What Belle said: Please, please contact your Representatives about this bill. I’m including the email that I sent to my Rep under the fold. Feel free to use any or all of it.
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Ted
Imaginary correspondent R. writes to say,
You seem to be going through your regularly scheduled bimonthly funk, in which you are frustrated with blogging. Why not work your way through it by writing a list recommending some of your favorite things, rather than waste everyone’s time with a “whither blogging” post? It’s quite charming when McSweeney’s does it.
Out of the mouths of imaginary constructs, as they say. As it happens, I have some recommendations…
Johnny Ramone died in his sleep last night. Ben Weasel, one of my favorite punk rockers, has a tribute to the late, great pioneer.
Johnny Ramone was never recognized as a revolutionary guitarist. Chuck Berry gave us rock and roll guitar playing. Hendrix showed us what the instrument was capable of in the hands of somebody with the ambition, vision and tenacity to bend it to his will. But what Johnny Ramone contributed to rock and roll guitar playing was just as important – maybe even more important – because he took the instrument away from the rock gods and handed it back to the rest of us. Johnny turned the guitar back into a brutal, primal, stunningly effective tool. He proved that you didn’t need to be a virtuoso to be a great guitarist. He reminded the world that rock and roll was supposed to be fun.
I recently went to see a speech and Q&A session by Marty Peterson, deputy executive director of the CIA. Some notes:
Those of us who enjoy a good InstaFactCheck will delight in Scott Lemieux, on Reynolds’ attempt to eliminate the gap between Kerry and Bush on gay unions. I wish that Lemieux had an instructional videotape or something.
One of the tragedies of living in Houston is the knowledge that Tom DeLay has his seat here. My friend Charles Kuffner, proving again that he’s one of the few bloggers who matter, has an interview with Richard Morrison, the Democrat who is trying to defeat Tom DeLay in his suburban Houston district. He’s also written a bit of a primer about the race. Apparently the most reliable poll shows DeLay at 49% and Morrison at 39%.
Interested Americans have the option of donating to Morrison here.
Under Mr. Putin’s proposals, which he said required only legislative approval and not constitutional amendments, the governors or leaders of the country’s 89 regions would no longer be elected by popular vote but rather by local legislatures – and only after the president’s nomination. Seats in the lower house of the federal Parliament, or Duma, would be elected entirely on national party slates, eliminating district races across the country that now decide half of Parliament’s composition. In elections last December, those races accounted for all of the independents and liberals now serving in the Duma.
The Moderate Voice has a long roundup of comments and analysis about Putin’s power grab in the wake of the Chechen terrorist attack on the school in Southern Russia. (Link via Obsidian Wings). I find myself agreeing with Ogged that this may be turn out to be the most serious story of the year.
There are any number of reasons why this story is horrible news. I find it historically unlikely that central, unchecked power will improve the lives of the people of Russia. I’m concerned about the precedent, in which a major power declares that security and democracy are incompatable. He’s going to get away with it, and he won’t be the last. I’m concerned about the muscular claims that Putin is making about the right of Russian forces to fight terror (defined solely by Putin) wherever he wants. Cold War II, anyone?
More than anything, I’m concerned about Russian nukes. I’m flabbergasted at the fact that we haven’t done more to take Russian weapons out of commission, (here, too) but at least we’ve had the benefit of Russian cooperation so far in our efforts. I’m very concerned that Putin is about to say to the West, “Thanks, but we’ll handle it from here.” Russia still has the materials to make tens of thousands of nuclear weapons. What in the world could we do?
I bow before the shrillitudinousness of Gary Farber, who has been blogging like a fiend. This campaign mudmeter is especially interesting. (I know it’s true because it’s on the internet.)
Ross Silverman, formerly known as the Bloviator, has moved his excellent medical policy blog to a new site, the Public Health Press. And he has managed to choke me up with only seventeen syllables.
On the subject of public health, and while I have Ross’s attention, there was some brief discussion here the other day about the scope of the role of the federal government (specifically, the National Institutes of Health) in pharmaceutical research.
I’ve done enough work with pharmaceuticals to know how much I don’t know. It’s a complicated subject, and difficult to summarize. But Derek Lowe makes a genuine contribution here. He’s a research scientist at a pharmaceutical company, and he shares his perspective on what the NIH does and doesn’t do.
Is there anything more boring than my periodic expressions of disgust with blogging? I’ll keep it short. (This right-leaning comedy site did a funnier job than I would, anyway.)
A pox on your house, Glenn Reynolds. You have done more than anyone to build the blogging community, and we’re in debt to you for that. But you’ve been poisoning the well for years now.
Matthew Yglesias was making a perfectly comprehensible point. You took one sentence, a sentence that was immediately negated by the next sentence, and distorted it to fit into a mirthless satire of left-wing thought. Does the man who wrote this:
Providing financial aid to terrorists who target European civilians would be uncivilized — but, then, the Europeans are supposed to be the civilized ones, no?
have
A pox on you, Andrew Sullivan. Andrew Sullivan, dumpster-diving for offensive comments on Lucianne.com isn’t any more illuminating than dumpster-diving for offensive comments on Democratic Underground.
A pox on you. Markos, with your organization, your community-building, and your Democratic fund-raising, you are one of the only bloggers who matter. Thank you for that. But this kind of post makes us look like hysterical jokers.
