"Rightbloggers: Blago, Richardson Prove Obama Corrupt, Dems Racist."

I always enjoy Roy Edroso's pithy, pissy roundup of opinion in the "Right-Wing Blogosphere" in The Village Voice — especially when he includes excellent quotes from me.

Here's my post on his first one, which had Tom Tomorrow caricatures of all of us on what I assumed was some kind of Rightblogger A-List. There's a Tom Tomorrow caricature on today's column, but it's not of anyone from that A-List. Who the hell is that guy supposed to be? Tomorrow has a spiffy graphic style, but he's not the best at capturing a likeness — kind of a liability for a caricaturist. Is that supposed to be the left-winger's vision of the generic right-winger — a balding white guy in a desert-camouflage T-shirt? Or is that some actual guy I should recognize from Tomorrow's feeble visual cues?

Richardson out.

Another money problem for the Dems. Can't we get a sex problem for a change? This is getting boring.

Questions that brought 1 visitor to my blog today.

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IN THE COMMENTS: Original George said...

Love, peace, and compassion were surrounding me. They were almost palpable. It was incredible. I was in total bliss. Even the foosball players hesitated long enough to appreciate the elongated notes as he suspended them in midair until they were almost palpable. They were almost palpable. For three weeks we had felt it, touched it almost; it engulfed us; it was warm. We were completely infatuated. Brass and woodwind players were on stage, and in the balcony, swinging their instruments and playing chords so dense they were almost palpable. They were almost palpable, and it was very easy to feel sorry for her character because of the injustices she suffered from her husband. With the international community frowning heavily upon him and local expectations becoming so strong, they were almost palpable. I felt that the passion, ambition, revenge, tension, etc. were so descriptive that they were almost palpable. The narrator also did a stunning job of bringing memories materialized from the walls, so strong they were almost palpable. Grandpop bursting through the front door, the decibel level skyrocketing off the cries of outrage were so intense, they were almost palpable. How could the writers do this to us? Did they not know that Jane would never try out? For upon the eyeballs, affecting the sight as though they were almost palpable to the touch, the dews had not descended, but the leaves were still wet.

What happens when you Google the phrase "they were almost palpable."

He's right! And here I was reading that and trying to understand where the mind of OrigGeo was going with that story.

Meanwhile, Jennifer says...

Oh, I thought we were speaking of one curious surfer who kept ending up at Althouse no matter what new question they came up [with]. That was a funnier mental image.

... and I laugh out loud.

Did you notice how pro-Israel Harry Reid was on "Meet the Press" today?

David Gregory asked whether the invasion of Gaza was offensive or defensive. Reid answered:

I spoke to Prime Minister Olmert a couple of days ago. He indicated that they would do the ground activities. Let's understand the background. For eight years they've been firing rockets into Israel. They've become more intense the last few months. Israelis have been killed, maimed and injured. Sometimes more than 200 a day coming into Israel. If this were going on in the United States from Vancouver, Canada, into Seattle, would we react? Course we do. We would have to. I think what the Israelis are doing is very important. I think this terrorist organization, Hamas, has got to be put away. They've got to come to their senses. The Fatah group, which is--makes up part of Palestinian group, has a peace arrangement with Israel. Hamas should do the same....

And, and, and Israel, for--since 1967, controlled Gaza. They gave it to the Palestinians as a gesture of peace. And all they got are a bunch of rockets in return....

So you think that Israel ought to move forward and try to remove Hamas from power?

They have to. I, I'm not concerned about removing Hamas from power, I'm concerned about stopping the rocket fire and the mortar fire into Israel. That is the key, and that's what Israel's up to according to the prime minister.

Should there be an immediate cease-fire?

If the Hamas organization will agree and there is some degree of certainty that they will follow through. They, in the past, have simply not lived up to what they said they would do. If there's a way of enforcing this cease-fire, then yes. Otherwise, Israel has to continue till they stop the rockets and mortars coming into Israel, maiming, injuring and killing Israelis.

So you, you're in sync with the Bush administration on this point?

Yes, I am.

