I have always had a sentimental attachment to Silent Night. When I was in Catholic grade school, it was the first Christmas song I ever learned. We kindergartners sang in it in that year’s Christmas Assembly. I learned all the versus by heart and my parents assured me I sounded amazing. Later, after I had children of my own, I heard the song and was struck by the fact that it was a tender lullaby as well as a song of worship. It humanizes Mary and her son in a way that is unusual if not unique among Christmas carols. I can almost see Mary crooning something low and gentle, like this song, to her infant.
I used to argue about that hummanity with my second college roommate. Jesus’ sacrifice, I maintained then and now, means nothing if Jesus Christ was not a human being. Without that fear and pain, it is not a sacrifice. There may be verses more important to understanding Jesus and Christianity than Mark 15:34, but they are few in number. Silent Night is the most human among the traditional Chirstmas carols and thus, to my eye, the most Christian.
Silent night, Holy night
All is calm, all is bright
Round yon Virgin Mother and Child
Holy Infant so tender and mild
Sleep in Heavenly peace
Sleep in Heavenly peace
Silent night, Holy night
Shepherds quake at the sight
Glories stream from Heaven afar
Heavenly hosts sing Hallelujah
Christ, the Savior is born
Christ, the Savior is born
Silent night, Holy night
Son of God, love’s pure light
Radiant beams from thy Holy face
With the dawn of redeeming grace
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth
Jesus, Lord, at thy birth
I am going to start this year with a song that it not only a great Christmas song, but one that follows my favorite song writing convention: really driving, up-tempo music combined with at least semi-depressing lyrics. 99 Red Balloons, of course, is the canonical example (and yes, the English version. The German version doesn’t count because I don’t speak German and thus have no idea how messed up the lyrics actually are.) Christmas isn;t bout you, it is about doing good thing for other people, about loving your fellow man, about giving not reciving, and all those other hoary cliches. But just because they cliches doesn’t men that they are any less true. And this song captures that pretty damn well.
When I was small I believed in santa claus
Though I knew it was my dad
And I would hang up my stocking at christmas
Open my presents and Id be glad
But the last time I played father christmas
I stood outside a department store
A gang of kids came over and mugged me
And knocked my reindeer to the floor
They said:
Father christmas, give us some money
Dont mess around with those silly toys.
Well beat you up if you dont hand it over
We want your bread so dont make us annoyed
Give all the toys to the little rich boys
Dont give my brother a steve austin outfit
Dont give my sister a cuddly toy
We dont want a jigsaw or monopoly money
We only want the real mccoy
Father christmas, give us some money
Well beat you up if you make us annoyed
Father christmas, give us some money
Dont mess around with those silly toys
But give my daddy a job cause he needs one
Hes got lots of mouths to feed
But if youve got one, Ill have a machine gun
So I can scare all the kids down the street
Father christmas, give us some money
We got no time for your silly toys
Well beat you up if you dont hand it over
Give all the toys to the little rich boys
Have yourself a merry merry christmas
Have yourself a good time
But remember the kids who got nothin
While youre drinkin down your wine
Father christmas, give us some money
We got no time for your silly toys
Well beat you up if you dont hand it over
We want your bread, so dont make us annoyed
Give all the toys to the little rich boys
Take it here, leading and seemingly irrelevant questions and all! I managed a perfect score, although I admittedly had to make educated guesses on three or four of the questions.
My house was built in the late 1950’s, and it was insulated for shit. The previous homeowners had put fiberglass batting down, but they did so over the top of blown-in insulation which had settled, meaning that they were insulating a nice toasty air pocket in the attic, rather than insulating the house.
After watching several depressing specials on global warming, pollution, energy efficiency, etc., I decided it was high time I get my house at least up to 20th century standards of insulation. But in my house, that’s not very easy to do.
