THEATER NIGHT. Tim Miller has been at the performance-art game for decades, and was a player in the NEA funding wars of the 80s, which seem to be making a comeback these days. He tours a lot and has a new show, Lay of the Land, at P.S. 122, where I saw him Thursday night.

Though I thought I'd seen every crackpot thing in New York in the 80s (I recall with particular fondness one performance in some fetid basement where a guy smashed beer bottles against the wall and then demolished a cinder block with a sledgehammer), I'd never seen Miller work before. Lay of the Land was mostly story-telling about his challenged life as a gay man in unfriendly America, with some slides and props. His stories, from his childhood and adulthood, explained both the origins and the depths of his outrage, which has led him into political action as well as performances.

However, the impression he left me was not of outrage, but of disciplined passion. As with many other performance artists I've seen, evident expense of energy seems to be part of his act; he motormouthed, he gesticulated, he stalked the stage. But he wasn't sloppy and I never got the feeling that he was trying to alert us to his capacity to go suddenly to outrage or violence (the flashing of which trump card is not unknown among many kinds of performers). He has obviously worked to keep his body, breathing and enunciation in condition, and the whole thing was carefully modulated. What tension there was came from the stories.

The political attitude expressed by those stories would be familiar, perhaps overly so, to anyone who would go to such a performance; it was his metaphors, and the eloquent way he expressed them, that put it as far as it went above agitprop. At one point he described himself as an already-gay kid having a dinner-table argument with his father about going to a baseball game, and suddenly choking on a piece of chuck steak. This led quickly to both lascivious and existential references of "biting off more than I can chew," to his feeling of being choked as a homosexual in a country that wants him silent and invisible, and (when the father prepares to perform an emergency tracheotomy on him) to the Bible story of Abraham and Isaac, to Caravaggio images of which he used to masturbate. It's no shock Tony Kushner is a fan of Miller's. They both have that tendency to reach through the ridiculous to the sublime.

At one point Miller seemed ready (if the audience would support him) to burn a flag in protest. I was surprised. Then he said he couldn't do it, even if they wanted him to, because he still believed in the promise of America. I still entertain a sneaking suspicion that he isn't eager to bite off more than he can chew anymore -- NEA pays some of P.S. 122's bills. A more charitable explanation would be that Miller, who's talented enough to have done plenty of other things with his time, is not inclined toward the quick shock, but for the long haul, if it's more likely to lead to victory.

LIF, LIBERY, AND THE PURSUIT OF BULSHIT. Now what can we do at The Corner to make politics out of a World Series bet? Oh Jesus:

Before the series began, [Arlen] Specter, confident in the bats of Ryan Howard and Chase Utley, made a wager with [Nancy] Pelosi. And this afternoon he paid up, via an enormous Hershey’s chocolate cake emblazoned with an image of Independence Hall.

For Pelosi, it may be a bittersweet gift: a reminder of a baseball triumph . . . and of the libery-loving tea parties which led to her party’s shellacking.

Being the world-record holder in typos, I wouldn't normally twit Costa or anyone for misspelling, but it's a gloriously apposite detail in the midst of all that hooey.

A STEP IN THE RIGHT DIRECTION. Ann Althouse equates liberalism with GWAR. Since the current Administration has been offering mostly Muzak, I see this as an advance, but only if GWAR serves as a gateway drug to the original Stooges. Liberals need more of a "Search and Destroy" ethos.

Professor Althouse, check out the Mentors. It's worse than you thought!

UPDATE. In comments, Professor Althouse engages! Always happy to see her here.

I'm equating Bloggingheads.tv and its visitors with liberalism. The GWAR video, which shows the graphic depiction of torturing and killing a woman, is presented by the website for its readers amusement. My point, which I make extremely concisely at the link, but will make verbosely here, is that liberals often put party politics ahead of feminist values, and when they do, I like to point it out. If the female victim were not Sarah Palin, the feminist issue would be obvious.

I have no idea what she means. Bloggingheads is liberal? (You could have fooled me.) The members of GWAR are liberals? (ADDED: Ahem. Thanks, jsacto!) The hordes of drunken fans are liberals? Maybe I should have gone to law school.

I wonder what the political demographics are for Lingerie Football.

UPDATE II. Wait, I get it -- Bloggingheads is Jewish! And you know how they vote.

