Cogitamus

You Gotta Do What You Gotta Do

Barack Obama has left Trinity UCC. 'Twas clever of the Obama campaign to announce it on Florida-and-Michigan day, but I'm still a little sad. After the Philadelphia speech, I was hopeful that the Obama campaign had successfully seized upon the opportunity to have a conversation about Race In America that treated us like adults. But then Clinton went to the well in her interview with the Post-Gazette, George Stephanopolous and Charlie Gibson tag-teamed Obama on the subject, and then Father Pfleger had to go there, just as the nomination was winding down. So instead, the whole conversation is reduced to caricature.

I'll turn the mic over to Stephen, who probably has something more insightful to say.

Destroy the State (or not)

Okay, in deference to my friend and colleague Crispin Sartwell, with whom I often disagree on matters political and social (such as his fondness for anarchism and love of rap, to name but two), I'm posting his challenge.  He's still a brilliant guy with often compelling arguments, and I'm as happy to throw down the philosophical gauntlet as the next person.  So here's his manifesto and challenge to you, gentle readers (he also has a video challenge up on YouTube, and if I could remember how to embed it I would):

Did Reid And McConnell Cut A Lieberman Deal?

Here are two things I can't explain -- except, maybe, in terms of each other.

First: Even if Joe Lieberman decides to officially become a Republican, this doesn't give the GOP control of the Senate. This is because of the organizing resolution that was passed at the beginning of 2007, which doesn't allow a change in majority to change control of the chamber. Things were different in 2001-2002, when Jim Jeffords' decision to leave the Republican Party gave Democrats control. Why did Mitch McConnell let Harry Reid set up the rules this way, when Tom Daschle didn't let Trent Lott set up the rules like that six years ago?

(Here's the text of the 2001 organizing resolution, which allows for control to switch. By contrast, this term's organizing resolutions list off the Democratic and Republican members of each committee by name, and specify which Democrats get to chair committees. As with so many good things, I got all this in an old post from Hilzoy.)

Second: Harry Reid hasn't been forcing the Republicans to filibuster very much, even on issues where the Democratic position is popular. There was the Iraq funding filibuster last July, but that ended a lot quicker than many of us expected. Why hasn't Harry Reid been forcing the Republicans to hurt themselves by filibustering popular legislation?

Non-RBC Open Thread

I confess, I don't give a whit about today's Rules & Bylaws Committee meeting. ARML is underway and I have a frisbee game to go to. Consider this an open thread to talk about anything else.

Terrorist Presence With a Checkered Past: It's Scrap Time!

Gone, but not forgotten.  OH no.

Symbol-sensitive and right-thinking 'Muricans, led by the intrepid hatemonger conservative blogger Michelle "Stalkin' " Malkin, have been, er, appeased (for the time being, anyway): a boycott-threatening campaign has led to Dunkin' Donuts pulling the now-famous Rachael Ray Jihadi Chic ads.

And never again will donut-scarfers have to cast their gaze on that dreadful terrorist scarf and its obvious, black-and-white implications.

But the fight is long from over.  We all know that lefty bloggers like TRex can be counted on to trick us, particularly when they insist on posting adorable photos of their new Siamese kittens. I mean, who can resist oohing and aahing at little Max, right?

More And Better Spreadsheets

Here's Revision two of the "Run everywhere" data. Important updates:

• Now accounts for number of college graduates when estimating "White PVI"
• Adjusts for observed turnout among Black & Hispanic voters. However, because this figure is based on nationwide turnout, there are still strange effects. Presumably in Chicano-heavy districts in the Southwest, Hispanic turnout is higher.
• Incumbents and Open Seats are now on the same spreadsheet, though on different sheets.
• You can edit it now (I think). Play with the turnout and Obama's vote to change which seats are in play! For reference, Kerry lost white non-college voters 62-38; Gore lost them 58.5-41.5. Kerry lost white college voters 54.5-45.5; Gore lost them 55-45. Current polls show Obama losing white college voters by 4 and white non-college voters by 20.

Missionaries And Guns Don't Mix

One of the more disturbing subplots of the Iraq War is the idea of a majority Christian nation invading, conquering and occupying a majority Muslim nation.  Never mind Bush's initial "crusade" reference; no one really thinks Bush knows enough history to understand why people might react badly to such a remark.  The real problem has been the ways in which the Koran has been treated and statements made about Islam by members of our government.

Now we can add proselytizing to the list of foolish, counterproductive actions.

FALLUJAH, Iraq — At the western entrance to the Iraqi city of Fallujah Tuesday, Muamar Anad handed his residence badge to the U.S. Marines guarding the city. They checked to be sure that he was a city resident, and when they were done, Anad said, a Marine slipped a coin out of his pocket and put it in his hand.

Out of fear, he accepted it, Anad said. When he was inside the city, the college student said, he looked at one side of the coin. "Where will you spend eternity?" it asked.

He flipped it over, and on the other side it read, "For God so loved the world, that He gave His only begotten Son, that whoever believes in Him shall not perish, but have eternal life. John 3:16."

Evangelicalism is marked by the propensity of its adherents to engage in evangelism - what else? - anytime, any place, without any invitation at all.  When you grow up within American Evangelicalism, you're taught that it is your call to spread the Gospel, not just the pastors' call.  It is your responsibility to ascertain the spiritual condition of everyone you know and to make sure that those acquaintances that don't know Jesus at least get introduced to him by you. 

Part of your training as a young Evangelical is a regular diet of stories about people who talked about Jesus with strangers or in seemingly hostile situations, the result of which was at least one new convert.  The Gideons would usually get one Sunday a year to ask for funds for Bibles to distribute, and they were always good for a couple of stories about people in hotel rooms picking up Bibles and miraculously opening them to passages that convicted them of their sin and convinced them of their need for Jesus.  So I can understand why people would think that even though there's a lot of tension in the Muslim-Christian relationship right now, even though the people distributing these coins would be doing so at the literal barrel of a gun, perhaps one Iraqi would be convinced of the truth of Christianity by one of these coins and would convert, thereby making the entire enterprise worthwhile.

Again, I can understand that viewpoint.  But I can't help but think, at the same time, that while our troops still suffer from a lack of body armor and up-armored Humvees, people spent money on these coins.  While the citizens of New Orleans still suffer in a ravaged city, while people still rely on toxic trailers from FEMA, someone decided that these coins were a good use of resources.  While the people of China and Myanmar suffer from natural disasters on top of human-manufactured oppression, while people in the US find it hard to afford their homes, their cars, their weekly grocery bill, a group of Evangelical Christians decided that the most important thing for them to do was to make a bunch of coins modeled after the Kennedy Method of evangelism.

The roots of American Evangelicalism lie not only in missionary zeal, but also in a commitment to improving the earthly status of the sick and the poor.  The movement's roots go back to the post-millennialism of pre-WWI Christianity - the idea that Jesus would come back only after they had brought about a 1,000 year age of Christian dominance over the whole world.  And before you get too shocked by that, the dominance they envisioned was one that resulted in worldwide peace and the end of such problems as hunger and disease.

Now Evangelicalism is reduced to people who, after waving automatic rifles in the face of someone who just wants to get home, hand them a worthless "coin" and expect that to fulfill their duty to the Great Commission found at the end of Matthew in the New Testament.  How sad to have fallen so far.

It's A Small World After All

Poblano of fivethirtyeight, it turns out, is Nate Silver of Baseball Prospectus. I remember reading Nate before I got into politics, back in 2003 when I was wondering what good I was accomplishing in the world applying my left-brain math knowledge to baseball when there's a war going on, George Bush was trying to pass more tax cuts with terrible budget gimmicks, etc. So I dove into politics, hoping to shed some light on polling information and budget flim-flammery.

If this keeps up I'm going to find people I played ultimate frisbee with in college, Georgia ARML team members, and other kids in the Brookwood Boys starting political blogs.

Who will rid me of this Meddlesome Priest?

So a couple of questions: After the Wright, Hagee, and Parsley controversies, what on earth could possess this asshole priest, who obviously thinks he's pretty fly for a white guy, to engage in this offensive, misogynistic, racist diatribe in Obama's church?   Does he not understand that everything that happens at that church is being filmed and scrutinized?  Does he not comprehend how harmful what he was saying could be to Obama?  Does he not understand how utterly incompatible with his role as priest this particular performance was, how vile the message, how hateful and un-Christ like?

I am sickened by these guys and their pathetic narcissism and their penchant for playing to the worst instincts of their congregations.  (I am put in mind of Diderot's observation that "man will never be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest."  Substitute "crazy minister" for king and we might be on to something here.)   

Can we return to being the party of the godless now?  Because I have to say -- none of my pagan rituals -- which chiefly revolve around food and drink -- okay a lot of drink -- are likely to offend my fellow citizens.   

Greatest Generation, Indeed

Do not mess with WWII vets:

Concerning the service of Mr. Charles Payne: C.T. Payne was a soldier in the 89th Infantry Division. He served in the 355th Infantry Regiment, Company K. The 355th Infantry Regiment was the unit to liberate Ohrdruf. Mr. Payne was there.

For those who seek to minimize the horrors of Ohrdruf since it was a 'work' camp and not a 'death' camp, we have but one word: shame. Ironically, this argument has been made to us time and time again by various Holocaust-deniers and other pro-Nazi groups. We will let the testimony of survivors and veterans speak for themselves.

The idiots of the rightwing blogosphere - and that term is a compliment - are so used to impugning the character and questioning the truthfulness of any person saying something inconvenient to their fantasy world that they reall don't know when to keep their mouths shut and their keyboards silent. Via Sady, No! there's an unintentionally hilarious - and revealing - post by Steve Gilbert of Sweetness & Light wherein the staggeringly unaware blogger publishes email exchanges between himself, some readers and the proprietors of the 89th ID WWII website.

Mark Kitchell, who runs that website, is not happy with the inquiries and their tone.  He's obviously no supporter of George Bush.  Mr. Kitchell's unwillingness to toe the chickenhawk line gives us a prime example of what the wingnuts really mean when they say they "support the troops."  Here's a good example of the high regard Mr. Gilbert holds our veterans and their families if they refuse to do his bidding:

I wonder how many people who visit the 89th Infantry site and support Mr. Kitchell’s work realize his politics are those of Cindy Sheehan?

Only someone as unpatriotic and, frankly, stupid as Steve Gilbert - and his commenters, oh Lordy, his commenters - would even care what a person's politics are.  Raymond Kitchell served in the US Army during WWII, and was part of a group of soldiers that liberated Jews from a concentration camp.  He has seen horrors that would send cowards like Gilbert running to the hills, their poop-stained britches falling around their ankles as their eyes sting from their tears. 

God bless Raymond Kitchell for what he did in WWII.  God bless all the men and women who lived through such horrors, including members of Obama's family.  And God bless Mark Kitchell for being willing to stand up to baseless attacks against the character of one of his father's fellow soldiers and, now, his own personal character.  Gilbert and the other rightwing extremists aren't fit to lick the mud off Raymond Kitchell's WWII combat boots.

Cogitamus Gets Results!

Bob Alexander (D-MI-08) now has a website! Okay, maybe it was due to recent coverage on the local CBS affiliate, but that's not going to stop me from taking credit.

Now, there's one caveat to all those Michigan districts. Apparently Michigan state law makes it difficult for students to vote in the districts where they attend school, and one of the big reasons my projections said MI-08 was vulnerable is because of the large number of students at Michigan State -- almost 14% of the district's white population is enrolled in a four year college, graduate school, or professional school. That said, Kerry and Gore averaged 45% of the white vote, which, in a district that's about 8% non-white, means Alexander still has a shot. I would probably push the district out of the top 20 and down into the top 30, with Steve LaTourette, Brian Bilbray, etc. It can still happen.

