Accidental Blogger

Chasing the Paliban (Sujatha)

Sarah Palin made it to my corner of the woods, this Saturday afternoon. "Thousands" lined up to meet her, per the gushing report from the Washington PA Observer-Reporter

(Note, the website page had been read 297 times by the time I saw it. Are there thousands of people in Washington PA, or was the true number of gawkers and admirers just barely over 2000, which would have qualified for the use of the plural?)

"Thousands of people stood in a queue outside Sam’s Club at Trinity Point Saturday morning, many standing in line overnight, for a chance to see Sarah Palin and have her autograph a copy of her new book.

...

Sharon Jacobs of Greer, S.C., along with her sister, Amy Gerwing of Venetia, got into line about 8:30 p.m. Friday outside the store. For Gerwing, it was not only an opportunity to have her books signed but to thank Palin for the note she sent to the Peters Township woman when she was diagnosed with breast cancer.

Palin sent her a note offering words of encouragement from herself and her husband, Todd Palin. Gerwing said a friend of hers sent Palin an e-mail about her diagnosis. Palin sent the note a few weeks later.

Jacobs said while her sister is a big Palin supporter, she was ambivalent about the former Republican vice presidential nominee who may be pointing for her own run to the White House.

“I am trying to educate myself and learn more about her,” Jacobs said. 

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Why didn't the folksy note translate into unquestioning adoration for Palin, I wonder. Maybe Palin's early departure leaving 400-odd unsigned books at Noblesville, Indiana yesterday had them wondering about the wisdom of relying on Palin.

Also, some camped there overnight in their enthusiasm - at least 40 people were in line at 8:30 pm on Friday, as they formed new friendships over mutual admiration of Palin. "He said Palin is likable because she is a down-to-earth conservative woman. "She hunts," he added."

For this area,  like many others, is Hunter's Paradise, the land of the brave, the free, the 'bitter who cling to their guns and religion'.

Maddy wants patient choice!

Babies and cute animals sell products. Congressman John Shadegg of Arizona set out to take that marketing ploy a bit too far, in fact nauseatingly so.  During last Saturday's debate on health care reform, he used an infant like a ventriloquist's dummy to make his case against publicly funded medical insurance. Even by the low standards of honesty and decency set by the Republicans, Rep Shadegg's exploitative grandstanding was cringeworthy. 

Meanwhile, the number of uninsured Arizonans is depressingly high and rising. 

 

 

Praising with a forked tongue

Gotta love the GOP ignoramuses.  I mean, what would we be doing here without the endless stream of gaffes, Freudian slips and calculated outrages that emanate from the right wing corridors of power? This one comes from South Carolina:

After his words attracted national attention and drew condemnation from a Jewish state senator, a South Carolina Republican official is now apologizing for co-writing a newspaper op-ed that described Jews as penny-pinchers.

James Ulmer, chairman of the Orangeburg County GOP, said he made a "great error" in the op-ed, which he penned along with Bamberg County GOP chairman Edwin Merwin.

The piece, which ran Sunday in the Orangeburg Times & Democrat, was meant to defend South Carolina Sen. Jim DeMint's position against congressional earmarks.

"There is a saying that the Jews who are wealthy got that way not by watching dollars, but instead by taking care of the pennies and the dollars taking care of themselves," the piece read. "By not using earmarks to fund projects for South Carolina and instead using actual bills, DeMint is watching our nation's pennies and trying to preserve our country's wealth and our economy's viability to give all an opportunity to succeed." (emphasis mine)

Oops! At least he didn't go into the subject of the powerful international banking cabal that controls the world through invisible financial strings. 

When good physicists go rogue (D)

The New York Times has an article about someone who thinks the higgs boson is traveling back in time to stop the Large Hadron Collider (where I do my research) from working. As evidence, we are reminded of project delays, the fact that the Superconducting Super Collider project was canceled in the nineties, and that time travel isn't strictly impossible. We can confirm the hypothesis by drawing cards from a large deck to see if unlikely combinations arise. Read the article, but only to marvel at the burning stupid it summarizes (the paper itself is here). It's just a dreadful paper, and you don't even need much physics to know so. In fact, time travel is hardly the biggest problem here:

• Not the slightest reason is given for why a higgs might want to not be made
• There's no explanation for why it would work its magic by playing puckish trickster pranks on physicists and engineers.
• In fact, there's no consideration at all given to *HOW* a particle would happen to tweak the brains and bodies of tens of thousands of people (including members of congress when they canceled the SSC) in just such ways as would preserve the ordinary operations of thought. You must have people thinking and acting in utterly prosaic ways as they decide whether and how to build accelerators (should this connection between two parts must be made of two-centimeter thick copper or one? Maybe construction on that sub-project ought to be shelved to speed up turn-on...) while all the time they're being tweaked to achieve something distinctly un-ordinary - the failure of a large-scale multi billion dollar project. This sounds like the adaptive, reasoning, intelligent operation of an Evil Agent, not the steady, simple, lawful action of a particle obeying fundamental laws. What do the authors imagine the tee-shirt equation-of-motion for an adaptive saboteur looks like? Perhaps as a toy model they can present it evolving forward in time, if backwards seems too hard.
• The so-called argument from reverse-causation would apply to anything that has ever faced difficulties. Maybe the universe also hates the big dig or the Kyoto Protocol and tries its damndest to keep them from working.
• The probabilistic reasoning is fatuous - how are we to tell "Ooh, we picked a rare card! The higgs really wants not to be discovered!" from "Man, this card is rare. We must paint Botswana purple at once!" from "Such a splendiferous card! Surely the saints are telling us Roman Polanski is innocent and that the Riemann Hypothesis is false"? In the paper, this magic is accomplished by writing text on the cards. The authors haven't seen fit to inform us whether words in any language reach the holy ears of the higgs, or if it likes only English. I imagine we are to be direct and straightforward in all our questions - it's a spin-free boson, get it?

The physics itself doesn't help one whit - there's no more than a smidge of formalism about frameworks where you can have backward propagation in time. At least real papers on the subject treat the attendant issues in depth and seriously. Here it's three or four essentially content free word-equations. The funny thing is there are much saner (and ubiquitous) ways of writing theories where the universe (or a part thereof) has a way of getting what it "wants" - you write an equation with a potential function, and regions of high potential are disfavored. So, the universe "wants" to keep us from escaping the surly bonds of earth by using gravity, if you want to put it that way.

The paper essentially serves as proof, if it was ever needed, that even people embedded in large scientific research communities may temporarily believe astonishingly foolish things when they're deprived of the means for keeping them sane, busy and active: data, if possible data that don't agree with what you already know.

Where has he been?

An interracial couple has been denied a marriage license by a justice of peace in Louisiana.  Keith Bardwell, the man refusing to issue the license, claims he is not a racist but that he is concerned for the well being of any future children the couple may have.

HAMMOND, La. — A Louisiana justice of the peace said he refused to issue a marriage license to an interracial couple out of concern for any children the couple might have.

Keith Bardwell, justice of the peace in Tangipahoa Parish, says it is his experience that most interracial marriages do not last long.

Neither Bardwell nor the couple immediately returned phone calls from The Associated Press. But Bardwell told the Daily Star of Hammond that he was not a racist.

"I do ceremonies for black couples right here in my house," Bardwell said. "My main concern is for the children."

