who's the fucking nihilist here!?! what are you, a bunch of fucking crybabies?!?!

david brooks' column is a perfect example of why i think the bailout debate is so ridiculous. first there's the name calling, labeling opponents to the bill "nihilists" does nothing to address the concerns of the people who voted against the measure (though it does provide a nice opportunity for a lebowski quote). then there's the brinkmanship:

The only thing now is to try again — to rescue the rescue. There’s no time to find a brand-new package, so the Congressional plan should go up for another vote on Thursday, this time with additions that would change its political prospects.

that sentence is patently absurd. why is there "no time to find a new package"? the last package was written over the weekend. isn't that about the same amount of time we have between now and thursday?

i simply don't get why so much working is going into shutting down any discussion of an alternative to the $700 billion bailout plan. maybe that is the best alternative, but let's see it compared with other ideas, especially considering that the $700 billion figure that everyone is so wedded to was simply pulled out of paulson's ass. as i said before, i'm not sure that the bailout plan is wrong, i just don't think that anyone's made a convincing case that it's better than the alternatives. indeed, there hasn't been any discussion of any of the alternatives. the fact that so many proponents seemed determined to stop anyone from even consideringother ideas makes me all the more suspicious of it.

another fine maverick move!

it can be pretty funny to watch mccain's inept attempts to profit politically from this bailout deal. last week it was his ridiculous faux "suspended campaign" gambit and today:

Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.) and his top aides took credit for building a winning bailout coalition – hours before the vote failed and stocks tanked.

spitting out the crap sandwich

if this actually does fail it will be extremely interesting to see what happens next. will they even consider a different approach than the paulson bailout? like maybe what europe is doing? or will they just take the same $700 billion bailout crap sandwich, pour a little more sugar on it, and send it back to the house hoping that this time they bite?

DC punk!

nancy pelosi: "This isn't about a bailout of Wall Street, it's a buy-in, so that we can turn our economy around."

dad: "Steven, I didn't sell out son. I bought in. Keep that in mind."

today's special in the house cafeteria

a big juicy crap sandwich.

mmmmm... enjoy your breakfast, congresspeoples!

alpha male

dear mr. broder,

if you're going to use metaphors taken from the study of primates maybe you should check with someone who studies primates.

why i'm (currently) against the bailout

it seems that there's a bailout deal. while it certainly could fall apart between now and tomorrow (when the house expects to vote on it), it probably will pass.

i'm still completely unconvinced that this is a good idea, largely because there's been almost no effort to muster a convincing argument that it is. instead, we're faced with a barrage of bare assurances that unless we pass this plan immediately, the country will be faced with financial armageddon. i'm suspicious when none of the proponents seem willing to do anything to defend this bailout idea on its merits. the only actual arguments are what kind of $700 billion bailout we should do, not whether we should do it in the first place. the proponents are not explaining why we should not do something completely different (for example, the sweden in 1992 model).

the fact that no discussion questioning the premise of the $700 billion bailout taking place is a pretty good reason to oppose the measure. the burden of proof is is on them (and by "them" i mean paulson, or whoever else is arguing for the measure), not us. they have to convince us that what looks like a blatant giveaway to wall street is actually necessary, not the other way around. i certainly could be convinced to support a bailout like this, but someone first has to actually convince me.

nature's noseprint

oops.

a "failed state" and the mysterious case of mushy

in my opinion, one of the mccain's strangest remarks during last night's debate debate was when mccain called pakistan a "failed state" prior to pervez musharraf's military coup. it's hard to really call him on something like this, there isn't a clear definition of what a "failed state" is. once you get beyond countries that are a total mess (i.e. somalia) there's probably more of a sliding scale of failure than a binary "failed" or "not failed" designation.

and yet, i think it's pretty clear that musharraf's seizure of power and rule made pakistan more of a failed state than it was prior to the coup. pakistan under nawaz sharif was a democracy, a corrupt somewhat weak democracy, but still a democracy. after musharraf's coup, pakistan became a military dictatorship, a dictatorship that increasingly lost control of the country the longer that musharraf stayed in office. during musharraf's tenure, islamic extremism grew substantially and the central government's authority in the tribal regions along the border with afghanistan receded. by the time musharraf left office earlier this year, there were regions of pakistan (specifically those afghan border regions) that resembled a failed state that were not nearly as bad under president sharif.

i wonder if mccain can even explain why he slapped the "failed state" label on sharif's pakistan. for some mysterious reason american conservatives really love musharraf. during the debate obama said the american stance was "well, you know, he may be a dictator, but he's our dictator." and that certainly seems to be the prevailing opinion among conservatives, including mccain. it's odd because musharraf wasn't even that good at being "our" dictator. he wasn't always supportive of american policies in the country, he government supported the taliban while it ruled afghanistan, undercut american efforts in that country after the taliban fell, permitted a.q. khan's network to undermine nuclear non-proliferation efforts around the world and then effectively let khan off the hook after he was caught. it also ceded portions of its territory to religious militants, militants that were fighting and are still fighting american forces over the border in afghanistan.

