57 States

"It is wonderful to be back in Oregon," Obama said. "Over the last 15 months, we’ve traveled to every corner of the United States. I’ve now been in 57 states? I think one left to go. Alaska and Hawaii, I was not allowed to go to even though I really wanted to visit, but my staff would not justify it."

What were those extra states in BO's mind? It's fun to think what their names might have been. Billy Bob State? Christians with Guns state? Pork n Beans State? Outside of Arugulaville State, Not-Massachusetts and Not the University of Chicago (far from Bill Ayers State), and Sarah Palinville, what does Obama really think of the rest of America? It would be fun to have a New Yorker type take on Obama's take on America.

JUDGES: A Fatal Flaw in Democracy

Judges judge. But can they do so fairly? We saw in the 2000 election that the resolution of the flawed Florida vote was given to George W. Bush on a strictly partisan basis, first by a Florida judge appointed by W.'s brother, Jeb, and later by the SCOTUS itself, and always on a strictly partisan basis. While some of us may have enjoyed and even celebrated that decision, probably no one saw it as "fair."

At least since then the idea has been to "pack the courts," since that's where the real action is. After California's Proposition 8 was nullified by an apparently gay judge the left had reason to exult. They saw that a single judge could nullify a proposition voted on by millions and millions of people. A narrow victory eked out over years and years of hard work could be undone by the flick of a pen.

Gordon Wood at Brown University's ISI seminar a few weeks back said that "Madison had wanted to 'elevate the level of decision making' by forcing decisions away from the local toward the federal and national, so as to guarantee the quality of those decisions." I'm paraphrasing Wood. He cited Brown vs. Board of Education as a positive example of this. I personally didn't like being bussed into a neighborhood in which I was a minority. Chris Rock, in his filmed series Everybody Hates Chris, is bussed into Corleone High School, and he didn't like it much either. But if you had some wit and charm, and watched your back, there was the possibility of survival. It wasn't Democratic, but the Federalists in general were against states' rights, and local school boards' decisions, and wanted a strong central government, backed by elite judges. Judges were the new aristocracy whose ideas were divine, and had the sanctity of God behind them.

Obviously, judges are just normal people. Some of them don't even seem particularly bright. Sotomayor's bizarre belief that she has superior wisdom on account of her race and gender is the usual "Feminazi" garbage that Rush Limbaugh has complained about for decades. You see that belief held quite commonly throughout academia so you'd think I'd have gotten used to it but I have always thought that people who think they are hot because they belong to some group or another is just nonsense. But of course it's easier to see this in groups to which I don't belong.

I never got used to the notion that our high school football coach was God on earth because he was physically stronger than everyone else around him. He had never read Shakespeare, and didn't know how to complete a crossword puzzle. I had no idea who he thought he was, but I steered clear of the vicious brute.

I have never respected power that comes through force. I do respect democracy, and do respect the notion of voting. But it all seems to be nullified by the judges.

We have two major groups in America: we have the Christian right, who look back to the ten commandments, to the covenants worked out with God in the OT, up through Christ's period, and beyond, through the Protestant Reformation, and Luther and Calvin's attempts to create a workably just system. This in turn led us to the Pilgrims, to the wars between the states over slaves, and then the Civil Rights battles.

The American left is primarily Marxist, and derives their mode of thinking from German totalitarian Karl Marx. Whereas Protestants and even Catholics grant that the world is not perfect, Marx wanted to force fairness on the peoples of the earth through redistribution, enacted by a totalitarian government that eradicated the free will and human rights of persons with private property, in order to guarantee a Cyclopsean fairness. We saw how that worked out in the Soviet Union or in Romania, but the left holds out the option of the US being more or less like Scandinavia. Scandinavia is of course a Lutheran area, and their peoples are Lutheran. But the birdbrains of the left don't know anything about Scandinavia. None of them have been there and few of them speak any of the local languages. They imagine that it's perfect there.

Trust me: I lived in Finland for five years, and it's not perfect there. It's not perfect anywhere on earth. You'd open the Finnish newspaper and fall back amazed at the crimes committed: girls abducted and tortured near a train track. A man taped his girlfriend's head with black duct tape while she was asleep and then broke her head open with a hammer. Some creep put sharp sticks in a local swimming hole so when the boys jumped in the first day of spring they were impaled. Rapes were common. Beatings. Knifings. Taxation burdens were enormous so there was a huge black market in goods. Alcoholism was a national problem. Entire days were given over to inebriation followed by fighting and beatings, and sugar poured into the gas tanks of cars owned by outsiders.