The prize you don't want to win

Just ignore Ezra and anyone else who tells you Indiana Jones is anything other than awesome.  That said, Ezra's mistake of declaring it the stupidest movie he's ever seen has launched a spirited debate in his comments thread over what is, in fact, the stupidest movie ever.  So far my vote is for Super Mario Bros.

Favourite comments:

From Ohioboy: 

Now, I love Raiders of the Lost Ark, and I presume most of you, and most of those calling IJ4 "stupid," also love Raiders of the Lost Ark. But if you're criticizing IJ4 on the grounds of plausibility, then I think you've simply forgotten what "Indiana Jones" means.

And from John "I wrote Transformers" Rogers:

Stupider than mine?  Serioulsy?!

WAHOOO! GIANT ROBOTS FTW!!

Though I think Mr. Rogers is just forgetting that he also had a hand in Catwoman.

Bitter -- I'll Show you Bitter

Imagine A Catchy Post Title

Some odds and ends. .  .

• First, as a bit of a response to Nick's counterintuitivity, take a look at this heartwarming story.  To summarize, Delta Airlines applied their standard customer service to Richard Roth and his family when the Roths attempted to take a trip to Buenos Aires last Christmas, which resulted in lost luggage, being stranded for days in airports and thousands of dollars in extra costs.

I utterly hate US domestic airlines, and held them in contempt long before President Bush turned every flight into a real-life GOP-politics-of-fear-style commercial.  The root problem with these airlines is that they are free, by law, from having to compete with international carriers in domestic air travel.  All US government-paid travel must take place on US carriers.  And, of course, the privately owned airline industry is heavily subsidized by the American taxpayer - not just with airports, but in actual direct cash bailouts of badly managed corporations  They don't need to be polite, they don't need to be efficient, because Americans have apparently decided that they're one of the industries that are just too big to fail - thereby guaranteeing a state of constant failure.  I say we institute some real airline deregulation.  Let international carriers do business wherever they want, let the Feds buy the cheapest tickets available, and shut down the wide-open pipeline of taxpayer dollars.  Let them go out of business, and take the money we've been flushing down their cramped toilets and start building a national high-speed rail system.  Or universal healthcare.  Or maybe we can round up all the people responsible for the last seven years in DC and pay them off to go live somewhere else and leave us alone.

• SPAM sales are up, which Hormel attributes to people wanting to save money on their grocery bill.  I've had Spam before, long ago.  It was horrible, bad enough that 20 years or so later I can still recall the taste of it.  So I'm not just hopping on the 'mock SPAM bandwagon.  What I truly don't understand is why anyone would buy SPAM as a replacement meat-type product to save money if they aren't already in the habit of buying it.  Yet according to Hormel, that's exactly what's happening.  If money is tight, there are other protein sources that don't have so much saturated fat, aren't loaded with extra salt and, most importantly, aren't SPAM.  Red beans and rice, anyone?

• Matt Stoller has a great post explaining why James Webb has no business being Obama's VP pick.  I'm so aghast at the idea of Democrats buying into the same ticket-balancing, shoring-up-GOP-defined-weaknesses and electability nonsense that doomed us in 2004 that I haven't been able to move on to the other reasons Stoller lists, so kudos to him for doing the work.  Obama needs to either pick someone who'll make a great President in 2016, or he needs to get back to the VP's essential worthlessness as an office and pick some nobody who won't screw up at funerals.

A League Of Their Own

Cheryl Rofer joins Thomas Carothers in criticizing the idea of an active 'League of Democracies'. The reason some people want such an organization is so that they don't have to listen to China and Russia in deciding when to undertake coercive action. That's an understandable motivation -- getting approval from dictatorships with serious human rights problems can often prevent us from achieving genuinely valuable ends. But I was pretty impressed by an argument that Matt Yglesias made in Heads In The Sand against relying on such an organization to legitimize sanctions and military action. 

Suppose we were to ignore Chinese opinion, and only seek the approval of our friends in the League of Democracies before undertaking coercive action. With the threat of being invaded or sanctioned by democracies, the dictatorships of the world wouldn't just shrug and plod along one by one in their oppressive way. Faced with an external threat, they'd form alliances against all those mean democracies that keep invading and sanctioning them. Nuclear proliferation is a particularly big problem here -- what's to stop China from selling nuclear weapons to dictators who promise to keep selling it oil or promise not to sanction it? As Yglesias points out, there's a serious danger that you'd end up in a great power conflict like the Cold War, with its Vietnam-style quagmires, huge sums of money wasted on armaments, brutal proxy conflicts that rip apart Africa and Latin America, and possibility of nuclear war.

That, obviously, isn't where we want to go. It's not even clear that this kind of polarized situation would be good on democracy-promotion grounds -- when your undemocratic country finds itself threatened with invasion by democracies, being a local democracy activist might make you look suspicious and unpatriotic. So as annoying as it is to look for Russia and China's approval on stuff, it's worth some restrictions on our freedom of action to avoid a situation where the world is embroiled in decades-long negative-sum great power conflicts.

A lot of this is moot right now -- after the Iraq War, our fellow democracies aren't exactly itching to follow the United States into battle. But building a substantial 'League of Democracies' that wields massive power and excludes countries we don't like isn't even really a goal to build towards. Truly inclusive organizations like the UN, even with their obvious drawbacks, are the kinds of international institutions to work through.

The Best Defense ...

Via OpenLeft, a list of states where the Barack Obama campaign is getting a head start on organizing. Here's the map of states where Obama is defending:

<p>&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;lt;strong&amp;gt;&amp;gt;&amp;lt;a href='http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/electoral-college/'&amp;gt;Electoral College Prediction Map&amp;lt;/a&amp;gt;&amp;lt;/strong&amp;gt; - Predict the winner of the general election. Use the map to experiment with winning combinations of states. Save your prediction and send it to friends.&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;</p>

And here's a map where they're playing offense:

<p>&lt;p&gt;&amp;lt;p&amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;strong&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;a href='http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-srv/politics/interactives/campaign08/electoral-college/'&amp;amp;gt;Electoral College Prediction Map&amp;amp;lt;/a&amp;amp;gt;&amp;amp;lt;/strong&amp;amp;gt; - Predict the winner of the general election. Use the map to experiment with winning combinations of states. Save your prediction and send it to friends.&amp;amp;lt;/p&amp;amp;gt;&amp;lt;/p&amp;gt;&lt;/p&gt;</p>

Assorted notes below the fold.

Little Debbie Explains it all to You

Alright I'll admit it -- I spend too much time fulminating over the Washington Post.  But it's been dropped at my doorstep every morning for over 25 years, so I tend to take it personally.  The decline of the Post's editorial page into something just this side of a den of reaction both saddens and infuriates me.

Thus I enjoyed the recent description of the Post's Op-Ed staff by Ombudsperson Deborah Howell ("Little Debbie" to me and low-tech cyclist) in which she concludes that it is too male, too white and too old.  (No wonder it seems like a Republican Party adjunct at times.) What she failed to note is that it is also absurdly right wing for the readership it serves.  Howell describes the Post's lineup as follows -- conservatives: George Will, Robert Novak, Michael Gerson and Charles Krauthammer; liberals: Richard Cohen, E.J. Dionne, Eugene Robinson and Harold Meyerson -- unaffiliated: David Broder, Anne Applebaum, Ruth Marcus, Jim Hoagland, David Ignatius, Sebastian Mallaby and Robert Samuelson. 

Let's start with the low-hanging fruit.  Mallaby and Samuelson -- if these two are centrists than I am Michelle Malkin's love toy.  Seriously, to claim that utter free market ideologues such as these two are not conservatives gives you some sense of just how warped the ideological lenses are at the Post.  Applebaum is still fighting Stalin and the Cold War, Ignatius is a classic Washington moron, Hoagland a status quo maven (whom I think I'd call a conservative if I could stay awake through one of his columns), and Marcus and Broder can reasonably characterized as centrists -- although Broder's centrism is of the stripe that always hurts liberals.  Of course all of the alleged centrists, including Broder and Marcus, are obsessed with entitled reform, i.e. benefit cuts for average people.   

