Musing's musings

Sweating the small stuff

Sometimes you have to. In my job, I spend a lot of time sweating the small stuff--because it's what I get paid to do, and because if I don't, it will be harder for the people I work with to get their research funded.

As always, however, the trick is to know when and how much--and as I look around at what's been going on around the country and the world, far too many people have been sweating far too much small stuff, and all at the wrong time. Consider the hoo-ha over President Obama's bow last week to the emperor of Japan. OMG, the president of the United States demonstrated manners and common courtesy in public in a diplomatic situation? What's the world coming to?

This week, the wingnuts are clutching their pearls and groping for their fainting couches at the prospect that people we've detained as terrorists might actually be tried and, if convicted, imprisoned on American soil. Leaving aside the inconvenient fact that eight years is probably not what the Framers had in mind when they enshrined the right to a "speedy and public trial" in the Sixth Amendment, I should think the fact that as of June 2008 we had locked up some 2.3 million people would constitute sufficient evidence that we've gotten pretty good at doing so. I see no particular reason to feel alarmed at the possibility that people from Guantanamo Bay might be brought to the continental U.S. and put on trial for what we are claiming they did. Nor do I feel any heightened anxiety at the possibility that the federal government is considering buying an under-used maximum security state prison not all that far away from where I live and using it to house those very criminals, should they be convicted. The mouth-breathers are all wetting their pants, but that seems to be their raison d'être; myself, I just don't enjoy the practice much.

The Catholic Church is also getting into the fearmongering and small-stuff sweating game, though I really do wish the Holy Spirit would rigorously apply the Cosmic Clue-by-Four to the backs of a few bishops' heads starting any day now. Of all the problems in the world the bishops could choose to care about, they're worried about who is boffing whom? Worse yet, rather than face the possibility that they might not be able to discriminate quite as freely against their LGBT flock as they are accustomed to doing, the Washington archdiocese has threatened to shut down all of its charitable institutions in the city, cutting off food and shelter and health care to the poor and the elderly. I know I'm not the only Catholic in America who is simply livid at the very idea; I'm also pretty sure I remember reading something, once upon a time, in a pretty important book, something about feeding the hungry and clothing the naked... Oh, yeah, it was this:

Ὅταν δὲ ἔλθῃ ὁ υἱὸς τῶν ἀνθρώπου ἐν τῇ δόξῃ αὐτοῦ καὶ πάντες οἱ ἄγγελοι μετ' αὐτοῦ, τότε καθίσει ἐπὶ θρόνου δόξης αὐτοῦ· καὶ συναχθήσονται ἔμπροσθεν αὐτοῦ πάντα τὰ ἔθνη, καὶ ἀφορίσει αὐτοὺς ἀπ' ἀλλήλων, ὥσπερ ὁ ποιμὴν ἀφορίζει τὰ πρόβατα ἀπὸ τῶν ἐρίφων, καὶ στήσει τὰ μὲν πρόβατα ἐκ δεξιῶν αὐτοῦ, τὰ δὲ ἐρίφια ἐξ εὐωνύμων. τότε ἐρεῖ ὁ βασιλεὺς τοῖς ἐκ δεξιῶν αὐτοῦ· δεῦτε οἱ εὐλογημένοι τοῦ πατρός μου, κληρονομήσατε τὴν ἡτοιμασμένην ὑμῖν βασιλείαν ἀπὸ καταβολῆς κόσμου. ἐπείνασα γὰρ καὶ ἐδώκατέ μοι φαγεῖν, ἐδίψησα καὶ ἐποτίσατέ με, ξένος ἤμην καὶ συνηγάγετέ με, γυμνὸς καὶ περιεβάλετέ με, ἠσθένησα καὶ ἐπεσκέψασθέ με, ἐν φυλακῇ ἤμην καὶ ἤλθατε πρὸς με. τότε ἀποκριθήσονται αὐτῷ οἱ δίκαιοι λέγοντες· κύριε, πότε σε εἴδομεν πεινῶντα καὶ ἐθρέψαμεν, ἢ διψῶντα καὶ ἐποτίσαμεν; πότε δέ σε εἴδομεν ξένον καὶ συνηγάγομεν, ἢ γυμνὸν καὶ περιεβάλομεν; πότε δὲ σε εἴδομεν ἀσθενοῦντα ἢ ἐν φυλακῇ καὶ ἤλθομεν πρός σε; καὶ ἀποκριθεὶς ὁ βασιλεὺς ἐρεῖ αὐτοῖς· ἀμὴν λέγω ὑμῖν, ἐφ' ὅσον ἐποιήσατε ἑνὶ τούτων τῶν ἀδελφῶν μου τῶν ἐλαχίστων, ἐμοὶ ἐποιήσατε.

