Beyond Good and Evil

Ta-Nehisi Coates says some very wise things regarding whether Stephen Alec Baldwin is a "bigot":

Alwan believes that we shouldn't, "make global judgments about people’s characters based on their worst moments, when they are least in control of themselves." I reject the notion that "bigot" is a "global judgement." Aside from Abraham Lincoln and Ulysses S. Grant, no single white person may be more responsible for the destruction of slavery than William Sherman. But Uncle Billy was—even in his own time—a reconstructed bigot and white supremacist. This is neither shocking nor particularly complicated. There is no reason why one could not, on the one hand believe, that slavery should have ended, and also believed that black people were inferior and worthy of a lesser place in society. "Bigot" is not a polite way of saying "child-molester" or "serial killer" or "genocidal maniac" or even asshole. And it does not automatically blot out one's other qualities such as "caring father," "good husband," "charitable giver," or "supporter of marriage equality."

Black people—who have spent much of the history living around, working for, or working with actual bigots but have not had the luxury of dismissing them "globally"—understand this. I suspect that women—who have, for some time, had to live around, work with, and work for sexists and misogynists, but have not had the luxury of "globally" dismissing them—understand this too. And I suspect the LGBT community, where people must function in families with other people who believe their lifestyle to be a sin, understand this as well. If you are gay your father or mother could be a "homophobic bigot," but you might well love him all the same. For a significant period of American history it was common for black people to have fathers who were white supremacists. Some of us hated our fathers. But for many of us, the feeling was somehow more complicated.

The ability to "globally" label anyone is a privilege that people who live with a boot on their neck don't really enjoy. We see people as complicated, because we must, because your tormentor one moment might be your liberator the next. This is not theoretical. In 1863, General James Longstreet led an Army that kidnapped free black people and sold them into slavery. Ten years later, Longstreet was leading black soldiers in a courageous, if doomed, campaign against white terrorists in Louisiana.

This is a very important insight. In contemporary parlance, "bigot" or "racist" or "anti-Semite" all refer -- and can only refer -- to someone on par with Hitler or the Klan (that is to say, "genocidal maniacs"). This seems like it should be a great victory for the anti-racist, anti-anti-Semitic, and anti-bigotry crowd. It isn't. As Coates observes, it flattens the enormous pluralism that comprises a racist, anti-Semitic, or otherwise bigoted social sphere, which includes a wide range of attitudes and behaviors that often lie quite far from (and may be held in opposition to) these blood-thirsty extremes. But perhaps more importantly, it stunts our ability to think about bigotry in all but the most superficial and unproductive ways.

As the defense of Baldwin demonstrates, structuring our thoughts about bigotry so it is synonymous with "unmitigated evildoer" only acts to shield the majority of bigoted attitudes and activity from scrutiny. The analysis becomes simple: (1) Alec is accused of being a bigot; (2) to be a bigot is to be a monster; (3) Alec is not a monster; therefore (4) Alec is not a bigot. This applies when we are appraising other people, and it clearly applies when thinking about ourselves: it is a rare person who -- taking the "bigot-as-moral-monster" approach -- will proceed to think "why yes, I am a disgraceful human being with no redeeming characteristics." More likely, we'll reject the appraisal, and aggressively denounce the person who made such a transparently ludicrous and offensive characterization of us.

The net effect of this outlook is that racism, anti-Semitism, and bigotry are so serious that they don't exist. It is pretty clear who benefits from that state of affairs, and it is not those still under the heel of these oppressions. It is to the advantage of those who hold onto or benefit from bigotry and oppression to have such things defined as the sole province of history's greatest monsters, for few would be so bold (and fewer would be convinced) that any sizable chunk of the population is such a creature.

Good Fences Make Good Communities

Alex Sinclair has a column up in Ha'aretz where he pleads with his right-wing pro-Israel friends not to attack his pro-Israel bona fides just because he approaches questions of Israeli policy from a more liberal perspective. In particular, he observes a dynamic whereby right-wing "pro-Israel" Jews, no matter how strenuously one disagrees with them, will never have their credentials as "pro-Israel" questioned; whereas for left-wing Jews this happens as a matter of course.

Very rarely do you hear left-wing Jews delegitimize the right-wing’s place in the Jewish community. Right-wing Jews who find themselves in situations where they are the minority amongst left-wingers may be subjected to harshly-worded questions, prejudiced assumptions, and even name-calling that goes too far (most right-wingers are not really “fascists”!) But rarely will you hear a left-wing Jew say that a right-wing Jew’s opinions make him suspect as a Jew. Or that her opinions make her unsuitable to lead a Jewish organization or community. Or that their positions should not be taught to the younger generation.

The same is not true the other way round. Discourse from the right towards the left often spreads beyond name-calling into delegitimization. Left-wing Zionists are accused of consorting with those who wish to destroy Israel, of not really being Zionists, of self-hate, of naivete.

Sinclair appeals for symmetry -- we should assume the good faith of left-wing participants on the same basis as we do our right-ward friends. Neither should be "delegitimized."

I certainly agree with symmetry. But it's interesting to me that I primarily think of this in the other direction: Just as a left-wing Jews' "pro-Israel" credentials are routinely questioned if they reach beyond certain lines, right-wing "pro-Israel" Jews should also find their status up for debate if they step beyond the pale. The point is that, if we want to say the terrain of "pro-Israel" is bounded -- that certain positions cannot be reconciled with being "pro-Israel" regardless of the assertion of the proponents (or even their subjective intentions) -- there must be rightward as well as leftward borders. Yet, as I observed previously, only one direction is policed:

The claim that one can purport to be pro-Israel, and yet act or advocate in ways that do it harm, is fair enough. But it has to be an even-handed principle, and there is little evidence that it is applied to right-wing Zionists, as opposed to only their left-wing peers. This is unjustifiable -- right-wing Zionists are guilty of many of the flaws Rabbi Kaufman identifies, and deserve the same level of chastisement for their breaches.
[...]
A bare assertion of good intentions is not sufficient to render a policy program "pro-Israel", and we need to have the space to call out people who stray from certain broad but recognizable boundary lines. But it has to be a two-way street. It can't be the case that right-wingers are free to be Zionist however they choose -- even when they criticize Israeli security determinations, even when they advocate a one-state solution -- while their leftist peers are constantly put under the microscope. There are borders on both sides, and we can't place one under stringent surveillance while leaving the other entirely unpoliced. One can claim to be a Zionist -- even a right-wing Zionist -- and still be a bad Zionist.

It is possible that this is a "second-best" compromise -- it would be better if, as Sinclair requests, that we all respect the good faith of all persons holding themselves out as pro-Israel. But I'm genuinely unsure. That "pro-Israel" is not infinitely malleable and that the Jewish community has the right to define certain borders strikes me as indisputably correct. While those borders should be broad, they should exist. For "pro-Israel" to be an intelligible category, after all, some things need to be excluded from its auspices. The point is that these fences cannot apply only to one side. I think it is a good and valuable thing that one-staters are not viewed as "pro-Israel," but that applies to those on the right as much as the left. If one only has a border on one end of the territory, one doesn't have a defined territory at all.

Knockout

Several assorted thoughts on CNN's article regarding a series of teenage assaults, titled "Terrifying teen 'knockout' game assaults spreading". First, some excerpts from the article:

- A sick so-called game known as "knockout" -- where teens randomly sucker-punch strangers with the goal of knocking them unconscious with a single blow -- is catching the attention of law enforcement throughout the nation.
[...]
Authorities have reported similar incidents [to one occurring in New Jersey] in New York, Illinois, Missouri and Washington.

One of the latest attacks happened on Friday, when someone was allegedly punched on a street in Brooklyn. Police brought four men in for questioning and arrested 28-year-old Amrit Marajh.
[...]
Youth violence expert Chuck Williams blamed the media and parents for what called extreme aggression by America's youth. Negative attention, he said, is often rewarded.

"That's America. America loves violence and so do our kids," Williams said. "We market violence to our children and we wonder why they're violent. It's because we are."

Williams, a professor of psychology and education at Drexel University in Philadelphia, said some young people are desperate for attention. He called it the "Miley Cyrus effect," where teens will do anything to get noticed, no matter how heinous or unconscionable.

"These kids know the consequences," he said. "They want to get arrested. They want to get caught, because they want that notoriety. They know they won't go away forever because they're kids. It's a win-win all around for them."
[...]
Republican New York State Assemblyman Jim Tedisco on Wednesday proposed new legislation he's calling the "Knockout Assault Deterrent Act," calling for juveniles charged with the random assaults to be tried as adults.

Now, my reactions:

First, I am 100% confident that this is not a national trend. There are several reasons for this, starting with the fact that these "terrifying teen crime-as-game wave" stories always turn out to be overblown (at best). Remember "wilding"? I'd ask how the media gets duped by this over and over again, except "duped" is the wrong word for "actively enflaming social anxieties in an effort to sell copy". Beyond that, there being reports of teenagers attacking people in five states does not a meaningful trend make. This would be true even if the one of "teenagers" cited as being part of the trend wasn't 28.

Second, I am 100% confident that "the media" and "culture" are not to blame for attacks by teenagers. Aside from the causality problem evident from the fact that everyone is exposed to this same culture yet most young people are not turning violent, juvenille crime rates have been consistently falling for the past 15 years. At the moment, our rates of juvenile murder and rape are lower than they were in 1960. Perhaps we should start contemplating what horrors were wrought by the horribly violent culture of the Leave it Beaver era. Or perhaps we can talk about our ongoing media culture of sensationalizing fictive "crime wave" stories which serve to justify over-policing and further damage trust relations between the police and communities they serve.

