English

Nice.

How do you bowl a 37?

I took Isa bowling when we were in Lake Tahoe. I strongly suggested that she not use the bumpers. She was amenable to the idea--she was five hundred miles from home, there were no peers around and the stakes were low. She bowled a 44, and we celebrated wildly. But I expect more from someone who wants to be President.

He's like a therapist to me sometimes as well

There's a lot to hate about Meghan McCain's take on her father's recent barbecue, even if you can get past the overly cozy relationship between candidate and press. There's the insistence on referring to the house as a "cabin." There's the melanoma ravaged presumptive Republican nominee openly daring the sun. But mostly there's the telling fact that the only examples she could come up with of friends she was excited to have at the party also happened to be employees.

The political winds

There was a New York State Senate election yesterday in a mostly-rural district along the eastern edge of Lake Ontario and the St. Lawrence River, an area where 300 inches of snowfall in a year is not unusual. Republicans hold an 8-5 registration advantage here and have held this seat for nearly 100 years. Polls taken over the weekend showed the race too close to call, but the Democratic candidate, Paul Aubertine, won easily. This all but guarantees the Democrats will wrest control of the State Senate this fall for the first time in generations.

If you want it done right...

Think Progress has a nice catch from an NPR interview, in which Attorney General Mukasey acts as if the current debate about waterboarding is academic:

OK, let’s assume that the president wants, despite a finding of illegality under law, to have waterboarding done, who is it precisely that he’s going to get to do it? He would virtually have to do it himself.

Is this meant to put us at ease? We're talking about a President who delighted in blowing up frogs as a kid. That's not something you grow out of, it's a gaping character defect. If the law ever actually required this President to roll up his sleeves and get in the game himself, I have little doubt he'd attack the task of torture with all the gusto he usually reserves for Texas brush.

tastes and preferences

Emptywheel is my favorite political blogger. Her name is Marcy Wheeler, she used to be a comp lit professor, and she specializes in close reading of text from trials, Congressional hearings, and redacted documents. I started reading her a few years ago, around the time Judy Miller emerged from jail, bony, girlish and incongruously triumphant.

Marcy gained a large following live blogging the Libby trial, and has since expanded into a dizzying array of subjects, including the scandals at the Justice Department. Yesterday, she was live blogging Attorney General Michael Mukasey's oversight hearing before the House Judiciary Committee. This exchange jumped out at me:

Schiff: You've said that if you were being waterboarded you would consider torture. Does it depend on who is being tortured?

MM: It would seem like torture to me. I would not use my own tastes and preferences.

I haven't seen this quote confirmed in the news, but Marcy's live blogging is usually pretty accurate, and the Attorney General is known for his love of Orwell. He even has a portrait of him in his office. People are starting to wonder why.

Meanwhile, in New Jersey

Hillary Clinton emerged victorious in the Garden State's primary today. Apparently her people are pointing to their strong showing among NJ's Hispanic voters (because who speaks more directly to the Latino community than an uptight white woman in an ill-fitting pantsuit). But I'm guessing I know the true reason: The junior Senator from New York spent a shitload more money here. I am basing this on the fact that I received 6 voicemails from the Clinton campaign in the past two days, and none from the Obama camp. (Pssst, Barack: most modern calling plans don't charge extra for long distance—you can pay a flat monthly fee for unlimited calls!)

The recorded call from Hillary, I expected. As did I anticipate the message from Bill. The one that caught me off-guard today? Jack Nicholson. Sorry there, pal, and I know you're a Jersey native, but if you really want me to take political advice from you, stop making late-career dreck like The Bucket List. (Obama fan George Clooney, on the other hand, has a very respectable and consistent Tomatometer record.)

And hold on, Senator Obama, I'm not letting you off that easy. If on Monday you send me an e-mail with this subject line:
From: Barack Obama
Subject: One last thing...

Jack --
Tomorrow is Primary Day in New Jersey, and I'm writing to you with an important reminder to vote and to make sure that your family, friends, and neighbors get out and vote too.

Then on Tuesday, you are NOT allowed to send me an e-mail that begins:
From: Barack Obama
To: Jack Silbert
Sent: Tuesday, February 5, 2008 7:00:06 AM
Subject: RE: One last thing...

Jack --
Today, you can join nearly half the nation in saying that we are tired of business-as-usual in Washington, we are hungry for change, and we are ready to believe again.

One last thing! That means the thing you say after it is the last thing you're going to say. At the very least, change the subject line to, "Oooh, wait, sorry, there was ONE other thing that I wanted to mention." And don't stick a RE: in there like we're writing back and forth to each other.

Oooh I'm mad. I guess what I'm saying is, don't try me, folks. Or I'm likely to once again cast my ballot for the only candidate who has always been there for me—the Trix Rabbit.

Voting in Topanga Canyon

My old pot dealer's wife checked me in. I said, "I'm John Levenstein, American." She started laughing, then couldn't stop laughing, and things bogged down for a while. The other woman running the polling place put a provisional ballot in the official ballot box by mistake, and then swore us all to secrecy.

State of the Union

The President is drunk and Dingell is dozing. Anyone else watching?

Perino wins what?

Undeniably sexy White House spokesperson Dana Perino won an odd little battle with the New York Times over a sub-heading to a story about the decision to destroy the CIA torture tapes. She got the paper to retract the claim that the "White House Role Was Wider Than It Said." The body of the piece remains in tact, and it outlines the involvement of four lawyers at a high level, not just one (sad, sweet Harriet Miers), as was previously leaked.

