Academy Award-winning actor Julie Andrews pens a spirited defense of the Los Angeles Public Library's funding, and Patt Morrison pickets in front of the June 3 ballot for better voting conditions. Cartoonist Ed Rall slips some snide commentary by the airline industry, and Rosa Brooks tells overbearing parents to give their kids a little independence. Pollster Douglas E. Schoen figures the recent controversies surrounding Obama's campaign may be "the best things that could have happened to his candidacy":

The last six weeks have been a great benefit to Obama -- and may emerge as the most important period of his quest for the presidency.

The poll evidence is unambiguous: He's suffered no short-term damage. A recent Los Angeles Times/Bloomberg poll shows Obama leading McCain in a hypothetical matchup by six points; in February, he was trailing by two. The Rasmussen Reports' estimate of electoral college strength has him leading McCain, 260 to 240. And a recent CBS/New York Times poll reveals that over the last few weeks, Obama's favorability rating actually increased by five points.

The editorial board wonders if the governor's revised budget plan is too clever by half, and calls the House-approved farm bill a lost opportunity for reform. The board also gives a chilly nod to the federal government's half-hearted move to list the polar bear as an endangered species:

Under legal pressure, Interior Secretary Dirk Kempthorne officially -- and historically -- added the polar bear to the threatened-species list, the first time a species has made the list because of global warming. His action Wednesday was extraordinary. Even more remarkable was Kempthorne's blatant undercutting of his own decision with regulatory shenanigans that will almost certainly mean no new restrictions on carbon emissions and no need to scale back on drilling for Alaskan oil....

What we have here is a newly protected polar bear with virtually no new protections.

Readers react to Hillary Clinton's primary win in West Virginia. Anna Shaff asks:

If the next few weeks afford Clinton a single moment of introspection, she should ask herself the following question: Has the fighter become a piranha?

Sorry, Bill Johnson supporters, but your man really is the gift that keeps on giving.

Devoted Johnsonians will recall that the good judicial candidate first appeared on our radar screen thanks to his help with an effort to unseat a group of Latino jurists and get Filipino-Americans get onto the bench. That effort was led by a minister in Carson, who explained his ambition:

"When you're running against a Caucasian, it's kind of hard," the Rev. Ronald C. Tan of Carson said. "As Filipinos, our names are almost the same as Hispanics, so that puts us on co-equal ground."

In Johnson's book they're already on co-equal ground. Amendment to the Constitution, the 1985 book written by Johnson under the alias "James O. Pace," presents the text of the proposed "Pace Amendment" mandating expulsion of non-whites from the United States, along with an extensive, Federalist Papers-style unpacking of the proposed law's text. Here's what the book has to say on Filipinos in its explanation of how folks of various ethnicities will be sent packing:

Filipinos. The Filipinos are generally new arrivals, and many are still Philippine citizens. Accordingly, they can be repatriated without much difficulty. The Philippine government can be encouraged to assist.

This is more mildly worded than Pace's suggestions for assorted Latinos ("The Puerto Ricans should be returned to Puerto Rico," "Central Americans should be returned to Central America," "It should be noted that repatriation has become necessary primarily because of the abuses that the Hispanics have made of our system"). But while Pace allows that "Hispanic whites who are basically indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is the British Isles or Northwestern Europe, need not be repatriated," he is silent on the matter of Filipinos who can pass. (Are there any of those? Is there a whiteometer we can check?)

But I'd rather light a candle than curse anybody's darkness. A few days ago our news side had an interesting story about the proliferation of headline-driven legislation bearing names like "R.J.'s Law," "Adam's Law" and so on.

Would the Pace Amendment have fared better if it had a nice round name attached?

"Ziegfried's Law," maybe?

Sen. Russ Feingold (D-Wis.) points out that the John Yoo torture memo is but one example of President Bush's hidden laws. High school junior Tom Stanley-Becker explains why opting out of an Advanced Placement class was a smart move. Columnist Patt Morrison says L.A. muralists have to fight for their work on two fronts -- taggers on one side, and numbskulls with paint rollers on the other. And columnist Rosa Brooks acknowledges that Hillary Clinton may have a right to keep campaigning, but says it isn't the right thing to do:

Tell an American he shouldn't do something, and odds are he'll respond by insisting that it's his "right" to do it, regardless of how pointless, destructive, offensive or downright stupid it may be....

Tell your 10-year-old daughter she's not allowed to buy thong underwear emblazoned with sexy slogans, and she'll give you an angry lecture about her free-expression rights.

Don't fall for it.

The editorial board agrees that it's over for Clinton:

Hillary Rodham Clinton has run a long and admirable campaign for president of the United States. The prospect of her presidency has energized voters, particularly but not exclusively women, and offered working people a champion for their cause in this time of economic malaise. She has demonstrated resolve and character. And yet, she has lost.

The board also praises the Los Angeles Unified School District's new deputy superintendent for disciplining LAUSD officials in a school sex case, and explores whether a new Sprint Nextel broadband venture could expand service across the country.

On the letters page, some readers aren't as enamored with taco trucks as the editorial board. East L.A.'s Omar Loya says, "I now have to deal with grease stains on the street, trash on the sidewalks, generators running late into the night and extra traffic."

No news here, but this strikes me as one of the great unresolved disputes in pop culture history:

I watched the original Star Wars a few days ago, and noted that on the commentary track George Lucas provides a new version of the development of the Obi-Wan Kenobi character. According to Lucas, he decided at some point in the production that Kenobi had to die part of the way through the movie — over the objections of Alec Guinness, who wanted to keep on working. Nothing remarkable there, except that Guinness very famously gave a totally different version of the story: that Guinness himself talked Lucas into killing off the character because he was bored with reciting "those bloody awful, banal lines." As the late actor told the late Talk magazine in 1999, "I'd had enough of the mumbo jumbo."

That's two incompatible versions of the same event. One witness is dead and the other is a fairly energetic reinventor of his own back stories. Which one do you believe? Against my usual habit of not trusting anything George Lucas says, I'm inclined to say he is telling the truer story.

Guinness built up a great reputation as a Star Wars basher over the years, but he didn't start out that way; there's very little in the contemporary record to suggest the kind of contempt for the movie he later showed. The argument-from-self-interest also works against Guinness' version. Actors want to keep acting, as Guinness himself went on to prove: Well into his career as a Star Wars refusenik, he accepted cameo roles in both sequels. Finally, Lucas earned a small believability credit with me by including the original, blissfully non-remastered version of the original movie in the DVD package, which suggests he has given up on his subtle but persistent campaign to convince everybody that the original Star Wars was always called Star Wars: Episode IV: A New Hope.

Whichever version is true, I'm well satisfied that the entire Star Wars project ran out of steam once Kenobi got killed off. They kept making the movies, but from that point I tuned out, only waking up from time to time out of respect for Lando Calrissian, inter-galactic cock-blocker.

