Author: jp

At the risk of pulling a Hitchens, I find myself–excuse me while I pause to catch my breath–finding some fairly salient points in the latest iteration of the National Review, Jonah Goldberg’s bastion of strident conservatism (the very same publication that used to host Ann Coulter’s mad rantings about the Arab world, e.g. pleading for the U.S. to “invade their countries, kill their leaders and convert them to Christianity”). You can imagine the horrible, haunting shame I feel right now.
Anyway, regarding Howard Dean’s impending, sure-thing nomination as the Democratic candidate in the 2004 Presidential Election, here is the contentious meat of the right-wing argument, courtesy of National Review senior editor Ramesh Ponnuru:

“No word yet from McGovern, Mondale, or Dukakis. . . . Come to think of it, the Ds now have a candidate with McGovern’s foreign policy, Mondale’s domestic policy, Dukakis’s regional background, and Gore’s arrogance. How perfect is that?”

Of course, this is just a nonsensically reactionary bit of conservative giddiness…but it’s that last comparison that threatens to really pass muster. Howard Dean: the perhaps not unelectable, but unlikable candidate? Ponnuru goes into greater detail on this subject in “Can Dean Win?“:

“Will Dean’s personality wear well? Some people have said that he projects too much anger for the general electorate; arrogance may be the deeper problem.”

This seems to be the core issue. Was it really surprising to anyone that Should-Have-Been President Al Gore endorsed Dean yesterday? After all, they’re both aloof, robotic, smirking politicos, except Dean has the “benefit” of coming off as the aloof, robotic, smirking, and thick-necked jock, as opposed to Gore’s aloof, robotic, and smirking policy wonk.
These aren’t just my concerns, though. Listen to Dean’s own campaign staffers (as gleaned from The Note, by way of Howard Kurtz):

“The dirtiest little secret of the fight for the Democratic presidential nomination is that the pros running Dean’s campaign know full well that the criticisms of The Doctor being made by the press and his opponents are often spot on.
“They know he is regularly careless, volcanic, dismissive, self-important, mercurial, hypocritical, patronizing, and politically tone deaf.”

Shades of Dubya, but at least the Governor from Vermont has a so-called liberal heart, which I’ll take any day over number 43’s shameless prevaricating and born-again evangelicalism.

After his former running mate Al Gore’s endorsement of his rival, Howard Dean, in the race for the Democratic nomination, poor Joe “Losing the Primaries” Lieberman must be feeling pretty low, indeed.
Here are some highlights of this morning’s interview with the Today show’s Matt “Losing My Hair” Lauer:*
First, displaying a bit of trenchant wit, too little, too late:

Lauer: Let’s try and talk about what’s changed. I want to run a clip of something Al Gore said as he announced you as his running mate in 2000.
Lieberman: This’ll be nostalgic.

Displaying a sad sense of betrayal:

Lauer: Four years ago, Al Gore wanted you to be a heartbeat away from the presidency and now he endorses Howard Dean. What happened?
Lieberman: Well, you would have to ask Al because I’m the same person today that I was when he said those very kind things about me.

Finally, some remorse:

Lauer: Just a week ago this is what you had to say about Al Gore, “As president I would turn to him not only for advice but see if he would be interested in holding some high office in my administration. He’s an immensely capable, principled, effective person.” Has that changed now?
Lieberman: I’d say that’s less likely this morning. [Laughter]

*(Alternate Joke Section: Joe “Pushover” Lieberman meets Matt “Comb-over” Lauer; Joe “Bald-faced Centrist” Lieberman meets Matt “Bald” Lauer; Joe “Shiny Happy Centrist” Lieberman meets Matt “Shiny, Hairless Pate” Lauer)

In what has to be an appeal to the lowest common denominator of newspaper readers–lower, even, than USA Today–this weekend’s Pittsburgh Post-Gazette takes a cue from Us Weekly and more or less “borrows” the trashy tabloid magazine’s popular “Fashion Police” feature, where five or six unknown writers and comedians take “witty” potshots at stars and celebrities in all their swan-dressed glory. Of course, the Post-Gazette, being a respectable/reputable daily newspaper, tries to get some more politically-oriented pundits (e.g CNN’s Paul Begala), and runs their feature under the investigative headline, “Who has the telegenic edge?“, but the following excerpts belie what they’re really going after: that elusive Bonnie Fuller/Bill Kristol crossover crowd.
Wesley Clark:

