Talleyrand

From a comment thread on Making Light:

Yesterday I ran across an apposite quote from Talleyrand:

It is easy to quarrel; I can do it as well as the next man, but why should I? One should not put others at ease by arguing with them, or permit oneself to be quarreled with at will.

For some reason this sums up the way Obama has run his campaign.

2008 Election

GM driven to the brink

The NYTimes manages to write an entire article about GM's reliance on suv's for fun and profits while blithely ignoring the companies own culpability in its own demise. I particularly love the line about:

"Analysts see little point now in second-guessing G.M.’s huge commitment to the S.U.V. market when gas was cheap and Americans bought the vehicles in droves."

Oh, no, god forbid we should second-guess GM! I mean, who could have anticipated that gas prices would ever go up? That environmentally conscious consumers would ever switch to smaller cars in droves? That suburban lifestyles would prove unsustainable? California tried desparately to mandate ZEVs. The car companies fought tooth and nail against them. Congress failed to raise CAFE standards for decades because Detroit preaching economic doom if they tried, and spouted the free market religion like a preacher in a revival tent. This is just another example of the accountability free society we live in. No leadership is ever responsible for their failures of foresight - who could have anticipated, after all?

NYTimes.com: Keeping Their Opinions to Themselves

Media Bias is hard, says the ombudsmen. However, after extensively researching various sources of possible bias and practically flagellating himself for not being sufficiently objective, he fails to conceive of the possibility that he's being played - that the accusations of bias are a deliberate strategy used by people who want to criticize the media when they're unable or unwilling to make their case on the merits.

Liquidity infusion

Give me my money back

Good news

Paul Krugman wins the Nobel Prize in Economics. For, we immediately assume, his distinguished work in the field of Being Right.

Bailout

The bailout failed - not enough democrats trust either their leadership or the bush admin enough to vote for this turkey. The house republicans have their crazy on. What would it take to get a democratic plan passed? Everybodies obsessing over technical details or pushing aggressively progressive ideas that aren't getting much traction - but at least 1/2 the problem is that nobody trusts the Bushies anymore, and we can't afford (according to the people pressing for this bailout) to wait until the next election and the months afterwards for transition, etc. So - here's a thougt - why not make the deal contingent on Paulson being replaced by a democrat? There's no reason bush can't appoint one if Paulson resigns, and once the senate approves him/her (Laura D'Andrea Tyson anyone?), it could be done in a matter of hours. Then the house dem's are happy to vote for it, the house republicans can get bent for all we care, and the senate repubs face the unhappy prospect of filibustering their own presidents nominee.

The Big Con

The press is finally showing signs of turning on McCain, and that the Palin pick is really the last straw. I'm not sure if anyone has explicated this turn fully, but here's my theory: The modern GOP is basically a gigantic con game. The press has played along with their nonsense for years and I think a big part of the reason is that they seem themselves as being the 'smarts'. In any good con there are the 'smarts' and the 'marks', the people who are in on the scam, and the targets, the suckers, the marks. The key to a good con is to make the marks think that they're the smarts and the press is exhibit A - they think they're in on the game. The problem with the Palin pick is that McCain is treating them like marks, and they've noticed. Nobody likes being treated like a chump and their reaction is natural. My only question is, what took them so long?

Learned Helplessness

Ok, late to the party as usual - but for what its worth here's my take on the whole 'tire pressure' imbroglio. The reason they do this is to ridicule the whole concept that individual action could make a difference. The right is in the business of centralized, top down, authoritarian solutions - heavy military equipment, nuclear power, heroic posturing by the president. Not collective action, and and involved and motivated electorate. Wait, maybe I'm not late- the new VP is ridiculing Obama for being a community organizer...

Dowd's continuing descent into self-parody

she did not just call him uppity? On the op-ed page of the NYT? She did.

more fine analysis

from 'google power reader' Ruth Marcus

google power reader

Is that really the best they could do for a lineup? Two right wing nut jobs, a collection of right leaning purveyors of conventional wisdom from the mainstream media, and Arianna Huffington? What about Josh Marshall, Markos Moulitsas, Digby, Matthew Yglesias, Duncan Black, or Kevin Drum?

