Thoughts on Politics, Culture, Books, Sports and Anything Else Your Humble Author Happens to Think Is Interesting
"It profits me but little that a vigilant authority always protects the tranquillity of my pleasures and constantly averts all dangers from my path, without my care or concern, if this same authority is the absolute master of my liberty and my life."
Mubarek has finally stepped down, this time apparently for real.
I reiterate Edmund Burke's 221 year-old caution:
When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before venture publicly to congratulate men on a blessing, that they have really received one.
An interesting set of birthdays today. First, Burt Reynolds turns 74. It's hard to overstate how big Reynolds was in the 1970s, or how badly that reflects on American culture of that era. Were the late 1970s of Jimmy Carter in the White House, the Bee Gees on the radio, and Burt Reynolds movies like Smokey and the Bandit or The Cannonball Run in the theaters the nadir of Western Civilization? I'd be willing to make that argument. But he was great in a great movie, Deliverance:
It's also Jeb Bush's birthday. Jeb was born in 1953, which makes him 57 now, and 59 in January 2013, when he would be inaugurated (if he were to run for President, that is). Is that oo old? No. But would he be too old in 2016? At age 63, I'd say that's getting pretty close. In other words, methinks it's now or never, and my prediction is... never. He won't run.
Ironically, it's also Sarah Palin's birthday. Palin, by contrast, is only 47, so she has plenty of time to build a resume before running again, and she may choose not to run this time against an incumbent Obama. On the other hand, Obama, like Clinton before him, proved that you never want to wait to run, and instead that you should always strike while your iron is hot. Otherwise, you're yesterday's news. (Ask Dan Quayle.)
Moving back to the Hollywood portion of the program, it's also Carey Lowell's birthday, who is 49, a fact I find astonishing. Lowell was the ingenue for a long time on Law and Order for, well, obvious reasons.
Along the same lines, it's Jennifer Aniston's birthday, who turns 42. Aniston has always had a soft spot in my heart for somewhat odd reasons.... she reminds me of friends at work who may have missed the window for having children and who seem (at least from a very very remote vantage) to be unhappy about it. I could be wrong.
Finally, Damian Lewis turns 40 today. Lewis was the British actor who played the great American hero Dick Winters in the HBO series Band of Brothers. Here's a clip of Winters/Lewis on D-Day:
Can't have starlets everyday. Here are the girlies, with a friend, sledding last Sunday, an hour or so before the start of the Super Bowl:
Winter in Wisconsin has its trade-offs, of course, but what could be better than sledding with your kids on Super Bowl Sunday and then watching the Packers win?
Leon Panetta, the Obama administration's Director of the CIA, apparently testified yesterday before Congress about the supposedly impending removal of Hosni Mubarek as Egypt's President, based on media reports. If all the CIA is doing is surfing the web to find out what Anderson Cooper knows, what exactly do we have a CIA for?
This was compounded by the Director National Intelligence, James Clapper, testifying that the Muslim Brotherhood is a "secular" organization. Huh? It has the freaking word "Muslim" in the name! The Muslim Brotherhood isn't al Qaeda, but it is Islamist -- they are essentially competitors for the hearts and minds of Islam.
Our country is, as the saying goes, in the very best of hands.
Great game last night, much better than the pundits expected. Duke pulled it out with 34 points from their great senior, Nolan Smith, and 22 from their transfer sophomore Seth Curry (above), who is the brother of NBA star Stephon Curry. Carolina has been coming on in ACC play, and they gave the Blue Devils a hell of a game, and probably should have won. Duke will have to play much better to beat them in Chapel Hill next month in the final game of the regular season, which will likely decide the regular season championship.
Just to put it in perspective... North Carolina is supposedly "down" this year, but their starting five were ranked as follows in the Rivals.com Top 150 recruits over the past three years: Harrison Barnes (#2 - 2010), John Henson (#5 - 2009), Kendall Marshall (#32 - 2010), Tyler Zeller (#33 - 2008), and Dexter Strickland (#34 - 2009). In other words, they are very very good players who were very highly recruited coming out of college. People can fail to develop, of course, or they can develop beyond the level they were recruited --Curry, for instance, wasn't in the Top 150 three years ago, and started his college career at Libery University. And the marginal perceived differences between highly ranked recruits at age 17 can be entirely different a few years later --in 2007, when Duke's Kyle Singler was the number five recruit in the country, Blake Griffin, an NBA All-Star and likely Rookie of the Year, was only the number 23 recruit.
