July 2010 archive

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

1 BP stops Gulf oil flow for first time since April

by Allen Johnson, AFP

Thu Jul 15, 7:18 pm ET

 What Digby said Goldilocks Triangulation

There’s a ton of discussion this morning about this article in which unnamed White House functionaries run to Politico to complain that nobody understands them. I think it pretty much speaks for itself, but there are some points worth discussing.

First of all, the central premise seems to be that liberals should be happy that Obama has “gotten something done” without regard to what that “something” is. But the fact is that professional politicians always rattle off a legislative laundry list while activists care about process, politics and policy — and average voters only care about the results. (The press cares about “the score”, however they decide to define it that day.) A successful president is expected to know how to manage all of that — and browbeating his voters is rarely a winning strategy.

Therefore, his political advisers should know that when the country is still reeling from unemployment and foreclosures after nearly two years, the passage of an inadequate stimulus bill, which unrealistic benchmarks and a giddy victory party ensured would be the only chance they got, the only people who will consider that a “success” would be beltway insiders. They should have realized that a health care bill that nobody in their right minds would have designed from scratch, the worst aspects of which liberals will be asked to defend for years to come, would be met with dampened enthusiasm by those who watched the process devolve from a sense of progressive purpose to an exhausting farce. They are expected to be able to predict that financial reform without accountability for what’s gone before, combined with the administration’s unwillingness to confront the civil liberties abuse of the last administration — indeed expanding on them in some cases — would show a lack of fundamental concern for justice among those who care about such things.

snip

Still, running to Politico to complain about the immature liberals would seem to be even more counterproductive than usual. Indeed, it’s so counterproductive that I have to assume this is a conscious triangulation tactic. After all, if what you are upset about is liberals failing to be properly supportive, it hardly seems wise to take to the Drudge Daily to complain about them, does it? But then even these anonymous whiners can’t be so stupid as to think browbeating a bunch of liberal bloggers has any meaning among anyone but the Village elite so that’s obviously what this is about — creating a Goldilocks meme among the media that says because Obama is criticized by both the immature bloggers and the radical tea party, he must be juuust riiiight. That won’t do the Democrats any good in the short run, but it sounds like a 2012 strategy in the making.  

Golly gee, seems to be a big kerfluffle in DC as institutional Democrats finally start reading some polls and find out that Villain Shifting and Blame the ‘Thugs ain’t gonna fool none of the people none of the time this time.

Folks, you read it here years and months ahead.  ‘I told you so‘ schadenfreude is an unavoidable reaction.

Anyone who claims they care about ‘Electoral Victory’ is a liar.

Now that it’s too fucking late to do anything about bad policy what is going to stave off the inevitable defeat they richly deserve?

How about some firings Barack?

How about Rahm “Fuck You” Emanuel?  What about “Peter Principle” Timmeh and Larry “Always Wrong” Summers?

Do I want to see heads on pikes?

Metaphorically yes.  These people have failed so badly their firing is already inevitable and has been for months which is why they are trying to fluff their crash pads.  Why not before the election while you can get some bounce from it Barack?

We vote for change and we’re going to keep voting until we get it.

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Just over the half way point today, one more day to the Pyrenees.  Cavendish the Manx Maniac has another controversial stage victory which moves him up in the Sprinter’s standings and does nothing at all to change the overall picture.  Head butts are an interesting innovation, but I can understand the steward’s actions and HTC-Columbia is now less the services of Mark Renshaw.

Umm… what makes them controversial is that they’re dangerous.  This is not Roller Derby or Hockey where contact is allowed and encouraged, it’s more like NASCAR where it’s merely expected.

Otherwise there’s nothing to watch.

Yawn.  3 Threes and 2 Twos, one of them at the finish in this 131 mile jaunt between Bourg-de-Péage and Mende.  Neither Contador nor Schleck are predicting any change in their 41 second gap and they seem well positioned to fend off interlopers.

Tomorrow’s stage is even less interesting if that’s possible so if there is a move before the mountains it should be today.

On this day in 1945, at 5:29:45 a.m., the Manhattan Project comes to an explosive end as the first atom bomb is successfully tested in Alamogordo, New Mexico.

If the radiance of a thousand suns were to burst at once into the sky, that would be like the splendor of the mighty one…

“Now I am become Death, the destroyer of worlds.”

Bhagavad Gita

J. Robert Oppenheimer

At least at 10 pm the Mets are back and who knows, maybe Carlos Beltran.

Other than that the appalling content drought continues.

The Specialist is a horrible Sylvester Stalone movie, but since they’re all horrible it’s hard to even care.  ESPN has highlights from The Open which is celebrating 150 years at St. Andrews with a surprisingly easy round.  Double Good Eats, Fried Chicken and Edible Oils.  Vantage Point is so riveting FX is running it twice when once would be more than enough.  History at least has The Universe and How the Earth was Made.

