President Obama's lackluster speech to the Democratic caucus.

I watched this live, and I was struck by the dullness of the crowd as they listened to words that were supposed to stir them up. This part, especially:

Sometimes I think about how I got involved in politics. I didn’t think of myself as a potential politician when I get out of college.... I was skeptical about politics and politicians, just like a lot of Americans are skeptical about politics and politicians are right now....

And I decided finally to get involved because I realized if I wasn’t willing to step up and be true to the things I believe in, then the system wouldn’t change. Every single one of you had that same kind of moment at the beginning of your careers. Maybe it was just listening to stories in your neighborhood about what was happening to people who’d been laid off of work. Maybe it was your own family experience, somebody got sick and didn’t have health care and you said something should change.

Something inspired you to get involved, and something inspired you to be a Democrat....

That really should have brought a big cheer. Obama seemed to expect something there. But he had to go on....

... instead of running as a Republican. 

Still no response.

Because somewhere deep in your heart you said to yourself, I believe in an America in which we don’t just look out for ourselves, that we don’t just tell people you’re on your own, that we are proud of our individualism, we are proud of our liberty, but we also have a sense of neighborliness and a sense of community -- (applause)....

Finally some applause. It's as if they'd forgotten what being a Democrat was supposed to mean, and he had to define it for them.

And then there was the "don't do it for me" part:

But if you agree that the system is not working for ordinary families, if you’ve heard the same stories that I’ve heard everywhere, all across the country, then help us fix this system. Don't do it for me. Don’t do it for Nancy Pelosi or Harry Reid. Do it for all those people out there who are struggling....

Do it for them. Do it for people who are really scared right now....

Don’t do it for me. Don’t do it for the Democratic Party. Do it for the American people. They’re the ones who are looking for action right now. (Applause.

This is what's known as protesting too much. You know damned well he needs them to do it for him and for the Party.

"Controversial propositions."

With health care politics raging, it's refreshing to debate over something — anything — else, and here, John Hinderaker has just listed a bunch of controversial things he feels like asserting are true. (Via Instapundit.) I'm going to respond to the items that it amuses me to respond to.

* Much as Bob Dylan was the most authentic spokesman for his generation, Taylor Swift is the most authentic spokesman for hers.

Well, that's a trick assertion, since Bob Dylan was never about authenticity:

During the first half of the concert, after singing "Gates of Eden," Dylan got into a little riff about how the song shouldn't scare anybody, that it was only Halloween, and that he had his Bob Dylan mask on. "I'm masquerading!" he joked, elongating the second word into a laugh. The joke was serious. Bob Dylan, né Zimmerman, brilliantly cultivated his celebrity, but he was really an artist and entertainer, a man behind a mask, a great entertainer, maybe, but basically just that—someone who threw words together, astounding as they were. The burden of being something else — a guru, a political theorist, "the voice of a generation," as he facetiously put it in an interview a few years ago — was too much to ask of anyone.

But no, it's not a trick assertion because he said "most authentic." Or is it that we Baby Boomers were raging phonies, and the biggest phony would thus be the most authentic. As for Taylor Swift, she seems like a nice person. Is she bland or am I jaded to find her too bland to care about? Is one more or less authentic when nice and bland?

So, my proposition is: Authenticity is bogus.

Back to Hinderaker:

* The three most desirable actresses in movie history are Paulette Goddard, Anna Karina and Catherine Zeta-Jones.

"Desirability" isn't a good abstraction. Hinderaker likes the brunette gamine. 

* London is the world's greatest city, and Israel is the world's most exciting place.

I can live without that kind of excitement. Have you noticed Indiana?

* America's youth have never been the same since Saturday morning television went from real programming (Fury, Sky King, the Cisco Kid, etc.) to cartoons.

I can't even remember that those shows were on in the morning. When I think about "Sky King," I remember this from Bill Bryson's "Life and Times of the Thunderbolt Kid": "Even at six years old, and even in an age as intellectually undemanding as the 1950s, you didn't have to be hugely astute to see that a flying cowboy was a fairly flimsy premise for an action series. Sky could only capture villains who lingered at the edge of grassy landing strips and to whom it didn't occur to run for it until Sky had landed, taxied to a safe halt, climbed down from the cockpit, assumed an authoritative stance, and shouted 'Okay, boys, freeze!' — a process that took a minute or two, for Kirby Grant was not, it must be said, in the first flush of youth." Now, I have to admit, I didn't think about that at the time. What I thought about was how it seemed that there was a competition between "Sky King" and "Whirlybirds" and that everyone had an opinion about whether they preferred airplanes or helicopters. I was adamantly helicopterist.

