Month: March 2011

They are all off to a really rocky start in their respective states.

Philippa Thomas, a BBC reporter on sabbatical who blogged Crowley's comment on Manning's detention, provides a timeline:

I could see the sources for the thousands of readers coming to my blog. They began coming purely via social media tools – Reddit and Twitter. Then via the websites of big media brand names – primarily the BBC and the Guardian. Hundreds at a time came from new media outposts like the Huffington Post, Salon and The Daily Kos. I knew that a lot of Washington insiders were across it when readers began clicking through from politico.com and washingtonpost.com .

March Beard Madness is on! But the Brits want no beardage at breakfast.

Reacting to news that Evan Bayh is becoming a Fox News contributor, George Zornick reminds us:

When former Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) surprised Washington one year ago and announced his decision not to seek re-election, he blamed “too much partisanship and not enough progress — too much narrow ideology and not enough practical problem-solving.”

Yglesias glowers at Bayh's new career:

Note that there’s considerable synergy between Bayh’s [lobbyist] job at McGuireWoods LLP and his Fox gig. This way business enterprises hoping for regulatory favors or subsidies from the federal government can hire McGuireWoods not only to take advantage of Bayh’s influence and knowledge on the Hill, they’ll also be gaining on on-air television spokesman, presumably one whose client affiliations won’t be disclosed to the viewing public. And since as best we can tell Fox has no journalistic standards, it’ll be an ideal venue for peddling whatever nonsense he likes.

A reader flags the troubling news, adding, "The Feds have not stopped cracking down on medical marijuana even though Obama said they would." NORML is all over it:

Our Montana Affiliate, Montana NORML, has been liveblogging the latest news.  They report the “smash and grab” tactics Californians are already familiar with, destroying ballasts, lights, seizing cash, computers, and lots of cannabis, but not charging anyone with crimes or arresting people.

(Photo: Federal agents and local authorities raid a medical marijuana operation on Monday, March 14, 2011 in Helena, Mont. Authorities from the Drug Enforcement Administration, the FBI, Lewis and Clark County sheriff's office and Helena police watched over at least eight people in handcuffs outside Montana Cannabis west of Helena Monday afternoon. The greenhouse is the length of half a football field and packed with marijuana plants. By Eliza Wiley/The Independent Record/AP)

Pete Wehner, in self-defense against Daniel Larison, who accused him of turning on Palin only after the mid-terms, points to a July 2009 piece he wrote taking Palin to task. 

My beef goes further back. Which conservative pundit didn't know that the Palin candidacy was a farce as long ago as September 2008? Who said so publicly? Who actually voted for a ticket that included her? It seems to me that those people have some 'splainin' to do as they currently assess Palin as a threat to serious government.

That includes, by the way, figures like Peggy Noonan who was busted for an off-air open-mic blast of honesty. The rest was partisan spin. How do we know it still isn't?

“On a good day, he’s a socialist. On a bad day, he’s a communist,” – Darcy Van Orden, a co-founder of Utah Rising, on Jon Huntsman, former Utah governor, US Ambassador to China, and now presidential candidate.

Louisville, Kentucky, 4.56 pm

Tony Comstock, the filmmaker whose ouvre includes erotic films of committed couples, is a historian of porn and its place in American culture. His latest project, now soliciting crowdfunding, is to submit his most recent film to the MPAA and see what comes back:

On the basis of the MPAA's feedback, we will produce a multi-angle DVD showing the exact difference between the Unrated, NC-17, R and PG-13 rated version of the film… Videos of each rating version of the film will also be uploaded to popular video sharing sites, such as YouTube, Vimeo, Daily Motion, etc to see how various MPAA-rated versions are treated by the vagaries of Community Guidelines is TOS agreements.

We're undertaking this project because kerfuffles over ratings generate a lot of anger and publicity, but they don't seem to leave anyone any better informed about the rating process, and we'd like to change that. By taking BRETT AND MELANIE through the MPAA process, we'll be able show just what sort of alterations were required to achieve various ratings. And once we have those ratings in hand, we can test the MPAA's content rating system and level of transparency against places like YouTube and Facebook.

With any luck we'll get another memo like this one which still wins the Dish's prize for Best. Memo. Ever:

A word to the wise: Broadway doesn't have these stupid rules. The Book Of Mormon is selling tickets here.

Hitchens is still itching for intervention:

The Arab League has now itself broken with decades of torpor, declared the Qaddafi regime illegitimate, and called for the imposition of a no-fly zone. This unprecedented resolution, which is not contradicted by any measurable pro-Qaddafi opinion in the legendary "Arab street," seems to draw much of the sting from the realist concern about regional opinion. The Shiite population has not forgotten Qaddafi's role in the disappearance and presumed murder of Imam Musa Sadr; Saudi officials have been targeted by his death squads; many other states have cause to resent his criminal meddling over the years. 

Germany has vetoed NATO action urged by Britain and France. Money quote from Merkel:

"What is our plan if we create a no-fly zone and it doesn't work? Do we send in ground troops?" she said. "We have to think this through. Why should we intervene in Libya when we don't intervene elsewhere?"

Turkey is also opposed. Daniel Larison sees even less international support for intervention in Libya than in Iraq in 2003:

Let’s compare support for action in Libya against the “coalition of the willing.” Today, Italy and Poland are opposed, Australia is not going to be involved, Asian, African and Latin American states are going to have nothing to do with this, and militarily speaking there are hardly any Arab governments that would be able to contribute to military action. If there is going to be a coalition of states in support of war with Libya, it will be even narrower and even more reliant on U.S. and British military power than the “coalition of the willing” that was widely and correctly perceived as window-dressing for a U.S.-British expedition. It doesn’t do supporters of war against Libya any favors to dwell on multilateral backing for invading Iraq, since they are proposing to start a war with Libya that with even fewer governments in support.

In another post, Larison looks at "illusionary public support" for a no-fly zone. Ackerman sizes up the roadblocks preventing a military campaign against Qaddafi:

International assistance doesn’t look to be on the horizon. The Arab League asked the United Nations to impose a no-fly zone over Libya, but Russia and China are holdouts. And it’s hardly clear that the U.S. is going to forcefully back a resolution calling for a costly, open-ended attack on Gadhafi’s planes and helicopters.

What about a NATO operation? Not as long as Turkey continues to oppose it. On Monday, Prime Minister Recep Tayyip Erdogan called intervention “totally counterproductive.” That’s further than retired Gen. Wesley Clark, a former NATO commander, has gone. But Clark probably spoke for many in uniform when he argued on Friday that intervention isn’t in the U.S.’s interest.

(Photo: Group of Eight Foreign affairs ministers (from left) Canadian Lawrence Cannon, Japanese Takeaki Matsumoto, Russian Sergei Lavrov, US Hillary Clinton, French Alain Juppe, British William Hague, Germany's Guido Westerwelle and Italian Franco Frattini pose for a family picture on March 14, 2011 at France Foreign Affairs' ministry in Paris. Group of Eight powers gathered in Paris today to thrash out a common line on possible intervention to ground the warplanes pounding Libya's rebels. By Miguel Medina/AFP/Getty Images)