alternative hippopotamus

On the front page of the Washington Postnasal we learn candidate Obama is guilty of impersonating a Muslim during a presidential campaign, or at least insufficiently denying any Islamic influence:

I’d be fascinated to hear how the story got assigned, who thought this was serving the community, etc. Did the Graham family maybe lose a bet with Roger Ailes or something?

Were you planning to go to this year’s climate conference in Bali? I wasn’t. But, I may go to the Second Life link-up:

Join the Bali Conference - Virtually!
At the UN Climate conference in Bali in December, key discussions will be held to sketch out the post-Kyoto roadmap. OneWorld is opening a virtual window on the Bali Summit, so you can participate from the comfort of your own home or office!

This entry is for those of you out there who like trivia of a historical nature. Of which I’m certainly one.

I was watching a show on the History Channel on the Seven Voyages of Zheng He. Apparently, He (the context mandates the capitalization, despite the entendre with the Divine “He”) was a larger than life explorer figure from the early 1400’s who commanded a sizable Chinese armada under the 3rd emperor of the Ming Dynasty (see this Wikipedia article for more details).

There’s a pretty decent argument that Zheng He, also known as Ma Sanbao, was the historical basis for Sinbad the Sailor from the Tales of the Arabian Nights.

There’s a controversial theory that Zheng He had made it to the America’s well before Columbus. And that he was a eunuch.

In retrospect that means we could have been known as the District of Sinbad. And that we could have no testicles.

Go read Someone more relevent

I’d like to ask a question based on a common theme found in today’s Glenn Greenwald Salon editorial, and Dan Froomkin’s White House Watch. Both are partly motivated by the timing of the Federalist Society Convention in our fair city, which I think we all agree is icky.

Glenn excerpts Bush’s speech at the Zombie Fest, aghast that Bush appears to claim to respect the constitution, and the three branches of government as co-equals. Here’s what Bush said:

When the Founders drafted the Constitution, they had a clear understanding of tyranny. They also had a clear idea about how to prevent it from ever taking root in America. Their solution was to separate the government’s powers into three co-equal branches: the executive, the legislature, and the judiciary. Each of these branches plays a vital role in our free society. Each serves as a check on the others. And to preserve our liberty, each must meet its responsibilities — and resist the temptation to encroach on the powers the Constitution accords to others.

I was walkin’ down the street, and was ambushed by these dudes from the Congress and Judiciary. They encroached on me, shoving all kinds of checks and balances in my face. So I showed ‘em who’s boss, heh heh. Just sayin’: some of us are more co-equal than others, heh heh.

If I could hazard a guess to what Bush means by preserving our liberty, I guess he’s picturing a world where young aristocrats blow-up frogs with firecrackers. That’s the liberty that needs to be preserved.

Froomkin instead focuses on the way in which Bush has permeated the Supreme Court with the candidates for Zombiehood that you will find in this week’s Whigathon:

So last night’s 25th anniversary gala for the Federalist Society, complete with a keynote from Bush himself, was an orgy of self-celebration. Membership in (or at least affiliation with) the reactionary legal group is practically a requirement for Bush appointees to the bench or top legal jobs.

Which brings me to my question: Why? Why do the things they do? Why do tthey care so much about expanding the power of the president? And, since this is a purely neo-Republican movement, why don’t they consider the possibility that the president could be, very soon indeed, not a neo-Republican?

The evangelical part of Bush’s base I can actually understand. They start with the idea that Christ, the Messiah was the Son of the Creator of the Universe. But, Christ did many other things beyond this, various miracles: turning wine into a prohibition against wine or raising from homosexuality into leprosy. This while teaching a philosophy based on the idea that the unborn were sacred, but the living needed to pay their own health insurance.

To fix the institution of Christianity into a permanent foundation, Christ would return to Jerusalem where he would defeat the anti-Christ, who walks among us. Then, he would throw all the non-Christians into a lake of fire, and there would be an enormous secular barbecue.

