kenyan sex strike

the goal seems to be to end the feud between the president and prime minister. the outraged reaction by male MPs would be funnier if it weren't for the possible increase in domestic violence.

that's how they ended the peloponnesian war, right?

the zaballeen just can't get a break

first, the city of cairo hires foreign companies to start regular trash pickup in the city, thus robbing the zaballeen of their traditional jobs. now they're killing their pigs.

plus this makes no sense. while the flu started as a swine virus, it's already jumped to humans and there's no sign that any egyptian pigs have H1N1. given how the animals are generally viewed in the middle east, i can't help but wonder if the egyptian government isn't a lot more inclined to order a pig-cull than, say, a lamb-cull.

the new face of the GOP

i think the party leadership thinks that rebranding just means using the word "rebranding" a lot.

deMint's wish

looking ahead to the 2010 senate races, things really do look grim for the republicans. here in PA, we'll probably end up with a crappy democrat like specter. but with so many other potential republican losses, it probably won't matter that much.

the only real question is how long it takes the GOP to pull itself out of its death spiral.

pat toomey drops in on philadelphia drinking liberally

it was oddly appropriate considering all the specter talk tonight.

so the philadelphia drinking liberally group had its weekly gathering. then john went to the bathroom. when he came back up he said "i think pat toomey is eating downstairs."

"where?" someone asked.

"down the stairs, first booth" said john.

i had to confess that i didn't know what toomey looked like. but i googled up a picture on my iphone and then volunteered to scout it out.

"it definitely looks like him" i reported back. brendan raced down the stairs to talk to him. i followed a few minutes later, introduced myself, shook his hand and asked if i could take a crappy photo of him with my phone. here it is:


then i left him alone with brendan. john got this photo of them together:


meanwhile i took a photo of his limo and driver checking the meter:


we should have invited him up to the bar. but i think after talking to brendan he just wanted to eat his burger in peace.

ADDING: here's john's version of the story, and atrios' and mithras'. and here's the clog post and ray's got more pictures.

...and, of course, brendan's account of the conversation.

"filibuster proof" redux

after reading what krugman said,¹ it's worth repeating what i wrote last december. the 50 senator threshold that democrats needed lieberman to clear in 2006 when they sought to control the senate is not the same as the 60 senator threshold that the democrats now need to beat a filibuster.

the democrats put up with lieberman in 2006 because, by allying himself with the democratic caucus, he delivered the democrats control of the senate. deciding who controls the senate, however, is essentially a head count. it doesn't depend upon votes of individual senators on individual issues.

with specter included and assuming that franken is eventually seated, it's true that the democrats will have 60 members of their caucus in the senate. and it's also true that you need 60 votes to avoid a filibuster. but that doesn't mean that the democratic majority is filibuster-proof. a filibuster is decided on a case-by-case basis. it's not a one-time head count like control of congress is. senator specter (or any senator) is free to vote however he wants on each cloture vote. just having a "D" next to his name doesn't guarantee anything. indeed, specter has already said that he's not going to be an automatic filibuster-buster for the dems. as atrios says, specter is still free to be a dick. just like he always has.

------
ADDING:
1- and what paul campos says.

the real problem

chris bowers is right, this is a pretty rotten deal. but the problem isn't specter, it the state party leadership that does everything it came to stop competitive primaries from taking place. that's what got us senator casey instead of a real progressive, and that's what will get us another term of specter.

switcheroo

specter switches parties. or at least, he will for next year's democratic primary. it's less clear to me whether he's switching caucuses right away.

this would have been a much smarter move before he came out against and effectively stopped the EFCA. before that, he would have been a shoe-in. now he's going to have to work hard to union support, risking another flip-flop on the EFCA issue.

on the other hand, switching is really the only hope that specter has to keep his seat. the big risk is that switching for such obvious reasons undermines his free-thinking mavericky credentials and makes him seem like just another mercenary politician.

(via MatthewB on FB)

game over

that's it, we're all gonna die!

no room?

russ douthat's first NYT column appeared today, but it wasn't in the dead tree edition that i read on the train. at the bottom of the online column it says that his column will appear on tuesdays, but where will it appear? will it only be an online thing?

someone doesn't like the GOP

first we had the mount redoubt eruption, making bobby jindal's mockery of volcano monitoring during the debate over the stimulus package look even stupider. and now the freakout about swine flu is reminding people of how republicans called flu pandemic preparedness funding wasteful during that same stimulus package debate. susan collins even succeeded in pulling that funding out of the bill in exchange for her support. talk about foresight!

it's almost like nature itself is plotting to make the GOP look dumb. someone should look to see if the republicans ever attacked funding for earthquake preparedness. if so, maybe we should start evacuating now?

ADDENDUM: some nobel laureate totally ripped off this post, or maybe great minds think alike... okay, i probably just bungled into the same idea as him. i really did write this post before i saw krugman's. really, i swear!

exceptions

i've never been as concerned about the logistics of withdrawal from iraq as i was about the idea of withdrawal itself. it's always been clear that pulling that many people and equipment out of the country would be a complicated and time consuming process. the main issue for me has been getting the goal to be leaving rather than staying. as long as that's what this country is trying to do, how they go about it was important, but not something i know enough about to have strong feelings either way.

so when i read this article my main question is whether this is just a one-time exception that wouldn't interfere with the overall project of getting out, or whether the u.s. leadership really doesn't want to leave and is dragging its feet. would this just me a small logistical change on the overall withdrawal route, or is this just stalling?

