hey

that's my chair!

mohammed jawad

the obama administration has been pretty awful on detainee issues. for all of obama's rhetoric and the executive order to close guantanamo, the administration's lawyers have pretty much continued to take the same absurd unitary executive-type positions in court. which is why i'm anxious to see what they do with mohammed jawad next month. military's case against him was always extremely flimsy, based almost entirely on his own tortured confession. it was so flimsy, they couldn't even hold it together before the military tribunal, where the normal standards of evidence are relaxed in favor of the prosecution.

now that a federal judge has ordered his release, the obama administration is considering filing criminal charges and transferring him to the u.s. for trial. but if they couldn't assemble a case that could meet the military commission's standards, they certainly don't have one that could stand up in a real court. all that would do is throw another delay in front of his release, a release that is now all-but inevitable.

so why are they bothering? the afghan government has offered to take him, there's no actual evidence to support holding him. plus, he may have been only 12 years old when he was detained. even if the prosecution's story was upheld by the court, it's not even clear that he would be criminally responsible for his actions.

the only reason i can think of for working this hard to hold him is to avoid the embarrassment of the entire case. it's been clear for a while that the entire military commissions system has been more about covering the ass of american personnel than national security or principles of crime and punishment. up until now, the obama administration has largely picked up the ass-covering where the bush administration left off. but as time passes, that gets harder and harder to do. the obama administration inherited a lot of these cases after its predecessor had already lost a bunch of court cases. i really hope they see the futility with this one and let mr. jawad go home.

deep thoughts

how do the birthers know that obama's father is from kenya? have they seen his birth certificate?

embargo

i've written a few posts that are embargoed. they're for later when i finally come clean on this project of ours. i just save the embargoed posts as drafts and calendar them for the end of august or early september.

but i also wonder how much longer before i come clean, or why i'm not already. it's practically august already. i haven't decided how much longer i'll avoid talking mentioning it here, or even what the point is of not talking about it. eventually it's gotta come up. it's come up already, as the embargoed posts and 2 deleted comments can attest. it's certainly on my mind a lot and i'm not sure what the point of not saying anything is anymore.

well, i sort of i do. it's the fear that it will all fall apart. that's still in the cards. it's always been in the cards. (fucking cards!) in fact, it's kinda fallen apart already--a few times even, depending on how you count it. but each time we've managed to get it going again. posting about it (in english) seems like i'm making some kind of official announcement. it almost feels like i'm sticking my neck out, and it could still not happen.

but it's getting close. and my neck really wouldn't be out. i mean, even if something goes wrong, there's no guillotine blade. so what am i afraid of?

not so hastings

suddenly the obama administration knows how to pressure congress.

on issue after issue, the obama administration is completely obsessed with not repeating the perceived mistakes of the clinton administration. while it makes sense to learn from political lessons of the past, you also have to take into account how circumstances have changed. it's not 1992 anymore. teh gay is less scary now than it was back then.

orphan

much to my own surprise, i'm a little late to this party. earlier today a co-worker told me about the controversy surrounding the film "orphan". the film opened nationally in the u.s. last friday. it a slasher-type movie about a couple that adopts a nine year old girl who turns out to be evil. the adoption community is up in arms, concerned that the film will foster negative views about adopted children. some have started a web site: orphans deserve better.

personally, i don't think this film is worth the hubbub. absent the controversy, "orphan" would probably be quickly forgotten. actually, even with the controversy, it seems to be already fading. in its opening weekend, "orphan" came in fourth, earning less than half as much as a film about secret agent guinea pigs. but the best part of all this is the movie studio's reaction to the controversy:

Warner Bros. said it has taken the concerns seriously. Spokesman Scott Rowe told The Associated Press the company is considering adding a pro-adoption message at the end of the film when it comes out in DVD form.

i can only imagine how that will go. after watching parents being terrorized by the girl they adopted for two hours, the credits roll and a kindly-looking fellow comes on screen encouraging people to consider adoption.

iraqi airspace

a lot of countries can't really defend their own airspace, so this would just mean that iraq would go back to how a lot of countries are.

