Month: September 2014

I don’t blame Jorge Ramos for ripping President Obama over his delay on immigration reform, but I do get annoyed when the people who demanded that he make the delay get off without a word of criticism coming their way. Let’s tell people why the president delayed action and not just talk about broken promises.

Never walk alone at Stonehenge, even for a moment.

I don’t know, maybe there was a brief period of time after I was first introduced to Joan Rivers via my television set that I didn’t despise her. I may have thought she was somewhat charming and funny and irreverent. I can’t remember. All I really remember is the plastic surgery and the vanity and the right-wing politics and the palling around with the nation’s most famous Birther, Donald Trump.

Peggy Noonan explains why I hated Joan Rivers better than I ever could. If you want me to hate you, try making a career talking about other people’s clothes.

I recognize that Joan Rivers touched a lot of people in a lot of ways and she can’t be reduced to a Ronald Reagan-adoring, Steve Forbes’ chateau vacationing, best-buddy of Peggy Noonan. But, to me, she was the worst of the worst.

I held her in the highest contempt.

I’m not pleased that she has died, but I have absolutely nothing positive to say about her life or career. I thought she was a dreadful human being.

Hello again painting fans.

This week I will continuing with the painting of the Goshen, New York house.  The photo that I am using is seen directly below.   I will be using my usual acrylics on a tiny 4 inch by 4 inch gallery-wrapped canvas.

When last seen, the painting appeared as it does in the photo seen directly below.

Since that time I have continued to work on the painting.

Note that this week’s final photo (below) has saturated the colors just a bit.  About that photo, the sky has received more paint.  It is now more strongly yellow as well as the house.  I have added the details of the gable ends.  The base has been painted below the bay window on the first floor left.  I’ve attempted to carry the shadows and highlights onto the windows from the siding.  The painting is now done.

My experiment of painting with a fair amount of detail on a very small canvas seems to have worked out well.  I’m pleased with the result and will definitely do another one sometime soon.

The current and final state of the painting is seen in the photo directly below.

I’ll have a new painting to show you next week.  See you then.

Earlier paintings in this series can be seen here.

The Crazification Factor has been authoritatively set at 27%, which means that 27% of the public is “head-trauma crazy” just like Alan Keyes.

In light of their declared hostility toward the United States, and the grisly murders they have perpetrated on account of it, we naturally assume that, when someone purporting to be the president of the United States speaks of a strategy for dealing with ISIS we are right to assume that they are the enemy. But the statements and actions of Obama and his cohorts suggest the likelihood that, in the strategy he is pursuing, the enemy is not ISIS, but the life and liberty of the people of the United States.

In his statement after Jim Foley was murdered Obama said disparagingly of the perpetrators that “They may claim out of expediency that they are at war with the United States or the West, but the fact is they terrorize their neighbors. …” He was speaking in the context of the gruesomely hostile murder of an innocent American citizen, dramatically enacted and publicized as an act of war against the United States. So what sense did it make to imply that the perpetrators’ claim to be at war with us is at all questionable?

It makes no sense, except perhaps as a lawyer’s quibble. Taken as such, it seems calculated to obfuscate the charge of treason that ought to be duly brought and tried if and when a serious investigation shows it to be a fact that that Obama and his cohorts aided and abetted the terrorist forces that constitute ISIS; that they did so in ways that risked and eventually claimed American lives, including innocent civilians, and military, diplomatic and security personnel, e.g., at Benghazi; and that they did so covertly precisely because they knew the declared aim of the terrorist forces in question and understood, therefore, that those forces are committed to making implacable war on the people of the United States and their self-government.

This makes sense to precisely 27% of the public, I am sure.

Tim Noah is so funny:

Last year, prosecutors offered [ex-Virginia governor] Bob [McDonnell] a deal in which he alone would plead guilty to a single felony fraud charge, according to The Washington Post. Maureen would not be charged at all. He turned it down, and both were charged on 14 counts. The legal tack they chose was for Bob to air the marriage’s dirty laundry on the witness stand – describing in lurid detail how greedy, reckless and verbally abusive she could be, even suggesting she was in love with another man – and to invite others to do so as well.

It wasn’t a strategy that seemed recognizably pro-family or Christian.

I don’t know why Jesus was always yammering away about hypocrites. It’s not like the folks who went to and graduated from Pat Robertson’s university got the message.

But, yeah, the way Creigh Deeds talks so fondly of his son, who almost killed him before he killed himself, does highlight that it wasn’t McDonnell who had the stronger family values in that 2009 election.

Aviva Shen at Think Progress points out that, overall, women will only benefit when the pill is made an over the counter drug if it continues to be fully covered on people’s health insurance. Otherwise, access will actually go down.

The Economist apologizes for publishing a ridiculous review of Edward Baptist’s “The Half Has Never Been Told: Slavery and the Making of American Capitalism.”

The most interesting thing about this tragic story about an elderly British woman being beheaded by a crazed stranger is how the police handled the suspect. Please note, they didn’t shoot him ten times and leave him lying in the street for four hours despite that fact the was clearly a major danger to both the public and the responding officers.

Hillary Clinton makes an announcement, of sorts. She’ll tell us if she’s running for president, but not until next year.