Therefore, it’s important for evangelicals to get someone on the court who will overturn Roe v. Wade.

Crazy? Sure. But, though there be madness, there is method in it.

The Federalist Society on the other hand? I’m totally lost on their motivation.

The Red Coats, assuming the form of the Federalist Society, intend to invade our fair city starting Thursday:

The theme for this year’s convention is “Shining City Upon a Hill: American Exceptionalism.”

Winthrop’s “City on a Hill” sermon meets American Exceptionalism. One of these things is not like the other thing.

As you probably recall from high school English, the sermon was actually named “A Model of Christian Charity.” Here’s the part alluded to:

For we must consider that we shall be as a city upon a hill. The eyes of all people are upon us. So that if we shall deal falsely with our God in this work we have undertaken…we shall be made a story and a by-word throughout the world. We shall open the mouths of enemies to speak evil of the ways of God…We shall shame the faces of many of God’s worthy servants, and cause their prayers to be turned into curses upon us til we be consumed out of the good land whither we are going.

Winthrop is admonishing us to behave as if we are an example to all humanity. To behave as a constant source of illumination and good will. To be, as suggested by one Jesus of Nazareth, the light of the world.

The American Exceptionalists have managed to mangle this idea until it means just the opposite: that somehow we have been granted a special relationship to the Omnicient, so that we operate not under the laws that the rest of the world is obliged to, but under our own special set of laws. So, we can invade countries, torture fellow human beings, rig elections, bomb our enemies, etc., all with complete impunity because we’ve been given that divine right.

I’m delighted to report that reading ebooks is soup. By that I’m referring, of course, to the old Campbell’s soup commercial where some young consumer-to-be asks his mother “Is it soup yet?” We gather from the visual image of the steam rising from the bubbling pot of pureed tomatoes that it is indeed soup, and all is well in the sample household. Picture a Sony Reader with steam rising from the pages of Kevin Phillips’ “American Theocracy”, and you’ll gather my meaning. The Sony Reader is soup, and just as tasty as the printed volume.

While I’ve been reading ebooks on my Palm TX for the last year or so, it’s important to remember that the TX is more like a Swiss Army knife than a precision tool. Here, there’s a huge difference between the two devices. The Palm TX (and for that matter all of its cousins, including the Treo) have an illuminated screen. This is ideal for reading in dark places, such as a pub, but not so good for reading in sunlight. Well, let’s face it, it’s just awful. The Sony Reader has the basic properties of a book: sunlight good, dark bad. The advantage, I suppose, is that you can always add a conventional book light to the Sony Reader, if you want to read in the dark. To read off an illuminated device you’d pretty much have to carry a shoe box around with you, which you’d have to cradle in such a way that you could get a decent view of the device while shading the light. I would posit that would come across as eccentric.

In the hands-on way that I take on any recommendation of a device, I don’t just play with it for a day or two. No, in this case, I read both the pdf version of “The Authoritarians” and Kevin Phillips “American Theocracy” cover to cover. Currently, I’m reading the classic science fiction novel “Neuromancer” and Jeffrey Toobin’s “The Nine.” Granted, with pdf files formatted for 8.5×11 you need to go into landscape mode (pressing the “+” button for 5 seconds), I’d still say that the experience is the same as reading a paper back.

Here’s the rub. The Sony Reader costs $300 which puts it price-wise in the same league as an ipod. Granted, ebooks are usually discounted relative to the print editions. So, let’s say on average the ebook costs $3 less. That means you’d have to read 100 books over, say, a 3 year horizon to cost-justify buying a Sony Reader. While there are certainly people in that category, I’d venture to guess that most of us read, say 10-15 books a year. That’s about what I read, anyway. So, it’s hard to justify the cost that way.

Sony is sweetening the difference by giving 100 free downloads in the Classics category if you purchase a Reader now and download before January 2008. Certainly, there’s some classics that I’ve always meant to read, but never have got around to: I’ve never read “War and Peace”, for instance, or “Anna Karenina.” And, yes, it would be nice to have Plato’s Republic on hand, or Thoreau’s “Walden,” my favorite books, and volumes that I go through again and again.