Rovitto: He looks very strong on television. He’s got the mature face, the military bearing, the graying hair. All of those things play to his benefit.
Julian: Clark’s ties are too long. He’s using his hands to express more emotion than his face. I’m not sure, but in some photos his shirt looks too big — like there’s a gap on the right side. He is a classic dresser.

Dennis Kucinich:

Begala: I believe the word Martian was mentioned by someone at some point. But I would never say that about him. He looks like a nice guy.
Brabender: I do not believe Kucinich is from this planet. It’s very obvious. I’m also suspicious that Kucinich is actually a prop of the Democratic Party, placed in the race to make their other candidates look better by comparison.
Julian: In one photo he makes the only unique neckwear statement with a light brown silk tie, which is a nontypical color palette.

John Edwards:

Begala: He’s 50 years young. He’s great looking, the best-looking candidate since Ronald Reagan, but so very young. If you combine that with the fact that here’s a guy in his first term in the Senate, that’s a real problem for him. I keep thinking of the line in “About Last Night” when Jim Belushi told Rob Lowe, “What you need is an industrial accident.”
Rovitto: He’s kind of goofy looking in some photos. There’s that youthfulness. He’s almost collegiate looking. But I don’t think his looks alone are such a distraction in the negative sense that it necessarily is a strike against him.
Brabender: The biggest problem Edwards has is that he looks too much like a candidate. He seems like someone sent from Central Casting to play the role of a young Southern senator running for president. This has hurt his credibility. I’ve thought all along he only entered the race to see if he could get a TV series out of it.

[with thanks to Jeff]

Perhaps you recall the House’s narrow passage of the contentious Pharmaceutical Industry Handout bill – ahem, Medicare bill – a few weeks back, whereby a handful of Republican representatives switched their votes from “nay” to “yay” in the waning hours of a pre-dawn roll call debate, thereby allowing the bill to pass. Early reports after the vote mentioned instances of leading Republican lawmakers huddling in great numbers around those representatives who were on the fence, urging them to pass the bill and not join the majority of Democrats in voting “no.”
Well, we now know what some of those specific huddle discussions were about. The play they called? Merely threats, and most certainly not bribery.
U.S. Representative Nick Smith went into detail yesterday on the specifics of the “non-bribes” levied against him, saying that

some Republican House members threatened to oppose his son’s election campaign unless the Republican from Michigan voted for the bill — but did not offer his son any money.
…”I want to make it clear that no member of Congress made an offer of financial assistance for my son’s campaign in exchange for my vote,” Smith said in a statement Thursday. “Some members said they would work against Brad if I voted no.”

That clears things up, then. And this, even moreso:

Mark Glaze of the nonpartisan Campaign Legal Center said House members could have violated a federal law against bribing public officials, if money was offered.
The law allows people to verbally persuade lawmakers, Glaze said, but doesn’t allow them to offer something of value to change a vote.

For a party membership that seems to have little to no understanding of nuance, these lawmakers do seem to grasp the significance of semantics in politics.

Yes, the lion’s share of the news-reading public (all 326 of us) has seen the now-infamous video still of Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld shaking hands with eventual Iraqi despot Saddam Hussein in 1983 as a representative of the Reagan administration. And, rather predictably, the photo of this event caused outrage amongst the anti-war left and contextual pandering by the apologetic rightwing.
This week, however, Rummy is in Afghanistan. You know, that mountainous nation run by the Taliban that we bombed in response to the attacks of 9/11, and subsequently left behind so we could continue our merry (and unrelated) bombing in Iraq. “Staying the course” in Afghanistan seemed to be out of the question, so now those lucky Afghanis have been left with a Taliban resurgence and more of that good ol’ general melee.
So, in this week’s bitter visit to our ex, Rumsfeld met with Hamid Karzai, the quasi-puppet leader installed by the United States after our supposedly overturning the Taliban’s grip on power. And, thankfully, someone took some sweet and charming photos of the awkward meetup.
However: there didn’t seem to be any photographers around when, on this very same trip, Rummy also met up with Afghani warlords who have been providing some rather thuggish “security” to the region and its residents. You know, violence, rape, robbery, extortion. Not unlike the early-eighties Saddam, come to think of it.
So, really, who can blame the U.S. government for not releasing photos of these lively meet-n-greets, when you just know, deep in your compassionate conservative heart, that the photos will come back to haunt you 20 years later?

