Saturday, July 5, 2008
Face Of The Day
05 Jul 2008 05:27 pm
Lord Mayor Boris Johnson attends the Gay Pride parade on July 5, 2008 in London. The parade consists of celebrities, floats, and performers celebrating the UK's largest gay and lesbian festival. By Mark Wieland/Getty Images.
"The Fundamental Commitment Of The American People"
05 Jul 2008 04:37 pm
James Poulos criticizes David Broder:
In his national greatness enthusiasm, Broder obscures a fundamental point: political participation — especially voting in one-off national elections — is not a reliable index of civic health or even vibrant citizenship. Broder thinks that enthusiasm about America — expressed by enthusiastically doing something America-themed — is patriotism. This is a seriously imbalanced view. Dormant citizens who rise from the grave of civic republicanism to cast a fevered ballot once every two or four years do not a healthy electorate make. Volunteering for a campaign is better, but ‘joining enthusiastically’ can mean, a bit lower down on the totem pole, sloganeering, attending rallies, and plastering bumper stickers, all without any reflection deeper than “My candidate cares about me“ or “My candidate’s a true patriot.” And community volunteering is great, but has no necessary connection to any knowledge of, or appreciation for, the American national identity. (Indeed this may be a good thing.)
The View From Your Window
05 Jul 2008 03:49 pm
Los Angeles, California, 4.09 pm.
Helms And The Bush Right
05 Jul 2008 03:35 pm
The posthumous embrace is pretty gob-smacking. Mark Levin calls him a defender of "abused minorities" and a "conservative great." And here is the president:
Throughout his long public career, Senator Jesse Helms was a tireless advocate for the people of North Carolina, a stalwart defender of limited government and free enterprise, a fearless defender of a culture of life, and an unwavering champion of those struggling for liberty. Under his leadership, the Senate Foreign Relations Committee was a powerful force for freedom. And today, from Central America to Central Europe and beyond, people remember: in the dark days when the forces of tyranny seemed on the rise, Jesse Helms took their side.
Jesse Helms was a kind, decent, and humble man and a passionate defender of what he called “the Miracle of America.” So it is fitting that this great patriot left us on the Fourth of July. He was once asked if he had any ambitions beyond the United States Senate. He replied: “The only thing I am running for is the Kingdom of Heaven.” Today, Jesse Helms has finished the race, and we pray he finds comfort in the arms of the loving God he strove to serve throughout his life.
There was nothing decent about the policy record of Jesse Helms.
Cringe Of The Day
05 Jul 2008 03:33 pm
"A totally crazy Saturday-morning thought: Wouldn't George W. Bush make an awesome high-school government teacher? Wouldn't it be something if his post-presidential life would up being that kind of post-service service? How's that for a model? Who needs Harvard visiting chairs and high-end lectures? How about Crawford High? (Or wherever?) Reach out and touch the young before they are jaded, or break them of the cynicism pop culture and possibly their parents have passed down to them. Whatever you think of President Bush, he's a likable guy in love with his country with some history and experience to share," - Kathryn-Jean Lopez, NRO.
Give Mugabe Tenure
05 Jul 2008 02:58 pm
From the archives, Cullen Murphy's tongue-in-cheek article on getting dictators to step down:
Now Boston University is experimenting with a new approach—the Lloyd G. Balfour African Presidents in Residence Program. The idea, simply put, is that democratically elected African leaders might not be so prone to overstay their welcome as chief executives (or to keep meddling in local politics after leaving office) if they had a well-endowed university sinecure in the United States to look forward to.[...]
Continue reading "Give Mugabe Tenure" »
Sprinting As Art
05 Jul 2008 02:32 pm
The Tate apes Jean-Luc Godard:
The Stupid Drug War
05 Jul 2008 02:20 pm
Jacob Sullum comments on the new World Health Organization study:
..one thing that's clear is the point made by the WHO researchers: Drug use "is not simply related to drug policy." If tinkering with drug policy (within the context of prohibition) has an impact, it is hard to discern, and it's small compared to the influence of culture and economics.
Jesse Helms At An Obama Rally
05 Jul 2008 11:32 am
Rare vintage footage. I'm pretty firm about always respecting the dead. But since he spent his life doing all he could to make my gay brothers and sisters marginalized, hated and dead, it is hard to feel what a Christian should. And since he was personally responsible for removing my chance to become an American, and his legacy of hatred toward those struggling with HIV is still alive, forgive me for finding forgiveness hard. But may he rest in the peace he so wanted to deny so many others - because they were different from him.
