Since I've said it myself a number of times, I feel obliged to enthusiastically agree with Jim Henley about foreigners and people, even though he is not a dirty hippie at all but in fact his hair was way too short last time I saw him.
In 2000 the press told a pleasing story about how it really didn't matter all that much who was president, or who ran Congress. In 2004 it was all about who had the bigger codpiece, and not much else. This time around I think people understand that, like it or not, this politics stuff kinda matters.
There just aren't enough people who have enough income to afford million+ residences. Though you feel bad for these owners, who will be losing their money and not the bank's.
Obviously this is of particular interest for me given where I live, but it will be truly bizarre if this thing lasts until the April 22 primary. There's just this giant gap in the primary calendar. Candidates won't have anything else to do but beg for votes here. I'll get a taste of what it's like to live in Iowa.
Just want to thank the regulars and other commenters for managing to not turn this place into a nonstop candidate flame war. It's been a problem on other sites, but for the most part not so much here.
Overall I just wish people would stop feeling the need to justify and defend basic lifestyle choices. Don't like being a single mom and wish you had some help? Fine! It's just weird to write elaborate and absurd lectures to others in order to justify that feeling.
But I'm sympathetic in that our society does elevate simple lifestyle choices - marriage, cohabitation, fertility - into moral ones, causing people to construct defenses of their own choices.
And the Villagers don't think it's a problem. Sure Fred Hiatt might tut-tut it now and again, but what really annoys the Villagers is that anyone else actually gives a shit.
The images in the Basra police file are nauseating: Page after page of women killed in brutal fashion -- some strangled to death, their faces disfigured; others beheaded. All bear signs of torture.
The women are killed, police say, because they failed to wear a headscarf or because they ignored other "rules" that secretive fundamentalist groups want to enforce.
"Fear, fear is always there," says 30-year-old Safana, an artist and university professor. "We don't know who to be afraid of. Maybe it's a friend or a student you teach. There is no break, no security. I don't know who to be afraid of."
I haven't been supportive of a rhetorical strategy of linking the economy with Iraq for a variety of reasons, including the fact that I didn't think people would like the message, but perhaps I was wrong.
While the "pimped out" comment was bad, in and of itself it's the kind of thing I could give a pass on based on the fact that sometimes stupid shit comes out of your mouth on live TV. It wasn't something he should have said, obviously, but there probably wasn't real animosity behind it. Just dumb.
But what I find worse is that it's part of a general pattern of taking perfectly normal political activities - in this case a family member helping out with a campaign - and talking about them as if they're unseemly, or corrupt, or inappropriate, or seedy, or sleazy, etc... The press has a long history of doing this with the Clintons, holding them to a weird standard that no one else is held to.
As the season progresses and I read my 4 millionth "I CAN'T POSSIBLE VOTE FOR AND/OR SUPPORT CANDIDATE X" post/diary it's useful to remind us all that presidential politics is not a contest to woo your little narcissistic self, it's a contest to get 50%+1 of the electoral college votes.
And most people do little to "support" any of the candidates. Many do, of course, give money and time. But most don't. It takes away from all that time spent bitching about the world online.
That being said, you are free to stay home and not vote. You are free to withhold what time and money you may have otherwise been willing to give for a different candidate. But nobody gives a shit. It's not about you.
* BAQUBA - Gunmen in police uniform stormed a house and killed five people including a woman and then blew up the house on Thursday in central Baquba, 65 km (40 miles) north of Baghdad, police said.
* NEAR BAQUBA - Police found a grave containing eight bodies including three females just north of Baquba, police said.
Every now and then, usually by chance, I come across something which brings back that truly traumatic time leading up to the Iraq war. It's hard to try to recapture those time. A nation had gone truly mad, our discourse was run by warmongering fools and Very Serious Liberal Hawks, and any attempt to oppose the Iraq war was marginalized 3000 different ways. All of us dirty fucking hippies were truly marginalized, despite the fact that we were, you know, fucking right.
A few weeks back I came across this passage from Kevin Drum from back in the day. I don't exhume it to pick on Kevin, but I thought it captured something from that time well.
If your opposition to war is based on the idea that Saddam does indeed possess illegal weapons but it's best to leave him alone anyway, well and good. But if it's based on the idea that the administration is lying and none of this stuff exists, you should tread carefully. I think it's pretty likely you will be proven wrong shortly.
