no recess

yet another stark display that senate democrats will give into almost any republican demand.


UPDATE: well that's what i get for posting in the early morning when just the original report is out. now that i have more info, it looks like the no-recess thing isn't as bad as i though as harry reid did get something in return for the no-recess appointment arrangement. specifically 54 obama appointments that had been denied in up-or-down vote by the GOP leadership will now go through. none of the 54 are judicial appointments, i wish reid had held out to include at least some of them.

but even putting that aside, this isn't a terrible deal. obama has been fairly slow and reluctant to do recess appointments even though the GOP has blocked a huge number of his nominees from getting a confirmation vote. it was quite possible that the president wasn't going to recess appoint anyone anyway. in return, reid is getting 54 nominees fully confirmed. again, including judicial nominees would have been much better. but this is not the giveaway to the GOPers that i originally thought it was.

(via memeorandum)

the expectations game

it occurs to me that expectations for GOP gains in the upcoming congressional elections are running really high, maybe unrealistically high. the poll numbers that are forecasting this republican wave are all based on likely voter models that assume a heavier turnout for republican voters because of that "enthusiasm gap."

the enthusiasm gap might be closing. but even if it doesn't close completely and the the democrats lose overall, it's hard for me to imagine the GOP meeting the sky-high expectations they have set up for themselves. they could be setting themselves up for a post-election story of GOP disappointment if their gains are not large.

mission accomplished

before today i would have said with 100% certainty that i was not alive during the first world war. i guess i was wrong. maybe that's what they meant by the "war to end all wars." it wasn't the last war, it just was the war that wouldn't end.

(via that political animal)

thanks christine!

thanks to christine o'donnell i can now say i went to harvard¹, wellesley² and princeton.³

------------------------------------
1- for a wedding
2- for summer camp
3- for a musical performance

drinking liberally

i'll be at the center city philadelphia drinking liberally tonight. you're all invited to come too!

where: jose pistola's, upstairs bar
263 S. 15th St.
Philadelphia, PA, 19102
when: 6pm until later

ted rall is in town and i have reason to believe he might drop in after his book signing. ted is pretty controversial. he has pissed off a lot of people, among them the central asian blogging community who basically think that he is thoroughly full of shit. given that much of my life these days is focused on that corner of the world, it should be interesting if i get a chance to talk to him.

macarthur

i'm not big on awards because i think most of them are bullshit. so i pay little attention when most award winners get announced.

the macarthur "genius award" is the exception. they're much more interesting than the average award. that's probably because they are not really a reward, they're just a grant, though an unusual grant because the recipients don't apply for it, which is why they are popularly referred to as an "award." what makes the macarthur grant recipients so interesting is that they manage to find such interesting people doing a variety of stuff i have mostly never heard about before. this year's list is no exception.

each year i skim down the list looking to see if i have heard of any of the recipients. most years i will recognize one name, two at most (and one time i actually knew one of them as he was my friend's father). this year the only one i have heard of is david simon because it's not that jorge pardo. simon is a pretty interesting choice. if a tv show can be a mark of genius, then the wire is just that, yo.

circle of life

last week's blog pissing match is over.

long live this week's pissing match!

dombra hero

i'm probably going to have to order one of these.

(via kzblog)

cold fission

the best part of the above photo--which i've seen before, but i pulled this time from this post on boing boing--are the things that mahmoud et. al. are wearing on their feet.

they are probably made of sterile blue plastic cloth, but to me they look like blue fuzzy bedroom slippers. the only thing that would make it better is if they had little blue bunny heads. (the slippers, not mahmoud et. al. though i guess bunny heads on them would be pretty great as well)

[oh and click photo to embiggen if you need to]

corruption

an article about corruption in iraq in today's NYT including the following sentence:

Corruption is so rampant here — and American reconstruction efforts so replete with their own mismanagement — that the fate of the computers could have ended as an anecdote in a familiar, if disturbing trend. Iraq, after all, ranks above only Sudan, Myanmar, Afghanistan and Somalia on Transparency International’s annual corruption index.

since i was in kazakhstan, i've been thinking a lot about corruption. i don't see how you can rank a country like somalia on a corruption index. when there's no functioning government, how can you determine what payments are corrupt?

imagine you're trying to do business in a foreign country. to complete the deal you need to move goods from point A to point B. a local tells you that you will only be permitted to do that if you pay $100. is that corruption? it depends.

if the person you are talking to is a government official, you need a special license to move stuff around the country and that license has a $100 fee, then no, it's not corruption. governments can charge fees and when they do, it is not considered to be corruption. on the other hand, if there is no legal license requirement, or if there is a license but the license fee is only $50, then the $100 charge would be corrupt. the charge itself is not what makes it corrupt. corruption depends on the legitimacy of the charge.

in a place with no functioning government, by definition, there are no legitimate charges. on the other hand, there are also no illegitimate charges. so while you can say that in a lawless place there is nothing but corruption, you can also say that in such places there is no corruption. an illegitimate charge is only illegitimate insofar as it is contrary to an existing regime of rules. if there are no rules, no charge is going to be contrary to one. any talk of "corruption" or "legitimate" in places like that becomes almost meaningless.

so is lawless somalia a very corrupt place? or a place largely free of corruption because it is largely free of a government (putting aside unrecognized entities like somaliland)? it's both, or neither, or rather concepts like "corruption" don't work in lawless places. much of afghanistan is also outside the control of the recognized legitimate government. so are those areas corruption-free or most corrupt of all? i don't know how anyone can say for sure either way.

lebanon

i saw lebanon tonight. it's been described as das boot in an israeli tank, and that's basically what it is. it's the first day of the 1982 israeli invasion of lebanon. the viewer sits with the four crew members of a single tank as they try to make sense of what is happening around them as things go wrong.

the film has some pretty striking, if graphic, scenes. it doesn't shy away from depicting the horrors of war, or war crimes. a lot of times the camera (which is really the point of view of the tank's gunner as he surveys the scene around the tank from his scope) focuses in on the faces, dead or alive, of the people suffering from the violence. while the characters in the tank never feel fully fleshed out, it adds up to a pretty strong anti-war film, as any film that shows the brutality of war inevitably ends up being.

who doesn't?

Do you want to know more about Belgium? from Jerome de Gerlache on Vimeo.

bubble boy

that other mccain thinks that he hasn't proven he's a big enough dickhead yet.

and so we've got him raging against a stereotype, which looks pretty foolish to anyone who knows what susie stands for (e.g. he seems to be under the impression that susie was an obama supporter at some point). i'm convinced this guy never heard of susie madrak before yesterday. he must not come out of his echo chamber very often.

anyway, i left a comment. it's currently awaiting moderation. (it's funny how all the conservative sites seem to censor their comments). we'll see whether he lets it through.

UPDATE: my comment no longer displays as being in the moderation cue, mr. mccain has posted his own comment since i left mine and mine still hasn't appeared. which means that the comment was censored. here's the comment that was so shocking and offensive that mccain felt he had to delete it to protect his readers:

upyernoz
September 24th, 2010 @ 8:54 am

wow, you really had no idea who susie madrak was, did you? from what i see here, i don’t think you have any idea just how hopelessly ignorant you are about what she thinks.

sure, your groupies might call it a “brilliant beotch slapping”, but really all you’re slapping is a weird caricature that doesn’t exist. which may make you look brilliant to people who don’t know any better, but it doesn’t look so smart from where i’m sitting.

(previously)

hippies punch back

congratulations to my friend susie for creating "an iconic moment in Campaign 2010."

BONUS: the other mccain proves himself to be as big a dickhead as the original.

mooning wiscon

elizabeth moon pulls a marty peretz, which causes a kerfuffle and raises the question of whether moon should still be guest of honor at wiscon in 2011.

i'm a wiscon person, at least sometimes i am. i've been an on-again-off-again attendee since 1995. there's a wiscon plug in the margin on the right and i've blogged from wiscon on several occasions even though since i left the midwest i haven't quite been able to go every year. so i'm disappointed to see that wiscon is sticking with moon as guest of honor. i wasn't very sure that i could make it in 2011 anyway. now, at least, i can call it a boycott.

