thoughts from a cute rural sweet shop

why is the fact that chocolates are "hand made" a good thing? i understand the appeal of fresh or otherwise high quality ingredients, but if contact with someone's hands is affecting the the taste in any way, i think i'd rather pass.

blogs suck

looking over the memeorandum links about the events in mumbai both today and yesterday, i'm once again reminds me how useless blogs are when it comes to a breaking story. there's nothing stupider than a blogger watching the news on t.v. and then posting a series of "updates" that are essentially just stuff we could all read on a regular news site. other bloggers pick out stray details from these stories and spin larger truths out of them, never mind that those details are culled from initial reports that often prove to be completely unreliable.

the best political blogs are good for giving news analysis. blogs aren't generally very good at delivery news. it can be funny to watch some of these bloggers pretending to be authoritative sources of information when they're just getting it second-hand like everyone else.

39

there's no denying it anymore. i think i've definitely reached the late mid-30s now.

(38, 37, 36, 35, 34)

iraqi parliament approves SOFA

it's official, the u.s. is obligated to be completely out of iraq in 3 years and it must remove all combat forces from iraqi cities by june 30, 2009. it also gives iraqi commanders a large say in american military operations, subjects american contractors to iraqi law, and also u.s. soldiers in some circumstances as well.

i'm really curious to see what actually happens when something happens that gives the u.s. the choice of whether to abide by the limits of the agreement. for example, the next time an american contractor shoots someone. and i wonder who will still be in baghdad on july 1, 2009. because the bush administration does not consider the SOFA to be a treaty, it won't submit it to congress for ratification. so technically, it's just a sole executive agreement under u.s. law. which means that it is binding but that president obama could "unsign" it at will.

however the iraqis probably will treat it as binding on the u.s. so it would could cause a world of trouble if the u.s. didn't comply with it. we'll see what actually happens.

i feel like i should do some kind of thanksgiving post

but i don't wanna.


...hey, i never realized that the bird's name does come from the country. i had always assumed it was just a coincidence.

and speaking of "the tendency... to attribute exotic animals and foods to a place that symbolized far-off, exotic lands" the three ways to say "turkey" (the bird) in arabic translate as "ethiopian cock", "indian cock" and "roman cock."

maybe i'm doing a thanksgiving post after all.

question authority

one of my earliest criticisms of the bush administration, was president bush's avoidance of press conferences. he did some pro-forma joint appearances with world leaders, but in his first year of office he held only four solo press conferences. and that's all he held in 2002 and 2003 as well. in 2004 he held five, a grand total of 17 solo press conferences in his entire first term. bush's lack of willingness to speak to the press used to drive me crazy. it really bothered me that the president wasn't willing to take questions about his actions. it struck me as both arrogant and anti-democratic.

my occasional rants about that issue mostly predated this blog. but it did come up tangentially in a couple of early posts. then i stopped fuming about it, partly because i got used to it, partly because bush held a few more during his second term and partly because critics of the president started finding more of a voice notwithstanding the relative dearth of formal press conferences.

obama has already held four press conferences since he was elected, three were just this week (and it's a short week). he's already has as many as president bush did in his entire first year. it's really great to have a president who is simply open to take questions.

this isn't really a feather in obama's cap as much as a testament to how bad bush was. there shouldn't be anything remarkable about a president being questioned by the press.

future posts

after blogger added the ability to write a post and schedule it to appear later i resisted for a little while. but this month i have written a few. someone sent me something halloweenie, but i didn't get it until a week into november. in the olden days i would think, "i'll try to remember to post that next year" knowing full well that i will probably never remember something like that a year later. but this time, instead of trying to remember, i wrote a future post setting it to appear on 10/31/09.

that one instance seems to have opened the door for future posting for me. i've been writing more and more in the past two weeks. i see something and think about how i'd like to post about that on some particular date. but instead of waiting, i future post it.

but the concept of future posts bothers me. this blog doesn't really have a purpose, but there are a bunch of different things that i like about it. which is why i keep doing it. one of those things is that i like having a record of what i was thinking about on a particular day. when i do hunt through my archives, it's always entertaining to read what i was thinking at various points in my past.

future posts tend to undermine that. if i had forgotten about that halloween link i alluded to above by next october, who cares? wouldn't whatever i decide to post on the actual day of october 31, 2009 be a better reflection of what i thought on that particular day than sometime i posted a year before? if i forget about the link, it really shouldn't be in the post. at least it shouldn't if contemporaneous reflection of my thoughts is the goal.

anyway, i'm probably obsessing about this issue too much. but that is what's going through my head this particular morning.

staying silent

the bush administration's interpretation of the SOFA doesn't matter much at this point. they can be as creative as they want with their own translation, adding asterisks and bracketed exceptions to their heart's content. if the agreement actually goes into effect january 1st, the bush administration's interpretation will only matter for 19 days. it's not really enough time to muck things up too much and, in any event, they won't be around when the withdrawal provisions come into play.

the real question is how does the new administration intend to interpret the agreement.

now everyone wants a big comfy SOFA

karzai requests a withdrawal timetable for afghanistan.

actually, is there any reason why the u.s. hasn't entered into a SOFA with afghanistan already? the bush administration started itching for one in iraq by the fourth year of the conflict. the war in afghanistan has been going on for seven years already. why hasn't the bush administration pushed for one there by now?

drinking inquisitively confirmed

does anyone have any idea what is going on with drinking liberally tonight? last week was such a disaster, i can't imagine anyone is itching for a replay. but i haven't heard where it will be yet.

