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.

kenyan sex strike

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

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

the zaballeen just can't get a break

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

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

the new face of the GOP

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

deMint's wish

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

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

pat toomey drops in on philadelphia drinking liberally

it was oddly appropriate considering all the specter talk tonight.

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

"where?" someone asked.

"down the stairs, first booth" said john.

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

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


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


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


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

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

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

"filibuster proof" redux

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

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

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

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

the real problem

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

switcheroo

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

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

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

(via MatthewB on FB)

game over

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

no room?

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

someone doesn't like the GOP

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

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

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

exceptions

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

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

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

something we might see someone saying

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

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

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

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

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

shit that's never gonna happen

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

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

specter is toast

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

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

truth commission

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

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

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

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

persistence of vision

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

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

on bananas and witches

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

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

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

what tom tomorrow said

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

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

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

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

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

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

hate triangle

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

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

warrants outrage

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

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

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

the right's dilemma

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

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

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

LID+2 (الصيني )

ما زال ننتظر

wall street's latest problem

oops.

(via link candy from here)

preconditions

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

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

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

toxic bonus

wow, this is a really good idea:

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

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

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

(via susie)

watch

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

presecution over impeachment

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

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

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

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

bachmann prediction

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

tea party

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

what is norm thinking?

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

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

isn't it ironic

like rain on your tea par-tay

cautionary tale

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

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

almost as fun as a tea party

egypt's clowns go on strike.

shaking in my boots

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

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

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

easy to deal with

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

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

vote maggie

consider that an official rubber hose endorsement.

to answer perino's question...

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

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

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

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

(HT MatthewB on FB for the achenbach link)

poops preview

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

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

crowd vs. crowd

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

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

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

it's about time

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

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

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

first brendan now this

too funny for words.

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

tap, tap tap...

is this thing still on?

barf detergent

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

call the bluff

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

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

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

a quick story and sita sings the blues

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

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

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

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

anyway...

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

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

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

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