Musing's musings

Leavin', but not on a jet plane

This year, we're doing it a little different. Normally at this time of year, I'm climbing on a plane to fly out to Las Vegas for vacation with my best buddy who lives there. We usually head up to Cedar City for some Shakespeare, and then pick a national park to go ogle.

This year, Dave's coming here for a change of pace. Going to spend a couple of days in Chicago hanging out and catching at least one show. Then we're heading up to the North Woods to the neighborhood of the old family homestead for a few days of hiking in the woods and floating on lakes. Down the Great River Road to the Quad Cities, overnight with the Trappists, and finish off with a flying trip to the alma mater and a couple of days in Springfield to look over the new Lincoln library.

I don't know what my internet access is likely to be over the next ten days, so posting will probably be light. I'll likely have pictures when I get back.

A picture is worth a thousand words

Especially this picture:

This past weekend, Pat Buchanan (the back of whose head you can see at right in the above image) was at a Republican strategery conference (as was the other dude in the picture, who runs a white-supremacist website that I will neither name nor link to for obvious reasons). Among the initiatives proposed at the conference as a way of attracting allegedly disaffected "white working-class Democrats" to their party, they were proposing to encourage Republican support for English-only initiatives in the coming year.

Perhaps before they run around insisting that everyone speak only English in this country, they ought to have to learn it themselves first? Who was it who said "Remove the plank from your own eye and then you will see clearly to remove the speck in your brother's eye"? Oh, yeah. Someone that Buchanan at least (and probably the other guy as well) claims to know very well and whose words he claims to follow.

The fail is truly epic.

(Hat-tip: Think Progress)

Who comes up with this stuff?

Checking over my site stats listing this evening, and I noticed a referral about an hour ago from a Yahoo search with the query "Who did Obama have the gay affair with?" I mean, really. I know there's a tendency in certain quarters to assume that because someone is vehemently anti-gay that they're actually in the closet, but come on. Obama may not be the "fierce advocate" for gay rights that he's continually claiming to be (or that I wish he were), but he's nowhere near as anti-gay as our last president (to use but one example), and I don't recall ever hearing any insinuation that G. Dumbya might have been a bit light in the loafers.

Now if you'll all please excuse me, I need to go find some brain bleach to get that image out of my head.

ARRA: #GOPFail

Pardon me for lapsing into what I understand to be Twitter-speak in the post title. As I was waiting to pay my bill yesterday at lunch, I caught a glimpse of some blowhard on Fixed Noise bloviating about how the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA, better known as the stimulus package) was "full of waste."

The bloviating blowhard even had a few examples. I couldn't write fast enough to get them down, but I did jot down the total. According to this pundit, there's $5.5 billion in "waste" in the ARRA. Oh, noez! Five and a half billion dollars, down the drain! Wow, that's really wasteful!

I'm sure that's the reaction the Republicans and their bought-and-paid-for propaganda outlet were going for. But let's put those numbers into some context. According to Recovery.gov (where anybody who's interested can go and see exactly how much money is being spent on what, in which places: it even has a handy-dandy link where you can report suspected waste or fraud involving ARRA funds--which I suspect might be where the bloviating blowhard got at least some of his numbers), total ARRA funding amounted to $787 billion. According to my back-of-envelope calculations, that means less than 1 percent of the money invested has been pegged as "waste." By Fixed Noise, so take that with a grain of salt, please. (And if it really turns out to be waste, I have little doubt that the federal government will demand that the money be given back, so they can put it to better use somewhere else. I know for a fact that's what the federal granting agencies are telling people--spend it, and spend it wisely, or we'll make you give it back.)

Now let's jump into the Wayback Machine, shall we? Set the dial to 2005, when an inspector general's report found a total of $9 billion of U.S. funds unaccounted for under the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq. A year later, and another report claimed that as much as $50 billion had been handed out with little or no oversight to various private contractors in Iraq. A year after that, it emerged that our government had flown in nearly $12 billion in cash to Iraq, and could hardly be bothered to keep track of what it then did with those 363 tons of money. (That's how much 281 million greenbacks weigh: almost 400 tons.) Where were the Republicans while all this was happening? Sending college interns, if memory serves, over to Iraq to help hand out that $12 billion--of course making sure that it always went to worthy causes and individuals, naturally.