Interesting. I wonder if he'd be admitting that he was "in sync with the Bush administration" if the Bush administration weren't about to leave — or if he would have admitted he was "in sync with the Bush administration" about a lot of things in the past if only the Bush administration had been about to leave.

Anyway, I added some boldface to the transcript to draw attention to something that doesn't quite fit together. Is it important for Israel to remove Hamas from power or not? He seems to contradict himself. [ADDED: I think maybe he said "They have to" as a response to whether "Israel ought to move forward" and didn't mean it to apply to "and try to remove Hamas from power."]

"They have bits sliced off and tied up and sucked out. I want to say to them, 'You lazy f---ing fat pig.'"

"'Just go for a run and stop eating burgers. You might fucking die.'"

Ricky Gervais opposes liposuction, tummy tucks, and gastric band operations. He also would like you to shout "Fatty!"at him when he walks down the street. Or perhaps "you fucking fat bastard," which is what he says to himself when he looks in the mirror in the morning.

He's a comedian, and that's all very funny, but he's raising some important issues. (No, not whether comedians should be more sensitive, and in any case, to the extent that it is an issue worth examining, he's already said that he's allowed to say cruelly harsh things about fat, because he's fat and admits it.)

1. Is it unethical for doctors to perform serious operation on people who have the alternative route of eating less and exercising?

2. Has the fat acceptance movement caused the obesity epidemic?

***

I got that link from Freeman Hunt's Twitter feed — just as I was finishing listening to "The Ricky Gervais Guide to Medicine," which I downloaded today on iTunes.

ADDED: More on the fucking fat bastard here:

'I work out every day,' says Gervais, who recently had a swimming pool built beneath his London home and has installed a gym at his New York apartment. 'Don't sound so surprised. I'm fat because I eat too much and I'd rather not give up food. It's not glandular, it's greed. If I didn't work out I'd still eat as much but instead of being probably 20 pounds overweight, I would be 40 pounds overweight and growing.' In any case, 'I don't think a comedian should be worried about their weight'.

Has he ever been on a diet? 'No.' At some points in his life – notably as a student, when he had little money, and had to cook for himself – 'I didn't eat and I was thin'. But 'for the past 15 years I've eaten and I've got fat'.

Jimmy Wales emailed me.

I think.

Is living in the city bad for your brain?

Some science-y crap:

Just being in an urban environment, they have found, impairs our basic mental processes. After spending a few minutes on a crowded city street, the brain is less able to hold things in memory, and suffers from reduced self-control. While it's long been recognized that city life is exhausting -- that's why Picasso left Paris -- this new research suggests that cities actually dull our thinking, sometimes dramatically so.

"The mind is a limited machine,"says Marc Berman, a psychologist at the University of Michigan and lead author of a new study that measured the cognitive deficits caused by a short urban walk. "And we're beginning to understand the different ways that a city can exceed those limitations."...

Consider everything your brain has to keep track of as you walk down a busy thoroughfare like Newbury Street. There are the crowded sidewalks full of distracted pedestrians who have to be avoided; the hazardous crosswalks that require the brain to monitor the flow of traffic. (The brain is a wary machine, always looking out for potential threats.) There's the confusing urban grid, which forces people to think continually about where they're going and how to get there.

The reason such seemingly trivial mental tasks leave us depleted is that they exploit one of the crucial weak spots of the brain. A city is so overstuffed with stimuli that we need to constantly redirect our attention so that we aren't distracted by irrelevant things, like a flashing neon sign or the cellphone conversation of a nearby passenger on the bus. This sort of controlled perception -- we are telling the mind what to pay attention to -- takes energy and effort. The mind is like a powerful supercomputer, but the act of paying attention consumes much of its processing power....

But the density of city life doesn't just make it harder to focus: It also interferes with our self-control. In that stroll down Newbury, the brain is also assaulted with temptations -- caramel lattes, iPods, discounted cashmere sweaters, and high-heeled shoes. Resisting these temptations requires us to flex the prefrontal cortex, a nub of brain just behind the eyes. Unfortunately, this is the same brain area that's responsible for directed attention, which means that it's already been depleted from walking around the city.

