(1) Julie Taymor is a genius (and perhaps even a Super Genius) who

(2) has the most striking and inventive visual imagination of, like, anybody ever and

(3) I’m just guessing here, but on stage and screen, “directors” tend to be “guys,” and if Julie Taymor were a “guy” I betcha millions more people would know (1) and (2). Not that she isn’t acclaimed or anything; she is. I believe she was the first woman to win a Tony for directing a musical, and she has her share of devoted fans. But still. You get my point, I’m sure.

So the other night, Janet and I sit down to watch The Departed. But no sooner do we settle in on the movie couch and hit “play” than we hear the opening riff of “Gimme Shelter” on the soundtrack. (In the past, some have described this soundtrack as “killer.”)

“Wait just a second,” I say. “This is Scorsese, isn’t it?”

“You know damn well it is,” Janet says.

“Well, what the fuck is up with this shit, then?” I say. “Does he have to use the intro to ‘Gimme Shelter’ in every single goddamn movie he makes?”

“He doesn’t use the intro to ‘Gimme Shelter’ in every single goddamn movie he makes,” Janet says.

“Oh yes he does,” I say. “He used it to suggest a kind of deadly intensity in Casino and he used it to suggest a kind of scary intensity in Goodfellas and he used it to suggest a kind of otherworldly intensity in The Last Temptation of Christ.”

“All right, I call bullshit,” Janet says. “Martin Scorsese did not use ‘Gimme Fucking Shelter’ in The Last Fucking Temptation of Christ.”

“Oh yes he did,” I say. “When Willem Dafoe is getting it on, fantasy-sequence-wise, with Barbara Hershey, it’s all like ‘love, sister, it’s just a kiss away, kiss away, kiss away.’ I swear you can’t fucking miss it.”

“You are so fucking making this shit up,” Janet says.

Readers, I parried her. But she had a point: Martin Scorsese has not, in fact, used “Gimme Shelter” in the soundtrack to every movie he has ever made. He refrained from using it in The Color of Money, which featured important Adult Contemporary talents like Eric Clapton and Phil Collins instead; he refrained from using it in The King of Comedy and Raging Bull (but check out the young Joe Pesci as Joey La Motta!), and, most amazingly, he refrained from using it in Mean Streets — though he did use “Jumpin’ Jack Flash,” which amounts to the same thing, because. . . .

(more…)

National Review’s Byron York shares the GOPs plans for post-Abramoff lobbying reform slash political cover.

“Republican leaders in the Senate have had a plan in place for the last two months to “get ahead of” the Jack Abramoff scandal by coming up with a new proposal for lobbying reform. The leadership “decided in November that lobby reform for the Senate was a priority for this session,” and Majority Leader Bill Frist placed Pennsylvania Republican Senator Rick Santorum in charge of it, Senate sources tell National Review Online.â€�?

Rick Santorum? The guy who’s been running the K Street Project? Well, I guess you kinda have to hand it to Republicans, at least they had the foresight to come up with a bill at all. Which is more than you could say for some parties who should be trying to maximize the political damage that Republicans are transparently trying to minimize. The fact that it’s more than likely a chimera designed to provide Americans with an excuse to stop paying attention hardly matters to anyone at all, except for weirdos with wild hairs up their asses. Like us.

“Santorum’s efforts will be apart from the work of Senator John McCain, who has already introduced a proposal for lobbying reform. That proposal, McCain said in mid-December, “provides for faster reporting and greater public access to reports filed by lobbyists and their employers under the Lobbying Disclosure Act of 1995. It requires greater disclosure of the activities of lobbyists, including for the first time, grassroots lobbying firms. The bill also requires greater disclosure from both lobbyists, and Members and employees of Congress, about travel that is arranged or financed by a lobbyist or his client.”

Santorum’s proposal is expected to differ from McCain’s, but it is not yet clear what the differences will be. “It is not McCain,” says another Senate source. “It would be another way of looking at it.”

“Another way of looking at it.�? Such a cute way of phrasing it. I guess we’ve already excluded the possibility of greater disclosures from lobbyists and the people they’re lobbying. Its tough enough jumping hurdles when you’ve got figurative armfuls of cash on your hands. Why make ‘em jump through hoops too?