(i also find it interesting that moon defenders are essentially making a free speech defense (as if free speech means that wiscon is required to keep someone as their guest of honor), but moon herself deleted all the critical comments to her controversial post)

ADDING: there are two muslims i know that at least sometimes have show up at wiscon. after i wrote the above i wondered what they thought about the moon controversy. one of them i knew had a blog. because i once linked to it i was able to dig the site up and found her initial reaction and a follow-up. (in case you're curious too)

"pledge to america" vows to repeal the affordable care act and replace it with the affordable care act

silly republicans, after months of railing about "obamacare" they still have no idea what the law says.

like raaaaaaaaa-yaaain on your wedding day

actually there's nothing at all ironic about fidel castro believing that israel has a "right to exist". this has got to be one of the more idiotic points that jeffrey goldberg has made since, well, maybe since his last post.

his point, such as it is, only makes sense if you believe that there are only two sides in politics, and that everyone one one side must agree with everything everyone else on their side happens to believe. which is a mind-bogglingly simplistic way to view politics. but i guess goldberg thinks that pro-life democrats, republicans who opposed invading iraq, republicans who disagreed with president bush about stem cell research, et cetera are all "ironic" too. there are endless examples of people disagreeing with "their side" on particular issues. irony is everywhere! only mindless partisanship (with only two possible parties) is non-ironic!

and that's putting aside the next level of stupidity in his post, his assumption that: (a) "fidel is popular among the members of the modern left, and (b) leftists, by definition, don't believe that israel has a right to exist and are in a "strange alliance" with " hardcore islamists" and "extreme rightists". both of those assumptions strike me as not just wrong, but really hilariously wrong. the kind of wrong that makes me shake my head and think that mr. goldberg is completely out of touch with actual living breathing progressives, or at least progressives living in modern times. (fidel castro being popular with the left? jesus. what year does goldberg think it is?)

(via memeorandum)

maybe the TX BOE wants to look unhinged

i've now read a half dozen or so articles about the texas board of education's claim that there is an anti-christian/pro-islam bias in american textbooks, but i have yet to see a single example of what they are talking about. i'm curious to find out what exactly they interpret to be anti-christian or pro-islam, but for all the news coverage i can't find anything specific.

can't someone ask them for the name of an offending textbook? or, better yet, a quote from the text that they find offensive?

باندا

dammit, they made the video private. if you're still craving the panda (and who isn't), you can still see the video here.

DADTDP

sometimes i wonder if part of the problem is that the popular name for the policy leaves off the last two words of its official name.

or maybe i'm being too charitable. it really does seem like the military is actively pursuing gay soldiers, notwithstanding the fact the existing policy says they can't do that.

APN-FOG app

i just downloaded it, but the americans for peace now facts on the ground iphone app is really pretty nifty. it combines google's satellite map of the west bank with the data that peace now has collected on settlement activity. the data layers allow you to display or hide various borders (e.g. the green line, the west bank barrier) and the oslo accords administrative classifications (e.g. area A and B).

i'm not sure how much i will use it, but it really seems like a pretty amazing resource. and it's free. so why not?

the 500 days of summers

i'm not a fan of larry summers, but i like how he picked the autumnal equinox to announce his departure.

not to fill today with political parties compare-and-contrast posts

this is pretty remarkable when you think about recent history. it was not too long ago when republicans would tack all sorts of crazy right-wing pet provisions onto military funding bills and then, when anyone dared to vote against the bill, they would scream bloody murder about how the no-voters hated our beloved troops. i guess every single GOP senator is willing to shut down the pentagon in order to stop the gay menace.

