disarmament through testing

that's a funny idea.

dozen

my marriage with mrs. noz has now seen every sign of the chinese zodiac.

...i guess that was technically true as of the last chinese new year. yeah but as of today the marriage has seen same number of days for each sign!

...except that's probaby not true either, because the chinese use that lunar calendar. dammit. so much for that idea.

...okay, i'll shut up now. i always get in trouble when i try to be clever.

(for history buffs: 11 10 9 8 7...)

unsettling congress

i've been pleasantly surprised that the obama administration has stuck to its guns on demanding that israel freeze settlement construction. they've even brushed aside the usually bullshit about "natural growth." it's really amazing, and it's quite a change from the last two decades, when the u.s. has been officially against settlements but willing to quietly accommodate israeli demands for some form of expansion.

that obama isn't backing down on settlements is surprising. but what is really surprising is this:

It's not just the administration that's delivering Netanyahu that message, however. Whereas in the past Israeli leaders have sometimes eased pressure from Washington on the settlements issue by going to members of Congress, this time, observers in Washington and Israel say, key pro-Israel allies in Congress have been largely reinforcing the Obama team's message to Netanyahu. What changed? "Members of Congress have more willing to follow the leadership of the administration ... because [they] believe it is in our national security interest to move toward ending the conflict and that it is not a zero sum for Israel," the former senior Clinton administration official said.

"Netanyahu and [Israeli Foreign Minister Avigdor] Lieberman are probing, looking for areas they can get space gratis from the United States," says Hussein Ibish, a senior fellow at the American Task Force for Palestine. "And they are not finding it."

"We've been watching the move in Congress, especially among certain high profile Jewish American members -- people like Representative Gary Ackerman, Representative Robert Wexler, and Representative Howard Berman," Ibish said. "What has occurred -- and this has been greatly intensified by the election of Obama: There has been a growing sense of members of Congress who are well-informed on foreign policy ... that peace is essential to the American national interest and the Israeli national interest. And there's been a growing sense that the possibility of a two-state agreement is time-limited and that things like the settlements are incompatible with the goal of creating two states."

that's an even bigger change, and one the israelis should take very seriously because congress controls the budgeting of israel's aid package.

most recipients of u.s. aid packages are extremely sensitive to american concerns out of fear that the u.s. will cut them off. israel, however, hasn't acted that way. it is free, for example, to openly threaten an attack on iran, over american objections, even though the blowback from such an attack would seriously damage american interests. as long the u.s. congress was staunchly pro-israel and unwilling to even entertain serious criticism of that country, israel wasn't like other aid recipients and was not deterred by american disapproval. if this report is correct, that dynamic might finally be changing. and it puts the netanyahu government in an uncomfortable political position as the settler movement is a key part of his base.

waterworld

the free state project doesn't seem to be taking off. so some libertarians are giving up on new hampshire and heading out to sea. it's not really going galt, more like going costner.

(via roxanne on FB)

the best of khalid

i'm not sure if this will be entertaining to anyone who didn't have the al-kitaab experience, but trust me. this is hilarious:


(via g)

strange partners

there's something a little bit crazy about the netanyahu government negotiating with the united states over whether it can continue to build settlements on the west bank. i guess they want to look like they're negotiating, but refuse to do it with the representatives of the people who actually live there. so instead, they start haggling with another country on another continent half a world away.

and even then, i'm not sure that they're actually negotiating.

kashgar

since at least 2003, kashgar has been on my personal lists of places that i really wanted to see. it may not be on that list much longer.

evor lrak

actually, karl rove has it completely backwards. affirmative action might help someone get into an ivy league school (whether for race, sex, or alumni connections). it won't, however, make that person graduate with the highest honors.

affirmative action can only get you in the door, it doesn't get you good grades, you need intellectual abilities for that. that's a lesson rove's buddy, our former president, knows quite well.

false witness

the michelle bachmann comic book is coming!

finally the collected conspiracy theories the one of the craziest wingnuttiest member of congress collected into a single graphic novel! all the dialogue is taken from actual bachmann quotes from real media appearances. when it comes to bachmann, truth is often better than fiction.

a preview is here. the full comic will be on sale sometime this summer.

