Month: September 2008

Ryan Radia argues that Google won’t go evil:

A major privacy breach is Google’s nightmare scenario. If anything happened to cause users to lose trust in Google, they’d go someplace else for email and search. Advertisers would follow suit, causing Google’s stock price to plummet. Google might never be able to recover from a severe privacy fiasco. Obviously, Google is well aware of its vulnerabilities on privacy, which is why Google has incredibly strong safeguards to ensure that sensitive data can’t be uncovered by a rogue product manager with an itchy trigger finger.

Laura Brunts reviews the revolutionary computer game, Spore:

The spawn of six years and an estimated $50 million of development, Spore is expected to earn serious money and pioneer a new way of playing.

The Creature Creator is a major breakthrough for artificial intelligence, especially insofar as it is available to everyday users, not just game designers or Pixar animators. It casts the user as the designer — which makes the game virtually boundless. You can’t yet directly play against other people (AI code, not human beings, controls the the monsters in the neighboring village), but you can download other users’ creatures into your game-world. So Spore is the sum of the imaginations of everyone who plays. And as that sum expands, the game will only get better.

…You can’t play Spore the way you play Monopoly or chess, plotting a winning strategy on a board with predetermined rules and frontiers. You have to play with it the way children play with crayons or dolls — limited primarily by your own stories and creativity. The problem with Spore could be that many of us have forgotten this old way of playing, and will have to spend some time relearning the habits of youth.

Here’s K-Lo today:

There was an hour-long special on tonight. I don’t have major complaints save for … did we need to be told Track was born eight months after Todd and Sarah eloped?

Well: Palin is the Christianist candidate, a fierce opponent of sex before and outside marriage, and yet she got pregnant before she was married. If you run as a religious candidate – and Palin’s career would not exist were not for Christianism – then it is absolutely fair to point out that you have violated in your own life the principles you believe should apply to others. Next question.

Well, despite being cut off from most links from the right-wing blogosphere, the Dish has now reached its highest ever Technorati ranking (an "authority" ranking based on linkage, not outright traffic), but traffic itself has roughly doubled since I began my airing of all we can find out about Sarah Palin’s Manchurian candidacy.

The Dish is now at Number 34 on Technorati’s list. The National Review’s Corner, in comparison, written by dozens, is now at Number 60. Pajamas Media, including Instapundit and the entire Bush-Palin-Cheney movement is at Number 62. The Dish is now Technorati’s highest ranked one-person mainly political blog in the world. Not bad for someone who’s gone "insane". The marketplace obviously disagrees. And you know what real conservatives believe about markets, don’t you?

They cannot win on the arguments; indeed, they have been proven so catastrophically wrong on the arguments that they have decided not even to fight this campaign on issues but on personalities. But they do care about power, and this Telegraph story suggests that Bill Kristol was a powerful motor behind the absurdity of Sarah Palin’s candidacy:

Sources in the McCain camp, the Republican Party and Washington think tanks say Mrs Palin was identified as a potential future leader of the neoconservative cause in June 2007. That was when the annual summer cruise organised by the right-of-centre Weekly Standard magazine docked in Juneau, the Alaskan state capital, and the pundits on board took tea with Governor Palin…

Now many believe that the "neocons", whose standard bearer in government, Vice President Dick Cheney, lost out in Washington power struggles to the more moderate defence secretary Robert Gates and secretary of state Condoleezza Rice, last year are seeking to mould Mrs Palin to renew their influence.

A former Republican White House official, who now works at the American Enterprise Institute, a bastion of Washington neoconservatism, admitted: "She’s bright and she’s a blank page. She’s going places and it’s worth going there with her."

Asked if he sees her as a "project", the former official said: "Your word, not mine, but I wouldn’t disagree with the sentiment."

In so many ways, Palin is the apotheosis of the neocon dream. She siphons the religious fanaticism of the base to support war on behalf of what the neocons believe is in Israel’s and America’s interests. The goal is war against Iran and Russia. And a further deepening of the occupation of Iraq.

 

Chris Bertram defends Michael Reiss.

Joe Klein reveals that John McCain’s chief economic adviser is smart enough to know that unless there are real, deep cuts in entitlements, taxes will have to be raised somewhere if the US is not going to fall off a fiscal cliff. But McCain will not say so in this campaign. Why? Matt Miller’s forthcoming book explains:

So why does tax-cutting mania persist among Republicans, I asked [Douglas] Holtz-Eakin, the McCain adviser–given…that, as Holtz-Eakin himself explained to me, taxes soon have to go up substantially in any event?

"It’s the brand," he said, "and you don’t dilute the brand."

Beneath McCain’s veneer of dishonesty lies another veneer of cynicism. They’re interested in marketing, not governing, in lying, not debating.

Obama’s fundraising phenomenon continues. Given the terrifying prospect of president Palin, I can completely understand why the money is now pouring in. My job is to flush out all the information we can find on this serial liar and get it to you. Your job is to figure out what to do with that information. But there’s no call for complacency:

It doesn’t mean the Democrats will outspend the Republicans this year, though. The Republican National Committee’s cash advantage over the Democratic National Committee, in combination with swelling outside spending, will likely allow McCain to level the playing field, though the fact that Obama has raised the money himself, in small chunks, gives him direct control over how it’s spent, and fewer concerns about technical limits on spending. An Obama aide said the campaign added 500,000 new donors to its rolls in August.

I hope Obama stops running that cheap ad about McCain’s out-of-it-ness with computers and the like. It’s not as vicious or anywhere near as deceptive as McCain’s ad onslaught, but it’s beneath the Obama campaign. It’s their one current error. Correct it. Remove it.

Obama must maintain the high road. He must keep insisting that the McCain-Palin camp has no new policies to offer on the most critical issues we face, especially in foreign policy. And he must carefully and relentlessly explain what he intends to do. If he does that and refuses to take the bait, he will win. If he descends into the foul sewer where McCain now resides, he will lose.

Karl McCain knows one thing: how to smear, lie, disorient, distract, and intimidate. You can’t beat these thugs and liars at their own game. Beat them at the task of government. They are unfit for it. Obama is not.

(Photo: Emmanuel Dunand/AFP/Getty.)

Jeffrey Goldberg explains.

Jonathan Martin:

McCain seems to have made a choice that many politicians succumb to but that he had always promised to avoid — he appears ready to do whatever it takes to win, even it if soils his reputation.

“We recognize it’s not going to be 2000 again,” McCain spokesman Brian Rogers said, alluding to the media’s swooning coverage of McCain’s ill-fated crusade against then-Gov. George W. Bush and the GOP establishment. “But he lost then. We’re running a campaign to win. And we’re not too concerned about what the media filter tries to say about it.”

What this means is that they will lie and refuse to be accountable for the lies. In fact, because the lies are working, they will keep lying. All that matters to McCain is winning. By whatever means. By whatever lies. It’s pure Rove. Which is why, if it works against a candidate like Obama, we will not have honest or rational discourse in American politics for a generation.