a Prescott Bush interview

I posted this at roughly 70% of the standard youtube size to improve the so-so image resolution, but if you want the rest or the "full-size", it's here( part one), and part 2 is here.

Both are via a channel called "BBC propaganda news", which, presumably, is not related to the BBC. As most of you already know, Prescott Bush was a US senator and the current president's grandfather.

100 years...or more

God and country on the Real News

Listening to these people in this story talk about how they really believe the Iraq war has helped keep them safe is singularly depressing to me. Earlier today I spoke to Arvin Hill, not about this video but in general terms about people's capacity for willful gullibility and denial, and he compared it to drug addiction.

On the damned presidential race

I have been studying the traits and dispositions of the lower animals (so-called), and contrasting them with the traits and dispositions of man. I find the result humiliating to me.-Mark Twain



Sometimes disgust is the necessary mother of invention:

The Hugo Zoom Undesirability Index© (HZUI, or "hizzooey!")


by my calculations, if Rudy Giuliani is the baseline for the 2008 group, getting a 100, then,

Huckabee gets a 97,
McCain a 95,
Hillary Clinton a 94, and Obama a 92, or a 91 cause I don't want Scarlett Johanson to be mad at me. Either way, a solid A minus in undesirability.

Edwards is awfully hard to grade, probably in the 70s or 80s, but a lot of it depends on how genuine you believe his conversion is-- a conversion to a politician quite unlike his Senate voting record. While he was still running I certainly hoped it was genuine, insofar as he seemed like the only remotely viable candidate who was also (possibly) worth a damn.

Ron Paul is also hard to assign a score. His views regarding the constitution and reining in the bloated US military empire would ordinarily make him an F minus on the HZUI, with a score of 30 or less, but then you have to reconcile those items with his hostility towards immigrants and homosexuals, as well his radicalism with respect to tearing apart the welfare state, abolishing the income tax, etc. I'm going to say 55.


Mike Gravel gets a 30. I'd slice 5 points off if he endorsed good old fashioned progressive taxation instead of his cockamamie value-added scheme which I don't think he's really thought out. You also have to note he's nearly 78 years old, so he can't score too low-- but if he's on the ballot in your state(he's not in Texas)I'd point out he has the worst HZUI score of any candidates still in the race-- therefore the best score. Dennis Kucinich gets a 20--but he also didn't make the Texas ballot, and needless to say, he's already dropped out, in no small part because the democratic party has threatened his day job in Cleveland(the Ohio primary, in which he faces a well-financed in-party challenger, is March 4th).

I think it's interesting and odd that the dynamic is so different with GOP rebel Ron Paul-- although he also faces a challenger in the Texas primary(also March 4th), the GOP leadership has mostly distanced themselves from the Paul primary house race, possibly out of fear of pissing Ron Paul off and of him subsequently running as an independent for president in November.(the Libertarian party, whom he represented for president in 1988 when he got around half a million votes, has already said their nomination is his should he ask for it. So far Paul has gone out of his way to say he has no plans to run as an independent in the fall, but I wonder if that will change after he secures his party nomination for his house seat.)

Now, back to the HZUI: you may object that it's facetious and simple-minded and reductive. Absolutely. It might even promote cavities-- I don't know. But I fail to see how it's any worse than all the bigshot bloggers going on and on and on, ad nauseum, about whether Obama or HRC poses a better ability to beat McCain. (The big time news media outlets are doing the same of course.) The undesireability index has the virtue of recognizing, in simperingly simplistic terms, that the democratic front runners don't really differ in any substantial terms from the republicans on the big issues, at least not when it comes down to brass tacks and actual congressional votes and actual implementation. Secondary issues, like gay marriage and stem cell research-- maybe. But on the big issues we are facing today-- the war and occupation of Iraq and Afghanistan, the possible war with Iran, and the death by a thousand cuts of the US Constitution-- not so much.

