Easier for me - were you voters saying something?

Peter Canellos, chief purveyor of the Washington conventional wisdom for the Boston Globe, says our choices are now "clearer". Simpler would be more like it. Yep, now they fit on a couple of coin flips. Especially simpler to cover.

Pete, buddy, we're looking for stark choices, not eeny-meeny-miney-mo.

Oh, and after the jump, I don't think the word skewed means what you think it means.

But you heathers now have the race you, uh, already had: the multi-culti black guy vs. the woman. I'm sure you're prepared to have fun setting that up on a tee for mancrush McCain.

Of pizza and roadkill

Massachusetts Senate President Therese Murray says I should support Hillary Clinton because she's a woman. Now that my man John Edwards has bowed out of the race, why not?

The problem with Hillary is not that she's a woman. The problem is that she's a difference-splitting, triangulating centrist. She and Bill too have pounded on the door for admission to the club instead of pounding the door down. They continue to do this even after the club viciously hazed Bill - really, both of them - for eight solid years.

Even after David Broder's famously bitchy, "They came here and trashed the place, and it's not their place," the Clintons still want to be the token trailer trash (well, Bill anyway) who get invited to Kennebunkport with the swells. They don't get the fact that they're the token minority in the all-white fraternity and that everyone makes fun of them, even to their face. Or maybe they get it, and they just sit there and take it because they like the attention.

I know that practically everyone in Democratic circles has agreed to look back on the (first?) Clinton administration as the golden age, but it wasn't that great. Sure, compared to Duhbya, Bill was a great President, but that's like saying week-old frozen pizza is better to eat than week-old roadkill in July. Is that really the height of our ambition?

The Republicans are actively evil, while the Democrats dither and compromise. Of course, I'll support Hillary if she is the nominee. No more roadkill! I even like Hillary better than Mike Gravel (maybe he's out of the race but the media skipped his press conference), but she has just moved up one notch to second.

American government needs big changes. Ron Paul would try radical change but in a completely bassackwards direction. Of those candidates who remain, only Obama is at all likely to deliver those big changes - and even he is not very likely to manage it.

No law, only power

When you buy a pig in a poke, this is what you get. Banal bullshit delivered with a smile.

Yet there is no one in the Senate who will cast aside loyalty to colleagues' vacations to say, "Here I stand. I can do no other." We get a little from Dodd, a little from Feingold, a little from Boxer, a little from Kennedy, but no one addresses the fundamental corruption of our political system.

The Constitution and the rule of law that were hallmarks of the old order have vanished under the Orwellian onslaught of the Bushists. Chuck Schumer must be so proud.

L'etat c'est moi

Duhbya does not recognize any restriction on his power. He's the very elected king that the Founders rejected.

Nothing to see here. The coup has happened. Move along. You have no rights.

Oh, the Minuteman Memorial? That's now a gravestone for the Constitution.



By the way, the single most important and non-negotiable aim of the Bushist invasion of Iraq was always to establish permanent bases there.

Don't let the door hit you in the ass

Rudy's out, Florida be praised.

Since I've been running down his chances for a long time, some past comments...

July 16, 2007:

Rudy the authoritarian gets it next. At some point, someone is going to make a commercial using all the stills and videos of Giuliani in a dress.

Sept. 8, 2007:

Rudy Giuliani has insinuated his America's Mayor branding into the media narrative, but his real appeal is visceral. Rudy is America's Augusto Pinochet. He is offering to save America from the brown people as long as we don't look too closely at how he does it. This is obviously his appeal to the anti-democratic reactionaries known as strong Republicans. I still don't think even Rudi's faux tough enough to look macho in a dress, and I expect Romney to put cross-dressing fashion ads in heavy rotation if he needs to.

Nov. 30, 2007: Rudy Giuliani, cheating on YOUR taxes

and...

The New York Times treads right up to the line and, though it doesn't quite say openly that Rudy Giuliani is a compulsive liar, cheat, and bullshitter, nowadays, that's close enough for plaudits.

