Another Scary but True Tale from Dumbfukistan

At a recent town hall meeting, a man stood up and told Representative Bob Inglis to “keep your government hands off my Medicare!” The congressman, a Republican from South Carolina, tried to explain that Medicare is already a government program — but the voter, Mr. Inglis said, “wasn’t having any of it.”

Any guesses as to whence the citizen gets his "News"?

Tricorythodes stygiatus

Come the Fourth of July attention around here turns to the spring creeks and the Trico hatch which comes off -- to a greater or lesser degree -- every morning until the first frost.

The hatches have been mostly quite good this year and I've burned a lot of gasoline and pissed away more than my fair share of mornings getting out of bed well before dawn and heading west to Pennsylvania for three hours of technical, intense, focused fishing followed by the long drive back.

I've been doing this for quite a number of years and caught my share of fish, but it is in the nature of fishing the Trico hatch that one never feels one has done as well as one ought to have. Fish are rising everywhere -- on some especially good days feeding as if they were baleen whales harvesting krill -- and you catch, say, three or four or five fish, not including the ones you merely prick and ones you break off. Occasionally you do a bit better; sometimes worse. It looks for all the world like it ought to be barrel shooting...but it ain't.

Not for me, at any rate. Honesty compels me to admit that I've frequently watched friends and strangers, upstream and down, do better than I. While the obvious conclusion might be that I'm just not all that good at it, I prefer to attribute my relative lack of success on those occasions to either an inferior location or the fact that none of the roughly two hundred flies in my trico box; purchased and home-tied; in sizes ranging from #22-#26; in an enormous array of pattern types, materials, and subtly differing colors...none of them are as good for that precise time and place as what the fellow out-fishing me is using. Fortunately -- like a duffer who hits the green with a long iron now and then -- I have just enough good days to allow me to cling to my illusions.

As an aside, people who have never fished with such small flies and the gossamer-fine 7x-9x tippets they require in order to allow them to drift properly (to say nothing of the virtual impossibility of threading 5x tippet through the eye of a #26 fly), wonder at the acuity of vision and exquisite touch they assume such fishing must require.

Tempted though I am to claim possession of such rarefied faculties, the simple truth is that the same conditions that make such fine terminal tackle necessary make its use feasible. The water is so smooth and slack that you are, in fact, able to see and track your tiny fly, assuming you cast well enough to know where it landed in the first place, and so clear that you can see the fish rise up, open its mouth and take. It does so deliberately and without haste, having all the time in the world as the fly drifts ever-so-slowly overhead, thus not triggering your startle reflex and allowing you to tighten up with the requisite gentleness.

There is a kind of rough rule of thumb for pattern selection. The males tend to emerge at/over night or very early in the morning and the females just after sun-up, so at 7:30, with the fish just beginning to rise and the spinner swarms just starting to form, a black bodied (or very dark brown; I've convinced myself that such minutiae matter sometimes) parachute with dun-length tails in #24 or #26 seems to be the choice. It's very likely to be the wrong choice, but one has to start somewhere.

By no later than 9:00 the spinners are starting to fall and with any luck at all the fish are steadily on the feed. Sometimes the fish seem more keyed in on males, in which case a spent-wing, black bodied (or very dark brown), long tailed pattern in #24 or #26 may work best. Sometimes, they seem to prefer the females, which calls for a #22 or #24 spent wing pattern with a white body (or green to mimic a pre-oviposting appearance; lots of controversy regarding whether the green version is either necessary or effective) with long tails and a robust black (or very dark brown) thorax.

The spinner wings are tied with antron, zelon, organza, hackle tips, CDC, Krystal Flash, "wonder wings" (a fairly fussy concoction made with hen hackle, created by Chauncy Lively and championed by Bob Miller), snow shoe hare foot fur...you name it. Sometimes they all seem to work. Sometimes one much better than another. Sometimes none of them do.

