And then out of nowhere I thought of Nielsen
We have George Will, a prominent conservative who expounds on baseball. Rush Limbaugh is a diehard NFL fan but this isn't nearly as famous as Will's baseball association. You'd have to actually listen to Rush to know about his football jones.

As far as I know, no other major U.S. sport has a big-name conservative trying to comment at length about it. Someone should rectify this. Wouldn't WFB's commentaries on the NBA just be through-the-roof Zen comedy?

The Zen of William F. Buckley
From the June 17, 2002, National Review, which (last night) I randomly picked up from a stack of magazines in our living room, some of the answers given by WFB in his "Notes and Asides" column. In each case the question is clear enough from context...

(If you're reading this blog, you probably know who William F. Buckley is. This particular column has always been a cross between Mr. Language Person and some guy answering his mail.)

Dear Mr. Shea: It is true. My grandfather was a law-and-order sheriff and a devout Democrat. His allegiance to the latter transcended the former, as witness that although he died in 1904, he voted for Lyndon Johnson in 1948.
Cordially, WFB

Dear Mr. Kennedy: I have no ear on that one, can't remember hearing about somebody "taking a decision." If I do, I will detain and ship him/her to you C.O.D.
Cordially, WFB

Dear Ms. Payne: You see "got" used so many ways; so does the dictionary. American Heritage gives 16 varieties.
Cordially, WFB

BONUS ZEN:
According to the back cover of this issue of NR,
Smart Investing and Catholic Values -- NOW YOU CAN HAVE BOTH

The Ave Maria Catholic Values Fund is an equity fund designed specifically for morally responsible [blah blah]

I think I'll stop posting in my own words and just spend several weeks on end block-quoting Rumsfeld
From this briefing:
Q: ...In order to defend prosperity in some parts of the world is there not a need to attack poverty in addition to all the other steps that you've taken?

Rumsfeld: Certainly there's a need to do that and I guess the question is how does one do that?

I was involved in the so-called war on poverty here in the United States and I've traveled the globe and seen just terrible poverty. I had a friend once and he was asked to chair a commission, an international committee, and the title of it was What Causes Poverty. He declined. He said I will do it but on one condition. The condition is that we change the title and I'll chair a committee on What Causes Prosperity. The reason he said that was, the title What Causes Poverty leaves the impression that the natural state of the world is for people to be prosperous and that for whatever reason there are prosperous people running around making people poor when you say what causes poverty. He looked at the world the other way. He said the natural state of people is to be relatively poor and that there are certain ways and things that can be done that can cause prosperity. They can create an environment that's hospitable to people gaining education and people gaining investments and people finding ways to contribute in a constructive way.

There are big portions of our globe that are so far behind the rest of the world that it is a dangerous thing. It is an unfortunate thing for those people. It's a heartbreaking thing.

The task for the developed world is to see that we do not just salve our consciences by finding ways like Lady Bountiful, we can give some country this or some country that which then is gone and disappears. But to the contrary, that we find ways to encourage countries to take the kinds of steps that create an environment that's hospitable to enterprise and to education so that the nation itself can do those things that will begin to ameliorate the kinds of terrible poverty that we see around the globe.

Certainly the United States has a responsibility as do the people from every nation in this room have the responsibility to contribute to that.

Being dissed, as a sign you're on the right track
The other day I saw a snide reference to "voucher school kids," somewhere on-line. When you're attacked like that, I suppose that means you're visible enough and relevant enough.

It's been awhile since Aaron McGruder smeared Condi Rice. I thought of that on walking past a newsstand with a banner headline about Nancy Pelosi.

If anyone other than Cheney runs with Bush in 2004, it better be her. (Rice, not Pelosi.)

Reaching-for-it Harry Potter allegory
This almost works but not quite. Ignoring the allegory for a moment and just sticking with Potter proper: I also think he's deeply overrated compared to Hermione et al, even though it's also true that Voldemort could not be defeated without him.

Potter does unite the efforts of a lot of really good people, just as W. unites Powell, Rumsfeld, Rice, and so on. That's what makes focusing on either figurehead so ironic.

Bulgarian anecdote
This in a nutshell is why Communism failed and also why I was relatively impatient with socialists in campus bull sessions.

