What is she prattling on about now?

The craziest redhead since Lucille Ball wades into the political fray again, with her tenured intellectual legal insight.

This appears to be a live-feed of thoughts, as she reads a newspaper column. (I haven't even read this column yet, but I've got to get in on this "Liberal Suicide March" action. Link! )


I can't keep up: for Obama, against? Conservative, or typical Madison lib who just happens to still drive a car and eat red meat? (I think it evolved out in the Next Generation...)

Sadly, this morning's blog post does nothing but "obfuscate" matters.

I've found, when excerpting large chunks, best keep clear who's writing. Particularly when the writers' voice are not clearly identifiable.

Is the good professor at Wisconsin agreeing with Brooks? (column paraphrase: The Dems are beating themselves again, with no clue as to working realities of life.)

Or is she still still a-hopin', a-wishin' and (definitely not) a-prayin' that Barack Obama will be the one, the secular savior that will be able to easily wipe clean our messes, put a smile on the childrens' faces, and send us all out to play in diverse, Benneton-clad groups in tall grasses under sunny skies full of fluffy white clouds?

I mean, come on.

She lost me with the silly justification of the two GWB votes, way back when. (I believe there were ways of intellectually justifying a non-Kerry vote, but that was another road not taken.)

This shared momma-son tweet, from the morning-after the election still makes me cringe a bit (too close for comfort?, too ignorant of the normalities of long-time integrated progress to realize the destruction of elevating a junior senator because of the historical first blackness thing? I don't know, but I know my instincts... that was just as creepy then as it is today, and these are the cream-of-the-crop of our educated lawyer class ;-)


So is it that my former law professor at UW is just playing an entertainment game? Doesn't matter what she's writing, so long as she can rip at a big NYT columnist -- Brooks here, Dowd throughout?

Criticism is cool, don't get me wrong. Educated criticism a rarity. But to play under the banner of educated criticism, and to have no consistency or even a credible political/legal/intellectual "voice" established yet... hmm. (Btw, did the new husband -- landscaper and creative financier, I believe... -- write this one then, or is it the law professor's thoughts Instapundit Glenn Reynolds linked to?)

Maybe I'm just lagged from a car journey yesterday, but that's too complicated to follow for too little intellectual payoff. How bout this? :

Sports Tips for Older Girls:

1) It's fine to appreciate good play, no matter which side makes it. It's good sportsmanship even. Fine also to have fair criticism of play, again on either side.

What really makes you look bad -- a newbie fan, if you will -- is shifting your allegiances here and there throughout the season (or even the game itself, if you'd have the audacity). You study the players, and (naturally to most?) develop your hunches and then stick to them: if your team wins, they win.

I mean, nobody likes a cheerleader who can't figure out the basics of the game enough to make up her mind and stick to it -- for a season, or a complete game at least.

If you lose, you lose. You can't say, "Oh, I knew he was going to lose (or win) all along, and just was prattling on about nonsensical side issues for kicks."

Ruth used to add up the names on the roster for the hockey games, even before the players came out skating their warm ups, and her theory went with the deeper bench. The bigger schools with varsity ranks in the 20s, she generally went with them over the smaller rosters.

Then, when they came out skating, and eventually took to the opposite benches, she'd use her eyesight across the rink (and then confirm with me) the counts, knowing that sometimes flu's or academic suspensions or whatever, could sometimes lead to discrepancies in the actual count and the roster names.

She'd also look at the speed and size of the kids playing, I think, but generally I remember she usually commented on how it would be hard, and they'd need to use all they had, for a significantly smaller bench to measure up in the end, particularly in the final period if the game was played hard.

Point is: no matter your theory, it helps to observe, compare, and stick with whatever it is you've decided to measure. That way, you don't come across as a finger-in-the-wind fan when the game is being played -- a most important time -- with no internal consistency whatsoever in what you admire in a player or value in a a team. Nobody admires a bandwagon cheerleader, if you catch my drift...

So, does that help any? Sometimes we get so locked into one way of thinking, I think, reinforced by like-minded others, related or not, that we make poor assumptions and can't see how we're coming across.




Oh, for the record, I liked Brooks today*. He's been doing too much covering himself lately for my tastes too: (paraphrasing) "Rahm Emannuel and Team Obama from the meritorious Ivy Leagues have put together a well-educated almost genius healthcare plan, in theory, that if Obama has the charm and dignity to pass with no changes by senatorial fatcats, will be the only hope of a quick fix because there are no other actions and we've got to put our faith in somebody credentialed and educated to lead us in these uncertain economic times, afterall. That's the way it's always been, and we can't get ourselves through this one without divine help from above, the problems are just too big for mere mortal Americans alone now..." yadda yadda.


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* I read the Brooks column last night before checking the proffy blogs this morning.


ADDED:
Some one of these days, we'll have to talk about Afghanistan. If I may, Friedman's column bears remarking on: do we really want to expend the military money and lives necessary to educate schoolgirls, or would there be better organizations than the U.S. military to make that committment, if indeed we judge that it is a mission worth undertaking?

Sometimes the "I was there and saw!" coverage -- whether from congressional junkets or veteran newspeople excursions -- is off, perhaps skewed by emotional influences of what you wish could be easily changed when opening eyes to reality.