debatepedia

Debatepedia is a wiki project of the International Debate Education Association (IDEA) and Georgetown University students and alumni with the mission to act as the "Wikipedia of debate and deliberation". It improves your ability to think through the complicated issues and debates you care about, take a confident stand, and take action as a citizen. An important way to take action is by participating as an editor on the site, where you can create new debates, build and organize pro and con arguments, and present supporting evidence (quotes, studies, links) from your readings all so that you can better deliberate. Your efforts, in turn, will also improve the ability of a wide audience of citizens, leaders, and decision-makers to deliberate and draw reasoned conclusions. As such, we believe Debatepedia will help fix an apparent deficit of balanced reasoning and deliberation within the public and among leaders today. Get started Debatepedia is endorsed by the United States' National Forensic League.

YouTube - Frost over the World - Benazir Bhutto - 02 Nov 07

YouTube - Frost over the World - Benazir Bhutto - 02 Nov 07

Score One for the Webs Don Quixote - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Score One for the Webs Don Quixote - Bits - Technology - New York Times Blog

Carl Malamud’s quixotic mission to free government information took a step closer to reality on Wednesday morning when he struck a deal with Fastcase to electronically publish a free archive of federal case law.

Mr. Malamud, an Internet radio pioneer who set up public.resource.org in March with the idea of making “public works” accessible via the Internet, wants to force the federal government to make information more widely available.

In August he began using optical scanning technology to copy decisions that have been generally available only on paper in law libraries or via subscription from the Thomson West unit of the Canadian publishing conglomerate Thomson and from LexisNexis, a division of Reed Elsevier, based in London.

The two companies now dominate the $5 billion legal publishing market.

However, Fastcase, a smaller player based in Washington, D.C., decided that Mr. Malamud’s idea had merit. The company has provided him with its database of federal case law from 1950 to the present and the earliest Supreme Court decisions. Fastcase and public.resource.org have placed the archive in the public domain.

The archive includes 1.8 million pages of federal case law. Ed Walters, the chief executive of Fastcase said that the contribution was a way for the company to expand its reach beyond lawyers and make legal information available to the general public.

“I said I would put all federal case law on line and this is a huge chunk,” said Mr. Malamud.

Still missing are the Federal district court filings, but he said that volunteers are now beginning to place current legal decisions online on sites like Altlaw.

“It’s not LexisNexis, but the raw data is there,” he said.

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses

Open Yale Courses provides free and open access to seven introductory courses taught by distinguished teachers and scholars at Yale University. The aim of the project is to expand access to educational materials for all who wish to learn.

Open Yale Courses reflects the values of a liberal arts education. Yale's philosophy of teaching and learning begins with the aim of training a broadly based, highly disciplined intellect without specifying in advance how that intellect will be used.

This approach goes beyond the acquisition of facts and concepts to cultivate skills and habits of rigorous, independent thought: the ability to analyze, to ask the next question, and to begin the search for an answer.

We hope these courses will be a resource for critical thinking, creative imagination, and intellectual exploration.

Crooks and Liars » Bush League Justice: Partisan Corruption of the DoJ

Crooks and Liars » Bush League Justice: Partisan Corruption of the DoJ

Dan Abrams continues his series on how the Bush administration (in particular, Dick Cheney and Karl Rove) has wreaked havoc on the Department of Justice with a look today at how corrupted and nasty partisan prosecutions have become, with the DoJ going after more than five times the number of Democrats as Republicans and using party and Bush loyalty as the overriding criteria for hiring attorneys.

Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse:

The Bush administration forgot that the sign outside says “United States Department of Justice” not “Bush Administration Department of Justice.” And the cost to us has been as a country and the cost to the department in particular has been terribly high.

Arianna Huffington: HuffPost's "The Bush Years" Posters: A Powerful Political Stocking Stuffer - Politics on The Huffington Post

Arianna Huffington: HuffPost's "The Bush Years" Posters: A Powerful Political Stocking Stuffer - Politics on The Huffington Post

Events

Slogans

People

Global Neighbourhoods: The SAP Global Report--Part One

Global Neighbourhoods: The SAP Global Report--Part One

[For those of you new to this blog, I have been working on the SAP Global Report on Culture, Business & Social Media since June. It has been a massive, revealing and entirely enjoyable project for me, which will be continued before year end.

