Vast Wasteland

2011-04-05T06:30:00.003-04:00

From the Department of Human Resources

Shutting down for a while here -- perhaps for good, perhaps not. It has less to do with there being nothing left to talk about (the opposite being closer to the truth in these news-dense days) than with there being not enough time in the day to discuss it in a manner that does the subjects justice.

In the meantime, you can find me next door at The Barsanti Nexus, which provides linkage to my articles, reviews, and books published elsewhere by some very smart and extraordinarily generous editors.

(Update: The Department of Weekend Reading is also available at the Nexus, right-hand column, updated weekly, except when not.)

See you at the movies.

2011-04-02T08:24:00.001-04:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Maybe every day should be Holi…

"Fox News can’t decide, what do they love more, bombing the Middle East or bashing the president?" – Who knew Rand Paul was funny?
Without any Western help, Outtara's rebel forces have seemingly routed their thuggish, illegitimate leader from power in the Ivory Coast. If only Libya was this easy.
No, there's no reason to fairly tax our mega-rich plutocrat overlords – that is, unless you want a complete societal implosion.
Florida GOP doesn't like Dems using words like, you know, on the House floor.
Bonus GOP crazy: Texas Congressman believes that Barry committed forces to Libya as a means of creating his own super-scary totalitarian healthcare reform army! Oh, yes.
From la-la-land to happy campers: new updates to the Oxford English Dictionary.
It was (not so) nice while it lasted – the end of compassionate conservatism.
Everyone's favorite atheist, Hitch, on the King James Bible.
Here's one totally not-crazy way to get the economy started: fire all them guvmint workers!
So that's what the ultra-secret new U.S. Army space spy plane looks like.
The illogic of privatization: California city planning for massive layoffs (one already laid-off worker commits suicide), then hires a communication specialist for $3,000 / week.
Now southern states are arguing over who gets to say they had the most soldiers die to defend an inhuman and feudalistic way of life.
Ferraro and race, yes it was that ugly.
A complete history of science-fiction, in insanely-detailed graphic form.
The great, wild hemp fields of Brooklyn.
X-Men, cowboys, and more Jack Sparrow: it'll be a sequel-tastic summer!
An Easter present for the Fuhrer.
Hard to resist: puppy vs. rottweiler.
So many ways to die in Atari 2600 – a montage of classic video game morbidity.

2011-03-29T07:37:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Quagmires

Could 2011 actually be the year that the allies begin their drawdown in Afghanistan? The steady increase in civilian casualties (a great majority of which still having been caused by the Taliban) has soured the population on the fighting more than ever, and just about every indicator of everyday life in the country has gotten worse, particularly with the Taliban ramping up Iraq-style terrorist attacks and assassinations.

McClatchey reported on the coming of spring and the return of the Afghan "fighting season," and the picture is bleak for the allies' International Security Assistance Force (ISAF):

Every nationwide indicator shows that security has never been so bad, including those compiled by the United Nations and the Red Cross. The Afghan government itself is among those questioning ISAF's strategy. President Hamid Karzai declared this month that international troops must "stop their operations in our land."

No matter how hard the ISAF wants to pursue their objectives in the country, with a government actively telling them to stop fighting the Taliban (this is an astonishing statement, even from somebody as mercurial and self-destructive as Karzai), how much headway can they actually make?

Add to this the gruesome reality of what is being reported about the so-called "kill team" in the 3rd Platoon, 5th Stryker Brigade -- from habitual hash smoking to purposeful killings of unarmed civilians and then gleefully photographing the results (full story at Rolling Stone here) -- and it's difficult to see how this all results in any measure of success.

Which doesn't mean that it's the right thing for the ISAF to pull out, leaving the country in the hands of Karzai's hapless and corrupt goons and the Taliban, a more toxic combination could hardly be imagined. But it does mean that the road to some version of stability for the Afghan people is getting rougher by the day.

2011-03-28T07:27:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Evil Media

For some people, it's just never good enough. GQ editor Jim Nelson decided the other day to deliver a sarcastic little missive about the media's coverage of the ongoing Jasmine Revolution:

One day it was a normal media universe: newsreaders tossing harmless inanities at each other, cooing over video of some overgroomed terrier at the Westminster Dog Show, or warning us that residents of Wisconsin "are bracing for another winter storm." (People up north must really get tired of "bracing"—that's all they do!) And the next thing you knew, our TVs went totally Al Jazeera, with caught-off-guard networks having to report twenty-four–seven on countries most Americans couldn't point out on a map—again, much like Wisconsin.

Putting aside the tweeny-LOL-sounding "went totally Al Jazeera," there's nothing really wrong with this observation. But watch where he goes next:

It was jarring, awkward, and, I'll say it, entertaining. I love watching journalists when they start acting hugely interested in stuff they never cared about, the look of half-baked consternation they give when they have to get "up to speed" on certain subjects, such as Arabs.

So which is it, GQ? Yes, news coverage on the average day here in your United States of Manhattan is for the most part insipid and pointless drivel, agreed. But when said media finally pivots around when faced with the prospect of breaking important news, they should be, what, mocked for doing their job? Read on as Nelson goes from twittery snark to quasi-offensive and, finally, utterly pointless:

Eventually, it became fun to Know Your Middle East. On CNN, that handsome young black anchorman who looks like he would never get his hands dirty with newsprint acted completely starstruck when talking to a real-life foreign correspondent. The guy was an Aussie, as they often are, and pointed at maps with a worldliness that said "I know from Shiite!" Gosh, said the anchorman, you're a foreign correspondent. And these countries are all so different. Where of all the places, of all these countries, would you most want to...go?

As satire goes, Spy it ain't. Stick to your day-job, GQ, pondering on the importance of new developments in denim or putting together Megan Fox slideshows, and leave the media analysis -- not to mention mocking writers who actually risk their lives to report what's happening -- to people who actually watch and read the news. Howard Kurtz doesn't cover Fashion Week, and thank god for that. (Hat-tip to Mediaite for pointing out Nelson's piece originally.)

2011-03-25T06:46:00.001-04:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

And Libya makes three...

A whole buncha wars, crippling deficits, and a recession that just won't go away, thank goodness Congress is considering making "In God We Trust" the national motto.
Heritage Foundation brains discover why Detroit is shrinking -- liberals!
Illinois man ends up on no-fly list because he emailed an imam about interfaith marriage, FBI allegedly offered to take him off it if he promised to spy for them.
Writer claims that striving New Yorkers are so obsessed with their gadgets, they just don't care about sex anymore.
Attack Qaddafi! No, don't! The many flips and flops of our beloved Newt.
KV Pharmaceutical bumps up dosage cost of drug that prevents pre-term labor from $10-$20 per dose to $1,500; seems reasonable, and not at all evil.
From Renaissance era-books to clothes to a Madonna and child statue, Anne Rice is auctioning a bunch of her stuff, and it's all on eBay.
Keep working! The Eye of Sauron is watching.
Remember books? The book club mailers of yesteryear.

2011-03-24T07:38:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Labor

One hundred years ago tomorrow, a fire broke out in a Manhattan clothing factory…

In the fire, 146 workers, mostly young immigrant women, died.
Modern worker safety regulations were one positive outcome.
The centennial remembrance ceremonies will begin at mid-day.
Trailer for Marc Levin and Daphne Pinkerson's HBO documentary on the fire here.
A century on, labor still fighting.
Last December, 29 Bangledeshi workers, mainly making clothes for The Gap, died in tragically similar circumstances.
Meanwhile, in Wisconsin, a judge has blocked the governor's attempt to deny unions collective bargaining rights.
And in Michigan, some of the same folks behind Wisconsin's anti-labor assault (a murderer's row of conservative corporate villainy, from the Kochs to the Waltons and the family of Blackwater founder Erik Prince) are now going after unions there.
Back in the home state, Wehrenberg theaters found to be flouting child labor laws.

2011-03-24T06:41:00.001-04:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

Today's whacked-out piece of right-wing hysteria comes courtesy of the alliteratively monikered Ron Johnson, GOP Senator from the Dairy State, who penned the following claim in yesterday's Wall Street Journal's op-ed page (which more closely resembles an unholy Tea Party / Chamber of Commerce / John Bircher coffee-klatsch with each passing day):

Today is the first anniversary of the greatest single assault on our freedom in my lifetime: the signing of ObamaCare.

According to Sen. Johnson's reasoning, the passing of health care reform not only imperils the life of his daughter, but just about every American unlucky enough to be born into such authoritarian times.

Remember when liberals were thought of as the freaked-out whiners? Ah for the days...

2011-03-23T07:55:00.002-04:00

From the Department of Electioneering

Finally, Lewis Black speaks the truth about what this country needs in its next president: "...a crazy third world dictator. And Donald Trump has what it takes to be that."

Video here, courtesy of TPM.

2011-03-23T06:27:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Quagmires

A historical footnote worthy of consideration as allied planes go after Qaddafi's ground forces, now that his air-defense system has been essentially erased from the equation and questions continue to arise about where it's all going, not to mention the effectiveness and ethics of air campaigns of this sort. About a hundred years ago, the first-ever use of an airplane for military purposes took place in Libya.

On Nov. 1, 1911, Italian reconnaissance pilot Lieutenant Giulio Gavotti flew over a camp of Turkish soldiers, unpinned four grenades and dropped them, to little discernible effect. According to Gerard J. De Groot's The Bomb, "No Turks were injured in this first instance of aerial bombardment, but they were mighty angry."

2011-03-22T07:20:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Energy

No matter what wingnuts like Anne Coulter and the industry apologists over at the Wall Street Journal op-ed page might think, the explosions, over-heating, radiation leakages and possible partial meltdowns at Fukushima Daiichi's six reactors are indeed, a very big deal. Yes, as some have pointed out, the number of people yet to die from this disaster fortunately remains at zero, much lower than the number of those who die from extracting energy from oil wells or coal mines every year. However, the potential for long-term catastrophic harm cannot be underestimated, or removed from the equation.

To that point, the New Yorker's head environmental writer Elizabeth Kolbert warns in this week's issue that despite decades of studies and regulations, the domestic nuclear-energy industry remains woefully ill-prepared to meet even a middling threat from natural causes or terrorist threat:

As the disaster in Japan illustrates, so starkly and so tragically, people have a hard time planning for events that they don’t want to imagine happening. But these are precisely the events that must be taken into account in a realistic assessment of risk. We’ve more or less pretended that our nuclear plants are safe, and so far we have got away with it. The Japanese have not.

Case in point: the only slightly agreed-upon repository for all the nuclear waste we've created so far, Yucca Mountain, is still years away from construction even being started. And being located quite near a major population center and in a geologically unstable area, it's hardly an ideal spot anyway. But, hey, let's go right ahead and build more plants before we've figured that out, right?

2011-03-19T13:16:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Insurrections

While the French start enforcing the no-fly zone over Libya -- this being a possibly good side effect of the U.S. having delayed action so far, in that it forced other nations to step up in the matter -- other conflicts continue to burn across two continents. In Bahrain, the military continues its crackdown on the unarmed opposition, and to make matters worse, the situation in the Ivory Coast continues to radically deteriorate. Foreign Affairs' Elizabeth Dickinson weighs in:

Believe me, I know: You have no bandwidth for the Ivory Coast today. But that may be exactly why the situation in this West African country -- far from the geopolitics of Libya and the human tragedy of Japan -- is going south so quickly. It looks increasingly like outgoing President Laurent Gbagbo has made a calculation that the world just doesn't have enough free hands to stop him if he pushes the country back into war..

Sadly, Jeffrey Goldberg may be right when he questions why the West is so (relatively) quick to action in northern Africa but not on the continent's benighted West Coast...

2011-03-17T07:12:00.001-04:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Oh, Pluto, we hardly knew ye…

Barry actually now going to push a no-fly (and maybe no-drive) zone? Also:

If Sarkozy is so gung-ho on the no-fly zone, who's stopping them? Tripoli's only 800 miles away.
Eliot Spitzer: Libya is looking like Hungary 1956; we may have only hours to save the revolution.

"You can't regulate God" and other horrifyingly stupid arguments made by arch-climate change denialist and oil industry stooge Rep. "Smokey Joe" Barton (R-Tx).
Meet the F-35 -- the wildly unnecessary $1 trillion fighter program that costs more than Australia.
Drought in Russia and bad crop yields in the Midwest contribute to a possible 2011 food price spike.
Our solution for the future: Dukakis 2012!
As the government tells all Americans within 50 miles of the still-unstable Fukushima Daiichi nuclear complex to get out now, it's worth considering: is nuclear power worth it?
The South Side Chicago gang who wanted some of Qaddafi's cash.
Now that Rummy's book is out, it's clear -- he really may have been the worst secretary of defense ever; and that's a neo-con talking.
First case of HIV transmission via living-donor transplant since 1985 confirmed.
Pseudo-birther and home-schooler extraordinaire Michele Bachmann doesn't think that she should have to produce her birth certificate to run for president.
Barry offers to sit down with NRA to talk gun-control legislation, they decline, get all huffy.
Odd Future Wolf Gang Kill Them All. Indeed.
With coverage of the horrible gang rape in Cleveland, Texas, it's more of the same: blame the victim.
Yes, Snoop was framed.
Possibly the first known photograph of a surfer dates from Hawaii, 1890.
To Kill a Mockingird and all the other books everyone should read, in cloud form.
Inception in 60 seconds, done entirely with paper dolls.

2011-03-16T07:02:00.001-04:00

From the Department of Electioneering

The 2012 Class of GOP Candidates are for the most part currently stumping through New Hampshire and Iowa, either auditioning for or on hiatus from their Fox News pulpits, hawking their latest ghostwritten "book" and competing over who can have the ugliest race-baiting moment (oh, wait, on that one we have a winner, it's Mike "we didn't have no madrassas in Arkansas" Huckabee!). Occasionally they'll stop draping themselves in down-home cornpone to put forth a thesis, and according to Politico, it's this:

...the very issues that have typically energized GOP primary voters — such as abortion, faith, gay marriage, debt, military power — are being subsumed into a larger debate about a country in decline.

It’s the idea, held by many conservative activists, that America is becoming too European — weak, feckless and faithless — a spendthrift nation in hock to China and led by an irresolute president who is accelerating the process, either by design or effect.

Let's see:

Ever-increasing anti-intellectualism and ignorance of history
Neverending loss of open land to suburban sprawl
Politicians who score points by degrading public broadcasting and public transit
Tax policies that burden the poor and line the pockets of the wealthy
Rampant childhood obesity
Insanely expensive and inefficient health-care system
Unquestioning worship of military might

Yep, sounds like Europe to us.