But the culture wars in America have turned us into two separate groups with two separate aspirations, two separate models of humanity, and political will, and people take their inspiration where they can. And let's face it: we hate each other's guts, even if on the local stage, we can be friends. Nationally, I hate the guts of your representatives, and you hate the guts of mine. And it's because we will do anything possible to use the courts to slam home our way of thinking, and force the other to dance to our tune.

I've been sick for almost a week and this is the first day in about five in which I am able to think clearly. It won't last, and I am about to be pulled back into a coma of unending sleep as I attempt to cure the flu (yes, I had the shot at Walgreens but it didn't work). Meanwhile, I managed to read this paragraph from Ludwig von Mises (first published in his book Liberalism in 1927), and was impressed at its prescience (I'm not sure you get enough workup to follow what he's saying as it took him ten pages to get to this bit):

"Where, however, differences of religion, nationality or the like have divided the population into groups separated by a gulf so deep as to exclude every impulse of fairness or humanity and to leave room for nothing but hate, the situation is quite different. Then the judge who acts consciously, or still more often unconsciously, in a biased manner thinks he is fulfilling a higher duty when he makes use of his prerogatives and powers of his office in the service of his own group" (116).

Duke Lacrosse versus Penn State's Sandusky

Stu Kurtz weighs in late on the PSU scandal, and accuses me of taking a position similar to Duke 88, in terms of condemning Paterno before he's had a trial. Stu claims there is a strong parallel between the way I treated Paterno and the way in which the Duke 88 group treated the three lacrosse students. What in general could be said to be the difference? I think this provides a lovely case for us all to think about the differences between the two cases. I think of them as night and day. Stu writes:

Looking back at your first comment in the Duke Lacrosse Redux thread, you wrote, 'The crime that I argue that the Group of 88 committed falls under the category of "bearing false witness." But they immediately insisted that the three students who were charged be thrown off campus, and their careers at Duke terminated, without even the benefit of a trial.'

In the case of the Duke 88, they bought into a common narrative that rich white frat boys will take sexual advantage of vulnerable woman. Usually, that vulnerability comes from over-indulgence in alcohol that the frat boys provided, but in the Duke 88 case, the vulnerability was constructed out of race, class, and occupation.

This is exactly what you've done with Paterno and the Penn State football program. You have a general understanding of college athletics as being a distraction from the central mission of academics, and often enough a financial distortion of a University's budget. And so you want to use the Sandusky affair, and in particular the broadest form of the prosecution's case (involving both Paterno and Spanier) to argue for that entire team sport should be discontinued.

Whatever you said about the Duke 88? You're just like them.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 12:10:00 PM EST"

I responded, initially, like this:


Kirby Olson said...
The Duke faculty tried their own students, abusing their authority in the name of race, gender, and class (all three came into play, and since the case seemed to reinforce their bias, they couldn't resist hoping that it made all their fantasies of how the world works into a truth that validated their mindless theories).

I am not a part of the Penn State community, and so have no authority to abuse in terms of my understanding of the Paterno case and have no special weight to offer, and thus have not been quoted in the national press, nor did I push anyone at PEnn State to think one way or another. By the time I weighed in, all the details were settled. Paterno was the resident authority in the matter, that is, since he had been at Penn State since 1950, he was the deepest and most important authority in the matter. By his own admission he should have reported the matter to the police, and "wish that I done more," as he put it.

I see him as part of a hierarchy (the topmost part) and he didn't protect those on the bottom (literally as well as figuratively), but merely reported the matter to his athletic director (who in effect reported to Paterno).

I couldn't follow Stu's ideas here. There's an athletic team, and there are accusations, but beyond that, I don't think he dealt with anything more than superficial similarities.

I am, first and most importantly, coming in after the indictment was sealed, and Sandusky had been arrested (many people in academia would not consider what Sandusky had done to be a crime unless race was involved because unless it was, race and gender were not involved -- if race and gender were not involved, many people in academia could not care less). Class was almost certainly involved, but that is no longer of any concern to most academics.

We will not hear anything from feminists since no girls were involved, and boys deserve whatever they have coming to them. Feminists don't care about boys. As far as they are concerned, boys can ge destroyed as a class, and why would they care, unless, of course, they also happen to be minorities.

If the boys turn out to be black, then we will get the race and gender pundits weighing in with every ounce of force they can muster, but if they are not, we will hear nothing from the Sharpton/McKinnon clique. If they are, we will hear about it for the next hundred years.

As for me, my problem with the Paterno situation is my problem with Catholic hierarchy (Paterno is Catholic) and the problem of not standing up and bearing witness (a problem we see not only in the Catholic abuse problem and its subsequent cover-up but also in Italy itself in which a mafia has extended its power throughout the peninsula bringing the Italian economy toward the brink of collapse). This is not necessarily a matter of Catholicism itself, or Catholics, but has to do with their top-down structure in which they think someone else is responsible for the problem. And one musn't block say anything that conflicts with the party line.

Lutherans have many problems, but reporting and being a witness is not one of them. We do not have a damaged sense of authority and so we generally trust authority (often too much, due to St. Paul's Romans, and the passage about trusting the authorities).

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 3:39:00 PM EST


stu said...
Kirby,

It seems to me that the case against Paterno is substantially more ambiguous than you're presenting it. He was presented with hear-say, and he kicked it up the administrative food-chain as such. There's an eminently ironic phrase for Paterno's (and the prosecutor's) argument that he should have done more, "Monday morning quarterbacking." Note that Paterno would have been held blameless, even admirable, if the AD or VP had simply passed the word along to the police. Any of them could have, and none of them did. If there was collusion, a joint decision to do nothing, that's one thing. But I don't have the sense that that's how it went down.

And here's another part of the puzzle that doesn't get much play. Sandusky was being groomed as Paterno's successor. In 1999, he was awarded Assistant Coach of the Year. Yet, he "retired" the same year, at 55 years old, and despite seeking a coaching job, he didn't get one. Funny thing that. Maybe someone around him was putting out the word that there were problems here. Maybe it's worth thinking about who was putting that word out, as you think about culpability.

Why do you consider these facts of the PSU case to be any more reliably established than the "facts" of the Duke Lacrosse "rape," which was tried in the media by the prosecuter?

It seems to me that the Penn State Board of Trustees should have suspended Paterno, Spanier, et. al., pending the result of a trial, but not fired them outright. It is one thing to act decisively in the event of credible information to protect others. It is another thing to prejudge the case -- and that's exactly what happened with the Duke 88 and with you. You're guilty of exactly the same error.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 4:06:00 PM EST


Kirby Olson said...
Stu, what the Duke 88 did to the students at Duke is what you're doing to me. First off, the students at Duke did nothing. They got the wrong three people, and framed them, and then railroaded them. The stripper pulled a Tawana Brawley. Remember that nothing happened at Duke. And yet everyone rushed to judgement with the exception of one or two administrative officials.

At Penn State, something really did happen. At least eight children were molested, and the perp was caught in the act, and Paterno not only didn't report according to Pennsylvania law, he participated in a cover up and allowed Sandusky to continue to have keys to athletic facilities that allowed kids to continue to be abused in those facilities. The grand jury indicted Sandusky on forty counts of child molesting. That's forty counts, and it includes at least 8 boys.

I'm not sure why I'm like the Duke 88. After all they railroaded the students when nothing at all had ever happened. Now if it turns out that no kids were harmed at all, and that the kids and their moms made all this stuff up, then we would have a situation parallel to Duke. Is Sandusky parallel to the three lacrosse students?

And at that point, I would apologize. But I would not have the responsibility that Duke 88 would have had. I have had no bearing on the case, being an outsider from a remote institution, writing on a blog that doesn't have national attention. Duke 88 were inside the institution and weighed in on their own students. Their names were widely known throughout the nation as wishing to forward the railroading. After the facts were known and it became clear the DA railroaded the kids (for which he lost his license) they still did not apologize, but went on bizarrely to continue to press the case even after the case had been dismissed by everyone else in the nation. They were still certain it had happened although all the facts were otherwise.

Your assertion that I am like Duke 88 is more like Duke 88 than I am, or so I think. Let's see what the others say, and see if Brett or others take your side. Helen Losse might, but she doesn't come here much any longer. In both cases I believed that there was a truth that was suppressed, and I thought it was a symptom of corruption and misplaced priorities.

Your values in this case are hard to fathom!

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 10:52:00 PM EST


stu said...
Kirby,

You need to go back and re-read your summary condemnation of the Duke 88. It had everything to do with a rush to judgment before a trial.

Has there been a trial of Sandusky? Has there been a trial of Paterno, or Spanier? I must have missed it.

The Duke 88 erred because accepting the prosecution's version of facts fit their narrative. You're doing the same. There is nothing more to say.

You're not trying. I agree that children need to be protected, and that if the case proves to be as the prosecution alleges, then Paterno (and Spanier and others) should have done more. But I also think that the record will ultimately show that both did considerably more than is currently understood, and that this will moderate judgments that now seem all-but universal. I've already sketched out a reaction by the PSU trustees that I thought met their obligations to both the alleged victims, and the alleged perpetrators: suspension until trial, and final resolution thereafter.

