Month: July 2010

If He Were President

Wyclef Jean is considering a presidential run in his homeland of Haiti. Daniel Berger, editor of Rap Genius, tries to decipher his policy positions:

Issue: Crime
Rhyme: "All my gangs put the peace sign up now" ("Rebel Music")
Policy: Gang violence is a major issue in Haiti. An anti-violence initiative would go a long way. (However, on "Ready or Not" he raps "if I could rule the world / Everyone would have a gun in the ghetto of course," so he may believe that personal responsibility is somewhat more effective than gun control.)

Issue: Sex Education
Rhyme: "That's Clef in the drop Lex / Keep the prophylactics for safe sex" ("Pussycat")
Policy: Nearly one in six Haitians have HIV/AIDS, so a comprehensive approach is needed. And if you are driving a Lexus convertible with the top down ("in the drop Lex"), abstinence is simply not realistic.

More here. Elsewhere in celebrity-presidential platforms, Marty Beckerman translates Palin's rap lyrics Facebook posts.

Hewitt Award Nominee

"While most of America was on vacation, President Obama bypassed the Senate confirmation process and on July 7 appointed a radical, Dr. Donald Berwick, to the Department of Health and Human Services to oversee the nation's Medicaid and Medicare system. While I was helping my 1-year-old son, Gunner, do his life-prolonging breathing treatment, his president betrayed him and others who suffer from cystic fibrosis," – Kristan Hawkins, Washington Examiner.

Three, Four … Twenty Blocks? Ctd

Yglesias tries to reason with Newt using Microsoft Paint:

According to Eric Kleefeld, Gingrich clarified his thinking somewhat last night on Greta Van MosquemapSusteren’s show indicating that the northern boundary of the Exclusion Zone lies somewhere south of 59th Street:

“You know, there are over a hundred mosques in New York City. I favor religious freedom,” said Gingrich. “I’m quite happy if they’d come in and said, ‘We want to build a community center near Central Park, we’d like to build a community center near Columbia University.’ But they didn’t. They said right at the edge of a place where, let’s be clear, thousands of Americans were killed in an attack by radical Islamists.”

So the zone is clearly meant to mark out some kind of specific element of lower Manhattan. My recollection of the actual events of 9/11 were that the National Guard set up barricades along 14th Street (inconvenient for my 12th Street-based family) that people weren’t allowed to cross except for a one-time opportunity for folks to get to their houses. So maybe in honor of the day, we should say no mosques south of 14th Street since, after all, the good people of Greenwich Village, SoHo, etc. are well-known fans of Gingrich, Palin, and their brand of xenophobic militarism.

As a Dish reader pointed out, "The group's leader, Imam Abdul Rauf, has held services in a small mosque in the neighborhood since 1983." Newt ups the ante by calling the mosque organizers "hostile to our civilization." Joe Klein gets the final word:

Newt Gingrich is clearly running for President. How do I know? He gets dumb and angry when running for office.

How To Rebuild Neoconservatism: Palestine, Ctd

I guess I didn't expect much of a response to my post yesterday and I wasn't disappointed. But I am not the first to make this case. Back when democracy-building in the Arab world was a major neoconservative theme, my current boss, James Bennet, then NYT's correspondent in Jerusalem, wrote two pieces. From May 2002:

It is perhaps Pollyannaish even to conjure the scenario, at such a dark moment in Israeli-Palestinian relations. But imagine the effect on Israeli fears about Palestinian intentions, and on Arab-Israeli diplomacy, if a democratic Palestinian government sought a peace accord guaranteeing a two-state solution with Israel. Imagine the effect on Palestinian life …

Among the Arabs, Palestinians are uniquely suited for such a democratic experiment, because of their bitter, close relationship with Israel, their stateless years and the intense international focus on their cause.

Nader Said, a sociologist at Bir Zeit University in Ramallah, said that the Israeli occupation had instilled in Palestinians ''their defiance of authority in general, and this sort of tendency for freedom — wanting personal freedom, and to not be controlled.'' At the same time, he said, ''even under the worst of circumstances, Palestinians have admired Israeli democracy.'' These are experiences that Mr. Arafat and his closest associates, in exile for so many years, did not have.

He followed up a year later. I recall Paul Wolfowitz once making this point, but now that Arafat is dead and even Israelis are remarking on the solid economic and political progress on the West Bank, why are there so few neocons eager to support this emphasis? Their silence does not help them convince others that they are genuine about Arab and Muslim democracy, rather than deploying these memes as a cynical way to advance what they foolishly think are the interests of Israel in the region.