Perhaps you object, that the possibly imploding economy is also a big issue. Yes, but while polled Americans roundly support leaving Iraq as a substantial solution to our economic woes, the leadership in both parties reject this, as each vies for the style of tax rebate or tax cut which will be better. So I'd argue the politicians have already taken the economy "off the table" and won't deal with it seriously no matter who wins in November.

Whenever I hear Hillary Clinton scolding the Iraqis for not "taking more responsibility" for their own security or Obama talking about the "threat" posed by Ahmedinejad(!?) I wonder what they think they're accomplishing, apart from legitimizing the standard BushCo/republican party take on foreign policy. But perhaps that's the point.

I'm even wondering, in complete seriousness, if the best way to protect social security from the privatizers is to vote for a republican president and a democratic congress-- because otherwise, if the democrats have all three they may feel they don't have to bother with the last pretense binding them, albeit barely, to their old New Dealing ways.

Then, their transition to the semi-secular branch of the GOP Big Business Party will be complete, and they'll insist that any privatization plan allow citizens consumers to choose a socially responsible, (cruelty-free?) portfolio of stocks for their damned individual accounts, designed to make you feel good like an investment option should.


see also John Caruso's "I don't care as long as it's a DEMOCRAT!"
and Rob Payne's "Pavlov's democrats"

Sleep well, knowing Rummy's still rich

There are many things I want to discuss in the next few days, still including the events in Gaza and Kucinich's withdrawal from the race, as well as that of John Edwards. And, some additional thoughts on the SOTU and the recession which we can't call a recession yet, given how relentlessly sunny we are supposed to be. Of course if you're not feeling relentlessly sunny, take a pill or something.

1.Xymphora (2006):"it's a small world, anthrax edition"

• Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld owns a considerable number of shares in a corporation called Gilead Sciences;
• Gilead owns the intellectual property rights to Tamiflu;
• Tamiflu is a pharmaceutical touted by the Bush Administration as a remedy for anthrax (although in fact it is not indicated for anthrax);
• the anthrax attacks on the United States vastly increased the demand for Tamiflu, and thus increased the value of Gilead, and thus made Rumsfeld a lot of money;
• the anthrax for the attacks almost certainly came from an American military laboratory at Fort Detrick;
• one of the named suspects at the lab is Philip Zack, a man who left the lab in 1991 after being involved in a racist attack against a fellow scientist of Arab origin, and a man who was observed having unauthorized access to the area of the lab containing the Ames strain of anthrax used in the attacks, around the time that some of the anthrax went missing.
• Philip Zack, as neatly described here (found via here), went on to work for Gilead (identified from a scientific paper published in December 2000).

and 2.(2008) in which X takes note of this Doctors without borders bulletin:

Patent revoked on Tenofovir
US patent office’s move to revoke patents on key HIV/AIDS drug could mean increased access in developing world

In a move that could have major implications on access to a cornerstone HIV/AIDS medicine across the developing world, the U.S. Patent & Trademark Office on January 23, 2008 revoked four key patents held by the pharmaceutical company Gilead Sciences on the drug tenofovir disoproxil fumarate (TDF).

The public interest group Public Patent Foundation (PUBPAT), which challenged the patents in the US, submitted evidence that TDF was already a known substance at the time of Gilead’s application for the patents, and therefore a patent should not have been granted. The evidence used in the patent office’s ruling may have an impact on whether the drug will be granted patents in other countries, such as India and Brazil.

3. Rob Payne calls my attention to this item by Dennis Perrin, "pre-soaking your sane"(and says some unwarranted nice things about me.)

4.Speaking of copyrights, here's a story from London to Lubbock.

Moulitas's Michigan hubris

photos:NBC,dailykos.com


A couple of weeks ago I promised you an essay about the countercurrents within modern liberalism, in which I would try to explain why the connection between liberalism and conservatism today is anything but the two-dimensional continuum that most people think it is, and how there are very significant ways in which the popular conceptions of the democratic party leadership are just plain wrong, and they are hardly "liberal" in any meaningful sense.

