perfidy

In a comment to my economics post below, GeekLethal coins the term "onanomics" to describe that branch of economics that manages, through narrowly modeled, tightly construed conditions, to describe absolutely nothing of use. Good coinage.

This weekend, I was watching the Sunday news cycles when I saw footage of Laura Bush speaking at the yearly dinner they throw to persuade the White House Press Corps that they are something better than slime you scrape off a shoe. The networks all replayed that sorta-funny but really upsetting set of jokes where W is so dumb he once tried to milk a male horse, so easygoing he is in bed by 9, and so unsubtle that he likes to fix every problem on his ranch no matter how big or small with a chainsaw... which is why he gets along so well with Cheney and Rumsfeld. What? Did Laura Bush just call her husband cack-handed and dim, with a penchant for unintrospective bumbling and jerking off horses, and then play that for laughs?

Almost as good as last year when they did that whole "nope... no WMDs under here montage" with George looking under couches and in closets. Laff freakin riot.

Anyway, the word that popped into my head to describe Laura Bush's performance at the Press Corps dinner was "macrotesticularity." As in, "my, that was awfully macrotesticular of her to play our nightmares for laughs like that."

Bet you didn't know that a post about neologisms was going to degenerate into a takedown of the President's speechwriters, foreign policy, and taste for chainsaws, didja?

[wik] I should probably be clear here. I don't think the President is stupid. To begin with, that would mean that his opponents are even stupider than he is, and although there is ample evidence to support that thesis, all that can be proven is that his opponents are less smart, not that the President is stupid. Moreover, stupid men don't make President. Period. Now, that does not mean that George W. Bush is far to incurious and prone to what I would call lack of insight, but that's a matter of taste. Au chaque ses propres, you know?

But to make a funny out of the President's supposed lack of intelligence is neither funny, reassuring, or particularly worthwhile for anybody. If he's that stupid that he jacks off horses and can't be bothered to figure out why, say, Turkmenistan's Islamic crisis is different from Sudan's, that's horrible. If he's not that stupid than joking about how he is is just sort of tasteless.

[alsø wik] I should also be clear on another point. I thought Laura Bush was pretty funny; they were funny lines. Or as it occurred to me later, they would be funny lines in another context. Unlike certain moral majoritarians, I have no problem with the First Lady making horsejacking jokes, and unlike some uptight liberals, I think it's funny to laugh at the President while retaining some respect for the office. But my mind's subprocesses have been working it over the last couple of days, and at some point I began to realize that jokes about the President's smarts are weak, tired and lame. Where's Bruce Vilanch when you need him?

[alsø alsø wik] I should also also be clear that I really haven't spent very much time thinking about this. Reading this post over, I come off pretty uptight. In reality, I'm not all that bothered by any of this and in fact have spent far more time writing about it than I have fretting about it. So I'm going to move on now, and post something about robots or music or boobies, or robots with musical boobies.

[wi nøt trei a høliday in Sweden this yër?] Ohhh, but this is too good to pass up! Big Time Patriot of blogcritics recommends that we test the mettle of the FCC and lodge formal complaints about the hot man-on-beast penile manipulation talk aired on CSPAN. If a blurry accidental nipple is worth half a mil, what's the going fine for horse dong?

I can't believe I forgot about this. Tomorrow is the 35th Anniversary of the Kent State shootings. Although police had killed eleven black students at an Alabama university earlier that spring, well... back in 1970 it took four blue-collar white students to capture the nation's imagination. Wizbang (linked above) has links to several good informational resources about May 4, 1970 as well as a priceless photo and quote from KSU Prof. Glenn Frank urging the crowd to disband before more people get killed.

I'm from just outside of Kent. Growing up I could see, across the lake and over the woods, the tall tower of the University library from our front picture window. There's something mentioned in none of the histories of the KSU shootings that means a lot to me. My grandfather died seven years ago, before I had a chance to really talk to him about his life. You know; you just figure they're going to be around forever. There are a million things I wish I'd asked him about. Like the time he and my dad loaded up the Ford with crates of polio vaccine in Akron and drove it back to Portage County to set up a clinic in his office. Or all the times he flipped his car over cutting across fields on the way to deliver a baby or treat a farmer with a broken leg. He was a country doctor of the old school, trained to handle everything from cancer to obstetrics, and he was a trouper.