(via eric kleefeld @ TPM)

the ignorant-or-misleading question

the most interesting thing about conservative attacks on obama's health reform plan is that they bear no relation to obama's actual health reform plan. for these attacks to be effective you have to be completely ignorant about every serious health care proposal currently being proposed by the white house or members of congress. so either the conservatives making these arguments are completely ignorant about the actual health care debate, or they're just trying to mislead the american public because they can't address the merits of the actual proposals.

i suppose it could also be both.

brendan for inky columnist

i'd like to second the nomination of brendan skwire as columnist for the philadelphia inquirer.

i promise to buy a copy of every issue with his column.

michael bay eating a bowl of cereal

secret reports

i love "secret reports" leaked from intelligence agency. because they're "secret" they must be credible even though they're effectively unsourced. plus, they're not really secret if they're leaked. and few articles about "secret reports" both to note that leaks are sometimes done on purpose and when they are often are done for political reasons, which would further undermine the credibility of the secret report.

take this one for example. the israeli government leaks a report that claims that two south american countries are supplying iran with uranium. by complete coincidence, the two countries in question, venezuela and bolivia, happen to be countries with particular bad relations with israel right now. isn't it crazy how stories about countries an intelligence source doesn't like seems to leak a lot easier than stories about countries that the source does like? crazy!

okay, maybe it isn't really a coincidence. maybe venezuela and bolivia's hostility to israel and relative good relations with iran would explain why they would give iran uranium notwithstanding the threat that would pose to israel's safety.

fair enough, but that still doesn't explain how the hell venezuela and bolivia would get the uranium. shockingly, the report about the leak didn't bother to explain that part even though that seems pretty important to me. either the uranium is really coming from somewhere else (i.e. somewhere that actually has uranium) or the report is full of shit. i really don't see another alternative.

UPDATE (3/26/09): the NYT report about the leaked report says that "Bolivia has uranium deposits. Venezuela is not currently mining its own estimated 50,000 tons of untapped uranium reserves, according to an analysis published in December by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace." i was going by the fact that neither country has a uranium mining industry when i wrote that they didn't have uranium. i guess i didn't think about the possibility of untapped reserves. the report still has all of the doubts about it that any leaked intelligence document about a country that the leakee doesn't like should have. but if they actually have uranium, it could be true.

UPDATE 2 (3/26/09): bolivia denies that it supplied uranium to iran, specifically noting that it couldn't have supplied the uranium:

Mining Minister Luis Alberto Echazu dismissed allegations in a secret Israeli government report, saying "there isn't even a geological study (of uranium deposits), much less export" of uranium to another country.

via steve hynd from the comments. hynd's post about the matter is here.

busy

i'm off to watch reverend black preside over the opposite marriage of a pair of friends.

congratulations to the soon-to-be dr.-princess and dr. oolius-job!

what would dick do?

as cheney's latest media blitz continues, i keep thinking back to a conversation i had with MatthewB two weeks ago in which we posed the following thought experiment:

what would dick cheney do if president obama declared cheney to be an unlawful combatant and made him disappear? would cheney's lawyers go to court and argue that the president lacked the power to do that? or would dick stick to his principles and accept the detention as a legitimate exercise of executive power?

i'm not advocating that this actually happen. it would be a horribly bad idea for a whole host of fairly obvious reasons. but i still can't help but wonder.

travel day

at least that's what all the kool kids call it. i'm on a non-supertrain for a while.

whoosh! new jersey

nuclear credibility

i really think the u.s. has a major credibility problem when it proclaims that iran simply cannot have nuclear weapons. that's not to say that i want iran to go nuclear. i don't at all. but don't they realize how ridiculous and paternalistic it looks for a country sitting on the largest nuclear arsenal in the world talks about who is allowed to have nuclear weapons and who isn't?

the argument that iran's nuclear arsenal is unacceptable because it would "spark an arms race in the Middle East" seems a little odd because there already is an arms race in the middle east. the arms race was sparked years ago when israel got the bomb. so why does israel get left alone about its nukes when iran is not? it seems the only reason is that we like israel better.

the great race

will mrs. noz and i get to kazakhstan before franken gets to the senate?

if i had to bet, i'd go with franken. but at this point, i could see it going either way.

proposal about something i know little about

one of the causes of the current financial crisis was the buying and selling of mortgage debt. from what i understand, when you separate the bank that originally offered the mortgage from the entity that later services it, it eliminates a lot of the incentives that would otherwise keep the mortgage business sane.

when giving a mortgages doesn't mean a 20-30 financial commitment but instead creates a salable asset, banks have every incentive to give credit to anyone they can so they can sell the loan off for a profit. if they don't service the debt, why do they care whether the homeowner later defaults? the separation of the original lender from the servicer also makes it much more complicated to renegotiate mortgages when something goes wrong, even when that would otherwise make the most sense. properties go into foreclosure even when it doesn't benefit anyone involved.

