I haven’t paid  any more attention to the Blagojevich bruhaha than was totally unavoidable—which still turns out to be quite a bit in DC—but I was nevertheless a little surprised to see the blogosphere’s Google-trained legal scholars reach such rapid consensus on Majority Leader Harry Reid’s threat to refuse to seat Blago appointee Roland Burris. There seems to be a general sentiment to the effect that Powell v. McCormack clearly precludes such shenanigans, and requries Reid to seat the guy, then muster a two-thirds vote to expel him. And this seems a little odd, because Powell appears to be about a related but different question. That controversy, like this one, turns on Article I, Section 5, which provides in pertinent part:

Each House shall be the judge of the elections, returns and qualifications of its own members, and a majority of each shall constitute a quorum to do business; but a smaller number may adjourn from day to day, and may be authorized to compel the attendance of absent members, in such manner, and under such penalties as each House may provide.

Each House may determine the rules of its proceedings, punish its members for disorderly behavior, and, with the concurrence of two thirds, expel a member.

But that case was about the “qualifications” component of that first clause. The Court, quite reasonably, ruled that Congress couldn’t invent new qualifications beyond the age and residency requirements spelled out in the Constitution as a sort of short-cut around the expulsion procedure spelled out in the following sentence. But nobody seems to be challenging Burris’ “qualifications” in the relevant sense; they’re judging the legitimacy of the process by which he was selected, given the cloud under which Blagojevich’s (ahem) “selection procedures” lie. Which sounds to me like a question about “elections.” (Technically, pursuant to the Seventeenth Amendment, the governor appoints a Senator via a “writ of election.”)

But then, what do I know? I’m just a Google-pundit here myself, after all. Fortunately, Google also tells me that NYU law prof Rick Hills had a similar thought, so I can assume that if this read is wrong, it’s at least not crazy. A bit oddly to my ear, though, Hills chases the idea of questioning whether Blagojevich is the “executive authority” of Illinois. He concludes it would be pretty implausible to claim that he isn’t, but I can think of another attack.

The question I’d want answered is exactly how broad the power to “judge the election” is.  I suppose it could just mean the power to confirm that the state election board has certified a winner properly. But on a somewhat thicker read, it doesn’t seem like too big a stretch to suppose that if an election were widely seen as riddled with fraud—perhaps involving the complicity of a corrupt certifying  authority—Congress could decline to recognize the result as valid.  The case that gave us the “political questions” doctrine, after all, had to do with whether a state had guaranteed a “Republican form of government.” It’s a little more of a reach to apply that notion to an appointment where nobody seems to be claiming that there was corruption involved in the specifc choice of Burris. But I don’t know if it’s a crazy reach. The underlying idea still seems to be that Congress gets to decide when the election process should be recognized as valid. It’s not clear to me how far that discretion goes, but it also doesn’t look like Powell settles it.

I always feel like I  ought to try to make it out to these “Twin Tech” events for professional reasons but dear God, if an evil genius designed a venue with the goal of driving me to shoot myself in the face, they’d come up with something like this place.  Would anyone with a scintilla of actual taste or style really be caught dead at a place tacky enough to explicitly remind patrons they should “dress to impress”? Just looking at the Web site makes me want a shower.  If the target crowd for these events is 1,500 people who can walk into this joint without suppressing a gag reflex, at least I can be confident I’m not missing anything.

Addendum: Yeah, that last line was unfair: As organizer Peter Corbett notes, there are only so many places in DC that can host 2,000 carousers for an evening. My snark is aimed at the venue, not the event.

As long as I’m amplifying, though, let me offer up a more general rule of thumb: the Poochie Principle. The Poochie Principle holds that the extent to which the marketing material for a place or product feels compelled to browbeat you with assertions that it is “sophisticated” or “cutting-edge” or “stylish” or “hip” varies inversely with its actual manifestation of any of these traits. Note that the single most common place to find 3 or more of these adjectives in conjunction appears to be in condo listings.

I hadn’t realized quite how bad it had gotten. Glenn Reynolds is now apparently linking the likes of this post.  One of the many sad things to watch over the past eight years has been the erosion—and in some cases collapse—of the boundary between sane conservatism and the cuckoo-bananas fringe. I’d hoped the election would at least free people of the impulse to concoct ludicrous defenses of George Bush. Apparently not.

I have no idea what “bisexual” means.

A thought stemming from a throwaway line in a post about something else over at Ars: Are we at the point yet of having developed multimedia dead metaphors? We’ve got tons of prose dead metaphors—expressions that started as evocative figures of speech but eventually lost any link to the original image they were supposed to call up. As some of you may recall, it actually took me a little bit of research earlier this year to figure out where the commonly-used expression “in the tank” came from. We hear it all the time, and we’ve grasped from context that it’s usually used to suggest a journalist secretly wants a particular candidate to win, but we don’t infer that meaning from any analogy to fixed boxing matches, let alone images of diving into a swimming pool. Presumably there are kids out there who, similarly, know perfectly well what “drink the Kool-Aid” means without ever having heard of Jim Jones. That one is probably not quite a dead metaphor yet, but it is certainly what Orwell would have called a dying one.   And there’s all those symbols that the pomo theorists we mostly ignored in my analytic undergrad department loved to talk about, abstracted from their original referents—the chess bishop comes to mind.

