Presidential candidates, Disney movies, Petraeus' report to Congress, and other things to find on ice

Okay, lots of links, so I'll keep the commentary short.

• First up, I hadn't sat down to read Giuliani's piece in Foreign Affairs yet. And now that I have, uh... he's crazy. Perpetual war for perpetual peace: the Rudy Doctrine. All enemies who happen to be Muslim = Islamofascists. Peace = bowing down to American military might or being crushed. Yglesias has perhaps the most succinct thoughts ("this man is batshit insane"). Jim Henley and Dan Drezner have their own thoughts, which are fairly concurrent. (For a contrast of "Foreign Affairs" articles written by presidential candidates, try reading Edwards' vision here. He may be wrong on trade, but at least he's not a bumbling/maniacal warmonger.)

• Yglesias also has this neat shout-out to a competent reporter actually questioning the boilerplate spin given by the federal government.

• At least Giuliani has these guys standing with him. Oh wait...

• In other campaign news, Hillary: The Play! Next up, Hillary on ice! (Hilariously, Priscilla Barnes plays Hillary. Yeah, that's right, Terri from Three's Company)

• Picking a major in high school: good or bad? I'd lean towards bad, just because I've been gleefully listless since whenever, but I bet it'd be good for a lot of kids to stay involved in their studies. Still, picking your job at age 13 seems like a stretch for ending systemic school failure.

• WashPost has an excellent look at the underbelly of pro wrestling. And here I thought it was all underbelly.

• Wroops.

• America gives Israel $30,000,000,000 in military aid (a 25% increase). At this point, does Israel really need aid? I don't think Israel is existentially threatened any longer. Sure, it was in 1973, but these days, I think they can manage with their booming defense contracting industry. (not to mention, you know, their nuclear bomb).

• Oh, that whole surge report thing? Yeah, turns out Petraeus won't be giving it to Congress after all and the White House will manage the language and the report. But, says White House spokesperson Dana Perino: "The Congress asked for these reports from the President." Yeah, except that's not what they asked for. BarbinMD at DailyKos has the rundown of what they asked for: a report from General Petraeus, who looks to be increasingly expendable for the Bush Administration, in his call for (gasp!) troop reduction. But I thought Bush was the Commander Guy!

• Speaking of Iraq, looks like there's a new coalition. With no Sunnis. Let's see how long this can last.

• Do we need a draft?

• Top ten newspaper websites. Sorry LATimes, you get pwnd.

• A ridiculous picture and video of a crowded wave pool in Tokyo. Yes, there is water in that pool somewhere.

• A long but worthwhile essay from Glenn Loury on why America has become an incarceration nation and its long-term effects. Bottom line: upper- and middle-class America benefit from state violence in the punitive justice system, but society on the whole suffers. At what point, then, are we culpable?

• SomethingAwfulites will have already seen this, but I just saw it on Reddit today, so sucks to your asmar. It's a 435-foot slip-n-slide.

• German physicists claim to have violated special relativity. I'm skeptical. But if they've really broken the speed of light, then Alpha Centauri or bust!

• A great series of movies on the making of the Muppet Show. Damn, that's complicated. Oh, how I love the Muppet Show.

• Freakonomics author Steven Levitt wonders in his new NYTimes blog how to best attack America. Homeland Security begins its surveillance.

• Clicked has a good run-down of Peru earthquake news and information.

• This movie looks awesome.

• Oh, boy, it's High School Musical PART DEUX! (High School Musical also available on ice.)

• In more important music news, it looks like Springsteen is reuniting with the E Street Band for his next album (due for release right near my birthday). In less important music news, Counting Crows is also recording again.

• The decline of a great brand: Jaguar.

• And finally, just in from CNN, massive miscarriage of American justice system takes place. Dahlia Lithwick tracks Padilla's journey of mistreatment here, here, here, and here. Full coverage of the saga from MotherJones here.
  

OK, video time. That Muppet Show thing reminded me of how much I love those wacky Muppets. It's one of the Great Summits in American pop cultural history and two of my favorite performers: Johnny Cash meets Miss Piggy.

mini-update

Because Anna's here, I'm not going to make a full post, but I figure a lil' one will do. So, no commentary, just links.

• NYTimes Sunday has all sorts of good stuff. A great slide-show on highway signs, a feature on couples group therapy, why Elvis wasn't a racist, and the one every blogger is linking to this morning, an expose on the failure of the war in Afghanistan (mostly thanks to the war in Iraq taking resources away).

• So, uh, troops? You hate the troops.

• Speaking of troops, LATimes has surfing veteran amputees.

• Wayne Barrett takes down Giuliani with no mercy in this Village Voice piece. Incendiary.

