Tuesday Trivia and Open Thread

 

"Island in the Sun" - Weezer

- I should be taking advantage of my porn privileges before President Santorum takes office, but I guess I have been a bit slack on the posting.  One gets the sense that Santorum knows the base, but not really the base part of the base. I think the only question is who looks at more porn -- the guys at Reason, NRO, or Red State?  You decide below, I report.

- I was interested to read this review of a new book on constitutional jurisprudence by J. Harvey Wilkinson III, a long serving judge on the Fourth Circuit Court of Appeals.  Wilkinson was a (at the time quite controversial) Reagan appointee to the appellate court in 1984 and one frequently mentioned as being on the short list of potential Supreme Court appointees over the years.  Wilkinson is an advocate of a more modest form of judicial conservatism than the likes of Scalia and Thomas, although he is still a conservative, one reluctant to read the Constitution broadly in matters of individual rights.   I think there is something to be said for this approach to jurisprudence, one that is reluctant to interfere unduly in the judgments of legislative bodies and one that avoids grandiose theoretical claims about the art of judging.  

I argued a Fair Labor Standards Act case in front of Wilkinson a number of years ago.  I had lost a bench trial before a Clinton appointee and took it up to the Fourth Circuit, where I drew a pretty conservative panel.  Wilkinson was the presiding judge at oral argument and was sharp, well-prepared, and quite fair.  I got the panel to reverse, so I have a bit of a soft spot for him.

- I thought this piece in the New York Times yesterday explaining voting behavior in terms of tribalism and the collective myths of the tribes rather than interests was rather persuasive.  

- And I thought this piece discussing the legalization of contraception in Massachusetts in 1965 (think about that for a minute) -- legislation introduced by a young state representative named Mike Dukakis -- after winning the acquiescence of the extraordinarily powerful Boston churchman Cardinal Richard Cushing was quite fascinating.  Cushing, who both married Jack and Jackie Kennedy and presided over the president's funeral mass, had amazing clout in Massachusetts.  (We had a some affection for "Diamond Dick" in my house too.  Once when my father was a young state trooper he was threatened with transfer to the western part of the state -- "hung by the balls in Shelburne Falls as the saying went" -- for refusing to fix a ticket for someone politically connected.  His threat to be at Cushing's home to complain that evening spared him.)  It was only when Cushing publicly endorsed the legislation as morally acceptable that a majority in the legislature could be mustered. 

We really have come a long way in many respects over the last fifty or so years.  Well, all of us except Rick Santorum.

Update:  Oops, to quote Rick Perry, forgot to mention that it's Illinois primary night.  I think Romney starts nailing down the final act tonight.  I had high hopes for Little Ricky making some headway, but then he went off on his bizarre frolic and detour to Puerto Rico to denounce speaking Spanish to a group of Spanish-speakers, followed by his anti-porn crusade.  And don't even get him started about Spanish-language porn.  He is a candidate who seems to have lost the thread, a guy who really goes out of his way to alienate and I suspect it will not serve him well this evening.  He'll probably win in Louisiana, where we will also see the last gasp from Gingrich, and then it is on to a steady dull barrage of victories for the plastic man from (pick one) Utah/Massachusetts/Michigan/New Hampshire/California. 

What's on your minds?     

Comments

[Mandos]

It's a toss-up between Reason and NRO.

[Mandos]

Sorry, Reason and Red State.

[low-tech cyclist]

I may have to get this bumper sticker. (Via MaddowBlog.)

[oddjob]

voting behavior in terms of tribalism and the collective myths of the tribes rather than interests

Nice to know a major media outlet has made that observation. It's hardly a secret. Even Al Gore's father (Sen. Albert Gore Sr. (D-TN)) was mystified by the refusal of poor rural white Tennesseeans to vote their interests and that was probably 50 years ago.

[oddjob]

the legalization of contraception in Massachusetts in 1965 (think about that for a minute)

That was about the time my father had to travel to Delaware to have a vasectomy (we lived just over the border in Pennsylvania) because at the time that procedure was illegal in Pennsylvania.

