SIXinternational.txt

On Sunday retired general Wesley Clark, promoting Barack Obama on CBS’ “Face the Nation” said some pretty provocative things in regards to John McCain’s service:

CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

Ouch. Pretty harsh, eh? This sounds like a scandal in the making.

At least it does when twisted out of their original context:

SCHIEFFER: I have to say, Barack Obama has not had any of those experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down. I mean –

CLARK: Well, I don’t think riding in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to be president.

SCHIEFFER: Really?

So basically Wes Clark has to defend Obama from Schieffer who is apparently supportive of the idea that riding in a fighter plane and being shot down is a qualification to be president, and is shocked when Clark says it isn’t. But if you were to read hack gossip websites Drudge Report or Politico.com or any of the hundreds of prominent blogs that copy from them verbatim, watch NBC or ABC, or god forbid listen to talk radio, you’d think Clark came out and took a huge shit on a pile of yellow ribbons.

This is what I mean when I talk about the media being awful. They do the bare minimum required to create new content, relying on gossip and out-of-context quotes to manufacture news and controversy. It’s completely irrelevant to the task at hand but it’s easier to be a reporter on a political version of Entertainment Tonight than to do the work of Woodward and Bernstein.

And as a side note, I can guarantee this is only controversy because it’s about McCain. I’m not saying the media was never easy on Obama; please, give me that much. The media has a vested interest in ratings above all, and the best way to get ratings is to create a close race. If McCain was up, it would be the reverse against him. Of course I do think on the whole the media is friendlier to the Republican marketing of we’re-the-tough-guys-and-they’re-the-pussies and typically do anything to reinforce those stereotypes, but that’s a tangent into which I won’t currently devolve.

This item was slashdotted this morning:

in some instances, Apple is charging 200% more for upgraded components, such as memory and hard disks. Either there’s a serious difference in the quality of components being used, or Apple is quite literally ripping off those who aren’t able to upgrade hardware themselves.

This is part of why I’ve railed against Apple for the past ten years or so. Everyone thinks they’re this great, consumer-friendly company that just wants to make things so nice and easy and helpful. And heh heh they do it so much better than PC manufacturers, right guys, heh? It’s all marketing, and it’s working incredibly well. Rather than allow you to just buy the system and upgrade and maintain it yourself (like quite literally every other computer manufacturer in existence), they force you to send everything in for even the most minor upgrades or replacements at double the cost to the consumer. Or, as in this case, even upgrading the parts before it’s being  sent out costs three times as much. Quite the price just to have a nicer case and a more visually pleasing OS.

But hey, it’s worth it so you can have appealing aesthetics, right? I mean what’s more important than that, honestly? What’s that about fools and their money? Sorry, I missed what you said, I was too busy applying these awesome stickers.

It’s easy to be rich beyond imagination and greedy. It’s easy to say, in so many words, “fuck you i got mine”. It’s easy not to care about the poorest among us while flying on a private jet. It’s difficult to be the world’s richest man and fight for tax equality, to your own detriment; to fight for the “common man” rather than letting them eat cake. Warren Buffet, worth $62 billion and growing, is one of the few people who got theirs and refuses to forget where he’s come from and the millions of people who haven’t made it in our world.

This may go against popular opinion, but I’d also rank Bill Gates as one of those great people and Microsoft as one of the greatest corporations around right now. They give billions to charity, helping third-world countries and people who really need the help rather than resting on their laurels. Sure, some internet nerds may rage against miKKKro$oft for whatever on their forums, but without Microsoft we would not be as far ahead in technological development as we currently are. And helping starving children in Africa outranks bundling Internet Explorer with Windows.

As a side note, Steve Jobs and Apple barely give any money to charity. Granted Jobs is worth 10% of Gates, but still, with $5.6 billion, you can afford to give some away.

I’m going to straight quote a Cato Institute blog for this one:

Reading Tim Lee on FISA, I had a historical revelation. We could have avoided the long national nightmare of Watergate if only the burglars had carried letters from President Nixon stating that John Dean had determined that they had a legal right to trespass.

