It’s always suspicious when people are beaten with the club of political correctness.

Granted, the source isn’t exactly solid gold.

Obama redeems a bit here:

“I’ve seen and heard worse,” Obama said. “[Still], in attempting to satirize something, they probably fueled some misconceptions about me instead.”

“But, you know, that was their editorial judgment,” Obama added. “Ultimately, it’s a cartoon, it’s not where the American people are spending a lot of their time thinking about.”

It really is just a cartoon. No big deal. It makes a point. Does the media focus on this meaningless bullshit because this is what sells or because they are too stupid to know what to focus on? I wish I knew the answer to that.

You can support them, too.

They’re being sued by some dude for some bullshit. To really know what it’s about without me butchering the explanation, just get it from the horse’s mouth. In a nutshell: perhaps it was an intentional smear, though it certainly looks like it is more complicated with that - and Harry’s Place should stand up for their rights. As an American I am not too sure about what rights they have any more in Britain, specifically, and how whittled down they are.

As a big fan of that crazy thing called freedom of speech that I have here in America, I consider the Harry’s Place blog to be well within the confines of legal speech, and in fact I am inclined to think that they serve a valuable watchdog function even if they stir up some shit now and then! Certainly there actions were not demonstrably illegal as far as I could imagine, not that I am an authority on that kind of stuff.

Robert Mugabe in Zimbabwe is doing it by putting a luxury tax on foreign newspapers, the Democrats in America are trying to re-enact the “Fairness Doctrine”. Both are trying to limit what the opposition can broadcast to the people so as to control the message. Same ends, different means. Yeah, it sure does sound like I’m exaggerating the implications of the Fairness Doctrine, and I probably am. But fundamentally, both Mugabe’s new tax and the liberal lobby’s push for the Fairness Doctrine, are as different as the butterfly and the caterpillar.

Hat tip HurryUpHarry/

In general I’m cool with any time the government doesn’t have power over something. Everything the government touches turns into a mismanaged and underfunded mess.

Here is the New York Times doing what they do best and screwing up the information transaction:

The administrator of the Environmental Protection Agency on Friday disavowed any obligation to regulate greenhouse gases under existing law, saying that to do so would involve an “unprecedented expansion” of the agency’s authority that would have “a profound effect on virtually every sector of the economy.”

The comments by Stephen Johnson, the E.P.A. administrator, reinforced a message that the Bush administration has been sending for months: that it does not intend to impose any mandatory controls on the emissions that cause climate change.

The only constant thing about climate is that it’s constantly changing. I do consider that a pretty bold statement at the end of that quote, which I in fact did ^{bolded up}.

Last time I checked this whole climate change/global warming thing was still being hashed out in science labs all around the world.

Total bullshit. Complete and utter.

The whole article, a propaganda piece pushing the cap-and-trade scheme, is garbage.

The most damning line of all, in my opinion, is this:

Cap-and-trade programs create a new commodity: the right to emit carbon.

I love that the US Government is telling me that they are creating a new commodity, which is the right to emit carbon.

Now, as a breathing human being, I emit carbon with each exhale.

Beyond even that, though, is the equally mind-boggling idea that the US Government is planning to turn something that formerly was MY RIGHT into a commodity, to be traded on an open market.

Is that how my rights are dealt with now?

I am well aware that they won’t be regulating every breath I take with this new carbon-trading boondoggle, but that certainly is the way this will all end, isn’t it?

Trent Reznor, the musical pioneer that practically is Nine Inch Nails, looks and acts like he traded the drugs and alcohol for Red Bulls and reddit. And that’s not a bad thing. He clearly made a much better health decision, and he’ll live a longer, healthier, and more productive and rewarding life than he was likely to endure had he not chosen to end his reliance on drugs. All great things, truly. A lot of bands, say, for example, Metallica, tend to lose that special something that helped them make truly meaningful and powerful music when they get off the junk and start hitting the gym. For Reznor, the increasingly-groomed but forever geeky captain of the S.S. Distress, sinking into irrelevance is not an option.