I can’t understand why Tyler Perry is famous any more than I can understand why Ghost Hunters made it to 100 episodes.  Better Off Dead?

Futurama has a premier episode @ 10.

Later-

Last Jon and Stephen, even in repeats, for a week.  Jon 7/6, Stephen 6/29.  David has Kyra Sedgwick, Bret Michaels, and Jimmy Cliff.  Alton talks about Freezers.  John Houston night on Turner Classics– 16 Candles, Ferris.

Evening Edition is an Open Thread

Now with 39 Top Stories.

1 BP stops Gulf oil flow for first time since April

AFP

19 mins ago

More on ACORN and Breitbart’s hoax from Joe Conason at Salon.com

ACORN hoax victim files lawsuit against O’Keefe and Giles

One of the many victims of Andrew Breitbart’s ACORN video hoax is finally striking back in court, against pseudo-pimp James O’Keefe and pseudo-ho Hannah Giles if not Breitbart himself. Former San Diego ACORN office employee Juan Carlos Vera, who was falsely portrayed in a heavily edited videotape as conspiring with O’Keefe and Giles to traffic underage girls across the Mexican border, is suing both of the right-wing filmmakers, seeking $75,000 in damages under California’s privacy statutes.

Filed  last week in the U.S. District Court in San Diego, Vera’s brief complaint claims that O’Keefe, Giles and up to 20 unnamed parties violated his “reasonable expectation of privacy” by conspiring to secretly videotape him and then posting the tapes on the Internet without his consent, causing him to lose his job and other damages. Indeed, as the complaint notes, the “pimp and prostitute” explicitly asked Vera whether their conversation would be confidential.

From Greg Sargent a the Plum Line who says that the House Democrats are finally getting angry at the obstruction of the Republicans and the White House’s lack of support for their campaigns.

The lid has suddenly been ripped off and the seething tensions and anger among Democrats have now been laid bare. As I noted here yesterday, House Dems are furious that they will be the ones who get shellacked in the midterms — largely because of the dithering of the Senate and White House on the economy.

This despite the fact that House Dems have already succeeded in doing the heavy lifting on their side on jobs- and unemployment-related measures and other legislation.

* Now House Dems are going public with this grievance and many others. Rep. Bill Pascrell boils it down:

   

“What the hell do they think we’ve been doing the last 12 months? We’re the ones who have been taking the tough votes.”

* House Dems also charge that the White House is far more effort into helping embattled Senate candidates than into helping them.

So I’ve spent the last week in a dual Ubuntu/XP environment and while I haven’t succeeded in improving either one of them very much I’ve at least been able to alleviate my load time problem with Yahoo News.

Of course now my YouTubes won’t play, so it’s all a compromise.

And I hate, hate, hate the keyboard translations that make my numeric keypad useless for selecting and transferring text (Ctrl-Insert, Shift-Insert, Shift all directions to select text).  Works fine off the extra keys and their teeny tiny carpal tunnel inducing foot print.

Not able to get that scroll wheel desktop switch thing working again in this version either which slows me down some, though for viewing (not composing) it’s still an incredibly efficient environment.

I’m also not having much luck getting DOSBox to load my old tired games like Scorched Earth, or AVG to do scans of my NTFS Windows drives.  I’m itching for a clean lean install of XP to see if that solves some of my issues on that side, but I’m waiting for a 32 Gb USB drive as a platform and yet maybe I’m foolish to do that.

You see I’ve always had a hankering to run a superfast development system in RAM.  Take 10k lines of code and see how fast you can get a native executable.  Now I have unimaginable amounts of RAM just on my Video Card, but I’ve never been able to set up a development system that worked as well as my CCPM-86/Desqview dual boot on my 286-12.

What I do to amuse myself instead is speed install OSs and I had thought that a Flash Drive installation would be noticeably faster than a straight SATA or 133  or even one of my notoriously unreliable RAID setups.  What causes me to question my assumptions is the availability of this part which provides the secondary benefit I desire- being able to boot from an independent drive so you can virus check and fix configuration problems (Trendnet Easy Go?  Don’t install that.).

I also take ‘normal’ questions.

Le.  Tour.  De.  France.

Well, Team Radio Shack has a stage victory from Sergio Paulinho.  While I congratulate the team and rider, Stage 10 didn’t change much though it is interesting that Samuel Sanchez continues to hang with Schleck and Contador.

Your US commentators keep hanging their hats on Leipheimer, but it’s not happening.  Lance lost time.

Most analysts don’t expect anything exciting before Sunday when the Tour hits the Pyrenees for 3 days of climbing, a recovery day, and then a 4th day in the mountains.

And then the moving finger will have writ, and having written moves on; but that’s the beauty part of sports, it has at least novelty.

Today’s stage is 115 miles from Sisteron to Bourg-lès-Valence and has only one climb, a category 3.