Typically, whatever you tie on, the first good cast and drift over a rising fish will result in anything from a good long look, to a skittish, slashing, short-strike, to a confident take. It goes downhill from there. The next cast over that fish -- assuming he didn't take the first time -- will be met with a brief, skeptical inspection. The next; complete indifference or a contemptuous little wriggle out of your fly's path. And by some mysterious process worthy of study by a more capable mind than my own, the fraudulence of your offering has been communicated to all the other trout in the area, so the promising reaction you received from the first fish on the first cast is not replicated should you turn your attention to another, notwithstanding that no fish conversation was observed taking place, and the second fish is distant enough from the first and at such a different angle that it hasn't yet seen either your line or fly.

Which of course raises the age-old conundrum of whether and when to change flies. It is easy to become convinced that your current offering is futile, but the fish are avidly feeding, the clock is ticking, and it takes time to change flies; sometimes a fair bit of time if the eye of your #24 fly is partially thread-obstructed and your eyes ain't what they used to be. Have any of you noticed, by the way, that the light conditions (shade versus sun, background, etc.) optimal for seeing the eye of your fly clearly are precisely the opposite of those that allow you to see the end of your tippet...and vice versa?

All too quickly, almost abruptly, you realize that it's over. The fish, so numerous minutes before, have -- sated -- seemingly vanished. So you wander the stream, looking for some last few stray risers or casting blind, trying to tempt them with Griffith's Gnats or ants or beetles before reluctantly concluding that you and the fish are done for the day and it's time to head home.

Michael Jackson Update

Still dead.

Happy Bastille Day!

In honor of the holiday, the first reader to correctly identify the above famous French people will win a free (!) year's subscription to Cloozoe's International House of Pancakes.

Catholicism as Antidote to Turbo-Capitalism

ETHICS IN ECONOMICS Benedict XVI signing his encyclical last week.


One can't help but wonder whether Catholic "conservatives" will embrace this aspect of the church's teachings with as much uncompromisting vigor as they embrace its anti-abortion stance.




By CARTER DOUGHERTY
Published: July 11, 2009

"...The message in both is that global capitalism has raced off the moral rails and that Roman Catholic teachings can help set Western economics right by encouraging them to focus more on justice for the weak and closely regulating the market..."

"...he offers a vision of a world governed by cooperation among nations, with a vibrant welfare state as the core of a market economy that reflects the love-thy-neighbor imperatives of Catholic social thought..."


MUNICH — The collapse of Communism in the East two decades ago did not provide much of an opening for the Catholic Church to influence economic policy, but perhaps the near-collapse of Western capitalism will. Two German authors — one named Marx, the other his patron in Rome — are certainly hoping so.

The first is Reinhard Marx, archbishop of Munich and Freising, who has written a best seller in Germany that he cheekily titled “Das Kapital” (and in which he addresses that other Marx — Karl — as “dear namesake”). The second is Pope Benedict XVI, who last week published his first papal encyclical on economic and social matters. It has a more gentle title, “Charity in Truth,” but is based on the same essential line of thinking. Indeed, Archbishop Marx had a hand in advising the pope on it, and a reading of the archbishop’s book helps explain the intellectual context in which the encyclical was composed.

The message in both is that global capitalism has raced off the moral rails and that Roman Catholic teachings can help set Western economics right by encouraging them to focus more on justice for the weak and closely regulating the market.

Unlike the 19th-century Marx, who thought organized religion was a trick played on the impoverished in order to control them, Archbishop Marx and other Catholics yearn for reform, not class warfare. In that, they are following a long and fundamental line of church teaching. What is different now is that some of them see this economic crisis as a moment when the church’s economic thinking just may attract serious attention.

Archbishop Marx has already drawn a following in Germany by arguing that capitalism needs, in a grave way, the ethical underpinnings of Catholicism. The alternative, he argues, is that the post-crisis world will fall back into furious turbo-capitalism, or, alternatively, experience a renaissance of Marxist ideology based on atheism and class divisions.