I’ve got to give today’s MVP in debunking to Fred Kaplan at Slate.
Here, one more time, is the truth of the matter: Kerry did not vote to kill these weapons, in part because none of these weapons ever came up for a vote, either on the Senate floor or in any of Kerry’s committees.
This myth took hold last February in a press release put out by the RNC. Those who bothered to look up the fine-print footnotes discovered that they referred to votes on two defense appropriations bills, one in 1990, the other in 1995. Kerry voted against both bills, as did 15 other senators, including five Republicans. The RNC took those bills, cherry-picked some of the weapons systems contained therein, and inferred that Kerry voted against those weapons. By the same logic, they could have claimed that Kerry voted to disband the entire U.S. armed forces; but that would have raised suspicions and thus compelled more reporters to read the document more closely.
What makes this dishonesty not merely a lie, but a damned lie, is that back when Kerry cast these votes, Dick Cheney—who was the secretary of defense for George W. Bush’s father—was truly slashing the military budget…
I’m not accusing Cheney of being a girly man on defense. As he notes, the Cold War had just ended; deficits were spiraling; the nation could afford to cut back. But some pro-Kerry equivalent of Arnold Schwarzenegger or Zell Miller could make that charge with as much validity as they—and Cheney—make it against Kerry.
The whole thing is great.
P.S. In the comments to a thoughtful Obsidian Wings post, a few people have said that delegates were chanting “Hang ’em” when Kerry or Edwards (or maybe just Edwards) were mentioned. Can anyone confirm or deny? Is there a reasonable story behind this?
I just wanted to be part of the Allelujah chorus on this:
Atrios reports gleefully that a Republican Congressman, asked point-blank about his sexual orientation, refused to answer.
Good for him! (The congressman, I mean.) The right answer to that question, from anyone except a potential sexual partner, is “None of your f—ing business.”
I really, really disapprove of gay-baiting, even if the gays being baited hold disgusting political positions. And I thought that attitude was part of the definition of liberalism.
When did that change? Did I miss the memo?
The non-political Vietnam Veterans of America have condemned the Purple Hearts band-aids worn as jokes by some Republican delegates.
Vietnam Veterans of America has received reports of delegates at the Republican National Convention disseminating and wearing “Purple Heart” band-aids in mockery of one of nation’s most distinctive honors, the Purple Heart medal…
The spirit of the award recognizes the personal sacrifice of our troops without regard to the severity or nature of the wound. It is the wounding itself that merits the honor. To demean the decoration and the sacrifice it symbolizes demeans all veterans and the patriots who honor them.
With our nation’s sons and daughters at war to protect global freedom, demeaning military service in this way is especially hurtful. Vietnam Veterans of America urges all Americans to decry this type of outrageous, disrespectful, and infantile behavior.
(Bitter rant with links to Bush-supporters who thought this was funny deleted)
Good.
Via Oliver Willis
Fred Clark has two excellent posts (here and here) about the Republican vision of the “ownership society.” I can’t help but quote this:
Sen. Majority Leader Bill Frist, R-Tenn., began his speech Tuesday at the Republican National Convention by talking about his father. “My dad, a family doctor in Tennessee for 50 years,” he said.
That would be Thomas Frist Sr., the founder of Columbia/HCA — a giant chain of more than 500 for-profit hospitals, outpatient centers and home health care agencies. HCA is worth about $20 billion.
So your basic Tennessee country doctor then.
Or this:
… The Republicans’ agenda … potentially involves a historic restructuring of the American system of government. Roughly two-thirds of taxable income is paid to workers in the form of wages and benefits. The other third goes to reward capital, or accumulated savings, in the form of corporate profits, dividends and interest payments. If Bush’s economic agenda was fully enacted, the vast bulk of these payments wouldn’t be taxed at all, and labor would end up shouldering practically the entire burden of financing the federal government.
In a new book, “Neoconomy: George Bush’s Revolutionary Gamble with America’s Future,” Daniel Altman, a former economics reporter for the Times and The Economist, describes what such a system might look like. “The fortunate and growing minority who managed to receive all their income from stocks, bonds and other securities would pay nothing — not a dime — for America’s cancer research, its international diplomacy, its military deterrent, the maintenance of the interstate highway system, the space program or almost anything else the federal government did. … Broadly speaking, that fortunate minority would be free-riders.”
That is President Bush’s goal and agenda for the next four years. Sound good to you?
“The danger to political dissent is acute where the Government attempts to act under so vague a concept as the power to protect ‘domestic security.’ Given the difficulty of defining the domestic security interest, the danger of abuse in acting to protect that interest becomes apparent.”
That’s a quote from a Supreme Court ruling in 1972. It’s also apparently a state secret, as the Justice Department tried to black it out on a court document.
It’s part of a complaint brought by the ACLU (.pdf file). One aspect of the Patriot Act is a gag provision that prohibits anyone who receives a National Security Letter (a request for information) from “disclos[ing] to any person that the [FBI] has sought or obtained access to information or records.” The ACLU is contesting this, and their legal documents are subject to redacting by the Justice Department. This quote from the Supreme Court was one of many portions redacted.
If you’ve ever thought about becoming a member of the ACLU, this might be a good time.