It just goes to show what can happen if you don't pay attention to judicial elections. Los Angeles voters could unwittingly end up electing white separatist Bill Johnson to the court. Vote-by-mail ballots are available Monday, so it's important for anyone planning to vote anytime soon to first read an April 29 Metropolitan News-Enterprise profile on Johnson. The story by editor Roger Grace exposes the candidate as the author of a proposed constitutional amendment to reserve U.S. citizenship exclusively to white people "of the European race."

Last month The Times endorsed James Bianco for the Los Angeles Superior Court seat, saying that  Bianco was "impressive as a Los Angeles Superior Court commissioner and would make an excellent judge." We didn't mention Johnson, his opponent, who ran for Congress in Arizona in 2006 on an anti-immigration platform; we simply focused on the fact that Bianco is the better choice.

I did note in a blog entry the previous month that Johnson helped circulate petitions for Carson minister Ronald C. Tan, whose petition campaign forced six Latino judges to be put on the ballot to face possible write-in opponents (none apparently have stepped forward).

Grace writes that Johnson wrote a 1989 book, under the name James O. Pace, called "Amendment to the Constitution," backing what became known as the Pace Amendment. Here it is, in part:

No person shall be a citizen of the United States unless he is a non-Hispanic white of the European race, in whom there is no ascertainable trace of Negro blood, nor more than one-eighth Mongolian, Asian, Asia Minor, Middle Eastern, Semitic, Near Eastern, American Indian, Malay or other non-European or non-white blood, provided that Hispanic whites, defined as anyone with an Hispanic ancestor, may be citizens if, in addition to meeting the aforesaid ascertainable trace and percentage tests, they are in appearance indistinguishable from Americans whose ancestral home is the British Isles or Northwestern Europe. Only citizens shall have the right and privilege to reside permanently in the United States.

This would likely come as news to Reverend Tan, the Filipino-American minister who got Johnson to circulate petitions to help him oust Latino judges — so Tan could try to get Filipinos elected. Tan earlier claimed not to know that Johnson was active in the Ron Paul for president campaign; here's something else for him to be surprised about.

The MetNews story also notes that Johnson ran for Congress in Wyoming 1989 under the name Daniel Johnson in a special election to replace Dick Cheney, who had been named secretary of defense in the administration of the first President Bush. Times stories from the 1980s connect attorney Daniel Johnson with the League of Pace Amendment Advocates and identify him as the author of the Pace amendment.

So here's a candidate for judge who espoused (and may still support) disenfranchisement and deportation of non-whites, and who ran for Congress from two different states, once under a different name, while maintaining his law practice in Los Angeles.

(Full disclosure: I worked for Grace at the Metropolitan News-Enterprise for 11 years. But I wish I'd gotten this story before he did.)

Could voters elect Johnson? Yes, they could, if they don't learn anything about the candidates. The MetNews story — and, I hope, our link to it — will help voters make wise choices.

And in case there was any doubt, we still support Bianco, now more vociferously than before.

... and soars on hot air from the blogosphere.

After more than a month of studied silence, the reverend has stepped into the public spotlight to defend his controversial remarks on race in America -- and make veiled criticisms of Sen. Barack Obama in the process. On Obama's repudiation of his incendiary statements, the minister had this to say: "He's a politician, I'm a pastor. We speak to two different audiences. And he says what he has to say as a politician."

Obama reacted angrily to his former pastor's comments, calling them "a bunch of rants that aren't grounded in truth." Jonah Goldberg gleefully celebrated Wright's coming-out as "every bit as radical as his detractors claimed."

They're not the only ones with choice words about Wright's recent performances:

The Times' own Top of the Ticket blog asks, "Was Jeremiah Wright's speech set up by a Clinton supporter?"

... we should have been paying a little less attention to Wright's speech and the histrionics of his ensuing news conference and taken a peek at ... who was sitting next to him at the head table for the National Press Club event.

It was the Rev. Dr. Barbara Reynolds ... an ardent longtime booster of Obama's sole remaining competitor for the Democratic nomination, none other than Sen. Hillary Clinton of New York. It won't take very much at all for Obama supporters to see in Wright's carefully arranged Washington event that was so damaging to Obama the strategic, nefarious manipulation of the Clintons.

Jeffrey Weiss over at the Dallas Morning News' religion blog wonders why pundits can't take Obama out of the equation:

After the NAACP speech, the all-news networks talking heads were mostly falling all over themselves to do political analysis about whether or not the speech would help or hurt Barack Obama, rather than attempt even a moment of thought about the meaning of what Wright actually said.

The Caucus over at the NY Times does a roundup of its own, observing:

Voices around the blogosphere say they’re tired of the media kerfuffle surrounding Barack Obama and his minister, the Rev. Jeremiah A. Wright Jr., but they certainly keep writing about it.

They also say they’re sick of the expression “thrown under the bus,” but they keep using it.

For some Wright-Obama commentary with both local and international flavor, Ha'aretz's Shmuel Rosner invokes the "Bradley Effect," but also snarks at the minister's comments about Israel:

At moments he came off as mocking and somewhat vain, but made an effort to soften the hardliner perception his speech had left behind. He was also asked about his views on Israel. "Apartheid?" he asked, adding that Jimmy Carter used this term, not him.

Israel, Wright said, "has a right to exist". His only desire was that the Israelis and Palestinians live in peace. He made no reference to the sermon in which he connected the Israeli-Palestinian conflict with the September 11th attacks, but he did make sure to emphasize his "Jewish friends". As it turns out, Jeremiah Wright also has a couple of those.

Daniel Nichanian at the Huffington Post compares Wright's position to one of the 2000 presidential election's most beleaguered political players:

Wright has no obligation to put Obama's interest above his own; dragged through the mud for news, the pastor has an opening to make people listen to him and hear the full context of his theology. Those who today profess themselves appalled that Wright would throw Obama under the bus miss the point that Wright does not think of himself as having any allegiance to Obama or to his election, just as Ralph Nader had no any allegiance to the Democratic Party making it hard to understand why 2004 was "a betrayal."

Wonkette agrees, in an offbeat sort of way:

He's blowing open the racial politics that Obama wants to close and claiming that Obama is insincere when he rejects Wright's "extreme sermons"; he's trying to balance a deserved self-defense with the collateral damage that that brings on Obama. He has an ego. Most importantly, he's just some old preacher and not Obama's surrogate father. He can say whatever he wants and Barry will just have to deal with it. Individual people have a right to defend themselves, and politicians have a right to disown them. That's all, goodnight.

While Sen. McCain had the plug pulled on the North Carolina Republican Party's ad highlighting the Obama-Wright connection, it seems the state party leaders will be getting the airtime they wanted for free.

President Bush has done it again -- commemorate the genocide of around 1.5 million Armenians nearly a century ago without offending the Turkish government by avoiding the word "genocide." Click here to read Bush's complete statement; here's an excerpt:

On this day of remembrance, we honor the memory of the victims of one of the greatest tragedies of the 20th century, the mass killings and forced exile of as many as 1.5 million Armenians at the end of the Ottoman Empire. I join the Armenian community in America and around the world in commemorating this tragedy and mourning the loss of so many innocent lives.