I've dropped the ball so far, mostly because of sundry distractions but also because of the unwieldiness of the subject matter. But I will address it, fairly soon. In the meantime other things keep happening that function to dovetail with that percolating essay about the hidebound democratic leadership and their deep-in-denial followers. One of them was an absolutely idiotic, too-clever essay by daily Kos's founder Markos Moulitsas in which he advocated that his readers (often termed "Kossacks") cross over and vote for Mitt Romney in Michigan.

"Let's Have Some Fun in Michigan"

In 1972, Republican voters in Michigan decided to make a little mischief, crossing over to vote in the open Democratic primary and voting for segregationist Democrat George Wallace, seriously embarrassing the state's Democrats. In fact, a third of the voters (PDF) in the Democratic primary were Republican crossover votes. In 1988, Republican voters again crossed over, helping Jesse Jackson win the Democratic primary, helping rack up big margins for Jackson in Republican precincts. (Michigan Republicans can clearly be counted on to practice the worst of racial politics.) In 1998, Republicans helped Jack Kevorkian's lawyer -- quack Geoffrey Feiger -- win his Democratic primary, thus guaranteeing their hold on the governor's mansion that year.

With a history of meddling in our primaries, why don't we try and return the favor. Next Tuesday, January 15th, Michigan will hold its primary. Michigan Democrats should vote for Mitt Romney, because if Mitt wins, Democrats win. How so?

For Michigan Democrats, the Democratic primary is meaningless since the DNC stripped the state of all its delegates (at least temporarily) for violating party rules. Hillary Clinton is alone on the ballot...

First of all, Hillary Clinton was not alone on the ballot-- Dennis Kucinich and Mike Gravel were still on the ballot, as well as withdrawn candidate Chris Dodd. More on that in a moment. Moulitsas wanted to encourage his readers, as well as their readers(since many blog readers(possibly most) are also themselves bloggers) to encourage Michigan democrats to "cross over" and vote for Mitt Romney, because this would allegedly hurt the Republican party.

Kos's hubris is difficult to fathom, although I suppose given how prominent DKos has become in recent years, maybe it shouldn't be surprising. There are many bone-headed assumptions here, even though if stroking the egos of his readership is the goal and he doesn't really care about what the democratic party supposedly stands for-- an increasingly common trait-- then I suppose he's actually pretty smart in making his pitch for Romney, irrespective of the outcome.

Obviously there are a large number of things liberal and would-be liberal Michiganders could do with their vote. You could stay home and say "fuck you democratic party" for taking away my state's delegates and telling me my vote won't count-- perhaps even with an email, with or without cursing.(I'd recommend without.) You could vote in the republican primary, also held on Jan 15th, whether for Romney or someone else-- such as for Ron Paul.

Kos insists that voting for Romney, who went into Michigan without a major primary win(he did win the barely-covered Wyoming caucus), would somehow hurt the GOP because their eventual nominee wouldn't be decided way ahead of time. He's smarter than us noobs because he's been on Meet the Press(above), so he knows this is so.

Anyway. You could vote for Kucinich or Gravel to protest the way the democrats have shrunk from the fight in congress, or even for Dodd to register your more specific disapproval for retroactive immunity of the telecoms that handed over personal data to the administration without legal authority. I would think a couple of thousand votes for Dodd might not be reported by MSNBC and company, but you can bet Senate staffers would take notice of it a lot more than a couple of thousand emails.

Avedon takes a similar tack, although she is more gracious to Kos than I am. Here's the comment I left her:

Kos has gotten arrogant, which leads to stupidity. I didn't read all the posts he wrote about Michigan, but he fails to note in the "Let's Have Some Fun..." one that Romney was in fact leading in the delegate count going into Michigan. Either he didn't know this or didn't care. Either way it seems he's starting to believe his own publicity, as it were.

