"The best punishment for a man who would take your wife is to let him have her."

A tl;dr summary to something that was actually not too long responding to a call for "instant karma" stories.

"I bet Barack Obama yearns for the days when he was only *running* for President."

"That's what he was good at. He'll have to reach much deeper into himself to find leadership, if it's there, and not just the idea, the mirage of it. It's scary and funny to see him so shaken by trying to ride the jackass bronc of Congressional Democrats and the mad bull elephant of House Republicans. Now we're getting somewhere. I don't think he'll completely fail, but it will be an unnerving while until he finds his seat."

***

Obama is giving soooooo much raw material to his opponents, who have — from Day 1 — been trying to frame him as a miserable failure — which exactly what Bush's opponents did to Bush.

You know what's really funny? That term — "miserable failure" — that was pinned on Bush so relentlessly? Do you remember who started that meme?

Tom Daschle!

Karma.

ADDED: Upon the suggestion, in the comments, that Richard Gephardt called Bush a "miserable failure" before Tom Daschle, I did a methodical search and found this from December 9th 2002:

"Their trickle-down economic theories have been a miserable failure, and this is an admission of that miserable failure," Senate Democratic Leader Tom Daschle told CNN.

The earliest Gephardt example was from January 21, 2003. To be accurate, I did find this earlier quote:

The absolutely miserable failure of this administration on economics is what brings us to this point.

That's from November 7, 1991. It's about Bush all right. Bush I.

The son says: "I got a feeling that when I have kids, I'm going to have a little girl, and she's going to be completely sensible."

The father says: "I do believe in karma, and if you think for one minute that there would be anything karmically correct for you to have a well-behaved little girl, you're dreaming."

Justin Townes Earle and Steve Earle.

***

That made me think of the old Cat Stevens song "Father & Son." The 2 points of view. The son seeing himself as different from the father, and the father believing the son really will be just about the same as he was.

Here's Cat, as a young man, singing the great song beautifully, powerfully. And here's old Cat -- "look at me, I am old" -- singing the song again, in his Yusef Islam self-re-invention. The voice is the same, slightly mellowed.

Who knows if the young man and the old man are different or the same?

"I'm a man without conviction."

Sang Boy George in "Karma Chameleon." As Sonicfrog notes, Boy George is not a man without conviction anymore.

"His priorities were cigarettes, Dr Pepper, hot Cheetos and, once a week, he would buy C batteries."

"He never asked for money, but people gave him money... Poor man, may he rest in peace."

"He was Mr. John," [an old woman] cried out in Spanish. "I don't even speak English, but I would say, 'Hi, Mr. John, happy today?' "...

"Karma is coming," [one man] said. "Karma is going to come and get whoever did this."

Would you trust a law professor to be President?

Okay, this annoys me, because Steve H. asserts that I was annoyed by something, which I wasn't — I was just making fun of him — but I'm going to talk about it anyway, not to demonstrate that I'm nowhere near as irascible as you may think, but because it looks somewhat interesting.

Titled "The Dalai Obama v. Karma/Pedal Your Tricycle Back to the Faculty Lounge," it begins with an assertion that Steve has the "wonderful feeling" that Obama has "royally shafted himself over the last month," a time period which, I note, includes the "fortnight" Andrew Sullivan has termed "objectively miraculous" for Obama. (Actually, it would be objectively miraculous if Obama could royally shaft himself.)

But Steve's idea of the self-shafting consists Obama's failure to admit that he was wrong about the surge, his waffling on offshore drilling, and his increasingly apparent egotism. He connects egotism to law professing and says he's "horrified by the prospect of a law professor running the country" (the point he's supposedly made before that supposedly annoyed me).

What's so bad about lawprofs? Steve thinks they are the "idiot-savants of the profession," who couldn't "hack it" in legal practice, and took "asylum" in the cushy world of law school where we are paid too much — he estimates the salary at $100,000 — and work very little — he estimates 15 hours a week. In Steve's view, most lawprofs are "pathetic," "socialist nutwads," who act "brave and rebellious, while working tenured jobs with outstanding benefits, and while toeing the administration line with a scrupulousness worthy of OCD." We "rebel by doing exactly what people in authority tell" us to do. Protected from the demands of the real world we ran away from, lawprofs spend our lives concocting phony theories that would self-destruct on contact with the real world.

