« April 2006 | Main | June 2006 »
May 31, 2006
More on the Pope's Auschwitz Speech
"Benedict clouded historical understanding, evaded moral responsibility and shirked political duty.Benedict falsely exonerated Germans from their responsibility for the Holocaust by blaming only a "ring of criminals" who "used and abused" the duped and dragooned German people as an "instrument" of destruction. In truth, Germans by and large supported the Jews' persecution, and many of the hundreds of thousands of perpetrators were ordinary Germans who acted willingly. It is false to attribute culpability for the Holocaust wholly or even primarily to a "criminal ring." No German scholar or mainstream politician would today dare put forth Benedict's mythologized account of the past.
Benedict did say correctly that the "rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people." But he then turned the Holocaust into an assault most fundamentally not on Jews but on Christianity itself, by falsely asserting that the ultimate reason the Nazis wanted to kill Jews was "to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith" — meaning that their motivation to kill Jews was because Judaism was the parent religion of Christianity.
As every historian, and even the casual student, knows — and as the church's historians ordinarily take pains to emphasize — the German perpetrators saw the Jews as a malevolent and powerful "race," not a religious group. Their desire to annihilate Jews had nothing to do with anti-Christianity."
See also John Leo.
Posted by Eric at 9:17 PM | Comments (12)
Dean Esmay and the Revisionist Reconstruction of a Coerced Germany
You'll recall that I argued that
no respectable scholar sees the evil of the Third Reich [as Ratzinger does -- namely,] as the responsibility of a cabal of criminals who intimidated and terrorized an unwilling German people into achieving the cabal's goals.Esmay responds:Nor could one plausibly maintain such a thing, given the overwhelming numbers of ordinary Germans who pulled triggers, typed lists, ordered supplies, "aryanized" property, guarded trains, drove trucks, medicated "defectives," built buildings, extracted fillings, collected taxes, broke windows, stitched clothing, tallied numbers, scheduled shipments, and did the thousands and thousands of other tasks that that built the Nazi machine of oppression and kept it running.
Eric, there are too serious academic scholars who say the German people, or at least vast swaths of them, were bullied and terrified into following Hitler's gang of criminals. A gang of criminals who were never legitimately elected. I can point you to academic sources that debunk the "Hitler was elected" nonsense any time you like. He and his group of thugs seized power, through terror, duplicity, and coercion. They then constructed an image of German national unity that had nothing to do with what everyday Germans actually thought.Why does Dean Esmay wish to propagate the revisionist myth of a terrorized German populace whose will was overborne?
Consider some excerpts from Doris Bergen's "War & Genocide: A Concise History of the Holocaust" (Rowman & Littlefield 2003), pp. 54-57, a well-regarded primer on the Holocaust that summarizes existing scholarship:
Hitler's political position in early 1933 (when he was appointed Chancellor) was not that strong. His party's support had dropped from its July 1932 peak, and even then it had received only 37 percent of the votes cast. . . .To be sure, Hitler and his associates used terror and intimidation to silence their loudest critics or to drive them into exile; Dachau began operation in 1933 as a political prison, not a site of racial extermination.Hitler made his first major move in early 1933 against the Communists, a target he chose with care. Communism could have posed a real threat to Nazi power. Like the Nazi party, the Communist Party had local cells throughout Germany. It was well represented both in the Reichstag and in the streets ... The Communists, however, were an ideal first target for another reason as well; Hitler was guaranteed to have allies against them. Precisely those elements in German society that had helped Hitler into the chancellor's seat -- conservatives, nationalists, industrialists, and military men -- hated and feared Communism. They were unlikely to protest any anti-Communist measures, no matter how unconstitutional or harsh.
...
The Reichstag fire gave Hitler a pretext to dismantle what was left of Germany's democratic institutions. Pointing to the supposed risk of disorder and to his now proven ability to act decisively, he convinced the members of the Reichstag to pass the Enabling Law of 23 March 1933. The Enabling Law allowed Hitler to put through any measure without approval from the Reichstag. ... Social Democratic representatives opposed the Enabling Law, but they were the only mainstream party to do so. In effect the Reichstag was now defunct; its own members [of whom only one-third were Nazis--ed.] had voted it out of existence. Their reasons for doing so varied: quite a few welcomed the new regime they thought would replace the cumbersome parliamentary system they hated with authoritarian order; others felt intimidated by Nazi attacks on Communists and Social Democrats; some hoped to curry favor with Hitler and his people by proving how willing they were to cooperate.
...
Hitler's political revolution was not without violence, but he established his dictatorship through means that were, at least in a narrow sense of the word, legal.
