Veritosity

The Omega Post

2007-11-28T20:12:00.000-05:00

We have moved.

Test

2007-11-16T20:45:00.000-05:00

2007-09-07T16:23:00.001-04:00

I had a much longer post in which I gently let down my two or three casual readers (counting myself) and told them that due to the demands of college and my internship at TPM I wasn't going to be posting on this blog again until mid-December. That post, of course, got messed up by Blogger. Don't you hate that?

Anywhere, here it is in fewer words. This blog exists pretty much entirely for selfish reasons - it's an outlet for my strong interest in politics and political commentary. TPM, at least for this semester, is going to be my outlet instead. Besides, I'm really really busy. Something had to go.

I'll see you all when winter break begins.

Surprise!

2007-09-03T17:11:00.000-04:00

I'm back (for now), but classes start tomorrow and my internship the day after that, so we'll see how long this lasts. I just had to pop in to mention this awesome surprise visit to Iraq from our president. I think the troops were hoping for Dave Chappelle, but Bush is cool too, I guess.

Anyway it's nice to see the president making these visits surprises - they boost morale and garner minimal fanfare except for a write-up by the AP and every major newspaper. Also, because they demonstrate how successful the escalation has begin because Iraq is clearly far too dangerous for the president to announce that he's going there and give the insurgency time to prepare a welcome party.

Surprise!

Wishful Thinking

2007-08-28T10:22:00.000-04:00

Here's something kind of interesting in this article about Bob Ney's besieged Democratic successor:

Both parties see Mr. Space’s seat as an important prize. The 18th Congressional District, which Mr. Space represents, is Republican territory; President Bush received 57 percent of the vote here in 2004. Winning the seat is essential for Republicans to regain control of the House next year, said David Cohen, a political science professor at the University of Akron. [Emphasis mine]

Huh. Does anyone actually see this as a possibility? It seems like since 2006 the goal of the Republican Party has just been to avoid hemorrhaging more seats. Sure they might be able to take this particular seat back, but overall what are the odds another coup as dramatic as 2006 but in reverse?

2007-08-27T09:52:00.000-04:00

Jesus. You spend one little news-free day moving into college and when you come back the Attorney General of the United States is suddenly gone.

So the question is, did his resignation have more to do with the fired prosecutors scandal or the warrantless wiretapping scandal? My money's on the latter - there must be something incriminating in those documents Leahy requested from the White House. And the clock is still ticking for them to turn them over.

A brief blogging hiatus from my indefinite hiatus

2007-08-24T23:14:00.000-04:00

Almost packed. In the meantime, I just found out today that I'm going to be interning for the fall semester at Talking Points Memo. I'm really excited, as this this is something of a dream internship for me. The thing is, and this is the chief reason why I'm mentioning the internship here, that and classes are going to be keeping me really busy for the semester. So that's going to cut into the time I spend writing and posting stuff here.

Just keep in mind that while you might see a lot fewer posts here with my name on them, it's because I'm doing work related to a blog with literally more than three times my readership.*

*Much, much, much more

2007-08-24T13:40:00.000-04:00

College is looming. On Sunday I'll be moving into my dorm at NYU, so I'm going on indefinite hiatus as of now to pack, move and get settled. I'll start posting again when I'm settled in, whatever that means.

2007-08-23T16:27:00.000-04:00

Taylor Marsh is so indignant about the tone Edwards has been taking lately that she accidentally forgot to listen to the actual substance of what he's saying.

They just left out the Clinton money quote Edwards used today, which is straight out of the right-wing playbook. There are plenty of ways to come at Clinton on the issues, especially Iraq. But if this is the Edwards re-launch, I hope it makes a turn into better territory. Because between Obama's "Bush-Cheney lite" and Edwards talking about "The Lincoln Bedroom is not for rent," I've got to say that these guys sound positively desperate.

What does it matter whose playbook it's out of if it's correct?

2007-08-23T11:19:00.000-04:00

The messy thing about installing a democracy in another country is sometimes you don't like who they vote for.

As bad as the White House has been with the occupation of Iraq militarily, politically it's been a complete joke. Check this out:

After the 2005 elections in Iraq, Blackwill wrote a laudatory op-ed in The Wall Street Journal praising Allawi's strategy for crushing the insurgency: "Mr. Allawi's message is simple: Join us in building the new Iraq and accept its benefits or, if you support the insurgency, get ready to die."

As it happened, the strategy didn't live up to its promises. The elections knocked Allawi out of power, as his tenure ended up alienating a large swath of the majority Shiite population. His attempts at enlisting American support to return to office -- a perennial rumor in Washington
over the past two years -- have all fallen short. Evidently, though, Blackwill and BGR evidently think that the time is right to get the old gang back together.

So a Senator Levin, the president, and a GOP lobbying firm all seem to want as prime minister the guy who got voted out of office the first time around for severely alienating a portion of Iraq that already feels thoroughly marginalized and trampled upon. Sounds like an awesome way to end that sectarian strife.

2007-08-23T10:25:00.000-04:00

I'd say right now that the Bush administration's attempts at secrecy have reached a new level of ridiculous, but of course that's probably not true. Be fair, though; it'd be pretty hard. And they're clearly trying.

Anyway, let's hope this gets laughed out of court [emphasis mine].

The Bush administration argued in court papers this week that the White House Office of Administration is not subject to the Freedom of Information Act as part of its effort to fend off a civil lawsuit seeking the release of internal documents about a large number of e-mails missing from White House servers.

The claim, made in a motion filed Tuesday by the Justice Department, is at odds with a depiction of the office on the White House's own Web site. As of yesterday, the site listed the Office of Administration as one of six presidential entities subject to the open-records law, which is commonly known by its abbreviation, FOIA.

Not absurd enough for you? Try this on for size.

Thanks to widespread efforts to understand what the NSA's highly classified warrantless surveillance program is -- from journalists, from legal scholars, from national security experts, from elected officials -- the Bush administration was forced last month to reveal too much about how the program operates, in order to correct misunderstandings. And that means, McConnell said, "Americans are going to die."

If there's one civics lesson that the administration has taught to Americans again and again it's that in a democracy, openly debating national security-related initiatives is about the deadliest thing you can do.

And I know this has been said before, but how stupid does the Bush Administration think these terrorists really are? Not even the dumbest lackey in the dumbest mob movie is going to openly discuss business on a phone line he doesn't know is totally secure. We're supposed to believe that Al Qaeda had never heard of wiretaps before all the newspapers started running stories about FISA?

2007-08-22T15:27:00.000-04:00

Could someone please explain to me what the big deal here is?

This old Free Republic post contains the text of [Republican Louisiana gubernatorial candidate] Jindal's "How Catholicism is Different" article, which is now the focus of a Democratic Party attack ad against him. It won't likely be up long, as the magazine is aggressively seeking to expunge versions of the piece from the web to protect Jindal.

Aside from the fact that it's written like a legal brief, apparently to make it seem "authoritative", it really is a slap across the face of all non-Catholic Christians.

Jindal's article has a lot of deliberately obfuscatory pseudo-intellectual talk so I'm just going to quote directly from Kos's summaries of each component of the argument:

Summary: Catholics are right, everyone else is wrong.

Summary: Catholicism is infallible, all other religions are burdened with utterly depraved minds subject to subjective interpretations leading to anarchy and heresy.

Or even more concisely: Non-Catholics are anarchic heretics.

Summary: Jesus was a Catholic, not a protestant.

Summary: Anyone leaving the Catholic Church is a heretic.

Summary: Luther was an idiot.

Summary: My church is big and old and can kick your church's ass.

Pretty controversial stuff, if you're not a Catholic. But there's really no reason to be surprised that Jindal would believe all of this stuff. It kind of comes with the territory of being a member of any religion. If you're Catholic, obviously Protestants are heretics. If you're Protestant/Jewish/Muslim/Hindu/etc., every single adherent to any religion not your own in deeply and profoundly wrong on many of the most basic matters of human existence.

It's something that liberals and pretty much anyone interested in the idea of religious tolerance get uncomfortable with, but there's really no way around it besides perhaps some kind of Gaimanesque omni-pantheon. It's simply not possible to have faith that something exists without the corresponding belief that a contradictory entity or event does not exist.

Religious conservatives tend to be a lot more up front about this than liberals. And while it may expose one of the bigger problems with religion in general, it makes us look a bit ridiculous when we get the vapors because a Catholic thinks that Protestant beliefs are dead wrong.

And while we're on the subject, the idea that tolerance of religion means that religious convictions, unlike any other form of belief, are magically above criticism in an open society is absurd.

2007-08-21T18:47:00.000-04:00

Unsurprisingly, some are upset that Leahy has responded to the Bush administration's snubbing of his deadline for turning over documents by ... extending the deadline. And sure it makes him look toothless right now, but there's a good reason for extending the deadline until after recess.

If Leahy starts handing out subpoenas right before August recess, he's giving the White House a month to let the whole scandal drop off the headlines and then when Congress comes back into session the story is effectively buried. But if he gets on this right after Congress goes back in session, he'll have all the press coverage he needs.

So the real question is, why was the deadline right before a recess anyway?

2007-08-19T13:30:00.000-04:00

This is the Edwards I've been waiting to see. It's a good move on his part.

From Ida Grove to Pocahontas, from Onawa to Osage, Mr. Edwards, who is seeking the Democratic presidential nomination, led a 7-day, 31-stop barnstorming tour of rural Iowa this week billed as the “Fighting for One America” tour — and fighting was an apt choice of words.

At each stop, he let out the same battle cry: a populist attack on big oil, big pharmaceutical companies, big insurance companies and corporate lobbyists in Washington. These he described as being “powerful insiders” that had “rigged the system” against the ordinary working man, leaving him poorer, degrading the environment and blocking access to affordable health care.

At the end of the day, passion is what's going to resonate with voters; not Obama's vague platitudes about optimism or Clinton's nonsense about corporate lobbyists representing real Americans. A lot of people are very angry for the right reasons and they're looking for a candidate who shares their righteous indignation.

The one risk that comes out of this is that what happened to Howard Dean will happen to Edwards - namely, the press will sink him by portraying him as angry, "abrasive," etc.

“There’s a fine line between passion and anger,” said David P. Redlawsk, an associate professor of political science at the University of Iowa and director of the university’s political poll. “It’s too early to tell which side of the line he is straddling. If he seems to be purely angry all the time, it will fail. People are not interested in a guy who is always angry.”

In the modern terminology of the campaign press, anger, even totally justified anger, is automatically a bad thing. That's what makes this such a big risk, and it's yet another reason why Edwards should be applauded. He could have easily clung to his safe 2004 persona as a smooth, inoffensive ken doll - but that's a cynical thing to do when you're running on real issues. The basis of Edwards' platform is poverty, and there's plenty to be furious about there. I would doubt his sincerity if he weren't.

Superbad

2007-08-19T13:21:00.000-04:00

Perhaps the best teen sex comedy ever? Admittedly the competition isn't too fierce in that category, to the extent that there actually any good teen sex comedies. I guess Heathers counts as a teen sex comedy. And while it's good, Superbad is better.

In a summer with movies like Sicko, The Simpsons Movie and The Bourne Ultimatum, for some reason this is the only movie that I wanted to see badly enough to spend money on a ticket. Certainly that has something to do with Apatow and Rogen being comedic geniuses. But this is also the perfect movie for where I am in my life right now - the whole thing is about leaving high school and moving on to college. With a little over a week left before I pack my bags and head for the city it practically seemed like a requirement that I go watch the movie before that happened.

It was a little bit of a weird viewing experience. Apparently Rogen and friend Evan Goldberg started writing this script as teenagers themselves, and it shows. These guys know what high school is like and the version of high school portrayed in the movie isn't even a little bit Hollywood. And the characters in the movie are people I know - watching it was kind of like having a good friend come up to me, saying, "Dude, you will not fuckin' believe the night I had last night," and then spend 90 minutes telling me a hilarious, unbelievable yet strangely plausible story.

