Following is the ending to an otherwise superb Charles Pierce piece
at The American Prospect:

It constantly eludes me why what should be the most aggressive, most skeptical, and most irascible press corps in the world seems so ready always to turtle up. There isn't even a practical reason to believe that Dick Cheney looked into the soulful jowls of Brit Hume and found his troubled inner soldier there.

What's he going to do if you don't write stuff like this? Shoot you?

Forget I said that.

OK, charles seems to get a lot about what is wrong with the washington press core (and with joe klein as a representative thereof) with razor sharpness. but then, at the end, just like Lindsay Jacobellis, he stumbles.

The answer to charles' question? really, i have to tell anyone? money, power and fucking, and the confluence of the three. that's why joe klein is like he is. that is why the washington press core eats whatever shit is handed to them these days.

someone figured it out: pays these fucks enough money and we can co-opt them completely! and lo, media deregulation happened, and the news sector became the entertainment sector, and instead of having to co-opt with some sort of "reason" (like in the days of James REston, say, where you agreed that communism was bad over a bottle of scotch and he then changed his copy), you just get the fuckers paid. fat coin. 50 million here, 500k there, whatever. money. oh, and you get them laid. with hot girls/boys. and a nice house in cleveland park or georgetown or wherever.

it
is
so
fucking
obvious.

funny thing, that's what the bush people do best: corporate cronyism. that will cost all of us ten trillion or so dollars when all is said and done. the greatest shift of human wealth in history. the pundit class is, relatively speaking, kind of cheap. a 10 dollar hooker.

mediawhoresonline, how i miss you.

Dakota Today

excellent south dakota perspective on the "rapist bill of rights" that the governor is considering signing, a bill that would in fact make all abortion illegal in the state and subject doctors to jail time.

no need to go to mt. rushmore or the black hills if this one passes, at least not in this family.

if the democrats want to be taken seriously, then they need to make hay out of the fact that meet the press will have peter king, john warner and arnie gropenfuhrer as their three guests this weekend.

a press release might read:

"democrats will no longer go on MTP until it stops having 2 to 1 republicans to dems, let alone this weekend's ridiculous and insulting 'mix' of 3 republicans. given that the american people continue to give incredibly low marks to republicans in congress and the president in particular, it is also an insult to the american people. If MTP cannot commit to balance, then they can go over to Fox News Channel, another station that democratic politicians will not be appearing on in the future."
Harry Reid (in my dreams, obviously).

i mean, how hard can it be to PLAY FUCKING HARDBALL ONCE IN A WHILE? (speaking of shows that should be boycotted by Democrats...)

This post sponsored by my anger, now with thirty percent more vitriol!

i have a friend, let's call him (again) jon although his name is john. good guy, works in the biz, he's smart, nice, good politics etc. so he looks at this dubai ports deal and he says (perhaps to himself first, later to me): "don't hate this deal just because it is the bushies. i mean, maybe they are the right people, the UAE folk, for this job. maybe we are being racist. maybe, just maybe, we should give bush the benefit of the doubt."

and i know, you're thinking yourself, like Kevin Drum and some others--we are just being knee-jerk here. let's look at this on the merits, separate from whatever our feelings might be about the monkeyspunk running our country.

it seems so...tolerant...so...liberal...so...nice...so...meritocratic.

YOU

MUST

BE

KIDDING

have these people been asleep for the last five years? do you think there is even the slightest chance that every day that we learn more about this deal will be another day that we realize the bushites are incompetent crony capitalists who would sell their grandmom to the arabs after they were done shooting her in the face? am i being too harsh? too "bush-hatey"?

let's see: john snow ran CSX and still holds stock in his trust. CSX sold their stevedoring business to Dubai ports. John snow was on the committee that unanimously approved this deal. it turns out this deal circumvented US law. how? in such a way that cronies of the bush administration could get more money. huh.

that's funny. not the haha kind, the beat-my-skull-against-the-wall-until-it-leaves-bloody-stains funny.

and if anyone thinks that Dubai ports would do the best possible job running our ports efficiently and safely, please line up for drunken hunting lessons with mr. cheney. line forms (pun intended) on the left.

Free speech, even if it hurts - Los Angeles Times

In re David Irving, holocaust denier, getting sentenced to jail.

just wanted to remind everyone--the thing that sucks about free speech is that assholes get to take advantage. the thing that's great about free speech is everything else. david irving, professional liar scumbag and anti-semite, should not go to jail. he should just be hated and shunned by all polite society.

if you don't believe this, you don't really believe in free speech, "for me but not for thee"

what about o'reilly et al? why glenn g is slightly off the mark regarding the coming together of left and right on issues of "liberty". Unclaimed Territory - by Glenn Greenwald: Are there American political values that transcend ideology?

Where Glenn states that

The set of precepts composing core American political values is clear and uncontroversial to most. We are a nation that lives under the rule of law. No man is above the law, including the President. Presidents do not have the right to engage in conduct which Congress makes it a criminal offense to engage in. To avoid the President seizing the powers of a King, the powers he exercises must always be checked and balanced by the Congress and the courts. In order to ensure that we have a representative government, only the people, through their Congress, make the laws, and everyone, including the President, is required to abide by those laws. We are a nation that is ruled by the people -- our elected officials do not rule over us -- and when we enact restrictions through our Congress on what our Government can do to us as citizens (as we did with FISA), those laws bind all citizens, including our elected officials.

None of those principles is even arguably liberal or conservative in the contemporary, political sense of those words. They are the defining American principles of government which has guided our country since its founding. And the Administration’s radical theory that any matter relating to national security threats "is for the President alone to decide" and that neither Congress nor the courts "can place any limits on the President's determinations" – which even bestows on the President the power to ignore Congressional laws or to wield war powers against American citizens on U.S. soil – could not be any more contrary to all of these core principles.

These are the principles that led Americans, in 1978, to enact a law, in response to decades of abuse of eavsdroping powers by Administrations of both parties, which made it a criminal offense for our government to eavesdrop on Americans without judicial oversight and approval. We collectively decided that we want aggressive eavesdropping against our foreign enemies, and the law we enacted enables aggressive eavesdropping. But we also decided that we trust our government to eavesdrop on Americans only with judicial oversight, not in secret and with no oversight. Through our Congress, that was the law we passed, and with that law, we imposed restrictions on the powers which our government could exercise against us.

he ignores the fact that there exists in this country a group who dedicates themselves on a daily basis to this very fundamental aspect of American law. they are called the ACLU. they are attacked regularly by the right, and not the "fringe" of which Glenn speaks, but rather by o'reilly and limbaugh and malkin and so on, e.g. "mainstream" conservatives. and say what one will about "classical conservatism"--these are the current exemplars of conservatism in the public sphere.

to quote a certain king, sorry, president of ours, "they hate us for our freedoms."

and that is what makes the modern left different from the modern right. where once the left was all for "speech codes" and punishments therein, it has all flipped, and now it is the right who attacks all kinds of speech as "treason" and so on.

just sayin'.

HaloScan.com - Comments

for what it's worth--dick cheney set to the rocking sounds of filter's "hey man, nice shot"

Reuters AlertNet - U.S. religious group condemns Iraq war

so the world council of churches believes bush is bad, iraq was a mistake of a war etc.

and many on the left will approvingly link to this, saying "see, even religious folk are on our side now."

in fact, i see it already has a link as dailykos.

and yet, the moment religious groups show too much fealty to the right (the brewing North Carolina republican registration of church members scandal) we will say "see--religion mixing with politics! bad!!!"

say it slowly, say it loud, whisper it in the ear of a loved one, whatever, just say it: religion is the problem. it's the problem when you agree with it, and the probably when you don't.

hypocrites.

UPDATE: THIS POST GOT PULLED BY THE WAPO TWICE TONIGHT. ANYONE WANT TO TELL ME WHY?


Responding to the washington post online and their continuing insistence that a) comity is more important than truth and that b) jack abramoff was a bid democrat, i write as follows:

if one thousand readers respond to a story, using language so foul it would curl the very hair of a sea captain, and those thousand responses were right on the facts--would their intemperate language change the underlying facts?

it's a yes or no question.

let me save you the trouble. no. the facts would remain. swearing is the reddest of herrings.

deb howell either lied or was hideously incompetent.

you covered up for her by removing non-profane posts which made substantive points that were not refutable and that put you in a terrible light. they showed that you were compounding your initial lie with further ones.

that's two really ugly lies, both which happen to support a republican narrative, one that (provably) has been deliberately crafted.

your readership, particularly on line, skews both left and sophisticated when it comes to these things. we saw through this in, oh, 2 minutes.

you aren't servicing that readership. that's bad business practice.

you should be fired. deb howell should be fired in disgrace. Derek Willis should either show us his evidence or be fired. sue schmidt should prove to us she doesn't do what she is told by republican operatives, or she should be fired.

you aren't just bad reporters and editors, you are people whose ethics are anethema to everything i believe in and try to teach my daughter. it's sickening.

profanity, or lack thereof, changes none of this.

So the NYTimes front-pages Sudan today. And midway through the third graf comes this little bit of kistof-ian gratuitous religiousity (with a backhanded karate chop at the left!):

Fighting between rebel groups and government-backed militias has destroyed entire villages, killing more than 200,000 and displacing about 2 million people. Both the United States and the United Nations have been criticized for responding too slowly to evidence that the African Union peacekeepers were having little effect.

