Niceness.

Just noticed I have 2 posts in a row calling something "nice."

I have a "nice" tag, you know.

My favorite one is "My 2 favorite 'nice' songs." [ADDED: I redid the poll.]

And "When you're nice to someone else... that someone else is nice back to you, and suddenly two people feel good about themselves and each other, and spread their feelings."

"Nice" is an interesting word. As the (unlinkable) OED puts it:

The semantic development of this word from ‘foolish, silly’ to ‘pleasing’ is unparalleled in Latin or in the Romance languages. The precise sense development in English is unclear. N.E.D. (1906) s.v. notes that ‘in many examples from the 16th and 17th cent. it is difficult to say in what particular sense the writer intended it to be taken.’

The meaning "Kind or considerate in behaviour; friendly (towards others). Freq. in to be nice (to)" only goes back to the early 1800s. Example from F. Scott Fitzgerald, This Side of Paradise i. i. 38   "I'm tired of being nice to every poor fish in school." But the way I used it in the previous 2 posts is the meaning "Delicate or skilful in manipulation; dexterous," which goes back to the 1600s. Here's the poet John Donne, writing in 1633:

So kiss good turtles, so devoutly nice
Are priests in handling reverent sacrifice,
And such in searching wounds the surgeon is,
As we, when we embrace, or touch, or kiss.

Turtles... fish... 

This is the post where I try to understand what Andrew Sullivan means by "Meep Meep Watch."

This Sullivan post is some kind of defense of Obama that deploys a Roadrunner analogy. I know Road Runner is the source of the "meep meep," as the illustration of Roadrunner makes clear, and adding "watch" is a way Sullivan has of indicating that he's collecting things in a category.

So I understand that he's on the alert for Road-Runner-like activity. My working theory is that he's saying that Obama is like Road Runner, which would mean that he's got an enemy trying to destroy him and he keeps escaping destruction — by speed and/or extreme good luck. The enemy's efforts always backfire, and Obama/Road Runner, escaping one more time, emits a cry of glee — meep meep.

Sullivan begins:

It’s worth recalling the glee with which many hacks determined that the Obama presidency was over before the second term had really kicked in, well, only a month ago. 

So the cry of glee comes from Obama's enemies — The Hacks. Is it also worth recalling the other hacks who — a month before that — gleefully announced that the GOP had committed suicide? Sullivan notes the various troubles Obama has encountered — which were not traps set by his American political rivals at all: Healthcare.gov, Syria, Iran, the economy. He continues:

But it’s worth digesting how all these alleged disasters have settled down. 

We seem to be inside a digestive tract. It seems we've managed not to vomit. Sullivan proceeds to say things are looking better. And he ends like this:

The GOP remains utterly devoid of any constructive alternative to Obamacare, whose winners have been far less vocal – so far – than the winners. 

Is that "winners... winners" some kind of humor that escapes me — like a bird outrunning a falling rock — or just a thudding mistake?

The president is on the offensive – on economic inequality and healthcare. 

On the offensive... so he's the Coyote?

It’s far too soon to project anything certain. But what we sure can say is that a huge amount is still to play for.

What I can sure say is I'm pretty sure Obama must be the Road Runner in this analogy but... why? A huge amount is still to play for.... suggests we're at a gambling table. Road Runner, the cartoon character, doesn't even realize he's got a relentless enemy trying to destroy him. He's oblivious and lucky. You can't picture Road Runner transferring his kind of luck to, say, poker, where one squarely faces the opponent and must make decisive moves based on a known set of rules.

Sullivan's analogies and metaphors are a crazy quilt of a mixed bag of bouillabaise.

Only now will I do a "meep meep" search on Sullivan. I tried tracing the hits back to the beginning and — having opened 20+ tabs — encountered a demand to subscribe to the website. I'll stick to the tabs I've got. From September 15th, there's "Meep Meep, Motherfuckers," which has a photo of Obama looking very smug, a quote about Syria from Obama, Sullivan's exclamation "Oh, snap!" and then:

It’s been awesome to watch today as all the jerking knees quieted a little...

Do jerking knees make a noise like cracking knuckles? Can we watch quiet the way we listen to the color of our dreams?