It is also unclear, at least at this moment, how bipartisan the Abramoff scandal will become. The leading figures in the affair so far are Republican lawmakers and their former staffers, but it is likely that at least some Democrats will be drawn into the investigation. In any event, Republican leaders want to be seen at the forefront of the reform movement, and not in a partisan, defensive crouch.

Translation: “Please, please please god, let there be at least one indictable Democrat somewhere in Washington DC? Please? Otherwise we’re gonna have to pull one of those stale Clinton comparisons. And, I’ll do it if I have to, if that’s your will, but jeez, we could really use some fresh material. I can barely pull this shit with a straight face anymore.�?

Republicans would not concede the comparison, but the lobbying-reform plan bears some similarity to the actions of President Bill Clinton, who in 1996, just days before his reelection, was faced with revelations about John Huang and the campaign-finance scandal. With Republicans pushing hard on the scandal, Clinton reacted by calling for campaign-finance reform. “The Republicans have been reluctant to give up their access to big money,” Clinton said on November 1, 1996. “We have played by the rules, but I know and you know we need to change the rules.”

There is, however, one significant difference between the two strategies. At the same time that Clinton called for reform, his attorney general, Janet Reno, severely limited the campaign-finance investigation, and dozens of Democratic donors eventually took the Fifth Amendment or fled the country to avoid telling investigators what they knew. In the Abramoff matter, the Bush Justice Department appears to be vigorously pursuing the investigation, even though its main targets, at least so far, are Republicans.

“Come on god? you really want me to try to get away with that? Again? Just one Democrat. Please? Goddammit. Hardly anyone cares about Bill Clinton anymore…”

Mark Steyn wrote some long-assed piece of crap in the opinion journal today. I had to cut out large swaths of it for the sake of space, and also because I’m not clever enough to respond to eleven pages worth of the same stupid drivel. Anyway. Git r’ done Fuckers!

“Most people reading this have strong stomachs, so let me lay it out as baldly as I can: Much of what we loosely call the Western world will not survive this century, and much of it will effectively disappear within our lifetimes, including many if not most Western European countries. There’ll probably still be a geographical area on the map marked as Italy or the Netherlands–probably–just as in Istanbul there’s still a building called St. Sophia’s Cathedral. But it’s not a cathedral; it’s merely a designation for a piece of real estate. Likewise, Italy and the Netherlands will merely be designations for real estate. The challenge for those who reckon Western civilization is on balance better than the alternatives is to figure out a way to save at least some parts of the West.

One obstacle to doing that is that, in the typical election campaign in your advanced industrial democracy, the political platforms of at least one party in the United States and pretty much all parties in the rest of the West are largely about what one would call the secondary impulses of society–government health care, government day care (which Canada’s thinking of introducing), government paternity leave (which Britain’s just introduced). We’ve prioritized the secondary impulse over the primary ones: national defense, family, faith and, most basic of all, reproductive activity–”Go forth and multiply,” because if you don’t you won’t be able to afford all those secondary-impulse issues, like cradle-to-grave welfare.â€�?

As Goering said, “Guns will make us strong, butter will only make us fat.�? And lo, look at how fat we’ve become suckling the teat of big government largesse. Fortunately, here in America, we’ve got none of those things. I didn’t know that Republicans were that into the reproductive activity though. Everytime I try to circulate a petition demanding that the local junior high teach the “pull out and pray�? method of birth control, some asshole with a big stupid “W�? sticker on his bumper gets that zinged out look in his eye, and little globs of spittle form in the corners of his mouth as he barks out that I get the “heeeel off my propity, ‘fore I shoot you dirty son of bitch rat where you stand.�? And I have to scuttle off on my way, but not too quickly, for the sake of my dignity.

“The design flaw of the secular social-democratic state is that it requires a religious-society birthrate to sustain it. Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonism. Indeed, in its reliance on immigration to ensure its future, the European Union has adopted a 21st-century variation on the strategy of the Shakers, who were forbidden from reproducing and thus could increase their numbers only by conversion. The problem is that secondary-impulse societies mistake their weaknesses for strengths–or, at any rate, virtues–and that’s why they’re proving so feeble at dealing with a primal force like Islam.
Speaking of which, if we are at war–and half the American people and significantly higher percentages in Britain, Canada and Europe don’t accept that proposition–than what exactly is the war about?â€�?

