I just posted this in Jane Galt's comments to this post.

Jane,

I'm going to ask politely if you can read CalPundit's post, Kieran Healy's post, and my post, and still feel comfortable with the conclusion that John Lott has been vindicated. In order for John Lott to be vindicated, you have to believe that he conducted a survey of 2424 people

- without notifying the Human Subjects committee
- paying thousands and thousands of dollars out of his own pocket (of which he has no record) all for one line in his book*
- with callers making thousands of long-distance calls out of their own rooms (for whom he has no names)
- without creating a single piece of paper that relates to the survey
- even though he's changed his story about where the 98% figure came from
- even though this survey couldn't possibly have been completed by the time his book came out
- even though a perfectly sampled, perfectly weighted study would have such a small relevant sample that he'd have a 20% margin of error
- even though no other survey has found results anywhere close to his numbers

You're willing to believe all of that because one pro-gun activist has stepped forward and said that he was interviewed?

For the record, I've never said a kind word about Bellesiles, and I'm pretty agnostic about guns. I lose my top, however, when I see intelligent people excusing or dismissing obvious academic fraud because it's useful for their cause. If this is the way we're going to evaluate evidence (useful to my side= correct), what's the point of performing studies? We should just watch Crossfire and see who gets the loudest cheers.

*To make sure that no one misses this- Lott defenders have pointed out that it's just one sentence in his book (albeit, a sentence he's repeated 50 times in interviews). Fine. So we're supposed to believe that Lott spent somewhere between $4,000 and $15,000 of his own money so that he could write that one sentence?

CalPundit has a number of good points on Lott. These seem pretty dang hard to refute:

So: 2,424 respondents means probably around 10,000 phone calls. That means 500 hours of calls. I doubt that students could manage to fit in more than 10 hours a week of calls, so this means at least 50 man weeks of phone calls, and that doesn't even count all the work of transcribing the results into a statistical package, doing the weighting he claims to have done, and then producing the final results. And all of that just vanished into thin air?

And don't forget: Lott originally sourced the 98% number to someone else and then changed his mind only in 1999 when it turned out that he had misinterpreted the survey results he was using. He had never mentioned doing a survey of his own until then. What's more, Lott's first reference to the 98% number was in early 1997, well before his survey could have been finished.

ArchPundit estimates how much it would cost to pay for John Lott's survey out of his own pocket. This doesn't look good, folks.

Three things about John Lott:

- For my undergraduate thesis, we interviewed less than 50 participants and produced no less than two boxes of paper. We had to have our methodology reviewed, because we were working with human participants. We had to keep the survey questions handy, so that critics could examine them later. I can tell you that a number of the people who worked on the study stayed in touch with my thesis advisor, out of academic ambition, personal friendship, or both.

The idea that a large-scale survey of 2,424 participants could be conducted and leave no trace seems frankly unbelievable to me. John Lott has proven that he's willing to lie in his own defense. You may think it's trivial; it's certainly not against the law. I personally think that Lott needs more evidence than one pro-gun activist stepping forward to save his bacon.

- If John Lott is right, it makes personal defense much, much easier. 98% of the time, merely brandishing a gun will break off an attack. You don't need to learn to shoot. You don't need to load the gun. You don't even need to use a real gun. All you need is a realistic prop.

If John Lott is wrong, he's repeated extremely dangerous advice in over 50 different venues. This should be of some concern to activists of any stripe who share a genuine concern for making law-abiding citizens safer from criminals.

- What he said.

Regarding Bush's nomination of HIV+ anti-gay activist Jerry Thacker to the Presidential AIDS panel:

Upon reflection, I don't think there's any way that Jerry Thacker's nomination could be the result of a poor vetting process. Thacker's anti-gay message isn't buried in an old interview- it's the only reason anyone has heard of him. In private life, Jerry Thacker may be a conflicted and multifaceted human being. But as Jerry Thacker, Public Persona, he has written one book, and is known for one thing- he's the HIV+ guy who thinks gays are wicked. His career as an activist exists for that reason alone- he's the Good Person who tours the country condemning Nasty Homosexuals for their "deathstyle".

It's like nominating Ward Connelly for a panel on affirmative action, and then pretending that you didn't know he was against affirmative action. It's his whole reason for being.

How could this not be an intentional message to the anti-gay right? If it wasn't, was Bush nominating people out of the phone book?

The Time story that Dubya restarted the tradition of sending a wreath to honor Jefferson Davis was not true. I blogged the story, I should blog the retraction.

Three more lightbulb jokes:

Nelson, the lightbulb joke savant, has two great ones:

Q: How many Howard Finemans does it take to change a lightbulb?