What Rumsfeld Got Right
05 Jul 2008 11:29 am
A video from Bob Kaplan:
Bob's related essay is here.
Hitchens and The "I"
05 Jul 2008 11:20 am
Packer analyzes Hitch's self-waterboarding:
His greatest weakness as a writer is his need to put himself at the center of attention, to win every argument, to walk away from every encounter in prose, as in life, having gotten the better of someone else. And yet the same impulse is essential to his ambition and power as an essayist. Hitchens is working, consciously, I think, in the tradition of the English essay, descended from Johnson, Lamb, Hazlitt, and Orwell, in which ideas are the flower of direct experience and everything depends on the strong presence of the “I.”
Hitchens’s limitation in this form is his inability, maybe unwillingness, to make literature out of the most interesting kind of argument which happens with oneself. When his book on Orwell came out, I wrote that this is the deepest difference between Hitchens and his hero (who’s also mine).
Continue reading "Hitchens and The "I"" »
Internet Sweatshops
05 Jul 2008 07:24 am
N’Gai Croal discusses user-generated content:
Whether these 21st-century worker bees can be said to be having fun (is it really entertaining to update a Wikipedia entry?), there's no question that their moonlighting has value even if they're not being compensated. A YouTube spokesperson informed us that 10 hours of video are uploaded to the service every minute, which she says is the equivalent of 57,000 full-length movies every week. The comedy site FunnyOrDie may have broken into the national consciousness with Will Ferrell's hilarious video "The Landlord," but it's the cumulative efforts of all the John Q. Comics that will determine the start-up's future prospects. We asked FunnyOrDie CEO Dick Glover to calculate what his site's estimated 10,000 hours of video would cost if professionally produced; at the "inexpensive" industry rate of $400,000 per half hour, it comes out to $8 billion.
Friday, July 4, 2008
Face Of The Day
04 Jul 2008 07:17 pm
76-year-old Traute Grier who experienced the Berlin airlift in 1948/49 wears littles US flags in here hair near the new US embassy in Berlin on July 4, 2008, on the day the building will officially be inaugurated by former US president George Bush during a ceremony also attended by German Chancellor Angela Merkel. By Michael Gottschalk/AFP/Getty.
Why Is John McCain In Colombia?
04 Jul 2008 06:04 pm
Steve Sailer has a theory:
The most reassuring theory I can come up with is that McCain intends to bring back a couple of sixty pound suitcases that the Secret Service will hustle for him through Customs. And soon Obama's big lead in campaign finance will have vanished. And there won't be anymore questions about McCain being too old to have the energy for the job as he starts campaigning 96 hours straight.
Heh. Any other ideas? It struck me as one of the weirdest campaign photo-ops I can recall.
What Makes An American
04 Jul 2008 05:30 pm
From Raoul de Roussy de Sales 1939 article:
An Englishman may have doubts regarding the British Empire, a Frenchman may be discouraged concerning the future of France. There are Germans who are not sure that they represent a superior race. All of them, however, remain thoroughly English, French, or German in spite of everything. The type of American who does not accept America as it is and has misgivings about it—such as Henry James, Edith Wharton, T. S. Eliot, and some others—belongs to a past generation. Today one seldom meets an American skeptic, for the reason that nothing is more assuredly unAmerican than to entertain any doubt concerning the fact that somehow or other this country will come out all right.
Continue reading "What Makes An American" »
Malkin Award Nominee
04 Jul 2008 04:02 pm
"...it looks like the only thing Obama won't change is his insistence on losing the war," - Hugh "lurches left" Hewitt.
The Audacity Of Apathy
04 Jul 2008 03:30 pm
Eric Zimmermann writes:
If the Republican candidate for president has to spend time and money reassuring and energizing delegates to the National Right to Life Convention, he's not in good shape.
Franklin Graham And Obama
04 Jul 2008 03:24 pm
He's a public face of today's evangelical movement - and a vastly different one than his father's. And Franklin Graham's concerns about Obama reveal more about sectarian bigotry than any concern for the public good:
Franklin Graham, son of the evangelical icon Billy Graham and head of the international Christian aid organization Samaritan's Purse, was seated next to Obama at the meeting. He peppered Obama with pointed questions, repeatedly demanding to know if the senator believed that "Jesus was the way to God or merely a way." Graham, who once incited an international controversy by calling Islam a "very evil and wicked religion," proceeded to inquire about the Muslim faith of Obama's father, suggesting that Obama himself may be a Muslim.