But still... North Carolina is awfully good and awfully dangerous. See you in March.
Awhile back I noted that a partner of mine used to have in his office a copy of the book The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, and that we often have as an issue in our cases how to explain to a jury in simple, visual terms a complicated quantitative analysis. In thinking about the budget cuts proposed by President Obama -- $775 million on a $3.8 trillion budget -- an amount that is literally chicken feed, I think the blogger Doug Ross has hit on a great way to visualize how little Obama is willing to do. Here are the budget cuts proposed by Obama (they're in green, while the budgeted spending and deficit spending left are in blue and red):
Can't see the cuts, can you? So Ross blows up the graph ten times:
Still can't see the cuts, can you? So Ross blows the graph up 100 times:
Now you can see them... a little sliver out of a huge ocean of government spending.
It's not enough, not nearly enough. Until we can see and feel federal government spending decreasing -- and it won't be painless, that's the whole point -- don't listen to anyone telling you they're willing to "cut" spending.
Hosni Mubarek, the President of Egypt, is supposedly stepping down today, after widespread demonstrations for "democracy" in the streets of Cairo. A "joint military council" will take over, comprised of the minister of defense, Field Marshal Hussein Tantawi -- who stands atop the military hierarchy -- along with the military's chief of staff, the chief of operations, and commanders of the Army, Navy, Air Force and Air Defenses.
This means, for an undetermined period, that the Egyptian Army will control the country. Is this a good or a bad thing? Does it tend toward more democracy? And, most importantly, in a country where radical Islamists under the umbrella of the Muslim Brotherhood are a significant, organized and highly vocal minority, is "democracy" necessarily a good thing?
It is at times like these that one reverts to the wisdom of earlier times, and specifically, Edmund Burke's 1790 classic, Reflections on the Revolution in France:
When I see the spirit of liberty in action, I see a strong principle at work; and this, for a while, is all I can possibly know of it. The wild gas, the fixed air is plainly broke loose: but we ought to suspend our judgments until the first effervescence is a little subsided, till the liquor is cleared, and until we see something deeper than the agitation of the troubled and frothy surface. I must be tolerably sure, before venture publicly to congratulate men on a blessing, that they have really received one.
UPDATE:
Well, Mubarek didn't quite step down, and it doesn't seem like the protesters are going to buy his charade of handing off power to his Vice President, Omar Suleiman, who after all is Mubarek's right-hand man. The mob is angry (see below -- showing the bottom of your shoes is a grave insult in the Arabic world) and what happens next is anyone's guess.
My beautiful wife is a big fan of the satellite radio station called "Coffeehouse," which plays mostly acoustic guitar songs that would appeal to what I would call the "hipeoisie" -- people who are nostalgic for a college coffeehouse lifestyle. On the other hand, it's pretty good music, and I listen to it occasionally too when my son is not inflicting yet another Bruce Springsteen song on me. Anyway, she mentioned a name that I had not heard for years, Edie Brickell, who I recall having one hit song and then marrying Paul Simon. According to Wikipedia (is there any other source for casual information anymore?), she's now about to turn 45 (in March), her big hit "What I Am" was 23 years ago (eek!), and she's still married to Simon (they have three kids). Again, time flies.
Here's the song, which still is pretty catchy, when she performed it on Saturday Night Live:
A mishmash of birthdays. Boris Pasternak, the Russian author of Dr. Zhivago, was born today in 1890. Dr. Zhivago was an enormous bestseller in the late 1950s after being smuggled out of Russia by Isaiah Berlin (Berlin, a "historian of ideas," is one of my intellectual heroes, and his essay on Tolstoy, "The Hedgehog and the Fox," is one of the works that has most influenced me). Pasternak won the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1958 on the strength of Dr. Zhivago (he had mostly been known as a poet in Russia), and with the help of Western intelligence agencies, who made sure that the novel was submitted to the Nobel Committee in time for consideration, in hopes that it would prove (as it did) to be an anti-communist propaganda triumph.