Bush later implores Turkey and Armenia to normalize relations and praises those who "support joint efforts for an open examination of the past in search of a shared understanding of these tragic events." But an overwhelming consensus of historians already has a clear understanding of what went on between 1915 and 1917: that the mass deportations, forced marches with no food or water and senseless massacres were nothing more than a genocide of Armenians by the Young Turk government of the moribund Ottoman Empire. Bush's call for an "open examination" is nothing more than a nod to Turkey's rigid (and incorrect) position that whether the events of 1915 - 1917 constitute a genocide is an open question. It isn't.

Matt Welch, a former editor at The Times' opinion pages, wrote about Bush's mealy-mouthed genocide statements last year; click here to read his Op-Ed.

Right-wing Dutch politicos-turned-producers watch out — free speech cuts both ways. From NPR:

A video portraying aggressive behavior by Christians matched with verses from the Bible is gaining traction on the Internet.

Raed al-Saeed, a young businessman from Saudi Arabia, is the creator of Schism, a six-minute video response to Fitna — a short film released last month that portrays Islam as a violent, fascist-like ideology. "Fitna" provoked anger in many parts of the Muslim world.

In case you don't remember, Fitna (a word meaning "ordeal" in Arabic) overlaid verses from the Quran over acts of violence — suicide bombings, beheadings, planes crashing into the World Trade Center. It was produced by Geert Wilder, a Dutch politician who happens to be unabashedly anti-Islam. Some found the film to be an act of bravery — Jonah Goldberg compared it to the Darwin fish — while Dutch Muslims greeted it with disgusted silence.

Nonetheless, it's interesting to see a response to Wilder's celluloid screed — the point being that you can find nasty bits in many different religious texts, including Christianity. Unfortunately, Saeed didn't find footage of many nasty people saying those verses out loud — and his substitution of the political for the religious (such as images of the bombing of Baghdad and the beating of prisoners) detracts from his point.

But, to my utter surprise, Saeed did strike darkly comic gold with some unassuming Christians whose rhetoric runs pretty close to that of radical Islamists. One woman — who looks like she could have run my preschool daycare — explains , "I wanna see [young people] as radically laying down their lives for the Gospel as they are in over in Pakistan and Israel and Palestine and all those different places, because we have — excuse me, but we have the truth!"

And later, at the center of a roomful of kids, upper arms jiggling with righteousness: "Take these prophecies ... and make war with them .... This means war! This means war!"

But Saeed is quick to point out that this video isn't an attack on Christianity or any other religion. The final text of the video reads,

It is easy to take parts of any Holy book that are out of content and make it sound like the most inhuman book ever written. This is what Geert Wilders did to gather more supporters to his hateful ideology. To create schism.

A fair observation, spelling errors aside — and yet, according to NPR,

A day after Saeed posted his video on YouTube, it was taken down for having "inappropriate content." He immediately reposted it with a message arguing that if his video was inappropriate, then Wilders' Fitna also should be removed. For now, both videos are available on the site.

And it still is. Go check it out — there are a few versions up, but the most-watched one has racked up more than 350,000 views so far, and more than 4,000 comments. Looking through what people had to say about Islam and Christianity made me wonder: How many viewers who made generalizations about Islam based on 'Fitna' were fully prepared to give Bible-lady's comments a pass?

And while the film means to make a point about not judging a religion by radicalism, I have to say, those angelic-looking children dancing around with what looks like warpaint on their faces is a little too Lord-of-the-Flies for me to handle.

UCLA graduate student and Chow Digest senior editor C. Thi Nguyen bemoans L.A. County's requirement that taco trucks move after one hour, and New York attorney Scott Horton analyzes UC Berkeley professor John Yoo's role in the Bush administration's stance on torture. Former Los Angeles mayor Richard Riordan hopes LAUSD will repair its relationship with charter schools, and Gregory Rodriguez scratches his head at Americans' insistence that politicians act like the average Joe:

Sure, high-ranking politicians of humble origins can lay at least some claim to being "common." But that's really a ruse. Because the best politicians wouldn't get as far as they do if they hadn't already successfully convinced large numbers of people that they were distinct from -- read: better than -- the rest of us.

And therein lies our dilemma. We hold to the belief that we are all equal, yet we yearn for distinctiveness for ourselves and those we choose to represent us. In a nation whose form of government exalts the illusion of uniformity among its citizens, we are collectively engaged in a struggle to be recognized as unique by our peers.

The editorial board publishes its endorsements for 17 seats on the Los Angeles Superior Court, and puts its money behind a House bill to force 401(k) managers to clarify the fees they charge "Jack and Jill Cubicle":

Unfortunately, as this newspaper detailed in a series of articles in 2006, many employees aren't being told how much of their nest egg is being frittered away on fees paid to the companies managing their 401(k)s. Buried in the fine print of incomprehensible forms or not disclosed at all, those fees can consume thousands of dollars over time. To address that problem, several lawmakers have introduced bills that would require mutual funds, insurers and other providers of retirement plans to make complete disclosures of their fees to employers and workers. 

Readers react to the Supreme Court's decision finding legal injections humane. Writes Joy Buckley, "State-sanctioned killing is barbaric, cruel and should be highly unusual. We should join the civilized countries of the world in eliminating it."

Psychologist Carol Tavris and oncologist Avrum Bluming put the latest breast cancer scare in perspective, and cartoonist J.D. Crowe comments on Hillary Clinton and John McCain's accusations of "elitism" against Barack Obama. Web editor Tim Cavanaugh wonders if the Vermont/Manchester project can survive the gentrification wars, and Patt Morrison searches between California's seat cushions for some spare change:

From Yreka to San Ysidro, official California is busted flat. We're so broke that Fabian Nuñez is probably drinking Two-Buck Chuck.

The temptations to make ends meet with corporate/civic deals are enormous. Budget Helper recipes can be a blessing for cities and states through the lean years, or they can become desperate sellouts that elected bodies can't scrape off their shoes once times turn good again.

The editorial board slams the state Legislature for neglecting the inmate medical system — and leaving California with a $7-billion bill — and sounds the alarm on world hunger as one of the greatest threats to international stability. The board also rolls its eyes at the New York Yankees' quest to dig a Red Sox jersey out of its new stadium:

... when somebody in the Yankees' front office ordered construction workers on Sunday to drill chunks out of the foundation — a five-hour job that cost a reported $50,000 — in order to remove the voodoo Fan Merchandise of Doom, it became clear that this incident was more than just a harmless sports prank. It was a reminder that for all of humanity's pretensions to modernity and reason, we are essentially just bald monkeys who wear shoes.

Readers provide some perspective on closing U.S. detention facilities at Guantanamo. Maria Matan writes:

Having just watched the better part of the "John Adams" series on HBO, and having a basic knowledge of the Constitution, it seems to me unlikely that our founding fathers would have stood behind the Bush administration's assumption that offshore detentions at Guantanamo can be justified without sufficient evidence to bring charges.

