Cogitamus

Most Overused Words Of 2007

Shakespeare's Sister used to ask readers to produce a list of "words you will be happy to not have to hear ever again in the coming year", so in that spirit, consider this an open thread for words we've heard way to much of, frequently in contexts where there's a more appropriate synonym or near-synonym.

• Markedly. Consider substantially, significantly, or no adverb at all.
• Systemic. I'm convinced that systematic would be a better word 80% of the time.
• Surge. Stop. Just stop. Although it gives me an excuse to make a bad physics/politics joke: What's a change in position? Velocity. What's a change in velocity? Acceleration. What's a change in acceleration? Surge, or perhaps Jerk. What's a change in jerk? An election.

Add yours in the comments.

Jon Swift's Best of the Blogs 2007

If you haven't already done so, head over to the brilliant blog of "reasonable conservative" Jon Swift, author of the definitive post on Jonah Goldberg's magnum ludicrous, Liberal Fascism, and check out his broad  offering of Best Posts as submitted by the bloggers themselves, including this one by Yours Truly. Lots and lots of great reading awaits--I was delighted to discover several compelling, new-to-me bloggers with whose work I was previously unfamiliar.

Jon's own pick?  The above-mentioned post about Liberal Fascism.  Partial as I am to anything brutally funny that manages to work LOLcats into the mix, I would say the Liberal Fascism post was right up there with Jon's best work, though as his fans already know, there was an awful lot of satirical goodness set forth by that guy in 2007--it's really hard to choose a favorite (Jon's Mothers' Day post, My Mother is a Terrible Person, for example?  Gorgeous.)

Enjoy.

Also at litbrit .

Ron Paul's Time Machine Mega Money Mania (With Cowbell)

Another choice bit of campaign comedy from the brilliant Lee Stranahan.  Now that I know Ron Paul will be suspended in a time machine over Times Square tonight, I'm wishing I could hop on a plane and join Son One and my brother-in-law, who'll be in the city to watch the ball drop.  *Sigh*

Also at litbrit.

Dynasties at Home and Abroad

Considering that Benazir Bhutto's chief qualification for her position in the PPP was that her father was Zulfikar Ali Bhutto, you're probably a little late to the party if you think that nepotism might reflect poorly on the PPP.

Also, a word about the invocation of the Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton reign.  Yes, the names make a nice little pattern, but I think it's quite clear that the Bush/Bush part is a much larger problem than the Clinton/Clinton part would be.  Frankly, it's a little lazy to treat these pairings as equivalent.  In one case, a man who had failed at everything in life rose to power solely on the basis of his family's connections.  In HRC's case, yes, it's unlikely she would've come this far on her own (just as it's highly unlikely that any one individual could be so close to becoming President), but by all accounts, she was a smart, passionate and disciplined young adult, and whatever you think of her views today as compared to the other Democrats in the race, she remains an intelligent and competent legislator who, if elected as President, would hardly come close to doing the damage that Bush II has done.  All dynasties, in short, are not equal.

The other aspect of American political dynasties that gets lost when people talk Bush-Clinton-Bush-Clinton is that -- again, notwithstanding the nice little pattern in the names -- dynasties have always been a part of American political life.  That doesn't make them desirable per se, but the election of HRC would hardly be the end of the republic.

Photo courtesy of SEIU International

Dynasties and Democracies

Banana Exploding  by Dr. Andrew Davidhazy.  Via Synthstuff.

Imagine this scenario, and yes, it is a present-day one: the leader of a populous, nuke-possessing nation, the citizens of which are religiously and ideologically divided--rather sharply so, sometimes to the point of violence and terrorism--is someone who rose to power after a stint as the head of the country's espionage agency. He places his sons in positions of governorship over two of the country's wealthiest and most politically-valuable provinces while grooming one son to be the guaranteed successor to his own position at the nation's helm a decade later; and, when that comes about, stacks his staff from the top on down with cronies and war profiteers.

I know, someone really ought to drag those banana republics into the twenty-first century.

Oh, wait...

