Doc's Rants

Ode to Sean Hannity

by John Cleese

Aping urbanity
Oozing with vanity
Plump as a manatee
Faking humanity
Journalistic calamity
Intellectual inanity
Fox Noise insanity
You’re a profanity
Hannity

This might be temporary, but Bloglines has just consistently gotten to a point for me where its unusable from a performance perspective. So I've switched to Google Reader instead.

I really prefer Bloglines functionality in a general sense, but Google's product is stable and far better, performance-wise. Both are free so its hard to argue there.

If you have a ton of sites in your bookmarks and spend a lot of your time checking web sites for updates, I highly recommend considering using one of these products. It will cut your surfing time down considerably.

Overall I thought it was fairly even. Neither side had any major gaffes. This was supposed to be McCain's turf (foreign policy & national security) and he held his ground, but so did Obama. I think Obama's primary goal in this debate was to show America that he had the chops to be an authoritative figure on these two subjects. In that regard, I think he did well.

Only one thing bothered me about the debate. I never once saw John McCain so much as look at Obama, even when they were shaking hands at the beginning and end, he refused to make eye contact. Not sure what to make of it, but it seemed to reek of contempt.

I think this format was the weakest for McCain. Obama had no issue addressing McCain directly. McCain clearly refused to do so. Of course, the town hall format (debate #3) will likely benefit McCain more, but we'll see.

Insta polling is showing Obama with a significant victory, but I don't take much stock in those. As a general rule, debates don't move the electorate in a significant fashion (1-3 pts at most). We'll see what the numbers look like mid week but I don't expect any major movement from the debate results.

Ok, that got your attention. Watch the SNL skit, its hilarious.

The plan was simple. I would help Natalie setup the booth at "Bark in the Park" for Paige to arrive and help her later. I make my escape and go get my XM radio worked on. Simple plan, no? Apparently it was much tougher to execute.

We finished setting up in decent time, but it was nice out so I decided to stick around for awhile. And that's when this little guy showed up at the animal rescue booth setup directly across from ours.

Ordinarily I have been remarkably resilient in resisting the pull of adding another animal to our household. As long as I spaced out our trips to Petsmart when the animal rescue folks were there, I could weather Natalie's desire to save another lost soul, especially the 3 legged variety.

This little guy was different. I can't point to a single reason that was substantially different from the previous encounters, but somehow there was a perfect storm that broke down my defenses and let this little guy crawl into my heart and take a nap.

We brought him home yesterday, and already the apple cart is completely toppled over. He's a very confident pup, and giving Shelby and Jules all they can handle. I think we're going to have to work on his limits with the cats, in spite of the fact that I really think he's just playing with them. We'll see.

My life was so wonderful before yesterday, what possessed me to add this little canine tempest in a teapot to the mix? Watching him lay next to Natalie as I left for work probably told me the answer to that. Our life was already rich and interesting, it just got a little more so on Monday. :)

C'mon, it can't be all serious stuff. This is pretty funny.

First we have the most successful run for the Presidency ever in Hillary Clinton, followed by only the 2nd Vice-Presidential nominee on a major ticket ever. And now it apparently requires women to ask John McCain the tough questions. Check out the grilling he got on The View, and it wasn't just Whoopie goin after him.

Perhaps The View can help the MSM recover its spine and start asking all of the candidates the serious questions Americans would like to have answered.

No, I'm not kidding. Its fast.

http://www.google.com/chrome/ 

So we learn today that McCain has selected Alaska Governor Sarah Palin as his VP choice. Its a shrewd move, to be sure. But what does it gain him? Here's how I see it:

At first blush, Palin looks a bit like McCain, especially from the media brand perspective. She's a maverick in her own right, having risked the ire of her Republican Party in Alaska through whistleblowing and ethics investigations. She has a nice record from an environmental perspective and complements McCain on global warming perspectives. She will undoubtably appeal to the pro-life wing of the GOP, having just delivered her 5th child in April who was diagnosed with down's syndrom early in her pregnancy. She's young and a fresh face to help uplift the future of the GOP. To be honest, other than her reproductive rights perspective, she and I likely agree on more things than we disagree.

But, and you knew there was going to be one, she basically robs McCain of arguably the single most effective argument he had against Obama's candidacy: experience, or lack thereof. Palin is younger than Obama and has zero foreign policy experience. She's been Governor as long as Obama's been in the Senate. McCain is turning 76 this year and needed to pick someone that could allay some people's fear about his ability to serve two terms by having someone that could be President on day one. Palin falls way short on that account, if you're to believe how critical experience is according to McCain.