Pope Benedict XVI’s  comment on his flight to the United States that “we are deeply ashamed” of pedophile priests may not appease Catholics in Boston who are upset that his American tour will bypass their archdiocese.

But the pope’s full remarks also may  discomfit conservative Catholics who argue that a supposed tolerance of gays  by the “liberal” post-Vatican II church somehow played a role in the scandal.  (The preferred liberal Catholic meta-explanation is that the celibacy requirement contributed to priestly abuse.)

In response to a question about the scandal, the pope said: "I would not speak in this moment about homosexuality, but pedophilia, [which] is another thing. We will absolutely exclude pedophiles from the sacred ministry, this is absolutely incompatible. And who is really guilty of being a pedophile cannot be a priest.”

The pope’s common-sense refusal to equate pedophilia with homosexuality raises the question of why he would support restrictions on even chaste gays becoming priests. Yet it was during his pontificate that the Vatican’s Congregation for Catholic Education issued a directive saying that seminaries should not accept candidates with “deep-seated homosexual tendencies” even if they don’t act on them.
In justifying the directive, Cardinal Zenon Grocholewski offered this out-of-this-world analogy: "It's not discrimination, for example, if one does not admit a person who suffers from vertigo to a school for astronauts." But wouldn't celibacy be just as dizzying an experience for priests with heterosexual "tendencies"?

In more than 20 years as a journalist in Pittsburgh, I used to listen with fascination to strange tales from the political subculture of Pennsylvania’s other metropolis: Philadelphia. Candidates for statewide office from the western part of the state would confide in our editorial board that “it’s like another world over there.”

One feature of that world was the practice of providing campaign workers with copious amounts of “street money” to boost voter turnout. Cash sometimes changed hands on Election Day in Pittsburgh, too, but, as with murder rates, the Steel City was a piker compared to the City of Brotherly Love.

Now the cost of doing political business in Philly is tripping up Sen. Barack Obama. According to a Times report, Obama is balking at disbursing dollars to party faithful, a decision that could save the Obama campaign as much as $500,000 on April 22, the day of the atypically important Pennsylvania primary, while costing him an undetermined number of votes.

Obama’s priggishness about street money contrasts with the situation ethics he has displayed on the question of accepting public financing –- and spending limits –- if he is the Democratic nominee. As the Times pointed out in an editorial last month, Obama promised to accept public financing if the Republican nominee did. After John McCain agreed to that deal, the Obama campaign began to waffle.

Now Obama is arguing that his campaign has created “a parallel public financing system where the American people decide if they want to support a campaign they can get on the Internet and finance it, and they will have as much access and influence over the course and direction of our campaign that has traditionally been reserved for the wealthy and the powerful.” Parallel universe is more like it.

If private Internet fundraising can be repackaged as public financing, so can street money for mercenary campaign “loyalists.” As George Costanza might say, it’s financing and it’s handed out in public ... so it’s public financing.

This post was updated at 11:48 am Thursday. See below:

From that great city to the north comes news that some art is so shocking even San Francisco hipsters will censor it. An exhibition by the French artist Adel Abdessemed at the spectacularly located S.F. Art Institute has been shut down following an outcry and threats from pro-animal activists. Kenneth Baker's review in the Chronicle describes the show and notes that complaints also were lodged by folks who in other circumstances might be the ones looking to épater le bourgeois:

The animal rights protesters were inflamed by Abdessemed's six very brief video loops, played on separate monitors, each showing an animal - a horse, a pig, a goat, an ox, a deer and a sheep - being killed, apparently without bloodshed, by a quick hammer blow to the head. Abdessemed shot the videos himself in rural Mexico, merely documenting passages in the town's customary food production.

But text accompanying the videos' presentation at SFAI left Abdessemed's role ambiguous.* A viewer had to wonder whether his hand wielded the hammer rather than the camera, whether he shot the video or merely commissioned it, and whether he commissioned the animals' execution.

The shock of the protest lies not only in its vehemence but also in the fact that it involves the rare spectacle of artists, including many SFAI faculty members, advocating censorship.

You could argue that censorship isn't the proper word here, since the objection raised by Eagle Rock's own Diana Thater and apparently others was to the killing of the animals, not necessarily to the art itself. But Thater herself gives that game away by denouncing the show as a "sick exhibit" that "represents the very worst impulses of the human imagination," fails to "raise people's consciousness"  and "will encourage them to accept animal abuse." Those are objections to expression of ideas, not to the acts themselves. (Whether the strict argument against killing the animals holds up is also open to question, since by general agreement these were all feed animals that were going to be done in whether there was a hoity-toity conceptual artist present or not.) *

Anyway, this is just a roundabout way of teasing my long-ago piece "Artists for censorship." Sez me, artists are no more or less censorious than anybody else. Writers and musicians have always believed some ideas needed to be suppressed. The urge to censor is particularly strong when the objectionable ideas show up in a medium other than your own (surprise, surprise). And there may even be some value in the impulse to "take seriously the idea that there may actually be dangerous ideas, and dangerous artistic vehicles for communicating them."

* According to an SFAI representative, the ambiguity Baker refers to is at most a red herring: the artist merely documented an existing procedure. "These pictures were taken by him in an abattoir and not staged," she says, "and he did not participate in slaughtering the animals." If true, this would eliminate the argument over the welfare of the animals (though you might be able to craft a case that the individual animal has a death-with-dignity right that would protect it from non-consensual documentation of the killing), and leave us only with the argument over expression. It may be helpful at this time to reiterate that the show was closed due to threats of violence against the institute, not due to the objections we've been discussing.

My former Pittsburgh Post-Gazette colleague Tim McNulty has a witty piece today about the quest for  "the biggest prey this primary season . . . Pennsylvania's voting-age white male."

McNulty writes: "The species is described -- depending on who's talking -- as either traditional or old-fashioned, proud or angry, straight-talking or racist/sexist. It is rough-hewn. It is gritty. It is a walking, talking cliche."

All true, and the fixation of journalists on angry white males predates my native state's sudden (and atypical) relevance in presidential politics. No convention of political reporting is hoarier than the interview with Joe Sixpack in the local workingman's bar, and the decline of the steel industry in Pennslvania won't prevent reporters from sidling up to big-bicepped bruisers in search of a rough-hewn observation about Obama or Hillary.

But it isn't just political journalists who refer to "males" as opposed to the more appropriate noun, "men."   

"Male" and "female" are adjectives, which have been transmogrified into nouns by laboratory technicians, Personals columns and police dispatchers ("Suspect is a white male with tattoos...").

It doesn't bother me when someone refers to a rat as "a male," but a human bring — even a suspected criminal — deserves to be called "a man," just as a woman is a woman, not a "female." As the Elephant Man (not Male!) famously cried" "I am not an animal."

In the Chronicle of Higher Education, Willis G. Regier surveys Aesop translations:

Nine translators dominated Aesop in English over the past 500 years, and new ones are vying for attention. What do the translations show? Most obviously, some Aesops have more Aesop, much more, than others. Some have been much more reprinted, and more popular. And some change the fables: In some editions a lion outwits three bulls, in others four. Animals are altered: A weasel in one translation is a cat in another, toads become frogs, crows become ravens, a bear becomes a tiger, a lion becomes a leopard, and so on.