with that kind of record i simply don't get why american conservatives have remained so loyal to the guy. they flipped out at france just for opposing the iraq war, but musharraf opposed it too. indeed, in 2006 he went on a book tour around the u.s. saying that the iraq war made the world more dangerous. if any other world leader had done that, it would have put them on at the top of american conservatives' shit list. but instead they mostly stood by him right to the bitter end. i simply don't get where that loyalty came from, or why mccain still displayed remnants of that at last night's debate.

subprime primer

via Anne, here it is in handy cartoon form.

actually, i think the best explanation of the mess is the TAL episode "the giant pool of money." listen to it if you haven't already.

performs his own stunts

unfortunately, i was stuck in meetings today, so i wasn't able to enjoy mccain's humiliating reversal with not even the face-saving gesture that i thought he would get (on the contrary, some congressional republicans think mccain screwed everything up).

hopefully, i won't be so busy for mccain's next crazy stunt. what will that be? your guess is as good as mine...

suspended campaign

what a joke.

...see what toobin says starting at about 1:30 in the below video:

the great schlep

hilarious

(via dsc by email)

...the unbleeped version of the video is here.

"suspended"

mccain seems to think that the word just means not showing up for a debate.

i'm actually pretty curious to see what happens tomorrow night. i predict that mccain will give in and go to the debate (especially if he can announce some bullshit face-saving "deal" right beforehand). but it would be awesome to have an empty podium on one end of the stage.

(image via tower of dabble)

is there anything new here?

i don't get why this is presented as some sort of startling new revelation. it was obvious that saddam's trial was a politicized mess at the time. this "new" revelation--that one of the judge's in the case was replaced in the week before the november 5, 2006 verdict because the maliki government wanted to be assured to get an execution--was reported in 2006. i mentioned the judge's replacement the week it happened and then again when saddam was executed.

of course, people's memory about these things tends to be pretty short. and very few people paid any attention to such details two years ago, so why should they now? in fact, i expect they won't.

iraq election law passes

i'm sure it will get lost in the financial and election mania, but this is actually a pretty big deal. a national election law is one of the benchmarks for success of the surge and while this version falls short of being truly national (because of the kirkuk carve-out), it's still a real step. that is, assuming the bill isn't vetoed by any of the members of the presidential council (the last version of the bill was vetoed by president talabani).

the main holdup up until now has been the status of kirkuk. they got around it this time by excluding the city from the next election, and sending the matter to a special committee for further study (i.e. kicking the can down the road). if the bill becomes law, elections will be held in all of iraq, except kirkuk, which means that the current officials representing the city will stay in office even as everyone else has to face re-election. i believe those officials are mostly kurds (but i could be mistaken), which makes it more likely that talabani (himself a kurd) won't veto the legislation this time.

the bill also eliminates quotas for christians in the provincial councils, which the NYT reports is "stirring outrage" in the christian communities. but because none of the members of the presidential council are christian, i expect no one else will give a shit. i bet those christians are wishing they had gotten a christian seat on the presidential council!

thomas the tank v. 50 cent

happy birthday baji!

(via JN on facebook)

it's true that hi has had a checkered past. but ed here is an officer of the law twice decorated, so we figure it kinda evens out

the federal bee eye likes us after all. so this week features all kinds of crazy errands, in addition to the usual work madness.

just so you know.

what's good for the goose...

last week rupert murdoch's NY post published an article accusing obama of asking the iraq government to delay reaching a status of forces agreement with the u.s. until after the election. that allegation, however, was based on the word of a single individual, amir taheri, a man with a long history of lying about explosive stories involving the region, and a history of forcing the media to issue retractions after depending on his version of events. but little details like an unreliable source didn't stop right blogistan from going nuts over the allegations, with some breathlessly asserting that the allegations meant that obama committed treason.

today, we learn that what actually happened is almost the exact opposite from what the conservatives were claiming last week. in fact, bush asked maliki to agree to a later withdrawal timetable in the SOFA to help the mccain campaign. and unlike last week's "scoop" that was sourced by someone dubious like taheri, this time the story came directly from iraqi prime minister nouri al-maliki.

holy crap, the president letting politics interfere with the biggest foreign policy issue facing this nation!?!?! it's time for more rightwing blogger outrage, right? right?...

