This is what happens when you have a real opposition party:
Over the last ten days or so, the President and the McCain campaign (who are clearly working in coordination, as they’re entirely entitled to do) have been systematically drawing back from their positions on Iraq, Afghanistan and Iran and either fully embracing or moving toward those held for some time by Barack Obama.
This morning as I was driving our stick shift car to work I heard a noise from the clutch. I was on the freeway so I raised the windows and listened more carefully. There it was. A short white noise, like the sound of windshield wipers making a single pass. It only happened when I shifted gears.
I was wearing loafers. It was the sound of air coming out of my shoe whenever I pushed down on the clutch. There was indeed something wrong with the man-machine interface. But the problem was closer to the man than the machine.
This is cursory judgment but no less informed than much of what I hear from pundits on television.
According to this book review, cited by Matthew Yglesias, the new book by Jane Mayer on America’s descent into the ranks of states that imprison without due process and torture without aim is:
2) eliciting so many false confessions and violating so many laws as to sabotage countless investigations and prosecutions
3) responsible for producing some of the bad intelligence used to justify the invasion of and war in Iraq
Which makes me think: elections are so incredibly important. Any voter who is flip about and/or unwilling to think out their position on elections is, in part, as guilty of the crimes spelled out above as the mad men who personally ordered them.
Ouch:
Yet, now that he is the presumptive nominee, Obama is standing not with Feingold, but with Bush and the special interests Obama once denounced. He says he’ll vote for a White House-backed FISA rewrite — which is likely to be taken up by the Senate this week — in opposition to the position taken by civil liberties groups, legal scholars on the left and right and, of course, Russ Feingold. Who can justify that?
There are so many brilliant, disarmingly beautiful moments in WALL•E, I want to watch it – or at least the first chapter – a few more times to begin to understand what I’ve seen.
The plot is easier to recall, especially as it’s a series of precise political punches. The EVE robot, newly arrived to an arid, dusty, garbage-strewn landscape shoots first and ask questions later. WALL•E lives to build skyscrapers – ziggurats – out of garbage. The complete arc of the movie is to deliver the audience – fat, lazy spectators – “back to earth.”
This is an irresistible – rather than an inconvenient – truth.
from Wired:
For instance, Google conquered the advertising world with nothing more than applied mathematics. It didn’t pretend to know anything about the culture and conventions of advertising — it just assumed that better data, with better analytical tools, would win the day. And Google was right.
Almost everything I get paid to do, I learned to do by applying one sort of “science” or another.
What happened next in the life of a small-time revolutionary after he was given $25 million and was repatriated to the U.S. with a new identity, might make for quite a show:
The hunt for Khalid Shaikh Mohammed involved the entire American intelligence establishment, with its billion-dollar arrays of spy satellites and global eavesdropping net. But his capture came down to a simple text message sent from an informant who had slipped into the bathroom of a house in Rawalpindi, near the Pakistani capital, Islamabad.
“I am with K.S.M.,” the message said, according to an intelligence officer briefed on the episode.
The capture team waited a few hours before going in on the night of March 1, 2003, to blur the connection to the informant, a walk-in attracted by the offer of a $25 million reward. The informant, described by one American who met him as “a little guy who looked like a farmer,” would later get a face-to-face thank you from George J. Tenet, then the C.I.A. director, at the American Embassy in Abu Dhabi, intelligence officials say, and he was resettled with his reward money under a new identity in the United States.
to the victor the spoils (of the GWOT):
And of course if I were Barack Obama it’s very possible that I wouldn’t think giving the executive branch unlimited surveillance powers was a bad idea at all — I’m going to be president in a few months.
Is it possible to send both a contribution and a rebuke all at once?
What Barack Obama did here was wrong and destructive. He’s supporting a bill that is a full-scale assault on our Constitution and an endorsement of the premise that our laws can be broken by the political and corporate elite whenever the scary specter of The Terrorists can be invoked to justify it. What’s more, as a Constitutional Law Professor, he knows full well what a radical perversion of our Constitution this bill is, and yet he’s supporting it anyway. Anyone who sugarcoats or justifies that is doing a real disservice to their claimed political values and to the truth.