I wonder about your values. You were big on "innocent until proven guilty" in the Duke case. You don't give a damn about it here. Hence, "innocent until proven guilty" is not one of your values, but instead is a tactic that you apply selectively to cases that meet other ideological tests.

Here's the thing that I don't get. Sandusky "retired" in '99. Yet the incident that is at the root of the current allegations occurred in the PSU football showers in '02. What, exactly, was an ex-employee doing there? Why did he still have access? I've not heard this addressed at all.

Wednesday, November 23, 2011 11:08:00 PM EST


Kirby Olson said...
Stu, you are in a time warp because of other events that have kept you from getting the latest facts in the Sandusky case. Paterno allowed Sandusky to use the facilities after he was not renewed. This meant that he had keys, and continued to abuse at least eight more children in the PSU facilities, and was caught red-handed at least once more by McQueary -- now in charge of the PSU football team. Read Jerry Sandusky, the Wiki page, and get caught up with the facts of the case. There are many new bits of data, including a missing DA (they can't find the body), the number of victims (not alleged victims who stand to gain something by speaking out, but instead victims whose lives will be further ruined by these crimes), and there are statements by Sandusky himself that have come to light, such as his statement to one of the victims' mothers: ""I wish I were dead," as he put it.

One way in which Paterno might not be as guilty as I have put it here is that he may be of an age in which it wasn't commonly realized that child perps will repeat their crimes if given the opportunity. He may have thought Sandusky was able to control himself having once been scolded. But perps in this category are repeat offenders at a 99% rate. What Sandusky apparently did is to use the facilities and tickets to treat children to presents that he would then get them excited with. Paterno let those gifts continue by not completely severing the relationship of Sandusky and the University facilities.

Paterno may not have realized that this would be the case, and the kind of crime may have been far from his ability to understand. He was, after all, 86. And maybe he had no awareness of anything outside of football. He may have been a kind of idiot savante. If that's the case, then it's possible to forgive his incredible dimwittedness on this matter.

There are new rumors that Sandusky groomed these kids as a child brothel for wealthy donors. A columnist named Michael Madsen made those allegations public. One wonders if the investigation will turn up an entire crime organization founded on the premises of PSU and in which money used to create a competitive team was gotten via this child brothel and translated into successful seasons. Time will tell.

As I see it, the number of personnel of very high standing involved, and the length of time this took to play out (at least a decade, and possibly more) make it quite unlike the Duke case in which a single night was involved, a false claim by a flighty person was believed by 88 faculty members, and in which the DA knowingly railroaded three young men who had nothing to do with the case for political reasons.

So far as PSU we have instead an insider very far up in the hierarchy who is accused of a far more dreadful crime -- raping children inside of campus facilities for a period exceeding ten years, and in which the top coach of the team was aware of the crimes, and barely did anything to stop it. Presidents of colleges can be released for any reason, and do not generally speaking have tenure, as faculty do. They can be released for any reason. It is not a crime to release them. Neither Paterno nor Spanier have been accused of criminal activity and neither one will be tried.

The lacrosse boys were tried in the public and on TV over a period of years, and false witness was knowingly borne against them, including by sports writers and major television figures. They were summarily removed as students from the student body. This was illegal given that they had not yet been found guilty (and ultimately the stripper herself said they had the wrong three men even though in fact noone had ever raped her).

The cases bear a tantalizing but superficial resemblance. The deep parallels aren't there.

Thursday, November 24, 2011 8:48:00 AM EST


Kirby Olson said...
Paterno was, by the way, a lifelong Republican, and a major donor to the Republican party. So I bear him no animus on a political basis.

Thursday, November 24, 2011 8:51:00 AM EST


Kirby Olson said... (Here is some of the data from Wikipedia):
On November 5, 2011, former Penn State defensive coordinator Jerry Sandusky was arrested on 40 counts relating to sexual abuse of eight young boys over a 15-year period, including alleged incidents that occurred at Penn State.[28] A 2011 grand jury investigation reported that then-graduate assistant Mike McQueary told Paterno in 2002 that he had seen Sandusky abusing a 10-year-old boy in Penn State football's shower facilities. The grand jury report would later detail that McQueary saw Sandusky sodomizing the boy. [29]According to the report, Paterno notified Athletic Director Tim Curley the next day about the incident, and later notified Gary Schultz, director of business and finance, who oversaw the University Police.[30]

That's from the Paterno page. 40 counts is fairly serious, and eight boys. We have far less in terms of the Herman Cain problem -- three reports of HARASSMENT, not rape (Clinton was accused of raping Juanita Broaddrick and paid her 850,000 hush money, but Democrats don't care, and would love to have him as president again), but with Cain it was only harassment, and we don't have faces, only allegations, and the crime is not nearly as serious as rape, much less of minors.

Where minors are concerned, the country is understandably alarmed because the very possibility of consent is not there.

Thursday, November 24, 2011 9:00:00 AM EST


Kirby Olson said...
The wiki page on Duke's lacrosse team cites the division of faculty members amongst the 88 Duke faculty who decided that the lacrosse players had been guilty of a hate crime:

"In three departments, more than half of faculty signed the statement. The department with the highest proportion of signatories was African and African-American Studies, with 80%. Just over 72% of the Women's Studies faculty signed the statement, Cultural Anthropology 60%, Romance studies 44.8%, Literature 41.7%, English 32.2%, Art & Art History 30.7%, and History 25%. No faculty members from the Pratt School of Engineering or full-time law professors signed the document. Departments that had no faculty members sign the document include Biological Anthropology and Anatomy, Biology, Chemistry, Computer Science, Economics, Genetics, Germanic Languages/Literature, Psychology and Neuroscience, Religion, and Slavic and Eurasian Studies."

OWS HAS A WIKI PAGE

There is now a Wikipedia page for OWS. It's interesting. Most Americans have had a rising income since 1979 but the top 1% has gained 275% while the middle class has only gained 40%. Many of the protesters want socialism and are prepared to use violence to get it (31% think violence is acceptable). 98% think that civil disobedience is acceptable.

"On Oct. 10 and 11, the polling firm Penn, Schoen & Berland interviewed nearly 200 protesters.[43] Half (52%) have participated in a political movement before, 98% would support civil disobedience to achieve their goals, and 31% would support violence to advance their agenda. Most are employed; 15% are unemployed. Most had supported Obama; now they are evenly divided. 65% say government has a responsibility to guarantee access to affordable health care, a college education, and a secure retirement. They support raising taxes on the wealthiest Americans, and are divided on whether the bank bailouts were necessary.[43]

In the Wall Street Journal, Fox News political analyst and Clinton administration pollster Douglas Schoen wrote that the protesters reflect "values that are dangerously out of touch with the broad mass of the American people" and have "a deep commitment to left-wing policies: opposition to free-market capitalism and support for radical redistribution of wealth, intense regulation of the private sector, and protectionist policies to keep American jobs from going overseas," and that politicians who support them will be hurt in the 2012 elections.[43]"

It's hard to know what to do with all this information except to file it under part of the growing gap between opinions of America's future. I personally am for private enterprise and private property and don't think others should either be able to seize it or to occupy it. The whole movement was apparently started by a Canadian activist group.

I do think the richest people should help the poorest, but on the other hand they are already doing so. Only 53% of people pay taxes at all in this country. I think even the poorest person in America has access to food and shelter (there are people who don't get enough calories but that is a voluntary thing called anorexia). In general, we are eating too many calories. I know I am. I do look for artificial sweeteners such as Sucralose, aspartame, and Nutrasweet, and love them all, but some people claim they cause cancer.

As I see it, life is a gamble from beginning to end. You hope when you get out of bed to have a good day. You hope to eat something that's decent and won't make you sick. You hope when you open Facebook to be amused. You hope when you open any book to be entertained and hopefully enlightened. You hope when you start a business to have a profit. You hope when you invest in a company that there will be a return on the investment. It seems to me that OWS is about dissatisfied people who want government to take all the gambles/gambols out of life, and make government into a nanny that will never forget your meal or to wipe your butt and face (hopefully not with the same napkin).

There is a certain level of risk when you make a decision to get married or to take a job or to hire someone. You never know if your partner will cheat, or die, or get cancer, or turn mean and spend the whole day screaming at you in public. A boss might fire you or harass you or never give you any raise, and then suddenly you're old and stuck. In Lois Lowry's The Giver she posits a society in which all risk has been removed. People are basically zombies. Inconvenient children (children who cannot produce, or aren't smart) are killed off (released).

In a game such as basketball the top 1% produce all the baskets in the NBA. Very few of the country's basketball players ever make it to the NBA. Those few who can get in (probably less than 600 players at any one time) score almost all of the baskets. And they also make almost all of the money to be made. But if you say that everyone in America should split the baskets then it's hard to see how the competition would be improved, or the game itself would be improved. It's frustrating for some to think that they are not succeeding. Excellent businessmen like Donald Trump aren't made overnight. Most can't cut it. And yet people envy them, and think that it's easy. Writing is also a competitive enterprise. Many start blogs, and few are read. Few get comments. Most fold in a certain amount of time. Most writers will never have a book and if they do the book won't pay for itself, much less make a profit or a name for its author. Is this fair? It's a risk that almost everyone will fail at. Life itself is a risk from the inception (billions of sperm cells but only one arrives at the egg first). Life is risk.

Risk is the main problem perhaps. The protesters want to limit the profits of the upper classes in order to make their own lives risk-free by creating a better tax base. However, without companies that are producing profits, there are no taxes. So, it would seem that free enterprise would work better for everyone. But the enterprises would have to be free to fail, too. The Fannie and Freddie debacle in which loans were given out but in which there was no risk is what ruined the economy. The government bailout of Fannie and Freddie created an enormous tsunami of debt that wiped out many companies and threatened to take the US under. It damaged our credit rating. The government has to let businesses fail, and businesses have got to get back to taking risks. Insurance companies have to be free to set their own risk levels. If they screw up, they go under. Government should get out of business altogether and simply regulate and make sure that businesses are safe for the environment and that they are not unfairly creating monopolies, or cutting the actual throats of other businessmen and businesswomen.

It's not as if I myself love risk. I find it unnerving. When I eat I want maximum enjoyment with minimum calories. So I drink iced tea with aspartame. This means I get a sweet drink but also the risk of cancer. The risk I do without is the calories. The best bet is to stay within the recommended BMI. The iced tea companies are betting that I will bet in this way: drink sweet beverages without calories. I should resist, but I willingly for for this risk. I shouldn't, but I do.

If I started to bet another way, so would they. This proves that capitalism is a democracy, and I am in control. Under communism, there would only be one drink, and everyone would be forced to drink it, or die.

RAISING CAIN (ABOUT CLINTON)

Herman Cain will have to bow out due to three alleged incidents in which he made passes at workers. Those workers don't have names and the settlements appear to be nominal (about 40 grand each). A new woman from Obama's Chicago has recently surfaced and made new allegations. I don't think Cain will be Able to survive the scandal. Newt Gingrich will have similar problems once voters are reminded that he has had three wives. But it's weird that Bill Clinton gets a pass. From Wikipedia:

"Throughout his career, Clinton has been subject to various allegations of sexual misconduct, though he has only ...admitted extramarital relationships with Monica Lewinsky and Gennifer Flowers.[139] For alleged misconduct during his governorship, Paula Jones brought a sexual harassment lawsuit against Clinton while he was president. The case was initially dismissed,[140] but Jones appealed the dismissal to the United States Court of Appeals for the Eighth Circuit.[141] During the deposition for the Jones lawsuit, which was held at the White House,[142] Clinton denied having sexual relations with Monica Lewinsky – a denial that became the basis for the impeachment charge of perjury.[143] On November 18, 1998, Clinton agreed to an out-of-court settlement, and agreed to pay Jones and her attorneys a sum of $850,000.00.[144] Clinton denies ever engaging in a sexual affair with her[144] and his attorney Bob Bennett stated that he only made the settlement so he could end the lawsuit for good and move on with his life.[145]

In 1998, Kathleen Willey alleged Clinton sexually assaulted her four years previously. In 1998, Juanita Broaddrick alleged Clinton raped her some twenty years previously. The accusations by Willey and Broaddrick were never brought before a court. The independent counsel determined Willey gave "false information" to the FBI and inconsistent sworn testimony related to the Jones allegation.[146] Gennifer Flowers, Elizabeth Ward Gracen, Sally Perdue, and Dolly Kyle Browning each have reported having adulterous sexual relations with Clinton during or before his service as governor. " But who cares he's a Democrat.

Now Clinton wants a third term. He's saying that given enough time a president should be able to serve an indefinite number of terms. Surely the allegations against him are far more serious than those against Cain, and yet, it's as if the allegations and memories only exist against Cain, and Clinton has been scrubbed clean by the media. (Pictured above: Juanita Broaddrick.)

PIZZA A VEGETABLE?