Evangelical Christians have been particularly outspoken in their calls for a more active American role, and Mr. Bush's remarks, in a question-and-answer session in Tampa, appeared to focus increased attention on the issue.

NATO has played a small logistical role in Sudan thus far, primarily airlifting African troops. Until recently, government officials had said NATO might do more, but all the discussion has been about providing equipment, communications and other logistical support.

i put in all three paragraphs there to highlight the extraordinary incongruity of that sentence. let's look at the "and" there--when you read papers by kids learning to write, they often struggle with the concept of "but" (hell, when you read scripts by fully grown adults you will see the same thing) being oppositional, not THIS, but THAT. i think that David Sanger, front pager for the Times, has forgotten how "and" works. it tends to link two related thoughts in one sentence. are we supposed to assume that bush is throwing out red meat to the base by highlighting something of signifigance to them? if so, Sanger should report that directly. he has both things in the same sentence, after all.

of course, i'm giving the benefit of the doubt where none is due. let's imagine a scenario--kristof grabs sanger for lunch at the office. they go somewhere midtown--i want to go with smith and wollensky, but i'm guessing--and kristof bends sanger's ear for an hour and a half about two things: one, how good it feels to buy cambodian hookers, and two, how the evangelicals really do get it on darfur better than anyone, really they do. and how remiss the times is in covering that fact.

cut to the next day, and sanger is preparing his column. he asks kristof for input, and kristof suggests highlighting the evangelical involvement in darfur. sanger, rushed for time, shoves something in there. eh voila, total nonsensical writing on the front page of the times!

and hey, the left wing blogosphere has been highlighting sudan troubles for 2 years. we have a couple of million readers in total over here. our readers are active. but i didn't note an utterly weird sentence about us in there. or about john kerry, who brought darfur and sudan up repeatedly in his campaign.

the times continues down a suicidal path. it will never be seen as being pro-evangelical enough, and it will lose its core readership, its base, if you will, of left-leaning folk.

How the blogosphere ate my brain, an essay

As usual, Glenn Greenwald is on fire, here.

he puts the NSA scandal, and its potential arc, in the context of the Watergate scandal. he's not the first to do, though he is the most articulate. that glenn guy is a really good writer and thinker. there's a big future ahead for him i suspect in policy. i hope spitzer is aware of him.

that said, i think he's a bit off base here in his Watergate analogy. what has changed since then? what is the key change in how the public consciousness is provoked and shifted? why, it's the internet! the internet changes everything. and it's not clear, in this case, that it changes things for the better.

let me explain: i was talking to friends last night, facetiously to an extent, about "scandal fatigue". I mean, every time Peter Daou makes a scandal list it is increasingly depressing. so why doesn't any of it stick? why, for instance, could whitewater go on and on, despite early and frequent exonerations of the clintons? well, it might be that those were the old days, when newspapers could focus on such things with real resources. the days before the 24 hour news cycle.

at first, it seemed with the advent of the cable channels that focus was what they did best. if they got their teeth on something prurient, slimy, or trashy, they just wouldn't let go.

and then came drudge. some won't remember, but before it turned out he was a shill for the republican party (and i'd love to know if they sought him out or if he...offered his services. natas si drol and all that. hope his soul is toasty currently) he was a paradigm-shifter. you could sit at your desk at work and Bam! news! hot and fresh. and though the cable news nets wanted to blow him off, and the networks even more so, how could they once he started putting up real numbers, breaking real stories? Of course, we found out later those stories were bullshit plants by Lucianne Goldberg and her hellspawn, but that wasn't the point--for all their haughtiness, the newspapers and networks, the opinion shapers, had to take note.

and they did.

then, to speed this travelougue up a bit, instapundit gets going, and then comes mediawhoresonline (lamented, missed, asskicking rip-roaring monsters they were) and bob somersby at the daily howler. then atrios and kos. and here's where it gets interesting. Markos decided to build something different--a real community. and dailykos is (re)born. then an interesting thing starts to happen. diaries and posts come so fast and furious it is impossible to keep up. and they rush by--ever pushed out by the one that was posted two minutes later.

but it gets even more complicated. as it happens, every post has the possibility to reference some other expert's take on something: "jane's got something new on plame, read here" or "glenn really nailed the NSA thing, read here" or "look what CNN just posted here" and so on. it's relentless, and it leaves us no time to focus on any of it as we try to focus on all of it. it's a new paradigm of how to process information, and it's never been tried on a mass scale before. all source material on everything is ubiquitous and omnipresent, and expert commentary is available often about 5 minutes after a new piece of info surfaces.

and it is amazing! it's amazing how many brilliant thinkers and writers and polemicists are out there--all at my fingertips. 24 hours a day! such a profusion of public thinking and writing is unprecedented in scope in the history of the world.

Gutenberg was a piker compared to bennett cerf. sorry, but it's true.

but with such a massive shift in how information interfaces with all of us, one must ask--what effect has all this had on our ability to make change happen in the off-line world? and i believe the answer is: it has lessened it. because information is now flowing faster than our ability to incorporate it, deal with it, and use it. by the time we've really pondered on anything, something new happens.

[as a side note here--some might say "well, these particular people who are running the country are so corrupt, so venal, and so incompetent that it is THAT fact that makes it hard to focus. it's the old "do stony things happen more often when people are stoned, or is it just that it seems that way because...you're stoned." i'm saying the paradigm shift just coincidentally happened at the same time as the vogons taking over our country.]

anyhoo--net of all this is, cheney shoots some old guy in the face, and it knocks the new diary off the front page, and out of mind.

so, what to do? well, we are going to have to figure out how to manage this process in such a way that we break through the noise (and by we i mean "the left" or "the left blogosphere" or "rational scientific people" or "secular humanists" or "brights" or whomever.) anyone but fucking rick warren or james dobson or al-zarqawi or the republican party and its apologists. we haven't got it right yet.

one possibility: imagine a world in which the democrats in concert with the blogosphere (hey, if there is a blogosphere can their be a blogosopher? just askin.) just don't comment on whatever new shit flows down the intersewer. "cheney shot someone in the face? hope he's ok. anyway Bush broke the law with the NSA thing." repeat eternally until you've made your point.

i guess i'll cross post this at my kos diary you know, for the irony of it all.

Metal Sludge - W. Axl Rose throws suprise listening party for Guns n' Roses recording "Chinese Democracy" in NYC! - The Power & Glory since 1998

look at this photo and then please ask yourself:

what

happened

to

axl

rose?

Another post about being a dev exec in h town

because i ankled. sort of.

i used to work with this guy from this country that is below sea level. very nice guy, but could be...difficult? he had a close friend with whom he had worked for several years (in a slightly different capacity), another director, and the two of them would bitch and moan about how hollywood was screwing them, how evil it was, how much better things were in the old days back home in clogville. or wherever.

these two guys have quotes of probably over 10 million dollars, between the two of them. they've been responsible for some of the worst (and, in my opinion, some of the best) hollywood action movies of the past 20 years. they've managed to get themselves studio deals with all the trimmings. they've bought houses in the hills. they've got budgets of over 100 million approved. their exquisitely stupid notes have been swallowed by many of the very people they bemoan.

if hollywood were a tit, they have sucked a DD cup down to about an A.

and yet. here it is, 1999 or thereabouts, with between them two of the biggest flops in the history of htown behind them, and still they bitch about the assholes who pay them their massive checks. and to be clear, in my humble, they are both genuises, and in both of their cases, have genuinely been fucked over by the process.

and yet.

gigantic checks cleared and cashed. the opportunity to make movies that so few can even dream of. my sympathy is limited.

my...friend...at some other blog is indeed one of the very best of the best. he's seen the shortest end of the stick one could imagine in our town. like so many others. william faulkner, for instance. kurt fucking weill and bertolt fucking brecht before him.

but still, the checks do clear, and the houses are nice.

i'm just saying.

The Poor Man Institute � Keyboard Kommando Komix PROUDLY presents �

new Keyboard Kommando commands your attention Captain!

read now and weep later.

The perks of power are sweet! SWEET!

Jonathan Schwarz of "A Tiny Revolution" with an excellent catch regarding an incident in Turkey 2 years ago, an incident considered by many Turks to be the most humiliating public betrayal in recent history.

would you believe it involves the US? and that you'd never heard of it in an american newspaper?

you would. if you were me.

OK--let's watch as my head explodes.

assuming, as i do (being sane and rational) that the NY Times, when it reports on international affairs, is not a hotbed of liberalism but rather a very good newspaper--right, we can agree on that? good, so assuming that is the case, today's front pager about "Afghan attacks linked to Taliban points to Pakistan" would have to lead a sane person to say, "gee, we've pretty much screwed the pooch on Afghanistan. And pakistan, while we're up."

1. We invade Afghanistan, bombing a county in the stone age back into the iron age. fair enough, they did have it coming, sort of. or the taliban did, anyway, although our bombs tend to hit more civilians than anything else, and those civilians had, in the main, welcomed the taliban when they came to power mostly because the (often US backed) warlords were serial rapists (especially of young boys) making the taliban look good by comparison. but fine, we did what we had to do. other than destroying the taliban totally, or capturing that bin laden guy.

but other than that, what have the romans ever done for us?

2. We pledge large amounts of money to the reconstruction of Afghanistan. this is a good idea on several levels: a real Marshall plan for this part of the world would make an enormous difference in the lives of afghanis, who've seen the short end of the stick over and over from us, from their leaders, from the soviets. we could right a few wrongs here and look good in the court of world opinion. maybe even regionally, such as in...