My guess is that McCain is gambling that he will pull enough of Hillary's supporters, from all walks and ideologies, to stem the tide of Obama's reconciliation at the convention. I think its a gamble that will ultimately fail.

Here's my one caveat how McCain could be successful, but I doubt it. In Palin he has an ally in the idea that how Washington works needs to change. If the McCain pre-2000 shows up at the convention, holds the mirror to his own party (not just the President) firmly and throws the Ted Stevens, Tom DeLays, Larry Craigs, and all the members of the GOP that have wildly pulled the party from its conservative roots under the bus and says "return to the conservative tradition or leave", he might pull enough Hillary supporters and independents to win the election. That is obviously a huge if, and unlikely because it would require being quite disruptive at the GOP convention and doing the unthinkable, criticizing your party at its convention. If he did that, I'd be darned impressed.

I started my summary, but realized that Andrew Sullivan's take very closely resembled my own:

It was a deeply substantive speech, full of policy detail, full of people other than the candidate, centered overwhelmingly on domestic economic anxiety. It was a liberal speech, more unabashedly, unashamedly liberal than any Democratic acceptance speech since the great era of American liberalism. But it made the case for that liberalism - in the context of the decline of the American dream, and the rise of cynicism and the collapse of cultural unity. His ability to portray that liberalism as a patriotic, unifying, ennobling tradition makes him the most lethal and remarkable Democratic figure since John F Kennedy.

What he didn't do was give an airy, abstract, dreamy confection of rhetoric. The McCain campaign set Obama up as a celebrity airhead, a Paris Hilton of wealth and elitism. And he let them portray him that way, and let them over-reach, and let them punch him again and again ... and then he turned around and destroyed them. If the Rove Republicans thought they were playing with a patsy, they just got a reality check.

He took every assault on him and turned them around. He showed not just that he understood the experience of many middle class Americans, but that he understood how the Republicans have succeeded in smearing him. And he didn't shrink from the personal charges; he rebutted them. Whoever else this was, it was not Adlai Stevenson. It was not Jimmy Carter. And it was less afraid and less calculating than Bill Clinton.

Above all, he took on national security - face on, full-throttle, enraged, as we should all be, at how disastrously American power has been handled these past eight years. He owned this issue in a way that no Democrat has owned it since Kennedy. That's a transformative event. To my mind, it is vital that both parties get to own the war on Jihadist terror and that we escape this awful Rove-Morris trap that poisons the discourse into narrow and petty partisan abuse of patriotism. Obama did this tonight. We are in his debt.

Look: I'm biased at this point. I'm one of those people, deeply distressed at what has happened to America, deeply ashamed of my own misjudgments, who has shifted out of my ideological comfort zone because this man seems different to me, and this moment in history seems different to me. I'm not sure we have many more chances to get off the addiction to foreign oil, to prevent a calamitous terrorist attack, to restore constitutional balance in the hurricane of a terror war.

I've said it before - months and months ago. I should say it again tonight. This is a remarkable man at a vital moment. America would be crazy to throw this opportunity away. America must not throw this opportunity away.

Know hope.

Inside of my jaded shell of attitutdes about politics and our largely inept government lies a seed of hope. Most candidates barely give me so much as a hint of warmth, much less the sense of sunlight possibly breaking through. Is this year different? Maybe. History tells me probably not, that even this sense of hope will eventually be dashed when the Washington political machine chews it up and spits it into the Atlantic. I'm willing to gamble that, though. I've got nothing to lose, and our country has everything to gain.

Clinton's action during the rollcall, Kerry's (yes, that Kerry) fiery speech, one of the best speeches I've seen Bill Clinton give, and finally Joe Biden's impeccable framing of the contest ahead wrapped up an incredibly solid evening for the Democratic Party.

Obama has some tough acts to follow. I hope the speech at Invesco Field lives up to its promise.

Andrew Sullivan has a pretty spot on analysis of McCain's latest performance on the foreign policy stage:

It has been a fascinating few days watching John McCain come alive. The difference between his talking about, say, energy policy or the economy, compared with the chance to have a visceral military conflict with Russia is a valuable glimpse into what makes him tick. It isn't just his comfort with military force. It's classic good McCain too. The pattern throughout his career has always been seeking out the supremely moral position in a losing conflict. And here comes Georgia, plucky little Georgia, doomed throughout history to be perched between Russia and the Black Sea, with a newly elected McCain-like figure, Mikheil Saakashvili, thumbing his nose at the biggest bully on the block. What's not for McCain to love? The hushed, Churchillian speeches and press conferences, the thrill of breaking war news, the existence of an enemy, an ancient, cold-blooded enemy against which to pivot.  It's all a wet dream for the Arizona senator.

No one should doubt that McCain's heart is in the right place. McCain long championed the persecuted people of Iraq; and he came to the defense of the beleaguered Bosnians. He is passionate about Burma and Darfur. You name a lost cause and he will rally to it. And no position fit him better than the role of lone crusader for the surge in Iraq in 2006, a military exercise that in his mind would snatch victory from the jaws of defeat, and punish enemies as disparate as Saddam Hussein and Don Rumsfeld.

His position on Georgia makes much more sense if you see it in this context.

In his own narrative, he is always the one man who kept the faith while so many lost theirs. Only McCain had the courage to champion Petraeus; only McCain was in intimate contact with Saakashvili before most others had even heard of him; only McCain can rescue Iraq; only McCain will defeat Iran and Russia and China, because only McCain has the moral clarity to see them as the evil they are, and only McCain has the balls to defend the weak and the defenseless (unless, of course, the CIA has them in a locked, dark cell).

That the world and America might need other virtues in the current global context does not occur to him. That these often admirably intentioned crusades might require more prudential reasoning, restrained caution and delicate diplomacy is not in his play-book. What Americans have to decide is whether, after the last seven years, this kind of with-us-or-against-us crusade against enemies near and far is the right approach to the current crisis. or whether it is part of the reason we are already in so deep.

This is the contrast that Obama must seize to explain the difference between him and McCain. In some ways, Obama is in fact closer to Bush on foreign policy than he is willing to admit. The difference lay in which year of the Bush Presidency you're referring to. McCain's approach is very much like that of the 2001 Bush "axis of evil" Presidency. The world is black and white, even after we are attacked. You are either with us or against us. You could almost term this the "Cheney paradigm". Obama, however, more closely resembles the work of Robert Gates (I agree with Sullivan here, Obama should keep Gates as Sec Def if at all possible), General Petraeus, Condi Rice, and Steven Hadley.

After 2005, Bush's foreign policy slowly began to change, starting with North Korea. Instead of resting on the hugely unsuccessful axis of evil dialogue, Bush dusted off Clinton's approach of engagement and adding partners (especially China) to the mix, and a new agreement on nuclear disarmament for North Korea was reached. I have often wondered if Libya's disarmament helped Bush realize that we gained more by talking to our enemies than not.

This change in policy continued in Iraq, where Bush witnessed the success of General David Petraeus in engaging our enemies by talking to them (and often paying them) instead of resting on his "we will overcome" strategy. This became the core argument of the "surge" strategy that was embraced only after Bush's chickens came home to roost in November 2006 and his party lost control of both houses of Congress. That, coupled with some favorable events in the Sunni awakening and others has resulted in a political climate in which Nouri Al Maliki has begun uttering Bush's four letter word (timetable) with abandon.

The last two years of Bush's Presidency has seen him spend less time in the binary world of Cheney's foreign policy, and far more time on the idea that, while we are still the last remaining super power, the world is far more complex today than simply viewing a relationship through a napkin patterned list of friends and enemies. Managing our relationships with all countries on this planet will require a President that doesn't write a country off because of its status as friend or enemy. Obama gets this concept far better than McCain ever will. That distinction, while it doesn't fit neatly into a sound byte commercial, would help Obama tremendously if he can explain it sufficiently for folks in places like Wilmington, Ohio.

I call it STISOTI, or

Stupid
Thing (or statement)
I
Saw
on
teh
Internets.

Entry number one from this little compendium of priceless quotes from religious chat rooms.

Everyone knows scientists insist on using complex terminology to make it harder for True Christians to refute their claims.

Deoxyribonucleic Acid, for example... sounds impressive, right? But have you ever seen what happens if you put something in acid? It dissolves! If we had all this acid in our cells, we'd all dissolve! So much for the Theory of Evolution, Check MATE!

Russia has hit Georgia hard on this front, and Georgia is getting help. Its a pretty interesting byline in an otherwise human tragedy that should have been prevented.

Larry Lessig has an insightful piece in discussing the current problems with government's performance. While the focus is unquestionably Federal, it could easily apply at the state and local level as well. It isn't a terribly long read, but it is sufficiently long that it does more than lament the role that money plays in Congress. It offers some practical solutions that will take some time to implement.

I'm still digesting parts of this, and will likely have a follow-up post, but thought I would share in the meantime.

