Unbelievable

Even I, cynic that I am, am mind-boggled by this.

Longevity

The Norwegians have recently discovered what the Jews have known for centuries--that there is a link between survival and humor. Andrea sent me this article on a study by a Norwegian researcher that concluded that people with a good sense of humor live longer. Apparently the more central a role humor plays in your life, the more years you'll spend on the planet. I, who have often said that I can survive anything as long as I have my sense of humor and my Mastercard, feel that I am bound to live a good long time. Perhaps the fact that I surround myself with punsters will make up for a lack of exercise.

Third war's the charm

Our government is founded upon the intelligence of the people. I for one do not despair of the republic. I have great confidence in the virtue of the great majority of the people, and I cannot fear the result. Andrew Jackson


I belong to an organization that has a truism: "Insanity is doing the same thing twice and expecting different results." And this is the line that came to mind when I read this morning that the Dems have decided it's not a good idea to limit Bush's ability to go to war with Iran. To be more specific, the House is contemplating an appropriations bill that would hemorage another 100 billion dollars into the war effort. The bill would require troops to be out of Iraq in 18 months, which of course, the executive branch finds appalling.

I tell you the whole thing makes me sick and angry. And to think I was actually contemplating a blog entry this week on Hillary being wrongly maligned for her stance on the war. [The NYT has a side-by-side comparison of the candidates vis-a-vis the war, and their Hilary quote:
VOTED YES IN 2002, NOW OPPOSED

If I had been President in October of 2002, I would have never asked for authority to divert our attention from Afghanistan to Iraq, and I certainly would never have started this war.

got me curious what exactly she did have to say in 2002 when she voted yes on HJ Res 114.

Salon had an article last month lambasting her for her refusal to admit she was wrong on her initial support of the war, and rather than finding it convincing it actually made me concede that Clinton has been more consistent on her war position than I initially granted her. In her speech on the resolution she says:

...I will take the president at his word that he will try hard to pass a U.N. resolution and will seek to avoid war, if at all possible....I urge the president to spare no effort to secure a clear, unambiguous demand by the United Nations for unlimited inspections ... A vote for [the resolution] is not a vote to rush to war; it is a vote that puts awesome responsibility in the hands of our president and we say to him: Use these powers wisely and as a last resort.

Which brings us to the issue of Iran and the Democrats decision to give Bush a blank check to go to war. Hell-oooh??? It revolts me that we're not even talking anymore about the US's dogged refusal to learn from history. Now we're talking about some sort of mass amnesia regarding five years ago. Maybe the Senators could take the memento approach and start tattooing important facts on their forearms ("Don't give president authority to go to war!")

This is from the AP article:

Public opinion has swung the way of Democrats on the issue of the war. More than six in 10 Americans think the conflict was a mistake--the largest number yet found in AP-Ipsos polling.

But Democrats have struggled to find a compromise that can satisfy both liberals who oppose any funding for the military effort and conservatives who do not want to unduly restrict the commander in chief.

Why is it that Republicans are the only ones who seem to have figured out that public opinion will follow them if they lead? Why are the Democrats so retarded???

I really want to believe in democracy. I really do.

Sigh.

It was a dark and stormy title

While I've always gotten a chuckle out of the Bulwer-Lytton contest, the fact that all of the entries are made up takes some of the fun out of it for me (though see this page on the Bulwer-Lytton site which contains actual published gems such as ""She stuck to his prime-grade A tush like shrink-wrap to a rump roast.").

The Bookseller/Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year on the other hand, has only bonafide publication titles competing. This year's entries (see the lower right-hand corner of the page) include a range of future classics such as How Green Were the Nazis? and The Stray Shopping Carts of Eastern North America: A Guide to Field Identification. And the lists from previous years were enough to make me laugh out loud even today, a Monday made worse by the need to "spring forward" this weekend.

My personal favorite is probably The Art and Craft of Pounding Flowers: No Paint, No Ink, Just a Hammer! but that may just be a reflection of my mood today. (A thanks to Nick for forwarding the URL.)

QOTD

Newt Gingrich to James Dobson, explaining why it wasn't hypocritical of him to be gunning for Clinton even as he was shtupping some chick who was not his wife:

The president of the United States got in trouble for committing a felony in front of a sitting federal judge.... as a leader of the government trying to uphold the rule of law, I have no choice except to move forward and say that you cannot accept ... perjury in your highest officials

It makes me think of the times they arrest people for resisting arrest.

Misappropriation of funds--now that's a different story.

I know you are but what am I?

