couldn't be sure.

Dripping with amphibology

Tehran, April 2nd. Photo by Atta Kenare/AFP/Getty Images.

World-famous master diplomacy maven David Brooks has ferreted out the hidden flaw in the framework for a nuclear agreement between the US and Iran: Supreme Leader Ayatollah Sayyid Ali Khamenei doesn't care whether there's an agreement or not, as he inadvertently revealed yesterday, talking to an "audience of religious chanters in his Tehran office" or "orators" or more specifically

in a meeting on Thursday with a group of women, poets and eulogists writing poems in praise of the Household of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), [where he] extended his congratulations on the birthday of Hazrat Fatima (the beloved daughter of the Prophet Mohammad) and made very significant remarks about nuclear talks and the developments in Yemen. 

No, really, Khamenei says he's

Blog against Theocracy

Image via Walking the Berean Road.

Avivah Zornberg's The Particulars of Rapture: Reflections on Exodos, which I was talking about the other day, introduces the problem of God's use of a plural form in Genesis 1:26, "Let us make man in our image." It's not some kind of royal we, which hadn't been invented back then. What is is? In a midrash, Rabbi Shmuel bar Nachman imagines Moses as he is taking God's dictation of the Torah, complaining (it's lovely to me what a kvetch Moses always is with the Lord) that the line will be an occasion for miscreants to deny God's singularity:

Pie-eyed and Prejudiced

Charles "Buddy" Rogers and Jobyna Ralston in Wings, 1929.

Shorter David Brooks, "What Candidates Need", April 7 2015:

Any presidential candidate worth our support should have at least in rudimentary form what Lincoln offered in full. He needs a profound vision formed by a thorough reading of no more than four books, all of them fiction; a double-minded temperament enabling one of his minds to check the other one when it gets dangerous; and the kind of strategic shrewdness with which Lincoln decided to end slavery not immediately but through unromantic, gradual economic means.

As you'll all remember, no doubt, from your history, when instead of issuing a showoffy emancipation proclamation, Lincoln devised his No Amnesty program permitting enslaved Americans to open tax-deferred Emancipation Accounts with their local stockbrokers so they would be poised to buy themselves when market forces drove their price low enough.

White House Fool Report: Hostile Working Environmentalism

Speaking of the president's negotiating skills, I was poking around the Wikileaks documents on the Trans-Pacific Partnership environmental negotiations the other day, trying to figure out exactly how upset I'm supposed to be and why, and saw something, I think, that I'm not hearing about from any of the commentators, which is that the most hateful provisions of the draft agreement are things the US negotiating team is committed to getting rid of.

That is, on the one hand the posted draft agreement (from Salt Lake City, November 2013, and thus presumably superseded by now, more than a year and a couple of rounds later) is, as Wikileaks says,

B.F. Deal

Peggy Noonan and ironman, via Media Matters.

Margaret Noonan:

None of the reporting out of Lausanne has suggested that a helpful agreement would emerge. Tuesday’s deadline for production of a basic framework was missed; on Thursday, a framework, the contents of which were not revealed, was announced. But President Obama is not known as a good negotiator.

That was issued by WSJ just after 8:00 pm on Thursday, about five hours after the extremely detailed

Parameters for Joint Comprehensive Plan of Action regarding Islamic Republic of #Iran’s Nuclear Program: http://t.co/4kRGQCAfSF #IranDeal
— Department of State (@StateDept) April 2, 2015

were released (at 18:56 Lausanne time or just before 3:00 in D.C.). Heh. I guess Noonan's in the company of those for whom the Powers figure no editing is needed. Anybody who goes behind that paywall and finds out whether they've issued a correction, let me know.

Eggs marks the spot

Holiday Rerun: Silly Easter piece from March 2013, before Bill O'Reilly succeeded in killing Jesus, which I felt like posting again, if nobody minds.

From David Lynch's Inland Empire (2006), via the Guardian.

O’Reilly points to a handful of small community centers and elementary schools that are hosting “spring egg hunts,” sometimes with a “spring bunny” emceeing the festivities. Nowhere to be found is the word “Easter,” laments O’Reilly, fearful that the nation’s six year olds will one day forget the religious symbolism of crawling around a grassy schoolyard on all fours searching for chocolate-filled plastic eggs. (Adam Peck, ThinkProgress) 

Peck probably thinks he's being funny here, under the assumption that the word "Easter", to say nothing of rabbits and eggs, has nothing to do with Christianity.

Sexy Seder

Parting of the Red Sea. Lego Bible.

Brooks:

Correction: April 3, 2015 

An earlier version of this column misidentified the sea that God parted in the Book of Exodus. It is the Red Sea, not the Dead Sea.

Hahaha. Actually I'm pissed off because I didn't notice the error this morning before it was corrected, as I certainly should have done, and it makes me feel somewhat less entitled to mock him than usual.

Today is a Passover column in which world-famous postmodern Rabbi David Brooks takes on the meaning or perhaps deconsruction of the holy day, which he seems to think is mainly about singing, storytelling, and sex. I'm with him on the storytelling part. To me the Seder is all about the unspoken answer to the First Question:

It's not about the cake

Cake jump. Via GalleryHip.

I guess I need to emphasize this. I keep writing about cake, because cake is, like tango, or Donald Trump, or the word "amplitude" (think about it!), intrinsically funny. But it's not about the cake.

What it's about, really, is the exposure of the whole system of Republican double dealing, which millions of American voters are now becoming truly aware of for the first time; the way they wrap every ugly agenda item inside a spuriously attractive one: from corporatizing the education system inside "leaving no child behind" to licensing corporate pollution inside "clear skies".

Simple answers to simple questions

For the people who keep saying this Iran deal would "avert a war": who would start that war?
— Glenn Greenwald (@ggreenwald) April 3, 2015

That would be the president you could elect in 2016 if you convince enough Democrats to stay home, Glenn.

Image by Associated Press/The Wire.

Cake is Speech

Marc Chagall was completely entitled to refuse to sell a bunch of stained glass windows bursting with Jewish imagery to the Catholic church of St. Stephan, Mainz, Germany. Although he didn't. I guess his moral standards just weren't as high as those of a Muncie cake shop. He was probably in it for the money.

Hannity insanity:

D'Souza then explained that opposition to the Indiana law "is a selective attack on Christianity."

"Not only do you not see the left talking about gays and lesbians abroad, but even at home, you’ll rarely find homosexuals trying to force a Muslim baker to bake a cake for a gay wedding," D'Souza said.

Of course the desperate plight of LGTBQ people under hostile governments and in dangerous environments in Christian countries like Uganda and Russia and Muslim countries like Iran and Pakistan and so on has long been an important cause for liberals and people of the left, as many writers have already noted.

What I wondered about was D'Souza's fantasy of the Muslim-American baker getting away with discrimination against gay brides and grooms because we powerful leftists give them a free pass, focusing our ire on Trinitarian confectioners. If I were Jon Stewart I'd certainly be sending a crew out to Brooklyn to check out whether the Muslim baker presents an actual problem. I'll bet you fifty bucks it would make some fun TV: