Biden on Tech Freedom Issues

Short answer: very bad.

Short-ish answer: Imagine if Jack Thompson were president, and GTA5 were coming out.

Yahoo! News has the long answer:

But back to the Delaware senator's tech record. After taking over the Foreign Relations committee, Biden became a staunch ally of Hollywood and the recording industry in their efforts to expand copyright law. He sponsored a bill in 2002 that would have make it a federal felony to trick certain types of devices into playing unauthorized music or executing unapproved computer programs. Biden's bill was backed by content companies including News Corp. but eventually died after Verizon, Microsoft, Apple, eBay, and Yahoo lobbied against it.

A few months later, Biden signed a letter that urged the Justice Department "to prosecute individuals who intentionally allow mass copying from their computer over peer-to-peer networks." Critics of this approach said that the Motion Picture Association of America and the Recording Industry Association of America, and not taxpayers, should pay for their own lawsuits.

Last year, Biden sponsored an RIAA-backed bill called the Perform Act aimed at restricting Americans' ability to record and play back individual songs from satellite and Internet radio services. (The RIAA sued XM Satellite Radio over precisely this point.)

All of which meant that nobody in Washington was surprised when Biden was one of only four U.S. senators invited to a champagne reception in celebration of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act hosted by the MPAA's Jack Valenti, the RIAA, and the Business Software Alliance. (Photos are here.)

Now, it's true that few Americans will cast their votes in November based on what the vice presidential candidate thinks of copyright law. But these pro-copyright views don't exactly jibe with what Obama has promised; he's pledged to "update and reform our copyright and patent systems to promote civic discourse, innovation and investment while ensuring that intellectual property owners are fairly treated." These are code words for taking a more pro-EFF (Electronic Frontier Foundation) than pro-MPAA approach....

...On privacy, Biden's record is hardly stellar. In the 1990s, Biden was chairman of the Judiciary Committee and introduced a bill called the Comprehensive Counter-Terrorism Act, which the EFF says he was "persuaded" to do by the FBI. A second Biden bill was called the Violent Crime Control Act. Both were staunchly anti-encryption, with this identical language:

It is the sense of Congress that providers of electronic communications services and manufacturers of electronic communications service equipment shall ensure that communications systems permit the government to obtain the plain text contents of voice, data, and other communications when appropriately authorized by law.

Translated, that means turn over your encryption keys. The book Electronic Privacy Papers describes Biden's bill as representing the FBI's visible effort to restrict encryption technology, which was taking place in concert with the National Security Agency's parallel, but less visible efforts. (Biden was no foe of the NSA. He once described now-retired NSA director Bobby Ray Inman as the "single most competent man in the government.")

Biden's bill -- and the threat of encryption being outlawed -- is what spurred Phil Zimmermann to write PGP, thereby kicking off a historic debate about export controls, national security, and privacy. Zimmermann, who's now busy developing Zfone, says it was Biden's legislation "that led me to publish PGP electronically for free that year, shortly before the measure was defeated after vigorous protest by civil libertarians and industry groups."

While neither of Biden's pair of bills became law, they did foreshadow the FBI's pro-wiretapping, anti-encryption legislative strategy that followed -- and demonstrated that the Delaware senator was willing to be a reliable ally of law enforcement on the topic. (They also previewed the FBI's legislative proposal later that decade for banning encryption products such as SSH or PGP without government backdoors, which was approved by one House of Representatives committee but never came to a vote in the Senate.)

There are a lot of good things that Biden brings to the table, and Obama's policy proposals on this are by-and-large one of the best parts of the campaign. But there will be tension.

Edit: Here's CNET's take on it too.

This does make me wonder about what an Obama administration's relations with the Netroots is going to be like. He's already made it pretty clear that he has no time for bloggers who aren't doing it on my.barackobama.com, and certainly has no time for those who raise and spend money outside his campaign. I'm confident that he's better than the Republicans—they're the Republicans, after all—but the Biden choice raises some questions.

Even if he rips up Romney, us users want proof he won't rip us up, too.

(You know what else raises questions? Trying to do a damned emdash in a blog. I'm moving away from using double dashes, but typing out a control code each time gets very, very old.)

Biden?

Well, sure, I suppose. He knows his foreign policy, and balancing the ticket with a repentant war supporter may make sense.

But the guy voted for the bankruptcy bill. That won't go over well.

(He'd be a better VP than anybody that McCain could prop up in front of a lectern, but still a trifle disappointing. Not Lieberman disappointing, but hardly "change".)

Looking For a Good Time?

Then Go watch Jerome Corsi get smacked around by Paul Waldman on Larry King.

As someone who's constantly decrying how Dems don't know how to handle media as well as Republicans, this was a breath of fresh air. He knew the talking points, knew how to refute them, knew how to fluster Corsi, and knew how to control the discussion. It was awesome. They should use it as a teaching aid in campaigning schools.

Meanwhile, in Soviet Canuckistan

In the midst of a giant tainted meat recall, the federal government is desperately trying to force the press not to reveal that they want to cut the holy hell out of the inspection agencies.

Once you gather together the chunks of your surely-exploded head, here's some fun links. Mostly from Kady O'Malley, who is really way too good for Macleans.

Edit: These guys are also co-opting the entire postal service, too. Hark:

In order to let my constituents know about the Town Hall meeting I held Wednesday night with Dion, I decided to use my ability to send mailers, called “ten percenters” to residents. Each one can cover only 10% of the riding, and each has to be different. So, I prepared ten of them, rushed them into the print shop and ensured they could be in mailboxes in time for people to book a seat.

In all, there were 60,000 pieces of mail, and getting this project done was a major task. The printing was done by August 6th, and they went to Canada Post the next day, marked for immediately delivery in Halton.

Sadly, on the day of the event – August 20th – not a single resident in Halton had seen one of these. Instead, skids of the mailers were sitting in Canada Post substations in Milton, Oakville and Burlington.

But at the same time, just prior to my meeting, two Conservative ten percenters arrived by mail to blanket the riding, sent by MPs in eastern Ontario, and Alberta.

So, my printing was garbage – expensive garbage, since it had all been paid for with tax dollars and was now worthless. And yet MPs that my constituents can never speak to and will never see, also used tax dollars to send them mailers on the benefits of Conservative policies.

Obviously, we called the postal service to get an explanation. Human error, said Gilles Campeau, our Canada Post liason. Sorry.

But M. Campeau also made it known that because of the barrage of mailings by out-of-town MPs, the agency’s workload has increased, “by 500%.” He also let it slip he’d been pressured by CRG (the Conservative Research Group – the marketing arm of the Harper caucus) to give it preferential treatment. Finally he told us that, “trucks are pulling up non-stop from printers all over the city (Ottawa)” full of MP literature, and they can’t keep up.

Bolding? Mine.

One can only speculate on what that "pressure" amounts to. It's almost impressive: having learned from the Republicans, these Canadian Repub-lites have arguably surpassed them. The apprentice has become a master.

(Kind of like Sith. Except with more evil.)

Hah! Take that, Comcast

So Comcast has a few questions to answer. The FCC appears to be slightly peeved at Comcast for changing their stories (if not out-and-out lying) about their connection throttling shenanigans.

And they should be. Yes, bittorrents (which are the issue here) are associated with piracy right now. That makes sense: hackers and pirates tend to employ whatever they can get their hands on, not being encumbered by things like patents and copyrights and whatnot. But that doesn't mean it's inherently a pirate technology; as companies like Blizzard and now EA have realized, it's an inexpensive and speedy way of updating stuff.

But, of course, it creates a problem, in that it requires people to actually use their internet connections. And the telecoms never wanted that, oh no they didn't. They don't want that at all. They want you surfing, which only needs to be fast for a very brief time, and then stays blissfully static whilst you read whatever it is you have on your browser. Or gaming, which is a constant connection, but a pretty low-impact one. It needs low latency, but it requires relatively little bandwidth. Or maybe even downloading music from single servers; it soaks up bandwidth, but it's all downstream, which is much easier to apply than upstream.

But bittorrenting? A system which rewards you handsomely for actually using that upstream you're paying for? HEAVENS no! It must be stopped! Using the bandwidth you paid for would force them to actually give you a connection that fits their promises! They might have to use that money the government gave them to give fibre to everybody for something other than mergers, branding, and buying expensive endorsement deals! What are they paying all those politicians lobbyists for, anyway?

So, uh, consider me somewhat flabbergasted that the FCC is actually doing its job. Sic 'em.

And While I'm on the NYT Columnists...

No, Tom Friedman, you're still completely ignorant.

Sorry, bud, but if you hadn't been flooding the zone with triumphalism about globalization back in the 1990s, you might have realized that it was going really, really badly in Russia.

You might have noticed that the privatization that you guys were so gleefully advocating had been turned into a game of "who can funnel resources out of Russian hands into private bank accounts the fastest" by Yeltsin's cronies and their American enablers. You might have figured out that your Lexuses and olive trees isn't going to impress somebody who hasn't been paid for months because his boss sold the factory for pennies on the dollar to a guy who was cutting said boss in on the take.

Had you done any of that, you might have also figured out that the Russian response would eventually be to say "blow this for a game of soldiers", kick out the thieving privatizers, and bring in someone who could restore their perception of national greatness. The "choking of Russian democracy" wasn't because of NATO, it was because Russians saw what elite citizens of the most powerful democracy in the world had done to them and thought "why would we want to emulate those assholes?"

But then again, all that would require you to admit that you were wrong about globalization. And I know that you'll never, ever do that. There's just too much money in pretending otherwise, isn't there?

MoDo Really Doesn't Like Clinton Now

Well, that's my interpretation of this column, but I'm not sure how you could see it any other way:

“He’s a bright young man, but he got ahead of himself,” McCain says. “He needs to be taught a lesson, and we’re the ones to do it. Have you seen the new Bloomberg poll? Obama’s dropped and we’re even again. The Bullet’s getting all the credit, but you and I know, Hillary, that it’s these top-secret counseling sessions we’re having. And thanks again for BlackBerrying me the Rick Warren questions while I was in the so-called cone of silence.”

“Oh, John, you know I love you and I’m happy to help,” Hillary says. “The themes you took from me are working great — painting Obama as an elitist and out-of-touch celebrity, when we’re rich celebrities, too. Turning his big rallies and pretty words into character flaws, charging him with playing the race card — that one always cracks me up. And accusing the media, especially NBC, of playing favorites. It’s easy to get the stupid press to navel-gaze; they’re so insecure.”

“They’re all pinko Commies,” McCain laughs. “Especially since they deserted me for The Messiah. Seriously, Hill, that Paris-Britney ad you came up with was brilliant. I owe you.”

Looking pleased, Hillary expertly downs another shot. “His secret fear is being seen as a dumb blonde,” she says. “He wants to take a short cut to the top and pose on glossy magazine covers, but he doesn’t want to be seen as a glib pretty boy.”

McCain lifts his glass to her admiringly. “If I do say so myself, while the rookie was surfing in Hawaii, I ate his pupus for lunch. Pictures of him pushing around a golf ball while I’m pushing around Putin. Priceless.”

“I have a little secret to tell you about that, John. Bill made it happen. He loves you so much. He called Putin and told him that if he invaded Georgia, he could count on being invited to the Clinton Global Initiative every year for the rest of his life.”

“Wow. Should I call him? I saw your husband’s kind words about me in Las Vegas on Monday, saying I’d be just as good as Obama on climate change.”

“I think he’d like that,” Hillary smiles. “He’s still boiling at Obama. And you don’t have to worry about my army of angry women. We’ve spread the word in the feminist underground — as opposed to that wacky Obama Weather Underground — that ‘catharsis’ is code for ‘No surrender.’ My gals know when I say ‘We may have started on two separate paths but we’re on one journey now’ that Skinny’s journey is to the nearest exit.”

I think the best question now is whether anybody still actually believes the long Democratic primary was a brilliant event that really helped the party. All those Democratic registrations seem a little unimportant these days.

But as for MoDo, well... at least it seems like Obama has one opinion journalist thoroughly backing him, now.

Apropos of Nothing

Gendy Tartakovsky's animated "Clone Wars", the one with the 5-minute long segments, is actually a really well done bit of action animation. It's arguably better than the movies that frame it.

I suppose that's why it got remade the way it did. Guess Lucas can't stand the idea of something good attached to his name, or a Star Wars-related trademark that isn't irrevocably polluted. Pity.

So Much for Musharraf

Yeah, the writing's been on the wall for this news for a good while now.

Under pressure over impending impeachment charges, President Pervez Musharraf announced that he would resign Monday, ending nearly nine years as one of the United States’ most important allies in the campaign against terrorism.

Speaking on television from his presidential office here at 1 p.m., Mr. Musharraf, dressed in a gray suit and tie, said that after consulting with his aides, “I have decided to resign today.” He said he was putting national interest above “personal bravado.”

“Whether I win or lose the impeachment, the nation will lose,” he said, adding that he was not prepared to put the office of the presidency through the impeachment process.

Mr. Musharraf said the governing coalition, which has pushed for impeachment, had tried to “turn lies into truths.”

“They don’t realize they can succeed against me but the country will undergo irreparable damage,” he said.

In an emotional ending to a speech lasting more than an hour, Mr. Musharraf raised his clenched fists to chest height, and said, “Long live Pakistan!”

His resignation came after 10 days of intense political maneuvering in Pakistan, and cleared the way for the four-month-old coalition government to choose a new president by a vote of Parliament and the provincial assemblies. But there were intense concerns in Washington that Mr. Musharraf’s departure would open a new era of instability in Pakistan, a nuclear-armed country of 165 million people, as the fragile coalition jockeys for his share of power.

Yeah, that's pretty much the question, isn't it? The reason why Musharraf lasted as long as he did was because of fears that he was the only thing between the West and an "Islamic Bomb".

More as it happens, I suppose.

A Quick Tip for Krauthammer et al:

Evicting Russia from the G8 and the WTO won't mean a thing. There's no way Russia will give a damn.

Why?

Well, with the G8, it's a point of prestige to be in there, but it's hardly necessary. It serves its purposes, but its more of an economic forum. Russia already has all the prestige it needs from its leadership role in the United Nations; and even if you discount the U.N., Russia has lots of other burgeoning economies in the "third world" to play with.

As for the WTO... please. Like Russia cares. They're an energy exporter, for heaven's sake, they already have all the markets they need for their products. The WTO is about agriculture and manufactures- energy doesn't really enter into it, at least not to the extent that those things do. Russia will always have a market for its energy, and will always have someone to sell them manufactures. A trade deal between China and Russia would take care of that. That would be Russia's logical trade focus, not the hapless WTO.

Ok, sure, it's also about IP, and first-world countries protecting their patents and copyrights and whatnot, but why on earth would Russia be interested in TRIPS? There's a reason movies come out on Region 5 DVDs almost immediately after hitting theatres; because they know that they'll hit the streets anyway. Giving the U.S. a strategic advantage by telling Russia which generic drugs it can and cannot produce doesn't sound like Putin's style anyway, not when he can make friends in China, India, and ASEAN by pissing off the D.C. pharma lobby.

(The silly-ass Olympics stuff is beneath discussion.)

Anyway, all this is vintage neocon, isn't it? It won't do anything real, it's all symbolic, and it betrays the touching belief that Russians give a damn whether the U.S. is mad at them or not. They can't invade or bomb—which they already mostly treat symbolically anyway—and they don't really know how international trade or law works, so they're forced to rely on this nonsense.

I wouldn't even write on this, probably, except that McCain appears to have been parroting this crap at that faith forum thing, which suggests that he still has a critical mass of neocons in his campaign. Sucks for him, worse for America.

So What Happened to Klein?

He's almost acting like, well, a journalist. That can't be right.

I heard about Jerome Corsi's book a few weeks ago from my mother, who said that her great fear--that Barack Obama has covert Islamic associations--had been confirmed by a new book. I told her not to worry, that many reputable people had looked into the matter and Obama was more likely to be spotted in Whole Foods than praying in a mosque. (Since my mother has never been to Whole Foods, so she didn't quite get my wry allusion.) "I hope so," she said, dubiously.

So we know the market for trash is there, and not so far from home. And we know, that Mary Matalin, who appears regularly on mainstream media programs like Meet the Press called the Corsi book in the New York Times today:

“a piece of scholarship, and a good one at that.”

