Hello World

I never took a civics course, so I never learned a lot of things I should have. And now I feel like they are so obvious that I shouldn't admit that I never learned them. But as a public service to anyone else who may be equally ignorant and too ashamed to admit it in public I will ask anyway (rather than just spend an hour figuring it out via Wikipedia).

What is the difference between the Speaker of the House, the Majority Leader of the House, and the Majority Whip? I mean, I know that they are different, and I've got some general suspicions, but I don't really have a strong idea of how it all works. And will the answer to that query explain to me what the Minority Leader and Minority Whip do? And are there other positions that I should be asking about also?

And how embarrassed should I be that I don't already know these things?

As of 12:42am:

Looks like a convincing House win for the Democrats and (probably) a narrow hold in the Senate for the GOP. I'm hesitant to even guess what the result of this will be except that with the Democrats' new position of responsibility each party can now credibly blame its opponent for every problem. And I don't anticipate President Bush reaching out to anyone across the aisle. So, okay, I guess I have a prediction: two years of stalemates and mutual finger-pointing, with little accomplished as each side prepares and postures for 2008.

But I'd be happy to be wrong on that point.

From the Washington Post:

DeLay Wanted to Leave Office on His Own Terms
Texas congressman had considered resigning on several occasions, but wanted to win the GOP primary before announcing his departure.

The way I read it, DeLay hamstrung his own party for one final ego-boost before acknowledging the obvious: that his own misbehavior ensured that he didn't have a chance of earning reelection. More precisely, as the article says, he screwed his GOP competitors out of personal animus and in all likelihood wrecked the party's chances of saving the seat (not to mention putting another dent in the party's national reputation). Am I wrong? Is there something more sophisticated and less unsavory going on here? Oh, okay, here's something:

An additional impetus for putting off the resignation until now was suggested by John Feehery, a former aide to DeLay and House Speaker J. Dennis Hastert (R-Ill.). "He needed to raise money for the defense fund. That was the bottom line," Feehery said. "He wanted to make sure he could take care of himself in the court of law." Under federal campaign rules, any reelection money a lawmaker raises can be used to pay legal fees stemming from official duties.

Delicious. The Hammer, going out with class.

Massachusetts's Supreme Judicial Court found today that the Bay State can't award marriage licenses to out-of-state same-sex couples. It is a sad day for the gay rights movement, but I think the court's decision is completely unsurprising. It just points out the obvious, which is that until the nation as a whole comes to its senses and realizes that gay marriage is deserving of the same respect and legal recognition as straight marriage we're all kind of screwed.

Anyway, ( here's my annotated version of the story )
Summing up: this decision demonstrates not that the Massachusetts judiciary comprises a bunch of jerks who hate homosexuals, but rather that an honest court has no choice but to enforce bad laws. Had the court found a way to get around this law, it would have given opponents of gay marriage more ammunition--activist judges stomping all over the legislature's bailiwick. If you don't like this decision (and I hope you don't), tell your representative. Don't bother telling your president, though. At least not til 2008.

Hey look, in Texas they're arresting people for public intoxication. No big deal, right? We don't want people wandering the streets in a drunken stupor, exposing themselves and others to danger. Oh, wait a second. They're arresting people while they're in the bar? Well, that certainly puts an interesting spin on things.

And while we're talking about bizarre alcohol-related arrests, check this one out. A 21-year-old and two friends hosted a party at their house and after the police busted the party the three were arrested. Only, um, he wasn't even at the party. His friends were given fines, but because his name was on the lease he got to go to jail for a month! See? The system works. [discussion of this case can be found at plastic.com]

Anyway, I know that the idea is to crack down on these huge stupid college parties and prevent people from killing themselves and others, but let's hold people responsible for their own actions--irresponsible drinking by partygoers is, first and foremost, their own fault. And, for that matter, (and this relates to the Texas story above) preemptively punishing people for legal drinking in a private establishment because they theoretically could do something bad is pretty ridiculous and an unwelcome imposition of the state into the private lives of its citizens.

Ooh, I'm perturbed about all this.

George Will wonders why conservatives are happier than liberals and predictably comes up with reasons that conservatism causes happiness.

Well, George, you've got to understand the correlative fallacy here. Maybe it's not that being conservative makes one happy but rather that being happy (read: complacent) makes one interested in preserving the status quo and keeping one's own circumstances as wonderful as possible (at the expense of the people whose own circumstances may not make them so happy).

I'm not saying that's true, I'm just saying that, you know, let's not jump to self-congragulatory conclusions just yet.

My favorite part is definitely this impressive bit of compressed contradiction:

Such puzzles show why social science is not for amateurs. Still, one cannot -- yet -- be prosecuted for committing theory without a license, so consider a few explanations of the happiness gap.

