Ted

In my previous life, I was a member of an active mailing list for fans of ska music. (In tribute, I’ve just created a ska name generator.) Every few months, members would talk about the music that they listened to, outside of ska. It quickly degenerated into a uniquely annoying form of indie one-upsmanship. Popular, marginal, and largely unknown bands were dismissed with contempt (“You’re still listening to Big Black?”). The discussion quickly disappeared down the indie rabbit hole, as members professed their love for vinyl-only releases from obscure foreign noise bands.

My friend Mark managed to shut them up. He wrote a long email about how everyone else was a sellout, and how he had gotten into the most obscure music ever. He would go to the local maternity ward with a stethoscope and listen to a particular fetus’s heartbeat.

Skagroup may be gone (or it might not), but the spirit lives on at the home of sloppy, reflexive contrarianism: Slate.

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The defeat of the Federal Marriage Amendment has led to some awfully good writing.

Fred Clark from the Slacktivist, a left-wing Christian, approaches the question “Why do some Christians hate gays but love bacon?” It’s a beautiful thing.

I’m not a fan of Thomas Frank. His adaptation of his thesis, The Conquest of Cool, is surprisingly good, but his pieces for the Baffler remind me of present-day Christopher Hitchens: sneering, blindingly angry, and unpersuasive to the unconverted. However, he’s managed to pop out a tight editorial for the NY Times. He argues that the failure of the FMA was intentional, part of a continuing effort to reclaim victim status for conservatives.

Losing is prima facie evidence that the basic conservative claim is true: that the country is run by liberals; that the world is unfair; that the majority is persecuted by a sinister elite. And that therefore you, my red-state friend, had better get out there and vote as if your civilization depended on it.

John Scalzi points out that the effort to “defend marriage” would actually have the effect of breaking up thousands of existing marriages.

So it’s pretty simple: If you actually want to defend marriage, you have defend all the legal marriages, and that includes the ones with two men in them, and the ones with two women. Otherwise you’re explicitly saying that the government has the right to void any marriage of any couple, so long as two-thirds of the House, Senate and states go along. Who wants to be the first to sign up for that?

Finally, MoveOn is running a fundraiser specifically for opponents of vulnerable supporters of the FMA. I love this idea.

I recently read Emmanuel Carrere’s The Adversary cover-to-cover in one night. It’s the true story of a man named Jean-Claude Roland who takes a terrible path, ending with his murder of his own wife, children, and parents.

Roland missed an important exam at the end of his second year of medical school, but never rescheduled it. Instead, he told everyone he had passed, and pretended to continue his studies. He married and had children, and became a respected member of the community, having convinced everyone that he was a high-ranking official with the World Health Organization. He got by by defrauding his parents, in-laws, and friends. He told them that he was investing their money, or selling them worthless cancer treatments. Eventually, when he realized he was on the verge of being discovered, he killed his family, and made a (strikingly half-hearted) effort to kill himself.

I find his story fascinating for a number of reasons, but I’ll single out one: it was so irrational. He could have just rescheduled the exam he missed. He could have gotten a job

Highly recommended.

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Have you ever read a blog post so aggressively, ferociously wrongheaded that it temporarily sucks all the fun out of political blogging?

Case in point. Glenn Reynolds seems to think that it’s fair to associate the Kerry campaign with a poster for Fahrenheit 9/11 produced by a distributor in the Benelux countries. (I’m still waiting for an explanation from the Kerry/Edwards campaign for White Chicks.) He says that Michael Moore (who is responsible for writing and directing left-wing films of questionable accuracy) is the American version of the Iraqi rebel cleric al-Sadr (who is responsible for killing our soldiers and running a repressive fundamentalist regime in Fallujah). Etc., etc.

I could argue with this nonsense. But wouldn’t all of our time be better spent sharing a genuinely delicious recipe for braised lamb shanks in red wine? I think so.

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* Katherine of Obsidian Wings is hanging up her blogging spurs. I’ll miss her. She’s written a long, thoughtful swan song about why we should care about U.S. human rights abuses towards people we suspect of terrorism.

* Tim Dunlop at The Road to Surfdom argues that right-wingers probably shouldn’t crow about this story. According to the Financial Times, a British governmental report is about to say that the British claim that Saddam was trying to buy uranium from Niger was “reasonable and consistent with the intelligence.”

The famous sixteen words in Bush’s State of the Union, “The British government has learned that Saddam Hussein recently sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa”, are arguably technically correct. However, the use of the word “learned”, and the context (in the SOTU, as part of an argument for war on Iraq) strongly implies that the United States believes that the substance of the statement is true.

Tim points out, in great detail, that the best intelligence in American hands said otherwise. (It wasn’t just Joe Wilson.) He points out that the CIA had successfully removed the claim from previous speeches. He also points out that the Administration already apologized for using the claim when Ari Fleischer said “This information should not have risen to the level of a presidential speech.”

(Also, Tim reminds me to mark my calendar. July 14th is the one-year anniversary of the outing of Valerie Plame by two senior Administration officials. Congratulations to the lucky felons!)

