Living dangerously with salsa and guacamole

The New Neo Posted on by

Remember how much fun it was to taste a bit of the raw batter during the making of cakes or cookies when you were a child? Well, that simple joy ended years ago, when raw eggs were nixed because they carried salmonella. Off limits, too, became the many wonderful recipes featuring raw egg whites, such as this favorite, unless one wanted to live especially dangerously.

And have you tried ordering a medium rare hamburger lately in a restaurant? Faggetaboutit. Oh, they’ll ask you how you’d like your burger cooked, all right. But if you answer with a request for anything less well-done than “medium,” they’ll sigh and say they just can’t do it. E.coli, you know.

And now we have warnings about two foods that heretofore seemed especially innocuous, salsa and guacamole:

The dishes were blamed for one in 25 identified outbreaks of food poisoning at restaurants between 1998 and 2008””more than twice the rate of the previous decade, the CDC said. Often, the outbreaks were traced to raw hot peppers, tomatoes and cilantro””common ingredients in salsa and guacamole.

The worst thing I’d ever previously thought salsa and guacomole could do to me was to taste so yummy with taco chips that I’d eat too much of them and gain weight. So could the food police please just stay away for a change and leave us to enjoy our simple pleasures, unmolested? Thank you; much obliged.

salsaguacamole.jpg

The World Cup finals

The New Neo Posted on by

I watched the World Cup finals yesterday with a bunch of people who care a great deal more about soccer than I do (not difficult, since I care scarcely more about soccer than I do about curling).

The world disagrees with me, of course; soccer is the most popular sport on earth. And so the term “world” in “World Cup” is a great deal more apropos than it is in other similar titles such as “World Series.”

As I joined a gazillion others in viewing the proceedings yesterday, I could not help but think the following:

(1) BOR-ing! Perhaps if I understood the finer points I would find the game hyper-exciting, but then again perhaps soccer is just a defensive, repetitive, low-scoring snore.

(2) Come to think of it, though, there are those muscular legs in those shorts. Very attractive indeed—although am I correct in noting that the shorts have gotten a bit longer over the years? Not a good trend, IMHO.

(3) There’s a lot of pretending to be injured in order to penalize the other team, complete with writhing around on the ground in seeming agony while grabbing the knee, and then bounding up pretty quickly after the umpire makes the call.

(4) Spanish guys are smaller and slighter than guys from the Netherlands.

(5) Those overtimes are loooong.

(6) I think Paul the Octupus knows something we don’t.

Bredesen tries to leave the sinking ship

The New Neo Posted on by

Tennessee’s Democratic Governor Phil Bredesen tries to distance himself from the large and dominant left wing of the Democratic Party. This is especially interesting since Bredesen is not running for re-election; term limits in his state prohibit that.

Note his delicate balancing act when it comes to Obama:

[Bredersen] was not directly critical of the president’s leadership, but when asked where he put Obama on the ideological spectrum, he said, “I’m not sure. I know in times that I talked to him during the campaign, he came across to me as fairly centrist on things. But I have to say that on things that have happened so far, he would be certainly well to the left of any independent in the country.

That is to say: Obama misrepresented himself, and actions speak louder than words.

Bredesen also has an interesting way to look at the Democratic victories in 2006 and 2008:

Those victories, he said, were not evidence of a long-term engagement between voters and the party but only a tryout for the party to show off new ideas.

“I don’t think we’ve done particularly well in the tryout, and I think it’s going to hurt us,” he said. “It’s certainly hurting Democrats in Tennessee. And I wish we could get back more toward the middle of the road.”

I think Bredesen is exactly right. Voters were dissatisfied with Republican control and wanted to throw the bums out and see what might happen. Well, now we know, and the new bums make the old bums look a good deal better in retrospect.

Not having heard of Bredersen before, I looked up his Wiki entry and found out a few things. He is a bona fide moderate Democrat, who won the governorship in the first place by appealing to Republicans in the state as well as members of his own party, and won his second term by the largest margin in Tennessee history, having practiced fiscal conservatism and balanced the budget.

