Gah. Look at that, 91°. Good thing I got the lawn mowed yesterday after the sun was mostly down behind the trees. This heat wave just isn’t breaking.

Coweta County commissioners voted last week to deny a business license to the owner of a would-be “adult” store just across Highway 34 from the Methodist church Wife-o-sferics and I used to attend. There will almost certainly be a lawsuit, but after all this time I’d be really surprised if it turned out the county hadn’t researched the issues thoroughly and determined they were on a firm legal footing. Meanwhile the building still has the chain’s signs on it and I doubt they’ll be removed until either the county wins a court case or the chain’s owner decides not to pursue it. No real way to know at this point.

Meanwhile the Walgreens and Tractor Supply stores nearby appear to be within weeks if not days of opening.

A couple of road projects in Newnan proper are moving right along; the intersection of Jackson Street and Roscoe Road, near the original Sprayberry’s barbecue restaurant, is about to be realigned to meet Sprayberry Road more cleanly, thus affording Roscoe Road the use of Sprayberry Road’s traffic light. For years now Roscoe has come into Jackson Street at an odd angle with only a stop sign in the face of cross traffic that either flows freely, or backs up from the Sprayberry light.

A two-lane highway bypass that has become congested, with frequent extended backups during peak traffic times, will finally see a four-laning project beginning in August, right about when school starts up again in these parts—there is an elementary school right in the path of the project and some other elementary and middle schools not very far away from the corridor. On the one hand the work will complicate traffic flows for months before things get any better. On the other hand, people who use that stretch of road regularly have been wondering for a long time how much worse it could possibly get, and curiosity like that deserves to be rewarded.

Can this really be true?

I haven’t been paying attention to what the left says since, well, ever. Is this really what they’re saying about the Iran protests?

If so, it helps explain the real reason why Obama’s being so wishy-washy about the events over there—it can’t be because he reads this blog and agrees with me that he hasn’t got the chops to handle an Iran crisis without creating a disaster.

In comments on another blog I read where some on the right think the example in Iraq is helping to inspire the opposition to the mullahs in Iran—and I responded jokingly, “ROVE, YOU MAGNIFICENT BASTARD!”

Some Alaska webcam captures here, taken at almost 11:30 at night. Click ‘em for full size.

   

On the left, looking south from the News-Miner building in Fairbanks, toward downtown. In the middle, looking south across the west end of the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus west of Fairbanks proper, overlooking the Tanana Flats and, barely visible in the distance in this shot, the Alaska Range.

At right is one of many views around Anchorage made available by Borealis Broadband.

In a perfect world the failure of a president certainly would mean net negatives for his nation, but we do not live in a perfect world.

In the real world, people vote for politicians for a variety of reasons, never entirely pure ones. Even the best among us harbor negative reasons for our votes, reasons that if fully realized could only be harmful to the nation. In a perfect world we would all be angels; in this world, none of us are.

One widespread force that has gripped American politics as long as I can remember is the trope of “white guilt,” the idea that because the ancestors of many white Americans enslaved and brutalized the ancestors of many black Americans, the former bear a perpetual moral debt to the latter and must forbear under a perpetual burden of legal and political disadvantages meant somehow to even the score. Thus equality before the law and desegregation have given way to affirmative action and de facto racial quotas that harm the reputations of hard-working blacks at least as much as they diminish the privileges, real and perceived, of being white—while often elevating unqualified men over the qualified of either race.

Politicians and race activists have played upon the guilt trope aggressively for years to inflate support for radical political and social agendas that otherwise never would have seen the light of day. Last November the process led to its crowning achievement—the election of an underqualified and untested black man as president who, ironically, has none of America’s racial crimes in the African side of his heritage, and who billed himself as potentially America’s first “post-racial” president.

More likely he is to be America’s last pre-“post-racial” president.

If Barack Obama’s presidency, by failing, finally discredits “white guilt” once and for all as a force in American politics, he will leave this nation far better off than he found it. By failing he can improve his country fundamentally in ways he never could by succeeding.

It’s a perverse and unsettling way to look at it, but we live in increasingly perverse and unsettling times—and as I think I’ve said before, the truth begs nobody’s pardon.

When legalization proponents argue that pot isn’t addictive, I think of how many stoners I knew over the years who insisted they literally couldn’t get through their difficult, pressure-filled lives (mostly putting up with the parents demanding they quit doping and get jobs so they can finally move out of the basement) without it.

