The Badger Herald writes about last night's teach-in on the Wisconsin budget bill and completely misrepresents what Prof. Donald Downs said.

Here's the Badger Herald.  Here's Professor Downs's response — which was cc'd to me:

I write in response to Grant Hermes reporting on my comments at the Law School Forum Wednesday evening. Hermes wrote that I "alluded to the idea that the governor’s proposed bill may have long-term negative effects on political areas outside of labor disputes, such as taxes and the rising cost in higher education." This is a complete misrepresentation of what I said and meant. I was talking about the crisis of debt, and how higher education is part of this crisis because we cost so much. Walker has had nothing to do [with] having caused this problem; indeed, his measures are designed to at least address the crisis of public debt in a forceful way. At no point in my discussion of this aspect of the problem did I implicate Walker's plan as a source of the problem. The cost of higher education has skyrocketed at twice the skyrocketing rate of medical care costs over the course of the last twenty years, and we are the source of this problem, not Walker.

Donald Downs
Meiklejohn Professor of Political Science, Law, and Journalism

Maybe the reporter had trouble hearing a professor imply that Scott Walker might be doing something good.

ADDED: The boldface is mine. Here's the last 2 1/2 minutes of Downs's talk.

"What did you want? attention? congratulations, i know you. i also know who hitler, ted bundy, and michael vick are."

Maybe serving lion tacos wasn't such a great idea.

Years ago, I took my sons to a restaurant, and one item on the menu was baby loin ribs. My younger son said "Oh, no! That's terrible!" What's so terrible? "Baby lion ribs!"

"Obama = Keynesian?" sign makes Rally for Sanity folks insane...

... and stupid:



Via Weekly Standard.

Bleh. I don't like saying Rally for Sanity folks. Help me pick a better coinage:

What should we call the Rally to Restore Sanity folks?
	Sanitarians
	Sane Freaks
	Reasonable People
	The Enemy
	Sanitizers
	Sanity's Little Elves
pollcode.com free polls

O'Donnell and Coons on the separation of church and state.

Somehow, I can't escape the feeling of obligation to post about this. It's a bit annoying to me, because I cannot stand when people jump to the conclusion that someone they want to believe is stupid is being stupid when they say something that seems wrong. Think first. Is it wrong?

And I hate the converse — the assumption that the supposedly smart person has said something smart. Stop. Slow down. Read/listen closely. It's often the case that what we have is a banal political disagreement. And that's what I think this O'Donnell/Coons thing is.

I really wish I had the verbatim transcript of the colloquy, and that's the main reason I've been dragging my feet posting on this. The reporters aren't presenting the quotes in a reliable fashion. And we need to begin with stark clarity that the text of the Establishment Clause is: "Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion."

So let's look at the reporting:

"Where in the Constitution is separation of church and state?" O'Donnell asked while Democrat Chris Coons, an attorney, sat a few feet away.

Plainly, the Constitution does not say "separation of church and state," so there's nothing stupid there. It's provocative, because many people like that gloss on the text.

Coons responded that O'Donnell's question "reveals her fundamental misunderstanding of what our Constitution is. ... The First Amendment establishes a separation."

He's talking about interpretations of the text, and she was talking about the text. What we're hearing is 2 individuals talking past each other.

She interrupted to say, "The First Amendment does? ... So you're telling me that the separation of church and state, the phrase 'separation of church and state,' is in the First Amendment?"

She's telling him to pay attention to her limited point about the text.

He noted again the First Amendment's ban on establishment of religion.

Ah, here's where I hate reporters. Give me the quote. I don't think Coons quite gets it. Ah. Here. He says: "Government shall make no establishment of religion."

O'Donnell reacts: "That's in the First Amendment?" And, in fact, it's not. The First Amendment doesn't say "government." It says "Congress." And since the discussion is about what local school boards can do, the difference is highly significant.

Also, it isn't "shall make no establishment of religion." It's "shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion." There's a lot one could say about the difference between those 2 phrases, and I won't belabor it here. Suffice it to say that it was not stupid for O'Donnell to say "That's in the First Amendment?" — because it's not. Coons was presenting a version of what's in the cases interpreting the text, not the text itself.

The 2 were talking past each other, trying to look good and make the other look bad. It is a disagreement about law between 2 individuals who are not running for judge. It's not detailed legal analysis. It's a political debate and this is a political disagreement. An important one, no doubt. But it can't be resolved by laughing at one person and calling her an idiot, something I find quite repellent.

