Mingle Until Departure

Shut it Down!

2006-08-15T13:46:00.000-05:00

Shut it Down Forever!

Er, maybe not. But on to further adventures elsewhere, now. Site will remain up as fodder for future oppo-research on myself and possible self-meme-miming.

By fer now; sign up for AWD if you crave actual content, relatively regularly.

User-Centric Identity

2006-05-30T19:05:00.000-05:00

Reading this post got me to thinking - why not take this a step further. Why not think about it in terms of developing user-centric tagging not as a standalone application but as one expression, one feature, of an entire user-centric online identity.

Earlier, I had been reading this post about social networking sites [and also recommend the May 15 New Yorker article on Mark Zuckerberg - which, btw is still not online. New Yorker: I luvs ya, but get your act together; when you write an excellent profile of the progenitor of one of the more interesting Internet phenomenons in the last few years, put it up online, and quick. I promise - you can sell ad space even - that the page views will make it well worth your while.] and it brought back some of the thoughts I had when Friendster came out - I adopted early and, despite the frustration with the site, developed an extensive network/online persona there. I also do have a MySpace, Orkut and Facebook account, but those are significantly less-developed networks (for a variety of reasons; my co-hort for the most part graduated college well before Facebook). And there's (some) overlap of network connections on those, but it's always been frustrating to me the repetitive/redundant work of doing what is, really, the same thing several times over. And for what? Resolving e-mail, IM contacts; same. And when I do blogging, or other online writing projects - same thing.

All this work and capital and ME is stranded out there, somewhere.

So - claimID is definitely a logical step towards staking a central pivot to what's already out there, and that's good. I think, though, that going forward it might be useful to think of these systems not as individual components but as modules to the unitary online experience: e-mail, IM, blogging, commenting, tagging, social networking are all of a piece.

The hard part, of course, is getting a whole lotta people to agree on a single standard that would then be interoperable across a whole range of sites/features/modules, and getting people cool with the idea that the primary owner and mover of the information is not the site owner/developer but the user, who can with little or no sacrifice move their usage elsewhere if the features are better. As Fred points out in the first-linked post, right now both user and site owner/developer lose value if the user leaves; making it easier for a user to leave with the value of the site experience (e.g., their tags) intact would, I think, actually also end up benefitting the sites. Because an easily portable and interoperable user identity could then be plugged right back in - with no wasted effort on either side - to a site if it became better (i.e., added/gained features that were a proximate cause for the user leaving in the first place).

More later.

Now You're a Man, a Man, Man, Man

2006-05-23T13:43:00.000-05:00

Francis Wilkinson has an excellent article in the American Prospect on politics, manliness, and the politics of manliness. Useful bookends from it:

We are in our sixth year of government by gonads. Through conscious, concerted, disciplined, and relentless effort, Bush and his party have succeeded in cowing critics and defeating Democrats by advancing images of, and insinuations about, manliness in the public sphere. In the Republican political schemata, this is a man’s world. Men have made it dangerous. And only men -- real Republican men -- can make it safe again.
...
The one man who taught us better than any other to conquer fear was no Governor Terminator. His muscles were unimpressive. He had no physical swagger to him at all. His military experience was a desk job. He wore no cowboy gear. He smoked cigarettes not like a Marlboro Man but filtered through a slender, feminine holder that could have been a prop from the Follies Bergere. He didn’t promise to protect us. He made us believe we could protect ourselves -- from the violence of fascism and the vicissitudes of capitalism alike. And he handed us the tools to do the job. We built the better part of the American century on the back of an aristocratic, polio-addled cripple. Now that was a man.

When people say "manly," they are not always speaking, chiefly, about manliness. They are speaking about the positive attributes our society attributes chiefly to men - hard work, responsibility, toughness. Disentangling these positive attributes from exclusively male ownership is one of the chief challenges in the struggle for a truly egalitarian society.

Fight the Future

2006-05-22T09:39:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald notes:

...this spewing of racially-tinged anger over Nagin's re-election is both childish and ugly. These bloggers having their fun with "chocolate" and "flavor" jokes think they have a built-in defense for speaking that way (namely, Nagin's use of those terms), and so, like an 8-year-old who discovers some excuse for using a bad word, they just revel in it over and over. The second they think there is an opportunity to spew all sorts of racially-tinged bile, they take it. And thus, a mayoral election is spoken of in terms of "poverty pimps" and "chocolate cities" and overt claims that he was only elected because he's black.