Bardwell said he has discussed the topic with blacks and whites, along with witnessing some interracial marriages. He came to the conclusion that most of black society does not readily accept offspring of such relationships, and neither does white society, he said.

"I don't do interracial marriages because I don't want to put children in a situation they didn't bring on themselves," Bardwell said. "In my heart, I feel the children will later suffer."

If he does an interracial marriage for one couple, he must do the same for all, he said.

"I try to treat everyone equally," he said.

So what does Bardwell fear may happen to the children?  Why, one of them might become the president of the United States, for one thing!

The Texas marriage trap

Divorce is good for marriage!  At least, that is proving to be true for a gay married couple in Texas, as a current court case here illustrates.

HOUSTON — A judge in Texas paved the way for a court battle over the state’s ban on same-sex marriage when she ruled this week that two men married in another state can get divorced in Dallas.

The state attorney general said Friday that he would appeal the decision, even as gay rights advocates applauded the judge, Tena Callahan of Family District Court, for declaring that the state’s four-year-old ban on same-sex marriages and civil unions violated the right to equal protection under the 14th Amendment.

The case highlights a subtle way gay men and lesbians often face complications when it comes to marriage: gay couples who have managed to marry in the few states where it is legal have trouble divorcing and dividing their property if they move to a state where it is not.

The case in Texas involves two men who married in Cambridge, Mass., in 2006, then moved to Dallas the following year when one of them was transferred by his company, a lawyer for the couple, Peter A. Schulte, said.

The men decided to divorce in January and reached an amicable agreement about splitting up their house, cars and other property. But they had to file for divorce in Texas, because, like most other states, Massachusetts allows only residents to sue for divorce, Mr. Schulte said.

The Texas attorney general, Greg Abbott, a Republican, took the unusual step of intervening in the divorce proceeding last January. Mr. Abbott asserted that the state court could not dissolve the marriage because the Texas Constitution, as amended in 2005, did not recognize any marriage unless it was between a man and a woman.

But Mr. Schulte said his clients, who were identified in court documents as J.B. and H.B., had not sought to challenge the state’s ban on same-sex marriage. They were asking only to split up without having to return to Cambridge, as a heterosexual couple would have been able to do.

“It’s not fair to make them uproot their lives, move back to another state, wait a year and then file for divorce,” Mr. Schulte said.

What a perfect case of Catch 22! The gay couple could not have married in Texas but having got married in another state where the nuptials were legal, they cannot dissolve the marriage in the Lone Star State where they now reside, when things have fallen apart in their relationship. The non-recognition of the marriage makes a divorce impossible - a painful paradox to say the least.  Naturally, many other right wing Texas law makers, Governor Rick Perry and Senator Kay Bailey Hutchison included, have climbed on to the attorney general's "no divorce" band wagon.  The funny thing is that H.B. and J.B., as the two petitioners are named in the case, are not challenging Texas' ban on gay marriage. They just want out of their own union but are being forced to stay in a state of perpetual wedded "non-bliss" by those who wouldn't have allowed them to marry in the first place.

Professor Andrew Koppelman of Northwestern University School of Law has warned of exactly such a scenario in his book Same Sex, Different States.

Must a state in which gay marriage is not legal recognize such a marriage performed in another state? The Constitution does not require recognition in all cases, but it does forbid states from nullifying family relationships based in other states, or from making themselves havens for people who are trying to escape obligations to their spouses and children.

So if Abbott and company have their way in denying J.B and H.B. a divorce, Texas could become a haven for gay men and women who walk away from a legal marriage in another state and default on spousal or child support. And to make matters even more complicated, they could even enter into  heterosexual marriages in Texas  without the fear of being charged with the crime of bigamy!   

 

Not seeing the oak for the acorn

Right wingers have always been very good at vilifying any organization whose politics don't match theirs, especially if those groups are advocates of the poor, minorities, women, immigrants or homosexuals. At one time or the other, groups like the NEA, ACLU, Planned Parenthood and even government welfare programs like Medicaid and Food Stamps have been objects of anger and derision. A favorite (and effective) tactic is to pick a grain of truth, an isolated incident, a statistically insignificant trend and occasionally, fabricated myths about these services and publicize them as true and widespread practices. Soon enough, with enough people repeating the highly exaggerated accounts of missteps and mismanagement, the organizations become tarred and feathered as un-American, wasteful, wanton and even immoral. The newest target of right wing ire is the community organization, ACORN, some of whose inept officials have been caught saying outrageous things on tape while being led on by conservative actors posing as pimps, prostitutes and other miscreants. (see this WSJ report dripping with gotcha sarcasm but not a word about entrapment) So, is ACORN really a group devoted to shady housing transactions, tax evasion, prostitution, voter fraud and even murder?  Are its employees quasi criminals masquerading as social workers out to defraud the system? Not quite so. Harold Meyerson of the Washington Post explains the background of Acorn.

The embattled community organizing group is much in the news these days, thanks to the idiocies of a handful of now-suspended staffers having been filmed and YouTubed by a right-wing sting squad. Most of the stories present ACORN as, at best, a shady organization up to no good in America's inner cities, not to mention the nation's primary source of voting fraud.

What's been obscured amid all the polemics, or the polemics passing as news reports, is what ACORN is and does. Founded in Little Rock in 1970 as an organization agitating for free school lunches, Vietnam veterans' rights and more hospital emergency rooms, ACORN has grown in the past four decades into the nation's largest community organizing group. Based in low-income neighborhoods, it has nearly 500,000 dues-paying members, recruited by door-to-door canvassers, with chapters in 110 cities in 40 states. Nationwide, it has more than 1,000 staffers.

What are the projects on which all these staffers and members work? Raising the minimum wage, for one. ACORN conceived and led the successful initiative campaign to raise the wage in Florida in 2004 and in four more states in 2006. In the past four years, it successfully pressured seven legislatures in other states to raise their minimum wage as well.

Another major campaign has been to limit the interest and fees that banks charge homeowners. In the 1990s, ACORN spearheaded a number of legal actions, often joined by states' attorneys general, that compelled such lenders as Citigroup to change many of their practices. The group has led successful drives to outlaw the most egregious predatory lending in nine states. It also counsels thousands of inner-city homeowners and home buyers. (More here)

Now, I have no problem with incompetent and corrupt officials belonging to organizations that are beneficiaries of public money, being fired. If a crime is committed they should also be prosecuted whether they serve liberal or conservative causes. ACORN is currently being investigated and the federal grants it receives are under review. Well and good. However, another organization that has been implicated in murder, prostitution, financial irregularities and even torture, is operating with impunity. But it happens to be a Christian, conservative operation. The private security firm of Blackwater (aka XE) which the Bush administration engaged for supplying mercenaries for the Iraq war has never faced any criticism of its unsavory business practices from right wing commentators or elected officials. What is even more ironic is that the Obama administration continues to utilize Blackwater's services while squirming to distance itself from ACORN!

In April 2002, the CIA paid Blackwater more than $5 million to deploy a small team of men inside Afghanistan during the early stages of US operations in the country. A month later, Erik Prince, the company's owner and a former Navy SEAL, flew to Afghanistan as part of the original twenty-man Blackwater contingent. Blackwater worked for the CIA at its station in Kabul as well as in Shkin, along the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, where they operated out of a mud fortress known as the Alamo. It was the beginning of a long relationship between Blackwater, Prince and the CIA.

