Well, I found an interesting possibility thanks to the brief window of opportunity offered by the Oxford English Dictionary website, which is letting anyone access the OED online for free (a heckuva lot less than the $295 annual subscription rate!) until February 5. (Just sign in using “trynewoed” as both user name and password. Hat tip to Jan Freeman.)

Did you know that one definition of “junk” – one of the American Dialect Society’s nominees for most useful word of 2010 – is “the lump or mass of thick oily cellular tissue beneath the case and nostrils of a sperm-whale, containing spermaceti”? Or as Henry T. Cheever wrote in his 1850 novel “The Whale and His Captors” (a possible template for “Moby Dick”): “What whalers call the junk, or mighty mass of blubber, separated from the case.”

Spermaceti, it turns out, has nothing to do with sperm, though it got its name because at one point people believed it was indeed the coagulated semen of the whale. According to the Encyclopedia Britannica, it’s actually a wax obtained from the head of a sperm whale or bottlenose whale that has been used in ointments, cosmetic creams, wax candles and industrial lubricants.

So does all that really have anything to do with the slang meaning of “junk” as used today? I couldn’t say for sure, but at least the spermaceti theory gives me something to ponder the next time I’m waiting in line at the airport.

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Here are a few examples:

* This Daily Beast Cheat Sheet selection about Prop. 19 rolls with the logo “High Times.”

Here’s the first line: What a downer: California voters are apparently not as enthusiastic about Proposition 19, the measure that would legalize marijuana in their state, as they appeared to be last month.

 * And the buzzword is…

This ABC News piece is headlined: “Buzzkill? Opponents of California Prop 19 Growing Optimistic.”

From the story itself: Two recent polls are showing support for Prop 19, which would legalize marijuana in California, losing its buzz and that’s making opponents of the measure more confident as Nov. 2 approaches.

The New Republic is also going with the flow, writing: California’s ballot-initiative system has a way of touching off culture wars that dwarf the buzz surrounding mere state and congressional elections.

* The headline of the New Republic story is “Fired Up?” And the last paragraph, whether intentionally or not, offers a nice homophone (as long as you don’t pronounce the last letter of toking): Yet, by the same token, it would be a little foolish for Democrats to rest all their hopes on a last-minute, unpolled surge of pot-smoking youngsters at the polls: They’ve been burned that way before.

* And finally, just to show that writers aren’t the only ones who roach, er, reach for word play when spilling the dope about direct democracy: There’s an anti-legalization group that calls itself Nip It in the Bud 2010: No on Prop 19.

And so my message to you, on this eve of decision-making, is to leave no stoner unturned in the search for more – let’s be blunt about it – bad puns. Oh, and don’t inhale if you’re planning to run for president.

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Even Barack Obama has gotten into the gap act, attributing the phrase to an amorphous “they” and urging young Democratic voters to flock to the polls. “They say that there is an enthusiasm gap,” Obama said to roars of dismay. “And that the same Republicans and the same policies that left our economy in a shambles and the middle class struggling, year after year, that those folks might all ride back into power. That’s the conventional wisdom in Washington. We cannot let that happen.”

Talk of this chasm is rooted in voter turnout for the primaries as well as in a multitude of polls over the past several months that have found Republicans more interested in voting and taking the lead in congressional seats. One such poll, conducted by Reuters/Ipsos and released in late July, found 72 percent of Republicans certain that they will vote in November, compared to 49 percent of Democrats.

And voter turnout might well turn out to be the make-or-break issue here. The latest two Gallup polls found that the race would actually be pretty close among registered voters; but in the smaller, and presumably more telling, category of likely voters, Gallup estimates that Republicans will out-vote Democrats by between 13 and 18 percentage points. The Democrats were indeed out-voted in the 35 statewide primaries held before September, in which GOP turnout was the highest since 1970 – and Democratic turnout was the lowest ever, according to Curtis Gans, director of American University’s Center for the Study of the American Electorate.