[crickets].

drive carefully!

i have no idea what happened in this particular case. but it seems that if you're an arab in israel and you get into a car accident where you hit pedestrians, you will be summarily executed at the scene, the government may demolish your family's house, and the ultra-orthodox will run around beating random arabs they find on the street.

again, i do not know if today's incident was really a terrorist attack or just a tragic traffic accident. there have been at least two recent incidents where pedestrians were intentionally run over by a palestinian driver in israel. but by killing the driver at the scene, israeli police have probably ruined the only real way of telling the difference. and this could have just been an accident. now we'll probably never know for sure.

the big fat idiot speaks

the stupidest thing about this obama is really an arab thing is that the people making the claim don't seem to know what an "arab" is. you'd think that the last few years of heavy news coverage of the arab world would give these folks some inkling of what that word means.

they also seem to think that "black"/"african american" and "arab" are mutually exclusive categories. "arab" is an ethnic group, not a race. in fact, the arab ethnic group includes people with a wide range of skin color, ranging from what we would consider "white" to "black" to everything in between. i've seen arabs in syria with skin as pale as mine, i've seen some with red hair and freckles. and i've seen arabs in egypt with skin as dark as i saw in kenya.

of course, the fact that some arabs are black, doesn't mean that obama is an arab. it's rather well documented that his father was a luo, which is a distinct ethnic group from the arab. (luos are nilotic, which is part of the nilo-saharan language family, whereas arabs are semitic which is part of the afro-asiatic language family) not that i expect the morons who listen to rush will be able to make such distinctions. but, if it helps, there is a handy map at alas, a blog. [never mind, as my bro points out in the comments, mr. fecke has the arrow for kenya pointing at tanzania. kenya is the one north of that (east of the country with the "2")]

dodd analysis outsourcing

mithras has good summary of the dodd plan.

(or do it yourself. the full text in pdf is here).

tzipi

i know very little about tzipi livni, but it sounds like she's pretty quick.

on the other hand, she could be a pinhead.

the most frustrating thing in the world

is fighting with your computer to try to get an arabic word inserted in the right place. apparently hebrew has the same problem. and so my master plan of having a trilingual flickr photoset for my israel pics is turning into a logistical nightmare.

operation: jacket recovery--status report

the operation was a complete success! after five days of jacketless and keyless fun, i successfully drove out to the cabin o' cabingirl and picked the damn thing up.

holy shit

that's it? that's the bailout plan? the federal government can give out $700 bil. to buy bad mortgages with no limits on financial institutions, no requirements of greater transparency to make sure this doesn't happen again, nothing.

it also says nothing about the price, which is a big deal, there is no real "market rate" for the bad or likely bad debts because the market is too scared to touch these things. and let's be clear, the mortgages that will be bought are the ones that are thought to be bad debts. troubled financial institutions are better off holding on to any "good" (i.e. profitable) mortgages. they're going to unload the dogs on the taxpayers at an inflated price. without any statutory guidelines on price, bush's ideologically pro-business flunkies are going to be paying ridiculously high prices for those things, all at the taxpayer's expense.

but the craziest thing of the entire act is this, section 8:

Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency.

no checks, no balances. in effect, secretary paulson could give the entire $700 bil. to his mistress's company in exchange for a single bad mortgage and that would all be perfectly legal under this bill.

actually, i'm not even sure it would have to be the mistess's company. if he gave it directly to her, it would seem to violate the law--the mistress is not a "financial institution". but without court review, there's no mechanism for enforcing it. if paulson just gave her the money, without even getting a mortgage in return, it doesn't seem like there would be anything to stop him.

inane in spain falls mainly on mccain

last night mrs. noz asked me what that mccain-spainish interview thing was all about. apparently yesterday (when i was mostly off the grid) the NYT ran some kind of story that didn't make a whole lot of sense if you didn't already know the story.

a pretty good explanation is here, you can listen to the original interview audio here (it's part of the youtube video). personally, i completely agree with josh marshall's take on this. the audio makes it pretty clear that mccain didn't know who president zapatero was. instead, i think he just assumed it was some latin american guy and so he gave a vague answer about meetings with latin american leaders. when the interviewer specified that she was talking about spain in europe, mccain didn't understand her--either he didn't hear or he had trouble with her accent, or both. i think she's pretty understandable, but it was a phone interview, maybe the line wasn't as clear on his end as it is in the audio recording. (click on the "here" link above and listen to it yourself)

and so, the campaign tried to cover for their candidate's confusion with this ridiculous story that he meant exactly what he said--even if that means that mccain implied that spain was in latin american and made a fairly belligerent comment about an american ally. i guess they felt they had to do that because mccain's alleged foreign policy "expertise" is the centerpiece of his campaign and because admitting that he was confused and/or couldn't hear well plays into the idea that he's old and addled. on some level i understand why the campaign took the stance it did. but the problem is that the explanation turns a gaffe (which i really wouldn't care about) into a display of some pretty bad judgment on the part of the mccain campaign. as marshall puts it: "Rather than copping to the goof, they decided to stick to the nonsensical statements and risk, should McCain win in November, significant damage to our relations with a major NATO ally."

