Month: June 2007

An interesting point:

There’s this weird paradox, in that the more transparent you become, the less spontaneous you can be. For example, you had these stories of people like JFK and LBJ on a campaign airplane, shooting the bull off the record with reporters and saying all kinds of stuff that they would never say now. But there’s no such thing as off the record anymore. You can’t do that. And the result has been, so far, that candidates have gotten stiffer and more scripted. The question is whether at some point that turns around. At some point, the fact that everything is constantly covered means that no particular news is really that big, and people will be able to be more spontaneous again. I don’t think that will happen this election cycle, but I’d love to be wrong.

St Petersburg, Russia, 10.30 pm.

For a newly updated, global gallery of Dish readers’ window views, click here.

In today’s climate, it may be the best conservatives can hope for. But that isn’t stopping CATO from criticizing:

Although the legislation, as Stuart Altman put it, "is not a typical Massachusetts–Taxachusetts, oh–just–crazy–liberal plan," there is enough "bad" and "ugly" in the mix to raise serious concerns, particularly when the desire to overregulate the health insurance market appears to be hard–wired into Massachusetts policymakers’ DNA.

If we want to make health insurance more affordable and avoid the "bad" and the "ugly" of the Massachusetts plan, Congress — or, barring that, individual states — should consider a "regulatory federalism" approach.

"He firmly believed that everything he did was right, that he ought on all occasions to have his own way — and like the sting of a wasp or serpent his hatred rushed out armed and poisonous against anything like opposition. He was proud of his hatred as of everything else. Always to be right, always to trample forward, and never to doubt, are not these the great qualities with which dullness takes lead in the world?" –  William Makepeace Thackeray, Vanity Fair.

(Photo: Tim Sloan/AFP/Getty.)

VDH:

Theocratic Iran is not exactly as "empowered" as is generally alleged, but in the greatest crisis of its miserable existence. As the mullahs up the ante in the region, they could very soon not only lose Iraq, but also their own dictatorship. Trying to oppose the West in Iraq, Lebanon, and the West Bank is taking an enormous financial toll, as is the general isolation from the world community.

With oil prices at an all-time high, Iran can’t provide gasoline for its own people, who resent the billions spent instead on Arab terrorists abroad. If oil were to dip from near $70 to $50-55 a barrel, the regime would face abject bankruptcy. For all the criticism of the U.S. position, from the left and right, we have now found the right blend of military determination not to let Teheran go nuclear, combined with economic and political efforts at containment. There is an array of future options — stronger embargoes, blockades, and military strikes on infrastructure — still on the table. The social unrest the mullahs desire in Iraq is starting to spill over the border into their own Iran, and its magnitude and final course are still unpredictable.

He’s getting an iPhone. It requires preparation:

First I need to go for a run and do some calisthenics, gather my water bottles and protein bars, gather books and laptop, buy an enormous umbrella (which will give me a critical advantage), and steel myself for boredom, which I generally can’t stand.

Don’t ask what he wants the enormous umbrella for. More video of iPhone geeks here. Will someone send Triumph please?

"My sense of the holy, insofar as I have one, is bound up with the hope that someday, any millennium now, my remote descendants will live in a global civilization in which love is pretty much the only law. In such a society, communication would be domination-free, class and caste would be unknown, hierarchy would be a matter of temporary pragmatic convenience, and power would be entirely at the disposal of the free agreement of a literate and well-educated electorate… [I have] no idea of how such a society could come about. It is, one might say, a mystery. This mystery, like that of the Incarnation, concerns the coming into existence of a love that is kind, patient, and endures all things," – the late Richard Rorty, in an exchange with philosopher Gianni Vattimo.

Here’s the data Democrats need to absorb:

More than half of Americans say they wouldn’t consider voting for Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton for president if she becomes the Democratic nominee, according to a new national poll made available to McClatchy Newspapers and NBC News. The poll by Mason-Dixon Polling and Research found that 52 percent of Americans wouldn’t consider voting for Clinton, D-N.Y.

Clinton rang up high negatives across the board, with 60 percent of independents, 56 percent of men, 47 percent of women and 88 percent of Republicans saying they wouldn’t consider voting for her.

Why would any political party in its right mind nominate someone who would concede more than half the electorate before she starts? What’s more striking to me is that a politician who knows she has this effect on the country still insists on trying to regain the power of the presidency.

A liberal Canadian paper publishes the following:

Like the kid who chops his father’s prize roses to give his mother a bouquet, Michael Moore delivers his films with dirty hands.

He sparks valuable debate about such serious issues as gun abuse, politicized terror and corporate chicanery, yet he does so with little regard to factual accuracy or even simple fairness. He is a crusader without conscience.

His latest work, Sicko, a probe into American health care, is occasionally enlightening, frequently amusing and constantly engaging. Viewed strictly as satire, which is how all his films should be seen, it does a good job of mocking a system that’s clearly in need of an overhaul.

Sicko is also completely lacking in journalistic rigour, presenting only the negatives of for-profit U.S. health care and only the positives of the government-run Canadian, British, French and Cuban Medicare programs. As always, Moore makes unsupported assertions and uses out-of-context edits. The film is not a documentary, if that term is to mean anything more than unvarnished propaganda.

I love the line about Moore’s condescending and absurd depiction of Canadians: "the cheery hobbits of North America."

It’s the Big Story, as far as I’m concerned. This part of the NYT coverage was eye-opening:

The Iranian government had planned for a year to ration gasoline but had postponed the move, fearing unrest. Iran offers the highest subsidies for gasoline in the region, buying foreign gasoline for slightly more than $2 a gallon, according to official figures, and offering it for 34 cents a gallon.

"Iran is in a bind," said Vera de Ladoucette, an energy analyst with Cambridge Energy Research Associates in Paris. "They have acted too late and too harshly," …

Mr. Ahmadinejad is facing growing discontent over his economic policies and is being blamed for failing to deliver on his promises to improve the economy. He suffered a setback last December when he lost local elections, and he faces crucial parliamentary elections in March.

"The government will have to back down or face consequences," said Ehsan Mohammadi, 32, who uses his motorcycle to work as a delivery man. "There are many people like me, and we cannot support our families with rationed gasoline."

Here’s a round-up of Iranian blogger reports, by City Boy (the best blogger on the story, btw) who translates this story thus:

A member of the government has said "[the riots] were not done by the people … the people are not stupid. This is all done by terrorists, foreigners and American dollars."

Blaming everything on terrorists and foreigners. Did Tehran get Rudy Giuliani’s Iraq memo by mistake? Meanwhile, the mullahs are trying to suppress news stories. A British conservative blog draws the following conclusion:

What the Iranian government needs right now is some external threat to unite the people. It had that in the sabre rattling over its nuclear plans, and it helped. We need to remove the obvious threats to Iran so that it can’t unite its people (as well as making sure they can a news service that tells them how bad things really are in Iran). In short we need to appear to take the pressure off.

That does not mean we stop working on its nuclear program, it just means we do so quietly and carefully so as not to give the Iranian regime ammunition to unite the Iranian people behind it.

I’d say it means we need to tighten the sanctions, especially on gasoline. If we can economically strangle the theo-fascists, it’s far preferable to war. Major photo-gallery here.