alternative hippopotamus

Sometimes I feel like politics is like a restaurant where you go in, and the hostess gives you the choice of one of two sections you can sit in, neither one of which is what you had in mind. Would you like Smoking or Torture? Bankruptcy or Permanent War? Or, as the title of this post suggests: would you prefer to be ignored by the Democratic Party, or victimized by the Republicans?

Since this is the result of a conversation I had at Drinking Liberally last Thursday, it may help if I put it in that context. The discussion began with who we liked in the 2008 presidential race, and who we’d likely support. Inevitably, the question of Hillary Clinton came up, and I expressed the view that if Senator Clinton were the Democratic nominee, I’d have to look seriously at a third party.

To that someone replied: “I’ve got one word for you. Ralph Nader.”

Fair enough. The world may never recover from Nader’s 2000 Green Party candidacy. I’m not even sure if the Green Party has recovered.

Another said: “In our system of government, it is essentially a choice between the two parties.”
The first one said: “When the Democrats have a comfortable majority, then there’ll be room for a third party nominee. We’re not there yet.”

The problem, as I see it, is that while the Republican party spends a great deal of effort making sure that their base is taken care of, the same thing doesn’t appear to be true with the Democrats. The environmental movement, for instance, is a natural part of the Democratic Party base, but, how shall I put it? Maybe another analogy will help.

If the Democratic Party base is like the Brady Bunch, then the environmental movement is like Jan Brady. Greg has problems with the football coach. Kind of like foreign policy vis-a-vis Iran. Peter’s voice just changed, and can’t sing with the band. In the analogy, like our veterans returning from foreign wars. Cindy just lost a tooth, but learned how to whistle. That’s a tribute to a future universal healthcare sytem. Bobby just broke Carol’s antique vase, and now Marcia has to get the cheerleader’s to raise the money so they can by a new one. Fortunately, Alice’s famous oatmeal cookies save the day. That’s a tougher one in the analogy department, but I’m pretty sure it has something to do with saving Social Security. Mike Brady really wanted to do serious acting, and AIDS awareness. Or, at least Robert Reed, the guy who played him did. In these analogies it’s hard to remember where life leaves off and role playing begins.

Jan Brady is like the way the Democratic Party sees environmentalists. She gets talked about, but the other kids take up so much energy, that she’s never front and center. Okay, there was the episode where she crashed her bike, got glasses and invented an imaginary boyfriend, but I can’t be the only one who found that kind of sad.

The Democratic Party certainly talks about the environment in a way much better than the Republicans do. I just wish that talk would turn into action.

For instance, I was trying to find what Hillary Clinton’s views are on CAFE standards. If you’re not familiar with CAFE standards, they’re an average figure of fuel efficiency for a manufacturer’s fleet of cars and trucks. For the last ten years they haven’t increased. On this key environmental topic we’re very different from the rest of the world.

Here’s a 2005 article from Grist on the subject:

And where were leading Democrats this summer when the energy bill chockablock with Big Oil handouts — and embarrassingly weak on support for renewable energy and efficiency — was being rammed through Congress? In June, Sen. Dick Durbin (D-Ill.) introduced an amendment to the bill that would have moderately increased fuel-economy standards for automobiles, but it got support from only 28 senators — not including Clinton and John Kerry (D-Mass.).

“It was clear that the amendment didn’t have enough votes to pass,” explained Wayland, “so some Dems decided they didn’t want to expend political capital on a vote that would alienate potential campaign support from Detroit.”

In the end, more than half of Democrats in the Senate voted in favor of the full energy bill, including Durbin, Lieberman, Obama, and Cantwell. If Clinton wants to be a leader on clean, forward-looking energy policy, she could start by convincing her own Democratic colleagues.

With anger over soaring fuel costs and anxiety over U.S. dependence on foreign oil, the nation is primed as never before to hear substantive new energy proposals. Whether Clinton — or any other leader, Democrat or Republican — can meet that demand with more than lofty rhetoric remains to be seen.

