digamma.net - notes

I can’t think of a horror movie I’ve ever seen that scared me more than this does.

And there are hundreds of videos just like this. And these are the ones that the cops don’t delete.

Fuck ABC and the Democratic Party for excluding Dennis Kucinich from last night’s debate. He’s polling ahead of Richardson and they let Richardson in. The difference is that Richardson’s ideas are within the boundaries of acceptable mainstream debate and Kucinich’s – peace! now, really, what is that? – aren’t.

For what it’s worth I guess Dodd was my favorite Democrat due to his heroic stand in the Senate on the warantless wiretapping issue. But Dodd is out now. So now I guess my favorite is Kucinich and he’ll get my vote in New York’s primary on February 5.

If I have to pick one of the Big Three, I guess it’s Edwards. It’s hard to forgive him for his vote on the war and his mediocre performance in 2004, but Clinton still thinks her war vote was a good idea and Obama is running against the party, so Edwards kind of wins by default.

If Edwards is out and I have to pick one of the Big Two, it’s Obama. He might fail miserably at every progressive initiative but he’ll probably kill less people with bombs than Clinton will.

If Clinton gets nominated I will not vote for her unless her opponent is Rudolph Giuliani and he has a real shot at winning in New York.

In the GOP, Ron Paul is obviously the man. I know he has crazy ideas but all the Republican candidates have ideas about foreign policy that make Ron Paul look like a genius. But their crazy ideas have mainstream acceptance and Paul’s don’t, so he’s crazy and they’re not.

It’s like that Twilight Zone episode where everybody went crazy and the one guy was sane. Although they were all like that.

Andy McCarthy at National Review Online says Benazir Bhutto was “killed by the real Pakistan” because some poll says a lot of Pakistanis approve of Osama bin Laden.

Josh Patashnik at The New Republic (where blanket slurs against large Muslim communities are often not a problem at all) replies, “But to say that Bhutto was killed by the “real Pakistan” seems to me akin to saying in 1968 that Martin Luther King, Jr. was killed by the “real America"–not completely absurd, but far from capturing the reality of the situation. It’s an insult to the disenfranchised majority of Pakistanis who reject both Musharraf and al-Qaeda.”

I am reminded of a fine observation by Noam Chomsky from some years ago:

As far as I know there are only two forces in the world that are pressing for a clash of civilisations. One is Osama bin Laden and the other is George Bush. Nobody else wants it.

Merry Christmas everyone!

My gift to you, my true love, is a link to Jonathan Schwarz and the best Christmas blog post ever:

I’m so tired of the commercialization of decrying the commercialization of Christmas!

When I was growing up, we didn’t need special issues of Real Simple Magazine or episodes of Oprah to decry the commercialization of Christmas. I bet my entire family could have decried the commercialization of Christmas for less money than they spend on one disapproving segment on the CBS Evening News with Katie Couric about competing neighbors in Boca Raton who each spend $1 million each year on Christmas decorations in their subdivision. In fact, one year when times were slow at dad’s law firm, we decried the commercialization of Christmas without spending any money at all!

That’s because we understood the true meaning of decrying the commercialization of Christmas. It’s about giving, and sharing, and spending time with your loved ones being angry about the CGI baby Jesus in the Wii commercial.

The worst part is that it starts earlier every year. First it was December, then Thanksgiving, then Labor Day. I wouldn’t be surprised if we wake up one year soon and we’re decrying the commercialization of Christmas on December 26th, before we’ve even returned the copy of It’s a Wonderful Life we bought to decry the commercialization of the previous Christmas!

So take my advice: this year, step back from your over-scheduled, stressful life, and decry the commercialization of Christmas the old fashioned way. You don’t need big corporations to do it for you. Just get together with the people you care about the most, and bitch about it like your parents did…and their parents before them. I bet a year from now you’ll look back on this as the best decrying the commercialization of Christmas of all.