Whenever the Son of Man shall come in his glory, and all the angels with him, at that time he will sit upon the throne of his glory and all the peoples shall be gathered together before him and he will separate them one from another, just as the shepherd separates the sheep from the goats. He shall place the sheep on his right hand, but the goats on his left. And then the ruler will say to those at his right hand, "Come here, you who are blessed of my Father; inherit the realm that was prepared for you from the foundation of the world. For I was hungry and you gave me food, thirsty, and you gave me something to drink. I was a stranger and you welcomed me, naked, and you clothed me. I was sick and you looked after me, in prison, and you came to visit me." At this point the just will respond to him and say, "Lord, when did we see you hungry and feed you, or thirsty, and give you something to drink? When did we see you a stranger and welcome you, or naked and clothe you? And when did we see you sick or in prison and come to you?" The Ruler will say to them in answer, "Amen I tell you, as often as you did it for one of the least of these my brothers and my sisters, you did it for me."

--Matthew 25:31-40, my translation from the original Greek

Should the archbishop decide to follow through on his threat, I would recommend that he read the rest of that pericope first. I don't think he's going to like how it ends. Jesus never said a single word about homosexuality (hardly surprising, given that neither the term nor the concept had come into being in his day), but he had quite a bit to say about taking care of the last and the least among us--and what those who neglected that most important task could look forward to when they came to face him at the end of their days. In fact, there's another passage from Matthew's Gospel that the archbishop might want to include in his lectio divina: it's Matthew 23:13-33. Verse 23 seems particularly appropriate.

On the public...and options

Apologies for my long absence. To make a long story short, too much to do, too much to think about, too much that makes me angry, and not a lot of energy for blogging.

Several of the things that have been making me angry and giving me food for thought are coming together in this post. I was flabbergasted this past weekend to see that more than forty so-called Democrats cast their votes for the Stupak amendment to the health insurance reform bill (to give it its proper name: it isn't reforming health care, it's reforming health insurance--and that just barely). Among the more common rationalizations and excuses offered for those votes is the notion that people shouldn't be asked to support, through their tax dollars, things which they personally do not approve of.

The thing that burns my onion is that the only time anyone ever seems to think that's a good or an important idea is when the matter in question is allowing men to control what a woman does with her body (i.e., abortion). It's not an altogether unreasonable idea, but before I could get behind it as a principle of government, it would have to apply to everything that our taxes fund.

For example, earlier this evening the Commonwealth of Virginia executed judicially murdered John Allen Muhammad, who was one of the two snipers who terrorized the Washington, D.C. area seven years ago last month. That's certainly something I don't support, and that I don't like to think about funding with my taxes. Another thing that was boosting my blood pressure was the tenor of some of the comments on Muhammad's pending execution that I encountered on allegedly progressive web sites: comments to the effect that he deserved what he was going to get, that he was worthless, and similar drivel that I would have expected from a right-wing site, but not at places where I spend time online.