I submitted a lengthy report on my findings so far, earlier this month. I am working also on an Appendix summarizing what the participants told me.

The report has been favorably received by SAP who has given me permission to publish the report, minus my specific recommendations to them. Upon completion, I will also publish the Appendix.

I will be publishing the report here in chunks over the next several days. This is the first part.]

1. Overview

My assignment was at once simple and monumental. Investigate and report on the state of social media in the world. Do it in three months and report to SAP on what I found.

I would approach the assignment, not as a traditional researcher, which I am not; but as a social media champion who has co-authored a book on business blogging transparently on my blog.

Instead of asking the same series of checkbox questions to a large number of people then compiling numbers onto a spreadsheet, I talked to just 48 people, residing in 25 countries, posting 53,000 words of interview results on my blog. The interviewees were a diverse group, ranging from celebrity bloggers to high schoolers; from South African ERP consultants to Ukrainian citizen journalists, from Cambodian NGO workers and Kenyan orphans to China’s most famous serial entrepreneur.

In giving me this assignment through The Conversation Group, SAP’s Mike Prosceno told me a primary goal was to help SAP become a social media thought leader. That’s a daunting goal but the survey in itself became a significant step down the path required toward achieving it. The transparent approach we took made thousands of people aware of SAP’s interest. By sharing our findings, SAP has already demonstrated it understands that to be a social media leader, one needs to be generous. By doing our work publicly, the public wants to know more. To date, I’ve received six requests to speak on the SAP survey. Mike has so far been asked to speak with me twice.

The process further demonstrates yet another important lesson of social media. Not only must a company be both generous and transparent, it must also understand that control is slipping from its clutches of organizations into the hands of its constituencies. When, I began the SAP Global Survey, as it has come to be called, I thought I was in control, when in fact I was not.

My very first survey respondent, Hugh MacLeod, author of the wildly popular Gaping Void and a Microsoft consultant, posted his answers on his blog rather than mine. Then Tom Raftery, an Irish IT blogger who was not on my list at all, copied Hugh’s questions, then answered them on his own blog. This was followed by Ken Camp, a Microsoft consultant, whom I had never talked with who posted to his own site. However, he apparently didn’t like one of my questions, so he replaced it with one of his own, answering it. A little while later, Joe Thornley, a Canadian PR executive would answer my emailed questions with a video post which appeared on Facebook. This was followed by a couple of people taking it upon themselves to ask questions from the survey on both Facebook and LinkedIn. More than 100 people served up answers.

I had obviously lost control, and the SAP Survey benefited greatly by that loss. It demonstrated two central assumptions of social media and why it is so powerful. People are wired to collaborate and most people perform better when you don’t attempt to impose excessive controls over the process.

Of course, the results of these findings are what is of the greatest value, not just to SAP, but to the general public with whom we will share them. As a social media professional, I will admit that the findings provide very few surprises to me. However, the survey adds hundreds of data points to the general body of knowledge. These confirm arguments that have been previously based merely on guesswork.

[NEXT: Seven Key Findings.]

Official Google Reader Blog

Official Google Reader Blog

One of the great things about Reader, and feed readers in general, is that they let you follow sites much more efficiently than you could just by visiting them directly. This means that once you get into the flow of it, you can subscribe and keep track of many more sites than before. The problem then becomes: what should you subscribe to? For example, there are millions of blogs, and while a few are well known, there are many more interesting (micro) niche blogs that would be great to subscribe to, if only you could find them.

To help with the discovery of interesting sites to subscribe to, we just released personalized recommendations in Reader. When you visit our discovery page, you'll see quite a few feeds that we think you may find interesting. "Interesting" here is determined by what other feeds you subscribe to, as well as your Web History data, all taken into account in an automated, anonymized fashion. (To learn more about how our recommendations work, see our help article about them). Hopefully you'll find your recommendations interesting and helpful in getting your information-triggered dopamine squirt.

Recommendations make it even easier to subscribe to lots of feeds, so then the question becomes: how do you organize those feeds better? As luck would have it, one of the other features we're announcing today is drag-and-drop support for your subscriptions and folders. You can now easily move feeds between folders, as well as reorder things up and down within the list.