It’s still all about the petro-chemicals, man. But I’m like totally on drugs so take that with a grain of salt. And maybe it’s only this heightened state of perception that these hallucinogenic jelly beans have brought to me, but this sentence – “Post-Christian hyperrationalism is, in the objective sense, a lot less rational than Catholicism or Mormonismâ€�? – is pretty far out. Like how could anything be more objectively rational than hyperrationalism, man? It’s like super rational vs your everyday, run-o-the-mill, discount, 3-for-a-dollar, brand-name generic rational. It’s like you get 64oz for only 25 cents more, you’d have to be an idiot not to take that deal. Plus like the free-refills and shit. I mean that’s like saying superglue is objectively less adhesive than licorice. Just cuz I’m doped up doesn’t mean I’m gonna buy your neon glowstick, brother.

“Yet while Islamism is the enemy, it’s not what this thing’s about. Radical Islam is an opportunistic infection, like AIDS: It’s not the HIV that kills you, it’s the pneumonia you get when your body’s too weak to fight it off. When the jihadists engage with the U.S. military, they lose–as they did in Afghanistan and Iraq. If this were like World War I with those fellows in one trench and us in ours facing them over some boggy piece of terrain, it would be over very quickly. Which the smarter Islamists have figured out. They know they can never win on the battlefield, but they figure there’s an excellent chance they can drag things out until Western civilization collapses in on itself and Islam inherits by default.â€�?

I don’t get how that’s at all like AIDS, but if you want me to wear a ribbon that represents my disdain for the Islamic faith, well okay, sure. But I’m not donating any money.

“Hmm. Lady Kennedy was arguing that our tolerance of our own tolerance is making us intolerant of other people’s intolerance, which is intolerable. And, unlikely as it sounds, this has now become the highest, most rarefied form of multiculturalism. So you’re nice to gays and the Inuit? Big deal. Anyone can be tolerant of fellows like that, but tolerance of intolerance gives an even more intense frisson of pleasure to the multiculti masochists. In other words, just as the AIDS pandemic greatly facilitated societal surrender to the gay agenda, so 9/11 is greatly facilitating our surrender to the most extreme aspects of the multicultural agenda.â€�?

I couldn’t help but laugh out loud at this point. And not just cause he’s kinda funny in the first couple of sentences with the “be nice to fruits and inuits big deal,” but because that last sentence is so absurd; raving at the moon while buck-naked except for a feather boa and a black jockstrap, while rubbing cat entrails over your chest, whacked out nuts, that I couldn’t help but laugh at it. And you probably get it. But if you don’t, I don’t think I could ever explain it.

“That, by the way, is the one point of similarity between the jihad and conventional terrorist movements like the IRA or ETA. Terror groups persist because of a lack of confidence on the part of their targets: The IRA, for example, calculated correctly that the British had the capability to smash them totally but not the will. So they knew that while they could never win militarily, they also could never be defeated. The Islamists have figured similarly. The only difference is that most terrorist wars are highly localized. We now have the first truly global terrorist insurgency because the Islamists view the whole world the way the IRA view the bogs of Fermanagh: They want it, and they’ve calculated that our entire civilization lacks the will to see them off.â€�?

Hmm, what’re you cooking up there in that crazy kitchen of yours Mark Steyn? Smells a bit like genocide.

We spend a lot of time at The New Criterion attacking the elites, and we’re right to do so. The commanding heights of the culture have behaved disgracefully for the last several decades. But if it were just a problem with the elites, it wouldn’t be that serious: The mob could rise up and hang ‘em from lampposts–a scenario that’s not unlikely in certain Continental countries. But the problem now goes way beyond the ruling establishment. The annexation by government of most of the key responsibilities of life–child-raising, taking care of your elderly parents–has profoundly changed the relationship between the citizen and the state. At some point–I would say socialized health care is a good marker–you cross a line, and it’s very hard then to persuade a citizenry enjoying that much government largesse to cross back. In National Review recently, I took issue with that line Gerald Ford always uses to ingratiate himself with conservative audiences: “A government big enough to give you everything you want is big enough to take away everything you have.” Actually, you run into trouble long before that point: A government big enough to give you everything you want still isn’t big enough to get you to give anything back. That’s what the French and German political classes are discovering.