I’m just not sure you can justify the cost, at least by any Math other than the special math Karl Rove used during the 2006 elections.

For that matter, I’m not sure you can justify an iPod on cost alone. You would need to be drawn to the aesthetics of the device. There is a kind of function-meets-art that hippopotami such as myself are attracted to in this case. Both the iPod and Sony Reader fall into this category.

Via TPMCafe, probably the highest kind of discussion we can have. Susan Faludi posits that gender notions in a post-9.11 world are causative to actions such as the invasion of Iraq. An intriguing hypothesis, but as a commenter points out: How would you verify or disprove it?

There’s something to be said for the original thesis. Violence and crowd emotions are tied up with this notion of machismo. There is, for example, a reason why you never see anyone reading Chekhov at a Redskin’s game. At the same the commenter is just right: that’s the kind of thesis that you need to be able to translate to empirical phenomenon. He poses a thought experiment where Al Gore, and not the Arbustomeister, was elected in 2000. Would that have led to a different historical outcome?

Doesn’t this process put the lie to what lovers of truth everywhere find so objectionable about the National Review, Powerline, Instapundit, David Brooks, Norman Podhoretz, Michael Gerson, Fox News, … just stop me when you’ve heard enough. The problem is that they throw out things like “Candidate X is too left-wing” “The American people will reject X’s quasi-Socialist views on healthcare, ” or “Democrats are cutting and running just when the surge is working,” or the ubiquitous “This will help the Republicans.” These are just loose formulations that the Theocrats for Plutocracy that currently run our military-industrial-banking complex hope to beat into your cerebral cortex by repetition.

To all of them the proper response is: That thing you just said. Is it true?

Every so often the Bushies will go: “We didn’t say Iraq was about 9.11. At any rate, the president certainly never said anything like that.” This, taken from his press conference with Sarkozy, is for the next time they trot out that old gray mare:

The interesting challenge we face in the world in which we live is there are murderers who will try to stop the advance of democracy, particularly in the Middle East. Isn’t it interesting that the places where there’s most violence is where there’s young democracies trying to take hold, whether it be Iraq or Lebanon or in the Palestinian Territories? And the call for nations such as ourselves is to support those who want to live in freedom. Freedom is the great alternative to the ideology of people who murder the innocent to achieve their political objectives — by the way, the very same ones that came and killed 3,000 of our citizens.

As a special bonus, let’s watch as Bush explains how great it is to be dictator, I mean, run a press conference in the US as opposed to France:

[BUSH:] You want to call on somebody?

PRESIDENT SARKOZY: You know, in France, I don’t choose, I don’t pick the journalists.

PRESIDENT BUSH: You don’t get to choose? Who chooses? I choose? (Laughter.) Who would you like me to choose? (Laughter.) Oh, he chose. Wait a minute, it didn’t last very long, did it?

PRESIDENT SARKOZY: I didn’t choose, I indicated a general direction. (Laughter.)

You know that’s funny, but not what I call “ha-ha” funny.

Holy Parisian Burger! (That’s what I ususally ordered)

After 40 years, the Childe Harold shut down Saturday for the last time. The owner made no announcement, saying he was too grief-stricken over losing something that has been in his blood since he was a teenager washing dishes in the kitchen and, later, broiling steaks for Springsteen between sets.

“This place has been my life,” Hossein Shirvani said yesterday, seated at the bar as a friend removed mementos from the walls. Down came a framed copy of Springsteen’s contract to play at the Childe Harold in May of 1973, two years before he landed on the cover of Time and Newsweek and became world famous.

DC for Democracy held a couple of their parties at Childe Harold on the third floor where the stage used to be. The weekend bartender also worked at the Democrats club during the week. There were plenty of connections between Childe Harold and the progressive scene in DC.

Damn.