Now, of course, we all know Putin shoots tigers and, by night, fights petty crime in Moscow to make the streets safe for larger crime; so there's little chance Dubya would have anything on him in an armwrestling contest. But now we get word that there's a feeling in certain circles that, maybe, just maybe, one of Medvedev's balls might've dropped?
Really, what are the odds of a surprise run by Medvedev when his term is up and he's expected to just pat the seat for Ol' Vlad like, "Was just keeping warm for you, Tsarov"? How fun would that be? How quickly would he get poisoned?
...is the Midwest coming under the sway of Canada. Really? Seriously? Kansas? Kansas under the sway of pot-decriminalizing, bilingual, socialized healthcare-having Canada? Madness. In Soviet Russia, prediction cracks up you!
Must've been a slow news day at the Journal. This hit reddit about a month ago and enjoyed a day of BOLD RED ALL-CAPS on Drudge around the same time. But, seriously... Kansas? Wow. And South Carolina under the sway of the European Union? Come now, anybody who's crossed the Mason Dixon knows SC is just biding its time until nobody's looking and then-BAM!-secession.
But, really, this predicting thing is fun. Let's try, eh? I predict that, in the next few years the continued slump in demand will push Putin threaten to cut off assistance to Iran's Bushehr facility if they don't do somethin' crazy. The resulting international backlash when he's found out will provide the perfect opening for Medvedev to demonstrate that he does, indeed, have a sack. Medvedev puts Putin on trial and he's exiled to the United States where he and Dubya do armwrestling for charity in Vegas.
DR: PANARIN: Insolent Amerikanskii; your decadent empire crumbles as we are speaking! TRANSLATOR: "Mr. Panarin posits, in brief, that mass immigration, economic decline, and moral degradation will trigger a civil war next fall and the collapse of the dollar. Around the end of June 2010, or early July, he says, the U.S. will break into six pieces -- with Alaska reverting to Russian control." -- WSJ
I have no idea where to begin, so let's start here.
I'll try to keep this brief because it is a matter of no consequence, but Stanley Fish's piece on AT&T, "How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love my Voice Mail," or whatever, wherein he tells us of trying to change his service via telephone, having a mild stroke over corporate language, and taking his revenge by writing a column (well play'd, sirra), so, see, we all fold back on ourselves with contented pop-pomo "glee" and "satisfaction," is a major thorn in my ass.
My problems are various. First, Dr. Fish asks us to forgive him in advance for having two homes and the problems that come with them. Imagine for a second if John McCain had done that. How well do you think the populace would have taken, "Look, folks. It's hard to deal with five mansions and two condos, but I can handle that challenge," etc.? Questions of class cannot be "bracketed," and the context of our Story of Frustration Rewarded, Fish's Pilgrim's Progress through the teleworld, determines our understanding. We can't forget about who Stanley Fish is and then react to his "ordeal" from behind the veil of ignorance.
How many times can I say the same thing? One more: if Fish had written a story about how he had returned to Home #2 after a long time to find it occupied by stoats and weasels, perhaps our sympathy readings would have ticked up. It's a bitch to get weasels out of your mansion, even if you do have three stout friends with cudgels. (What I'm doing here is a little text-blend on Mr. Fish, you see, so that he, with his animal name, joins Mr. Toad, Badger, Ratty and Moley in The Wind in the Willows, which, full disclosure, was my favorite thing to listen to when I was small. Cross-disciplinarity, self-referentiality, intertextual references and light caricature, let us remember, are all hallmarks of the bargain basement postmodernism seminar that Fish runs.)
Point: the quality of the pain experienced has a lot to do with whether the reader will allow Fish to bracket his class issues. Also, bracketing anticipates a return to the bracketed matter. Our sympathy for Fish presumably escalates when he publishes his piece on Class and the Telephone. Hint.
All other problems with the piece flow from this first bracketing. Stanley is not a person who gets the bureaucratic run-around so often as to be inured to it, so AT&T makes him crazy with a Network kind of amokness. People who spend their days-off standing in line at the gas company, then at Department of Human Services, constantly being unserved, approach bureaucracy with frustration, not satisfaction, as the expected end product. Thus, what Stanley brackets away is an understanding of why he has such a hard time with AT&T: he has irrational expectations of service. Note the arrogance of his demanding that AT&T be running fully staffed on Sunday. Okay, noted? Let's move on.
Again, from his cocoon, Stanley can't tell that the grammatical boner that sends him into apoplexy might actually be intentional. Operators cut in and out of multiple phone calls rapidly. Sometimes they'll lose the first syllables, sometimes the last. "With whom do I have the pleasure of speaking with?" could lose its front or back, and remain nominally intelligible and polite. The greeting has the advantage, from a corporate viewpoint, of inducing hypnosis, or from a consumer's advocate's viewpoint, of assuaging concern. (Also, I've gone seven rounds with Ma Bell, and seventeen with Verizon, and never have I heard this Yeti-phrase. Is it possible, not to be meta-anything, that Stan has made this story up as bait? Is he just stirring up the pond?)
Other things Stanley loses with his class in brackets: the realization that the operator who laughs is laughing at him, not with; the understanding that AT&T has no idea who he is, or what conference Florida International plays football in; the sure knowledge that the troubles of one little person, etc.; the possibility that there are other things outside his immediate experience worth writing about, as Israel continues to bomb Gaza, and possibly even there are some experiences near to his own worth writing about, like winter, or Christmas, because who clears up bureaucratic slop between Christmas and New Year's?
But the kicker is this: Fish, by excluding his story from solidarity with a community, clearly even while he is enacting it, forgets the double bind he's put the customer service people into. Refer the crazy man to your boss, and you seriously could be fired. Deny good customer service to the crazy man, e.g. by refusing to refer him up the chain of command, and you could also be fired.
Operators hem and haw, not because they're corporate peons (which assessment is the unspoken message of Fish's diatribe, that people lose their humanity by internalizing corporate imperatives or some such bull's shit) but because they're in an untenable position.
Seriously, a Christmas message for everybody, you, me, Fish, Israel, Hamas: try a little tenderness...
As if the end of capitalism-as-we-know-it weren't enough to bring out the pre-millenial tension, now comes what looks an awful lot like endgame for Gaza.
Opening the routes to commerce was Hamas’s main goal in its cease-fire with Israel, just as ending the rocket fire was Israel’s central aim. But while rocket fire did go down drastically in the fall to 15 to 20 a month from hundreds a month, Israel said it would not permit trade to begin again because the rocket fire had not completely stopped and because Hamas continued to smuggle weapons from Egypt through desert tunnels. Hamas said this was a violation of the agreement, a sign of Israel’s real intentions and cause for further rocket fire.
Why now? This is not an off-the-cuff response to an immediate threat, remember. Every police and fire station in Gaza is a target; this isn't a fine-bore assassination. The stated provocation -- Hamas' unwillingness / inability to halt rocket attacks absolutely, despite the recent ratcheting down of same by 90 percent -- is incommensurate to Israel's response. A planned operation; so, timing matters.
Does the Bush-Obama interregnum matter here? Is this attack one last bash in the days of carte blanche? Is this a pre-election surprise? Ehud called off his campaign a la the Air Pirate, after all. (What if McCain had had something to bomb back in October? What if...) Is this, in short, something other than the end times for Palestine?
The possible net gain for Israel is so small (0 rockets a month from 10-20), indeed at this point is negative, as 70-odd rockets were launched in response to the raids, and the risk so ludicrous that the Road Map cycle (raids, talks, breakdowns, raids) is now obsolete.
Egypt has no further incentive to keep Rafah closed. Ditto Syria and a tight leash on Hezbollah. Israel has to imagine that overwhelming force will eliminate the threat from Gazastan, and trump any response from the broader community of militants. Which is not exactly what we saw in Lebanon, but selah.
Then: Israel carpet-bombs Gaza, which experiences Beirut-2006-like casualties, world opens its heart to Hamas. At this point, we either get back on the Road Map, and kids lose their hands for next 20 years playing with cluster bomblets, or the bombing doesn't stop, and our children will talk about Palestinians the way we talk about Tasmanians. -- ds
Little Nouri is consolidating power. Today's NYT story on the arrest of 35 Interior Ministry officials includes a correction.
