The Record Industry: Still assholes

So the radio broadcasters of America have done pretty well for both themselves, and the music industry over the years. Curiously, the AM and FM radio stations do not pay royalties -- I assume this is some vestige of the early days of radio, where both industries were primarily interested in screwing performers and creators, so they made a tacit agreement to label radio as "promotional".

But now the record industry is going looking for new revenue, and the AM/FM broadcasters look plump and juicy.

On Monday, the recording industry sent the National Association of Broadcasters -- the trade group representing the $16 billion a year AM-FM broadcasting business -- a can of herring to underscore that it believes its arguments against paying royalties are a red herring. The NAB says its members should not pay royalties because AM-FM radio "promotes" the music industry.

The herring present followed another gift -- a dictionary, a bid by the recording industry to explain what it saw as the difference between fees and taxes. The NAB describes the latest royalty proposal as a tax.

And two weeks ago, the recording industry, under the umbrella group musicFIRST, sent the NAB four digital downloads: "Take the Money and Run" by the Steve Miller Band; "Pay me My Money Down" by Bruce Springsteen; "Back In the U.S.S.R" by Paul McCartney and "A Change Would Do You Good" by Sheryl Crow.

In case you missed it, the record industry just called the radio industry a bunch of Communists, for adhering to the status quo. Time was, you actually had to have a revolution and nationalize property to be a Marxist. Now all you've got to do is abide by long-held agreements.

Not that I'll shed any tears for the radio broadcasters -- they've spent the last decade screwing Internet radio as hard as they can, so I'll be happy when this entire sick, sordid industry collapses in on itself.

The scramble for Africa: Picard edition

So a few weeks ago, this story ran on Reuters:

GENEVA (Reuters) - China is drawing on natural resources such as farm land, timber and water twice as fast as they can be renewed in its drive for development, a report from Chinese and international environmentalists said on Tuesday.

The report said the next 20 years would be critical to correct the situation and put the Asian giant's burgeoning economy, with a rapidly growing population, on to a sustainable path.

"China's average ecological footprint has doubled since the 1960s and now demands more than two times what the country's ecosystems can sustainably supply," said a summary of the report, issued by the Swiss-based WWF International.

So, with China in short supply of square meters, what to do? Oh, I'm sure this won't end badly...'

China’s growing demand for food and the rapid shrinking of available arable land in China itself due to environmental degradation and urbanization have made finding new agricultural lands an urgent priority for the Chinese government....

China’s search for new land has led Beijing to aggressively seek large land leases in Mozambique over the past two years, particularly in its most fertile areas, such as the Zambezi valley in the north and the Limpopo valley in the south.
Chinese interest in the Zambezi valley started in mid-2006, when the Chinese state owned Exibank granted $2 billion in soft loans to the Mozambican government to build the Mpanda Nkua mega-dam on the stretch of the Zambezi in Tete province. Since then, China has been requesting large land leases to establish Chinese-run mega-farms and cattle ranches. A memorandum of understanding was reported to have been signed in June 2007, allowing an initial 3,000 Chinese settlers to move to Zambezia and Tete provinces to run farms along the valley. A Mozambican official said the number could eventually grow to up to 10,000. However, the reports of this deal caused such an uproar that the Mozambique government was forced to dismiss the whole story as false.

Hmmm. Rapidly industrializing powers arranging sweet deals in the poorest regions of the world to secure the scarce resources they crave for further economic growth? Nope, doesn't ring a bell...

Shifty brown people trying to steal our bodily fluids

You would think, based on reading the two columns this weekend from Christie Blatchford and Thomas Walkom, that they were talking about two different trials. Indeed, two different trials on two different planets! But no:

And of course there was; the court has heard evidence up the ying-yang that there was just such an enterprise afoot. Was it the finest plot ever? Oh hardly. Were its members variously bumblers, what those who hang around courts call “yutes” or raving hotheads? Absolutely. But there was a plot.

Meanwhile, Walkom:

Paid $300,000 by the RCMP to infiltrate the cell of alleged terrorists, Shaikh is the sole source for many of the sensational charges levelled against them – including claims that they wanted to blow up nuclear plants and storm Parliament.

If, as the Crown now suggests, this RCMP agent can't be believed, what happens to the government's case?

You'd also think they're on different planets because, while Walkom actually writes about, you know, what happened in the courtroom, Blatchford writes about how Muslims make her feel all icky.

Well, guess what? Seven of those arrested that day have since had their criminal charges stayed or dropped, one is on trial now, and 10 others remain charged. Recent convert or raised in the faith, white or brown or black, guilty or innocent – the one sure thing is that they are all Muslims and that faith was what bound them together.

Ooh, good deduction there Christie. Some alleged criminals are Muslim, therefore Islam is criminal. Rarely spelled out so clearly by our pundits, but nicely done.

Let's try a few more of these out:

Adolf Hitler was a vegetarian, Hitler hated Jews, therefore vegetarians...

Timothy McVeigh was a white Christian, Timothy McVeigh was a terrorist, therefore white Christians...

Christie Blatchford is a journalist, Christie Blatchford is a disgrace, therefore journalists...

It's really too bad the Globe decided to give column inches to someone one step away from NRO.

Two bad both candidates hate this issue

My friends know I am an unreconstructed space nut. While I get a lot of the objections to the real-world examples of space exploration spending, I really don't understand people who, for example, want to de-fund NASA and spend the money "here on Earth" (where do they think it's spent?)

That said, I think even the most charitable observers see the Space Shuttle/ISS combination as basically a 30-year long detour in terms of any real accomplishment. The public -- not unreasonably -- likes to see actual results for their money, and an important part of that is basically seeing the government doing something new every once in a while. But the SS/ISS combo wasn't really about that, it was bureaucratic circular reasoning made manifest. Why do we need the space station? Because that's where the Space Shuttle will go. Why do we need the Space Shuttle? Because it's the way we'll get to the Space Station. Simple, right?

Of course, the Soviets -- then the Russians -- managed to maintain a much more robust space station program without a space shuttle. But that's just details...

One of the most depressing things about the Bush Administration's approach to space is one of those things I could almost grudgingly praise. Scrapping the Shuttle? Good start! Giving NASA Mars as a goal? I'm with ya. But there's this curious Moon detour. Landing astronauts on the Moon will do basically nothing to really prepare NASA for a Mars landing, given the dramatic differences between the two. It will consume a great deal of capital -- financial and political -- and probably kill any serious attempt at the Red Planet.

So I'm a much, much bigger fan of this idea: a bunch of NASA insurgents, calling themselves the "Asteroid Underground" are trying to push for a piloted rendezvous with a Near Earth Object (asteroid).

An asteroid-bound crew would therefore need to “bring mission control on board,” says Korsmeyer, in the form of highly automated decision-making software. “When something bad happens, which tends to happen quickly, the crew and systems will have to manage it on their own. This is something humanity hasn’t done yet. But that makes it the best of all possible testing grounds for Mars, which, without an asteroid mission, will be like jumping into the deep end without practicing in the shallow end.” In comparison, “the moon is like the baby pool. I don’t mean to minimize that—Apollo 13 showed us you can drown there too.” But, he says, an asteroid “would really be someplace fabulously new. You’re talking 2.5 million miles, more than 10 times the distance between Earth and the moon. You’d be so far away you could cover up Earth with your finger. It would be no more than a beautiful, pale blue star.”

An asteroid mission would be a meaningful test of a lot of the Constellation hardware (zero-gravity, deep deep space, long-endurance space flight) that can't necessarily be fully duplicated in orbit of the Earth, no matter how high up you go. It frankly makes a lot more sense to do something like this, instead of going back to the Moon to play around.

If you could guarantee it wouldn't detract from the goal of landing on Mars, and if you could guarantee long-term political support, I'd say America can easily afford to do both: a full-spectrum space program would cost a tiny fraction of what America is spending to lose two wars, after all. But in the real world, I think any attempt to spend a lot of time on the Moon will come at the expense of a Martian goal.

Plus, NASA's new spacesuits meet the all-important requirement of looking cool.

I try to stay on top of the good news, and fail

I missed this last week, but good news as one of Canada's more level-headed governments pushes through authorization for ZENN's electric low-speed vehicle to be used on public roads with minimal red tape. Sadly, it's not the jurisdiction in which I live, because on this issue Dalton McGuinty is apparently content to let the beating heart of the Dominion be eclipsed by Quebec, BC, Manitoba...

When you ask the people at Ontario's MiniTrans why it is that Ontarian drivers are apparently to stupid to cope with a car that's legal in 48 states and now Canada's second-largest province, the sole answer you'll receive is "we won't comment on decisions made in other jurisdictions." Which is, you know, less than satisfying.

Anyone want to guess on when Ontarians will be granted the same priviliges as Quebeckers?

RIP George Carlin

So apparently Mr. Carlin is dead. He will be missed. As Jonathan Schwarz notes, he embodied much of what's best about American satire. This is a good example: skip to about 1:40 to get to the meat.

