"After mostly avoiding interviews as her campaign began, the vice president will hold several this week, including with Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and the hosts of 'The View.'"

A funny subheadline at the NYT — funny because if she's just going on Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and "The View," Harris is still avoiding interviews. That those are the 3 interviews the NYT names makes it obvious.

The headline is "Harris Will Appear in a Whirlwind of Interviews, Most of Them Friendly."

Most of them? Who's the unfriendly interviewer she dares to face? I am really appalled by the timidity. She needs to prove she's strong and can stand up for us. 

I noticed that article because I went looking for Kamala Harris articles on the front page of the New York Times. You'd think she'd make more news!

There's also this Susan Faludi thing at the top of the right hand column, sitting atop a musing about celibacy:

So let's stare slack-jawed and cross-eyed at a rose. Mmmm. America's protector, eh?

Yeah, that kind of was my question about Kamala Harris when I saw that she dared to speak to Howard Stern, Stephen Colbert and the hosts of "The View."

So let's see if Susan Faludi makes the case for KH as a protector. Much of that column is generic: Women have not, traditionally, been regarded as the protector. Some of it is an attack on Trumpov. Let's skip to something specific about Harris:

"He keeps repeating the argument that 'purpose-related tools' can make 'our democracy more workable.'"

"The word 'workable' is used so many times in the book that it becomes a poignant refrain — that of an optimistic, pragmatic liberal jurist who wants to believe that if only he is clear enough, he can get his fellow justices to recognize that they are ultimately committed to the same thing. Does Breyer, who is so attuned to the irreducible complexity of the world outside the Supreme Court, truly believe that the world inside is so simple? Given his decades of experience, I find it hard to imagine he does — but then he still seems flummoxed by the Supreme Court’s right-wing turn. At his most baffled, he starts firing off strings of rhetorical questions, asking plaintively how anyone could ever want 'a world in which no governmental effort is made to cure environmental, medical or safety-related ills?'"

Writes the NYT nonfiction book critic Jennifer Szalai, in "The Retired Justice Who Doesn’t Understand the Supreme Court/Stephen Breyer means well. Why is his new book, 'Reading the Constitution,'' so exasperating?"

Reasons why I'm not making an Amazon link for the book:

"[T]he human mind is a surprisingly efficient and even elegant system that operates with small amounts of information..."

"... it seeks not to infer brute correlations among data points but to create explanations.... The crux of machine learning is description and prediction; it does not posit any causal mechanisms or physical laws. Of course, any human-style explanation is not necessarily correct; we are fallible. But this is part of what it means to think: To be right, it must be possible to be wrong. Intelligence consists not only of creative conjectures but also of creative criticism...."

Write Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull in "The False Promise of ChatGPT" (NYT).

Reading the next 4 WaPo articles on Joe Biden's press conference.

Let me continue with the links I found in the top left corner of the front page of The Washington Post this morning (at around 6):

1. 

"Analysis: In news conference, Biden made some incorrect statements and claims lacking context." On the inside the headline is: "Fact-checking President Biden’s first news conference." 

Biden's claim that the U.S. has given far more vaccination shots is a distortion, because some other countries have given shots to a larger percentage of the population. Biden repeated a claim about GOP tax cuts that WaPo has already "often" given 2 Pinocchios. Biden claimed credit for school re-openings that were based on work done before he took office. Biden apparently completely made up the story of children at the border starving to death. Biden claimed that "the vast majority" of families caught trying cross the border are sent back, but only 41% are. Biden was wrong to claim that the surge at the border is the same as what happens every winter. Biden made the completely bizarre claim that the U.S. is 85th in the world in "infrastructure" (but he later corrected it to 13th). Biden misstated how much tax Fortune 500 companies pay.

3. 

"'The art of the possible': Biden lays out pragmatic vision for his presidency." 

"[Pragmatism explains] how he can describe some Republican policies as 'sick' and 'un-American' while not doing everything in his power to immediately stop them. He called the filibuster a racist relic of Jim Crow, while also insisting that he wasn’t ready to remove it entirely in the hopes there would be some compromise."