Bredesen is also a rarity for a southern politician: a Yankee, born in New Jersey and raised in New York and Massachusetts. What’s more, he’s a Harvard grad who majored in physics and who later made so much money as the founder of healthcare management company HealthAmerica Corp that he has accepted no salary during his stint as governor.

So why is Bredesen speaking out now? My guess is that, even though he can’t run for governor again himself, he cares about the future of fellow Democrats in Tennessee and sincerely dislikes the direction the Democratic Party has been headed lately.

[NOTE: And Bredersen’s not alone, although (unlike Bredesen) some of the other governors doing the criticizing are indeed up for re-election, and so self-preservation may be motivating them. And they’re not all moderates, either.)

US v. Arizona: where’s the conflict?

The New Neo Posted on by

In a National Review piece, Kris W. Kobach, one of the drafters of the Arizona law, offers a series of defenses of the statute that seem quite strong to me, among them this:

The U.S. Supreme Court has long recognized that states can enact statutes to discourage illegal immigration without being preempted by federal law. In the landmark 1976 case of De Canas v. Bica, the Supreme Court upheld a California law that prohibited employers from knowingly hiring unauthorized aliens. The Court rejected preemption arguments, since “respondents . . . fail to point out, and an independent review does not reveal, any specific indication in either the wording or the legislative history of the [Immigration and Nationality Act] that Congress intended to preclude . . . state regulation touching on aliens in general.” States and cities can enact laws discouraging illegal immigration, and can assist the federal government in enforcing federal immigration laws in other ways, as long as their actions don’t conflict with federal law.

In the case of S.B. 1070 [the Arizona statute in question], the ACLU will be hard-pressed to find any such conflict. Indeed, S.B. 1070 is a mirror image of federal law. The documentation provisions of the Arizona law penalize precisely the same conduct that is already penalized under federal immigration law…Because S.B. 1070 matches federal law so precisely, it is protected by the legal doctrine of “concurrent enforcement.

Kobach goes on to describe a host of other relevant cases in which states were held to be able to regulate and enforce immigration law that does not actively conflict with federal law, all of which appear to apply to the statute currently under attack. The leading argument against it appears to be this, which seems patently absurd to me as a reason to declare a law unconstitutional:

The only argument…left is the dubious claim that more vigorous enforcement of federal immigration laws in Arizona will conflict with federal purposes, perhaps by compelling LESC personnel to respond to a much larger number of calls from Arizona. But the U.S. District Court for Arizona already rejected that line of thinking in Arizona Contractors Association v. Napolitano (2007), evaluating Arizona’s 2007 law that required all employers to use the E-Verify system to verify the work authorization of employees. According to the court, “the fact that the Act will result in additional inquiries to the federal government is consistent with federal law.” (In that case, Janet Napolitano, as governor of Arizona, defended the law; now, as homeland-security secretary, she opposes S.B. 1070.)

In summary, we’ve heard all these arguments before. Many of the people and organizations that are now declaring S.B. 1070 to be unconstitutional made the same claims regarding previous Arizona statutes: Arizona’s last three major laws concerning illegal immigration were all challenged in court ”” Proposition 200 in 2004, the Human Smuggling Act in 2005, and the Legal Arizona Workers Act in 2007…In every case, the Arizona law in question was sustained.

Ironies abound, do they not? When the political shoe is on the other foot, what was defended before is attacked now, and vice versa.

There is no use pretending that politics do not influence courts’ decisions, and so if the arguments the federal government is making at present were rejected by courts in the past, it does not mean decisions won’t go differently now.

Broadway, the Tonys, and the fountain of youth

The New Neo Posted on by

I was very small when my parents first took me to see many of the classics of the Broadway musical theater. In those days a regular family could afford to do so. Tickets were not just cheaper in the absolute sense (a few dollars bought some very good ones) but in the relative sense as well. And the quality of the shows was superb, at least in my memory.

