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John McCain’s campaign bus, the Straight Talk Express, has officially become a rolling punch line to the joke of the GOP presidential primaries. There has simply never been a primary for either major party as ridiculous as the 2008 GOP effort. Mitt Romney, who would easily have won the Phil Gramm award for . . . → Read More: From Straight Talk Express to K Street Express: McCain implodes Fierce Invalids Home From Hot Climates, by Tom Robbins The unifying theme of these three novels is the embodiment of contradictions. It’s not exactly a rare theme in literature, and I’m no doubt committing certain literary sins by sitting Franz Kafka down at the same table as Orson Scott Card, but there they were in the pile. Although I didn’t really consider this when I grouped these novels, each one manages to contain all that dualism by way of manipulating the point of view, not going crazy with the narrative devices or anything, but employing the usual tools necessary to reveal enough about the opposing ideas. But choosing what to show is a lot like cheating the odds in favor of balance. How much evil in the world can be ascribed to the common acceptance of third-person omniscient storytelling, the one that so often balances the depth of thought equally with the depth of consequences? It legitimizes shoot-but-cry narratives; it pretends that the moral calculus in any act is fully known. It gives us a template on which to write our many apologia… Continue reading More Book Reviews – Contradiction and Omniscience Documents unsealed in a British court allege that Prince Bandar, Saudi Arabia’s long time US ambassador and a close family friend of president George W. Bush, threatened to withhold terrorism intelligence from the UK if former prime minister Tony Blair failed to subvert a bribery inquiry into payments to the prince from mammoth British . . . → Read More: Did Bandar Bush blackmail Tony Blair to quash bribe inquiry? A recent Barack Obama campaign email carried the tag line “We are the change we’ve been waiting for”, drawn from a speech he made after the February 5th primary extravaganza. The line leaves me cold because my resistance to Obama arises in large part from his inflationary rhetoric, but it nagged at me . . . → Read More: Walt Kelly meets Barack Obama on the beach Colin Powell dropped some hints yesterday in an interview with CNN’s Wolf Blitzer that he’s looking outside the GOP for a candidate to endorse. Powell, who served as the closer for the Bush administration’s sale of an Iraq invasion with an astonishingly dishonest speech to the United Nations, the world and, most importantly, credulous . . . → Read More: Colin Powell set to endorse a Democrat? Serge Kovaleski’s New York Times story on Barack Obama’s youthful flirtation with recreational drugs has been in the works for a while. Obama wrote about his drug use in his autobiographical “Dreams of My Father”, and his mention of the subject prompted a brief flurry of stupidity in December culminating in the resignation of a top Clinton campaign official. Rumors began circulating around then that the Times was planning a major story on the issue. So, what did the paper find? Not much. “In more than three dozen interviews, friends, classmates and mentors from his high school and Occidental [College] recalled Mr. Obama as being grounded, motivated and poised, someone who did not appear to be grappling with any drug problems and seemed to dabble only with marijuana.” Well, that’s no fun. 1740 words and no, er, smoking gun? In fact, the there is so much not there that the primary dramatic thrust of the story comes from the suggestion that Obama may have been exaggerating his drug experience in the memoir. “Mr. Obama’s account of his younger self and drugs, though, significantly differs from the recollections of others who do not recall his drug use. That could suggest he was so private about his usage that few people were aware of it, that the memories of those who knew him decades ago are fuzzy or rosier out of a desire to protect him, or that he added some writerly touches in his memoir to make the challenges he overcame seem more dramatic.” Continue reading Breaking News: Obama not a hard-core druggie! Continuing on my quest to close enough browser tabs for my computer to regain some self-respect and nimbleness, here’s the second installment of stuff I either meant to write but never quite did, or did write but for some reason couldn’t bring myself to part with the web page I used for material. See here for Part 1. Some of these pages have been open for close to a year, but the one for policy shop Third Way is only a week or so old. Third Way, which describes itself as “a non-profit, non-partisan strategy center for progressives”, got a bunch of attention from Blogolia lately when it emerged that they’re the bozos responsible for