While I tend to think of YouTube as that great site that brings us classics like this, it is, apparently, ground zero for a virtual "war" between Turkey and Greece with people in both countries volleying nationalistic insults back and forth via online video clips. But Greece has gone a bridge too far in the latest pixelated grenade by calling Ataturk, and Turks in general, gay, and Turkey is banning YouTube entirely. Truly the whole thing is pretty remarkable. It's like what if PeeWee Herman were in charge of diplomatic affairs. Not only are there hundreds of edifying videos like Ataturk is not Gay! and Gay Greece, they each have long threads of "whoever smelt it dealt it" sorts of comments:

I am a gay Turk and am sick and tired of village idiot Turks comming on here and pretending that you cannot be Turkish and openly like bum sex. It is so macho to be a Turk accept when they are busy bumming each other and then pretending that our founder was not a bum bandit.

Makes you glad to be an American; we only have to worry about our Founders being slave owners.

Droppin' of the Carp

One of my coworkers here also lived in Wisconsin for many years. She just visited there over the holidays and brought back this clipping from the Wisconsin State Journal:

They'll Lower A Fish To Celebrate New Year

Some state residents will be celebrating the New Year in a unique way -- by watching a 20-pound female carp lowered by a 110-foot crane. The annual Droppin' of the Carp was begun by Tom Nelson and his wife, Cathie, who got the idea from a New Year's celebration in Savannah, Ga., where they lowered a giant Styrofoam peach.
"We decided we could have some sort of New Year's celebration here in the Midwest," Nelson said. "Being on the river, it had to be a fish."

The couple organizes the event each year on St. Feriole Island. They expect to draw as many people as last year -- about 1,500.

The first year the Nelsons used a 3-foot carp and named it Lucky after they learned the Chinese believe eating carp on New Year's brings good luck. Each subsequent fish has had the same name. This year, Lucky is a nearly 20-pound female carp caught in the Mississippi River in late November by Mike Valley, who has the fish in a freezer at his store, Valley Fish and Cheese.

Valley plans to shellac Lucky and give her a few touchups, including a crown.
It takes about 2 1/2minutes to lower the carp, Nelson said. Those gathered will then sing "Auld Lang Syne," recite the Pledge of Allegiance and sing "God Bless America." Lucky will then return to the freezer until May, when she will be buried and a maple tree planted over her.

I can't think what to say that could improve upon the greatness of the story as it stands, so I'll just leave it at that. And once again I marvel at the fact that I lived in Wisconsin for 11 years.

Unbelievable

This is kind of interesting. Slate paired up with a market research group to graphically display the believability of Bush's Wednesday night "damn the torpedos" speech. Vidlit produced a video of clips from the speech and a focus group, broken down by political affiliation (Dem, Rep, and Ind) was asked to rate the video as it was ongoing using a mouse and a sliding scale. I mean, personally I don't really care about market research personal opinion stuff since 1.I think most people kind of stupid, and 2.I think most market research is poorly designed, but it's sort of interesting in a meaningless way.

Baby blog

A big congratulations to my friends Marc and Christy who just had a baby yesterday. Ollie is already blogging, precotious cuss.

Timeless

Today marks the 230th anniversary of the publication of Thomas Paine's Common Sense, Wonkette reminds us. Of course, we love Tom Paine. And while we favor The Crisis, Common Sense does have its particularly salient passages:

Men of passive tempers look somewhat lightly over the offences of Britain, and, still hoping for the best, are apt to call out, "Come, come, we shall be friends again, for all this." But examine the passions and feelings of mankind, Bring the doctrine of reconciliation to the touchstone of nature, and then tell me, whether you can hereafter love, honour, and faithfully serve the power that hath carried fire and sword into your land? If you cannot do all these, then are you only deceiving yourselves, and by your delay bringing ruin upon posterity. Your future connection with Britain, whom you can neither love nor honour, will be forced and unnatural, and being formed only on the plan of present convenience, will in a little time fall into a relapse more wretched than the first. But if you say, you can still pass the violations over, then I ask, Hath your house been burnt? Hath your property been destroyed before your face? Are your wife and children destitute of a bed to lie on, or bread to live on? Have you lost a parent or a child by their hands, and yourself the ruined and wretched survivor? If you have not, then are you not a judge of those who have. But if you have, and still can shake hands with the murderers, then you are unworthy of the name of husband, father, friend, or lover, and whatever may be your rank or title in life, you have the heart of a coward, and the spirit of a sycophant.

In other news, Bush wants to add 21,500 more soldiers in Iraq. AP reports on the announcement which will be made later tonight: "In a now-familiar refrain, Bush was to portray the war in Iraq as "the decisive ideological struggle of our time."

Indeed.

Even my cat is cutting edge

Those who know me, know that my cat is a cat only a mother can love, really. He's obese, asthmatic, and suffers from clinical depression. When we moved to LA he responded to the stress of a nine day road trip and a radical relocation by determining that he was a cat who thinks outside the box, as it were. So he's been on meds for years now. Yes, I am clean and my cat is drugged. So today I see this article in the LA Times, complete with this photo of the day:

As I have often said, it's a good thing I didn't have children.