2011-03-15T16:33:00.002-04:00

From the Department of Quagmires

This is not an argument necessarily in favor of foreign powers enforcing a no-fly zone in Libya (it's not as simple as it sounds, as SecDef Robert Gates has pointed out, to the consternation of pro-interventionists), but one has to be staggered by the seeming refusal of NATO and other possible players to come to any solid conclusion about it. France and Britain are in favor, Germany, Russia, and China are against it, the United States is fence-posting, and the Arab League is all for it.

But the time for any decision is pretty much long gone. Qaddafi appears to have turned the tide, in a way that even grounding his air force wouldn't help (those massed artillery barrages and tank columns are not so easy for an adhoc rebel militia to hold out against). Today, pro-government forces are closing in on the main rebel stronghold in Benghazi from the west, and have cut off the road leading east to Egypt, which would have been the rebels' escape route. (The New York Times has a continually updated map of the Libya fighting here.)

If a no-fly zone was going to be enacted, then it should have been done last week when the rebels still had a chance. And if it wasn't going to happen, then the possibility shouldn't have been dangled, as it may have given them false hope that led to an over-extension of their lines. Instead, we have had international dithering at its best.

Now, unless some unforeseen turn of events can blunt the momentum of Qaddafi's charge, it's all over but the shooting.

2011-03-15T14:19:00.001-04:00

From the Department of Fine Literature

From Reuters:

Author James Frey, whose "A Million Little Pieces" hit bestseller lists and courted controversy, again stirred the publishing world on Monday with the announcement of a new religious novel and plans to sell it via an art gallery.

"The Final Testament of the Holy Bible" tells the story of a second coming of Jesus Christ, the Messiah to millions of Christians but just plain Ben Jones to family and friends

Ben, whose real name is Zion Avrohom, is a hard-drinking man who lives in a dirty apartment in The Bronx, New York. He smokes dope and has sex with women and men.

There is something depressing -- or is it desperate? -- about what Frey seems to be trying here (oh, just count the taboos being broken...). Possibly figuring that he last got press for being the bad-boy addict memoirist, Frey is thinking that he can get back some of that cachet? Frey does have a knack for the punchy line, so maybe this could make for something of actual artistic interest.

Anyway, cue the 15 minutes of outrage, which will probably last just until people start getting their hands on Joe McGinniss's Sarah Palin book.

2011-03-15T07:43:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Evil Media

Apparently the largest earthquake in Japan's living memory, a tsunami, thousands of deaths, and multiple nuclear reactors in potential simultaneous meltdown, isn't really that big a deal. From the peanut gallery:

Things aren't that bad in Japan, the media just wants it to be, and those nuclear reactors? Largely "behaving as designed." - Rush Limbaugh

2011-03-14T21:53:00.003-04:00

From the Department of Evil Media

Aren't we done with this schmuck yet? First James O'Keefe III - the embarrassing would-be Bob Woodward of the hyperactive conservative blogosphere -- makes a point of going after ACORN (forget the work which the organization does on behalf of the poor, they apparently deserve to be demolished for daring to voice liberal beliefs), then he gets arrested trying to tamper with the office phones of Sen. Mary Landrieu (D-La.) and also tries to trick a female CNN reporter into getting onto a boat he'd filled with sex paraphernalia. Now he's doing a lousy job of trying to prove that National Public Radio is ... what? Staffed by people who think that a good percentage of hardcore Tea Partiers are quasi-racist whack-jobs? That simply shows good sense...

O'Keefe is not a reporter. He is a sleazy propagandist whose manufactured scandals are simply matches applied to an already mountainous pile of kindling.

So, why, then is anybody listening to or watching anything the guy does? And why (as Ira Glass plaintively asks) is NPR not only peremptorily firing people over this but not fighting back at all? As NPR itself and several other entities who finally bothered to watch the entire O'Keefe video have discovered, the guy concocted a hatchet job packed with misleading edits and innuendo. (The somewhat pleasant surprise in all this is that the first people to break this story were actually over at Glenn Beck's site, The Blaze.)

Of course, it's probably too late -- Congressional Republicans are already out for blood and they think they have their moment (note Wisconsin Congressman Paul Ryan's recent lament that his fellow deficit-hatin' Tea Partiers seem to naively think that the budget crisis can be solved "by cutting waste, fraud and abuse, foreign aid and NPR"). The organization's decision to simply fire people and curl into a defensive crouch isn't exactly going to make the problem go away.

Note, though, that none of the people calling for an end to government funding of PBS and NPR ever point to actual examples of liberal bias, they just assume it. Because, let's be honest, any radio station with all that serious news reporting and any television channel showing that many non-country music concerts and documentaries about things besides World War II and Ronald Reagan is clearly crawling with God-hating libruls. As Rep. Tom Graves (R-Ga) said:

I never listen to NPR. As I travel across Georgia, I tune in to hear Glenn Beck or Rush, Hannity or catch the news or just relax to good ole country music. NPR is too snooty for my taste.

Well, that's an argument that's hard to beat. So take in all the Frontline and On the Media and This American Life that you can now, folks...

2011-03-11T06:45:00.006-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

You're all guilty, I says!

Congressman Peter King, who just loves holding hearings about Muslim terrorists, also totally hearts Irish Catholic terrorists.
Corporate America and the GOP's campaign against labor, by the way, could be considered a violation of the UN's Universal Declaration of Human Rights ("Everyone has the right to form and to join trade unions for the protection of his interests").
T55 tanks to pickup-mounted heavy machine guns – how the Libyan rebels and military are armed.
Why is nuclear power always a bad idea? This is why. Also, this.
In pseudo-scandal, NPR staffers on video make comparisons between birthers and flat-earth believers; apparently this is a problem.
Also, "America in 2011: a crumbling nation of fat slobs who ignore their kleptocrat kings…"
New Hampshire state representative advocates eugenics, literally; guess what party he's from?
Bikes and those who hate them – Park Slope loses its bloody mind.
Yes, China might yet have its own Jasmine moment, it'll just take longer to get moving.
What is conservatives' problem with trains?
Brits spend less on health care than Americans, are healthier; we suck.
The Assisterati of New York.
"Ten cities the size of Houston populated exclusively by young males" --Niall Ferguson on the scary implications of all those bachelors in Asia.
From the increasingly and wonderfully loopy Rand Paul: If the guvmint is allowed to tell you what kind of toilet to buy, well, what next?
Apparently, if you have a passport and live in America, you're less likely to have diabetes.
Awesome alert: In new Michael Chabon series for HBO, Hobgoblin, con men and magicians fight Nazis.
So which character from Jonathan Franzen's Freedom are you?
Petra to the Galapagos: five places to see before the revolution.
The big question: which aliens-invade-Los Angeles flick is better?
From Avatar 2 to Russell Brand as King Arthur: Anthony Lane's Oscars of the Future.

2011-03-09T06:47:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Haute Couture

Although it was initially surprising when one read of John Galliano's racist diatribe not long ago, the idea that a high-end fashion designer would have beliefs not exactly commensurate with a pluralist, egalitarian society is far from shocking.

In this close to brilliant op-ed from the past weekend, Prof. Rhonda Garelick makes the connection between fashion and fascism, most directly in its legacy of Nazi collaboration and instinctual elitism:

At the root of the whole system is the most elusive myth of all: the impossible promise that fashion can vanquish physical inadequacy and aging, conferring the beauty and youth we see on the runways and on every page of Vogue — a cult of physical perfection very much at home in the history of fascism.

And although we insist on the racial diversity of fashion’s current standards of beauty, the fascists’ body ideal has persisted and expanded far beyond Europe. The hallmarks of the Nazi aesthetic — blue eyes, blond hair, athletic fitness and sharp-angled features — are the very elements that define what we call the all-American look, still visible in the mythic advertising landscapes of designers like (the decidedly non-Aryan) Ralph Lauren and Calvin Klein.

2011-03-08T07:21:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Insurrection

The deranged Muppet who claims to be ruler of Libya keeps on bombing his own people as they continue to make clear that he's no longer in charge of anything. Meanwhile, the rest of the world tries to figure out how to support the rebels without getting involved in another Middle Eastern quagmire.

Some recent developments:

Al Jazeera reporting that Qaddafi is trying to broker a deal whereby he steps down but is allowed to leave safely.
Rebels say, no deal, the guy's never kept a promise in 42 years.
Arab League holding an emergency meeting on Friday (seriously, that's the earliest they can get together?), may be OK with enforcing the no-fly zone that NATO is proposing to the United Nation.
Moscow says, forget that no-fly zone thing.
Meanwhile, thousands of migrant workers trying to escape fighting stuck in refugee camps. (You can donate to Red Cross assistance in the camps here.)

2011-03-07T06:49:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Athletics

As the NFL players union tries to convince the owners of their teams that actually the guys who are out on the field getting beaten to a pulp every game are the ones that deserve the lion's share of revenue from said games, Barry unhelpfully weighed in on the issue by repeating the old canard about the argument being millionaires vs. billionaires.

Even for a supposed Democrat who's only given the most tepid support to workers' rights since gaining office (at least in part due to support from organized labor), this seemed particularly off-key and misinformed. Dave Zirin at The Nation points out a few very good reasons why, here's just one:

...calling this “billionaires vs. millionaires” is a ridiculous act of moral equivalency where none exists. Here’s the reality. You have thirty-one of the richest people in the United States—people with generational wealth, people whose children’s children will make Tucker Carlson look like Big Bill Haywood—going against a workforce with careers that last just 3.4 years. It’s a workforce that draws almost exclusively from poorer socio-economic backgrounds. It’s a workforce that will die more than twenty years earlier than the typical American male.

So, no, the owners -- who, mind you, are usually able to get local taxpayers to foot the lion's share of the cost and risk of their superdome luxury-box megaplexes -- do not deserve a larger piece of the pie. They're doing just fine, and living longer, to boot.

(Note: Big Bill Haywood was one of the great heroes of the American labor movement's radical wing in the early years, and a founder of the Wobblies.)

2011-03-03T07:46:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Newt for President? Apparently things have gotten that bad…

Leaderless Libyan rebels still beating pro-Qaddafi forces.
No surprise, birthers a majority among likely Republican primary voters.
How the Koch billionaire brothers evangelize for the free market while sucking up all the government money they can grab.
Taliban gunmen murder Pakistani Catholic minister Shahbaz Bhatti, for wanting to reform the country's blasphemy laws.
Natalie Portman, Hedy Lamarr and other unlikely science nerds.
From Barry's Cairo speech to Google Earth's influence on poor Bahrainians: the many things that Tom Friedman thinks led to the Jasmine Revolution.
Latest addition to the ranks of over-indulged anti-Semites: Julian Assange? He says not.
New story from the late, great David Foster Wallace, "Backbone," published in the current New Yorker.
Texas group pushes college scholarships for that supposedly underserved minority: white guys.
So now psychotic Kansas homophobes are free to show up at anybody's funeral. Awesome.
Bob Woodward (who would know) on Rummy's memoir: "one big clean-up job, a brazen effort to shift blame to others...distort history, ignore the record or simply avoid discussing matters that cannot be airbrushed away."
In Canada, they actually have a law that saws a news network can't broadcast lies – too bad for Fox.
People who suck: our fellow dedicated NPR listeners.
So last week, the city of Providence, R.I. fired all of their teachers. Umm...
Newest pseudo-trend: anti-Barry donation requests in obituaries.
Apparently now they're even inviting Truthers onto The View.
If you love America … pull over to the side of the road! This makes sense to some people.
Why lists of the greatest 1001 whatever are so addictive.
Thanks to Barry, the White House now has its own beer. It's a honey ale, by the way.
The Dr. Seuss birthday quiz.
Ten awesome Philip K. Dick stories that haven't been made into movies yet.
More in film: Star Wars 3D to come your way in February 2012 (...hurray?), and Peter Jackson's two Hobbit films (which start shooting later this month) to be called There and Back Again and My Unexpected Journey.

2011-03-02T08:24:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Jurisprudence

Quote of the week comes from Chief Justice of the Supreme Court, John Roberts, and his opinion on a case in which AT&T was arguing that since it as a corporation was considered a "person" under the law (ludicrous, but anyway), it could also claim "personal privacy" against requests under the Freedom of Information Act (FOIA) requests (again, ludicrous). The closing line of Roberts' opinion reads:

The protection in FOIA against disclosure of law enforcement information on the ground that it would constitute an unwarranted invasion of personal privacy does not extend to corporations. We trust that AT&T will not take it personally.

Fantastic. Read more in Dahlia Lithwick's Slate article on yesterday's action at the Court for Roberts' comic ruminations on adjectives and root nouns.

2011-03-02T08:00:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Evil Media

Note to the Tea Party: nearly 70 percent of Americans do not want to eliminate funding for the Corporation for Public Broadcasting.

By the way, that annual funding for PBS and NPR is $420 million -- which works out to a little over a buck a year per American citizen, or about one-and-a-half F-35 fighters.

Also, NASCAR remains ridiculous.

2011-03-01T07:36:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Labor

How exactly is it that those who are rallying the people to tar and feather unionized public workers for having the gall to fight for better pay and benefits haven't put the following point together? As union membership in this nation has declined, inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated or dropped. This is cause-and-effect.

Hendrik Hertzberg puts it more succinctly:

Organized labor’s catastrophic decline has paralleled—and, to a disputed but indisputably substantial degree, precipitated—an equally dramatic rise in economic inequality. In 1980, the best-off tenth of American families collected about a third of the nation’s income. Now they’re getting close to half. The top one per cent is getting a full fifth, double what it got in 1980. The super-rich—the top one-tenth of the top one per cent, which is to say the top one-thousandth—have been the biggest winners of all. What is always called their “compensation” (wage workers lucky enough to have a job simply get paid) has quadrupled.

The fight in Wisconsin and other state capitols isn't about pension plans, it's about trying to stem the tide of corporate hegemony. When the old song asks, "Which Side Are You On?", the question for most of us is moot, because we're on the side of the unions, like it or not, since they're just about the only ones on our side.

2011-03-01T07:06:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Fine Music

Whatever you think of the overpriced and underwhelming hulking oddity that sits on Cleveland's lakeline and calls itself the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, being entered into its ranks does confer a kind of legitimacy on artists who don't always experience it otherwise. Sometimes that legitimacy is not particularly well-earned (Madonna?), but more often than not it's a welcome spot of recognition from an industry that has always moved on to the next big thing -- a welcome break from all the greed and short attention spans, in other words.