Dude, you really are plagiarizing Goering at this point for Christ’s sake, with all this babble about the elites and blah blah blah. Seriously. Stop it. You’re writing in the Wall Street Journal now, not whatever the fuck New Criterion is. And I don’t want to implicitly praise WSJ, but I guess I did think they had some standard of decency.

“There is no “population bomb.” There never was. Birthrates are declining all over the world–eventually every couple on the planet may decide to opt for the Western yuppie model of one designer baby at the age of 39. But demographics is a game of last man standing. The groups that succumb to demographic apathy last will have a huge advantage. Even in 1968 Paul Ehrlich and his ilk should have understood that their so-called population explosion was really a massive population adjustment. Of the increase in global population between 1970 and 2000, the developed world accounted for under 9% of it, while the Muslim world accounted for 26%. Between 1970 and 2000, the developed world declined from just under 30% of the world’s population to just over 20%, the Muslim nations increased from about 15% to 20%.

And yet the world is utterly altered. Just to recap those bald statistics: In 1970, the developed world had twice as big a share of the global population as the Muslim world: 30% to 15%. By 2000, they were the same: each had about 20%.

And by 2020?�?

I fear to even imagine it.

“So the world’s people are a lot more Islamic than they were back then and a lot less “Western.” Europe is significantly more Islamic, having taken in during that period some 20 million Muslims (officially)–or the equivalents of the populations of four European Union countries (Ireland, Belgium, Denmark and Estonia). Islam is the fastest-growing religion in the West: In the U.K., more Muslims than Christians attend religious services each week.

Can these trends continue for another 30 years without having consequences? Europe by the end of this century will be a continent after the neutron bomb: The grand buildings will still be standing, but the people who built them will be gone. We are living through a remarkable period: the self-extinction of the races who, for good or ill, shaped the modern world.”

Tell us Mark Steyn, how do we avoid the self-extinction of our race? Tell us what must be done.

“What will London–or Paris, or Amsterdam–be like in the mid-’30s? If European politicians make no serious attempt this decade to wean the populace off their unsustainable 35-hour weeks, retirement at 60, etc., then to keep the present level of pensions and health benefits the EU will need to import so many workers from North Africa and the Middle East that it will be well on its way to majority Muslim by 2035. As things stand, Muslims are already the primary source of population growth in English cities. Can a society become increasingly Islamic in its demographic character without becoming increasingly Islamic in its political character?”

Oh. Is that all? Cutting welfare. Well, if that’s what we gotta do to save the white race from extinction, I guess the pro-business Republicans at the Wall Street Journal have been right all along. But seriously, somehow, I. did. not. see. that. coming.

“This ought to be the left’s issue. I’m a conservative–I’m not entirely on board with the Islamist program when it comes to beheading sodomites and so on, but I agree Britney Spears dresses like a slut: I’m with Mullah Omar on that one. Why then, if your big thing is feminism or abortion or gay marriage, are you so certain that the cult of tolerance will prevail once the biggest demographic in your society is cheerfully intolerant? Who, after all, are going to be the first victims of the West’s collapsed birthrates? Even if one were to take the optimistic view that Europe will be able to resist the creeping imposition of Sharia currently engulfing Nigeria, it remains the case that the Muslim world is not notable for setting much store by “a woman’s right to choose,” in any sense.â€�?

Oh. So cutting welfare will also save feminism and gay marriage from the Islamic menace? This is too good to be true! Please, tell me it’ll end racism and poverty next!

I watched that big abortion rally in Washington in 2004, where Ashley Judd and Gloria Steinem were cheered by women waving “Keep your Bush off my bush” placards, and I thought it was the equivalent of a White Russian tea party in 1917. By prioritizing a “woman’s right to choose,” Western women are delivering their societies into the hands of fellows far more patriarchal than a 1950s sitcom dad. If any of those women marching for their “reproductive rights” still have babies, they might like to ponder demographic realities: A little girl born today will be unlikely, at the age of 40, to be free to prance around demonstrations in Eurabian Paris or Amsterdam chanting “Hands off my bush!”

Hmm. That’s disappointing. But, for the sake of saving feminism, I guess we better get onto forgetting all that “right to chooseâ€�? noise. Because if any prospective daughter of mine is brought into this world, it will not be a world where she can’t prance around the streets of Paris chanting “hands off my bush!â€�? If America means anything, it means our daughters have the right to prance around Paris making such chants. I pay my taxes.

