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Friday, October 25, 2002
Bleak Friday I don't have much to say, beyond the obvious, about the Wellstone tragedy, but a blogger who calls himself the Hamster suggests linking to Wellstone's 2001 book, ""The Conscience of a Liberal: Reclaiming the Compassionate Agenda." I haven't read it, but it is described as "laying out a political agenda that includes universal health care, reversing welfare reforms, prekindergarten education, raising the minimum wage, and campaign-finance reform." There are worse things for which one could be remembered. -------------------- Thursday, October 24, 2002
The elephant in the living room Tomas Jogin forwards a blog post of his concerning a report on US energy strategy sponsored by the Council on Foreign Relations and the James A. Baker III Institute for Public Policy. The report, written in 2001 prior to 9/11, strenuously calls for a "reassessment of the role of energy in American foreign policy", with access to oil repeatedly cited as a "security imperative". The report's recommendations coincide with the actions of the Bush administration on numerous accounts. It's hard to not suspect it to be the textbook in use on how to, in the interest of oil, invade Iraq and make it look like it's for the good of the Iraqi people and a campaign against weapons of mass destructions in the hands of Saddam Hussein… The report, sponsored by American Vice President Dick Cheney (as a member of CFR) among others, refutes the common argument that the US is unaffected by Middle East supply problems because the US imports roughly 75% of its oil from other, less capricious, sources outside the Persian Gulf. "The global nature of oil trade and pricing means that it matters little if Gulf oil flows to Asia or the United States. Middle East Gulf pricing and supply trends will affect energy costs around the globe regardless. If the United States wishes to change this reality, it must start now to deploy new energy technologies that will lessen this dependence in the long run." Jogin's post here. PDF file of the report, Strategic Energy Policy Challenges for the 21st Century, here.
A lot of ifs If they've arrested the right people this morning, and if they turn out to have been "motivated by anti-American sentiments in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks", I'm guessing a lot of people are going to try to score ideological points off of this--despite the fact that, as I write this, the suspects appear to have no connection to organized terrorism (outside of the dark recesses of their own minds, perhaps). Of course, if the sniper had turned out to be some sort of loner white male gun nut, a lot of those same people would have screamed themselves blue insisting that this was just an isolated incident with no larger implications whatsoever, and if he hadn't had his sniper rifle he would surely still have killed all those people with, you know, a bow and arrow or a big rock or something. Personally, I don't care if the shooters were motivated by their fantasies of al Qaeda or by telepathic messages from the planet Mars. I just hope the police have caught the right people, and my friends in DC can finally walk outside of their front doors again without the terrible sensation that someone nearby is watching them through a sniper scope. I guess we'll know soon enough. Update: Looks like people already are trying to score points on this thing. But the tireless Max Sawicky is on the case: ISLAM! ISLAM! ISLAM! Just thought I would get into the act too. Note to the clueless: just because I change my name to Joe Islam doesn't mean I'm part of a worldwide terrorist conspiracy. Further note: "leaderless resistance" refers to decentralized operatives who have first been organized to perform certain tasks after dispersal. It does not refer to any dude who takes it into his deranged head to emulate something he saw on television. Question: is there any event you would not exploit for the sake of harping on your theme of a worldwide war on Islam? -------------------- Tuesday, October 22, 2002
Oh well When I saw that Garry Trudeau was setting up a riff on blogs yesterday, I was looking forward to seeing what he had to say. Unfortunately, judging from today's installment, it doesn't look like he has much of a handle on the phenomenon. He does have this interesting quote on his opening page, however: "Maybe it's part of our national character, you know, we like to have these problems nice and neatly wrapped up, put a ribbon around it. You deploy a force, you win the war, and the problem goes away, and it doesn't work that way in the Middle East; it never has and isn't likely to in my lifetime." -- Dick Cheney, 1996 Update: some of you seemed to think I took offense at Trudeau's satire of blogging. Hardly. I just think he's missing the mark so far. I'd like to see him sinking his teeth into the right-wing echo chamber, the self-important deconstructions known as "fisking," and for that matter, all the secret treehouse lingo like "fisking." A riff on bad punctuation just doesn't seem that insightful to me. But there's still the rest of the week to go, maybe he's just getting warmed up. * * * Incidentally, thanks again for all help on the Ashcroft and Bush files, but I'm covered, thanks to August, and by way of expressing gratitude for his efforts, I'd like to encourage everyone to go read his blog now. -------------------- Monday, October 21, 2002
Andrew Sullivan is officially obsolete There's simply no need for him anymore, now that the new, improved, self-writing warbot has been unveiled. -------------------- Sunday, October 20, 2002
Anybody know... ...where I can download a video clip of that Bush "fool me once, shame on, shame on you, fool me, you can't get fooled again" bit? Not streaming, but something I can actually download to my hard drive? I'd also like to get a clip of Ashcroft singing "Let the Eagle Soar," if it exists in anything but streaming format anywhere. Clarification: profuse thanks to everyone who sent in links so far, but unfortunately the quest continues. Need a reasonably high rez video, especially of the Bush quote, and I'm looking for the straight news footage, rather than the Daily Show version, which has too much audience laughter for my purposes. Update: Still looking for Ashcroft, but August came through with the Bush clip I needed. Thanks again to everyone who offered help.
Er--beg your pardon? From what appears to be a sort of ombudsman column in the Atlanta Journal Constitution: In last Sunday's Comics section, one "Boondocks" character repeated a German official's recent characterization of President Bush as a modern-day Hitler. The other character replied that even he wouldn't make that comparison, but then tossed out this zinger: "Hitler was democratically elected, wasn't he?" …The controversy over this particular strip was compounded by its running in the Sunday comics pages, which are printed in advance and often are not read by news editors before being distributed. (During the week, "The Boondocks" runs inside the Living section, and editors have, in the past, tweaked its language before publication.) "Tweaked its language"? In other words, editors at the Atlanta J-C are changing MacGruder's words, probably without his knowledge or permission, to make the strips more palatable to their readers? It's MacGruder's business how he responds to this, of course, but if it were me, I'd pull the damn strip from the paper so fast it'd make your head spin. Column here. Thanks to Mark Nuhfer for the tip. Update from reader Dwight Brown: After reading the entry in your weblog concerning the Atlanta From: "Inside" We edited out a vulgarity and replaced it with dashes so that the meaning --------------------
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