Heard an amusing program on NPR this evening. I was driving so I'm not sure I got all the facts straight. But this is more or less what I got. Obama's czars or some Obama group have been trying to decide if pizza counts as a vegetable for school lunch. They said that if a single slice had a half a cup of tomato sauce, then it counted. Pizza factions fought back and said no kid would eat pizza with that much sauce. Obama's czars caved. Two teaspoons is sufficient. This recalled the argument during Reagan years about whether ketchup was a vegetable and could count as one in school lunches. Reagan said yes. The communists screamed no. I don't know who won. Is there a real difference between ketchup and pizza sauce? Isn't it the same thing? SCOTUS should settle these things. But do we even know what a vegetable is? We don't know when a person is a vegetable much less when we're eating one. They are hard to distinguish from fruits. French fry manufacturers are going to try to argue that it's still enough like a potato to qualify as a vegetable next, the announcer said.

I MISSED THE DEBATE

I found the channel switcher but there were no batteries. It was 8:50 and the debate ended at 9. I scrounged up batteries from the kids' toys (a perpetual battle) and switched on the Republican debates. They were just ending with Ron Paul standing up against torture in any situation including if children are at stake (it's illegal, don't you know). My children torture me. I can never find the channel switcher. It's often days befo...re I can find it, and then it's been stripped of batteries. It's torture to not be able to watch a show I want to see. I think Ron Paul is the one Republican I would never vote for, even if Obama was the only other choice. Paul is a visionary. That's what we don't need, as the kids would say. I just want someone who's effective. Ron Paul wants to dump all the federal agencies in the Potomac, call home all our troops, get rid of foreign aid, and open the borders entirely and stop caring about the drug trade. He also wants to return to gold and silver (as if there's enough for 300 million people to really do this). There's a golden gleam in some of his ideas, especially the ones he's gleaned directly from austrian school economics: particularly Hayek and Von Mises. But otherwise, he's way too libertarian for me. It's torture to listen to Ron Paul. His voice grates up and down my spine. I hesitate to compare it to waterboarding. I just want someone competent who will get the business sector moving again. Ron Paul is always up on a high horse about something. It's just torture to listen to the man, even if he's against it.

I like Herman Cain but he's lost the women now. The Republican candidate is going to have to pull together the entire electorate to win. I love how he approaches problems. Got a Gordian knot? He approaches it with a chainsaw. Rip! It's over. Unfortunately he also approached dating in much the same way.

I think it will end up Romney as the nominee, with someone on the ticket who can hopefully apologize to the evangelicals for his being Mormon. Maybe Huckabee? We have to win all the debates, and can't have a single serious misstep or else the MSM will go wild. They want communism by any means necessary. We have got to get the economy back from the Democrats. They are waterboarding the entrepreneurs, and I think the impression of something dying may be for real.

PATERNO FIRED: CANCEL THE WHOLE SEASON OUT OF DECENCY AND RESPECT

Sandusky apparently admitted what he'd done to one of the mothers and said that he wished he was dead. I wish he was dead, too.

But what's odd to me about Paterno's comments have been how this was such a tragedy for HIM. And for Penn State. Doesn't he have any loyalty to humanity itself? Why doesn't he have any solidarity with those little boys?

It's like football is everything. I think they ...should cancel their entire season and get a sense of perspective. The entire community should do penance for at least a year. Football has become a form of idolatry for them.

Football is stupid, and brings out the stupid beast in people. I've never liked it. Ok, I hate the sport. It should be banned. If this was one of the clean programs, then the whole sport should be outlawed. I can't believe they are going to play the game on Saturday, and that students are upset that Paterno is out. They showed students demonstrating at Penn State while in a drunken state, and smashing things. They want an accessory after the fact to continue in his position? They want a coach who looked the other way to keep his job?

There are more important things than winning a stupid game.

And it really is a stupid game. These people might as well all be zombies in a postapocalyptic rite.

Why don't the trustees go all the way and fire the entire team and ban football at the school for a year or two (or preferably, make a truly moral choice and ban it permanently at their school?).

Soccer is a superior game. (It is a superior game.) (Badminton is even better.) (Team sports invariably lead to communism.) But it's also disgust over all the allegations and cover-ups, and the whole way in which many people find it highly inconvenient that some children's lives were destroyed before Paterno could have his last season. Why did it have to come out now, is the message I'm getting.

You shall know them by their fruits, Christ said. We can see the fruits of the football program at Penn State. Monstrous idiots without a trace of wisdom or decency who pulled in millions of dollars for their school thanks to winning seasons. Football reminds me of ancient Rome at its worst. I don't think there should be any contact sports.

Presidential Politics

If you could have any president in American history for our next president (the two term rule being waived), who would you choose, and why?

