Dr. X's Free Associations

Politics Around the Blogs and Tubes

• Hillary telling fibs?  You'd think she'd have known that someone would check into her claims?

• I wouldn't play poker with Edwards OR Obama, but Edwards suggests that Obama is too nice to play with the big boys.  I've written about the way Obama plays here.

• Why is the Musharraff government lying about Bhutto's death?  New video.

• Here's Huckabee pretending to be clean while going dirty.

• Ed Brayton has been stirring up the Paul-bots:


There's a lot about Ron Paul that I like a lot and I'd like to support him... [but] Over the last few weeks I have reached the reluctant conclusion that Paul is what Sandefur calls a "doughface libertarian." The evidence is clear to me that he supports what I consider to be the reactionary elements of libertarianism, the neo-confederate, anti-14th amendment wing. It isn't just that he takes money from them; he has actively courted their support. Read more here and here.

• Dirty Pipes:  Have you no sense of decency, Mr. Pipes?

Psychology, Mind & Neuroscience Roundup

• What's past is prologue: Providentia summarizes findings from a longitudinal study investigating the relationship between childhood suicidal thinking and adult psychological problems. The researchers found evidence that childhood suicidal thinking was highly predictive of both suicidal ideation and suicide attempts in adulthood.

• The Situationist announces reader selected favorite posts for 2007.  The winners are Jason Chung's Is ESPN killing the NHL? and Emily Pronin's You think you've got magical powers?   Both posts are excellent, but Pronin's is my personal favorite.  You simply cannot understand or appreciate the active, underlying role of dynamic unconscious activity in our lives without recognizing and understanding the central role of magical thinking.

• Psychblog discusses a scandal at the Judge Rotenberg Center (AP, Dec 20, 2007) in light of Stanley Milgram's infamous obedience to authority experiment.

• Does Cymbalta help in chronic pain management?  Grohol talks about meta-analyses.

• Are Machivellians psychopaths?  No, says Dr. Steve at the Top Two Inches.

• Holiday Humor: The Splintered Mind reports that he received this Christmas greeting from his mother, a statistics professor:  H_o H_o H_o!, to which he replied: H_a H_a H_a!

Photo of the Day: New Year's Eve In New York

1950's revellers. Clik photo to enlarge.

Photo of the Day: 1943

Storefront in Natchez, Mississippi.  Click photo to enlarge.

Underdogs and Envy

Laura Freberg speculates on bowl games and why many people like underdogs.

She thinks it has something to do with envy.  I think she's right.  In the 1960s, the expansion Mets built a fan base from Dodger remnants that suffered unremitting Yankee envy.

Quote of the Day

"If the French hadn't saved our asses in the revolutionary war, we'd all be speaking English right now." --Ed Brayton.

Immigration Wars: Making A Case For Guest Workers

President Bush's proposed expansion of guest worker programs has been widely denounced by critics on both the left and the right, but in a fresh analysis, Kerry Howley argues that guest worker programs might be good for the both U.S and for "the world's poorest people."

“Give the Senate some credit,” James Suroweicki wrote in the June 11 New Yorker: “In shaping the current immi­gration-reform bill, it has come up with one idea that almost everybody hates.” Hates was an understatement. President George W. Bush had been pushing for some sort of guest worker program since before the 9/11 attacks, and as that idea inched closer to realization in 2007, his critics grew more vitriolic. Right-wingers who fervently believed the U.S. government would succeed in rebuilding the Middle East excoriated Bush for his starry-eyed idealism, and left-wingers who wanted amnesty suddenly came out against the entrance of hundreds of thousands of new immigrants.

The New York Times complained that no worker should be sent home; National Review complained that no worker would go home. The New Republic said the plan fell within “the tradition of the African slave ship,” and the right-wing Center for Immigration Studies, which wants more deportations of peaceful undocumented workers, called it “morally dubious.”  Continue Reading Kerry Howley (Reason, January 2008)

Bush might be right about an expanded guest worker program being our best alternative. I think that a substantial number of American's could be persuaded to an give expanded guest program a try, but I don't think Howley's analysis would persuade the discourse-dominating ideologues who insist on an America that replicates the America of their fantasies.

For better or for worse, ideologues are defending frames of reference they rely upon to make sense of all things political.  With stakes like that, changing one's mind on a single political issue can seem like stepping into a moral and intellectual abyss -- and no one likes stepping into an abyss.

H/T: Will Wilkinson

Related post: La Shawn Barber's Fictional (ideologically-driven) History of Immigrants

World War IV

The Barrister points to an interesting 2005 article by a war opponent who traces U.S. policy in the Middle East to key decisions made by Franklin Roosevelt and Jimmy Carter.  The author, Andrew Bacevich, is a conservative professor of international relations at BU and a West Point graduate who served in Vietnam.  He was the subject of much media attention in May 2007 when his son Andrew was killed serving in Iraq.

From The Real World War IV:

America's political and military efforts in the Middle East go by many names: War on terror. Clash of civilizations. Democratization. But our author argues that all of these undertakings grow from a fateful decision made decades ago that the American way of life requires unlimited access to foreign oil. Read More...

Photo of the Day: 11¢ a Gallon

NY (1936). Click photo to enlarge.

plus 4 ¢ tax.

Conservatives Abandon Strict Constructionism For "Mass of Organic Utterances" Approach To Constitution

A foolish consistency may be the hobgoblin of little minds, but how should we think about conservative inconsistency on judicial activism?  Is such inconsistency wise, self-deluding or just plain dishonest?

Take the case Justice Antonin Scalia who has no problem with judicial activism when he finds it convenient.

And in this Right Wing News interview, an anti-ACLU attorney cites Justice Brewer writing for the majority in an 1892 Supreme Court decision.  Jay, from Stop the ACLU exclaims:

This is a Christian Nation! And we ought to be damn proud it is! Because it is only in Christian Nations where you will find freedom of religion. We are a Christian Nation, and the U.S. Supreme Court said so. The Supreme Court in HOLY TRINITY CHURCH v. U.S. that this is a Christian Nation. That is our history. The history the ACLU wants to erase."

But a look at that opinion reveals that the rationale offered by Justice Brewer is hardly consistent with strict constructionism:  Brewer wrote:

"These and many other matters which might be noticed, add a volume of unofficial declarations to the mass of organic utterances that this is a Christian nation."

So what are we to think about a right-wing attorney citing this court opinion to support his own contention that the United States is a Christian nation?  Has the right given up on strict constructionism in favor of the mass of organic utterances approach to the constitution?