It's also the birthday of another great writer, Bertolt Brecht, born in 1898. Brecht, a lifelong communist, was also perhaps the most prominent German intellectual anti-fascist, and fled Germany upon the ascent of the Nazis in 1933. Brecht's most famous work is likely The Threepenny Opera, from the late 1920s, which he wrote with the composer Kurt Weill. Here is the most famous song from the opera, "Mackie Messer," or "Mack the Knife," in the original German:
Amazingly -- time flies, I guess -- perhaps the greatest swimmer ever, Mark Spitz, turns 60 today. Spitz won 7 gold medals in the 1972 Olympics, setting new world records in each event. This was the Olympics that was marred by the murders of eleven Israeli athletes and coaches by Palestinian terrorists. Spitz was 22 at the time, and also Jewish, and had to be evacuated from the Olympic Village under armed guards in fear for his safety.
Finally, it's Glenn Beck's birthday today. Beck is 45. Has he eclipsed Rush Limbaugh as the most powerful conservative talk show host? Maybe, maybe not. Limbaugh speaks, I think, more to the Chamber of Commerce, small business Republican, while Beck speaks a little bit more to the gold standard, Ayn Rand, evangelical hard (and somewhat loony) right. It seems strange that, after only twenty years or so of right-wing talk radio, that there are "establishment" talkers (Limbaugh) and "insurgent" talkers (Beck), but that's how I see it. Both Limbaugh and Beck are, needless to say, very funny, which to me accounts in large measure for their appeal, and which liberals have never been able to understand.
Now that the Super Bowl is over, and before "March Madness" heats up, the next order of business is for the St. Louis Cardinals to re-sign Albert Pujols to a long-term deal that will keep him in St. Louis for the rest of his career. The stakes are huge. For Albert, he wants and deserves to be the highest paid player in baseball. His career numbers speak for themselves: his average year for the past ten years has been 41 HRs, 123 RBIs, and a .331 batting average. In more "advanced statistical" measures, Pujols is also ridiculous: a lifetime OPS (on base plus slugging) of 1.050 and an average WAR (wins against replacement) of 8.4 per year. For the Cardinals the stakes are even higher. Pujols is an icon in St. Louis, probably the most beloved Cardinal since Stan Musial. He has to be re-signed. But at what cost? If you pay Pujols too much, you won't be able to pay enough good players around him to be competitive. And Pujols will be 32 when the contract starts. How long can you afford him and when will he start the inevitable decline phase of his career (even harder to figure now in the post-steroids era). In year four of the contract, at age 35, will Pujols be worth $30 million? Will he still be an elite player? And, as a first baseman, he plays a position where you can find cheaper substitutes who can give you 25-30 HRs and 90-100 RBIs.
In any event, Pujols is in the driver's seat. My offer would be something like the following. $30 million a year for five years (paying for Pujols' prime at a level that would make him the highest paid player in baseball history). $20 million a year for 3 years after that (paying a slightly discounted amount for Pujols' decline phase, which should still be pretty good since he's so good to begin with). $10 million a year for 2 years for Pujols' swan song years. Then $3 million a year for 40 years after that to serve as the Cardinals' elder statesman and "special consultant." Total value is $350 million, which again would make it the biggest contract in baseball history, but you wouldn't be overpaying him and skewing your payroll in his declining years.
Update:
Here is an article from the Post-Dispatch about a nice evening Pujols had with a local family who won a dinner cooked by Dee-Dee Pujols at Albert's charity golf outing. This kind of thing may be marginally manufactured by a good PR guy for Albert, and it appears suspiciously at a fairly crucial moment in the negotiations (Albert has said that he won't negotiate once spring training starts), but it still highlights how attached the community is to Pujols, and how horrible it would be if he left.
Nate Silver of the New York Times has prepared a moderately useful graphic representation of the current GOP Presidential field for 2012 that suggests that defeating Obama may be easier said than done. The upshot: Obama would lose to a generic conservative Republican, but you can't run a genre, you have to run a person, and there's no perfect candidate out there.
The y-axis is how much of an insider or outsider the candidate is; the x-axis is how moderate to conservative the candidate is. The size of the circle is how currently popular or powerful the candidate is. The color of the circles represents the region the candidate hails from: Northeast is blue; South is red; Midwest is green; and West is yellow.
The GOP leaders who most interest me aren't on the graph: Chris Christie and Paul Ryan. Of those who are on the list, the candidates who most interest me on the right side of the graph are John Bolton and Rick Santorum, for their foreign policy and social issues (pro-life) bona fides, respectively. I don't believe either can win -- as the smallness of their circles suggests -- although I do think Santorum, had he not lost in 2006 in a horrible year for Republicans, would have been an obvious candidate for 2012 (he would have been 18 years into a distinguished Senate career from a key state, Pennsylvania). Instead, I fear that the two big circles in the upper left and lower right quadrants will suck all of the juice out of the race, and we'll have a Romney v. Palin match -- Eastern establishment moderate versus Western outsider conservative -- in which Romney will be the inevitable winner as the supposedly more "electable" alternative. But Romney is severely flawed due to the Massachusetts version of Obamacare he signed off on; he's Mormon (shouldn't matter, but it will); and he's distrusted as a flip-flopper by the social issues wing of the party (Evangelicals and Catholics).
