Just What We All Needed -- The Date Of The Apocalypse

Time to short-sell all those five-year bonds.

Turns out the world will end on December 21, 2012. At least, at that point we'll have gone off the Maya Long Count Calendar, an ingenius system for measuring epochal spans of time devised by the cryptic Mesoamerican culture. Apparently there are going to be all sorts of disaster movies made over this year and next that will be based on the end of the world on that date. Return of Quetzalcoatl sounds like the best title.

Wingnuts: Are You Going To Ignore Karl Rove, Too?

Bill Cunningham, the conservative talk radio host from Cincinnati who repeatedly invoked Barack Obama's middle name of "Hussein" in a warm-up speech for a McCain campaign rally, complains that he got "thrown under the Straight Talk Express" by the candidate. So, Cartman-like, he's going away and joining Ann Coulter and a few other right-wing kool-aid drinkers in their pretzel-logic support of Hillary Clinton. Thing is, McCain deserves praise for trying to focus the debate on the merits of the various candidates rather than scurrilous rumors, innuendo, and outright lies. Throw Cunningham under the bus, gain points in my book.

What's more, no less a right-wing political icon of kidney-stabbing attacks than Karl Rove has warned conservatives to not demagogue about Obama's middle name. Rove rightly perceives that simply making fun of Obama's name will do nothing but perpetuate the myth, that moderate voters are perfectly ready to buy into if they see any evidence for it, that conservatives are bigots. Suggesting that Obama is anything other than what he has proven himself to be -- a devout Christian and an American who has dedicated his life to public service of the nation -- is a very dangerous game that in all probability will end badly for Republicans.

Perhaps, then, the McCain candidacy will be good for the Republican party in another way, in that it will provide a way for the most foul-tempered spewers of bile to be purged out. Some of the far right will go with them, and a degree of fanatical enthusiasm will leave the party as a result. But at the same time, the party can reach into the moderate middle, that growing segment at the top of the bell curve of American politics who yet have reservations about the neo-collectivism proffered by the standard bearers of the Democratic party and vote Democrat only because they are so very repelled by these fountains of vitriol who hold themselves out to be the spokespeople for a vast segment of conservative Americans. No one in the moderate middle wants to get in bed with Ann Coulter or Lars Larsen. But centrists can be persuaded to look again at Republican ideas if Republicans show themselves to be principled enough to police their own as well as others for minimal standards of human decency.

When even Karl Rove is suggesting that a measure of civility is to the conservatives' tactical advantage, that's as clear a sign as anyone should need that the rhetoric has escalated beyond a critical point.

Yesterday, I offered a brief eulogy for Bill Buckley, in which the focus of my praise was on his ability to bring erudition and civility to political debate -- and for which he was rightfully recognized as the paterfamilias of the conservative movement. I've no doubt that Buckley would have shied away from referring to the Democratic front-runner as anything other than "Senator Obama" or "Mister Obama" and would have been repelled at the idea of using the man's name (something he did not choose for himself) to imply disloyalty to America. Buckley would have been quick to concede that Obama was a faithful Christian and a talented politician with good intentions. But note that one can concede that Obama has dedicated himself to the service of the country, even if his policy ideas are not particularly agreeable to the person making that concession. Note that one can concede that he is a Christian even if one might not like some of the things his pastor has said in the past. That's what I mean about civility and that's why Buckley's passing at this moment in time is so poignant.

McCain scolded Cunningham for being out of line, and rightly so. Buckley would have scolded Cunningham, too, if he had thought Cunningham were anything other than an obnoxious insect who would be best ignored.

A Buck Fiddy

Today marks the first time that the Euro has traded for $1.50 in U.S. money. That's right, a buck fifty buys you only a single Euro. This is not good news for Americans planning to live abroad right at this exact moment. It also means that the dollar will need to strength significantly, or I will have to win the Lotto, before I can go visit my cousins in Italy again.