But hey, Mary stands to make big bucks off this scholarship, which I'm sure was submitted for peer review and otherwise held to the highest editorial standards--and I'm sure her reputation and mediagenicity won't be damaged by this poisonous crap, and we're all friends here, aren't we? And, yknow, they say politics ain't beanbag...and it's all in the game to tell innocent, well-intentioned people that Barack Obama is a secret Muslim or that John Kerry wasn't really a hero in Vietnam. Or, as George W. Bush, once told a rightly outraged John McCain--whose wife and daughter Bush's minions had smeared--"It's just politics."

Back in the day, John McCain was the sort of politician who would stand first in line to call out this sort of swill. (As, I'm sure Barack Obama or John Kerry would do, if some hate-crazed, money-grubbing left-winger published a book claiming that McCain had been successfully brainwashed in Vietnam--as Kerry did indeed do when a group of spurious Bush-backing Vietnam vets tried to claim exactly that about McCain during the 2000 Republican primary in South Carolina.)

But we're not seeing those sorts of claims being made about McCain this year...because Democrats tend not to do that sort of thing. They are the sorts of claims that Republicans--Bush Republicans--make. They range from the blatantly extra-curricular, like Corsi's book, to the official McCain-sanctioned introduction made by Joe Lieberman--of all people--yesterday: that Obama doesn't "put America first."

I know that people like me are supposed to try to be fair...and balanced. (The Fox mockery of our sappy professional standards seems more brutally appropriate with each passing year.) In the past, I would achieve a semblance--or an illusion--of balance by criticizing Democrats for not responding effectively when right-wing sludge merchants poisoned our national elections with their filth and lies. And it is true, as John Kerry knows, that a more effective response--and a bolder campaign--might have neutralized the Swiftboat assault four years ago. It is also true that Corsi's book this time is far less effective than his Swiftboat venture, since it doesn't come equipped with veterans willing to defile their service by telling lies to camera.

But there is no excuse for what the McCain campaign is doing on the "putting America first" front. There is no way to balance it, or explain it other than as evidence of a severe character defect on the part of the candidate who allows it to be used. There is a straight up argument to be had in this election: Mcain has a vastly different view from Obama about foreign policy, taxation, health care, government action...you name it. He has lots of experience; it is always shocking to remember that this time four years ago, Barack Obama was still in the Illinois State Legislature. Apparently, though, McCain isn't confident that conservative policies and personal experience can win, given the ruinous state of the nation after eight years of Bush. So he has made a fateful decision: he has personally impugned Obama's patriotism and allows his surrogates to continue to do that. By doing so, he has allied himself with those who smeared him, his wife, his daughter Bridget, in 2000. Those tactics won George Bush a primary--and a nomination. But they proved a form of slow-acting spiritual poison, rotting the core of the Bush presidency. We'll see if the public decides to acquiesce in sleaze in 2008, and what sort of presidency--what sort of country--that will produce.

As any number of his commentators have said, the problem is not necessarily so much the Republicans as the media. Half the reason Dems don't "do that sort of thing", is because they know that they'll get called out, whereas Republicans are almost pathetically dependent on a press corps that chortles at the attacks and repeats them, safe in the knowledge that they didn't write them.

But, hey, one step at a time, right?

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Now this is an attack ad:

Exiled Agitprop

There's a very good bit on exiled online about how the Georgians are doing a very, very good job of exploiting the CNN effect.

One of the weird things about this conflict is how divided perceptions on it are. Russians see it as straight-up peacekeeping, whereas the West sees it as clear Russian aggression. Part of that is because of nationalism, of course, but a lot more is because Saakashvili has managed to sway the western media very, very skillfully. Case in point:

Psychological Operations

DoD definition: Psychological Operations (PSYOPs) are focused on the cognitive domain of the battlespace. PSYOP seeks to induce, influence, or reinforce the perceptions, attitudes, reasoning, and behavior of foreign leaders, groups, and organizations in a manner favorable to friendly national and military objectives. PSYOP is just another way to say that P word no one likes to use anymore, propaganda.

Analysis: This here is a no brainer. Georgia has dominated the psychological playing field from the beginning. As Mark Ames discovered, Georgian leaders were making collect calls to just about every influential person on Wall Street, convincing them that Georgia was the victim of Russian aggression even as Georgian rockets were leveling Tskhinvali. And that was before Russia officially entered into the fray. Saakashvili then made himself available for round-the-clock CNN and BBC interviews. He repeated the same simple lines in near-perfect English, and always flanked by an EU flag: “Russia is an aggressor. We are a small democratic country. Please help us.” Georgia was putting the “CNN effect,” as the military types like to call it, to extremely good use. The pro-Georgian CNN effect was so strong, in fact, that CNN used footage of Tskhinvali for a report on the destruction in the Georgian town of Gori. Check it out:

All the Russians did was call an emergency meeting of the U.N. Security Council to try to pass a resolution demanding that Georgia and the S. Ossetia lay down their arms. It wasn’t much of a psychological operation, one that the U.S. didn’t even back.

Psychological Operations Grade: Georgia: A+, Russia: F+

Can't disagree with this. They know how to play the game. They know how to manipulate the media's perceptions. They know who to call, and what to say. They know their talking points, and how to adjust them to shape facts on the ground.

If anything, this certainly gives credence to the assertion I've read in several places that Saakashviki is intimately tied with the neocons. He's just like them: hasn't the faintest idea how to conduct a field operation, but hot DAMN does he know how to spin it.

Welp, No Surprise Here

Once again, the bullshit swiftboating book machine is in full operation:

In the summer of 2004 the conservative gadfly Jerome R. Corsi shot to the top of the best-seller lists as co-author of “Unfit for Command,” the book attacking Senator John Kerry’s record on a Vietnam War Swift boat that began the larger damaging campaign against Mr. Kerry’s war credentials as he sought the presidency.

Almost exactly four years after that campaign began, Mr. Corsi has released a new attack book painting Senator Barack Obama, the Democrats’ presumed presidential nominee, as a stealth radical liberal who has tried to cover up “extensive connections to Islam” — Mr. Obama is Christian — and questioning whether his admitted experimentation with drugs in high school and college ever ceased.

Significant parts of the book, whose subtitle is “Leftist Politics and the Cult of Personality,” have already been challenged as misleading or false in the days since its debut on Aug. 1. Nonetheless, it is to make its first appearance on The New York Times best-seller list for nonfiction hardcovers this Sunday — at No. 1.

The book is being pushed along by a large volume of bulk sales, intense voter interest in Mr. Obama and a broad marketing campaign that has already included 100 author interviews with talk radio hosts across the country, like Sean Hannity and G. Gordon Liddy, Mr. Corsi said on Tuesday.

The publisher is Threshold Editions, a division of Simon & Schuster whose chief editor is Mary Matalin, the former Republican operative turned publisher-pundit. And it is a significant, early success for Ms. Matalin’s three-year-old imprint, which is also planning to publish the memoirs of Karl Rove, President Bush’s longtime political guru. Threshold says it has undertaken an extensive printing effort for anticipated demand, with 475,000 copies of “The Obama Nation” produced so far.

“The goal is to defeat Obama,” Mr. Corsi said in a telephone interview. “I don’t want Obama to be in office.”

Apparently this is one of the "unfit for command" guys. Whoopee. Well, he's just a patsy. The real point is that machine discussed in the section I bolded above. People have been talking about the "mighty Wurlitzer" for nearly a decade now, but what's shocking is that it still hasn't changed. We've still got the same suspects cranking out the same lies from the same machine, because the left still hasn't really got its act together.

(How bad? Well, if you want to know, go read Matt Bai's The Argument. It remains one of the most important (yet overlooked) books out there, because it details exactly why liberals haven't been able to build their own machine or tear down the other one. That imbalance is at the heart of modern American politics, and a lot of people realize it: but thanks to the divisions between those who are writing, those with the money, and those with the Congressional and State Houses seats, the right still manages to trump its opposition.

It's not as bad as it used to be. I remember 2002-2003- it's definitely not as bad as it used to be. But damned if this book doesn't show how the Wurlitzer is still very much operational.

Edit: And, naturally, it doesn't matter if every word in the book is disproven. One of the facts that's been rather difficult for many people (including myself) to accept is that, a lot of the time, whether you're right or wrong has little to do with whether people accept what you say. If you reconfirm their biases, they'll do all the hard work of convincing themselves for you. If you challenge them, it'll be an uphill struggle to get them to listen. The right knows they can tap into the fears about a black president with a "funny name" to play up all manner of underlying stereotypes and biases, and know exactly which ones they're after.