There follows a colorful tale of Royalists fighting Roundheads, Anglicans lecturing souls into heav'n, and the winner of the best-overall-translation wreath: Laura Gibbs' Aesop's Fables. Yet it still leaves my lifelong Aesop question unanswered...

What the hell is the fable "The Man and the Satyr" about?

Here, try reading another version of the tale. Or try this one and see if you can figure out what the moral could possibly be.

Is the moral that satyrs are too dumb to understand rudimentary heat transfer?

Or is the idea that the satyr is right, and it is wrong to produce breath that is warmer than frost but colder than porridge? That seems to be the point of this version, which includes a moral:

The man who talks for both sides is not to be trusted by either.

So, I give up: Why is a man who maintains a body temperature of 98.6 fahrenheit more or less trustworthy than any other man who maintains the same body temperature? Do you need to know the temperature of satyr breath to understand this one?

Like the late Rodney Dangerfield, state constitutions "get no respect" in discussions of constitutional law. A rare exception came in this week's oral arguments in the U.S. Supreme Court over the constitutionality of the District of Columbia's gun-control law. In trying to puzzle out the original meaning of the 2nd Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, Justice John Paul Stevens asked Walter Dellinger, D.C.'s lawyer: "To what extent do you think the similar provisions in State constitutions that were adopted more or less at the same time are relevant to our inquiry?" Dellinger bobbed a bit, replying that various state constitutional provisions  on the right to keep and bear arms are written in "different terms."

Dellinger surely knew that at least one state, my native Commonwealth of Pennsylvania, has a venerable state constitutional provision dealing with guns that sounds as if it was written by the NRA: "The right of the citizens to bear arms in defense of themselves and the State shall not be questioned" Hmm. maybe I was violating the state constitution when I was writing all those pro-gun-control editorials for the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. (I'm safe now; California's constitution lacks a little Second Amendment.)

Unlike the "real" Constitution, state constitutions are sometimes prolix documents. For example, their protections of religion and freedom of expression often read like the First Amendment on steroids. The First Amendment is content to say that Congress shall make no law "abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press."

Here's the equivalent provision in the Pennsylvania Constitution's Declaration of Rights:

The printing press shall be free to every person who may undertake to examine the proceedings of the Legislature or any branch of government, and no law shall ever by made to restrain the right thereof. The free communication of thoughts and opinions is one of the invaluable rights of man, and every citizen may freely speak, write and print on any subject, being responsible for the abuse of that liberty. No conviction shall be had in any prosecution for the publication of papers relating to the official conduct of officers or men in public capacity, or to any other matter proper for public investigation or information, where the fact that such publication was not maliciously or negligently made shall be established to the satisfaction of the jury; and in all indictments for libels the jury shall have the right to determine the law and the facts, under the direction of the court, as in other cases.

Whew!

Ironically, in this case more (verbiage) is less: Pennsylvania's version of the First Amendment is less friendly to the press, particularly in libel cases, than the First Amednment as it has been interpreted by the U.S. Supreme Court. Hunting is big in Pennsylvania; so are libel suits by public officials, including judges. Too bad the framers of the constitution didn't write: "The right of freedom of the press shall not be questioned"

From our front-pager on the $86 million Starbucks expropriation:

"They were subsidizing Starbucks' labor costs" by helping the company pay its supervisors, [plantiff's attorney Terry] Chapko said. "This is about getting money back to the lowest-paid employees."

In honor of the fifth anniversary of the invasion of Iraq, "expertologists" Christopher Cerf and Victor S. Navasky study the surge in punditry while cartoonist Ed Stein watches President Bush navigate the labyrinthine occupation. Novelist Andrew Klavan applauds playwright "David Mamet's public coming-out as a political conservative," and Tim Rutten likens Barack Obama's "More Perfect Union" speech on Tuesday to Abraham Lincoln's historic "House Divided" address. Contributing editor Erin Aubry Kaplan also has a thing or two to say about Obama's speech on race:

Obama rebuked Wright, in part, because he knew their association was in mortal danger of morphing him into just another angry black man a la Nat Turner, Malcolm X and Louis Farrakhan (whom Obama detractors have already attempted to conflate with Obama). Whatever salient points these men made have been entirely eclipsed by the fact that they were just too mad for comfort.

Strange, when you consider that we live in a culture that thrives on vituperation institutionalized by conservative talk radio -- guys such as Rush Limbaugh and Don Imus are paid to be mad. But, of course, white anger is seen as fundamentally reasoned and righteous, and Americans have an almost limitless capacity to forgive it when it isn't.

The editorial board condemns China's manipulation of media coverage as it cracks down on protesters in Tibet, and urges LAPD Chief William J. Bratton to release a private report examining SWAT. The board also finds great value in Obama's address:

It may have begun as an exercise in political damage control, but Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia on "A More Perfect Union" was that rarity in American political discourse: a serious discussion of racial division, distrust and demonization. Whether or not the speech defuses the controversy about some crackpot comments by Obama's longtime pastor, it redefines our national conversation about race and politics and lays down a challenge to the cynical use of the "race card."

Readers react to the McCain campaign's murky plans for Iraq. Harold Tuchel writes:

It is concerning to hear an advisor to John McCain say McCain will not be as robust in military matters as his current campaign speeches indicate.

Although I don't favor any of the presidential candidates because of their policies of amnesty for illegal immigrants, what really concerns me is that they say one thing while fully intending to do another.

We have had enough of this type of chicanery with George W. Bush. 

Our sister LAT blog “Babylon & Beyond” has an affecting article (with a fantastic photo) about the mourning in Iraq for Archbishop Paulos Faraj Rahho, the Chaldean Catholic prelate who died after being kidnapped near Mosul. The death of the archbishop is another blow to Iraq’s Christian community, including the Chaldean Catholic Church, an ancient community in communion with Rome. The exodus of Christians from Iraq in the aftermath of the overthrow of Saddam Hussein goes a long way toward explaining why the Vatican was opposed to the American invasion. It also explains why Chaldean Christians in America resent Bush’s war.

Aside from the carnage unleashed by the invasion, which appalled Popes John Paul II and Benedict XVI, the invasion and the subsequent creation of an Islamist-friendly regime have made life hazardous for Iraq’s Christian minority. Saddam Hussein may have been a ruthless dictator, but, like the equally autocratic Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak, he was better for Christians than the alternative. (During a visit to Cairo several years ago, I noticed portraits of Mubarak in the vestibules of Coptic Orthodox churches and was told that Christians considered the dictator a bulwark against persecution by Islamic extremists.)

The effect of the invasion on Christians in Iraq is only one of the unforeseen consequences of the neocons’ cocky campaign to transform the Middle East. But it is an especially painful one for Christians including the pope, who last year appointed the Chaldean patriarch to the College of Cardinals as a gesture of solidarity with Iraqi Christians.

