Month: January 2008

Rod Dreher thinks an unthinkable thought.

I’m not an economist but this emergency .75 cut in interest rates strikes me as a really panicky move. Either that, or Bernanke knows stuff we don’t. We haven’t had any sort of downturn for a very long time; we’ve jumped from one bubble to another; and the Fed’s view is that we need to be cushioned from any further effects from the global market and US imbalances? I repeat: I’m not an economist, just a lay person with some basic knowledge of the economy. But the Fed just made me a lot more concerned about the economic future, not less.

A pile-up:

It’s turning early abortion into a private affair and reducing the recourse to abortionists:

At a time when the overall number of abortions has been steadily declining, RU-486-induced abortions have been rising by 22 percent a year and now account for 14 percent of the total — and more than one in five early abortions performed by the ninth week of pregnancy.

Technology changes things – not as a question of morality, but of practicality.

My take here. A Republican loves the thought of Hillary here. Josh Marshall thinks Clinton’s toughness helps her.

Kevin Drum makes the case that electability means more than an appeal to Independents and moderates. In his gut, he prefers Obama’s broader appeal …

But my gut is a well educated, middle class, politically active blogger gut, and that’s a pretty small constituency.

A reader writes:

The Clintons are like the arsonist firefighter in the movie Backdraft — using their political skills to create divisive and destructive fires in an attempt to dominate their opposition, and then immediately promoting themselves as the only firefighters that will put them out.  They did it in the White House by making Bill’s indiscretions a partisan issue, and now they’re doing it with the gender and race issue. And it baffles me how willing Hillary supporters are to continue to participate in this cynical and destructive mechanism.

I’m a very politically interested Dem in a large family of moderate to conservative Republicans and Independants.  I can, and have, made a good case with them for Obama, but there’s no way I can justify a Hillary nomination to myself, much less to them. If the Dems are short-sighted and suicidal enough to give a Hillary the nomination instead of seizing the opportunity with Obama to create a once-in-a-lifetime historical political realignment in this country, they can count me, my family, and many of my Dem friends out this Nov.

Don’t miss Fareed this week. Money quote:

The Democrats are having the hardest time with the new reality. Every candidate is committed to "ending the war" and bringing our troops back home. The trouble is, the war has largely ended, and precisely because our troops are in the middle of it.

The surge has brought neither victory nor defeat. It has brought about a temporary freezing of the stalemated civil war. We have surged 160,000 troops to put the war on "pause." Money quote:

The national reconciliation that Iraqi politicians promised has not occurred. Some movement has taken place on sharing oil revenue but on almost nothing else. The complicated new law on de-Baathification has been, in the words of a senior Iraqi official, "a big mess, perhaps worse than if we had done nothing." The non-Kurdish parts of the country remain utterly dysfunctional, and chaos and warlordism are growing in the south.

If we stay for McCain’s hundred years, this might abate some. If we stayed for another ten, we might wear down the belligerent parties. So our options remain a little clearer but pretty much the same as last spring: ten months to get out or ten years to dig in further. So the question becomes: which of the candidates will either be able to get us out of there with the least trauma and the most national unity or which will be able to entrench us there with the most national unity for the next century? The answers are Obama and McCain. Clinton? I think she’s too beholden to the politics of triangulation to pull troops out. She would get crucified by the right if she tries to withdraw. And her decisions are always largely driven by political calculation. She is a creature of the Rove-right: its hologrammed negative plate.

If the Clintons are re-elected, what are the odds we will still be occupying Iraq with over 100,000 troops by the end of their third term in 2012? Pretty high, I’d say. They simply don”t have the domestic leverage to do anything else. I actually think McCain is likelier to get us out of there. At least he could.

It broke out in Nevada:

Now, I’m a connoisseur of ugliness in all its forms, I find it mostly entertaining, but the part of yesterday’s caucus that was so ugly as to be distressing was to see the Hispanic and black communities so polarized: The Clinton caucusers were predominantly Hispanic-American and the Obama caucusers were predominantly African-American – most on both sides were women – and they shouted and taunted each other with boos, cat-calls, hisses, thumbs down, and at one point one man on the Obama side began chanting, “I did not have sex with that woman!” (The apparent shop steward in the chef’s hat bolted over to him to tell him to shut up: “this is a serious caucus,” he said, succeeding in getting that soldier back in line.)

It was clear at that moment that while all the race-baiting of the past two weeks didn’t have the desired effect on most white Democrats, it had driven a stake between the Latinos and the blacks. And this, if it continues that way into California and other primaries, is going to mean bad news for the political futures of both groups. Democrats – this is a matter that is much bigger than Clinton v. Obama – have only nine days before the California primary to try and put out that fire before it burns down the house.

The formula was the freshest I’ve seen in a very long time – and sets a new standard for the horror flick.

Basically: Godzilla Meets Blair Witch via 9/11.

The real coup was in using very rudimentary camera work to feature CGI. So it was the first CGI horror movie which wasn’t so in love with its new technology to be confident enough to hide it, and to subjugate it to story and narrative. Yeah, The Host was pretty cool, in a pomo kind of way. But Cloverfield actually scared me – because it was so realistic for a movie about a mega-monster terrifying Manhattan.

This is the case with all new technologies, of course. The first-adopters simply play with it. The second wave uses it. This was the second wave, and worthy of the hype.