Forgive me, but America should not give a hoot what Keith Ellison’s favorite book is. Insofar as a member of Congress taking an oath to serve America and uphold its values is concerned, America is interested in only one book, the Bible. If you are incapable of taking an oath on that book, don’t serve in Congress. In your personal life, we will fight for your right to prefer any other book. We will even fight for your right to publish cartoons mocking our Bible. But, Mr. Ellison, America, not you, decides on what book its public servants take their oath.

 

Wait.  It gets better.

 

Devotees of multiculturalism and political correctness who do not see how damaging to the fabric of American civilization it is to allow Ellison to choose his own book need only imagine a racist elected to Congress. Would they allow him to choose Hitler’s “Mein Kampf,” the Nazis’ bible, for his oath? And if not, why not? On what grounds will those defending Ellison’s right to choose his favorite book deny that same right to a racist who is elected to public office?

 

The swearing in itself involves no bible.  It is an en masse intonation of sorts.  Repeat after me — I will never be found with a fridge full of kick-backed cash.  Keith Ellison is going to ceremonially have the photo taken with him and his Koran, I suppose to be used in campaign literature and warm and fuzzy photos that most members of Congress — as our friend Dennis Prager points out, Jews included — have done so with the Bible.

 

Suppose for a minute that the swearing in with the Bible were more official.  If you do not believe in the bible, swearing on it is a meaningless gesture.  Swearing on the Koran would be a more meaningful gesture.  It is in this general reason that a person speaking in a court proceeding can forego swearing on the bible to God and instead “affirm”, because by definition swearing to that that does not exist is meaningless.  I would suggest that an atheist go ahead and suck it up and swear to the imaginary god on the superstitious ancient bible if s/he does the calculation that it may play up unnecessary prejudices on the part of the jury or judge, but the option is over.

 

As for Mein Kampf… well, if somebody goes ahead and take that photograph and uses it in the ceremonial manner, I suspect s/he would not win re-election, and the problem is thus solved without much fuss.

Yesterday, in a news story about Iowa governor Tom Vilsak’s announcement that he is running for president, I heard Iowa referred to as a “red state”.  Indeed, a google search reveals that Iowa is designated “red state”, and Tom Vilsack’s popularity in “red state” Iowa works to his advantage.

Time Magazine: Vilsack will run as centrist with a record of success in a red state

The (much and properly maligned) DLC: There’s also a Democratic governor in the red state of Iowa, whose name escapes me at the moment. (A joke, because the article is written by Tom Vilsack hisownself, which means that Vilsack conciously positions himself as a “red state governor”.  He either should know better, or is a highly cynical operator.)

And there are several other examples you can find for yourownself.

Iowa voted for the Democratic presidential candidate since 1988 to 2000, narrowly voting for Gore in 2000 and narrowly voting for Bush in 2004.  One of the more liberal Democrats, Tom Harkin, heralds from the state.

In 2002, there was a news story posted at something like abcnews.com.  It contained a sentence that stated that Iowa was won by George W Bush.  This was false.  It was changed, sans correction notice, to a reflect that Al Gore narrowly won the state.

In our popular imagination, there are three regions of the nation that are blue.  The northeast.  The Pacific Coast.  And, less stated than the regions marked as being up against the oceans, this group of states which collectively at least are up in the middle of the nation against the Canadian border.  Iowa has been part of that congregation, and has been not part of that congregation.  Iowa is part of the “Snow Belt”, something that at its low ebb in terms of Democratic voting faded to Minnesota in 1984, Iowa tied in thereafter but it fell off in 2004.

As an aside, in 2000 we also had the island of New Mexico floating there as “Blue State”.

So, in the popular imagination, Iowa is “red”.  I am not entirely sure how the politics of Iowa plays out.  I assume that broadly speaking it works as it does everywhere, which is that the cities and college towns vote heavily for the Democratic candidates and the country-side votes for the Republican candidates.  Beyond this I figure there are several hitches, and Labor plays a bigger role than in most states – Iowa is part of the “Rust Belt”, I think.

Iowa has a conservative Republican Senator, a liberal Democratic Senator, a “Centrist” Democratic Governor, and a five cycle record of voting for the Democratic presidential candidate.

So why is Iowa red?  Iowa is red because it grows a lot of corn.  Not so much as neigboring Nebraska, mind you, but it grows corn nonetheless.  They also, I presume, eat a lot of beef.  Ergo, Iowans are the alt of the Earth.  Red is heartland (get it? Heart?  Red?) , and Blue is the Ocean (get it?  Blue?  Bunch of elitists sipping late on the beach).  Iowa cannot possibly be blue.

Is the color coding ditchable?  I think it was the invention of David Brooks, but it falls ashunder because Iowa keeps being referred to as “red” when the election that forced the terms into existence had Iowa as “blue”.  Maybe we can change the color scheme next time out.  I want green and yellow.  I have a theory that seeing different colors on the electoral map will reshape our conciousness in subtle yet profound ways.  An experiment: next time you want to use the terms “red state” and “blue state”, use instead “yellow state” and “green state” and see how it works.