(Why do you think the book makes such a big deal out of Obama's purported drug use? It ain't because he's a liberal, folks.)

That's as true for the media as it is for everybody else; they have their own prejudices and biases. Hence The Real McCain getting overlooked by the McCain-friendly media, who think that he's the genial "maverick" he purported to be, while Obama Nation gets widespread coverage, as it gives them the secret little shiver of malicious delight at watching Republicans beat up on Democrats.

(They don't really want to like it, but those evil old men are just so good at it, and those liberals just think they're soooo smart.)

Sucks, don't it? Still, it could be worse. Imagine what they would have done to Hillary.

Wait a Second...

Sarkozy ended the conflict?

Well, that's what DDay is saying anyway.

So Russia starts bombing targets inside Georgia, the United States huffs and puffs to no avail. Then French President Sarkozy hops on Easyjet and stops off in Moscow, and within a matter of hours, in fact just after he lands, Russia calls a cease-fire.

MOSCOW — President Dmitri A. Medvedev of Russia announced Tuesday that he had ordered a halt to his country’s military operation in Georgia, although he did not say that troops were pulling out and he insisted that Russian forces were still authorized to fire on enemies in South Ossetia.

The president said Russia had achieved its military goals during five days of intense fighting, which has seen Russian troops advance into Georgian territory and which brought strong denunciations from President Bush and other Western leaders.

Now, there are scattered reports of continued fighting here and there. And Sarkozy was just beginning cease-fire talks and didn't exactly provoke this. But basically, what you have is a country that maintains good relations and holds a little thing called influence, and another country that has, well, nothing of the kind.

I should note that, according to Jonathan Landay at McClatchy, (h/t K-Drum) we begged Saakashvili not to attack Georgia (which I don't totally believe) and we "had an understanding" with the Russians that they would limit themselves to fighting in South Ossetia and not beyond those borders. That's just kind of stupid, to expect the Russians not to want to dominate their sphere of influence.

Ah. So he didn't necessarily do it. But it's not outside the realm of possibility, either. And certainly a European figure has more sway than Americans do; there is still a substantial contingent of Russians who want to be seen as a European country, rather than as some autocratic backwater. It's unlikely that Putin or Medvedev care too much about their perceptions, but it is something that may be an issue going forward.

Russia's on Their Way to Tbilisi

Now that they've taken Gori, it's only a matter of time.

This incursion has shifted the onus on this completely. Back when Russia was just aiding the South Ossetians it was plausible as a defence against Georgian incursion. Now that Russian troops are on undisputed Georgian ground, though, that's gone.

Not that that justifies the "ARRGH LET'S GO KICK SOME BUTT" brigade. But that's the situation.

Simple Answer to an Idiot's Question:

Yes, Mr. Kristol. Yes, Russia will "get away with it".

Because you can huff and puff all you want about dictators (which seems to be a slight mischaracterization of the situation both Hu Jintao and Vladimir Putin are in, but anyway), but Russia isn't Syria, Libya, Iran or Iraq. You can't bully it, and you sure as hell can't invade it.

This is a whole different level, now, and your yapping, irritating toy poodle of an discredited ideology isn't equipped to handle it. Go back to prattling about Lebanon or something.

Edit: Hahaha, this stuff is all over the place. Robert Kagan is prattling on about how this is clearly just like 1938, proving once again that if you took away WWII analogies from a neocon, the poor man would be absolutely lost. Yglesias makes the valid point that making these comparisons is irresponsible if you aren't planning to declare war, and declaring war in this case is impossible.

But then again, when all you have is a hammer...

(Further Edit: Didn't realize Yglesias had moved over to ThinkProgress. Good for him. That pretty much removes any interest I have in The Atlantic these days, though. Sully has his moments, but it's still the outfit that signs McArdle's paycheck.)

Georgian Wikiality

For those interested in watching Russia grind down the pretense of Georgian autonomy, there's a great timeline Over on Wikipedia.

One thing, by the way. Georgia shelling South Ossetia was a fantastically dumb move. Saakashvili was overreaching, and should have known there was no chance of meaningful American intervention. But that doesn't change the overall issue here. This isn't about South Ossetia, or Abkhazia, or even Georgia. It's about Russia, Putin, and his aspirations to regional control.

Obama Texting His VP Choice

I can understand the man wants to be technologically up-to-date. And in principle I'm kind of for it.

But I can't shake the feeling that this idea takes it a little too far, and that there's maybe a reason for the "press conference with glowing candidates shaking hands" bit.

Georgia Wants it Over

So says the Post.

No surprise. Georgia can't stand up to Russia, and they know it. They want this over.

Hasn't seemed to make a difference, though:

Russia ignored calls for a truce and continued to bomb targets deep in Georgia, with little apparent opposition, drawing new condemnation from the United States and other Western countries. President Bush spoke of his "grave concern about the disproportionate response," and the White House warned of serious setbacks in relations with Russia if the onslaught against a close U.S. ally did not end.

Russian airstrikes Sunday evening hit the international airport and a military factory in the capital, Tbilisi, as well as Georgian-held positions in Abkhazia, another breakaway region on the Black Sea. Russian warships were reported to be blockading a Georgian Black Sea port and to have sunk a Georgian gunboat.

It remained unclear Sunday how far Russian troops intended to advance. Georgian villages just outside South Ossetia were shelled Sunday, clouds of smoke and burning fields visible on the horizon as artillery barrages echoed loudly. Georgians fled the villages, bedding loaded into the backs of their cars. Residents of one village outside South Ossetia, Kekhvi, said advancing Russian troops had entered their homes.

Georgian President Mikheil Saakashvili told CNN in an interview that the people of his country "are not crazy" and "have no interest whatsoever in pursuing hostilities."

Russia is doing this to send a message, and the message is "we control this region, no matter what you may think, and never ever forget it." It's gunboat diplomacy, except more so.

Western reporters entering South Ossetia with Russian troops, meanwhile, saw Georgian soldiers' bodies lying uncollected in the streets of Tskhinvali, the region's capital, and heavy damage to the city. Georgian troops launched an offensive to take control of the breakaway region early Friday. Civilians told the reporters that Georgian tanks had fired indiscriminately during the two-day seizure of the city, killing and wounding many city residents.

Georgia's retreat is translating into popular anger among Georgians against the United States and the European Union, and a widespread sentiment that this small, pro-Western country has been abandoned to face Russia alone. Georgian officials said that the West's credibility is on the line and that failure to stop the continuing attacks could embolden Russia to threaten other countries in the region.

"Russia has applied unprecedented military power . . . and it is of such amplitude that it would have scared much bigger states," Alexander Lomaia, secretary of Georgia's National Security Council, said in an interview. "This war has changed the whole system of values of pro-Western, liberal-minded people. I don't want to be a bad prophet, but why would Russia stop here? There are other countries where Russia thinks it has a claim to territory."

The West was never going to enter into Russia's backyard. Certainly the United States wasn't going to antagonize a nuclear power that's also a major oil exporter, and the Europeans don't have the muscle to do so even if they wanted to, either.

So, yes, that message has been heard loud and clear. The Russians once again have satellite states, and will not brook interference or disobedience, no matter how friendly they are with the West. If the United States doesn't like it, they are free to intervene... but the Russians are clearly confident that the United States won't do anything, for the reasons I just mentioned.

It's also a clear rebuke for advocates of democracy and the rule of law in the region, too. Never mind the fact that Russia has interfered in a fellow sovereign state's internal affairs based on dubious claims of genocide, or the challenge to the democratic "system of values".

Let's just count down the contradicted core democratic principles here:

But such statements appeared to be having little impact on Russia. In a conversation with Georgia's foreign minister, Russian Foreign Minister Sergei Lavrov replied, "What bombings?" when asked to halt raids on the military factory in the capital, which was struck twice Sunday, in the morning and evening. The conversation was described by a Georgian source who heard the exchange.

Governmental honesty and transparency? None.

In Russia, where public opinion is inflamed against Georgia, state television has aired almost no reports that military action and airstrikes on Georgia proper continue.

A free, fair, and honest press? Nope.

Russian Prime Minister Vladimir Putin, who cut short a visit to China to meet with military commanders near the Russian border with Georgia this weekend, appears to be driving Russian policy even though the constitution specifies that the country's new president, Medvedev, is the commander in chief.

