PostPartisan

Someone sent me a Tweet asking a good question: Have Huntsville, Ala., authorities found “the idiot in the projects” who climbed through a window and into bed with Antoine Dodson’s sister and tried to rape her? I didn't know the answer, so I did some hunting around. Turns out, no, the perp who inspired the bed intruder song is still at large.

But 24-year-old Dodson, who has had more costume changes than Diana Ross at Super Bowl XXX has proven to be very wise. He hired a lawyer. And now he's made a deal with iTunes and his Web site is promoting Antoine Dodson merch, with his "trademarked catch phrases," such as "hide yo kids, hide yo wife." He also hasn't been shy about asking for donations. As a result, Dodson announced in an interview, "It was enough [money] to move my family from the projects." I love good stories like this.

My hunting also turned up this utterly charming Q&A; that Dodson did for his fans.

Dodson’s gratitude and humility are endearing. My favorite response is the one directed to a woman who asked if Dodson would marry her. “How big is the ring?” he asks with a laugh and a smile. And to a personal question that he didn’t need to answer but graciously does: “Am I bi? No. Am I gay? Yes,” he says, with a “what you think?” cock of the eyebrow.

No, it’s not because I think Congress should have rejected it. It’s that its passage led to a lot of distorted, ideological hyperventilaton. Take, for example, this misleading dispatch from the Senate Republican Conference today:

So, About Those ‘Stimulus’ Claims…

Democrats’ economic recovery predictions:

“Vice President Biden predicted Friday at a Pennsylvania fundraiser that the U.S. economy would be adding up to 500,000 jobs each month ‘some time in the next couple of months.’ ” (Garance Franke-Ruta and Frank Ahrens, “Biden predicts economy will create up to 500,000 jobs a month soon,” Washington Post 04/23/10)

Speaker Nancy Pelosi, D-Calif.: “Five hundred thousand Americans will lose their jobs each month until we have a recovery package.” (Transcript, “Fox News Sunday,” 01/18/09)

Turns out to be exact opposite of reality:

“Last week, the number of first-time filers for unemployment insurance rose for the third time in a row, to 500,000, according to a Labor Department report released Thursday.” (Julianne Pepitone, “‘Just a bad trend’ - 500,000 jobless claims,” CNNMoney.com, 08/19/10)

“New applications for unemployment insurance reached a half-million last week for the first time since November, a sign that employers are cutting jobs again as the recovery slows.” ("Jobless Filings at Highest Point Since November,” Associated Press, 08/19/10)

This news release, of course, is misleading because the number of new unemployment claims doesn’t account for the number of people who were also hired during the same period. So, while it’s not a good sign, it doesn’t give us a full picture of net employment during that time, no matter how over-optimistic the Democrats were at one point about the stimulus.

But the bigger problem is that the argument about the stimulus is basically unwinnable, for now. That’s because, when you look past the gotcha quotes, much of the Obama administration’s justification for the Recovery Act relies on a difficult-to-prove counterfactual -- that it created or saved jobs.

So, unemployment could even be going up, and the president could still claim the stimulus was a success, since it could have been worse. Here, the GOP conference ignores this argument entirely, as it so often does, by pointing to negative raw data and ignoring the Democrats’ argument that you have to compare them to a far more catastrophic baseline. Obama’s critics on the left often do the same to conclude that the stimulus was much too small.

I tend to sympathize with the administration on this. It’s shocking how quickly people have forgotten the rank fear that pervaded the country in late 2008 and early 2009. As with the Troubled Assets Relief Program, approving the stimulus was important if only to prove that the government would not let the economy fall off a cliff. At the same time, policymakers had to pay attention to folks worried -- without much reason in the short-term, it turned out, but it was hard to know that then -- about inflation and the willingness of private capital to finance American government debt at low interest rates. How do you quantify the number of jobs saved from ministering to such psychological preoccupations? It’s hard, but it doesn’t mean they weren’t saved.

Yesterday in "The Grand Old Party of distractions", I mentioned how Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision last week declaring California's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional had rendered conservatives mute because of the limp defense put on by Proposition 8 proponents. Well, I want to revise that. There is one conservative who hasn’t been mute. In fact, he’s part of a liberal-conservative tag team with David Boies leading the fight for marriage equality. He is Ted Olson.

Not long after I posted that piece, Olson appeared on “Andrea Mitchell Reports” on MSNBC. I include the short exchange below in its entirety because Olson delivers a succinct and eloquent rebuttal to conservative arguments against same-sex marriage.

