Grim's Hall

Pickled Oysters with Cucumber & Dill

Pickled Oysters with Cucumber & Dill

by Thomas Keller, The French Laundry Cookbook

Pickling liquid:

1 cup white wine vinegar

1/2 cup water

1/2 cup sugar

1 star anise

3 cloves

6 coriander seeds

3 dill stems

6 oysters

Capellini:

1 cucumber, peeled

1/2 t kosher salt

1 T rice wine vinegar

1 t dill, chopped

1 oz. sevruga caviar

6 sprigs dill

For the pickling liquid: Place all of the ingredients in a saucepan. Bring to a boil, cover, and allow to steep for 30 minutes. This is enough liquid to pickle up to 2 dozen oysters.

For the oysters: Shuck the oysters. Wash the deeper halves of the shells and reserve. Using scissors, cut away the muscle portion of the oysters and discard. Wash the trimmed oysters under cold running water to remove the milky residue, which would coagulate with the vinegar in the pickling liquid and create an unwanted coating on the oyster. Add the oysters to the pickling liquid and refrigerate in a covered container for at least 12 hours and up to 36 hours.

For the "capellini": Using a mandolin, cut 1/16-inch lengthwise slices form one side of the cucumber until you reach the seeds. Turn the cucumber and continue slicing for all four sides. Stack the slices and cut them lengthwise in 1/16-inch julienne strips to resemble capellini. You will need 1 cup of "capellini." Combine the cucumber strands with the kosher salt and rice wine vinegar in a bowl and allow them to marinate for about 30 minutes to extract the excess liquid. Drain the "capellini" and squeeze to remove the excess liquid. Place in a bowl and toss with the chopped dill.

To complete: place a bed of seaweed or rock salt mix one each of 6 serving plates. Twirl the cucumber with a fork, as you would pasta, and place a mound on each oyster shell. Remove the oysters from the pickling liquid and place an oyster on each mound of cucumber. Garnish each oyster with 1 t of caviar and a sprig of dill.

Oysters Brownefeller

Oysters Brownefeller

by Alton Brown

1 T unsalted butter

3/4 cup onion, chopped

3/4 cup celery, chopped

1 t salt

1 T garlic, minced

1 24-oz. can artichoke hearts, drained and chopped

1 cup breadcrumbs

2 t lemon zest, finely chopped

1/2 t black pepper, ground

1 t dried oregano

24 oysters on the half shell

Preheat the oven to 425 F. Melt the butter in a 12-inch saute pan over medium heat. Increase the heat slightly and add the onion, celery, and 1/2 t salt; sweat for 5-7 minutes. Add the garlic and cook for an additional 1-2 minutes. Reduce the heat to low and add the artichokes, bread crumbs, lemon zest, remaining 1/2 t salt, pepper, and oregano. Continue cooking for 2-3 minutes, then remove from the heat and set aside.

Place the oysters on a sheet pan and divide the bread mixture evenly among them. Place in the oven for 10-12 minutes. Bread crumbs should be slightly browned. Serve immediately.

Raw Oysters with Smoked Salmon & Caviar Cream

Raw Oysters with Smoked Salmon & Caviar Cream

From David Rosengarten:

1/2 cup creme fraiche

1/2 cup cream

1 T lemon juice

1 T dill, finely chopped

2 oz. smoked salmon, thinly sliced

12 oysters

2 ounces caviar

In a bowl, mix the creme fraiche, cream, 2 T of the caviar, lemon juice, and chopped dill. Refrigerate the sauce for 1 or 2 hours before serving. Just before serving, cut the salmon into 12 pieces large enough to wrap the oysters into roughly square little packets. Wrap the oysters.

Divide the cream sauce among the serving plates, creating a pool of sauce at the center of each plate. Divide the wrapped oysters among the plates, arranging them on the sauce pools. Garnish each packet with a generous 1 t of caviar and a dill sprig.

Cocktail Sauce

Cocktail Sauce

All oysterfests begin with raw oysters and cocktail sauce on crackers. Grim, you can put this on cooked fish instead.

3 cups catsup

1/3 cup celery, very finely chopped

1/3 cup onion, very finely chopped

1 t salt

1 t cracked black pepper

3 T horseradish

juice of 1 lemon

tabasco sauce to taste

UK v GA

UK v. GA:

UK: 'Don't put protective wire on your windows -- burglars could get hurt by it.'

GA: 'Who would put ugly wire on their windows when one of these is so much better for hurting burglars?'

Oysterfest

Oysterfest

Our annual Oysterfest was this weekend. It was more of a family and local affair this year than usual; our discombobulated schedule didn't firm up until the last minute, so not many friends from Houston could make it. But my husband outdid himself, as usual, with a dozen oyster dishes served over a five-hour feast period. Here are some of them:

Pickled oysters:

Oysters in spicy tomato sauce:

Oysters in smoked salmon packets with dill cream sauce:

Oysters Rockefeller soup with gruyere croutons:

Oyster pie:

Oysters in lime chile vinaigrette:

Oysters in chipotle with salsa verde:

Oyster au gratin:

Oysters "Brownefeller" (with artichoke hearts):

Useful Piece

The TEA Party & Montesquieu:

A useful piece by a professor of history on the TEA Party and its antecedents. He begins by acknowledging that it's a movement that some may find troubling:

It is perfectly understandable that Republican regulars thwarted in the primaries, Democrats defeated in the midterm elections, and adherents of both parties who found themselves suddenly deprived of political influence should find these developments disconcerting. It is equally understandable that those who find unpalatable either the Tea Party’s approach or some of the more colorful and/or questionable candidates to emerge victorious as a consequence of its rise might consider this leaderless and inchoate force’s impact worrisome or even frightening.

There are, though, earlier movements of this type, as he demonstrates, which inform our thinking. His argument does not demonstrate that the turmoil promised by the movement will end well. A repeat of Jefferson's or Jackson's electoral adjustment of the American project is fine; a repeat of the American or English Civil War, which he also cites as antecedents, would be less enjoyable for all concerned.

However, as he notes, the alternative is the end of the American project.