i really can't tell. but it does make me more vigilant in looking for other signs of stalling.

something we might see someone saying

last fall, when the full scope of the current financial crisis was becoming apparent at the same time that president bush agreed to a binding timetable to withdraw from iraq as part of the SOFA, it occurred to me that the jihadis would probably take credit for the collapse of the american economic system. after all, they took credit for the fall of the soviet union, claiming that the USSR's dissolution was caused by god's wrath for invading afghanistan. it's a pretty simplistic after-the-fact spin on those events, but so is every just-so story. it's not really any more ridiculous than the one where the soviet union's fall was caused by ronald reagan telling mr. gorbachev to tear down that wall.

anyway, it seemed like the sinking american economy and agreement to withdraw were too parallel for someone not to notice and start telling the same basic story. but i haven't heard anyone make that claim yet. but i still expect i will eventually.

today i thought of another variation on that claim, maybe one that could be made by an islamist who knows a little more about the source of the economic crisis. mortgage-backed securities only can really work as an investment because mortgages are charged interest. the promise of owning a revenue stream that will add up to several times the amount of the original debt is essentially what investors were buying when they bought those things. the extra value from the interest is what makes the debt worth buying.

islam forbids the charging of interest. so i can imagine some muslim fundamentalist claiming that the west faces economic collapse, not just because it invaded muslim countries, but also because it violated god's rule against charging interest--that led to the securitization of mortgages, which led to toxic assets, which led to an insolvent banking system, which led to the current mess.

i'm just putting this out there so i can say i was right if anyone starts making that claim. if no one does, i'll just pretend this post doesn't exist.

shit that's never gonna happen

a testimony to our dumb discourse, this really could be a regular series.

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart	M - Th 11p / 10c
Sh#t That's Never Gonna Happen - Global Currency
thedailyshow.com
Daily Show Full Episodes Economic Crisis Political Humor

specter is toast

this is another nail in the coffin. and if by some miracle he manages to survive the primary, he'll probably lose in the general election. in past years, specter has managed to survive in this progressively bluer state, by getting the union vote. that's pretty much over now. he's pretty much screwed in both the primary and the general election.

well, maybe not the general election. his best chance there is if the democratic leadership deep-sixes any serious primary challenge and gets some bland party hack to run for the seat. but it's still saying a lot that the best this well-entrenched incumbent senator has going for him is the incompetence of the other party.

truth commission

it's strange how the truth commission for bush-era torture allegations is being treated in this country's discourse. the "truth commission" idea is modeled after the south african truth and reconciliation commission. that model has been successfully used in several other countries that have emerged from a period when their leaders committed serious crimes.

truth commissions, as they have been used internationally, are generally viewed as an alternative to criminal prosecution. truth commissions hand out legal immunity to people willing to tell the truth to clear the air and document the nation's past crimes. the country uses a truth commission to avoid the pain of politically charged prosecutions.

but the way the truth commission debate is shaping up here in the u.s. seems to be completely different. it's not portrayed as a choice between a truth commission or prosecution, it's portrayed as a choice between truth commission or just letting them get away with it. in fact, for some reason both the media and politicians who have addressed this issue seem to think that a truth commission would be a precursor to prosecution, rather than an alternative track.

sometimes an entire debate is won or lost by how the issue is framed. if the choice is between criminal prosecution or a truth commission, the truth commission is the one that looks like the reasonable moderate position. if, on the other hand, the issue is "truth commission" versus "doing nothing", "doing nothing" is the clear favorite to win.

persistence of vision

i do find the persistence of the pakistani military establishment's belief that india is the biggest threat to that country to be pretty weird. how much of the country needs to fall out of the central government's control before they think otherwise?

or do they not really think that way? sometimes i wonder if the news i get through this american prism underestimates the pakistanis.

on bananas and witches

sure, because banana republics are notorious for their zealous prosecution of torture.

sarcasm aside, i understand why having a new administration come in and use the power of the state to settle scores against members of the prior regime is a bad precedent. but the bush administration record of legalizing torture is a bad precedent too. there needs to be an accounting for this. on top of that, the u.s. is legally required to pursue torture allegations. not pursuing what the bush administration did would itself be illegal.

put another way, a "witch hunt" is bad because there are no witches (or at least there were none in the satan worshipping sense that the folks of salem thought). someone engages in a "witch hunt" when they smear innocent people with baseless charges. in this case, there's a real basis for the charges and the people involved seem far from innocent.

what tom tomorrow said

along the line of the point that i've been trying to make recently, i think that this cartoon is actually fairly accurate. (click for a better view)

i just don't think the rightblogistanis realize how ridiculous they look to other people. want another example? there's this quote:

Last week, conservatives were complaining Obama was establishing a socialistic fascist dictatorship.