• Jack Balkin refuses the Administration's spin of the FISA bill. Of the anti-authoritarian bloggers, Balkin has been most closely following the tricky legal grounds of the law. His other posts on the subject are definitely worth reading.

• When Republicans leak state secrets, it's OK. I guess that's not really news.

• Are 10% of people really gifted? British teachers say, eh...

• Is virtual marital infidelity as bad as real marital infidelity?

• James Fallows has some perceptive takes on China's largely incompetent attempts at censorship. Here's the umbrella post that has interior links to the others. It helps put an article like this in perspective.

• Work faster, cows!

• People in Jordan and Guam can expect a longer life than Americans. I suspect both our girth and crappy infant health.
  

• This kinda thing irritates me to no end. Once they're ex-employees, they criticize to no end, but where are they when this stuff is actually going down? Where's the outrage when they're still on payroll? Colin Powell, I'm looking at you.

• Formin' like Voltron!

• Stephen Hunter sucks.

• Could this story be any more ridiculous? He rented a plane to hunt down his stolen boat! Straight thuggin.

• Speaking of thuggin', please please let this be true. Kanye, do whatever it takes.

• Spider-man breaking up with Mary Jane? MJ dying? Gimmicky comic book non-event? Yeah.

Video choice today is a classic: the greatest cartoon short of all time. "What's Opera, Doc?"

Wait till I get my money right

I can't believe I've missed this. The surrealest video ever. Zach Galifianakis + Will Oldham + Kanye + farm work + Amish Paradise = GENIUS

Higher quality version on Kanye's own website. Check it out. The lip-syncing is uncanny.

My favorite moment is the blotted out tractor logo. Nothing short of brilliant.

Broken promises... so what else is new?

To begin, I am more angry at the Democrats now than I was at the Republicans. Because, face it, I pretty much expected the Republican Congress to blindly enable the Bush Administration with shameless kowtowing to the unconstitutional expansion of executive power. They've been loving that since Nixon. But before I lament the spinelessness of the feckless Democrats (notice how the words applied to the Democrats are -less words? Powerless, careless, worthless. Less, less, less.), let me go over the surveillance law a bit.

It's important to note that the activities allowed by the law basically already happened, but had been ruled illegal by the FISA court (see previous post). Also, the law's ostensible intent is reasonable. After all, with the routing of most international calls through the great fiber-optic switches in the USA, it makes sense to listen in on calls within the country, as long as the two parties who make the call are non-citizens and out of the country. This law is nothing of the sort.

Reasons why this law blows:

1.) It EXPANDS the Attorney General's power. Yeah, that's right. This guy. Rather than leaving the surveillance oversight in the hands of an external court (the FISA court), the attorney general and director of national intelligence get to approve spying.

2.) This law permits wiretapping as long as the party being investigated is out of the country at the time. That is to say, if an American citizen went overseas and called back to another American citizen in the United States, that call could be monitored, violating both of their Fourth Amendment rights.

The right of the people to be secure in their persons, houses, papers, and effects, against unreasonable searches and seizures, shall not be violated, and no Warrants shall issue, but upon probable cause, supported by Oath or affirmation, and particularly describing the place to be searched, and the persons or things to be seized.

3.) The Democrats and Bush's National Intelligence Director Mike McConnell had already struck a deal for wiretapping that closed the loophole without giving all the oversight to the most dysfunctional Cabinet Department ever. Bush nixed the idea and with more fearmongering, bent enough Democrats to get what he wanted.

It's disgusting to see the Democrats submit to pressure, since they're afraid of being viewed as "weak on terror." Guess what? Something tells me that the Republicans will STILL call every Democrat they can "weak on terror." You know what else makes you look weak? Doing everything the President tells you too, because you're so scared. Want to show you have guts? How about doing something you believe in every once in a while? How many non-binding resolutions must the American people endure before this Congress takes real action? ARGH.

More (and better-worded) reactions from Balkinization, Greenwald, and Dover Bitch.

OK, on with the linksesses...

• More broken promises from the Army Corps of Engineers. Looks like the 17th Street Canal, supposedly built to withstand a storm surge of 13.9 feet, can't even take a 6.3 foot storm surge. It turns out that if you have a levee which can withstand a high storm surge at almost all points except one, the storm surge still busts the levee. (More about Army Corps incompetence in this long Time magazine feature.)

• Sarkozy keeps it real. Mad real.

• Imagine my surprise that flooding Iraq with weapons in an attempt to spark the ragtag security forces turned out to be a bad idea. Still, 190,000 firearms? Sweet zombie Jesus. Hey, it goes with the NRA position here... guns don't kill people, after all. Guns defend people from people with smaller guns.

• George Bush, master of history.

