January 2008 Archives

This paragraph in a recent Mark Schmitt column from the American Prospect is one of the most important I have read recently. People really should take the time to understand the historic lost opportunity it describes -- and we need to remember it, daily, and not allow it to be lost to the midsts of time.

For a moment after September 11 (which, by coincidence, is when Brands' book appeared), there was reason to think that the crisis would bring us together with a new appreciation of government and sense of mutual obligation. But it didn't happen, and Bush's presidency can be understood as an effort to make damn sure it didn't: the single-minded focus on military solutions, the refusal to call for shared sacrifice whether in the form of taxes or a draft, even the insistence that our enemies "hate us for our freedoms," since if that's the case, there's not much to be gained by improving those freedoms. (emphasis added)

When people think of radical regimes, they should ponder the implications of the paragraph above and understand how it really explains why the priorities of the Bush-Cheney regime have been so misguided.

While everyone tries to figure out what happened in New Hampshire yesterday, Atrios and Josh Marshall, among others, are doing a great job of examining if people reacted to the misogyny that is often driving coverage of Senator Hillary Clinton's candidacy.

Rachel Maddow on MSNBC even went as far as to pin it on Chris Matthews -- which, as a metaphor for what is wrong with reporting today, makes a bunch of sense. (You should check out the videos of Maddow and Matthews posted here. Alas, he hasn't learned anything.)

As a writer to Josh Marshall's Talking Points Memo puts it:

Based on what I was feeling, there were two turning points for Clinton in the past week. One was a report that people were chanting "Iron my shirt" at her during a rally. The other was John Edwards' idiotic statements about Clinton tearing up at an event. Mix that in with the subtle media digs at Clinton's gender in recent months (descrptions of what she's wearing, how she "emasculates" men, etc.), and I think you had a tremendous push back from women, and men, who are tired of the misogyny underlying this campaign. It swayed me toward Clinton the past few days, even as I cheered for an Obama coronation.

Mix the "Bradley effect" to this -- the phenomenon where non-white candidates poll better than people actually vote -- and one may have a good explanation of what happened yesterday.

And alas, this is the 21st Century and we still have to consider seriously both of these factors.

Isn't it grand what our species can accomplish with our uncontrolled experiment on the environment? ABC News' Lee Dye writes:

We humans are having such a dramatic impact on our planet that some leading scientists think the current era needs a new name. We're no longer in the Holocene epoch, they say. We're now well into what they are calling the Anthropocene.

This planet is being changed by human activities in ways that will continue to alter Earth for millions of years. The most obvious example is global climate change precipitated by the release of greenhouse gases from fossil fuels, but there are many more, some so obvious it's hard to think of them as insidious threats to our environment.

But they are indeed, according to the leader of the Anthropocene movement, Nobel laureate Paul J. Crutzen, who is said to have coined the word during a science meeting in 2000. Crutzen, former chief of atmospheric chemistry at the Max-Planck-Institute in Germany and now a part-time professor at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in San Diego, is out with a new paper that leads off with a provocative question: "Are Humans Now Overwhelming the Great Forces of Nature?"

(Hat tip: DeSmogBlog)

It sure is good to know that President George W. Bush retains a heathy ego after the past seven years.

As Dan Froomkin of the Washington Post explains:

With time running short on his presidency -- and on the eve of a trip to the Middle East -- President Bush seems to have overcome his aversion to talking about his legacy and is now speaking fervently about how he expects to be remembered.

As it turns out, the president sees himself as quite the heroic figure.

Click through to see the president proclaim this around the globe -- while speaking of himself in the third person. I imagine we are in for decades of this revisionism from 43.

Um, so, why all this negative reaction from the punditry to Senator Clinton getting emotional on the campaign trail -- when, as Think Progress reminds us, the men get positive points for being "poignant" and "genuine"?

The cool kids in the media are far more than passive observers of our politics. We should never lose sight of who has so much control over the narrative that drives the coverage.