Quote of the day
From David Frum, summarizing a report by Alan Greenspan (I first saw it mentioned by Susanna Cornett):

One year ago, the United States absorbed the most horrific attack on its own territory in its history: Pearl Harbor and the San Francisco earthquake all rolled into one. And yet, in the four quarters since the attack, the U.S. economy has posted an average growth rate of 3%.

There’s no comparing the characters of these two men, but on Greenspan’s evidence, Osama bin Laden managed to do less harm to the U.S. economy than President Jimmy Carter.

Heritability of Income
Here's the same article mentioned in a comment a couple posts back.

My top-of-head intuition is that the correlation is increasing a bit and that college admissions probably have a lot to do with it.

Granted, the correlation between high income and elite college attendance is weaker now than before (since Ivy schools are primarily about high academic achievement now rather than Old Boys' Networks), it looks as though it's still the case that if you're a Harvard "legacy," you're basically in. Meanwhile, because the best schools have gotten so much better -- and also their reputations -- the elite degree actually makes a bigger difference in expected earnings, especially these days when everyone is expected to get a college degree.

Not sure what to think of this; it's definitely not a good trend.

For obvious reasons I still want to believe that the opportunity is there for everyone to make a better life for themselves. (Immigrants certainly still believe this, "voting with their feet" and so on.)

My vague hierarchy of volunteer/activism priorities
It's been a long time since I donated my time to a cause. Money, sure, every once in awhile I'll drop $20 on the Salient or $50 if a GOP fundraising is sufficiently compelling (and not off-putting). But time, it's been too long. So (and by the way, this post was going to be a response to a comment but it started to run long), off the top of my head:

1. Any pro-life charity that focuses its energy on practical ways to make pregnancy-to-term doable rather than agitating for legal changes. Provide support -- financial, moral, logistical, and so on -- so that even within the framework of a "choice," the best choice actually does seem like the best.

2. The ASPCA or the like, basically any animal shelter or similar that focuses its resource on direct aid to animals rather than lobbying and litigation. (Hmm, #1 and #2 are pretty similar in a way.) These guys seem to need money more than human labor -- in Boston at least, they actually discouraged us from going to shelters because they feared getting sued if anyone got rabies. I have a major disconnect here, where I strongly believe in properly caring for animals but strongly disagree with the political agenda of PETA and the like. (The big difference between my take on animals and my take on small children -- or fetuses -- is how I evaluate the morality of killing one. Even then, it's possible to overestimate what the difference means.)

3. Any group that works to protect gay people from legal discrimination based on their sexual identity. (For example, laws preventing gays from adopting.) Of course there's a difference between preventing singularly bad treatment and supporting singularly good treatment -- I'd be as opposed to set-asides for gays as I am opposed to most affirmative action programs. But right now gays really do face discrimination, to a degree that ethnic minorities don't. I bet there are actually a lot of groups like this in & around SF.

Seriously, I think my big motivation here is some combination of establishing cred and making up for the people whose side I'm on most of the rest of the time. By and large I think Middle American consensus gets the big issues right. But Middle America is still wrong about how to handle homosexuality.

4. Work for a specific candidate. This should probably be higher but I have yet to come across any Californian who I felt strongly enough to support that way. Actually this is false; I feel nontrivial remorse over not realizing that Gray Davis would set up his attack machine even before the primaries. Maybe if I'd gone gung-ho for Riordan back a year ago, he'd have been less likely to lose to Bill Simon.

Obligatory Oklahoma anecdote: One year's governor's race featured a crook versus a Good Old Boy on the Democratic side, and a moderate businessman versus a hard-core religious guy in the GOP. I forget who the Good Old Boy was but the others were David Walters, Vince Orza, and Bill Price. I supported Orza but didn't actually go work for him -- well, this was 1990, so I'd have been 15 at the time. Orza lost the primary to Price. I think he'd have beaten Walters but Price lost badly and Walters was about as corrupt as your stereotypical Oklahoma governor, pre-Frank Keating. Price's daughter -- niece? -- went to Harvard; I think she dated Randy Fine. At most one of you knows who Randy Fine is. Orza was a businessman, owned a restaurant chain; Price ran ads attacking him for losing money in his first few years of operation. Never mind that EVERY business loses money at first before it becomes profitable in the long run.

