liberal japonicus

Us and the rest of the world

by

by liberal japonicus I may be wrong about this, but I think that this article is something that is pretty inexplicable to most Americans.  On 26 September, Alex Haigh became the first person to be jailed under section 144 of the Legal Aid, Sentencing and Punishment of Offenders Act. His crime was one of which countless … Read more

A long goodbye?

by

by liberal japonicus That's a way that Alzheimer's has been described, so I hope I'm not twisting it out of shape and making anyone feel bad when I say that this news story had me think of that phrase.  Kansas City Chiefs linebacker Jovan Belcher killed his girlfriend before driving to the team's practice facility … Read more

Finally! A good thing to come out of Romney’s candidacy

by

by liberal japonicus

Every cloud has a silver lining. From a Dem point of view, having Romney as a candidate may have been all silver lining, but it is hard to imagine the tiniest glimmer from the Republican side, as this Amy Davidson New Yorker piece makes perfectly clear. Of course, if you are a heighten the contradictions kind of person, you might argue that Romney's candidacy was the best thing to happen to the US since Watergate. Or Vietnam. Or maybe even the Civil War. (in fact, if you look at things that way, US history tends to be full of silver linings)

But I'm not one of those folks, so for the nation, I think this is great

One of the quirkiest rituals of the presidential election—the straw poll of Republican voters in Ames, Iowa—is obsolete and should be eliminated, Iowa's GOP governor says.

"I think the straw poll has outlived its usefulness," Gov. Terry Branstad said in an interview about the political jamboree. "It has been a great fundraiser for the party, but I think its days are over."

While everyone has concentrated on the ideas that the Republicans need to change or revise, all that talk is about the basic principles, and functionalist that I am, if the structure of how they select a candidate doesn't change, I don't see those basic principles changing that much. It also seems the if progressives want more of a voice, they are going to have to argue for similar changes as well, though after Obama's victory, it's would be the Republicans that will do the heavy lifting for changing any system. I'm wondering what everyone thinks should be done to change the way we nominate a candidate and how it would actually happen. The wikipedia article gives a dizzying array of proposals, but how these go from drawing board to implementation, I have no idea.

Is it merely because of considerations of efficiency and state law that (most?) Repub and Dem primaries are on the same day? I'm thinking that, absent that, and given the Republican predilictions, I wouldn't be surprised if they would change their system to a regional one, and have the first region be all the states of the former Confederacy…

I'm sure many of you saw this, but I am reminded of the  Iowa Nice video  and I have put it (censored version, slightly NSFW) below the fold.

Read more

Zizek on Obama

by

via liberal japonicus I think some folks here might be familiar with Slavoj Žižek, though his name appears a lot more at Crooked Timber (I don't think I've ever seen his name here). This Guardian profile gives as an enjoyable look at the man, but if you don't click on it, you can get a taste … Read more

Curiouser and curiouser

by

by liberal japonicus This, from Jane Mayer at the New Yorker, is pretty fascinating Both the New York Times and the Washington Post report that the F.B.I. had found, after months of investigation, that neither retired General David Petraeus, now the former director of the C.I.A., nor the woman with whom he was evidently involved, his biographer Paula Broadwell, had broken … Read more

Your Orca thread

by

by liberal japonicus At the risk of upsetting Katherine Goldstein, I will crack open a thread about the GOTV program (or perhaps that should be written pogram) that was Orca. There are a number of links floating around, the politico link has been cited quite a bit, and it has the added advantage of having … Read more

Your standards of beauty Friday open thread

by

by liberal japonicus It's nice to have objective standards, so this was heartening. A Chinese beauty contest requiring candidates to have nipples spaced at least 20 centimetres (7.8 inches) apart sparked a storm of criticism on the Internet on Friday. I was wondering if 20 cm was close to some ancient Chinese measure of proportion. … Read more

From Dr Science

by

via liberal japonicus Hello Mr and Mrs America and all the ships at sea. The good doctor is fine but doesn't have the bandwidth to post this up, so she sent it as an email to the usual suspects and Japan time being what it is, I'm putting it up.  I've had an easier Sandy … Read more

w00t!

by

About time too. Whether or not America’s politicians can find a way to sidestep the brutal automatic military cuts of sequestration, the era of rising Western spending on weapons and wars is over. link Discuss.

your price of gas open friday thread

by

by liberal japonicus Over here, I don't think much about the price of gas. No really critical uses of the car, and gas is sold in liters. For me, there is some sort obsfucation constant that is added whenever you translate something from imperial to metric. "It's 39 degrees celsius" and I yawn. 'It's 103 … Read more

anti and pro military on the left (retry)

by

by liberal japonicus

This weekend, I was watching the internet thru my new iphone, which was a bit like taking in a baseball game thru a knothole in the fence. You can catch the basic action, but you don’t see the whole game.