"They focused on abortion, gay marriage, and then Franklin Graham tried to get Senator Obama saved," said Rev. Eugene Rivers, an African-American pastor from Boston who attended the meeting. Rivers told the Religion News Service that Graham pointedly questioned Obama's "father's connections to Islam." Obama reportedly said of his father, "The least of things he was was Islamic."
Graham's spokesman, Mark DeMoss, denies that Graham asked Obama about his father's Muslim faith. DeMoss did, however, confirm that Graham questioned whether the candidate believed Jesus was the only way to Heaven. "Jesus is the only way for me. I'm not in a position to judge other people," Obama responded, according to Rivers.
I have a feeling that Obama's position is far closer to that of most believing Christians than Graham's. Which is why the right-wing Christianists are getting as afraid as the neocons.
Americans Love Pragmatists
04 Jul 2008 03:13 pm
A majority of Americans think both McCain and Obama have changed positions for purely political reasons. Nate Silver writes:
John McCain is not seen as having the higher ground on the flip-flops issue in the same way that George W. Bush was. Nor is it clear that being labeled as a flip-flopper is necessarily some kind of death-knell for Obama (or McCain for that matter): both candidates were regarded favorably in this poll overall.
The View From Your Window
04 Jul 2008 02:41 pm
Noank, Connecticut, 8.15 pm.
"In Praise of Barack Obama"
04 Jul 2008 02:40 pm
Redstate applauds Obama for "rejecting at least some of the extremism of NARAL, Emily's List, and other radical abortion organizations." As a long time believer that partial birth abortion should be banned period, I agree.
Artful Flip-Flopping
04 Jul 2008 01:55 pm
Jaime Sneider counters me:
Andrew Sullivan says, "Sometimes a flip-flop is a sign of real maturity in a politician responding to new events or facts." That's only true however, when a candidate acknowledges and explains why he's changing. Principle plays no role when the pol instead self-righteously asserts that there has been no change at all. Principle doesn't play a role when a candidate claims that everyone simply misunderstood his previous position--as with the meaning of "negotiate with Iran without precondition"--even when the misperception was widely reported and the candidate did nothing to correct it for many months. Aside from charging the other side with flip-flopping, one other job typically assigned to a campaign's war-room is correcting media reports that mischaracterize their candidate's position. That Obama's staff was apparently sitting on its hands shows Obama either meant what he said or wanted people to believe that he did.
The strategy is to get out of Iraq completely and try and contain Iran diplomatically. The policy is what it was. The tactics shift, as they must. I'm not aware, for example, that the president has described the evolution of his own North Korea policy or his change of counter-insurgency tactics in Iraq as flip-flops. Nor should he. One thing I learned from the Iraq war debacle: we were far too focused on our own ideological positioning than on getting the reality of Iraq right. It's a good thing that since the last election both Bush and Obama have adjusted. We need more of this, not less.
Obama Talks FISA
04 Jul 2008 01:49 pm
Obama responds to his critics.
Yglesias On Krauthammer
04 Jul 2008 12:00 pm
Ouch:
"The only question is why The Washington Post thinks it's a good idea to publish columns that are designed to mislead its audience rather than to inform its audience, or why they think customers would want to pay money for a publication that behaves that way."
Desperation explains the column, I think. The end of an era.
Songs Of The States
04 Jul 2008 11:43 am
Norm Geras has posted songs from all fifty states - just in time for July 4.
The End Of A Bigot
04 Jul 2008 11:42 am
Jesse Helms just died.
This I Believe
04 Jul 2008 11:10 am
Commissioned three years ago by NPR (audio here), today is as good a day as any to remind myself why I love this country, even as I wait to see if I will be allowed to stay here:
I believe in life. I believe in treasuring it as a mystery that will never be fully understood, as a sanctity that should never be destroyed, as an invitation to experience now what can
only be remembered tomorrow. I believe in its indivisibility, in the intimate connection between the newest bud of spring and the flicker in the eye of a patient near death, between the athlete in his prime and the quadriplegic vet, between the fetus in the womb and the mother who bears another life in her own body.