But the thing I most remember is that the producers and directors did not feel the need to knock the audience over with a wall of sound and action, nor to exhaust the with frenetic over-the-top energy. The stages were not amplified, and performers had to supply their own lung power.

Sometimes, it’s true, you might lose a word or two (or three or four). But if you paid attention, you’d be rewarded with a natural sound, one that didn’t assault the ear with its ramped-up zing.

I’m very sensitive to sound, and I noticed it immediately later on when mics became standard on Broadway. The souped-up voices sounded metallic and fake. Why bother to go to live theater at all when the sound you heard there seemed canned?

And to go with the new sound systems, suddenly all the shows seemed as though they were on steroids in other ways as well. “Fiddler On the Roof,” for example, was a show I’d seen and loved in the original version with its original cast. But at a later Broadway revival I took my young son to see, I was aghast at the glitzy production values and booming, artificial sound, so at variance with the theme. There was no sense of intimacy, no subtlety, no emotional give and take with the audience except in the brashest of ways. Now everything was a huge production number meant to wow.

I pretty much stopped going to the Broadway theater about two decades ago—except for a few exceptions, which I’ve immediately regretted. The high cost has been part of the reason. But if I did go, I found I just wasn’t liking what I saw, and I’d rather keep my pleasant memories intact.

Fast forward to the recent Tony awards, which I watched on TV a couple of weeks ago. I was double-tasking, working on my computer. But still, I paid attention to quite a bit of the proceedings.

Nothing I saw there contradicted the impression I’d already had of what Broadway has become. The dancing was flashier, tremendously skilled but slick and unmoving. There may indeed be no business like show business, but show business (theater, that is) has come more and more to resemble the movie business, complete with tons of crossover stars (Catherine Zeta-Jones and Scarlett Johansson were big winners that night).

I was transfixed, however, by the appearance of Bernadette Peters. Peters has been on Broadway since childhood, and she’s now of “a certain age” (an age that can be confirmed by Wikipedia as 62). She looks, as they say, MAHvelous.

Unfortunately, I could only find a couple of photos of Peters from the awards ceremonies, and they were uniformly awful although she had looked wonderful. I can only conclude she’s not especially photogenic in stills, because they look nothing like the way she looked on TV. However, here’s one that captures more I less what I mean. It’s from a year ago—which means that Peters was 61 in this photo:

bp61.jpg

I don’t know what the story is on Peters. Either she’s hiding the fountain of youth in her apartment, or she’s got the best genes in the world, an incredible exercise and nutrition program, or a genius of a plastic surgeon—or perhaps all four and more.

What’s in a Hussein name?

The New Neo Posted on by

Check this out:

As reported in the New York Times, [Obama] was asked about “the anxiety of many Israelis who feel that he does not have a special bond with Israel.” Obama replied ”” get ready for it: “Some of it may just be the fact that my middle name is Hussein, and that creates suspicion.”…

[F]or Obama to impute Israeli anxiety to his Cheshire Cat of a middle name is grossly dismissive and insulting to the Israelis. Does he really believe they are such bigots as to judge him ”” other things equal ”” by his middle name? Does he have any evidence for that? Or was he drawing on his own stereotype of Israelis? How exactly was he judging them, when he tossed out that remark?

I’ll venture a wild guess that the problem for Israelis is not Obama’s name ”” first, last, or middle ”” but his flim-flam fictions and negligence regarding too many hard and dangerous realities in the Middle East.

During the campaign, Obama featured these sorts of remarks—about people reacting negatively to his name, or the way he looked—quite often (I wrote about the phenomenon here). It’s almost a kneejerk thing for him to do, so I’m not sure there’s any special message about Israelis here. The message is more about Obama and the way he thinks; he seems to believe that if people disagree with him, racial and ethnic motivations are in the picture. Or perhaps he doesn’t really think that, and it’s just a card he plays. Who knows?