One of those comments argued that unless one had been part of the community that Muhammad and his accomplice Lee Boyd Malvo terrorized through random violence, one was somehow not entitled to have or to express an opinion about what would, or would not, bring closure to the families of the victims. As I pointed out in response to that comment, this is precisely why we have a justice system. We do not allow the victims of crimes (or their relatives) to determine the fates of those charged with committing crimes against them, because they lack the necessary objectivity.

How the Freepers see America

Via Joe. My. God., here's how the Freepers (hell, no, I'm not linking to that sewer) see America.

Unfortunately for their ability to get a good night's sleep for the next few years, this is how that map ought to look, courtesy of the New York Times.

Worse still, also from the Times, is this map, showing the change from 2004 to 2008. Counties that went more Democratic in 2008 are colored in blue (with the shading indicating how big the shift was), and counties that went more Republican in 2008 are colored in red.

No matter how you slice it, the Republican Party is in disarray. It's losing members right and left, its approval ratings are in the toilet (and swirling the bottom with the rest of the turds), and no one can readily identify the person who's in charge. Even Tom DeLay, hardly known for being either a liberal or for sugar-coating unpleasant truths, admits that the GOP is wandering aimlessly in the desert. I don't agree with him that Obama's situation, politically or otherwise, is "dire," but the rest of his analysis is spot-on. The Party of No knows only how to win steal elections, smear opponents, and oppose progress. When it comes to actually running the country, formulating policy, or articulating a new idea, they're as hopeless as newborn babes. They haven't had a new idea in a generation, and the voting public has finally caught on to the fact that the ones they do have don't work--and never have.

It is certainly within the realm of possibility that the Republicans will manage to turn this shit parade around. They may even manage to do it in time for the 2012 presidential elections, though I'd lay long odds against both eventualities. The bigger issue, as I see it, is what (or who) will replace the Republicans when they either disappear from the scene or find themselves marginalized for the next little while. If we continue our historical pattern, another party will emerge to take the Republicans' place. Perhaps a better solution, however, would be the emergence of several parties--all across the political spectrum.

The dominance of our political dialogue by the Republicans and the Democrats has, I believe, weakened our nation and artificially polarized our society. Worse, it inclines us to think in paired binaries: left vs. right, liberal vs. conservative, and the like. The real world, on the other hand, is colored largely in shades of grey, and admits of far more complexity than most voters would probably find comfortable. There are plenty of good ideas that don't easily fit into the available pigeonholes in American politics, and I, for one, would like to see them find vehicles whereby they might be expressed--and, God willing, put into action. We'll never have a better time to experiment, so why not take the plunge?

One of these things is not like the other

ἠκούσατε ὅτι ἐρρέθη τοῖς ἀρχαίοις· οὐ φονεύσεις· ὃς δ' ἂν φονεύσῃ, ἔνοχος ἔσται τῇ κρίσει. ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν ὅτι πᾶς ὁ ὀργιζόμενος τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ ἔνοχος ἔσται τῇ κρίσει· ὅς δ' ἂν εἴπῃ τῷ ἀδελφῷ αὐτοῦ· ῥακά, ἔνοχος ἔσται τῷ συνεδρίῳ· ὃς δ' ἂν εἴπῃ· μωρέ, ἔνοχος ἔσται εἰς τὴν γέενναν τοῦ πυρός.

You have heard that it was said to those of old, "You shall not murder. Anyone who commits murder shall be liable to judgment." But I say to you that everyone who grows angry with a brother or a sister shall be liable to judgment. Whoever insults a brother or a sister shall be liable to the Sanhedrin. And whoever says "You fool" shall be liable to the fires of hell [literally, "the Gehenna of fire"].

