Sound and Fury

Metamorphosis Complete

2010-04-19T18:56:00.001-05:00

John McCain disavows the title "Maverick." He truly has become Bush.

Tea Party, ca 23 A.D.

2010-04-19T17:47:00.004-05:00

I like paying taxes. With them I buy civilization. - Oliver Wendell Holmes

There are truly innumerable examples of teabaggers unwittingly spouting stupefying irony/ignorance (here and here , for example).

But did you know that this tea party mindframe has existed practically unchanged for 2000 years? It's true!

PS: On a serious note, the Obama protesters are actually not at all comparable to the Monty Python crew. Why? Because the while the Romans did tend to levy oppressive taxes on their tributary states, Obama actually cut taxes for 95% of working Americans. Including teabaggers. No shit.

Unrelated, but what the hell.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

2010 Census

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor

Tea Party

Update: Someone (15000 someones) agrees with Justice Holmes!

Final Stretch

2008-10-13T14:39:00.003-05:00

Instead of televising a debate, we should do something more like this:

Fuck debates. What a joke.

Anyways,this is how it's gonna be till election day.

I thought this was interesting:

Damn It Feels Good To Be A Banker

2008-09-25T19:30:00.002-05:00

This is HILARIOUS.

Of course, at the moment, it doesn't feel that good to be a banker.

Superstar Sarah

2008-09-15T19:55:00.003-05:00

I was reading more on Palin (for the life of me, I cannot understand why I can't let it go. Her story is not particularly interesting, other than the insanity that it reflects in McCain for having chosen her, and in others for supporting her. Maybe it's just that she's so easy to rip on that everyone's having a field day. Anyway.) and I found that even Maureen Dowd --the Sarah Palin of NYT editorialists (yeah I'll say it)-- gets her barbs in. Excerpt:

Palin has rocketed in the polls, drawing women and men with her vapid — if vivacious and visceral — scripted cheerleading. But if you’re reading this, Charlie, we want to know everything, including:

What kind of budget-cutter makes a show of getting rid of the state plane, then turns around and bills taxpayers for the travel of her husband and kids between Juneau and Wasilla and sticks the state with a per-diem tab to stay in her own home?

Why was Sarah for the Bridge to Nowhere before she was against the Bridge to Nowhere, and why was she for earmarks before she was against them? And doesn’t all this make her just as big a flip-flopper as John Kerry?

What kind of fiscal conservative raises taxes and increases budgets in both her jobs — as mayor and as governor?

When the phone rings at 3 a.m., will she call the Wasilla Assembly of God congregation and ask them to pray on a response, as she asked them to pray for a natural gas pipeline?

Does she really think Adam, Eve, Satan and the dinosaurs mingled on the earth 5,000 years ago?

Why put out a press release about her teenage daughter’s pregnancy and then spend the next few days attacking the press for covering that press release?

As Troopergate unfolds here — an inquiry into whether Palin inappropriately fired the commissioner of public safety for refusing to fire her ex-brother-in-law — it raises this question: Who else is on her enemies list and what might she do with the F.B.I.?

Does she want a federal ban on trans fat in restaurants and a ban on abortion and Harry Potter? And which books exactly would have landed on the literature bonfire if she had had her way with that Wasilla librarian? "

And also, seriously...I mean seriously.

Finally:

In other words:

Beauty queens are all the same. Except for ones from the midwest, who have an annoying accent when they spout idiocy.

Not Done With Palin

2008-09-14T19:05:00.003-05:00

NYT gives her a bum rap. She's uber-secretive, cronyistic, petty, ignorant, and has ties to religious fanatics. Sound familiar? No wonder McCain thought she might energize the base.

Here is an excellent editorial by Marc Fisher that comments on the sort anti-technocracy that I've bemoaned before. An excerpt:

Most people I spoke to readily conceded that Palin lacks experience with or knowledge of many important national and foreign issues. But, as Allison McGarvey, a teacher who lives in Stafford County, said, Palin is "a courageous woman, and what she doesn't know, she can learn quickly. Let's face it, no president knows all the issues. Anyway, I don't see how a candidate can pick one stand and just stick to it. The world situation changes every day. It's their moral and ethical background that's important."

In this hyperdemocratized society, the national conviction that anyone can succeed is morphing into a belief that experience and knowledge may almost be disqualifying credentials.

Like many at the rally, Victoria Robinson-Worst sees Palin's lack of experience as an asset. "I know people who have experience who are totally incompetent," said Robinson-Worst, who lives in Loudoun County, designs wedding flowers and raises two children. "And I know people who have no experience who step in and get it right. I mean, women can do amazing things."

This is where culture wars, identity politics and self-suffocating academic theories of deconstructionism have led us: Authority is suspect. Experience is corrupting. Ignorance is strength?

Next will be "war is peace." Or have we already heard that one?

Krugman tells how this campaign is gonna be.

This is a relatively objective critique of Palin's inexperience.

This is perhaps the most interesting take on what the Palin pick really means, and it's quite scary.

Even Friedman has a point on Palin. (And Friedman is kind of an idiot.)

Damning With Faint Praise

2008-09-08T13:39:00.003-05:00

Wonkette nails it. Condi's apologia is so piss-poor it's laughable. Condi ends by saying, "There different kinds of experiences in life that help one to deal with matters of foreign policy." Chief among these: dealing with matters of foreign policy. Shitty among these: having babies, winning beauty pageants. Which ones does she have again?

Finally, an authoritative fisking of Palin's stance on the "bridge to nowhere," with damning photo to boot.

The reviews below also really hurt, since the worst (in my opinion) are plucked from the National Review, an arch-conservative publication with highly apologetic tendencies towards bush. Ouch. If I'm agreeing with Bill Kristol, something is terribly wrong.

Read Me

2008-09-04T20:43:00.001-05:00

A good quickie on the role of the media this election cycle.

So Clever

2008-09-03T20:01:00.003-05:00

I love Wonkette. Didn't see the movie.

Link Dump - Mostly Palin, That Hilariously Unqualified Minx

2008-09-02T19:25:00.003-05:00

I'm a little disappointed that I missed on my forecast of Lieberman for veep, but I am stoked that my prediction of "the perfect storm of electoral failure" still looks on the money. I mean, what was he thinking?

"She's a moose hunter. That sounds like a euphemism for something, but it's not. She actually hunts moose."

Palin's to do list.

Two main points from the NYT article on McCain's pick:

Ms. Palin appears to have traveled very little outside the United States. In July 2007, she had to get a passport before she visited members of the Alaska National Guard stationed in Kuwait, according to her deputy communications director, Sharon Leighow.
Whooops! said the McCain staffers who initially tried to claim that Palin's travel abroad would help offset her lack of "formal" foreign policy experience. This was an asinine claim even if it had been based on reality. Also:
Ms. Palin is known to conservatives for opting not to have an abortion after learning that the child she was carrying, her youngest, had Down syndrome. “It is almost impossible to exaggerate how important that is to the conservative faith community,” Mr. Reed said. "I mean, these people are themselves -- almost without exception -- born with severe mental retardation."
Okay, so Ralph Reed didn't actually say that last bit. But he's proven it many a time.

I do feel bad for her daughter Bristol in all this. Not just because she's young a dumb and got knocked up, and not just because the whole country now gets to know about (and presumably pass judgment upon) this, but because Palin has declared that she's looking forward to her daughter's having the baby with "the man she will marry." So there will be a shotgun wedding so as not to torpedo her mother's political aspirations. Nice.

This is not right. The meth-heads with guns that wanted to to kill Obama were deemed "not a credible threat," but some dude in prison who wrote a nasty letter to McCain was dealt with swiftly and harshly.

Unrelated:

Unfortunately, escape is not so easy.

When The Shit Hits The Solar-Powered Fan

2008-09-01T19:03:00.001-05:00

A very funny little fiction about peak oil. I liked this line:

Funny how electricity and oil are so closely tied. Never thought of that before.

One Woman Is As Good As The Next?

2008-08-29T18:04:00.002-05:00

This commentary pretty much says all you need to know about McCain's pick for VP.

Paul Begala also offers a few not-completely-idiotic thoughts, as he is wont to do when not seated opposite Tucker Carlson:

For a man who is 72 years old and has had four bouts with cancer to have chosen someone so completely unqualified to become president is shockingly irresponsible. Suddenly, McCain's age and health become central issues in the campaign, as does his judgment.
(snip)

For months, the McCainiacs have said they will run on his judgment and experience. In his first presidential decision, John McCain has shown that he is willing to endanger his country, potentially leaving it in the hands of someone who simply has no business being a heartbeat away from the most powerful, complicated, difficult job in human history.

Yes, it's rhetorical and not particularly insightful, but it's also unquestionably true. She has no serious leadership credentials. Period.

I'd say the pick makes McCain look fairly desperate. I'm clearly biased, but I can hardly see any other way to construe it. I mean, while Biden may be a good choice for Obama as far as "shoring up weaknesses," I kind of wonder how many people really believe that that sort of thing decides elections. I half-suspect it just provides mouthy pundits (or wannabes, like, um, yeah, nevermind) with one more topic over which to engage in moot, mentally masturbatory bloviation. I mean, the fact of the matter is that people vote for the presidential candidate they want to be president. Veeps are an afterthought. So when McCain makes a reachy move like this (this might be the most "maverick" we've seen from him in a while), it seems almost like an admission that he can't beat Obama head to head. He's pulling out the gimmick playbook because he can't get it done with fundamentals. Once again, while I happen to really like Obama's pick of Biden, there is absolutely no question that Obama's campaign intends to win the election on the strength of Obama. He could have chosen just about anyone as his veep and it wouldn't have made much difference. Well, he couldn't have chosen "a first-term governor of a state with more reindeer than people" without raising some eyebrows about what type of campaign he was trying to run.

As for my predictions about the efficacy of this gambit, I suspect that it will fail spectacularly. The desperation of this pick will not go unnoticed, and I think the patent insincerity of his attempt to reach out to female voters (read: exploit disgruntled Hillary supporters on the rebound like Fratty McRoofie III at a kegger) will probably backfire. Not like, not work well. More like, blow up in your face you patronizing old pig.

Furthermore, in failing to choose an old Republican stalwart (for all his weaknesses, I think Tom Ridge would have been an excellent choice for McCain; they would present a united front of old, grouchy, militant geezers, which they might as well do, because only the die hard Red-Heads are going to vote for them anyway.) he will most likely continue to alienate the conservative branch of the Republican constituency. Much as he may think he can pick up points with traditionally Democratic demographics, what he really needs to do is ensure the thus-far tenuous support of traditionally Republican blocks. Some of the old boys from the party will not be pleased that he has chosen an upstart nobody of a woman from Alaska, while McCain, regardless of his running mate, is himself an awful choice for reaching to anyone not already in the fold. Not to mention he's running against Barack Muthafuckin Obama, the archetype of charisma and pied piper of the disillusioned, so even a more dynamic candidate would hardly stand a chance among the ranks of the undecided. In short, for a guy who touts his military expertise, McCain has done a terrible job of picking his battles. McCain would do better to base his strategy on ensuring maximum turnout from the Republican faithful: wave the flag, cut taxes, hate gays, love Jebus. Don't try to get cute and start pretending that women matter all of a sudden; in matters of fresh faces and fresh ideas, Obama is king.

PS: If the McCain campaign really thought those sore losers on the HillRod wagon were serious when they claimed they would vote for McCain if Obama won the nomination, they will prove sadly mistaken. On the other hand, this maneuver is somewhat more subtle than I've given them credit for. I cannot but imagine that McCain strategists appreciate that they will have little success in capturing the female vote at large. Palin's unique appeal is in her exemplification of a strange and paradoxical political entity that I call the she-o-con. There are a handful of Fox News pundits and such that also fit this mold, and they are essentially smart, attractive, conservative women wily enough to conceal their "masculine" political ambitions behind a pretense of dutiful motherhood. They are proud soccer moms who quickly avow their subservience to their husbands, lest they be castigated as uppity, but who are meanwhile clearly brainy and ballsy enough to handle the Machiavellian machinations of the political world. They're like the Republican equivalent of Hillary Clinton masquerading as Martha Stewart. A strange beast indeed. (Actually, I don't know enough about Palin to confidently assert that she is a she-o-con, since she's never really been in the media at all. But I extrapolate this from what little biographical information is available on her. If she is not she-o-con, then she REALLY doesn't have much going for her.)

PPS: I have been please with my calls about the election so far. Way back at the beginning of primary season, even after Hillary came out of the gates super strong, I predicted confidently that Obama would win the nomination. So I'll make another prediction, this time on the record, so that the legend of my political forecasting prowess will spread from - and be enshrined forever upon - a blog that nobody reads. Obama crushes McCain in the biggest landslide I will see in a presidential race in my lifetime. We're talking like 57%-40% of the popular vote, and carrying almost all of the big swing states to a thrashing at the electoral college level. It will be an embarrassingly lopsided lopsided contest. See "a thumpin'."

PPPS: I didn't mean to compare Palin to Hillary in a way that would validate McCain's oh-so-ridiculous strategy of placing a Hillary decoy on his ticket. Also, I just found that Wonkette feels similarly, calling Palin a "fake Hillary Clinton," and breaking the news (to me) that Palin is embroiled in a scandal. Oh Alaska, do you ever elect legislative types that aren't corrupt?

More on Joe Biden

2008-08-27T20:28:00.003-05:00

Here's a Biden video I had posted earlier that got taken down. I really do like this sumbitch. It's a shame he and Rudy fell out of the race so early, because their pointed remarks toward one another (an exchange that Biden got the better of) were nothing short of hilarious.

I also came across a nice Politico article elaborating on the notion that Obama's choice of Biden as VP really stuck it to McCain.

Here's the guy running off at the mouth, but in such a great way. Why can't more politicians talk like this? Dare I say, it reminds me of some sort of (now defunct) rapidly moving vehicle that conveys speech in a bullshit-free manner.

Non sequitir:
An interesting way to think about the Olympic medal count.

And an awesome xkcd. For pure math nerdiness, this is about as clever as it gets.

KOwned

2008-08-26T15:49:00.004-05:00

I LOVE that man.

Also, I have semi-fawned over Joe Biden before (here and here), so I must say I'm pretty happy with Obama's choice. Given that Hillary was essentially ruled out from the start (although I'm still not sure why it must have been so), I think Biden is one of the best choices out there. Truthdig gives him a review that is, not surprisingly, quite positive, and speaks to some of the more substantial strengths that Biden provides the Obama campaign. Most notably, he shores up Obama's foreign policy cred with a great deal of experience in that arena. It's also an interesting observation that this choice "hamstrings" McCain with respect to the sort of running mate he can now select. (Ha! Obama forcing McCain to be conservative; there's a punchline for ya.) I would also love to see Biden in some VP debates; I think he would give Lieberman (yes, I think it will be Lieberman; McCain is orchestrating the perfect storm of transcendent electoral failure) a pretty nasty whoopin'.

And lastly, remember our plan for Iraq: "As they stand up, we'll ~~stand down~~ keep staying here. Even if they tell us to leave because we're fucking shit up. (Like this. Or these. I could go on.)

Seriously though, if even Al-Maliki thinks we should go, what the hell are we doing there? We should probably leave ~~soon~~ 5 years ago.

</rant>

PS: From this link:

Custer Battles is a relatively new company in the booming field of so-called "private military companies" in Iraq providing veteran soldiers from around the world for various security jobs. Named for founders Michael Battles and Scott Custer, who are military veterans, the company quickly nabbed lucrative contracts in Iraq, where U.S. authorities needed firms who were willing to accept high-risk assignments.