Those who opposed the war were constantly being told that they'd better be careful, both in why we opposed the Iraq war and how we expressed that opposition when those views had a complete media blackout... what if Saddam really is dangerous! Then you'll be sorry!!! And, you know what? It's true. If they'd found the nuclear warheads, and the long range missiles, and the massive bioweapons programs, and the deadly drones of mass destruction, or whatever, people like me would've been drummed out of our discourse 4ever. Stupid dirty fucking hippie!
But, hey, if you supported a pointless war which has lead to hundreds of thousands of deaths there was no need to "tread carefully." Bombs away, baby! Bygones.
While many think of this as a politics blog, it really grew out of an obsession with just how stupid our elite discourse is. And there's no one more elite than Tom Friedman, the nation's premier foreign affairs columnists. And, perhaps, no one more stupid, except maybe Gregg Easterbrook. Oh and Will Saletan. Oh and... okay, there's a lot of stupid out there I admit.
Our own Janeane the Acerbic Goblin had, a few times, suggested I track down a horrifying Tom Friedman moment in Charlie Rose. I admit that I didn't quite believe that even little Tommy Friedman, age 9, could have said something so profoundly awful, and besides the transcript wasn't in Nexis. But then I did find it on google video.
This is the very serious thinking that got us into Iraq. This is the very serious thinking that influences the Villagers. 3 Pulitzers, baby! About 2:45 in.
I think it [the invasion of Iraq] was unquestionably worth doing, Charlie.
...
We needed to go over there, basically, um, and um, uh, take out a very big state right in the heart of that world and burst that bubble, and there was only one way to do it.
...
What they needed to see was American boys and girls going house to house, from Basra to Baghdad, um and basically saying, "Which part of this sentence don't you understand?"
You don't think, you know, we care about our open society, you think this bubble fantasy, we're just gonna to let it grow?
Well Suck. On. This.
Okay.
That Charlie was what this war was about. We could've hit Saudi Arabia, it was part of that bubble. We coulda hit Pakistan. We hit Iraq because we could.
WASHINGTON (AP) — It's almost as if people can barely stand the thought of President Bush and Congress anymore. Bush reached his lowest approval rating in The Associated Press-Ipsos poll on Friday as only 30 percent said they like the job he is doing, including an all-time low in his support by Republicans. Congress' approval fell to just 22 percent, equaling its poorest grade in the survey. Both marks dropped by 4 percentage points since early January.
It's so quaint, now, but we should remember that in the early days Republicans dreamed of an Iraq which was a libertarian paradise giant patronage machine for their donors.
But back in Washington, D.C., the focus had already turned from the needs of Iraq to the bottom lines of a select few corporations. "The battle for Iraq is not over oil," said one Defense Department official involved in communications. "It's over bandwidth." And no one was fighting harder for a piece of the spectrum than the consortium led by American cellular giant Qualcomm with such business partners as Lucent Technologies and Samsung of South Korea. They wanted to follow U.S. troops into Iraq with Qualcomm's patented cellular technology, called CDMA, a system no nation in the Middle East had yet been willing to adopt. Even as the bombs fell over Baghdad, Rep. Darrell Issa (R-Calif.), whose district includes many Qualcomm employees, had tried to wrap his favored company in the flag. He denounced the cellular system used by Iraq's neighbors as "an outdated French standard," and proposed a law that would effectively mandate Qualcomm on Iraq. "Hundreds of thousands of American jobs depend on the success of U.S.-developed wireless technologies like CDMA," Issa wrote in a March 26, 2003, letter to Defense Secretary Donald Rumsfeld. A swarm of lobbyists rallied to the companies' cause, including William Walker, a former protégé of Rumsfeld from the Ford White House, and Stacy Carlson, who ran President George W. Bush's California campaign in 2000.
Just for the record, I have never in my life met anyone who quit working because their taxes were too high, nor have I ever even heard of someone who suddenly wanted to work harder because of a tax break.
To be clear, I certainly understand why the comments section can be overwhelming at times. I've shut them down here, too, previously. Even if you have a pretty hands off light moderation policy, comments are something you always have to pay attention to.
Those of us who can remember back longer than the past 3 days remember that in 2000, John McCain was the neoconservative candidate of choice. The Weekly Standard was basically an outpost of the McCain 2000 campaign. Bill Kristol likes war. McCain likes war.
It suddenly occurs to me that I'd been assuming that all this primary nonsense would be over by now and I could stop reading posts by hysterically over the top supporters, accusations about my motives and honesty, etc...
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