• From the Political Wire:
  

  When asked to name their favorite electronic gadgets, the AP notes Sen. Hillary Clinton, John Edwards and Fred Thompson picked their iPods while Sen. Barack Obama, Mitt Romney and Gov. Bill Richardson chose their Blackberries.
  
  Rudy Giuliani was the least technologically advanced of the group picking his CD player.

  
  If only his other policies were stuck in the 90's . . .
  
  
• It's a relief to know that Mike Huckabee thinks that a consenting sexual relationship between two responsible adults of the same gender isn't quite as bad as fucking a corpse.
  
  
• Apparently there's talk of Chris Dodd ousting Dead Fish Harry Reid as Senate Majority Leader. I would have a part in his honor if that happened. No one would come to that party, but I'd have it anyway
  
  
• Teflon:
  

  This Larry Craig guy. First he’s able to elude that embarrassing recant on his pledge to resign, then he dodges those Ethics Committee hearings McConnell told us we’d get, then EIGHT MEN relate their stories of gay sex with this hypocrite, and where does it bring him today? To the White House as an official guest for a signing ceremony. [Pause, so as to consider]. Larry Craig is the best politician of our era.

  
  
  
• If Bloomberg runs for the presidency under a centrist platform, does that liberate the Democrats to be actual liberals? Or do they stick to the MOR course and hope that their brand of heavily watered down liberalism sound better than Bloomberg's?
  
  
• I think Bob Kerrey has managed the unexpected feat of endorsing both Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for president.
  
  
• Tom Tancredo has dropped out of the presidential race. I am very much hoping that his absence from the national conversation in this election will allow some measure of sanity to return on the topic of immigration.
  

Top 20

So, I did almost nothing worthwhile over the break. It was sort of magnificent. So magnificent, in fact, that today I decided to continue doing frivolous things and just publish my list of my favorite albums of 2007. Please note that I'm not calling these my "best of 2007" because there are probably better records that aren't on my list, but these are the ones that have made me real happy. Links are included to more detailed reviews (they're not all up at this time, but hopefully by the end of the day tomorrow, I'll have a complete set).

Honorable Mention (I can't put it on the list because it's a single and not an album): Vee Dee - Glimpses of Another World

Dishonorable Mention (Because it's just that bad, and the people need to be warned): The Stooges - The Weirdness

20. Marnie Stern - In Advance of the Broken Arm
19. Boris with Michio Kurihara - Rainbow
18. Throbbing Gristle - Part Two. The Endless Not
17. Terror Visions - World of Shit
16. Scott Walker - And Who Shall Go to the Ball? And Who Shall Go to the Ball?
15. Cornelius - Sensuous
14. Yoko Ono - Yes, I'm a Witch
13. MARVELKiND - State of the Artificial
12. Dinosaur Jr. - Beyond
11. Miss Alex White & the Red Orchestra - Space & Time
10. The Busy Signals - The Busy Signals
9. Grinderman - Grinderman
8. Enon - Grass Geysers . . . Carbon Clouds
7. The Book of Knots - Traineater
6. The Black Lips - Good Bad Not Evil
5. Thurston Moore - Trees Outside the Academy
4. The Coathangers - The Coathangers
3. Of Montreal - Hissing Fauna, Are You the Destroyer?
2. Bobby Conn - King for a Day
1. The Veils - Nux Vomica

[EDIT: The list has been expanded to 20, because dammit, I just couldn't help myself. I couldn't stand to bump anyone out of the originally posted 15, but I couldn't bear to leave the others off the list. And while I did what I said I wasn't going to do and ranked them, every single one of these records is AWESOME and I had a hell of a time organizing this list. For example, it breaks my heart that Miss Alex White didn't get into the top ten, but there are too many people making good music these days. Bastards.]

Last year at Christmas, James Brown died. Today, Oscar Peterson died. Christmas is a bad time to be a legendary musician.

Alberto Gonzalez doesn't recall the last time he said something so memorable

Congratulations to one Senator Joe Biden of Delaware for being the most quotable man of the year -- not for topping the list of the most memorable quotations of 2007, but for being the only person to appear on it twice.

The list:

1. "Don't tase me bro" - Florida student Andrew Meyer as he was arrested for heckling Senator John Kerry.

2. "I personally believe that US Americans are unable to do so because some people out there in our nation don't have maps and I believe that our education like such as in South Africa and Iraq and everywhere like such as and I believe that they should our education over here in the US should help the US or should help South Africa and should help Iraq and the Asian countries so we will be able to build up our future for us." – Miss South Carolina Lauren Upton.

3. "In Iran we don't have homosexuals like in your country" - was Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad's comment during a speech at New York's Columbia University.

4. "That's some nappy-headed hos there" – shock jock Don Imus' comment about a university basketball team that cost him his job.

5. "I don't recall." - Former US Attorney General Alberto Gonzales' repeated response to questioning at a congressional hearing about the firing of US attorneys.

6. "There's only three things he (Republican presidential candidate and former New York City Mayor Rudy Giuliani) mentions in a sentence: a noun and a verb and 9/11." - Senator Joseph Biden, speaking at a Democratic presidential debate.

7. "I'm not going to get into a name-calling match with somebody (Vice President Dick Cheney) who has a nine per cent approval rating." - Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid, a Democrat.

8. "(I have) a wide stance when going to the bathroom." - Idaho Republican Sen. Larry Craig's explanation of why his foot touched that of an undercover policeman in a men's room.

9. "I mean, you got the first mainstream African-American who is articulate and bright and clean and a nice-looking guy. I mean, that's a storybook, man." - Biden describing rival Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama.

10. "I think as far as the adverse impact on the nation around the world, this administration has been the worst in history." - Former President Jimmy Carter in an interview in the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette newspaper.

Tunguska Event

I've just finished my last exam and posted my final paper, which heralds the end of the fall semester and the beginning of a month of personal reading time. Having written over 10,000 words in the last two days, and with the general feeling that my brain might at any time simply drain like chunky applesauce out my ears, I'll be going easy on the links tonight. Oh, yeah, and it's Friday.

• I don't agree with everything said in this piece, but if you're interested in one perspective on what is going on in Russia, I'd recommend you check out this TPMCafe post.

• Via this article on Wired.com:

• Insurance company denies a client payment for a liver transplant, stating the procedure was experimental and outside the scope of coverage.

• Doctors write a letter to the company saying patients suffering similar complications and undergo liver transplants have a 65% six-month survival rate.
  

• Ten days later, the insurer reverses the nonpayment decision, but the young woman dies a few hours later.

• Bill Clinton has an iPhone, apparently.

• Mars stands a pretty good chance at getting smoked by a massive asteroid next month.

• "The asteroid, known as 2007 WD5, was discovered in late November and is similar in size to an object that hit remote central Siberia in 1908, unleashing energy equivalent to a 15-megaton nuclear bomb and wiping out 60 million trees."

• If the space rock hits, astronomers predict it will create a hole in Mars the size of Meteor Crater.

Sounds like it should be a pretty good show as long as it stays the hell away from Earth. Tune in next month.

Now, get out there and enjoy the weekend.

Aw, Hell, it's Mike Gravel!