They, on the other hand, might be able to afford a trip here if they can only scrape together enough money for the airfare. After all, the exchange ratio works two ways, and to them, a dollar would only cost seventy-five cents. It would be fun to show the suddenly-rich Italians around Los Angeles, and good language practice for me. "Sì, questo è il luogo dove ha ottenuto un travestito en l'auto de Eddie Murphy." "Te piace il cane de Dodger?" "No, sarebbe scortese chiedere Signora Hilton per il suo sopra del' bikini. Non importa che lei è ubriaco. Dobbiamo invece avere alcune sushi."

Milk Spam

A friend of mine spammed me today with a video about how evil the big corporations Fox and Monsanto are because they're lying to the public about the dangers of recombined bovine growth hormone. My characteristically verbose response:

My view of this issue is more than a little bit ambiguous. Stipulated that the FDA is corrupt and lazy. That was amply demonstrated when the FDA approved Fen-Phen and Vioxx. Now, recombined bovine growth hormone (rBGH) has been in the news for years and Monsanto’s use of litigation to protect its product has indeed been unusually aggressive. The product is physiologically the same as a hormone that occurs naturally in the cow (bovine growth hormone), but the injection does increase the level of that hormone. Canada’s national health authority, which is less obviously corrupt than the USFDA, sees problems for bovine health but not human health, from the use of rBGH.

Another thing to keep in mind is that for a small dairy farmer (and unlike corn and wheat producers, there are still a lot of small but viable dairy farms out there) the use of rBGH can have a real economic impact on the business as a whole because it can boost milk production by as much as 10% -- so after about a week, each injection of the product essentially pays for itself in increased milk to sell to a processor. So were rBGH to be banned, that wouldn’t put large-scale corporate dairy farms out of business but it would mean that some of the smaller family-run dairy farms would have to sell out to the big guys. That may not justify the perceived health risk, of course, but it is a price that would have to be paid so it’s something that should be taken into account when making a decision about whether, and if so under what conditions, rBGH should be used or banned.

Testing and labeling is a tougher issue than it would seem at first glance. Monsanto’s lobbying against mandatory labeling laws has been based on the idea that it is impossible to tell from a sample of the milk product whether the cows that produced the milk were treated with rBGH or not. You can measure how much BGH was present in the cow based on the amount of an enzyme that resembles insulin, but because the BGH works in the cow’s bloodstream and then is metabolized, the hormone itself does not appear in the milk. The insulin enzyme is a byproduct of its presence, and it’s the same enzyme whether the hormone was naturally-occurring within the cow (BGH) or manufactured and injected (rBGH). So far as I can tell, even the anti-rBGH activists have conceded this point based on existing technology within the realm of reasonable cost-effectiveness. While in theory I would like the idea of a labeling law, it would seem that enforcing the law would require the inspectors to draw blood from the producing cows, so this could only effectively be done on a sampling basis and since producers sometimes sell to different processors, there would be no guarantee of accuracy by the time the product gets down to the consumer, rendering the labeling only a step better than guesswork.

Personally, I think I’d prefer to avoid milk produced by rBGH cows, although I would not go very far out of my way to do so. If milk I knew to be rBGH-free were ten cents more to the half-gallon than unlabelled milk, I might buy it, but beyond that I would become more price-sensitive than product-sensitive. Your tolerance may vary from mine. If you want to avoid rBGH in your milk, shop at Vons (they call it “Safeway” elsewhere), get your milk-based coffee drinks from Starbucks, and eat at Chipotle. I think you do at least two-thirds of that already. Ben & Jerry’s also only buys from rBGH-free dairies to make its ice cream. “Organic” milk basically means that it is rBGH-free; I don’t think there is really anything else “artificial” that can be done to alter the process of a cow eating grass and then turning it into milk and cow poop, so you can buy the more expensive “organic” milk. But just as there is no real way to enforce rBGH labeling, there is also no real way to enforce “organic” labeling, so enforcement would be very expensive and at the end of the day, you have to decide if you trust the seller to accurately represent their product to you as the consumer.

