Sunday February 29, 2004
"I can't wait for his tax audit!" "Scary times!" says Billy Crystal after the acceptance speech of the director of "The Fog of War."
You can see here an interesting discussion with Robert McNamara at Berkeley.
Saturday February 28, 2004
According to human rights groups, those leading the rebellion in Haiti are convicted murderers and veterans of death squads. And the administration apparently prefers these guys over Aristide?
Wednesday February 25, 2004
Gibson's film
The New York Times had a panel of religious leaders watch the film. I found this bit interesting:
With criticism of the film growing in recent weeks, Mr. Gibson tried to alleviate the concerns of some Jews by removing a scene of the Jewish high priest Caiaphas's declaration: "His blood be on us and on our children." The line is from the Gospel of Matthew and has often been cited as the definitive source for the deicide accusation against the Jews.
But Mr. Gibson removed the line only from the subtitles, not from the film, said Rabbi David F. Sandmel of KAM Isaiah Israel Congregation in Chicago. He is also a professor of Jewish studies at Catholic Theological Union.
The film's dialogue is in Aramaic and Latin, and for those who know Aramaic, the Jewish mob is still heard yelling the curse in Aramaic, Dr. Sandmel said.
Looks like Mel tried to pull a fast one!
Monday February 23, 2004
Secretary of Education Ron Paige's "apology" for deeming the NEA "a terrorist organization":
"It was an inappropriate choice of words to describe the obstructionist scare tactics the NEA's Washington lobbyists have employed against No Child Left Behind's historic education reforms."
Here is my "considered response":
I pray that a large, thick cucumber does *not* find itself somehow embedded in your anus over and over by an overdeveloped circus cretin.
Sunday February 22, 2004
What is trackback?
Trackback allows bloggers to hold on a conversation between blog entries. When two bloggers' sites support trackback, each time one links to the other (in Atrios's case, they also have to place his trackback URL in a ping field of their blog entry), the other gets a "ping" letting them know that someone has linked to them. If they were to respond in the same fashion, it would be possible to hold a back-and-forth conversation between blogs that others would be able to track via their trackback logs.
Let's try this again...
Atrios has implemented trackback on Eschaton, so now more people will come across piddly little blogs like this one. If you are here via Atrios's trackback, I'd be interested to know you were here, so leave a little comment if you have a minute.
And no, I'm not the Chris Nelson of the Chris Nelson Report.
Terry McAuliffe was all piss and vinegar on Face the Nation this morning. An interesting scrap. Ed Gillespie was clearly out of his depth. With Gillespie and Scott McClellan as spokesmen, the Right have assembled a team that will surely carry them to victory.
Nader? He only needs to look at Dennis Kucinich's support to see how the Left is going to judge his presidential run.
Saturday February 21, 2004
When do Republicans play their Bin Laden trump card? There's only so long they can hold it - will it be out before Kerry gets the nomination? Or soon after?
Wow. Via Brad Delong.
Our military is being forced to trade away its maneuverability in the wider war against terrorism while being placed on the defensive in a single country that never will fully accept its presence. There is no historical precedent for taking such action when our country was not being directly threatened. The reckless course that Bush and his advisers have set will affect the economic and military energy of our nation for decades. It is only the tactical competence of our military that, to this point, has protected him from the harsh judgment that he deserves.
That's Reagan's Secretary of the Navy. The first quoted line is probably as clear a description as you can get of the state of affairs of our foreign policy and military engagement in Iraq. And in 33 words.
Friday February 20, 2004
Confronting Rightist aggression
Here is a letter, quoted in full, to AWOLBush.com, seen via David Neiwert's website Orcinus:
From: "Baker, J." [liberalbasher@sbcglobal.net] To: [webmaster@awolbush.com] Subject: Comments . . . Date: Wed, 18 Feb 2004 22:33:11 -0500
You people are beyond evil. George W. Bush will be re-elected to a second term, and hopefully it will drive die-hard idiotic leftists to commit suicide, that would be the bonus round!
Instead of bitching about how much you hate George W. Bush and how he stole the election and went AWOL from the National Guard, why don't you rotten cocksuckers spend your time and money and offer up a candidate who isn't a god-damned America-hating lunatic?
You people are utterly useless to humanity and wholly better off dead, burning in eternal damnation.
Ya know, I think it's too bad that we can't follow Saddam's model of dealing with opposition - just open up mass graves and start torturing, maiming, and murdering liberals and leftists by the millions - toss them into the ground, and fill the holes up with dirt. I would love to volunteer for such duty!
Eat shit and die, all of you!