But what is life for, if not to walk around a complicated city, receiving and responding to the stimulation? Do you have something better to do? If you leave the city, you won't be living in a beautiful mansion, with a beautiful garden and a sun-filled studio where you're painting Picassos. Will you?

Is the brain in the city impaired or is it just used? Now, it's true, our brains evolved in a non-urban environment. But does that mean these brains of ours are hurt whenever we use them for things they didn't evolve by doing? You'd have to also say that our brains are hurt by reading, by climate-controlled interiors, by the knowledge of the news of what's happening in other countries, by YouTube....



Let it be a good city!

If you were blind, would you want a Seeing Eye dog...

... or a Seeing Eye miniature horse — a black and white one named Panda?

"[M]iniature horses are mild-mannered, trainable and less threatening than large dogs. They’re naturally cautious and have exceptional vision, with eyes set far apart for nearly 360-degree range. Plus, they’re herd animals, so they instinctively synchronize their movements with others. But the biggest reason is age: miniature horses can live and work for more than 30 years."

And they seem pretty cool. So cool that maybe you're thinking you want one even though you are not blind. Service animals, they're not just for blind people.

I was thinking I'd like a nice big protective dog to walk with me everywhere, down to campus, into the buildings, into the classroom. What problem/disability would I need to get that privilege? Anxiety?

[A] growing number of people believe the world of service animals has gotten out of control: first it was guide dogs for the blind; now it’s monkeys for quadriplegia and agoraphobia, guide miniature horses, a goat for muscular dystrophy, a parrot for psychosis and any number of animals for anxiety, including cats, ferrets, pigs, at least one iguana and a duck.

Oh, yeah! Anxiety!

They’re all showing up in stores and in restaurants, which is perfectly legal because the Americans With Disabilities Act (A.D.A.) requires that service animals be allowed wherever their owners want to go.

Come on, psychiatrists! Just put Sense of Entitlement Syndrome in the DSM and help us all out.

I don't want to make this post too long. I'm into Twittery terseness today. But the article is long. I'll just flag 2 things:

1. Jim Eggers, a man whose parrot purportedly keeps him from "snapping": "'I have bipolar disorder with psychotic tendencies,' he told me as he sucked down a green-apple smoothie. 'Homicidal feelings too.'" Now, I'm officially afraid of people who drink green-apple smoothies. I'm afraid of green apples. Hell, I'm afraid of people who use straws. Can I have a parrot in a restaurant now?

2. "Business owners and their employees often couldn’t distinguish the genuine from the bogus. To protect the disabled from intrusive questions about their medical histories, the A.D.A. makes it illegal to ask what disorder an animal helps with. You also can’t ask for proof that a person is disabled or a demonstration of an animal’s 'tasks.' There is no certification process for service animals (though there are Web sites where anyone can buy an official-looking card that says they have a certified service animal, no documentation required). The only questions businesses can ask are 'Is that a trained service animal?' and 'What task is it trained to do?'" Apparently, soothe me is the wrong answer.

This is a tough issue. Too many conflicting interests. You have the people who obviously need service animals with trained service animals like Seeing Eye dogs, people who are just completely abusively bringing animals everywhere, and everything in between. And you have business owners who want to be compassionate and who accept that they must follow the law, but who don't want to be played and who are afraid of losing customers and of being sued. And you have all the people who are annoyed, allergic, and afraid of all the animals other people are imposing on them.

I have no answer of my own for this, but gee, wasn't that little horsey cute? I can see why the NYT Magazine led off its article with the blind woman and her Panda!

"Twitter = Terse. I like terse."

Comments Freeman Hunt on last night's post about Twitter.

Nothing prevents us bloggers from blogging tersely wherever we are already blogging. When I started blogging, I worked hard at terseness, and I still do. Nevertheless, there's a temptation to expand and elaborate. Terseness is a discipline. Some of use can achieve it without imposed constraints.

Twitter wants to make us all Instapundit.

***

I tried very hard to make this post terse, but it's way too long for Twitter.

***

Hey, follow me on Twitter.

