Month: July 2008

A new agreement on Iraq’s election law bars posters for candidates featuring anyone’s image except the candidate’s own. It’s another attempt to pre-empt Sadr’s potential popularity from dominating some Shiite votes. Sistani was behind the move apparently.

This is designed to tickle deficit hawks like yours truly (and if I believed it, it would):

“In the long-term, the only way to keep the budget balanced is successful reform of the large spending pressures in Social Security, Medicare, and Medicaid,” the McCain campaign says in a policy paper to be released Monday.

“The McCain administration would reserve all savings from victory in the Iraq and Afghanistan operations in the fight against Islamic extremists for reducing the deficit. Since all their costs were financed with deficit spending, all their savings must go to deficit reduction.”

So we’ll have "victory" in both Iraq and Afghanistan in the first term – with a peace dividend to balance the budget. Believe that if you want. I’ll just note that the McCain and Obama campaigns are getting closer and closer on Iraq – as some of us predicted a while back. When McCain is promising a peace dividend, you can only hope his bluster about "victory" is about domestic politics, not the Middle East.

That anniversary of the "I Have A Dream" speech could be quite a night.

A competitor takes part in the third annual World Bog Snorkelling Triathlon on July 6 2008 in Llanwrtyd Wells, Wales. The event, were competitors are required to complete a fell run of approximately 12 miles, a bog snorkel of approximately 120 yards through the bog trench and a 19 mile mountain bike ride, is seen as a preview to the annual Bog Snorkelling World Championships which takes place this year on August 25. By Matt Cardy/Getty Images.

"We know Barack Obama is for allowing gays in the military, and Bill Clinton tried to do, but backed off. This is not a popular issue. Gay marriage is another one. These are both issues that I think McCain’s going to have to use. You can’t ignore the right. If he does, he’ll lose," – Fred Barnes, Fox News Sunday, arguing for classic Rove politics to rescue McCain.

My take on his post-primary adjustments:

There’s a point to the successive shifts: Obama is slowly undermining every conceivable reason to vote for Republican candidate John McCain. If you want to withdraw from Iraq – as prudently as possible – Obama is still your man. You now know though that he won’t risk chaos in a precipitous withdrawal regardless of the strategic and tactical situation. He will not, in other words, be susceptible to snatching defeat from the jaws of progress. Unlike McCain he is also unafraid of real diplomacy with Iran and Syria; and unlike McCain he does not threaten a hundred years of occupation in Iraq and the suspicion that he’d like the US to stay there for ever.

What can McCain say now in response? All he can say, I think, is that Obama is cynical. However, it is a little difficult to have spent the entire year portraying Obama as a radical, soft-on-terror leftist and now pivot to accuse him of being like the Clintons.

Obama, after all, is not running for Bush’s third term, but he is running after Bush’s two terms.

In the brutally real world, he cannot undo the Iraq invasion. He cannot ignore the pressing need for good intelligence gained through wire-tapping after 9/11. He cannot ignore Tehran’s malevolence, while being more open to diplomacy than McCain is.

What the smarter foreign policy conservatives have long sensed in Obama is not a knee-jerk leftie, but a cool, cunning liberal strategist who could be a potent weapon for the West in the war on terror. Obama will inherit Bush’s war apparatus and it is not in his nature to dismiss all of it as useless until he has a grip on what’s working in a dynamic world. He is not going to surrender to Iran either, but he has a much better chance of wielding soft power as well as hard power in trying to avoid another conflict in the Middle East than McCain. He also has a chance to bring the American public with him – an attribute that Bush hasn’t had in his diplomatic arsenal for years.

Continued here.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

Utica, Montana, 7 pm.

So says John Taylor:

It’s Sen. Obama who’s displaying Nixonian subtlety in the calibration of his war policy. Like RN with Vietnam in the 1966 and 1968 elections, Obama has enjoyed the benefit of being able to say that the war was started by the other guys. After riding antiwar sentiment to victory in the primaries, he is beginning to give himself some wiggle room. Like Nixon, he would inherit a war that he wouldn’t have started. He would be wise to study how Nixon ended it.

Granted, Obama’s lurch to the center on Iraq and a variety of other issues has been ham-handed.

The New York Times denounced his opportunism in an almost-blistering editorial, which no one will remember in November (unless Obama chooses to reproduce it in his swing-state advertising for the sake of right-leaning independents). But at least on Iraq, Obama’s is precisely the move his critics warned he’d make and pragmatic friends such as Andrew Sullivan insisted that he’d have to make.

If he seems changeable, perhaps that resonates with Americans who were opposed to the war in 2003 or ambivalent but now understand that a too-hasty withdrawal, no matter how much his Bush-hating base may wish it, would be bad for America’s position in the region, for the Iraqi people, and for those who volunteered to fight, bleed, and die. On Iraq, Obama’s doing what he must to do be elected President. It’s also what he should do if he’s going to be President.

Jim Denevan makes massive sand drawings:

From the ground, these drawn environments are experienced as places. Places to explore and be, and to see relation and distance. For a time these tangible specific places exist in the indeterminate environment of ocean shore. From high above the marks are seen as isolated phenomena, much like clouds, rivers or buildings. Soon after Jim’s motions and marks are completed water moves over and through, leaving nothing.

One of his recent pieces was three miles across. It took 100 miles and eight days of walking to complete, and has been called "the largest freehand drawing in the world." Rain washed it away the next week.

Lightmark, a German project, has some stunners.