slacktivist

Snopes.com is necessary, but not sufficient.

That's one of the things I started out wanting to say. Then I got a bit distracted as that thought was reinforced by the dismaying spectacle of Sarah Palin's unconditional admirers -- their admiration only increasing with every Katie Couric interview and every repeated, documented lie -- and that initial thought led to others and those led to others, and puzzlement led to exasperation and then to pity and then to resolve and I never quite came right out and said exactly what it was that I had initially wanted to say as precisely as I'd wanted to.

And that again was this: Snopes.com is necessary, but not sufficient.

If you're not familiar with it, Snopes is an indispensable resource, one of those Internet tools that it now seems impossible to imagine living without. They deal with rumors, urban myths, legends and idle gossip, addressing every case with an open mind and subjecting it to a simple test: Is this true? What are the facts?

Facts matter. But facts are, in themselves, rarely persuasive.

The last time I had occasion to consult Snopes involved an acquaintance who is, in many ways, a likable enough person. But he also seems to hear and absorb a lot of information that ain't necessarily so.

This time it had to do with Target, the nationwide discount retail chain. He refuses to shop at Target because they hate veterans. I hadn't heard that. It seemed implausible, since hating on veterans would be just about the most self-destructive PR strategy one could imagine for a retail chain. Plus I know a lot of veterans and I've never heard about this from any of them. Those I know best, in fact, shop at Target all the time.

But OK, I said, let's look it up. And we went to Snopes and there it was. Snopes explains that this rumor is not true. They provide the background of the rumor and trace its history back to a single e-mail from a single person. They cite that person and his retraction and apology. They cite official statements from Target and evidence of the company's support for veterans' causes. They cite veteran's groups gratefully attesting to that support. This is all sourced and linked back to sources and in general a devastatingly thorough and altogether Snopes-like job of debunking and rebutting the rumor.

The result of this, of course, is that the acquaintance still does not shop at Target because he still chooses to believe that they hate veterans, and now he no longer believes anything from Snopes.com because, he says, this proves they can't be trusted.

This might have gone another way. Had this guy merely been misinformed, the Snopes data might have been persuasive. If the root of his problem were only a matter of bad information, good information might have resolved that problem and he could have walked away knowing something true instead of having to manufacture new falsehoods to reinforce the old ones. But misinformation was not the root or the source of his problem, so supplying him with the correct information was not, in itself, sufficient to help him.

And that really is my goal here -- to figure out some way to help this guy and others like him. To figure out some way to help these poor bastards and others like them.

They need help. They need, frankly, liberation.

The weird rumor about Target or the even weirder rumor about P&G are somewhat trivial examples of this, but basing your life on things that aren't true, that aren't real, is a kind of bondage. In simpler, more pragmatic terms: Unreality doesn't work. It is unsustainable. It is a recipe for unhappiness.

The reason I've been writing about/obsessing over things like the P&G rumor or the usefulness of Snopes is that I'm trying to figure out how to liberate the captives of unreality. (I doubt they'd appreciate my stating it that way, but there it is.)

Part of that task, obviously, is to provide them with a dose of reality -- to supply good information that might replace the bad, to offer them facts as a better option than lies. That's necessary, but not sufficient. That throws open the gates, but can't convince them to walk out into the world. Providing information offers the opportunity to choose reality, but it cannot compel or persuade them to take that opportunity or to make that choice.

That's what we're dealing with here: choices. My Target-boycotting acquaintance is making the choice to believe what he prefers to believe, irrespective of whatever the facts might actually be. That's a lot of hard work on his part. It requires an ongoing and exponentially multiplying set of fabrications to maintain. It involves an ever-expanding web of things that he can't allow himself to think about. It has to be, on some level, exhausting.

Take a look at those videos linked above (via). These people have fabricated imaginary monsters that, at some level, they know aren't real and yet they've put those monsters in charge of their lives. They're driven by fear and hatred -- fear and hatred of things they know don't really exist. They are, for whatever reason, choosing bondage to that fear and hatred and it's making them miserable. It's stunting their humanity. It's confining them. It's wearing them out.

They need help.

I'm sure help isn't something they'd welcome. And it's probably not something they'd want (although what they really might want is a more complex question). Whether or not it's something they deserve isn't for a wretch like me to decide.

But it's not about welcome or want or deserve. It's about what they need. They need liberation. They need help. And we're going to have to figure out how to help them, soon, because many of the people in those videos seem to be on the threshhold of real violence and the kind of ugliness that will make it even harder for them ever to escape.

I heard an interview with Don Cheadle recently in which he said, "You can't play down to the cynics." That's an actor's advice, but he wasn't talking only about acting. Ours is a cynical time, and in such a time I realize that any expression of concern will sound to many as merely concern trolling. Attempts to diagnose will sound to many as mere attacks or accusations. But I'm not concern trolling here and I'm not attacking or accusing. I'm just trying to figure out what has gone wrong with these people and why, because allowing them to continue along the path they have chosen would seem, for lack of a better word, cruel.

Information -- facts, reality, the rebuttal and debunking of lies -- is one kind of help that the captives of unreality need. That information is necessary, but not sufficient, for those who have chosen their own captivity. What else is necessary, and what might be sufficient to help them choose not to make that choice, is something I want to continue exploring.

Commenters on the previous post about this rumor were right to argue that I overstated the case in saying that there could be no "innocent dupes" involved in its spread. That's too categorical. But those few who may have been innocently duped by such an unbelievable tale -- the very young, the very old, the very insular -- weren't also among those most active in spreading the rumor. They heard it, and they may have believed it, but believing false witness and bearing false witness are not the same thing. It is those bearers of false witness I'm interested in here.

That lore does not arise from or relate to any actual belief system or actual believers. It is, rather, the stuff of legend as recounted in a hundred Jack Chick tracts and heavy metal album covers, in urban legends and campfire stories, in the flim-flammery of Mike Warnke and Bob Larson, and in low-budget Z-movies like the classic Satan's Cheerleaders.

But while the P&G rumor can't really be considered a horror story, it is clearly about horror or, at least, about fear. Consider, for example, the variation of the rumor that Snopes provides on their page debunking it. Try to count all the things the author of this particular lie is afraid of:

Former 1960s radical Bill Ayers appeared (as himself) in the 2002 documentary The Weather Underground, which was narrated by Lili Taylor.

Taylor was in High Fidelity with Tim Robbins who was in The Hudsucker Proxy with Steve Buscemi.

And Steve Buscemi was in Tanner on Tanner with, yes, Barack Obama.

That's only four degrees of separation -- a closer connection than either The Wall Street Journal or The New York Times was able to establish in their exhaustive attempts to find any links between the former '60s radical and the current Democratic nominee for president.

Gov. Sarah Palin has also recently tried to link Obama and Ayers, suggesting that Obama is somehow complicit in Weather Underground activities that took place when he was a child because he has since raised funds for poor kids' schools in Chicago and so has Ayers. CNN debunks Palin's claim, noting that they're a bit late to the party what with the Times and every other news outlet -- "Several other publications, including the Washington Post, Time magazine, the Chicago Sun-Times, The New Yorker and The New Republic ..." -- having already staked and dusted the claim before Palin repeated it.

I've never met Ayers, and I haven't been to Chicago in years, but I can claim a closer connection to the man than Obama has. My uncle, and namesake, is listed in Ayers' c.v. Ayers contributed a chapter for a book* my uncle edited. It's the very first chapter -- meaning Ayers' name in the book's table of contents is listed directly below the name of my mother's favorite baby brother. By Gov. Palin's reasoning, that'd be more than enough to put me on some FBI watch list.

This kind of desperate straining to find some distant association with which to smear Barack Obama seems like a counterproductive tactic for the McCain campaign. Going after Obama with a smear that's this obscure, this far-removed, and this baseless reinforces the perception that McCain and his hired mudslingers were unable to find anything substantial or legitimate with which to criticize his opponent. (Plus, as a general rule, when you're trying to land a below-the-belt smear it probably shouldn't include having to point out that your opponent has a long history of raising funds to help poor schoolchildren. That's generally regarded as a Good Thing.)

It doesn't speak well of Sen. McCain that his campaign is willing to rely on such silly tactics. Ten years ago I might have said that McCain was "stooping" to such tactics, but the senator has gotten lower and lower over those years, wallowing deeper and deeper in whatever filth he thought might get him elected. It's hard to say at this point that anything is beneath him.

More to the point though, these strained attempts at guilt-by-association don't actually prove anything. The photograph above, for example, shows the 1996 Republican nominee for vice president Jack Kemp with one of his intimate business associates -- a suspected murderer who is now a convicted felon. Did Kemp's association with this unsavory figure make the former congressman any less qualified to be Bob Dole's running mate? I didn't think so, but then I don't work for the McCain campaign.

Actually, when I say that these baseless and illegitimate attacks "don't prove anything," that's not quite accurate. They don't prove anything about the person being attacked, but they do prove quite a bit about the people making the attacks. They prove the attackers to be capable of the level of dishonesty and the level of sheer silliness that ought to disqualify one from public office.

In Gov. Sarah Palin's case, this isn't the first time she has demonstrated such dishonesty or such silliness. Nor is this the first instance of Palin repeating something that isn't true long after it has been thoroughly documented as untrue.

Palin's willingness to repeat such disproven and discredited allegations confirms the dismaying pattern we saw established in her very first speech after being selected by John McCain. She says things that aren't true. She does this a lot.

Worse than that, Palin says things that aren't true long after it has been pointed out to her repeatedly that the things she is saying are not true. She says things that aren't true that she knows are not true. This is called lying.

The public hasn't been afforded the opportunity to learn very much about Gov. Sarah Palin, but this much we do know: Sarah Palin is a liar. She lies to make herself sound better than she knows herself to be and she lies to make her opponents sound worse than she knows them to be. Her lies are many and they just keep coming, from her misleading self-flattery on her role in the Bridge to Nowhere scandal, to her obstruction of the Troopergate investigation, to her recent perverse description of her role in Alaska's efforts to divest from the Sudan. She is a serial liar.

This has now been so well documented that the closest thing to a defense of Palin isn't a defense at all, but rather an admission. "All politicians are liars," her defenders say. That cynical, blanket condemnation blurring all degrees and frequencies of dishonesty fails to recognize what makes the Alaska governor special. She has distinguished herself by her willingness to continue repeating her lies long after they have been thoroughly discredited. Most lying politicians either back off or change the subject when their lies are refuted, but not Palin.

And that brings us to the second thing that we have been able to learn about Gov. Sarah Palin: She views her own supporters with contempt.

However much Palin may dislike her critics, that dislike is nothing compared to the scorn, disdain and loathing she regularly displays for those who offer her only their unconditional support. She detests those people.

Palin's supporters are, for the most part, evangelical Christians, which is to say these are my people. She feeds my people lies, with a smile on her face, convinced that they are too stupid or too lazy to know or to care that she is feeding them bullshit and calling it chocolate. These people that she is treating with such contempt and inordinate condescension are my family -- both figuratively and literally.

And, yes, I find it upsetting when someone treats my family so contemptibly. It would be wrong of me to allow anyone to treat my family this way without calling them on it, so I am calling her on it: Sarah Palin is a remorseless liar with a hole where her soul should be.

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* The chapter "Work that is real: Why teachers should be empowered" in the book Empowering teachers and parents: School restructuring through the eyes of anthropologists. G. Alfred Hess, Jr., ed., Bergin and Garvey, 1992. In case you were wondering.

"U.S. Forces," Midnight Oil
"Ultra Violet (Light My Way)," U2
"Umbrella," Rihanna
"Umbrella," Manic Street Preachers
"Un Gars Fragile," Prototypes
"The Unattainable Earth," Daniel Amos
"The Unattainable Earth (remix)," Daniel Amos
"Uncomplicated," Elvis Costello & The Attractions
"Uncovered," The Call
"Undecided," Ella Fitzgerald & Louis Armstrong

Sometimes I get a bit fuzzy on the distinction between stuff I posted and stuff I thought about posting. Falling into that gap apparently was the post I'd intended to do explaining my planned schedule, such as it is, for future Left Behind Fridays.

So OK then, here that is.

I'll be taking a brief break from the collected works of LaHaye and Jenkins in order to do two things: 1) watch my beloved Mets in the playoffs, and 2) focus for the next few weeks on the upcoming election, which is the most important of my lifetime* and thus a bit more urgent.

Come the first Friday in November, we'll pick up with LB Fridays, starting with a brief look at Left Behind: The Movie. It's wretchedly awful, yet far superior to its source material. After that, we'll turn to Book 2 in the series, The Tribulation Force.

In the meantime, via Pam Spaulding, here's an American News Project video reminding us of one way in which this stuff actually matters.

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* Although one could argue that the most important election in my lifetime probably already took place in 2000. Had that gone differently, we'd never have imagined just how important it really was.

Who doesn't like pie?

I no longer live just down the road from Linvilla Orchards, but it's still that time of year. Apple season. Apple pie season.

Consider this an apple-pie (or other-pie) tips and recipes open thread.

(But don't feel constrained to stick to the topic of pie. I mainly just wanted to get another thread up for an alternative to the likely more contentious previous post on you-know-what.)

I want to revisit the Associated Press article on Pulpit Freedom Sunday that I linked to yesterday. The article, by Dinesh Ramde, was headlined, "Wis. pastor shares his plan to vote for McCain," and it concluded with a jaw-dropping, horrifying statement from Pastor Luke Emrich of New Life Church in West Bend, Wis.

Emrich was one of the 33 pastors participating in Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Those pastors, conservative evangelicals, unsurprisingly endorsed the McCain-Palin ticket, and they did so on the basis of what is, for them, the foremost issue in this and any election -- abortion:

"The choice for life," as Emrich calls it, is the foremost issue for him and his flock because they believe, in the starkest of terms, that abortion is morally indistinguishable from murder. The 1.21 million abortions performed in 2005, they believe, are morally indistinguishable from mass murder, from genocide. What other issue could possibly compete with carnage on such an epic scale?

This is why abortion opponents like Gov. Mike Huckabee speak of "the holocaust of liberalized abortion." That's how high they view the moral stakes here. That is what they regard as the gravity of the situation.

And if you really believe that, then you are obligated, at the very least, to do what Pastor Emrich did and risk the tax-exempt status of your congregation in order to speak out against this holocaust.

But here is the horrifying, astonishing conclusion of that AP article:

That, right there, in a nutshell, is the essence of contemporary American evangelical political philosophy. Votes are cast almost exclusively on the basis of a moral claim that holds that Barack Obama and Joe Biden and millions of other Americans, Democrats and Republicans alike, are moral monsters -- advocates of mass murder and holocaust. But then after Election Day, they think it is appropriate to shake hands with those same monsters.

It is not possible to believe both of those things at the same time.

Yesterday was "Pulpit Freedom Sunday," a publicity stunt coordinated by the Persecuted Hegemon Legal Defense Fund, also known as the Alliance Defense Fund.

The ADF began as a cooperative program launched by several of the leading members of the religious right, including James Dobson and Pat Robertson. It's two-part mission is to: 1) Raise lots and lots of direct-mail money by telling scary stories about the ACLU and convincing gullible Christians that their donations are the only thing stopping mass arrests by the homo-humanist Gestapo; and 2) Boost the self-esteem of evangelical Christians by insisting that they have every right to feel aggrieved and unappreciated.

Anyway, Pulpit Freedom Sunday is intended to create a court challenge to the law that says you can't have your cake and eat it too. The cake, in this case, being the tax-exempt status enjoyed by churches. Churches don't have to pay taxes, and contributions to churches are tax deductible. Along with that tax-exempt status comes the agreement that churches will not engage in direct, partisan political activity or official endorsements of political candidates.

ADF wants both. They want churches to be able to endorse candidates and engage in partisan politics and to remain tax-exempt while doing so.

