No Foolin'

Say what you will, but 17 minutes and 4 seconds is a damn long time to stay underwater.

I'm In

Let's not forget all these recommendations for a "Lincoln-Douglas" style debate, ie. one with no moderator.

I'd totally watch that kind of thing with McCain and either Clinton or Obama.

Priorities

US troop deaths push monthly toll to 7-month high in Iraq - Yahoo! News:

BAGHDAD - The killings of three U.S. soldiers in separate attacks in Baghdad pushed the American death toll for April up to 47, making it the deadliest month since September, the military said Wednesday.

Can we stop talking Wright now?

Bad Idea

Some sanity in the news:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A gas tax holiday proposed by U.S. presidential hopefuls John McCain and Hillary Clinton is viewed as a bad idea by many economists and has drawn unexpected support for Clinton rival Barack Obama, who also is opposed.

"Score one for Obama," wrote Greg Mankiw, a former chairman of President George W. Bush's Council of Economic Advisers. "In light of the side effects associated with driving ... gasoline taxes should be higher than they are, not lower."

Republican McCain and Democrat Clinton, who is battling Obama for their party's nomination, both want to suspend the 18.4-cents-per-gallon federal gas tax during the peak summer driving months to ease the pain of soaring gas prices. The tax is used to fund the Highway Trust Fund that builds and maintains roads and bridges.

Economists said that since refineries cannot increase their supply of gasoline in the space of a few summer months, lower prices will just boost demand and the benefits will flow to oil companies, not consumers.

"You are just going to push up the price of gas by almost the size of the tax cut," said Eric Toder, a senior fellow at the Urban-Brookings Tax Policy Center in Washington.

Obama criticized the plan as pure politics and said the only way to lower the price of gas is to use less oil.

"It would last for three months and it would save you on average half a tank of gas, $25 to $30. That's what Senator Clinton and Senator McCain are proposing to deal with the gas crisis," he said on Tuesday in Winston-Salem, North Carolina.

"This isn't an idea designed to get you through the summer, it's an idea designed to get them through an election."

This stance has prompted Clinton to accuse him of being out of touch with ordinary Americans as she campaigns ahead of key presidential nomination contests in North Carolina and Indiana on May 6.

Slowly

Jonathan Chait:

Why did he let the story hang out there so long without a response? I don't know, but I do see a pattern here: Throughout the campaign, Obama has made very good tactical moves, but he's made them slowly. Hillary Clinton, by contrast, has made a lot of mistakes, but she does grasp the 24-hour news cycle and she acts very quickly.

They'll Never Love You

First they criticized Obama for not denouncing Wright. Then, when he does, they call him Barack Stabber.

Fuck these people.

Brontë Crater

Fun list of new names for surface features of Mercury and of Saturn's moons, as made evident by images from MESSENGER and Cassini (respectively) and as chosen and "approved" by the International Astronomical Union.

Barbara and Tweety

John Cole drops a couple o' gems:

I have yet to read any memos from Barbara Streisand detailing how we should spy on American citizens

Also:

Get back to me when Chris Matthews feeds hungry people for three decades.

Dave Winer: "Buffet of human fool"

Well I'll be.

Dave Winer:

I liken [Rev Wright's] appearance yesterday at the National Press club to shark-infested water. Wright was joking in a way that one jokes with friends. But he wasn't with friends (though he brought some with him, they were the ones cheering him on). He was in the water with sharks and feeding them high quality chum and putting blood in the water and screaming look I can swim with the sharks, this is fun, it isn't bad, I'm the boss, the new Martin Luther King, but I own the president. I'm the power behind the man, and you're all going to be taking orders from me, starting now. The sharks said "Oh boy a full course all you can eat buffet of human fool!"

