alternative hippopotamus

I would have to agree with the folks at NRO, if you want to pass the bail-out bill, do as suggested:

I have no visibility into the current machinations on Capitol Hill, but I’m with Noah Millman: as far as I can see, if I were a senior Democrat right now, I’d introduce a Democratic alternative tomorrow and pass it on a party line vote.

This assumes you agree with folks like Brad Delong that the $700B is not going to effect progressive initiatives including health care.

Washington Post-It Note:

U.S. Attorneys serve at the pleasure of the president and can be fired for any reason. But the contradictory explanations for the dismissals, and the steady release of internal email messages suggesting the plan had evolved over two years in consultation with White House officials, damaged the department’s reputation and credibility. The report will sift through all of the conflicting data about prosecutors who found themselves on lists prepared by D. Kyle Sampson, the former chief of staff for Gonzales.

At this point I’ve read enough of Jane Mayer’s “The Dark Side” to know that there is probably some memo written by David Addington that says that the President’s War-Time powers include the right to intervene in US elections. What’s left of the domestic common sense would argue that Karl Rove, Kyle Sampson, and Monica Goodling can’t staff the Justice Department with doctrinaire freepers who use the office to make elections Republican friendly.

I’m not arguing this as some hypothetical. This appears to be what’s taken place. I only wish there was a way of letting my local newspaper understand this.

I really don’t care what side of the debate you’re on. This is funny.

And, yes, in a dream world retrospective, Lehrer did baah like a sheep while black smoke came out of his nose.

I continue to look through analysis of last night’s debate. In the process, I ran across this assessment from Politico that used a metaphor I hadn’t run into yet: (my emphasis)

But the 90-minute session put on vivid display the side of McCain that his strategists believe is his best hope: an emphatic, impassioned, even indignant leader with a more seasoned and more visceral understanding of a cynical capital and a violent planet.

Obama’s Ole Miss strategy seemed more complex. He tied McCain to the unpopular policies of President Bush, as he always does. But even these shots were delivered with a cool and dispassionate style, hoping to impress viewers with precision, fluency and logic. That’s the way debates are won in academic halls, though not always on television sets.

Obama’s answers were crisp in places, a bit wandering in others, but always aimed at what he seemingly defined as his imperative for the evening: not to land hard punches on McCain but to reassure people about his own knowledge and poise in the realm of foreign affairs.

In the end, McCain sounded most often like a trumpet, Obama more like a violin.

It’s an interesting way of looking at the world. A society whose outlook is primarily martial would probably choose the trumpet. A society dominated by nuance and complex inter-relationships would choose the violin. I would like to suggest that the society we live is indeed dominated by such complexity. Yet we choose the trumpet every time.

I don’t know that the analogy is entirely on target. It may be McCain is more of a trombone, while Obama is more like an oboe. The spectacle of these debates then becomes an evening where entirely different woodwinds and brass attempt to imitate a trumpet. And that’s how we grade them.

Tonight I watched the debate between Obama and McCain at the 17th St. Cafe near Dupont Circle with a largely (perhaps entirely) progressive audience. Here’s what I learned: in a situation where the stakes are very high, and this presidential contest counts as such a situation, watch what you say. Tonight, for example, I thought that Obama had a very good night, but needs to be more clear on some of his attacks. In particular, there were two concerns that I had about his performance:

• He has a bad habit of saying “I agree with my opponent.” A debate is by its nature a compare and contrast kind of event. Saying why you’re the right guy, and your opponent is the wrong guy is entirely okay in that situation.
• Obama has either the excellent or horrible habit, depending on your point of view, of being congenial. Obama tends to allow his opponent to frame attacks. McCain’s overall theme for these debates is clearly that Obama does not have the experience to be president. He said as much in his closing. Obama’s theme is less clear. One of the people I was with argued that Obama’s theme was that McCain does not have the judgment to be president. I would argue that Obama could learn something about framing his attacks.

Here’s how WaPo’s Michael Shear and Shailagh Murray saw the framing of the debate:

McCain repeatedly cast Obama as naive, while the Democrat sought to link his opponent to the highly unpopular president, especially on the economy and Iraq policy. At the end, McCain stated unequivocally that “I honestly don’t believe that Senator Obama has the knowledge or experience” to be president.

Here’s how Jane Hamsher saw the standoff:

But the biggest problem for me was that McCain had a grab bag of adjectives he consistently used to characterize Obama — “naive, inexperienced” — and every time he repeated them, it was like money in the bank. He worked them in at every opportunity, and their cumulative effect wore into Obama as the evening went on. Obama missed the opportunity to do the same and characterize McCain as brittle, rash, impulsive and out-of-touch. His critiques were all over the place, and his failure to tie them together into a coherent narrative about McCain meant that he never really grazed the old buzzard.

That sounds pretty close to what I was saying. Now, no one is trying to argue that Obama didn’t win the debate. He did. I think there is an argument that Obama could learn something about creating a clearer message.

And here’s my point: saying that Obama was off in his framing was an opinion dismissed out of hand. None of the people I was with wanted to hear anything of the sort. I’m not even sure if we’re on speaking terms at this point.

This was rather surprising to me. Hopefully this is just an abberation of the intense political drama.

Palin loses the right-wing spinsters at NRO:

Only Palin can save McCain, her party, and the country she loves. She can bow out for personal reasons, perhaps because she wants to spend more time with her newborn. No one would criticize a mother who puts her family first.

Do it for your country.