"Attorney General Eric Holder... said that legalizing recreational marijuana in California would be a 'significant impediment' to the government's joint efforts with state and local law enforcement..."

I'm picturing the Washington Post editors high and dorkily giggling.

"To know what Ann Coulter writes in her books, they’d have to know what’s in her books."

"That would require reading Ann Coulter’s books — and worse yet, admitting it in print, which no self-respecting Timesian would do. Far better to make a major embarrassing error... and thus actually score points when busted by Mickey, since this makes it clear to the NYT crowd that your mind is unpolluted by contact with Coulter’s writing."

This is the most egregious example of wilful misunderstanding I've seen in a long time.

John Amato must really think his readers are stupid. Shameless.

Rush Limbaugh says there will never be equality because:"some people are just born to be slaves"

How dare you say there's racism in the Teabircher movement? I'm so offended by that notion. Isn't what Rush Limbaugh says just soooooo true?

Amato pretends to wring his hands over the slavery in American history, as if he doesn't know the ways in which we who are free behave as if we were slaves. I can't make myself read the comments over there, but, please, somebody tell me if anyone is smart and honest enough to understand Limbaugh's point.

New York Magazine rocks snarky headline, poor reading.

Their headline is: "Caroline Giuliani Rocks Smirk, Long Hair While Cleaning Toilets." You're invited to smirk at the notion of hair dipped in latrines and e. coli wicking its way scalpward:

[S]he was "decked out in an orange work vest," the Daily News reports, but she let her long locks flow down over her shoulders in a sort of "devil may care" way, we noticed, while donning a simple gray dress for photo-ops and, once again, showing off that camera-ready smirk of hers. Still got it!

Here's the Daily New story, the source of the photo NY Mag is riffing on. Caption: "Caroline Giuliani (in an older photo)...."

"Once again"... an old photograph looks the same as it used to look.

"Megan McArdle Really Hates Sex at Dawn"...

... is a funny title for an article, written by the author of "Sex at Dawn," which book title he declines to put in italics or quotes in his article title. I thought it would be interesting to discuss sex at dawn, in the literal sense, but I find myself confronted with an author who's miffed at a blogger who's dissing his book:

Her comments begin strangely, with the admission that she's "in the middle" of the book. Note the urgency to condemn it publicly, even before reading the damned thing! 

Oh, blah! I hate this criticism. McArdle is blogging, not doing the official book review for the Atlantic. A rule against criticizing books you haven't finished would overprotect authors, since you shouldn't finish a bad book, and it would also underprotect authors, since the critics wouldn't disclose that they hadn't read the whole thing.

But bloggers... bloggers can open a book to a random page, read one sentence, cogitate furiously, then open up their laptops — maybe right there at Borders, where they picked up the book they didn't buy — and tap out a free-association blog post saying anything that occurs to them and publish — using the WiFi they didn't pay for either. It's not the slightest bit strange. And it's not unfair either. It is what it is, and we know what it is. It's blogging.

And boy, does she lash out:

•    "It reads like horsefeathers . . . like an undergraduate thesis,"
•    "breathless rather than scientific"
•    "cherry-picked evidence stretched far out of shape to support their theory,"
•    "they don't even attempt to paper over the enormous holes in their theory."

Ouch! And that's just the first paragraph. 

Eh! There are only 4 paragraphs. By the way, "their theory" — if I can trust McArdle — is that "people are naturally polyamorous." The dispute continues with McArdle and the author (Christopher Ryan) throwing shit at each other in a fight about whether people are like bonobos. I'm just saying "throwing shit at each other" because that's how bonobos fight, and people are like bonobos, right? Not right? Advantage McArdle!!!!!

Anyway, as you've probably figured out by now, the book is not about sex at dawn — the practice of having sex upon first awakening in the morning — but sex and evolution — "dawn" in the sense of "the dawn of man."

So where am I going with this? It's a blog post. I'm a blogger. I'll go where I want, which is where I always go when this subject comes up, and I don't feel safe in this conversation no more...

Roy Edroso imagines that Leslie Savan had the courage to "dispute Muslim articles of faith."

He's presenting something I wrote to his readers, who follow his direction and call me an idiot, but he's got it wrong. I blogged (and agreed with much of) Savan's piece in The Nation and tweaked her by asking if she was "paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs?" I also snarked that "I didn't know you could do that in The Nation."

