The League of Ordinary Gentlemen

Sex Scandal Extravaganza!!!

by Tod Kelly May 21, 2012

Over the weekend I posted the argument that unlike with other elected officials, in today’s modern media world we tend to pick presidents based more on “likability” than qualifications, experience or record. My Jumping-Off-Point was the Gary Hart scandal from 1988, and one of the interesting conversations in the threads was the topic of why some political sex scandals are get widely reported and others don’t. The seemingly obvious answer is bias against one party, but this doesn’t hold up ...

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What Makes a War?

by J.L. Wall May 21, 2012

In his writing on the Civil War and American slavery, Ta-Nehisi Coates frequently refers to a “war” on the slaves and/or America’s black populace. (The violence done to slaves — or at least the threat of it – did to some degree extend to free blacks.) This is a notion that I’ve been less than comfortable with, without ever quite understanding why. Recently, TNC paused to define and criticize his own terminology: The use of the word “war” carries with it a notion of ...

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Presuppositional Constitutionalism

by Tim Kowal May 21, 2012

Does the Constitution assume certain presuppositions on the part of those it means to govern? If so, what are those presuppositions? I submit the answer to the first question is yes, and explain the presuppositions that by necessity must be true for our Constitution to be intelligible. In light of the project begun here recently to explore the contemporary significance of the natural law, I offer for your consideration my theory of natural law constitutionalism, or “presuppositional constitutionalism.” It is ...

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Cory Booker Is Very Reasonable

by Elias Isquith May 20, 2012

Newark Mayor Cory Booker has been on something of a permanent honey moon with the Democratic Left — the apotheosis of which was his foray into firefighting — but that now seems to be over. He had to go and ruin it all on Meet the Press this morning, saying something centrist, like calling the Obama campaign’s anti-Bain Capital ads “nauseating to the American public.”… [Continued at Jubilee]

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Tebow vs. Tebow™: Because 5 months without a Tebow post is too long, dammit!

by Tod Kelly May 20, 2012

It appears that Tim Tebow and his legal team are about to file a lawsuit against Cubby Tees, a tee shirt manufacturer. Cubby Tees, in an obvious attempt to cash in on the buzz surrounding Tebow’s move to the NY Jets, is marketing a new shirt that toys with the Jets’ logo. Instead of saying NY Jets it says My Jesus, and the simple football graphic has been replaced with the ubiquitous Christian Ichthyis. The shirt does not mention Tebow ...

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How Gary Hart Taught Me that Obama Will Win in November

by Tod Kelly May 19, 2012

I have a friend that I used to hang out with back in the 90s. He was older than I was, and during the years leading up to the 1988 election he worked for the AP following the various Democratic Presidential wannabes that were touring the Midwest and East coast in what would end up being a monumentally poor attempt at defeating the Reagan-lite George Bush. I heard him talk about candidate Gary Hart a number of times to various ...

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What’s a Grecian Government Urn?

by James K May 19, 2012

The situation in Greece seems to be coming to a head, with the Greek people near-united in opposition to austerity, but not apparently sufficiently united on an alternative. The mainstream left has lost ground to a coalition of far-left parties which are totally opposed to austerity. Even the fascists are crawling out of the woodwork, as they typically do at times like this. Meanwhile, the Greek government’s credit rating has fallen from B- to CCC, which is basically a move from “Pretty dodgy” to ...

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Two Audiences

by Elias Isquith May 18, 2012

Responding to Mitt Romney’s newly unveiled national ad for the general election, Jamelle Bouie writes: I imagine that the ad will serve its purpose. If you—like most people—haven’t been paying attention to politics over the last year, you would think that President Obama has purposefully kept jobs from the United States, raised taxes on “job creators,” and passed a terrible, ineffective health care bill… [Continued at Jubilee]

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How Thurgood Marshall Beat David Allan Coe

by Mark Thompson May 18, 2012

“We consider the underlying fallacy of the plaintiff’s argument to consist in the assumption that the enforced separation of the two races stamps the colored race with a badge of inferiority. If this be so, it is not by reason of anything found in the act, but solely because the colored race chooses to put that construction upon it.” -Plessy v. Ferguson, 163 U.S. 537 (1896) “To separate them from others of similar age and qualifications solely because of their ...

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Monty Python and the Holy Grail: The Game

by Erik Kain May 18, 2012

Over at Forbes I have a post detailing why I think somebody needs to make a Monty Python and the Holy Grail MMORPG. I list out monsters, character classes, etc. So if you have any thoughts on the subject, or notice anything I missed, please check it out and let me know…

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Who’s the New Guy?

by Conor P. Williams May 18, 2012

I. The Task: Why so awkward? Everyone who writes for The League is ordinary, but some are more ordinary than others. Some of these super-ordinary League elites asked me to provide an introductory post, on pain of not being allowed to post rambling thought pieces anymore. I hear there’s also going to be a small “initiation” ceremony. I’m kidding, of course. They’re all swell gents, those guys. But they did ask that I give the League‘s readers some background. A caveat: As a native Midwesterner, I find ...