A transparent chain of command and rule of law, as embodied by someone like Putin actually, um, giving up the reins to the "president"? Yeah, not so much.

Like I said, nobody wins here. Not the Georgians getting the holy hell bombed out of them, not Western advocates of democracy, and certainly not the Russians, who look like two-bit thugs. Nobody's won. It's just a question of who's lost the most.

A Simple Thought

Could it be that McCain and the Republicans are so gung-ho for offshore drilling because the coasts are pretty solidly blue, and they think their "heartland" supporters won't give a rat's ass about those commie coastals?

You've Gotta be Kidding Me

No, not Edwards. Sorry, but considering the Republicans nominated a presidential candidate that married his mistress, I find myself not caring overmuch.

And no, not the Chinese Games. I was thoroughly impressed by the choreography of the opening ceremonies, particularly of that last run-around-the-ceiling torch ceremony, but it was created by the guy who made Hero. Impressive wirework was pretty much guaranteed.

No, it's this Russia/Georgia thing. Now let me get this straight: we've got an American-backed state, bristling at any thought of being dominated by Russia, attacking a smaller Russian-backed breakaway province.

Then the Russians start bombing Georgia to defend the province, ensuring that all the Georgian preconceptions about Russia's attitudes towards them are completely validated, and the Russians look especially imperial. Again.

Oh, and at least according to the BBC's Kevin Connolly, Georgia is trying to draw the "West" into it:

He compares Russia's military actions today with the German invasion of Poland in 1939, or the Soviet intervention to crush Czechoslovakian liberalisation in the Prague Spring of 1968.

In both cases of course, the democracies of the West were unwilling or unable to contain aggression - and Mr Saakashvili is hoping to shame them into reacting more strongly this time around with those carefully chosen examples.

I agree with Kevin that it's incredibly unlikely the west will intercede. Honestly, I can't see how they could without this turning into some sort of nuclear-tipped WWI scenario.

But honestly, everybody is going to come out of this disappointed.

The Russians will be disappointed because the rest of the world will think that they're one bad day away from reenacting that bit from the Simpsons where Lenin busts out of his glass chamber.

The Georgians will be disappointed because they'll learn that, yes, Russia still pretty much has a veto over their security policy.

The Americans will be disappointed because they'll have their monomaniacal focus on the middle east shoved in their faces, as they learn that the Caucasus probably should have got more attention than it did.

And I'll be disappointed because I'd actually like to see some progress towards peace and democracy in the former Soviet Union, and I'm seeing precious little of that right now.

(Edit: And the Chinese will be disappointed because it looks like brotherhood is in short supply these days, and the spectacle of Putin and Bush arguing with each other isn't one the Chinese wanted those billion or so viewers to be watching.)

No, Seriously, Stop It

Batman is not a political model.

I'm not saying this guy is wrong about his political positions, but The Dark Knight is simultaneously about a lot more and a lot less than your ridiculously simplistic political arguments.

So Apparently This is Spam

You'd think I'd be making more money. (Or, well, money. Notice advertising links? Neither do I.)

Yes, apparently I got one of those emails giving some dire warning about how the site is a source of spam and will be shut down forever unless I request a reset. I figured it for spam of its own, but was a bit curious, and discovered a lot of other people actually getting shut down.

And then there's this:

You knew that already, and now we do too. We have now restored all accounts that were mistakenly marked as spam yesterday. (See: Spam Fridays)

We want to offer our sincerest apologies to affected bloggers and their readers. We’ve tracked down the problem to a bug in our data processing code that locked blogs even when our algorithms concluded they were not spam. We are adding additional monitoring and process checks to ensure that bugs of this magnitude are caught before they can affect your data.

At Blogger, we strongly believe that you own and should control your posts and other data. We understand that you trust us to store and serve your blog, and incidents like this one are a betrayal of that trust. In the spirit of ensuring that you always have access to your data, we have been working on importing and exporting tools to make it easier to back up your posts. If you'd like a sneak peek at the Import / Export tool, you can try it out on Blogger in Draft.

Our restoration today was of all blogs that were mistakenly marked as spam due to Friday's bug. Because spam fighting inherently runs the risk of false positives, your blog may have been mis-classified as spam for other reasons. If you are still unable to post to your blog today you can request a review by clicking Request Unlock Review on your Dashboard.

Obviously I'm not affected, or you wouldn't be able to read this.

But it has made me realize that I take this a bit for granted. I've probably got one of the oldest continually-running political blogs out there at this point, and it'd be unfortunate if it all disappeared overnight. (I'd certainly miss the stuff with ol' Steve Den Beste, wherever he got to.) I'll have to see about using that tool to back this thing up.

Fox News Commentators Use White House Talking Points

Courtesy of Think Progress, (it's from a little while ago, but I hadn't got to it) here's Olbermann talking about McClellan's reveal that Fox News does what the White House sez:



So, yeah, I don't think anybody's actually surprised, but it's still kind of incredible that it's actually come out that the White House said "jump" and Fox said "how high?"

Edit: Oh, and the White House is implicated in attempted fraud, too.

Anthrax Deceptions

I don't know if I agree or not with what Glenn Greenwald is saying about a cover-up of the true source of the Anthrax attacks in 2001, and the media's possible deception of the American people as to whether or not there was an Iraqi connection. (There wasn't, but they were breathlessly reporting "sources" saying it was.)

But I do think you should read it for yourself.

Olmert's Out

Whoo doggies, things just got a whole lot more interesting in the Middle East.

Not that this wasn't something that people weren't predicting. I'm actually a bit surprised he lasted as long as he did, considering how scandal-beset he was and how much of a debacle Lebanon was. The Guardian thought that he pretty much had to go, and I can't say I disagree.

But then, who replaces him? Here's the take I saw on Reuters:

The following are three scenarios for what might happen next in Israel's shaken political system:

* Israeli opinion polls show Foreign Minister Tzipi Livni and Transport Minister Shaul Mofaz, a former defence chief, are favourites to win the Kadima party leadership contest. Either could forge a coalition similar to the current one. It would take office once sworn in by parliament in late October. Olmert would remain caretaker prime minister until then.

* Some of Olmert's bickering coalition partners may balk at joining a coalition with the more politically moderate Livni if she became Kadima leader.

These parties could swing behind rightist parliamentary opposition leader Benjamin Netanyahu and force President Shimon Peres to ask Netanyahu to try to form a coalition. Such a government might be reluctant to pursue U.S.-backed peace talks with the Palestinians or indirect negotiations with Syria.

* Olmert's resignation could prompt a majority in parliament to opt for an early election. Parliament could dissolve itself and set an election date before the scheduled date of 2010.

An election must be held within five months of the Knesset voting to dissolve itself, but the gap is usually shorter in practice. Recent opinion polls show Netanyahu's Likud party would emerge strongest if a vote were held now.

Such a scenario could leave Olmert as caretaker prime minister until a government is formed after the election.

Bibi would be a disaster. With Kadima having formed in Sharon's center-right wake, having the rightist rump that is Bibi's Likud take over would be absolutely disastrous.

I don't know Livni or Mofaz too well, but from what I understand, Livni's a big proponent of disengagement from the West Bank. Not that I disagree with that policy--far from it--but I can't imagine Kadima holding together were she to seriously pursue that as PM. But her reputation for being "Ms. Clean" might hold things together in Olmert's wake, as the Israeli people jettison the focus on their relations with their neighbours and the territories in favor of having a clean government for a change.

In any case, it's certainly going to complicate American foreign policy. America could see a very different Israel very soon.

Working the Press

We all know how the game is played. There are two parts, and always two parts.

First, there's making the media freak out that they're being too positive towards your opponent. Are the Republicans and their various creatures doing that? Hoo yeah. Just look at your typical right-leaning editorial cartoon these days.

Second, there's feeding them false stories to prove "bias". Digby has the story on that: specifically that "won't meet the troops" set-up that McCain has been exploiting to the hilt.

And here's an interesting bit she quotes from TPM:

Okay, this is interesting: It looks as if the new McCain ad falsely attacking Obama over his canceled troop visit may not really have a lot of money behind it, suggesting that its real purpose isn't getting it before voters directly.

Rather, the real target audience may be the media -- meaning that the McCain camp's goal is largely to get the ad debated in the press and to drive the conversation that way.