Now, when legalization proponents argue that pot isn’t like tobacco because it doesn’t cause harm…

Marijuana smoke has joined tobacco smoke and hundreds of other chemicals on a list of substances California regulators say cause cancer.

The ruling Friday by the Office of Environmental Health Hazard Assessment likely will force pot shops with 10 or more employees to post warnings. Final guidelines are expected by the time warning requirements take effect in a year.

The listing only applies to marijuana smoke, not the plant itself.

Spokesman Sam Delson says the state agency found marijuana smoke contains 33 of the same harmful chemicals as tobacco smoke.

► Calif regulators find pot smoke causes cancer

Plenty of other bloggers are arguing over whether the Obama Administration should be doing or saying more to support the protesters in Iran who are unhappy with the re-election of incumbent President Mahmoud Ahmadamnutjob and the alleged irregularities in how the election took place. I was e-mailed a commentary by Walid Phares that describes how vain it was ever to hope that the election would turn out any other way, regardless of the wishes of Iran’s electorate, and nothing Phares writes surprises me.

The question of whether we should be offering more support for the opposition in Iran is not simple. If we still had a president who could be counted not to screw up everything his teleprompter touches, I would wholeheartedly agree that the entire force and credibility of the United States should be deployed on the side of real democracy in any country deprived of it by its current ruling regime.

But Barack Obama’s foreign policy chops make Jimmy Carter look positively deft, and some of us remember what happened with Iran when Carter was in charge.

For the sake of everyone involved, I’m praying Obama keeps his mouth shut about Iran. That way when he leaves office the worst anyone will be able to say about him is that he was derelict in his duty and negligent of American interests abroad.

Per Backwoods Conservative, my thoughts on what Letterman said about Sarah Palin’s daughter on his show last week.

The Facts: Recently Gov. Sarah Palin (R-Alaska) traveled to New York, initially for an event in Auburn honoring Lincoln/Johnson-era Secretary of State William Seward, who negotiated the purchase of Alaska from the Russian Empire in 1867. While she was in New York she attended a baseball game in New York City with her 14-year-old daughter Willow.

Afterward on his show, Letterman made a joke about Palin’s New York visit, including a line about Alex Rodriguez impregnating “her daughter” during the game.

A brouhaha erupted over many people’s perfectly reasonable assumption that since the daughter at the game was only 14 years old, Letterman had been joking about her. Letterman later issued a grumpy on-air “apology” insisting he’d been talking about Palin’s eldest daughter Bristol, who is 18.

Bristol, of course, was not at the game.

Commentary: Most of the commentary I’ve seen about the kerfuffle has been in these posts at Protein Wisdom by Dan Collins (1,2,3) and Jeff Goldstein (1,2).

My initial reaction can probably be ascertained from my characterization of the facts: that it was reasonable to believe Letterman, in alluding to a sex act that was supposed to have taken place at the game, was talking about the daughter who was present at the game—14-year-old Willow—and not some other daughter who wasn’t. I’m not in complete agreement with Jeff on the significance of Letterman’s “comedy” or his argument that the target of said “comedy” is not the real Palin family but a cartoonish construct that just happens to bear their names.

Even so, in keeping with my general level of apathy about most things, I didn’t get into any prolonged sense of outrage over the joke as some seem to have done. I sent an e-mail to CBS before Letterman’s “apology,” stating my belief that he owed one. Perhaps I should have specified that it be a sincere one expressing genuine remorse and that, if he couldn’t even be bothered to fake that, maybe he needs a vacation back home in Indiana where people are still mostly raised right. My bad.

I did express two additional thought about the controversy in the PW threads though. After the “knocked up” joke Letterman also sniped at Palin’s wardrobe choices, which led me to post this:

To me the funny part about Letterman sniping at Palin’s wardrobe is this.

On the thread linked in that comment, Charles Hill posted a picture of First Lady Michelle Obama in an outfit that must be seen to be believed, yet of which we will never hear Letterman make fun.

On the overall fuss, though, this was my conclusion:

Censorship is out and boycotts are pointless. The only workable response to objectionable speech is more speech.

Which, really, I don’t think Jeff is disagreeing with. I do think that expressing outrage is just “more speech” and can’t hurt.