The Nazi revolution had immediate effects on those groups Hitler had described as enemies for years. It was not only political opponents like the Communists who felt early blows; homosexuals, Jehovah's Witnesses, German Jews, people considered physically or mentally handicapped, and Afro-Germans all experienced attacks with the first year of Nazi rule.
Hitler and his associates in the new German leadership struck in dramatic, decisive ways, but they always tested the public response to each move before proceeding further. This mixture of boldness and caution would be typical of Nazi tactics throughout the Third Reich, form its inception in 1933 to its collapse in 1945. Public opinion was very important to Hitler. A firm believer in the stab-in-the-back myth [which preached that Germany had lost World War I not because of military failure but because internal state enemies such as Jews and Communists "stabbed Germany in the back" and surrendered], he was convinced that a disgruntled German public had lost Germany the First World War. He was determined to avoid a repeat of that situation under his rule."
But there is no support, outside of Dean Esmay's imaginings, for the proposition that "everyday Germans" -- indeed, "vast swaths" of them -- were just "bullied and terrified into following Hitler's gang of criminals."
Why Dean Esmay prefers to fantasize about Germany in this way is anybody's guess.
Posted by Eric at 8:50 AM | Comments (6)
May 29, 2006
The Pope's Disastrous Speech at Auschwitz
A synagogue visit last August and recent news of a contemplated visit to Israel were welcome moves; they left me hopeful that my concerns about airbrushing and avoidance of responsibility were wrong.
On Sunday, Pope Benedict visited Auschwitz and dashed those hopes.
His remarks there were a huge disappointment, and a confirmation of my worst fears about this pope and his stance toward his, and Germany's, wartime past.
A year ago, it disturbed me that Josef Ratzinger and his family had managed only an ordinary moral response to the challenge of Nazism, rather than the exemplary response that one might have hoped for in a future pope. It turns out, though, that Josef Ratzinger's understanding of this chapter of modern German history does not even rise to the level of the ordinary. Ratzinger is out at the self-absolving fringes of his generation on the question of German responsibility for the crimes of the Third Reich.
Worse still, Ratzinger proved himself incapable – even standing beside the crematoria of Auschwitz – of understanding the Holocaust as a crime against the Jews. Jewish suffering is just a tool for Ratzinger, an instrument for repositioning Christianity as the true target of Nazi oppression.
Consider, first, Ratzinger's account of his reason for traveling to Auschwitz:
Pope John Paul II came here as a son of the Polish people. I come here today as a son of the German people. For this very reason, I can and must echo his words: I could not fail to come here.This takes the breath away.I had to come. It is a duty before the truth and the just due of all who suffered here, a duty before God, for me to come here as the successor of Pope John Paul II and as a son of the German people -- a son of that people over which a ring of criminals rose to power by false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity, but also through terror and intimidation, with the result that our people was used and abused as an instrument of their thirst for destruction and power.
Of course, scholars debate the extent of the responsibility that ordinary Germans bore for the crimes of the Third Reich. Some subscribe to Daniel Goldhagen's thesis that "regarding Jews, German political culture had evolved to the point where an enormous number of ordinary, representative Germans became – and most of the rest of their fellow Germans were fit to be – Hitler's willing executioners." Others favor my UNC colleague Christopher Browning's views that there was nothing uniquely German about the crimes of the Reich, and that mundane principles of social psychology better explain ordinary Germans' collaboration with evil than any uniquely German tendency to violence and anti-semitism. And some prefer other accounts of the degree of responsibility shouldered by average Germans.
But no respectable scholar sees the evil of the Third Reich as the responsibility of a cabal of criminals who intimidated and terrorized an unwilling German people into achieving the cabal's goals.
Nor could one plausibly maintain such a thing, given the overwhelming numbers of ordinary Germans who pulled triggers, typed lists, ordered supplies, "aryanized" property, guarded trains, drove trucks, medicated "defectives," built buildings, extracted fillings, collected taxes, broke windows, stitched clothing, tallied numbers, scheduled shipments, and did the thousands and thousands of other tasks that that built the Nazi machine of oppression and kept it running.
Yet that is Josef Ratzinger's view. There was the "ring of criminals" who "rose to power," and there was "our people" – the German "people," that is – whom the ring of criminals "used and abused."
Note too the touch of anger and disappointment that lingers in Ratzinger's account of the Nazis' rise to power. Not only did the Nazi "ring of criminals" intimidate the "people" of whom Ratzinger is a son; the criminals also tricked the German people into accepting them through "false promises of future greatness and the recovery of the nation's honor, prominence and prosperity."
Did you get that? "False" promises.
