Pun Salad

URLs du Jour — 2012-05-17

• The Club For Growth performs its fine duty of checking up on how well freshman GOP congresscritters are holding on to what, arguably, got them elected: a commitment to limited government and economic freedom.

  It's a mixed bag. Scores range from a pristine 100% to a dismal 37%. Spoiler for Granite Staters: NH-01's Frank Guinta got a needs-improvement 77%. Charlie Bass grabbed a near-the-bottom 48%.

• Back in November we heard about the plight of Joe the Puppeteer, an Occupy Wall Street denizen. After 3 years and $35K in student loans, he got his MFA from UConn. In puppetry. And was surprised that he was unable to find a job that would recompense him at the level that his newly-gathered education demanded.

  But what is it with Connecticut higher ed anyway? Via Taranto, we learn of Mike Alewitz, art professor at Central Connecticut State University. He teaches "a mural class and a street art class", but The Man keeps hassling him. One of the products of his class is a 7-by 40-foot mural that "depicts students struggling under the strain of college debt as the CCSU mascot, a blue devil, looks on."

  Yes, as Taranto points out: the students are irate about their eyeball-deepness in debt, due to tuition paid for a class that taught them the valuable job skill of painting a mural protesting how deep in debt they were.

  Is that irony? I can never tell.

• Wired is part of the Condé Nast publishing empire, which is home to a lot of trendy leftism (e.g., New Yorker, Vanity Fair). But Wired almost always plays it straight, if somewhat befuddled, when it comes to politics.

  So I was pleasantly (but only slightly) surprised by the end of Wired editor Chris Anderson's wide-ranging interview with Marc Andreessen, inventor of the modern web browser. Andreessen notes how Amazon drove Borders out of business and thereby helped build a better world. And:

  Anderson: So it's creative destruction.

  Andreessen: When Milton Friedman was asked about this kind of thing, he said: Human wants and needs are infinite, and so there will always be new industries, there will always be new professions. This is the great sweep of economic history. When the vast majority of the workforce was in agriculture, it was impossible to imagine what all those people would do if they didn't have agricultural jobs. Then a hundred years later the vast majority of the workforce was in industrial jobs, and we were similarly blind: It was impossible to imagine what workers would do without those jobs. Now the majority are in information jobs. If the computers get smart enough, then what? I'll tell you: The then what is whatever we invent next.

  I think Wired just assured my subscription renewal for the foreseeable future.

• Ladies and gentlemen: the funniest Saturday Night Live skit ever:

  Disagree? Sorry, you're wrong.

Posted 2012-05-17 5:30 PM EDT
Last Modified 2012-05-18 6:03 AM EDT

The Phony Campaign — 2012-05-15 Update

Apologies for the belated "weekly" update to the phony campaign. The past few days have been filled with stuff that crowds out blogging. But phoniness went right on without us:

• The big phony news was President Obama's shifting position (don't call it a flip-flop) on gay marriage. It impressed the mass media rubes. Everyone else … not so much. We don't quote people associated with The Nation very often, but Richard Kim, executive editor of that magazine's website, espied what was coming up before the actual announcement: "Obama's Phony Position On Gay Marriage".

  There's one thing that has always irked me about Obama's evolutionary narrative on same-sex marriage -- and that's not his position on it per se so much as the insincerity of his homophobia. To take Obama at his word, same-sex marriage is something he "wrestles" with, something he thinks a lot about and might support but for a deep conflict with his Christian faith. I'm not privy to what goes on in the president's head, but frankly, this smells like b- - - - - - t.

  The link is to NPR, which apparently has a problem with that final word. At the magazine's website they spell it out, if you're confused.

• But wait, there's more: Over at www.whitehouse.gov, the current inhabitants are inserting references to President Obama into the official biographies of past presidents. In fact, reports Seth Mandel at Commentary, "it turns out Obama has added bullet points bragging about his own accomplishments to the biographical sketches of every single U.S. president since Calvin Coolidge (except, for some reason, Gerald Ford)."