I'm beginning to think this is all a plot to get people to watch videos on Bloggingheads. Well played, Professor!

SERVICE ADVISORY. I played around with the template here this evening. Nothing fancy, just a different Blogger template into which I could easily add features I'm too stupid and lazy to jerry-rig with massive workarounds. I wanted to keep the old comments despite our regular problems with the system because they're so good, but it wasn't working.

I fear the old comments may be lost in the next edition. Can you live with that? A few years ago all old comments were expunged when my previous service shut down; I hated to lose those, too, but we are but a moment's sunlight fading in the grass and all that.

Don't worry, whatever I do alicublog will probably remain butt-ugly.

THIS IS YOUR FUTURE. The new Republican Governor of Wisconsin, Scott Walker, wants us to know that Wisconsin is now "open for business," and Remapping Debate wants us to know what he likely means by that, focusing on Walker's pledge to "require state agencies to review [business] permit applications within 60 days of receipt and approve or deny them within 180 days or else they will be presumed approved":

Wisconsin’s Commerce Department currently insures that businesses meet the regulatory standards the state sets before issuing them a permit to do business in the state. Walker would transfer the regulatory functions of the state Commerce Department to the relevant state agencies for the specific industry -- the norm, actually, before former Republican Governor Tommy Thompson incorporated many regulatory functions into the Commerce Department’s granting of permits.

But the Commerce Department wouldn’t be stepping out of the process. It would be changing hats. Walker would reconfigure the Department as an advocate for private industry in negotiating the regulatory demands of state agencies. Instead of the Commerce Department acting as a gatekeeper -- protecting the public interest in, say, workplace safety -- before issuing permits to do business, the new agency would advocate for the business, becoming, potentially, the adversary of state agencies seeking to insure compliance with government standards.

Remapping Debate also gives us a taste -- sometimes tinged with animal excrement -- of what this could mean for neighbors of the state's factory farms, which "account for only 2 percent of Wisconsin’s farms, but 50 percent of its output from animal-based agriculture," and one of which, per Midwest Environmental Advocates, is "the state’s fourth largest source of sewage, lagging only behind the cities of Milwaukee, Madison and Green Bay."

Who knows, maybe the new state administration (Republicans now run both houses of the legislature) will wind up balancing community interests in a thoughtful manner. But with jobs everyone's #1 issue (Wisconsin unemployment is at 7.8 percent), large-business interests have a tremendous advantage over environmental interests, as citizens (as suggested by their votes) increasingly acknowledge. The Republicans react accordingly ("the House Appropriations Committee will be exercising its prerogative to withhold funding for prospective EPA regulations and de-fund through the rescissions process many of those already on the books").

The Atlantic has today a slideshow of the "30 Most Dynamic Cities in the World" as found by the Brookings Metropolitan Policy Program. Only one U.S. city, Austin, is on the list; the winners are mostly in places like India and China -- which make things foreigners want to buy, and which also have less exacting standards than we do at present, to put it mildly, when it comes to balancing community needs against commercial growth. They are slowly moving in our direction, while we appear to be moving rapidly in theirs. Wisconsin is exporting less milk these days, but they and the rest of America seem to be importing ideas about growth from the developing world at a fast rate.

THE OLD BAG OF TRICKS. The booboisie have caught up with that gay show at the National Portrait Gallery I mentioned yesterday.

Prepare For Massive Christian Riots In 3... 2... 1...(Update)

No, wait. Christian don't riot over this stuff, so it is okay to offend them...

Why riot, when you can call in the mullahs? John Boehner and Eric Cantor squawked, and the Gallery pulled the ant-covered Jesus, though the clown fucking a skeleton is apparently safe, at least until they need something to make a new stink over.

I keep hearing about what an innovation the Tea Party Republican Party is, but so far it looks like Jesse Helms all over again.

SHORTER ARMED LIBERAL: James Fallows claims that liberals who denounced civil rights offenses in the Bush era still denounce them in the Obama era. But that's not the point; the point is that Toby Keith song, "Beer for My Horses." I really like that song, especially the part about lynching, but liberals hate it. I rest my case!