A:His predecessor would have hosted all-night bull sessions on the intricacies of indoor lighting, But unlike Bill Clinton, Bush has little patience for the intellectual jousting of policy wonks. Comfortable in his own skin, he is sure of one thing: the lightbulb must be changed. Those who know him best predict he will address the crisis with the same quiet intensity he brings to his afternoon games of computer solitaire.

Just over two years ago, an untested governor of Texas became president of a deeply divided America. Today, a leader of almost mythic proportions, George W. Bush is poised to lift the nation out of darkness. His journey is our journey. His story is our story. The story of all fifty-something white males with incomes over $200,000 a year.

Q: How many Tim Russerts does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Mr. Lightbulb, I would like to read you something. This is from your own packaging. It's about six months old. It says that the bulb -- that's you -- will produce , and this is a direct quote --"nothing but cleaner, whiter looking light." Yet just six months later, you are not producing any light at all. Again, this was from your own packaging. How do you respond to those who would say the lightbulb said one thing six months ago but has now abandoned that position for political advantage? Also, have you definitely ruled out a run for the presidency in 2012?

I love that.

Reader Emily Jones is, amazingly, the first person with a Noam Chomsky joke:

Q: How many Noam Chomskies does it take to screw in a light bulb?

A: Two. One to produce a 60 page treatise on how the words “light” and “bulb”, when taken together, imply the existence of a bulb that produces light while also asserting that both the color and the phallic nature of the bulb infer the superiority of white males, and another to just screw the damn thing in, already.

Jeff Cooper's back! -ish!

Kieran Healy, a professor of sociology, can verify that even black and white households with the same incomes have wildly different levels of wealth. He also confirms that the astounding 7-1 ratio between black and white household wealth is a median, not a mean. That is, it's not distorted by a relatively small number of extremely wealthly white households. Blacks own less than 1% of the total wealth in the United States. Blacks actually save slightly more than whites with the same income, yet they own much less. I'm stunned.

Apparently a Yale sociologist named Dalton Conley has studied this phenomena in Being Black, Living in the Red (scroll down). The webpage that he's linked to has a number of links to papers and reviews of Dalton Conley's book. They're all well worth reading, but you might want to open all the links to a new window, as they kept crashing my browser until I did that.

This is fascinating:

Conley's big idea addresses the perplexing fact that black and white students from homes with identical incomes do not perform equally well. Why is a white girl much more likely to graduate from college than a black girl from a family that earns just as much money?

That gap in performance -- not only in education, but in employment, welfare and crime -- is terribly disturbing. It fuels racism. At times, I have found myself wondering if my deepest beliefs about equality are valid. I hate the thought...

Conley thought: Why not look at wealth, at family assets, as opposed to merely earnings? Would the differences in academic achievement still be there? He almost dismissed his own insight. A million people, he thought, must have studied this before.

As it turned out, nobody had. And when Conley did, he discovered that if you looked at the assets of black families and white families, or in other words their wealth, their children performed equally in school. (my emphasis)

The problem is, Conley writes in ``Being Black:'' ``At all income, occupational and educational levels, black families on average have drastically lower levels of wealth than similar white families.'' ...

He proposes, for instance, that government policy should aggressively support the accumulation of property by poor people, instead of penalizing them for having assets the way Medicaid and welfare programs do.

It seems so obvious. ``People who have a stake in the American dream,'' says Dalton Conley, ``are better citizens.''

Also:

Without assets, says Mr. Conley, families with modest incomes will always find it more difficult to move to affluent neighborhoods with good schools, send their children to college, ride out temporary periods of unemployment, or escape the terror of living paycheck to paycheck. Black people have had little chance to create these financial cushions, because discrimination and racism historically have denied them opportunities to go to college, move up the job ladder, secure credit, start businesses, build up home equity, and live in integrated, middle-class neighborhoods. "Having parents with wealth is the best advantage you can have," Mr. Conley says. And wealth begets wealth, so the disparities widen with each generation...

Mr. Conley's research has stark implications for government policy toward the Masryks and Avenue D's all across the country. The safety net that merely seeks to keep income above the poverty level is valuable, he says, "but income programs miss half the story." And cash assistance to families with children, he adds, actually discourages the poor from saving by counting their assets against their benefits.

"Our affirmative action policies are completely misplaced," he continues. "We should try either of two things: aggressive, race-based affirmative action policies in the realm of property accumulation, or a color-blind but class-based affirmative action measured the right way, defining class in a way that includes assets, not just income."

In Being Black, Mr, Conley discusses a number of ways to close the wealth gap. Some, such as an annual wealth tax on the rich, would redistiribute assets- and would be controversial, to say the least.