[I]t should be reassuring rather than frightening to the American elite that at the dawn of the third millennium, Americans know to become nervous and watchful when a presidential candidate who has presented himself to the public as a moderate devotee of bipartisanship intent on eliminating waste in federal programs suddenly endorses “spreading the wealth around” and on the eve of his election speaks of “fundamentally transforming America.” It should be of comfort to them that a small-business owner in Nebraska believes he has reason to express public qualms when a prospective White House chief of staff, in the midst of an economic downturn, announces that the new administration is not about to “let a serious crisis go to waste” and that it intends to exploit that crisis as “an opportunity to do things you couldn’t do before.” And it should be a source of pride to elites that the philosophical superstructure of the United States demonstrated extraordinary durability when a significant number of their fellow citizens refused to sit silent after an administration implied the inadequacy of the founding by promoting itself as the New Foundation, and after the head of government specifically questioned the special place of the United States in the world by denying “American exceptionalism.”...

In Europe, Jefferson explained, “under the pretence of government, they have divided their nations into two classes, wolves and sheep.” He feared that the same would in time happen in America. If the people in the United States should ever “become inattentive to the public affairs, you and I,” he wrote to one correspondent, “and Congress and Assemblies, judges and governors shall all become wolves.” From the outset, Jefferson feared that in this country the government would eventually find its way to what his friend James Madison would later call a “self directed course.” It was with this unwelcome prospect in mind that he asked, “What country can preserve its liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve their spirit of resistance?” In the end, then, one does not have to agree with the Tea Party movement in every particular to welcome its appearance.

Emphasis added. This is a long quote, but the main reason to read the piece is the historical argument, which I have not attempted to excerpt. What is given here are only the framing arguments. We should discuss the whole.

Skillet-Broiler Pizza

Skillet-Broiler Pizza:

You probably saw this new pizza hack via InstaPundit. I gave their final version a try tonight:

1) Preheat the cast-iron skillet and turn the oven to highest broil,

2) Form the pizza in the hot skillet,

3) Place the skillet in the oven and broil until the top is browning and crispy,

4) Return to the hot eye and cook until the bottom is crispy.

The claim was that the pizza would not only be delicious, but that the dough would remain thin and crispy beneath, but with significant "spring" to the dough on the edges. This produces the puffy and light (but still strong) outer edge called the cornicione .

The problem is with oven spring (or a lack thereof). When a pizza (or any bread, for that matter) first gets blasted by the heat of an oven, the moist air pockets inside the dough rapidly heat and expand, causing the dough to puff out. If it expands rapidly enough, it's possible to get a serious amount of poofing before the proteins in the flour begin to set, locking those bubbles in place. So there are really three factors that affect it: the stretchiness of the gluten in the dough, the amount of air in the dough, and the efficiency of heat transfer in the oven.

So how did it turn out?

Note that this pizza was made with a whole wheat crust, which I made using King Arthur's White Whole Wheat flour. Even with this denser crust, you get significant "pop" on the edges, and a thin inner crust that has the right mix of crunchy and chewy.

Serve with Guinness, of course.

Legendary

Legendary:

I'm pretty sure this is how the game was meant to be played.

From D29

Gun Trusts

Gun Trusts

A friend has come to me for help setting up a gun trust. There are lawyers, I know, who specialize in this kind of thing. I wondered if anyone here had ever done one. As I understand it, the idea is that some kinds of weapons or associated paraphernalia (in this case, specifically, noise suppressors) are so restricted in their transfer that it can be a good idea to put title in a trust whose multiple trustees are the whole group of family or close friends that are likely to be using or even temporarily possessing the weapon. Use of a trust also makes some aspects of the initial licensing process more convenient.

This sounds like a skill I need to learn. Perhaps we all have someone special in our lives who would like to receive a gun trust for Valentine's Day.

Angels & Devils

Angels and Devils

From Neal Boortz via the always reliable Maggie's Farm, this clip from "Family Feud," where I guess the setup is that they ask 100 people in a shopping mall how they would complete a common phrase, and the contestants win money if they guess the most common answer. Here, they're asked for "something that you would be likely to pass around," and two contestants offer a suitable and an unsuitable answer. How do you stack up against mall-going America, readers?

Luxuries

Luxuries

The Maine Family Robinson site continues to serve as my own personal mouthpiece, in "10 Luxuries We Don't Do Without." Well, that is, except for the part about TV, which I still watch, so sue me. I'm really liking the new show "Justified," for instance. How can you go wrong with Timothy Olyphant and Elmore Leonard?

But about luxuries, Greg Sullivan recommends things like a real fire that doesn't use an on/off switch, sleeping according to one's need for rest, and actual food. His kids, he says, "aren't rousted like vagrants and put on buses before the sunrise because it suits the public school teachers." They wake up when they're rested, and then his wife starts to teach them.

You Just Maht Be a Historical Revisionist!

In the 1950s and '60s, there were still states that outlawed birth control, so I started funding court cases to challenge that. At the same time, I helped sponsor the lower-court cases that eventually led to Roe v. Wade. We were the amicus curiae in Roe v. Wade. I was a feminist before there was such a thing as feminism. That's a part of history very few people know.

- Hugh Marston Hefner

Or maybe it's just a part of history few people will admit.

Birth control, abortion, no fault divorce, the sexual revolution: these are the four horsemen of the American apocalypse. And we all know who is to blame for these blights on traditional morality: feminists. We know that because we see feminists blasted 24/7 on conservative blogs. So let me ask those of you who are so sure that all of society's ills can safely be laid at the door of women's liberation: when was the last time you saw a conservative blogger taking Hugh Hefner to task? Surely if we regret admitting these four horsemen into our midst, we ought to recognize that feminists were hardly the first - or the only - ones holding open that barn door? They were hardly the only ones to advocate free love at the expense of marriage and fidelity:

Hefner’s friend Burt Zollo wrote in one of the early issues:

Take a good look at the sorry, regimented husbands trudging down every woman dominated street in this woman-dominated land. Check what they’re doing when you’re out on the town with a different dish every night...Don’t bother asking their advice. Almost to a man, they’ll tell you marriage is the greatest. Naturally. Do you expect them to admit they made the biggest mistake of their lives?

This was strong stuff for the mid-fifties. The suburban migration was in full swing and Look had just coined the new noun “togetherness” to bless the isolated, exurban family. Yet here was Playboy exhorting its readers to resist marriage and “enjoy the pleasures the female has to offer without becoming emotionally involved”—or, of course, financially involved.

