Moondrunk

So every time some Donk raises the high hackles about her congresscritters' ever-unfolding capitulation on the surveillance-state issue of the day, she must ad that

FISA is perfectly fine to protect the country from terrorists while respecting civil liberties.

Perhaps you, like I, wonder how a secret administrative court whose opaque decisions are not subject to public knowledge or review and which uniformly and universally grants the government whatever it desires, preemptively and retroactively alike, "respect[s] civil liberties." Naderites!

They ought to get rid of the Ass and remake their mascot as Pierrot Lunaire.

Okay, So, Like . . .

NOW can we compare them to the Nazis?

The Irresistable, Hermeneutical, Semiotical, Homosexual Allure of craigslist Missed Connections

ISO the yuppie hipster queer lover that winked at work - m4m

what is pittsburgh's fascination with labels, titles, image, -stereotypes-. seriously, we aren't in high school. there are so many people that post words that really have no value. the "professionals" who know oh-so-well the "real world" still act like little high school brats. it's disgusting. it's one thing to use words to say what you want. it's something else to use words as labels and categories and belittle anyone else that does not fit that category. i can't see how any hipster or yuppie would ever have a relationship lasting more than a week. i personally walk out on someone so insecure that he has to get caught up in saying how much better he is than other guys. quit being a bunch of bitchy douchebags and actually look. if you can network to land your successful job (which i doubt these guys landed without daddy at this if it really is a great gig), you sure as hell can ask around to find a guy. or maybe you haven't had success because you are stuck up and insecure and you need to seriously examine your priorities.

but everything is still a goddamn stereotype. everything is divided into a clique, a scene, a status. i would say there are more guppies in pittsburgh than there are just normal guys that just happen to prefer guys. cause everything's a goddamn label, idnit?

I think this gentleman overestimates the overlap between "yuppie" and "hipster." While there are surely some yupsters, it is in general my observation that the tighter the jeans, the smaller the wallet, with a few notably fashionable exceptions. Unlike, say, Williamsburg, Hipsburgh has yet to be fully gentrified.

Anyhoo, I dredged this up for the notion that "it's one thing to use words to say what you want. it's something else to use words as labels and categories." Because, il ne faut pas le dire, words as labels and categories that approximate an external reality is just, gosh, crazy.

Any one of you pricks move, and I will execute every last motherfucking one of you!

Fucking awesome! "Inevitably, another national security crisis will occur." Wesley Clark is starting to look a little bit like Sterling Hayden to me, btw:


Anyway, this new Clinton ad, which you can watch on the WaPo blog via the link, is insanely fucking cool. Personally, I think that they should just have Hillary holding a gun to those cute little baby heads. "Vote Clinton or I will fucking ice this toddler."

La mia Dorabella

Così is a weaker opera in the transcendent sense than La Nozze, but it's one of the most charmingly perfect things ever to appear on stage. I've always thought of Mozart as a wonderful sort of proto-feminist, at least in his two great opera buffa, which show the soul of men's cruelty to be their ridiculousness.

Judas

There seems to be a widespread misapprehension about George W. Bush's comments on the necessity of "telecom immunity." People have fallen back on the old "nation of laws, not men" bromide to explain their outrage. They have it in their head that because the United States is a democracy, or whatever, "the law" exists somehow objectively, that it is neither ad hoc nor arbitrary. Of course that isn't the case. At every stage of enaction and enforcement, the law is discretionary. The police, the prosecuter, the DA, the judges, the budgetmasters in the legislatures, the attorneys general, the governors and presidents--all hold and exert the independent power to determine within a certain scope whether or not to enforce a law. The idea that uniformity and equality will flow from such an arbitrary network is one of the great errors of democratic political philosophy. The grade-school definition of the Executive Branch holds that it is the job of the executive to make sure that the law is enforced. It naturally follows that this power operates in the other direction as well. By omission or by commission, the President can also see that a law is not enforced. The controversy over "signing statements," like the liberal outrage over Gee-Dub's imperialism, is about style and not substance. He has simply taken to announcing what has always been the case--that the Emperor is the Emperor, and the Senate not fit to be slaves.

On the other hand, in civil law, actions can originate from outside of the apparati of government. The arbitrary nature of "justice" usually accrues benefit to preexisting power, but it is arbitrary, and the "some side effects may occur" of this particular drug is that from time to time someone might make the "wrong" decision. Some judge might actually award monetary damages, for instance. Even if that were not the case, the expense in time and money of mounting multiple defenses in multiple, many-yeared legal disputes might disincline "private companies" from doing what they are told to do. This is not a moral calculus; corporations are not moral agents. Qwest, much-lauded as the "good" telecom, was not a "good" actor, but a prudent one. It anticipated certain expenses and decided to avoid them outright. Granted preemptive immunity from civil penalty, it would act exactly as the other telecoms, who simple erred in overestimating their and the government's capacity for secrecy. The view of the government is that civil actions must be staunched in order that comapanies can follow the law. "'The law' is what we tell you to do!"