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Radio Free Europe: In Which the Good People of the Netherlands Turn My Post Into a Radio Program

by Tod Kelly May 18, 2012

Last December on the day after my birthday, I received an email from Netherlands public radio. One of the producers there had come across a post of mine. “I wanted to make contact with you regarding doing an essay for our radio programme,” she wrote. “The idea would be to take your story and turn it into an essay that you would share on our programme. If this sounds interesting to you, please get in touch.” I was pretty sure ...

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Wendell Berry Studies I: Mother Nature’s Son

by J.L. Wall May 17, 2012

Wendell Berry’s recent Jefferson Lecture was not, as both his supporters and detractors have acknowledged, his finest piece of writing. His use of the lectern to present a theory of Kentuckian animosity for all things Duke that began well before 1992 has, however, obscured the more interesting and important aspect of the address—which, to one well-read, though by no means an expert, in Berry’s writing, at the very least felt new: his explicit and concise argument for affection. In this post ...

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On Bases And Bandwagons In Election 2012

by Elias Isquith May 17, 2012

A bit of yesterday’s news, but I’d like to talk about this article from National Journal‘s Alex Roarty on voter expectation and November’s election. Roarty highlights a CNN poll that finds a substantial majority of voters expecting to see the Obamas in the White House until 2017. Maybe not especially surprising, if we take into account that most incumbents win reelection (though whether voters know this is doubtful), but what’s striking is just how few think they’ll be seeing Mitt ...

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Talk radio, taxes, and the Bible

by Guest Authors May 17, 2012

~by M.A. Conor P. Williams, in Conservatism Isn’t Radical—It’s “Modular”, argues that there is a certain amount of mental jiu-jitsu involved in shifting frameworks from argument to argument. An interesting test of this very case came up this morning with the local radio talk host bringing up the topic of the death penalty in conjunction with a Time Magazine story covering the execution of one Carlos DeLuna, who a 5-year investigation has shown was almost certainly innocent of the crime he was executed ...

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Adventures in Baby Name Charts

by Ryan Noonan May 17, 2012

After reading Will’s post yesterday about baby names, I started poking around in the Social Security baby name database (which is an incredibly fun resource and might be all we get, since Republicans think we shouldn’t let Census do fun things any more).

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Conservatism Isn’t Radical—It’s “Modular”

by Conor P. Williams May 16, 2012

Though the post-Lugar media tide has subsided, the American Right’s growing radicalism is still a leading theme of American political coverage. Even before Lugar’s unceremonious exit from public life, the Tea Party and other far-right-wing groups were attracting serious attention. Whatever else Lugar’s exit means, it’s clear that the American Right is engaged in a quest for ideological purity. Isn’t it? Well, yes—like most worn truisms, it is true. However, as is also usually the case, it’s not a very ...

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The Real Mitt Romney, Inside the Actor’s Studio

by Erik Kain May 16, 2012

James Lipton offers some good, though likely impossible, advice to Mitt Romney (via The Dish.) Politics is performance. This has never been more true than now.

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Aesthetic Preference is a Recognition of Craftsmanship

by Christopher Carr May 16, 2012

Something David Ryan wrote about dark art and wanna-be-sophistos has had me thinking for a while – first about whether valuing civility and the desire not to offend keep us all trapped in a glass fortress (they do, but there’s a trade-off, of course) – then about why we like the things we do. In terms of the latter, after considerable thought and up until recently, I had embraced some species of nihilism; the idea that aesthetic preferences are merely ...

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Why I am not an attachment parent

by Rose Woodhouse May 16, 2012

Time Magazine deliberately started an uproar with its cover photo of a woman confrontationally breastfeeding (seriously, if you can breastfeed confrontationally, she’s doing it) a preschooler. And so the backlash against attachment parenting begins. The article is behind a pay wall, and I really don’t want to reinforce this kind of cover, so I haven’t read it. I don’t especially welcome this backlash. If someone wants to breastfeed her kid until he’s four, that’s seriously none of my business. It certainly doesn’t ...

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Poli-Sci 101 : Hunter S. Thompson Edition

by Guest Authors May 16, 2012

by Sam Wilkinson Once, I was a graduate student pursuing a PhD in Political Science, a stupid idea for at least a thousand different reasons, perhaps most importantly my aversion to political science in general. I took a comprehensive exam in which I was expected to cite literature that the department had decided was important to the field. As I am wont to do, I insisted upon including a reference to Hunter S. Thompson’s “A Southern City With Northern Problems,” an essay he ...

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