The phrase “Ugly American” had its beginning in the book by Eugene Burdick and William Lederer, in which the character of a Burmese journalist is given the line: Read the rest of this entry »

Reacting to Hillary Clinton’s stemwinder, here’s K-Lo: Read the rest of this entry »

Well, Michelle Obama’s speech tonight was pretty incredible stuff, and ought to put to bed the all the reprehensible nonsense that’s been said about her. But it won’t. And apparently the Obama campaign and the Democratic party decided the thing to do would be to blow 25% of their convention on themeless, formless, pointless soft-focus feel good blah blah blah. I hope those watching the live C-SPAN feed didn’t develop diabetes. Maybe the point was just to set up Mrs. Obama’s speech, and the thinking was that they shouldn’t step on the feel-goodiness of her speech with attacks on John McCain. Maybe the next two days will be devoted to stripping off his hide. But if tonight was a preview of the rest of the proceedings, whatever good will it produces will have all of a weekend to make it into the zeitgeist before Maverick McPOW, Vice President Zell Lieberman, and the rest of Team Honor Goldfarb get America reacquainted with the surrender-loving Weatherman Senator from Kenya. How do Democrats keep forgetting how these things work?

I’m even more excited than ever we will have Glenn in chat on Wed. [6:30-7:30 p.m., EDT.] Read how he, Jane Hamsher and others, all with press credentials, were chased off a Denver public sidewalk by the police as the intrepid bloggers tried to identify and inquire of Blue Dog Democrats — who handed AT&T telecom amnesty — why these pols and telecom lobbyists were attending a lavish, private party held by. . . AT&T. (And there is video!)

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The Phoenix New Times article from 2000 on John McCain’s family connections to the alcohol industry and organized crime is pretty annoying. (Article disinterred by Jonathan Schwarz.) Some of the Hensley brothers’ WWII-era bootlegging operations have a certain raffish charm. And while there’s credible evidence that their friends and business partners include outright mobsters, neither the article authors nor law enforcement seem to have connected McCain’s in-laws themselves to actual violence.

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Glenn Greenwald will appear in AoTP chat from 6:30 - 7:30 p.m. Wednesday, August 27th, [edited to add: EDT] to report from Denver on the goings on at the DNC — he will be there as a credentialed journalist for Salon. Rumor has it that nite will feature the prime-time speech of Obama’s VP choice, Joe Biden. For the inside scoops (e.g., have Obamacons and Hillaryites REALLY made up, how is Biden going over as Veep choice?), do join us. (But you must beforehand briefly undertake this sign-up process, if you have not already done so.)

What I am posting concerns my part-time job at a very right-wing, small-town library. I don’t think they can track me since my last name is not published here, yet it makes me nervous. But the issues involved have me so angry, here is why I, a libertarian who has some criticisms of unions (but have never objected to them per se, not at all), am looking into starting one.

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I used all my jokes on my home blog, but we are nevertheless required by statute to have a “Joe Biden is the Democratic nominee for Veep” thread. So, then. My impression was that the Biden nomination may be reasonable electoral politics, but that he’s a pretty awful avatar of left-libertarian hopes and dreams: meaning, Biden’s not much of a peace and civil liberties guy. He sponsored the RAVE Act and voted for the October 2002 AUMF in Iraq. But on the bright side, he’s got an 86% rating from the ACLU (compared to 29% for Delaware’s junior Senator, Thomas Carper). His voting record on GWOT issues this year has been better than Obama’s own. Animals will like him.

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The past 14 months of my life have been dedicated to a project; to put Peace on the map.  I just safely made it home after 98 days on the road. I rode 11,000 miles on a 125cc scooter. Last year I rode 11,000 miles as well.  By the end of my trip, which started and ended in Washington D.C., I had traversed through 29 states, and created the largest Peace sign in history on the U.S. map.

I wanted to reach thousands of Americans and ask them, simply,  “How do you define Peace?”  In order to approach and develop conversations with a diverse sampling of Americans, I chose to leave politics out of our Read the rest of this entry »

History teaches us that men and nations behave wisely once they have exhausted all other alternatives.
–Abba Eban

And so it goes, that Obama can make righteous political hay out of this (actually, only occasional) truth vis-a-vis Iraq.
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Dan Froomkin in WaPo:

In agreeing to pull U.S. combat troops out of Iraqi cities by June, and from the rest of the country by 2011, President Bush has apparently consented to precisely the kind of timetable that, when Democrats called for one, he dismissed as “setting a date for failure.” Bush can call it an “aspirational goal” until he turns blue, but a timetable is exactly what it is, thank you very much.

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The liberal Rachel Maddow will have her own show on MSNBC, beginning September 8. That this is so is causing massive pearl-clutching in certain enclaves, such as TNR’s Sacha Zimmerman. As TPM Cafe’s Andrew Golis so deftly puts it in describing Zimmerman’s inane screed:

In short, then, Zimmerman is arguing that Rachel Maddow shouldn’t have her own show because Sean Hannity is an asshole. Great.

(Via Greenwald, whose own thoughts are also entertaining and insightful.)
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All the speculation, hand-wringing, and brow-furrowing (check out some of the lefty blogs) about Joe Biden as veep overlook the essential reason Biden is far and away the best choice — and not just for Obama’s chances, but for America. Yes, he voted for the war (though he proposed an alternative to the AUMF that if passed, might have prevented it). Yes, he voted for the bankruptcy bill liberals loathe (though I can’t really get worked up about it, except that it looks like a pretty gross giveaway to the worst state on the Acela corridor). Yes, he’s incredibly pompous, is capable of behaving like a jerk, has been around so long he can scarcely remember not being a member of the senate and has little valuable non-senatorial experience; yes, even if he avoids some ridiculous verbal gaffe, it’ll be stunning if he doesn’t have a few interminable self-back-patting soliloquies (though on the flip side, all the foregoing makes him immensely entertaining). Yes, he’s been saying unhelpful things about the Russia-Georgia standoff.

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Richard Posner has a piece at TNR attacking the Heller decision as without “any principles,” which absence “supports the hypothesis that ideology drives decision in cases in which liberal and conservative values collide. If loose construction produces a conservative limitation on government, most conservatives will support it and most liberals will oppose it; and if it produces a liberal limitation on government, most liberals and conservatives will switch sides.” Right on, and get the smelling salts ready. Posner specifically shows in painstaking detail that so-called originalism not only fails to support Scalia’s reasoning, but directly refutes it. (The confusion arises from the fact that Scalia’s “original meaning” analysis gives as the meaning of any constitutional or statutory provision whatever Scalia wants it to mean, its original meaning having no bearing whatsoever.) But look: the 9th Amendment is in the Constitution. Really, it is. Go ahead and check; I’ll wait. It also means something, not nothing. That means that there are (some, not zero) inalienable constitutional rights that are not enumerated. Private gun ownership is a pretty plausible candidate to be one of them.

Apparently, our significant other in the Special Relationship recently flirted with the idea of cutting state compensation to rape victims who were drunk at the time they were assaulted. That prompted brother-of-Christopher to write:

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The Pittsburgh blogosphere’s top dismal scientist explains why drug prohibition is a natiional security threat to the US. Plus, as he notes, all the dead and blighted foreigners.

And presumably yet another nation on which we must wage war: in addition to Iraq, Iran and Russia. According to the “scholar” who was just edged out of (or, depending on whose spin one believes, left of his own accord) the American Enterprise Institute, it has to do with an old saying about a scorpion and a crocodile (altho the version I always heard, had a frog in the role of the crocodile). Damn those neocons have such rarefied reasoning, it can be hard for we mere proles to follow.