Yahrzeit

Today is my dad's yarzheit. He's been gone twenty years--rather incredible. I was missing him tonight. I lit my memorial candle and said Kaddish, and I thought maybe I would blog something of his to close out the night. So here are some long excerpts from an even longer letter he wrote my sister when she was in college. It's dated November 1967 and is responding in large part to her increasing political activism.

He writes:

Some people feel one is not worth his salt unless he is a radical at 20 and a conservative at 40. This is a vile canard propagated by the pusillanimous. One need not become a fat cat at forty. See, e.g., Norman Thomas whose big many voice, turning again to childish treble, pipes and whistles in his sounds, to quote the Bard, but who preaches the same revolt against oppression that he sounded with stentorian speeches at the turn of the century. See also Bertrand Russell, William Douglas, and Jake Podofsky. (Jake runs the delicatessen at 14th and Irving Sts.)

I do not hold with those who attack all our institutions. I am not blind to the virtues of other ways of life but I personally feel that what we have in this country is the best way of life thus far evolved by man as a functioning society. I am 100% American. But I am not like those Southerners who loved the Confederacy so much they would not even wear a Union suit. I want my country to present a favorable image, to maintain a posture that I find admirable, and will not yield my right to criticize it when I think it is wrong. I want America always to be the land of the three "P's" -- Peace, Prosperity, and Pfreedom, for myself and my pfosterity. I want America to stay healthy because I know that when the United States sneezes much of the rest of the world catches pneumonia.

Finally, let me only remind you that you ought not get yourself so involved that you jeopardize yourself in your studies. It is essential that you get decent grades, continue your education, and work assiduously toward your career. Sorenson in the Saturday Review last week did not say anything much different from what many other pacifists have said in the past few weeks bu this article was read by millions because he achieved such eminence in his field that his voice was effective. At the big peace march we listened intently to what Dr. Spock said largely because more than half the people there had taken castor oil when Spock told their mothers to administer it. On the other hand, I'll bet you didn't hear one word Tillie Gockenheimer said, did you? And Tillie has been marching in protest demonstrations since Kemal Pasha besieged the poor Armenians in 1916 or whenever the hell it was. But that is because Tillie Gockenheimer dropped out of high school in Pottstown, Pa. when she was 16 and has been working in a brassiere factory in High Point, N. Car. ever since.

There's more, but those are the best parts. Except there is one place where there's a line something like this "7 883347xc (Travis' interjections)" because I must have been sitting in his lap while he was typing the letter. I was two at the time.

That my dad, who was blacklisted during the McCarthy era, could write such a letter, is real patriotism. I'm not much of a nationalist really, but I was, once upon a time a Constitutional scholar and I too love America from Ben Franklin to X. And at the same time, I'm proud as hell to have a dad who was a blacklisted labor lawyer.

It's all so complicated isn't it--our feelings for family and country.

Anyway, it's past my bedtime, maybe I will try to resurrect my blogging spirit for the new year. I can't promise anything though. I've made enough of those that didn't come to fruition in terms of my poor neglected blog.

Labor begets labor

I just got back yesterday from a trip to upstate New York where I was connection-less. So now I'm catching up.

I was staying at my sister's cabin in the woods, a place so remote that when you search for the nearest Starbuck's, you find there isn't one within a fifty mile radius. (By contrast, there are twenty-four within five miles of my zipcode.) It is, in fact, so remote that when we left (at 4am) to drive to the airport, we didn't pass another car for forty-five minutes.

So I'm glad to be back to the traffic, the smog, and the fake boobs. Gosh I love LA.

But I didn't post just to talk about my trip. Really I just wanted to let out a superior chuckle about this, the report produced by Missouri's Special Committee on Immigration Reform that argues abortion is one of the root causes of illegal immigration. It seems we are aborting our labor force and so we must look south for more workers:

There's a lot of editorial comment there that I couldn't really stomach," Rep. Trent Skaggs said Monday. "To be honest, I think it's a little delusional."

All 10 Republican committee members signed the report, though one of them, Rep. Billy Pat Wright, said Monday he didn't recall it connecting abortion and illegal immigration.

Emery, who equates abortion to murder, defended the assertions.

"We hear a lot of arguments today that the reason that we can't get serious about our borders is that we are desperate for all these workers," Emery said. "You don't have to think too long. If you kill 44 million of your potential workers, it's not too surprising we would be desperate for workers."

These anti-choice folks really do have an "if the only tool you have is a hammer" way of thinking about anything that's going on in the country. It's pretty astounding.