the iraq government is in a strange position over this. the idea that it lacks the capability of defending its own skies probably would not go over well with the iraqi populace (assuming they knew about it). but at the same time, the presence of u.s. bases, including airbases, in iraq already isn't popular with the iraqis. so the iraqi government can solve the first problem by inviting american air power to stay, but that would perpetuate the second problem. and a continued american military presence in iraq after the pullout date is more obvious than its air vulnerability. so the iraqi government has an incentive not to issue the invitation and to ignore its open skies as much as possible.

it also occurs to me that the biggest loser if americans ended protecting iraqi airspace would be iran. one of the reasons why israel hasn't bombed iran is that the u.s. won't allow israeli planes to travel over iraq. without such overflight permission, israeli planes wouldn't be able to make it there and back safely. effectively, the u.s. is protecting iran from israel. and oddly enough, that protection started with the bush administration who also refused to allow israel to fly over iraq to strike iran. without an extension of the american presence in iraq, an israeli strike on iran would be a lot more likely after 2011 than it is now.

like finding hay in a hay stack

as a nice coda to yesterday's post, go read what paul krugman wrote. krugman points out that martin feldstein is punditing about health reform while revealing that he doesn't understand the most basic concepts in the health reform debate.

maybe i'll make this a series, linking to all the times that people critical of health reform who inadvertently reveal that they know nothing about health reform. except i think i would have to stop doing everything else in my life to keep up.

tom tomorrow and the basics of health reform

tom tomorrow on health care reform (click to make bigger):

the fourth panel happens to be one of my current fascinations with the health care debate: how many conservative criticisms of the democrat-sponsored bills have no relation whatsoever to what is actually being proposed.

critics on the right regularly compare the reform plan to "socialized medicine" or the systems they have in canada, the UK or cuba, when the plans that have been proposed are none of those systems. i would say the vast majority of criticism in the media doesn't apply at all to any of the actual bills in congress. the critics depend on the ignorance of the public to scare them into believing that "obamacare" is something that it's not.

actually, i'm pretty sure that a lot of conservative mouthing off on healthcare themselves are pretty ignorant about what different health care systems are and how they work. a lot of them don't seem to be aware of even the most basic concepts in the health care world: like the difference between health care itself and health insurance. or the difference between different kinds of universal health care models, like "socialized medicine" (i.e. the beveridge model where health care providers are publicly employed), "single payer" (i.e. private health providers with public insurance), or the bismarck model (i.e. private health care providers and both private and public health insurance with the insurance industry regulated to enforce universality, minimum standards of coverage, and cost control). the bismarck model is clearly what the obama administration is aiming for, but you would never know it from listening to conservatives. that's because most conservatives don't know it either.

anyway, a good summary of the different models is here. our current system is the fourth "out-of-pocket" model, the one that prevails in the poorest countries of the world. however, our system also has add-on elements of beveridge (e.g. the VA system) and single payer (e.g. medicare and medicaid) that apply to only certain people. those other elements do tend to take some of the bite out. if we didn't have them, i wonder if comprehensive health reform would be easier to accomplish.

(TMW cartoon is from here and is via susie. frontline link via yglesias)

a very special drinking liberally

right now i'm trying to SUPERTRAIN out of town, but i'll be training back in time for drinking liberally tonight. this one's a very special episode featuring both the final appearance of roxanne (at least as a filadelfyan) and a bunch of lawyers of some kind or another. so come toast the leavings of roxanne, get yourself some counsel, or ask glomarization what the hell she's doing there:

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

i guess on fox there are two niles

(via)

beer stunt

it looks like they're going to take the president up on his publicity stunt. all three stand to gain from this one, so why not?

i wonder why W, the president that everyone allegedly wanted to have a beer with, never tried this one. okay, so he was a recovering alcoholic who claimed not to touch the stuff. but he still could have sat around with other people drinking beer. it's still a little surprising that mr. rove didn't take advantage of that beer thing and go for a photo-op like this.

there's nothing really wrong with it. i'm just a little tired of it

is it possible for any american newspaper to write an article about american and russian interests in central asia without using the words "great game"?

nope.

darmok and jalad at tanagra

eric kleefeld writes:

Republican National Committee chairman Michael Steele warns that Democratic government intervention in health care will be even worse than the Schiavo case. Huh?