“Mr. Longman’s point is well taken. The refined antennae of Western liberals mean that whenever one raises the question of whether there will be any Italians living in the geographical zone marked as Italy a generation or three hence, they cry, “Racism!” To fret about what proportion of the population is “white” is grotesque and inappropriate. But it’s not about race, it’s about culture. If 100% of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy, it doesn’t matter whether 70% of them are “white” or only 5% are. But if one part of your population believes in liberal pluralist democracy and the other doesn’t, then it becomes a matter of great importance whether the part that does is 90% of the population or only 60%, 50%, 45%.â€�?

You know, I remember the good old days when Italians were considered as swarthy as any Eastern European with papist and socialist tendencies and union trouble-making, and all that. Sacco and Vanzetti, right? Now here they are, one of the last bulwarks of liberal democracy itself. Brings a tear to the eye, no? I don’t mean that in a sentimental way.

Jack Abramoff copped to his much-anticipated plea deal today, and Josh Marshall publishes an email from some guy who’s import I’m unable to ascertain, but who nevertheless opines that the legal system should shy away from trying cases that threaten to “alter the political balance.�?

The post in full except for some preliminaries:

There is a lesson to be learned from the “Abscam” investigations that should be applied to any examination of that constellation of events that fall under the heading of “The Abramoff Matter.” (hereafter TAM). That lesson is that TAM exceeds the scope of the legal system and, specifically, the Justice Department. This is what “Abscam” taught us. If you recall “Abscam” was a DOJ sting operation that offered bribes to congressmen. It turned out that it was a very successful sting and several members of Congress were prosecuted. But then the operation was terminated although if anything was learned it was that there were more opportunities for success. It was terminated precisely because of its success. The DOJ determined that they might be able to unseat as much as a third of the sitting Congress if they continued. DOJ determined that if they did continue then what began as a law enforcement project could alter the political balance within the Legislative branch. The DOJ decided, rightly I believe, that it was not their place to fundamentally alter that political balance.

And so it will be with TAM. At some point TAM will become a potent enough matter to be profoundly political in nature and those involved in the legal system will have to withdraw. To do otherwise would be to improperly engage the legal system in a political contest and undermine the foundational premise of an independent judiciary. This is the tightrope that Fitzgerald is walking in the Plame matter. So long as he is pursuing the violation of a particular Federal statute he is on solid ground. But were he to find himself standing on the threshold of something that, if pursued, could alter the political balance of power then he would have to retreat. Otherwise he would fall into that political contest and improperly involve DOJ in the public arena of political combat.

It would be wise of those of us who are offended by the realities of TAM to resist the temptation to view TAM as a fundamentally legal matter. Rather we should debate it within the arena of political and social ethics. If we cannot win the contest on the basis of these ethical principles then no legal system can save us from ourselves.

Thoughts?

Okay. Weelll, Thought #1, Josh why do you ask for my thoughts when you don’t provide me with a convenient forum for expressing them? Huh? Thought #2, this emailer of yours, with phrases like “independent judiciary�? seems to think that the judicial branch prosecutes crimes. It doesn’t. The Executive Branch does. This is not a matter of splitting hairs. It undermines quite a bit of his argument. Thought #3: Where he says “So long as he is pursuing the violation of a particular Federal statute he is on solid ground. But were he to find himself standing on the threshold of something that, if pursued, could alter the political balance of power then he would have to retreat.�? I’m confused as to whether he’s stating a tautology or if he’s making a now-familiar-though-dubious argument. What happens if Fitzgerald is persuing the violation of a particular federal statute that threatens to alter the balance of political power? The phrasing is rather ambiguous. But I’ll assume he’s not making the so-obvious-one-can’t-help-but-wonder-why-anyone-would-bother-to-say-it notion that a prosecutor should not go beyond prosecuting violations of actual umm laws as codified in uh statutes, and start prosecuting people just for the sake of trying to shift the prevailing balance of power.

Thought #4, I have no idea if that’s an accurate rendition of the “Abscam�? history, but it wouldn’t matter if it were. Thought #5, Why is that Washington seems to be filled with people who think politics is above the law? Paging Richard Cohen, and his addle-headed ravings concerning Judy Miller and L’affair du Plame. The whole gist of which was that the District is a self-policing town, with their own agreed upon norms and values, and they don’t need some outside prosecutor coming in and mucking things up with his talk of laws and the violations thereof, which can only have been technically violated if the transgressor is still in everyone’s good graces. This is a fucking sickness.