Poor, poor Colin Powell, always caught in the middle of all sorts of political and diplomatic crossfire. After his adventures at the U.N. regarding Iraq last spring, and his negotiations with North Korea over their acquisition of “nucular” weapons, he can now look forward to this week’s compromising involvement in that proverbial fool’s errand, the Middle East peace process.
But first, some background, courtesy of Alisa Solomon at the Village Voice, on the “Geneva Accord” (whose full text is available here):

At its heart, it proposes a Palestinian state on almost all the land Israel captured in the 1967 war. (Some border modifications would enable Israel to absorb Jewish neighborhoods outside Jerusalem for which Palestinians would get a one-to-one land swap; other Jewish settlements in the West Bank would be evacuated.) The accord elaborates an internationally monitored system for sharing Jerusalem as the capital of both states and it pledges Palestinian recognition of a right of the Jewish people to statehood (and Israeli recognition of the same for Palestinians). Most groundbreaking, it lays out a formula for refugee compensation and resettlement that “provides for the permanent and complete resolution of the Palestinian refugee problem,” thus nullifying any future Palestinian claims for Israeli land or refugee rights.

Secretary of State Powell (never, by the way, has the acronym “S.O.S.” seemed more appropriate) is scheduled to meet with the Israeli and Palestinian authors of the current peace process cause du jour this upcoming Friday.

“I don’t know why I or anyone else in the U.S. government should deny ourselves the opportunity to hear from others and who have ideas with respect to peace,” Powell said at a news conference during a visit to Tunisia.
He added that the meeting “in no way undercuts our strong support” for Israel and the road map.

OK, sounds like a fairly reasonable stance, Colin. One which, however, set off alarms with rightwing Israeli politicos. And by “alarms”, I mean, “hysterical analogies”:

“It is as though the French foreign minister were to meet (American) Indian chiefs who claimed to have been dispossessed of their land, and who were now getting organized with money provided by the Cuban ruler Fidel Castro,” read an editorial in Hatzofeh, a newspaper affiliated with the National Religious Party.

Umm, yes, that’s it exactly.
If we’re comfortable with all these erroneous socio-historical analogies, let’s try some alternates: “It’s like Los Angeles mayor James Hahn meeting with the Crips to work out their feud with the Bloods, while taking campaign donations from the makers of British “BK” Knights.” Or, “You wouldn’t resolve the dispute between David Lee Roth and Sammy Hagar by having Gary Cherone preside over the settlement. Plus, Extreme sucked more than Arafat and Netanyahu combined.”
Realistically, however, the most effective way to put up a roadblock for any sort of “road map” would be to, say, build a gargantuan wall right across that very road. Good luck on Friday, Colin.

At the risk of encroaching upon Gothamist‘s turf, we’re going “local” for a moment. Today’s New York Times unfurls a piece about the city’s budgetary problems in dealing with the increasing costs of ridding the five boroughs of the thousands of tons of trash it produces daily. Given Mayor Bloomberg’s oh-so-non-green anti-embrace of recycling initiatives, it may or may not be of any great concern that this particular article appeared in newspapers which must have used thousands upon thousands of tons of wood pulp for today’s Times paper production. But that’s beside the point. We’re talking about trash here, not the Times. Or vice versa?
The article floats a number of ideas entertained by city officials as they attempt to locate novel (and cheap) ways of dealing with the refuse, which is currently de-Manhattanized by trains heading north and trucks making

“about 240,000 trips a year to and from New Jersey, mostly over the George Washington Bridge, taking at least 30 minutes to travel each way. In addition, 250,000 or so trips are made on the region’s highways by tractor-trailers taking the waste to landfills in Pennsylvania, Virginia and Ohio. A tiny part of the city’s 11,000 tons a day of residential trash goes to a landfill in upstate New York.”

The “radical” alternatives being bounced around by officials include some well-nigh science fiction-esque proposals, such as building “three 900-foot semisubmersible ships” which “would carry as many as 18 of the old-style barges at a time to landfills in the northeastern United States or to an island in the Caribbean…where an incinerator would be built.” Or how about the one where the city builds “a trash plant within New York City that would heat waste to such a high temperature — perhaps 30,000 degrees — that the garbage would break into elemental components, creating byproducts of natural gas and a stone-like residue. The gas the plant would create could be used to power it.”
One idea seems to go unconsidered, however. Taking a “virtuous” cue from Vice President Dick Cheney, perhaps we, as residents of this great urban environment, might consider engaging in a bit of that age-old conservation? This includes heartily embracing responsible packaging initiatives and being wary of products and corporations that fail to do likewise. Just a bit of “personal” public policy, if you will.
Until then, “Happy Holidays!” from low culture.
(Sidebar: Today’s Daily News is coincidentally running an article that tangentially touches upon both issues, i.e. the city’s budget and its trash. It seems New York’s chief marketing officer, the same jackass who brought us the Snapple-in-schools initiative, wants to plaster advertisements all over the city’s trash cans to generate revenue. Someone, please help us.)

After all the discussion last month about President Bush’s dismissal of the national news media as a “filter”, rather than a conduit, for his “message”, it’s super-meta-blogging quiz time here at low culture: Between Michael Jackson and George W. Bush, guess which public figure had his media folks say this about his newly-launched blog (the obvious giveaways have been “blacked out“):

“…the Web site allows _____ to bypass the news media to deliver his side of the story to the public.
“He’s able to communicate with those people interested without the message being filtered by the media,” said _____. “If he wants to put out an 800-word press release, you can read all 800 words.”

Bonus points go to whomever can guess which of these two public figures has been arrested at some point in his life (though I guess that doesn’t really help to clarify anything).
Extra bonus points go to whomever can justify, or at least explain, the use of the scribbled crayon font in Bush’s blog logo (see the actual graphic above).
*(Answer, if you really care about the previous quote: Michael Jackson.)

While we’ve already snidely covered the numerous instances wherein the U.S. military’s documentation of events has moved from loudly inflammatory on day 1, to quietly inaccurate on day 2, we’re proud to admit another entrant into low culture‘s “Regretful Press Release 2003” contest.
Day 1, November 23, 2003:

Three US soldiers were killed in northern Iraq on Sunday, including two in the heart of the city of Mosul who witnesses said had their throats slit.
Two shopkeepers who saw the attack said the two soldiers killed had their throats slit after being ambushed in traffic.
A senior US military spokesperson said it would be “ghoulish” to comment on the testimony, but did not specifically deny it.

Day 1, continued, November 23, 2003:

An Iraqi mob, most of them teenagers, dragged two bloodied soldiers from the car, threw them to the ground and pummeled their bodies with concrete blocks, according to witnesses, describing a burst of savagery reminiscent of that in Somalia a decade ago.

Day 2, November 24, 2003:

Military officials retracted a report today that two American soldiers had been slashed in their throats in an attack Sunday in the northern city of Mosul.
A military official here, speaking on the condition of anonymity, said that the two soldiers had died of gunshot wounds to the head and that their bodies had been pulled by Iraqis from their car and robbed of their personal belongings.
The military official said that contrary to some reports, the men had not been beaten by rocks or mutilated in any way…
…Another mystery was the initial reports about the men having their throats cut. The official could offer no explanation for that.

Until round 5 of the contest begins, we recommend Amazon.com’s 317th-ranked bestseller, co-authored by Rick Bragg and Paul Wolfowitz.