The hemorrhage of Christians from Iraq and elsewhere in the Middle East — including Palestine — is traumatic for Christianity because the religion began there.  Chaldean Catholics, and their cousins the Assyrian Christians, traditionally celebrate the Eucharist in Syriac, a language similar to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus and his disciples. They are in a sense living fossils who remind Western Christians of their faith’s Semitic origins. It would be ironic if a military operation likened by Muslims to the Crusades succeeded in depopulating Iraq of its Christians.

If you're looking for a little countertonality in the choir of angels praising Barack Obama's anti-disownment speech, Washington Post columnist and former G.W. Bush administration speechwriter Mike Gerson belts it out for you:

The problem with Obama's argument is that Wright is not a symbol of the strengths and weaknesses of African Americans. He is a political extremist, holding views that are shocking to many Americans who wonder how any presidential candidate could be so closely associated with an adviser who refers to the "U.S. of KKK-A" and urges God to "damn" our country.

Obama's excellent and important speech on race in America did little to address his strange tolerance for the anti-Americanism of his spiritual mentor...

This accusation [that the government invented HIV as a means of genocide against people of color] does not make Wright, as Obama would have it, an "occasionally fierce critic of American domestic and foreign policy." It makes Wright a dangerous man...

And his pastoral teaching may put lives at risk because the virus that causes AIDS spreads more readily in an atmosphere of denial, quack science and conspiracy theories.

Obama's speech implied that these toxic views are somehow parallel to the stereotyping of black men by Obama's grandmother, which Obama said made him "cringe" -- both are the foibles of family. But while Grandma may have had some issues to work through, Wright is accusing the American government of trying to kill every member of a race. There is a difference....

What if a Republican presidential candidate spent years in the pew of a theonomist church -- a fanatical fragment of Protestantism that teaches the modern political validity of ancient Hebrew law? What if the church's pastor attacked the U.S. government as illegitimate and accepted the stoning of homosexuals and recalcitrant children as appropriate legal penalties (which some theonomists see as biblical requirements)? Surely we would conclude, at the very least, that the candidate attending this church lacked judgment and that his donations were subsidizing hatred. And we would be right.

I don't like columns that ask rhetorical questions, then answer them, then invite me to congratulate myself on agreeing with the answer. I have at least one family member who believes the U.S. Government is up to all manner of criminal and murderous activity. And I object to the political prophylactic of denouncing and excommunicating non-violent zealots — in fact I find all attempts to police the borders of acceptable conversation to be self-serving, authoritarian and worst of all boring. So I'm the worst possible judge of this column.

But if there is some theonomist politician out there, considering whether to make a run: You have not yet lost my vote. The odds are you will lose it. (It's not just you; it happens to most guys!) But if you're offering me something good (or better, not offering me anything at all), I won't pull somebody else's lever just because you have some crazy ideas.

What a two-week punch it's been for New Jersey. First Wall native Ashley Alexandra Dupré, a.k.a. Kristen, proved to be the only sensible character in the Empire State's Spitzer farce. Now the ashes of Dina Matos McGreevey's divorce from former N.J. Gov. James McGreevey have returned to blue, hot life with revelations from an actual graduate of Rutgers, the State University of New Jersey.

By way of both praise for truth-seeking and caution about evaluating claims made by adultery correspondents, please take a look at Andrew Strickler's piece highlighting the sharp dissonance between Kristen's unflattering description of the Jersey Shore and the awesome, awesome awesomeness of the actual Jersey Shore. I don't believe Dupré should feel compelled to deflect or soften or in any way defend her personal reputation, and I wish her hard work and success in whatever path she chooses to take. But just because the bluenoses are ganging up on you is no excuse for dumping on the Garden State.

Theodore Pedersen, the Scarlet Knight now at the center of the toothache-probingly annoying-but-compelling McGreevey saga, emerges as a 29-year-old philosopher. As he tells America's finest newspaper, the Newark Star-Ledger:

"[Dina Matos McGreevey]'s trying to make this a payday for herself. She should have told the truth about the three of us." Pedersen did not say if he was gay or bisexual and only described having contact with Matos McGreevey during the trysts. He also said he never knew for sure if McGreevey was gay.

"I had heard the rumors in circles outside of work," he said. "In hindsight, there might have been light interest (in me), but it didn't seem like he was gay. It did enhance their sexual relationship having me be a part of it."

Even casual Savage Love readers will recognize that the tripartite alignment alluded to here does not dispose of the question of any participant's permanent sexual orientation, if permanent sexual orientation does in fact exist. The Star-Ledger quotes a four-sentence passage from Matos McGreevey's book which is equally nebulous on the matter:

In her memoir, Matos McGreevey says little about the sex life she had with her husband, except to say that it never gave her any reason to doubt he was straight.

"The sex was good," Matos McGreevey wrote.

It's worth noting that both Matos McGreevey and Pedersen could both be telling the truth (at least as quoted here; I have not read Silent Partner, so I don't know if she makes any falsifiable claims about specific romantic activities). In fact, more credit to Matos McGreevey if it is true, for trying to make the most of her mate's special interests — though others may take a less tolerant view than I do, particularly when full custody of a child is at issue. At Matos McGreevey's request, Pedersen has given a sealed deposition in the McGreeveys' divorce case, reports the Star Ledger, which also quotes Pedersen's useful seduction tips:

"The more we spend time with each other, the more we begin to trust each other with non-professional things," he said. "That relationship starts to progress, to transform into subtle hints, flirts."

Yes, Pedersen is fine! But how will this affect James McGreevey's efforts to become an Episcopal priest?

Dr. Seuss must be turning in his grave. Pro-lifers are claiming there's an anti-abortion message in Horton Hears a Who, a movie based on his second book featuring the lovably loyal elephant. From NPR:

"I meant what I said and I said what I meant. And an elephant's faithful, 100 percent."

That's one of Horton the elephant's best-known mottoes. But with a movie version of Dr. Seuss' much-loved children's book opening Friday, another Horton saying has drawn attention from activists who see a message in the movie — a message that suits their purpose.

That message: "A person's a person, no matter how small."

"Exactly," say abortion foes.

Using Horton's innocent words to support the personhood-at-conception argument? It's a world gone mad. Frankly, I like it better when they protest popular lit (à la witchcraft in Harry Potter), because an angry social conservative is a lot less irritating than a self-satisfied one. Observe:

In Horton Hears a Who, Horton discovers that there's a whole town (Whoville) full of tiny people (the Whos) on a tiny speck of dust that's come floating his way. His neighbors think he's lost his mind. But Horton decides it's his calling to protect the life on the speck: "A person's a person no matter how small," he insists.

When Jim Carrey, the film's Horton, said those words during the Los Angeles premiere of the film last week, demonstrators who'd slipped into the theater started to yell. It was a surprise, to say the least, for the premiere audience.

"I thought maybe there was a nut loose in the theater or something," says Karl ZoBell.

Just the one? Just checking.

Audrey Geisel, Dr. Seuss' widow, has objected to the demonstrations because the Geisels didn't want to see Seuss characters used to advance any political purpose.