Is this why there have been what can only be understood as trial balloons floated recently in National Review (here and here) about reviving the political career of Jeb Bush, the former governor of Florida and, of course, the son of you-know-who and the brother of you-know-who-II?
Update:
Hot Air also has an article up about Rick Perry, the Texas Governor, who is "oddly" focusing on what might be seen as hot-button national issues such as border security, abortion, eminent domain, balancing the state budget, and voter ID. If Jeb Bush and/or Rick Perry got into the race, there would be some excitement.
Having just watched the great BBC series Downton Abbey, I recalled a somewhat similar series set at an English country home just before World War I that came out in the late 1970s called Flambards. The series involved a girl who is a distant cousin of a landed family that, destitute, comes to live with them, only to find that the manor is itself heavily mortgaged and dilapidated, and that the two brothers of the family (who ultimately vie for her hand) hate each other. It was a lovely show with one of the weirdest theme songs ever.
Anyway, the girl, "Christina," was played by a young British actress, Christine McKenna, who like all of the really great young actresses in BBC shows, has never been heard from again.
Here is the theme song via Youtube. Sorry if you won't be able to get this out of your head.
Also, through the miracle of Amazon, you can get Flambards on DVD, and it's well worth a watch, particularly if you can't wait to see the next season of Downton Abbey.
According to The Hill, "President Obama's budget director outlined some of the 'touch choices' Obama is willing to make to cut spending in his 2012 budget request due out on Feb. 14. The piece details cuts that affect initiatives dear to the president: programs to help the poor and to clean up the Great Lakes near the president's home state of Illinois. The cuts are relatively small, however, in the larger scheme of things. In total, the $775 million in detailed cuts fall far short of demands by congressional Republicans and will do little toward tackling the deficit, which is estimated to be $1.5 trillion this year by the Congressional Budget Office."
$775 million... wow! Obama thinks we're stupid apparently, or innumerate, or both. Let's do the math... $775 million is about 1/20th of a percent -- that's 1/2000th -- of the federal deficit this year, and about 1/50th of a percent -- or 1/5000th -- of the total federal budget of roughly $3.8 trillion. But this is all so difficult -- he must imagine us thinking -- all these millions and billions and trillions; they all sound alike, so they must mean something.
But consider this analogy. Say I have a family of four and I make $50,000 a year, the median family income in the U.S. But say I am spending roughly $80,000 a year -- meaning I am "deficit spending" about $30,000 a year. And I go home to my wife and say that we need to make some "tough choices" because our current path is "unsustainable," so I am going to work toward cutting my deficit spending of $30,000 a year by cutting 1/20th of a percent of that deficit spending. Wow, she says, what a "tough choice"! What a man you are, honey, thanks for taking control of our family's finances! Then she gets out her calculator and figures out that one percent of $30,000 is $300, and 1/20th of $300 is $15. Fifteen bucks I'm going to cut. That will certainly put my family back on firmer ground. Maybe I'll cut out a McDonalds run in April sometime, and then another in October. Voila! Fiscal soundness awaits!
The President's "proposal" is chicken feed; it's simply not serious.
***
Rand Paul, the new senator from Kentucky, is acting like a real leader in his proposal for $500 billion cuts. That's at least in the same basic order of magnitude that we need. The problem is that we may be playing into Obama's hands politically. He will propose almost inconsequential cuts to a baseline that is already super-inflated after the 2009 stimulus. Then he will say over and over again that he was for "cuts." But he will make the Republicans do the heavy lifting in proposing real cuts that will really gore someone's ox. And then he will say that we are being "draconian" and "hurting the poor" and "starving children." Just wait.
The secretaries on my floor (whose opinions about matters of common sense are invaluable) agree that the Black Eyed Peas' halftime show at the Super Bowl was atrocious. Here are the last six Super Bowl halftime shows:
2005 - Paul McCartney
2006 - The Rolling Stones
2007 - Prince
2008 - Tom Petty
2009 - Bruce Springsteen
2010 - The Who
All of those (OK, maybe not Tom Petty) are all time great rock-and-roll acts, and all of them, for better or worse, can be counted on to play actual music on actual instruments competently. The Black Eyed Peas, by contrast, are overproduced synthetic studio rap and dance music. I can't imagine anyone listening to a whole album of their stuff, much less listening to their songs with pleasure 30 or 40 years from now. It was like they literally didn't know what they were doing out there in terms of entertaining a live audience on stage; they just stood around and did various strange movements in place -- not dancing anyway -- and shouted out strange things at odd times and called it music. Truly weird.
I'm not saying we should go back to the days of the Grambling Marching Band and Up With People, or Carol Channing and Al Hirt, but still.... wow, that was strange stuff.
The Packers held off the Steelers last night in what I believe will go down as one of the greatest Super Bowls ever, and as the start of a great run of Super Bowls for Aaron Rodgers and the Packers. The Packers will be the prohibitive favorite to repeat going into next year, when they will return running back Ryan Grant, tight end Jermichael Finley, inside linebacker Nick Barnett, linebackers Brandon Chillar, Brady Poppinga and Brad Jones, safeties Morgan Burnett, Derrrick Martin and Anthony Smith, and defensive ends Johnny Jolly, Justin Harrell and Mike Neal, all of whom were on injured reserve for all or most of 2010. (The Packers had a total of 15 players on injured reserve by the end of the season.) Grant, Finley, Barnett, Burnett, and Jolly have all been starters; Finley is a Pro-Bowl quality tight end. Add to that the fact that rookies Brian Bulaga (T), Andrew Quarless (TE), James Starks (RB), and Sam Shields (CB) are only going to get better, and that the Packers will add another 7-8 draft choices, and the Packers are going to be loaded next year.
And, of course, they have the best young quarterback in football, Aaron Rodgers.
Today is the 76th birthday of the great Hank Aaron -- the real home run champ with 755 lifetime HRs without steroids.
(To be fair, I think Barry Bonds is a great player, one of the greatest ever, who should be in the Hall of Fame. He used steroids in an era when a lot of players did, an era in which baseball looked the other way. I can't really blame him that much -- if I had an opportunity to make tens of millions of dollars playing baseball, I am pretty sure my morality wouldn't extend to not using a drug that is commonly prescribed for many valid medical purposes. But he's not the HR champ for the simple reason that he only beat Aaron by 7 HRs, and he hit 317 of those after age 35 when he was fairly obviously on the juice; Aaron hit only 245 after age 35. At age 30, Aaron had 366 HRs, while Bonds had only 292. Both great players, but Aaron wins the comparison when you consider only Bonds' "clean" years.)
In any event, Aaron was a truly great player and one of the most remarkably consistent players ever. From age 21 (in 1955) to age 39 (in 1973), Aaron never hit fewer than 24 HRs in a single year, hit fewer than 30 only four times, and had 38 or more HRs eleven times; he had more than 100 RBIs eleven times and scored more than 100 runs fifteen times; and his lowest slugging percentage in those 19 years was .498. He received MVP votes in every one of those years, but astonishingly only won one award, in 1957 with the Milwaukee Braves. He has also, by all accounts, always been a true gentleman.
Mike McCarthy, the coach of the Packers, who in my view is going to go down as one of the great coaches in NFL history. Calm, tough, smart, and values-driven, McCarthy is the perfect fit for blue-collar Green Bay and the Packers.
Super Bowl prediction: Packers in a minor blow-out, 34-13.
Lila Rose is the Pro-Life activist founder of Live Action who has been responsible for some remarkable "sting" operations against Planned Parenthood in recent weeks in which clinic employees provide helpful advice to a pimp about how to keep his underage prostitutes in business with abortions and birth control. It is one more step in the long march toward creating a culture in which abortion becomes like smoking -- legal perhaps but heavily regulated and essentially taboo in the wider society. Coming on the heels of the exposure of Kermit Gosnell's abortion abbatoir in Philadelphia, one might hope that the long march is accelerating. When will we reach the tipping point toward a pro-life society?
The birthdays today reflect the truth of life that the people we think of as heroes often are not moral exemplars in their real lives.
First, born in 1902, the flyer Charles Lindbergh, first man to cross the Atlantic solo. It is hard today to recapture just how huge Lindbergh was in 1927. But it is worth recalling too that Lindbergh was a key proponent of the America First movement that, had it prevailed, would have kept America out of World War II, and likely sacrificed Europe and England to the Nazis. Lindbergh's anti-war stance also had not-so-vaguely anti-Semitic overtones; he claimed that "both the British and the Jewish races, for reasons which are as understandable from their viewpoint as they are inadvisable from ours, for reasons which are not American, wish to involve us in the war."
It's also Lawrence Taylor's birthday. Born in 1959 -- good gracious, he's exactly my age -- Taylor is probably one of the five greatest football players of all time (Jim Brown, Dick Butkus, Jerry Rice, Joe Montana and Taylor would be my five). But he was also a cokehead and a serial abuser of women, and recently pled guilty to the misdemeanors of sexual misconduct and patronizing a prostitute for soliciting a 16 year-old. He will also have to register as a sex offender.
I always tell my son that he should look up to his grandfather and father and uncles, and his coaches and teachers.... in other words, men who he knows personally.... and not worship idols from pop culture or sports from afar. Too often they will disappoint.
Jessica Brown-Findlay is the young girl who plays the youngest daughter on the BBC series Downton Abbey, who is a bit of a suffragette in 1913 England. We've now finished watching it on PBS, and it was wonderful. I literally can't wait for the next season, but I suppose I must, since it won't be on here in America until probably winter of 2012.
Sunday will be Ronald Reagan's 100th birthday. Much has and will be written about Reagan -- see this nice piece by Stephen Hayward at National Review -- but to me there is no substitute for the man himself in his own words. So, here is Reagan's great "A Time for Choosing" speech in its entirety:
Listening to this speech, two thoughts come to mind. First, it seems plain to me that Reagan wrote this speech entirely himself. How many politicians do that anymore? Second, it also seems obvious to me that Reagan has high analytical intelligence. How is it then that Democrats two decades later would label him an "amiable dunce"? It has taken another two decades for the truth to win out, with a key moment coming when Reagan's handwritten radio speeches (below) were published in 2001, showing his deep intelligence, his consistent philosophy, and his precise writing style. People who continue to claim Reagan was unintelligent are simply dishonest. But then, we knew that, didn't we?
Truly mediocre birthdays today. Horace Greeley, the abolitionist newspaperman? Walter Bagehot, the British writer and economist? Fred Lynn of the Bosox? Bah.
It is, however, Blythe Danner's birthday. Born in 1943, Danner was the beautiful and husky-voiced actress who regularly showed up in relatively high-brow TV in the 1970s -- I remember her best as the love interest for Hawkeye Pierce in the TV version of M*A*S*H back when it was a good show (before Alan Alda took over writing it and turned the show into a mush of liberal piety). Danner is also the mother of Gwyneth Paltrow, which raises the question.... are they the hottest mother-daughter combination in Hollywood history? Consider:
I'd consider Danner-Paltrow to be a heavy favorite over Judy Garland and Liza Minnelli, although it's hard to argue against the proposition that Garland-Minnelli were much much more talented (Minnelli in Cabaret might be the greatest single performance by an actress in a movie musical in Hollywood history).
Who else? How about Goldie Hawn and Kate Hudson? Or Janet Leigh and Jamie Lee Curtis? I think I might still take Danner-Paltrow.
I missed blogging yesterday because we were digging out from under about two feet of snow here in beautiful Wisconsin. The snow was actually pretty light and granular, not slushy, so it wasn't too bad digging out -- just a lot of repetitive swipes with the old snow blower and, voila!, four hours later you're all cleared.
Anyway, I missed blogging about Groundhog's Day, which coincidentally is both the title of one of my favorite movies and my parents' anniversary. Here's a classic scene with Bill Murray and the groundhog driving:
Jonah Goldberg of National Review wrote a terrific analysis of Groundhog's Day a few years ago that argues that it is one of the greatest conservative (and Christian) movies ever. Well, maybe. But it's awfully funny.
The eldest sister and central romantic figure of Masterpiece Theatre's Downton Abbey is Lady Mary, played by a lovely young British actress, Michelle Dockery, who, like many young BBC actresses, is someone we'll probably never see again, notwithstanding how pretty and talented she is. It's a great show, and she's wonderful in it.