or not really. we all know that the republicans senators can rest easy that the DADT provision was always just a bluff. by tomorrow, the dems will introduce a new bill without the DADT repeal provision. if the democratic leadership were capable of playing hardball, they would only allowing a defense will with the DADT repeal come to a vote, forcing the GOP to really consider how much they want to stop the repeal. but there's no chance of that, so the GOP had no real risk of calling the democrat's bluff.

murkowski would have been better off as a dem

there's an interesting contrast between how the GOP is reacting to murkowski's decision to run a write-in campaign notwithstanding her loss of the party primary, and the democratic party's reaction to joe lieberman's decision to run as an independent in 2006 notwithstanding his loss of the democratic primary.

the GOP, it seems, supports the results of its primary process whereas the democratic leadership largely continued to back lieberman notwithstanding his primary loss. it was never completely clear to me why so many dems in the national party supported joe. it seemed like he just had a good personal relationship with them. and that carried him through, no matter what he did. it still carries him today.

dead man running

i feel strangely worn out after working late on friday, staying out with friends that evening, waking up early the next morning to fly to montreal, staying up late playing poker there, running around to see the city sunday morning then flying home in the late afternoon, running to a neighbor's house to watch mad men before going home and getting to sleep after midnight, then waking up before dawn this morning to drive 2 hours to harrisburg so i could get there by 8am, driving back home to get to my doctor's office by 10:30 and then catching the 10:56 train back to my office. and now, after 7 hours of work here, i can finally go home to stay up late so i can talk to my wife before i can catch some sleep before i wake up to do a hearing tomorrow morning that will probably last all day. then i have another hearing the day after that--this one house-of-meat, PA--which means another early morning drive to look forward to on wednesday.

the good news is i think i might actually be able to have a solid rest sometime around this coming thursday, unless something else comes up between now and then. in which case there is always saturday. that's only 5 days from now!

heading north

burning down the house

you can disguise it in jargon like "pre-existing conditions", but let's be perfectly clear what huck is saying here: he is in favor of letting people die because they cannot afford to pay their medical bills out of pocket.

that's the bottom line. not every pre-existing condition will kill the person that has it, but some will. if you permit insurance companies to discriminate against them that means a certain percentage of americans with curable diseases will die. maybe that scenario reminds huckabee of an already burned down house, but what it reminds me of is negligent homicide.

one quote sums up the modern GOP

"A top Republican on financial issues said Thursday he was concerned that Elizabeth Warren would use a position in a new consumer protection agency to promote 'social justice.'"

and remember this is the "top republican" who is considered to be a moderate, so moderate that president obama appointed him to be a member of his cabinet.

wee booties are the key

(via boing²)

i can't get enough of these loonies

dan riehl calls on fox news to suspend karl rove from being a commentator on the network. rove's crime? working behind the scenes to cut a deal with the tea party to save mike castle's campaign and his comments on fox news yesterday in which he questioned o'donnell's competency as a candidate and senator. as riehl puts it:

Especially given his comments on Fox News tonight, until this is resolved, it seems impossible to trust Rove as an objective analyst.

that's right. riehl thinks that rove should be pulled off fox news because he isn't echoing the right party line. (or as riehl puts it, rove wasn't being "objective," because he said different stuff from everyone else).

even dan riehl doesn't view fox news as anything more than a right wing mouthpiece with no dissenting voices allowed. so why does anyone still pretend that it is a news source?

this might be crazy, but maybe she can pull it off

it's pretty fun to watch all the fighting on the right about o'donnell. and the delaware senate campaign really does have a lot of entertainment potential.

plus, right blogistan is really awesome this morning. check out this post about why o'donnell could win the general election:

Five Reasons O'Donnell Could Win

1. Coons could always self-implode. There is a small but nontrivial chance any politician will simply blow up. Odds are maybe 2% of that, but it's somethin'.

2. Coons isn't ideologically suited for Delaware himself. He's called a "bearded Marxist" -- he too may be too extreme for Delaware. Thus, we'd have a Republican too far to the right battling a Democrat too far to the left. Not great chances, but not an impossible longshot, either.