Third, I am 100% confident that the vast majority of young people contemplating engaging in random acts of violence do not have any sense of the legal framework and sentencing guidelines which govern their contemplated offenses. I base this on the fact that I'm pretty sure I was in the 99.9th percentile of legally-aware teenagers, and I had no idea about what criminal penalties existed for various offenses. To the extent that teenagers do have beliefs that their sentences will be relatively lenient, I am sure it comes not from poring over the latest statutes to emerge from the legislature but rather from a vague sense that "juveniles don't do hard time," which won't be sensitive to changes in penalties. Moreover, the youths most at risk for this sort of behavior are also those most likely to know from personal experience that teenagers can and are sent to prison for long periods of time.

Honestly, stories like this make me really angry. They're the same "mistake" over and over, and unlike the majority of American teenagers they actually do pose a systematic threat to the safety of our nation, by misdirecting legal and police resources and by reinforcing narratives that lead to the police and young Americans seeing each other as enemies. It's disgraceful.

UPDATE: As if to mock me, CNN posts the video entitled "Is The Knockout Game Even Real?" They spend 95% of the time rehashing the knockout game sensationalism, followed by quickly noting that there may be nothing distinguishing these attacks from other random acts of violence (let alone warranting a "trend story"). Even this caveat is immediately brushed aside on the grounds that we all should be terrified of this wave of violence.

Things People Blame the Jews for, Volume VIII: Colonialism

It's Thanksgiving, and of course that brings to mind colonialism. And that ideology and action is the subject of this week's edition of Things People Blame the Jews For.

But I was thinking -- it is a seemingly inevitable facet of this feature that it portrays only one side of the story. I might write about people who blame the Jews for Energy Speculation, for example, but in doing so I invariably ignore those who blame the Jews for not allowing enough energy speculation. How unfair is that? It certainly does not give due respect to the fantastic creativity of the blame-the-Jews crowd.

So this week, I decided to make things harder. Obviously, it is not difficult to find people who blame Jews for colonialism (generally in the Middle East, though again the range really knows no bounds). But can we find someone who blames the Jews for making us care about colonialism? Yes we can! [http://linkis.com/veteranstoday.com/YzAh]

Aztec culture was the pinnacle of the civilizations speaking the Nahuatl language when history says Mesoamerican civilization was discovered by Christian Europeans. This “civilization” lends an element of belief to the Cthulhu Mythos of HP Lovecraft. Savagery so unprecedented in the annals of known human cultural practices that the original assessment of the conquistadors, that it was orchestrated by Demons from hell, is still the most valid.
[...]
Much revisionist history has been written about the conquest of the Aztecs in the hundreds of years after the facts, especially by those within the scientific community indoctrinated into the Caucasian self-loathing and cultic denial of the soul which has become the standard Smithsonian and National Geographic fare welded like a weapon of mass destruction in the hands of Jewish professors.

Stupid Jews, making good White people feel bad about slaughtering savage brown people. Truly, the idea that it is bad to invade others' territory and mercilessly slaughter its inhabitants for the gain of outsiders was one of the more insidious weapons in my arsenal back when I was a Jewish professor.

The New Old Line State

The secession movement (which, as per history, is comprised of conservative furious that liberals win elections) rolls into Western Maryland. Fun fact: If "Western Maryland" was admitted, it would become the first state featuring more counties than people.

(Fun actual fact: The combined population of the targeted counties -- Allegany, Carroll, Frederick, Garrett and Washington -- is roughly 653,000, which would place it as the 48th most populous state in the union: ahead of Vermont but behind North Dakota)

Normal Identities

Via Amp at Alas, a Blog, I see a column up by Jonathan Rauch that opposes efforts to pass expansions of employment discrimination protections to gays and lesbians. He argues that such laws are emblematic of "victim" politics -- gays needing protection -- rather than "responsibility" politics, whereby gays actively seek to take on public responsibilities. Gay marriage and service in the military are examples of the latter.

I would never deny the continuing and often harsh reality of anti-gay discrimination, especially for kids. And I would agree with anyone who points out that allowing gays to sue discriminators in federal court is fair and reasonable. (Federal antidiscrimination law, after all, already protects other groups, like Christians, that endure far less social hostility.) But at this point, the right to file federal lawsuits is unlikely to make a big difference in gay people’s lives, and the 1970s civil rights model has become a warhorse in need of retirement.

The next Congress should be the second since 1994 when ENDA is not introduced — this time because gays ourselves have decided to move on. A country of gay spouses and parents and service members and veterans is a country of gay citizens, not gay victims. Ten years after Goodridge is a good time to recognize and celebrate that change.

As Amp points out, this puts the cart way, way before the horse. It reeks of someone who lives in a climate where gays really have made huge strides towards acceptance, without regard for people living in locations where anti-gay prejudice still looms large and really does affect employment (and housing) opportunities. That being said, I think I understand the theoretical impulse here, and perhaps can explain it in a way that explains why it can't apply to gays and lesbians at this stage in the political game.

Take two of my identities: I am Jewish, and I am (former) high school athlete. One of these two identities enjoys protections through anti-discrimination law, and one does not. One of these two identities also is one where I feel concerned about my status as a full and equal member of the polity, while the other elicits no such anxiety.

It may seem odd that the identity that enjoys greater legal protection is also the one whose position feels more fraught. Indeed, the vast majority of our identities garner no specific formal legal protection whatsoever. And it's not because they are not the subject of regulation, even controversial regulation, either. Athletes can face significant regulations (such as mandatory drug tests, or heightened academic requirements), and they may have strong views about the propriety of these ordinances. Lawyers (to take another example) face a massive array of regulations governing their conduct and certainly have no qualms about arguing over them. These arguments, however, occur without the backstop of any formal legal regime recognizing specific protections against unfair treatment for the identity. We fight these battles with nothing more than the normal tools of politics.

Yet this thought does not fill most of us with dread. To the contrary, it strikes us as utterly unremarkable. It is normal that most of our identities will be regulated and protected through nothing more than the normal channels of political and social dialogue. The need for something like anti-discrimination laws suggests a particular aberration from this norm -- recognition of a particularly dangerous or fraught area of controversy where the normal rules cannot be trusted.

For this reason, it is wrong to view the end-game of anti-discrimination work as the enactment of a robust array of legal protections. As one jurist put it, anti-discrimination laws "acknowledge—rather than mark the end of—a history of purposeful discrimination." Hernandez v. Robles, 7 N.Y.3d 338, 388-89 (N.Y. 2006) (Kaye, C.J., dissenting). Or to quote myself:

If one only has protections because one devotes every spare vote, dollar, resource and minute to secure them, one can hardly be said to be an equal. Equality comes when equality is normal — so normal, that you don’ t have to be perpetually on your guard to defend it. So normal that it wouldn't occur to anyone to try and take it away.

What Rauch is trying to get at is the securing for homosexuality the status of a "normal identity" -- one in which their equality is so natural that it need not be remarked upon, and where the natural flow of social and political channels will regulate matters of sexual orientation in a manner which, if not agreed upon by all, at least is not viewed as something extraordinary.

Needless to say, we are not there yet. And Rauch makes a huge mistake by jumping the gun. Indeed, part of being a normal identity is that one can insert yourself into the political process and secure benefits (same as other groups do as a matter of course), so it is antithetical to the notion to throw up barriers to a group's particular political ambitions. That is to say, it is not necessarily the case that a "normal identity" never receives protective measures, it is simply that if they do so it isn't seen as any more remarkable than, say, dairy farmers gaining legislative protections -- we might debate about it or oppose particular proposals, but it is not viewed as a high stakes deviation from politics-as-normal.

In sum, I see the appeal of Rauch's endpoint. He's just wrong to force the issue.

Sounds Like a Job For...

As soon as a read this story about a woman who was "fined" $3,500 by a company for posting a poor review of their services (it allegedly violated a "non-disparagement clause" in the contract), I immediately thought "this sounds like something Popehat would tackle." So I hopped over to their site, and lo and behold...

By popular demand — which is a polite way of sayingyes, I heard about this, for the love of God stop sending me emails about it — it's time to talk about KlearGear, an online company that sells "desk toys" and gadgets and tchotchkes and such. Tim Cushing at Techdirt has the story.

Poor guys. At least I checked before sending them a link. But it's too their credit that they've carved this niche out for themselves.

(Their post on the subject is good reading, too).

Things People Blame the Jews for, Volume VII: Jews

It is unsurprising that the "blame the Jews" phenomenom would eventually come a full circle. The idea that the entire idea of a "Jew" is a myth is hardly new -- anyone who has seen a "Black Israelite" on a street corner is familiar with the trope, but it has gotten some new life recently with the publication of Shlomo Sand's The Invention of the Jewish People. Sand, a professor of modern French history and film studies, contends that the entire idea of a "Jewish people" is a myth invented towards the end of the 19th century as part of the Zionist enterprise. He further argues that (Ashkenazi) Jews are not descended from people who left modern Israel in the Roman era, but rather are descendants of Khazars (a long-gone kingdom in modern Russia).

One thing that is often remarked upon about anti-Zionist discourse is how it takes attributes that apply to nation-states generally and ascribes a uniqueness (or at least a special virulence) to them when applied to the Jewish state in particular. With Sand's argument we see much the same thing, but applied to the concept of "nations" more broadly. The idea of a "nation" as an "imagined community", whose bonds are constituted intersubjectively rather than representative of some eternal and pure blood tie, is not exactly revolutionary in the field. And that the idea of Jewishness as a nation in the modern sense didn't begin to form until the 19th century too, wouldn't be surprising -- the concept of nations in their modern form didn't begin to emerge until the 19th century. Jewish "peoplehood" was in all probability no more or less developed than those of other peoples across history; but that doesn't make it fake (then or now).

The very, very elementary mistake some people draw from this is that, because the origin story is partially mythological, the community is a fiction. We decide what ties bind us. None of them, in all likelihood, translate into any sort of eternal, transhistorical truth -- an observation that has no bearing on their validity. It's how people screw up social constructivism more generally -- "socially constructed" is not a synonym for "fake." Most important elements of our lives are socially constructed, that doesn't make them any less real.

Nor does it particularly matter whether any individual Jewish person can individually trace their bloodlines to someone who lived in Jerusalem in 259 B.C.E. Let's say Sand is 100% right that modern Ashkenazi Jews are descended from Khazars, who were converted by Jewish missionaries from the Holy Land. To assert that this makes anybody any less Jewish or any more disconnected from a historical or Bible-era Jewish people requires us to say that only way to be "truly" part of a people is to descend via bloodline. But that's (a) not true and (b) not something Jews have ever believed. Descent can make one a member of the tribe, but it doesn't make one any more of a member than a convert. In this, one can say that Jewish identity reached a modern (or perhaps post-modern) form ahead of the curve -- our conception of peoplehood was less predicated on a literal chain of "who begats", and instead embraced the idea of created a community and nation out of shared intersubjective bonds and commonalities of creed. Not only is this not an illegitimate form of social organization, nominally it would seem to be superior to assertions that are quite literally based off ethnic essentialism.

The normative argument Sand wants to make -- undermining the "reality" of a Jewish people and its connection to Israel by way of genetics -- is something I've criticized before (and criticized when it is applied to Palestinians, who also are accosted with charges that they are johnny-come-latelys to the territories):

I hate this. I hate this in all of its forms. I hate it when folks try and tell me that Jews don't really belong in the Middle East because they actually descend from Khazars. I hate it when people argue that Palestinians aren't a "real" people because they didn't have national ambitions until relatively recently. I hate it when Israelis are accosted as inauthentic because they have the "wrong" eye color. I hate it when people seem to think this entire conflict is properly resolved via an impossible historical inquiry into who got to the Holy Land "the firstest with the mostest".

It all just strikes me as incredibly primitive -- based on old-school notions of ancestral ties and bloodrights and purity that have no place in modern discussions. I'm a Levi, so I assume I descend from relatively deep Israelite strands. But who knows -- maybe there are some European converts in my family tree. So what? And if some persons with African blood identify as Palestinian and are so recognized by the Palestinian community -- good for them! It is sordid business, this attempt to police each other's racial authenticity for our own transparently political ends.

And that's the problem here. There is an ongoing debate over the genealogy of Ashkenazi Jews (a debate with far more qualified participants than professors of modern French history, I might add), but to assert that it resolves any claims regarding the legitimacy of a Jewish state requires us to believe in some very retrograde notions of statedom -- that they really are and must be predicated on purity of blood and bloodline and a belief that this volk is eternally tied to this soil. The problem being that nobody believes that, and claims of that sort have long since ceased to be necessary for the maintenance of a national identity.

The bizarre summation of Sand's normative attack is that the only legitimate identities are those actually based on historically verifiable racial purity; Jews actually comprise a variety of ethnicities who may or may not share blood ties with ancestral Jews, therefore, Jewishness is a falsehood. To state that argument is to refute it: all identities are socially constructed, and that fact does not falsify the identity to anyone but someone more enamored of old-school racist ideologies than I think Sand would prefer to admit.

Sorry, SCOTUS: Pixie Needs Me

Something about this I find absolutely hilarious. Judge Richard Posner was asked about the possibility of serving on the Supreme Court. After noting he was probably too old, he also stated that he thought the Supreme Court wasn't "a real court" because of its selective docket and overly politicized nature. Moreover, with its limited case load it doesn't give the justices sufficient opportunity to write. But the most important barrier to seeing Justice Posner is ... his cat Pixie:

Posner also reveals in the interview that he works from home at least half the time, and one reason is his cat, Pixie. “I’m a very big cat person,” Posner says. Pixie is affectionate and "her little face falls" if Posner or his wife leaves the house. "The cat wants us at home," he says.

I don't know why that paragraph cracks me up, but it does.

Let's Get Ready to Humble!

I was thinking about Michael Buffer's famous line, said before boxing matches around the world -- "Let's get ready to RUMBLE!" It is an iconic phrase -- possibly one of the most iconic in the world. Everybody knows it, even if you've never seen a boxing match.

Buffer is getting on in years, and eventually (hopefully not too soon) he'll die. And when that happens, the phrase will die with him -- not just in the sense that nobody will say it, but it's massive cultural penetration will rapidly become almost unintelligible. In 100 years, not only will nobody remember that phrase, but if they stumble on a historical artifact which references it, they'll have no idea what it means (culturally -- literally speaking, they could probably parse it out). Even if a historian did happen to be familiar with it, how would he explain it in terms of its incredible global reach? For something so ubiquitous, it really has no substance behind it whatsoever -- it's just a neat phrase, said in a neat way, that people around the world associate with the start of the fight.

This sounds a bit maudlin, and I don't mean it to be -- I actually think it is kind of neat that as a species we have managed to unify behind something as shallow and ridiculous as this. But it was a strange thought to have, and what is the purpose of having a blog if you can't share strange thoughts?

I'm assuming the Post will be apologizing for Richard Cohen shortly?

Today’s GOP is not racist, as Harry Belafonte alleged about the tea party, but it is deeply troubled — about the expansion of government, about immigration, about secularism, about the mainstreaming of what used to be the avant-garde. People with conventional views must repress a gag reflex when considering the mayor-elect of New York — a white man married to a black woman and with two biracial children. (Should I mention that Bill de Blasio’s wife, Chirlane McCray, used to be a lesbian?) This family represents the cultural changes that have enveloped parts — but not all — of America. To cultural conservatives, this doesn’t look like their country at all.

A different sort of gag might be appropriate for Richard Cohen when he thinks he wants to talk about race.

Also, his assessment of current "convention"

Monday, November 11, 2013

What Was Needed Was More Gunfire

The tragic story of a shooting spree at a Texas party that left two teenagers dead is precisely why I don't understand the "more guns will keep us safer" argument. The short version of what happened at the party is that some idiot decided to fire off his gun into the air "in a celebratory fashion." Someone else took that as a threat, and fired into the crowd (presumably in the direction of the original shooter). In the ensuing chaos, two innocent people were killed.

That was bad enough. But imagine there were six armed people there, or twelve. And they don't necessarily know each other, and they see other people pulling out guns and firing, and they have no way of knowing who are the bad guys. And so the whole party massacres itself.

Real life, particularly in a civilian mass shooting situation, isn't like Call of Duty. There are no uniforms and nothing glows red when you target an enemy. What more guns means in this situation is more chaos and a situation where not even the cops can tell who is a threat and who is trying to "help".

Things People Blame the Jews for, Volume VI: Energy Speculation

One of my new practice groups at the firm (see my shiny new bio!) is energy, an area which is quite new to me. I spoke to a partner who described how you can appraise how senior someone is in the energy law field by asking them "where does electricity come from" -- my answer, as of now, is: "the wall."

This is a shame, though, because as a Jew, energy markets (and energy speculation) are apparently my reason for existence in Washington. Here's Texe Marrs (there's a name!) with the lowdown [http://www.texemarrs.com/042011/zionist_oil_speculators.htm]:

They’re doing it again! Three years ago, two Rothschild-owned Wall Street banks—Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley—artificially drove the price of oil up to $142 a barrel, and the American economy collapsed. One year later, the price had fallen to $32 per barrel—and the oil companies were still making money, (They bring it out of the ground for a puny $4 per barrel!)

Now, Rothschild's Wall Street manipulators are back in business. For weeks now, oil gasoline demand has actually decreased. Nevertheless, the Wall Street criminals are driving the price of oil up through the roof on the oil futures market—which they own! That’s right, they own the commodities future exchanges!

And here’s what else you need to know:

1. President Obama is colluding with these bums. His Fed Reserve (with Jewish chairman Bernanke) gave 73 billion dollars in “loans” to Libya and Gaddafi. But Gaddafi’s oil goes to France, not the U.S.A.!


2. Obama’s Treasury Secretary (the Jew Geithner) gave a two billion dollar “loan” to Petrobras, the Brazilian oil giant, to drill in the Atlantic, off the coast of Brazil. Surprise: Brazil’s oil goes primarily to Red China and India, not the U.S.A.!


3. Obama’s Marxist EPA and Energy Department hassles U.S. oil drillers with a blizzard of regulations—all to intentionally force Americans to buy foreign oil owned by Rothschild and other Israel and Jewish billionaires. This in spite of the fact that the U.S. oil reserves are greater than Saudi Arabia, Kuwait, Iran, and all the rest of the world’s nations combined.

What the environmental crazies and Obama plan is for the price of gasoline to shoot up to $6.00, even to $10.00 per gallon. They think that Americans will be forced to drive less and thus their Global Warming scam will be enhanced.


4. Fidel’s Cuba and Red China are drilling new oil wells in international waters off of Florida, but Obama says “No!” to American drillers.


5. Iraq’s abundant oil is being shipped by oil pipeline through Israel to tankers sitting off the coasts of Gaza and Lebanon and is going directly to Red China. That’s right, Rothschild’s Israeli partners have been given—yes, given!—all of Iraq’s oil. They’re making a mint selling it to the Communists in Beijing. Remember when Dick Cheney promised us that the invasion and occupation of Iraq wouldn’t cost Americans a dime, because Iraq’s oil would pay for it? Well, now you and I see what rotten, filthy liars these politicians are!