So it's nice to see that a couple weeks from now, none other than that industrious beatnik Tom Waits will be finally cemented into music infamy, along with a mixed bag of other performers like Alice Cooper and Neil Diamond and Dr. John. One can only hope that they will all be forced to jam together, maybe on "Downtown Train" or "Cold Water."

NPR has the full audio from a Waits concert in Atlanta on his (fantastic, haunted) "Glitter and Doom" tour from 2008 available here. Check it out and get lost.

2011-02-28T07:37:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Fine Literature

From today's Guardian, great news of once-banned books now being available for sale in a freer, post-dictatorship Tunisia. Also:

Anecdotal reports are also emerging of once suppressed titles appearing for impromptu sale on street corners and newspaper kiosks across Egypt. Salwa Gaspard of joint English/Arabic language publisher Saqi Books said accounts in the Arabic press told of books that had been hidden for years in private basements now once more seeing the light of day.

2011-02-28T07:13:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Fact-Based Realities

Earlier in February, at a cozy little conclave of world-running billionaires and the journalists who like to catch rides on their NetJets called Davos, many important statements were made. One that didn't catch a lot of attention at the time was included in a CNN interview with Bill Gates, in which he talks about the proven lie that vaccines cause autism in young children and the doctor whose fraudulent Lancet study started the panic:

Dr. Wakefield has been shown to have used absolutely fraudulent data. He had a financial interest in some lawsuits, he created a fake paper, the journal allowed it to run. All the other studies were done, showed no connection whatsoever again and again and again. So it's an absolute lie that has killed thousands of kids. Because the mothers who heard that lie, many of them didn't have their kids take either pertussis or measles vaccine, and their children are dead today. And so the people who go and engage in those anti-vaccine efforts -- you know, they, they kill children.

This is an all-too-rare case of a public figure standing up against a populist tide of Internet-abetted frenzy, conspiracy, and mob-illogic. (On a side note, Judith Warner's article from the weekend New York Times magazine notes that the current vogue in red-state circles against reality-based thinking about climate change and a host of other issues can actually be traced back to the insistence of their one-time bete noires in academia that all facts were merely interpretations. Ignorance knows no political affiliation, ultimately.)

As Wired's Matt Blum points out, though, no good deed like Gates' goes unpunished. So now some vaccine disinformation propagandists are actually demanding that Gates apologize. For telling the truth. And trying to save the lives of children.

2011-02-25T07:16:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Are you sure your last name ain't Daley?…

In addition to destroying unions, Wisconsin Governor Scott Walker's budget also includes some nice tidbits for anti-union Koch Industries, one of his biggest donors.
Speaking of unions, who belongs to the AFL-CIO-affiliated American Federation of Television and Radio Artists? None other than union-haters like Glenn Beck and Rush Limbaugh. So, like many right-wing Americans, they prefer to quietly reap the benefits of labor organizing and collective bargaining while demagoguing against labor in the cheapest, most hypocritical way.
No retreat, no surrender -- Yep, looks like the federal government will be closing early next Friday.
Violence in Iraq is bad enough without all the toy guns.
Good luck hiding from the Army's new breath-detecting robot.
Hurray for homophobia and racism! The five most offensive T-shirts of the Cubs-Cards rivalry.
In Civilization, it's all about the dictatorship -- When liberals play computer games, they tend to turn into raving conservatives.
Teachers and bankers – who gets to sacrifice for their country?
Satan's screening room: ten films condemned by the Catholic League of Decency.
Too many stars at too few teams: Why the NBA is soon going to look like England's Premier League (i.e., soccer).
"At night, the writers of the future sleep but never dream…"

2011-02-24T08:35:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Before we get too carried away calling for dire punishment for the Democratic lawmakers who fled Madison rather than be present for the gutting of state workers' rights (as Fox News fans would prefer), let's remember that fleeing the capitol to avoid a vote has a long and hallowed tradition.

In 1839 (dates vary), Abraham Lincoln was an Illinois state representative who didn't want to be present in the majority-Democratic chamber and allow a quorum for a vote on getting rid of the Illinois state bank. To keep this from happening, he and some of his aides jumped out of a one-story window.

According to David Herbert Donald's 1996 biography Lincoln, the escapade didn't work, as Abe had already been counted as present. The vote went forward, the Democrats won the day, and many mocked "Mr. Lincoln and his flying brethren." Points for determination, if not planning.

2011-02-24T08:06:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

Over the weekend, a person very, very upset about the union protests in Wisconsin tweeted that riot police should "use live ammunition" to clear them out of the capitol building. The problem wasn't just the creepy fascist violence behind this statement and others by this tweeter -- who also compared workers in the SEIU to Nazi brownshirts -- but that the man behind them was in fact Jeff Cox, a deputy attorney general of Indiana.

Cox was fired today, to nobody's surprise perhaps other than his own. Cox's wit, compassion and wisdom will surely be missed.

2011-02-24T07:07:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Anybody worried about the Democrats' chances in 2012 should hope -- nay, pray -- that the GOP nomination process splinters into internecine squabbling over who loves America and the Tea Party more. A perfect candidate to induce such bickering and low demagoguery would be Rick Santorum.

The former laughingstock of Pennsylvania and odious homophobe, he's back now making suggestions that he'll run for president (apparently he loves the idea of mustering 0% of the vote). Santorum also likes to occasionally lob out verbal idiocies like when he made recently claimed that not only were the Crusades pretty awesome but were only criticized by people who "hate Western civilization at the core."

Run, Rick, run!

2011-02-23T07:57:00.008-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Remember when you listen to Fox Newsers and Rush's dittoheads cry "socialism!" whenever anybody in this country except for the mega-rich tries to get their bosses to pay them a little more, that it's not just insane but utterly wrongheaded.

Consider the graph below, taken from Congressional Budget Office figures and compiled by Mother Jones.

Not only are the richest Americans richer than ever, they're also able to keep more of their income than ever after the government's paltry (for them) taxes.

But no, state workers in Wisconsin and elsewhere should know better than to suggest that they have the right to bargain for higher wages, even after agreeing to cuts in benefits. Don't they know the rich are suffering? After all, according to Mother Jones, the top 10 percent of the American income bracket controls a mere 2/3 of the nation's net worth. With the help of the GOP, the Koch brothers, Murdoch media, and general stupidity, surely we can get that up to 3/4 by the time President Romney enters office!

2011-02-22T06:52:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Cultural Affairs

In the latest Atlantic, B.R. Myers unleashes a long-overdue rant against the cult of the foodie, particularly as it resonates through the world of the New York Times-skimming, food-market-fetishizing demimonde.

While his targeting the likes of Anthony Bourdain is occasionally off-key (Bourdain's writing does tend to the bullying and simplistic, but he's too much of a cultural omnivore and serious traveler to be pigeon-holed so easily), Myers' attack handily skewers the self-satisfied gluttony of a certain class of literary foodie who believes all morals and ethical quandaries matter not against the desires of their gut.

To wit:

So secure is the gourmet community in its newfound reputation, so sure is it of its rightness, that it now proclaims the very qualities—greed, indifference to suffering, the prioritization of food above all—that earned it so much obloquy in the first place. Bourdain starts off his book by reveling in the illegality of a banquet at which he and some famous (unnamed) chefs dined on ortolan, endangered songbirds fattened up, as he unself-consciously tells us, in pitch-dark cages.

Myers (a well-known vegan scold) notes elsewhere that the Roman historian Livy "famously regarded the glorification of chefs as the sign of a culture in decline." For all the benefits of a culture that's (slowly) moving to slower, less fast food-based, and increasingly organic culinary habits, the glorification of the banquet, the superstar chef, and outrageously expensive cuisine in a time of rampant unemployment does seem little more than outright decadence.

2011-02-18T06:56:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Next stop, Rockford…

More Glenny conspiracies -- on chalkboards!
Mugabe? Castro? Who's the next dictator to go?
The average American Christian household owns nine Bibles and buys about one new one per year – doesn't mean they're reading or understanding it.
Paul Ryan is very angry with Barry for ignoring the Erskine-Bowles debt commission proposals -- just like Ryan did.
Conservatives like nothing more than killing train projects that would take money away from building more stripmall-friendly highways or tax breaks to oil companies; however, trains are cool if Ayn Rand is involved.
Primary documents: what the Scientologists say about L. Ron Hubbard's military career.
Archie marries Veronica, and Betty! Change comes to Riverdale.
Why Jeopardy isn't really a good test for artifical intelligence.
Jonathan Lethem, the Brooklyn Bard, heads to California, smells the eucalyptus trees.
Finally, The Book of Mormon musical, from the makers of South Park, comes to Broadway.
$600 for...what? Why the iPad kinda sucks.
Tell The Economist how much you're paying for a Big Mac in your neck of the woods, so they can update their weirdly reliable inflation index.
Rep. Jackie Speier (D-CA) listens to male Representative fulminate on the floor of Congress about evils of abortion, gets up and discusses her own abortion: "for you to stand on this floor and to suggest, as you have, that somehow this is a procedure that is either welcomed or done cavalierly or done without any thought is preposterous."
The tan man speaks: Boehner's cool with losing jobs, so long as they're government employees.
Who's fighting for Wisconsin public workers' rights? The Green Bay Packers, dangit!
The new McSweeney's color insert – ask your local newspaper to carry it.
New! From Apple!! Water!!!
Could Pujols actually end up with the Cubs? Probably not, but the mind boggles….
Eternal Sunshine director Michel Gondry to film Philip K. Dick's Ubik.
Why does Justin Bieber hate America?!?
The awesomest island in the world just might be here.

2011-02-17T06:58:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Labor

Apparently some people in the home state want to return to the 19th century. You know, the glorious years before the guvmint started telling good American sweatshop owners how they could exploit their workers!

How do we know this? Because Jane Cunningham, a Republican state senator who reps a swath of well-heeled McMansioned suburbia west of downtown St. Louis, is sponsoring a bill, SB 222, that would essentially eliminate all rules and regulations concerning child labor. According to Cunningham, she's doing this because her two sons worked before the age of 16 and are all the better for it.

Fair enough. But instead of proposing a modification to current laws that would let kids younger than 16 work in certain kinds of jobs as long as they had parental permission (or something along those lines), SB 222 just takes a hatchet to all child labor legislation. The bill's official summary says it "removes the authority of the director of the Division of Labor Standards to inspect employers who employ children and to require them to keep certain records for children they employ."

In other words, nobody to inspect employers who have children working for them. What could possibly go wrong?

2011-02-16T07:36:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

What makes one notice these days is not when some right-wing loon (a larger and larger component of the conservative movement, it seems) makes some paranoid comment about the president, it's when a conservative actually comes out and asks people to put a hold on the crazy.

For instance, it was briefly news over the weekend when Glenny went on The O'Reilly Factor and even Bill wasn't drinking his caliphate Kool-Aid. O'Reilly even appeared to disagree with the great Karl Rove when the latter claimed (with a straight face somehow) that Mubarak's state didn't torture prisoners, in particular those whom we turned over to them.

Now add to this short honor roll Michael Medved. A dyed-in-the-wool culture-war conservative, Medved writes books with titles like 10 Big Lies About America and 5 Big Lies About American Business (both America and American business are awesome, by the way). He's no fire-breather though, with a Ned Flanders mustache and humble demeanor that puts him in an entirely different league than the proto-fascist Coulters and Limbaughs of the world.

On Monday, Medved published an op-ed in the Wall Street Journal about Barry. In it, he essentially tried to walk his fellow conservatives back from the brink by saying, hey, disagree with the guy or not, let's have some respect for the presidency and remember that he's not trying to destroy America.

Medved actually had to say this:

None of the attacks on Mr. Obama's intentions offers an even vaguely plausible explanation of how the evil genius, once he has ruined our "strength, influence and standard of living," hopes to get himself re-elected. In a sense, the president's most paranoid critics pay him a perverse compliment in maintaining that his idealism burns with such pure, all-consuming heat that he remains blissfully unconcerned with minor matters like his electoral future. They label Mr. Obama as the political equivalent of a suicide bomber: so overcome with hatred (or "rage") that he's perfectly willing to blow himself up in order to inflict casualties on a society he loathes.

Kudos to Medved for calling out the crazies. What's unfortunate is the need to do so in the first place.

2011-02-15T07:19:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Fine Literature

"We must be careful about what we pretend to be."
- Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night

The Onion's A.V. Club posted a thoughtfully annotated list of 14 other things that the late, very great Kurt Vonnegut said better than anybody else.

2011-02-14T06:35:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Evil Media

In the aftermath of the great big Huffington Post buyout by AOL, David Carr considers whether or not this is a "Tom Sawyer moment" for the media:

"Does a boy get a chance to whitewash a fence every day?” he says to his friends, and sure enough, they are soon lined up for the privilege of doing his chores. That’s a bit like how social networks get built. (Just imagine if Tom had also schooled them in the networking opportunities of the user-generated endeavor: “You’re not just painting a fence. You’re building an audience around your personal brand.”)

Douglas Rushkoff makes the same point in his latest book, Program or Be Programmed. For too many writers and other "content creators" (an ugly, soul-killing label if there ever was one), there is money to be made on the interwebs, just not by them.

2011-02-11T07:28:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Well, that didn't work…

So which spa shall Mubarak retire to?
Even Eisenhower met with them - a thumbnail history of America and the Muslim Brotherhood.
Birther jokes and neo-Nazis pushing English-only legislation: have a fun CPAC!
The class war is on: The (not-so) secret corporate plan to destroy Wikileaks and its supporters, and how that feeds in to the ruling class's war on all of us.
Aging listeners and a repetitive message – right-wing talk radio fading.
Print and read: New Yorker's long, fantastic expose on Scientology and its apostates.
By the way, it's official: Wal-Mart kills jobs, doesn't create them. Remember this when they come to your town.
Humanity's got three or four decades before becoming obsolete, says Mr. Singularity.
GOP trying to end tax deductions for insurers who cover abortions, which sounds like onerous government regulation of private industry to us.
Clean white design and an eyebrow-arching, one-word title: make your very own Malcolm Gladwell book.
Fox News insider: not only do we just make things up, but during Dubya's presidency, "We were a "Stalin-esque mouthpiece."
Now that people in Washington, D.C. can legally obtain handguns, who's buying them? Rich people in rich neighborhoods.
The Tea Party and Al-Qaeda now both have magazines – whose is better?
News flash, the media isn't biased to the left, it's biased to a fantasy of the center.
The annoying author bio.
Finally! The (Vatican-approved) Catholic confession app.
Diane Sawyer and Sue Sylvester, the Twitter war.