Saturday Night Linkdump

From Tom Engelhart: Iraq 4 evah, baby!

Michelle Obama, still refusing to use the word "whitey". Hell, I've probably used the words whitey, honkey, and cracker more than she has.

John McCain, still crazy and attracting the crazy. My fave:

A few paces away, I catch up with a man named Ron Saucier and a woman who would only identify herself as Mary. Ron says his problem with Obama is the integrity thing. "He exaggerates too much," Ron says. "He's not honest."

"OK," I say. "What does he exaggerate about?"

"Well, like that time he was saying he had a white mother and a white grandmother," he says.

I ask him how this is an exaggeration.

"Well, he was saying . . ." he begins. "As if that qualifies him to . . ."

Despite my repeated prodding, Ron seems unable or unwilling to say aloud exactly what he means. Finally, his friend Mary, a grave-looking blonde with fierce anger lines around her eyes, jumps in, points a finger and blurts out one of the all-time man-on-the-street quotes.

"Look, you either are or you aren't," she says.

"And he aren't," Ron says, nodding with relief.

Artificial diamonds!

What Thoreau said:

I mean, surely the people in the Bush administration must have some worthless relative who lies about everything and can never manage to hold an honest job. Once you learn the type it’s easy to spot.

And then it hit me: These guys are the relatives who lie about everything and can’t hold honest jobs. They felt a natural kinship with him but were too stupid to realize what that meant.

Planet X: Still out there, somewhere?

Hooray for oral pain!

So I made my first trip to the dentist's office in... well, let's not talk about that. Suffice to say, it's been longer than it should have been. All in all, not too much unexpected bad news.[1] But this is the first time in my adult life I've had to ask the question, "will the insurance cover that?" This whole private health care thing sucks balls, let me just say. OHIP for teeth!

Now, it's not that bad. Even if I had no insurance, I could probably afford to pay my bill out of pocket because of a number of factors, including saving for tuition that I no longer have to pay[2], a recently-arrived tax refund, and a few more cheques that are in the mail. (They swear.)

But it does make me think how I'd manage if I weren't young, healthy, employed, and covered by a loved one with a real job.

[1] So, uh, getting wisdom teeth pulled. Does that, like, hurt a lot?

[2] No, I didn't drop out. My scholarship has been renewed.

That should do the trick

Wednesday surliness? Gone. The reappearance of Rudy Giuliani -- thrice-married warmongering nutter and once-GOP hopeful -- as a McCain surrogate is just the thing I needed to make it all feel smiley once more. Who once spoke these words, talking specifically about Rudy Giuliani?

"I think the nation respects the mayor's leadership after 9/11, and I do, too, and I think he displayed leadership at a time that Americans needed some steady hand, and I think that his conduct was very laudatory following 9/11... I don't think it translates, necessarily, into foreign policy or national security expertise. I know of nothing in his background that indicates that he has any experience in it..."

Who answered John McCain?

By the way, John McCain is now trailing Obama in Florida, Ohio, and Pennsylvania.

This isn't going to be close. This is going to be nasty.

Occupational hazards

Is it possible for a bookseller to commit malpractice? And could I be sued?

I ask because I work in a bookstore, and have worked in a number of different bookstores over the last decade or so, big and small. I met my beloved Vicki while we were working together at a bookstore, and it's a great job to have as a student, and seeing as it looks like I'll be in school for most of my adult life...

But there are certain books that I really think we just shouldn't sell. And, believe it or not, neither climate change deniers nor Michael Ignatieff are on that list. No, this little ramble is prompted by the woman who asked if we could hold a book for her last night. The book, to my dismay, was on "curing your addiction" through diet changes.

Look, people can buy any number of stupid-ass books, and I don't care. You want to read Mark Steyn, go ahead, just don't make me. But when a book promises an "easy, pain-free" cure to addiction -- with a 74% success rate, no less! -- I shudder inside. You're messing with people's lives. And I'm employed by the pusher. (Does that make me a mule?)

Even sadder was the fact that we'd already extended this hold, and the woman swore up and down she'd be in before Friday to pick it up... the same thing she'd said last Friday. Despair.

All this made the guy who complained about our "biased" book selection being unfair to climate change deniers seem even more ridiculous than normal. Note to jackass: we sell what sells. And apparently, your crackpot idea about global warming not happening, or being caused by penguins with investments in real estate, or whatever the fuck you crazy people believe, is so pathetic that the "desperate addicts looking for easy solutions" is a more lucrative market. That's right, you're less popular and influential than the not-quite-rock-bottom-yet crowd.

Hm. Need something to pick up my mood.

Your actions please Ceiling Cat

I love the Internet so goddam much.

Warning: Epic Nerd ahead.

(If you're confused, don't try to keep up.)

You can't have him

Dear people in charge of Firefox

When you said, "Hey everyone! Come download Firefox as soon as possible on Tuesday so we can set a world record! It'll be nifty!"

You remember that, right?

Did it not occur to you that people might actually, you know, do that?

(Hits refresh button, swears.)

Way to go people.

"The Old Man is staying because I'm not ending up in The Hague."

Robert Farley has previously argued against trying dictators who step down after securing immunity from prosecution, ie Pinochet. It's not an argument I can bring myself to agree with easily, but damn if this isn't evidence in his favor:

JOHANNESBURG — In the first, electric days after Robert Mugabe lost the opening round of Zimbabwe's presidential election, it seemed as though he might simply accept defeat and step down. His family and closest advisers were telling him that, after 28 years in office, it was time to go. He opened secret negotiations with the opposition Movement for Democratic Change (MDC) on a deal that would guarantee his party a share of power, provide him with a peaceful retirement and, crucially, make him immune to prosecution for crimes committed during his long and troubled tenure...

Over the next few weeks, the story of Mr. Mugabe's about-face gradually emerged: Stunned and embittered at his loss, he had been prepared to go, but those around him — in particular, the five generals known as "the securocrats" who oversee the armed forces, the prison service and the police — refused to let him.

"The Old Man is staying," a senior member of his ZANU-PF party told The Globe and Mail, "because I'm not ending up in The Hague."

Once again, the long arm of international law had reached into the heart of an African conflict and extinguished the possibility of a quick and peaceful resolution. Zimbabwe provides the latest evidence that a concept heralded as a way to bring justice to ordinary Africans, but driven by a largely Western-based hunger for prosecution, can instead prolong their misery.

The rest, here.

Surprising Nobody

So Darlington it is. Which is what any thinking person would have gambled on -- the plant was always only half-built, so this will probably be the cheapest option. "Cheapest", only if you constrain the choices to nuclear power. Which is basically what the Liberals did. Oh well.

...adding, this means AECL will get the contract for the reactors themselves. Bank on it. This:

The manufacturer of the new reactors will not be selected until the end of this year. Three companies are competing for the business: Crown-owned Atomic Energy of Canada Ltd., French-based Areva SA and Westinghouse Electric Co.

[...]

While the first shovels will not go in the ground until 2012, already there are questions about cost overruns.

Mr. Phillips declined to say whether the government will have to revise its estimate of $26-billion for its entire nuclear project. But he said he expects all three vendors to “sharpen their pencils” and aggressively pursue the business.

Is pure smokescreen. AECL will get the contract, AECL (in all likelihood) knows they will get the contract, and any cost promises they make now won't be worth the paper they're printed on.

By the time McGuinty needs to run for re-election in 2012, the cost estimates will have at least doubled. Bank on that, too.

What [a different] John said

Here:

Here’s a quick test on whether Obama should be considered fully black: Poof! Barack Obama has been magically transported to a KKK meeting in deepest, whitest Klanistan without his Secret Service detail. There’s a rope and a tree nearby. What happens to Obama? If you say, “why, Barack Obama walks out of there alive, of course” then sure, he’s biracial. Also, you’re a fucking idiot. To everybody who cares about Obama’s racial identity, either positively or negatively, the man is a black man, married to a black woman, who has black children. Black black black black black black black black.

I vow to thee my country

Every time I see the ad for "Young People Fucking" I feel a swell of pride for my country.

Not only can a film like this be made in Canada, not only will it be shown in Canadian theatres, but the governments of Ontario and Canada helped fund it.
Try to imagine the US Congress allowing funds to be spent on a film that portrayed non-marital sex between consenting adults as normal, and even enjoyable behaviour.

That's right, you can't.

Funny thing: I was at a theater seeing another movie while a screening of YPF was showing, and it appears the theater staff have been forbidden from actually speaking the name of the film when telling patrons what is playing. When I asked what the screening was, the poor till-jockey literally held up a piece of paper with the title on it, rather than vocalize the dirty word.

So, Canadians: go to your nearest theatres tomorrow and demand, in loud and clear voices, to see Young People Fucking! Stick it to management -- always a good principle, and pretty much required in this case!

I'd like to hear more about that...

And as Lars Osberg pointed out at the recent PEF session on carbon pricing, the expansion of consumption by the richest is largely responsible for Canada’s horrible emissions record (the bottom 80%, in Lars’ estimation, have met their Kyoto commitments due to stagnant incomes and improvements in energy efficiency).

