... that you need to have a "Cliff notes" section of your blog to explain in a few, clear, 3rd grade level sentences what the main point of your blog entry was? And do you get depressed about that feeling?

I can kind of understand the reasoning of the Nobel prize committee on this. The absolute unwillingness to negotiate, the declarations of American sovereignity over every other nation that Bush would make, repeatedly ("of course we can go into any country we wish, take whoever we want out of it, and put them away in a secret prison somewhere, it's necessary in the war on terror, and if you object, you are our enemy" is the message Bush openly sent to the rest of the world over and over). So, when the next president of the most powerful nation that has ever existed, whose military budget is larger than the rest of the world combined, comes in and says "hey, we want to talk about things with you guys, and listen to what you have to say, we recognize that you are your own countries", that is a huge step from the rest of the world's viewpoint.

And a sign of just how bad things are for peace these days.

But, that is a digression to this post. This post is about guilt by association. It reminds me of when I get told "Hitler was a vegetarian", or that "From each according to his ability, to each according to their needs" is a bad sentiment because the USSR under Joseph Stalin called itself a communist country, instead of it being the fundamental goal of all forms of society.

And, yes, it is stupid politics. The stupid people who fall for these tactics already have the Republican party, so why continue emphasizing you are just a second-rate Republican party? It's like an advertising campaign by Wolfgang Puck saying "Our pizza is just like Dominoes, except we DON'T deliver".

There is a strange "common wisdom" about the "law" as being intended to be absolute and if you break it, no matter what the circumstances, you will be punished by a pre-ordained punishment. This mindset is stupid, and is what has led to so many people going to prison. It has always seemed to me that one of the prime reasons for having courtrooms, judges, juries, lawyers, etc. is that the real world can never be adequately accounted for by any law, and so the law needs to be interpreted, and can even be ignored given sufficiently extenuating circumstances. Such a judgment is not left in the hands of the police, prosecutors, or president, but is given to the combination of a jury of your peers and a judge (or several as the case may be).

As an aside, mandatory sentencing is bat-shit crazy. A friend of mine was horrified several years ago when he found out his reporting of the theft of his $50 bike might lead to a life-sentence because of this being a "third-strike" for the person who took it.

Anyway, back to the main point. We have a whole third branch of government, which acts in concert with the public, for interpreting and applying the law to particular cases. Bush, Congress, and Obama are all actively interfering with that process. It is simply not their place to override the courts or tell a prosecutor, judge and jury which laws should be followed and which shouldn't. This is the fundamental concept of the Rule of Law, not that the laws are absolute, but that the determination of when and how to apply a law should not be determined by governmental power struggles.

It was a slight attempt at humor, but there was still a particular point I was making. Mathematical symbols, unlike commas, semi-colons, periods, contractions, etc. have no proper place in written discussions such as this. Mathematical symbols have precise definitions and certain properties which are always true, which is why they are used in scientific proofs. When you use mathematical symbols for attempting to make sociological arguments, you are adopting a patina of hard science about something which is not a scientifically valid conjecture, but simply a working cultural definition. I.e., you are attempting, whether consciously or not, to give some arbitrary semantic definition an aura of an "universal truth", which it does not have. And what you end up doing is taking the thought out of the concept you are trying to propose, and obscuring what you actually mean. Improperly casting it into a mathematical formulation serves no purpose unless you are actually trying to assert that Power = Racism - prejudice naturally follows from your premise Racism = Power + Prejudice.

Now there are proper ways of expressing the same idea using symbolic logic which might actually lead to further insights and relationships among the subjects involved, but that isn't what you are doing when using such a sloppy shorthand. So it is really a cheap marketing gimmick, and comes across as such. A replacement for actual thought. Better to actually say that "Racism of the type that governments can and should interfere with is when one group has a negative view of another group over which it has some power, where the groups are defined by arbitrary hereditary characteristics." Or, more simply, prejudice without some power to do harm to the group being disparaged is not something that requires legal action. Therefore, if a group does not have power to act upon their prejudices in a way that significantly changes the power dynamic in a society, then you do not refer to it as "racism".

If that is what you actually mean.

agree with you about the NYT story. Event people like Kieth Olbermann seem to be spending more time repeating what the loonies are sayig rather than pointing out how things are taken out of context or misrepresented.