I don't give a shit what your founders' names are, naming your fighting/mercenary outfit "Custer Battles" is re-fucking-tarded. Is that some kind of sick joke? What the hell is wrong with you people?

</rant> 

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Not Helping...

2008-08-23T18:12:00.002-05:00

Robin Leach apparently leapt to John McCain's defense in a recent media schaden-session, deftly explaining why the geezer couldn't remember how many houses he owned. This unfortunate brain flatus was already a minor disaster for the McCain campaign, adding one more facet to the narrative of McCain's not-so-creeping senescence and seriously undermining his digs at Obama's elitism. What he really didn't need to help reassure voters that he can relate to their financial woes was for the Grand Poobah of pretentious dickwads, a man whose very existence is predicated on showcasing how much "better" some people live --nay, are -- than regular Americans, to cavalierly tell us "It’s nothing to get into a kerfuffle about."

[Leach said] he isn’t really surprised at McCain's odd memory lapse given the complex lives that the super-rich lead.

"He probably was confused as to which homes are in his name, his wife's name, or corporate names," Leach explained in his familiar, deep British baritone. "In his attempt to be honest, he put his foot in his mouth."

Well, if your dayjob is (well, was before he retired) touring opulent shrines to Mammon, it's rather easy to dismiss this incident as a common mishap among the fabulously wealthy. The problem is, voters don't like candidates to be fabulously wealthy (or, rather, they don't like to envision them so). Moreover, this incident has prompted many to investigate just how many houses the McCain estate does comprise, and their approximate value. And all this negative PR is being disseminated without the Obama campaign having to dirty their hands with innuendos or accusations. That is why this fuck-up is big; it has invited people to criticize McCain on their own terms. And Robin Leach's ill-conceived defense, in fact, the very notion that he saw fit to defend McCain at all, is most certainly not helping.

McCain: With friends like these, who needs enemies!

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More on Torture, Part 2

2008-08-23T11:14:00.003-05:00

There is no greater fallacy than the belief that aims and purposes are one
thing, while methods and tactics are another. -Emma Goldman, social
activist (1869-1940)

Here are some very interesting comments on interrogation by a guy who knows the field:

I am certainly pleased to hear that the ticking time bomb scenario is in fact unrealistic. But I should point out that even without that scenario's unlikely justification, Sam Harris's defense of torture is quite compelling. I'm not so sure I can stand by my claim that I unconditionally oppose torture (although my thoughts about the legal process that must govern its use most certainly hold). Harris's argument is essentially that if we are willing to engage in a practice (namely, war) that will undoubtedly kill innocent people, how can we cringe at a practice (torture) that might do the same or less, and presumably on a much more limited scale. (The argument that torture can in fact be worse than death is, if true, not applicable. Maiming, disembowelment, the loss of children, parents, and loved ones are all inevitable consequences of war. In short, there is no suffering that can be inflicted by torture that is not inflicted by war.) He sums it up thusly:

Assuming that we want to maintain a coherent ethical position on these matters, this appears to be a circumstance of forced choice: if we are willing to drop bombs, or even risk that rifle rounds might go astray, we should be willing to torture a certain class of criminal suspects and military prisoners; if we are unwilling to torture, we should be unwilling to wage modern war.

Unfortunately, I find his logic quite sound. The logical conclusion of any frank discussion about the ethics of warfare seems to arrive at simplistic aphorisms. If warfare is permitted at all, then "all's fair in [love and] war," or more simply, "war is hell." How then do we stay on the high side of the slippery slope to Shermanesque absolute war?

I don't know. But in the theme of reducing complex ethical issues to vulgar wisdom, I'm reminded of a movie quote on war:
"Strange game. The only winning move is not to play."

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Tha't all you had to say....

2008-08-23T10:38:00.002-05:00

This interview was also kind of interesting, although I think it was conducted poorly by both parties. The amazing thing is that the consistent incoherence and irrelevance of Bush's answers make it impossible to pin him down on an issue. I think his stupidity is truly in asset in answering a policy question with a propagandist response; Karl Rove or even Dick Cheney could never pull off the old bait-and-switch as convincingly, because at least they would know they were doing it. W seems to legitimately fail to grasp the question.

Which is not to say that he's incapable of lying, of course. It's just that with the toughest questions, it's better to duckspeak. And as Harry Frankfurt elaborates, bullshit is a more pernicious enemy of truth than lies, because:

"It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may pertain to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose." (On Bullshit, pp. 55-56)

To put it another way, his fault is not that he provides the wrong answer to the question, it's that he's not even trying.

So when Bush actually does lie (like below), it's actually strangely refreshing. At least the value of truth is acknowledged by the attempt to deny it. (Likewise, it does not crush my spirit to think that my compatriots have elected a liar. Having elected a moron too stupid to be worthy of the epithet "liar", well, that is quite bleak.) So lie to me Georgie, it's better than whatever the fuck you were saying to that Irish gal.

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Neuro Neatness

2008-08-18T14:03:00.002-05:00

I've seen this research before, but this is a particularly interesting popular piece on it that explains its relevance to neuroeconomics, social neuroscience, and addiction. Good stuff.

Article at Seed Magazine.

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Magic Patriotism

2008-08-17T21:58:00.002-05:00

Penn and Teller have a point:

Although it would have been a better trick if they hadn't given up the goodies at the end. Well, not a better trick, but a much better political lesson.

Here are some interesting stats regarding presidential candidates and experience.

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Alternative Medicine - Extra Weird Addition

2008-08-17T16:15:00.004-05:00

This is the stupidest thing I've ever seen. It could well be the stupidest thing on the internet. HOLY FUCKING SHIT is that stupid. It really makes me reconsider my stance on mandatory sterilization for mental midgets.

Disclosure: I am heavily biased in my evaluation of this birthing method, as I am a strong opponent of the impingement upon traditional hospital-based medical care by non-humanoid mammalian practitioners (especially aquatic ones) and other bestial outpatient clinics.

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TDS Gets Its Due

2008-08-17T14:24:00.002-05:00

From the NYT, no less.

["The Daily Show" has become] a genuine cultural and political force. When Americans were asked in a 2007 poll by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press to name the journalist they most admired, Mr. Stewart, the fake news anchor, came in at No. 4, tied with the real news anchors Brian Williams and Tom Brokaw of NBC, Dan Rather of CBS and Anderson Cooper of CNN. And a study this year from the center’s Project for Excellence in Journalism concluded that “ ‘The Daily Show’ is clearly impacting American dialogue” and “getting people to think critically about the public square.”

While the show scrambled in its early years to book high-profile politicians, it has since become what Newsweek calls “the coolest pit stop on television,” with presidential candidates, former presidents, world leaders and administration officials signing on as guests. One of the program’s signature techniques — using video montages to show politicians contradicting themselves — has been widely imitated by “real” news shows, while Mr. Stewart’s interviews with serious authors like Thomas Ricks, George Packer, Seymour Hersh, Michael Beschloss and Reza Aslan have helped them and their books win a far wider audience than they otherwise might have had.

Not so relatedly, this xkcd pic is funny. It's called "Wikipedian Protester".

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True...

2008-08-16T18:31:00.003-05:00

From XKCD.

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Atlantic Stuff

2008-08-14T14:49:00.002-05:00

This piece in The Atlantic has some of the most insightful commentary I've read on how this election has demonstrated a radical evolution in the dynamics and strategy of a successful electoral campaign. Excellent.

Sure, we all know that this is the “YouTube election.” The Web has replaced TV, and e-mail has replaced direct mail, as the current modes of wholesale campaigning. Hillary’s tone-deafness has been well explored and mocked, but her comprehensive misapprehension of how rapidly mutating media alter the way people communicate has not. The digital living room she was once going to fill with listening and sharing as she cakewalked to the nomination has become an altogether more dissonant gathering place. Thanks to some sort of undead-like invincibility, she is surviving, but certainly not to have the sort of chummy conversation she envisioned in those innocent fall e-mails. Like watching Nixon sweat on television in 1960, to read Hillary’s e-mail today is to experience an old dispensation crashing headlong into the new.
(snip)

There’s a serious point here. For all the focus on position papers, and process, and even likability, what gets lost is that elections are ultimately about making connections; about showing the largest number of voters that you care about them; about, as they say in my world, relatability. Relatability is a function of discourse, which requires the candidate to speak in the vernacular of the moment. And what the era of YouTube and social media prizes is authenticity, improvisation, rough edges. Whether these values are genuinely held or brilliantly mimicked is immaterial. You have to bring the realness.

John McCain and Barack Obama turn out to be fantastic at realness; each offers up a kind of linguistic metanarrative that says—screams—“I am not a politician,” or at least, “I’m not only a politician.” Obama’s admission in his 1995 autobiography that he did “a little blow” as a teenager may in retrospect have been his most brilliant campaign gambit, one that makes him of this moment (confessional, flawed, post-Boomer, ultimately untouchable on questions of honesty because he already admitted to something no candidate has ever admitted to before) the way Bill Clinton’s “I didn’t inhale” nonadmission (Boomerish, entitled, prone to sanctimonious deployments of situational ethics) made him quintessentially of his. Authenticity now is more coded, in the sense that the politician needs to have an intuitive understanding of how to converse, what to concede, what to hide, and what the Web hive will and will not validate.

As we contemplate Hillary’s persistent outré-ness, it’s worth dwelling on the ways in which she so misunderstood this moment. She is a politician who can never get out of the way of her politicianness; even her efforts to recast her campaign as a “conversation” reeked of politician. Last summer, the Clintons’ YouTube quasi-parody of the Sopranos finale initially seemed audacious, a witty surfacing of the repressed subtext of the couple’s Mob-dynastic ambitions and less-than-fully-intact marital status, until it devolved to more shtick about Bill’s diet. Perhaps the Clintons didn’t get their own joke? The campaign proceeded to become more and more obtuse about the Bill-Hillary dynamic until the subtext—was Bill undermining his wife’s candidacy?—drowned out the official text. Despite those grasping and un-fun appearances on The Daily Show and Saturday Night Live (required stops on the political self-flagellation circuit), it remains hard to find the human being inside, to break through Hillary’s carefully wrought positional scrim.

We understand intuitively why this discourse comes off as so wooden, so content-less, even in its relentless gravitas, but why is it so off-putting now? The answer has to do with how digital culture has made us all skeptics, all Swift Boaters. There is not one affectation, one biographical detail, that now can survive the relentless interrogation of bloggers, oppo researchers, amateur videographers, data miners. This digital Panopticon has in turn bred a culture of preemptive self-revelation, a race to bare body and essence: Hey, I did a little blow!

On the other hand, I think the author profoundly misses the boat in proclaiming that McCain's candor still passes for authentic (and in suggesting that McCain has a legit shot at the presidency; he will be crushed in the biggest landslide most Americans have ever witnessed), but it was a ploy that once worked exceedingly well for him. In fact, McCain was much admired by staunch liberals like myself simply for the fact that he did not --or at least convinced us that he did not-- bullshit us. Anyways, those days are over and Obama brings an even more refreshing form of hopefully sincere self-revelation to the table.

Frankly, this is my great concern about Obama. He is lovable to liberals for many of the same immaterial reasons that Bush was so appealing to conservatives. McCain made a strong run on his platform of honesty, and it turns out that he probably would have been nearly as disastrous a president as Bush. So I'm not so much worried that Obama's "authenticity" will turn out to be of the same quality as McCain's, but rather that authenticity does not ensure a successful presidency. In my heart I believe Obama will be pretty good, but a decision this important needs to be made with my head. (Not that there's really an actual decision here; I'll vote for Obama. It's just a question of how strongly I truly support him.) In any case, I still have a nagging fear in the back of my mind that he could be the Democrats' Bush: a perfect figurehead of incomparable incompetence. Let's hope not.

Here is another fantastic article in the same issue of The Atlantic. I read it just before going to Israel and it profoundly enhanced my appreciation of the political situation there. On firsthand inspection of the situation (Among other things, I had an incredible experience touring Bethlehem, a Palestinian settlement, with a christian Palestinian who claimed with credibility to have been one of Arafat's bodyguards for several years. Needless to say, we discussed the politics and prospects of peace among Israelis and Palestinians.) I found much of it to be uncannily accurate. Important reading if you care about what's going on there.

Bookmarkz

Enlightenment

2008-08-12T17:17:00.002-05:00

The below excerpt is essentially this entire NYT article.

Borrowers who are in trouble on their mortgages have seen their government move slowly — or not all — to help them. But banks and the executives who ran them are quickly deemed worthy of taxpayer bailouts.

On the ground, this translates into millions of troubled borrowers, left to work through their problems with understaffed, sometimes adversarial loan servicing companies. If they get nowhere, they lose their homes.

Taxpayers, meanwhile, are asked to stand by with money to inject into Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the government-sponsored mortgage finance giants, should they need propping up if loan losses balloon.

The message in this disconnect couldn’t be clearer. Borrowers should shoulder the consequences of signing loan documents they didn’t understand, but with punishing terms that quickly made the loans unaffordable. But for executives and directors of the big companies who financed these loans, who grew wealthy while the getting was good, the taxpayer is coming to the rescue.

To be sure, bailouts are becoming increasingly necessary in our highly leveraged, interconnected financial world. One obvious reason that huge companies are not allowed to fail is that so many people are hurt by such debacles. If a family files for bankruptcy or loses a home, the pain still hurts, but its emotional and financial ripples are confined.

And in the heat of a financial crisis, there is often little time to think through who deserves a bailout and who does not. In especially dire circumstances, leaders have no choice but to rescue companies. Think about Bear Stearns: even though it was relatively small in size for a brokerage firm, its demise had to be averted because of a possible domino effect that might have also taken down its many trading partners. In that multibillion-dollar bailout, it was Bear’s big and wealthy counterparties who benefited.

Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, however, present an exponentially larger problem. They are unquestionably too big to fail. With $5.2 trillion in mortgages either on their books or guaranteed by them, their bailout was completely predictable. If those companies had been left for road kill, the mortgage market would have ground to a halt and a financial conflagration of historic and devastating proportions would have resulted.
(snip)

Bailouts are also ticklish affairs because of the precarious state of our economy. As Americans are being asked to shore up reckless financial companies, they are also being punished by high oil prices, rocketing food costs and a stomach-churning slide in the buying power of their currency, the once-almighty dollar.

So asking Main Street to bail out Wall Street leads to this inevitable question: Weren’t the financial folks the ones who helped create the mess we’re in?
(snip)

Once again, this emergency action smacks of the regulatory responses of recent years: do nothing to curb the deal-making mania while it is occurring, but when the rout comes along, hurry up and rein it in.

Of course, people prefer rising stock prices to declining ones. Wouldn’t it be wonderful if shares never fell? But such actions call into question the claim that ours is a free-market system. More and more, our version of free markets holds that they are free only when asset values rise. When they fall, the markets must be managed.

HERE is a question: Might not the routs, which inevitably follow the manias, be less painful if things were not allowed to get wild and crazy on the upside? Might not the American people be better off with regulators who curb market enthusiasm — whether in the form of errant lending or voracious, ill-considered deal making — when it reaches manic levels, to protect against the free fall, and the bailouts, that ensue?

No, no, no — perish the thought, especially when the taxpayer is there to pick up the bill.

Which returns us to the dispiriting divide between those who receive help and those who don’t.

“The banks are too big to fail and the man in the street is too small to bail,” said John C. Bogle, the founder of the Vanguard Group, the mutual funds giant, who is a philosopher of finance.
(snip)

Mr. Bogle, like most investors, is an optimist at heart. But he believes that we must work to correct the growing imbalances in our country. “We Americans are one lucky bunch,” he said. “But, let’s face the truth. While the Declaration of Independence assures us that ‘all men are created equal,’ we’d best face the fact that we may be created equal but we are born into a society where inequality of family, of education and, yes, even opportunity begins as soon as we are born.”