• This long piece on one family's experience in open adoption in the LATimes really touched an emotional chord with me. I hope you all take the time to read it. I guess in the age of open adoption, the birth parents can suddenly decide to play a much bigger role, but the strain it puts on a child seems extraordinary.

• Looks like Soriano is injured. Time to trade for Griffey.

• A great piece in the Sunday Trib about the mighty 7-Elevens in Taiwan. If Taiwan had a true national symbol, it would be a 7-Eleven. Or more accurately, it would be an unending row of 7-Elevens down the entire street.

• LCD Soundsystem has a great interview/in-studio performance on NPR's World Cafe.

• Apparently, getting rid of a pheromone sensor turns female mice into raunchy dudes, "complete with mounting, pelvic thrusts, and the ultrasound calls that males use to attract a mate." Good-bye sewing circle, hello Foxy Boxing.

• Via reddit, it's Damn Interesting hunting for the source of the word "thug." I always knew Indiana Jones and the Temple of Doom had something to do with it.

• Jimmy Wales refuses to submit Wikipedia to the censorship in China that Google has undergone (and downright complicity in repression in which Yahoo has participated). It's a tough line to toe, but I think Wales can do it. Long live Wikipedia!

• There's no stopping the wave of dangerous Chinese goods. There's just too much of it. So comes the true high cost of low prices... sometimes the products kill you.

• More on the issue of the social contagion of obesity. Here's the original article in the New England Journal of Medicine, with some interpretive riffs in Time. The general idea is, as one person got fat, the chance of his/her friends increased significantly. Therefore, obesity can be 'spread' through social networks. There is, however, a dissent coming from children's health advocates like Dr. Neil Izenberg, whose letter in the NYTimes describes the problems of 'quarantining' fat people. I agree that attaching an additional stigma to being fat can aggravate rather than improve the situation, but it's hard to argue against the fact that friends and family strongly influence eating/exercise patterns. Here's Izenberg's interview in Alternet.

• Final note before the video, Lee Hazlewood, great American musician, died over the weekend. While there are a few tributes here and there, the best tribute I could find was this NYTimes article (Select only, folks) from January of this year. Priceless.

Ok, video time. This is terrible. Awful. Horrible. Maybe the worst commercial I've ever seen. Talking sandwiches, saying Filet o' Fish. In different accents. For a whole minute. It's godawful and had me staring in dumb disbelief that such an abomination was ever made. And that's why you should watch it.

Secrets...

• So, it turns out that a FISA court overturned part of the Bush surveillance plan as illegal, which is why the Bushies are scrambling to expand surveillance. Wait, but why didn't we find out about it until now? Oh, that's right, like all things dealing with this hilarious Administration, it's a SECRET. You know, like this guy's job description. At least, it's only a secret until the Senate Minority Leader reveals it all on Fox News. Then it's not a leaked secret, just a sincere cry to fix our intelligence gaps. Right. In any case, the Post spends a lot of time talking up the potential Boehner leak, but to be honest, what's most disturbing here is the attempt to circumvent FISA through even broader legislation. Overreaching, Big Brother surveillance, and sneaky media manipulation? Check, check and check. Just another day in the life for this farce of a White House.

• Not that Congress is much better. Here are the sober lawmakers having a raucous spat over whether the Democrats counted the votes wrong. Or something. I mean it could be worse... but not much. At least the public approves! I hate to say it, but I liked Congress better when it was Republican. Then at least my hate for it could be uncomplicated. With this Congress, I have to accept that my own party may be lamer than I ever imagined. Sheesh.

• The other failed invasion/occupation. Ethiopia in Somalia and the destabilization that it has brought. (Free registration required)

• Gates testifies bluntly about Iraq's deteriorating political situation. As others have noted, no matter how good the military news is, it's impossible to separate the military aims from the political ones. And the rest of the situation remains terrible.

• Commander Obama toughens his stance, while everyone and their momma chews him out. I don't necessarily see hypocrisy in wanting to talk to North Korea, Venezuela, and Iran, while wanting to attack camps inside Pakistan. If you can't control what's going on within your own borders, and those people have directly threatened the United States, why not invade? Obama's "wrong war, wrong place, wrong time" shtick on Iraq only makes sense if there is a right war at the right place at the right time. Yet, in the context of the failed Iraq war and the ailing efforts in Afghanistan, we would do better to exercise caution than fling ourselves into a country teetering on the edge of serious civil unrest. I find this to be another troubling example of an Obama campaign more fixed on shrewd political maneuvers than on speaking uncomfortable truths about American policy and bringing about sweeping change. I'm still backing the Barackmobile, but I'm skeptical as ever. Regardless, everybody should seriously consider the remarks by Obama in his sweeping foreign policy speech (Read it in full here). The question of how we construct a substantive foreign policy out of the Iraq debacles must be brought to the forefront. No one but Obama and Paul (in his ultimate isolationism) has proposed anything of the sort.
  

