At the 9 Putts Café...

... sometimes everything falls into place.

"Yep. [The press corps] 'neared rebellion' not over OLC memos or drone strikes or FOIA tardiness or leak prosecutions..."

"... but over their inability to ask Obama questions — tough ones! penetrating ones!—before and after he hit the links. Sheesh."

"President Obama on Sunday displayed the freedom that comes with not having another election ahead of him..."

"... golfing with Tiger Woods in an enclave of privilege here along Florida’s blustery Atlantic coast."

"Rookie golfer suffers Black Widow spider bite during Women’s Australian Open, uses golf tee to remove deadly venom."

"After being informed that a bite from a Black Widow can kill a child in about 30 minutes, Daniela Holmqvist channeled her inner MacGyver and took matters into her own hands."

It's not just Phil Mickelson — plenty of high-income athletes want out of California taxes.

Mickelson was just the one who was PR-deaf enough to let us know how he feels.

Why do you think Tiger Woods lives in Florida?

In November, voters in California approved a ballot measure raising the top rate on income over $1 million to 13.3% (the increase applies retroactively to last year). ... Mr. Woods grossed $56.4 million in 2012. As a Floridian, he will keep about $7.5 million that he otherwise would have owed to the state of California. His net tax savings over his 16-year career come to about $100 million. Mr. Mickelson last year earned $60.7 million. Paying the 13.3% California rate, he will owe the state $8 million.

That takes Mickelson down to $52.7 million, putting him behind Woods, when he was ahead of him on the money list. Aggravating! (I know, I'm failing to take account of the way state taxes are a deduction on your federal income taxes and everything else that affects after-tax income.)

The benefit of living in a state without an income tax can be diminished by the "jock tax" that states impose on money earned by athletes when they're playing or training in the state. (Luckily for baseball players, spring training is in no-tax Florida or low-tax Arizona.) But in sports like tennis and golf where athletes can train anywhere in the world, a preponderance happen to migrate to states without an income tax.

These celebs — with their endorsements — need good PR, as the Mickelson slip proved. State tax proponents could get proactive and actively shame the sports stars who live in Florida without an adequate cover story. 

For instance, Serena and Venus Williams grew up in Compton, Calif., but moved with their father to Florida in the early 1990s.

When golfers go Depardieu.

Actor Gerard Depardieu has been putting on a big show of running from France to escape high taxation.

Now, here in America, "Golfer Phil Mickelson May Call It Quits Due To Climbing Tax Rates."

If you think perhaps Mickelson is being a bit of a baby for threating [sic] to end a career that’s earned him a spot on this list of 10 wealthiest athletes on the planet because of some tax increases, understand that he’s getting hit on the state level, too. In November, California passed Proposition 30, which increases the top income tax rate on resident millionaires to 13.3%, a drain on Mickelson’s take-home pay that may force him to sell his 9,500 square foot mansion and flee his home state in search of more friendly pastures.

Do Americans care whether Phil Mickelson lives in the United States or not? It's hardly the equivalent of Gerard Depardieu and France. Or is it? Maybe I'm not getting America's attachment to its athletes.

Which, if any, Americans are in a position to protest — effectively protest — taxes by threatening to leave the country? Threatening to leave a state seems more plausible. I would think there are a lot of athletes in team sports who could let it be known they are taking taxes into account, but presumably that's all haggled over in private negotiations. A team in a high-tax state is going to have to put up more money than a team in a low-tax state. It really is the golfer — the athlete in business for himself — who has some choices about where to live. But other than the one-off character Tiger Woods, America doesn't care about golfers.

Protestants are no longer the majority in America... and sectlessness doubles.

It's the other Pew survey that just came out — the religion one.

Do you accept the word "sectlessness"? It's pretty much my coinage, but I'm going to promote it as a good, short headline word to refer to the absence of a religious affiliation. I originally had "atheism," but it's the wrong word, because many of the people who say they belong to no religious group also say they believe in God and even that they pray and have what the Washington Post refers to as "regular spiritual routines." I'm trying to picture those routines, and I don't know, I'm just seeing a blank. Hmm. Seeing blankness — that could be a spiritual routine. What do you think? Seems zen, doesn't it? Yeah, that's the ticket. I'm spiritual. Seriously, what do you think these regular-spiritual-routines folk are doing? Anything fancy with bread and wine or just gazing at nature and feeling aglow?