“But the Constitution demands more,” he adds. “We the people are enjoined to form a more perfect union, to establish justice, ensure domestic tranquillity, and to promote the general welfare and to secure the blessings of liberty to ourselves and our posterity. So it’s up to each of us to summon our unique genius, our own power and our own personal magic to restore these values in today’s imbalanced society.”

Not a bad idea, bringing a little 18th-century enlightenment to this moment of 21st-century gloom.

In a more pragmatic vein, former Secretary of Labor Robert Reich makes a "modest proposal" at his blog:

Socialized capitalism of the sort the Fed and the Treasury are now practicing, consisting of private gains and public losses, is untenable. On the other hand, it's also true that giant Wall Street investments banks as well as Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are too big to fail. How to reconcile these conflicting principles?

Here's a modest proposal: When taxpayers insure a giant entity against loss -- as we now are with Freddie, Fannie, and Wall Street investment banks -- those entities must agree that:

(1) for the duration of the bailout, their top executives cannot receive total annual compensation higher than that received by the President of the United States, and

(2) the government gets five percent of their current valuation as shares of stock (roughly representing the benefit to their shareholders of the federal insurance) -- so that if and when the entities become profitable again, taxpayers are compensated for the risk they've taken on.

Here's a funny cartoon on McCain's offshore drilling plan, from The General.

Finally, if a soldier falls in the desert and nobody hears him, do we make a sound?

Bookmarkz

Econ 101

2008-03-01T12:24:00.001-06:00

It's pretty simple, actually.

So thoroughly is the economy decoupled from ordinary experience that according to a CNN poll, 57 percent of Americans thought we were already in a recession a month ago. Economists may complain that this is only because the public is ignorant of the technical definition of a recession, which specifies at least two consecutive quarters of negative growth. But most of the public employs the more colloquial definition of a recession, which is hard times. And... most Americans have been living in their own personal recession for years.
(snip)

In the months ahead, we can expect the hard times to spread... This is what a stimulus package needs to address: the persistent and growing struggles of the middle class and the working class, which is increasingly conterminous with the working poor.

There are reasons for doing so other than compassion. The chronically poor and the battered middle class have become a tripwire in the American economy — generating defaults on debts, depressed consumption and global market turmoil.

Bookmarkz

Internet Junk Day

2008-02-20T23:11:00.003-06:00

This was interesting considering the Obama shenanigans.

This was fairly interesting as well.

This says it all:

Bookmarkz

Bush Gets Smart On Fiscal Policy

2008-02-13T10:03:00.001-06:00

Just kidding. But if this was funny almost six years ago...just, wow.

On a more serious note, this is wild. Check out the lower fifth's consumption vs. earnings.

The Masque of Anarchy

2008-02-12T19:28:00.001-06:00

What a poem.

Bookmarkz

Wow

2008-02-05T11:06:00.000-06:00

Jesus is an NRA member, among other crazy things.

Note: This site is ~~almost certainly~~ definitely tongue-in-cheek, although it is not nearly as good natured as Jesus' General

Bookmarkz

Iraq: Who Knew?

2008-02-05T09:32:00.000-06:00

“There is still—and I say this with a heart full of sorrow—no Iraqi people, but an unimaginable mass of human beings devoid of any patriotic ideas, imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common tie, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever. Out of these masses we want to fashion a people which we would train, educate and refine…The circumstances being what they are, the immenseness of the efforts needed for this [cannot be imagined].” -King Faisal I of Iraq, circa 1930

“Evidently we are in for a long, costly campaign in Mesopotamia which will strain to the uttermost our military resources.”

"There is something very sinister to my mind in this Mesopotamian entanglement...It seems to me so gratuitous that after all the struggles of war, just when we want to get together our slender military resources and re-establish our finances and have a little in hand in case of danger here or there, we should be compelled to go on pouring armies and treasure into these thankless deserts.”

"We have not got a single friend in the press on the subject, and there is no point of which they make more effective use to injure the Government. Week after week and month after month for a long time we shall have a continuance of this miserable, wasteful, sporadic, warfare marked from time to time certainly by minor disasters and cuttings off of troops and agents, and very possibly attended by some very grave occurrence.
-Winston Churchill, various private communications during the 1920's

“You are flying in the face of four millenniums of history if you try to draw a line around Iraq and call it a ‘political entity!’ They have never been an independent unity.”
-American missionary warning the British, circa 1920

“The people of England have been led in Mesopotamia [Iraq] into a trap from which it will be hard to escape with dignity and honour. They have been tricked into it by a steady withholding of information…..We are today not far from disaster.”
-Colonel T.E. Lawrence (of Arabia) in the London Sunday Times, August 1920

Apparently, George Bush is not lying when he says that all he reads is the Bible.

Bookmarkz

Drug Abuse?

2008-02-04T22:27:00.000-06:00

This is an interesting piece calling into question the efficacy of statins, whose use is essentially de rigeur for anyone threatening a heart problem (which incidentally, high cholesterol does not necessarily portend, so there are a few pieces of conventional wisdom being challenged here). Good stuff, and once again an example of the incredible amount of influence that the pharma industry wields; they have, via clever marketing, quite literally told doctors how to practice medicine, and wouldn't you know it, the "suggestions" happen to benefit their promulgators to the tune of billions of dollars.

Here is a piece in a similar vein.

This is tangentially related, but obviously much more pertinent to the ongoing circus of political "debates." It reminds me of memes like "John McCain is a straight-talking maverick" and "George Bush is a real down-home everyman." I've never understood how those sorts of assertions could scan with the public, but perhaps it really has to do with our fundamental tendency to favor gossipy descriptions over objective information.

Bookmarkz

What It's All About

2008-02-04T14:58:00.001-06:00

The intro page to a blog I have recently discovered is actually one of the most cogent and concise critiques that I've read about the current media situation. The NonSequitir really nails down what political punditry needs more than anything:

While run-on sentences, comma splices, split infinitives, and other such grammatical minutiae may rarely make appearances in the best of our nation’s dailies and weeklies, and a small but growing class of press watchdogs help to correct errors of fact (pointing out bias, factual omissions, and distortions), a more perilous corruption lurks under the clean surface of the printed page: specious reasoning.

The political media is in the business of persuasion. It generally falls to the columnists, the editorialists, and the pundits to draw inferences from the facts, to argue for opinions, and to persuade the readers by the strength of their reasoning. But, for their arguments to be of any value, for their reasonings to command our assent, they must not only have a clear basis in fact, but more importantly, they must have a cogent logical structure.

It is, thus, one thing to have one’s facts straight and one’s sentences grammatical, but how one alleges that the facts are connected is often simply ignored as outside the realm of the editor’s responsibility: A matter of debatable opinion, they say, let the reader sort it out. Let the reader judge the author’s arguments.

Errors in grammar may produce laughable incoherence, errors in fact produce fiction, errors in logic, however, produce simple nonsense. Unlike grammar and facts, logic is not a matter of debate: Reasonable people cannot, in fact, disagree.

Bookmarkz

Moby Dick

2008-02-01T09:58:00.000-06:00

For God's sake, be economical with your lamps and candles! not a gallon you burn, but at least one drop of man's blood was spilled for it.

Text.

PS: There Will Be Blood was badass. The final scene is one of my favorite ever in film.

Bookmarkz

Gladwell

2008-01-28T11:46:00.000-06:00

Malcolm Gladwell wrote what is probably the best account of the racial-prowess-at-sports debate that I've ever read. He also brings the perspective of increased genetic variance to a few other issues to which it is relevant. (This line of reasoning is to me particularly reminiscent of the Larry Summers scandal at Harvard, which the article predates.) He also includes social science evidence for possible mechanisms of positive feedback involved in these selection processes. Good stuff.

He also has an interesting series of blog posts of the silliness of the anti-performance-enhancing-drugs crusade in professional sports:
Part 1, 2, 3, 4.

Bookmarkz

Wow, That's a Good Idea

2008-01-24T18:58:00.000-06:00

A few decades after idealists dreamed of a virtual vehicle by which useful information and informed opinions could be shared digitally around the world, the internet has begun to realize its potential. There have been a few hiccups along the way, but finally Big Think is here.

A random sample:

Bookmarkz

What Are They Waiting For?

2008-01-24T18:53:00.000-06:00

What?

Bookmarkz

Aussies

2008-01-15T10:23:00.001-06:00

Are now running neck-and-neck with Brits for the funniest people that speak my language.

Bookmarkz

Kucinich

2008-01-13T23:12:00.000-06:00

I like him for exactly the same reasons he will never be president; chiefly, the sumbitch just won't play ball. More here.

A judge ruled against his suit. While I find that unfortunate, I think the court is correct in allowing parties to enforce their own reasonable rules internally; it's the Democrats that are the assholes. Signing an unconditional oath of support? Falling in line behind the honcho, come what may? That's how the Republicans got where they are, and I want no part of it.

Bookmarkz

The Dirt on Romney

2008-01-11T22:20:00.000-06:00

Taibbi's got it, again.

Take home:

The most common thing you hear from voters after a Romney event is how impressed they are by his demeanor and delivery, his obvious vitality, by the fact that he looks like he could do this twenty-four hours a day and twice on Sunday, taking off only twenty-six minutes once a week to make monogamous, missionary-position love to his baby-factory wife. And that's precisely the way Romney wants it: He wants voters focused on him the man, this unblemished, in-control Example for All who, unlike his Republican rivals, is in no danger of collapsing onstage, or getting caught on camera with his cock in some bruise-covered stripper or Jack Russell terrier.
[snip]

You can learn a lot about a candidate by what his leadoff line is, and in Romney's case, when he's not in New Hampshire (where he unfailingly kicks off every event with a Red Sox reference; I actually clocked him at one stop mentioning the Sawx as early as three seconds after grabbing the microphone) he plunges right into his I-know-the-way-because-I've-made-shitloads-of-money act.

"The challenges we face are beyond the scope of just a politician," he says. "It's going to take somebody who's been able to live in the private sector, who learns how the economy actually works, who knows how to get the job done. It's going to take someone like that to get America on track again."
[snip]

Only in America do audiences not burst out laughing when a guy worth $250 million gets up onstage and says he and his CEO buddies spend their spare time racking their brains to find ways to help people.
[snip]

In a delicious detail that says a lot about the nature of Romney's morality, the investor had no problem making piles of cash off companies that executed mass layoffs or defrauded the government, but he balked when asked to invest in a Bain deal to acquire a video distribution company called Artisan Entertainment. "I didn't want to profit from a studio that made R-rated movies," he huffed.
[snip]

The real question is this: If you're gunning for the GOP nomination, where do you run these days? Do you strap on your medals, limp into VFW halls and do a Band of Brothers act, a la John McCain? Do you stand up before suburban crowds, tell horror tales of hairy Muslims lurking near reservoirs and promise to bomb them all back to the Stone Age, like Rudy Giuliani? Do you wear your WWJD cap and quote the Bible, like Mike Huckabee, or freak out about rape-hungry Mexicans, like Tom Tancredo? Or do you do what Romney does: Look smooth, keep your nose clean and tour the country talking about business being the answer to all the world's ills?

It's a conundrum, and the problem isn't just that the current batch of ruling Republicans have horrified the whole world through their insane invasion of Iraq, run up record deficits despite campaigning on a platform of fiscal restraint, punted the ethics issue deep into Democrat territory with a parade of staggering corruption indictments and turned their pompous emphasis on personal morality into a late-night punch line through their hilarious high-profile pursuits of little-boy pages and anonymous bathroom sex. It's also that America is getting older, and yesterday's liberalism is slowly but surely turning into a new generation's conservatism. So when some starched-up, smooth -talking, TV-ready creature like Mitt Romney, who made his fortune laying off factory workers, walks onto college campuses and starts bashing cohabitation and having children out of wedlock, he loses young people who are tired of watching our leaders fuck things up on a grand scale and then turn around and blame our problems on stoned teenagers. Back when the Gingrich revolution was hot, even college kids bought into the reactionary rhetoric. But now that Bush and Cheney have blown that revolution to itty-bitty pieces, the Republican morality line sells like warmed-over horseshit; on college campuses, Romney comes off like a parent trying to maintain his moral authority after a messy divorce in which the kids got to watch Daddy shacking up with his secretary and Mommy hauling out the lawyers to repossess Dad's fridge.

His interesting ethical stances in his lucrative business ventures were, for me, the most interesting and illuminating (though hardly surprising) details of the story.

Here is an oddly prescient piece.

Bookmarkz

Lashing Out

2008-01-10T21:21:00.000-06:00

I love Matt Taibbi.

Then there's this whole business of liberals who are accused of "rooting" for failure in Iraq. I'm sorry, but the next pundit who whips that one out should have his balls stuffed down his throat. You cocksuckers beat the drum to send these kids to war, and then you turn around and accuse us of rooting for them to die? Fuck you for even thinking that. We're Americans just like you. You don't have the right to get us into this mess and then turn around and call us traitors. Your credibility is long gone on this issue. Shut up about us.

Beyond that, what you say doesn't even make any sense. For most of us, if we thought there was any chance this thing could work, we'd have been for it, or at least not so violently against it. Instead, our opposition to the war was based on our absolute conviction that it would end in disaster -- which it incidentally has. But according to Klein, if we see a guy step off the top of the Empire State Building, we're supposed to root for him to nail the dismount. The whole issue is irrelevant and absurd. This is a catastrophe, not a baseball game. "Rooting" is a kid's word; grow the fuck up.

But that's not exactly what the article is about.

I think they're all full of shit -- Klein, McCain, Kerry, all of them. But especially Klein. He is the living, breathing incarnation of American "conventional wisdom" -- and what American "conventional wisdom" is is a spineless, slavish, power-worshipping watcher of polls who has no problem whatsoever denying today what he said yesterday, and is mostly interested in making sure he still has invitations to the right Beltway parties.

The war, you might have noticed, has not budged very many of these people from their places. Many of them now claim to be against the war. But they're the same people they were three or four years ago, and they're still quite openly sneering at the people who really were right all along. They seem to hate us even more, now that we've so obviously been proven right.

Which tells us: if they're going to end this Iraq thing, they're going to try to do it without admitting either that they were wrong or we were right. And we'll take that, I guess -- but Jesus, is it infuriating.

Here's some more from Taibbi (from a different piece). I love him because he is so astute in putting his finger on exactly how a given political stance is bullshit. Check him ripping the dems (my emphasis):

The Democrats, God bless them, came out with yet another calculated media attack last week, following up Hillary Clinton's August ambush of Don Rumsfeld with the calling for the defense secretary's resignation. From almost the moment that Rumsfeld gave a speech early last week comparing Bush's Iraq war critics to pre-WWII Nazi "appeasers," the Democrats started whaling away at him, filling the front pages of big dailies across the country with "Top Dems Blast Rumsfeld" headlines.

Almost the whole roster of prominent Democrats was in on the effort, with everyone from John Edwards to Chuck Schumer to Nancy Pelosi to Ike Skelton to Jack Reed seemingly reading from the same gloatingly self-righteous "Rumsfeld is a real dick" script. It was one of those groan-out-loud coordinated media-sandbag jobs, now standard procedure in American politics, where the various politicians separately make exactly the same pre-prepared "jokes" in their respective "extemporaneous" public remarks, delivering their message with all the wit and spontaneity of a Speak N' Spell:

Pelosi on Rumsfeld: "If Mr. Rumsfeld is so concerned with comparisons to World War II, he should explain why our troops have now been fighting in Iraq longer than it took our forces to defeat the Nazis in Europe."

Biden: "The most significant comparison with World War II is that we soon will have been in Iraq as long as World War II, with much less success."