Because people were stupid in the 50’s, my house was built on a slab foundation, with the ductwork all running through the attic, and run in such a way as to make it virtually impossible for a person to get to the edges of the attic. As such, I’ve hired contractors to come in and do the blown-in insulation deal. I went with cellulose insulation because much of the attic is floored, and the cellulose has more R-value per inch than fiberglass, and they’re blowing in insulation under the attic floor — this way I maximize my R-value.
I have to say, I’m impressed. They’ve done a very thorough job removing obstructions and other things that would interfere with the insulating properties of the stuff they’re blowing in, and they even removed floorboards where necessary to get good coverage below the attic floor.
But the bottom line is, this is messy, and it’s yet another one of those jobs that’s worth every penny it costs to pay somebody else to do.
Over at the Volokh Conspiracy, supposed Constitutional scholar Michael Stokes Paulsen, from Univ. Minnesota Law School, digs up a startling and confounding Constitutional issue regarding Hillary Clinton’s appointment as Secretary of State: the “Emoluments Clause” of the Constitution (Article I, section 6) states: “No Senator or Representative shall, during the Time for which he was elected, be appointed to any civil Office under the Authority of the United States, which shall have been created, or the Emoluments whereof shall have been encreased during such time.” The SecState’s salary was increased eariler this year, while Hillary was serving her current term as Senator. This would seem to make it unconstitutional for Hillary to assume that office while her current Senatorial term is still in effect (even if she resigns from the Senate first - it says “during the time” of the term, not just while the elected official is still in office).
Hmmm. There are some further considerations, including whether anyone actually has standing to bring a complaint if the unconstitutional appointment is in fact made. And there appears to have been precedent for such appointments in the past, Emoluments Clause notwithstanding. But he does have a strong argument here. It will be interesting to see if it gets legs.
That’s not what I wanted to comment on, however. Paulsen uses his law journal article (from which his blog post is derived) to work in some snarky comments in favor of a “strict constructionist” reading of the Constitution and against the “living law” doctrine. Obviously, his general argument is that the Emoluments Clause has to be appled exactly as written (even though it was obviously intended to block elected officials from deliberately creating or improving offices for their own benefit and then having themselves appointed into them - which is clearly not what Hillary was seeking). That’s not a bad argument, and there are various ways to defend it. But Paulsen’s stand is taken on the idea of a literalist reading of every part of the Constitution, including the parts that can’t be read that way. To show how wrong it would be to do otherwise, he quotes his own example from an earlier law journal article on the same topic. (Remember: the example below has been published in two law journals by a “leading Constitutional scholar” of the strict constructionist school.) Here is Paulsen’s incisive mind at work:
if the meaning of texts “evolve” over time, then “thirty-five years of age” does not mean “thirty-five years of age” but stands instead for an evolving principle of maturity. In 1996, this would have meant that the lawful President of the United States was Strom Thurmond, not Bill Clinton.
This is why nobody takes “strict constructionists” seriously.
You can argue that changes in context, referential meaning, impact, or other aspects of terms used in the Constitution should not be taken into account in applying those same terms more than 200 years after they were written, under unrecognizably different circumstances, if you like. But you cannot bolster that argument by the asinine suggestion that that there is any difficulty in interpreting terms whose meaning has not changed.
“Firearms” and “militias” are both very different things today from what they were, and were intended to be, when the Constitution was written. So is the common appreciation of what punishments are deemed “cruel”, or the empirical facts as to which are “unusual”. Again, you can inist on ignoring those differences if you feel you have to - presumably out of some psychological hankering for a pre-Civil Rights, pre-Miranda, pre-New Deal, pre-feminist, pre-Civil War, pre-industrial America. But the meaning of “year”, and indeed of the number “35″, have not changed. It doesn’t require “strict constructionism” to apply the same meanings to numbers, and to astronomical phenomena, today as in 1887; they have the same meanings no matter what interpretational doctrine you subscribe to, because the meanings are fixed as matters of logic or as basic scientific facts. For the same reason, showing that the meanings of unchanging terms should be regarded as . . . unchanging . . . offers no support for a doctrine of unchanging interpretation as applied to terms that are highly context-dependent.