Also, going hunting is not for amateurs. Still, one cannot -- yet -- be prosecuted for hunting without a license. Apparently.

Almost all from The Washington Post:

Boehner in the House. No comment!

Puppies cut open and filled with heroin. Awful.

To read the rest of this post, click here.

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the perils of profiling in the New Yorker:

One afternoon last February, Guy Clairoux picked up his two-and-a half-year-old son, Jayden, from day care and walked him back to their house in the west end of Ottawa, Ontario. They were almost home. Jayden was straggling behind, and, as his father’s back was turned, a pit bull jumped over a back-yard fence and lunged at Jayden.

“The dog had his head in its mouth and started to do this shake,” Clairoux’s wife, JoAnn Hartley, said later. As she watched in horror, two more pit bulls jumped over the fence, joining in the assault. She and Clairoux came running, and he punched the first of the dogs in the head, until it dropped Jayden, and then he threw the boy toward his mother. Hartley fell on her son, protecting him with her body. “JoAnn!” Clairoux cried out, as all three dogs descended on his wife. “Cover your neck, cover your neck.”

A neighbor, sitting by her window, screamed for help. Her partner and a friend, Mario Gauthier, ran outside. A neighborhood boy grabbed his hockey stick and threw it to Gauthier. He began hitting one of the dogs over the head, until the stick broke. “They wouldn’t stop,” Gauthier said. “As soon as you’d stop, they’d attack again. I’ve never seen a dog go so crazy. They were like Tasmanian devils.” The police came. The dogs were pulled away, and the Clairouxes and one of the rescuers were taken to the hospital.

Five days later, the Ontario legislature banned the ownership of pit bulls. “Just as we wouldn’t let a great white shark in a swimming pool,” the province’s attorney general, Michael Bryant, had said, “maybe we shouldn’t have these animals on the civilized streets.”

Read the rest. [kottke]

RICHMOND, Jan. 25 -- The state Senate all but guaranteed on Wednesday that Virginia will hold a November referendum on whether to amend its 230-year-old Bill of Rights to bar same-sex marriages.

The Senate voted 28 to 11 to follow the House of Delegates in approving the amendment. Though each chamber still must pass the measure adopted by the other, their wording is identical and support among the senators and delegates is strong.

"The family is the foundation of our society, and it's been based on a union of a man and a woman since the inception of marriage," said Del. John A. Cosgrove (R-Chesapeake). "A constitutional amendment . . . will protect that."

---

RICHMOND, Jan. 26 -- A Virginia lawmaker accidentally discharged a handgun in his General Assembly office Thursday morning, firing a bullet into a bulletproof vest that was hanging on the wall of his office. No one was hurt.

Del. John S. "Jack" Reid (R-Henrico) apologized to his colleagues on the floor of the House of Delegates Thursday afternoon, saying that "everyone has a right to feel safe here."

Reid said he has a valid permit to carry a concealed weapon and regularly brings his gun to the legislative session. But he said he usually ejects the cartridge that holds the gun's bullets and carries that separately in his pocket.

Virginia, you're in great hands.

Marion Barry, former DC mayor and current member of the city council, tested positive for cocaine. In case you don't remember, this is the same guy who got caught (while mayor) buying crack at a DC hotel and proclaimed of an associate, "bitch set me up!" And then, not long after that, he was reelected mayor! The man, in terms of DC politics, can dodge bullets (this didn't prevent him from being robbed at gunpoint a couple weeks ago, however).

Barry is the Mike Tyson of the nation's capital. And in the same way as with Tyson, while it's funny to watch his life continually devolve into absurd catastrophe it's also getting pretty hard to watch. Maybe if people stopped electing him to office he might stop getting high on the job and/or pay his taxes occasionally.

At any rate, I'm pretty sure this is the last ugly turn in his life I'm going to make fun of. From here on out it's pity all the way.

Some great stories on the front page of the Post this morning:

The FBI set up a fake candidate in a West Virginia state delegate race. They were trying to investigate and uncover widespread corruption, including buying votes, in Logan County. There was a suit alleging that the scam robbed voters of their constitutional rights, but it was denied. This would probably make a pretty boring movie, but it’s interesting.

Blackberry users are feeling anxious as a likely court injunction jeopardizes their chronic crackberry use. Interesting how no blowhard has weighed in with a comment like “I don’t see the problem here--an American company is trying to recover the profits lost by the insidious malfeasance of a Canadian corporation bent on intellectual property theft!” I guess the problem is that every blowhard in Washington has a Blackberry. You don’t see a whole lot of principled debate without concomitant self-interest, I find. On a related note, the government has an exemption so that, even if RIM does get hit with an injunction, Congress will still be able to email each other “this filibuster sux LOL.”