Others would simply encourage the accumulation of wealth among those without it. Some cities have turned public-housing units over to their tenants. Government-subsidized savings accounts for the poor, an idea championed by Michael W. Sherraden, a professor of social work at Washington University, and included in President Clinton's latest budget, have already been enacted in at least 13 cities.

I really ought to get a hold of this book. My sincere thanks to Professor Healy.

Early today, I wondered if it could possibly be true that average African-American household net worth is a mere 14% of average white non-hispanic net worth. That's simply astounding; it means that the net worth of the average white household is equal to the net worth of seven African American households. Kevin Drum has satisfied me, showing evidence from all sides that that's entirely plausible:

If minorities are overwhelmingly concentrated in the two bottom categories — and they are — then it's easy to see that their median wealth is indeed around $17,000. And if the top 20% is overwhelmingly white — and it is — then it's easy to see how their enormous wealth pulls up the average for all whites.

Other charts in the report tell the story: minorities own virtually no financial assets (Table 5); they own homes at much lower rates than whites (Table 8); and their debt levels are about the same as whites (Table 11). Add it all up, and minorities have low incomes, fewer (and certainly less valuable) houses, lower inheritances, very little in the way of stocks and mutual funds, and the same high debt rate as whites.

In the comments to the original post, other friendly people have pitched in. We have to be careful here about the word "average", because a relatively small percentage of super-rich white households are stretching the white average up. If I get a chance, I'll try to figure out the median white vs. median black household net worth. Even so, these numbers are simply astounding. Thanks, Kevin!

Ned Flanders, on the other hand, hasn't done jack for me lately.

Glad to hear it...

A Christian activist chosen by the White House for a presidential AIDS advisory panel is withdrawing his name under pressure after characterizing the disease as the "gay plague,'' along with other anti-homosexual statements.

(via Atrios)
Pro-Bush spin: See? The White House rejects anti-gay bigotry.

Anti-Bush spin: So why was he nominated in the first place? Either:

- they're dangerously incompetent and sloppy in their nominations (this story makes that seem entirely plausible)
- they knew that he was fiercely anti-gay, and didn't object
- they knew perfectly well what he stood for, and thought that they could slide this one in under the nose of the major media (the editing of the Bob Jones webpages implies that this may be the case)
- they knew what he stood for, intended to stand up for him, but thought better of it

Or... what if they knew what he stood for, and intentionally set themselves up for a Sistah Souljah moment? Yeah, that's the ticket. If you see a conservative trying to justify Thacker's nomination with a "rope-a-dope" argument, let me know, will you?

A blog that I've never seen before, UnSpace, asks an intriguing question:

What should the pastor do in the following scenario?

You are the only pastor for a small Presbyterian Church (USA) congregation. During premarital counseling class with five young couples, the question about children comes up. A young woman named Chris speaks up. She’s been coming to your church all her life, and has been a regular in Sunday School. Chris says that she has Complete Androgen Insensitivity Syndrome, and so she and Tom (her husband-to-be) plan to adopt. The class moves on without comment.

After the session, you look up CAIS on the Internet. After a quick read, you realize that Chris was telling you that her body cannot recognize the androgens it makes. Even though she appears outwardly to be female, she is genetically male.

As you question why they never prepared you for things like this in Seminary, the phone rings. One of the conservative elders in your congregation (who is against every sin but gossip) calls to remind you that homosexual marriages are not permitted in the church. If you permit the marriage of these two “men,” the elder says he will “fight your apostasy with my dying breath.”

What would you do?

Read the comments, too. The author, Rob Carr, is an elder in the Presbyterian Church, as well as a former biochemist and Paramedic Crew Chief. He's not just engaging in cheap shots.

In all honesty, I find this question fairly easy, but then I strongly support gay marriage. I'd be interested to see what opponents of gay marriage would say. Maybe I'll ask some.

Rob also had a great post on Bush's proposal to allow states to limit the number of emergency room visits that Medicaid patients receive. More recently, he noted that Republicans and Democrats came together and forced Bush to back down.

(Proof that Bush is a uniter, not a divider? I report, you decide.)

UPDATE: Another harrowing post from Rob that I'd like to mention. He talks about the time that he was exposed to HIV on the job, and how his minister didn't think that it was a good idea to have the congregation pray for him. The sad thing is, I can understand where the minister is coming from.

“AIDS was God’s condemnation on sinners.” Gee, thanks. I’m out there risking my life every time I go to work, and this is God’s “thank you” to me for trying to show His love in a practical way? “God hates faggots and queers. We should hate the sin and love the sinner.” Yep, if I were gay, that would sure make me want to come to this church. “People with HIV should be quarantined so that righteous people won’t get it.” I don’t remember if I actually kissed the lady that said that on the cheek, or if that was just a pleasant daydream.