What fuels the selective outrage against feminism? Is it principle, or personal pique? Keep in mind that Playboy began bashing marriage in the 1950s - years before Betty Friedan wrote the book that launched second wave feminism. No fault divorce and Roe v. Wade were still decades away and birth control was still illegal in many states. Yet somehow, evil feminists found a way to go back in time and brainwash poor Hugh. Who knew they had such power? ~~His~~ Their message was a simple one: chumps settle down with one woman and raise families. Real men demonstrate their sophistication and manliness by ducking marriage and wallowing in commitment-free sex:

According to the writer, William Iversen, husbands were self-sacrificing romantics, toiling ceaselessly to provide their families with “bread, bacon, clothes, furniture, cars, appliances, entertainment, vacations and country-club memberships.” Nor was it enough to meet their daily needs; the heroic male must provide for them even after his own death by building up his savings and life insurance. “Day after day, and week after week the American hubby is thus invited to attend his own funeral.” Iversen acknowledged that there were some mutterings of discontent from the distaff side, but he saw no chance of a feminist revival: The role of the housewife “has become much too cushy to be abandoned, even in the teeth of the most crushing boredom.” Men, however, had had it with the breadwinner role, and the final paragraph was a stirring incitement to revolt:

The last straw has already been served, and a mere tendency to hemophilia cannot be counted upon to ensure that men will continue to bleed for the plight of the American woman. Neither double eyelashes nor the blindness of night or day can obscure the glaring fact that American marriage can no longer be accepted as an estate in which the sexes shall live half-slave and half-free.

The "slaves" in this utopian manifesto were married men and traditional family life was the enemy of happiness and fulfillment.

This is not to say that second wave feminism, which became prominent well over a decade after Playboy began touting its siren song of self uber alles, did not have its own part to play in the dissolute and rootless culture we live with today. But to blame feminism first and foremost is to put the cart before the horse. Looking back at the world Hugh Hefner and his cronies worked so assiduously to destroy (and conservatives praise so long as no one expects them to adhere to the "prudish" moral code that made it possible), one can't help but wonder at the blind folly of human nature:

It was a world largely constituted by what he calls “desire”—desire chastened by deliberation, restrained by prudence, constrained by self-respect and rendered noble by a concern for the welfare of others. Since the 1960s, thanks to “the democratic project”, we have lived to an ever increasing extent in a world constituted by what he calls “impulse”, passion liberated from restraints and constraints, unchastened and utterly irresponsible.

The founders we love to quote understood the difference between freedom and license. They also understood that without personal responsibility, freedom is short lived.

What if feminism were only one part of a sweeping shift in morality that was fed by many sources: the civil rights movement, activists like Hugh Hefner who funded landmark court cases and worked tirelessly against traditional morals and traditional marriage, progressives who sought to maximize individual freedom while transferring individual responsibility to the State? And yes - feminists?

What if life didn't lend itself to simple answers where the other guy (or gal) is always - and conveniently - at fault? There's no question about it: we live in Hef's world now. If only I could figure out how those durned feminists got him to do their bidding.

Free Space

Free Space:

Skip to about three minutes in -- past the familiar ranting about the problems of large government agencies, and to the part where he begins talking about what private actors are doing right now.

That's some good stuff.

Fair

Be Fair:

The man says, "I didn't raise taxes once." PolitiFact says that's false.

Be reasonable, now. There must have been once that he didn't raise taxes.

Park, Out of The

Park, Out of The:

Dr. Althouse puts one over the bleachers. She has a couple of other posts on the subject as well, but that one is a very strong point.

Impossible

"Impossible"

From the NYT:

It was identified by Jonathan Haidt, a social psychologist at the University of Virginia who studies the intuitive foundations of morality and ideology. He polled his audience at the San Antonio Convention Center, starting by asking how many considered themselves politically liberal. A sea of hands appeared, and Dr. Haidt estimated that liberals made up 80 percent of the 1,000 psychologists in the ballroom. When he asked for centrists and libertarians, he spotted fewer than three dozen hands. And then, when he asked for conservatives, he counted a grand total of three.

“This is a statistically impossible lack of diversity,” Dr. Haidt concluded, noting polls showing that 40 percent of Americans are conservative and 20 percent are liberal.

Well, no. "Impossible" is clearly right out. The point is that the... ah, discipline... that you participate in is untethered from reality. I believe that was T99's point from a day or two back.

That doesn't imply that nothing it says is ever of any use at all. It does suggest that we ought to be very careful in granting it standing -- only in special cases, or on especially good evidence in a particular case.

GOProud

Sarah Palin & GOProud:

I don't care if anyone goes to CPAC, which garners no interest from me in the first place; but the question of how conservatives (in general) should relate to homosexual groups (in general) is a good one. Sarah Palin provides a fairly moderate suggestion.

[P]erhaps what it is that you’re suggesting in the question is should the GOP, should conservatives not reach out to others, not participate in events or forums that perhaps are rising within those forums are issues that maybe we don’t personally agree with? And I say no, it’s like you being on a panel shoot, with a bunch of the liberal folks whom you have been on and you provide good information and balance, and you allow for healthy debate, which is needed in order for people to gather information and make up their own minds about issues.

I look at participation in an event like CPAC or any other event, along, or kind of in that same vein as the more information that people have, the better.

That seems reasonable to me. You're all familiar with my own positions on the two largest "gay" issues, gays in the military and gay marriage; obviously I'm opposed to both. The reasons for being opposed are different in each case, but have to do in both cases with the bedrock status of the institution. There's a great deal of room for social experimentation in America, but that room lies within the walls guarded by the military, kept firm by the family. I must oppose anything that appears to weaken either institution.

That isn't a condemnation of homosexuality -- for example, there are probably a lot of extraordinary people who nevertheless have no business in the military. To say that they do not have any business in the military is not to condemn them as human beings. By the same token, to point out that their unions are not creating new kinship relationships across generations is merely to state fact, not to condemn what they are doing. It is a bedrock feature of my philosophy that there should be room for many different kinds of human beings.

One might argue that Christianity requires us to condemn homosexuality; I am not sure that I agree. There seem to be two approaches to this argument, both of which are doubtful. The first is the clear condemnation in the Old Testament; but it is not clear to me that the Old Testament's laws for the Jewish people are meant to apply broadly to all humanity, rather than being supplanted by the Great Commandment for Christians.

The second approach argues from St. Thomas Aquinas' three part test for sexuality: that there are three goods that God intended sexuality to fulfill, and therefore the moral kind of sex will be that which fills all three. These are: (1) generation, (2) a deepened union between the man and woman joined as 'one flesh,' and (3) mutual pleasure, which is a good of a lesser kind. Homosexuality clearly cannot fulfill the first two (being neither capable of generation, nor a tie across the sex divide that would allow deepened understanding between a unified man and woman), and the first of the three is given special importance by Aquinas.