“There is no way back into an old world,” Archbishop Marx said in a recent interview, before the encyclical was issued. “We have to affirm this world, but critically.”

Catholic voices have long had influence on the debate in the West about social justice, but never as much as the church would have wished. That reflected the enduring challenge of devising alternative policies, rather than simply criticizing secular authorities.

Pope John Paul II, a Pole with an intuitive feel for Communism’s injustices, was an important voice in bringing that system down. But he had to watch in the 1990s as Eastern Europe embraced Communism’s polar opposite — a rather pure form of secular capitalism, instead of any Catholic-influenced middle way.

“John Paul II was often very clear what he was against: He was against unbridled capitalism and the kind of socialism of the Soviet sphere,” said John Allen, the National Catholic Reporter Vatican watcher. “What he was for was less clear.”

Now Archbishop Marx, who at 55 occupies an ecclesiastical perch once held by Benedict, is trying to wriggle out of that intellectual straitjacket.

With his talent for turning a provocative phrase, he has more in common stylistically with the evangelist St. Paul or the philosophes, who popularized Enlightenment thought, than with Karl, who ground out his dense texts from exile in London. After beginning his book puckishly by addressing Karl Marx personally, the archbishop races through 200 years of Western economic history in a way that pays tribute to Karl’s core analytical conclusion — that capitalism embodies contradictions that threaten the system itself.

But he also makes it clear he is no Communist. He admires Wilhelm Emmanuel von Ketteler, a 19th-century writer who put Catholic theory into practice as a member of Germany’s first national Parliament in 1848, and later became a bishop and a fervent critic of Karl Marx.

The gregarious Archbishop Marx has cut a profile in the German business community for his willingness to walk into a roomful of executives and raise the roof. (“Are you marionettes?” he once asked a manager who protested that markets sometimes dictate unethical actions.)

In his book, which was published last fall, he offers a vision of a world governed by cooperation among nations, with a vibrant welfare state as the core of a market economy that reflects the love-thy-neighbor imperatives of Catholic social thought.

On the first point, Archbishop Marx is in good, cosmopolitan company; many officials, from New York to London to Beijing, are calling these days for a world in greater regulatory harmony, though the specifics may be hard to agree upon. He sounds considerably more German when exhorting the world to create, or recast, the welfare state. People need the welfare state before they “can give themselves over to the very strenuous and sometimes very risky games of the market economy,” Archbishop Marx said. The burdens of aging, illness or unemployment “need to be borne collectively,” he added.

In support of his argument, the archbishop calls for a “global social market economy,” based on a concept familiar to Germans as the model for their own postwar system.

Of course, the archbishop says he realizes that a European’s ideal of welfare states and border-straddling institutions might not have universal appeal. At the end of his book, he quotes Jean-Claude Juncker, the prime minister of Luxembourg, who has said, “I approve of the notion that Europe sees itself, unpretentiously, as a model for the world, but the consequence of that is that we would have to constantly change that model because we are not the world.”

Neither, he might have added, is the Roman Catholic church.

The Pissed-Off Red Necks' Avatar

The following piece by Frank Rich gets it about right. The only question is how much uglier things will become.

"...No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party...It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it..."


"...Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind..."

"...wrote one fan. 'I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?' Another called for a new American revolution, promising 'there will be blood.'..."

"...She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her..."





By FRANK RICH
Published: July 11, 2009

SARAH PALIN and Al Sharpton don’t ordinarily have much in common, but they achieved a rare harmonic convergence at Michael Jackson’s memorial service. When Sharpton told the singer’s children it was their daddy’s adversaries, not their daddy, who were “strange,” he was channeling the pugnacious argument the Alaska governor had made the week before. There was nothing strange about her decision to quit in midterm, Palin told America. What’s strange — or “insane,” in her lingo — are the critics who dare question her erratic behavior on the national stage.

Sharpton’s bashing of Jackson’s naysayers received the biggest ovation of the entire show. Palin’s combative resignation soliloquy, though much mocked by prognosticators of all political persuasions, has an equally vociferous and more powerful constituency. In the aftermath of her decision to drop out and cash in, Palin’s standing in the G.O.P. actually rose in the USA Today/Gallup poll. No less than 71 percent of Republicans said they would vote for her for president. That overwhelming majority isn’t just the “base” of the Republican Party that liberals and conservatives alike tend to ghettoize as a rump backwater minority. It is the party, or pretty much what remains of it in the Barack Obama era.

That’s why Palin won’t go gently into the good night, much as some Republicans in Washington might wish. She is not just the party’s biggest star and most charismatic television performer; she is its only star and charismatic performer. Most important, she stands for a genuine movement: a dwindling white nonurban America that is aflame with grievances and awash in self-pity as the country hurtles into the 21st century and leaves it behind. Palin gives this movement a major party brand and political plausibility that its open-throated media auxiliary, exemplified by Glenn Beck, cannot. She loves the spotlight, can raise millions of dollars and has no discernible reason to go fishing now except for self-promotional photo ops.
The essence of Palinism is emotional, not ideological. Yes, she is of the religious right, even if she winks literally and figuratively at her own daughter’s flagrant disregard of abstinence and marriage. But family-values politics, now more devalued than the dollar by the philandering of ostentatiously Christian Republican politicians, can only take her so far. The real wave she’s riding is a loud, resonant surge of resentment and victimization that’s larger than issues like abortion and gay civil rights.

That resentment is in part about race, of course. When Palin referred to Alaska as “a microcosm of America” during the 2008 campaign, it was in defiance of the statistical reality that her state’s tiny black and Hispanic populations are unrepresentative of her nation. She stood for the “real America,” she insisted, and the identity of the unreal America didn’t have to be stated explicitly for audiences to catch her drift. Her convention speech’s signature line was a deftly coded putdown of her presumably shiftless big-city opponent: “I guess a small-town mayor is sort of like a community organizer, except that you have actual responsibilities.” (Funny how this wisdom has been forgotten by her supporters now that she has abandoned her own actual responsibilities in public office.)
The latest flashpoint for this kind of animus is the near-certain elevation to the Supreme Court of Sonia Sotomayor, whose Senate confirmation hearings arrive this week. Prominent Palinists were fast to demean Sotomayor as a dim-witted affirmative-action baby. Fred Barnes of The Weekly Standard, the Palinist hymnal, labeled Sotomayor “not the smartest” and suggested that Princeton awards academic honors on a curve. Karl Rove said, “I’m not really certain how intellectually strong she would be.” Those maligning the long and accomplished career of an Ivy League-educated judge do believe in affirmative-action — but only for white people like Palin, whom they boosted for vice president despite her minimal achievements and knowledge of policy, the written word or even geography.

The politics of resentment are impervious to facts. Palinists regard their star as an icon of working-class America even though the Palins’ combined reported income ($211,000) puts them in the top 3.6 percent of American households. They see her as a champion of conservative fiscal principles even though she said yes to the Bridge to Nowhere and presided over a state that ranks No.1 in federal pork.

Nowhere is the power of resentment to trump reason more flagrantly illustrated than in the incessant complaint by Palin and her troops that she is victimized by a double standard in the “mainstream media.” In truth, the commentators at ABC, NBC and CNN — often the same ones who judged Michelle Obama a drag on her husband — all tried to outdo each other in praise for Palin when she emerged at the Republican convention 10 months ago. Even now, the so-called mainstream media can grade Palin on a curve: at MSNBC’s “Morning Joe” last week, Palin’s self-proclaimed representation of the “real America” was accepted as a given, as if white rural America actually still was the nation’s baseline.

The Palinists’ bogus beefs about double standards reached farcical proportions at Fox News on the sleepy pre-Fourth Friday afternoon when word of her abdication hit the East. The fill-in anchor demanded that his token Democratic stooge name another female politician who had suffered such “disgraceful attacks” as Palin. When the obvious answer arrived — Hillary Clinton — the Fox host angrily protested that Clinton had never been attacked in “a sexual way” or “about her children.”

Americans have short memories, but it’s hardly ancient history that conservative magazines portrayed Hillary Clinton as both a dominatrix cracking a whip and a broomstick-riding witch. Or that Rush Limbaugh held up a picture of Chelsea Clinton on television to identify the “White House dog.” Or that Palin’s running mate, John McCain, told a sexual joke linking Hillary and Chelsea and Janet Reno. Yet the same conservative commentariat that vilified both Clintons 24/7 now whines that Palin is receiving “the kind of mauling” that the media “always reserve for conservative Republicans.” So said The Wall Street Journal editorial page last week. You’d never guess that The Journal had published six innuendo-laden books on real and imagined Clinton scandals, or that the Clintons had been a leading target of both Letterman and Leno monologues, not to mention many liberal editorial pages (including that of The Times), for much of a decade.

Those Republicans who have not drunk the Palin Kool-Aid are apocalyptic for good reason. She could well be their last presidential candidate standing. Such would-be competitors as Mark Sanford, John Ensign and Newt Gingrich are too carnally compromised for the un-Clinton party. Mike Huckabee is Palin-lite. Tim Pawlenty, Bobby Jindal — really? That leaves the charisma-challenged Mitt Romney, precisely the kind of card-carrying Ivy League elitist Palinists loathe, no matter how hard he tries to cosmetically alter his history as a socially liberal fat-cat banker. Palin would crush him like a bug. She has the Teflon-coated stature among Republicans that Romney can only fantasize about.

Were Palin actually to secure the 2012 nomination, the result would be a fiasco for the G.O.P. akin to Goldwater 1964, as the most relentless conservative Palin critic, David Frum, has predicted. Or would it? No one thought Richard Nixon — a far less personable commodity than Palin — would come back either after his sour-grapes “last press conference” of 1962. But Democratic divisions and failures gave him his opportunity in 1968. With unemployment approaching 10 percent and a seemingly bottomless war in Afghanistan, you never know, as Palin likes to say, what doors might open.

It’s more likely that she will never get anywhere near the White House, and not just because of her own limitations. The Palinist “real America” is demographically doomed to keep shrinking. But the emotion it represents is disproportionately powerful for its numbers. It’s an anger that Palin enjoyed stoking during her “palling around with terrorists” crusade against Obama on the campaign trail. It’s an anger that’s curdled into self-martyrdom since Inauguration Day.
Its voice can be found in the postings at a Web site maintained by the fans of Mark Levin, the Obama hater who is, at this writing, the No.2 best-selling hardcover nonfiction writer in America. (Glenn Beck is No.1 in paperback nonfiction.) Politico surveyed them last week. “Bottomline, do you know of any way we can remove these idiots before this country goes down the crapper?” wrote one Levin fan. “I WILL HELP!!! Should I buy a gun?” Another called for a new American revolution, promising “there will be blood.”

These are the cries of a constituency that feels disenfranchised — by the powerful and the well-educated who gamed the housing bubble, by a news media it keeps being told is hateful, by the immigrants who have taken some of their jobs, by the African-American who has ended a white monopoly on the White House. Palin is their born avatar. She puts a happy, sexy face on ugly emotions, and she can solidify her followers’ hold on a G.O.P. that has no leaders with the guts or alternative vision to stand up to them or to her.

For a week now, critics in both parties have had a blast railing at Palin. It’s good sport. But just as the media muttering about those unseemly “controversies” rallied the fans of the King of Pop, so are Palin’s political obituaries likely to jump-start her lucrative afterlife.

Breaking news!!

Michael Jackson still dead.