Official Google Reader Blog: Read what they read

Official Google Reader Blog: Read what they read: "discussion groups" Sigh. Is this really the best they can do? Warmed over conventional wisdom from the likes of Mark Halperin and Ruth Marcus, 'balanced' by the right wing ravings of Chuck DeFeo and Patrick Ruffini.

dazed and confused

more like this:

Obama Strategery

There's a lot of back & forth about the day to day poll numbers and various tempests in microscopic teapots that make for plenty of blog-fodder among people following the presidential campaign closely. Most of this is just inside-baseball for whatever the political equivalent of 'technorati' is, and I don't have strong opinions about the details. Ok, i do, but not strong enough to blog everyday about. I mean McCain's dogwhistle politics probably deserve some sort of push-back. I mean, how many different ways will they find to spell 'uppity'? This week its 'presumptuous'. Whatever. In general its hard to criticize Obama's campaign on tactical grounds - he's raising a ton of money and building a huge ground organization, and he's doing it in more than just the 'swing states' that democrats are always focusing on. The problem I have is that they haven't developed a narrative for their criticism of McCain. While there's plenty of substantive grounds to criticize McCain, the key to a good message machine is to have a theme and keep pushing it so that everything you're doing becomes reinforcing. The republicans seem to understand this instinctively now. They pick a theme and they keep hammering it regardless of how accurate or relevant it is to the target, or the topic at hand. Flip-flopper, elitist, uppity, whatever it is they're pushing it and it doesn't matter what the topic is. I haven't seen such a theme emerge yet from the Obama side, but I have an idea: McCain is 'confused'. I think this is a theme that will carry a lot of resonance with voters - its a way of making McCain look old and doddering without making it explicit, and it allows Obama-ites to point out inaccuracies without calling McCain a liar. Is Obama a 'political celebrity' ? No, John McCain is just confused - who's hosted SNL? Who's made for guest appearances on tv shows? Who's been a political headliner since the '80s?

Serenity vs. Oklahoma!

Making Light strikes again.

Berube channels world

world gets it right

SF network admin jailed

For those who were wondering what happened, an interesting explanation at infoworld.  Sounds plausible, and it doesn't make the city look good, which given that they already looked incompetent at best, is saying something.

Phil Nugent - Easy Answers:

"In the last year or so, I've noticed more and more people pointing out that it's "easy" to sneer at George W. Bush and his enablers, that it's "easy" to consider them dumb, "easy" to make fun of them. This is true. Making fun of Bush and scorning his cheering section is as easy as pulling your hand away from an open flame, as easy as reaching for a glass of water when you're thirsty, as easy as rolling your eyes at a John Stossel column. The first thing that may be worth pointing out about this is that I don't remember these same observers falling over themselves, when Bush and his war were breaking all box office records, to praise critics and doubters for taking what, at the time, was perhaps not the easy route. The second thing is that it may not always be the wisest course to avoid doing the easy thing just to demonstrate that you are capable of coming up with a more complicated response to what's in front of your face than the one that your frontal lobe is screaming at you to take. Yes, it may be possible to come up with an entertaining and elaborate theory explaining why George W. Bush is a genius and everyone who has had a kind word for him and his policy should not shut the fuck up, sign over their power of attorney to their dog, and never darken a voting booth again."

starting up

its blogger. here i am ... what do i have to say? Let's start here: http://krugman.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/07/phase-two/ I love when people draw statistical conclusions from such small samples. Presidential elections seem to invite this sort of analysis - they happen every four years, or to look at it another way, there have been only 10 in the last 40 years. Having said that, the 2000 campaign really stands out as a crappy job by the incumbent party. The only ones below the line with anywhere near that poor a performance are 1968 and 1976. Given that Viet Nam and Watergate were the two biggest political disasters of 20th century america, what does that say about Al's campaign? Not much. But, I think Kerry ran a worse campaign. Given a big fat target, he whiffed. Everyone blames the swift boating, but I think that was overrated. If he had made Bush the issue, it wouldn't have mattered at all.