Beyond that, the comparisons to Marion Barry are as baseless as they are telling. Barry is known for all sorts of behaviors that have long been at the crux of ugly racist stereotypes -- he's a drug addict who has been caught on camera using crack with hookers in a downtown hotel, and he then encountered all sorts of allegations of financial impropriety in connection with his political office.

None of that is true for Nagin. Nagin and Barry have nothing in common other than that they are black Mayors. It would be like comparing every white Southern Governor to Lester Maddux, or every white evangelical Christian male to Jim Bakker or every white Southern male to David Duke. It's deliberately inflammatory, and it purposely seizes what they perceive is an opportunity to traffic in racial stereotypes which they normally are too afraid to voice.

"Afraid" is the right word. These idiot racists are terrified children, terrified of their own weakness, yearning for the days when White Men ruled the world. They look to the future and see that whites will not simply rule based on their Whiteness - they see in their worst nightmares a future where all men are indeed judged by "the content of their character, not the color of their skin." And for these racists - these small, awful men - they know that there will be no glory there for them.

Good.

And - by the way, Nagin was re-elected with a substantial share of the conservative white vote.

Poor, crazy, cracker

2006-05-17T15:48:00.000-05:00

Via MediaMatters:

From the May 16 edition of Fox News' The O'Reilly Factor:

O'REILLY: Now in 1986, President Reagan thought he could solve the [immigration] problem by granting about 3 million illegal aliens amnesty. The New York Times was in heaven, editorializing back then, quote, "The new law won't work miracles but it will induce most employers to pay attention, to turn off the magnets, to slow the tide." Of course, just the opposite happened. But the Times hasn't learned a thing. That's because the newspaper and many far-left thinkers believe the white power structure that controls America is bad, so a drastic change is needed.

According to the lefty zealots, the white Christians who hold power must be swept out by a new multicultural tide, a rainbow coalition, if you will. This can only happen if demographics change in America.

An open-border policy and the legalization of millions of Hispanic illegal aliens would deeply affect the political landscape in America. That's what The New York Times and many others on the left want. They might get it. And that's the "Memo."

"Sour"

2006-05-16T17:40:00.000-05:00

E.J. Dionne has an excellent column in today's WaPo about Karl Rove's increasingly desperate lying. On one point, however, even Rover has to concede the truth:

In explaining Bush's poor standing, Rove kept going back to the war in Iraq. "They're just sour right now on the war. And that's the way it's going to be," Rove said of the voters. At another point, he acknowledged that the war had created discontent in the land. "I think the war looms over everything," he said.

Gee, I can't possibly imagine why Americans would be "sour" over the war. They just must be a bunch of malcontents and depressives; certainly nothing about being lied into a disastrous war with no end could reasonably make people "sour," could it? And none of that would have anything to do with you, Karl, or your boss, could it? Huh, motherfucker?

Much Respect, Citigroup

2006-05-12T16:37:00.000-05:00

Because it's important to note when the modern world and its many conveniences actually work - i.e., when the conveniences are actually convenient - I think it's worth noting that I just had perhaps my greatest customer-service experience, ever.

I no longer use my CitiCard, so when a charge showed up in my last billing cycle - $3.55 at an Au Bon Pain in Boston - I knew it was, well, fraud. So I called up the customer service number - keyed in my account number - password - and was immediately connected with a customer service representative (who actually sounded like he was somewhere on the North American continent). I reported that I was pretty sure my last transaction - gave the transaction number - was fraudulent, as I hadn't been in Boston since last fall. He asked if I loaned the card to anyone - no - and then said, okay, we're going to credit your account. I asked if there were any other transactions since - nope - okay, have a good weekend, man. Bing, bang, boop. 2:54 of talk time and my problem's taken care of.

So, CitiGroup, big ups to y'all. For today at least, I don't care that you launder and profit from drug money.

Death Star Governance

2006-05-11T12:45:00.000-05:00

Glenn Greenwald notes the following:

This continuous evasion of judicial review by the administration is much more serious and disturbing than has been discussed and realized. By proclaiming the power to ignore Congressional law and to do whatever it wants in the area of national security, it is seizing the powers of the legislative branch. But by blocking courts from ruling on the multiple claims of illegality which have been made against it, the administration is essentially seizing the judicial power as well. It becomes the creator, the executor, and the interpreter of the law. And with that, the powers of all three branches become consolidated in The President, the single greatest nightmare of the founders.

Hmmm...where've I heard something like that before?