So it was with the second campaign of the CT-LGM blog war*. The first, which could be termed The battle of Conor’s bluff, was part of a larger war and centered around whether one should vote for Obama despite the use of drones or make a statement and vote for Gary Johnson.
The second campaign, The fight of Navy’s need, took place over the weekend. (I hope those attempts at factual restatements don’t insult anyone on either side) In both campaigns, some current and former ObWi commenters were part of the troops arrayed. This post is not about either of those fights (so I’m not linking to them, though going to CT and LGM should be sufficient) but about what I think is the larger question behind them. If that intrigues, check below the fold.

*I should add that whether or not is was a ‘war’ is questioned by some of the participants.

Read more

A master debater

by

By liberal japonicus The title is a hangover from the detour into Portnoy’s complaint. I didn’t see it and I’m now at a a retreat with students. I caught a small bit of one commentator saying that Romnet behaved like an alpha male and that this might hurt him. Given the amount of testosterone that … Read more

Your meeting the troll Friday open thread

by

by liberal japonicus He drove me off Twitter, hacked my Facebook, and abused and terrified my family. Yet the biggest shock of all was meeting him A fascinating Guardian article, originally from this site (though the white font on a black background is a bit tough to read) about one person's very surprising experience with a troll. 

Obama and energy independence

by

by liberal japonicus I fell for the double threadjack and messed up the last thread, but since Obama's approach to energy independence seems to be of interest, I wanted to pass on this article on. In preparing to write The New New Deal, Grunwald did extensive research on the Department of Energy's Stimulus-funded quest to … Read more

Found things Friday open thread

by

by liberal japonicus In line with the possible discovery of Richard III's remains and woolly mammoth DNA and a lost Renoir in a WVirginia flea market, I wonder what the commentariat would like to be discovered. Obviously, finding something in the same fashion as the $7 Renoir, that would allow me to live in the style I … Read more

Akin’s a Chinese spy!

by

by liberal japonicus Well, maybe not, but my post about Akin and the Republican Mission Impossible disavowal somehoe moved to the perfidious Chinese, so in that light, this article on Huawei is quite interesting. The first grafs: Chen Lifang is a bit flummoxed. Chen is a board member and senior vice president at Huawei, the … Read more

Apple is turning Japanese

by

by liberal japonicus Something a bit off of the politics talk. I'm a mac user, but I wanted to give a different perspective to the Apple-Samsung decision and maybe talk about something other than politics. As usual, the thread is also for everyone who wants to explain why the patent system sucks, why Apple is the best/worst … Read more

your artistic ability Friday open thread

by

by liberal japonicus As a person with not a scintilla of drawing ability, I feel this woman's pain. Juan María de Ojeda, a city councillor, said the woman, acting "spontaneously and with good intentions", had confessed what had happened as soon as she realised "that things had got out of hand". Discuss here the biggest … Read more

A Scot that Russell hasn’t met

by

by liberal japonicus Not picking on Russell, but his love of the Scottish people (a love I share) gives me an excuse to make a link list. Brad DeLong on Niall Ferguson Fallows on Ferguson Wolcott on Ferguson Ezra Klein on Ferguson Sullivan (and Sullivan) on his "old and good" friend Ferguson Krugman on Ferguson and … Read more

Yeh! I mean Boo! I mean…

by

by liberal japonicus Just an amuse bouche for you, but I'm trying to figure out if this is progress or not. Senior Republicans on Monday pushed their candidate in the Missouri Senate race, congressman Todd Akin, to quit over his remarks about rape that distracted from the build up to the party's nomination of Mitt … Read more