... and all the instant judgments of the past month ceded to a deeper acknowledgment (even among Republicans) of what had actually been substantively achieved: something that, if it pans out, might be truly called a breakthrough – not just in terms of Syria, but also in terms of a better international system, and in terms of Iran.

The post ends:

So it was another treat to hear the president say, in tones that are unmistakable:

“I welcome him being involved. I welcome him saying, ‘I will take responsibility for pushing my client, the Assad regime, to deal with these chemical weapons.’ ”

Meep meep.

A treat? Sullivan feels he received a treat in hearing Obama say something that he paraphrases as the Road Runner's cry of glee at escaping another Coyote trap. But what is Road-Runneresque about Obama welcoming Putin's involvement, as if Obama is inviting Putin into an elaborate game in which we can't tell who will ultimately get played?

Here's a "Meep Meep Watch" from September 2012:

Has Obama now done to the entire GOP what he did to the Clintons, McCain and Romney? Make them somehow self-destruct? Know hope – and I haven’t said that in a while.

This one gives some clarity to what Sullivan seems to think he's seeing: a magical ability to luck into the self-destruction of one's enemies. It's like Bill Clinton's "He's Luckier Than A Dog With Two Dicks."

ADDED: Let's look at the official rules that Chuck Jones had for Road Runner, as explained in "Chuck Amuck: The Life and Times of an Animated Cartoonist."

1. The Road Runner cannot harm the coyote except by going "Beep-beep!" 

So, it's not "meep meep" at all, which just goes to show how wrong you can be.

2. No outside force can harm the coyote—only his own ineptitude or the failure of the Acme products.
3. The coyote can stop any time—if he were not a fanatic. (Repeat: "A fanatic is one who redoubles his effort when he has forgotten his aim."–George Santayana; this quote appears on a promotional poster featuring the duo; with the quote appearing in Burma Shave-style clips on signs amid the roadrunner's air wake)
4. There may be no dialogue ever, except "beep-beep!" The coyote may, however, speak to the audience through wooden signs that he holds up.
5. The Road Runner must stay on the road —otherwise, logically, he would not be called "Road Runner".
6. All action must be confined to the natural environment of the two characters—the southwest American desert.
7. All materials, tools, weapons, or mechanical conveniences must be obtained from the Acme Corporation.
8. Whenever possible, gravity should be made the coyote's greatest enemy.
9. The coyote is always more humiliated than harmed by his failures.
There was also a tenth and more unofficial rule: The sympathy of the audience must lie with the coyote.

The sympathy of the audience must lie with the coyote!

"Computers, like children, are more often taught by rote. They’re given thousands of rules and bits of data to memorize..."

"... If X happens, do Y; avoid big rocks — then sent out to test them by trial and error."

 This is slow, painstaking work, but it’s easier to predict and refine than machine learning. The trick, as in any educational system, is to combine the two in proper measure. Too much rote learning can make for a plodding machine. Too much experiential learning can make for blind spots and caprice. The roughest roads in the Grand Challenge were often the easiest to navigate, because they had clear paths and well-defined shoulders. It was on the open, sandy trails that the cars tended to go crazy. “Put too much intelligence into a car and it becomes creative,” Sebastian Thrun told me.

From a New Yorker article about self-driving cars.  I'm interested in the analogy to the education of humans especially with respect to the fear of creativity arising from too much intelligence but also the downside of too much experiential learning: blind spots and caprice.

"Both [Bush's] Iraq intervention and Obama's health-care 'reform' were responses to a status quo that was widely understood to be unsatisfactory."

"We would argue that the former replaced a horrific regime with a better, albeit still flawed, one, whereas the latter appears on its way to replacing a flawed regime with a horrific one."

But it's difficult to dispute that both efforts suffered from severe misjudgments in execution, or that both were entered into amid a cocky overconfidence that led to gross overestimates of the benefits and underestimates of the costs.

Shock and awe/big fucking deal.

The NYT acknowledges Obama's in trouble by reminding us that Bush was really, really bad. Remember?!!

At the website front page the teaser headline  — which is also the headline in the paper version — is:  "As Troubles Pile Up, a Crisis of Confidence for Obama." But if you click to the article, the headline becomes "Health Law Rollout’s Stumbles Draw Parallels to Bush’s Hurricane Response."