3. Coons may not be a great practical candidate, either. Mike Castle just wins elections -- until now -- so when he entered the race no more experienced Republican challenged him. And, I think, no serious Democrat rose to the challenge, either. Just Coons. (In fact, he was unopposed for the nomination -- apparently no one else wanted it, like O'Donnell versus Biden.) So he's not a superman, either.

4. O'Donnell could actually grow as a candidate. She's got a serious amount of work to do, and I don't know if she can do it. But until now she has been entirely on the defensive against attacks from within her party (which is something that has caused a lot of anger among her supporters). Now she's freed up from the constant defenses to do something besides all that. Will she rise? Probably. Enough? Probably not -- but who knows.

5. The Red Wave might even be bigger than we thought. Actually, I don't know about this one, because I was already thinking of an even bigger Red Wave than most people were and even my big Red Wave, in my mind at least, wasn't enough to do the trick. But with a little help from Coons, and a little help from herself... who knows.

(emphasis added)

check out all those weasel words! so to sum up, ace thinks that o'donnell might have an outside chance of winning because: (1) coons could screw up really badly (though there is no specific thing he sees that would cause that), (2) coons "may be" too left wing for delaware (but he doesn't seem too sure), (3) her opponent may not be a good campaigner (but again, he's not sure. ace is sure, however, that coons is not an imaginary alien from a series of comic books), (4) o'donnell may get better (but probably not), and (5) the national mood in favor of republicans might be enough to overcome the fact that o'donnell really really sucks as a candidate (but again, probably not).

but why did ace stop at just five? you can always make up more unlikely reasons for o'donnell to win. has he even considered these:

(6) coons might turn out to be jeffrey dahmer, if he faked his own death in prison years ago and has since then lay low as a mild-mannered county executive (but, i guess the odds of that are pretty low)

(7) coons might be abducted by aliens and not returned soon enough for him to campaign before the general election (okay, the odds are low for this too, but who knows?)

(8) let's not rule out spontaneous human combustion (sure, the SHC fad has passed, but it could come back before the election!)

(9) mass amnesia hitting democratic voters. it is possible that all the democrats will forget to vote on election day. (another small chance, i'd say less than 2%, but it could happen!)

(10) o'donnell might be a skilled mass hypnotist. (just because she hasn't displayed those abilities yet, doesn't mean she isn't saving them for the general!)

spoiler fun

for what it's worth, christina o'donnell was the favorite of the center city drinking liberally crowd this evening. and that's notwithstanding the fact that mike castle really does look like a muppet.

dreams

a substantive issues-oriented campaign would probably favor the democrats. lucky for the republicans, there is virtually no chance of that happening.

speaking of pinheads

i left a comment to this post over the weekend. all i was reacting to was this sentence:

The rest of the presser involved Obama making excuses for the economy - as if Democrats haven't had filibuster-proof control of Congress since 2007 - and avoiding questions about how many Democrat incumbents are running away from him and his policies in an effort to avoid responsibility for the mess they've created.

in my comment i pointed out that the democrats only gained a theoretical filibuster-proof majority when al franken was sworn in on july 7, 2009, and then they lost it when scott brown was sworn in on february 4, 2010. rather than having "filibuster proof control of Congress since 2007", the democrats had enough members of their caucus to defeat a filibuster for a total of 212 days. plus, even during that period, as a practical matter they did not have a filibuster-proof majority on most votes because on most issues individual members of the democratic caucus like ben nelson or joe lieberman would join with the republican filibuster. so as a practical matter democratic leadership never had a filibuster-proof majority for a lot of things they cared about.

anyway, i submitted my comment and got a message that it was in the moderation queue, presumably pending approval of joshua himself. today, i noticed that although subsequent comments have been posted, my comment was never accepted, even though i made nothing but a factual point. needless to say, the "since 2007" line remains in the post, without correction.

i only noticed because i dropped back in to peek at the blog today to see that joshua pundit laments accountability for military coups. i guess the overthrow of democracy with thousands of civilians missing and hundreds of thousand tortured is a good thing is this guy's mind.

pinheads

i love how o'reilly has a photo of his own head right over the word "pinheads". when i saw an advertisement for the book this morning, i initially thought it was a book about o'reilly and not by him.

just because they are handed an unexpected opportunity...