Habitat for Humanity houses -- 8 years old and alive with "cockroaches, mildew and mysterious skin rashes."

Jimmy Carter was one of the 10,000 volunteers who built the Fairway Oaks housing development in 17 days. Now, there's a lawsuit, but it doesn't seem to be based on the shoddy workmanship of amateurs. It seems to be mainly about the site — a garbage dump:

One man pulled up his floorboards to find rubbish 5ft deep under his kitchen. Other complaints include cracking walls and rotting door frames that let in rats and ants.

Habitat must have a system that limits and supervises all those volunteers. It's too easy to laugh at the do-gooders. Even when you use professional builders, you can have problems like rotting door wood, especially in a wet climate. You have to take care of your house, and even when you try, you do periodically find things that have gone bad, and it's your responsibility to make repairs. But once you decide to sue about one thing — here, the site — the lawsuit becomes a grab bag of all your complaints.

Which side should Michelle Malkin be on?

All Jimmy Carter-bashing and schadenfreude aside, do the residents have a bona fide case or are these professional moochers trying to pin blame on others for their own lack of personal responsibility?...

I’ve watched enough of these “environmental justice” activists to know that they coach their clients to complain about vague ailments (“mysterious skin rashes”) that have no relation in reality to the environmental conditions they claim are the cause. These professional grievance-mongers have blocked countless private redevelopment and remediation projects — and milked tens of millions in settlements — based on bogus scientific and medical claims....

The Left has stoked both eco-zealotry and the entitlement culture with impunity. Perhaps they’ll feel a little less inclined to feed those beasts after getting bitten squarely in the ass.

Where hell is a hotel room....

... and the other people are Steven Spielberg, Andy Warhol, and Bianca Jagger.

"I'm not gay! I'm morose!"

Twittering.

Do you Twitter, or have you, like me, been avoiding it? I have, but now, if you want, you can follow me -- as they say. Frankly, I think it's weird to ask people to follow you. To me, it sounds like Jesus:

"Come, follow me," Jesus said, "and I will make you fishers of men."

Or Gary Hart:

"Follow me around. I don't care. I'm serious. If anybody wants to put a tail on me, go ahead. They'll be very bored."

Messianic or inanely desirous of stalkers.

But the world has changed since 32 or 1987, and the real issue for me is whether Twittering is pointlessly duplicative of blogging. The easiest way to delve into that issue is to do it. So, I guess: Follow me.

ADDED: Jac points me to something he wrote on a Metafilter post:

Could someone please explain why anyone would use Twitter? It seems like basically a blog service but with a word limit that's so restrictive that it's awkward to do links. Or like IM without the spontaneity. Or like Facebook's status updates without Facebook. So, it's like a severely limited version of a bunch of other social media, with nothing extra to compensate? What's the point?

I'm just starting, but at this point, I think:

1. There's something fun about being limited to 140 characters. As you type, you see the number counting down. That makes it breezy and game-like, which pleases me.

2. Theoretically, you are answering the question "What are you doing?" I don't know if they kick you out if you use your 140 characters in some other way, but whether you stick to the question or not, there is the idea that you are not purporting to do anything more than saying what you are doing. Presumably, you Twitter because that seems nice.

3. A Facebook page has more information, and it is more of a stable location that represents you, even if you're good about posting "status updates," which I'm not. Twitter isolates your status updates, which looks kind of snazzy. Less is more.

4. On Facebook, people have to ask you to accept them as friends, and I've never accepted people I don't more or less know. (And I only IM a few people.) On Twitter, people can just start following you. There's something simple and friendly about that.

5. That anyone can follow you affects what you're willing to write. I'm interested to see what I will write under those conditions.

6. Twitter could be used interactively with blogging, in ways that I think I'll explore.

"Wikipedia's bureaucracy is distinctly, fearsomely awful."

"The site, which dictates the online reputation of countless living people and companies, itself operates by rules that are completely incomprehensible, determined by a self-appointed group of volunteer editors who can seldom stop arguing over obscurities to explain their ways to outsiders."