The retraction relies on a narrow (I would say contorted) definition of "White House," making Perino the only legitimate mouthpiece. It denies the obvious fact that the leaker who was selling the original story that only Miers was involved was also in the White House. The New York Times knows who the leaker was. They were leaked to. They could easily out the source, who clearly lied to them and has lost the right to confidentiality. But they chose to change the sub-heading rather than out a lying source. You'd think they would have learned their lesson from Scooter Libby.

And think about what the retraction makes clear. The Times was wrong to say the White House minimized its role in the scandal. The White House never claimed its involvement in the destruction of the torture tapes wasn't wide.

mortgage meltdown

There's been a lot of talk about helping out homeowners. Alan Greenspan was the latest to suggest some sort of bailout.

What is it about homeowners that elicits such sentiment? Where were these concerned parties when the bankruptcy bill was pushed through? Is credit card debt inherently less noble than mortgage debt?

Or if you like your victims even more blameless, consider the plight of recent college graduates. Many are entering the workplace with student loans in excess of $100,000. It limits their career choices and blocks public service and entrepreneurial innovation. Are we really willing to sacrifice these kids so people with terrible taste can stay in houses they couldn't afford in the first place?

common courtesy

Senator Arlen Specter doesn't like being blown off. From a letter to Dick Cheney, accusing him of going behind Specter's back to other Republican members of the Judiciary Committee:

"I was surprised, to say the least, that you sought to influence, really determine, the action of the Committee without calling me first, or at least calling me at some point. This was especially perplexing since we both attended the Republican Senators caucus lunch yesterday and I walked directly in front of you on at least two occasions enroute from the buffet to my table."

He is keen to social dynamics, sensitive to slights, especially when they involve willfully not discussing Constitutional issues in casual settings. I am reminded of the flap with Ted Kennedy during the Alito confirmation. Kennedy threatened to hold up the hearings if a subpoena wasn't issued. Specter was characteristically quizzical:

"I am just a little puzzled at the issue being raised in this manner," Mr. Specter said. "Senator Kennedy and I frequent the gym at the same time," he continued, "He never mentioned it to me."

So if you see Arlen Specter outside of regular office hours--plate piled high with roast beef, or shirt dripping with sweat from a steps class--stop and say hello. He's always open for business.

"of course" and "obviously"

They are the most overused words by conservatives:

"Of course we want to get out of Iraq."

"Obviously no one cares more about the suffering in New Orleans than I do."

"Obviously no one wants war."

"Of course we want to find out how the information was leaked."

Once you've tuned in to those words, you can't listen to a Dick Cheney interview or Rush Limbaugh monologue without hearing them every other sentence. And of course it doesn't tend to be when things are actually obvious.

The most overused word by progressives? Kabuki. They're tired of the kabuki dance between Bush and Congress! They're sick of it!

Mike Huckabee

He suggested that Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers, and there's been a big flap. Amid all the outcry, one thing I'm still not quite clear on: do Mormons believe Jesus and Satan are brothers?

The President opens up about whiskey

"Alcohol can compete with your affections. It sure did in my case," Bush said, "affections with your family, or affections for exercise."

This quote might be more effective if he hadn't dragged exercise into it, because, for an exercise addict like Bush, affection for exercise can get in the way of affection for family. And you're right back where you started.

Et Tu, Murtha?

So by now I'm sure you're all aware that we're winning the war in Iraq. No, really, it's as good as won actually. The surge is working. Troop fatalities dropped to under 40 in October as well as November, the lowest monthly totals since March of '06.* And those totals each represent nearly a 75% drop in monthly US combat deaths since the peak when 126 were killed in May of this year. I don't know about you, but I'm ready to break out the Schlitz and vote for Mike Huckabee!

Now, what's scary about the above sentiments, is that the staunchest Democratic opponent of this debacle of a war actually did say on Thursday that "the surge is working."** John Murtha, Democratic congressman from Pennsylvania and a former US Marine, has just done what you were hoping and praying he wouldn't... he embraced his inner Democrat and turned tail. This is the same man who has blasted Bush and Cheney repeatedly and with great conviction to the point of choking back tears on several occasions as he demanded our troops be redeployed out of Iraq. He was one of the few who genuinely seemed to care about the human tragedy behind the Bush/Cheney/Rumsfeld war machine. But like all the other sheep in both parties and the press, Murtha joined in turning this war into a stock ticker, and right now the Dow Jones Military Casualty Index is hitting a record high by hitting a record low... in deaths.

That's what this war has come to. So pathetic was this abysmal "preemptive" battle from its inception, so low has the bar now been set by the incompetent rogue in the Oval Office, and so cynical and apathetic are our politicians and media at this point, that the only thing left for them to chew on are numbers. So the sheep chew on them like cud. And as long as those numbers keep dropping like mortgage rates in '05, we're in for a good little run! Of course, just like the mortgage rates were in no way reflective of reality, these declining death rates are also no measure of the true impact this war has had and continues to have. These are lives, each of these numbers, and this war is a human tragedy, not a math game. I thought of all people, John Murtha understood that. Guess not.

*These figures are meticulously recorded for posterity at the following site: http://icasualties.org/oif/)

**http://ap.google.com/article/ALeqM5ibDeMEMDEYv4V-eqfWH0lbqZe6RwD8T8CL702

speaking of democrat-on-democrat violence

No one's worse for the party than this guy. Rahm Emanuel doesn't want us to talk about Iraq, impeachment, the Constitution, anything that separates us from the Republicans. The only way in his mind to beat them is to act as indistinguishable as possible and maybe trick people into voting for us. He won't be satisfied until every Democrat looks like Heath Shuler.