This week, conservatives are complaining Obama does not want to torture his opponents.

want another one? how about the claims that obama is a marxist because his administration is shoveling tons of dollars into wall street while working hard to avoid creating an ownership interest in the bailed out companies.

the right is being mocked because they keep doing very silly things. at the same time, they seem to be completely unaware how silly they look to everyone else. i find that to be completely fascinating.

hate triangle

good news, armenia and turkey could finally work out their differences!

bad news, armenia and turkey could finally work out their differences!

warrants outrage

it's fun to watch jane harman express "outrage" at the fact that her call was tapped and recorded by the NSA. harman was one of the democrats who was briefed on the bush administration's warrantless wiretap program before it was reported in the media. and then she became one of the biggest defenders of the program among the democrats after the NYT broke the story.

and now comes steny hoyer expressing "great concern" that a fellow congressman had her phone tapped. hoyer was the one who brokered the deal giving retroactive immunity to the illegal wiretap program and making it easier for the NSA to tap and record americans' conversations in the future.

apparently the real problem here is not harman's fourth amendment and statutory rights to privacy--in fact, because the harman tap was initiated as part of a criminal investigation it appears to be a legal tap made pursuant to a warrant--the real problem is that the target is a member of congress.

the right's dilemma

michael tomasky takes apart the latest smear of one of obama's judicial nominees. it's pretty interesting how blatant the lie is and how easy it would be to refute, if they just took a few minutes to look into it. and yet in right blogistan the lie is repeated endlessly as fact.

this is what i predict: i expect few, if any, of those bloggers will ever retract what they say. certainly newt gingrich won't. to them, judge hamilton will always be the judge that favored allah over jesus. inside their own bubble the lie becomes an unquestioned fact, a premise for their next howl. "judge hamilton" will become a shorthand for their own paranoid belief that islam is favored over christianity in this country--something that seems laughably false to people outside their bubble. and even though most people probably won't know who "judge hamiliton" is, the right will evoke his name in speeches. it's a good way to throw red meat to their supporters, but it's a horrible way to ever win over anyone who isn't already on your side.

that's basically the dilemma of the modern right. they're building their own alternate reality that they really believe to be true. and they believe that repeating these "facts" is the best roat out of the political wilderness. except that to everyone else, the repetition of stuff like this look like rants. it isn't very convincing (especially, to anyone who bother's to fact-check them) and instead makes them look crazy.

LID+2 (الصيني )

ما زال ننتظر

wall street's latest problem

oops.

(via link candy from here)

preconditions

i'm glad that the u.s. state department is rejecting israeli prime minister benjamin netanyahu's insistence that the palestinians recognize israel as a jewish state as a precondition of negotiations. and i'm glad that bibi seems to have caved on the issue ("Contrary to reports, I don't condition dialogue with the Palestinians on recognition of Israel as a Jewish state. Nevertheless, progress in the peace process does depend on the willingness to recognize Israel as a Jewish state.") if nothing else, this shows the enormous potential influence the u.s. has over the israeli leadership--assuming that the u.s. government is just willing to use it.

the reason why i think bibi's original pre-condition was a bad idea, and why it's a good thing that the u.s. got him to drop it, is because recognition of israel (including how israel will be recognized) is one of the few bargaining chips the palestinians have. also, recognizing israel as a "jewish state" essentially cancels out one of the palestinians' key demands, the palestinian right of return. demanding that palestinians give up its recognition chip and its right of return even before the horse trading can begin, all you're doing is requiring one side make concessions in exchange for nothing.

that's why any offer to negotiate with preconditions is essentially a fraudulent offer to negotiate. negotiations means give-and-take. preconditions means just take. when you impose preconditions it shows that you're not willing to negotiate. but because it is dressed up in the language of an offer to negotiate, it creates the false impression that you are.

toxic bonus

wow, this is a really good idea:

Why not say that all bank compensation above a baseline amount - say, $150,000 in annual salary - has to be paid in toxic assets off the bank’s balance sheet? Instead of getting a check for $10,000, the employee would get $10,000 in toxic assets, at their current book value. A federal regulator can decide which assets to pay compensation in; if they were all fairly valued, then it wouldn’t matter which ones the regulator chose. That would get the assets off the bank’s balance sheet, and into the hands of the people responsible for putting them there - at the value that they insist they are worth. Of course, the average employee does not get to set the balance sheet value of the assets, and may not have been involved in creating or buying those particular assets. But think about the incentives: talented people will flow to the companies that are valuing their assets the most realistically (since inflated valuations translate directly into lower compensation), which will give companies the incentive to be realistic in their valuations. (Banks could inflate their nominal compensation amounts to compensate for their overvalued assets, but then they would have to take larger losses on their income statements.)

that's from two months ago, but it's new to me. and it still seems like a good idea now. apparently, credit suisse used a version of that idea last december. (prompting the folks over at baseline scenario to wonder who came up with the idea first)

whoever first thought of it, it seems like an almost magically clever solution for getting toxic assets off bank balance sheets while also not letting the people who put them there off the hook. other than the banksters' natural resistance to something that puts the risk of these assets on them personally, is there any reason why it shouldn't be done?

(via susie)

watch

the kids today don't wear a wristwatch. i'm not one of the kids today.

i have this watch that i'm really attached to. it goes backwards, i.e. counterclockwise, and i've had it forever. which means that i can't tell time on a normal clock anymore. well, that's not completely true. it's more like i can't easily tell time on a normal clock. but when i do encounter one of those round things with the hands that go clockwise, i'm so used to my counterclockwise watch that i have to stare at the clockwise clock and mentally flip the image. in other words, i imagine what the clock would look like if i were looking at it in a mirror. once i create the mental image of what that would look like--like how the time would look on my counterclockwise watch--i understand the time.

it's not as hard as it sounds, but it does take a few seconds more than the average person-who-is-used-to-clockwise-clocks would take. a few years ago, i decided this was a problem. i wanted to train myself to be "bilingual" in telling time. by that i mean i wanted to be able to instantly recognize the time on both a regular clockwise clock and on my beloved counterclockwise watch. so i got myself a clockwise clock and decided to wear the clockwise and counterclockwise watch on alternate days until i got used to both. but instead of shaping my brain into clockwise/counterclockwise bilingualism, instead it left me totally confused. whereas before i could at least instantly recognize the time on my counterclockwise watch and have to think when i looked at clockwise clocks, in the era of alternating watches i had to think hard no matter which watch was on my wrist. rather than making me bilingual, i felt like it was destroying my ability to tell time on either kind of clock. eventually, i called the experiment off and went back to being a purely counterclockwise watch-wearing person.