As news comes forth that assassinated former PM Benazir Bhutto's husband Asif Ali Zardari and their son Bilawal will co-chair the Pakistan People's Party, the Freepers and Green Footballers of the world are picking away at the splinter in Pakistan's eye--muttering about corruption and nepotism while remarking that Musharraf isn't perfect but hey, he seemed to be working--even as they ignore the telephone poles that are firmly lodged in their own red-white-and-blue-tinted corneas.

It strikes me as more than a bit hypocritical for anyone Stateside to be grousing about, well, corruption and nepotism abroad.

It matters not if a country is known for its bananas or its missiles: power-poisoned human beings, brown and white ones alike, will always revert to form. La plus ça change...

Also at litbrit.

WI Picks Its Man Of The Year

Not only did Jeff Fecke create the above image, he also wrote an excellent post that lays out the case against anyone hiring Bill Kristol, let alone the New York Times. 

Kristol's the guy who said of Iraq, "There's been a certain amount of pop sociology in America ... that the Shia can't get along with the Sunni and the Shia in Iraq just want to establish some kind of Islamic fundamentalist regime. There's almost no evidence of that at all. Iraq's always been very secular."

[H]e also said, in April of 2003, "The battles of Afghanistan and Iraq have been won decisively and honorably. But these are only two battles. We are only at the end of the beginning in the war on terror and terrorist states." Or in 2004, "What the Bush administration did say--and what so many reporters seem to have trouble understanding--is that Iraq and al Qaeda had a relationship that, by its very existence, posed a potential threat to the United States."

What You Pay for When You Buy a Newspaper

Justin Fox is right to take issue with David Lazarus' argument that newspapers "give away the store online" by allowing people to read their work for free:

News was already pretty close to free long before the Internet came along. It was free on TV, free on the radio, and effectively free in newspapers when you consider all the valuable stuff that came packaged with it for 25 or 50 cents, from comics to crosswords to classifieds to supermarket ads.

You can actually take this a step further.  The money that people fork over for print newspapers isn't some premium for the value of the content inside.  It's money that goes to covering the cost and distribution of the actual paper.  (See Kinsley on this point, for instance.)  So the notion that you would pay nothing for a paperless product actually isn't so crazy.  Lazarus either doesn't know this or is obscuring it.

Celebrating Patriot Perfection with LCD Soundsystem

Yes, Stephen, there is perfection. And we are reveling!

What's a guy gotta do to get a column in the NYT?

Evidently, be wrong about absolutely everything.  And contemptuous of your future employer.  Maybe contemptuous isn't really strong enough -- believe that your future employer is a traitorous organization that should be criminally prosecuted for fulfilling its journalistic duties.

What in God's name can these people be thinking?  Is there anything that a right winger could do that would disqualify him/herself from being treated as a serious and respectable human being by main stream media organs like the Times?

I shake my head.  Ruefully.   

Kabuki Foreign Policy

It's been a little over a month since the much ballyhooed Annapolis conference between the Israelis and Palestinians.  I had the opportunity the other night to ask a career foreign service officer with significant experience in the Islamic world whether Annapolis presented a possible break through or more Kabuki theater courtesy of the Bush Administration.  His view was unequivocally on the side of Kabuki theater. 

I believe he summed it up thusly -- a hastily called meeting of three leaders (Abbas, Olmert and Bush) whose combined approval ratings probably barely crack sixty 60 percent, with zero collective political capital, minimal credibility with their own people and one another, and in the case of Bush, an utter lame duck.  He predicted no actual achievements of note, no follow through, and the collective forgetting of what little was accomplished there.  A depressing but I am guessing accurate summary of another moment of photo op foreign policy by an administration that deliberately ignored the conflict until well past the point where anything useful could be accomplished.      

Movie Madness

One of the joys of the holiday season is that it tends to be the one time of year that movies catering to people with three digit IQs are released.  I've indulged fully this past week and can recommend several films without hesitation, despite lacking the time and talent to really review anything. 

My favorite of all has been Juno, written by the immensely talented Diablo Cody mentioned by Sara below.  Juno is charming, witty and off beat and filled with great performances, most compellingly by its young lead, Ellen Page.

I also recommend The Great Debaters which features tremendous work by both Denzel Washington and Forest Whitaker, among others.  What could be a cliched triumph of the underdog motif is leavened by a gritty depiction of the terrors and humiliations of African American life in the segregated Texas of the 1930s.

Finally, today I saw two of the finest actors alive -- Phillip Seymour Hoffman and Laura Linney -- in an impressive, albeit depressing, small film, The Savages.  The tale of two siblings dealing with the onset of dementia in their highly problematic father, this is not fare for everyone and would never be confused for being a date movie.  But if you want to see searingly honest acting by performers who never strike a false or vain note I recommend this one to you as well.  (Hoffman also has a nice showing in Charlie Wilson's War another pretty good flick.)           

Will music suck for the rest of our lives?

This Rolling Stone article about the changing standards for sound on music CDs is interesting to me -- it's not the first time I've seen a major publication decry the overuse of dynamic range compression.  Where RS really loses the plot, I think, is when they blame the rise of MP3s for the trend.  As the article itself notes, the overuse of DRC really began in the mid-90s, before MP3s had really begun to take off, and well before they'd set the new standard.

In a nutshell

Via Jezebel, Diablo Cody expressed very nicely how a woman is damned if she does, and damned if she doesn't. 

"...This is a real paradox for me: My entire life I've been told I wasn't pretty enough. My entire life I was told by people that I was ugly, that I was too tall, that I was flat-chested, that I was this, that I was that. When I was a stripper I was never quite pretty enough. I was never one of the beautiful girls. I was never one of the top earners. Suddenly I achieve something in my life that is purely intellectual and purely creative, and I'm being told that it's because I'm pretty. To me that is the weirdest, most ironic thing ever. Like all of a sudden I'm attractive when it suits people's purposes. But in the past when I needed to be attractive I was ugly. So let's pick. Which is it?" -- Juno screenwriter Diablo Cody [Minneapolis City Pages]

Don't we all know: it's neither.  It's that a woman can't be successful on her own merits, so she's got to be cheating somehow.

New Hampshire: At Least It's A Regular Vote

Once again, I'm just not very interested in the GOP field.  Apparently they have all these different people running for President, but all I see is pretty much the same old white guy who would be an utter disaster as President no matter what name they put at the bottom of the screen.  The authoritarian nutjob called "Giuliani" is shedding supporters rather quickly, but they're finding a nice home with the authoritarian nutjob called "McCain" who is, apparently, still running for President.  Grandpa's "support" comes from those who feel sorry for him getting trotted out for a few minutes of mumbled rambling about Reagan, Ron Paul gets the votes of those who think New Hampshires' motto is "Live Free and Kill the Darkies," and so on.  So let's move on, shall we?

The Democratic race is not quite as tight here as it is in Iowa.  Here's the trends up to 12/26:

A List of Music Never Before Made In Such Detail Or With Such Care

Here's an assortment of albums worth listening to that I discovered this year:

• Magneta Lane, Dancing WIth Daggers
• Kanye West, Graduation
• Mos Def, The New Danger
• Stiffed, Burned Again
• The Cloud Room, The Cloud Room
• Northern State, Can I Have This Pen?
• !!! (which should be pronounced "Bang Bang Bang" and not "Chk Chik Chick", no matter what the artists think), Louden Up Now
• Arctic Monkeys, Whatever People Say I Am, That's What I'm Not

And yes, part of this list is current, while part of it is woefully behind the times. That's just how I roll. Buy it on Amazon MP3, now featuring artists on all major labels except Sony.

She Rests Now in Peace; Will the Rest of Us Know Peace?

Photo of Benazir Bhutto taken by NYT photographer John Moore
minutes before she was assassinated at a rally on December 27, 2007.

At the end of a year full of sad and shocking events, yesterday we were profoundly saddened and utterly shocked, yet again, this time by the brutal assassination of Pakistan's former Prime Minister, Benazir Bhutto.

I commend to you this superb post by The Dark Wraith, who wonders why the United States invaded Iraq when clearly it was the roiling marketplace of WMD's and their attendant parts furiously bubbling away in Pakistan, right under our noses--particularly, at least until she was deliberately outed, the trained nose of CIA counter-proliferation specialist Valerie Plame--that represented an actual and real nuclear threat in the Middle East (emphasis mine):

In 2003, the United States attacked Iraq despite the fact that it was Pakistan, through the long-term, ongoing efforts of nuclear scientist and entrepreneur Dr. A.Q. Khan, which was the principal wellspring from which not only the technology of nuclear weapons was spreading, but the actual parts to build the bombs, themselves, was flowing to countries like North Korea, Iran, and Libya; but instead of crushing the operation, arresting the participants, and punishing Pakistan and its leaders for their support of this global bazaar of weapons of mass destruction, the Bush Administration, through its very own top-level officials, outed a CIA non-official cover spy, Valerie Plame, and thereby destroyed her network that was tasked to tracking these very WMD proliferators. Moreover, the Bush Administration, which now expresses outrage at the assassination of the best hope for Pakistan to emerge from years of authoritarian rule, has poured billions of dollars of aid at the corruption-riddled Pakistani leaders, even as the junta-led Pakistani armed forces have been entirely ineffective in preventing the country's western frontier from falling solidly into the hands of Taliban forces and their sympathizers, who have pumped combatants, war material, and ideological strength into the debilitating war of attrition being waged against U.S. and other NATO forces in Afghanistan.

Dear Iowa: Don't Muck This Up For Us

It's less than one week until a few residents of Iowa - if they don't have anything better to do, mind you - get to decide 50% of the 2008 Presidential election.  The other 50% of the decision rests on those residents of New Hampshire who decide it's worth it to tunnel out from under the snow to vote.

Yay.

But this post isn't really about the idiocy of our current system.  That issue has simultaneously been discussed to death and has seen the breadth of its dysfunction barely addressed. 

What is interesting is the campaign to be the nominee for both parties.  This cycle the Democrats and Republicans are mirror images of each other.  On the Democratic side, we suffer from an embarrassment of riches, with several quite good candidates.  For all the fussing and fighting we do about Hillary, Obama and Edwards, any one of them has the definite potential to be an excellent President, and that's not even just compared to Bush.

On the Republican side, they're just suffering from embarrassment.  The successful recruitment of Grandpa Fred to the roster apparently cured them of their search for a political messiah, and Republican voters understand that "None of the Above" isn't going to be on the ballot no matter how much they might wish it to be.  I don't really care that much about the GOP side; Huckabee will win Iowa, the Republican leadership and Village media will completely lose their minds, and it'll be fun to watch.

Since the Democrats have the only people worth caring about, let's look at them in depth.

Roving Reporters

Technology can do wonderful things, but I doubt it's going to be enough to keep the Post's foreign news coverage at its current level once, as the Observer informs us, the paper replaces some foreign bureaus "with a roving reporter who will cover several areas and countries at once."  This is from an internal memo:

These new assignments will not be based in bureaus as we have known them. Instead, the correspondent will be the bureau. We need people who can live and work for extended periods out of a suitcase, who will organize their planning, reporting and writing around nothing more than a laptop, air card and cell phone. We seek reporters who will be comfortable traveling at least two and sometimes three weeks out of every four...

While each correspondent will have a base, we envision only a light presence, with no office, no formal staff, and a strong demand for work in the field.

Covering just one country was easy enough -- why not a few countries all at once? 

Responding to this sort of hand-wringing, Jack Shafer once commented that "[t]he closures of foreign bureaus and downsizing of Washington offices by newspapers are much lamented by journalists, but how essential are they in an age when any reader can call up on his screen free coverage by the top U.S. dailies and the foreign press?"  That doesn't do us much good when it's the top U.S. dailies that are scaling back their coverage, and when there's no indication that news organizations in other countries are going to pick up the slack. 

And while there are plenty of non-Western countries with vibrant news media, this is generally not the case [PDF] -- and it's almost certainly not the case in those countries where skillful coverage is likely to be most valuable.  For instance, the Observer adds that "[o]penings are available immediately for Pakistan, Afghanistan, and Central Asia."  After all, nothing particularly important ever happens in those parts...