Now the New York Times is reportingthat in 2004 the CIA hired Blackwater "as part of a secret program to locate and assassinate top operatives of Al Qaeda." According to the Times, "it is unclear whether the CIA had planned to use the contractors to capture or kill Qaeda operatives, or just to help with training and surveillance."

The Timesreports that "the CIA did not have a formal contract with Blackwater for this program but instead had individual agreements with top company officials, including the founder, Erik D. Prince, a politically connected former member of the Navy Seals and the heir to a family fortune." A retired intelligence officer "intimately familiar with the assassination program" told the Washington Post, "Outsourcing gave the agency more protection in case something went wrong." The Postreported that Blackwater "was given operational responsibility for targeting terrorist commanders and was awarded millions of dollars for training and weaponry, but the program was canceled before any missions were conducted."

Jeremy Scahill's report in the Nation here and a video of Scahill in conversation with Bill Maher here.

Egypt's Folly - Health Measure Was Hogwash

Superstition ridden medieval Europe condemned cats as witchs' agents and slaughtered them. Nature's pay back for that brutal and dastardly act came in the form of the Black Plague when the rat population proliferated in the absence of a natural feline pest control. A similar but less deadly fate may be in store for Egypt whose president Hosni Mubarak, in a heartless, mindless and misguided moment of inspiration, ordered all pigs killed in order to protect the nation from swine flu. The streets of Cairo are now awash in stinking garbage. The pigs used to consume organic trash in large quantities and helped keep the city  partially clean. Now they are all gone due to the stupid step taken by ignorant, cowardly politicians and the rubbish is piling up. So, Egyptians are protected from swine flu (they wish!) but are sure to suffer from other more easy to spread infectious diseases that the putrid waste will help breed. And they had been warned of the consequences of the idiotic measure. The story in the New York Times.   

Golconda (Sujatha)

The taxi winds around the narrow maze of roads leading up to the fort. It's a very democratic cross-section of the population that lines up to enter the grounds: at Rs.10 per ticket, this is a poor man's park, not just the haunt of the well-heeled. The lawns near the entrance are surprisingly green, well-watered even as an extended dry spell has been hovering over the city and suburbs. But further inside, the parterres look parched and dusty red.

(The photo above is by A.Gopalratnam)

As we climb the steps, we dip off to the side, under the erstwhile stables/bodyguard barracks. At the far end, a couple of cauldrons are cooking and a largish group of picnickers are seated in a row, partaking of the feast. (Is that the famed Hyderabadi biryani that I smell?)
We pass on, further up the steps to the main fort. A couple are marked with what I suspect to be red and yellow paint- it's too bright to be kumkum and turmeric. I wonder why, until a few steps later we are treated to the unexpected spectacle of a man cutting the head off a white rooster in front of a small make-shift altar at the step. Maybe a sacrifice to the goddess Jagadamba, who has a temple, even in this fort which was last controlled by the Muslim Qutb Shahi dynasty.
My kids and friends are shocked by the blood spilling out onto the step, and walk gingerly around the altar and rooster head, bemoaning the barbarianism. The man carefully washes the blood from the steps, and walks quickly away, clutching the rooster's body, that likely will be cooked as part of the Bonalu festival.
We stop the walk to the top of the hill, and retrace our steps towards another area where a Light and Sound show will be held. This is for the bonafide wealthier tourists, cost Rs.100 for an ordinary ticket and double that for the VIP Executive class ticket, which comes with free soft drinks. The path to the seats is fraught with the perils of Bat-smell and Bat-droppings, echoes from the cliff-swallows swooping around the cavernous ceilings, as we wait in line for the security queue. A uniformed policewoman diligently peeks into our handbags before nodding us in.
As we swelter in the last rays of the setting sun, batting mosquitoes and ticks away in vain, a couple of scrawny cats rush towards the nearby garbage can, disappearing almost entirely inside as they rummage for leftovers.
A squeal from the loudspeakers, and then a booming voice announces the start of the show. It is a well-written and re-enacted history of the occupants of the fort, starting with the Kakatiya kings who built it, to the Qutb Shahi rulers who maintained the longest control over it, tales of kings and singers and lovers and saints, all wiped away in the final blast of war for control of the fabled fort. The Golconda is impregnable to all onslaughts but that of treachery. The lighting is wonderfully synced with the stirring narration and dialogues.
The audience is alternately captivated by the narration, or nodding off when the too-long musical interludes commence.(I'm sure they must have paid the singers handsomely for their efforts, but that doesn't necessarily mean that the whole songs be played in their 6 -or-8-stanza entirety!)
We escape during the final soulful paean to the glories of the Telugu people, just minutes before the remaining mass of the audience tries to ooze through the narrow pathway back, through the Bat-zone.
Walking outside the fort towards the taxi, squeals of horror from the kids punctuate our path: We have just managed to step on masses of teeming cockroaches that are out for the evening's dinner, congregating in the manholes.
The verdict from the kids: Unmitigated disaster of an excursion, since they didn't like the sacrificial rooster, or the bat-smells or the cockroaches.
My verdict: A reminder that beyond all the tourist trappings, there is still an underlying India that is worth seeing in all its glory and squalor.
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Cross-posted from Fluff 'n' Stuff

The varying shades of racism

A recent chance conversation with an Indian friend and Dean's comment on class and meritocracy, reminded me that although I have discussed racism in America and Europe on several occasions, I have probably never addressed the same issue vis-a-vis India in particular and Asia in general. Rampant racism, casteism, privilege by virtue of *high birth* and family connection is an unsavory fact of life in many parts of the world. In south Asia skin color plays a major role in determining social status, at least superficially.

It is not very well known that amidst the widely heterogeneous racial admixture that makes up the population of the Indian subcontinent, a tiny minority is of African descent. A couple of years ago, on his blog Amardeep Singh had written briefly about the Afro-Pakistani poet Noon Meem Danish. Amardeep's post contains a  link to an interesting account of the contrast between the modern Pakistani intelligentsia's political solidarity  with the distant continent of Africa and the sad plight of Pakistani citizens whose ancestors had been brought to the region as slaves from Africa centuries ago (scroll down to the last three paragraphs). The derogatory word for blacks in northern India and Pakistan is "Habshi." It packs a punch not quite as vicious as the N-word in the US, but the disdain built into the pejorative is unmistakable.

Faiz Muhammed Sheeddi and his organization have been in the forefront of advocating this community's causes. Indeed, the treatment of the sheeddis in Pakistan -- an example of which is the murder in police custody of the Afro-Sindhi youth, Mashooq Sheeddi, in 1994 at the hands of the Hyderabad police -- is reminiscent of racist police brutality against black youth in the US.

These communities closely follow events in Africa, and an example of both the interest and the identification is the fact that Faiz Muhammed Sheeddi and his fellow sheeddi tribesmen proudly say that Nelson Mandela has the same origins as themselves.

These currents of influence -- sometimes paradoxical, even contradictory -- between the continent of Africa and the region that is now Pakistan give the lie to the self-contained vision of the nation projected by the state. Instead, they bear witness to the histories of the wretched of the earth, and their struggles for solidarity. It is high time that the third world state began to reflect these histories and these realities of power, and took on again, with more seriousness than the last time, the project of solidarity.

I had left the following comment on Amardeep's post - a litany of casual observations describing what I had encountered as a young person growing up in a multi-ethnic society where color consciousness and judging people by physical attributes are ingrained.  Africans were not the only targets of derison.  