ἠκούσατε ὅτι ἐρρέθη· ἀγαπήσεις τὸν πλησίον σου καὶ μισήσεις τὸν ἐχθρόν σου. ἐγὼ δὲ λέγω ὑμῖν· ἀγαπᾶτε τοὺς ἐχθροὺς ὑμῶν καὶ προσεύχεσθε ὑπὲρ τῶν διωκόντων ὑμᾶς, ὅπως γένησθε υἱοὶ τοῦ πατρὸς ὑμῶν τοῦ ἐν οὐρανοῖς, ὅτι τὸν ἥλιον αὐτοῦ ἀνατέλλει ἐπὶ πονηροὺς καὶ ἀγαθοὺς καὶ βρέχει ἐπὶ δικαίους καὶ ἀδίκους.

You have heard that it was said, "You shall love your neighbor and hate your enemy." But I say to you, love your enemies, and pray for those who persecute you, so that you may become children of your Father in heaven; for he makes his sun rise upon the wicked and upon the good, and sends rain upon the just and the unjust alike."

ὁ λέγων ἐν τῷ φωτὶ εἶναι καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ μισῶν ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ ἐστὶν ἕως ἄρτι. ...ὁ δὲ μισῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ ἐστὶν καὶ ἐν τῇ σκοτίᾳ περιπατεῖ καὶ οὐκ οἶδεν ποῦ ὑπάγει, ὅτι ἡ σκοτία ἐτύφλωσεν τοὺς ὀφθαλμοὺς αὐτοῦ.

Anyone claiming to be in the light and who nevertheless hates a brother or a sister is still in darkness. ...Anyone hating his or her brother or sister is in darkness, and walks in darkness, and does not know where he or she is going, because the darkness has blinded his or her eyes.

πᾶς ὁ μισῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ἀνθρωποκτόνος ἐστίν, καὶ οἴδατε ὅτι πᾶς ἀνθρωποκτόνος οὐκ ἔχει ζωὴν αἰώνιον ἐν αὐτῷ μένουσαν.

Everyone who hates his or her brother or sister is a murderer, and you know that no murderer has eternal life abiding in him.

ἀγαπητοί, ἀγαπῶμεν ἀλλήλους, ὅτι ἡ ἀγάπη ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ ἐστιν, καὶ πᾶς ὁ ἀγαπῶν ἐκ τοῦ θεοῦ γεγέννηται καὶ γινώσκει τὸν θεόν. ὁ μὴ ἀγαπῶν οὐκ ἔγνω τὸν θεόν, ὅτι ὁ θεὸς ἀγάπη ἐστίν.

Beloved, let us love one another, for love is of God, and everyone who loves has been born of God and knows God. Anyone who does not love does not know God, for God is love.

ἐάν τις εἴπῃ ὅτι ἀγαπῶ τὸν θεὸν καὶ τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ μισῇ, ψεύστης ἐστίν· ὁ γὰρ μὴ ἀγαπῶν τὸν ἀδελφὸν αὐτοῦ ὃν ἑώρακεν, τὸν θεὸν ὃν οὐχ ἑώρακεν οὐ δύναται ἀγαπᾶν.

If anyone should say "I love God" and yet hate his or her brother or sister, he or she is a liar. For anyone who does not love the brother or sister whom he or she has seen cannot love the God whom he or she has not seen."

--Matthew 5:21, 5:43-45; 1 John 2:9, 11, 3:15, 4:7-8, 4:20: my translation from the original Greek

If you're a homosexual, I hope you get brain cancer like Ted Kennedy.

MS: You want all gay people to be executed, correct?

SA: That is correct. It is what the Bible teaches.

--Steven L. Anderson, in an interview with Michelangelo Signorile

Mr. Anderson (I absolutely, categorically refuse to use the honorific "Reverend" in reference to this man, as I find in him nothing worthy of reverence) claims to be a minister and is one of the fundamentalist types who has begun praying and hoping for the president to die. This man may have a church, and claim to be preaching the Gospel of Jesus Christ, but it's fairly obvious to me (and should be so to anyone who has ever actually read the Gospels) that he is a liar. Indeed, the words of the Beloved Disciple I quoted above convict Mr. Anderson of being a liar out of his own mouth, since he has stated elsewhere that he hates President Obama and everything he stands for.

