If there is one thing about Ron Paul you should never doubt, it is his ability to pull in the conflicting and monstrous fringes within our political system.
He doesn’t mean that in a good way.
Archive for the ‘Americana’ Category
Monster mash
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
Posted in Americana, Politics and Poker | 2 Comments »
Michelle and me
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
Michelle Obama, the highly accomplished wife of Senator Barack Obama, and I are Princeton classmates. Did you know that?
Me neither, until fairly recently.
I’m quite sure she doesn’t know it even now! She’s got plenty on her mind and, I’m guessing, like most of you doesn’t know where I went to school. And why should she? Unlike yours truly, Mrs. Obama distinguished herself academically,
graduating cum laude, and therefore must have spent a lot of time in the library, where I was not. (I graduated sine laude, as I have mentioned before, and spent a lot of time on the radio.)
I am sure we never met at Old Nassau, because in four years there I had personal contact with, I believe, six black people, maybe five, and I remember them pretty distinctly; a few of them were (and are) my friends.
Not that there were so few blacks at Princeton, but in those days blacks mainly segregated themselves at what was then a voluntary-membership residential college called the Princeton Inn College or “PIC.” It was named after a defunct hotel adjacent to the campus which the university had acquired and turned into residences, dining and social space. Over the years became the place for black undergraduates. Perhaps not coincidentally, the space was somewhat isolated from the main part of the campus, though legend had it that the accomodations were superb. In four years, I recall stepping in there only once. I had no business there. I don’t really know if Michelle lived there, and have no way of finding out.
Not long after we graduated — well, shucks, not really “we,” right?; I graduated and also Michelle did — alumnus Steve Forbes gave Princeton a gazillion dollars in honor of his father Malcolm Forbes and they renamed PIC after the old man. A short time later Princeton reshuffled its residential and dining options, made the colleges non-voluntary for underclassmen, and desegregated them.
Not then, however. Michelle Robinson found the Princeton experience to be one that only enhanced her racial identity:
At Princeton, where she followed her brother by two years, she wrote her senior sociology thesis on race, titling it “Princeton-Educated Blacks and the Black Community.”
“One of the points I was making, which is a reality for black folks in majority-white environments, is it is a very isolating experience. Period. The question is how do people deal with that isolation,” she says now. “Does it make you cling more to your own community or does it make you try to assimilate more?”
As an adult, working in public, private, and political worlds, Obama emphasizes the nuts and bolts of her undergraduate thinking, while also talking of grander goals that infuse Team Obama’s quest. She issues a challenge, equally to Chicago, to elite universities, and the nation: “It is incumbent on us, whether we are in city government or sitting around the corporate boardroom or in policy or education, to have critical masses of diverse voices at the table.
“At many of the top universities, we still struggle with that. … The question for Princeton is what does the ratio of underrepresented minority students look like today? What about faculty? What about top administrators? Those are the questions we have to continue to ask as a country.”
I actually didn’t quite get the answer to the question posed in the first paragraph — “Does [racial isolation in a mainly white environment] make you cling more to your own community or does it make you try to assimilate more?” Read the rest of this entry »
Posted in Americana | 6 Comments »
Conference room days
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 21, 2007
Glenn Reynolds got me all excited for nothing:
ANOTHER HOLLYWOOD SUICIDE BOMB: Wagner James Au emails: Not sure anyone’s pointed this out yet, but *Redacted* was a giant bomb, I mean just disastrous in relation to profile, ranking *50th* place in last weekend’s box office receipts.
Here I thought I was finally going to go see a movie, but “Redacted,” it turns out, is not what I thought it was. No, it’s another pro-surrender movie and it’s tanking. That’s fine, but I was hoping — from the title, you know? — that it was a movie about document production in a big law firm, as I wrote about in my never-written book, Boiling the Ocean (pdf). I was even going to go out and buy a new REDACTED stamp and everything — just to relive old times.
I can’t understand why no one makes movies like that!
UPDATE: Contrary to some suggestions to the contrary in the comments, it appears that it may be a lot worse — not a lot better — for “Redacted” than initial reports suggested.
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | 6 Comments »
Big shoe drops
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 20, 2007
On the Second Amendment. Evidently, what was a stupid, unsupportable decision to this New York judge is of some interest to a few Supreme Court justices. They might agree with him. Or not.