Here.

Can we bomb their broadcast towers yet?

Michelle Obama: Barack's "baby mama".

Thanks, Fox News.

Maybe someday they'll built permanent bases in reality

There are any number of things that are pathetic about this story:

BAGHDAD - A proposed U.S.-Iraqi security agreement that would set the conditions for a defense alliance and long-term U.S. troop presence appears increasingly in trouble, facing growing resistance from the Iraqi government, bipartisan opposition in Congress and strong questioning from Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

Pathetic, in no particular order:

• The Bush Administration still thinks it can salvage something -- permanent occupation, no less -- from the wreckage of their past.
• American legislators, including the current Democratic nominee for the Presidency, need to remind the White House squatter that agreements with foreign governments need to be ratified by the Senate.
• The White House seems to not care about #2.
• Therefore, if the Iraqi occupation is finally undone, it will be because of the strength of Iraqi democratic institutions, not the sclerotic American ones.

Sad, sad, sad.

And, in case you didn't think this was all bad enough, the US is literally holding billions of dollars of Iraqi money hostage unless the Iraqi Parliament prostrates itself before Rome. Unconscionable.

Those of us -- including Senator John Kerry of Massachusetts -- who were saying since 2004 that the Bush Administration was attempting to build permanent bases in Iraq and institute a permanent occupation without democratic consent can claim to be right all along, but at this point we've racked up enough karma. I want these people gone, driven from the halls of power and whipped through the streets of Washington D.C. at mid-day.

Question of the Day

Barack Obama Sr. (the Senator's father) was a Kenyan born in 1936, when Kenya was still a British colony.

When was the last time the United States had a President who was that close to the British colonial experience? That is, when was the last time a President was only one generation removed from direct British rule?

Some quick Wikipedia-ing suggest Lincoln or Andrew Johnson.

Also, kind of an inside joke among my friends: Obama Sr. was a political opponent of Jomo Kenyatta. A clash with African strongmen is not generally a career-enhancing move, nor was it for Obama Sr.

Peanut farmer

John McCain: still finding relevant, contemporary differences between himself and his Democratic challenger:

“Senator Obama says that I’m running for a Bush’s third term," McCain said, picking up the central Democratic line of attack. "Seems to me he’s running for Jimmy Carter’s second.”

I was born less than one month after Jimmy Carter left office. I have no strong memory of the Reagan Administration, and only hazy memories of Bush I (entirely due to the Gulf War.) If there's a surge in youth voting this year -- as seems likely -- it's all but certain that the majority of voters in 2008 will have been born after the Carter Administration, and have similarly hazy ideas of the pre-Clinton past.

Still, the Simpsons taught my generation that Carter was history's greatest monster, so maybe this will have some resonance.

The "sticking it to Goldwater" doctrine

So it's a week old, meaning I'm way behind the times, but I really want to emphasize this poll (PDF) from Public Agenda (via) showing that 80% of Americans want something other than military action or threats thereof against Iran.

I mean, it's great news on its own, and many have rightly pointed out that it shows the American people aren't really willing to wage unending war against phantoms for zero gain, so hurrah. But it also reminded me of something I read last summer, something that it took me a while to find: From The Best and the Brightest by David Halberstam:

In the fall [of 1963] the President had been scheduled to go on a tour of Western states that Mike Mansfield had promoted, a conservation tour in essence, where he would praise wide open spaces and high mountains and clean rivers. It was not a subject which particularly interested him... but Kennedy was glad to be leaving Washington. The trip did not start well. He made two poor appearances, and then in Billings, Montana, he was scheduled to give another boring speech, boring himself and the audience, and in the middle of it he mentioned the test-ban treaty, and as he did, the crowd responded with force and immediacy....

Kennedy, who was above all a good politician, whose ear was fine and always tuned, and who sensed his audience well, adjusted immediately and continued on the peace theme, accelerating the tempo and intensity, and the crowd responded....

From then on through the Far West, the trip was the same; he strayed more and more from conservation and into the test-ban treaty, and everywhere the crowds were very good, and very responsive. The last night he went to Salt Lake City, and the crowds along the route were the best yet, and when he entered the Mormon Tabernacle, allegedly the enemy camp, he received a five-minute standing ovation as he walked in. Here again, in what was alleged to be Birch country, Goldwater territory, he challenged the theses of the far right and talked of the problems of living in a complicated world. He had long suspected that the right in America was overrated as a political force, that there was an element of blackmail to its power, and now he was convinced that the country was going past old and rigid fears of the Communists, that it was probably ahead of Washington in its comprehension of the world and its willingness to accept it... He sensed that there was a deep longing for a sane peace and sane world....

The following evening both Tom Wicker and Sander Vanocur, the New York Times and NBC White House correspondents, respectively, sought out Press Secretary Pierre Salinger and suggested that the Western trip had uncovered a new and powerful issue. "Yes," said Salinger, "you're right. We've found that peace is an issue."

--Halberstam, p. 361 (Chapter
15)

Just as Barack Obama's pledge to negotiate with rogue regimes seems to have come about by accident, Kennedy's revelation was totally unanticipated. But there was, and there remains a constituency in America for peace, or at the very least not shooting first. The Ledeen Doctrine's constituency consists of the comment threads at the Corner and LGF (but I repeat myself.)

If Americans were enthusiastic about trying to negotiate an end to the Cold War -- only a year after the Soviets had put missiles in Cuba! -- why shouldn't they be willing to negotiate from a position of much greater strength with Iran, North Korea, or any other country on Earth?

God hates the stupid

Dept. of easy calls

I don't know why this ever left the discussion, but Joe Romm points out something rather important at Gristmill: for all the big-big-big numbers thrown around when talking about mitigating climate change, it's worth noting the direct, calculable, brass-tacks benefits. For example, investing in fuel-efficient cars will reduce your gasoline bill.

If we can capture those kinds of efficiencies on a broader level – and there's every reason to think we can – then the costs of mitigating climate change basically pay for themselves. And neither I nor Romm are talking out of our asses here – the International Energy Agency, an OECD body charged with looking ahead on energy issues for the developed world, agrees with us.

Or, to put it the way David Roberts once did (can't find the link right now): if we push for a solution for climate change, we will almost by definition get energy security as a happy side effect. If we push for energy security alone, we are likely to doom the planet with coal-based gasoline. (Please, please, please no Vice-President Schweitzer!)

It's not really that tough a choice, and according to a growing consensus, it will probably save us money in the long run, especially if you think counting pollution as a cost instead of a benefit makes sense.

Why I'm not worried about November, vol. MXIX

Sen. Obama is 8 points ahead of McCain in Rasmussen's tracking poll.

To restate things, the black dude with the Arabic name is 8 points ahead of the white senior Senator war hero.

Mwahahahaha.

Update: And 6 points ahead in the Gallup tracker. Gallup had previously had him within 2 points of McCain. And in case you're wondering, the bulk of the movement has happened since Saturday.

All together now, Obama supporters:

Thank you, Senator Clinton.

Why I'm not worried about November, vol. MXVIII

John McCain has not faced a competitive election (defined as one where the margin of victory was less than 10%) since 1982. (I was born in 1981.) The closest example since then would be the GOP primaries of 2000, which he lost to the current President. Simply put, there's no reason to think of the man as a competent campaigner. (Being the Republican Senator from Arizona has job security that would make Teamsters cry foul.) Meanwhile, Barack Obama just pulled off one of the biggest campaign upsets in modern history, dethroning the closest thing the Democrats have to an incumbent Vice-President.

The candidate with the better military record hasn't won an election since... What, Bush 1988? Before that, Kennedy?

More than that, Barack Obama's campaign machine is good. Putting aside for the moment Obama's inspiration and ability to recruit new supporters (though I think these are crucial to the victory in November) his team is simply one of the best-run campaigns the Democrats have seen in decades. They'd have to be to accomplish what they have.

Not a single iota of the above is cause for complacency. It is, however, cause for hope. There's that word again.

You can watch Sen. Obama address his campaign staff in Chicago.



I especially like this quote from about 9:30:

If I'd lost Iowa, it would have been okay. One of the other Democrats would have emerged, and they would have carried the banner, and we would have joined their campaign, and we would have moved forward. And the country would move in a better direction. But now that we've won, we now have no choice. We have to win.

And then there's simply the fact that John McCain seems to be suffering from some of the same personality... attributes that caused so much pain for the Clinton camp.

Yet some McCain sympathizers are concerned about how their candidate is presenting himself.

"It lacked graciousness, lacked civility and it was small," one friend of McCain said in describing the candidate's attacks on Obama on the night the Democrat made history by becoming the first African-American to run as a major party's nominee.

McCain and his campaign are unhappy, this source suggested, at where they find themselves heading into the general election.

"They're mad at the situation and at a candidate who they correctly feel hasn't earned his place in history, much less the right to run for president."

Uh-huh. Sen. McCain, the last 6 months are on the phone. They wonder if you've learned anything. No? Take a message? You'll get back to them?