Wow. Jimmy Wales, ousted? By "Sue Gardner, a Gothy, spider-tattooed Canadian pop-culture expert who now runs the site"? Bizarre!

UPDATE: I get email that seems to be from Jimmy Wales:

Valleywag routinely prints absolutely false stories. There is absolutely no truth to this story - or most of the things in it.

The truth is that my reappointment to the board, quite routine and unanimous, was publicly announced a week ago. Sue Gardner and I have an excellent working relationship, like, really really excellent.

It's a little alarming that anyone reads it at all. I would file a libel suit agianst them, except, well, you're a law professor so you know the difficulties of that.

People send fake email too. What do I know? The address looks Wikipediaish, and yet when I Google it, I get nothing. When I Google my own email addresses, something always comes up. I don't want the real Jimmy Wales emailing me about absolutely fake email addresses.... and not threatening lawsuits... etc.etc...

UPDATE 2: Jimmy Wales emails: "Please don't quote me." Well, that's rich! Why email me other than to seek a correction? In blogging, we don't take things down. We just continue the flow. This isn't Wikipedia.... The hell!

"The real problem with literary types is..."

"... that the painstakingly detailed analysis of relationships required to understand or even to produce top notch novels can't be turned off when applied to one's spouse, or one's children. Even though you have to tell yourself they are not the same thing. One is an abstract, parallel world, where the rules are similar, but not the same. If a human being has a port wine stain on his forehead, it is a random accident of birth, but if you put one on a character in a novel, either you are a rank amateur, or the stain means something like 'mark of Cain,' etc. Or, to use Chekov's example, if you walk into somebody's house in real life, and they have a gun displayed on the wall, there is no guarantee that it is going to go off an kill somebody you know in the course of your relationship with the person, but in a novel, if there is a gun on the wall, it is going to go off and is going to affect somebody somehow."

Said Barlycorn, John, commenting on a post written by my son John and hitting me — the ex-wife of a novelist — way too close to home.

Scroll up to the post for a great Bertrand Russell quote about the happiness of the man of science.

So Harry Reid pressured Blagojevich not to appoint Jesse Jackson, Jr. — AKA "Candidate 5."

This happened before Blago's arrest. According to the Chicago Tribune. The reason — which does not make Reid look bad — is that Reid didn't think Jackson could win in a statewide election. It's that whole statewide election problem that seems to account for the lack of black Senators (when there are plenty of blacks in the House of Representatives).

But Blagojevich felt pressured to appoint a black person to Barack Obama's seat. It's one thing when only white candidates win those statewide elections, quite another for a Governor with the appointment power to pass over all the most prominent black politicians in his party.

The structural problem is obvious. Congressional districts are drawn to increase the power of black voters, with majority minority districts, and then the district is won by a black politician who designs his policies to appeal most strongly to these voters. In 2001, the radical Bobby Rush trounced Barack Obama in a congressional primary race:

Mr. Rush won the primary with 61.02 percent of the vote; Mr. Obama had just over 30 percent. Mr. Obama was favored by whites but lost among blacks, Mr. Lester said. Looking back, some say the magnitude of the loss reflected Mr. Obama’s failure to connect with black, working-class voters. Mr. Mikva said, “It indicated that he had not made his mark in the African-American community and didn’t particularly have a style that resonated there.”

Obama — the black politician who is atypically popular with white voters — was able to move directly to the Senate, bypassing the House. But the House has plenty of black representatives who, despite their accomplishments, can't move up to the Senate — at least not without a boost from a Governor with an empty seat to fill. And that Governor is pressured by his party not to put the black congresssman in the slot because he'll be too easy to defeat in the next statewide election. Ironically, what was supposed to increase the number of blacks in Congress works to keep them in the House.

I'm beginning to feel that Jackson was ripped off. Wasn't he the natural choice for the seat?

***

Meanwhile, over at the Chicago-Sun Times, Roland Burris said "We are the senator."

"There is no confrontation here, there is no antagonism here," Burris said in a phone interview from Chicago. "And so we are proceeding very diplomatically, and we are proceeding with all concern about not creating any type of circus that will entertain the media."

A circus? Will there be clowns???