The exponential increase in vitality that results from taking a pale, drug-addicted goth and transforming him into a sober and invigorated musical missionary has propelled Reznor to release 4 albums in 4 years, a huge increase in productivity for someone who had released 4 over the prior 10 years. Not only that, the organic energy injection turned Reznor into a political animal, the album Year Zero being in essence an anti-Bush theme album. In addition to an interest in liberal politics he has revamped his website (nin.com - he clearly acted early to secure that domain name!) and retooled his relationships involving agents and distributors. The old model that the record labels are desperately clinging to has been gutted by Reznor, with almost everything now done ‘in-house’ or with small, friendly companies amenable to the p2p philosophy. His recent free downloads (dozens of songs, multiple albums) are amazingly generous considering that, despite the major labels’ ill health, they and Apple’s iTunes still control the music marketplace and free music from a major artist isn’t exactly commonplace. For Reznor, though, his website lets him communicate and do business with his customers in a manner that removes almost all the middlemen and deliver his music at rock-bottom prices for him and for the buyer. The inner capitalist in me cannot help but be excited for the changes that are hitting the music industry, and Trent Reznor is helping to break the major labels’ levees. All this is leading to new and improved ways for artists to represent themselves and the consumer to get the music, all while the labels lose customers to the undertow from the tsunami setting up to wash away those former music giants as they thrash around in the courts trying to sue their customers into staying customers.

Trent’s new-found focus to technology and the nin.com website now has led to a lot of really neat, ground-breaking features. For example, all of the Nine Inch Nails singles are available at the remix.nin.com subdomain, and users can download the different individual music files to remix their own versions of songs from the huge Nine Inch Nails catalog. The unleashing of so much intellectual property, including using Creative Commons, is unprecedented and certainly commendable as it is a clear win-win for the consumer, for whom free is always a good price. It also is a way to twist that knife stuck in major media’s chest as the Internet enables bloggers, loners, and small fish to turn the tables on the music, movie, and news industries, which is another win-win for the consumer, for whom more choice is always nice.

Trent just released a post with some really cool screenshots of the downloads from the newest album, The Slip, mapped out. You can find all the images by going here, although I’m not sure how long that link will work due to how he posts at his blog (I couldn’t find the permalink). You can use the Google Maps software to toy with the data yourself, if interested. For planning a world tour this kind of graphic information has to be invaluable. With the help of cutting-edge technology Trent is able to see the most-profitable cities to tour in by seeing where on Earth interest in his music is greatest.

Sadly, a look at East Asia shows that the North Koreans don’t appear to be downloading much music these days. I wonder why?

Trent Reznor has clearly not lost his edge yet. If that mysterious edge is the ingredient that propels him to musical mastery and staying relevant then I think that Nine Inch Nails will be putting out well-received an critically-acclaimed music for the foreseeable future. The only question in my mind is whether or not a man who has just took depression out back and triumphantly stomped his boot into it’s throat can keep making the dark and bitter music that he has always made, and which made his fans love him? He has confronted his demons, some of the very demons that haunted him and made him bleed a nearly palpable sense of disgust and despair into all his songs, and he beat the demons. His former manager, John Malm, has lost a contentious court battle with Reznor and ordered to pay millions in restitution to him for fraud - possibly bankrupting Malm and certainly pleasing Trent. President George W. Bush won’t be around to fill the demon void this time next year, his financial situation is recovering nicely, his health appears excellent, and he is a popular web presence and a maverick in the music business - what is their to be upset about now?

If the past 4 years are a hint at things to come, then it’s safe to say that as long as their are major labels and Republicans Trent Reznor will have something to be pissed off about. For those of us who like Nine Inch Nails that is a good thing. Let’s hope Reznor does not let his blade go dull as his own personal life improves, at least for our sake.