Is being won by the Russians for America’s military provisioners:

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Daniel Larison has some fun at the expense of Roger Kimball, an unserious man in a serious bowtie, who is one of many “thinkers” to see John McCain’s extra-sensory detection of the letters K-G-B in Vladimir Putin’s eyes, and raise him a U-S-S-R. Now, crazy as the notion that foreign policy towards the Soviet Union is substitutable salva veritate for foreign policy towards the Russian Federation may be, Daniel is being far too charitable in crediting a hypothetical hawk who claims “that Moscow is trying to reassemble parts of the pre-revolutionary Russian Empire” with avoiding “embarrassing himself by saying completely nonsensical things.” Really? There was fairly considerable overlap between the territory of the Russian Empire and the Soviet Union, including the only non-Russian territory Russian troops occupy at present, so the available data doesn’t tell us precisely which prior frightening Russian polity Messrs. Putin and Medvedev are trying to reassemble, nor (therefore) which rapacious expansionist regime’s rebirth we’re going to have to go to pre-emptive war to, um, pre-empt. (Could it be that Putin is really trying to re-establish the Kievan Rus? That man is capable of anything, after all.) More to the point, as Daniel says, Kimball &co. couldn’t say the things they are saying if they knew what ’soviet’ means, but just as the workers’ councils have gone the way of the passenger pigeon, so have any number of the political and cultural artifacts of the Rossiyskaya Imperiya. And on the other hand, there are features the Russian Federation shares with the USSR — like a tank army and a nuclear arsenal — that certaintly weren’t present in the empire of the Tsars. Which is unsurprising. As has been noted before, “any two things share infinitely many properties, and fail to share infinitely many others. That is so whether the two things are perfect duplicates or utterly dissimilar.” Comparing the Russian Federation to the Russian Empire: nutty. Comparing the Russian Federation to the Soviet Union: also nutty. (Which is nuttier? Depends on which dissimilar features are particularly salient, which in turn depends on context and subjectivity.)

I’d probably be taking a more critical tone in responding to this Marty Peretz post talking up a Saudi Arabian columnist agitating for war with Iran, except that somewhere amid the prose I completely lost my foothold on whatever point he was trying to make. Still, this jumped out: Read the rest of this entry »

This could be big.

By this time tomorrow most people following the campaign are likely to have read the Daily Kos diary about the story John McCain recounted last night of one of his Vietnamese captors drawing a cross in the dirt of the Hanoi Hilton on Christmas Day — an experience, according to this McCain campaign ad from late last year, Team Maverick believes constitutes an argument for a McCain presidency without further elaboration. Flagging the DKos diary, Andrew Sullivan notes that he has heard McCain tell the cross-in-the-dirt story “countless times.” Problem is, unless prison guards who oversee torture and abuse have a strange and heretofore undocumented habit of drawing crosses in the dirt (in which case, I’ll be the first to apologize and correct), it would appear that McCain blatantly and shamelessly stole the anecdote from Alexander Solzhenitsyn. Nor does McCain’s evident admiration and familiarity with Solzhenitsyn’s life and works (would that it were slightly more complete) paint him in cherubic hues. Nor, for that matter, does the fact that as a citizen of a historically Orthodox Christian state, a prison guard in Soviet Russia could reasonably expect to be able to connect his own experiences to a prisoner’s by means of Christian iconography; whereas Christians are only 8% of the Vietnamese population today, and with most of them concentrated in the south around Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City (where European missionary activity was centered), there were probably not all that many guards and soldiers in the North Vietnamese army for whom a cross in the dirt would be a useful way of sharing a moment of humanity with an American prisoner. In other words, it looks really, really bad for McCain. Read the rest of this entry »

Michael Walzer has a short, sharp online-only piece for Dissent about the Georgian crisis. A few points in response: (A) Walzer’s point (1), about how Russia’s war is an “unjust war,” seems to fail to recognize a distinction whose essentiality to discussing the justice of war Walzer himself is most responsible for promulgating, namely the distinction between jus ad bellum and jus in bello, or just cause and just conduct. Clearly, Russia’s behavior fails appallingly on the second score. But the first is murkier. The Russian invasion was of course hardly launched for humanitarian purposes, and as Walzer notes, “the Russian claim that the Georgians killed or injured 2,000 civilians [isn't] credible.” Nonetheless, Georgia triggered the conflict with an unjust attack on Abkhazian and South Ossetian separatists. It can’t be that Russia doesn’t even have an arguably legitimate interest in protecting them.

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This afternoon I saw this noir-ish Batman film with my nine- and 10-year-old grandsons. And an observation about my choice of viewing companions: had I recalled this from Jim’s review at UO:

There are lingering scenes of children being menaced; acts of great cruelty; a pitiless death for a central character; and sustained scenes of people being tempted toward monstrous acts of cowardice. That’s good stuff if you’re a grownup - it’s really a very smart movie, albeit written by people with only a fitful understanding of how people talk. But get a sitter.

I might not have taken them. However, I discussed it with their daddy and my daughter-in-law — who were aware of the reputation for violence in the film — and we decided we’d follow the same protocol we all did after I took the boys to see Iron Man: employ it as a teachable moment revolving around the moral implications in the film.
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Unbeknownst to me (and needless to say, this comes totally unprompted and without any financial incentive), “Burning Birthdays,” the first EP of the Harlem Shakes — a phenomenally talented band that happens to be fronted and bassed by a couple of pretty good friends of mine — has been available for download on itunes for a while now, and at less than $0.99/song (!). You should do yourself a favor and check it out. Start with “Sickos,” their signature song. I wish I could give a detailed description of their music but it’s too eclectic for simple characterization; closer to punk than anything else but not particularly close to punk. Sadly, one can’t do the Harlem shake to any of their songs — at least not easily — but otherwise “BB” is pretty close to flawless. And think of the opportunity to tell people you were into them way back when; or, if you’re a hipster douche, you can tell people about how you liked them before they sold out their values and all the real music fans who followed them.

English journalist tries to eat what Michael Phelps does in a day; gets a small fraction of the way through; fails miserably; gets sick. Obviously, the thing for Phelps to do is seek out more variety in his diet. What could go wrong with that? Hot peppers are a lovely addition to most any savory breakfast or lunch food, and would go a long way to cutting through the disgusting (I’m assuming) taste of all that mayonnaise.

Sort of….

Tom Maguire has a few justified chuckles at the expense of some tested and ready practitioners of the august profession of journalism innumerate hacks at the Grey Lady. Clearly, the fourth estate would be better off if its members were required to undergo some basic quantitative training — not even necessarily anything involving actual computation or problem-solving, just enough to get a grasp of basic concepts — and the whole nation might be better off as a result as well. (At the very least, it would not be possible — to paraphrase a former Dean of Admissions at Yale — to shoot every reporter in the country, recruit pajamas-wearers to fill every, um, cancelled position, shoot all of them, and then recruit a third string journalistic corps with scant if any diminishing of the substantive quality of reporting.) That said, it’s sort of cute that Maguire thinks business school credentials would stand our press in markedly better stead. Sure, there are exceptional B-school grads; there are also exceptional J-school grads. And really now — has he met many Harvard MBAs? They’re supposed to be the best of the lot, and…let’s leave it at that. Read the rest of this entry »

Christopher Hitchens wants to know, in re: the 79 billion dollars of petrol-fueled surplus funds the Iraqi government is expected to accrue by year’s end, if “we [may] take a moment to apologize to Paul Wolfowitz? Of all the many slanders hurled at this advocate for Iraq’s liberation, probably none was more gleefully bandied about than his congressional testimony that Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism could be self-financing.” Well, before we decide whether we owe Wolfowitz an apology, it might be helpful to take account of what Wolfowitz actually said. Wolfowitz’ 2003 statement to Congress on the eve of the invasion didn’t refer to “Iraq’s recovery from decades of war and fascism” — and note the classic Hitchens gambit of putting his own highly tendentious characterization of an event into other people’s mouths, the better to stack the deck rhetorically in favor of the moral blackmail* sure to come within a few paragraphs — but it did include a handy timeline and some dollar estimates: Read the rest of this entry »

Nell’s comment in Mona’s thread on Jon Henke’s condemnation of Jerome Corsi - got all that? - deserves more prominence:

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The odious Jerome Corsi’s hit-piece book on Barrack Obama is premiering at No. 1 on the NTY Bestseller list. At the newish conservative/libertarian site, The Next Right, Jon Henke — who gave me my start blogging (at a now defunct blog) — says what needs to be said about the right’s ongoing reliance on this malevolent smear artist: Read the rest of this entry »