Democratic Senator Jay Rockefeller’s enthusiastic endorsement of immunizing the telecommunications industry from consequences for violating the law on behalf of the Bush administration’s surveillance state. It was Third Way VP Matt Bennett who infected Rockefeller with one of the more dishonest talking points on the subject: that immunity is necessary to guarantee future cooperation from the industry when future presidents ask them for help. The argument got prominent play in Rockefeller’s generally stupid Washington Post op-ed on the subject, which was immediately and thoroughly debunked by Glenn Greenwald, among many others, with one of the primary points being that companies already enjoy immunity for assisting the government in its inquiries so long as they can show that they made a good faith effort to comply with existing law. But that’s not enough for the progressives at Third Way, where the law takes a back seat to corporate and governmental thuggery. Continue reading Clearing the decks, Part 2: The progressive case for lawlessness When onlookers asked Ben Franklin what sort of government the constitutional convention had produced, he told them “A republic, if you can keep it.” Well, we haven’t. We no longer live in a constitutional republic. The republic is dead, deceased, demised, passed on, no more, ceased to be, expired, late, bereft of life; it . . . → Read More: Bush and Congress turn a republic into the Monty Python parrot Many months ago when I was writing something about health care I ran across a blog that had a number of entries on the subject, one of which I used in my piece. That web page and 70-some others are still open in my browser, which in retaliation is now consuming most of my computer’s memory and a good chunk of the processor capacity. So I’m going to write some things I meant to write during these past many months and reclaim some space. The blog in question is Hipparchia’s, and she (I think) has added several entries on Canada’s health care system since I last checked in. They’re all instructive but the one I like the best deals with the origin of the Canadian system, which can be described in two words: Tommy Douglas. Douglas was the Saskatchewan premier who, beginning in the 1950′s, fought to bring, single-payer health care coverage to his province. He stepped down in 1961 but the next year, after an epic, decade-long war with private insurers and doctors, his legislation passed and became the model for Canada’s national system. Some advocates for a progressive health care system here tend to be federal-centric, and it’s good to remember that state and regional efforts can drive the federal one. Thanks, Hipparchia. Continue reading Clearing the decks, Part 1: health care for all and a lot more When last we noted the Bush administration’s appalling record on national security, a few items fell through the cracks. The story was on the economic resurgence of opium in Afghanistan following the US invasion that drove the Taliban out of power and ended the group’s short-lived but astonishingly effective ban on opium poppy cultivation. Since then, the opium yield has grown in size—record crops every year but one, culimating in an 8200 ton haul in 2007, as opposed to a few hundred tons in 2001 and a pre-invasion record of 4,200 tons in 1999—and impact, comprising half the country’s national income in 2007. Although Afghanistan is a rich topic for discussion of itself, any comment on it is necessarily incomplete without addressing Pakistan, whose semi-autonomous border regions are home to both the Taliban in exile from Afghanistan and Pakistan’s own version of the group, and which is also heavily impacted by the growth in opium production and smuggling. As the situation in Afghanistan deteriorates, US defense secretary Bob Gates has become increasingly strident toward both Pakistan and his NATO allies in Afghanistan. With his poorly received offers to provide US combat or training troops to Pakistan if only they would ask, he has repeatedly signalled the US desire to take a more active role inside that country. Gates’s impatience with NATO countries, especially Germany, has led to some distinctly undiplomatic incidents. Gates hastened to make amends with the NATO countries doing the bulk of the fighting in Afghanistan after he delivered his cutting remarks about them, but the NATO effort is little more than a year, perhaps only months, from coming apart at the seams. Canada has threatened to down weapons and walk when its commitment expires next year unless other NATO countries (Germany, again, primarily) step up their involvement, and the occupation was becoming more unpopular in other NATO countries even before the degree to which it is unraveling became apparent during the past month. Continue reading Worst national security administration ever: omnibus edition |
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