The American Prospect's Dana Goldstein actually attended one of the caucuses held in Iowa the other night. It's not a pretty picture.

At Des Moines' 23rd Precinct, for example, just three miles from Barack Obama's triumphant victory party, organizers failed to adequately explain the caucus process, voters publicly protested the participation of two immigrant women, and Spanish translations were unavailable. And while in theory, the process of "convincing" one's neighbors to caucus for a certain candidate sounds like grown-up debate club, in practice, it looks more like junior high school clique formation, replete with peer pressure.

If more journalists attended actual caucuses, Americans would have a better understanding of the inequities of this process, which holds inordinate influence over our political system. The few organizations that do cover caucuses, such as the New York Times and the Washington Post, choose to emphasize reporting from candidate parties held at downtown hotels and conference centers. And the vast majority of the national press corps bypasses observing the caucuses entirely. On CNN's American Morning Friday, a reporter even said -- erroneously -- that "we're not allowed" inside caucus sites. In fact, both the Iowa Democratic and Republican Parties offered a clear credentialing process for media interested in seeing a caucus. It's exciting, of course, to watch campaign staffs go through heartbreak or elation in real time. But that's only part of the story; the caucuses themselves are equally dramatic.

Read her story and then try to explain how such a caucus system should have any place in the 21st Century United States.

Almost exactly one year after Newsweek's Howard Fineman made this horrible analogy, Time's Michael Scherer decides to boil down the presidential race into a stupid high school clique story.

I hope Scherer will pay some royalties to Fineman. Or at least buy him a beer with a smile.

Anyway, Mr. Scherer, this campaign is not your high school. These campaigns are actually important matters. They cannot be boiled down to a review of your high school days.

More important to note: these campaigns are about personality only because you and your colleagues focus on personality and the horserace instead of policies. Why? Well, the easy answer is that you do this because you are too damn lazy to look at the policies and report on them.

It is okay to want to write profiles like this. Just stop pretending to care about politics and get a job in the style section.

Then you can swoon over the jock and take shots at the valedictorian all you want.

Scott Norton catches President George W. Bush once again comparing himself to George Washington and Abraham Lincoln, while believing history will vindicate him as it did Harry Truman.

Perhaps this is how he gets through the day. It sure beats an accountability moment.

Chris Mooney explains why the time has come to rethink the role of the president's science advisor:

Because formal US science advising was born during the Cold War, the emphasis often lay upon finding someone who intimately grasped nuclear security issues. The tradition lingers up to the present: The past four science advisers, including Marburger, have all been physicists. Yet while nuclear security issues remain vital, the science policy portfolio has dramatically diversified since the Cold War era. Environmental and energy issues like climate change, and biomedical and bioethical ones like embryonic stem cell research, have increasingly come front and center. Even security policy decisions have to encompass concerns about bioterror and biowarfare.

Mark Penn really is a pox on Democratic politics. Perhaps the media will notice now that he has admitted to being such a pathetic liar about the polling data in advance of the Iowa caucuses. As Josh Marshall writes:

But perhaps one really good thing can come out of it: driving Mark Penn out of Democratic politics once and for all. I really don't know how he keeps his hooks in his clients, particularly Hillary.

Indeed.

Well, today is the last time I will ever walk into a GameSpot. I had an awful experience at one of the stores in the Sun Valley Mall in Concord, as I attempted to purchase a Wii game for my oldest son's upcoming birthday.

I found the box for the game I wanted to get, and then got in the incredibly slow checkout line. While there were two people working at the counter, only one seemed interested in checking people out.

After 15 minutes (with only two people in front of me), I finally reached the front of the line and handed over the box to check out and head home.

"Oh, this really isn't a game. This is a promotional item only."

What? Are you kidding?

No. The person behind the counter was not.

Apparently, there is a very small notation on the back of the box that lets a customer know that this actually isn't a purchasable item, but just an advertisement. Of course, the person behind the counter had trouble finding it until another person in the store helped her out.