I can think of a whole bunch of non-parallels:

1. Bush's political party didn't design and enact Hurricane Katrina.

2. Bush didn't have 5 years to craft his response to the hurricane.

3. Bush didn't have the power to redesign the hurricane as he designed his response to it.

4. The Republican Bush believed he could not simply bully past the Democratic Mayor of New Orleans and the Democratic Governor of Louisiana and impose a federal solution, but the Democrat Obama and his party in Congress aggressively and voluntarily took over an area of policy that might have been left to the states.

5. The media were ready to slam Bush long and hard for everything — making big scandals out of things that, done by Obama, would have been forgotten a week later (what are the Valerie Plame-level screwups of Obama's?) — but the media have bent over backwards for years to help make Obama look good and to bury or never even uncover all of his lies and misdeeds.

6. If Bush experienced a disaster like the rollout of Obamacare, the NYT wouldn't use its front page to remind us of something Bill Clinton did that looked bad.

But let's check out the asserted parallels in that NYT article by Michael D. Shear:

The disastrous rollout of his health care law not only threatens the rest of his agenda but also raises questions about his competence in the same way that the Bush administration’s botched response to Hurricane Katrina undermined any semblance of Republican efficiency.

But unlike Mr. Bush, who faced confrontational but occasionally cooperative Democrats, Mr. Obama is battling a Republican opposition that has refused to open the door to any legislative fixes to the health care law and has blocked him at virtually every turn. 

Oh, well, that's another nonparallel. Republicans oppose Obama, unlike those Democrats who sometimes helped Bush. And the NYT reinforces my point #5 (above).

But think about it this way, NYT. What if Bush and the Republicans had created the hurricane, and the Democrats adamantly believed it would be better not to have a hurricane? Would the Democrats have been "occasionally cooperative" to Republicans who smugly announced that they won the election and they've been wanting this hurricane for 100 years and canceling the hurricane was not an option?

Republicans readily made the Hurricane Katrina comparison. 

Oh? Note the wording. It doesn't say that important Republicans were bringing up Katrina on their own. I suspect that the journalist, Shear, asked various Republicans to talk about Bush and Katrina and some of them did.

“The echoes to the fall of 2005 are really eerie,” said Peter D. Feaver, a top national security official in Mr. Bush’s second term. “Katrina, which is shorthand for bungled administration policy, matches to the rollout of the website.” 

Okay, so Shear got Feaver to put a name on the assertion that Republicans made the comparison. No other Republican is named. Shear moves on to Obama's "top aides" and tells us — here's my point #5 again —  that they stressed how unlike Katrina it is, since "Mr. Obama is struggling to extend health care to millions of people who do not have it. Those are very different issues."

I agree. The health care screwup isn't a natural disaster. Obama and the Democrats made their own disaster, stepping up to do something they should have known they weren't going to be able to do well, and they lied about what they were doing to get it passed.

And yet they meant well. They wanted to help people. Unlike Bush, who — what? — asked for that hurricane?

ADDED: My point #4, above, draws from this passage in Bush's "Decision Points" (previously blogged here):

If I invoked the Insurrection Act against [Governor Blanco's] wishes, the world would see a male Republican president usurping the authority of a female Democratic governor by declaring an insurrection in a largely African American city. That left me in a tough position. That would arouse controversy anywhere. To do so in the Deep South, where there had been centuries of states' rights tensions, could unleash holy hell.

And the NYT would have framed it that way (which is my point #5).

If you think the NYT is inclined to explain the racial angle to all manner of stories...

... you should notice when it fails to do so, as here: "Era Fades for Helping Hand at the Washroom Sink."

The NYT readers did. One reader wrote:

I'm surprised that racism is not mentioned.... I have not seen many bathroom attendants, but I never saw a white man in the position and always felt that my tip was like a vote cast in favor of a miserable and humiliating caste system.

Ha. This is a reason not to tip?!

