greasy album of the week

live from austin tx, drive-by truckers.

perfect because abbreviation suits them. because restraint suits them. because zip city is my favorite cooley song. because puttin people on the moon is my favorite patterson song. because marry me still makes me want to get drunk with my wife and rob fucking banks. because five are favorites from their best record. because two are unexpected tears. and because the remaining three are nine loud years ago at continental.

wendy and lucy

you could cut will oldhams scene-chewing and the shot of some dude reading sometimes a great notion and this would still be a great movie. mostly because of michelle williams. david gordon green caught similar lightning with zooey deschanel but her ethereal shine was muted by one too many orbiting irrelevants. in wendy and lucy its just wendy and lucy and lucy is a dog.

[4 netflix stars]

palindrone (cont)

dahlia lithwick:

The more Palin tries to explain herself, the more we all fail to get her. Every time she goes off script, she makes less sense. No wonder she didn’t want to do debate prep or be coached by the McCain communications team. Instead of thanking those who packaged, explained, and spun her, Palin resents them. And because she believes she has been crystal clear all along, she’s come to resent us, too. The enduring political lesson of Sarah Palin may simply be that for most of her political career she’s been lost in translation, without fully appreciating that only in translation was she ever, briefly found.

just when i thought i lost all empathy i read the perfect description of me drunk.

obamaism (cont)

joe cirincione walks the company line:

In Prague, in Cairo, and now in Moscow, we are witnessing the emergence of an Obama Doctrine. A world view guided by universal compliance with democratic norms and the rule of law; policies driven by the convergence of shared interests and responsibilities; and a statecraft that does not shirk from the application of military force when necessary but promotes America’s interests with respect for other nations and the strength of joint enterprise.

how bout we quit this race to establish what has already been established.

progressive bloc strategy

chris bowers (via yglesias):

This is like some beautiful dream come true. At the behest of a determined bloc of progressive Democrats, the Senate leadership is dropping futile attempts to appease Republicans by weakening major legislation. It is difficult to even count all of the times Open Left and other blogs have urged the Democratic leadership to do just that.

This has happened because the Progressive Block strategy is starting to manifest itself. Rather than Democratic leaders voluntarily turning legislation into a warm pile of corporate mush in order to appeal to a center-right business, media and political status quo, and then having those leaders browbeating the left into supporting said warm pile of corporate mush because that is just “political reality,” now progressives are determining the limits of political reality themselves. Progressives are offering the leadership a simple choice: pass a strong public option, or you don’t get a health care bill.

The Progressive Block strategy is working. Have you ever remembered another major legislative debate where the momentum of fight is to actually make a bill more progressive? Neither have I.

a test of obamaism. if the progressive bloc succeeds will it work in concert in picking other points of no return? or does it repudiate by going all gatling gun on motherfuckers?

waveland

i quit halfway through probably because the book was free. or maybe because i finally figured out the difference between good and great and i got no time for good. if this is even good. i dont know. i was too distracted by the unlikely menage a trois. the canned conversations. the strained humor. the lack of poetry. the cliched use of television. etc. etc.

mcnamara

kevin drum:

Robert McNamara has died. Lots of people a little older than me won’t agree with this, but I’ve always felt sorry for him. I think part of the reason is that his personality is a lot like mine — it’s mine squared or cubed or to the tenth power or something, but still recognizably mine. And so it’s easy for me to believe that if I had been in his situation I might have ended up doing many of the same things he did: overanalyzing the details, burying myself in work, staying too loyal to a cause for too long, avoiding the moral consequences of what I was doing, and then ending up haunted by it for the rest of my life.

That’s no kind of excuse, of course. I might have done what he did in the same circumstances, but I didn’t. He did. And yet, even at that, at least he figured things out eventually. That’s a helluva lot more than some of the other architects of Vietnam did. Most of them didn’t resign, didn’t admit error, and apparently didn’t even feel much anguish over their roles aside from the purely selfish anguish of being objects of public scorn. McNamara’s anguish may have seemed rather technical and remote to a lot of his critics, but that’s just who he was. At least it was something.

Anyone old enough to have lived through the 60s as an adult probably won’t feel much sympathy for this point of view. But it’s hard for me not to. He’s a cautionary tale for people like me. R.I.P.

hard not to be sympathetic toward, curious about and frightened of the fallibility of reason among the reasonable.

leaving brooklyn

after a weekend away you listen past midnight to the deep concussions of leftover fireworks and you rage at the thought you half expect a horribly desperate Please No No No Please! to waft in one night through your kids open window.