Oh, I’m not done with the Commentards yet. Here’s what Sam Munson highlighted as the Comment(ard) of the Day: Read the rest of this entry »

The worst blogger on earth, writing for the worst site on the world wide web (including all the porn), demonstrates the nonideological idiocy undergirding her entire output quite apart from her laughably slavish partisanship, dishonesty, and stupidity:

Rove’s analysis [of state-by-state contests] should put much of partisan punditry into proper perspectiveational polls are fun but largely irrelevant. Remember Hillary Clinton and Rudy Giuliani’s double-digit leads months before the first votes were cast?

Jesus H. Christ. How many confusions is it possible to pack into two short sentences? Read the rest of this entry »

For reasons I might explain some other time, I have the professional qualifications of a NCAA strength and conditioning coach. So it raised my eyebrows just a bit to come back from al-Quds to the land of Coca-Cola to find Matthew Yglesias offering Michael Phelps the sort of advice you’d expect a professional blogger to offer a champion swimmer:

The story [of Phelps eating ≈12000 calories/day] is written in such a way as to make it seem as if he eats this exact same set of meals every day, but it seems to me that if you’re in a position to eat so much you ought to take advantage of the situation and incorporate more variety.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, and again, no. That’s insane. Read the rest of this entry »

I’ve now read all of Joel Salatin’s book on the politics of farming, Everything I Want to Do is Illegal: War Stories from the Local Food Front. I enjoyed it a great deal. One sentence review: This book could make a libertarian out of me . . .

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As mentioned previously, Rick Perlstein is in our chat rooms tonight to talk about his book, Nixonland.

The chat room is here.

To participate in the conversation, you’ll need to sign up here.

The chat starts at 7 PM, EDT.

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As previously announced, tomorrow, Wednesday, at 7 p.m. EST we welcome Rick Perlstein, author of Nixonland, to AoTP chat. This review (by the conservative Ross Douthat) in The Atlantic points out why it has been nearly impossible for yours truly to read the book in time (obtained only last Friday) for her own-full-fledged review:

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Historian and blogger Rick Perlstein will be our guest this coming Wednesday in The Lobby chatroom. Currently I am voraciously consuming his excellent book, and will have a post up about it before the chat. Perlstein’s tour de force examination of of Nixon and the GOP is truly a must-read. To participate in chat just undertake the brief sign-up process.
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Johann Hari at Huffpo is spot on:

Before this campaign is out, Obama needs to be asked: do you really think you should be in jail? McCain needs to be asked: do you really think your wife should be in jail? Both need to be asked: do you really think 46 percent of Americans should be criminalized? And if not, what are you going to do to begin ending this mad, unwinnable ‘war on drugs’?

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Matthew Yglesias, long one of my favorite bloggers, has begun publishing from his new home at Think Progress. For those of you keeping score at home, this is Matt’s umpty-umphth edition of his internet-web "blog."

Daniel Larison has written a lot about what a disappointment Barack Obama is from an anti-interventionist perspective: the amount of “humanitarian interventionism” in his rhetoric, the “sensible, serious” and idiotic assertion that we need to expand the most bloated military in the world, and too much willingness to accept the hawkish rhetorical frame on Iran. But Larison’s new post on John McCain’s harsh anti-Russia rhetoric suggests why, despite everything, Obama is the better anti-interventionist candidate of the two people who might really win the White House by far. Obama will disappoint us around the Third World in general and the Middle East in particular with his willingness to continue “engaging” with the region using Predators and MRAPs. But he shows no evidence of wanting to start a new Cold War with Russia or, for that matter, China. McCain and the “defense” “intellectuals” around him would like to do both. This isn’t surprising: rebuking George isn’t going to justify a new round of massive military hardware spending. Worsening relations with Russia and China will. A McCain presidency would waste vastly more money on great-power conflicts we shouldn’t exacerbate, and return the risk of nuclear war from the Museum of Old Fears to a prominent place our daily mental furniture.