Why does Ratzinger choose to mention that the promises of greatness for the German Volk turned out to be "false?" Would things be different for Josef Ratzinger if the Nazis had managed to make good on their promises of greatness for the German people? The "German people" to whom Hitler promised greatness did not include Jews, Gypsies, homosexuals, the handicapped, or anyone else on the wrong side of a supposed racial line. Why, then, should it matter to Ratzinger – or to any moral being – that Hitler's promises of greatness to the German people turned out to be "false?"
These are troubling words. They are not the words of a moral leader, or of a man who has sought the truth about his "people," or of a man who has done much reflecting on the impact of growing up in a nation dominated and swept along, to greater and lesser degrees in individual cases, by a culture of hatred and racial supremacy. They are the distressingly self-deceptive words of a man who continues to indulge a fantasy that a great and noble German Volk was hoodwinked by a small group of bad men and then forced into atrocity at the point of a gun.
All of this is disturbing enough, but it gets worse. Next consider Ratzinger's account of what this cabal of criminals was trying to accomplish by annihilating the Jews:
"Some inscriptions [on the walls at Auschwitz] are pointed reminders. There is one in Hebrew. The rulers of the Third Reich wanted to crush the entire Jewish people, to cancel it from the register of the peoples of the earth. Thus the words of the Psalm: 'We are being killed, accounted as sheep for the slaughter' were fulfilled in a terrifying way.It is important to see that Ratzinger is here offering a couple of precise claims about the historical intent of those who planned and executed the Final Solution. And the claims are that their intent was essentially theological, and that it was "ultimately" directed at Christianity."Deep down, those vicious criminals, by wiping out this people, wanted to kill the God who called Abraham, who spoke on Sinai and laid down principles to serve as a guide for mankind, principles that are eternally valid. If this people, by its very existence, was a witness to the God who spoke to humanity and took us to himself, then that God finally had to die and power had to belong to man alone -- to those men, who thought that by force they had made themselves masters of the world. By destroying Israel, they ultimately wanted to tear up the taproot of the Christian faith and to replace it with a faith of their own invention: faith in the rule of man, the rule of the powerful."
The first part of this claim is deeply contestable; religious antisemitism had a long European history, but the form of antisemitism that culminated in the Final Solution was grounded at least as much in early-20th-century racial "science" as it was in religious hatred. Martin Luther's antisemitism may have been essentially theological, but Adolf Hitler hated Jews not so much because they were adherents of a hated religion as because they were members of an enemy and inferior race.
The second part of Ratzinger's claim – that the annihilation of the Jews was really just a roundabout assault on Christianity – is shocking. How degrading it is, at Auschwitz, to speak of Judaism as "the taproot of Christianity" rather than as the faith of so many who perished there! How presumptuous, and unforgivable, to see behind the Nazis' annihilation of six million Jews an "ultimate" motive to strike at Christianity! Was an effort to eliminate Judaism from the world not a complete crime in itself?
And finally, notice the tragically self-regarding limits of Josef Ratzinger's imagination:
"The other inscriptions, written in Europe's many languages, also speak to us of the sufferings of men and women from the whole continent. They would stir our hearts profoundly if we remembered the victims not merely in general, but rather saw the faces of the individual persons who ended up here in this abyss of terror.This is the one moment in the speech when Ratzinger leaves the level of abstraction and places a specific human face on the horror of Auschwitz. And the face he sees is the face of a person who left Judaism behind to become a Catholic. So many Jewish authors, actors, scientists, lawyers, doctors, politicians, artists, and musicians were murdered there. And so many rabbis. And yet the face that makes the horror real to Josef Ratzinger is the face of a Jew who converted to Catholicism, and who died not only "with" the Jews, but somehow also "for" them."I felt a deep urge to pause in a particular way before the inscription in German. It evokes the face of Edith Stein, Teresa Benedicta of the Cross: a woman, Jewish and German, who disappeared along with her sister into the black night of the Nazi-German concentration camp; as a Christian and a Jew, she accepted death with her people and for them."
What does this mean, her dying "for" the Jewish victims of Auschwitz? Apparently when the death camp worker dropped in the Zyklon-B, and the Jews in the gas chamber began to asphyxiate, somehow Edith Stein died a more consequential death, a death not just "with" the others in that room, but "for" them. How audacious, this singling out of one ex-Jew's death for special mention, an act of supposed martyrdom, of "dying for" others while everyone else around her merely "died with" each other. How disrespectful of the memories of the unconverted Jews in that gas chamber, those men, women and children who died with each other, but without the significance of Christian martyrdom.
At the opening of his Auschwitz speech on Sunday, Josef Ratzinger said that "[i]n a place like this, words fail."
He proved himself right.
Posted by Eric at 11:12 PM | Comments (92)
May 27, 2006
Malkin(s)watcher Averts His Gaze.
Auguste brought us the Michelle/Jesse ghost blogging story, which, he notes one more time, was not only fun, but true.