...tonight's location will be:

triumph brewing company
117 Chestnut Street
Philadelphia, PA 19106
6 p.m. until ?

everyone's invited (and forget what i said about "disaster" above. DL is great fun! really!!!) and if you know anyone who might be interested, please pass on the above information.

kaufman

i don't understand the criticism of appointing ted kaufman to fill biden's seat. the only really coherent statement of objection is here but i guess i just disagree with nate silver on this one. if your goal is to have a place-holding senator for the two years until a special election is held, then it seems to me that a high-ranking aid to the outgoing senator is a good choice. kaufman knows how to run biden's senate office, he's been the one running it for years.

so what if he isn't "prominent" (whatever that means) or if he didn't have a wiki page before the appointment was announced? governor minner wasn't trying to appoint someone who was famous, she was trying to appoint someone who would make a good senator for the next two years.

and yes, kaufman is probably just keeping the seat warm so beau biden can run for it when he gets back from iraq. but so what? beau still has to run for election. he'll have all the advantages of the biden name in delaware, but he would have that with or without the kaufman appointment. and the important thing is that delaware voters would be free to reject him if they thought he wouldn't make a good senator.

escape from new york

still working on it. but at least i managed to get out of brooklyn.

long day.

the light at the end of the taxi to the dark side

i finally saw taxi to the dark side last night. it was striking how quickly the subject matter of that film has taken on the feel of history. the bush administration is still in office, but rumsfeld is gone and the rest are on their way out. the supreme court has ruled that the detainees now have a right to submit habeas petitions to federal court and several detainees have already been ordered released. the incoming administration has promised to close the prison on guantanamo and end the practice of sending detainees there.

it's not over yet, there's no way to undo an innocent taxi driver who were tortured and killed in american custody, and the perpetrators of the torture policy have not answered for their crimes. perhaps they never will. but to me the movie felt a little less depressing now than it would have just earlier this year.

obama-SOFA

earlier in the week, when the iraqi cabinet approved the SOFA, i saw a few conservative blogs spinning the u.s.-iraq agreement to a withdrawal of all american forces from iraq as if it were some kind of rejection of obama's withdrawal plan. all because the SOFA requires a withdrawal of all forces by the end of 2011 whereas obama's 16-18 month withdrawal timetable would finish in the summer of 2010. now tom hayden seems to be saying the same thing:

The pact being negotiated between the US and Baghdad governments includes a direct rebuff to president-elect Barack Obama's promised policy of withdrawing American combat troops in 16-18 months. The pact instead would leave those troops in place until the end of 2011, a doubling of the timeline to which Obama pledged himself.

but there's nothing inconsistent between obama's plan and the plan in the SOFA. first, obama's withdrawal timetable only applied to "combat troops". much to the chagrin of DFHs like me, obama never promised they all u.s. military personelle would be out by the end of his withdrawal timetable. the SOFA deadline, on the other hand, applies to all members of the u.s. military. thus, it doesn't contradict obama's plan (or "rebuke" it), it just gives an outer deadline for the non-combat personnel to leave. both obama's plan and the SOFA can be read together without contradiction: first the combat forces come out, and then a year later the rest come out.

but second, the SOFA pretty clearly states that the end of 2011 deadline is a floor, not a ceiling. that is, while all forces have to be out by then, nothing in the agreement prevents them from leaving earlier. indeed, article 24 of the agreement states quite clearly: "The Iraqi government admits to the sovereign right of the United States to withdraw U.S. forces from Iraq at anytime." that's not a "rebuke" to obama's position in favor of a quicker withdrawal, it's an endorsement of it in a legal document.

which once again makes me wonder whether the people making this argument have bothered to look at what the SOFA actually says.

deja vu

the historical context for iraqi opposition to the SOFA.

islamists vs. pirates

the somali islamists have are hunting the pirates that seized the "sirius star" oil tanker last week. the tanker is a saudi-owned vessel, which makes me wonder if someone in riyadh didn't just make a call to some friends in east africa.

i also wonder if the islamists will be able to rehabilitate their image with the west if they start presenting themselves as anti-piracy fighters.

joints

from today's NYT:

The family is said to have fought for control of markets ranging from illegal gambling joints, to bottle recycling, to sidewalk flower stalls.

i bet if the article had been about anything other than organized crime, the reporter never would have used the word "joints."

count this vote

under minnesota law, a ballot should not be invalidated if the voters intent is determinable. i think it's pretty clear that this voter believed that the lizard people should be on the ballot but that al franken nevertheless would make a better senator. thus, she or he wrote in "lizard people" but filled in the franken oval (instead of the write-in oval) to cast his/her vote for franken that race.

it's also apparent that the voter wanted the lizard people to be president, not senator (that's the vote above the senate race. baldwin/castle was the constitution party's ticket in the presidential race)

you can puzzle out other challenged minnesota ballots here.

(via skippy)

اتفاق انسحاب القوات الأميركية من العراق

it's true.

also the arabic acronym of the title isn't "SOFA," it's something like iiqaa' (ااقاع). i don't think that spells anything, but it is sort of close to the word for "abyss" (قاع).

then again, i don't understand how arabs do acronyms. like why is "fatah" backwards? and how does hamas make the word "islamiyya" an "s" in their acronym? do they always use first letter of the root instead of the first letter of the word when they make acronyms? if so, then the acronym for the arabic agreement would be wasaqaa' (وسقاع), which is the arabic word for "and saqaa'"

slumdog millionaire

i got tickets to last night's advance screening of slumdog millionaire via the philadelphia film society. (it's only really an "advance screening" for philadelphia. the film has already opened in a few other cities). the extra ticket went to susie and ciarán met us there through the power of his own free ticket.