Cohen is a special case -- I will briefly summarize his output -- wank, wank, wank, scary black people scare me, wank, wank, wank, scary Muslims scare me, wank, wank, wank, I am funny, wank, wank, wank, no really I am, wank, wank, wank, black people should denounce scary black people who scare me, wank, wank, wank, hey baby if I said you had a beautiful body would you hold it against me, wank, wank, wank, you don't have a scary black or Muslim boyfriend do you.         

Counterintuitive!

I've been short on blogospheric heterodoxies of late, and while there's no point in contrarianisms for contrarianism's sake, it always gives me pause. So I was a bit happy to think that it's not clear that regional high-speed rail would be a very good idea in most the United States. The Northeast Corridor already has the Acela, so the only issue there is that the US probably needs to scale back its safety-in-the-event of a crash requirements to allow for lighter trains, and do whatever it is that needs to be done to the tracks to allow for faster travel.

But that's really the only place it makes sense, thanks to the region's dense development and robust commuter rail services. Take the Midwest. Ideally, you'd run high-speed lines connecting Minneapolis-St Paul, Milwaukee, Chicago, Indianapolis, Cleveland, Cincinnati, Columbus, Detroit, Pittsburgh, and Buffalo. But there are lots of outlying medium-sized towns that make that problematic. What do people living in Racine do: drive an hour north to Milwaukee, park, then hop on a train to Indianapolis, making a stop in Chicago? Ah, you say, we'll run local trains that stop at places like Racine! Suddenly, those trips get a lot longer; a train that stops in Racine has to stop in Waukega, Gary, probably Lafayette, etc. Either way, air travel is starting to look tempting; either I have to drive and park anyway, at which point I might as well take the somewhat faster flight, or I have to make stops in other medium-sized towns, at which point the flight is a better use of my time.

Yes, it works in Europe, but of course in Europe the overall population density is higher. Plus, the rail system is at some level owned by the national government, so unless you get state governments to pony up, you're asking America to swallow a large tax increase. We need a better understanding of the country's travel patterns before we build huge rail systems. In the meantime, it seems more promising to focus on metro-level commuter rail and intra-city subways/elevated rails/streetcars than pie-in-the-sky regional projects.

Favorite Coded Sentence of the Week

A very good friend of mine who is a long time activist in the women's community in DC advises me that the apostates in the group, i.e. Obama supporters, have taken to saying "I haven't given any money to a candidate yet" as a code to indicate to others (whom they suspect are sympathetic) that they are not backing Hillary Clinton -- okay it's not as cool as asking "are you a friend of Dorothy's" but I like it.  Evidently, it is still considered bad form to overtly back Obama a la NARAL and there is fear that it will be professionally harmful.   

Hippies! Dirty, Smelly, Hippies! You Can't Vote With 'em!

Stealing a page from Sir Charles, the rightful heir of this regular item, I wanted to highlight this wonder from Dick Wadhams, last seen presiding over the demise of George Allen's Senate/Presidential campaign, and now working for Bob Schaffer in the Colorado race, offers us this wondrous construction:

The real significance here is that Boulder liberal Mark Udall is a man who is apparently ashamed of his Boulder roots because he has gone to great lengths to try to distance himself from Boulder, to the point of almost acting like he's never heard of Boulder, Colorado.

For those of you playing at home, drink every time Wadhams says 'Boulder'.

You see, Wadhams has a problem. His candidate isn't very good. The political climate, especially in Colorado, is trending against Republicans. Immigration hasn't worked as an issue. He doesn't have much ammunition left, so he decides to campaign against the dirty hippies in Boulder. But Udall isn't actually from Boulder. Ah, says Wadhams, he may not live in Boulder, but his mailing address is their thanks to quirks in the USPS system. The Rocky Mountain News gives this story the appropriate headline: "Schaffer camp taking aim at Udall ZIP code".