Okay then.

Bravo, Hillary

A fantastic speech -- complete with scattered boos at the mention of Obama's name, as can only be expected -- that has me in mind of one of the last lines from Casablanca.

As the three of them stand on the airport runway, Rick, Ilsa and Victor all basically agree to a palatable fairy tale about what's transpired in the last few days. None of them are happy -- at all, really -- but the problems of three little people etc, etc. They concoct a fiction that they can all live with, and they part ways to continue the vastly larger fight ahead of them.

At the end of it, Victor shakes Rick's hand and says, "Welcome back to the fight. This time I know our side will win."

I've had that line stuck in my head for days.

More data

6 months after Barack Obama entered the primaries, Hillary Clinton had a, 84% approval rating among blacks, with only 10% unfavourable.

Today, it's 36% unfavourable.

Once again: if Hillary Clinton had managed to keep her losses among blacks to even 70-30, instead of 90-10, she'd probably be the nominee today.

Bill Clinton owes his wife more than he can ever possibly repay. Worse still, in his efforts to repay, he made things worse.

This is going to be more fun

John McCain, determined to keep his age out of public discussion, compares Barack Obama to William Jennings Bryant.

...a relevant comparison to the 20% of the population who were alive in the 1920s, maybe.

General election: the first 48 hrs

First of all, hell yes I want these two to be the first couple. Much much more than I wanted Bill Clinton back in the White House. And here's a question: when was the last time a President had children in the White House as young as Malia and Sasha Obama?

Secondly, I'd like to relate a conversation I had a few weeks ago: a friend asked me a) if Obama would really win the nomination, and b) was I certain he would win the White House if he did. I answered affirmative to both. McCain and Obama had just started to hit each other over Obama's diplomacy, and the polls hadn't moved, so I began to explain why I thought the Republicans weak-ass shit wouldn't work this year, that Obama had found a way of appearing strong while rejecting the madness of the Clinton/McCain "no talkie" approach.

But If I had a time machine, I think I'd just go back and show him this clip of McCain, apparently doing his best to look like every child's nightmare image of the boogey man.



This election is going to be fun.

And not to get Sullivan-esque in my fawning, but this quote blew me away:

"The primaries showed that the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, a place that is open-minded enough to have a woman or an African American as its president," - Minoru Morita, a Tokyo political analyst.

"...the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be..." Five, four, three years ago those words would have been acid, and could have been followed by approximately: "... the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, the biggest bully in the world, invading oil-rich countries to enrich a powerful few." Or, "the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, torturing people and humiliating them for its own sadistic impulses." Or, "the U.S. is actually the nation we had believed it to be, unwilling to make even modest cuts in its oil and coal consumption to avert climate disaster."

And until January, all those things are still true. But for today, redemption.

Denver! Denver!

Well, in a primary season where I think I've gotten every possible prediction wrong, it's nice to know that I got the last prediction right: Clinton is dropping out Saturday, and it's because her own closest supporters basically told her the gig was up.

Which puts me in mind of a Winston Churchill quote:

The late M. Venizelos observed that in all her wars England -- he should have said Britain, of course -- always wins one battle: the last.

See, so if you disagree with me you love Hitler.

Seriously, I was sick of the primaries weeks ago.

Funny story

I've had to work every Tuesday night for the last five months or so. Almost without fail, I've missed every important primary. Apparently, something rather important happened tonight, but I missed it, as I've missed every single important event of this primary season, with the exception of Barack Obama's speech in Philadelphia about Rev. Wright.

I've been working 16-hour days for three days now, and I've got one more ahead of me before I'm over the hump, so rather than write at length on the blessed and praised end of the primaries, I'm going to bed.

Congratulations to Barack Obama and Hillary Clinton, for three things: 1) You both ran amazing campaigns, 2) Obama, you've won, and 3) Clinton, you've probably speech-ed yourself out of the VP slot, if it was ever even a possibility.

Inappropriate metaphor Olympics

Oh dear God. Some Clinton supporters are actually arguing that the decisions by the RBC on Saturday -- to allot each state half-votes because of their illegal primaries -- amounts to "worse than slavery". Because half a vote is less than 3/5 of a vote. And slaves were counted as 3/5 of a person. (Actually, there's such a thing as "punishment" for "breaking rules". Not that it's ever popular.)

There's so much, so deeply offensive about even writing that where other people can see it, that I didn't know where to start. An arcane procedural dispute totally internal to a political party is akin to a system that killed tens of millions, and reduced the survivors to things? The mind boggles at where to go on that.

Or, my mind boggles at where to go. My girlfriend, after I read that aloud to her, tried to one-up Clinton supporters: "This parking ticket is even worse than the time I had to stick a coathanger in my uterus for an abortion!"

Your own inappropriate similes in comments. Or tell me why I'm an awful person.

Unforgiving, unforgiven

I'm starting to feel bad for Hillary Clinton's supporters. Not because they're losing, but because they're being lied to. By Hillary Clinton. And they don't even realize it. When I see reactions like this from Hillary supporters, my heart goes out to them. I don't understand or feel your anger, but I don't doubt it's real. But anger is a step on the way to acceptance, not a substitute for it.

Let's be clear: Hillary Clinton isn't going to take her challenges to Denver. If she tries, she'll be stopped by the party. The only thing that going to Denver would accomplish would be to make Clinton's humiliation more final, and more public. (And if you don't think it can get more public than this, wait and see what it's like when the entire party has to publicly repudiate her.) Look at the results from the RBC yesterday for what the facts of the matter are: on a committee where Clinton supporter held a plurality of votes, the Obama campaign's preferred position almost won outright. CNN and other outlets are reporting that the Obama campaign actually had to push the committee to accept the outcome it did, rather than simply allocating the delegates 50/50. The party is dissolving away from the Clintons, due in large part to two factors: 1) They never much liked the Clintons anyway, and 2) their conduct in this election has been disruptive to the very process of the party, and no institution takes shit like that sitting down.

So yes, this is almost over. But Hillary is trying to keep the money spigot open, and trying to keep her supporters energized until at least... Wednesday. In fact, I doubt even Harold Ickes knows the truth: that Clinton is dropping out of the race, and before the end of June. (I'd wager before the 20th.) The Clintons have a long, long history of lying to their closest advisors about their plans. Does nobody else remember the stories about high-level White House staffers being shocked -- actually shocked -- when President Clinton admitted his affair with Lewinsky?

Make no mistake -- it's been a bad weekend for Sen. Clinton. She got slapped down by the RBC, which refused to recognize Michigan as a legitimate primary, and turnout in Puerto Rico was way too low to justify any claim to have taken the popular vote. (Don't be fooled -- the dodgy math of the Clinton campaign hasn't changed. You have to discount hundreds of thousands of Obama votes to manufacture Clinton's 'lead'.) What's aggravating me about so much of the denoument of this campaign is how much of the narrative has been captured by the accusations of sexism, racism, arcane party disputes, etc.

Lost in all this is that Clinton has run an objectively weaker campaign. To put it bluntly, if demographics were all, and Clinton had a lock on women the way Obama has a lock on blacks, Clinton would be the nominee. If Clinton had managed to lose blacks by only 65-35, instead of 90-10, she'd be the nominee. If she'd managed to swallow her pride and make an early apology for her support for the Iraq war, she'd be the nominee. And if she'd managed to make the argument that she was better qualified without sounding ridiculous (yes, sniper fire moved votes) she'd be the nominee.

This was a close fight, and any number of things could have won Clinton the nomination. But they haven't. She's lost. It's all over but the shoutin'. Unless, of course, you actually believe the Clinton campaign, in which case you'll feel doubly hurt -- and betrayed? -- when your candidate drops out, after assuring you that she was staying in until the convention. No doubt some will find a way to blame Obama for that, too, just as some blame Newt Gingrich for putting Bill Clinton's dick in Lewinsky's mouth. Which is what brings me to this Vanity Fair article. In part, it's a very poor article -- a great deal of innuendo about Clinton's sex life post-White House -- but two things really stuck out. When the author tried to get Clinton's people to comment on rumours of Clinton's continuing infidelity, they got this back:

“The ills of the Democratic Party can be seen perfectly in the willingness of fellow Democrats to say bad things about President Clinton. If you ask any Republican about Reagan they will say he still makes the sun rise in the morning, but if you ask Democrats about their only two-term president in 80 years, a man who took the party from the wilderness of loserdom to the White House and created the strongest economy in American history, they’d rather be quoted saying what a reporter wants to hear than protect a strong brand for the party. Republicans look at this behavior and laugh at us.”

Oh Jesus that brings back memories. For all the talk about Obama's people being a cult, I think a lot of people, including some otherwise astute observers of politics, learned the wrong lessons about the Clinton years. At the end of the day, the lesson I learned was that, even if the Republicans never managed to catch Clinton on the shit they went digging for, there wasn't a lot that Bill Clinton wasn't willing to lie about. WMDs in Sudan? Lies. His zipper? Lies. His support for gay rights? Mostly lies.