• It turns out that taming the Yangtze doesn't mean taming flooding. Ten percent of China's population (120 million people) were affected by this year's floods, anyways.

• Is this creepy to anyone else? I mean, I understand that we want to market things younger and younger. Also, I know that everyone knocked TV and radio and comic books for kids because it was lurid and whatnot. But isn't social networking for kids a little (a lot) dangerous? Despite assurances that strangers can't get on these sites, come on, it's not that hard to be anonymous online. I dunno, call me old-fashioned, but I think there are enough dangers in the world without adding virtual ones, and the parental units are always so behind the times that online dangers may be the most difficult to detect.

• Uh, how is this not bigger news? Reporter has affair with Mayor of Los Angeles... who she is reporting on while the affair takes place. I'm pretty sure the Los Angeles case even worse than this. Maybe I just haven't been watching the news enough to see more of it.

• A totally ridiculous Ask Metafilter question. Worth reading the whole thread.

• Note to IU football players: If you throw a water balloon at the driver of a car at a stop light, make sure it's not an IU Police Officer.

• I'm fairly certain that this is sorcery. (I know, I know, I always blame wizards, but it's the only reasonable explanation)

• See, this is the part where the NAACP says, "No, we don't want the PR nightmare of publicly defending a coddled athlete who probably hosted vicious dogfights in his home. We learned from the Duke rape case that jumping to the defense of the black person in the situation just because he or she is black, is probably a bad idea." Wait, they're defending him because they're bowing to community pressure rather than doing what's right and staying out of it? Oh, well scratch that last part then. I swear, Chappelle wasn't entirely wrong.

• Are there too many heroes? A worthwhile point; we worship people for just doing what they're supposed to do.

• God Bless America. A story of the most glorious shit in the history of the world.

• Weird hidden photoshopping in al Qaeda images and tapes.

• After Internet 2.0, are we just going to have Bubble 2.0? It certainly seems reasonable. After all, the hype about social networks and user-generated content are outpacing any actual business these people do. Isn't it? Doesn't this sound familiar?

• Hey, maybe we just execute people because we really like executing people. No amount of forensic technology improvements can hide the fact that prosecutors, police, and citizens all want to see suspects arrested, tried, sentenced to death and killed.

• Speaking of murder, here's a disturbing piece in the New Yorker about how a U.S. Attorney wanted to solve the murder of one of his subordinates and ended up axed by the Bush Administration, while the killer of Tom Wales is still at large. It's long and covers the rather unseemly trail of murder, but the worst part is its open-ended ending.

• J-Pod reviews the Simpsons Movie for the Weekly Standard. A strange, if not entirely wrong-minded review. Probably the best negative review of the movie I've yet seen.

• Another long piece, available without subscription temporarily from the Atlantic archives, about why Americans hate the press. Come to think of it, Fallows has some pretty good reasons: The media is out of touch with America, largely accepts the powers-that-be spoonfeeding them, and is so eager to talk about itself with meta-reporting that real issues get avoided. "Bias" isn't why people distrust the media. Laziness is.

• An unbelievable story about how a teacher quit his job after a failed student was passed by administration to boost graduation rates. Just goes to show that the goals of public schools in America have very little to do with education, and a lot to do with being holding pens and getting public dough.

• Say it ain't so! Roy Pearson, the judge of the famous dry cleaning pants case, is going to lose his job. Poor Roy; those malicious Asiatic dry cleaners ruined his pants, his reputation, and his job!

• You may notice there's nothing here about the Minneapolis bridge collapse. Frankly, there's enough out there that you can find it on your own, but here's a video anyways.

• AT&T may be run by Satan, but this Blue Room Lollapalooza live webcast should be pretty neat.. Bookmark it for the weekend here.
  

• Gary, Gary.

• Ha, these guys are blogging about breaking absurd laws that are still on the books. Pretty funny stuff.

• The Real Or Fake Breast Test. Uh, NSFW, kids. I got 14/20. That shit is tricksy!

• A pretty neat trick: solar panels + Stirling engine = 500 megawatts of power with no pollution.

• Oh, also, the Cubs are in a rather unbelievable first place, but I don't think it's gonna last too long with a three-game set against the Mets. Hope Big Z is lights out today. Otherwise, it's gonna be a long series. Let's see some power. Where da HR's at?

• iPwnd. Apple must change its design for its iPhone battery or get class-action lawsuited.

Video o the day. It's CHROMEO TIME! The pimpest pizza deliveryman ever chills with Chromeo-o-o-o-o-o-o-o.