As for Mr. Anderson, if that is the stance he's going to take about gay people (and he really should go back and re-read his Bible, since the prohibition he's referencing only speaks of men who have sex with other men--it never mentions lesbians), then here are a few of the other things he had better not have done himself, or for doing which he should be demanding that people be put to death:

• Eating pork, lobster, shrimp, clams, mussels, or crab (Leviticus 11:9-12; Deuteronomy 14:9-10)
• Eating meat rare (Leviticus 7:24, 17 passim)
• Wearing clothes made from blended fabrics (Leviticus 19:19)
• Shaving (Leviticus 19:27)

Why our children isn't learning good

(Apologies for the atrocious grammar in the post title: It was deliberately done to make the point.)

It is a regrettable truism in textbook publishing that as Texas goes, so goes the nation. With so many schools needing books, the biggest states like Texas and California have a disproportionate influence on what is, and is not, available from textbook publishers. No publisher wants to come out with a book that school districts in mega-states won't buy, so they tend to tailor their materials to what they know they'll be able to market in the biggest markets they have available to them.

This should be a textbook illustration of why unfettered capitalism is not always a good thing. But of course, such an opinion would be highly unlikely to pass muster with the Texas Education Agency, which recently released a draft of its new standards (PDF link) for the teaching of U.S. history since the Reconstruction. The standards were revised with the advice of what the TEA terms expert reviewers, though I would argue that their definition of that term is considerably looser than most historians would probably be comfortable with. Of the six individuals listed, two are professors of history, two are tied to evangelical ministries and have absolutely no academic background in history whatsoever, one is a lawyer whose academic background is not clear, and one is a professor of education with no discernible training in history.

I don't recognize the name of either of the two historians on the panel, but that is not in and of itself significant, since I'm a Europeanist by trade. According to his bio page at Texas State University, Jesus Francisco de la Teja holds a Ph.D. in Latin American history from the University of Texas at Austin. How this qualifies him to address U.S. history is not precisely clear to me. Lybeth Hodges' biography page at Texas Woman's University does not explicitly address either her academic background or her research interests, which is somewhat unusual in academic history. It does seem to me that both of the historians on the panel were chosen primarily for having done all of their academic work in Texas, rather than having the academic background to be able to address questions of American history.

Don't even get me started on having two evangelical Christians empaneled as "expert reviewers." Both David Barton and Peter Marshall appear to have an interest in history, but "having an interest" in a subject is not the same thing as having the necessary background and training to be able to evaluate how it is taught--not to mention the fact that the majority of both men's interest in history appears to involve removing from the teaching of history anything of which they personally disapprove (and they disapprove of quite a bit). If it were not such a serious issue, it would be hugely ironic to see, in Mr. Barton's review of the current standards (PDF link), his disgust that so few American high school graduates can, among other things, find Iraq on a map, name even one Cabinet-level agency in the federal government, or state the freedoms protected by the First Amendment. I agree with Mr. Barton that this lack of what I would consider elementary knowledge is appalling--but I would also argue that it is precisely the inclusion of people like Mr. Barton on review committees that explains why so few of our students come out of high school in possession of such elementary knowledge. They are too busy being force-fed blind patriotism and religious dogma in the guise of education to have the time needed to learn and remember things that are truly important.

It is also ironic to see that the draft standards include (p. 13) an expectation that students will be able to "use standard grammar, spelling, sentence structure, and punctuation" (an expectation which Mr. Barton derided as belonging more to language arts than to social studies or history), when, in one of the comments (A47, on page 5), the reviewers or the staffer who put together their recommendations into final form described Chester Nimitz as the "navel [sic] commander in the Pacific theater." (I should also note that, while the note in question says that Nimitz was added to the list of significant military leaders in World War II, his name does not in fact appear on the list of such leaders that students are expected to know about.) And while I agree that Nimitz played a significant role in WWII as CinCPac (and would argue that he was far more significant a military leader than Douglas MacArthur was), I suspect that his being a Texan might also have an impact on why the TEA wants students to learn about him.