Thought #6, the last two lines seem to indicate that this should be viewed as an entirely political matter. If at the end of all the haymaking, the public doesn’t “kick the bums out,�? then we should accept these activities as ethical and not resort to legal solutions, which in this scenario would not be up to the task of saving the Republic anyway, because the Republic could not be reformed. Well, that’s a point of view. I’d rather the take the opposite one. That violators of laws should be prosecuted regardless of the political consequences, because justice is… oh I dunno… blind, or something. The legal system performing its functions does not seem to have great consequence upon the legitimacy of the political system as expressed by the outcomes of elections. Thought #7, not directly relevant to this post, but I’ve come to believe that as much as Republicans deserve to be punished for their corruption, the Democrats really don’t deserve to benefit from it.

Seems as though a bunch of folks have been making their 10 worst Americans lists. But to me that’s a bit like making a list of the 10 worst Oasis songs. I mean, sure, you could come up with one, but why would you want to? Especially during wartime. So instead, I’m making a list of the 10 BEST Americans of all time. Here goes.

1) Jesus
You know goddamned well, that if Jesus were alive today he’d be an American citizen. It’s not America’s fault that we didn’t exist 2000 years ago, so please don’t be childish about it, and make me roll my eyes at you. Of course, he’d still be kind of a fruit, probably writing children’s books with titles like “the good jihadist,�? and we’d all be making fun of him. But still he died for our sins, and that goes a long way.

2) George Washington
This one’s obvious. But here’s a little known fact. Did you know that George Washington hated cherries almost as much as he hated loyalists, the “liberals�? of his day? And he was known to take an ax to both of them.

3) All of our Soldiers Currently Fighting Overseas
And I’m saluting the flag as hard as I possibly can.

4) Richard Nixon
Primarily for this picture. Today, you may think of communism, like syphilis, as primarily a punchline. But like syphilis, it was once a serious menace, and there was no way of knowing who had it, and might be spreading it. Richard Nixon stood up to the commies when no one else had the balls to do it.

5) Popeye the Sailor Man
Sure, he’s a comic book character. But he’s also the perfect embodiment of American values. Meek and dimwitted until confronted by evil, at which point he eats some spinach and starts kicking commies all over the goddamned place. Also he likes his women anorexic.

6) Oliver Wendell Holmes, Jr.
Known as “The Great Dissenter,�? Holmes is one of the few giants of American law, serving on the Supreme Court for 30 years, and crafting many well-written, well thought out, and influential opinions, thus shaping, as few have, American law and society as we know it.

And with that I’m all out of ideas. So make it 6, instead of 10, I guess. I don’t care.

Yglesias says the other day:

“The idea is that, well, no child should be left behind. It’s an essentially egalitarian aspiration — the school system should try to do well for the hardest to teach kids, included ones coming from difficult backgrounds and ones who simply for whatever reason have a hard time with school. The idea of “gifted” programs is basically the reverse vision — that the school system should focus on the easiest cases and push them to the highest level of achievement possible.

There’s not a stark either/or choice between the hard cases and the easy cases, but at some level you do need to make a decision about priorities. Insofar as we’re serious about educational equality, that will to some extent involve shortchanging the best and the brightest. Insofar as we’re serious about taking the most talented as far as they can go, that will involve shortchanging equity. The former strikes me as more desirable than the latter, especially for people who want to think of themselves as being on the left.”

I guess you could say I’m slightly peevish about the “you are a liberal, this is THE liberal position, therefore by transitive property, you MUST support it” form of argument. I mean I understand that if you’re reading TPMCafe, you’re presumed to be a liberalish sort at a liberal blog, so one can take the normative short-cut probably. But I suppose I don’t have to tell you at this point that I don’t find it persuasive.

But I guess if we retreated behind a Rawlsian veil we’d probably agree with Matt, and that is a pretty compelling argument that it is in fact THE liberal position. Nevertheless, I still think it’s a completely wrong way of looking at the issue.