"slumdog" tells the tale of jamal malik, a poor kid from the slums of mumbai who wins big in the indian version of "who wants to be a millionaire." the question posed by the film is how can an uneducated slumdog like jamal know enough to get that many questions right. the movie is structured by a series of flashbacks. each question in the game show prompts a look into jamal's past to explain how he happens to know each answer. the "now" of the film is a just 24 hour period which jamal spends in the "millionaire" hotseat and in a police station. but through the flashbacks we learn jamal's life story.

using quick cuts and a handheld camera, the film does a good job of getting across the chaotic feel of the mumbai streets. it also is surprisingly adept at sucking you into the story and keeping you on the edge of your seat, even though you basically know where it's going. (i even correctly guessed what jamal's last question would be). at its heart, "slumdog" is a feel-good film about a poor kid who beats the odds and ultimately triumps over his adversaries. but it feels original and, unlike the typical feel-good film, "slumdog" does not shy away from the darker side of life on the streets of india. as the mandatory bollywood dance number began and the closing credits started to roll, ciarán said "that's the best movie i've seen all year." i don't know if i'd go that far, but "slumdog" really is worth seeing.

there was a Q and A with danny boyle at the end of our screening. don't believe me? here's a crappy picture i took with my cell phone:


i only got to see some of the questions before susie and i made a run for the train station. usually i find the Q and As to be pretty dull. but boyle actually seemed to have interesting things to say about filming in india, the clever use of subtitles, et cetera. feel free to tell me what i missed, ciarán!

...susie's post about the film is here.

FAIL

missouri is officially red.

and my prediction is finally officially wrong. but hey, getting one state wrong out of fifty isn't bad. and that one state was so close that i managed to avoid being officially wrong for more than two weeks after the election.

okay, i also didn't predict that one of nebraska's EVs would go to obama. on the other hand, i didn't address that issue either way when i wrote the prediction post. but on the other other hand, the reason i didn't address it is because i didn't think it would be a factor (that is, i didn't think ME or NE would split their electoral votes) so if i had been asked about it, i would have predicted that wrong too. on the fourth hand, none of my dear readers ever asked me about that issue to make me make a wrong prediction. so it's really your fault, not mine.

but on the fifth hand, going back to missouri, that's actually russell's fault. because that was what we decided on election night. thanks russell!

SOFA text

mcclatchy published an unofficial translation of the SOFA that was recently approved by the iraqi parliament. raed jarrar's translation is here. (i haven't gone through the two english versions line-by-line, but they look fairly similar to me). the original arabic version of the agreement that jarrar worked off of to make his translation is here.

there has been some discussion about whether the withdrawal timetable is "binding" or not. but looking at both the translations and the arabic version, it seems rather clear. the section discussing withdrawal of u.s. forces is article 24. from the mcclatchy translation:

All U.S. forces are to withdraw from all Iraqi territory, water and airspace no later than the 31st of December of 2011.

from the jarrar translation:

All U.S. forces must withdraw from all Iraqi territories no later than December 31st 2011.

from the arabic original:

يجب ان تنسحب جميع قوات الولايات المتحدة من جميع الاراضي العراقية في موعد لا يتعدى 31 ديسمبر/كانون الاول عام 2011 ميلادي

i'm not sure where mcclatchy got the words "water and airspace" in their translation, which makes me wonder whether they are working off of the same arabic document as jarrar. but all three don't leave any wiggle room about the withdrawal deadline. it sure looks mandatory to me.

that clinton thing

i have no problem with hillary clinton being secretary of state if that is what happens.

well, i have one problem with it. i'm not looking forward to putting up with this kind of bullshit for the next four-to-eight years.

last night at drinking liberally, roxanne asked why the clintons bring out the crazy in so many people (on both ends, there are both rabid clinton haters and rabid clinton boosters). we have the dowds of the world on one hand and the PUMAs on the other. they seem like opposite sides to the same coin. it makes no sense to me at all. both bill and hillary are flawed center-left politicians. are they really all that different from the others?

pirates less fun when i can't fill my tank

i'm beginning to wonder if the somali pirates may have finally overreached when they seized the saudi oil tanker.

sure, they've attacked cruise ships in the past. but who takes a cruise off the coast of somalia?

and yeah, they snatched that a ship filled with heavy weaponry. but the weapons were probably just going to feed the sudanese civil war. the pirates may have done us a favor by preventing that shipment from going through.

sure, their actions have disrupted shipments of videogames. but is that a bad thing? maybe the those kids will pick up a book instead.

but you don't fuck with the world's oil supply. this attack in particular has a lot of scare potential as the tanker was seized 450 nautical miles southeast of mombasa, that's a long way from the somali coast (mombasa itself is quite a bit south from the somali border). if pirates are going that far afield in every direction, that would place a lot of the gulf oil shipments in jeopardy. if they keep this up and particularly if there's a noticeable effect on world oil prices, the world powers will probably come down pretty hard on them.

secret ballot

i think the fact that lieberman's committee chairmanship is being decided by secret ballot will probably work to lieberman's benefit. on the one hand, secrecy will give senators cover for voting against someone who they may have good relations with as a friend and colleague. on the other hand, secrecy will allow senators to avoid accountability with the democratic base if they're inclined to give their old friend and colleague a pass.

between those two possibilities, it seems more likely that senators will favor personal connections over accountability. lieberman may end up losing some minor perks as a token penalty, but i predict that he will remain chair of the homeland security committee.