Auguste is right. It is true. Auguste knows it to be true, and I know it too. Maybe someday lots of people will know it.
In the meantime, best of luck to Auguste in his future blogging ventures.
Posted by Eric at 7:12 PM | Comments (1)
Ed Cone Blogs Truth. And Reconciliation.
Posted by Eric at 10:19 AM
May 26, 2006
The Truth About Bill Clinton's LAX Haircut
The details of this story have long had the whiff of urban legend to me, so I decided to check it out.
Here's what I found in the New York Times:
"A person familiar with the airport's operation on the day of the visit said that the plane was parked in a secure 'non-movement area' and remained on the ground for 56 minutes, from 4:52 p.m. until 5:48 p.m., while Mr. Clinton got styled.Robert Reinhold, "The Pilot Has Turned Off the 'Shrewd Move' Sign," NYTimes, 5/23/1993, at E5."This resulted in at least two flights being held up longer than 15 minutes, the threshold requiring an accounting to aviation authorities. Both delays -- one 17 minutes, the other 25 -- were on commuter flights with fewer than 30 passengers. Other, larger craft were delayed too, for less than 15 minutes, because all traffic had to be diverted to the two runways that remained open."
I know it doesn't matter. But now, maybe people googling the anecdote will find these facts, rather than just the legend that circulates in Wingnuttia.
Posted by Eric at 8:45 AM | Comments (2)
May 25, 2006
Miriam Cherry Is Right ...
Posted by Eric at 8:25 AM
May 24, 2006
Arbeit Macht Money.
Posted by Eric at 4:46 PM | Comments (1)
Did You Know That It Takes Over Four Years To Get Bald Eagle Parts?
Posted by Eric at 8:45 AM
May 23, 2006
The "Hindsight" Theory of the Japanese American Internment Takes (Yet) Another Hit.
Doing some research yesterday in the papers of the Commission on Wartime Relocation and Internment of Civilians, I came across a letter that confounds that claim pretty nicely. Note that it's dated April 30, 1942.
That's just the opening couple of paragraphs. It goes on to ask that Japanese aliens and American citizens of Japanese ancestry be accorded hearings before being removed from their homes -- something the government declined to do. "To grant to Italian and German aliens a right denied to American citizens of Japanese origin is a type of race discrimination for which there is no ethical justification."
The letter concluded, and was signed, as follows:
As a Tar Heel, I was especially pleased to see the name of Frank Porter Graham on the list.
Posted by Eric at 12:44 PM | Comments (2)
May 21, 2006
Don't Know Much About History, ...
Absolutely horrifying behavior from these trusted allies of ours.
UPDATE: The Saudi ambassador to the United States responds.
All of this chatter about what Saudi textbooks really say is starting to look silly. Somebody who has access to these books -- if the Saudi ambassador is to be believed, any of us could easily gain access to them -- should just scan a bunch of pages from these books, along with their copyright dates, and post them on a blog.
Posted by Eric at 9:47 PM | Comments (5)
May 19, 2006
Judge Edward Becker Passes Away.
How sad.
Judge Becker was not only an absolute delight as a judge, but one of the kindest, most generous people I've ever known.
(Hat tip: Daniel Solove.)
Posted by Eric at 9:47 PM | Comments (3)
May 17, 2006
Howard Coble's Antiterrorism Dreamscape
I mention this so that you'll appreciate the significance of what follows.
And what follows is a frightening glimpse into how deeply into the minds of the Congress's Republican leadership the lies and obfuscations of the Bush Administration have penetrated.
Yesterday morning, Coble appeared on the Brad & Britt Show on Greensboro's WZTK-FM talk radio station. He was asked about the recently disclosed allegations of NSA data mining from the telephone records of ordinary Americans and their entirely domestic telephone calls.
Consider his response, and the exhange that followed. (You can listen to the mp3 here.)
Britt (one of the show's hosts): Before we let you run, I wanted to get your opinion on this NSA story about the data mining. The story that came out last week in USA Today where Bellsouth and Verizon and AT&T have handed over records to the National Security Agency…As confusion and nonsense go, this is a thing of beauty.Brad (the show's other host): Bellsouth denies that they've been cooperating, by the way.
Britt: It took them a few days to do that, but they finally got out there. What do you think about this story, sir?
Coble: Well, gentlemen, I'm not upset about the wiretapping issue. I mean, we are, after all, at war, and we're dealing with people who, Brad and Britt, would like to kill each of you and me, and they're willing to kill themselves. So I'm not troubled by any of that.
Brad: But, the argument would be, none of us want to get killed, and none of us want to restrict the President or the National Security Agency from doing the job to protect us, but weren't there laws that were skirted, laws that were ignored here? And that's what the argument is over. Or maybe we don't have to abide by the law when we're in a time of war, and everybody should just shut up.