nice going.

independent schmindipendent

two days ago, mccain didn't understand the current financial crisis enough so he proposed a 911-style commission to figure it out.

i guess he decided that the don't-know-what-exactly-is-happening stance wasn't working for him, so today he dropped the commission idea and instead proposed decisive action. he promised that if elected he would fire SEC chairman chris cox. except that the president doesn't have the authority to fire the SEC chairman.

maybe mccain should get the 9/11 commission to explain to him the concept of an independent regulatory commission.

deja vu

the reason it's called a "bounce" is because it goes up and then it goes down. both candidates got a post-convention bounce and both of those bounces seem to be over now.

despite all the triumphalism and/or panic by both sides over the past month, we're basically where we were when i last posted about the gallup tracking poll on august 19th. if there's a game changer in this race, it simply hasn't happened yet.

يوم طويلا

i woke up this morning and hopped out of bed extra early to run to an arbitration. then i realized lost my jacket. then i realized that one of the pockets of said jacket contained my keys, including both my house keys and my car key. then i realized that needed said car key to drive to the diner where i was meeting my witnesses for this morning's arbitration.

so i took mrs. noz's car key and went to the hearing, sending messages out from my iphone trying to figure out where the hell my jacket was. the arbitration that was supposed to take "a couple of hours" instead lasted all day. during the breaks i managed to figure out that i had left the jacket in the back of cabin girl's car. (she and booman gave me a ride back from drinking liberally last night).

the arbitration ended just in time for rush hour. so i braved the traffic into center city to meet my arabic tutor, next door to my office that i never actually entered today.

now i'm home. exhausted and still keyless. but at least now i know where they are.

volunteer for voter protection

a few days ago mithras called for bloggers to get off their asses and volunteer for the obama campaign. i work full time, i haven't been able to do nearly as much as mithras has already done registering voters. but i can at least spare election day. and so i have volunteered to work for the campaign's voter protection program.

i did the same thing back in 2004 for the kerry campaign and despite my disappointment with the outcome of that election it really was a great, albeit exhausting, experience. if there are any other lawyers (or law students) out there reading this, i urge you to volunteer for the program. and if you're not a lawyer, you can always volunteer to do something else.

the doctor of my dreams

five former secretaries of state have endorsed obama's policy of opening up direct talks with iran. that includes henry kissinger, one of john mccain's national security advisors.

friends of foreign wars

drinking liberally

it's tuesday, time for my usual DL post. drinking liberally. tangier. 18th and lombard. 6 p.m. until whenever. everyone is invited. blah blah blah.

this post is getting old, but come join us anyway. tonight's secret code word is almaty.

to answer atrios' question

i don't think mccain has any idea which of the economy's fundamentals are strong. i think he just has a vague sense that presidents are supposed to reassure the markets and he wants to look presidential.

and in another example of the mccain campaign's spectacular bad timing, donald luskin, aka the stupidest man alive and advisor to the mccain campaign, has an op-ed piece in the this morning's washington post about how the american economy is really doing pretty well.

no mudslinging!

(via echidne)

dishonorable

ten bucks says mccain's response will be POW!

has the financial system collapsed yet?

crazy times.

but on the (debatably) plus side, oil actually dipped below $100 a barrel. just a week ago people were saying that we'd never see an oil barrel for < $100 again. then again people are already saying the dip is only temporary.

bah, people.

new sitemeter sux

the new sitemeter rolled out today and my first impression is: i hate it.

the annoying thing is that the old sitemeter let you easily display a list of the recent referring sites, even with a free account. now referral info is buried, you have to find it in individual hit reports. if you want a list of referring sites, you need to pay for the premium account.

i'm not really trying to increase my hit numbers with this blog. but i never tire of looking at the referring page info, seeing all the weird google searches that bring people here. i guess i'll be using at statcounter more often.

UPDATE: i wasn't the only one complaining about new sitemeter. it has now switched back to the old version and the company has issued an apology. i can see my referrals again. yay!

capped

after avoiding having that blasted contraption attached to my head for years, it looks like mrs. noz is going to get her first look at my brain waves since 1991 today.

i can't believe i managed to avoid it this long.

the giblets doctrine

if palin wants to understand the bush doctrine of preemption, all she has to do is read fafblog.

it's about as good an explantion as any.

the next stupid kerfuffle?

the right's sudden discovery and enthusiastic embrace of the sexism charge makes me wonder if someone out there won't complain about the use of the word "skirt" in this headline.