so why not just ban the sale of debt based on real estate? it wouldn't help fix the already existing problem, you couldn't reverse sales that already have happened, but maybe it would help prevent this mess in the future. it seems like a simple ban would be easy to enforce. is there any reason that we would want to allow the sale of real-estate based debt to continue?

from gitmo to NIMBY

for years i was hoping that congress would get some courage and cut off funding for the war in iraq. but it's only now that harry reid suddenly discovers the power of the purse.

it also annoys me that reid just assumes everyone in guantanamo are terrorists. that's not even what the pentagon claims anymore, and yet politicians continue to use that term whenever they posture. besides, until they have a fair trial, at best they're just suspected terrorists. harry's in for a tough election next year. that's probably what is behind his end of this nonsense.

i find this whole not-in-my-backyard fear-mongering surrounding the gitmo issue to be pretty strange. presumably anyone convicted of terrorism would be held in a maximum security federal facility. as atrios once said, the fear mongerers seem to think that terrorists are not ordinary human beings, but rather possess special super powers so that a regular supermax facility just can't hold them. these people were tortured and broken for years down in gitmo. if anything, they are probably less of an escape threat than the average domestic convict.

maybe i don't see this as particular scary because members of my family already have had terrorists imprisoned almost literally in their backyard. mrs. noz's mother happens to live just up the hill from a maximum security federal penitentiary. i'm not sure if they are still there, but for a while the terrorists behind the 1993 world trade center bombers were held in that facility. there has never been any incident and i've never been afraid of terrorists when i visit. honestly, i don't think about the prison much at all when i'm there, even though it's hard to miss if you sit on the deck. i doubt if i'd worry at all if some people from gitmo ended up there eventually.

drinking liberally

in case you haven't noticed from the lack of posting, i've been pretty busy lately. still, i expect i will find a way to extricate myself and stagger over to center city drinking liberally tonight.

if you're in town, join us. if not, you suck.

hemorrhaging voters

i don't know why i continue to be fascinated by the GOP's ongoing disintegration as a viable national party. you'd think it would get old by now. but no, still fascinating. they've lost ground against the liberal, moderate and conservative demographic, the ultimate political trifecta!

i think the fascination is due to the fact that it is completely contrary to how i have grown to see the republican party over the past decade. even as i disagreed with most of their policies, they were always the ones who had their shit together. they weren't very good at governing, but they were brutally effective at winning elections. meanwhile, the democrats could always be counted on to be in total disarray. the dems are still kind of a mess, but all of a sudden the republicans have managed to somehow out-dysfunction them. i never would have thought that possible!

i just can't get over how quickly and completely the GOP has fallen. and i can't get over how what's left of the party base simply doesn't tolerate any effort to make them electable again.

local news

this is pretty funny. i can practically see that bank from my window right now.

(by "practically", i mean i can't. but i think i would be able to in winter. stupid trees.)

military commissions won't die

obama is now saying that his administration will try detainees before a military commission, contrary to what he said as a candidate. the administration says that his commissions will extend more rights to the accused than his predecessor's.

i want to know what exactly those more rights are, and what is still being left out. the whole problem with bush's military commission idea is that it was a way to try people without giving them the rights they would have in a regular court. it wasn't the military commissions per se that was the problem. the problem was the the deprivation of rights. (on that point i seem to disagree with glenn greenwald). in theory, if the military commission system had the same rights as a regular court (including appeals to the civilian court system), i wouldn't have a problem with it. but if the commissions are exactly the same as the courts, what's the point of using commissions? the only reason to use them is as a way to get around some rights, making it easier to get convictions. obama's military commissions with extra rights idea might not be as much of a kangaroo court as bush's version, but it's still a farce.

underlying all of this is a real dilemma. because of the way that the prior administration treated detainees, it's quite possible that they are unprosecutable. evidence obtained through torture is inadmissible. it may be that the cases against these detainees are all tainted. but so what? the rule against the inadmissibility of evidence obtained through torture is there for good reason. coerced information is unreliable. people will say whatever they think their torturer wants them to say when they are being tortured.

maybe when they were picked up, the bush administration actually did have a legitimate case against them. but if they ruined the case with subsequent mistreatment, we can't ever be sure how legitimate it was. if the administration can't prove its case without bending the rules to get a conviction, the accused should go free. that would be a hard choice politically to make. but it still would be the right one. the only one that is consistent with american values. let the bush administration take the blame for ruining these cases. instead, it looks like the obama administration is going to make the bush-era outrage their own.