I believe in liberty. I believe that within every soul lies the capacity to reach for its own good, that within every physical body there endures an unalienable right to be free from coercion. I believe in a system of government that places that liberty at the center of its concerns, that enforces the law solely to protect that freedom, that sides with the individual against the claims of family and tribe and church and nation, that sees innocence before guilt and dignity before stigma.
I believe in the right to own property, to maintain it against the benign suffocation of a government that would tax more and more of it away. I believe in freedom of speech and of contract, the right to offend and blaspheme, as well as the right to convert and bear witness. I believe that these freedoms are connected -- the freedom of the fundamentalist and the atheist, the female and the male, the black and the Asian, the gay and the straight.
I believe in the pursuit of happiness. Not its attainment, nor its final definition, but its pursuit. I believe in the journey, not the arrival; in conversation, not monologues; in multiple questions rather than any single answer. I believe in the struggle to remake ourselves and challenge each other in the spirit of eternal forgiveness, in the awareness that none of us knows for sure what happiness truly is, but each of us knows the imperative to keep searching. I believe in the possibility of surprising joy, of serenity through pain, of homecoming through exile.
And I believe in a country that enshrines each of these three things, a country that promises nothing but the promise of being more fully human, and never guarantees its success.
In that constant failure to arrive -- implied at the very beginning -- lies the possibility of a permanently fresh start, an old newness, a way of revitalizing ourselves and our civilization in ways few foresaw and one day many will forget. But the point is now.
And the place is America.
Sanity From Josh
04 Jul 2008 11:07 am
This strikes me as an obvious distinction:
I've watched this campaign unfold pretty closely. And I've listened to Obama's position on Iraq. He's been very clear through this year and last on the distinction between strategy and tactics. Presidents set the strategy -- which in this context means the goal or the policy. And if the policy is a military one, a President will consult closely with his military advisors on the tactics used to execute the policy.
This is an elementary distinction the current occupant in the White House has continually tried to confuse by claiming that his policies are driven and constrained by the advice he's given by his commanders on the ground. There's nothing odd or contradictory about Obama saying that he'll change the policy to one of withdrawal of American combat troops from Iraq with a specific timetable but that he will consult with his military advisors about how best to execute that policy.
But it also remains true that a withdrawal longer than sixteen months because we want to preserve as much of the security gains of the past few months is nonetheless an adjustment. Of course it's an adjustment. I would hope there is an adjustment. Any potential president who is uninterested in the facts on the ground in calibrating his Iraq policy would be ... another George W. Bush. And the brilliance of this is that Obama's trip to Iraq and statements thereafter will be parsed and examined and focused on like no other. This campaign remains all about him. And in the short and long run, that's less desperately needed oxygen for McCain.
Krauthammer Panics
04 Jul 2008 10:56 am
A classic today, but this is the money quote:
Obama's strategy is obvious. The country is in a deep malaise and eager for change. He and his party already have the advantage on economic and domestic issues. Obama, therefore, aims to clear the deck by moving rapidly to the center in those areas where he and his party are weakest, namely national security and the broader cultural issues. With these -- and, most important, his war-losing Iraq policy -- out of the way, the election will be decided on charisma and persona. In this corner: the young sleek cool hip elegant challenger. In the other corner: the old guy. No contest...
As Obama assiduously obliterates all differences with McCain on national security and social issues, he remains rightly confident that Bush fatigue, the lousy economy and his own charisma -- he is easily the most dazzling political personality since John Kennedy -- will carry him to the White House.
They figure it out eventually (apart from the notion that Obama will "lose" any "war"). Having spent much of the year attacking Obama as a commie atheist alien (Hewitt only this week called Obama's post primary position a series of "lurches left"), the neocons are now going to have to attack him as a more electable version of the Clinton they came to love and praise in the primaries. Worse: they fear that Obama has shifted because he wanted to - not because they bullied him into it - and so they have no control any more. They won't be able to use all the usual FoxNews Rovian crap they have long been used to throwing at the Democratic nominee. Charles finishes with a question:
Of course, once he gets there he will have to figure out what he really believes. The conventional liberal/populist stuff he campaigned on during the primaries? Or the reversals he is so artfully offering up now?
I have no idea. Do you? Does he?