لا ناقة له فيها ولا جمل

as i've said several times now, i don't think the "experience" argument for presidential candidates is very compelling. at least, it's often too vague to amount to a convincing case. the presidency is, in many ways. a unique job. no one is really "experienced" until they get there. it's true that various experiences in the candidates' background could help them when they are president. but i don't see any reason why government work has to be the only relevant experience. and just reading a lot of books about foreign policy could give a candidate extremely useful knowledge about that subject, probably better knowledge than what most people get while in most public offices.

which is why i think the "palin has more executive experience than obama" is such a flimsy argument. it is true that a mayor and a governor are "executive" positions. but the two jobs of (a) mayor of a small town and (b) president of an economic and military superpower really have almost nothing to do with one another, other than the fact that both positions are labeled "executive". and if you want to play word games, i could point out that obama has been the "chief executive" of a national political campaign--a campaign that employs more people (counting both paid staff and volunteers) and has a budget that is much bigger than the town of wasilla, alaska. and obama has been running that campaign for about as long as palin was governor.

but who gives a shit? this is really about judgment and knowledge. experience is really just a proxy for those things. it's obvious to me which is better on those fronts. to die-hard mccain-palin supporters, their answer probably seems just as obvious.

"unprovoked"

from palin's interview last night:

GIBSON: Let's start, because we are near Russia, let's start with Russia and Georgia.

The administration has said we've got to maintain the territorial integrity of Georgia. Do you believe the United States should try to restore Georgian sovereignty over South Ossetia and Abkhazia?

PALIN: First off, we're going to continue good relations with Saakashvili there. I was able to speak with him the other day and giving him my commitment, as John McCain's running mate, that we will be committed to Georgia. And we've got to keep an eye on Russia. For Russia to have exerted such pressure in terms of invading a smaller democratic country, unprovoked, is unacceptable and we have to keep...

GIBSON: You believe unprovoked.

PALIN: I do believe unprovoked and we have got to keep our eyes on Russia, under the leadership there. I think it was unfortunate. That manifestation that we saw with that invasion of Georgia shows us some steps backwards that Russia has recently taken away from the race toward a more democratic nation with democratic ideals.That's why we have to keep an eye on Russia.

i don't understand how anyone who followed the war could call russia's attack on russia as "unprovoked." the crisis began with a georgian military offensive against south ossetia. georgia took that action after russia warned georgia not to take military action against the breakaway provence and massed troops on its southern border with georgia/south ossetia. oh, and also the georgian attack killed 12 russian soldiers (not to mention a lot of south ossetians, who the russians consider to be their citizens).

you can argue whether russia or georgia was in the right in the conflict (personally, i think neither side was wearing a white hat), but it's the height of ignorance to call the russian response to georgia's attack "unprovoked." if attacking russian military positions and killing their soldiers isn't a provocation what is?

and this isn't just a criticism of palin. since the russian offensive began, the mccain campaign has been characterizing russia's actions as "unprovoked aggression."

who factchecks the factcheckers?

there is something kind of amusing about mccain citing factcheck.org to claim that obama is making false attacks on palin, only to have factcheck.org issue a press release saying that mccain's factcheck.org citation itself was false and misleading.

if we're not going to do issues, at least we can do meta.

new heights of stupidity

nuff said.

succession

we might soon be seeing one of the downsides to the isolated paranoid playboy crazy-person form of government.

deep thoughts

i'm in a september 10th mindset today.

palin's non-gaffe

like atrios, i think palin's statement about fannie mae and freddie mac suggests that she really has no idea what is going on with those companies and the housing crisis. i also don't think her statement was a "gaffe."

a gaffe is when a politician misspeaks or makes a mistake while speaking. gaffe's don't actually reveal much about the candidate other than the fact that he/she is speaking a lot and being recorded all the time. anyone in the spotlight that is shining on all of the major candidates is going to make a ton of stupid mistakes. that's just human nature.

but this is not a case of palin mixing up words or the like. yesterday, palin told a crowd about a major event in national news and got her facts completely backwards. mortgage finance companies did not get into trouble because "[t]hey’ve gotten too big and too expensive to taxpayers." they were private companies that didn't get any taxpayer money. that is, until the government takeover announced this week. private companies failed and the government, this week, announced that it will take them over to rescue them.

palin apparently thinks that the companies' collapse is due to a failure of government when actually it is a failure of an entity that the government privatized decades ago. if they hadn't been privatized the problem might not have happened at all. and, based upon its actions this week, a reversal of that privatization (i.e. nationalization) is what the bush administration thinks is the solution.

i wonder if palin's confusion is not ideological. to members of the extreme right, there are no such things are market failures. to them, every problem with the market is a government failure. when she heard about the collapse, she probably just assumed that they were government entities because that's how she was inclined to think about a failure. but that's an explanation for her mistake, not an excuse. the bottom line is that the housing crisis is possibly the biggest economic issue facing the country right now. we deserve to have leaders who know what the hell is going on.

nine years ago today it was 9/9/99

happy anniversary cthulhia!

credit where credit is due

congratulations to all my friends at the pa college republicans you made it into the chronicle of higher education!

the honor appears to be well deserved. and thanks to drexel dem for pointing out their accomplishment to me.