les magasins de noz

my french isn't perfect, but it looks like i'm taking over france.
by the power vested in me, i hereby assign amy to get a picture of one of those stores. you know who you are.

what was that porcine illness thing again?

either the danger went away or the media just got fixated on a new shiny.

that pelosi thing

i haven't been able to understand the right's game plan on this pelosi kerfuffle. the left pushed for an inquiry into and/or prosecution of bush-era torture. the right responded first by defending the practice. but that didn't seem to work, so they started on piling on pelosi, claiming that she knew about the torture because she was briefed on it by the CIA.

but that doesn't get the right off the hook for authorizing torture, it just would mean that pelosi shares some the blame for it. but even then pelosi's share of the blame for knowing torture had been authorized torture and not doing anything about it would not be as much as the blame due to the people who actually authorized torture.¹

the whole pelosi-knew thing just seems like a reincarnation of the blame-clinton defense that was so popular whenever anyone brought up that "bin laden determined to strike the u.s." memo during the bush presidency. as i noted three years ago, the blame-clinton defense isn't a defense at all. it just makes the person raising it look stupid, just as the pelosi mania makes me think the right is hopelessly stupid now.

not only is it stupid, it also seems to be backfiring. if the point was to head off an investigation of torture, all the conflicting stories is doing is pointing out the need to have one. pelosi is basically demanding an investigation and now newt gingrich is demanding one as well. sure, newt is just talking about investigating pelosi, not torture itself. but i don't think there's any way to investigate one without the other.

plus, by making the issue about the truthfulness of a congressional leader, you can't simply have congress itself investigate it because there's an obvious conflict of interest.

the only real solution is an independent commission. let's call it a "truth commission" (everyone wants the commission to find the truth, right?). a week ago i thought a truth commission was unlikely. now it seems more likely.

-------------
1- it's also not clear if pelosi could have done anything if she wanted to. the briefing sessions were classified so she couldn't have gone public.

UPDATE (5/16/09): that answers my question, at least as it pertains to those conservatives. i guess they really are that stupid.

my brief escape

mustang bobby has already put up an account of our meeting yesterday. i'm not sure what to add. it was great to finally meet MB--and he did show up in a mustang convertable. i am extremely grateful for his tour of miami. riding around with the top down is the perfect remedy to being cooped up in a conference hotel for two days. maybe some day i'll be able to return the favor if MB ever makes it up to my neck of the woods. well, minus the convertable. and the cuban food.

anyway, i'm back in the coop today. this evening, i'm hoping to fly, inshallah escaping not only the coop but xanth altogether. it has been a great trip, but i'm getting pretty conferences out. it's going to be a long day, but it will be nice to be home late tonight, assuming i ever get there.

"conservative intellectuals had no party"

this is another one of those "holy shit" moments. it looks like the conservative movement has lost richard posner. his post about why, by one of the right's leading intellectuals, is really remarkable. matthew yglesias has already excerpted the key bit from the post. but i really can't resist reposting the same part:

My theme is the intellectual decline of conservatism, and it is notable that the policies of the new conservatism are powered largely by emotion and religion and have for the most part weak intellectual groundings. That the policies are weak in conception, have largely failed in execution, and are political flops is therefore unsurprising. The major blows to conservatism, culminating in the election and programs of Obama, have been fourfold: the failure of military force to achieve U.S. foreign policy objectives; the inanity of trying to substitute will for intellect, as in the denial of global warming, the use of religious criteria in the selection of public officials, the neglect of management and expertise in government; a continued preoccupation with abortion; and fiscal incontinence in the form of massive budget deficits, the Medicare drug plan, excessive foreign borrowing, and asset-price inflation.

By the fall of 2008, the face of the Republican Party had become Sarah Palin and Joe the Plumber. Conservative intellectuals had no party.

And then came the financial crash last September and the ensuing depression. These unanticipated and shocking events have exposed significant analytical weaknesses in core beliefs of conservative economists concerning the business cycle and the macroeconomy generally. Friedmanite monetarism and the efficient-market theory of finance have taken some sharp hits, and there is renewed respect for the macroeconomic thought of John Maynard Kenyes, a conservatives’ bête noire.

this touches on something that i've thought about a lot lately: the current republican party's own internal dynamics make it impossible to do the things it needs to reverse the failures of its movement. at least in the short term. right now, the party remains committed to the ruins of the failed movement.

in most parts of the country, any republican who tries to break from the movement will have trouble winning the republican primary. but the republicans who can survive the primary often cannot win in the general election. that dynamic renders the republican party is effectively unelectable much of the nation. unless either movement conservative changes to abandon its failures, or the republican base abandons movement conservatism, the republican party will remain in the political wilderness on the national level. based on their actions in the first half year since the election, it looks like the republican base is in too deep a state of denial to take either of those actions. you'd think that a post like posner's, from such a well-respected conservative thinker, would jar them to their senses. but i suspect there aren't enough intellectuals in the republican party left to notice.

except this one

hey remember when i said i would post from miami? well, apparently not so much. except this one, of course.

the problem is that i have a policy of not posting about a few specific topics, one of them being work. and yet, this is a work-related conference. usually i write about the stuff that i'm thinking about. but most of the stuff i've been thinking about is verboten. and so i don't write. except now, of course.

the rumor is that george clooney is staying in this hotel. a fellow conference-goer says she saw him by the elevators late last night. but she wasn't sure so she asked some person at the front desk if that was really him. and the some person said it was. then at breakfast she told me that story about clooney and the confirming some person. and that made it a rumor. i keep hoping that it's true and that i'll run into him so i can ask if he remembers being whacked by a suitcase in the denver airport in or around the year 2000. both me and mrs. noz are pretty sure that is who we whacked.

mother's day and beyond

it's mother's day! so i'm off to mom's this morning. then i'm off from there to the airport where i go further off to miami, where i'll be for the next few days.

if all goes well, i'll finally get to meet mustang bobby. i'm going to miami for work, not play. but i'll be staying at some swanky place where they filmed part of goldfinger. it's on the beach and everything! except i really don't like beaches, so the place may be wasted on me. in any event, i'll probably spend most of my time inside for that work stuff i mentioned. there will be a computer in my room, so i will post if i get the chance and feel so moved.

speaking of the beach, while i'm traveling this should keep you busy (at least for 59 seconds):


(via susie)

star trekkin'

plus, check out the best-worst parodies.

... i guess i should add the onion news report about the new trek film:

"do you want these dangerous terrorists in your community?"

i guess the community of the republicans on john boehner's blast email list is maximum security prison.

NIMBY only makes sense if they're talking about your BY.

against competition

conservative opposition to having a public option in health reform seems to be based on the argument that private insurance companies just can't compete with a public plan. underlying this concern is the notion that, if given a choice, most members of the public will choose the government run plan over the private plans. but that completely undermines the conservatives' usual argument that a public health insurer will lead to less efficiency and worse health outcomes. if that were really true, private plans would have no trouble cleaning the public plan's clock.

there's an interesting comparison between this issue and public school voucher programs. with school vouchers, conservatives want desperately for public schools to compete with private schools. i guess they really do believe their own hype about the shortcomings of public schools, but not about public health insurers.

specter's first week as a democrat

arlen specter managed to vote against obama's budget and he voted against the mortgage cramdown amendment, and he announced his opposition to obama's OLC nominee, and he announced his opposition to a central pillar of the administration's health reform plan, and he also announced his opposition to the funding mechanism for an alternative health-care reform proposal (thus effectively threatening to kill the possibility health reform altogether), and he told a reporter that he wanted norm coleman to get the minnesota senate seat over al franken. all that in a single week since he became a democrat!

but that's not all that surprising. what is surprising is that the democrats are actually rebelling against the sweetheart seniority deal. seriously, i didn't know they had that in them. i've gotten so used to the senate democrats rolling over no matter what happens. of course, giving specter seniority means taking seniority away from other senate democrats. so it looks like they can grow a spine, but only when it threatens their own prerogatives.

meanwhile, the grumbling about specter might actually be having an effect! suddenly, specter claims he "misspoke" about the coleman thing. if there's a primary challenge, maybe he'll decide that he misspoke about other stuff as well.

poll questions

this is the second poll in as many days to look at potential specter vs. toomey and specter vs. ridge races. the first is here. when is someone going to do a poll that includes sestak? and why are they only asking about cross-party races (e.g. toomey vs. specter and ridge vs. specter) and not the intra-party primary contests(e.g. sestak vs. specter and ridge vs. toomey)?

i'm curious to see how specter fairs against sestak (i'm not sure how well sestak is known outside the philly area). and i'm curious to see if ridge has a shot to beat toomey in the primary (i'm thinking no, notwithstanding ridge's better shot in the general election).