Nancy Pelosi and Joe Biden cannot see what is right in front of their faces.

In a few years, when the was is over and done with and Iraq is pumping millions of barrels of oil per day, the educated doctors and lawyers are back in Baghdad, and things are generally going much better than in any other Middle Eastern country, then we will get to look back and poke much fun at Pelosi, Biden, Hillary, Obama, Chucky Schumer, and Harry Reid and all the Democrats who went out of their way to call the surge a failure before it even started, while it was ongoing, and even when it was bringing about great successes.

Those days will be fabulous, indeed.

Progress:

Al-Qaeda suffered perhaps its greatest blow on June 24 when American soldiers gunned down Abu Khalaf, the “emir of Mosul”. He had been a close associate of Abu Musab al-Zarqawi, the most notorious leader of Al-Qaeda in Iraq, who was killed in an airstrike two years ago.

An aide wearing a suicide vest died with the emir, as did a woman who tried to pull the detonator on his vest.

Al-Qaeda was also bleeding support as allied Iraqi insurgents accepted an amnesty. It did not apply to Al-Qaeda. “If you are fighting to install sharia [Islamic law] on this country, you are going to have to be killed,” said Colonel David Brown, an American adviser to 2nd Division. WITH its supply lines disrupted, Al-Qaeda is increasingly turning to extortion and kidnapping, further alienating the population.

Chuck Schumer absolutely cannot stand to see the people of Iraq making their own decisions, especially when those decisions contradict the wisdom he so helpfully offers them.

Back in late 2005 he was telling them to divide their country into three pieces which he would then tell to “govern yourselves”:

“I wouldn’t make it into three countries, but I would make it into three autonomous regions,” Schumer said during a taping of Sunday Edition with Marcia Kramer. “I’d go say to the Kurds up in the north, they’re about 25%, you guys govern yourselves. By the way, they’d be pretty democratic. The Kurds [who are also Sunni Muslims] like democracy. They’re capable of defending themselves. We wouldn’t have to have a troop there. They can defend themselves. I’d say to the Sunnis, the 50% of the people in the [middle] of the country, you go defend yourselves. They will.” Schumer added that he would say the same to “the Shiites, the 50% in the southern half of the country, you go defend yourselves, and they would to.”

Schumer said, “We’ll say to them you govern your selves. We’re not going to tell you who to pick. You govern yourselves. I think that is a plan that could work. And I think it’s going to gain currency.”

Welp, Chuck, it was a bad plan and it didn’t gain currency. In addition to that it’s, you know, sort of contradictory to decide from Washington, D.C. to split up a foreign country and then tell them to “govern your selves”…

So now we also have Henry Waxman dis-pleased because the Kurds are “governing themselves” as Chucky Schumer had suggested:

Also piling on is House baron Henry Waxman, who is upset with a separate contract that the Kurdistan Regional Government has signed with Texas’s Hunt Oil. Mr. Waxman thinks the Bush Administration didn’t do enough to stop the deal.

(I thought I’d never see the day when I heard political attacks on Bush for not being sufficiently involved with lucrative and controversial oil deals.)

I guess Bush should have inserted himself directly into all the business and political discussions going on in Iraq so that, like Schumer and Waxman prefer, he could then micro-manage their affairs from afar. I am sure that would go over splendidly with the Iraqis. It sounds like the Democrats would prefer that the US maintain a colonial type of control over Iraq.

As the New York Post notes, Schumer and the Democrats only want Iraq to be independent so long as the Iraqis do exactly what the Democrats want them to do.

But now that Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki’s government is actually taking steps to secure his country’s future, the Dems are demanding an effective policy veto.

What’s the message - take responsibility for your own country, but only when America says so?

Thankfully, Bush and the US military disregarded Schumer’s plans to divide Iraq and they disregarded Schumer & Waxman’s assertions that the US should exercise veto power over the decisions that the Iraqi government makes.