Two Indians of African descent that I was familiar with in childhood (although I only realized that fact when I was a bit older) was Siddhi, as he was commonly known, and Prakash. Siddhi was my father's favorite fishmonger who came to our home early every morning during the first ten years of my life bearing the *best catch of the day* for my father. He belonged to the Siddhi community of coastal Gujarat whose members trace their ancestry to Africa. Siddhi was dark skinned but looked not much different from many other Indians. Prakash, my uncle's motorcycle mechanic who too came to our home to do the repairs on the Royal Enfield, was a true blue African. A Kenyan by birth, he had been adopted in his infancy by a Punjabi couple in Nairobi who later moved to India when Prakash was a toddler. Well over 6' 3", he was an extremely handsome, gentle giant who spoke fluent Hindi and Punjabi. Given Prakash's size and build, I doubt that anyone called him a Habshi .... at least surely not to his face.

Habshi doesn't mean "slave" technically. It is derived from the word Abyssinian but does have a derogatory connotation in India and Pakistan. In my native language Bengali, I don't recall an equivalent word. But among my Hindi and Punjabi speaking friends, the word was common parlance. Some of my Punjabi friends' mothers would gently chide their fair complected daughters to stay out of the sun lest they start looking like "Habshis." And that extremely kinky hair that Narayan refers to, I have seen that trait mostly among dark complexioned Keralites and fair skinned Punjabis. 

By the time I was in college, (late sixties - early seventies) there were quite a few students from Africa in Delhi university. The way some students behaved with them was deplorable. They also found more difficulty in renting rooms around the university campus than other foreign students did. But then most foreign students (Thai, Arab, Indonesian, European) faced insulting conduct frequently. Even diasporic Indians from Fiji, east Africa, Mauritius etc. and genuine Indians from the northeast (Assam, Nagaland, Manipur), as also Tibetan and Sikkimese students faced rude behavior at the hands of local toughs. Most groups swallowed the insults and went about their business, sharing their discomfort with their more sympathetic Indian friends. Except the well built and fleet of foot, soccer & hockey playing Tibetan boys. I witnessed some truly blood curdling retributive justice meted out to those who made the mistake of calling them "Chinks."

The question of race is muddled and external appearances misleading but we just can't let go of it. South Asians are as obsessed with it as anyone else. Race being such an inexact category it is best not to make too much of it as James Watson has probably realized now.

Amardeep, please forgive me for two rapid links to self promotion. We have discussed the race / IQ / genetic trait controversy extensively at our blog. Please see what my co-blogger Anna wrote regarding something else Malcom Gladwell has said about IQ, this time Jewish IQ specifically.

Healthcare and Hitler

A couple of months ago, an otherwise cheerful neighborhood block party on our quiet street caused some agitation among the attendees when one of the neighbors began to describe President Obama as un-American, a socialist and a terrorist. He was angry with Obama's economic stimulus and distrustful of his health care plan. Even though there were only three people at that gathering who had voted for Obama (my husband and I accounted for two), even some of my Republican neighbors were a bit startled by the harsh rhetoric. 

There is danger in exaggeration, in describing things as much worse than they really are.  Not only does one thoroughly enrage the opposition, even those who agree with you in principle may not be willing to act with you. Although my neighbor, who claims to be a libertarian, did not call Obama a Nazi, the right wing opposition to health care reform routinely and loudly smears the president with Hitlerian analogies. Words like the Final Solution, Nazi and Mein Kampf are being carelessly tossed about by reactionary loud mouths like Rush Limbaugh and Sean Hannity. A swastika graffiti defaced the sign bearing the name of a Democratic congressman who supports Obama. Major and minor GOP operatives are gloating about spontaneous grass roots uprisings against the dreaded Obamacare. Protesters are showing up at town hall meetings with guns (even assault rifles) and pictures of Obama donning a clipped mustache. Yesterday a woman brandishing a placard depicting Obama as Hitler, asked Rep Barney Frank (D-MA) why he supported a "Nazi" like policy. She quickly learned that it was a mistake to direct such a stupid question at a smart, gay, Jewish man with a sharp tongue.  

The funny thing is that the fear mongers who warn us that a national health care system is equal to the National Socialist Party of 1930s' Germany, willfully ignore the reality of health insurance in America - that we are currently at the mercy of jackbooted private insurance companies goosestepping over the sick and dying all the way to the bank.  Death panels already exist and rationing of health care is routine in the free market system that they so adore. Please read columnist Froma Harrop's account of her family's ordeal with the insurance company during a period of life and death decision making.

Have the GOP partisans, whose elected leaders have not condemned any of the tactics described above, gone too far in vilifying Obama and the Democratic Party's efforts at overhauling the health care system? Have they fallen victim to Godwin's Law too early in the debate? Most Americans are satisfied with their doctors but many are scared of their insurance companies. Obama will do well to tout the Health Care Reform bill as the Insurance Reform bill. I am hoping that the loud and abusive theatrics of the angry and armed right wingers will back fire (no pun intended) since most Americans would like to see their health insurance system improved. I would however be more reassured if I didn't find President Obama's insistence on feel-good bi-partisan solutions a bit disappointing. In his efforts to calm too many nerves and smooth too many ruffled feathers, he has wasted precious time trying to find compromises where no common ground exists. Has Obama squandered his political capital by ceding too much ground and time to adversaries who merely wish to see him fail?   

After his brilliant beginning, the president suddenly looks weak and unreliable. That will be the common interpretation around Washington of the president's abrupt retreat on substantive heathcare reform. Give Barack Obama a hard shove, they will say, rough him up a bit and he folds. A few weeks back, the president was touting a "public option" health plan as an essential element in reform. Now he says, take it or leave it. Whatever Congress does, he's okay with that.

The White House quickly added confusion to the outrage by insisting the president didn't really say anything new. He's just being flexible. He still wants what most Democrats want--a government plan that gives people a real escape from the profit-driven clutches of the insurance companies. But serious power players will not be fooled by the nimble spinners. Obama choked. He raised the white flag, even before the fight got underway in Congress.

He hands the insurance industry a huge victory. He rewards the right-wing frothers who have been calling him Adolph Hitler or Dr. Death. He caves to the conservative bias of the major media who insist only bipartisan consensus is acceptable for big reform (a standard they never invoked during the Bush years). Obama is deluded if he thinks this will win him any peace or respect or Republican votes. Weakness does not lead to consensus in Washington. It leads to more weakness. The Party of No intends to bring him down and will pile on. Obama has inadvertently demonstrated their strategy of vicious invective seems to be working.

I don't know if things are as bad as the Nation article suggests. I think the president still has time to pivot around, steel his nerves and gather support from those who are committed to correcting the current flawed system of health care in America. Perhaps he will learn to ignore the name callers. Just today he went on the air and met with Democratic members of Congress to dispel some of the blatant misinformation spread by his critics whose only aim is to muddy the waters and stall any progress on this front. Obama called health care reform a moral obligation.  

When the orchestrated hysteria of the town hall fiascoes first began, I used to wince every time I heard Obama speak of bi-partisanship and then get whacked with derision, lies and abuse.  Now I am beginning to get impatient and even a little angry with his unwillingness so far to exercise his confrontational skills (if he has any, that is) in a timely fashion. He doesn't have to do quite what Barney Frank did. But a toned down variation of it will be refreshing. It is time to upgrade the campaign slogan of "Yes, we can" to the presidential drumbeat of "Yes, we will."