i think this is just another glimpse of the alternate reality the republican leadership is stuck in. to the denizens of planet earth, the terry schiavo matter was when the republican party jumped the shark for a lot of americans. when it became clear they were simply beholden to the religious right, even when it ran counter to the views of an overwhelming majority of americans. that's the point that GOP numbers really started going down the toilet, a toilet that they still haven't escaped to this day.

but on planet wingnut, things look totally different. their history books don't talk about political mistakes, just points when they diverged from orthodoxy. which is why their political analogies look so strange to us here on earth.

those crazy frogs

it's such a strange thing to realize that in other countries being perceived as an intellectual is thought to be a benefit at the polls. i suppose that just means there's a lot of faux-intellectualism (à la sarko). but i still think that's better than a political culture where dumbing down is the norm.

PHL blogging

sitting on a runway is not nearly as action-packed as i remember it.

in case you're wondering

i'm in florida for (what i suspect) is the reason that most people make sudden unexpected trips to florida.

the birther spotlight

i, for one, don't mind the recent media mania about the "birther movement." it just reinforces the double-bind the republican party is in. the party has been whittled down to a stump of true believers, many of which are truly crazy. the party needs to sweep them under the rug if they want to reclaim a majority with the general electorate. but they can't because, while the birthers are a small percentage of the overall population, they're a big percentage of republican primary voters. which means that anyone who challenges them from within the party (like mike castle) risks paying a price from the rank-and-file in their party. but anyone who doesn't risks looking like a lunatic to the rest of the country.

which is why the media attention is actually good. birtherism is one of those ideologies that seems to look incredibly convincing from the inside and batshit crazy from the outside. which means that whenever these stories run, it may get 10% of the audience nodding their heads, but the other 90% are thinking "holy shit, i may not like president obama, but those folks are off their fucking rocker." in terms of political effect, this attention can only screw over the already pretty screwed republicans.

plus, birthers are fun to make fun of. i mean, the punchline to all of this is that even if obama were born in a different country, he'd still be eligible to be president because his mother was a u.s. citizen. even if they were right, they'd be wrong.

freeper logic

john @ chez atrios WTFs this freeper manifesto. i second that emotion, but beyond the clinton thing there's a lot of remarkable stuff in that document, like the call to repeal the seventeenth amendment in the name of restoring power to the people. "They've turned this upside down and inside out" indeed.

actually, their entire beef with XVII seems to be that it does something to the constitution that wasn't the intentions of the people who first drafted it. but doesn't that same argument apply to every single amendment? by that logic, they all should go, the abolition of slavery, the right to vote for all citizens, equal protection under the law, etc. maybe they'd be fine with that too. at least until they counted down to #2.

skip gates

am i the only one who didn't know that henry louis gates, jr. is also called skip gates? all of a sudden, everyone is calling him "skip" (e.g.) as if he's a buddy of theirs. i even heard it on NPR today while driving through the wilds of south jersey.

it reminds me of when i first went to wiscon and everyone was calling samuel delaney "chip delaney" or sometimes just "chip". to me it just came across as an effort to create a false sense of familiarity with someone famous.

i don't even have to read the interview to get this one

the answer to the question in the title is yes and no.

unless you're meditating on a radioactive mat. then the answer would be yes and yes.

will i never learn?

once again the first law of blogging applies.

"I don't do policy"

say what you will about steele, sometimes he really is the perfect spokesperson for the modern republican party.

blogroll messing

i deleted some of the links to the right. most of them were from sites that aren't active anymore. but a few are just of places that i don't go anymore.

a lot of blogs don't pay much attention to their blogrolls anymore. blog aggregators/feed readers have made rolls less necessary, and a lot of bloggers are turned off by the nasty politics that comes with adding or subtracting a site. but not me. i have an irrational prejudice against aggregator or reader services. i'm strictly old school, i click down the blogroll fairly regularly. but that means that i want the links to the right to basically reflect what i read. it's nothing personal if i cut a site. it doesn't mean the site isn't good. it just means my tastes change and i've lost interest.

in any case, i'm open to suggestions for additions. does anyone know of a site that i should check out?

i came to the office for this?

so i suck it up and go into the office on this beautiful saturday. it's hard enough to stay motivated with sunny philly spread out outside my window. i got here a few minutes ago, turned on the computer and, just as i'm about to do something productive, the fire alarm goes off.