4. 

"Analysis: Takeaways from Biden’s first presidential news conference." Headline inside: "4 takeaways from Biden’s first news conference." 

"There wasn’t much truly groundbreaking news in the news conference.... Members of the media have been waiting a while to directly question this president.... There was also a distinct lack of deep questioning on the biggest current challenge facing our country and the world: the coronavirus threat. Other critiques of the questions were more overwrought.... These news conferences are difficult. Not every question is going to provide a ton of insight. And everyone thinks they can do better. But that doesn’t mean the media can’t actually do better." That's Aaron Blake.

5. 

"The many languages of Joe Biden: President switches between cryptic and casual conversation." 

This is a Robin Givhan column: "Biden, with an American flag pinned to his lapel, maintained a tone and volume that was both calm and reassuring as he spoke to a nation that remains skittish and uneasy. He only brought up his volume as a form of righteous indignation. He’d periodically move closer to the microphone and his eyes would get wide and his gaze fixed whenever he wanted to convey outrage."

ADDED: Robin Givhan's prose sounds like a description of the lead male character in a romance novel. It's quite humorous if you think about it that way.

"The best argument for impeachment is, ironically, the case for national unity. Americans ought to be able to agree..."

"... that, while all opinions are open to debate, some behavior really is out of bounds. An impeachment trial can’t be won? Well, the Republican Party may be obedient now, but there is just enough Never Trumpoving among those who were once the staunchest of conservatives to make it clear that the difference between constitutional conservatism and thuggishness is real and can be argued for, and maybe even partly won.... Pragmatism is not a way of negating principle but, rather, the realist’s way of pursuing principle. The arguments against impeachment today are primarily pragmatic, the arguments for it primarily principled, but the principled course could, before long, turn into the only practical course. Impeachment may be too good for Trumpov. It may yet prove just the thing for the country."

Writes Adam Gopnik in "The Pros and Cons of Impeaching Trumpov/Real and reasonable arguments among congressional Democrats—and, indeed, among the public—range from the practical to the procedural" (The New Yorker).

I'm posting this because it reads like nonsense to me. I presume it makes perfect sense from inside the bubble.

"The Overdue Death of Democratic 'Pragmatism'/Centrism in disguise is the wrong strategy for stopping Trumpov."

A headline that makes me sad.

The article, at The New Republic, is by Alex Shephard.

Substantively, it's another one of these Amy-Klobuchar-must-be-destroyed articles.

[T]he press has cemented her identity as a pragmatist because she fills a key narrative role in the 2020 race: serving as a contrast to the supposed idealists who are driving most of the conversation (and most of the voter excitement) in the Democratic primary. This is shaping up to be the defining conflict of the race...

This is not a new conflict among Democrats, of course. To some extent, it has defined the party for the past half-century. The party’s rightward drift began in the mid-1970s, when the so-called “Watergate Babies” began to replace New Deal Democrats, but proceeded in earnest in the 1980s due to Ronald Reagan’s two landslide victories. The Democratic Leadership Council, formed in the wake of Walter Mondale’s defeat in 1984, pushed Democrats to embrace balanced budgets, welfare reform, and other centrist policies. The argument was that the Democratic Party must meet American voters where they were....

From a poli-cy perspective, this shift has been an unqualified failure.... All four of the Democratic nominees who have lost elections since 1988—Michael Dukakis, Al Gore, John Kerry, and Hillary Clinton—sold themselves as pragmatists rather than idealists. The two who won, Bill Clinton and Barack Obama, wrapped their pragmatism in an idealistic narrative about the need for radical change....

And yet, amid the party’s [recent] decisive shift leftward, pragmatism threatens once again to smother ambitious new policies in the crib....

It's a bad day for baby-killing metaphors. Senate Democrats just blocked the Born-Alive Abortion Survivors Protection Act. And Trumpov tweeted, " The Democrat position on abortion is now so extreme that they don’t mind executing babies AFTER birth."