For me, the price difference between “organic” milk and the regular kind is greater than the minutely decreased health risk associated with someone claiming to be selling an “organic” product.

Now, my friend is a big health food nut and probably won't like the idea that I'm balancing a few pennies against my health and that of my wife when I buy groceries, and would be quick to point out that the small diary farmers only use rBGH because the big companies do, too, and that they'd all be on an equal footing if the substance were banned from use. But mainly, my friend holds a religious-like belief in the power of "natural" things being good for your health. "Wholesome" things, I'll buy into. But "natural?" Arsenic occurs naturally in the groundwater here. Just because it occurs in nature doesn't make it good for you.

And the health effects on humans caused by rBGH use are nebulous but opponents of its use get to invoke the scary phrase "cancer accelerant." Not being one to be readily frightened by such boogeymen, I want more data. It's not at all clear what drinking milk with a higher than expected insulin-like ratio is. Sounds like it would be good for a diabetic to drink milk like that, but that would be a big leap on my part to proclaim as a fact. What I feel comfortable with saying is that rBGH is chemically identical with the naturally-occurring bovine hormone. Whether the chemical is created in a cow's pancreas or in a laboratory in St. Louis, the effects of its use would be the same. If the chemical were harvested from non-dairy cows (say, from beef cattle shortly before it was slaughtered or from stud bulls) it would have the same effect.

The real issue is not the "artificial" origin of the chemical, it is the effect of increasing the amount of it in the animal. Here is where we run into the real problem. The FDA does not typically do its own studies, and relies on the scientific work of the proponent of a substance to prove its safety. Naturally, we might view that sort of data as not particularly objective or trustworthy. And the FDA is in kind of a no-win situation: doing its own work would be criticized as "over-regulation," "needlessly duplicative," and "dilatory." When people are literally dying for lack of medicine, a government agency that slows down the distribution of that medicine can be seen as evil. But at the same time, the FDA is criticized for "under-regulating" the entities it is charged with policing and being "overly deferential" to their data.

We should not be afraid of new techniques for making food. We should not be afraid of genetic engineering coming to the aid of food producers or of eating the food that is generated through such methods. These should be subject to reasonable review and analysis. What is "reasonable" will have to be determined on a case-by-case basis. Attempting to define what is "reasonable" in all situations in advance will never be possible. We need a regulatory agency that takes seriously its mandate to protect and advance public health while not obstructing the advancement of science or not permitting legitimate commercial activity to take place.

Is that really too much to ask for?

U.S. Mint Rejects D.C. Quarter

Turns out, the U.S. Mint took less than twenty-four hours to reject a proposed "state quarter" design offered to Washington, D.C. that included the city's official motto, "Taxation Without Representation." (Note, though, that the Federal District's official motto is "Justicia Omnibus"; while the city and the federal district are coterminous, they are overlapping and not the same level of government and the federal district's motto was put in place by Congress.) Apparently, the "Taxation Without Representation" issue, although a classic political "slow burn," is still too hot for the Mint to handle and they won't put it on our money.

"Bitch set me up" might still work, though.

Once More Because You Didn't Hear Him Clearly The Last Five Times He Said This

Michael Bloomberg will not run for President. His appeal would have been that of a good manager and successful businessman who could rise above partisanship and an advocate for policies that he thought were right regardless of which banner they were offered under. Given that the Republicans are on the verge of nominating John McCain and the Democrats are trending towards nominating Barack Obama -- both outsiders who have been soundly rejected by their respective parties' establishment -- it is clear to me that there is no particular need for an independent candidate.

