Mosaic on the DNC convention- an Arab view

via truthdig.

Dead Horse: September 1st(Part 1 of 2)

Sometimes it's difficult for me to write according to the perceived dictates of blogging, by which each post is supposed to be about a discrete topic, ostensibly separate from the topics that precede and follow. For example, when I look at the miasma of events in recent weeks I try to give them a context, at least within my own noggin. South Ossetia, Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, the "pre-emptive" Minneapolis police raid(also here (via), hurricane Gustav, the forced resignation of Pakistan's corrupt strongman(and the continued non-resignation of our own president), they're all connected, at least in my mind.

Yesterday I called my father, whom I hadn't talked to in a couple of months, and I expressed my disappointment with Obama. My pop is intelligent enough not to fall for the "historical opportunity" song-and-dance, and he's not the sort to be reactively aghast at the thought that somebody might think that the meaningful differences between the two parties is becoming increasingly irrelevant. Nevertheless, he said that he felt the differences that do exist do matter, and that you don't have to be crazy about the nominee to vote for him, because at least he's not McCain, etc. You know, the lesser-of-two-evils argument.

The cartoonishly earnest change-fetish segment of Obama's supporters get a lot of media(and blogosphere) attention, but, win or lose, it's unlikely they make up that big a segment of the voting populace, or even of the people who will end up voting for him. I suspect that the number of voters who choose Obama in November who take a more sober approach like my father are far larger. In a recent comment thread at Jonathan Schwarz's ATR, Nell of A Lovely Promise argued that turning away from the Democratic ticket because you're hoping to hasten the decline of the US empire was a form of "armchair Leninism", and noted that it's pollyannish to expect that a more enlightened state would inevitably emerge from the rubble-- and I suspect she's right.

cross-posted at Dead Horse.)

Some recent items 8-17

Aziz in City of Brass, "Obama's Muslim Outreach Advisor Resigns":

Chalk up another victory for the scalp-hunting Islamophobe right: Mazen Asbahi, appointed as national coordinator for Muslim American affairs by the Obama campaign, has resigned from his volunteer position because of claims that he has "ties" to the Muslim Brotherhood, and served on the board of advisors for an Islamic fund at the same time (8 years ago) as another member, Jamal Said who is a fundamentalist imam. Asbahi actually resigned from that position after only a few weeks, once he learned of allegations against Said. In other words, Asbahi got the jihadi cooties, which are kind of like a mixture of anthrax and herpes.

Obama continues to disappoint on this score. He still remains unable to state publicly that "no, I am not a muslim but it would make no difference even if I were." It would have truly been a hope-inspiring change to see him defend Asbahi and take on the whisperers, because caving to them makes them all the stronger. That would be audacity I can believe in.

Yes, 12% of voters still think Obama is muslim (incidentally, 1% think he's Jewish). So whats the better strategy? Try to distance yourself from muslims at all costs to try and make that 12% think, "hmm. ok so he threw his volunteer outreach guy under the bus. I'm convinced!" ? Or to try and undermine the reasoning that says "if Obama is muslim, then I cannot vote for him, because muslims are not acceptable" ?

If any politician had the power or the pulpit to take on the ugly, dark side of American culture that Islamophobia represents, it's Obama. Given the confluence of events of war and energy and security, a sane outreach to Islam is in our collective best interest. Yet Obama runs away. Again.

This item from "Dr iRack" of Abu Muqawama very succinctly frames the issue of the fight regarding provincial elections in Iraq, which are tentatively scheduled for this fall:

Back on June 23, a guest poster on Abu Aardvark (now revealed to be Sam Parker at the United States Institute of Peace) usefully framed Iraq's central political cleavage as a clash between the "Powers That Be" (PTB: Dawa, ISCI/Badr, IIP, the Kurds) and the "Powers That Aren't" (PTA: Sahwa/tribes/SoIs, Sadrists, independents, secularists, etc.). This paradigm overlaps with, but greatly complicates, the standard Shia vs. Sunni and Arab vs. Kurd dichotomies typically used to define ongoing communal struggle in Iraq.
[...]

He goes on to recommend:

1. Reidar Visser's excellent discussion of the Kirkuk issue, provincial elections, and the PTB/PTA paradigm.

2. Michael Gordon's NYT Magazine article on the PTB/PTA clash within the Shia community.

3. A very good WaPo piece by Sudarsan Raghavan and Ernesto Londono on how the PTB/PTA conflict plays out regionally across Iraq.

The security improvements in Iraq are real but reversible. They cannot be sustained if the PTBs lock the PTAs out of politics. Period.

Joe Bageant quotes an anonymous political consultant regarding the Obama phenomenon in "Life in the Post Political Age"

Insofar as the style-over-substance post-political age we supposedly live in is a construct imposed on voters by elites, the degree to which people buy into it is debatable. Large numbers of people don't vote, and large numbers of the people who do vote do so in spite of lacking confidence in the basic health of the system, thinking they have no other choice. But it's worth reading-- an excerpt:

The underlying social change that led to the Obama victory is the unprecedented extent to which the narrative of popular consumer culture, and the media that drives it, has become the dominant influence on how Americans think, formulate their ideas and understand the world around them.

The most important result of this process has been the steady and consistent depoliticization of American society, to an extent that we can make the case that we are living at the dawn of the post political age.
The two primary features of the post political age are a politics completely drained of all its contents and ability or willingness to be used as an agent of change in social or economic policy, and its full integrations into the world of American popular, consumer and entertainment culture.[...]

It is a result of this dynamic that the two consistent winners in American politics over the last 30 years have been the cultural left and the economic right.

A preoccupation with symbols and empty gestures

Neither Spel-ChekR® nor I know how to spel tryptich, which is why I didn't include a similarly themed pic of McCain demonstrating hubris. I imagine lots will become available at the GOP convention.

Micah Holmquist:

Tim Russert was the only hope we had in this Road Warrioresque landscape. Without him, we are doomed.

Arvin Hill:

Saying "bring it on," kind of tough talk, you know, that sent the wrong signal to people. I learned some lessons about expressing myself maybe in a little more sophisticated manner -- you know, "wanted dead or alive," that kind of talk. I think in certain parts of the world it was misinterpreted, and so I learned from that.
~George W. Bush to The Times of London

Arvin: The Boy King regrets not being a more accomplished liar.

No one could have foreseen such vanity.

Michael Cortese(aka Mykeru):

the recession seems to have turned the decades long game of “let’s make a buck with China” into, and I couldn’t believe it even as I watched, Lou Dobbs on TV the other night warning people about the growing threat of cheap coat hangers from China.

Thanks Lou. See that big building over there? That’s a Wal-Mart. Apparently there’s a whole lot of that going on in there. You’ll go in there fighting, and you’ll come out with golf clubs.

Alison Kilkenny: Jesus Arm-Wrestled Dinosaurs

Who is IOZ? Why, the king of the one-liners, that's who-

IOZ, "The Food bad, the portions small": Jesus Lord A-Mighty, buy some fucking bicycles, you whiny little bitches.

and, "McLame": John McCain is so old that creationists are actually forced to deny he exists.

an interesting new(well, new to me) site: Troubling Information http://www.troubling.info/

I'll miss this guy

George Carlin, May 12, 1937 – June 22, 2008.

"There are no bad words. Bad thoughts. Bad intentions," he said. Yet, out of 400,000 words in the English language, there are seven: "That will infect your soul, curve your spine and keep the country from winning the war...."

Two items

Dave Neiwert at Orcinus, "The crazies and Obama":

read some of the details emerging from that militia bust in Pennsylvania that the media have been studiously ignoring. To wit:

Bradley T. Kahle, 60, of Troutville, was one of five people arrested in last weekend's sweep. He told undercover agents he hoped Sens. Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama would be killed if they were elected president, and that he would shoot judicial and law enforcement officials if he became terminally ill, according to an affidavit of probable cause made public Tuesday.

"Kahle said words to the effect of, that 'if Hillary Clinton, or Barack Obama, get elected, hopefully they will get assassinated, if not they will disarm the country and we will have a civil war,'" the affidavit stated.

The same man also told authorities he planned to visit Pittsburgh so he could get on top of a high rise and start shooting black people. And of course, the judge let him go on bail. Would I be crazy to suspect that if he were a Muslim talking about shooting white people from a high rise and hoping John McCain would get killed, no judge on earth would let him go?

Jay Taber writes, on the "Culture of imbeciles":

"This Guy apparently thinks most Americans are incapable of even comprehending a concept like centrist."

I've been trying, as is so often the case in fits and starts, to wrestle with a longer piece about how Right and Left/Conservative and Liberal have stopped meaning what they used to mean in practical terms, even if many people continue to apply the old assumptions. Of course many of the assumptions aren't really that old, but stereotypes developed by the Reaganites in the 1970s and 1980s. But they still have a lot of currency, in terms of how people think about the political spectrum here in the U.S.

At one point I wanted to call it "Liberalism and its Discontents", but that seemed insufferably gaseous. Later I wanted to call it "Liberalism in the Pelagic Zone", using the metaphor of being at sea far from recognizable landmarks, and discussing the ways we seek out things by which to establish reference points, and the unseen creatures towards the bottom, beyond where sunlight penetrates, like the mysterious Kissinger Fish or the Carlyle Group Lamprey.

Part of my meaning, which I'm having some difficulty fleshing out, can be limned by asking yourself why in the world anybody would consider either Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama to be liberals, when at the very best they're centrists. (And by no means our best centrists.) It's NOT simply a question of being "more liberal" than the centrist democrats-- I think Ron Paul's candidacy and the nerve he touched helped demonstrate this.

(The usually perceptive David Neiwert, whom I quote above, insisted on doing everything he could to tear Paul down earlier this year. He did this , I think, in part I think because he could only see the forest for the trees, while nevertheless grasping that Paul represented a mirror that showed the cracks in modern liberalism's facade, and had to be put down at any cost...)

Jeremiah Wright and Samantha Power and their relationships with Obama also demonstrate this, in two more ways.

I'll get back to this soon.

Over the top? Sure, but so was Gloria Swanson

I suppose I'm avoiding discussing the real issues of the day, like the upcoming US-sponsored "cleansing" of Sadr city. It's too fucking depressing.

IOZ and Dennis Perrin like this video too. Auf wiedersehen fer now.

NOW can we call her a monster?

I don't have a book of quotations handy, but I imagine somebody both cleverer and famouser than me has already observed that the things left undiscussed in a narrative are usually far more telling than the things spoken about.
Off the top of my head, the best I can do is Gershwin's line from Porgy and Bess:

The things you're liable
to read in the Bible,
They ain't necessarily so.

American politics is arguably like that. For example, I think about the controversy about Samantha Power calling Hillary Clinton a monster back around five or six weeks ago. Even though it was undoubtedly a spontaneous event(as you probably recall, Power tried to qualify it as off-the-record), but the various players in the Obama and Clinton camps and the media immediately knew how to respond to this, as if a script was ready, questioning Obama's judgment in selecting Power as an adviser, insisting Power apologize or resign, Obama dutifully apologizing for her remarks, etc.

I wondered how many people out there in Real-People-Land even paid any attention to the whole dustup. Not terribly many, I'm guessing. I also wondered, why precisely does Power feel Hillary is a monster? Should I automatically assume it's for reason x or y, and weren't other people curious about Power's reason(s)? I realize this is one of those mutually and tacitly agreed upon things, the rolling out of a familiar script by which to deflect the impertinent questions of people like me, as per the nonplussed onlookers at the parade when the naked emperor goes by.

I'm guessing the answer to my question wasn't necessarily that interesting, that it had to do with Clintonian campaign tactics, but that's not really my point. When the Clintons and Obamas and the TV press and the Powers respond in the preordained, scripted ways, it seems designed to avoid the question, because once you have Sam Power's answer, inevitably other persons with other reasons for regarding Hillary as monstrous might gain some scrutiny, and the next thing you know some of those brains out there in Real-People-Land might start ruminating, and that would be-- I don't know, monstrous.

Likewise, this afternoon I watched the nightly news, and it seemed as if people just stopped dying in Iraq and Afghanistan(just like Somalia), nobody objected to China hosting the Olympics, nobody lost their house, nobody was kidnapped in Colombia, and nobody was waterboarded or forced to evade questions about torture. The only thing worth discussing was the Pennsylvania democratic primary, the most important primary, the most important event ever, since Reagan freed the hostages or Grant surrendered to Lee at Appomattox. The world dutifully stood still. (And yes, this kind of sarcastic trope about a single event being made to dominate the news isn't original either-- just hard to resist.)

There was a sound bite of Hillary Clinton telling a crowd that with her 10 point win, she'd pulled ahead in the popular vote viz-a-viz Obama, and a chart graphic saying that Obama was ahead of her by 600,000 votes, but that Hillary was counting the disputed primary votes from Michigan and Florida, which Obama hadn't contested. The Penn primary, and various prognostications about which states Obama could win in the general election versus ones Clinton could win, was of course pretty much the whole news show. (I watched CBS, but I imagine the others were pretty much the same.)

I saw nothing about the ABC interview HRC gave (admittedly on Monday morning) with Chris Cuomo on Good Morning America-- I heard about that through Raw Story. (But if you knew about it, how could you not wonder about its impact?)

“I want the Iranians to know, if I am president, we will attack Iran,”( if they launch nukes against Israel), Clinton said. “I want them to understand that. … We would be able to totally obliterate them. That’s a terrible thing to say, but those people who run Iran need to understand that.”

Clinton said she hoped her stern warning would serve as a deterrent from Iran doing anything “foolish and tragic.”

The quote in the Reuters article is somewhat misleading, suggesting in parentheses that she immediately added "if they attack Israel."(But to be honest, in referencing the video above, it looks as if it's been edited to take some pauses out.)

Again I find myself wondering about the people out there in Real-People-Land. Does the sickness of this register with them? You wonder how many people are even aware and paying attention to this, trying to be good citizens and keeping up with the news while they drown in the soporific horse-race minutiae of who would be more likely to beat McCain in Colorado or Tennessee, eventually giving up on the sucker's game of trying to stay informed.

Some of the articles about this have titles that say Hillary says she will obliterate Iran, while others note the "would be able" and reproduce the quote more accurately. I can't help but be reminded of Kerry's "for then against" position and Bill Clinton's tortuous question about what the word "is" means. If you look at the real-life pacing of her words and her body language, she has unamiguously threatened to attack Iran if she's elected. I think that's a violation of international law, and I'm sure that Mrs it takes-a-village has frightened a lot of ordinary people in Iran, including kids, who are now aware that one of the leading candidates of the opposition party is just as demented as George W. Bush.

In one way, however, the follow up by Cuomo and Clinton was even more disgusting:

Cuomo: Is it difficult to reconcile the logic of a statement like that, with the realities of what it would be like to make that desicion?

HRC: It is. It's very hard. And that's why you hope to deter such behavior.

Boo hoo. Isn't it horrible, when you have to kill thousands of people cause their gummint don't act right, the toll it takes on you? Years ago whenever the Labour party in Israel capitulated to demands from the right that they start yet another offensive against the Palistineans, somebody once referred to the rationalizing speeches offered in the Knesset as "shooting and crying." Only Mrs Clinton seems more gleeful than a good liberal should be about it.

The things you're liable
to read in the Bible,
They ain't necessarily so.

Simon Jenkins:Despite Iraq, America's love affair with war runs deep

Independent(UK): Tough-talking Clinton vows to 'obliterate' Iran if it ever dares to attack US ally Israel

CNN's political blog: "Clinton: Iran would pay a 'very high price' for nuclear attack"

El Baradei interview(from 2007)regarding Iran's nuclear program[video]

Marketwatch: "Has Hillary's tough talk increased pain at the pump?"

Clark(Montana)Chronicle:Ron Paul: Clinton 'doesn't understand the presidency'

Dennis Trainor, Jr: "Hillary: I can do war bigger and better than Bush"

ABC News:"Pennsylvania's Six Week Primary Ends Tonight"
[original title of this ABC article on Tuesday:
Clinton on Iran Attack: 'Obliterate Them']

portable health care 2.0

via Mark Kleiman and Ron Wyden.