Can we now pronounce May 26, 2008 as the day the vaunted Republican Attack Machine died?

Finger In the Brain

Preach it, Brother Atrios. In fact, there are five good reasons for Hillary Clinton to drop out:

• Mark Penn
• Howard Wolfson
• Terry McAuliffe
• Harold Ickes
• Mark Penn Lanny Davis

Someone at some point (was it Ezra) observed that they didn't have much of a problem with Clinton, it was the high-level Clinton campaign operatives that were driving them crazy. But at some point, the cossacks work for the czar. Clinton hires these people because she believes they're effective at the daily hand-to-hand combat of Presidential politics. Which they were, at various points, but the moment has clearly passed, and without public opinion on her side, as it was on Bill's side during impeachment, they're all bluster.

The Sound of One Hand Wanking

[As we like to say in Washington, I've revised and extended my remarks.]  In a world of ridiculous op-ed columnists, it is easy now and again to forget some of the offenders.  Really, one has only so much time for moral outrage in a given day.  As a result, I have been neglecting good friend Richard Cohen in recent weeks because of the greater offenses given by his brethren.

I saw, however, that Cohen had return to claim yet another coveted "Wanker of the Day" award from Atrios and felt compelled to actually read the offending column.  All I can say is wow!  This is Grade A Village wankery of the highest order -- arrogant, clueless, condescending, with a finely narrowed world view and not a hint, I mean not a scintilla. of self-awareness or humility.

Where to begin, there are so many nuggets of classic bullshit:

I attribute Obama's predicament to inexperience and a certain worrisome naivete.  When he said he would negotiate with Iran he might not have realized exactly what he was saying.

He then describes Obama as a naif.  Was Nixon a naif (makes you laugh just typing it) when he sat down with Mao?  Or Brezhnev? Was Kennedy suffering from naivete when he talked to Kruschev?  Strangely enough, the people with whom we have conflicts are often not the most savory people in the world.  Yet, these are the people with whom we often have to deal to resolve these conflicts.  Why acknowledging this is somehow seen as weak or fuzzy headed I cannot say.

This high handedness of Cohen's would be sad were it not so amusing.  Or do I have that backwards?  Here is a man whose credulity with respect to the Bush Administration and the Iraq War is seemingly infinite.  (See this lovely dismantling of the bearded clown performed by Attaturk at Firedoglake, who dubs him "America's Concern Troll" a moniker that really can't be improved upon.)  Someone who thinks that characterizing a point of view as "French" is the height of withering argument.  That this clown is confused by the Post's Ombudswomen as a liberal can only make one shake one's head.   

Cohen does get one thing right though -- he says that "[c]ampaigns tend to make idiots out of really smart people."  They evidently don't do a lot for dumb asses either.   

   

An Engineer's Guide to Cats

As someone who lives with four cats (and no, I haven't replaced the four two-legged beasts, I mean in addition to them), I can relate to every bit of this cute video short.

Out-of-kilter aspect ratios: check.  Floral arrangement and regurgitation: check.  Cardboard box performance art: check.

Who knew engineers were this funny?

(H/T Waveflux)

Also at litbrit.

School and War

Back in 2003, one of the students in the class I was TAing came to my office to tell me that I wasn't going to see him in class for the rest of the semester. When I asked him why, he explained that was being deployed to Iraq. My attitude did a split-second shift from "kid dropping out of school" to "brave young man risking his life in war" and we sat there and talked for about half an hour.

It didn't occur to me to get his email address then, so over the next few years I'd occasionally Google him to see if any news came up. I had little success, because his name isn't especially unusual and all I could find were thousands of irrelevant hits. I reminded myself that this was a good thing -- most likely, if his name was in the news, it would be because something bad had happened to him.

Run Everywhere: Incumbents

Another list, this time looking at GOP House incumbents in districts where Barack Obama can be expected to do well.

Again, races that have already made the punditocracy's radar are in bold: