Category: Uncategorized

… Hillary’s Budweiser-drinking, Ford F350-driving supporters?

Clinton surrogate and Machinists union President Tom Buffenbarger: “Give me a break! I’ve got news for all the latte-drinking, Prius- driving, Birkenstock-wearing, trust fund babies crowding in to hear him speak! This guy won’t last a round against the Republican attack machine. He’s a poet, not a fighter.”

(Link).

I went to the Obama rally in Hartford, and the audience — the huge, arena-filling audience — was strikingly diverse in race, age and apparent income class. While I’m probably leaning toward Obama at the moment, I don’t find him as transcendent and transformational as a lot of people seem to — but this is simply not a characterization of his supporters rooted in reality.

Via Atrios who posts the appropriate accompanying video.

Definitely take the time to check it out, if weather permits. I saw one a few years back, and the moon just looked surreal — I remember thinking that it looked like a basketball hovering maybe thirty feet in the air. As the AP explains:

The moon doesn’t go black because indirect sunlight still reaches it after passing through the Earth’s atmosphere. Since the atmosphere filters out blue light, the indirect light that reaches the moon transforms it into a reddish or orange tinge, depending on how much dust and cloud cover are in the atmosphere at the time.

Sometimes the stagecraft of the world stands revealed for a moment, in these small and wonderful ways.

This is from an interview with Reed College Professor Darius Rejali, author of Torture and Democracy:

REJALI: [T]orture does migrate, and there are some good examples of it both in American and French history. The basic idea here is that soldiers who get ahead torturing come back and take jobs as policemen, and private security, and they get ahead doing the same things they did in the army. And so torture comes home. Everyone knows waterboarding, but no one remembers that it was American soldiers coming back from the Philippines that introduced it to police in the early twentieth century. During the Philippine Insurgency in 1902, soldiers learned the old Spanish technique of using water tortures, and soon these same techniques appeared in police stations, especially throughout the South, as well as in military lockups during World War I. Likewise, the electrical techniques used in Vietnam appeared in the 1960s appeared in torturing African Americans on the south side of Chicago in the 1970s and 1980s, and, as I argue in the book, that wasn’t just an accident.

So torture always comes home. And the techniques of this war are likely to show up in a neighborhood near you.

The rest.

MADISON, Wis. – The online gun dealer who sold a weapon to the Virginia Tech shooter said it was an unnerving coincidence that he also sold handgun accessories to the man who killed five students at Northern Illinois University.

Eric Thompson said his Web site … sold two empty 9 mm Glock magazines and a Glock holster to Steven Kazmierczak on Feb. 4, just 10 days before the 27-year-old opened fire in a classroom and killed five before committing suicide.

Another Web site run by Thompson’s company also sold a Walther .22-caliber handgun to Seung-Hui Cho, who killed 32 people in April on the Virginia Tech campus before killing himself.

“I’m still blown away by the coincidences,” Thompson said Friday. “I’m shaking. I can’t believe somebody would order from us again and do this.”

If only there were a lesson to be learned from this. Oh, I know: gun control would never, ever work, and there’s no point in even thinking about it!

Link.

Back in April, 2003 a friend of mine told me that, just after the war began, he’d seen William Kristol appear with Daniel Ellsberg on C-Span. He said Ellsberg had brought up the U.S. support for the 1963 and 1968 coups that brought Saddam Hussein to power, and Kristol appeared genuinely not to know about it.

Since then I’ve been trying to track the show down. There weren’t any transcripts and it didn’t seem to be in the C-Span archives. Only recently was I able to locate it, thanks to Kenneth Osgood of Florida Atlantic University, who pointed me to a dusty little corner of the C-Span store.

While watching it, I realized Kristol had performed at a superhuman level. At normal times he is, of course, one of the wrongest people on earth. Yet I’d never seen him be wrong quite like this. So I wrote a long, long piece about it. It’s one of my favorite things I’ve ever done about politics, so I hope you have a chance to check it out and perhaps go over to my site here to comment.

link

The Lost Kristol Tapes
What the New York Times Bought
By Jonathan Schwarz

Imagine that there were a Beatles record only a few people knew existed. And imagine you got the chance to listen to it, and as you did, your excitement grew, note by note. You realized it wasn’t merely as good as Rubber Soul, or Revolver, or Sgt. Pepper’s. It was much, much better. And now, imagine how badly you’d want to tell other Beatles fans all about it.

That’s how I feel for my fellow William Kristol fans. You loved it when Bill said invading Iraq was going to have “terrifically good effects throughout the Middle East”? You have the original recording of him explaining the war would make us “respected around the world” and his classic statement that there’s “almost no evidence” of Iraq experiencing Sunni-Shia conflict? Well, I’ve got something that will blow your mind!

I’m talking about Kristol’s two-hour appearance on C-Span’s Washington Journal on March 28, 2003, just nine days after the President launched his invasion of Iraq. No one remembers it today. You can’t even fish it out of LexisNexis. It’s not there. Yet it’s a masterpiece, a double album of smarm, horrifying ignorance, and bald-faced deceit. While you’ve heard him play those instruments before, he never again reached such heights. It’s a performance for the history books — particularly that chapter about how the American Empire collapsed.

So, sit back, relax, and let me play a little of it for you.

The rest.

The C-Span page tells you how many times the segment’s been watched. When I first checked, the number was one. By this time yesterday, it had risen to four. All three additional viewing were me.