National Holiday for Obama? Joseph Farah Goes off the Deep End

Over at WorldNutDaily, Joseph Farah took a break from serving as one of Rush Limbaugh's hemorrhoids to chirp the following:

A civil rights organization in Kansas has launched a campaign to designate Nov. 4 as a national holiday, commemorating the election of Barack Obama as president.

Of course, Drudge picked up on it, Malkin chimed in, and the right-wing web community went into collective apoplexy.

And over what?

One loopy guy who calls himself "Bias Busters of Kansas" has been holding court in a downtown McDonald's in Topeka for some time, and had the hair-brained idea to lobby for November 4th to be declared a national holiday in celebration of an African American being elected president. Yes, the notion of a holiday in honor of a sitting president is silly. But the hysteria of the right is breathtaking. One random fool with a single follower (judging by the video here) does not equate to "a civil rights organization", much less the vast left-wing conspiracy the in-house harridan of PajamasMedia seems to see.

Try to maintain a bit of composure, folks.

Mark Lilla on the decline of Intellectual Conservatism

Honestly, I'm going to have to start paying Ed Brayton a finder's fee for hunting down good articles for me to read.

Over at the WSJ, Mr' Lilla has an excellent article on the fall of intellectual conservatism and the GOP. Worth a read. He describes the fall, as many have in recent months, as culminating with the selection of Sarah Palin as the VP nominee. His argument is that a re-emergent populism and the demonizing of intellectual prowess resulted in the low-brow conservative echo chamber which now controls the right's campaign machine:

So what happened? How, 30 years later, could younger conservative intellectuals promote a candidate like Sarah Palin, whose ignorance, provincialism and populist demagoguery represent everything older conservative thinkers once stood against? It's a sad tale that began in the '80s, when leading conservatives frustrated with the left-leaning press and university establishment began to speak of an "adversary culture of intellectuals." It was a phrase borrowed from the great literary critic Lionel Trilling, who used it to describe the disquiet at the heart of liberal societies. Now the idea was taken up and distorted by angry conservatives who saw adversaries everywhere and decided to cast their lot with "ordinary Americans" whom they hardly knew. In 1976 Irving Kristol publicly worried that "populist paranoia" was "subverting the very institutions and authorities that the democratic republic laboriously creates for the purpose of orderly self-government." But by the mid-'80s, he was telling readers of this newspaper that the "common sense" of ordinary Americans on matters like crime and education had been betrayed by "our disoriented elites," which is why "so many people -- and I include myself among them -- who would ordinarily worry about a populist upsurge find themselves so sympathetic to this new populism."

The die was cast. Over the next 25 years there grew up a new generation of conservative writers who cultivated none of their elders' intellectual virtues -- indeed, who saw themselves as counter-intellectuals. Most are well-educated and many have attended Ivy League universities; in fact, one of the masterminds of the Palin nomination was once a Harvard professor. But their function within the conservative movement is no longer to educate and ennoble a populist political tendency, it is to defend that tendency against the supposedly monolithic and uniformly hostile educated classes. They mock the advice of Nobel Prize-winning economists and praise the financial acumen of plumbers and builders. They ridicule ambassadors and diplomats while promoting jingoistic journalists who have never lived abroad and speak no foreign languages. And with the rise of shock radio and television, they have found a large, popular audience that eagerly absorbs their contempt for intellectual elites. They hoped to shape that audience, but the truth is that their audience has now shaped them.

This basically encompasses all of the grave missteps of the right over the last 2+ decades. The withdrawal from open fora and retreat to the rhetorical cocoon of talk radio and conservative think-tanks/web sites, the glorification of intellectual mediocrity and the offhanded dismissal of educated classes, the proffering of academia as inherently antithetical to conservative causes.

This sort of thing is now being openly said all over the media. Amazing how things can change in just a few weeks. Question is, will conservatives do anything to correct it?

If this woman is a source of their ideas, I'm thinking no.

Obama to Close Camp X-Ray, End Millitary Commissions

From Time, via Dispatches from the Culture Wars:

President-elect Obama's advisers are quietly crafting a proposal to ship dozens, if not hundreds, of imprisoned terrorism suspects to the United States to face criminal trials, a plan that would make good on his promise to close the Guantanamo Bay prison

And with that, he's justified my vote. But there are aspects to this I'm not entirely sold on yet. He's closing the prison, which is awesome. He's releasing or moving into the Federal Court System most of the detainees, which is excellent. But then we get this:

A third group of detainees — the ones whose cases are most entangled in highly classified information — might have to go before a new court designed especially to handle sensitive national security cases, according to advisers and Democrats involved in the talks.

A special court designed to handle "sensitive national security cases". There's a red flag for me, right there. That seems to be a step right back toward the secret courts we have now. How would this court be different from the regular court system, one might ask? Well, the article goes on to state the reasons for having a special court, so one might glean a hint or two there:

"It would have to be some sort of hybrid that involves military commissions that actually administer justice rather than just serve as kangaroo courts," Tribe said. "It will have to both be and appear to be fundamentally fair in light of the circumstances. I think people are going to give an Obama administration the benefit of the doubt in that regard."