J. Baker
Phoenix
If you have been paying attention to the rhetoric of the right over the past few months, it would be hard to say that this kind of talk is not on the rise. As Neiwert says, he's "beginning to detect a real fear, sometimes bubbling up in little frantic moments. This makes them, in my estimation, very dangerous."
Neiwert's prescription? "Where conservatives threaten violence and discord, liberals need to respond with firmness and healing. The mass of voters out there will not have to be told who the 'real Americans' are."
Neiwert's solution for countering this rhetoric is soothing, but not necessarily helpful, for if these people erupt in violence or near violence (as they started to in Florida in late 2000), what is the Left to do? Take up a passive resistance? I certainly believe that engaging in violence to further a cause is folly, but I think that the issue of violence is much more endemic in our humanity. Violence doesn't beget violence; while violence may stoke fires already raging, those fires are raging inside of us, and we ourselves are the ultimate instigators. But even if we are able to calm that fire, the question still comes down to, "what do you do at the moment the cudgel is upon you?"
It's one thing to say that the Dem party is the party of healing, not division, but what if you're the party of healing because the opposition has just beaten you with clubs? Would the Dems cruise to victory as the "pity" party?
I think that going forward the Left needs to do a few things to address the possibility of Rightist thuggery:
- Start a documentation campaign. Every campaign event this season needs to have video documentation, preferably from two or more sources.
- Document Rightist eliminationist rhetoric. A website archive would be a good place to start.
- Finally, further consideration of the methods of passive resistance, but also the methods of mass defense (how does a mass of people defend itself without succumbing to the same behavior as the aggressor?) This entails knowledge of methods for disarming and methods for restraint. Seeing that Rightists are the ones with the majority of guns, the Left should also consider strategies for dealing with such contingencies as sniper-fire (how to perform mass evacuations with the fewest injuries, etc), and such rudimentary issues as how your crowd is structured (do you want the truly defenseless on the periphery?) Most importantly, it would entail study of a) methods to keep a group cohesive and b) ways for crowds to keep themselves in a proper mindset and if necessary talk themselves down from the brink of violence. For as soon as the first fists fly, it's probably impossible to stop.
Study of such issues would do more than just aid the Left; testing of these methods could provide case-studies for mass-opposition movements throughout the world who need to face much more violent governments and militias.
And, along with Neiwert's tough, non-violent talk, it can help cast the Left as strong but civil, and help build a coalition of people who together can stand up against the violent menacing of the Right.
Thursday February 19, 2004
Richard Perle wants the head of George Tenet on a stake on the Capitol steps. If only your problems would go away that easily, Richard!
"Then Bush's motorcade drove by. One middle finger went up in the crowd, then another, and soon they were everywhere.
As the crowd scattered to their seats, one of the few black fans I spotted at the racetrack ran by and saw me scribbling in my notepad. "Writing for a newspaper?" she asked. Before I could respond, she shouted, "Tell them Bush sucks!" Then she disappeared back into the fray. "
Bush's "NASCAR dads" base at the Daytona 500.
Wednesday February 18, 2004
Mike Ferner on H & I in Iraq: "'H & I,' or harassment and interdiction fire: 'Random artillery (or aerial) bombardments used to deny the enemy terrain which they might find beneficial to their campaign; general rather than specific, confirmed military targets.'"
Is there anyone else that think that Edwards' showing yesterday was nothing more than a Republican effort to game the system, and that if the primaries had been Dems-only, Kerry would have won by a much more comfortable margin?
Not that I think it's a bad thing. I think the Republicans are making some big missteps, and this could be one of them. Keeping the spotlight on two good candidates can only make Bush look bad. And the longer it keeps up the smaller he shrinks. (Especially when his first "campaign-like" stop spouts... you guessed it... tax cuts!)
Tuesday February 17, 2004
Best news of the last few days: Edwards pulls up even in the Wisconsin vote. And now we have two strong candidates focusing on one weak incumbent. That is if they don't eat each other alive.
Saturday February 14, 2004
Larry David approaches hero status. Here he is on his time in the Army Reserve during Vietnam:
In those days, reserve duty lasted for six years, which, I might add, was three times as long as service in the regular army, although to be perfectly honest, I was unable to fulfill my entire obligation because I was taking acting classes and they said I could skip my last year. I'll always be eternally grateful to the Pentagon for allowing me to pursue my dreams.
Friday February 13, 2004
2; Krugman on the myth of Bush
2 US Troops were killed by a roadside bomb in Baghdad.
Paul Krugman on the Bush myth. "By my count, this year's budget contains 27 glossy photos of Mr. Bush. We see the president in front of a giant American flag, in front of the Washington Monument, comforting an elderly woman in a wheelchair, helping a small child with his reading assignment, building a trail through the wilderness and, of course, eating turkey with the troops in Iraq."