Another wrote:

In September I took my 14-year-old daughter to Manhattan and to our very special lunch in the City. More than the food or excitement of Balthazar's lively atmosphere, or the fantasy that she was in a Parisienne cafe, is her memory of the bathroom, and the bathroom attendant. She was astonished at the idea of a bathroom attendant even after I, her 70s disco clubbing worldly mom explained, even after our teachable moment about racism, economics, education, sexism, fine dining, NYC, etc. She thought it had to be the worst job ever -- cooped up in that tiny smelly space hoping someone would give you a dollar for a paper towel; how would a poor old lady have money to spend for a stranger's perfume? It looked like slavery to her, too. I have to agree; although I see the need for reliable sanitation throughout the workday it really is archaic and peculiar.

(I added the link to that last word.)

"So let it be written" — 5 million lines of code... and "a couple of hundred functional fixes" on the "punch list" they're "pretty aggressive" about getting to.

You know who Tony Trenkle is? No, of course not. You didn't know who he was and you didn't notice the other day when he was thrown under the bus to appease you. Some appeasement! That was supposed to distract us the other day, by happening at the same time as HHS Secretary Kathleen Sebelius was slated for more exposure:

She made her comments at a hearing of the Senate Finance Committee hours after the Obama administration disclosed that the chief information officer at the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services would retire. His office supervised the creation of the troubled website.

The official, Tony Trenkle, will step down on Nov. 15 “to take a position in the private sector,” according to an email circulated among agency employees. He has supervised the spending of $2 billion a year on information technology products and services, including the development of the website.

Okay, then. Trenkle down. Feel better yet? But let's look at Sebelius:

Ms. Sebelius said officials had a list of “a couple of hundred functional fixes” that had to be made so the website, HealthCare.gov, would work smoothly for most users by Nov. 30, a deadline set by the administration.

“We’re not where we need to be,” Ms. Sebelius said. “It’s a pretty aggressive schedule to get to the entire punch list by the end of November.”

Oh, the punch list! The list of a couple hundred things they've noted need fixing. They haven't fixed them yet. They've just noticed a couple hundred things, in there in that 5 million lines of code. Get on it, code-writing peons:



Or do you prefer "Look, Daddy! Paste it!"?

Obama admits government — compared to the private sector — is far less capable of accomplishing anything on computers.

In yesterday's interview with Chuck Todd, Obama said:

You know, one of the lessons -- learned from this whole process on the website -- is that probably the biggest gap between the private sector and the federal government is when it comes to I.T. ...

Well, the reason is is that when it comes to my campaign, I'm not constrained by a bunch of federal procurement rules, right? 

That is, many have pointed out that his campaign website was really good, so why didn't that mean that he'd be good at setting up a health insurance website? The answer is that the government is bad because the government is hampered by... government!

And how we write -- specifications and -- and how the -- the whole things gets built out. So part of what I'm gonna be looking at is how do we across the board, across the federal government, leap into the 21st century.

I love the combination of: 1. Barely able to articulate what the hell happens inside these computer systems, and 2. Wanting to leap!

Because when it comes to medical records for veterans, it's still done in paper. Medicaid is still largely done on paper.

When we buy I.T. services generally, it is so bureaucratic and so cumbersome that a whole bunch of it doesn't work or it ends up being way over cost. 

This should have made him sympathetic to the way government burdens private enterprise, but he's focused on liberating government to take over more of what has been done privately. And yet there's no plan, no idea about what would suddenly enable government to displace private businesses competing to offer a product people want to buy.

Instead, we've been told we must buy a product, and things have been set up so we can only go through the government's market (the "exchange"), and the government has already demonstrated that its market doesn't work. But you can't walk away, you're forced to buy, and there's nowhere else to go. And yet, he wants us to feel bad about the cumbersome bureaucracy the government encountered trying to procure the wherewithal to set up the market it had already decided we would all need to use.

It's like a medieval torturer complaining to his victim about how difficult it is to use pilliwinks while the thumbscrews are on backorder.

And yeah, in some ways, I should have anticipated that just because this was important and I was saying this was my top priority. And I was meeting with folks once a month telling 'em, "Make sure this works."

He was meeting with his "folks" once a month. He was tellin' 'em "Make sure this works." Why didn't that work, that tellin' 'em? The tellin'-the-folks method. He is the President. I think it looked like this:



Why didn't that work? Who knew?!

There are gonna be some lessons learned....

Yeah, he had to learn that you can't just say This is important, I care — Obamacare — and so let it be done. Make sure this works.

Minimizing the crimes of women (in a serious case about federalism).

Here's how WaPo's Robert Barnes begins his report about a case of attempted murder:

A melodramatic love triangle begat a ham-handed revenge poisoning. That led to what one Supreme Court justice called an “unimaginable” federal prosecution of the scorned wife under a law enacted to implement a global chemical weapons treaty.

As long as the victim didn't actually die, it's just some kind of joke?

Now, there is a problem with the feds taking over this prosecution, and that should be the focus of the story about this case. But you should see how outrageous it is to diminish the criminal behavior in this gendered fashion.

Carol Anne Bond, a Pennsylvania microbiologist... ordered a rare blend of chemicals, partly off the Internet, and over the next several months tried to poison [Myrlinda] Haynes 24 times by putting them on her doorknob, car and, critically, mailbox.

Just some nutty lady's bumbling parry in a cat fight?

Federal prosecutors charged Bond with violating the 1998 Chemical Weapons Convention Implementation Act, a law based on the chemical weapons ban treaty that is signed by all but four of the world’s nations.

The problem here is not the unseriousness of attempted murder. It's that murder is traditionally left to the states, and the federal government is — at least theoretically — a government of limited, enumerated powers. With this important constitutional principle at stake, Bond is represented by the great ex-Solicitor General Paul Clement:

Clement...  said that if the law implementing the treaty “really does reach every malicious use of chemicals anywhere in the nation, as the government insists,” then it violates the “bedrock principle of our federalist system that Congress lacks a general police power to criminalize conduct” that does not have distinctly federal concern....

[Justice Elena Kagan] said the treaty gave Congress the power to pass implementing legislation. “So you have to find a constraint on the treaty power. Where does it come from?” she demanded.

Justice Sonia Sotomayor worried about the courts hamstringing efforts to deal with terrorism. 

Writing tip for Barnes: If you've already got "ham-handed," don't use "hamstringing." Too much ham.

“It would be deeply ironic that we have expended so much energy criticizing Syria, when if this court were now to declare that our joining or creating legislation to implement the treaty was unconstitutional,” she said.

Now, we're getting to the real meat of it. The government was represented by the current Solicitor General, Donald B. Verrilli Jr.

Chief Justice John G. Roberts Jr., who posed no questions to Clement, asked Verrilli if it would be possible for the president to join a treaty that gives national governments all powers and for Congress then to put in place such legislation.

When Verrilli said that would be unimaginable, Justice Anthony M. Kennedy shot back: “It also seems unimaginable that you would bring this prosecution.”

That led the conservative justices — plus Justice Stephen G. Breyer, who usually sides with the liberals — to unleash a barrage of hypotheticals of what could be prosecuted under the broad law, which covers chemicals that could harm humans or animals: a wheelbarrow full of kerosene; a poisoned potato given to a horse; the performance-enhancing drugs allegedly used by cyclist Lance Armstrong.

“Would it shock you if I told you that a few days ago my wife and I distributed toxic chemicals to a great number of children?” Alito asked Verrilli, drawing laughter from the court’s spectators. He explained that chocolate Halloween candy is “poison to dogs, so it’s a toxic chemical” under the act.

Verrilli chafed, saying, “This is serious business.”

Yes, it truly is. It's easy to see Kennedy's point: The federal government shouldn't have chosen to prosecute this case. But it did, and now what? It's easy to think: The central government needs ample power to do everything that might need to be done at a national level and it should refrain from using that power to deal with matters that are better left to the states.

But it doesn't refrain.

The administration's refusal to give Congress access to the Benghazi witnesses.

On today's "Fox News Sunday," Lindsay Graham was talking about his threat of blocking all the President's nominees in the Senate until Congress is given access to the witnesses to the Benghazi attack.

CHRIS WALLACE: OK. So, when you and other senators -- because you're not along in this -- asked to talk to the survivors... or to read the interviews that the FBI conducted within hours after the attack... what does the administration say to you?