Due to a presently unfinished paper which is due later today, I didn't have an opportunity to write a post last night. In my view, the absolute weirdness of Mike Gravel completely makes up for this failing. This video's damn sure better than any of those other candidates' Christmas/Holiday ads that the media has been obsessing over for the last week.



Alright, that's it. Next Christmas we're spending it with Duncan Hunter.

Good evening, I'm Wyl. Tim has the night off.

Tim's taking the rest of the week off, so I'm going to try to fill in for him a bit. It's finals week for me here in Madison, which means I'm not going to go link crazy, but I thought I'd at least keep the chair warm for Tim until he's back.

• Time Magazine has named Russian president/Supreme Leader Vladimir Putin 2007 Man of the Year, edging out Nobel laureate Al Gore. A few thoughts:

• Since Mr. Gore has come up short before, I'm sure he's nonplussed by losing out on such a prestigious award. Yes, I'm being sarcastic.
  

• Putin is now tied at one award each with Adolf Hitler (1938) and former Soviet leaders Nikita Khrushchev (1957) and Yuri Andropov (1983, co-winner with Ronald Reagan). He is still behind notables Joseph Stalin (1939 and 1942), Deng Xiaoping (1978 and 1985), and Mikhail Gorbachev (1987 and 1989), but at only 55 years of age and with an absolute iron grip on Russia, I think Putin has a shot at a repeat performance.
  

• On the other hand, at least they didn't give the award to runner-up J.K. Rowling, who should finally just go away already. How does she even meet Time's "for better or for worse, ...has done the most to influence the events of the year" criteria? The ghosts of J.R.R. Tolkien, C.S. Lewis, and Madeline L'Engle should be all come back and haunt Rowling for the next fifty years. I'm sure she'll write a book worth reading after that experience.
  

• According to the NYT, it looks like the Bush Administration's lawyers were significantly more involved in the CIA tapes scandal than the administration was previously willing to acknowledge. I wonder if any of those lawyers were over at Dick Cheney's office in the Old Executive Office Building today... Supposedly it wasn't a terrorist attack, but shouldn't we all be checking with Rudy Giuliani before we decide for sure?

• Congressional Democrats are once again flexing their collective spine.

• The Pentagon (with an assist from The WaPo) spins even better than Kool Herc:

• According to the WaPo, the Pentagon has concluded that "Iraqis of all sectarian and ethnic groups believe that the U.S. military invasion is the primary root of the violent differences among them, and see the departure of 'occupying forces' as the key to national reconciliation, according to focus groups conducted for the U.S. military last month."

• Also according to the WaPo, this is "good news, according to a military analysis of the results. At the very least, analysts optimistically concluded, the findings indicate that Iraqis hold some "shared beliefs" that may eventually allow them to surmount the divisions that have led to a civil war.

• Sounds like Tom Tancredo's presidential aspirations have crashed to earth before they ever even took off. One would hope/imagine a similar announcement from Duncan Hunter isn't too far off. If this country collectively loses its mind and Rudy Giuliani is somehow elected I'm sure both of these fanatics would find jobs within his regime - Hunter as Rudy's SecDef, and Tancredo as head of the INS. Talk about the inmates running the asylum...
  

• Finally, on a sad note, Dennis Kucinich's youngest brother, Perry, was found dead today. I'm sure I speak for Tim as well when I offer condolences to the Kucinich family.
  

I know the world isn't fair, but why isn't it ever unfair in my favor?

Gore Vidal's column over on Truthdig yesterday brought back some feelings of resentment that had faded into the background over the course of the week (I'm in the midst of fall semester finals).

I don't agree with Mr. Vidal on the particular cause of Rep. Kucinich's exclusion, however. Please consider his assertion reproduced below:

Elements of right-wingism are keeping his voice from being heard, even though there are many millions of us (Kucinich is ahead of both Biden and Dodd in the national polls) out here who like to hear his voice. He is in the great tradition of the original People’s Party of the 1880s; he is in the tradition of George Washington and of Thomas Jefferson, and to silence him with a bunch of political hacks who have made such a mess of our political system, pretending these were the only voices who could talk as presidential candidates ... is it because of their campaign budgets?

Now, I know, as all of you know, that people can come in with millions of dollars, like Romney and so on, and can buy time in Iowa and in the North Pole or wherever it is they are running. They can buy it, but to get an honest member of Congress speaking out for the people of the country is a great and rare thing.

What Mr. Vidal is asserting here is quite a bit of a stretch, at least in terms of the exact particulars on which he chooses to focus. He has erroneously jumped to the conclusion that a vast right-wing conspiracy is excluding Rep. Kucinich from the Iowa debates in the face of a much more simple conclusion - that the mainstream media is not interested in devoting time to candidates which do not boost or maintain their ratings.

Every television minute or inch of column spent discussing the candidacies of Dennis Kucinich, Mike Gravel, Ron Paul, or yes, even Alan Keyes is a minute or inch that a competitor can use to steal the media market of Americans grown fat and stupid on the Hollywood headliner political mentality. For the sake of ratings (and thus, income derived from the selling of advertisements) the script must not deviate from the Safe Six of the Democratic side (Clinton, Obama, Edwards, Richardson, Dodd, and Biden in more or less that order of "importance") or the Foolproof Five of the Republicans (Huckabee, Romney, Giuliani, McCain, and Thompson in a somewhat more fluid order).

A much more egregious and recent example of this media glass ceiling for non-headliner candidates is the near-complete media silence after Ron Paul's record-breaking fundraising event on the 234th anniversary of the Boston Tea Party this week. Dr. Paul, who pulled in a haul of over $6 million dollars in 24 hours last Sunday, was virtually ignored by the mainstream media the following day.

I had stayed up until 3am studying for a Russian exam, and throughout the night had monitored Dr. Paul's attempt to break John Kerry's record. Before I went to bed I had learned from Politico.com that Dr. Paul had been successful, but had I not looked specifically for that information I would have gone completely unaware of both the attempt and the ultimate breaking of the record.

No major news source which I checked via Google News - including MSNBC, CNN, FOX News, and the major American newspapers - gave a headline to Ron Paul. Some mentioned it well down in small print on their pages devoted to Politics, while others made no mention of it at all. Curious, I watched cable news that night to see if Ron Paul would make the headlines he might have missed due to the late hour and the nature of press-time deadlines (which would be a weak excuse at best in the age of 24-hour digital news via the Internet). Again, Ron Paul was stonewalled.

When I saw that Ron Paul was tied with Alan Keyes in the most recent Gallup poll of GOP candidates, it seemed pretty obvious to me that part of the reason for this is because the media won't give any exposure to Dr. Paul's campaign. When Ron Paul does seem to get media exposure, it comes from statements like this, or a calculated-to-be-damaging report like this, both of which are amplified by the media to antagonize the voting public and deprive them of any proper context in which to place Dr. Paul. In short, it's yellow journalism designed to mislead and shape the conversation in a way most appeasing to advertisers.

Reexamine Mr. Vidal's words for a moment, with minor changes made for an interesting effect:

Elements of media bias are keeping his voice from being heard, even though there are many millions of us (Dr. Paul is ahead of Fred Thompson in New Hampshire and tied with Rudy Giuliani in Iowa) out here who like to hear his voice. He is in the great tradition of the original People’s Party of the 1880s; he is in the tradition of George Washington and of Thomas Jefferson, and to silence him with a bunch of political hacks who have made such a mess of our political system, pretending these were the only voices who could talk as presidential candidates ... is it because of their campaign budgets?

Now, I know, as all of you know, that people can come in with millions of dollars, like Romney and so on, and can buy time in Iowa and in the North Pole or wherever it is they are running. They can buy it, but to get an honest member of Congress speaking out for the people of the country is a great and rare thing.

Given Mr. Vidal's reasoning, one would expect Ron Paul's $18 million in fourth-quarter earnings to be speaking louder than words. Sadly, Mr. Vidal is mistaken.

This is not to imply that Dennis Kucinich has not been wronged by the media. Last month Rep. Kucinich was running fourth in a Democratic primary poll and made a joint appearance with his wife on CBS' Early Show. In the course of the brief interview the ever-vapid Hannah Storm went to great lengths to repeatedly establish the existence of Mrs. Kucinich's tongue ring. Given the demographic likely to watch The Early Show, I'd say this qualifies as a similar attempt to shift coverage from a candidate's success or stance on issues to a topic which is calculated to be misleading or damaging. The exclusion of Rep. Kucinich from the Iowa Democratic debate is just a step further down the road.

While Mr. Vidal's resort to what I hope was hyperbole at the end of his piece was unfortunate, I was very much heartened to see at least one prominent American speak out against the exclusion of Dennis Kucinich from the most recent Democratic debate in Iowa. It is unfortunate Mr. Vidal hadn't been so moved earlier this year when NBC excluded Sen. Mike Gravel from a nationally televised Democratic debate. It seems from this that Mr. Vidal, while more than willing to bemoan the exclusion of his pet candidate, is willing to look the other way when it comes to the media's silencing of those individuals with whom he disagrees. That, too, should qualify as a form of yellow journalism.

1. The next pundit who uses the word "maverick" within the same article as the words "John McCain" had better have a helmet and some damn good private security.
2. I'm taking the rest of the week off. This week has been and is going to continue to be a marathon, and if I have any free time at work during that marathon, I'd rather spend it reading something more enjoyable than news of Mike Huckabee's dog-murdering son.
   

A Christmas present I wish I could exchange

I might be late to the party on this one, but I just now have found out about Billy Joel's latest composition, "Christmas in Fallujah." I initially caught wind via this TPMCafe post, which linked me to a Huffington Post article by IAVA founder/director Paul Rieckhoff. The Rieckhoff article contains the same video I'm embedding directly below:



My feelings are very mixed on this one. The song itself is interesting and not without merit. It echoes quite a few of the feelings that were going through my mind in the Summer of '04, particularly when contextualized with the neocon proselytizing of my unit by our Evangelical Crusader, Bible-thumping Commanding Officer.

The song's major weakness is simply that I'm not sure it's striking the right tone. Part of the problem is that Cass Dillon - the pipsqueak "singing" the song - is not up to the song from either a musical or maturity standpoint. As a vet, I don't feel like I can respect him or his image. I like that Billy Joel felt that he should give the song to someone of my generation, and I tip my cap to him for that consideration, but I'd have much preferred he give it to someone with more gravitas and testicular fortitude.

Dillon's performance reeks of an extremely unfortunate "pretty-boy newly gone solo from his Metallica tribute band" stench, something I'd expect from some lame douche bag with long hair who thinks a wardrobe rife with Hot Topic clearance rack Tatzenkreuze makes him a musical bad ass, and who is currently living in his parents' basement - but just until he gets the "big break" that is never coming (unless you count playing at every poser-dive bar in white bread suburban Chicagoland).

I sincerely want people to respect this song and who and what it represents (and not just because I'm part of that group). I simply don't think it's possible with the weenie Billy Joel put out there to front it, particularly when his grating, rangeless whine is upstaged by the "Oorah!" chorus.

Isn't there a young performer out there somewhere who has the stones necessary to record a song like this, no matter if they hang externally or not?

Last night I went to see Shellac, who many of you will immediately know is the band of noted analog snob Steve Albini. During the performance, I saw someone pull out a Blackberry. I groaned at the irony. And now I'm complaining about it on a weblog, and am once again groaning at the irony.

• Senator Mitch McConnell (R-KY, not to be confused with Mike McConnell, the Director of National Intelligence) is going to have some interesting competition. He's now being challenged by Lt. Col. Andrew Horne, a Marine and Iraq War veteran, who (duh) is running on an anti-war platform.
  
  
• Who watches the watchmen?
  
  
• Sadly, No breaks down a neo-con argument about how Mike Huckabee would be a god-awful choice for ultra-conservative GOP voters, and provides the counterpoint that most of those things would actually make him a better president than, say, George W. Bush. He's interested in social spending and isn't intent on war with Iran. This is why he scares me: he's got some good qualities, but if you buy into those, you get pro-life creationism for free. It worries me.
  
  
• In related news, Romney has acknowledged that he's getting his ass handed to him in Iowa.
  
  
• If any of you have a lot of money on your hands and want to buy me a Christmas present, Dennis Kucinich is selling off Palm Beach County voting booths from 2000, chads and all.
  
  
• Desperate to get his polling numbers above 2% in New Hampshire, Fred Thompson has begun pandering to female voters.
  
  
• I just really can't fucking stand Joe Lieberman. I've decided that I'm going to blame him for Al Gore's loss in 2000, and subsequently the last 7 years of catastrophe at the hands of George W. Bush.
  
  
• I still want Elizabeth Edwards to be president.
  
  
• I'm sorry, but when the man is hauling in over $6 million in a day, including donations from almost 25,000 new donors, you have to take the Ron Paul campaign seriously. I know he'll never be president, but he's tapping into a very potent desire for a lot of people that needs to be recognized by both parties.
  
  
• I cannot tell you how much I'd love to see a brokered convention. Regardless of the fact that it would hobble the GOP, I really like the idea of candidates making deals for support, taking each others' ideas onto their platforms, and generally being forced to compromise for the good of the party. That's why I've been encouraging people to vote their consciences in the primaries this year: voting for a longshot could actually give him some sway.
  

• The quote of the day is from The Onion: "I worry that if the campaign's common denominator gets any lower, it will create an improper fraction."
  
  
• The good news is that Leonard Cohen, Gamble & Huff, and the Dave Clark 5 are going to be inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame. The bad news is, so is John Mellencamp.
  
  
• How many bored Korean geneticists does it take to plug in a cat?

No, I will not give you any substantive news today. It's Friday.

In the last 30 minutes, I have received to pieces of god-awful news.

1) Mitt Romney is buying Clear Channel.
2) The Mitchell Report (re: baseball players and steroids) is in, and it's not pretty.

People wonder why listen to sad and/or angry music all the time.

We're all devo

• Sir Elton John, in his infinite wisdom, understands that the internet is not a truck. He does not, however, have any idea what it is or what it's used for, and thinks the tubes should be shut down for five years because music was better when we communicated by telegraph and carrier pigeon. Take that, Radiohead!
  
  
• Send Leonard to CPAC. I promise, it's an investment in making a brighter future for all of us.
  
  
• Democrats are learning from Ronald Reagan's approach to the Cold War: they're trying to get the GOP to spend so much money that they can no longer function.
  