If there's one thing a billionaire (Jewish or otherwise) loves, it's Marxism. And if there are two places Jews have infinite sway, they're Iraq and Saudi Arabia

UPDATE: Somebody must have forwarded this shocking hot take to Guatemalan activists protesting energy prices there.

Who Cares About Deficits?

I've been meaning to welcome my old debate teammate (and very, very technically, former co-blogger) Emily Mirengoff to the blogosphere. She's been writing an ongoing series on education that is well-worth your time.

Her blog is titled "A Moderate Mindset", and last month she put up a post entitled "A Moderate Solution to the Government Shutdown." I, too, have sometimes written on the moderate label, a characterization I'm sure Emily would find laughable (in my defense, see my "The Moderator's Voice" post, where I discuss how I reconcile my currente leftist beliefs with what I take to be the virtues of "moderation" -- I think she might view it with a surprising level of agreement).

In any event, here were the counters of her proposal:

On the Obamacare issue, the Republicans are dead wrong. The law passed; they were unable to overturn it; and they shouldn't be holding the budget hostage in retaliation.

On the debt ceiling issue, the Democrats have spiraled completely out of control. Below is a video of a Democrat who agrees with me. He may look familiar to you; he’s a political rising star named Senator Barack Obama.

[...]

So here’s the compromise: President Obama agrees to institute a real debt ceiling–and actually adheres to it by cutting down government spending–and in return, the Republicans abandon their doomed anti-Obamacare campaign. It would truly be an astounding day for the U.S. government: Both parties acting reasonably! Compromise! The government re-opening!

Okay, from one erstwhile moderate to another, let's rap.

On the one hand, we have Republicans unreasonably holding the country hostage while they engage in futile efforts to try to block the healthcare law. They should knock this off, and that would be their side of the compromise. Now, a substantial part of the "problem" here isn't that Republicans oppose the Affordable Care Act. That's their prerogative! It's that they're engaging in extreme levels of hostage taking to substitute for the fact that they are not, currently, in a position to repeal the ACA. I take it that Emily is not proposing that Republicans not try to overturn the ACA if in the future they happened to regain control of Congress and the Executive Branch (such a promise would be unreasonable and entirely unenforceable in any event). So the Republican side of the compromise would be "stop trying to repeal Obamacare until you actually are able to repeal Obamacare." That's not nothing, given that the ongoing GOP temper tantrum on this issue is doing real damage to the country, but you can imagine why Democrats wouldn't exactly be leaping for joy over it.

On the other side, Democrats are supposed to accede to spending cuts in order to bring the deficit under control. The "Democrats have spiraled completely out of control" on the debt, and the way to fix it is spending cuts. We might begin by quibbling with the notion that Democrats have not concerned themselves with deficits -- tough to swing, given that deficits have been slashed dramatically during Obama's tenure in office. But since we're still running a deficit, debts continue to accumulate, and the debt ceiling remains a problem. To the extent we care about reducing our debt load, more steps need to be taken.

The real question is, why is this a "Democratic" sacrifice? The answer is that, somewhat strangely, Emily says we should reduce our deficit level solely by reference to spending cuts. But that is only one way to skin the cat -- another way of reducing deficits, of course, is by raising additional revenue.

Put another way, let's say we posit that Republicans care about deficits and Democrats don't. Republicans would demand steps for deficits to be reduced. Democrats wouldn't be particularly interested because (per stipulation) they don't care about deficits. And they'd be concretely adverse to cutting spending on social programs they value. But Democrats don't really have any objection to raising taxes on the wealthy, or removing the privileged and distorted position capital gains enjoy vis-a-vis other forms of income in our tax code. So presumably, if what Republicans cared about was "deficits", this would be an easy agreement to hammer out: high-income taxes are raised, deficits go down, everyone is happy.

This, of course, is not the terms of the debate. As Jon Chait has noted, the Republican position on deficits is that they would do anything to reduce the debt load, except contemplate any increase in taxes whatsoever. It is a very impressive thing that the GOP has managed to stake out this position -- rejecting even 10:1 spending cut/tax increase propositions -- while still convincing people that their primary concern is with deficits, rather than with cutting spending. And not just any government spending, either: As we learned from the Farm Bill debacle, the real object is slashing government spending that helps poorer Americans, demanding slashes to food stamps while fighting bitterly to maintain subsidies to wealthy agricultural producers (even the National Review found this to be beyond the pale). Certain spending -- for example, defense spending, or corporate subsidies -- doesn't seem to be problematic to the Republican Party at all. Hell, the Affordable Care Act reduces deficits -- yet for some reason this does not endear it to supposedly deficit-conscious Republican congressfolk. Deficit reduction is, at most, a tertiary issue -- perhaps a happy side-effect of depriving impoverished Americans of food, but nowhere near as important as insuring that income earned via capital are taxed at half the rate of earnings won through labor.

I should say that while I obviously oppose these Republican policy priorities substantively, I'm not really bothered by the fact that these are their priorities as opposed to deficit-cutting. Republicans have policy objections to government spending money on healthcare, food stamps, unemployment insurance, and other programs that primarily benefit poorer Americans. If, as a consequence, deficits are also reduced, that's a nice benefit, but it is a bonus, not the primary motivator, and where there are available deficit-reduction opportunities that don't cohere to these priorities (such as raising taxes, or, for that matter, passing the Affordable Care Act), they'll oppose them. Democrats, for their part, support these sorts of programs and wish to expand them. While they'd probably be willing to mitigate their impact on the deficit by passing higher taxes on wealthy Americans, that isn't their priority either and if that avenue is unavailable they'd rather keep the programs and expand the deficit. All of that is perfectly fine, it just demonstrates that deficits and debt are not actually what's driving the current controversy between the parties, and so bootstrapping the debt ceiling to the argument doesn't make a lot of sense.

The real lesson we've learned, hopefully, from the past few months is that the debt ceiling isn't something to grandstand about (and I hope Barack Obama, looking back on his senatorial self, has been appropriately chastened). So my moderate proposal flowing out of the shutdown crisis is considerably simpler: abolish the debt ceiling outright.

Note I am not saying that Congress should rack up infinite deficits. But the amount of debt we incur in a given year is a product of the budget negotiated within Congress and approved by the President, and the presence of a debt ceiling doesn't change that. All the debt ceiling does is threaten a global economic meltdown whenever Congress, as is often, can't get its act together. In essence, what the debt ceiling does is say "we, Congress, cannot be trusted to pass budgets which reduce our debt load. As a consequence of that dysfunction, we will periodically put the entire world at the risk of an unnecessary massive economic calamity unless we decide to take an affirmative step to stop it." This is not sound policy, whether as a tool for reducing the debt or for anything else.

If Congress wants to incur less debt, it should achieve that through the budgetary process. We should incur as much debt (or not) as results from the negotiated balance of revenues to spending that Congress approves in its budget. If that results in too-high debt levels, then the budget should be rerenegotiated to either lower spending or increase revenues. Periodically arming, defusing, and then rearming a ticking time bomb is neither helpful nor sensible. And that lesson, hopefully, has become quite clear.

Law, Law, Everywhere There's Law

Anytime a lawyer looks at a new industry, he or she is immediately struck by just how much law there is about it. It can be quite intimidating. In order to, say, build a water treatment plant, it isn't enough to simply know how to build the plant. One has to be aware of a massive buffet of rules and regulations that govern the field -- zoning, building codes, environmental approvals, laws governing any financing -- the list goes on and on. The amount of effort it takes just to know what you need to know, let alone to actually know it, let alone to actually do it, is daunting. Good for me professionally, but daunting.

So in that sense I can be sympathetic to complaints that there is too much red tape stifling businesses. But then I think about it a little more, and I can't help but think my complaint boils down to crying that filling important social functions takes hard work. Poor us -- we'd like to be able to plan the development of a major public utility in an afternoon and then golf for the next three weeks, but we can't (thanks, Obama). And phrased that way, it feels a little ridiculous.

Things People Blame The Jews For, Volume V: Law (Schools)

I have begun my trek into the world of legal practice, but it is important to remember my roots as a legal academic. Specifically,, a Jewish legal academic. Oh, does that rub some people the wrong way [http://vnnforum.com/showthread.php?t=78280]:

They’re barely two percent of the population, but research indicates that jews occupy slightly more than half of the teaching slots at America’s top ten law schools. (By ranking of U.S. News & World Report, these are: 1. Yale; 2. Stanford; 3. Harvard; 4. Columbia; 5. NYU; 6. Chicago; 7. Berkeley; 7. Michigan; 7. Pennsylvania; 7. Virginia.) The same people who give you the endless song and dance about overrepresentation of white males in every sector they haven’t yet commandeered for themselves have nepotistically positioned their racial crime syndicate to decide who becomes a power player in 21st-century AmeriKwa -- and they breathe not a word of this prodigious legal enormity to the mass public. The simple fact is, jews and people trained to think like them exercise an effective monopoly over the legal profession. In a country in which you can hardly pick your nose without counsel, that fact is grounds for some very serious thought about where we’re headed, and what’s going to be left of normal whites like you and me when we get there.

VNN researched the matter online (you can verify all the findings, the names and pictures, online at vnnforum.com ). This was easy to do, since all these schools list their professors by name. It is clear from the very look and feel of these sites that the attitude of the folks training our top lawyers is the same as the jewish business owner who said, “I only hire jews, women, and gays.” Normal white males need not apply, and the ones who do attend these schools, are either self-hating liberals to start with, or bent that way after Prof. Selznik’s “words mean what they have to” course. Simply look at the graphics used by these top ten schools to see the future this type envisions: women and coloreds and jews, with nary a white male to be found. This is the utopia the jew prepares for our race. When they say “abolish,” they mean it. White genocide is very plainly the agenda of the jews who control our law schools.