Posted in Americana, Lex scripta | Leave a Comment »
Their day in court
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 19, 2007
Dahlia Lithwick writes perceptively about how critical it is that litigants — especially in family court — feel they have been heard by the court:
Last week in Las Vegas, Reno, Nev., millionaire Darren Mack shocked the court by pleading guilty, midtrial, to killing his estranged wife, Charla, in June 2006. . . . In the weeks before he murdered Charla, Darren Mack was frustrated and then enraged by Judge Weller’s interim custody and support order, which resulted in shared physical custody and the requirement that Darren pay Charla $10,000 per month in interim spousal support. Darren didn’t pay, Weller found him in contempt, and Darren declared bankruptcy. Convinced that Weller “had made up his mind prior to coming to court, … didn’t like him and no matter what he did, Weller would rule against him,” as a friend explained, Darren launched a crusade. . . .
Mazoltuv Borukhova was outraged by the Oct. 3 decision of Sidney F. Strauss, a state Supreme Court judge in Queens, to transfer temporary primary custody to Malakov, evidently without a hearing. Even if a judicial move like this sounds familiar—courtesy of the Britney Spears 24-hour legal cable extravaganza—it’s almost never done. Judge Strauss, however, switched custody because Borukhova “was allegedly not cooperating with supervised visitation.” . . .
I’ve come to suspect . . . that Mack may have snapped because, after years of feeling listened-to in the family courts, even when he lost, he came across a judge who seemed to reach swift conclusions, without always hearing him out.
After he pleaded guilty last week, Mack went out of his way to thank Judge Herndon, saying he appreciated the “integrity” the judge had shown throughout the murder trial. There is much that needs fixing in the family law system. But, at least from the perspective of these two aggrieved parents, the quickest fix seems to be a family court judge who schedules one more conference, and presides over one more hearing, and truly listens, even when she thinks she’s heard it all before.
These complaints are in the air all day if you are involved, as I am, with litigation matters that implicate anyone but the largest corporations. They’re especially pernicious in family court, where the judges are required to get involved in situations full of raw emotion and to issue rulings that are almost certain to inflame more.
But in almost any case, Lithwick is right: Nothing — nothing — outrages litigants as much as the perception that the judge isn’t listening, has already made up his mind, and isn’t fair. Thus I have found that many settlements, objectively unreachable, have been achievable when a judge, or even a court-appointed referee or other neutral, spends “quality time” in his or her chambers at a judicial settlement conference. It is ideal if both sides will agree to a period where each litigant can have the judge to him- or herself.
All of a sudden it turns out that, quite often, it really isn’t “about the money,” when a person feels he has had his day, however brief, “in court.” It says something about our litigation system, and about the arrogation of power by the government through the courts, that this is so often impossible to achieve. A large part of the complication comes from the increasing criminalization of almost every aspect of the family law system in the states, as extensively written about by bloggers such as Trudy Schuett.
It would be awful to contemplate that judges might start listening to these stories because it’s dangerous for them not to.
Cross-posted at Right Wing News.
Posted in Americana, Lex scripta, Oppression | 4 Comments »
One of the best 14 liveblogging lines of the night
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 15, 2007
8:51: What 9/11 is to Rudy, “the Bush administration” (as in “it’s the Bush administration’s fault”) is to Hillary. It’s a safety blanket to drape over the base voters who don’t trust her.
Posted in Americana, Politics and Poker | 1 Comment »
Those who can’t, coach
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 15, 2007
ABC News has this story (yes, Glenn again) about three grateful recipients of Bill Clinton pardons who, not surpisingly, want to show some gratitude — and the best way to do that right now is to give money to his co-president in her current campaign for the Top Banana role.
This does not move me that much.
I was, however, struck by this piece of the story:
One of the pardonees who has become a donor to Sen. Clinton is David Herdlinger, a
former prosecutor in Springdale, Ark., who, according to press accounts at the time of his pardon pleaded guilty in 1986 to mail fraud after taking bribes to reduce or drop charges against defendants charged with drunken driving offenses.
Now a life and business coach in Georgia, Herdlinger was pardoned by President Clinton in January 2001; he donated $1,000 to Sen. Clinton’s presidential campaign in August.
A disbarred lawyer who “pleaded guilty in 1986 to mail fraud after taking bribes to reduce or drop charges against defendants charged with drunken driving offenses” — a life coach? What a country!
Posted in Americana, Jocularity, Sisyphus | 5 Comments »
Do you believe in magic?
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 15, 2007
Kaus on how Obama is arguing for his electability (link added by me):
Obama’s new wrinkle is the argument is that Bush is so unpopular he’s freed up a bunch of voters at the center for Dems to capture without triangulating. That may be true on universal health care coverage (where Obama’s plan arguably triangulates a bit more than Clinton’s plan). But I’m not sure where else it applies. At bottom, it still seems a variation of Shrumian populism, the idea that there are obvious answers to benefit the common man and the only thing standing in the way is some elite group or “corporate lobbyists in Washington”–as opposed to the non-populist position, which is that there are answers that benefit the common man but what’s standing in the way is usually a) the common man and b) poweful interest groups on the Democratic as well as Republican side. If our most difficult domestic problems (Social Security, health care cost control, poverty, civil rights, immigration) really did conform to the Populist model, they’d have been solved by now, by Democrats.