...rumor has it that they cut a deal for lieberman. vote or not, they will make sure that lieberman keeps his homeland security chairmanship but lose some token subcommittee chair or chairs. as i said before there were good pragmatic reasons for dealing with lieberman in 2006. but those reasons don't apply anymore. the democrats would lose nothing by throwing him completely out of the caucus. but it looks like that's not how things will go.

drinking liberally: same bat-time, new bat-channel

the philly drinking liberally is meeting at a new location tonight: plough and stars, 2nd street, btwn market and chestnut.

other stuff like the time (6 p.m. to later) and those annoying regulars will remain the same. see you there!

rotascope iraq cabinet approves SOFA

and the real cabinet did too. the version they approved has a firm pullout deadline of 2011. in its desperation to get a deal, the bush administration not only agreed to a timetable for withdrawal, but a firm deadline that precludes any permanent bases or any "residual force." it's a remarkable turnabout considering that just a little while ago the very administration that negotiated this agreement would refer to anyone who suggested a much more modest withdrawal plan as a traitor.

in retrospect, the biggest success of "the surge" was probably not that it was responsible for the entire reduction of violence in iraq, the awakening movement and al-sadr's cease-fire had big roles in that too. but rather because the surge gave president bush the ability to claim a success in iraq. and that gave him the political cover necessary to enter into a binding agreement to pull all american forces out.

of course, that's assuming that the deal passes the iraqi parliament. odds are, it will, but it's not assured of passage.

(and yes, i'm still playing with the cartoonizer)

synecdoche, ny

mrs. noz and i saw synecdoche, ny last night. i'm a big fan of charlie kaufman, so i really wanted to give this film the benefit of the doubt. and while i really enjoyed the first 30 minutes or so, it's hard to see the rest of it as anything other than a complete train wreck.

it helps to understand the film if you know what synecdoche means. (the examples are more helpful than the definition). kaufman clearly is trying to say something about the nature of creativity and how a person can take on another persona during the creative process. hell, that's what all of his movies are about. also in all of his films, it always feels like kaufman is trying to push the plot a little over the top by the end. this time, i think he simply pushed too soon and too far.

when you pile oddities upon oddities, eventually the oddness overwhelms the film. kaufman's quirky exploration of his themes are shoveled on top of one another until the movie is nothing but quirk. it's just a big convoluted metaphor that loses its power the longer it stays on screen. kaufman's sense of humor, which i really like, itself gets diluted by overuse. there is no there there. or, at least, i think i got all i could out of the there a good hour before the end of the film.

and yet, plenty of people out there seem to really like this movie. i wonder if they're not giving it more credit than it deserves. just because it's weird and convoluted doesn't necessarily mean that it's hiding any deeper truths. if you untangle all its thread, i suspect you'd say: "that's it? i got that in the first half."

cartoonizer

i've been making cartoon versions of myself over at befunky.com. i almost posted one, but then i didn't.

so there.

(via EP on facebook)

electoral explorer

via mithras, here's a nifty map of the u.s. showing county-by-county results from the recent election that you can mess around with by varying the demographics.

okay, maybe that wasn't very clear. but the map itself is pretty self-explanatory. just go there and start clicking and sliding to watch the blue and red appear and disappear. you'll figure it out.

weekly video address

years ago, i asked whether any radio stations actually broadcast the president's weekly radio address. ach week i'd hear press reports about what the president said in his address, but i never heard the radio address on any radio station, other than clips pulled out for news reports. it seemed like no one other than the press corps ever actually listened to the thing.

then hydro pointed out in the comments that it was regularly broadcast, locally on KYW. but who wants to listen to a speech at 10 a.m. on a saturday morning?

the new president seems to be fixing that problem. he's replacing the weekly radio address with a weekly web video. actually, he's not replacing it, the audio from the video will continue to air as the weekly radio address.

anyway, the video will probably turn out to be just as boring as the usual radio address, but at least you can watch it whenever you're in the mood for that kind of thing. and with a web video, there's actually a chance that the audience will be more than people like the press corps who are watching because it's their job. (not me though. i'll probably only bother with the ones that cause a kerfuffle)

gender analyzer

the gender analyzer guesses that i'm female, though it also hedges by noting that this site is "quite gender neutral." five years ago the gender genie correctly guessed that i was male. advantage, gender genie.

however, the GG guessed some other stuff wrong back when i wrote the 2003 post. and if i cut and paste the text from my last post into the gender genie, it marks me pretty definitively as female. advantage, gender confusion.

so maybe i'm hard to classify. maybe these sites are picking up lingering vibes from my cheerleading days. or it could be that women's college i went to.

(via og by email)

another reason i like this time of year.

i realize that a lot of people don't like how early it gets dark this time of year. i've been lucky in that my mood isn't noticeably affected by the amount of sunlight i'm exposed to each day, and i like the less harsh light we get during the winter in this part of the world.

but on top of that, i really love getting to see the sunset from my office window this time of year. my window faces east, not west, so i don't see the real sunset unless i walk over to the conference room. but even from my eastern view, the colors and shadows over philadelphia from 51 floors above can still be pretty dazzling.