GRAHAM: They say it's an ongoing criminal investigation, which is stunning. Under that theory, we would not be able to look at 9/11 and to Khalid Sheikh Mohammed was prosecuted. He's still not even going to trial....

Under that theory there would not have been Watergate hearings!

GRAHAM: Can you imagine if this was George W. Bush and he told the Congress after 9/11 -- you can't talk to anybody because there's a potential criminal investigation, we're not going to investigate how 9/11 became the failure that it was?

"When we were an agrarian nation, all cars were trucks..."

"... because that’s what you needed on the farm."

That's an analogy from Steve Jobs, quoted in a NYT article about the newest iteration of the iPad. Is it really true that the earliest cars were truck-like? I didn't believe that. I Google. I get to Wikipedia. I'm amazed and call out this question to Meade (who is editing dog video in the next room): "When do you think the earliest thing that could be called a car — an automobile — was?" He says 1910, then re-guesses 1890. I say: "1672."

Ferdinand Verbiest, a member of a Jesuit mission in China, built the first steam-powered vehicle around 1672 as a toy for the Chinese Emperor. It was of small enough scale that it could not carry a driver but it was, quite possibly, the first working steam-powered vehicle ('auto-mobile').

Yes, you can say that doesn't count. But if it doesn't, we've still got things in the 18th century:

Nicolas-Joseph Cugnot demonstrated his fardier à vapeur ("steam dray"), an experimental steam-driven artillery tractor, in 1770 and 1771. As Cugnot's design proved to be impractical, his invention was not developed in his native France. The centre of innovation shifted to Great Britain. By 1784, William Murdoch had built a working model of a steam carriage in Redruth, and in 1801 Richard Trevithick was running a full-sized vehicle on the road in Camborne. Such vehicles were in vogue for a time, and over the next decades such innovations as hand brakes, multi-speed transmissions, and better steering developed. Some were commercially successful in providing mass transit, until a backlash against these large speedy vehicles resulted in the passage of the Locomotive Act (1865), which required self-propelled vehicles on public roads in the United Kingdom to be preceded by a man on foot waving a red flag and blowing a horn.

When do you think was the earliest law stopping progress?

"New York City Used To Be A Terrifying Place."

A photo essay, from last August about NYC in they pre-Giuliani years, which I ran across this afternoon as I was thinking about the electoral prospects of the left-Democrat mayoral candidate Bill de Blasio in the aftermath of Alexian Lien's motorpsycho nightmare.

Scroll down at the first link to find: "Bernhard Goetz, who shot four youths in a subway train in 1984, became a symbol for the paranoia New Yorkers felt about getting robbed or attacked."

Lien got me thinking about Goetz. Similarities and differences. Goetz had a gun and overreacted out of fear; Lien had a car and underreacted (at first). Arguably. Those are the differences.

The similarity is: A man embodies the plight of an ordinary citizen in a city gone wild. And mayors are held accountable.

"Arguendo" — a play with the text lifted from a Supreme Court oral argument about free speech and nude dancing.

At the Public Theater until the end of October. From a review in NY Magazine by Scott Brown (presumably not the political dreamboat Scott Brown)(links added by me):

In 80 dizzy minutes of towering, tottering legalese, hilariously atrocious wigs and highly athletic swivel-chair-ballet, five performer-creators... do the seemingly impossible: They make the Rehnquist Court feel as intellectually rigorous as The Muppet Show. (And I mean that flatteringly, with respect to The Muppet Show.)...

Guided by conceiver-director John Collins and aided by the endlessly creative video projections... the ensemble teases out the muffled passions and inarticulable absurdities throbbing beneath the intellectual chessmatch of [Barnes v. Glen Theatre Inc.]—is this an obscenity case? Is dance really “expression”? “Why do they call this place a ‘bookstore’?”—and crystallize the justices as characters without resorting to direct caricature.... The black-robed sages literally circle Indiana Attorney General Uhl (played by Williams and Knight) and respondent attorney Ennis (Iveson), swooping down like vultures one minute, creeping up like Skeksis the next, depending on the line of attack.... The whole nature of expression is called into question in the uninhibited finale, where briefs of all sorts go flying.... The show’s ultimate thrust is a bit of a feint, but the legal term “arguendo” translates colloquially to “for the sake of argument,” not “to conclude definitively and forcefully.”... [A]s a friend of mine used to say, “to reach a conclusion is to limit the potential of argument.” 