meanwhile because this backwards watch of mine is so beloved, i have dumped an unreasonable amount of money and effort into keeping it going. i'm not just talking about battery changes or watchband replacements. i've had plenty of them and they're not that expensive. i've also had the glass watch face changed a few times and twice i've had the internal mechanism completely rebuilt. and one of those rebuilding times i had to have it redone because when i got the watch back i discovered that it was going backwards from its normal backwards, that is, frontwards. so i had to get the watchmaker dude understand (despite his limited english) exactly what the problem was and to get him to do it again right, which to him was probably wrong.

anyway, the reason i'm bringing this up now is because there's a new problem with my beloved watch. see, while the guts of the thing have been replaced a few times, as has the glass watch face cover and the watchbands, the metal back bit (the part that lies against my wrist) is still the original metal. the edges of that thing have started to corrode which has made them sharp and jagged. for a little while it was actually making small cuts on my wrist. i ignored it and my wrist, noting that i wasn't paying attention, changed tactics and started making these itchy calluses instead. those things are actually less comfortable than the cuts. and so, for the first time, i'm trying to figure out what to do about it.

i could dump more money into replacing the back of the thing so it doesn't annoy my wrist. the problem with that is that, as the kids today have entered the post-watch era, the corner watch repair shop is becoming a rarer and rarer thing. it actually was pretty hard to find someone who was willing to replace the guts of my watch when i last did it a few years back. it's probably even harder to find someone who can do this now.

or alternatively, i could try to ebay myself a replacement. i would need to ebay because the beloved watch is no longer made and hasn't been made for years. and because it's beloved, if i were to replace it, the replacement would have to be just like the original. except that, even assuming i could find the perfect replacement, any such replacement would be as old as the original. it might even have the same problem, or would be likely to develop it in relatively short order. and what are the odds that someone else has refurbished the thing as much as i have? the original watch was not very expensive. i think the odds of that are pretty low.

or i could switch to a regular clockwise running watch. except that i don't actually like watches that much, unless they are the beloved watch.

or i could become one of the kids today and become a watchless person.

or i can ignore the problem with the beloved watch and wait to see if the calluses eventually get less uncomfortable.

presecution over impeachment

atrios suggests impeaching jay bybee. bybee is the author of the earliest of the torture memos that were released yesterday and he currently sits on the ninth circuit court of appeals.

federal judges are subject to impeachment, although article III, the section of the constitution that is about the judicial branch, doesn't mention impeachment, but it does say that federal judges can hold their office "for good behavior." the problem is that the "good behavior" seems to refer to the judge's conduct while serving as a judge.

13 federal judges have been impeached in the history of this country. four were acquitted, seven removed, and two resigned after they were impeached but before a conviction. every one of those cases was about the judge's conduct after he (they were all men) became a federal judge.

there is no precedent for impeaching bybee for a memo he wrote before he was nominated to the bench. a better strategy would be to prosecute him for approving torture. that would force him to either resign or could be a basis to remove him from office later. of course, it's pretty unlikely such a prosecution would ever actually happen.

bachmann prediction

there are a few other contenders, but i think that michelle bachmann may be the craziest member of congress. when she's not introducing legislation to ban the latest wingnut conspiracy fantasy, she's floating paranoid theories about the president, or telling lies about other members of her congressional delegation.

i predict that later this year bachmann will create a stir about the puerto rico quarter that was just released. someone will give her one as change in the capitol caffeteria and bachmann will flip out, claiming that allowing P.R. to have a state quarter is part of a devious secret plot to make the spanish-speaking island a state. maybe she can tie it to greater aztlan or illegal immigrants somehow.

pay attention to atrios even though he's no longer on the cover of any newspaper

this is basically one of the points i was trying to make in my previous post:

All fun aside, there's obviously nothing wrong with the right attempting to engage in protest politics. The problem is that it was never clear what they were protesting. So far Obama has cut taxes for most of the population and... well, that's it. The protests of "The Left" have long been mocked for lacking message discipline. That criticism has often been fair. The difference is that our side's protests generally have a single point ("don't do this stupid fucking war in Iraq") which gets hijacked by a bunch of other causes when the speakers hit the stage. But the teabaggers... honestly, I still have no idea what it was about. I mean, I know it was about tribal allegiance against Barack Mumia Saddam Obama III. But it wasn't actually about anything else.

the crowd yesterday was clearly anti-obama and everything and anything that he was doing. but exactly what were they proposing that would convince anyone that they should be running the economy instead? i was there for an hour and i still have no idea. that's why this tea party "movement" is not going to go anywhere. the polls show that the public trusts obama on economic matters more than the GOP by a fairly comfortable margin. how are they going to convince the public, and especially independents given how low the numbers of self-identifying republicans has fallen in most parts of the country, that they have better ideas? i just don't think that tea parties have any chance of helping them win any debate. if anything, the low turnout compared to say, well just about any demonstration or rally i have ever been to, just makes them seem more marginal.

if there's one impression i didn't get yesterday, it was that this crowd was part of some rising populist uprising against the current administration.

tea party

the philadelphia tea party was just a block or two from my office, so how could i resist?