Or the times in 1970 when that semiretired doctor would come home shaking and furious from his work as a staff doctor at Kent State University. Sometimes student protestors would lock their limbs together in such a way that the police would have to dislocate a joint in order to break up the line; they were not shy about doing so. My grandfather was 'asshole' to the students, in his nice brown suit and tie, and to the cops he was a 'goddamn pinko fag sympathizer' - all because it was part of his life's work to reset a dislocated shoulder. He was a gentle man and a gentleman, and it no doubt cut him deeply.

My grandfather died before I could ask him about that hideous day in May when as the staff doctor on call he pronounced four young men and women dead and treated the bullet wounds of the survivors.

I miss my grandpa.

[wik] If you want a real head-trip, there is no better drug then the Portage County (Ohio) Record-Courier from the first five months of 1970. Without getting too deeply into it, here's the basics. Kent State was a practical school where mill and factory workers sent their sons and daughters so they would have something more waiting for them than a rivet gun at Lordstown or a stamping machine in Canton. Most Kent State students in 1970 were from this blue collar background, and nearly all of them were first-generation college students. Therefore, the understanding from their parents, speaking generally, was that they were there to better themselves.

Moreover, Kent the town in 1970 was an insular place. According to one book on the shootings, written in 1970-71, the only place you could by a Washington Post or New York Times in town was at the drugstore on the corner of Water and Main (it's still there.) If you got there early, that is, for one of the two copies they got in each day. News of war protests, student uprisings, and the like came to Kent filtered through the intensely conservative viewpoints of the editorial pages of the Record-Courier. Naturally, the good people of Ohio felt that war protesters were acting in irresponsible and un-American ways. Remember, this was well before any concensus of any kind had formed about Vietnam being a "quagmire."

When protests broke out on the campus of Kent State, the town was positive that outside agitators (from the Yippies and Black Panthers) had infiltrated the student body (this wasn't particularly true, by the way). As the protests grew in intensity, the irritation of the town grew more quickly. The sons and daughters of GM and Goodyear were smashing windows and singing songs and having group sex rather than studying. The diseases of the liberal East Coast seemed now to infect the heart of Middle America. James Michener's investigative book, Kent State: What Happened, and Why fanned these flames in the aftermath of the shootings with portraits of irresponsible, drug-addled losers sucking on daddy's money to blow off class and have dirty sex, all exemplified by a hippie-infested "House on Ash Street." (For what it's worth, there is no Ash Street in Kent.)

The "Letters" page of the Record-Courier tells the story first hand: the students deserved to be shot; the dirty hippies are a cancer to be cut out; why did the National Guard stop at four?; kudos to the Guard for keeping the peace; it's about time these punks were taught a lesson. As understandable, though chilling, as these letters might be, the sickening ones are from local people who put a dollar value on human life. In the days before May 4, students had smashed some windows downtown and graffitied and defaced some storefronts and public areas. One letter, I remember, put the $11,000 pricetag for some of the repairs as a fair price to pay for four lives lost.

Richard Nixon found his support among the "silent majority" he hailed as true Americans. The history of that majority has been written out of the popular recollection of the Vietnam era, as most of the "silent majority" went on with their lives without bothering to make lavish documentaries about them. Peace, love, hippies, Hendrix, and Easy Rider make it through to us, but my former neighbor spoke for a much larger part of America when she wrote in her letter to the paper that the "poor lambs" got what they had coming.

Die!

By My Hand!

I Creep Across the Land!

Killing Firstborn Man!

*duggaDUGduggaDUN-DAH* I'm Creeping De-eath!

... and so on. But for reals. A group of UK adventurers are currently in the Gobi desert in search of... no shit... the Mongolian Death Worm.