The data war has to some extent given way to a rally war, with political leaders replaced by media figures like Glenn Beck, Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert, who have the advantage of guaranteed media promotion as they galvanize the pre-election crowds.

Of course, at a rally of like-minded adherents to the cause, enthusiasm is generally the byword, not the missing word. At a Madison, Wisconsin, rally of 17,000 students (plus 9,000 who couldn’t get in), Sen. Russ Feingold, a Democrat from Wisconsin who is fighting to keep his seat, decried the much-publicized gap as “phony” and told the crowd, “This doesn’t look like an enthusiasm gap to me.”

For all the trends and counter-trends reflected in polls and rallies, though, nothing’s for sure until the ballots are counted. As a sagacious participant in yet another rally, the liberal “One Nation Working Together” rally held Saturday, put it: “There may be an enthusiasm gap, but we’re not going to know until we have an election.”

While the term “enthusiasm gap” is being used specifically to refer to differences between Democratic and Republican attitudes toward voting ahead of this year’s midterm elections, the construction of the phrase is familiar, since it follows the same format as its more well-known cousins, like “generation gap,” “age gap” and “credibility gap.”

Merriam-Webster’s Dictionary of English Usage cites references to other variants of the “gap” formulation dating from 1971, including the “trash gap” (the difference between the trash kids used to fill their minds with and the trash of nowadays) and the “confidence gap” (“distrust plus loss of self-confidence,” according to a 1983 book review).

Whether or not the Dems manage to un-curb their enthusiasm, writerly types ought to be warned: “The use of gap in such phrases as generation gap and credibility gap is discouraged as hackneyed,” scold the language dictators at Merriam-Webster. All the same, they acknowledge that there is, as they wouldn’t dare say, a usage gap between such stodgy prescriptions and the reality that, as they concede, those who proliferate such terms have yet to lose their enthusiasm.

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At the same press conference at which he revealed the songfest, Putin said he knew who betrayed the agents. “It was the result of treason,” he said. ”It always ends badly for traitors: as a rule, their end come from drink or drugs, lying in a ditch. And for what?”

Given the context of the spy ring, Putin’s description of actual singing highlights the metaphorical use of the verb “to sing” to mean a form of betrayal.

The American underworld adopted the use of the verb around 1930 to mean “to inform to the police,” an extension of its previous meaning of “to break from evasion, or from false cover, to tell the truth,” according to Eric Partridge’s “A Dictionary of Slang and Unconventional English” (edited by Paul Beale). The bad guys weren’t able to hold on to sole ownership of the “informant” connotation of singing for long, though; the police were using it by 1940 and it had entered general usage by 1950, according to Partridge.

He writes that singing like a canary is an elaboration of the one-word version and was used mostly by the police. It turns out, though, that canaries are far from the only animals associated with informing on your former partner(s) in crime. You probably already knew that but never really thought to connect the dots proving that animals are the ultimate traitors. After all, aside from canaries, there are also rats, stool pigeons and finks (which is apparently the German word for “finch”). And what do they all do? They squeal – just like a pig.

It was Robert Allen Palmatier who opened my eyes to the plot afoot in the animal kingdom, in his insightful and unexpectedly funny (if you like that sort of thing) book “Speaking of Animals: A Dictionary of Animal Metaphors.”

“The canary bird sings its heart out, in its little cage, for a reward of bird seed,” writes Palmatier. “The human canary sings his or her heart out, in a big ‘cage,’ for a plea bargain and a reduced sentence.”

Unlike canaries and finches, rats don’t sing, even if the effect is similar. “Besides deserting sinking ships, rats refuse to live in harmony with the humans who have fed and housed them for centuries. Human rats betray ‘honor among thieves’ by informing on their fellows: i.e., they rat on them,” writes Palmatier.

As for pigs, the word may derive most of its renown in the world of metaphors from its use as a derogatory term for police officers, but the verb most associated with the animal means “to inform on a partner in crime,” he writes, adding: “The first thing a pig does when it is picked up is to squeal. This is often the first thing a crook does, too: squeal on his/her fellow crooks in exchange for a plea bargain.”

Perhaps Putin’s real goal in spiriting the spies back to where the motherland begins was to make sure they wouldn’t be serving 20 to life in a certain high-security correctional facility in upstate New York. You know, the one whose name echoes what the Russian president might have said in English if he were exhorting a bunch of spies to exercise their vocal chords with him.

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Barton, the ranking Republican on the House Energy and Commerce Committee, said he was “ashamed” of the deal made at the White House to set up an escrow fund – which he called a “slush fund” with “no legal standing” – to cover damages and claims related to the environmental disaster. “I apologize,” he repeatedly told Hayward. Barton’s gushing contrition had Democrats gleefully outraged and Republicans scurrying for protective gear, with Barton’s later apology for his apology doing little to aid the GOP cleanup effort.

But while Barton’s comments may have come as a surprise, they did not just drop out of the clear blue sea.

Before we look at where they appear to have come from, let’s first sort out just what a shakedown (one word in the noun form) is. Put simply, it’s extortion, or as Merriam-Webster defines the two-word verb form (shake down): “to obtain money from in a deceitful, contemptible, or illegal manner.” Although the verbal phrase “to shake down” is recorded as early as circa 1400 and the noun form dates to 1730, the meaning of “blackmail, extort” wasn’t documented until 1872, according to the Online Etymology Dictionary. (The earlier verb form meant “cause to totter and fall,” and the noun referred to an “impromptu bed made upon loose straw.”)

But while extortion might not smell too good, it doesn’t carry quite the same whiff of the mob as “shakedown” does. Just take a look at the context a couple of dictionaries provide to describe what exactly those nice husky men are doing when they make their kindly offer to keep an eye on the shop. According to Merriam-Webster, they’re “racketeers shaking down store owners for protection.” The American Heritage Dictionary of Idioms (which describes the term as slang and dates it more generally to the second half of the 1800s) offers a similar example: “They had quite a racket, shaking down merchants for so-called protection.”

The connection between a Mafia-style shakedown and Chicago, the American city that may be the most closely identified with political corruption and the mob – and which also happens to be the hometown of the former Illinois senator who now sits in the very White House that, as Barton would have it, shook down BP – was made explicit in a Republican Study Committee press release issued the day before Barton used the loaded word.

Called “Chicago-Style Political Shakedown,” the statement by Rep. Tom Price of Georgia, who heads the group of more than 100 House conservatives, said: “BP’s reported willingness to go along with the White House’s new fund suggests that the Obama Administration is hard at work exerting its brand of Chicago-style shakedown politics.  These actions are emblematic of a politicization of our economy that has been borne out of this Administration’s drive for greater power and control.”

Price and Barton are playing off Chicago’s reputation for unsavory alliances between public officials and the city’s unofficial bosses (most notably Al Capone). “Most cities have one overriding claim to fame,” argues the 2004 book “When Corruption Was King: How I Helped the Mob Rule Chicago, Then Brought the Outfit Down,” by Robert Cooley, a lawyer who fixed court cases for the Mafia and then testified against the city’s mob bosses (and wrote a book about it, with Hillel Levin). “Say Los Angeles and you think about the movies; say Paris you think art; and Detroit, cars. But when people, the world over, say Chicago, they think of something less marketable: Organized Crime. It is a stain that no amount of accomplishment or image-boosting will ever wipe clean.”

The Chicago Outfit may be past its heyday, but as impeached Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich stands trial for charges including attempting to sell President Barack Obama’s vacated U.S. Senate seat and running a racketeering scheme from the governor’s office, the Windy City still has a long way to go before the reputation alluded to in Barton’s shakedown comment is tossed aside like so many millions of gallons of crude oil.