Official Google Blog: Calling all developers: $10M Android challenge

Official Google Blog: Calling all developers: $10M Android challenge

Last week we announced the Open Handset Alliance, a group of mobile and technology leaders committed to improving the mobile experience and Android, the first truly open and comprehensive platform for mobile devices.

Today, the team is releasing an early look at the Android SDK for developers interested in building applications for Android. To get things rolling, we've also announced the Android Developer Challenge, which provides $10 million in awards for developers who build great applications for Android. Read more on the new Android Developers blog to learn about this exciting mobile platform.

With so many brilliant minds striving to design engaging, innovative applications, mobile users around the world (3 billion and counting!) can expect phones equipped with dynamic and unprecedented applications very soon.

The Great Firewall: China's Misguided — and Futile — Attempt to Control What Happens Online

The Great Firewall: China's Misguided — and Futile — Attempt to Control What Happens Online:


















"The Golden Shield — the latest addition to what is widely referred to as the Great Firewall of China — was supposed to monitor, filter, and block sensitive online content. But only a year after completion, it already looks doomed to fail. True, surveillance remains widespread, and outspoken dissidents are punished harshly. But my experience as a correspondent in China for seven years suggests that the country's stranglehold on the communications of its citizens is slipping: Bloggers and other Web sources are rapidly supplanting Communist-controlled news outlets. Cyberprotests have managed to bring about an important constitutional change. And ordinary Chinese citizens can circumvent the Great Firewall and evade other forms of police observation with surprising ease. If they know how."

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out ... - Google Book Search

The Pleasure of Finding Things Out ... - Google Book Search





























Richard Feynman:

p. 110-111

"I believe that we should demand that people try in their own minds to obtain for themselves a more consistent picture of their own world; that they not permit themselves the luxury of having their brain cut in four pieces or two pieces even, and on one side they believe this and on the other side they believe that, but never try to compare the two points of view.

Because we have learned that, by trying to put the points of view that we have in our head together and comparing one to the other, we make some progress in understanding and appreciating where we are and what we are. And I believe that science has remained irrelevant because we wait until somebody asks us questions or until we are invited to give a speech on Einstein's theory to people who don't understand Newtonian mechanics, but we never are invited to give an attack on faith healing, or on astrology-on what is the scientific view of astrology today.

I think that we must mainly write some articles. Now what would happen? The person who believes in astrology will have to learn some astronomy. The person who believes in faith healing may have to learn some medicine, because of the arguments going back and forth; and some biology. In other words, it will be necessary that science become relevant. The remark which I read somewhere, that science is all right so long as it doesn't attack religion, was the clue that I needed to understand the problem.

As long as it doesn't attack religion it need not be paid attention to and nobody has to learn anything. So it can be cut off from modern society except for its applications, and thus be isolated. And then we have this terrible struggle to try to explain things to people who have no reason to want to know. But if they want to defend their own point of view, they will have to learn what yours is a little bit.

So I suggest, maybe incorrectly and perhaps wrongly, that we are too polite. There was in the past an era of conversation on these matters. It was felt by the church that Galileo's views attacked the Church. It is not felt by the Church today that the scientific views attack the Church. Nobody is worrying about it. Nobody attacks; I mean, nobody writes trying to explain the inconsistencies between theological views and the scientific views held by different people today-or even the inconsistencies sometimes held by the same scientists between his religious and scientific beliefs.

Now the next subject, and the last main subject that I want to talk about, is the one I really consider the most important and the most serious. And that has to do with the question of uncertainty and doubt. A scientist is never certain. We all know that. We know that all our statements are approximate statements with different degrees of certainty; that when a statement is made, the question is not whether it is true or false but rather how likely it is to be true or false.

"Does God exist?" "When put in the questional form, how likely is it?" It makes such a terrifying transformation of the religious point of view, and that is why the religious point of view is unscientific. We must discuss each question within the uncertainties that are allowed. And as evidence grows it increases the probability perhaps that some idea is right, or decreases it. But it never makes absolutely certain one way or the other. Now we have found that this is of paramount importance in order to progress. We absolutely must leave room for doubt or there is no progress and there is no learning. There is no learning without having to pose a question. And the question requires doubt. People search for certainty. But there is no certainty."