Known to the locals as Allghoi khorkhoi (Mongolian for intestine worm due to its resemblance to a length of cow’s stomach), the blood red creature is much feared.

Three to five feet long, the Death Worm is said to lurk beneath the sands, emerging only at certain times of the year to spread fear among the desert dwellers. The nomads insist that the beast can spit a corrosive yellow saliva that acts like acid and that they can generate blasts of electricity powerful enough to kill a full grown camel.... Expedition leader, cryptozoologist Richard Freeman thinks it’s death dealing powers are apocryphal. . . .

What kind of animal is the Death Worm? Freeman has a theory. “I don’t think that it’s a worm at all. True worms need moisture. I think it is a limbless, burrowing reptile, probably a giant member of a group of reptiles known as amphisbaenas or worm lizards. These are a primitive group of poorly studied animals. They are not snakes or lizards but are related to both .I think the Death Worm is a giant member of this group.”

The team plans not only to catch the creatures but bring them back to England alive! They intend to force the Death Worms up from their burrows by damming local streams and flooding small areas of the desert.

It's times like these when I realize that I have made certain wrong decisions in life. Although it's a good life, with a roof, a wife, and this nifty striped tie I'm wearing, well... something is definitely missing. Here I sit in a nice beige office block while a team of Brits and their Mongolian guides streak across the high desert in Land Cruisers in search of a fearsome and deadly creature of legend.

However, it turns out I am lucky in one way. The expedition is sponsored by the

Exeter based Centre for Fortean Zoology, the world’s only full time, scientific organization, dedicated to the study of mystery animals. Past expeditions have included hunts for the Chupacabra, a blood drinking, nocturnal beast from Puerto Rico, the Naga, a 60 foot crested serpent in the jungles and caves of Thailand, and Orang-pendek, an ape man in the unexplored valleys of Sumatra.

I did some digging into the Ministry's archives, and I found out something ve-ry interesting. It seems that the Ministry played a hand in founding the Centre, with funds made available by the liquidation of our Kandahar branch office in the early 1990s (yes... it is vital the Ministry retain a presence in such troubled places to monitor the activities of evildoers, but it's amazing what a few unsuspected Stinger missiles in the hands of fanatics will do to a modest office flat, okay? Lesson learned, moving on.). Given that we have graciously allowed the British Government stewardship of the organization during the CFZ's search for the Chupacabra and the Naga, we respectfully request that any live specimens of Mongolian Death Worms be delivered forthwith to the Ministry Bunker and Castratorium. We need a little something for our moat.

[wik] I might also add... Shai-Hulud!!

I'm going to continue the amateur econoblogging, this time courtesy of Loyal Reader #0016/EDog.

DEMOCRATIC
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
You feel guilty for being successful.
Barbara Streisand sings for you.

REPUBLICANISM
You have two cows.
Your neighbor has none.
So?

SOCIALIST
You have two cows.
The government takes one and gives it to your neighbor.
You form a cooperative to tell him how to manage his cow.

COMMUNIST
You have two cows.
The government seizes both and provides you with milk.
You wait in line for hours to get it.
It is expensive and sour.

CAPITALISM, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
You sell one, buy a bull, and build a herd of cows.

BUREAUCRACY, AMERICAN STYLE
You have two cows.
Under the new farm program the government pays you to shoot one, milk the other, and then pours the milk down the drain.

More below the fold.
AMERICAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You sell one, lease it back to yourself and do an IPO on the 2nd one.
You force the two cows to produce the milk of four cows. You are surprised when one cow drops dead. You spin an announcement to the analysts stating you have downsized and are reducing expenses.
Your stock goes up.

FRENCH CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You go on strike because you want three cows.
You go to lunch and drink wine.
Life is good.

JAPANESE CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You redesign them so they are one-tenth the size of an ordinary cow and produce twenty times the milk.
They learn to travel on unbelievably crowded trains.
Most are at the top of their class at cow school.

GERMAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You engineer them so they are all blond, drink lots of beer, give excellent quality milk, and run a hundred miles an hour.
Unfortunately they also demand 13 weeks of vacation per year.

ITALIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows but you don't know where they are.
While ambling around, you see a beautiful woman.
You break for lunch.
Life is good.

RUSSIAN CORPORATION
You have two cows.
You have some vodka.
You count them and learn you have five cows.
You have some more vodka.
You count them again and learn you have 42 cows.
The Mafia shows up and takes over however many cows you really have.

TALIBAN CORPORATION
You have all the cows in Afghanistan, which are two.
You don't milk them because you cannot touch any creature' private parts.
You get a $40 million grant from the US government to find alternatives to milk production but use the money to buy weapons.

IRAQI CORPORATION
You have two cows.
They go into hiding.
They send radio tapes of their mooing.

POLISH CORPORATION
You have two bulls.
Employees are regularly maimed and killed attempting to milk them.

BELGIAN CORPORATION
You have one cow.
The cow is schizophrenic.
Sometimes the cow thinks he's French, other times he's Flemish.
The Flemish cow won't share with the French cow.
The French cow wants control of the Flemish cow's milk.
The cow asks permission to be cut in half.
The cow dies happy.

FLORIDA CORPORATION
You have a black cow and a brown cow.
Everyone votes for the best looking one.
Some of the people who actually like the brown one best accidentally vote for the black one.
Some people vote for both.
Some people vote for neither.
Some people can't figure out how to vote at all.
Finally, a bunch of guys from out-of-state tell you which one you think is the best-looking cow.

CALIFORNIA CORPORATION
You have millions of cows.
They make real California cheese.
Only five speak English.
Most are illegals.
Arnold likes the ones with the big udders.

Late last week I came upon a new paper from the National Bureau of Economic Research that caught my fancy, called Rockonomics: The Economics of Popular Music. The abstract reads

This paper considers economic issues and trends in the rock and roll industry, broadly defined. The analysis focuses on concert revenues, the main source of performers ' income. Issues considered include: price measurement; concert price acceleration in the 1990s; the increased concentration of revenue among performers; reasons for the secondary ticket market; methods for ranking performers; copyright protection; and technological change.

For economists, this is actually a pretty interesting idea; I don't know of any solid studies that exist on the economics of the music biz.

However, I hadn't reached page two before I found something so egregiously lazy and wrong that I had to put the paper down and stop reading. Authors Marie Connolly and Alan B. Kreuger, both of that cidadel of Rock known as Princeton, of course have to start their paper by defining what the "Rock and Roll Industry" is in the first place. Leaving aside the incredible conceptual and grammatical slippage inherent in categorizing popular music over the last few decades as "The Rock and Roll Industry," the coauthors do a pretty good job of nailing down what their sample set will be:

Here, we will define popular music as music that has a wide following, is produced by contemporary artists and composers, and does not require public subsidy to survive. This definition rules out classical music and publicly supported orchestras. It includes rock and roll, pop, rap, bebop, jazz, blues and many other genres. What about Pavarotti? Well, we warned you that the border of the definition can be fuzzy. If the three tenors attract a large following and are financially viable, we would include them in the popular music industry as well.

So far so good, except for the weird decision to separate out bebop from jazz, and the continued insistence on using "rock and roll" as the defining paradigm of blues-based (mainly) white-people music as though Billy Joel can be comfortably put in a basket of commodities alongside Minor Threat.

But that's where the going gets really nutty. The authors write,

Why is popular music worthy of a handbook chapter? There are several responses. . . .[F]or many fans popular music transcends usual market economics and raises spirits and aspirations. In this vein, for example, Bruce Springsteen once commented, “in some fashion, I help people hold on to their own humanity, if I'm doing my job right.” Dewey Finn, the character played by Jack Black in the hit movie, School of Rock, went even further, immodestly claiming, “One great rock show can change the world.” The rock and roll industry arguably started as a social movement intended to bring about political, economic and cultural change, as much as it did as a business. Certainly, popular music is an important cultural industry. [My emphasis]

Bullshit. Bullshit. Bullshit. "Rock and Roll" did not arguably start as a social movement yadda yadda, unless by "argument" you mean "irritatingly lazy statement that will cause people to argue with you." "Rock and Roll" did not start as a social movement except in the fusty cheap-pulp pages of Rolling Stone compilation books full of lazy mythologizing and glory-days reminiscing about the time in 1967 when the Airplane played that one benefit for the Diggers that raised some cash for some homeless people to eat with. Leary was there too! With LSD! Ahh...those were the days! What was the explicit sociopolitical agenda of "My Ding-a-Ling?" Or of the film soundtrack extract "Rock Around the Clock?"

