Month: December 2008

By Patrick Appel
A reader writes:

There are two reasons – one major and one minor – to give the Governor the power to appoint a Senator until a special election can take place.

The major reason is speed. 

It takes time to hold a special election and the state loses half of its Senate representation in the interim. Actually, I think the Constitution should be amended so that House seats can be temporarily filled in the same fashion.  Aside from the principle of full representation, imagine what would happen in the case of a military or terrorist attack that wiped out Congress – the country would have no legislature for a few months while states (being in whatever shape as a result of the attack) tried to hold elections. A governor can fill a spot instantly.

The minor reason is cost and the integrity of the electoral process. Special elections held outside of the "normal" time for elections are expensive and, because of the short time within which they must take place, give an advantage to candidates who can instantly fund their campaigns.  Imagine, e.g., the need to have 2 or 3 such elections in a short period of time because you lose a couple of Senators in a row – that kind of thing.

Neither reason, however, means that you can’t create mechanisms that make it more difficult for the Governor to act corruptly in naming a temporary replacement:  1. you can decide to accept the cost and make it easier to hold a special election so that whoever the governor appoints is only there for a limited period; 2. you can put limits (as some states do) on the Governor’s choices – requiring that the temporary Senator be from the same party as the departing one, that he be from a list of persons chosen by the legislature or the departing Senator’s party or a commission, etc.

There’s nothing valuable about letting the Governor appoint whoever he wants – but there is some importance in allowing him to appoint someone ASAP.

By Patrick Appel
Eli Kintisch on why the Chu pick is so exciting:

Finally, there’s Chu’s enthusiastic support for a new energy research concept called [Advanced Research Projects Agency – Energy (ARPA-E)] – he might have even invented it. The wonky sounding agency was meant to be an unclassified version of DARPA, the Pentagon’s risk-taking, blue-sky research arm. The Gathering Storm report, of which Chu was one of the authors, called for the creation of the agency, which would pursue risky energy research with big payoffs. (Chu later was ARPA-E’s advocate in congressional testimony and public appearances.) Congress passed a law creating the program within DOE last year, but DOE hasn’t appointed a director or tried to fund it. Chu would reverse that policy immediately if Obama lets him, but the president-elect has yet to take a position on ARPA-E.

By Patrick Appel
As a former fine artist, I may appreciate this more than you do:

Colours from Charlie McCarthy on Vimeo.

[Update]

A reader writes:

Please don’t condescend to us who don’t call ourselves artists, as if we have a somehow lower, degraded aesthetic sense.

Obviously, people who aren’t artists can appreciate this film. But when I watch the video, as someone who formerly thought he would be a painter, it reminds me of the thousands of hours I’ve spent in the studio. I can almost smell the paint. Re-reading that line, I see how it comes off as pretentious, but it was meant more as an apology for being self-indulgent.

by Chris Bodenner
In contrast to the Dee Dee Myers tirade against Obama’s young scribe, the women at Broadsheet were eminently more reasonable:

Sarah Hepola:

I found it hard to drum up outrage. Maybe because I’m so inured to frat-boy shenanigans that this seems utterly tame; maybe it’s because there is a frighteningly similar picture of me groping Dr. Spock at a college party.

Amy Benfer:

I think Hillary’s spokesperson’s response was classy, funny and exactly right.

Jeanne Carstensen:

It was hard for me to get too outraged over this sort of party pranking. The stupidity speaks for itself. Yet the dude with his hand cupping Hillary’s cardboard breast is Obama’s senior speechwriter. Obama is facing the worse national crisis in over a generation, and this guy is crafting his speeches? Talk about cognitive dissonance.

Kate Harding:

It’s not like I don’t have any pictures of myself or my friends drunkenly doing lewd things to inanimate objects, but the fact that it was Obama’s senior speechwriter doing it to a Hillary effigy, after she suffered so much sexism while running against him — there’s just a little too much symbolism for comfort there.

Katharine Mieszkowski:

Try to imagine a photo of a top female speechwriter for the female president-elect grabbing the crotch of a cardboard cutout of the male politician whom her boss had vanquished in the primary. The cable news talking heads would be fulminating about castration for a week!

by Chris Bodenner
Tracy Clark-Flory has been following the "sexting" meme, most recently posting stats showing how prevalent the practice is among teens: 20% have sent/posted nude photos of themselves, while 39% have texted sexy messages.  But she isn’t getting worked up about the widespread use:

As someone who came of age during the Internet boom … these findings are utterly predictable. For young adults, technology can offer a means of intimacy or performance, or both. … Of course, when teens start sharing pornographic photos of themselves, some legitimate dangers are introduced…. [But] the majority of teens are "sexting" their boyfriend or girlfriend — not (at least intentionally) their entire school. This seems less an issue of young people being made into amateur porn stars by our sexed-up culture, than it is that virtually every aspect of their lives has gone digital.

By Patrick Appel
From Michael Crowley’s article on Afghanistan:

For the left in the Bush era, America’s two wars have long been divided into the good and the bad. Iraq was the moral and strategic catastrophe, while Afghanistan–home base for the September 11 attacks–was a righteous fight.

This dichotomy was especially appealing to liberals because it allowed them to pair their call for withdrawal from Iraq with a call for escalation in Afghanistan. Leaving Iraq wasn’t about retreating; it was about bolstering another front, one where our true strategic interests lie. The left could meet conservative charges of defeatism with the rhetoric of victory. Barack Obama is now getting ready to turn this idea into policy. He has already called for sending an additional two U.S. brigades, or roughly 10,000 troops, to the country and may wind up proposing a much larger escalation in what candidate Obama has called "the war we need to win." […]

The challenge of exiting Iraq was supposed to be the first great foreign policy test of Obama’s presidency. But it is Afghanistan that now looms as the potential quagmire. Winning the good war will, at a minimum, require the most sophisticated counterinsurgency techniques…which take enormous resources. But, even then, it’s not at all clear what victory looks like, or whether it’s even possible in a country known as the graveyard of empires. All of which raises the question of how much longer Afghanistan really can be considered the good war.

By Patrick Appel
Nige writes:

An obscure satellite pay channel no one had heard of screens what sounds like quite an interesting (in a grim kind of way) documentary about an ‘assisted suicide’ which happens to show the ‘moment of death’ – and all hell breaks loose. Some object that this glamorises euthanasia, and there might be something in that (though, without the row, no one would have seen the film), but that doesn’t really [explain] the heat being generated.

It would seem the ‘moment of death’ really is the ultimate taboo – a taboo endorsed and entrenched by standard hospital practice, which does its best to bar family from the deathbed. If you have the misfortune to die in hospital, you’ll be in the company of a nurse you don’t know who’ll be addressing you by your Christian name (or someone else’s) – great! Once you’re safely dead, your family will be telephoned and told you’re getting worse and they’d better come in…

So this strange taboo endures. Why?

Appleyard chimes in here.

By Patrick Appel
Blagojevich’s approval rating hits seven percent.

by Chris Bodenner
Videogum digs up an old TV commercial for a simple, but rather effective, fishing tool.  Blogger Gabe comments:

Granted, I know that when you were sitting around the Invention Corp. conference room trying to come up with a name for "a long hard rod that you insert deep into the mouth" that it was almost irresistible. And shouldn’t it actually be called THE WUNDER DE-BONER? Oh well, Wunder Boner it is.

By Patrick Appel

Martijn Hendriks downloaded YouTube videos, digitally removed the people in them, and then put them back up. I liked this one best:

(Hat tip: Pieter)