Thosethingswesay

Yes, continue to be a bigot

2009-06-25T19:23:00.000-07:00

Third Way has done a good thing by reaching out to the evangelical community to assure them that new hate crimes legislation will not result in preachers being prosecuted for calling homosexual an abomination or saying that homosexuals will burn in Hell.

Because, no, we don't want to prosecute people for their beliefs or their speech, only actions that harm others.

However, I should point out what Third Way can't: if you think that homosexuality is an abomination and that homosexuals will go to Hell, you're a bigot. Thinking that something's in your religion doesn't make it right, unbigoted, moral or any less stupid than it is.

The Wandering Governor

2009-06-24T19:26:00.000-07:00

Imagine this: Bill Clinton went missing for 5 days. His office lied about where he was. Hillary said she didn't know where he was. Some said out hiking. Some said just taking some time off. Some said they saw his SUV parked at the airport. Then he came back from Argentina and admitted to having had an affair.

I don't really care about Mark Sanford's private life.

But Bill Clinton got far worse treatment from the press, for far less a personal transgression.

Just sayin'.

... They Pull Me Back In

2009-03-17T12:46:00.000-07:00

Apparently, like Lindsay Bluth Fünke, I only want what I don't have. I resigned myself to taking a sabbatical from the blog and then, about five minutes later, I found something that made me need to post.

The Pope thinks that using condoms will worsen the African AIDS epidemic.

In response, I have composed a rhetorically sophisticated, thoroughly researched open letter to His Holiness:

Dear Pope,

Screw You.

Without a condom.

Yours sincerely,

Jon E.

Sigh. Yay. Sigh.

2009-03-13T18:24:00.000-07:00

So, um, the blog is on life support. If it weren't for a few conservative right-to-lifers keeping the hospital from pulling the plug, it might be dead.

But since it's still here, let me urge anybody still left reading to Google "Daily Show" and "Jim Cramer Unedited Interview." Jon Stewart does more for the integrity of financial reporting in America in fifteen minutes than CNBC did for a decade.

Also, he says, "Doucheboro." Nice.

Get the Tingle at Tingley

2009-01-30T11:30:00.000-08:00

BitchinShit Productions (™, mofos, ™) is proud to announce:

Steel-Cage, No-Holds-Barred Grudge Match of Unemployed Titans:
Dick "The Dick" Cheney vs. Rod "The Rod" Blagojevich

Two Men Enter, One Man Keeps the Hair.

Tingley Coliseum
Albuquerque, NM
Tickets start at $40.

John Updike Dies at 76

2009-01-27T10:22:00.000-08:00

This from Random House:

It is with great sadness that I report that John Updike died this morning at the age of 76, after a battle with lung cancer. He was one of our greatest writers, and he will be sorely missed.

JOHN UPDIKE
March 18, 1932 – January 27, 2009

My Secret Shame #285: Rod Blagojevich

2009-01-26T16:01:00.000-08:00

I actually voted for that putz in 2006 even though his opponent was a biological human being with detectable brain function.

Sorry, Illinois.

Welcome, President Obama

2009-01-20T08:04:00.000-08:00

Nice to have you.

Please don't get tripped up when former President Bush lets the door hit him on his way out.

Channeling David Rees

2009-01-16T23:25:00.000-08:00

So I just got this rejection e-mail for a novel query, LOL. It's unchanged except for removal of proper names to protect the awesome:

thank you for your query, but we are not interested.

peace
firstname lastname
some agency

LOL, are they bringing the rejection pretty hard here or are they bringing it even harder? Is this rejection form more cutting edge than ginsu knives in space because they don't even capitalize and because they wish me peace after the literary equivalent of paying their little brother fifty cents to ignore me because they're too busy to do it themselves? LOL. Is the only thing better than form e-mail rejection a form e-mail rejection texted into a cell phone by a fourteen-year-old? LOL, this sure raises the dignity level for everybody involved to like the dignity penthouse of one of those super tall Shanghai skyscrapers of tomorrow.

Oh thank God!

2009-01-01T12:15:00.001-08:00

That year is over.

Do over!

No Elected Officials?

2008-12-06T04:57:00.000-08:00

Last time I got to vote to elect local officials, I voted for Hillary Clinton as my Senator and Elliot Spitzer as governor. Spitzer resigned after having sex with a prostitute and was replaced by David Paterson. Clinton will be leaving her seat to become Secretary of State and Paterson will appoint her replacement.

So, an unelected governor is going to appoint my senator? Worse, people think he's going to appoint Caroline Kennedy whose only qualification is that she was born a Kennedy.

We need a special election.

But I Don't Want to Own Citigroup!

2008-11-23T14:26:00.000-08:00

Some announcement on Citigroup expected tonight.

Does. Not. Want.

Filing Label

2008-11-18T10:17:00.001-08:00

File this under "How Far We've Come" or "How Messed Up America Can Be"? Both?

I recently watched actual footage of an American soldier coming home to a USO dance after fighting in Europe.

The soldier was Japanese-American.

The USO hall was in his family's new neighborhood: a Japanese interment camp.

Changes: It Seems Heaven-Sent

2008-11-15T18:15:00.000-08:00

This would've been more timely two weeks ago, but I've stopped pretending to myself that I'm either cutting-edge or quick on the draw.*

Anyway, it wasn't too likely, but Tupac's "Changes" should've been the Obama theme song.

Kinda obvious why it wasn't, but it should've been.

I'm not sure when he recorded it, but it was released posthumously, so maybe twelve or thirteen years ago. Anyway, Pandora popped it up just now for me, and I was struck how it sounds both outdated and painfully relevant at once:

"Changes"
...
I see no changes wake up in the morning and I ask myself
Is life worth living? Should I blast myself?
...
We gotta start makin' changes,
Learn to see me as a brother instead of two distant strangers.
And that's how it's supposed to be—
How can the Devil take a brother if he's close to me?
I'd love to go back to when we played as kids,
But things changed, and that's the way it is...

I see no changes all I see is racist faces.
Misplaced hate makes disgrace to races.
We under, I wonder what it takes to make this
One better place. Let's erase the waste,
Take the evil out the people they'll be acting right,
'Cause both black and white is smokin' crack tonight,
And only time we chill is when we kill each other.
It takes skill to be real, time to heal each other
And although it seems heaven-sent
We ain't ready, to see a black President.
It ain't a secret, don't conceal the fact:
The penitentiary's packed, and it's filled with blacks.
But some things will never change...

And still I see no changes can't a brother get a little peace
It's war on the streets & the war in the Middle East
Instead of war on poverty they got a war on drugs
So the police can bother me...

It's time for us as a people to start makin' some changes.
Let's change the way we eat, let's change the way we live,
And let's change the way we treat each other.
You see the old way wasn't working so it's on us to do
what we gotta do, to survive.

-----
* Or original. I just did a Google search and am shocked--shocked!--to discover that I'm not the first person to have had this thought. Whatever. Time-traveling plagiarism artists and other haters will not drag me down.

It Intensifies Your Political Philosophy, Man

2008-11-10T00:17:00.000-08:00

I'm psychic.

And remarkably good-looking, but the psychic part is more relevant here. On Friday, I responded to Paul Krugman's ecstatic proclamations about Obama's "mandate" and how he'd won that mandate during a referendum on "political philosophies" that "the progressive philosophy won." I said:

In 2004, cultural conservatives misunderstood the significance of Bush's victory--they thought so many people voting (in part) out of fear of terrorism meant that the country was ready to return to 1948, only with better wiretapping technology. It wasn't. And this year, so many people voted (in part) out of fear for their pensions. That doesn't mean the country is salivating for the New New Deal. Voters in 1932 knew that the stakes were much higher; contrary to FDR's speeches, Depression-era voters had to fear not only fear but also starvation.

And then today, Krugman wrote this:

Barack Obama should learn from F.D.R.’s failures as well as from his achievements: the truth is that the New Deal wasn’t as successful in the short run as it was in the long run. And the reason for F.D.R.’s limited short-run success, which almost undid his whole program, was the fact that his economic policies were too cautious.... Obama’s chances of leading a new New Deal depend largely on whether his short-run economic plans are sufficiently bold. Progressives can only hope that he has the necessary audacity.

Krugman, god bless, clearly hasn't slept since Tuesday. Near as I can figure it, since they called the election, he's been using America's maxed-out credit card to scrape transcontinental, Union Pacific rails out of a Montana-sized pile of powdered optimism.

Get some sleep, dude. Barack Obama will still be President-elect when you wake up and come down.

Stop Saying Mandate

2008-11-07T18:25:00.000-08:00

The Obama victory feels good. It really does. And it should.

But let's not kid ourselves. Obama's election marks a shift in race relations in this country. It constitutes a small step back from the edge of a very deep crevasse of self-destructive stupidity. Lovely, the both of them.

But it wasn't a mandate. The only mandate worth talking about in this election is the mandate in California, Arizona, and Florida that now legally cannot turn into a manmarriage. (In California, at least, we can thank some Obama voters for helping make that civil rights triumph possible. Swell work, fellas.)

Because they illustrate the point better than talking and because I'll never get tired of their odd beauty, here again are Mark Newman's cartograms:
2008

2004

The 2008 map is notably bluer, but parts of it are redder and a whole lot of it is still purple. So let's not allow the the electoral college numbers to blind us. Obama only won about 53% of the popular vote. Admittedly, unlike Bush's party in 2004, Obama's party in 2008 picked up a lot of seats. But even there they still hold no more than 60% of seats in the House and Senate. Tidy gains, but hardly transformational. So talking about Obama's "mandate" is only fractionally less silly than all the wishful conservative talk of Bush's 2004 mandate, when he barely cleared 50% of the popular vote.

Of course, that's not stopping Paul Krugman from imagining that America has suddenly turned into the Netherlands:

Anyone who doubts that we’ve had a major political realignment should look at what’s happened to Congress... Since [the 2004 elections], Democrats have won back-to-back victories... [and] now have bigger majorities in both houses than the G.O.P. ever achieved in its 12-year reign.

And, since in American political punditry, one can only get a mandate after holding a referendum, Krugman says that progressivism won that referendum:

Bear in mind, also, that this year’s presidential election was a clear referendum on political philosophies — and the progressive philosophy won.

Now, there were a bunch of ballot initiatives in California, so maybe I missed it, but I don't remember that particular referendum. In 2004, cultural conservatives misunderstood the significance of Bush's victory--they thought so many people voting (in part) out of fear of terrorism meant that the country was ready to return to 1948, only with better wiretapping technology. It wasn't. And this year, so many people voted (in part) out of fear for their pensions. That doesn't mean the country is salivating for the New New Deal. Voters in 1932 knew that the stakes were much higher; contrary to FDR's speeches, Depression-era voters had to fear not only fear but also starvation.

We may get to starvation, but we probably won't, precisely because we elected Obama when we did. A little competence and accountability might be enough to turn things around, which means it might be enough for most voters. Of cousre, after the past eight years, a little competence and accountability almost seems like too much to ask.

After dancing his mandate jig, Krugman goes on to argue that Obama should seize his chance to help rebuild the America's infrastructure and social safety nets. Well, amen to that. But let's not imagine that'll be a snap for him.

The last thing we need three months from now is a bunch of unrealistic lefties sniping at Obama for not unveiling a National Recovery Act on inauguration day. The damage done over the past eight years will require some bold action, but it will first require some careful analysis and then some skilled politicking to get that bold action through the Congress. I'm not saying that we should stand on the sidelines uncritically waving pompoms for Obama, but I am saying we shouldn't act like those drunk, moronic fans who get red in the face because their team has a game plan that acknowledges the presence of the other team and of complicating factors like gravity and friction.

Oh, and an afterthought: I'm not sure that any candidate in America has ever gotten a true mandate from "the American people." For a long time, only a small percentage of the population could vote freely. And once most of the adult population could vote, many people simply didn't bother--and still don't. This year, despite the record voter turnout, almost as many voting-age adults in America didn't vote (about 100 million) as did (about 122 million). If anybody had a mandate in this election, it was None of the Above, continuing decades of strong showing for the Apathy and Alienation Party.

American Rorschach

2008-11-06T11:30:00.000-08:00

For an explanation see comments or go here.