"Rock and Roll," to use the authors' term, started for two reasons: for artists to get paid, and for artists to get laid. Just because the martini set thought Lead Belly's singing was perfect for their Worker's Struggle don't make it a movement. Just because Bruce Springsteen writes bad poetry about factories and bad cops doesn't make it a movement. No matter what it might from time to time temporarily become (and rarely for long, or to much end), the music business has always been a business, whether the incentive for the performer is increased social capital, a tangible good, or currency.

I don't mean to shovel all my vitriol on these two well-meaning economists, but it really bugs me that every time a new discipline discovers that music is worthy of study they feel compelled to try to reinvent the Stratocaster. In this case, it's as if dozens of journal articles, hundreds of books, and thousands of published interviews don't already exist in the popular press, musicology, sociology and history-- articles that have long since evolved a highly refined set of assumptions about the history of popular music that no longer have much room for arbitrary handwaving about Rock And Roll as a Social Movement For Uh Making The World Better And Stuff. That's high school term paper thinking. In internet terms, these authors have not RTFFAQ and are acting like total n00bz begging to be pwned. QED. DOA. SOL. etc.

Rock and Roll changes lives because people hear the music and are compelled to do something. It's internal; it's individual; it's atomized, ephemeral, and (unfortunately for economists) almost totally unmeasurable. Rock and Roll does not, NOT NOT NOT, change lives because an artist sits down in the studio and says, "today, I'm going to change the world." That's what got us "We Are The World! A paper on the economics of the concert industry need not even go down this road if it aims to be taken seriously.

As for the rest of the paper, I haven't been able to pick it up again thanks to my lingering irritation. The lesson for today is: even the most revolutionary theses can be derailed by lazy hand-waving in the introduction.

The Universe is a demanding place. It was not enough that I spent most of a year groveling before HR drones, dutifully following up on every lead, no matter how tenuous, sending emails and trolling through the nether recesses of internet job postings. I had to demonstrate that I really, really wanted to work.

Last week, I started applying for McJobs. While I have been getting the occasional short term techwriting gig – a week here, a week there – the work was not dependable enough to provide any kind of financial security. So I figured a yob at Kinkos would provide a steady, if not large, amount of income to even out the feast and famine of intermittent contracting. Among the fine institutions that I petitioned for work was the local video store.

Last Wednesday, I accepted their kind offer of employment and free movie rentals. The Universe, now convinced that I was serious about the whole work thingy, turned the work spigot to ’11.’ Thursday, I had an interview with Northrop Grumman. Whilst I was interviewing, I got two calls offering short term contracts. Friday morning, Northrop offered me a job at significantly more than I was making last year. Today, I fully expect my last two interviews to call back and offer me work; and just to rub it in, I bet someone I talked to half a year ago will call back and say that the position I interviewed for is now open, and can I start yesterday.

Not that I’m complaining. After very nearly a year of blissful unemployment, I am ready to get back to the daily hassles of interminable commuting, smelly coworkers, cramped cubicles and (this is the important bit) the bimonthly ego validation of shekels in my checking account. The long drought is over, and now I need to google for whomever is the patron saint of unemployed and desperate white collar IT wage slaves.

He gets a candle and a beer.