Thursday February 12, 2004
Wow - they had to pull out the big guns early in order to kill this AWOL story.
If Kerry survives this, it's only gonna get worse, folks.
How much spin can you fit on the head of a pin?
Is it just me, or does Bush's platform for his re-election campaign seem to be caving in around them? Every statement, about the economy or about Iraq, has become such a refined piece of spin that it seems that the administration is balancing itself on the head of a pin -- it has given itself very very little room to maneuver. Their claims for the economy recovering are based on a high productivity growth number, and a bump up in the stock market, but the growth isn't translating into jobs, and to get a good jobs number they essentially have to cook the books (see Brad DeLong for the rundown on this).
Regarding Iraq, they seem to have pinned their hopes on getting the elections overwith by the middle of the year so they can wipe their hands to the whole affair. (Apparently Rumsfeld is now busy trying to foist the whole kit-and-kaboodle on the State department.)
If they're not going to run on Iraq, why did they go there in the first place? It certainly wasn't for the weapons.
Needless to say, this leaves them very little coverage leading into the election, and one of the reasons the AWOL story has taken on such huge proportions.
And the AWOL story is a great example of what I'm talking about. There's only one way to deny the AWOL story, and that is to control the release of information, and paint the information that you do release as exculpatory. It is obvious that to do anything more than that at this point courts disaster. So again the administration is balancing on its pinhead, pretending it's the foundation of a skyscraper. But now the press is starting to see how easy it is to topple them off their perch. It takes no more than actually doing their jobs professionally and thoroughly.
All this leads me to believe, however, that the Republicans are going to realize that the only way the can win the next election is by 1) the smear and 2) divisiveness. The smear has already started on Kerry (they -- and some Dems -- did a bang-up job on Dean), and the divisiveness can be seen in their gay marriage amendment.
What's next? I think it hinges on the AWOL story. Does the press cave, or do their jobs? I think the possibility of a scoop is what's driving them now, and that can't be a good sign for the Bush team. Once you give a member of the press the possibility of boosting his/her visibility, there's no stopping 'em.
Tuesday February 10, 2004
Never thought I'd say this at this point in the race, but the Bush administration is already starting to stink of desperation. Scott McClellan's performance today regarding Bush's military record was sputtering, defensive and downright pathetic. They certainly could never have expected to be in this position this early in the race.
This also means that they're going to roll out the big guns even earlier than expected. Get out the popcorn (and perhaps the Valium!)
Jobs; AWOL; bomb
Krugman uses the three words that would cast Bush out of office: "out of touch."
Although the Republicans (and some in the press) would like the AWOL story to be over, it's not. And Bush's little lie about it on Meet the Press surprised some. The Republicans are already spinning Bush's comment that in 2000 they had already released all the documents about his record. Now their story is, "we made everything we had available during the 2000 campaign."
Anyone else here think that the document discovered by "aides" in Iraq, in which an Al Quaeda operative complains to a superior that they are "losing" the insurgency and that a vote by midyear might kill it off completely, is more Chalabi work? Interestingly, in that article, a senior official goes on the record saying, "no reason to believe the letter is bogus in any way." Other than the fact that it is an absolutely perfect bit of propaganda for the administration? That it tries to place the onus for the car bombings on Al Quaeda instead of everyday Iraqis? That it makes the midyear vote sound like the golden chariot of freedom and democracy? Not surprisingly, the NYTimes article ends with this caveat:
On Monday, senior American officials were careful to describe Mr. Zarqawi as "an associate" of Al Qaeda rather than a member. American military officials say that at least 90 percent of the attacks on United States troops are thought to have been carried out by Iraqi Sunnis opposed to the occupation.
A large bomb exploded near a police station in Iskandariyah, killing dozens.
Sunday February 08, 2004
Bush's performance on Meet the Press so far is pathetic. The press will love it.
This is my latest post to a recent comments section:
What it really comes down to is this: have the Republicans been successful in their plan to cleave America in 2 in such a way that it can't be healed short of revolt?
What have the Rush Limbaughs and Ann Coulters been doing over the past 5 to 10 years? They have been poisoning a significant portion of America against the other. And in this election, we're going to see how far their brainwashing attempts have gone.