Just a reminder for this upcoming political season. If this site isn't in your bookmarks, it should be. Its an invaluable tool for fact checking both sides attempts at political advertising. In my opinion they are one of the few truly unbiased sites out there for truth seeking folks in a muddy election season.

http://factcheck.org/

Summer keeps me busy and to be honest the election stuff has me a little burned out atm. So here's a quick summary:

• My grandmother is an angel, I'm convinced of it.
• I had a wonderful time camping with my sister-in-law and my youngest nephew, Evan (there is NO charge for awesomeness!)
• I am surprised at my feeling of peace during my wife's job turmoil. I have complete faith that she and everything related to this situation will be fine.
• We're cordoning off the house because the dogs are pooping where they shouldn't be.
• I think the Internet has allowed the journalist to "become the story", and I'm not convinced that's a good thing.
• I hope Obama stays humble amidst his rock star status currently.
• I love my wife dearly and the life we have together. Our time with the horses last night was a good reminder of how precious that is to me.
  

Any questions?

I've spent some time in the last few days reading a number of posts and statements regarding Senator Obama's decision to tentatively support renewal of the Protect America Act. A key point to understand here is that the Senator is not "renewing FISA". FISA is a statuatory law that was created in 1978 and to my knowledge has no expiration date.

What the House recently passed was a compromise on a set of amendments that would effectively renew the poorly named "Protect America Act". PAA was passed in August 2007 that contained a collection of amendments to FISA that was allowed to expire in February of this year. Fundamentally, it attempted to legalize President Bush's previously illegal program of not requiring warrants for surveillance activities involving persons reasonably believed to be foreign based but could also include US citizens (if the other actors were foreign agents).

The problem all along with this legislation has been the rhetoric vs. reality. Following 9/11, Congress hastily passed legislation that updated FISA to this century, allowing it to focus on all modern methods of electronic surveillance. The problem was, the Bush Administration wanted carte blanche to snoop anyone, anywhere, without the nuisance of having to get a warrant for every actor they wanted to target.

I won't belabor all the history here, its detailed fairly well in Wikipedia here and here. The PAA expired in February 2008, so "in theory", any warrants associated with that act would expire. That has been part of the Obama campaign's explanation for its support, but I don't entirely buy it.

Obama has been an ardent opponent of PAA and any amendment to FISA that would remove 4th amendment protections for US citizens.

The red herring in this whole discussion has been the telecom immunity provisions of the 2008 amendments. Frankly, I don't have an issue with telecoms participating in a surveillance program if the government is requesting it and they are providing some documentation as to its legality. In my opinion, "good faith" is at play here.

My real problem with the 2008 amendments lie with the fact that, if Obama opposed PAA, why is he supporting renewal of it here? What changed? Has the legislation really been improved enough that it productively balances our Fourth Amendment rights against the needs for improved national security protections? I'll admit, I don't have the time to dissect the passed legislation, so I'm relying on some people have do have the time. From what I have read, this legislation effectively just renews PAA and adds the telecom immunity clauses.

Upon reflection, I can only think that there are two possible explanations why Obama has changed course on this.

1) The Dean/Olbermann Theory - According to Dean, there was nothing in PAA or this legislation that would prevent criminal prosecutions for violating FISA. All the civil cases would get dismissed, but Obama, if elected, could instruct the AG to prosecute anyone who knowingly violated FISA prior to the 2007 legislation. That's a fascinating, if marginally tin-foil oriented theory.

2) My theory (more question than theory) - Has Obama been briefed on some level of complexity that FISA creates currently that is really hamstringing our efforts to monitor terrorists? I realize such an explanation might be difficult to explain to the American people in a sound byte, but he has my email address and a youtube account: explain it to me. I'll listen. This might be my naivete at play here, but I'm hopeful there is a deeper reason for this.

In concept, I fully support FISA. I understand our need to monitor some communications to help protect the country. My simple request, and its supported by that wonderful 4th Amendment, is that you get a warrant for said surveillance.

While I still plan on fully supporting Obama in November, my credit card will stay in my wallet for his campaign until I get a better explanation for this flip on FISA.

 

To be honest, its sad that we've even come this far in the dialogue on this practice. It should have never even been questioned. But one brave journalist with whom I likely disagree more often than agree (though both do happen), actually underwent the practice, twice, and told about his experience in Vanity Fair. I highly encourage everyone to read it.

The article is a sobering read, and a definitive reaffirmation of my belief as to how far our country loses its humanity when it considers such practices as "necessary".

This word is likely to get a lot of play in the 2008 election. One of my favorite foreign policy analysts at Newsweek, Fareed Zakaria, adds a historical perspective that might surprise some people: