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Thursday, December 25, 2008

Merry Christmas!

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The alternate ending to It's A Wonderful Life:



really gives it a different feel, huh?


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and for the masochists out there, here's the Star Wars Holiday Special:










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Thursday, December 18, 2008

the soft bigotry of soft bigotry

Pastor Rick Warren
Mindy Schauer


Sarah Posner and David Corn each explain why Rick Warren shouldn't be part of the inauguration


Marc Ambinder makes good points about the politics of choosing Warren here and here



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It's the American way:





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Al Jazeera coverage of the shoe thrower:




Some guy is offering the shoe-thrower his daughter (she's cool with it)



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It never fails to amaze me how dorky the people I read really are when they show up on the teevee. That's the thing about blogs: being smart is what makes you cool... but clearly this is not how the rest of the world works.

Here's Spencer:




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There's some excitement in certain quarters today about Obama's choice for Sec of Labor. Read this and this to learn a few things about Hilda Solis. Or check her out yourself:





What Obama's cabinet appointments, and the choices in general he's been making, signal to me is that "change" isn't something that's necessarily going to apply across the board... rather he's going to pick his battles. But he's actually picking a lot of battles. Health care reform will be taken seriously, global warming and creating green jobs will be taken seriously, labor will be taken seriously. Other issues like agricultural reform and educational reform and civil rights will get less attention. But if Obama actually wins all the battles he is choosing to fight he will be incredibly successful.


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Mark Wilson/Getty Images

Hook a brother up!: Howard Dean deserves a great gig after the amazing job he did at the DNC.


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Katrina's hidden race war.


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Meet Cap'n Dividend:




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Still trying to find the perfect gift for that special someone? Act now (while supplies last) and get the 2009 Sarah Palin wall calender!:

sole searching

Bush Shoe Throw 03


Bush Shoe Throw 06


Bush Shoe Throw 10








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Arab reaction to the shoe thrower:






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Is he being tortured?


This report suggests he might.


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It occurs to me that the job of the liberal blogger is basically to make this point over and over and over again.



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A look at today's Taliban



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Scott Horton:

How often in our nation’s history has a Congressional Committee published a report which concludes that the President is essentially guilty of war crimes? Only once. It happened last week with the release of the Senate Armed Services Committee report on prisoner abuse. Put a sharper point on it: war crimes that produce the death of a detainee are punishable with the death sentence. And in this case we now have more than one hundred deaths potentially linkable to detainee abuse, linked to the President. Yet to the American mainstream media, which has made virtually no effort to comprehend the report, it was a non-event.



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Vanity Fair has an article on why torture doesn't work



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Did Cheney admit to committing war crimes?:





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Rachel Maddow talks to the guy that revealed the illegal spying program:





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The NYT on Obama's relationship with the press



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Digby:

It's a coincidence, I'm sure, that they only feel the need to make sure that politicians don't "get away with"anything when the politician is a Democrat and they only need to prove they aren't reflexively hostile when it's a Republican.


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The Economist weighs in on Caroline Kennedy



Ezra Klein basically agrees, but makes a number of points in her favor along the way, and basically convinces me that appointing her is a good idea. Look, if we want to consider changing the rules so that Governers don't get to make appointments in these situations in favor of special elections, I'm all for of that. But at present those are not the rules, and to ask Dems to tie one hand behind their back is not only unfair, it will have real moral implications... when someone doesn't get healthcare and dies, or goes to war without the right kinds of body armor, or whatever, that has far more real world implication than whether or not appointing someone from a well connected family really serves Democracy. If appointed she'll face the voters in a couple years. Sure, it's ugly, but the last 8 years have been far uglier.



Matt Yglesias makes a related point.


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Obama makes an, uh, unfortunate choice for who will deliver the inaugural invocation. I don't want to just reflexively defend everything Obama does, but I will at least throw out there that this decision really only has symbolic meaning and no real policy implications... perhaps Obama's thinking this would be a way to score some points with social conservatives without really giving them anything. But I still find it.... unfortunate.



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U.Va. Center for Politics



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new old Obama pics:

Obama was a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles photographer named Lisa Jack


Obama was a freshman at Occidental College in Los Angeles photographer named Lisa Jack

Monday, December 15, 2008

shoo!



Shoe-mania:




The guy's certainly getting his fifteen minutes of fame. (He's like an Arab Joe the Plumber!... sort of)


Spencer Ackerman suggests some more targets for shoe-throwing here, and here.



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oh yeah a Senate report links Bush to detainee homicides and reveals a campaign of lies to cover it up but, you know, whatever...


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Now get ready for the new rules! (and more here and here!)



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Bill Moyers interviews Glenn Greenwald (vid)


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Speaking at a church in Selma, Obama was not a patriarch and not a prophet but the prophesied. “I’m here because somebody marched,” he said. “I’m here because you all sacrificed for me.”


David Remnick, editor of The New Yorker, will be expanding this recent article (which I had missed) into a book. I haven't read the article yet, but it looks good.


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Obama's been working the phones:

Now that he has won the White House, President-elect Barack Obama is courting another set of voters: the 535 members of Congress who can make or break his presidency.

Obama, the first president elected directly from the legislative branch since John F. Kennedy, has packed his White House team with respected legislators and connected congressional staffers and has surprised lawmakers with phone calls — and not just to Democrats.

"This is unheard of," Rep. Ray LaHood, R-Ill., who is retiring after 14 years in Congress, said of Obama's calls to Republicans. "I don't know of another president-elect who has done this."



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Four smart people talk about Obama's first 100 days (read or listen)



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Obama's Green Team


James Fallows has more on Dr. Chu here and here



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The war on Festivus!


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Ezra Klein is skeptical of David Brooks' skepticism:

I'm not against the sort of gnawing skepticism David Brooks displays here, but it does seem like an effort to have it both ways. Brooks isn't making the case against massive spending, he's just suggesting that it makes him uncomfortable. And it wasn't that long ago, of course, that Brooks himself was proposing massive new infrastructure investment beneath the rubric of a "national mobility project." But you could read Brooks' column without really understanding that we're on the precipice of an incredible economic calamity -- one that our best efforts may well prove insufficient at averting. Under those circumstances, there should be some recognition that the massive spending plans are an attempt to apply the best remedies we have to an urgent crisis. They're not, as Brooks would have it, some sort of psychological dysfunction, or social mania. For a columnist, the stance of caution might be a good play. But were the government to decide that spending should be pure and the policies implemented slowly, the human cost could be tremendous, and the financial cost could be far greater.



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Non-political: David Foster Wallace considered the lobster. (Gourmet Mag reprinted)


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In keeping with this blog's new title, here are some pics of a riot in Greece this last weekend and it's aftermath. (The Police there killed a 15 year old kid)


(OLIVIER LABAN-MATTEI/AFP/Getty Images)


(LOUISA GOULIAMAKI/AFP/Getty Images)


(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)


(AP Photo/Petros Giannakouris)


(REUTERS/John Kolesidis)

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