That ever-important 1,000th death causes people to question the death penalty. It’s a complicated issue, I suppose, although I’ve made up my mind. (Disturbing and powerful sidenote: you can read the last words of the astonishing number of people executed in the great state of Texas here.)

And, finally, DOJ lawyers found that Texas gerrymandering was illegal (Texas again!). They were overruled by their politically-appointed superiors, however. Highlight of the piece for me:

J. Gerald "Gerry" Hebert, one of the lawyers representing Texas Democrats who are challenging the redistricting in court, said of the Justice Department's action: "We always felt that the process . . . wouldn't be corrupt, but it was. . . . The staff didn't see this as a close call or a mixed bag or anything like that. This should have been a very clear-cut case."

(later in the story)

Mark Posner, a longtime Justice Department lawyer who now teaches law at American University, said it was "highly unusual" for political appointees to overrule a unanimous finding such as the one in the Texas case.

"In this kind of situation, where everybody agrees at least on the staff level . . . that is a very, very strong case," Posner said. "The fact that everybody agreed that there were reductions in minority voting strength, and that they were significant, raises a lot of questions as to why it was" approved, he said.

Good times!

And from Wired News, more info on the pointlessness of airline security!

And on the other side of the homeland security front:

I wrote back in August about how the Transportation Security Agency was considering lifting the ban on things like scissors and razor blades on airplanes. It looks like that plan, or at least a version of it, is poised to actually put it through, as part of a larger emphasis on preventing explosive materials rather than sharp objects. Some interesting info in that article, especially the revelation that screeners right now spend half of their time looking for cigarette lighters. I'll repeat that for you. Half of their time looking for cigarette lighters. THANK HEAVENS THEY'RE PROTECTING US FROM THOSE DANGEROUS CIGARETTE LIGHTERS! WHAT A GOOD USE OF THEIR TIME!

Obviously, I support this. Security right now is utterly absurd, focusing on visibility rather than effectivity. Any step toward treating travellers like citizens rather than suspects is a step in the right direction. An Australian minister pointed out earlier this month the pointlessness of current security measures (article and Bruce Schnier's blog post about it):

In a wide-ranging speech to Adelaide Rotarians, Senator Vanstone dismissed many commonwealth security measures as essentially ineffective. "To be tactful about these things, a lot of what we do is to make people feel better as opposed to actually achieve an outcome," Senator Vanstone said.

She actually goes on to make some very graphic and accurate observations, ones that very few people have been willing to publicly voice in recent years, so you should definitely check those links out.

Anyway, the opposition to this as quoted in the article comes off as pretty ridiculous:

Charles Slepian, an aviation security consultant based in New York, said the TSA's proposed changes fail to take into account the safety of passengers and cabin crew. "Whenever you are serving alcohol, you have a double duty to those who are present to protect them from someone who goes off the deep end," Slepian said.

And that, folks, is why we ban scissors in bars and restaurants.

"TSA needs to take a moment to reflect on why they were created in the first place -- after the world had seen how ordinary household items could create such devastation," said Corey Caldwell, spokeswoman for the Association of Flight Attendants, which has more than 46,000 members. "When weapons are allowed back on board an aircraft, the pilots will be able to land the plane safety but the aisles will be running with blood."

Clearly the reasonable reaction to this is to ban "ordinary household items" from travel. After all, "ordinary" is just a step away from... "lethal." And if you missed it, she used the phrase "aisles will be running with blood." You know, like they did every day prior to the hyperbolic overreaction that followed 9/11.

Man, that kind of fear-mongering is my least favorite rhetorical tactic. We've seen more than our share of it in this century, and it's just dispicable. It's the last desperate talking point for every advocate of draconian security measures that do more to terrify regular people than they do to protect them. Emotion has its place in public policy debate, but it shouldn't be the only consideration. Things like effectivity, practicality, and logic ought to have their day, too. This proposal's enactment would be a good start.

Sidenote: I don't know about you, but I'm about ready to be allowed to leave my cellphone on and use my mp3 player on takeoff and landing. These and other in-flight prohibitions are baseless and irritating and making flight attendants enforce them is a complete waste of time.

Calamity Jon wrote a little something about our nation's courageous stance against terrorism, and man, do I ever agree with him.

The more stories like this I read, the more I wonder: what the fuck is going on? Do decision makers even remember that the whole purpose of this ridiculous war is to preserve liberty, at home as well as abroad? We've done a pretty good job of making everyone afraid of some indistinct but Very Serious Threat while subjecting Americans to a remarkably thorough invasion of their privacy, not to mention a constant irritation caused by security measures aimed at putting forward the image of safety without the substance of effectivity or justice. What's the point of turning America into a police state just so we're saved from the sinister influence of those who would turn it into a police state? Look, I'm not saying America would be better off in the hands of those from whom we're trying to protect outselves--it would be much worse, in fact--but since when is "less awful" synonymous with "good"?