Yuk, yuk. In any case, this anti-Rumsfeld broadside is a classic political canard, a perfect expression of everything the modern Democratic Party stands for. Politically, it makes perfect sense, as Rumsfeld is much less popular even than Bush; this is a figure whose approval ratings were down in the thirties two years ago, back when Bush was still capable of winning a national election.

The attack will work, because so many voters out there will see in it a reflection of their own animosity towards the hoary defense secretary, not thinking about the real underlying meaning of the Democrats' campaign. Because what Rumsfeld actually represents to the Democrats is a means of attacking the Republicans on the Iraq issue without having to explain their own vote in support of the invasion.

Essentially the Democrats will call Rumsfeld a bunch of names for the sound bite, and then, in the fine print, state their real "objections" to Rumsfeld's record, which will amount to something like the fact that he invaded Iraq on a Thursday instead of a Tuesday, used too few troops to needlessly destroy Iraq's national infrastructure, failed to distribute free milk and cookies to the Mahdi army, etc. A typical comment will be one like Chuck Schumer's of last week: "There are growing doubts about how competently he's conducted the war." (How do you competently invade the wrong country?) And so the Democrats once again will make an effort to sound antiwar out of one side of their mouths, and pro-war out the other side; they will then close their eyes and hope that they pick up sixteen seats before anyone notices. If that ain't leadership, what is?

And of course, a righteous repudiation of the media, wrapped in a story that's so much more.

One more. An all-opinion piece.

Bookmarkz

I'm Doing This

2008-01-10T17:23:00.000-06:00

HELLLL YEAH.

More info.

Bookmarkz

Jimmy

2008-01-10T14:13:00.000-06:00

While the same clowns who bitch about Hollywood actors opining on politics want to dig up Dutch, the question remains: How did he ever beat this guy?

Seriously, WTF?

[Sans research, I recall that Jimmy Carter was a Naval Academy alum, nuclear physicist, down-home peanut farmer, genuine Christian with serious human rights and humanitarian aid cred (I'm against religion, especially in public life, but at least he's lived up to the principles he espoused as a candidate before, during, and after his political career), prophet of energy policy, Nobel Peace laureate, etc. He lost to Reagan, the American-born predecessor of Arnold Schwarzenegger. Seriously.]

Non sequitir: Are you kidding me?

Bookmarkz

Dr. Wii

2008-01-10T14:07:00.000-06:00

I'm going to lean on this really hard during medical school.

Bookmarkz

New Hampshire

2008-01-09T12:30:00.000-06:00

Here's one on Tenet that's great. I must have missed it.

If I had known that you could write a book about sucking at your job and then calling your boss a dumbass, I could have writ thousands of books!

Bookmarkz

Show Us The Body

2008-01-08T23:12:00.000-06:00

For if we allow that to happen to anyone
then we invite it to happen to us.
If our freedoms can be suspended
they can be ended, and we must not pretend it's
okay that our rights can be taken away.
For in that notion, tyranny is reborn.
Be warned: America will fall or rise as we defend it.
It's what we do, not what we intended.

Sound familiar? (?)

By the way, this whole ACLU-inspired/promoted spoken word project is freakin awesome. This is probably my other favorite, but they are all incredible.

Bookmarkz

Oh God

2008-01-08T19:23:00.000-06:00

Bookmarkz

Healthcare Wars

2008-01-08T10:47:00.000-06:00

By far the most famous feud in medicine, the DeBakey-Cooley schism was almost certainly a primarily personal affair at its core. But this NYT article places the argument in a healthcare policy context, and does quite a job of making that context just as interesting as the ego clash itself. Good read.

On one side is Michael E. DeBakey, 85 years old and still practicing. Many operations that are now routine first took place under his knife, including the bypass procedure that has kept millions of failing hearts throbbing.

But now he is on the defensive, intent on preserving the traditions of American medical research, training and treatment. He says the pressure to contain medical costs endangers not only patients on the operating-room table today but also those who would someday benefit from the expensive research, like his, that has made American medicine arguably the best in the world.

He mocks the growing number of physicians who are accepting prices and practice standards dictated by Government bureaucrats or insurers. When someone from an insurance company -- "some clerk," he says -- called recently to urge him to discharge a 90-year-old stroke victim, he snapped: "You come here and tell the patient's relatives you want her transferred to your care. Otherwise, butt out."

Needless to say, I'm with Debakey. In fairness, I did not find the article particularly friendly to Cooley. Whether it was his fault or the reporter's, his case looks weak and he looks like an asshole. There are much better advocates of his position (which is not nearly as true of DeBakey), but not ones that have legendary status in medicine, and of course a great backstory in a legendary feud.

[Note: This article is quite old. Debakey is STILL practicing at a hair away from 100 years old. I don't know what Cooley is up to, but about a year ago they formally reconciled and, for sake of appearances at least, let much of the bad blood dissipate.]

Bookmarkz

Simple

2008-01-07T16:09:00.000-06:00

[I]t's not a question of "forces beyond anyone's control", it's a matter of deliberate government policy. Want a middle class society? Great. In exchange you have to give up having tons of obscenely rich people. You can't have both.

Wow.

Bookmarkz

Huckster

2008-01-06T13:01:00.000-06:00

Read me.

Related article.

More on Huck. A review of his governorship and character by an unadmiring Arkansan.

This is also a very thoughtful article (and entirely unrelated to the presidential race).

This is interesting too.

This is interesting...and very disturbing.

Bookmarkz

Moore on Iowa

2008-01-04T12:51:00.000-06:00

I've said that I think the early caucus mania is a three ring circus of bullshit, but if I had to comment on it, it would sound something like what Michael Moore says here:

"It's the War," Says Iowa to Hillary -- And a "Happy Blue Year" To All! ...from Michael Moore

January 3, 2007

Friends,

There was no doubt about it. The message from Iowa tonight was simple, but deafening:

If you're a candidate for President, and you voted for the war, you lose. And if you voted and voted and voted for the war -- and never once showed any remorse -- you really lose.

In short, if you had something to do with keeping us in this war for four-plus years, you are not allowed to be the next president of the United States.

Over 70% of Iowan Democrats voted for candidates who either never voted for the invasion of Iraq (Obama, Richardson, Kucinich) or who have since admitted their mistake (Edwards, Biden, Dodd). I can't tell you how bad I feel for Senator Clinton tonight. I don't believe she was ever really for this war. But she did -- and continued to do -- what she thought was the politically expedient thing to eventually get elected. And she was wrong. And tonight she must go to sleep wondering what would have happened if she had voted her conscience instead of her calculator.

John Edwards was supposed to have come in third. He had been written off. He was outspent by the other front-runners six to one. But somewhere along the road he threw off the old politico hack jacket and turned into a real person, a fighter for the poor, for the uninsured, for peace. And for that, he came in a surprise second, ending up with just one less delegate than the man who was against the war from the beginning. But, as Joshua Holland of AlterNet pointed out earlier today, Edwards is still the only front-runner who will pull out all the troops and do it as quickly as possible. His speech tonight was brilliant and moving.

What an amazing night, not just for Barack Obama, but for America. I know that Senator Obama is so much more than simply the color of his skin, but all of us must acknowledge -- and celebrate -- the fact that one of the whitest states in the U.S. just voted for a black man to be our next president. Thank you, Iowa, for this historic moment. Thank you for at least letting us believe that we are better than what we often seem to be. And to have so many young people come out and vote -- and vote for Obama -- this is a proud moment. It all began with the record youth turnout in 2004 -- the ONLY age group that Kerry won -- and they came back out tonight en force. Good on every single one of you!

As the only top candidate who was anti-war before the war began, Barack Obama became the vessel through which the people of this Midwestern state were able to say loud and clear: "Bring 'Em Home!" Most pundits won't read the election this way because, well, most pundits merrily led us down the path to war. For them to call this vote tonight a repudiation of the war -- and of Senator Clinton's four years' worth of votes for it -- might require the pundit class to remind their viewers and readers that they share some culpability in starting this war. And, like Hillary, damn few of them have offered us an apology.

With all due respect to Senator Obama's victory, the most important news out of the caucus this evening was the whopping, room-busting turnout of Democrats. 239,000 people showed up to vote Democratic tonight (93% more than in '04, which was a record year), while only 115,000 showed up to vote Republican. And this is a red state! The Republican caucuses looked anemic. The looks on their faces were glum, tired. As the camera followed some of them into their caucus sites, they held their heads down or turned away, sorta like criminals on a perp walk. They know their days of power are over. They know their guy blew it. Their only hope was to vote for a man who has a direct line to heaven. Huckabee is their Hail Mary pass. But don't rule him out. He's got a sense of humor, he's downhome, and he said that if elected, he'd put me on a boat to Cuba. Hey, a free Caribbean vacation!

Bottom line: People have had it. Iowa will go blue (Happy Blue Year, Hawkeyes!). Whomever your candidate is on the Dem side, this was a good night. Get some sleep. The Republicans won't go down without a fight. Look what happened when Kerry tried to play nice. So Barack, you can talk all you want about "let's put the partisanship aside, let's all get along," but the other side has no intention of being anything but the bullies they are. Get your game face on now. And, if you can, tell me why you are now the second largest recipient of health industry payola after Hillary. You now take more money from the people committed to stopping universal health care than any of the Republican candidates.

Despite what your answer may be, I was proud to sit in my living room tonight and see you and your family up on that stage. We became a bit better tonight, and on that I will close by saying, sweet dreams -- and on to that other totally white state of New Hampshire!

Yours,

Michael Moore
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

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Zapping Cancer

2008-01-04T11:24:00.000-06:00

I talked a bit about the technology before, and today I have discovered that the situation is actually somewhat more complicated than I had thought. (That's how scientists admit to being wrong.) The full Nature article is here. And an additional excerpt:

The work is intriguing, says Hongjie Dai, from Stanford University in Palo Alto, California, who is using near-infrared radiation with nanotubes in similar systems in mice. “If indeed effective, it would be more desirable than the near-infrared laser heating method,” he says.

But Dai says that the reasons why the nanotubes get so hot need more investigation before the system can be advanced. “The physics behind the radio-frequency heating is not clear,” he says.

In test experiments, a suspension of nanotubes in water got as hot as 45ºC within 25 seconds when treated with radiofrequency waves. “I was really amazed by the amount of heat that was released by these nanoparticles,” says Curley.

He attributes the phenomenon to the “unique electronic properties” of carbon nanotubes. It might also be that the tubes align themselves into antennae-shaped arrangements to conduct heat better. Curley says that he has as-yet-unpublished evidence to better explain his findings.
[snip]

Part of the remaining challenge is to remove the two to three millimetre “zone of damage” around the nanotube-containing cells, he says.

And the intention is to one day create nanoparticles that seek out cancerous cells, rather than having to inject them into tumours. This would be done by sticking targeting molecules on the outside of the tubes: antibodies or proteins designed to recognize a site on a cell that is cancerous, says Curly. This would mean that nanoparticles could infiltrate cancer cells selectively, before the radio waves are applied. The team is working on this.

The Onion weighs in.

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Rudy! Rudy! Rudy!

2008-01-03T16:53:00.000-06:00

"These people are very, very dedicated. They're also very smart, in their own way."

You could eat the irony with a fork.

It reminds me of one of my favorite contemporary political philosophers, Peter Griffin, who reminded us that "It doesn't really matter where you're from, as long as we're all the same religion." Amen.

Update...kind of:

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Stuff Dump

2008-01-03T16:10:00.000-06:00

Here's what I'm thinking today.

This is what keeps me awake at night...when I'm not on meth. Cuz then it's the meth.

From Michael Moore:

Who Do We Vote For This Time Around? A Letter from Michael Moore

January 2, 2008

Friends,

A new year has begun. And before we've had a chance to break our New Year's resolutions, we find ourselves with a little more than 24 hours before the good people of Iowa tell us whom they would like to replace the man who now occupies three countries and a white house.

Twice before, we have begun the process to stop this man, and twice we have failed. Eight years of our lives as Americans will have been lost, the world left in upheaval against us... and yet now, today, we hope against hope that our moment has finally arrived, that the amazingly powerful force of the Republican Party will somehow be halted. But we know that the Democrats are experts at snatching defeat from the jaws of victory, and if there's a way to blow this election, they will find it and do it with gusto.

Do you feel the same as me? That the Democratic front-runners are a less-than-stellar group of candidates, and that none of them are the "slam dunk" we wish they were? Of course, there are wonderful things about each of them. Any one of them would be infinitely better than what we have now. Personally, Congressman Kucinich, more than any other candidate, shares the same positions that I have on the issues (although the UFO that picked ME up would only take me as far as Kalamazoo). But let's not waste time talking about Dennis. Even he is resigned to losing, with statements like the one he made yesterday to his supporters in Iowa to throw their support to Senator Obama as their "second choice."

So, it's Hillary, Obama, Edwards -- now what do we do?

Two months ago, Rolling Stone magazine asked me to do a cover story where I would ask the hard questions that no one was asking in one-on-one interviews with Senators Clinton, Obama and Edwards. "The Top Democrats Face Off with Michael Moore." The deal was that all three candidates had to agree to let me interview them or there was no story. Obama and Edwards agreed. Mrs. Clinton said no, and the cover story was thus killed.

Why would the love of my life, Hillary Clinton, not sit down to talk with me? What was she afraid of?

Those of you who are longtime readers of mine may remember that 11 years ago I wrote a chapter (in my first book) entitled, "My Forbidden Love for Hillary." I was fed up with the treatment she was getting, most of it boringly sexist, and I thought somebody should stand up for her. I later met her and she thanked me for referring to her as "one hot s***kicking feminist babe." I supported and contributed to her run for the U.S. Senate. I think she is a decent and smart person who loves this country, cares deeply about kids, and has put up with more crap than anyone I know of (other than me) from the Crazy Right. Her inauguration would be a thrilling sight, ending 218 years of white male rule in a country where 51% of its citizens are female and 64% are either female or people of color.

And yet, I am sad to say, nothing has disappointed me more than the disastrous, premeditated vote by Senator Hillary Clinton to send us to war in Iraq. I'm not only talking about her first vote that gave Mr. Bush his "authorization" to invade -- I'm talking about every single OTHER vote she then cast for the next four years, backing and funding Bush's illegal war, and doing so with verve. She never met a request from the White House for war authorization that she didn't like. Unlike the Kerrys and the Bidens who initially voted for authorization but later came to realize the folly of their decision, Mrs. Clinton continued to cast numerous votes for the war until last March -- four long years of pro-war votes, even after 70% of the American public had turned against the war. She has steadfastly refused to say that she was wrong about any of this, and she will not apologize for her culpability in America's worst-ever foreign policy disaster. All she can bring herself to say is that she was "misled" by "faulty intelligence."

Let's assume that's true. Do you want a President who is so easily misled? I wasn't "misled," and millions of others who took to the streets in February of 2003 weren't "misled" either. It was simply amazing that we knew the war was wrong when none of us had been briefed by the CIA, none of us were national security experts, and none of us had gone on a weapons inspection tour of Iraq. And yet... we knew we were being lied to! Let me ask those of you reading this letter: Were YOU "misled" -- or did you figure it out sometime between October of 2002 and March of 2007 that George W. Bush was up to something rotten? Twenty-three other senators were smart enough to figure it out and vote against the war from the get-go. Why wasn't Senator Clinton?