4th of july

sometimes a great notion:

Hank was wakened by a rapping on the bars. The cell was stifling and he lay soaked in sweat. The bars undulated grotesquely before his eyes for a second, then snapped straight; there stood a cop in khaki sweated dark under both arms; at his side was the tourist Hank had swatted,  his face swollen and blue under the tan. A girl drifted past behind the two, half-transparent in the heat like some creature glimpsed uncertainly out of the corner of the eye.

“Accordin’ to your things,” the cop said, “you just got back from overseas.”

Hank nodded, trying to smile, trying to catch another glimpse of that girl. In the limbs of the chinaberry tree beyond the bars a bug creaked in the heat.

palin pulls a c-webb

michael scherer:

[Palin] compared herself to a point guard who [was] being picked away at by a “full court press” from “the national level.” Palin explained how that metaphorical point guard should respond. “She drives through a full court press, protecting the ball, keeping her head up because she needs to keep her eye on the basket, and she knows exactly when to pass the ball so that the team can win,” Palin said. “And that is what I am doing, keeping her eye on the ball that represents sound priorities. Remember they include energy independence, and smaller government, and national security and freedom. And I know when it’s time to pass the ball for victory.”

Palin’s description of a full court press from the national media and political establishment is hardly an exaggeration. Within the last week, she has withstood a withering Vanity Fair profile, the leaks of once-private, unflattering emails she sent to McCain campaign staff, and a public cat fight between former McCain advisers that dealt with her role in the campaign. Meanwhile, in Alaska, she has been beset by continuing state sniping from both political parties, ongoing ethics complaints and the recent controversy over the the state’s public health director, who said she was forced out because she did not agree with Palin’s stand on social issues.

against a man press, sure, beat your man off the dribble. unfortunately the above was a zone trap. (two dribbles. jump stop. short crisp pass.)

jonestown

mary matalin calls palins sudden resignation Brilliant. not cowardly savvy. Brilliant.

palindrone (cont)

david frum (via sullivan):

The McCain campaign is over. The duty of confidentiality has expired. The next campaign has begun. If conservatives are to avoid catastrophe, they need to hear from those inside what exactly happened. If true, the leaks constitute an urgent warning and public service. I believe they are true. For sure they confirm what I have heard during the campaign and after. Instead of complaining about these leaks, conservatives should heed them – and fast.

the silly presumption here is that the frums and kristols and schmidts will still be in the game come 2012. if conservatives truly have any sense they will acknowledge the hail mary and move the fuck on with a whole new cast of reasonable minds.

some duplicitous shit

time warner dropped hdnet (dan rather, soderbergh premieres, 70s auteur flicks, etc). i paid $8 for that shit. i still pay $8. for mgm, smithsonian and something called mav tv which is now showing dirt track racing from bulls gap, tennessee.

comeback

i listened to this in bed in the dark like i was 12 except the game crackled from an iphone rather than a clock radio and the half-naked chick next to me was fucking real, man.

hizzoner

growing up in georgetown was a funny thing. on the one hand i never made friends with kids in the neighborhood because they had nannies and went to expensive schools and lacrosse camps and i didnt. on the other hand georgetown was still fucking georgetown which meant i grew up without cable because marion barry decided us rich folks could wait. id be lying if i said i didnt appreciate that on some base level. and id be lying if i said i dont sometimes appreciate his other random base shit:

Barry’s bill is important because it is the kind of stance that ex-offenders cannot make on their own. Right now, any university or employer can deny you a job or deny you admittance to a school without a hearing, without a valid reason. They can deny you and pretend that it’s based on something other than your felony – or they can say it’s because of your felony. Of all the collateral consequences that come with a prison sentence this shutting off of opportunity is the most dangerous. At the end of the day, I feel like, no matter his reasons, Barry’s proposed amendment is an acknowledgement that society works better when all the members who can contribute are given the opportunity.

congress

a deconstruction:

One thing I will say is that I think it’s absolutely vital that Senators start out by writing a new, much better bill than the one that passed the House rather than using the House bill as a starting point. The reason is that I think that for any given climate bill, there are a lot of Senators from coal areas who will insist on weakening the bill to make it more coal-friendly. The Senators in question aren’t going to care that coal state House members already did this. They need to do it personally so they can claim credit. So you need to go back to a cleaner bill, then basically let the coal state Democrats do what Rick Boucher (D-WV) already did all over again. That way they can say that they changed the bill, and saved Appalachia from the depredations of the environmentalists, which sounds a lot better than just giving Boucher the credit.