[oddjob]

He is a candidate who seems to have lost the thread

I don't think he ever really had the thread. He just got lucky briefly.

[oddjob]

(You can't be the candidate from Opus Dei and be a front runner, you know?)

[oddjob]

I may have to get this bumper sticker.

LOLOLOLOL!!!!!!!

[oddjob]

This year, thanks to the House's Tea Party faction, we "... have a recipe for an unusually clear-eyed ideological debate over whether New Deal and Great Society-like federal programs are in the country’s best interest, or whether they were errors that ought to be unwound...."

(Or to put it another way, that Tea Party faction hasn't gotten the message yet.)

[big bad wolf]

oddjob, their myths, their social groupings, their shared concerns are, in many ways their interests. thus, i think it is inaccurate for us to say that they don't vote their interests. they don't vote for what we see as being in their interest and for their benefit. we are convinced they are wrong, but they are equally convinced we are wrong. what i like about the times piece makes it clear that the myth explanation works both ways. we, of course, see our interests as firm, right, and reality based. i personally cannot get enough outside our story to see them otherwise, but, intellectually, i can recognize that they are temporally defined, contingently created value systems and interests. that doesn't make them less right to me, but it does make me realize that we could be wrong about some things. how that affects me in my choices is that it makes me very wary of claims of truth, of certainty, and of prosecution and punishment in any kind of political context.

and, to flog a dead horse, and then i will stop, the times piece explains why a bland slate article can cause hollering (digby) or inaccurate snark (duncan). it hit their interest story.

[oddjob]

Job seekers getting asked for Facebook passwords

[oddjob]

their myths, their social groupings, their shared concerns are, in many ways their interests

Point taken. I should have said "economic interests".

[kathy a.]

economic interests? "Republican presidential candidate Rick Santorum says the issue in the presidential race is not the economy but an oppressive government that's taking away people's freedom."

this from someone who does not believe in contraception, or in women working outside the home, and does not believe in the separation of (his) church from (our) government.

[Mandos]

"The voting against their own interests" thing from liberals and leftists always annoys me. No, they aren't.

Consider this video.

Yes, there are "mouth-breaters on meth" who have no idea what they're doing. But you have quite a number of them quite willing accept that the pursuit of their beliefs might be making them materially poor.

I partly blame economists, both left-ish and right, for popularizing the idea that voluntarily performing actions that hurt oneself if others are hurt more is an irrational exception.

It is the rule.

[Sir Charles]

bbw and Mandos,

I think that there is a legitimate critique to be made that life can not simply be boiled down to economic interests and that the materialist approach to analyzing voter behavior has its flaws. A number of good treatments of the book "What's the Matter with Kansas" made this point well.

Hell, I vote against my material interests all the time.

Having said that, it is always a source of despair to me when people vote against their material interest for no other reason than manifest ignorance or, even worse, because of their antipathy to other groups. Perhaps we need a better vocabulary with which to discuss this phenomenon -- irrational may not be the best term to capture the phenomenon, which ranges from a deliberately mean-spirited view of world to one in which certain group loyalties and general cultural attitudes just prevail.

[oddjob]

Emotional comes closer to it. I've always viewed tribalism as the ancient attachment to "family first" writ on a society-wide scale.

[kathy a.]

there is another way of looking at it. what motivates many voters is the idea that we have collective interests -- so, it may cost me more in taxes to support schools and poverty programs and other items that i may not personally use, but which are important to the community. i do not want to pit my personal interests against the basic needs of my neighbors.

and i think what is troubling about efforts to slash programs for the many and cut taxes for the very fortunate etc. is a lack of that sense of collective responsibility. these kinds of measures are pushed using the politics of division and exclusion. us vs. them can be quite appealing, especially to people who feel that they have lost ground because less worthy folks have gained ground. to juice it up, the divisions and who is less worthy are trumpeted -- sluts are undeserving of women's health care; welfare queens and their flocks are undeserving of "cadillacs" (tr: food, shelter); we just can't afford medicare for those old people who are such a burden; the unemployed don't deserve benefits and should just get a job; etc.

to be honest, there is some "us vs. them" driving my political views, too. i think it is inequitable for the few to wildly profit at the expense of the many. i think it is horribly unjust for the few to impose their narrow moral beliefs on everyone else. my idea of "us" is pretty broad; my idea of "them" is directed at people of extraordinary fortune and power, particularly when they lack a respect for the humanity and needs of the many.

when the fortunate toss a couple bones out to a mass of the hungry, then watch as the hungry fight one another -- that's not generosity. that's not responsibility. that's not building community. that's dogfighting.