That Paulsen would seriously suggest that the obvious absurdity of an “evolution” in the meanings of the names of integers, or the physics of the Earth’s orbit of the sun, demonstrates a parallel absurdity in the idea of changes in technology, social institutions, or societal values over more than 220 years, calls his comprehension of basic language into question. It would have to be regarded as a joke, except that (a) it is no dumber than the usual “constructionist” reasoning, and (b) he published it twice in well-known law journals, and relies on the same example to make similar arguments in different cases more than 10 years appart. Apparently Paulsen is not making a joke with his argument for a static interpretation of the Constitution; he’s making an argument he believes to be serious, that simply sounds like a joke.
In a fit of what can only be described as insane optimism, I volunteered to cook the Thanksgiving dinner this year. Keep in mind, please, that I once burned water and that it is actually illegal for me to prepare food in three Indiana counties. So if anyone (except tgirsch. tgirsch is a full on foodie. He has deep and apparently meaningful conversations about the appropriate way to cure pig’s tail and knows the complete sequence of chemical reactions that leads to the perfect pot of boiled water. If I were to take his advice, not only would I screw it up, but I am pretty sure I would end up creating a zombie turkey monster that would devour Memphis. That would be worse, I think, than burning water.) has any advice, I am all ears.
You can tell when you’ve hit yankee country. When the gas stations stop calling it “soda” or “soft drink” and start calling it “pop”.
Since I grew up in “yankee country” (by which I assume he means “the North,” rather than its true meaning, roughly 3/4 of greater NYC), but always called it “soda” (never pop), this puzzled me a bit. Also, if anything, in the South, people seem more likely to call it “Coke,” whether or not it actually is, than to call it “soda.” And then there’s the uniquely New Orleanian abomination: cold drinks. (Imagine a vendor shouting out “Ice cold cold drinks!”)
Anyway, that got me curious, and a quick Google turned up this:
Publius does a nice job summing up what’s at the heart of the liberal/conservative divide on “social conservative” issues:
The social conservatives’ positions tend to empower government over individuals. If they got their way, the public would be forced to submit to the government’s decision-making. The more liberal position, by contrast, allocates power to individuals – no one is forced to do anything. (Admittedly, this is not really a constitutional argument – just an additional explanation for why the Christian Right tends to scare people).
Take, for instance, the granddaddy issue of them all – abortion. The Christian Right position would require every single person in a given jurisdiction to give birth. (Yes, some would argue that it’s simply about letting the states decide – but still, they prefer this position because many states, and virtually the entire South, would ban abortion). Thus, the decision-making power here would belong to the government. Individuals would no longer be free to decide.
The pro-choice position, by contrast, ensures that individuals – not the government – will ultimately make these private decisions. Individuals remain free to have, or not have, abortions as they and their God see fit. And everyone remains free to persuade their fellow citizens of the values of bringing all pregnancies to term. But in the end, the individual – and not the state – would make the final call.
This pattern repeats itself across a number of issues. For example, gay marriage doesn’t require anyone to do anything. It merely allows consenting gay adults to be married. Gay marriage bans, by contrast, grant that decision-making power to the state.
Similarly, rights to contraception don’t require anyone to do anything – the ultimate decision remains with the individual. Contraception bans, by contrast, allocate the decision-making power to the government.
Same deal with school prayer. Banning school prayer in public classes doesn’t prevent anyone from praying privately at the school. But allowing public prayer, by contrast, would force non-Christians to sit through prayer sessions in a publicly funded school. Again, the decision to participate in prayer would be made by the state, not the individual.
The larger point is that these examples illustrate why many people fear social conservatives – simply put, many of the latter’s preferred positions would use the state to intrude on people’s lives and dictate very private and personal decisions to them.
Now, I think this is largely true. But at the same time, if you expand beyond the so-called “social conservative” issues, there are plenty of places where it’s the liberals who would be doing the forcing. Environmental issues, for example, or gun control.
That said, I think the fact that compliance is somehow enforced is not, in and of itself, necessarily a bad thing. It depends upon your view of the thing being enforced.
Paleocon Daniel Larison minces no words in explaining why Bush doesn’t get more credit from his critics:
War opponents don’t give him credit that his war is now not nearly as destructive and horrifying as it once was–he started the war! Critics of his NATO expansion policies don’t give him credit for that because it was a terrible idea that contributed to the outbreak of the war in the Caucasus. Critics of recognizing Kosovo independence don’t give him credit for that, either, because once again it was a terrible idea that also contributed to the outbreak of the war in the Caucasus. He does not get credit for the loose monetary policy that helped to create the present crisis, because that is not something to be praised. His deliberate efforts to increase homeownership in reckless ways are not praised because they were misguided and have come back to bite us. Which policies, exactly, merit appreciation and respect for Mr. Bush? The illegal use of wiretapping, or the use of torture, or perhaps the shredding of 4th Amendment protections (with a big assist from the Congress), or maybe declaring U.S. citizens and foreign nationals enemy combatants without real cause and then holding them without charge for years? If you are concerned about AIDS in Africa and homelessness, by most accounts Bush administration policies in these areas have been reasonably effective. In most other respects, his administration has been a disaster. It is difficult to see what it is we will be thanking him for in the years to come. Many of his critics don’t blame him for everything that has gone wrong–they hold him accountable for the things that he and his administration did wrong, including many things that take away any right to expect the respect that is properly accorded to his office. Mr. Bush frittered away that respect with the decisions he made, and in the process he diminished the respect shown to our country.
In the debate about whether to bail out the Big Three automakers or let them go into Chapter 11 (an issue about which I’m still genuinely on the fence), one of the commonly-repeated talking points I keep hearing from the anti-bailout crowd is that Chapter 11 would allow the automakers to “dispose of legacy costs.” It’s pretty clear what that actually means, however, and why the Chapter 11 proponents don’t want to call it what it is: Screwing the pensioners.
Now some will doubtless object that the federal pension insurance will cover the pensioners, but there are two problems with this. First, this insurance will only pay a fraction of what the pensioners are currently receiving, and secondly, it makes those payments on the taxpayer dime, which means that from that perspective, we’re screwing both the pensioners and the taxpayers.
Now maybe this is unavoidable at this point — maybe the pensioners can’t fully be saved. I don’t know. But when we’re talking about real people, real benefits, and real jobs, we should at least be honest about what it is we’re talking about doing.
This is delicious. A right wing documentary maker got Zogby to conduct a push poll designed, apparently, to make Obama voters look like idiots. Nate Silver explains why the questions are so ridiculous, misleading and inaccurate here and interviews the person who commissioned the poll here:
NS: Do you stand by all the statements in the survey as being unambiguously true?
JZ: I stand one hundred percent by the notion that there is absolutely zero ambiguity as to what the right answer is to any of the questions. With the one exception of the Palin-Russia-Alaska question which we asked the way we did for a very specific purpose which was to try and gauge the Tina Fey Effect which I think we did in a very effective manner which was what was actually said by Tina Fey, everyone attributed to Sarah Plain. But for purposes of scoring Obama supporters’ answers we counted Palin as a correct response.
NS: What was the right answer to that [Palin] question?
JZ: The technically accurate question [sic] is that none of the four people said that, but we counted it as correct if they said Sarah Palin.
NS: Why would you commission a survey question with no correct response?
JZ: The purpose of the question, you pinhead, was we wanted to determine the Tina Fey Effect.
It sorta goes downhill, in a gloriously hilarious fashion, from there. The last three or four questions are not to be missed.
Some stole a five year old’s wheelchair — her pink, decorated with stickers and painting to her personal specifications by her friends and family wheelchair. And then tore it to pieces:
A custom-built wheelchair stolen from a 5-year-old girl was recovered Tuesday but chopped up into “a million pieces,” her mother said.