I have a theory: Hillary knows the sexist country we still live in and that one of the reasons the public, in the past, would never consider a woman as president is because she would also be commander in chief. The majority of Americans were concerned that a woman would not be as likely to go to war as a man (horror of horrors!). So, in order to placate that mindset, perhaps she believed she had to be as "tough" as a man, she had to be willing to push The Button if necessary, and give the generals whatever they wanted. If this is, in fact, what has motivated her pro-war votes, then this would truly make her a scary first-term president. If the U.S. is faced with some unforeseen threat in her first years, she knows that in order to get re-elected she'd better be ready to go all Maggie Thatcher on whoever sneezes in our direction. Do we want to risk this, hoping the world makes it in one piece to her second term?

I have not even touched on her other numerous -- and horrendous -- votes in the Senate, especially those that have made the middle class suffer even more (she voted for Bush's first bankruptcy bill, and she is now the leading recipient of payoff money -- I mean campaign contributions -- from the health care industry). I know a lot of you want to see her elected, and there is a very good chance that will happen. There will be plenty of time to vote for her in the general election if all the pollsters are correct. But in the primaries and caucuses, isn't this the time to vote for the person who most reflects the values and politics you hold dear? Can you, in good conscience, vote for someone who so energetically voted over and over and over again for the war in Iraq? Please give this serious consideration.

Now, on to the two candidates who did agree to do the interview with me...

Barack Obama is a good and inspiring man. What a breath of fresh air! There's no doubting his sincerity or his commitment to trying to straighten things out in this country. But who is he? I mean, other than a guy who gives a great speech? How much do any of us really know about him? I know he was against the war. How do I know that? He gave a speech before the war started. But since he joined the senate, he has voted for the funds for the war, while at the same time saying we should get out. He says he's for the little guy, but then he votes for a corporate-backed bill to make it harder for the little guy to file a class action suit when his kid swallows lead paint from a Chinese-made toy. In fact, Obama doesn't think Wall Street is a bad place. He wants the insurance companies to help us develop a new health care plan -- the same companies who have created the mess in the first place. He's such a feel-good kinda guy, I get the sense that, if elected, the Republicans will eat him for breakfast. He won't even have time to make a good speech about it.

But this may be a bit harsh. Senator Obama has a big heart, and that heart is in the right place. Is he electable? Will more than 50% of America vote for him? We'd like to believe they would. We'd like to believe America has changed, wouldn't we? Obama lets us feel better about ourselves -- and as we look out the window at the guy snowplowing his driveway across the street, we want to believe he's changed, too. But are we dreaming?

And then there's John Edwards.

It's hard to get past the hair, isn't it? But once you do -- and recently I have chosen to try -- you find a man who is out to take on the wealthy and powerful who have made life so miserable for so many. A candidate who says things like this: "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy." Whoa. We haven't heard anyone talk like that in a while, at least not anyone who is near the top of the polls. I suspect this is why Edwards is doing so well in Iowa, even though he has nowhere near the stash of cash the other two have. He won't take the big checks from the corporate PACs, and he is alone among the top three candidates in agreeing to limit his spending and be publicly funded. He has said, point-blank, that he's going after the drug companies and the oil companies and anyone else who is messing with the American worker. The media clearly find him to be a threat, probably because he will go after their monopolistic power, too. This is Roosevelt/Truman kind of talk. That's why it's resonating with people in Iowa, even though he doesn't get the attention Obama and Hillary get -- and that lack of coverage may cost him the first place spot tomorrow night. After all, he is one of those white guys who's been running things for far too long.

And he voted for the war. But unlike Senator Clinton, he has stated quite forcefully that he was wrong. And he has remorse. Should he be forgiven? Did he learn his lesson? Like Hillary and Obama, he refused to promise in a September debate that there will be no U.S. troops in Iraq by the end of his first term in 2013. But this week in Iowa, he changed his mind. He went further than Clinton and Obama and said he'd have all the troops home in less than a year.

Edwards is the only one of the three front-runners who has a universal health care plan that will lead to the single-payer kind all other civilized countries have. His plan doesn't go as fast as I would like, but he is the only one who has correctly pointed out that the health insurance companies are the enemy and should not have a seat at the table.

I am not endorsing anyone at this point. This is simply how I feel in the first week of the process to replace George W. Bush. For months I've been wanting to ask the question, "Where are you, Al Gore?" You can only polish that Oscar for so long. And the Nobel was decided by Scandinavians! I don't blame you for not wanting to enter the viper pit again after you already won. But getting us to change out our incandescent light bulbs for some irritating fluorescent ones isn't going to save the world. All it's going to do is make us more agitated and jumpy and feeling like once we get home we haven't really left the office.

On second thought, would you even be willing to utter the words, "I absolutely believe to my soul that this corporate greed and corporate power has an ironclad hold on our democracy?" 'Cause the candidate who understands that, and who sees it as the root of all evil -- including the root of global warming -- is the President who may lead us to a place of sanity, justice and peace.

Yours,

Michael Moore (not an Iowa voter, but appreciative of any state that has a town named after a sofa)
MMFlint@aol.com
MichaelMoore.com

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Christmas for Jews

2008-01-03T10:27:00.001-06:00

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Do Unto Others

2007-11-09T15:17:00.000-06:00

...as they will do unto you once elected.

It sounds like a pretty nice idea when it's called the Golden Rule, but it's a bit more seedy when it means "You scratch my back, I'll scratch yours." If there was ever any doubt that politico-preachers are more about power and prestige than principles, this settles it. It's one thing for someone to say "John Kerry is a douchebag but I'm voting for him anyway," because pragmatic Americans are frequently in a position of having to decide among less-than-ideal options. But when your convictions are ostensibly based upon the will of the infallible and omnipotent creator of the universe, you have substantially less freedom to be expedient. If Giuliani is a sinner, or force of evil, or whatever the hell Pat Robertson used to call pro-choice divorcees before he endorsed one of them, then it seems to me you don't really have the authority to endorse him, even if he is preferable to the other demons that populate the field. Not that preachers have any business opining on politics anyway.

(The middle guy in The Onion sketch couldn't have been more on the money: "I don't know whose credibility this ruins more." Bingo.)

Update: Jackie and Dunlap break it down:

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Chuck D

2007-11-08T17:52:00.000-06:00

That is, Charles Darwin, not the guy from Public Enemy. It's amazing how little respect the former gets in America these days. Marty Klein has a few pointed observations (emphasis added):

Say what you will about the Brits (the food isn’t their only fault), they gave the world parliamentary democracy. Not to deny their imperialism and funny hats, but they have often been an island of sanity (literally) in a world gone mad. And every day of my visit last week, I had some of that sanity in my hand.

Their 10-pound ($20) bill features a picture of Charles Darwin on the back.

Can you imagine that in the U.S.?
[snip]

I call these [antiscientific] opinions lies because when confronted with the evidence that they’re wrong, these people almost always say, “I don’t care about your so-called facts. I know what I know.” Worse, they spread these lies via government websites, “decency” campaigns, and TV shows.

One of the most tragic accomplishments of the Bush Administration is the cultural devaluation of knowledge. Facts are no longer seen as special. In a single decade, the scientific enterprise—the thought process that lifted human beings out of caves, cannibalism, and the fear of fire—has been nakedly politicized, reduced to the level of just another opinion.

As teacher Bob Riggins says, “Do you believe in evolution?” is the wrong question. It suggests that there is a choice. It implies that “believing” and “not believing” are, on some intellectual level, equivalent. But they aren’t.

Evolution’s history and contemporary processes have long been established as knowledge. In fact, you can see evolution easier than you can see intercourse causing pregnancy or the moon causing tides. The next time you get a drug-resistant flu or infection, you’re seeing evolution in action. And when you drop your pen, does it fall because of “gravity,” or the floor god Calvin? Does not believing in gravity make it any less real?

In England, people don’t discuss whether or not they “believe” in Darwin or Evolution. Millions of them are good Christians.

But in today’s America, more people believe in the reality of the Rapture than in the reality of Evolution. As Richard Kliman says in Philip Roth’s new novel, Exit Ghost, “these are people who don’t believe in knowledge.”

Defend Science.
Defend Science.

By the way, though I am no fan of strict dichotomies, I must accede to the claim that the battle lines have been drawn. Materialism, science, humanism, call it what you will: a worldview that relies on observation rather than revelation is incompatible with religion in any true sense of the word. Here is a fantastic critique of the often-espoused pseudo-moderate apologia of those who believe otherwise. (This is a clear case of pandering, as Brownback almost certainly does not believe in their compatibility; he just doesn't want to admit that he is a fundamentalist to those who don't already know it.) Such arguments are big on heart, to give them the benefit of the doubt, but undeniably small on brain. An excerpt:

To say that there is no conflict between faith and reason, therefore, is to say that the propositions one holds to be divinely revealed do not contradict the propositions knowable according to the standards of science or philosophy. Whether this is really the case depends, obviously, on just which propositions one thinks were divinely revealed and which are knowable in science or philosophy. If it turns out that a proposition one holds in faith is contradicted by a proposition known by reason, then one must either rework one’s theology, giving up on the idea that God revealed the proposition in question, or else show that the scientific or philosophical arguments that contradict that proposition are in fact inconclusive by scientific or philosophical standards.

Although the author offers a half-hearted defense of theism, it is notable that by his own logic this argument is scientific (or whatever we should call human-derived knowledge), and is thus no defense of religion as conventionally practiced. In fact, like all arguments that turn on the convenient convergence of rational belief with religious practice, it is a near deathblow to the rationale for religion, depriving it of its saving grace: What can it show us that we can't figure out ourselves? He says so himself:

To relegate normative questions to the realm of faith would be to deny the existence of an objective morality knowable by human reason—and in this way the virtues, natural law, and human rights become indistinguishable from whatever putative divine commands any crackpot may say he has lately received. This is not a view that anyone, especially someone involved in public life, should want to defend.

Matt Taibi also has a great piece in Rolling Stone that talks about the fairly recent Dover trial: our generation's Scopes trial. He makes an interesting an often-overlooked point in that while some of the more conciliatory intellectuals may pretend or even believe that the faith vs. reason conflict need not end in epistemological Armageddon, true believers are astute in realizing that it must. And they are equally right to fear that they will lose. Cognoscenti have no credibility in claiming that secular knowledge will not obviate and obliterate the current alternatives, as well they shouldn't:

"Dr. Alters," he said, "were you aware that Professor Steven Weinberg once said that 'I personally feel that the teaching of modern science is corrosive to religious belief, and I'm all for that!'"

"An unfortunate remark," said Alters, shaking his head and squirming. The look on his face said, "Can we move on?"

But Muise didn't: He rattled off more quotes from prominent scientists, including one from Gould ("Before Darwin, we thought that a benevolent God had created us") -- who, Muise noted with obvious pleasure, had once written a foreword to one of Alters' books. Alters shrugged it off, calmly sticking to his contention that evolution was not an indictment of religion.

As Alters gave his denials, Muise turned to the gallery and, for the first time that afternoon, evinced a small smile. That smile spoke volumes. It said, "At least my clients know when they're full of shit. But these eggheads . . ."

Muise had a point. His defendants and their ID theory had come under attack for an obvious reason: Just because you say in a court of law that you're not creationists doesn't make it true.

Now Muise got to say the same thing to those superior-sounding intellectuals who flew into God's country and insisted, under oath, that they weren't enemies of religion. You can yell it at us till you're blue in the face, the lawyer seemed to be saying, but we who really believe know better.

To blue-state intellectuals like Alters, Kitzmiller v. Dover was just another clash with religious loonies of the same primitive sort found in the original Scopes trial, die-hards determined for some incomprehensible reason to drag us back to the Stone Age.

But to the defendants in this case, Kitzmiller was a chance to turn Scopes on its head. If what Scopes' defense attorney Clarence Darrow accomplished eighty years ago was to expose the narrow-mindedness and anti-intellectualism of the Bible Belt, lawyers like Muise were out to show the opposite in Kitzmiller -- that most scientists secretly hate God, laugh at his followers and would like to stamp out both for all eternity, only they don't take Christians seriously enough to be straight with them about this.

Both sides were right[.]
[snip]

But the real victory of the defense was in forcing men like Alters to insist with a straight face that Darwinism is not incompatible with religion. Technically this was true, of course, but it was striking that it was exactly the same kind of feeble technicality as the contention that ID has no literal connection to God or the Bible. A technicality like Clinton not sleeping with Monica Lewinsky, like John Kerry owning a rifle. Technically true -- but fooling no one.

Intelligent design may very well have been conceived as an end run around the Supreme Court, and in a matter of weeks, it will likely be exposed as such, when the Honorable Judge John E. Jones III rules in favor of Kitzmiller et al. in the Dover case. [Note: Judge Jones, who had close ties to Republican politicians sympathetic to ID, was suspected to be as favorable to the ID cause as anyone you could find on a federal bench. Nonetheless, his ruling was brutal. While he needed only rule on the impropriety of the particular case, which was obvious and could have been accomplished on a technicality rather than the heart of the legal issue, he chose instead to rule broadly and harshly on the impropriety of ID itself, essentially closing the door to similar cases in the future. He also lauded the ACLU prosecutor's devastating cross examination of the key expert ID witness, Michael Behe, as "textbook."]

But ID is also revealing itself here in Pennsylvania in another form. It's having a coming-out party as a deliberate satirical echo of the great liberal lie of the modern age: the idea that progressive science and religion can coexist.

For a century or so since Nietzsche, popular culture in the West has operated according to an uneasy truce, in which God both is and is not dead. We teach our children the evidence-based materialism of science and tell them they can believe in God and a faith-based morality in their spare time if they like.

And in some parts of the country, we celebrate Scopes as a victory over ignorance, while still insisting that we do not also celebrate it as a victory over religion. What these endless Scopes sequels tell us is that somewhere many years from now we're going to hit a fork in the road, beyond which this have-it-both-ways philosophy isn't going to fly anymore. Is God dead, or isn't he? Are we believers, or not? They know what we think. They just want us to come out and say it.

Almost anywhere else in the developed world, the notion if True Belief is quaint. But in the US, God is not dead quite yet. But make no mistake about it, it's Nietzsche or the Bible. I know who I'm pulling for.

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Taxes

2007-11-08T12:58:00.000-06:00

Well, what else can I say:

You can find out more about the "carried interest" tax rate here. Needless to say, it has been greatly misunderstood by many who have opined on it. Further, while organizations like MoveOn are pushing this as a major populist issue (which it is) the implication is that this is a Republican thing, which it apparently is not. While a Dem introduced the bill to close the loophole, support for it on his side of the aisle has been less than convincing. Notably, Chuck Schumer of New York (he's close to Wall Street types, so this is obviously uncomfortable for him) has opposed the bill. We'll see what the Dems do, but if this bill doesn't pass it will (and should) seriously damage their credibility as the party of common people, especially in juxtaposition to Republican "elitism."

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The Elephant In The Room

2007-11-06T17:41:00.000-06:00

[While it occurs to me that the title is probably the most cliche of all political puns, I still thought it was rather clever at the moment.]

Biden finally says what few others have had the balls to mention. I love that man.

Biden is not as wonkish on policy as my ideal candidate would be, but he's not full of shit either and that counts for quite a bit these days. Here is an excellent piece on Biden. It's wordy, but substantial. It also reminds us of his significant personal faults and past political transgressions (and some might claim it glosses over these), but all in all I think it's the portrait of a man who has the foundations of knowledge and character to be a good president. I think I like him for putting his foot in his mouth occasionally because he does so out of what seems to be unaffected candor, and he responds to his own unfortunate outbursts by neither denying nor eschewing his positions, but simply apologizing where it's warranted.

In short, vote Jackie Broyles.

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Constitution 102

2007-11-02T14:29:00.000-05:00

I have already posted excerpts on this, but when a presidential front-runner like Mitt Romney says at the Republican debate--to copious applause, no less-- that it is acceptable for traditionally defined constitutional civil rights to take a back seat to the exigencies of safety, it bears repeating. [For some reason, I can't find a clip of him saying this. I saw the clip originally on the Daily Show, which has done a heinously amateurish revamp of their site and it is now almost impossible to find anything.] More excerpts below, and here is the full article.