A real company that actually cared about its customers would make such a distinction more clear -- before forcing customers to get in a very slow checkout line.

I don't go to the mall often, but I needed a new watch battery and was trying to take care of a few errands at once.

One thing I do know -- a company that does not have the common courtesy of clearly marking promotional items in a way that is different from items available for purchase shall never have me as a customer.

And unless you have loads of time to waste, I'm sure you can find better places to shop if you are looking for video games.

Olmsted, of the bright lights of the blogosphere, was killed in Iraq earlier this week. I've enjoyed reading his thoughts over at Obsidian Wings.

His final post, written to published if he were killed, is truly beautiful and well worth your time to read. And I do hope everyone respects his wishes that his death not be used by anyone on any side of the debate to score political points.

Especially when the political media love you for unexplainable reasons. As Atrios so often says, any news is good for John McCain. Think Progress has a sampling of some of the punditry's love letters to McCain after the Iowa Caucuses.

Oh, why is it that everyone laps up McCain's comments about how Iowa proved people hate negative campaigning without noting that McCain has run negative ads against Romney? At least Media Matters is on the case.

...are not happy that Mike Huckabee won yesterday. Sadly, No! has the sordid details.

If you like football, and if you ever played Tecmo Bowl, then you will find these simulations of this weekend's NFL wildcard weekend matchups extremely fascinating.

From the Associated Press:

The number of reporters killed on the job has risen 244 percent over the past five years, due in large part to the Iraq war, Reporters Without Borders said Wednesday.

More than half of the 86 journalists killed worldwide last year died in Iraq, the Paris-based media watchdog said. In 2002, by comparison, 25 journalists were killed worldwide, and the number has risen steadily since, it said.

All but one of the 47 reporters killed in Iraq last year were Iraqi nationals — most of them "deliberately targeted," the group said. The only foreigner was a Russian reporter.

"No country has ever seen more journalists killed than Iraq," the group said. At least 207 media workers have died in the country since the U.S.-led invasion in March 2003, it said.

This is not a sign of progress.

So much for the establishment candidates today in Iowa.

Frankly, given the nature of his victory today, I have a hard time seeing how Barack Obama will fail to win the Democratic nomination. He should have all of the momentum, especially after giving what was the best Democratic speech of the night. John Edwards needed to win to get a bump to New Hampshire, and finishing third really hurts Hillary Clinton. Clinton has the resources to stay around long enough to catch a break and turn it around, but I think it is going to take something amazing to stop Obama from being the nominee.

Things are not quite so simple for Mike Huckabee. I still think he is the likely nominee (a prediction I've been making for a while, given my strong belief that the Republican Party will not nominate Mitt Romney, John McCain, and Rudy Guiliani, and that Fred Thompson is really a horrible campaigner). So, one needs to look at the rest of the field and see who has a shot -- and that someone has always been Huckabee.

Yes, he hasn't been sharp on foreign policy, but I don't think many voters really vote on the nuances of foreign policy knowledge (see, for example, Bush, George W.). He represents the sweet spot of the GOP now -- for better or for worse for that party. His speech tonight was also excellent -- he connects with voters. This, I believe, is a good thing in a campaign.

Steven Aftergood of the Federation of American Scientists Project on Government Secrecy explains why the new Freedom of Information Act law signed by President Bush is not nearly as good as some media reports initially suggested.

Some reporters and editorial writers, perhaps enchanted by the name of the new law, mistakenly assumed that it accomplishes much more than that.

"The law ... restores a presumption of a standard that orders government agencies to release information on request unless there is a finding that disclosure could do harm," according to a January 1 Associated Press account that appeared in the Washington Post, the New York Times, USA Today, the Wall Street Journal and elsewhere.

Further, the widely-published AP account continued, "The legislation is aimed at reversing an order by former Attorney General John Ashcroft after the 9/11 attacks in which he instructed agencies to lean against releasing information when there was uncertainty about how doing so would affect national security."

But that is incorrect.

No wonder the president actually signed it.