Time to boycott Whole Foods?

Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's answer to Health Care Reform sounds awfully like "It's your fault if you are sick or dying."  The rest is all about letting private insurance companies do their thing without government mandates. The last few paragraphs are especially irritating.

Rather than increase government spending and control, we need to address the root causes of poor health. This begins with the realization that every American adult is responsible for his or her own health.

Unfortunately many of our health-care problems are self-inflicted: two-thirds of Americans are now overweight and one-third are obese. Most of the diseases that kill us and account for about 70% of all health-care spending—heart disease, cancer, stroke, diabetes and obesity—are mostly preventable through proper diet, exercise, not smoking, minimal alcohol consumption and other healthy lifestyle choices.

Recent scientific and medical evidence shows that a diet consisting of foods that are plant-based, nutrient dense and low-fat will help prevent and often reverse most degenerative diseases that kill us and are expensive to treat. We should be able to live largely disease-free lives until we are well into our 90s and even past 100 years of age.

America's Health Care Options

Paul Krugman sums it up.

Shouldn't he be Dancing With The Sharks?

The distasteful, disgraced and now mercifully resigned, Tom DeLay, the former US Congressman from my voting district has a new gimmick up his sleeve to get back into the public eye. The Hammer will be dancing with the stars.

Update: From the Houston Chronicle :

WASHINGTON —Former House Majority Leader Tom DeLay, better known for his hard sell than his soft sole, is making an improbable comeback in a different kind of competition.

ABC TV announced Monday that the longtime Houston Republican will join former Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Michael Irvin, one-time child pop star Donny Osmond, model Kathy Ireland and a dozen other celebrities from the worlds of fashion, entertainment and sports on the ninth season of the popular television series Dancing with the Stars.

DeLay, whose own political star dimmed after his 2005 indictment by an Austin grand jury, already is revving up his legendary political machine to get viewers' votes.

“This is going to be so much fun,” he declared Monday in the inaugural post on his new Twitter account. “I will need your support.” ...

Looking for a comeback?

Robert Thompson, director of the Bleier Center for Television and Popular Culture at Syracuse University in New York, agreed that Dancing can help relaunch a stalled career — for an entertainer.

“But if you were once a major force in national politics and you're on Dancing With The Stars, I think one has to be aware the reason you're being cast is because you're one of the ‘funny' contestants,” he said, “one of the ones that we're supposed to be mocking. Political redemption, even coming back from the brink, is not impossible, but I don't think dancing is the way you'd start doing it. It's a different thing for Marie Osmond than for Tom DeLay.”

To prepare for the Sept. 21 season premiere, DeLay, 62, is working out regularly and has dropped 12 pounds.

While DeLay may enter the competition with low expectations, he has one strategic advantage: ABC is adding the “two-step,” a Texas favorite and a DeLay specialty, to the roster of possible dances.

Longtime DeLay loyalists warn the liberal media not to underestimate the wicked waltzer (and disco king) from Sugar Land.

“Don't be fooled,” says former DeLay spokesman Stuart Roy. “He's actually a pretty good dancer.”

 

The optional and the forbidden (D)

If you wish to believe that certain certain kinds of conservatism are caused by bugs in the brain, I offer up some tentative evidence:

Recently, Mark Krikorian at the National Review has decided to bless us with the insight that vegetarianism is immoral:

The problem is that none of this is vegetarianISM, which, if words have meaning, is the normative principle that the consumption of animal flesh (and dairy and eggs, for vegans), under any circumstances, is wrong. None of the practical reasons offered for such a moral principle hold any water, which is why the only meaningful basis for such a normative stance is that animals are on the same moral plane as human beings.

The claim was picked up by Julian Sanchez, in whose comments thread a PETA vice president shows up and says even he doesn't believe non-human animals and people have the same moral worth. He points out, quite reasonably, how strange such a view might be for him to hold as a practicing Catholic.

As I read that thread, I suddenly remembered I myself had only recently seen someone at NRO make the truly bizarre claim that it's wrong to not anglicize foreign names. Yep, it's Krikorian again, insisting that it's wrong to pronounce 'Sotomayor' with the stress on the final -or:

This may seem like carping, but it's not. Part of our success in assimilation has been to leave whole areas of culture up to the individual, so that newcomers have whatever cuisine or religion or so on they want, limiting the demand for conformity to a smaller field than most other places would. But one of the areas where conformity is appropriate is how your new countrymen say your name, since that's not something the rest of us can just ignore, unlike what church you go to or what you eat for lunch. And there are basically two options — the newcomer adapts to us, or we adapt to him. And multiculturalism means there's a lot more of the latter going on than there should be.

Here I offer an entire comments thread jumping all over this pap, if you care to see it done.

We may, in trying to understand why anyone would arrive at these bizarre nooks of idea-space, try to consider differing models and assumptions underlying political reasoning. Maybe we should incorporate in our toolkit different theories of multicultural coexistence, for instance. Here at least I think it's all a lot simpler though: Mr Krikorian has achieved a wiring mistake in his head, and has confused the 'not obligatory' with the 'absolutely forbidden'. He has lost the bucket in his head that corresponds to the 'optional', so whenever he decides he doesn't need to do something, he jumps from there to the conclusion that everyone ought to do the opposite. Assuming the twice-in-two-months repeat time is typical, I expect two or three more performances this year.

Walls and Fences

For thousands of years men have built security barriers to keep out menace, real and imaginary. History tells us that while the track record of walls and fences to keep out a wily enemy is mixed, political barricades almost always generate paranoia and a misguided sense of power among those who guard them.

A week ago I wrote about the wall that Israel has erected to keep out Palestinians and the ridiculous commercial that celebrates the peaceful atmosphere supposedly created between warring populations as a result of separation. Following in the footsteps of Israel, India has built a fence on its border with Bangladesh to keep out smugglers, illegal aliens and terrorists. The area around the fence has become a killing zone. The Indian Border Security Force (BSF) is accused of firing indiscriminately and killing citizens on both sides of the fence.  Around 6:41 on the video, listen to the Indian minister supporting the right of the security guards to "exercise his right of private defence by using minimum force." Shooting to kill unarmed villagers qualifies as minimum force according to this idiot's standards! (video link via Sepia Mutiny)

Verlyn Klinkenborg needs a geography lesson (D)

(Alt. title: your eco-rant for the week)

I wonder, only half-facetiously, whether Verlyn Klinkenborg is one of those "US Americans" who don't have maps, and don't know there's almost a whole planet outside it. Here he is from a few years ago, on mining in Wyoming:

The mining laws, which assume that mining is the highest, best use of the land, already make ordinary people feel disenfranchised...It’s hard enough to protect the Bridger-Teton National Forest, vastly harder still to protect a place like the Green River Basin. To a driller it’s a wasteland ready for the drilling rig. To an environmentalist, it’s delicate habitat.

The real question isn’t whether Wyoming can stabilize its prosperity. It’s whether it can protect values and resources that are not as easily monetized as coal, oil and natural gas, or translated into the terms of national security. But then this is the question the whole nation faces.

Here he is now, hand-wringing about a plan to get natural gas in New York:

There is plenty of change in the Catskills, much of it driven by energy development. The great scar of the Millennium Pipeline, which will someday bring natural gas from Ontario to New York City, comes straight over the mountains and down to the river. Yet that is nothing when measured against the huge changes that will come if New York State gives the go-ahead to gas drilling in the Marcellus Shale.