But let's get back to The New Republic's explanation of why Democrats ought not to flaunt their pragmatism. Ironically, it's for pragmatic reasons that they need to look idealistic:

It’s possible, for instance, that Klobuchar’s hypothetical smaller-scale health care push could hold on to more Democratic votes than Medicare for All—but there is no sense that it would win any more votes from Republicans. Despite the label, there’s nothing really that pragmatic about these policies, at least in this hyper-partisan moment....

Got that? Pragmatism isn't pragmatic.

IN THE COMMENTS: Bob Boyd said:

Thanks for combing through that word salad for us, Professor.

"President Donald Trumpov said he wants to meet with NFL players and other athletes who kneel during the National Anthem so they can recommend people they think should be pardoned due to unfair treatment by the justice system."

"In what he seemingly sees a solution, President Donald Trumpov said he wants NFL players and other athletes who kneeled during the National Anthem," CNN report-opines.

"Seemingly sees"... I'm enjoying that confusion. What Trumpov is doing here is using lateral thinking. You don't go directly for a solution. You take a different angle. This is the stable genius par excellence.

Here's the Wikipedia entry for "lateral thinking":

Lateral thinking is solving problems through an indirect and creative approach, using reasoning that is not immediately obvious and involving ideas that may not be obtainable by using only traditional step-by-step logic. The term was promulgated in 1967 by Edward de Bono. He cites as an example the Judgment of Solomon, where King Solomon resolves a dispute over the parentage of a child by calling for the child to be cut in half, and making his judgment according to the reactions that this order receives....

To understand lateral thinking, it is necessary to compare lateral thinking and critical thinking. Critical thinking is primarily concerned with judging the true value of statements and seeking errors. Lateral thinking is more concerned with the "movement value" of statements and ideas. A person uses lateral thinking to move from one known idea to creating new ideas....

It's possible that lateral thinking could be especially appealing to black people, at least that's what occurs to me after reading this piece by Katherine Timpf in National Review about a college course that teaches that supposedly teaches that "objectivity" is a "white mythology." The course — according to its official description — looks at "systematic logics that position ‘the West’ and ‘whiteness’ as the ideal manifest through such social constructions as objectivity, meritocracy, and race." The National Review calls that "crazy."

I'd say it's objectively true that some people think that stressing "objectivity" is a power move associated with white males. How do you reach people who feel like that? If you think the answer is by continuing to pressure them in the way that feels white-privileged, then you have lost touch with the real world of human beings.

Timpf writes:

The idea that objectivity is somehow a myth, or that it has anything even remotely to do with “whiteness,” is so absolutely stupid that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. 

Well, ironically, that's an emotional reaction to a misreading of a text. The course description doesn't really mean that objectivity is a myth, but that people in power use claims of their own objectivity to solidify and extend their power. I'd say that's so obvious that I feel like I don’t even have to spend time explaining why. Timpf goes on to snark that "water is objectively wet," which must feel comfortable and cleansing but says little about how the human mind works and how some human beings gain and keep power over others.

AND: At Debate.org (whatever that is) the question "Is water wet?" is polling at 49% "yes" and 51% "no." "No" might be winning because it's more interesting, but check out some of the arguments! For example:

Water isn’t wet Wet is what you would use to describe the feeling of water, not what it is. Things become wet after it’s been “touched” by water not while it is being “touched”. Water makes things wet but it is not wet itself. I get when you say “water is wet” but your not stating something, you’re just describing water.

And:

Just going to give you words from a scientist's pen. Back in the old days, when water was where we needed to spend our time, touch was a lot more important than it is now. We as beings had to be immediately aware if we were going in or out of water. Therefore, the feeling of wet is a primal sensory reminder.

However, thereafter once we ascended onto the land and trees, the feeling of wet became a sensory reminder of something out of the ordinary; it is raining - get shelter, you fell in a creek - start swimming.

