Dangerously Unprepared

Oh, where does one even start...

So VP nominee Sarah Palin, after spending weeks under the radar due to what the mediacrats have been suggesting is an appalling lack of knowledge about the world, politics, or what exactly a vice president does all day, has finally emerged into the soft glow of a media night-light in the form of a softball interview with Charlie Gibson.

As has earlier been pointed out by AARON, this interview was so softball, so non-threatening, some have suggested it shouldn't even have been accepted by Gibson on the offered terms. So under her own hand-picked conditions, how badly could the interview possibly go?

Weeeell, let's begin with the part where Palin soothed the tensions between the US, its European allies, and Russia...oh wait no, that isn't at all what happens when you threaten war against the Russians, is it? In fairness to her, America's headline writers appear to have rather lost their heads- she was just applying her probably recently acquired knowledge about the structure and purpose of NATO, but international diplomacy is a subtle game, and her inexperience led her into the kind of mistake that probably moved her a few places up some Russian security hit list, and has diplomats across Europe shaking their heads and stocking up on brown paper breathing aids. Everyone knows force is an option, you don't actually say it, especially in reference to someone with a large, poorly maintained nuclear arsenal. Seriously governor- a land war in Asia?? I mean, that never goes badly for anyone...

Perhaps more unsettling, Gibson's subsequent softball question regarding the Bush Doctrine met with a complete stall, because Palin obviously didn't know what he was talking about.

After all this coaching, she didn't know what he was talking about.

John McCain may have had good political instincts on this one, but seriously - you want to put this woman, who could clearly be outmaneuvered in terms of running the government by a freshman polysci major in their second semester, in the number two slot for the US government?

In ancient Athens, they chose their leaders by lottery for a time. Took like half an hour, cost almost nothing, and you still had a chance to be led by an almost complete neophyte unqualified in most respects to run your state. Probably save us a lot of money.

No-Bid No Go

The New York Times reports that the no-bid Iraqi oil contracts for Western oil companies have been withdrawn. It always struck me as unbelievably absurd that this kind of shameless pandering to Western oil interests ever got as far as it did. It certainly wasn’t in the best interests of the Iraqi government to hand out their most valuable resource without competitive bidding.

Of course, under the Bush Administration, no-bid contracts seem to be the order of the day. I can’t think of a legitimate reason for a government to hand out a no-bid contract. That should be a red flag for corruption. I hope that the next congress will take some steps to stop the kind of abuses that the Bush Administration has practiced in this area – I’m look at you, Haliburton. Is there any reason why a government contract should be granted without a bidding process? Remind me again who was supposed to be the party of fiscal sanity?

Living Abroad is Great and All ...

But sometimes it can be kind of a pain. For example, when you read a review of a book about Roald Dahl’s life as a British spy in Washington, DC during World War II. It sounds amazing – I wish I could get my hands on it. Alas, we’re not very well stocked for English language bookstores here. At any rate, if you’ve never read Roald Dahl’s autobiography of his time in East Africa with the Shell Oil Company and as an RAF fighter pilot in North Africa and Greece, Going Solo, you really owe it to yourself to check it out. He did more than write children's books and amazingly twisted short stories (though that would certainly be enough)!

A Moment of Inner Peace...

Tashi Dele!

As Gail "The Voice of Reason" Collins points out in this op-ed, the tenor of the campaign for those of us who place fossils and people in different rock strata has become rather strained of late.

The NYT, with no apparent sense of irony, also includes this piece on spa getaways, and has prompted me to query our loyal readers, most of whom I assume receive regular massages at their respective country clubs, on several points:

1. Have you ever had one of those massages where someone walks on your back? Is it nice, or the sort of thing more associated with Mistakes I've Made Channeling Hemingway in Pamplona?

2. What's up with those little rocks they put on your spine?

3. All the problems with massage addressed in that one Seinfeld episode about massages- how do you avoid that stuff?

4. If Obama really is still holding a commanding lead in electoral votes, then what the heck have we been shouting about since Palinzilla strode into the American consciousness in Minnesota?