It is of course true that acquiring fossil fuels imposes severe costs upon the planet. We should be doing what we can to reduce heating/cooling costs, make cars more efficient, improve public transport, raise gas taxes, research alternative energies, and so on. Meanwhile, we should be trying to optimize the use of what fossil fuel we must.

But none of this accounts for Klinkenborg's opposition to energy development in the US. Any given unit of oil consumed - however much is consumed in toto - must come from somewhere, and where it comes from, it shall degrade the environment and decimate biodiversity. Venezuela, Saudi Arabia, Russia, the North Sea and Canada all have ecosystems too, and drilling there causes bio-destruction too, just somewhere else. A respectable response to "drill, baby drill" is to try and reduce total drilling consistent with global development, not to insist that that drilling just happen out of American sight.

Now of course in practice such dumping happens in the Larry Summers spirit - ships get broken in Alang, not in Boston. The trash from Beverly (or Malabar) Hills probably gets dumped in some poor locality. I'm even on the whole a realist about this sort of thing - I don't think it's unusually wise economically to insist that eco-standards in China be what they are in the US, for instance. But why on earth should such positions acquire a varnish of green virtue? Why should it be a precept of the environmental movement that a nation using a quarter of the world's oil resources shouldn't suffer any of the costs? It's especially galling in that in a related context, that of labor treatment by multinational corporations, you'd expect someone like Klinkenborg to hand-wring the other way, fair-trade coffee-cup firmly in hand.

Atlas Shrugged (film) (Joe)

Ayn Rand's Atlas Shrugged is the biggest piece of garbage I'm proud to say I've never read.  Well, apparently they're making it into a movie.  Or a miniseries, I'm not sure.  But definitely starring Charlize Theron, or else some other beautiful blonde actress who can't act.  Anyway, in advance, the Onion's A.V. Club has a funny and appropriately scathing review.  (h/t that guy with all the blogs)

Who Acted Stupidly, Indeed (Joe)

Over at Faculty Lounge, Calvin Massey somehow manages to conclude (1) that Gates acted stupidly and (2) that the police officer did not act stupidly.  How?  By twisting the facts -- beyond even those stated in the official police report.

A pedestrian out for a walk notices two men wearing backpacks jimmying open the front door of a house.  She calls 911 to report what appears to be a burglary in progress.  A cop responds to the broadcast of an apparent burglary.  He finds two men inside the front door of the house.  The cop asks for their identification.  One of the men refuses and hurls abuse at the cop.  The cop persists in his request.  Finally the man produces ID from his university employer.  The man continues the abuse and, after delivering various threats to the officer, demands the officer's name and badge number.  The cop gives it to him.  The cop, apparently satisfied that the man does in fact live in the house, exits the house to the front porch.  The man pursues him to the front porch, heaping more abuse upon the cop and repeatedly demanding the cop's name and badge.  The cop tells him he has already provided that information.  A small crowd gathers.  The man remains in high dudgeon.  The cop then tells him to cool down and warns him that he is engaging in public disorderly conduct.  The man continues his tirade.  The cop arrests him.  The man has a friend, who happens to be President of the United States, who then says that while he "doesn't know all the facts," the cops "acted stupidly."  Oh, the man is black; the cop is white.  The man says this is a case of racial profiling.  Racial profiling?  The man was arrested for his abusive behavior towards a cop performing a service for the man in question.  After all, the man was jimmying his front door because, by his own admission, his house had been the subject of a recent burglary attempt.

Nice.  We don't know why, or at what point, Gates got pissed off at the cop.  But we do know that the officer asked Gates to step outside and join him on the porch; Gates did not "pursue[] him to the front porch."  Again, this is by the version of facts as presented in the police report.  Massey makes it sound like the officer just decided to leave ("thank you, have a nice day") when he saw identification proving that Gates was who he said he was and that it was in fact his own house -- but that's just not the case or he would have, you know, left.  It's pretty clear that the only possible basis for asking Gates to join him outside was to create the basis for an arrest for disorderly conduct. 

Incidentally, that's a great implicit potshot at Obama: why is he making a judgment about who acted stupidly, when he doesn't know all the facts?  Of course, Massey's understanding of the facts is apparently even worse, yet he's willing to defend the cop against this unfounded charge while at the same time leveling the same charge at the black professor who didn't enjoy being wrongly treated like a criminal.  Proving, once again, that law professors often comment stupidly on things they apparently don't know enough to comment on.  [UPDATE: I apparently misread the last part of the post -- there's nothing implicit about it, he actually says it was stupid of Obama to call the cop stupid while admitting he didn't know all of the facts.]

Speaking of Obama, shouldn't it also be mentioned that his "stupid" comment was his way of defusing the situation?  Read as: "I don't know what role race played in this situation, so I'm not going to call the cop a racist.  But drumming up a disorderly conduct charge in order to arrest a man who broke into his own house, because he annoys the police officer and isn't subservient during their interaction, is police behavior that should be discouraged."

(I really also want to comment on police character attributes, too.  It seems to me that people become cops -- also, soldiers -- because they want to be put in the societally accepted role of dominance as a part of their job, which gives them license to frequently beat the crap out of people.  But I don't have time for that post at the moment.)

“We just want to have a little fun”

What is the problem with Israeli made commercials?  A few months ago we featured this ridiculously tasteless spectacle and now a friend points me to another ad from Israel whose makers seem equally oblivious to the implications of the imagery they present.   

So, some Israeli soldiers are gleefully playing a game of soccer with invisible Palestinians on the other side of the "wall." What does that signify? That the wall has been effective against suicide bombers and has made Israelis so safe and secure that even uniformed soldiers can indulge in a lighthearted game of ball with the enemy? Or does it mean that the wall can shield Israeli citizens from thinking uncomfortable thoughts about the Israeli occupation of Palestinian territories? A simple "out of sight, out of mind" solution for a complex and intractable problem. Or did the ad makers mean to invoke something deeper, like the WWI Christmas Day truce between German and British soldiers, who were rumored to have played soccer with each other during a brief period of camaraderie? (never mind that they went back to slaughtering each other after the armistice was over.) Perhaps it doesn't mean anything. The tacky video is probably just another example of a crass attempt at peddling a product. After all, as my friend translated for me, the voice-over at the end of the mindless message coos, “We just want to have a little fun”.

No Centaurs For The Senator

Senator Sam Brownback (R-KS) is a long time champion of "sanctity of human life." He is a staunch opponent of abortion and since his conversion to Catholicism, also of the death penalty, except in rare cases. It is not surprising therefore that Brownback does not support embryonic stem cell research or cloning. All this while I had assumed that his opposition to both stemmed from his "culture of life" philosophy in which making and taking of lives should be left in the hands of the almighty. But now I find out that the senator is also worried about genetic research leading to the creation of human-animal hybrids. To thwart the sudden emergence of mythical creatures like centaurs and minotaurs in the midst of our otherwise peaceful world, Brownback has introduced a bill called the The Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act.

“This legislation works to ensure that our society recognizes the dignity and sacredness of human life,” said Brownback. “Creating human-animal hybrids, which permanently alter the genetic makeup of an organism, will challenge the very definition of what it means to be human and is a violation of human dignity and a grave injustice.”