Coble: (laughing) Well, I don't know that I would finalize it that brutally, Brad, but I do think we're going to have to be willing to compromise some of our – I hate to even say this – some of our liberties in view of the enemy that we confront, because we've never known an enemy like this. People who want to kill us, and are eager to kill themselves to make the point. And I think we may have to back off a little bit, become a little more flexible.
Brad: I'm kind of surprised to hear you say that, Congressman Coble, only because of the next President being, maybe, a Democrat. Would you be saying the exact same thing if the President were of another party?
Coble: Well, I think I would. I'm a partisan, but I've never been fiercely partisan, and I think I would.
Britt: But this is the difficult part, Congressman, is that we don't know when this war is going to be over.
Coble: I know.
Britt: There was a VJ Day, there was a VE Day. There probably will not be a VT Day.
Coble: I hope there will be.
Brad: "Victory over Terrorism."
Coble: Yeah.
Britt: So indeed, if we give up some of these liberties, are flexible about some of these liberties until the War on Terror is over, when are we going to know when the war's over?
Coble: Well, I'm the eternal optimist, Britt, who always sees the glass half-filled, and I think this war will ultimately be over, and I don't think it's going to be an eternity, uh, it may not be tomorrow, but I hope it will certainly be within the next few months, to certainly no more than … well, I won't put a timetable because I really don't know. But once they can get a government together over there, given that you have four or five sects that don't like each other, and who don't like us, it's going to be a difficult case to make, but I believe it can be done.
Notice first the categorical statement that on the issue of "wiretapping," Coble -- the man in the House responsible for oversight of this very area -- is just "not troubled by any of that."
Period. End of story.
You'd think maybe he'd say something about needing to learn something about the program before making a judgment.
Nope. He's just "not troubled" by reports of government data mining from millions of records of domestic phone calls by American citizens. Nothing to see here. Move along.
Notice next Coble's absurd, reality-suspending "optimism" about the "war on terror." This "flexibility" about civil liberties is just a temporary "wartime" measure, so don't you worry: it'll all be over soon, you see. A few months. Victory is right around the corner.
But then notice what to my eye is the most troubling thing of all. Coble is asked about the likely duration of the war on terror -- the war against al Qaeda, who attacked us on 9/11 -- and without missing a beat, Coble responds with pie-in-the-sky predictions about the likely duration of the war in Iraq.
No worries about domestic intelligence-gathering by the executive branch. We have to surrender our freedoms to win the war on terror. Victory in the war on terror is just around the corner. And the war on terror is the war in Iraq.
All this from the man who sets the agenda for the Judiciary Committee's oversight of surveillance and homeland security.
Posted by Eric at 7:39 PM | Comments (10)
Sue Kunitomi Embrey, 1923-2006
A former internee, she was instrumental in the creation of the Manzanar National Historic Site.
She and her energy will be greatly missed.
Posted by Eric at 11:15 AM
Will You Still Need Me, Will You Still Feed Me, When I'm Sixty-Four?
Posted by Eric at 8:59 AM | Comments (1)
May 16, 2006
Mission Accomplished! Again!
I kid you not.
(The artwork is Roger Shimomura's Justified Internment (2003). You can read more about the painting here (halfway down the page.))
Posted by Eric at 12:53 PM | Comments (3)
May 15, 2006
Go 'Canes!!!!!!
Posted by Eric at 8:59 AM | Comments (3)
May 14, 2006
Thank you, Sir. May I have another?
"Earlier today, Bryan Preston and I traveled to the National Cryptologic Museum in Fort Meade, Md. ... One interesting thing happened worth sharing: When I missed the turn for the museum, I had to drive through the guard booth. Because I officially entered the NSA premises uninvited, I was pulled aside into the parking lot by security. They asked for my driver's license and my Social Security number. And then one security guard looked me straight in the eye, unembarrassed, and asked if I was a citizen.(Hat tip: Jacob, via email)"I couldn't help it. I answered affirmatively and then told him: 'I guess I'm not supposed to editorialize, but it is really refreshing to hear a security guy ask that question out loud without apologizing.' He and his colleague chuckled. Appreciatively."
Posted by Eric at 7:43 PM | Comments (5)
May 12, 2006
Duke Lacrosse Case
I knew you could.
Posted by Eric at 11:18 AM | Comments (8)
May 11, 2006
"Brodeur's Good, But Cam Ward's Better"
Posted by Eric at 7:20 PM
May 9, 2006
Could Wyoming Send a Democrat to the House of Representatives?
The election pits six-term Congresswoman Barbara Cubin against newcomer Gary Trauner, a Jackson, WY, businessman.