I'm Opposed to Gay Marriage

2008-11-05T17:49:00.000-08:00

So Prop. 8 passed in California. The legal challenges will no doubt clog up the courts for a while, but Prop. 8 is definitely a short-term blow to gay marriage in CA and the US in general.

I've argued this at length (length!) before, but the ridiculous arguments for Prop. 8 have reinforced for me that I'm opposed to gay marriage--at least if by gay marriage we mean the government's solemnizing the sacred union of two people of the same sex. That's because I'm opposed to all such marriage.

People opposed to same-sex unions haven't noticed it yet, but marriage as a civil institution of the sort it used to be 150 years ago is already defunct. They're defending the shell of corpse. And may it molder in peace--we don't need to resurrect an institution designed in large part to relegate women to a second-class citizenship in which they couldn't own property, vote, or work outside the home (unless poor).

Civil unions can fulfill some of the duties of civil marriage (creating a legal framework for dealing with property and child-rearing), and I'm fine with that. Civil unions for all.

But the sort of marriage that most of the Yes on 8 voters defended yesterday had nothing to do with civil unions. Those voters were defending a religious covenant. And the wisdom of the First Amendment should guide us on this one: if marriage is a religious sacrament, then the government should stay the hell away from it, not enshrine it in a state or federal constitution.

Sure, as long the government continues to arrogate to itself the right to affirm the marriages of straight people, gay people should get the same treatment. But at this point that's like the government giving permission to Catholics to pray to Mary since it already gives Protestants the right to pray to Jesus. Not the government's job.

Hell, Yeah

2008-11-04T21:20:00.001-08:00

That's much, much better, isn't it?

Why You're Voting for Obama

2008-11-04T08:56:00.000-08:00

It's not just what he'll have to do, it's what he'll have to undo.

Pollward, people. Pollward!

Synchrodestiny, Bitches

2008-10-28T10:22:00.000-07:00

Yet another tip of the hat to David Rees, who cheered me up this morning and gave me an excuse to take the "Bradley Effect" off the top of the blog:

On election night, Rees was depressed. You may remember it--realizing that all it took for Bush & co. to stay in office while treating America and American ideals with contempt was to tell Americans how much he loved them and how much everybody else hated them. "You know how you're always regaining consciousness in the gutter with some liberal standing over you, asking if you're okay, trying to help you stand? Pretty suspicious, huh? That liberal probably put you there, dontcha think? Now me, I would never do that. Me, I'm standing innocent as can be directly above you, up there on the penthouse balcony with the broken guardrail. And I've waving as compassionately as hell with the hand not grasping your wallet and the college degree your kids will never get."

So, in his devastation, Rees wrote a piece of inspirational prose and credited it to Deepak Chopra:

CHIN UP.
We’re smarter than those motherfuckers.
We can learn more quickly than those motherfuckers.
We can be more ruthless than those motherfuckers.
We can be some six-million-dollar motherfuckers ourselves.

Chin up.
We’re more American than those motherfuckers.
We’re more responsible than those motherfuckers.
We’re more compassionate than those motherfuckers.
Hell, our atheists are more Christian than their Bible-thumpin’ motherfuckers.

There’s an election in two years.
There’s nothing we can’t do.

Chin up.
Because it’s on, motherfuckers.
It is on.

Now go canvas & call voters, you American motherfuckers.

The Bradley Effect & Other Fears to Scare You at Night

2008-10-19T10:14:00.000-07:00

The Bradley Effect is a term coined by scholar Charles Henry in his effort to explain why LA Mayor Tom Bradley was polling so well during the 1982 California gubernatorial race yet lost the actual election. Bradley, Henry concluded, was getting misleading information from the polls because he was black and because some white voters were really uncomfortable with two things: 1) voting for a black guy and 2) admitting they were uncomfortable with voting for a black guy.

So be encouraged by the latest polls, but don't let them make you complacent.

If you're not doing so already, an activity with a relatively high utility to awkwardness ratio is calling voters in swing states. You can sign up at My Barack Obama (worst political website nickname winner for 2008: myBO.com), which has a good system and relatively painless script for calling voters. You can do it in small chunks of spare time if necessary. I've been calling Ohio, and I don't think I've convinced anybody to vote for McCain.

If you actually live in a swing state, you have more choices. Knocking on doors is a big one. Helping the local Democrats organize voter turnout is another. Just do something practical.

Let's not give them any reason to rename it the Obama Effect.

Some of these People May Know How to Work a Voting Machine...

2008-10-17T17:27:00.001-07:00

...so vote and call undecided voters. Knock on some doors if your state is at all up for grabs.

Link to the dumbery.

It's Even More Impressive...

2008-10-16T17:08:00.000-07:00

So I was going to write post entitled, "STFU About Joe the Plumber." But that was pretty much all I had, so I was stuck on what to write about.

Then this came along:

This charming image comes courtesy of Diane Fidele, President of Chaffey Community Republican Women, a San Bernadino group not far from my new hometown. Fidele mailed it out to about two hundred people, including some of the group's members.

Sure, the image does call food stamps "Obamabucks." Sure, it does have a picture of Obama superimposed on a cartoon donkey at its center. Sure, it shows Obama surrounded by Kool-Aid, ribs, and watermelon. Sure it's a festival of racist stereotypes.

But that doesn't mean it's racist. As Fidele told a local newspaper: "I never connected. It was just food to me. It didn't mean anything else."

I can see that.

I mean you wouldn't believe the flak I got from those panty-bunchers over at the Chinese-American Citizens Alliance when I launched my new drycleaning business two years ago: Chinky Slanteyes' SuperStarch Laundry--"We Wash You Rong Time!" Apparently, that's some kind of obscure ethnic slur. And I guess they weren't too happy with these really great pictures I had of buck-toothed coolies with huge ponytails. Just because I used canary yellow for the skin color or something.

Anyway, that killed my promising business. I hope things turn out fine for poor Fidele. Sounds like an honest mistake.

------
It's impressive that Fidele managed to Photoshop this without taking off her hood, but it's even more impressive she did it with her hooded head crammed that far up her colon.

You Keep Going, Girl!

2008-10-14T13:21:00.000-07:00

In all the hurly-burly of America's best political and economic year ever, let's not forget about the lonely struggles of loyal reader Sarah P. of Wasilla, Alaska, who continues to be pestered by haters who are all like "ethics, laws, blah, blah, blah" when she's all like "Obama, terrorist, nig-- uh, terrorist, America, rah, rah, rah!"

America needs more rah-rah and less blah-blah, my friends. More rah, less blah. That's change you can trust.

Anyhow, the legal midgets in the Alaska Senate concluded that Sarah P. broke state ethics law by trying to get some guy fired just because he was like a total douche-cob to her sister Molly. First, like why even be governor if you can't shitcan guys who divorce your sister? Second, haven't people in Alaska heard about the "tainted investigation" defense, in which a defendant must be found innocent if he or she says that the prosecutor doesn't love him or her enough to be objective?

Fortunately, Sarah P. and her crack legal team know have been able to fall back on the "Nuh Uh" defense. The Nuh Uh defense was established by landmark Fantasy Court decisions in Bush v. National Intelligence Estimate and Bush v. Climate Change, in which Fantasy Court judges ruled that official or legal findings must be declared null and void if the person inconvenienced by them pinky-swears that those findings seriously didn't happen and then refuses to talk about the findings ever again (starts about 1:20):

As always, we'll keep you updated like all get-out on this one, America.

Katie Couric = Matt Taibbi

2008-10-08T15:21:00.000-07:00

At least when the economy doesn't seem to be collapsing around our ears, right-wing politicos and think-tankers in this country generally brand any concern with economic justice "class warfare." It is, you see, un-American and divisive to worry that 1% of the country controls 40% of its wealth and that the income of that top 1% grew 180% from 1979-2004, whereas the income of the bottom 20% grew about 10% over the same period (see p. 5 of "Is the American Dream...").

But those same politicos and tankers seem to have no objection to cultural warfare. It's totally cool to act as though a tiny percentage of Americans control 95% of the nation's--nay the world's--virtue. See, whereas it's divisive to tell poor people that they're getting the short end of the stick, it's just not a big deal to tell liberals that they're unpatriotic and/or tipped for everlasting torment.

For some obscure reason, I've been thinking about The Titanic lately. And gosh darn if a little old Alaska common sense doesn't tell me that we seem finally to have reached the iceberg-intensive portion of the journey at which the folks in first-class are sending stewards down to steerage to tell us, "Hey, hey, why so reproachful? I mean, we're all in the same boat here, folks."

Then they add, "So all you peons should stay here while the boat sinks because there aren't enough lifeboats for everybody."

Anyway, that's all a long-winded and indirect intro to a relatively brief point.

To wit: political life in this country is increasingly a weird game in which a tiny majority holds power over a large majority while insisting that the people in that ruling minority are coextensive with some vague populist majority. And that creates all kinds of conceptual weirdness.

In particular, I'm struck lately by how the McCain-Palin campaign--especially Palin--simultaneously insists that its candidates know what mainstream Americans really want at the same time that it claims that the "mainstream media" are out of touch with mainstream America.

But if the media really are "mainstream," then wouldn't that mean they're in touch with mainstream America? And if McCain and Palin mean "left-wing" media rather than "mainstream," why don't they say that? Surely they don't want to imply that mainstream America is left-wing?

Is it because if McCain and Palin were actually to say "left-wing" rather than just hint it, they'd have to explicitly accuse Katie Couric of being the hatchet-woman of the liberal media elite and they know that would sound more than a little loopy?

Or (and) is it because they're trying really hard to appeal to groups--especially fundamentalist Christians--whose very identity since at least the 1970s has come in large part from positioning themselves as an embattled, even oppressed, minority in the current, decaying America, although they see themselves the dominant majority of real Americans?

-------
In memoriam Might Magazine: "Katie Couric = Matt Taibbi = GAY!"

Oh, Right, Real Issues... Yeah...

2008-10-02T15:54:00.000-07:00

Found this via David Rees' blog and felt an unaccustomed moment of optimism and gratitude. It's Richard Trumka from the AFL-CIO talking about race and union voters in this year's election:

Elitism

2008-09-30T08:59:00.000-07:00

Doonesbury has been running some funny strips on Sarah Palin lately, and the strip's site has a related poll asking readers to say whether they think they're qualified to be President. The variation in response by age is interesting, though I don't know if it marks a shift in attitudes based on the era of one's birth or simply the gloomy realism that comes with getting older.

I may say more on this when I have time and brain to think more clearly about it, but for now, I just want to say that I'm depressed how childish the American electorate seems to be (to have become?). All of these people who dislike Barack Obama for being "elitist," all of these people who look at George Bush (grandson of a Senator, son of a President, graduate of Andover, Yale, and Harvard) and John "Many Houses" McCain.

Sure, some of this "elitist" talk is just code talk for "uppity Negro"--and that's depressing in its own way--but some of it is sincere. It seems to be based on the idea that Obama doesn't have Americans' interests at heart because (unlike Bush) he talks like he has the education that he has. And probably it goes beyond education--I think that people don't like that Obama talks like he's smarter than us, more thoughtful than us.

You know what? Odds are that he IS smarter and more thoughtful than us. And he flippin' should be. The Presidency requires somebody of extraordinary abilities. A President can have an ordinary background--that's better, probably--but he or she needs to outstrip the rest of us in some pretty substantial ways if the country's going to thrive. Or survive.

And I'm fine with that. Abraham Lincoln was nobody's elitist, but he was smarter and more thoughtful than almost all Americans alive at the time (and now). You know that story about his teaching himself to read on the back of a coal shovel? That shows not just that he came from humble origins but also that he was quicker to learn and more disciplined about learning than almost all of us. How many of your high school buddies would have worked that hard? How many of them did work that hard? Did you? (I didn't.) And can you imagine George Bush learning to read under similarly difficult conditions? He barely managed at some of the richest schools in America.

If Lincoln were alive today and from Compton, he would probably have taught himself Spanish and Chinese in elementary school and learned UNIX on the middle school computer. And, if he had a little luck, he would have gotten a scholarship to the same schools that George Bush went to as a C-student legacy case. And he might talk and act much like Obama does now.

Am I saying Obama is a Lincoln for our times? No. He hasn't been tested yet in a way that would let him prove or disprove that claim. I am saying that I'm afraid that a Lincoln in our times might be like a caveman Shakespeare: somebody whose gifts are unvalued or actively despised by the people whose lives they could improve.

A Thought on the Bailout

2008-09-29T04:26:00.000-07:00

According to the Times: "To help struggling homeowners, the plan requires the government to try renegotiating the bad mortgages it acquires with the aim of lowering borrowers' monthly payments so they can keep their homes."

Try? The government will try?

Let's be clearer about this. It's the government. The government could have long ago directed all lenders to renegotiate terms with struggling borrowers and the government would not have had to take over the loans to do so. Regulating credit is the government's job.

Now, the government has taken over the loans. It could forgive all of the debt if it wanted. That wouldn't be smart, but it can certainly succeed in renegotiating terms on most of this debt. It is, in effect, the lender now and if your lender wants to reduce fees and interest rates or forgive penalties, the lender can. The government has to do everything possible not to foreclose on its own taxpayers.

Try is not good enough. The government must bee expected to vigorously pursue this part of the plan.

Fascinating Obama Tidbit

2008-09-27T18:37:00.000-07:00

I just got curious and searched the Dow Jones Factiva database for the earliest reference to Barack Obama that I could find. First was from Chicago, a local account of Barack's community organizing efforts in 1985. It was a brief mention and they gave him a brief quote but already you got the sense that a reporter had decided that Barack, under 25 at the time, was worth taking seriously.

Then we go to 1990 when he became the first black editor of the Harvard Law Review. First mentions were brief and put the Harvard Law Review into context for the rest of us -- it is a place where law students practice theories and where the more established legal mines debate them.

Then came an LA Times feature on Obama. Was the first major one, best I can tell. It ran march 12, 1990. I was going to turn 15 on March 16th 1990. Race was a huge issue at the time. We had Clarence Thomas and the LA Riots on the way.

Obama got a package that they didn't open for awhile because, the reporter noted without the need for attribution or expansion, that "shortly after the elections, a package turned up at the law review office with no return address. Obama said he hesitated to open it because of the spree of recent mail bombings targeted at civil rights activists nationwide. When the package was finally opened, inside were two packages of dim sum, with no explanation. Some students made light of the media invasion, posting a memo titled 'The Barack Obama Story, a Made for TV Movie, Starring Blair Underwood as Barack Obama.'"

Wow.

Here's Obama's quote about it:

"For every one of me, there are thousands of young black kids with the same energies, enthusiasm and talent that I have who have not gotten the opportunity because of crime, drugs and poverty," he said. "I think my election does symbolize progress but I don't want people to forget that there is still a lot of work to be done."

I'm posting this, in part, because Obama needs the youth vote and I am no longer a youth. But when Obama took over the Harvard Law Review I was in high school and we were debating about things like affirmative action. It was passionate stuff. And I was, I admit, on the wrong side. I hated affirmative action. I suspected my own opportunities in life were being given away unfairly and I was a jerk about it. But, we had it out back then and it wasn't so long ago. Then Clarence Thomas happened and then the LA Riots happened. That all made the debates harsher. For me, it's when I started to think things through a little more. But it also hardened a lot of opinions, including my own. Heck, as we see today, back then we were dealing with a rotten economy that certainly contributed to things like the LA Riots.

Okay, this is a meandering post but... I looked up some old Barack stuff and found him speaking at a time where I had just become politically aware. He was so engaged in the issues of the time and he still is. Good to know.

Got to say, my initial reaction was that his quote about drugs keeping people down is milquetoast, but... heck, he is. I think he's at least an authentic milquetoast and not somebody who, like George W. Bush, has done his best to suppress his past.

Wait, Why Am I in Debt at All?

2008-09-24T19:16:00.000-07:00

Today the President said we have to give $700 billion to Wall Street because if we don't we won't be able to get loans for cars, college and housing.

Um...

Why in the Hell do people who work every day need loans to by simple things like cars, education and housing?

Seriously, the real failure here doesn't have anything to do with any capital markets, the failure is that our government allowed an economy to develop where the totally reasonable wishes of everyday workers have been priced to the point where those workers have to go into debt to get them.

Personal transportation, education, housing. Those all strike me as reasonable desires that any person might have. If they perform labor in the service of others on a daily babsis, seems to me like those three things should be givens.

The crisis right now is not a credit crisis, it's a compensation crisis. People who work day in and day out simply shouldn't have to borrow in order to meet basic needs. The problem is that managers and executives take too much and that they pay too little to the people who make the profits.

The True Face of Hubris

2008-09-21T19:09:00.000-07:00

Goldmand Sachs and Morgan Stanley were, until recently, too good to take your deposits. They didn't need your checking account. They only wanted to deal with members of the "investor class" and that meant people with enough money left over every two weeks that they could buy stocks in taxable accounts.

But now... they suddenly want your deposits.

Don't do it, unless they pay a huge amount of interest, something north of 7%. They only want your money so that they can put it on their balance sheet as an asset. They want to seem innocent about it since your deposits are insured by tyhe government but make no mistake -- they want your money so they can shore up against all of the idiotic mortgages and consumer debt that they bought and packaged for resale but couldn't resell.

Just remember what these banks did. Every time you had to buy something on credit because you didn't have the cash, they registered your debt, packaged it with other debt and tried to sell it to a hedge fund. Now that nobody's buying, they want you to deposit money with them in order to... yep... back the very debt that you owe them and that they're trying to sell.

I have a better idea. You own my debt, Goldman Sachs? Then sell it to me. At market price. Which is 20 cents on the dollar at most.

Obama was wrong about the surge?

2008-09-21T16:44:00.000-07:00

One thing that's really annoying me about the coverage of the presidential election is the notion that Obama was wrong when he said, last year, that the surge of new troops into Iraq was "doomed to failure." Because there has been a reduction in violence in Iraq, some pundits have concluded the the surge worked.

But it really was the failure that Obama predicted. 1,000 more US troops died since the surge began. Were their lives really worth a "reduction in violence" given that we could have pulled our troops out long before Bush decided to send more of them into his war of choice? We've also spent billions more. Given what we have to pay now to bail out Wall Street, were the billions we spent to fund the surge in Iraq really worth the "reduction in violence?"

Here's where the rubber really meets the road: if the Surge was a success and Obama was wrong, then why in the Hell are we still in Iraq? The fact of our continued occupation is proof enough that the surge failed. The point was to end the war and bring our troops home. Didn't happen. Surge failed. Deal with it.

0 Comments

2008-09-21T13:58:00.001-07:00

Yeah, well, fuck you too, interwebs.

And Now I'm Disabled by Incredulity

2008-09-21T13:43:00.000-07:00

I have a friend who's convinced that American Spartacists (the vulgar Marxists who show up at every vaguely lefist event and tell you that Castro and Chavez love vigorous debate, liberty, and puppies) are all CIA operatives designed to make the left look like a bunch of buffoons. And I thought at first that Sarah Palin's nomination was proof that Rahm Immanuel had activated a sleeper agent in McCain's inner circle (who knew that résumés are now supposed to begin with a "Disqualifications" section?)

And this? Well, this just seems like a scheme rigged by small-government conservatives (remember them?) to embarrass government, unions, and anybody who's ever said anything nice about them.

Bail Out Wall Street? What's In It For Me?

2008-09-21T11:28:00.000-07:00

So George Bush and Hank Paulson's Wall Street bailout plan is going to cost every American household between $2,000 and $5,000. Maybe the apocalypse is upon us and it must be done, but the American people deserve a return on this invesment. Indeed, congress needs to make sure that this is an investment, not a bailout.

The US government should get large equity stakes in all Wall Street firms that come begging for aid. The government should then use its position as a shareholder to pass resolutions that force these banks to act in the interests of the American people. The citizens of the United States, as shareholders, can demand fully green operations, investments in alternative energy and can demand that these banks no longer advise on job destroying mergers and that they refuse to underwrite debt offerings made by America's enemies.

Let's not bail out Wall Street. Let's take it over.

Still Working the Taint

2008-09-18T18:28:00.000-07:00

Well, my friends, I'm delighted to report that the party of law and order rides again and that a new deputy has joined the posse.

Loyal reader Sarah P. of Wasilla, Alaska has been joined by her husband Todd in her brave effort to defend her constitutional right not to answer questions if she doesn't like the official investigator asking them.

Or, in this case, their constitutional right to ignore an Alaska state senate subpoena.

Well, you go, Todd and Sarah! And you tell that mean ol' Alaska Republican senate president that she's a super-big jerk for sending all those subpoenas that everybody's ignoring.

Healthcare Solved!

2008-09-17T09:52:00.001-07:00

I'm told that the American people now own 80% of the world's largest insurance company. If that's the case, then 37 million no longer lack health insurance, right? Seems as if the owners of AIG should demand cheap and comprehensive healthcare from our new company.

Amateur Legal Advice for Corrupt Politicians

2008-09-15T20:18:00.000-07:00

So occasionally in this space I like to offer amateur legal advice.

Today's Tip: Working the Taint
My friends, you don't have to answer prosecutors' or police officers' questions if you think the people asking them might not be on your side. This is called the "tainted investigation" theory, and is based in landmark cases Hubris v. Juris (1943) and Self v. System (1973), which established that any bastard who would dare to question you doesn't deserve a goddamn answer other than "go screw, bucko."

Thanks to loyal reader Sarah P. from Wasilla, Alaska for reminding us of the tainted investigation immunity. Sarah, do be sure to keep us updated on how you're doing with your invocation of the TI immunity.

.

Just a Reminder

2008-09-14T16:22:00.001-07:00

As Lehmann topples and Fannie & Freddie go under government supervision, let's remember that Maverick Reformer (TM) John McCain knows a thing or two about bad banking decisions and expensive bailouts.

Specifically, he knows that if you put $360k into a a buddy's strip mall, if you make and fail to disclose $13k in trips to your buddy's houses (some in the Bahamas), and if he raises $112k for your campaign war chest, you should go out of your way to make sure that he gets "a fair hearing" from bank regulators looking into his corrupt and collapsing Savings and Loan.

A Senate ethics committee later exonerated McCain of impropriety and gross negligence but did say that he'd shown poor judgment. (McCain's the guy who says that what separates him from Obama is his judgment, remember. I guess he was complimenting Obama when he said that.)

It's been twenty years since then McCain became one of the Keating Five. And since then, having learned his lesson from getting caught up in a massive and expensive exercise in banking fraud, corruption, and financial mismanagement, he has gone on to display his Maverick Reforming zeal by, uh, letting the same thing happen again without a peep from the Senate floor?

Nice.

You Don't WANT the Truth!

2008-09-13T13:05:00.001-07:00

I'm a little concerned that Obama is running his campaign too much against the odious Palin (whose light will soon burn out on its own) and also too much on the notion that John McCain is a liar. Yes, John McCain is a liar. He accused Obama of sexism for his "lipstick on a pig," comment when we all know that usage of "lipstick on a pig," easily outdates Sarah Palin's use of the word lipstick to mean "I'm a nobody in make-up."

Obama, an intellectual who holds the notion of truth in high regard has recently been spending his time refuting the lies of McCain and Palin. "You can't just make stuff up," said Obama.

No, you can't. Not at the Harvard Law Review. Not in a nonfiction writing class (and if you try to make stuff up in a fiction class you'll probably face a professor demanding even MORE truth) and not in testimony before a court. No, in those cases, you can't just make stuff up.

In life, you can. In life, you do. "Hello, future employer! Of COURSE I know HTML! I know the other letters too!"

We lie. We exagerate. We don't really judge others for doing so, unless they really burn us. We don't condemn lying. We condemn some lies.

Barack Obama believes in the truth, I think. I'm sure it's a nuanced, well thought out truth. But he believes in one. Few others do. I'd venture that most people don't believe in the truth but that they think they do. I'd also venture that every time Obama calls McCain a liar, a lot of people think, "Yeah, he's lying, or at least stretching, but Obama is probably lying to and what are you going to do in an election." Or, more succintly, "Sure, but politicians lie."

We are not going to win the presidency by running against the opposition's running mate. We're also not going to beat their nominee by calling their nominee a liar, even though he is one. Seems like we've been on the defensive lately and that isn't going to work. "They are lying," is not the phrase that will bring us home. Let's get back to "Change We Can Believe In." Because... the way I see it, there's no way you can look at the decrepit dirty old man and the woman he dressed up as his naughty librarian and conclude that they can bring us anywhere.*

*except of course maybe, "Off. At the senior center outside Phoenix, AZ."

Oddly Inspiring Thoughts for the Day

2008-09-09T17:15:00.000-07:00

Yes, irony, I'm blogging about doing. Baby steps, people. Baby steps.

Some thoughts from Jean-Paul Sartre's Existentialism and Humanism, which I'm finding more interesting the less I think "is this more or less brilliant than the other ideas in class" and the more I think "huh, wonder if this makes sense":

That is the idea I shall try to convey when I say that man is condemned to be free. Condemned, because he did not create himself, yet, in other respects is free; because, once thrown into the world, he is responsible for everything he does...

There's no such thing as a cowardly constitution.... the coward is defined on the basis of the acts he performs. People feel, in a vague sort of way, that this coward we're talking about is guilty of being a coward, and the thought frightens them. What people would like is that a coward or hero be born that way.

If one calls every attitude of unbelief despair, then the word is not being used in its original sense. Existentialism isn't so atheistic that it wears itself out showing that God doesn't exist. Rather, it declares that even if God did exist, that would that would change nothing [because] we think that the problem of His existence is not the issue... In this sense existentialism is optimistic, a doctrine of action, and it is plain dishonesty for Christians to make no distinction between their own despair and ours and then to call us despairing."

All Right, That's Enough

2008-09-08T10:40:00.000-07:00

So grinnin' John McCain and his chicken bull running mate are now LEADING in the polls.

I, along with much of America, was initially shocked to discover that all it took to get the GOP base fired up was a good-looking goofball with minimal executive experience, a hostility to books, and an authoritarian streak wider than Larry Craig's stace.

Then I remembered the 2000 election.

We need to take this seriously. These two could be your future presidents.

Really.

I'm pretty lazy, I admit. But I'm not deluded enough to think that blogging makes much if any impact. There are far more practical things to be done. So I'd like to encourage people to post to the comments sections ideas about practical steps one can take to help register new voters, how to make calls to get voters to polls, etc. Information (phone numbers, URLs, etc.) about such practical ideas are also much appreciated.

If nothing else, it'll help me figure out how to spend my time and money between now and election day.

Thanks!

John McCain is So Old.

2008-09-07T08:55:00.000-07:00

How old is he?

John McCain is so old that if he hasn't been elected president already, there's obviously something wrong with him.

More About Sarah the Coward

2008-09-07T08:50:00.000-07:00

Check out the line-up for today's Sunday talk shows. Obama, McCain and Biden are all willing to subject themselves to direct public interviews. But not Sarah Palin. Because she either knows she's unqualified or is a big blowhard coward.

Guest lineup for the Sunday TV news shows:

ABC's "This Week" — Democratic presidential nominee Barack Obama.

___

CBS' "Face the Nation" — Republican presidential nominee John McCain.

___

NBC's "Meet the Press" — Democratic vice presidential nominee Joe Biden.

___

CNN's "Late Edition" — Sens. Jon Kyl, R-Ariz., Barbara Boxer, D-Calif., Kay Bailey Hutchison, R-Texas; Gov. Tim Kaine, D-Va.; Obama campaign adviser Robert Gibbs; McCain economic adviser Nancy Pfotenhauer.

"Fox News Sunday" _ Obama chief strategist David Axelrod and McCain campaign manager Rick Davis.

Fiscal Responsibility

2008-09-06T16:17:00.000-07:00

John McCain says that what he likes most about Sarah Palin is that she put a private jet that the previous governor had purchased on auction at eBay and that she sold it "for a profit."

But the truth is, yes, she p[ut it up for sale on eBay but like many an eBay merchant has learned, putting a product on the site doesn't mean somebody will buy it, especially at the price you're asking.

Palin sold a jet that copst $2.7 million to an Alaskan business man for $2.1 million.

So is it really so admirable to lose $600,000 on your own petulant hissy fit at the governor before you?

Finally, is the media going to just allow McCain to claim, unchallenged, that Palin "sold the plain on eBay for a profit?" Does the truth matter or is it another case of "It's Okay if You're a Republican?"

The Toothless Barracuda?

2008-09-05T17:29:00.000-07:00

So Sarah Palin is supposedly tough. But she won't subject herself to direct questions from the press. No, she's only available to interviewers like Oprah -- people who won't or can't challenge her.

Until Palin sits down for real interviews with real journalists, people should stop marveling at how "tough" she is. Anyone can stand on a stage making false claims about John McCain being a maverick. Let's see if this nobody who thinks she can be president can actually hold her own in a real, public discussion about foreign policy. Or domestic policy. Tough people aren't afraid of a little conversation.

And THIS Should Be a Scandal

2008-09-04T13:07:00.000-07:00

So, in addition to apparently being more about loyalty than competence or legality (sound familiar?), Mayor Sarah Palin was an aspiring censor.

From CNN/Time:

Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. "She asked the library how she could go about banning books," he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. "The librarian was aghast." That woman, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn't be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire Baker for not giving "full support" to the mayor.

Yeah, I'm guilty too (see below), but doesn't the fact that someone potentially second in line for the Presidency wants to ban books for naughty language and Unchristian sentiment sound more important than a pregnant teenager? Not to mention that her MO seems to be trying to fire everybody who doesn't support her crackpot authoritarianism?

My guess about some of the inappropriate language? I think it involves words like "tolerance, intellectual inquiry, dissent, skepticism, freethinking, investigative reporting, moderation, atheism, Islam, New York, and polyglot."

Like Juno, Only Under Surveillance

2008-09-03T17:32:00.000-07:00

As Mike's comments suggest, he and I noticed this comment in a post below:

I just don't know where to indicate my confusion about the absence of Palin-related inappropriate commentary on this blog. I mean, where else does one go for mean-spirited political snark about Alaskan rednecks with pregnant teenagers? I suppose I can understand leaving the softballs for lesser observers, but still.
--Emily

Since our Google metrics indicate that Emily constitutes 33.3% of our regular readership and 59% of replies that I didn't make, Mike has already sprung into action.

I guess I've been reluctant to touch on the issue because, well, somebody's teenage kid got knocked up and is keeping the baby. Mostly, that's none of my business. I guess it might be legit political news if one were to find out that Sarah Palin is pressuring her daughter Bristol to carry the baby to term and to get married because it would hurt Palin politically for Bristol to have an abortion and/or conceive out of wedlock. But there's no evidence of that out there.

I guess I have the same thing to say about this that I have to say about most conservative sex scandals: it may tell you something about the accuracy of your beliefs and the efficacy of your social policies if you and/or your close family can't practice what you preach no matter how sincerely you try or how loudly you yell.

If, as a man, you find that the faith-based homosexuality cure just won't remove those pesky cocks from your mouth no matter how many times you renounce Satan and his veiny snares, then it's probably time to consider the possibility that human sexuality is more complicated and difficult than your legislation acknowledges. Maybe you have to consider that if you didn't spend much of your public life trying to stigmatize gayness, you might not have to seize your only moments of gayness through glory holes.

And if, as an advocate of abstinence-only education, you find that your strategy doesn't work even on your own child--the kid you most closely supervise and mentor--you may have to ask yourself whether it's good enough. Or whether it might even be more a cause of teen pregnancy than a cure for it.

Heck, the entire Republican party might ask itself this: Is it just bad luck that the party of family values has on its ticket a divorced man whose second wife refuses to acknowledge the existence of her half-sister and an abstinence-only advocate whose teenage daughter didn't get the message? And that the nominees of the party of butt-love and dental dams has families that better exemplify the family values message? Or--just a thought here--is there something pernicious about the right's need for the Ward & June fantasy that actually encourages people to scorn and dismiss more stable, successful domestic arrangements that aren't desperate, doomed imitations of chez Cleaver?

Past that, I dunno, I feel bad that Bristol and her hubby-to-be have gotten dragged out in front of everybody. I mean, this is worse than being sixteen and having your parents walk in on you masturbating. It's more like that happening, and then having your parents shoved out of the way by Anderson Cooper and his camera crew.

Why the Sarah Palin Scandal isn't like the typical Republican Sex Scandal...

2008-09-03T17:02:00.000-07:00

...unlike the typical Republican sex scandal, it involves consenting adults.

Oh wait... no it doesn't.

We love you, Emily!

Writing Innapropriate Commentary About Underage Sexpots...

2008-09-03T14:58:00.000-07:00

...is easier than an Alaskan teenager.

We love you Emily.

Good News is Bad News (LA Style)

2008-09-02T16:06:00.001-07:00

Found this story on the front page of today's LA Times metro section:

Summer slayings in L.A. fewest since '67 summer of love
By Joel Rubin | 2:00 PM PDT
LAPD Chief William J. Bratton says there were 84 slayings in the city from June through August. He adds that all categories of violent and property crimes are down from last year.

Bringing up the summer of love is a little weird, but that weirdness pales in comparison with the implication that it's good news that there's was only about a murder a day in my new home town over the summer. Not that Chicago was any better, but I had the same sense of wonderment there every time I was supposed to be delighted that the death rate had dropped from the spectacularly awful to the merely unacceptable.

Yes, people in Baghdad would love to have LA's murder rate. But then people in Baghdad would love to have a lot of things that don't involve explosions in public places. We should probably set our standards higher (here and there, really).

A few interesting/depressing facts, many of them from the very good website that the Times maintains for homicides in LA County. In the county (pop. 10m, which includes a lot more than the city), there have been 485 murders so far this year. A whopping 85% of those killed have been men (most of those apparently between the usual ages of 15 and 40). Here's a breakdown of the homicides by race (comparing the actual percentages to the percentages one would expect if homicides were independent of race).

Asians account for 5.1% of total homicides, 38.3% the amount one would expect.

Whites account for 8%, 29.2% the expected amount.

Blacks account for 30.1%, 313.5% the expected amount.

Latinos account for 56% of homicides, 118.3% of the expected amount.

Note: A likely thing skewing this is age. LA County's Latino population is generally substantially younger than the other groups, especially non-Hispanic whites. Since homicide victims (and killers) tend to fall in that 15-40 age group, it's a meaningful point. If anybody has current demographic information, please let me know.

John McCain Is So Old.

2008-08-29T13:21:00.000-07:00

How old is he?

John McCain is so old that he thinks Life Alert is a health care program.

And they sent the oil to China

2008-08-28T13:14:00.000-07:00

Iraq's government signed a deal to sell $3 billion of oil to... Chinahttp://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/business/7585790.stm.

So the Bush administration starts a war over aggression over oil and they don't get the oil. Not only that but it goes to our biggest competitor.

Nice one, morons.

Seriously I could have stolen that oil. I'd have just bribed Saddam for it.

Dem Convention

2008-08-25T20:37:00.000-07:00

Having a hard time getting excited for it. Joe Biden just seemed like such an uninspired choice. Maybe I'm too hard on Obama. But he really could have done better than that.

Reading Michael Moore's new book, "Mike's Election Guide." In it he has a chapter called how to elect John McCain, a sort of blueprint for failure. Picking an insider, conservative white guy running mate was one of the ways to do it. I think Moore really meant "don't pick some guy just because he's a military vet." But Biden really is a conservative Democrat (as a Senator from Delaware he's entirely beholden to the banking industry) and he's an insider and he was wrong about Iraq, which is what Obama bludgeoned Hillary with for months.

Hopefully McCain will just hand us the election by picking Joe Lieberman as a running mate.

Jamaica Wins the Olympics!

2008-08-21T18:16:00.000-07:00

UPDATED & EXPANDED!

I went through and ran this again with the final numbers. Basically, Jamaica kicked ass.

Yes, I'm still avoiding the Democratic convention.

The Chinese government put concerted and massive effort into winning the most (gold) medals during the Beijing games, and it paid off. Chinese athletes won 100 total medals, 51 of them gold. US athletes won 110 total medals, 36 gold. China finished first in the gold medal race, the US second. In the total medal count, China & the US flipped positions.

By simple measurements, the usual suspects did quite well for the summer Olympics. The top five nations by total medal count were: USA (110), China (100), Russia (72), Great Britain (47), and Australia (46). By weighted medal count (in which a gold medal equals 3 points, a silver 2, and a bronze 1), that doesn't change much: China (223), US (220), Russia (139), Great Britain (98), and Australia (89).

But I'm less interested in which nation won the most medals than which nation did the best with what it has.

First, population. Among the top thirty medal-winning nations (actually thirty-one due to a tie) the top five nations by per capita medal count were: Jamaica (4.07 medals per million people), Australia (2.15), Cuba (2.12), New Zealand (2.09), and Norway (2.08). The US was 25th out of thirty-one with 0.36, and China was dead last with .08.

Next, wealth. Among the same thirty-one nations, the top five medal winners were: Jamaica (1,100 medals per US$1 trillion GDP), Cuba (480), Kenya (467), Belarus (380), and Ethiopia (368). China was 17th (30), and the US was 29th (9).

To measure both wealth and population, I set up a formula by which the richest country (the US) got a wealth value of 1.0, and all the other countries got lower values based on their percentage of the US' GDP. I did the same with population, and then I divided each country's total medals by the sum of its wealth value and population value. The resulting quotient is to me the ultimate measure of doing the best you can with you've got:

1) Jamaica--3,983
2) Cuba--1,976
3) Belarus--1,737
4) Azerbaijan--804
5) New Zealand--711
6) Kazakhstan--689
7) Ukraine--601
8) Hungary--565
9) Australia--561
10) Slovakia--507

(By this formula, the US's score of 89 ranked 26th, and China's 81 ranked 28th.)

Unsurprisingly, John McCain's house count becomes less impressive if one adjusts for wealth.

Gloat, Gloat, Heh

2008-08-12T20:00:00.000-07:00

French xenophobe Jean-Marie Le Pen and his ultranationalist party the National Front have become increasingly unpopular and are consequently having financial difficulties. The National Front's most recent notable fundraising effort is to sell its national headquarters in Paris to a Shanghai university.

John Edward Wins Silver

2008-08-12T17:37:00.000-07:00

So by now we all know that John Edwards cheated on his cancer-stricken wife.

I suppose one up side of this is that it spares us any chance of Newt Gingrich's making a last-minute run as an independent. Everybody's justifiably laughing over Edwards' attempt to mitigate his assholery by pointing out that his wife was in remission during the affair, but after one of his affairs Gingrich actually asked his wife for a divorce while she was in the hospital recovering from cancer surgery. So despite a strong kick at the end Edwards will have to settle for silver in the 400m Freestyle Big-Haired Douchebag

But keep at it, tiger. You're an up-and-comer.

(Nyuck, nyuck.)

Yet again, I'm having a hard time getting scandalized by this. Mostly, as Mike and I have been saying for a long time, Americans need to stop pretending that monogamy is easy. People cheat on each other. People have open relationships. Spouses should care about that stuff, but I don't think the rest of us should. Not unless a candidate has made his or her own monogamy or celibacy a selling point or has spent a lot of time demonizing others for violating sexual taboos that he or she is also violating.

Still, I'm curious: should I be a bit upset? Is there some hypocrisy here (mine or Edwards')? Edwards, after all, was trying to position himself as a "values" Democrat. I guess my thought is that despite the occasional nod in the direction of the religious right, what Edwards meant by "values" always seemed to have a lot more to do with social justice than sexual conduct. But maybe I'm letting him off the hook too easily. Anybody have thoughts?

Does Anybody Believe...

2008-08-04T12:53:00.001-07:00

...that the government scientist who killed himself just before he was about to be indicted for the post 9/11 anthrax mailings was actually the guy who committed the crime?

Because I don't think I do.

I mean, maybe.

But, no, I doubt it.

The Most Trusted Name In News

2008-07-29T06:59:00.000-07:00

Watching a little CNN as I head off to work and they just had a bunch of footage of scary al-Qaeda training camps. The story? A possible al-Qaeda attack on the Olympics in Beijing. Not that there's any evidence this will happen, of course. It's just something that some CNN producer has decided could happen and hence the story.

Here's my story pitch to CNN. It's also something that could happen: I've known since childhood that the ruthless Cobra Commander has been using genetic manipulation and human cloning in order to create an army of super soldiers who are stronger, faster, more agile, more resilient and smarter than the average person. Seems to me that these superhuman clones could blend in well with.... Olympic athletes. CNN should do this story. What if Cobra Commander replaces the world's Olympic Athletes with his superhuman clone soldiers? As soon as the torch is lit, the clones could attack and take over Beijing, China and eventually the world.

How Katie Keeps Her Job...

2008-07-28T12:22:00.000-07:00

CBS has to pay her $40 million if they fire her.

And, good for her. It's always a good idea to give a ruthless employer something to think about before they jump the gun and fire you, especially when you left a high paying job to take a risk anchoring the broadcast that's pretty much always been third in the ratings.

George Bush Is Batman

2008-07-25T10:42:00.000-07:00

The Wall Street Journal decided to run this column by a mystery writer who believes that Batman is a metaphor for George Bush, so I thought I'd share the laughs.

Money quote: "...when our artistic community is ready to show that sometimes men must kill in order to preserve life; that sometimes they must violate their values in order to maintain those values; and that while movie stars may strut in the bright light of our adulation for pretending to be heroes, true heroes often must slink in the shadows, slump-shouldered and despised -- then and only then will we be able to pay President Bush his due and make good and true films about the war on terror."

Well, I could pick this apart and make an argument about how the writer, Andrew Klavan doesn't understand the Batman mythos or the movie he saw. But that'd be pedantic and dorky. It'd be pedorkant. Instead, let's just list all the things we know that prove that George Bush is NOT The Batman despite the fact that they both come from rich families and have ties to weapons contractors:

Batman knows better than to go into battle without body armor.

Batman cannot be knocked unconscious by chewing a pretzel.

Batman would not choose a guy who looks like his enemy The Penguin to be his vice president.

If George Bush were Batman, Batman would love the Joker. "That guy's weird. Heheheh."

Batman never gets into a fight without having formulated an exit strategy.

Katie, Hillary and Sexism

2008-07-22T13:20:00.000-07:00

I definitely think that Hillary Clinton's campaign was hurt (but not ruined) by sexist media coverage, especially from folks like Chris Matthews. But to have to read Katie saying this " is a tad annoying: "I find myself in the last bastion of male dominance, and realizing what Hillary Clinton might have realized not long ago: that sexism in the American society is more common than racism, and certainly more acceptable or forgivable. In any case, I think my post and Hillary's race are important steps in the right direction."

Katie Couric makes $15 million a year to read the news. I just don't get how she's a victim of sexism. $15 million a year and her ratings suck. And no, her ratings don't suck because of sexism. Her ratings suck because she has no credibility because she spent years acting like a clown on The Today Show, for which she was also paid obscenely.

This somewhat applies to Hillary Clinton as well. She had to put up with some comments that no reasonable contender for the presidency should have had to put up with. But I actually attribute a lot of it to that Washington D.C. rule of the 1990s which says that it's okay to say anything you want about a Clinton. Even so, she was badly treated. But she's no victim. She's a multimillionaire Senator who is on track to achieve any number of great things in the years ahead.

Is it sexism that keeps Katie from being the number one rated anchor? Or Hillary from being President? How can anyone square that with the wealth, power and influence they already have? Oprah Winfrey had a ton of struggles too. But you don't see her going around saying that sexism and racism have kept her a billionaire instread of a multibillionaire.

Fact-Finding, Fact-Losing

2008-07-18T16:26:00.000-07:00

McCain recently criticized Obama for reiterating his intention to get American troops out of Iraq within eighteen months if he's elected even though Obama hasn't yet made his upcoming fact-finding trip to Iraq.

“In my experience," McCain said, "fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy."

I'm not sure it's a fair accusation in this case, but it's a reasonable one. Policy decisions should always be inspired by aspiration but shaped by information. And even more important than finding facts is really thinking them through--making sure that they're as reliable, complete, and contexualized as possible. I've got no problem with McCain making this critique of Obama's stance. It rings a little hollow since I don't think there's any facts McCain could find that would make him change his policy, but that's a another story.

What I do object to is that since learning in 2000 just how ruthless and dishonest Bush and his retinue can be, McCain seems to have developed Stockholm syndrome for his captors in the creep wing of the GOP. In the past 5 years in Iraq, the US government has spent about a trillion dollars that could have been used at home (hello, mortgage crisis, hello tanking dollar), the US military has lost 4,121 soldiers, and (conservatively) 90,000 Iraqis have been killed.

This all happened to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction that were long gone and to take out al Qaeda loyalists who weren't yet there. Before the invasion, those facts had been found. But then the White House had them lost. McCain isn't dumb. He knows that. But he's been mute on it for five years, and he'll be mute for another five months at least. If it's worth criticizing Obama for not making military decisions in terms of the best available information, surely it's worth criticizing the Bush administration-- Oh, never mind. We know what's going on.

Anyway, the good news in all this is that during the Bush administration, human life hasn't become worth less just figuratively. It's now literally worth less. 11.5% less, to be precise. In 2003, the EPA set the value of human life at $7.8 million dollars in deciding whether certain environmental pollution regulations saved enough life-dollars to be worth the regulation-dollars spent on them. Since then, the figure has dropped to $6.9 million.

Putting the dead from the Iraq war at 94,121 and setting aside deaths due to opportunity costs, the new EPA figure means that those who died in the Iraq war are only worth $649 billion. So it turns out that losing those facts about Iraq was only about a $1.65-trillion mistake rather than a $1.73-trillion mistake. Nice.

Lame Bedfellows

2008-07-17T14:15:00.000-07:00

So the New Yorker's latest issue has a caricature of Michelle & Barack Obama on its cover. She looks like a cross between Sister Souljah and Angela Davis, and he looks like Osama bin Laden. There's an American flag burning in the background.

Obviously--obviously!--this is a satire of all the untrue rumors about Obama that range from the (should-be) benign (Obama = Muslim) to the clearly insane (Obama = al Qaeda sleeper). It's well done and kinda funny.

Naturally, nobody involved in the major parties' campaigns admits to having a sense of humor about it.

An Obama spokesman told reporters, "The New Yorker may think... that their cover is a satirical lampoon... But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree." John McCain weighed in on the issue himself, calling it "totally inappropriate" and adding, "I understand if Senator Obama and his supporters would find it offensive." Heck, even Michael Bloomberg said, "We all have to watch very carefully what we say — our attempts at humor, our attempts at informing people — because some of what we say can be misinterpreted and do real damage."

Isn't it bad enough that during a presidential election our candidates' debates involve no real debate and that their policy positions have about as much detail as a 4-dpi image? Are we supposed to sacrifice our senses of humor too?

Well, as far some are concerned, yes. But the really annoying thing is that I'm convinced that neither McCain nor Obama is truly offended by these cartoons. There's no way that anybody who has even the vaguest idea what the New Yorker is would legitimately believe that the cartoonist was being serious. And it's a pretty funny drawing. I'm almost positive that both candidates responded as they did solely in order to put position themselves as centrists.

By claiming to be offended, Obama gets to take a swing at a lefty publication and remind people that, indeed, he isn't a terrorist and that his wife doesn't hate whitey. And John McCain gets to present himself as a racially sensitive kinda Republican who's wiling to agree with his opponent on matters of principle when their principles overlap.

Except here the principle they share is "I really want to get elected." And, of course, to bore us silly in the process. Only it's the kind of silly that we're not allowed to laugh at, apparently.

Free at Last, Free (of him) at Last!

2008-07-04T10:42:00.000-07:00

Former North Carolina Senator Jesse Helms died early this morning. No doubt it would have pleased him to die on the Fourth of July, though likely not as much as making it to next April 12 would have.

You know, I disagreed with pretty much every position Jesse Helms ever took--on race, on militarism, on art, on religion, on gay rights and civil rights in general. But when a man dies, you have to be respectfully willing to give him his due on the things he did right.

Unfortunately, I have no idea what those things are. Maybe he was a good family man?

If I remember correctly, soon after the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jesse Helms used one of his popular WRAL radio commentaries to say that King had gotten what he deserved for promoting violence. In that eulogistic spirit, let me commemorate the life of Jesse Helms with some things that he definitely did say about race and social justice:

—"It is time to face, honestly and sincerely, the purely scientific evidence of natural racial distinction in group intellect."