2011-02-10T07:19:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Fine Art

If you already know the photography of Mark Hogancamp, then you've probably already seen the above. If not, dig into a gallery of his haunting, funny, strangely emotional work at The Morning News.

You can also check out last year's moving documentary, Marwencol, about the alternate universe that Mark created after an attack that left him brain-damaged and looking for a way to reconnect with the world. That he found it in photographing dolls and turning them into a sprawling narrative of danger, hope, and rescue is one of the modern art world's more incredible and unsung stories.

2011-02-09T07:55:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

Showing that lessons have not been learned in the wake of the Giffords shooting, this past weekend State Senator Scott Beason (R-AL), after talking about how illegal immigration "will destroy" communities and how liberals want to create utopia by raising taxes and letting in more illegal immigrants(?), went on to advise his fellow Republicans to:

...empty the clip, and do what has to be done.

In reporting on how Beason then felt the need to walk his statement back and claim it was taken out of context, Matt Yglesias found the silver lining in this dark cloud of violent idiocy (what context?):

Even in Alabama it would be politically damaging to be thought of as the guy who wants to shoot Mexicans. And the reason it’s wrong to shoot them is that they’re people and their interests count. So that’s progress.

2011-02-08T08:26:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Flashbacks

While certain people in this country are still getting themselves in a lather over the fact that gay people exist -- not to mention wanting fair treatment and all those other Constitutional rights -- it's interesting to look back at what one of our presidents once said on the issue of gay rights.

In 1978, during a fight over a ballot initiative in California (where so many of these idiot fights seem to happen) over whether to ban gays and lesbians from teaching in public schools, Governor Ronald Reagan wrote the following in an op-ed in the Los Angeles Herald-Examiner:

Whatever else it is, homosexuality is not a contagious disease like the measles. Prevailing scientific opinion is that an individual's sexuality is determined at a very early age and that a child's teachers do not really influence this.

Stephanie Mencimer at Mother Jones points out the sickening irony of this quote of Reagan's even as his memory is invoked by an ad that claims the Gipper would have been cool with Republicans (Huckabee, DeMint, etc.) boycotting the Conservative Political Action Conference just because a gay Republican group (GOProud) has elected to attend:

It's hard to imagine that a politician brave enough to write such a statement in 1978, even as he was preparing to run for president, would have been especially cowed at the thought of bumping up against a few gay Republicans at CPAC. Jim DeMint should take note.

2011-02-08T07:21:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Evil Media

Glenn has a point to make! Egypt is big.

Also, check out Glenn's phenomenal ability to link everything that happened ever to the dread evil of progressive politics. In this clip from last week (it's longish, but worth watching as long as you can) he links the Weather Underground to the Gaza blockade incident to Turkey to Iran 1979, all the while pursing his brow in faux-naif thought. It's astonishing, highly entertaining theater. Also utterly demented.

Additionally, Jeffrey Goldberg looks forward to more Beck-ian conspiracy linkages:

...I think it's fair to say that Beck will be paying a lot of attention in the coming weeks to the dastardly, pro-caliphate work of Joy Behar; [the] makers of Little Debbie snack cakes; the 1980s hair band Def Leppard; Omar Sharif; and the Automobile Association of America. And remember, you read it here first.

2011-02-07T07:44:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Flashbacks

How is it exactly that some Republicans have convinced themselves that they know anything about fiscal discipline? It's bad enough that they want to claim sainthood for old Ronnie and slash government spending just as the economy looks on the verge of recovery - FDR did that in the late-1930s and nearly brought the Great Depression back.

For a trip into the looking glass, let's go back to this Washington Post story from 2004:

In late 2002, Cheney had summoned the Bush administration's economic team to his office to discuss another round of tax cuts to stimulate the economy. Then-Treasury Secretary Paul H. O'Neill pleaded that the government -- already running a $158 billion deficit -- was careering toward a fiscal crisis. But by O'Neill's account of the meeting, Cheney silenced him by invoking his take on Reagan's legacy ["Deficits don't matter"].

Hypocrisy and forgetfulness go both ways, of course. In the 1980s, it was the left that predicted economic apocalypse from running huge deficits, which turned out not to be the case (though even Ronnie ended up raising taxes to help balance things out, not that any of his current history-blind acolytes remember). And Cheney is many things (fill in the blank) but he's not a Tea Partier.

Still, it's disturbing just how quickly reality and history become these fungible, endlessly mutating things depending on what side of the political divide you're on. No matter that Reagan and Dubya recklessly exploded deficits and increased the size of the government, no, it must all be Barry's fault. Always. And to hell with the historical record.

2011-02-06T09:30:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

It's hard to say what the worst thing is about the corporate-funded tea partier crusade (and it is a crusade for many of them) against health care reform, but here's a couple of nominees.

Firstly, it's frightening that this sort of public policy debate has attracted the kind of messianic, unthinking zeal normally reserved for more gut-level issues like abortion.

Jonathan Chait at the New Republic may unfortunately be right when he refers to the repeal movement as less of a political belief and more of a "pathology":

If this was a dispute about policy, of course, Republicans would be willing to pursue alterations. Democrats didn't like the Bush tax cuts, but if Bush had been willing to tighten up some tax loopholes, maybe lose the estate tax cuts, then they'd have been happy to entertain some alterations. While they may not have liked the law, they could surely imagine ways to improve it that could meet with bipartisan approval.... But the Affordable Care Act has become to the right a symbolic totem that has little to do with actual policies. Its very existence is an enduring emotional wound.

The second problem with this whole crusade is that it's simply annoying. Not just because it's sucking up time better spent on substantive debates. No, it's annoying because it's forcing left-wingers who never liked the bill in the first place to feel compelled to defend it. Why? Because as short-sighted and fatally compromised as reform was, it beats what the right would put in its place (i.e., you're on your own).

2011-02-05T12:40:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Athletic Endeavors

As you're getting ready for the big Super Bowl decisions coming up tomorrow (Nachos or just plain chips? A focus on the lighter pilsners or heavier stouts? Why the hell am I watching this again?), it might be worth considering that this could be the last professional football game of 2011.

That's assuming that the owners and players can't come to a resolution over whether or not players deserve to, you know, get paid what they deserve (sure, some players end up millionaires, but the average salary is less than $800,000 for guys who play on average only three years and too often end up with lifelong injuries as a result).

Another consideration of football comes courtesy of the good people at The Rumpus, with its handy guide to the Super Bowl for those people who normally couldn't give a toss about the sport and have a hard time getting into the annual idea of a football game transformed -- once all the interesting teams have been winnowed out -- into a quasi-militaristic advertising and public-relations juggernaut:

It's no wonder. Football lacks the artful, accessible flow of soccer or basketball; it’s an inscrutable sport of attrition, hampered by jagged game action that’s comically brief (according to the Wall Street Journal, there’s only about 11 minutes of actual football being played during a football game, while a full 67 minutes of air time is devoted to the players standing around). The constant work stoppages, arcane terminology, and baffling penalties (e.g., “unabated to the quarterback”) make this game a pain in the ass to watch for anyone who hasn’t already been doing so for years.

We'd go for the nachos and generous dosings of Miller Lite.

2011-02-04T12:13:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Is it departure time already?…

Income inequality is part of what's driving the protests in Egypt – even thoug it's actually worse in the United States.
The week in Egypt, in pictures.
Can we finally shut up about Twitter when it comes to revolutions? Should we?
All that tear gas being shot at Cairene protesters? Says "Made in the USA" on the side, great!
The Army wants a newer, cooler rifle that doesn't jam up in dusty conditions; who doesn’t?
The word from Fox: when "democracy" comes to the Middle East at the end of an American invasion, it's just awesome; when it tries to spread via public action, it's terrifying.
From Saudi Arabia's King Abdullah to Turkmenistan's Gurbanguly Berdymukhamedov: five more dictators besides Mubarak that the U.S. still supports.
Like the Eighties and Nineties all over again as the GOP tries to turn back the clock on womens' rights.
Now Birthers think they can keep Barry from winning in 2012 by keeping him off the ballot in Arizona; it just might work, too.
Reagan's budget director David Stockman to new-breed Republicans: hey, idiots, if you actually want to reduce the deficit, you need to raise taxes, cut defense spending, and apply means testing to Social Security and Medicare, as in now.
Some Arizona legislators want the option of voiding any federal law or regulation they don't like; apparently they're this far from firing on Ft. Sumter.
Lisbeth Salander -- the fashion spread.
Bloomberg sends undercover officers to Arizona gun shows to find out how easy it is to skirt regulations (very easy). So of course, gun nuts are outraged by the reporting of the truth, as always.
One more way that China is kicking America's tail: wind power.
Profiling on Facebook by literary selections.
Fer crissakes, what isn't this guy against?
More Barry conspiracy theories – now with Egypt!
Bring on the asteroids, government is the problem!
A short video history of awesome Muppet duets.

2011-02-03T08:26:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Foreign Affairs

Even as the pro-Mubarak militias and mobs try to shut down the pro-democracy protesters on the streets of Cairo with beatings and killings (all of it most likely organized by the ruling party), Mubarak's ouster still hangs out there as a tenuous possibility.

People aren't backing down and the army has yet to take the side of the thugs who don't seem to have the capability for organized violence that the Iranian mullahs did when they crushed the Tehran protests.

Anything is still possible, but as Thomas Friedman noted the other day, the Rubicon has been crossed, and the entire Middle East can't go back to what it was before the Egypt uprisings.

There is also a lot to be cynical about here, particularly the possibility of a Cairene militaristic junta spoiling for a war and eager to use Gaza as a proxy battleground. That said, there is also something inspiring about what has been uncorked in the Egyptian citizenry.

For one, there is this picture that claims to show a ring of Egyptian Christians forming a protective barrier around fellow Muslim protesters during their prayers -- a stunning thing to contemplate, given the recent anti-Christian violence there.

Also, take this item from an especially emotive piece in the New York Times by Anthony Shadid, which reported on how the pro-democracy protesters fought back against the thugs:

The battle was waged by Mohammed Gamil, a dentist in a blue tie who ran toward the barricades of Tahrir Square. It was joined by Fayeqa Hussein, a veiled mother of seven who filled a Styrofoam container with rocks. Magdi Abdel-Rahman, a 60-year-old grandfather, kissed the ground before throwing himself against crowds mobilized by a state bent on driving them from the square. And the charge was led by Yasser Hamdi, who said his 2-year-old daughter would live a life better than the one he endured.

“Aren’t you men?” he shouted. “Let’s go!”

As the crowd pushed back the government’s men, down a street of airline offices, banks and a bookstore called L’Orientaliste, Mr. Abdel-Rahman made the stakes clear. “They want to take our revolution from us,” he declared.

These are not people who will be content with the likes of Mubarak and his ilk for much longer.

2011-02-03T07:16:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Fine Cinema

A great city is nothing more than a portrait of itself, and yet when all is said and done, its arsenals of scenes and images are part of a deeply moving plan. As a book in which to read this plan, New York is unsurpassed...

According to Deadline, Warner Bros. is about to get started on a big-budget film adaptation of Mark Helprin's masterful novel, Winter's Tale. A gonzo fairy-tale romance by way of Gangs of New York, it'll be a tough work for anybody to tackle.

However, perhaps unfortunately for lovers of the book -- one of the great New York novels, by the way -- the writer / director is going to be screenwriter Akiva Goldsman, who has flip-flopped from outright embarrassments (Batman and Robin) to the merely efficient and serviceable (The Da Vinci Code).

Here's to hoping it's a labor of love for Goldsman.

2011-02-02T08:28:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Fine Literature

There is no heresy or no philosophy which is so abhorrent to my church as a human being, and accordingly I am going to Paris.

Your quote of the day comes courtesy of the great James Joyce, born this day in Dublin in 1882.

2011-02-02T06:54:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Quagmires

Above, a scene from the poppy fields of Afghanistan, which provide most of the world's illicit opium supply. See the rest of the photographs in the National Geographic gallery here, which accompany a great article by Robert Draper about the poppy problem's past, present, and future:

The grim axiom defining today's Afghanistan, 85 percent of whose citizens are farmers, is that its economy relies on two dueling revenue streams. One flows from Western aid, in the hopes that the country will renounce the Taliban. The other flows from opium trafficking supported by the Taliban, which use the proceeds to fund attacks on Western troops. Only recently has the Afghan government seemed to take stock of the obvious: For the outside world's largesse to continue, the national economy's addiction to opium must end. The poppy fields must be destroyed. But just as this devoutly Muslim nation did not become the world's leading opium supplier overnight, uprooting Afghanistan's poppy mind-set promises to be a complicated endeavor.

Link to the full article here.

2011-02-01T07:44:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Foreign Affairs

Whatever else happens with the Egypt situation, it's heartening that for about a week now there have been near-constant protests and marches in Cairo and other major cities (including today's planned "million man march") without any major violent reaction from the government. Also, for perhaps the first time in the nation's history, large numbers of women are taking part, and without the sexual harassment that usually afflicts Egyptian women in public spaces. Part of this has to do, of course, with the military wanting to play it safe and not tie themselves to the sinking ship that is Mubarak.

But it also shows that (perhaps) the world is a different place now than back in 1989, when the Chinese government could simply massacre its protesters in Tiananmen Square, break the spine of the resistance, and face little more than tut-tutting from the international community. (To be safe, China has increased their web censorship just in case any of their own democracy-seeking protesters are interested in what's happening in Cairo.) Just today, Jordan's King Abdullah fired his entire government in the face of mounting protests there -- something that would have been unthinkable until, well, last week.

We've been here before, and all too easily the optimism can curdle once the fascists and mullahs start seizing power, implementing press controls, religious edicts, and xenophobic (particularly anti-Israel) propaganda. But if the army can keep their pact with the people and hold things together for a few months until elections and a rough kind of democracy can start forming, then maybe the Egyptian people will have a chance for a better life free from the autocracy all too common in the Middle East.

But in the end, it's also just another excuse for Dubya's favorite war-mongering walrus (John Bolton) to come out and say now we might really need to bomb Iran.

2011-01-31T07:50:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Evil

Ever have the feeling that most of the terrible ideas that have been wrecking the country for years now and threaten to keep on wrecking it for the foreseeable future -- from lax environmental laws to warmongering interventionism to anti-tax demagoguery to the dismantling of labor rights -- could also be traced back to one sulfurous gathering of corporate tycoons and right-wing media clowns?