Of course, this raises tantalizing questions about my own exit from an academy that was apparently built for my own personal pleasure. Was I expelled as a dissident from the Elders' orthodoxy? One would think my anti-discrimination law focus would have kept me safe from charges of apostasy. Maybe the problem was the opposite, my lack of subtlety? Or perhaps it was random caprice -- sometimes, a random zag is the best way to throw folks off the trail. Regardless of the explanation, one can be sure it is nefarious.

Tantrum Ad

If I were a Democratic strategist tasked with running ads right now (or really, right after the shutdown), this is the one I would have run:

SCENE: Two PARENTS, a MOM and DAD stand outside a closed door. Inside, a TODDLER can be heard screaming and throwing a tantrum. The parents look at each other.

MOM: Should we say something?

DAD: I think we have to.

They enter the room. Inside, is a child's bedroom with toys reflective of Washington (e.g., a miniature Washington Monument. The toddler is revealed to be an older white man in a baby outfit featuring an elephhant -- a CONGRESSMAN.

MOM: Do you know why you're in here?

CONGRESSMAN (sullenly): No.

MOM: Yes you do. The government shut down, the debt ceiling, the constant obstruction ...

DAD: I know you oppose expanded health care access, but that's not appropriate behavior.

CONGRESSMAN [screaming]: But I hate it! I HATE IT I HATE IT I HATE IT!

[He throws the toy Washington Monument, which bounces off of MOM's chest. She closes her eyes in exasperation.]

MOM: You're in timeout until you learn how to behave yourself.

[The CONGRESSMAN resumes screaming, and both parents leave the room]

MOM: That hard.

DAD: I know, but if he's not punished, he won't learn.

Scene ends, splash screen comes up asking people to send Republicans in Washington a message

Call me any time, DCCC.

Pope Fraud!

Allegations of widespread "voter fraud" is a story I've followed with some interest over the past few years, despite the fact that "voter fraud" in the United States is virtually non-existent. This factoid seems not to discourage anyone, and certain themes stand out in the attempts to stir up a panic about it:

1) Voter fraud is an organized part of a vast conspiracy to bring America under the dominion of scary Marxist brown people, probably at the orchestration of ACORN.

2) Voter fraud is epidemic, despite its empirical rarity.

3) Relatively minor instances of voter irregularities will be drummed up and exaggerated beyond all reason as proof of said epidemic.

Following these conclusions gives a rather different spin on this report about the circumstances of Cardinal Bergoglio (now Pope Francis') election to the papacy:

What happened? After the fifth ballot was cast and the ballot box containing the votes of the 115 cardinal electors opened, the ballots were counted as always before being scrutinised and the resulting number was 116. There was one extra ballot. One of the cardinals had mistakenly placed two ballots in the box without realising it: one contained the name of his preferred candidate and the other was blank.

The mistake meant the whole voting session had to be cancelled, without the ballots even being scrutinised. If they had, Bergoglio would probably have probably come out on top. It was decided that another vote should be cast immediately. The mishap would not have influenced the cardinals in any way as none of them knew what name (in this case none) was on the extra ballot. On the sixth ballot and after the fifth scrutiny, the Archbishop of Buenos Aires won a clear majority: way above the expected quorum of 77 votes. Then the white smoke billowed out of the Sistine Chapel chimney and Pope Francis greeted the crowds for the first time.

Seems an amusing if innocuous story. But translated into the American fever swamp coverage of voter fraud, and we'd get something like this:

Catholics were shocked when Hispanic Cardinal Jorge Bergoglio was elected to the Papacy. His radical views and known ties to Latin American Marxists have already manifested in a papacy that has at every turn eviscerated traditional Catholic values. But the mystery may have been solved: A Breitbart exclusive reveals that his "election" may have actually been the result of widespread fraud in the sacrosanct election proceeding. Sources inside the Vatican have confirmed that one of the election rounds simply wasn't counted after an unrevealed Cardinal was caught trying to stuff the ballot box. Despite evidence of a potential corruption scandal, allies to Cardinal Bergoglio not only refused to tabulate the ballots, they forced a highly irregular immediate revote where their preferred candidate surged to a shocking victory .....

And so on and so forth.

We Are ... The Resistance

And this, ladies and gentlemen, is why I wanted to become a lawyer.

The government has moved to ban the [defense from using the] word “government” [to refer to the prosecution]. The State of Tennessee offers precisely zero legal authority for its rather nitpicky position, and the defense can find none. The Plaintiff has failed to carry its burden on this motion. Moreover, the Plaintiff’s proposed ban on speech would violate the First Amendment. The motion should be denied.

Should this Court disagree, and feel inclined to let the parties basically pick their own designations and ban words, then the defense has a few additional suggestions for amending the speech code. First, the Defendant no longer wants to be called “the Defendant.” This rather archaic term of art, obviously has a fairly negative connotation. It unfairly demeans, and dehumanizes Mr. D.P. The word “defendant” should be banned. At trial, Mr. P. hereby demands to be addressed only by his full name, preceded by the title “Mister.”

Alternatively, he may be called simply “the Citizen Accused.” This latter title sounds more respectable than the criminal “Defendant.” The designation “That innocent man” would also be acceptable.

Moreover, defense counsel does not wish to be referred to as a “lawyer,” or a “defense attorney.” Those terms are substantially more prejudicial than probative. See Tenn. R. Evid. 403. Rather, counsel for the Citizen Accused should be referred to primarily as the “Defender of the Innocent.” This title seems particularly appropriate, because every Citizen Accused is presumed innocent.

Alternatively, counsel would also accept the designation “Guardian of the Realm.”

Further, the Citizen Accused humbly requests an appropriate military title for his own representative, to match that of the opposing counsel. Whenever addressed by name, the name ”Captain Justice” will be appropriate. While less impressive than “General,” still, the more humble term seems suitable. After all, the Captain represents only a Citizen Accused, whereas the General represents an entire State.

Along these same lines, even the term “defense” does not sound very likeable. The whole idea of being defensive, comes across to most people as suspicious. So to prevent the jury from being unfairly misled by this ancient English terminology, the opposition to the Plaintiff hereby names itself “the Resistance.” Obviously, this terminology need only extend throughout the duration of the trial — not to any pre-trial motions. During its heroic struggle against the State, the Resistance goes on the attack, not just the defense.

WHEREFORE, Captain Justice, Guardian of the Realm and Leader of the Resistance, primarily asks that the Court deny the State’s motion, as lacking legal basis. Alternatively, the Citizen Accused moves for an order in limine modifying the speech code as aforementioned, and requiring any other euphemisms and feel-good terms as the Court finds appropriate.

The government's motion was denied.

The Importance of Being Earnest

There is a widespread consensus that the attorney who argued for the plaintiffs in Schuette v. Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action (regarding the constitutionality of Michigan's anti-affirmative action constitutional amendment) did a poor job. The chatter about her performance is amplified because she was not originally scheduled to argue the case, instead substituting at the last minute. There's been a lot of speculation about why that happened, but Tony Mauro may have uncovered the answer:

Detroit civil rights lawyer Shanta Driver made a last-minute decision to argue in a high-profile Supreme Court affirmative action case on Oct. 15 in part, she said, because so few African-American lawyers appear before the justices.

Speaking at a rally of affirmative action supporters in front of the court after the argument, Driver said that only one black lawyer—who spoke for 11 minutes—appeared last term before the justices. It was important, she added, for her as a black woman to argue in Schuette v., Coalition to Defend Affirmative Action to show the justices that someone “who really could speak for the movement” was making the case to save affirmative action.

Her comments, which have gone unreported, help solve the mystery surrounding Driver’s surprise appearance before the court in one of its most important cases of the term. Until the morning of the Supreme Court arguments, Driver’s law firm partner George Washington, who is white, was listed by the court as the one who would make the case for state programs that give a boost to minorities.

Josh Blackman declares this to be "startling" and "patronizing to the Justices." But I'm not sure that's fair.

I should preface by saying that I don't have an opinion on whether the attorney's performance was in fact good or bad -- both because I haven't listened to the argument and, more importantly, because I agree with the also-generally-agreed-upon consensus that she was drawing dead to begin with. And we will never truly know whether the decision to swap in Driver would have made any difference. Counterfactuals are of course impossible and most people are skeptical that the quality of oral argument really impacts the Supreme Court's decisions, particularly in high-profile cases like this.

All that being said, I do want to make the simple observation that the way in which the race of an advocate or interlocutor affects the way we make decisions is an empirical and psychological one, and shouldn't be waved away on the grounds that it is "patronizing." There are many people affiliated with the Court in the early 90s who are convinced that the presence of Thurgood Marshall deterred his colleagues from being as aggressive as they would have liked in rolling back Warren Court race precedents, and that it made a significant difference when he was replaced by Justice Thomas. Driver seemed to think that it was important for liberal judges to see her, and perhaps her presence would impact how hard they'd dig in their heels in writing their dissent (or whether to dissent at all).

The point is that the impact on race in modern society is often framed in terms of politeness -- it's impolitic or rude to speculate that something like race might matter. But the impact of race on perception exists independently of how we would like polite society to operate, and we shouldn't be short-changing inquiry into the question by framing the entire question as ill-mannered.

Energizer Bunnies

I had my first day of work today. Obviously, I've had quite a few "first days of work" before, but this one was different because unlike all of my previous jobs, this one is of indefinite duration. Summer jobs end with the summer ends, my clerkship and my teaching position were both for defined one-year stints. But my tenure at a law firm can continue on and on, until one of us decides to cut the cord. In the words of Community's Mr. Radison:

This is forever. This is what we do now. This is who we are.