  My guess is that the ensuing ridicule may force these self-promotional ego-trip modifications to disappear into the memory hole in the near future. But here's what's currently on the Hoover bio:

  President Herbert Hoover signed the bill founding the Department of Veterans Affairs July 21, 1930. President Obama is committed to making sure that the VA, the second-largest cabinet department, serves the needs of all veterans and provides a seamless transition from active duty to civilian life, and has directed his Administration to modernize the way health care is delivered and benefits are administered for our nation's veterans. First Lady Michelle Obama and Dr. Jill Biden launched Joining Forces to mobilize all sectors of society to give our service members and their families the opportunities and support they have earned.

  All that's missing: noting that Mitt Romney has promised to steal every vet's wheelchair if elected.

• And if you're looking for something else to be irked about: Joseph Curl notes that President Obama, who spoke compassionate and understanding words on the drug-related deaths of both Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson, was completely silent on the passing of Adam Nathaniel Yauch, aka MCA of the Beastie Boys. Who also died way too young, but apparently on the natch.

• In case you missed it: "How The Gutsiest President Ever Single-Handedly Killed OBL".

• In non-presidential phony news, Elizabeth Warren continues to punch above her weight. As late as yesterday, she was still claiming to be "proud of my Native American heritage". Despite the fact that the proof of that career-boosting heritage has been, at best, ephemeral.

  Victor Davis Hanson notes the obvious:

  I guess some of us are on a different planet, because both Warren and Harvard University seem to have been unethical at best and unlawful at worst -- if she or anyone from the Law School (no less!) signed forms or affidavits attesting to Warren's Native American status in accordance with federal affirmative action/diversity guidelines. Fabricating an entire identity seems to me right up there with plagiarism, and yet neither Harvard nor Warren is the least bit troubled by the fact that at the heart of this scandal is an outright lie, both spoken and written. How many Harvard Law Schools or Elizabeth Warrens are there out there in academia, that have been untruthful in assessing their diversity profiles, and is that the reason for the complete silence on this matter from various professional academic and scholarly associations?

  For higher ed folks, especially those with political ambition, rules are for the little people.

Posted 2012-05-15 12:00 PM EDT

URLs du Jour — 2012-05-07

• You should subscribe to Reason, but if you don't: editor Matt Welch's column from the latest issue is online; he considers John Stossel's pessimistic view of the state of the ongoing batter for liberty. A sobering take:

  Take federal spending: In March, Rep. Paul Ryan (R-Wisc.) proposed, and House Republicans passed, a budget blueprint that increases federal spending over the next decade from $3.6 trillion to $4.9 trillion (in current dollars), and according to the Congressional Budget Office never once comes close to balancing any year’s budget during that time frame. At a time when debt levels and entitlement time bombs are putting the nation at severe financial risk, Ryan’s budget should be seen as inadequate to the task of averting catastrophe. Instead, he’s being accused of deliberately starving the poor.

  Welch argues that fans of liberty should play the "long game." Pun Salad agrees.

• Your blog post title of the day: "Eat, Fart, Die".

Posted 2012-05-07 6:30 PM EDT

The Phony Campaign — 2012-05-06 Update

President Obama continues to lead in the phony poll, but his margin continues to shrink. This week, it's 23.5-to-1.

A veritable flood of phoniness this week.

• Our first note isn't even at the presidential level, but it is classic phony: Massachusetts US Senate candidate Elizabeth Warren claimed to be "Native American" as she was climbing up the academic career ladder, culminating with her faculty appointment at Harvard. She based this on dimly-remembered "family lore", but eventually tracked down a poorly-sourced document that gave her (at most) ¹⁄₃₂ Cherokee DNA.

  As I type, Google hits for "Elizabeth Warren" phony number 532,000. Which means she's moving into Mitt Romney levels of perceived phoniness. That can't be good for her.