The post BP Shakedown: What Happens When You Combine Oil and Wind appeared first on The Faster Times.

It is “an embarrassment,” she wrote at the time, that “senators today do not insist that any nominee reveal what kind of Justice she would make, by disclosing her views on important legal issues.” 

Now that President Barack Obama has selected Kagan as his nominee for the Supreme Court, the U.S. solicitor general and former dean of Harvard Law School may be wishing she had not set the bar quite so high.

Kagan’s 15-year-old statements about the confirmation process’s egregious lack of rigor have not exactly gone unnoticed, especially since the fact that she has not authored any judicial rulings means that there aren’t too many other clues for senators and pundits to pore over in an attempt to glean her “views on important legal issues.”

And that means Kagan may just have to live up to what has come to be called the Kagan standard, a term that even Democrats are tossing around. But while Democratic politicians have been wielding the phrase in the course of what The Washington Post referred to as polite “jabbing,” it may also serve as a stimulus for some uppercuts from the other side of the aisle when the confirmation hearings begin June 28.

The Post article quoted Richard Durbin, a Democratic senator from Illinois and a member of the Senate Judiciary Committee, as using the phrase during a get-to-know-you meeting with the nominee last month, during which they discussed Kagan’s 1995 article.

“I asked her about it, and I said, ‘You know, you’re going to have to live by the Kagan standard, which you established,’” Durbin said. “She said, ‘Well, the world looks a little different from this vantage point.’”

The same story quoted Dianne Feinstein, a Democratic senator from California and another member of the committee, as saying she told Kagan, “I trust you are going to be a paragon of exactly the opposite of what you wrote about” – to which they both laughed, Feinstein said.

Conservative legal analyst Ed Whelan, president of the Ethics and Public Policy Center think tank, was not so blasé. “It’s especially important that the Senate hold Kagan to the Kagan Standard,” he said.  “Among Supreme Court nominees over the last 50 years or more, Kagan may well be the nominee with the least amount of relevant experience.”

Of course, Kagan isn’t the first Supreme Court nominee whose name has made its way into the English language (though it’s too early to tell if “the Kagan standard” will remain a fixture of it). If the Senate were to block her candidacy “by use of sustained public disparagement,” it would be borking her as it did Robert H. Bork, the man who lent his name to the word when, in 1987, he spectacularly failed to secure a seat on the Supreme Court. Indeed, the article in which Kagan critiques the confirmation process began as a review of a book by Yale law professor Stephen Carter, “The Confirmation Mess,” which discusses the battle over Bork’s nomination.

William Safire, in his book “Safire’s Political Dictionary,” describes Bork as an insufficiently deferential, brilliant and prickly adherent of constitutional originalism who believed that Roe v. Wade was, as Bork later wrote, “a radical deformation of the Constitution.”

But the term featuring the name of the current nominee possesses a duality that the verb doesn’t. While the origin of borking (that is, Robert Bork) is the object of the verb (in the terminology in current use, the Senate borked Bork; Bork didn’t do the borking), Kagan is both the initiator of the standard and someone to whom the standard could be applied.

This lexical flexibility doesn’t appear to be all that common. Take another eponymous verb, “bowdlerize.” In that case, Thomas Bowdler is, anachronistically speaking, the subject of the verb; in expurgating what he considered inappropriate fare for a father to read aloud to his children, it may be said with the benefit of hindsight that he bowdlerized Shakespeare’s works in 1818.

Eponymous noun phrases can also lead to confusion about the role of the person behind the term. The Peter principle is so called after Laurence J. Peter, the author (with Raymond Hull) of a 1969 book by the same name that argued that in a hierarchy, every employee tends to be promoted to his level of incompetence.

But the Bradley effect — the theory that black politicians might do worse on Election Day than they did in the polls because voters can’t be counted on to actually pull the lever for the black politician they said they would vote for — is named not after a sociologist or political commentator but after former Los Angeles Mayor Tom Bradley, a black politician who lost the 1982 California gubernatorial election to a white Republican despite having led in the polls by a wide margin. (This theory was dredged up in the last presidential election as analysts wondered, in the words of this CNN headline: ‘Will Obama suffer from the ‘Bradley effect’?)

Perhaps the eponymous word that is most similar to “the Kagan standard” is one that, fittingly, brings Bork into the picture once again. Well, not Bork exactly, but another guy who lent a similar name to a verb. Under the “bork” entry, Safire writes that “to bork” is similar to “to burke,” which he describes as a verb “taken from the name of William Burke, executed in Edinburgh in 1829 for smothering his victims so as to leave no mark on their bodies that would make them unacceptable for anatomical dissection.” The verb, writes Safire, originally meant “to murder someone by suffocation, especially in order to sell the body for dissection,” but has acquired the figurative sense of smothering or suppressing less mortal objects, like books, debates and issues.

And the connection to Elena Kagan? At William Burke’s hanging, Safire tells us, “spectators shouted, ‘Burke him, Burke him! Give him no rope!’” In other words, the crowds were chanting for the Burke standard to be applied to Burke himself. Sound familiar?

Photo by Harvard Law Record

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(The riptide of references has yet to fully recede, by the way, as indicated by recent headlines like “National debt: A tsunami of red ink.”)

This time around, of course, the natural disaster in question is the Icelandic volcano, which is serving as a fount, not only of ash, but also of objects of comparison, neologisms and, inevitably, puns and doctored aphorisms.

As it turns out, commentators covering Britain’s general election campaign appear to be drawn to Eyjafjallajökull like moths to lava. This Guardian article notes that the primary target of such fiery comparisons has been the third-party candidate for prime minister, Liberal Democrat leader Nick Clegg.

“Damien Reece of the Daily Telegraph compared Clegg’s success to ‘a surprisingly large puff of smoke that will inevitably disappear after causing some serious disruption,’” writes Elizabeth Day in the Guardian piece. Other citations Day found include a reference in The Times of London to Britain’s Labour Party, represented by the color red, and the Conservative Party, represented by blue (just reverse the color scheme of America’s donkeys and elephants): “a volcano has erupted and a cloud of ash has grounded all the red and blue planes.”

Despite having no idea what the Ashes are, American commentators have also gotten into the game. Day quotes an unnamed CBS news correspondent as “churlishly” saying that Clegg “has a snowball’s chance in an Icelandic volcano” of becoming Britain’s next prime minister.

But political campaigns are not the only man-made disasters for which force majeure can serve as a basis of comparison.

For Bobby Cleveland of Mississippi’s Clarion-Ledger, the massive BP oil spill is apparently not a serious enough blight in its own right to avoid being likened to that other catastrophe. “Let there by no mistake,” he writes. “[T]here is a volcano of oil on the floor of the Gulf of Mexico spewing 200,000 gallons of crude a day with no end in sight.”

As Erin McKean of Wordnik points out in the Boston Globe, the volcano has also caused an eruption of related words, such as “volcanoed” and “volcation.”

“I got volcanoed,” Paul Dickinson, the CEO of a greenhouse reporting organization who had to cancel plans to fly from Beijing to London to interview three job applicants, told Fortune magazine. (He ended up interviewing them via teleconference, which seems like a much more fitting method for a company called the Carbon Disclosure Project.)

Other media outlets went with headlines like “A Letter From My European ‘Volcation’” and “Travelers stranded on ‘volcation’ in NYC get helping hand.”

Then, of course, there’s the punning opportunity that headline writers live for. The text of that Fortune story about the CEO who realized that teleconferencing could be at least as good as stomping around leaving carbon footprints all over the place tells us there’s a “silver lining to every cloud, even the one made up of volcanic ash.” And the headline? “Volcanic activity: Businesses winning the Iceland ‘boom.’”

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That, after all, is the box he checked on his U.S. Census form. Though he could have ticked the category representing the heritage of his white Kansan mother in addition to that representing the heritage of his black Kenyan father, the president of the United States in effect chose to identify himself solely as his father’s son.

Some see the Census decision as an official confirmation of something that required no affirmation. As this poster wrote on Hip-Hop Wired:  ”Uhhh why did [we] need White House officials to confirm this? Did everyone else not get the memo that this is the first Black President?”

Others, especially those seeking greater recognition of many Americans’ multiracial identities, were let down by that decision.

Michelle Hughes, president of the Chicago Biracial Family Network, told the Chicago Tribune that she received several emails from surprised friends within moments of Obama’s decision being made public.

“I think everybody is entitled to self-identify. If he chooses to self-identify as African-American, that’s his right,” she said. “That being said, I think that the multiracial community feels a sense of disappointment that he refuses to identify with us.”

A commenter responding to the CNN story on Obama’s decision wrote that by picking only one racial identity, he chose to separate Americans rather than unite them, even though he could have “stood up for my children, who have been told they are not black enough or not white enough.”

“[L]ike it or not, he is not black, he is not white, he is multi-racial and should not be shamed of it,” wrote the commenter.

But though Obama can be seen as denying half his roots, and even as turning his back on his fellow neither-here-nor-there Americans, I think I get why someone like Obama might want to identify purely as a black man.

On the realpolitik side, there are the cut-and-dried electoral considerations. Yes, the number of Americans who describe themselves as being of mixed race is on the rise, having increased 25 percent between 2000 – when the U.S. Census Bureau first allowed respondents to pick more than one race – and 2007, while the nation’s overall population has grown 7 percent in that time, according to this MSNBC article by Mike Stuckey.

But in that year, multiracial Americans still constituted less than 2 percent of the population, compared with 13.5 percent for blacks in 2008. That’s 41.1 million black people, but less than 5 million (according to one count) Americans of mixed race.

There are other political considerations, too. Numbers speak loud, so identifying as black rather than as multiracial can be a way of granting additional power to black Americans as a demographic group; it can affect the extent and distribution of government policy and expenditure, and it can shape the public perception of which voters are worth wooing. And when as high-profile a (half-)black man as the president of the United States identifies solely as black, that can potentially have the effect of artificially increasing the number of “blacks, African Americans or Negroes” not only by inspiring those who fit that description to fill out the Census form but also, possibly, by spurring those who aren’t sure if they fit that description to check just the one box. Perhaps this is part of what Hughes meant when she said she thinks the president’s choice “will have political, social and cultural ramifications.”

Of course, there’s more to it than pure politics.

Even presidents can be presumed to have personal and family considerations, such as an individual sense of belonging likely bred at least in part of the external appearance that typically precedes inclusion in one group and exclusion from another. Obama’s personal story and the American national story would have been different if he had come out looking more like his mother, Ann Dunham, who died of cancer in 1995.

And there’s also a certain satisfying story arc, a narrative simplicity even in the face of a complex tale, that comes from Obama’s identification with a specific group rather than with a jumbled agglomeration of members of Some Other Race.

On the national level, there’s an element of pride in being able to say that those who dreamed of being the first black president will now have to content themselves with dreaming of being merely the next black president – something that just wouldn’t come out the same if you were to replace “black” with “multiracial.”

And yet, somewhere between my belief that personal and communal considerations (not just political ones) may well have played a role in Obama’s decision and my belief that ultimately it’s none of my business how any individual identifies himself – even when that individual is the president, and even when his decision is announced by the White House press secretary – I can’t help but ask the nagging elephantine question: After all these years, is the one-drop rule still in effect?

For all the potentially positive reasons for identifying as black – and only as black – is Obama ultimately saying that no matter what you accomplish, even if you become president of the United States, you will still be defined by whichever ethnic group is furthest from that of the Founding Fathers, the quintessential WASPs?

Could be.

Maybe what Obama is really saying is that that’s okay with him.

Photo by jurvetson

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It’s all those references to “the people” (real ones, no less) that have helped brand the former Alaska governor and 2008 Republican vice presidential nominee a populist, as well as win her ardent applause and adulation from her target audience.

That populism does not seem limited to those responding to Palin, though. President Barack Obama’s defense of nothing-if-not-unpopular bankers caused quite a backlash from those who are nostalgic for the days when he got in trouble for talking about “fat-cat bankers.”

Seemingly logical conclusion: Populism is newly popular, on the left as well as the right.

But though one might think that believing in “the rights, wisdom, or virtues of the common people” would, almost by definition, be likely to be “commonly liked or approved,” it turns out the p-word is not as universally acclaimed as current events might indicate.

“Populist” is actually the least popular of five common political labels, with just 8 percent of U.S. voters viewing it as a politically positive description and 36 percent classifying it as a negative description, according to the Rasmussen Reports polling company. It got beat out by “political liberal” (which 14 percent consider positive), “libertarian” (18 percent), “progressive” (22 percent and heading downhill) and “conservative” (40 percent and on the upswing).

Perhaps the confusion over the (un)popularity of contemporary populism is related to the confusion over which ideas this populist fervor seeks to propagate, and on which side of the aisle those ideas belong.

Though the anti-Big Government ideology might seem like it would mesh with classic Republican tenets, this kind of Palinesque populism is also anti-Big Business, without which the GOP would probably just be the OP. It also doesn’t really have the support of those inside-the-Beltway politicos who happen to be Republicans – and who are trying to convince Wall Street that, unlike the Democratic White House, they’re on the side of Big Business.

Senator John Cornyn of Texas, chairman of the National Republican Senatorial Committee, said he visits New York about twice a month to try to tap into Wall Street’s remorse about supporting a president who has been publicly attacking them.

“I just don’t know how long you can expect people to contribute money to a political party whose main plank of their platform is to punish you,” Cornyn said.

So if the Dems are anti-Big Business and the Tea Partyers are anti-Big Business, is everyone on the same populist page, but just shouting so loud they can’t tell? Or maybe the answer to the question of which ideas today’s populism is pushing is: All of ‘em! As long as it makes me mad!

That’s pretty much what James Surowiecki  argues in The New Yorker, writing: “The electorate, we hear, wants Barack Obama to be more of an economic populist but less of an ambitious reformer. He has to aggressively create jobs but also be less spendthrift. This advice may be contradictory, but then so are the economic opinions of the many angry voters who are animating what’s being called the new populism.”

This new populism, he adds, “has stitched together incompatible concerns and goals into one ‘I’m mad as hell’ quilt. The people may have spoken. It’s just not clear that they’re making any sense.”

Photo by ann-dabney

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“Yes,” writes Henninger, “it is about a general revulsion at government spending, what is sometimes called ‘the blob.’ But blobs are shapeless things, and in the days ahead we will see the Obama White House work hard to reshape the blob into a deficit hawk. Unless the facade is ripped away, the machine will survive.”

 Wait a second, did he just say “the blob”?

 As in the 1958 horror sci-fli flick, remade 30 years later, about a mysterious creature from another planet that resembles a giant blob of jelly, lands on Earth and consumes everyone in its path?

 Yup, the very same.

This highly evocative and not exactly flattering moniker is a fairly popular way for those opposed to government spending to denigrate it with four measly letters that drip with scorn as they instantly trigger precisely the intended image: an out-of-control, oozing creature that can’t stop devouring everything around it.

Or, as a tag line for the original version of the movie put it: “Indescribable… indestructible… insatiable.”

Perhaps it is the inherent shapelessness of Blob the kitschy monster that lends a certain ambiguity to blob the economic metaphor. Though those who make the comparison are referring to aspects of the same general phenomenon, they do not always use it to mean precisely the same thing.

While Henninger used “blob” to refer to government spending, a reader of Louisiana newspaper The Town Talk compared the sci-fi creature to President Barack Obama.

In a letter to the editor published on the paper’s Web site, Tom Hough of Natchitoches, Louisiana, says the “ever-consuming, ever-growing Blob” is the “movie character that best fits Obama,” who, he says, doesn’t appear “as if he ever plans to reduce spending.”

Over at  the financial news and opinion Web site Wall Street Pit, William L. Anderson uses the term as a synonym for the economy, as viewed by advocates of government spending.

Anderson, an assistant professor of economics at Frostburg State University in Maryland, cites an Associated Press article stating that the “federal spending surge of more than $20 billion for roads and bridges in President Barack Obama’s first stimulus has had no effect on local unemployment rates, raising questions about his argument for billions more to address an ‘urgent need to accelerate job growth.’”

 ”Why has this spending not had the desired effect?” he asks. “To answer that, one has to understand that an economy is not an amorphous blob into which one pours money in order to make the recipe complete.”

Anderson uses the blob metaphor in pretty much the same way on the blog of the Ludwig von Mises Institute, which calls itself the “the research and educational center of classical liberalism, libertarian political theory, and the Austrian School of economics” – in other words, not the biggest fan of blob-like spending, or as Anderson describes it in his Mises Economics Blog post, of blob economics.

Anderson gets a wee bit peevish, scattering scare quotes rather immoderately.  ”You see, at the Hallowed Halls of MIT and Princeton (and the other ‘elite’ institutions of ‘higher’ learning), an economy is nothing more than a ‘blob’ of goods and spending, a perpetual motion machine that must continue to be greased by more spending,” he writes. “For all of the supposed sophisticated math that dominates the ‘elite’ or ‘A’ journals of economics, it pretty much comes down to ‘blob’ economics. Economists create extremely crude models of an economy, and then have the chutzpah to tell the rest of us that they have the ability to replace the workings of an economy and its billions of prices and transactions with their Own Infinite Wisdom.”

As with the other references to the 1958 horror flick, the blob as understood by Christopher Markowski, an anti-establishment financial consultant and radio host and author of the Watchdog on Wall Street blog, entails condemnation of government spending – but he doesn’t view the blob as a mistaken model of the economy or a way of describing spending practices themselves.

Instead, he writes, “The new and improved modern-day Blob is none other than our federal government. Instead of engulfing humans, this version swallows up money, our money, our tax dollars.”

But others are loath to grant the federal government an exclusive hold on bloated blobbishness.

NewJerseyNewsroom.com reports that the creature that voters fear may engulf Gov. Chris Christie is the state government, which it calls the “Trenton blob.”

For reasons that may be better left unexplored, blobs seem to be a big issue in the Garden State, as can be seen in a recent editorial in The Trentonian called “Christie goes up against The Blob,” which the paper defines as “the public sector.”

“All across America, from sea to shining sea, the public sector goes on spreading like some proliferating menace in a sci-fi movie,” the editorial states. “Out in California, it has reduced even The Terminator to a whimpering girlie-man. On the opposite end of the continent, here in New Jersey, can Gov. Chris Christie perform feats of strength that not even Arnold Swarzenegger could manage?”

Just as the movie Blob “engulfed everything in its path,” the paper says, “the public sector likewise seeks to eliminate obstacles to its inexorable expansion. (For example, uncooperative politicians.) And meanwhile with a single-minded purpose it seeks out sustenance. (For example, cooperative politicians bankrolled by public sector unions.)”

So, does “the blob” (or, for more frightening effect, “The Blob”) refer to government spending, a pro-spending view of the economy, the federal government, the state government or Obama himself? There is no one answer, it seems, but if nothing else, you can be pretty sure that if you spot the word “blob” in a piece about the economy, you’re probably not reading a proposal for another stimulus package.

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