But this is the Clinton math all over again -- all addition, no subtraction. If the country got dragged through the mud because of his infidelity, that was the GOP's fault, not his. If women's rights, workers rights, and gay rights got stomped on again and again, well that's all the fault of the GOP Congress. Oh, and lets not forget that in this retelling Gore's 2000 loss is due entirely to Ralph Nader and not Bill Clinton's record in Florida, either. The Clintons can do no wrong for some Democrats.

But then there was also this piece, which makes me think of Bill Clinton as something akin to Gerald Ford's attempt to get on the ticket in 1980:

“Look, the game has changed,” said Mike McCurry. “He ran his last national campaign in 1996, and remember, we kind of ran unopposed. It’s been a while since he did that, and the way you summon people up and get them to do things has changed. All of this stuff, the blogging and the YouTubing and the way in which everything is instantaneously available: I tell you, until you get out there and are actually dealing with the consequences—having what you just said as you were walking out the door [all over the Internet], that’s brand-new to him.”

Bill Clinton has been out of big-game politics for twelve years -- almost half my life. America's newest voters will almost certainly have little to no memory of the Clinton years -- the impeachment mess would have ended when they were 8. The Florida recount was going on while they were learning long division. He is, in short, a man of the past. Senator Clinton might -- might -- have been a woman of the present, but she didn't make it.

Oil pun here

With oil hitting $130, we're finally seeing people start to accept the reality that oil ain't gonna be cheap, ever again, folks. I was shocked this week as none other than the Wall Street Journal seemed to adopt many of the tenets of the peak oil perspective, for example noting that it's not just oil production that's flatlining: oil exporters are shipping less as their own domestic demand keeps going up. The problem isn't just that the Chinese and Indians are driving more -- the Saudis, Kuwaitis, and Qataris are as well.

Also worth noting is that LNG plants have stalled in America as the price of domestic natural gas has (unexpectedly) stayed low. Cheap natural gas is okay, but it's almost certainly evanscent -- we'll be caught with our pants down when US conventional gas production starts a rapid decline.

Probably most notable of all was the WSJ's story on the International Energy Agency finally admitting that the oil we expect to need simply won't be there. Usually the IEA and US DoE simply predict demand and assume the energy will be there. The IEA at least is finally admitting that we're at least 12 million barrels short by 2015. Oops.

But probably the most thought-provoking thing I've read all week has been Jeff Rubin's CIBC analysis (PDF) which declares that high oil prices have "effectively offset all the trade liberalization efforts of the last three decades." Basically, the cost of shipping a standard container from Shanghai to Los Angeles has more than doubled since 2000 due to fuel costs, and if/when oil gets to $200/barrel, the price will have quintupled relative to 2000. At $200/barrel the effective tariff rate on shipping products to the US is equivalent to rates prevalent before the Kennedy Administration.

This is great news for Canadian and Mexican manufacturers, I suppose, given the cheap transportation to the US. The real question is how high can US demand stay as oil climbs higher and higher -- and why isn't the Ontario government pushing to have more fuel-efficient cars built here?

Worst. People. Ever.

Just when you think it can't get any stupider, the American right throws a hail mary pass and scores a touchdown in the Stupidbowl:

Dunkin' Donuts pulled a television spot featuring talk show host and Food Network personality Rachael Ray this weekend after a Fox news commentator associated it with terrorists.

In the ad, Ray is wearing a scarf that Michelle Malkin said in her nationally syndicated column resembled a kiffiyeh, Middle Eastern garb that is "popularized by Yasser Arafat and a regular adornment of Muslim terrorists appearing in beheading and hostage-taking videos."

Please, keep telling me how the left is intolerant. She wore a fucking scarf, and was called a terrorist.

(Of course, won't my face be red when Racha el-Ray detonates her explosive vest in the middle of a crowded book signing.)

TREASON!

Chet, you're missing the point: McClellan is a traitor because, after the Patriot Act was passed, "The United States" means the Bush White House and providing aid and comfort to the enemy means telling the 70% of the population who hates Bush America that the dirty fucking hippies have been right all along.

The anger never left

Through the magic of the Internets, I just finished watching Recount by HBO. It's fantastic and enraging all over again. One of the things I wonder, after watching it, is if James Baker sleeps well at night. He played a pivotal role in arranging the Bush coup. 8 years later, he's the author of at least one official document repudiating, well, everything about the Bush Presidency. You could be forgiven for thinking, hey, maybe Baker doesn't think President Bush was such a good idea after all.

When Baker dies he'll have to answer for what he, and others, did to put Bush at the hands of the world's most powerful killing machine. And now that it's gone like a thresher through hundreds of thousands of lives, even if Baker is allotted even a small, infinitesimal fraction of the guilt for those killings, I doubt a God of justice would put him on the up escalator, if you know what I mean.

Suck it, Zapruder

What you're looking at is a picture of the Phoenix lander, during its descent. This isn't a recreation or anything -- the Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, operated by remote from 90 million miles away, with a window of only minutes, caught Phoenix's landing on camera.

Way to go, NASA. And congratulations on the whole "not smashing hundreds of millions of dollars worth of hardware" thing, too.

Your assignment, should you choose to accept it

Can anyone think of a Federal cabinet minister more incompetent, with more bungled moments in his brief tenure, and with an exit more ignominious, than Maxime Bernier?

Has to be three of three to count.

Mission impossible, indeed.

If you count her votes twice, she's winning!

Kudos to Jonathan Alter for pointing out that the Clinton campaign's latest talking point -- that Clinton is "leading" in the popular vote count -- is a pack of lies. Basically, Clinton's strongest argument relies on counting all of her votes from Florida and Michigan, but not counting 4 of Obama's caucus states, nor counting any of the people in Michigan who clearly intended to vote for Obama. It was this last bit of Alter's that intrigued me:

With a big win in Puerto Rico, Clinton could possibly erase that margin (plus several thousand more that Obama is expected to net in Montana and South Dakota). She could then proclaim that with the help of Puerto Rican voters who cannot vote in a general election, she is the popular vote winner.

The shorthand many Clinton supporters are already taking into the summer is that she won the popular vote but had the nomination "taken away" (as Joy Behar said on "The View") by a man.

So I went over to RealClearPolitics to check their popular vote counts. If you take only the states that actually have electoral college votes in November, and award Obama 100% of the uncommited votes from Michigan, he's still ahead by more than 170,000 votes. (The corrollary is that you can award Obama substantially less than 100% of the Michigan vote, and he'd still be ahead.)

There are two further questions here: One, should Obama get 100% of the uncommited votes, and two, should Michigan and Florida be seated at all? On question one, I think it's only fair to answer yes, definitely. Democrats were encouraged to vote "uncommitted" by their state leaders if they wanted to vote for Obama, Richardson, Edwards or Biden. Obama always led all of the other candidates, and in the intervening time Richardson and Edwards have endorsed Obama.

Call me a tyrant if you must, but I come down pretty hard against seating Florida or Michigan with any serious voting rights at the convention. They knew they were breaking the rules, they knew what the consequence was going to be, and unless there's a very strict penalty for breaking DNC rules, we'll all be here again when 2016 rolls around.

But at the end of the day, the whole popular vote count is a red herring -- Clinton knew the rules of the game, she just played it badly. Now she wants to change the scoring, so that if you count all of her votes but only 90% of her opponents, she's in the lead. And, as an added bonus, she's going to tell her supporters that she "earned" the nomination but the old boys club (known universally as a friend of blacks everywhere!) took "her" nomination away. Simply awful, and I would have thought, before this primary season, that it was beneath a Democratic politician.

Resource depletion

Chet has a very good corrective to some of the accusations that have been levelled at Sen. Clinton in the wake of what I'm calling "hey, you never know, bang bang bang click"-gate. I agree with Chet that we should extend more charity to politicians, given that none of them are 100% perfect electoral cyborgs. But.

But Sen. Clinton has exhausted any reserves of charity and goodwill that I had towards her. Consider: as Chet mentions, there was a previous controversy involving Barack Obama, one where the word "bitter" featured prominently. And did Sen. Clinton issue a short statement saying she regretted the Senator's words, but she took him at his word that he meant no offense? Fuck me she did. No, she, the multi-millionaire policy wonk, became the whiskey-shooting, duck-hunting, "hard working white American"-loving darling of Appalachia. She clung to the "elitist" charge and ran with it for weeks. And that's only the most prominent charge against her. She ran with the William Ayers thing, she ran with Rev. White, and when all of that fizzled she brought up Hamas during the ABC debate.

So no, Sen. Clinton doesn't get charity from me anymore.

I've resisted the calls for her to drop out, but here's the funny thing: looking back on this campaign, I'm thinking she's going to wish she had dropped out sometime before Pennsylvania. If she'd dropped out after Texas and Ohio, people would remember her as the most serious female candidate ever, she'd be better-suited to argue for herself as VP, and she'd have capped off a series of losses with two wins.

And nobody would have ever heard of Bosnian sniper fire.

Nobody would have heard of "hard-working, white Americans".