"ah-- you have scored a point there"

soon there will be an opening for the position of world's biggest asshole. no one is clamoring to apply.

future times

fun stuff. if you're confused, look for the fine print.

if the NYT were as ignorant of the concept of "fair use" as the (possibly defunct?) PA college republicans, they'd be sending a DMCA notification about now.

the malkin-ayers connection

bill ayers wouldn't be able to "cash in" if people like michelle malkin hadn't been talking about him so much. you could argue that malkin and ayers are directly profiting off each other. malkin is making money by railing about ayers and ayers is making money by riding the notoriety that he gets from that said railing. they're like symbiotic business partners.

(via memeorandum)

blogging my way out of a cabinet seat

i think obama's vetting questionnaire is the wave of the future. especially this part:

They must include any e-mail that might embarrass the president-elect, along with any blog posts and links to their Facebook pages.

The application also asks applicants to "please list all aliases or ‘handles’ you have used to communicate on the Internet."

on the plus side, if what i write here excludes me from a cabinet position, i can hire all the illegal nannies i want. woo-hoo!

drinking liberally

if you're in the area, come toast the coming soviet caliphate at the center city drinking liberally:

tangier
18th and lombard
philadelphia, pa
6 pm until later.

this could be your big chance to meet your favorite blogger! plus, i'll be there too.

cut him loose

it makes no sense to me at all why the democratic party leadership would want to cut lieberman any slack. the guy voluntarily left the party when he chose to run as an independent. after the 2006 election, the party needed lieberman to be a part of their caucus to get control of the senate (and thus hold the chairs of all of the committees). at that time lieberman had an actual bargaining position: he wanted his seniority to be honored by the dems and to become chair of a committee, the dems wanted lieberman in their caucus so they could achieve the magic number to be the majority in the senate. there was a clear quid pro quo and so in 2006 it made perfect sense for the senate democratic leadership would make concessions to keep him in the democratic caucus.

but after the 2008 election, the situation has completely changed. there are still a couple of senate races that haven't been called yet, but no matter which way AK and MN goes, democrats will be the majority in the senate with or without lieberman. simply put, they don't need him anymore. so he doesn't have any leverage to negotiate himself a chairmanship.

the fact that lieberman might contribute to getting the filibuster-proof 60 number shouldn't be a factor at all. the majority party of congress is decided by the size of each respective caucus. it's essentially a single vote, taken at the beginning of the congressional session. breaking a filibuster, on the other hand, can happen in any number of individual cloture votes during the next two years. a senator's caucus doesn't determine that senator's cloture vote, and it happens fairly often. they can always support a filibuster even when their party leadership is against it. nothing about keeping lieberman in the democratic caucus would require him to vote with his party on cloture.

once again, lieberman voluntarily left the democratic party. he also broke his promise to support the democratic candidate for president. and worse, he didn't just break his promise in a passive way by not doing anything to support the democratic nominee. he went further, actively campaigning for the republican candidate and joining in some of the smears of one of the nastiest campaigns in recent history. those are all serious strikes against him.

so what does benefit does the democratic caucus get by overlooking all of that and keeping him in the caucus? as far as i can tell, none. yes, lieberman still votes like a democrat on a few issues (he is, for example, pro-choice). but is he really such a prick that he will vote against his conscience on an abortion vote just because he's mad at the party that he dumped? besides, lieberman's one vote probably won't make a difference on any abortion-related vote. it's highly unlikely that lieberman would even be the deciding vote on cloture. there's no reason to let him keep his chairmanship under these circumstances.

the eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month

is now. well not exactly (at least not the famous one), because those pesky european powers weren't on eastern standard time.

i've always wondered about the poor guy who was shot at 10:59 a.m. that morning.

religious exemption

it's kind of pointless to protest religions for the stances they take. religions aren't democracies. they take these positions because they believe their religious doctrine requires it. maybe if you committed to a detailed theological debate you could convince them they are mistaken. well, probably not. but that at least would have a better shot than waving placards outside their temples.

but the controversy over the morman church's role in funding proposition 8 does raise the question of why religions get a special tax exemption. some of the protesters have pushed to get the church of latter day saints tax exempt status revoked because they engaged in politics during the prop. 8 campaign. that raises a host of messy questions about where the line is between advocating for a particular candidate (or referendum vote) and being vocal about a tenet of your religion. the line between the two is inherently fuzzy. it seems that every time that the prevailing party in an election was supported by a religion, there are calls by the losing side to revoke that religion's tax-exempt status.

so why do we give religions tax exempt status to begin with? let's revoke every religion's tax exemption. then religious leaders could openly say whatever they want to say, even out-and-out endorse candidates, without the threat of any financial penalty. and members of other religions or non-believers like me could stop resenting the unfair tax advantages that religious organizations get over everyone else.

beaufort

i finally saw beaufort yesterday, a beautifully shot israeli film about the IDF's final days in beaufort castle. the film takes place just before israel completed its withdrawal from southern lebanon in 2000.

the film is called a "war movie", but if that's what it is, it's a pretty unusual example of the genre. there's no real combat scenes. the film depicts a bunch of IDF soldiers bunkered at the top of the mountain and shelled on a daily basis. there are explosions and there are deaths, but the enemy is completely unseen and the protagonists don't shoot back.

the reason they don't is because they've been ordered to leave. before the movie starts, the israeli public had soured on the occupation of lebanon and the IDF had planned a slow orderly withdrawal. they did not want to get entangled in any new offenses into the surrounding villages (where hezbollah was shelling them from). meanwhile, hezbollah wanted to get the credit for the israeli withdrawal. by firing on their positions right up until the withdrawal date, they could make it seem like hezbollah drove the israelis out of southern lebanon. thus, hezbollah had every incentive to continue firing at the soldiers to the bitter end whereas the soldiers could do nothing but crouch and wait for the order to leave.

while the soldiers basically spend the film waiting to get out, many were also reluctant to leave. in 1982, israel had waged a bloody battle to take the mountain fortress. to abandon it after 18 years seemed to render that sacrifice pointless. and yet all they were accomplishing by staying was attracting fire and dying one by one. the israeli government had already decided to withdraw from southern lebanon, the senselessness of soldiers dying to take the mountain in 1982 was trumped by the ongoing senselessness of their dying to stay on the mountain that they had already decided to leave.