And besides, why do people automatically assume it's bad for a candidate to not have the nomination sewn up before the convention? Just as some voters may have voted for HRC because they were tired of Matthews and others dumping on her, might not the party that goes into its convention without a clear winner end up with an advantage and a more sympathetic candidate, partly because people are getting tired of the horse-race style political coverage, and partly because the party that goes into the convention w/out a clear winner will paint the other one(not entirely unreasonably), as the party that gamed their own voters into voting for their pet establishment candidate?

I know that if I was Romney or McCain or Huckabee and I only managed to get the nomination at the convention itself that's how I'd paint "HRC Clinton the 2nd."

New Hampshire and the horse race

with approximately 86% (via) of the precincts reporting:

Hillary Clinton 95,331 39%
Barack Obama 89,360 37%
John Edwards 41,190 17%
Bill Richardson 11,178 5%
Dennis Kucinich 3,371 1%
Joe Biden 543 0%
Mike Gravel 342 0%
Chris Dodd 163 0%
Precincts Reporting - 259 out of 301 - 86%

Republican Presidential Primary
Candidate Votes Percent Winner
John McCain 74,847 38%
Mitt Romney 63,818 32%
Mike Huckabee 22,253 11%
Rudy Giuliani 17,455 9%
Ron Paul 15,588 8%
Fred Thompson 2,446 1%
Duncan Hunter 1,007 1%

Undoubtedly it's childish of me to point this out, but Dennis Kucinich's one percent is bigger than Fred Thompson's one percent.

96 percent? boy New Hampshire's white. Iowa, New Hampshire...South Carolina. Makes you wonder.

Glenn Greenwald(Jan 7th):

...Aside from the fact that these endless prediction games completely overwhelm any substantive discussions, their guesses -- which are really wishes -- are almost always dreadfully wrong and plainly designed to advance their concealed agenda for which candidates they like and dislike. Why is any of that something that reporters ought to be doing at all? Is there any distinction between what a "reporter" does and what a "pundit" does covering this campaign? There doesn't seem to be any.

As but one example, consider this new daily tracking poll today from Rasumussen Reports. At least according to this poll, it is true that there has been one candidate who has been genuinely surging in the last week or two among Democratic voters nationally -- John Edwards...
[...]
I'm not focusing on the accuracy of horse-race predictions here, but instead, on the fact that the traveling press corps endlessly imposes its own narrative on the election, thereby completely excluding from all coverage plainly credible candidates they dislike (such as Edwards) while breathlessly touting the prospects of the candidates of whom they are enamored. Their predictions (i.e., preferences and love affairs) so plainly drive their press coverage -- the candidates they love are lauded as likely winners while the ones they hate are ignored or depicted as collapsing -- which in turn influences the election in the direction they want, making their predictions become self-fulfilling prophecies.

It's just all a completely inappropriate role for political reporters to play, yet it composes virtually the entirety of their election coverage. Go read Time or The New Republic or The Politico or The Washington Post and see if you can find any examples of straight factual reporting about the remaining candidates, their positions, anything substantive -- rather than endless, group-think gossip about tactics and winning/losing predictions. It basically doesn't exist (here's an interview Ana Marie Cox conducted with John McCain yesterday where she tried to press him on his comment that we should remain in Iraq for 100 years -- notable because it's so rare to find any questions of this type).

I realize none of this is a revelation. But it's still astonishing how extreme it is. The point isn't just that this empty chatter squeezes out anything more meaningful -- it does -- but that it completely drives voter perceptions and controls the ability of candidates to be heard.

Here is an interview with Fred Thompson on the Today Show where he makes this point quite well, chiding the interviewer for asking him about nothing other than the sorts of speculative, irrelevant predictive matters that dominate press coverage, to the complete exclusion of anything he is trying to argue as part of his campaign. Inventing exciting dramatic narratives and predicting outcomes just isn't the role of a political reporter, even thought it's what most of them to do to the exclusion of all else.

the Greenwald passage above is from a much longer piece, "The role of political reporters" from Monday's Salon. It's not directly related to the results in New Hampshire, but it's definitely worth reading in its entirety(above emphases are mine).

Anything for a Buck

As Iraq continues to disintegrate into city states run by warlords America’s “Defense” (war is now referred to as defense) industry is padding the pockets of our leading Democrat presidential frontrunners but not to worry the war industry is covering all their bases by giving gobs of cash to all the front runners in our so-called elections (dog and pony show).

According to the Progressive this is the breakdown of what our own leading warlord hopefuls have received this quarter alone from the war industry.

Chris Dodd -- $168,900

Hillary Clinton -- $128,988

Obama -- $57,990

Giuliani -- $58,400

Romney -- $82,975

Interestingly though Hillary Clinton is the worst choice among the Democrats when it comes to a continued program of war in Iraq and beyond she is clearly ahead in recent polls for the race to the Whitehouse. I believe this is so for more than one reason. First Americans are very poor at paying attention to politics other than what they get from watching the local news. Second the news media itself will support any candidate that is pro-war, pro-establishment and represents the so-called mainstream while candidates that do not fall into this category are relegated for the most part to obscurity and derision, they are simply not to be taken seriously. Keep in mind that the news media is in business to make profits and war is very good for news media profits. Adding to the problem of a less than forthright news media are those unwitting dupes of power and the establishment the centrist bloggers who continue to support the Democratic Party no matter what. Some may actually be getting paid for these services rendered but most do it out of an abysmal ignorance and an unreasoning tribal loyalty based on erroneous assumptions. I recently read at one blog that the answer to our problems is to vote in progressive politicians at all levels of government. The only problem with this brilliant thinking is that with a minute handful of exceptions there really are no progressive politicians. If I suggested that the answer is to howl at the moon it would be as useful. And while these centrist blogs sometimes come up with useful facts they unfailingly fail to make that final connection that the Democrats are screwing us and have been for decades.

In an interview with Nir Rosen, Rosen states that it does not matter at this point if we end the occupation of Iraq or not. Keep in mind that this statement by Rosen is only in the framework of what it means for Iraq. In that framework Rosen is probably correct yet for the average American nothing could be further from the truth. Simply put the cost of the Iraq occupation is killing our democracy, which in my opinion has long been dying anyway, and our economy. Since the Democratic Party has been just as guilty as the Republicans of promoting an illegal war, which has become an illegal occupation, they are not about to impeach Bush or Cheney. Both Republican and Democrats alike are up to their necks in one of the greatest crimes of recent history. If the Democrats were to pursue impeachment they would have to impeach themselves as well for they are guilty of the same crimes they would be impeaching Bush and Cheney for. And besides all that the Democrats are war mongers themselves due to their undying belief in American exceptionalism and our right to dominate the planet which they see as being for everyone’s benefit not to mention the benefits to their own bank accounts.

We need to keep in mind that for both of our political parties power is paramount for power is an end to itself and provides all the justification needed to do whatever it takes to stay in power up to an including ignoring the destruction of the nation the political parties are leading. I don’t know who coined the phrase follow the money but it should have been chiseled into the stone tablets Moses brought down from the mountain, perhaps the eleventh commandment.

Prior to World War II there was no war industry, at least not as we know it today, which we hilariously and less than honestly refer to as the defense industry. During World War II factories that were fabricating peacetime goods were converted to manufacturing weapons but as is so often the case with capitalism (anything for a buck) giant corporations found just how lucrative the death industry could be and they liked it.

From the American Prospect:

In fact, the United States is still far and away the top arms exporter on the planet, delivering $11.6 billion in arms last year[2005] -- 45.6 percent of the world's total, according to a recent report by the Congressional Research Service.

