It's springtime in North Carolina

and pansies are in the air. Orwell must have used the term "pansy-left" half a dozen times, and in boxing (Easley was using a boxing metaphor, after all), a "pansy" is a weak fighter, but the Hillary haters see an opening and poof! (oops!) this record breakingly stupid primary breaks its own record for stupidity. Again.

Ritualized humiliation time for Obama

1) Wright fouled up in his press conference. The same guy who was so charismatic and smart on Moyers' show couldn't find it in him to just duck. Partially this has to do with being an honest man, partially with being an honest black man who is passionate about what he believes and the status of blacks in this society. But the biggest part of it was just someone not ready for the prime time going out on the national stage. Everyone has their off-kilter beliefs, but most people, especially public people, hide them away in deep places, to be brought out and looked at only in the safety of the dark. Wright had a golden chance here to make a big difference, both for his community and Obama, and he blew it. Coming out and speaking was the right thing to do; coming out and speaking honestly was not.

2) Obama gets a taste, his first, of the ritualized humiliation that Dems must go through. It won't be his last.

3) Now that Obama has denounced Wright, there are two questions. First, how much damage will this do to him in the remaining primary, and second, what else the Republicans have on him they can drag out and flog him with in the general. I think he handled this reasonably well, but it's just the beginning.

4) So much for the nullwits who've been demanding Hillary withdraw.

Jeremiah Wright

Knocks it out of the park. This is one of the potential advantages of an Obama candidacy and presidency. Wright is one half of a dialogue that never gets finished. People need to hear what he has to say, hear about the concerns and hopes he has, and represents. This interview should be seen by a wider audience than PBS, but of course, the only way that would happen would have been if Wright had gone out and made an ass of himself. Because he did well, it will be disappeared -- such is the way of our media.

But thank you, Bill Moyers.

Utterly creepy:

California will adopt the most aggressive approach in the nation to a controversial crime-fighting technique that uses DNA to try to identify elusive criminals through their relatives, state Atty. Gen. Jerry Brown announced Friday.

Employing what is known as familial or "partial match" searching, the policy is aimed at identifying a suspect through DNA collected at a crime scene by looking for potential relatives in the state's genetic database of about a million felons. Once a relative is identified, police can use that person as a lead to trace the suspect.

...

The policy, which takes effect immediately, is designed to work like this: The state's crime lab will tell police about DNA profiles that come up during routine searches of California's offender database and closely resemble, but do not match, the DNA left at a crime scene. (Previously, the state refused to tell police about these partial matches.)

The lab will then perform calculations and tests to determine the likelihood of a biological relationship between the person found in the database and the unknown offender believed to have left DNA at the crime scene.

When such partial matches do not surface or fail to produce a lead, a more customized familial search can be done in which computer software scans the database proactively for possible relatives. The software measures the chance of two people being related based on the rarity of the markers they share.

California appears to be the first state in the nation to use this second technique as a matter of policy. Drafted with the heavy involvement of lawyers, the new policy requires a series of meetings with police and prosecutors to ensure that the relative's name is vital to the investigation and that all other leads have been exhausted.

Once a relative has been identified, police can interview him or construct a family tree based on existing records. If a suspect is identified, police can obtain a warrant for his DNA, or even gather it surreptiously from an abandoned drink or cigarette butt. The suspect's DNA sample would then be compared to the crime scene sample and possibly used as evidence.

...

Civil libertarians oppose using DNA databases to search for relatives of unknown offenders, saying it puts family members under "genetic surveillance" for crimes they did not commit. For now, all the people in the state's database are convicted offenders, but the state plans to expand the database next year to include arrestees, heightening concerns over privacy.

Critics say familial searching could expose sensitive and secret genetic relationships. A son, for example, could learn that his father was not his biological parent. DNA databases also reflect the racial and ethnic biases of the justice system, exposing minority communities to more surveillance than others, critics maintain.

Story

I really like the part about collecting DNA from people who aren't even convicted of a crime. Our founding fathers would be horrified by what the nation has allowed itself to become.

Noodlin'

With how sad steps, O Moon, thou climb'st the skies!
How silently, and with how wan a face!
What, may it be that even in heavenly place
That busy archer his sharp arrows tries?
Sure, if that long with love-acquainted eyes
Can judge of love, thou feel'st a lover's case;
I read it in thy looks; thy languisht grace
To me that feel the like, thy state descries.
Then, even of fellowship, O Moon, tell me,
Is constant love deemed there but want of wit?
Are beauties there as proud as here they be?
Do they above love to be loved, and yet
Those lovers scorn whom that love doth possess?
Do they call virtue there, ungratefulness?

-- Sir Philip Sidney

If you put a gun to my head and forced me to choose just one, I'd choose this as my favorite sonnet. The opening line is clearly written by someone who was in complete control of his language, and I can still remember double taking the first time I read that line, and then reading it a couple of more times before reading the rest of the poem -- it's arresting, you instantly get a sense -- but not too much of one -- of what the poem is going to be about, it has a nice feel to it, and then there is the mastery of poetic language and words, the heavy spondees forcing you to slow down as you read, setting the somber mood for the rest of the poem. The final couplet is also perfect: plaintive, accusatory, a little whiny -- it packs the wallop that the rest of the poem builds to, a requirement of this form. As I recall, I was in a difficult relationship when I read the poem for the first time, which is one of the reasons it resonated so strongly with me then, and that last couplet captured perfectly the way I felt.

I've read Shakespeare's sonnets so many times I know some of them by heart, Donne, Milton, Drayton, the later bastardizations of the form by Owen and others, but this one, one of the very first written in English, stands out to me not just because it's great in itself, but because it demonstrates the possibilities of the form, captures the tautness of expression forced on the poet by the rhyme scheme and 14 line requirement. If Sidney had not written this one poem (I confess I'm not too enamored of the rest of Astrophel and Stella), would the sonnet have become as important as it did in the English language? Would Shakespeare have written his own sonnets, let alone written the plays by which most people know him, and which have probably done their part in shaping history since his time in ways we can't even begin to understand?

Slouching away from Bethlehem

What can you do but laugh?

I realize this isn't a foreign policy gaffe of the same proportions as Goolsbee-gate or sniper-gate. But as a native of New Zealand, I feel obliged to draw your attention to an incident in which Hillary Clinton may have gravely insulted this small but very important nation. Asked by Newsweek (seemingly apropos of nothing), if she "had any good jokes," Clinton offered:

"Here's a good one. Helen Clark, former prime minister of New Zealand: her opponents have observed that in the event of a nuclear war, the two things that will emerge from the rubble are the cockroaches and Helen Clark. [Laughs]"

Setting Hillary's sense of humor aside for a moment (the joke doesn't get funnier even if you happen to know something about New Zealand politics), Helen Clark is the current prime minister of New Zealand.

The diplomatic ramifications of this become even more dire when you consider that New Zealanders have been somewhat skeptical about Hillary Clinton ever since she met Sir Edmund Hillary, the first mountaineer to climb Everest, and mentioned that she had been named after him. It was later pointed out that Sir Edmund climbed Mt Everest six years after Hillary Clinton was born.

This is what happens when all the cool kids of the blogosphere get together and decide to create their own reality: the less cool kids, desperate to join the club, make fools of themselves. This particular bit of stupidity seems to be too far over the top for even the most gone of the Obamamaniacs to take seriously, but a lot of the stuff they do take seriously isn't much better. The left blogosphere has, I suspect, reached its peak. Not in terms of reach, but in terms of its ability to positively influence the discourse with thoughtful, dispassionate, analysis. It's just a shouting, deranged mob now, and an increase in its numbers isn't going to make it less deranged. I'm sure when the primary is over some sanity will return, but I think anyone would be hard pressed to look at the recent performance of Marshall, Yglesias et al and decide it's any worse than what the MSM has been doing. If you can't count on them on a crucial thing like this primary, you can't count on them at all.

Yeah, right

Joe Biden:

"Congress must ensure that Gen. Petraeus does not bring an Iraq bias to his new job, at the expense of America's broader security needs."

It's pretty obvious that Petraeus in charge of Central Command and a Petraeus protege in charge of Iraq itself is, and is intended to be, a Trojan Horse given as a "gift" by the Bush Administration to any Democratic successor. Tie the generals' careers and reputations to the Surge™, build them up as indespensible, and dare a Democratic president to run them out on their asses after assuming power. The question is what Biden and his fellow Dems are going to do about it, besides asking a few questions and then meekly backing down in the face of the MSM/right wing axis' attacks along the "unpatriotic," "Defeatocrat", "I'm so uninterested in the Democrats shooting themselves in the foot over this" line.