Rockabilly weirdo Hasil Adkins is dead. I wish I had more to say about him, but all I have to go on are rumor, innuendo, and one indelible song I treasure as part of my collection. I always meant to see him play, always meant to buy a ticket if he ever came around, but now I can't. He lived in near total obscurity. He never had a hit, he never had radio play. What he did have was a fucked-up way of playing guitar and singing that sort of combined the berserk ravings of Screamin' Jay Hawkins with the unmedicated sincerity of Wesley Willis (rock over Chicago... Be A Pepper, Drink Dr. Pepper). He had perfect pitch, yet sung like he was on quaaludes and sometimes strung his guitar with fishing line. When he was a child, he heard Hank Williams on the radio and assumed in the way that children do that Hank was playing all those instruments himself, so li'l Hasil taught himself to play several instruments at once.

Fat Possum Records has a good one of his, that you can buy here, and Amazon seems to have available a compilation that contains his harrowing early '50s hit "She Said."

There's not much I can say that will convince people that they would get something out of music as strange and periodically unpleasant as Hasil Adkins, which is a shame. I have a Fat Possum compilation from the mid-1990s with Adkins' "Your Memories" on it, and I am periodically compelled to pull the disc out again and reaffirm my devotion to its wonders. "Your Memories" is a dirgelike piece in which Adkins chokes chords out of his guitar as he weeps, moans, and mutters a lovers' lament. Is she dead? Is she gone? Was "she" a pet? The whole performance seems like it should belong on some Smithsonian Folkways archive recording from the Harry Smith collection - here it is on a compact disc recorded with modern-ish equipment and converted to a series of finely-grained ones and zeroes, and yet it seems to seep out of the speakers like oil from some forgotten hollow in the West Virginia Hills. It's too real, too raw, too wierd in a high lonesome way, to really belong to the age of digital.

I have at home a collection of Irish folk music recorded for the Tradition label in the 1940s and 1950s before the Irish backcountry was really too tightly tied into the rest of the world. Some of the numbers are familiar enough; bodhrian drum, fiddle, pennywhistle, maybe a broadchested lad belting out threats against the Black and Tans. But others - others - are otherworldly experiences. You can imagine a middle-aged Irish lady with excellent Gaelic and only fair English standing in her chicken yard. She prepares to sing by clasping her hands behind her back like she was taught in school. She closes her eyes, turns her head so her mouth is as close as possible to the microphone. She begins to sing a song that sounds like it was handed down intact through the long years from before the coming of the Christian Monks. She sings in English but the words are unintelligible. She sings in key but the scale is wrong: flat where it should be natural, unsettled where it should resolve. The entire weight of Irish particularity; their pride, their strangeness, their history of glory, of murder, of revenge, of drowned children, of not enough to eat, of exiled lords and foreign wars on Irish soil hangs by this one thin thread of song.

West Virginian native Hasil Adkins kept spinning that thread right up until yesterday.

Over the weekend the Goodwyfe and I caught the filmic version of The Hitchhiker's Guide To The Galaxy. Was it good? Weeeellll.... it didn't suck. There were some brilliant bits and it was lovely to see Douglas Adams brought to the screen with his point of view and wit intact, but the whole thing didn't really hang together particularly well. See it, but at a matinee or at home.

Considering that a fairly large proportion of weblog readers are also Douglas Adams fans, I will refrain from tossing spoilers out here. I will just quickly note a couple real highlights: Sam Rockwell plays Zaphod Beeblebrox as a fuddled and slap-happy George W. Bush, down to the tipsy smirk and the West Texas accent (and gives Trillian the opportunity to speak the line, "Buttons are not toys!"). Somehow, it really really works. Martin Freeman from the BBC's The Office is pitch perfect as Arthur Dent, and Alan Rickman is perfect as the depressive robot Marvin. Magrathea, the Infinite Improbability Drive, the Vogons and their penchant for brutal yet stifling bureaucracy, and the British ability to stand in line like no other race in the galaxy are all pretty much perfectly done.

Pretty much, if you don't mind seeing one of your favorite books interpreted lovingly as a semi-disconnected series of sketches a la Monty Python, be my guest.

Just when I thought I'd seen it all, I realize that I'm a world-baby.