This is why I’ll always be saying the Bush administration has been the worst since Nixon, if not worse. At least Nixon was held accountable by the public. Back then, wiretapping used to scare people. Now even the Democrats support warrantless wiretapping. Barack Obama yesterday:

My view on FISA has always been that the issue of the phone companies per se is not one that overrides the security interests of the American people

Despite in November ‘07 when he was saying this:

One of his most passionate passages was not in the prepared text. He promised to close down Guantanamo “because we’re not a nation that locks people up without charging them. We will restore habeas corpus. We are not a nation that undermines our civil liberties. We are not a nation that wiretaps without warrants.”

His justification for denying public financing passes muster with me. This, however, seems to be a lot more spine-bending in terms of spin. Obama won’t even be present to vote on the FISA bill. Progressive leadership at its finest!

With all the uproar over Obama’s decision, has anyone noticed that John McCain is in a bit of a dust-up of his own on the very same issue of public finance? Granted, we haven’t heard word one about it since February, but again, this is because the media is just so goshdarn friendly to Obama I guess. TPM Muckraker had a few good articles on it though from back in February:

First, McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries last year. It meant that his struggling campaign would get $5.8 million in public matching funds in March. Now that he’s effectively the Republican nominee, he wants out, because the system entails a spending limit of $54 million through the end of August. He’s almost spent that much already, according to the Post.

…

It is a serious issue. As the Post reports, “Knowingly violating the spending limit is a criminal offense that could put McCain at risk of stiff fines and up to five years in prison.”

McCain opted in to the public finance system for the primaries back when he was dead broke before New Hampshire in order to qualify for a loan (and also for free access to ballots, which cost Howard Dean approximately $3 million back in 2004). After New Hampshire when he was flush with money and it became apparent he would be the nominee, he has said that his opting in didn’t count and he wants to opt out because he didn’t want to be restricted by the spending limits. Here’s your campaign finance reformer, ladies and gents. Here’s the guy who’s so outraged by Obama opting out of public funding for the general.

Oh, and by the way, the law he’s breaking was created by the McCain-Feingold Bipartisan Campaign Reform Act of 2002. As a side note, McCain is now running not only against that bill, but also against immigration legislation passed in 2006 and 2007 based on the failed-then-reworded McCain-Kennedy bill from 2005. The man is campaigning against two bills that he himself wrote and his opponent is the “flip-flopper”?

The DNC is filing a lawsuit this week in regards to McCain’s FEC problems because the FEC board does not have enough members to vote on whether McCain broke the law or not. Aside from Countdown with Keith Olbermann, does anyone honestly expect the news to cover it? I mean, with the news being such a liberal organization like Limbaugh and Hannity are always telling us, shouldn’t this be getting constant coverage while Obama’s finance problems go under the radar?

I’m still waiting for someone to show me evidence of a liberal media on any sort of wide-scale. I’m wholly convinced that the media has been rooting for conservatives since Reagan at the very least, but you can go back throughout history til at least the beginning of the Cold War with all of the communism scares to see similar actions. It feels like we’re still in McCarthyism mode, where reporters are afraid to look even the tiniest bit anti-war or pro-socialism lest they be outed as a dreaded LIBERAL. The questions are always “is he too weak?”, “is he too left?”, “are his acquaintances a little too extreme?” and never whether McCain gets too angry or if he’s too quick to go to war or if he’s going to further the privatization of government duties that has gotten us where we are today.

Left-wing media my fucking ass.

EDIT: Perfect timing via FirstRead:

With so much attention on Obama’s reversal on public financing, liberal bloggers like Arianna Huffington and Josh Marshall have wondered why McCain’s own apparent flip flop on the subject hasn’t received as much scrutiny.

Well, the Democratic National Committee is trying to change that by filing a lawsuit in US District Court in DC to force the Federal Election Commission to investigate McCain’s decision to opt in the public matching funds system for the primaries, secure a loan based on those public funds, and then withdraw from the system after becoming the GOP front-runner. McCain, though, never actually received those public funds before opting out.

“The chairman of the FEC,” the lawsuit states, “has already advised Sen. McCain that he is not free to withdraw unilaterally from his agreement with the FEC and to ignore the legal requirements of the Matching Payments Act, without the FEC’s approval. Yet Sen. McCain cannot obtain such approval, because he already violated a key condition for dispensing with the Agreement by which he entered the matching funds program: he has pledged matching funds as collateral for a loan to his campaign.”

Let’s see if this gets covered this time for any amount of time. I’ll be watching…

EDIT 2: Quoting Washington Post columnist Richard Cohen (Via Sargent):

Obama might have a similar bottom line, core principles for which, in some sense, he is willing to die. If so, we don’t know what they are. Nothing so far in his life approaches McCain’s decision to refuse repatriation as a POW so as to deny his jailors a propaganda coup. In fact, there is scant evidence the Illinois senator takes positions that challenge his base or otherwise threaten him politically. That’s why his reversal on campaign financing and his transparently false justification of it matter more than similar acts by McCain.

There you have it, in black and white. You see, McCain’s actions are justified because he was a prisoner of war.

Wow.

Everyone’s up in arms about Obama declining public financing for the general election and instead relying on his private donation base for funding. For a little background: public financing is an opt-in system that taxpayers check a box to donate $3 towards it, and the money is collected and split between the candidates evenly. This was instituted after Nixon to reduce the influence of big money in politics. Obama signed a pledge saying the following:

My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election. My proposal followed announcements by some presidential candidates that they would forgo public financing so they could raise unlimited funds in the general election. The Federal Election Commission ruled the proposal legal, and Senator John McCain (R-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election.

The key quote most people latch onto saying that “I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election” and calling it a DISASTEROUS FLIP FLOP OF EPIC PROPORTIONS. Did he technically go back on his pledge? Sure. And could we cynically say that the decisions was based solely on the fact that he’ll be able to use a ton more money from his private donations than the $80mn provided by the government? Sure. And I have no doubts that was a part of the decision. But that’s not the whole truth.

What is the point of public financing? Most people say either it is to reduce special interest influence in politics or to set the two candidates on even footing for the election with money not being the deciding factor. In regards to the first premise, I don’t think anyone can say that Obama’s contributors represent special interests. Nearly 1.5 million people have donated, with the vast majority of donors being under a few hundred bucks. (Be careful listening to the conservative news establishment - a story being referenced on cable news referred to Obama’s campaign being 55% supported by big donors, with everyone leaving out the qualifier that “big donors” represents people who’ve given more than $200; that’s a pretty meager cutoff for a big donor, and places myself in the ranks who will apparently by calling up Obama for personal favors in the near future) I would assert that 1.5 million people donating small amounts to a campaign directly follows the spirit if not the letter of campaign finance law.

As to the second premise, the candidates will never be on purely even footing with the spending by outside groups that are not controlled by law. 527 groups, such as the Swift Boat Vets for Truth from 2004, are allowed to spend as much as they’d like. Since McCain refused to even try to stop these 527 groups this round (as he knows shutting them down would put him at a major disadvantage) even while Obama was successful in shutting down most Democratic 527s, how can it be said that Obama adhering to public financing would have put them on even footing?

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This election season is quickly devolving into petty, holier-than-thou back and forths over whose positions have changed more drastically and more often, and who should denounce whom in the others’ campaign. Mostly it has been Obama on the receiving end of the scrutiny by the aforementioned conservative media establishment, where even a guest pastor’s sermon at Obama’s church must mean that their views are similar (while McCain largely gets a pass on his religious endorsements from John Hagee and Rod Parsley). This is turning into a post for another time, but I’ll just say that for all the hype about Obama being the media’s darling, the reality seems pretty far from the truth. While we’ve spent weeks and weeks on Obama’s acquantainces and guilt-by-associations, from Tony Rezko to Jeremiah Right to Bill Ayers to Father Pfleger, I haven’t heard word one about McCain’s involvement in the Keating Five scandal (he was the one who received the most soft money if you hadn’t heard) or any stories about his first wife who stayed with him and their three children while he was a POW only for him to return, and upon seeing her disfigured from a car crash would subsequently cheat on her and divorce her for a younger, richer, not-disfigured woman. Oh, and don’t forget about the fact that he called his current wife a “trollop” and a “cunt” in public, in front of a group of reporters of all people. Family values and all that, right? Imagine if Obama had been involved in any of these stories. It would have sunk his Presidential bid. But McCain? Aw we can’t hold any of this against our beloved, decorated war hero! That’d be downright unpatriotic! Hell, let’s not even report on it so the American people don’t even have to consider this as a slight against his character which we, the media, have already deemed to be far above average. Let’s not let anything go against our pre-determined characters, ok?