[jeanne marie]

amen

[nancy]

Not sure how much more anyone wants to know about Santorum, but this could explain a few things: From today's journey piece at WaPo.

Santorum’s first turn away from the gray-area Catholicism of his youth came when he met his future wife, Garver, around 1988.

She had only recently ended a six-year relationship with an obstetrician and abortion provider 40 years her senior. Her relationship with Tom Allen — who delivered her in 1960 — had led her to drift from her devoutly Catholic family.

On to Opus dei. Makes sense.

Think they're going to have to go with the Mormon.

[Sir Charles]

The Santorum's wife thing is just too much. I was actually having this conversation with a Washington Post reporter on Saturday night.

Living in sin with an abortion doctor who had actually delivered her.

How fuckin' weird is that?

[kathy a.]

that's pretty fuckin' weird. so all this is about rehabilitating his wife's reputation? gah.

[oddjob]

And his wife's parents' religious beliefs.

[low-tech cyclist]

They say truth is stranger than fiction, and when something like this pops up, it's hard to disagree.

[kathy a.]

if there is a god, she won't let me die with rick santorum's stories on my mind. dude should find a better hobby.

[nancy]

I'm trying to imagine how Karen Santorum could ever have supported a run for national office knowing that the nugget above would make its way into the public arena. Maybe it already had, but if so, I think most of us missed it. Why, oh why, would anyone want to have to explain or discuss such matters with one's children? Ever? I find it strangely abusive.

Opus Dei, male-dominated that it is, must have thought the six-year hiatus with Dr. Allen to be talked away as a minor detour for a wayward.

The psychodynamics at work here leave me speechless. So 'way too much information' on one hand, yet astounded they thought the underlying *strange* would go unremarked politically on the other. Oddness squared all 'round.

[Sir Charles]

nancy,

Really, it's just so wrong on so many levels.

[jeanne marie]

Knit a Uterus to Donate to a Congressman in Need.

[nancy]

jeanne marie -- Yarn stash should never be wasted on the unappreciative. My motto anyway. ;-)

[beckya57]

Sir C and kathy--well said. Sir C, when you say you vote against your own interests all the time, I'm guessing you mean very narrow economic interests. My husband and I do the same, but part of why we do so is we think it IS in our interest to live in a well-functioning society in which no one goes hungry or without needed medical care, children are educated, parks are plentiful and safe, police and other first responders are there when you need them, etc. I don't want to live in the right-wing utopia, which bears a striking resemblance to a lot of 3rd world hellholes IMHO.

I ordered a bunch of the bumper stickers to distribute to my friends. ;))

[big bad wolf]

SC, i agree that a more nuanced vocabulary would help us. i see few incentives for that developing.

i think the best we are likely to do is make some in-roads into manifest ignorance, which i would define as inaccurate factual beliefs; e.g., obama is a foreign national. mean-spiritedness i dislike a lot, but i see it on our side as well as theirs. i fear that most people are tribal---something i adamantly resisted for years---even if the tribe is that of being educated or eating organic or being skinny, which are far lesser, to me, dangers, but not untribal and not escaping in their language from mean-spiritedness toward others.

i think it inadequate to merely proclaim that we are interested in the collective good. the collective good, i think, can be understood in various ways. any particular way of understanding it can only be advocated and worked for; it can claim no natural or higher realm. we do what we can because we think or believe we are right, not because we can prove we are.