Don't laugh off such paranoid-seeming dreams any longer. There is such a meeting, and it took place over the weekend in Rancho Mirage, California.

You can get the full dope on the fat-cat organizers, the cartoonishly wealthy and reactionary Koch brothers, in this New Yorker profile from a few issues back. Seriously, a comic-book couldn't have dreamed up mega-polluting, democracy-cheating villains like this.

2011-01-28T07:46:00.007-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

So what's the word from Davos?

Ugandan gay rights activist David Kato murdered with a hammer after his photograph was published in an anti-gay newspaper whose headline read: "Hang them."
Live updates from the Egypt uprising.
Facing rioting in the streets, Egypt figures, "forget this," and shuts down the Internet. Just about all of it .
Moody's warns that the US could lose AAA credit rating. Biggest reason? The recklessly idiotic extension of Dubya's tax cuts. We didn't need that $400 billion anyway...
Print and read: from dementia to early death, football's concussion crisis.
According to the government's accountants, Don't Ask Don't Tell cost just under $200 million to replace and retrain all of those soldiers between 2004 and 2009.
Everything from Mexico to Afghanistan falls apart; a list of possible 2011 nightmare scenarios.
Fox News, while peddling bogus "Electric cars are worse than gas-powered cars" meme, inadvertantly admits that climate change exists.
Difference between Tea Partiers and mainstrem GOPers increasingly just a matter of style.
In case anybody cares, Dubya and his buddies did flagrantly break the law by using federal funds and resources to shill for GOP candidates; not that anybody will get arrested for it.
Phosphate-free dish detergents, those damn environmentalists!
From the vaults: Salinger loved Burger King.
Comic Sans Italic is easier to read than Helvetica! An argument for godawfully ugly fonts.
The National Book Critics Circle's best books of 2010 nominees, with links to free samples.
How big a Coen Brothers fan are you? Take the quiz.
It's about time: Tweeting the Civil War.
Writing a bad review and getting sued for it.
The best piece of Barry art ever.
Vegans are just better than the rest of us, and other things that we learned at the movies in 2010.
Most importantly, next week on Community: Advanced Dungeons & Dragons.

2011-01-27T07:48:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

Everybody will likely continue to argue over whether political rhetoric had anything to do with the Tuscon Safeway shootings for years without coming to any definite conclusion. But there was another tragic shooting the previous year in Arizona where another innocent little girl was murdered, and in that case, the correlation between violently xenophobic Tea Party propaganda and violence is as direct as can be.

Shawna Forde (pictured at left, center) is on trial in Tucson right now for supposedly breaking into a home near the Mexican border and gunning down a father and his 9-year-old daughter, Brisenia Flores, as part of a plot to raid the homes of alleged drug dealers as a way to finance her anti-immigrant fringe group, Minutemen American Defense.

The Phoenix New Times reported that Forde attended a Tea Party rally last April that could charitably be described as Nuremberg Lite:

There were neo-Nazis in attendance, John Birchers, estwhile Ron Paul-ites (or "Ronulans"), middlebrows who'd read too much Ayn Rand, minutemen, nativist members of United for a Sovereign America and other anti-immigrant groups, you name it.

After Forde left the font of anti-Obama invective, she penned the following online missive:

"This is the time for all Americans to join organizations and REVOLT!!!. Refuse to be part of a system only designed to enslave you and you children. Times will get worse before they get worse, *Say no to illegal immigration* Lock and Load, Shawna Forde."

Only a month and a half later, Forde and a fellow gunman and white supremacist allegedly broke into the Flores home, looking to rob and murder all to fund their fanatical war on illegal immigrants.

Not that the mainstream media has noticed, though.

2011-01-26T07:47:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Since John McCain picked Sarah Palin as his running mate in 2008, Washington Post columnist Dana Milbank has written some 42 columns about Sarah Palin. A Google search of the lady turns up some 26.9 million results. According to the Hollywood Reporter, MSNBC and Fox have a bilateral Palin problem: the former can't stop going after her and the latter can't stop defending her -- Keith Olbermann mentioned her almost every other episode of his late show, and Chris Matthews may have talked about her even more.

So, Milbank has proposed something radical, let's stop talking about the wacko from Wasilla:

I hereby pledge that, beginning on Feb. 1, 2011, I will not mention Sarah Palin -- in print, online or on television -- for one month. Furthermore, I call on others in the news media to join me in this pledge of a Palin-free February. With enough support, I believe we may even be able to extend the moratorium beyond one month, but we are up against a powerful compulsion, and we must take this struggle day by day.

Let's start early, as of today. Even if she (gulp) announces her candidacy for the presidency. Until March at least...

2011-01-25T08:02:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Fine Cinema

Another dispatch from movie-world comes courtesy of GreenCine Daily's Steve Dollar, which reports on an incredible-sounding new documentary (likely never to come to a theater near you) about umlaut rock's most indestructible icon: Motorhead's Lemmy.

According to Dollar, one of Lemmy's fans is quoted in the film as saying approvingly, "If they ever drop a nuclear bomb on this world, the only thing left behind will be Lemmy and cockroaches."

Hear, hear.

2011-01-25T07:00:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Fine Cinema

So the Oscar nominations are out, and as to be expected, The King's Speech walked away with the bulk of them. The other expected award magnets like The Social Network, Black Swan, True Grit, 127 Hours took care of much of the rest, with Winter's Bone the only unsurprising surprise nod to lesser-seen indie filmmaking.

In other words, no, opening up the best picture nominees to ten films didn't exactly lend itself to any shockers.

2011-01-24T11:00:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Why do Republicans hate trains? In the list of specific budgetary cuts that the party released on Friday, near the top of the list was the $1.5 billion or so in subsidies that supports Amtrak each year, not to mention $150 million for Washington D.C.'s Metro system and $2.5 billion in grants for high-speed rail development. Nowhere in this list, of course, was any mention of cutting back on federal funding for highway construction -- since cars are awesome symbols of American independence and trains little better than a Marxist takeover of our travel freedoms.

Other things Republicans appear to hate:

The arts (National Endowment for the Humanities, Sesame Street, etc.)
Poor people who need lawyers (Legal Services Corporation)
Food not grown with all available pesticides (National Organic Certification Cost-Share Program)
Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (this one's probably not a bad idea, and comes to about $30 billion a year to unnecessarily prop up an already-glutted housing market)

Things Republicans like, besides highways, corporate tax loopholes, and giving rich people everything they could ever desire:

Guns. Lots of guns.

2011-01-21T07:19:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Has the pendulum swung back yet?…

Missouri is to Finland as Illinois is to Turkey – how states compare to other nations.
Barry's numbers starting to trend upward.
Hail Washington, pity Stockton: America's most (and least) literate cities.
Rick Santorum is back and maybe running for president! And with weirdly racist things to say! Yay!
Nobody on the right will mention it, but a majority of Americans (including Republicans) are cool with cutting defense to balance the budget.
Why do liberal women hate Sarah? Only the Wall Street Journal knows!
We better not catch you not being Christian in Alabama.
After the shooting, we and Hannity are just glad that Sarah's OK. Awesome, in a horrible kind of way.
Glenn Beck's enemies of humanity have a disturbing tendency to also be Jewish.
The hedge fund that funded those attack ads about the Lower Manhattan mosque.
Don't worry suburbanites, when the climate change that your SUVs are partially responsible for really gets going, it will ruin faraway places like Bangladesh first.
College students (especially those not in liberal arts) don't seem to be learning critical thinking – or even reading or studying all that much.
In photos: see how much has not changed in Haiti during the year since the earthquake.
To succeed where citysearch and so many others have failed? Patch, it might work.
Ham and bread equals: world's greatest sandwich.
Yep, the new Catwoman is … Anne Hathaway.
But, who's going to play Abraham Lincoln, Vampire Hunter?

2011-01-20T07:15:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Electioneering

A new poll from ABC News and the Washington Post just surveyed many of the likely GOP voters who weren't out buying up gold or drawing funny mustaches on pictures of Barry. They were asked who they think would be best suited for continuing in 2012 and beyond the transfer of money to the wealthy and the dismantling of our sense of the common good, and this was the response: a three-way tie between Huckabee, (21%), Palin (19%), and Romney (17%), with Newt Gingrich (9%) and Chris Christie (8%) bringing up the rear.

America, meet thy future.

2011-01-19T07:38:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Urban Studies

One of the greater, and arguably most damaging, trends in postwar America has been the decades-long redistribution of population from the old Northeast and Upper Midwest urban centers to the so-called Sunbelt of Southern California, the Southwest, and parts of the South. The siren song of cheap housing, eternal sunshine, and endless loops of highway-fed exurbs fed the exodus for years. Of course, when the Great Recession hit, these unfocused pseudo-urban blobs were the first areas to get seriously hammered by job losses and foreclosures.

The Atlantic reports that a new study shows the old trend might be reversing itself, particularly among the college-educated:

Before the crisis ... young college grads had been strongly attracted to Sunbelt bubble metros like Phoenix, Las Vegas, and California's Inland Empire (the Riverside metro), where housing was cheap, credit readily available, and local economies were booming around real estate and services. Those trends have been almost completely reversed. In the wake of the crisis, young adults are flowing towards larger cities, college towns, knowledge-based and creative economy metros, and even some older Rustbelt metros are beginning to increase their ability to retain and attract them.

This is part of a change among the greater population as well. Last summer, it was reported that while the Sun Belt continues to grow, it's at a slower pace, with Florida in particular -- memorably described back in a 2009 New Yorker piece by George Packer as a state whose central organizing principle was a real estate Ponzi scheme -- hemorrhaging population.

Ultimately, with gasoline prices likely to hit $4/gallon sometime this year, the more that people relocate to areas that have at least a passing familiarity with walkable neighborhoods and public transportation, the better off they'll be.

2011-01-18T07:00:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

For all the hue and cry and nit-picking punditry surrounding the Giffords case, the prize for capturing the weird, weird mix of self-pity and righteous rage coming from certain sectors goes once again to Mr. Scarborough. In today's Politico, one of the last sentient Republicans speaks it clear:

We get it, Sarah Palin. You’re not morally culpable for the tragic shooting in Tucson, Ariz. All of us around the “Morning Joe” table agree, even if we were stunned that you would whine about yourself on Facebook as a shattered family prepared to bury their 9-year-old girl.

The same goes for you, Glenn Beck. You’ve attacked your political opponents with words designed to inspire hatred and mind-bending conspiracy theories from fans. Calling the president a racist, Marxist and fascist may be reprehensible, but it did not lead a mentally disturbed man to take a Glock to Rep. Gabrielle Giffords’s “Congress on Your Corner” event.

Good on ya, buddy. You weren’t personally responsible for the slaughter at the Safeway. Maybe you can put it on a poster at the next “Talkers” convention.

Meanwhile, New York's lonely gun-control crusader, Rep. Carolyn McCarthy, is just about the only member of the Democratic party -- which has cravenly abandoned this issue in recent years -- willing to actually try and push legislation that could stop massacres like this from happening, or at the very least allow such gunmen to inflict less damage (smaller magazine, fewer bullets, it's not that hard to figure out).

Last word to Scarborough: "I wonder why some on the right can't defend the Second Amendment without acting like jackasses."

2011-01-11T07:41:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Fine Reading

Coolest library ever? Maybe.

Also in book news, a completely unknown manuscript by poet Federico Garcia Lorca has been sitting undiscovered in the Library of Congress's music archives for years.

2011-01-10T07:15:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Evil Media

Stupid has again ruled the airwaves immediately following the foul tragedy that was the attempted murder of Rep. Gabrielle Giffords and the killing of six innocents -- it's become a sort of ritual in modern America. A senselessly horrible event happens, all the talking heads begin babbling about it, and all too often they get it entirely wrong.

No, rhetoric alone has never killed anybody. But the idea that all the relentlessly weaponized talk coming out of an increasingly and desperately paranoid and xenophobic conservative movement -- which continues to hypocritically claim to be the majority will pretending to be an aggrieved, put-upon minority -- over the past few years hasn't made the entire debate violently toxic is too much idiocy to swallow.

Just as idiotic is the idea that Arizona's lax gun laws had nothing whatsoever to do with a psychopath being able to easily acquire a deadly firearm. (NRA propaganda is working, no matter how many civilian massacres happen, support for any gun control keeps dropping.)

Like it or not, the right has had something close to a monopoly on political violence in this nation ever since the last gasps of the Weathermen. Say what you want about the American left, but aside from breaking the occasional chain-store window, violence hasn't been their bag for years. (See this depressing recent timeline of anti-government violent actions from the Coalition to Stop Gun Violence: from murderous freaks who think Barry's going to take their guns to killers of abortion providers, right-wingers all.)

Mark Potok of the Southern Poverty Law Center noted on NPR over the weekend that Barry's election and a weak economy led to a 50 percent in the number of hate groups operating in the US. According to Potok:

Earlier in the decade, it was paramilitary groups and nativists who were reacting to illegal immigration. But then you have the first black president and the economy, which just exacerbates the feeling among some whites that they are losing opportunities, or losing their country. Now you're seeing a cross-fertilization between those groups from the early 2000s and the people who are upset over Obama and the economy.

But to placate a whingeing right-wing, which is currently spasming with its usual venom against anybody who dares suggest that all the insane Tea Party rhetoric about revolution and reloading and tyranny actually mean anything -- see here, here, here, here, and here for more babbling defensiveness (awful lot of it these days) -- we're being asked to "leave politics out of it."

Apparently it wasn't the Tea Party who vandalized Giffords' office last year during the health-care debate. Loughner didn't call a classmate a "terrorist" for her abortion views. And Arizona isn't a fetid breeding-ground of intolerance and hyperbole masquerading as political discourse. These are all just coincidences.

Just like the Oklahoma City bombing had nothing to do with conservative paranoia about a supposedly out-of-control Democratic government. Nothing at all.