"beaufort" is an israeli film and clearly is trying to capture an ambivalent moment in the israeli psyche. but as an american, it's hard not to see the parallels with iraq, once withdrawal finally becomes official u.s. policy. once that happens, it's hard not to see american soldiers in iraq as being in the same situation as the IDF soldiers portrayed in "beaufort." americans have died in iraq. perhaps a withdrawal would be seen as taking away the point of those deaths. but staying in iraq and continuing to sacrifice also seems pointless. in the end, staying for the point of staying--staying just to show that those earlier sacrifices weren't in vain--really isn't a point at all.

mad simpsons

for some reason the editing function is a little messed up. the first time you play it, the beginning flashes a bit of the scene i thought i edited out. but if you hit "watch again", the beginning is (sometimes) smooth, like how it was when i previewed my edit on the hulu site.

anyway, i'm still experimenting with hulu. i hate how the video will expire and disappear after a few days. by next week this post will have even less of a point.

which came first?

earlier in the week, i had a dream that i was sneezing uncontrollably. it woke me up and i started sneezing. i couldn't get myself to stop for almost 20 minutes. did i dream about sneezing because as i slept i felt that i had to sneeze, or did i psych myself into sneezing by having the dream?

unlike the chicken-and-egg problem, i don't think this one is solvable.

the deal with missouri

in finally found an article that helped me figure out why missouri hasn't been called yet. mccain is ahead with 100% percent of the precincts reporting. it's been like that for the last 48 hours. what are they waiting for if all the votes are in?

this morning i searched around and found this article from last wednesday:

With all Missouri precincts reporting results, Republican John McCain has 1,442,613 votes (49.4 percent). Democrat Barack Obama has 1,436,745 (49.2 percent). Four other candidates split the remaining 38,263 votes (1.3 percent).

The secretary of state’s office said about 7,000 provisional ballots were cast around the state. They won’t be counted until election authorities (county clerks, in most cases) determine whether the voters were eligible to cast ballots.

so now it makes sense. 1,442,613 minus 1,436,745 is 5,868. obama is behind, but the number of provisional ballots that haven't been counted exceed the margin that mccain is ahead. the provisionals have to be individually adjudicated (to see if each one should count) before they can be opened and added to the tally.

while the number of provisional ballots gives obama a theoretical possibility to win missouri, he would have to get the vast majority (more than 83%) of those votes to win. meanwhile, it looks like missouri officials have already worked their way through some of the provisional ballots. look at the CNN page again. as of this writing, mccain's total has increased to 1,442,673 (an increase of 60 votes from the block-quoted article) and obama's has increased to 1,436,814 (an increase of 69 votes). in the past two days they've counted 129 additional votes and that resulted in only a 9 vote gain by obama. he's getting only 53.4% of the provisional votes (and that's assuming that none were deemed to be invalid), far short of the pick-up rate he needs. (note: by the time you read this, the mccain and obama tallies might change a bit more)

in addition to the 129 provisions that have been counted and added to the tally on the CNN page, there must have been some that were thrown out. during my poll watcher training, the obama campaign estimated that only 1/2 of all provisionals would be counted. assuming that rate applies, that would mean that about 250 provisions have been reviewed so far, leaving about 6,750 still outstanding. to win MO, obama would have to close a 5,859 gap. at this point he would need to get about 86.8% of the remaining provisional ballots both to be counted as eligible ballots and to be an obama vote. i can't see that happening. missouri may not be officially called yet, but it is effectively a red state.

post-election report from earth-3

it's interesting to watch what rightwingers have been saying since election day. before november 4th it made sense for them to misrepresent obama's positions because they were trying to win over voters. so when they would claim that people who earn less than $250k would get a tax increase under his tax plan, or that obama is for a government takeover of the health care industry or advocates universal health coverage mandates, or that obama is for confiscating everyone's firearms, or that obama was for an unrealistic teleport every soldier out of iraq the day he entered office policy, or that obama advocated attacking pakistan and surrendering to iran, or that obama would squelch rightwing speech by restoring the "fairness doctrine", et cetera, it looked to me like these were all attempts to mislead people so that they would vote for mccain.

but now the election is over. there's no need to repeat those lines anymore if your purpose is to stop obama from getting someone's vote. and yet the lines live on. it's almost like they weren't trying to misinform other people these last few months, but rather they were misinformed themselves. the post-election persistence of the health care and iraq lines are particularly surprising. obama's opposition to health insurance mandates got a fair amount of coverage during the campaign, particularly last winter and spring. it was one of the biggest policy differences between him and hillary clinton in the primary. i obama's 18 month iraq withdrawal timetable has been in the public eye for just as long if not longer.

it's basically the same thing with the continued emphasis on obama's middle name. sure, one week ago you could maybe think that saying "hussein" would scare people away from voting for him. but now that the election is over, it's become bigotry without a point. i guess that's what happens when you live in the alternate reality of talk radio and fox news for this long. it's not an electoral strategy after all. they really can't tell what obama stands for and they really do think his middle name has actual significance.