The Human-Animal Hybrid Prohibition Act would ban the creation of human-animal hybrids. Human-animal hybrids are defined as those part-human, part-animal creatures, which are created in laboratories, and blur the line between species. The bill is modest in scope and only affects efforts to blur the genetic lines between animals and humans. It does not preclude the use of animals or humans in legitimate research or health care where genetic material is not passed on to future generations, such as the use of a porcine heart valve in a human patient or the use of a lab rat with human diseases to develop treatments.

Brownback continued, “This legislation is both philosophical and practical as it has a direct bearing upon the very essence of what it means to be human, and it draws a bright line with respect to how far we can go in attempting to create new creatures made with genes from both humans and animals.

“My background is in agriculture, and for a number of years we have been working with crops and animals to produce a superior soy bean, a superior cow, and so-on. We can genetically engineer safe products and herds that are disease resistant or that possess more desirable attributes. But doing this in plants and livestock is very different than doing this in humans.

“The issue is that when you make changes in the germ-line, such changes are passed along to one’s offspring. You could make a change now that could be passed along through the gene-pool for the rest of humanity. We do not know what the full effect of this could be, and it could be disastrous.

“Tampering with the human germ-line could be the equivalent to setting a time-bomb that might detonate many generations down the line; but once it is set, there is no reversing course.

“I am optimistic that our nation we will make a sound choice for the generations to come. Already, in Louisiana last month, Governor Jindal signed legislation into law that would prohibit the creation of human-animal hybrids. That law is modeled after earlier versions of the legislation that we introduce today.”

All the co-sponsors of the bill are Republican senators (John McCain among them). What is Democrat Mary Landrieu doing here? Trying to outdo Governor Bobby Jindal in political grandstanding, I suppose. But don't they love mermaids in Louisiana?

Senator Jeff Sessions' Southern Discomfort

I happened to catch parts of Tuesday's Senate confirmation hearings for Judge Sonia Sotomayor. The most fascinating exchange of the day took place when Senator Jeff Sessions (R-AL) questioned the judge. Sessions, a southern right winger, whose own nomination to federal judgeship was blocked in 1986 partially because of his attitude towards racial issues,interrogated Sotomayor about her opinions on race and prejudice. The line of questioning was doggedly vicious, not uncommon for either political party when a candidate from the other side is up for confirmation. But in the case of Senator Sessions, he not only displayed remarkable mean spiritedness but he also inadvertently gave us a glimpse into the one track mind of a bigot who is not quite comfortable dealing with an accomplished woman of color. Of particular interest to Sessions was Sotomayor's statement regarding a "wise Latina woman." Here is an excerpt from the transcript of Tuesday's hearings:

SESSIONS: Welcome. It's good to have you back, Judge, and your family and friends and supporters. And I hope we'll have a good day today, look forward to dialogue with you. I got to say that I liked your statement on the fidelity of the law yesterday and some of your comments this morning.

And I also have to say had you been saying that with clarity over the last decade or 15 years, we'd have a lot fewer problems today because you have evidenced, I think it's quite clear, a philosophy of the law that suggests that the judge's background and experiences can and should -- even should and naturally will impact their decision what I think goes against the American ideal and oath that a judge takes to be fair to every party. And every day when they put on that robe, that is a symbol that they're to put aside their personal biases and prejudices.

So I'd like to ask you a few things about it. I would just note that it's not just one sentence, as my chairman suggested, that causes us difficulty. It's a body of thought over a period of years that causes us difficulties.
And I would suggest that the quotation he gave was not exactly right of the wise Latina comment that you made. You've said, I think six different times, quote, "I would hope that a wise Latina woman, with the richness of her experiences, would more often than not reach a better conclusion." So that's a matter that I think we'll talk about as we go forward."....

SESSIONS: I know one judge that says that if he has a feeling about a case, he tells his law clerks to, "Watch me. I do not want my biases, sympathies or prejudices to influence this decision, which I've taken an oath to make sure is impartial." I just am very concerned that what you're saying today is quite inconsistent with your statement that you willingly accept that your sympathies, opinions and prejudices may influence your decision-making.

So it went on and on about heritage (read "race and gender"), experience and resulting biases that supposedly taint judicial decisions. Later, second guessing Sotomayor's ruling about the New Haven firefighters case, Sessions said to Sotomayor: 

SESSIONS: Judge, there was a -- apparently, unease within your panel. I -- I was really disappointed. And I think a lot of people have been that the opinion was so short. It was pro curiam. It did not discuss the serious legal issues that the case raised. And I believe that's legitimate criticism of what you did.

But it appears, according to Stuart Taylor, a respected legal writer for the National Journal -- that Stuart Taylor concluded that -- that it appears that Judge Cabranes was concerned about the outcome of the case, was not aware of it because it was a pro curiam unpublished opinion. But it began to raise the question of whether a rehearing should be granted.

You say you're bound by the superior authority. But the fact is when the re -- the question of rehearing that 2nd Circuit authority that you say covered the case, some say it didn't cover so clearly -- but that was up for debate. And the circuit voted, and you voted not to reconsider the prior case. You voted to stay with the decision of the circuit.

And, in fact, your vote was the key vote. Had you voted with Judge Cabranes, himself of -- of -- of Puerto Rican ancestry -- had you voted with him, you -- you -- you could have changed that case.

Wait a minute! What was that about Judge Cabranes and his Puerto Rican ancestry?  After raking Sotomayor over the coals for her so-called biases, did Sessions suggest that she, a Puerto Rican by birth, would have done well to vote with a fellow Puerto Rican?  Perhaps Sessions was also chiding her for failing to keep her womanly foolishness in check by not following a man's example?

When at last can we hope to see the last of such lizard-brains like Senator Sessions, the likes of whom continue to contaminate all public discourse with their outmoded ideas and prejudices?

Lincoln out, Christianity In

Having failed in their attempt to inject religion into science education, Texas conservatives have shifted their attention to the state's elementary school social studies curriculum. According to some, school children need no longer learn about national figures such as George Washington and Abraham Licoln or Texas leaders like Stephen F. Austin.  Other public figures, Cesar Chavez and Thurgood Marshall for example, too could be excluded from the study material.  According to the right wingers, the former is an "unworthy role model" for young school children and the latter's life story and influence are deemed "inappropriate." Instead, they would like to emphasize the role of Christianity in founding America and formulating Texas history. I suppose if you can't indocrinate older children with faith based science, it is far simpler to catch them young by way of revisionist history.

AUSTIN — Biographies of Washington, Lincoln, Stephen F. Austin? Not fit reading material for children in the early grades.

Cesar Chavez? Not worthy of his role-model status.

Christianity? Emphasize its importance.

Such suggestions are part of efforts to rewrite history books for the state's schoolchildren, producing some expert recommendations that are sure to inflame Texans, no matter their political leanings.

The State Board of Education expects to start discussing new social studies curriculum standards this week, with members of the public getting their first opportunity to speak this fall and a final board vote next spring.

The process is a long one with lasting impact: reshaping the social studies curriculum, including history, for 4.7 million Texas public school children.

“This is something that every parent would want to be paying attention to. This will determine whether or not the kids get the education needed to succeed in college and jobs in the future,” said Dan Quinn of the Austin-based Texas Freedom Network. “If we are going to politicize our kids' education, that will put our kids behind other kids when they're competing for college and good-paying jobs on down the road.”

Curriculum standards are updated about every 10 years; the last social studies update came in 1997.