TODAY IN THE ARTS. See what you're missing, not reading National Review's The Corner? There Kathryn J. Lopez sent me to CNSnews for

Smithsonian Christmas-Season Exhibit Features Ant-Covered Jesus, Naked Brothers Kissing, Genitalia, and Ellen DeGeneres Grabbing Her Breasts

WARNING: This story contains graphic photographs of items on display in an exhibit at the Smithsonian Institution’s National Portrait Gallery.

It is a thing of beauty. Reporter Penny Starr copiously details the outrages. Her descriptions are pretty good:

One of the paintings in the exhibit is “O’Hara Nude with Boots,” from 1954, by Larry Rivers. O’Hara was an American poet (1926-1966). The painting depicts O’Hara standing nude and the exhibit description says Rivers was O’Hara’s “sometime lover.”

But those she wisely excerpts from the catalogue are even better:

Broadly modeled on Goya’s dystopian Saturn Devouring His Children, Caja’s painting depicts his friend and muse Charles Sexton engaged in an act of self-cannibalism. Literally painted on Sexton’s ashes after his death from AIDS, Charles Devouring Himself, like Caja’s Bozo F---s Death, an image of a heavyset clown engaged in anal intercourse with a grinning skeleton, hit that sweet spot, so often historically associated with drag queens, between pathos and aggression.

I've got my trip all planned, but the idea is to get CNSnews' wingnut readers worked up about these homosexual doings put out where children can see them. In our Nation's Capital. At Christmas!

It isn't a Christmas show per se, though, it's a three-and-a-half-month show that just happens to run through Christmas. (It's also running through Hanukah, so Michael Savage can get in on this if he wants to.) But the vicissitudes of scheduling are no excuse. Picture it: The Petersons come from Oshkosh to D.C. for the holidays. They're tripping down the Mall, and suddenly spy the National Portrait Gallery. Portraits! If the kids didn't like going through metal detectors and standing in line for a glimpse of the Constitution, maybe they can be edified by majestic oils of Washington and Jefferson. They get in there and John Wayne Gacy is sodomizing a skeleton and that lady from TV is feeling herself up. Even a whole afternoon at the Air and Space Museum won't wash that out of their brainpans.

I applaud Starr for her honesty in pointing out that the exhibition is financed by sponsors rather than by taxpayers, but Chris Edwards of the Cato Institute finds a loophole:

"If the Smithsonian didn't have the taxpayer-funded building, they would have no space to present the exhibit, right? In my own view, if someone takes taxpayer money, then I think the taxpayers have every right to question the institutions where the money's going."

"Think about the Washington Post," he said. "They don't have to publish every op-ed that they get, right? They own the platform. In this case [the Smithsonian Institution], the taxpayers own the platform and so the taxpayers should decide what is presented on that platform."

In fact, what do we have statist curators for, anyway? Turn these apparatchiks out and let the people decide what goes and doesn't go at the National Portrait Gallery! Then we can have room after room of giant TVs playing Dancing with the Stars and Fox News, and if there must be sodomy, let it be as practiced on the adult cable channels and Cinemax.

It was getting a little slow on the culture war front; I'm glad to see they've still got it in them.

THE TERRORIST HAS WON. Of the many conservative commentators who think the new WikiLeaks dump is absolutely immoral and simultaneously proves we should change U.S. foreign policy to suit their prejudices, there may be no riper example than James Carifano at National Review:

The administration can, however, do two things to repair the damage wrought by WikiLeaks. First, it can embrace a foreign policy that our adversaries fear and our friends respect. Nobody gets more cooperation than a winner. For starters, the president should dump the New START treaty — its one-sidedness makes the U.S. look like a lousy negotiator in the eyes of the world… and a patsy in the eyes of the Russians. He should also reject out of hand calls to gut the defense budget and just flat out declare that America will stick it out in Iraq and Afghanistan until the job is done. And while he’s at it, he could stand up to China and stop extending the hand of friendship to regimes interested in a world without freedom or America.

I haven't read them all, but I don't see why the leaks demand the death of START -- because we called Putin Batman, maybe? Russia's international wheeling and dealing as revealed by WikiLeaks is neither a shock nor out of character. I'm guessing Carifano just considers the docs a good news hook to promote the planned Republican obstruction of the treaty in Congress.

As for the allegedly necessary result of leaving defense out of the budget cutting we heard so much about during the recent electoral campaign, there's the fig leaf for the small-gummint Tea Partiers to wear when they excuse the Pentagon from the bloodletting. Rand Paul, your come-to-Jesus moment has arrived!