Still on the subject of Oklahoma GOP primaries: I actually did do some work for Rob Johnson, not the Buffalo QB but rather a Tulsan, the second best candidate (of six) in the 1994 1st district congressional race, when Inhofe moved up to Senate. The most successful candidate, of course, was a certain NFL Hall of Famer. The big deal was whether he'd be held under 50%, to force a runoff, Johnson being a clear second. I forget whether there was a runoff or not but either way it was really close.

Incisive Metaphor of the Day
While she may be good at getting pious lefties into fits of insane rage, I've generally found [Ann] Coulter to be a Michael Moore of the right: a self-absorbed loudmouth dingbat with a great talent for witty invective and none whatsoever for coherent thought patterns.
--Whacking Day

Ironic quote of the day
Children under age 18 must have a parent or legal guardian's permission to submit their designs and for us to publish it along with their name.
--from the Planned Parenthood "Behind Every Choice There Is A Story" poster campaign, as mentioned by Best of the Web.

(OpinionJournal was also how I got to the story about the Berkeley kids but I think I read about it on Instapundit first, without bothering to follow the link then.)

On the indoctrination of children
As you've seen on the main blog I'm still pretty outraged about this.

It's one thing to encourage your kids to be politically aware, but when you not only feed them half-truths (if not outright lies) but also use their muddled perception of the world to convert them into a prop, that's just low.

Devil's advocate: Why is this worse than listening to Rush Limbaugh in the car when you drive your kids somewhere?

On nine-irons, sperm, and so on
Here's the actual article that led to my last main-blog post.

Glenn Reynolds makes the obvious "A Handmaid's Tale in reverse" reference.

(Digression: I know at least one person whose skittishness and irrational political stances shot up after she read A Handmaid's Tale. Is it really that bad? We had to read Failsafe in high school; I was deeply disappointed that when everyone else just stopped short at omigod, nukes are really really dangerous, we're screwed!, I was the only one who came out of it deeply convinced that we needed something like SDI.)

I suspect she doesn't seriously mean it, partly because she actually uses the phrase "a modest proposal" in her article. (That's shorthand for, "in the tradition of Jonathan Swift, I'll write something satirical that underscores my real point," right?) But
1. It's awfully hard to tell, isn't it?

2. What is her real point? (More specifically than just "any legislation that restricts abortion is bad"?) Whatever it is, since she completely fails to take into account the possiblity that maybe -- just maybe -- a second human life is involved, I doubt she's going to get anyone to read the article and suddenly "see the light." Preaching to the choir is always fun though.

(Amusing moments in on-line arguments: Somebody asked me once, how would I feel if abortion were mandatory -- to draw a moral equivalence between forcing it and banning it. Well... what if matricide were mandatory? I don't think there are very many cases where "we shouldn't require it" singlehandedly implies, "we shouldn't ban it either.")

Okay, in fairness, "we really can't prevent unwanted pregnancy no matter what we do," is a fair argument*, since it's a factor in whether we think of abortion as (even if we assumed for the sake of argument that it's killing) as justifiable killing.

"Oh, don't worry about him, there's plenty more where that came from." Or, without the flippancy, a case against the whole "what if you just aborted the next Beethoven" argument? Since, statistically speaking, humans are fungible, even if thinking that way makes me queasy.

It probably has to come down to individual autonomy (no, not only the mother's). I make a big deal about brain waves and a heart beat. Someone else reading this might make a big deal about conception. Still another person might make a big deal out of that point in infancy where a baby gradually learns to distinguish "me" from "not me."

*- Particular individuals CAN live in way that avoids unwanted pregnancy almost 100% reliably. Then again, I guess rape is always a theoretical possiblity. Also, I'm really sick of being condemned as a Puritan for actually mentioning abstinence. Nobody actually wants to be told this; I guess -- when it comes to individual sexuliberty -- mutal masturbation, 69, and even homosexuality just don't cut it if you can't also stick tab A into slot B.

How to avoid a police state
Vote Republican. (Seriously!)

You already saw this story linked from the main weblog.

The fact that things like this can actually happen in this country makes me outraged and, yes, vaguely afraid. Intuitively, Democrats have a somewhat better record on civil liberties than Republicans; then again, which party is more likely to support federal legislation about how your toilet flushes? (Yes, there's a connection here, between how intrusive are the laws you're willing to pass and how intrusively you're willing to enforce them.)

As for the "drug war" proper, it looks like a dead heat, with as yet no strong legalization movement building in either party.