And nobody would have heard about how hey, you know, RFK was killed in June.

The Dirty Hippies were right, once again

It's worth repeating: the IMF and World Bank suck, big time. They suck a lot. And good evidence of how much they suck is that when developing countries are given any other alternative to the IMF or World Bank, they usually take it. And they don't just take it, they flee the Bretton Woods system like East Germans trying to get over the wall.

I know you all saw the same front-page story on the Washington Post that I did:

As Global Wealth Spreads, the IMF Recedes

This is one of those seriously good-news stories from the last half-decade or so. Basically, the rise of China and India (and other suddenly-flush states) with the concommitant collapse of Argentina and other IMF projects has created lending competition that the IMF, with its rigid insistence on ideological and fiscal straitjackets, is losing.

(One of the underreported aspects of the clash over the World Bank and IMF in the early part of this decade was the fact that these institutions derived operating funds from their loans, so they had an interest in seeing loans and interest rise as high as possible. With the collapse of the IMF lending system, the IMF has been in a pretty severe budget crisis.)

The usual liberal tic here is to bemoan America's waning influence in the developing world, as China provides aid without America's allegedly high-minded concern for free markets or human rights. But there's no reason -- absolutely none -- that America, or the countries who control the IMF, should be losing out to countries that are still quite poor. The IMF and World Bank collectively are, as Dean Baker has said, the OPEC of money. If China is offering developing countries cheap money, America, the UK, and other rich countries have every ability to offer more money for cheaper, if this is really about geopolitical influence.

But what's clear, at this point, is that the competition isn't really over money. It's about respect for national sovereignty. The IMF and World Bank were able to get away with incredibly abusive treatment of the developing world during the 1980s and 1990s, as the influence of America's competition on the world stage waned and collapsed. The abuse of poor countries included starving Malawians in the name of the free market, among other things. As money from different sources becomes available, a large number of developing countries could be forgiven for telling the Bretton Woods organizations to go pound sand, no matter what money they offer.

This is one of the reasons that John McCain's "League of Democracies" is so unlikely. The young and developing democracies of the world do in fact have wildly different conceptions of what the world should look like, and despite wealthy white countries' pet ideologies like "the responsibility to protect", old Westphalian notions of sovereignty, autonomy, and equality among states have a great deal of currency among the middle and lower class of nations.

Fuck you and go away

Hillary Clinton:

My husband did not wrap up the nomination in 1992 until he won the California primary somewhere in the middle of June, right? We all remember Bobby Kennedy was assassinated in June in California.

She's already apologized, and well she should. Seriously, is Sen. Clinton sticking in the race in the hopes that a tragedy befalls Sen. Obama?

About Edumakayshun

So, when I was at Carleton I took a class called "Moral Panics", about, uh, moral panics. The class spent the term learning about how easily urban legends and outright falsehoods spread when the dominant group in society has concerns about a minority group. And you can pretty much apply this model to any dominator/dominated model, whether it be white/black, hetero/homo, man/woman, or yes, adult/child.

But then, some idiot in the class watched a Dr. Phil episode about the raging epidemic of pre-teen sex that had gripped America in late 2005. (Don't you remember it?) And -- in a class where everyone had just spend two months learning about moral panics, and how they're universally full of shit -- I was one of I think three people pointing out that, maybe, just maybe, we shouldn't take Dr. Phil as gospel.

In particular, they laughed at the idea that a raging sex epidemic among 11-year olds would, in all likelihood, produce some documentation: whether a school principal's report, or a lawsuit between two aggrieved parents, whatever. When these kinds of things happen, they produce paperwork. You know, that thing North American society excels at producing?

But no, I was unable to convince anyone in the class who didn't already agree with me that, in all likelihood there is no national-scale orgy of tweens going on. In a university-level class. In a class that was all about these urban legends being totally and universally false.

So much for the benefits of higher education.

That's impossible, even for a computer

Vicki and I have a game we play -- not so much a game, as a verbal tic. We basically bring Star Wars quotes in to the conversation at every opportunity. And, believe me, the opportunities are endless. The following, totally not-made-up conversation is just one example of many we've had over the last 7 years and a bit.

WARNING! FLYING PENIS TALK AHEAD!

Me: So, did you see this video of the flying penis that interrupted Gary Kasparov's press conference?

The Girlfriend: No. Wait, what?

Me: Somebody attached a remote controlled helicopter to a sex toy. Presto, flying penis.

TGF: Okay.

Me: Yup. You can imagine it derailed the press conference.

TGF: I bet. You know what they should've done?

Me: What?

TGF: Land the penis in some dude's mouth.

Me: Humiliation for everyone, then?

TGF: Absolutely.

Me: Well, except for the dude flying the helicopter. Landing a flying penis in some guy's mouth must be about as hard as bullseyeing whomp rats in your speeder back home.

And that, kids, is how we do that.

And because my parents aren't yet convinced I need to be written out of the will, the video.

Somebody needs to be killed, is all I'm saying

Adam Blickstein reminds us all of the most infuriating aspect of the stream of undiluted bullshit coming from the White House, Pentagon, and McCain campaign over Iran. McCain continues to claim that Barack Obama said he would negotiate unconditionally with Mahmoud Ahmedinejad, when all Obama's ever said is that he'd negotiate with Iranian leaders. (Which is, you know, the perfectly sane policy the US should follow.)

In any case, Ahmedinejad makes a useful (anti-semitic, scary-man-with-facial-hair) foil for McCain, even if he has to lie about his opponent. But (to repeat myself) the important point to make here is that Ahmedinejad has absolutely zero impact on Iran's foreign policy. He can want to destroy Iran until the cows come home and he's less dangerous to Iran than I am. Iran's military and foreign policy is set by Khamenei and the other clerics, not the elected President or legislature.

Even more offensive, however, is the current emphasis on Ahmedinejad as the face of Iran. If you cast your minds back to the hallowed days of 2003, Blickstein reminds us, the same weakness of the Iranian Presidency that McCain is deliberately obscuring was seen as the very reason that you couldn't negotiate with Iran -- the reformers who were currently in power would easily be overruled the clerics.

So, the status of US-Iranian relations, 2002: The President may be a reformer, but he doesn't count, so we can't negotiate.

2008: The President is a maniac! We can't negotiate!

Basically, the strategy is to never talk until after the war I guess. At a certain point, though, we should ask why it is that American politicians keep finding it convenient to twist themselves in to knots, so long as it involves killing people of different religions and skin tones.

State of Israel is insufficiently pro-Israel

Negotiating with a state sponsor of terrorism, one that nearly destroyed the Israeli state itself in the 1973 war. What would George Bush say?

It's worth repeating Daniel Davies here:

As I’ve argued elsewhere, although the Mearsheimer & Walt “Israel Lobby” does have a referent which is a real and definable set of groups and institutions, this lobby really doesn’t have all that much to do with Israel. Every time this slightly scary bunch of warlike, paranoid and rather right-wing people are asked to make a choice between the national interests of Israel and their own vanity politics, it’s Israel that gets shafted. Any concern over “divided loyalties” or what have you is completely misplaced – the “Israel Lobby” are nationalists of a completely imaginary state, one which has no meaningful politics of its own, no need to compromise with reality and no national interests other than constant war.

And my favourite Yitzhak Rabin quote, after an American supporter talked about how she "remembered exactly where we all were when the scuds started falling."

Rabin: So do we -- you were in America.

I read the news today, oh boy

I wake this morning to a sensation I've almost never felt: giving the National Post more credence than the Toronto Star. via, two rather interesting articles:

Ignatieff rubs some Liberals the wrong way

The shocking revelation is that Ignatieff is losing the popularity contest to Bob Rae. What to say here except, gee, who could have thought that a man with zero previous serious political experience would be pushed aside by a more experienced pro? It's almost as if broadcasting your contempt for the current leader, month after month, might make you some enemies in the party...

Meanwhile, James Travers gets the "overreaching hypothesis award" of the day: after discussing the regressive nature of a carbon tax, he writes

Dion occupies the flip side of the history and politics equation. Whatever his motives, he deserves full marks for identifying the threat and challenging the conventional wisdom that it's suicidal to engage voters in a serious campaign debate.

But he also gets failing grades for misunderstanding the Liberal situation.

Canadians will be skeptical about Liberal big-government solutions until he and his party exorcise their big-program ghosts.

Uh, really? The implication seems to be that the Liberals lost the last two campaigns because of big-spending government programs, when every possible shred of evidence indicates they in fact lost because of (mostly unfounded) suspicions about Liberal criminality. Given that the Conservatives in 2006 ran on reduced waiting times (in plain english, more health care spending) and a child care tax credit (yet more big spending) it's diffifult to argue, I think, that they won because of government restrain. What they won on, if anything other than Liberal malaise, was a more appealing form of big government, not less of it.

But then, you'd have to read something other than Jim Travers to know that.

