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Jennifer Rubin has a short piece on the election tomorrow titled; New Jersey Too!
I spent the weekend in Virginia covering the upcoming election, which is shaping up to be an historic sweep for Republicans. A bit of trivia: keep your eye on the House of Delegates race in the third district, where the Republican challenger in coal country in southwest Virginia is running on cap-and-trade. Democratic handicappers are throwing in the towel on that one. (If that bill weren’t dead before, it will be. At least with the Virginia delegation and other similarly situated lawmakers, the race would turn almost solely on this issue.)
But everywhere I went, the question was the same: what do you hear about New Jersey? This is what happens when a blowout is coming – political observers begin to look for something of interest that isn’t a foregone conclusion.
The last few polls have shown an uptick for Chris Christie and a leveling off in support for Chris Daggett. Then Sunday night, the Democratic Public Policy Polling found Christie leading 47 to 41 percent, with 11 percent for Daggett. The explanation: …
In World Affairs Journal, John McWhorter has a fascinating discussion about the death of languages and the ubiquitousness of English.
…Yet the going idea among linguists and anthropologists is that we must keep as many languages alive as possible, and that the death of each one is another step on a treadmill toward humankind’s cultural oblivion. This accounted for the melancholy tone, for example, of the obituaries for the Eyak language of southern Alaska last year when its last speaker died.
… Linguistic death is proceeding more rapidly even than species attrition. According to one estimate, a hundred years from now the 6,000 languages in use today will likely dwindle to 600. The question, though, is whether this is a problem. …
…What makes the potential death of a language all the more emotionally charged is the belief that if a language dies, a cultural worldview will die with it. But this idea is fragile. Certainly language is a key aspect of what distinguishes one group from another. However, a language itself does not correspond to the particulars of a culture but to a faceless process that creates new languages as the result of geographical separation. For example, most Americans pronounce disgusting as “diss-kussting” with a k sound. (Try it—you probably do too.) However, some people say “dizz-gusting”—it’s easier to pronounce the g after a softer sound like z. Imagine a language with the word pronounced as it is spelled (and as it was in Latin): “diss-gusting.” The group speaking the language splits into two groups that go their separate ways. Come back five hundred years later, and one group is pronouncing the word “diss-kussting,” while the other is pronouncing it “dizz-gusting.” After even more time, the word would start shortening, just as we pronounce “let us” as “let’s.” After a thousand years, in one place it would be something like “skussting,” while in the other it might be “zgustin.” After another thousand, perhaps “skusty” and “zguss.” By this time, these are no longer even the same language.
…Notice that this is not about culture, any more than saying “diss-kusting” rather than “diz-gusting” reflects anything about one’s soul. …
… language death is, ironically, a symptom of people coming together. Globalization means hitherto isolated peoples migrating and sharing space. For them to do so and still maintain distinct languages across generations happens only amidst unusually tenacious self-isolation—such as that of the Amish—or brutal segregation. (Jews did not speak Yiddish in order to revel in their diversity but because they lived in an apartheid society.) Crucially, it is black Americans, the Americans whose English is most distinct from that of the mainstream, who are the ones most likely to live separately from whites geographically and spiritually.
The alternative, it would seem, is indigenous groups left to live in isolation—complete with the maltreatment of women and lack of access to modern medicine and technology typical of such societies. Few could countenance this as morally justified, and attempts to find some happy medium in such cases are frustrated by the simple fact that such peoples, upon exposure to the West, tend to seek membership in it. …
Jonah Goldberg, in the National Review, comments on NEA director Rocco Landesman’s tribute to Obama, in the wake of Sargent’s demise.
…Instead, Landesman embraced a timeless tactic of power politics. He debased himself with incandescently vulgar obsequiousness to his supreme leader. “There is a new president and a new NEA,” he proclaimed. “This is the first president that actually writes his own books since Teddy Roosevelt and arguably the first to write them really well since Lincoln. If you accept the premise, and I do, that the United States is the most powerful country in the world, then Barack Obama is the most powerful writer since Julius Caesar. That has to be good for American artists.” …
… Lincoln never wrote any books.
In short, Landesman doesn’t know what he’s talking about. But he does know what he’s doing.
What matters to him is not the power of Obama’s writing but the power of the writer. Why else compare a democratically elected president to one of history’s most iconic dictators? That is, unless we are to believe he is a huge fan of Caesar’s De Bello Gallico. …
…By demonstrating with brazenly self-abasing ignorance that he is wholly Obama’s man, Landesman is making it clear that the NEA is completely committed to Obamaism. There’s no need for any more of Mr. Sergant’s tacky, Chicago-style pay-to-play. Self-humiliation sends a far more powerful signal. …
In the National Journal, Stuart Taylor points out that a recent UN resolution could be the top of a slippery slope. Or perhaps a tipping point?
…But the real problem is a provision, which the U.S. championed jointly with Egypt, exuding hostility to free expression.