But God willing, someday I will win regionals.

Things People Blame the Jews For, Volume IV: Sex

"Every generation," the saying goes, "thinks it invented sex." Wrong. The Jews invented sex -- at least, the dirty, perverted, sexy sex whose kinky hotness is erotically destroying civilization as we know it. From "The Secret Sex Life of the Jews" [http://www.veteranstoday.com/2013/10/19/secret-sex-life-of-the-jews/]:

No class of men appears to be quite as sex-obsessed as the Orthodox Jews and the rabbinate. If you compare the religious texts of the various world religions, you will find that all of them—with the single exception of Judaism—maintain a high moral tone throughout. They don’t keep harping on about breasts and penises, prostitutes and semen. Judaism does.
[...]
Jews certainly have sex on the brain. And they have transmitted their obsession to the rest of society. We have all become infected, to a certain degree, with the sex virus.
[...]
Of one thing we can be reasonably certain: any society that attracts large numbers of Jews can expect within a few years to enter a spiral of decadence. Moral anarchy sets in. Sexual promiscuity throws open its Pandora’s box of evils. We saw it in Weimar Germany.

We see it gathering pace in America today. We see it above all in Israel, a society of fanatical settlers and rabid right-wing rabbis: a country surely doomed to implode from within, sooner or later, under the pressure of its own moral and military excesses.

I cannot help feeling that a great storm is brewing and that only a military coup or revolution can now save America. Save it from what? From the spiritual cancer that is consuming it from within, and from the iniquitous wars into which it is being lured— Afghanistan, Iraq, Libya, Syria, and soon perhaps Iran—on behalf of a foreign nation and its disinfo agents in America.

Unless a miracle soon occurs and some charismatic leader comes to our rescue, an unimaginably bleak future surely awaits us: a future in which the only consolations left to us will be mindless entertainment, drugs, alcohol, sexual intoxication — and suicide.

This is ridiculous of course -- anyone who thinks suicide will save them from the endless march of Jewish sexy sex obviously has never heard of autoerotic asphyxiation (thanks Hebrew school!).

That being said, you can't deny that she has a point. Jews are overwhelmingly liberal on issues of sex and sexuality. Seventy percent support gay marriage. Ninety percent support legalized abortion in most cases. Ninety four percent of Jews reported having premarital sex. Shameful, I know. And as this exclusive behind the scenes footage of a typical Bar Mitzvah demonstrates, dirty, filthy sex lies at the very center of what it means to be a Jew:

Citicare

Citibank just emailed me to let me know that I have some rewards points expiring at the end of the year. Since I am mandated to use them or lose them, I dutifully logged onto the Citibank "Thank You" website to see what my ~6000 points could buy me.

The website is a disaster. Every page has failed to load at least once if not multiple times that I've clicked on it, making it virtually impossible to browse for items (let alone filter my searches). Once it spontaneously logged me out of my account, causing me to have to start everything over. I finally found a product that I wanted (a cast iron skillet), but I had to enter a new shipping address, and I can't do that because each time I click "submit" the page times out and I have to reinput the information.

In conclusion, clearly Citibank is a failure and must be repealed, and the entire project of private capitalist enterprise has been discredited.

Project Runway All-Stars 3: Initial Thoughts

They don't give us any time to relax, do they? The week after Season 11 of Project Runway ends (and immediately following the reunion special), we begin a new season of all-stars! Some first thoughts:

* When they started to announce the designers' mentor, Jill and I squealed with excitement in anticipation of Joanna Coles. And then it was Zanna Roberts Rassi. Such a quick mutual high-to-low is a rare thing.

* I can't believe there's already been three seasons of all-stars (and that doesn't include the special one episode all-stars challenge they did when the show moved to Lifetime. Everyone forgets about that).

* Andy South changes gender and becomes Ari South, and she still isn't the designer whose look has altered the most. That honor goes to Jeffrey Sebelia, who now looks like an extra from a Jeff Foxworthy routine. Elena doesn't count because Elena looks like a completely new person every single episode, thanks to an infinite array of hairstyles.

* I'm glad Viktor didn't go home. I liked his look and generally like his aesthetic, and think he has more to show. I think Melissa was the clear loser of the challenge though (Korto was a bit lucky to be safe, I thought, and Daniel's usual insanity coin-flipped the wrong way).

* I'm not Seth Aaron fan, but that outfit rocked. Also, his vibe is now more "L'oreal executive vice president" than his previous "hyperactive clown." It's an improvement.

* Elena wins her first ever challenge! No complaints by me -- the look was very cool and very her. I have no doubt, however, that she will still bring the crazy this season.

* Also, I understand she meant well, but greeting the guest judge/theme with "my dad will be so psyched" is probably not the preferred reaction.

* Irena's dress! Va-va-voom! Definitely could have seen that on top.

Currency Manipulation

The Washington Post issues its endorsements for local Virginia House of Delegate seats. All four are currently occupied by Republicans, and there discussion of each race begins by observing that, in essence, the incumbent is a lunatic. There's the one who was one "of a handful of lawmakers to speak out against an otherwise highly qualified judicial nominee who happened to be gay." There's the one who "voted to study whether Virginia should develop its own currency as a hedge against financial chaos." There's the one whose "contempt for homosexuals is surpassed only by his disregard for women who have abortions; he suggested that God exacts vengeance on women who abort their fetuses by assuring that their next pregnancy will produce a disabled child." And finally there's the one "who has tormented gays, immigrants and women with his right-wing views."

Well, that makes life easy doesn't it? Not so fast! Two of these four somehow managed to get the Post's endorsement anyway. That's because it appears that the Post's only criteria for its endorsement was a vote for a transportation bill the paper thought was important. Two of the incumbents voted for the bill and garnered an endorsement, two opposed it and saw the nod go to their challenger. Simple as that.

In case you're curious, the lucky duo who got the endorsement were Mr. Won't Vote for the Gay and Mr. Create our own Currency (incredibly, the Post managed to call both "pragmatists" for their transportation vote in the same paragraph that they opened by detailing their extremism).

And They Never Saw a Latte Again

Some folks are buzzing about the fact that Conde Nast is ending its internship program after being sued for not paying its workers. This has led to some gloating from libertarian sorts, who are elated to inform us that when government forbids for-profit employees from working for free (or for pennies), sometimes the opportunity to work at starvation wages goes away!

Color me unconvinced. I'm truly unconvinced that nobody at Conde Nast will now be doing ... whatever it is that the interns did that allegedly kept them in the office 12 hours at day at $12 a day. The difference is now the person (a) won't be called an "intern" and (b) will get something approximating an entry-level worker's salary. This is not a bad thing. Indeed, it is kind of the point. Whatever wonderful experiences one gets by being one's own Devil Wears Prada extra is now available to people who actually need their jobs to pay money.

The 47%, Redux

Maine Governor Paul LePage (R) takes a page out of Mitt Romney's book (via):

Maine Gov. Paul LePage (R) took a page from the Mitt Romney playbook when he told a conservative audience at an event last week that 47 percent of able-bodied people in the state don't work, the Bangor Daily News reported Tuesday.

[...]

"Number two, when you talk about workforce development, it really means that the people that -- about 47 percent of able-bodied people in the state of Maine don't work," LePage said. A woman can then be heard on the recording reacting to that figure, to which LePage reiterated "About 47 percent. It's really bad."

Politifact rates this statement "mostly true" because the real figure undoubtedly contains two digits followed by a percent symbol.

Sweet Home Alabamacare

One of the interesting points about Obamacare's supposed unpopularity is that it combines the people who don't like it because it's liberal socialist communist overreach, and the people who don't like it because they're holding out for single-payer. The GOP, naturally, really represents only the latter constituency. And while such persons do represent the majority of the loyal Obamacare opposition, breaking the numbers out is rather revealing. 41% of Americans support Obamacare, and another 12% oppose it because they wish it was more liberal. Only 38% of Americans oppose it on conservative grounds. To put that in perspective, 38% is roughly the vote share President Obama managed to win in Alabama in 2012.

Now this does raise the question of who exactly these 12% not-liberal-enoughers are. I, for example, might wish Obamacare was more liberal than it is, but I still won't say I oppose it. There are some Americans who really are left-wing enough so they oppose, on substance, mainstream liberal policy objectives, but I don't think they total 12%. There's probably some remnants of the firebagger wing of the party mixed in here. And there are probably some people who, unlike me, will vote "opposed" in a poll question of this sort of they can conceive of any policy they'd prefer to Obamacare, even if they don't find the law itself to be particularly objectionable.

In all cases, to say such people won't vote Republican is not to say they will vote Democratic, but obviously to the extent that 12% has a lean, it will lean in favor of the Democratic Party.

Quote of the Weekend

Talk radio host and far-right extremist Alex Jones hosted a gun rights rally at The Alamo, which concluded by raffling off various high powered firearms. Scott Eric Kauffman remarks:

Because nothing says “America is a meritocracy!” more than a game of chance in which the winner obtains enough firepower to take out the losers.

Things People Blame Jews For, Volume III: Rudeness of the French

I had an idea for this week's "things people blame Jews for" edition. It was solid, and thematic around a life event of mine. But sometimes, things just fall into your lap, and you can't bear to let them pass. So it is with this week's entry, wherein we discover that Jews are to blame for ... the rudeness of the French [http://henrymakow.com/2013/10/French-Rudeness-Due-to-Occult-Attack%20.html].

In general, the French are rude because as a people, we are under attack.

Most of people just reflect back the aggression they are suffering themselves.