That review could use a rewrite. Maximum sexual innuendo or children's puppet show analogy: Pick one.

From the NY Post review of the play: 

Since the case revolves the issue of defining nude dancing as a means of communication, Collins seems to extend the discussion to the idea of theater itself. Can you turn any document into a play, even a law case? Can actors jumping and yelling seemingly randomly qualify as a show, and does nudity make that much of a difference?

Lo and behold, [the actor playing the lawyer for the strip club] strips to a golden thong, black socks and dress shoes. Then he takes off the thong.

He takes takes off his underpants to nail the argument.

HuffPo has a lawprof's cogitations. It's Michael Meltsner, who uses Barnes in his teaching of oral advocacy (and who wrote a book called "Race, Rape, and Injustice: Documenting and Challenging Death Penalty Cases in the Civil Rights Era").

Alas, while the production presents the legal arguments of two knowledgeable advocates, it is replete with jargon and enough insider's free expression law that even many lawyers in the audience were grabbing smart phones to do some instant Googling. Collins has chosen neither to dignify the ideas expressed by the lawyers nor use them as a take off point for a serious exploration of a culture that debates at the highest levels the constitutional value of public nudity before consenting adults.

That would all by perfectly ok if the result was really funny but too often the text has been saddled by distracting black robbed justices swivel chairing around the stage, enough voices overriding voices to suggest a confusing Tower of Babel in what for all its faults is a process that in the real world aims at clarity and a chaotic display of less than beautiful frontal nudity.

Ooh. Ow.

I hope you like the link I did — up there in the first indented block of text — on "briefs of all sorts go flying." That was the most literally apt image from a Google search on "flying underpants." But something urges me to show you this too:



What is Sting saying via flight-themed underpants? The eloquence of his expression escapes the banks of chaos in my mind.

Poets, priests and politicians

And lawyers and judges...

Have words to thank for their positions
Words that scream for your submission
And no one's jamming their transmission
'Cos when their eloquence escapes you
Their logic ties you up and rapes you 

When words tie you up and rape you, say it with — or without — underpants. Sing a song. Sting a thong.

"Community organizers like President Barack Obama make great husbands."

Begins a Margaret Carlson column.

They listen before making decisions, never insist that it’s their way or the highway, and won’t leave the cap off the toothpaste tube. They consult on the big life stuff such as where to live, and they rarely draw red lines. When they do, they agonize over whether sending the children to bed without dessert sends the right message.

This must make Michelle Obama very happy; Americans, less and less. The president’s community-organizing skills don’t so much make him lead from behind as they make him lead this way and that (let’s bomb Syria; oh, dear, let’s not). He wants to please everyone, but in the real world, only one faction can be satisfied at a time, leaving everyone else very unsatisfied....

Is this Obama's problem, wanting to please everyone, wanting to give everyone their say?

And has it ever been established that the community organizer phase of Obama's life represented his true core, the real structure of his character, where his most basic attributes had the best fit?


It's something he did between the years 1985 and 1988. It's a meme about him, a meme that worked as he campaigned for political office (and campaigning has occupied far more of Obama's time over the years than community organizing).

Here's Byron York in September 2008 asking "What Did Obama Do As A Community Organizer?
And is it really a qualification to be president?" Excerpt:

... Obama seemed to realize that it was very, very hard to get anything done. “He didn’t see organizing making any significant changes in things,” Jerry Kellman recalled.

The solution, Obama felt, was to find a way to political power of his own.

“He was constantly thinking about his path to significance and power,” Mike Kruglik told me. “He said, ‘I need to go there [Harvard Law School] to find out more about power. How do powerful people think? What kind of networks do they have? How do they connect to each other?’”

In a few months, Obama was gone. He had been an organizer for three years. When he returned to Chicago after law school...

Note that law school also takes 3 years.

... he did some voter-registration work and then joined a civil-rights practice. In 1996, he ran for the state senate. Eight years later, he was elected to the U.S. Senate, and within a year after that he was exploring a run for president....