How does that Bible saying go, “Ask and ye shall receive”? Well, on Tuesday with regard to the “mosque” debate, I asked, “[W]here is Rudy Giuliani?”
I guess he heard me, because there was the former New York City mayor sitting with Matt Lauer of the Today Show talking about the controversy.

Giuliani pretty much espoused the same points he made during that conservative radio show interview in July. He had questions about the people behind Park51. “Are you really what you pretend to be?” Giuliani asked. “If you’re going to so horribly offend the people most directly affected by this.....how are you healing?” And he has questions about the imam, Feisal Abdul Rauf, who would lead the project. “I'm confused by the imam," Giuliani said. "I see all the things that you're saying, but I also see a man that says America was an accessory to Sept. 11."

I don’t agree with Giuliani on this. I think Park51 should be built -- and in the location chosen by the private developers, which is not at Ground Zero but two blocks north of it. But there’s a difference between Giuliani and his fellow Republicans who have waded in on this issue. While he’s asking tough, edgy questions of the project’s backers, he’s doing so without engaging in the needlessly inflammatory and divisive rhetoric that makes a mockery of everyone’s professed support of freedom of religion.

Now that Giulaini has broken his silence, it’s time for another one to do so. Calling George W. Bush.

Forget repealing the Fourteenth Amendment. Let’s repeal the Nineteenth! Before the Nineteenth Amendment passed, we lived in an idyllic world of hoop skirts and corsets. Vote? We were too concerned that we might faint if left outdoors for any period of time. And as a consequence, everything was so much more ladylike. World War I happened, and our country scarcely participated. We women sat around sewing our political opinions onto samplers and subtly placing them near important figures. “Do you notice that cushion you’re sitting on, Woodrow Wilson?” we asked, demurely. “That cushion endorses the League of Nations.”

Before women got the vote, there was no glass ceiling. It was just a regular ceiling! If we wanted to work in traditionally male-dominated industries such as writing sentimental novels or fighting in the Civil War, we had to pretend to be men, and if they caught us, we were stopped. But now that we can vote, nobody stops us from doing anything. We’re expected to do all the things men do, as well as a few bonus things such as bearing children, having empathy, and hearing ourselves roar. It's too much effort. We even have to arrange our own marriages. Marriages today are to marriages back before suffrage what travel today is to travel back then: someone used to set it all up for you, and it required you to spend a lot of time sitting in uncomfortable chairs. And you couldn't bring nearly so much baggage.

Now we can vote. What has it gotten us, besides Presidents Harding through Obama?

It’s a word so grotesque, so hurtful that I can’t bring myself to type it, let alone say it out loud. Yet controversial radio host Dr. Laura Schlessinger used the N-word 11 times in a recent exchange with a caller. In response to listener complaints – and likely management and advertiser concerns -- Dr. Laura announced last night that she’ll stop her radio show at the end of the year.

I’m no fan of the good doctor, who bills herself as a tough love life counselor. I find her unnecessarily combative, close-minded, and so lacking in empathy as to be down-right mean. But I don’t think she should have called it quits – or have been pushed out, if that turns out to be the case.

Unlike Mel Gibson’s obscenity-laced attacks, Dr. Laura did not use the N-word to describe a particular person or as a smear against African Americans. She used the word matter-of-factly in describing – accurately, by the way – how often the word is used by African American comedians. “Black guys use it all the time,” she said. “Turn on HBO, listen to a black comic, and all you hear is” the N-word. She added, “I don't get it. If anybody without enough melanin says it, it's a horrible thing; but when black people say it, it's affectionate. It's very confusing.” It’s a distortion to say that African Americans always use the word to express affection and many people of all colors find it patently offensive no matter the context. But you get her drift. She later apologized, before announcing her resignation.

Were her comments provocative? Absolutely. Did she deal indelicately with an exquisitely delicate subject? Yes, again. But were her comments racist? I don’t think so. Here’s a link to the full audio of Dr. Laura’s exchange with the caller. You be the judge.

“You're a phony celebrity, and in two weeks no one's going to give a [crap] about you... that's Chicago.”

No, it’s not a quote from the Blago trial. It’s from that other memorable show set in Chicago: the musical Chicago by Kander and Ebb, with book by Bob Fosse.

And except for the conspicuous lack of sequins in Blagojevich’s case, the two are surprisingly similar.

