The Dish

"Well I believe, George, in the 1990s we had a booming economy that created nearly 23 million new jobs, more people were lifted out of poverty in any time in our near history. It was an economy that worked for everyone, not just the rich, the wealthy and the well connected, but there were underlying issues that we didn’t understan fully. Now, you remember this, because George did work in that ‘92 campaign – George and I actually were against NAFTA – I’m talking about him in his previous life, before he was an objective journalist," – Hillary Clinton being "interviewed" by her former employee, George Stephanopoulos.

Was that mockery?

Already. That’s half the entire turnout of last time around. Amazing.

Obama fights against the freak show:

The movie parodies continue. I love Darth Hillary:

He seems a little more comfortable with a president Obama than a president McCain. Again: this makes little sense of you look at this election from a standpoint of ideology. Obama is not a small government conservative. But on the integrity of the Constitution, on walking back the doctrines of pre-emptive war, torture and a permanent occupation of the Middle East, the two have something in common. and both represent insurgencies from below – and the next generation.

I don’t think you have to agree with Obama on many things to want him to succeed. The point is in part a thorough repudiation of the past eight years, and a rejection of what Rove Republicanism has come to mean.

Charles C. Mann’s 2002 article describes why we need technology that will fail smartly:

[Bruce Schneier, a famous ex-cryptographer,] is hardly against technology—he’s the sort of person who immediately cases public areas for outlets to recharge the batteries in his laptop, phone, and other electronic prostheses. "But if you think technology can solve your security problems," he says, "then you don’t understand the problems and you don’t understand the technology." Indeed, he regards the national push for a high-tech salve for security anxieties as a reprise of his own early and erroneous beliefs about the transforming power of strong crypto. The new technologies have enormous capacities, but their advocates have not realized that the most critical aspect of a security measure is not how well it works but how well it fails.[…]

"The trick is to remember that technology can’t save you," Schneier says. "We know this in our own lives. We realize that there’s no magic anti-burglary dust we can sprinkle on our cars to prevent them from being stolen. We know that car alarms don’t offer much protection. The Club at best makes burglars steal the car next to you. For real safety we park on nice streets where people notice if somebody smashes the window. Or we park in garages, where somebody watches the car. In both cases people are the essential security element. You always build the system around people."

John Cole questions Obama’s proposal of a windfall profits tax on gas companies.

"McCain wants to stay in Iraq until no more Americans are getting killed, no matter how long it takes and how many Americans get killed achieving that goal–that is, the goal of not getting any more Americans killed. And once that goal is achieved, we’ll stay," – Rick Hertzberg, back in January.

A reader writes:

I’m baffled by your glee at Boris Johnson’s victory in London. You say Johnson couldn’t survive US political life as if that were a bad thing, but it wouldn’t take “swift boating”, the seemingly authoritative dissemination of mistruths, to derail his campaign. Johnson’s a thug who used his position as a journalist to help old friends violently settle scores; he’s an anti-Muslim bigot who claims the problem in Britain isn’t Muslim extremists, but Islam itself; he’s a racist who writes of Africans’ “watermelon smiles” and throws around the word “piccaninnies”; he’s a homophobe who says same-sex marriage is indistinguishable from bestiality.

As someone who supports Barack Obama, a candidate whose own biography and positions combat the notion of a clash of civilizations and who attempts to transcend the ugliness of America’s racist past, how can you also support Johnson? Were BoJo an American politician he’d be the very type of right wing blowhard you’d be criticizing for his corrosive bigotry. I get that you knew him in college, but does that really make everything okay?

My Sunday Times column is on a possible Obama-Clinton ticket. I’ll write more tomorrow, and fully expect push-back, but it’s just up and here’s the link.