It's a rhetorical question but I'll answer it. Yes, I do. And yes, he does. He wants withdrawal from Iraq as prudently as possible. That this might take longer than sixteen months, even though that is the goal, is Bush's fault, not Obama's. Yes, he does want to expand access to private healthcare, engage Iran with more than bluster, raise taxes on the successful, pass immigration reform, end torture, and restore America's moral reputation in the world. And he intends to do it without acting like a rigid, purist ideologue, of the kind Krauthammer admires and of the kind that has driven us into a ditch in Iraq. His adjustments in the post-primary campaign take the hard edges off his clear policy positions, defuse some obvious weaknesses, move aggressively to the center ... and use his money advantage to win the thing. Er: he's a skilled politician. I know the Republicans are used to Democratic candidates being knocked about and defined and pummeled from the get-go. But Obama is different. Hadn't you noticed that yet?
Next question.
(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)
Obama And Iraq Reax
04 Jul 2008 10:43 am
Larison opines:
Obama does a lot of backward walking these days, and so it’s not surprising that he keeps tripping all over his own promises. Of course, there are two ways to look at this latest news: either Obama’s original antiwar stance was never very strong and any “refinements” he makes now are just small modifications to an originally weak position, or he has started yielding to the conventional wisdom that his position on Iraq has to change because of the “success” of the “surge” (whose success, as I have said before, might better described as failure). This either confirms that he was never much of an antiwar leader, or it means that he will align himself more and more with the Washington consensus the closer he comes to being elected.
Marc:
So there may be a change of emphasis, rather than a change of position, consonant with the facts on the ground -- which is, to Obama's credit, what he, in more reflective moments, said he would base his Iraq policy on. But it's also clear that Obama wants to make sure the contrast between himself and John McCain is sharp.
Continue reading "Obama And Iraq Reax" »
Happy Independence Day
04 Jul 2008 07:06 am
Thursday, July 3, 2008
SJFWT!
03 Jul 2008 08:25 pm
Not everyone is happy with Hitchen's waterboarding himself. Phillip Carter:
I thought we learned in grade school to be a little smarter than this -- that it wasn't necessary to stick a metal fork in the electrical socket to know there was electricity there. Unfortunately, for some people personal experience trumps all other forms of learning, and they must learn at the school of hard knocks. Or, in this case, the school of hard torture.
Join SJFWT! That’s Stop Journalists From Waterboarding Themselves, @TAC’s new help group. According to the CIA, only a handful of terror suspects have been waterboarded. Yet SWJT reports that thousands of journalists, suffering from chronic lack of inspiration, have had themselves asphyxiated for the sake a crumby article. Worst of all: it’s entirely self-inflicted.
Obama On Iraq
03 Jul 2008 07:46 pm
I'm relieved that he has shifted exactly as I hoped he would: to a pragmatic commitment to a withdrawal strategy that does not jeopardize the fragile and reversible gains of the last year or so. I don't see this as a U-turn, any more than I regard my own attempt to understand the situation in Iraq as best I can and to remain open to good, as well as bad, developments as some kind of flaw. Very few people foresaw the extent of the gains we have made this past year, in part because a new counter-insurgency had the luck to coincide with some real shifts among Sunni tribes and the Sadrite opposition. But facts change. Shouldn't tactical policy respond? I would never have felt that Obama would be a good president if I felt he'd stick to a position on an issue irrespective of empirical data. As long as the goal is total withdrawal from Iraq as soon as possible, and the man doing it has the vital characteristic of having opposed the war in the first place, I'm fine with pragmatism. Any conservative should be.
And this shift is yet another instance of Obama's remarkably shrewd post-primary strategy. He is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for McCain. If you want to withdraw from Iraq - as prudently as possible - Obama is your man. He won't risk chaos in a precipitous withdrawal regardless of the strategic and tactical situation. Unlike McCain, he is also unafraid of Baker-Hamilton diplomacy; and unlike McCain, he does not threaten a hundred years of occupation and the suspicion that he'd like the U.S. to stay there for ever. What can McCain say now? All he can say, I think, is that Obama is cynical. I don''t think that's fair: there's a distinction between cynical and pragmatic.
When you put this together with Obama's defusing of the patriotism issue and his brazen cooptation of Bush's faith-based social services policy, you see what a gifted strategist Obama is. And if you don't see the power of it, just check out the Bush-right blogs right now. They're veering between a splutter and a strange new respect.