Now think about film: It has plenty of its own idioms and tropes too. Has it been long enough for some of them to be dead or dying? Because the other day I saw a film trailer that began with a montage clearly meant to invoke “telecommunications”—a couple of seconds worth of images and sounds that would quickly establish for the viewer that this was about, you know, techie stuff—data traveling over wires. One of these was the sound of an old dial-up modem handshaking protocol—14.4kbps, I think. And it suddenly struck me that, possibly excepting a credit card machine at a deli or something, most people under about 25 wouldn’t have any reason to be familiar with that sound in real life. They’d only know it as “that sound in movies that means telecom.”

So I started trying to come up with other examples. Sepiatone or Super-8 colors are sometimes used to suggest that we’re witnessing a flashback to the 20s or 70s, respectively, and a young viewer now might encounter that in several films before ever seeing a really old photograph or an old home movie. Ditto with black-and-white film, come to think of it. There’s that little snippet from the score of The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly now universally recognized as signifying “cowboy showdown” by people who’ve never seen the movie, or indeed, any old Western. (Confession: I actually haven’t seen that movie, and had to Google to figure out where it originally came from.) You play that in a scene where two guys meet at the office water cooler and we instantly understand that they’re workplace rivals.  Those are the only ones that immediately spring to mind, but I’m sure there are others; enlighten us in the comments.

Update: On the Media hit the increasingly anachronistic use of the vinyl-scratch as all-purpose WTF sound in a 2005 episode.

It’s a week old now, but this Feministe post exhibits a type of category error that crops up in other contexts, so I figure it’s still worth saying a few words about it. The touchstone is this Rolling Stone postmortem of the battle over Caliornia’s Proposition 8, which concludes that the anti-gay amendment could have been defeated, but for a signally inept campaign waged by its opponents. Blogger Cara responds:

I’m personally really sick of the idea that the “gay people just didn’t beg enough for their own rights” argument is a brilliant replacement for the racist one above.  Guess what?  If entrenched homophobia (across the board) and religious intolerance was not an issue, the fact that No on 8 ran a shitty campaign wouldn’t have been an issue either.  And saying “well maybe if they’d just asked the nice straight people a bit more pleadingly” is just another example of the privilege and prejudice.

No one should have to beg for their rights.  Period.  And the oppressor is always to blame for the oppression they commit.

First, a purely stylistic quibble. The locution “[Statement]. Period.” is not persuasive. It doesn’t impress the reader with your steely commitment to justice. It’s just rhetorical foot-stamping, about half a notch up from the clever habit of punctuating an attempted reductio with “hel-LOOOO?”  It really serves no good purpose. Period, if you will.

The substantive problem here is not that Cara is wrong, as such, but that her being right does no useful work. We can all agree—I assume the author and editorial staff of Rolling Stone agree—that the real problem here is that many people are homophobic and unwilling to extend gay couples the equal treatment to which they are entitled. They really ought to cut that out.

OK, waiting… waiting…

Crap, nope, they’re still homophobes. Even after we pointed out they’re homophobes. And added a “period” to make it clear that we really, really mean it. Given demographic trends, we can probably just wait for them to die out, but since many of us aren’t that patient, some more proactive measures may be in order.  For those of us squeamish about pogroms, that probably means some sort of attempt to persuade them to be less homophobic—or at least less disposed to express their homophobia through the legal system.  If this persuasive effort is sufficiently organized, one might even call it a “campaign.” And if we care about achieving equality, it’s probably helpful to know whether this “campaign” is run competently or incompetently, and how the next one might be run better.

Now, to be sure, criticism of tactics shouldn’t be confused with criticism of the goal: Gay activists morally deserve to win, regardless of how well they campaign,  just by dint of being in the right. That and five bucks will get you a venti latte. Given the premise that their cause is just, the question is how to achieve the goal. That question is not answered by stressing yet again, to people who already agree with you, that the cause is righteous. We know that.  And while I understand the desire to avoid any hint of victim-blaming,  surely when one is addressing a sympathetic audience—the readership of Rolling Stone, say—there’s a point where you get past the satisfying but futile exercise of lamenting the stuff you don’t control and focus on the stuff you do control. Supporters of gay equality have no control over other people’s bigotry, except through an effective persuasive campaign. We do have control over whether those persuasive campaigns are run well or poorly.

When you’re talking to the population as a whole, of course, the thing to stress is that it’s wrong to deny equality to gay couples—though just calling those who disagree bigots may be a suboptimal tactic, even if it’s true. When you’re talking to people who are all pretty much on board with that idea, the thing to stress is whether you’re doing a good job mobilizing those who agree and bringing around those who don’t. Morally speaking, you shouldn’t have to bring them around—or “beg for your rights,” if that’s how we want to put it: They should just abandon their repugnant views. Unfortunately, they haven’t. Now what?

In something like six years of blogging, this may be the most spectacular act of institutional tone deafness I’ve seen—certainly from an institution that’s supposed to be all about using new media to advance a political agenda:

This is Jennifer Palmieri, acting CEO of the Center for American Progess Action Fund.

Most readers know that the views expressed on Matt’s blog are his own and don’t always reflect the views of the Center for American Progress Action Fund. Such is the case with regard to Matt’s comments about Third Way. Our institution has partnered with Third Way on a number of important projects - including a homeland security transition project - and have a great deal of respect for their critical thinking and excellent work product. They are key leaders in the progressive movement and we look forward to working with them in the future.

It’s like they made a list of the dozen ways they could’ve handled some minor internecine friction—including just ignoring it—and asked: “Which of these is really guaranteed to blow up in our face in the most self-defeating way possible?”  I mean, believe me, this is not the first time in history a D.C. blogger wrote something that ruffled a feather or two upstairs—I may have done it myself once or twice.  But the response is usually, well, a bit more deft.  I guess they get points for transparency, since normally you’d never hear about the internal “try not to piss on our allies more than necessary” e-mail, but I somehow doubt that this was a principled act of PR seppuku.

So congratulations, Third Way, a whole lot of people who’d never heard of you now know exactly one thing about you: You’re thin-skinned whiners. And a word of advice for Ms. Palmieri: If you’re going to be a “senior vice president of communications” for an institution that communicates through blogs, you may want to take a couple days off to figure out how these wacky “blog” things work.  Here: Just to get you started, I’ll save you the trouble of Googling “Streisand Effect.”

So, it doesn’t bother me especially that Caroline Kennedy lacks “political experience.”  Rah-rah democracy and all that, but on the rare cases where we’re going to appoint someone to Congress, it seems like a grand opportunity to pick precisely the kind of person who wouldn’t normally get elected—someone who’s spent their life acquiring experience and expertise as a scholar or entrepreneur or activist rather than a professional campaigner.

Rather, it’s that Kennedy doesn’t seem to have done much at all with the massive wealth and privilege she was born into. She’s licensed to practice law, but I haven’t seen reference to any significant legal work she’s done. People cite her work as a fundraiser, which again seems to come down to being a Kennedy and having wealthy friends. That leaves her work as an “author”—which aside from slapping her name on a few edited collection of Kennediania appears to consist of two semi-serious legal books she co-authored.  I’ve read one of the two, The Right to Privacy, mostly because I read any book I can get my hands on with “privacy” in the title.  It’s been a while, but my recollection is that it was pretty damn mediocre. It’s not bad if you want a quick, readable layman’s intro to privacy jurisprudence, but I don’t think I’ve ever recommended it to anyone.  There’s nothing there to make you think she’s an unusually deep thinker on these issues. If that’s what you’re looking for, I hear Nadine Strossen’s free.

Oh, FireDogLake:

Conservative ideologues looking to punish workers and the American middle class for auto industry failures are driven by an authoritarian worldview George Lakoff calls the strict parent model.

Senate Republicans see their opposition to the rescue of Detroit as whipping the children. They are not that different from the failed father who thinks his follies can be overcome by beating the wife and kids. Politically, they seek to avoid responsibility for the nation’s economic woes. It’s not the strict authority who’s at fault. It’s the misbehaving children. Conservatives think they must take away the keys to the car.

Did we all follow that one? Failing to funnel billions to a failing business is a form of authoritarian punishment. As an alternative, we’re offered the proposition that we “want affordable, safe, fuel-efficient, environmentally sound cars built by committed workers who are rewarded for undertaking this task on our behalf.”  I think it’s a lot more revealing to contemplate the sort of mindset that insists on seeing every economic outcome as a political “reward” or “punishment.”

This whole familial frame seems to amount to an inverted Gospel of Wealth: Where the 19th century claimed that financial success was a reflection of moral worth, the function of public policy in the 21st century will be to create that symmetry.  The only question is whether workers in a particular industry are naughty children who need to be sent to the corner for a time-out, or well-behaved children who should get a gold sticker for effort.  This is, as I hope goes without saying, a pretty authoritarian frame on either side.  It also seems like a manifestly awful way to make economic policy choices. Barring some marvelous Lebnizian coincidence, the answers to questions about the moral desert of workers in particular sectors are unlikely to consistently match the answers to quesitons about what’s in the long-term interest of the economy as a whole.