GRAND MOFF TARKIN: The Imperial Senate will no longer be of any concern to us. I have just received word that the Emperor has dissolved the council permanently. The last remnants of the Old Republic have been swept away.
GENERAL TAGGE: But that's impossible. How will the Emperor maintain control without the bureaucracy?
GRAND MOFF TARKIN: The regional governors now have direct control over their territories. Fear will keep the local systems in line. Fear of this battle station.

He said "butt"

2006-05-09T11:23:00.000-05:00

Gilliard:

Bush will be the butt of every joke around, not in the Jay Leno way, but in the Joey Buttafuco way, someone who just isn't serious, in Bush's case, anymore.

Er...Remind me to never ever go to Cortez, CO

2006-05-08T14:15:00.000-05:00

From a WaPo chat with Kos and Byron York:

Cortez, Colo.: This question is for Byron York. I disagree that Republicans are in trouble. Undoubtedly Mr. Rove will come up with something as compelling as the gay marriage scare to keep the party in line and of course the party owns the issue of world wide war on terror and abortion. After George Bush was elected in 2000 and then relected in 2004 with a Republican congress and supreme court, I was surprised to see no particular push to dismantle social programs including public education. Indeed, there were huge additions to said programs. I am curious now, if you know, what is the Republican plan or goal beyond staying in power and making Christianity a more dominant voice in government?

Byron York: A Republican strategist would probably tell you that George W. Bush never ran as a budget-cutting, small-government conservative. Of course, no one knew he would be as unworried about overspending as he has turned out to be. On the other hand, I think if you asked anyone in the White House what their one big goal is, it would be to win the war on terror.

Really, I don't know what more to say.

Double Shot

2006-05-04T14:10:00.000-05:00

Blogger at my post yesterday, so it's two-for-Thursday: a trolley map of LA circa early 20th C., and a milk-snortingly good post by The Editors. Enjoy!

Sadness Remote and Immediate

2006-04-29T09:25:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure why this story has such particular resonance for me - I wasn't even a fan of any team he ever played for - but the news of Steve Howe's death strikes me as no small thing (of course, no death is small), and quite sad:

NEW YORK -- Steve Howe, the relief pitcher whose promising career was derailed by cocaine and alcohol abuse, died Friday when his pickup truck rolled over in Coachella, Calif. He was 48.

Howe was killed at 5:55 a.m. PT, said Dalyn Backes of the Riverside County coroner's office. The pickup truck Howe was driving left the roadway, entered the median and rolled several times, ejecting Howe from the vehicle, according to the coroner's office. The accident occurred about 130 miles east of Los Angeles.

Howe had been in Arizona on business and was driving back to the family home in Valencia, Calif., business partner Judy Welp said.

Toxicology tests had not yet been performed.

The hard-throwing lefty was the 1980 NL Rookie of the Year with the Los Angeles Dodgers, and helped them win the World Series the next year.

But for all of Howe's success on the field, the hard-throwing lefty was constantly troubled by addictions -- he was suspended seven times and became a symbol of the rampant cocaine problem that plagued baseball in the 1980s.

During the 1992 season, he became the first baseball player to be banned for life because of drugs. An arbitrator reinstated him after the season.
[...]
Howe was 47-41 with 91 saves and a 3.03 ERA with the Dodgers, Twins, Rangers and Yankees. His final season in the majors was 1996, and the Yankees released him in June.

A moment of silence was observed at Yankee Stadium before New York played Toronto on Friday night. Howe played for the Yankees from 1991-96.

Two days after the Yankees let him go in 1996, Howe was arrested at a Delta Airlines terminal at New York's John F. Kennedy International Airport when a loaded .357 Magnum was detected inside his suitcase. He later pleaded guilty to gun possession and was placed on three years' probation and given 150 hours of community service.

Chicago White Sox coach Tim Raines played with Howe in that final year.

"You always get second chances -- third and fourth sometimes. And people really believed in him and that he'd eventually kick the problem. Unfortunately, it didn't happen for him," he said.

Howe tried a comeback in 1997 with Sioux Falls of the independent Northern League and retired after injuring his forearm. That August, he was critically injured in a motorcycle accident in Montana and charged with drunken driving; those charges were later dropped when prosecutors decided his blood test was improperly obtained.
[...]
Howe was suspended for the 1984 season by commissioner Bowie Kuhn for cocaine use. Howe was out of the majors in 1986 after a relapse the previous August with Minnesota.

Texas released him before the 1988 season because of an alcohol problem, and he did not pitch again in the big leagues until 1991.