» Google’s new mantra: Making the Web a better platform for all | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com

» Google’s new mantra: Making the Web a better platform for all | Between the Lines | ZDNet.com:

"“In the next year we will make a series of announcements and spend hundreds of millions on innovations and giving them away as open source,” said Vic Gundotra, the new head of Google’s developer programs. Google believes that innovation on the Web has been lacking. XML and HTTP Request were innovative technologies in 1998, but it took until April 2004 for an application, Gmail, to really take advantage of them, Gundotra said.

The initiative to gift Google’s technology to the Web community at large comes from co-founders Larry Page and Sergey Brin. “Google was born on the Web. Larry and Sergey and the rest of Google built Google on the Web and with open source. They want to give back,” Gundotra said.

The idea is that by making the Web a better platform, through open sourcing core software technology, innovation will accelerate and improve the overall Web experience for all. But the Googlers are not being purely altruistic.

“It also makes good economic sense. The more applications, the more usage. More users means more searches,” Gundotra said. And, more searches means more revenue for Google. The goal is to grow the overall market, not just to increase market share."

A picture of the E8 root system

A picture of the E8 root system

The E₈ root system consists of 240 vectors in an eight-dimensional space. See what is E₈? Those vectors are the vertices (corners) of an eight-dimensional object called the Gosset polytope 4₂₁. In the 1960s, Peter McMullen drew (by hand) a 2-dimensional representation of the Gosset polytope 4₂₁. The image shown below was computer-generated by John Stembridge, based on McMullen's drawing.

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Is mathematical pattern the theory of everything? - fundamentals - 17 November 2007 - New Scientist

mirrored on techbus

GARRETT LISI is an unlikely individual to be staking a claim for a theory of everything. He has no university affiliation and spends most of the year surfing in Hawaii. In winter, he heads to the mountains near Lake Tahoe, California, to teach snowboarding. Until recently, physics was not much more than a hobby.

That hasn't stopped some leading physicists sitting up and taking notice after Lisi made his theory public on the physics pre-print archive this week (www.arxiv.org/abs/0711.0770). By analysing the most elegant and intricate pattern known to mathematics, Lisi has uncovered a relationship underlying all the universe's particles and forces, including gravity - or so he hopes. Lee Smolin at the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics (PI) in Waterloo, Ontario, Canada, describes Lisi's work as 'fabulous'. 'It is one of the most compelling unification models I've seen in many, many years,' he says.

That's some achievement, ... [just open up a little patch of design space and see who surfs in]

see also n-category café article

Discover: Map: A visualization showing the structure of scientific knowledge

To show how information builds up and flows among scientific disciplines, Columbia University computer scientist W. Bradford Paley, along with colleagues Kevin Boyack and Dick Klavans, categorized about 800,000 scholarly papers into 776 areas of scientific study (shown as colored circular nodes) based on how often the papers were cited together by other papers. Paley then grouped those nodes by color under 23 broader areas of scientific inquiry, from mental health to fluid mechanics.

1 Social Scientists Don’t Do Chemistry

The bigger a node is, the more papers it contains. Heavily cited papers appear in more than one node. Black lines connect any nodes that contain the same papers; the darker a link is, the more papers the connected nodes have in common. These links create the structure of the map and tend to pull similar scientific disciplines closer to one another.

2 Birds of a Feather

Paley refers to his map as a “feather boa”—the feathers being gently waving strings of key words that uniquely define each node’s particular subject matter. In tiny type, the word string “percutaneous tracheostomy, material review, autoimmune pancreatitis, and dialysis catheter,” for example, swirls off a node in the infectious disease area. Unlike the carefully calculated placement of the nodes, the team’s arrangement of the word strings on the page was left mostly to aesthetics.

3 The Road to Knowledge

The map doesn’t show the road to breakthrough discoveries, but it can be used to determine which areas of science are most closely connected to one another, as well as which are the most—and least—intellectually vital and productive. Advances in mathematics are few. Medicine, on the other hand, dominates the lower half of the map.

4 No Science Is an Island

…except maybe organic chemistry. One might assume that this bane of premed students is closely tied to medicine, but the map shows that the route from organic chemistry to health care requires more than one pit stop through fields like analytical chemistry, physical chemistry, biology, and even earth sciences. In fact, all of chemistry is a bit of an inside job. The links between the nodes of different chemistry disciplines are darker than other links because the disciplines tend to contain the same papers.

