Gallows Humor

I've lost track of the number of Obama administration scandals boiling over at the moment. (I think its four: IRS, Sebelius' shakedown of the health industry, Benghazi, and wiretapping the Associated Press.) So, these are embroiling the Treasury Department, Health and Human Services, the State Department, and the Justice Department.

Why do I get the feeling someone should be checking Energy and Education to make sure they aren't stealing booze from the White House liquor cabinet?

It would be funny if we weren't all so very screwed.

Benghazi: No Heavy Analysis Necessary

So Benghazi. What have we learned?

A) The political people around Obama are a profoundly insecure bunch. Their judgement in the wake of the attacks was just plain dumb. There was no way this could have turned the election. It was a terror attack against the US. When have the American people turned against their leaders in the aftermath of such an attack? (The answer is never.) How out to lunch do you have to be not to know this?

B) Those early mistakes were compounded by the refusal to admit there had been any mistakes. As a controversy this should have been over months ago. They can blame Republicans all they want, if anyone is still talking about this it is the fault of the Obama administration and no one else.

C) The capacity for the unofficial/official propaganda arm of the Democratic party, i.e. The New York Times, The Los Angeles Times, etc, to run obfuscating disinformation campaigns for the administration is truly remarkable. And disgraceful.

The Reading List Grows

Well, the first trip to the bookstore has taken place and the reading list has doubled in size to four with the purchases of Chuck Thompson's Smile When You're Lying: Confessions of a Rogue Travel Writer, and Sean McMeekin's July, 1914: Countdown to War.

These were something of a no brainer for me to pick up. Slightly irreverent travel writing is right up my alley, as is any history book that blames the occurrence of the First World War on Russia - right where it belongs. McMeekin also wants to blame France, so I'm intrigued to see what his evidence is.

The trick now will be to not begin to read these until after the semester is over. Easier said than done.

Summer Reading

This is the last week of classes at the university where I teach, which means next week is finals. After that I'm only a few grueling days of grading away from summer. (Which would be especially welcome if it ever stops snowing around here.)

Summer means reading.

Which is, oddly enough, a bit of a problem.

Usually, at this point I've got a stack of books I've procured since last summer waiting to be devoured over the next couple of months. As of right now I have two so far this year; Alan Furst's Blood of Victory, which I picked up years ago and never got around to reading, and Jeff Shelton's Caleb & Callie. Jeff is an online acquaintance of mine, and a hell of a power pop songwriter and performer. (In fact, his new band Hot Nun will make up part of the soundtrack for my summer.) I'm looking forward to diving into his first novel.

The problem is that is it. It is almost disconcerting how unconnected I am to the world of books. Oh, I peruse the catalogs of academic philosophy and social science that fill up my mail box at work, and some of those find their way into my shelves. The larger world of books, however, escape my notice.

This is particularly trying to me as once upon a time I was plugged very deeply into the book world. I managed a good little bookshop for a number of years and got used to being immersed in a sea of books, where currents of information on the new and interesting was constantly at hand. But as time has gone on I've  lost touch with those currents and I find out about books in a haphazard way. We do take the London Review of Books, but really it is a terrible waste. The "reviews" are most often not about books at all, but merely a venue for the article writer to tell you how they view the world. It doesn't help that those views are among the most moralizing and self-congratulatory you will ever find. (Really, when did priggishness make its comeback? Oh, my God, is it annoying.)

Soon, I will make my traditional late spring trip to the local bookstores to see what may be there to catch my eye, but usually that effort was merely to add one or two titles to round out the selection. Never before has it been expected to supply the bulk of the reading list.

I will keep reader here informed of how it goes. I also plan to post little reviews of the things I read this summer.

Any suggestion readers may want to share can be left in the comments. They will be appreciated.

Unallowable Questions

Add a new query to the "too sacred to be uttered" list. Evidently asking if childless adults are less interested in posterity than adults with children is strictly verboten. (And, no, I am not aware of a groundbreaking social science study which conclusively answers such a question. A preliminary search turned up very little, but who needs "studies" when you have moral exactitude!)

I really wish the new American Taliban would publish a list of these unquestionable 'holy of holies" so we can all be as "enlightened" as they are. Of course, being merely censorious is small potatoes when you could be a true visionary, which evidently involves advocating burning books that challenge these new sacred truths.

Exciting times we are all in.

Good News (A Rare Feature)

Here is something of a counter cultural result these days; the powers that be don't actually win all the time.