It is not too much to ask, I believe--and particularly in an era when we are trying to get back to the idea that before someone can be certified to teach a particular subject, s/he should have to have received some academic training in it--that anyone asked to review educational standards should have to have the relevant academic background to be able to address whatever standards s/he is being asked to evaluate. If we're talking about the standards for teaching history, then we should be asking historians. If we're talking about mathematics, then it should be mathematicians on the panel--and not megachurch ministers, even if they're very good at counting to large numbers. Parents would rightly be outraged to learn that their children were being taught by people who had no real training in the material they were trying to teach. Why should they be satisfied to have "experts" reviewing the curricular standards that their children's teachers will be forced to follow (and which will likely have a disproportionate impact on the kind of textbooks get published for the next five to ten years) who lack such training?

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.

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

Wingnuttery: The gift that keeps on giving

So I was digging around on Thomas this morning (the Library of Congress's interface where anybody with an internet connection can go to look up what's been going on in the legislative branch), trying to find some summary or, better still, the actual legislative language, of the congressional budget estimates for 2010. I was going through the Congressional Record's daily digest pages for the House of Representatives when I stumbled upon this lovely tidbit:

By Mrs. BACHMANN (for herself, Mr. HENSARLING, Mr. PRICE of Georgia, Mr. SHADEGG, Mr. KIRK, Ms. FOXX, Mr. PITTS, Mr. BARTLETT, Mr. MCCLINTOCK, Mr. GINGREY of Georgia, Mr. WAMP, Ms. FALLIN, Mr. FLEMING, Mrs. BLACKBURN, Mr. BROUN of Georgia, Mr. AKIN, Mr. ISSA, Mr. KING of Iowa, Mr. BURTON of Indiana, Mr. GOHMERT, Mr. THOMPSON of Pennsylvania, Mr. LAMBORN, Mr. PAUL, Mr. CULBERSON, Mrs. BIGGERT, Mr. BROWN of South Carolina, Mr. JONES, Mr. POSEY, Mr. ROE of Tennessee, and Mr. CONAWAY):

H.J. Res. 41. A joint resolution proposing an amendment to the Constitution of the United States to prohibit the President from entering into a treaty or other international agreement that would provide for the United States to adopt as legal tender in the United States a currency issued by an entity other than the United States; to the Committee on the Judiciary.

This, after I lay in bed this morning listening to way too much Republican whining, whinging, and hand-wringing about the budget--this is what our Republican "friends" (to use the appropriate legislative phrase) think it's important for Congress to be spending time on? Making sure we don't inadvertently join the Euro zone?

Never mind that the euro has been outperforming the dollar for most of the ten years since it was first introduced--or that the euro zone, considered as an entity unto itself, is the second largest economy in the world. And never mind that, as is apparent to virtually anyone with a brain over the age of about seven years, the U.S. economy (along with those of most of the rest of the world) is hanging, Wile. E. Coyote-like, in the air after running itself off a cliff. While we're waiting to see if its forward momentum will be enough to carry it more or less safely to the other side of the chasm and back on to safe ground, and while the president and the Democratic majority in Congress are working together to get us out of the tremendous messes left for us by the previous (Republican) administration, all the Republicans in Congress seem to have on offer is a lot of hyper-partisan (and scathingly, blindingly, typically short-sighted and forgetful) carping--and this piece of crap.

To quote Dr. Johnson, that the Republican party is still functioning is much like a dog walking on its hind legs: "It is not done well; but you are surprised to find it done at all." If they keep this kind of crap up, I think we can reasonably and confidently predict that they will very shortly fall over and be unable to get up again.