You all watch CNN, listen to news sources... You have seen the Republicans on station after station, article after article, say exactly the same things -- more often than not complete fabrications -- and pass them off as obvious fact, when you yourself know that there was one newspaper or one tv station out there that had told the truth. They do this and continue doing this because they have been successful in convincing people that there are only certain news sources that are trustworthy, and those people will never, never trust a different news source. I have to be honest, though, and say that the Internet has been to blame as well. Now that we have hundreds of news sources at our fingertips, we have to pick and choose the ones that we trust -- more often than not those are the sources that reflect our own view of the world. I can't say that I read Andrew Sullivan or National Review or the Weekly Standard or the Washington Times -- they raise my blood pressure way too much and their spin is too blatant for me. But I do occasionally wade through the Wall Street Journal (and even their editorial page which would agree with Bush even if he said that raising taxes would cause Jesus to return ahead of schedule). It is harder than ever in this world to stay open to information as our news sources become ever more biased. We have to filter out so much more than our ancestors did, and the amount of bullshit that we have to deal with is of a significantly higher proportion as well.
Just think: 30 years ago our parents got up, dressed, turned on the radio, listened to the morning news (when it all seemed like it was just one "news"), went to work, dealt with the idiot boss or administration, came home, and turned on the evening news (again, even though there were three broadcast networks, it was really more a choice of the anchors' hairstyle and delivery than a choice of trustworthiness).
Now, we get up, have 1000 sources of news available, the radio cluttered with dead-headed Rightists from morning to night, the boss just as vile but now he's whittling away at your pension while siphoning off money for his yacht and art collection,we come home and watch Wolf Blitzer, Brit Hume and the rest as they lube up for their administration guests, and we pass fitfully into sleep thinking that there was important news today that we will never know of because the news/entertainment industry took a pass.
I think the natural reaction to this is to pick your trusted sources and stick with them. But when your trusted sources are also biased and out to convince you that other interpretations of the news are the work of the antichrist, it becomes a much more serious and potentially incendiary situation.
Remember, the last election almost ended in violence. America has only grown more fractured since then; what we can hope is that a large enough portion of those listening to Rush Limbaugh are attempting to reconcile his rhetoric with the fact that their family members and friends are sitting at home, jobless, watching their neighborhoods disintigrate around them. Maybe Americans aren't so gullible as to ignore what's in front of their faces in favor of the rantings of ignorants.
Thursday February 05, 2004
David Neiwert is happy that the AWOL story is finally getting some coverage.
Are the Dems on a collision course?
Ok, all you Dems out there (I'm not one of you, sorry -- I'm registered not affiliated), it's time to start actually thinking about electability, and that means thinking strategically. Without an Edwards or Clark on the ticket somewhere, the game's lost. It's time for you to think with your heads instead of your hearts. Kerry's not gonna go anywhere -- he's never going to gain ground in the south without a Southerner on the ticket, but any Southern liberal can do well in Northeastern states and the West coast (which are reflexively liberal), but Kerry's never going to crack the nut of the South. Manybe another candidate, but not Kerry. He's got too many inherent negatives (liberal, Massachusetts, a patrician air that he's not able to shake). And I don't think that a Southern VP will help. We're going to see after next week. If Kerry doesn't win Virginia or Tennessee, it's time for him to go.
Wednesday February 04, 2004
Campaign thoughts
Any combination of Kerry/Clark/Edwards I could live with at this point; I'd prefer Edwards/Clark, Kerry was never a first choice, in fact he was well down my list of preferences (way too patrician for my tastes). Clark, I don't think, has a chance of getting the nomination, but he'd put up a good fight against Cheney as the VP nominee. Edwards would make Bush look more like the miserable, ex-alcoholic, withered, mean-spirited frat-boy bully that he is.
I see Edwards and Clark (particularly Edwards) less likely to pull a Gore: allowing themselves to get trapped into a characterization that they can't shake. Kerry's almost into Gore territory as we speak, and once you're there, as Dean has shown, you can never leave.
Edwards has ably turned the trial-lawyer image into a positive message; his kungfu is strong. It will be interesting to see how next week's primaries shake things up, and if he gets any bounce from his SC showing. I think he's going to be hard to beat in the southern states. Kerry needs to be a tad worried.
Brad DeLong catches the Washington Post's Jonathan Weismann being a lazy media whore and a snippy twit. From an email:
F*** Brad DeLong. The first piece put on the web is slapped together as quickly as possible, and the guy for some reason doesn't like me.
"Damn that Brad DeLong for making me look like a whore for putting up what essentially amounted to a press release from the White House about their latest budget proposal."
Monday February 02, 2004
A winter glove, dropped accidentally, covered in a heavy snow, only rediscovered at the coming of the spring thaw. Its material soaked through and unravelling, encrusted with dirt and leaves; its match lost to the world.
I would vote for such a glove over our current President.