"Stand up to China" is just an old-fashioned rightwing non-sequitur, as we are in it up to our eyeballs with that totalitarian regime on a bipartisan basis. Ask Rupert Murdoch.

Carifano also claims "the leaks could well get people killed" and wonders how Assange sleeps at night. That's gratitude for you! WikiLeaks is pure gold for these guys, since their customary free-associative style applies as well to its revelations as to anything else -- if Assange next leaks medical records from our various diplomatic outposts, I bet Carifano will find in them an indictment of government health care -- and gives their deranged conclusions added publicity to boot.

They should be sending Assange tokens of appreciation. He is, after all, providing them a crisis, and being good Alinskyites they aren't letting it go to waste.

UPDATE. Looks like they're softening toward Assange:

Rep. Pete Hoekstra, the ranking Republican on the House Intelligence Committee, tells National Review Online that the WikiLeaks controversy shows how the White House is keeping Congress in the dark on foreign policy...

Although he agrees with calls for the [WikiLeaks] perpetrators’ prosecution, he’s not convinced that Rep. Pete King’s suggestion that the government label WikiLeaks a terrorist organization is feasible. “I wouldn’t get to the point of classifying WikiLeaks as a terrorist organization,” Hoekstra says. “I don’t think under our current framework you could do that. You may be able to get them under espionage, but it’s difficult.”

WikiLeaks' services to the nation are noted. In a few more weeks they'll put Assange up for the Medal of Honor.

THOUGHT FOR THE DAY:

To a guard, after tearing the heel off one of his shoes:
“I don’t want anybody else to stand in my shoes.”
— Richard Carpenter, convicted of murder, electric chair, Illinois.
Executed December 19, 1958

I've been on their Twitter feed awhile, but it only just occurred to me to add Last Words of the Executed to the blogroll.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the latest from WikiLeaks and the rightblogger response, which I suggest is more pleased than their patriotic complaints might suggest. Everyone seems to get something out of WikiLeaks; I'm beginning to wonder if the government hasn't set it up to distract us from our real problems.

HAPPY BLACK FRIDAYSGIVING. Sorry to have been so far off the grid, again, but this time I wasn't having a wire shot up my penis. I went to New Hampshire by bus -- not to evade our fascist TSA overlords, but because it was cheap -- and am on holiday with my good friends Martin & Zara. Yesterday we ate a giant turkey that came out of this:


The terror of conducting this potentially injurious procedure gave me a great appetite, and I ate enough for two men, which is too bad because I have only one digestive tract, which buckled under the strain. I hope to be back on solids soon.

This being Live Free or Die territory, I also went off to the range and shot off guns -- a 9 mil and a shotgun:


Suck on that, Washington establishment.

P.S. I know The West Wing was wish-fulfillment, but really, what kind of a Thanksgiving are you having when you feel compelled to post this:


"Read all eight of Reagan’s Thanksgiving proclamations here." Then, some football, three hours of Luftwaffe documentaries, and then to the writing desk to fire off some sharp correspondence regarding one's elected representatives.

SHIT FLOATS. The Washington Post has hired Commentary's Jennifer Rubin to fill its Ben Domenech Chair for Wingnut Blogging. I said in August that Rubin was "fast becoming the worst hack on the internet." I like to think this was what clinched it for Rubin.

The Rubin atrocity that prompted my comment was a doozy -- she claimed that the President of the United States' "sympathies for the Muslim World take precedence over those, such as they are, for his fellow citizens" (for Commentary writers, real patriots only allow Israel to come before the United States) -- but she has delivered many others:

• Regarding the "Ground Zero Mosque," Rubin told us 3,000 Americans were killed at the Burlington Coat Factory at West Broadway and Park Place, and that by supporting it the Left was "advertising its own intellectual crack-up and unfitness to govern."
• When Mel Gibson was famously recorded screaming at his girlfriend to blow him, Rubin said, "by golly, it sounds like… well, Obama."
• During last summer's flotilla massacre, Rubin created a forgiving new definition for self-defense: "When the Israeli commandos were set upon as they were lowered from a helicopter, they acted to defend themselves." (That's why, if armed men break into your home and you shoot them, they walk and you go to jail, like in Charles Bronson movies.)
• And there's always the old Obama-isn't-"down-to-earth"-if-you-know-what-I-mean-(pushes-in-nose) schtick.

