Category: Politics (explicit)

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Swingers

Not that anyone comes here for political wisdom, but I sure am glad to see the pendulum swing this morning. It’s gratifying to me not because of any leftover leftist tendencies from my college years, but because it demonstrates what it is that works about our democracy: our ability to throw the bums out, or at least to wrest power from one group of bums and bestow it on another.

In the gratifying / infuriating department, it’s good to see that the 2004 sentiments like “we live in a permanent Republican majority,” “right-wing Christian fundamentalists have hijacked the country,” and “gerrymandering has rendered all elections meaningless” have proved to be utter bullshit. I never take it well when someone takes the present moment and decides that it’s an indicator of how everything will be for the rest of time.

Which gets me back to that pendulum. It swings. In my opinion, which is likely wrong, the end point of the pendulum’s arc (is that called its period?) was the moment at which the federal government intervened in the Terry Schiavo case. Plenty of other people will contend it was the Iraq war, while others will contend it was “the economy.”

So the pendulum swung in one direction, and now it’s swinging back. Let’s see some gridlock-induced compromises in the next two years! Go, Team America!

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Unrequired Reading: Nov. 3, 2006

Official VM buddy Tom Spurgeon & his brother Whit sacrifice themselves to The Guiding Light in order to chronicle the soap opera’s tie-in episode with Marvel Comics.

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Two tax articles from Slate: the continuing phenomenon of Bushenfreude — those who benefit from the Republican tax cuts but contribute to Democrat politicians, and Bono/U2’s decision to reduce its tax burden by moving its music publishing company out of Ireland:

“Preventing the poorest of the poor from selling their products while we sing the virtues of the free market … that’s a justice issue,” Bono said at a prayer breakfast attended by President Bush, Jordan’s King Abdullah, and various members of Congress earlier this year. Preaching this sort of thing has made Bono a perennial candidate for the Nobel Peace Prize. He continued:

Holding children to ransom for the debts of their grandparents . . . that’s a justice issue. Withholding life-saving medicines out of deference to the Office of Patents . . . that’s a justice issue.

And relocating your business offshore in order to avoid paying taxes to the Republic of Ireland, where poverty is higher than in almost any other developed nation?

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Dan Drezner examines the importance of China in negotiations with North Korea. I believe I’ve said it before: When you manage to get the U.S., Russia, China and Japan on the same page against you, you have severely messed up.

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BLDGBLOG remains one of the most eerie/haunting sites out there. This post about offshore oil rigs proves my point.

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When we gaze into the Barack, does the Barack gaze back at us?

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In honor of the premiere of Borat, the UK press has been doing interest stories from Kazakhstan.

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Reason on misreading the Beats.

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I know enough small publicly-held company execs who would agree with this post: SOX sucks.

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It’s Ron-Ron’s world.

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And in honor of the NBA season kick-off (as it were): Kieran Darcy gives up on the Knicks, about 10 years after I did.

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Are you on drugs?

An Italian TV show has been surreptitiously drug-testing 50 members of parliament, allegedly finding that 12 MPs tested smoke weed and 4 tested positive for cocaine:

The programme sent a reporter to interview lower house deputies allegedly for a programme about the 2007 draft budget currently going through parliament. . . . But unbeknown to each of them, the make-up artist employed by the show was dabbing their brow with swabs, and their perspiration was later tested for cannabis and cocaine.

Any guesses how our own House of Reps would fare?

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Will on Wal

George Will on the Democrats’ strategy of attacking Wal-Mart:

Liberals think their campaign against Wal-Mart is a way of introducing the subject of class into America’s political argument, and they are more correct than they understand. Their campaign is liberalism as condescension. It is a philosophic repugnance toward markets, because consumer sovereignty results in the masses making messes. Liberals, aghast, see the choices Americans make with their dollars and their ballots and announce — yes, announce — that Americans are sorely in need of more supervision by . . . liberals.

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Unrequired Reading

Stuff I meant to post about in the past week:

Writing about restaurants in New Orleans (with a go-to mention of Finis Shelnutt):

“When people are still mucking out their houses, chefs are living in FEMA trailers, and others are finding out they are going to get screwed by their insurance company, I don’t want to be the guy who is writing about how the foie gras is not quite up to snuff,” he said.

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Why bashing Wal-Mart is not a good strategy for the Dems:

By restraining inflation, intense competition of the sort that Wal-Mart provides eases pressure on the Federal Reserve to do the job with higher interest rates. Note the paradox: At one level, intense competition destroys jobs, as some companies can’t compete, but the larger effect is to increase total job creation by fostering favorable economic conditions.

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Get your picture taken with Jesus.

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NO,LA: It’s the civil engineering, stupid!