the alarm is particularly annoying, it's very loud. there's a two-tone ring that bores into your skull, followed by a recorded voice that says there's an emergency and tells us not to do anything. that's right. i'm on the 51st floor, they tell me the building might be on fire and that i should neither use the elevator nor fire exit. i guess we're just supposed to wait further instructions. but in the past those instructions have never come, the alarm just stops, some scratchy voiced guy comes on saying it's all clear and we go about our business. but until the alarm stops, it's impossible to get anything done. it just blares and repeats, repeats and blares. like it is right now.

oh, the humanity

crash

gang-bangers

why are so many "centrists" or "moderates" in congress attracted to the gangsta lifestyle?

gang of six, gang of fourteen, gang of fifteen, gang of sixteen, almost every time there's a gang in congress, they take the mantle of the middle.

the one exception i can think of is the gang of eight.

that bachmann howl sounds familiar

ever wonder why michelle bachmann is so hilariously misinformed? i'm guessing it's because she reads rightwing blogs.

poor michelle spoke before she saw the instapundit "update". and i bet she never was aware of the well-deserved mockery of this point from the other side.

chart redux

i still think the scary chart strategy to attack health care reform is stupid. but upon reflection, i realize there's another angle to this: the chart is also misleading. that's the case even if it's 100% accurate. it's misleading because the flow chart does not show how individuals would deal with the system while at the same time it is intended to create the impression that dealing with the system would be complicated.

for example, i already plugged steve benen's post about the chart. in it, he makes the following comparison:

Indeed, if I were to do a chart detailing the way John Boehner's car works, it would also show a complicated system, but I suspect he'd take it to work every morning.

we can all imagine a flow chart showing all the system in boehner's car, the engine, the transmission, the fuel pump, etc. and as benen says, that chart would probably look quite as convoluted as the health care chart.

but here's the thing: that hypothetical car chart wouldn't reflect what john boehner does to drive his car. to represent that, you'd need an entirely different flow chart. chart #2 wouldn't have squares for engines or fuel pumps, it would have one square for turning the ignition key and another for pressing the gas pedal. indeed, if, like me, boehner were completely clueless about how chart #1 works, he still could drive around just fine. all he would have to know is chart #2. let the auto mechanic worry about chart #1.

it's the same thing with the health care chart. it shows a bird's eye view of the health care system, not the view from someone within the system. from the participant's perspective, the things that matter are how much it will cost him/her (in terms of premiums and/or additional taxes) and the level of benefits. that's about it. even if the machinery that runs the health care system has a lot of moving parts, it doesn't have to be complicated to the participant. i can drive a car even though i have no idea what goes on underneath the hood.

battle of the charts

yesterday the republicans unveiled a colorful chart (pdf) to highlight the complexity of the democratic health reform plan:

which prompted TPM to create a chart based on the house republican plan:

meanwhile, jonathan cohn points out that the current health insurance system is just as complicated, if not more so, than the one the republicans are mocking:

my take is essentially the same as steve benen's. the point of the chart is what, that health reform is complicated? um, yes. but didn't we know that already? if you want a simple chart, go for single payer. but i don't think conservatives really want a simple chart. they want to make health reform seem scary and confusing. it's not a substantive argument, but that crowd doesn't do substantive arguments much anymore.

stupid monkeys, think they're so smart...

this will blow your mind.

we've all been doing it wrong.

city of borders

i mentioned before that there wasn't much in the Q fest program that the really jumped out at me. the exception was city of borders (imdb), a film that i saw tonight.

"city" is a documentary about the gay community in jerusalem, a mixture of jews and palestinians whose social life centers around shushan, the only gay bar in the holy city. the people who frequent the bar are a diverse lot. other than their homosexuality they don't have very much in common. there's boody, a palestinian from ramallah who illegally sneaks across the border into israel to partake in gay culture and to perform as a drag queen at the bar. there's samira and ravit, a palestinian-israeli lesbian couple, whose relationship has to struggle with religious differences, the politics of occupation, and disagreements over whether to have children. there's adam, a young gay man who proudly lives on a settlement and, aside from his views on homosexuality, seems a bit more to the right than everyone else. nevertheless adam was stabbed during the 2005 jerusalem gay pride parade by a black hat fundamentalist. and then there's sa’ar netanel, owner of the shushan and also the first openly gay member of the israeli city council, a body controlled by the ultra-religious of various denominations who have nothing in common other than their hostility to gay people.