In any case, my intuition is that Democratic politicians are all basically fair-to-middling on civil liberties issues, caring more about the ones their party base care about. On the other hand, things on the GOP side are more interesting: There's a very strong libertarian vein here, among folks who are Republican for the free market economics and either hold their noses on social issues or actually fight back. Then there's the so-called "Religious Right," which people think of as the party's base.

The thing is, the more center-type people vote for a given political party, the more profitable it becomes for that party to move to the center and to tell its "base" to go jump into the lake on issues where the base is just flat-out wrong.

Anyhow, final point, on Big Entertainment: three guesses which likely House leader is all chummy with Jack Valenti. Right now neither major party is standing up for consumers against the abuse of copyright law that record and movie types want. If the GOP took up the mantle here... wow.

I love NY
And this piece of news.

Ha. Apparently Boston is too white to create a racial diversity dog-and-pony show; almost as amusing as the idea of delegates lodging in Canada.

Regardless of the Dems' choice, I think New York is a no-brainer for the GOP.

Evil Maniacal Laughter
I have mixed emotions about so many people on the Left being so sad after last week. On the one hand I don't like seeing friends be glum -- this includes at least one of the loyal readers here and also at least one loyal reader who reads everything I blog other than politics. I would love for y'all to see just how unwarranted your fears are.

Then again I get to see how afraid these people are (link via her) and I don't know whether to laugh or cry. They're panicking; they're cussing up a storm; one of them is planning to move back to Ireland.

(Did that one Baldwin brother ever leave? If not, what's keeping him? Don't let the door hit his butt in either direction.)

There's an entire group of people that I used to interact with a lot on line but really don't anymore, mainly because they had a tendency to sound exactly like the Salon TableTalk people. (Actually they're more like a cross between TT and Slashdot, sometimes with the best elements of both but often with the worst.)

Present company excluded, of course. I guess things got pretty nasty between me and one of you in 2000 (you know who you are and if I never apologized, well, I do now) but there's a difference between being fiercely partisan and being outright delusional.

Have "we" really "won"?!
Food for thought in a letter to Andrew Sullivan. (Entry titled, "Is It Over?") The writer says to Sullivan, "WE HAVE WON." (Capitalization in original.)

My immediate response: Who should "we" be? In context, I don't think should be Republicans or webloggers or warbloggers or anti-Idiotarians or anyone else; rather, post-September 11, the best "we" is just the set of people who believe in freedom and don't want to lose our way of life.

Looking at it that way, I don't think anyone is anywhere near victory. Here are the conditions for victory I'd lay out, in no particular order (pardon the atrocious grammar):
1. Assurance, beyond a reasonable doubt, that Osama bin Laden is dead
1a. and that his cohorts are too weak to reassemble a terror cell on anywhere near the level they'd achieved by 2001.

2. Free and fair elections in Afghanistan. (The media hasn't paid much attention to Afghanistan lately. You may ask, what's happening in Afghanistan lately? As far as I can tell, the U.S. troops stationed there are teaching women how to read and children how to play baseball. That's probably oversimplified and skewed pro-American but it's a decent approximation.)

3. New regime in Iraq. (Barely acceptable substitute: Proof -- to an even higher standard than "we know bin Laden is dead" -- that the weapons of mass destruction have been eliminated and that there's no hope for reconstituting the program.)

4. Freeze or seize the assets of a vast majority of the financial backers of terror, the people who fund al Qaeda and Hamas and the like.

5. The ability for a thoughtful person to have faith that Israel will exist a year from now. (Right now I don't think we can currently say anything like that so confidently. As long as the world glorifies suicide bombers and doesn't take the anti-Israeli threat seriously, it looks pretty bleak to me.)

6. Westernization of Saudi Arabia -- which, deep down, we all know is the source of the hateful fanaticism that led to all this in the first place -- would be a huge plus. I would have counted the fall of the house of Saud as a condition for victory except that we also know that won't happen any time soon.

I'd actually vote for a Democrat who had that as an avowed policy goal and also a plan to make it so; as far as I can tell no such Democrat ran for anything useful this year.

Coming soon to a weblog template
"We've got the Constitution, two George Bushes, great toilets -- hell, we've played golf on the moon."
--Hank Hill on what makes America great and why we don't have to be #1 at everything.

(I almost put that quote in just now but yanking the Reagan Normandy quote seemed disrespectful on Veteran's Day.)