Besides, Bloomberg was only polling around 15% nationally anyway, if the rumors were to be believed. Bloomberg wouldn't spend a billion dollars of his own money to get 15%. He might have spent it if he had a credible shot at winning. But a billion bucks, just to be a spoiler. He's no dummy and he can see how badly Mitt Romney got burned -- over forty million Romneybucks lit on fire so that Mitt the Flip would be on John McCain's short list of potential running mates. Not a good buy.

Vi Veri Vniversum Vivus Vici

Today marks the death of William F. Buckley, Jr., the intellectual progenitor of the modern American conservative movement. Though I despise some of the social excess that movement has taken on in recent years, for the most part I remain convinced that conservatives have worked a net benefit for the country.

Buckley wrote and published God and Man at Yale, which revealed the then-surprising truth that the American Academy was hostile to traditional notions of religion and morality. This set off a debate about the proper role of higher education and the extent to which a person's views should be influenced by their intellectual superiors. Buckley founded and published National Review, the flagship publication of political conservatives. It commented, as it still does, with dry wit and thoughtfulness on the issues of the day. Buckley created and hosted the public-affairs show Firing Line, which proved that erudite, intelligent discussion of a wide variety of issues could find an audience and political disagreements could be simultaneously fierce and polite.

That's not to say Buckley was always right about things. Although always an opponent of anti-Semitism, Buckley was not so quick to see the injustice of racial segregation, and as Ilya Somin points out at Volokh Conspiracy, his later recanting of his states-rights stance on the civil rights movement only mitigated that position.

Nevertheless, Buckley also labored mightily to reconcile libertarian thinkers with social and economic conservatives. The marriage always worked better for the economically-minded than the social types, which of course is the very fracture seen today in the Republican party, which no one yet has been able to heal. A son of privilege and wealth, Buckley was not content to merely enjoy his money and felt motivated by noblesse oblige to make the world better not just for those like himself but to do what he genuinely thought would make the world better for everyone. Thus, he was willing to break ranks with other conservatives and advocate the legalization of drugs (a distasteful position but an unavoidable one from both his principle and policy positions) and was one of the first major conservative figures to openly criticize George W. Bush for his handling of the Iraq War.

He set out and accomplished ambitious goals for himself in life -- he resolved to stem the tide of liberalism in academia by creating an environment where conservative thinkers would be deemed worthy of respect; he resolved to set in motion a political movement that ultimately culminated in the election of Ronald Reagan; and he put a friendly, intellectually-satisfying face on politics during a time when the rest of the people filtering the events of the day to the public were reducing their quotes to sound bites filled with invective. He was also candid about admitting when he was wrong, which is a lot more than most political figures can do even after his example. The world is a less colorful place now without him.

What Qualifies A President To Be President?

The survey results are in. A slim plurality of NAPP voters (4) agree with me that the best training available to be President of the United States is to be the Governor of one of the several States. Other (3 each) voters think that attaining a high academic degree, or having had service in the U.S. Congress, are the best available training. Other votes came in for success in private business (2), military service (1), diplomacy (1), and prosecutorial or crimefighting experience (1).

Personally, I think that legislative service is a relatively poor way to train someone for executive leadership. Legislative service is inherently a deliberative process. It involves seeking consensus and compromise amongst people who are more or less equals. Chairs of Congressional committees certainly wield great power, but they do so because they have the backing of their peers and therefore concentrate the power of the entire Congress into themselves, at least within their areas of speciality.

Being a legislator is great experience for learning how to make deals. It isn't a great way to learn how to delegate tasks, how to read peoples' abilities and how to pick amongst people for various jobs, how to set priorities. Executive power is taking the helm of an organization; it is not exercised by seeking consensus and compromise, but rather through personal charisma and the dissemination of a common set of visions, goals, and values. Ultimately, being President isn't about making deals, it's about taking charge. So I have to disagree with those among you who picked service in the Congress as the best qualifier for the White House. I'd have picked "Cabinet service" before "Congressional service." But that's just me.