Politicians often use the patriot ploy as in the oft used term support the troops which has become a double edged sword for the Democrats on one side using it to hide their true agenda of endless war while on the other hand live in fear of being accused of not supporting the troops. Whatever one may think of the troops the troops are simply not the issue they are but pawns used as cannon fodder for whatever is convenient at the time by our illustrious national leaders. When you consider that patriotism is the furthest thing from national leader as well as weapon maker minds one should do a double take every time someone makes an appeal to your “patriotism.” Patriotism is nothing but propaganda used to pull a blanket over the eyes to hide the true motives of men. Consider this passage from the same American Prospect essay.

No one can accuse the defense industry of lacking audacity. Despite receiving vast sums of money from the Pentagon each year, and having much of Congress in their back pocket, arms manufacturers have been holding conference after conference of late complaining that big government is keeping them down. At a Heritage Foundation event in mid-October, at which industry officials gathered to discuss the burdens of arms-export regulations, Robert Bauerlein, a vice president at Boeing, griped: "Government fundamentally doesn't trust industry to do the right thing when it comes to export controls." This from a company that earlier this year was fined $15 million for illegally selling military technology to China.

One could take this one step further if you consider a reality where our government is no government at all but is merely a front for the giant corporations who rule our lives and fates confounding our sensibilities with a puppet government whose goal is to make their corporate masters richer than they already are and at the same time keeping themselves in power.

Recalling those “donations” from the war industry we can see how though they favor certain mainstream candidates they do a good job of covering all their bases by giving large sums of money to all the candidates. To me this makes the suggestion that there are two distinct political parties laughable and to believe that your vote matters downright hilarious. It is useless to argue over which candidate or which party is best because they are all of a mind which is the pursuit of power that binds them together in their criminal and murderous pastimes. There are signs all around us that illustrate this sameness shared by our politicos. One of the most glaring of these signs is the enduring (permanent) bases that have been built in Iraq that the news media rarely mentions. The Democrats have indulged President Bush by handing him the monies to build these tributes to our particular brand of colonialism despite their pathetic and lying claims of being an opposition party. It matters not who is elected in regards to Iraq because we shall be residing there in our billion dollar bunkers for many, many years to come.

Then of course there is the great American public whose only problem with the occupation of Iraq is that it has been a failure. For the most part most Americans never question our self destructive path to world domination because Americans feel we have the best form of government, our democracy, and that our hamburger way of life is one that everyone should follow. Being the self-absorbed nation that we are occasionally reality impinges its unwelcome manifestations on our thought processes thus we know when our lives are affected especially when it hits us in the pocket book but when times are flush and high paying jobs are plentiful watch out for that arrogance and the delusions of grandeur that so easily materialize in our minds. However when money gets tight social programs don’t seem like such a commie thought. In the end Americans don’t much care about all the dead and displaced Iraqi people rather it is our own sense of self preservation that wins the battle of our hearts and minds.

This is truly an anything for a buck nation.

Arnie n' GWB

I hate to admit this photograph from the BBC amuses me, suggesting as it does that Arnold is annoyed by something Junior is saying.



meanwhile, here's the mustaches of the nineteenth century blog.

since you insist on content...

...here's some content!

actually, I occasionally visit other lazy blogger's blogs and post comments like,
"hey, how about some more content?" or(and I think this is much more polite): "hello-- more content please."

the caption at Lisa Nova's site reads:

"Gov. Mitt Romney meets a medical marijuana patient--Oct. 6
October 09, 2007, 05:05 PM
Clayton Holton of Granite Staters for Medical Marijuana asks Gov. Mitt Romney if he will have seriously ill patients like himself arrested for using medical marijuana with their doctor's approval. Gov. Romney doesn't answer the question and turns his back on Clayton."

winning is everything

photo: Villeneuve.com

from "The presidential primary scam: why the game is rigged, and why true democracy is only a secondary factor in the nation's rush to nominate the next president", by Michael Sherer, in today's Salon.com:

FACT: Not all votes will count. The Republican Party plans to punish every state that votes before Feb. 5 by denying half of that state's delegates access to the floor of the Republican Convention next year. At the same time, the Democratic Party is planning to punish the vast majority of its January voters, perhaps more than 2 million, by removing all the delegates from Florida and Michigan. Both parties are likely to reinstate the delegates later in the summer, but in the case of a contested convention, no one should hold their breath.