Heh.
(Photo: Hiroko Masuike/Getty.)
Old School Crist
03 Jul 2008 07:25 pm
After nine months' dating, he gets married to a woman. I wonder if that was a condition for the vice-presidency. His parents, by the way, are "ecstatic." I'd say the odds of his becoming the veep - and McCain's heir apparent - just increased exponentially. As a Crist fan, I'm happy - he'd be great for the GOP. But if I were McCain, I'd worry that if this is a marriage of political convenience and if it opens up questions about his past, we could be in a Michael Portillo situation. And no one will want that in a general election campaign.
Put this piece of news with the Obama Iraq adjustment, and you see the contours of the fall election coming into view.
Who Lives? Who Dies?
03 Jul 2008 07:21 pm
A computer program can predict, with 92 percent accuracy, which prisoners on death row will be executed:
According to the system, the death row inmates most likely to be executed are those with the lowest levels of education. The researchers, from Texas A&M University–Texarkana and Loyola University New Orleans, report in the International Journal of Law and Information Technology, that neither the severity of the crime nor race—the latter of which is often cited as a key factor in convictions—are reliable forecasters of a prisoner's fate.
Importing Mexican Happiness
03 Jul 2008 06:05 pm
Wilkinson summarizes:
The new World Values Survey is out and these dismal United States comes in 16th in the world in the WVS happiness rankings, just between such Scandinavian hellholes as Sweden and Norway. You’ll see the usual Latin American bonus in the data, with Puerto Rico, Colombia, and El Salvador populating the upper reaches of the rankings. However, the U.S. has now pulled ahead of Mexico. Maybe it’s because all the Mexicans who moved to the U.S. Denmark retains its happiness crown.
The Zimbabwe Paper Trade
03 Jul 2008 05:22 pm
Tyler Cowen on the Munich-based company that supplies Zimbabwe with bank notes being pressured to stop dealing with Mugabe:
The deeper question is why any tyrannical government would find such a high inflation rate to be seigniorage-maximizing. At some point people simply abandon the currency or prices end up rising as fast or faster than the government spends the newly printed money. (Related query: When the number "quadrillion" is in play, are the "anti-forgery" features of the paper really needed? Isn't the value of the bill higher as paper in any case?) Under one hypothesis, the time horizon is very short and the mass printing of bills maximizes seigniorage on a week-to-week basis but not overall. Under another hypothesis, seigniorage is declining (given price expectations), but without the stream of new bills it would be declining even more rapidly.
An Old Tradition
03 Jul 2008 05:16 pm
A gay couple just got married in Virginia, because the younger spouse disguised himself as a woman:
The near-nuptials began when the couple arrived at Newport News Circuit Court on March 24 to apply for a marriage license. McCain, who court employees said appeared to be a woman, presented a Virginia driver's license and filled out the section of the application labeled "bride." Court employees commented on "what pretty skin" McCain had, a court official said.
It was subsequently exposed and undone. There's a famous case of a lesbian version of this in 1731 when one Mary East became "James How" in order to marry her beloved in Philadelphia. Their marriage lasted thirty-four years before it was discovered. The story is one of many in my anthology on marriage equality, which you can buy here.
The Privacy Of Your Youtube Watching
03 Jul 2008 05:06 pm
It just got overthrown by a troubling court ruling.
Yglesias Award Nominee
03 Jul 2008 04:53 pm
"Say what you want about Obama, he's no radical. Yes, he has an unusual name, but once upon a time, all of our names -- whether Irish, Italian, or Hungarian -- were considered uncommon. Despite his unfamiliar persona, his is a charming and conventional American success story -- he grew up in a broken home, was raised by a relative, became chief editor of the Harvard Law Review (hardly the house organ for a bastion of bomb-throwers), and then spent most of his political career in the bowels of that well-known cauldron of Marxism: the Illinois state legislature.
Along the way, Obama clearly made the acquaintances of all kinds of folk -- including Ayres and Wright, the latter of whom became one of his many spiritual mentors and has already damaged Obama's candidacy all that he's going to.
But the pattern throughout his career indicates that Obama apparently cultivated these gentlemen -- and undoubtedly many others -- more for what they could do for him and his political career than for what he could do for them. And he has already disassociated himself from both Wright and Ayres, albeit clumsily. Does that make him very ambitious? Yup. But if that were a disqualification, we could eliminate virtually every presidential hopeful in history, including John McCain," - Steve Stark, RealClearPolitics.