Evan Tracey, who tracks media buys at the Campaign Media Intelligence Group, took a look at the McCain buys and discovered that an earlier McCain foreign policy attack ad, as well as the troop visit attack spot launched this weekend, are running in almost no battleground-state markets, with the new spot only running in Denver and Washington, D.C.

It's not for us. It's for them. You set them up, get them nervous, get them freaked out, and then toss them a lifeline. Of course, said lifeline is completely bullshit so they're still screwed, but they're still gonna grab for it.

Expect more.

Edit: extra bit from one of her comments:

For a preview of the next few months, compare the Democratic response to this slander against Obama with the Republican response to Wesley Clark's statement that "getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is [not] a qualification to become president."

The Republicans still own the corporate press/media. That means that they can coordinate messaging, publish and broadcast lies and smears, and prevent any criticism or counter-narrative.

By August 15th, Obama's disdain for the troops will be accepted as fact throughout the corporate press/media. Hell, I fully expect him to apologize for this by Friday.

They should have stood up for Clark. It would have made a difference in how this story was handled. They should have attacked the attackers without waiting.

But they didn't. They never have.

I don't know why not.
James E. Powell

Well, I hate to say it, but part of it is because Dems still think that, somehow, rational and reasonable argument will win out against exploitation. Unfortunately, it usually doesn't. And it REALLY doesn't if you play the "I don't think this is that important, it's a tempest in a teapot, ignore it and it'll go away" card. No, it doesn't go away. It never goes away.

Don't expect Queensbury rules when your opponents are facing oblivion.

George Bush isn't Batman

Now stop acting like a bunch of idiots.

(He may, however, be Ozymandias. Hoo boy, the reaction to Watchmen is going to be interesting.)

Edit: The Joker isn't Osama, either. Cripes, I know that's what people do with archetypes, but not everything is about justifying how you fight your war.

There Can Be Only One

So Roger Ebert gets comments:

I received this message on the blog, but it obviously fits no known topic. The author is something of a mystery: "R. Crutch," no city, no e-mail. But I felt it necessary to share with you. RE

From R. Crutch:

Whenever I get a package of plain M&Ms, I make it my duty to continue the strength and robustness of the candy as a species. To this end, I hold M&M duels.

Taking two candies between my thumb and forefinger, I apply pressure, squeezing them together until one of them breaks and splinters. That is the "loser," and I eat the inferior one immediately. The winner gets to go another round.

I have found that, in general, the brown and red M&Ms are tougher, and the newer blue ones are genetically inferior. I have hypothesized that the blue M&Ms as a race cannot survive long in the intense theater of competition that is the modern candy and snack-food world.

Occasionally I will get a mutation, a candy that is misshapen, or pointier, or flatter than the rest. Almost invariably this proves to be a weakness, but on very rare occasions it gives the candy extra strength. In this way, the species continues to adapt to its environment.

When I reach the end of the pack, I am left with one M&M, the strongest of the herd. Since it would make no sense to eat this one as well, I pack it neatly in an envelope and send it to M&M Mars, A Division of Mars, Inc., Hackettstown, NJ 17840-1503 U.S.A., along with a 3x5 card reading, "Please use this M&M for breeding purposes."

This week they wrote back to thank me, and sent me a coupon for a free 1/2 pound bag of plain M&Ms. I consider this "grant money." I have set aside the weekend for a grand tournament. From a field of hundreds, we will discover the True Champion.

There can be only one.

I wonder if that one champion will gain a mental link with all the other M&Ms in the world?

And will it be Scottish?

Garth

So, anybody else noticed how singular Garth Turner is?

I've given Canadian Liberal bloggers a lot of heat of late. There's no real "netroots" up there; to the extent that any liberal (or progressive) blogs, they've been echoing talking points. Certainly whatzisname does as well, albeit different ones.

(Mostly his rage at Canadian libel laws having been made less expansive than their British counterparts, but I digress.)

There's little discussion of policy, and little discussion of politics, even, except for the horserace stuff.

But then there's Garth. Not only is he willing to get into hot water over what he believes in, but he's done a really good series of late on the problems with the Canadian economy. Normally I would never, ever expect a backbencher to make these sorts of comments; you don't become a Minister by sticking your neck out, and often don't win elections either, especially in such a policy-allergic party like the Liberals.

And then there's fascinating pieces like this one talking about Canada's House of Parliament; how it was rebuilt after a devastating fire, how it desperately needs refurbishing and renovation, about how it's filled with Asbestos (!) and about how much the building means to him.

He's loyal to Dion, that much is clear--they say there's no greater patriot than an immigrant--but he's still willing to speak his mind and write an interesting piece to go along with it. He's sometimes (maybe even often?) wrong, but at least you get the sense that he's not bullshitting you about it. As much as I can disagree with him, he's one of the better bloggers the Liberals have.

(Honest and outspoken. Heh. No wonder Harper tossed him out.)

If Canadian Liberals want a model to build their blogging careers on, might I suggest that they stop looking to whatzisname (who, again, told a bunch of people that, Obama aside, the Internet is unimportant) for answers, and start looking in Garth's direction.

Neverending War

"There's no doubt in my mind that we'll be welcomed as liberators."

Old quote, right? But there's one thing:

John McCain is the guy saying it.

That, and lots more, in this video by Jed Report called "John McCain's neverending war."
It's pretty damning.



It's huge on Digg right now, so I don't really need to push it; even so, it's worth repeating. I'm also thinking about finally taking the plunge and setting up that little mini-wall of social networking widgets that many blogs have these days. An occasional Digg would be nice.)

Anyway, most interesting thing aside from the content is that there's a war over it on Digg. Social collaboration and networking sites are nice enough, but if you've got enough people with an agenda, they become a war zone; in this case between people Digging the story to get more people to notice it and McCain supporters trying to bury it. Considering a rating-and-burying system much like Digg's might be coming to Google soon, this is a huge issue, and makes me wonder where "Web 2.0" is going, exactly.

Could Web 2.1 be less of a conversation, and more of a battlefield?

Backup

Remember I did a bit on Sean Tevin? The Kansas blogger that was leveraging the Internet to find 3000 donors, a number considered heretofore-impossible?

Well, he not only did it, he got five thousand and counting.

That says two things to me.

First, don't screw with Cory Doctorow, he's got power.

Second, that what Obama did is replicable. It isn't just about personality. It's about creativity, finding an audience, and a winning pitch. Tevin using XKCD-style art to support his campaign was a creative idea, and people liked it. And since they were happy to like it to the tune of about eight bucks, the boy is swimming in cash and very likely to put on a serious fight.

And, let's not forget, he's also got a gigantic list of donors that he doesn't need to reveal if he doesn't want to. That's handy. If, say, Sean's Congressman, Dennis Moore, wants to see if he can get a few bucks from The Three Thousand (which is now about five, it's STILL going up as I write this) too, he's going to need to play ball with Sean. Ditto for Sibelius, assuming that she isn't going for a VP run.

Heck, even then, if Sean has donors that aren't Obama names, even Obama might want a friendly mention. (For some cross-promotional considerations, of course.)

Even if Sean doesn't win this race, I'd keep an eye on him. He's got something going here.

And, as always, I'd suggest to any Canadian progressive readers that might have the ear of prominent Liberals that they need to start paying some goddamned attention to what's happening in America. Sean got big wads of cash because he doesn't fear blogging. There just might be a lesson in that.

A Simple Point:

From the Nunberg piece I mentioned in the last entry:

the right has managed to reconfigure the polarities of American politics so that economic divisions are trumped by the bogus cultural distinctions of the "red-blue" divide

I think I know how Lakoff would respond, and I'd agree with him:

if it ain't "bogus" to them, then it ain't "bogus". And if you continue to ignore how the definition of "bogus" has changed, or how conservatives work to change how people think of "bogus", and think that you can appeal to a pure Cartesian dualist "reason" in order to sway people to your side?

Well, you deserve the drubbing you'll inevitably get.

So I Read Lakoff's "The Political Mind"

...and my principal take-away is that in order for the book to be effective, it needs to be broadly ignored.

See, I think he has a point. He makes the point that the way we think about things bears little resemblance to the abstract, computer-like capital "R" Reason of the old Enlightenment. No, it actually has a lot more to do with the connections we make between narratives, frames, and concepts. If confronted with a fact or concept that builds a frame (or a connection between frames) we accept it. If not, we reject it.