The row in front of me was filled with collar-popping designer-clad fratboys. I wondered what the hell they were doing there in the theater. They might have found the movie funny, but there was no way they could have gotten the point of it, because after all, this isn't a movie for them. This isn't Van Wilder.

It's almost too bad that this movie is destined to be a cult classic. You're going to spend the next couple of years hearing it quoted into oblivion until all of the jokes lose their satirical bite and the movie becomes less bittersweet and more a comfortable, predictable kind of funny. If we're very lucky, the name "McLovin" won't become as ubiquitous and painfully overplayed as "I believe you have my stapler," or a Napoleon Dynamite-esque, "Gosh!"

Politics is boring

2007-08-17T14:16:00.000-04:00

Our national discourse has hit a pretty astonishing high in terms of vapidity, and one of my worst fears is that it hasn't even peaked yet. But sometimes I'll read some so vapid, so unbelievably astonishingly stupid about the presidential race that it will catch me completely off guard.

"Can you imagine what debates are going to be like with great big Andrew Jackson-looking Fred and Hillary on her stubby little legs, stamping her feet?" Thompson, if elected, would be the tallest president ever. Republicans are not just looking for the usual John Wayne-type signifiers as they go about selecting a candidate, but thinking about who can best loom over Hillary Clinton and make her look like a shrill, small, silly little woman. Thompson's booming voice will make her "sound like Madame Defarge."

Does the guy who said this, apparently a "leading figure in the Iowa Republican Party" even give a shit about policy? Is there any ideological or philosophical reason why he's a Republican? Does he have the slightest interest in actual politics?

I've learned to expect this sort of thing from stupid people in general, but when the stupid person in question is a professional political operative (which the description seems to indicate) this sort of thing becomes absolutely shocking.

2007-08-15T11:08:00.000-04:00

ter·ror·ism (tĕr'ə-rĭz'əm) pronunciation
n.

The unlawful use or threatened use of force or violence by a person or an organized group against people or property with the intention of intimidating or coercing societies or governments, often for ideological or political reasons.

One particularly aggravating rhetorical device that I've seen people on both the left and the right use is the tendency to use the label "terrorist" totally irresponsibly. Anyone who has any familiarity with this blog knows how I feel about our president, but calling him a terrorist is not only stupid and inaccurate, it's also totally unproductive.

The same goes for the Iranian Revolutionary Guard.

The United States is declaring a branch of another country's military to be terrorists. Which, I suppose, would shoehorn an attack on them into the AUMF (not that the "administration" ever believed such authorization was necessary).

And, of course, it opens up all sorts of possibilities for detention of Revolutionary Guard personnel (or anyone "suspected" of the same) captured, well, anywhere in the world, presumably. The United States might be expected, under this provision, to suspend the application of the Geneva Conventions to the actual, uniformed soldiery of Iran. Granted, the Revolutionary Guard is a bit of an odd duck, at least in western terms, but this looks like trouble to me.

I'd be more concerned about this if any of the administration's previous steps towards an apparent conflict with Iran had turned into anything. But Ahmadinejad isn't an idiot, and he doesn't seem interested engaging the US no matter how much he is provoked. The White House is the only one who wants this war and I think at least some of the people close to Bush realize that any kind of unilateral, unauthorized strike on Iran ordered by the executive branch would be the end of his already moribund presidency.

Or at least I hope so.

Multiculturalism and the Department of Education vs. Some Lunatics on Podiums

2007-08-14T22:26:00.000-04:00

Today, TPMtv showcased the first of what I hope will be many home-made videos documenting what's happening on the ground in election '08. This one, from TPM fan Greg Hauenstein, took a look at what the GOP candidates were actually saying to their base at the Ames straw poll when they figured the media wasn't looking. You non-Facebook people can see the video below. And below that are my favorite moments what, unsurprisingly, was a day of batshit-insane speeches.

1:33: Huckabee breaks out the first embarrassing analogy. Republicans fail in elections when they have the leaves, but not the fruit. The Republican fruit.

1:43: Ron Paul is known by some as "the sane one" because he's the only anti-war candidate in the GOP primary. However, it's worth noting that he's still crazy in his own special way. Example: he wants to get rid of the Department of Education and the Department of Energy. Public education is a scourge on this nation!

2:04: Much like Martin Luther King, Brownback has a dream. His dream, however, seems to be more about personal gratification and the acquisition of power than the other one. Who's going to be the next candidate to tragically misappropriate a famous expression used by a civil rights leader? Is Tancredo about to go all Malcolm X on us?

2:28: Huckabee's graduated past stupid metaphors to stupid mixed metaphors. That's because he knows that the voters in Ames understand they're buying the cereal, not just the box. And hopefully it's fruity cereal. Instead of leafy cereal. Perhaps he's saying that Republicans like Fruit Loops?

3:25: Tancredo warns that America is under attack from multiculturalism. That's so ridiculous and borderline racist that it leaves me completely snarkless. Insert your own snide comment here.

2007-08-14T13:17:00.000-04:00

I was actually going to write about this anyway, but Josh Marshall's post provides an excellent lead-in.

Is it me or is the most remarkable thing about Karl Rove's resignation that it seems almost like a non-event? I had the feeling as the day wore on that all of us in the news and commentary business were trying to make it a big event. But somehow it just wasn't there.

...

In part this must be because Rove's departure seems unequal to his billing. It fits no one's expectations. He's certainly not leaving in triumph. And, for the moment, not in handcuffs either.

I think the reason is a little simpler than that. If Rove had ducked out when the administration was at the peak of its popularity (or at the very least, not at rock bottom yet), it would have been huge news because they would have lost their political brain. But the administration is already more or less politically crippled, so it doesn't matter anymore whether or not they've got any good political architects left.

Rove is resigning

2007-08-13T13:37:00.000-04:00

And thus goes the political strength of the White House. Or not.

Exactly how much influence Rove had inside the White House when not campaigning, and how much damage he alone did will probably never be fully revealed. But that's not really the question on everyone's minds right now - there's plenty of time for that when he actually leaves later this month. What everyone's wondering right now, is : why did he leave?

I've heard two possible reasons. Of the two, I'd wager that the more likely one is:

A desire to avoid congressional oversight
There have been a lot of scandals in the Bush White House, but the politicization of the Justice Department in particular seems to have become one of the most damaging scandals they've been through, if only because of the new Congress's willingness to investigate. If Rove was involved in this, it makes sense he would want to duck out before his refusal of a subpoena got him a contempt of Congress citation.

A new, scary direction for the Republican Party
The GOP has been imploding politically for a while now and it's plausible that Rove could want to duck out instead of being stuck as one of the chief political architects of a now seriously deformed party structure. I'm a little skeptical of Marcy Wheeler's "the Republican Party is about to go very overtly racist" explanation, but the rest of her post is worth reading.

2007-08-11T23:40:00.000-04:00

Well the results of the Iowa Straw Poll are in. I don't think anyone's by Romney's narrow victory (both the "victory" and the "narrow" parts). Note also that Brownback is in third and Giuliani is all the way down in eighth. I've said before that Brownback's been dangerously underestimated, and this signals that he may have a better shot than anyone expected in the early primaries.

Meanwhile, John McCain scores a major coup by coming in only second to last, ahead of a man who nobody has ever heard of, ever.

Pretty much the scariest baby ever

2007-08-10T13:20:00.000-04:00

I'm sure that this post from Amanda Marcotte says something very interesting about marketing fast food to children, but it's hard for me to address the thesis of the post because the picture right above it is so goddamn terrifying.

Seriously. I try to read this thing and eventually I'm watching this grotesque attack on nature warily as if the moment I look away it will strike.

And it doesn't matter where I go in my room, either. Its eyes follow me.

When did McDonald's go from pretending to care about you and your family to reveling gleefully in its own malevolence because they know millions of people will eat that shit no matter what they do?

More Clinton weirdness

2007-08-08T13:18:00.000-04:00

Following up on yesterday's bizarre poll, here's another one that doesn't make much sense to me:

Do you seriously believe that Senator Hillary Clinton would be influenced by a lobbyist?

Yes 48
No 24

(Among Democrats)

Yes 30
No 35

Do you seriously believe that most politicians would be influenced by a lobbyist?

Yes 63
No 15

(Among Democrats)

Yes 55
No 17

And since yesterday's poll brings up Clinton and foreign policy again, Matt Stoller has a worrisome highlight from yesterday's debate:

Cognitive Dissonance

2007-08-07T23:47:00.000-04:00

I'm having a hard time reconciling this:

William Kristol has finally made his endorsement, declaring Clinton to be the “responsible” Democratic candidate.

With this:

The new USA Today/Gallup poll contains an interesting set of numbers that suggest Hillary's winning the debate with Obama over foreign policy -- at least, if you define winning as being seen as the better choice to do certain aspects of the job of "commander in chief."

Perhaps the key words there are "Dems and Dem-leaning independents." Not primary voters per se, but just a large group of people who aren't necessarily well-informed about politics. Still, this is a little but disturbing.

2007-08-06T14:11:00.000-04:00

One of the most important functions of the progressive blogosphere in recent political history has been to try to keep the Democratic establishment in line and avoid falling into the trap that conservative punditry seems to have sunken into, of just being glorified cheerleaders for their party establishment. With that in mind, stories like this out of YearlyKos are worrisome, to say the least.

There are two explanations for why few blogs have outright endorsed a Democratic presidential candidate. One is that pretty much all of the candidates are condescending, narcissistic, opportunistic robots. The other explanation, as Kos himself puts it (without, amazingly, the slightest trace of sarcasm):

"I feel no compulsion to pick anybody," confessed Markos Moulitsas Zuniga, the proprietor of DailyKos, the largest liberal blogging community, "because they are all so great."

Now Kos is a very intelligent person, and I know he's familiar with Clinton's schizophrenic Iraq policy and her affection for corporate lobbyists. So he must also know about Obama's ardor for the coal industry in Illinois, Richardson's incessant harping on the Balanced Budget Amendment, and so on. If you look at all of this stuff it seems to difficult to avoid the conclusion that the current Democratic slate is a bad joke.

What I'm worried about here is that the netroots are ignoring these obvious flaws in the Democratic candidates and the Democratic Party because hey, it's better than the Republicans. And because, to a certain extent, these ugly compromises are the cost of getting a seat at the table.

Either way, it's undeniably disturbing that a candidate like Kucinich to get shouted down for criticizing the Democrats for not being progressive enough.

The only candidate who was booed louder than Clinton at Saturday's presidential debate was the unlikely left-winger Dennis Kucinich. He made the mistake of aping one-time presidential candidate Ralph Nader, who regularly attacked the Democratic leadership as a bunch of sellouts. "Why don't people vote?" Kucinich asked, rhetorically. "It's because they don't think there is much of a difference between the two parties."

The booing immediately drowned Kucinich out. He had committed a cardinal sin, demeaning the Democratic Party before a crowd that works countless unpaid hours a week to make the party stronger.

If this sort of thing is a trend and we end up with both a centrist DLC-type president and a conservative Democratic Congress then I fear that the netroots are going to wind up nearly totally impotent when it comes to fighting corruption within the party.

This week in annoying ledes

2007-08-04T23:13:00.000-04:00

Democrats Feel Pressure on Spy Program

WASHINGTON, Aug. 4 — Under pressure from President Bush, House Democrats on Saturday grudgingly prepared to move ahead with approving changes in a terrorist surveillance program despite serious reservations about the scope of the measure.

Golly gee, if only they had more than 28 Senators. Or some way of blocking a floor vote by dragging out the debate into a public spectacle. Some kind of "debate extendinator," if you will.

Oh well. Wouldn't want to mess with their August vacation.

2007-08-04T12:25:00.000-04:00

What the hell is the point of having a Democratic Congress if they're going to roll over for shit like this?