  It also shines a little light on how the "Affirmative Action"/"diversity" movement plays out in higher ed hiring. As Hans Bader points out at OpenMarket.org, the Warren case is a prime example of "how elites milk racial preferences for their own gain." Fun fact:

  Ordinary people have been fired from their jobs in Massachusetts for falsely claiming to be minority. As law professor David Bernstein notes, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court upheld the firing of two brothers from their jobs as Boston firefighters for racial fraud, since they had red hair and looked white, although they cited the existence of a black great-grandmother. But they weren't law professors. Politically speaking, they were nobodies.

  Also worth reading is John S. Rosenberg at Minding the Campus, who points out "the bigger, more significant issue of this kerfuffle is what it reveals of the commonplace wink-and-a-nod corruption of the entire affirmative action enterprise as it is currently practiced."

  One of Warren's previous employers, the University of Texas has budgeted nearly a million bucks for defending its race-based admissions policy. Modern universities, which like to pride themselves on their devotion to truth, literally can't afford to be open and honest about their hiring and admissions processes.

• David Maraniss is coming out with a biography of President Obama, and a published excerpt in Vanity Fair concentrates on his New York love life in the early 1980's. A lot of people have been having fun with the differences between Obama's story of the "composite" New York girlfriend depicted in his Dreams from My Father, and the actual New York girlfriend, Genevieve Cook.

  There is much for the phony connoisseur here, but let's just quote one letter from Barack to buddy Alex, where he discusses, as young people do, T.S. Eliot.

  I haven't read "The Waste Land" for a year, and I never did bother to check all the footnotes. But I will hazard these statements--Eliot contains the same ecstatic vision which runs from Münzer to Yeats. However, he retains a grounding in the social reality/order of his time. Facing what he perceives as a choice between ecstatic chaos and lifeless mechanistic order, he accedes to maintaining a separation of asexual purity and brutal sexual reality. And he wears a stoical face before this. Read his essay on Tradition and the Individual Talent, as well as Four Quartets, when he's less concerned with depicting moribund Europe, to catch a sense of what I speak. Remember how I said there's a certain kind of conservatism which I respect more than bourgeois liberalism--Eliot is of this type. Of course, the dichotomy he maintains is reactionary, but it's due to a deep fatalism, not ignorance. (Counter him with Yeats or Pound, who, arising from the same milieu, opted to support Hitler and Mussolini.) And this fatalism is born out of the relation between fertility and death, which I touched on in my last letter--life feeds on itself. A fatalism I share with the western tradition at times. You seem surprised at Eliot's irreconcilable ambivalence; don't you share this ambivalence yourself, Alex?

  Best comment is this headline from Diane Ellis at Ricochet: "Young Obama May Have Been Even More Pretentious Than Current Obama".

• And last but not least, the Obama campaign released "The Life of Julia", a heartstring-tugging slide show that urges us to "Take a look at how President Obama's policies help one woman over her lifetime--and how Mitt Romney would change her story."

  For example, when Julia is 25:

  Under President Obama: After graduation, Julia's federal student loans are more manageable since President Obama capped income-based federal student loan payments and kept interest rates low. She makes her payments on time every month, keeping her on track to repay her student loans.

  Under Mitt Romney: Under the Romney/Ryan budget, interest rates on federal student loans would be allowed to double, affecting Julia and 7.4 million other students.

  This was, of course, ripe for parody. Iowahawk:

  Under President Obama: Julia is graduating college with a degree in feminist website design. Thanks to President Obama, she will receive the federal help she needs to pay back her $100,000 debt. No wonder her professors - and the bank who gave her the loan - fully support President Obama's re-election!

  Under Mitt Romney: Romney will make fun of Julia for taking 7 years to graduate. Also, science will be outlawed.

  And Frank J is also not to be missed:

  Under President Obama: Julia graduates college and looks for a job. No jobs are currently available, so she is given more contraceptives. She watches on TV as President Obama, now immortal in his robot unicorn body, is democratically elected god king. Thanks to the new two-way TV design, she is comforted by the fact that Obama could be looking back at her.