نابلس

how did my post get to be the #8 hit if you google nablus? it's the largest city on the west bank! and it's not like the place hasn't been in the news quite a few times.

my little post shouldn't even make it to the first page. i realize that google owns blogger, and i've noticed that google seems to give preference search terms that appear in the title field of a blogger post. surely there are better sites to find information about the city than my reflections from a one-day day trip.

i wonder if i would get as many hits if i wrote the title to my "nablus" post in arabic.

drilling for price spikes

one problem with using offshore drilling as a strategy to stabilize fuel prices as that a lot of the offshore oil fields are in hurricane-prone areas. even if we assume away the main problems, that offshore fields don't have enough oil in them to significantly effect world oil prices, putting a greater percentage of american oil supplies in a hurricane zone is likely to increase price volatility, not decrease it.

4th time's a charm?

another month, another fingerprinting.

palin-watch to end soon

wow, that was quick. i complained the other day and again earlier today about how the mccain campaign was hiding palin from the press. and i wasn't the only one. then biden joined in which seems to have produced some results.

palin has agreed to an interview with ABC's charlie gibson. as jed says, picking gibson was a smart choice as he's "the most McCain-friendly journalist outside of FOX." i wonder whether gibson will bother asking her hard questions: like her long record of scoring earmarks for alaska, the fact that she was for the "bridge to nowhere" until after congress killed its federal funding (i.e. she cut funding only after it would have to come out of her own state budget), or anything related to troopergate.

the power of pop culture

once again yglesias makes a point that i've meant to say but never bothered to write. political islam is much more successful as an opposition movement than as a governing philosophy. religion is a handy tool to rail against the corruption of the establishment. but once it becomes the establishment then the islamists in charge either start to lose the support of the people or start to moderate their position. everyone hates the corrupt western puppet tool-of-a-leader, but dammit don't mess with pop culture!

i've long been fascinated by the tug-of-war between anti-western islamists and satellite dishes. it seems that every anti-satellite dish campaign ends up with failing. the only example i can think of where an anti-tv movement actually worked is in taliban-controlled afghanistan. and maybe the taliban didn't last long enough before illegal dishes became commonplace as they eventually have elsewhere.

the shame campaign

we've already had a president who avoided questions from the press, why do we need a vice president who is the same way? these people are supposed to be accountable to us. if a campaign won't let its vice presidential candidate take unfiltered questions, it's simply trying to prevent the public from making an informed choice.(get the palin clock code for your site here)

ADDING: as josh marshall says:

[McCain campaign manager Rick] Davis says Palin won't give any interviews until she feels "comfortable" giving one. And this morning he added that she wouldn't give any "until the point in time when she'll be treated with respect and deference."

Sarah Palin could be the President of the United States in four and a half months. We tend to think of this as an abstraction; but it's true. And yet today she's so unprepared and knows so little about the challenges and tasks facing the country that she can't even give a softball interview.

That's really all we need to know. Yes, she's off being prepped at some undisclosed location. And I've little doubt that by the time her debate rolls around she'll be sufficiently pumped full of slogans and bromides to make a show of it. But now, this moment, is the one that tells us all we need to know.

As is so often the case, Palin is the incarnation of the Republican slurs. The darling of the hard-right; she gives a stem-winding speeches. She pushes all their buttons. But she's such a lightweight, they can't risk letting her answer a few questions. Not even on Fox. They know she's not ready and probably never will be. But they think the politics might work for them.

i still find it bizarre that a campaign claiming that palin is ready to be president seems to be saying that she's not ready to give a press conference. giving a press conference is part of the job of president.

how it is playing out

the mccain people really do know what they're doing. while publicly complaining about the media's focus on palin's family issues, they're moving quickly to kill the real scandal concerning her abuse of power as alaska governor.

a couple of days ago i wondered how the scandal would play out, now it looks pretty certain that palin will not be subpoenaed, she won't testify (breaking her earlier promise to fully cooperate with the investigation) and that at least seven of her associates who earlier promised to testify, now will not. the bottom line is that alaska is solidly in republican control and that the republican establishment is no longer interested in investigating the scandal. instead they're circling their wagons to protect their party's vice presidential nominee. ironically, this is the same party establishment that palin claims she "took on" when she became governor.

and unless the press starts hounding the mccain campaign about the efforts to shut down the investigation, it probably will work.

mccain doesn't think palin is ready

so now it seems that palin won't answer questions from the press at all, at least not in the short term. apparently, the mccain campaign doesn't think she's up to taking hard questions about the various brewing scandals.

if the obama campaign is smart, they'll start making hay out of the fact that palin is either unwilling or unable to handle even a press conference. it's worth noting the obvious fact that dealing with the press is part of the president's job.

walter reed something-or-other

hilarious.

aurora feint

just what i needed, another addictive waste of my time.

damn you, mrs. atrios!!!!

(and if anyone out there has a hint on how i'm supposed to build the "strategist: strength" blueprint, please feel free to tell)

fact-checking palin's speech

one, two, three, four.

frankly, it won't matter that palin's speech was filled with factual inaccuracies, it's already been declared a hit. ideally the wonkish class would be investigating whether the claims made by candidates check out. but instead most of them are more about treating election campaigns like celebrity gossip. coverage of a speech like this is more about how the delivery compares with the pundit's pre-existing expectations. because those expectations were absurdly low (as digby says a lot of people expected her to "run out on stage dressed like Ellie May Clampett, chomping on a wad of tobacco and talking like Roseann Barr"), palin did better than they thought she would. and so it will forevermore be declared a success!

never mind whether the assertions she made actually checks out.

sir oolius for veep!

he makes a compelling case.

reckless in tblisi

what the hell? when pretty much everyone else is saying that the russia-georgia war killed any chances that georgia will ever be admitted into NATO, why is cheney still making commitments like this? can anyone explain to me what benefit there is to raising georgia's hopes again? and why is georgia all of a sudden a critical strategic importance to the u.s.?

i have every sympathy with the georgians who suffered through the war, but frankly their situation was brought about by president saakashvili's reckless offensive into south ossetia. the georgian president acted recklessly in part because of the bush administration's assurances that the u.s. stood behind georgia, which he interpreted as a promise for military support if russia attacked them. if the u.s. actually does have an interest in georgia's well-being, they completely backfired by getting the georgian president into a fight that he couldn't win.

so why the hell is cheney doing it again? is he trying to set them up for another disaster? does he have some weird grudge against the georgians? or is he just too thick to learn from his own mistakes?

rip off

actually, matthew yglesias raises a good point. it is kind of strange that peggy noonan and mike murphy's public comments about the mccain campaign (e.g.) don't correspond with what seem to be their actual opinions as captured by the live mike.

i mean, they both regularly appear in the media to give their opinion about politics. hell, noonan is a professional opinion columnists. and when they appear they are there to give their opinion to the public. that's their job. in noonan's case, i think it's her only job (murphy is also a republican political consultant).

but it turns out that they're not doing their job. instead, they're just parroting the official position of the mccain campaign. i guess as a consultant, it is understandable that murphy would be pushing the republican candidate.¹ but that doesn't explain noonan. why is the wall street journal wasting its money paying an opinion columnist who isn't actually giving her opinion? couldn't they get essentially the same thing by just publishing mccain campaign press releases? they could probably do that for free. if she's not giving her actual opinions, what are they paying her for? it seems to me that the wall street journal is getting ripped off.

i should add that i think noonan's explanation is pretty hilarious. does her tortured "it's over" backtrack make any sense to you? yeah, the WSJ sure is getting its money's worth!

------------------
1-of course that begs the question why networks would invite political consultants giving their opinions on the air. it doesn't seem like they're good places to go if you're looking for reasoned analysis.

google earth add-ons

i can't wait to get home and try some of these out. it's like map geek heaven.

(via celluloid geekazoid)

palin digest

unlike, say, joe biden, sarah palin's views on various issues are not widely known to the public. think progress is assembling a sarah palin digest

i should note again that the vice presidential candidate's views aren't as important as the views of the person at the top of the ticket. historically, when there's a pre-existing disagreement between members of a ticket, the vice presidential candidate tends to change his/her views to correspond to what the presidential candidate thinks. and yet, because mccain is using the appointment to placate his right wing, the nomination can be revealing about what mccain thinks are the issues that he wants to use to reassure his base. also, with mccain being the oldest major party candidate for president in american history, there is the increased risk that his veep might become eep down the road. that's reason enough to scrutinize where she stands on various issues.

how it plays out

i'm trying to run through my head how this will play out. palin is trying to have the trooper-gate allegations referred to the state personnel board (which is made comprised of three people, all of whom were appointed by governor palin herself), just one month after the state legislature hired a special counsel to look into the allegations.

the special counsel has noticed a deposition, but governor palin says that she will refuse to testify. the special counsel may subpoena her, and if she refuses, presumably he will go to court to have the subpoena enforced. if it is enforced, that means that the republican vice presidential nominee would be subject to arrest. it also means that the trooper thing is going to stay in the news for the remainder of the election cycle.

i wonder if refusing to testify will be seen by the mccain campaign as less damaging than testifying. i imagine so, even though it would further tarnish her credentials as a good government reformer. good government types don't refuse to answer questions about their actions.

ATM rant

why don't american ATM machines give back your card before releasing the money. in some countries (e.g. israel, estonia, latvia and lithuania) dealing with an ATM machines goes in this order:

(1) put the card in the machine,
(2) punch in your code and tell the machine what you want,
(3) the machine returns your card, and
(4) then gives you the money.

in the u.s. steps #3 and 4 are often reversed, so you get the money before the machine releases your card at the end of the transaction. it seems like those other countries have developed a common-sense way to prevent customers from forgetting about their bank card back and wandering away before the machine gives it back. no one will leave before they get the money. but once you get the cash, it's quite easy to start thinking about the next thing you have to do, forget that you need to wait for the card and run off to the next place you have to be. (we've all done stuff like that before).

obviously i'm only thinking about this today because i stopped at the ATM machine this morning and i just got back from israel a few weeks ago. sometimes i wonder why the u.s. isn't better at ripping off good ideas from other places. [and no, i didn't forget my card today]

the dirt cascade

of all the crazy palin stuff that's come out in the past 24 hours some of it doesn't matter and no one will care (e.g. her husband's DUIs, that fact that she got married less than 9 months before the birth of her first child), some of it doesn't matter and will nevertheless get attention (e.g. her daughters pregnancy and upcoming shotgun wedding), and some of it does matter but i'm not sure if anyone will care because the press will be captivated by the knocked-up daughter story.

the things that i think do matter are her support of the "bridge to nowhere" before she turned against it, the fact that she ran senator steven's 527, palin's purge of political enemies when she became mayor of wasilla (which spawned talk of a recall effort), and her membership in the alaska independence party. the first two go directly to her anti-corruption/earmark image that mccain touts as the reason he picked her. the mayoral record is probably the best indication of her governing style, and the independence party thing, well, it cuts rather well against mccain's "country first" theme.

oh and then there's the trooper-gate scandal (hasn't that name already been taken?) that one already has legs. and it won't help that palin is going to be deposed before the election.

meanwhile, republican officials are already denying that palin will be withdrawn before the election. just the fact that there are denials is not a good sign for the ticket. and etrade has started taking bets.

drinking liberally: not monday edition

these three day weekends always throw me off. i keep thinking it's monday. but if i manage to remember the day of the week when i get off work this afternoon, i'll be at drinking liberally: tangier, 18th and lombard, 6 p.m. until later.

and unless she lied to me, our group will host a very special guest, charo. not to mention the usual assortment of regulars who are not in utrecht.

to late to vet

josh marshall has been writing about how the mccain campaign seems to be mostly vetting palin after her nomination was announced. but that raises the question: is that still vetting?

isn't vetting something one does before offering employment? the idea is to look into someone's background, see if there's anything unacceptable there, and if there is, to not make that person an offer and instead move on to the next potential candidate. that's what i thought vetting meant. it's something to be done before the decision is made.

you can't vet someone after you've already named them as the running mate. if post-hoc vetting turns anything up, it's too late to quietly pass them over for someone else. i realize that the mccain campaign may not have sufficiently vetting palin, the NYT suggests that palin may have been vetted for only a single day before the announcement. but the mccain campaign can't fix the problem by sending vetters to alaska now for a more thorough job. unless mccain were considering dumping palin, it's too late to vet now.

nude floridians?

a badly worded search got me to this news story from last december. "when did i take a picture of nude sunbathers in florida?" i asked myself. i don't think i've ever been to "playalinda beach." i'm not even sure where it is. (i'm guessing it's in brevard county, florida. wherever that is).

in any case, the photo used in the article is this one:

as far as i can tell there are no nude people in the photo. click on it to make it big, if you don't believe me. oh, and i took the photo in smyltyne beach on the curonian spit in lithuania (near klaipėda).

i guess the florida reporter was too lazy to send a photographer down to the beach to catch some naked people on film. so he picked a random beach photography without naked people that i took in lithuania two years ago and used it instead. surely a photo from a country as sexy as lithuania must have a naked person in it somewhere!

it's a strange world. but hey, at least they gave me the photo credit.

and in other news, this seems to be the only reference to "upyernoz" on the whole internets that isn't connected to me in any way. except now it is. now it's linked to my blog.