But that argument is a little misleading, because Dr. Seuss has always been about politics. Seuss, né Theodor Geisel, previously tapped his illustrative genius as a left-leaning editorial cartoonist with a razor-sharp pen. And many of his most enduring children's books slip in very liberal political messages. The Butter Battle Book gave grim commentary on mutual deterrence during the Cold War, and The Lorax was a rallying cry for tree-huggers everywhere. Yertle the Turtle, meanwhile, provided a rather proletarian critique of monarchy, or capitalism, or something.

Given the history, you could just as easily argue that Horton Hears a Who is about valuing people who are less economically well-off, who are of a different race, who live in a different part of the world — or who may just be vertically challenged. In short, pun intended, people who are easier to ignore, neglect or even persecute.

The problem isn't that pro-lifers are politicizing children's literature. That happens all the time. It's that they really need to do their homework. Out of ignorance, they're disregarding Seuss' rich liberal legacy  — and in the case of Horton, what could be a very different political message.

Gov. Eliot Spitzer's meteoric fall from power after being linked to a prostitution ring has come to a pretty spectacular crash — but instead of focusing on his smoldering career, the media's gaze is lingering on his wife, Silda. From today's Times:

It was the way she stood there, enduring.

Silda Wall Spitzer did not say a word as her husband, Gov. Eliot Spitzer, brusquely apologized to his family and the public after he was allegedly caught on a wiretap doing business with a high-priced prostitution ring. Her face was drawn. But she took her husband's hand as they left the room.

And of course, the question everyone seems to be asking is, why? What point is there in standing by your man?

Patt Morrison wanted Silda to "let him twist in the wind alone," and I'm not going to lie, I was kind of hoping she would leave him hanging at his resignation speech. Nevertheless, the bipolarity of the discussion is tiresome. Commentators either attack her integrity or demote her to Stepford status. Top of the Ticket says many women consider this "a hard-to-fathom decision" even as other news sources sympathize with "The awful life of a political wife" (though the New York Daily News objects heartily to that characterization). You'd think, with such a venerable American tradition of political sex scandals, we'd have some new angle to take.

The thing is, Spitzer's standing by her husband may not be an admission of helplessness or a statement on self-respect. It could just be a big fat middle finger in the face of the media and her critics, since keeping her emotions to herself makes it harder for commentators to perform gleeful autopsies of her emotional state.

One person who isn't holding back any tears, though, is "Mad Money" host Jim Cramer. A longtime friend of the Spitzers, he had defended the governor when the story first surfaced, and seemed genuinely heartbroken over the sad affair. After watching an interview on the Today Show, I felt more sorry for him than I did for Silda:

Cramer was close to tears as he spoke about Silda Spitzer and the marriage he had observed as a close friend of both spouses.

“I think she loves Eliot. I know he’s always worshipped her,” he said. “I don’t want to make any excuses for what he did. I can’t believe it. But she loved him. I feel bad for them. I feel bad for the girls. That’s what I said to him. I said, ‘Let me speak to Silda.’ It’s Silda that you feel bad for.” ...

Cramer didn’t say he felt betrayed by his friend, but that was the implication as he struggled before the cameras to make sense of it all.

“Look, I’ve just known them for a long time,” he concluded, his voice starting to choke. “I obviously didn’t know him as well as I thought.”

Sounds like it's time for couples counseling.

Whatever you've got to say about the murder of 17-year-old Jamiel Shaw or the arrest of 19-year-old Pedro Espinoza for the crime, start your engines. Please keep it clean: no threats, bullying, bogarting or unamusing ad hominems will be accepted. I'll approve as fast as I can. Some scenes from Shaw's funeral may give the conversation a little focus.

Council on Foreign Relations senior fellows Charles Kupchan and Ray Takeyh advise the U.S. to find a new, nonaggressive strategy to "bring Tehran to heel," and cartoonist Lisa Benson wonders whether Texas will end up bucking Hillary Clinton in tonight's Democratic primary. Meanwhile, New Republic senior editor Jonathan Chait suggests Clinton admit defeat and "go gentle into that good night," and Temple University mathematics professor John Allen Paulos wonders why, in America's shifting religious landscape, atheists are still stuck at the bottom of the totem pole. George Washington University professor Jonathan Turley marvels at the manipulations of Atty. Gen. Michael Mukasey:

I suddenly realized that there was something profound, even beautiful, in Mukasey's action.

In his twisting of legal principles, the attorney general has succeeded in creating a perfect paradox. Under Mukasey's Paradox, lawyers cannot commit crimes when they act under the orders of a president -- and a president cannot commit a crime when he acts under advice of lawyers.

Such a perfect paradox is no easy task. Most attempts fall apart because of some element of logical consistency.

The editorial board serves up its recipe for streamlining the beleaguered Food and Drug Administration, and tells Mayor Villaraigosa's critics to quit complaining about his globetrotting ways:

Los Angeles had a stay-at-home kind of mayor and didn't much like it, so the city dumped James K. Hahn and voted in a player. Antonio Villaraigosa told voters they lived in a big city, one worthy of a big-city mayor who could hold his own not just with high-profile mayors from New York or Chicago but with presidents. He said he would go to Sacramento, Washington or anywhere else to put L.A. at the top of the national political agenda. On this point, he was as good as his word. It was no surprise when he went to Asia or Latin America. It should be no surprise now that he is spending so much time out of state in a last-ditch effort to salvage Hillary Rodham Clinton's presidential campaign.

Readers react to Gov. Schwarzenegger's plans to deal with the state's budget problems. "Real Republicans," writes Karen Reisdorf, "will stand up and declare that educating our children is more important than protecting their playthings, i.e. yachts, airplanes and luxury RVs. In the face of the unfunded mandate in No Child Left Behind, only a selfish juvenile would do otherwise."

Gregory Rodriguez advises Barack Obama to start wearing his patriotism on his sleeve -- or on his lapel -- and American University law professor Nancy D. Polikoff calls for laws to recognize the whole spectrum of family structures, whether gay or straight, married or unmarried. Civil rights lawyer Peggy Garrity assesses the damage that tort reform has caused the justice system:

A second woman is likely to face the same fate in the same court, in a suit alleging that she was drugged and brutally gang-raped by co-workers in Iraq and then held incommunicado, without food or water, in a shipping container by the same employer.... Adding insult to injury, the rape kit used by a military doctor in examining the victim was reportedly handed over to Halliburton/KBR, and doctor's notes and photos of her bruises are missing.

There was no criminal prosecution of the alleged perpetrators because they worked for a defense contractor, which is exempt from criminal sanctions under an order enacted by the Coalition Provisional Authority in Iraq during L. Paul Bremer III's tenure as its administrator.

That decision was outrageous enough. But now the Texas court ruling appears to say that because of the arbitration clause, these women have no standing in a U.S. civil court either.