  
• If you're a Christian in America and you feel persecuted because of your faith, Congress has a bill in the works that will help protect you from the godless hordes that make up a small minority of the U.S. population. Note: occasionally incurring the wrath of a deranged lunatic, while certainly tragic, doesn't count as "persecution." Other religions have to deal with the wrath of deranged lunatics too, who are often far more organized.
  
  
• Mitt Romney scores the endorsement of the National Review.
  
  
• In a shocking turn of events, Pope Benedict XVI has broken with millennia of Catholic tradition of nurturing scientific progress and declared global warming to be nothing but "scare-mongering."
  
  
• Mike Huckabee wants Duncan Hunter to be his Secretary of Defense. Eep.
  
  
• What will the political world do when David Yepsen dies and they don't have anyone to explain what's going on in Iowa?
  

And now, for your education, here are a series of informational links about America's Mayor, Rudy Giuliani (thanks to Leonard at Sadly, No, and an unnamed former NYC government employee for supplying some of these links):

1. Regarding his newfound hatred for illegal aliens.
2. Regarding his dubious knowledge of the Iranian Hostage Crisis.
3. Regarding his leadership on 9/11, and his dedication to law and order.
4. Regarding his business relationships with known terrorists.
5. Regarding his stellar handling of race relations in New York.
6. Regarding the police force of which he was so proud.
7. Regarding his views on freedom of the press.
8. Regarding his views on freedom of expression. (Quote of the day: “Freedom is about the willingness of every single human being to cede to lawful authority a great deal of discretion about what you do,” Giuliani said early in his tenure as mayor. “You have free speech so I can be heard.”)
9. And for anyone who thinks they missed anything, you can review with this quiz.

As a bonus today, I will also offer you some choice quotes from presidential candidates in regards to global warming:

Fred Thompson: There are a lot of unanswered questions. We don't know to the extent this is a cyclical thing. This may or may not effect very much. The extremists are the ones who want to do drastic things to our economy before we have more answers as to how much good we can do and whether people in the other parts of the world are going to contribute. It's the fact that our entitlements are bankrupting the next generation. We're spending the money of those yet to be born and we can't continue that way.

Mitt Romney: I don't wanna have America unilaterally think it's somehow gonna stop global warming. They don't call it America warming. They call it global warming. And that means China, which is the biggest Co2 emitter in the world, as well as other nations like Indonesia and Brazil are gonna have to be a part of the global effort. So Kyotowas wrong, because it left major polluting nations out.

And my personal favorite, from Mike Huckabee: And we ought to declare that we will be free of energy consumption in this country within a decade, bold as that is.

• Tom Tancredo: his new ad may be considered tasteless by some. What effect will this controversy have on his promising presidential aspirations?
  
  
• If you're boxing, you don't wait until the fifth round to throw a punch.
  
  
• "But Mom! He started it!" Somebody send Wes Clark home and tell him not to come back to the campaign trail until he's gotten a clue.
  
  
• I can deal with crazy people on the street cursing loudly at an invisible man named George. The crazy people that scare me are the ones coherent enough to successfully argue their constitutional rights in court.
  

  A federal appeals court Thursday sided with a Kansas woman who believes that God’s hatred of homosexuality requires her to picket funerals for American soldiers holding signs that read “Thank God for Dead Soldiers” and “God Blew Up the Troops.”

  Shirley Phelps-Roper is part of a Topeka, Kan. church that contends God is punishing the United States for permitting homosexuality by killing soldiers. In response to a August 2005 protest by Phelps-Roper and other members of her church at the funeral of Army Spc. Edward Lee Myers in St. Joseph, Mo., the Missouri legislature passed a pair of laws that prohibited picketing near a funeral location or procession. [...]
  
  As an aside, a visit to the church's website reveals that the church doesn't simply show up funerals. Upcoming targets include Billy Joel (and not for continuing to release greatest hits packages), Ozzy Osbourne, R. Kelly, Mannheim Steamroller(!) and, for some unspecified reason, the University of Kansas basketball game against Ohio University.

• If you don't believe in a God, and don't belong to an organized group that claims to know the ins and outs of the nature of the divine, Mitt Romney thinks you just suck, and you should probably move to Cuba, you godless commie swine!
  

• Here's the question: if you're you going to do something of dubious legality and unambiguous immorality that you're going to have to protect yourself from, like planning the Watergate break-in or torturing someone, why the hell would you tape it to begin with?
  
  
• I don't know if there's such a thing as a "December Surprise," but this will have your jaws on the floor. Ready? Tom Tancredo did not participate in the Spanish-language GOP debate on Univision. I know. Your mind is blown, isn't it?
  
  
• The only reason Dana Perino has a job is because she's the most attractive aryan dumb enough to come near the Bush administration.
  
  
• Thanks to a single magical instance of collective non-hypocrisy (or possibly just good taste) by the Republican Party, Giuliani appears to have seen his presidential hopes annihilated by his inability to control his own penis.
  
  
• At long last, the White House answers all of your questions about Scooter Libby and the Valerie Plame leak debacle . . . if your only question was "has Dana Perino talked with the president about the matter since Libby made his announcement that he's not going to continue his appeals."
  

Stockhausen

Karlheinz Stockhausen is dead.

I think I was about 21 when I first heard "Kontakte." My roommate Kelly had decided that the Moog synthesizer was just about the coolest thing ever, and badgered me into reading Analog Days, which got me digging into early electronic music (so I could hear what they were talking about). A lot of it was shrill or boring, or just sort of ham-handed. Many of the early electronic "musicians" were innovators in technique and technology, but had no conception of how to make music out of the sounds they were discovering. Stockhausen was different. He was still leaps and bounds away from anything that resembled traditional composition techniques, but that's what made it so interesting. He had created a whole new musical vocabulary, and was using all of the tools at his disposal, all the sounds he was discovering, to rewrite the rules on how music could be built. It may sound crude in comparison to the electronic music that has come since, in a large part thanks to Bob Moog's efforts to make using that technology more accessible. But Stockhausen was there at the beginning, pushing the boundaries as far as he could.

I'm not sure what else to say about him, but I couldn't let it pass without mention. The man reshaped music as we know it, and I want to recognize that.

• United States foreign policy is now operating under the Code of the West:
  

  America has told Britain that it can “kidnap” British citizens if they are wanted for crimes in the United States.

  A senior lawyer for the American government has told the Court of Appeal in London that kidnapping foreign citizens is permissible under American law because the US Supreme Court has sanctioned it. […]
  
  “If you kidnap a person outside the United States and you bring him there, the court has no jurisdiction to refuse — it goes back to bounty hunting days in the 1860s.”

• John Edwards: I care about autism enough to drop $500 on, but not enough to risk my hair for it.
  
  
• Want to know what's happening in Guantanamo Bay? Read a detailed analysis of the 2004 update to the Standard Operating Procedures manual. (From TPM)
  
  
• Some of Hillary's supporters are arming her with stories about being berated and getting angry calls from Obama supporters, which she's using to attack Obama. As far as I can tell, this is just a case of overzealous volunteers who've been stuck at a phone too long getting cranky, and should in no way be transferred to the candidate himself. To quote fictional journalist Spider Jerusalem, "There's one hole in every revolution, large or small, and it's one word long: people." If blaming Obama for his less tactful volunteers is legitimate, then I'd like to hold a posthumous trial for Jesus of Nazareth in order to hold him responsible by association for the Crusades, the Inquisition, all of the Matthew Shepards of the world, witch trials across the globe, and a other atrocities that have been committed in the name of Jesus and his God. However, I don't think it's legitimate, so let's just leave it at that.
  