Wow, right after I shout out Atrios for criticizing Bill Clinton, Paul Krugman takes a shot at Barack Obama:

From the beginning, advocates of universal health care were troubled by the incompleteness of Barack Obama’s plan, which unlike those of his Democratic rivals wouldn’t cover everyone. But they were willing to cut Mr. Obama slack on the issue, assuming that in the end he would do the right thing.

Now, however, Mr. Obama is claiming that his plan’s weakness is actually a strength. What’s more, he’s doing the same thing in the health care debate he did when claiming that Social Security faces a “crisis” — attacking his rivals by echoing right-wing talking points.

That’s right.

It’s a shame about Obama. I really thought he was the man for a while, but somehow he lost his nerve, if he ever had it.

A long-running theme on this blog (though when you only post once every two months, most of your themes are long-running) is how some Democrats who oppose George W. Bush’s horrible foreign policy supported the same type of conduct from Bill Clinton. And I’ve always seen Atrios as the worst offender on this score.

So I was really impressed with this yesterday:

Unlike, say, for Joe Klein* or numerous others who kept their traps shut during the run-up to the war, I think it would be quite possible for Bill Clinton to have opposed the Iraq war in his heart but to have kept his trap shut due to the inconsistently observed but somewhat valid tradition that ex-presidents pull back a bit from politics.

But the quote below demonstrates that Clinton was proud of his role in opposing the opposers, in battling the Fearsome Left.

Go Atrios!

Atrios says:

If these Democrats were in charge 30 years ago they would’ve supported retroactively immunizing the Watergate burglars.

And, damn, he’s right.

A radio ad for phillycars.com (which I’m deliberately not linking) I just heard during a Phillies radio broadcast contains this nugget of wisdom:

I’m a mom from the Main Line. Thanks to phillycars.com I found my dream car: a Hummer H2. Outta my way, sucka!

It makes me very sad that I have to share roads, governments, and the atmosphere with the people at whom that ad is targeted.

For those of us with short attention spans, Matthew Yglesias offers a quick summation the presidential candidates’ positions on Cuba:

The main point, though, is that Chris Dodd has boldly challenged the status quo, Barack Obama has put forward more modest proposals for change, and Hillary Clinton and the Republicans all support the status quo policies that have been failing for decades.

Remember back in aught-five when a friend of my family who writes for the Guardian got kidnapped in Iraq?

Now he’s wising off to Hugo Chávez’s face:

What prompted the ire was a Guardian query about a draft constitution and its most contentious provision: the abolition of presidential term limits to allow Mr Chávez to run again when his period in office expires in 2012. Given that he had ruled out a similar change for governors and mayors, on the grounds that they might become corrupt in power, why risk it with the president?….

The carnival mood curdled when Mr Chávez was asked about term limits. “Why don’t they ask for a referendum in the Caribbean [Commonwealth] islands and ask people if they want the Queen to be their head of state? Why doesn’t the Guardian make an investigation in Britain about the monarchy?” he asked. There was no chance to explain that the paper has advocated republicanism.

Glorious.

If you’re going to write a whole article desperately looking for political incorrectness in Harry Potter, could you spare one clause to J.K Rowling’s depiction of Irish people? Come on. A British author is not allowed to put the phrase “me mam” in the mouth of an Irish character. That’s some minstrel shit.

The film producers aren’t off the hook either. They got this thug, who looks like the guy who mugged me in Dublin when I was 11, to play Seamus. And of course they cast Brendan Gleason as the flask-chugging Professor Fake-Moody, who was never mentioned as Irish in the books.

I, for one, am outraged.

Atlas Shrugs refers to Gates of Vienna as “some of the most coherent writing on the web.”