That provision “expresses its concern that incidents of racial and religious intolerance, discrimination and related violence, as well as of negative racial and religious stereotyping continue to rise around the world, and condemns, in this context, any advocacy of national, racial, or religious hatred that constitutes incitement to discrimination, hostility, or violence, and urges States to take effective measures, consistent with their obligations under international human-rights law, to address and combat such incidents” (emphasis added). …
…It could be read narrowly as a commitment merely to denounce and eschew hate speech. But it could more logically be read broadly as requiring the United States and other nations to punish “hostile” speech about — and perhaps also “negative stereotyping” of — any race or religion. It’s a safe bet, however, that the Islamic nations that are so concerned about criticisms of their religion will not be prosecuting anyone for the rampant “negative racial and ethnic stereotyping” and hate speech in their own countries directed at Jews and sometimes Christians.
Eugene Volokh of the University of California (Los Angeles) Law School pointed out on his Volokh Conspiracy blog that the reference to “obligations under international human-rights law” could be seen as binding the United States to a provision of the International Covenant on Civil and Political Rights requiring that hate speech “shall be prohibited by law.” The U.S. has previously rejected that provision.
Added Volokh: “Advocacy of mere hostility — for instance… to radical strains of Islam [or any other religion] — is clearly constitutionally protected here in the U.S.; but the resolution seems to call for its prohibition. [And] if we are constitutionally barred from adhering to it by our domestic Constitution, then [the administration's vote was] implicitly criticizing that Constitution, and committing ourselves to do what we can to change it.” Such a stance could be seen as obliging the executive branch to urge the Supreme Court to overrule decades of First Amendment decisions.
Far-fetched? Not according to the hopes and expectations of many international law scholars. “An international norm against hate speech would supply a basis for prohibiting it, the First Amendment notwithstanding…. In the long run, it may point to the Constitution’s more complete subordination,” Peter Spiro, a professor at Temple University Law School, asserted in a 2003 Stanford Law Review article. …
Toby Harneden posts a piece of Plouffe on Biden, on his blog in the Telegraph, UK.
This is priceless. An extract from Time.com from a new book by David Plouffe, Barack Obama’s campaign manager, on interviewing Joe Biden for the veep slot. One of the best bits is the notion that being a Senator is being a “top dog” – that and his shtick that he didn’t really want the vice-presidential job:
The [first] meeting started with Biden launching into a nearly 20-minute monologue that ranged from the strength of our campaign in Iowa (”I literally wouldn’t have run if I knew the steamroller you guys would put together”); to his evolving views of Obama (”I wasn’t sure about him in the beginning of the campaign, but I am now”); why he didn’t want to be VP (”The last thing I should do is VP; after 36 years of being the top dog, it will be hard to be No. 2?); why he was a good choice (”But I would be a good soldier and could provide real value, domestically and internationally”); and everything else under the sun. Ax and I couldn’t get a word in edgewise. It confirmed what we suspected: this dog could not be taught new tricks.
But Obama still chose him.
Brian Palmer has an interesting linguistic piece in Slate. Must be language day.
Former Bosnian leader and accused war criminal Radovan Karadzic did not appear for the start of his trial on Monday in the Dutch city of The Hague. Why do we call it The Hague, rather than just Hague?
Blame the locals. Those who live in The Hague never stopped using an old-fashioned name that described the place according to its medieval use. We get the official name Den Haag from Des Graven Hage, which means “the counts’ hedge” and refers to the fact that Dutch noblemen once used the land for hunting. Many other place names started off as descriptions with definite articles. For example, the city of Bath, England, famous for its purportedly health-supporting natural spring, was referred to as “The Bath” until the 19th century. The town of Devizes, about 20 miles east of Bath, used to be called “The Devizes,” because it once divided the estates of two large landowners. In these cases, the definite articles dropped off when the locals started thinking of their town’s name as more than a mere descriptor. But people in The Hague have stuck with the original phrase—even to the point of using the longer “Counts’ Hedge” title from time to time. …
… Place names change over time, but in general the movement is away from the use of the definite article. Until approximately 50 years ago, Ukraine, whose name is derived from the Proto-Slavic term for a borderland, was almost always referred to as “The Ukraine.” Now, according to the Ukrainian government—and a federal judge who presided over a case in which the U.S. government and a Ukrainian deportee couldn’t even agree on how to refer to the country—the proper name is simply Ukraine. …
… The Bronx is another interesting case. …
In the Times, UK, Jenny Booth reports on a fatal coyote attack.
A teenage folk singer has died after being set upon by two coyotes as she hiked alone in a national park in Nova Scotia.
Taylor Mitchell, 19, a rising star of the Canadian music scene, died in Halifax hospital yesterday after the normally shy animals attacked her as she hiked one of the most scenic trails in Cape Breton Highlands National Park.
Walkers who heard her frantic screams alerted park rangers, who shot one of the coyotes. …
…”Coyotes are normally afraid of humans. This is a very irregular occurrence,” Ms Leger said. …
…”There’s been some reports of aggressive animals, so it’s not unknown,” said Helene Robichaud, the park’s superintendent. “But we certainly never have had anything so dramatic and tragic.” …