I know this has become a cliché, but I'm just going to go ahead and repeat it anyway: "Those who would give up essential Liberty, to purchase a little temporary Safety, deserve neither Liberty nor Safety." Ben Franklin was right, my friends.

Anyway, Jon makes a point that I think is fundamental to this issue: the more we do both here and in Iraq to scrutinize and surveille the behavior of common citizens, the more we create an enviroment that fosters terrorism. If you think criticizing our government gives solace to our enemies, imagine how gratified they are to see us weaken and abandon the very freedoms that they seek to destroy.

My alma mater is thinking about setting aside some gender-neutral bathrooms in its student center building. The argument put forward is that the traditional, heteronormative, bifurcation of men's and women's bathrooms leaves out those who don't see themselves as fitting into those categories--those who see themselves as transgendered, gay, lesbian, etc.--and puts them in danger.

An opinion column argues that this proposal is politically-correctness taken too far and (awesomely) warns that Pomona is perilously close to going overboard, as have institutions like Wesleyan and Oberlin.

Another opinion column responds to the suggestion that this is just "too P.C.," noting that this is a serious matter for trandgendered and people who identify as otherwise outside the traditional view of gender--a personal safety issue.

There's a lot of overblown invective on both sides here--keep an eye out for references to nazis and accessories to murder--but I do think this is an interesting issue and there's merit to each perspective.

What's my opinion? Well, there's good moral reason behind trying to accommodate every member of the community, including those who don't fit into the simple categories that serve the majority. But ultimately, bathrooms are gendered for very practical, anatomical reasons, and though that isn't the whole story it is certainly relevant. It makes more sense to install urinals in a bathroom used by people with male anatomy, and to install more stalls in a bathroom used by people with female anatomy. Those with ambiguous anatomy might be left out, to a degree, but I don't think that gender-neutral bathrooms will solve the problems raised in this discussion. The proposal asks for multi-stalled handicap-accessible bathrooms in extant facilities, which is as a purely practical matter pretty unreasonable. If the goal is to accommodate a clear minority, why set aside the bathrooms best equipped to serve large numbers of people? As a statement, it's great, but if I were running the student center I'd be concerned with making sure resources weren't being wasted in one place when they are needed in another. And as at least one of those pieces mentions, there are gender-neutral restrooms in most, if not all, dorms, so it's not like the variant-gendered community is being disregarded. Pomona is certainly one of the most open-minded and tolerant colleges in the country, so I understand the concern that this may be political correctness for its own sake. I don't really think its proponents see it that way, but I do think that at a certain point practicality has to trump principle.

And as for the safety issue, there's an argument that "gender-variant" people feel uncomfortable or unsafe in gendered restrooms, and there's a retort that "normatively gendered" people would feel uncomfortable or unsafe in gender-neutral restrooms. And there's the retort to THAT that if the straight kids would feel uncomfortable sharing a restroom with gender-variant people the campus has bigger problems than bathroom gender politics. And I think this last point if crucial, because it leads directly to my general opinion: if your biggest problem were gendered bathrooms in the student center, I'd say you'd be pretty far ahead of the curve in terms of gender awareness on campus. And, more importantly, if your biggest problem in fact IS gendered bathrooms in the student center, maybe the way to deal with it is to concern yourself with the intolerance or ignorance of heteronormative people on campus, rather than the mostly-symbolic gesture of gender-neutral bathrooms. The problem, after all, is in perception and attitude, and improving that would have a much greater effect in the long run than segregating the "normatively gendered" people from the "gender-variant" people.

Incidentally, here are the words I found in these various pieces that go a long way toward explaining why most people who read or hear about this see it as a liberal-arts joke (which, fundamentally, it's not):

• gender-neutral
• normatively gendered
• transgender
• heteronormative
• gender-segregated
• gender-variant
• genderqueer
• transexual

I mean, good lord. What a morass. Is it any wonder that the whole discussion comes across to most people as politically-correct academic bullshit? Can we just speak seriously and honestly and skip the gender studies lesson?

Paper Shows Oil Chiefs Met With Cheney in 2001
Energy task force meeting was denied as recently as last week by industry officials testifying before Congress.

Are you still glad you refused to put them under oath, Senator Stevens?

Man. I bet if you could get past the gate at 1600 Pennsylvania and onto the lawn you could see a steady stream of rats spewing from the White House basement.