So my controversial proposition will be: The best people prefer helicopters to airplanes. 

* The only good lawyer show in the history of television was Perry Mason.

False. "The Defenders." That was the good one. 

* The smartest person whom most Americans see on a regular basis is Simon Cowell.

Ha. Maybe. I'm going with a corollary: Americans are better able to enjoy displays of intelligence that come with a British accent. And: What seems especially smart about Cowell is that he's willing to come right out and say — quite directly — things that are true. He gets away with doing that on television because he's got a British accent. An American panelist with the same amount of time to express an opinion will need to blow at least half of it on blather intended to make us feel that he is a nice (and normal) person.

That's all I've got to say. Sorry I didn't take the bait on any of Hinderaker's historical propositions — the best and worst characters in history and so forth. Or, no, I can make one very grand assertion: The best and the worst human beings who ever lived were undoubtedly shunned by most people and forgotten soon after they died.

Megan McArdle was just trying to explain the nefarious "doc fix," and now she's stuck fending off a wave of stupid with the dreaded rhetorical device "um."

The post — "Politico's 'Doc Fix' Memo: Fake, But Accurate?" — now begins with a sadly urgent "update":

Update:  Please READ THE POST before launching into your attacks.  Hint:  the headline is name checking a famous quote, not suggesting that this was a valid idea.  Had you read the post before beginning your cringe-inducing denunciations of my "hypocrisy", you would have, um, known that.

The life of a blogger is tough. It's not easy, as some people seem to think. You work hard crafting snark, and nobody understands it! You write updates beating readers over the head with your point, and other bloggers needle you for being pissy and obvious....

"Can the House vote to amend something that isn't the law, as the Senate bill will not be law before the president's signature?"

"The Rules Committee meeting turned into mass confusion":

Democratic Rep. Sander Levin [said] "We're going to be amending the law"...

[Democratic Rep. Henry] Waxman added, "We change current law, and the current law will be the Senate bill once it's voted on in the House."

But it won't be law until the president signs it.

This is different from the problem discussed in the Michael McConnell post. McConnell's argument was based on the necessity of seeing the 2 bills as one. This new problem arises when you assume there are 2 bills. If a separate bill is just a package of amendments, and if it must be aimed at "current law," then you can't merge the vote, because even if the Senate bill is "deemed" passed, putting it first in time before the passing of the package of amendments, there's no procedural trickery that can get the President's signature into that time sequence. Even if you can fiddle with time somewhat, you can't do that.

UPDATE: "Democratic lawmakers and an aide to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif., say they've dropped plans for an indirect vote that would have relied on a legislative maneuver to give their OK to the Senate's version of health care legislation." Good. So, now, once it is undeniable that the House is passing the Senate bill, will the votes be there?

Meade goes to Washington: Pictures from the Capitol, from just a few minutes ago.

I just spoke to Meade, who arrived in Washington, D.C., after a 22-hour bus ride, in time for the protest at the Capitol. He's taking pictures and video, but what I have right now is from the iPhone:



I think the yellow flags say "Don't Tread on Me" (or as we say around here: Don't Tread on Meade).



Nice soviet-style graphics in this one:



This shows the crowd-size:



Consider that the weather is absolutely beautiful — and either discount the crowd-size or get over there and make it bigger.

I love this guy:



He had a whole traffic-sign theme going:



Meade got his name as David Rothwell — from the eastern shore of Maryland.

And I really love this guy:



Citizen Meade!

I spoke to him from the scene, where the phone battery is close to dying. I'll put up the video of the phone call in a minute, but basically he's having a great time amongst the right-wingers who, he assures me, are not crazy.

ADDED: Here's the video of the phone call:



And Meade texts that he'd like you to see this:

Michael McConnell states the constitutional problem with the "deem and pass" more clearly and concisely than anyone can explain what the "deem and pass" is.

Is that a clue that something really devious is going on?