The secret to Rubin's success is that she just spins everything and anything so that it will sound heartening to her fellow conservatives. Back during the 2008 campaign, she was happy-clapping about "the difficultly many Democrats will have in moving on to support Barack Obama" (pushes in nose) and suggesting "McCain can capitalize on this by outreach to the aggrieved [Hillary] Clinton female voters (or by putting a woman on the ticket)." She started predicting Obamadamerrung -- "the Obama team is lawyering up, the Senate will be sued" -- in... January 2009. She just sputters hyperbolic insults -- for example, when Obama attempted to negotiate with Iran, she called him "a cold-hearted technocrat obsessed with engaging a loathsome regime."

So whenever things go wrong for the Democrats, she's vindicated, and whenever they go right... well, they never go right. Even when Obama sent more troops to Afghanistan, which you'd think would warm her black little heart, her response was, "Obama never did say 'victory,' and that is telling. It's not his thing."

In short, the woman's so full of shit I'm surprised she doesn't explode. Her fans across wingnuttia will enjoy reading her as they scream about how they can't trust the WaPo.

MO' MONEY, MO' PROBLEMS. Jim Geraghty sees the flaw in that poll showing most Americans un-outraged by the new TSA screenings: It includes people who don't fly at least once a year, presumably because they are obliged to drive, take Greyhound, or hitchhike on their rare travels.

Are we surprised that those who will rarely or never experience the pat-downs are less opposed to them? Like Barack Obama or Hillary Clinton, for these folks, a TSA agent reaching where he shouldn’t is an entirely theoretical manner.

The smug bastards! I bet they're throwing off the support for extending the Bush tax cuts on the wealthy, too. What do the rich think of those cuts, that's what we should be looking at.

Someone will soon invent a polling service that only questions top earners, and will become very rich.

TV PARTY. My sublet has a TV, which is a blessing and a curse. In my experience, when granted a monitor the TV abstainer will start on substance and eventually work his way down to crap. So it's been for me; I started on TCM but soon hit the harder stuff. Not Dancing With The Stars, yet, but I have seen some of that show with the two fat people. It's alright, but they have some serious catching up to do with Roseanne and Dan.

My current favorite form of crap is Two and a Half Men. I watch it in reruns and first-run whenever I can. It's taken Larry David's commandment for Seinfeld -- "No learning" -- from a sneaky sophisticate's joke on sitcoms to its logical conclusion: A smooth and popular comedy about pathetic dysfunction enabled by unearned privilege.

Horndog Charlie has a glorious life in Malibu bought with jingles, and has been putting up his absurdly maladroit brother and his horrible kid for eight years. If they all lived in a double-wide and scavenged deposit bottles, this might be a documentary. But money makes it funny: The characters' various ineptitudes cause comic embarrassments instead of life-threatening crises.

Everyone snipes at one another, and no one ever leaves, though in real life Alan would probably be rotating in and out of SROs and periodically pleading his brother for a sofa and a shower from a pay phone outside a shelter, and the kid (now pretty well grown, but still chubby and stupid) would be in protective custody. Alan's and Charlie's mother is a true gorgon, and most of the other women on the show are bunnies outsizedly lusted after by both. (Charlie has the means to both get and get rid of them, but when he's actually emotionally interested in one, he is incompetent to commit, while Alan simply winds up paying more alimony.)

Married… With Children had a similarly miserable outlook but was played broadly, overlit and theatrical, a live-action Punch and Judy show (I've always thought Peg and Al would make a great Mere and Pere Ubu); Two and a Half Men is played more coolly in a traditional sitcom format, like The Mary Tyler Moore Show. In other words these people, in TV terms, are supposed to be real. And despite all their advantages, they're deeply unhappy. Their greatest pleasure is to insult their alleged loved ones with zingers that convulse the laugh-track and leave themselves bitter and wounded. If I were tasked with creating a time capsule to explain our low age to our feral survivors, I would have to include a boxed set of Two and a Half Men.