FACT: Political power brokers in New Hampshire, Iowa, South Carolina and Nevada have forced the Democratic candidates to pledge not to campaign in Michigan and Florida before the end of February, which means the citizens of those states will have to vote without ever seeing or hearing directly from their candidates. This is justified because Michigan and Florida disobeyed national party orders in order to hold their primaries in January. These states also have more voters than the four other states combined, threatening to upend the traditional hand-shaking privileges in the diners of Des Moines and Manchester. In the meantime, Democrats in two of the nation's largest states will never get to meet their leaders -- unless, as mentioned before, they throw a fundraiser.

About a week ago, Barack Obama traveled to Florida for a fundraiser at the home of Tom Scarritt, a Tampa trial lawyer. Afterward, he walked across the street and answered a half-dozen questions from reporters, a sin that prompted an immediate denial from the campaign. "It wasn't a news conference," claimed Robert Gibbs, Obama's communications director. This is what it has come to: Presidential campaigns trying to deny that their candidates spoke in public. Even Obama cowered. "I was just doing you guys a favor," he told the Tampa Tribune, after a reporter in the street pointed out that he was breaking the rules by speaking outdoors, where the public might hear. "We won't do it again."

Sherer also talks to U of Virginia's Larry Sabato, who seems to think the Constitution needs to be amended to fix the present system.

(Or maybe is just saying so apropo of a book he's hawking. I don't know why, but Sabato has always rubbed me the wrong way and struck me as a tv-whore type of academic. I haven't read his book but I know I'm pretty leery of casual talk of amending the constitution as if it were a trifle, especially since we live in an age where there are tons of folks who would gladly amend the hell out of the constitution to make society profoundly hostile to immigrants, gays and women seeking abortions-- and that's probably just for starters. I'd rather live with the imperfect document as it is than unbar the door just now. Sabato's book is entitled A More Perfect Constitution: 23 Proposals to Revitalize Our Constitution and Make America a Fairer Country .)

I know a lot of people would like to see a single national primary that took place over the course of one week in all 50 states, something Sherer doesn't mention but an idea which inevitably gets bandied about when people discuss reforming the primary system. I certainly agree with Sherer that the parties are behaving badly by penalizing Florida and Michigan, but I don't agree with the notion of a no-fuss, no-muss single primary, as the imperfect system we now have at least allows for the possibility that a less-well funded candidate might emerge to challenge the front runners.

Maybe it's just wishful thinking, but with our current, woefully inefficient system, I see at least a oh-so faint sliver of a possibility that a viable anti-Hillary, or even an actual anti-war(!) democrat might emerge. If we had a single national primary there wouldn't be even the remotest chance of something like that.

The problem is not so much the system as the voters who insist on voting with an eye to practicality and who fear "wasting" their vote on a second or third-tier candidate. I want to tell the people who fear wasting their votes in the primaries-- "what the hell is your problem? You're going to vote for whoever the party tells you nominates in the fall anyway, so why are you afraid of "wasting" your vote in the primary?"

therealrudy.org

Robert Greenwald, the documentary filmmaker who made Outfoxed and Iraq For Sale, among other works, has a new documentary out about Rudy Giuliani. Some snippets are available on Youtube, like the one above. (Via Mark Kleiman, who notes that Giuliani has a nervous laugh that seems to correspond with his getting ready to lie about something. )

also, this youtube-like site has Osama Bin Laden's recent video, in its entirety(well, as far as I know!), here. He praises Noam Chomsky(!?), which to me only reinforces the sense so many people have that the neocons and the extremist fundamentalist terrorists are perversely dependent on one another.