Some things should be regarded as "givens"

Shakespeare's Sister calls our attention to this gem from shrub's Saturday radio address: "[A]ll Americans can take pride in the example our democracy sets for the world by holding elections even in a time of war."

Just how low can we set the national pride bar, do you think? Gee, I'm so proud that we don't suspend Constitutional democracy and institute martial law. And you know what else? I'm really proud we let women vote here (and drive cars!). We rock!

More good news

It seems John Bolton is back on the job market.

Everything old is new again

In yet another demonstration of the US's astounding ability to back the wrong horse, Daniel Ortega was elected president of Nicaragua this week. The Independent's coverage of the campaign reads like a near-parody:

His campaign flag and theme tune, he insists, said it all. The old red-and-black flag and silk scarves of the Frente Sandinista de Liberacion Nacional (FSLN) were still on show, but alongside them were flags and banners in Ortega's new favoured colour--shocking pink--chosen by his wife and meant to symbolise the new Ortega's softer, gentler side.

The old FSLN anthem, which included the words "let us fight the yanqui, enemy of humanity", could still be heard during his campaign, but it played second fiddle to Ortega's latest theme tune--a Spanish version of John Lennon's "Give Peace a Chance", which calls for reconciliation and whose refrain is "We all want to live in peace". It also gave a Washington Post headline writer the chance to come up with "Daniel Ortega, from Lenin to Lennon".

Something about fuschia-clad Sandanistas singing Lennon songs really seems like a moment right out of Delillo to me.

And if the Independent's coverage reads like a postmodern novel, the BBC's is like the political equivalent of the musical reunion tour:

So who has become the principle agitator-in-chief for those opposed to Mr Ortega?

None other than Lieutenant-Colonel Oliver North, the public face of the Iran-Contra scandal in the days of Ronald Reagan's presidency.

"If Ortega wins," he said on a two-day visit here. "He will have key regional allies... who together could create problems aplenty for the US and its democratic Latin American allies."

"Today, Nicaragua looks like a case of back to the future," Mr North added.

Wow. The eighties revival is clearly far, far more pervasive than I had imagined.

VOTD

Via After School Snack comes the video of the day.

Read of the day

Garrison Keillor's piece for the Chicago Tribune yesterday.

This paragraph almost made me cry:

People still care deeply about our government, despite every invitation to disillusionment. This is the astonishment. For my generation, the first big blow was the failure of Washington to get to the truth about the assassination of John F. Kennedy and then its inability to change a disastrous course in Vietnam. You stand at the majestic polished wall with the 57,000 names on it, and you look across the river to Arlington, and here, within one mile, are two enormous aching sorrows, and a mile behind you is the U.S. Supreme Court, which threw the election of 2000. Some people killed our president and got away with it; men were shipped off to die in a lousy war promulgated by Democrats afraid to be called weak on communism; and an election was stolen, no protest. And yet we still stroll down to the church and cast our ballots. We live on hope.

Schadenfreude

The Dems have the Senate. It's official. Allen conceded.

My favorite part of the article is this bit:

Allen was comfortably ahead in polls until August, when he mockingly referred to a Webb campaign volunteer of Indian descent as "Macaca," regarded by some as a racial slur. The incident, caught on videotape, became international news. Some former football teammates from the University of Virginia also charged that Allen had commonly used a slur for blacks--something he denied.

I guess we're talking about the word "nigger" here, a term that is apparently so sensitive the paper cannot print it even when printing it to make reference to its use as a word (what the Chicago Manual refers to as "words and phrases used as words" (7.62). What I wonder about is how exactly he was accused or able to deny the accusation when the word itself can't actually be used. "No, I never used that word, which I cannot use here to deny that I used it."

Don't let the door hit you in the ass on the way out

From SL comes this collection of Rummy classics. Ah the passing of an era:

"As we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns - that is to say, we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns, the ones we don't know we don't know.”

"I'm not into this detail stuff. I'm more concepty." In an interview with the Washington Post

"It is unknowable how long [the war in Iraq] will last. It could last six days, six weeks. I doubt six months." To U.S. troops in Aviano, Italy

"Needless to say, the President is correct. Whatever it was he said."

"We do know of certain knowledge that [Osama bin Laden] is either in Afghanistan, or in some other country, or dead. And we know of certain knowledge that we don't know which of those happens to be the case."

"Well, you know, something's neither good nor bad but thinking makes it so, I suppose, as Shakespeare said."

"That's all you guys do is read these books. You ought to get a life." To reporters during a press briefing

"I have never painted a rosy picture. I have been very measured in my words, and you'll have a dickens of a time trying to find instances where I have been excessively optimistic. I understand this is tough stuff." At Senate hearings, in an exchange with Sen. Hillary Clinton

"I don't do quagmires."

"I would not say that the future is necessarily less predictable than the past. I think the past was not predictable when it started."