Halley is hilarious (and ribald) about why she hates b&b’s.

I hate them too, but my reasons don’t require me to use the phrase “doggy-style.” In part it’s because, as Halley puts it so well, “The kooky couples who decide to run them are eavesdroppers at best and psychotic quaintmongers at worst.” Ok, that’s a tad harsh (but funny), but it’s true that, in my experience, the owners often trangress the lines. For example, the owner of one b-and-b carefully pointed out to us a coffee table book the cover of which had a photo of a baby emerging from a vagina. “That’s our daughter,” she said proudly, leaving it to us to decide if she was referring to the baby or the vagina. Some questions are better left unasked. (Of course, that left our coos of “Gosh, so beautiful!” unfortunately ambiguous.)

Even when the owners are not characters played by Kathy Bates, I have other issues that make bed-and-breakfasts only a little more appealing than sleeping on a tarp spread out in a parking lot. For example:

The owners pretend to be delighted to see you.

You have to pretend to be interested in their collection of 19th century compass tips.

Your strained conversations with the owners come precisely at the moments when you don’t want to have a strained conversation: When you’re checking in after a long trip and when you want to read a newspaper while eating breakfast.

The obsessive orderliness of their house silently rebukes my own slovenly appearance.

Apparently I am supposed to be so fascinated by my room’s knotty pine paneling that I won’t want to watch TV.

Before you leave in the morning, you have to examine your room to see what kind of impression you’re making.

Stealing the towels takes a special kind of courage.

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I enjoyed chatting with a bunch of you during the previous debate. So, let’s do it again. I’ll set up a channel at irc.freenode.net called johodebate, starting around 8:45pm (Boston time). You’re all invited

If your chat software works the way mine (HydraIRC) does, you go to File -> Connect, and then click on Freenode as your server. Beneath that you should see irc.freenode.net. Click on that one. Once the window opens indicating that you’re connected, in the type-in field at the bottom, type “/join #johodebate” except without the quotes.

Play nice. No trolling. And I get to decide who to kick.

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Derrida is dead but not erased. Steve Johnson has blogged a memoir that, in a couple of paragraphs, puts Derrida in a perspective that others have spent volumes trying to get right. Snippet:

Ultimately, I came out of that period with the feeling that deconstruction was ultimately an accurate, legitimate, and surprisingly understandable critique of the way language produces meaning. (Or it least it could have been understandable, if its proponents weren’t so insistent on having their writing enact the contradictory, self-erasing property they were trying to document — which is a bit like a evolutionary biologist choosing to write a paper using strands of DNA.) But I also came to feel that the lessons of deconstruction were fundamentally small ones; extremely important to deal with if you were, say, a philosopher of language –but not all that important if you were trying to analyze a novel, or a political movement.

When Derrida was coming to prominence, I was hanging out with Heideggerians who viewed Derrida as someone who would spew irksome contradictions merely to have something to say…pretty much exactly what non-Heideggerians thought of Heidegger. I never made it over Derrida’s intelligibility hump. In fact, only now am I reading Foucault with the respect — awe — he deserves. Maybe I’ll make it to Derrida before I die…

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I don’t know much about country music, so I can’t tell if this song is any good, but I like the idea of it…

And here’s a one-minute remix of Bush’s performance at the first debate. The remix is called “Hard Working George.” (Thanks, Mike O’Dell for the first link and John Driscoll, for the second.)

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Kerry says that we need to do everything we can so we can return to a time when terrorism is merely a nuisance. Bush says that Kerry thinks terrorism is merely a nuisance. Both quotes are getting play on the media. So, will this be the time when Kerry says, “Are you so unconstrained by truth and decency that you will say anything to get re-elected” … and America listens?

Kerry says we need to return to a time when terrorism is merely a nuisance. Bush says we’re going to win the war against terrorism. Is this the time that Kerry says, “We will hunt down and kill every terrorist we can find, but the day you, Mr. President, stand on an aircraft carrier and declare ‘Mission Accomplished’ in the war against terrorism is the day you let down America’s guard” … and America listens?

The UN International Atomic Energy Agency reports that nuclear materials have vanished from Iraq:

The U.S. government prevented U.N. weapons inspectors from returning to Iraq — thereby blocking the IAEA from monitoring the high-tech equipment and materials — after the U.S.-led war was launched in March 2003.

Yup, we had the foresight to guard the Oil Ministry but not the nuclear materials. It makes me sick to my stomach.

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I’m in SF for half a day to keynote an e-learning conference. Since I’m in a hotel room, the TV is on. I’m watching a rerun of Sunday’s Meet the Press featuring the two candidates for Senate from Colorado, Ken Salazar (D) and Pete Coors (R). Man, it makes me glad I’m from Massachusetts. Based on this joint interview, they are a sorry pair.

(Here’s The Advocate‘s coverage of the show.)

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Outlandish Josh reports that Viacom is refusing to run ads (see one here) from Compare, Decide, Vote that compare Kerry and Bush on some Youth-Oriented Issues and find Bush wanting. Viacom has not said why they’ve rejected the ad. Sumner Redstone, the owner of Viacom, is a Bush supporter.

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Test your luck with Florida’s sample electronic ballot…

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From Friday’s debate:

MICHAELSON: Mr. President, if there were a vacancy in the Supreme Court and you had the opportunity to fill that position today, who would you choose and why?

BUSH [pleasantries snipped]: I would pick somebody who would not allow their personal opinion to get in the way of the law. I would pick somebody who would strictly interpret the Constitution of the United States.

Let me give you a couple of examples, I guess, of the kind of person I wouldn’t pick.

I wouldn’t pick a judge who said that the Pledge of Allegiance couldn’t be said in a school because it had the words “under God” in it. I think that’s an example of a judge allowing personal opinion to enter into the decision-making process as opposed to a strict interpretation of the Constitution.

Another example would be the Dred Scott case, which is where judges, years ago, said that the Constitution allowed slavery because of personal property rights.

That’s a personal opinion. That’s not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we’re all — you know, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t speak to the equality of America.

And so, I would pick people that would be strict constructionists. We’ve got plenty of lawmakers in Washington, D.C. Legislators make law; judges interpret the Constitution.

Clearly, Bush considers the Dred Scott case to be a bad decision by an activist judge who is not a strict constructivist. Actually, the case wasn’t about whether slavery was legal; that was not only taken for granted, it was written in the Constitution. The case was actually about whether slaves had enough standing to sue in a federal court. Chief Justice Taney said not only didn’t they have the standing, but the Missouri Compromise unconstitutionally violated the right of property owners to transport their property — whether it’s a chair or a slave — anywhere they wanted. Scott’s legal owner could not be denied his rights as a property owner, Taney wrote, basing his opinion on the Fifth Amendment’s promise of due process. This is from Taney’s decision:

…Thus the rights of property are united with the rights of person and placed on the same ground by the Fifth Amendment to the Constitution, which provides that no person shall be deprived of life, liberty, and property without due process of law. And an act of Congress which deprives a citizen of the United States of his liberty or property, without due process of law, merely because he came himself or brought his property into a particular territory of the United States, and who had committed no offense against the laws, could hardly be dignified with the name of due process of law…

Note that in this passage, the person being deprived of property is not Scott but Scott’s owner. That Taney didn’t need to explain that shows just how embedded was the Blacks-as-property “frame.”

Then we get this mind-twister of a sentence from Bush:

That’s a personal opinion. That’s not what the Constitution says. The Constitution of the United States says we’re all — you know, it doesn’t say that. It doesn’t speak to the equality of America

Here’s what I think happened in Bush’s brain:

Dred Scott= slavery ok. Dred Scott decision bad.

US Constitution says “All men created equal.”

ALARM! ALARM! ALARM! Is that in the Constitution or the Declaration of Independence? ABORT THE SENTENCE! ABORT!

Go for safety: “It [the Constitution] doesn’t say that.”

Ditch the entire thing. Go back to “Dred Scott bad”: “It [Dred Scott decision] doesn’t speak to the equality of America.”

Taney was an activist in that he could have ruled narrowly on whether Scott had standing to bring suit. Instead, he ruled on the issue that Scott was raising, in effect saying, “No, you can’t sue, but we’re ruling against you anyway.” That’s not a very good example of what it means to be an activist judge. Worse for Bush, Taney’s decision was based on a narrow, literal and strict construction of the Constitution’s meaning.

Anyway, I, like all Americans, was impressed that this shard of 8th grade American History class had remained lodged in Bush’s brain.

Paperwight adds another dimension when he points out that the anti-abortion movement often thinks of itself as modern-day abolitionism. To them, Dred Scott is to slavery what Roe v. Wade is to abortion rights.

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I feel cheesy being moved by the death of Christopher Reeve. With all the suffering in the world, my values must be pretty screwed up to be saddened by the loss of one pretty-good actor who, crippled in a rich guy’s hobby, got medical care reserved for the earth’s elite. Yet his public optimism was a welcome rebuke to our normal values. And, because of his accidental identification with Superman and his determination to walk again, he was in a story arc that was supposed to have ended better.

So, what the hell, I’m going with it: I admire the courage of his values and am sad about his death.

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