I don’t agree with a lot of the criticisms of Sarah Palin, particularly those focused on her gender, the fact that she has a family, the fact that her daughter is pregnant, or the fact that she “lacks foreign policy experience” (that last one is basically code for “is a committed raving imperialist”). Of course, I can’t stand her policies at all,and her religiosity is disturbing.
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While the US is bogged down in Iraq and Afghanistan, Russia is asserting itself, disrupting American plans for energy transport and control around the Caspian Sea . Perhaps unsurprisingly, the Bush Administration isn’t all that good at effective strategy, as Michael Klare discusses in TomDispatch.
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I hadn’t heard of Michael Hudson before, but I found what he had to say in this interview rather interesting. He gives explanations that sound plausible to me for a number of apparent oddities in the world economic system, for example his first answer about why the US can sustain such a huge deficit.
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In Minneapolis/St. Paul, there’s been plenty of democracy suppression over the last few days, with various police forces raiding homes and gathering points of groups planning to protest the Republican National Convention. Glenn Greenwald covers the bases here, and also has a follow-up about Federal involvement.
As pointed out in a letter to Glenn, this isn’t new by any means (nor, I suspect, is it restricted to the Republican convention—I’d be rather surprised if the same stuff happened around the DNC). It also goes back a lot further than the letter-writer suggests (they cite 2000 as the starting point).
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I finally got around to seeing The Dark Knight this evening. I had mixed feelings about Batman Begins—I loved the first half of it and hated the second half. The Dark Knight was different: the parts I hated and the parts I loved were mixed together throughout the film.
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This story about CBS Outdoor refusing art billboards in Minneapolis/St. Paul is quite illustrative of how tightly the public sphere is controlled in this country. CBS worries, essentially, about offending some powerful Republican patrons—at least, that’s my guess, it might not even get to that level of conscious thought.
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This was on Boing Boing, but I think it’s a good enough article that it’s worth posting anyway. Writer Joshuah Bearman has posted a PDF of his Harper’s article about Pac-Man and classic arcade game mastery. It’s well-written and compelling, and of course the fact that people still play those games so compulsively decades after their heyday is fascinating.
The United States outspends the next five or ten countries on the list combined when it comes to military spending. However, I’ve always been sceptical about translating this into actual military power, because it seems that tremendous amounts of waste clearly go on… even if other countries waste a percentage of their own military budgets on boondoggles and industrial subsidies, I suspect that the US is even worse due to the huge amount of money concerned.
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When I hear the name Joe Biden, I don’t have good impressions. I think of a long-term Democrat who’s thoroughly absorbed into the party machine, and into the ruling machine. For the detail work, though, I’ll leave you in the capable hands of Jonathan Schwarz, Dennis Perrin, and Radley Balko (who I don’t read regularly, but whose commentary on Biden and the “Drug War” seems solid).
The New Republic has an interesting article on how John McCain, as a political creature, emerged—essentially, he married his political ambitions to those of his second wife’s family. There aren’t huge shockers about Cindy McCain in the article (it’s not like the piece Vanity Fair did on Judi Giuliani), but as a background piece on McCain and people like him, it’s quite good.
In addition, Glenn Greenwald does the necessary work on contrasting how right-wing commentators treat some men who marry into wealth differently from others.