I’m so naive, it never occurred to me that people did this in real life:
There are reports from very reliable sources that Hoyer, after engineering this “compromise” and ensuring it has enough votes to pass, will then vote against it so he can claim it’s not his fault (as will Pelosi). Worse, the Democratic leadership in the Senate (Reid and Durbin) have been saying that while they oppose the “compromise” and will vote against it, they will do nothing to impede its passage.
We would never permit a network to physically beat people in order to report on the beatings as sensational news.
The body politic is another story. Frank Rich:
The fictional scenario of mobs of crazed women defecting to Mr. McCain is just one subplot of the master narrative that has consumed our politics for months. The larger plot has it that the Democratic Party is hopelessly divided, and that only a ticket containing Mrs. Clinton in either slot could retain the loyalty of white male bowlers and other constituencies who tended to prefer her to Mr. Obama in the primaries.
This is reality turned upside down. It’s the Democrats who are largely united and the Republicans who are at one another’s throats.
Yet the myth of Democratic disarray is so pervasive that when “NBC Nightly News” and The Wall Street Journal presented their new poll results last week (Obama, 47 percent; McCain, 41 percent) they ignored their own survey’s findings to stick to the clichéd script. Both news organizations (and NBC’s sibling, MSNBC) dwelled darkly on Mr. Obama’s “problems with two key groups” (as NBC put it): white men, where he is behind 20 percentage points to Mr. McCain, and white suburban women, where he is behind 6 points.
Since that poll gives Mr. Obama not just a 19-point lead among all women but also a 7-point lead among white women, a 6-point deficit in one sliver of the female pie is hardly a heart-stopper. Nor is Mr. Obama’s showing among white men shocking news. No Democratic presidential candidate, including Bill Clinton, has won a majority of that declining demographic since 1964. Mr. Kerry lost white men by 25 points, and Mr. Gore did by 24 points (even as he won the popular vote).
“NBC Nightly News” was so focused on these supposedly devastating Obama shortfalls that there was no mention that the Democrat beat Mr. McCain (and outperformed Mr. Kerry) in every other group that had been in doubt: independents, Catholics, blue-collar workers and Hispanics. Indeed, the evidence that pro-Clinton Hispanics are flocking to Mr. McCain is as nonexistent as the evidence of a female stampede. Mr. Obama swamps Mr. McCain by 62 percent to 28 percent — a disastrous G.O.P. setback, given that President Bush took 44 percent of the Hispanic vote in 2004, according to exit polls. No wonder the McCain campaign no longer lists its candidate’s home state of Arizona as safe this fall.
There are many ways that Mr. Obama can lose this election. But his 6-percentage-point lead in the Journal-NBC poll is higher than Mr. Bush’s biggest lead (4 points) over Mr. Kerry at any point in that same poll in 2004. So far, despite all the chatter to the contrary, Mr. Obama is not only holding on to Mrs. Clinton’s Democratic constituencies but expanding others (like African-Americans). The same cannot be said of Mr. McCain and the G.O.P. base.
That story is minimized or ignored in part because an unshakable McCain fan club lingers in some press quarters and in part because it’s an embarrassing refutation of the Democrats-in-meltdown narrative that so many have invested in. Understating the splintering of the Republican base also keeps hope alive for a tight race. As the Clinton-Obama marathon proved conclusively, a photo finish is essential to the dramatic and Nielsen imperatives of 24/7 television coverage.
World tips Hollywood on its axis:
The studios may be Hollywood-based, but their conglom parents are thinking globally, which affects every business and creative decision.
In the past, each country’s box office was a mix of Hollywood blockbusters, U.S. midrange and indie pics, and local fare. Recently, the midrange pics have been squeezed out by local titles, such as by French blockbuster “Bienvenue chez les Cht’is.”