And, yes, that’s stupid. But I’m quite confident that’s how congress works.

which is why franken has already pissed me off with his requisite im your representative rather than the 60th democrat blather. sure thats true and sure 60 is damn near impossible but eyes on the prize bro. eyes on the prize.

hyberbolical point scoring (cont)

larison:

After quite a few weeks of defending Obama against his more unreasonable detractors, it is refreshing to be able to criticize the administration for its incredible incompetence in responding to the “coup” in Honduras. What is so impressive about the bungling here is that it contradicts every argument the administration has made in support of restraint and caution when it comes to the Iranian protests. Obama didn’t want to insert the U.S. into an Iranian dispute. Iranians, he said, would decide their own future. Hondurans apparently are not accorded the same respect. Their sovereignty isn’t quite as important. Obama withheld judgment about the legality of what had happened in Iran. In Honduras, he just knows that what the military did was illegal, despite far stronger evidence that it was legal and a result of the proper functioning of their constitutional system. U.S. intervention in Honduras has been no less than it has been in Iran. Indeed, it has been far greater. At least six times in the 20th century beginning in 1907, U.S. forces were deployed in Honduras. For fear that the U.S. might be seen to be replicating the error of 1953, Obama has kept his distance from the Iranian dispute. As ever, Central American nations’ past resentments about frequent U.S. intervention count for little or nothing, and so Obama has dived right in.

The President said that a “terrible precedent” would be set if Zelaya was not allowed to return to office. Yes, there would be a terrible precedent that Presidents cannot break the law and get away with it; there would be a terrible precedent that the rule of law prevailed; there would be a terrible precedent that Hondurans coped with their own political crisis without having to depend on anyone else to fix their problems for them. If I sympathized with left-populists, executive usurpation or interventionist foreign policy, I would be deeply troubled by what the Honduran military has done in ousting a usurping populist without having to rely on outside aid. One can only guess why the administration is getting this one so badly wrong, whether it is currying favor with other OAS member states or not wanting to appear as a supporter of a “coup” or just plain fumbling the issue, but it has dropped the ball on Honduras. We can only hope that it will not lead to any greater mistakes than misguided rhetoric.

even i recognize the continuation of a realist foreign policy. if you want to make predictable black & white generalizations how bout: we still have no proof the iranian election was rigged but we have proof the honduran military ousted its president (whether the president deserved to be ousted or not). surely it is in our (and democracys) interest to question why an elected president was not ousted impeached whatever by democratic means. just as it was in our (and democracys) interest to not wreck the iranian protestors chance to fight another day.

greasy album of the week

electric dirt, levon helm.

out east toward new orleans, the old man with radio. depending.

[slice: kingfish]

i spy

im probably to blame for this. i think it started when i said i spy (what im sure are) big ole silver dollars.

gradualism (cont)

wapo:

Hoping to succeed where other presidents have struggled in implementing their agenda, the Obama White House has attempted to work Capitol Hill with a blend of agenda-setting and deference. Obama outlines ambitious objectives, then leaves lawmakers largely in charge of their final shape.

House Energy and Commerce Committee Chairman Henry A. Waxman (D-Calif.) enlisted two senior committee members to help assemble the House energy bill: liberal Rep. Edward J. Markey of Massachusetts and conservative Rep. Rick Boucher, from coal-producing southwestern Virginia. The authors’ bottom line was a cap that would gradually reduce greenhouse gas emissions, ultimately achieving 80 percent reductions from 1990 levels by 2050. Everything else was negotiable. When Obama entered the fray on May 5, summoning all 36 committee Democrats to the White House, he didn’t make a single demand. Rather, participants say, he pointed to a portrait of Abraham Lincoln and said, “He had a chance to affect history. You, too, have a chance to affect history.”

until climate & health care fail miserably i love these paralysis cure experiments (appeals to ego, better angels etc). with obvious exceptions (gay rights, indefinite detention etc) any lefty criticism of obama strategy should be tempered by the thought that nothings worked and were long past getting all john brown extralegal on motherfuckers.

corollaries to the corollaries

john cole:

There needs to be some form of one of the corollaries to Godwin’s Law that applies to the word treason, in that anyone who accuses someone of treason for non-treasonous behavior automatically loses the argument.

i use treason here & here. id respond with something about the overused suggestion of a corollary to the corollaries to godwins law except i suggested my own here.

cap & trade (cont)

tomasky:

But the longer-term lesson of the [climate bill] vote is that Congress is tied up in knots, for institutional, ideological and financial reasons. Today’s liberals need to give more thought and devote more energy to this problem than they do. When progressive legislation is weakened, as the emissions bill was last week, most people just reflexively chalk it up to a presidential failure of will. And sure, to some extent, Obama is perhaps too quick to seek compromise.