Article I, Section 7 clearly states that bills cannot be presented to the president for signature unless they have been approved by both houses of Congress in the same form. If the House approves the Senate bill in the same legislation by which it approves changes to the Senate bill, it will fail that requirement.

The actual constitutional text is: "Every Bill which shall have passed the House of Representatives and the Senate, shall, before it become a Law, be presented to the President of the United States."

No one doubts that the House can consolidate two bills in a single measure; the question is whether, having done so, it may then hive the resulting bill into two parts, treating one part as an enrolled bill ready for presidential signature and the other part as a House bill ready for senatorial consideration. That seems inconsistent with the principle that the president may sign only bills in the exact form that they have passed both houses. A combination of two bills is not in "the same form" as either bill separately.

McConnell is fending off the argument that the House, under Article I, §5 ("Each House may determine the Rules of its Proceedings"), has the authority to bundle 2 bills together and vote on them at the same time. He also must contend with the argument — which has some case law in support — that the House makes the final call on the meaning of the Constitution in this area.

Read lawprof Jack Balkin's response to McConnell:

As I understand the rule in question, it does not actually "consolidate two bills into a single measure." Rather, it says that once the House votes on the reconciliation measure, it also votes on the Senate Bill....

McConnell's objection is formalist: He concedes that the House could have separate votes on both bills, and send one to the President and the other to the Senate. His sole objection is that the House leadership has decided to vote on them together using a single procedural rule.

But if he wants to make that kind of formalist argument, the House has an equally formalist rejoinder: The use of this particular procedural rule does not consolidate the two measures into a single measure. It just consolidates a vote on the two measures. In fact, the language of the rule actually preserves their separate character; it refers to the language of the reconciliation measure and the Senate bill separately.

What the leaders of the House would say is that McConnell has made a basic mistake: He has confused a bill with an internal rule for voting on a bill....

... The Constitution leaves to Congress to decide how to authenticate bills, and the Court won't second-guess the evidence....

What I've observed is that the Supreme Court employs formalistic-sounding arguments as a convention of opinion-writing when it is confronting Congress over matters like this and finding something unconstitutional. But, I think, a judicial intuition that something is amiss precedes the opinion-writing, and that intuition has to do with much more than a parsing of the text. As Balkin shows, you can go either way with the text if you want. The deeper question is whether the procedure deprives us — the people — of a structural safeguard that would protect us from the abuse of power. Is this something that matters, something we should care about, something that operates to preserve the accountability of our representatives?  And the answer to that question must be disaggregated from the question whether we like the substance of the bill/bills. If you go with Balkin because you want the health care reform, or with McConnell because you don't, then you are not talking about the Constitution.

McConnell's main aim is to create doubt about the "deem and pass" and thereby affect the vote in the House. He ends his op-ed:

Will wavering House members want to use this procedure when there is a nontrivial probability that the courts will render their political sacrifice wasted effort? To hazard that risk, the House leadership must have a powerful motive to avoid a straightforward vote.

Whether you want to think about the Constitution or not, you may ask: If this reform really is desirable, why are they doing it in such a bizarre way? The constitutional questions add heft to that question. If McConnell's interpretation is good, the procedure is all the more bizarre, and the doubts that arise are aggravated. If Balkin's right, then everything's fine, calm down, let it go. They are talking about law, but they are talking to Congress, trying to affect the vote. Predictions about what courts will and will not do play into the present debate.

What seems most important to me, both politically and in answering the constitutional question (if it, ultimately, becomes necessary), is whether the members of the House of Representatives understand and make it absolutely transparent that what they are doing is voting on 2 bills and that the Senate bill, if approved, will go independently and directly to the President for signature, and that, upon the President's signature, that bill will become law on its own, without any regard to whether that other bill ever makes it through the Senate and into law later on.

If the members of the House of Representatives are going to deny that they voted for the Senate bill that became law (on its own) or if they will say that they were somehow caught unaware or betrayed by the Senate or tricked, then I think the rule is unconstitutional. But if they cannot use the rule that way — as political cover — why use it at all?

It's the first day of spring.

Yesterday, the last day of winter, I was barefoot when I walked to the end of the driveway to kiss you goodbye. You slept on the bus, and I slept without you for the first time in our marriage and woke to a first day of spring that looked like this....