And, most critically, facts that could build up multiple narratives might not necessarily do so. If a fact could be used to support two contradictory narratives--which is common enough, actually--the one that's got the strongest connection will win out. So, for example, if there are two connections to the concept of "war on terror", one progressive and one conservative, the conservative one will win out even if the connection only slightly more powerful. The only way to make "war on terror" seem progressive is to use other narratives and concepts to build it up.

Fine so far. But there's one problem. (Well, two. His concept of liberalism as "nurturing parent" is incredibly message-blind coming from someone like him.) The problem is that the reason Republicans get away with this sort of thing is because they don't talk about it. They just do it. Luntz doesn't talk to the press about it (and they'd never get behind it anyway, as seen by the damned-near-hitpiece that the NY Times threw up about the book) and neither does Rove. They just tell the people who need to know, and publicly reveal just enough to impress the press and scare the Dems without actually revealing the core ideas. Nobody out-and-out said that the term "tax relief" was intended to de-legitimize the concept of taxation as a duty and government as a shared responsibility. No, they just worked out that that phrase suited their positions, and went for it.

Lakoff gives lots of examples of more positive "frames", but by telling everybody how the trick works beforehand, nobody's interested. He's so worried about having his idea of framing taken seriously by clearly-befuddled Dems that he makes a point of showing Republicans exactly what the frames are and therefore exactly how to beat them!

And that's too bad, because stripped of the controversy over cognition, there are some points that are definitely worth repeating. People really aren't the rationality machines that "rational choice" theory purports they are. There really isn't a spectrum from "left" to "right" that people sit on. A lot of people really do jump back and forth on all manner of issues because of the meaninglessness of "consistency." People really do respond instinctively to narratives, and the complex narratives that make up most people's politicaly opinions really are usually built out of a variety of interconnected simpler narratives.

And, yes, you really need to place your arguments within a moral framework. Liberal arguments of the "but it's the only rational solution!" variety are a vicious trap, and we need to jump over the damned thing already and move on to basing our reason on real moral cases.

But honestly, I kind of hope that this disappears completely under the waves in public. That there's no debate, no discussion, and no dissection of the book. That liberals pay very, very close attention to what it says, think about how it affects how they argue, and stop mentioning the damned book completely.

And that Lakoff maybe take a page from Luntz, and work behind the scenes a bit more.

Oh, and a bit of an edit: Lakoff has a point on how political opinions build up. But his "nation as family" concept is kind of flawed, because there are a LOT of metaphors used for a nation. Geoffrey Nunberg made some good points on that front a while back, and they're still valuable today.

There's the problem. If you tried to simply apply Lakoff's solutions, they wouldn't work. If you even apply his grand political theories, they probably wouldn't work. But if you take what he's saying about cognition to your own positions, well now, there's where you've got something.

Cognitively aware liberalism is far more than a "nurturing parent."

More editing: Just to boil down what I'm thinking here.

I think Lakoff has done a fabulous job of describing the landscape, and has done some yeoman's work in laying out the tools that have been used by conservatives to shape said landscape: the trimming shears, riding lawnmowers, weed-whackers and so on. And, once again, the simple insight that politics requires an explicit moral base, not a simple appeal to interests, is a very powerful one.

Where he hasn't quite nailed it yet is the how; he gets that liberalism is built on "empathy", but hasn't sourced it enough and continues to drop the ball with that lame-sounding "nurturer parent" line. And he hasn't figured out exactly how to use the tools. He's a scientist, not an engineer. Application isn't his job.

So what needs to be done from here is mostly translation and application. Happily, there is hundreds of years of writing on liberalism to translate and apply using these new tools of cognitive liberalism. Even if Rockridge isn't around to do it, other people can pick up the torch.

Sean Tevis for Kansas State Rep

Why?

Because this cartoon donation scheme is damned creative, that's why.

(And also because he's running against an arch-supporter of Intelligent Design. And in Kansas, that's a real issue.)

Digby on McCourts

For all the Obashing that's been going on, digby does make a good point:

The Senate has shown they will confirm a doorstop if the president wants them to. There are no Teddy Kennedy's who will lead the charge against another Bork. This is one reason why I'll vote for Obama enthusiastically. A President McCain will throw the wingnut zealots the most reactionary, federalist society hack he can find, like bloody bloody meat to a piranha tank. He doesn't care about anything but paying off his rich friends and making war. Whatever our problems might be with Obama we know that he won't do that.

The problem is that in order to move these guys, you have to be willing to ignore all this and punish candidates for going against you. But if you do so, you might end up seriously hurting your own interests in the short- to medium-term.

(And that's assuming you can capitalize on it in the long term, which requires a lot of things liberals still don't have.)

So yeah, at the end of the day, it's still better to vote for Obama. And hell, after all this controversy, he might well be a bit more cautious about switching positions to chase the mythical centrist swing voter. He tends to have this problem; he'll jump face-first into a problem, but then muddle his way through to a decent (or even admirable) final solution. Voting for him in November is still the best bet.

But that doesn't mean that now, in July, we can't tell him to watch it a bit.

Obama and Self-Swiftboating

Lawrence Lessig has a point.

All signs point to an Obama victory this fall. If the signs are wrong, it will be because of events last month. These events constitute a so-far-unnamed phenomenon in Presidential campaigning -- what we could call "self-Swiftboating." To understand "self-Swiftboating," you've got to first understand "Swiftboating."

Some use the term "Swiftboating" to refer to harsh, even vicious attacks on an opponent. I use the term in a more restrictive sense: "Swiftboating" is (1) attacking the strongest bits of a candidate's character, with (2) false or misleading allegations. That was what Kerry suffered -- attacking his courage as a soldier, the characteristic that distinguished him most from Bush, with misleading (at least) allegations by some who knew him when he served.

Self-Swiftboating is to Swiftboat yourself: For a campaign to do something that has the effect of undermining its own candidate's strongest characteristic, with actions that are (at best) misleading. The Obama campaign has now self-Swiftboated candidate Obama.

(1) An attack on a core characteristic: There are at least two views about what makes Obama so compelling. One that he happens to have the mix of positions on policy questions that best matches the public's. The other that he is perceived by the public as "different," and hence (given the public hates politicians so) someone the public can like, or more significantly, get enthusiastic about.

I'm strongly in the second camp. It seems to me nothing more than consultant-think to imagine people choosing a President with a checklist of issues, finding the one to vote for the way they pick a place to vacation. It seems to me nothing less than obvious that people are passionate about Obama because he strikes them as a different kind of candidate -- one that stands for his beliefs, that speaks clearly and directly, that can be trusted to stick by his beliefs, that says what he believes regardless. Such a creature, in most people's minds, is "not a politician." Such a creature (i.e., "not a politician") is what people want in a President.

Democrats never seem to get this. The last two campaigns were lost (in my view) because the campaign was working overtime to bob and weave to match the program of the candidate to the pollsters' latest work. That the shifts would signal that the candidate was nothing different just didn't seem to compute. Better, for example, to have people believe the candidate (Kerry) was against gay marriage than to worry that most would see the position as a political ploy.

Republicans, on the other hand, seem obsessed with this. It was the defining feature of the success of Reagan that he made it appear as if he did what he believed, not what the polls said. It was the part Bush v2 mimicked best. It is the clear dream of the McCain campaign to do the same. "You may not like what I say, but at least you know where I stand" is the signal virtue in a GOP campaign. It is the signal blindness of a Democratic campaign.

I am not saying that Republicans are consistent and Democrats not. I am saying something very different: that Republicans believe appearing consistent/principled/different is the key to victory, where as Democrats (apparently) do not.

Well put. It's something that surprises the hell out of me: that Dems would be so attached to the "we'll just shift along the (supposed) electoral spectrum until we hit the magic point" that they manage to completely screw themselves up, with no real help required from the Republicans.

Maybe they just listen to the media too much. All those pundits who are saying "oh, those stupid lefties, they don't realize that you need to shift" are going to savage him for it come October.

Maybe they listen to the consultant class too much. All those consultants who look at polls and nothing else still have too much power, because they don't realize that a party and a candidate needs to have lines that they will not cross, and that those lines are what make you look "principled."