For anyone who isn't already familiar with FISA, let's recap:

As currently written, the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act already gives U.S. spies broad leeway to monitor the communications of foreign terrorism suspects, but the 30-year-old statute requires a warrant to monitor calls intercepted in the United States, regardless of where the calls begin or end.

Note that this warrant comes from a secret court and in some cases can be issued retroactively. And the court is a notorious rubber-stamper.

So when the Bush administration started violating FISA in 2002, the only possible reason is because they wanted to conduct wiretaps that no sane judge could possibly issue a warrant for.

This bill is the result of them getting caught. Instead of being prosecuted for it, they're asking for a change to the law so they can conduct business as usual - except this time, while the wiretapping is still flagrantly unconstitutional, at least they have a bill to back them up. A bill which, amazingly, only 28 senators opposed.

According to TPMmuckraker, the Director of National Intelligence actually signed off on an earlier compromise version of the bill which the administration then squashed.

2007-08-04T12:12:00.000-04:00

This is about eight or nine different kinds of ridiculous. The proper judge of whether or not someone is serious about foreign policy or terrorism is now their use of the appropriate buzzwords?

Why is it so important to Lieberman that discussion of terrorists always include the framing term "Islamic"? Is he concerned that we'll confuse Al Qaeda with all those Wiccan terrorists?

Everyone understands that when we're discussing religiously-themed terror threats to the United States, the vast majority of the time we're talking about Islamic extremists. The only reason anyone would feel obligated to frame "extremist" with "Islamic" every single time the topic came up would be to reinforce negative and flatly untrue generalizations about Islam in general.

But of course, to be considered a serious foreign policy expert by neoconservatives, a little imperialist bigotry is practically a requirement.

2007-08-03T16:04:00.000-04:00

Is the infamous Republican attack machine running out of steam? In previous elections, the GOP marketing engine has been feared and hated for its ability to go after the emotional center of the voter's brain and shut down the rational center. And you know what? For the most part, they've been very good at it. So it's a little disconcerting to see something as amateurish as this paid for by the GOP.

For one thing, the production values are embarrassing. It doesn't look like a video made by a high-paid party consultant. It looks like it was made by some guy with a free iMovie trial on his computer. But the actual quality of the attacks within the video and the video's substance is even worse.

First, the attacks on Daily Kos. The GOP has tried attacking Kos before and I don't think it's ever been terribly effective. Kos is only really a household name in the homes of committed progressive activists. The target demographic of a GOP attack video doesn't know who Kos is and I don't think they care very much. It just seems silly to go after a minor Internet celebrity and try to connect him to the Democratic presidential candidates instead of going after the candidates themselves.

Especially when they're rehashing old, proven to be ineffective attacks. Like quoting the National Review, for example. That's already a bad sign. They've run out of attack material, so they're going back and quoting older attack material and trying to present it as new? Please.

But perhaps the silliest part of the video is going after the Democrats for not showing enough allegiance to the DLC. For one thing, it has the same problem as the attacks on Kos - what the hell is the DLC to the average guy on the street? For another thing, does the GOP really want to defend the DLC?

And of course, the whole video caps with Howard Dean screaming. Because Howard Dean is running for president. Or was, anyway. And because the whole scream thing is still funny and embarrassing! I hear that the Democrats plan to retaliate with a barrage of "Dan Quayle is stupid" jokes.

I'd like to volunteer my services to the GOP on crafting the next attack video. My rates are competitive - hell, I'll work for free, since I know you guys are having money issues. Sure I'm not a professional PR consultant, but I'm pretty sure I could do better than this crap. And while I normally wouldn't work for the GOP, this whole thing is so sad and desperate that it's taking all of my energy to summon up the normal levels of righteous indignation. That's just not good.

2007-08-02T10:55:00.000-04:00

I don't see the Bush administration really having a use for this, as they already seem to feel pretty confident that they can just hold tight until January 2009. Certainly Pollack and O'Hanlon's insipid article and the overjoyed reception it received on the right imply that it's going to be very difficult for Congress to force the Bush administration to take any steps to withdrawal and that the next president will have to be the one to disentangle us from this whole catastrofuck.

If a move like the kind our mystery senator describes actually occurred, it would be useful only as political cover for Republican senators, but I don't think they need that kind of political cover to keep in line. After all, if they're not already fleeing for the hills they've exhibited the kind of slavish devotion to their leader usually seen in bad horror movies where people get hypnotized by vampires.

Still, if there was a reduction in troop levels, that would be something. It would make efforts in Congress to end the war more difficult, but unfortunately that might not be a political reality with this president anyway no matter what.

Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows: Initial Thoughts

2007-07-31T17:55:00.000-04:00

Having finished Richard K Morgan's Thirteen the night before, I finally got started on the last Harry Potter book last night. Here to help articulate my first impression of the book are its own lovable main characters.

"Wow!" said Harry excitedly, "I can't believe I'm already two hundred pages through."

"That's one of Rowling's biggest strengths as a writer," Ron replied knowingly. "Everything she writes is difficult to put down."

"But she also has a few annoying habits that get to me the more I read her work!" cried Hermione tearfully.

"What do you mean?" inquired Harry inquisitively.

"Well for example her obsession with adverbs," Hermione retorted snifflingly.

"I have no idea what you're talking about," said Ron ronnishly. At his cutting remark, Hermione burst into tears again.

"Actually I noticed that too," Harry said observantly. Watching Hermione weep, he added, "And that's another thing - why does Hermione keep bursting into tears like every other page?"

"I can't help it!" Hermione said thickly. "I'm just so sad all the time for no discernible reason!"

"Well cut it out," Ron snapped snappishly. "And stop ruining my reading experience with your constant sobbing. Do you know how difficult it was to wait a week before finally reading this book without accidentally overhearing any spoilers?"

"Why do you care so much about what happens in the book anyway?" Harry asked Ron bluntly. "You could be reading something by Haruki Murakami instead."

Harry found himself at a loss for words. Just as he was forming a response, it was cut off by Hermione's crying again.

2007-07-30T12:56:00.000-04:00

The depth of my animosity towards Chuck Schumer is difficult to articulate, and this is a perfect example of why.

WASHINGTON, July 29 — June was a busy month for Senator Charles E. Schumer. On the phone, at large parties and small gatherings around the nation, he raised more than $1 million from the booming private equity and hedge fund industries for the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, of which he is chairman.

But there is another way Mr. Schumer has been busy with hedge fund and private equity managers, an important part of his constituency in New York. He has been reassuring them that he will resist an effort led by members of his own party to single out the industry with a plan that would more than double the taxes on the enormous profits reaped by its executives.

Mr. Schumer has considerable say on the issue. In addition to being the third-ranking Democrat in the Senate leadership, he is the only Democrat serving on both of the major committees, Banking and Finance, that have jurisdiction in the matter.

So Schumer, less than a year after unfairly scrabbling up a lot of the credit for leading the Democrats to victory by focusing on, among other things, corruption,is now throwing his weight around to protect the insanely rich at the expense of the all the people who voted for his party because they were tired of Republicans protecting the insanely rich at their expense.

2007-07-29T21:35:00.000-04:00

Atrios doesn't even touch on the most ridiculous part of Hoagland's column, which has to be this:

When spectators jeered Michael Rasmussen, a world-class Danish cyclist, at the end of a long day's climb through the Pyrenees in the Tour de France last week, they turned the sporting world upside down.

The fans were not upset because Rasmussen had performed badly. He had in fact set a blistering pace to clinch what looked like ultimate victory in the bicycle race that is France's summer glory and concludes today in Paris. The spectators were booing precisely because Rasmussen (and others in the race's leading rank) had performed like Superman.

His numbers were too good to be true without the aid of performance-enhancing drugs, the fans had concluded. They did not need to wait for the scientific testing of athletes that is redefining the public's faith in sports industries on both sides of the Atlantic.

Their instinctive judgment -- which was validated a few hours later on Wednesday when Rasmussen's embarrassed team expelled him from the race -- parallels the increasingly skeptical reaction voiced by many American baseball fans as Barry Bonds has closed in on Hank Aaron's home-run record this summer. [Emphasis mine]

Ignoring the fact that this has absolutely nothing to do with either the blogosphere or politics (and oh how Washington Post columnists love irrelevant analogies), Hoagland's making the exact opposite point that he wants to make. Rasmussen was accused of using steroids because everyone could tell he was using steroids.

Which when you think about, is a lot like those mean, vindictive bloggers calling for Bush's impeachment because he's committed numerous impeachable offenses. So I guess Hoagland is onto something after all.

UPDATE: I've been asked to clarify what I'm trying to say here and going back and reading the post it isn't exactly clear. Basically Hoagland is trying to convince us that bloggers are viciously attacking people who don't deserve it and in order to convince us of this he draws an analogy between bloggers and a group of people who accused someone of something that he was, indeed, guilty of.

Rock the Bells

2007-07-29T21:09:00.000-04:00

Holy God. 20 hours of practically no food, 90 degree weather, writing sweaty bodies, drunk unconscious people and all-around awesome. I've got a cough right now from inhaling all that dust or maybe just from the dehydration.

I don't normally do big concerts and festivals, and not just for financial reasons. I don't really have the temperament for that sort of thing. A lot of my friends go to concerts specifically to fight their way towards the front of the audience and then get their asses kicked by the crush of people around them. One person I know got hit square in the chest by someone and ended up almost losing consciousness in the first aid tent. A couple other people were getting wasted as a side-effect of their dehydration. And one guy came home with a little blood on his shirt and completely unsure of where it came from.

They all think that kind of stuff is awesome. Me? I was just there for the music. So whenever things got kind of crazy I hung back. But I guess I can kind of see the appeal. Sure it was too hot, too dirty and too humid, but that all added to the excitement.

Anyway, here are some of the performances I saw, in order:

Jedi Mind Tricks
Not too familiar with these guys, but a decent show. Immortal Technique was next, and I'm not too wild about him. He's a talented lyricist but his paranoid, violent imagery and self-righteous lecturing verges on self-parody. Still what I saw of the tail end of his show was good and his speech about hip-hop bringing people together, if self-indulgent, was still interesting.

Pharoahe Monch
This was one of my favorite shows. I had listened to a little of his stuff but it didn't prepare me for the live show. I certainly wasn't anticipating the live instrumentation, something that I wish rappers did more often. I'm definitely listening to more of this guy based on his performance at Rock the Bells.

Mos Def and Talib Kweli
What can I say about these guys that hasn't been said before? Black Star is arguably the best hip-hop duo in history and it was great to see them back in action again. And the big audience chant of, "1, 2, 3, Mos Def and Talib Kweli" was probably the greatest group sing-along of the festival.

Sage Francis
I was a little disappointed at the lack of a live band, and a little bit more disappointed that he didn't yell, "YOU CAN'T KILL ME, MOTHERFUCKER!" in the middle of the song Dance Monkey. But it was still a great show and Sage showed off some of his ridiculous dance moves. Despite the heavy content of his lyrics, he was clearly having a lot of fun and the fact that he was having so much fun made the audience have a lot more fun.

Besides, he's an amazing lyricist, maybe the best in hip-hop today. I wouldn't even be into hip-hop if I hadn't been introduced to him and one of the highlights of the festival was that I got to shake his hand later that evening and tell him that to his face. A lot of his biggest detractors call him self-righteous, arrogant and narcissistic because of the political and autobiographical content of his lyrics and the heavy use of metaphor but when I talked to him he was very friendly and humble. Just because his stuff is very poetic and lyrically dense doesn't make him a douchebag - it makes him extremely intelligent.

Public Enemy
They were playing at the same time as Sage (and very loudly; at one point Sage said, "I can hear these guys as well as I can hear myself."), so I only caught the tail end. It was kind of sad - these guys are hip-hop legends, but the set was pretty anemic and ruined by the presence of Flavor Flav, who has become everything that Public Enemy was originally against. And to ruin it, he just wouldn't shut the fuck up.