Prison Planet

For the first time in the nation’s history, more than one in 100 American adults is behind bars, according to a new report.

Nationwide, the prison population grew by 25,000 last year, bringing it to almost 1.6 million. Another 723,000 people are in local jails. The number of American adults is about 230 million, meaning that one in every 99.1 adults is behind bars.

Incarceration rates are even higher for some groups. One in 36 Hispanic adults is behind bars, based on Justice Department figures for 2006. One in 15 black adults is, too, as is one in nine black men between the ages of 20 and 34.

These are extraordinary numbers.

I want you to consider, the next time you read some New York Times mouthpiece yammering about an "increasingly authoritarian Russia," or about the repressions of this or that state in the "Muslim world," that a person is more likely to be thrown in jail in the United States than in Saudi Arabia.

Free at Last

Jesus. The praise for Buckley. The mad encomiums! He was the A.K. Chesterton of our time. He was a third-rate thinker with a second-rate vocabulary who only ever impressed the fourth-rate English majors who cluster in newsrooms and on the teevee. He was always wrong when it mattered and only right when it was too late. The fact that he was the exemplar of American Conservativism and one of the movement's great intellectuals proves something about both Buckley and American Conservativism, neither proof being proof of anything good. He was Ezra Pound shorn unfortunately of classicism, talent, and a cage.

Everything that Acts is Actual

The so-called virtual fence was an awfully silly idea to begin with, and the fact that the virtual has failed totally as the actual is not exactly surprising. I mean, they're going to spend $8 motherfucking billion on some kind of fanciful scifi pipe dream. I can't wait until they announce that there was no majority report. You know how many dune buggies and border agents you can get--and for how long!--for $8 motherfucking billion? Personally, I'm in favor of open borders as a prelude to the destruction of human society and a return to matriarchal hunter-gathering, but honestly, there is very little that sensitive, finicky, high-techery can accomplish that some dudes with binoculars can't. If one were a cynic, one might suspect that both the idea of the virtual fence and the practical failure of its application were smoke and mirrors intended to camouflage the fact that our government is not in fact interested in staunching the necessary flow of cheaper labor into the United States. Surely, though, that couldn't be the case.

The Peace of Westphalia

Roger Cohen is one of the latest Times goofballs to be elevated from nonentity to irrelevance through receipt of an Op-Ed sinecure. In today's column, he appears to be arguing that the remilitarization of continental Europe is the necessary precondition to a lasting peace.

The solution is Madison Avenue:

NATO has failed to prove its relevance to a post-modern European generation. NATO needs re-branding.

Re-branding! You can call a rotary phone whatever you like, but you still can't oprima numero dos on the goddamned thing.

No Matter Who You Are or Who Commenced It . . .

The country wants change.

-Digby

Digby's post has something to do with Tim Russert, but I am only interested in this opening assertion, which is now the principle theme of Donk politics, oddly counterpointed by the contradictory notion that the country needs to "get back on track." I find it odd, because despite all the highfalutin', it appears to me that change is precisely what the country doesn't want.

That is to say that there seems to me to be no evidence that the citizens of the United States of America--neither a majority nor a plurality nor even a substantial minority--desire any meaningful alteration in the way in which they live. They desire sameness without anxiety, and that is a different thing altogether. They desire comfort without precariousness. What they want is for someone else, politicians or business or "innovators" of some kind or other, to make the current arrangement of their lives "sustainable." They want someone to "fix" the mortgage crisis, but they will not tolerate the material reduction in standards of living that the necessary changes in the way we think of money and credit necessarily imply. They want to "do something" about climate change, which all but the most ignorant (or in-the-tank) acknowledge as an actuality, but they won't contemplate that the entire material basis of our society, from our remaining industry to the physical geography of our communities, undermines any possibility of becoming a less consumptive nation. They want to wean themselves from "dependence on foreign oil," but don't even consider that this ultimately requires the massive physical displacement of millions of people back to cenralized, pedestrian communities. They want a "safe food supply," and they are coming to understand the awfulness of transnational agribusiness, but they don't understand the malthusian dilemmas posed by returning to the lower-yield agriculture of the independent farm, nor yet the fact that such exotica as tomatoes in December would for most of us simply cease to exist. They want cheaper, easier access to healthcare, but they won't revise their attitudes about death, heroic care, and euthenasia.

Obviously that's only a partial list, but it highlights the fundamental emptiness of this oft-requested, never-commenced "change." The truth is that many of the very depredations that liberals like Digby so routinely lament are necessitated by the very nature of the lives that they live. (I hardly exclude myself from that category, by the way.) There is, however, something screamingly dishonest about calling for a change that manifests itself in the preservation of a way-of-life concurrent with the drawing of an opaqued scrim over the social and economic machinery that runs it.