Roy Edroso pretends to laugh at my joke ("Tee hee") and lobs the sarcasm: "Because libs are so cowardly they cannot dispute Muslim articles of faith. Which Savan proves by just having done so."

But Savan did NOT do so in the paragraph that precedes my joke. Savan savaged Americans. First, she said:

Regardless of what the Muslim world may or may not believe, this whole seed fixation is profoundly un-American. 

In other words: Put the beliefs of Muslims to the side; I want to talk about American values. Then:

It says that genealogy is destiny, that a man is Muslim regardless of what he espouses or believes. It’s all about descent—and nauseatingly close to the “one drop rule” of the post-Reconstruction South. That rule held that if a person had any African or Indian ancestry whatsoever, he or she was classified as “colored” and subject to anti-miscegenation laws, voter disenfranchisement, and segregation at large. At least eighteen states adopted some form of the rule; Virginia’s 1924 law, for instance, was called the Racial Integrity Act.

Having purported to limit herself to American values (as opposed to universal truths), she goes through a litany of historical wrongs, committed by Americans, a comfortable and familiar place for readers of The Nation. This is the point at which I asked my question whether she's "paying enough attention the the way she is expressing contempt for Muslim beliefs."

I think she thought that she'd limited her inquiry at that point to American values and American racism. Although some Muslims are Americans and could presumably be swept up into an inquiry about American values, Savan has specifically set aside what Muslims believe. Plus, she's switched to talking about race. What interested me is something I don't think she meant to do but only unwittingly implied.

Did Edroso even understand my point? I deliberately write in an elliptical style sometimes. You have to think a minute to get it, and I don't think Edroso did. The writing may look simple, but there is a challenge in that simplicity that you'd better be sure you see and meet before you decide you've done the easy reading and are now in a fine position to call me stupid.

I'll be heavy-handed so he can rethink his insolent attitude toward me. I think that Savan didn't mean to say that the Muslims are repellent if they believe that a person is a Muslim because his father is a Muslim. She only meant that Americans violate American values if they perceive someone — such as Obama — as Muslim because his father is a Muslim. I would guess that she subscribes to the cultural relativism that accepts Muslims (even American Muslims) viewing their religion as a genetic matter. I don't think she wanted to deal in higher level philosophy about individual freedom and autonomy (which is the subject that I went on to talk about, quoting James Madison).

So, Roy, imagine that an editor at The Nation had responded to Savan's draft with these direct questions: Did you mean to imply that you are disgusted by a Muslim's belief that religion is inborn? Did you mean to say that that Muslim belief is like racism, because it looks like you may have implied that? I think you probably meant to say that Muslims should be judged by Muslim values and that you are leaving that judgment for other Muslims, and that you only mean to say that Americans are judged by American values and that you are all about being very critical of Americans who say that Obama was a Muslim — right?

Do you think Savan would have answered yes or no to those questions? If she answered yes, don't you think the editor would be likely to say: Could you rewrite this to make that really clear? And if she said no and wanted to make that absolutely clear, don't you think that the editor would have killed the piece?

Maureen Dowd says "Rush Limbaugh... mocks 'Imam Obama' as 'America’s first Muslim president'" but what did he actually say?

Here's Dowd's column. You can search the radio show's transcripts here. It was a joke:

"If it was laudatory to call Bill Clinton America's first black president, why can't we call Imam Obama America's first Muslim president?"

To be fair, Dowd's use of "mocks" could be said to acknowledge it as a joke. But come on. She says:

Many people still have a confused view of Muslims, and the president seems unable to help navigate the country through its Islamophobia. It is a prejudice stoked by Rush Limbaugh....

If you're going to worry that comments plant the wrong ideas in people's heads, you should be more careful about the ideas you plant. Dowd took a Limbaugh phrase out of context. (Hey! Remember last month, when we were hyper-sensitive about the problem of taking quotes out of context?) In context, it was, first, a question, and second, always only a comparison to the famous Toni Morrison characterization of Bill Clinton as the first black president:

Years ago, in the middle of the Whitewater investigation, one heard the first murmurs: white skin notwithstanding, this is our first black President. Blacker than any actual black person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime. After all, Clinton displays almost every trope of blackness: single-parent household, born poor, working-class, saxophone-playing, McDonald's-and-junk-food-loving boy from Arkansas.