"Howsie had some issues everybody knew about," Arizona manager Bob Melvin said in San Francisco. "Everybody who hasn't played with him didn't know what kind of teammate he was. What you hear about Steve is the drug stuff. ... He was kind of the captain of the bullpen out there."

Iron Triangle

2006-04-27T13:22:00.000-05:00

Good news from my soon-to-be new home: it pisses Michelle Malkin (OC '91) off.

Specifically, the above picture.

Ooh-rah!

The Future Arrives, Unassumingly, on a Wednesday in My Tertiary E-mail

2006-04-26T23:14:00.000-05:00

This is just extraordinarily exciting:

PayPal Mobile:
Send money to friends and family

Send money securely, anytime, from wherever you are. You don’t need cash or a check – just your phone.

After you activate your phone, you can send money one of two ways:

Text to 729725 (PAYPAL) with the amount and recipient’s phone number.

Example: send 5 to 4150001234
Or

Call 1-800-4PAYPAL (1-800-472-9725) and follow the instructions.

Buy stuff with your phone

Buy it when you see it. Where you see Text to Buy – on a poster, in a magazine, at an event – just order the item securely by text message

Really. No, really. The world just changed. The long-rumored [near-] obsolescence of paper money is really, actually, truly possibly, now. It's not so much that this is a great thing - though I think on balance it's pretty great - as that it's a huge change. HUGE. And about to happen, right about...now. Very exciting.

But...but...I don't wanna live in a police state...

2006-04-25T21:57:00.000-05:00

Too bad!

I've always thought that one of the perverse consequences of a libertarian utopian government that does nothing but national defense, policing and dispute resolution would be that this government would naturally seek to expand its powers in those areas. If a state's only function is policing, it functions as a ... police state.

We've watched the fake small government conservatives spend huge sums of money on war profiteering, oily pork and tax breaks for their rich contributors. But where they have really made their mark is with these ridiculously expanded executive and police powers. And they continue to suck up more of them every day:

Amid intense debate over how far the government can go to keep its secrets secret, Congress is taking up an expansive intelligence measure that proposes tougher steps in cracking down on leaks of classified information and authorizes broad arrest powers for security officers at intelligence agencies.

Provisions tucked into the legislation, which the House is expected to vote on as early as tomorrow, represent a major departure from traditional intelligence agency roles in plugging leaks and conducting domestic law enforcement, according to government watchdog groups and intelligence professionals.

If the measure is approved by Congress, the nation's spy chief would be ordered to consider a plan for revoking the pensions of intelligence agency employees who make unauthorized disclosures. It also would permit security forces at the National Security Agency and the CIA to make warrantless arrests outside the gates of their top-secret campuses.

[...]

At the request of National Intelligence Director John D. Negroponte, the legislation would allow agency security forces at the NSA and CIA to make arrests outside the grounds of those agencies. Ware said the measure is "just clarifying the authority" of agency security officers "to arrest individuals."

[...]

Loch Johnson, a top Senate aide on the Church Committee, which investigated CIA abuses in the 1970s, called it a "worrisome" expansion of power.

"That's why we have the FBI and other law enforcement officials," he said. "I don't know that this needs to be an intelligence officer's function. I wouldn't think it should be."

I know I feel safer already, don't you?

This is the kind of stuff that's going on right now in the Congress, even as the president's approval rating sits in the low 30's and the Republicans appear to be poised to lose their majority in the fall. They are like sharks, mercilessly pursuing their agenda no matter what is going on around them. They know that it is much more difficult to reverse this kind of thing than it is to enact it. Their gargantuan, national security bureaucracy replete with gun-toting NSA "security" authorized to arrest anyone they choose will be institutionalized and anyone who tries to end it will be tarred as a Democratic sissy for the next generation. If they can sneak this one through, they will.

This letter from the Project On Government Oversight to Rep. Peter Hoekstra and Jane Harmon outlines the various issues of concern. It's hard to believe that these people would have the gall to use this leak controversy as an excuse to create two new secret police forces in the CIA and NSA, but that's what they're doing (among other heinous things.)

In all seriousness...yeah, this is just about what it looks like. Secret police that are the same people who tap your phones and read your e-mail and aren't really answerable to any court and, because of other legal decisions made by and during this administration, can detain you, indefinitely, incommunicado with no judicial recourse.

Welcome to the Terrordome, kids.

Spit-Take for the Day

2006-04-22T15:51:00.000-05:00

Thank you, Billmon.