But they will be, really soon. Why, just look at the Democratic Congress!
UPDATE: I took a closer look at the link I placed in the quote above for a definition of “Shrumiam populism.” It’s a very good article by Bill Clinton (and now Hillary Clinton) enabler Joe Klein, presaging the “Bob Shrum is the kiss of death in presidential elections” theme that was indeed proved true again in 2004. But being me, I liked this bit about John Edwards, because it’s a lot like what I’ve been saying all along:
The notion of economics as a zero-sum game—the people gain when the powerful lose; the people gain when they don’t have to compete against immigrants for work—is the mean-spirited fallacy at the heart of modern populism. This message is not only a proven loser but also the intellectual opposite of the expansive, inclusive, “rising tide” public activism that moved a generation of Americans, including Bob Shrum, to get involved in politics in the first place. The next John or Robert Kennedy may be a forlorn liberal hope and—as presented by Shrum—a threadbare cliché, but the Kennedys were, at the very least, idealists who raised the nation’s spirit with inspirational words and deeds. And they never defended “the little people” for a third of the take.
That leaves the Democrats (one would like to think) with Senator Clinton, who is not having her best autumn ever. Not by a long shot.
This just might turn out okay!
Posted in Americana, Politics and Poker | Leave a Comment »
Toying with us
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 14, 2007
The consumer-watch-out-or-else people have put out their list of death toys. I had to laugh (darkly) when I read this excerpt:
Joan Lawrence of the Toy Industry Association questioned the usefulness of WATCH’s list, saying such lists often lack context about who
the toy is aimed at and how it should be used.
For instance, “Jack Sparrow’s Spinning Dagger,” a toy from the popular “Pirates of the Caribbean” movie trilogy, clearly isn’t right for small children, but is fine for older kids, Lawrence said.
“In general, the products are safe as intended to be used,” she said.
Like any American my age, I was instantly reminded of old Irwin Mainway, President of Mainway Toys:
Consumer Reporter: Good evening, and welcome to the holiday edition of “Consumer Probe”. Our topic tonight is unsafe toys for children. For instance, this little bow and arrow set. [ holds up ] Pull the rubber suctions off, and the arrows become deadly missiles.
We have with us tonight, Mr. Irwin Mainway, President of Mainway Toys. Uh, Mr. Mainway, your company manufactures the following so-called harmless playthings: Pretty Peggy Ear-Piercing Set, Mr. Skin-Grafter, General Tron’s Secret Police Confession Kit, and Doggie Dentist. And what about this innocent rubber doll, which you market under the name Johnny Switchblade? [ holds up doll ] Press his head, and two sharp knives spring from his arms. [ demonstrates ] Mr. Mainway, I’m afraid this is, by no means, a very safe toy.
Irwin Mainway: Okay, Miss, I wanna correct you, alright. The full name of this product, as it appears in stores all over the county, is Johnny Switchblade: Adventure Punk. I mean, nothing goes wrong.. little girls buy ’em, you know, they play games, they make up stories, nobody gets hurt. I mean, so Barbie takes a knife once in a while, or Ken gets cut. You know, there’s no harm in that. I mean, as far as I can see, you know?
Consumer Reporter: Alright. Fine. Fine. Well, we’d like to show you another one of Mr. Mainway’s products. It retails for $1.98, and it’s called Bag O’ Glass. . . .
Posted in Americana, Jocularity | Leave a Comment »
Hate means
Posted by Ron Coleman on November 14, 2007
In academia today, a professor who falsely smears his university’s students as racists is a hot commodity. And hate means never having to say you’re sorry.
(Via I/P.) Gosh, I am glad I got out of there before it got this bad — though I don’t think it’s this bad at my alma mater, regarding which I do pay some attention to developments. Even in the early ’80’s, Princeton was certainly across-the-board politically correct. When I put up signs promoting a campus chapter of a group called, at the time “Peace Through Strength” — I don’t know what became of it, though several groups using that name seem to still exist — they were all, every one of them, pulled down well before the event took place. Still, that is part of the game. I was a Resident Advisor my senior year (I wouldn’t have even gotten the gig at Duke or one of the other PC hotbeds) and we had no responsibility for ideological indoctrination, nor was there much of that at all 25 years ago — though you could see its beginnings.
And where is its end?
Posted in Americana, O Mores!, Oppression | Leave a Comment »