Also saw the John Lennon American Masters show on PBS. I'm allergic to hagiography, and there's a strong vein of it in this bio; the drugged- and drunk-up parts of his life, for example, are treated somberly as darkly romantic effusions of his artistic personality, which I can certainly get with but which removes the comic pathos that might really humanize him. (They relate the famous LA tampon incident, for instance, but don't include the punch line: Lennon saying to a waitress, "Don't you know who I am?" and the waitress replying, "Yeah, you're some asshole with a Kotex on his head." Too deflating, I guess.)

Nonetheless it's good to hear so much about the guy at work -- much of it from musicians and other collaborators, and some from tape track run-off that hints at his methods ("It has to be a little laid back because he's watchin' the wheels, he's not drivin' the damn truck"). Especially for someone with so much else to occupy his thoughts, Lennon worked very hard and seriously on his music, and I'm grateful for any glimpses I can get of how he did it.

And though I'm sure Yoko Ono, keeper of the flame, held a heavy club over this production, I'm glad this bio helps cement the acceptance of her stuff from the Lennon years as something more than a sideshow. When I was a teenager walking to downtown Bridgeport to buy any John Lennon single that came out, I'd play the Yoko b-sides almost as much as the Lennon songs. They sounded super groovy coming out of the tiny, maxed-out speaker of my picnic player. (Of course I was also a big fan of "They're Coming to Take Me Away Ha-Haaa!" and its backward b/w. In fact I still am.) Whatever else she was and is, Ono had the balls to assert her bizarre idea of rock and, as Lennon astutely observed when he first heard the B-52s, the world caught up with her. Fuck Albert Goldman.

UPDATE. Some fine TV partying in comments; Kia does close analysis on Hoarders ("...gradually you begin to realize that the piles of crap are actually keeping the husband out of the house by the grace of a wise and powerful subconscious intuition... Do I have a life? Well, not much of a life. Why do you ask?" I hear ya, sis).

WORST ENDORSEMENT OF THE MONTH. At National Review:

Today on Uncommon Knowledge, Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein answers the charge that, if he were an American, he would be a member of the Tea Party movement. "Well, yeah I have to accept that."

Prince Hans Adam II of Liechtenstein! (In the tape, by the way, interviewer Peter Robinson refers to him as "Your Highness" rather than as "Citizen" or "Ruling Class Scum.") They aren't making grassroots like they used to.

NEW VOICE COLUMN UP, about the TSA tsimmis. As I mentioned before, while I'm pleased that conservatives are standing up for their civil rights, they seem far less interested in those of people who do not resemble them. How far we've come, though, from the time when Peggy Noonan complained about airport security in 2008 and Scott Johnson of Power Line sighed, "Better to bash Bush from the perspective Noonan imputes to the weary travelers at Gate 14 than to help readers understand Bush's predicament as a politician constrained by the consent of the governed... . Included in the actions that Bush has taken to prevent a terrorist attack on the United States since 9/11 are those Noonan mocks in the column." Johnson is now much less inclined to defend the President of the United States on airport security grounds. Something has changed -- must be a new respect for civil rights!

UPDATE. For some reason I'm reminded of this.

PRE-EMPTIVE STROKE. At Reason, Brian Doherty is telling his fellow libertarians to give new Senator Rand Paul a break. He's only one man:

In terms of passing laws or shifting the Senate in his direction, Paul is not going to get much done by trying to operate as a one-man Tea Party in a minority party. Though he may become a filibuster machine, which given his outlier status means the Senate will have lots of cloture votes to shut him up...

As a legislator, it would be silly to expect much out of Rand Paul, either as a minority party freshman or even as the majority party freshman he may well become in 2012.

This Doherty attributes to the nature of the Senate, where even an illuminated hero like Paul cannot stampede his colleagues to reason with a "Cross of No Gold" speech, but must grub for votes. And when he inevitably fails to shake the walls of Congress with the libertarian thunder of his genius, guess who will then be to blame:

Paul is a Republican who thinks of himself as a Tea Party man. But whether we like it or not, or certainly whether he likes it or not, he is linked in the public mind with libertarianism. While significant differences in style and emphasis exist between him and other libertarians, his general political vision is as radically libertarian as anything the modern Senate has seen.

Thus, any dumb thing Paul says or does, any deviation from small-government principle, will become a public brick against libertarianism. And in an MSNBC world, sticking to his principles will be a weapon used against libertarianism as well...