the documentary was interesting, but not great. it's greatest strength is the source material, which is inherently compelling. if anything there may have been too much source material. all of the characters were interesting, but i felt like i didn't see enough of any of them. i can see how the filmmaker would get caught up in the myriad of divisions brought out at shushan, which is both a microcosm of israeli society and very much marginal to it. but none of those divisions are fleshed out as much as they could have been. the film is definitely worth seeing. but the end felt like a lot was missing. i left the theater feeling that it could have been better.

(if you're interested, the trailer is here)

zombie robots

i'm not one to fear the coming age of robots. i, for one, welcome our new mechanical overlords. but this still looks like an incredibly bad idea.

why can't we have our robots feed off garbage or greenhouse gases or brussel sprouts or DVDs of bad tv shows? why not try to clean up this shithole rather than unleashing things that consume dead human flesh to survive?

dead end

john (f/k/a drexel dem) has a good discussion of sarah palin's op-ed from yesterday's washington post. the most interesting thing i saw in the piece is how palin didn't seem to remember that only nine months ago she ran for vice president on a cap-and-trade platform.

a few weeks back i noted that cap-and-trade was the republican solution to environmental problems during the reagan and poppy bush era. in fact, it seems that it was part of their repertoire as recently as last october. the idea only became "an enormous threat to our economy" after obama became president. funny how that works.

the cost is only meaningful if it's linked to the benefit

this headline is pretty funny. but it highlights the mistake of polling the cost and benefit separately.

if you polled most americans and said "do you want a new car?" i expect a clear majority would say "yes." but if you separately asked them "do you want to spend $40,000?" a big majority would probably say "no." who wants to give $40k away?

those two polls, taken together, don't tell us anything about the number of people who would be willing to spend $40,000 for a particular new vehicle. on that question the numbers might be completely different than the responses to those two separate polls. if we're talking about an "is it worth it" question, you have to ask a question that causes each respondent to weigh the costs against the benefits. otherwise, the poll isn't all that illuminating.

gerlach leaving

i moved to PA ten years ago. a few years later, my congressional district was gerrymandered out of existence and i became the constituent of jim gerlach. ever since then, i've been hoping to get rid of the guy. lois murphy narrowly lost to him in 2004 and 2006. what's-his-name lost by a slightly wider margin in 2008. prevailing wisdom is that the best time to take out an incumbent congressman is in his first term or two (after that they become entrenched and all but unbeatable). notwithstanding the overall blue shift of this state, i was resigning myself to be stuck with gerlach forever.

but now it looks like i may finally be rid of him. the odds of him clearing the republican primary and then being elected governor are long (though it may depend upon who the dems come up for their candidate. governor rendell is term limited out), and my gut still tells me that without the power of incumbency the republicans can't hold this district.

maybe i'm wrong, but this does give me hope. i haven't had three democrats representing me in congress since i had durban-braun-rush in 1999.

going galt is a liberal plot

via roy edroso i see that july 30th is going galt day:

On July 30th, Conservatives are "Going Galt". On that date, we are asking Conservatives all across the nation to "Call in Conservative". On July 30th, Conservatives will not work, we will not buy.

i expect that almost no conservatives will actually heed this call and stay home from work. but in the spirit of the going galt idea, i am tempted to imagine what would happen if people actually paid any attention to the tea party folks and a bunch of conservatives really did stay home from work.

what would probably happen is that a lot of conservatives would get fired. i don't usually talk about my life as an employment lawyer, i certainly can't talk about specific cases, but employers tend to be extremely unsympathetic when it comes to political stunts like these. if you want a lot of conservatives to join the growing ranks of the unemployed, you should be encouraging them to "call in conservative." after they're all on unemployment insurance and other government benefits for a while in this crappy job market maybe they'll start to rethink their knee-jerk hostility to government programs.

that's why i sometimes suspect that the "tea party movement" is really the brainchild of leftwing double agents, sleeper cells planted deep within right blogistan. how else can you explain it? otherwise, you would have to assume that the leaders of this movement aren't thinking about the obvious consequences of their actions. they couldn't be that stupid...