Though a hybrid court may be unpopular, other advisers and Democrats involved in the Guantanamo Bay discussions say Obama has few other options.

Prosecuting all detainees in federal courts raises a host of problems. Evidence gathered through military interrogation or from intelligence sources might be thrown out. Defendants would have the right to confront witnesses, meaning undercover CIA officers or terrorist turncoats might have to take the stand, jeopardizing their cover and revealing classified intelligence tactics.

So they have to be "fundamentally fair", while admitting evidence that would normally be deemed inadmissible, and preventing the defense from vigorously challenging testimony offered against the accused. This is progress, how? I mean, it's nice that we'll no longer be water-boarding innocent farmers along with the (very) few actual terrorists we pick up, but the above items are two of the 3 biggest problems with the commissions. If we are not capable of extending true due process in these cases, should we be trying them at all?

We have had a functioning civilian court system for 200+ years. It has dealt with sensitive material and testimony numerous times. I see no compelling reason to set up a new, quasi-opaque system just to deal with a few terrorism suspects. Our courts worked for the Mafia, they should work for terrorists. Unless, of course, the objective is to provide the government with the means to circumvent the law.

If your case can't pass muster in front of the court, the problem probably isn't the court: it's probably your case. Just sayin'.

Back again

Had to take a break for a while, got burnt out there. Glad the country survived the election: I guess the right's hysteria about the nation collapsing in the aftermath of an Obama victory was... slightly exaggerated?

Wow. Just... wow.

Obama's speech was brilliant.

I also thought McCain's concession speech was excellent, and will always believe that if he had maintained his principles and not sold his soul to the GOP machine, that this election would certainly have gone much more favorably for him.

Fuck you and goodbye, Rove.
Fuck you and goodbye, Dobson.
Fuck you and goodbye (soon), W.

On Grandmas and Memories and Rectangular Poultry

Over at Margaret and Helen, there's a thread running off into infinity about grandma stories, due to the passing of Toot. I didn't want to post too extensively there, as there are currently close to 400 comments.

I remember very little about my paternal grandmother, who we called "Mama". My father grew up in Macon, but moved up to Milwaukee after a stint in the Navy to take a jobs with Allis-Chalmers. We visited her several times during my early childhood, and she and Papa came up to Milwaukee, too, but I was very young when she passed away. My memories are fragmentary, half a bespectacled face here, they warm, dry feel of her hand holding mine there, but little of a coherent nature. I remember a huge down bed in her house that my sisters and I played on, but was too tall for me to climb into: my oldest sister had to boost me up. I remember a broad boulevard in front of her house, or maybe just somewhere near, where I flew balsa wood planes. And I remember a small park nearby which to my delight had, as Bill Cosby put it, "one of those things, I don't know what they call it, but you sit on it and four of your friends spin you 'round and 'round for five minutes, and... then you throw up".

I was much more fortunate when it comes to my maternal grandmother. My mother's family was from here, and her parents lived just a few miles away.

Two things generally pop into my mind when I think of her. The first is a mix of Thanksgiving and Christmas meals: turkeys and hams and stuffing and gravy and pies and cakes and presents and lights - sort of a melange of Rockwellian dinners. I always assumed as a child that my grandmother was directing the kitchen work, and that my aunts were there to basically provide labor. That's how it's always done, right? Everyone's grandma is the best, most "from-scratch" cook they know.

Well, then I learned about "Square Chicken". It turns out that unlike most people's grandmothers, mine was not a kitchen virtuoso. The phrase was the prospective title of a book my mother and her siblings thought of compiling after she passed away, of some of her more, shall we say intriguing culinary exploits. It appears that one night she was thawing a block of chicken parts in the oven, and forgot she had put them in there. Hours later, noticing the oven light on, she opened the door to discover a solid, rectangular mass of chicken, well past it's prime. Don't know what she wound up serving that night, but the incident stuck in people's memory. Well, bless her, no one can be good at everything.

The second thing I think of is an image, a still frame, really, from when I was about six. I was up at my grandparent's lake home near Tomahawk, WI. It was the fourth of July weekend, and Grandma was being a pyro. She was born on the fifth, I gather that as a result her childhood birthday parties always involved a fair amount of ordnance. And she got "the good stuff" as we would say back then (now, almost anything is fair game in WI, but 30 years ago, all you could get legally were sparklers, smoke-bombs, small cones and fountains, etc). She had just lit the fuse of a "firecracker" - a cherry bomb by today's standards - and was running to get clear of the blast radius. She'd placed an empty tin can on it to see what damage she could cause. The look on her face is one of such fierce, unbridled, maniacal glee, it makes me pump my fist in the air just to think of it.

She was a loving, funny, intelligent, well-read, warm, highly educated, intriguing person: a conservative, devout Catholic housewife who could also spin hysterical stories about how she and her friends got around prohibition. She and my great aunt, her sister, knew where every speakeasy (umm... and whorehouse. Never asked how they knew that) in the city was, and most of the passwords you needed to get into them. She was wonderfully contradictory.

Miss you, grandma.

Election Day '08: After 2 Years, It's All On Us

The world is watching, people: go kick the GOP's ass:



My experience was a breeze: in and out in 5 minutes. I still wish Wisconsin did mail balloting like Oregon, though.