—Martin Luther King, Jr. and his followers can be "proved Communists and sex perverts.”

—King is “a sham, an agitator, a fellow traveler with known communists … King can wave his Nobel Peace Prize to his heart’s content, [but his movement] is about as non-violent as the Marines landing on Iwo Jima, and is a ‘movement’ only in the sese that mob action is moving and spreading throughout the land.”

—In 1968, Helms could hear in in King’s voice “the crackle of anarchy and the threat of violence.”

Rest in Silence, Jesse Helms.

.

Almost Forgot about Them

2008-07-01T18:34:00.000-07:00

So, yeah, the NRA. Great.

The NRA is proudly proclaiming that it's going to carry out a $15m campaign against Barack Obama. Now, I kinda suspect that figure's a strategic exaggeration, but still, the NRA would seem to mean business on this one.

My favorite quote from the CNN article I've linked to:

The NRA's beef with Obama: He supports a ban on semi-automatic weapons and on almost all concealed weapons, and a limit on handgun purchases to one a month.

Yup, clearly the man's a fanatic.

The Crowded Table

2008-06-23T11:51:00.001-07:00

Have you noticed that already in the course of this presidential election Barack Obama (among others) has been criticized for saying that he might be willing to negotiate with, say, Cuba or Iran if it seemed fruitful to do so. Such willingness, apparently, might make America look weak.

The thing that increasingly amazes me as I think about this is that a lot of the same people making this critique believe that the US would look weak if it were to take "any option off the table." But apparently in this lexicon, diplomacy literally is not an option. Leaving all options on the table is shorthand for "We reserve the right nuke Tehran."

So, it's sober politics to say, "Well, we might nuke you if it seems useful." And it's crazy talk to say, "We might talk to you if seems useful." Got it.

Clear All Cookies

2008-06-22T11:46:00.001-07:00

Cindy McCain has stirred up controversy recently because when asked for a family cookie recipes, she offered up one taken from Rachel Ray's website. Then, when asked on a later occasion for a favorite recipe, she borrowed one from hersheys.com and said it was from a friend.

On one level, this is a little embarrassing, not so much for the plagiarism but because it seems to reinforce the idea that the McCains are as old as the their detractors say--nobody under the age of 40 thinks that you can successfully plagiarize from websites that come up on the first page of Google hits.

Mostly, though, I hope she keeps doing this. I remember when Hillary Clinton had to go through this as a prospective first lady. Two or three more times and it will be hilarious performance art. It might even keep magazines from feeling like they have the obligation or right to ask first spouses for recipe tips.

Seriously, who cares what cookies the first spouses make? At this point, presidential candidates are likely to be married to men or women who don't spend much time baking. Accept it and move along.

Oh No, PUMA People!

2008-06-06T12:41:00.000-07:00

So there's an online movement calling itself Party Unity My Ass that seeks to... I'm not sure what. It opposes Barack Obama and seems to oppose the Democratic party because "It is no longer the party of FDR and shared responsibility. Now, it is the party of wannabe rich libertarian Democrats."

I wonder what there problem is with libertarian Democrats. All we want is social freedom (the right to do mostly what we want so long as we aren't harming others), reproductive freedom (and in general the right to make private medical decisions) and equal treatment under the law (as with the right to same sex marriges). Why should any of that bother these people?

Given that Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton agree generally on the major issues, what are these PUMA people so worked up about?

On Negotiating With Castro

2008-05-23T13:13:00.000-07:00

Fidel Castro has relinquished power in Cuba. Negotiating with the successor government, as Barack Obama would like to do, makes sense. See, when governments are in transition like this and when the old guard has faded into the background, it kind of changes the game.

It's not 50 years ago. The same players aren't even on the field.

Obama gets it.

Joe Lieberman doesn't.

Tard Working Americans

2008-05-08T06:15:00.000-07:00

I am really tired of the phrase "hard working Americans."

A New Blog That You MUST read!

2008-04-06T17:36:00.000-07:00

I've just been tipped off to the fact that John McCain's best friend of 847 years is now blogging from Scottsdale, Arizona! Check it out!

Bowling? Wha?

2008-04-01T06:53:00.000-07:00

So Barack Obama isn't a great bowler.

Chris Matthews makes an ass out of himself over it, of course. But people are really taking the "Barack Obama isn't a great bowler" story seriously. As if it says something about the guy.

It's 2008. Do any of us even know anyone who bowls regularly? If somebody came up to me right now and said "Let's go bowling!" I am absolutely sure I would suggest some other activity. Maybe any other activity.

Chris Matthews seems to equate bowling with manliness. So this just falls into that category of stuff they make male Democrats do when they run for president -- I hope that Obama doesn't feel the need to eat food that he doesn't like or to hunt for animals that he doesn't particularly want to kill just to prove his manliness to Chris Matthews.

And Chris... you're a doughboy. You need to get to the gym before you talk about anyone else's manly qualities. I got an idea -- you and me in a public boxing match. I say you wind up cowering with your face behind your gloves within the first minute and that you'll never bring up the "who's manly" question in public again.

Random Reader Poll

2008-03-31T20:52:00.000-07:00

Yes, yes, any reader we get is probably "random" in the sense of "accidental." I think most of our traffic comes from assorted fluid fetishists who mistyped "thosethingswespray."

Be that as it may, I hear from the kids that the Internets are all about "interactivity" and "participation" (you know, like democracy used to be). In that spirit, here's another of my ongoing series of random poll questions.

Kickette.com: Check out the link and vote in the comments section.

Is it:

1) A site run by and for women with an interest in soccer players' hot bodies, chiseled jaws, and strangely dressed wives and girlfriends,

OR

2) A site run by and for "women" with an interest in soccer players' hot bodies, chiseled jaws, and strangely dressed wives and girlfriends?

Evidence for #1: Well, they all sign on with women's names. And many of the ladies do like hot men. I hear.

Evidence for #2: They all sign on with women's names. If this weren't camp-central, wouldn't there be more self-identified gay men posting?

Oh, and if you want to be all safe and lame, you can refuse the false dichotomy and vote "3) Some of both."

Seriously? (v. 2.0)

2008-03-30T11:41:00.000-07:00

Okay, so the Bush Administration just explained to Chinese Premier Hu Jintao that in 2006 the US military accidentally sent Taiwan not the intended helicopter batteries but rather nuclear fuse triggers. Also, it took them eighteen months to notice.

The horrifying thing is that, while I think Hilary Clinton was just lying about her sniper adventures in Bosnia, I'm at least willing to entertain the possibility that the Bush administration really did manage to accidentally send nuclear weapons parts abroad.

Really? Seriously?

2008-03-25T17:45:00.000-07:00

From the BBC:

[Clinton's] aides earlier admitted she "misspoke" in claiming she and daughter Chelsea "ran with our heads down" when arriving in Bosnia in 1996.
...

In her speech last week, Mrs Clinton said: "I remember landing under sniper fire. There was supposed to be some kind of a greeting ceremony at the airport, but instead we just ran with our heads down to get into the vehicles to get to our base."

...
But a video clip played by CBS on Monday showed Mrs Clinton and Chelsea walking across the tarmac smiling and waving before stopping to shake hands with Bosnia's acting president and meet an eight-year-old girl.

Mrs Clinton said in Greensburg, Pennsylvania, on Tuesday: "So I made a mistake. That happens. It proves I'm human, which you know, for some people, is a revelation."

Okay. Seriously. I can see a Green Beret getting confused about when he did and didn't take sniper fire. But how often do you come under sniper fire if you're the daughter of an affluent Park Ridge family who goes to Wellesley as an undergrad, to Yale for law school, to Arkansas to live in the governor's mansion, and then to D.C. to live in the White House? How on earth do you "misremember" that or "misspeak" about that?

Seriously.

A NAFTA Post

2008-03-20T17:21:00.000-07:00

Michael Mink would like a NAFTA post and since he represents our readership (by himself) we would do well to say "yes!" when he asks for something. Michael Mink has great powers. But that's a post for another time.

NAFTA
a post
by
Mike M.

It's really difficult to post about NAFTA because the issue was picked to death when it became law in the 1990s and because it's clear a decade later that both its adherents and its detractors were wrong. It did cost American manufacturing jobs. But it created jobs in other industries including shipping, retail and high tech. Some of those jobs are not as good as the jobs that were lost, some are better. Most people say it's a wash. One of the tough things that Clinton and Obama have had to deal with is that if you're campaigning in Texas, people tend to like NAFTA. If you're campaigning in Iowa, not so much. NAFTA didn't represent a loss or gain of wealth so much as a transfer of wealth or a transfer of opportunity if you prefer.

The ability to import cheap manufactured goods allowed our economy to grow like gangbusters during the 1990s without sparking inflation. Cheap goods are deflationary. We're partly in trouble now because our falling dollar is making cheap goods less cheap. That's why everyone's so worried about inflation now. The price of oil is going up partly because the dollar is so weak and people are using other competing currencies to buy it. Still, cheap goods are deflationary. If we didn't have access to them right now, the economy would really crater.

Now this is a mixed bag but on the subject of NAFTA and trade in general -- it's somewhat good that we send our dollars away in exchange for cheap goods. It really does help people improve their lives. India and China and Brazil are really developing middle classes because of this. Less so in Mexico, though. Because it is a mixed bag. Some countries get middle classes. Some countries get to make cheap goods while being treated as virtual prisoners in sweat shops. And don't get me started about the environmental impacts of low cost production facilities.

Which means that NAFTA and all trade agreements need labor and environmental standards. This is a no brainer. Unfortunately, these standards are never implemented in trade agreements. Ever.

I believe that international trade is good. I also believe that you have the right to purchase goods from outside of the US. I am drinking an Argentinian wine right now. That's a good thing. It's tasty and a good deal. Yay for me.

But having that right doesn't mean we should let the invisible hand take over. We have a tremendous amount of influence because we are the world's largest customer.

Take Michael Mink, this blog's only reader. He wanted a post on NAFTA. He got a post on NAFTA. He has tremendous influence as he is this blog's largest customer. My big mistake was waiting for days to fulfill his request. It really was a mistake. I might have lost his loyalty. That's not good.

The US is the same way. Our trading partners might complain but in the end they really will meet labor and environmental standards if it's their only way to get our money. They will do it. Everyone knows it. Problem is, it's the multinational corporations that are based here in the US (or Bermuda, for tax purposes) who don't want us making an issue out of that. Heck, most of the time that we find companies behaving badly in other countries (putting children to work in factories or dumping sludge in rivers) those companies are either subsidiaries of US multinationals or working to fulfill contracts to US multinationals.

Will labor and environmental standards make cheap goods less cheap? No. That's where the market really will come into play. Clever business types throughout the world will find ways to make their products cheaply without abusing their workers or the planet. They simply will. Capitalism is not a system that hates regulation. It dies without it. Capitalism actually loves regulation. It loves rules. Because it can generate the most efficient solutions only when the rules are known and enforced. Capitalism tells you how to best make Y out of X under rule Z.

Because a capitalist is not the same think as a free market adherent.

So there you have it. NAFTA and trade in general is largely the moral thing to do, largely a good thing to do, but needs to be implemented according to clear and intelligent rules. Labor and environmental standards would be a start.

Bias

2008-03-13T11:59:00.001-07:00

This blog is biased.

Against things that suck.

I just want to be clear on our editorial policy here.

Well, prostitutes suck and we're not biased against them.

We're biased against things that suck as an adjective, not as a verb.

We'll be having a meeting to clarify our opinion about NAFTA.

Spitzer? I Hardly Know Her!

2008-03-11T11:32:00.001-07:00

You know, the only reason I care about in the Eliot Spitzer sex scandal is that it once again makes me giggle to hear that paying a sex worker to cross state lines is a violation of the Mann Act. I just think that's hilarious.

Otherwise, I dunno. I don't really care about sex scandals. Sure, I'm always willing to say, "Live by the sword, die by the sword" when some gay-bashing conservative Senator gets caught licking crank off some nineteen-year-old twink's cock. And I'll be willing to say the same just as soon as some straight-bashing liberal Senator gets caught settling down with an opposite-sex spouse to form a family. But Spitzer's whole schtick has always been fighting corporate corruption. So until we find out that Goldman Sachs paid the sex worker in question to goldman his sack, I don't think I care.