She is a non-stop embarrassment as a member of Congress (I say this as a former Wyoming resident). It is true that she has been a champion for the unborn, but for the born she has been pretty much of a dismal failure from the get-go. Indeed, even before the get-go.
More than that, though, she is a hypocrite: elected in 1994 on a promise to serve no more than six terms, she is now running for her seventh.
This is a race worth watching.
Posted by Eric at 8:47 AM | Comments (3)
May 8, 2006
And You Used To Be Better-Looking, Too.
Posted by Eric at 11:50 PM | Comments (1)
Confederate "Leadership": When Was Enough Enough?
Depends what you mean by "leadership." The Confederate Commander in Chief, President Davis, wanted the Confederate army to keep on fighting after the fall of Richmond and after Appomattox, and even to dissolve into the hills in order to engage in protracted guerrilla warfare against an occupying Union force.
It was the military leadership (Lee and especially Johnston, who unlike Lee had a reasonable shot at a successful break for the mountains), who defied the political leadership and decided that "enough was enough."
(Just finished reading April 1865, by the way, which is what leads me to post on this.)
UPDATE: Welcome, Instapundit readers! While you're here, please take a moment to reflect on why Fox News "Senior Judicial Analyst" (and former NJ Superior Court judge) Andrew Napolitano appears to be making up phony cases to support the arguments in his new book assailing the federal judiciary. And why he hasn't seen fit to respond to my requests for a citation to the apparently bogus case he's talking about.
Posted by Eric at 10:38 AM | Comments (3)
For Once.
Posted by Eric at 9:37 AM | Comments (2)
May 7, 2006
In Real Life, Very Few People Are Turned On When Strangers Grope Them.
To be sure, this is one of Eugene's more curious postings.
UPDATE: Eugene has revised his views on the issue, saying that he overstated the extent to which getting groped turns on the gropee, and understated the extent to which it turns on the groper. The thread jumps the shark, however, when a commenter tries to advance the discussion by quoting ... Ayn Rand.
Posted by Eric at 9:18 AM | Comments (4)
May 6, 2006
Carolina Six. New Jersey Zero. Brodeur's Our B*tch. Cam Ward's Our Hero.
The Canes they did a tap dance, on the Devil's game,
New Jersey came to Caroline, they'll leave the state in shame.
They call us Southern crackers, we're inbred yokel goofs,
Can rednecks play the frozen game? 6-0 is the proof.
Ric Flair is our spokesman, we like it just that way,
Wrastlin' and the Nascar are other sports we play.
Good old boys and moonshine, Tarheel barbecue,
Hockey can't be played down here? Son, the joke's on you.
A hurricane can clear a path of misery and dread
Now Carolina's found a place, deep in Brodeur's head.
Posted by Eric at 8:35 PM | Comments (2)
Why Does Baseball Hate America?
(Well, and he or she also wants to know why baseball doesn't love the Confederate States of America.)
Posted by Eric at 11:31 AM | Comments (3)
Hooters Offensively Reinforces Archaic Gender Stereotypes
To think: Hooters, engaging in crass gender stereotyping.
On behalf of all men everywhere, I am outraged.
(hat tip: Back to Square One)
Posted by Eric at 9:16 AM | Comments (3)
May 5, 2006
Judge Napolitano and the "Case" of the Window Washers
The story sounded to me like an urban legend rather than a real case. I emailed Judge Napolitano (at two different email addresses) for information about the case. He has not yet responded.
Here, for the record, is what Judge Napolitano said on the radio. (You can listen to the clip by clicking here.)
Judge Napolitano: Here's the most ridiculous one. Congress regulated the minimum wage for window washers. And the argument by the employers before the federal appeals court was, "Well by definition we stay in one state. We go up and down buildings." And the federal government said, "Well, yeah, but you're in New York. And if you're at the top of the Empire State Building, and you look west, you can see New Jersey. Therefore, the window washers are involved in interstate commerce."I've searched for this case using Westlaw, Lexis, Google, and even the New York Times historical newspaper database (which has the full text of everything in the NYTimes since 1851), and I have found nothing that even faintly resembles this case. (Nor have I found "hundreds and hundreds of examples" of similar cases.)Brad (one of the show's hosts): Oh, stop it!
Judge Napolitano: And the court went along with that!
Britt (the show's other host): Oh my God! (laughing)
Brad: I can't take it anymore.
Judge Napolitano: This shows you the ridiculous extremes to which Congress has gone to justify power never given to it under the Constitution, and even worse, the ridiculous extremes to which life-tenured judges who don't run for reelection, and shouldn't care what the people think, have gone to go along with this. This is what my book is all about, and there are hundreds and hundreds of examples of this.