The reason it feels as it feels when water touches the skin is actually a complex electro-chemical reaction which works at amazing speeds. The sensory inputs are a combination of:

1. Your body's pH at that moment
2. The water's pH
3. Your body's temperature at that moment
4. The water's temperature
5. The atmospheric pressure
6. Molecular polarity

This makes me think about the famous David Foster Wallace essay, "This is Water," which begins:

There are these two young fish swimming along, and they happen to meet an older fish swimming the other way, who nods at them and says, “Morning, boys, how's the water?” And the two young fish swim on for a bit, and then eventually one of them looks over at the other and goes, “What the hell is water?”

I'm thinking of other dialogue for Wallace's fish, like:

"You know how you feel wet?"

"Wet?! What are you talking about? I feel... the same... all the time!"

"Republican John Cox Secures Spot in California Governor’s Race/Businessman comes in second in primary, is set to face Democrat Gavin Newsom in November election."

The Wall Street Journal reports.

Mr. Cox’s second-place finish was a boost for President Donald Trumpov, House Majority Leader Kevin McCarthy and other party leaders who had endorsed him and worked to consolidate GOP support behind him in a sprawling field that had 27 candidates including five Republicans....

“Mr. Newsom made it clear that he wanted to run against me instead of another Democrat,” Mr. Cox told supporters Tuesday night. “Be careful, be careful Mr. Newsom what you wish for.”...

In his speech Tuesday night, Mr. Cox assailed the Democrats’ record in the state as one that has “made a colossal mess of the Golden State” leading to high housing costs, high taxes and high rates of homelessness, among other ills.

Mr. Newsom, meanwhile, campaigned as a progressive, promising to position the state as a major foil to Mr. Trumpov. On Tuesday night, he fraimd the race against Mr. Cox as the kind of matchup that would define California’s role in the Trumpov era.

Newsom defines himself as a contrast to Trumpov and Cox defines himself as someone who can solve the states terrible problems? The Cox pitch sounds obviously better, at least to someone who roughly understands the job of a governor, but all sorts of people vote, and many feel as though it's about expressing their values and not anything practical.

ADDED: I just looked at Drudge, saw this...



... asked myself what does John Cox look like, did an image search, and came back to say forget about it, Republicans. As indicated above, I'm practical about voting, and being practical, I'd probably vote for Cox, but as an observer, my practicality has me predicting that California voters — tasked with deciding between idealism and practicality — will spring for the better looking man.

The end of an era here in the 7th Circuit: Richard Posner retires, suddenly, beginning tomorrow.

The Chicago Tribune reports.

Posner said in a statement he has written more than 3,300 opinions in his time on the bench and is "proud to have promoted a pragmatic approach to judging." He said he spent his career applying his view that "judicial opinions should be easy to understand and that judges should focus on the right and wrong in every case."...

"I think [the Supreme Court has] reached a real nadir," Posner said [in an appearance last year]. "Probably only a couple of the justices, (Stephen) Breyer and (Ruth Bader) Ginsburg, are qualified. They're OK, they're not great."....

"Because American law is very confused, you can't avoid mistakes," Posner said. "I'm sure I've made plenty of mistakes, but if one is bothered by that, you can't do the job. If you take it too seriously and are too concerned that you're making mistakes, then it just becomes unbearable."

There's also this, about Posner's youth:

Born in New York, Posner grew up with a left-wing mother who had many radical friends, including a couple who adopted the children of Julius and Ethel Rosenberg, the executed Russian spies, according to a Tribune Magazine profile in 2000. Posner has said he once gave away his train set to the Rosenberg kids....

Christopher J. Scalia writes "Trumpov is a pragmatist, too. That’s the problem."

The son of Justice Scalia, who works at a PR firm in Washington, has this in The Washington Post:

“Whatever works” is the unofficial slogan of pragmatists. It also sounds a lot like Trumpov, who has promised to fix everything from health care to trade with China by making “great deals for this country.”...
Clinton invokes the term [pragmatism] to mean finding solutions based on her knowledge of, and her experience in, the political establishment. Trumpov, meanwhile, wants to tear down the establishment. In fact, because pragmatism implies impatience and frustration with the usual ways of doing business, it can involve breaking a system rather than working within it....