Don’t do it Sarah! Without you, we just have the old geezer to heckle.

One of the great themes of Orwell’s body of work is the use of language to manipulate. Particularly those who are in a minority to manipulate the majority. Who can forget the elegance of the formulation that all animals are equal, though some more equal than others. Or how torture is the chief mission of the Ministry of Love.

Some of his best examples go beyond the use of language. The most taughtly constructed are insights to the workings of human psychology, if admittedly the dark side of humanity. The Two Minutes Hate is an example of how people in that fictional society are being controled by their anger.

People like me mine the political discourse for examples of Orwellian language. This hasn’t been hard work, as the wingnut contingent has been a reliable source of Orwellian, or at least fallacious rhetoric. What has changed this election season is the use of fallacious rhetoric by the left.

For example, substitute Obama for Emmanuel Goldstein and you have a pretty good understanding of a typical “Confluence” rant- and I would argue a reasonable explanation for what motivates the PUMAs. They are using anger. Anger towards losing the primary, anger towards Howard Dean, anger towards the unfairness of life, to perpetuate the PUMA brand.

I was going through the various PUMA and PUMA-related sites, when this sentence caught my eye:

The fracture of the party this year into Obamacans and Clinton Democrats, a split that numerically favors the latter while the former retains control of key intersections of power, has spurred most of my writing for the last year, trying to comprehend how we got to this point.

Now, if the bolded part of that quote were true, then I could understand some frustration. If the Democratic party majority were under the thumb of an elite minority, then that’s not going to work. But, what supports this assertion? Is this a re-hash of the “Clinton won the popular vote” argument? Since the PUMAs were arguing that the superdelegates should have over-ruled the results of the Democratic Primary, I find the argument to be somewhat disingenuous. But the key point here is that statements like that need some way of tracking their validity. At least propose a metric whereby you can show that the greater are being held in check by a powerful minority.

Statements like this one are, quite simply, incomprehensible:

The dark underbelly of this move is the presumption that the people who have been told their interests must wait will always be there for the Democrats because we have nowhere else to go. Specifically, this means African Americans, women voters and GLBT voters.

The DNC is putting the vast resources of the party to elect Obama, and this blogger believes that this is telling African Americans that they have no where to go? Lost me on that one.

But, let’s take a moment to look at this “no where else to go” rhetoric. It seems reasonable to me to say that in a two-party system, the Republican base can only turn to Republicans while the Democratic base can only turn to Democrats. In my case the most important issues are Energy and the Environment. Can I get what I want from the Republican Party? No, because their corporate base is it odds with what I want: greater regulation of the environment, reduced pollution, mass transit, higher CAFE standards. Is it somehow unfair that I can realistically only appeal to Democrats for what I want? I don’t see how. It’s just the reality of the situation. Is it unfair that someone who wants affirmative action to be abolished can only turn to Republicans for support? No, because the Democratic Party supports affirmative action.

Finally, I want to look at the use of charged language. From the same blog post:

Thus the electoral strategy of the current party leadership appears to be keep the yahoos down on the farm and secure the hegemony of Whole Foods Nation.

I’ll have to explain to the DC for Democracy folks that their Whole Foods Hegemony only serves to support a system where the yahoos are kept down on the farm.

Dan Froomkin points out a very common error that people make about the Bush Doctrine. The way Charlie Gibson put it was:

“The Bush doctrine, as I understand it, is that we have the right of anticipatory self-defense, that we have the right to a preemptive strike against any other country that we think is going to attack us.”

A more accurate version is:

“Incompetence and Internal Warfare.”

“A noun, a verb, and 9.11″ would also have been acceptable.

I really have to pay more attention to McPalin. These right wing nut cases want to raise our taxes: (Steve Benen)

On the substance, Klein is exactly right. McCain’s proposal would count the healthcare benefits Americans receive from their employers as taxable income, leaving tens of millions of middle-class families paying higher taxes and leaving millions more without insurance behind.

But on the politics, I’m not sure if Klein’s observation is quite right. He finds it “amazing” the Obama campaign hasn’t pointed this out yet. But here’s the thing: the Obama campaign has pointed this out. Obama talks about it on the stump, and his team have been writing about it for quite a while.

It hasn’t generated any real interest from political reporters, though, because a) it’s substantive; b) it takes a few seconds to explain; c) there’s no provocative video to accompany the story; and d) it makes McCain look bad.

Now, I’m not objecting just to the idea of someone raising my taxes. I’m objecting to them raising taxes so they can bring more and better wars to the Middle East. Raising taxes to create a better world? That’s socialism. Raising taxes so they can bring Christianity to the infidels? Republicanism.

It would be easy to dismiss the Microsoft Zune player. In a time and place where the iPod dwarves everything around it, why second-guess a cultural icon?

I would say that both are engineering marvels. What isn’t clear to the observer is that the Zune API is a subset of the Xbox API. That means that, yes, it would be possible to port some of the games running on XBox to the Zune. I’m assuming that the 2d graphics are just an initial serving and the idea is to offer some variant of DirectX. That’s my assumption in the long term.

Meanwhile, the iPod has well… pretty much everything a geek could want. Maybe a slightly better audio codec? (I give a slight edge to the Zune in this regard.)

The point being: I’m glad these dudez at Wired haven’t written the Zune out completely. Maybe they’ll push the Zune engineers a bit. I’d like to see something come of this “Macrosoft Corp” or whatever it is their calling themselves.