I see via Instapundit that cartoonist Bill Mauldin has died after a long affliction with Alzheimer's disease. He was most famous for his sardonic Willie and Joe cartoons during World War II, although he had a long career as an editorial cartoonist. He won two Pulitzer prizes for his cartoons. I've seen an anthology of his cartoons, and he seemed like a true original, and a man of deep humanity and sympathy.

More on how the Bush admnistration is choosing Main Street over Wall Street here:

The staff of the Securities and Exchange Commission plans to recommend that the agency soften proposed rules that would impose new obligations on lawyers and accountants, government officials said today.

After an onslaught of lobbying, the commission will complete work this week on regulatory proposals that were required under a law passed by Congress nearly six months ago to address a spate of corporate scandals.

Earlier proposals had been intended to instill investor confidence by imposing the new regulations. The rules would have required corporate lawyers, for instance, to report to regulators if they failed to persuade managers to fix potential securities law violations. The proposals would also have restricted accountants from auditing the same tax shelters they created. And corporations would have been required to spell out in more precise detail how much they paid their accounting firms for auditing and consulting services

But some of the toughest proposals appear to be dead, watered down or postponed, S.E.C. officials said today. Critics attributed the shift to heavy lobbying from prominent law firms, bar associations and some leading accounting firms and trade groups.

Harvey Pitt's still in charge, as you may know. He declined to discuss any of these proposals. To quote Dwight Merideth, "After you shake hands on a deal with the firm of Bush, Delay & Lott, you better count your fingers."

UPDATE: It's worth noting that Harvey Pitt is still in charge because it takes time to confirm his successor, not because of any chicanery. I just wanted to make the point that it's still the same old fox guarding the hens.

Rob Humenik has fun with this Karl Rove quote:

"This president is a populist," he said. "Given a choice between Wall Street and Main Street, he will chose Main Street any time."

Mark Byron has some new lightbulb jokes. My favorite:

Q: How many Kevin Holtsberrys does it take to screw in a lightbulb?
A: Everyone else has blogged on the lightbulb-screwing issue, including Joshua Claybourn and Mark Byron, but I'll put my $0.02 in. In the old days, we just grabbed a chair and screwed it in. We didn't make a production number out of it. Now, red tape have made it next to impossible to screw in a lightbulb without running afoul of some regulation. We've got a bill in the Ohio legislature to streamline lightbulb-screwing regulations, but it's bottled up in committee.

Andrew Sullivan gets it right.

BUSH'S INSULT TO GAY AMERICANS: What on earth is a fire-breathing, Bob Jones University alum doing on the presidential commission on AIDS?... They appointed him how long after the Lott affair? (Did he also endorse their ban on inter-racial dating at the time?) I'm sorry, but if he's appointed, I can't see how any self-respecting advocate for public health can stay on the same board. Or any self-respecting gay man or woman either.

Atrios has a lot more information on Jerry Thacker, and the Slactivist has some quotes from his book:

To understand the heaviness of this topic, you must understand a bit of the mindset of right-wing fundamentalist Christians. The sin of homosexuality has long been one of those considered worthy of death. That was the Old Testament Jewish response to sexual immorality with either an adulterous man or woman or with two men engaged in sex. In our time, many pastors still believe that the only way AIDS can be transmitted is through these heinous activities. In a way, admitting that you have been exposed is admitting that you are a sinner of the worst possible magnitude...

While I do not claim to be a psychologist or psychiatrist, it is my understanding that homosexual conduct is a learned habit -- an acquired sinful lifestyle. As such, its remedy includes the recognition of it as a sin, the recognition that it is the product of a process of wicked thinking, and something to be repented of. My first response to a person who would come to me and tell me of their homosexuality would be to arrange counseling for them with a qualified Christian nouthetic counselor. Since the patterns of sin that lead to such a lifestyle are not instantly developed, they probably will require time to be reversed. ...

What in the world could someone who thinks gays are wicked, and calls homosexuality a "deathstyle," add to an AIDS commission? There's one and only one reason for this appointment; to wink at bigots who hate gay people, and to let them know that the President feels their pain. Sorry, moderate Republicans, but this is your guy.

The Congressional switchboard number is 800-839-5276.

From Slate's Today's Papers:

The 10th paragraph of USAT's lead briefly mentions: "Median net worth for whites rose 17 percent to $120,900 but fell 4.5 percent to $17,000 for minorities." If those stats are correct, they deserve a lot more attention.

Can that be right? According to the chart in this story, African-American household income is 56% of white non-hispanic household income, but African-American net worth is only 14% of white non-hispanic net worth?

According to a quick google search, the 2000 census showed that nationally, 73% of whites own their homes, compared with 47% of African-Americans. It seems likely that houses owned by whites are more valuable, on average, than houses owned by blacks. According to this story that's true in Minnesota, but the difference in median home value is "only" $122,000 for white-owned homes vs. $106,400 for black owned homes. I wasn't able to find home values by race on the Census page. It's even more confusing when you look at other minorities, who tend to come in somewhere between blacks and whites.

I'm sure that there's a tremendous racial disparity in ownership of other financial assets, and I'm sure that the relative percentage of very weathy whites pulling up the average is greater than the proportional percentage of very wealthy blacks pulling up the average. But still, these numbers are simply amazing...

Professor DeLong? Max? Megan? Kevin? Flanders?

Greg Beato has been in correspondance with Mary Rosh, in the interest of finding out how many John Lotts it takes to screw in a lightbulb.

To me, the funniest part of John Lott's online alter ego "Mary Rosh" is the gushing review that he wrote of his own book. For posterity:

(five stars) SAVE YOUR LIFE, READ THIS BOOK -- GREAT BUY!!!! August 18, 1999

If you want to learn about what can stop crime or if you want to learn about many of the myths involving crime that endanger people's lives, this is the book to get. It was very interesting reading and Lott writes very well. He explains things in an understandable commonsense way. I have loaned out my copy a dozen times and while it may have taken some effort to get people started on the book, once they read it no one was disappointed.If you want an emotional book, this is not the book for you. If you want a book with the facts, a book that tells you the benefits and risks from protecting yourself and your family from crime, a book that will explain the facts in a straightforward and clear way, this is the book to get.This is by far the largest most comprehensive study on crime, let alone on gun control. Professor Lott examines crime rates as well as accidental gun deaths and suicides for all 3,056 counties in the United States by year for 18 years. By comparison, the previous largest study on gun control examined 170 cities within one single year 1980. Lott examined 54,000 observations and the previous largest study looked at 170 observations. Lott used all the FBI data that was available from the first year that they released the county level data to the last year that they had put it out when he wrote his book. Unlike other studies, Lott used all the data that was available. He did not pick certain cities to include and others to exclude. No previous study had accounted for even a small fraction of the variables that he accounted for.

Tim Dunlop has a damn good question for Rush Limbaugh:

Why the hell isn't laughing about hungry children in this country unAmerican?

Do you have an insouciant pet?

Have you ever sat through Snow Dogs, Cats & Dogs, or Men in Black II, thrilling to the antics of these wild animals and musing: I wish I could get a piece of that action! Well, it's possible that, right now, you might be living with an insouciant animal -- one that could soon be earning tens of thousands of dollars starring in crowd-pleasing comedies and kicking Jerry O'Connell in the nuts!

From today's Howard Kurtz profile of Paul Krugman:

Online columnist Andrew Sullivan, a frequent Krugman antagonist, derides "the extreme partisanship, the self-righteousness and the moral condescension toward his opponents, who are obviously evil to him."

If you listen closely, you can actually hear Irony dying.

I blogged the Rumsfeld statement about Vietnam draftees adding no value, so it's only fair to blog the Rumsfeld apology. It's a fairly typical politician's "I'm sorry to anyone who was offended for what you thought I said (but I didn't actually say)." But I don't doubt that he's sincere, and in this life, you take what you can get.

Wow, I'm finding myself really liking Keith Richards!

I'm sorry that it's taken me this long to welcome Ginger back.

Atrios can make me laugh and cry within three posts.

$3 million and one year to investigate September 11th. As compared to, say, $5 million and 2 years to study legalized gambling. $3 million is a little more than 1/10th of 1% of the cost of a single stealth bomber, which keep us safe at airshows and Superbowls, but otherwise aren't very useful. This, after a year of obstructive tactics, insisting no independent investigation was necessary, picking Henry Kissinger to head the commission...

You know, why even bother? An oversized foam middle finger to the families of the victims would get the same job done, and at a tiny fraction of the cost. Christ, this makes me angry.

UPDATE: Before someone calls me on it, there are other sources which say that a stealth bomber costs less than the source I've linked to- as little as $1 billion per plane. I don't know who's right, and I don't want to argue about it. I will argue that you can't solve problems that you refuse to look at. More specifically, I will argue the Administration's fight against an honest investigation into failures that led to September 11th is an appalling slap in the face, and it's going to cost more American lives.

I've commented in the past that lawyers and published writers have an annoying tendency to write circles around the rest of us bloggers. Martin Kimel* is both. Well worth reading. He's a reasoned centrist with an impressive ability to avoid demonizing his opponents, and many of his articles that he links to (this one, for example) are very good.

Now, if he only had permalinks...

* I'm an idiot, and spelled his name wrong.

If the generous person who sent me a gift from my wish list would like to email so that I can thank him individually, that would be great. My jaw hit the ground when I saw it. Thanks so much!

Jay Caruso wants to know why radio is so bad. I blame the white man.

No, actually, I blame "independent promotion." I put this in his comments:

Independent promoters are crooks that the labels pay to get songs on the radio. Payola never really went away, it just got outsourced. Here's a short introduction.

For more details, go check out Fredric Dannen's "Hit Men." It starts with an incredible anecdote:

Pink Floyd's The Wall was the number one album in the country from January to May 1980, and Pink Floyd was doing a small tour to support it. Because of the cost of the elaborate stage show, it was only being put on in four cities- London, Berlin, and New York and Los Angeles. Demand was high, and the five concerts in L.A. sold out, despite very high ticket prices.

"Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2", the first single off of The Wall, was the number one song in markets all across the country, but the Top 40 stations in Los Angeles refused to play it at all, despite the presence of the smash-hit sold out tour in their city. It was a total blackout.

The reason was that CBS Records had refused to pay the independent promoters (abbreviated as "gangsters") to promote this single in L.A. They wanted to see if the combined forces of a hit album, a hugely successful tour, and massive media attention would be a sufficiently powerful incentive to the radio stations that they would ignore the gangsters for once. The stations refused to cross the gangsters. CBS finally caved, paid the gangsters, and "Another Brick in the Wall, Part 2" hit number one that afternoon.

In the end, major labels never beat the gangsters. However, they succeeded in making them a "recoupable" expense- that is, an expense that artists themselves have to pay for out of their $.12 per album royalties.

MORAL: Everyone in the major-label music industry is corrupt and evil except Willy Nelson.

UPDATE: And Lyle Lovett.

Paul Krugman:

A liberal and a conservative were sitting in a bar. Then Bill Gates walked in. "Hey, we're rich!" shouted the conservative. "The average person in this bar is now worth more than a billion!" "That's silly," replied the liberal. "Bill Gates raises the average, but that doesn't make you or me any richer." "Hah!" said the conservative, "I see you're still practicing the discredited politics of class warfare."

Heh heh.

It's not the biggest news of the day, but the world is distinctly poorer for the loss of Al Hirschfeld. I feel like a glamourous old nightclub has just shut down, leaving the city a little bleaker. Sigh.

I haven't finished the Lighbulb Variations webpage. I'll let you know.

Meanwhile, here are a few of my favorites that I haven't put up yet:

Stephen Aquila at Hoosier Review:

Q: How many Antonin Scalias does it take to change a light bulb?
A: None. They didn't have working light bulbs when the Constitution was written, so it was obviously meant to be read by daylight or candlelight only.

Hesiod has a den Beste joke that (true to form) you'll have to set aside some time to read.

E. Rush Carskadden at Freeside has a series of liberal jokes., and some are pretty dang funny. My favorite:

Q: How many liberals does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Burning out is part of that lightbulb's culture. Who are you to ask for change?

Stephen at doggerelpundit writes:

How many Glenn Reynolds to change a light bulb?

More than one, surely. But the hit logs show a single changer of twenty-six bulbs between 4:35 and 5:06 am, Tennessee time. Interleaved in the changes were 3 posts to Instapundit, a TechCentral article, a single post to GlennReynolds.com, plus a lecture prep, a read/grade of 15 bluebooks, and a band practice. A post on the bulb changes was up by 5:15, with Updates at 5:41 and 6:02. Heh. Indeed.

New Dem writes:

Q: How many Mickey Kauses does it take to change a lightbulb?
A. I predict this broken lightbulb story will be off the front page by Thanksgiving.

And reader Nelson, who has a real knack for this, writes:

Q: How many Michael Kellys does it take to change a light bulb?

A. The conventional wisdom among the braying Washington elites is that the light bulb needs changing. But as sophisticated society works itself into a tizzy, it’s worth considering some facts. In 1999, when the light bulb was originally installed, it was apparent to all but the most cretinous observers that some day it would have to be replaced. There was only one responsible option: Destroy the fixture. But remember, this was also the era of President Beezelbub Clinton. Our repulsive leader was too interested in wallowing in his own filth to be distracted by such petty concerns as the continued existence of the nation. In the most disgusting act of perfidy in the history of mankind, the obscene boy-king installed the light bulb. Today, the liberal jackaninnies and simpletons that populate the media can be counted on to make their feeble defenses on his behalf. These witless apologists are nothing more than Golliwogs and Mugwumps. Bazzomba! Habblubaoa!! ZZHHablsibasap! ….

**********************

Q: How many Josh Marshalls does it take to change a lightbulb?

A: Although inexplicably ignored by the Washington press corps, the administration’s failure to foresee the need to change the light bulb represents a misjudgment of colossal proportions.

More on this later.

There are always those who take it upon themselves to defend God, as if Ultimate Reality, as if the sustaining frame of existence, were something weak and helpless. These people walk by a widow deformed by leprosy begging for a few paise, walk by children dressed in rags living in the street, and they think, "Business as usual." But if they perceive a slight against God, it is a different story. Their faces go red, their chests heave mightily, they sputter angry words. The degree of their indignation is astonishing. Their resolve is frightening.

These people fail to realize that it is on the inside that God must be defended, not on the outside. They should direct their anger at themselves. For evil in the open is but evil from within that has been let out. The main battlefield for good is not the open ground of the public arena but the small clearing of each heart. Meanwhile, the lot of widows and homeless children is very hard, and it is to their defence, not God's, that the self-righteous should rush.

Yann Martel, Life of Pi. Bit of a strawman argument, I realize, but still well worth reading every now and again.

On second thought, is it such a strawman? We all know that Bush recently declared "Sanctity of Life Day" to coincide with the anniversary of Roe v. Wade. I don't talk about abortion much, because what's the point, but I've always felt that the pro-life movement have their hearts in the right place. I believe in a woman's right to choose, but from their perspective, they're trying to save lives, and you've got to respect that.

Meanwhile...

In a reversal, the Bush administration has ruled that managed care organizations can limit and restrict coverage of emergency services for poor people on Medicaid.

The new policy, disclosed in a recent letter to state Medicaid directors, appears to roll back standards established in a 1997 law and in rules issued by the Clinton administration in January 2001 and by the Bush administration itself in June 2002.

Josh Chafetz at Oxblog, no bleeding heart, says it in more measured tones than I would:

This policy shift is disgusting. There's no excuse for a state's limiting the amount of emergency care that Medicaid recipients can get, and so there's no excuse for the Administration's decision to allow states to put up such limits...

Relatedly, I don't see how the Administration can claim that its policy shift is legal. If, as the NYT article states, "Congress ... stipulated that managed care organizations had to provide coverage for Medicaid patients in any situation that a 'prudent layperson' would regard as an emergency" in the 1997 legislation, then the Administration can't just change that with a letter from its Medicaid head. (Of course, this wouldn't be the first time that this Administration has tried to do an executive end-run around a law.)

This is shameful, and it's the antithesis of what compassionate conservatism is supposed to be.

Meanwhile, in the great state of Texas, many of the lucky duckies who are getting state subsidies on AIDS medication are getting kicked off. If this initiative passes, only people earning less than $12,404 will be eligible for assistance.

After months of calling the state health department and swamping the agency with more than 800 letters, AIDS patients and their families will converge on a public hearing in Austin today to describe how proposed AIDS medication cuts would shorten their lives...

To obtain subsidized drugs, the cutoff is now 200 percent of the federal poverty line -- $17,720 for an individual. But state health officials first deduct the cost of the drugs, which can easily top $10,000 annually, before determining who qualifies.

Under the proposed change, the cutoff is 140 percent of the federal poverty line -- $12,404 for an individual -- and medication costs can't be deducted, making that cutoff absolute.

You know, we in Texas have a $10 billion budget shortfall. This doesn't exactly make us unique; a lot of politicians gorged on tax cuts and/or spending in the 90s, and Governor Bush was no exception. It's a long, ignoble story, and Charles Kuffner has been all over this. It's time to pay the piper. I understand and accept this. But...

Maybe I don't understand the Texas legislative process. But I know that the new Republican-controlled legislature only reconvened on Tuesday, January 16. This story is from Thursday. It appears that right out of the gates, the reconvened legislature immediately made it a priority to kick low-income AIDS patients off of their drugs. Job one.

Incidentally, if you have a strong stomach, you can see what some of the compassionate conservatives at Free Republic think about this story. Some of them... may God have mercy on their souls, because I wouldn't.

The Catholic Archdiocese of Boston still finds ways to surprise. From Brad DeLong:

I must say that I had always thought that by the time I reached 40 I would have heard about or thought of every possible kind of sin. But the Catholic Archdiocese of Boston has proved me wrong. I had never thought of:

- "Reaching out" to the victims of sexual abuse by priests, telling them that the church cares about them, suggesting that they get therapy and counseling.
- Offering to pay for the therapy.
- Then subpoenaing the therapists, trying to break the confidentiality of the patient-therapist relationship, in the hope of learning something (a) that will weaken the victim's case in court, or (b) that would be so embarrassing if it were revealed in court that the plaintiff can be induced to drop or cheaply settle his or her legal case.

I am dumbfounded. This is betrayal of a high order: Dante's Inferno Tenth-Circle buried-in-ice-for eternity order. Moreover, this is something that I would never have thought of doing in ten-thousand years.

If this strategy had occurred in a novel or TV show, I wouldn't have belived it. I can't help but think of the old (I think) Eddie Murphy line about the guy who shot the Pope: "What's the idea? You want to go to Hell, and you don't want to wait in line?"

Andrew "Poor Man" Northrup wants your non-fiction reading suggestions. I did this a while ago for fiction and got a 300-book-long reading list. I loved it. So go pitch in.

I've had a small epidemic of reading other people's posts and finding that they'd written something that I wish that I had written. I was pleasantly surprised to see, via Rob Lyman, that Charles Krauthammer has already captured my sentiments about Martin Luther King's legacy of nonviolence.

Perhaps even more important than the civil rights movement's ends, however, were its means. That was its other great gift to America. The civil rights movement transformed nonviolence from a notion into a norm--an act of astonishing political creativity whose legacy has been so thoroughly assimilated into contemporary American life that today we hardly appreciate it.

The fact is, however, that the civil rights movement forever set the standard for social transformation in America. We owe to King--his vision, his courage and his discipline--the fact that every subsequent social movement from environmental to gay rights to antiwar has almost automatically embraced nonviolence. Political violence has, of course, not been abolished. But the nobility and success of the civil rights movement has delegitimized the very idea of political violence--giving us a country that now routinely achieves profound social change in an atmosphere of comity and mutual respect rarely seen anywhere else in the world.

That's just about perfect. And now I don't have to write it.

On a less serious note, Charles Murtaugh says another something I wish I'd said:

Can I just say how annoying this tendency is in general on the part of conservatives? Even though I agree with most of the Right when it comes to Iraq, it still bothers me that they consider liberal celebrities to be somehow unserious on this and other issue, de facto, while conservative celebrities are American Icons. What the fuck does Charlton Heston know about anything, anyway? And did I blink or something during the '80s, or wasn't the country being led by someone who owed all his name-recognition to a career in Hollywood?

For that matter, what does comedian Larry Miller know that earned him a place as a Weekly Standard columnist?

I might have picked up some new readers last week. Hello, folks! Good to have you here! I should explain that most of the time, this is more or less just another left-leaning political blog. I don't generally post long strings of jokes. The Lightbulb Variations Museum should be finished tomorrow, and I have a few more jokes to post at that point. Today, I shoulldn't be posting at all, really; it's going to be another busy day. So I'd just like to say a few words about Martin Luther King when I get my thoughts together, and then I'm going to stay off the dang internet for the day.

Until then, there are a few posts I'd like to acknowledge.

Dwight Merideth at P.L.A. has a measured post on defensive medicine that is dynamite. I had half-written something like it in my head, but Dwight did it far better than I would have.

Jim Henley at Unqualified Offerings pulls a similar trick for James Lileks bizarre stance that John LeCarre has no right to opine about politics.

Digby's Hullabaloo is great. Really, really great. Check this out.

He also provides this link to the Daily Kos. I am friggin' dying to hear conservatives defend Dubya's decision to restart the tradition of honoring Jefferson Davis's grave. His father had the sense to end this tradition, but Bush II decided that honoring the leader of the rebels who killed countless American soldiers in the interest of preserving slavery was good politics. I find it difficult not to be hyperbolic about my disgust.

Tim Dunlop of The Road to Surfdom has a great post to a hypothetical (?) person contemplating starting a blog. It nicely complements this very practical post by Jane Galt. Tim captures a number of points about blogging better than anyone I've seen before. This is especially nice:

Whenever someone does something in public, including blogging, there is an element of performance involved, and you should remember this. Don’t be fooled by the first name basis, the colloquial language and the pop culture references. All of this can give blogging an air of intimacy and informality, which it definitely has, but it is a public intimacy and therefore somewhat artificial. One of the interesting things about blogging is that it is a new attempt to define the line between public and private, and it is inventing as it goes along new ways for ordinary people to be public, one of its most valuable, if underrated achievements.

If you keep this in mind, this aspect of performance, this layer of artificiality, it might offer you some comfort when someone does attack what you’ve written. Remember, at some level, there is an element of exaggeration, of impersonality in what they say about you -- they are putting on a show. Their public self is actually attacking your public self and there is therefore an element of remove in the exchange. In public exchanges, this is right and necessary because with strangers we don’t have the bonds of genuine intimacy to help smooth over criticisms. We need to find ways to disagree with strangers and to the extent that blogging facilitates this, it is performing a service. Perhaps this will help insulate you against some of the criticism you will inevitably get.

He says it's the first in a series. I can't wait.