When President Bush signed the Military Commissions Act into law in October 2006, he dismissed objections to its Draconian and tyrannical provisions with one very simple and straightforward argument (emphasis added):
Over the past few months the debate over this bill has been heated, and the questions raised can seem complex. Yet, with the distance of history, the questions will be narrowed and few: Did this generation of Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat? Every member of Congress who voted for this bill has helped our nation rise to the task that history has given us.
That paragraph summarizes the Bush movement. Because the threat posed by The Evil Terrorists is so grave, maximizing protections against it is the paramount, overriding goal. No other value competes with that objective, nor can any other value limit our efforts to protect ourselves against The Terrorists.

That is the essence of virtually every argument Bush supporters make regarding terrorism. No matter what objection is raised to the never-ending expansions of executive power, no matter what competing values are touted (due process, the rule of law, the principles our country embodies, how we are perceived around the world), the response will always be that The Terrorists are waging war against us and our overarching priority -- one that overrides all others -- is to protect ourselves, to triumph over Evil. By definition, then, there can never be any good reason to oppose vesting powers in the government to protect us from The Terrorists because that goal outweighs all others.

But our entire system of government, from its inception, has been based upon a very different calculus -- that is, that many things matter besides merely protecting ourselves against threats, and consequently, we are willing to accept risks, even potentially fatal ones, in order to secure those other values. From its founding, America has rejected the worldview of prioritizing physical safety above all else, as such a mentality leads to an impoverished and empty civic life. The premise of America is and always has been that imposing limitations on government power is necessary to secure liberty and avoid tyranny even if it means accepting an increased risk of death as a result. That is the foundational American value.

It is this courageous demand for core liberties even if such liberties provide less than maximum protection from physical risks that has made America bold, brave, and free. Societies driven exclusively or primarily by a fear of avoiding Evil, minimizing risks, and seeking above all else that our government "protects" us are not free. That is a path that inevitably leads to authoritarianism -- an increasingly strong and empowered leader in whom the citizens vest ever-increasing faith and power in exchange for promises of safety. That is most assuredly not the historical ethos of the United States.

The Bill of Rights contains numerous limitations on government power, and many of them render us more vulnerable to threats. If there is a serial killer on the loose in a community, the police would be able to find and apprehend him much more easily if they could simply invade and search everyone's homes at will and without warning. Nonetheless, the Fourth Amendment expressly prohibits the police from undertaking such searches. It requires both probable cause and a judicial warrant before police may do so, even though such limitations on state power will enable dangerous killers to elude capture.
(snip)

Our country is centrally based upon the principle that we are willing to assume risks in order to limit government power. Numerous other amendments in the Bill of Rights are grounded in that same principle. And, of course, that is the central belief that drove the founders to risk death by waging war against the most powerful empire on earth. Objectives other than physical protection matter greatly. We have never been a country that ignores other objectives and asks only, as the president put it, did "Americans take the threat seriously, and did we do what it takes to defeat that threat?"

The president's mind-set is utterly contrary to core American principles. Historically, the worst mistakes America has made -- those instances in which it has departed most radically from its ideals -- happened not when Americans failed to take seriously enough some Evil lurking in the world, but, to the contrary, they occurred when our government leaders exaggerated the threat of Evil and accordingly induced overreactions among citizens.

Historians will almost certainly ask about the Bush presidency: Did America adhere to its values and principles when defending itself against the threat posed by terrorism, or did it succumb to fear, overreaction, and violate its core beliefs in pursuit of illusions of maximum protection?

To put it another way...

This is an excellent recap of the point by David Foster Wallace, but since it's probably not linkable without a subscription, I will plagiarize the point below. [Of The Atlantic, Harper's, and The New Yorker, I'm not sure why The Atlantic seems to be notably more protective of their online content. I hate to do this, but this is the way media works nowadays.]

Are some things still worth dying for? Is the American idea* one such thing? Are you up for a thought experiment? What if we chose to regard the 2,973 innocents killed in the atrocities of 9/11 not as victims but as democratic martyrs, “sacrifices on the altar of freedom”? In other words, what if we decided that a certain baseline vulnerability to terrorism is part of the price of the American idea? And, thus, that ours is a generation of Americans called to make great sacrifices in order to preserve our democratic way of life—sacrifices not just of our soldiers and money but of our personal safety and comfort?

In still other words, what if we chose to accept the fact that every few years, despite all reasonable precautions, some hundreds or thousands of us may die in the sort of ghastly terrorist attack that a democratic republic cannot 100-percent protect itself from without subverting the very principles that make it worth protecting?

Is this thought experiment monstrous? Would it be monstrous to refer to the 40,000-plus domestic highway deaths we accept each year because the mobility and autonomy of the car are evidently worth that high price? Is monstrousness why no serious public figure now will speak of the delusory trade-off of liberty for safety that Ben Franklin warned about more than 200 years ago? What exactly has changed between Franklin’s time and ours? Why now can we not have a serious national conversation about sacrifice, the inevitability of sacrifice—either of (a) some portion of safety or (b) some portion of the rights and protections that make the American idea so incalculably precious?

In the absence of such a conversation, can we trust our elected leaders to value and protect the American idea as they act to secure the homeland? What are the effects on the American idea of Guantánamo, Abu Ghraib, Patriot Acts I and II, warrantless surveillance, Executive Order 13233, corporate contractors performing military functions, the Military Commissions Act, NSPD 51, etc., etc.? Assume for a moment that some of these measures really have helped make our persons and property safer—are they worth it? Where and when was the public debate on whether they’re worth it? Was there no such debate because we’re not capable of having or demanding one? Why not? Have we actually become so selfish and scared that we don’t even want to consider whether some things trump safety? What kind of future does that augur?

Here are a few things I've quoted before.

No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.
-Edward R. Murrow

We will not be driven by fear into an age of unreason if we dig deep in our history and our doctrine. And remember that we are not descended from fearful men, not from men who feared to write, to associate, to speak, and to defend the causes that were for the moment, unpopular. This is no time for men who oppose Senator McCarthy’s methods to keep silent, or for those who approve. We can deny our heritage, and our history, but we cannot escape responsibility for the results. We proclaim ourselves indeed we are, defenders of freedom where ever it continues to exist in the world, but we cannot defend freedom abroad by deserting it at home.
-Edward R. Murrow

One of our greatest leaders once told us that the only thing we have to fear is fear itself. We should remember that.

Somewhat relevantly, this is not a model of government:

Non sequiturs below:

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Surprise!

2007-10-30T10:42:00.000-05:00

Not really.

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An Education Well Spent

2007-10-23T18:03:00.001-05:00

This is why I can't wait to get to medical school. The kind of students that populate top medical schools are truly amazing. Milton is a friend of a friend of mine from Vanderbilt undergrad, and I wish him all the success he obviously deserves.

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Why The System Is Broken

2007-10-22T13:07:00.000-05:00

Here's a little something I stumbled across. While I often disagree with libertarians like those at Reason on many things, I rarely disagree with them on everything. Here's the bit of this argument that I like most:

"If you don't know what you're talking about," South Park co-creator Matt Stone recently told Rolling Stone, "there's no shame in not voting." The comment upset actor-activist Sean Penn, who scolded Stone for "not mentioning the shame of not knowing what you're talking about."

When it comes to politics, Americans who don't know what they're talking about have a lot of company. In fact, as George Mason University law professor Ilya Somin shows in a Cato Institute paper published last month, they represent a majority of voters.

Somin reviews survey data from the 1950s on that indicate "most individual voters are abysmally ignorant of even very basic political information." Furthermore, "a relatively stable level of extreme ignorance has persisted" despite rising education levels and increased availability of information.

The rest of the article fleshes out those assertions somewhat and then devolves into some personal whining that injures an otherwise strong point.

Of course, The Onion already knew that:
Poll: Bullshit Is Most Important Issue For 2008 Voters

And speaking of Parker and Stone, I haven't seen Idiocracy, but this little clip from it makes me think it's worth a gander:

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Democratic Elitism

2007-10-17T20:54:00.000-05:00

I have defended the notion of "elitism" here before. While there are some forms of elitism that I oppose, like plutocracy, I do consider myself an aristocrat in the original Greek sense of the word, which is better represented in the modern lexicon by the term technocrat. (I am aware of the irony of dropping Greek-bombs when defending elitism; how autologous!) In any case, I suppose I will be getting a cane, because I must sound a lot like this guy:

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AI

2007-10-16T11:25:00.000-05:00

This reminded me of my philosophy of mind class. Dennett and Fodor would dig it.

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Christianisty

2007-10-13T12:40:00.000-05:00

"Not John McCain pandering, but pandering a little."

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The Swift-Boating of Graeme Frost

2007-10-12T13:23:00.000-05:00

This article pretty much says all you need to know about the Republican smear machine. Smearing candidates and speciously impugning the credibility experts are long-accepted forms of political and legal discourse, but I think you need to step back and consider the depths to which you have sunk when you viciously attack a kid and his family (using claims that are not just spun but purely fabricated, I would add) to defend an act that is frankly indefensible -- the denial of healthcare to children whose parents can't afford it -- just to preserve tax breaks for the wealthy.

"It's for your own good; socialized medicine will destroy everything in the end."
It's easy for a politician to say that to a camera, but it's not easy for a doctor to say it to a patient. Because it's not true.

From the article, a letter from the father:

"My son Graeme has helped put on a human face, that of a young boy, representing the needs of children and families across this nation. We are a hard working family that has stepped forward to support SCHIP. Mudslinging from the fringe has now been directed at the messenger. To be smeared all over the Internet and receive nasty e-mail — my family does not deserve this retribution. It is both shameful and pathetic.

"Driven by a most dubious agenda, shortsighted cut-and-paste bloggers, lacking all the facts, have made a feeble attempt at being crack reporters. This is an aberrant attempt to distract the American people from what the real issues are. Hard working American families need affordable health insurance.

"I find it morally reprehensible, and the act of a true coward, to publicly (world wide) smear a man and his family and not sign one's own real name to what they have written. I sign my name to what I write.

-Halsey Frost"

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Doubting Thomas

2007-10-10T19:45:00.000-05:00

I actually caught the 60 Minutes segment where Clarence Thomas, in an effort to promote his new book, paints quite a different picture of himself than history would suggest is the case. It did not go unnoticed, and he was called out on his hypocrisy. This post pretty much says it all.

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Fucking Linguistics

2007-10-10T18:33:00.000-05:00

Tee hee.

Besides being at once playfully scatalogical and beautifully deadpan, the article is actually quite serious and thoughtful, as I will fail to suggest in my commentary below.

I love Steven Pinker. I think he should write just about everything that gets written about popular neuroscience and linguistics, and when he says things like "the gynecological-flagellative term for uxorial dominance," it makes me think he should write the clues for the NYT crossword too. That would be one fun crossword. (How fun would it be? Fucking.)*

*Pinker says that this construction is ungrammatical, which it clearly is. But I'm going to try and change that.

By the way, although most of the piece is focused on the sociolinguistics of profanity and the evolutionary traits that underlie it, he offers a spot-(fucking-) on assessment of what this means, politically, for us today:

When it comes to policy and law, it seems to me that free speech is the bedrock of democracy and that it is not among the legitimate functions of government to punish people who use certain vocabulary items or allow others to use them. On the other hand, private media have the prerogative of enforcing a house style, driven by standards of taste and the demands of the market, that excludes words their audience doesn't enjoy hearing. In other words, if an entertainer says fucking brilliant, it's none of the government's business; but, if some people would rather not explain to their young children what a blow job is, there should be television channels that don't force them to.

Read it.

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Deathswitch

2007-10-05T15:28:00.000-05:00

Here's a morbidly fascinating idea.

And here is one that scared the crap out of me. However, the analogy to Google is an excellent point. Much more commentary at that link as well.

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Dr. Marty

2007-10-05T15:26:00.000-05:00

A few things from Marty Klein:
A pretty succinct review of the case for gay marriage.

A message to Larry Craig.

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Blackwater

2007-10-02T19:36:00.000-05:00

I've always thought that contracting a war out to mercenaries (who are politically unaccountable and of a questionable international legal status, among other issues) was a terrible idea. I'm surprised how little political outcry it has caused. But amidst growing discontent among Americans for the Iraq war, and among Iraqis for Americans, the recent shooting of about 20 Iraqis by Blackwater has provoked the censure of the Iraqi government and attracted much negative attention from our citizens at home. Now there are a string of high-profile allegations, revelations, and PR disasters, culminating in congressional investigations. You could say the shit has officially hit the fan. I hope accountability is restored.

Also in the bad news department for Blackwater, the wrongful death suit against it by families of deceased contractors is a big news item once again.

All I can say is that I don't think people should be getting rich off war, period. Combined with the fact the Blackwater seems to have been greedy, unethical, and inhumane in many of its actions and policies, I hope courts show no mercy.

Update: Another embarrassing incident and a piece about, what else, corruption.

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Healthcare

2007-10-01T12:47:00.000-05:00

In a follow up to this post, the Onion offers Bush's solution to healthcare reform, reminding us that it is not government's business to take care of (our own) citizens.

But seriously, the military-industrial complex is not very funny. Why We Fight is an amazing documentary that explores its historical roots and contemporary relevance. Every American should watch it.

Official site.

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MD/PhDs

2007-09-30T22:34:00.000-05:00

I'm glad that I didn't read this until my applications were done. Not that I was oblivious to the quagmire that is the NIH funding system.

While training more medical scientists than we can realistically support (and then having them drop out of research) is certainly a concern, another equally unfortunate scenario that could result from a glut of MD/PhD graduates would be if all of the promising candidates ended up in industry. Biotech is booming, and many predict it will be a juggernaut by the time I graduate, so they may indeed end up picking up the slack for a lack of government funding. Of course this is not inherently bad; many great things come out of industry research. But it would be a shame if industry consolidated too great a share of our biomedical capital, much as the pharmaceutical industry has done. Many very bright medicinal chemists and pharmacologists (and probably a few other specialties) have virtually no choice but to work for the overlords of Big Pharma.

Many of them do good work, but it's no secret, for example, that urinary incontinence is a very active area of pharmaceutical research. Why? Obviously, this is not a pressing medical issue. However it is a fairly common problem and, more importantly, one which won't kill you. If a drug were developed, a patient might well take it continually for 20 years. I won't belabor that it is a terrible disconnect when treating an innocuous "disease" is incentivized over one with a high mortality rate. It would indeed be a shame if many of our best and brightest physician-scientists were beholden to such a system of crass bottom lines. The people who will make the greatest innovations in medicine over the next several decades need only to have their patients' best interests at heart, not their stockholders.

Commercially viable research is driven by profit potential, and this end does not always square nicely with medicine's obligation to treat even the toughest, most unrewarding of cases. That is why we must maintain a strong backbone of government supported investigation into the difficult, ugly, never-gonna-make-anybody-rich-but-could-save-many-lives problems. Further, there is an important synergy here; basic academic research lays a foundation of knowledge by which industry can judge if there is potential for a commercial solution, and run with the promising ideas that academia has illuminated. So much preliminary investigation is involved before an idea can even be considered for the industry pipeline that industry would virtually never produce anything new if they had to do all the research in house. The fact of the matter is that an unbelievable percentage of promising research turns out to be a clinical dead-end, so the risk is simply too great for any company to sustain active R&D in that kind of field. That's why we need to have plenty of NIH money: everyone depends on it.

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The Ignorance of Crowds

2007-09-27T17:33:00.000-05:00

Here is an excellent article by Nicholas Carr that assesses the hype over the new fad of "open-source" everything. In short, those who believe that collaborative, wiki-type projects will revolutionize corporate production philosophy are probably out of touch with reality. While wikis make for a popular encyclopedia, that product is so successful not because it lacks flaws --even its most adamant proponents would surely admit that Wikipedia is lacking in many areas-- but because it's free. The open-source model, left entirely to its own devices, will likely produce many more Wikipedias, and you can't sell one of those for much.

But even as the corporate world has begun to embrace the idea of the bazaar as a forum for innovation, software programmers have continued to debate the strengths and weaknesses of peer production. The open source model has proven to be an extraordinarily powerful way to refine programs that already exist — Linux, for instance, is an elaboration of the venerable Unix operating system, and the open source Firefox browser builds on Netscape’s old Navigator — but it has proven less successful at creating exciting new programs from scratch. That fact has led some to conclude that peer production is best viewed as a means for refining the old rather than inventing the new; that it’s an optimization model more than an invention model.

Here I'm reminded of one of the early successful open-source models: the cryptographic doctrine of security through transparency. (Lo and behold, I looked for something to link for that concept and ol' Raymond is in the article. Maybe I shouldn't be so hard on Wikipedia after all. And maybe I shouldn't link a Wikipedia article to support my thesis that Wikipedia is pretty crappy.) Anyways, the theory basically says that encryption algorithms that rely on a secret in the algorithm itself (i.e., the algorithm is not known) are not as secure as those in which the algorithm is public, and only the key is secret. By the way, The Code Book is a fantastic lay explanation of basic concepts in cryptography.

Anyway, the reason the analogy is (hopefully) apt is that strong encryption algorithms are not developed by democratic collaboration; they are developed by the same isolated, eccentric geniuses as ever. But they are then scrutinized by the masses in a process that confirms and ensures their security. The wiki-digm may lead to better critics, but that's a far cry from producing better authors. In a production sense, the creation of material for them to improve upon is still rate-limiting. This is the invention vs. optimization distinction, and it's one of the primary reasons this "revolution" will end not with a bang, but with a whimper:

What makes the open source model so well suited to finding and fixing software flaws is that debugging is a task that requires little coordination among workers. Debuggers are able to sift through chunks of code in isolation — whether “splendid” or not — without knowing or caring what their fellow bug finders are doing. “Debugging,” as Raymond puts it, “is parallelizable.” All the debuggers have to do is communicate their findings and fixes to some central authority, like Linus Torvalds. The central authority takes care of synthesizing the work of the crowd, choosing the best contributions, melding them together into a coherent product, and then redistributing the work to the crowd for the next go-round.

But in Raymond’s observation, we also begin to see some of the limitations of the bazaar. First, peer production works best with routine or narrowly defined tasks that can be pursued simultaneously by a big crowd of people. It is not well suited to a job that requires a lot of coordination among the participants. If members of a large, informal group had to coordinate their efforts closely, their work would quickly bog down in complexity. The crowd’s size and diversity would turn from a strength to a weakness, and the speed advantage would be lost. Second, because it requires so many “eyeballs,” open source works best when the labor is donated or partially subsidized. If Linus Torvalds had had to compensate all his “eyeballs,” he would have gone broke long ago.

Third, and most important, the open source model — when it works effectively — is not as egalitarian or democratic as it is often made out to be. Linux has been successful not just because so many people have been involved, but because the crowd’s work has been filtered through a central authority who holds supreme power as a synthesizer and decision maker.

The take home:

The bottom line is that peer production has valuable but limited applications. It can be a powerful tool, but it is no panacea. It’s a great way to find and fix problems, to collect and categorize information, or to perform any other time-consuming task that can be sped up by having lots of people with diverse perspectives working in parallel. It can also have the important added benefit of engaging customers in your innovation process, which not only allows their insights to be harnessed but also may increase their loyalty to your company.

But if peer production is a good way to mine the raw material for innovation, it doesn’t seem well suited to shaping that material into a final product. That’s a task that is still best done in the closed quarters of a cathedral, where a relatively small and formally organized group of talented professionals can collaborate closely in perfecting the fit and finish of a product. Involving a crowd in this work won’t speed it up; it will just bring delays and confusion.

Ultimately, the hitch is the same as it ever was: the judicious selection of the talented few who possess the discretion to separate the wheat from the chaff. And we can't rely on the wisdom of crowds for that.

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Thank You Jim Webb

2007-09-26T17:01:00.001-05:00

That was a sneaky trick they tried to pull with this amendment:

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Kiva

2007-09-24T12:19:00.000-05:00

Microcredit is an amazing idea. And with the advent of decentralized financial transactions provided by the web, it has really begun to come into its own as an efficacious method of socioeconomic change. Kiva is leading the way in realizing this idea's potential. It's amazingly simple. It works like this.

Even those of us who have very little money can make a substantial contribution. After all, you're almost certainly going to get your money back, so it's really just an issue of living without part of your paycheck for a bit. I am stunned at the power of such a simple idea.

Update: A fantastic example of the way people in undeveloped countries are really lacking only for seed capital, rather than intelligence, ingenuity, or desire, is here. There are several other case studies in the enabling of the destitute and their amazing capacity for technological achievement (which sounds -- and is -- naively chauvinistic to say in light of these examples) in this book.

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Healthcare Reform

2007-09-23T21:58:00.000-05:00

RSU's got it figured out.

"You know, a lot of sick people think they deserve to get better. Bullshit. I don't see nothin like that in the Bill of Rights."
"We'll give sick people just enough to stop 'em from bitchin."

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From The General

2007-09-22T11:48:00.000-05:00

A few things from one of the best blogs on the web.

Who will clear up this Craig misunderstanding? Brian Baird will.

On Alan Keyes, the only true family values candidate.

Some much more serious thoughts.

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On Reality

2007-09-20T23:49:00.000-05:00

Read this. Wow, that's good. Here's a taste:

The rumored totality of America's cynical scorn for politics and leaders notwithstanding, this country has many citizens who still believe, even after what has happened, that if the president of the United States says it, then it must be true. This isn't a conscious thing; it happens way back in the slushy part of the brain, where unpleasant facts or disquieting fears are submerged and drowned like rats in an applesauce vat. Bush and his crew counted on that, using TV news messaging to furrow the field in preparation for seeding time, and their trust in the trust of Americans was shown to be well-placed.

When the serious push came, it came fast and furious. Dick Cheney declared that the Vice President's office no longer existed within the Executive branch because he didn't want to give any of his documents to the National Archives as is required by law, and actually went on to defend the legitimacy of his astonishing, arrogant, galactically mistaken declaration, and he got away with it.

Bush's lawyers put forth a claim of Executive Privilege that was the very living essence of overheated hubris run amok - a claim that for all intents and purposes declared Bush and his people to be fully and completely above the rule of law, and he got away with it. Subpoenas issued by Congress were either utterly ignored or smugly slapped aside, and the lawyers got away with it.

Another piece of draconian surveillance legislation aimed at shattering our remaining rights arrived in Congress, so the Bush folks brazenly bullied the majority into passing it by threatening to blame them for the next terrorist attack to come, whereupon the majority instantly wilted like orchids in a snowbank, the bill passed with room to spare, and once again they got away with it.

Cheney's chief of staff was convicted for lying about lying about lying about outing a deep-cover CIA agent and sentenced to federal prison, initiating the single most observably crooked bag-job in modern political history: Libby took the bullet for his boss, got rewarded for his service with a presidential get-out-of-jail-free card, and they all got away with it.

All of this was deployed in rapid succession, presenting the American people with a sudden feast of gibberish that has redefined incoherence across the board: the VP is not in the executive branch, and the executive branch is above the law, and the majority in Congress is actually the minority, and obstructing justice to protect Cheney from being prosecuted for annihilating a CIA operative isn't anything to get in a snit about. If that is not prima facie evidence that a new reality has been imposed upon us, then I don't know what is.

Slowly but surely, the eerie prophecy of Ron Suskind's iconic piece on the Bush presidency has been realized. Recall:

In the summer of 2002, after I had written an article in Esquire that the White House didn't like about Bush's former communications director, Karen Hughes, I had a meeting with a senior adviser to Bush. He expressed the White House's displeasure, and then he told me something that at the time I didn't fully comprehend -- but which I now believe gets to the very heart of the Bush presidency.

The aide said that guys like me were ''in what we call the reality-based community,'' which he defined as people who ''believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality.'' I nodded and murmured something about enlightenment principles and empiricism. He cut me off. ''That's not the way the world really works anymore,'' he continued. ''We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality -- judiciously, as you will -- we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors . . . and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do.''

**Shudder**
**Sob**

Tangent:

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Integrity

2007-09-18T21:11:00.000-05:00

This is why I love the ACLU. They stand on their principles, even for the assholes who openly contemn them.

Exoneration will obviously not salvage Craig's political career. After all, he pleaded guilty to the minor charge of "disorderly conduct." The calls for resignation are not because he's a criminal, they're because he's gay. The scandal isn't that he tried to have sex with a policeman, it's that he tried to have sex with a man.

Nonetheless, the ACLU is exactly right: in the same way that I can walk up to a woman at a bar and proposition her, a man may do the same to another man. And the same speech that's constitutionally protected in bars is constitutionally protected in bathrooms. They are also correct in pointing out that it would be quite easy to stop people from having sex in an airport bathroom, especially since airports are already crawling with uniformed officers. So this sting operation is, in effect, an extortion scheme that fails to accomplish its ostensible goal of keeping guys from getting busy on their layovers.

On a tangent, Daniel Gilbert's blog contains an excellent remark that embodies the cause celebre of the ACLU:

We live in a world in which people are beheaded, imprisoned, demoted, and censured simply because they have opened their mouths, flapped their lips, and vibrated some air. Yes, those vibrations can make us feel sad or stupid or alienated. Tough shit. That’s the price of admission to the marketplace of ideas. Hateful, blasphemous, prejudiced, vulgar, rude, or ignorant remarks are the music of a free society, and the relentless patter of idiots is how we know we’re in one. When all the words in our public conversation are fair, good, and true, it’s time to make a run for the fence.

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Why We Should Leave

2007-09-18T13:12:00.000-05:00

It hurts when a 3-star general and former head of the NSA under Reagan thinks the president is a madman. This op-ed is old, but not a bit dated. (That shouldn't be surprising, as any serious debate of the Iraq conundrum has been stifled by rhetoric and temporization.)

The new National Intelligence Estimate on Iraq starkly delineates the gulf that separates President Bush's illusions from the realities of the war. Victory, as the president sees it, requires a stable liberal democracy in Iraq that is pro-American. The NIE describes a war that has no chance of producing that result. In this critical respect, the NIE, the consensus judgment of all the U.S. intelligence agencies, is a declaration of defeat.

Its gloomy implications -- hedged, as intelligence agencies prefer, in rubbery language that cannot soften its impact -- put the intelligence community and the American public on the same page. The public awakened to the reality of failure in Iraq last year and turned the Republicans out of control of Congress to wake it up. But a majority of its members are still asleep, or only half-awake to their new writ to end the war soon.

Perhaps this is not surprising. Americans do not warm to defeat or failure, and our politicians are famously reluctant to admit their own responsibility for anything resembling those un-American outcomes. So they beat around the bush, wringing hands and debating "nonbinding resolutions" that oppose the president's plan to increase the number of U.S. troops in Iraq.

For the moment, the collision of the public's clarity of mind, the president's relentless pursuit of defeat and Congress's anxiety has paralyzed us. We may be doomed to two more years of chasing the mirage of democracy in Iraq and possibly widening the war to Iran. But this is not inevitable. A Congress, or a president, prepared to quit the game of "who gets the blame" could begin to alter American strategy in ways that will vastly improve the prospects of a more stable Middle East.

No task is more important to the well-being of the United States. We face great peril in that troubled region, and improving our prospects will be difficult. First of all, it will require, from Congress at least, public acknowledgment that the president's policy is based on illusions, not realities. There never has been any right way to invade and transform Iraq. Most Americans need no further convincing, but two truths ought to put the matter beyond question[.]
(snip)

As Congress awakens to these realities -- and a few members have bravely pointed them out -- will it act on them? Not necessarily. Too many lawmakers have fallen for the myths that are invoked to try to sell the president's new war aims. Let us consider the most pernicious of them.

1) We must continue the war to prevent the terrible aftermath that will occur if our forces are withdrawn soon. Reflect on the double-think of this formulation. We are now fighting to prevent what our invasion made inevitable! Undoubtedly we will leave a mess -- the mess we created, which has become worse each year we have remained. Lawmakers gravely proclaim their opposition to the war, but in the next breath express fear that quitting it will leave a blood bath, a civil war, a terrorist haven, a "failed state," or some other horror. But this "aftermath" is already upon us; a prolonged U.S. occupation cannot prevent what already exists.

2) We must continue the war to prevent Iran's influence from growing in Iraq. This is another absurd notion. One of the president's initial war aims, the creation of a democracy in Iraq, ensured increased Iranian influence, both in Iraq and the region. Electoral democracy, predictably, would put Shiite groups in power -- groups supported by Iran since Saddam Hussein repressed them in 1991. Why are so many members of Congress swallowing the claim that prolonging the war is now supposed to prevent precisely what starting the war inexorably and predictably caused? Fear that Congress will confront this contradiction helps explain the administration and neocon drumbeat we now hear for expanding the war to Iran.

Here we see shades of the Nixon-Kissinger strategy in Vietnam: widen the war into Cambodia and Laos. Only this time, the adverse consequences would be far greater. Iran's ability to hurt U.S. forces in Iraq are not trivial. And the anti-American backlash in the region would be larger, and have more lasting consequences.

3) We must prevent the emergence of a new haven for al-Qaeda in Iraq. But it was the U.S. invasion that opened Iraq's doors to al-Qaeda. The longer U.S. forces have remained there, the stronger al-Qaeda has become. Yet its strength within the Kurdish and Shiite areas is trivial. After a U.S. withdrawal, it will probably play a continuing role in helping the Sunni groups against the Shiites and the Kurds. Whether such foreign elements could remain or thrive in Iraq after the resolution of civil war is open to question. Meanwhile, continuing the war will not push al-Qaeda outside Iraq. On the contrary, the American presence is the glue that holds al-Qaeda there now.

4) We must continue to fight in order to "support the troops." This argument effectively paralyzes almost all members of Congress. Lawmakers proclaim in grave tones a litany of problems in Iraq sufficient to justify a rapid pullout. Then they reject that logical conclusion, insisting we cannot do so because we must support the troops. Has anybody asked the troops?
(snip)

[T]he strangest aspect of this rationale for continuing the war is the implication that the troops are somehow responsible for deciding to continue the president's course. That political and moral responsibility belongs to the president, not the troops. Did not President Harry S. Truman make it clear that "the buck stops" in the Oval Office? If the president keeps dodging it, where does it stop? With Congress?

Embracing the four myths gives Congress excuses not to exercise its power of the purse to end the war and open the way for a strategy that might actually bear fruit.

The first and most critical step is to recognize that fighting on now simply prolongs our losses and blocks the way to a new strategy. Getting out of Iraq is the pre-condition for creating new strategic options. Withdrawal will take away the conditions that allow our enemies in the region to enjoy our pain. It will awaken those European states reluctant to collaborate with us in Iraq and the region.

Yeah. That's what I was gonna say.

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Why People Believe Strange Things

2007-09-17T15:25:00.000-05:00

Michael Shermer of Skeptic Magazine offers a few insights at TED. The TED archive is awesome.