The logical error here is this: if a thing is "good" in the eyes of God, then it is good. If mutual pleasure is the only good being achieved, still it is a good! Aquinas may be correct to say that the best kind of sexuality will achieve all three -- that seems correct to me. It does not follow that the only good kind of sexuality will do so. As long as greater goods are not being set aside in its favor, I'm not convinced that logic requires us to condemn it from these principles.

In any case, this is the long way around saying: by all means let us speak with people with whom we have some disagreements, and other agreements. In some sense that captures all of humanity, none of whom will agree with us about everything -- I suspect that several of you will disagree with me just over the material in this post! Yet I regard you still as my friends and companions, and think it is an excellent thing that we should debate and discuss both what we agree upon, and what we do not.

What Am I Missing Here?

This is a question for the men, but perhaps also for the women (because I'm inclusive and tolerant like that). What is the deal with men complaining that they don't get to have everything 100% their way anymore?

Once upon a time, the world belonged to men.

Literally.

Because men had exclusive power in both private and public life, they controlled their surrounding environment and the way in which space was designed and decorated. Consequently, the world was once a very masculine place.

Fair enough. I'd say a world where women are actively excluded from most public spaces could fairly be called "a very masculine place". It's lines like this that send me scurrying for the nearest liquor cabinet:

... we’ve made progress in the area of gender equality and women have brought their influence to bear in both the home and the workplace. However, as with many other areas of modern life, the pendulum has swung from one extreme to the other;...

Has it really? Funny - I would have sworn on a stack of Betty Friedan novels that the polar opposite of: "Once the world belonged to men" isn't "... but then we decided to share". I would have thought it was something more like, "Now the world belongs to women.

Except the world doesn't belong to women, does it? We don't control everything, or even most things. Come to think of it, I can't think of a time in history when women ever held "exclusive power". I can't think of a time when we could exclude men from the workplace, from commercial businesses, or from voting booths. The truth is that Mr. McKay has never actually experienced the 'opposite extreme' of this metaphorical pendulum. Things haven't moved to the other extreme at all, but rather to some middle ground between one pole that has persisted throughout most of human history and an opposing fantasy scenario none of us has ever witnessed.

That middle ground, apparently, can be a bleak place:

...instead of creating a world that’s friendly to both male and female space, we’ve created one that benefits female space at the expense of male space.

It seems remarkable to this wife and mother that men gave up absolute control over the world peacefully. This is a thing that hasn't happened often in our history - confronted with demands from women that men give up some of their power and share control over the world we both live in, men decided (for whatever reason) to do so voluntarily. I would hope that every man who loves his wife or mother or sister - every man who has young daughters - would rejoice at this miracle that was accomplished, not at the point of a sword but at the ballot box.

The truth is that no one is keeping men out of the workplace. No one is keeping them out of bars. As McKay admits, women were first accepted in bars during Prohibition. When it was over, no law forced bars to continue admitting women. For over 30 years my husband has had his hair cut at a barbershop. Never, even once - in any state we've lived in - has he elected to patronize a unisex salon. But more importantly, never once has he had the slightest trouble finding a barbershop. If there were sufficient demand - FROM MEN - for single sex hair establishments, there would be more barbershops.

Likewise, single sex gyms have largely given way to co-ed ones. The success of Curves (which, by the way, is nothing like a full service gym) is a testimony to the free market's ability to meet the demand for single sex workout emporiums... as is the rise of male-only gyms like Cuts and Blitz.

As a woman, I can't begin to imagine what it must be like to marinate in nostalgia for some magical time when the law of the land guaranteed me the "right" to exclude one half of humanity from places of employment. And while I don't much care for forcing legally mandated inclusiveness upon private organizations that accept no public funding, I can't help noticing that the bulk of McKay's examples involve neither force nor operation of law, but rather gradual shifts in public sensibilities: the inevitable changes in outward form that follow changes in the function of our social institutions.

No law today prevents men from negotiating private space in their own homes or spending their leisure time with male friends. Men (and now women, too) have full access to the courts and the voting booths. They have both the freedom and the ability to influence and even change the laws we live under. In today's world a man is even free to, as one of McKay's commenters so aptly phrased it, "act without consideration":

The decline in male space also correlates with a decline in male empowerment. I am 52 and my father did whatever he wanted without consideration of my mother. I get to do about half of what I want with my wife disallowing the other half. My sons will I am afraid get to do nothing they want, unless it includes and is approved by the wife.

Question for the day: are we talking about empowerment? Or entitlement?

Martyr

A Martyr:

This is the kind of thing that might make you question the mission in Afghanistan; but the man himself should be seen for the inspiring figure he is, in spite of the circumstances.

National Debt

National Debt

Assistant Village Idiot's son's friend has produced a 90-second video about the national debt as part of a contest. You can watch all five of the videos that made the finals and vote for the one you like best. His son's friend's entry is winning so far.

Superbowl Ad

Superbowl Ad:

I imagine you've all seen this advertisement:

It reminds me of a story. Way back when my son was one year old, my parents bought him a toy remote control tractor. He was much too young to understand about remote controls, or to have operated it in any case, but he liked the tractor so they bought it for him. For about two years, he played with that tractor toy as you would play with an powerless toy car.

So one day, when he was about three, I got out the remote control and stood in the kitchen. I watched him play with it for a while, and then when he backed away to do something else, I had it follow him. As soon as he turned to look, I stopped it.

Then he started forward, and I had it back away. He said, "It did do it!" Then it followed him around the room for quite a while, before I showed him how it worked.

I suspect the rest of his life has been a disappointment after that. We live in a world where there isn't much magic left, and people seem resolutely determined to drive out what remains. These people are blind, and have missed the true story: everything we think we understand is really magic, and is hiding secrets we don't yet dream of behind its mask.

Catholics & Mormons in the Lead

Catholics & Mormons in the Lead:

That sounds like the introduction to a joke, but it's the thesis of an article by a jealous evangelical Protestant. He argues that there are two reasons: theology for Catholics, and culture for Mormons.

It's an interesting question.

Dolor Occultus

Dolor occultus

An article that takes up where the recent expansion of the official list of psychiatric disorders left off: Asymptomatic Depression: Hidden Epidemic and Huge Untapped Market.

The author proposes a binary approach to diagnosis and treatment. If the patient acknowledges depression, he is treated with drugs that have a variety of unpleasant side effects, the severity of which convince him of their power to alleviate depression. If the patient does not acknowledge depression, he is diagnosed with "putative axiomatic biochemical imbalance" and treated with the same drugs, until the side effects induce a more classical presentation of depression symptoms, after which he can be treated as usual for depression.

H/t Maggie's Farm

Wikileaks & Public Service

Wikileaks & Public Service:

Although the transfer of secret diplomatic documents to Wikileaks was an act of treason, it is not the only betrayal that the episode has revealed. The betrayal of our British allies by this administration does not quite rise to the level of treason, since we cannot commit treason against any country but our own. Nevertheless, it is shocking to the conscience.

The Obama administration plainly dislikes the British, but the rest of us Americans have warm regards for the mother country. We had our disputes at first, but have been strong allies since coming to terms on our independence. That is reasonable, as the British idea of freedom and human liberty -- not the French doctrine, which served as the root of so many of the early democratic movements -- is the root of the American ideal. We have often fought together in defense of our mutual ideals, across many wars and the entire world.

How Bad is This?

How Bad Is This?

Georgia is my home state, so when I see a political story located here I have to take notice. What a doozy this one is!

Georgia Republican state Rep. Bobby Franklin (of gold-standard-wannabe fame) has introduced a bill to change the state’s criminal codes so that in “criminal law and criminal procedure” (read: in court), victims of rape, stalking, and family violence could only be referred to as “accusers” until the defendant has been convicted.

The Democratic Legislative Campaign Committee says:

Burglary victims are still victims. Assault victims are still victims. Fraud victims are still victims. But if you have the misfortune to suffer a rape, or if you are beaten by a domestic partner, or if you are stalked, Rep. Franklin doesn’t think you’ve been victimized. He says you’re an accuser until the courts have determined otherwise.

To diminish a victim’s ordeal by branding him/her an accuser essentially questions whether the crime committed against the victim is a crime at all. Robbery, assault, and fraud are all real crimes with real victims, the Republican asserts with this bill.

Rep. Franklin surely is aware that the crimes for which he believes there are no victims are disproportionately committed against women—and are disproportionately committed by men.

It is a reasonable point that the victim of a rape has suffered emotional damage, and the court should give attention to the question of not inflicting further damage. It's fair to ask that the court use language that will not cause insult or offense.

Where I differ with the DLCC is here: that interest in protecting the victim has to be balanced against the bedrock legal principle of presumptive innocence. That may be of particular importance in cases where one of the questions before the court is whether a rape did, in fact, take place -- either because of disputes about consent, or questions of whether or not there was really sex at all. The court has to be careful not to prejudice the jury in either direction. If those interests cannot be balanced completely, shouldn't we err in favor of the bedrock legal principle that is protecting someone who is in jeopardy of losing freedom or life?

Perhaps not! There may well be cases when the presumption of innocence is a facade that no one can really keep up; frequently in criminal court everyone is quite sure of the guilt of the accused because of numerous past offenses. In those cases, the court may do the minimum necessary to keep up the facade for the sake of the jury, and no more than is required. Certainly in cases where there is no dispute that a rape occurred -- where the accused is merely disputing that he was the one who committed it -- it would make no sense to force the court to refer to the woman as "an accuser" rather than a victim. In cases where there is reasonable doubt, though, and where the fact of the rape is in dispute, it may be necessary for the court to consider the issue of language to ensure a fair outcome.

The issue is surely a complicated one; it is probably best be left to the discretion of the judge, rather than handled with an across-the-board legislative remedy. I agree that this attempt is clumsy and ill-advised. I'm not convinced that the motivating sentiment is immoral, or that a bill aimed at this matter should be taken as prima facie evidence of bias against women.

Permitorium Hell and Waiver Heaven

"Permitorium" Hell and Waiver Heaven

Laws that theoretically allow citizens to conduct their lawful business, but in fact leave the regime's political enemies exposed to the the whim of a bureaucrat who can refuse to grant a permit. Laws that theoretically compel all citizens to adopt an unpopular and ruinous course of business, but in fact leave the regime's political friends a loophole via waivers. None of it is consistent with free citizens co-existing with a properly limited government.

Look at the flap over the Planned Parenthood videos. People who believe in the importance of granting young women unrestricted access to what they call "reproductive healthcare" are alert to the dangers of imposing too many regulations on abortions to minors, such as parental consent requirements. Over-regulation in that context clearly undermines the essential freedom guaranteed by the law, right? Imagine how they'd react to the idea of a law "guaranteeing" the right to abortion by either subjecting it to a permit process, or outlawing it subject to the possibility of a waiver.

Lottery

The Lottery:

A voluntary tax on the stupid, it has been called; but that may be too strong. It is merely a voluntary tax on the innumerate. Just how much this is true is revealed by the statistician who broke the code:

After analyzing his results, Srivastava realized that the singleton trick worked about 90 percent of the time, allowing him to pick the winning tickets before they were scratched.

His next thought was utterly predictable: “I remember thinking, I’m gonna be rich! I’m gonna plunder the lottery!” he says. However, these grandiose dreams soon gave way to more practical concerns. “Once I worked out how much money I could make if this was my full-time job, I got a lot less excited,” Srivastava says. “I’d have to travel from store to store and spend 45 seconds cracking each card. I estimated that I could expect to make about $600 a day. That’s not bad. But to be honest, I make more as a consultant, and I find consulting to be a lot more interesting than scratch lottery tickets.”

So, in other words, if you're good enough to beat the lottery? You can make more money doing honest work.

A Pheasant Pie:

Served with a good brown ale.

Jerusalem

Jerusalem:

A new book provides a 'biography' of a city.

Over three millennia people have believed the city to be the bridge between heaven and earth. But it has usually been a dangerous crossing. Jerusalem has inspired courage, sacrifice and chivalry; art, architecture, and music. It has also sunk into persecution, brutality, butchery, squalor and venereal disease. Just to its south lies the Valley of Hinnom, notorious for child sacrifices even in the early Jewish era. As a result, it came to be known as Gehenna: hell. Given Jerusalem’s history, it is appropriate that it should have its own branch of Hades.

Jerusalem is surely one of the most fascinating cities in the world, even apart from religious history. Just the question of its relationship to water is fascinating. I have only become interested in it recently, but the more you learn about it, the stranger and more gripping the story becomes.

Historiography

Historiography:

Fox News reports that President Obama botched a Bible verse.

"Those who wait on the Lord will soar on wings like eagles, and they will run and not be weary, and they will walk and not faint," the president said during a speech to several thousand people at the breakfast.

But the actual passage, from Isaiah 40:31, states: "But they that wait upon the Lord shall renew their strength; they shall mount up with wings as eagles; they shall run, and not be weary; and they shall walk, and not faint."

The implication Fox wants you to draw from this is almost certainly backwards. Historians normally take an error of that sort to be evidence that someone was quoting from memory, as memory often contains minor errors. For example, Aristotle frequently misquotes Homer; this is usually thought to prove that Aristotle had spent a lot of time reading and thinking about Homer, so that he didn't feel it was necessary to look up the passage he wanted to reference.

So, the President's misquote is probably evidence that he's spent a fair amount of time reading the Bible. That's just the opposite of what is being implied, but it's the normal conclusion we would draw from someone who gives a close misquote.

Lost Music Found

Lost Music Found

When we were kids, my sister and I listened to a four-record set night and day, full of great folk songs. We lost it long ago and couldn't find it online. Although we could remember many of the songs, we were sure we remembered that it was called the Newport Folk Festival of some year or another. Now and then we'd find a recording of one of these festivals, but never what we remembered.

The other day a synapse tripped while my sister was trolling YouTube videos of old music recordings: the record set was called "Folk Songs and Minstrelsy." With this clue, we found a copy of the boxed set on eBay. It was a Book of the Month Vanguard recording; only the fourth record is marked "Newport Folk Festival." Googling it, I noticed that every few years someone writes an article about how much they remember loving this set and how sorry they are it was never released on CD. Some of the artists, like Odetta, were prominent enough that particular tracks, or similar ones, showed up on CDs. But, oh! this boxed set has everything I remember, and cuts I've never been able to find again:

SIDE 1

Sumer Is Icumen In: The Deller Consort
He That Will an Alehouse Keep: The Deller Consort
Greensleeves: The Deller Consort
We Be Soldiers Three: The Deller Consort
Come All Ye Fair and Tender Ladies: Leon Bibb
Squirrel: Leon Bibb
Cotton Eyed Joe: Leon Bibb
Darlin': Leon Bibb
Poor Lolette: Leon Bibb

SIDE 2

The Golden Vanity: Ronnie Gilbert
Go From My Window: Ronnie Gilbert
Johnny Is Gone for a Soldier: Ronnie Gilbert
Spanish Is a Loving Tongue: Ronnie Gilbert
House of the Rising Sun: Ronnie Gilbert
East Texas Red: Cisco Houston
The Sinking of the Reuben James: Cisco Houston

SIDE 3

Meet The Johnson Boys: The Weavers
The Wild Gooses Grasses: The Weavers
Aweigh, Santy Ano: The Weavers
Get Along, Little Dogies: The Weavers
The Erie Canal: The Weavers
We're All Dodgin': The Weavers
The State of Arkansas: The Weavers
Greenland Whale Fisheries: The Weavers
Eddystone Light: The Weavers

SIDE 4: Odetta

I've Been Driving on Bald Mountain/Water Boy
Saro Jane
God's A-Gonna Cut You Down
John Riley
John Henry
All The Pretty Horses
No More Auction Block for Me

SIDE 5: Odetta

The Foggy Dew
No More Cane on the Brazos
The Fox
He's Got the Whole World in His Hands
The Ox Driver
Another Man Done Gone
I'm Going Back to the Red Clay Country

SIDE 6: Cisco Houston

Talking Guitar Blues
Danville Girl
Old Dan Tucker
The Buffalo Skinners
The Streets of Laredo
Hard Travelin'
Bonneville Dam
Do Re Mi
The Wreck of the Old 97
John Hardy

SIDE 7

The Bold Fisherman: Ed McCurdy
When Cockle Shells Turn Silver Bells: Ed McCurdy
Frankie and Johnny: Ed McCurdy
Lang A-Growin': Ewan MacColl
Virgin Mary Had One Son: Joan Baez/Bob Gibson
Wayfaring Stranger: Bob Gibson
The Hangman: John Jacob Niles
I Know an Old Lady: Alan Mills

SIDE 8

Johnny, I Hardly Knew Ye: Tom Makem
The Whistling Gypsy: Tom Makem
The Cobbler's Song: Tom Makem
Railroad Bill: Cisco Houston
The Cat Came Back: Cisco Houston
East Virginia Blues: Pete Seeger
Old Joe Clark: Jimmy Driftwood
The Unfortunate Man: Jimmy Driftwood

Reviewer Jim Clark notes:

One of the frequent memories of those older than about 30 is how free childhood was back then. Most of us went outside in the morning, returned briefly for dinner, and returned to the world until bedtime. Games were organized by the kids playing them, streets were avenues to the far corners of the known world, and parents were arbitrary and bizarre creatures who appeared only to bring bad news. We lived free, had fun, and learned life's lessons at our pace and in our way. And most of us made it.
But no longer. No, today's kids are protected from germs, weather, competition, failure, loss, disappointment, and anything distasteful. Who would let their children listen to "The Cat Came Back" today? "They dropped him in the hopper when the butcher wasn't round, the cat disappeared with a blood-curdling shriek, and the town's meat tasted furry for a week."

My neighbor's Christmas present this year included equipment and software for transferring LPs to digital format. If she'll help me digitize this box set, I think I'll even learn how to upload it to YouTube.

Japenese Sword INferor

On the Inferiority of Japanese Swords:

An account:

Some doubts of the temper of these swords arose in consequence of a playful encounter which happened on board one of the ships, in which a Japanese sword suffered some injury from the cuts of an English one, which had received several cuts from the Japanese sword without receiving any dents...

FWIW.

Irish Crochet Lace

Irish Crochet Lace

I've finished my first project from the Irish Crochet Lace book that my sister sent me for Christmas. What fun! This is a christening cap for my newest grand-nephew.

Four Loko = Ethanol

"How Four Loko Became Ethanol"

A video by Mary Katherine Ham examines the way that a popular drink -- one people were eager to buy -- has been banned by the government, and is now being subsidized as ethanol.

If the people were really in charge of the government, this would not happen: not because of Four Loko, which is popular only with the young and foolish, but because we don't want ethanol in our gasoline. This wonderful product absolutely destroys small engines, such as those in chainsaws, and turns gasoline into something like varnish in about a month. I lost a chainsaw to it last year; and when I spoke with several small engine repairmen in the course of trying to get it fixed, I learned that the problem is epidemic.

(Another great idea from the EPA: make chainsaw manufacturers craft engines that run on 50:1 oil mix instead of the richer 40:1 mix. The extra oil in older small engines is of great benefit to keeping those engines from tearing themselves apart when run with the new ethanol mix. Pity they're not allowed to make them that way anymore! Environmentalists who are high-fiving each other can take a few minutes to reflect on the additional coal being burned to power the plants that are making new chainsaws, because the old ones are being destroyed and have to be replaced. Meanwhile, for your average American who just wants a small engine that works reliably? Tough luck, buddy. The government's not in the business of considering your requirements. It's in the business of telling you what to do.)

These ethanol subsidies are great for the massive agricultural corporations that dominate the corn industry. They are terrible for the average American who wants to mow his lawn or cut his own firewood. The poor college kids are getting sucked in as well. None of this is about what we want. All of it is about the government having the power to control our personal decisions, and have the power to choose winners and losers in the market. That power means they can readily command the bribes that have come to define the American political and regulatory system, whether those bribes are paid in the form of campaign contributions, plush honorariums for speeches, or generously-paid jobs or consultancies after their political career.

This activity is framed as beneficial, but it is really parasitic.

Gratuitous Gender Wars Provocation

Gratuitous Gender Wars Provocation

A reader wrote to a favorite word-maven columnist of mine with a question about word usage. Because the usage was called to mind by an episode of Laurel & Hardy, he stopped to muse about why women never seem to like either Laurel & Hardy or The Three Stooges. He said that women of his acquaintance found the humor too "mean." The word maven agreed, and extended the principle to the Marx Brothers.

Now there I have to protest. My sister and I always have been crazy for the Marx Brothers. The word maven defined genuine enthusiasm for this peerless comedy team as "being willing to watch Duck Soup three times a year." I'd happily watch it once a month, and the same goes for "A Night at the Opera." It's my husband that stares a little blankly when they come on. I have to admit that I'm no more than moderately amused by Laurel & Hardy and The Three Stooges, but I can't say they're any "meaner" than the Marx Brothers. It's true I have a high threshold for meanness as long as no animals are involved.

How about it, Hall members? Does the Y chromosome control the slapstick reflex, by and large, in your experience? Am I an outlier, corrupted by my elder sister?

Snow Strategies

Snow Strategies

Chicago is using a fleet of snowmobiles to transport patients from inaccessible homes or cars to waiting ambulances. The snowmobiles pull the patients on a kind of basket-sled behind them.

Lake Shore Drive was no place to be. This is some AP footage. Be prepared to be annoyed at the attitude struck by the TV crew.

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

The Revolution Will Be Tweeted

I've been meaning to read this piece at The American Thinker since DL Sly recently included the link in a comment. It's hard to know what to make of the account, but it certainly provides a perspective I haven't been reading elsewhere. The author, described as an Egyptian student, sees the uprising as a popular backlash against moderately capitalist reforms by Mubarak's heir apparent, Gamal, which were never sold effectively to a population used to nanny-state control of the economy and a lot of socialist security. He also attributes the uprising almost entirely to the organizational tools of Twitter. He believes that, although the initial "flash" mobs were exaggerated, they were big enough to panic a crusty old autocracyinto shutting down the Internet. Paradoxically, the populace responded with emboldened ridicule of a repressive government running scared of modern communications.

Perhaps most interesting is the account of how, between the withdrawal of the security forces and the arrival of the army, the population took advantage of the power vacuum to storm every police station and prison in the country, free the prisoners, and confiscate the weapons. Then, as widespread looting broke out, neighborhoods spontaneously organized to protect each block with their new weapons. The author feels that the mass of the people have stopped demonstrating and are looking to the army to shut down the Islamist troublemakers. He also feels, however, that the neighborhoods will not soon forget that they took their security into their own hands, and successfully.

The author closes with a strange combination of predicting that nothing important will change, while at the same time suggesting that everything has changed. In the meantime, Egypt's economy won't soon recover, and capitalist reforms (if that is in fact what's been going on there) are at an end for the foreseeable future.

Monster Storm

Monster Storm

This thing was really huge. Even way down here it's giving us several days of hard freeze, with ice and even snow possibly on the way in the next day or two. It's a good thing we prepared for the paradoxical effects of global warmening by wrapping the citrus trees and laying in a supply of firewood.

Not for the Child

Headlines:

"Abortion May Be Less Traumatic Than Childbirth, Study Finds."

Not for the child.

St. Raymond

St. Raymond of Fitero:

Dad29 sends this story of a warrior monk.

Apparently St. Raymond was a model monk, for he was elected as the prior of the new monastery of Nienzabas on land granted by the King Alfonso VII of Castile and afterwards became abbot, relocating the house to Fitero around 1150.

It is here that St. Raymond’s military career begins. At the death of King Alfonso in 1158, St. Raymond went to Toledo to confirm Fitero’s privileges with the new king, Sancho III, taking with him to court Diego Velásquez, a knight turned Cistercian lay brother. At the same time, the Kinghts Templar had given up hope of holding the stronghold of Calatrava, which sat at the southern border of Christian Spain, and had withdrawn. In desperation, Sancho offered Calatrava to whoever could hold it.

We might consider doing that with Detroit -- at least, if there remain any Cistercians who think they could make it work.

Evil

Evils Done:

Some commentary:

When asked how long a girl might have to wait to get back to the work of the sex trade after an abortion, two weeks minimum is the answer. He protests, “We’ve still got to make money.” The clinic worker understands his predicament and so advises that the girls can still work “Waist up, or just be that extra action walking by..." to advertise[.]

For a long time I was persuaded that, however personally opposed I might be to abortion, it was a matter of decent respect to let the individuals involved make such an intimate decision according to their private moral conscience. Here we see no such example. The girl, if she has a private moral conscience kept intact despite the trauma, is not really being consulted. She is left at the mercy of a pimp and his accomplice -- one who probably thinks of herself as a defender of something like "women's rights," at the same time she consorts in the slavery of women.

The American project is conscious of the importance of individual liberty, which is what has allowed the practice of abortion to survive our moral good sense. The rot that has followed from that infection -- is that language too strong? -- now poisons us. Probably this woman got into her line of work thinking she was doing good. This is what she is doing instead.

