that al-haramain case

it's good to see that the obama administration is losing the right court battles. i was disappointed when they adopted the bush administration's position in that case. but so long as they keep losing whenever they do something like that, i suppose it doesn't make much practical difference in the long run.

ADDING: empty wheel has a good post on the importance of the ruling.

and on a related note, every time i see a story about the charity involved in that legal battle, al-haramain islamic foundation, i think: why would anyone give money to a charity called "the two thieves"? today i finally bothered to look up the original arabic name. not surprisingly the name of the organization isn't spelled that way. i guess the world doesn't exist for my entertainment after all.

mccain vs. mccain

john mccain calls obama's 19 month withdrawal timetable "reasonable" and says that he's "cautiously optimistic that the plan as laid out by the president can lead to success."

last august, john mccain said that obama's 16 month withdrawal timetable meant that obama would pursue "a path of retreat and failure for America."

those extra three months must be really awesome.

the announcement

i criticized the obama withdrawal plan yesterday because of the residual force issue. but that shouldn't obscure the fact that this is still a great step forward, one i've been hoping to see for the past 6 years.

what's really surprising, pleasantly surprising, is that the plan is getting a lot more criticism from the left than from the right. the "stay the course" brigade has largely vanished. i'm not sure where they went. maybe all this shouting about how awesome the surge was has convinced too many conservatives that there's nothing left for u.s. troops to do over there. or maybe now that bush is gone they don't feel the need to mindlessly defend his positions anymore. or maybe the fact that bush agreed to a timetable for withdrawal at the very end of his presidency means that now they're only interested in mindlessly defending that.

who knows why? the bottom line is that with "stay the course" out of the mix, the debate will be between those who want a 35k-50k residual force, those who want a smaller residual force and those who want none. not only does that legitimize the "no residual force" position (which only a year and a half ago was reserved only for marginal presidential candidates), it also leave open the possibility that number of troops in iraq after august 2010 will be lower than what obama is talking about now. that's all good news as far as i am concerned.

batman vs. superking

i love the super-crappy costume. i'm not completely sure that adam west is drunk, as suggested here. he just seems to be winging it badly.

(via where else?)

residual force

i still don't get the appeal of leaving a residual force in iraq. it still strikes me as being the worst of both worlds. a lot of the remaining violence is driven by the presence of u.s. troops in iraq. u.s. troops will be just as capable of inspiring violence whether there are 150k or 50k soldiers there. leaving only a residual force just means there will be fewer troops to fight back. a reduced presence will still be expensive, still needlessly risks the lives of american soldiers, and still will feed the violence in the country.

nancy pelosi says "I don’t know what the justification is for 50,000... I would think a third of that, maybe 20,000, a little more than a third, 15,000 or 20,000." but what's the justification for 15k or 20k? if this country is not going to completely leave iraq, why isn't anyone trying to explain what a reduced military presence is supposed to achieve? sometimes i think that endorsing a residual force is nothing more than a mark of moderation, letting the proponent chart the middle path between a total withdrawal and staying the course. but the middle isn't automatically sensible. there needs to be some justification why that number makes the most sense.

besides, a residual force idea isn't compatible with the SOFA agreement. under that agreement, the u.s. is obligated to remove all forces, whether combat troops or non-combat troops, by the end of 2011. assuming the u.s. won't break the agreement, we're only talking about the residual force remaining between august 2010 and december 2011. what is the point of that?

it's all volapük to me!

mapping incomprehension.

liz/kenneth '12!

given that i've only seen 2 or 3 episodes of 30 rock and missed jindal's speech tuesday night, i've been really curious about the ubiquitous kenneth comparison (93,200 hits as if this writing). you can see it for yourself here.

i wonder which cast member the next rising star of the conservative movement will resemble. i don't know the show, are there any obvious choices?


