Reason Magazine - Staff > Tim Cavanaugh > Hit & Run Posts

May you build a ladder to the stars and climb on every rung, may you be in Heaven an hour before the Devil knows you're dead, and may gentle be all your steps as you walk beyond this valley...

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 20:05:00 EST

Friday was my last day at Reason, and I've just been finishing up last stuff and getting ready to be fitted with my MSM subcutaneous microchip. So let me say what a privilege it has been working at Reason these past four years. This was a truly fantastic place to work, and I leave with too many regrets to mention. Among other things, it pains me to be taking off just as we finally have our brand-spankin' new CMS, with a more responsive Hit & Run and an all-around better and more manageable site. For this achievement I should publicly thank Mike Alissi, the mysterious Pierce Inverarity figure who quietly makes just about everything happen at Reason. I'm just sorry I only got a week to play on the new site.

The great Radley Balko and "Delaware" Dave Weigel will be expertly serving up the Reason you've come to know and ~~loathe~~ love, and will undoubtedly cause you to forget I was ever here within a matter of hours. I've been honored to work with all the Reason staff and to edit myself into trouble under Nick Gillespie, who is what Rupert Pupkin would call a great artist, a great innovator, and a great great loss. Every former employee hopes to see his old bosses brought to ruin so he can claim that he was the indispensable element, but in my case I hope Reason soars to ever greater orbits of world domination and pan-galactic comity.

Finally, all my love to you, the fabulous little people. A quality publication is about great readers as well as great writers, and it's a too-rare pleasure to write for a readership that is engaged, informed, argumentative, and prone to understanding jokes. To both the regular commenters and the great lurking masses, I say thank you. I very much hope to see you at the L.A. Times, and I fully expect to keep seeing you at Reason.

William Styron, R.I.P.

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 18:46:00 EST

Belated obsequies for the Virginia-born heavyweight novelist, who I just learned died a few days ago. Styron's lifelong fascination with "the catastrophic propensity on the part of human beings to attempt to dominate one another" made him something of a kindred spirit back in my force-loathing salad days, and he became a hero to literary traditionalists (I'm not one of them) for steadily eschewing nearly every Modern and Post-Modern trick in the book. Sophie's Choice and The Confessions of Nat Turner, the two books out of Styron's slender oeuvre on which his reputation rests, would be enough for anybody to hang his hat on, but the controversies over those two books were also crucial to his significance. By weathering the idiotic storms about the right of a white man to write about slavery or a goy to write about the Holocaust—and in both cases to do so in a more oblique manner than traditional thinking about these catastrophes had usually allowed—Styron became a hero on the manner of Madonna: somebody who revealed what a fake concept authenticity really is. He's an icon of freedom in another manner: A lifelong depressive and legendarily functioning drinker, Styron was one of our greatest self-medicators.

Stark, raving mad: Pain in the ass blogger gets Allen thugs madder than ever

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 17:15:00 EST

Mike Stark, last seen in a Bridget Jones's Diary-style brawl with George Allen's flunkies, continues his Ahab-like pursuit of the true George Allen, and Allen's goons continue to provide him with photo opps. This time, an Allen associate (according to Stark) bumps him and then takes a dive, and cops come in to handcuff and detain the irrascible Stark. Full video coverage here, and the highlight is definitely the Allen goober who taunts Stark as he's being hustled into the squadcar: "Don't you write for the blawg, Mike? The liberal blawg? Answer the question Mike. Don't you write for the liberal blawg?"

Saddam sentence: Death by hanging

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 04:03:00 EST

...or as I always prefer, that he be hanged by the neck until dead.

Mixed bag for co-defendants: Some cleared, some 15-year sentences, at least one life sentence and at least one hanging. Nothing online yet. Saddam's response: "God is great." Ramsey Clark removed from the court.

Give Your Awl for the Right to Concealed Carry, or, First They Came for the Pointy Woodworking Tools

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sun, 05 Nov 2006 03:23:00 EST

Haven't we all been here? You're sprawled out naked on a tree stump in a public place at quarter to eight in the morning, peacably choking your chicken, when along come the jackbooted thugs who force you to give up the sharp instrument you've got discreetly cached up your Hershey Highway. And they call this the land of the free...

And what of Fusilli Jerry?

Because I'm...Fred Garvin, Male Prostitute

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 03 Nov 2006 16:18:00 EST

I am too childish foolish for this world. When Mark Foley tried the old molested-by-a-priest trick, I figured that had to be straight-up bullshit. Not a day later, it turned out that, while they may not have been unwanted encounters, there really were some hot interludes between the boy-wonder Foley and Fr. Anthony Mercieca (now living, in a detail nobody could make up, "on the Mediterranean island of Gozo off Malta").

Yesterday I hear that Rev. Ted Haggard, the gay-marriage-hatin' (now former) head of the National Association of Evangelicals, was involved with a male prostitute, and it sounded like the whole thing was so obviously a setup that it wasn't even worth a second thought. Today it turns out Haggard really was doing the nasty... Excuse me, he was just buying some drugs from the gay escort in question, but there was no sexual (mis)conduct—which I guess is the Evangelical equivalent of Kevin Spacey innocently lending his cell phone to a Hyde Park hustler.

And I mean, I'm always willing to believe the worst of religious people. But these just seemed too convenient to be true. No more! Twice bitten, thrice shy, I say. From this day forward, I believe everything I hear.

Special Gaydar Update: Commenter crapactionjackson sends along a great clip of Richard Dawkins getting harangued by Haggard. I had never seen Haggard in action before; the man is obviously queer as a French horn. Here I was thinking he was one of God's tough guys, equally at home cutting down trees and sharing his enormous penis with his young son. To reiterate, I should have been, like Haggard's flock, ready to believe.

Does this count as a market failure?

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 18:20:00 EST

Commenter Happy Jack notes that Kroll Inc. has decided to stop providing security services in Iraq, following the deaths of four employees. AP paraphrases Michael Cherkasky, president and chief executive of Kroll owner Marsh & McLennan Companies, as saying that business in Iraq and Afghanistan "wasn't worth risking the lives of company employees."

Interestingly, the whole private contractor issue continues to boil over stateside. In the close race for Colorado's 5th Congressional District, Republican Doug Lamborn has been waving the bloody shirt at Democrat Jay Fawcett by tying him to Daily Kos' fabled Destroy All Mercenaries comment. Fawcett is trying to put some daylight between himself and the Kossaks, and turn the conversation around to his own service in the USAF. Lamborn, like many a GOP stalwart, knows it's more important to support the troops than to be the troops, which led to an amusing exchange where Fawcett questioned his lukewarm patriotism, and Lamborn responded Frank T.J. Mackey style, by quietly judging him:

During a later break, Fawcett questioned why Lamborn had never served in the military or Peace Corps; Lamborn looked back at him without answering. Fawcett told him that he'd "been stared down by better" and Lamborn replied: "I'm not intending to stare at you."

Fawcett/Lamborn has been a pretty entertaining negative campaign, with lots of "This scum-sucking pig is calling me names" road rage. Read all about it here, here, and here, because attack ads are good for you.

The joke you've all been waiting for

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 16:52:00 EST

The Wine Commonsewer (or somebody claiming to be TWC—I don't see the trademark Hawaiian shirt) gets the official response from the troops to John Kerry's personal Dien Bien Phu:

I don't vouch for the authenticity of the pic, nor do I claim those aren't eight campaign volunteers posing in their Halloween costumes at President Bush's Crawford estate, but it's still a pretty funny joke. Still, once they stop laughing and fold up the sign they'll still be stuck in Iraq, and that's gotta suck.

Stark Incident! 'Skins scion sics goons on spit-taking gadfly

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 09:48:00 EST

Dig the footage of "Former Marine and first year law student" Mike Stark getting into a mega-wimpy tussle with some flunkies from the George Allen campaign. Stark got the brawl going with a question we should all be asking ourselves every morning: "Why did you spit on your first wife?"

Opinions? I'm watching it in a public WiFi zone with no sound, so I can't say for sure, but it looks to me like Stark is moving in pretty fast and furious, in a manner that could be interpreted as threatening to overly zealous staffers. (The arty shakycam effects may make Stark look more like a would-be assassin than he did in person.) The slap fight is good stuff though, and I give Stark full props for hanging on to his schoolboy bookbag (worn over one shoulder, koolkid-style) throughout the ordeal. As so many real-world fights do, this one reminds me of my favorite fight in literature, the lumbering brawl between Humbert Humbert and Clare Quilty:

We rolled all over the floor, in each other's arms, like two huge helpless children... I felt suffocated as he rolled over me. I rolled over him. We rolled over me. They rolled over him. We rolled over us...[E]lderly readers will surely recall at this point the obligatory scene in the Westerns of their childhood. Our tussle, however, lacked the ox-stunning fisticuffs, the flying furniture. He and I were two large dummies, stuffed with dirty cotton and rags. It was a silent, soft, formless tussle on the part of two literati... Both of us were panting as the cowman and the sheepman never do after their battle.

Remember the Stark Incident.

Merry Prankster dropout Kathy Casano, aka Stark Naked.

How would history have been different if Prince Andrew had married Koo Stark before Fergie came into the picture? How would all our lives be different if Koo Stark's cameo as "Camie" hadn't been cut from the original Star Wars: Episode Whatever the Hell It's Being Called Now?

Quote of the Day

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 01 Nov 2006 08:23:00 EST

"I guess Kerry wasn't content blowing 2004, now he wants to blow 2006, too."

That's an unnamed "Democratic congressman" talking to ABC's Jake Tapper about John Kerry's new Edu-gate gaffe, which is now splashed on Drudge, up to 720 stories on Google News, and forcing President Bush to object that the troops are "plenty smart." What's the route of that one-man parade again?

Can't you just taste the excitement with your uvula? Dems within striking distance, maybe, says CQ

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 31 Oct 2006 10:41:00 EST

Congressional Quarterly says it's all down to 18 "tossups" in the House, and the Democrats have an unlikely chance of gaining control of the Senate:

Democrats are increasingly bullish on their chances to net the gain of at least 15 seats that they need to oust the GOP’s J. Dennis Hastert of Illinois as the Speaker of the House and install Nancy Pelosi of California instead.

As of Oct. 27, CQ’s individual assessments of all 435 House races showed Democrats seriously contesting Republican holds on 72 seats (31 percent of the party’s current total) with seven of those races already leaning toward a Democratic takeover and 18 more considered genuine tossups — the result of a combination of Republican political weaknesses and the Emanuel team’s success at growing the roster of competitive Democratic challengers, many in districts that the party had not contested in years. By contrast, only 21 Democratic seats were in play, and only a handful appeared seriously at risk. The bottom line is that the Republicans are now ahead at least marginally in only 207 races, meaning that even if they hold on to all of those (which won’t happen) they must win 11 of the 18 tossups to retain power. The Democrats are now ahead in 210 races — nine more than the number of seats they have now — so if they hold all those leads they will need to win just eight of the tossups to gain control.

As they have throughout the campaign, the Democrats face their more daunting task in the Senate: They must gain a net of six seats to take control — an all-the-more-unlikely prospect just two years after they lost four seats. But their quest has now put them within striking distance.

With 10 days to go, four GOP incumbents are now underdogs for re-election: Conrad Burns of Montana, Mike DeWine of Ohio, Rick Santorum of Pennsylvania and Lincoln Chafee of Rhode Island. The Democratic bids in Missouri against Jim Talent and in Tennessee for the seat that Majority Leader Bill Frist is vacating are absolutely too close to call, while the party still has a clear shot at George Allen in Virginia. So if they win two out of three — and if they protect all their own seats, particularly that of New Jersey’s Robert Menendez, who’s also in a tossup — the Democrats should win the Senate.

Whole discussion here, with details on the close Senate races, the eight glorious mysteries of electioneering, and House details North, South, East, and West. Just to prove these guys don't really know anything you don't, there's also ominous talk of an October surprise (only hours left! Happy Halloween!), and a great prim reference to "Mark Foley’s tawdry behavior toward congressional pages." But like most political prognostication, it's a vibrant species of on-the-one-hand-this-on-the-other-that.

Can the Dems still snatch defeat from the jaws of victory? My ancient prophecy that the Republicans would retain both houses was based on the Democrats' proven ability to fuck up the proverbial one-man parade. And if this election is anything, it's a Monday morning walk of shame for President Bush. But I am impressed by how widespread the belief is that the Republicans are headed for a catastrophe. If nothing else, it will be nice to be proven wrong on this.

At least he didn't use the f-word

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 15:48:00 EST

Reader "Chilli" emails a review. Cavanaugh garbologists are welcome to speculate on what, if anything, he or she is responding to:

F_____ you, you smegma eating far right jerkoff! I hope you're happy that your Republican morons put Hitler in the White House. And yes, I'm a liberal, you fascist---with three honorable discharges and service in the Korean War. Now, why don't you telll me how many DC solons (Republicans) served in the military? There's a sheet going around that tell you. And how about your Bush baby dodging military service in Vioet Nam? You people must come out of the womb screamingh Nazi propaganda! Drop dead---please!

I Wish I Could Piss Like A Man, I'd Join the Navy

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 30 Oct 2006 09:15:00 EST

The neighborhood of what was all too briefly my Old Dominion home is blanketed with Webb and Allen posters, but was still late getting to the season's dumbest election story: penisinthemouthgate In case you missed it, Sen. George Allen has unleashed a library-clearing broadside against challenger James Webb, the decorated Vietnam veteran and former Navy secretary whose military novels contain such racy passages as a reference to a woman who pees standing up ("Didn't lose a drop, either. Not a drop"), a stripper who can cut a banana "in four equal sections by the muscles of her vagina," and this bit that has captured the hearts and minds of all Americans:

"A shirtless man walked toward them along a mud pathway. His muscles were young and hard, but his face was devastated with wrinkles. His eyes were so red that they appeared to be burned by fire. A naked boy ran happily toward him from a little plot of dirt. The man grabbed his young son in his arms, turned him upside down, and put the boy's penis in his mouth."

"Most Virginians and Americans would find passages such as those below shocking," Allen says, raising the question of what most Virginians would find above shocking. Allen's Great Books crusade has already been good for hundreds of breathless news stories and has already generated the inevitable unintended hilarity: Lynne Cheney's battle to suppress her own steaming-hot-lesbo novel Sisters. Even Hit & Run commenter "ex-subscriber" has got his or her panties in a knot about Webb's purple prose. Maybe I'm jaded, but the perverse stuff seems like standard issue sailor talk (wake me up when a stripper can peel and cut a banana with her pussy muscles), and the descriptive parts sound pretty much like the ham-handed "toward dawn, he took her again" passages you usually find in books like this. Maybe Webb's a misogynist, but based on these passages I'd say if anything he shows a healthy respect for the power and versatility of female plumbing.

What to make of it all? Reason's own Radley Balko points the way on his blog, noting that the boy's-penis passage (which even in Allen's invidious out-of-context quote reads like the piece of oddball local color it obviously is) actually draws attention to something Allen should probably be downplaying-that Webb actually served in Vietnam. I am not a James Webb supporter (the only thing I'm hoping for the Democrats to deliver in two weeks is divided government), but he's the closest thing to a renaissance man American politics offers at the moment: a decorated veteran, a high-level government official in various capacities, a highly praised novelist (the only one I've read is Fields of Fire, which I liked a lot), a popular historian with a prominent book about the Scots-Irish to his credit, and so on.

Against this, Allen is arguing, as Jeff Taylor noted a while back, that he should be re-elected because he's a moron. Based on the positive reaction this desperate attack on Webb is getting, it looks like that argument may be good enough. That's more disturbing than anything in James Webb's novels.

Title explanation.

Imagine the Dewlap: Central Casting villain leads central planning boondoggle! With special all-choking featurette

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 12:19:26 EDT

Shawnee Hoover of the Exxpose Exxon campaign wants us to publicize former ExxonMobile CEO Lee Raymond's involvement in a new Oil and Gas Study sponsored by the Department of Energy. Raymond's ready-for-an-Oliver-Stone-movie petrovillain look, including a massive neck, have made him a favorite cartoon villain for petrorexia sufferers everywhere, who find it all too easy to believe the jolly oil tycoon is actually a 12-foot lizard. Exxpose Exxon is urging resistance to Raymond's heading the National Petroleum Council. Hoover warns:

Though President Bush has alerted Americans to our oil addiction, he is now putting the most successful pusher of that product in charge of determining our energy future. When many of our future solutions hinge on buying and burning less oil, it seems obvious that the last people that should be charting that course is the oil industry itself. Mr. Raymond's repeated criticism of U.S. energy independence, investments in renewable energy, peak oil, and policies to help combat global warming have made it clear exactly where he stands.

Fun stuff, but if I may go completely off-topic, this dustup reminds me that in my previous story about Raymond, his critics, oil panics, and crazy attempts to solve our "gas crisis," I made a passing reference to the Heimlich maneuver. This prompted a fascinating response from an emailer purporting to be Peter Heimlich, the son of the inventor of the legendary anti-choking technique. I've been looking for an excuse to publish that one for a while, so swallow this:

Three years ago my wife and I began researching my father's career. To our astonishment, we turned up a remarkable history of fraud. To make a long story short, he's a charalatan, albeit a singular one. Among other more serious issues, it's clear he didn't invent the Heimlich maneuver, but appropriated the idea from a colleague. Our original research has been the basis of dozens of articles in publications which include the New York Times, LA Times, Reuters, and many others. We were recently profiled in a two-part feature in Radar Magazine. For more information and for links to these articles, you may wish to visit our website.

You should know that my father's frequent claim which you repeated, that backslaps "push lodged objects down the esophagus," is dubious. The only scientific evidence supporting that claim is a 1982 study by the late pediatrician, Richard Day MD. My research uncovered that my father clandestinely paid for the Day study. The study was presented by Day and my father to a national committee of the American Heart Association (AHA) in 1985 which—after an overheated ten-year media campaign conducted by my father against the AHA and the American Red Cross—removed backslaps from choking rescue guidelines. Since then, in this country anyway, it's been the Heimlich maneuver and nothing else when it comes to choking rescue.

It's a different story in Europe and most of the rest of the world which continued to teach backslaps as the first step in choking rescue since backsalps are less invasive than abdominal thrusts (the "Heimlich maneuver") which has been associated with a variety of injuries. And my father's "celebrity doctor" image had little, if any influence outside the US.

Fast forward to December 2005, the AHA recently revised choking guidelines. Both backslaps and chest thrust are again in the guidelines and the phrase "Heimlich maneuver" has been deleted in favor of "abdominal thrusts." For more on chest thrusts as well as further commentary on my father's conduct, you may wish to read this recent letter. The editor's note that follows includes a link to the new AHA guidelines.

What's more, I have an e-mail from Roger White MD, a world-respected emergency medicine physician at the Mayo Clinic, who was chairman of the 1985 AHA committee, the one that eliminated backslaps. Dr. White wrote:

There never was any science here; Heimlich overpowered science all along the way with his slick tactics and intimidation, and everyone, including us at AHA, caved in...We were taken....

Finally, your article included a link to a 1988 article co-authored by my father and Dr. Edward A. Patrick. If you're unfamiliar with Dr. Patrick, he figures prominently in my father's career. Dr. Patrick was the subject of this 2004 Cleveland newsweekly cover story, "Playing Doctor," which raises questions about the legitimacy of his credentials.

So, sorry to say, the actual history doesn't bolster the point you were making in your column. Not that I fault you. For over 30 years my father has been relentlessly repeating the "deadly backslaps" myth and it has entered the popular history as an unexamined trueism.

Now imagine what combination of compression, backslaps, stomach pushes, and solid-fuel rocketry would be required to dislodge half a sandwich from Lee Raymond's throat.

Victory in Iraq: Out. Victory in America: In!

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 11:38:53 EDT

President Bush: "I know many Americans are not satisfied with the situation in Iraq. I'm not satisfied either. And that is why we're taking new steps to help secure Baghdad and constantly adjusting our tactics across the country to meet the changing threat."

Karl Rove:

Rove predicted the Republicans would retain control of Congress, discounting polls that show the Democrats threatening to take over.

"You heard it here first," Rove declared in his interview with Fox News Radio.

Actually, you heard it here first. I can already hear "Mandate!" ringing in my right ear and "Diebold!" ringing in my left.

Times finally admits it was right

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Wed, 25 Oct 2006 10:51:25 EDT

"In the early months of 1935," writes David Leonhardt in today's New York Times, "this newspaper ran a series of editorials warning about a grave threat to the American economy. The Social Security plan being pushed by Franklin D. Roosevelt was 'a bad bill,' the editorials said, that would become an enormous burden on American companies and might be unconstitutional to boot...

Many Congressional Republicans and business executives agreed, predicting that the bill's new payroll taxes would short-circuit the economy's recovery from the Great Depression. With all this criticism, the bill's fate seemed uncertain. On March 21, the editorial page of The New York Times approvingly quoted a news report saying that the bill's prospects were "diminishing daily."

The worries about Social Security may sound silly now, given that it did pass that summer and went on to become one of the most popular government programs in American history. But on the narrow charge that they were making—that Social Security would destroy jobs—the critics at The New York Times and on Capitol Hill were, in fact, correct.

Besides taking money out of the pockets of workers that otherwise might have been spent, the new payroll taxes raised the cost of employing workers, and when the cost of something goes up, demand for it usually goes down. The Social Security Act of 1935, as the historian Edward Berkowitz has noted, laid the groundwork for the "Roosevelt recession" of 1937 and 1938.

Regular readers of the Kan-Do Keynesian's "Economix" column will have guessed already that this stunning admission is just a setup for an argument that "job-killing programs" are good for the economy. Social Security, Medicare, and workplace safety rules, Leonhardt argues, have all elevated standards of living at the cost of only rounding-error-level dips in productivity. So make room for minimum wage hikes, which are on the ballots in Arizona, Colorado, Missouri, Montana, Ohio and Nevada:

[Arguments against the min-wage hike initiatives] seem to be falling flat with voters. A recent poll in Colorado shows 69 percent supporting the measure there, and only 26 percent opposed. In the other five states, the initiatives have similarly big leads...

I think there are two main reasons for the enormous popularity of the proposals. By now, many people probably understand that the dire predictions about higher minimum wages don't come true. In the 10 years since Congress raised the minimum wage, crime didn't become an epic problem, as [Colorado Sen. Hank] Brown forecast. Instead, it has fallen sharply.

In fact, modest rises in the minimum wage don't even appear to kill many jobs. The recent state increases have created a series of natural experiments for researchers to study, and they have generally found that modest changes have only minor effects on employment levels. Some have found no net effect. Higher wages may end up lifting employee morale and reducing turnover, making business more productive and mitigating some of the higher labor costs...

The second big cause of the proposals' popularity stems in all likelihood from the rise of income inequality. The American economy has done so well at creating jobs in recent decades that almost anybody who wants work can find it. The problem is that too many jobs still don't pay a decent living.

There is another argument against the minimum wage, of course: Nobody's forcing you to offer or take any job at any price. If you and another party agree on a price, why is that the government's business? And what powers of perpetual motion does the law have that it can make "income inequality" disappear by fiat?

That having been said, it's worth giving a think to Leonhardt's main point: that the apocalyptic predictions about minimum wages, Social Security, and a host of other expense-creating government mandates have failed to come true, leaving the human race (disappointingly) still alive. Ominously, you could make the same point about almost any regulation on the books.

Courtesy of reader "M," who calls the column, "Pork: The other Social Security."

New at Reason

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 12:45:21 EDT

David Weigel gives a Red Baron salute as the conservative pundit class crashes to earth.

Balloon Smuggler In the Heart of Dixie

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 24 Oct 2006 12:40:19 EDT

Loretta Nall, the Libertarian Party candidate for governor of Alabama who was last seen around here admitting her aversion to underpants, presses the flesh with a mammocentric run in the closing weeks of the campaign. Nall is urging voters in the Camellia State to focus on her breasts:

"It started out as a joke, but it blew up into something huge," said Nall, a 32-year-old with dyed blond hair.

Her campaign is offering T-shirts and marijuana stash boxes adorned with a photo of her with a plunging neckline and the words: "More of these boobs." Below that are pictures of other candidates for governor—including Republican incumbent Bob Riley and Democratic Lt. Gov. Lucy Baxley—and the words: "And less of these boobs."

Her Web site has a cartoon of someone stuffing bills down the front of her low-cut top. And for $50 donation she apparently offers to show a cartoon of herself flashing her breasts.

Whether it's the prominent headlights or the unfettered caboose, Nall is gettting screwed by the usual election shenanigans that require third-party candidates to gather 40,000 voter signatures to get on the ballot. On the plus side, despite her ample bra-stuffing, Nall has also not reached the $25,000 threshold where campaign finance regulations kick in.

On the stump, Nall points to her misdemeanor arrest for marijuana possession in 2002, which led her to form the U.S. Marijuana Party, and notes that her one-woman panty raid prevents her from visiting her brother in prison. Visit her slow-loading site for a view of a modestly dressed candidate.

Other news from the LP hall of shame: Blue candidate Stan Jones inveighs against the world government.

Are we not men? In the future, everybody will look like Rick Santorum or Linda Hunt

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 05:29:28 EDT

If you ever grokked the illustrated features on future human evolution they used to run in Omni and such speculative magazines—which always seemed to envision a future where everybody was either a big-eyed monkeyman or a quasi-grey with an enormous cranium and a shrimpy little body too feeble to support the head (which at the most fanciful meant that our serene descendants would be levitating around on thought waves)—you'll be saddened to know that even this once-thriving field of speculation has turned out to be a disappointment. According to this BBC article, "Evolutionary theorist Oliver Curry of the London School of Economics expects a genetic upper class and a dim-witted underclass to emerge."

On the plus side, things will be looking up for the next 1,000 years or so, which the Beeb relates in Cinemax-ready detail:

[M]en will exhibit symmetrical facial features, look athletic, and have squarer jaws, deeper voices and bigger penises.

Women, on the other hand, will develop lighter, smooth, hairless skin, large clear eyes, pert breasts, glossy hair, and even features, he adds. Racial differences will be ironed out by interbreeding, producing a uniform race of coffee-coloured people.

Count me in! But it starts to head south after that, your arms hanging limp at your sides, your legs got nothing to do, some machine doing that for you, while you pick your son, pick your daughter too, from the bottom of a long glass tube. Whoa-oh. In what sounds suspiciously like an eat-some-vegetables-put-down-the-remote-and-go-out-and-play scolding, this chilling vision of the future goes on to warn of our increasing complacency and techno-dehumanization:

Social skills, such as communicating and interacting with others, could be lost, along with emotions such as love, sympathy, trust and respect. People would become less able to care for others, or perform in teams.

Physically, they would start to appear more juvenile. Chins would recede, as a result of having to chew less on processed food.

There could also be health problems caused by reliance on medicine, resulting in weak immune systems. Preventing deaths would also help to preserve the genetic defects that cause cancer.

I think this passage really demands to be read aloud in a Captain Kirk voice ("...emotions such as love, sympathy, trust, respect. People would become less able to care for others..."). Anyway, dig the unattractive results:

So get a sonogram for Zog's sake!

Richard Dawkins notes that prudent evolutionists steer clear from speculation about this kind of stuff, but when did that ever stop anybody? Here are a bunch of variations on our post-human future, and a really far-out trip about the future of animals. I always had more sympathy for the Morlocks then the Eloi, a bunch of candy-ass communists. But let this crackpot look ahead be reminder that even when mind and strength had gone, gratitude and a mutual tenderness still lived on in the heart of man.