5 The Friendster Element

On the map, computer science is linked more closely to social sciences like psychology and sociology than to applied physics. “If you trust it for a minute, it does make intuitive sense,” Paley says. Social networks like Friendster depend heavily on software programs, while social scientists frequently rely on computers for statistical analysis.

SI.com - NCAA Football - Trinity needs 15 laterals to pull out improbable victory - Sunday October 28, 2007 3:45AM

SI.com - NCAA Football - Trinity needs 15 laterals to pull out improbable victory - Sunday October 28, 2007 3:45AM

same day self-exemplifcation

Taking video of artist Coygon Robinson, Jr. in his Terrace Street studio, Oakland California, around the corner from Archway School.

I was taking video of the Archway Walkathon and noticed his 'art show open house' sign, so I went up to have a look. I was holding my camera and tripod, all set up, and ended up doing an impromptu interview / conversation with the artist in his studio. Here it is, in two parts:

Part 1 (7:16)


Part 2 (7:44)

• Coygon Robinson, Jr., Mississippi Oral History Project

click on image to enlarge

ok, 3 parts:

Part 3, Mose T (1:20)

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Open Content Alliance (OCA) - Home

Open Content Alliance (OCA) - Home

NASA - Stellar Fireworks

NASA - Stellar Fireworks





Resembling an aerial fireworks explosion, this dramatic image of the energetic star WR124, taken by the Hubble Space Telescope, reveals that it is surrounded by hot clumps of gas being ejected into space at speeds of over 100,000 miles per hour.

Also remarkable are vast arcs of glowing gas around the star, which are resolved into filamentary, chaotic substructures, yet with no overall global shell structure. Though the existence of clumps in the winds of hot stars has been deduced through spectroscopic observations of their inner winds, Hubble resolves them directly in the nebula M1-67 around WR124 as 100 billion-mile wide glowing gas blobs. Each blob is about 30 times the mass of the Earth.

The massive, hot central star is known as a Wolf-Rayet star. This extremely rare and short-lived class of super-hot star is going through a violent, transitional phase characterized by the fierce ejection of mass. The blobs may result from the furious stellar wind that is unstable as it flows into space. As the blobs cool, they eventually will dissipate into space and so don't pose any threat to neighboring stars.

The star is 15,000 light-years away, located in the constellation Sagittarius. The picture was taken with Hubble's Wide Field Planetary Camera 2 in March 1997. The image is false-colored to reveal details in the nebula's structure.

Image credit: NASA/Yves Grosdidier (University of Montreal and Observatoire de Strasbourg), Anthony Moffat (Universitie de Montreal), Gilles Joncas (Universite Laval), Agnes Acker (Observatoire de Strasbourg)

Interview with Carol Lam

Stanford Lawyer #77 Q & A: Legal Matters with Carol Lam

Whatever one's views on the propriety or legality of the administration's actions, the firings will be remembered as a political blunder—as well as a public reckoning. And this is Lam's main point. She is, even after the events of the past year, optimistic about the future of the DOJ because of the public's attention to the controversy. "For me it's not a loss of faith in the Department of Justice or this country. It's really a reaffirmation and a recognition that we can't take justice for granted," she says.

. . .. ... .. . .

TPM timeline

shift happens

h/t the letter

duration 8:19


An official update to the original "Shift Happens" video from Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, this June 2007 update includes new and updated statistics, thought-provoking questions and a fresh design.

For more information, or to join the conversation, please visit http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com. Content by Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod, design and development by XPLANE.

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Gore Derangement Syndrome

Crooks and Liars » Krugman: “Gore drives right-wingers insane”

Nicole noted the first few minutes of Fox News Sunday yesterday, and just how angry the conservative Republicans were about Al Gore winning the Nobel Peace Prize. [Noted bloviator] Bill Kristol disparaged Gore and the Nobel prize itself, saying “it’s a prize given by bloviators to a bloviator.” Charles Krauthammer insisted the award goes to “people whose politics are either anti-American or anti-Bush, and that’s why [Gore] won it.”

