Sherry Chandler

I keep swearing off this subject but then something comes up like Anglachel’s take on Hillary Hatred:

The key marker of a Hillary Hater is the willingness to state, in almost the same breath, that [Hillary hatred] is out of control and then to plunge in for a full-throated round of it. The calumny, of which the respondents, just like our own pitiful Josh Marshall, appear oblivious, is their own. They are engaged in a performative (hey, I did spend a lot of time in grad school learnin’ the lingo…) of hatred. They are not describing something about Hillary (she, as a corporeal being, is negated) - they create “Hillary” with their assertions about what is or is not relevant to the construct. Indeed, the respondents sometimes do not appear to understand the effect they are having on the listener, the way in which they are exposing their own innner psyche:

…

Fish then dives directly into the darkest heart of the revivified Clinton Derangement Syndrome and its powerful hold on the Left, the way in which it is used to rationalize support for Obama. As with Hillary, Obama himself is erased as a person and reappears as a screen upon which the lines of CDS are limned.

Anglachel is riffing off Stanley Fish’s column A Calumny A Day to Keep Hillary Away, which in turn is a response to all the Hillary-hating comments he got to his first column on the subject of Hillary Hatred: All You Need is Hate. All good reads.

What interests me here is the notion that CDS hurts not just Clinton but Obama too and the whole Democratic Party by reifying both our candidates. It amazes me how naïve some pundits on the left are to fall for this. It is not Hillary Clinton who is dividing the party. It’s the right. From Fish:

Carolyn Kay ([commenter] 456) makes the point when she observes that if you vote against Clinton because you fear the virulence of her most vocal enemies, “you have allowed the right-wing hatemongers to decide who our candidate will be.”

To quote Anglachel again:

How inconsiderate of her, indeed. How dare she force the political conditions which make us feel uncomfortable. This gets back to something I have been saying again and again in the last month, where I point out the deep discomfort that the wine-track left and especially the A-List Boyz have with political conflict. They somehow want to have victory without having anyone besmirch their candidate and without having that candidate taint his dainty hands with the crude weilding of power. What Krugman (here and here) and Perlstein both point out is that there are divisions in this nation that run so deep and are so powerful that we have no choice save to fight them tooth and nail, and to understand that we have only our mortal, flawed and always already compromised leaders to rally behind. What these respondents hate the most about Hillary (and also about Bubba) is that they are “unclean”.

And Fish:

Of course Obama has every right to take advantage of the enmity his opponent has garnered over the years. It is the politically savvy thing to do, just as it is politically savvy for him to insist that the superdelegates follow the voters in their districts, given that a majority of them is known to favor Senator Clinton. But political savvy is perhaps not what Obama wants to claim. His boast–problematic down the road–is that he is not a politician at all.

Meanwhile, the Big Tent Democrat sees the future in Bobby Jindal’s eyes. Sigh.

Guys, we are not electing “Most Popular” in the Senior Class. It’s issues we need to think about. We need candidates who are actually going to accomplish something for us whether we like them or not! And we need more Democrats in the Congress!

Rant courtesy of Shakesville blogwhoring.

The battle escalates!

And it makes the NYTimes:

PORTSMOUTH, Ohio

An eight-ton rock rested for generations at the bottom of the Ohio River, minding its own business as time and currents passed. It favored neither Ohio to the north nor Kentucky to the south. It just — was.

Occasionally, when water levels dropped, the boulder would break the surface long enough to receive the chiseled tattoos of mildly daring people seeking remembrance. But it stopped playing peek-a-boo nearly a century ago, leaving only ephemera in its wake, including a sepia photograph of a well-dressed woman in a frilly hat, standing in the middle of the Ohio, on this rock.

Now, because of one man’s obsessive good intention, the fabled rock sits on old tires in the municipal garage of this river city, awaiting the outcome of a border dispute …

Last month the Kentucky House of Representatives passed a resolution demanding the rock’s return to its watery bed, with one of its members suggesting that a raiding party to Portsmouth might be in order. Not to be outdone, the Ohio House of Representatives is considering a resolution that asserts the rock’s significance to Ohio, and its speaker has said he is ready to guard the boulder with his muzzle-loading shotgun.

With slideshow. Though it seems biased toward the Ohio side, it’s got some great pictures of the rock.

And Charlie, they didn’t even give you and me credit for our great coverage of this item.

I’ve spent most of my life in territory marked out by the Licking River on the east and the Kentucky River on the south and west (it curves), both of which flow north and debouch into the Ohio on the north. The Ohio is a huge river, receiving drainage of a large part of the Appalachians in Pennsylvania, West Virginia, Ohio, and Kentucky before it reaches Cincinnati, where it swells to nearly a mile wide. It was a major thoroughfare for western migration and how to get across it still figures into any planning for a drive north.

It was with considerable interest, then, that I learned recently that both the Licking and the Kentucky Rivers are a million years or so older than the Ohio. As is Eagle Creek, a considerable stream that meanders through Grant and Owen Counties where I grew up and where my family now lives. Eagle Creek forms the northern border of Owen County as the Kentucky River forms its western border, and I spent a good part of my childhood in, on, and around these streams.

Eagle Creek and its bottoms are so important in the settlement and economy of contiguous counties that my friend Georgia Green Stamper says that when her pioneering family found land on the banks of the Eagle, they saw no need to go further or ever move again. (You will find this story and others about the Hudsons of Eagle Creek in Georgia’s book of essays, tentatively titled You Can Go Anywhere and due out soon from Wind Publications.) My own family didn’t live on the creek itself but on Elk Creek, a feeder stream for which the Elk Creek Winery is named. Occasional plans to dam Eagle Creek to provide water for the urban areas of Scott and Fayette Counties have always met huge protests from local farmers.

You can see the current Lower Eagle Creek Watershed below. I found the map and pictures of Eagle Creek here. The gray area at the top of the map is the Ohio River. The Creek curls back around into Owen County actually it arises in Owen County south and east of Owenton, travels east into Grant and then curls back around west and into the watershed area you see here. That is the part I lived nearer the headwaters.

According to Stanley Hedeen in Big Bone Lick. The Cradle of American Paleontology (University Press of Kentucky, 2008), plate tectonics threw the Cincinnati Arch (or the Lexington Peneplain) up out of the Ordovician Sea. At that time, say 4 million years ago, the area was a “rolling flattish surface,” somewhat like the Bluegrass Region that is a part of the Arch that wasn’t scrubbed by glaciers. The Old Kentucky and Old Licking Rivers, which even then flowed north, were formed by it’s drainage. About two million years ago, as the map below shows, these two rivers joined somewhere around Hamilton, Ohio, and continued northward perhaps into the Erie Basin or perhaps into another preglacial river, the Teays. Meanwhile Old Eagle Creek may have flowed into the Kentucky at the current site of Big Bone Lick (in Boone County).

Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from James T. Teller, “Preglacial [Teays] and Early Glacial Drainage in the Cincinnati Area, Ohio, Kentucky, and Indiana,” Geological Society of American Bulletin 84 [1973]:3679, and Frank R. Ettensohn, “The Pre-Illinoian Lake Clays of the Cincinnati Region,” Ohio Journal of Science 74 [1974]:215.

You can see the extent of the Cincinnati Arch in Kentucky in this map from the Kentucky Geological Survey. That horseshoe (ahem) around the Ordovician defines the Bluegrass Plateau.

And this is the way things stood until the first of the Pleistoscene Ice Age glaciers, the Pre-Illinoian, started pushing south. That devil really tore up jack. It was like a big dam coming down from the north. It filled up the Old Kentucky River and all the other north-flowing streams draining between Cincinnati and the Appalachians and turned them into lakes. And as the lakes overflowed into one another, voilá, the Ohio River. You can see from the map below that the peculiar curve of the Ohio in northern Kentucky is pretty much the same as the curve of the glacier. The glacier also pushed up some pretty big hills out of what once was the plain around Cincinnati.

The Pre-Illinoian covered Big Bone Lick and pushed Eagle Creek southward into approximately its current bed. The Ohio cut its present channel as the glacier retreated.

Map from Stanley Hedeen, Big Bone Lick, adapted from Louis L. Ray, “Geomorphology and Quaternary Geology of the Glaciated Ohio River Valley—A Reconnaissance Study,” U.S. Geological Survey Professional Paper 826 [1974], plate 1

Through it all, though, Big Bone Lick stayed put. Somewhere in all the glaciation, it formed its own drainage stream, Big Bone Creek, and it was always a site that attracted mammals to its salt spring. Hence its name. It has also attracted Native Americans and colonists who distilled its salt, tourists who sought the healing powers of its waters, amateur paleontologists, including Thomas Jefferson, who carried off its fossils, and most lately, creationists who wanted to build their museum beside it to make some kind of point. Fortunately, that last scheme was thwarted.

No particular reason for telling all this except that it fascinated me and maybe illustrates the magnitude of change we may see as the globe warms. If you want more information, visit Kentucky Geological Survey’s Fossils of Kentucky and other links on the page.

Update: Harry says he’s already getting hay fever over there in England and links to this article in the Telegraph:

Traditional British winters no longer exist and spring should be brought forward because the seasons have changed so much in recent years, according to the curator of Kew Gardens.

While long, hard winter freezes which were once commonplace are now gone, trees traditionally seen as harbingers of spring are awakening months early.

Dr Nigel Taylor, curator of the Royal Botanic Gardens at Kew, said the changes were significant this year because they had affected hardy, woody plants, not just bulbs.

English Hawthorn, also known as May for flowering in that month, was already in leaf in late January, two months early. It may now flower before the end of this month.

Both Blackthorn and Common Ash are already in flower. Daffodils, crocuses and snowdrops are also early this year according to the gardens’ latest data.