In my infirmity...

I've been watching a lot of West Wing. The cool fall weather and and the annual, cruddy fall cold means that I've been watching my favorite political drama. And recently, I saw the episode on PBS.

It is, and I say this with no exaggeration, a crime how little we fund and promote our public broadcasting.

I grew up on PBS and NPR. I have bright and clear memories of watching the MacNeil/Lehrer Newshour with my dad everyday when he came home from work. I learned my letters and numbers from Sesame Street and my geography from the campy, live-action Where in the World is Carmen Sandiego. My parents once, from somewhere, scraped up 100$ to sponsor an hour of the boring but classic Prairie Home Companion. I am conversant in classical music and was on the classic blues trip long before my friends, entirely due to public radio. Both my parents still send me clips and stories from NPR. Public Broadcasting is a good thing.

We don't value public broadcasting because we are, rightly, suspicious of government, and because we are, wrongly, suspicious of learning. If I were a genius, I'd invent a way to reconcile those. I always liked the NEA's slogan "A Great Nation Deserves Great Art," because I think it's true. Our greatness isn't international heft or economic clout, it's our spirit. I think, then, that a great nation deserves great public broadcasting.

Sweet, light crazy.

Anti-masonry has a long and distinguished history in the United States, and I am glad to see someone carrying that torch.

A slight issue with Politico.

From their piece on Tim Pawlenty:

Pawlenty, under the radar of D.C.’s political community, has locked up some of the key operatives who engineered then-President George W. Bush’s reelection campaign — a significant feat for a little-known Midwestern politician.

Emphasis added. If you believe the narrative that GWB was a dim-but-vaguely presidential cipher, this isn't a significant feat at all. Pawlenty has all the benefits of a first term Bush (with, I suppose, the exception of a famous name, but all of those seem pretty tapped out at this point). If you're looking for a nice, neutral conservative so you can continue your war on Americans making less than a cool million, I think Pawlenty's a good choice.

Of course, given how this year has been going for conservatives, I'm waiting for the inevitable revelations that he likes some sort of deviant sex.

God damned retrograde

John Derbyshire, British stick-up-the-ass conservative, has come out against the 19th Amendment. Really, it takes some balls to deny a basic right to half the population, so I would have to give him credit if it weren't such a self-evidently terrible idea, for a few reasons.

First, I'm just going to quote Amanda Marcotte, because she put it too well:

If you think you can just repeal half the population’s right to vote because you don’t like the outcome, then why even bother with democracy in the first place?

Second, it's a tactical mistake. Generally, politicians don't get elected on the basis of denying rights to the people who are voting for them. Given that women vote at a higher rate than men, any politician associating with Derbyshire or NRO should be toast after this.

Really, this should serve as a meditation on the fact that conservatism in this country isn't about returning to the mom and apple pie 1950s of legend, it's about returning us to the Gilded Age of horror stories.

Rally in Belleville.

By Nazis, quite literally, for white civil rights after a beating that the police apparently decided was not racially motivated.

The worst part is, 55% of people on the poll at the bottom said that the rally was a good thing.

Were I a paranoid sort

If I were the type to jump at shadows, I'd see a conspiracy here. First, Newsmax pulls an article (by a long-serving columnist) promoting a military coup, next Thomas Sowell at NRO compares the president to a "Latin American charismatic despot" and asks "do we want to become the world's largest banana republic?"

It's almost like they're laying bare their deepest desires.

Ok, still.

Maybe not, per this congressman, a holocaust, but 45,000 extra deaths a year is pretty substantial in a country that's supposed to be the greatest on earth.