Anyone not notably relaxed by these thoughts can also go here, BuddhaNet, and listen to some soothing chanted sutras.

Have a most enlightened morning, good readers!

Obama's Response

I will second everything Dylan Matthews says here, so you should go read that. He makes a lot of good points and it’s worth your time. Even more worth your time is this clip of Obama speaking yesterday about the “lipstick on a pig” faux controversy. Go check it out. I’ll wait.

I think it makes the contrast between Obama and McCain quite stark, not to mention the shame that every member of the media should feel for pushing this nonsense along. We’re all poorer for it.

More Vote Suppression Shame

The New York Times has an editorial discussing the kind of vote suppression nonsense that PW was talking about last night. It seems that down in Mississippi, that bastion of fairness and equitable voting practices, the Republican governor and the Republican secretary of state have cooked up a little scheme to try and game an election. The Democrat running to fill Trent Lott’s vacant senate seat has been doing very well this year – he’s close with current Sen. Roger Wicker. So, do they decided that, instead of seeing who will come out on top on election day, they were going to have a little fun with the ballot. Federal law says that federal elections have to go at the top of the ballot. Well, this particular senate race is going to be printed at the bottom of the ballot, after the local elections, after the ballot initiatives, after the dog catcher. The other senate race in Mississippi, where the Republican is favored, is where it out to be.

The fact that this can go on without people marching on the statehouse is absolutely shameful. I just don’t even know what we can say about this. The Republican Party has made it a solid tenant of their election practices to try and prevent people who out to be able to vote from voting. How these people are able to look themselves in the mirror in the morning is beyond me. They should be ashamed of themselves. It is a truly shameful situation.

BizzaroWorld

This video's making the rounds quite a bit, but I thought it was too funny not to post. It's a sad statement, and I mean this -- when Matt Damon is more a voice of reason in our political discourse than the vast majority of our MSM. Money quote: "I need to know if she really thinks that dinosaurs were here four thousand years ago. That's an important...I wanna know that, I really do. Beause she's going to have the nuclear codes."

We have descended into madness. That quote from Damon (which made me laugh out loud), should be a punchline. But, it's not. Maybe I shouldn't have laughed after all, because it's a serious topic. Perhaps an interviewer should ask her that. Oh, wait. She's not taking any of those.

Just Shamefull

According to the Michigan Messenger, the Republican Party of Michigan is already gearing up an organized campaign to challenge the voting rights of minorities in Michigan (their colleagues in Ohio seem to be contemplating something similar) who have had their houses foreclosed on, on the grounds that they are no longer residents of their counties. As the article points out, in addition to being "mean spirited," just because a notice of foreclosure has been sent to a house doesn't mean that its occupants no longer live there.

The idea that a central component of Republican election strategy is to attempt to deny the vote to people based on the suspicions of their paid legal representatives, who make no effort to conceal that they are essentially engaging in racial profiling as a basis for that suspicion, is appalling. Who are these people, and where have they been since the end of Jim Crow??? Why doesn't Michigan have a more stringent requirement to challenge voter eligibility? Why aren't the people of Michigan deluging Governor Jennifer Granholm's office with complaints? In my vision of America, this is the sort of thing that should have angry people in the streets, and politicians preparing to pack up their desks. Apparently, this is part of the Republican vision of good, clean electioneering, worthy of emulation in other districts, just one of the many concepts that play a part in the colorful pagent of American politics. I realize that racism is fairly prominent in the history of American political discourse, but Michigan has no tradition of anything on this scale that I have ever heard of, and in any case I really want to believe that we've moved past this and would now find it intolerable anywhere. If the people of Michigan let them do this, with aforethought, they tarnish the American dream.

Here is a another concept with some prominence in historical American political discourse the RNC might want to include in McPalin's stump speech for the remainder of the campaign:

Dictionary.com Unabridged (v 1.1) - Cite This Source - Share This tyr·an·ny Audio Help /ˈtɪrəni/ Pronunciation Key - Show Spelled Pronunciation[tir-uh-nee] Pronunciation Key - Show IPA Pronunciation –noun, plural -nies.

1.	arbitrary or unrestrained exercise of power; despotic abuse of authority.