The NYT “Well” podcast is about beets. Incidentally, I learned that the beet became popular as a sugar source in Europe during the Napoleonic wars after a prize was offered for whomever could find an alternative source of sugar after sugar cane supplies were disrupted by the conflict.

The podcast URL is http://podcasts.nytimes.com/podcasts/2008/07/02/03well.mp3, if you’re interested in beets.

Andrew Sullivan’s view of Barack Obama’s cynicism as pragmatism is like Markos Moulitsas excusing Obama’s shift on the FISA bill…except even Kos had the brains to call a spade a spade, not pragmatism.

Despite his insistence that he is a conservative, he doesn’t seem to have a clue about the right-wing blogosphere whom he todays claims is “veering between a splutter and a strange new respect” for Obama because Barack did the inevitable and flipped the script on Iraq. Suddenly Obama professes that he wants to be a steward of stability in Iraq as the US withdraws troops, and that he will consult the commanders on the ground in Iraq and “refine” his plan accordingly. The right wing, he claims, is impressed and confused. Right now I am more impressed with Kos, and that’s saying something.

Frankly, I didn’t observe any right-wingers today during my adventures in the blogosphere that seemed confused or struck with a new found respect for Obama. If Sullivan’s label-defying character is exemplary of his ability to categorize blogs politically, then the right wing blogs he reads are probably firedoglake and Huffpo. Personally, I remain unimpressed with Obama and his aura, still I am not caught up in the vapors that turn grown men into young boys, with admiring eyes on Obama’s package in the locker room and pondering the mystery of his justification-inducing attraction. His political tap dance on Iraq is a testament to his superficial strategy of expedience and convenience. His positions during this campaign will mirror the positions of a majority of the voters he wishes to woo to his side. The new kind of politics is refreshingly familiar to me, as new to me as the rising sun in the morning.

If you can decipher what Obama’s policies are, peeling back the layers of vague aspirations and crowd-moving sermons, and then you can positively state that you support Barack Obama for President…then that’s fine by me. Problem is, that’s not very easy to accomplish: explaining policies that Obama himself is reticent to elaborate on. Obama on Iraq is as illustrative as Clinton on “is”.

I can’t quite figure out why self-professed conservative Andrew Sullivan would support a (very) liberal candidate for President. If you can imagine the political landscape being a continuum, conservatives and liberals would be on opposing sides, so Sullivan’s entire body of work as well as his attraction to Obama remain unexplained with regard to his alleged conservativeness. I think he likes to remain aloof, above it all, in his own mind. He transcends such labels. He defies categorization. Perhaps that is what attracts Sullivan to Obama? They both want to transcend somehow without reaching some sort of higher plane. Gravity is tugging Obama down and Sullivan is still up in the vapors.

It is a common mistake of the Left to refer to the fake turkey presented to troops for a photo-op in Iraq. Tim Blair has been noting the fake turkey does not die. The turkey was real. Unfortunately, this is an example of the impact the “first impression” of a story makes, and to the fact that no one checks the corrections that a newspaper belatedly issues. The story had already circled the globe and the blogosphere before the Times ever got around to slipping in their correction. 4 years later and Brad Reed makes the mistake today. The persistence of the eagerly believed fake turkey story is amazing.

Here is the correction issued by the New York Times, in 2004:

Corrections
Published: July 11, 2004

An article last Sunday about surprises in politics referred incorrectly to the turkey carried by President Bush during his unannounced visit to American troops in Baghdad over Thanksgiving. It was real, not fake.

I have a link to the correction at the NYT site here, although if it doesn’t work anymore just do a search of the New York Times archives with the phrase “fake turkey bush” and it will be in the results (in the first page probably). Make sure you search the 1981 and later part of the archives.