The expression should be in proportion to the intent, though. Which is why my expression of outrage has been limited to telling CBS Letterman should apologize. I will now express that the apology he gave wasn’t good enough. There. I’m done expressing, until something new happens.

All that being said, I think there are certain things that need to become embedded in the public consciousness about this incident.

1. Regardless of what Letterman claims, the fact is that the Palin daughter who was present at the game was not 18-year-old Bristol but 14-year-old Willow. Letterman’s writing team had plenty of opportunity to check on that fact before the joke made it to air, but they didn’t bother.
2. CBS was sufficiently shamed by the joke they deleted it from the transcript circulated to the media after the show. Letterman, by contrast, was petulant in his response to the reaction from the TV audience.
3. Letterman has never subjected the Obamas—two adults who sought national attention—to anything like the same “comedic” treatment he unleashed on Willow Palin that night.

Bill Clinton became a national laughingstock despite everything his political and media allies could do to protect him. The same, I think, will inevitably befall David Letterman if he continues on his present course.

Which he probably will. If so, then to David I say, Aloha oe.

Updated: Sun 14 Jun 2009 4:30 pm EDT

In the original post I characterized Jeff Goldstein’s view of Letterman’s “knocked up” joke in what might seem a cavalier and unfair fashion, and I want to go a little further into why Jeff and I disagree about this.

Jeff, for those unfamiliar with his blog, is a proponent of intentionalism, where the meaning of any given text is what the author intends—and that subsequent interpreters must take that into account. In Jeff’s view (if I understand it correctly) he regards Letterman’s intent as frivolous and inconsequential—to elicit a laugh by holding up puppets bearing the names of “Sarah Palin” on one hand and “her daughter” on the other. Given that in the circles Letterman inhabits Palin and her family are regarded as cartoon characters, they become convenient embodiments of stereotypes that comfort people in those circles about the tension between their own worldview and that of red-state types who might sympathize more with the Palins about, well, things like this.

That’s all well and good, but I think that it is absolutely the author’s responsibility to ensure that his text reflects his intent, and in the case of Letterman’s joke the facts set up two competing interpretations, which Letterman—if we are to take his subsequent remarks at face value—clearly did not intend.

Letterman, in my opinion, negligently assumed that “her daughter” would be understood by one and all to refer to the one Palin daughter who had, in fact, become pregnant out of wedlock: Bristol. As we know, the references to the context of the events described in the joke do not support that interpretation. Only if Letterman sincerely believed the daughter at the game with Gov. Palin was Bristol, can his explanation be taken as sufficient.

Jeff argues that Letterman was in New York telling the joke to New Yorkers. Maybe Dave forgot about the TV cameras up there on the stage with him, all pointed at him as he told the joke. Maybe he forgot that people elsewhere in the country do still sometimes watch late-night TV, even on CBS. I don’t think it’s unreasonable to expect him to take the TV audience into account.

A previous discussion at PW about intentionalism arose over Rush Limbaugh’s comments that included his famous stated hope that Obama fails. In that case one can only misinterpret Limbaugh by ignoring the full immediate context of what he said during his radio monologue. In the case of Letterman, the immediate context of the joke is as I have presented it: one daughter, who has been pregnant out of wedlock, wasn’t at the game; another daughter, who has not, and who is only 14, was.

Had Letterman simply specified in telling the joke that the daughter he was joking about was Bristol, he could potentially have gotten away with it—at least among the red-state audience. It’s what he should have done, and what any comedian with an ounce of decency would have done.

Letterman, however, was constrained by the broader context from doing so, because as he told his joke in New York to New Yorkers, they—present in the auditorium with him as he spoke—didn’t want for there to be a human face on the targets of the joke (Sarah, of course, doesn’t count). They would have reacted badly to his use of Bristol’s name, perhaps as badly as the west-of-Hudson audience reacted to the absence of any name at all, but for a very different reason.

This is also why Letterman refuses to tell jokes at the expense of President Obama or any member of his family. And it’s why he is increasingly unfunny and irrelevant.

Does the decline and fall of a late-night host mean anything significant to America? Apparently a great many think so, given the amount of attention that has been focused on the joke and its aftermath. I’m more interested in what it says about Letterman’s New York audience: that they’re intolerant, incurious, and uninformed about the very things Letterman jokes about—yet still they laugh.

To them also I say, Aloha oe.

Updated: Mon 15 Jun 2009 10:21 pm EDT

Better, Dave. Still wrong, but better.