I'm a little surprised at the emphasis put on the academic background by NAPP poll respondents. If you include a J.D. within the ranks of a "high academic degree" then certainly many of our Presidents have had that degree (or its equivalent) but certainly not all of them. The current President holds a Harvard MBA, and is the first President to have that degree. His predecessor has a Yale J.D. Before that, you've got to back in history a ways to find a President who held a degree more advanced than a B.A. or its equivalent. George H.W. Bush holds only a bachelor's degree in economics, although he did make Phi Beta Kappa. Ronald Reagan also only held a bachelor's degree in economics (and he doubled in sociology). Jimmy Carter holds a bachelor's degree in nuclear physics (from Annapolis, which couldn't have been easy).

In fact, the postwar era, we've had only four Presidents with postgraduate degrees: Bush the Younger, Clinton, Gerald Ford, who got an LL.B. (the then-equivalent of a J.D.) from Yale; and Nixon, whose J.D. was from Duke. If you want a President with an advanced degree other than in law, you've got to go all the way back to Woodrow Wilson, who got a Ph.D. from Johns Hopkins in history and political science. I believe that Wilson is the only President to boast a Ph.D. and that he and Bush the Younger are the only ones to boast a graduate degree other than in law, but I haven't done the research to confirm those facts.

In fact, while many of our Presidents have been lawyers, many of them never got J.D.'s (or their then-equivalents) because until about the 1950's, attaining a J.D. was generally not a prerequisite to being admitted to the bar and before the 20th century, it was highly unusual for a lawyer to complete law school -- for the most part, law schools as we would recognize them today didn't exist, and most lawyers got their training by way of what could best be called "apprenticeships."

Harry Truman never even went to college.

This isn't to say that guys like Truman or Carter were dumb or that Lincoln was a bad lawyer because he never went to law school. These guys were really smart, and Lincoln was one of the best lawyers this nation has ever produced. It just means they didn't get all that much fancy education, for whatever reason. And other than a law degree, post-bacchalaurelate degrees have not been pursued by the men who became Presidents. So I would submit that educational achievement is probably not as significant a criterion for advancement to the Oval Office as, say, raw mental ability. We do want our President to be smart, that's for sure.

Of the major candidates remaining in the race for President today, John McCain holds a bachelor's degree from Annapolis (he was ranked 894th in a class of 899 graduates); Hillary Clinton was valedictorian in political science at Wellesley College and holds a J.D. from Yale; Barack Obama's bachelor's degree in political science is from Columbia and his J.D. is from Harvard, which was awarded magna cum laude. (This would be the time to derisively snort, "Oh, couldn't make summa, huh?" as if you could have possibly got better grades than he did.)

None of them have any personal experience in government other than in legislatures, unless you count Hillary Clinton's quasi-cabinet level service in her husband's administration putting together a health care reform proposal that ultimately failed. So if you're going to pick among them based on their educational achievement, I would say that Obama's is the most impressive, followed closely by Clinton's.

I was ultimately attracted to Rudy Giuliani as a candidate because he seemed to best possess the inspirational and managerial qualities one looks for in executive leadership. Obviously, he's not an option any more. So of demonstrated executive experience, I like John McCain's record as a military leader best. He wasn't much of a leader in his early and middle military career, the part for which he is famous. But after he got back from The Nam, he turned around the largest air squadron in the Navy and made it the best. But I have to question whether military leadership translates into the ability to lead the civilian government; in the military, there can be real consequences to not following orders while in the government, it can be very difficult to persuade civil servants to do things differently from the way they have been doing them. And McCain's governmental experience, a third of his lifetime, has been in Congress.

Hillary Clinton's work in her husband's administration seems like Cabinet-level service to me, and it's clear that she's learned something from that experience. But she couldn't inspire a starving man to go to a buffet. Barack Obama has no executive leadership to speak of on his resume, but he possesses more ability to inspire than McCain and Clinton combined. That counts for a lot, but it's not the same thing as actually running something more complex than an Senatorial office with a staff of twenty or so people.