Yesterday the House of Representatives passed the Child Interstate Abortion Notification Act, which basically makes it illegal to transport a minor across state lines for the purpose of having an abortion if the minor's home state requires parental notification prior to the procedure. That, I only have *some* trouble with on the usual Federalist grounds and because although I don't much care for Roe v. Wade, I also would like states that (at some point in a theoretical future) legalize abortion to not have the legality of the practice stepped upon by other states' laws that prohibit same. Slippery slopes, all that.

But that's not what cheeses me off. What does cheese me off are the infantile hijinks of the Republicans in Congress. (Honestly, these days I could start every single post that way and not once would it be less true.) Hilzoy of Obsidian Wings (who I do not want to marry despite here many charms and virtues, being already happily wed (never mind, folks! (that's an inside-baseball(well, blogball (how many nested clauses can I achieve? (Five!)))) comment) read the bill closely and observed a fascinating phenomenon. The Democrats offered a number of amendements to the bill which would have, for example, exempted Greyhound drivers from prosecution if one of their passengers was a fifteen year old crossing state lines for an abortion. The original text and vote count read:

DEMS: a Scott amendment to exempt cab drivers, bus drivers and others in the business transportation profession from the criminal provisions in the bill (no 13-17):

The revised text in the Congressional Record now reads:

GOP REWRITE. Mr. Scott offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution if they are taxicab drivers, bus drivers, or others in the business of professional transport. By a roll call vote of 13 yeas to 17 nays, the amendment was defeated.

Wha? That's gotta be a mistake, right? In my best John McLaughlin voice, "WRONG!" See this amendment,

DEMS: a Nadler amendment to exempt a grandparent or adult sibling from the criminal and civil provisions in the bill (no 12-19)

... which somehow ended up as this amendment:

GOP REWRITE: . Mr. Nadler offered an amendment that would have exempted sexual predators from prosecution under the bill if they were grandparents or adult siblings of a minor. By a roll call vote of 12 yeas to 19 nays, the amendment was defeated.

So not only are Greyhound drivers not exempted from this law, but in the GOP revisions, it somehow it all suddenly became about child molesters. In the words of Phil Dennison in the comments, "This is almost literally the equivalent of a high school student grabbing someone's textbooks or homework, crossing out that person's name in them, and writing "Fag" over and over."

He's right. The Republican party, who I used to from time to time make common cause on issues like government spending, taxes, minimally intrusive regulation, and the like, have never gotten over the smarmy prep-school smugness that marred the Gingrich years. You'd think that being in power would finally assuage their victim complex, but nooooo! It's "the liberals" this and "godless" that and "we're under attack on every front!" when the Presidency, both houses of Congress and at least 5/9ths of the Supreme Court are their folks. I mean, shit. At least we Red Sox fans had the good graces to shed the whole Our Lady Of Perpetual Angst schtick once we won the Series. But the Republican Party can't seem to stop. Bill Frist fulminates against the Godless. Tom DeLay plays funny with ethics rules. Rick Santorum... well, the less said about Dim Bulb Ricky, the better.

What's more is while changing the wording in every amendment on a bill is wildly funny in some locker-room contexts in high school, and might even arguably be construed as the feisty jabs of an underdog minority (see 1994), when you're the party in power, that kind of move means you're a prick and a bully. Power doesn't make you a prick; pricks prove themselves through power. Newt Gingrich: Prick. When he was in charge of the House, that was dazzingly obvious he was a giant prick. He even shut down the government by way of proving his prick credentials. Now that he's faded into the background, he might still be a prick but he's at least 50% less of a prick about it.

That such adolescent, disrespectful behavior ends up in the Congressional Record, entered there by the Committee Chairman (Sensenbrenner, in this case, not some no-name looking for street cred (or prick cred)) rather than being left among the table scraps of a hi-larious three martini lunch at the Hotel George means you're bordering on insane. So I don't give away the whole game, I urge you to go read Hilzoy's post to find out why Sensenbrenner felt it so important that the amendements be revised to read they way they do. It's a larf riot.

"We're trying to get a permit from the city," he says. "Because you know, you can't secede from the union without getting a permit from the city."

I ardently wish this weren't a joke, but we're all perfectly safe regardless.