"Unfortunately"

2006-04-11T15:47:00.000-05:00

From Glenn Greenwald's "Unclaimed Territory, this post, The Endless War:

"Finally, someone at The Washington Post appears to be an admirer of Us Magazine, or People Teen, or something, and they are offering a new (?) feature entitled 'Off Hours' which, as they put it, 'featur(es)Washington's top decision makers in their off hours -- outside the office and inside their lives.'

Today's version contains vapid and oh-so-humanizing details about Attorney General Alberto Gonzaels' not-at-all-contrived-or-self-conscious interactions with his son and wife, but it also contains this significant revelation:

But as Gonzales pumped up a hill, he said he wasn't troubled by critics. He was troubled by terrorists. "I stay up at night," he said, rounding a corner near the water. "I read the reports. Sometimes I ask myself, when will it end?"

The river rippled away from the shore. "The answer is -- it probably never will."

That is an extremely important yet virtually never acknowledged truth revealed by the selfless Gonzales (who doesn't care at all about criticism of him, only about the dangers posed by terrorists). The "war" on terrorism -- which justifies everything from lawbreaking to expanded presidential powers across the board, and which means that we should be muted in our criticisms of the Commander-in-Chief (when we are allowed to voice them at all) -- is expected to end . . . right around never.

All of those Bush defenders who are constantly justifying radical changes to our country based on this "war" are not advocating short-term, temporary or finite changes. They seek fundamental and permanent changes to our system of government, and to transform the United States into a country that is in a state of war that literally has no end. That is not news to many people, but it is still striking to see it acknowledged so nakedly and starkly as Gonazles, likely unguarded by the family puff piece, admitted to it here.

They don't even bother pretending. It's everyone else - their supporters, the media, even us - who pretend that they don't really mean what they say and do.

Listed Uses

2006-04-04T13:47:00.000-05:00

At Overstock.com's $25 and under electronics section, I stumbled upon the above item. It is a USB Massage Ball (only $11.95!). Below is the entire product description:

This USB-powered gadget ball gives you a massage without ever leaving your desk!
Great for massaging shoulder, thigh, waist, neck, back, foot, or hand
One-touch On/Off switch
3600 RPM vibration speed
USB powered
1.8-meter USB cable

Right - "shoulder, thigh, waist, neck, back, foot, or hand." Nothing else.

Who talks about massaging your waist, anyways?

Stadia Et Cetera

2006-04-04T08:44:00.000-05:00

From today's WaPo, the incomparable Hank Stuever:

No amount of Whitney Houston and Toni Braxton and Mariah Carey songs could mask the pain. One by one, until the wee hours Monday morning, the reigning drag queens of Half Street SE descended the stairs at Ziegfeld's cabaret to strut their last, blowing kisses to admirers and making a few more sweepingly glamorous gestures -- all of it a farewell to the shabby but perfect place they called home for three decades.

Ziegfeld's, and four other establishments on the same forsaken industrial block at Half and O streets, closed yesterday in a cruelly predictable high school metaphor: The jocks win.

...the packed-sardine crowd -- gay men, mostly, and not all of them the kind you see on HGTV. Far from the happy, let's-walk-the-Labrador-to-Whole-Foods realm of Logan and Dupont circles, the O Street scene was the real deal: grubby, hidden even within sight of the Capitol, and just plain ugly-gorgeous.

Xavier, a wicked-eyed diva who has performed at the club for a fraction of the time Ella has, trash-talked the crowd into a mild frenzy: "Now they're going to build a baseball stadium here. And what are we going to do when it's done? Burn it down! That's right! We are gonna burn! It! Down! . . . [Bleep] baseball! Who gives a [bleep] about baseball?"

So now you've done it, Washington. You've spurned the queens, and they are both heartbroken and livid. Besides Ziegfeld's and its full-frontal go-go annex, Secrets, the block was also the home to the Glorious Health Club, Follies (a "movie theater," in the language of old newspaper clippings, back when police were raiding the place, charging the, um, moviegoers with acts of sodomy), and another club called Heat. Nation, a nightclub a few blocks north, has announced that it's closing July 16 to make way for an office building.
...
Ziegfeld's and Secrets are owned by Allen Carroll and Chris Jansen, who have promised their clientele (in ads in the gay press, and in person at the farewell bash) that they are going to reopen -- someday, somewhere.