UPDATE: a republican polling firm has polled a hypothetical ridge-toomey primary race. much to my surprise. ridge crushes toomey. the toomey campaign is crying foul because the pollster used to work for specter.

but still no one seems to be doing any polls with sestak (or any dem other than specter) in the mix.

plan b is there is no plan b

roy edroso addresses answers the question behind one of my recent obsessions: why the hell are the rightwingers acting so hard to make their party unelectable?

The rightbloggers still think [the Arlen Sspecter defection is] a great thing for their cause. A big part of the reason is that they're accustomed to see everything as a great thing for their cause. But though I am tempted to dismiss this, like many of their puzzling sentiments, as a brain chemical issue, I sense a plan forming: they're really thinking realignment -- Goldwater '64, perhaps, or Jeb Davis '61; they consider the Republican Party too liberal, and are content to reduce it to a rightwing rump in preparation for a a big takeover. Everything depends of Obama washing out completely, and as we've seen they're full of faith that he will.

i guess that makes sense. if the republicans shed all but their right wing the party's only hope is that the obama presidency ends with him almost universally viewed as a total failure. at that point the american people would probably accept any alternative, no matter how batshit crazy. such are the perils of the two party system.

except that the whole plan hinges upon that failed obama presidency. and it has to be a colossal failure too, even worse than president bush. that's a pretty high (low?) bar to clear. as far as i can tell, right blogistan doesn't seem to have a plan B if he beats their phenomenally low expectations. their only insurance is the fact that they will see obama as an utter failure no matter what happens. that won't get them back in power, but it will keep them convinced of their utter righteousness.

drinking liberally

last week pat toomey showed up at the center city philadelphia drinking liberally. then he polled twenty points behind arlen specter. coincidence? probably. but why not give your numbers a-thumping too!

join us at triumph brewing company, 117 chestnut street, philadelphia, PA, 6 p.m. until everyone leaves.

i got sick of posting about DL, but i'm still there every week. you knew that though, right? also, by "every week" i don't mean "next week." if you've been trying to avoid me, next tuesday is the time to go.

star wars day

even to a major star wars geek like me, that is a pretty lame holiday.

invisible car

this blows my mind. the "invisible car" would only work if you view it from one particular vantage point. if you're a little closer or farther away or if you're standing off to the left or right, the perspective painted on the car wouldn't match the surroundings anymore.

what's amazing is how she kept the perspective internally consistent. that is, when she painted the back of the car with perspective suited for a particular point of observation, how did she manage to paint the hood of the car with the exact same vantage point? if that point moved even just a little bit as she painted different car parts, there wouldn't be a single spot where all of the car would merge with the surroundings this well. when she was standing next to the car to paint, how did she keep it consistent?

we need a primary challenge

one thing arlen specter is good at, it's looking out for arlen specter. if we want him to stop pulling this shit, we need him to see a real threat to his job. even if the primary challenge is ultimately unsuccessful, the threat alone will get specter voting better. plus a primary challenge could actually work. joe sestak would be a much better senator than specter.

the people who say that we should support specter to keep the seat are delusional. toomey can't win in a statewide election in this state. even some republicans know that. that's why ridge might fight him for the nomination.

living in the past

earlier this week, cenk uygur highlighted the fact that condoleezza rice seemed to use the nixonian "it's legal if the president does it, it must be legal" defense. yesterday, scott horton posted a piece for harpers which included a video of her extended remarks to the students and listed some of the more egregious factual errors that condy made.

meanwhile, right blogistan seemed to be completely unaware of what was going on. they only discovered rice's remarks when the right-leaning daily telegraph site posted the very same video. that triggered a whole series of pro-condy posts that only highlights the right's complete inability to notice all the stuff that rice got wrong.

the fact that rice was repeating lines popularized circa 2004 that have since been shown to be false doesn't register with them. they don't even argue against those problems because they are completely unaware they are even problems. in some ways, they're still living in 2004. they don't seem to have even a passing familiarity with a lot of the stuff that has come out since then. that's pretty much where much of right blogistan is right now.

(via memeorandum)

yurp, in stereo(type)!

i'm more entertained by this map than i should be. click to make it bigger. then go here to see the comment (don't forget the notes! move your cursor over the various blocks on the map).

i also really like how armenia is labeled "armenia."

(via the boing² folks)

photo credit: "Where I Live" by ArtWerk

the DC circuit's may day present

everything the labor board has done for the past year and a half is now possibly invalid. what a mess.

m'aidez

it's fun being at work when the rest of the world has the day off.