Posted 5:16 AM by Martin Wisse

Atrios on bipartisanship:

More generally, I think anyone who preaches the joys of bipartisanship is a fool who has little understanding of how American politics does and should work. Partisanship is a good thing. If the opening position is compromise then the public never receives a healthy debate over the merits of a particular policy. Sometimes I wonder if that's really what members of the Broder school of political analysis really want - to cut the pesky people out of the process.

Atrios is quite right on this. The main complaint with politics in the Netherlands is, because no government can be formed other than as a coalition of parties, that there is no room for debate. Before the government has been formed the coalition partners will have negotiated a roadmap for their government and since each coalition will have a majoruty in parliament is is only rare that debate, let alone significant changes, are forced through.

Posted 2:34 AM by Martin Wisse

Archy on domestic terrorism:

Why has Byck been so absent from discussions of terror? Is it because it was thirty years ago? Byck's incompetent plot took place during the golden age of hijacking. Had he succeeded, he would have killed about four hundred people (and rather abruptly ended the Watergate crisis). Certainly, any discussion of hijacking, airport security, and the danger of airplanes as missiles should include our closest previous near miss. Is this just another one of those things that we can blame on the lack of historical sense among Americans? Or is it because Byck was a white American citizen. Just as Oklahoma City and other right-wing domestic terror rarely makes it into our public discussions of the current threat, do we exclude Byck from our historical memory simply because he wasn't Cuban or Palestinian?

Posted 1:54 AM by Martin Wisse

The AFL-CIO is holding a Show Us the Jobs tour, taking 51 people, each from every state plus Washington D.C. to look for where their jobs went. Naturally, these people blog their experience.

Posted 3:28 AM by Martin Wisse

Archy on the Bush administration's ongoing politicalisation of the civil service:

An entire agency is charged with finding photo ops to aid their boss' reelection effort. A congressional committee uses their publicly-financed Website to attack the minority party's candidate. Official communications from a department become commercials to drum up partisan support for a controversial policy initiative (during an election year). All three have the same corrupt element in common: the Bush team obviously regards the government as just another advertising medium for them to use in their election effort.

In the last case, Keane, the talking head for DHHS, brings up something that has bothered me for years. When, exactly, did legality become the refuge of choice for scoundrels? It seems that whenever someone—political or corporate—is caught with their hands in the ethical cookie jar, their preferred defense is to loudly quote the letter of the law and announce that they did nothing illegal. Never mind that they may have trampled the spirit of the law and vomited on any relevant concept of ethics, if they are safe within a legal loophole, they can stand tall.

The whole historical point of a professional civil service was to create a body of depoliticized workers whose first loyalty was to performing their defined duties, not to supporting their political masters. The current behavior of the Bush/Rove cohort seems to have the goal of undoing 120 years of political reform for a moment’s advantage. Why am I not surprised?

Posted 2:50 AM by Martin Wisse

Public Nuisance on the Bush administration's effectiveness int he War on Terra:

Let's review that for a moment. The original target was not something wildly unreasonable, like 'actually correct security failings in the near future'. It was, more than two years after 9/11 to have a plan of how to assess infrastructure security. That has been pushed back - the administration now expects to take 40 months after 9/11 before they have a plan. The actual assessment will be another five years. That means that, if he wins, Bush doesn't expect to have assessed infrastructure vulnerability to terrorists by the end of his second term. Actually correcting vulnerabilities will presumably take even longer - not to mention there's no money for it.

This is from an administration whose major claim is their effectiveness in fighting terrorists. It's the only area in which poll show Bush with a large advantage over Kerry. If people find out just how weak the Bush anti-terror effort is, he's going to be in deep trouble.

Posted 3:56 AM by Martin Wisse

Ezra, you bitch:

It is spectacularly unfortunate that the qualifications Andy demands from a President are a mere moderate hostility to homosexuals and an idiot savante-like reliance on the words "terrorism" and "Al-Qaeda". Don't put him in a concentration camp and repeat Osama Bin Laden's name like a Buddhist mantra and you've got the critical Sullivan endorsement. Ah Andy, can you do no better?

Posted 1:35 PM by Martin Wisse

Calpundit gets cynical:

My point? What makes us think that the people of America are interested in someone who is competent, steeped in the issues, and allergic to the magic asterisk? As near as I can tell, they are far more likely to vote for people who (a) lie to them, (b) cut their taxes, and (c) pretend that a magic asterisk really will make the deficits caused by their tax cuts go away. The American public is practically addicted to the magic asterisk.

I have a nasty suspicion that Roger Altman's budget document will not inspire very many people to vote for John Kerry.

Posted 4:42 AM by Martin Wisse

Archy on the state of US politics:

One aspect of the polarization of American politics over the last decade or so, is that politics is mostly a grim and unpleasant business. It's hard to measure the long-term practical effects of groups like the Kabouters, Yippies, and Merry Pranksters. One thing that is certain is that they made the whole process of politics a little more entertaining. I think that's a good thing. And along the way they occasionally came up with some simple optimistic ideas. I'm not sure what kind of people came up with the metro book project in Mexico City, but I would like to see more of this kind of thing in the States. This is the kind of activity third parties need to engage in to gain legitimacy, not quixotic runs at the presidency.

Posted 1:42 AM by Martin Wisse

From Slate

Posted 3:55 AM by Martin Wisse

The fake patriotism of Bush apologists

Crooked Timber has two posts up about Ann Coulter and Mark Steyn's smears against Max Cleland, one by Ted Barlow and a followup by Chris Bertram. Both drew a lot of Bush and Coulter apologists trying to excuse the smears; reading them made me think about how Bush and co use patriotism.

What I (once again) realised is that Bush and his apologists for the most part only use patriotism as a political weapon, rather than being genuinely patriotic. A genuine patriot would respect Cleland for going to war for their country and would respect him even more so for the sacrifices he made by doing so: the loss of three of his limbs. Genuine patriots would not belittle these sacrifises in order to glorify their own side.

But clearly, this is what Bush and co have been doing. Bush and very many of his cronies have never had to make the same sacrifices as Cleland made and in fact have gone out of their way to avoid having to do so. At the same time, they have also gone out of their way in creating the image of Bush the uberpatriot, while bludgeoning political opponents with it.

Which is why John Kerry and Max Cleland are so dangerous to Bush now. Because they have made sacrifices and their patriotism is more than skindeep. Because they've learned their lesson when Cleland lost the Georgia senatorial election in 2002 when he was smeared as anti-American. Kerry and Cleland know that Bush will again try this strategy and as recent events have shown, they are ready for it.

Posted 6:38 AM by Martin Wisse

Orcinus provides an in depth review of The Passion of Christ:

Is The Passion of the Christ anti-Semitic? In a word: Yes. But not in any kind of obvious fashion, like what you might find in Jud Suss or The International Jew or "The Prioress's Tale" in Canterbury Tales. It's more pernicious than that.

Gibson clearly identifies the Jewish high priests with evil throughout the film -- from the use of ominous music to the Jewish soldiers' presence to the slithering of Satan among the robed set. And he does use ancient stereotypes to depict them -- their hook noses, their conniving manner, their sinister intentions.

What is striking is the narrative choices that Gibson makes throughout. The Gospels, of course, give conflicting accounts of Jesus' death, and Gibson's version borrows freely from each of them and then tosses in his own "details" and rearranged timeline for good measure. At each step, Gibson's choice shape the kind of narrative he tells.

The final shape that emerges is a narrative that places the blame heavily on the Jewish high priests as causing Jesus to be crucified and nearly exonerates Pontius Pilate -- though he, of course, proves to be easily manipulated by the scheming Jews. A more balanced narrative might have noted, for instance, that one of the reasons the Jews may have had to arrest Jesus was the Roman preoccupation with violently suppressing uprisings, and Jesus' teachings had created a revolutionary fervor likely to bring down the wrath of Pontius Pilate. The Romans, in other words, could just as easily have been the chief culprits; but Gibson chose the Jews.

However, the anti-Semitism seems incidental to the larger worldview at play here. And what becomes clear is that Gibson's Catholicism is not merely conservative -- it is positively medieval. In that context, the anti-Semitism is a noxious and fairly constant presence, but it is only a product of its larger thrust, which is a religious politic of domination, the rule by guilt and fear.

[...]

It is timed to be injected into a society still reeling from the 2001 terrorist attacks and the fear-mongering environment that has been fostered in the body politic since then. In such a milieu, rife with a host of personal and social dislocations, psychologists say, people are more prone to developing or harboring an extreme dualist worldview -- a stark, black-and-white division of everything into good vs. evil. This likewise makes them more susceptible to recruitment into extremist belief systems.

Posted 2:42 AM by Martin Wisse

Why some people see no difference between Bush and the Democrats

Via Atrios comes the news that one Democratic Party candidate for congres supports Bush on his constitutional amendament regarding gay marriage:

Herseth backs the president on both counts.

'I agree with the president on this issue. Marriage is between a man and a woman,' she said."

And in a later statement:

Stephanie and her campaign team understand the reaction to yesterday's news. Stephanie's position on the amendment is consistent with her position of the Defense of Marriage Act -- she believes the issue ultimately should be left to the states, whether they decide it individually under federal legislation or collectively within the ratification process. In this election year, we truly hope this issue doesn't distract from important discussions on issues like lowering the cost of health care, creating jobs, and getting our economy moving in the right direction.

Fucking weak. This sort of lilylivered pandering towards people who in all likelyhood won't vote Democratic anyhow explains why the party is in the mess it is in. Everytime a principled stand is expected from it, it caves in in favour of short sighted, small minded "eelctionability". I had hoped after the disastrous mid-elections of 2002 the Democrats would've learned this lesson, even more so after the various Democratic presidentful hopefuls finally started laying into Bush good, but alas.

It is not worth getting Democrats elected if they're only going to be Republicans-lite; people chose the original over the copy most of the times anyway.

Posted 3:30 PM by Martin Wisse

Pandagon on "nascar dads":

Every election year, we get a new subgroup that's this year's "it" voters - soccer moms, security moms, office park dads, and now NASCAR dads. What always frustrates me about this is that it seems like it's simply a constant race to see who can classify what largely white, middle-class voters in swing states are concerned with. The convention itself annoys me - soccer moms, for instance, never made up more than 6 percent of the voting population, yet you would have thought that soccer was the new Playstation the way it was taking over America in 1996.

They're new, easily disposable methods of pretending you're talking about long-standing electoral groups in new and incisive terms. You know who NASCAR dads are? Working- and middle-class white males with families. You know who office-park dads were? Middle- and upper middle-class white males with families. You know what the difference is? Almost nothing, in real terms. Slightly different motiviations, slightly different economic strata, and a whole lot of assigned psychological and political phobias that various strategists wanted to make into issues.

Posted 1:47 PM by Martin Wisse

Mary Beth Williams, of Wampum has decided to stand for state office in Maine. Good luck to her and if you are in her state, vote for her in the Democratic Party's primary on June 8th.

I am now officially running for the legislative seat in this new district, renumbered as 116.

The challenges we Mainers face, underfunded schools, cuts in critical services, devastating job losses, an exodus of our young people, unsupported small business and skyrocketing health care costs, have led me to conclude my experience and energy is better served AS the candidate at this time, rather than my managing the candidate, as I've done for the past twenty years.

In addition, Portland is represented in Augusta by eight House and two Senate seats. Currently, these are held by nine Democrats and one Green Independent. All ten legislators are male. I'm the only woman, and only person of color, running from the largest, most ethnically diverse city in Maine. Sadly, in a city with the first openly lesbian mayor, we haven't sent a female representative to Augusta since 1998. I hope to start a new trend.

Posted 5:22 AM by Martin Wisse