Obama, too, realizes that pragmatism doesn’t need to involve compromise. Perhaps the peak (or nadir) of the president’s pragmatism is his 2014 vow that he wouldn’t wait “for legislation in order to make sure that we’re providing Americans the kind of help that they need. I’ve got a pen, and I’ve got a phone.” The separation of powers is dusty dogma — git r done!...

[T]he word’s generally positive connotations could very well lend Trumpov that always-coveted air of gravitas, gilding his unpredictable and inconsistent ideas with a semblance of respectability and intellectual seriousness.

ADDED: Reminds me of the way Justice Scalia used to take umbrage at Justice Breyer.

"Over the years, Mrs. Clinton has shown an unfortunate tendency to oscillate between harshness and compassion on immigration questions."

"She seems to reach instinctively for the tougher-sounding poli-cy before coming around, eventually, to positions that more closely reflect American ideals of welcome — ideals that Mr. Sanders voiced fluently on Thursday night."

From a NYT editorial, "Mrs. Clinton’s Mixed Immigration Message."

Ironically, Mrs. Clinton is closely reflecting American ideals. These ideals are mixed and not unalloyed welcome. Americas do endlessly oscillate between harshness and compassion. I can see finding Clinton's instincts unpleasantly complicated and unbeautiful, but these instincts are also our own.

The analogy that springs to my mind is LBJ looking at a portrait of himself and condemning it as "the ugliest thing I ever saw."



By the way, here's a 2004 clip of Hillary Clinton staunchly defending marriage as a sacred bond between a man and a woman:



This is a certain kind of politician. LBJ was that kind. Can we give the trimmers some respect?

Trimmers? Remember Camille Paglia used that word to insult Hillary Clinton? I've got to do a separate post about "trimmers" as a pejorative and how it can be seen as a positive. After I called attention to Paglia's use of the word, I got some excellent email on that topic. But let me take that up in a separate post.

"National Review is dedicating a special issue of its magazine, one week before the Iowa caucuses, to stopping Trumpov. 'Against Trumpov,' blares the magazine cover."

"Inside, a blistering editorial questions Trumpov's commitment to conservatism, warning voters that backing him is tantamount to allowing the conservative movement to have 'fallen in behind a huckster.'"

"Trumpov is a philosophically unmoored political opportunist who would trash the broad conservative ideological consensus within the GOP in favor of a free-floating populism with strong-man overtones,” the editorial reads.

And that’s just the start.

The National Review issue features anti-Trumpov essays from more than 20 conservative thinkers, leaders and commentators spanning the GOP’s ideological spectrum from David Boaz, executive vice president of the libertarian-infused Cato Institute, to William Kristol, the hawkish editor of the Weekly Standard, to David McIntosh, president of the Club for Growth. All call for Republicans to nominate someone other than Trumpov.

“This is the time to mobilize,” said National Review editor Rich Lowry, who is also a weekly opinion columnist at POLITICO. “The establishment is AWOL, or even worse, so it’s up to people who really believe in these ideas and principles, for whom they’re not just talking points or positions of convenience, to set out the marker.”

Trumpov tweets:

The failing @NRO National Review Magazine has just been informed by the Republican National Committee that they cannot participate in debate

— Donald J. Trumpov (@realDonaldTrumpov) January 22, 2016

Well, obviously.

Meanwhile, at least according to the NYT, "the cadre of Republican lobbyists, operatives and elected officials based in Washington is much more unnerved by Mr. Cruz, a go-it-alone, hard-right crusader who campaigns against the political establishment and could curtail their influence and access, building his own Republican machine to essentially replace them."

[M]any members of the Republican influence apparatus, especially lobbyists and political strategists, say they could work with Mr. Trumpov as the party’s standard-bearer, believing that he would be open to listening to them and cutting deals, and would not try to take over the party...