A federal jury today found former Valdosta State University (VSU) President Ronald M. Zaccari personally liable for $50,000 for violating the due process rights of former student Hayden Barnes in the case of Barnes v. Zaccari. In May 2007, Zaccari expelled Barnes for peacefully protesting Zaccari's plan to construct two parking garages on campus, calling a collage posted by Barnes on his personal Facebook page a "threatening document" and labeling Barnes a "clear and present danger" to VSU. Barnes first came to the Foundation for Individual Rights in Education (FIRE) for help in October 2007.

"College administrators have been blatantly and willfully violating student rights for decades, but they have far too often dodged personal responsibility. Not so today," said FIRE President Greg Lukianoff. "We hope this serves as a much-needed wake up call to college administrators that it's time to start paying close attention to the basic rights of their students."

"After five years, I finally feel vindicated. This is a victory for me but it's also a victory for students everywhere," said Barnes. "I hope that other college administrators take heed and see that violating students' rights can be costly and that they will be held accountable. I thank my legal team and FIRE for making this victory possible and my friends and family for standing by me through this difficult fight."

Barnes' ordeal began in the spring of 2007, when he protested Zaccari's plan to construct two new parking garages on campus at a cost of $30 million. By posting flyers and sending emails to Zaccari, student and faculty governing bodies, and the Board of Regents of the University System of Georgia, Barnes expressed his concerns and proposed what he saw as environmentally friendly alternatives. Barnes also penned a letter to the editor of the VSU student newspaper about the proposed parking garage plans and wrote to Zaccari to ask for an exemption from the mandatory student fee designated for funding the construction.

In response to Barnes' activism, Zaccari personally ordered that he be "administratively withdrawn" from VSU in May of 2007, ignoring the concerns raised by members of his administration. Zaccari absurdly claimed that Barnes presented a "clear and present danger" to both Zaccari and the VSU campus on the basis of a cut-and-paste collage Barnes had posted on his Facebook page that included pictures of Zaccari, a parking deck, and the caption "S.A.V.E.—Zaccari Memorial Parking Garage." Given no notice or opportunity to defend himself, Barnes came to FIRE for help in October 2007. 

Today's verdict follows five years of litigation, both at the trial and appellate levels.

All too often university administrators, particularly at the uppermost levels, act as if they were tin pot dictators because most times there is no one able or willing to hold them accountable for their misdeeds. Cases like this can serve an important reminder that state-run colleges and universities are not personal fiefdoms to be run any way they damn well please, nor are students and faculty second-class peasants without Constitutional rights.

Who knows, maybe they will learn the lesson.

(Okay, I realize they will not but a man can dream, can't he?)

Until Further Notice...

...it is safe to assume I think any political story making headlines is either:

A) Asinine.
B) Sadly typical of this brain-dead age.
C) Evidence of the inevitable decline of our civilization, or
D) A little bit of all of the above.

Your Comedic Interlude I

Your Musical Interlude XXXI

Hurricane Sandy. Unprecedented As Long As You Ignore The Precedents

The loonies are out in force.

“I’ve never seen anything like this and I’m at a loss for expletives to describe what this storm could do.”

Yes, I’ve never seen anything like it either nor have our modern meteorological tools. As I wrote yesterday afternoon, we don’t know whether our tools are up to the task because no storm of this nature has occurred in the modern meteorological era….


“Isn’t it strange that a hurricane in the Bahamas would somehow turn into a monster mega-storm and slam into the Northeast at the end of October? Aren’t hurricanes supposed to weaken as they move north over cold water? What the hell is going on?
The answers are… yes, yes, and we’re not completely sure. This is a beyond-strange situation. It’s unprecedented and bizarre.

What a crock of shit.  I spent five minutes and found three October storms with similar profiles to Sandy. All three originated in the same spot in the Caribbean. All of them intensified as they moved north. Two of them plowed straight into the North American continent. Hurricane Irene, in 1999 (ancient history I guess) intensified into a Category 2 hurricane over the same water Sandy has held (barely) its Category 1 status.
Hurricane Hazel, in October 1954, intensified as it moved north through the Bahamas to strike the Carolinas as a Category 4 storm. Hurricane Isabell, in October 1964, also intensified into a Category 3 storm as it moved north over the same waters as Sandy before striking near the North Carolina/Virginia border.

Just imagine what I could have found had I looked before 1950?

Who Is More Civil?

I just did a little Google experiment by searching for the following terms:

"X should be shot"
"X should be killed"
"X are evil"

Where "X" is either the word Republicans or the word Democrats.

Using the word "Republicans" returned 217,400 responses.
Using the word "Democrats" returned 85,100 responses.

Just sayin'.

A Confession

I have a confession to make.

I have not voted in an election, of any kind, since 1998.

I fell out of the habit on voting when I lived in Washington, DC. Voting in DC is a pointless prospect (for everyone) as there are no competitive elections there, and, besides, the local pols are hopelessly corrupt. After I left DC I lived in five different places in three years. Not a situation that encourages civil engagement to any great degree.

In the meantime, I continued to think about and, once I started this blog, write about politics. However, I found I was content to leave things in the realm of opinion. Sure, I had a rooting interest, but not at a level that required my participation.

I began this election cycle with no intention of that changing. Romney was always the most likely to emerge from a decidedly lackluster group of Republican candidates and, for me, there was nothing all that appealing about the prospect. It must be said, in all honesty, my feelings concerning Romney really haven't changed over time. I will never think, "Wow! I get to vote for Mitt!"

So what happened to get me motivated to register and vote? In a word, Benghazi.

I have not written much of anything about the attack and its aftermath, mostly because it would have been a string of invective fit to make a longshoreman blush. The initial responses of the Obama administration (to blame a YouTube video, and to attack Romney in a bid to gain a temporary political advantage) were bad enough, but as September wore on I was still content to criticize and stay on the sidelines. However, by the dying days of September, as the ineptitude and duplicity of the Obama administration became increasingly apparent, my disgust level reached an intolerable level. Writing out my opinions and standing on the sidelines was not going to cut it anymore.

In a sense Obama will accomplish the impossible on election day; he will make it possible for me to vote for Mitt Romney with enthusiasm.

A Tale Of Two Polls

I mentioned last time out that the more Obama friendly polling assumes Democrats will enjoy similar advantages in enthusiasm compared to Republicans that they did in 2008. You can see this assumption built into some of the polling. For example, this recently released Time magazine poll which shows Obama up 5 points in Ohio and which many lefties are convinced means the election is over.

If you look at he internals of the poll you discover the pollsters have broken down the Ohio electorate as follows:

Democrat: 37%
Republican: 28%
Independent: 29%

(The numbers don't add up to 100% in the above because 40 something respondents answered something else.)

Now, lets compare this to the Suffolk University poll which found the race a dead heat.

Democrat: 39%
Republican: 35%
Independent: 27%

Very, very different samples, you will agree. So different, in fact, that the Time sample seems to be measuring an "Ohio" in a alternate universe (presumably one in which the sky is always fuchsia.) Indeed, no other poll listed by Real Clear Politics is claiming Independents outnumber Republicans in Ohio. However, that is the sample Time is using. When you look at the exit polling from 2008, when everything, and I mean everything was breaking in Obama's favor the partisan split between Democrat and Republican was only +8D. That's right, Time is telling us this election will break even more favorably for Obama than 2008 at +9D.

The way they achieve this "result" is by skewing the gender numbers. In the Time sample a full 65% of Democratic respondents are women, in the Republican sample its a 50/50 split (exactly.) The only way they make the whole thing not look ridiculous is by making the Independent sample skew male heavy at 57%.  As males as a group break heavily for Romney this gender imbalance has the effect of depressing Romney's vote total among Republicans and pumping up Obama's score among Democrats. Time has Romney winning among Republicans by 84% to 11%, while McCain won 92% to 8%.  Meanwhile they have Obama winning amongst Democrats 92% to 6%, while in 2008 those numbers were 89% to 11%.

Among Independents Romney is ahead 53% to 38%. In 2008 Independents went for Obama by a 52% to 44% margin.

Any way you want to slice it, it don't add up.

What A Difference A Month Makes

I put together a little chart looking at ten prominent "battleground states" to see what the last month or so has meant for the poll numbers. (Positive numbers = Obama lead; negative numbers = Romney lead).

It certainly looks like there has been a lot of erosion of support for Obama, doesn't it?

(Note: There has been no recent data released for North Carolina as Obama is no longer viewed as being competitive in the state. I used the latest available data, October 18th, for the later North Carolina average. All data gleaned from Real Clear Politics.)

As a point of comparison, here are the current poll numbers compared with the actual results of 2008.

Many of the "predictive models" have been assuming 2008 levels of enthusiasm for Obama in the tailoring of their samples. However, its difficult to see that enthusiasm when you look at the numbers.

An Analogy (Presented As If Tweeted)

Grapes are like twelve pressure treated 2x4s.

If you don't understand why that is you must be an idiot.

#shitobamasays