When I was a youngster, adults would tell me stories about the Soviet government that sounded just like this:

At one point, according to Fish and Wildlife Service Director H. Dale Hall, MacDonald tangled with field personnel over designating habitat for the endangered Southwestern willow flycatcher, a bird whose range is from Arizona to New Mexico and Southern California. When scientists wrote that the bird had a “nesting range” of 2.1 miles, MacDonald told field personnel to change the number to 1.8 miles. Hall, a wildlife biologist who told the IG he had had a “running battle” with MacDonald, said she did not want the range to extend to California because her husband had a family ranch there.

In another incident described in the report, MacDonald argued with Hall over the Kootenai River sturgeon, a fish in Montana and Idaho that needs a certain level of river flow in order to spawn. Field biologists determined that the sturgeon’s needed flow level ranged between 2.3 and 5.9 cubic feet per second, but MacDonald instructed them to cite only the 5.9 figure, which would have aided dam operators. After Hall demanded she put the request in writing, the report noted, “she ultimately relented and they kept the 2.3 to 5.9 range.”

Just as troubling, MacDonald twice sent internal EPA documents — one involving water quality management — to individuals whose e-mail addresses ended in “chevrontexaco.com.”

It’s like School House Rock, except with less School House and more Xenophobia:

You do not know me. But I am on the lookout for you. You are my enemy. And I am yours.

I am John Doe.

I am traveling on your plane. I am riding on your train. I am at your bus stop. I am on your street. I am in your subway car. I am on your lift.

I am your neighbor. I am your customer. I am your classmate. I am your boss.

I am John Doe.

[make scratchy noise and do a little dance]

I will act when homeland security officials ask me to “report suspicious activity.”

I will embrace my local police department’s admonition: “If you see something, say something.”

I am John Doe.

I will protest your Jew-hating, America-bashing “scholars.”

I will petition against your hate-mongering mosque leaders.

I am John Doe. Hear me Roe. In numbers too big to igno’.

LA Times, lightly stolen from Froomkin:

“Bush is approaching this intensifying debate with what appears to be utter denial about his political situation. . . .

“Increasingly, the White House is demonstrating not only defiance but disdain in its dealings with Congress. . . .

“Bush has approached Congress with the attitude of a teacher determined to discipline unruly kindergarteners, not as the head of a co-equal branch of government.”

I wouldn’t be surprised if deep down Bushie believed that the parts about the co-equal branches of government was just something the authors of the Constitution put in to get it passed, and maybe partly to keep feelings from getting hurt. After all, the president is the only useful part of government, according to this view, and in a budget crunch we could always get rid of the other two. Maybe some of the Democrats don’t like the idea of Bush being the supreme decider-in-chief, and instead of calling him a king prefer to emphasize the notion of an Executive branch with power distributed across the entire branch, and not concentrated in a single invidual. But hey, if the scepter fits.

In my mind he’ll always be Lord Frat Bush.

I know there’s some people who are going to be confused by the lede of today’s Glenn Greenwald post:

The new online political magazine, The Politico, is a pernicious new presence in our media landscape. As I noted the other day, it really is nothing more than the Drudge Report dressed up with the trappings of mainstream media credibility. Today, Will Bunch of the Philadelphia Daily News writes on his blog about what is merely the latest episode (of many) proving how closely coordinated The Politico is with The Drudge Report. It is not hyperbole to say that the former is all but an arm of the latter.

As a close observer of inside-the-beltway-grassroots politics (let’s just coin a new term and call them “beltroots”) I can tell you this is going to rub some people the wrong way.

First, the beltroots don’t look at Politico as rightwing. Looking at the comments on the site I’d have to conclude that the VRWC pwns Poltico, but I can tell you anecdotally that others disagree. Second, while the beltroots would agree that the Drudge Report is a scandal sheet, they would dispute the notion of any coordination between Drudge and the Republican party. To put it more generally, even reasonably well-read people here in our fair city think that the notion of a Republican Noise Machine (RNM) is hyperbolic figure of speech.

While I can’t stalk the wild arbusto in a single blog post, I can explain why I believe that Drudge coordinates with the RNC: because the RNC has admitted as much in the Washington Post:

At the Republican National Committee, leaking items to the Drudge Report is an official part of communications strategy.