When it comes to Derek Jeter, people talk too much. Just enjoy the next few weeks and show some respect. No one could ever conduct themselves with more class than Derek Jeter.

I know what Lindy West is saying about Ricky Gervais.

At Ten Miles Square Johann Koehler has some weekend movie advice.

At College Guide Sara Neufeld writes about the lack preschool access for Latinos in Illinois.

Let’s have some more Specials.

Harvard psychology Professor Steven Pinker makes a number of highly contentious assertions in his big The New Republic piece on Ivy League admissions, and I am not going to try to challenge or refute any of them. All I want to talk about is his idea that it would be a better admissions system if the Ivies just relied almost exclusively on standardized tests.

I think it’s a terrible idea, and not just because I think standardized tests discover a too narrow band of aptitude. Prof. Pinker is clearly bitter that a lot of Harvard students skip his lecture, in his opinion, with the blessing of the Harvard administration. They do so to work on the student paper, to row on the crew team, to sing in ensembles, and to goof off or otherwise satisfy some higher priority. But, here’s the thing. Most college students learn as much or more from interacting with other students than they do from their instruction in classes. This is just as true at Harvard as it is at Ohio State. Kids are learning when they play a role in a play or play racquetball in the rec center. So, it’s not only important that colleges have organized activities outside of the classroom, but it’s important that the student body is diverse enough to have a starting quarterback for the football team, a cellist for the orchestra, and an editor for the newspaper. A college body made up purely of the kids who scored the best on standardized tests would be unlikely to mesh with the requirements of the school.

As a society, we have a tendency to look at college admissions as something that should done purely on merit, which puts the entire enterprise squarely on the individual applicant and not on the culture of the school. It’s strikes many people as unfair that a student with lower grades and aptitude scores would be selected over one with higher ones. That’s understandable, but it is the wrong way of looking at things. When I was growing up in Princeton, I knew two students at the university, one from Oklahoma and one from Alaska, who never would have been accepted if they had grown up in New Jersey. They got in specifically because they came from states that had only a handful of applicants. And they added something to the culture of the school that one more kid from Princeton High School would not have. That admissions process discriminated against me, but it wasn’t all about me. It was about having a student body that was itself educational.

I went to boarding school in New England for one year, and the school had a program that brought in black children on scholarship from Far Rockaway, New York. Without question, I learned more from interacting with those kids, who had both an urban sensibility and the experience of discrimination, than I learned in any of my classes. Most of those kids would not have aced a standardized test, but they benefited from the quality education they received and they gave back by educating everyone around them.

Prof. Pinker seems to think that Harvard and the Ivies should have a different standard than the Ohio States of the world, primarily because they can select only the brightest students who score the best on standardized tests. If you want to sing in a choir or star in a play, you can do that anywhere. So, maybe Harvard should just shut down all its non-classroom activities. Those things are a distraction from academics.

I suppose we could create schools like that. They would admit only the best test-takers and they would provide nothing but classes and coursework and labs. But, in my book, those kids would be getting only half an education. Actually, I think they’d be getting somewhat less than half.

Peter Beinart echoes my analysis of the tough rhetoric coming out of the administration, particularly from Vice-President Joe Biden. I’m constitutionally opposed to the Hegelian fascination with building systems, so I don’t really want to try to understand American foreign policy by breaking it into Hamiltonian, Jeffersonian, Jacksonian, and Wilsonian categories. But, it’s an exercise that can illuminate some things. The primal call for revenge is Jacksonian. And that’s what Biden and Kerry were feeding with their tough talk about how we’re going to deal with the Islamic State.

The question is, in feeding that tradition, do they make it stronger and more demanding (as Ed seems to think) or do they satiate it so that is has less power to coerce (as Peter and I believe)?

You can argue either way, but it’s clear that pandering to the impulse is not the same as following it.

And it’s such a powerful impulse that I don’t think you can ignore it or pretend that it doesn’t exist or behave as if it has no legitimacy.

When an individual is legitimately incensed and wants immediate justice, you can use various strategies to get them to calm down and let cooler heads prevail. You can tear gas and fire rubber bullets at them and blame the victims, as was attempted in Ferguson, Missouri. You can offer to seek justice on their behalf, as the Justice Department promised to do. You can distract them with a shiny object. You can stall and let the passage of time do your work for you.

But you can’t do nothing.

I think people are legitimately incensed that American citizens have been beheaded. The administration has to respond to that. They have to respect that feeling, and they’re entitled to share that feeling.

But foreign policy ultimately cannot be crafted on feelings alone. It must be carefully planned and thought out, and it must be realistic and achievable. When George W. Bush used a bullhorn to promise revenge for the 9/11 attacks, he earned a lot of good will because it was what people wanted to hear. That, in itself, wasn’t the problem. The problem was that they followed the Jacksonian tradition after that and pursued a policy that was driven more by revenge than thoughtfulness.

President Obama cannot ignore people’s desire for revenge, and he must manage that public rage. But, once that rage is managed, he must try to find solutions that will actually work. No, you can’t kill Americans with impunity just because it’s difficult to strike back.

We can figure this out.

I’m filling in for Ed today at the Political Animal.