Month: September 2010

Obama's speech to Gen44 tonight knocked my socks off. It's streaming on CSPAN here. If you've forgotten why many of you worked your ass off for this guy, and felt hope for the first time in many years, watch it. He deserves criticism when necessary as this blogazine has not shied from at times. But he remains in my judgment the best option this country still has left – and it's far too easy for the left and far too dangerous for serious conservatives and independents to abandon him now.

What I particularly loved about the speech was his direct attack on the fiscal irresponsibility of the Pledge To America, the $700 billion it means we will have to borrow from China to sustain the unsustainable Bush tax cuts for those earning over $250,000 a year. And what I agreed with was his embrace of government that is lean and efficient, because these are times when the government is necessary to help reverse self-evident decline, mounting fiscal crisis, deeply dangerous enemies, and socially dangerous inequality, exploited at home by ugly demagogues and know-nothing nihilists. Here is his invocation of Lincoln's core argument about the role of government:

I believe the government should do for the people what they cannot do better for themselves.

Then this passage where he soared like he hasn't since the campaign:

I believe in a country that rewards hard work and responsibility, a country where we look after one other, a country that says I am my brother's keeper, I am my sister's keeper, I'm going to give a hand up, join hands with folks and try to lift all of us up so we all have a better future, not just some – but all of us. That's what I believe.

I do too. I do not believe for a second that the GOP of Palin and Boehner and Beck and DeMint represents anything but more debt, more war, more social division and more denial about the deeply serious problems this country faces and the profound dangers that are metastasizing in the world. I have no love for the Democrats but I do fervently believe that this president's record is far better than many now fashionably claim, that his inheritance was beyond awful, and I am not giving up on this president's immense task now, and neither, in my judgment, should any of those who voted for him in 2008.

Know hope; and fight the cynicism and nihilism that is increasingly the alternative.

(Photo: Yuri Gripas/AFP/Getty.)

Today on the Dish, Andrew challenged O'Reilly to duel it out, and he fact-checked D'Souza because Forbes was incapable. Anderson Cooper nailed Andrew Shirvell's bizarre vendetta against a gay student, and this reader shared a heartbreaking story of times before it got better. Germany approached the finish line on its WWI reparations, Pakistan closed its borders to NATO supplies for Afghanistan, and the Derry/ Londonderry drama wore on.

Sarah squared off with Mitt, and Will Wilkinson wasn't buying the "mama grizzly" phenomenon, especially with someone like Carly Fiorina. Brendan Nyhan researched Chait's unenthusiastic Dems, Tom Jensen looked into angry voters, and Andrew scolded unenthusiastic Prop 19 supporters because this vote does matter. Atheists scored more points on world religion, and one in nine black children have an incarcerated parent. This reader wanted the Tea Party to weigh in on the liberty of marijuana, Allahpundit questioned and John Cole answered on James O’Keefe's motives for attempting such a bizarre stunt, and Republicans found their own double rainbow dude.

On the technology front, Jonah Lehrer reached back in time to rebut Gladwell on Twitter while tech pessimist Evgeny Morozov agreed. Walter Russell Mead imagined a world with lots of electric cars, and Jeff Jarvis didn't appreciate The Social Network's portrayal of geeks. Las Vegas was too hot for this hotel, and this marketing stunt might actually save lives. Larry Summers and Megan wanted better airports, and Bruce Schneier feared function creep in internet wiretaps. VFYW here, MHB here, and FOTD here.

–Z.P.

Since they went there, their filter tools are FUBAR. Bummer. I need to control for Rasmussen!

Just a quick word to say that I hope to respond to his excellent questions very soon – it's just been a busy day on the personal front and I didn't want to dash off a response unworthy of the challenge. I also had a column to write today – the one you can't read any more without paying for it.

I’m a little late on this but the staffer who wrote “All Faggots Must Die” on JoeMyGod has now been fired, and Senator Chambliss classily called Joe himself to apologize. The twist, however, is that the comment did not come from Chambliss’ Georgia office, but his DC office and the culprit was not exactly “fired”. From the AJC’s Jim Galloway:

In a prepared statement, Chambliss also spoke of the immediate “removal” of a staff member – who was not identified. The wording is important. We’re picking up that the staffer was a military liaison assigned by the Pentagon — a fact that Chambliss’ office would not confirm.

Hmmm. Weirdly, the sergeant at arms also did not call the comment “bigoted” or “hateful” but merely “ignorant free speech.” And the identity of the staffer remains a mystery. So this is not over. If the staffer was a Pentagon employee, does the Pentagon still employ him? Could he be reassigned to another Senator? And why is his identity being kept secret?

Allahpundit asks what James O’Keefe hoped to accomplish with his odd little stunt:

What I can’t quite grasp is how, if he and his team really did intend to follow the script and film Boudreau on the boat with sex toys scattered around, they could have conceivably released the resulting video and thought people would like it.

John Cole's answer:

Any video he got from the boat would have been “proof” of whatever they claimed it would be. These are the folks who took a video of Shirley Sherrod rejecting racism and used it to… call her a racist. These are the folks who had Acorn officials fired for… calling the authorities when they went in and pretended to be sex traffickers and the Acorn folks did the right thing. All they needed was videotape of anything involving Abbie Bordreaux on that boat. It doesn’t matter if she was repulsed or what she actually did, they would lie and edit the video and it would become whatever they wanted it to be.

Scott Morgan held a chat with Ryan Grim today at FDL. Grim:

Those in drug policy reform must be feeling a bit like the Koch brothers, who’ve been throwing hundreds of millions of dollars up against the wall for decades trying to create some kind of Tea Party movement, and they’ve finally got (a few very loud) people on their side. There’s a big difference, though: people are coming around on drug policy by themselves, without any well-funded national campaign. It’s a genuinely organic evolution of public opinion, and it’s one you could see coming a few years ago.

I write in the book that marijuana has been part of the public consciousness, part of the popular culture, longer than any other widely used drug save alcohol. For baby boomers and anyone born beyond, they’ve had personal experience – either they or people they know – with pot, and that has a powerful ability to combat propaganda. Having Bush in the White House for eight years held back the floodgates, it slowed time, so to speak. By the time he left, though, only people who are now in their late 60s didn’t grow up with pot as a ubiquitous thing. But – and we have to give Obama credit here – the new administration’s decision to follow its campaign promise and (mostly) block the DEA from raiding pot clubs in states where medical marijuana is legal unleashed things: Colorado has a booming industry and states who had resisted passing their own laws got a big boost from the feds backing off. New Jersey’s law is now going into effect, as is D.C.’s and a number of other states are getting close.

The difficulty of regulating medical marijuana, especially since it’s still illegal at the federal level, has led and will continue to lead to policy setbacks and challenges. But those challenges have been overcome in some places – Oakland and San Fran, for instance – and can be overcome in others. The danger is a backlash that puts everything back under ground. But if people move cautiously and remember history, the future belongs to those who advocate treating pot like alcohol, such as groups like Just Say Now here at FDL.

First Read points them out:

Over the past year, the political world has operated under the assumption that Mitt Romney is the front-runner for the GOP presidential nomination in 2012. After all, he has a wide fundraising network and a deep roster of potential campaign talent. What’s more, Republicans almost always nominate their runner-up from the previous cycle (though both Mike Huckabee and Sarah Palin might also claim that status). But if Romney is the front-runner, he’s starting out at a much weaker position than Bob Dole or John McCain ever did at this point in the ’96 and ’08 cycles. According to our latest NBC/WSJ poll, Romney’s national fav/unfav is upside down at 21%-30%, compared with Dole’s net-positive 38%-25% in Sept. ’94 and McCain’s 40%-16% in June ’06. Intensity is a problem, too, for Romney. Just 6% view him VERY positively, versus 14% for Dole in ’94 and 11% for McCain in ’06.

Tech pessimist Evgeny Morozov –surprise!– mostly agrees with Gladwell:

If one believes that effective social change, especially in tough authoritarian conditions, can't succeed without getting citizens to participate in old-school political processes – showing up to political marches, risking one's life defying the police, getting beaten up and thrown in jail – then the ability to sign online petitions and retweet links to news articles may not seem impressive. In fact, it may even give the young people living in those countries the wrong impression that politics driven by virtual rather than real protest is actually preferable to the mundane and often corrupt world of traditional oppositional movements.

Tim Lee dissents. Yglesias wants to know why we are focused on dictatorships:

[A] great many countries are neither well-established liberal democracies nor well-entrenched authoritarian regimes. Do the weak ties promoted by Facebook make it harder to steal an election in Mexico? Provide a useful outlet for opposition views in Venezuela? Point the way to an alternative to Silvio Berlusconi domination of Italian broadcast media? I don’t really have a well-informed or strongly-held view on those questions, but they’re all elements of promoting liberal politics.