Thoughts on Signing up Obama Supporters on a Streetcorner in Park Slope

- Middle-aged Jewish lesbians and Hispanic restaurant workers are not my candidate's core constituency.
- Dishevelled young people and older guys with really thick glasses who look like high school history teachers are.
- A political activist in Park Slope can expect to talk to as many or more representatives of national political magazines looking for topics to blog on as actual undecided voters.

Thick-Skulled Press

The media is pretending to have a hard time understanding why their predictions about the Nevada caucuses were wrong. They thought that Obama had a major coup with the endorsement of the culinary workers union and that he might win because of that. Well, he did win (despite the headlines, he got more delegates than Hillary), but not because of that.
To understand what really happened, which should have been predictable, one only has to see an account of what the voting was like and have a little goddamn common sense.

Nevada held its first ever real caucuses, which involve the most absurd and confusing democratic process used in this country, between 11 a.m. and 1 p.m. on a Saturday and pundits expected every prostitute, bartender, and line cook in Vegas to either be able to wake up or get a two hour lunch break in order to show up, and then know how to caucus, and then vote for the guy the union told them to. Ridiculous.

So the real point is, why the fuck does Nevada have a caucus and not a normal election where people can take five minutes to vote in the afternoon or evening?

This is real

Work of the Committee on Committee Structure Completed

For well over a year, the Special Committee on AALL Committee Structure, chaired by Karl Gruben, has been thoroughly reviewing all of our committees, their charges, and their operations. The committee's final report was approved by the Executive Board at its November meeting, and the report is now available on AALLNET.

(That's from an email I received today. I will never again hear anyone say that librarians spend their time doing insanely bureaucratic and obscure things.)

This is Awesome

Depos

The best part about this is that the lawyer understands what she's saying. She's not incoherent, some Southerners just speak a different language.

And this one is just like .68% meaner than a normal deposition:

Articles

Pointing out that, despite a history of sexism, our country in its current state was built for middle class white girls who make lists.

David Crane resurfaces with his theory that Gaddafi (I think you can spell this however you want) is responsible for every war where a bunch of nine year-olds hacked whole villages to death with machetes. (I'm not going to say any more about that because I'm sure that I'm the only person who's at all interested.)

George Will Sports Machine

To make up for all that ranting, I offer this:

This Week in Rant #3 Lawyers Have it Even Worse

This Times article about how people are now finding that it's not so worthwhile to be a lawyer (or doctor) anymore makes its examination of how lawyering sucks by looking at only the top 10% of lawyers. They say that at least the money's still good. Guess what, it's not. Welcome to the 21st century, bitch. The jobs they're talking about only go to Ivy graduates and the top 10% at other law schools. Most of everyone else can expect to spend their first few years in practice making, after loan payments, less than they made or would've made with a BA, and to be working twice as hard.

Who the fuck is the Times Style section written for anyway? Exclusively prep school/trust fund people that have to be less than 5% of the paper's readership? Why is every article in there about how it's now fashionable to buy a mini elephant for your vacation home in Spain? Would it kill them to print one fucking article with some trick for how to get drunk for less than $20 in New York?

This Week in Rant #2 Stanley Fish is Stupid

Fish explains why the humanities are worthwhile by explaining that they're not worthwhile whatsoever, and then tacking on some bullshit at the end. His argument, that if the humanities helped create better people, then the people who teach them would be great people, is misguided. It's obviously masturbatory to spend your life studying the humanities and it should go without saying that it will turn you into a warped person with tons of knowledge that you have almost no way of using. You're supposed to use this knowledge to help you do other, real-world things better. And as the second comment reminds us, you have to understand history to avoid repeating it (who can think of any current armed conflicts this applies to?).

Also, he totally ignores the fact that no student takes his imagined classes on Western Civilization anymore. It's now easier to find classes on Bob Dylan than Plato in most humanities departments, and every study of classic literature is about how every character was actually a vampire lesbian.

This Week in Rant #1. All Classical Economists Should be Shot

There are 3 things I read this week that pissed me off. Here goes.

1. All Classical Economists Should be Shot
Looking at finance in a lifeless vacuum, devoid of common sense, allows one to reach some pretty absurd conclusions. Case in point, this article, in Slate, about how Huckster's national sales tax is an awesome idea.

"In the long run, most people, or at least most families, do spend what they earn. (Why earn it if you're not going to spend it?) True, some of us die with money in the bank, but usually our children or grandchildren step in to spend the remainder for us. So, as far as your dynasty is concerned, a 20 percent income tax and a 20 percent sales tax are equally painful."

He goes on to say that a sales tax is better than an income tax because with a sales tax you get to put your money in the bank and earn interest on it. What the fuck does he think he's talking about? This is the life-cycle of a paycheck for about half the country, including me: receive paycheck, pay bills, have a small amount left over for eating, drinking, strippers, really awesome Warcraft ax, Warcraft strippers, or whatever you're into for entertainment, and by the time the next paycheck arrives we are somewhere between having $5 left and pawning our teeth. Think the class divide is bad now? Wait until we have a sales tax and the monied people are even more monied, while everyone else is in the same place. And where will that moniedness be spent? At the high-end Manhattan stores that just set up shop in Montreal. This is retarded.

An even more obvious reason a sales tax is a bad idea: we don't have a functioning economy. We don't make anything except movies based on comic books. We are getting by because people refuse to stop going into debt to buy shit they can't afford. If that stops happening, as it would with a sales tax, we'll collapse. Our greatest national resource is the lists of consumer information we sell to each other because they'll help us sell each other more shit. Jesus Christ, I'm sick of economists trying to out absurd-conclusion each other.

Hang Clemens

Why are they going through with all of this? I believe in giving people a lot of meaningless legal process, even to the point that it'll probably get me nuked someday, but we should really just decree that Clemens is a juicer who has buttsex with Andy Pettite and tell him to shut up and go back to his enormous ranch and beat his dog (whose name begins with a K).

In 1997, when I started pitching for a college in Boston, one of the first things I was told is that Clemens is on steroids. This was when it was only obvious but not yet reported that half of the MLB was juicing, but it was assumed to only be position players using steroids. They said, "Here is your windbreaker, and did you know that Clemens is a juicer?" I wasn't surprised. After all, he has the anger of ten men.