Wait, what’s that? Someone spoke at Obama’s church when he was hundreds of miles away and said some things that might be racy? QUICK, GET A GRAPHIC TOGETHER! THIS IS GONNA BE PEABODY MATERIAL!

The House today, with plenty of shameful Dem yeas, passed the FISA “compromise” bill to expand the FISA wiretapping system in the government, with an additional provision of retroactive telecom immunity in an amendment. This amendment is controversial because many people, myself included, think that companies like Verizon, AT&T, etc. who let the government gently nudge them into giving up customers’ information should be held accountable for their actions rather than given blanket immunity. The government should of course also be held accountable, but saying that’s “unlikely” is being generous. On the other hand, Republicans support illegal wiretapping and of course think that the companies who helped them should not be held responsible for their part in the offenses. But then again, when do Republicans find legal fault with corporations anyways?

More info about the bill itself can be found on Wired. It appears that it both legalizes and legitimizes the illegal wiretapping operation people concerned with civil rights have been bitching about for years, which the Bush administration apparently found far too inconvenient to enact through legislature and bypassed the whole thing when implementing its policies years ago. THANKS, DEMOCRATIC MAJORITY. GLAD YOU GUYS CAME THROUGH WHEN WE NEEDED YOU. Even Republican senator Kit Bond said, “I think the White House got a better deal than they even had hoped to get.” A good summary of the situation and details on the spinelessness of Democrats from Glenn Greenwald.

This bill has come up before. In January, barack Obama supported Sen. Chris Dodd’s filibuster of the immunity amendment, effectively shutting the bill down until it could be rewritten. But on the day the bill has passed the House with the same amendment and is going into the Senate with a filibuster-proof majority, he makes a statement:

Given the grave threats that we face, our national security agencies must have the capability to gather intelligence and track down terrorists before they strike, while respecting the rule of law and the privacy and civil liberties of the American people. . . .

After months of negotiation, the House today passed a compromise that, while far from perfect, is a marked improvement over last year’s Protect America Act. . . It does, however, grant retroactive immunity, and I will work in the Senate to remove this provision so that we can seek full accountability for past offenses.

It is not all that I would want. But given the legitimate threats we face, providing effective intelligence collection tools with appropriate safeguards is too important to delay. So I support the compromise, but do so with a firm pledge that as President, I will carefully monitor the program, review the report by the Inspectors General, and work with the Congress to take any additional steps I deem necessary to protect the lives -– and the liberty –- of the American people.

Basically saying he supports it. Though he does say that he will “work in the Senate” to remove telecom immunity, that’s going to fail, and he’s going to vote for it anyways. I guess everything changes when you’re gonna be the guy doing the wiretapping, eh? Is it too much to ask for a politician to not completely buckle when it comes down to supporting civil rights over some vague notion of national security? This whole situation is awful, the Democrats did not have to give in but they did, just out of habit one might assume. What’s the point of supporting Democrats when it seems like when push comes to shove they kowtow to the Republicans? Even when the Republicans are in the MINORITY?

I donated money to Dems during the primary season; I think I’ll be keeping it for myself for the rest of the year. For the record, Louise Slaughter D-NY 28th voted Nay, while the three Republicans in the Syracuse-Rochester-Buffalo area (Tom Reynolds 26th, Randy Kuhl 29th, Jim Walsh 25th) all voted Yea.

El-P : Deep Space 9mm (Fantastic Damage 2002)

Sweet beats have been fallin like discreet sleet for me this past week (i made that all by myself, give me a high-paying contract).

I’ve been immersing myself this past week or two in ‘underground’ hip-hop, with artists like El-P, Aesop Rock(both on the Def Jux label which is phenomenal), and Sage Francis. Not exactly unknowns or anything, but the style isn’t anywhere near the BLIIIING CRUNK CLUBZ bullshit of many mainstream artists. I’ve always enjoyed hip-hop to a certain extent, particularly when there’s something behind it like in Grandmaster Flash’s “The Message”. I like hearing the urban existentialist poetry and I love interesting production that’s catchy without being too cheesy and poppy. If all it is is bitches and dranks and gunz yo then it can stay in the frat parties thankyouverymuch.