However I offer Obama this poem in response, inspired by a well-known Shakespearean passage:

‘Tis not thy name that is my enemy;
It is thyself, though. Forget “Hussein.”
What is Hussein? it is nor hand, nor foot,
Nor arm, nor face, nor any other part
Belonging to a man. O, be some other name!
What’s in a name? that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;
So Obama would, were he not “Hussein” call’d,
Retain those imperfections which he owes
Without that title.

Favorite movies about courts and lawyers

The New Neo Posted on by

Glenn Reynolds gives out a call:

I’m interested in movies and TV about law and lawyers ”” not just stuff with a legal setting, but stuff that revolves around lawyers and what people think of them. Any suggestions?

Movies about what people think about lawyers would be few and far between, and probably X-rated. As for movies that feature lawyers in general, Glenn’s already got “The Verdict,” “Absence of Malice,” “Twelve Angry Men,” “Judgment At Nuremberg,” and “The Paper Chase” listed. But I’ve a few more suggestions:

(1) “To Kill a Mockingbird”
Who wouldn’t want Gregory Peck as father or lawyer and all-around nice guy? “Mockingbird’s” a perennial favorite of most people, although I have to say it always for some reason bored me nearly to tears.

(2) “Adam’s Rib”
Dueling married lawyers Tracy and Hepburn are fine fun here.

(3) “Witness for the Prosecution” and “Judgment at Nuremberg”
These are two gimmees, but both are less about law and lawyers than about trials.

(4) “Compulsion”
An old chestnut about the Leopold-Loeb murder trial, a fictionalized account in which the character meant to represent Clarence Darrow is a big player.

(5) “Inherit the Wind”
Again we have Spencer Tracy, who plays another figure meant to represent Clarence Darrow. In the movie, though, it’s Frederic March as William Jennings Bryan who absolutely steals the show with a performance that is uncanny in its force, although hammy. He even looks uncannily like Bryan. Here, you be (as it were) the judge.

First the real Darrow and Bryan (note that Darrow looks nothing like Spencer Tracy):

darrowbryan.JPG

And now here’s Frederic March in the movie as the Bryan figure:

tracymarch.jpg.

I started out writing about lawyer movies, but I end up thinking about Darrow. He was an early interest of mine, and when I saw “Inherit the Wind,” Tracy’s friendly and avuncular down-home persona as Darrow struck a jarring and false note for me in terms of the historic record, although it undoubtedly made good theater.

As a child, I had a book of Darrow’s summation speeches to the jury, which I read till it was dog-eared (yes, I’ve said before I was a weird kid). The guy was a genius of sorts, very eloquent. Another thing that drew me to Darrow’s addresses to judge and/or jury was that he loved to use poetry in them (I wonder how many lawyers that’s true for nowadays).

Darrow was a very complex figure, a “progressive” and outspoken atheist who defended a great many shady characters and was tried for bribing a jury himself. But man, the guy could deliver a summation that could wring tears from a stone—or even, at times, a judge.

As for poetry, it turns out that for a significant period, Darrow worked with lawyer-poet Edgar Lee Masters (the two were in the same law firm; both were self-taught lawyers, not an altogether-unheard-of path to law back in those days), author of “Spoon River Anthology.”

Masters and Darrow didn’t always see eye-to-eye; their relationship is described as “strained.” But Masters wrote this poem about Darrow:

This is Darrow, Inadequately scrawled,
with his young, old heart,
And his drawl, his infinite paradox,
And his sadness, and his kindness,
And his artist sense that drives him to shape his life
To something harmonious, even against the schemes of God.

Violette Verdy: coaching “Dances at a Gathering”

The New Neo Posted on by

Surfing on You Tube recently, I came across a 2001 video of then-nearly-seventy-year-old Violette Verdy coaching French dancer Isabelle Guerin in Jerome Robbins’s “Dances at a Gathering,” teaching her the role that was first created on Verdy herself in 1969. This is how ballets are generally passed on, person to person.

I saw the original not once but many times. Unfortunately, I can’t find any online videos of what I remember as the transcendent performance of Verdy as part of that long-ago cast.

But you can watch Verdy attempt to teach her old role to Guerin (unfortunately, embedding is blocked, so you have to click on the link to see it). Violette sparkles with effervescence despite the fact that she’s merely indicating the barest outlines of the movements. Guerin, who was forty at the time, only a bit past her prime as a dancer, shows none of the fluid charm, subtle humor, and exquisite musicality I remember from Verdy’s long-ago performance of the very same steps.

It lives on in my memory. I guess such things cannot be transmitted to the next generation; they must be savored as they happen. As Verdy says towards the end of the clip: “we were incredibly lucky.”

I said there are no videos available online of Verdy dancing the role But I found a still that appeared in Life magazine, with some multiple exposures that may give you a small fraction of an idea of what I’m talking about. It’s a mighty poor substitute, but I guess it will have to do:

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The politics of the US v. Arizona immigration law challenge

The New Neo Posted on by

Froma Harrop is a liberal. But (perhaps surprisingly) she does not think Obama is wise in pursuing the lawsuit against the state of Arizona. Harrop thinks it’s an especially bad idea in the political sense:

The Obama administration is challenging Arizona’s tough new immigration law, and that’s too bad. It’s not that the Arizona law is good policy, because it isn’t. And it’s not that President Obama doesn’t have a better idea on immigration reform, because he does. Democrats should know that they play with fire by going after a law that reflects the public’s utter frustration with illegal immigration.

I find it interesting that even Harrop—a staunch Obamaphile, when last I noticed—is alarmed by this move and realizes it is hugely unpopular with the American public and could backfire. Although that sort of thing has never stopped President Obama before, she advises him to pursue the Schumer-Graham immigration reform bill instead and lay off Arizona:

Many [voters] may not care much for the details in the Arizona law, but after decades of seemingly open borders, they may feel it’s the only law they have.

It’s up to the Obama administration to change that impression. The president can do that by leaving Arizona alone and promoting an effective and humane immigration policy going forward.

I’m not in agreement with Harrop on most things, but if I were still on the same political side of the fence as she I would most definitely agree with her here, and I understand her frustration with Obama’s tendency to shoot himself (and the party, and the liberal cause) in the foot.

What Harrop doesn’t understand is that Obama is not thinking on the same wavelength as she. He is not trying to solve a problem called illegal immigration. He is not trying to appeal to people of good will on both sides. He is trying to prove his bona fides to Hispanics and leftists, and to serve warning to Arizona and other states that if they try to take matters into their own hands and challenge his failure to enforce the law and protect them, it will cost them plenty in time and money, and they may lose.

It will be very interesting to see how this case goes in the courts, including the one where I think it may end up, the SCOTUS.

[NOTE: There are some excellent comments on the Harrop piece, here, including the following from “Ernie + Banks:”

My understanding is that the Arizona law carefully mirrors the law that has been in place in Rhode Island for several years. If it is legal in Rhode Island, and has been accepted by the feds, then why is it unacceptable in Arizona?

And if the premise of the federal case is that states and cities cannot pass laws about enforcement of immigration status, then why do they permit the existence of sanctuary cities all over the US?

Finally, I understand that the federal law calls for local law enforcement agencies to turn over illegal residents to the feds for prosecution. All the Arizona law does is provide guidelines to local police on how to do that. Rather than contradicting federal law, it supports it and provides clear rules to be followed. This process is followed in virtually every other field of law. What is so special about immigration?

I wouldn’t write off Arizona’s chances of prevailing in court. They are likely to be slapped down with an injunction written by the Clinton appointee that will hold the first hearings. And that injunction likely will be upheld by the 9th circuit, the most liberal federal circuit court of appeals in the country. But when it lands in the Supreme Court, it could go either way.

One more observation: Harrop notes that the public “may not care much for the details in the Arizona law.” But it seems to me that many members of the press (and the Obama administration) have not even learned those details, and/or are consistently misrepresenting them. Much of the public seems to have done its homework more attentively than either of those entities, and seems to understand and appreciate that the details of the law are not nearly as bad as painted.]