  Under Mitt Romney: Julia ventures out only at night to make it harder for Bain Capital's hunter/seeker robots to find her.

  Neither Frank nor the Hawk should be excerpted, but I did it anyway.

  For a slightly more serious take there's JPod: "O's campaign gets creepy". He notes that as Romney charges that Obama is trying to create a government-centered society, the whole message of Julia says: "You bet we are!" Conclusion:

  The November election results will go a long way toward telling us what kind of country Americans want the United States to be -- whether they want to continue down the road to a European social democracy.

  The response to "Julia" over the next few weeks will offer some early hints. If it really does go viral, maybe grown Americans really do want to be treated like children.

  If it doesn't, that will suggest even Obama enthusiasts don't appreciate the condescension toward the value and virtue of independent human endeavor that is at the root of Obamaism.

  Indeed.

Posted 2012-05-06 12:47 PM EDT
Last Modified 2012-05-07 8:00 AM EDT

URLs du Jour — 2012-05-02

• We all know from the whole George Zimmerman/Trayvon Martin saga that Florida is a gun-crazy zone, where all you have to do after shooting someone is to come up with a halfway-plausible self-defense yarn. And, via Florida's "stand your ground" legislation, that's a stay-out-of-jail-free card. Right?

  Jacob Sullum says: Wrong, hoplophobia-breath! He tells the story of Jacksonville resident Marissa Alexander who fired a warning shot, in a confrontation with her abusive husband. The conclusion:

  On March 16, after deliberating for 12 minutes, a jury convicted Alexander on three counts of aggravated assault with a deadly weapon. Although she injured no one, she faces a 20-year mandatory minimum sentence unless she can win a new trial.

  Just outrageous.

• What political news can you safely ignore? Cracked provides a handy guide: "5 Ways to Spot a B.S. Political Story in Under 10 Seconds".

  It's Cracked, so beware: the language is a little rougher than (say) National Review. But it's mostly non-partisan, true, and funny. The warning signs:

  5. The Headline Contains the Word "Gaffe"
  4. The Headline Ends in a Question Mark
  3. The Headline Contains the Word "Blasts"
  2. The Headline Is About a "Lawmaker" Saying Something Stupid
  1. The Headline Includes the Phrase "Blow To"

  Follow the link for the whole story. Nevertheless, if I see a headline that reads

  Senator Shaheen Blasts Opponent, but will Stupid Gaffe Deal a Blow To Her Re-Election?

  … I will probably read the article.

• In an old (i.e., funny) episode of The Simpsons, "Homer at the Bat", Mr. Burns found himself in charge of Springfield's baseball team and brought in pro ringers, including Daryl Strawberry, to play a key game. Key quote:

  Burns: You, Strawberry, hit a home run.
  Strawbery: Okay, skip.
  (hits a home run)
  Burns: Ha-ha! I told him to do that.
  Smithers: Brilliant strategy sir.

  Frank J. remembers that episode too. And you'll never guess what reminded him of it.

• This story from last week has been tickling funny bones at work. We do crazy here in New Hampshire too:

  A driver waved a flare gun at another vehicle on Interstate 93 on Monday before the gun ultimately went off in his own car, narrowly missing a juvenile passenger, according to the state police.

  Thought he was Mel Gibson, turned out to be Moe Howard.

• In other traffic news, I want one of these for my commute. It says it takes up more than one traffic lane, but somehow… given the right accessories, I don't see that as a problem.

Posted 2012-05-02 6:30 PM EDT

The Phony Campaign — 2012-04-29 Update

The phony race continues to narrow, with President Obama's lead over Mitt Romney shrinking to a 24.7-to-1 margin:

And the phony high points of the week were:

• CNN reports that the humor at the 98th annual White House Correspondents' Association Dinner—and please note that I am quoting directly from the story here, because this is a play on words that even I would be ashamed to make—"went to the dogs." For phony purposes, President Obama's speech Went There:

  "I know everybody is predicting a nasty election, and thankfully, we've all agreed that families are off-limits," the president said. "Dogs, however, are apparently fair game."