(via)

the le bad republican response

as i said yesterday, i've long thought SOTU addresses were bad. and as i said last year the response by the opposition party is often even worse, bordering on pathetic. but i really am blown away by just how bad the reviews of bobby jindal's response have been.

i'm still not sure if i could have sat through the whole thing. but it sounds like jindal achieved a so-bad-it's-good level speech. maybe he can be the next buckaroo banzai! jindal's ironic fans will throw parties where they shout at the screen what exactly "volcano monitoring" means. who knows? maybe jindal's best shot for the presidency will be to assemble a coalition of members of his cult following and the christian right. he's already an exorcist. that puts him halfway there even before last night's speech.

state of the union

it's kind of an annual tradition, but let me just reiterate my long-held hatred of state of the union speeches. or maybe not, just click the links and be dazzled by my last five years of whining.

it's not even a real state of the union speech this year. in inauguration years the president doesn't technically give a SOTU address. but these presidential people just can't resist speechifying so obama's doing a pretend SOTU address tonight.

or did. i guess it's over now. even if it's not a real one, i still skipped it. i went to drinking liberally but cut out before the video came on.

no thank you

i understand that urine is sterile. and i think that a do-it-yourself kit that converting human urine to fertilizer isn't a bad idea, though it may strike some as a little gross when they use it on their house plants. and i realize that the process may also produce drinkable water in addition to the fertilizer.

but the image of the woman sitting on the toilet and drinking from a fountain that draws its water from the bottom of that same toilet does not make me want to buy this product. it doesn't matter that there's a non-dead fish swimming in the water under the peeing woman. the fact that the fish doesn't look ill doesn't make me any more anxious to take a sip. i realize it's not completely rational, but you're just not selling me with your drinkpee advertising campaign.


i'm just saying.

(via)

deficit

ordinarily i'd be all in favor of the president trying to reduce the deficit. but i gotta agree with robert reich, it doesn't make sense to do it now.

the administration has decided that it will try to spend its way out of the financial crisis. good for them! that's what i think should be done too. but spending your way out means you got to resign yourself to increased deficits until the crisis is over. it doesn't make any sense either logically or politically to push for both increased spending (and thus additional debt) and for less debt. the two goals are directly contrary to one another. trying to do both will only serve to undermine your own efforts.

putting the G in GOP

i'm pretty sure they don't mean that kind of "coming out party." but even if they did, i still predict it would be too boring to watch.

not working

the republican strategy of opposing everything that obama does doesn't seem to be working. it's still early, of course, but marching in lock step in opposition to a popular president with popular proposals while presenting no coherent program of your own seems like madness to me. but that's just how the modern republican party works. the pragmatists have mostly left the party, leaving just the ideologues. blind adherence to ideological positions in the fact of an economic crisis like this looks like political suicide. but frankly, given who makes up the remainder of the party, i guess they don't have any choice.

but on the plus side for the elephants is our two party system. with only two parties, each gets defined in opposition to the other. eventually, obama and/or the democrats will make some major blunder or otherwise get the american people to sour on them. when that happens, the republicans will rise again, just by virtue of being the not-democrats. it doesn't really matter how discredited their policies are. if the other side screws up, whatever they push will get recredited. that's how the american political system works. the only real question is whether the GOP can maintain ideological purity long enough for the next upswing in their fortunes. there's going to be a lot of pressure in the meantime for individual republicans to break ranks. at least there will be if these poll numbers continue to hold up.

modeling bin laden

the other day thomas gillespie and john agnew, a pair of geography professors from UCLA claimed to have found osama bin laden. well, not exactly "found". rather they used models for tracking the spread of animal species to conclude that bin laden is probably in one of three walled compounds in parachinar, a town in the FATA of pakistan.

if he's right, that's a pretty cool trick. the problem is that professor murtaza haidar is from that area and he notes that parachinar is a highly unlikely place for bin laden to be hiding. parachinar is a predominantly shia town, something that gillespie et. al. could have discovered themselves from reading the wiki entry. considering bin laden's hostility to the shia and the recent sectarian violence in pakistan, that makes parachinar a pretty bad choice. as haidar says, "I find it hard to believe that after having hundreds, if not thousands, of Shiites murdered by the followers of Osama bin Laden, the Shiites of Parachinar would like to aid and abet Osama bin Laden."

i never heard of parachinar before this week. but if haidar is right, it seems like the UCLA team goofed pretty badly on this. haidar characterizes their report as "This is yet another example of technical analysis devoid of any understanding of the local socio-cultural and political contexts." maybe there's a problem with applying models designed for tracking animals to track a human being.

ayn rand-inspired high priest of laissez-faire capitalism touts bank nationalization

i think we're reaching the "dogs and cats, living together" stage of the crisis.

(via the birthday boy)

sign of the times

who says that no one is hiring?

(via Moi ;))