Archive for the ‘Political’ Category

July 19, 2010

Monday, July 19th, 2010

I know it isn’t as sexy as Sarah Palin making up the word “refudiate”, but Eli Lake, a respected foreign policy commentator, takes note of the possibility that Egypt’s president, Mubarak, will soon die of cancer at age 82 and what that will mean to U.S. interests in the MidEast.

A little sexy, if not as sexy as Blogblah’s convertible driving image, is the Washington Post’s opening of a series on America’s intelligence community, the billions spent in waste and redundancy and the hundreds of thousands of wankers shuffling papers in Top Secret.

Since I’m talking politics again today despite my realization of the total impossibility of it having any practical effect, there’s a smart look at the hard right turn of the GOP into the Tea Party by Jonathon Chait at The New Republic; it turns out there’s a downside to playing to the radicalized angry white south. More than that, it turns out that there’s a limit beyond which the public Tea Party leadership is unwilling to go — it won’t let talk radio host Mark Williams of the Tea Party Express express his “satiric” letter to Abe Lincoln from the NAACP’s “colored people”. The Tea Party umbrella organization kicked out Williams and his organization from their organization as the big tent gets smaller.

My review of “Inception”:
Freud goes into the Matrix, plot gets muddled but Escher climbs his stairs until Keanu…er…Leo DiCaprio goes “Whoa!”

The oilspill in perspective (updated)

Wednesday, June 23rd, 2010

hat tip to The Duty

A strategic perspective on the oil spill and outrage HERE.

A representative quote:

We Americans have been abused again and again by those we trusted. First it was the banks. Now it’s the oil companies. It’s not that we had some wide-eyed innocence about how moral and ethical they were – this is business after all.

But we expected them to have a clue how to do their jobs. We expected the banks to be smart enough to know not to put the entire world’s financial system at risk just for a few extra winnings at the gambling table. We expected the oil companies, who were engaging in acts of simply astounding engineering prowess, to have worked out contingency plans to mitigate the obvious risks of drilling holes in the ocean floor 5,000 feet down.

It’s not even that mistakes were made or things went wrong. What’s enraging Americans is the completely cavalier attitude these ultra-rich executives have shown in the face of their utter stupidity. Watching these executives give testimony, it feels like we’re watching teenagers claim “I dunno” after they wrecked the family car in a joyride.

In today’s news, the spew goes unchecked as capping failed and nine miles of beach in Pensacola was covered in sludge, per Anderson Cooper.

A Meme Too Far

Wednesday, June 9th, 2010

Just want to make a short observation about political reporting. For weeks, the “meme” (a sort of made up word I don’t particularly like, but which is serviceable for this purpose) has been that it’s an anti-incumbent year and that the Dems, being the incumbents, will have more than the normal share of problems for a White House in an off-year election. A Deepwater Horizon of digital ink has been spilled about this idea.

Vintage RayBans

I respectfully dissent.

Look at last night’s election results without any coloring.

On the East Coast in So. Car., Mrs. Nikki Haley is cruising towards being elected the first woman governor of that state.

In Arkansas, Sen. Blanche Lincoln fought off a stiff male challenge from the left (yes, I intended that).

In Nevada, Sue Lowden and Sharron Angles vied for the right to challenge Majority Leader Harry Reid.

In California, the Republican Party nominated Meg Whitman for Governor and Carley Fiorina to face incumbent U.S. Sen. Barbara Boxer.

I’m not inclined to make too much of this, except to say I think too little has been made of an election in which so many women have played such a prominent role and been so successful at such a high level. I’ll also note that Oklahoma is very likely to have its first woman governor. With the exception of Sen. Lincoln, all those women are Republicans, which seems counterintuitive on several levels considering the policy stances of that party vis the Democratic Party.

Something is going on that has little to do with incumbency, it seems to me, but it also seems that it may be too difficult for political writers to think and write about.

I’m going to leave it there and let you guys draw your own conclusions.

Blogblah

October 12, 2009

Monday, October 12th, 2009

shut up, he explained

shut up, he explained


The Dow Jones Industrial Ave. “flirted with” 10,000 on the New York Stock Exchange today. Isn’t that just like fickle lady luck. One day, you’ve got 14,000 on your arm, the next thing you know and you’re slumming with some 7000s and the best you can do after months and months is to just flirt with five figures. A few trillion here and few trillion there adds up and there’s nothing like a trillion in the wallet to make you handsome.
Blogblah

October 11, 2009

Sunday, October 11th, 2009

Blogblah

Blogblah


Harry Truman integrated the armed forces with a stroke of the pen and Obama could do the same for gays in the military. Instead, he gave his 2007 campaign speech to the Human Rights Campaign dinner last night, once more promising he would do something great, but just not now, just not yet, wait some more.
The fierce urgency of the end of my projected second term, you might say.

* * *
In a column in today’s New York Times, Frank Rich writes about a topic that’s been really bothering me lately: why the hell are the discredited neocons — who have been consistently wrong for more than a decade about everything foreign policy — still on the Sunday talk shows?
When does Stephanopolous look William Kristol right in the eye and say: is this like when you said the Iraq war would be over in 6 weeks? Is this the same as when you told us we’d be greeted as liberators in Baghdad? Is there any part of the “robust” assertion of American military power you advocate that has actually succeeded in doing good for us?
And, yes, I would include Sen. McCain, who has a foreign policy that is based on nationalistic fighter pilot chutzpah and not any serious and in-depth study of global issues, and who, I will remind you, lost the presidential elections rather badly.
They aren’t foreign policy experts, they just play one on TV. (more…)