Nope. I don't.

Does anybody else? I mean, I'd hate to harsh a good moment of outrage

7.5 Tons of Angry Steel

2008-03-02T23:04:00.000-08:00

The US Navy just christened a new amphibious assault ship the USS New York, which will interest most people primarily because 7.5 tons of the ship's steel was salvaged from the 9/11 Ground Zero.

You know, I'm always glad to raise the one-finger salute to al-Qaeda and its affiliated ghouls. But I have mixed feelings at best about this particular gesture, especially since the dedication for the ship took place in Louisiana (where the ship was built). It seems to me like a more fitting gesture would have been put that steel and that money into rebuilding the levees and the other storm-mitigation infrastructure in New Orleans. Because ultimately I think it's better to tend to one's own than to spite one's enemy.

Those Draft Bloomberg people sure are angry!

2008-02-29T05:02:00.000-08:00

Okay, I signed the Draft Bloomberg permission as First Name: Stupid and Last Name: Dumbass, just to see if they were paying attention. I didn't expect a letter like this!

www.DraftBloomberg.com - logo

Dear Stupid,

Thanks for signing the Draft Bloomberg petition.

As I am sure you know by now, the Mayor has decided that he will not run. He has asked us to pass along these words to you:

"I have been greatly flattered and gratified by your encouragement, but as you know I have decided not to seek the presidency. If one of the remaining candidates chooses an independent and non-partisan course to meet the severe issues confronting the country, I will be fully engaged and supportive, and I hope you will be as well. Thank you for your confidence."

It is surprising to realize that it has been less than two months that the Draft Bloomberg effort first took shape even before the first vote was cast in the Iowa caucuses. The goal was simple: To enable the American people to have the option on the November 2008 ballot to vote for a candidate who would meet the enormous challenges in front of the country and change Washington's broken politics-as-usual forever.

Michael Bloomberg would have done that and could have won.

But an interesting thing has happened since then. The American people, sensing those challenges themselves, seem to be in the process of choosing the most likely candidates in their parties to do the same thing. A contest between Senators McCain and Obama would be transformational in itself; the small-time, bickering, schoolyard politics of Washington seems on the verge of change.

Your voice was one of the many demanding the change that is happening. That's the way the system works: What the people demand they get. And while a Bloomberg candidacy and presidency would have been an appropriate answer, thanks to you and millions like you there is still hope for transformational change in front of us.

Thanks,

Doug Bailey
Jerry Rafshoon
www.DraftBloomberg.com

12,008

2008-02-21T09:53:00.000-08:00

I'm so desperately unhip that I got this link from Newsweek, but it amused me. (It's funnier if you've seen the will.i.am Obama video first.)

Fifteen Percent

2008-02-15T23:18:00.000-08:00

So most of you know that Mike and I grew up in New Mexico. Part of my growing up was running cross country in high school.

I was pretty good. Not great, but pretty good. I ran my thirty to forty miles a week hard (though I bitched whenever I had enough breath), and I usually beat way more people than beat me. Still, I knew that my chances of a college scholarship were pretty much nonexistent (I got lazily recruited by precisely one school, which was never going to give me a scholarship--not sure it gave anybody scholarships). And I knew my chances of competing at some level beyond college were slightly worse than those of becoming an astronaut. So I was fine with putting in my miles, drinking my lemon-lime saline water, and occasionally barfing after a really tough race. Good friends and relative success were all I needed from sports. I was going to prep school, after all. I was supposed to go to college to do things with books, and I did. Now I work at a desk and hit the treadmill and wonder how I gained thirty pounds overnight. (Oh, wait, over fifteen years. Crap.)

Anyway, I remember running against guys who took the sport way more seriously. A lot of those guys were from tribal schools. And those guys, the serious ones, man they ran hard. As far as I could tell as an outsider, for a lot of the Native American runners cross country was like football for poor kids in west Texas.

A varsity cross country team puts seven runners in the race, the first five of whose scores count. My senior year (after an injury to our best runner) I was usually the fastest on our team. But there were certain schools--mostly the big tribal schools--who were so good that I sincerely felt proud if I could beat their slowest scorer. During my time, Gallup was the school to beat. They weren't a tribal school, but I think all their runners were Navajo. (Gallup is right at the edge of the Navajo Nation.) I couldn't tell you what Gallup's top runners' faces looked like, but I remember the back of their jerseys. Those guys could run.

Our team had certain teams that we disliked or outright hated--Sandia, La Cueva, Manzano, St. Pius. Those were teams from bigger schools or teams whose dickhead coaches passed on their dickhead ethos. (Even more obnoxious than John Kreese telling all his little Cobra Kai students "No mercy" is some douche in with a stopwatch and a whistle doing the same thing beside a chalk line through a New Mexico mesa.) We never hated Gallup, though. It would have been like going to the beach and hating the tide. They ran hard. They won. The sun set, the sun rose. Besides, even then we all knew there was something deadly serious about how the guys from Gallup ran (about how the guys from Laguna Acoma ran, the guys from Shiprock, from Zuni). They trained seventy miles a week. They ran before the sun rose, after the sun set.

We had one kid on our team--a freshman when I was a senior--and he ran hard too. He had talent and, more to the point, he had something to prove, though I never quite figured out what. He left himself jelly-legged after every hard workout. (It paid off. He went on to be a Gatorade All-American I think, maybe regional All-American.) Running against a lot of the tribal schools was like running against squadrons of that kid. I'm not saying they were inhumanly great or glassy-eyed zealots, of course. But they did seem more intense than the guys I ran with.

I had some sense of why that might be, of course. Like I said, I grew up in New Mexico. If you actually read the history book they plunked in front of you in seventh grade, you could take a pretty good guess as to where least some of that urgency and intensity came from. ("And then the Spaniards returned to the rebellious village and cut the right foot off every man and child older than twelve." "And then the US broke another treaty with the Navajo or the Apache, you know, to keep in practice.") But I'm not sure if that ever really sank in for me, or even if it has now.

I bring this all up now because I just read a story in the New York Times about Wings of America, an elite cross country team that draws from reservations schools across the US. The team sounds like it offers an outlet and an opportunity for a lot of runners, and I'm glad it's there. But the story had this quotation in it:

In the Navajo Nation... many of the statistics concerning health problems are even higher than for the overall numbers for American Indians. A study in the American Journal of Public Health showed that nearly 15 percent of youths in the Navajo Nation in grades 6-12 had attempted suicide....

“There’s this element of historical post-traumatic stress that’s occurred in Indian communities,” said Dr. Chuck North, the chief medical officer for Indian Health Services. “The history of Native Americans in the United States is one of loss: losing land, losing language, losing culture and losing family members.”

As far as I can tell, North is pretty much right, although no surviving people's history is entirely a history of loss. Anyway, it made me remember those Gallup runners. More important, it seemed astonishing. 15%! The average rates of US suicide in other ethnicities in that age group run from 1.5-6% (girls rank nearer the high end, boys lower). That's horrifying enough, but 15% is triple or quadruple that rate. Why don't we talk about this more?

Lord knows I waste enough time posting about soccer jerseys, but wow. The shit we talk about and the shit we don't.

Victory Is Mine!

2008-02-05T21:53:00.000-08:00

Actually, both Clinton and Obama did very well. But Hillary isn't getting proper credit for her achievement.

Winning New York and California is big.

Losing Connecticut is bad because she should have won the tri-state area.

But winning Massachusetts is huge. Senators Kennedy and Kerry endorsed Obama, as did the state's very popular governor. Not only that but the Kennedy endorsement led to ridiculous media coverage of other Kennedy family Obama endorsements (including Caroline Kennedy and Maria Shriver, neither of whom are more qualified than the average non-rich or famous person to make an endorsement). The Massachusetts political machine was dead set against Hillary and the media helped the machine along. She still won. That should be a big story of the night. She's that kind of fighter.

Is Hillary an Opportunist?

2008-02-04T19:16:00.000-08:00

Is it down to Barack the idealist vs. Hillary the opportunist? Well, my fellow blogger Jon makes a good point about Hillary's Iraq war vote, which was clearly a vote of political expedience. It is hard to watch her claim that she didn't think George W. of all people, wouldn't rush to war as soon as he got the authorization. She was just afraid to be on the wrong side of it. What if it turned out to be a quick war that ended with us finding a bunch of uranium in Baghdad? That's how people were thinking at the time.

I'm not proud of Hillary on that point.

She's an opportunist. It's true. But, I think she has ideals too. I doubt anyone would disagree.

Now here's the truth about Obama -- he's an opportunist too. He's the product of the dirty Chicago political system, and he'll allow an antigay gospel singer to campaign for him, or he'll no-show women's rights votes just the same way Hillary would.

Obama is an opportunist too, but he pretends to be a pure idealist.

Hillary is a player who says "you can trust that my ideals will have me mostly playing for the right team." Obama doesn't even want you to know that he's playing, but he is.

I have to admit that I'm kind of annoyed that Obama is able to somehow credibly claim to be "above it all" when he most definitely isn't.

Meanwhile, Over on the Group W Bench...

2008-02-04T11:35:00.000-08:00

Okay, I'm late to the party with this, but I just noticed that Arlo Guthrie, probably most famous for his song "Alice's Restaurant," has endorsed Ron Paul in this year's the Presidential election.

Strange bedfellows indeed.

Voting on Tuesday

2008-02-03T19:11:00.000-08:00

My vote was going to go to John Edwards but since he's out...

I'll be voting for Hillary Clinton. Yes, I'm irked by her Iraq war vote but this is the woman who has understood the Republican attack machine from the very beginning. When she was first lady and she called out the "vast right wing conspiracy" she articulated something that's true in contemporary American politics. The Republicans have beaten a lot of our party's best with that machine. But they've never beaten a Clinton. When they tried to impeach Bill he not only stopped them but took down Newt Gingrich even while he was on defense.

Hillary understand that politics is war. Partisanship is not a bad thing. People are supposed to coalesce around the ideas that they think are important. Then people are supposed to disagree, loudly and proudly. I think calls for "unity" tend to lead to compromise solutions that satisfy no one.

I don't believe that Barack Obama has enough fight in him to deal with an angry, out of power, minority party that will have just enough representation to stymie everything. He'll try to reach across the aisle and he'll pull back a stump.

Hillary knows what she's up against. She knows you can't compromise with it, or play nice with it. Hillary's a fighter and I'm voting for a fighter in Tuesday's primary.

I also have to admit that I find Obama a bit... disturbing. His supporters so often seem in thrall. He's Messianic about his own candidacy. For example, he recently argued that if he's nominated he'd easily get the votes of Hillary's supporters but that if she's nominated the reverse isn't true. If that's what Obama's supporters are really like (him or nothing) then I'm a bit weirded out by Obama's supporters.

Let's face it -- the two are identical on policy. When they tried to articulate their differences during the last debate, they really had to stretch. So anyone who supports Obama but won't vote for Hillary has to admit that they're basically making a decision based on Obama's charisma. It's a cult of personality. Because of the issues were at stake here, than either candidate would be able to count on the other's supporters in the general.

Well, there you have it. I'm voting for Hillary. I hope she wins and I think she'll make an excellent president. She's really earned it, too. She's already made history as the first former First Lady to be twice elected to the Senate. She's ready to make history again.

The only difference between her and Obama is that she understands the other side and he doesn't get it. He's just too precious right now. Let's send him back to the Senate and maybe warm him up for 2016.

A Note On the Debate

2008-01-31T17:51:00.000-08:00

It's actually been really substantive and I keep getting a good feeling that Hillary is ready.

But here's a funny part. The visual on my digital cable feed froze and the audio kept on. I must have watched for like 2 minutes, kind of thinking something was wrong but not figuring it out... talk about striking poses.

So there's the joke.

Here's the good news -- no offense to my favorite candidate, John Edwards, but it is nice that we'll be making a historic nomination. Better than that, these two are good. I'm for Hillary at this point. But whether she wins or loses, I don't think I'll have to "hold my nose and vote" in the general election this time.