The $8,000-chair belongs to Annabelle Hulgan, who has been paralyzed from the waist down since birth by spina bifida. It was stolen Monday from the front yard of her daytime caregiver.
Annabelle’s mother, Christen Hulgan, said the chair was found dumped beside a city street with much of its frame disassembled and its pink striped wheels pulled off. Thieves may have planned to sell the chair for scrap metal, she said, and parts of it appeared to have been hacksawed.
8 grand is a lot of money and the family is not in the best financial shape. Her life is severely restricted without it. I know times are tough, but if you have some extra cash, you could do worse than helping her out:
To donate to the Anabelle Wheelchair Account, you can contact Nancy Martin at MIFA by calling (901) 529-4525.
Daniel Larison has started an interesting, but cursory, discussion on what constitutes a “Christian,” and whether or not Obama can rightly be considered one. This is a line of inquiry which has always irked me, but at the same time, given me trouble. On the one hand, we can’t have a definition of “Christian” that’s so broad that it includes anyone who claims to be one, irrespective of their actual beliefs. But on the other hand, we’ve seen far too many attempts to go to the other extreme, defining away anyone who doesn’t agree with someone’s particular brand of Christianity in no-true-Scotsman fashion.
To his credit, Larison recognizes (correctly, I think) that any attempt to define Obama as non-Christian would also define Mormons as non-Christians, and even more compellingly. The problem is, given the nature of the current Christian conservative movement, I’m not sure this is terribly helpful.
And making matters worse, when pressed for a definition of what he thinks really constitutes a “Christian,” Larison refers us to a five-volume set (!); apparently, if there’s an easy-to-summarize layperson’s definition of what’s “really” Christianity, Larison opts not to explain it to us.
Barack Obama’s incoming administration is unlikely to bring criminal charges against government officials who authorized or engaged in harsh interrogations of suspected terrorists during the George W. Bush presidency. Obama, who has criticized the use of torture, is being urged by some constitutional scholars and human rights groups to investigate possible war crimes by the Bush administration.
Two Obama advisers said there’s little - if any - chance that the incoming president’s Justice Department will go after anyone involved in authorizing or carrying out interrogations that provoked worldwide outrage.
Every time the discussion about this comes up, someone, probably many someones, is telling Obamam not to do this. They are telling him that if he does this, he will never get anything done in his first term. The Republicans will go completely apesh*t and defend their brethren with all their might. They will do everything humanly possible to keep his appointments tied up and to kill his legislation. The David Broders of the world will spend their column inches and pixels bemoaning how fall down the partisan rabbit hole and oh isn’t a shame that the Obama is trying to put people in jail who only wanted to help their country. Democratic leaders — some of who were too scared to stand up to Bush when they found out what he was doing and some of whom were too scared to exercise the oversight they should have — will be similarly, if more quietly, working to undermine the investigations. Lieberman will do everything humanly possible form stopping the inquiries, and since he apparently is going to keep his chairmanship, that would probably be quite a lot.
And going after torturers, Obama is being told, is surely a political loser. It will make him look vindictive, they say, and even soft on terrorists. And they may be right. I don;t think they are — I don’t think, outside of the radical right wing loons that there is a constituency for torture. I think that eventually, Obama would look good for having the courage to cleanse the country of the stain of it. I think that a full airing of the details would repulse peopel and turn the practitioners and order givers into pariahs. I think that Obama would have a much easier time getitng Republicans, worried about 2010, to go along with his plans.
But it would not be easy. There is no vocal, elite constituency opposed to the police state tendencies in our government and out nation. The FISA bill proved that. The NY Times and Fox News and the Washington Post all spoke with one voice on that matter, and I suspect they would speak with one voice on investigating torturers and the men who ordered the torture: no. Until that changes, bringing those people to justice will be difficult and I can see why a cautious person would think that ending the practices would be sufficient and that justice wold not be worth the cost of everything else on his agenda. Especially if there were many, many critical issues needing immediate attention.