Jan. 18, 2008:

Rudi, ah, Rudi, it's not that we hardly knew ye. It's just that you are too obviously a mean, authoritarian SOB. And to the Republican base, those are your good qualities. I never thought a repeat cross-dresser could win in the Republican Party; his poll numbers were a media creation doomed to die embarrassingly. Except that nothing embarrasses Rudi, not even all that icky personal stuff.

Live boy or dead girl?

No branch of government is clean in Louisiana. But don't sneer at the Cajuns for Edwin Edwards and Huey Long and now John Weimer - the federal gummint is corrupt, too, by money and by power.

Judge Robert Nader, dissenting, could barely contain his disbelief, saying the initial decision was infected by “approximately $1 million in contributions from a very financially interested individual” to Judge Batchelder, a Republican, and to the local Republican Party.

Make no mistake about this, though, both parties are to blame.

But any state where judges raise campaign cash to run for office is more subject to this obvious conflict of interest.

Yum, tasty bullshit!

You could have a nose full of head cold and still smell the reeking bullshit that Duhbya is feeding America. But Peter Canellos, ever the wide-eyed credulous innocent, wraps it up in lace doilies and calls it dessert:

Last night, it was possible to envision what that presidency might have looked like - and to hope that it's not too late to make good on some of its promises.

If Canellos is trying to cop a sinecure in the Duhbya Presidential Liberry, he should remember that the actual books will fit in an unused liquor cabinet and that most of the work will involve dressing up as a pony and posing with Bush Pioneers in the Neoconworld theme park.

Youth in Asia (and vigor, too)

Maybe Duhbya did us a favor. He certainly put a fast end to the talk of the 21st century as the second American century. No lingering death, that. America as Karla Faye Tucker, now there’s some gallows humor.

The nightmares of others

Maybe I was wrong. Maybe this is the nightmare scenario. Either one is pretty bleak.

Actionable intelligence

This CNN summary of this CBS story strikes me as the unvarnished truth.

• Saddam needed WMD to survive in a rough neighborhood.
• He wanted WMD.
• He didn't have WMD.
• He knew he couldn't stand and fight against the U.S. military, but he was caught between us and Iran.
• Duhbya is different than his father or Bill Clinton, and Saddam didn't figure that out in time.
• Saddam was a bad, violent, self-aggrandizing man.
• Interrogation works.

No news hook

So if you're one of those readers, nothing to see here. I've been saying that newspapers risk their core readership by catering to readers who are really interested in picture books. If that's you, this is all going to be text.

No surprise, this assessment of audience is not a scoop. The New York Times had it months ago. The whole industry is grappling with it.

It seems to me from outside that the Times understands that its market is changing radically. It's the number one national newspaper, but it understands that most other papers cannot aspire to that. The Times has managed the Boston Globe as a regional newspaper for New England, and I think that's the correct business decision. The Globe was the Times's major competition in the region, and it made sense to combine and segment the market.

I don't mean that this is good for journalism, but I don't see anyone talking about putting the media ownership genie back in the bottle. What's happening to newspapers happened to national banks thirty years ago - they're getting much bigger and many fewer. The cause is the same, too - less government regulation.

This is definitely worse for journalists, too. If one reporter's work is read many more places, the other reporters whose work would have been in that news hole no longer have jobs. This economy of scale also provides much more homogenized content.

What I don't understand is the newspaper industry's continued reliance on dead-tree circulation figures. Yeah, I know that's how they get paid. But they need to be talking up all the eyeballs they get on the web, because that's obviously where readers are going. They need to get paid well enough by advertisers on-line to survive. They are going to have to sell this. If they don't figure that out, since the on-line subscription model failed, we're all going to be looking at picture books.

Sunday comics - logic?

Click the image to see Mark Fiore's complete animation.

Sunday comics - behind the chemical shed

For the full cartoon from Adam Zyglis in the Buffalo News, click the image.

"Heh, I like the way that Mitt Ronmey treats his dawgs."

Unshared prosperity

The Washington elite, press and politicians, don't usually get just how divided the country is by Republicrat economic policies that beggar the poor and the middle class to keep the financial markets in gravy. That way, they can fling off a few inconsequential (to them) campaign contributions to keep the cycle rolling.