I guess Slate doesn't exactly ♥ Hillary Clinton

The headline on the Slate article reads,"The Hillary Deathwatch Widget:Embed Clinton's sinking ship on your blog, iGoogle, or Facebook page."

I'm not going to put this on the sidebar as a permanent or semi-permanent fixture, just here for one post. As far as I'm concerned all three of the mainstream presidential choices stink, and HRC certainly is a corporatist, prowar phoney. But even as some of the humor directed at her amuses me, some, mostly photoshopped grotesquerie, is really off-putting.

Occasionally I wonder how much of it has to do with her simply being a woman, since-- inexplicably to me-- most people don't seem that bothered by the dynastic implications of two Bushes and two Clintons possibly ruling governing us for as much as 28 years in a row. Virtually none of the humor directed at her seems to touch upon that. And as far as humor about her ambition goes, well yes, it's certainly fair game, but all the men who ran and are still running are plenty ambitious too.

I guess gender equality means the soulless and power-hungry who would do their damnedest to persuade us to keep ruining our country (and others) via unbridled empire deserve to be blasted, irrespective of their sex. I'd prefer the kind of social progress that involves doing away with soulless and power-hungry leaders who want to wreck as many countries as possible, but perhaps I'm fussy.



(the inset panel above, regarding Scaife, is from Tom Tomorrow. The rest is from Get Your War On.)

The April fool is you

ok, in a nod towards thoroughness, the above links are here:

"Clinton n' Obama shake their fingers at oil guys"

• Oil executives defend soaring profits
• CNNMoney: Congress lays into oil execs
• CNNMoney: Issue #1: America's Money
• iReport.com: What would you ask Big Oil?

Senators Clinton and Obama care(a lot), and they're angry, and they're not afraid who knows it. When HRC voted for the Iraq war resolution in 2002, undoubtedly it had nothing to do with oil, any more than her subsequent unwillingness to defund the war or commit to ending the war in the next four years. Of course Obama has also demonstrated an unwillingness to defund the war or commit to getting out by 2012, but that's different-- he had the guts to oppose the war as a state legislator. Then, when he was running for the US Senate in 2004 and was invited to speak to the democratic convention that summer, he had a chance to reiterate his stance on the war before a national audience-- but he recognized that might embarrass the headliner, old for-it-before-he-was agin' it John Kerry, and decided not to. (I guess that's different too.)

But with the "off the books" financing of the Iraq debacle-- and the utter unwillingness of Obama and Hillary Clinton to publicly draw the connection between the war,the weakening dollar, and the ever-upward spiraling of dollar-denominated oil prices, I question whether the democrats represent a substantially more sober answer.(yeah, you care-- but who cares?)

I'm sure John McCain cares a lot too, but his nomination is nicely sewn up, so it's not so pressing for him to be so demonstrative this early.

I don't know when I first watched a tv report about congress calling executives in front of them to scold them and beat their chests in righteously populist fashion for the cameras. When I was 11? 12? I used to love watching the news when I was a kid, and although I don't remember for certain, I imagine I took these sorts of dog-and-pony shows at face value when I was a kid and I watched the CBS morning news with Hughes Rudd before going to school.

That was such a long time ago, and although I remember the news in the late 70s being less mediocre, journalistically speaking, than today's focus-grouped soft-edge presentations, I also wonder if that's just the natural consequence of a middle-aged man romanticizing something from his youth at the expense of the present. I DO remember that news about celebrities wasn't a big deal in those days, as well as Rudd's wizened, subtly sarcastic manner. CNN's Jack Cafferty is the closest thing on TV news to a similar sensibility, and he seems like something of an artifact, what with CNN having gone (fairly precipitously) downhill in the past eight to ten years, especially after Lynn Russell left(I often think that maybe she saw the writing on the wall and decided she didn't want to be part of the crappy new order.).