These pundits were obviously bitter, much the same way National Review’s Iain Murray was late last week, when he suggested Gore share his award with Osama bin Laden, “who implicitly endorsed Gore’s stance” in a September video harangue. (Apparently, to accept global warming is to embrace a terrorist philosophy.)

It led Paul Krugman to ask a good question: “What is it about Mr. Gore that drives right-wingers insane?”

The headline on Krugman’s piece is entirely appropriate: “Gore Derangement Syndrome.” The whole “derangement syndrome” phenomenon stems from an increasingly common problem — when contempt for a leader strays from simple political opposition to irrational, reflexive antagonism. If so-and-so says “day,” I’ll say “night,” even if the sun is shining.

It’s more important to fight the perceived opponent than to make sense.

And for far too long, that’s exactly how the right has approached Gore and the science on global warming. The evidence must be wrong, because Gore believes it. The Nobel Peace Prize must be worthless, because Gore won it.

These aren’t arguments. They’re sad and nonsensical temper-tantrums.

Open Avatar Announcement a Great Move

Open Avatar Announcement a Great Move

The announcement today by Linden Labs and IBM that they are working on interoperability in virtual worlds is really good news not just for the 3D web, but perhaps a sign that some companies are getting that "winner takes all" isn't the only way to play the game. First, the announcement, as reported by Steve Lohr in the New York Times story Free the Avatars:

"At the Virtual Worlds Conference and Expo at San Jose, Calif., the two companies are announcing plans to develop open standards that will allow avatars to roam from one virtual community to the next. The goal is let a person create a digital alter-ego that can travel to many virtual worlds, keeping the same name, look and even digital currency.

...

The logic of the move is impeccable. The growth of the Internet and the Web, after all, has been fueled by open standards. The more people who can communicate, inform and entertain each other freely on a network, the more valuable it is. Economists call this the “network effect.” And the Internet is the network effect on steroids.

"I.B.M. also hosted a meeting on Tuesday in San Jose with a group of companies and some university researchers to discuss open standards for virtual worlds and plans for establishing an organization to promote the technologies needed for an interoperable 3D Internet. The companies included Cisco, Google, Linden Lab, Sony, Intel, Multiverse, Microsoft, Motorola, Philips and others."

Amen to the logic of open systems and interoperability. They are the secret to the internet's ability to create value, changing what had become a zero-sum game in the computer industry to an open ended game that just keeps on creating new value.

And virtual worlds are far more than a game. They are ultimately a simulation layer that can be overlaid on the real world, as well as creating new purely virtual "real estate." (See my 2006 Radar post Google Earth, Sketchup, and Second Life. The story I wrote the other day, mentioning SAP's work with a Swiss property management company to turn Second Life into a platform for sensor-based property management, is also relevant. See also Forterra's "distributed virtual world technology for the corporate, healthcare, government, and entertainment industries.")

Just as the web put an end to the competition between early online communities to be the one-size-fits-all destination, an interoperable 3D web will allow vertical 3D application niches and platforms to flourish.

I look also for the 3D web to interoperate with location-based services. We shouldn't think of this interoperability as being just for virtual worlds. Ultimately, virtual is just another layer on top of physical. GIS folks don't think of maps per se, they think of map layers -- hundreds or thousands of levels of data overlaid on the world. Many of these layers are abstract and virtual. Aren't street addresses actually virtual? Might not other classes of data be anchored to the real world in some way? A company has a physical address, but they also have an address on the telephone network, an address on the web, and many others. Just as a skyscraper reaches into the sky from a single street address, housing thousands of souls at work or at sleep, might there not be virtual towers anchored to physical locations, embracing and extending our world?

There's quite a future ahead of us here. It's silly to try to recreate the wheel (or to own the wagon) when by working together we can build something that is so much bigger. Open standards are a winning strategy.

stuck

Thanks for posting the Stewart/Matthews interview. That is a classic, right up there with Stewart's appearance on Crossfire on October 15, 2004 (transcript).

I don't want to bury it with all of this text, so here it is up top:



Fox Reax

A friend was visiting my corner of the blogosphere for the first time shortly after that post appeared at the top of the geebus.

Friend: I was intrigued by the crooked logic piece, but had trouble following so I went to the Jon Stewart link and watched his interview with Chris Matthews and laughed my head off. So I would say my first visit to your blog was successful.