The table is set up for warm breakfasts for 2, but I'm cooking oatmeal for one, sitting elsewhere, and awaiting your missives from the Tea Party.

At the Last-Year's-Sandwich Nightclub...

... I'm thinking about how much fun we had exactly one year ago. But you can talk about anything.

"Here's the famous banned butcher cover. You can sell it for $11m dollars."

So wrote John Lennon. And now, the item is offered for sale, at $11 million, naturally.

(If John Lennon really wrote "$11m dollars," he made a common redundancy error.)

The photograph — which, btw, is offal — may top the list of the most expensive Beatles memorabilia, which currently looks like this:

#5, John Lennon's talisman necklace...

#4, Gibson SG guitar played by George Harrison and John Lennon...

#3, A hand painted Beatles Sgt. Pepper's drum skin...

#2, John Lennon's Steinway piano...

#1, John Lennon's hand painted Rolls Royce Phantom V...

Heavy on the John Lennon. Light on the Paul McCartney.

With the entire C-SPAN archive up on-line, what was the first thing I wanted to re-live?

This:

ADDED: Check out the memorable moments page, which includes:

Al Gore concession in 2000 election Bill Clinton 1987 press conference where he says he will not be a candidate in 1988 Barack Obama 2004 convention speech George W. Bush announcing the capture of Saddam Hussein Ronald Reagan and Gorbachev summit in late 1987. Clarence Thomas testifying that he did not watch Anita Hill testifying. Bill Clinton grand jury testimony Dan Quayle and Murphy Brown Medal of Freedom Award to Margaret Thatcher George H.W. Bush inviting Dana Carvey to the White House where he impersonates Bush 1992

"Caterpillar Inc. said the health-care overhaul legislation being considered by the U.S. House of Representatives would increase the company's health-care costs by more than $100 million in the first year alone."

"In a letter Thursday to House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and House Republican Leader John Boehner of Ohio, Caterpillar urged lawmakers to vote against the plan 'because of the substantial cost burdens it would place on our shareholders, employees and retirees.' Caterpillar, the world's largest construction machinery manufacturer by sales, said it's particularly opposed to provisions in the bill that would expand Medicare taxes and mandate insurance coverage. The legislation would require nearly all companies to provide health insurance for their employees or face large fines."

Oh, but after the health care bill is passed, Congress and the President are going to focus on jobs.

"On the road to Demon Pass, our leader encounters a Baier."

Ha.

"I am calling to all of you freedom-loving Americans to come once again to Washington D.C. to gather on the Capitol steps on Saturday, at 12 o’clock noon."

Writes Jon Voight. Are you going? Are you getting on that Greyhound bus around now and traveling overnight to arrive in D.C. in the morning? Ah! You are! Send me messages and photographs... and then get on the bus Saturday night and sleep your way back home to me.

The last part of that applies only to Meade. As for everyone else, yeah, go ahead and get on that bus/plane or in that car if that's what you think you should do.

People who have deep meaningful conversations are happier.

Assuming this is true...

“We found this so interesting, because it could have gone the other way — it could have been, ‘Don’t worry, be happy’ — as long as you surf on the shallow level of life you’re happy, and if you go into the existential depths you’ll be unhappy,” [said Matthias Mehl, a psychologist at the University of Arizona].

... is it because deep meaningful conversations cause happiness or happiness causes deep meaning conversations?

[Mehl said that] substantive conversation seemed to hold the key to happiness for two main reasons: both because human beings are driven to find and create meaning in their lives, and because we are social animals who want and need to connect with other people.

“By engaging in meaningful conversations, we manage to impose meaning on an otherwise pretty chaotic world,” Dr. Mehl said. “And interpersonally, as you find this meaning, you bond with your interactive partner, and we know that interpersonal connection and integration is a core fundamental foundation of happiness.”...

“...Can we make people happier by asking them, for the next five days, to have one extra substantive conversation every day?”

I don't know if conversations in blog comments sections count, but go deep and report back in 5 days.

Fess Parker, King of the Wild Frontier.

The hero of our childhood has died. Fess Parker was 85.

"I must say that I find the phrase 'Final March' a bit ominous..."

"... sort of a combination of the more common phrases 'Death March' and 'Final Solution.'"