But no neighborhood wants them, and saving the clubs has so far not been placed very high on the gay agenda. Early in the baseball debate, after a proposal to relocate some clubs in Ward 5 was met with complaints, the city attempted to find Ziegfeld's another option:

"In P.G. County," scoffed Carroll, who told a city representative, "I am born and raised in D.C., and I have been down here 31 years. And they want us to move to Prince George's County?"
...
Driven by an unfriendly police chief in the '70s down to the blight of the Navy Yard, the seamier clubs thrived here. It became the opposite of more mainstream, ho-hum homo club life. Going down to Navy Yard made you feel a little dirty (or a lot dirty), in an adventurous or perhaps even anonymous way. It never felt completely safe. Parking was plentiful but dicey. Razor wire and cinder blocks -- it was a look, and it is perhaps irreplaceable. It may be hard to understand Half and O as a lost gay authenticity; harder still to assign it any civic value.

So come back inside Ziegfeld's. Understand it, at the very least, as home.

This, of course, was entirely predictable. I went to Nation, once, a few years back for a Social Distortion concert (a great concert - a strange venue); over the years, I am sure I will go to see the Nationals dozens of times in their new park. And that's me - most of the future attendees of Nats games are people who would never have allowed themselves within 20 blocks of Navy Yard SE.

Newly constructed baseball stadia - often on the public dime, welfare for billionaires, but that's another discussion - have gone hand in hand with the urban renewal projects in many cities over the past decade or so: Baltimore was first, followed by Cleveland, Detroit, maybe a dozen others. You can argue just how economically beneficial each have been for their respective cities, but the simple fact of the matter is that they - and the surrounding sports bars, family restaurants, etc. - are in pretty much every case a marked improvement over the dingy, often dangerous neighborhoods they replace. Boring and white-bread, yes; but almost always improvements, nonetheless.

There's another dynamic here, too, that Stuever points out - "Far from the happy, let's-walk-the-Labrador-to-Whole-Foods realm of Logan and Dupont circles, the O Street scene was the real deal: grubby, hidden even within sight of the Capitol, and just plain ugly-gorgeous...But no neighborhood wants them..." This is the toll of progress - once upon a time, Logan and Dupont circles were also pretty grungy, sketchy neighborhoods. Over the past 30 years, the neighborhoods and their residents have become prosperous and "respectable," to the extent that the High Heel Race is now a requisite stop for mainstream D.C. politicians. Not being gay, I won't really extrapolate too much further on these contrasting pictures of D.C. gay identity, but the unstated feeling here seems an element of embarassment at the now-departed O St. scene - which is too bad. The marvelous thing about cities is how weird and crazy and mysterious they are - the hidden gems, the hole-in-the-wall take-away place and the wonderful club in the sketchy-ass neighborhood. The fact that all sorts of different people and competing interests and agendas have to figure out a way to coexist in an extremely limited space.

A friend from high school was in town recently, and recounted going downtown with his family only to discover that the former site of the 9:30 Club - and the alley where where he'd drunk 40s before shows - was now the Spy Museum and attendant overpriced cafe. I knew this already and wasn't shocked by it and, all in all, it's also a good thing that one can walk safely downtown after dark. Gentrification and redevelopment has made D.C. a better, safer place to live, with more and better jobs. There is no doubt about that.

But. But. I'm not sure but what - but it's something.

State of the War

2006-03-29T23:55:00.000-05:00

Steve Gilliard:

We do not have an army which can actually prevent mass killing and restore order. We have an army which is trained to kill the Group of Soviet Forces Germany. They are now lost to the mists of history, but our Army remains the same.

Yet, there is no plan to actually make an Army which can fight guerrillas, aid and protect NGO's and mobilize quickly. Instead, we're converting artillery and engineers into ad hoc infantry and MP's and sending people out to die in hillbilly armored vehicles.

Right. I've written about this some, long ago, but it bears repeating that for all of Rumsfeld's talk of "re-structuring" the army, this is a fighting force constructed for a purpose which no longer exists. Plenty of countries - most notably Sweden, Italy and several other NATO nations - have entire branches of their armed services that are dedicated to peace-keeping and development work. And they're actually, y'know, trained to do those things. Rather than just shoot stuff.

So, food for thought. In addition to everything else - a career in a branch of the military where you learn how to do humanitarian work, and then actually do it (even laying your life on the line for it, at times) would be much, much more appealing for a lot of people than the current military.

State of the Union

2006-03-28T10:40:00.000-05:00

Digby:

9/11 changed everything. It made people stupid.