According to a preliminary draft of the new proposed standards, biographies of George Washington, Abraham Lincoln, and Stephen F. Austin have been removed from the early grades, said Brooke Terry of the Texas Public Policy Foundation.

The early draft, which is likely to change multiple times in the coming months, also removes Independence Day, Veterans' Day, and anthems and mottos for both Texas and the United States in a section on holidays, customs and celebrations, she said.

Monday Mixer

Feeling too lazy to write at length on anything (an increasingly frequent occurrence of late). So here are a few links to stories that I heard, saw or read in passing over the last week.

No Smiley Faces On DMV Mugshots:

Few places in Virginia are as draining to the soul and as numbing to the buttocks as the branch offices of the Department of Motor Vehicles. And yet, until recently, smiling was still permitted there.

No more. As part of the DMV's effort to develop super-secure driver's licenses and foolproof identification cards, the agency has issued a smile ban, directing customers to adopt a "neutral expression" in their portraits, thereby extinguishing whatever happiness comes with finally hearing one's number called.

The driver's license photo, it seems, is destined to look like a mug shot.

DMV officials say the smile ban is for a good cause. The agency would like to develop a facial recognition system that could compare customers' photographs over time to prevent fraud and identity theft. "The technology works best when the images are similar," said DMV spokeswoman Pam Goheen. "To prepare for the possibility of future security enhancements, we're asking customers to maintain a neutral expression."

At a Manassas DMV branch yesterday, that translated to a simple directive: "Don't smile."

No Liberty For Democrats:

Liberty University has revoked its recognition of the campus Democratic Party club, saying “we are unable to lend support to a club whose parent organization stands against the moral principles held by” the university.

“It kind of happened out of nowhere,” said Brian Diaz, president of LU’s student Democratic Party organization, which LU formally recognized in October.

Diaz said he was notified of the school’s decision May 15 in an e-mail from Mark Hine, vice president of student affairs.

According to the e-mail, the club must stop using the university’s name, holding meetings on campus, or advertising events. Violators could incur one or more reprimands under the school’s Liberty Way conduct code, and anyone who accumulates 30 reprimands is subject to expulsion.

Hine said late Thursday that the university could not sanction an official club that supported Democratic candidates.

“We are in no way attempting to stifle free speech."

Mixed Race Americans - Fastest Growing Demographic Group

WASHINGTON — Multiracial Americans have become the fastest growing demographic group.

The number of multiracial people rose 3.4 percent last year to about 5.2 million, according to the latest census estimates.

First given the option in 2000, Americans who check more than one box for race on census surveys have jumped by 33 percent and now make up 5 percent of the minority population — with millions more believed to be uncounted.

Demographers attributed the recent population growth to more social acceptance and slowing immigration. They cited in particular the high public profiles of Tiger Woods and President Obama, a self-described "mutt," who are having an effect on those who might self-identify as multiracial.

Measured by percentages, Hawai'i ranked first with nearly 1 in 5 residents who were multiracial, followed by Alaska and Oklahoma, both at roughly 4 percent.

Population figures as of July 2008 show that California, Texas, New York and Florida had the most multiracial people, due partly to higher numbers of second- and later-generation immigrants who are more likely to "marry out."

Rick "Secessionist" Perry: "no" to stimulus money; "yes" to home improvement.

AUSTIN, Texas – While Gov. Rick Perry is criticizing Washington bailouts, state lawmakers are planning to use $11 million in federal stimulus money to help rebuild the badly burned Texas Governor's Mansion.

Approximately $10 million in state tax money will also be spent on a renovation, which is expected to cost about $20 million, officials said Thursday. A House-Senate committee agreed on the expenditures late Wednesday night.

The mansion was burned in an arson fire last summer.

Perry has railed against federal bailouts and what he called the free-spending, power-hungry ways of Washington. In January, he said Texas was endangered by Uncle Sam's "audacity."

Perry spokeswoman Allison Castle released a short, written statement late Thursday when asked about using stimulus money to renovate the mansion.

"We are continuing to work with lawmakers on the budget," she said.

The $11 million for renovations would come out of the $700 million rescue package for Texas, lawmakers said.

"If we're going to fix it up we're going to have to use stimulus money," said state Sen. Steve Ogden, R-Bryan. "We've made a decision to use the stimulus money. This is a good use of it."

The governor has been living in a three-story, limestone home with a heated pool, an outdoor cabana and a guest house.

The state is paying some $9,900-a-month in rent while the Governor's Mansion undergoes renovations, records show.

Smart and not-so-smart judges (Joe)

I don't doubt that some of the "Judge Sotomayor just isn't smart enough to be a justice" criticism is racially tinged. It's probably sexist, too. But I'm not writing to defend Sonia Sotomayor -- I'm writing to defend Clarence Thomas (who I am distinctly not a fan of).

Because, of course, on the left -- and in the rush to defend Sotomayor -- there is crap like this at the Huffington Post:

Speaking of Thomas, I find it interesting that Republicans talk a great game about picking only the best and ignoring racial considerations. Eighteen years ago, Thomas was considered by many to be a lightweight who only got in because Thurgood Marshall was leaving, and Republicans wanted credit for appointing an African American to replace him. They denied this, of course, and said Thomas would go on to greatness. Two decades later, we're still waiting for the guy to ask a question, author a memorable opinion, or be anything other than Antonin Scalia's sidekick.

First, point out that Justice Thomas was appointed because he's black, wrongly suggesting that this means he was appointed only because he's black, i.e. that his race was his sole qualification.

Second, mock his silence at oral arguments. I'm actually more concerned with judges -- especially judges with the tremendous resources that SCOTUS Justices have -- changing their minds based on which side has the more articulate litigator at oral arguments, but that's just me. In any event, no one has ever suggested a plausible theory on how Thomas's lack of questions at oral arguments is meaningfully probative of his intelligence, and I'd be surprised by a compelling argument in favor of it revealing anything about his quality as a judge. Cubias (the HuffPo author) certainly doesn't give us anything along those lines here. Just point it out condescendingly, hope the reader understands the meaning.

Third, well, obviously he must be Nino's stupid sidekick. They're both conservative after all, but Scalia was there first and he's snarky at oral arguments and has written lots of sarcastic and angry dissents in which he is lauded for his style (by lawyers who are terrible writers and have probably never read a word of Atwood or Conrad) for his overuse of italics to emphasize lots of phrases. Scalia is just so damn glib! Plus Scalia's the white one. Ignore all those times where Thomas has disagreed with Scalia. Ignore all those times where Thomas has gotten it substantially more right than Scalia. From what I've seen, Thomas is actually more consistent, which means that he's also more intellectually honest on the bench, if you care about those things. I'd also note here that with respect to this nonsense about "memorable opinions," this disparity isn't really there from a lawyer's perspective, and from a non-lawyer's perspective no one on the current Court wrote Roe, Brown, or Miranda (Kennedy did give us Lawrence, but his talent for getting the juicy opinions lies more with his supermedian-justice status).

Fourth? Okay, Cubias only did one through three. But I want to put as four here, "Look like a racist." This is really a cumulative thing: 1 + 2 + 3 = 4. This line of attack on Justice Thomas is a fiction designed to discredit or trivialize him, and I'm sick of seeing it.

It would be nice, as liberals seek to defend Sonia Sotomayor from unfounded attacks, if they wouldn't rehash the unfounded, racist attacks on Clarence Thomas.