That’s high praise from the woman who wrote this:

GREAT great great news day! Iraq ! What is going on is so thrilling
Every school should be tuned to fox today
The world should be tuned in to fox today
“This man crawled on his hands to a voting booth.” all that is goings on in Iraq!
the building, the training, the new forces going thru newly learned manuevers
the children, the poor people, creating makeshift blockades on their own,to stop vehicles going down a street with a polling place
we are not getting the real story
and the better the prospect for democracy, the higher the higher the decibel of vitriole
i know all about the terrible attacks but we are witnessing the birth of a nation. So GREAT TO ALIVE.
there is soooooooo much more going on there and there i am no pollyanna
Condi is being sworn in what a news day Newsgasm!
Bush (speaking for him and Laura) to Condi WE LOVE HER (and he says” i dont think i’m supposed to say that")
SWOON ……………….*Snoopy Dance of Glee*
so so rare so great! Keep it on Fox!

Gates of Vienna, by the way, is hilarious for other reasons.

It’s a Sunday, not much happening, Google Reader says I’ve got…. whoa, 11 new posts on Atlas Shrugs? That woman is unstoppable.

Let’s see here…. she starts out with a long quote about the Holocaust. Well, OK. Then she notes, “I will not go quietly, ladies and gentlemen. Be warned.” Well, I don’t think she’s ever done ANYTHING quietly.

So after like three paragraphs, we find out that apparently nature.com has published a map that refers to Israel as “Occupied Palestinian Territories". Well, that’s obnoxious if it’s true. I guess I should click the link.

First line: “The 57 countries in the Organization of the Islamic Conference are home to 1.3 billion people.” Since Israel is not a member of the Organization of the Islamic Conference, why would you expect it to be on that map?

Once again, I am stupider for having visited that site. Atlas Shrugs is the lead paint of the Internet - delicious but deadly.

Today:

During the 2000 presidential campaign, Ralph Nader mocked politicians of both parties as “Republicrats,” equally subservient to corporations and the wealthy. It was nonsense, of course: the modern G.O.P. is so devoted to the cause of making the rich richer that it makes even the most business-friendly Democrats look like F.D.R.

But right now, as I watch Senate Democrats waffle over what should be a clear issue of justice and sound tax policy — namely, whether managers of private equity funds and hedge funds should be subject to the same taxes as ordinary working Americans — I’m starting to feel that Mr. Nader wasn’t all wrong.

It took a minor tax policy question to make you figure that out? Next thing you know, the Democrats will Republicans will propose an idiotic war and Democrats will vote to authorize the use of force. Oh, wait, that happened five years ago.

This post from Scott Lemieux reads like a parody of desperate Clinton defenders, but he actually means it:

As Ezra says, as long as the GOP has more than 40 Senators and the White House, major accomplishments are not an issue. This also comes up a lot in debates with my Naderite friends, but while there are any number of valid critiques of Clinton, to attack him for not achieving any major progressive initiatives after 1994 is bizarre; with a Republican Congress this simply wasn’t a possibility. The President has a lot of power to affect the implementation of existing policy and can do a lot to obstruct change, but his ability to create major domestic policy shifts without Congress is nil.

No one on the left ever dreamed that Clinton would create a major progressive domestic policy shift. The most they ever hoped for was that he wouldn’t actively push conservative policies. And he fell well short of that goal.

The Telecommunications Act? Communications Decency? Antiterrorism? Welfare reform? These were all passed with Clinton’s signature and, with the POSSIBLE exception of welfare reform (on which he waffled repeatedly), with his enthusiastic support. You can’t blame the Constitution for that.

I pointed these out and Lemieux replied:

Of course, Clinton can be criticized for not preventing bad policies from passing, but since nothing I said contradicts that I’m not sure what the point is.

This is a pretty bizarre move of the goalposts. It seems to me that allowing major right-wing shifts should be considered worse than failing to create major left-wing shifts. Right?

Last night I tried to take $100 out of a Bank of America ATM, and it gave me two 50’s.

I have never seen an American ATM do this before. What am I supposed to do with 50’s? I only use cash for small purchases - movie tickets and drinks, pretty much. Lots of these businesses have signs saying they won’t take anything bigger than a 20.