And, as the studios enter local-language production, Hollywood finds its monopoly on big-scale epics also being threatened. Cash-rich Asian companies grabbed headlines in Cannes with a string of deals and presentations for ambitious films that reached far beyond their traditional markets.
Just in the first three months of 2008, recent lobbyist disclosure statements reveal that AT&T spent $5.2 million in lobbyist fees (putting it well ahead of its 2007 pace, when it spent just over $17 million). In the first quarter of 2008, Verizon spent $4.8 million on lobbyist fees, while Comcast spent $2.6 million. So in the first three months of this year, those three telecoms — which would be among the biggest beneficiaries of telecom amnesty (right after the White House) — spent a combined total of almost $13 million on lobbyists. They’re on pace to spend more than $50 million on lobbying this year — just those three companies.
as my dad would say “what a racket.” as in racketeering.
the executive branch asks companies to become accomplices in a crime spree. the companies accede. a few years later, the white house gets caught. the companies get caught. and now the legislative branch, via its unofficial intercessors, is asking these companies to pony up some money or else they’re going to get fined, prosecuted, whatever.
it almost makes arguments for small government conservatism sound reasonable. why empower crooks to lie and steal?
unfortunately that logic would also dictate that we do away with freeways because they lead to forty thousand deaths each year when the reasonable response is to make freeways more efficient and less dangerous by making them more “transparent.”
the same logic applies to governance.
Catastrophes are like a political x-ray machine. They reveal the true condition of civic institutions.
Following the earthquake in Sichuan, China:
Among the developments to watch in coming days is growing public anger over the shoddy construction of schools in rural China. Among the dead are a massive number of children. Many parents are already asking: Why did the schools collapse when other government buildings remained standing?
Following Cyclone Nargis in Myanmar:
In the wealthy neighborhoods where the generals and diplomats live, groups of soldiers are clearing away debris and workers are perched on rooftops replacing tiles. But in the poorer neighborhoods, “there are no soldiers at all,” said one resident.
Following Hurricane Karina in New Orleans, USA:
Hurricane Katrina exposed the U.S. government’s failure to learn the lessons of the Sept. 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, as leaders from President Bush down disregarded ample warnings of the threat to New Orleans and did not execute emergency plans or share information that would have saved lives, according to a blistering report by House investigators.
Military columnist Joe Galloway as quoted by Glenn Greenwald:
…Marine Gen. Paul Van Riper had walked out of an Iran scenario war game where he was commander of the opposing forces when he outfoxed the U.S. Navy & Marine attacking forces, sunk over a dozen major American ships and killed over 10,000 U.S. sailors and marines. The headquarters response was to re-start the war game with new rules forbidding Van Riper to employ any of his successful tactics — using small speedboats and small aircraft packed with explosives in a mass kamikazi attack on the fleet; defeating U.S. eavesdropping by dispatching his orders by messengers; etc.
At this point Van Riper walked out. An investigation of the whole affair was done & DOD promised Van Riper they would release it within a year. They never did.
Awesome eight years, excellent political movement.
update. Eric Martin: “Making important policy choices based on hoped for outcomes is something of a pattern for the Bush administration.”
Great tits cope well with warming
update. it’s a thing of elegance, indeed. two days after noting the above, the headline – just the headline – was on BoingBoing.net. the story – rather, the headline – stayed in BBC News’ site most e-mailed category for at least a week.
Newsweek via Schneier on Security:
Sir David Omand, who used to head Britain’s version of the National Security Agency and oversaw its entire intelligence establishment from the Cabinet Office earlier this decade, described terrorism as “one corner” of the global security threat posed by weapons proliferation and political instability. That in turn is only one of three major dangers facing the world over the next few years. The others are the deteriorating environment and a meltdown of the global economy. Putting terrorism in perspective, said Sir David, “leads naturally to a risk management approach, which is very different from what we’ve heard from Washington these last few years, which is to ‘eliminate the threat’.”