All told, it seems that we have a slate of candidates to choose from who do not have the kind of significant executive, managerial experience that I would like to see in a President. And particularly if McCain is elected (I know the odds are against it but November is a long way away) the choice of a vice-President will matter a lot. I would hope, then, to see someone with some gubernatorial experience in that slot, whether that person be a Democrat or a Republican.

Seventy Percent Solution

I felt about 70% of normal this morning, so I went to work. Still sniffling, sneezing, and coughing. You don't think about it much when you don't have to do it, but it seems to take literally every muscle in your entire body to cough. That's not good for sleeping. Or for sleeping spouses. Or for spouses who want to be sleeping but can't because you're coughing.

Anyway, I was mentally alert when I woke up, and that was good enough for me. I got the biohazard treatment from pretty much everyone at work and a lot of people were very solicitous of my status: "How are you doing, TL?" I assume they were asking out of a mixture of compassion (as my sneezing and coughing must have been clearly audible) and wariness (because they sure don't want this crud). As I understand it, for about the last day you have significant symptoms, you're expelling only dead viruses (virii?) that won't be viable even if picked up by a new host, so you aren't contagious. But that may just be a myth and maybe I should have stayed home today, too, even though I was going kind of stir crazy here.

Continuing Theme: Kids With Mohawks

Today's "kid with a mohawk" story is brought to you by way of Parma, Ohio, where a six-year-old has been suspended from a charter school for having the distinctive haircut. "I understand they have a dress code," the mother of the punished student said. "I understand he has a uniform. But this is total discrimination. They're singling out my son. They can't tell me how I can cut his hair."

This is exceptionally silly, and in my opinion the fault lies with the parents. While the kid says he likes the mohawk, he's six. Yes, a six-year-old is more than old enough to have preferences about things like that, but the barber takes his instructions from the kid's parents. And the kid probably wants to please his parents, so he says he likes the mohawk whether he has formed an opinion on the subject or not. So it's the parent's choice to have their kid's hair this way. And a mohawk is a haircut that is deliberately chosen for its distinctiveness, for its ability to make the wearer of the haircut stand out and call attention to him. (Or her, but we don't need to go down that path yet because I haven't noticed baby girls with mohawks. Yet.)

As for the school administrators, they most certainly can tell you how to cut the kid's hair. It's a charter school, meaning it has its own set of rules. If you accept that the school can impose a dress code, well, that includes the kind of hair styles the school deems acceptable. That means that you have agreed, in advance, to the school's officials deciding that a mohawk haircut is sufficiently out of the ordinary and distracting to other students that it's not appropriate in a classroom setting. However arbitrary that decision may seem to you, you've already agreed to live by their decision. What they can't do is force your child to attend their school at all.

To the extent that a haircut is protected First Amendment expression, I note that students neither shed all First Amendment rights at the schoolhouse door, nor do they enjoy the same level of free speech rights they would as adults in a public square. Their expression of free ideas must not conflict with the basic educational purpose of the school. I'm also not entirely sure what message a six-year-old is is expressing by wearing a mohawk haircut. A sixteen-year-old is expressing a message of defiance of authority, or at least one of advocating listening to punk rock music. I don't think that a six-year-old can be said to be doing the same thing. Now, I don't know exactly where the line gets crossed, and it's probably different from individual to individual. But it would be a very precocious six-year-old indeed who was able to formulate an anti-authoritarian or pro-punk rock concept.

And then there's the invocation of that bugaboo, "discrimination." You can "discriminate" based on a lot of different things, and not all of them are bad. The first thing we think of when the word "discrimination" comes to mind is racial discrimination, like whites-only drinking fountains in the South of the 1950's. No question that that kind of discrimination was bad. But if your employer requires a high school education for applicants to be eligible for a job, that employer is discriminating against uneducated people. Clearly, excluding uneducated people from a job that requires a certain level of mental ability is an acceptable form of discrimination -- and indeed, one that is probably necessary and beneficial.

So what's the difference? A law professor of mine put it nicely back when I was a 2L zygote-lawyer (maybe by second year you stop being a zygote and start being a blastocyst, but this is not the place for that kind of semantic quibble). A Black person has no choice about being Black. No ability to control it, or choose to be something different. But the high school diploma implies a certain level of achivement, something that someone can earn. What's more, only a minimal level of mental ability is needed to attain this achievement. So, someone without a high school diploma or its equivalent has in all likelihood chosen to forego that achievement. Perhaps that was a rational choice for them to make at the time. But that is a choice with consequences. That's why discriminating against people without high school diplomas is morally acceptable, while discriminating against people based on their race is not.

So, is the mohawk like race-based discrimination, or like education-based discrimination? That's an easy call. You have to go out of your way to get your kid a mohawk. The mohawk is a choice. So that means you get to live with the consequences of that choice, which includes other people disapproving of it.

What kind of a lesson does this teach the boy in question? Seems to me that it inhibits teaching him that society has conventions about what is and is not socially acceptable. Those lines are blurry enough as it is. It also teaches him that if he is somehow inappropriate in appearance or behavior, there will be authority figures who intervene on his behalf and attempt to make allowances for his benefit despite his breaking the rules. This can play out in all sorts of destructive ways.

Maybe not, we can hope. Sometimes a haircut is just a haircut and maybe none of this will matter in the future. Like I said above, this incident says nothing of importance about the child in question, who really does not have a lot of say in how this has played out, one way or the other. It has a lot more to do with his parents who thought that mohawking their six-year-old boy was a good idea, and the school administrators who have the temerity to say, "No, it's not." I'm siding with the administrators here.

UPDATE: A lawyer in the firm advises that when he was a kid, fifty-five years ago, he lived in a very rural, mountainous region of California, and his parents gave him and his brothers mohawk haircuts as a fun thing to do one summer. Apparently his dad was inspired by reading Last of the Mohicans. This hadn't occurred to me, because the mohawk haircut has taken on a meaning in today's world entirely different from the world in which my colleague lived as a child. I'd make a sizeable bet that the names "James Fenimore Cooper" and "Natty Bumppo" would not mean all that much to the parents of 95% of the kids walking around with mohawks today.

Advice

You know those juice boxes? The ones that have just the right amount of juice in them and are handy when you're sick because you can just grab one and sip on it while you're trying to comply with the bromide of drinking lots of liquids? And they're handy for kids' lunches, too. Yeah. Well, here's the thing.

You tear off the little straw and you punch the straw down into the box. After you do that -- this is very important -- do not squeeze the box.

Okay, that's our safety tip for the day. Let's be careful out there!

More Day By Day Flak

A couple weeks ago, I gave up on Day By Day being funny ever again and took it off my blog. It seems, though, that after I did this, the author caused something of a shitstorm by analogizing one of Barack Obama's speeches to one given by Adolf Hitler. This has caused some controversy and criticism, and in the interests of clarity and facilitating the friction-free exchange of ideas on the internet, I offer this handy flowchart to help assist other people out on the Internets in their decisions about whether or not to use Nazi imagery in their blogs, online comics, or other publications:

Things Were Better In The Old Days

Back then, sleeping through this cough would have been a snap:

Building A Cathedral

I wouldn't have thought that a thousand-page long novel about a generation-long struggle to build a cathedral would have been interesting. But I was really fascinated by The Pillars Of The Earth and its depiction of twelfth-century life in England (and elsewhere) and I recommends the book highly.

Stand Up Guy

I gained another measure of respect for John McCain, or at least got a refresher in why Republicans ought to be willing to embrace him. He's a stand up guy, a guy who doesn't feel the need to mince words or call people on the carpet when that's the right thing to do. That includes, as it turns out, a speaker at one of his own rallies who went over the top with his criticism of Barack Obama.