3. pakistan, who are ostensibly our ally. why are they our ally? well, it's not because of AQ Khan, who sold the bomb to N Korea and Libya. it's not because of the ISI, who supported the taliban and OBL. it's not because of musharraf, who's a dictator. no, it's because they have the bomb, period. one thing we've learned these past 5 years is that countries WITH the bomb don't get attacked, pace N. Korea. Countries without it are fair game. so pakistan can support our mortal enemy OBL, can support our enemies the taliban, no problem.

4. we stop giving any money of any note to afghanistan about 6 months after we pledge to rebuild their society. hamid karzai is installed, and then elected, to be the "mayor of kabul" since the rest of the country is back in the hands of the rapist warlords, with whom we have been doing business since 1982 or so.

5. the taliban regroup. they get money from...our ally...pakistan! and guns! and the afghan warlords, many of whom HATE the taliban, suck it up and start helping them, because while they may hate the taliban, they hate outsiders more. although they are happy to take our guns and butter.

6. Musharraf continues to be unable to find OBL, although it seems clear he travels with impunity in the hinterlands of NW pakistan. still our ally though!

7. the ISI starts arming suicide bombers (something afghanistan has never had before) to go into afghanistan and blow themselves up the better to bring the taliban, you know, the guys who blew up buddhist statues and ruined women's lives, and harbored OBL? those guys? to bring those guys back into contention to run various parts of afghanistan.

8. meanwhile, a massive and devastating earthquake hits pakistan. another opportunity for the US, the richest country in the world, to show the muslim world of our munificence. squandered. even as we speak. but we are tied up somewhere else, known as...

9.Iraq.

10. worst. president. ever.

here: Afghan conundrum.

Strange Detractor's professional accomplishments

now that shit is funny.

very very funny.

go. read. leave me and my blog in peace. for the time has come for all good men to play soccer. right now. at pop star's house. you know the one i mean.

so over at some writer's blog, some guy who claims to know my friend who was at this dinner the other night...

it's a bad intro. i'm not a writer. i'm a (recovering) development executive. here's the thing about being a development executive. and it's good news/bad news.

good news. once upon a time i'm playing on my hardscrabble soccer team in the LA Municipal league. this was a team i'd put together in one of the mid-level divisions (the core of which would go on to dominate in the top division later), we played at some shitty fields, but we had a good time. i had a writer friend on the team (several), most of them not getting much work. some of them seemingly living in their cars. but we were all friends, and my junior junior junior exec career was just beginning, so i was a beacon of hope for these guys. one friend and his partner had done a t. corghasson (spelling?) boyle short story adaptation, and a pretty damn good one. no one had bitten, but it had got them meetings around town. which, of course, pays very little rent. but here i am at my new fancy job (pay? 27,000k a year.) reading, oh, conservatively, 8 scripts every tuesday (spec day!!!), all on a rush, all needing synopses and comments, and should my bosses actually read them?. plus a manuscript, usually on wednesdays, 500 pages and could you turn it around in 2 hours? and is it any good? and about 15 scripts a weekend. and the notes: mother of gog and magog, the notes! massive tomes, documents that would stand the test of time! oh mighty notes, i must have written an asimovian output of them. and to some damn good writers--some of the top in the industry. i had been working in the biz for a year or so. no background in film. but these guys had to execute my notes, or be fired.

but i continue, as is my way, to digress.

so my friend, let's call him John, though his real name is jon, has written this adaptation of boyle. and i force my boss to read it, because my boss has been fixated on this brilliant moon ghost story thingie. for years. but no one has been interested. so he likes the boyle script, brings the writers in for a meeting, and lo! and behold! they get hired. and they get a nice chunk of change, something around 6 figures. and suddenly, i've hooked my friends up with a great paying gig. and that is just fucking cool.

that's the good. the bad, and here josh f only gets it half right: sure, often the gig requires saying "this is grrrrrrrrrreat" about steaming piles of ordure. but more often, in my experience, it requires coming up with endless stuff to say about why, oh, i don't know, a story about the gadget guy at the CIA should be about a low level engineer type who discovers the secret to cold fusion. in other words, auto-job-justification. pages and pages. notes on notes. notes on drafts that are based on previous notes rewritten to meet previous notes all of which are contradictory. and if the writer is "good", all of which have been executed faithfully, because by jove if the character needs to be more "somber" yet "funnier" somewhere in the same set of notes, you had better deliver.

you think i need barton fink to give me that barton fink feeling? i've got a thousand barton finks!

i once told a certain director from a certain country where they wear a certain kind of shoe made out of a certain naturally growing substance about a certain script that became a certain movie with academy award winning actors/editors/producers/production designers/composers and so on...i told this guy, upon receiving the (greenlit, budgeted and ready to roll, full fee to the director who was like a boss to me, in that i worked for him) script, that it sucked. ass. that it would be a mistake to make it.

i was fired.

just in case any prospective future employers are reading this, i just want to make very very clear: message received.

back to my regularly scheduled ranting.

The Washington Note

so the other thing today--valerie plame was working on something important? you don't say? covert? you don't say. involving nuclear proliferation (which, for the morons in the crowd, is the same thing as nucular proliferation)? huh. Iran? really? funny that.

so to summarize: A covert operative, one who our government spent enormous amounts of (our) money training, sent out into the field where she made relationships with people in dark and dangerous places, who further put her life on the line in the service of our country and against the proliferation of the most deadly weapons on earth, who in turn came back to the states to try to get the government response just right, and who's husband has been called a national hero by no less than GB 41, that's the person they chose to out?

if you can't figure out why this is the most evil act imaginable by government official, you are beyond hope. there is a special place in A.Q. Khan's heart for you, though.

Here is the report,
in all its gory glory, about the right wing-ed imbalance on the Sunday wind breakers aka Press the Meat et al.

basically, you will be shocked shocked shocked to find that the damn things have more conservatives than liberals, that positions seemingly held by a majority of americans are not represented etc.

i've always wondered--that guy Scott Ritter, ex-marine, ex-head of the Iraq WMD task force--yeah, you've heard his name, oddly he never ever seems to get on these shows.

which is funny. because he is the only person involved who had any kind of voice (and who wasn't, say, insane, like your ramsey clarks of the world) in the national media who got the WMD call right. everyone else who pontificated was just wrong wrong wrong. not ritter. that got him disinvited from the party, apparently. weird.

Debt and Denial - New York Times

Krugmania! Now more than ever.

since most can't read the above without the magic password from the times selectoton, here is an excerpt, and a choice one at that:

"Last year America spent 57 percent more than it earned on world markets. That is, our imports were 57 percent larger than our exports.

How did we manage to live so far beyond our means? By running up debts to Japan, China and Middle Eastern oil producers. We're as addicted to imported money as we are to imported oil.

Sometimes large-scale foreign borrowing makes sense. In the 19th century the United States borrowed vast sums from Europe, using the funds to build railroads and other industrial infrastructure. That debt-financed wave of investment left America stronger, not weaker.

But this time our overseas borrowing isn't financing an investment boom: adjusted for the size of the economy, business investment is actually low by historical standards. Instead, we're using borrowed money to build houses, buy consumer goods and, of course, finance the federal budget deficit. "

Good times, people, good times. As someone who lives at the epicenter of the housing bubble, i feel it is incumbent on me to set 100 dollar bills on fire while drinking expensive champagne. that's what the neighbors do around here, anyway.

The Moderate Voice - White House Faces Renewed Credibility Problems On Katrina

In.Comp.E.Tent.

the people who run our country are not very good at their jobs, if one doesn't count auto-nest-feathering and bomb-dropping. though it must be said we've dropped a lot of inaccurate bombs in Iraq these past two years.

anyway, democrats--competence is the issue. competence. run on it. make it your platform. make it your frame. i don't care if you say that "republicans used to be competent, but they've lost their way". whatever. the point is, forget everything but this--democrats get things done, get social security checks showing up every month, run medicare effectively, punish wrongdoers etc.

These republicans couldn't hit water from a rowboat in the middle of the ocean.

Match Point Review, WITH TOTAL SPOILERS, so if you haven't seen it, don't read this.

Match Point was by far my favorite mainstream movie this year. my favorite underground movie was done by a sub-ethnic group so obscure, using non-narrative techniques so different from western studio ethics, that i can't even tell you about it. fine, one word. turkmenistan.

but back to match point. what makes this movie so different from today's standard thriller (for the sake of argument, let's call that "Derailed", so very down the middle)?

well, remember Jim Thompson: "there is only one plot: things are not as they seem."
now more than ever. every scene in every thriller must be fraught with potential peril. the audience must be kept waiting to know just what is coming next. they can't be in on the secrets of each character--BOW DOWN TO THE MIGHTY REVEAL PEONS!!!!

that's the way it is. and don't even get me started on M. Night's third revealatorium--it is but to puke. but that's a post for another day. back to match point.

the genius of this movie is that in every scene, where you are programmed to wait for the other shoe to drop...it never does. if a character says he or she is doing something, that's what they are doing. when someone appears out of the blue--the tennis player who shows up in the second act, say--they are there to illuminate some aspect of our main characters, not to reveal the real reason behind their dastardly plan. and yet, rather than become dull or episodic, this has the effect of making the movie feel like a real story, with the flow that comes from a good novel with an omniscient (and not faulty) narrator.

because this is a great little story, a taut and intense plot, well shot and well acted. in fact, until the third to last scene, it is a movie that could have directed by...well, um, who does good thrillers these days? anyone? hitchcock. it feels like a solid hitchcock movie. in that antepenultimate (look it up) scene, where jonathan rhys-meyers tells a ghost that if existence has specific meaning, then he will be caught--well, it is woody allen, so you are right to guess he won't get caught. but that doesn't detract from the last scene at all--it's just a sop for the insider types. like me.

jon and scarlett both give superb and naturalistic performances as well. you believe them both--they never oversell their characters, they just inhabit them (with one proviso--that doesn't look like much of a groundstroke on J R-M, but hey, he's better than DiCaprio's basketball skills in "The Basketball Diaries").

it's a beautiful piece of work--i'm excited to watch it again on ppv.

Rolling Stone : God's Senator

Just to be clear--it isn't only muslim fundamentalists who are utterly batshit crazy. sens coburn of ok and brownback (as this article makes clear) are loony. full of hate for their fellow man. soaked in contradiction that they clearly aren't smart enough to absorb and deal with. utterly religious, and unable to incorporate new ideas into their orthodoxy.

welcome to the future as long as we secularists are unwilling to fight harder and meaner for what we believe.

Paul Craig Roberts: Who Will Save America?

a representative quote from former reagan administration official roberts:

Before flinching at my assertion of blackmail, ask yourself why President Bush refuses to obey the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act. The purpose of the FISA court is to ensure that administrations do not spy for partisan political reasons. The warrant requirement is to ensure that a panel of independent federal judges hears a legitimate reason for the spying, thus protecting a president from the temptation to abuse the powers of government. The only reason for the Bush administration to evade the court is that the Bush administration had no legitimate reasons for its spying. This should be obvious even to a naif.



he's pissed. and scared.

"What next, bearded one?" - signandsight

more on the whiny little pathetic creatures who can't take some ribbing of their prophet, from a german journalist.

brilliant.

Salon.com News | "Everyone is afraid to criticize Islam"

says it so well. why are we allowing ourselves to be fooled into "respecting the feelings" of these assholes?

hirsi ali is a hero in the truest sense. she deserves the kudos of the entire free world. here is an excerpt:

Was apologizing for the cartoons the wrong thing to do?

Once again, the West pursued the principle of first turning one cheek, then the other. In fact, it's already a tradition. In 1980, privately owned British broadcaster ITV aired a documentary about the stoning of a Saudi Arabian princess who had allegedly committed adultery. The government in Riyadh intervened and the British government issued an apology. We saw the same kowtowing response in 1987 when [Dutch comedian] Rudi Carrell derided [the Iranian leader] Ayatollah Khomeini in a comedy skit. In 2000, a play about the youngest wife of the prophet Mohammed, titled "Aisha," was canceled before it ever opened in Rotterdam. Then there was the van Gogh murder and now the cartoons. We are constantly apologizing, and we don't notice how much abuse we're taking. Meanwhile, the other side doesn't give an inch.

What should the appropriate European response look like?

There should be solidarity. The cartoons should be displayed everywhere. After all, the Arabs can't boycott goods from every country. They're far too dependent on imports. And Scandinavian companies should be compensated for their losses. Freedom of speech should at least be worth that much to us.

But shouldn't Muslims, like any religious community, also be able to protect themselves against slander and insult?

That's exactly the reflex I was just talking about: offering the other cheek. Not a day passes, in Europe and elsewhere, when radical imams aren't preaching hatred in their mosques. They call Jews and Christians inferior, and we say they're just exercising their freedom of speech. When will the Europeans realize that the Islamists don't allow their critics the same right? After the West prostrates itself, they'll be more than happy to say that Allah has made the infidels spineless.

What will be the upshot of the storm of protests against the cartoons?

We could see the same thing happening that has happened in the Netherlands, where writers, journalists and artists have felt intimidated ever since the van Gogh murder. Everyone is afraid to criticize Islam. Significantly, "Submission" still isn't being shown in theaters.

Cross Posted at my daily kos diary, where maybe someone will read it.

It's hard to admit that your lifelong beliefs, inculcated from people who were otherwise quite perceptive and accurate about the state of the world, could be so horribly wrong. but facts are facts. the point of being a secular humanist, nay the very definition of one, to me at least, is that when new information comes in that refutes other firmly held beliefs, and that information stands up to scientifically based scrutiny, you change your beliefs to accomodate this new information.

Right?

So, a bit about me. i was raised by a social democratic professor father, and an early and ardent feminist mother. i lived either in London, where such beliefs were mainstream, or in Northampton, Massachusetts, about as liberal a college town as one could find. i think i went to my first gay rights march when i was 7, in 1975 or so. i was surrounded, literally, by people who believed that difference (later known as diversity, or multi-culturism) was to be celebrated. i guess the extreme version of this would say that headhunters in borneo were behaving in a manner appropriate to their culture, and who were we to judge them?

it always annoyed me that my parents were mostly right about everything political (although supporting one quixotic campaign after another [Fred Harris for President in 1976 for instance] ,was ultimately a useless endeavor), so where was the chance at rebellion? But something about the whole 70s/80s progressive beliefs always rubbed me the wrong way.

Moral Relativism was one central component of that group of beliefs which made up the "Academic Left" of that era. Let's call that the philosophically grounded version of the simpler concept of "tolerance." ultimately, tolerance is a profoundly Liberal (and liberal) sentiment: that one should listen to and respect the beliefs of others, especially if one disagrees with those beliefs. one root of this belief comes, at least in part, from the central nature of the protection of minority rights that Hamilton held so dear, as he made clear in his Federalist papers. those guys were very open minded for their time, the founding fathers. they were...tolerant. obviously within the proscribed area of possible reality of the 1770s, but nonetheless still very open to other's ideas.

Tolerance was so central to my upbringing, that it curled off into the P.C. of late 70s/early-mid 80s. P.C., as some will remember, was an internal issue of the Left (we used to make jokes about how we had to mention every agenda at every meeting--"what will the anti-fur pro-vegetarian radlebfems think" etc.) back then. it was later seized on by the Right as a club against us, and in retrospect, it was the beginning of the Right using our own belief system to get their own power boosted.

so where did all this multi-culti stuff lead? well, i would argue to two places. first (and grist for the mill of a second post, i don't want to deal with it here) i believe it became the linchpin of the criticism of the left, and of progressivism in general, in a way that allowed people to take what were once racist beliefs but could now be subsumed under the rubric of "anti-affirmative action" in the negative, or "i'm a proud white man celebratin' my heritage with this confederate flag" in the proactive mode. in turn i think this hurt our standing in the real world of american politics, and some of what tom frank talks about in "What's wrong with Kansas" comes out of this same place. these are bad things, but much less pernicious than the second outcome. and here we come to the present day, via the magic of cartoons, of all things.

we all know the story by now, how the muslim world has reacted in the main to the publication in a danish newspaper of mildly critical and marginally satirical cartoons depicting mohammed in various different ways. the muslim reaction was predictable--salman rushdie gave us a preview, and theo van gogh as well. islam has a shitty track record at inculcating criticism and improving from it. rather, it tends, as a religion, to lash out at criticism in ways we are all seeing now. I absolutely do not want to single out Islam here--all the major monotheistic (or polytheistic, in the case of Hinduism, or something-or-othertheistic, as in buddhism) religions can't handle logically grounded criticism, but some deal with it better than others. it is central to jewishness to push against the religion for many jews, and always has been. but really, all religions are pretty much terrible for progressivism, whatever good lefty catholic priest or unitarians might say to the contrary. Sam Harris has made the case quite brilliantly in "The End of Faith" that in fact moderate religious folk are the most dangerous people of all, as they allow us to believe that somehow these religions are sane or rational. they are neither, none of them. they are all ancients wrong-headed attempts to understand a world that is utterly different from the one we live in today. they fuck us up. bad.

but as a liberal, as a lefty, i'm supposed to celebrate this diversity of belief. i'm supposed to respect people's religious values. i'm supposed to believe that our country very existence comes from such beliefs. and no matter how weird, one is supposed to tread lightly when criticizing such beliefs. in this country, we have in Mormonism and Scientology two of the craziest fucking set of precepts one could imagine. you would have to be a fucking science fiction writer to come up with that shit.

oh. right. funny, but sad clown funny. shakes the clown funny. bad funny.

so i find myself, as is my wont, perusing your dailykos, your atrios, your americablogs, and yet on no strong intelligent lefty site can one just boldly state the obvious: You can't write a cartoon about your prophet? he's that insecure? your belief in him is that insecure? i can't express my opinion because of your insecurity? THAT IS FUCKING LAME AND IRRATIONAL, AND A BELIEF SYSTEM THAT IS SO FUCKING DELICATE AS TO FEAR ATTACKS FROM CARTOONISTS IS AN EMBARRASSMENT TO ALL RATIONAL HUMAN BEINGS!!!!!!!

sorry, yelling there. i've calmed down a bit. why can't otherwise right (and by right i mean left) thinking folk say this? because religion is the bridge too far. to belittle religion is to be racist, or anti-diversity and multi-culti, and it is ingrained into us on the left that this is a very.bad.thing.

well, that's wrong. it's just plain wrong. their are elements of the right who can say the obvious about islam with far greater accuracy than our side can. i'm not going to link to the horror festival otherwise known as Little Green Footballs, but trust me, those paranoid whack jobs over there are far more comprehensive and right-on in their analysis of islamic behavior than anyone on our side is, even Juan Cole, one of my favorite writers. don't get me wrong--if you turn the right towards the insanity and shortcomings of Christianity in its myriad guises, they revert to type, and will attack you for daring to say their god is as stupid as mohammeds. but still, what is wrong with us on the left that we can't see this situation for what it is: example number 1,000,000,000,000,000,000 that religion is one giant death cult and that ultimately the battle that matters will be between rationalists and god freaks.

get on the right damn side of the ramparts, i say.

Cross Posted at my Daily Kos diary

some excerpts from the The Onion, sorry I mean the NY Times select op-ed page. The comedy comes when you juxtapose Friedman's column, where he warns himself not to drink the kool-aid, gets thirsty, looks around for something to drink, and says "hey kool-aid, oh yeah". a long gulp later, he reminds himself, "don't drink the kool aid!"

in and of itself, hilarity! but even better is when you move your eyes mere inches to the right side of the page, where you see krugman smash friedman's column with a sledgehammer of truth, or to continue the metaphor, some tonic for the truth troops. excerpts from each below. put all liquids down before reading.


Friedman (the italic portions are his internal narrative--they are very funny in an unintentional on the page but didn't make the on-line version, and Friedman's non-internal narrative will be in bold, to stir or save confusion.)

"Well, it wasn't exactly Nixon to China. But it wasn't bean bag either. I'd say the president's State of the Union speech, when it came to calling for an end to our oil addiction and a real push to improve our educational competitiveness, was more like Nixon goes to New Mexico. It was an important change in direction and tone -- but still a long way from China, a long way from a definitive change in policy and implementation.

Oh, come on, Friedman, get real! The president throws a few paragraphs your way and you go all weak in the knees. Show some spine, man! You need to trash this thing. You know these guys are not serious. This is a president who once called for putting a man on Mars and then just dropped it. You assumed they were going to do the Iraq war right -- remember? Look where that got you, you moron. You should have listened to your wife!"

I'm going to go ahead and guess that he wrote this before he heard the US Energy Secretary saying "When bush said 75%, he didn't mean it." or that he didn't see the Saudi Ambassador's quote about "really, you guys are giving us the shaft? let me get a quick word with my bitch friend Georgie." Or perhaps he missed the fact that the administration is laying off scientists who study alternative fuels even as we speak. hey, it could have happened. maybe he doesn't get a news feed at the office. he certainly wasn't reading kos yesterday, i can tell you that.

more TF

So here's my bottom line: I'm glad the president is changing his rhetoric on energy and says he is changing his funding priorities. It makes for a great headline. But he has to go much further if he wants to make a great difference. There's no pain-free solution. Remember how President Kennedy ended his May 25, 1961, State of the Union speech calling for a moon shot? He said: "I have not asked for a single program which did not cause one or all Americans some inconvenience, or some hardship, or some sacrifice."

Pigs will fly before Bush says that.

You may be right. And if he fails to carry through with this energy initiative, I'll be the first to rip him for it. In the meantime, I prefer to give him a new reputation to live up to. You never know. ..."

I want to make a bet right now. Thomas Friedman will not "be the first to rip him for it." i don't think he'll be the 1075th. If he rips Bush, he will be stumbling into a party where only the host and two alcoholics are left, mumbling over the last shots of Jaeger.
Again, to be clear--this initiative--and there aren't html tags that could make the word initiative be ironic enough--this initiative lasted exactly as long as it took bush to speak it. then it ended.

now on to the shrill one. he doesn't write with the same...panache as TF, so no need for italics. just bold. And shrill. so very shrill.

"So President Bush's plan to reduce imports of Middle East oil turns out to be no more substantial than his plan -- floated two years ago, then flushed down the memory hole -- to send humans to Mars.
But what did you expect? After five years in power, the Bush administration is still -- perhaps more than ever -- run by Mayberry Machiavellis, who don't take the business of governing seriously.
Here's the story on oil: In the State of the Union address, Mr. Bush suggested that "cutting-edge methods of producing ethanol" and other technologies would allow us "to replace more than 75 percent of our oil imports from the Middle East."
But the next day, officials explained that he didn't really mean what he said. "This was purely an example," said Samuel Bodman, the energy secretary. And the administration has actually been scaling back the very research that Mr. Bush hyped on Tuesday night: the National Renewable Energy Laboratory is about to lay off staff because of cuts to its budget.
"A veteran researcher," reports The New York Times, "said the staff had been told that the cuts would be concentrated among researchers in wind and biomass, which includes ethanol."
Why announce impressive sounding goals when you have no plan to achieve them? The best guess is that the energy "plan" was hastily thrown together to give Mr. Bush something positive to say."

huh. look at that. very same page as friedman's ruminations come krugman's refutations. what we at my college called a harsh biscuit. tierney and friedman must hate krugman. he just crushes them every damn time.
i don't really have anything clever to add to PK. he is the master and i am a mere acolyte. The other op-edders must beg Gail Collins every time not to let Krugman destroy them on their very own page. yet he does. it does, however, make one wonder about the standards the times has for its op-ed writers. then one remembers A.M. Rosenthal and Safire-on-Atta-meeting, and one realizes there aren't any.

(One last point--the alert reader will note that i have edited Friedman to make him look worse than the actual op-ed. this is true. but tom friedman, for his many crimes against coherent thought, logical analysis, and good writing, deserves no break, not from me, not from anyone. it's his megaphone and he is the one yelling in all our damn ears with his nonsense. so tough titty, Tom.)

Some chit-chat at firedoglake (and elsewhere) about paid plants in the blogosphere. most people seem to be focused on comment plants--either churning them out for marketing reasons (if you keep posting comments then later when you post something relevant you will seem like a trustworthy person) or political--stirring the pot with (usually) republican talking points.

it's all true, and soon we will find proof. i'm hunting for it right now, talking to my marketing and promotion contacts, and will have something concrete within days. but the real question, one that relates nicely to the armstrong williams/maggie gallagher/the list is fucking endless with right wing hacks payola non-scandal is this: who amongst us in the blogosphere is a paid shill who is not announcing same? given the current state of world affairs you would have to be a fool not to think that one of the top ten right wing bloggers is getting paid sub rosa by somebody scaife-y. or CIA-y. not to be paranoid or anything.

to think anything else is to be a fool. they (the right wing noise machine, also, oddly enough, the name of my new band) are playing hard, playing to win. i hope those on the side of decency and light and puppies will do the same.

this post sponsored by "The Death and Resurrection Show", Killing Joke, from the last (and quite great) album from them.

test

Back and better than ever new and improved.

so let's start with the report about Jack Kelley and his fabulistness, if you know what i mean. Pace The Onion: Holy Fucking Shit! This guy lied about everything and anything. He was a sociopath of the first order, and i am surprised bodies didn't turn up when other journalists went to investigate.

1) Unnamed Sources. here the key point rears its ugly head (just like in Shattered Glass--i guess no one wants to learn this lesson--more on that later)--if you can't pin someone down as to who said what to them, and that disability is institutionalized in the very format of your system, not much of a surprise when problems come up, no? i mean, you could basically say to your boss "yeah yeah this guy really said it, i have WRITTEN notes (wow, you wrote them down? they must be true)" and as far as i can tell from the somewhat discreet langauge of the report, your boss would say "print that sucker". pathetic. but what the authors of the report fail to discuss (as David Ehrenstein does quite brilliantly in this week's LA Weekly) is the EFFING MOTIVATION of the people giving you material anonymously. i won't cover too much ground here--david's discussion in the weekly should suffice--but this point seems obvious, and maybe we can get at the why of this disaster here.
a) perhaps the desire to get scoops, combined with the need to keep one's job, wrapped up with a post-Watergate isn't-deep-throat-the-coolest-thing-ever reportorial mentality will lead people to TURN OFF THEIR BRAINS. why, anonymous gov't official says that higher up official is "really focused on doing what's right for the country right now"--no shit? wow, and you'll let me print that? that your boss just cares too much? that is so...brave...you just want the truth to get out in my FRONT PAGE STORY YEAH FOR ME I WILL GET A RAISE AND MAYBE A PULITZER.

guess where this mentality takes you, friend. Bob woodward, the worst reporter on the planet, a truly stupid and vapid and sad little man masquerading as a....well, they put it best in the report at USA today. for some reason kovach et al believe a reporter's characteristics are "...easy to describe: independence, skepticism, curiosity and distrust of authority. " huh. so that's how they would describe woodward? jeff gerth? elizabeth bumiller? nedra pickler? Fox News? Paula Zahn? Tim Russert? These people fucking love authority! they ARE authority! They hang out at Press club functions and make haha googly-eyed jokes about this shit with the very people they are supposed to be "independent from, with a healthy level of distrust" (I made that quote up, but fuck it, gotta get with the times and The Times). HAHAHAHAHA oh shit i just snarfed my cognac. i'll ask hitchens to clean it up. back to my point--woodward's book is as bad, if not worse, than kelley's mendacities--woodward describes spin as fact, in truth he creates a narrative in which all spin MUST be fact, and in true Kantian fashion, because Woodward himself is doing the reporting. the very authorial voice he uses forces spin to be true. again, better writers than me have broken this shit down, but woodward is a dangerous man who must be given his day of reckoning by his fellow journalists.
b) in the report, a reporter at USA today is described as finding some of Kelley's stories "incredulous" . This bit of nonsense managed to both be spoken by a reporter at our finest McPaper, but was also left uncommented on by the three wise men of the report staff. i'm incredulous with laughter, or something.