  The president's punch line: An ad by a phony Super PAC that featured Romney on Air Force One with a dog cage on top of the aircraft and promoted dog freedoms, while warning of Obama's policy of dog socialism.

  But the president didn't back away from his own doggy history:

  "That's pretty rough. But I can take it, because my stepfather always told me, it's a boy-eat-dog world out there," Obama said.

  Maybe you had to be there.

• Ms. Ann McFeatters, a Scripps-Howard columnist who has (it says here) "covered the White House and national politics since 1986" penned a commentary headlined with a blazing insight: "Romney trying too hard, coming off phony".

  And now we have the great loosening-up campaign.

  The problem?

  Nobody can really imagine living next door to Mitt Romney, let alone exchanging house keys with him in case of emergency.

  That is how Howard Baker, the Republican former senator from Tennessee and all-around good guy, once described a hypothetical perfect presidential candidate.

  To quote Han Solo: "I don't know, I can imagine quite a bit." I find myself easily imagining all sorts of people living next door. I find it harder to imagine that Ms. Ann McFeatters is actually paid to write this by-the-numbers drivel, yet here it is right on my screen. It's a funny world.

• Speaking of imagination, Captain Ed noted that you have to have a very flexible one to take political attack strategies seriously. He mused on a MSNBC Morning Joe commentator, whose remarks were reported thusly:

  The interesting thing that's happened in the last week, I think, is the way in which the Obama campaign has shifted away from the consistent argument that they've made over the course of the last year, really, about Mitt Romney, which is that he is a flip flopping phony, away from that argument to the argument he is a right-wing nut. And, you know, with David Plouffe coming out and saying that he is the most radical conservative since Barry Goldwater. You can't kind of have it both ways. Barry Goldwater was not a flip flopping phony. And so, if you're going to say that Romney is a flip flopping phony, you can't say that he's a hard right conservative.

  I think they are shifting in that direction and that is, I think, part of their trying to adapt to a new environment where they think Romney might be able to get to the middle, and they want to try and keep him over there on the far right.

  I suppose they need to fill the MSNBC airtime somehow. If they just noted that political argument is designed to bypass rationality and aim for the gut…well, that would take about 7 seconds, and what would they do with the remaining 23 hours, 59 minutes, and 53 seconds that day?

Posted 2012-04-29 9:11 AM EDT
Last Modified 2012-05-02 9:13 AM EDT

URLs du Jour — 2012-04-23

• The editors of National Review examine the proposed "People’s Rights Amendment" that would restrict rights protected by the Constitution to only "individuals acting individually", denying any protected rights to individuals acting cooperatively. It overturns centuries of law, and concentrates unprecedented power in Congress. Nancy Pelosi considers this to be a fine idea. Hey, what's not to like?

  The editors conclude:

  Nancy Pelosi proposes to amend the Constitution the way the iceberg amended the Titanic. The First Amendment has served us well. Nancy Pelosi has not, but she has led her Democrats to a disturbing place in their quest to secure power, even at the cost of cashing in the Bill of Rights.

  You can check the legislative status of this odious amendment here, including its cosponsors. Who deserve your unmitigated contempt.

• Over the weekend I attended the Granite State Patriots Liberty PAC "Save-Our-Republic Tea Party" in Dover New Hampshire's lovely Guppey Park. Skip of GraniteGrok was there too, and did great work recording the event for posterity. Check out his reports here and here. Attendance exceeded expectations, and the speakers were almost all good. (Only exception: Dr. Joe Tarta, speaking about ObamaCare, was unprepared and lackluster. Sorry, Dr. Joe.)

• Hey, kids, remember when President Obama was pushing to get Obamacare passed, and repeatedly said things like "If you like your health care plan, you keep your health care plan"?

