Video Showdown
Obama:
Someone is lucky elections don’t work like American Idol.
Consider this an open thread.
by John Cole| 51 Comments
This post is in: Previous Site Maintenance
Video Showdown
Obama:
Someone is lucky elections don’t work like American Idol.
Consider this an open thread.
by John Cole| 16 Comments
This post is in: Military, Politics, War, General Stupidity
The Politico:
According to late February polling conducted by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, 53 percent of Americans — a slim majority — now believe “the U.S. will ultimately succeed in achieving its goals” in Iraq. That figure is up from 42 percent in September 2007.
The percentage of those who believe the war in Iraq is going “very well” or “fairly well” is also up, from 30 percent in February 2007 to 48 percent today.
The situation in Iraq remains fluid, of course. A surge in violence or in troop deaths could lead to rapid fluctuations in public opinion. But as the war nears its fifth year, the steady upturn in the public mood stands to alter the dynamics of races up and down the ballot.
The Washington Post:
Twenty-eight percent of the public is aware that nearly 4,000 U.S. personnel have died in Iraq over the past five years, while nearly half thinks the death tally is 3,000 or fewer and 23 percent think it is higher, according to an opinion survey released yesterday.
The survey, by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press, found that public awareness of developments in the Iraq war has dropped precipitously since last summer, as the news media have paid less attention to the conflict. In earlier surveys, about half of those asked about the death tally responded correctly.
Discuss.
*** Update ***
Now In the Role of Bluto Blutarsky, the American PublicPost + Comments (16)
This post is in: Election 2008
I see the intertrons is all aflutter about Obama’s apparently crazy-ass minister:
Sen. Barack Obama’s pastor says blacks should not sing “God Bless America” but “God damn America.”
The Rev. Jeremiah Wright, Obama’s pastor for the last 20 years at the Trinity United Church of Christ on Chicago’s south side, has a long history of what even Obama’s campaign aides concede is “inflammatory rhetoric,” including the assertion that the United States brought on the 9/11 attacks with its own “terrorism.”
In a campaign appearance earlier this month, Sen. Obama said, “I don’t think my church is actually particularly controversial.” He said Rev. Wright “is like an old uncle who says things I don’t always agree with,” telling a Jewish group that everyone has someone like that in their family.
This apparently does not sit well with the rubes:
Wright isn’t just someone with whom Obama is friendly. To criticize Obama for having friends with controversial, or even abhorrent, views would constitute guilt by association. But Wright is Obama’s spiritual leader. To be sure, no thinking person always agrees with his minister, priest, or rabbi on political and social issues. But it’s unusual for a thinking person to retain an affiliation with a church whose leader attacks his country unless, at a minimum, that person considers those attacks not “particularly controversial.”
Obama should explain why he retained his apparently close affiliation with Wright and his church in more persuasive terms than he has to date. Otherwise, I think it’s reasonable to draw adverse inferences based on that affiliation, including the inference that Obama doesn’t quite measure up as a “post-racial” figure.
Why does anyone give a shit what Obama’s minister thinks? Seriously? Why does anyone care what Hagee (McCain’s gay-bashing BFF) thinks? They are religious leaders. Who cares what they think- they are paid to peddle mythology to the masses, so who cares what sort of nonsense they spout? Is singing “god hates America” any crazier than telling people if they refuse to follow the wishes of an unknowable, invisible, unverifiable yet presumably omnipotent deity (as documented a couple thousand years ago by people who saw things in the desert after days without water) they will be damned to a fiery eternity in hell. That hell, of course, is conveniently located AFTER you die, so we can’t prove anything about that fiction, either.
So really. Who gives a shit what Obama’s minister thinks? He is just another bullshit artist.
And I know, I know, I am going to go to hell for writing this. Whatever.
by John Cole| 75 Comments
This post is in: I Read These Morons So You Don't Have To
This has to be the best reaction to the news that Spitzer’s hooker had been identified:
The low-hanging fruit would be a nude photo shoot, for which she would be paid a lot of money, but if she is smart she’ll think bigger. She is said to be an aspiring singer, so now she can probably get a record deal and a night club career. Or she can perhaps break into films if she is so inclined. But that’s not all: my guess is that she will be interviewed by journalists, and quoted as though she were a serious social critic.
If anyone knows something about low-hanging fruit, it is a Powerline front-pager.
by Tim F| 25 Comments
This post is in: Domestic Politics
Nancy Pelosi’s House leadership just voted to make their own jobs harder.
In the wake of a string of Congressional misconduct and corruption cases, the House on Tuesday created an independent panel to investigate suspected wrongdoing by lawmakers, despite deep reservations from rank-and-file lawmakers from both parties.
[…] By creating a panel of six people of “exceptional public standing,” the House, for the first time, delegated the authority for regulating behavior in the House to nonlawmakers. Current members of the House, federal employees and anyone who has been a registered lobbyist in the past year would be ineligible.
Good for them. Tom DeLay’s GOP Congress showed beyond any conceivable doubt that American government suffers from a gross deficit of oversight, and it equally showed that in-house ethics committees, when they act at all, only move when it’s politically convenient (Bill Jefferson, Larry Craig). After watching Republicans hash the government during six years of more or less total power it seems naive to think that a one-party Democratic government will entirely resist the obvious temptation. We will be better off locking in whatever safeguards we can get while there is still some motivation to do it.
Republicans and some Democrats complain that the panel will tie up lawmakers in “frivolous” investigations. That concern would worry me more if guilty lawmakers didn’t use that exact word literally every time an investigation gets under way. The word doesn’t necessarily signal guilt; it’s just a reflexive response to being investigated. As long as the investigating body is relatively non-partisan and free from political control it won’t bother me at all to hear the word “frivolous” used quite a bit more around DC.
On the list of good results, the real threat of oversight will clear out lawmakers who come to DC for the perks. Coincidentally, these guys tend to be shitty lawmakers (see DeLay, Cunningham, Renzi, Cunningham, Jefferson et cetera ad nauseum). A little honest fear will go a long way towards getting more of the people’s work done amidst the usual vanity and graft.
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As a side note, MissLaura at Kos pointed out yesterday that Bill Foster won the special election for Hastert’s seat on Tuesday and cast the tie-breaking vote for ethics reform one day later. Not bad for a guy who doesn’t have an office yet.
by Tim F| 14 Comments
This post is in: Republican Crime Syndicate - aka the Bush Admin.
Late in the year, when days get dark early and families gather around the woodstove, oldsters sometimes tell about a mythical band of critters who once inhabited these woods. A fractious bunch, ornery but principled, they loved business and hated government. Stories like this would drive them up the wall.
WASHINGTON — Senior officials of the Federal Bureau of Investigation repeatedly approved the use of “blanket” records demands to justify the improper collection of thousands of phone records, according to officials briefed on the practice.
The bureau appears to have used the blanket records demands at least 11 times in 2006 alone as a quick way to clean up mistakes made over several years after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks, according to a letter provided to Congress by a lawyer for an F.B.I. agent who witnessed the missteps.
Needless to say, conservatives don’t live here anymore.
by Tim F| 65 Comments
This post is in: Science & Technology
Actual scientists looked at whether recent climate warming correlates with changes in the sun. The answer: no, it doesn’t.
Hey, maybe the denial crowd will take the study at face value. And then maybe flying monkeys will emerge singing out of my butt.