Courtesy of Arts & Letters Daily

Don't count your chickens until you've looked too closely at how sausages are horse-traded, or something like that

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 15:24:34 EDT

Eric Alterman, thinkologist for The Nation and prolific Reason pen pal, has been hinting darkly for a while now that the big Democratic midterm victory is going to end with Santa shaking his head sadly and saying "We'll just have to cancel ~~Christmas~~ Winter Holiday! And the children have been so good this year!" While Alterman's never quite willing to consider that the left is just selling a product few Americans want to buy, he's got a strong point about how districting has greased the ladder for the Democrats, linking to this interesting study:

Why are things so tough? Looking at the 2004 election, the Democrats won their victories with an average of 69% of the vote, while the Republicans averaged 65% in their contests, thus "wasting" fewer votes. The Republicans won 47 races with less than 60% of the vote; the Democrats only 28. Many Democrats are in districts where they win overwhelmingly, while many Republicans are winning the close races—with the benefit of incumbency and, in some cases, favorable redistricting.

I find gerrymandering issues heap-big confusing—isn't there a pretty low ceiling to how much you can redistrict your way to victory at the national level? (That is, I can see how it works to gerrymander a district at the local level, but when you're talking about all 535 seats in Congress, shouldn't it tend to even out?) But as Delaware Dave Weigel reminded me the other day, since the days of the Contract With America, the GOP has had plenty of time in control of a variety of state houses to set things up. It's going to take some doing for Powerhouse Pelosi to orchestrate a national turnover, and a general sense that "Americans are unhappy with the direction of Congress" is not enough to do it.

Studying how the Republicans have stacked the deck against Democrats (sort of like how the Democrats did the exact same thing to Republicans until the 1990s) takes some of the sheen off President Bush's performance as head of the Republicans, but not much. As I never tire of pouring icy water on political hopes, I'll point out again that Bush is still way ahead of the average presidential-coattails performance in off-year and midterm races. Even if the GOP lost both houses in November, Bush would still be ahead of the average. He's already an electoral success for his party. How such a small man had such a big effect is something future historians, with their smellevision and massive frontal and parietal lobes, will have to puzzle out.

Asking the important questions...

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Fri, 20 Oct 2006 10:52:22 EDT

If the G4 Channel's "Icons" squared off against the Sundance Channel's "Iconoclasts," who would win?

Next up for the Icons: Jamie Kennedy

Next up for the Iconoclasts, according to a press release I just got: Eddie Vedder, interviewed by Laird Hamilton

I think that may be a push.

Passenger 57 arranges his affairs so as to make taxes as low as possible

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 16:55:29 EDT

Welcome to the fight, Wesley Snipes! On the iron principle that even inadvertent tax cheats are secret tax rebels, it's clear that the increasingly straight-to-video screen hunk is reviving his star turn as Demolition Man villain Simon Phoenix—the last free man, breaking the law and playing by his own rules. Or more precisely, claiming $12 million in refunds from the Internal Revenue Service in 1996 and 1997, and failing to file tax returns after that.

The Snipes-as-tax-protestor theory may have more than joke support. Apparently the actor was working with "American Tax Litigators," the nuisance-suit group affiliated with infamous tax skeptic Eddie Kahn. An ATL tax preparer (now in custody), claimed the troubled star of Liberty Stands Still (if only Snipes' commitment to tax freedom were accompanied by support for the right to bear arms!) was entitled to a $7.3 million refund in 1997; using the classic tax-protest argument that only income from foreign sources is taxable, Snipes' income for that year was adjusted down to a cool $0.00. Foolishly, Snipes failed to file returns from 1999 to 2004: His filmography from that period indicates he may have been entitled to some substantial refunds, plus federal emergency relief.

Another plot wrinkle: the Blade star may be on the lam. Authorities don't know where Snipes is, and he has yet to come forward to either the press or the law. "We've spoken to his former attorneys over the weekend," U.S. Attorney Paul I. Perez tells AP. "We presume that he knows, and of course after this press conference he will definitely know."

But will he care? I suspect his supporting role in the new Toussaint L'Ouverture movie has kindled the fire of Snipes' lust for liberty, and he's getting ready to stand or die in the name of maniacal tax-protest theories.

Brian Doherty took a tour through the land of the 16th Amendment rebels a few years back.

Pre-Election Bipartisanship

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Tue, 17 Oct 2006 00:59:04 EDT

On that side of the aisle, the cloak-and-dagger netherworld of Secret Agent Rep. Curt Weldon (R-Penn.) catches up with him as federal Kremlinologists look into his ties to Russian wheeling and dealing. Sadly, odds are Weldon will live to see tomorrow.

On that other side of the aisle, full-bore bore Sen. Harry Reid (D-Nev.) will celebrate Christmas in October by paying back campaign funds he used to tip Ritz-Carlton bartenders. Without admitting wrongdoing, of course.

Cthulhu and You, Perfect Together

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 23:59:52 EDT

In the New York Review of Books, Luc Sante gives a (somewhat belated) salute to H.P. Lovecraft to mark the Prince of Providence's induction into the Library of America and the English-language publication of a decade-old appreciation by Michel Houellebecq, the French literary curmudgeon and maker of craptacular spoken-word mood music.

Lovecraft retrospectives follow a pretty standard pattern by this point. There's the to-be-sure opener about how his prose style was unspeakable, blasphemous, unhallowed, noisome, hideous, nauseating, repulsive, unmentionable, appalling, and too full of adjectives. The best summation of this critique, I think, was by Jorge Luis Borges, who said the difference between Edgar Allan Poe and Lovecraft was that Poe would depict something horrible, while Lovecraft would depict something horrible and then tell you that it was horrible. Next, there's the consideration of his disgust for sex, other races, and human flesh in general. Sante improves on this with a list of bad-trip items that includes "invertebrates, marine life in general, temperatures below freezing, fat people, people of other races, race-mixing, slums, percussion instruments, caves, cellars, old age, great expanses of time, monumental architecture, non-Euclidean geometry, deserts, oceans, rats, dogs, the New England countryside, New York City, fungi and molds, viscous substances, medical experiments, dreams, brittle textures, gelatinous textures, the color gray, plant life of diverse sorts, memory lapses, old books, heredity, mists, gases, whistling, [and] whispering."

The value of the Sante piece (I haven't read Houellebecq's book) is that it turns the great neuresthenic's vices into virtues:

Lovecraft is at his most effective when he evokes this inhuman realm, just as he is at his best when he suggests, rather than attempting to describe. He does himself no favors by revealing, for example, that the beings of the Great Race are cone-shaped, of a "scaly, rugose, iridescent bulk...ten feet tall and ten feet wide at the base"; the sight may cause Lovecraft's narrator to scream hellishly, but the reader is more likely to picture some kind of Cyclopean jelly candy. The more spectral and unimaginable his subject, the more Lovecraft is at home. Where he fails utterly is in conveying lived experience, the material counterweight to his phantoms. His monsters, when exposed to the light, exhibit the pathos of creatures in poverty-row horror movies; his depictions of human life on earth in his own day are the least credible elements in his work. The stories "He" and "The Horror at Red Hook" make it sound as though he had never set foot in New York City, while "The Shadow Over Innsmouth" suggests that he never visited the New England coast and "The Dunwich Horror" and "The Whisperer in Darkness" that he never so much as glanced out a train window at a rural landscape. It is not that his settings are unreal—it is that they are made entirely of words. They do not provide any suggestions to the inner eye, only adjectives, mostly hyperbolic.

It is of course unfair to expect a thistle to bring forth figs. Lovecraft only barely managed to exist on the material plane himself, and it certainly was not his subject. His strengths, meanwhile, were unusual and idiosyncratic. He had a flair for names, for instance. The monikers he hangs on his otherworldly manifestations—Nyarlathotep, Yog-Sothoth, Tsathoggua—are evocatively miscegenated constructions in which can be seen bits of ancient Egyptian, Arabic, Hebrew, Old Norse. The terror of Cthulhu is most vivid on the purely linguistic level: "Iä! Shub-Niggurath! The Black Goat of the Woods with a Thousand Young!" The New England he fashions is so tangibly haunted in its nomenclature— Arkham, the Miskatonic River, Devil's Hop Yard, Nooseneck Hill—that he would have been wise to stop there and not attempt further description. He savors the dark texture of seventeenth-century Puritan names: Obed, Peleg, Deliverance, Elkanah, Dutee. He frequently engaged his schoolboy correspondents to send him lists of regional names from their local phone books. Names, real and imagined, accomplish nearly everything his strangled fustian tries and fails to do: suggesting vast stretches of time, experience far outside the modern frame of reference, the subterranean course of genetic inheritance, the repression of dismal ancestral proclivities.

There's something missing in this version of Lovecraft as a descriptively non-descriptive writer, however. If Lovecraft is so bad at describing concrete things, how is it that Cthulhu, a being so ugly it's literally impossible to look at him, is instantly recognizable in visual form? Wherever he shows up, on the campaign trail, in Bizarro Chick Tracts, as Ron Perlman's nemesis at the end of Hellboy, the leader of the Great Old Ones is instantly recognizable by his vaguely anthropoid outline, octopus-like head whose face is a mass of feelers, scaly, rubbery-looking body, prodigious claws on hind and fore feet, and long, narrow wings behind. Give him a one-tentacled salute:

Reason Writers Around Town

tcavanaugh@reason.com (Tim Cavanaugh) — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 02:52:38 EDT

David Weigel takes the wayback machine to a time many macacas ago, when an embarrassing number of people actually thought George Allen had a shot at becoming president.