[Sir Charles]

bbw,

I think that we want to at least try to frame our politics around solid facts, reasonably good history, and the best possible approach to policy empiricism we can muster. Naturally all of these things are colored by value judgments that frame our politcs --and really that's how it should be.

I think one should seek to persuade and to shed as much light as possible.

Ultimately, I think we may have goals that are never changing -- greater solidarity and security, an economy that actually works for the greater good, a respect for individual autonomy in most spheres -- but we want to at least be open to the idea that our specific policies are not well designed to achieve them, to be able to react to evidence, to make adjustments, and to admit mistakes.

None of this is easy, but I think it is a decent rough summary of where I am coming from.

[herve leger]

I really enjoyed this post, especially the “examples in this post” portion which made it really easy for me to SEE what you were talking about without even having to leave the article. Thanks

[jeanne marie]

I decided to subscribe to the AUL propaganda (just to torture myself, of course).

Here's a snippet from yesterday's missive and $$ plea:

Together with Planned Parenthood, the Obama Administration has forced the pro-abortion healthcare law onto pro-life taxpayers and appointed two radical, pro-abortion justices to lifetime seats on the Supreme Court. And now they are trying to trample on our conscience rights. It's too frightening to even consider what kind of damage four more years of this pro-abortion Administration could do to pro-life Americans.

The Obama Administration has willingly allowed Planned Parenthood to be in the driver's seat. In a blatant political payoff to the radical pro-abortion base, this Administration has methodically dismantled many commonsense protections for the unborn with their signature legislative “achievement” in the form of the new healthcare mandates. We must elect a pro-life President and Senate to thwart Planned Parenthood from expanding its complete control over your tax dollars ...

What Planned Parenthood isn't counting on is how far you and I are willing to go in this fight. They have vastly underestimated the resolve of America's pro-life activists. In 2012, AUL Action is launching an unprecedented grassroots, online, and advertising campaign designed to hold pro-abortion politicians accountable. This major investment will make the difference in mobilizing pro-life voters and swinging critical undecided voters for life.

I think it's important to listen to how this is being pitched to understand why so many women are "on board" with the Republicans.

As for the tribal affiliation, I remember getting almost identical anti-NRA propaganda (just substitute "W" for "Obama" and "NRA" for "Planned Parenthood") years ago.

[kathy a.]

what "pro-abortion healthcare law"?

what "radical" pro-abortion base?

[nancy]

Pleased to say, we saw this coming.

War on women now a battle of the wits. These guys won't be able to say they weren't warned.

jm and kathy -- 'Unborn' is the term I'd like to see taken on. Eventually it shouldn't surprise us to hear them describe all of our *unfertilized ova* as the 'potentially unborn' -- and right back to the duty of women -- well, white women -- to bear as many children as humanly possible. Cause zealotry really accepts no limit.

[jeanne marie]

How about the absurdity that Planned Parenthood is in the driver's seat?

[Crissa]

Are you saying that the NRA wasn't pushing for sales of guns without registration and mobile castle laws, like the one Zimmerman is out free via?

I really don't understand your point, jeanne marie. Both sides are not equal here. One is lying about what a politician has done, and the other is not lying. Not equal.

[kathy a.]

it is one of the absurdities that "pro-life" people also tend to be NRA fans; and that denying women's reproductive health care ruins lives of the already born, and guns ruin them (in a more startling and abrupt manner) too. go ahead and own your guns; just don't have them where i might be shot, OK? i won't make you take birth control pills or have an abortion.

i think that one problem is that pro-gun laws make it more possible for somebody else -- by accident, by intent -- to kill you and/or your loved ones. by contrast, the protection of women's health does not actually hurt anybody -- it demonstrably makes it more possible for families to avoid suffering, and it also makes much more financial sense than the alternative.

[jeanne marie]

Crissa, I agree with you.

My point is that the language was very similar. And thus persuasive to those who seek to validate the moral imperative of their tribe.

The formula goes something like this:

"Evil powerful radical organization" + "White House" = assault on moral high-ground

If we don't fight back = evil laws enacted + radical Supremes appointed. Send money now.