  That was a lie, of course. But the Obama Administration is engaging in a desperate (and expensive: $8 Billion) attempt to make sure a large fraction of the electorate don't find out about that lie until after the election. A bunch of old folks were due to get pushed out of the popular "Medicare Advantage" program in October 2012. But…

  But the administration’s devised a way to postpone the pain one more year, getting Obama past his last election; it plans to spend $8 billion to temporarily restore Medicare Advantage funds so that seniors in key markets don’t lose their trusted insurance program in the middle of Obama’s re-election bid.

  The money is to come from funds that Health and Human Services is allowed to use for “demonstration projects.” But to make it legal, HHS has to pretend that it’s doing an “experiment” to study the effect of this money on the insurance market.

  That is, to “study” what happens when the government doesn’t change anything but merely continues a program that’s been going on for year.

  I strive to live up to the Costello Pledge ("I used to disgusted, now I try to be amused.") But President Obama really makes this tough. (Also on this topic: Peter Suderman at Reason.)

• It has been estimated that each smartphone and tablet contains approximately 4000 patented elements. At Wired, Lore Sjöberg reviews some of the more obscure ones, including:

  Method for Using Up All Your Battery Power at Once

  Motorola took out this patent in 2004, which describes a software approach to making it so that your electronic device takes several hours to get down to 50 percent battery power, then suddenly drops to 10 percent “in, like, half an hour, and you’re not even watching movies or anything.” The fact that this functionality is apparently necessary for practically any device with a touchscreen puts Motorola in a strong bargaining position.

Posted 2012-04-23 6:00 PM EDT
Last Modified 2012-04-25 12:25 PM EDT

The Phony Campaign — 2012-04-22 Update

The phony gap between our two leading candidates continued to narrow this week, with the President beating Mitt by a 27.2-to-1 margin. (As opposed to last week, where the ratio was 27.5-to-1.)

So what went down in Phonytown this week?

• Charles Krauthammer's headline: "The Buffett rule is another phony Obama free lunch". (Note: a lot of folks have been misspelling this as the "Buffet Rule". Maybe this is a freudian-slip revealing their hopes that the free lunch will be a buffet.)

  Anyway, Dr. K makes a point we've mentioned before, but is worth repeating:

  OK. Let's do the math. The Joint Committee on Taxation estimates this new tax would yield between $4 billion and $5 billion a year. If we collect the Buffett tax for the next 250 years -- a span longer than the life of this republic -- it would not cover the Obama deficit for 2011 alone.

  As an approach to our mountain of debt, the Buffett rule is a farce. And yet Obama repeated the ridiculous claim again last week. "It will help us close our deficit." Does he really think we're that stupid?

  Krauthammer may mean that last bit as a rhetorical question, but… yes, I'm pretty sure President Obama does think we're that stupid. (I sure seem to use Herman Cain's spot-on book image a lot here, but, here I go again.)

• Maureen Dowd got her snark on in her New York Times op-ed column: "Phony Mommy Wars". She officially found a way to disapprove of Ann Romney's reaction to Democratic strategist Hillary Rosen's on-air remark that Mrs. Romney "never worked a day in her life."

  But at a fund-raiser at a private home in Palm Beach, Fla., on Sunday, the night before her 63rd birthday, Ann made it clear that she wasn't really aggrieved. She was feigning aggrievement to milk the moment.

  "It was my early birthday present for someone to be critical of me as a mother, and that was really a defining moment, and I loved it," a gleeful Ann told the backyard full of Florida fat cats, sounding "like a political tactician," as Garrett Haake, the NBC reporter on the scene, put it.

  It's important when you act the martyr not to overplay your hand. If you admit out loud to a bunch of people -- including Haake, who was on the sidewalk enterprisingly eavesdropping -- that you're just pretending to be offended, you risk looking phony, like your husband.

  Ms. Dowd finding phoniness in a political campaign. How insightful!