In case you aren’t familiar with the plot, the main character, Roxie Hart dreams of stardom. On the same night that star Velma Kelly commits a double murder, Roxie shoots her lover. Both women wind up in the Cook County jail, awaiting trial for murder. After Roxie persuades a high-powered lawyer, Billy Flynn, to take her case, she rises to fame -- or at least notoriety -- and winds up going free and joining Velma in a double act. There is also a lot of singing and metatheatrical commentary on the nature of performance, or something, but that’s the general gist of it.

At the center of it all is a great trial set piece, where Billy Flynn’s song Razzle Dazzle sums up my general feelings about celebrity trials:

The economy is in a deep funk. Private-sector job creation is anemic. The jobless rate is stuck in the mid-9 percent range. As a result, the American people are mad as hell because their unemployment benefits are running out, the prospect of a job is as distant as the horizon, and they’re worried about losing everything. You’d think Republicans would club President Obama and the Democrats like a [fill in cute, endangered species here] on an hourly basis from now until Nov. 2.

Instead, GOP leaders and strategists have put the administration and Democrats on the defensive in the run-up to the midterm elections by exploiting hot-button emotional wedge issues they hope will draw people to the polls and put Republicans in the majority. The “controversy” now is the “mosque” planned for Lower Manhattan. Last week, it was “anchor babies” and repealing the 14th amendment to the Constitution. Back in July, there was the faux-troversy over a voter intimidation case in Philadelphia involving the New Black Panther Party. This was followed by a frenzied week in which Shirley Sherrod, an Agriculture Department official in Georgia, was fired over racially inflammatory remarks, only to be rehired when it was revealed that she was actually delivering an address on race and reconciliation.

In those four instances we have the tried-and-true of hysteria: race, religion and immigration. All that’s missing are the gays. In the old days, Judge Vaughn Walker’s decision last week declaring California's ban on same-sex marriage unconstitutional would have had conservatives bursting into rhetorical flames. But Prop 8 proponents put up such a limp defense (if you can call it that) that the usual wailing about activist judges has been decidedly mute.

My post this morning wondering “where is Rudy Giuliani?” in this whole "mosque" debate set off quite the conversation on my Facebook page. Some were happy the former mayor has been pretty much absent. One asked why Park51 was even an issue and slammed the right for making it one. “Either we have freedom of religion in this country or we don't,” wrote Joseph Ferraro. “If only conservatives could bring the passion they have for the Second Amendment to the rest of the Bill of Rights.” You know, that’s a pretty good point.

Another good point came from my H.L. Sudler, who moved beyond the current controversy to focus our fleeting attention on the fact that nearly nine years after terrorists took down the towers at the World Trade Center site, the redevelopment of Ground Zero is mired in progress-choking bickering.

One of the things to ponder in all this is the excessive political hubbub over a mosque to be erected near Ground Zero (or the World Trade Center Memorial Park), which in and of itself remains unconstructed due to ceaseless greed and litigation. If politicians wished to be proactive and productive, I'd urge them to throw their weight around to get this project (for lack of a better term) off the ground. This would serve as a better memorial for the lives lost at that site than the endless, pointless bickering over territory which neither productively serves the memory of those individuals lost on that day nor the supposed belief that we Americans espouse: freedom.

Until life returns to Lower Manhattan with the vibrancy it had on Sept. 10th, the memorial Sudler and New Yorkers long for will never be complete.

In my latest column I interview Rep. Mark Kirk (R-Ill.), who is running in a special election for President Obama’s senate seat and pledges that if he is seated as the 42nd Republican senator in November he will oppose the Democrats’ plans to enact their legislative agenda through a lame-duck session of Congress.

I note in the column that Rep. Mike Castle (R-Del.) could be seated in November as well, and I speculate that he might also oppose a lame duck since he voted last week for a resolution in the House that would bar that chamber from meeting between November and January. Well, Castle’s office has since confirmed that if elected to the Senate he would, indeed, join Kirk in opposing a lame duck. A Castle spokesperson told me in an e-mail, after reading Kirk’s comments in The Post, that “The Congressman agrees with Rep. Kirk that a lame duck session is no place for controversial legislating.”

And then there is this added wrinkle: Last week Democratic Sen. Russ Feingold of Wisconsin also announced his opposition to a lame duck, declaring that such a session would “override the public’s will as expressed at the ballot box.”

So with Kirk-Castle-Feingold in opposition, it appears a center-left coalition is forming that would join with conservatives in blocking the Democrats’ plans to push major legislation through Congress in a lame-duck session. So why won’t the Senate GOP leadership step forward and put the lame duck out of its misery?