So the take-home message from the GOP seems to be that anything under $10 billion is "waste," while anything over that amount is "business as usual"--at least as long as it's a Republican in charge of handing it out. As ever, the GOP's rhetoric rings hollow. But I just love it when they make it so easy to fact-check them.

Sex, money, and amateur sports

Last August, I wrote about the two University of Nebraska wrestlers who were dropped from the squad after news became public that they had posed nude on a pornographic website that largely caters to gay men. The two wrestlers, Paul Donahoe and Kenny Jordan, were both interviewed (along with several other figures associated with the scandal) for an episode of ESPN's Outside the Lines which aired this morning.

While ESPN's reporting suggests that there may have been more to the story than was apparent 10 months ago, I nevertheless found the rationalizing of the Nebraska officials they interviewed about the dismissals both specious and self-serving. Their major concern, at least as expressed in the few public statements they have been willing to make about the incident and the very few documents the university was willing to release in response to ESPN's request under the Freedom of Information Act, seems to have been the damage done to the school's image by having two of its student-athletes appear in pornographic videos.

Considering that a third of the athletes on the Nebraska wrestling squad over the last two years have faced criminal charges--and yet were not dropped from the team--that reasoning seems mighty thin to me. When you consider that Tom Osborne, now the athletic director at Nebraska and head coach of its football team in the 1990s, handed out only token punishments to stars on his football team (suspension for one spring exhibition game for Christian Peter, who racked up eight separate arrests and at least one conviction, and an on-again, off-again suspension for Lawrence Phillips after he assaulted and injured an ex-girlfriend), the rationalizations look thinner still.

Terribilis est locus iste

The title of this post is from the Vulgate Latin of Genesis 28:17. Of old, it was the Introit or entrance hymn proper to the dedication of a new church in the Catholic tradition. Literally translated, it means "This is a terrible place," but "terrible" needs to be understood not in the modern sense of something awful or bad, but a place that inspired awe. I'd have said "awesome," but those connotations are not right, either--especially in view of the context in which I'm writing.

Stephen Tyrone Johns, 39, a security guard at the United States Holocaust Memorial Museum (of which I have the honor to be a charter member), was shot and killed this afternoon in the line of duty at the museum. An 88-year-old Maryland man, James W. von Brunn, walked into the museum carrying a rifle, pointed it at Mr. Johns, and pulled the trigger. Mr. Johns did not even have time to draw his own weapon. Mr. von Brunn, described as a "hard-core" white supremacist (is there another kind?), was wounded by other guards who returned fire. He is listed in critical condition at George Washington University Hospital.

This was heller Wahnsinn, to use the language Mr. von Brunn's ancestors probably spoke, "utter madness." Wahn is virtually an untranslatable word in German--there is no clear English cognate. "Madness," "insanity," "mania," "delusion," "craziness"--all fit, but none of them precisely.

The last time I was in Washington, I visited the Holocaust Memorial Museum for the first time. It was, indeed, both a terrible and an awesome place: not quite the equal, in my estimation, of Yad Vashem in Jerusalem, but nevertheless a hallowed place for what it commemorates and the work that goes on there. Terribilis est locus iste, indeed. The museum may not, to carry on with the text of Genesis, be literally a domus Dei et porta caeli, "the house of God and the gate of heaven," but it is certainly now a more terrible and awesome place for having the blood of a martyr spilled at its very gates.

My thoughts and prayers go out to the family of Mr. Johns. I will leave them with some words that may perhaps provide some comfort in their time of sorrow:

...all mankind is of one author and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated. God employs several translators; some pieces are translated by age, some by sickness, some by war, some by justice; but God's hand is in every translation, and his hand shall bind up all our scattered leaves again for that library where every book shall lie open to one another.

--John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions, Meditation XVII