Community organizing is just as essential in understanding Obama. But what does it say about him?...

When he left for law school, Obama wondered what he had accomplished as an organizer. He certainly had some achievements, but he did not — perhaps could not — concede that there might be something wrong with his approach to Chicago’s problems. Instead of questioning his own premises, he concluded that he simply needed more power to get the job done. So he made plans to run for political office. And in each successive office, he has concluded that he did not have enough power to get the job done, so now he is running for the most powerful office in the land.

And what if he gets it? He’ll be the biggest, strongest organizer in the world. He’ll dazzle the country with his message of hope and possibility. But we shouldn’t expect much to actually get done.

"Obama plays 27 holes."

"After morning briefings on the crisis in Syria...."

6 ideas for Obama supporters on how to spin this:

1. Impressive to work on a Saturday, when most ordinary golfers head straight for the course.

2. 27! Wow! Most golfers poop out after 18 holes.

3. A round and a half. A circle followed by an elegant a semi-circle. Creative! Who but Obama thinks of such things? Brilliant!

4. Oh, how much new is there really on any given day about Syria? What difference at this point does it make?

5. Why do you think they call them "briefings"? They're brief.

6. You don't want to get into the weeds — in briefings as in golf. NOTE: You've got to be careful with the "weed" imagery. The mind drifts here, but the point is: Jimmy Carter micromanaged, and Obama is not like Carter.

"The city does not allow meals to be served to members of the public in someone’s home."

Illegal "supper clubs" in NYC.

Basically, these are dinner parties where guests pay. Something about exchanging money makes the private zone public, right? Like with prostitution.

"The word 'slam-dunk' should be retired from the American national security issues."

Said John Kerry on "Meet the Press" today, when David Gregory asked him: "This is a sarin gas attack, perpetrated by the Assad regime, this is a slam-dunk case that he did it?"

The term "slam-dunk" figured large in the run-up to the Iraq War. Hence the resistance. It should connote certainty, but the meaning got flipped. To use it now is to seem to say: How do we know you're not conning us? And I'm going to assume David Gregory meant the insinuation, because everyone's been making the comparison to the selling of the Iraq War.

"Barely a third of U.S. senators pay their interns — and embarrassingly for Democrats, a party focused on workplace welfare, most of them are Republicans."

Under the heading "EXPLOITATION," Instapundit links to this piece in The Atlantic.

No pay is the ultimate defense against the accusation of low pay.

It's the difference between a girlfriend and a cheap prostitute.

If you don't have the money to buy something at a price that won't offend the seller, you should try to get it for free. Then the seller is flattered.

This is the way the world works. Not everything is commerce, or — I should say — not everything is always usefully portrayed as commerce. The only hypocrisy I see in Congress here is that whenever they want to use their Commerce Power, they'll argue that their regulatory target is commerce.

A 332-page book about Justice Holmes's dissenting opinion in Abrams.

Reviewed here by Alan Dershowitz, who says:

In “The Great Dissent,” Thomas Healy, a professor of law at Seton Hall Law School... postulates that a chance encounter with Learned Hand — then a district court judge — on the train between New York and Boston planted the seed that eventually blossomed into Holmes’s full-blown defense of free speech. Hand attempted to convince the 77-year-old justice that tolerance of dissenting, even obnoxious and dangerous, views was essential to democratic governance, but his effort seemed at first to fall on deaf ears: Holmes insisted that the state could legitimately enforce what a majority accepted as the truth, which he defined as “the majority vote of that nation that can lick all the others.” He accused his younger judicial colleague of striking “at the sacred right to kill the other fellow when he disagrees,” and he later invoked an absurd analogy between the power of the state to vaccinate those who might spread dangerous diseases and to imprison those who might spread dangerous ideas.

"Some rock stars get tragic as time passes... That would never happen to Rod."

"He doesn’t take any of this nonsense personally.... You don’t get to be Rod Stewart unless you have an element of the cold-blooded showbiz huckster... But you also don’t get to be a husband unless you have some Rod Stewart in you — grinding through the years, getting off on repetition."

From a review of Rob Sheffied's book "Turn Around Bright Eyes: The Rituals of Love & Karaoke."