Was the news coverage better? In spite of today's 24 hour news channels, I'm inclined to think so. Does that mean that better news coverage makes for more sensible, skeptical citizens-- in other words, were people smarter back then? Well, they did foist Ronald Reagan on us in November of 1980, the start of our modern age of the unraveling social compact, but the Ayatollah had our hostages, and there was that botched rescue mission, etc. Besides, how were they to know Reaganism would have such far-reaching effects?

When I watch the news, especially when the reporter cherry picks one or two presumptively representative man in the street interviews, I wonder about whether or not people are dumber as a consequence of post-deregulation Potemkin village news. And of course, there's also the pressure of Reagan-style federal tax cuts, shifting spending to the states, which consequently spent less on education. I don't know how you'd objectively factor in the effect of the more extreme religious fundamentalists, who insist that science may not offend when kids come home with tales of degenerate relativism, etc.

(The fact that, in spite of how outrageously the domestic media has sucked up to Junior and protected him from our knowing more about the conduct of the war, the war and the president are still as unpopular as they are, suggests holding out some modest hope that our collective intellect still has some functioning grey matter.)

What I do know is, selective man in the street interviews and stories asking "what would you ask Big Oil" notwithstanding, certain questions wont get asked, on tv, or even in print(and in print online) . How about a story asking

"are the congressmen just covering for their own failures in trotting out the oil executives?" or
"When congress scolds big business on tv, does anything get done as a consequence?"

(The silence is part of the disinformation-- so when you have such thoughts, if you do, you are more likely to dismiss them, maybe out fear that you might be a crank, or seem like one to others.)

Or, "should we spend more on public transportation?"

Or, "do you think we should bring back the 55 mph speed limit to reduce oil consumption?"

Of course, the lawmakers could just do that without putting on a show. I'd favor a 100 kph(@61 mph) national speed limit, and maybe by getting people to learn the conversion they'd start using their noggins too.

Now, I don't believe the lawmakers mean to do any of those things-- they're boring and don't involve an immediate or certain political reward. So I'm inclined to think today's event on capitol hill may have been scheduled for April first by persons with a sense of humor, albeit humor that involves laughing at you and me.


see also, Christian Science Monitor: "With gas costly, drivers finally cut back:
A decline in miles driven is the first since 1980"

[922]

Hillary, Scaife etc

photo: National Review

Firstly, three items from Slate:

1.Rich Men Behaving Badly: Meet the super-rich, the dysfunctional class threatening American values.
By Daniel Gross
Posted Saturday, March 29, 2008, at 7:08 AM ET

2."The New New Deal:"
Roosevelt-era reforms are saving capitalism—again.
Daniel Gross
March 25, 2008, 3:29 PM ET

3.Hillary's Rev. Wright:
His name is Richard Mellon Scaife.
Timothy Noah
March 25, 2008, 6:47 PM ET

"Hate speech [is] unacceptable in any setting," Hillary Clinton today told the Tribune-Review. We turn now to this excerpt from a 1981 Columbia Journalism Review profile of Scaife by Karen Rothmyer, in which the reporter describes a conversation with the distinguished publisher and philanthropist:

"Mr. Scaife, could you explain why you give so much money to the New Right?"

"You fucking Communist cunt, get out of here."

Well. The rest of the five-minute interview was conducted at a rapid trot down Park Street, during which Scaife tried to hail a taxi. Scaife volunteered two statements of opinion regarding his questioner's personal appearance—he said she was ugly and that her teeth were "terrible"—and also the comment that she was engaged in "hatchet journalism." His questioner thanked Scaife for his time. "Don't look behind you," Scaife offered by way of a goodbye.

Not quite sure what this remark meant, the reporter suggested that if someone were approaching it was probably her mother, whom she had arranged to meet nearby. "She's ugly, too," Scaife said, and strode off.