The Southern strategy of the Republican Party, accelerated and radicalized under Bush, has finally created a more than equal reaction in the North. Ten years ago, 10 moderate Republican senators, all from the Northeast, met weekly for lunch. After the 2006 election, only three remain, in Pennsylvania and Maine. When they retire they are likely to be replaced by Democrats.

In Rhode Island, which has a long history of working-class deference to patrician politicians, Sen. Lincoln Chafee, a moderate, even liberal figure, whose father had been a popular U.S. senator and whose own popularity was above 60 percent on Election Day, was defeated by 6 points. His Republican label alone condemned him.

And on it goes.  I am a little bit sick of the electoral map for 2000 and 2004 as a defining nature of this nation, and it has long seemed as though we’ve settled into that rut of believing it to be a permanent fixture of our politics.  2006 may have shifted some things, though 2002 was supposed to have done the same in the other direction.  Indeed, I read through the National Review’s post-mortem issue of the 2006 election, and it was basically a direct flip of the reaction from the 2002 election.

I am looking forward to a new map.  This map, contrary to what we’ve settled ourselves into believing, is not permanent.  Forces are always there tearing it apart — you only need to go back to the Clinton elections to see a completely different map, and go back to Carter’s 1976 to see a map that could only exist in that election’s set of circumstances: West — East as opposed to South — North or Coastal — Inland (the South temporarily thumping back to solid Democratic to support an evangelical Christian, the North-East having switched to the Democrats over the past few decades — which continued on to the 2006 status of being as Solid as any Solid South can conceivably be these days, and the West being the burgeoning Republican Reagan land.

But here’s what I am wondering.  The 2000 map is basically a mirror image of the 1896 election map — parties switched — and to look at the contours of this is a startling experience.  In one of the upcoming three election, is there going to be as startling mirror image of a previous map — which signifies that the nation is electorally wandering around in circles.

Schumacher Furs & Outerwear, after 111 years of business and one solid year of fervent animal-rights protests, is hanging it up in Portland.Owner Gregg Schumacher, who depicts the city’s core as dangerous and not conducive to retailers, said Tuesday that he’s moving his shop to the suburbs, though he wouldn’t say where.

Officials from City Hall to the Portland Business Alliance, while making it clear they’re sad to see downtown lose any merchant, particularly such a longtime institution, called Schumacher’s claims, in effect, bunk. 

Good riddance.  It’s not even that I particularly care about the animals so much as I find the enterprise very WASPy and devoid of style.  It reminds me of the manner in which Dick Cheney hunts — stick a quail raised in captivitiy into a confined space and give the man a rifle to be used in between gulps of beer.  If you are going to wear the fur creatures, I would prefer that it come from something you yourself hunted, which fits a bit more in the frontier history that Schumacher is an anachronism from seeing as it sways the scale from the luxury item (though its status as a status symbol has dissipated to the point where I don’t know who out there is impressed, and there’s another good riddance to be thrown there).

As for the protesters, I’ve seen them assualt customers walking out to the point where the customer has to take sanctuary in the convenience store across the street.  It’s not exactly a case where I can sit comfortably in a “good guys versus bad guys” camp.  I don’t know where the proper limits of their guerrila tactics lie — the chalked slogans are a more permanent reminder of them anyways.

I think this is what Randy Leonard (city council member) is speaking of with the words “I honestly had never been involved in anything in which I felt like the folks I was trying to help did not want to be helped.”:

along with Schumacher’s plea to have the protesters prosecuted under a Bush signed quasi-anti-terrorism bill — the “Animal Enterprise Terrorism Act”.

The man should enjoy himself in whatever suburban denzien he gets his claims to, no doubt more hospitable toward wiping out the pesky protestors by any means necessary.  I myself have the dream of organizing a large and sustained picket of as  non-controversial a business as there is, just for dada-esque amusement… but that will continue to remain in the realm of my fevered imagination.

It’s a minor version of the famed “eye of the storm”.  The sky directly above me is… well, probably a light gray.  I can’t quite tell, because we’re in a prolonged twilight.  In every direction, coming and going, are dark and forboding rain clouds.  There was a heavy downpour just an hour ago, and there will be a heavy downpour in a hour or so.

There is an eerie silence.  Traffic is logging past me, off to Thanksgiving Weekend.  It’s quite tranquil, and the only possible moment I’m going to be walking.

I veered into an area without much traffic, and into a bus stop.  Somebody had abandoned an umbrella.  I inspect it to see if is in working order.   It was not.  I hear a loud, shrill “Meerow”, and look down to see.  Only a kitten can be as shrill as this.  I had destroyed the kitten’s refuge, under an umbrella, under the roof of this bus stop where the rain does not disturb.