During the 2004 campaign, current and former RNC staff members said, opposition research nuggets on Kerry were almost always leaked first to the Web site. Sometimes they were trivial — such as the fact that Kerry got expensive haircuts at the Christophe salon — other times they were controversial quotes from his days as a Vietnam War protester. All together, these and other items contributed to Kerry losing control of his public image.

Ken Mehlman, the RNC chairman and head of Bush’s reelection campaign, said his operatives leaked to Drudge because it inevitably drove wider coverage, including to old media organizations: “He puts something up and they have to follow it.”

Last year, a delegation of RNC officials flew to Miami Beach, where Drudge lives, for a dinner at the Forge steakhouse to introduce the Internet maven to Matt Rhodes, the party’s new opposition research director.

Yes, Virginia there really is a Republican Noise Machine. And that’s why you should take the possibility that Politico is a slightly dressed up version of Drudge seriously.

Like many of you who’ve seen some version of this story about Rick Santorum turning to documentary filmmaking, I for one am glad that facts have a liberal bias. The documentary film business even more so.

From what I’ve seen, what passes as conservative art relies on an unhealthy dose of making stuff up. The Path to 9.11 is a good example of this. Virtually nothing other than names and dates had a basis in fact. Nothing in the film reflected the reality of the Clinton and Bush administration’s pursuit of terrorism. Gone, of course, were the scenes of Bush panic-stricken in a Florida classroom, hiding in secure locations, or of Cheney taking control.

(Did you know that Rumsfeld, not Cheney, was next in the chain of command that day? Don’t they brief the President’s staff on these things? Full story at the NYT, lightly stolen from Shakespeare’s Sister.)

My guess is that Santorum will have trouble raising money to make a documentary. Still, I can’t help but wonder what he’d call it: Fahrenheit Man on Dog? Or maybe something closer to his own life story: An Inconvenient Election.

Avedon observes here that we may be experiencing a cool front as of late:

Like many of the 2nd and 3rd-tier bloggers [ed: I’ll flatter myself and say that I’m an 8th tier blogger], I’ve noticed a tailing-off of hits over the last several months. Kos and Atrios can’t be the only people who purged their blogrolls, since I would have been unaffected by those (because Kos never had me on his, and Atrios kept me on) - but I’m definitely seeing fewer incoming referrals lately, partly because some old friends have gone dark, but also because some people have similarly purged me, if no one else, from their blogrolls.

It’s not just the blogrolls, though. I’ve noticed even in myself a greater tendency to look first at some of the bigger blogs and to spend less time going through the smaller ones. There’s a feedback effect there as their authors are likely to do the same thing, with the result that everyone is linking something from Eschaton, and I don’t feel much inspiration to link to something on a small blog that just quotes Atrios and doesn’t add much original content. But, like me, many people have had a decreasing interest in doing much original writing, and I guess many of us feel that either it’s already been said numerous times over the years or else Digby just said it in the latest post.

First, regarding readership and the decline thereof. Some trends are cyclical. Over time, people are more and then less interested in reading blogs, or other ways of keeping up with the latest current events. And, of course the 2006 elections did change the tone and the nature of the political dialog in this country. I continue to enjoy my favorite blogs, though certainly I don’t feel that the need is as great as the period between 2002 and 2006, a period I’ll always think of as the Dark Years. Thankfully survival has given place to a period of oversight, which, while great for healing the damage, may mean there’s less urgency for the stuff you can get from the blogs.

To put it an entirely different way: I had made a promise to myself that after the 2004 election was over, and Kerry became the 44th POTUS, I would take a break from the slings and arrows of outrageous political fortune. As it turned out, that break was not to be.

Even worse, the Republican-controlled House, Senate, and White House saw this as an opportunity to inflict some serious damage. Do you remember that chorus of youngsters in Brooks Brothers’ suits chanting: “Hey hey. Ho ho. Social Security has got to go?” Meanwhile, Bush was touring the country explaining how we’d all get rich from Private Accounts, ejecting anyone who voiced dissent, or even might voice dissent. Do you know how close we came to drilling the rest of the coast of Alaska? Or how about cutting terrorism funding for NYC and DC, giving the money instead to Republican-friendly states? Then there’s the extra-ordinary rendition, the end of habeous corpus, and the Gonzo-approved torture policies. On the lighter side there was the attempted Republican coup against Public Broadcasting.