* From Reason’s Hit and Run, Tommy Chong is out of jail, having served nine months for selling bongs over the internet. He’ll be on the Tonight Show this evening. According to the Drug Policy Alliance:

Tommy Chong was arrested and indicted following a series of DEA raids in February 2003 as part of the Government’s “Operation Pipe Dreams” crackdown on illegal drug paraphernalia. The crackdown involved at least 1200 officials, including hundreds of DEA agents, and at least 103 US Marshals. The operation led to 60 arrests. It occurred during an Orange Alert against terrorist attacks.

* The Poor Man is right about everything.

Finally, at least two evangelical Christians have written about Focus on the Family’s decision to distribute Michael Moore’s home address to their email list.

* David Wayne at Jollyblogger has a very good post arguing that FOTF is only hurting the Christian cause.

* Joe Carter at the Evangelical Outpost thinks that the concern is overblown. He thinks that the real issue is (surprise!) the hypocrisy of the left. I agree with him that politicially motivated outings of gays are shameful. However, I don’t understand how Carter can dismiss the right-wing invasion of privacy, condemn the left-wing invasion of privacy, and then feel secure enough in his own righteousness to condemn the left for selective outrage.

There ought to be a word for these kinds of arguments, in which one simultaneously displays and condemns hypocrisy. They happen a lot.

I should note that Carter doesn’t seem to have much support in his comments. If you choose to comment, please be polite.

The local alt-weekly, the Houston Press, has a good piece about the woes of the summer’s major concert tours. They do a good job of laying out all the fees in going to see (say) Kid Rock, concluding:

So let’s say you plan to take a date to go see the Kid. That’s $56 for two tickets, plus $42.15 in fees, of which Ticketmaster takes $18.15 and the Woodlands folks $24. Ring-ring, that’s $98.15, please, all before your first expensive beer or soggy nacho…

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The local alt-weekly has a good piece about the woes of the summer’s major concert tours. They do a good job of laying out all the fees in going to see (say) Kid Rock, concluding:

So let’s say you plan to take a date to go see the Kid. That’s $56 for two tickets, plus $42.15 in fees, of which Ticketmaster takes $18.15 and the Woodlands folks $24. Ring-ring, that’s $98.15, please, all before your first expensive beer or soggy nacho…

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Blogger Jonathan Ichikawa has gotten an email back from Focus on the Family about their distribution of Michael Moore’s home address. His comments are very good.

I see that Mickey Kaus is asking of John Kerry and John Edwards, “When do they hold hands?” and “When do they kiss?” Lighthearted plays on homosexual panic haven’t always been a Slate trademark, but maybe they’re trying new things.

How time slips by. It was only two years ago that Mickey Kaus was warning us that this country was in for a wave of left-wing violence.

It only takes a few, we’ve learned — and if you figure that for every 500,000 pissed off and frustrated citizens (in either camp) one or two might resort to terror, then increased left-wing violence is something we can see coming down the road.

Mickey apparently faced some blowback, but found a way to back up his accusation: a year-old anonymous message on an unmoderated left-wing message board.

No danger on the Left? If you don’t think there’s any danger of political violence coming from the angry anti-Bush left, check out this creepy message-board post on the subject of how to seat Gore (the “duly-elected President”) in the White House. I’d repeat the money sentence here but I don’t want the Secret Service on my case.

As an anniversary present to M. Kaus, I’ve got an old post about how his research methods warn us of the coming violence from left-wingers, right-wingers, Dominique Moceanu fans, Beatles fans, Vietnamese people, Will and Grace watchers, and me.

My fiancee recently finished Helen Hanff’s charming memoir, Underfoot in Show Business, about her failed attempt to break into the New York playwright scene in the 40s and 50s.

At one point, Hanff is employed by a movie studio (which she gives the pseudonym “Monograph”) as a reader. Monograph would give her new novels. She would read them very quickly, write a summary of the story, and offer her opinion about whether the studio should option the book or not. I had to laugh when she read this story to me:

On the blackest Friday I ever want to see, I was summoned to Monograph and handed three outsized paperback volumes of an English book which was about to be published here. I was to read all three volumes over the weekend, and since each volume was double the length of the usual novel I was invited to charge double money for each…

What I had to read, during that nightmare weekend- taking notes on all place names, characters’ names, and events therein- was fifteen hundred stupefying pages of the sticky mythology of J. R. R. Tolkein. (I hope I’m spelling his name wrong.) I remember opening one volume to a first line which read:

Mr. Bilbo Baggins of Bag End announced that he would shortly be celebrating his eleventy-first birthday…

and phoning several friends to say goodbye because suicide seemed so obviously preferable to five hundred more pages of that.

I also remember the bill I turned in:

For reading and summarizing
TITLE: Lord of the Rings
AUTHOR: J. R. R. Tolkein

Volume I…………….. $20
Volume II……………. $20
Volume III…………… $20
Mental Torture………. $40

Total…………………… $100

Whew! Monograph sure dodged a bullet on that one!