Why didn’t the Corps design a consistent, redundant system? In large part, the reason was foot dragging — or worse — by pols on the state, local, and federal levels. In some cases, political opposition prevented the Corps from seizing land to build sturdier foundations. Plus, Louisiana’s local levee boards were lousy stewards. Levee officials were political animals, not engineering experts, and sometimes proved more interested in running ancillary “economic development” projects than working with the Corps to make sure the levees were up to their task. (It’s not because New Orleans is poor and black: the levees protect New Orleans’s richer, whiter suburbs too.) In addition, the Corps warned that many of New Orleans’s manmade canals, obsolete for years, should be closed or at least gated -— to no avail. Moreover, when the Corps, along with state officials, came to understand that wetlands restoration is a vital part of the flood protection system, not a tree-hugger’s afterthought, Congress balked at spending the required $14 billion over several decades for coastal restoration.

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The Chinese village of Dafen is like the opposite of William Gaddis’ The Recognitions:

In just a few years, Dafen has become the leading production center for cheap oil paintings. An estimated 60 percent of the world’s cheap oil paintings are produced within Dafen’s four square kilometers (1.5 square miles). Last year, the local art factories exported paintings worth €28 million ($36 million). Foreign art dealers travel to the factory in the south of the communist country from as far away as Europe and the United States, ordering copies of famous paintings by the container. [. . .]

Some five million oil paintings are produced in Dafen every year. Between 8,000 and 10,000 painters toil in the workshops. The numbers are estimates: No one knows the exact figure, which increases by about 100 new painters every year. But it’s not just professional copy painters who are drawn to Dafen — graduates of China’s most renowned art academy also come here. They complete only a small number of paintings a month and earn as much as €1,000 ($1,282).

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A guy used the graphics engine of the computer game Half Life to make a video tour of Frank Lloyd Wright’s Fallingwater house.

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Go see Little Miss Sunshine when you get the chance. We caught it yesterday. So did a couple of children sitting in the row behind us. They were less than 10 years old, and I’m sorta wondering if their mom noticed the “R” rating on the movie, or just thought it would be a fun flick about children’s beauty pageants, with that guy from The Daily Show. She may’ve been a little surprised when Alan Arkin was snorting heroin in one of the opening scenes. Anyway, it was a really wonderful flick, with a punchline that almost had us crying with laughter.

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And have a good holiday.

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WWII Flashback Day!

At the Washington Post, Jim Hoagland has a column on Gunter Grass, while George Will writes about the Japanese shrine to war-dead, which drives China into a tizzy.

It’s interesting, how we can’t bear to forget and we can’t bear to remember.

Here’s Hitchens reviewing a book about the moral issues of firebombing Hamburg, Dresden, Wurzbeg and other German cities during the war.

Meanwhile, I just finished re-reading Gravity’s Rainbow, which is (in part) about the German rocket bombardments of England. And behavioral science, organic chemistry, kaballah, Argentine politics, the afterlife, zoot suits, pinball, cinema, the tarot, Nixon, and the respective extinctions of the dodos and the Hereros. I’m still juggling and re-parsing What Went On.

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C’est Levy

Bernhard-Henri Levy wrote an excellent essay from and about Israel in the NYTimes last Sunday:

Zivit Seri is a tiny woman, a mother, who speaks with clumsy, defenseless gestures as she guides me through the destroyed buildings of Bat Galim — literally “daughter of the waves,” the Haifa neighborhood that has suffered most from the shellings. The problem, she explains, is not just the people killed: Israel is used to that. It’s not even the fact that here the enemy is aiming not at military objectives but deliberately at civilian targets — that, too, is no surprise. No, the problem, the real one, is that these incoming rockets make us see what will happen on the day — not necessarily far off — when the rockets are ones with new capabilities: first, they will become more accurate and be able to threaten, for example, the petrochemical facilities you see there, on the harbor, down below; second, they may come equipped with chemical weapons that can create a desolation compared with which Chernobyl and Sept. 11 together will seem like a mild prelude. For that, in fact, is the situation. As seen from Haifa, this is what is at stake in the operation in southern Lebanon.

Israel did not go to war because its borders had been violated. It did not send its planes over southern Lebanon for the pleasure of punishing a country that permitted Hezbollah to construct its state-within-a-state. It reacted with such vigor because the Iranian President Ahmadinejad’s call for Israel to be wiped off the map and his drive for a nuclear weapon came simultaneously with the provocations of Hamas and Hezbollah. The conjunction, for the first time, of a clearly annihilating will with the weapons to go with it created a new situation. We should listen to the Israelis when they tell us they had no other choice anymore. We should listen to Zivit Seri tell us, in front of a crushed building whose concrete slabs are balancing on tips of twisted metal, that, for Israel, it was five minutes to midnight.

As a bonus, he also manages to bring kaballah and rocketry together (a little easier at that permeable border than Pynchon’s merkabah mysticism).

There’s also a neat article by Barry Rubin in the current ish of Foreign Affairs about Israel’s security strategy (reg. required), written before the kidnappings by Hamas and Hezbollah. While it doesn’t predict the very current events, it does help explain the political and military evolution of Israel’s strategy of withdrawing from southern Lebanon, the Gaza Strip and parts of the West Bank.