Let me be very clear here: the scope of Congress's powers under the Commerce Clause undoubtedly exceeds what the Framers might have been able to envision. And there are real cases that illustrate this point.
So there's no need to make up cases. Especially not cases that, at least as presented, ring false.
(Sure, if I took some time, I could probably come up with a rationale for the result in the window-washer case -- a rationale that is based in the ability of a person to see New Jersey from the top of the Empire State Building -- that might pass the giggle test. Let me try: The Empire State Building attracts tourists from all over the country and the world by bragging about the view through the windows of the observation deck; if the windows are dirty, the view is impaired; if the view is impaired, and you can't see New Jersey, fewer visitors will travel to New York in interstate commerce and fewer visitors will pay to go to observation deck; if window washers are paid a substandard wage, they won't work as hard or won't be as skilled; if the wage is too low the windows will be dirtier and the view of New Jersey will be impaired -- and therefore -- the wages paid to window washers at the Empire State Building have a substantial effect on interstate commerce.
Would such an argument prevail in court these days? I tend to think not. And more to the point, I tend to think that the government would never even make such an attenuated argument to support a minimum-wage law for window washers, as there are lots of much better arguments to support such a law that don't depend on seeing into New Jersey from the top of the Empire State Building.)
Posted by Eric at 9:22 AM | Comments (11)
May 3, 2006
Puck Bard
Go Hurricanes!
Posted by Eric at 9:13 PM
Michael Froomkin Declines Role In Security Theater
Posted by Eric at 4:17 PM
The Commerce Clause à la Fox News?
On the radio this morning, Napolitano mocked current Commerce Clause jurisprudence by telling the story of a supposedly real case in which a federal court upheld a minimum wage law for New York window washers on the theory that the wages paid to the washers were within Congress's power because window washers at the top of the Empire State Building can see across state lines into New Jersey. The story was greeted with just the sort of outraged disbelief from the show's hosts that it was designed to elicit.
Here's the thing, though: I'm guessing that the story is bogus. Mind you, this is only a guess, and if I'm wrong, I'll be the first to tell you so right here. But I've spent some time on Google, Lexis, and Westlaw today, and I can find no trace of any such case.
I'm going to try to email Judge Napolitano to get a cite to the case; if he provides one, I'll put it up. If any of you has heard of this case and can provide a source, please leave a comment.
For now, though, I say: "I doubt it." The story, as told, just doesn't sound real to me.
UPDATE: Just sent Judge Napolitano this email via his website:
Dear Judge Napolitano,I heard your interview on WZTK-FM (Greensboro, NC) this morning, and was surprised to hear the story you told about a federal court that relied on the fact that Empire State Building window washers could see into New Jersey in order to find a connection between a minimum wage law and interstate commerce. I am a constitutional law professor and would like to learn more about this case -- even perhaps assign it to my students. Would you please supply me with the source for this story about this case?
Also, in looking over your new book this afternoon, I noticed with interest that you argue that Abraham Lincoln needlessly dragged the nation into the civil war because he could have avoided the entire conflict by simply paying southern slaveowners for the human beings they owned. I take it, then -- your book does not make this entirely clear -- that on your view, slaveowners in 1860 deserved such compensation. Is that correct?
Thanks very much.
--Eric Muller, University of North Carolina School of Law
Posted by Eric at 2:41 PM | Comments (9)
May 2, 2006
Name Some Books.
Posted by Eric at 8:45 PM | Comments (24)
And What A Great Third Of A Century It Has Been!
Posted by Eric at 10:16 AM | Comments (2)
May 1, 2006
If You're A Registered Independent, You Don't Have To Listen To Anything!
After 34 years of college teaching, I thought I had heard just about every imaginable student complaint. Last week, however, a freshman in my 300-seat US History Since 1865 course came in to discuss her exam with one of the graders and proceeded to work herself into a semi-hissy over the fact that we had spent four class periods(one of them consisting of a visit from Taylor Branch) discussing the civil rights movement."I don't know where he's getting all of this," she complained,"we never discussed any of this in high school." One might have let the matter rest here as simply an example of a high school history teacher's sins of omission being visited on the hapless old history prof. had the student not informed the TA in an indignant postcript, " I'm not a Democrat! I don't think I should have to listen to this stuff!"
Posted by Eric at 10:27 PM | Comments (4)
The Puzzling Case of "Mixed" Lawprof Blogs
Larry says that mixed blogging will confuse (and therefore put off) serious scholars, who mostly want their meat without the potatoes. He also says that mixed blogging will likely fail ("tend to fade away," in his words) because it will not be rewarded by administrators, and scholars will not want to spend their time on things that aren't rewarded.
My reaction to Larry's arguments is both agreement and disagreement.