Annoy The Media: Nominate John Edwards

In 1992, some clever entrepreneur started selling bumper stickers that read "Annoy the Media: Reelect Bush". Between Atrios and MyDD contributer desmoinesdem, one wonders if frustration with press coverage has now come full circle.

Dog Whistle Politics

The art of using dog whistles in political discourse is endlessly fascinating to me.  Each ideology has elements so repugnant to people of differing opinions that politicians are desperate to find ways to reassure and inspire followers while keeping off opponents' radar screens.  Bush's invocation of the Dred Scott Supreme Court decision in his 2004 debate with Kerry is a famous example of this, signalling to anti-choicers his commitment* to removing federal oversight over the issue of abortion, which would allow states to restrict women's lives to their hearts' content.

Or we could look at Ron Paul's candidacy.  Truly here is a master of the dog whistle, as Paul is able to attract the support of many progressives because of his opposition to the Iraq War and, more importantly, his support of the Constitution.  To progressives this means that FISA regulations need to be obeyed and even strengthened in favor of privacy.  It means no retroactive telecom immunity, it means following the Geneva Conventions.  To conservatives, however, it means opposition to Social Security, public schools, Medicare, Medicaid, the federal minimum wage, the EPA, the FDA, and pretty much any other aspect of the federal government that intrudes upon individual rights (for corporations and the investor class).

No, it really happened

The girlfriend didn't believe me when I started talking about the Christmas Truce a few minutes ago.  There's something about the mind that rebels at the idea of basic humanity in a time of war, I suppose.

I mention this only because a) I always think about the Christmas truce at this time of year, and b) it gives me a chance to link to an old classic of mine.

Tough Guy My Ass

Atrios points out this most recent atrocity by Ed Henry of CNN in which he characterizes Bush as "tough guy from Texas."  What is there in the life of George W. Bush to suggest that he is in any way a tough guy?  Where has he ever had to prove his mettle as a man?

Because I look and all I see is a smirking, privileged, arrogant, bullying frat boy who has had everything in life handed to him.  I see nothing in his biography that suggests any demonstration of physical or moral courage in his life.  And, no, getting other people's children killed, or having them kill other other people's children doesn't really make you a tough guy by any objective measure.  I absolutely hate crap like this.  So Ed Henry, in the spirit of the season, fuck off you smarmy ass kisser.   

Monday Tuesday Miscellany

A bit late, folks, sorry about that.  It's always hectic, celebrating Santa's birthday.  And I don't know about you, but I can do without the sooty footprints inside and the pig urine all over the place outside, thank you very much.

At any rate, here's some highly interesting information.

• Christmas may be "over" for many of you, but traditionally it would just get started.  So I don't feel too out of season by posting yet another example of Kitschmas, courtesy of our friends at Ship of Fools.  It's the Pope's cologne, "aristocratic, Old World cologne with surprising freshness." 

It's Pius IX's personal formula, handed down over the last 150 years by the family of his captain of the guard.  So there you go.

My First Vlog Post!

This weekend, I made my first attempt at video blogging!  Unfortunately, the full moon came up right before I started, which caused me to undergo some unfortunate changes.  But I hope it still turned out okay.  Thanks to my fearless brother and sister for filming and technical assistance. 

Steve Martin's Christmas Wishes

I can't argue with a single one of Steve's Christmas Wishes*--they all sound perfectly reasonable to me, heh heh.

But I will add to his list my own hopes for peace,  and of course a big, all-embracing wish that everyone who stops by this page will have a wild and crazy Christmas Eve--one that's filled with color and sparkle and children climbing on you and grownups handing you yet more things to eat and sloppy kisses from ecstatic dogs and Yes, please, more wine, and generally too much of everything.  Just what Santa's helpers everywhere need if we're going to bust out of the bleakness that has plagued December thus far and ready ourselves for the Big Day tomorrow.  That, and lots more alcohol.

Happy Birthday to my Baby Brother, who turns 45 today.

Alla famiglia!

*Via Bob Cesca's Goddamn Awesome Blog.

Also at litbrit.