 "Trope" — I love that. AKA stereotype.

And when virtually all the African-American Clinton appointees began, one by one, to disappear, when the President's body, his privacy, his unpoliced sexuality became the focus of the persecution, when he was metaphorically seized and bodysearched, who could gainsay these black men who knew whereof they spoke?

 Ha. You know how I feel about "gainsay." It's the red flag of bullshit.

The message was clear "No matter how smart you are, how hard you work, how much coin you earn for us, we will put you in your place or put you out of the place you have somehow, albeit with our permission, achieved. You will be fired from your job, sent away in disgrace, and--who knows?--maybe sentenced and jailed to boot. In short, unless you do as we say (i.e., assimilate at once), your expletives belong to us."

(Shouldn't that be "all your expletives are belong to us"?)

Now, we all know that Bill Clinton is not actually black, so to say Obama is the first Muslim president in the way that Bill Clinton is the first black president actually implies that Obama is not a Muslim. As in: Christian faith notwithstanding, this is our first Muslim President. More Muslim than any actual Muslim person who could ever be elected in our children’s lifetime.

In context, please!

And answer the question: If it was laudatory to call Bill Clinton America's first black president, why doesn't the phrase "first Muslim president" work the same way?

There are some good answers to that question:

1. Back in 1998, when Morrison wrote her essay, Americans — or at least the Americans she was writing for — really did think it would be a fine thing to have a black president, but today, when Rush Limbaugh said that, Americans have a big problem with the idea of a Muslim president and Rush knows that.

2. Since we know Bill Clinton isn't black, calling him black creates no confusion. Calling Obama a Muslim, even as a trope, plays with — stokes — the doubts people have.

Bottom line: Am I criticizing Dowd? Only a little. She's stoking the misunderstandings of Rush Limbaugh that she knows NYT readers have. She doesn't care about giving him his due. But that's okay. He feeds on the things like this. I'm sure he'll have his fun on tomorrow's show. And it will give him license to spend a few more minutes massaging Obama-Muslim, Obama-Muslim, Obama-Muslim... into the listeners' confused mushy heads.

Haiti's constitution rules out a Wyclef Jean presidency.

He's Haitian, but the constitution requires presidential candidates to have lived in the country for the past 5 years.

The musician had argued that his appointment as a roving ambassador for Haiti in 2007 exempted him from the residency requirement.

Apparently, textualism beat out fancier notions of interpretation. No "active liberty" or whatever?

Mickey Kaus tried to do a 3-hour radio talk show, but "They said I lacked intimacy, Bob."

Kaus says:

"Basically, you're talking to people who are alone in their apartments. And I knew I dropped the ball on that. I forgot that. I was proclaiming like Rush Limbaugh, you know, denouncing people, as if I was talking to talking to a crowd of 10,000 people. And I knew I screwed that up."

Now, wait a minute. Your mistake was that you were too much like Rush? But Rush is very successful on the radio. I'm not hearing your show — can we get an audio clip? — but I'm willing to bet that you tried to talk the way you imagine Rush talks — "proclaiming... denouncing... as if I was talking to talking to a crowd of 10,000 people" — but that you are wrong about him.

In fact, Rush does not lack intimacy. The show doesn't feel like an oration to a crowd. Even though Rush gets loud and rowdy, he only does that some of the time, and he pulls back and gets confidential or off on some little digression about his dogs or his Apple computers. He travels a very wide range of soft to loud and back again. There's a musical range of tone, with good pauses and changes of pace. There's a big emotional range too, from serious to funny and from angry to silly. There's a tremendous amount of artistry to the performance, and the effect is like having a very interesting, talkative, demonstrative friend watching the news on TV with you.

In fact, as Zev Chafets wrote about Rush in the NYT Magazine a few years back, Rush picked up his style from his father:

Limbaugh’s father, Rush Jr., was a lawyer... a prominent local Republican activist and the most influential figure in his sons’ lives. He served as a pilot in World War II and became vehemently anti-Communist and very much committed to the ideas and ideals of small-town Protestant America... To this day, Limbaugh calls his father “the smartest man I’ve ever met.”

Certainly he was one of the most opinionated and autocratic. “On Friday nights my friends would come over to the house just to listen to my dad rant about politics,” Limbaugh recalls. “He was doing the same thing as I do today, without the humor or the satire. He didn’t approve of making fun of presidents. He didn’t think that sort of thing was funny.”