But the more pressing issue – and the hidden one that most big-time pundits don’t write about – is how messed up Congress has become. This is on the brink of becoming a disaster for this country. Reforming Congress, something we call a “process” reform rather than an actual matter of “substance”, is something most liberal interest groups don’t give much thought to. But today, process is substance – or is killing it. Obama and the advocacy groups that support his goals need to grasp this and do something about it, or the whole agenda will sink into the quicksand down the other end of Pennsylvania Avenue.

yglesias beats the same drum but usually blames congressional intransigence over anything obama. of which i agree. people are fucking selfish. besides which our country has a long record of gradualism toward rightness.

vampire porn

shit gets better & better.

silly sports urgency

yglesias:

Draftniks like Ford tend to just systematically overstate the value of almost everyone in the draft. He tells us that Jermaine Taylor, selected by the Rockets early in the second round, is “a great athlete and scorer” but in the real world there just aren’t 30+ “great” prospects in any given draft. And in particular in this draft everyone beyond Blake Griffin seems to be a bit of a crapshoot.

i stopped watching things like sports center. got no stomach for the Importance of the Moment topped by the Importance of the Next Moment. so as much as i instinctively like someone like stu scott i cant listen to dude.

cap & trade

marc ambinder:

The debate is classic Washington, putting the short-term economic conseridations [sic] of congressional districts versus a long-term and fairly intangible public goal.

metaphor for obama presidency going forward: transcendent or merely present?

(dc) schadenfreude

wilbon:

You know what the greatest thing about draft night ‘09 was? Knicks fans in agony. The look on their faces when the Warriors, picking seventh, took Curry one spot ahead of the Knicks picking eighth, was worth coming to New York to cover the draft. I love coming to watch basketball in Madison Square Garden, no matter how stinky the Knicks are.

The only thing that ever gets tiresome is Knicks fans, so their self-absorbed righteous suffering is something I’ve come to snicker at over the years. They act as if the basketball gods owe them something, though the Knicks franchise is possibly the most overrated in professional sports in America. When the Timberwolves selected Rubio and Jonny Flynn, both point guards, with consecutive picks, Knicks fans went wild. They were so certain Golden State, already stocked with shooters, wouldn’t take Curry.

But of course Don Nelson was going to take Curry to put in a lineup with newly acquired Stoudemire, Stephen Jackson, Monta Ellis and Corey Maggette. After spending all season coveting somebody else’s player (LeBron), it was knee-slapping funny to see the Knicks fans have the rug snatched out from under them again. Good.

whatever. losing is losing is losing. substitute yankee for knicks and then you have something.

michael

saw the victory tour. my first concert. i was too cool for that shit. ironically it wasnt until dude was uncool that i recognized pyt etc wont be beat.

state of me

for instance: ive been listening to silly lagniappe when i couldve been listening to this. because of a mood my face drained of  color; tired of considering shit i couldve done better and things i shouldve done differently.

dillinger

book shoulda been written by someone else. shoulda been historical novel w hard-boiled fantasticals. ned kelly spoilt me but dig these indiana towns: lima. peru. greencastle. michigan adjectival city.

sanford

mystified as to why this is such big news. sure he cheated. sure he took off. sure he gave bad email. sures hes a public official. sure hes one more disgraced republican who preached family values. sure he had presidential aspirations. but above the fucking fold? people cheat. at this rate i half expect:

Lawmaker forced to admit secret life of fidelity.

scarborough (cont)

chris matthews exposed joe scarborough (again) by essentially echoing what nate silver wrote here:

What [George] Will’s position reflects instead is ideology: who cares that the federal government could build a better mousetrap? They’re the government and that’s bad. His argument is really no more sophisticated than that. If a libertarian conservative wants to make this argument, more power to them, but they absolutely should not be turning around and suggesting that a public option would raise health care costs. They’re saying, rather, that they’re morally opposed to the cost savings that would ensue.

scarborough has no constituency to defend nor will he be mistaken for some ideologue which in my mind makes the shit worse: these common-sense types are the ones who should be moving the ball fucking forward; instead they are strangely lauded faux iconoclasts who continue to be trapped by the same old short-sighted point scoring bullshit.

[more on scarborough here and here.]