On the one hand, I suspect that Larry is quite right about how and why many academics pay attention to certain things and don't pay attention to others. I'll be personal about this -- this is, after all, a "mixed blog" that often includes personal stuff -- and cite my own blogging as an example. I've been blogging since January of 2003; when I started, I was one of the first handful of lawprofs in the gig. My blog has done pretty well by lots of the usual objective measures, and I frequently blog about law and legal (especially civil rights) history. Yet I have some reason to believe that I'm not really seen as a lawprof blogger at all.
I think my case shows pretty clearly that Larry is at least partly right: I suspect that many lawprof blog readers (and perhaps judges and law clerks and attorneys and other consumers of legal scholarship) don't really know quite what to make of my blog – frankly, I myself often don't – and therefore maybe don't even think of me as a lawprof blogger. It probably doesn't help, either, that a good deal of my "serious" scholarly blogging is about a topic – legal history, specifically the legal history of the Japanese American internment – that legal scholars are likely to place in a "something other than law" bin. So – and I'm just guessing here, but I think this is probably somewhere near correct – the position (or comparative lack thereof) of IsThatLegal in the lawprof blogosphere tends to demonstrate Larry's thesis that academics get a bit confused when they encounter a blog that mixes in a lot of "other stuff" (politics and humor and personal musings) with its scholarly posts, especially if those scholarly posts don't shout that they are conventional, straight-up-the-middle legal scholarship. I suspect that this blog's experience tends to demonstrate that lawprof bloggers pay attention mostly to the blogs that do not present these ambiguities and that give them what they're looking for more efficiently.
Yet on the other hand, Larry is also partly wrong about "mixed" blogs by law professors. Consider Glenn Reynolds, Ann Althouse, Steve Bainbridge, and Eugene Volokh. Glenn and Eugene got into the blogging biz before I did; Ann and Steve got into it after. Each of these bloggers blogs about a wide variety of things. Glenn (who is, admittedly, something of a special blogging case (and I mean that in a good way)) almost never blogs about law. Ann blogs about a dizzying array of things; only very rarely does she post something that would appeal to scholars in her academic field(s). Eugene and Steve both do more blogging in their areas of expertise than Ann or Glenn, but both of them also blog extensively about other things (Eugene about, for example, politics and sex and vacuum cleaners and language and lots of other stuff; and Steve about, for example, religion (specifically Catholicism), wine, and culture). The blogs of each of these lawprofs is likely to be confusing and inefficient for academic readers in the very ways that Larry Solum describes. Yet they flourish; indeed, their blogs are by any measure "important" blogs, and not just outside legal academia. Lawprofs who read blogs are likely, at least periodically, to read these blogs.
Now I will be the very first to admit that one thing that might distinguish my "mixed blogging" from theirs is that they do it better – more interestingly, or more brilliantly, or more eccentrically, or more entertainingly, or more eloquently, or sometimes (though not always) more frequently – than I do. (Note to snarky would-be commentators: I've said it, so you don't have to!)
But I note one additional distinction: these highly successful "mixed" lawprof bloggers all blog from, and to a readership primarily on, the political right. (I usually find Ann's blogging to be a bit more up-the-middle than do many, but a recent poll shows that her readership is far more to the right than the left of the political center.) (And I confess that I'm not a regular enough reader of Steve Bainbridge's to be completely certain that he's to the right of center, but my impression from his blogging during the campaign season is that this is true.)
The couple of genuinely "mixed" lawprof bloggers to the left of center – I'm thinking, I guess, mostly of myself and Michael Froomkin, and I'd probably throw in Ann Bartow of Feminist Law Profs as well -- don't hold a candle to their readership or their influence.
What do I make of that? To be honest, I don't really know. I certainly don't think the legal academy is skewed towards a Republican/conservative viewpoint; it isn't.
The preeminence of right-of-center "mixed" lawprof bloggers may, however, reflect an overall blogospheric tilt to the right; look at the TTLB ecosystem's ten "Higher Beings" and you'll see that seven are blogs from the right, whereas only two are blogs from the left.
Or maybe it reflects something else entirely. I'd be curious to know what you think.
In any case, Larry's thesis – that lawprof bloggers who blog about law as well as lots of other stuff will confuse their readership and drive them away, and that their blogs will therefore fade away – appears to be incorrect, or at least incomplete. Something surely explains why certain "mixed" lawprof blogs are among the most successful blogs in the blogosphere, even among lawprofs and other consumers of legal scholarship, and something surely explains why right-of-center ones do a whole lot better than left-of-center ones.
Posted by Eric at 10:06 AM | Comments (13)
A Pivotal Moment In The History of American Political Satire?
Now, dammit!
(There are 3 parts; the link is to the first of the three.)
Posted by Eric at 9:03 AM | Comments (2)