It is still wrong, but it is not surprising. Until the elite culture is changed, until we force the default security posture in this country away form the twin notions of Empire and “kill them all and let God sort them out”, we are very poorly positioned to bring these people to justice. The political cost will always be seen as too high.
I am not generally in favor of bailing out businesses. In general, businesses should be allowed to live or die as the market dictates. But I was in favor of some kind of bailout for the financial sectors, largely because I believed that the credit market really was in a dangerous place, dangerous enough to take down the rest of the economy. I think we are probably in the same place with GM.
First, it seems pretty clear that the automakers would not be ale to reorganize under Chapter 11 and would have to go to Chapter 7 — meaning liquidation. Not only would that kill those companies, it would kill all of the suppliers who depend on their business. And that would kill all of the companies that depend on those suppliers, and so on and so on down the line. Anywhere from one to three million people could lose their jobs from those effects. And that doesn’t even include the effects from the loss of millions of pensions or the fact that this would be the first major economic downturn with the new, draconian personal bankruptcy laws in place. It would now be harder for unemployed people to get back on their feet, increasing the economic damage. Some studies suggest that it could cost state, local, and federal governments up to 200 billion dollars just to mitigate the damage a collapse would cause. And that number doesn’t even include the cost in lost tax revenues, estimated to be in the neighborhood of 10 billion dollars over the next three years.
That all would be bad enough by itself, but we are already looking at the deregulation recession and it is looking to be a bad one. If the economy cannot survive without a functioning credit market, it can also not survive without consumers who are capable of spending and willing to do so. Unfortunately, consumers have not shared in the productivity gains of the last eight years and are, at best, making as much today as they were eight years ago. They are generally carrying too much debt and will see no increase in their income for quite some time. Consumer sentiment, already at record lows, could very well be crushed by the sight of such a sudden collapse. It could very will be the mental straw that causes consumers to tip the recession into a deep economic stagnation.
There is also no reason to believe that the bailout would be an act of charity. In addition to the savings in government outlays and increased tax revenues, a properly constructed bailout could and even should be a long term benefit to the country. First, any bailout would be an opportunity to force the Big Three to finally address the reality of energy independence and global climate change. That, and the breathing room to finish the management changes they have already undertaken that promise to turn them into better competitors, should make the Big Three much better job producers and tax sources in the years ahead. The last auto bailout actually made the government money, and there is no reason to believe that, eventually, this bailout could not do the same.
In ordinary times, for ordinary businesses, a bailout would not be the correct decision. But these aren’t ordinary businesses, and these certainly aren’t ordinary times.
Seems to me that both parties are demagoguing the holy shit out of GM’s woes and what, if anything, to do about them. Speaking for myself, I’m open to being convinced in any direction. On the one hand, I’m not in love with the idea of bailing out a company that has made mistake after mistake after mistake and whose business model is almost certainly unsustainable; on the other hand, I’m not eager to screw a bunch of workers and pensioners out of their retirements or do away with the country’s 8th largest employer, either. So what to do?
Blindly partisan crap from either side need not apply. I’m looking for even-handed, well-reasoned arguments about what to do, not demagoguery. Anyone aware of some good essays?
Patticakes solicits gloom-and-doom predictions from the PSH crowd about how Obama will ruin everything, for three time frames: after three months, after a year, and after four years. He says that after a few months, he’s going to repost samples of the predictions to see which ones have come true and which ones have proven out in tin-foil-hat territory. Some of it’s pretty damn hilarious (e.g., repeal of the second amendment followed by total confiscation; “mandatory unionism”; “massive” tax cuts; restoration of the fairness doctrine [not sure why this is supposed to be as onerous as the others listed here]; nationalized police force; expanding the supreme court to 11 justices; etc.)
What’s funny and/or scary about it is how difficult it is to tell whether these people are being serious. Most of the ones I listed above were made by people who really seem to believe it will happen. Anyway, go check it out.
NOTE: Patterico says he wants to know what Obama will do in the first four years of his presidency. I have to say, I like his optimism!