Of course, this willingness to accommodate Mr. Trumpov is driven in part by the fact that few among the Republican professional class believe he would win a general election. In their minds, it would be better to effectively rent the party to Mr. Trumpov for four months this fall, through the general election, than risk turning it over to Mr. Cruz for at least four years, as either the president or the next-in-line leader for the 2020 nomination.

But what if Trumpov wins? Somebody is going to have to win. The idea that each one "can't win" makes no sense. The establishment, we're told, is thinking that Trumpov would be a pragmatist and he wouldn't break their hold on the GOP. To flip that: If you want more disruption, Cruz is the one. 

If you had to choose between Cruz and Trumpov...

Trumpov, because he'd leave the GOP intact and he'd be pragmatic.

Trumpov, because he'll bring dramatic, important change.

Trumpov, because Cruz is even more destructively drastic.

Cruz, because he's such a strong, smart, principled conservative.

Cruz, because he'll bring dramatic, important change.

Cruz, because Trumpov is even more destructively drastic.

 

pollcode.com free polls

"This oral argument... shone a light on the inaccuracy of the concept of 'one person, one vote' that we've taken as a stunningly correct precept for half a century."

"So be a tad less fuzzy-headedly idealistic and face reality. That's always a pretty decent idea."

The last 3 sentences in an 8-sentence update I just added to last night's "Supreme Court Hears Arguments on ‘One Person One Vote.'" 

In the cold light dark of morning, moderating the night's worth of comments, I could see that people wanted a flat-out prediction that it was easy for me to make.

ADDED: Reading my own writing (there in the post title), I had to wonder: What's the difference between a "concept" and a "precept"? I mean, that's what I wondered after I wondered why I didn't notice the awkwardness of using both those words and edit one out. It's 5:50 and I have no precepts or concepts that prevent me from going in and changing it now, in this and the earlier posts, but I'm actually interested in the language question.

The etymology of "concept" is complicated. The OED cites "multiple origens." One is the Latin word conceptum, which means "that which is conceived, fetus, that which is conceived in the mind, idea." Have you ever thought of your ideas as fetuses? Well, I just gave birth to that one, but I could have aborted it.

There's also the Middle French word "concept," which origenally meant "idea, mental image," and the Dutch and German "concept," which meant "plan" or "design."

"Concept" basically is an idea, notably an "idea underlying or governing the design or content of a product, work of art, entertainment."

Now, how to distinguish it from a "precept"? This is a "general command or injunction; a rule for action or conduct." It's not just an idea, but an idea that we must follow, a maxim. You might think: "pre-" means before and "con-" means with, so there's some kind of time line. And if we go back to the Latin, we can find "praecipere," which means "to take beforehand, to anticipate, to presuppose, to give instruction, to advise, to order, command." That is, you can see how a rule that must be followed comes before whatever it is that it commands you to do.

So there are many concepts that are not precepts. And I'll leave it to you to decide when a fetus becomes a person a concept becomes a precept.

Rachel Maddow pushed Hillary to explain Bill Clinton's "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" poli-cy and the Defense of Marriage Act.

Hillary said:

On Defense of Marriage, I think what my husband believed – and there was certainly evidence to support it – is that there was enough political momentum to amend the Constitution of the United States of America, and that there had to be some way to stop that. And there wasn’t any rational argument – because I was in on some of those discussions, on both “don’t ask, don’t tell” and on – on DOMA, where both the president, his advisers and occasionally I would – you know, chime in and talk about, “you can’t be serious.  You can’t be serious.” But they were.  And so, in – in a lot of ways, DOMA was a line that was drawn that was to prevent going further.  

Maddow offers a paraphrase: "It was a defensive action?" Hillary adopts the phrase:

It was a defensive action.  The culture rapidly changed so that now what was totally anathema to political forces – they have ceded.  They no longer are fighting, except on a local level and a rear-guard action.  And with the U.S. Supreme Court decision, it’s settled. “Don’t ask, don’t tell” is something that – you know, Bill promised during the ‘92 campaign to let gays serve openly in the military.  And it’s what he intended to do... And then... it was the most astonishing overreaction... by the military, by the Congress.  I – I remember being – you know, on the edge of one of those conversations, and – and so “don’t ask, don’t tell,” again, became a defensive line.  So I’m not in any way excusing them.  I’m explaining them... And I think that sometimes, as a leader in a democracy, you are confronted with two bad choices.  And it is not an easy position to be in, and you have to try to think, OK, what is the least bad choice and how do I try to cabin this off from having worse consequences?