confirmation hearing

the sotomayor confirmation hearings begin today! yippy!

actually, i hate these things. they're completely useless. not because people up for a life tenure job on the supreme court shouldn't be asked tough questions before they take their seat. rather it's because the members of the senate judiciary committee simply aren't up to the job of asking tough questions.

so expect instead heapings of blowhardism on one side and lots of non-answers on the other. our only real saving grace is that biden is no longer on the judiciary committee, so we'll be spared his constitutional scholar act.

in theory these things could be quite interesting, but in practice they come off as little more than a show. barring something unexpected, sotomayor will be confirmed. it's just a matter of how much crap we have to sit through until then.

sometimes doing nothing is also distracting

the times article calls investigating bush-era crimes a potential "distraction from Mr. Obama’s domestic priorities." and yet, the article notes a "new push" to investigate the prior administration's actions. why do these pushes keep coming? could it be that the real distraction is not investigating this stuff and letting it fester?

no remedy

booman's post raises an interesting issue: what is the penalty for not fully briefing congress? as far as i can tell, the law doesn't provide an enforcement mechanism. which means it's illegal, but not a crime.

i know it's a felony to lie to congress, but it's not lying to congress if you just don't bring something up. at least i don't think it is.

least surprising revelation imaginable

seriously, was anyone in the entire universe surprised by this headline?

future excitement

"Aktobe... is a drab industrial city where you might need to change trains."

"...Aktobe... is not a major tourist destination, but there are some quirky attractions here, including sites linked with female sniper Aliya Moldagulova, around whom there is something of a personality cult, and a charmingly down-at-heel planetarium."

"Aktobe... is a centre of iron metallurgy, chrome smelting and a petrochemical industry. It is not a particularly attractive town for tourists..."

sign of the times

photo taken outside ACCU Staffing Services office, center city, philadelphia

just like a real disemboweled tauntaun!

uh, how does it smell?

(via sunny @ FB)

triple helping of stupid

holy shit! an eleven year old wore a t-shirt with a peace symbol on it!!! i guess a small right blogistan freakout is in order. after all, this can only mean that the symbol is fully endorsed by her parents.

because parents always endorse everything their eleven year old wears. and because it would be a disaster of untold proportions if the president of the united states supported the concept of peace.

weeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeeee're dooooooooooooooooooomed!!!

iranian hostage crisis ends

not that one, the more recent one.

for the record, it's been 909 days since u.s. forces stormed the iranian consulate in erbil and snatched the five iranian diplomats. that means that iranian hostage crisis 2.0 lasted 465 days longer than the original.

excuses excuses

when people ask me how often i post on my blog. i usually answer "one-to-four posts a day." except when i don't.

sometimes i don't post because i'm busy. sometimes it's because the server goes down. sometimes it's because i have nothing to say that hasn't been said better elsewhere. and sometimes it's because a family from the west bank is in town and i would rather march them around philadelphia to make up for when they showed me and mrs. noz around nablus last august than goof around on the internet.

sometimes it's all of those things. sometimes it's none.

i've got 18 channels of shit on the tv to choose from

sometimes i feel like i'm living on a different planet than most other people.

not about national security

a revealing bit at the end of this article:

Before being released from Guantánamo in February, Mr. Mohamed was offered a plea bargain, which required him to agree to abandon his efforts to obtain documents that might bolster his torture claims and not to file lawsuits against the United States government or any of its officials.

He rejected the offer and a few months later all charges against him were dropped.

it's not about national security, it's about covering their ass.

what's in it for him?

looking at it from sanford's perspective, why would he resign?

the "appalachian trail" kerfuffle has now passed. the media was distracted by michael jackson, then sarah palin. once that happened, sanford seems like "old news" even though the story really isn't that old. when the media moves on, something big and new has to happen for them to come back. the political damage has already been done. sanford's prospects as a presidential candidate have been damaged, perhaps fatally. but resigning isn't going to make any of those things any better. he's got almost two more years in his term as governor. his national reputation may be shot, but it's possible that he can do something as governor to improve his image in the state and maintain his local political viability. that option is only available if he doesn't resign.

so what would sanford gain by resigning? nothing really. and staying as governor offers him a chance at rehabilitation (slim as it may be). plus he doesn't have to find another job. resigning may be the honorable thing. but if he were going to do that, he would have done it by now.