After viewing the Stewart/Mathews clip, I agree that this was a successful first visit from my perspective too, given how highly I think of Jon Stewart's performance. So thanks for posting that, geebus.

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My reaction to the Stewart/Matthews interview:

i did not laugh my head off

i did not laugh at all

i just sat silent and calm

operating my photon reception system just like i do a camcorder at a soccer game

when taking soccer video, one key is to introduce as little additional motion into the frame as possible

there is plenty of motion in the frame as it is

i guess it is a little like archers releasing the arrow between heartbeats

the calmer you are the better

mind you, it's not that i don't think it's funny

karate man cheer his daughter's goals on the inside

so i'm watching jon stewart with my on-board video system

and he's gliding into the box and eluding defenders at will

he's cutting and dodging and having fun, dancing the samba

he reminds me a little of my friend's daughter, in this regard :)

he and his teammates are playing keep away, triangulating, sticking the ball into the net at will

teammates?

all the rolled-up collections of facts and emergent understanding that jon stewart has on his side

it's so clear to him, he has such a facility, it's as if ... as if ... as if he were pulling the sword from the stone like a hot knife from butter

but it's absolutely invisible to Matthews

who apparently (I haven't read his book myself, the one he was on Stewart's show to talk about) ...

Sent at 11:02 AM on Friday R:

has evinced a strong affinity to Thrasymachus, of Plato's Republic fame, the greek god of spin doctors:

Glaucon asks whether justice is good by nature or only by law or convention, and is thus the first participant in the dialogue who turns to nature as his standard. He is a daring man whose desire not to be hoodwinked by common opinions about the good gives him a certain intellectual force lacked by Thrasymachus (the ace Rhetorician).

Thrasymachus is perhaps too concerned with, and dependent on, what men usually hold to be good to look for a standard independent of civil society which might divorce him from it.

And he also is so convinced of the power of art, and of his art in particular, to accomplish whatever one wants that he does not feel compelled to look for the permanent limits and ends which cannot be altered by art.

Glaucon tells the story of Gyges, the shepherd, who discovered a magic ring that made the wearer invisible, and, making use of the ring, deposed his master and exploited his master’s flocks. Glaucon draws the conclusion that if a man could be invisible to human beings, there would be no reason for him to be just in his pursuit of the good.

By means of Thrasymachus’ rhetoric, men believe they can make their acts change appearance, which is tantamount to making them invisible.

Sent at 11:09 AM on Friday R:

the above is quoted or paraphrased from Professor Bloom's interpretive essay

inserting cite for future reference ... please stand by

Sent at 11:22 AM on Friday R:

The Republic of Plato (A. Bloom trans.), Basic Books, Second Edition (Paris 1991), pp. 340-41

[alibris / amazon]

actually, this is fairly verbatim, with only non-substantive edits so i'm glad i fetched up the cite

karate man traffic in ideas

ideas speak for themselves and can defend themselves and can persist across millenia waiting for the logic of human destiny to iterate itself out a better substrate

and avatars like jon stewart

and you
(dear reader)

but, jon stewart, geez, what an epic freakin hero

every generation throws a hero up the pop charts

but this is a different kind of hero, and a different kind of pop chart

pop chart: chart: map: phase space

y'know, i don't want to be fooled by randomness (or just plain foolishness) ...

but couldn't a fella be excused for thinking that there is a new kind of information processing substrate under the sun that is proving to be remarkably conducive to the success of the rigorously truthful strategy?

jon stewart is threading passes around and through thrasymachus doofus-boy matthews' pathetic swiss-cheese defense. it's as if matthews were standing on the field like a petulant playground bully screaming at the ref some ridiculous arguments about why he should be considered to be winning the game, when for all the world to see Stewart's side is playing the beautiful game, joga bonito, fast and fair; and Matthews is just a crybaby defender throwing a fit when shown the red card.