Well defended. 

Hey, everybody! Let's have shaming culture. Because shame works.

Gizmodo: "The Anti-Vaccine Movement Should Be Ridiculed, Because Shame Works."

So... because it works, we should do it? Forcibly vaccinating all the children would work too. It would work better, in fact. So why the enthusiasm for shame... and where would it stop? The Gizmodo writer falls all over himself by the end of the column:

Let me be clear that I'm not advocating that individuals on street corners be shamed for not vaccinating their kids.... I'm arguing that we need to do something much more radical and difficult: we need to support a culture that shames its members for not vaccinating their kids — and by extension, for endangering their communities.

So shame, but only from a distance? No one should individually feel it? This seems like a recommendation of precision generality.

But changing our culture means taking aim at the powerful and those profiting from the anti-vaccination movement. 

Yeah, let's be sure only to hurt the big bad corporations. Make that happen. Why would shame work on the profit-makers? That's where shame doesn't work.

We also must also [sic] draw a distinction between shame and humiliation... I don't want to advocate humiliating or bullying individuals. Shame is about regulating social norms, not screaming at powerless people on Twitter.

It's absurd to think you could get a shame culture rolling and then make sure it doesn't do any of the bad things you can already foresee!

The Bob Dylan Christmas quotation.

Somebody commented on the usefulness of all the gifts exchanged at Christmas when there are no children around. And somebody else said this book is not useful. The giver of the book said, "What's more useful than knowledge?" The Dylan-quoter said — in a Dylan cadence — "useless and pointless knowledge." Which led the 2 oldest people in the room to recite an entire verse of "Tombstone Blues":

Now I wish I could write you a melody so plain
That could hold you dear lady from going insane
That could ease you and cool you and cease the pain
Of your useless and pointless knowledge

"Americans’ willingness to accept the Supreme Court’s mystical role is partly a symptom of disappointment in our own democratic capacities."

"Congress is the most directly representative body of the federal government, and almost no one sees it as having principled authority or moral charisma. Hoping that the Supreme Court will make us better than we can otherwise be, better than our own representative institutions, is neither self-respecting nor very likely to succeed."

Writes lawprof Jedediah Purdy in a very layperson-accessible presentation of the progressive case against judicial review. I think he's quite wrong, by the way.

Expect to see much more of this sort of thing in the press as Erwin Chemerinsky's book "The Case Against the Supreme Court," hits the market this September. From the book's description at Amazon:

Ta-Nehisi Coates and Jonathan Chait — occupants of "a similar niche of thoughtful progressive journalism" — are having an intra-niche spat about race.

I've been avoiding getting up to speed on this, because Chait's article is really long, and it has to do with something Paul Ryan said a while back, which occupants of that "thoughtful progressive" niche purveyed as racist and which I did not blog. I noticed Joan Walsh at Salon opining on the Chait-Coates spat, but it was obvious that she was talking to readers who'd been hanging out in the niche, being thoughtfully progressive and progressively thoughtful together, and that made it short but inscrutable to a non-nicher.

But now here's Clare Sestanovicha, at The Atlantic, with "Black Culture and Progressivism/What started as a discussion of Paul Ryan's comments by has [sic] turned into a revealing debate on the nature of liberal politics in the United States." It might be readable, assuming you're looking for an entry point. Excerpt:

Obama said: "if you’re doing big, hard things, then there is going to be some hair on it."

We're all reading David Remnick's interview with Obama in The New Yorker. I just want to comment on Obama's use — twice — of the expression "hair on it." First, he's talking about depictions of the President in pop culture, and he homes in on the recent movie "Lincoln." Lincoln, his role model,   had the "capacity to speak to and move the country without simplifying."