An earlier version of this article incorrectly reported that one of the Iraqi officials arrested was Gen. Ahmed Abu Raqeef, the ministry’s director of internal affairs.
Turns out WaPo read the first draft and just called up General Abu Raqeef to ask if he had hired a lawyer. Obv., 'Qeef was pissed:
When reached by telephone, Raqeef denied the allegation and said he was still in his job. He blamed disgruntled rivals inside the ministry for spreading rumors to discredit him." I fired many officers and sent some of them to face justice," Raqeef told the Washington Post. "Probably this is why they are trying to destroy my reputation."
Until we have details of the planned coup, names of the conspirators, when they met, where they met, how much money they had, and proof that Al Awda (The Return) is more than an acronym for Nouri's Al Dawa, probably we should file these stories under "Nouri Does the Putin."
GI's are out. Surely it would help Nouri going forward if Shiite militias acting as the military wing of Dawa were active again. And the quickest route to that happening is to diminish the power of the IM's Internal Affairs, chief of which is the "squeaky clean" Gen'l Abu Raqeef. Says Mr. Kazimi at the Hudson Institute:
He was arrested by U.S. troops not too long ago on trumped up charges, and I wouldn't be surprised if these latest accusations turn out to be more of the same.
As we transition from an economy based on speculation to one based on gift, let DS be no exception to the potlatch: a gift for you, dear Reader.
I've spent most of my time the past few weeks working down at the paint shop, whose one advantage over other jobs is the license I've been given to indoctrinate others to my musical beliefs. Ha. What this means is I listen to the first Joggers record a lot. Which is an acquired taste, Pitchfork's 8.0 notwithstanding, featuring as it does the "thing" that skyrocketed the band to fame, namely shape note singing. Check it here, at 02:30 :
...Republicans will start electing non-Anglos. Congratulations, for instance, go to new Representative Anh Johnny Cao, who rid us all of William Jefferson to become the new poster child (sorry Bobby Tomato) for a no-longer-race-exclusive-GOP. Ignore John Boehner's lame writing:
In a release titled “The Future is Cao,” Boehner wrote that “the Cao victory is a symbol of what can be achieved when we think big, present a positive alternative and win the trust of the American people.”
Mr. Cao joins Republican sponsors of terrorism Ileana Ros-Lehtinen, Lincoln Diaz-Balart and Mario Diaz-Balart in the exclusive Quagmire Caucus, a group open to right-wing immigrants, refugees or children of same who fled American military action in the 60s and 70s.
I also considered titling this post "How Now Brown Cao?" Forgive me, and chuc may man, Mr. Representative. You may now git some. -- ds
The infrastructure improvements, in ordinary circumstances, would be welcome news in a poor and neglected neighborhood like Silwan. But in the charged atmosphere of East Jerusalem, which Israel seized from the Jordanians in the 1967 war and later annexed, some perceive even municipal road works and new traffic arrangements as part of a larger plan.
Soft pedal? Ignorance? Lack of sleep? What happened here?
Since when have residents of poor neighborhoods anywhere ever seen "infrastructure improvements" as "welcome news"? I mean, I get the jobs argument, but it didn't happen that way in the South Bronx. Or Columbus OH, where I-71 cuts off the East Side from the rest of town, or Richmond VA where I-195 excises basically all the poor neighborhoods from the monied core of the city, or indeed anywhere in America.
"New traffic arrangements"?? Like Jews-only access roads? I mean, what to us are mere "traffic arrangements" are the means of repression in E Jerusalem and the W Bank.
Not to hyperventilate here, but this Robert Moses attitude towards the people on the ground is not doing the State of Israel any favors, either in terms of pure PR or more seriously, in terms of preserving peace. And all these "construction projects" are handled neutrally in the NYT, as if Palestinian anger over them is utterly incomprehensible.
Man. Flashing fuck fingers at the NYT today, y'all... -- ds
...and I won't blow myself up in this public place?
Hamas gained popular support in a context of official fecklessness. The equation is not simply, provide general welfare = win elections. Hamas won the Palestinian assembly because it gave people, over the course of decades, the material wealth that Fatah hoarded for itself, the Arafat family, and sundry cronies.
Point is, it doesn't matter how much American civilian aid / reconstruction gets doled out. If we are still bombing civilian targets on flawed intelligence, if we are still occupying territory, we are the enemy.
I mean, never mind the fact that there is not such thing as unfettered distribution of reconstruction aid: we and the Iraqi government have some problems building those precious water treatment plants.
Pakistan under Musharraf, and I'm guessing this won't change under Zardari, said thanks but no thanks to that reconstruction aid, adding, "Could we please have some of those F-16s though? We need a rapid-response delivery vehicle for our nuclear weapons, you see."
Reconstruction aid is a bridge to nowhere. Only a legitimately elected regional government will be able to deal with the NW Frontier. Our best bet in the meantime is targeted assassinations of Qaeda and Taliban leaders. Preferably not from airplanes/drones. If that would be made easier by breaking Pakistan into little bits (a Baluch republic in the southwest, bantustans around the Khyber) so be it. Eff with the bull, you get the horns. -- ds
Doug Burgess in the NYT has editorialized in support of prosecuting Somali pirates under terrorism laws, arguing, among other things, that pirates are hostis humani generis, enemies of the human race.
Now the last time the paper called someone hostis humani generis, it was Saddam Hussein, but you know, we'll let bye-byes be bye-byes. It was a long story, there were subpoenas, and it involved poor Judith Miller having "lunch" with -eugh- Karl Rove.
What's not to love about Somali pirates? First of all, it takes balls of brass to hit the Indian Ocean in a skiff and knock off a luxury liner or an oil tanker. There is no count of the men who have died in these pirate raids, just by virtue of foul weather.
Second, they're getting money into the hands of the Somali populace, which is something no "legitimate institution" in Somalia has succeeded in doing, from the warlords' gangs to the UN-pawn transitional government, to the Islamic Courts Union.
Third, it's not like these men have much choice in the matter. Stay on land, and you might be able to smuggle khat for a living. Oh. Or not. Of course, there's a civil war going on, and if the Ethiopian occupiers (for whom we the US provided air cover) don't mistake you for an insurgent, chances are some yank from JTF-Horn will.
Fourth, compared to the grim specter of Germany suddenly finding it necessary to vest the powers of a unitary executive in the chancellor again, the pirates look like Goldilockses.
Fifth, what kind of neoliberal worth his salt would do anything but applaud the ingenuity of these men, their ability to take lemons and make cash out of 'em. Piracy is one response to the West's relentless hectoring of the third world to do what their parents did and get a job sir. It's a small business, run in a decentralized manner. CEOs are reinvesting their capital in operations to increase productivity, you know, instead of investing it in corporate jets. Having had early success, they've broadened their scope.
And the real kicker? Shippers' insurers realize what this dillweed in the NYT chooses to ignore: it's cheaper to pay these men than to mount operations to "rescue" the impounded merchandise. Shippers themselves would rather pay pirates their ransom than pay insurance companies the ludicrously high premiums that would attend any decision by the shippers to do something rash such as arm all crew. Filling a market niche cheaply! Reinvestment and expansion! What part of piracy is not model capitalism?
Since this Doug person needs to be taken back to middle-school civics class, we'll start here: Piracy is fundamentally apolitical -- there is no pirates' polis. This is how it differs from terrorism. Francis Drake and Walter Raleigh were pirates. Pirates helped the colonies throw off the British yoke. You can't pay Al Qaeda to cease operations, to release the whereabouts of Osama Bin Laden etc. Any pirate, however, can be paid cash. All grievances can be settled for legal tender.