There's plenty of things that Republicans will be able to find to criticize Obama about. McCain has made it very clear that he doesn't want that list to include personal attacks or making fun of the guy's name. If that means repudiating and offending a popular right-wing talk show host, he's willing to do that. This is a promising sign; it suggests we'll have a somewhat more civil campaign than we've been used to in the past.

Contrast McCain's approach to Hillary's.

Things You Don't Get Admired For

No one admires you when you're sick and show how dedicated you are to your work by showing up at the office and working through your illness. Their reaction is always, "Dude! I don't want what you've got. Go home!" So I've been staying home as I convalesce from whatever terrible thing seized my body Sunday and kept me up shivering in a heated house all night long. I slept for nearly 20 hours yesterday and no one will admire me for that, either. I don't feel rested at all from it, either.

Fortunately, I'm mentally aware enough today to get some work done remotely, and I can log in from home to do my work from here. It's not nearly as efficient as it is at the office but it's way better than nothing. No one admires you for missing deadlines, either.

Unmitigated Good News For John McCain

Of the population of voters who would even consider voting for Ralph Nader, exactly zero would divert their votes from McCain. Nader and his colossal ego will do nothing but drain Obama's base. The only question is whether Nader's impact will be:

A) at least as negligible as the libertarians and Transcendental Meditation votes; or
B) annoying like Ron Paul but otherwise not enough to have a meaningful impact; or
C) enough of a draw for "progressives" as as to spoil a critical state or two for the Democrats like Ohio, Pennsylvania, or Florida.

Whether the result is A, B, or C, McCain benefits.

RTFA, TL

Why don't conservative college students get Ph.D.'s? Um... because they'd rather get private-sector jobs?

Of Course Judges "Make" Law

Someone must have really pissed off wine afficionado Stephen Bainbridge about this ought-to-have-been-obvious point that so often gets dressed up in political rhetoric and trotted out to whore for votes. Money quote (for me, at least): "...the notion that judges find law that somehow was missed - like an explorer discovering some lost continent - is absurd. Judges make law."

When judges make law concerning the interpretation of securities regulations, or when they make law about the allocation of third-party indemnity in complex insurance disputes, effectively no one gives a damn and there's no reason for them to. When judges make law about whether tort causes of action are viable as between certain plaintiffs and certain defendants, or when they make laws like "delayed discovery" as a tolling on a statute of limitations, people should care, but don't. When judges make law about criminal procedure, like what a police officer has to do when arresting someone or when the officer can search a suspect's vehicle, people used to care, but do not seem to care any longer.

"What about education?" skeptical Readers ask. School prayer? Teaching evolution? Or teaching creationism (whether or not under the guise of "intelligent design")? Bussing? Yes, people got upset about those things. In the 1970's and 1980's. That's yesterday's news.

No, people only get mad about judges "making " law these days when the judicially-created law involves sex. What a state government can do to prevent or persuade a woman from getting an abortion; what kind of person can marry what other kind of person; consensual sexual intercourse between people of the same sex -- these are the only sorts of legal issues that courts handle which people get really upset about. They don't want judges "making" laws dealing with sex and issues that relate to sex in some way.

Aside from sex, I don't think anyone has lost any substantial amount of sleep over judicially-created laws for a generation.

I Didn't Think They Were Dumb

Seems that a lot of Democratic superdelegates who proclaimed for Hillary Clinton early are having second thoughts and may well renege on their commitment, despite whatever favors they may owe the Clinton machine. Faced with a Democratic party tearing itself up with the nightmare scenario of two candidates of roughly equal strength, many of these party elites are coming to realize that opting for the the one who seems to be gathering more public support is probably a better choice than the one whose best days appear to be behind her.

If Hillary continues to lose her advantage in the inside game like this, it really will be all over for her.