In the next installment of its series "The Great Thirst," the editorial board predicts plans for a peripheral canal will be a win-win in the water wars between Northern and Southern California. The board also kicks off the one-year countdown to round one of Los Angeles' city elections, and calls out John McCain and Barack Obama for inching away from their commitment to public funds:

[W]ith his new front-runner status -- and facing the prospect of raising more private money than McCain in a general election -- Obama has begun to waver. Asked in the last Democratic debate if he was waffling on a promise to accept public financing, he dodged, saying that, if nominated, he wants to "sit down with John McCain and make sure that we have a system that is fair for both sides." That sounds like the "old politics" that Obama inveighs against.

Both candidates should get over their buyer's remorse. What they gain by abandoning public financing, they may lose in credibility.

Readers write requiems for Dutton's books, set to close at the end of April. "With the imminent passing of Dutton's books," mourns Burt Prelutsky, "I feel as if I am on the verge of losing a relative. That is, a relative I actually like."

The efforts of Democratic presidential candidates Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama to differentiate themselves on the issue of gun ownership has been, like so many of their efforts to differentiate themselves, a kind of off-key opera buffa. Does Obama support individual ownership or a universal ban? Does Clinton really believe law-abiding citizens should be allowed to own guns? Do either of them believe the right of self-defense is anything but a quaint conceit? Are Second Amendment stalwarts right to view this as a choice between one gun grabber and another?

Richard Feldman, author of Ricochet; Confessions of a Gun Lobbyist, hips us to an obscure but telling difference in how the two candidates view these issues. It involves law-abiding citizens, shades into self-defense in its most elemental form and arguably reveals a great deal about how the two view the use of force — that is, the use of force against law-abiding citizens by the state. And there's a clear distinction.

I give you Vitter Amdendment No. 4615, which was voted on in the U.S. Senate at 6:13 PM on July 13, 2006. Here's the text:

To prohibit the confiscation of a firearm during an emergency or major disaster if the possession of such firearm is not prohibited under Federal or State law.

The amendment, which was attached to a Homeland Security appropriations package, was approved 84-16. The bill itself was signed into law in October 2006.

If the confiscation issue seems recondite, set your wayback machine to the post-Hurricane Katrina period, when wild and largely inaccurate tales of disaster-area pillage gave way to revelations about how incompetent police chief Eddie Compass and other authorities eventually went about pacifying the Big Easy. In particular, some footage of cops manhandling Patty Konie — an elderly resident seen holding (by the barrel) a revolver that looked like something that would have blown up in Wild Bill Hickock's tiny hands — provided a shock even to those who don't normally get excited about such matters.

This was the context in which the Vitter amendment was introduced. Here is how the Democratic front-runners voted:

Clinton (D-NY), Nay

Obama (D-IL), Yea

Neither campaign has responded to my request for more information on their votes and decision-making processes. Will update if they do.

There's an old tension here between individual rights and the need to establish (by force) police supremacy in a chaotic and dangerous situation. That question dates back to frontier times, or at least to George Romero's The Crazies, and it's not one we can answer here. But post-Katrina weapons confiscation did provide some pretty clear choices: If you really think legally owned handguns were degrading, or in any other way influencing, the security situation in New Orleans in 2005, you've got your ideology where your common sense ought to be. And if you don't believe in the right to bear arms to protect your life and home during a days-long period when the authorities are nowhere to be seen, well, how can you say you believe in that right at all?

Bored after the War On Christmas ceasefire, I tried in late 2007 to get another civil war going, this one over New Year. To wit: Who are you to wish me well on holidays drawn from your "rational" sun-worshipping eurocentric calendar? My lunar calendar, where holidays show up during high midsummer in some years and the dead of winter in others, where we never know which month is crop-planting month, is no worse than yours, merely different!

I got nowhere with that prank. One bored colleague replied, "Eh, our calendar's no better. They can't even do it without adding an extra day every four years."

Too true! To all people who still wonder why the cycles of the day, the lunar month and the year can't be better matched, and to everybody else, I highly recommend Thomas S. Kuhn's The Copernican Revolution: Planetary Astronomy in the Development of Western Thought. "Being able to understand how it looks from the creator's point of view is just great," writes Amazon reviewer A Customer. "My lesson learned: work your tail off and when you win, it always looks easier than it was..."

But don't take Customer's word for it, take mine. Whether you're a history buff or just curious about why people still comprehend so much of the world through meaningless human-scale patterns, Kuhn's book is full of valuable insights and disambiguations.

In the eternal struggle against The Jews, there can be no deserters.

That's pretty much the takeaway from this astounding interview that Norman Finkelstein, the historian, communist provocateur and academic-without-portfolio, gave last month to Lebanon's Future TV. Among many other Finkelsteinian aperçus: Any Arab who fails to resist the Israeli juggernaut to his last bullet will become a "slave of the Americans" reduced to "crawling on your knees"; interviewer Najat Sharafeddine reveals herself as neither a serious nor a level-headed person for suggesting that the 2006 attack on Lebanon could have been avoided; Hitler would have prefered to achieve his goals through peaceful means (I am not making that up); anybody who prefers survival to glorious death in service of the international Shiite jihad deserves no respect; Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice is a "human freak"; any Lebanese who is presently alive has "no self-respect"; and of course, every situation everywhere always is exactly analogous to Hitler and the Nazis.

It's a mind-bogglingly arrogant, condescending, creepy, ill-informed performance. And in fact an overtly imperialist one that erases all marks of local politics and individual choice in order to make room for great-power conflict. In true Leninist fashion, Finkelstein does not believe in bystanders; any Arab who chooses not to engage the international struggle against the Zionist/capitalist enemy is not only expendable but beneath consideration. (Allah only knows what Fink made of Future TV's founder, the late rentier oppressor of the proletariat Rafiq al-Hariri.)

I've never given much thought to Finkelstein, who seems to have done some interesting historical (or at least historical-debunking) work, and my view of his long-running feud with Alan Dershowitz has never gone beyond a vague wish for both sides to lose. But at least Dersh contents himself with being a stateside nuisance of no danger to anybody except the wives of insulin-happy bazillionaires. Finkelstein, however, is speaking in the context of a goodwill tour of Lebanon on behalf of Hizbollah — whose views, don'tcha know, have been too long ignored in the United States. (Speak for yourself, Norm!) This is where the cesspool of leftwing extremism eventually flows, into a full-hearted alliance with any scuzzbucket willing and able to kill people. At Reason, Michael Young (who has had his own apparently bruising exchange with the no-nonsense Sharafeddine) expands on the pathology at work:

This behavior comes full circle especially for the revolutionary fringe on the left, which seems invariably to find its way back to violence. In the same way that Finkelstein can compare Hezbollah admiringly to the Soviet Red Army and the communist resistance during World War II ("it was brutal, it was ruthless"), he sees in resistance a quasi-religious act that brooks no challenge, even from its likely victims. What is so odd in Finkelstein and those like him is that the universalism and humanism at the heart of the left's view of itself has evaporated, to be replaced by categorical imperatives usually associated with the extreme right: blood; honor; solidarity; and the defense of near-hallowed land.

Full interview (courtesy of the invaluable MEMRI) and transcript.