OWS in HISTORICAL PERSPECTIVE

"The common man as a rule does not have the opportunity of consorting with people who have succeeded better than he has. He moves in the circle of other common men. He never meets his boss socially. He never learns from experience how different an entrepreneur or an executive is with regard to all those abilities and faculties which are required for successfully serving the consumers. His envy and the resentment it engenders are not directed against a living being of flesh and blood, but against pale abstractions like 'management,' 'capital' and 'Wall Street'" -- The Anti-Capitalistic Mentality, by Ludwig Von Mises, Martino Publishing, Mansfield Center, CT, 2009, pp. 15-16. (First published in 1956 by the Van Nostrand Company of Princeton, NJ.)

Harvard U. Conference on What So Proudly We Hail!

I went over to Harvard U. for a conference on literature with Leon Kass and his wife Amy. Mr. Kass is famous for having been a philosopher of bioethics associated somehow with George Bush. His wife Amy and he have been together since their undergrad days, and are now retired (they taught at the U. of Chicago).

I drove over still thinking about Stu's statement that God could choose to be either male or female. I don't know. Aren't there any limits? I think a person is either a male or a female. God is a person. How could He go back and forth? Maybe Stu thinks God is a hermaphrodite. With this in mind, I wondered if that is what he meant.

En route I stopped at Walden Pond (it's paved around the edge, but it's done quite tastefully as it prevents erosion). I walked around the lake at 3 mph and it took forty minutes. Thoreau's cabin is no longer there but the outline of it is, and it's probably smaller than the Unabomber's cabin. It was a crisp autumn day and the trees were still orange. The lake (it's too big to call a pond) was absolutely pristine. I wasn't really aiming to go there but once I was I walked all around it. It's pretty as heck. If heck can be called pretty, it would look like Walden Pond.


I also looked at a house that Emerson and Hawthorne lived in, and the bridge on which the Revolutionary War started: both in a town called Concord. It was already getting dark when I saw the house and it looked about like any other house from 1825 or thereabouts. It was high, had shutters, and didn't look like it had insulation. The bridge was dark, so I really didn't see it at all, but a sign assured me it was there. I had to get to my motel and spent an hour on loopy roads which went back and forth all over Waltham and Watertown. I kept asking for directions at gas stations but the problem is the roads aren't straight. They loop and "jog," which means they are discontinuous. The signage is a joke.

But I eventually arrived. I stayed in a Super 8 motel in Watertown. It's a wonderful place: very quiet. I had to go to Target too last night to get pyjamas which I forgot to pack. Then I went into Harvard this morning and it was hard to find parking because every place required a permit. It made me nervous to be so late. I was close to Harvard Square when I suddenly got on some road that took me away from Cambridge and I was back in Watertown staring at the Super 8 sign of the motel I had stayed at the night before. I tried again, and this time I asked a woman at a stop sign for help. She was going to Cambridge she said. So I should just follow her. She was a huge beefy woman from some unidentifiable culture, probably one of the -Stans, but I wasn't sure. She waved goodbye out her window after getting me to Harvard Square. But then I couldn't find any parking. Every place said must have a permit.

Finally I found one block that was seemingly unregulated, and ran ten blocks to get into the meeting. We read a story by Jack London about a man who freezes to death, and a story by Hawthorne about a utopian colony called MerryMount. But when you read with intelligent people it goes on and on, all day, and time just waltzes past: a Busby Berkeleyesque kaleidoscope of forever deepening insights. Leon and Amy Kass were unbelievably good facilitators of the viewpoints. I can't tell you how brilliant we all were, thanks to them. The sandwiches were good, too, but not as good as us. I had a mozzarella and tomato sandwich. The sandwiches were better last week at Brown University (I had a hummus sandwich last week and it killed me it was so good). I can't tell you why. But the drinks were better at Harvard. I had lemonade and a berry drink this afternoon. But we were all quite good this day. Last weekend it was mostly Gordon Wood who was really good. But this weekend we were all good, and Amy and Leon Kass made it happen. I thought about how in basketball it was said that Michael Jordan made all his team mates look good. He set up Scotty Pippen and Dennis Rodman. Without Jordan, they were mere mortals and their teams sucked. I think the Kasses were just very good at setting up plays. And they worked in tandem. I felt like I could dunk from half court (well, at least from the top of the key, with the help of a trampoline).

I really enjoyed the seminar and am thinking seriously of developing an honors course around the idea of America: using their text. Maybe I'll write more about it later. I'm tired. Although the Super 8 was unbelievably quiet, I couldn't sleep. I missed my kids and wife, and felt like I was on the other side of the world, and might never get back.

He's back, as Jack Nicholson said in the Shining.