Arnold's McCain Endorsement, A Haiku

2008-01-31T10:53:00.000-08:00

Solar energy,
bipartisanship is good*,
and he was tortured

*Thanks to cubiclewarrior at Swampland for adding two syllables!

Ugh

2008-01-31T00:09:00.001-08:00

The above is the new US men's national team soccer jersey. Because sponsors (in this case Nike) can push us and all the other lesser soccer nations around, every two years they come out with a new jersey in order to boost sales. That's bad for establishing a tradition, and it's worse because about half the jerseys are lame. This one isn't the worst, but it doesn't say "soccer." It says, "Biff, do tell tell the boy to trim the sail, won't you?"

For about half an hour, I put my amateurish art skills to work and came up with a better option (mostly by stealing features of the previous jersey):

Nike, try harder.

(We now return to politics 'n' stuff.)

The Republican Front Runner's Platform

2008-01-29T21:36:00.000-08:00

Less jobs and more wars.

It's very amusing how much the Republican press and punditry hate McCain.

And deeply disturbing that they're right about his platform and that the mainstream media continues to love him anyway.

Huckabee to Romney

2008-01-28T12:19:00.000-08:00

Start Digging Your Grave With a Knife and Fork.

How the media will cover the general election...

2008-01-26T13:00:00.000-08:00

Want to get on record with this prediction:

If Hillary wins the nomination, the media will spend the entire general election wondering if young and black Democrats feel disenfranchised and how that will help McCain, Romney or a third party candidate.

If Obama wins, the media will fret over whether or not Boomer aged women feel disenfranchised and how that will help the Republicans or a third party.

These arguments will be made most enthusiastically if the Republicans nominate McCain or if Bloomberg runs.

The media is setting up a "group x was left out" narrative that will benefit the Republicans and it will work to make the general election a lot closer than you think it's going to be. If the media insists on this story it is likely to become self-fulfilling.

Gitmo (Yes, Still)

2008-01-16T13:40:00.001-08:00

I'm sorry not to have posted for a while and also sorry to return to a familiar theme (Gitmo) even though there is, in theory, so much news to discuss.

However, I'm having a hard time giving a rat's ass about the primaries. The ratio of coverage to information is so punitive as to make tuning in feel like a very unsexy form of masochism. And let's not even talk about the lack of real conversation and debate. (From here on out, I propose that we replace the debates with Talking-Point Doll Theater. Each candidate would be represented by five dolls, each of which speaks a recorded talking point when you tickle its belly.)

One thing I am interested in but not in a position to have an opinion about: are things getting better in Iraq? The reports don't seem nearly so dire of late. Or is it just that we're no longer getting 24/7 IED porn because the American news outlets got distracted by Clinton's moist eyes?

Anyway, here's my gesture at a post, which actually more of a poll for anybody who happens to still be reading the blog.

The Declaration of Independence says that people shouldn't change their governments capriciously but that when a government becomes destructive to basic liberties, people can and should change the government.

To prove that King George had to go, Jefferson wrote this:

The History of the present King of Great-Britain is a History of repeated Injuries and Usurpations, all having in direct Object the Establishment of an absolute Tyranny over these States. To prove this, let Facts be submitted to a candid World.
HE has obstructed the Administration of Justice, by refusing his Assent to Laws for establishing Judiciary Powers.
HE has affected to render the Military independent of and superior to the Civil Power.
HE has combined with others to subject us to a Jurisdiction foreign to our Constitution, and unacknowledged by our Laws; giving his Assent to their Acts of pretended Legislation: FOR imposing Taxes on us without our Consent, FOR depriving us, in many Cases, of the Benefits of Trial by Jury, [and] * FOR transporting us beyond Seas to be tried for pretended Offences.

Jefferson goes on to complain that the King had "plundered our Seas, ravaged our Coasts, burnt our Towns, and destroyed the Lives of our People." I don't think we're there yet (tho' Iraqis may feel differently), but the other complaints do remind me of Gitmo.

So, on a scale of 1-10, how close are they? (1 = "radically dissimilar," 10 = "identical")

Primaries...

2008-01-03T22:53:00.000-08:00

Sorry, I got bored with blogging. So did Jon. Now there are primaries. We both might get back into it.

But I don't know.

Does this primary season really have a day called "Super Duper Tuesday?"

Is this an election or an episode of Romper Room?

I'd Spend My $100,000 on Space Tourism

2007-11-26T10:59:00.000-08:00

The New York Times just ran a piece pointing out that the because the GOP is having so much trouble raising money from voters, it's seeking out rich candidates who can pay for their own Congressional campaigns. So far, 14 Republican candidates have contributed more than $100,000 of their own money to their own campaigns.

According to the Times, the Democrats' campaign committee has raised $56.6 million and has $29.2 left in the bank. The Republicans' committee has raised $40.7 and has a balance of $2.5 million.

A couple thoughts:

1) If the Democrats can't use this to drive home the point that the Republican party is out of touch with voters who actually work for a living and uninterested in getting back in touch, they deserve to lose all 14 seats.

2) This strikes me really ominous. People shouldn't have to be rich to run for office, and the parties should seek to run a platform that voters can identify with enough to contribute to a campaign.

Mark Twain is Still Right

2007-11-16T15:23:00.000-08:00

I don't repost items too often. But this one seems worth it. I posted a longer version of this over a year ago, and I think the questions have become more urgent since then.

=================================================================

Why Are We There? When Can We Leave?

I'd like to share with you Mark Twain's thoughts on the Iraq war:

You ask me about what is called imperialism. Well, I have formed views about that question..... There is the case of Iraq. I have tried hard, and yet I cannot for the life of me comprehend how we got into that mess.... We were to relieve them from Hussein's tyranny, to enable them to set up a government of their own, and we were to stand by and see that it got a fair trial. It was not to be a government according to our ideas, but a government that represented the feeling of the majority of the Iraqis, a government according to Iraqi ideas. That would have been a worthy mission for the United States. But now -- why, we have got into a mess, a quagmire from which each fresh step renders the difficulty of extrication immensely greater. I'm sure I wish I could see what we were getting out of it, and all it means to us as a nation.

Okay, obviously Mark Twain didn't say that about America's occupation of Iraq. But he did say it--with the nations' names changed of course--about America's occupation of the Philippines, a nation that which came under US control in 1898 as part of the terms the treaty that ended the Spanish-American War (the Philippines had long been Spanish colonies). We promised the Filipinos that we were freeing them from oppressive monarchic and colonial rule, but they decided they'd rather free themselves. In 1899, the Filipinos declared independence. We fought their independence movement until 1913, and we won. The islands didn't leave American control until WW II (when Japan occupied them) and didn't get independence until 1946. (We got Puerto Rico and Guam in the same treaty and kept 'em.)

I'm fascinated that Twain's sense of the problems of the problem with America's occupation of the Philippines in 1900 applies so well to America's occupation of Iraq in 2006. And I don't think it's a fluke. I think it tells us something about the dangers of pursuing a foreign policy based on military force.

Worse, a closer analog to Iraq than the Philippines is another island nation that fell under our control after the Spanish-American War: Cuba. We got Cuba in the same treaty that we got the Philippines. President McKinley was pleased to have Cuba under his control, and he declared that America would have a twenty-year trusteeship over it. Pres. Roosevelt was more sympathetic to Cuban desires for independence, so he granted independence in 1902. But that independence had a big catch. Not only did the conditions of independence require that Cuba lease of Guantanamo Bay in perpetuity, they also granted--explicitly in the Cuban constitution--the US the right to intervene in Cuba's domestic affairs when it saw fit.

In 1906, the US exercised that right when it wasn't satisfied that Cuba's fragile (and elitist) government would survive the death of Pres. Estrada Palmer. The US was directly and indirectly involved with appointing or deposing governments in Cuba until 1944.

The factional and racial violence that helped keep Cuba politically unstable over that period seems unnervingly analogous to the regional and ethnic tensions in today's Iraq. Of course, the new Iraqi constitution doesn't allow us the right to intervene at will in Iraqi affairs, but Iraqis' inability to establish a new government, the ongoing guerrilla violence, and our having a hundred and fifty thousand troops on the ground makes that constitution more a piece of paper than a compelling reality.

And I'm afraid that the temptation to intervene militarily in Iraqi politics will be enormously strong for this and future Presidents. We now know that Bush entered this war excited not so much by supposed WMDs as by the neocon aspiration of "regional transformation," of deposing Saddam and putting a democratic, pro-US government in his place. A lot of those people are still in various important positions in the US government and a lot of them will be reluctant to see the US leave Iraq before a strong, pro-US government is in place. The problem is, it seems less likely every day that left to its own devices Iraq will have either a strong government or a pro-US government any time soon, much less both.

And you don't have to be a neocon to be tempted to stay in Iraq until we somehow "get it right." We've lost thousands of soldiers, killed tens of thousands of Iraqis, spend hundreds of billions of dollars that could have been spend on education, or health care, or a night on the town. People want those lives and that money to mean something. And Iraq is hugely important--as a source of oil, as a check on Iran, as a potential ally. If things go badly there, all that could go down the drain.

It took only a few years for thoughtful people to realize that they couldn't understand why we were in the Philippines or Cuba, but it took the US forty-eight years to get out of the Philippines and forty-six years to get out of Cuba. We've been in Iraq four. When will we get out? When can we get out? And, at least as important, how can we stop getting into these situations?

Let's Mean It, For a Change

2007-11-13T09:02:00.000-08:00

The United States must stop supporting President of Pakistan Pervez Musharraf.

President Bush has treated him as an ally in the war on terror, and Musharraf has managed to convince not just Bush but many Americans who are aware of his existence that doing so makes sense. Like many a strongman before him, Musharraf has earned American financial and political backing by rhetorically positioning himself as the only thing standing between his country and the enemies of America--in this case, Islamic fundamentalists. Pakistan's nuclear weapons make the threat of an Islamist takeover especially alarming and therefore make us more likely to listen carefully when Musharraf says he's the one keeping nukes out of Osama bin Laden's hands.

But that now seems like bunch of bunk.

For days now, despite martial law, Pakistanis have taken to the street to protest Musharraf's sacking of the Supreme Court and his feeble interest in holding elections as scheduled. But the people calling for Musharraf to resign aren't al-Qaeda and Taliban sympathizers. Many--maybe most--of them are lawyers.

It's easy to make lawyer jokes, but these should be America's best allies in the region. They have a commitment to the rule of law, to the democratic process, and a deep opposition to letting a bunch of Islamist thugs take office. Musharraf talks a good game about preventing the spread of radical Islam, but all his authoritarian rule does is encourage it because Musharraf's ultimate interest is in staying in power, not in improving life for Pakistanis. The more poverty, ignorance, and hopelessness in Pakistan, the better the chance al-Qaeda has of making real gains there. The more hopeful, educated, thoughtful people in positions of genuine authority, the more obvious al-Qaeda's stupidity and death worship will be to average Pakistanis.

Musharraf may be our dictator, but he's a dictator. Right now we have a choice between supporting him and supporting democratic reformers. That should be an easy choice, and it's one we should happily make while we still have the chance. If we continue to support Musharraf, we really will have to make the choice that he wants us to think we already have to make: the choice between him and some even less pleasant jerks. Why let it come to that?

We're always talking about spreading the rule of law and a faith in democracy. Now, in Pakistan, let's mean it.

Spineless Democrats

2007-11-09T08:10:00.001-08:00

According to this article in The Hill, the Senate's five presidential candidates weren't there to vote on whether or not Mike Mukasey, who doesn't understand that waterboarding is torture, should be attorney general.

Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, Joe Biden and Chris Dodd had all promised to oppose the Mukasey nomination but they couldn't be bothered to show up and do it.

They wouldn't have made a difference, but they would have made a 53-40 vote much closer had they been there to oppose.

Also, Evan Bayh, Diane Feinstein, Ben Nelson, Mary Landrieu, Charles Schumer, and Thomas Carper are all aleged Democrats who are no longer worthy of your support. Of course, Joe Lieberman showed once again why the people of Connecticut made a big mistake last year.

This should have been a slam dunk rejection.

The only argument against sinking this nomination is that Bush would have just kept a temp in place for the rest of his term and the temp would have been worse than Mukasey. But that's a weak argument. Congress should have left Bush with an illegitimate AG.