So I’d recommend if anyone’s interested in getting into some much more listenable and intelligent hip-hop, check out Aesop Rock’s latest “None Shall Pass” or El-P’s “I’ll Sleep When You’re Dead”. Two different styles for sure, Aesop being a bit more upbeat and El-P being more… apocalyptic?, but both are interesting and exciting to listen to.

First time I got into hip-hop was in 7th grade with Busta Rhymes (that’d be 1997-1998). I was in a similar groove back in freshman year of college (again, that’d be 2003-2004 for those keeping track), and it’s been until now where I’ve really had the urge to get back into it. At the same time though I feel a much bigger connection to it than I did then. So we’ll see how long this lasts… and if it’ll be another five years until I get into it again next time.

Tim Russert was like a member of the family to me. I’ve watched him nearly every Sunday morning for about the past eight years, getting his take on politics and watching him ask the hard questions to people in power. It’s truly a sad day for the world of journalism and for myself personally. Sunday mornings will never be the same again.

Tim wasn’t a perfect journalist. There were too many times I felt he glossed over serious issues, particularly in the lead-up to the Iraq War. However, he was steadfastly objective and he did much better than the vast majority of his colleagues, asking the questions that provided us with such quotations as Dick Cheney talking about “winning hearts and minds” and others like that. He always gave the politicians enough rope to hang themselves with as they saw fit. He wasn’t the type of attack/show journalist to push harder and harder on an issue to corner a politician, which some may see as a flaw. But he asked the questions, received their answers (or non-answers), and let the people decide from there.

He was the last of a dead breed of journalists, concerned more with the questions than with their own egos - I can’t imagine anyone new bringing the same gravitas as he had to Meet the Press.

It’s times like this I wish I believed in a Heaven - I’d enjoy nothing more than to meet up with Tim after my own death and talk politics and sports with him until the end of time.

And he never got to see Buffalo win a major championship. Any chance the Bills or Sabres will win one for him next year?

…who am I kidding.

A most amazing observation, one predicted by natural selection/evolution, and about the 847th nail in the coffin of creationism (via New Scientist):

Twenty years ago, evolutionary biologist Richard Lenski of Michigan State University in East Lansing, US, took a single Escherichia coli bacterium and used its descendants to found 12 laboratory populations.

The 12 have been growing ever since, gradually accumulating mutations and evolving for more than 44,000 generations, while Lenski watches what happens.

…

But sometime around the 31,500th generation, something dramatic happened in just one of the populations – the bacteria suddenly acquired the ability to metabolise citrate, a second nutrient in their culture medium that E. coli normally cannot use.

Indeed, the inability to use citrate is one of the traits by which bacteriologists distinguish E. coli from other species. The citrate-using mutants increased in population size and diversity.

“It’s the most profound change we have seen during the experiment. This was clearly something quite different for them, and it’s outside what was normally considered the bounds of E. coli as a species, which makes it especially interesting,” says Lenski.

Even more exciting than observing that, the researchers were able to revert to previous generations and watch the bacteria re-evolve the same trait!

To find out which, Lenski turned to his freezer, where he had saved samples of each population every 500 generations. These allowed him to replay history from any starting point he chose, by reviving the bacteria and letting evolution “replay” again.

Would the same population evolve Cit+ again, he wondered, or would any of the 12 be equally likely to hit the jackpot?

The replays showed that even when he looked at trillions of cells, only the original population re-evolved Cit+ – and only when he started the replay from generation 20,000 or greater. Something, he concluded, must have happened around generation 20,000 that laid the groundwork for Cit+ to later evolve.

Lenski and his colleagues are now working to identify just what that earlier change was, and how it made the Cit+ mutation possible more than 10,000 generations later.

In the meantime, the experiment stands as proof that evolution does not always lead to the best possible outcome. Instead, a chance event can sometimes open evolutionary doors for one population that remain forever closed to other populations with different histories.

Lenski’s experiment is also yet another poke in the eye for anti-evolutionists, notes Jerry Coyne, an evolutionary biologist at the University of Chicago. “The thing I like most is it says you can get these complex traits evolving by a combination of unlikely events,” he says. “That’s just what creationists say can’t happen.”

Absolutely fascinating. This is so much more exciting than believing in magic and religion - this stuff actually works! I’m too dumb to add a comment of my own on this, but it’s just amazing the exponential progress that’s being made in our scientific knowledge on a daily basis. Keep up the good work, science!