Bear in mind, I am very much pro-gun control. I believe I have the moral high ground. I have friends who died from guns and I marched in the Million Mom March. I am what you call passionate.

When I received the emails encouraging me to fight the radical pro-gun base, I was on board! I was outraged to learn that the NRA and "W" were working together to reverse the AK-47 bans and other common sense Brady Laws legislation.

You and I know there is a vast difference between the NRA and Planned Parenthood. But the language employed in the pro-life email (above) was cannily similar to the pro-gun control email I received many years ago.

The pro-life base - especially the women who are drawn to the cause on moral grounds (not to be confused with the political players or the misogynists) - are passionate about saving the lives of the unborn. The scums at AUL know that if they use the above formula, they will keep these women "on board" for their cause.

By the way, this exercise came about because I was trying to understand why so many women (friends of mine) remain steadfastly in the Republican tribe even to defend the recent loathsome "war on women" legislation.

You can be sure they hate Planned Parenthood almost as much as I hate the NRA.

How do we break through to these women?

[jeanne marie]

kathy - I could not agree more. it's absurd.

[kathy a.]

here we go -- news from a city council member, telling it like it is.

JM -- i don't know that there is an organized political way to break through. but i think that women tend to hear a lot of stories that other women will not share with men. about our ladyparts; about pregnancies; about complications and losses. there are women whose political default on abortion is "never," but when it comes to particular situations -- not so much. i don't actually know women against birth control, even ones who sign on to "those sluts shouldn't be sleeping around" -- most don't support slashing birth control for upright married ladies who are trying to take care of their existing families. a good number also don't want to raise surprise grandchildren. maybe they do not understand how broad these attacks are.

[nancy]

Lest anyone think I'm pushing into the realm of unnecessary hand-wringing with concern over use of the term 'unborn', one might look at Mormon teaching with regard to those called 'spirit children of God' during a pre-mortal existence. Some Mormon families are large by design but also to a faith purpose, bringing the unborn to their time on earth. And of course we know what the USCCB would have to say -- a version of 'every sperm is sacred.'

'Unborn' is code which we should stop repeating. The right latched on to the word and uses it to refer to any possible impregnation of any duration. Letting this *framing* go unremarked is a mistake I think.

Yesterday in Idaho at the Statehouse in Mormon country -- "Anti-abortion activist Brandi Swindell conducted a live ultrasound demonstration over the noon hour with the enthusiastic air of a state fair product demo host. 'Isn't this fun? Who doesn't love seeing an ultrasound image of a baby?' she asked, adding, 'Remember, this is first trimester, so the baby is tiny, tiny, tiny.'" One legislator explained the ultrasound bill as necessary to give the "unborn one more chance to make the case that they should live."

Today it looks as though the demo [six of them actually] may have helped halt the bill.

I really really want my separation of church and state back.

[nancy]

Note: All of the women at this statehouse ultrasound demo had arrived via a crisis pregnancy center. As has been pointed out, because these are not medical facilities, under some legislative bills, an additional ultrasound performed at a medical facility could be required by a state before an abortion could be performed. Crisis pregnancy centers are billing themselves as the alternative to Planned Parenthood and they are clearly not.

[kathy a.]

nancy, thanks for the links. i really like my separation of church and state.

it's all groovy to see an ultrasound of a fetus who is wanted, and is not gravely impaired. but really creepy to see this demo done in public. obviously, the "volunteers" had been pre-screened to ensure their fetuses were not missing something major like a brain or a heartbeat.

i've had a bunch of ultrasounds. there was the one on my heart that showed a prolapsed mitral valve. some on my lumpy breast showing benign cysts, which is better than the alternative, especially with my family history. several for my kids -- one was special, because it showed my son in a frank breech position, meaning a c-section unless he could get turned around, which he couldn't. other monitoring when i had bleeding early in the pregnancy with my daughter, and then when i went into early labor with her, and so on. all of this was PERSONAL MEDICAL INFORMATION. none of it was anybody's business but mine and my doctor's.