That situation would, of course, be awesome for those churches -- a cash bonanza like nothing the world has ever seen.

Think about it. The Obama and McCain campaigns have raised hundreds of millions of dollars, plus hundreds of millions more for the Democratic and Republican national committees, the state committees, the House and Senate re-election committees, the PACs and all the other candidates at every level of government. That's a multibillion-dollar pot of money.

All of those groups and candidates have to raise money without being able to promise their donors a tax-deduction in exchange for their contribution. Now imagine those donors had a tax-deductible alternative. Imagine they could instead give this money to the churches in ADF's network and take a tax deduction, knowing that the churches would simply be rechanneling the money to the same campaigns and committees. In exchange for this laundering service, the churches could skim a tiny percentage of the contributions. Cha-ching! It'd be like a license to print money.

That's what the Alliance Defense Fund is shooting for.

They can't come right out and say as much, of course, so instead they're trying to frame this as a free speech issue. As the Associated Press notes, churches already enjoy freedom of speech when it comes to elections and political campaigns:

None of those activities threaten a church's tax-exempt status, but that's not good enough for the ADF. Thus, in the hopes of creating a test-case to challenge and try to change existing law, the group sponsored yesterday's Pulpit Freedom Sunday. Pastors at some 33 churches across the country endorsed Republican John McCain from the pulpit. ADF figures that will prompt an IRS investigation that they hope to fight all the way to the Supreme Court.

Prof. Wolfe is right and the ADF knows this, but keep in mind what the ADF is really all about. It's a "legal defense fund" only to the extent that posing as such provides fertile ground for its real mission: direct-mail fundraising.

ADF is hoping its challenge will take years to work its way through the courts -- long, lucrative years during which they can send out millions of direct-mail solicitations warning their marks that "the IRS is trying to take away your tax exemption" and that the only way to save churches is to donate to ADF.

Sleazy, but time-tested.

Bonus link: Martin Marty on Pulpit Freedom Sunday.

One of the clearest and most concise explanations of the sub-prime mortgage meltdown that I've found is a special report that This American Life produced back in May called "The Giant Pool of Money."

You can download a podcast of that report from the show's online radio archive. If you're unclear as to what exactly happened and how and why, or if you just want a wryly engaging refresher on the subject, I recommend that you give it a listen. It's an hour well-spent.

The same team -- producer Alex Blumberg and NPR reporter Adam Davidson -- have now produced a similar report on the current financial crisis. You can read/listen to a nine-minute teaser version of this report now at NPR.org ("The Week America's Economy Almost Died"), or you can catch the full report on the radio this week or download the podcast from TAL's radio archive once they get it posted (should be some time this week).

If, like me, you're a little rusty on the inner-workings of things like commercial paper and how that relates to money market funds, then I really recommend checking this out.

I also urgently recommend both of these special reports to the short-straw staffer on the McCain campaign whose job it is to get vice presidential nominee Gov. Sarah Palin up to speed on this financial crisis. Go buy her an iPod with one of those velcro straps for runners, load it up with the two reports from Blumberg and Davidson, and don't let her go jogging without it.

Sadly, I don't really think these would help Palin to understand this financial crisis. These reports are excellent and richly informative, but after watching Palin's interview with Katie Couric, I realized that Palin's problem is not primarily a lack of information or a lack of knowledge of the facts of the matter. Yes, she is appallingly ill-informed, but I think that's more a symptom than the actual disease.

We've seen this disease before. We've been watching it for eight years now. This is ignorance born of incuriosity. And that incuriosity arises from a lack of empathy. Like President Bush, Gov. Palin doesn't know because she doesn't care.

Here is the video of the section of the Couric interview on the economy, and here is the transcript. Note this section:

The question was to name some "pros and cons" of "a moratorium on foreclosures to help average Americans keep their homes." This is a bit like the old routine about "What was the color of George Washington's white horse?" -- part of the answer is contained in the question itself. The "pro" side of helping average Americans keep their homes is that you're helping average Americans keep their homes.