Ralph Nader Intends to Blow Up the Moon with Republican Support

One thing that astonishes about Democratic partisans out in Netrootsia is just how thoroughly unexamined are their assumptions about what The Meshiach is going to do when the good lord delivers him--or, increasingly unlikely, her--unto Washington. "But Obama is going to end the war," someone said to me just the other night, face alight and bosoms aflutter, as if this nutty assertion was going to alter the Good Ship Abstention from its set course, which is neither into nor out of the doldrums.

"No he isn't," I replied flatly, and I found that my friend was totally unable to formulate a response--could not muster any evidence that this would in fact be the case, because there is no such evidence. The belief that Obama is going to end the war is as crazy an article of faith as the conviction among certain types that John McCain is going to win it. How will Barack Obama end the war? And if the answer is anything other than, "Upon assuming office, he will immediately begin the complete withdrawal of all American military forces, ordering an orderly withdrawal of all personnel and as much materiel as can be effectively salavaged, ceasing any and all interference in Iraqi internal affairs, engaging in no military action except the direct protection of departing soldiers and civilians, to be completed with no residual presence in-country by a date no more than three months distant," then, kids, I've got to tell you, he's not going to end the war.

What, instead, "ending the war" seems to mean is that a Democratic president by virtue of not being George W. Bush is going to effectuate precisely the sort of "reconciliation" that we are all being endlessly told is the necessary precondition to leaving. This is rarely stated outright, but always implied. Democrats are going to "use diplomacy". Words on the wind. It is a euphemism for the incredible notion that the United States is going to catalyze a negotiated settlement among grievants in Iraq that returns the territory to something resembling its pre-Invasion equilibrium, but Now With More Democracy! In case no one has noticed, the Turks have invaded Iraqi Kurdistan, the Iraqi Kurds are about to have a civil war (as well as expel the Arabs from Kirkuk), and among Arab factions--well, who the fuck even knows? Proportional representation and factional power-sharing is not the goddamned answer. Just look at the fucking Balkans!

Because no Democrat can accept a.) that Iraq as a national entity is thoroughly fucked, and b.) that Iraq is going to remain fucked during and well after our departure, no Democrat can end the Occupation. And that assumes that elected Democrats want to end it, which is itself a highly dubious proposition. Meanwhile, you can expect these very same Donk boosters to start clamoring that we "do something" about Sudan as soon as they have their hands back on the lever.

Titration

But any decent person who looks at the McCain record sees that while he has certainly faltered at times, he has also battled concentrated power more doggedly than any other legislator.

-David Brooks in the Times

Dear Davey,

Population of the United States of America: 303,514,433

Population of the United States Senate: 100

Love,
IOZ

When Did You Stop Beating Your Wife?

Thanksralphery is especially geared up for it being so early in the running of the race, so you can be pretty sure that Democratic partisans are already deep into the Fear, as Hunter S. might've put it. The fellows at Lawyers, Guns, and Money have already posted 16,247 times on how Ralph Nader was responsible for the Democrats' losses in 2000 and 2004, as well as for the Holocaust, the kidnapping of the Lindbergh Baby, Godfather III, the Great Leap Forward, the cancellation of Sportsnight, and the 1755 Lisbon earthquake. Scott Lemieux confesses, "I'm more sad than angry about what Nader will do to his reputation with another pointless Republican-funded campaign at this late date." Oh, his reputation. He could bottle and sell those tears.

The comments are a priceless, if dour, rolling example of the persistent confusion between correlation and causality. Lies, damned lies, and statistics, I suppose.

The Empire Never Ended

Perhaps I'm misreading, but it appears that when Amy Sullivan says that abortion is no longer the only issue that really affects the choices of "Christian voters", what she's actually saying is that abortion is the only issue that really affects the choices of Christian voters.

On a somewhat related note, to the question of, "How would Jesus Vote?" I must say that I've read the Bible a bit, and it does not occur to me that Jesus would vote.

Poo

I am at worst minarchist libertarian and at best an anarchist, so you'll understand that nothing I'm about to say implies any particular advocacy for Vladimir Putin's Russia. But you know, for most of human history and in most of the world today, people have lived and do live under some or other form of autocracy. Hell, we live under a form of autocracy--I don't think you can reasonably dispute that our country as currently constituted involves a quadrennial or octennial replacement of one dictator with another.

That's not really the point, though. The point is this broad notion, well reflected in the tone of the linked article, that "democracy" is necessarily good, regardless of its outcomes. Of course, Russian democracy under Uncle Boris wasn't pretty, unless you mean pretty awful. It was also questionably democratic in any event. You may recall that Uncle Boris was the one who sent in the tanks. This is not a minor procedural point. Now I, for one, would not want to live under the watchful eye of Czar Vladimir, but it remains unclear to me why either I or the average Russian should be so outraged or disquieted about the marked improvement in almost every aspect of his life.