Ayo Gurkhali!

It's OK to bring a knife to a gunfight, if you know what to do with the knife.

A 35 year-old Gurkha soldier named Bishnu Shrestha was riding a train when he suddenly found himself in the middle of a massive robbery. 40 men armed with knives, swords and guns stormed the train and began robbing the passengers.

Bishnu kept his peace while the gang snatched cell phones, jewelry and cash from other riders. But then, the thugs grabbed the 18 year-old girl sitting next to him and forcefully stripped her naked. Before the bandits could rape the poor girl in front of her helpless parents, Bishnu decided he had enough.

“The girl cried for help, saying ´You are a soldier, please save a sister´,” Shrestha recalled. “I prevented her from being raped, thinking of her as my own sister.”

"One man shall drive a hundred, as the dead kings drave."

Obama Invokes the Kerry Doctrine

Watching various members of the Obama administration twist themselves into rhetorical pretzels over the individual mandate, erstwhile admirers of the former Junior Senator from Massachusetts might be forgiven for wondering whether we're not witnessing the return of the Kerry Doctrine? Here's a short history lesson for those of you who need a refresher:

''There are those trying to say somehow that Democrats should be admitting they were wrong'' in opposing the gulf war resolution, Kerry noted in one Senate floor speech. But he added, ''There is not a right or wrong here. There was a correctness in the president's judgment about timing. But that does not mean there was an incorrectness in the judgment other people made about timing.''

For you see, Kerry continued, ''Again and again and again in the debate, it was made clear that the vote of the U.S. Senate and the House on the authorization of immediate use of force on Jan. 12 was not a vote as to whether or not force should be used.''

In laying out the Kerry Doctrine -- that in voting on a use-of-force resolution that is not a use-of-force resolution, the opposite of the correct answer is also the correct answer -- Kerry was venturing off into the realm of Post-Cartesian Multivariate Co-Directionality that would mark so many of his major foreign policy statements.

Back in 2008 our Fave Constitutional Law Prof was inclined to oppose the individual mandate on the grounds that such measures grant Congress far too much power:

...in 2008, then-Senator Obama supported a health care reform proposal that did not include an individual mandate because he was at that time strongly opposed to the idea, stating that, ‘If a mandate was the solution, we can try that to solve homelessness by mandating everybody to buy a house,’” Judge Vinson wrote in a footnote toward the end of his 78-page ruling Monday.

Of course, the beauty of evolving standards of Constitutionality is that legal scholars like the President need wait only a year or two before heaping scorn on their own arguments!

Much of Judge Vinson‘s ruling was a discussion of how the Founding Fathers, including James Madison and Thomas Jefferson, saw the limits on congressional power. Judge Vinson hypothesized that, under the Obama administration‘s legal theory, the government could mandate that all citizens eat broccoli.

White House officials said that sort of “surpassingly curious reading” called into question Judge Vinson‘s entire ruling.

“There’s something thoroughly odd and unconventional about the analysis,” said a White House official who briefed reporters late Monday afternoon, speaking on the condition of anonymity.

One wonders: did that "anonymous" White House official realize that his boss had made precisely this argument just a short time ago? Ah well... this is hardly the first time the Obama administration has been caught talking out of both sides of its mouth. Why, just a few months ago the individual mandate was not - we repeat, NOT - a tax:

... Mr. Obama refused to accept the argument that a mandate to buy insurance, enforced by financial penalties, was equivalent to a tax.

...When Mr. Stephanopoulos said the penalty appeared to fit the dictionary definition of a tax, Mr. Obama replied, “I absolutely reject that notion.”

Congress anticipated a constitutional challenge to the individual mandate. Accordingly, the law includes 10 detailed findings meant to show that the mandate regulates commercial activity important to the nation’s economy. Nowhere does Congress cite its taxing power as a source of authority.

It took only few months for that argument, too, to become "surpassingly curious", if not downright "odd and unconventional":

When Congress required most Americans to obtain health insurance or pay a penalty, Democrats denied that they were creating a new tax. But in court, the Obama administration and its allies now defend the requirement as an exercise of the government’s “power to lay and collect taxes.”

And that power, they say, is even more sweeping than the federal power to regulate interstate commerce.

Administration officials say the tax argument is a linchpin of their legal case in defense of the health care overhaul and its individual mandate, now being challenged in court by more than 20 states and several private organizations.

Here we see the beauty of the Kerry Doctrine, in which the administration and Congressional Democrats can argue that the individual mandate is NOT - we repeat, NOT A TAX - while claiming that it is justified under Congress's well known power to collect things-that-are-NOT-taxes for the general welfare. The severability argument is likewise disposed of by the Kerry Doctrine. Judge Vinson's finding that the individual mandate cannot be severed from the overall bill without fatally compromising the bill's overall objective is plainly an unwarranted and unreasonable judicial power grab:

... both the administration, which is implementing the law and defending it in court, and Congress, which wrote and passed the law, have made clear that the individual mandate is an absolutely critical provision. Vinson explains:

The defendants have acknowledged that the individual mandate and the Act’s health insurance reforms, including the guaranteed issue and community rating, will rise or fall together as these reforms “cannot be severed from the [individual mandate].” As explained in my order on the motion to dismiss: “the defendants concede that [the individual mandate] is absolutely necessary for the Act’s insurance market reforms to work as intended. In fact, they refer to it as an ‘essential’ part of the Act at least fourteen times in their motion to dismiss.” [bold added]

Vinson provides several examples, and also notes that Congress itself, in drafting the law's text, put forth a similar claim:

Congress has also acknowledged in the Act itself that the individual mandate is absolutely “essential” to the Act’s overarching goal of expanding the availability of affordable health insurance coverage and protecting individuals with pre-existing medical conditions.

Of course, when both Congress and the administration made the same argument the searing, Kerryesque logic was impossible to refute.

Lesser minds might see hypocrisy in the administration's toffee nosed condemnation of its own arguments, but discerning intellects know that false dichotomies like "right/wrong" or "then/now" cannot withstand the compelling logic of one John Foragainst Kerry:

Kerry has made clear that if he is elected president, the nation will never face a caveat shortage. He has established the foragainst method, which has enabled him to be foragainst the war in Iraq, foragainst the Patriot Act and foragainst No Child Left Behind. If you decide to vote for him this year, there would be a correctness in that judgment, but if you decide to vote for George Bush, that would also be correct.

How conveeeeeeeeeeeeeenient.

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