Also--this asshole Kelley had the temerity to not pay his translators, and keep the money for himself. oh how i hate this detail--all these people saying "he was so good to me i didn't see it coming". Nope, i don't believe it, if this guy was ripping off hard working people in third world countries so he could buy a bigger bible (more on that later too) or whatever, he is just a pathetic piece of rat excrement. i can't imagine anything worse, he basically stiffed his waitress 10000. bastard ratfink fuckwad.

Last but not least, i love how they got through the whole report without mentioning that Kelley's "trustworthy demeanor" and "likablity" were largely a product of his religiousity. not one mention. fucking NYTimes at least had the sac to admit that Blair's blackness was a potential issue. this is the one area where i really feel let down by USA today's examination staff. Kelley talked a lot of shit about how important god was to him, over and over ad nauseam. some people eat that up, and it makes them more susceptible to lies. piousness can be that way. this has been true since they invented religion, but somehow the stupid part of the human genome survives through to this day to lick religion up (ewwwwww.)

today brings sad tidings from our dear friend at the Times--The Week in Review. This article, with its slightly mocking tone, tut-tuts that Americans DO in the main believe in Heaven, but that it is a place much like earth, oh dear. John Edwards, lying fake psychic asshole, as opposed, of course, to John Edwards, seemingly decent but ultimately doomed politician, is named as a phenomena that supports the views in the article, without any question about his alleged and obviously fake "abilities". I guess no one at the TImes watches "South Park", which had a takedown of Edwards this season so brilliant it was painful. Including was a scene of Stan saying, directly to the camera "John Edwards, you are a fake and a fraud, and if what i'm saying isn't true, then you should sue me." Genius, one of the funniest eps they've ever done, but i digress.

Anyhoo, this article talks about American belief in Heaven (82%! Hire three more Peter Steinfels!!!!), and how we like our Heaven all soft and squishy. Michael Novak, some kind of "academic", is unhappy that there is no more fire/brimstone, like the old days. This is where i start to scratch my head. Fine, i started the moment i saw the headline, this is where i draw blood and kill lice. This guy is a fucking PHD with an expertise in Heaven? Heaven forfend, has he perhaps been there? Seen it firsthand? Has he read works by others who have been there? Seen it firsthand? Or, more likely, has he read a bunch of other people's completely random guesses, and then created "expertise" out of gobeldygook. I mean, could i become a PhD in Arcturus 7 Alpha Prime life forms? I have as much knowledge about those aliens (greenish, small, thin, shiny thing at end of finger) as he does about heaven. SHit, there are whole books devoted to this stuff!

fucking pathetic. the whole article mindlessly accepts the assumptions of the religious folk, without even realizing it is doing so. it manages to patronize those who believe this crap, while pissing off those who don't.

robert

hey everybody--look at that---a blog from the man himself!

well, back to my crap...

Thomas Powers is an erudite man, one who constructs sentences with near-surgical precision. I'm not so much like that. i will break down his extraordinary article in the NY Review of books as follows:

a) a specific case was made to go to war, with specific claims that are verifiable
b) none of those claims have been verified. zero. zilch. nada.

a comment i left on abortion at the right christians blog:

so...boring...so...obvious...

a) all agree that the "born" are individuals with enumerated rights, regardless of religion. though those rights change from society to society, again all agree that the "right to life" (e.g. the right NOT to be killed by other members of the society) is primary.
b) some people, the GREAT majority of whom are driven by their religious convictions, believe that a fetus has those same rights that any individual has in society. But many others, in fact a plurality if not a super-majority, disagree with this viewpoint. So, unlike a) what we have here is a point of major dispute. does a) apply? some say yes, some say no, but in such numbers do some say no that those that say yes, pretty much everywhere in the civilized world, have to live with the will of the majority.
c) there are 5.7 billion people on earth, of whom only 2 or less billion are in fact Christian. Of those billion plus Christians, not all agree that fetuses have the rights of an individual in a society. yet
d) those who are both Christian AND believe in the rights of the fetus as an individual believe further that their belief system, esp. on this point, must supercede the beliefs of the other 4 or so billion people on this earth, both in the micro (their society) sense, and in the macro (the rest of the world who does not share their religious belief) sense.

e) now read carefully here, because this is the key point--IF YOU THINK THAT YOUR MINORITY BELIEF SYSTEM IN A GOD THAT KILLS HIS SON FOR YOUR SINS MUST BE FOLLOWED BY ALL UNDER ANY AND ALL CIRCUMSTANCES, YOU ARE INSANE.

f) To understand this is to understand why many people HATE religion and (even worse) religiosity. just to be clear--I promise, forever, not to make your daughter have an abortion. I really do. Until i hear from Christians that they promise NOT to prevent my daughter from having a safe and healthy abortion, should she so choose, i will reserve the right to find Christians, as far as cults go, to be the most dangerous and hateful of them all.

obviously, there is a fundamental and inherent insanity in a belief system that is self-reflexively and necessarily omnipotent, and one that 4 billion people don't have any time for. So...boring...to...have...to...point...this..out...



peace,

r

Don't read if you haven't seen the Matrix yet:


here is the movie i thought/wished to see:

neo discovers it's all a trick--zion is a construct, the machine world is a construct, it's all part of one unitary supercomputer. the architect is the only "representative" of the outside world, and he tells neo/the oracle that none of it is real, that in fact, there is no "real" for neo/the humans as they have been led to believe. and that either a) neo can go and tell everyone this, destroying whatever hope they have, or b) neo reaches into THE ARCHITECT and we smash cut to some hermetic white room at JPL or something, and all of the sudden they have finally created "true" AI, or maybe c) Neo is told by The Architect, "look, do whatever the fuck you want, you have know gained total control over the Matrix, remake it in "your" image.

If I were writing the copy for the Times part I:

Somewhere, buried in the business section, is a little innocuous article about Dennis Miller being hired to do a primetime show on CNBC. No mention is made of his politics, nor of those of CNBCs various hosts.

I might have written it thusly:

"CNBC, whose hosts run the gamut from middle of the road (Keith Olbermann) to hard right Wall Street (Kudlow and Cramer), have added another conservative pundit to their line-up. Dennis Miller, who has introduced President Bush and Ahnuld in recent weeks, is slated to begin his new show in the spring. Miller has come to be known for his acerbic attacks on Democrats, particularly President Clinton, along with other Democrats. Miller's transformation from Libertarian to conservative began in 199..."

same info, all true, acknowledges the reality of CNBC. is perfectly "objective" by any measure. but nope, not a word about any of that in the Times' article. SCLM indeed.

David Brooks is doing that damn thing that seems to be epidemic these days--Chris Rock said it best when he exclaimed to Ann Coulter "you just make shit up!". At the end of an up-and-down seeming attack on the GOP (though he manages to posit that only McCain, Gramm and Novak are heroes in this case of Boeing "leaseback"--what, no Dems on that list, what a shock) Brooks pines for the days of Gingrich, when the Republicans were young and angry. The question (and it's damn near metaphysical) is simple: is Brooks aware of the facts, of Gingrich's district regularly being ranked in the top three pork receivers while he was speaker? Or that Reps spread it around EVEN MORE THICKLY than Dems? Or that Red States get more than they give? I figure he does know this (sorry about reading your mind David, but one becomes cynical about your ilk these days)--Gingrich was a legendary feather-bedder, and i'm sure David has been to one or more lectures at some Gingrichian Institute of Funny Walks down there in Georgia...

Brooks has had a chance to be an important voice of conservative reason on the Times Op-Ed, an antidote to the insanity of Safire (who makes really dangerous shit up), the wishy-washy yucky neo-liberalism of Kristof, the...someone help me out with how to sum up Friedman, someone? Fat chance. Just another guy who would rather score a point than have one.

Why I hate hockey, a sport I used to love more than any other to watch.

The first in a series of very occasional sports posts...

2-1 final scores are great in soccer, but hockey's scoring dearth is depressing. the game has been ruined by
a) steroids, which in turn have led to players who are TOO FUCKING BIG. If i want to watch football, i will. I'm sick of every player looking like a linebacker, with hands that match the profile. 6'6" 245 is NOT hockey size.
b) rink size. they are too small. in part, this has to do with a, cuz bigger players take up more room on the ice, obviously. but still, a bigger euro style rink would make for more scoring and skating. course, you would have to get rid of some seats (and premium seats!) so fat fucking chance.
c) goalie equipment. too much too big. every year they say they are making stuff smaller, but come on--goalies should look the way JD did in 1979.
d) bad rule changes. the NHL made several changes to slow down the Oilers in the 80s (couldn't have too many stanley cup games in CAnada now could we?). some of those rules were idiotic--what the hell is wrong with a two line pass? of course, no one can get around to changing the rules back to when hockey was...exciting.
e) a diminished talent pool, though in fact a) is the root of this. i'm sure there are plenty of 5'11" guys languishing in lower divisions or in europe...
f) coaches who are afraid of their own shadows. Anyone with knowledge of Italian Serie A soccer from the 70s knows that catenaccio grew out of coaches worried about getting fired, so thus, play for the 0-0 and you are better off. hockey is thick with coaches who play not to lose, and that leads up to..
g) the trap. the worst thing in hockey, other than a).

fuck it, i can't watch it any more, and it really does make me sad. farbeit from Bettman et. al. to learn from baseball--what energized baseball more than any in modern history? why, it was a home run race between mcgwire and sosa, probably juiced up with the tightest wound baseball since 1930.

my two cents.