M for McCain

2006-03-24T16:04:00.000-05:00

From a TomDispatch.com interview with historian Chalmers Johnson:

Chalmers Johnson: If a bankruptcy situation doesn't shake us up, then I fear we will, as an author I admire wrote the other day, be "crying for the coup." We could end the way the Roman Republic ended. When the chaos, the instability become too great, you turn it over to a single man. After about the same length of time our republic has been in existence, the Roman Republic got itself in that hole by inadvertently, thoughtlessly acquiring an empire they didn't need and weren't able to administer, that kept them at war all the time. Ultimately, it caught up with them. I can't see how we would be immune to a Julius Caesar, to a militarist who acts the populist. [emphasis mine]

TomDispatch: Do you think that our all-volunteer military will turn out to be the janissaries of our failed empire?

Johnson: They might very well be. I'm already amazed at the degree to which they tolerate this incompetent government. I mean the officers know that their precious army, which they worked so hard to rebuild after the Vietnam War, is coming apart again, that it's going to be ever harder to get people to enlist, that even the military academies are in trouble. I don't know how long they'll take it. Tommy Franks, the general in charge of the attack on Baghdad, did say that if there were another terrorist attack in the United States comparable to 9/11, the military might have no choice but to take over. In other words: If we're going to do the work, why listen to incompetents like George Bush? Why take orders from an outdated character like Donald Rumsfeld? Why listen to a Congress in which, other than John McCain, virtually no Republican has served in the armed forces? [emphasis mine]

I don't see the obvious way out of our problems. The political system has failed. You could elect the opposition party, but it can't bring the CIA under control; it can't bring the military-industrial complex under control; it can't reinvigorate the Congress. It would be just another holding operation as conditions got worse.

There is no person in American politics today more perfectly described as a "militarist who acts the populist" than John McCain. His image - created and perpetuated by the media irrespective of reality - is of a maverick, a moderate, a man who is not of the Republican Party. Nothing could be further from the truth. With the exception of campaign finance reform (a cause from which he is now careful to distance himself), he is a reliable party-line Republican on nearly every issue, stands strongly against equal rights for women and gays, and despite occasional "concern" that he expresses about excessive spending (military and otherwise), almost never votes against any bill put forward by leadership. When you hear about a party-line vote, he's part of that majority party.

McCain has, over the last several months, drawn himself closer and closer to George W. Bush - a man who has been at pains to identify himself at every available opportunity with the military, with his status as "Commander-in-Chief." Bush has gone so far as to, on several occasions, don a fake, custom-made military uniform, and frequently speaks before military audiences who are obliged to applaud on command. It is astonishing how willing our press has been in perpetuating the myth of George W. Bush as High Warrior, a behavior they will almost certainly repeat - enthusiastically - for a prospective candidate, nominee and President John McCain, given that McCain was a bona fide war hero and survivor of North Vietnamese POW camps. They will construct this image, and they will construct the image of McCain as a glorious outsider, a man uniquely able to address the problems our country currently faces - the war in Iraq, a weakened, nearly bankrupt federal government, corruption rampant in the halls of Congress - despite the fact that McCain has been instrumental in creating and furthering these various problems.

Scott Shields at MyDD offers the following:

"...the Republicans are going to pretend that 2008 is a complete changing of the guard -- from Bush to McCain. But it will just be more of the same. McCain will no doubt put a friendlier face on the politics, but the policies will remain bad none the less, because as Lizza says, at the end of the day McCain really is "the last Bush Republican.""

I think that this is exactly what is going to happen, and I agree that McCain is, for now, "the last Bush Republican." But there only needs to be one Bush Republican around at any given time - one High Warrior. It is difficult to emphasize sufficiently just how skillful the GOP has been in constructing of a cult of (militarized) personality around George W. Bush - a man who is not merely ordinary but far below mediocre in nearly any and every category of assessment one might offer of a man. With the chaos of the world that Bush has created, it will be ever easier to create a similar cult around a man who possesses some manner of competence and charisma.

Giving such a man the keys to the country at this point - when the administration of the far-below-mediocre George W. Bush has managed to consolidate all the powers of the federal government in the executive - would be exceedingly dangerous. Digby quotes Bruce Fein, Constitutional Scholar and former Deputy Attorney General in the Reagan Administration from his December 19, 2005 appearance on the Diane Rehm Show, and then offers his own thoughts.

"...if President Bush is totally unapologetic and says I continue to maintain that as a wartime President I can do anything I want - I don't need to consult any other branches - that is an impeachable offense. It's more dangerous that Clinton's lying under oath because it jeopardizes our democratic dispensation and civil liberties for the ages. It would set a precedent that - would lie around like a loaded gun, able to be used indefinitely for any future occupant."

The president continues to say that as a wartime president he can do anything he wants, openly and without any sense of shame. He has loaded that precedent and unless somebody puts a stop to it, it will lie there waiting for the next time a despotic president and his party want to use it.

The key for Democrats, then, is in preventing the successful construction of such a cult of personality around McCain - the "militarist who acts the populist" - and preventing his ascension to the presidency. To do so, they must begin to expose him for who he truly is. Matt Stoller, also at MyDD offers some hope:

First up, McCain. In Arizona, he's taking a beating in his approval/disapproval ratings. He was up 72-24 a month ago, he's now 64-29. That's a 13 point swing. What's more interesting is where the swing is happening. Among Democrats, his approval rating has dropped from 73-24 to 58-32, a drop of 23 points. Among independents, he goes from 72-25 to 64-30, a drop of 13 points (which I would imagine is occurring among left-leaning independents). Among Republicans, he stayed neutral, going from 70-24 to 72-26. McCain's partisanship isn't new, but the willingness of Democrats to call him on it is new, and this seems to be having an effect.

This, at least, is a possible way out. At least some people who believe - incorrectly - in the construction of McCain as maverick, McCain as moderate, McCain as populist, are willing to chnage their minds in the face of the new evidence in the form of McCain's recent movesto ally himself with the current regime. In terms of public opinion, a move in approval of 23 points in one month in any group, absent a major event, is a large one. This means this task is not impossible - but it is still formidable. Even Arizona Democrats, after this past month, approve of him by a margin of 58-32 - and they are in the best position to know and have known the real John McCain. There is considerable work to be done, but considerable incentive to do so for our Republic - if we can keep it

UPDATE: This, at least, shows we're not there yet.

I'm more excited about Emeril's "Nutria Madness," m'self

2006-03-23T23:04:00.000-05:00

TV chef Jamie Oliver should encourage schoolchildren to eat grey squirrels in an effort to save the endangered red species, a Conservative peer says.
Lord Inglewood said greys had to be culled to ensure reds - native to the UK - did not die out.

"I must confess that I have never actually eaten a grey squirrel... but I am prepared to give it a go," he said.
...
Lord Inglewood said: "Unless something radical and imaginative is done Squirrel Nutkin and his friends are going to be toast."
...
Last year, Mr Oliver launched a campaign to improve the quality of England's school dinners, which resulted in extra government funding to raise standards.

LINK

Chicken Dance

2006-01-31T16:06:00.000-05:00

Sick.
Headache, fever, exhausted, achy.
Probably have the Bird Flu.

If the world starts dying soon around Washington, D.C., probably my fault.

Futbol

2005-12-05T19:33:00.000-05:00

From ESPN:

LEIPZIG, Germany -- Five days before the draw for next year's World Cup finals, the debate began on how seeding for the group phase will be determined. The criteria used to set up the four pots from which the 32-country field will be divided into eight groups of four teams will be decided Tuesday.
Being selected for Pot 1 -- made up of the top eight teams -- will help the chances of the game's powerhouses from avoiding another top country in the first round.
"There are different proposals," FIFA president Sepp Blatter said. "It certainly will be a mix of the performance from the last World Cup and the world rankings."
...
All that is certain is that Germany, as host, and Brazil, as defending champion, will be put in Pot 1 to head one of the groups.
Two-time World Cup champion Argentina is considered a top candidate for Pot 1, while Italy, England, Mexico, Spain and France are among the favorites.

Okay, so I'm hardly naive about us gringoes' not-American football team. We're sure as heck better'n we used to be, and 2002 was a really fun year that is not likely to be repeated. European and South American teams still have a healthy degree of contempt for the U.S., just not the same degree of condescencion.

But Mexico getting the top pot over the U.S.? Bull.

For all intents and purposes, the two teams are tied in the world rankings (Mexico comes in at #7, a few scant points ahead of the U.S. at #8), and tied for the top of the table in CONCACAF - though the U.S. wins a tie-breaker there, having fallen 1-2 in Mexico City, and winning 2-0 in Columbus.

But most importantly: in the last game they played that really mattered - in the 2002 World Cup - the U.S. destroyed Mexico, just beat them to a pulp.

So, this is an offhand reference in a wire story. And really, this is a good team, but a top pool seed would not at all guarantee advancing to the second round. But it'd sure be nice.