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].

The Only Thing We Have To Fear....

Kevin Drum links to an interesting study (summarized here; full-text is here for people who, unlike me, have access to these sorts of things) about why people listen to talk radio. The answer is it provides an affirming space where they can express their political opinions in a welcoming environment without fear of social sanction. And the reason conservative talk radio is so much more popular than its liberal counterpart is that conservatives are far more fearful of a particular type of social sanction: being called a racist.

In conversation with conservatives, liberals risk being called naïve or willfully blind to potential threats—not very pleasant labels, but not especially damaging ones, either. In contrast, conservatives risk accusations of racism—and “being called a racist carries a particular cultural force,” the researchers write.

“The experience of being perceived as racist loomed large in the mind of conservative fans (we interviewed),” they report. Every single conservative respondent raised the issue of being called racist, and did so without even being asked.

“What makes accusations of racism so upsetting for respondents is that racism is socially stigmatized, but also that they feel powerless to defend themselves once the specter is raised,” the researchers add. “We suspect that this heightened social risk increases the appeal of the safe political environs provided by outrage-based programs, and may partially explain the overwhelming conservative dominance of outrage-based political talk media.”

I think any White person at least feels a ping of recognition here. I didn't always have the views of race and racism that I do now, and I remember when I viewed the charge of "racism" in much the same way -- a bolt of lightening, wanton and capricious, impossible to predict, and terribly destructive. I try to remember that outlook because I remember who I was then: I wasn't some monster or Klansman in training, and (obviously) I was still in a position where I could eventually be persuaded to think more critically about the role of racism in contemporary American life.

That being said, one thing that I think often gets lost in these discussions is who is benefitted by viewing racism this way. Let's use Drum's discussion as an example:

It's obvious that race infuses a tremendous amount of American discourse. It affects our politics, our culture, and our history. Racial resentment is at the core of many common attitudes toward social welfare programs; our levels of taxation; and the current occupant of the White House. There's no way to write honestly about politics in America without acknowledging all this on a regular basis.

At the same time, it's also obvious that, in many ways, a liberal focus on race and racism is just flatly counterproductive. When I write about, say, the racial obsessions displayed by Fox News (or Drudge or Rush Limbaugh), it's little more than a plain recitation of obvious facts, and liberals applaud. Ditto for posts about the self-described racial attitudes of tea partiers. But conservatives see it as an attack. And why wouldn't they? I'm basically saying that these outlets are engaged in various levels of race-mongering, and by implication, that anyone who listens to them is condoning racism. That's such a uniquely toxic accusation that it makes any real conversation hopeless. Cognitively, the only way to respond is to deny everything, and that in turn forces you to believe that liberals are obviously just lying for their own partisan ends. This feeds the vicious media-dittohead circle, and everyone withdraws one step more.

Drum identifies a paradox: We have to talk about racism, but talking about racism renders conversation impossible. Racism is a "such a uniquely toxic accusation that it makes any real conversation hopeless."

But here's the thing: there's no reason why that has to be true. When we talk about homelessness, for example, and I argue that a particular political position is unfair to the homeless, it doesn't have this effect. Racism is different: to talk about racial justice at all is automatically translated into a personal attack on the target's moral character. And once that's the terrain of the discussion, we've insulated the underlying policy differences from critical review. All conversations about racism are converted into inquisitions into whether or not someone is a conscious bigot. Since they know they're nothing of the sort, the "accusation" is dismissed and the "accuser" is labeled a race-baiter. One may have noticed that even if one takes great pains to frame an argument such that it does not call anybody a racist, the stock response nevertheless will be "are you calling me a racist?!!?" Why are they so eager to make the debate about something so "toxic"? It's because that's actually very easy terrain to deal with.

Framing racism as a "toxic" accusation benefits the status quo racial hierarchy. Most obviously, it does so by insulating policies which have racial impacts from meaningful scrutiny. More subtly, it allows proponents of maintaining racial hierarchy to maintain their self-perception as anti-racist. This whole gambit depends on asserting the exceptional moral seriousness of racism (else how could it be so "toxic"?). One often hears the claim that a given charge of racism is spurious coupled with the assertion that such frivolous accusations "make it harder to oppose real racism" -- a reassertion of racism as something that is serious and does need to be opposed. The net result is that racism is so serious that nothing ever actually can be racist -- a neat equilibrium, for those who want to identify as non-racist but don't want to actually change anything about themselves.

For this reason, in Sticky Slopes I warn that ratcheting up the moral condemnation associated with "racism" isn't necessarily a good thing -- as we increase the seriousness of the norm, we decrease the range of behaviors people are willing to accept may be in violation of it. Racial liberals probably had a great role to play in giving "racism" its toxic reputation; but racial conservatives have powerful cognitive incentives to continue perceiving it this way.

Pieces of the Pie

The latest Republican gambit to extract themselves out of their own self-destructive shutdown technique (other than blaming federal employees for the GOP's own decision to refuse to pass a clean budget bill) is to pass piecemeal bills that fund certain high profile federal programs, like national parks and cancer research on sick kids. It is of course breathtakingly cynical, and Democrats are right not to take the bait.

But my question is this: why can't Democrats volley this back the same way they've done to the House "defund Obamacare" packages? Take the House bill which funds just parks and research and veterans programs, amend it to add back every other program, pass that, and then send it right back to the House? It seems like that would neutralize the gambit pretty effectively. Hell, add back in some money to food stamps and leave out farm subsidies. If we're going to fund the government "piecemeal", well, an entire pie is technically a "piece"; especially if you shave off a few crumbs of corporate welfare.

Be Bold!

When I first posted Sticky Slopes onto SSRN (way back in 2009), Larry Solum gave it his coveted blue stamp of approval. It was the pale blue version, and as every reader of the Legal Theory blog knows, his endorsement comes in levels. Today, Unsuspecting made its appearance on Solum's blog, and it got the bold blue seal of approval. Ladies and gentlemen, I am moving up in the world!

(And of course, my thanks to Larry for the recommendation and kind words! He really is one of a kind in the legal marketplace, and his Legal Theory blog is an indispensable resource for anyone working in ... well, any area of law, really. It's really quite amazing).

I'm a Bad Man

I believe it was PG who complained that characterizing the Republican gambits regarding the debt ceiling and government shutdown as "hostage taking" was unfair and hyperbolic -- akin to the famed "Bushitler" extremism we'd all do better without. In rebuttal, here's former Bush speechwriter Marc Theissen, embracing the label:

Obama has accused Republicans of hostage taking. Let’s be clear: I’m all for taking hostages. Both sides do it all the time. But one of the first things they teach you in Hostage Taking 101 is that you have to choose a hostage the other side cares about saving.

Hence, Theissen argues for swapping the government shutdown hostage for the debt ceiling hostage. The former doesn't hurt the country enough, and people are blaming Republicans for it anyway. Not raising the debt ceiling, by contrast, now that will do some damage!

There's this weird trend whereby the media seems intent on characterizing Republican tactics in language far milder than do the Republicans themselves. So while the media is intent on "can't we all just get along" whines, Republicans are gleefully characterizing themselves a curled-mustached villains demanding we reverse the 2012 election lest they put two in the head of that pretty little economy of ours.

In Praise of Miserable Judges

Senior United States District Judge (D. Neb.) Richard Kopf talks about what it means to be a judge in today's criminal law environment:

The best way to think about it [becoming a federal judge] is to ask yourself this question: “Am I a willing judicial executioner, a person who consciously does great harm to other human beings by faithfully executing the extraordinarily harsh national criminal laws?” Those who covet a federal trial judgeship should think hard about this truth before pursuing the job.

I doubt they will. Instead, they will say to themselves, “I’m different. I am not weak. I am strong-minded.” Or, “I’m just doing what the law requires.” Or, “They did it to themselves. They deserve it.” Or, “Someone has to do it, and maybe I can improve things.” The rationalizations are endless.

But stripped of the BS that allows good people to do bad things, here is the essential truth: When sentencing people, federal trial judges literally and consciously destroy lives and most do so on a daily basis. So, I have a bit of advice for those who wish to replace Judge Bataillon. Be careful what you ask for. You have no idea what the hell you’re getting into.

Will Baude and I had the exact same instinct, which was that this sounds a lot like Robert Cover's famous declaration that "judges deal pain and death." I doubt Judge Kopf, a Reagan appointee, has typically been mistaken for Professor Cover, which makes this all the more striking.

Judge Kopf's sense is one I shared when I was clerking. For the most part during my clerkship, I did not feel like I was "doing justice" in any real sense, particularly in criminal law. This was not a knock on my judge or co-clerks, or anybody else on the Eighth Circuit. But doing law the way law is done, I felt like I was ruining far more lives than I was validating. At many times, it felt to me like I was making the world a worse place. It was not a good feeling.

On the other hand, I also cringe at Judge Kopf's suggestion that candidates for judgeships "think hard" about the truth of federal sentencing. Not because I oppose hard thought, but because however hard it is to be a judge who is miserable in her role as a "judicial executioner," I think it would be far worse if the only judges we had are those who ask themselves if they're willing to take on that role, and answer with a hearty "hell yeah, I am!"

Could Be!

Anita Perry, wife of Texas Governor Rick Perry (R), doesn't appear to share his view on abortion:

Speaking to Evan Smith at the 2013 Texas Tribune Festival, Perry said that abortion, an issue that Governor Rick Perry has made the cornerstone of his entire reign as Texas’s most important ten-gallon hat wearer, “could be a women’s right.” ....

In front of a visibly surprised Smith, Perry tried to elaborate her opinion about why abortion in particular is a uniquely women’s rights issue, saying, “That's really difficult for me, Evan, because I see it as a women's right. If they want to do that, that is their decision; they have to live with that decision.”

Smith then asked the blunt (and exceedingly generous) follow-up everyone else was probably itching to ask: “Mrs. Perry, I want to be sure you didn't just inadvertently make news. Are you saying that you believe abortion is a women's right, to make that choice?"

... [Perry responded:] “Yeah, that could be a women's right. Just like it's a man's right if he wants to have some kind of procedure. But I don't agree with it, and that's not my view."

Republicans will no doubt be appalled at this gross breach of party orthodoxy -- specifically, a woman who has an opinion different from that of her husband.