  
• Wonkette sums it up nicely: "So we’re at a point now where a massive intelligence report says Iran is not making nukes, and Bush responds with they are going to nuke us tomorrow." If you want a really great read on this masterpiece of bullshit, though, check out Froomkin here and here.
  
  
• If anyone wants to read Mitt Romney's speech on being a Mormon president, you can find it here. I actually didn't think it was that offensive. Most of it is about how, as president, he becomes a representative of people of all faiths, of all Americans, and how it's his duty to uphold the law and the Constitution, and not to make religious judgments on behalf of people who don't hold his beliefs. I believe all of that is true. He does not, however, tackle the issue of his participation in a religion whose holy book describes dark skin as a sign of being cursed by God, and how Jesus left Israel in 33 AD and got to America to chill with the Nephites by 34 AD.*
  
  
• Speaking of unfortunate religious practices, the Pope is now granting indulgences to anyone who visits a shrine at Lourdes within the next year or so. They're not selling them, true, but was raised Lutheran, so I was thinking about trotting over to Holy Name Cathedral on my lunch hour and sticking 95 Post-Its on their door.
  
  
• Mike Huckabee defends a science teacher's to teach science, and postulates a heretofore unheard of form of rock and roll that incorporates neither sex nor drugs into the lifestyle around it.
  
  
• This probably won't be the last time I say this, but it deserves to be said and said often: possibly my biggest pet peeve in relation to current events is the term "playing politics." YOU'RE FUCKING POLITICIANS. THAT'S WHAT YOU DO. GET OVER IT. IT'S NOT A SLUR, IT'S YOUR JOB. SHUT UP. SHUT UP SHUT UP SHUT UP.

This is as much fuming as I can fit in before lunch. More later.


*It's worth saying that I do believe in freedom to be Mormon. Believing that angels showed Joseph Smith where to dig up some golden plates with scripture on them isn't any more outlandish from a logical perspective than say, believing that God parted the Red Sea and every Jew living at the time walked through it without getting a drop on them. I will also say that in my own very limited personal dealings with Mormons, I have found them to be kind, generous people who are dedicated to the collective good of the human race. I don't necessarily think that a Mormon shouldn't be president. I just think Mitt Romney shouldn't be president.

I can see this going real well.

***

Dear Kim Jong Il,

How are you? I am fine. Say, would you tell us all of your nucular secrets? I am concerned about other countries having the same sorts of dangerous things as me. I want to be #1 keeper of dangerous things in teh world. You should tell me what sorts of dangerous things you have so I can tell you not to have them anymore.

Love,
George Bush

***

Dear George,

What are you, deficient? I've never heard anything so dumb come out of anyone that wasn't Portuguese. Do you know what a secret is? It's something you don't tell other people. I can't believe your stupid country would let anyone with hair as bad as yours run the country. And seriously, a letter? Come see me in person. I'll give you a cushy room at one of our finest imperial hotels.

Piss off.
Kim Jong Il

***

He must have gotten the idea to send a letter asking for information from Harry Reid. It always works so well when he tries it.

Back in the saddle

• Diabolical arch-fiend Paul Wolfowitz is back to Washington, this time with a cushy State Department job. One can only wonder what kind of mischief he'll be up to in the next year, but if he lives up to his resume, it will surely involve gratuitous loss of human life and/or abuse of government funds to help this unctuous little goblin get laid. Exciting!
  
  
• I hate to say it, but Karl Rove is a smart guy.
  
  
• The Clintons just can't get past that whole cheap sex fixation, can they?
  
  
• I like that the National Security Adviser is publicly trying to get Dick Cheney's finger off the trigger:
  

  “The estimate offers grounds for hope that the problem can be solved diplomatically — without the use of force — as the administration has been trying to do,” Mr. Hadley said.

  
  
  
• Someone at the Romney campaign made a wise choice: deciding that Rudy is only going to dig himself further into the hole he's in on this "shag fund" story, so they're just going to stand by and watch politely. For example, there's really just no good way to account for city police officers getting paid to walk your mistress' dog.
  
  
• It seems Hillary has a little more work to do. First of all, you don't try to explain the nuances of immigration policy in a stump speech: you lay out broad position statements and take care of the details after the election, or in detailed papers available to the press and to particularly diligent voters. Also, what you extra especially don't EVER EVER EVER want to do is attack your opponent for something he wrote in kindergarten. It's sloppy, it reeks of desperation, and it's just plain petty. I look forward to hearing about how her dad could beat up Obama's dad.
  
  
• I just got an email from the Biden campaign with the subject line, "I will eat Rudy Giuliani alive at a debate." If he means this literally, politics just got a whole hell of a lot more interesting.
  

Lies.

• Henry Hyde is dead. I actually lived in Hyde's district for a large portion of my childhood. It was a place where mothers of three stayed slim and tan, children could safely play in the streets, and rain might as well be illegal. It was also a place where girls got institutionalized for an "eating disorder" because they came down to dinner late, where ten-year-old boys come to school talking about fingering their girlfriends the night before, where teens hit heights of drug-fueled depravity I have never seen or heard of before or since (from people of any age group), and where they have to put up street signs discouraging domestic violence. I'm not blaming Henry Hyde for this, of course. However, I do see him as a product of the repressive, sweep-anything-unpleasant-under-the-rug, denial-based branch of conservatism that yielded such a fucked up place. The world will be a better place when the legacy of Hyde and his ilk is a cautionary tale for more sensible generations to come.
  
  
• I don't have words for how big of a jackass Rudy Giuliani is. I mean . . . it's . . . ugh. HE'S TALKING ABOUT ENERGY CONSERVATION AT A FUCKING NASCAR RACE. WHAT THE FUCK, PEOPLE? HOW HAS OUR COUNTRY SUNK THIS LOW?
  
  
• David Obey is pretty awesome.
  
  
• "Bernie, stop helping."
  
  
• For as much as I've followed the primaries up to this point, I really could've been doing something else with my time. Because as people really start paying attention, there's no telling what the hell is going to happen, and all the speculation about someone having the election in the bag is probably going to turn out to be a load of crap. This is when politics gets fun.
  
  
• The U.S. Department of Agriculture shot 87,000 coyotes from planes last year. Expect some PETA protests when former Secretary of Agriculture Mike Johanns starts holding rallies for his Senate campaign. This is the guy we're getting to replace Chuck Hagel?
  
  
• The government is bloated and unwieldy and corrupt and we should dismantle as much of it as possible. Unfortunately, we don't yet have some key pieces which we really need, which are going to be bloated and unwieldy and corrupt and as Wonkette explains, absolutely necessary.
  
  
• I look forward to when this gets blamed on four guys who spent the 70's smoking pot and listening to Jethro Tull, a la WM3.
  

A conversation between me and Wyl from yesterday:
Wyl: Fred Thompson is still running for president?
Tim: Apparently.
Wyl: Someone should tell him.
Tim: Nah, he's cranky when you wake him up.
And if you want to know why he's so cranky when you wake him up, it's because he's polling at 2.8% in Hew Hampshire. What makes it even better is looking at the actual polling graph and seeing at the little blip on the screen that is the Fred Thompson line. It goes up for a little bit and then drops just as fast. I just don't think that'll ever stop being funny. This is one of those moments that reinvigorates your faith in democracy.

Backtracking

• George W. Bush touts his "firsthand" virtual reality combat experience. Sometimes it seems like his presidency is conducted in virtual reality.
  
  
• Mike Huckabee isn't as sterling as he likes to paint himself.
  
  
• Trent Lott resigns and we all do a little dance. It's pretty sweet news, even if a Democrat doesn't take the seat.
  
  
• If Hillary steamrolls Obama, what does that say about celebrity against the grass roots? It's still two months until "Tsunami Tuesday" and who knows what's going to happen (especially if Newt is right and Obama springboards ahead in Iowa), but if Hillary takes this nomination, I honestly think it will say more about her ability to make her celebrity and "inevitability" the only topic in media discussion of this primary race than it will about her ability to be a good president. The two may be more closely linked in this day and age, but while I think Hillary is a fantastically capable woman, her ability to spin the press doesn't necessarily speak well of her judgment.
  
  
• This worries me: if Huckabee gets the nomination, I see him becoming a significant candidate, and possibly even a dangerous one in an election year that has consistently been promised as an avalanche of Democratic victories. In a nutshell, he's an evangelical fundamentalist Christian (an ordained one at that) who is thoroughly personable and charming, and loves to talk blue collar issues. His organization thus far hasn't been as good as it should be, but if he gets the nomination, he'll have the entire Republican organization at his disposal. Romney, Giuliani, Thompson and McCain are all cannon fodder: Huck is the one to worry about.
  
  
• Thankfully, Mitt Romney has secured the endorsement that, without a doubt, will secure his place as the Republican front-runner: The Osmonds.
  
  
• George Bush never really got the full scope of that "Commander in Chief" thing, though I do respect his intentions.
  
  
• My contempt for Joe Lieberman knows no bounds.
  
  
• I'm as happy as anyone that Barry Bonds is getting indicted, but doesn't it seem like the federal bodies that conduct investigations have had more important things to look into over the last four years?
  
  
• An interesting note about the nature of crime. Remind me to mention this to my grandmother, who's terrified because I live in the big scary city.

More updates as I can get caught up. November's been a crazy month.

In brief:

1) Prostitution reaches a new low: a woman agrees to perform sexual favors in order to receive money that she has to pay back, with interest.

2) Rudy Giuliani wants to be simultaneously at war with Iraq, Afghanistan, Iran, Russia, and China. Which is really dumb, because as anyone who has seen The Princess Bride knows, you should never get involved in a land war in Asia, and ESPECIALLY NOT FIVE OF THEM AT THE SAME DAMN TIME.

• On Monday, Ron Paul raised 4.2 MILLION DOLLARS, all online, in the span of a day. And yet yesterday, not the Washington Post, not the New York Times, nor CNN's websites had even the slightest mention of it on their front pages.
  
  
• Bob Geiger at HuffPo makes a case at great length for voting for Chris Dodd. In a nutshell, it's because Chris Dodd is busy making a case for voting for Chris Dodd by doing things in the Senate. Unfortunately, Barack Obama is not doing the same.
  

• 80's nostalgia/kitsch is bad for the economy.
  
  
• Cheney admits to being a dark lord of the Sith.
  
  
• [Redacted by executive order].
  
  
• I know I shouldn't listen to anything Hannity says, but come on. Claiming that Halloween is a liberal corruption of our children because they're learning to ask for handouts? HAVE YOU NO SENSE OF SHAME? (Apparently, the answer is no.)
  
  
• Newt Gingrich is talking to leading Congressional Democrats, because Republicans won't listen to him. In other news, "down" has now been reclassified as "up."
  
  
• I'll stand by Chicago as the best city in the country for now, but if New York goes through with a plan for pigeon contraception, I might start waffling. I haaaate pigeons.
  
  
• It pays to keep some humor blogs on your feed-reader, even if you use your feed reader for research for a news-related blog. First, it keeps you from murdering yourself. Second, it occasionally feeds you pertinent bits of wisdom:
  

I guess the Red Sox won some game last night that was pretty important, so good for them.

• Chris Dodd decides to jump on student usury. I still have yet to find a reason to dislike Chris Dodd.
  
  
• Finally, the future that 6-year-old boys have always dreamed of is here . . .
  
  
• Larry Craig is going to argue (and I'll back him on this, actually) that getting arrested for toe-tapping is a violation of his First Amendment rights. Interestingly enough, this argument isn't saying that he wasn't looking for sex (on the contrary, it implies it), just that it's legal to look for sex in a public bathroom.
  
  
• Michael Chertoff on the California wildfires, last Friday: "We’re still not out of the woods . . ."
  
  
• FEMA . . . I . . . fuck it. They just suck.
  
  
• And apparently, so does the House Judiciary Committee. There is no worse fate I can imagine than ratting out Dick Cheney, only to have Dick Cheney find out about it.
  

News from the Streets

Today, H.L. Mencken will do my post for me.

The whole aim of practical politics is to keep the populace alarmed (and hence clamorous to be led to safety) by menacing it with an endless series of hobgoblins, all of them imaginary.

Don't forget it.

• This is heartening: apparently the new Chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff is capable of standing up to Dick Cheney.
  
  
• Comcast is now charging the government for the right to infringe on your privacy. Awesome!
  
  
• The "George W. Bush is a manipulative sack of crap" quote of the day:

  I know some in Congress are against the war, and are seeking ways to demonstrate that opposition. I recognize their position, and they should make their views heard. But they ought to make sure our troops have what it takes to succeed. Our men and women on the front lines should not be caught in the middle of partisan disagreements in Washington, D.C. I often hear that war critics oppose my decisions, but still support the troops. Well, I'll take them at their word -- and this is the chance to show it, that they support the troops.

• Apparently Chris Dodd is smarter than Hillary Clinton or Barack Obama, because he's the first one to figure out that the best way to campaign for president is by actually doing something with the power he has, rather than just talking about what he wishes he could do if he had more power. It drives me nuts to hear all of this hypothetical talk from the front-runners who have essentially abdicated their Senate seats so they can campaign, and the people actually trying to move forward legislation, guys like Dodd and Biden, get made fun of for even being in the race.
  
  
• Alright, Turkey, I'll make a deal with you. If you let us acknowledge the Armenian genocide, we'll give you not just Iraqi Kurdistan, but all of Iraq. It's all yours, we'll be out of there by spring. 'Kay? 'Kay. Have fun!
  
  
• As someone who's currently making his way through the DVD's of the new Battlestar Galactica series, this scares the living crap out of me.
  
  
• News from the White House on the economy front: more than half of America isn't poor. That's . . . that's pathetic and unacceptable is what it is. I think we should be shooting for a better vague statistic than "more than half."
  
  
• I wonder how many vegans will turn against Barack Obama for this.
  
  
• Tom Tancredo asked ICE to raid Dick Durbin's press conference and round up any illegal immigrants there might be floating around. When an organization whose acronym is "ICE" has to reign in your lack of decorum, something might, just might, have gone horribly wrong in your brain.
  
  
• Pennsylvania has an interesting take on voter suppression: don't tell anyone where they need to go to vote.
  
  
• I'll finish tonight with a victory: Pat Leahy and Arlen Specter finally get to see some domestic surveillance documentation.
  

Lovable Losers

This afternoon, my friend Mike noted that the Democratic Party, on which all of the hopes of the anti-war movement rests, is just a few short months from nominating Hillary Clinton, the Democratic candidate least likely to stop the war in a swift fashion, to be their candidate for the presidency of the United States. It occurred to me at this point that perhaps my lifelong affection for the Chicago Cubs is actually very similar to my affection for the Democratic Party. Disappointment is both obvious and inevitable.

Going into 2008, the Democrats have a massive glut of cash: Democratic top fundraiser Hillary Clinton has out-raised Republican top fundraiser Mitt Romney by 50%, and a good amount of his money comes from himself (Congressional candidates in both houses are raising money at similar ratios). The Cubs payroll for 2007 was nearly $100 million, while National League Champions the Colorado Rockies have slightly more than half of that. Both enjoy massive popularity. The Democrats have support because they favor an end to the war in Iraq, they talk about restoring civil liberties, and have gotten aggressive on popular social programs like SCHIP. The Cubs enjoy popularity because Chicago has a massive population of post-fraternity buffoons with too much money who like paying $400 for a ticket to a place where they can sit in an uncomfortable seat and pay $6 for a can of Old Style, watch their favorite team lose, and then puke their beer up all over Clark Street.*

The talent is there too. In the running are Hillary Clinton, the wife of (and some say the brain behind) the most popular living president; Barack Obama could probably legitimately change his middle name to "Rock Star," given how frequently people call him that; John Edwards has the most popular wife in politics, and is rumored to have also had some experience in national politics. The bullpen, much like the Cubs, has skill but is unreliable: guys like Joe Biden and Bill Richardson have moments where they seem untouchable, and then they turn into walking gaffe-machines and give up six runs in the debates. The Cubs have real talent at the plate (Derrek Lee and Aramis Ramirez) and some decent starting pitchers (Carlos Zambrano) but have never in my entire life have they had a reliable bullpen to draw on to replace the starters. In 2004, we could've seen Wes Clark as a decent Secretary of Defense or National Security Adviser, but no one really looked at all of those mock turtlenecks and thought we could have pulled him up to mound as a presidential candidate: he's just there to pull a couple of innings on the campaign trail or something like that.

There was a time when we had some solid guys calling the game for us, too. But they got cocky: Steve Stone pissed off the players by pointing out their mistakes, and got fired, and Michael Moore pissed off too many of the fans by pointing out their leaders' mistakes and got relegated to wingnut status.

But then there are management issues. Dusty Baker, of course, was plenty reliable: he always used the same strategy for losing games, and always backed up Larry Rothschild when he wanted to run good talent into the ground until they need Tommy John surgery. Harry Reid and Nancy Pelosi, are the same thing: they talk a good bit about stopping the war in Iraq, about cutting off illegal domestic spying, expanding positive government programs: all the day before the Washington Post reports that they've caved on any or all of those things. And it repeats ad nauseam.

But here's the thing. We know that the other team is tough. There's some real solid competition in this division (central division for the Cubs, partisan division for the Democrats), and we need to go with the roster we think is going to take us there. The Cubs don't feel that they have the luxury of time to go back to basics: over the course of a few years, build up a solid bullpen, get a catcher or two with a decent bat, and hire a pitching coach who doesn't put his best players in the hospital, and build everyone together, as a team, over a few years, rather than scrambling around for ringers before the trade deadline. The Democrats certainly don't think they have time to get together and build a strong, coherent platform and pull their members into lock-step to get it done. Instead, you have Jim Webb and Joe Biden and everyone else trying to push 50 different plans to make some small progess towards getting us out of Iraq. So we go with someone we think can get it done and keep things warm for now: John Kerry (Kerry Wood) in 2004 and Hillary Clinton (Alfonso Soriano) in 2008. We know, of course, that this is not the dream team. We know that by signing Clinton we're just pining for the 90's, when the world is a very different place, and that by signing Soriano, we're just pining for the player he was with the Yankees (and the team and management he had around him). So when the inevitable defeats come, when the Cubs choke one game shy of the Series in 2003 like John Kerry a year later, no one will really be surprised, they'll just hang their heads in disappointment and say, "I thought maybe it would've worked out differently this time around."

*Seriously, if you're going to be near Clark Street on a game day, wear galoshes. It's like Bourbon Street, but all the college girls have their shirts on.

Catching up

Sorry about the lack of posting, everyone. Things have been a little hectic lately, I haven't had much time to keep up with the feeds.

• Whee! Sam Brownback is dropping out of the presidential race! You know what this means? It means Mike Huckabee has eight more votes.
  
  
• Uncomfortably honest headline of the day: "Self-loathing is Key to Success."
  
  
• Hastert is leaving. As Skeleton Key once said so eloquently, "let the fat man swing."
  
  
• Everyone knows that Illinois is a blue state, and that Chicago in particular is run by the Democratic party whether state or federal authorities like it or not. However, that doesn't mean we're immune to the whims of highly under-qualified, election-stealing, nepotist dimwits who are only in power because of their fathers' names and who want to use tax money to do nothing good for the people who are being taxed. We have Todd Stroger and Richard M. Daley, who are going to rape the city on taxes (a proposed 11% sales tax, with increases on just about every other tax to boot) and won't explain what they're going to do with the money. I'll cut Daley some slack, since he has done some good for the city, but Stroger has done nothing but give six-figure salaries to his cousins for jobs that are either unnecessary or for which they are not qualified. Since my voice will not be heard, though, I'll just take some sadistic glee in wikivandalism WHICH I DID NOT COMMIT but found and enjoyed anyway.
  
  
• I don't have time to write a proper essay on the merits of file-sharing right now, but in light of ComCast's decision to block P2P programs, let me just tell you what I told Wyl. I have a dream. I have a dream where Chuck D beats a cowering Lars Ulrich with a shovel, while the RIAA headquarters burns behind him. In this dream, there's a PA system playing a pirated copy of Gil Scott-Heron's "The Revolution Will Not Be Televised." It may not be as eloquent or idealistic as, say, Martin Luther King's dream, but it sure sounds satisfying.
  
  
• Liberals are up in arms about the Democratic compromise on the new FISA bill that would absolve telecom companies for giving information to domestic intelligence agencies without a warrant. I am less upset. The laws on this topic have been such a clusterfuck ever since the PATRIOT Act that I don't think anyone's been quite sure what's legal. And since none of these laws are especially constitutional, but are laws nonetheless, the telecoms were in a bind. As long as these agencies are now absolutely and permanently beholden to courts, I'm willing to move forward from here, and get a fresh start.
  
  
• Sadly, No on book censorship: "Sadistic librarians do not roam the stacks in vinyl stiletto boots, rounding up hapless patrons and giving interpretive readings of Venus in Furs. You have to choose books to read - the books do not choose you."
  
  
• Mitt Romney on Hillary Clinton: "

  She hasn't run a corner store. She hasn't run a state. She hasn't run a city. She has never run anything. And the idea that she could learn to be president, you know, as an internship, just doesn't make any sense."

  Can you pick out the one word in that sentence that he REALLY SHOULD NOT HAVE USED?
  
  
• Some times I feel disappointed in the world we've made for ourselves. As a kid, I was expecting it to be a lot more like Akira or Demolition Man than it is. Then I see headlines like "Robot Cannon Kills 9" and I know we're still making progress towards our dystopian dream of electronically anesthetized life under the barrel of a gun.
  
  
• For a while now, I've been trying to figure out the dynamic of the GOP nomination race. It's too wide open and it just feels really disjointed and schizophrenic. But as I was reading this, I figured it out. Everyone is running against someone or something. Romney and Giuliani are running against each other, because they both believe in nothing save that they should be in charge. Fred Thompson is running against the expectations he built up of himself and losing. Mike Huckabee is running a similar race, against his own "dark horse" status: people are finally paying attention to him, but all they're saying is, "oh my god, I can't believe I'm paying attention to Mike Huckabee." John McCain is running against his defeat at the hands of an imbecile in 2000, and possibly against the Viet Cong. Ron Paul is running against the post-war era (and especially the post-9/11 era): in a recent e-mail, he lamented the demise of the Robert Taft wing of the Republican Party. On the fringes, Tom Tancredo is running against Mexico, Duncan Hunter is running against Communist China (and anonymity), and Alan Keyes is running against Satan's insidious influence. But the one thing they're all against is Billary Clinton.
  
  
• You know I hate to say this, but good for the GOP: they're stripping five states of delegates for holding their primaries to damned early. THAT MEANS YOU, NEW HAMPSHIRE.

A Clarification Seems Necessary

If my McCain piece earlier has left anyone scratching their heads, allow me to clarify:

Would a President McCain be able to win the Iraq War? I highly doubt it, even if he had the full support of Congress and the American people. So why would I state that, at least in terms of respect and trust, I think I could support a petition by McCain to attempt to mend what we have horribly shattered?

The thesis that I cling to in regard to John McCain's support of this folly of a war is that McCain cares about American troops strongly enough to not want a single one to have died in vain - hence his vehemence on "winning" the war. I often wonder if he was so traumatized by the Vietnam War that he doesn't want a recurrence of that crushing emotional and moral defeat, with the corresponding unearned black mark on the rank and file, even if it is, at least for the moment, completely out of his hands. Clearly other politicians, even some within his own party, would disagree with McCain's conclusion that the war must go on, but I don't think any of them - or any of us - have enough reason to believe there is something at work in McCain's rationale beyond the sincerest of good intentions.

At least that's what I really hope is driving him.

I was discussing this with Tim a few moments ago, and he summed up his (and my) sentiments quite nicely:

Since I don't think it's possible to make something of the situation in Iraq by continuing our military presence, I would prefer to cut our losses and let our fallen soldiers have died for hubris rather than letting more soldiers die in the name of the hubris of trying to rescue George Bush from his own legacy.

I'm sorry if I caused any confusion with my previous post - I'm no more for the continuation of this war than anyone else with everything to lose from participation in it. I merely wished to express my personal bewilderment over my reaction to the intersection of my respect for John McCain as a man and former POW and the possibility of McCain asking me (and others in my same predicament) to follow his footsteps down a very lonely path.

In which I am in disbelief of my own convictions.

I came to the most disconcerting realization this weekend, one I will share with you in a paragraph or two. First, some brief context:

I'm against the war in Iraq. I recently joined the IVAW after many months of deliberation. As a member of the Individual Ready Reserve (IRR), it's not a decision I arrived at lightly. I'm still subject to the Uniform Code of Military Justice (UCMJ), and while servicemen are authorized to belong to anti-war organizations, it's best not to let one's membership become common knowledge at the command level.

Nevertheless, I'm making my membership public now; the purpose of stating my active membership in such an organization is to throw my following remarks into high relief.

I'm quite concerned about being called back to active duty in order for the Marines to redeploy me to Iraq. It's a distinct possibility which crosses my mind every day, and it's a fear my family, particularly my fiancée, my parents, and my siblings, must cope with until 01 December 2010. I personally know guys I served with who have already been cleared for an involuntary return to active duty; one former colleague will receive his orders to deploy to Iraq early next year.

I'm opposed to this war at every turn, particularly the deception with which it was initiated and has continued to be falsely justified by the present administration. I've been continually disappointed by the failure of the Democratic Congress, lead by Nancy Pelosi and Harry Reid, to act on the mandate given last year. I'm equally disappointed by large portions of the American media for not turning up the heat on Congress, and - allow me to be completely honest - I'm deeply disappointed in the American people for not demanding Pelosi's and Reid's hides and heads for Congress' moral defeat at the hand of a ethically bankrupt Executive Branch.

Despite my signature on a covenant with the American people, I am having serious misgivings about answering any potential call to return to active duty. I do not believe this war has been argued for or waged in good faith, and I have come to believe this administration's repeated contempt for the men and women who have shed blood in Iraq morally absolves me from any document obliging me to obey the orders of this president. I swore an oath to support and defend the Constitution of the United States against all enemies, foreign and domestic, and it saddens me to say that today I see more domestic enemies than I do foreign.

And yet, after reading John McCain's remarks at the Values Voter Summit, I arrived at a troubling conclusion: If, someday, President McCain were to ask me to return to active duty and redeploy to Iraq, I might be persuaded to do so.

It would take qualifications, admissions of wrong-doing. I'm not a McCain-booster, and I certainly don't agree with his stance on the war. But I somehow believe in the deepest part of my heart that a fully-informed President McCain would not ask, much less demand, that I die in vain, and that he would be honest with me, and with this country, about the war.

If President McCain were to say in his inaugural address that the Bush Administration had made a mess of this war, devastated an entire nation, and destroyed America's reputation, I would listen to him and his plan for righting those wrongs. If President McCain made a personal commitment to rebuild and then immediately withdraw from Iraq, I would believe him. I would believe him, and, as my Commander-in-Chief, if John McCain were to request my return to active duty to help rebuild Iraq and right the Bush Administration's wrong, I would go.

In my own small way I helped make that mess over there in the desert, and if something were to happen here because of the ill-will we have generated over there, I could never forgive myself. Though part of me would be devastated by a redeployment's cost to my family and friends, part of me would feel absolved in trying to do right by the Iraqis, my country, and my conscience.

You see, unlike most members of the current administration, President McCain would know exactly what he was asking of me. Unlike this administration's greatest chicken hawk, John McCain did not have "other priorities in the '60s than military service." John McCain, whatever his policy on the Iraq War, has a deep respect - a fraternal love - for the men and women in the armed forces, and he would not callously squander their lives the way this administration has.

I don't agree with John McCain on some very significant issues, but if, as President, he requested that I step up one more time and try to do something on behalf of my country, I don't think I could refuse the man. He is one of the select few in Washington who truly understand the price of war, and I feel confident he wouldn't needlessly and cavalierly send servicemen into harm's way.

That said, I'm not certain there is any evidence or any plan even a man like John McCain could possess which would make me change my mind about this war. It's been a dirty, rotten farce from day one, and each death is the result of an administration which has quite likely done more to create ill-will for Americans abroad than any other in history. If we live in danger today (and we certainly do), it is substantially of this administration's making.

I'm not sure there's any way, no matter how well-intentioned, to fix that.