Maybe they listen to Republicans too much. It still fascinates me that Karl Rove is being hauled out as a political analyst, as if he's doesn't have a horse in this race. The Republicans are more than willing to attack them for both shifting and for not shifting enough, because as long as they keep doing that, they'll keep the public's eyes away from their own candidates' faults.

Whatever it is, Lessig's right: if they lose, it'll be because of this nonsense, and because Obama supporters' yells of "well, come on, he's still just a politician" are the dumbest goddamned thing that's been said about an American presidential candidate since "uniter, not divider."

Europeans Have 'till Monday to Save Their Online Rights

Headline over at boing boing:

EUROPEANS! You have until MONDAY to contact your MEP and save the EU from a three-strikes copyright rule!

They aren't wrong.

Back-room dealings in the European Parliament have resulted in a "three strikes" rule being included in a new telecoms bill -- the rule would force ISPs to kick people who've been thrice accused of copyright infringement off the Internet.

If this bill passes, then Europeans' access to the network that delivers freedom of speech, freedom of the press, freedom of assembly, access to medicine, family, civic engagement, banking, government services, and the whole sweep of human online endeavor would last only so long as they avoided three unsubstantiated accusations of downloading music or video or software without permission.

Worse still, the bill is set to be voted upon on July 7 -- that's this Monday.

The Open Rights Group has instructions for contacting your MEP. If you live in the EU and you care about your future as a citizen of the information society, call right away and make sure your MEP knows that this matters to you.

Here's the Open Rights Group link Cory posted. I know most of my own readers are North American, but if you're European, follow that link. Now.

Cripes

There's been a lot of talk about the various tools Canadian PM Stephen Harper will deploy in the upcoming election.

There's one important one that people haven't been talking about, though: Maclean's puff pieces about Harper's geeenius! Yep, Paul Wells is running back to the, er, well, burning 2700 words on a panegyric about how awesome Stephen Harper is, and how awesome Paul Wells is for pointing out how awesome Stephen Harper is.

But seriously, Paul. How on earth is a guy who styles himself one of Canada's foremost political commentators the last to bust out that "he's playing chess while everybody's else is playing beer pong" line? Sure, you were looking for a reason to refer to Perlstein's Nixonland, but come on.

After all, if the conservatives were that good, your colleagues wouldn't be having a grand time yelling catcalls at them as they run from committees with their tails between their legs. And if Nixon were that good, he wouldn't have had to cheat to win.

(Or, well, appeal to southern racism. Funny how that got left out of Wells' discussion of Harper's similarity to Nixon, huh.)

Iran Photoshopped Their Missiles

No, really.

As news spread across the world of Iran’s provocative missile tests, so did an image of four missiles heading skyward in unison. Unfortunately, it appeared to contain one too many missiles, a point that had not emerged before the photo appeared on the front pages of The Los Angeles Times, The Financial Times, The Chicago Tribune and several other newspapers as well as on BBC News, MSNBC, Yahoo! News, NYTimes.com and many other major news Web sites.

Here's the picture in question:


In case you didn't see it, the two rightmost clouds are obviously a copy/paste, as are the two highest missiles.

Damned if I know why they did it, but it's the silliest damned thing I've seen this week.

KrugChart!

Hey, here's a fun chart:



And here's where it came from:

The funny thing is that the essential ludicrousness of this guy was plain to see all along.

(The column.)

There are some things that probably deserve a bit more attention, though. The "net worth" increase is probably meaningless, since so much of it is top-end biased and what's left depended on the home value bubble. And look at the employment and wage numbers: they're ridiculously small! Not just in comparison to the typical increase, but as a straight percentage, they're ludicrous!

And that's not even factoring in the incredible expansion of executive compensation!

Worst. Preznit. Ever.

Edit: Krugman points out that a lot of these problems preceded Bush. Fair enough. One problem, though- he also reveals that most of them are the fault of, yep, Republicans. Health care costs? UHC was scuttled by Republicans. Energy prices? Republicans didn't do a damned thing about them except invade Iraq in 2003. Housing? Well, blame for that goes around to a ton of places, but it wasn't the Dems who were agitating for "reducing red tape" on the quasi-banks that underwrote and drove the credit expansion.

Face it. Republicans are terrible at economics. It sounds wrong, you'd think old, fat, rich white men would know a thing or two about handling the public purse, but they really don't. They're horrible at it. Their ridiculous unsupportable ideology keeps getting in they way.

Better to have a Know-Nothing speaker than a Republican one.

Iranian Language Question:

How do you say "get a REALLY GOOD proxy" in Iranian?

Because, well, I'd heartily suggest it to any bloggers in Iran right about now.

Holiday!

Happy Independence Day to the Americans reading.

(And a happy belated Canada Day to those Canadians who might still be hanging around for the occasional Canada-related piece I still do. Hope you had a good one.)

In Happier, Robot-ier News

Wall-E is absolutely amazing, and yet more proof that Jobs should execute some kind of bizarre leveraged buyout of Disney just so that he can hand the whole damned thing over to John Lasseter.

I'm a bit divided on the inevitable toys, though. On the one hand, Disney has always made sure that Pixar spin-off toys are good quality stuff, and yet on the other hand, it's Wall-E we're talking about here. (Maybe some recycled plastic used in the construction?)

But on the other hand--of this horrific three-armed beast--anything that gets kids into robotics is probably a good thing. You know that at least a few kids walked out of that theater and thought "robots are awesome! I want a robot! I wanna make robots!" And you know what? Robots are awesome, kids. Go nuts.

So, maybe the solution is to let the kids have a Wall-E for Christmas, but only if they learn how to program it. Or maybe if they build one themselves. How's THAT for good ol' American do-it-yourself spirit!

If You Can't Say Anything Nice, Don't Say Anything At All

Jesse Helms dead at 86.

"..."

Notice Something Missing?

In the Times today, there's a nice big article about how Leftist college professors are retiring. They're building it up as the "end of the culture war" or some such thing.

Er, no. See, what they aren't talking about is the other side of "scholarly studies": the archipelago of think-tanks and "institutes" and whatnot that are supposed to serve as a counterweight to the overwhelming liberalism of campuses. There are a lot of them, and they're very well funded.

Now, campuses were never that liberal. Some departments were, some weren't. But they were fairly liberal, and certainly liberal compared to their overwhelmingly conservative private-sector counterparts. If the liberals in academe are retiring, and their replacements are self-consciously (and uncritically, but nevermind) "moderate", but the conservatives are still right where they are...

...guess what that means for the American academic discourse.

It's funny. By and large, the tropes of conservatism are completely discredited. Reagan didn't win the Cold War. Armed interventionism doesn't work. Reflexive market-boosting and regulation-cutting can actually hurt markets, and certainly hurts public welfare. Social security is pretty safe right now, and UHC seems on the horizon.

Yet if you look at it in a broader sense, there are definitely rainclouds on the horizon. These "moderates" don't know what they're in for.

(They're also obsessed with "the data", apparently, which is hilarious in its own way. But that's another post entirely.)

A Followup Tip to Google:

Give people the option of wiping their data. It's too late for YouTube, but this is a really good lesson in how people need control over their data in your servers, and how they need to be allowed to maintain their privacy.

If you want to do no evil, that's a start.

Get a Proxy.

Well, it's been made abundantly clear what time it is.

Google must divulge the viewing habits of every user who has ever watched any video on YouTube, a US court has ruled.

The ruling comes as part of Google's legal battle with Viacom over allegations of copyright infringement.

Digital rights group the Electronic Frontier Foundation (EFF) called the ruling a "set-back to privacy rights".

The viewing log, which will be handed to Viacom, contains the log-in ID of users, the computer IP address (online identifier) and video clip details.

While the legal battle between the two firms is being contested in the US, it is thought the ruling will apply to YouTube users and their viewing habits everywhere.

That's bad. This is worse.

The US court declined Viacom's request that Google be forced to hand over the source code of YouTube, saying it was a "trade secret" that should not be disclosed.

But it said privacy concerns expressed by Google about handing over the log were "speculative".

This is simply one U.S. court, not the Supreme Court. But this is the Roberts court; it's likely to stand up. The implication here is perfectly clear: Corporate privacy is valuable and important, whereas individual privacy is "speculative."

Letme repeat that, in case it didn't sink in. Any privacy concerns about Viacom getting full and unrestricted access to everything anybody has ever viewed on YouTube is "speculative."

You have no rights.

Get a proxy.