"Gimme the Loot" is running through my head. -- ds
Leaving aside the question of whether there ever really was an "American World" to predicate a "Post-American World," Fukuyama's generally on that "man, we gotta make our society actually work 'cause other folks is catchin' up"-boilerplate steez that's pretty de rigeur nowadays, what with our society not really working and other folks catchin' up as they is. Very little new or interesting--which isn't necessarily too huge a criticism, as the problems faced are well known, as are many reasonable solution--but here was an interesting tidbit: The critique was that real men and real foreign policy professionals don’t do this kind of nation building or deploy soft power, but rather deal with hard power with military force.
But, in fact, American foreign policy has to be preoccupied with a certain kind of social work today. Opponents of American power around the world—the Muslim Brotherhood, Hamas in Gaza, Hezbollah in Lebanon, Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in Iran, as well as populist leaders in Latin America like Hugo Chavez, Rafael Correa or Evo Morales—have succeeded in coming to power because they can offer social services directly to poor people in their countries.
Here's where one of the real shames of the transition. BHO pledged to double foreign aid to $50 billion. In recent weeks, he's said that may have to be one of the things on the chopping block in light of the financial Gotterdammerung. Crying shame, that, 'cause wouldn't it be interesting if'n we could stroll into Pakistan with maybe 2/3 the current military aid, putting the other third into building them... say... water purification systems?
In June 2001, a total solar eclipse was about to cross southern Africa. To prepare, the Zimbabwean and Zambian media began a massive astronomy education campaign focused on warning people not to stare at the Sun. Apparently, the campaign worked. The locals took a real liking to the vocabulary, and today, the birth registries are filled with names like Eclipse Glasses Banda, Totality Zhou, and Annular Mchombo.
So long Vlad, Vytautas, Ivy, Daisy, Polygraph, Mindaugas, Rickey Henderson and Barry Zito: meet new baby Eclipse Glasses! -- ds
I'm actually sitting here watching The Incredibles for the second time this weekend, searching for the Main Nerve. What was it that triggered my rat-brain to respond to the so-called philosophers of the post-human with the emotional equivalent of fatwa? I have no problem with superheroes; I saw and dug the last Batman movie; I'm a fan of Thus Spake Zarathustra, and find the refrain "Humanity must be o'erleapt!" to have healing power. The current spurs to my thought are a NYT Mag interview with the maker of Wikiscanner, and a piece in Der Spiegel, but they might as well have been Heroes, Fringe, or Mitt Romney. No shortage.
The idea of superfluous human potential is a soothing fantasy. For a Saturday evening's entertainment, a spectacular fiction. Theorists of the post-human are -- I think; the lines blur between what are, to a post-humanist, the inevitable consequences of the "post-human condition," and what are ideological postures to be advocated -- doing something apart from the modern project of perfectible humanity, sublated into pure Spirit.
Which makes a defense of a -- by contrast, if not authentically -- humanist position a little more slippery. If we were talking about exceeding human potential through cloned organs, genetic modification, artifical neural nets, usw, it would suffice to refute such ambitions with a sardonic, "Cf. Levi, Primo, 'Angelic Butterfly,' in The Sixth Day and Other Tales," which is one of Levi's sci-fi works, describing the reluctant work of a Nazi scientist locked into experiments in human potential. Turns out that believing adult humans are actually larval and dosing them with hormones has ugly consequences.
But post-human theorists can't be caricatured as a new generation of Dr. Mengeles. There is a sense of fatigue in the work that any resolute modernist would shy from, and that frankly, gets its impetus (if you can call it that) from the same place as sparked Levi's pity/scorn for humanity. The problem of justifying human activity (building, writing, producing, spawning) via humanism (if our works are meant to give us fleeting access to our higher nature, where in the pantheon is Auschwitz?) is yes cumbersome. That doesn't mean that we can shunt off the responsibility to account for the ideology beneath our actions elsewhere, like "I dunno. Humanity is a problem. Let's leave it to the cyborgs."
This isn't about the menace inherent in any discussion of our non-human doppelgangers (Although of course it is also about that. I think of a Mitt-Romney-Terminator, what about you? Also: What's the difference between zombies and cyborgs? Braaaiinsss).
I suspect that theorists of the post-human, like acolytes of any new religion, need a coping mechanism to deal with radical inhumanity. Rather than do the hard work of admitting that hideous humans are still human, isn't it easier to change the subject; to enter into endless divagations about what constitutes a human, when life begins, what is the nature of consciousness, und so weiter?
How tired of human problems do you have to be to fantasize about artificial intelligence and artificial corporeality? Isn't the Singularity just one more otaku vision of hyperreal pocket pussy, as the NYT slyly suggests?
MEET SINGLES: Afraid of, or excited by, the prospect of ultraintelligent machines that can think, learn and know that they’re thinking and learning?[...]
More later. Perhaps sometime I'll be able to articulate my love of Nietzsche vis-a-vis my hatred of cyborgs (seriously, Human, All too Human is not a curse, it's a gift). Right now, I'm going to Netflix A Scanner Darkly...peace... -- ds
But it looks as if Newt will try to take over the party machine with a bid to become the new chairman of the Republican national committee. Jindal is biding his time. The likeable Cajun newcomer, the nearest thing the Republicans have to an Obama figure, is worth a flutter.
Piyush might've been better served had his name not been bandied about so much as longshot veep-fodder. The lefties know about him now and have a healthy base from which to keep digging. But I wonder if he won't keep his powder dry until 2016. Palin will come out guns blazing in 2012, one supposes. And the base is hungry for her return, feeling she's the way the party should've gone anyway. Sac-Lamb decreed, does Catho-convert Piyush go along with?
Who said I was an ideologue? Let them fall silent, for today, unlike those 13 namby-pamby Dimmycrats who wouldn't publicize their votes against Lieberman, Senator Jim DeMint of the Palmetto State put his name to a resolution to expel Ted Stevens from the Senate, thereby earning praise from these quarters. Not only that, while Mitch McConnell was speaking, DeMint said he had the ten-and-a-half:
"After talking with many of my colleagues, it's clear there are sufficient votes to pass the resolution regarding Senator Stevens."
Making DeMint's assault on Stevens even more brazen, the whole process of retribution may be moot, because Begich is up by some thousand of votes.
Clearly, this is a choice based on principle, not expediency. A reformed conservative movement will stand on principle, and that means kicking the bums out. Even when the voters have already done so. Nothing better than a surreptitious kick to the balls...
Bernie Sanders, I-Vt., and Pat Leahy, D-Vt., spoke against allowing Lieberman keep the Homeland Security and Government Affairs post. Reid, Majority Whip Dick Durbin, D-Ill., and John Kerry, D-Mass., were among those speaking in his favor, according to a Democratic aide, who spoke anonymously to discuss a private meeting.
Some, like Iowan Tom Harkin, still harbor hard feelings for statements Lieberman made during the campaign. Harkin took particular offense when Lieberman said a vote against funding the war in Iraq without a deadline for a troop withdrawal meant Obama had voted to cut off funding for troops in harm's way.
As near as I can tell, from hints in this one and the articles above, those agin' Leebs: Sanders, Leahy, Harkin?, Casey? More speculatively: Byrd?, Webb?, Feingold?, Feinstein?, Kennedy?
For Leebs: Reid, Durbin, Kerry, Salazar, Dodd, Klobuchar, Nelson (NE), Nelson (FL), Carper (DE), Cardin, Landrieu. -- ds
Poor Nouri Kemal al-Maliki. All the problems he contends with on a basis daily. Iran, Turkey, the PKK, Muqtada al-Sadr, now two American administrations with separate demands and expectations, and those pesky Iraqi accountants...at least the accountants he can fire.
I'm particularly fond of the Times' surreptitious kick to the Iraqi balls, noting again and again the Iraqi "endemic corruption," -- how that's just how things are in "that part of the world." And the USG should know. We ourselves keep misplacing our collective wallet over in that part of the world.
In China, the penalty for bribery is death. This accords with my latent puritanical character. (There will be Virtue, or the Terror!) For the land that birthed Hammurabi to go soft on oversight is just a damn shame.
Check the step-in by TXGov in that press conference. The repub governors from the Contiguous States of Real America, along with a nice amount of the party machinery, hate this woman. She's PeggyHillClueless, I think. Coming off a personal jet, shopping spree, adoring crowds whirlwind. Just biding her time until 2012 to run again.
Check the comedy of Pat "White People Need to Breed More" Buchanan and random black (ugh) republican. Black dude's like "party needs to change," Old Man Buchanan, how fucking apropos? can't even conceive of what he's talking about.
So the repubs aren't going to get it together any time soon. They just can't present a viable alternative to the coming Democratic left-pragmatism. They'll have no organizing principle by 2012. These things don't just happen over the course of a presidential term. They have no organizing hero. No vanquished one to long for and get behind. Post 2008 election, they're left with the McCain the Antedilluvian, Romney the Creepy, Huckabee the Homely, RonPaul! the Crazy, and... oh yeah... Palin the PeggyHillClueless.
So I'm betting the left-pragmatic job creation scheme works pretty well in a few years. Things won't be great, but they'll be picking up. The country will be a few years older, more used to Obama. The muslim rumors will vanish. The skittishness about his readiness dissipates. And Americans get comfortable with BarryHussein. No reason to change horses midstream. Meanwhile, the repubs have no organizing principle, still. And they need a sacrificial lamb. Up steps Sarah...
The gift and the curse of Sarah Palin is in full effect as Republican governors retreat to Nixon's turf for their winter meetings. The gift is the unprecendented media attention given, by spillover, to dudes like Tim Pawlenty.
The curse is she had to speak. Beginning with "God Bless George W. Bush and I thank you Mr. President," is, I'm guessing, not what Americans want to hear. The GOP seems to recognize this. Politico's blind quote is indicative: She Is Our Britney Spears.
Pawlenty's remarks, on the other hand, are awesome. Listen to the whole thing on Minnesota Public Radio.
To start, he disses Palin before she even gets to town, saying it is not "fair and not complete" to just say "we didn't do that bad." He litanizes the ass-whupping, and I'm paraphrasing here: We cannot compete in the northeast, the great lakes, the west coast, the mid-atlantic [...] those are not factors that make up success going forward. For his money, the GOP can harmonize the Hensarling Quasar and the nameless "modernizing" forces within the Party (evidently those that recognize that non-white people can actually vote). I don't know if he's right, but Pawlenty is funny and thoughtful, and once again, I'm pretty sure that McCain called him up looking for a VP, and Tim said "No thanks, Air Pirate."
Big Government and Big Business coalescing to defend their interests! Tim! You sound like John Edwards! "Drill baby drill, by itself, is not an energy policy." To applause! There aren't enough Republicans around to be throwing people overboard! The party with a big-ass Welcome Mat! Why isn't this man a Democrat?
His closing anecdote about MJ's 56-point night was brilliant. He's buddies with Tim Kaine, which, you know, to my mind is a demerit, but to plenty of Virginians is a good thing. This is all gravy for the GOP. The question is, Can a voice of Reason, Probity and Temperance prevail against its own Hard-Ass Brethren? Can that voice then compete with an already-established Cool Hand?
Thinking a little bit longer on this, the brilliance of that Jordan story is that it makes up for the knocks against Palin scattered throughout Tim's speech. Pawlenty doesn't want to banish Palin to the Senate, he wants her front and center, making sure the voters of the family values fringe line up and vote hard. It's funny, self-deprecating (if we assume that by analogy, Pawlenty is the rookie who scores one point, and Palin Jordan with 56) and practical.
For the moment, I'm putting money on Hensarling leading a redneck-small-gubmint series of night raids. Pawlenty's Big Think is being done already, just by Democrats, and it will take longer than a couple of election cycles. So while Jeb and company focus on one half of Nathan Bedford Forrest's famous dictum, i.e., getting there firstest, Tim graciously takes the second half: getting there with the mostest. -- ds
DS called this, including the passage about non-acceptance of Senators' credentials, here. DS also speculated on the analogous relationship between Palin and MacBeth here. Read how closely the AP hits DS talking points:
Even if he is re-elected, Stevens could be ousted by the Senate for his conviction on seven felony counts of failing to report more than $250,000 in gifts, mostly renovations on his home. If Stevens loses his seat, Palin could run for it in a special election. She also could challenge incumbent GOP Sen. Lisa Murkowski in 2010.
Right on. Article 1, section 5 is Palin's best friend. Because she ain't going to beat Lisa Murkowski. End DS gloating.
Also, for the record, the press needs to quit burying the Republican Party. I feel like Cowboy in Full Metal Jacket, urging the platoon to keep moving because 8-Ball is wasted: "I've seen this before, man." The consensus that the GOP is dead is like snipers shooting into a corpse to lure unsuspecting/enraged soldiers in closer. Don't touch the corpse. Let's keep our distance, and see if we can spot where the revanchist fringe will retreat to. Signs point to here: a swath of counties running from the Ozarks to southern Appalachia wherein the population became 10-15% more Republican between 2004 and 2008.
The head of Putin is heavy. As Dark Steer's analysis showed, the last thing Putin really wanted this August when he invaded Georgia / accepted Georgian provocation to invade was to add yet another Russian region to the long list of "restives."
Today we saw proof. Russia can't expand a sphere of influence while continuing to wage war just to maintain its territorial integrity. What succor can Putin offer the "oppressed peoples" of northern Georgia when he can't protect his own from Chechen suicide bombers?
So, questions for the Premier: Was Putin's motivation in the Georgian incursion to deny safe haven in South Ossetia for Chechen militants? If so, can't we expect him to back down on the announced Polish-border missiles?
Don't the Chechens want what Putin does, i.e. land and thus oil royalties? So isn't the real beef a federalist beef, i.e., between the regions en masse and the central government? Thus, isn't it absurd to target the capital of North Ossetia rather than a Big Russian target? What kind of dumbass Chechen would do this?
Do Ossetians (of N and S) really want Chechens to have beef with them rather than with Mother Russia? If not, does this push them towards Moscow and anschluss, or away and toward more "restiveness"? Might Moscow have a reason to start beef between regions therefore?
(This is not nearly as paranoid as it sounds. Putin covered up Beslan, assassinated Anna Politkovskaya, etc. He likes Dark Ops. Why he can't just say, "I'm waging war on Chechnya, don't mess with me, this is an insurrection," I still don't know. Presumably he still wants to be invited to the G8, but that's a high price for a tea party...)
This is how it feels to win an election. Forgive ds, but this is an entriely new feeling. The first real election I was aware of, to the extent that I felt real heartbreak, was 1994. Failure ever since; we can argue the merits of 1996 or James Jeffords' defection, but the fact remains that I have never seen a tidal wave / tsunami / landslide / metaphor-worthy election.
McCain's concession was the only eloquent thing he's said since he fired Mike Murphy. I'm betting Murphy, or one of the heads from 2000 wrote it. Even the phrases encapsulating the seed of a future "Racism Is Over" tactic were glorious. A cynic would say necessarily so. Still:
But we both recognize that, though we have come a long way from the old injustices that once stained our nation's reputation and denied some Americans the full blessings of American citizenship, the memory of them still had the power to wound.
...is not half bad for the guy who voted against Martin Luther King Day. Had sentiments like these come out six months ago, McCain would be president. Surely, the fact that this dude can only be gracious in defeat, and is petulant the whole rest of the time, this is the hallmark of political failure, Cf. Gore, Albert Arnold Jr..
Another note: Keep David Axelrod off the television. He looks like a communist Mike Ditka. He looks like Fat Hitler. A head out of The Jungle. Face fit for radio. Like he never missed a meal. Like he could fish Lake Michigan with his head. All Chicagoans are like this. How do they make it in the World?
Nuhs like to think Palin is done, but I disagree. I think she's just got a taste. Does she run for Ted Stevens' seat? (Again, this is assuming Begich doesn't pull a couple thousand votes out of his hat. Also assuming that Stevens a) dies, b) resigns, c) is refused a seat in the Senate, as a convicted felon. Article I, section 5: "Each House shall be the Judge of the Elections, Returns and Qualifications of its own Members[...]." I remember this from the noise about possibly not seating Ollie North in 1996...) I think she wants all the perks of office, with none of the scrutiny, and given Stevens' example, the Senate is the place to be. Keep the oil flowing, not really do shit.