I'm reminded of my father, who when asked (by me) why he didn't go to church, said you can commune with God anywhere, for example, on the golf course. He liked to golf. Sorry, am I being too puritanical? Either participate in some official group ritual or lay off the claims of worship? No, I don't really think that. I'm just skeptical. Hell, I'm skeptical about whether the people who go to church (or other place of worship) really believe what the ritual is supposed to demonstrate. I think many people are there to honor the tradition they feel part of or to keep in touch with a social circle or to facilitate the efforts at community organizing. Maybe the sectless souls with spiritual routines are more sincerely religious.

Ah, well. It's American etiquette to accept whatever people say about their religion and move on to more easily debatable topics. Within that scheme, I'm being rude.

Back to the Pew survey: 79% of Americans named "an established faith group" that they belong to. The 21% — atheists, agnostics, and "nothing in particular" — skew strongly toward the Democratic Party.
This group is the Democrats' "largest... faith constituency" — at 24%. Or so the WaPo says, but that's only if you split Protestants into groups like "black Protestants" (16%) and "white mainline Protestants" (14%), which, added together, is 30%. Note that "white evangelicals" — also Protestants — are viewed as a separate "faith constituency," and these folks skew Republican. 34% of Republicans are white evangelicals.

The study presents a stark map of how political and religious polarization have merged in recent decades. Congregations used to be a blend of political affiliations, but that’s generally not the case anymore. Sociologists have shown that Americans are more likely to pick their place of worship by their politics, not vice versa.

How awful! What are you supposed to do when your family's traditional religious group is one that channels politics you don't like? Can you stand to attend services and sit through lectures (sermons) about politics blended with religion? You're supposed to change your religion to accord with your political ideology? That should lead many sincerely religious persons to stay away... and insincere politicos to gravitate toward the like-minded crowd.

***

I did mean to allude above to our President's religion. For context, let me repeat my own summary of  Chapter 14 of Obama's "Dreams from My Father":

While working as a community organizer, Obama was told that it would "help [his] mission if [he] had a church home" and that Jeremiah Wright "might be worth talking to" because "his message seemed to appeal to young people like [him]." Obama wrote that "not all of what these people [who went to Trinity] sought was strictly religious... it wasn't just Jesus they were coming home to." He was told that "if you joined the church you could help us start a community program," and he didn't want to "confess that [he] could no longer distinguish between faith and mere folly." He was, he writes, "a reluctant skeptic." Thereafter, he attends a church service and hears Wright give a sermon titled "The Audacity of Hope" (which would, of course, be the title of Obama's second book). He describes how moved he was by the service, but what moves him is the others around him as they respond to a sermon about black culture and history. He never says he felt the presence of God or accepted Jesus as his savior or anything that suggests he let go of his skepticism. Obama's own book makes him look like an agnostic (or an atheist). He respects religion because he responds to the people who believe, and he seems oriented toward leveraging the religious beliefs of the people for worldly, political ends.

"There may well come a day, when women will be invited to join our membership..."

"... but that timetable will be ours, and not at the point of a bayonet."

Why is it that Obama can't just enjoy his slow jam with Jimmy Fallon?

We were talking about Obama's effort at comedy on the Jimmy Fallon show. I had said, in the post, "Doesn't he have a job?" In the comments, Rabel said:

From the AP, April 25, 2012....

KABUL, Afghanistan (AP) — NATO says that two service members have been killed in separate attacks in southern Afghanistan, while two others have died of non-battle injuries.

The coalition said in statements that one service member was killed by an improvised explosive device Wednesday and another by a similar weapon on Tuesday....

So far this month, 31 coalition members have died in Afghanistan, bringing the year's toll to 122."

Barack Obama was their Commander-in-Chief.

