The Dish

There are times when, watching Comedy Central, I will accidentally find myself being exposed to Carlos Mencia. (My deranged cable fantasy is to have him co-host a show with Lou Dobbs.) But it turns out he may have some ethical issues as well. One other comic, Joe Rogan, is accusing Mencia of stealing jokes, and takes him on in public. From this clip, it looks like Mencia has some ‘splaining to do. More here on Rogan’s blog. Make your own mind up. Warning: profanity-laced comic confrontation:

Giuliani’s latest campaign tactics are getting more scrutiny.

This is a 1980s photograph of Oxford’s Bullingdon Club, a select crew of partiers and boors from Britain’s upper crust. Unfortunately, Number 2 is now the leader of the Conservative Party, and currently posing as a regular bloke who can relate to people of all classes. He has said he had a "normal university experience."

I was at Oxford a year or so before Cameron, and knew Boris Johnson (Number 8) from the Oxford Union (I was president in 1983). The Bullingdon was easily the worst of the obnoxious class-based clubs. Cameron’s youthful pot-smoking doesn’t help the class image either. It’s hard to explain to Americans but in the 1980s when I was at Oxford, pot was basically an upper-crust activity. I despised it as decadent and aristocratic and never touched the stuff. What’s been remarkable so far about Cameron’s popularity in Britain is that his privileged background – Eton, especially – hasn’t worked against him. This is a big shift. People seem to have left this class hatred behind in the last couple of decades (Thatcher + Blair = Blue State America). But put cannabis and Bullingdon into the same stew and you can see this Guardian blogger doing his best to whip up class hatred. But check out the comments as well. They show a more complex picture of Brits not willing to return to the class hatred of yore.

Here’s a good riposte to the Guardianista:

yeah, cos the only people who get pissed up and make twats of themselves at uni are toffs right?

For the non-Anglo "pissed up" means drunk. "Toffs" are preppies. "Uni" is college. "Twats" … well, here’s another:

"The Bullingdon invented binge drinking and yobbery long before it was discovered by the kind of people the Daily Mail is always denouncing."

Yeah. Binge drinking and yobbery started 150 years ago. Are you English? It’s what we’ve always done. It’s normal. It won us the Napoleonic War. It built our cities.

And besides, look at the clothes those guys are in. Now look at photos of Spandau Ballet and Duran Duran from the same time. Oddly those urban non-university kids looked much the same. A bit more makeup maybe.

Another:

As much as this is juicily wonderful background, and as hypocritically loathsome as it is for David Cameron to put himself forward as some sort of man of the people (and generally get away with it), he was right when he said that politicians should be allowed a private life before entering office. His supposed cannabis use won’t become something that can either be touted as a sign he’s a hypocrite or in touch with people. And if you really feel like judging the man, there’s plenty of contemporary material to work with, rather than using his background against him.

Finally:

didn’t this type of class envy go out some time in the 1970s? this really is feeble stuff.

Yes it is.

Another Toles home-run.

It’s war, I tell you.

Kathleen Hall Jamieson writes from her perspective in the Texas Monthly:

George Bush’s legacy is going to be his use of signing statements. He has used them to replace the veto, which represents a shift in institutional power and alters the relationship between the branches. When a president doesn’t issue a veto until the sixth year of his presidency but nonetheless systematically takes exception to legislation, that person is doing something different from what his predecessors did. Some observers view this as a healthy exercise of executive power; others view it as overstepping. I’m in the second camp.

Many signing statements are absolutely benign. They applaud Congress for passing the legislation, for instance. It’s true that earlier presidents used signing statements as something akin to what I call a ‘de facto item veto.’ What’s new in this president’s use is the displacement of the traditional veto for this alternative form. A good example is John McCain’s proposal from 2005 that banned the torture of detainees and passed with a veto-proof majority. Bush had already made clear his administration’s views on the matter, but he held a press availability with Senator McCain in which he said positive things about the legislation. He engaged in what I would call “public embrace, private repudiation.” Two weeks after the press conference, President Bush signed the bill, and the signing statement was posted on the White House Web site. Its eighth paragraph reserved the right to nullify the provision over which McCain and Bush had fought. The president didn’t say he would nullify it; he said he reserved the right to do so. That happened on December 30. Where do you think reporters are on December 30? They’re not paying attention to the White House Web site.

So you can ask if the press availability was real. Now you have a de facto item veto in a constitutionally problematic moment, because had Bush simply vetoed the bill, McCain would have had the votes to override it. That would have checked the president, as provided for in the Constitution.

If President Bush’s successors continue to do this, it could be not simply an important legacy. It could be the most important legacy. It shifts your presumption of what presidents can do.

It’s called creeping monarchism.

Champaign, illinois, 9.30 am.

Thank God I’m not the only one:

One man confesses to his long-held wish to ‘bind both the Queen and Baroness Thatcher with ropes and then make love to each woman in turn’. Some are deeply disturbing – a woman whose parents perished in the Holocaust who has always become aroused by the thought of SS officers in jackboots. Kahr says he has been for a long time intrigued by a comment of Freud’s suggesting ‘that every sexual act is a process in which four persons are involved’: the two people in bed and the two others in their heads. He sees himself in the tradition of Alfred Kinsey and Nancy Friday, a liberating force, and insists that that force is still needed when it comes to the British and sex.

We’ve found how hard those words can be for a president. But in a critical period, under immense stress, Lincoln was up to it. Here’s a simple short letter from Lincoln to General Grant, after the capture of Vicksburg, Mississippi, written July 13, 1863. I’m struck by its indifference to cronyism or friendship, its candor, and its sincerity. A reader recently remarked that Lincoln was never wrong. This is untrue. But what made Lincoln great was his capacity to see his own errors – and go out of his way to acknowledge them:

My dear General,

I do not remember that you and I ever met personally. I write this now as a grateful acknowledgment for the almost inestimable service you have done the country. I wish to say a word further. When you first reached the vicinity of Vicksburg, I thought you should do, what you finally did — march the troups across the neck, run the batteries with the transports, and thus go below; and I never had any faith, except a general hope that you knew better than I, that the Yazoo Pass expedition, and the like, could succeed. When you got below, and took Port-Gibson, Grand Gulf, and vicinity, I thought you should go down the river and join Gen. Banks; and when you turned Northward East of the Big Black, I feared it was a mistake.

I now wish to make the personal acknowledgment that you were right, and I was wrong.

Yours very truly
A. Lincoln

A Texas legislator – Chairman of House Appropriations no less – is eager to have public schools teach creationism. No big whup. This is Texas. But Mr Warren Chisum distributed a memo to his fellow state congressmen recently. It made for lively reading:

The memo points to "indisputable evidence" that "evolution science has a very specific religious agenda" and refers readers to a Web site that asserts the universe revolves around the earth. It also suggests that Jewish physicists are part of the force behind a "centuries-old conspiracy" to destroy the Christian teachings of Earth’s origins …  Mr. Chisum said all he thought he was doing was "a Good Samaritan" deed for a fellow legislator. "If that’s a sin, well, shoot me."

Is that a wise thing to encourage in Texas?