2.	the government or rule of a tyrant or absolute ruler.

3.	a state ruled by a tyrant or absolute ruler.

4.	oppressive or unjustly severe government on the part of any ruler.

5.	undue severity or harshness.

6.	a tyrannical act or proceeding.

Perhaps I'm Just Seeing the Darkness Before the Dawn ...

Marc Ambinder is calling McCain’s campaign “Keyser Soze Rules.” He says, “Go further than your opponent is willing to go. So long as you commit to this strategy 100%, it can work.”

I’d just like to echo Matt Yglesias’s comments from the other day. Marc Ambinder is one of a handful of people who can point out that what McCain is saying is not true. And yet he continues to report it like it’s some sort of horserace, with nothing at stake. Like he’s some sort of distant observer, and not a member of the institution that is supposed to inform Americans. This election has made the run up to the Iraq War look like Watergate.

After talking to my mother tonight, who said that Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood were both talking about how Obama called Sarah Palin a pig, I’m no longer sure exactly what to think. I guess my steady media diet of reading newspapers, blogs and the candidates' policy positions is no longer adequate to actually understand the moronic dynamic that actually exists in the United States. Honest to god, if the media doesn’t start to call out the McCain campaign on this stuff soon, is there any hope for it? I’m not a huge fan of corporate news broadcasting to begin with, but if they allow McCain to walk through one of the sleaziest, most fact-free campaigns ever – has there ever been a campaign who has made so much hay out of so little? – I don’t know what to think.

You, if you’re reading this, and I, we know what McCain is up to. I’ve spent my twenties on a steady downslide in my opinion of the intelligence of the American public. We’ll soon see if the media can do their job, or if my darkest opinions have turned out to be justified.

Strange Fixations

What can you even say to this? Thomas Friedman in the New York Times today:

This race has a long way to go. It is still Obama’s election to lose. But Obama got where he is today by defining himself as the agent of change and by defining change as the issue in this election. McCain, with Palin’s help, has once again not only made Obama’s experience an issue, but has now moved in on Obama’s strength and tried to define the G.O.P. ticket as the party of “change.”

How, you ask, can two people running with the exact same policies as the party that has been in power for eight years, claim to be the agents of “change?” That’s politics. There’s no shame. But what this has done is to make the word “change” as a campaign slogan meaningless. Obama will need to find another way to connect his ideas — clearly, crisply and passionately.

Has our political culture truly become so debased that candidates are lambasted for sticking to facts, policy proposals and the idea of competent governance? Do Americans truly only care about what they feel “in their gut”? If John McCain is wrong on virtually every issue, if he is running a substance free campaign based upon the constant repetition of lies and well known authors writing columns for the nation’s largest newspaper decide to write about how Barack Obama isn’t “connecting” with people, what, exactly, is Barack Obama supposed to do about that? What are any of us supposed to do?

Perhaps Thomas Friedman should concentrate some more on discussing why people should vote for Obama, instead of bemoaning the fact that people still like the media golden boy, the gamblin’ flyboy John McCain. Obama has to make his case through the media. I’m getting heartily sick of listening to media figures bemoan the fact that Obama isn’t making his case. Well, Obama can only make his case through the media – and if they keep on concentrating on how much more people like Sarah Palin than Barack Obama, it’s going to be awful difficult for him to do that. Perhaps Thomas Friedman should spend some more time discussing why he prefers, especially, Obama’s energy policy. Perhaps instead of writing about why he thinks the candidate he prefers is likely to lose, he should write about why he thinks that candidate should win.

Big Science

The CERN Large Hadron Collider went live this morning outside Geneva, Switzerland. If you follow science, this is pretty exciting news. This particle accelerator hopefully has the ability to prove – or disprove – some of the many theories surrounding the world of physics right now. In particular, they’re hoping to discover a particle called a Higgs boson, a particle that’s predicted by a lot of theories but so far has remained undetected. Theoretically, the Higgs boson is the particle that makes up and gives other particles mass. It would be a big discovery.