The mainstream media and the liberal blogosphere often refer to the “Swift Boat Veterans for Truth” group as con men who smeared John Kerry unfairly and cost him the election. It is done casually and without mention of even the existence of doubt. According to the myth it was the Republican Party’s hatchet men working on Bush’s behalf to tarnish the good name of an honest soldier. In reality, they were just 200 guys with something important to say - and millions of Americans probably found it important, too. They helped call attention to at least one confirmed major lie in Kerry’s story - the Cambodia chapter. Jim Geraghty talks about this today, and I am going to post on it because I will refer to it often in the future I predict, since I see Swift Boat Vet references all the time, and it’s invariably in a derogatory sucker punch in passing. Here’s Jim:

I’m not the first to make this point, but it seems the attacks on John McCain’s war service stem from prominent Democrats completely misreading what happened with the Swift Boat Vets for Truth. The Democrats’ conventional wisdom is that A) everything the group said was a lie and B) they attacked Kerry’s wartime service.

Go back and reread what they charged. (Take a walk down memory lane from the Kerry Spot here, here and here and Byron’s assessment of the impact here.) A lot of their stories came down to their word against John Kerry’s. Some of the points of contention were inconclusive, and some of the reactions their comments triggered, like convention delegates wearing “purple heart band-aids” on the floor of the convention, were crass. But they scored several major points. The first was when they pointed out the impossibility of Kerry’s story of “Christmas in Cambodia” that was “seared, seared” into his memory. When one of Kerry’s oft-cited war stories had such a glaring impossibility at its heart (Richard Nixon wasn’t president, and thus couldn’t be denying bombing in Cambodia, on Christmas 1968) it raised doubts about all of his other accounts of the war.

I see Lefties getting all in a tizzy about the questioning of John Kerry’s honesty and patriotism, yet in the next breath question the honesty and patriotism of the 200 swift boat veterans. Starting today (8.1.08) I will chronicle the swift boat revisionism as it unfolds. Bear in mind that I am not questioning John Kerry’s service, what I am doing is calling attention to the unfair definition of “swift boating”. I don’t really give a damn about the details of John Kerry’s service record, I am more concerned with what I have heard him say about the US military right after he got back from Vietnam. All those things he said are not in question - they are on video at youtube. John Kerry said, in testimony in Wash., DC that the US soldiers were torturing prisoners in Vietnam, but then turned around and admitted that he only knew of such incidences second-hand, as stories told to him by an associate. That’s very questionable judgment in my opinion.

George Packer at the New Yorker takes note of Obama’s “outdated and out of touch” strategy on Iraq. In this article Packer dutifully reminds us all that the turnaround in Iraq is due primarily to sheer luck, and least of all should we be thanking the US military, General David Petraeus, or President Bush:

The improved conditions can be attributed, in increasing order of importance, to President Bush’s surge, the change in military strategy under General David Petraeus, the turning of Sunni tribes against Al Qaeda, the Sadr militia’s unilateral ceasefire, and the great historical luck that brought them all together at the same moment. With the level of violence down, the Iraqi government and Army have begun to show signs of functioning in less sectarian ways. These developments may be temporary or cyclical; predicting the future in Iraq has been a losing game. Indeed, it was President Bush’s folly to ignore for years the shifting realities on the ground.

Packer’s summation of the developments in Iraq is just the kind of superficial and misleading revisionism that I would expect from the mainstream media. The surprising thing, though, is that after doing some blogger investigation (AKA Google - some of these major magazines and newspapers should try it) I see that in April of 2006 George Packer had an article in the New Yorker called The Lesson of Tal Afar in which he noted a late-2005 effort by American and Iraqi forces in the Iraqi city which was clearly an advanced version of The Surge:

Last fall, thousands of American and Iraqi soldiers moved in to restore government control. This time, a thousand Americans stayed, and they slowly established trust among community leaders and local residents; by January, a tenuous peace had taken hold. The operation was a notable success in the Administration’s newly proclaimed strategy of counterinsurgency, which has been described by Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice as “clear, hold, and build.” Last month, in a speech in Cleveland, President Bush hailed the achievement in Tal Afar as evidence that Iraq is progressing toward a stable future.