...that doesn't mean congressional democrats won't still be congressional democrats.

the best thing democrats have going for them is the republicans are charging straight into crazy land. the best thing the republicans have going for them is the democrats can't stop acting like democrats. strategic cowering indeed.

a half apology doesn't cut it

just to be sure that the point actually tipped, marty peretz apologized for saying that muslims shouldn't have first amendment rights but then doubles down on the idea that muslim life is cheap. oddly, marty seems to think this makes it all okay. even odder is that his "muslim life is cheap" argument basically comes down to saying that nick kristof thinks so too.

"nuh uh", says nick. so maybe this won't go away so easily. maybe peretz is finally going to be held accountable for what he has been getting away with for years.

then again, the worst that could possibly happen to him is that maybe the new republic will cut him loose. within days the weekly standard or fox news will scoop him right back up, to a place where he can preach his gospel without apology.

nitpick of the day

yesterday's telegraph:

They lived in an expensive apartment next to Central Square in the Kazakh province of Zhambyl (now called Taraz), where Ms Ashkenazi's grandfather, Zhylkybay Aralbaev, worked as secretary of the provincial Communist Party committee.

in fact, the province is still called "zhambyl". however, the biggest city and capital of the province changed its name from "zhambyl" to "taraz" in 1997.

on the other hand, the "central square" probably refers to dostyk square, which is in taraz city. so i guess my only real beef is the use of the word "province" instead of "city" (there's no need to get into the "oblast" thing). if they had gone with "city", i guess there wouldn't have been anything for me to pick.

i know, this is stupid. but what else am i gonna do with all that useless trivia i crammed into my head during my six months in taraz?

stuffed animals with mental disorders

i want the crocodile.

(or maybe i should have said i am out to get him)

(via Beth T on FB)

to answer john cole's question

these things always play out like this. someone makes an stray comment and everyone pretends it didn't happen. then it happens again, and they let it pass. and then it happens again, and they give it another pass. if it keeps up, eventually the past transgressions pile up high enough so there is an incident that, while it may not be inconsistent with prior behavior, puts the whole pattern in context and triggers a reaction. that's why it's called a "tipping point."

the only weird thing is that there just is no telling when the point will suddenly tip.

signs of disarray

it looks like a bunch of people ignored crazy pam's request.

and i'm guessing the blumenthalesque videos are not far behind.

stop

i'm slowly coming to the conclusion that the best way to commemorate 9/11 is to stop trying to commemorate 9/11. everyone who tries to do it just ends up twisting the event for their own political purposes. after nine years of this the day is starting to reek of cheap politics instead of feeling anything like a solemn occasion.

so maybe it would be better to just stop trying so hard. i'm not saying we should forget what happened. we won't anyway. i am saying a lot of these self-conscious efforts to remember often end up sullying the memory.

i'm not sure if i have thought this idea through yet. but after reading my FB feed this morning, i feel like throwing it out there.

get ready for one more notch on the crazy dial

by unfortunate coincidence eid al-fitr will fall right around september 11th this year, just as islamaphobia is reaching a fevered pitch in the u.s. we're probably only a few days away from some knucklehead noticing and claiming the muslims are "celebrating september 11th."

i bet no one will draw the same conclusions with rosh hashanah.

sounds like "night" but spelled like "no no"

my friend lala explains why she isn't in the peace corps.

paging michael ellis...

i think i liked terry jones better when he was a nude organist.

ed morrissey never heard of "margin of error"

the obvious answer is not a left-leaning media trying to find a poll to claim GOP momentum is reversed, but rather that last week's generic ballot poll showing a 10-point GOP advantage and this week's generic ballot poll showing a tie are probably both statistical outliers. the "real" generic ballot result is probably a GOP advantage of 4-6%.