If we as a society our going to make decisions concerning prioritizing scarce educational resources, it makes sense to me, for us to consider what kind of output we desire. Do we want to, for example, mazimize the number of future American Nobel prize winners and enjoy the fruits of the breakthroughs that our most gifted can achieve, or do we want to maximize the educational level of the median American worker? Both results have great value, and if we were to quantify them in terms of dollars, I’m not sure which one would prove to be of greater value to society. But I think these are the questions we should be discussing. And that devoting our resources to maximizing the future opportunities of our least educationally apt children for the sake of doing so, without examining the costs, is fuzzy-headed. Which may or may not be a liberal value. But as liberals we do acknowledge that society is not just a collection of disparate competitive individual maximizers, but that we live in a community where cooperation is also an important value. And that maximizing the strength and resources of that community is itself a liberal value.

And now I’m left to wonder whether this is a significant point, or if I’ve just been in DC for too long.

Okay so I’m back (somewhat) after a few days without internet, and well, fact is my ability to access the internet is still a bit iffy for the time being. But I’ll do my best. Anyway, it’s a long story, mostly boring so I won’t really go into it. But it’s sandwiched around a couple of fifteen hour bus-rides, and let’s just say I’d rather spend a week in prison than ever travel by Greyhound again. And I really don’t want to go to jail. Cause it’s like “when in rome…�? ya know? And lets just say I’d rather not rape anybody.

But anyway, I was making the internet rounds this morning, when I realized I’m tardy on these memes I got with a couple of days ago, by Ezra and Lauren, respectively. And Lauren’s is the same one Pam did earlier. But I’ll get Ezra’s out of the way first. Just cuz.

I stuck ‘em below the fold, cause it’s kinda long. But they’re worth reading. Trust me.

The Meme of Fours

Four jobs you’ve had in your life: Newspaper Editor, Record Store clerk, political organizer, campaign field staff.

Four movies you could watch over and over: Pulp Fiction, Aladdin, The Big Lebowski, Chinatown.

Four places you’ve lived: Cleveland, OH; Columbus, OH; Philadelphia, PA; and now Washington DC.

Four TV shows you love to watch: Arrested Development, Aqua Teen Hunger Force, The Joe Schmoe Show, and that old soap-opera thing they used to show on mtv of college kids that was really awful, but whose name I can’t remember.

Four places you’ve been on vacation: France, Italy, Florida, and fucking Jersey.

Four websites you visit daily: I dunno.

Four of your favorite foods: Calamari, Burger King Whoppers, Chicken Masala, Gawumpke.

Four places you’d rather be: Philadelphia, The Carribbean, dick deep in Selma Blair’s vagina, or Australia.

Four albums you can’t live without: Captain Beefheart’s Trout Mask Replica, The Avett Brothers Mignonette, The Ultramagnetic MC’s Critical Beatdown, and the Pixies Doolittle. I can’t even tell you how difficult excluding What’s the Story? Morning Glory was.

And now let’s do Lauren’s Seven things Meme:

Seven Things To Do Before I Die
1. Publish a book (stealing this one from Jill and Lauren)
2. Videotape myself peeing on someone
3. bone someone famous
4. move to Brazil
5. get appointed to an ambassadorship
6. learn Russian
7. travel

Seven Things I Cannot Do
1. Rimjobs
2. Whistle
3. Speak in public
4. blow smoke rings
5. act
6. play the guitar
7. sing

Seven Things That Attract Me to…Blogging
1. I dunno.

Seven Things I Say Most Often
1. Whatever.
2. mmm-hmm.
3. Man, that’s not cool.
4. huh?
5. Will you shut up already?
6. what do I look like, the fucking cigarette fairy?
7. Care to buy me a drink?

Seven Books That I Love
1. The Sound and The Fury by Faulkner
2. The Tin Drum by Gunther Grass
3. Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
4. The Revolt of The Cockroach People by Oscar Zeta Acosta
5. Blood Meridian by Cormac McCarthy
6. JR by William Gaddis
7. Despair by Vladimir Nabokov

Seven Movies That I Watch Over and Over Again
1-4. Repeat from above.
5. Can’t Hardly Wait
6. The Princess Bride
7. Happy Gilmore

Seven Songs I Play Over and Over Again:
1. “Wonderwall”
2. “Idiot Wind” by Bob Dylan
3. “Now to War” by Guided by Voices
4. “Girlfriend is Better”: by the Talking Heads
5. “Prayer to God” by Shellac
6. “Alternative Ulster” by Stiff Little Fingers
7. “3rd Planet” by Modest Mouse

Seven People I Want To Join In Too
1. Jonah Goldberg
2. Josh Marshall
3. I don’t really have any idea who else has already done this, so feel free if you want.