Sharply Etched Clarity

Textism:

There’s a funny thing that happens to me – maybe it happens to you – when moving somewhere new, which is remembering with sharply etched clarity every single moment of the first month or so. It’s four years on and I still remember every banal detail of those days, every breakfast, every shower; whereas if you asked me to describe last week I’d maybe come up with something about getting into the car once, and I think we watched TV at some point. Doubtless there’s an evolutionary survival explanation involving brain activity being piqued in unfamiliar settings, but I wonder if there’s a way to get that sort of mental stenography in a perpetual way, short of moving somewhere new every month. Would beat the pants off of writing things down all the time.

Good Faith

Glenn:

Karl Rove's army, including those in the media who revere him, aren't objectively evaluating each Democratic candidate to decide which one is strongest, which one is best, what they ought to do to win, etc. Their goal, instead, is to demonize and weaken whomever the nominee is going to be. There's a preexisting media narrative that will be fulfilled no matter who the nominee is; it's the same one that is applied in every national election.

Praising whomever appears to be the loser at the expense of the winner -- while issuing "advice" designed to exacerbate tensions and wedges -- is one prong in that strategy. Why would anyone take any of that seriously, as though it's some sort of serious political analysis being offered in good faith?

Foreign-Policy Schizophrenic

Fareed Zakaria, in Newsweek:

I write this with sadness because I greatly admire John McCain, a man of intelligence, honor and enormous personal and political courage. I also agree with much of what else he said in that speech in Los Angeles. But in recent years, McCain has turned into a foreign-policy schizophrenic, alternating between neoconservative posturing and realist common sense. His speech reads like it was written by two very different people, each one given an allotment of a few paragraphs on every topic.

Cheese!

Glenn Greenwald on the "photographic evidence" presented by the Bush Admin that Syria and North Korea are building a nuclear reactor together:

If two countries are engaged in a highly covert and nefarious program to build nuclear weapons, are their leading nuclear officials really going to pose together outdoors for a smiling, casual, tourist-like photograph?

Top of the Slide

Oh, this sounds like it's gonna be awwwwwesome:

WASHINGTON (Reuters) - A cargo ship contracted by the U.S Military Sealift Command has fired at least one shot toward an Iranian boat, a U.S. defense official said on Friday.

Fallacy

Josh:

I think I've said this a hundred times, as have many others. But this article in Thursday's Times is a good moment to revisit the point. As Patrick Healy explains, it is simply a fallacy to claim that winning a state's Democratic primary means you're more likely to win that state in the general election or that your opponent can't win it.

The dynamics are simply different between general elections and primaries. You have on the one hand patterns and preferences that Democratic voters show for different candidates in Democratic primaries. Then you have the separate question of whether these same voters will vote for the Democratic or the Republican nominee in the general. One is simply not predictive of the other. It could be -- if one candidate's voters simply refuse to vote for the other candidate. But who wins a primary doesn't tell you that.

And it's really not a big mystery that the argument doesn't hold up because it wasn't devised or conceived as an electoral argument. It's a political argument -- one that only really came into operation at the point at which the Clinton campaign realized that it was far enough behind that it's path to the nomination required making the argument to superdelegates that she's electable and Obama is not.

It actually doesn't matter whether the public thinks this is true right now. I'm just hoping that the superdelegates are smart enough to see through this fallacy, and think in terms of electoral efficacy - if that's the sole reason for them to exist.

Zen Thursday Continues

Feel the loop.

Child Leaps Over Car

It's Thursday. So a video of a child jumping over a car. Great job, kid!

Love the backpack, too.

How Law Works

WTF?:

Police believe they've found those responsible for the so-called "Ninja Burglaries" on Staten Island, but they're short of evidence – so they're turning to immigration authorities to throw the suspects out of the country.

Why let a little thing like not having enough "evidence" keep you from finding the guilty party?

Investigators say they don't have enough evidence to charge them, but the men have been arrested for other burglaries in the past.

What the hell country is this??!


( via icanhascheez)

Think For A Sec

Wouldn't you feel like an ignorant fool if you wrote headlines like "Which Terrorists Support Which Democratic Candidate?"

I Could See It

Yes, yes, the primary's not over, sure, but...whatcha think bout Hillary for Supreme Court justice?