And yet Gov. Palin wasn't able to come up with even that. She doesn't seem to comprehend or be capable of imagining the downside of mass foreclosures. In 2007, 1,650 families in Alaska lost their homes, but their governor is unable to say for sure whether that's a Good Thing or a Bad Thing.

Palin's problem, in other words, isn't that she's been inadequately briefed about the housing crisis or the consequences of foreclosures, or that she lacks a grasp of the policy options for addressing these problems. Her problem in this interview is that she can't be bothered to imagine what this means for real families who are really losing their homes. Not a lack of information, but a lack of empathy.

That's troubling, because a lack of information can be fixed. Someone who doesn't yet know enough can set out to learn more. But someone who doesn't care about other people because they are other people, well, I don't know how to fix that. I'm not sure it can be fixed.

"Time," Phil Keaggy
"Time," T-Bone Burnett
"Time," Tom Waits
"Time," Tori Amos
"Time After Time," Allison Crowe
"Time After Time," Chet Baker
"Time After Time," Cyndi Lauper
"Time After Time," Willie Nelson
"Time and Time Again," Counting Crows
"Time Is a Healer," Eva Cassidy
"Time Is Tight," Booker T. & the MGs
"Time to Begin Again," Billy Crockett
"Time to Get It On," WNOC
"Time to Goof Off," Terry Taylor
"Time Will Do the Talking," Patty Griffin

That Tori Amos video is from her Sept. 17, 2001 performance on Letterman. That same week, our president told us it was our patriotic duty to go out to the mall and do some shopping, so I went and bought a copy of Strange Little Girls.

Here's a question: Is "The American Songbook" closed, or are we still adding to it? The Chet Baker recording above is the Cahn & Styne standard, but the other three tracks listed as "Time After Time" are the Lauper & Hyman song. At the risk of offending the American Songbook Preservation Society, I'd argue the latter song has, oddly, become just as much of a classic and a standard. It's being widely performed, recorded, interpreted and reinterpreted -- that's pretty much what "standard" means, isn't it? Here's Miles Davis, for example, which has to count for something. ...

NEW YORK -- Mets manager Jerry Manuel announced Wednesday night that, due to the urgency and gravity of the financial crisis on Wall Street, the New York Mets will be suspending their pennant race.

"This is just too important," Manuel said. "It's time to put country first."

It's unclear what "suspending" even means in this context, but Manuel hinted that it would likely include not playing the four games remaining on the team's schedule.

Manuel called on the Milwaukee Brewers to join the Mets in suspending their pennant chase as well. The Brewers and Mets are currently tied for the National League Wild Card berth.

Informed that Milwaukee intended to play the remaining games on its schedule, Manuel noted that he was "saddened that the Brewers do not share my ostentatious love and devotion to this great country."

"But," he added, "even if they win out, we'll still be tied in the loss column."

Asked if this wasn't just a crude stunt attempting to stave off a repeat of last season's late-September collapse, Manuel bristled.

"The finanical crisis is very grave," he said. "If swift action is not taken to restore faith in our financial system, then this will begin to affect the daily lives of ordinary Americans. It may become impossible to get a mortgage, or a car loan, or to pay your center fielder $18 million to hit a lousy .280. And do you people realize what it's going to cost us to sign Francisco Rodriguez this winter? Decisive action is needed to restore faith in our financial institutions and our bullpens."

Chicago Cubs manager Lou Piniella, whose team is scheduled to play the Mets tonight at Shea, said he had no intention of suspending the final game of their season series.

"This is the big leagues," Piniella said. "You have to be able to deal with more than one thing at once."

Piniella, whose team has already clinched home-field advantage throughout the playoffs, did agree to send Cubs slugger Alfonso Soriano to Washington to assist congressional leaders in finalizing the details of the bailout agreement.

(Update: Fixed spelling of Lou's name. Didn't fix the unfair shot at Beltran, but yeah, he's actually having a great year.)

I'm not usually in a position to say that I have more experience, knowledge and know-how than Ben Bernanke, but he really should've talked to somebody like me before heading to Capitol Hill yesterday to help Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson present a three-page memo asking for $700,000,000,000 of the public's money.