2011-01-07T07:09:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

So, the big question is, who won the Ashes?…

Will Barry be forced to call GOP bluff on raising the debt ceiling, ala Clinton's arguably crazy manuever back in the 1990s? Maybe, but if so "trying to out-crazy today’s Republicans is a dangerous proposition."
Most sickening story of the day: rose petals for an assassin.
The British Medical Journal shows that that study linking autism and vaccines wasn't just flat-out wrong, it was intentionally fraudulent.
DARPA mad scientists sick of military and intel analysts having to wade through millions of pictures. Solution? Cameras that can think for themselves.
Every American accent broken down by region, with audio samples.
A map of American food deserts.
Why The King's Speech is bad history.
The great Estonian Nerd Draft.
Sudan is about to split into two countries.
It's 9:30am, what is my editor doing instead of reading my manuscript?
It's about time: Vladimir Putin gets his own mountain.
Hitchens on Kissinger: "that rare and foul beast."
Why nobody in India wants to buy the world's cheapest car.
The Constitution, as redone by the Tea Party.
A Daley finally makes it to the White House. Great.
The other insanely wealthy Mormon and potential GOP presidential candidate in 2012 won't stay in Beijing forever.
The David O. Russell-directed, Jessica Biel-starring, nailgun-in-the-head political comedy that never will be.
Still plenty of cool used bookstores in the Twin Cities, even in Rosedale.
But what would be on Holden Caulfield's playlist?
"Iran purchases $78 million worth of used nuclear-missile parts on Craigslist" -- and other notes from Dave Barry on all that was awful about 2010.
Teddy bears and top hats on the luggage carousel: best flight ever.

2011-01-06T07:09:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Potable Pursuits

Speaking of beer, which somebody must have been, a gauntlet has just been tossed down. Rick Ball over at the excellent Guernica magazine has penned a missive about microbrewed beers. Basically, he thinks they're more about the status and idea than the actual taste. To wit:

Now, this is a gross generalization, and I don’t really intend to defend it. People enjoy drinking their microbrews, and I am not about to tell them they shouldn’t. A bunch of people across the country got excited about the idea of making beer and producing something different than people were used to, and we all benefit from that tremendous variety. Their motives are pure, and the level of interest in good beer has increased immensely in the last couple of decades.

All very true. It's hard to argue that the idea of abstaining from the mass-produced lagers of InBev and the like doesn't motivate people of a certain disposition to seek out smaller, locally-made brews. Ball's point is that so many microbrews tend toward ales with complicated, heavier tastes, which are fine but can sometimes leave you wanting something cleaner and crisper. He notes that "You can make a mediocre ale and nobody will notice; with a lager there is nowhere to hide."

Also true. While the pale ales and oatmeal stouts and bocks favored by so many of the country's stalwart indie brewers have expanded our beer vocabulary to a wonderful extent, it must be said that they have a hard time matching the sharp, drinkable perfection of a Coors. (We'll leave Budweiser out of it.) Maybe now with the InBev purchase of Budweiser, Stella Artois -- arguably the single greatest beer mankind has ever brewed -- can become as common as Bud Lite.

Ball concludes with an ode to beer in general, especially pilsner, long may it live:

I’ve just returned from Prague, where the beer is uniformly terrific, and it’s just everywhere. You walk down the street on a summer afternoon, past restaurants with outdoor seating, and you see people in good spirits at tables full of glasses of golden, beautiful beer. It’s wonderful stuff.

2011-01-05T07:43:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

"All those in favor of the gold standard, say aye..."

Welcome to 2011, all you fresh-faced new Republican politicos, it's going to be the coolest year ever! In between reading aloud parts of the Constitution whenever possible (just the good parts, you know, about gun rights and the gold standard and privatizing Social Security), we hope that you save enough time to tweet about the latest episode of Sarah Palin's Alaska and do some governing that hopefully won't destroy what's left of America.

On this first day of the 112th Congress, let's take a look at what some of the incoming freshmen have in mind:

"I will be hosting Constitutional Seminars."

Repeal "jobs killer" healthcare reform as a deficit-reduction measure, even though the Congressional Budget Office has estimated the bill will cut the budget by almost $150 billion over the next decade.
Oh, and don't forget that even though the new Republicans have pledged not to pass any legislation without funding it, they're going to make an exception for repealing healthcare reform which will, again, increase the deficit.
Railing about healthcare but -- except for a few ideologically consistent stalwarts -- keeping that good government-funded insurance for yourself.
Shutting down the entire government by around, say, March. Good times.
Lobbyists already lining up at gala fundraiser (with Leann Rimes!) to fling dollars and suggestions for industry-friendly regulation at supposedly abstemious new breed Republicans.
Making damn sure that the EPA does nothing whatsoever to protect the environment. Because that kills jobs. And probably kittens, too.
Rooting out waste, fraud, and corruption in government spending, except when it comes to the military. Where most of the money gets wasted.
House Republicans save $35 million by cutting office budgets -- just $90.65 billion to go! (Oh wait, Congress hasn't even come to session yet, and the GOP has already backed off that "cutting $100 billion in spending" thing. Ah, well.)
Bonus Michele Bachmann: she will now be serving on the House Intelligence Committee. To be a fly on the wall...

Popcorn, anybody?

2011-01-03T08:32:00.004-05:00

That Was the Year That Was:

The Best Films of 2010

Over at filmcritic.com, we all got together and came up with a list of the ten best films for the year 2010 - because making lists is what critics do in the holiday season when not arguing, say, whether Black Swan is high art with campy overtones or high camp with artistic window-dressing (hint: it's the latter, which doesn't detract at all from its enjoyability).

Here's the group list from the filmcritic mob:

Inception

Inception
The Social Network
Black Swan
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
True Grit
Toy Story 3
127 Hours
Greenberg
Please Give
Shutter Island

Fish Tank

And, for what it's worth my individual list, with some links to reviews:

Fish Tank
Scott Pilgrim vs. the World
The Social Network
Never Let Me Go
Last Train Home
Boxing Gym
White Material
True Grit
I Am Love
Carlos

2010-12-23T07:04:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Holiday Reading

Good ahead, take a snow day – you deserve it.

We'll return in 2011, in the meantime, here was the year that was…

Don't worry if you're broke – here's the ten best free albums of the year.
According to Merriam-Webster, according to frequency of searches on their web site, "austerity" is the Word of the Year, followed by "pragmatic."
All about Mark -- Time's Person of the Year.
Storms and charging animals; winners of the 2010 National Geographic photo contest.
Possible activities for 2011: start a men-only book club.
The year 2010 in pictures.
An overview of what happened over the past twelve months from The Economist, and the Encyclopaedia Britannica.
The Social Network to The Ghost Writer -- Roger Ebert's best films of 2010.
What a whole posse of New Yorker think was worth reading in 2010.
Jane Eyre to Devil in the White City: 15 books to read before the movie comes out.
The New York Times list of 100 Notable Books of 2010 – get cracking.
Frank Deford on why 2010 was a freaking lousy year for sports. (Not just because Sylvester Stallone was inducted into the Hall of Fame.)
The legend of Santa Claus, as done by Neil Gaiman, creepily.
Most importantly, have a very merry Ramones Christmas.

2010-12-21T08:41:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Electioneering

Astoundingly, some people are taking the idea of Mississippi governor Haley Barbour's presidential aspirations seriously. On the one hand, he's no more ridiculous a candidate than Sarah Palin, but on the other hand, he seems little more than an unreconstructed cliche of entrenched Southern conservatism.

In the current The Weekly Standard, Andrew Ferguson's feature on Haley not only glosses and primes him for that supposed 2012 run -- while at the same time pointing out that this is a man who made his wealth as a stereotypical fat-cat Washington lobbyist wheeler-dealer mold, Jack Abramoff with a Delta drawl -- but also quotes his rose-tinted recollections on racial attitudes in his hometown of Yazoo City during the civil rights era.

You heard of the Citizens Councils? Up north they think it was like the KKK. Where I come from it was an organization of town leaders. In Yazoo City they passed a resolution that said anybody who started a chapter of the Klan would get their ass run out of town. If you had a job, you’d lose it. If you had a store, they’d see nobody shopped there. We didn’t have a problem with the Klan in Yazoo City.

As TPM notes here, the idea of the infamous Citizens Councils being anything less than fronts for organized discrimination (particularly in Yazoo City itself) is something close to a sick joke.

Now what's disturbing here, unfortunately, is not that the governor of Mississippi thinks that there was nothing wrong with this network of white supremacist groups -- organized in direct reaction to postwar desegregation. The New Republic's Jonathan Chait points out that Ferguson's article, while not entirely fawning, did contain some pretty cheap shots at the shibboleth of liberal elitism as a way of deflecting criticism of Haley's southern racial issues.

The problem is, Chait says, that this kind of reflexive wagon-circling, could mean that Haley might have a shot in 2012 (for the nomination, at least):

...Barbour might (despite my bafflement) be a force in the GOP primary. His past is not racist enough to disqualify him, but it is murky enough to spur the liberal media to raise questions. And thus Barbour will be in the position of being the white conservative attacked by liberals for his alleged racism. Even the hypothetical possibility of racial question being raised is enough to make Ferguson defensively sneer at the elite liberal media. The actual reality of it will surely make Republicans rally to Barbour.

For all that, the National Review's Jim Geraghty disagrees, thinking that Haley's pattern of questionable comments and behavior on race -- never mind that now he's walking back from those Citizens Council remarks -- makes him essentially unelectable.

Given all that (plus his memorable performance last month on Meet the Press), it's not hard to imagine Haley making his stump speeches in a flashy white suit, waving a cigar, and declaiming about how the greatest problem facing America today (after taxes and libruls) is "them Duke boys!"

2010-12-20T07:25:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Now that the "Don't Ask, Don't Tell" repeal (some reactions here) is head to Barry's desk, we should think about how historic a moment this is. While discrimination is far from a thing of the past in the country, clearly, the fact that the populace has moved so far in the past decade and a half on this issue shows that the efforts of thousands of activists and ordinary people has not been wasted.

Speaking of waste, the GOP has now decided that since they lost their fight to keep homophobia institutionalized against ALL advice from the nation's military leadership, they're going to do the next best thing: kill the New Strategic Arms Reduction Treaty (START). According to the Washington Post:

New START would reduce both nuclear giants' long-range deployed warheads to 1,550, from a current ceiling of 2,200. The treaty also would reestablish a system under which U.S. and Russian officials could monitor each other's strategic nuclear arsenals. The U.S. military regards such inspections as crucial to maintaining stability with the world's other nuclear giant.

But, as the Associated Press notes, that's not good enough for Republicans like Mitch "Just Say No to Everything" McConnell, who are carping about some nonbinding language in the treaty about missile defense, the pie-in-the-sky dream of conservatives since the days of Reagan's "Star Wars" program.

Supply-side economics, promises of corporate bosses to self-regulate, climate-change denial, and now missile defense: is there any fairy tale the Republican leadership won't believe?

2010-12-17T08:44:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

See, in Europe, they protest…

Honor roll of Senate Republicans who bravely voted to repeal "Don't Ask, Don't Tell": Richard Burr of North Carolina, Mark Kirk of Illinois, John Ensign of Nevada, Scott Brown of Massachusetts, George Voinovich of Ohio, Lisa Murkowski of Alaska – and Olympia Snowe and Susan Collins, both of Maine.
Ask the pilot: we faced worse airborne terrorism in the 1980s, and we as a society didn't freak out, what happened?
Less popular than Fox, less focused than MSNBC: how did CNN let it come to this?
Once again, the rumors flow: Bloomberg for president?
Sure, he was a vicious drug lord, but what about those free Bibles?
The thirteen-year-war: whatever else happens, we're in Afghanistan until 2014, at least.
From Paris to Williamsburg, a sociological investigation of that which they call the hipster.
The deadly border trade: drugs come north from Mexico, American guns flood south.
Jack Abramoff no longer working at Baltimore pizzeria.
Thomas Friedman takes (metaphorically) the heads of Israeli, American, and Palestinian leaders and knocks them together, Moe-style.
Air Force blocks access from its computers to news sites like The New York Times and The Guardian that reported on Wikileaks documents – that'll show 'em!
From Die Hard to Beautiful Girls -- underappreciated Christmas movies.
"How did I get a camera into a British prison? Maybe you weren't listening, I'm Julian Assange."
Fox News D.C. bureau chief to staff: always remember to cast doubt on climate change, always!
Ladies and gentlemen, the Fabulous Stains!
Best fiction and nonfiction books of 2010, a sampling.
A quick tour of bibliomania.
"My male paladin wants to marry a chaotic evil lady magic-user. Is this okay?" These and other burning questions from the archives of Dragon magazine's venerable "Sage Advice" column for querulous Dungeons & Dragons players.

2010-12-16T08:15:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Economics

While we contemplate the long-term economic disaster being inflicted upon us by the current Congress -- with both Republicans and Democrats abnegating their most basic economic responsibilities -- there is one fact that really must be acknowledged: giving the rich billions more dollars in (maybe ill-gotten, maybe not) income will not do one thing to help the economy.

In his book from earlier this fall, Aftershock, Robert Reich made the argument that in fact the opposite is true, that increasing income inequality in fact hampers robust economic growth. According to a Bloomberg News article on Reich's book:

Our Great Recession boiled up, in Reich’s view, from 30 years of growing income inequality that concentrated the nation’s winnings in the hands of the wealthy few. By 2007, the richest 1 percent of Americans received more than 23 percent of U.S. income (up from some 9 percent in the 1970s). The last time U.S. wealth was so condensed was in 1928.

Reich’s objection has less to do with morality than with practicality. When income clumps at the top, demand for goods and services shrinks, he says.

In short, there's only so much money to go around, and $100 million spread among one million people is going to be spent on goods and services, as opposed to hunkering down in somebody's Swiss bank account, as it's more likely to do if concentrated in the hands of one person.

It's too late for this argument of course, but we can't say that we weren't warned.

2010-12-16T07:00:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Imaginary Literature

Above: something that never was but should have been. Part of a series of "Scifi Childrens' Books" reimagined by one Caldwell Tanner over at CollegeHumor.

See the full gallery here.

2010-12-15T06:57:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Quagmires

On the brink of the administration's release of an assessment of the situation in Afghanistan, a pair of classified National Intelligence Estimates (one on Afghanistan, the other on Pakistan) which the New York Times talked to unnamed sources about, cast serious doubt on the ability of allied forces to have much success there in the near future:

...although there have been gains for the United States and NATO in the war, the unwillingness of Pakistan to shut down militant sanctuaries in its lawless tribal region remains a serious obstacle. American military commanders say insurgents freely cross from Pakistan into Afghanistan to plant bombs and fight American troops and then return to Pakistan for rest and resupply.

Some in the military argue with this assessment, saying that the intel is outdated and that Barry's surge of 30,000 troops will have an impact in the immediate future. This is a fair point, though somewhat undermined by this disturbing line from later in the story:

American commanders say their plan in the next few years is to kill large numbers of insurgents in the border region...

In other words, exactly the sort of body count-focused, Vietnam-style, attrition approach that the broad-spectrum counterinsurgency strategy (or COIN, as the wonks say) we're supposed to be using fundamentally rejects.