The comments on the recent post about Focus on the Family’s distribution of Michael Moore’s home address have occasionally drifted into anti-Christian sentiment, which was very much not what I was hoping for. For a more heartening look at conservative Christianity:

The Southern Baptist Convention, a conservative denomination closely aligned with President Bush, said it was offended by the Bush-Cheney campaign’s effort to use church rosters for campaign purposes.

“I’m appalled that the Bush-Cheney campaign would intrude on a local congregation in this way,” said Richard Land, president of the Southern Baptist Convention’s Ethics & Religious Liberty Commission…

The Bush campaign defended a memo in which it sought to mobilize church members by providing church directories to the campaign, arranging for pastors to hold voter-registration drives, and talking to various religious groups about the campaign…

But on Friday, Land said, “It’s one thing for a church member motivated by exhortations to exercise his Christian citizenship to go out and decide to work on the Bush campaign or the (John) Kerry campaign. It’s another and totally inappropriate thing for a political campaign to ask workers who may be church members to provide church member information through the use of directories to solicit partisan support.”

I disagree with the Southern Baptists on many things. At the same time, I have great respect for this enthusiastic defense of the boundaries between church and state from a religious organization . Furthermore, their apparent acknowledgement that it’s just as legitimate for congregants to feel moved by Christian principle to work for Kerry as Bush is highly welcome. My heartfelt thanks to the Southern Baptists for this bit of culture war disarmament.

P.S. More on Focus on the Family here (funny!) and here (not funny; it’s a FOTF ad).

AND ANOTHER THING: A small point about that ad- who is that sad little boy supposed to be? In context, it only makes sense if he’s supposed to be a boy raised by gay parents, upset because he doesn’t have both a father and a mother. How, exactly, is a constitutional amendment preventing his parents from marrying each other supposed to help him?

Edward at Obsidian Wings points to an ad from Focus on the Family. It contains a large picture of a sad child, and expresses the concern that children raised by gay parents will grow up without both a father and a mother, and encourages readers to contact their senators to support the Federal Marriage Amendment.

Edward points out, quite rationally, that the vast majority of children who don’t have both a mother and a father are in that position because their heterosexual parents have split up, or never were together. If being raised by both a male and female parent is important enough to change the Constitution, surely it’s important enough to ban divorce.

A few questions remain…

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A Florida Division of Elections database lists more than 47,000 people the department said may be ineligible to vote because of felony records. The state is directing local elections offices to check the list and scrub felons from voter rolls.

But a Herald review shows that at least 2,119 of those names — including 547 in South Florida — shouldn’t be on the list because their rights to vote were formally restored through the state’s clemency process….

State elections officials acknowledge there may be mistakes on the list but insist they have built in safeguards to make sure eligible voters are not removed by local election offices. They say they have warned election offices to be diligent before eliminating voters, and have flagged possible cases in which voters on the list may have regained their rights….

Of the 2,119 people who obtained clemency, 62 percent are registered Democrats, and almost half are black. Less than 20 percent are Republican. Those ratios are very close to the same in the list of 47,000 voters who the local elections officers are supposed to review and possibly purge from the registration rolls.

As it turns out, justice delayed is, in fact, justice denied. The list was released yesterday, and the Miami Herald has already found this. I feel a case of the shrill coming on.

Via Body and Soul.

The White House has contacted the Irish Embassy to complain about the Irish journalist, Carole Coleman, who interviewed President Bush last week. (via Radley Balko)

“‘The White House rang Thursday evening,'” said Irish embassy spokeswoman Síghle Dougherty. ‘They were concerned over the number of interruptions and that they thought the president was not given an opportunity to respond to the questions.'”

Said Dougherty: “They were mostly troubled by what they said was the way the president was ‘talked over.’ “

I’d imagine that most regular blog readers are aware of this interview. (Here’s the transcript; here’s the video, starting around 15:00.) You can judge for yourself about whether Bush was given the opportunity to respond to questions.

She asked tough questions about the mounting death toll in Iraq, the failure of U.S. planning, and European opposition to the invasion and occupation. And when the president offered the sort of empty and listless “answers” that satisfy the White House press corps – at one point, he mumbled, “My job is to do my job” – she tried to get him focused by asking precise follow-up questions.

The president complained five times during the course of the interview about the pointed nature of Coleman’s questions and follow-ups – “Please, please, please, for a minute, OK?” the hapless Bush pleaded at one point, as he demanded his questioner go easy on him.

A few questions:

1. What the hell is the Irish embassy supposed to do about it?
2. Why would the White House decide that the benefits of this action possibly outweigh the negatives involved in keeping the story alive?
3. … unless this supposed to be a warning shot at the American press,letting them know that the President is not to be the subject of serious interviews?
4. Will the press be so cowardly as to play along?

There’s this sense of how dare you question them. And that is the thing that I almost find more appalling than the decisions that they make. Because I can accept incompetence, but I cannot accept self-righteous incompetence.

Jon Stewart

UPDATE: Jesse Walker has more, and the Poor Man does a good job of summarizing the general issue.

ANOTHER UPDATE: One of my betters has more on this. Thanks to antirealist.