But the real questions are all about the mid-term election. Largely, this is because we can't think about 2012, though we try, until 2010 is sorted. And really, what are the Democratic prospects in 2010? The speculative economy is broken. We would be able to speculate on New Energy, if the Obama energy plan were operative. So find me 100 billion dollars in the federal budget.
Iraq? Trick is that incremental drawdowns of troops don't proportionately draw down costs, Cf. Congressional Budget Office, 10/24/2007. Veterans cost money too, for starters, and the infrastructure already in country has a flat cost that ain't going nowhere. Let's be charitable and assume that the drawdown gets us to 6 billion a month down from 10. The president-elect has committed to a troop surge in Afghanistan. There go your savings.
Increase marginal tax rates, right? Without 60 in the Senate, without the right bundle of tax cuts to sugarcoat it, without some way to round the corner on all those conservative congresspeople we just elected, it ain't happening. Seriously, is Periello, assuming he makes it into Congress from the VA 5th, going to raise anybody's taxes? A sugarcoated marginal tax increase is good policy any damn way, don't get me wrong, Teddy Roosevelt caught all kinds of shit for the progressive income tax, we know this, but do middle-class tax cuts result in increased federal revenue? Which, remember, is what we need to solidify the economy, get elected again, and really get some socialism on...aw, did I say that out loud?
For real. Show me the money. The first 100 days are economy days. Taxes alone will take 100 days. The "mandate" was historical, in that the election had an historical purpose. But that purpose is acheived, and 2010 is back to ordinary politics. I'm talking to you, Fat Hitler.
Seriously, this could be a Jimmy Carter presidency. It should not be. -- ds
So I was walking to campus the other night, and I sidestepped a woman in a Starter jacket who was yelling at the ground. She had, among other things, lost her phone. Having found her phone, she started yelling into the air things I can't transcribe because they were too wacky to remember (we come to nature through a schema, after all, and what doesn't fit is cast aside as dream-time). Things like: "Are you in a disguise?" and, "one of those fag spies," and "selling oil, real underground shit!" This is run of the mill in Philadelphia, and is mitigated by the fact that there's always someone else on the street with you and Crazy Jane. Here, sadly, no.
All of which made me think of Our Hero, the Famous Air Pirate, who has finally pulled the prohibition on running Wright ads, albeit on broadcast TV with the juiciest bits fobbed clean. He is essentially, at this point, alone on the street, yelling incoherently into the air.
Incoherence. The ad -- on TV, "God damn" is bleeped out -- presumes that the audience knows about it already. I mean, when you bleep out "God damn America," couldn't it just as easily be "God bless America?" Isn't this supposed to be an election won in the center, and by undecideds?
Once again, this is tacking to the right for 2010. The major corporate contributors to the NRTPac (scroll to the end of the individual disclosures) are rightist media outlets: Newsmax, Endeavor Media, Eagle Publishing. The treasurer, Peter Leitner, runs a talk radio blog that reminds us, "Jihad runs both ways." He appears to be his own announcer, and broadcasting from his mom's basement, btw.
Are a handful of amateur Tim McVeigh sympathizers really going to change the minds of every undecided voter in Pennsylvania, Virginia, Ohio, usw? Please.
Although, from the looks of Palin's barn-raising down by Rickenbacker Airport, it is not the Great Silent Majority, but the Mere Redneck Plurality that she's pinned her hopes on, viz.: "Redneck Woman" by Gretchen Wilson, plywood false-front barn, buckeye necklace, Ku Klux fliers.
That's right, the Klan is using 2008 as an opportunity to pare back to a core of true believers. Said one Travis Pierce, national membership director for KKK, LLC.:
This office gets about 100 calls a day, and it's been that way since the start of the election season [...] People are looking for answers to what's going on in this country and they are coming to us.
So how is the McCain-Palin Tanking like Klan recruitment? A: Both campaigns suffer from the delusion that a greater political force will one day emerge from a dedicated 8 percent of the electorate. The trouble (for our purposes, the entertainment) inherent in such a position is that no persuasion exists without mass appeal. No one listens to Ralph Nader, or Dennis Kucinich, or Ron Paul. Build the crowd, then sway the crowd.
Also of note: compare Hitchens' response to the McCain Khalidi attack to the desperate parrying and backtracking on McLaughlin by typical MSMers (transcript)! Everyone hears, "Barack Obama sat in a room with Palestinians," and only Hitch refrains from shitting his pants with fear! Page and Clift are scared shitless of Monica Crowley! Hemming and hawing about "They released the tape! They reported it!" Show some spine. The appropriate response to Crowley is as follows:
It ain't "Jew-bashing" to complain when some right-wing arriviste bulldozes a chunk of your millenia-old town, puts guard towers and access roads on the highest point in the area, and tells you it's okay, because God promised this land to him.
Anyway, I'm prepping the post-game rant, on some real Marxist shit. (World Socialism Now! Mandatory Abortions for Everyone! Up Against the Wall! That sort of thing.) See y'all on the 5th... -- ds
Lack of chemistry? Now, given this is an entirely subjective reading on the part of Chuck Todd, I'm seeing shades of Kerry-Edwards here. Youngish, pretty, charismatic, obscene expenditures on coiffure or couture...
...but most importantly, the lack of chemistry. Is she aiming for a 2012 run? People seem to think so. But I'm not thinking it'll work. God willing, the Famous Air Pirate and the Beauty Queen will lose in two weeks and, in four years, she'll face some of the same problems as Edwards. That is: she'll still have little more than charm and red meat for the Base to run on.
Oh, sure, some neocon or theocon will take her under his carrion-smelling wing, try to tutor her in the ways of wickedness. She'll probably do some speaking tours on the SuperChurch circuit in between texting with Kissinger and hitting up AIPAC and PNAC gatherings to bone up on her bona fides. She'll likely seek a second term up in Seward's Icebox and win. All the while coyly dodging questions about disagreements within the campaign and whether or not she'll run again:
"Oh, you know, you get two independent minds on a ticket and there's bound to be some disagreements. Would I have done things exactly the same way? I don't really see any point in looking back. What I'm trying to make sure I do is keep my eye on the prize in ensuring I'm doing the best job I can to protect the people of this great state from what I truly believe will be destructive fiscal policies under this president. Am I going to run in two years? Oh, now let's not put the sled before the dogs here. I'm governing Alaska. It's a great job and I can't say what the future holds..." U.S.W.
And then, come 2011, she'll still have her ready made base of support. All revved up and ready to face Mittens. She's free and pretty compared to his stiffness and artifice. And then both of them get surprised all to hell by Bobby Jindal.
Let's talk more on this Republican Nova stage, though...
This is a fabulous consequence of the Obama candidacy, and I wonder if the same effect could have been engendered by a Hillary-Bayh ticket. Check out Minnesota rep Michele Bachman on Hardball, the weenie is at 5:45.
This is an object lesson in how not to realign your party, people.
Pity Michele. She's just been sent out to echo Palin. All she has to do is stick with the topic: BHO's alleged associates. But Matthews knows what's at the end of the argument, that it's about character, that we're talking about BHO himself, not Bill Ayers.
Getting people to talk about Obama is a centrifugal question: the heaviest freaks get separated from the party they hide themselves in. I saw this happening in the Inquirer last year, where white working-class dudes, who spend all day on the docks with their black working-class cohorts and buddies, all of a sudden had to air their real racism before all and sundry. Something like this happened when HRC said "hard-working Americans, white Americans," back in the day. And poor Michele. Just caught in the gears of a media machine she pays no attention to:
Bachmann said Tuesday she probably should have watched "Hardball" to see what it was like before she went on it.
So please, hard-working people of Congress, white people of Congress, please, let us know now what you think of Senator Obama. Please let us know if you do not read newspapers, watch cable TV etc., and if not, why not. Is your response from Paul's Romans? Is this a be-ye-not-conformed thing? I need to know. Because tight-faced white women with crazy smiles are still uttering shibboleths about "liberal leftists," "socialized medicine," "real Americans," etc., and holding forth on what's in Article I. I mean damn, before this election, would you have believed that any elected official could get away with not knowing what Hardball is? Is the governor of Alaska strategically expanding the role of the vice-president, or does she just not know better?
BTW, how does Jeb Hensarling feel about the imminent purge of one more know-nothing freak from the ranks? And is there a Democratic purge coming any time soon? When can we ice John Dingell and Dennis Kucinich? Trust the centrifuge! -- ds
Clearly, McCain is a rotten corpse, and is slowly being wiped off the map. The electoral map. Sarah Palin is slowly disposing of him, going, as Dickerson says, rogue. What I thought was a simple conservative realignment is more complex than that, and weird questions linger about Caribou Barbie. Namely:
Is she intentionally or unintentionally off-message? My guess is the latter. When perplexed, she punts. How else do you square her position on rewarding the DPRK with her abstinence-only diplomacy? She doesn't have a guru, she's flying blind, there's no way she's capable of orchestrating something as diabolical as a stab-McCain-to-run-in-2012 reverse.
Did someone tell Palin that McCain wanted to give her the ax, sending her into a flurry of preemptive strikes and gross, confusing incompetence, leading to her ultimate downfall? Is this like Throne of Blood?
What all this boils down to is the original and abiding question of Palin's candidacy: why her? I've had the feeling that she was simply the only person McCain called who said yes. I never bought the arguments for doing something mav'ricky, for rallying the base, for attempting to appeal to the Femmes d'Hillary. Thin gruel. There are plenty of intelligent, qualified Republican women (I will never call Olympia Snowe Lobster Barbie); McCain's been pandering to the right for two years at least; he knows as well as anyone that the change-meme is Obama's property. Rationalizations. Palin answered the phone. Since, you know, she doesn't read the Jewish media outlets, she was the only person in America who thought being Walnuts' VP was a smart career move.
And now the question resurfaces, only she asks it of herself: Why me? Why isn't Tim Pawlenty stuck on this Ferris wheel?
There is, however, a light at the end of the shitstorm for Sarah Palin. Ted Stevens is done. Whether he gets elected or not, or is elected and resigns mid-term, the days of his funnelling contracts to friends and countrymen are over. Someone is going to run for his seat before 2014. Now, were you Sarah Palin, wouldn't you rather be junior Senator from Alaska than be John McCain's vice-president? -- ds
Alright, so I live in Columbus OH now. And I just saw this commercial on the ABC affiliate, and it's funny, because I never would have pegged BHO as Nixonian:
At least they can't call him inexperienced AND a crafty kombinator at the same time, right?
Also, notice the strategic mispronunciation of "renege." As Overheard in New York has told us before, you don't re-nig on something. You re-nig-er, you.
Anyway, I got interested in who's paying for this. The ad very briefly flashed The Denver Group, which is a batch of concerned Femmes d'Hillary who evidently at the last possible second have decided, for no other reason than that it looks like BHO might actually win the election, to bolt the party and back the party of War in Iran and Drill to Prosperity. That makes me upset.
Since you claim to speak for a "disenfranchised" and obviously aggrieved minority, but a group, in any case, of individuals, more to the point who stand for "principle," surely, Heidi Li, you'll tell us who pays the rent.
Send shout outs, etc. to Denvergroup@gmail.com. -- ds
The first thing to understand about Jeb Hensarling, head of the RSC, R-TX 5th district, is that he is going to operate as a sleeper for a long while. This is going to allow him to figure out some things, and sleep off others. For instance, he'll be able to figure out how to pay for an undefined committment to Iraq without raising taxes (A: Economic Growth! Like in the 80s!). He'll be able to evade questions about his weirdly specific interest in defending online poker sites. And he'll be able to work out his relationship with Green Mountain Energy, a greenwashing business (selling incinerator-generated electricity as wind-and-solar, among other crimes)that savaged McCain in 2000.
Unless Green Mountain goes Enron, or leaks dioxin into the East Texas atmosphere, Jeb, former VP, is safe. Even a Keating-Fiver can run for president! (DIGRESSIVE, BUT IMPORTANT: Now, whether 'Merkins will trust said Keating-Fiver with their money is another story. And the point there is not whether anyone remembers the old transgression, but whether the transgressor can demonstrate new competence. For McCain, character is the real issue: swayed by his own vanity, he leaned on a regulator on Keating's behalf. Swayed by vanity, he divorced his crippled wife, married a beer-distributionship heiress, picked Palin, dissed Letterman. He's John McCain, (R)-The Media. Vanity is the source of McCain's petulance toward Obama, as if he's mystified that anyone could mistake his hammy quips and tin smile for charisma. It's an illusion: a corpse running in a war-hero's suit. As the authors of Ecclesiastes tell us, hevel hevolim, vehakol hevel, Vanity of vanities, all is vanity. END.)
But what I see in Hensarling -- though at this early date, who really can evaluate his character with certainty? -- is not McCainiac. McCain has always been obsessed with his own mythopoesis: thus the image of his body as a reliquary of torture, the arms not lifting, the hair prematurely white, the teeth mangled, the knees crushed. Hensarling, again, at this stage, is a loyal jihadi; one who believes in his body as the vessel for a cause. Witness the selflessness of his "Why I opposed the bailout." This is career-making writing: an even cadence, an appeal to reason. If he were a Back Bay Democrat instead of a SE Dallas Republican, he would need change but one word, probably "subsidize" for "socialize":
"In my heart and in my mind, I believe that this plan was fraught with unintended consequences, would force generations of taxpayers to pick up the tab for Wall Street losses and could permanently and fundamentally change the role of government in the American free enterprise system. [...] Once the government socializes losses, it will soon socialize profits. If we lose our ability to fail, we will soon lose our ability to succeed. If we bail out risky behavior, we will soon see even riskier behavior."
Now, when the bailout passed, he was capable of escaping, because it's the ideas (or, cynically, the soundbites) that are important, not Jeb of the Texas Fifth, and he can fade into the background with a hiss about the "slippery slope to socialism."
The past may hold other road work for his future. Back in 2005, Jeb was on the forefront of financial deregulation; broadly speaking, deregulation is one of the causes of our current situation, n'est-ce pas?. But in effect -- and fact-checkers, please check -- his 2005 bill was written to provide to credit unions, S&Ls and small community banks the same benefits that financial services giants got in the 2004 version of the bill. If we were in the business of spinning for this guy, it would be easy to say that in both these cases, Jeb was on the side of Main Street against Wall Street, was ensuring a level playing field, was for the David-banks against the Goliath-banks, etc.
Again, ideas are paramount, and the RSCers have been busy for a while. In May they could tell their party was going to reap the whirlwind, and called for a restatement of principles. The best part of this little manifesto is the sense of self-awareness buried in there, as if he's saying to his peers: "Fine, go home and run against 'Washington,' just remember you're It." Bring on the self-flagellation:
"And [Americans'] anger boils over as they watch politicians in Washington point fingers at each other, launch politically motivated investigations, waste money on wasteful pork barrel spending, and reward special interests over the national interest — while consistently failing to provide solutions to the real problems that they face each day[...]The time has come to move beyond empty political rhetoric and to revitalize our contract with the American people."
So, Q: Is Hensarling too devout to be successful? That is, when his balanced budget noumenon hits the defense appropriations phenomenon, which one yields? Phil Gramm, Steve Forbes, Jack Kemp all lost. (A: I don't think so. The man has admitted that reforming the budget process is unsexy. I think he defines success differently than other politicians.)
Q: Is he then unlikely to win hearts and minds even if he wins his ideological turf-war?
Q: Is any of this stuff even plausible in the face of a trillion-dollar deficit and endless war?
Q: And by the time BHO is done remaking government, isn't the Phil-Gramm-budget-hawk-model going to look awfully vestigial?
Q: By the time we've set up a national Infrastructure Investment Bank (whereby gov't subsidies stimulate the production of physical objects that we sell to other people in the World War on Carbon Emissions), isn't the notion of tax-cuts-as-stimulus going to look like what it is, i.e., endlessly dosing a dead heart with atropine?