Just this past Sunday, six U.S. soldiers were killed in the Arghandab River region of southern Afghanistan near Kandahar when a van packed with explosives detonated just outside their building. It was a horrific scene, but one that is sadly commonplace in the region, whose dense network of canals and small villages make it a perfect hiding place for the Taliban. As the Times story about the attack noted:

Fighting has subsided in recent weeks as the weather has cooled and the leaves have fallen, making it more difficult for insurgents to hide.

But the Taliban has continued to plant bombs and send suicide bombers, and American and Afghan soldiers are wounded or killed in the province almost every day.

Meanwhile, we give billions of dollars in aid to our supposed strategic partner Pakistan every year. Until we actually use that money for leverage, scenes like this will continue and the chance for even a remotely acceptable conclusion to the fighting will slip further and further away.

2010-12-14T07:45:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Apparently there's nothing to worry about. Even though the extension of Dubya's tax cuts for a couple years will cost hundreds of billions of absolutely needed revenue -- eventually trillions because it's hard to imagine those things being rolled back in two years' time by Democrats grown even more timid (if that's possible) during an election cycle -- it's sure to bring us all more jobs, right?

In yesterday's Washington Post, Fareed Zakaria termed the current tax-bill compromise (a curious term since the Republicans got nearly everything they wanted while Dems gave away the house) "Procrastination economics":

I understand the politics of compromise and the politics of reelection, and this deal makes sense on both grounds. It doesn't make much sense for the long-term growth of the American economy. What Washington is trying to do is reignite the consumption bubble - hoping to get Americans to spend money and take out loans. This plan, presidential adviser Lawrence Summers tells us, will get the economy to "escape velocity." It's an intriguing theory. If Americans keep spending money, using their credit cards, and buying houses, this will trigger the next technological and economic revolution.

China has a different theory of how to get long-term, sustained growth. The Chinese have doubled their spending on education - with stunning results - and continue to build the world's best infrastructure. Reuters reports that Beijing is contemplating a plan to invest $1.5 trillion over the next five years in seven crucial industries. The targeted sectors are alternative energy, biotechnology, new-generation information technology, high-end equipment manufacturing, advanced materials, alternative-fuel cars, and energy-saving and environmentally friendly technologies. Somehow, housing and retail didn't make the list.

So no new WPA, no great infrastructure projects, no moon-shot reinvestment in research and development, no GI Bill-style push to send the unemployed back to school. Nope, just a few more dollars in your pocket to blow on HDTV sets. That are made in China.

As Robert Reich pointed out yesterday, a millionaire marginal tax of 70 percent -- he notes that it was 91 percent in the Eisenhower years, and the economy did great -- would eliminate the future budget deficit. Not that taxing the rich is always the way out of a hole, but it beats giving them presents.

2010-12-13T07:20:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Fine Cinema

As snow begins to blanket the land, film critics from far and near gather to decide what indeed were the best things they have seen in the year drawing to a close. We're months from the Academy Awards, but already the critics' group awards are starting to trickle in. While there's a definite grouping of attention toward a small cluster of films -- Black Swan, The King's Speech, 127 Hours -- the film to beat does appear to be The Social Network.

A selection of awards:

Broadcast Film Critics - 12 nominations for Black Swan
Los Angeles Film Critics Association - Best Picture: The Social Network
Boston Society of Film Critics - Best Picture: The Social Network
New York Film Critics Online - Best Picture: The Social Network

Also check out this early look at how the Oscars could well shake out (The Social Network is ahead, but there's still time, and plenty more critics' groups to present awards this week alone) from IndieWire.

2010-12-10T07:09:00.004-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Do you have that holiday spirit yet? Do you?!…

Christian outrage in the classroom! Barbara Ehrenreich's Nickel and Dimed refers to Jesus as "precocious Socialist" and "wine-guzzling vagrant" – woo-hoo!
The Baltimore Orioles' paranoid conspiracy theoriest birther redneck Luke Scott on "real Americans" (and of course race has nothing to do with it).
Julian Assange or "the unemployed American"? Online polling for Time's Person of the Year open through Sunday.
American idiot: "Name and define the Fundamental Rules of Arithmetic," and other questions from an eighth-grader's exam from 1895.
Why did Arizona really want to pass that immigration law? Well, getting to pack for-profit prisons with detainees was part of it.
"The coming era of the kinder, gentler panopticon, when all our lives will be transparent" – or, whether or not the next digital revolution will suck or not.
Fine, you fix the dang budget!
According to these economists (insane, yes, but maybe no more so than the average for their divorced-from-reality profession), the problem with Dubya's tax cuts is that they didn't go far enough.
So a lot of those incoming Republicans who campaigned on being D.C. outsiders and whatnot? Yep, they're hiring lobbyists, just like everybody else.
A wretched litany of ready-for-film thrillers; Hitchens on the deplorable lack of a great Washington, D.C. novel.
Text while you drive in Europe's forthcoming automated car convoys.
More techy: Disposable e-readers (e-paper?) might be on the way; plus, the Google laptop coming in 2011.
Likely returning cast members for The Hobbit should include Cate Blanchett (Galadriel), Ian McKellan (Gandalf), and Andy Serkis (Gollum).
Pirate-hunting off the Horn of Africa, an astounding photo essay.
Gorgoues deep-space photography courtesy of the Hubble.
Mike Birbiglia's book release / makeout party – in your basement.
Finally, the new Carls Jr. Bedtime Burger.

2010-12-09T07:33:00.000-05:00

From the Department of the Electorate

To be sure, there are no end of culprits for what appears to be a full-blown last-minute collapse of what there was of a Democratic coalition. But in addition to knee-jerk tax-haters and weak-livered politicians (including those in the apparently mid-term-focused White House), one can add another villain to the rogues' gallery of those enabling the unsupportable extension of Dubya's tax cuts. Witness the results of this new Gallup poll:

... 66 percent say they support the extension for all Americans, including families making over $250,000 per year. An equal amount say they approve of the temporary extension of unemployment benefits for the long-term unemployed, which was part of the deal between the president and Republican leaders in Congress.

In the words of the great Walt Kelly, we have met the enemy and he is us.

2010-12-08T06:38:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

Although there has been much wailing and gnashing of teeth from the left over Barry's recent capitulation to the right -- he somewhat predictably lashed out at them in Rahm Emanuel fashion as "purists" who don't understand compromise or politics -- the prize for the week's most overheated rhetoric must go to ... Christine O'Donnell, who said this yesterday, according to The Hill:

Tragedy comes in threes. Pearl Harbor, Elizabeth Edwards's passing and Barack Obama's announcement of extending the tax cuts, which is good, but also extending the unemployment benefits.

Yes, the anniversary of a resounding military defeat, the death of the wife of a former senator and presidential candidate, and the government giving the long-term unemployed some money to keep the heat on ... these are all perfectly equal events. All we can hope now is that Christine will start tweeting every little thought that scuttles into her brain throughout next year's election cycle (she's already forming her own PAC, Sarah Palin-style). It'll be something to distract from the ugly.

2010-12-07T07:39:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Nice to see that some Democrats at least remember what their party is supposed to stand for. As Barry appears ready to hand Republicans an extension of Dubya's ruinous tax cuts (which will balloon the deficit by some $4 trillion over the next decade, if left unchecked), as well as another millionaire handout in the form of a more favorable estate tax, some members of his own party might try to scuttle the deal. According to McClatchey's Washington bureau:

In the Senate, liberals led by Sen. Charles Schumer, D-N.Y., have been adamant that they don't want to extend tax cuts for the rich. Though they fell short of blocking such an extension Saturday, they have more than enough votes to launch a filibuster to block the new deal.

It's not much of a hope but it's something. Maybe they can save Barry from his own, constantly compromising self.

Katrina vanden Heuvel points out in today's Washington Post that Barry's latest actions are little less than defeatism writ large:

This is political self-immolation...The $60 billion each year in Bush tax cuts for the richest Americans could pay for universal preschool for America's children, or tuition and board for half of America's college students.

But hey, millionaires need a break too, right? Those preschoolers shouldn't get a free ride...

2010-12-02T07:27:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

If only it were just a joke…

Joe Scarborough: GOP needs to stop cowering and act on taking down the "spoiled brat" that is Sarah Palin before she does more damage to what's left of the true conservative movement.
Hitchens on the pathetic nature of "don't touch my junk" security discourse and how if TSA was being honest, they'd have started doing cavity searches a long time ago.
Detroit SWAT team busts through door and guns down a seven-year-old girl – reality TV camera crew likely got them more amped up than was necessary.
One intrepid writer finally follows the trail of John Steinbeck's Travels with Charley and discovers what others should have long ago – Steinbeck just lied.
Totally-not-racist Minnesota minister says Rep. Keith Ellison's support for repealing Don't Ask Don't Tell is (stay with us here) a plot to advance sharia law in America.
Also, Oliver North (why are we still listening to him?) says that if Don't Ask Don't Tell is repealed, people will quit the military in droves and we'll have to reinstate the draft. Never mind that the Pentagon's study shows that most soldiers don't care.
Ben Affleck (yep, that one) on what the world can, but likely won't, do to stem the tide of violence in the Congo, already the bloodiest conflict on Earth since World War II.
On how Mark Zuckerberg is the anti-Gutenberg, and "texting ourselves to death."
Erasmus: "Is there anywhere on earth exempt from these swarms of new books?" Information overload in the 16th century.
NASA finds completely new (but small) Earth lifeform, made out of arsenic.
So what has God been tweeting of late?
Winter's Bone way ahead in the 2011 Independent Spirit Award nominations; along with Black Swan and Rabbit Hole.
Amazing photos (if you like that sort of thing) from the making of The Empire Strikes Back.

2010-12-01T08:26:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Foreign Affairs

Hillary Clinton, who can usually be relied on to provide a modicum of calm in the midst of a hullabaloo like the latest Wikileaks diplomatic cable fandango, tried to insert a joke that also had a sting of truth to it. In response to controversy over previously-secret comments made by US diplomats about foreign leaders -- one called Silvio Berlusconi "feckless, vain, and ineffective as a modern European leader," and another termed Angela Merkel "risk averse and rarely creative" -- Hill quipped that one of her counterparts said: "Well don't worry about it, you should see what we say about you."

In other words, yes it's embarrassing to have this kind of dialogue out there but in the adult world this is how people talk, and everybody in the diplomacy game seems fully aware of that. Ruffled feathers will be smoothed.

Ultimately the real scandal here is how could a low-level intel analyst in Iraq run wild inside the government's computer networks? According to ZDNet, it appears that because the US Army should have installed a software (which they had in their possession) on the laptops that Private Manning had access to that would have kept him from being able to copy documents from two highly sensitive government networks: SIPERNet (Secret Internet Protocol Router Network) and JWICS (Joint Worldwide Intelligence Communications System). And so:

This resulted in a chink in the armor that was exposed to the wrong type of person — a mentally unstable, angry young 22-year old Army Private who had carte blanche capability to copy and suck down everything from SIPRNet and the JWICS that he could get his grubby little hands on...

So what nailed us was simple. We allowed this guy to walk into work with writeable DVD media and gave him laptops with functional read/writeable DVD drives and possibly even USB ports, at an Iraq field operations center in a theater of war, when the standing policy on military bases and in other government installations (such as at US Central Command) is to prohibit personnel from bringing USB devices, Smartphones, iPods and CDs onsite.

That’s just plain stupid.

Smart it isn't. But maybe now they'll pay attention. Already it seems that the big chill is on with the feds restricting access to documents across all spectrum of communication -- you can also be assured that diplomats aren't going to be quite so forthcoming in their cables going forward. Thanks, Julian.

2010-12-01T07:34:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Wingnuttery

Sometimes people don't even bother to hide their prejudices. Case in point being Rep. Steve King (R-Iowa), who's just enraged by the thought that the government is going to have to shell out over $4 billion to settle claims (grouped under the Pigford v. Glickman lawsuit) brought by black and Native American farmers who were discriminated against by federal agencies for decades.

According to King, this is all just a smokescreen to cover Barry's real agenda, which is obviously reparations:

We have a very, very urban Senator, Barack Obama, who has decided he's going to run for president, and what does he do? He introduces legislation to create a whole new Pigford claim...

We've got to stand up at some point and say, 'We are not gonna pay slavery reparations in the United States Congress.' That war's been fought. That was over a century ago. That debt was paid for in blood and it was paid for in the blood of a lot of Yankees, especially. And there's no reparations for the blood that paid for the sin of slavery. No one's filing that claim.

So not only do we have a president who's "very, very urban" (interesting word choice and emphasis there) but King also seems to be claiming that there is not just some pernicious conspiracy here, but the fact that white Northerners died in the Civil War to him somehow makes it impossible to think that the government could ever have discriminated against anybody ever.

Adding fuel to the idiocratic fire was everyone's favorite Martian, Michelle Bachmann, never at a loss for braindead statements, who just came out and called everybody involved in the settlement a liar since the number of claims is larger than the number of black farmers currently working. This of course ignores the fact that many stopped farming years ago because they couldn't get financing. Because of discrimination. Which is why the lawsuit happened.

Can somebody teach remedial logic to the likes of King and Bachmann before they get in front of another microphone or Twitter account?

2010-11-30T14:25:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Foreign Affairs

Yesterday in Tehran, a couple of unknown assailants on motorcycles drove up to cars carrying two top scientists in Iran's nuclear program (also known as SESAME), attached bombs (possibly the same kind of small, magnetic-attached explosives known as "sticky bombs" that wreaked havoc in Baghdad for a time) and drove off, detonating them from a distance. One of the scientists was killed, while the other -- Fereydoon Abbasi, who's on a UN sanctions list for his nuclear work -- was wounded.

The usual suspects (America, Israel) are being blamed by the mullahs. Of course, those same countries are blamed whenever Ahmadinejad stubs his toe. Another interesting answer to who might be behind the daytime bombing are the various intelligence agencies of the oil-producing Arab states -- note how the secret diplomatic cables in Wikileaks' latest document dump showed how frightened they are of Iran gaining the bomb.

This latest bomb attack, by the way, was the second time this year that a scientist attached to SESAME was killed by an explosion. Between these attacks and the Stuxnet virus, somebody out there isn't waiting for sanctions to convince Tehran to pull the plug on their centrifuges.