Mental Health Break
03 Jul 2008 04:20 pm
Introducing the AirPiano:
Praying For Cheaper Oil
03 Jul 2008 03:55 pm
The Pray At The Pump Movement is auditioning as some kind of perfect representation of Bush conservatism, no?
Obama's Marriage Cowardice, Ctd.
03 Jul 2008 03:29 pm
Matt disagrees with me about Obama's incoherent position on marriage equality:
I can't peer into Obama's mind and see what he's thinking, but this looks like a political strategy rather than a logically coherent set of statements. Contra Andrew, I don't think chalking this up to "cowardice" is the most reasonable interpretation. If you want to see the cause of marriage equality advanced, you need sympathetic politicians to win elections. If the sympathetic politicians all say things that are politically toxic, they'll just lose and nothing will be accomplished. But if the sympathetic politicians hew to the more politically tenable line that special anti-gay constitutional amendments are wrong and discriminatory, and also appoint the sort of progressive jurists who are likely to look sympathetically on gay rights causes, then you'll get to equality.
I take the point, except no national politician can or will give us marriage equality. It's a state matter, and in those debates, it's worth holding up the incoherence of politicians' public arguments, if only to make our case better. It's not a huge deal to me because the work is being done outside presidential politics and seems oddly detached from it. Look how much progress we made under Bush: a fiercely Christianist president failed to pass the FMA, presided over California and Massachusetts affirming marriage equality and the abolition of all sodomy laws - laws Bush backed when Texas governor. If we can move this far under a Christianist president and, for much of Bush's term, a Republican Congress, the future is bright.
McCain's Number One Priority
03 Jul 2008 03:04 pm
Beating Hillary Clinton.
Grass Art
03 Jul 2008 03:02 pm
An art project at Wimbledon:
The artists essentially use grass as a form of photographic paper, projecting a black-and-white negative image onto a patch of grass as it grows in a dark room, and using the natural photosensitive properties of the grass to reproduce photographs.
The best part:
Part of what interests Ackroyd and Harvey about using grass is its ephemeral qualities, with the images they create often melting away soon after the grass is exposed to natural light and begins to grow. In galleries the artists have used light control to prolong the life of a work, but, before you rush to SW19 to see the HSBC piece for yourselves, this work lasted only as long as the Wimbledon crowds, and now that we have settled into the final stages of the competition has already pretty much disappeared.
Proving Faith
03 Jul 2008 02:49 pm
Alan Jacobs on challenging religious sincerity:
It’s easy to come up with a story explaining why this person or that person is falsely professing religious belief; and, because we don’t have any (human or mechanical) mind-readers at hand, such skepticism can never be either refuted or confirmed. I’ve been around this highly annoying block way too many times. I have politically conservative Christian friends who are certain that Bill and Hillary Clinton have never been Christians but have been faking it all these years for political leverage; I have politically liberal friends who say exactly the same thing about George Bush. Maybe they’re all right; maybe they’re all wrong. How the hell would I know?
In general, people should be allowed to define the content of their own religious experience - not its authenticity.
The Web vs The Long Tail
03 Jul 2008 02:35 pm
Chris Anderson has argued that the web is moving us away from mainstream products and towards the "long tail," the vast number of obscure products on the web. A recent study comes to a different conclusion:
In a recent study Anita Elberse, a marketing professor at Harvard's business school, looked at data for online video rentals and song purchases, and discovered that the patterns by which people shop online are essentially the same as the ones from offline. Not only do hits and blockbusters remain every bit as important online, but the evidence suggests that the Web is actually causing their role to grow, not shrink.
Anderson's response:
Continue reading "The Web vs The Long Tail" »
Pick An Issue, Any Issue
03 Jul 2008 02:29 pm
Ruffini is worried about McCain:
Message wise, McCain seems to be paralyzed by indecision between multiple different ways to get at Obama -- is he a phony? a naif? too liberal? There has been nothing as disciplined as the Kerry flip flopper meme.
Continue reading "Pick An Issue, Any Issue" »
The View From Your Window
03 Jul 2008 02:09 pm
Akureyri, Iceland, 1.30 pm.
Taxing Who?
03 Jul 2008 01:27 pm
Robert Frank looks at how the rich would fare under Obama and McCain.