SLIGHTLY SHORTER GLENN REYNOLDS. Did I mention I'm not a Republican? Though I'm no Socialist either. Heh. (coughing into fist) Reagan!

You Democrats ought to stop obsessing on Bush's lies. No one cares. The French are evil. There was that 9/11 Commission, you should look into that -- what? You have? Heh, heh, I can't hear you. Heh, heh.

The President has shown himself amenable to invasions anywhere except Saudi Arabia. Many prominent conservatives want to invade Saudi Arabia. There's a winning issue for the party of Clinton!

Homeland Security is a mess. I believe Democrats have failed to notice.

And why have none of you made an issue of the FCC? Swing voters are waiting to be swayed by your opinions thereunto.

You're always tearing down, never building up. I hate you. That's why I spend many column inches giving you advice. You should take it. Suckers. Indeed.

IN DEFENSE OF PRISONER TUCK 'N' ROLLS. I see a convicted killer wants a sex change at taxpayer expense. Like most of you, I had at first a bad first reaction to it -- the situation carries a heavy "ick" factor, as the icky Jonah Goldberg might put it. But let's take a contrarian view (actually contrarian, not the bullshit normally peddled under that name) and see how we feel.

If we accept Ruskin's idea that the state of any society can be measured
by the condition of its prisons, we suck. But I think we are generally tilting in the right direction on that score. Even some conservatives, normally insensible to the suffering of others, have warmed to the issue of prison rape. If National Review columnists give a shit whether Guests of the State are sexually tortured, you know we've reached a watershed.

And also in general, we have for years been pushing out the boundaries as to what, medically speaking, constitutes the acceptable minimal quality of life. With close to 20 million Americans taking antidepressants, it may be that condition of mind is getting to be as significant a standard of health as condition of body was back in the days when we first started deploring rickets in children.

I know that most people hate prisoners, for reasons ranging from personal injury done by them to a free-floating and very American contempt for all unfortunates. But even the most sour apple will admit that the lowliest convict must be given food to sustain himself and perhaps a little exercise. As our MDR for a tolerable state of being is inexhorably lifted, might we one day accept that gender confusion is a cruel and unusual condition even for the least of us?

I'm inclined to think, looking more than usual at the way our society has gone during the span of my life (tomorrow is my birthday), that despite the exacerbations of our natural cruelty leaders and newsreaders try to excite at every opportunity, we will soon enough grant privileges to prisoners that are unimaginable at this moment.

Will we, nill we, we're getting kinder. You may think that's bad, criminal, idiotarian, but there it is. (Hell, with the WMD evidence looking flimsier every day, even the hardest among us point to the kindness done to Iraqis as the justification for invasion -- if that's how Republicans are turning, can you imagine what's going on with the rest of us?) You may gnash your teeth at the injustice represented by one human being getting a little break, but I am looking at the horizon, and it seems a little brighter. I've never been among that pinch-necked crew that thinks we have too many rights. Your mileage may vary, but I believe time is on my side.

A LITTLE GOOD NEWS. "Masturbation protects against prostate cancer." Well, that's just the icing on the cake, so to speak.

So fellas, visit this newcomer to the blogosphere and blow a wad a votre sante!

"NEVER GET OUT OF THE BOAT." Freddie Forrest in "Apocalypse Now" knew it was a bad idea, but did it anyway and almost got eaten by a tiger. I knew reading Instapundit would piss me off. When will I learn? From the Perfesser's parsing today of a Times of London story about documents that suggest Italy was also duped about Nigerian uranium:

[A reader] adds: "Let's see. Italians fooled. Brits fooled. CIA left out of the loop until it was too late and the Govt presentation was compromised... Soooo... I guess that leaves France as the perp. Which is what everybody knows already, but pretends not to." Sounds plausible. Is it true? I don't know. But somebody does.

The really maddening thing is, you can't tell whether he's kidding or not. Now, I know he used to have that quote up on his site about having a dry sense of humor that many people are allegedly unable to get -- but sometimes when people are incomprehensible, it's not because they're geniuses, but because they're incoherent. IP floats so many ridiculous ideas that there's no telling whether he means this one. I guess a "heh" or an "indeed" might help.

Aaargh! (rubbing skull, Spock-like) Forget... forget...

LAST REPLACEMENTS LYRIC OF THE NIGHT: Who will be the next to dry your lashes?/Who knows?

HEY NOW, YOU'RE AN ALL-STAR. Great game tonight. The MLB directive that this shall determine home-field advantage in the October Classic (instituted after last year's debacle -- scroll, ye bastards, to July 9, 2002!), turns out to have been brilliant. Hank Blalock's homer was a great moment, but the whole chess match was worth watching. So much is ill done, what a pleasure to see something well done. Especially when it's a ballgame.

(On the stereo: The Replacements, "Another Girl, Another Planet.")

YO EL ROY. Here's another weblog by a guy named Roy! Looks like he's doing alright. I knew nearly everyone on the web was better off than me, but to find a guy with my rarified name -- a name that means King, after all -- in that distant, high-floating, wave-at-the-drowning-man boat is... piquant.

(On the stereo: The Replacements, "Portland.")

HOUSE POOR. From a FuckedCompany discussion of the West Coast housing bubble:

"Hell, Vegas is over $220k or so for a decent new place.....Phx can't be far behind. Reno is already $300k, even fucking Fresno is $300k for a new place. WHERE THE FUCK ARE THESE PEOPLE GETTING THE MONEY?"

"I have no idea how people who only make $45k per year are getting into $300k houses. Plus they have they obligatory GMC Yukon Denali or Hummer H2 as well..."

"For giggles, I did a search in the Washington Post's real estate section for any home in my area (Fairfax) for $125,000 or less. Six dilapidated condos were returned, tiny, in HUD areas."

"And when it all ends, those of us who still have money will be asked to bail out the banks who made loans at up to 125% of equity value, to people with shaky incomes or credit. Just like last time."

"Spoke to a guy recently who spent $650k (NYC) for a one bedroom condo. He's near panic state now thinking about real estate crashing."

Now, these seem like coastal concerns perhaps to the fat, happy Red Staters. They come mostly from angry, educated Blue Staters, whom they despise -- though this post perhaps hits a little closer to home:

"I am building in vegas. I see i every day. Its not the 300,000 houses that we wonder where the money is coming from. Its all the 2 million + houses that are being bought up. I wonder everyday where all these people are coming from and where the money is coming from."

It'll get worse and move toward the interior. Via Calpundit, we see that deficits are going through the roof, and there's not much wiggle room left in which Mr. Greenspan can do anything about it.

The housing market will crash. No one, not even Midwesterners, can afford the terms of home ownership by the standards of a generation ago, and with personal bankruptcies rising, it is questionable whether they can afford them by the standards of the present. The squeeze is on with no relief in sight. We live on a new bubble now, but without the cheerful feeling of the last one. God help us when it bursts.

CALM DOWN. Terry Teachout asks, "Am I the only person to have spotted the social significance of Roz Chast’s Cremaster-bashing back-page cartoon in the June 9 issue of the New Yorker?" I daresay he is. He goes on: "I do think there is something quite genuinely subversive about the fact that Roz Chast, of all people, felt free to make fun of Matthew Barney in the New Yorker, of all places."

If you type "art" into the search field at the New Yorker's Cartoon Bank, you will find plenty of panels lampooning artistic pretensions of all sorts. (Good example: one dog telling another, "What I do as an artist is take an ordinary object -- say, a lamppost -- and, by urinating on it, transform it into something that is uniquely my own.")

Teachout seems not have noticed. "Back in the days of Harold Ross, the New Yorker wasn’t above publishing cartoons that made fun of abstract expressionism," he reports, "but ever since Jackson Pollock became God, they’ve been careful not to make that kind of mistake again -- until now."

Well, I haven't seen any biting satires on Jackson Pollock, lately, but I imagine that's because he's been well beside the point for a long, long time.

There are a whole nest of critics who, like Teachout, seem to get a charge out of the idea that art scenes are all mobbed up to the advantage of certain deleterious movements and dogma. (Actually they are mobbed up, but to the advantage of certain individuals who are admired by the powerful -- and, of course, those thought to be bankable -- and 'twas ever thus.) I guess this makes such critics feel like rebels or something. If the magazine's management, acting as a sinister and monolithic force, roams the hallways muscling writers and artists (Mister Remnick wants you should say something nice about the Cremaster Cycle!), then to speak against Matthew Barney is something more than one man's opinion; it is an act of courageous political incorrectness.

Why Teachout, who writes and thinks well and whose present edition is otherwise a delight, needs to perpetuate this kind of juvenile fantasy is genuinely puzzling.

(Found via the Castel-Dodges)

FIELDER'S CHOICE. If you like fiction, as opposed to the chronicles of collective waking nightmare that comprise this weblog, there's a new story on my website.

I'LL WAIT TILL THE THIRD INNING. I see they yanked Zito for Clemens to start the All-Star Game. That's too bad. Yeah, I know it's Rocket's career year, but I hate the son of a bitch. He made some shitty cracks about Piazza's gender prefs on Letterman (I hate that son of a bitch, too, but that's for another time). And he throws at hitters without fear of retribution -- not because he is known for any self-defense skills, but because League rules prevent him for climbing into the batter's box to take some of what he dishes out.

In this respect he resembles his fellow Texan, George W.

UPDATE: Turns out Clemens isn't starting -- they just yanked Zito for him. An even dumber move in a game that's supposed to "count."

IF IT'LL BE LIKE THIS, PLEASE DON'T. "The North Korean problem is the most serious issue facing our country right now. Thank goodness President Bush dispatched Saddam Hussein before he became an 'imminent danger.' Korea is an imminent danger right now, and that’s exactly why it’s so hard to do anything about it. I hope to write more about Korea just as soon as I get a chance...." -- Stanley Kurtz at NRO.

THE NEW BUBBLE. We were told back then that everything had changed.

Lately when I think of the Old World I think of an insult that I mean as a tribute. It is the phrase the narcissism of small differences. In the world that has just passed, careless people--not carefree, careless--spent their time deconstructing the reality of the text, as opposed to reading the book. You could do that then. The world seemed so peaceful that you could actively look for new things to argue about just to keep things lively... You could have real arguments about stupid things... We were not serious. We were not morally serious.

In our newly-sobered media, there are hundreds of stories this week about a cute girl who, while pretending to be a sausage, was knocked over by a Pittsburgh Pirate. There are also a number of stories, less energetically pursued, about the latest attack on our troops in Iraq, a place where, you may recall, a great victory for American power and prestige was lately won.

There are also stories about the latest prospective military target in our new era of seriousness. American interests in Liberia are hard to explain, especially in light of the current Administration's previous disinterest in the region. But everything has changed, again, and keeps on a-changin', especially when there are electoral points to be scored ("Where do Janeane Garofalo, Mike Farrell, and Martin Sheen stand on intervention in Liberia?") by fresh use of the lately-sanctioned (and, given the slim chances of an economic turnaround at home, most readily available) vote-getting tool, foreign intervention.

Meanwhile patriotic writers in redoubts of high seriousness speak of the indignities suffered by privileged Americans.

It's a good thing the grown-ups are in charge.

YELLOW CAKE AND CIRCUSES. First the Bushies were telling the truth about Nigerian unanium and Iraq, then they were misled by the CIA, and now their claims are "accurate" and "supported by other British and U.S. information" (Associated Press). This is spin at its finest, folks: a zig-zag pattern that establishes the Administration as right even when it's wrong.

It doesn't just work for uranium, either: the WMD bullshit can also be treated similarly. The "even Hans Blix" argument that everybody thought the weapons were there (never mind that neither Blix nor most of the other cited sources thought their suppositions required an immediate U.S. invasion) maintains the Administration's plausible deniability (or affirmability, depending).

The mildly humorous spectacle of our leaders tossing dossiers amongst themselves, as in the old Time Bomb game -- no one wants the thing in their hands when the ticking stops -- distracts from the less humourous spectacle of the occupation, the cost and length of which looks worse everyday day. The task of the White House handlers is to make our foreign adventures look benign. Hence, Bush hugging Africans.

Meanwhile, everyone hates us and our economy is in the toilet.

ASK YO' MOMMA. At TownHall today, Jonah Goldberg says, "How come black people can say stuff about black people, but when we say it we get in trouble?"

Well, he didn't use those words. They were actually used by kids on my block when I was growing up, only they didn't use the phrase "black people." Goldberg uses several hundred other, different words, but they pretty much amount to the same thing.

What is it with this guy and peeps of color?

AVERAGE AMERICAN BLUES. Plagued by bigot and bullshit eruptions, the Right cries out that they still have the support of the Average American. Jonah Goldberg:

This crowd is always insinuating that Fox News is the tool of corporate and Republican interests. And yet, Fox is more popular among the "little guys" -- you know the people, not the powerful. If you keep in mind that Fox News, Rush Limbaugh, O'Reilly etc represent the victory of the Republican Party to be every much as populist (not always a good thing) as the Democrats you can decipher a great deal of the grumpiness and confusion of liberals who shriek about "right wing media."

The fact that grumpy liberals "shriek" is offered, one imagines, as further proof of their unpopulism and lack of Little Guy cred. No way the Average American would hang with them! Now, another working-class hero, John Podhoretz:

The problem is that American elites are weirdly immature. They should be sophisticated enough to know these things take time, but they have no patience... What's amazing is that the ordinary American shopping at Wal-Mart and going about her daily life, with no capacity to name the head of the Iraqi National Congress (or Tommy Franks, or Jerry Bremer), does have the patience that the experts, who really should know better, sadly lack.

Boy, these liberals sound like a pain in the ass, don't they? Always showing off how much they know! Whereas in JP's portrait of America, brave shoppers neither know nor care what the hell is going on, and are better, more patient people for it.

Of course, it may be that the Average American does notice some other stories in which he is also invoked, and which may cause him to wonder if his patience is still a virtue. Anchorage Daily News:

According to the U.S. Census Bureau, the average American worker now spends 237.5 days a year on the job, about 25 days a year more than in 1973... Since 1970, the number of U.S. families that regularly eat dinner together has dropped by a third, de Graaf said. The number of families that take vacations together has also dropped by a third. "In fact, vacations for American families are starting to disappear"...

The average U.S. worker gets just 13 vacation days a year, according to a 2003 study by the U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics. The average Western European receives almost six weeks.

Meanwhile there's this interesting bit from the Southern Baptist Convention's Baptist Press:

It's hard to believe that a typical American family accepts a 30-year home mortgage as normal today or that it is now possible in some cases to borrow on a home for nearly 70 years... Today it requires from 40 to 70 percent of the average American family's total income to buy an average home, even with a 30-year mortgage.

The longest term of debt God's people took on in the Bible was about seven years. During the seventh year of remission, Jews were instructed to release their brothers from any indebtedness (see Deuteronomy 15:1-2).

Well, the Average American isn't going to see any such Jubilees anytime soon.

Perennial Average-American advocate NewsMax has a story up headlined, "Average American Lifestyle Called "Total Bull---t" by Environmentalist." NewsMax sneers at such analyses, but I wonder if a lot of Average Americans aren't beginning to feel the same way themselves.

AND SHALL I COUPLE HELL? I actually liked this Randy Barnett column at NRO. So that's what they're paying him for! In this Lawrence examination, he argues that Kennedy's decision (following on his Casey opinion back in 1992) has shifted the emphasis in SCOTUS anti-sex-law matters from the right to privacy (which Barnett finds shaky) to the right to liberty (which he wholeheartedly endorses).

Barnett comes at these things from a different angle than I do, but I am astounded at the fact that I've gone through the column once and haven't found anything that really pisses me off. And it's at National Review Online! Nothing they've emitted so far on this subject has been anything but an outrage. Indeed, its editors currently mutter darkly that the aforementioned decision "called into question [the Court's] willingness to tolerate any state laws based on traditional understandings of sexual morality."

Maybe there'll be something good on ABC tonight. This is a day for miracles!

BILE-GOGGLE HANGOVER. The Classical Values guy has responded to this post, and he has a few good (not to say airtight) points. One involves my conflation of MSNBC with Fox (one of these days I have to get cable) and the other involves me saying "most of" his Lawrence post was a states-rights encomium.

I have reread his post with the bile-goggles off, and admit the piece in toto is much more nuanced than that. I didn't see that at first because the thing started with, "A lot has been said about Lawrence v. Texas, too. Tactically, I still think it would have been better to get rid of sodomy laws state by state, because that would have been a more democratic, more final, victory," and I must admit my eyes just glazed right over. A major victory won, and we start by wishing it had been won according to Marquis of Queensbury (or Scalia) rules.

But there's a lot more in it I still don't like. For example: "Government force can masquerade as an altruistic concern over the very rights many of my friends demand -- so dressed up in human rights or domestic rights drag as to be unrecognizable." Even as I am inclined to agree with the principle (I'm not big on Federal hate-crime laws, for example, that essentially legalize double-jeopardy prosecutions) I'm troubled, because it's a demurrer in an argument about sodomy laws. Really, what "altruistic" legislation is anywhere near as onerous as sexual prohibition? CV's cited example is amusing and well-observed, but the prospect of "gay alimony" just doesn't chill my blood as much as Bowers v. Hardwick did.

Perspective's the issue. Yeah, it's bad that litigiousness has so hampered human affairs, but when you bring it up as an "on-the-other-hand" sidebar in a discussion of Lawrence, a reasonable person might respond, "Jeez, are you sure you're happy about this?" It's just too much like a lot of other discussions where, for example, someone denouncing Ann Coulter feels obliged to connect her to Maureen Dowd. I don't like Dowd either, but in terms of noxious emissions, Coulter and Dowd aren't even in the same solar system.

When I hear that kind of stuff, I assume that the plaintiff is trying to defuse the historical impact of these phenomena by yoking them to mildly related liberal examples. This may not apply to CV. Well, I'll keep an eye on him. I vastly prefer making snotty comments to actually having to pay attention, but hey, the blogosphere's been good to me -- maybe it's time to give a little back.

As for the Fox thing, I suppose I could have asked instead how NewsMax got in on the scheme. Same diff.

P.S. The Michael Savage conspiracy thing is still bughouse.

NAME GAME. Hey, editor Martin sent something in, and since he is unable to manipulate Blogger (being at this point nothing more than a mouldering corpse in a Victorian breakfront), I will post some of it myself, with quotation marks so you know it's Martin speaking, not me (this device, and the word "blogosphere," were invented by Steven Den Beste, or Penelope Ashe, I forget which).

Commenting on a recent New York Times story about Major General Paul Eaton's plan to gin up a new Iraqi army, with "1,000 soldiers training by August, and 12,000 by the end of the year... [and] 40,000 by an unspecified date in 2004," Martin writes:

"Are we going to give them our stuff, or are we going to the rummage sale for some 1960s Soviet crap, so that when the new army stages a coup to set up a militant Islamic state, we can play war with them again?

"I often think about guns. AK-47s and M-16s? Isn't that a bit like typewriters and mimeographs? Where are the plasma-pulse pistols and destructor-ray rifles? Who's working on these things? They're fired. (No pun intended.) Also, have you noticed that nobody refers to the afformentioned AK-47 as such since some time last year? Now it's 'Kalashnikovs.' Why haven't we started calling M-16s by the name of their inventor, Eugene Stoner? Oh, I see, right..."

And so forth. Good show, Marty! How I wish you were not a mouldering corpse.

I think the name thing can be easily explained, though. Being older, I remember when the word "AK-47" stirred the American adrenaline -- it was like the names we gave our guns, (e.g., Colt .45, Winchester 77), but slightly more modern (and therefore slightly more cool) in that we dispensed with the words and just used letters, man. It was like gravitational measurement units (Mars, I recall, rated a G4), or the HAL9000 in 2001. It was like the X-15. It was our vision of the future. Food out of tubes, and all that.

Nowadays, we are at least as tech-mad, but we are way, way more brand conscious. In my day, brands were either simple descriptors (e.g. Keds) or evil clouds of anaesthetic gas meant to distract us from the accelerating Nazification of our country. Since Reagan, of course, brands have become objects of worship. And since we must call our beloved(s) by name, not by number, it is better to call them Skechers and Microsoft than G6 and X7. Kalashnikov might as well an edgy fashion line. Or a band.

Now fetch Old Uncle Roy the jug and he'll tell you more about life in the Rust Belt.

EDROSO.COM IS BACK UP. I feel silly announcing this because there's been nothing new there since April (though, to be fair, my back catalogue makes Glenn Reynolds look like a man of few words). But I do expect to post a new, depressing story by week's end. And my mail's up, too! I've already got two new mails: one marked URGENT, from Mr. Frank Abudu, and another from "jehanna gerry" about "Back-Door Stretched Girls." Gee, I don't know anyone named jehanna, but that's a pretty name -- maybe she's pretty, too! I better see what she wants!