Now, as Roger L. Simon illustrates at Pajamas Media, the New Yorker is not exactly a facts-based paper any more than the Discovery Institute is a science-based organization. Much of Packer’s 2006 article was about Colonel H. R. McMaster, a man who was already then pushing for a more robust and imaginative counter-insurgency strategy. In fact, most of the 2006 article is about US efforts to belatedly revamp the counter-insurgency and the resistance coming from some of the Bush team. If anything, the article makes it look like the US military had capable and imaginative personnel pushing for the Surge as far back as 2005, so Packer’s present-day attribution to the improved situation on the ground in Iraq to luck most of all, and to the actual men and women in combat least of all, is in contradiction to Packer’s own writing in 2006.

As for luck, that’s preposterous. The US military, under General David Petraeus currently and thanks to men like Colonel H.R. McMaster, was able to intelligently and effectively re-prioritize the US strategy in Iraq in order to incorporate the homegrown resistance into the Iraqi government and security forces and to disenfranchise al-Qaeda in Iraq. So far the plan has worked out very well.

Just 2 months ago when the media was calling the Battle of Basra the new Tet Offensive I noted that the war in Iraq was apparently entering the final phases. The Surge made these events possible. Our military leadership formulated a great plan and our men and women on the ground are making that plan work, surpassing the dire expectations of the mainstream media. Next time George Packer wants to make a list of the parties responsible for improving conditions in Iraq he might want to consider that the people doing the heavy lifting in Mosul and Baghdad aren’t floating helplessly on the winds of change but are instead the actual agents of change.

Moqtada declared a cease-fire because US and Iraqi forces were relentlessly destroying his rebel group and Moqtada was forced to flee Iraq and hide out in Iran.

The Sunni Tribes turned againts al-Qaeda because the US military decided to offer these Iraqi tribesmen promises of inclusion in the future Iraqi government, security forces, and society and offering them honest protection from Shiite death squads.

All the things that Packer mentions as ancillary to luck as factors which helped the US turn the tide in Iraq are all things that the US military actively accomplished through a deliberate strategy. Luck was not what made the difference. Packer’s own writing from 2006 refutes his most recent writing.

Nasty Nas been off the streetz and in his bedroom on the computer reading blogs it would seem. Queens rapper Nas is now reading Daily Kos and building a Bill O’Reilly voodoo doll from the sound of it.

Is this what has become of the in-your-face rap music of the 90’s? Now we have all these rappers that have been living easy for so long with all their millions that they are sitting around reading Huffington Post and making shitty music!

Too formulaic, nothing like he used to put out. When artists resort to lame political bullshit and whining about crap I don’t want to hear about it gets real difficult to listen to them. This song seems like it’s trying too hard to be an itch to be scratched. Hopefully this song isn’t how the whole album sounds.

From the looks of it, he has taken enough to be officially lame.

Robot at “keymachine.de” has been hitting my server over and over again for a while now. I never notice it since I use little bandwith and y server is inexpensive so I don’t even complain about it, but I could imagine that larger websites probably suffer noticeably from robots like this.

The government, for every bailout from now on, should explain what the government did wrong to bring about this need to repay a debt. I think the results would be illuminating.

Think about it:

But here, I propose a very fair trade. I will trade the second amendment for the fourth amendment. If the Bush administration releases the fourth amendment that it is currently holding hostage, I’m happy to consider the Supreme Court decision on the second amendment final and decisive. You keep the second amendment, we keep the fourth.

That seems like the fairest possible trade. My guess is that conservatives won’t bite. They will continue the party line about how crucial it is that we follow the constitution when it comes to the second amendment and how important it is that we ignore the constitution when it comes to the fourth.

Gee, I’m not sure how effectively a citizen can resist unlawful search and seizure, if it really came to down to all these “police state” scenarios the Left is always painting, if the citizens had already been disarmed by the government…

Huffpo, of course.