This seems like a major change in policy. Is there some kind of major inflation coming down the pike that only BoA knows about? Will 50 2008 dollars be worth $20 in inflation-adjusted 2006 dollars?

Last night I was almost struck by a taxi turning left to go west on 14th Street from 8th Avenue in Greenwich Village.

Not long ago, a woman was killed three blocks away by a turning truck. She was walking with the light, and the driver got off with a court summons. If I had been hurt, the city would probably have blamed it on my dark-colored clothing (which made me harder to see) and the music I was listening to. Because in New York, it’s every driver’s right to make turns at full speed and expect pedestrians to get out of the way, walk signal be damned.

The stuff they write about at StreetsBlog really, really matters.

UPDATE (Wednesday, 9 PM): And then this morning I watched a truck make a left from 8th onto 15th. A city garbage truck. Insert libertarian snark here.

An editor at the American Prospect should really make Garance Franke-Ruta apologize for this.

Let me begin with an anecdote. A bunch of us Tappers went for drinks the other day, and Hillary Clinton came up. It was a mixed crowd, but, reflecting the magazine’s writing employees, mainly men. As the conversation turned to ‘08, a young woman spoke up softly. “I like Hillary,” she said. Very quickly, several men raised their voices against her, expounding, at great length, on everything that was wrong with Hillary, and why she couldn’t win, and why no one should support her. The young woman said nothing in reply, and, in fact, said nothing more for the remainder of the evening. But I’m not sure that her mind was changed.

Today, the Gallup Poll reported that “Clinton’s highest level of support is among 18- to 49-year-old women; her lowest, among 18- to 49-year-old men.” And so, with all due respect to Sam and Matt and Scott and Ezra and Mark, their views on this site must be understood as unavoidably a reflection of their demographics, as well as their judgment, as are the differing views of Dana and J. Goodrich and, well, me.

Two questions remain in my mind.

1. Why are the sexist male writers at TAP, who criticize Clinton strongly, unanimous in their praise for Pelosi’s leadership in Congress? Somebody should tell them Pelosi’s a woman! It’s almost as if there were some other difference between Clinton and Pelosi, but I can’t imagine what that might be.

2. Why are the prominent self-proclaimed feminists in the blog world equally unsupportive of Clinton? Shakespeare’s Sister, Feministe, Majikthise…. are these all self-hating women for supporting more progressive candidates for President?

Franke-Ruta seems to have run out of defenses for her uninspiring right-wing candidate and has nothing left but “you just think that because you’re a man!”

So we all know that when you sell a finite good at a price that’s too low (or give it away) you can end up with shortages, often with the visible result of people’s waiting in line. But I never would have imagined this:

No Vacancy (PDF download), a new study by Transportation Alternatives, finds that nearly half of all of the vehicles clogging the vital shopping avenues of Park Slope are occupied by drivers who are simply looking for a parking space….

White says “When one in two cars is simply circling the block in search of parking, the curb is being mismanaged. This study shows that Brooklynites are suffereing from needless traffic and dangerous illegal parking that could be easily eliminated through inexpensive improvements like market-priced Muni-Meters and residential parking permits.”

Free street parking seems to be the third rail of urban American politics. In my hometown, an entire trolley project had to be delayed because the city council defended one block’s right to park illegally. But you can’t combine all the car-independent benefits of city life with the car-friendliness of the suburbs. Pick one.

Wow.

DOT Deputy Commissioner Michael Primeggia provided the day’s highlight when he used the traffic engineering term “pedestrian interference” in describing how a street’s “Level of Service” is calculated. What a priceless glimpse inside the mind of the man who, essentially, owns and operates New York City’s streets. The next time you’re almost hit by an aggressive SUV driver while crossing the street, think of yourself not as a victim but as “pedestrian interference” impeding that motorist’s Level of Service. As for all of the activities that Danish urban designer Jan Gehl refers to as “public life?” Turns out it’s actually “pedestrian interference.”