But I remain hopeful, if only because the alternative is so bloody depressing. Imagine what the $8 billion thrown into corrupt hands in Iraq could accomplish in Palestine.

“A Veritable Who-fest”

A reader writes:

Thanks for the Doctor Who theme mashup. I think that show and I switched DNA somewhere when I was a kid, as evidenced by the uncontrollable smile and comfy TV chair dance I do whenever I hear the theme song. Thank you also for bringing up the Doctor’s inherent decency. It’s funny to reflect what the show has meant to me in my life having had sort of a typical broken family experience and having been raised in some small way by the TV as a result. Choosing The Doctor as an early role model wasn’t the worst thing to happen to me!

Another writes:

Here’s an amazing thing about that theme.

The original – created in 1963 by Delia Derbyshire and the BBC Radiophonic workshop – is an absolute seminal masterpiece of electronic music. Derbyshire and her team created it by generating individual electronic tones with an early analogue synth, and then edited it and assembled it by hand, splicing the magnetic tape of each note into sequence manually with scotch tape. It’s breathtaking what they achieved for the time, and the fact that it still stands up today, 47 years later.

Another:

My children are 13 and 15 and are obsessed with Doctor Who.  With the advent of YouTube, they have been able to catch up on a lot of the past forty years of the show.  My daughter feels that Eccleston was best but dearly loves Tennant.  My son and I feel that Baker was excellent but that Matt Smith might just be the best of all eleven Doctors.  His humanness is absolutely charming and at the same time even more alien.

The show has also led to some real world discussions on politics, history and science. At this moment in my life, Dr. Who has brought me closer to my teenagers.  While others feel more distant to their teens, I’m grateful that this program has helped us relate!

Another:

Finally, something we can agree on!

I’ve been watching Doctor Who since the ’70s (we Americans had to wait a while before PBS picked it up) and I’ve probably watched more hours of Doctor Who than any other program. Tom Baker is also “my” Doctor, although I was also quite fond of the Jon Pertwee era – Doctor Who remixed with a bit of the Avengers and mini-skirts is A-OK in my book.

I hooked my two oldest boys on the series by buying the old episodes on DVD and they were really getting into it when the new series began, so it’s been a veritable Who-fest around these parts ever since. My youngest son will probably start in on the older series very soon (he’s autistic, so calibrating the level of thrills is a sometimes spotty task), and I’ve even got my wife watching the new series.

Hope you’ve managed to get the hubby watching – nothing like a good Who story on a rainy evening.

Another:

The compilation you posted struck a chord with this Yank. Not owning cable nor having a TV when Dr Who has been available in the US has left me entirely in the dark – until three weeks ago, when I was browsing my girlfriend’s Netflix instant watch.  Since then I’ve managed to watch every episode from the modern series up to Matt Smith. I just finished the last David Tennant episode last night and I was almost in tears.

It’s remarkable to me how a show can be so quintessentially British, yet still have such a massive universal appeal. It’s a paradox of local and global in the way it manages to be such an icon for the British, yet still be so engaging for someone who has never even visited the British Isles. To me, that’s the sign of a good show. The Greatest Show in the Galaxy.

Yglesias Award Nominee

"We noted yesterday the controversy over the Obama administration's reaction to Scotland's proposed release of Lockerbie bomber Abdelbaset Ali Mohment al-Megrahi on compassionate grounds, i.e., the claim that he was about to die. Foreign newspapers quoted a letter from a U.S. Embassy official in London, Richard LeBaron, which said that the U.S. would prefer that Megrahi not be released, but that if he were to be let go, the Obama administration thought it was "far preferable" to free Megrahi than have him transferred to a Libyan jail. On its face, this preference seemed odd; many wondered whether the notoriously pliable Obama administration had used Megrahi's alleged illness as another opportunity for "outreach." But, as I noted last night, the full text of LeBaron's letter had not been made public, so it was difficult to judge. Today the State Department did release the full text of LeBaron's letter. In my opinion, it answers the questions we asked yesterday and reflects credit on the State Department and the Obama administration," – John Hinderaker, Powerline.

Debbie Schussel gets an honorable mention too:

Michelle Fraudkin, Matt Drudge, and virtually every other right-of-center source picked up and ran the complete lie.  Now that it’s been shown to be a total fraud, per their usual fakery, no apology, no correction, no nothin’.

Debbie needs to recall that today's American "conservatism" is never wrong, almost never apologizes and rarely corrects. They learned this from Bush and Cheney.