...When the nation as a whole is paying attention to a libertarian as hardcore as Rand Paul (and he's not even that extreme—he told ABC’s The Week that he’s OK with a $2.4 trillion dollar government as long as it doesn’t spend beyond its means trying to be a $4 trillion government), I fear that most Americans will find they do not like what they see. An inefficacious senator risks becoming an extremist laughingstock.

He's damned if he does, damned if he doesn't, trapped in a world he never made, etc. So don't expect too much from him. (If only Obama could get that sort of pass from leftists!)

But there is hope:

So if Rand Paul ends up getting nothing done and failing to win mainstream respect for the ideas he stands for, what good is he?

If he can use cable news and the Internet, and skillfully exploit the predictable crisis on the horizons arising from the out of control spendng, inflation, and debt he decries, Paul can become the Tea Party leader he wants to be. Thus he might influence and inspire future politicians who will seek, and perhaps win, congressional primaries, whether or not the powers that be in the media or the party hierarchy like it.

The choice is clear: Paul should quit halfway through his term, take a job on Fox News, and star in his own reality show.

JUNK SCIENCE. Back in my increasingly distant youth, I often heard it said that the domestic interventionist policies of Theodore Roosevelt (now widely denounced as a socialist) only really caught fire with the American public when Upton Sinclair's The Jungle nauseated them sufficiently with its descriptions of unhygienic food handling that they were willing to accept the statist Pure Food and Drug Act.

Sinclair's novel also revealed savage inequities in the treatment of working people, and the author hoped this would touch readers' consciences; but the travails of a bunch of sweaty and possibly communist immigrants did not interest Americans of the middle class nearly as much as the possibilty that they might find shit in their vittles.

Now there is a great tsimmis over new and more invasive airport security measures. Dave Weigel says that Republicans, who were in power during the creation of the TSA, have always been kinda sorta against the agency -- or at least "a rump of congressional Republicans" were, presumably not including those whose districts profited from the newly beefed-up airport security industry. And Lord knows there were always plenty of prominent conservatives demanding to know why real Americans had to take off their shoes when all the Gummint had to do was start profiling Arabs.

But now the spectacle of little girls being patted down by screeners has freshly inflamed America's outrage, and citizens worried about having their junk touched are newly energized in opposition to this intrusive behavior.

Good for them. It's always nice to see people recognize that they have civil liberties, however late in life it happens. It's just too bad that drug war casualties, indefinite detainees, victims of criminally overzealous prosecutors, and other unfortunates whose rights are routinely trampled will never find themselves anywhere near the front of the complaint line now headed by middle-aged outrageaholics who suspect TSA employees are leering at them.

Americans usually can't be bothered about violations of civil liberties because they think they only happen to other people. The only way to convince them otherwise, it seems, is to hit them in or around the gut. What they lack in empathy they make up for in queasiness. The problem with using the ick factor as a spur to heightened consciousness, though, is that it doesn't get us high enough.

SERVICE ADVISORY. Apologies for the light posting. I'm down to D.C. for the annual medical Disneyland tour. My time has been eaten by a battery of tests and doctor visits, some tourism and socializing, and bouts of insomnia, mortality contemplation, and vacant staring at cable television. The highlight so far: today's cystoscopy, which went something like this:



I kid. The facility and care are everything one can expect from the National Institutes, and I do not seem to have any stones. But the procedure was performed with only local anesthetic (administered with what seemed to be a glue gun); this made insertion less traumatic than I expected (it was sort of like peeing in reverse), but did not alleviate the highly unpleasant sensation of wires being pushed up into my bladder, much less the somewhat worse sensation of a noble though doomed attempt to penetrate my ureters. Well, you hang around NIH long enough, sooner or later they let you on all the big-kid rides. Now if I could just stop pissing blood.

Tell you more later. Time to do some drinking.

UPDATE. Thanks, all, for the good wishes. The red tide has receded.

UPDATE 2. You're all so good to me, sob. Someone suggested pain medication. They did give me an anti-spasmodic, but shortly after taking the first dose I got a terrible abdominal cramp that sent me running back to the doctor, who assured me that this, too, would pass, and it did. Sometimes the only way to learn the side effects of a procedure is to experience them. (I'm still not sure whether my racing pulse and sleepless night were caused by my F-DOPA injections, and neither was my endocrinologist.) Consider it part of my contribution to medical science.