UPDATE: it looks like the SC GOP has taken a page from moveon.org. i think resignation is officially off the table now.

carte de la blogistan politique

wow, i'm actually on the map.

i've seen several other attempts to map out the blogosphere, but i think this is the only time this little taco stand made it on. or maybe i've been on some other one. this is at least the first one i've seen that has a search function. i doubt i would have found my tiny dot without that.

bills + a long addendum

if palin really resigned because of she couldn't handle all the legal bills, why has she been threatening to sue so many people since her resignation speech?

i almost didn't publish this post because i think the palin-mania is a little stupid. i understand why an out-of-nowhere incoherent resignation speech from a nationally known governor would make headlines for a day or two. but it's already stretching beyond that with no end in sight. i've long felt that palin has been getting a lot more attention than she deserves since the election ended. if the media made any sense at all, that would be doubly true at the end of the month when she's not even a governor anymore. but i expect that she won't just fade away after july.

at this point palin is covered like a tabloid figure rather than a politician. she's a star because she's a star. she gets the coverage because she remains in the public's eye and thus the public must be interested in every detail about her. but she only remains in the public's eye because she keeps getting coverage.

it's a vicious cycle that is sure to continue. and it's also sure to generate some unfair commentary about her and andrew sullivan is sure to hawk his conspiracy theories about her children. but the unfairness doesn't mean that she isn't also a terrible politician, one who seemingly has no ability to speak coherently about any substantive policy. unless and until she runs for something else (or becomes a news commentator, thus intentionally puts herself back into the conversation), why should i pay any attention to her?

a priest, a rabbi, an imam and a buddhist monk walk into a game show...

i think that all four will be at a serious disadvantage in this show. in my experience, most believers haven't thought about what actual atheists believe nearly as much as atheists have thought about what believers believe.

as an atheist who has sometimes solicited a conversion pitch for fun, my impression is that most proselytizing religious people have little contact with living breathing atheists and thus have little idea with what real atheists think about the world. but no matter how ignorant they are of how real atheists think, proselytizers think they know, often relying upon some crude (and sometimes funny) stereotype. atheists, on the other hand, live in a world of believers, and cannot help but be familiar with how believers think. at the very least, they are familiar with the dominant religion in their society and/or the religion of their family.

this puts the believers at a severe handicap in the game show, which means that it's likely that no one will win in most cases. if the people who run it are hoping for some dramatic on-camera conversion, they need to either lower their expectations or cheat and hire actors to make one happen.

i wouldn't totally rule out the latter.

(via b²)

why do americans celebrate independence day by blowing stuff up?

i suppose it's better than beating up british people.

it had steam?

i'm not even sure that it was ever really a movement.

boo!

that's it? that's the missile launch that everyone has talked about for the last few weeks? they put interceptor missiles in hawaii only to have the rockets fall thousands of miles short.

have the north koreans ever done a test that wasn't a whole lot less fearsome than the pre-test hype? maybe these tests are really about the internal power struggles in that country. or maybe they are an attempt to strike fear into the hearts of the foreign community about the NoKo military might. if it is supposed to be the latter, i'm not sure what is so scary about it. quite a lot of countries have missiles with a 500km range.

only dead fish go with the flow

i'm completely stunned by this.

i must admit, before today i had been feeling sorry for palin. i mean, the presidential campaign is over, she really doesn't matter anymore, except for in the tabloid gossipy side of politics. but watching that speech (especially part two) is like watching some kind of bizarre stream-of-consciousness train wreck.

failed state index

i always find rankings like these to be both fascinating and completely suspect. it's hard to argue that somalia or zimbabwe aren't basket cases and the ones listed as "most stable" clearly are pretty stable places.

but, for example, is iran really more stable than bhutan and less stable than georgia? bhutan? seriously? has there ever been serious strife there? and georgia has two regions that are outside of the government's control, with a much larger neighbor regularly threatening another invasion. as bad and as unstable as iran is right now, i don't think it's as bad as georgia. FP may have tallied the numbers, but i don't know if that methodology is really any better than my own gut.