2010-11-29T06:52:00.001-05:00

From the Department of Urban Studies

If you're looking for a true image of downtown devastation in modern-day America, you don't really need to go to Detroit (empty office buildings, stretches of arson-cleared ground) or Florida (never-should-have-been-built developments descending into foreclosure limbo) -- Cairo, Illinois will do the trick quite nicely. A town nestled into the confluence of the Mississippi and Ohio rivers that was always destined for being passed-over once the steamboats were chucked into the dustbin of history, it was dealt a second blow by an ugly battle over racism in the early 1970s.

Now, as you can see in this sad but beautiful shot by St. Louis photographer Michael Eastman, much of the town has been given over to the wind...

2010-11-23T07:04:00.006-05:00

From the Department of R&R

Some years back, the late home-state beat icon and dissolute, gun-toting, polymorphously addicted pseudo-heir to an adding machine fortune William S. Burroughs (or "Il Hombre Invisible," as they called him down Mexico ways) composed a "Thanksgiving Day Prayer" that can always stand to be revisited, particularly during a season of holiday gathering, curious papal pronouncements, general patriotic / political tensions (good, however, for dinner-table arguments), and a generally uninteresting slate of football games to choose from.

Complete video/audio of Burroughs' prayer for America here.

2010-11-19T07:22:00.003-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Ah, for those halcyon, hopey-changey times of yore…

The nonsense to come: Just because Barry screwed up, doesn't mean the rest of us should suffer from the new band of fools in charge.
When did conservatives become the party of Snookiism?
Kristof: Calling modern America a banana republic of income inequality is an insult to said republics.
Oh, Glenn.
"They are, of course, Nazis." Who is Fox News head Roger Ailes going on about?
Print and read: who's who in the world of future Preisdent of the World, Sarah Palin.
Convenience or racket? An average four-person Open Table reservation could end up costing that restaurant over $10.
"A sprawl of helpless joy" -- Springsteen and Seinfeld raise money for wounded vets.
Andrew Sullivan on the "thug" Dubya and how he should avoid going to Britain on his book tour, just in case he gets prosecuted as a war criminal.
So Staff Sgt. Salvatore Giunta was fighting in Afghanistan's Korengal valley when he saw some Taliban hauling away one of wounded buddies; he opens fire, chases them off, gets his guy back, and this week was given the first Medal of Honor since Afghanistan. According to some psychotic Christian would-be Patton, we shouldn't be giving soldiers medals unless they kill somebody.
Once again, Barry quits before even bothering to fight.
A view of Sarah Palin's Alaska show: "It's like Dwight Schrute produced it."
Of trailer parks, Israel, and F-35 fighter planes; also stress cracks found in the F-35, already the most expensive plane ever built..
Glenn Beck and the whole anti-Semitism problem.
A short history of great Fresh Prince of Bel-Air guest stars.
A history of sci-fi weaponry, in T-shirt form.
A musical tribute to the Tea Party, sort of.

2010-11-18T08:01:00.005-05:00

From the Department of Disarmament

Bluster and an ability to think ahead seem to be salient factors of the incoming House Republicans, and so also appear to be a theme for the week. Along those lines, consider this latest outrage, from the New York Times:

President Obama’s hopes of ratifying a new arms control treaty with Russia this year appeared to unravel on Tuesday as a Senate Republican leader moved to block a vote in what could be a devastating blow to the president’s most tangible foreign policy achievement.

Mr. Obama had declared ratification of the New Start treaty his “top priority” in foreign affairs for the lame-duck session of Congress that opened this week. But the chances of winning the two-thirds vote required for passage of the treaty appeared to collapse with the announcement by Jon Kyl of Arizona, the No. 2 Republican in the Senate and the party’s point man on the issue, that the Senate should not vote on it this year.

Now, the New Start treaty is modest as these sort of things go, nothing like the monumental negotiations that took place during the chilliest parts of the Cold War, but it's highly significant nonetheless. If passed, the treaty would limit Russia and the United States to 1,550 long-range nuclear warheads apiece (down from 2,200) and, more importantly, keep up inspections of each country's nuclear sites -- now lapsed for the first time since the Cold War.

Oh, and did we mention that if the treaty falls apart then we can probably kiss goodbye to any Russian cooperation on Iran or any other major strategic initiatives for a few years? Apparently, 1,550 long-range nukes just won't allow us to blow up the entire world as many times as we'd like. No, it's better to play games with the survival of the human race.

Along with all the other chest-thumping paleo-cons who can't bear to part with even a single nuke, even Sarah weighed in on the issue -- since she's a serious politician and stuff -- prompting this response from Barry:

...if the secretary of defense and the chairman of the joint chiefs of staff are comfortable with it, I'm probably going to take my advice from them and not from Sarah Palin.

2010-11-18T06:41:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

If you're looking for the guy who could start undoing what meager progress we've made in this country toward environmental reform, look no further than Rep. Joe Barton (R-Texas). Currently embroiled in an ugly little tiff over who will get to be chairman of the Energy and Commerce Committe, Barton is your typical know-nothing climate change denialist, only more emphatic on the subject and generally stupider than average -- last year, he famously opined that CO2 can't be bad for the environment because it's utterly harmless: "It's in your Coca-Cola. your Dr. Pepper and your Perrier water."

And in case your memory stretches back to this summer's little problem in the gulf, yes, this is the same Joe Barton who begged the forgiveness of BP after the feds tried to get them to, you know, clean up their catastrophic oil spill.

There are potentially worse people than Barton in the wings for this chairmamship. For instance, Rep. John Shimkus from the home state has also tossed his hat in the ring. This is a guy currently best known for claiming that devastating climate change couldn't happen because, well, God told Moses so.

2010-11-16T06:10:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Evil Media

A selected quote from honoree Tina Fey's remarks from PBS's Sunday broadcast of the Kennedy Center's Mark Twain Prize for American Humor, regarding the rise of conservative women on the American scene:

And, you know, politics aside, the success of Sarah Palin and women like her is good for all women - except, of course --those who will end up, you know, like, paying for their own rape 'kit 'n' stuff. But for everybody else, it's a win-win. Unless you're a gay woman who wants to marry your partner of 20 years - whatever. But for most women, the success of conservative women is good for all of us. Unless you believe in evolution. You know - actually, I take it back. The whole thing's a disaster.

Of course, PBS's edited version was somewhat different. Cut perhaps for time, perhaps not to offend the millions of viewers of Sarah Palin's Alaska -- probably a different demographic, but whatever.

2010-11-15T06:59:00.000-05:00

From the Department of Illogic

A story that made the rounds at the end of last week didn't get quite as much attention as it should, highlighting as it does a particularly dangerous mentality currently making its presence known in the national mindset.

It would appear that the likes of Rush Limbaugh and Michelle Bachmann crawled out of their dank caves long enough to spot yet another dire threat to all that we hold near and dear. In short, that threat is energy-saving florescent light bulbs, and one of their more unlikely champions, a Republican representative from Michigan named Fred Upton.

According to Politico, Upton wants to head up the Energy and Commerce Committee, and this is seen as a clear and present danger by certain GOP-ers since Upton has taken the radical position that maybe, just maybe, we as a country should start phasing out incandescent light bulbs in favor of their more efficient florescent versions. Limbaugh spluttered:

This would be a tone-deaf disaster if the Republican leadership lets Fred Upton ascend to the chairmanship of the House energy committee ... This is exactly the kind of nannyism, statism, what have you, that was voted against and was defeated last week. No Republican complicit in nannyism, statism, can be rewarded this way.

For her part, back in 2008, Bachmann made the following utterly not insane statement:

Fundamentally, it is an issue of freedom ... It’s about whether people are able to make even the most basic decisions anymore or whether Big Brother will control every aspect of their lives.

Next the government will start telling us we can't sell E. coli-infected food! It's difficult to even figure out what to say about these manic invocations of statism and Big Brother, as using more efficient light bulbs simply means the nation will use less electricity. (Are these people just worried about losing their 7mpg SUVs down the line? Slippery slope and all.)

Freedom should mean more than simply being able to buy any fool thing you want.

2010-11-12T07:15:00.006-05:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Ladies and gentlemen, meet your new Republican House of Representatives…

Now that the GOP has to actually govern again -- and given that Americans like to rail against government while in practice liking all the things that government actually does -- their popularity could prove very short-lived.
Oh, dear, normally-sane Lindsay Graham calling for all-out war on Iran, since that last preemptive invasion worked out so well.
Not only are soldiers from poor background with less education more likely to be the ones serving in our military, they're also more likely to die on the battlefield.
Dubya's book as superficial and simplistic as the man himself.
ACLU: Just go ahead and investigate Dubya for torture already.
According to some folks from Idaho (whose books are beloved by Glenn Beck), the Constitution came down direct from Mt. Sinai and can only be defended by white Christians with guns, who knew?
Card-carrying Berkeley lefty novelist Ayelet Waldman goes to the Army War College, has swell time with not-so-right-wing soldiers, cries a few times.
One more cool thing about the Special Forces – some of them get to train in Key West.
Three men serving in Iraq or Afghanistan took wounds that made them quadruple amputees, and survived.
No, gold is not at a record high. Account for inflation, dummies.
It's official, Daily Beast and Newsweek are merging.
According to Ann Coulter, every bad thing that happened in America since the early 1970s can be blamed on 18-year-olds getting to vote.
Sarah Palin likes her sugary cookies, darnit! And Tweeting!!
A breakdown of black politics and the potential for a black mayor in Chicago.
All hail Hüsker Dü.
Socialism in the home state! Missouri narrowly passes anti-American and anti-business Marxist puppy law!
Why does Google hate America?

2010-11-11T07:06:00.005-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

That was fast. The new crop of Republicans haven't even set foot in the House and already it appears that the White House is beating a tactical retreat. In an interview given to Huffington Post, David Axelrod strongly hinted that the administration was just going to shout "Uncle" on the issue of whether or not to extend Dubya's tax cuts (all of 'em) for the time being.

One could argue, as Axelrod does, that the whole thing is just too much of a third-rail issue to get much traction on with an ascendant band of doctrinaire Republicans -- likely to be accompanied by the few Blue Dog Democrats who survived the mid-terms -- who believe that all tax cuts, no matter how imprudent or unaffordable, automatically produce jobs and revenue. (Tax cuts apparently can also reduce the deficit, win the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, cure the obesity epidemic, cancel Desperate Housewives, and possibly even generate delicious jelly beans out of thin air -- the little-studied Norquist-Friedman Magic Jelly Bean Effect).

But given that these tax cuts are just shoveling trillions more dollars into the deficit over the next few years, doesn't it seem like this is a debate worth having? It's hard to imagine a better one to have, in fact.

A far better idea, it seems, would be for Barry and his team to get behind the proposal put out today by the chairmen of their bipartisan deficit reduction commission. Their impressively audacious plan (handy graphic above from the Wall Street Journal) -- which cuts benefits, defense spending, and tax loopholes, in addition to dramatically simplifying the tax code overall and leaving health-care reform intact while strengthening some much-need cost-cutting plans in Medicare -- has already infuriated Republicans and Democrats alike. Meaning it's likely on the right track. And also will be probably consigned to the trash heap where all logical, apolitical plans end up.

UPDATE: The White House shot back later on today saying that they haven't actually thrown in the towel, and strongly implying that they're going to fight to repeal the tax cuts on the wealthiest. Let's hope they're telling the truth.

2010-11-10T06:57:00.002-05:00

From the Department of Realpolitik

Facebook campaigns aside, with the release of Dubya's big new book Decision Points, it may be worthwhile to follow the lead of Stephen Walt over at Foreign Policy in reminding ourselves just exactly why the man was so horrible for the country and the world. Walt lists twelve reasons, but you don't really anything past #1 ("Listening to Cheney") or #3 ("No-Go on Kyoto").

2010-11-02T06:58:00.003-04:00

From the Department of R & R

The fish are biting. Back soon.

2010-11-01T06:31:00.000-04:00

From the Department of Evil Media

It's nice to see that, in addition to the usual slew of cant, lies, and demagoguery being spewed out by the reactionary right (and their corporate paymasters) these days, that some good old-fashioned xenophobia has apparently come back into vogue.

Case in point, this glossy piece of video propaganda that's been running in many markets during the run-up to tomorrow's election. Set in China in the year 2030, it features a smarmy professor lecturing his students about the reasons why America collapsed -- which turns out to be a few top "Pledge to America" talking points from whichever logic-challenged Tea Partier is running in your district or ranting on your radio. Apparently, it was because we tried to "tax and spend" our way out of a recession, government took over private industry (Obamacare!), and so on down the list of lies.

Of course, the professor chuckles, since "we" (China) owned America's debt, "now they work for us." The class explodes in laughter. So not only are liberals threatening the American way of life, they're selling us to China!

This comes to your television courtesy of some front group calling themselves "Citizens Against Government Waste" -- by citizens, of course, they mean professional think-tankers and lobbyists paid for by huge, mostly secret, slush-fund donations from corporations who will do anything (including race-baiting and Cold War-style fear-mongering) to roll back even the slightest hint of regulation or fair tax policies.

2010-10-29T07:32:00.003-04:00

From the Department of Weekend Reading

Are you going to the rally? Send a postcard…

Sarah on legalizing the dreaded weed: "I think we need to prioritize our law-enforcement efforts. And if somebody’s gonna smoke a joint in their house and not do anybody else harm, then perhaps there are other things our cops should be looking at to engage in and try to clean up some of the other problems that we have in society."
Malnutrition and pandemics down, literacy and vaccinations and income up; the 2000s were apparently more awesome than previously believed.
Russians are back in Afghanistan, this time helping out on drug lab raids.
"Being attacked, it seems, and attacking back, is like that bracing slap of after-shave in the morning" – why conservatives tend to love violence in general, and war in specific; at least in theory.
Print and read: a soldier class increasingly made up of Southern Republicans and fewer civilian leaders with any military experience; just a couple of the facts (also, you can blame Scots-Irish immigrants if you feel like it) for America being mired in seemingly permanent war.
So what did the stimulus do, again? Resentful in the home state.
A reason to vote: if Republicans take the House, look for EPA and OSHA, just now getting their bearings back in the post-Dubya era, to go back into a defensive, see-no-evil crouch.
India getting nervous about all those Chinese troops moving into neighboring Tibet.
Now you too can own a good part of Anne Rice's personal library.
Nobody ever lost money in this country by selling fear.
Print and read: To wage cyber war or not?
You want to impeach Barry? Who doesn't?
How do you discover new authors? Help beta-test Peroozal.
Are all those organic products at Trader Joe's actually organic? Nobody really knows.
Newest threat to democracy: Zombies!