  Gosh, I'm pretty sure an "enterprisingly eavesdropping" reporter could have found some partisan glee in Democratic ranks over what Rush said about Sandra Fluke a few weeks back. You remember: that was back before the "war on women" wasn't phony.

  Impress me, Maureen, and open up your other eye.

• Speaking of phony outrage, a Mr. Tommy Christopher examined banner at a Romney campaign event that stated: "OBAMA ISN'T WORKING". Gosh, Tommy wondered. What could that possibly mean? He rooted around in his subconcious and…

  The slogan is a multiple entendre, but one of those entendres, intentionally or not, is evocative of a nasty racial stereotype about black men.

  A belated add-on to Tommy's post revealed that this slogan has been part of the Romney campaign for nearly a year. From a campaign-site post dated July 24, 2011:

  

  … is actually a nod toward this slogan from Margaret Thatcher's 1978 campaign:

  

  Tommy, however, didn't back off his charge. Because, you see, the first thing he thinks of when he sees "isn't working" is "lazy black men."

Posted 2012-04-22 10:44 AM EDT

Good for Foster's

I dumped on my local paper, Foster's Daily Democrat, back on Wednesday for its uncritical coverage of a dinky protest in downtown Dover NH put on by a group called "CREDO", a left-wing organization run out of San Francisco. The protest was allegedly a non-partisan grassroots-activist gathering concerned with tax "fairness" to the middle class; in actuality, it was all about "taking down" our district's current Congressman, Frank Guinta.

Foster's redeemed itself somewhat with a Saturday editorial that revealed to its readers CREDO's not-particularly-grassy roots and partisan purpose. So good for them. Although it would have been nice had the original Foster's story had included at least some of this information.

Interesting paragraph:

Foster's asked some of the picketers to better explain the slogans on their signs. The response: We're just holding them.

Posted 2012-04-22 8:56 AM EDT
Last Modified 2012-04-26 3:49 PM EDT

URLs du Jour — 2012-04-20

• Apparently the offer to have dinner with (just) President Obama wasn't generating enough campaign dough, so Julianna Smoot spammed me yesterday:

  Want to meet George Clooney and Barack Obama -- at Clooney's house?

  He's hosting supporters at his home next month to help build support for this campaign and elect President Obama in November. And he's saving seats for two grassroots supporters like you and their guests. It's just not a chance most people get -- well, ever.

  What follows points you to a page to enter a drawing in exchange for a $3-and-up campaign contribution. But if you read the fine print, you'll find a link to this page where you can enter for free.

  So: a chance to (a) check out George Clooney's house; and (b) give President Obama a piece of your mind. Without having to donate to the campaign. What are you wai… oh, you've clicked already.

• Jonah Goldberg has a new blog in support of his new book The Tyranny of Cliches. Which I already have on order.

• Congressperson James McGovern represents a long Massachusetts district, and he's no fan of the Constitution as written. He's proposed the "People's Rights Amendment" to the Constitution. It ostensibly would undo the Supreme Court decision in Citizens United by definition; where the Constitution mentions "people, person, or persons", the Amendment explicitly restricts the language to "natural persons" only.

  UCLA lawprof Eugene Volokh outlines just what that would mean:

  So just as Congress could therefore ban the speech of nonmedia business corporations, it could ban publications by corporate-run newspapers and magazines — which I think includes nearly all such newspapers and magazines in the country (and for good reason, since organizing a major publications as a partnership or sole proprietorship would make it much harder for it to get investors and to operate). Nor does this proposal leave room for the possibility, in my view dubious, that the Free Press Clause would protect newspapers organized by corporations but not other corporations that want to use mass communications technology.

  And there's more. All of it enabling a chilling and unprecedented power grab by the state.

  Supporters of this travesty include Nancy Pelosi. In a more sensible nation, support for such an Amendment would cause an ignominious defeat in a subsequent election. Instead…

• I'll be setting the iPod to play The Band on my way home tonight. RIP, Levon. Check out Marc Cohn's great tribute from a few years back:

Posted 2012-04-20 5:30 PM EDT