i met up with john, ray, brendan and a bunch of other people who don't even have blogs at the rally. the crowd was medium-small, i'm guessing between 150 and 200 people. but people were coming and going so it's hard to say how many total people attended. it was raining the whole hour i was out there, which probably also cut down on attendance. on top of that, there were a fair number of liberal infiltrators like me. and that's just the people i recognized. who knows how many more were there that i didn't? the loyalties of the the people holding signs or wearing right wing regalia was pretty clear. but most of the people were just standing around with umbrellas looking soggy.

meanwhile, brendan ran around, making tea bag jokes with B. and recording youtube videos on his camera. ray wandered through the protesters taking pictures of signs. i didn't end up talking to the true believers like i wanted to. at one point i watched one of the organizers get interviewed, but he left when i tried to ask him a question. i didn't try again after that.

there were a bunch of ron paul people there. they would boo whenever any speaker said the word "federal reserve" and yelled "ron paul!" when the speaker asked who would be the next winner of american idol. the speeches i heard had a definite libertarian bent. they recounted the glorious gold-standard pre-new deal past, talked about abolishing the federal reserve, equated tax with theft, ranted about socialism, used that ubiquitous frogs in boiling water metaphor, et cetera. i didn't hear any proposals of how to deal with the current financial crisis other than to stop doing what obama is doing.

neither i nor my friends were making any effort to stand apart from anyone else (where's the fun in that)? no doubt we were counted as supporters of the tea party by the teabag promoters. that probably would have bothered me if the message of the protest didn't come across as so fringe. if republicans are counting on this "movement" to revive its fortunes at the polls, i think we're looking at a comfortable democratic majority for a while.

i'll link to my compadre's accounts, videos and photos when i find them.

UPDATE: hey, it looks like my uneducated guess about the crowd size is about as good as the inky's. meanwhile, ray has started putting up has posted his tea photos. click at your own risk. it looks like i'm in two of them.

UPDATE2: brendan's post is up. i assume his videos will come later.

what is norm thinking?

i really don't know what is going through norm's head right now. he has no real chance of winning the legal battle anymore. the best he can do is delay franken from taking his seat but that will probably ruin his long-term political prospects, at least in minnesota.

the national party has every incentive for him to fight on and deny the dems another senate seat, but coleman himself really doesn't if he ever wants to get another elected office. i guess the national party will take care of him, maybe give him a job organizing the RNC or something. or maybe he'll get to be a FOX news contributor. wingnut welfare usually does take care of its own. but if norm has any political ambition, he might as well write that off--at least for the next bunch of years.

isn't it ironic

like rain on your tea par-tay

cautionary tale

for a while i've been saying that members of the bush administration should avoid traveling to other countries after they left office because they risked international prosecution. that appears to be happening. i doubt if these prosecutions will really ever happen. but it will put these five individuals in an uncomfortable position. in addition to limiting their ability to travel, it's a pretty major black mark on their record which could also affect their lives right here in the u.s. for example, if berkley decides to follow this precedent, it could jeopardize john yoo's job.

the obama administration should also take note. the policies they are now defending are not the same as the ones that got the bush administration officials into legal trouble. but the current administration seems to be embracing an expansive view of executive power that led to the abuses of the prior administration. it's not clear to me at all why they would want to walk down this potentially dangerous path. unlike the bush administration, the obama administration has not given any broad justification for its stance on these cases. in fact, its position on habeas corpus and state secrets directly contradicts some of obama's public pronouncements on those issues.

almost as fun as a tea party

egypt's clowns go on strike.

shaking in my boots

apparently the "considerable mockery" of the teabagger's movement indicates that liberals are scared of them. at least that's how right blogistan seems to be spinning it.

this is shaping up to be the perfect storm. usually when people do something that is unintentionally funny they realize it pretty quickly and stop being funny. in this case, the right has convinced itself that the mockery is nervous laughter, not genuine amusement. and because they love "pissing off liberals" more than anything else, they're likely to ramp up their ridiculousness, thinking that liberals will quake even more. instead they'll end up being even more fun to watch.

this just highlights one of the disadvantages of a movement that doesn't listen to what the other side says and yet simultaneously believes that it knows exactly what the the other side thinks. well, disadvantage for them. it's looking pretty good from where i sit. i personally can't wait for tax day this year.

easy to deal with

the weirdest thing about this controversy is that i don't think that chinese names are hard to pronounce. i mean, chinese immigrants generally don't expect anyone here to get the tone right (i.e. the only potentially hard part). once the tone goes out the window, you usually end up with fairly simple, generally monosyllabic, name.

i mean, representative brown brought this up when she was talking to a guy named "mr. ko." mr. ko! how hard is that?

vote maggie

consider that an official rubber hose endorsement.

to answer perino's question...

...the proof is around the world. if you want to see it yourself, all you have to do is get off the o'reilly set, go to other countries, and talk to people. quite of few of them have spontaneously talked about that very issue to me. it really isn't hard to find a ton of evidence if you really want to see it.

i'm incredibly fascinated by this weird alternate universe that movement conservatives seem to be living in today. perino takes something that seems obviously true to anyone who has talked to regular people around the world over the past few years and then claims that, contrary to many people's first hand experience, that something is completely false. to me, and i think to much of the country, perino comes across really badly when she says such things. but her audience, the small percentage of bush administration loyalists, she seems completely reasonable.

it's like joel achenbach's dispatch from planet hannity, or roy edroso's weekly surveys of right blogistan. when i first became politically aware in the 1980s there were mainstream conservatives and then there were the john birchers, a crazy fringe minority. nowadays, it's completely reversed. 2 decades ago, i would have to pick up those hand typed tracts at truck stops to find people railing about socialist infiltration of government. now i just need to listen to republican members of congress.

members of the conservative movement seem to be speaking their own dialect. when they talk among themselves, goes over fine. they're just reinforcing what their own people already believe or want to believe to be true. but they don't seem to realize that when viewed from the outside, these claims come across as completely batshit crazy. as a result, these conservatives are largely unable to communicate with people who don't already share their political beliefs. because a clear majority of the country, and an overwhelming majority of democrats and independents, aren't in the conservative bubble, i don't know how the movement can ever hope to win another national election. every time they open their mouth, they build another wall between themselves and the rest of the country.