Talking to you means you're awesome

A 2-Yglesias-post day. Responding to McCain's idiotic notion that merely talking to someone enhances their prestige, Matthew Yglesias asks:

Our guys talk to their guys, the meeting happens, and this gives Khatami enhanced prestige in the eyes of whom? And what does this enhanced prestige allow him to do? What, in other words, are we afraid of?

The answer is that this isn't foreign policy, it's imperialism. When you believe yourself to be the center of all that is right and good in the world, you believe that legitimacy is something that you have a monopoly on, and distracting people who speak different languages are best ignored, lest we Simply by talking to people we don't like, we give them legitimacy and prestige -- something that we have a monopoly on, and they certainly don't get by such tawdry means as winning elections.

Or, as Winston Churchill said of another insurgent back in the day:

"It is alarming and also nauseating to see Mr. Gandhi, a seditious middle temple lawyer, now posing as a fakir of a type well known in the east, striding half-naked up the steps of the viceregal palace, while he is still organizing and conducting a defiant campaign of civil disobedience, to parley on equal terms with the representative of the king-emperor."

Unfortunately for Churchill, the King-Emperor, and the Empire itself, monopoly didn't flow downhill from Buckingham Palace, it also flowed uphill from those pesky Indians themselves. And whether we like it or not, we don't get to pick and choose who runs which countries in the world.

Random politics thoughts

You know, before Edwards pushed it out of the TV news cycle, I was really enjoying the few hours everyone spent asking "Gee, why is a black candidate failing so badly in West Virginia and Kentucky?"

Yes, it sure does defy rational thought that those two states might not welcome black leaders. I mean, what could possibly explain it? Kentucky -- which never seceded from the Union -- likes to teach its schoolkids about its "Confederate Heritage", and let's not even talk about West Virginia.

Actually, Josh Marshall has a really interesting take on Obama's "Appalachian Problem". When Obama's winning white-bread states like Iowa and the entirety of the black working class, Obama's "weakness" among primary voters basically boils down to not winning the Deliverance vote. Which, btw, doesn't vote Democrat. (WV may have to be abandoned by the Dems -- so long as any Democrat is serious about climate change, the heart of coal country is going to be tough going. Ross Gelbspan has written intriguingly about Big Coal's role in handing WV to Bush in 2000.)

Anyway, in other primary news this interview Clinton did with Wolf Blitzer made me feel much, much better about her. I think she's struggling to find a way to stay in the race until the end without lashing out at a rival candidate who's ended a dream of hers -- I can't say I blame her for the occasional slip up, even if rhetorically linking "white" with "hard-working" has a bad, bad history. Still, if you can catch the video I'd recommend watching it.

The explanation as to why Clinton is staying in the race that I buy -- that I choose to believe, given the evidence -- is that she believes she's got a historic role as the first female candidate to make it this far, and she'd like every woman in America who wants to vote for her to have the opportunity to do so. She's got to raise some money, too, but if that was all it was I've got to believe she'd still leave. It's been a year and a half of campaigning, so 3 more weeks makes no difference.

That's right, it's been a year and a half. And for about 75% of that time, Clinton has been the prohibitive favourite to win the nomination. She had the money, she had the vast majority of endorsements, and she had a lot of the party aparatus lined up in her corner. People who (still!) say Obama is unelectable need to answer a basic question: if Clinton got beat by Obama, with all of her inherent advantages in the primary, how can she win against McCain, against whom she'll have no similar leg up?

I wonder what the reaction of her supporters will be when she strides up to a podium to endorse her party's nominee?

Wow

Edwards is endorsing Obama.

I'm actually quite surprised. I figured he wouldn't endorse at all. I REALLY want to know what the divisions were between him and his wife.

Update: The Caucus says Edwards may be President Obama's Attorney-General, something that actually gives me chills. In the good way.

President Obama, red districts going blue, and Attorney-General Edwards. This November is going to be awesome.

When McCain said "100 years", this is what he meant

It would make me very happy if people realized that the US presence in Japan, South Korea, and former European adversaries has not been without controversy, crime, or killings.

TOKYO, Japan (CNN) -- A U.S. Marine accused of raping a 19-year-old Japanese woman last year was found guilty Thursday of "committing wrongful sexual contact and indecent acts," the U.S. military said, but he was acquitted of rape.

The soldier in this case was found innocent, but he's literally only one of dozens of cases like this -- in just the last few years. So exactly how many Iraqi women does McCain think should be raped over the next century?

Harvey Weinstein: Jackass

A high-profile example of the kind of thing that concerns me about Clinton supporters:

WASHINGTON — In a heated phone call with House Speaker Nancy Pelosi late last month, Hillary Clinton supporter Harvey Weinstein threatened to cut off campaign money to congressional Democrats unless Pelosi embraced a new plan by the movie mogul to finance a revote of the Democratic presidential primaries in Florida and Michigan, according to three officials who were briefed on the contents of the conversation.

Weinstein denies it but, well, I don't believe him for a second. These reports have been coming out without naming Clinton supporters for a while now, with Dean and Pelosi both getting threatened this way.

There's an interesting wrinkle about this, though: Weinstein is acting to protect himself just as much as he's acting to protect Hillary. The Iron Law of Institutions say a person would rather be more powerful within an institution than have the institution be more powerful without them. Obama has managed to build a coalition that not only doesn't include Weinstein, but is dramatically less reliant on large donors. Weinstein isn't just backing Clinton because of sincere political belief -- though I believe he is -- but you can also explain his behaviour as a form of self-defense: he and other large donors have been used to having one hand on the tiller of the Democratic Party for almost 20 years now, since the ascendancy of Bill Clinton.

The rise of Obama is shuffling the deck in the Democratic Party, and the knives are gonna keep coming out for a while yet.

Dreams of his father

Jon Schwarz is a genius, so I'm just going to steal this post in its entirety.

It's September 12, 2001. You're sitting in front of a TV, watching footage of the World Trade Center collapse over and over and over again.

All of a sudden, someone from seven years in the future walks out of a tiny temporal vortex, and tells you: George W. Bush is going to fuck this up so badly that in 2008, the United States of America will likely elect as president a black man whose middle name is Hussein and whose father was Muslim. Oh, and he also admits he's used cocaine.

I think it would have been easier to convince me of the reality of time travel. "No, no, I believe you really are from the future. But the other stuff, that's CRAZY."

Meh

Okay, so my two-week (poorly observed) hiatus from blogging about the primary is over. And, just in time, because the press is finally coming to see what was pretty obvious as of early-mid March: barring a meltdown of Dean-esque proportions, Obama is going to be the Democratic nominee for President.

Going back, I don't remember calling for her to drop out of the race, nor does a quick search of my archives reveal one. And as much as I think staying in the race now will accomplish very little, I also think leaving now would accomplish little except to tell the people of Montana they suck. To rephrase that slightly, if she was going to drop out early, she's months overdue. So as far as I'm concerned, she can stay in the race if she likes, just keep it clean and stop giving McCain ammunition for November.

All that said, I'm seriously concerned about the state of Sen. Clinton's supporters. I'm read about a half-dozen of their blogs regularly, and (continuing my policy of not naming names in the hopes that these people will realize how crazy they sound) they're freaking me right the fuck out. The following things have all been written in the last 24 hours:

1) There should be a unity ticket. With Clinton as President, and Obama as Vice-President.

2) The Obama campaign deliberately engineered a racial divide in the party, which the Clinton campaign is in no way responsible for.

3) If Obama is the nominee, they will vote for McCain, or not vote at all.

In short, some Democrats have gone absolutely looney tunes. 1 is clearly bizarre, as most reputable organizations don't make a habit of giving the first prize to the runner up. (Imagine if Jeopardy ran that way...) 2 is only "subjective" in the same way gravity is, and otherwise is clearly false. Even if we put aside most of Sen. Clinton's surrogates, surely her husband's remarks have some bearing here? But 3 is what really boggles my mind.

Look, in 2000 a non-trivial number of lefties voted with their narcissism, not with their brains. And the result has been, and will continue to be, a catastrophe. To do so again would be petty, arrogant, and self-defeating. (Just what we've come to expect from the Democratic Party!) But for a number of her supporters -- most vocally self-described feminists -- to threaten to do so when the other side is running John McCain, a man who wants to criminalize abortion and whose only complaint about the current Supreme Court is that it's not partisan enough, is insane.

I've recently warmed a bit to the idea of a unity ticket, though I still think overall it's a bad idea. If having Clinton's name on the ballot is what will keep her supporters in the tent, then I say fine, whatever. The Vice-Presidency isn't an important post anyway. But the idea that Obama -- a pro-choice Democrat -- has to buy feminist votes against an anti-choice Republican at this point is absurd, and I hope they come to realize that.

BREAKING: Jesus hates me

TORONTO -- The '90s boy band New Kids On The Block are taking their reunion tour to Canada this September.

The pop quintet says they'll be bringing hits such as "You Got It, (The Right Stuff)'' and "Step By Step'' -- as well as new music [WTF??!!] -- to cities including Montreal and Toronto.

Correction: Jesus hates everyone.