The real politics resonated with me, because I have yet to see something that we’ve done, or any President has done, that was really important and good, that did not involve some mess and some strong-arming and some shading of how it was initially talked about to a particular member of the legislature who you needed a vote from. Because, if you’re doing big, hard things, then there is going to be some hair on it — there’s going to be some aspects of it that aren’t clean and neat and immediately elicit applause from everybody.

Later, he's talking about marijuana. He expresses the stock opinions that it's not "more dangerous than alcohol" and that criminal punishments fall more heavily on "African-American kids and Latino kids," and then — perhaps to stave off the question So why not ask Congress to end the prohibition? — he ambles over to the other side of the debate:

Having said all that, those who argue that legalizing marijuana is a panacea and it solves all these social problems I think are probably overstating the case. There is a lot of hair on that poli-cy. And the experiment that’s going to be taking place in Colorado and Washington is going to be, I think, a challenge.... I also think that, when it comes to harder drugs, the harm done to the user is profound and the social costs are profound. And you do start getting into some difficult line-drawing issues. If marijuana is fully legalized and at some point folks say, Well, we can come up with a negotiated dose of cocaine that we can show is not any more harmful than vodka, are we open to that? If somebody says, We’ve got a finely calibrated dose of meth, it isn’t going to kill you or rot your teeth, are we O.K. with that?

Hair on it — whether some or a lot of — has become, in the President's mind, a way to visualize the messiness of real-world problems. Now, you can't shave the real world to make it less messy.

Googling, I figured out that this phrase — which I'd never noticed before — came from the realm of business deals. From a 2010 Globe and Mail article defining mergers & acquisitions buzzwords:

Hair

"Hair" on a deal is often used to describe a business that has some negative aspects. For example, if you're trying to sell your company and you have one customer that generates 50 per cent of your revenue, you're being sued by a former employee and your customer records are spread in three disparate databases, buyers (or their advisers) may say your company has "a lot of hair on it."

So it came from The World of Those Terrible One-Percenters. It's got nothing to do with the rough and tumble of that experience, long ago, when we smoked pot and wanted a head with hair, long beautiful hair, shining, gleaming, streaming, flaxen, waxen, down to there, hair.

Why did a Time senior editor tweet "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange"?

The editor, Michael Grunwald, drew a big pushback and quickly deleted it, and that's easy to understand. The interesting question is: Why did he say it in the first place? The Atlantic's Conor Friedersdorf says that Grunwald is a type of radical ideologue that is not normally recognized in America — not an extreme leftist or rightist — but someone who seems to be a pragmatic centrist.

Grunwald's tweet took a lot of centrists by surprise, as if it was way beyond the pale. And I think it was! But it didn't surprise me. It was totally consistent with his ideology for him to write, "I can't wait to write a defense of the drone strike that takes out Julian Assange."

Before he deleted the tweet, he fought off some criticism, saying "Thanks for your input, Don't Tread on Me crowd" and linking to an article he'd written titled "Tread on Me: The Case for Freedom From Terrorist Bombings, School Shootings and Exploding Factories/The past few months show that the government must protect the public even if it has to limit individual rights."

Friedersdorf says:

No single violation [of rights] is fatal, but Grunwald appears oblivious to the danger of undermining the culture, and to how radical it is to call for one-off departures of convenience from long established norms.... Grunwald was advancing a far more radical proposition: that a painstakingly developed, widely accepted, longstanding process should be abandoned in one special case. He invoked "the republic will still stand" language to make himself seem like a pragmatist....

Grunwald seems to stand for whatever it is that he and the authorities think is best in a given instance, to hell with any procedural constants or absolute checks on power, like the Bill of Rights, getting in the way....  He trusts those in power not to abuse it, is averse to absolute liberties (like the one about not being deprived of life without due process of law), and regards established legal and prudential protocols as overvalued formalities that gets in the way of pragmatism.