president-elect

once upon a time i thought that president-elect was the best job in the world. you're not president, you don't have any actual responsibilities. you're not running for president, so all that campaigning shit is finally over. and yet you're about to be the president of the united states! plus, you're the new shiny incoming president, not the crusty old one that everyone is tired of. you can go on and on about any issue in the world, and everyone will listen.

and that's why, circa 1992, i went through a stage when i told people: "when i grow up, i want to be president-elect." not president, mind you--what a shitty job that is-- but president elect, the best job in the world. i couldn't figure out how to get to be president-elect without having to endure an election campaign. i had no desire to run for president. but i figured that if i could somehow get to be president-elect i could avoid being president by resigning on inauguration day.

anyway, this week i've decided that, contrary to my earlier impression, the president-elect actually has some responsibilities. so i don't want to be president-elect anymore. thanks, but no thanks.

toot toot

i just want to point out that with NC blue and MO still technically up in the air, my pre-election guess has still not been proven wrong. it looks like it will be as soon as mccain's apparent victory in missouri becomes official. but i might as well bask in the remaining moments before that happens.

shorter right blogistan

Police: Elderly man upset over Obama win bites bar patron's nose

A 70-year-old man upset with the election of Sen. Barack Obama as president of the United States began swinging his cane at customers inside a Kingston bar Tuesday night and bit one patron on the nose, according to Kingston police.

Alexander J. McKenna, of Landon Avenue, Kingston, is charged with simple assault, disorderly conduct, public drunkenness, and harassment.

Police said they arrived on the scene at Pizzle’s Bar on Cherry Street around 2:15 a.m. to see McKenna on the ground screaming obscenities while being detained by customers.

Witnesses told police McKenna walked in the bar, had a few drinks and began to scream vulgarities regarding Obama’s election victory.

Two brothers tried to calm him down and make friends with him, but he continued to be disorderly. He walked over and bit one of the brothers on the nose, police said. McKenna then struck several customers with his cane before being subdued.

The suspect "stated he was drunk and upset over Obama winning the presidential nomination and subsequently took his anger out on them (customers)," police wrote in arrest papers.

McKenna was jailed in the Luzerne County Correctional Facility until his morning arraignment. He was released on $2,500 unsecured bail.

(via cuzzin dan via email)

story time!

a lot of people are buzzing about whether they ever thought they would see a black president elected during their lifetime. to be honest, the campaign season dragged on for so long, i can't remember what i thought before it began anymore. but i do have a story (cue wavy flashback lines)

the year was 1998. i lived in hyde park, a neighborhood in the predominantly black south side of chicago. hyde park was a strange neighborhood. it included the university of chicago, and thus a lot of undergrads, graduate students and professors who were from all over the place. as i just mentioned, hyde park was also one of the predominantly black southside neighborhoods. but unlike some of those other neighborhoods, hyde park was not a slum. and thus it attracted a lot of chicago's black professionals. hyde park, or at least northern hyde park and kenwood (the neighborhood immediately to the north) was also nation of islam central. louis farrakhan was one of my neighbors (if 8 blocks or so away still counts as being a neighbor) as was mohammed ali.

hyde park was one of a few really mixed race neighborhoods in chicago. but there was some segregation within the neighborhood. some businesses were only frequented by "university people" and others by "neighborhood (i.e. black) people." there were also some businesses that both went to. but a lot fell into one category or another.

the neighborhood had a single movie theater. it varied a little depending on what films were playing there, but most of the time the theater catered to the neighborhood people. the university had its own film series for students and professors whereas the movie theater drew south siders from a lot of the surrounding black neighborhoods. but that didn't mean that we never went to the local movie theater. it wasn't that unusual for mrs. noz and i to go.

we saw deep impact in that theater. it was a mostly forgettable film, taking place in the near future where the world is faced with a meteor impact that threatens the extinction of the human race. but i do remember this: the president of the united states was played by morgan freeman. when freeman first came on screen, a kid's voice from somewhere in the almost all black audience said very loudly "the president is a black man!" then the audience laughed. i couldn't decide if the audience was laughing at the fact that the kid took notice of the race of the president, or at the absurdity of the idea that the president would ever actually be black. i'm still not sure which one it was today.

the day after

i'm still waiting to see if my prediction is right. my three "optimistic guesses" (IN, MO and NC) are still up in the air right now, but if current leads hold IN and NC will be blue and MO will be red. that would mean i predicted only one state wrong and it would mean i got it more right than mr. rove. it would also mean that MO would lose it's status as the bellwether state.

y'hear that missouri? you'd better flip soon or people will pay even less attention to you from now on.

anyway, i had a good time poll watching last night. i managed to help between 3 and 4 people cast a ballot who otherwise wouldn't have. at least one of them was probably a mccain vote (judging from the stickers i saw on her car when i followed her into the parking lot to talk her back into the polling place). mostly things went extremely smoothly at my little precinct. occasionally, people from the campaign or independent floating observers would come by and tell stories about serious problems at a neighboring precinct (we got a few people showing up at our polling place who were turned away there) or other places in the region. like my 2004 experience, even though i spent much of the day standing around, it felt extremely satisfying. and it was fun to watch the pride of people casting a vote in such a historic election. more than one family took pictures of each other as they entered and left the polling booth.