The Anchoress -- the blog name of Elizabeth Scalia at First Things -- has an absolutely essential post up about the media's shameless neglect of the obvious follow-up stories they might do in the aftermath of the discovery of the "baby charnel-house" (a quote from the Grand Jury's report) run by the abortion "Dr." Kermit Gosnell in Philadelphia. Here's the money quote, but, as they say, read it all:
Do a quick run-through of the search engines. Beyond some perfunctory coverage on the day the Gosnell story broke, there has been little attention paid, no follow-up by the mainstream media. This is an ugly story; it touches too many social shibboleths and indicts too many philosophies. The press wants Kermit Gosnell and his scissors to go away, and to that end they are simply not talking about him.
So, allow me to ask the impolitic question I have hinted at elsewhere: in choosing to look away, in choosing to under-report, in choosing to spin, minimize, excuse, and move-along when it comes to Kermit Gosnell—and to this whole subject of under-regulated abortion clinics, the debasement of women and the slaughter of living children—how are the press and those they protect by their silence any better than the Catholic bishops who, in decades past, looked away, under-reported, spun, minimized, excused, moved-along, and protected the repulsive predator-priests who have stolen innocence and roiled the community of faith?
Today's only notable birthday is also one of Hollywood's biggest stars ever, Clark Gable, born in 1901. I was talking with someone recently about the new version of True Grit and I gave them my take that while the script of the new one is better, the acting is better, the cinematography is better, etc., the 1969 version is still the classic version because Jeff Bridges is a terrific actor, but John Wayne is a Movie Star. There is something about a Movie Star that transcends acting, that jumps off the screen. It's magical, and you either have it or you don't. Gable had it too, like only a handful of actors ever -- my short list would be Gable, Cooper, Stewart, Tracy, Bogart, Cagney, Wayne, Fonda, Heston, Brando, Lancaster, Kirk Douglas (but not his son Michael), Newman, McQueen, Redford. Later great actors like DeNiro, Hoffman, Pacino and Duvall are close, but no cigar; they are artists, but not Movie Stars, in my book. Of that later generation, probably only Jack Nicholson quite measures up. Of the next generation, Clooney, Pitt, Cruise, etc.... I just don't see it. They couldn't do this scene and not have it look like a shadow of the original:
Roger Vinson, a senior judge in the United States District Court for the Northern District of Florida, today struck down Obamacare as unconstitutional in its entirety because (a) the individual mandate violates the Constitution's Commerce Clause because it purports to grant Congress the right to force an individual to buy health insurance; and (b) because, absent the individual mandate, the law as a whole is unintellligible (in legal terms, the individual mandate cannot be "severed" from the law as a whole). The money quote, which will get a lot of play going forward, is this passage from Judge Vinson's opinion:
It would be a radical departure from existing case law to hold that Congress can regulate inactivity under the Commerce Clause. If it has the power to compel an otherwise passive individual into a commercial transaction with a third party merely by asserting --- as was done in the Act --- that compelling the actual transaction is itself “commercial and economic in nature, and substantially affects interstate commerce” [see Act § 1501(a)(1)], it is not hyperbolizing to suggest that Congress could do almost anything it wanted. It is difficult to imagine that a nation which began, at least in part, as the result of opposition to a British mandate giving the East India Company a monopoly and imposing a nominal tax on all tea sold in America would have set out to create a government with the power to force people to buy tea in the first place. If Congress can penalize a passive individual for failing to engage in commerce, the enumeration of powers in the Constitution would have been in vain for it would be “difficult to perceive any limitation on federal power” [Lopez, supra, 514 U.S. at 564], and we would have a Constitution in name only. Surely this is not what the Founding Fathers could have intended. See id. at 592 (quoting Hamilton at the New York Convention that there would be just cause to reject the Constitution if it would allow the federal government to “penetrate the recesses of domestic life, and control, in all respects, the private conduct of individuals”) (Thomas, J., concurring).
Vinson has this just about perfect, but I can already hear the howls of displeasure welling up from the bowels of the mainstream media and the left tomorrow, in which they will make much hay out of Vinson's reference to the original tea party (and, by implication, to the current Tea Party), and the fact that he was appointed by Ronald Reagan, and the fact that he went to the Naval Academy and Vanderbilt Law School and was born in Kentucky. He'll be dismissed as a right-wing extremist and a Southerner and some may even snigger that he didn't go to Harvard or Yale. That's what the Left does when it has lost an argument.
The decision will no doubt be stayed pending appeal, and the appeal process is going to be a long one, perhaps lasting into the term of the next President, but this is a great day for freedom nevertheless. Hence.... "boo yeah!"
