Excused Lame

The Dallas Cowboys – the greatest sporting team that ever was, is or ever will be – lost for the second straight week, today to the Chargers 20-17. On next Saturday to New Orleans to play the 13-0 Saints.

Despite the eccentric lot dimensions of our new home (135 feet x 1321 feet), one of the things that attracted us to it was the 30 x 36 metal building erected on a concrete pad, ideal for a new kennel building.

Since they arrived here from Ohio in late May, the dogs have been housed in crates in the garage, an arrangement neither they nor us enjoyed at all. Young, energetic dogs need time and room to run and play and even the older ones like a chance to tear around for a while. Having them crated like that not only restricted their activity but it also took us an hour or more to exercise everyone in their social groups of two and three. Do that three times a day and that’s quite a bit of time taken up.

Well, our house in Ohio sold in late August after being on the market only 12 days, a testimony to my lovely bride’s labors and her taste in getting it ready. With the money from the sale, we could now go ahead and renovate our building to house the dogs. The idea was to insulate it, put in water, electricity and air conditioning, surround the building with a 10 foot apron of concrete, add dog doors and pens inside and runs outside for the critters.

There was one small problem. After a heavy Gulf Coast rain, the building looked like it was surrounded by a moat. Here’s what it looked like after getting six inches of rain in one afternoon.

Even though the water drained away in a couple of days, considering all the venemous and verminous creatures that could be living in the swamp we couldn’t have outside runs where the dogs could be exposed to them. So the entire area around the building had to be built up by about a foot. The soil for this came from the pond at the back of the property, which the contractors dug up and moved. Sure enough, our back yard ended up looking like the Western Front.

Eventually, even though it never seemed like it would, the job was finished. The dogs were moved out last week and are now happy to be out in the sunshine and free to move around. We’re delighted too, not only that the job is done but also at getting a few hours of our day back.

Who knows? Some day, grass may even grow out back again!

Where else but the New York Times?

To the Editor:

Who should bear responsibility when consumers use products, such as cellphones, in unreasonably dangerous ways? Generally, the narrative of personal responsibility has precluded courts from allocating a share of responsibility to product suppliers.

But when we focus on the aggregate things look different.

Cellphone suppliers know that in the aggregate a predictable and high percentage of consumers will fail to exercise reasonable personal responsibility and drive while texting or talking. These companies know that no warning will alter this predictable behavior.

Given the completely predictable way consumers will use the product, selling cellphones is not so different from releasing a deadly toxic agent. In both cases a certain predictable number of innocent people will die.

The misuse of cellphones by drivers is too predictable and too unavoidable to shield cellphone suppliers from partial responsibility.

Carlos E. González

Newark, Dec. 7, 2009

The writer is a professor at the Rutgers University School of Law.

Well, really what did you expect from a lawyer? There’s nothing too useful or too beneficial that some ambulance-chasing parasite won’t try to attach itself to and suck the life out of. Mr. González is just one of their enablers.

P.S. It’s my habit to omit the names of the letter writers in this sporadic series in order to spare them any further embarrassment. But Mr. González is an attorney who just had to append his professional affiliation to his missive. How can you possibly further embarrass someone like that?

Victor Davis Hanson:

The society at large, driven by the sermonizing of its elites, has come to an unstated conclusion that, unfortunately, a few Americans will have to be sacrificed from time to time, for the larger goal of establishing the fact that Americans in no way think Muslims are anymore likely than any others to commit either random or premeditated terrorist violence. I think that is the initial lesson of Fort Hood.

The tree of diversity must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of innocents.

Apart from journalism, there’s no profession as self-congratulatory as entertainment. I can’t even turn on the TV without stumbling on some awards show.

Of course, part of what our actors, directors, musicians, etc. congratulate themselves on is taking a hard, honest look at the world around them, bravely risking the displeasure of the comfortable bourgeoise.

So it’s with no small amount of amusement that I read this about 2012, the new movie by Roland Emmerich where damn near everything we recognize is shown getting wiped out. Well, not everything after all:

He razed Rio de Janeiro; Rome; California; Washington, D.C.; Tibet; Las Vegas; Yellowstone National Park; and more but decided against destroying Islamic symbols. “My co-writer, Harald” Kloser, “said, ‘I’m not writing this to get a fatwa on my head,’ ” Mr. Emmerich said. “We have Jesus falling apart in all kinds of forms. The Vatican falls on people’s heads, and we can do that because we’re a free, Western society, but if there would be, like, Mecca destroyed, there would be an outrage. And so you don’t do it. At the end of the thing it’s entertainment.”

Perhaps Mr. Emmerich and Mr. Kloser are a little more courageous than the above quote suggests. It may, after all, take a special kind of bravery to show how cowardly you are.

Pembroke, Virginia. “Hey, gimme a ham and swiss on rye with mayo and ten-penny nails!”

From Megan McArdle’s blog, on the story of the State of California withholding more money because it needs it more than its citizens do:

Frankly, I think in this, as in so many other areas, California is providing a valuable example for other polities to follow.

In an ideal world, all income would be directed (“withheld” if you must straight to the government. Then, at an appropriate time, members of the public could petition for the return of funds they feel they are entitled to, within the limits of total allowable refunds as set by law.

This way we would never again run into the awful situation of the government having to go about groveling for extra money or engage in tedious debates about the “appropriate” level of taxation. The government would simply collect all money in the economy, decide how much it needed to perform all of its many vital functions and then determine how much of the remainder to return and to whom.

The whole system would be much more efficient and result in a significantly more just & rational final distribution of income. Thank goodness we have California to spearhead the first tentative steps towards the kind of bold, new thinking on government’s powers of taxation that we so desperately need in this country.

It’s just part and parcel of the semi-conscious notion on the part of the bien pensants that all the money belongs to the government, which graciously allows you to keep part of it. The sort of thinking that calls tax cuts “giveaways” or that they’ll “cost the government” something.

Next step: in 2010, the State of California will issue more IOUs, or figure out some other way not to give it back. Why have a messy debate on raising taxes when things can be done by administrative fiat?

A discussion at The Corner deals with movie remakes, both good and bad. What about operas that turned out much better the second time around?

Iphigenia en Tauride: Niccolo Jommelli (1771) vs. Christoph Gluck (1779)

The Flying Dutchman: Pierre-Louis Dietsch (1842) vs. Richard Wagner (1843)

Manon Lescaut: Daniel Auber (1856) vs. Giacomo Puccini (1893)

Ariadne auf Naxos: Georg Benda (1775) vs. Richard Strauss (1912)

Faust: Louis Spohr (1816) vs. Charles Gounod (1859)

The Barber of Seville: Giovanni Paisiello (1782) vs. Giacchino Rossini (1816)

Alceste: Georg Frederic Handel (1750) vs. Christoph Gluck (1767)

Falstaff: Antonio Salieri (1799) vs. Giuseppe Verdi (1893)

Romeo and Juliet: Vincenzo Bellini (1830, as I Capuleti ed i Montecchi) vs. Charles Gounod (1867)

Fidelio: Pierre Gaveaux (1798, as Leonore) vs. Ludwig van Beethoven (1805)

Where else but the New York Times? 

To the Editor:

The hubris destroying this country comes from the private sector, not government. Constitutional safeguards protect us from the abuse of government power.

Executives exercise unchecked power not only to pay themselves confiscatory sums but also to use corporate assets to finance enormously expensive campaigns of lobbying, donations and relentless, outrageously dishonest propaganda — all for the enhancement of their personal power and wealth while impoverishing the rest of us and undermining our rights.

The central tenet of the post-cold-war Republican Party — the transfer of power from the public sector, where it is subject to constitutional protections, to a private cabal — is as profoundly anti-American as it can be.

“… But don’t question my patriotism!”

The Nobel committee has awarded the 2009 Peace prize to Our President, the Rt. Hon. Abraham Delano Fitzgerald Mahatma Obama for… what exactly? When Charles Ives won the 1947 Pulitzer Prize for Music he gave away the money, making the eminently wise statement, “Prizes are for boys and I’m grown up.”

Next step: the United Nations makes Our President a god, allowing him to be addressed as “The Divine Obama.”

The American political system was, as the saying goes, “designed by geniuses so it could be run by idiots.” But a cocktail of political and technological trends have converged in the last decade that are making it possible for the idiots of all political stripes to overwhelm and paralyze the genius of our system.

Those factors are: the wild excess of money in politics; the gerrymandering of political districts, making them permanently Republican or Democratic and erasing the political middle; a 24/7 cable news cycle that makes all politics a daily battle of tactics that overwhelm strategic thinking; and a blogosphere that at its best enriches our debates, adding new checks on the establishment, and at its worst coarsens our debates to a whole new level, giving a new power to anonymous slanderers to send lies around the world. Finally, on top of it all, we now have a permanent presidential campaign that encourages all partisanship, all the time among our leading politicians.

I would argue that together these changes add up to a difference of degree that is a difference in kind — a different kind of American political scene that makes me wonder whether we can seriously discuss serious issues any longer and make decisions on the basis of the national interest.

We can’t change this overnight, but what we can change, and must change, is people crossing the line between criticizing the president and tacitly encouraging the unthinkable and the unforgivable.

Thomas Friedman, New York Times, September 30, 2009

The Republicans’ health care plan for America: Don’t get sick. That’s right. Don’t get sick. If you have insurance, don’t get sick. If you don’t have insurance, don’t get sick. If you are sick, don’t get sick. Just don’t get sick. That’s what the Republicans have in mind for you, America. That’s the Republicans’ health care plan. But I think that the Republicans understand that that plan isn’t always going to work. It is not a foolproof plan. So the Republicans have a back-up plan in case you do get sick. If you get sick in America, this is what the Republicans want you to do. If you get sick, America, the Republican health care plan is this: Die quickly. That’s right. The Republicans want you to die quickly if you get sick.

Hon. Alan Grayson (D.-FL), September 29, 2009

A few milestones on our girl’s career:

First show: June 25, 1998, Warren County Kennel Club of Ohio, judge Roy Holloway

First points/first major: April 18, 1999, Delaware, Ohio KC, judge Jon Thompson

Championship: May 26, 2000, Winners Bitch for 5 points, Borzoi Club of America National Specialty, judge Christine Rafton

First Best of Breed: August 20, 2000, Muncie KC, judge Virginia Hampton

First Group placement: March 3, 2001, Belle-City KC, judge Pete Dawkins

First Group 1: August 26, 2001, Owensboro’s River City KC, judge Dr. Ron Spritzer

First Best in Show: November 17, 2002, Danville KC, judge Susan St. John Brown

First Specialty Best in Show: February 15, 2003, Rocky Mountain Borzoi Club, judge William Paul Shelton

Last Best in Show (her fifth): September 18, 2005, Butler County KC, judge Susan St. John Brown

Last Group 1 (her 31st): November 27, 2004, Kankakee River Valley KC, judge Luc Boileau

Last Group placement (her 127th): August 21, 2005, Anderson KC, judge Robert Forsyth

Last show (her 388th)/last Best of Breed (her 269th)/last Best in Specialty show (her fourth): May 27, 2006, Borzoi Club of America National Specialty, judge Espen Engh.

MBIS MBISS Ch. Soyara’s Chantilly Lace JC ROM-C

December 19, 1997-September 25, 2009

The morning was silver, the noontime golden and the evening bronze.  But each was polished until it shone after its fashion.

Lacey was our heart.  She was magic.

Retired Supreme Court justice David Souter has cached his apparently extensive diary with the New Hampshire Historical Society with the stipulation that it remain under wraps for 50 years. Too bad! I was looking forward to reading something like this:

July 25, 1993

Came across a book at a second-hand store entitled “The Constitution of the United States.” I’d never seen it before. I flipped through it and found nothing relevant to my present job.

It would certainly explain a lot.

Senator Edward M. Kennedy is dead.

Edward Kennedy will be remembered as a man who overcame an impoverished, hardscrabble upbringing to matriculate at Harvard, where he soon established a reputation for extraordinarily original thinking. Before his election in 1962 he had complied such a record of accomplishment that the voters of Massachusetts were impatient at the Constitutional age limit of 30 for senators.

When faced with a great personal crisis, Kennedy acted with such straightforward candor and courage as to embody that old adage, “Let justice be done, though the heavens may fall.”

In his only run for the presidency, he laid out such a coherent vision of his reasons for seeking that office that it was only through the machinations of his opponent that he was deprived of it.

In his 45 years as a Senator, Kennedy’s green-eyeshade approach to spending and careful appreciation of the Constititional restraint on the reach of the Federal government earned him the affectionate title of “The Taxpayer’s Friend.”

A faithful husband as well as the father of another upstanding legislator, Edward Kennedy was the embodiment of his Catholic faith. We will not see his kind again.