Seymour Hersh, in his (as usually is the case) excellent article in The New Yorker says this:

"The government of the British Prime Minister, Tony Blair, President Bush’s closest ally, was also brought in. As Blair later told a British government inquiry, he and Bush had talked by telephone that summer about the need “to disclose what we knew or as much as we could of what we knew.” Blair loyally took the lead: on September 24th, the British government issued a dossier dramatizing the W.M.D. threat posed by Iraq. In a foreword, Blair proclaimed that “the assessed intelligence has established beyond doubt that Saddam . . . continues in his efforts to develop nuclear weapons.” The dossier noted that intelligence—based, again, largely on the sismi report—showed that Iraq had “sought significant quantities of uranium from Africa.” A subsequent parliamentary inquiry determined that the published statement had been significantly toned down after the C.I.A. warned its British counterpart not to include the claim in the dossier, and in the final version Niger was not named, nor was sismi [ITalian intelligence]. "

Bob Somersby over at the (nearly always) excellent Daily Howler harped for weeks on this particular aspect of the NIger scandal--that Bush's "sixteen words" were NOT in fact a reference to NIger, because Bush repeated Blair's claims that "Sadaam has sought nuclear materials in Africa (emphasis mine)" as opposed to specifically saying Niger, and thus all reporting on Bush's words that didn't clarify this was misleading, lazy, or possibly worse. I think this is important because this is the first time the press, EVEREVEREVER, got around to actually dealing with Bush's raging mendacity, taking a meme from the blogworld and making it mainstream (as always, Paul Krugman gets honorable exception...). But in truth, as one reads the above, it seems clear (and to me has forever seemed clear) that the Niger claim WAS the Africa claim--that is, there was no other evidence to which Blair or anyone else could refer. NOw, ex post facto, vague and hopeful bits of spin were thrown out there by Cheney and others about some third country in AFrica, but none was ever named, no evidence was ever offered--e.g. just more bullshit. So, it seems clear that it was in fact reasonable to assume that Niger=Africa for the sake of this argument, and that sometimes, even my heroes like Somersby can have feet of clay.

Parsing the Times part MDMCXVIII:

So on the cover, we get a story that Bush is saying that THE PHILLIFUCKINGPINES are our template for Iraq. The times reporter in classic "while some claim the earth is round, others believe it is flat" mode gently points out around para 32 that it took 50 or so years for us to leave them to their good graces after our splendid little war. And in para 31 that the precipitating incident, REMEMBER THE MAINE, was bogus.

what they don't mention is that after 50 years, we ended up with Ferdinand Marcos, and the lovely and talented Imelda, fascists who raped and pillaged their own country to the tune of a billion or so dollars. Oh, and if you think this is old news, there was a military coup attempt 3 months ago too. Great fucking template, moron-in-chief. I wish i knew how to curse someone in Tagalog.

Michael Newdow is my hero. Someone should give this guy a fucking medal. He is smart and well spoken, and he doesn't believe in supremedeitythatlivesintheskyandknowseverything. support him here.

This was written, maybe, by Norman Rush and you should click there and buy his new book. Even if he didn't send me this. Like i think, maybe, he did.

US soldiers bulldoze farmers' crops

US soldiers driving bulldozers, with jazz blaring from loudspeakers, have uprooted ancient groves of date palms as well as orange and lemon trees in central Iraq as part of a new policy of collective punishment of farmers who do not give information about guerrillas attacking US troops.

The stumps of palm trees, some 70 years old, protrude from the brown earth scoured by the bulldozers beside the road at Dhuluaya, a small town 50 miles north of Baghdad. Local women were yesterday busily bundling together the branches of the uprooted orange and lemon trees and carrying then back to their homes for firewood.

Nusayef Jassim, one of 32 farmers who saw their fruit trees destroyed, said: "They told us that the resistance fighters hide in our farms, but this is not true. They didn't capture anything. They didn't find any weapons."

Other farmers said that US troops had told them, over a loudspeaker in Arabic, that the fruit groves were being bulldozed to punish the farmers for not informing on the resistance which is very active in this Sunni Muslim district.

"They made a sort of joke against us by playing jazz music while they were cutting down the trees," said one man. Ambushes of US troops have taken place around Dhuluaya. But Sheikh Hussein Ali Saleh al-Jabouri, a member of a delegation that went to the nearby US base to ask for compensation for the loss of the fruit trees, said American officers described what had happened as "a punishment of local people because 'you know who is in the resistance and do not tell us'." What the Israelis had done by way of collective punishment of Palestinians was now happening in Iraq, Sheikh Hussein added.

The destruction of the fruit trees took place in the second half of last month but, like much which happens in rural Iraq, word of what occurred has only slowly filtered out. The destruction of crops took place along a kilometre-long stretch of road just after it passes over a bridge.

Farmers say that 50 families lost their livelihoods, but a petition addressed to the coalition forces in Dhuluaya pleading in erratic English for compensation, lists only 32 people. The petition says: "Tens of poor families depend completely on earning their life on these orchards and now they became very poor and have nothing and waiting for hunger and death."

The children of one woman who owned some fruit trees lay down in front of a bulldozer but were dragged away, according to eyewitnesses who did not want to give their names. They said that one American soldier broke down and cried during the operation. When a reporter from the newspaper Iraq Today attempted to take a photograph of the bulldozers at work a soldier grabbed his camera and tried to smash it. The same paper quotes Lt Col Springman, a US commander in the region, as saying: "We asked the farmers several times to stop the attacks, or to tell us who was responsible, but the farmers didn't tell us."

Informing US troops about the identity of their attackers would be extremely dangerous in Iraqi villages, where most people are related and everyone knows each other. The farmers who lost their fruit trees all belong to the Khazraji tribe and are unlikely to give information about fellow tribesmen if they are, in fact, attacking US troops.

Asked how much his lost orchard was worth, Nusayef Jassim said in a distraught voice: "It is as if someone cut off my hands and you asked me how much my hands were worth."

read it here

Comment: Every now and then we hear reports of "friendly fire" or other "accidents." They're not, and they're not "mistakes" or "bad judgment" by some troops or other, either. If I throw a match onto a mattress soaked with kerosene and it lights up, we don't call it an "accident." It's a predictable consequence, as are all of these: the Iraqi cops killed by "friendly fire," etc. When you occupy a nation by armed force, against resistance, the way you do it is to kill people every now and then. If you go around asking if they're the right people to kill, it's already too late. So right now the U.S. military is in the business of killing Iraqis or destroying their property: pour encourager les autres, as the saying goes.

It's important to understand, therefore, that despite what all the pundits and middle-of-the-road Democrats say, the United States has absolutely NO "responsibility" to help rebuild Iraq. That's like saying that after burglars have trashed a house, they have a responsibility to stay and help the householders clean it up--just love to have you guys around. Or after a rapist has impregnated a woman, he should move in and help her raise the child. No--the "responsibility" of the invader is to dis-invade and get OUT--and then, of course, pay what's owed to compensate for the destruction. Who should be rebuilding is the only people who did not support the invasion and consequent destruction--the U.N. With the money the U.S. owes for the job. But of course the U.N. cannot and should not possibly do this until the opponent of peaceful reconstruction, the guys who want to do it all their way for their own profit and fuck the Iraqis--namely the U.S. Bush Administration--are out of there. And if the U.N. can't do it either, that's too bad, history is sometimes disastrous. But the people who brought about the disaster in the first place can only pile more on top of it by pursuing the agenda that brought it about in the first place. That many Iraqis are grateful for the chance at building democracy is a good thing; but they won't have that chance in the present course of events, whether or not they realize that--as more of them every day are indicating they do.

U.S. Out. U.N. In.

So i read the ever-irritating Gregg Easterbrook, whose column runs in the Not so liberal republic, in which he feels compelled to blame Kill Bill on those damn Jews that run Disney (and by extension, Hollywood), particularly as regards to its violent content.

some truth to the fiction:

the head of film at Disney, Dick Cook, is a non-Jew, as are 80% at least of the board of directors (led of course by Roy Disney, non-Jew and son of Walt, non-Jew-fan). Sony is run by the Japanese (not Jews as far as i know), Fox is run by Rupert Murdoch, non-Jew-non-pareil, Paramount is owned by Viacom, a cabal of non-Jews if ever there was one, though what about TW, you say? Dick Parsons, not a Jew. MGM is run by Armenians, so blame Silence of the Lambs and hannibal on them, or something.

and re-read my dad's anti-semitism piece, clearly relevant once again...

posted here by me:
no one seems concerned that Plame's networks--networks that were specifically targeted towards WMD proliferation--were rolled up. forget, for a moment, the politics of this. republican, democrat, it matters not. here is what should concern every american--a specialist whose entire job was to smoke out those who could hurt us most, e.g. terrorists or rogue states with WMD, particularly nuclear ones, has been outed, and her network most likely has been rounded up. one can only speculate, but chances are "rounded up" is a euphemism for killed. And let's say that there is a 10% chance that one of those sources who has now been burned was pursuing, oh, say a lost Ukrainian stockpile of enriched uranium, or a belarussian missile that "fell off the back of a truck" or so on. and that trail is now cold. and that missile or material is later used against us.

this is why this story matters. this is why this offense should be punishable as treason (and the death penalty should be an option--i say this as someone firmly opposed to it but in this case if it exists it should be used as a scare tactic), this is what Bush 41 was saying in his now famous quote. Now the partisan in me could take this mighty far, and say that it perfectly encompasses everything that i fear and loathe about our administration, its secretiveness, its mendacity, its inability to discern the difference between moral rectitude and political success... but it doesn't matter. even minus that last sentence EVERY person of moral character, right/left/inbetween, should be enraged by this, and by bush's lack of caring about it.