it really is remarkable how many people who regularly watch the polls completely disregard that bit at the bottom that says "For results based on the total sample of registered voters, one can say with 95% confidence that the maximum margin of sampling error is ±4 percentage points." it's not just right-wingers who make this mistake.

and that's on top of the fact that the "generic ballot" question itself is pretty meaningless. generic ballot questions are like the iowa straw poll. they are one of those things that political reporters pay attention to, which fools political junkies into thinking generic ballot polls mean something about an upcoming election, when there is little evidence that they predict much at all.

can't get enough of my prints

we almost went a whole year, but not quite. we had to get fingerprinted again today, our eighth time (according to the blog archives) since the fun began.

i guess that counts as progress of some kind. between the beginning of this process and the mythical end, we will be fingerprinted a total of X times. as of today, we only have X minus 8 left.

not a big deal

does it really matter that most americans don't know who the chief justice of the supreme court is? sure, to a political junky and lawyer like me it may look like a big deal. but for most americans, it really doesn't make much of a difference whether they can answer that question.

every once in a while, i shock someone by revealing that i don't know the name of a single professional baseball player. to the diehard baseball fan this seems like a major demonstration of ignorance. but i get along just fine without knowing those names. the supreme court justice's name is really the same thing. most people can live their lives just fine without knowing. and while i think it would be better if they were into the same stuff as me, it's not a major problem that they are interested in other things instead.

besides, the poll is actually encouraging. while only 28% could name the chief justice, 53% said they did not know who the chief justice was. that means that 81% actually got the question right! not bad, american people.

can't hide it all

like clockwork, a right wing rally happens and a video of interviews with participants appears on the internet, showing how uninformed the participants are.

the aftermath of other right wing rallies haven't just featured these kind of videos (what i think of as the max blumenthal genre on youtube). in the past, the post-rally period has often also featured photos of extremist signs. but glenn beck banned participants from holding signs, presumably to prevent embarrassing photos showing what his crazy followers actually think. pam geller seems to be following glenn's lead for her upcoming rally. but i bet by september 13th we will still have video evidence that geller's people don't know shi'ite from shinola.

the problem is that they can't really ban video cameras because they want attention. that's the whole point of these rallies. if they hide so much that no one knows the rally took place, it undermines what they're trying to do. which means that the max blumenthal genre is here to stay.

suddenly oil is combustible

the big revelation from yesterday's exploding oil platform is that these platforms catch on fire and explode all the time. as the article says "roughly 100 fires" per year are reported by the u.s. coast guard. mariner energy alone (the company that owned the platform in yesterday's incident) has been involved in 13 such incidents since 2006.

this has always been a problem. it's just that until the BP deepwater disaster happened, no one paid any attention. now that these kind of incidents have caught the public's attention, we probably will be hearing about fires and explosions every once in a while from now on, creating the impression that "all of a sudden" offshore oil drilling is prone to accidents. in fact, it's always been prone to accidents. it took an unprecedented disaster to convince the media that the public would care about this sort of thing.

good old fashioned suck

tomorrow is gonna suck. but not in the way that my recent sucky days have sucked. no, tomorrow will suck in that refreshing old-fashioned sucky sort of way, like the days that sucked of yore.

i'm almost looking forward to it. there is a certain nostalgia for those classic sucky days, back before my current troubles in kazakhstan. tomorrow there won't be any judicial decisions that hit so close to home, no gut-wrenching judgment calls about the future of my family. it's just going to be a long day of work. which will suck, but in the broad scheme of things, not so badly. it might even bring me back to brighter times, when my bad days really weren't all that bad after all.

not so fast at hitting that bottle

there was a bit of a buzz yesterday about this study which allegedly found that heavy drinkers outlive nondrinkers. it's the kind of study that always gets a lot of attention, the media lives things that overturn commonly held beliefs about health, especially when something viewed as sinful to some might actually be good for you.

but the press coverage didn't bother looking into how reliable the study might be. echidne is the only one who did that, and she raises some serious questions whether the study isn't tainted by sample bias.