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Fear and Disgust

2007-09-16T18:50:00.000-05:00

...may not bode well for travelers, but lets try and stick to detecting things like weapons and explosives first. This is a stupid idea.

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Busted

2007-09-13T17:29:00.000-05:00

Bush and Petraeus have tried to attribute their agreement to begin drawing down forces next April to a success in Iraq. But, ignoring the fact that there are no indications whatever that this is the case, everyone already knew that we HAD to bring home about 30,000 troops at that time anyway. So let's not try to spin a military necessity as a policy move, eh fellas?

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This WILL NOT Change The World

2007-09-13T15:27:00.001-05:00

As for the cancer part, exciting nanoparticles with otherwise innocuous radiation is actually a great idea. The problem is selectively delivering the particles to cancerous cells and not healthy ones. If you just give someone a mouthful of gold dust, that won't happen. (Antibody-based delivery is promising, though.) That idea is not exactly original, although it is certainly very clever. As for the radiation, though, radio waves will never work. Electromagnetic radiation will only interact strongly with objects or particles that are comparable in size to the waves' length, and radio is at a very long wavelength. For instance, AM radio at 1000KHz, which is the same kind you can pick up in your car, has a wavelength of about 300 meters, or 1000 feet. [Speed=Frequency X Wavelength, so: (3*10^8 m/s)/(1*10^6 s^-1) = 3*10^2 m] We are too small for radio waves to mess with and that's exactly why, as he demonstrates in the video, you can put your hand next to an RF generator and nothing happens. That's not true of the magnetron in your microwave! It's also why dinghies and canoes won't make a blip on a battleship's radar.

Anyway, the point is that nanoparticles require wavelengths of nanometers to excite them. The visible spectrum runs from around 400-800nm, with shorter wavelengths being in the UV range and longer being infrared. UV is obviously quite harmful, but it turns out that we can make particles tuned to resonate at the low range of the IR spectrum, which is otherwise harmless glowing warmth, and this causes tumors to cook. It's a therapy with beautiful potential, but again its primary limitations are in making sure that the particles are where they're supposed to be. So the idea is great, but he should know that radio waves are out of the question; the EMR must be from a much shorter part of the spectrum.

And as for the water combustion solving an energy problem, well, that's just retarded. Why do you think he can't find a buyer for the idea? Hydrogen fuel will never solve ANY problem, because the reason it burns in oxygen is that water is more stable than its component elements. That is, the amount of energy released by burning hydrogen is equal to the amount of energy required to split water. So if you split water and burn it you could, at very best, hope to break even. Unfortunately, even this is impossible; the laws of thermodynamics forbid perfectly efficient energy transfer, so it will always cost more energy to split water than can be released by burning it. Entropy * is a bitch.

*The video for the link is obviously apropos of nothing. It was the only link I could find to that ridiculously awesome MC Hawking song.

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Awwww Snap

2007-09-11T20:15:00.000-05:00

Congressman Eliot Engel (D-New York) lays into Petraeus.

"Optimism is great, but reality is what we really need."

True, and I suppose I should probably applaud his restraint in phrasing it so delicately, but for once I'd like to hear a congressman just say "Bullshit. You are full of shit. Stop lying to me."

The one piece of evidence he offers in support of a continued occupation of Iraq is an absurd fact by which to bolster the case for staying there: he says that Iraqis are taking losses several times higher than our own. That's supposed to be good news? Sure, on the one hand you could interpret that as them standing up so we can stand down, but on the other, more obvious hand, it means at the very least that there's a shitload of violence going on over there. And since our mission is a stable Iraq, that would seem to suggest we're not doing a very good job. So I wouldn't bring that up if I were him. (By the way, if that statistic is at all based on reality it is only counting a select group of combat-trained Iraqis, because Iraqi citizens are undoubtedly dying at a MUCH higher rate than that.)

Like a good military man, Petraeus just wants to do his job to the best of his ability. Fortunately then, he is not really in charge; civilians are. So let's give him his new mission: bring us home.

Robert Wexler (D-FL) makes the point:

PS: Petraeus toes the party line masterfully. He is intelligent and well spoken, and carefully crafts statements that don't smack of PR-firm talking points. He seems sincere in his beliefs, or at least he is not brazenly disingenuous. I guess what I'm saying is that after Gonzo, it is an honor to be lied to by a man of Petraeus's caliber.

PPS: Veracifier is the awesome.

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Progress

2007-09-07T16:33:00.001-05:00

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Jobs and Smarts and Diplomas

2007-08-29T16:47:00.000-05:00

Some interesting thoughts.

Here's a thought that, while it certainly doesn't capture the thesis of the piece, has probably occurred to many people before:

Part of the change in a degree's value, however, comes from a trend that the authors decry: credentialism. "More and more employers don't care what you know," says Pryor. "They just care if you have the right sort of degree; it does nobody any good." Although they admit that scholars should conduct more research on the topic, Pryor says he believes that some employers -- banned from using many types of tests for employment purposes -- use the degrees that people have earned as a crude personality-screening mechanism. "If someone has the where-withal to finish junior college, even if they don't have any more real skills, some employers might figure that they are simply a better worker."

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Bill Sali (R-Idaho)

2007-08-26T23:43:00.000-05:00

Is a world-class douche bag. But don't take my word for it. There's plenty of sources to check.

I won't bother to comment on the obvious fact that his assholery is protected by the same amendment that protects the Hindu prayer, or that the Christian purity he insinuates is expressly forbidden by Article VI of the Constitution. Screw that guy.

Mark Day knows what's up:

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On Sicko

2007-08-26T22:21:00.000-05:00

Some interesting thoughts. I'm not sure I totally buy his premises, or the historical applicability of the Upton Sinclair analogy (though I love the quotations), but it's definitely food for thought.

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Don't Mention It. No, Really, Don't.

2007-08-24T14:06:00.000-05:00

Bush recently invoked the lessons of Vietnam as, get this, an argument for staying in Iraq. It was a stupid thing to say. He has failed to grasp the aptitude of the comparison before, and has been widely and deservingly excoriated for his ignorance on the matter. Once again, he has mustered the audacity to present a war he refused to serve in as a rallying cry for the current quagmire. And he is so unbelievably wrong, his credibility so minuscule, you really have to wonder who he's even trying to fool with this absurd rhetoric. I doubt it's working.

This op-ed sums up my thoughts pretty well.

Desperate presidents resort to desperate rhetoric -- which then calls new attention to their desperation. President Bush joined the club this week by citing the U.S. failure in Vietnam to justify staying on in Iraq.

Bush's comparison of the two conflicts rivals Richard Nixon's "I am not a crook" utterance during Watergate and Bill Clinton's "I did not have sexual relations with that woman, Miss Lewinsky," in producing unintended consequences of a most damaging kind for a sitting president.

It is not just that Bush's speech to the Veterans of Foreign Wars convention on Wednesday drew on a shaky grasp of history, spotlighted once again his own decision to sit out the Vietnam conflict, and played straight into his critics' most emotive arguments against him and the Republican Party.

More important, Bush has called attention to the elephant that will be sitting in the room when his administration makes its politically vital report on Iraq to the nation next month. For Americans, the most important comparison will be this one: As Vietnam did, Iraq has become a failure even on its own terms -- whatever those terms are at any given moment.

That is, the administration has constantly shifted its goals in Iraq to avoid accepting failure and blame -- only to see the new goals drift beyond reach each time. Liberation of Iraqis became occupation by Americans, democracy became an unattainable centralized "national unity" government and this year's military surge has become a device for achieving political reconciliation among people who do not want to reconcile.

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My Candidate

2007-08-22T15:15:00.000-05:00

"This isn't American Idol; we're choosing the President of the United States." --Dennis J. Kucinich

I still like Biden a lot. He's a straight shooter, and I don't doubt his intentions. Richardson appears do be a Wesley Clark-like candidate: appealing on the surface but with little panning out on closer inspection. But the thinking person's candidate is a no-brainer: Dennis Kucinich. He's the type of guy who you would have hired on the spot if these debates were anything like a real job interview. He was a carefully considered answer to every question, and he honestly and fully elaborates his position. He is the only candidate that actually answers the questions instead of being evasive. His most memorable lines are fully backed by a consistent track record as a legislator and activist, unlike many of the candidates who just talk the talk. And as of late, he's actually become a pretty decent orator. But the fact of the matter is, when it comes to pure policy talk, he's the only one with any cred. No, perhaps some of the author candidates have those credentials, but they refuse to talk about them. But there's still no doubt in my mind that Kucinich would make the best president. He would run the country better than anyone else. Maybe people wouldn't like him. Maybe he wouldn't give entertaining press conferences or uplifting SOTU addresses, but he would do a great job at what a president should really be doing: improving the lives of Americans through better government.

It's a damn shame that he's so thoroughly unelectable. But it's even more of a shame what a self-fulfilling prophecy this observation has become. Yeah, he's short, not particularly good looking, and is all around lacking in the panache that many people expect from a serious contender. And the media has treated him accordingly, virtually guaranteeing that he can be nothing more than a dark horse, or perhaps an anti-spoiler who forces the other candidates to reveal their positions on issues rather than their slogans. But at a time when Americans are (hopefully) awakening from our political complacency and realizing that likability is not an adequate solution to our very serious problems, I can't understand why we don't even give this guy a chance. I for one am appalled at how much the debates have already focused on Obama and Clinton, ensuring that they are the only two candidates likely to garner mainstream appeal, because the others are relegated to obscurity even to those who have an open mind to consider them.

Anyways, Dennis is the man. When he gets massacred in the primary, I hope someone thinks to add him to their ticket. And I hope he declines. But it would be a tremendous service to the country if the eventual winner would put him exactly where he belongs: in charge of an important government function that could use some work. He would make an excellent Secretary of Labor, Energy, Agriculture, HHS, or pretty much anything else that's really important but fairly unglamorous. I am praying to whoever will hear me, please let this guy do something bigger than holding a House seat from Ohio.

Links:

Dennis for President

A great piece that makes me wonder if Dennis doesn't have the rhetorical flourish to match his substance...

YouTube him for more, but here's a start:

I disagree with him on nuclear power. While it is an uncomfortable solution, it is increasingly looking like the only realistic option. But I believe he is the reasonable sort of politician he would honestly investigate the truth of this assertion, and if he could find an alternative, then more power to him. Otherwise, I believe he would submit to the necessity of meeting our power needs sustainably, and that seems to mean nuclear to me.

A response to criticisms that he didn't vote with dems on their Iraq withdrawal plan.

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Link Dump

2007-08-21T14:42:00.000-05:00

Patrice Evans on the ethics of being Goliath.

NYT says exercise is good for your brain! Interesting addenda on drugs; I hadn't heard that moderate ethanol intake increased neurogenesis.

WaPo has a reasonably informative, though perhaps overly glossy, commentary on the sub-prime loans debacle.

WaPo also has an interesting piece on an interesting type of political exploitation: a quasi-fraudulent scheme that fleeces donors. The specific example is Linda Chavez, a Reagan/Bush 1 hack.

Here is a good free peak at a piece by Michael Ignatieff on the lessons learned in Iraq. He has been accused of covering his own ass while not offering an apology, although I (and I am no fan of revisionist history) find that critique overly harsh. I think the piece is in fact much more humble and insightful than the HP author gives him credit for. Although, Ignatieff has been known to cling resolutely to the apologists' position in the past.

Here is an excellent piece on the biological basis of altruism's antithesis: spite. Did you know bacteria have suicide bombers too?

This provides a horrific example of industrial encroachment on the responsible, patient-oriented practice of medicine. Specifically, it details a scheme in which pharma can target its marketing efforts towards doctors in a way that encourages unabashedly quid pro quo exchanges (as if this weren't already enough of an issue). It's particularly pernicious in that it allows doctors to reap the benefits of crookedness without knowingly --or demonstrably-- acting unethically. Pharma bears the burden of any ethical suspicion, and with a powerful lobby and enormous legal team, they are well-equipped to face the legal consequences of this racket...by making sure that there are none. This is NOT right.

On a lighter note, a friend showed me this:

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Post Secret

2007-08-14T17:15:00.000-05:00

I have written about this site before.

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WMD Video

2007-08-14T10:56:00.001-05:00

The first video gets a bit incoherent at the end, but it's an excellent expose on the rhetoric that has gotten us where we are today.

It wasn't misleading. It wasn't slightly but defensibly dishonest, if there is such a thing. It wasn't about "WMDs" that could include 20-year old nerve gas that we had sold them; it was about nukes. It wasn't about state sponsorship of terrorism, which Syria, Iran, and most of the Arab states are guilty of; it was about a direct connection to 9/11. It was manipulation. It was wholesale fabrication. It was lies. It was despicable.

On a related note, this includes some of the statements of the very architects of the Iraq plan before this horrendous idea became so fashionable.

If only this guy had been around to talk some sense into renegades like Colin Powell:

But he was not.

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Joyous Day

2007-08-13T10:25:00.001-05:00

I can't believe what I just read!

I can't wait for this guy's memoirs/deathbed confessions. Who will be our generation's Woodward and Bernstein and hound him all the way to the grave?

I would like to read something into the timing of this resignation, but they're all just too secretive to speculate about what, if anything, it means. Oh well. I can imagine just about anything other than that he's actually feeling the heat of congressional investigations; he has too defiantly thumbed his nose at oversight of any kind for that to be a plausible theory. Perhaps, for the very first time, he is telling the honest truth: with the new democrat-controlled Congress, there is simply nothing left for him to do. He and his ilk have wielded near-absolute power for a long time, but now there is nothing to do but stem the tide of the reversal of their abuses, and frankly that's not very exciting. Anything is drudgery compared to playing a modern Rasputin, so who could blame him for walking out on a high note?

The Onion weighs in.

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Seniors Ignorant, Study Finds

2007-08-08T12:58:00.000-05:00

From WaPo. The headline is "Test Finds 42% of Seniors Proficient in Economics."

Check out this clown's response:

While there is clear room for improvement, the results are not discouraging," said Darvin M. Winick, chairman of the National Assessment Governing Board, which oversees policy for the NAEP tests, in a statement before a news conference in Washington this morning. "Given the number of students who finish high school with a limited vocabulary, not reading well, and weak in math, the results may be as good as or better than we should expect.

Yeah, good point. Since they don't seem to be learning jack shit anyway, we shouldn't pressure them to learn this specific shit. Better to keep them homogenously uninformed. Idiot.

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Good Going

2007-08-07T11:19:00.000-05:00

WTF, mate?

"You won't need to eavesdrop to hear this: I voted for you assholes because you said you were against shit like this."

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Gonzo's Last Gasp

2007-08-05T16:05:00.000-05:00

This is really the only defense left for him:

Oddly, I've pretty much had it with calls for Gonzo's head. It's not that he doesn't deserve it, it's just that it is now clearly a lost cause and a waste of precious legislative time and effort. He's not going to resign, Bush certainly isn't going to make him, and while even Republicans in the House and Senate are happy to verbally condemn him, nobody's going to orchestrate his political lynching (how typical of the Dems not to shove when pushing is nonplussed). So at this point, heaping scorn upon Gonzales actually plays right into the White House's strategy. Libby-like, they have designated a whipping boy who will dutifully absorb his flogging and deflect the outrage from where it rightfully belongs. (He will be well compensated in the end, we presume.) Don't give them what they want. Brand Gonzales the idiot and liar that he is, and move in to other examples of malfeasance. There's plenty of criticism to go around, and it's not fair or wise to let Gonzo become the lightning rod for the manifold transgressions of his employers, in much the same way that the Libby conviction (even if it had had teeth) was ultimately a vacuous appeasement given the depth of corruption that his scandal embodied.

This is funny too:

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Non

2007-08-02T15:29:00.000-05:00

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