[What a guy. I should note that I think Jeremiah Wright seems like a much more agreeable character than Mr. Scaife, and hardly deserves to be compared to him.-JV]

Elsewhere-
Alex Jones loses it on Youtube,


And finally,"America is Run by Gangsters",
via Joe Bageant:

Tony from Sydney Australia writes to Joe:

I have been over to the USA four times and travelled around the back blocks a bit, including your area. I feel a sadness for the average citizen there. They haven't got a clue as to what's going on. I feel the USA has become a giant military camp to protect world capitalism and the citizens are not aware they have been conscripted. I have also travelled around Asia a bit. I've had deeper conversations about world affairs with Indonesian fishermen, Thai taxi drivers and even Tibetan peasants in far western China than I could get out many of the "middle class, educated" people I have met in the USA.

Mike Gravel leaves the democrats

On Wednesday Mike Gravel announced that he was leaving the Democratic party and joining the Libertarian Party, with the intent of securing their nomination for president. While I don't think Gravel is a real libertarian(and that's mostly a good thing), I can easily understand his sentiment when he says "I didn't leave the democratic party, the democratic party left me." (see video, above)

Although I don't entirely agree with his platform, to me the fact that he's nearly 78 is the only shortcoming Gravel presents as a viable candidate. Yes, he's an unpolished debater and very few people take him seriously, but those are separate matters.(I also like his sense of humor, as evinced by the rock-in-the-lake video.)

If you live in a solidly red state like I do, it makes very little sense to vote for the democrat when the GOP will win all your state's electors, but a vote for Cynthia McKinney of the Green Party, or Gravel should he secure the Libertarian nomination, is a meaningful way to vote against the war, and doesn't strike me as any more of a "wasted vote" here than voting for the democratic nominee, especially one who's already hemmed and hawed about withdrawing from Iraq by 2012, as both HRC and Obama have.

Perhaps even less of a "wasted vote," if you think about it. In the past the Libertarian Party has always made the ballot here in Texas in presidential years, but the Greens weren't on the ballot here in 2004. The dynamic is substantially different in a place like, say, Wisconsin or Pennsylvania.


Given Gravel's historically important role in defending an open society[video], you'd think the mainstream press would have told you about Gravel's announcement. I didn't see anything about it on TV, but both the Washington Post and New York Times dealt with it using the new 21st century style of burying news on the back pages: by only discussing the news in their blogs.

WaPo, here, and NYT, here.

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.

Mister Fish is new (well, to me)

If finding this amusing is wrong, I don't wanna be right. (via King Simbaud)

100 years...or more

God [darn] America

here, lazily, is the comment I left at ATR earlier tonight, apropos of a really nice post* by Bernard Chazelle referencing "the speech" Obama gave regarding Jeremiah Wright:

The speech was sheer BS-- he had a real chance to do what he does best, round off sharp edges, by saying Wright was right but the problem was in his vitriolic style, not the content. And if anybody in US politics today could have pulled that off, it was Obama.

Instead, he's playing Hillary's game and chasing the white swing voters who won't vote for him anyway, instead of being square with a slightly different demographic, the white swing voters who otherwise might vote for him.

What he accomplished instead was he demonstrated weakness. That when push comes to shove and sacred cows push, he'll let them shove him around, and will disavow his friends for votes.

In the past I've said I'll discuss thing/person/phenomenon x at greater length tomorrow, or the day after, without always following through. Nevertheless, this time I will follow up with a lengthier discussion in 24-48 hrs, tops.

*"the perils of truth-telling"— Bernard Chazelle

Salon has the text of the speech here, and the video is up on YouBiquitousTube, here.

don't forget to vote, parte dos

And, from the "I try to learn something new every day" department: "Smurfing"

Courtesy Gov.(for now)Spitzer of New York.

I don't know whether prostitution is a victimless crime or not. It's especially unclear at the tonier levels-- but I fail to see how Spitzer's behavior warrants impeachment when that of You-Know-Who and Mister Growls-a-lot does not.

Matthews vs Kirk Watson re Obama

Whether you see it as unseemly or reasonable, this is the video clip that apparently has the blogosphere all atwitter today. I think it's reasonable, but I'm concerned that McCain's water carriers may not get the same, and will get a pass instead.

An afterthought, 2.21: It occurs to me that when they booked Watson they may have indicated a specific set of topics, then switched up on him on purpose, to make him and Obama look foolish. Do the network news shows do things like that? I don't know.

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"