That's Steve's theory anyway.

So let's see.

1. Of course, it's fun to attack lawprofs, and many of us have retreated from the demands of clients, billable hours, and the practical application of legal knowledge. It's fun to attack lawyers too, and not being the lawyer type could be seen as a good thing. A lawyer must work in the client's interest — which is why everyone else is rightly suspicious of him — but a law professor wants to take a wider view and be free to look at problems from different perspectives.

2. Obama did not retreat from the world to become a law professor. He even turned down the job of full-time, tenured lawprof. He was always pursuing his political career, working as a legislator, or doing "community organizing," while putting in extra hours hashing through the constitutional law cases with students. He was only attracted to the teaching side of the lawprof job, the part that puts you in a lively room full of demanding, competitive individuals. He entirely eschewed scholarship, so it's irrelevant that a lot of lawprofs while away their time with unworkable theories or sucking up to other academics.

3. You certainly wouldn't want a typical lawprof to be President, but Obama was a lawprof the way Bill and Hillary Clinton were lawprofs. That is, he's a politician. Basically, we always get a politician for President.

"The son's defeat is seen as a cosmic act by his father in Seattle. He thought there was a divine reason for it."

From a newspapers in India:

Sanjaya Malakar -- who grew up learning Hare Krishna bhajans from his father Vasudeva Malakar and went on to become the most controversial contender in the singing contest American Idol, and arguably its most visible and most discussed participant -- was "sent home" on Wednesday night...

But the son's defeat is seen as a cosmic act by his father in Seattle. He thought there was a divine reason for it. Sanjaya's father said good karma would be with his son and his daughter. Incidentally the senior Malakar came to America from India as a Hare Krishna pujari.

"I am very proud of the fact that he could endure a lot of criticism and reach this level," his father said in a chat over the phone. Two weeks ago Malakar had gone to Hollywood to be with his son. "We went to the Hare Krishna temple, and we prayed. He received the prasad. And I told him that whatever happens in the competition, he should take it as something good, and he should not forget there is a path of bhakti.",,,

"America still loves him," said Malakar senior. "He would not have lasted so long otherwise. People of Indian origin here and in India love him. I will not be surprised if more and more Indian kids show up in this competition in its next season."

Sanjaya's dad met his mom when she a Krishna devotee. She no longer is a follower and his parents are divorced. But his dad continues to be a strong member of the Hare Krishna community in Seattle.

"Both Sanjaya's parents are very spiritual," said [his uncle's wife Christi Recchi who trained him as a gospel singer].... "Sanjaya has a very good heart and a lovely singing voice....

"The energy and karma is being boomeranged back on these people."

Says Sally Regenhard, an opponent of the design for the World Trade Center memorial. The project is in disarray:

The current rethinking has been prompted by a report leaked May 5 estimating the project's cost at $1 billion. But criticism of the design had mounted on such grounds as safety, symbolism and the order in which victims' names would be listed in underground galleries. Last week, representatives of the city, state and private agencies in charge of rebuilding at ground zero returned to the drawing board, looking at alterations that would cut the memorial's estimated cost in half....

Last year, [Michael] Arad's design underwent another change, reducing the number of ramps descending into each void from four to two — one entrance and one exit — after consultants said visitors would find his design too confusing. Arad, who is contractually prohibited from discussing the process, is said to have been unhappy with the decision.

What the present crisis over cost means for the design is "very unclear," said Frederic Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects. But Bell said he has been troubled by suggestions that the underground portion of the memorial could be eliminated. That change, Bell said, would be "the last straw" for Arad's original design.

Does it not seem wrong to spend so much money on a memorial? Isn't simplicity, not extravagance, what is called for? But the design is simple. Surely, it's not ornate. It's expensive because of the scheme of moving people underground:

"That's what Michael's scheme is about. It is about going down and separating from the street life and hurly-burly," [Frederic Bell, executive director of the New York chapter of the American Institute of Architects] said. "The lack of descent would be the irreconcilable change that would finally cause the scheme to lose its meaning."

Shouldn't they have thought this through long ago? Or would any design have embroiled us in boomeranging energy and karma like this?

Project Runway.

We see Daniel given the choice to keep his model or switch to Tarah, whom Zulema stole from Nick last week, setting in motion the bad karma that took her down and put Tarah up for grabs. But Daniel sticks with his original model, and the charming Tarah must go.

The new task is to make something out of things bought from flower stores. It seems inspired by the wonderful first episode of Season 1, when Austin made a dress of corn husks, and no one else got seriously into the vegetable matter on hand in the grocery store where they had to do their shopping.

Tim Gunn tells them that the winner on this project will have immunity. We see Santino saying he really wants to win this one so he can do something "really offensive" on the next one and get away with it. Nice attitude. That's what immunity's for, isn't it?

Kara cares about helping Chloe, who's way behind. She's got this the theory that one woman must make it to the final three. Kara says she's amazed that she's made it this far, and she's generous about acknowledging that Chloe was the best of the women. Chloe doesn't have much of a design though. It's just an ordinary dress with a lot of leaves plastered all over it. Much is made of the fact that she doesn't have enough time to stick on all the leaves properly, but not the fact that there isn't much of an underlying idea.

And then it turns out that Kara made a terrific, detailed dress when we weren't looking.

Nearly everyone has focused on leaves and shied away from flowers, flowers being dangerously fragile. Daniel was the only one to use many flowers, and the judges really wanted to see that. So he wins. He now seems to be so much the frontrunner to win the whole season.

And Andrae must leave. Oh! I'd grown to love him. But his Spanish moss thing really was doormat-y. It didn't fit at all. And it was quite a cop out to just shape the whole thing out of moss. (Hey, remember the moss wall on "Trading Spaces"? Moss is doom!)

Andrae interviews that he thought he was an angel floating above all the problems, and it's tough to discover that he's a human being like everyone else. Ah! The men thought they were all safe and surely one of the women would go home tonight. So I guess I'm glad to see that they were the ones who sustained the loss. But I did really like dear, sweet Andrae.

"I wrote Lennon's obituary for this newspaper the day after he was shot, Dec. 8, 1980."

Paul McGrath writes a memorial to John Lennon, which he publishes 5 days before the 25th anniversary of Lennon's death:

By and large, he had found his peace. He had survived his vices, his politics, his rages and his therapies, avoided the junkie's death unlike so many, only to meet a cheap little handgun in the hands of a sad case like so many others he had met, kids who believed in some desperate part of them that this man could actually pull them out of the pit. And he couldn't. All he could do was write and sing, and in those songs tens of millions did in fact find a real solace, a pushing back of the fog and the dark.

I'm going to pick out a set of John Lennon songs to play it as I drive my car -- baby, you can drive my car -- in the next week. I'll reveal the song list later. If you care about John Lennon, tell me, what is your song list?

UPDATE: After collecting 35 songs from my various CDs, I selected these 17:

Happiness Is A Warm Gun
Come Together
Tomorrow Never Knows
Being For The Benefit Of Mr. Kite!
Instant Karma!
Strawberry Fields Forever
Rain
Across the Universe
She Said She Said
Don´t Let Me Down
You've Got To Hide Your Love Away
Girl
Lucy In The Sky With Diamonds
In My Life
I'm So Tired
Revolution
A Day In The Life

I'm going to put the second group of 18 in my car too:

A Hard Day's Night
Please Please Me
Not A Second Time
You Can't Do That
All I've Got To Do
I Call Your Name
Sexy Sadie
Julia
If I Fell
I'm A Loser
Ticket to Ride
I'm Only Sleeping
I Feel Fine
Help!
Mind Games
I Am The Walrus
All You Need Is Love
You Know My Name (Look up the Number)

Some things about the sequencing I did on purpose. Others I find amusing now that I notice, like that I put the two songs with exclamation points together. These are all songs that appeal to me for one reason or another, and I didn't put them in the order that I favor them, though I did put my favorite one first.

UPDATE: Al Hurd remembers John and lines up 3 discs worth of songs.