Fun with the NY Times part 74:

the Sunday edition lead photo was of a bunch of Iraqi children being taught football, American-style, by our troops in Iraq. Yes, i can just see the day when Ahmed and Yousef get the thousand dollars necessary for their helmet/shoulder pads/knee pads, not to mention goalposts etc. oh, and steroids, they will need those too. of course, it shouldn't surprise anyone to note that Iraqi children DO love football, only the kind where are you need is a ball and a flat area, i.e. soccer. And in fact, the MLS did give Iraqi kids a ton of balls/goals/shoes etc., to their credit. but there is something so quintessentially empire-ish about that photo--you know, bringing cricket to the natives and all that...

Also, a question about the Victoria Plame/Wilson affair, best followed here via Josh Marshall: is it true, as some have alleged, that in being "outed" as she was, her network has been "rolled up"? (that means killed in spookspeak)

because if so, rove or whomever did this--but it has to be rove--has blood on his hands and should be spending 10 years in jail, which is in fact the maximum punishment possible for publicly naming a CIA officer.

scum, all of them.

So once again i see Viet Dinh's name in the news. As it happens, before Viet was on Ken Starr's prosecutorial star chamber, before he wrote the Patriot Act (I'm not joking, he is in fact the author of that particular ineffective abomination), I had the pleasure of having a long dinner and debate with him when he was but a 24 superstar on the rise. AT that point, he was Sandra DAy O'Connor's law clerk, had graduated from law school, and had written a screed on affirmative action and its negative implications that had caused much delight amongst the hard right.

Viet was up for a job with a prestigious law firm (Munger, Tolles and Olson) in downtown LA, and my girlfriend's father had invited him to a dinner with the partners. Foolishly, i was invited along with my girlfriend. I went and read Viet's affirmative action article--it was risibly polemical with little independent thought or analysis--a basic partisan hack job. I guess that he was young and a prodigy and an immigrant (vietnamese, obviously) made the righties care overmuch about the article, but i didn't get it. so at the dinner, which was supposed to be a "kiss viet's ass fest", i engaged him on his views. I asked, "have you considered that perhaps white folk get some help from legacy admissions policies at universities?". No, he said, hadn't thought of that. Huh. I asked him about job nepotism--the old boy's network tends to bring in those that are its like--e.g. white folk, in the main. No, he hadn't thought of that either. I asked him to look around at the partners of MT and O--notice anything, Viet? Bunch of white men looking to hire one semi-dark skinned right-winger to give "balance"--did that bother him? at this point well over 15,000 dollars per hour of lawyer were staring bullets at me, but the Petrus was flowing and i wasn't backing down. I told Viet that a college drop out could rip mile wide holes through his argument while drunk, and given how obviously brilliant he was, this was a sad statement on what unadulterated ideological rigidity could do to anyone.

He sort of acknowleged my point. I felt like a winner.

later, i decided to try to produced movies. He impeached a president and rewrote the constitution. i guess i didn't win so much.

Watching NOW with Bill Moyers on PBS is disturbing. To see what an actual alert and forthright left-wing press could be on TV--it is more than a breath of fresh air. How it is possible that no one from neither MSNBC nor CNN can see the obvious market to be cornered truly boggles. This is a case where the corporatist and rightist meme is SO STRONG that it actually overcomes the capitalist one. I can't think of many other places in our society where this can be said. Instead one right wing voice after another is added to the former (and watching JEsse Ventura on Bill Maher, one know-nothing voice after another) and the latter goes for "personality" TV with second rate and soft anchors. There is a desperate desire for a true left wing voice on tv, one that is unabashed in its pursuit of its agenda, as dogged as Fox but without the palaver about being "fair and balanced." I could even forgive Fox TV some of its dissembling if they just would ADMIT that this is right-wing TV, all the time. Then you would know that honest voices were being heard, even if you didn't necessarily agree with them. FOR FUCK'S SAKE, ROGER FUCKING AILES RUNS THE NETWORK!!!! surely it would be not overly difficult for him to stop lying for the seconds long enough to say, "Yeah we are the right now get over it". But he just can't admit it, just can't tell the truth. A strong left wing voice, presenting facts like Moyers was tonight, tough but fair (and almost literally eviscerating ex-non-jellyfish Christine Whitman, wow what a devastating presentation) that can make OUR arguments is absolutely priceless. Our voices need, require, such a thing to happen.

so i'm off to make 200 million or so and to make it happen. wish me luck.

more NPR fun! for all your friends!!!

sometimes the targeting on ad-based demographics becomes so disturbingly...accurate? terrifying?...NPR's "All things Considered" sponsored by (not going to mention "commercial free" will let that pass) THE DEAD, no, not the ultimate film of John Huston's career, but rather the warmed over rehashed LSD besotted meta-wankery of messieurs Lesh et al--e.g. the Jerry Garcia lickspittle brass band. words fail.

fucking pathetic.

better than dealing with the horror festival which is our administration, at least for a day. now leave me alone.

so this morning on NPR i hear some woman who is a honcho in the republican party here in California continually (or continuously, or quite possibly both) refer to the "democrat" party without rebuke from the reporter. How can a professional reporter let this wack-job right-wing Rush limbaugh renaming of one of the TWO major parties in our country go unchallenged? for those who don't know, far right elements of the republican party feel that called the Democrats the "Democratic" party is a bridge too far, and that they should be known as the "Democrat" party.

I have never suggested that the Republican party be called, for instance, the "no talent ass clown" party, or "Antonin Scalia's bitches", or the "2nd in votes, 1st in gerrymandering" party etc.

not me, nope.

"Donald Rumsfeld was right yesterday when he said that anyone who criticizes the administration is giving comfort to the terrorists. If we learned anything from September 11, it’s that dissent cannot be tolerated in a free society. If we resolutely fall in unquestioning lockstep behind our leader and approach this crisis like serious Christians and Jews, then we can beat back this tide of autocratic religious fundamentalism that threatens to engulf us all. "

Yet more proof that Neal Pollack is the greatest writer in the history of seriocomic political post-modern meta-blogdom, perhaps the greatest -dom of them all.

I agree that it is important that you buy his book, which may or may not prove to be the greatest book ever written, based upon how good it will be.

As Atrios is reporting, it looks as if CNN has removed their wolf blitzer question of the day. the obvious reason is of course that the poll keeps getting responses skewed against the fool, or president, or whatever we are calling him these days.

of course, it would never ever ever ever ever occur to CNN that maybe, JUST MAYBE, this is because they have a groundswell of more progressive viewers? that maybe, just maybe, being an actual counterpoint to msnfoxbc news might lead to an increase in neilsens? of course, one could argue that accurately presenting actual news items would lead to the same result, but i think that is even more of a fantasy than seeing them pull to the left.

a boy can dream.

fun back and forth with the columbia journalism review regarding their crappy article by David Greenberg, ably destroyed by Bob Somersby at the daily howler.

first my post to them, then their reply. enjoy.



On Fri, 5 Sep 2003 rgreen@mediaventures.com wrote:

> i would assume, after reading www.dailyhowler.com
> 's quite vicious and entirely accurate
> take down of Mr. Greenberg's article regarding lies and journalism,
> that you might either want to a) issue a retraction (given the
> vacuousness and inaccuracy of greenberg's work) or b) hang your heads
> in shame. either way, a sad day for journalism when even CJR can't
> come within 100 miles of intelligent analysis of the most important
> issue of our day.
>
> i am both a creator and consumer of media, and i have finally managed
> to start reading articles as mendacious and absurd as greenberg's (and
> i will not bother to enumerate the list of mistakes and shoddy
> analysis contained therein, Mr. Somersby does that more than well
> enough) while seeing their emptiness as i read, rather than having
> that sick feeling in the pit of my stomach afterwards. I tend to
> assume (partially based, i admit, on Stanley Rothman's rather
> tendentious survey from 1980 that started this whole thing) that many
> on the board of CJR are in fact Democrats, maybe even (the love that
> dare not speak its name) liberals. Your slavish devotion to
> "fairness" has led to a weird and sick kind of self-hatred that is all
> too perfectly crystallized in greenberg's piece. you should all take
> a nice long weekend in the Hamptons to think about what has gone wrong
> both with journalism in this country and with your own work.
>
> best,
>
>
> Robert Green

Hi Mr. Green. Jeez, you're a self-important kind of guy, aren't you? And a little pretentious? I'm actually going to a ball game. bye.

Mike Hoyt, CJR


Well, they got me good.

Music, ripping, burning and so on, is today's topic. there is an excellent thread over at ATrios on this issue today, but i have a slightly different take. i, like many others, have managed to digitize my entire CD collection. I have approximately 12,000 songs now on my hard drive. I don't share them, a bit because i'm not comfortable with file sharing on that scale and also for security reasons. However, my 40 gigs worth of music, carefully filed and tagged, is easily, in less than a half hour, transferred to a 40 or 60 or whatever gig hard drive via either firewire or USB 2.0. All someone has to do is spend around 120 dollars for the drive, come over, copy the music, and "hey presto" they now are the proud owner of over a thousand CDs worth of music. As the memory technology gets increasingly cheaper and easier and better, i think THIS is the area where the record companies are screwed. people will just exchange memory sticks that will be credit card sized and hold a terabyte and cost probably 30 bucks, all within 10 years or less.