The kitten looked young enought that it may still be nursing from its mom.  It was possible it was lost in a quick shuffle and get-away the mom had to pull in an emergency.  If not, it was just barely past this stage.  At any rate, the kitten was as lost as could be.

I walked on.  The kitten followed me, galloping as quickly as it could, shouting its shrill “Mee-row!”  I was its best chance at the moment, nevermind I was not going to adopt a stray kitten.  Even if I wanted to, I’m not in a position to care for a pet kitten.

The kitten kept with me for about five blocks, a pretty good endurance.  At the sixth block, I looked back to see the kitten had stopped, and was now mee-rowing to somebody’s yard dog — a smallish muttish non-threatening creature.  The kitten had found its new best chance, as pathetic a chance as it may be.

If anybody is missing a kitten, and this is that kitten, I can’t help you.  It is the proverbial needle in a hay-stack.  The kitten is lost to the wilderness.

Everything you need to know about Presidents John Quincy Adams and Martin Van Buren.  Their presidencies are fortetable enough, the imports of their careers taking place elsewhere, and thus I have nothing to say about them. 

John Quincy Adams is thought of as the Greatest Secretary of State in American history, being the author of the Monroe Doctrine. 

The Monroe Administration is known as the “Era of Good Feeling”, James Monroe’s re-election having been a near unanimous, one dissenting vote to preserve George Washington’s fame, affair.  Martin Van Buren believed his lowest common denominator of a Republican — Federalist fusionism fell too far toward the by now virtually dead Federalist party, and thus deigned to create out of various political machinery extent in the nation a more disciplined national political party than had existed before.  Historians, in their rankings of the presidents, place Van Buren right in the middle of the pack, and note that he coined the word “ok” — wryly noting that that’s an apt phrase for his presidency before describing him as a political hack.  To call him a political hack is to simply define him and not do justice to him, for Martin Van Buren is THE political hack, having hacked out the Democratic Party.

The details of his creation of the Democratic Party are a bit mysterious, but it was a bunch of behind the scenes manuevering and noted at the time more or less as “something fishy is going on here”.  The most notable and telling part of his dealings comes with a correspondance between him (the most powerful politician in New York state) and a powerful Virginia Senator that amounts to “you scratch my back; I’ll scratch yours”, an agreement to pull together their political clout and electoral weight in determining the national agenda and the next president.  The veiled agreement that was made in this new coalition, and which would unravel the Democratic Party soon and a century hence, as well as the nation, was that the issue of slavery would be ignored.  (The precursor for the next century being the issue of segregation, slavery’s bastard off-spring.)

In his post-presidency, with all due respect to Jimmy Carter fans probably the greatest post-presidency in American history, Congressman John Quincy Adams acted as a bomb thrower by holding forth against slavery, reading citizens’ petitions on the house floor.  This prompted a gag rule to shut him up, revealing the contradictions in the Democratic Party and exasperating the nation’s continuing crisis on the slavery line onto regional lines.  Adams continued on his path and evaded the gag rule through the use of parliamentary tricks, continuing to incense the southern contingent of politicos.

I mistakeningly thought that this was the part of John Quincy Adams’s career marked in John F Kennedy’s Profiles in Courage, but apparently Kennedy profiled something from Adams’s pre-presidential Senatorial career, a moment that served as a break for Adams from the Federalist Party to the Republican Party (or, if you will, the amalgrated one-party government of James Monroe.)  Adams would later go on to win his House seat under the temporal Anti-Mason Party label (a party which ceased to exist after it successfully made Mason membership a political liability), and then the Whig Party which came into existence to oppose the newly formed Democratic Party.

For his part, Martin Van Buren abandoned the Democratic Party and ran for president under the Free Soil banner.  He received 10 percent of the vote and played spoiler for the same Democratic Party he had hacked together.  The Free Soilers generally served as part of the base of the Republican Party that would emerge triumphant as the Democratic Party splintered apart as the Southern “Slave Power” demanded furthering the institution of slavery and the northern Democrats and Whigs remained forever wishy-washy on the subject.

Their presidencies were better than the presidencies of everyone leading up to Lincoln, Polk excepted, but nobody remembers a thing about it.

I saw a license plate a little while ago.  “PROUST”.  Interestingly one can very easily figure out who the owner of this car is with that little bit of information, but it is safe to assume s/he’s a Marcel Proust fan.

The car is littered with bumper stickers, the only one I remember saying “I Read Banned Books”.  Which leads me to wonder about the censorship history for Proust.

I may or may or not read In Search of Lost Time and Rememberance of Things Past one of these days, or anything else Proust has written.  I am unlikely to read it in public, mostly lest strangers believe I’m trying to impress them, but also to avoid being forced to admit a less than total comprehension of what I’m reading, or pretend otherwise.

I also doubt I will ever get to a point where I’ll want a license plate that defines me in terms of Proust, but (1) To each their own, and (2) Life is full of surprises, and you never know where life will take you, so I can’t totally shut that door, can I?