Fuck him.

 And then Rabel came right back and said:

That's his job right there.

Fuck him and fuck his Goddamn comedy act.

Now, that's a very harsh way to talk about Obama, but it's the way people talked about George Bush all the time. Remember how Bush was savaged for displaying a capacity for enjoying himself when Americans were fighting and dying?



That much criticized performance occurred in 2002. A year later, after he received news of war deaths while golfing, Bush gave up golf:

“I don’t want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander-in-chief playing golf... I feel I owe it to the families to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong message."

Does a slow jam with Jimmy Fallon send the wrong message? Or do we not think about the mom whose son may have recently died anymore? (Obama has no Cindy Sheehan dogging hounding him bothering him... at least not that we see in the news.)

Why is Obama immune from the criticism that normally befalls a President? Back in 2008, running for President, Obama pushed back the press one time with "Why is it that I can't just enjoy my waffle?"

It's like that was a really hard question — why is it that he can't just enjoy his waffle... and his multiple vacations and his golf and his rock concerts in the White House and his slow jam with Jimmy Fallon?

The answer is: Because you have a job. You applied for it. We hired you. Make us believe you're doing it.

You know, a couple days ago, Rush Limbaugh said something that sounded outlandish to me at the time:

There's a lot of mythology out there still today about Obama and his strengths and how there hasn't been any fallout from the dismal record that he has amassed.  None of this is true.  They're in trouble.  They're in deep trouble.  You basically have David Plouffe, who's the president, you got Axelrod who's the chief of staff and Obama's out playing golf.  Obama... Not quite.  Obama's out doing the fundraising, but David Plouffe is the acting president, Axelrod's chief adviser, and Obama's out playing golf.  Obama basically has a nine a.m. to four p.m. day.  It's these other guys that are formulating policy, doing all this other stuff.  He knows what's going on, don't misunderstand, and he's guiding and influencing it.

I'm not saying Obama's disengaged, doesn't know what's going on and he's a puppet.  Don't misunderstand.  Not saying that at all.  But he's not known as a hard worker. He's not known as somebody who gets in there early and stays late....

While David Plouffe is the president, Axelrod's the chief of staff, Obama's out raising money. After his campaign stop in North Carolina today, he's going on his comedy tour.  He'll be appearing on the Jimmy Fallon show and then with Jimmy Kimmel before being roasted at the White House Correspondents Dinner this weekend....

Plouffe is the acting President?! That sounded outlandish. But look around. Obama performs 5 minutes of a musically sexualized speech about students and... it's wearing down my sense of the outlandish.

"Baseball as a Road to God" — the name of a course at NYU.

Taught by John Sexton:

As the president of N.Y.U., Dr. Sexton could certainly teach any course he wanted. And as the former dean of its law school and clerk to a chief justice of the United States, he might have been expected to hold forth on jurisprudence. However, as a child of Brooklyn, as a scholar whose academic robe bears the number 42 in homage to Jackie Robinson, and as a practicing Catholic with a doctoral degree in religion, Dr. Sexton has for more than a dozen years chosen baseball and God as his professorial focus.

“The real idea of the course,” he put it in an interview, “is to develop heightened sensitivity and a noticing capacity. So baseball’s not ‘the’ road to God. For most of us, it isn’t ‘a’ road to God. But it’s a way to notice, to cause us to live more slowly and to watch more keenly and thereby to discover the specialness of our life and our being, and, for some of us, something more than our being.”...

The core of his original reading list — “The Sacred and the Profane,” by the religion historian Mircea Eliade — remains central to the class all these years later. Eliade’s essential insight, at least for Dr. Sexton’s purposes, is his concept of hierophany, meaning the manifestation of the sacred in the world. So, just as much as Stonehenge or the Kaaba or the Western Wall or St. Peter’s Basilica, baseball in Sextonian teaching affords such a locus for faith.

Hey, this reminds me of what my father used to say when I asked him why he didn't go to church. When we kids were little, the parents took us to church — we went here — but later they opted out. My father, who liked to play golf, said "God is every bit as much on the golf course as He is in church." I'm putting a capital "H" on "He," but it's not like he said it with a capital "H." That answer annoyed me, by the way. I was a teenager.
I was a nonbeliever in the proposition that guys on the golf course were thinking about God. Maybe if he'd claimed God was there with him when he went for a walk in the woods, I'd have accepted it. But my father never went for a walk in the woods.

By the way, a sexton is "An officer responsible for a church and its property, and for tasks relating to its maintenance or management" or "A warden, a custodian; a guardian or keeper of something..." The etymology goes back to words like "sacristan" and is influenced by the "secretarius" line of thinking which leads to "secretary." It's not connected to "sex," "the state of being male or female," which goes back to the Middle French word "sexe," meaning genitals —I'm getting this from the Oxford English Dictionary, which, sadly, I can't link to — even though one might think of genitals as sacred and secret.

"Hierophany" — which the linked article calls Sexton's "concept of... the manifestation of the sacred in the world" — is a word that is not in the Oxford English Dictionary. The closest thing is hierophancy, "The function of a hierophant; capacity of expounding sacred mysteries." A hierophant — familiar to anyone who's fooled with Tarot cards — is "An official expounder of sacred mysteries or religious ceremonies...." The etymology goes back to a root that means "bring to light, make known, reveal."



The sexton and the hierophant... picture them. One keeps things and the other brings them out into the light. Sexton's intellectual pursuit seems to be a manifestation of that old notion that an individual takes on a profession suggested by his name — many dentists are named Dennis, that sort of thing. If you were a sexton, would you not long to be a hierophant? If you were a groundskeeper, would you not long to be the Commissioner of Baseball? And if you were a lawprof, wouldn't you want to be President of NYU?

"I guess America has a new favorite Bubba."

Ha.

The University of Wisconsin Marching Band practices "I Got Plenty o' Nuttin'" in the rain...

... and Meade and I watch from the car. We proceed around town and there's some miscellaneous conversation about ant heads and graveyards and so forth. This is just a late-night trifle for anybody who wants to hang out with us for 14 minutes or less.

"But He Gave Up Golf."

Remember how the press treated George Bush?

(Story at the link originally blogged here.)

The Obama White House "actually fit all of the classic legal requirements for a genuinely hostile workplace to women."

Said former White House communications director Anita Dunn, as quoted a new book, "Confidence Men: Wall Street, Washington, and the Education of a President" — written by a man, Ron Suskind — the Washington Post reports.

Dunn now rejects the term "hostile workplace,” and adds the typical PR bullshit evidence: “The president is someone who when he goes home at night he goes home to house full of very strong women... He values having strong women around him.”

In my experience, women who are vigilant about workplaces that are hostile to women hate that argument: A man has a strong wife at home, so he must not be opposed to the success of women in the workplace.

And, by the way, specifically, I'd say that Barack Obama has kept his wife in a distinctly subordinate role. Michelle Obama went to Princeton and Harvard Law School, and now she works on encouraging children to eat vegetables and get some exercise.

But... whatever... Anita Dunn... I always thought she was a bit of an idiot. She shouldn't have gotten the job in the first place. If she was initially overpromoted, it was a good thing that she got excluded. She shouldn't have been included.

But Suskind talked to other disincluded women. According to the Washington Post account of the book:

[W]omen occupied many of the West Wing’s senior positions, but felt outgunned and outmaneuvered by male colleagues such as former Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel and Summers.

Obama, according to the book... failed to call on Romer after asking her male colleagues for their opinions. The snub prompted Romer to pass a note to Summers where she threatened to walk out of the dinner, according to the book....

The Obama White House has long been dogged by similar claims of exclusivity — his golf outings have been typically all-male affairs...

So... is there something sexist about the Obama administration? Seems like Suskind came up with a great angle for his book, but I'm skeptical. I think Obama may have been overenthusiastic about giving a lot of  positions to women, and perhaps those women really weren't as good as the men he surrounded himself with and really does need to rely on. In that case, he deserves credit for good judgment. But it is funny that he's not more concerned about the optics. Perhaps he assumes that he is especially appealing to women constituents and he doesn't need to do much to maintain that favor. It's the men he's in danger of losing. Time for another round of all-male, manly golf.

"He’s not Jimmy Carter. He’s Tiger Woods — a natural who’s lost his swing."

"He has so many different swing thoughts in his head, so many people whispering in his ear about what the polls say and how he needs to position himself to get re-elected, that he has lost all his natural instincts for the game."

Racist or just fatuous?

Racist or fatuous?
	Racist.
	Fatuous.
	Both.
	Neither.
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"Yeah, anytime you spend four hours with the president, either with a spoon in your hand or a golf club in your hand or nothing in your hand — you learn something."

"If he invites you to lunch — anytime you get a chance to talk to the president, in any context, I find incredibly beneficial."

When he's around the President, please keep an eye on what Thomas Friedman has in his hand.

Tiger Woods steps on President Obama's 11 a.m. news conference.

Which 11 a.m. appearance are you going to watch?

Obama?

Obama plans to hold a press conference at 11 a.m. in Washington today, his fifth public remarks on the debt in a week, as he presses lawmakers to reach an agreement to raise the $14.3 trillion U.S. borrowing ceiling before an Aug. 2 deadline. The president and bipartisan congressional negotiators agreed to meet every day until they reach a deal, said one legislative aide on condition of anonymity.

Or Tiger?

[T]he news that Tiger will sit down with The Golf Channel's Kelly Tilghman on Monday morning at 11 AM ET seems a bit strange....

What could it be?... Here are a few of the possibilites.

-- Tiger won't play golf for the rest of 2011...

-- Tiger needs to have surgery to fix his knee/Achilles.

-- Tiger might comment on his relationship with Anthony Galea, maybe just to clear the air after Galea was indicted last week on counts of transporting illegal drugs across the border for a number of athletes.

-- Tiger might be giving us an idea of when he will return to golf.

Which press event will you tune to at 11 a.m.?
	Obama
	Tiger
	Neither
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Obama in long pants. Boehner in shorts. [CORRECTION ADDED: I got played by the NYT!]

Obama won the "Golf Summit." In my book.

You've got a big photo-op golf game with the President of the United States? Wear pants!

Don't the Republicans like to portray themselves as the adults? Put on a pair of pants! A man in shorts looks like a ridiculously enlarged boy.

CORRECTION: The golf summit is next weekend. The photos are just what the NYT selected to illustrate its article about the future event. Unfair to Boehner! I expect both men to wear pants for the summit.

"It's not that we're against raccoons and skunks."

"We'll go through the proper channels now."

Just another gun rights issue here in Wisconsin.

There's also: "Walker says concealed carry bill should require training, permits."

Trump on same-sex marriage: "It's like in golf... people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive."

Okay, it's an analogy, you know!

At one point, he compared his opposition to the legalization of same-sex marriage to his reluctance to use a new kind of putter.

“It’s like in golf,” he said. “A lot of people — I don’t want this to sound trivial — but a lot of people are switching to these really long putters, very unattractive,” said Mr. Trump, a Republican. “It’s weird. You see these great players with these really long putters, because they can’t sink three-footers anymore. And, I hate it. I am a traditionalist. I have so many fabulous friends who happen to be gay, but I am a traditionalist.”

He said that, should he run, he would offer himself as a “conservative with a big heart.”

Now, do you understand the analogy, wise guy? Before you get your panties in a twist? Think about it!

What's his main point? He's saying it just looks weird to him — the long putter and the same-sex marriage. It bugs him. He's not saying he hates gay people. It's the casual "I hate it" that means "It drives me nuts." Now, it's not all about him and how things make him feel — not if he means to acquire political power. (Which I'm sure he doesn't, even though he's saying he's decided "in my mind" to run for President. Or is it that he's decided to run for President in his mind?)

Anyway, I think that putter thing is rather self-deprecating. He's confessing that his mind has limits, but he sees and talks openly about the limits of his mind. That's actually refreshing!