This report hooks readers with race:

Mr. Mattingly added that, in a county where the large businesses are run by white men and “ancient parochial attitudes” persist, voter enthusiasm for Mr. Obama had a logic that went beyond simple loyalty.

But class is the underlying fact made visible by skin color. This is why Democrats must be class-conscious, why I support John Edwards, and why I prefer Obama to Hillary, even if a Clinton supporter gave this perfect quote:

“She’s about better pay and education for the kids,” Ms. Willis said.

Update (4/16/2011): Minor edit to clarify.

The technological animal

"I can walk without canes, but it's not real pretty," [Marine Lance Cpl. Joshua Bleill] said.

Sounds gorgeous to me.

Money leaves a trail

The financial straits of the Salem schools need to be addressed, and that's what the story is about, but I want more. Some forensic accounting is needed to find out what went wrong and who's responsible. School systems often have poor internal controls (though at least we're not talking 5 billion euros here), but there should still be enough of a paper trail to get to the bottom of it.

Ranch for sale

Come 2009, Duhbya's toy ranch in Crawford will have served its photo op purpose. The White House press office's claim to the contrary is proof.

Sing this corrosion to me

Why work for a scoop when you can predict the future? I'll give Chris Cillizza this: At least, he matched up his predictions against reality and found them often wanting.

So, what's the harm in it? Here's how it works:

• Reporters, whose job is to report what has actually happened, give their take on the conventional wisdom on the press bus. There's some variation from one reporter to the next but not enough - that's why it's the conventional wisdom. Besides, they really want not to be blatantly wrong.
  
• Once the CW goes out under their names, they commit to it. To stay consistent, they then are much more likely to write stories that reinforce their predictions.

If you think this is nonsense, read Influence, by Robert Cialdini. Ch. 3, "Commitment and Consistency", should convince you. Here's the opening:

A study done by a pair of Canadian psychologists uncovered something fascinating about people at the racetrack: Just after placing a bet, they are much more confident of their horse's chances of winning than they are immediately before laying down that bet.

It should be just as unethical for a reporter to place bets as it was for Pete Rose.

Six months in blog years

I've been at this for six months now, give or take a day. Don't be fooled by the items from before July. While I did write them, most of them were comments somewhere else that I've collected to help out my many coming biographers. Heh.

Six months in blog years is a long damn time. It gives me new respect for the early adopters who have been at it for years. Damn, how did I miss that boat? I have a four-digit DailyKos ID, so I coulda been a contendah, but for now a white noise generator on the web would probably get more hits than I get.

Yep, Google Analytics is a mixed blessing. Where before I merely suspected, now I know I'm being ignored! But I'm also thinking about driving traffic more systematically, while still retaining the job that actually pays the bills.

There are two problems for a single-author blog. One is those days you don't have anything to say - not frequent for me, but fatigue and hopelessness do strike every now and then. The other is those days when the aforementioned job seems secondary, and you want to post a dozen items, which could get you fired and your laptop repossessed.

So, ignoring those difficulties, I've posted another bloody survey. Click away, my lovely readers. All three of you. Tell me what you want so that I can see if that fits into LL! Note, however, that I did not include STFU for drive-by trolls. Let them put that in comments if they wish. I'll try to be polite to them. Maybe we could work out a reciprocal trolling agreement to drive traffic. Every Ali needs his Frazier.

See, you can get anything you want... (maybe)

You want to end war and stuff, you gotta sing loud.

I've been playing this song for six months. I can play for another six months. I'm not proud ... or tired.

Need for a welfare state

Democrats are so afraid of losing their jobs they won't take a stand. They play it safe and the country suffers.

Republicans solve this with a welfare state for ex-pols. In many cases, they're better off financially after defeat or retirement than before it.

We Dems need to compete, if only to help get the weak, used up old toothless Democrats to shuffle off into the sunset.

I never thought I'd say this, but I really miss LBJ. Now that man could twist some arms.