Three pages. Seriously:

That description of a "three-page summary" isn't quite accurate. Calling it a "summary" implies that there exists some longer document offering a more detailed and documented proposal. No such longer document exists. The three pages isn't a "summary," it's the entire plan.

And Paulson didn't present that plan as a "summary." He presented it as a piece of legislation he wanted Congress to introduce, and pass, and turn into law, in a day or two. Here's the entire document.

A bit of experience in the nonprofit world would have helped Paulson and Bernanke here. It would have helped them to realize that when you're asking for money, you have to do your homework.

I spent a decade working for a broke nonprofit -- basement offices, salvage-yard furniture, etc. The kind of place where the founder/president/executive director spent evenings stuffing envelopes along with the rest of the staff.

Maybe you've worked, or volunteered, in an office like that too. If so, then you know that stuffing envelopes is never enough to pay the bills -- you also need grant money. That means writing grant applications or, as the lingo goes, "writing grants." Lots of grants -- big grants, little grants, national grants, local grants, targeted grants from niche donors and those invaluable and elusive elastic grants for the operating budget. Grants for programs, grants for interns, grants for travel, grants for computers, grants for grant-writing.

The point here being that we wrote a lot of grants.

And the thing is that every one of those grants was longer, more detailed and better documented than the sorry excuse for a memo that Paulson threw together to request $700 billion from the public coffers.

A three-page memo with no details means your grant application gets turned down. It means your $15,000 grant application gets turned down. Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money, and if you're going to ask someone to hand over that kind of cash, then you're going to have to do your homework. You're going to have to explain, in detail, what the money is for, where and when it's going to be spent. You're going to have to explain how you intend to report back, with detailed documentation, after the money is spent. And you're probably going to have to describe a detailed plan ensuring that you won't need to come back six months later to ask for another $15,000 for exactly the same thing.

Fail to provide that kind of documentation and detail and your grant application will be rejected. Not only that, but you'll be lucky if you're ever allowed to come back and re-apply with the same foundation. Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money, and when you ask someone to give you $15,000 without the courtesy of telling them what precisely it's for, they tend to take offense. And the failure to do your homework and put together a decent, detailed application is viewed as evidence that you're not responsible enough to handle the money wisely. "We're lazy and disorganized -- give us money" is not considered a winning grant-writing strategy.

Paulson, of course, was applying for a bit more than $15,000. He was asking for 47 million times that. He was asking for $700,000,000,000.

So, yeah, a three-page memo ain't gonna cut it.

By way of contrast, consider that on the same day that Paulson was offering his half-baked grant application for $7 x 10^11, Congress was also working on an omnibus spending bill for FY2009. That bill includes the entire budget for the Department of Homeland Security, everything the government is budgeting for veterans programs, for military base construction and, oh yes, an all-time record high request from the Pentagon for the Department of Defense. The total pricetag? $630 billion.

That omnibus spending bill weighs in at 357 pages, plus 752 additional pages of notes, explanations, pork, etc. More than 1,100 pages in all. That's for a request for $70 billion less of the public's money that what Paulson was requesting with his slapdash, cocktail-napkin memo.

Heck, even Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin's request for FY2009 earmarks -- a paltry $197 million or so -- comes with 70 pages of documentation painstakingly compiled with help from Sen. Ted Stevens (link to a .pdf can be found here). Sure, a lot of that is for parochial boondoggles and thinly veiled plunder, but the Palin/Stevens pork-barrel wish-list was assembled with far more care and attention to detail than Paulson bothered to put into his three-page non-summary.

I'm guessing that none of you will ever be in a position to have to apply for a $700,000,000,000 or a $630,000,000,000 or even a $197,000,000 grant. But someday you might be serving on a board of directors for some nonprofit and you might have to write one of those $15,000 grants to fix the leaky roof.

If you should find yourself in that situation, try to be as thorough and detailed as possible. A three-page memo just won't do.

Why? Because $15,000 is a lot of money.