Flav started off by bragging about his various insufferably stupid TV shows (The Surreal Life, Flavor of Love, I Love New York, etc.) and then went on to introduce all of his children onstage, brag about how good of a parent he was, yell two painfully drawn-out "Yeah, boyyyyyyyyy!"s, do a drum solo and take a courageous stand against social injustice by leading the audience in chanting "Fuck Bush!" and "Fuck racism!" I'm afraid that the showboating, narcissistic, shallow corporate twerp has ruined the quintessential protest hip-hop group forever. Way to dick up the legacy of a music legend.

The Roots
These guys are a perfect example why live instrumentation and hip-hop are such an amazing combination. Amazing protest anthems went off into lengthy jazz improvisations live and the whole thing was just flawless and beautiful, particularly when they played "Don't Feel Right." Not even the annoying drunk guy nearby who was trying futilely to mosh to jazz could detract from a set like these.

Cypress Hill
"How I Could Just Kill a Man," is a great song, but Rage clearly improved on it when they covered it so strangely enough it was kind of a step down to hear the original band perform it. Plus one of the guys from Cypress Hill just wouldn't shut up about marijuana. Even if you're really, really into weed, how much can you possibly talk about how awesome it is when you're supposed to be performing a concert?

Wu-Tang Clan
I was probably the only person there who wasn't a big Wu-Tang fan, but I will still admit that they are, clearly, nothing to fuck with. The music was annoyingly repetitive but it didn't really matter because of the incredible energy coming off of both the group and the audience.

Rage Against the Machine
Speaking of incredibly energy, the crowd for this show was absolutely nuts, and for good reason. Not even my friends who are normally into moshing could handle it for more than three songs. I hung back for the whole thing and watched it from a distance, but even very far away from the stage the sound was overwhelming and the place was densely packed. There was a group of crazy shirtless guys under one viewing screen that just waved their arms around and charged into each other at top speed.

They played a lot of Evil Empire songs, which was kind of weird because it's pretty much universally held that Evil Empire is their weakest album. But the songs sounded significantly better live than they did on the album and it was hard not to get swept up in the energy. It was just amazing watching them all do their thing.

It seems like it would be a serious oversight to not end with this post with a music video. Since Guerilla Radio is not only my favorite Rage song but also one of the best ones to hear live, here's a video of another great performance:

Thomas Paine

2007-07-27T14:24:00.000-04:00

Here's another song. Since this one is just vocals and acoustic guitar, it ended up not taking nearly as long to record.

2007-07-26T11:00:00.000-04:00

No posting yesterday because I spent a good chunk of the day in the recording studio (by which I mean my basement) hard at work on some songs I had written with the invaluable assistance of my good friend Ali Telmesani.

Here's the first completed song. There are more to come. Keep in mind that this one was kind of an experiment, but I think it still came sounding pretty good. Obviously Ali's drum machine can't replace a real drummer. If all goes well in the next couple of months I'll be collaborating with a real drummer (and maybe a couple other musicians for a fuller sound) and re-recording some of this stuff. In the meantime, enjoy the demo version.

2007-07-24T16:26:00.000-04:00

One of the aggravating things about supporting Edwards is that while he seems to be the only presidential candidate who's campaigning based on a coherent vision right now, his responsiveness to what the other candidates have been saying has been toothless at best and sluggish and toothless at worst.

So while, for example, his response to the whole hair thing is coming a bit late, at least it's finally sending the right message: how much a candidate's haircut costs is trivial bullshit. We all know it's trivial bullshit. And if you believe that the cost of Edwards' haircut has a place in a national debate about weighty issues like what to do in Iraq then your frivolous, shallow bullshit is part of the problem.

Speaking of shallow, frivolous bullshit, it's also nice to see Edwards finally challening Obama, who has managed to position himself as the "change" candidate while doing absolutely nothing to earn it.

2007-07-24T14:06:00.000-04:00

Via Pandagon, here's a frank, moving story of one LA Times staff writer's journey from devout Christian to atheist.

It's pretty illuminating in terms of the personal struggles with faith some people have before ultimately renouncing it. I'm going to admit that I didn't have a real crisis of faith like this - I was raised in a very reform Jewish household and figured out I was an atheist on my own with very little fuss.

But the interesting point this article makes that I think is pretty much universal is that atheists aren't necessarily overjoyed at the idea that there isn't a benevolent, all-powerful god watching over them who will reward the pure and punish the guilty. Needless to say, it would be cool to be able to actually believe that. An atheist is simply someone who finds that wonderful idea impossible to reconcile with the world he or she perceives. An atheist is not someone who goes around trying to disbelieve God because he or she hates God with a passion.

A Sort-of Endorsement

2007-07-22T15:56:00.000-04:00

To Chris Bower's list of reasons why few liberal blogs have endorsed candidates, I would add that thus far we don't have a whole lot of great options among the candidates. Until I recently I wasn't even really leaning towards anyone because all the candidates seemed almost equally annoying.

But although this isn't an endorsement, I'm pleased to announce that there's now a candidate that I'm at least leaning towards. That is, this is the guy I would recommend voting for in the primary. Edwards.

Why Edwards? I've liked his focus on poverty for a while, his willingness to talk about actual issues while his opponents run campaigns focused on personality. He seems to be the only major truly populist candidate running.

This isn't news and I was still somewhat ambivalent about Edwards for a while. But then I started reading some of anti-Edwards criticism and attacks. And the thing was that none of it had any real merit. It wasn't until I noticed how hard people had to dig to come up with a progressive argument against Edwards that I realized that he was the only real major progressive candidate.

Oh dear God

2007-07-20T14:00:00.000-04:00

According to Wikipedia, a colonoscopy only takes about half an hour. But then there's the administering of the sedative. And waiting for the sedative to wear off. So between those two things, you've got to figure that Cheney is going to be in power for a few hours.

Be afraid.

2007-07-20T11:08:00.000-04:00

This shouldn't be terribly surprising. And not just because of the Vitter thing, either. Giuliani's been getting kind of a free pass on national press coverage for the past six years because of 9/11, but that went away the moment he decided to run for president.

What's interesting is that with presumptive savior of the GOP McCain having fallen, and new presumptive savior of the GOP Giuliani getting pretty thoroughly McCained, I don't think anyone can predict who would be able to step in and fill in for him. GOP base support is so fractured, and their level of enthusiasm for one candidate specifically so low that not only is the primary still anyone's game but I can't imagine any candidate emerging unscathed, much less with the base of their own party totally locked up.

But is that really much worse than what's happening on the Democratic side? Look at who our presumptive nominee is.

What a movement looks like

2007-07-18T23:06:00.000-04:00

A bunch of people who really like keychains and bumper stickers.

Coming soon: volunteering for the campaign by attending rallies, watching rallies on TV, telling your friends to vote for Obama or being polite to him that one time you ran into him.

2007-07-18T14:55:00.000-04:00

Senate Republicans may have (temporarily) successfully blocked a vote on the Reed-Levin amendment, but I don't see this as a loss. The all-night session did exactly what it was supposed to - it was a dramatic move that drew attention to the fact that the GOP is blocking any attempt to withdraw from Iraq.

Basically it alerted America and the media to what Greg Sargent points out:

What this means in a nutshell is this: While a majority of the U.S. Senate favors withdrawal from Iraq, the Senate can't vote on a measure that would accomplish this -- because the GOP Senate leadership won't allow it.

Exactly. And it's important that everyone understand that.

2007-07-18T14:50:00.000-04:00

Continuing the Harry Potter-bashing vs. Harry Potter-bashing-bashing thing from yesterday, one of my biggest complaints with the series was how ineptly Rowling writes teenage angst. She's got to have a pretty low opinion of people in my age bracket if she really believes we're the bipolar, petulant, emotionally-unstable emo brats that she describes us as.

Then of course there's the whole thing about all the kids at the school being clean-mouthed straight-edge kids, but that's just an inevitable byproduct of the need for the book to reach an audience whose parents don't want them reading about drinking, cursing and sex.

Still, it's aggravating and that's why every once in a while it's nice to read a book like Small Town Punk, which I started last night. You get the impression that not only does the writer, John Sheppard, know real-life teenagers, but he also might have been one at some point in his life.

Image courtesy of Amazon.com

2007-07-17T15:49:00.000-04:00

Unlike either of the two Matts, I'm actually inclined to be a little sympathetic to Ron Charles' argument. There is something a little awry when intelligent, literate people read only Harry Potter and not other books that are not only better, but that they might actually enjoy more.

That being said, Matt (the older one) has a point. Even if you agree with Charles' basic thesis, there's no reason to be a dick about it. Instead, it's better to take a positive approach and recommend some good books.

So I'm going to take this opportunity to strongly recommend three other book series. All three are sci-fi or fantasy and all three are, like Harry Potter, quick, addictive reads.

The first one is pretty light fair, but if you're reading Harry Potter I'm going to go ahead and assume that you're not a snob about reading popcorn literature. The Harry Dresden Files by Jim Butcher have been called Harry Potter for grown-ups a lot, but the tone is too different for that title to really fit - it's a lot more film noir and with a sharper sense of humor. Still, it's got the quick pace, convoluted mythology and addictive quality of the best Harry Potter books - just with a noir twist, a bit more of a wink and nudge, and much better characterization. Just don't watch the awful Sci-Fi channel adaptation.

For dark fantasy with a little bit more meat on its bones (and some political undertones that any liberal blogger would appreciate) you can't get much better than China Miéville's books about the twisted steampunk landscape of Bas-Lag, starting with Perdido Street Station. For people who find Rowling's fantasy creations a little too derivative this is a demented, inventive acid trip.

Richard K Morgan also writes some of the best politically themed speculative fiction out there. Altered Carbon, Broken Angels and Woken Furies are gritty, bloody, furious future noir masterpieces. Like Miéville, Morgan's got a particular interest in leftist politics - his book Market Forces is what would happen if Noam Chomsky wrote the script for Mad Max.

2007-07-16T16:55:00.000-04:00

Alan Dershowitz certainly shows a remarkable aptitude for political clichés, even if actual insight is lacking.

But let's take his argument at face value. Let's assume that the Democratic primary voters are a bunch of extremists whose views are completely out of touch with the average voter and that the 2006 election proved that Americans just love themselves some centrism.

Even if you buy all of that, why is this article even necessary? Who are these Democratic presidential candidates that he's worried are pandering to the Hard Left (proper noun, according to Dershowitz)? Is he really all the concerned about what could happen if Kucinich wins the primary?

2007-07-16T16:44:00.000-04:00

Josh Marshall takes the words out of my mouth. Enough of this "gentleman's agreement" crap. Announcing your attention to filibuster means you should actually follow through with it and accept the political consequences if you want to prevent a straight up-or-down vote.

This is a dramatic move and I hope it gets some coverage. It's important that everyone sees that some members of Congress aren't interested in sitting quietly until September.

My Endorsement for 2008

2007-07-16T15:55:00.000-04:00

John Edwards Vows To End All Bad Things By 2011

DES MOINES, IA—Edwards' "Good Things for All" initiative builds on previous efforts to end bad things, like skinned knees, curse words, and splinters.

The tone of Edwards' campaign is vastly superior to Senator Clinton's slogan: "Maybe we should have a conversation about doing something about all these bad things at some point in the future."

Or Obama's: "Cynicism is a bad thing because good things are awesome."

That must have been a really boring debate

2007-07-15T13:07:00.000-04:00

Image courtesy of the Detroit News

The exact reason for why this happened still eludes me. I don't see a whole lot of political benefit in all of the Republican candidates excusing themselves from an NAACP event, but this isn't a new thing for Republicans in general. Anyone remember this?

Amanda Marcotte argues that the candidates are appealing to a racist Republican base. Although I don't doubt that there are racists among the far-right base of the party, I'm still not sure that I buy that full-out racists make up a significant enough portion of the base to be worth openly courting like this.