Stupidity is the leading cause of stupidity among the stupid

Wonderful. All three leading candidates for the US presidency repeat the bullshit claim that vaccines can/might/do cause autism, rather than correcting the public perception which is, as has been demonstrated over and over and over, bullshit. (The preservative in question has been almost entirely phased out. Autism rates, sadly, persist in their upward climb.)

The results? Gee, lower vaccinations and increased infections among children. Way to go, American leaders. While I suppose a measeles infection is preferable to the usual hospital stay American presidents visit upon children, we'd all still be better off with fewer sick kids, right?

And to break my pledge momentarily, I'll readily concede that while none of the candidates is on the side of the angels, Hillary Clinton comes away best on this count -- pledging "funding" without outright stating a falsehood.

News roundup

• I haven't really written anything about this whole "Tar sands kills wildlife" story because my first reaction was to scream at my monitor. Specifically, I wanted to scream, "WHAT THE FUCK DID YOU THINK WAS HAPPENING? DO YOU THINK THESE ARE THE FIRST CREATURES TO DIE FOR TAR SANDS OIL???!!!" Come to think of it, I don't really have anything to add.
• Nope, still not writing about the primaries. Feels pretty good, actually.
• If you're going to object to Grand Theft Auto 4 on feminist grounds, this is the wrong way to do it. Especially when there's way more substantive grounds, such as the tightly interwoven themes of prostitution and female characters who are either duplicitous or stupid throughout the GTA franchise. But to say that GTA4 is misogynist because you shoot women in it misses the point that, in the GTA games, you shoot everyone.
• And speaking of bullet-riddled games with the number "4" in them, I installed Call of Duty 4: Modern Warfare on my computer two nights ago, and boy that's a misnomer. "Modern Warfare" has shockingly little to do with... modern warfare. Aside from the fact that it apparently involves killing lots of brown people. An alliance between Islamic terrorists and Russian ultra-nationalists? You may have noticed that, in fact, Russian nationalists of the non-ultra-variety still find plenty of reasons to hate on the Muslim. In little-known places like "Afghanistan" and "Chechnya". Actual Russian ultranationalists have a multiculturalism policy that needs to be translated from the original German. For a game that obviously put huge amounts of research in to weaponry and so on, an even-somewhat-more-plausible plot would have been nice. Still. Awesome friggin game.

It's the Pentagon's world, we just live in it

When Fareed Zakaria writes this:

we magnify small differences. We define deviancy down, so that any expression of national pride or interest by Russia or China becomes evidence of inevitable great power conflict... My fear is that the United States continues to have a maximalist view of international security - which sees any deviation from what we want - as evidence of evil.

and Matthew Yglesias writes this:

It's really bizarre how, in the context of war, totally normal attributes of human behavior become transformed into into mysterious cultural quirks of the elusive Arab.

What they're both really talking about is the fractured lens through which the US sees everything that happens beyond its own borders (and quite a bit of what happens within them.) You see this is the mysterious view that Europe is in the process of being conquered by multiplying Arabs, that France is basically a third world country, that China is relentlessly pursuing aggressive military buildups, etc etc etc. Now, this is annoying when any nation does it. (And we all do it.) But it becomes truly terrifying when great powers do it, because it leads to tragedy.

Which brings me to a very interesting article (via) comparing two very different views of the Cold War, even though they're almost precisely contemporary -- the views of George Kennan and Paul Nitze, embodied in the Long Telegram and NSC-68 respectively.

To grossly summarize the article, the author basically argues that the difference between Kennan and Nitze was a matter of worldview: Kennan saw the Soviets as motivated almost entirely by a sense of inferiority and fear of the more advanced western powers, while Nitze saw them as motivated by a crusading desire to destroy the capitalist west. (Again, gross summary.) Now, if you were going to mark these two men, I think you'd have to give the match to Kennan on points. He called more things right -- though he was not without error -- than Nitze, even if we restrict ourselves to a comparison of these two documents. Kennan saw that the USSR was fundamentally weaker than the west, and called basically for non-military competition except where necessary to contain. Nitze saw the USSR as stronger -- at a point when the US was already vastly more powerful in relative terms than it would be for the rest of the 20th century -- and called for massive arms buildups.

Now, it's not like Nitze was solely responsible for what happened. Nitze's work, however, was the one that got the military-industrial complex really rolling. After NSC-68, as Richard Rhodes writes in his most recent book, the defense budget became basically uncoupled from the rest of the fiscal process. Before NSC-68, in peacetime the budget was determined then the military budget was sized within that box. After NSC-68, the military got whatever it wanted, and then everything else the US government does got shoehorned in to the remaining fiscal room.

You can see that in many ways we still live in the world Paul Nitze helped build.

But, NSC-68 wasn't the only impact Nitze had. He was also, to his everlasting discredit, one of the key members of the Team B, Committee for the Present Danger fiasco which provided so much impetus to the Reagan buildup. In so doing, he helped the forces that may have brought the world closer to nuclear war than any time since the Cuban Missile Crisis.

This isn't incidental -- Nitze was one of the strongest voices calling for an aggressive, confrontational policy with the USSR, and it nearly led to disaster. Can we assume he did this for the same reasons that he wrote NSC-68? That is, isn't this view a product of a fundamentally flawed view of the USSR's power and it's intentions?

This would all be of mere historical interest if it weren't basically still the fundamental flaw in the worldview of American foreign policy. Differences are defined as threats, legitimate security concerns are seen as offensive actions, and the mere act of trying to keep up with American arms purchases is called "a military buildup". America has been so successful as a handmaiden to peace that the President and Presidents-to-be are reduced to trying to scare people with the specter of a bearded dude without a necktie in Tehran. (Whatever odious things Ahmedinejad says, even if he were an absolute ruler his power would still be limited by the fact that he's the President of Iran, a country 1/5th of America's population and 1/20th America's GDP.) Rather than celebrate this epochal success, the White House tries to scare the piss out of us, and too many in the media go along with it.

Imagine, then, how we would conduct ourselves differently if we were to acknowledge -- even for a second -- that other states have legitimate security interests too, and that we can even (gasp!) acknowledge them without sacrificing our own safety in the process. Imagine what we would have gained if men like Paul Nitze hadn't triumphed, and some more-sane-level of deterrence had been found. Imagine if we weren't, still, willing to spend ourselves in to penury to grapple with phantoms.

The wrong will never be punished, the right will never be forgiven (II)

...Part a billion-and-one in a series

Oh, and btw, we've been negotiating with the Taliban. You know, like certain voices were advocating for us to do years ago.

So at what point can we expect the calls for Stephen Harper's resignation? As of this morning he's got no excuse to not know about this, and the longer it goes on the longer he will be guilty -- as the right would inevitably label it if it were anyone else -- of negotiating with terrorists.

Oh. That's what I thought. Certain things are only "gaffes" or "unrealistic" or "naive" when the NDP calls for them. When the Liberals or Conservatives do it, it's called pragmatic.

Blech.

The wrong will never be punished, the right will never be forgiven

...Part a billion in a series

You'd think there would only be so much room for horrible people who cast baseless slanders against their rivals, and certainly only so much room for people like that who share the same last name. But you'd be wrong. Jeffrey Goldberg, recent arrival at the Atlantic family of blogs (and one of the most egregious of the pro-war journalists in 2002) calls Ken Silverstein "ethically challenged". As Silverstein notes, if he's referring to anything at all, he's probably referring to Silverstein's Harper's piece where Silverstein pretended to be a representative from the autocracy of Turkmenistan and got Washington lobbyists to explain how they'd improve that country's image.

There's something much more important here, but first I want to deal with this issue: I don't think you would easily get a majority of journalists to agree that Silverstein's conduct in this case was unethical. I haven't done a poll or anything, but from the conversations I've had about Silverstein's piece, I'd bet that even if you got a majority to call it unethical, it would be a slim one. And many journalists I know would explicitly and loudly defend Silverstein's actions and tactics. What journalists really shouldn't do -- and this is j-school, day one -- is carelessly try to ruin someone's reputation. Like, if you're going to criticize someone's Iraq war coverage, you better bring evidence. And if you're going to call a critic ethically-challenged, you might want a consensus opinion about that, or a clear example of a broken policy. In this little spat between Silverstein and Goldberg, only one side has risen to the level of debate. Ahem.

But really, Goldberg (and I have to remember we're not talking about Jonah for once!) symbolizes everything that's wrong with American journalism today. Silverstein breached the formulaic straightjacket of journalistic ethics, but got at the truth. Nevertheless, he's "ethically challenged". Meanwhile, Goldberg checked off all the boxes for what you're supposed to do, but got his pre-war coverage disastrously wrong. (His commentary before the war was about as wrong as it's possible to be, but we're talking about his journalism here.) So Goldberg gets rewarded.

How about this for a standard: it is possible to bend, and even break the rules of journalism, but you have to get the story right -- you have to get the truth. (God help you if you don't.) And no amount of rule-following can excuse getting a story like "Saddam Hussein has WMDs and collaborates with terrorists, so we should invade" wrong.