Gentle Reader -- You are welcome to peruse my web-based journal. I assure you that my contributions to this medium will be both infrequent and inconsequential. Read on!

MY INTERSECTION WITH HISTORY

From a WaPo article regarding the politicizing of the hiring process at DoJ:

According to a former deputy chief in the civil rights division, one honors
hire was a University of Mississippi law school graduate who had been a clerk
for U.S. District Judge Charles W. Pickering Sr. about the time the
judge's nomination by President Bush to a federal appeals court provoked
opposition by congressional Democrats, who contended that Pickering was hostile
to civil rights.

A few months after he arrived, that lawyer was given a cash award by
the department, after he was the only member of a four-person team in the civil
rights division who sided with a Georgia voter-identification law that was later
struck down by the courts as discriminatory to minorities, according to two
former Justice lawyers.

What does this have to do with me? Well, Judge Pickering was the federal District Judge for my home district, with the courthouse in Hattiesburg. I interviewed with him for that clerkship, at just about the time he was put forward for appointment to the Fifth Circuit. Our interview was just before that happened, actually.

Now, there was never any chance that he was going to hire me -- we were not on the same page, ideologically speaking, and he asked for a two-year commitment when I had expected it to be one year only . . . but it is interesting how these things play out.

Labels: my intersection with history

posted by Carlton at 12:27 PM

MORE, PLEASE

All the world is abuzz with the news that Harry Reid said something that most Americans think is true:

"This is the message I took to the president," Reid said at a news
conference.
"Now I believe myself ... that this war is lost, and that the
surge is not accomplishing anything, as indicated by the extreme violence in
Iraq yesterday," said Reid, of Nevada.

David Broder had a heart attack. William Kristol called for Reid's resignation for, you know, the good of the Democrat(ic) party. Even the people of the lefty blogosphere had to scratch their heads and wonder: "Did he have a seizure?"

Or, for the most Pollyanna-ish of us, maybe it was a mistake, but at least maybe he meant to say what he said:

Some have questioned his rhetoric and his choice of words, calling it a gaffe.
But what if Reid had carefully chosen his words? What if his intention was to
spur debate, or even further, to forward the debate beyond the question of this
supplemental funding bill and the squabbling over it?

I mean, maybe something can be salvaged of this horrible, horrible mistake, and maybe the Republicans and Brit Hume won't be mean to us any more about it. Maybe we can just forget it happened.

Bull feathers. This country is in a state of crisis, and we aren't going to get anywhere by talking around the facts. Our reluctance to say things like this out loud and in front of television cameras has allowed this situation to develop into the full-blown crisis that it is today.

Say it again, Harry. The war is lost. Accept it as a fact, and do something smart based on that fact. posted by Carlton at 11:28 PM

ONE FOR THE GEEKS

A computer glitch fouls up the Cricket World Cup. But what's the actual error?

Bob Harris explains:

This makes sense, actually. New Zealand had lost a wicket before scoring a
run, which meant their "run rate" (a cricket stat you don't need to worry about)
would have required dividing by zero, something the scoreboard designer
apparently never realized could happen. (OK, so maybe this wasn't
Microsoft's fault.) Instead of a line of code fudging a zero or inserting
a blank for the stat, there was a sudden unexpected fireworks display visible
(but barely legible) to the sheep wandering across a distant parking lot.

There you go.

posted by Carlton at 9:39 PM

THE MUFFIN JOKE

This has been going around for a while now. If you're a sociologist studying laugh responses, you have to tell jokes. Here's one:

So there are these two muffins baking in an oven. One of them yells, “Wow,
it’s hot in here!” And the other muffin replies: “Holy cow! A talking
muffin!”

And to study laughter in different social situations, it helps if you tell the same joke each time. So . . .

[The muffin joke] was inflicted by social psychologists at Florida
State University on undergraduate women last year, during interviews for
what was ostensibly a study of their spending habits. Some of the women were
told the interviewer would be awarding a substantial cash prize to a few of the
participants, like a boss deciding which underling deserved a bonus.

The women put in the underling position were a lot more likely to laugh at the
muffin joke (and others almost as lame) than were women in the control group.
But it wasn’t just because these underlings were trying to manipulate the boss,
as was demonstrated in a follow-up experiment.
This time each of the women watched the muffin joke being told on videotape by a person who was ostensibly going to be working with her on a task. There was supposed to be a cash reward afterward to be allocated by a designated boss. In some cases the woman watching was designated the boss; in other cases she was the underling or a co-worker of the person on the videotape.

When the woman watching was the boss, she didn’t laugh much at the
muffin joke. But when she was the underling or a co-worker, she laughed much
more, even though the joke-teller wasn’t in the room to see her. When you’re low
in the status hierarchy, you need all the allies you can find, so apparently
you’re primed to chuckle at anything even if it doesn’t do you any immediate
good.

Well, interesting. But that doesn't get at the real question: Is the Muffin Joke funny?

John Tierney, writer of the above article and blogger for the New York Times: It is so not funny. He does moderate his position to a certain degree:

I’ll grant that the muffin joke meets a theoretical test for humor. The second
muffin’s response fits Kant’s definition of laughter as “an affection arising
from the sudden transformation of a strained expectation into nothing.”

But still: So. Not. Funny.

Response: It is too funny!

Other responses: Yeah! Funny!

Your thoughts? posted by Carlton at 10:59 AM

THE NEXT ONE

As you probably know, the Congress (House + Senate) recently passed a supplemental bill for funding the Iraq war that contains language setting deadlines for getting our troops out of there. The two houses passed different language, which I guess will be reconciled in conference.

The House-passed measure requires the withdrawal of combat troops by Sept. 1,
2008. The Senate bill mandates the beginning of a withdrawal within 120 days,
and sets a nonbinding goal of March 2008, for its completion.

Our president's response: No way I'm signing that. You're on the road to Veto City.

The Senate Democrats have a response today:

Washington D.C. -­ U.S. Senator Russ Feingold (D-WI) and Senate Majority
Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) announced today that they are introducing legislation
that will effectively end the current military mission in Iraq and begin the
redeployment of U.S. forces. The bill requires the President to begin safely
redeploying U.S. troops from Iraq 120 days from enactment, as required by the
emergency supplemental spending bill the Senate passed last week. The bill ends
funding for the war, with three narrow exceptions, effective March 31, 2008.

Dems to President: You don't like this bill? Think it's a bitter pill? Well, the next one is a suppository.

I wouldn't pretend to know how this will turn out, but I like this way of thinking. Of course, this President seems completely willing to drive the bus over the cliff in the name of his own vanity, making the brinksmanship game quite dangerous. I could imagine him leaving our troops in the desert with no gas, food or ammunition, just to show everybody what happens when he doesn't get what he wants. posted by Carlton at 10:30 AM