Dick Adams, Rush’s boyhood friend and high-school debate partner, told me: “Mr. Limbaugh didn’t suffer fools lightly, let’s just put it like that. Many times I was over there when he called down Rush or David in harsh tones. There was usually a string of expletives attached.”

See? It's the feeling of being in that living room with the smartest — and funniest — man I’ve ever met. Here's this middle-aged guy that the young kids will go out of their way to hear rant — in his home. Not to a crowd of 10,000. It's home-style talking... sound you would like to fill your apartment (or car) with when you're alone. It does not lack intimacy. Don't underestimate what he does. It's something no one else has been able to achieve — including Rush, Sr., who didn't have the humor.

Encouraging students and professors to communicate by texting.

Georgia Gwinnett College is spending $1000 per professor to pay for smart phones for professors who are supposed to respond to student texts within 24 hours. Professors already have computers and respond to email, so what is the point of this? You want students dashing off little notes full of typos and abbreviations and professors struggling with teensy keyboards and adapting to the ultra-concise writing form? And what happens when there are misunderstandings? These are inevitable in texting.

Leave texting to friends and family and to coworkers who interact casually. Professors — however friendly they may seem in person — must relate to students in a professional way.

Tee Barron, an associate professor of mathematics, says she sometimes gets texts from students asking questions that they could easily have answered by consulting a classmate or the syllabus, but that can be corrected with a benign rebuke. “I’ll sometimes text back, ‘Hahaha by the time it took me to e-mail or text me you could have found this out yourself and now you’re going to have to anyway,' ” Barron says. “I think after the first couple times the [students] who are high-maintenance and try that — they start getting it.”

So you're going to taunt and tease them into behaving appropriately? But you're not modeling appropriateness! You're letting them think you have a cutesy, jokey relationship. And who would text the 27 words "Hahaha by the time it took me to e-mail or text me you could have found this out yourself and now you’re going to have to anyway." (I'm counting "hahaha," a misspelling of "ha ha ha," as 1 word.) In the real world of texting, it's going to be more like "get it yrsf" or "u gotta b kiddng" or something even more abbreviated and subject to misreading.

It might work for Tee Barron, a math prof. Maybe math students are coolly unemotional, consuming messages, but I think student-teacher texting is likely to go bad... very bad. And that's assuming fully virtuous professors who don't even dream of entering into inappropriate relations with students.

Film critic writes a book about snark — called (duh!) "Snark" — and there's nothing to do about it, except...

... snark.

First [David Denby] references one of [Wonkette's] male associate editor’s posts about Chelsea Clinton and suggests that the “young women” who wrote it must have some catty jealousy issues, with their vaginas. Then he writes that we made fun of Ted Kennedy on the day of his brain tumor surgery, citing a post about something else entirely that was written seven months before Kennedy even got cancer. Damn those bloggers, always trying to ruin other peoples’ reputations with false information!

Snort.

Andrew Sullivan trashes the Washington Post for omitting something from its KSM story...

... that the Washington Post included in the story.

How could he make such a mistake? He relied on an Althouse blog commenter! LOL.

And his reading of this blog as "pro-torture" is equally lame.

Come on, Andrew! Raise your game!

Sports headlines toy with the brains of nonfans.

I've long been annoyed by the NYT blog called "Bats." I was bitten by a bat once and had to get rabies shots. And I've had other run-ins with the leathery-winged fiends. Actually, I love them when they are outside, eating mosquitoes and so forth. I might like reading a blog about bats. But Bats is not about bats. It's about baseball. (Maybe if I cared about baseball, I'd still hate the blog title "Bats," either because it disrespects pitchers or because I would still think it was about bats.)

Now, today, The Washington Post has a front-page teaser: "Do Juicers Belong in the Hall of Fame?" And I'm thinking, so there's an Appliances Hall of Fame? Where is it? What was the first inductee? Refrigerator! I'll bet it's refrigerator! But I click to the article —which is (obscurely) re-titled "Do Juicers Belong in Canton?" — and see that it's about drug users and the Baseball Football Hall of Fame. Oh, I don't know. But if there's an Appliances Hall of Fame, it's scraping to low too let in the juicers.

"Judge rules former President Bush can be deposed."

A headline that seemed odd but wasn't meant to be odd.