We are under an occult attack from the Masonic Jewish cabal that controls France. Although the majority of French cannot identify this source, we are reacting to the evil we are being fed by the media, politics and culture as a whole.

We've been uprooted as a Christian people, and the loss of Christianity as religion, ethic, moral values, communication, education and so on, is what's turning us into reckless maniacs.

We do not know how to interact with others nicely because evil is being forced down our throat daily. This creates a deep sense of moral discomfort and insecurity. And when you add the constant influx of foreigners into the country, inspired by the Masonic Jewish cabal, you end up with a people that feels (the word is not too strong) terrorized.

I have to admit this one surprised even me. Typically, Jews are blamed for grand social calamities or massive disasters. Being blamed for a bad attitude is distinctly small ball -- even if it does come tied to our supposed control of an entire nation-state. On the other hand, at some level it also is demonstrative of our limitless reach and zeal for control. Any tyrannical cabal can control a banking system -- it takes a true attention to detail to be responsible for individual mood swings as well.

While the hat tip goes to Adam Holland, this post had to be dedicated to Phoebe Maltz Bovy, given that it is basically the bizarro version of her own blog.

Norm Geras, RIP

Norm Geras, writer of the famous NormBlog, has passed away. He was a superb writer, an incisive thinker on topics of political philosophy generally and Jewish experience particularly, and a valued member of the blogosphere. Though I only interacted with him a few times, he was unfailingly courteous and thoughtful in all of my interactions.

Rest in Peace, Norm. You'll be missed.

Followers

One of the nice things about being a politics junkie in DC is that everyone else is a politics junkie too. Even the muggers:

An attempted mugging on Capitol Hill was thwarted Monday night by a quick-thinking victim — one who apparently keeps an eye on national security news.

The victim was walking home to her Capitol Hill townhouse when she was violently confronted by a man in the dark, grassy area between the Securities and Exchange Commission and the Heritage Foundation.

The assailant grabbed the victim's arm and demanded her wallet and phone. "I said the first thing I could think of," the victim, who asked to remain nameless, told the Washington Examiner.

The victim, who weighs a petite 95 pounds, explained to the assailant she was an intern with the National Security Agency. As an intern, she said, she had no cash to fork over (she is actually a staffer at a D.C. nonprofit, and in fact did have cash on her).

[...]

The victim elaborated further, warning the would-be mugger that the phone she held in her hand — complete with a pink-and-blue Lilly Pulitzer case — would be tracked by the NSA if she were to turn it over.

"I told him that the NSA could track the phone within minutes, and it could cause possible problems for him," the victim recounted.

The NSA has been in the spotlight this year due to controversial and far-reaching intelligence-gathering programs it had kept hidden from public knowledge.

Perhaps wary of just how far the NSA would go to keep its assets safe, the assailant just "looked at me and ran away," the victim said.

Well played. And good on the criminal too, for staying abreast of the news.

Sticky Slopes on the California Law Review Website

Here's a link to a PDF of Sticky Slopes on the California Law Review's website, as well as the final abstract:

Legal literature is replete with references to the infamous "slippery slope"-situations in which a shift in policy lubricates the path towards further, perhaps more controversial, reforms or measures. Less discussed is the idea of a "sticky slope." Sticky slopes manifest when a social movement victory acts to block, instead of enable, further policy goals. Instead of greasing the slope down, they effectively make it "stickier." Despite the lack of scholarly attention, sticky slope arguments show up again and again in legal argument, particularly in areas focused on minority rights. Formal legal doctrine can create sticky slopes insofar as it reduces legal protections for marginalized groups as they gain political power. Informally, sticky slopes can also develop through backlash, through legal arguments whose valences drift from their original intention, or through society's exhaustion with attempting to address the problem of inequality to seemingly little effect.


I argue that attentiveness to sticky slopes is important for three reasons. First, awareness of the prospect of a sticky slope can be important in long-term social movement strategizing. Where social movements are in pursuit of a cluster of related political ends, they will want to choose their tactics carefully so as to minimize the degree that their past accomplishments can be turned against them. Second, when deployed by legal actors, sticky slope arguments sometimes do not play true causal roles, but instead act as a mask for other, less tolerable justifications. Unmasking sticky slope logic can force legal policymakers to be more explicit about the rationales and implications of their decision. Third, sticky slopes reveal how prior victories are themselves sites of social conflict and controversy over meaning, which social movements will want to turn to their preferred ends.

David Schraub, Sticky Slopes, 101 Calif. L. Rev. 1249 (2013).

Identifying the Problem

Seventh Circuit Judge and noted polymath Richard Posner has come out and stated that he was "absolutely" wrong to have voted to uphold voter ID laws. Posner authored a 2-1 opinion in Crawford v. Marion County, later upheld by the Supreme Court, which affirmed the constitutionality of Indiana's voter ID requirement.

Yes [I got the Crawford case wrong. Absolutely. And the problem is that there hadn't been that much activity with voter identification. And ... maybe we should have been more imaginative ... we ... weren't really given strong indications that requiring additional voter identification would actually disfranchise people entitled to vote. There was a dissenting judge, Judge Evans, since deceased, and I think he is right. But at the time I thought what we were doing was right.

It is interesting that the majority opinion was written by Justice Stevens, who is very liberal, more liberal than I was or am.... But I think we did not have enough information. And of course it illustrates the basic problem that I emphasize in book. We judges and lawyers, we don’t know enough about the subject matters that we regulate, right? And that if the lawyers had provided us with a lot of information about the abuse of voter identification laws, this case would have been decided differently.

I don't necessarily disagree that there were, in fact, plenty of people who had the knowledge and imagination to understand how voter ID laws would act primarily to disenfranchise selcted classes of voters while doing virtually nothing to staunch the voter fraud non-issue. Nonetheless, Judge Posner deserves a nod of approval for admitting that he was wrong on such a high-profile issue. Between this and A Failure of Capitalism, Judge Posner has shown an admirable willingness to revisit his positions when new facts warrant it, and that is laudable.

Things Jews Are Blamed For, Volume II: New York City

Greetings, blog readers! I'm in New York City for a wedding, and what better place to do the weekly "Things Jews Are Blamed For" series than the Big Apple? Now, I thought about just doing 9/11 for this entry but, come on, that's a gimme. The point of this series is to stretch our horizons a bit -- really reach down into that primordial id.

So instead of doing New York's greatest tragedy in living memory, I decided to go even bigger: New York. All of it. The entire city and state. Jews' are to blame. The site is "Incog Man" ("Sick of the BS" is the tag, right above a link to "The Rela Holocaust Deal"), the article is titled "Like They Say: It Really is 'JEW York City'" [link if you dare: http://incogman.net/2010/11/it-really-is-jew-york-city/]. Here's how it begins:

New York (City) is a place that is heavily influenced, and in the majority of instances, utterly controlled by the obscenely wealthy Zionist elite. The governorship is currently occupied by David Paterson, who replaced the disgraced Zionist Eliot Spitzer. Just two days after Spitzer stepped down, New York’s Zionist leaders fully endorsed Paterson, who had been well known for his charity activities in the Zionist community even prior to becoming governor (1). His lieutenant governor, who controls the state senate, is Richard Ravitch. Though his ascension to the position was ruled unlawful (2), he remains in power. Ravitch is a powerful Zionist whose construction company built Manhattan Plaza and Waterside Plaza and who has been involved in Zionist fund-raising for half of a century (3). The speaker of New York’s State Assembly is Zionist Sheldon Silver, and earlier this year, he made a request that Ravitch, and not Paterson, should take control of New York’s budget crisis (4).

New York’s US Senate members include the junior official, Kirsten Gillibrand, who stated that she will be an ‘unwavering supporter’ of the Zionist entity and ‘continue to assure Israel’s strategic military advantage in the region (5),’ and the senior official, long-familiar Zionist politician Chuck Schumer, who made it known that he thinks it makes sense to strangle Gaza economically (6). New York City’s representatives in the US House are entirely Zionist. Anthony Weiner, Jerrold Nadler, Nita Lowey, Steven Israel, Eliot Engel, and Gary Ackerman all support Israel unabashedly. New York City’s mayor is 9/11 criminal, the Zionist billionaire Michael Bloomberg, who regularly donates to pro-Israel charities (7). New York’s Department of Education is headed by Zionist Joel Klein, selected to serve by Bloomberg. Klein and Bloomberg finalized an agreement with the United Federation of Teachers’ President, Zionist Randi Weingarten, to have total dominion over New York’s school system (8).

The diamond industry in New York has always been a ‘Jewish’ establishment since the city’s inception (9), and once the plot to create Israel was hatched, the diamond district began funneling dollars to the Zionist power brokers. The Diamonds Dealers Club (DDC), the elite ‘club’ within the diamond district that makes all of the important decisions, has a board of directors and an arbitrators’ committee comprised of several Israeli-born Zionists, and is owned and operated by Zionists Moshe Mosbacher, who serves as President, and Martin Hochbaum, who serves as Managing Director (10). The former president of DDC, Jacob Banda, who recently died, was a staunch Zionist who contributed substantial amounts to Hatzalah, a Jews-only ambulance service that is prominent in Israel (11). New York’s diamond district is going through a renovation process that will model it after Israel’s Diamond Exchange (12). All of Israel’s top diamond exporters have offices within the New York diamond district. The transactions being processed represent billions of dollars for the Zionist entity (13).

The most famous, and most influential New York city paper is the New York Times, owned by the Ochs-Sulzberger family, a wealthy Zionist creed that has donated to pro-Israel causes for more than 100 years despite outwardly opposing the usurping entity at times so the family appears ‘non-Zionist’ (14). To this very day, it operates with a strong bias for the Zionist state and reinforces the negative portrayal of Arabs and Muslims in accordance with the other mainstream media outlets (15). The NASDAQ is controlled by Zionist Robert Greifeld, who signed an agreement with Ester Levanon, the CEO of the Tel Aviv Stock Exchange to formalize a ‘closer relationship’ between the two markets (16). The Dow Jones is controlled by the CME Group, owned by Christian Zionists Terrence Duffy and Craig Donohue. Duffy and Donohue purchased the stock exchange from News Corp, owned by infamous Zionist Rupert Murdoch. Duffy and Donohue were honored by Hebrew University earlier this year for their ‘strong support of the state of Israel,’ with Duffy receiving the Zionist school’s National Scopus Award (17). Hebrew University is built on illegally occupied land in Jerusalem. Wall Street is crawling with Zionists, and every company involved in the recent criminal bailout of the banking industry had deep loyalties to the illegitimate terror state. Several of the financial giants were also connected to the 9/11 false flag attack (18).

It goes on (and on and on), but the upshot is apparently this: "It is perfectly reasonable to hypothesize, considering how much financial clout and political power the Zionists possess, that any project, structure, or event going against their interest in New York wouldn't be able to come to fruition." I'd like to make a crack about the size of my hotel room, but I've actually been pleasantly surprised. Then again, I am Jewish, so presumably the Sheraton bent over backwards to give me this 6th floor masterpiece.

In any event, the verdict is clear: If it happens in New York, it's the Jews' fault. Tune in next week, for more exciting adventures in "Things Jews Are Blamed For"!

Quote of the Day

Johann Gottlieb Fichte previously gained mentioned on this blog for advocating that, as a prerequisite for their getting civil rights, Jewish "heads should be cut off in one night and replaced with others not containing a single Jewish idea." This quote, while equally revealing, is somewhat less revolting:

"What sort of philosophy one chooses depends, therefore, on what sort of [person] one is; for a philosophical system is not a dead piece of furniture that we accept or reject as we wish; it is rather a thing animated by the soul of the person who holds it."

Johann Gottlieb Fichte, The Science of Knowledge (Wissenschaftslehre) 16 (Heath and Lachs, trans., Appleton-Century Crofts 1970) (1797).

To some extent, our philosophies act as constraints on what sorts of behaviors we're willing to engage in, but to a much larger extent what behaviors we feel are important or valuable or worthwhile constrain the philosophies we are willing to accept. When last I made this point (with respect to our judicial interpretative philosophies), I illustrated it by a conversation in Firefly between River Tam and the bounty hunter Jubal Early:

River: You hurt people.

Early: Only when the job requires it.

River: Wrong. You're a bad liar. [...] You like to hurt folk.

Early: It's part of the job.

River: It's why you took the job.

Sometimes the fruits of our philosophical positions are just "part of the job." More often though, I suspect, they're why we adapted the philosophy in the first place.

Get This

Here's something you don't see everyday:

Two Orthodox rabbis and two others were arrested for allegedly kidnapping and beating men in order to force them to grant their wives religious Jewish divorces.

The men were arrested Wednesday night in a monthlong sting operation in which a female FBI agent posed as an Orthodox woman trying to get a religious divorce, or “get,” from her husband.

The problem whereby Jewish men do not give their wives a get, and thus prevent them from remarrying, is a well-known issue in the Orthodox Jewish community. They've come up with a variety of different responses, most of which are variations on social shaming techniques. This is the first I've heard of vigilante beatings, though.

The simple solution, of course, is to allow either party to file a get. Gender egalitarianism -- is there any problem it can't solve?

Private Eyes, Public Lies

A Texas high school teacher was discovered to have had nude photos of her taken while she was in college. Some parents are calling for her to be fired. Students, by contrast, are reallying to save her job (via). At the Texas Monthly, Dan Solomon asks if we're entering a new era where having some old naked photos crop up isn't a big deal. Naked selfies are becoming so common, he argues, that people will soon no longer be able to muster up any outrage about them.

This is something I've thought of a lot -- less from the naked selfie perspective than from the more general fact that far more of our lives (and particularly our young lives) are documented for posterity than ever before. As a society, we are forgetting how to forget -- everything you do is part of your permanent profile. Young people are constantly warned that those Facebook pictures of themselves at the kegger in high school could have serious consequences when they try to apply for jobs. Old transgressions can come back to shame people years later with a few well-placed google searches.

And that may be true, in the short-term. But in the long-term, I suspect it's more likely that we will systematically recalibrate our expectations. The shock value of a picture showing a guy passed out on the couch surrounded by PBR cans is dramatically diminished when the HR director has the same photos floating around. If everyone has embarrassing photos, dumb teen angsty poetry, and nude self-portraits scattered throughout the internet, then nobody does.

This has more profound consequences than I think are typically acknowledged. We talk about the dangers of the internet's limitless memory as if I current conceptions of shame, guilt, condemnation, and even personal continuity will survive intact. But it's at least as likely that the fact that a documented past is now the norm rather than the exception will cause significant alterations to all of these things. The regulation of underage drinking, for example, occurs now even though it is exceptionally likely that virtually every state and federal politician drank while underage. We know that, but we don't know that, and if a picture surfaced of Congressman John Doe drunk while in college would still be news. It's a different thing when the existence of these photos is commonplace and mainstream -- it prevents us from even maintaining the facade to shield ourselves from charges of hypocrisy -- or so I think.

The result, I hope, is a more forgiving society. If everyone's dirty laundry is out there for the rest to see, there's no sense preserving its status as reputation-annihilating. Reputation is a collective action problem, and the share-everything mentality of the internet helps resolve it. Or so I think.

A War of All Against All

Some gamers usee Scribblenauts to answer the ultimate question: Who would win a fight (everybody edition)? The ultimate champion may be a surprise.

Better Than Newt

This strikes me as a reach:

Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) told his Republican colleagues that the shutdown has improved the GOP's position in a closed-door lunch on Wednesday, according to the Washington Examiner.

Cruz paid for a poll conducted by Chris Perkins, of Republican polling firm Wilson Perkins Allen. The poll found results similar to those run by national firms this week, which showed Republicans taking the majority of blame for the shutdown. Only 28 percent of Americans have a favorable opinion of the Republican Party, according to findings from Gallup released Wednesday.

However, Cruz argued that because the shutdown resulted from a disagreement over Obamacare, not spending in general, Republicans are in a better position now than they were in 1995, according to the Examiner.

Cruz's poll found that 46 percent blame the 2013 shutdown on Republicans, while 51 percent blamed the 1995 shutdown on Republicans, according to the Examiner.

The public hates us, but not as much as they hated Newt Gingrich does not an effective rallying cry make.

Roadspierre

Well this will certainly brighten the grim DC mood:

On October 11th, a group of right-wing truckers is planning to drive to DC to shut down the major commuter highway that circles the city. They’ll continue to block traffic, they say, until they see the arrest of elected officials who have “violated their oath of office.”

Organizers of the event, which is titled “Truckers Ride for the Constitution,” say they are fed up with a variety of headaches caused by the government: Fuel efficiency standards enforced by the Environmental Protection Agency, Obamacare, state and local laws over idling their trucks, and “insurance companies purportedly requiring technological updates,” according to US News and World Report.

They say that to demonstrate against violations of the constitution, they plan to circle interstate 495 — known widely as the beltway — and not allow through any traffic. If police try to stop them, they’ll park their trucks right on the highway.

Originally, reports from US News and World Report indicated the truckers were looking to impeach President Obama. But Earl Conlon, an organizer of the event, told US News, “We’re not asking for impeachment, we’re asking for the arrest of everyone in government who has violated their oath of office.” These include House Minority Leader Nancy Pelosi (D-CA), and Sen. Dianne Feinstein (D-CA), both for purportedly arming al Qaeda linked Syrian rebels.

Oh joy. But wait! I take the Communist Socialist Metro for my commute! Joke's on them!

When Friends Get Too Close

Poor Ken Cuccinelli -- his friends are his worst enemy. First one of his supporters makes an anti-Semitic joke while introducing him at a rally (to Cuccinelli's credit he immediately condemned the remark). Now he's taking great steps to avoid being associated with Sen. Ted Cruz (R-TX) -- a goal with which Cruz is not exactly cooperating:

In the clearest sign yet of the potent effect of the government shutdown on the Virginia governor’s race, Republican Ken Cuccinelli avoided being photographed with Ted Cruz at a gala they headlined here Saturday night—even leaving before the Texas senator rose to speak.
[...]
For his part, Cruz heaped praise on his “friend” Cuccinelli and argued passionately in a 54-minute speech that their party can still win the messaging fight over the shutdown if the people just speak out loudly enough.

“Ken is smart, he’s principled and he’s fearless,” said Cruz, in a line that may give the left fodder for attack ads, given how the campaign has gone. “And that last characteristic in particular is a rare, rare commodity in elected life. There are so many elected officials in both parties that desperately crave the adulation of the media and the intelligentsia.”

That sequence honestly made me laugh out loud -- I can just imagine Cooch backstage muttering "shutupshutupshutup!"

Cruz, of course, does not shut up.

Things Jews Are Blamed For: Inaugural Fukushima Edition

I'm tempted to start an ongoing weekly series entitled "things Jews are blamed for" (it could be daily or hourly content-wise, but I have my sanity to think). It will feature various things going on the world and how somebody, somewhere, is convinced the Jews are at fault.

Today's entrant: Jews caused the Fukushima disaster. [http://firstlightforum.wordpress.com/2011/10/31/jews-sabotage-fukushima-power-plant-as-payback-for-japans-support-of-an-independent-palestinian-state/ -- in general I won't be directly linking to the sites in question for obvious reasons].