These are my concerns, Jeb. What I'm hearing on the radio telescope, it's either a faint persistent signal, or just static... -- ds
I missed this piece in Slate last week, but here it is: Chuck Hagel, deployed properly, could win North Omaha for Obama, giving him one of NE's five electoral votes. And with the GOP pulling out of Maine, there'd be no counterweight McCain-district-in-Obama-state...but all this is academic, as we're talking about a coast to victory...boat drinks, gentlemen...
Hagel endorses Obama, hits the stump five days before election... -- ds
In the aftermath of the rapidly floundering attempt to link BHO to the Weathermen, re which I can't wait to watch Walnuts get all fusty and unhinged tonight as he promised to once more try the Obama-is-a-terrorist waters, there emerges a late entry in the right-wing-counter-terror-as-career-strategy-meme: it turns out that McCain and Lieberman are quislings for Cuban radicals! While campaigning for McCain, he promised to pursue a presidential pardon for Eduardo Arocena:
Arocena is the founder of the notorious Cuban exile militant group Omega 7, renowned for a string of bombings from 1975 to 1983. Arocena was convicted of the 1980 murder of a Cuban diplomat in Manhattan. In 1983, Arocena was arrested and charged with 42 counts pertaining to conspiracy, explosives, firearms, and destruction of foreign government property within the United States. He is currently serving a life sentence in federal prison in Indiana. His targets included:
Madison Square Garden (he blew up an adjacent store);
JFK airport (Arocena's group planted a suitcase bomb intended for a TWA flight to Los Angeles—in protest of the airline's flights to Cuba. The plane would have exploded if not for the fact that the bomb went off on the tarmac prior to being loaded);
Avery Fisher Hall at Lincoln Center (causing damage to three levels of the theater and halting the performance of a music group from Cuba);
the ticket office of the Soviet airline Aeroflot;
and a church.
He also attempted to assassinate the Cuban ambassador to the United Nations.
So while McCain is busily denouncing Barry's domestic leftism, Lieberman is getting it on with "freedom fighters," like Furs jou get de money, den jou get the power, den jou get dee weemen...Ileana Ros-Lehtinen beware! -- ds
I don't get this. The NYT finds itself duty-bound to vet the McCain campaign's allegations of a nefarious Obama-ACORN connection. This neither-nor criticism effectively grants some right-wing-rant about Those Ones stealing the election equal time with mere facts from Barry's CV. The NYT covers the story about BHO's connections without questioning the legitimacy of the allegation that those connections are themselves dubious. Slate covers the "Q: What's wrong with ACORN?" angle, but sticks to interviewing the people who put a bounty on ACORN's head in the first place.
Okay, so big deal. Small ripple. Never mind that it's this kind of acrobatic accomodation of the far-right that got Judith Miller's Iraq stories printed. Never mind that Ed Murrow figured in the '50s that all opinions are not equal: when covering a lynching, do you make sure to give the local Grand Wizard equal time? Never mind that if so-called bastions of the liberal media have to kowtow to the right fringe now, what lengths will they go to to protest their innocence once Republicans are out of power and spoiling for a fight? Seriously, look at how they savaged Jimmy Carter, for no other reason than to prove they didn't just hate Nixon.
I hate to think that I've become a one-issue bloggist, but the discovery of the Hensarling Quasar (alternately, the incipient Fourth Red Shift in American politics) has become a unifying theory for the McCain Campaign. Why pick Palin? Why harp on Ayers? Why holler about ACORN? In a time of national crisis, the campaign decided to run sludge ads? (The last Ayers ad I saw, btw, was far more savage than the flip-flopping Kerry ad from 2004. See? Isn't that cute?)
The people who are working on his campaign clearly expect to work for someone else: what's their best-case scenario? One term, followed by a Palin 2012 run? The man has lost a 14-point lead in North Dakota; he's clinging to West Virginia by 2 points; there is no future for you, staffers.
Again, at the risk of being prolix, if McCain wanted to win the election, he would have never run the Ayers-meme. Clearly, he has no interest in winning the presidency, as at this point who would? Presumably, he has a crock pot full of Wright-meme ads, ready to rock, so that by 2012, there will be a core of wounded free-marketers with exaggerated senses of entitlement for the Palin-Romney ticket, all shouting about black separatism, reverse discrimination; weeping about how McCain was martyred and how they was robbed.
Running on McCain's corpse is more profitable than running beside it. -- ds
The Obama campaign announced that Lilibet Hagel, the wife of Republican Sen. Chuck Hagel, will accompany Michelle Obama at Wednesday night’s final presidential debate.
Quick thought... is the Obama campaign holding back on a Hagel endorsement until a more opportune time? Hagel's not really going to sit on the sidelines for this one, is he? When do they come out with it? After the debate? Week before the election? Special event to steal that one electoral vote in Omaha or somewhere? Only the Shadow knows...
This bitch's harebrained wildness I colossally underestimated. Her joke candidacy must end. I don't care what the crypto-fascist fringe has to say, some 100 retired assholes in Wisconsin -- WI kiss my ass: Milwaukee is your crown jewel? 'You fucking kidding me? -- I don't care if Troopergate does martyr this mushmouth ass-tosser, thereby throwing the election to Walnuts. Don't matter. Dick Cheney knows god ain't start war in Mesopotamia, but clearly he(Cheney)'ll countenance the diversion. Who wouldn't?
Revisionists, beware! When we get to 60, we're shipping all your asses to the Hague! -- xx
I realize this is going to provide aid and comfort to the know-nothing Bob-Barr fringe -- essentially, women in parka vests with coolers of rain water and grain alcohol in their camper-back pickups, busily protecting our precious bodily fluids --but this ad started running in Ohio yesterday, 10/7, night after the debate, during the news hour:
BHO is up 14 in Pennsylvania, up 10 in Wisconsin, up 14 in Minnesota, up 6 in Colorado, up 7 in Nevada and ahead by a couple in Ohio, Florida and Virginia. Obama has a plus 19 favorable. In order to win the election, McCain has to sweep 8 toss-up states (Nevada, Colorado, Missouri, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, North Carolina, Florida). To repeat: Barry only has to win a state larger than Colorado. Stakes is high.
What's interesting to me is to see what McCain does when cornered, and to figure what that means for his party: it's clear that, in a tough spot, he's decided to swing to the right. Bad debate fixed with abortion ads. Bad VP debate fixed by domestic terrorist smears. Bad economy fixed by accusing FNMA and FMAC of loaning too much money to poor, inner-city black folk. The preconditions-meme, the government-chooses-your-doctor-meme, usw; all the familiar tropes of 1990s AM radio on an eternal-return.
Now, what that means is that McCain has adopted a revolutionary posture. Like the SI said, revolutionary language (or punk rock, for Greil Marcus) brings the unsettled debts of history back into play. 1990s revanchists evidently believe that their concerns remain incompletely addressed. And there's a case for that. But there's no real way to pay them their ransom; when public discourse is held hostage, the price of release escalates every time it is met, (e.g., the NRA radicalized gun ownership in the late 1970s via the specter of government raids on private homes; then by fighting mandatory gun-locks, mandatory gun registration, background checks on purchasers, handgun bans in inner cities. Their demands are now so acute that even Pennsylvania's proposed one-gun-a-month law was treated as a mortal danger and scuttled.) thereby making the tactic profitable so long as the stakes are low, and incremental gains tiny.
If your movement calls for France to reclaim the Ruhr valley, your movement will fail; if your movement calls for the full funding of French-language private schools in Alsace, then you can work your way east. Likewise, no one wants to overturn Roe v. Wade; they want to stop clinics that promote abortion-on-demand, stop spending tax dollars on contraceptives overseas, and protect the babies that survive partial birth abortion.