Now I understand the old Chinese curse: may you live in interesting times. As Thorton Wilder put it, we got through it by the skin of our teeth. It’s not a surprise that some of us need a breather.

The Republican Noise Machine hasn’t gone away, of course. Still, while it’s true that they’re gearing up to fight the fight against global warming, right now they’re fuming over Al Gore’s Oscar, and staging pseudo debates on NPR. When the fight over Global Warming gets serious, as it will in the not-too-distant-future, I trust that some of us will return to the fray.

Since Avedon mentioned blog rolls specifically, I wanted to comment on how my reading habits have changed. These days I read pretty much everything through an rss reader. Usually using bloglines on my mobile phone at a favorite pub or cafe. Even newspapers I mostly read on the mobile using pressdisplay’s interface. I can’t exactly call it one of life’s simple joys, but it’s a great way to spend a Sunday afternoon, curled up in front of the imaginary fire at Elephant&Castle with their very real wifi. A loaf of bread, a jug of wine, and TCP/IP.

I’d suggest that blogrolls, while being a way to acknowledge the work of your favorite bloggers, may not be the most useful way. Instead, I’d like to suggest something I started to experiment with a couple of months ago: create your own rss feed of articles and blogposts that you find interesting, and post it on your blog. Originally I did this by hand, but that was too much of a chore. Social bookmark sites like del.icio.us automate the process, and well, you can see the result in the righthand column of this page.

The blame-the-left-first crowd laments:

In their assessment of what is going on in the world, they seem to start off with a default assumption that we are in the wrong. The “we” can take different forms: the United States government, the vast mass of middle-class Americans, white people, affluent people, churchgoing people or the advanced English-speaking countries.

If by “we” you mean “you,” that is, people like Michael Barone, then I would agree that I start off with a “default assumption that we are in the wrong.” And, you know what? It’s a pretty good rule of thumb. If you start off by assuming that the opposite of whatever NRO, Powerline, Malkin, LGF, etc. says is correct, then you have a decent first approximation to the truth.

From the comments to this MyDD post comes a link to a very helpful resource. It’s a comic book from Duke Law School discussing copyright and fair use.

That said, the premise of the original post was questionable:

Progressive Democrats don’t like unfair and illegal strangeholds on free speech under the guise of copyright. This Larry Lessig Op-Ed on Viacom suing youtube is worth reading. Viacom’s stranglehold on the political and legal process has made it impossible to get clear rules on copyright.

The Viacom/YouTube lawsuit is a very poor example of big business putting a stranglehold on internet free speech. YouTube, recognizing Viacom’s rights to the videos, had agreed to take down popular clips from Comedy Central, and was negotiating with Viacom for a licensing deal. YouTube didn’t want to pay Viacom’s price, and was lax about taking down copyrighted videos. Since then, Viacom has signed a licensing deal with Joost, for all you Comedy Central fans.

Here’s what I find so frustrating about YouTube: they have a parasitic relationship to content. The premise of the company was to make it as easy as possible for their users to steal the work of others, meanwhile, the YouTube founders sell advertising. That’s the YouTube formula.

I’ll also point out that the Duke Law comic book on copyright law is careful to distinguish between Fair Use, and theft. One of the requirements is that the use of the copyrighted material be “transformative.” A new work of creativity emerges. As a parody, commentary, critque, etc. The point is, something new needs to be created. Copying clips from the Daily Show or Colbert Report is not creating anything new. Unless we’ve reached the sad point where setting the VCR to REC at 11:00pm is considered an artistic act.

Here’s what I’m saying: if YouTube stays in business it needs to start paying content creators cash money. Either that, or it becomes a site that distributes political ads (and other forms of advertising) without compensation. Along with the clips of people on fire riding a bicycle that YouTube users seem to crave.