Well, anyway, sorry if my answers sucked. Kinda lost interest there. Sorry if you feel misled.

The Washington Post this morning reports that a FISA court judge, appointed to the court by Rehnquist, has resigned in protest of Bush’s domestic spying program. While the New York Times is reporting that purely domestic communications have been swept up in the program.

Meanwhile, Larry Johnson at TPMCafe shatters the administration spin about the necessity of this program to deal with new technologies, etc.

“Having watched former Deputy CIA Director John Mclaughlin spend the day trying to back and fill for President Bush’s decision to circumvent the FISA Court procedure (which occurred during Mclaughlin’s tenure), we begin to understand why the CIA declined so badly under his watch. Mclaughlin argues, as always, in a calm, polite voice–the quintessential bureaucrat–that the threat is new and terrorists move too quick. Now, either he’s lying, which I don’t think, or he spent too much time cloistered at the Headquarters in McLean and is sadly misinformed. The so-called “new practice,” where terrorists call on one phone, dump it, pick up a new phone, dump it, and so on, was pioneered by the Colombian drug cartels, among others, more than ten years ago. DEA, while facing some challenges, has actually become quite adept at chasing these guys while working within the constraints of FISA. Surely Mclaughlin is not asking us to believe that the intelligence community is too stupid to learn lessons from DEA?”

Meanwhile, five senators, including two republicans, have called for hearings into the program. And I think Kevin Drum is exactly right about this:

Of course, their argument is not that the president has the inherent power to authorize domestic surveillance anytime he wants, only that he has that power during wartime. And as near as I can tell, that’s the elephant in the room that no one is really very anxious to discuss: What is “wartime”? Is George Bush really a “wartime president,” as he’s so fond of calling himself? Conservatives take it for granted that he is, while liberals tend to avoid the subject entirely for fear of being thought unserious about the War on Terror. But it’s something that ought be brought up and discussed openly.

(…)

If this is how we define “wartime,” it means that in the century from 1940 to 2040 the president will have had emergency wartime powers for virtually the entire time. But does that make sense? Is anyone really comfortable with the idea that three decades from now the president of the United States will have had wartime executive powers for nearly a continuous century?

Somehow we need to come to grips with this. There’s “wartime” and then there’s “wartime,” and not all armed conflicts vest the president with emergency powers. George Bush may have the best intentions in the world â€�? and in this case he probably did have the best intentions in the world â€�? but that still doesn’t mean he has the kind of plenary power Abraham Lincoln and Franklin Roosevelt exercised during their wars.

And when he says “this program was the result of a panicky decision by a panicky president.”

[UPDATE] Right-wing spin on the equivalency of Clinton/Carter equivalents is not only irrelevant, it’s bullshit.

Also read Peter Daou.

Dadahead’s been doing a good job staying on top of Strip Search Sammy’s SCOTUS nomination, which I appreciate. Today he writes:

Fate has blessed the Democrats with a remarkable convergence of stories, with the Alito confirmation hearings about to follow on the heels of the revelations about Bush’s domestic spying scandal, if they choose to take advantage of it. Alito’s Achilles’ heel is civil liberties, and the spying scandal has put that issue on the front burner. Bush obviously cannot be trusted to respect the privacy and freedom of American citizens, and neither can Alito. So opposition to Alito can be woven into a more general narrative about the Bush administration’s power-hungry tactics, and the fact that now, more than ever, we need to make sure that we have leaders who respect the idea of checks and balances, and of limits on state power.

35% is ridiculously low for a Supreme Court nominee, and it’s getting close to the point where GOP senators from purple or blue states could start feeling pressure not to confirm him, if our side can manage to make an issue out of each senator’s vote. If the Dems in the Senate can just remember that acting in accordance with the wishes of the vast majority of the public is usually not tantamount to political suicide, we just might have a chance of blocking Alito. Are Lincoln Chafee, Olympia Snowe, et al. really prepared to go ‘nuclear’ over Sam Alito?

It would be a good time to let your senator know how you feel about the prospect of Alito getting confirmed. Especially if you have one facing a tough re-election. Defeating Alito will take a focused effort, but I don’t see why it can’t be done.