and, of course, it didn't hurt that i really thought that obama was cruising to a victory. the results weren't all great. gerlach is going to remain my representative, it looks like proposition 8 will pass in california (though it still isn't certain yet), and stevens will probably keep his seat long enough to have palin appoint herself as his successor when he gets hauled off to jail (though the stevens race is also still technically up in the air). [UPDATE: it turns out it's not clear if the stevens to palin handoff would really work because of some confusion in alaskan law. but palin could run in the special election] and i'm still biting my nails over the franken-coleman race, which doesn't look too great right now. but, it really was a fun day, a long exhausting fun day. but still fun. and it was nice to go to an election party last night that didn't end as a total downer.

long day

are we at mars yet?

election prediction

it's a pretty optimistic map. missouri, indiana and north carolina are all toss-ups right now and i've decided to toss them to my candidate. karl rove's map has essentially the same prediction without those three. MT and ND are also close enough to go blue. but i have a hard time believing obama will win all the states that are close and i got to draw the line somewhere.

anyway, it's a guess. not a blind guess, but a semi-educated one.¹ we'll see how wrong i am soon enough.

(graphic made using the real clear politics electoral map tool)

-----------------
1- i'm just referring to my state-by-state predictions here. predicting an obama win is pretty safe at this point.

vote

as i mentioned before, i'm doing voter protection tomorrow for the obama campaign. all the americans out there should go out and vote (if you haven't early voted yet). and yes, that goes for the trolls too. i'm a big believer in everyone's voting rights. plus it looks like we're gonna kick your ass this year. i can afford to be magnanimous. ;)

by any measure the voting system in this country is a total mess, with each jurisdiction having its own rules and it's own voting methods. wherever you are, if you have trouble voting don't back down and leave before you've submitted a ballot. seek assistance from the volunteers on the scene or call your local voting authority for help. if that doesn't work, call the campaign that you support and ask for their help. both campaigns will do whatever they can to make sure their supporters have the right to cast a ballot. as a very last resort, ask for a provisional ballot. the worst thing to do is to be turned away from the polls without casting any kind of vote. and go in knowing your rights. the ACLU has state-by-state information. the obama campaign has a good summary of your rights as a voter in each state. there's also some good information at the 866-our-vote web site. it's a non-partisan group you can also call if you have problems voting and don't want to call a campaign.

if you're a pennsylvania resident, find your polling place here. or residents of any state can find their voting place through the obama campaign site or the mccain site. each county uses a different voting machine in this state, you can watch a demo video for your machine here (again, this is only for PA. other states may have their own page). the PAvotes web site contains a lot of good links and information. if you live in another state, your own state may have set up an equivalent site.

UPDATE (5:14 p.m.): i moved this to the top of the page because i want everyone to see it. go out and vote!

fucking election memories

inspired by mithras, i read through all of this. fucking. election. to see how many i could remember. i got and could explain almost all of them. the only ones i couldn't get are the following eight:

MILLS
DR. NO
WE GO PLAY HOOP
CHOOM GANG
MIKE'S ALTERNATE DEBATES
HE'S CATCHING ON I'M TELLING YA
CAR TELEPHONES
4CHAN HACKERS

can anyone do better than that? the winner will be recognized as having no life for the past year and a half.

waiting in line to avoid the lines

one thing that captain fish did get right: why would anyone wait hours to vote early if the main point of voting early is to "avoid the lines"?

it is remarkable that our voting system can be completely overwhelmed when a whopping 60% of eligible voters actually shows up to vote. we want all eligible voters to vote, but the voting system strains when more than half of them heed the call and actually do.

peeking under those SOFA cushions

i realize everyone's obsessing about some kind of election thing, but iraq has a looming crisis over the SOFA. for whatever reason, the SOFA matter has been all but absent from the presidential race. mccain seems to have bamboozled the press into believing that iraq is a nice stable resounding success simply because it's not as big of a fucking disaster as it was 15 months ago. it's strange, daily violence like this would be considered a major crisis if it happened anywhere else in the world. but because iraq was even worse fairly recently, politicians can use words like "peace" and "stability" to describe current conditions without being laughed off the stage.

but the issue isn't going away. the current wrinkle are the remarks of massoud barzani, leader of the autonomous kurdish region in iraq, in which he suggested that kurdistan might sign its own status of forces agreement with the u.s. if the national government can't reach a deal. this caused a major political storm as it sounds a lot like kurdish separatism. alas, it seems it's not a big enough storm to make it to the english language press. (here's an english translation of the article via google translator)

but, you know, the surge worked. so none of this can really be happening.

(via)

the beginning of the end

i picked up my poll watcher credentials tonight. it really does feel like the endgame now.

exciting!

two days

part of me can't believe that this election will ever be over.

and since we're trading drinking liberally stories, at the last one drexel dem remarked that this election campaign has been going on for almost 10% of his life. i'm a bit older than DD, but it's still frightening to note that this thing has been going on for over 5% of mine. i was getting sick of this campaign a year and a half ago. can it be that soon the press will actually be talking about something else?

musical toxic cheese

we skipped out on the trick-or-treaters last night and went to see the toxic avenger musical over in central jersey. it was great halloweenie fun. they really should turn more troma films into musicals. it's been decades since i saw the original film, but i think it actually works better as a stage musical. this is the closing weekend for the play in new brunswick. but the rumor is it will re-open soon somewhere off-, or maybe off-off-, broadway. check it out if you get the chance.

meanwhile, this is shaping up to be a b-movie weekend. mrs. noz and i will celebrate cheese day XIV this afternoon. the film is the warriors, which i've never seen. i'm hoping it's cheesetastic. (why else would they be working on a remake?)