The sad part of all this is that the United States was set to build an even larger, more powerful particle accelerator in Texas called the Superconducting Supercollider. Congress killed it because of its budget in 1993. It would have been a truly impressive machine. With the Iraq War costing $12 billion dollars a month, it’s hard not to be a bit wistful about the uses that money could be going towards. I’ve always been a huge fan of “big science” projects like particle accelerators and space probes. I can understand people who think there are better uses for that money, and they may be right: education, transit infrastructure, poverty, medical research. All that stuff is important.

But it’s just not as cool as slamming particles together at seven trillion electron volts.

Transit in Small Towns

Matt Yglesias is pounding the drum for transit again, and once again I think he’s making a lot of sense. I thought I’d throw in a few of my thoughts on transit issues.

I currently live in a country where the level of automobile ownership is much lower than the United States. For the most part, people get around by public transport. Where I live, in a town of about 35,000, there is a bus system with a limited schedule. Most people take taxis where they need to go if it’s further than walking distance. There are four or five different companies, and there are many cab stands throughout the city. There’s an informally agreed upon rate of about a dollar anywhere in the city – further, to one of the many small villages in the area, and it goes to about thirty cents a kilometer. For me, this works great. I walk most places, but if I need to get someplace in a hurry, I can always take a cab. I would prefer if there was a regular bus service to more parts of town (and if you had been on some of the cab rides I have been, you would to). It’s not perfect, but it works. Larger towns have more options: trams, trollys, heavily frequented bus lines.

Between cities, there are two options: trains and buses. I prefer trains, but they have some major downsides. They’re slower than buses, and they don’t go to as many places. I live in a majority ethnic minority area, and it has traditionally not seen the kind of infrastructure improvements that the rest of the country has enjoyed. The end result is that there are a lot of poorly paved roads and very few rail lines. There is a rail line coming to my town (one of the biggest in the region), though, so I’m able to take advantage of it. The trains are cheaper than the buses – they’re less affected by the price shocks caused by oil price fluctuations. I’ve lived in this area for about a year and a half now, and I’ve seen the price of a ticket to the capital go up by half. Trains also run at night, which most buses do not do. Buses are quicker, but they’re also more annoying – the seats are small, they’re unbelievably hot, and the drivers seem to be having some sort of “most reckless” contest. Their biggest advantage is that they go pretty much anywhere. Every day, people use these buses to travel between cities for jobs that, without a car, they could not ordinarily hold.

This is a pretty sharp contrast with the United States. Before I left for the Peace Corps, I worked as a cab driver for a short while. I drove in my hometown, a small industrial city in Ohio. The cabs were used almost exclusively by low income senior citizens, the mentally handicapped being taken from and to adult daycare facilities and people who had lost their driver’s licenses, mostly due to drunk driving charges. You could purchase tokens for two dollars a piece to take you anywhere in the city, but you had to call and arrange for drop off and pick up beforehand. If you didn’t have a token, a fare inside the city was six dollars. I assume in the almost two years since I’ve driven a cab that those prices have gone up. I once took a woman to the airport in Columbus, Ohio, a forty-five minute drive from town – it cost her sixty five dollars. I can take a forty-five minute bus ride here for about four. Inside the city, the cabs were too inconvenient and too expensive for people to take in lieu of their regular car – it’s just much easier to take a car when you have to call a dispatcher and wait half an hour for a cab (containing one or two other passengers).

The United States desperately needs to reinvest in major transit infrastructure. Most of what Matt Yglesias is talking about deals with urban transit. That is certainly an area that needs work, but in small town and rural areas of the US, people who lose their driving privileges or simply can’t afford a car are almost wholly unable to find work outside of their immediate areas. A comprehensive transit system, including interurban transport, whether bus or train, would allow people to go to where the jobs are, instead of being stuck in dead-end jobs and on government assistance. The US had a system like this, but we dismantled it as the age of the automobile got its start. But now, as oil prices are on the rise and unlikely to come back down, we need to start preparing for the end of that age. Automobiles would never have come to dominate as much as they have if the government hadn’t made a decision to invest heavily in the infrastructure they require – well paved roads, major highways connecting urban centers. We need to make the same kind of investment in other forms of transit.