THUS, the ad above. Barry clearly voted against the Illinois law because he refused to be baited by the fringe right. Let's recall that less than one percent of all abortions in the US occur after 24 weeks; extraction-and-dilation accounts for a fraction of that; what Illinois zealots believe to be botched E&D would account for a fraction of that number. If that number exists at all. The whole intent of the law was to scare providers into no longer providing. If doctors think they'll lose their license for a one in a million mistake made in a one in 10,000 procedure, they'll do the math; if insurers see a risk, no matter how infinitesimal, they will kill said risk.
The capstone in the right's strategy is to gradually push all women wanting abortions into late-term, high-risk procedures: 87 percent of all American counties have no abortion provider; 60 percent of all women delay abortions. If there's no Plan B, if there's abstinence-only education, if there's intense public disapprobation of abortion, women get funnelled into the high-risk procedures. Then, all the right has to do to de facto outlaw abortion is to outlaw the high-risk procedures. Viz. the Guttmacher Institute.
I mean, that's the theory. Again, the whole point of fighting on the fringe is to keep the issue alive. The point is to fight, not to win. The vast majority of women who have abortions do so for economic reasons. To tangle with the main causes of abortion would be to tangle with poverty. This ad is to bring out the base (in both senses of the word). Running this ad, at this time exemplifies the McCain-Palin retreat-to-the-right, and their preparation for the advent of the Hensarling Quasar... -- ds
Obama had two replies. First, he wasn't calling for an invasion of Pakistan—just for "taking out" Osama Bin Laden if we had him in our sights and the Pakistanis couldn't or wouldn't do it. Then he won the round decisively by remarking, "This is the guy who said 'Bomb, bomb Iran,' " who called for "the annihilation of North Korea," and who, after we ousted the Taliban from Kabul, said, "Next up, Baghdad." That's not talking softly. (McCain's response, that he was just joking with an old veteran friend, was, first, not true—he said it in a public forum—and, second, quite lame.)
Yeah I was wondering about that lame excuse. I mean, for my money, it wasn't the most outlandish, nor the most important/heavyweight misdirection Walnuts used in the town hall, e.g., he will fine you, he will snatch defeat from the jaws of victory, (at 02:03)
he was wrong on Russia (btw, we're all wrong on Georgia; are Georgians sniping at Russians as they (the Russians) leave?). Right, sod all that. Where is this "Bomb Bomb Iran" thing? Murrell's Inlet, SC? Listen to the wackjob fascist asking the question: When do we airmail Tehran? Poor Walnuts had to do something...I actually think the Barbara Ann thing is hilarious, and it's going to be in my head for the rest of the afternoon. We out here at the 'Steer already understand that the Famous Air Pirate is off his gourd, so the joking about nuclear annihilation thing is, we feel, to be taken in stride. Like the man says, get a life; Politics has no real-world application, right? -- ds
Charles Taylor, former president of Liberia, founder of the Demon Forces (officially referred to as the Anti-Terrorism Unit) is in the Hague. His son Chuckie McArthur Emmanuel, born in Boston, in in Miami facing prosecution under 18 USC 2340A, the extraterritorial torture statute. In Liberia in the late 90s,
Mr. Emmanuel selected and shot [three men] in the heads [sic]. He then ordered their bodies to be dragged away and displayed two of the heads at the checkpoint posts,
you know, among other counter-terrorist-spring-break activities...
Q: Is his defense attorney smart enough to make use of exemptions to US torture law to get Chuckie off?
(Chuckie's trial in the US, btw, might have been mooted by extraordinary rendition; can't we just call this guy a terrorist and ship his ass to Syria and pull out his fingernails?)
I mean, it's tricky, but this is what the guy is paid for. It all hinges on his status. Emmanuel, clearly considers himself an anti-terrorist operative. It's clear that the USG doesn't want to deport/extradict him, so there's no real loss by his claiming to be a paramilitary fighter, or a civilian contractor working for the Liberian (i.e., his pop's) army. At the time of the atrocities, the nearest thing governing the actions of American civilian contractors was MEJA (Military Extraterritorial Jurisdiction Act, 2000), which covers any American employed overseas by Department of Defense. Commit a felony, you're tried in the US. There were, until last year, holes:
The holes in MEJA became especially apparent during the Abu Ghraib scandal of 2004, when a civilian interrogator from Titan Corporation and a civilian interpreter from CACI International faced no punishment, despite their implication in the official report.31 These civilians were technically working for the US Department of the Interior, rather than the DOD, thus shielding them from MEJA’s reach. Their military colleagues had no such protection from courts-martial, however.
So, to rephrase the Q: Is there light between being an American torturer abroad and being an American civilian contractor not employed by DoD? And, Q: Since we've spent so much time cobbling ways (way, way, way, way, way, way) for non-soldier torturers to escape prosecution by a "host country," or indeed, by anyone, where's the sympathy for the Demon? -- ds
Not to refry the VP debate or anything, which in this 49th hour of coverage has finally gelatinized into a tight bolus of conventional wisdom (Palin did not trip over her shoelaces; Biden did not push her face into the mud), but I can't shake my ideological middle-ear back into alignment. There were steeplechase moments on both sides (Biden triangulating on gay marriage, Palin's "darn right it was those predatory lenders,"), but the strategic-level outburst of cognitive dissonance, the peal of feedback in my polisci-lizard brain was in the tandem pronouncements:
"We do need the private sector to be able to keep more of what we earn and produce [sic]. Government is going to have to learn to be more efficient and live with less if that's what it takes to reign in the government growth that we've seen today."
and,
"And the rescue plan has got to include that massive oversight that Americans are expecting and deserving."
Or this pair:
"Patriotic is saying, government, you know, you're not always the solution. In fact, too often you're the problem so, government, lessen the tax burden and on our families and get out of the way and let the private sector and our families grow and thrive and prosper."
and,
"We need to make sure that we demand from the federal government strict oversight of those entities in charge of our investments and our savings [...]"
If you believe, with John Dickerson, that this debate was about rebranding Sarah Palin for future use, you have to square these statements. This is the Republican VP candidate calling for massive regulation of financial markets alongside massive deregulation. My brain, together with my hair, stood on end! WWMilton Friedman D?
Never mind that Palin is participating in the same overt hypocrisy of Reagan's "Government, you are the problem," pretending that government is something you can be in and not of, something you seek but won't accept, (also, necessarily, presuming that government is something other than the things we choose to do together), etc., the way that diehard evangelicals read the Letter to the Romans' "Be ye not conformed to this world, but be transformed," and find free license to run a child-rape cult...Again, never mind all that. Never mind the soggy logical turf her handlers are inhabiting there. What kind of party brand can you build on this?
What I would have given for Biden to have started autistically screeching "Fuzzy Math!" or "Voodoo Economics!" Clearly, we need a shock into awareness. The party brand -- listen up, Mitt! -- that is built when you promise to shrink government while maintaining an open-ended war in Iraq, while increasing non-emergency approprations for defense, USW, is the Bush-Cheney brand. It is deficits don't matter. It's this kind of pigeon shit.
Maybe it's an Eastern thing, like "Spending and tax cuts are the father and mother of the ten-thousand things," but my guess is it's far from it...
IF, on the other hand, you struggle to comprehend why anyone thought this a successful appearance for SP (at 01:19 here, she called Al Qaeda Shiites:
she said the trouble on Main Street was trickling up to Wall Street (which she didn't mean to say, clearly, but is true nonetheless), and this is recalled off the top of my head, God knows what other horrors lie in that transcript), then the above are just parts of a cynical "Sure, you can have your cake and eat it, why not?" gesture.
No Republican president has ever shrunk government and none ever will. We all know this. But the only thing worse than a will-wank-for-coins tactic is a will-wank-for-coins tactic that doesn't work. The tax-cut-spending-increase bait-and-switch will crash the Republican party (and looking very far ahead, the thing I really fear is a hard nut of a latter-day GOP emerging when this party goes -nova, the remaining True Believer fiscal conservatives sloughing off the excess gas of the past 14 years to become a mighty quasar, a radio beacon audible throughout the universe; those guys are more comfortable on AM anyway; the Hensarling Quasar is a metaphor pret a porter).
Either the tune is going to change, or Jeb Hensarling will be the only one standing When the Revolution Come... -- ds