But on the other hand, I don't see this getting much press outside of the news junkies on either side, the people who wouldn't vote for a Republican candidate no matter what anyway, and the people who are voting in the Republican primary.

Now that I think about it, some of this may have to do with a perception in the Republican Party of the NAACP as a leftist organization - in other words, the candidates could rationalize it by arguing that they're not attending the debate for the same reason Democratic candidates refused to attend a FOX News debate. But that goes back to some of the racist undertones in the Republican Party - as in, if you believe that the NAACP is an adversary of the Republican Party, why is that?

Your mouth says no but your lack of a stable infrastructure says yes

2007-07-15T12:56:00.000-04:00

This is actually kind of funny, to the extent that any humor can be wrung out a tragic situation like the Iraq War.

“We say with confidence that we are capable, God willing, of taking full responsibility for the security file if the international forces withdraw in any time they wish,” Mr. Maliki said.

How diplomatic! It's like the United States military is the last guess at a party that started winding down long ago and it doesn't get the repeated hints the host is throwing that maybe it's time to live.

Maliki: Man, I'm really tired. That was some party though.

Bush: Yeah, it is.

Maliki: I've got to clean up and everything to. I should probably get started on that right now.

Bush: Okay.

(Pause)

Maliki: You know, I've got work in the morning.

Bush: Me too.

(Pause)

(Pause)

Like with any oblivious guest, these hints are going to be completely ignored until the US damn well feels like leaving. Because as Frank Rich points out elsewhere in today's NYT:

The White House's game is to create a new fictional story line to keep the war going until President Bush can dump it on his successor.

2007-07-14T14:00:00.000-04:00

I write this on what it was once again a keyboard made whole. Huzzah!

This post started off being about Lieberman's continued insistence that we go after Iran, but I'm starting to think that the shriller he gets the more it signals his increasing irrelevance and that he realizes that - he's deliberately trying to be absurd and inflammatory now. But like Ann Coulter before him, it's getting less and less effective and more and more pathetic.

Anyway, I was just reading this. And of course the article that inspired this post. It's interesting stuff. Generally I'm not terribly interested in how spoiled trust fund kids like to party, but this was interesting.

Maybe it's because Angela Valdez didn't gloss it over like an episode of My Sweet Sixteen which treats the absurd sense of entitlement a lot of these people have as well-earned and give them desperately craved positive attention. Valdez committed what appears to be one of the deadly sins: she managed to capture the ridiculousness of all of this.

Just look at this:

Then the bearded one in the middle busts out with this: “Do you like anal sex?” I squint. I’m confused. “Do you do anal?” he repeats, head bobbing with excitement. The litany continues. Do I want to take it in the ass? Have I ever taken it in the ass? My silence is taken as an affirmative and he announces that this interview will go no further unless he receives a hand job. I retreat into a hole carved out during similar sessions in high school and head for the door.

The response to the article in the comments section is almost as fascinating and revealing as the article itself:

People saw you drunk and groping men. You're a horrible person, and you've ruined people's lives over this article. Do you have any shame? I know of one person in this article who was fired an hour ago. Whatever happened to responsible journalism?

The "DC as high school" analogy has become cliché, but reading this you can see why it gets used so much.

Paranoid Blogger

2007-07-10T16:21:00.000-04:00

I've been keeping any sort of computer-based writing to a minimum today because of my broken keyboard, but I just had to draw attention to Stereogum's celebration of the 10th anniversary of OK Computer's release.

I have to admit to not having listened to any of the mp3's yet, but the endeavor itself seems noteworthy. And I can't wait to see what Chris Funk has done with it.

Call me paranoid but I think my coffee this morning got swapped with decaf, hence my more-than-usual scatterbrained thought processes today. But considering I've made it through the day without my head bursting into flames so far, this seems like a good excuse to try quitting drinking coffee. Let's see if that idea even lasts until tomorrow morning.

Stupid Kyboard

2007-07-09T12:35:00.000-04:00

The reason for less posting as of late is that the e key on my keyboard is broken, which is making typing much more of a chore than it should be. Hopefully it will be fixed in a couple of days, but in the meantime I have to copy and paste "e" over and over again.

Anyway, it's kind of a hassle. And unfortunately it means a lot less writing for the next few days.

2007-07-06T13:43:00.000-04:00

I just started reading A Russian Diary, the final dispatch from a dissident Russian journalist who was murdered in cold blood last year. It's a disturbing, fascinating account of what a failed democracy looks like.

It makes me glad to be living in this country, for all of its flaws, but there's also an undertone to it that's far less reassuring. In some ways this reads like a Science Fiction novel of a dystopian United States several decades into our future. It's certainly still a comfortable implausibility, but I wonder if we're not closer to the precipice than ever before.

Either way, this book should be near the top of everyone's summer reading list.

Photo courtesy of Amazon.com

2007-07-05T13:54:00.000-04:00

Via Amanda Marcotte, here's a particularly bizarre pro-life explanation for the recent increase of abortions in Minnesota.

"Planned Parenthood has learned how to take advantage of teenagers and young women by marketing its brand and building relationships to create future abortion customers," said MCCL executive director Scott Fischbach in a statement. The statement, issued by MCCL in response to the report, cited the opening of two Planned Parenthood mall locations that do not provide abortions as a reason for the increase.

Yep. There are more abortions because abortions have become totally rad. Like Sprite! And Converse!

"The spike occurred the same year Planned Parenthood of Minnesota, North Dakota and South Dakota opened two suburban 'express' mall stores targeting young women with scented oils, candles and referrals to its St. Paul abortion center," the statement said.

I like scented candles! Abortions are awesome!

From the department of ridiculous analogies

2007-07-05T13:48:00.000-04:00

One of the running themes in President Bush's war rhetoric is he likes to flatter himself by comparing this current conflict to other wars that we were on the winning side of - and by extension, comparing himself to America's leaders during those wars.

He's already done the Cold War/Reagan thing. And the WWII/Roosevelt thing. So what's next? Probably the silliest one yet. The Revolutionary War.

Actually, he's got a point. The Revolutionary War was all about a long, drawn-out insurgency. The empire in this case was attempting an indefinite occupation for economic reasons but the insurgency managed to grind them down by using guerrilla tactics and waging a war of attrition.

By now you've figured out the obvious problematic connotations with this analogy. You would think Bush would want to avoid equating us with the British Empire and the Iraqi insurgents with American revolutionaries.

The analogy is certainly valid, but lends itself more to an anti-war argument than a pro-war one. As today's op-ed in the New York Times demonstrates.

Patriotism

2007-07-04T14:54:00.000-04:00

Happy July 4th, everyone. If I could intrude on the festivities with some heavy shit for a moment, today seems like a good time to reflect on this.

And this.

Enjoy your explosions and hamburgers. Or, in at least one case, exploding hamburgers.

UPDATE: Oh, and this.

2007-07-03T13:14:00.000-04:00

Joseph Wilson shares my suspicions regarding the commutation of Libby's sentence. That is to say that he thinks it might have been a way of keeping Libby from squealing about who actually ordered the leak.

But he's willing to take it a step further, and suggest that Congress look into obstruction of justice charges against the president.

Could that be the next step in Conyers' investigation? Possibly. Conyers isn't normally one to shy away from bold moves against the administration.

And you thought Schrödinger's Cat was a headache

2007-07-03T13:09:00.000-04:00

I'm a little drowsy right now and that probably has a lot to do with explaining why I'm in no condition to try and digest this mind-bending interview. I'm still having trouble with the idea of causality not being time-linear. From there it just gets weirder.

It's all fascinating stuff, though. I would be interested to go back and read it when I'm more caffeinated.

Why did Bush commute Libby's sentence?

2007-07-02T19:35:00.000-04:00

It wasn't loyalty, if that's what you were about to guess. Bush has a history of merrily dumping close associates who have long shown unswerving loyalty to him - look at Rumsfeld. And Libby was nowhere near as close to the Oval Office as Rumsfeld was.

No, I think this all goes back to who actually authorized the leak. It seems to me that if Bush didn't bail Libby out of prison Libby would probably be talking right now about who told him to leak the information.

Which isn't to say that now that Libby's been paid off we still can't use this opportunity to find out who the real blame lies with. I think Conyers has the right idea here.

Later on we can try a postmodernist impeachment agenda

2007-06-30T17:23:00.000-04:00

What makes the idea of minimalist impeachment interesting to me is the whole idea of message focus. This has been a consistent problem for the left with any push for, well, anything - for example, perfectly good protests against the Iraq War get bogged down with extra baggage about preventing war with Iran and bringing an end to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict.

Obviously these are both noble goals in of themselves, but the more elaborate the message is, the less effectively one can produce it. Plus, there are people who we might be able to sway to opposing the war if we don't alienate them by using every opportunity to oppose the war to saddle it with other issues that they disagree with us on. That's just not how you build a coalition.

When it comes to impeaching the President, it's the same thing - if there was a reasonable response guaranteed to every impeachment-worthy sin in office than Bush would have already been impeached a dozen times over. But if we're going to avoid muddling the case for impeachment, then perhaps the argument being used shouldn't be big enough to fill a book.

Maybe instead the way to do this is to focus on the issue that we can build the broadest coalition on and let history judge him on all the rest. If it works, he'll still be removed from office.

Not that I think a movement to impeach Bush would be successful - but it's worth pursuing anyway. A central pillar of our democracy is that not even the president is above the law and I don't see how we can accept that and still allow these crimes to pass without the proportionate response.

Back, Sort Of

2007-06-30T13:38:00.000-04:00

I got back Thursday evening a now fully oriented NYU freshman. Maybe a little too oriented, given that I've still got a couple of months to go before I actually move in there. To an extent, it feels like I didn't entirely come back from orientation.

I've been thinking about shifting this blog to covering more NYU-specific stuff when I actually go to school there. Maybe getting into city politics.

Moving back into the political arena, here's something interesting I missed: Apparently we're seeing a pattern in the administration of failing to hold onto classified materials. Not so much as a malicious thing (although the Plame leak was certainly that) but more of just an issue of incompetence.

PSA

2007-06-25T17:50:00.000-04:00

I'm going to be at college orientation from tomorrow morning to Thursday afternoon, so there will be no posting during that time.

In the meantime, here's a very important public service announcement from Tom Morello.

SCOTUS Rules Bong Hits Not Legitimate Form of Prayer

2007-06-25T13:56:00.000-04:00

What makes this ruling particularly troublesome is precisely what the Post chooses to omit from the article - that the banner in question was not actually ever on school grounds.

This is a disturbing precedent for student rights. The Supreme Court is basically saying that public schools can punish kids for exercising their right to free speech off of school grounds, where it can in no way interfere with the school's ability to educate.

You had better believe that this is going to be held up by prosecuting attorneys as overruling Tinker in the future. That's not just bad news for school papers - that's bad news for pretty much anyone in a public school.

Gotcha!

2007-06-23T14:51:00.000-04:00

The thing about Rahm Emanuel is that he's essentially a campaigner before he's anything else. So any legislation that comes out of this guy exists primarily for the political advantage it lends to the Democrats.

So you get snarky "gotcha" legislation from him, like this gem.

Obviously there's an important point to be made about Cheney's insistence that he's exempt from the rules governing the executive branch and the frightening precedent that sets. But I wonder if stunts like this don't distract from the less entertaining but more important duties that Congress should be getting around to.

2007-06-22T13:49:00.000-04:00

Mitt Romney has a War on Terror PowerPoint? That's absolutely genius.

This is really a perfect example of how confused our priorities are in terms of who's "serious" on national security and who isn't. If you were against the war from the start and you think we need to withdraw, you're not serious. If you throw around a bunch of buzzwords and have a PowerPoint that conversely lays out and obfuscates your ridiculous Manichean world view with slides like this:

Great plan! But first we need to consolidate our priorities and form a task force. And work smarter, not harder.

Hey Romney, did you fill out those TPS reports?

2007-06-22T13:37:00.000-04:00

I'm a pretty big fan of protest music, but I'll freely admit that like any music genre, it has its fair share of shit. The way you can tell good protest music from bad, I've discovered, is that bad protest music has a couple common attributes:

-Generally bad protest music is made by people who aren't particularly knowledgeable regarding what they're complaining about. Maybe they're not even particularly interested in it, but everyone hates Bush so that seems like a profitable bandwagon to jump on.

-Bad protest music is generally pretty whiny. The songs that really work, though (like the Arcade Fire song that Matt uses as an example) are just plain pissed off.

That's why Rage Against the Machine is one of the most effective musical vehicles for political change in recent history. It's because instead of moaning about how we should "give peace a chance," every single song quivers with righteous anger.

This post seems like as good an excuse as any to post Let Them Eat War. Bad Religion is probably one of the most consistently underrated punk bands out there, and one of my personal favorites. This song right here is their indictment of the Bush administration and the war in Iraq and it was basically the soundtrack to my work on the Lamont campaign.

(Bonus points: the rap in the bridge is performed by Sage Francis on the album)

2007-06-21T16:05:00.000-04:00

I'm not going to pretend to understand a lot of the anti-Nader animosity that still exists on the left. Sure he was wrong when he said there wasn't a jot of difference between the Democratic and Republican parties, but considering how things are going in the Democratic primary right now, it's hard not to admit that he might still sort of have a point.

So it makes sense that he would want to run for president again. Of course, Kos is still harboring a little post-2000 resentment.

Anyone who clings to the fiction that President Al Gore would've been no different than President George W. Bush is beyond redemption.

But it doesn't sound from the article he links to like Nader does cling to that fiction. In fact, it sounds a lot like Gore and Nader are on very friendly terms these days and have found some common ground.

And it sounds like Nader would be talking about some issues that desperately need to be addressed that both parties are ignoring. So maybe if a Nader candidacy were to gain enough steam so that Democrats were confronted with those issues and forced to rediscover their testicles, some good would come out of a Nader candidacy.

Bumblebee Puppy Rulez!!

2007-06-21T13:08:00.000-04:00

Mustard Faced Dancing Guy was funny like eight months ago. Maybe.

Take Back America

2007-06-21T12:49:00.000-04:00

In the aftermath of the Take Back America conference, John Nichols sees promise in the desperate GOP attacks on those candidates who participated.

The problem with that logic is that it generally doesn't lead to anything. The GOP, in good times or bad, will always go after Democrats for any reason, regardless of whether or not it looks desperate. The thing is, these are RNC press releases. They can't be traced back to any specific candidate, so no specific candidate will get the blame for sending them out.

So where does that put us? If liberals complain about the attacks, then it turns into a "plague on both our houses" things and Republicans and conservative Democrats alike get to complain about negative campaigning from both sides of the aisle, regardless of which side all of the specific examples of negative campaigning are coming from.

So no, I don't see it as an example of GOP desperation, although examples of that do exist elsewhere. This is business as usual.

The new development from TBA, and this one is kind of disturbing, is Clinton's policy shift on Iraq to make her seem more anti-war and progressive.

Clinton didn't say anything at TBA that she hadn't already said elsewhere. Given her schizophrenic Iraq policy, it would probably be impossible for her to say something about Iraq she hadn't said before. But when she talked about getting out of Iraq this year, she framed it in some very disturbing language. Unfortunately, this wasn't the MSN's focus, so it only got a small mention in the Post article.

The group booed loudest when Clinton criticized the Iraqi government because it was like "blaming the victim," Evans said.

A lot of Democrats have been using language like this or something similar (such as "the Iraqis need to step up," or expressing frustration with how slowly the Iraqis are taking charge of their own country) and you know what? They need to shut the hell up. Implying that our continued involvement in this catastrophic quagmire is somehow the fault of the Iraqis displays an emotional cowardice almost as bad as the desperate pleas for an open-ended commitment.

The American government got Iraq into its current FUBAR status, thanks to the Bush administration with what was, at the time, a cheerful helping hand from the Democratic Party. And now instead of copping to how badly they fucked up, the Democrats are turning around and criticizing the Iraqis for how inefficiently they're recovering from their violent rape at our hands.

But I guess whatever helps Clinton live with the fact that she voted for the war is fine as long as she actually supports an end to it. Given her track record, however, I'm skeptical on that count.

Summer time means funner time

2007-06-20T20:15:00.000-04:00

Well, I'm officially no longer a high school student as of yesterday. Still rather exhausted from the all-night graduation party, so in lieu of actual content I give you this.

2007-06-19T14:27:00.000-04:00

Hillary Clinton's new campaign song is perfect. No, seriously. It's a perfect metaphor for her campaign. Pretty much any Celine Dion song is, actually.

It's obnoxiously generic, just plain abrasive to the ears and mot of all it's a lot of noise and maudlin gibberish that doesn't really signify anything. Sound familiar?

2007-06-19T08:41:00.000-04:00

To give you a couple of examples of how bizarre the 2008 race is:

On the Democratic side, the latest "gate" has Obama apologizing for some rather tame, if stupid, snark in a recent campaign memo.

And on the Republican side, Fred Thompson is trying to curry favor with Reagan Republicans by looking for the endorsement of a former British prime minister.

The Republican Party's whole system is based so heavily on having one guy as the de facto moral/political leader of the party and with everyone running as far away from Bush as possible, their only backup (Reagan) is recently dead. How strange would it be if his replacement wasn't even a US citizen?

I'm graduating tomorrow

2007-06-18T16:16:00.000-04:00

So if posting's a little light in the next couple of days, that's why.

In other news:

2007-06-16T20:35:00.000-04:00

An even more hostile Lieberman? How could Lieberman possibly become more hostile?

Lieberman's power comes out of the fact that he can continually threaten to switch parties. Remove his ability to make that threat and his power and relevance are diminished dramatically. End of story.

2007-06-16T16:33:00.000-04:00

The irony of this phenomenon that Jared Roebuck is talking about is that in the 2006 election all these Republicans were bemoaning the Democrats' insistence on "ideological purity" because of the primary challenge against Lieberman.

Pot. Kettle.

Please Stop Believing

2007-06-16T14:57:00.000-04:00

Amanda Marcotte takes a break from discussing feminism, marriage equality and choice to address another grave problem we face today.

An on-going dispute at the Punkass Mousepad is whether or not Journey is next in line for some sort of hipster revival. Marc says aye, and I say if it happens, it shows that the practice of hipster revivalism has hit something of a wall.

This isn't just something that's bound to happen. It's already happening. People I know who otherwise have a perfectly respectable taste in music have begun arguing vehemently that Journey is a good band. They really appreciate the music.

And let's be clear: I'm not talking about ironic appreciation here. I'm not talking about appreciation of Journey the way one might appreciate a Dragonforce song. I'm talking about being completely unironically moved by songs like "Any Way You Want It."

This monster must be stopped.

2007-06-16T14:56:00.000-04:00

Via David Sirota's blog comes Matt Taibbi's latest dispatch of information nobody really wants to hear but everyone should.

Basically it's a manifesto of everything that's wrong with the American left. If you're like me, seeing an article about something like that is bound to make you groan and think, "Jesus Christ, more angsty soul-searching bullshit from the left." Except Taibbi's not that kind of writer, not by a long shot. This article is a wakeup call.

From the article:

No matter what it claims for a self-image, in reality it’s the saddest collection of cowering, ineffectual ninnies ever assembled under one banner on God’s green earth. And its ugly little secret is that it really doesn’t mind being in the position it’s in – politically irrelevant and permanently relegated to the sidelines, tucked into its cozy little cottage industry of polysyllabic, ivory tower criticism. When you get right down to it, the American left is basically just a noisy Upper West side cocktail party for the college-graduate class.

And we all know it. The question is, when will we finally admit it?

Among the problems that Taibbi identifies are a lack of focus on issues that directly affect the lives of average Americans and an obsolete, patently silly self-image.

When it comes to the first point, I would point out that the environment is something that affects everyone. We're in the middle of a global environmental crisis. The problems is that the environmental issue isn't being framed in terms of self-interest. This isn't just about saving penguins, and it isn't just an issue for PETA or the Sierra Club. Taibbi rags on An Inconvenient Truth a little, but I think the popularity of that film shows movement in a positive direction.

But it's true that the American left needs to focus on trade more. And he hits the reason why it's not spot on:

Sanders agrees, saying that “where the money comes from” is definitely one of the reasons that the so-called liberals in Washington – i.e. the Democrats – tend not to get too heavily into financial issues that affect ordinary people. This basically regressive electoral formula has been a staple of the Democratic Party ever since the Walter Mondale fiasco in the mid-eighties prompted a few shrewd Washington insiders to create the notorious “pro-business” political formula of the Democratic Leadership Council, which sought to end the party’s dependence upon labor money by announcing a new willingness to sell out on financial issues in exchange for support from Wall Street. Once the DLC’s financial strategy helped get Bill Clinton elected, no one in Washington ever again bothered to question the wisdom of the political compromises it required.

As much as it sounds like procedural bullshit, there needs to be a push for campaign finance reform. Once again, it needs to be framed the way it really is: we need reform so that the voters can force Democrats and Republicans alike to start dealing with the issues that right now they're being paid to ignore.

The other issue that Taibbi discusses, the issue of image, is trickier. Clearly the 60s model of protest is dead. And Taibbi has a good message for privileged, educated coastal liberals:

When they start embracing their position of privilege and taking responsibility for the power they already have – striving to be the leaders of society they actually are, instead of playing at being aggrieved subjects – they’ll come across as wise and patriotic citizens, not like the terminally adolescent buffoons trapped in a corny sixties daydream they often seem to be now. They’ll stop bringing puppets to marches and, more importantly, they’ll start doing more than march.

Ah yes, the puppets. Living near Wesleyan University, I see a lot of the type of liberals that Taibbi has the most scorn for - a friend of mine once labeled them "trust fund hippies." These are the ones who show a lot of concern for impoverished people in other countries but are scared to talk to people from the North End. These are the guys with those idiotic puppets. This is what it means to have an important point obfuscated by orthodox adherents to liberalism more as an aesthetic than a set of solutions to some grave problems.

Matt Singer, the guy who posted this on Sirota's blog, thinks that Taibbi is being too harsh. And clearly, Taibbi isn't referring to the whole left. There was a lot of good progressive backing for Bernie Sanders and the Lamont candidacy in the last election and I think one of the positive outcomes of the rise of blogging is that you're seeing a lot more influential liberal thinkers who are just average, albeit unusually pissed-off, people. Still, Taibbi's got a point. We've got a ways to go.

The Audacity of Hope

2007-06-16T13:53:00.000-04:00

The great thing about Obama's campaign is that they're not entrenched in the old, cynical model of politics. They're blazing a new trail. This is a movement.

Look, it's been said before, but if your entire campaign is based around the concept of a new, idealistic form of politics then you actually have to back that up with something. You can't lecture your opponents on running a clean, positive campaign and then smear your opponent's spouse with an unconfirmed story from the freakin' Drudge Report, of all places.

I'm starting to think that despite the squeaky-clean image Obama's trying to build for himself, he's actually the most cynical candidate of them all. There's a certain amount of duplicity involved in any major campaign, but nobody pushes this phony Eagle Scout image as hard as he does.

I hear Estragon is his running mate

2007-06-16T00:02:00.000-04:00

Vote for Gravel in '08! The existentialist candidate.

An inexplicably cheerful interlude

2007-06-14T20:59:00.000-04:00

Because this pretty accurately describes the mood I'm in:

2007-06-14T15:57:00.000-04:00

Does anyone really expect this to amount to much? Every single time the administration gets hit by a scandal too big to ignore, they launch one of these hilarious little "internal investigations." It's like letting the defendant pick the prosecuting attorney and really what it generally amounts to is a ploy to take the heat off with Congressional oversight by telling Congress, "We're taking care of it."

Except for, of course, what Congress should be seeking is accountability and what an internal investigation generally amounts to is a snow job. So how is this one any different?

2007-06-14T11:07:00.000-04:00

Jerome Armstrong hits one of the things that annoys me the most about the Obama campaign right on the head. That is to say, he goes after this myth of the movement.

The thing about Obama is that he seems to be trying to replicate the genuine "movement" phenomenon of the Dean '04 campaign and, more recently, the Lamont '06 campaign (which, ironically, Obama more or less threw under a bus along with the rest of the Democratic establishment).

The problem is that he's not really running his campaign in any sort of way that would justify calling it a movement. He just looks at his own popularity, calls that a "movement," and then issues this insufferably smug, self-congratulatory emails about leading America into a new progressive promised land.

Maybe once Obama actually does something in the Senate instead of giving lectures about leadership and hope, then we'll be able to talk about things like movements.

But on the other hand:

2007-06-14T10:05:00.000-04:00

Via Fark, this article stops just short of suggesting something that I've suspected ever since I first watched The Corporation.

The thesis of the documentary was that the modern corporation, if treated as a human being with human psychology, shows all of the signs of a classic textbook sociopath. If you buy that, it seems natural that, as the psychotherapist in the article says, psychopaths thrive in a corporate environment.

Dr Clarke, who has penned two books about workplace psychopaths and will speak at the state government-sponsored Queensland Safety Show in Brisbane next week, today said up to three per cent of the Australian population was psychopathic.

"I would say that in every major company there would be at least one," Dr Clarke said.

"Psychopaths are very comfortable in successful corporations because they are actually rewarded for their behaviour.

"In business you are encouraged to make money for the company and if you appear to be doing whatever it takes to make money, you are often promoted.

"They are seen as rising employees who are full of energy and creativity."

What I'm interested in here is the causality at work. It's difficult for even an actual psychologist to discuss, in broad terms, the source of mental illness, and I'm certainly not a trained psychologist. But I wonder if there's anything in our corporate culture that encourages psychopathy. Is the number of psychopaths in the United States higher now than it was several decades ago, and does that have anything to do with the growing power and influence of corporations on everyday American life?

Corporations feed off of a person's ability to put profit and the acquisition of material possessions ahead of all other considerations. In other words, it seems like it would be in corporate America's best interests, profit-wise, to create an entire country of sociopaths. It's hard not to ask whether or not advertising, consciously or unconsciously, is geared to do just that.

2007-06-14T09:24:00.000-04:00

In today's Post, Schumer seems absolutely certain that Lieberman will never switch parties.

Despite the feisty rhetoric and his defection on Gonzales, Senate Democratic leaders are confident that Lieberman will not cross the aisle to formally join Republicans, leaving his erstwhile party's majority status intact. Sen. Charles E. Schumer (N.Y.), chairman of the Democratic Senatorial Campaign Committee, rated Lieberman's chances of joining the GOP at a blunt "zero."

Lieberman, of course, has repeatedly threatened to cross sides, but in reality, why would he? The threat is far more useful than actually jumping ship. That's all been discussed before - what's interesting here is that Schumer seems to know exactly what Lieberman is doing. And he just goes along with it.

I don't like Schumer as a senator for a lot of different reasons, but the man's not an idiot. Surely if he realizes that Lieberman sees more advantage in sticking with the Democrats and constantly undermining them than just switching sides outright, then he also realizes that Lieberman is doing more damage to the Democrats by ostensibly being on their side than he could do if they just made it clear he was unwelcome in the caucus?

Of course, do that and bogus statistics like this get trotted out:

Actually, Lieberman remains a solid Democrat, at least on paper. Of the 210 votes that the Senate has taken so far this year, he has broken with the party just 24 times. A third of the dissenting votes were related to Iraq.

That record, compiled by washingtonpost.com, rates Lieberman as slightly more reliable to Senate Democrats than Sens. Jon Kyl (R-Ariz.) and Kay Bailey Hutchison (R-Tex.) are to the GOP -- and they are both members of the Senate Republican leadership. Lieberman's 88.3 percent score for the 110th Congress represents a slight decline from his 89.9 percent rating in the 109th Congress, but a fairly significant drop from his 93.2 percent score during the 108th Congress.

Never mind that vote scores like that don't take into account scenarios like when a senator votes one way on cloture and another way on the actual bill. Or that these ratings don't take into account the actual significance of a bill - the important thing here isn't whether or not someone sides with his or her party a certain percentage of the time but on the issues that dominate the American political arena today.

Also, can we please finally abolish euphemisms like this from public discourse:

On foreign policy, however, Lieberman continues to march to his own beat. Last week, the senator told CNN that the U.S. troop increase in Iraq "has worked," although most military experts agree that its impact will not be clear for several more months. (Emphasis mine)

It makes Lieberman like a zany uncle. This isn't endearingly quirky, though; it's dangerously delusional for a man in his position. We really need to stop treating blatant disregard for reality as a valid dissenting opinion.

2007-06-13T20:16:00.000-04:00

I like most of what Kagro X is saying here, but I'm not quite sure if I like how he's phrasing the argument - that is to say, by accepting the premise that moderation is inherently good all the time while rejecting Joe Klein's definition of moderation.

We need to take a serious look at what the cult of moderation really is. Yes, compromise should be a major facet of any democracy. And moderation is frequently, even mostly, a positive thing. But if you accepts the idea that moderation is always, invariably positive and that the political fringes of any society have never contributed anything, that strikes me as a load of crap.

Does that mean the abolitionists of pre-Civil War America, because they were on the political fringes, didn't have a point? I don't think anyone would want to argue that.

Radical ideas are worth consideration, and the fact that they're to the far left or the far right of the United States' political norm at this point in our history doesn't automatically render them invalid. Sometimes a radical idea is what a country needs more than anything else.

Best Ever AV Club Article?

2007-06-13T12:06:00.000-04:00

Perhaps not. But as an avid fan of obscure pop culture trash, I found the AV Club's first annual "Absolute Best" issue a handy resource on things like best cinematic reasons to move to Canada.

On that note, I wish that they had included a runner-up for that title that did more to showcase some great Canadian cinema than show how absolutely awful American cinema can be. I would recommend Waydowntown, which depending on the mood you watch it in is either a great reason to watch more Canadian cinema or a great reason to curl up in your bed and babble incoherently into a pillow for 90 minutes. What I'm trying to say here is that it's a weird, weird movie.

Getting back to pop culture trash, though, I found out just yesterday that the dollar store at the local mall is a wonderful resource for DVDs of obscure, absolutely awful films. And yes, they're all only $1. Between that and a marked-down DVD box set at FYE, for about $14 we share joint custody of over 15 hours of deliciously low-grade kung fu garbage, with an additional three hours of low-grade blaxploitation garbage (those gems Black Cobra and Black Cobra II). I foresee an entire weekend marathon of terrible movies in my near future.

2007-06-13T11:54:00.000-04:00

As most of you probably already know, Senator Lieberman has been getting more difficult to live with recently, between his saber-rattling at Iran and his vote against cloture for the no-confidence Gonzales vote. Interestingly, his explanation for why he voted against cloture makes no sense at all:

You catch that? Technically speaking, Lieberman actually voted to extend debate -- that is, to refuse to end it by cloture. Which is a fine way to express your opposition to spending time on more debate, don't you think? Sort of like supporting the troops by voting to uphold a veto of a funding bill for them.

Politically, I don't really see any reason why Lieberman would have voted against cloture. Obviously, the explanation he gave is bullshit - plus, there are enough Republicans jumping ship on this to provide cover for him to vote with, you know, the party he ostensibly caucuses with. Plus his vote seems like it would have mattered little, considering that the resolution was non-binding. So why not throw the Democrats this one little bone to justify their continued tolerance of him?

I don't see a clean answer here, except that maybe Lieberman is less cynical than that and more just plain crazy. Maybe he's lying through his teeth about why he voted against cloture, but he's honestly so invested in this administration that he believes it's his duty to defend their Attorney General.

Who knows? Either way, the backlash to his recent craziness has been intriguing, to say the least. Take, for example, today's article on The Nation website which goes all Harry Turtledove and posits an alternate universe with President Lieberman. The result, he argues, wouldn't be much better than the universe we currently inhabit. Lieberman is such a consummate neocon patsy that we would end up in some sort of analogue to the war in Iraq (a central pillar of neocon governing philosophy) anyway.

Although this gets left unsaid in the article, a President Lieberman might have even been worse than a President Bush. For all the complaints about this being a one-party system, at least the Democrats do offer up some resistance to this White House. If the guy who started the Iraq War was, say, a member of their own party, then a lot of them would still be lined up behind the Iraq War along with the neoconservative Republicans. That's a chilling thought.

This next thought, meanwhile, is less chilling than it is hilarious. Some of you may already know how Dr. John Orman was originally considering running against Lieberman in the Democratic primary in 2006 before Ned Lamont stepped in. I might very well be the only person to try and apply for an internship on his campaign - at the very least, there probably weren't a lot.

Anyway, after the election, Orman stepped in and made himself the chair of the Connecticut for Lieberman Party. It's all perfectly legal and official and means that the actual party machinery for the party that Lieberman invented is now out of his hands.

Which means that Orman gets to do hilarious shit like having Lieberman's own party call for his resignation.

Or how I learned to stop worrying and love the nuclear option

2007-06-12T07:03:00.000-04:00

Josh Marshall hits on what I've always thought of as a delightful quirk of the Republican minority. Their system goes like this:

1. When Republicans are in the majority, an emasculated Democratic minority uses some sort of parliamentary trick to prevent a particularly heinous bill from passing.

2. Republicans denounce that trick as undemocratic, say the Democrats don't want an honest vote, and proceed to demonize anyone who takes advantage of Congressional rules in such a way.

3. Republicans loudly discuss eliminating the rule all together.

4. Republicans lose an election. Massively.

5. Democrats bring a bill to the floor and the Republicans, now in the minority, use the same rule that the Democrats did to block the bill. Except they call it something different now.

6. Republicans applaud our wonderful democracy for having a system built in that protects the rights of the minority.

7. (Optional) Republicans fret over whether or not Democrats will eliminate the rule and accuse them of being a bunch of totalitarians for even thinking about it.

Tomorrow

2007-06-11T22:44:00.000-04:00

Tomorrow is my last day of classes in high school, which is probably a bigger deal than it seems. Right now I'm having a hard time caring that much. A lot of that probably has to do with the fact that Senior Supper, Graduation, Project Graduation, the Blue Prints Dinner and all that good stuff are still coming up. So it's not like the school's done with me after classes end.

But I'm also just feeling a lot of high school-related fatigue right now. I'm tired and apathetic towards pretty much everything related to high school - even not being there doesn't sound too exciting anymore.

Things are about to change around me, but not significantly. That doesn't really happen until the end of summer, the way I see it, when I go to college. And even while things change around me, I doubt I'm going to change very much in the next week or so. Nor are any of the people I know who are going through the same experience. We've just reached an arbitrary benchmark in our personal development.

And yet so many people who aren't in high school are flipping out over this whole graduation thing. To the point where it's getting rather irritating. Surely if the people who are actually graduating are just sort of taking things in stride, that should be a strong hint to just chill the fuck out?

Right now I've got bigger things than the end of high school to worry about. Things like, what exactly do you have to do to earn a no confidence vote from the Senate? Cap a guy on the White House lawn?

By the way, here's an interesting piece of trivia: Seven Republican Senators voted for the resolution. Lieberman? Eh, not so much.

I really just wish he would switch parties already. He's worse than a Republican, as evidenced by this vote and his recent calls for military action against Iran - clearly keeping him in the Democratic caucus isn't doing a great deal to reign him in. So cut him loose - I don't think there's anything wrong with some healthy intra-party debate, but this is absurd. I'm sick of it.

The last time you'll read about Paris Hilton here

2007-06-11T06:42:00.000-04:00

Why does the Huffington Post suddenly seem to have more Paris Hilton coverage than political coverage? I just ran a search in my news feed client and came up with 21 blog posts since June 1 about Paris Hilton. That's a lot of gossip column material.

The great thing about Paris Hilton is that everybody gets to hate her. On the right she gets to be a whore and on the left she gets to be a spoiled neo-aristocrat. And you can either gleefully frolic in a state of perpetual schadenfreude over whatever embarrassing thing has happened to her recently or you can tut-tut and tell everyone what the big lesson is, the moral of this most recent sordid little story.

Here's the thing, though: the more you obsess over this young woman's life, the more you're engaging in the kind of disgusting star-fucking that spawned a media creation like Paris Hilton in the first place. Hell, I'm a little bit complicit just for writing this post.

I suspect that the real Paris Hilton is just a sad, confused, none-too-bright girl. This other thing, this media beast, is something we created just so that we should destroy it, and the real human being at the center of it is just collateral damage. There's something really repulsive about that.

It's like Grease, but with old white dudes instead of Australian girls

2007-06-10T12:43:00.000-04:00

A lot of people who are interested in politics, including myself, spend a lot of time complaining about the mainstream media's fascination with political theater and the horse race aspect of political campaigns over actual issues. It's no longer news, or even noteworthy in any way, when a Washington Post reporter writes a story where he takes one of the candidates and instead of examining the guts of the candidate's policy instead makes an inept attempt at psychoanalyzing him and creating a character from a bad paperback thriller out of his public image.

So that's old news. But sometimes a reporter finds a twist on the old, tired formula that is so shockingly unself-aware that it blows your mind. That's what Washington Post writer Sridhar Pappu did in today's issue when he decided to view the two most recent presidential debates through the eyes of a theater's artistic director.

We had come to Roth to help us look at the most recent political debates through a different prism, viewing the candidates as dramatic archetypes, characters in a story full of subtlety and nuance. In short, we'd come for advice on how to watch these things go forward without looking for the nearest bell tower to leap out of, in the vein of Kim Novak in "Vertigo."

God, politics is, like, sooooooooo boring. But Hairspray is awesome!

Seriously, you'd think that a staff writer for the Post would assume that whoever was reading his stuff would have some sort of passing interest in the actual reality of the campaign and didn't need to have his or her intelligence insulted by turning it into melodrama. But you'd be thinking wrong - this is the exact same article that's been written hundreds of times over since the first candidate announced. Now they're just being more blatant about it.

"Different prism?" Please.

For fun, let's try picking out the code words for different candidates that Roth uses.

Obama and Edwards: "rail-thin, scrapping youngsters"

Clinton: "calm female presence," "maternal"

Obama: "uninspiring and mired in data"

The Democratic slate: "a motley crew"

The Republican slate: "a bunch of white guys"

Democrats: "have a very strong antagonist in the person of George Bush"

Republicans: "There's nothing to rally around."

Not a single thought in there that couldn't be picked out of a hundred other half-assed campaign commentaries. Which means, of course, that if theater doesn't work out for him, Roth has a very promising career ahead of him as a political consultant.

Actually, it's kind of hard to be annoyed with Roth over this. He's not the one who came up with the idea for this article, or the guy who decided to take up space in the Post with it. And if we didn't have to listen to this vapid parade of clichés from him, we'd end up having to listen to it from, say, Howard Kurtz.

2007-06-10T00:32:00.000-04:00

I was at a friend's surprise birthday party tonight when another (mutual friend) told me of the existence of a rather insane cover: Arcade Fire bringing their apocalyptic atmospherics to the Clash's Guns of Brixton.

Yep. Crazy.

The Two Most Important Issues Nobody Ever Talks About

2007-06-08T21:57:00.000-04:00

One of the cool things about The Nation is how concerned the good folks are over there with two of my pet issues: unchecked corporate power and the Bush administration's erosion of our civil liberties.

Both of these issues seem to be more or less dead in the presidential race - Dodd's made some pleasing noises regarding restoring Habeas Corpus, but everyone seems to be pretty much ignoring him because he's not "top tier" enough.

So why isn't anyone talking about either of these issues?

-Corporations fund presidential campaigns. You don't want to go pissing off your benefactors.

-Civil liberty incursions happen to other people. I'm a little worried that the problem with talking about civil liberties is that even the portion of the electorate that sympathizes with us in principle still doesn't see it as a big deal, but instead as a thing that only happens to Arabs and socialists. It's bad, but it doesn't really concern them.

So if a presidential candidate wants to run on restoring civil liberties, first he has to convince the electorate that it does concern them. And it's easier to talk about something that they already know concerns them instead.

But the fact is that we've still got two facets of our country that are very badly broken right now, and we're not even going to be able to begin fixing them until we can force our leaders to acknowledge that we've got a problem on our hands.

2007-06-08T18:36:00.000-04:00

Recently, Philip K. Dick's been getting a lot more mainstream acclaim, most recently in today's New York Times. Maybe that has something to do with four of his books being reissued by the Library of America. Or maybe it has something to do with the fact that his work seems increasingly relevant in our current paranoid, absurd dystopic political atmosphere.

Either way, I'm glad. The guy's one of my favorite authors, and he's long overdo for recognition as one of the giants of American fiction.

Right now I'm reading one of his books, The Three Stigmata of Palmer Eldritch. This is my first time reading it all the way through, but it's a good introduction for Dick newbies for his bizarre, funny, strangely compassionate and just plain fucked-up style.

2007-06-06T15:55:00.000-04:00

What's with Clinton insisting that America is safer now than it was on 9/10/01? That seems to me to be a pretty bizarre position to take, particularly for a Democrat - after all, if you're from what is ostensibly the anti-Iraq War party, it shouldn't be a big leap to admit that the Iraq War has contributed in hugely to a destabilized Middle East and anti-America sentiment abroad.

I think the problem here is Clinton's own incoherent Iraq policy. Because she doesn't want to admit that she was wrong to originally vote for the war, part of her wants to minimize how catastrophic that decision truly was, even if doing so butts up against both reality and her insistence that we bring (some of) the troops home.

2007-06-05T14:39:00.000-04:00

Going back to yesterday's post on Dodd's Talk Clock, Chris Bowers asks whether or not giving top-tier candidates more time to talk than lower-tier candidates is necessarily a bad thing.

That question immediately leads to another question: in a crowded primary field, is it wrong to distribute time to candidates based on the current campaign standings? On the one hand, it can be argued that doing so will only serve to reinforce the current campaign standings, and debates are supposed to give equal exposure to all candidates. On the other hand, many commenters, including myself, have expressed a desire to see only the top four candidates or so on a stage together at some point (five of them should be free the night of the Fox News debate). Instead of holding exclusionary debates, perhaps a better solution is to have everyone on the stage at once, but to allot the frontrunners more time. After all, candidates like Obama and Clinton are running far more expansive campaigns than someone like Gravel, who seems to have done little except declare that he is running for President and then show up at candidate forums.

So-called top-tier candidates already have a massive fundraising, resources and name recognition advantage. That's what makes them top-tier. The point of a structured, moderated debate is that this is where all the candidates have only their own oratorical skills to stand on and they all start the debate with equal footing. If we start messing with that, the debate ends up becoming just another thing for the wealthier campaigns to buy, and that just defeats the whole purpose.

It future debate moderators start toying with the time scale we saw on the Talk Clock as a legitimate rule, I would recommend that any candidate not named Obama or Clinton boycott that debate.

Of course, you can debate about the legitimacy of such a debate rule, and Bowers lays out as decent a case for it as I think you'll see. So Blitzer could defend himself if he were just upfront about how he managed debate time. Of course, he's not.

Wolf Blitzer
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Time to break out the yellow ribbons

2007-06-04T10:46:00.000-04:00

Kevin Drum and Spencer Ackerman argue that all this "support the troops by bringing them home" rhetoric is insulting to the troops. From Ackerman's article:

....Democrats have made the decision — rightly, I think — that withdrawing from Iraq is the least bad of many bad options. But they shouldn't kid themselves into thinking that a majority of the troops doing the fighting agree with them. For soldiers like Lieutenant Wellman, this will be hard to accept. As he told me of war doubters back home, "I don't want them to just support the troops. I want them to support the mission." This matters, because pretending that in ending the war they're doing the troops a favor hurts Democrats politically. They risk looking condescending, and, worse, oblivious — which has the broader effect of undermining public trust in the Democrats to handle national security. More basically, it does a disservice to those who serve. For soldiers who are optimistic, being told that the war can't be won is bad enough. But to be told that politicians are doing them a favor by extricating them from a mission they believe in is downright insulting.

Except that the majority of troops stationed in Iraq, by a significant margin, support withdrawal within the year. It's not condescending to say one support the troops on this issue when one is doing so by aligning himself with the political position of the majority of the soldiers in Iraq.

But I agree in part with Drum's seconding of the article's thesis:

This is God's own truth. Ditto for the Democratic obsession with using better body armor, higher GI pay, or the quality of military medical care as proxies for "supporting the troops." As with leaving Iraq, these are all good things to support. But they're good things on their own terms, not because anyone in uniform will be fooled into thinking that voting for them means you support the military. It's the equivalent of Democrats who thought that John Kerry had automatic credibility on national security just because he was a Vietnam vet.

Telling the truth, as usual, is better: we need to leave Iraq not because we think the troops need rescuing, but because we think that leaving is what's best for our national security. And in the future? That we'll support the troops by making sure that we send them into war only with proper leadership, proper planning, and when the national security of the United States is genuinely at risk. On all these counts both the civilian and uniformed leadership of the military has let down the troops in Iraq. We need to promise that we won't do the same on our watch.

I would argue here that a sufficient distinction isn't being made between being pro-troop and pro-military. I don't think most liberals would want to be classified as pro-military, if you define that as being the kind of person who wants increased defense spending and greater legal flexibility for the military at the expense of social programs in the US and the civil liberties of prisoners of war. But on the other hand, if you define being pro-troop as wanting the best for our soldiers and not wanting to see their lives sacrificed at the altar of a senseless, unjustifiable conflict, then that should kind of go without saying for anyone who feels the smallest amount of empathy towards other human beings, and constant insistence on being pro-troop ends up sounding cheap as a result.

2007-06-04T10:35:00.000-04:00

Today's senior skip day, that Monday after senior prom when traditionally almost all of the seniors at my school don't show up to school. Strangely, I'm finding it more productive than an actual school day.

I missed the debate last night, but from reading some of the news roundups it doesn't sound like it was particularly revelatory. Edwards had a nice showing, apparently, and Clinton continued to undermine her own hollow "bring the troops home" rhetoric with choice quotes like this one:

"I was thoroughly briefed. I knew all the arguments. I knew all of what the Defense Department, the CIA, the State Department were all saying. And I sought dissenting opinions, as well as talking to people in previous administrations and outside experts."

Via My Left Nutmeg, I saw that the Dodd campaign has created this handy little graph showing who talked the most at the debate:

Met00 has been focusing on how much more time Blitzer gave to Obama than to, say, Dodd, which is true - isn't the whole point of a debate supposed to be that it's the one part of the campaign that starts off with a totally level playing field? - but something else struck me when I saw the graph.

Why does Blitzer have the third-highest time spent talking? Again, I didn't see the debate, but it doesn't seem like he'd be able to get that much time out of just moderating and posing questions.

Secular Triassicists

2007-06-03T21:41:00.000-04:00

They're the enemies of God.

I Believe In Evolution, Except For The Whole Triassic Period

I consider myself a rational person. When I have a question, I turn to science and logic to find the answer. Regarding the origins of life,...