(HT MatthewB on FB for the achenbach link)

poops preview

almost three years ago i holy crapped the announcement that "everyone poops" was being adapted as a feature-length film. the project has apparently progressed since then. mr. aristocrats is out, mr. adaptation is in (which makes sense considering how unadaptable the book is).

also, there's a trailer! is this the next citizen kane or what?

crowd vs. crowd

hey remember that iconic scene six years ago today when u.s. troops took baghdad and pulled down a statue of saddam with iraqis looking on and cheering? CNN called the iraqis a "crowd", but this is a shot of the square when the statue was coming down:

today "crowds" of iraqis gathered in the same square demanding u.s. forces leave the country. this is what that "crowd" looked like:

(top photo via DU, bottom photo via think progress)

it's about time

richard cohen really is the only columnist in a major publication that is actually critical of the prevailing bordering-on-ridiculous wisdom about iran.

my favorite recent bibi absurdity about iran was when he claimed that the heavy casualties that iran suffered during the iran-iraq war proves that the regime is irrational. you know, because iranians getting killed fighting back after saddam hussein invaded proves that iranians are bloodthirsty.

meanwhile bibi comes from a country that has taken military action against its neighbors dozens of times since the 1979 iranian revolution, with two separate military actions (gaza and sudan) just in the last few months. iran hasn't shown nearly the propensity of israel (or the u.s., for that matter) in taking aggressive military action. indeed, in 1998 iran illustrated the regime's restraint when it decided not to attack the taliban after the group slaughtered iranian diplomats in mazar-i-sharif. iran had massed its troops on the border, but then decided to stand down because ultimately the iranian leaders decided that military action would get that country into a morass that it couldn't get itself out of. if only the israeli leadership could display that level of foresight. the iranian regime certainly had done plenty of stupid things, but the last 30 years of history has shown them to be anything but trigger happy.

first brendan now this

too funny for words.

at least he's looking off to the side, not staring at you from every corner.

tap, tap tap...

is this thing still on?

barf detergent

i didn't realize that barf brand detergent had such a following online. here's its wiki page (okay, stub), and here's my picture of a box of barf from bukhara.

if tomorrow's errand works out okay, maybe i'll get to bring some barf home with me later this year.

if a G-20 falls in the woods...

the G-20 happened in the middle of my film fest mania last week. but even though my thought is almost a week old i'm still wondering about this:

i've been reading all these people who think that the G-20 summit ended up being surprisingly substantive. you wouldn't know it from 90% of the ridiculous gaffe-obsessed media coverage, but apparently the joint communique issued by world leaders addressed actual issues related to the financial crisis. this time, it wasn't just a bunch of vapid pronouncements. hell, even paul krugman liked it, and he hasn't been happy with much lately.

but even if we assume that the document coming out of the meeting was the best of all possible documents, does that mean that the meeting mattered? is it going to change a single u.s. policy? the document, for example, called on the world to institute a bunch of new regulations of hedge funds. but i don't think that pronouncement makes such regulation any more likely to pass congress. actually, i have a hard time imagining that it will effect the administration's or congress' actions much at all. and then there's the internal political situation in the 19 other countries to consider. even if by some miracle the u.s. actually does all the stuff in the document, what are the chances that every other country will manage to get it through their parliament, cabinet, or whatever?

other than making good reading for economic wonks of the world, did anything actually happen in london last week?

call the bluff

i say let them go nuclear. seriously, what exactly is at stake here? are they really going to block everything on the lofty principle of hiding the prior administration's war crimes? do they really think that will be seen as a winner to their constituents?

besides, the republicans are already voting lock-step against most of obama's proposals. i expect he'll get just as little support from the GOP for his nominees no matter what he does with the torture memos. (indeed, they were already blocking several before this even came up) this seems to me to be a pretty obvious bluff. the only real question is whether the democrats will just give in, like the weenies they are. i'm hoping they surprise me, release the memos, and then slam the GOP with their own words about an "up and down vote" from 4 years ago if they actually try to filibuster.

on top of that, the GOPers who are making this threat are using the word "nuclear" all wrong. this is really the opposite of the so-called "nuclear option." instead of using a procedural ploy to declare the filibuster unconstitutional, getting rid of the practice, what they're threatening now is to use the filibuster not get rid of it. indeed, if anyone used the nuclear option now, the GOP wouldn't even have this bluff.

a quick story and sita sings the blues

i almost didn't get in to sita sings the blues (imdb). i arrived just after the screening sold out. B, a friend from drinking liberally who was volunteering for the fest at the ticket box, suggested the wait list. that had worked for me before, so i got in the wait list line. i was #8 out of about 25 people waiting for tickets.

meanwhile, i saw simon and ashley, another pair of friends from drinking liberally, in the ticket holder line. two years ago our situation was reversed, i was in the ticket line for eagle vs. shark and they were on the wait list. the ticketed people are seated first, the wait listers get whatever (usually crappy) seats are left. i saved four non-crappy seats for simon, ashley and two of their friends for "eagle" in 2007. so tonight, through a series of hand signals, simon promised to hold a seat for me in case i could get off the waiting list.

unfortunately, after they let the ticketed people go in, one of the film fest people came out and told us wait listers that there were no seats for us in the theater. everyone in the wait list left. except me, i went inside to the box office.

"i thought i had an in!" i joked to B. "i'm sorry," she said, "but maybe you can still get in." "what?" i asked. "just sit down with me," she replied. so i sat with the other volunteers in the film fest box office. a minute later the location managed came out and said they had a few seats in the very front that the festival volunteers could use. B asked the manager if i could have one of the volunteer seats and so i got in after all. meanwhile simon and ashley were also saving me a (probably much better) seat, a seat i never got around to using. it really helps to have connections.

anyway...

"sita" ended up being well worth the trouble. it's an extremely entertaining animated break-up musical. the film combines a 3,000 year old hindu myth, modern sensibility, a bit of autobiography, at least five different animation styles and jazz vocalist annette hanshaw to make a funny irreverent film that was just a pleasure to watch. it's hard to believe that the entire feature length film was created on writer/director nina paley's PC.

because of song copyright issues, the film may never come out. if you get a chance to see "sita" in a theater, jump at it. nina paley has made the film available online (look for the "watch it" link at the top or bottom), but the film is gorgeous on the big screen. really hope more people get the chance to see it big.

"sita" was the last film i'll see at this year's film festival. it's nice to end on a high note. 13 films (14 if you count the talk cinema film) in 9 days isn't bad. i would have seen a couple more, if a pair of friends didn't insist on getting older and having parties about it. but i'm satisfied with this year's run and i'm ready for the end. blogging about other subjects will resume relatively soon.

UPDATE: glomarization's much more negative review of the film (and a screed about the copyright issue) is here. she seems to be one of the few who didn't love the film.

the pope's toilet and the brothers quay

i saw the pope's toilet this morning through talk cinema, not this year's film festival (though it was in last year's). it tells the uplifting tale of beto, a resident of melo, uruguay who makes his living smuggling goods over the brazillian border on his bicycle.

okay, maybe not that uplifting. the film begins just before pope john paul ii's may 1988 visit to the town. beto, like many of melo's residents, hopes to use the papal visit to break the cycle (heh) of poverty. beto's idea is to build a toilet in his yard and then charge pope-watchers for its use. needless to say, a whole series of things go wrong, both before and during the pope's appearance.

"the pope's toilet" is a 2007 film that still hasn't come out, even after winning all kinds of awards on the festival circuit last year. most film that appear at "talk cinema" do eventually get a theatrical release. if this one ever does, i think it's worth seeing.

after the going to the toilet, i made a run back to the festival for the quay brothers sampler, a collection of seven short films by the avant garde animators, steven and timothy quay. the quay brothers are the guest of honors to this year's fest. my only exposure to their work before today was the piano tuner of earthquakes, a film i saw at the festival three years ago. i didn't like it, but i also wasn't sure whether the problem was "piano tuner" itself, or if it was because it was the fourth of four consecutive films i saw that day. (i have since set my limit at three because of that bad experience).

so this year with those quays being the guests and all, i decided to give them another chance. i picked the sampler because it would give a good sense of their body of work and figured that i might like their work more as a series of shorts than in a feature length film. the shorts spanned over 20 years of their career and were pretty different from one another. on the other hand they were all pretty much the same. the quays have a definite style, dark lighting, stop motion animation of "found art" (i.e. garbage), discordant music, no real dialogue (or at least a dialogue where you can't make out the words). there is some kind of plot, but it's often hard to figure out what exactly that is. the biggest pleasure from their work is the visual spectacle of it all. but frankly, that wasn't enough to hold my interest after the first few shorts.

i did stay for the first half of the Q and A at the end. but all that did was remind me why i don't like Q and As with filmmakers. if anything it just reinforced my impression of the brothers' pretentiousness.

oh well. i think i'm finally done with the brothers quay. it's just not my thing after all. to prove that i was at the Q and A, here's a crappy iphone photo i took.

so there.

tulpan

picking a film because of its country of origin usually doesn't turn out well. but it worked out pretty well with tulpan (imdb). i've only seen a handful of central asian films, but aside from mongol, the ones i have seen all have that slow pacing and deliberate lingering scenes that i associate with iranian cinema. i really like those films, but they're clearly not for everyone.

but if you don't mind the pacing, tulpan is both a lot of fun and beautiful on the screen. i don't know if the latter is to the credit of the cinematographer, or if its just that the central asian steppe is so visually striking it's going to look great no matter who is behind the camera. with the big sky as a backdrop, tulpan is basically a comedy about asa, a young kazakh who dreams of getting married and getting his own yurt and flock of sheep. he can only get a flock (and yurt) if he gets married. so he sets his sights on tulpan, who seems to be the only unmarried woman his age anywhere near him on the vast steppe. maybe "sights" is the wrong word. in the process you get a remarkable look at asa and his family's way of life, a traditional nomadic style with little hints of the modern world beyond the horizon. plus, it's got this incredibly graphic sheep childbirth scene. actually, two of them. how can anyone resist that?

the NYT happened to review this film the other day. its review is here.

lemon tree

lemon tree (imdb) was the best film i've seen in the fest this year, at least so far. there are still a few more days and i still have passes to burn.

in any case, "lemon tree" tells the story of salma zidane, a palestinian woman who lives off a lemon grove on the edge of the green line. the israeli defense minister moves into the property just across the fence and soon her lemon trees are declared to be a security risk by the minister's security protocol. salma ends up fighting for her lemon trees all the way to the israeli supreme court. the film does a really good job of creating three dimensional characters on all sides of the story. the defense minister, his wife and the soldiers are not caricatures, even as the film portrays the hardships they impose on salma and the helplessness of the palestinians against israeli power. like in the syrian bride, director eran riklis does an great job of showing the way that politics creates turmoil in the lives of regular people.

the fantastic acting of haim abbass didn't hurt either. but she's always really good. no wonder mrs. noz developed a crush on her after seeing the visitor.

festival faves

the festival favorites have been announced. each year the fest reserves a bunch of slots at the end of the festival to show festival faves. in each screening, viewers are handed a ballot and each viewer rates each film in the fest on a scale of one to five. supposedly the the faves are the films rated highest by the viewing audience.

but it always seems like the festival faves selections are a total crock. the faves list went up yesterday when there were still four days left in the 12 day festival. there are a bunch of films that haven't had their first screening yet, and many more that still need to have their second or third screening how can it really be the audience's favorites if the audience hasn't seen all the films yet?

on top of that, this year the only "favorite" that i have seen is for my father, the film i liked least of the ten i've seen so far. while that doesn't prove the selection is a crock--maybe i was in the overwhelming minority on that film (though it didn't seem like it from the audience i was sitting in)--it does tell me that i shouldn't put any stock at all in the films that get declared to be faves.

on the other hand, the good news for all you folks who have been bored to tears seeing all these posts about films that will probably never get released is that the festival is almost over. by tuesday, my little vacation from all that other stuff will be over and i'll start ranting and raving about such things again.

white night wedding

iceland again? i wanted to see white night wedding (imdb) because it was directed by baltasar kormákur, the director of 101 reykjavik. "white night" ended up being pretty different from "101". but for all it's problems i basically liked it.

while "101" takes place in reykjavic, "white night" takes place on the opposite end of the country, a remote island off the northern coast. we meet jon, a professor planning to marry thora, a former student who is 18 years his junior. interspersed with scenes of the day leading up to the wedding are flashbacks to jon's prior life, when he moved to the island to care for his mentally ill wife anna. while there is some light touches in both story lines, story A (the day before the wedding to thora) has a lot more drunken hijinks than story B, which revolves around the disintegration of jon's marriage with anna and the beginning of his romance with thora.

there is a nominally happy ending when the two stories eventually reach their thematic intersection at the end. but by then i was rooting for them to call the wedding off. while jon was supposed to be a character preoccupied with guilt and regret, he just came across as uncaring and bland. i honestly didn't see what thora saw in him. cg attributed that to bad acting, and maybe that's all it was.

despite it's problems, i still thought it was an entertaining film. there are some genuinely funny bits. while the serious plot line seemed a little flat, the film's sense of humor made it worth seeing.

meanwhile, i recognized Ólafía hrönn jónsdóttir (well, her face, not her name) from back soon. there can't be too many icelandic actresses. if anything it's surprising that more didn't overlap.

UPDATE (4/5/09): glomarization was also at the screening, her review of the film is here.

sadder even than that one with the clown and the daisy and the tear rolling down

no one wants to play sega with harrison ford


unfortunately (or fortunately for mrs. noz), the original painting is sold.

(via)

jury duty

jury duty (imdb) doesn't bother with introductions. in the very first scene, grégoire duval, a pharmacist in small town france, tries to force himself on a young woman. she starts to scream and he strangles her to death. it's 1961, in the midst of the algerian war of independence. the victim's algerian boyfriend is accused of the murder and is widely assumed to be guilty in the racially-charged atmosphere. duval is chosen for the jury and has to decide whether he is willing to sentence an innocent man to death to cover for his own crime.

the film is intended to be about the racial politics of early 1960s france, but it is unintentionally said about sexual politics both then and now. there are basically only two female characters in the movie, the victim, who we know little about other than the fact that she slept around a lot, and duval's wife, who spends the entire film plotting to advance her position in society, even if it means covering for her husband's crimes. and there we have it, the classic bitch/slut dichotomy. on one level the film is about duval's attempts to make up for his own guilt by saving the innocent algerian. on another, the film pours all its sympathy on male characters (even the would-be rapist/murderer protagonist) and treats the female characters rather badly. it's really striking how much effort the film makes to build (well deserved) sympathy for the accused algerian, but pays no such attention to the murdered woman.

in writing this post, i discovered that the film is actually a remake of a 1962 film. so maybe the film's sexism can be explained as the a product of that earlier time. and yet, from what i can tell from the imdb entry, in the earlier film the accused was not algerian. it seems the original plot focused more on class differences than race. presumably, race was added to the modern version to explore an issue that was unexplorable when the original was made. but if that's true, couldn't they also have done a better job dealing with the sexism of the story?

one more thing, i don't understand why they gave the film the english name "jury duty." a lot of times the original names of foreign films don't sound right if translated word-for-word into english. so it makes sense that the filmmakers would want to give a film a catchier english title when it travels the the english-speaking world. if nothing else, it's a good marketing decision. but this film's original title is "le septième juré", which would translate as "the seventh juror". "the seventh juror" is a much better title for this film than "jury duty". "jury duty" sounds like the title of a comedy or buddy cop movie, not something that takes itself as seriously as this.