Matthews gets frustrated just like a defender who has gotten burned all game starts playing rougher, throwing elbows, tackling from behind, charging off the ball ...

the frustrated defender's actions depart from the rules of the game (and are increasingly at odds with broader values of youth sports communities, etc.) just like matthews departs from the merits and, flustered and ready to brawl, attempts to spin his way out of his pit, practicing Thrasymachus' ancient art in a pathetic (and self-defeating) attempt to salvage the thesis of his book (which, ironically, is apparently to the effect that Thrasymachus had it right).

at that moment, he is as stuck a pig as i have ever seen on a nationally televised program
(not that I watch many nationally televised programs, so my sample is small)

Self-defeat of this sort is a special kind of self-exemplification, and it makes for good television.

and here's the thing:

he would not be as stuck a pig if he were yet more of a pig

for example, if it were tom delay up there, or larry craig ... they would be saying stuff with no connection to reason at all

matthews is db, don't get me wrong, but he is far more rational than the most gonzo larry craig types

Thrasymachus' strategy, after all, has persisted and thrived

and this makes him all the more a stuck stuck pig

karate man agree with jon stewart that there are "permanent limits and ends which cannot be altered by art," to borrow Professor Bloom's words once again; and further, that they are ascertainable and can't be infinitely spun.

. . .. ... ..... ........ oOo ........ ..... ... .. . .

& Mark Leibowich, NYT Magazine 4.11.2008

Comedy Central : John Stewart and Chris Matthews

Comedy Central : Videos

Slashdot | UC Berkeley Posts Full Lectures to YouTube

Slashdot | UC Berkeley Posts Full Lectures to YouTube

mytrip writes to tell us that Berkeley is now using YouTube as an important teaching tool. Today marks the first time a university has made full course lecture available via the popular video sharing site. Featuring over 300 hours of videotaped courses initially, officials hope to continue to expand this program.


Here is one that looks interesting (Guest lecturer Sergey Brin)

A Milky Way Band

APOD: 2007 September 30 - A Milky Way Band

Curtains for Convention

A blog is a collection of digital content that, when examined over a period of time, exposes the intellectual soul of its author or authors. Blogging is the act of creating, composing, and publishing this content; and a blogger is the person behind the curtain. Part social software and part web building, blogging is peer-to-peer publishing—the future of our connected lives.

Biz Stone, Who Let the Blogs Out? 35 (2004).

like a patient etherized upon the table

daily kos

A lot of Very Important People keep telling me that I have to continue being patient with the Iraq war. People like the President of the United States:

March: Bush Pleads for Patience in Iraq War

May: Bush Urges Patience on Iraq

June: Bush urges patience on Iraq

July: War In Year 5; Bush Requests Patience

August: Bush pleads for more patience for Iraq war efforts

September: Iraqi civilian deaths up, Bush urges patience

Contrary to what the frequently-wrong media pundits say, I (and, I'm willing to bet, you) do understand the gravity of the situation in Iraq. It's the mother of all messes. One of the worst blunders our country has ever made. It's just a big ball of bad and there's no way to get around it. If we stay it's bad and if we leave it's bad. The word of the day, the week, the month, the year and the decade is: "Bad."

And here we are, four and a half bad years after we strolled into Baghdad with our picnic baskets and Starbucks franchise leases, being asked to be patient just a little while longer because we're this close to going from "baddest" to "badder" on the scale of bad. Fine. I'm a reasonable man and perfectly capable of being patient. I've even heard it's a virtue.

But I want something in return. I want the nincompoops who orchestrated this farce in a massive rush of non-patience to excuse themselves from the public stage. That includes the president, the vice president and the secretary of state. They need to resign, find a nice rocking chair far away from D.C., and never be heard from again.

It includes the neocons and their think-tank buddies who continue to flap their gums about how awesome the Iraq war is going and wouldn’t it be swell to bring the same kind of awesomeness to Iran NOW NOW NOW!!!

It includes the journalists who helped beat the drums of war by "catapulting the propaganda" and advancing the official White House narrative. And it includes the members of the House and Senate who believe that buying "five rugs for five bucks" at an Iraqi marketplace surrounded by armed guards and attack helicopters is all the proof I should need that things are going swell, so sit down, shut up and be patient.

Greenwald: The art of neocon innuendo

Glenn Greenwald - Political Blogs and Opinions - Salon

Writing in National Review a couple of days ago, Michael Ledeen of the American Enterprise Institute blatantly violated the New Rule in America which prohibits questioning the credibility of a four-star General in a Time of War, when Ledeen (during a Time of War) attacked recently retired Four-Star General John Abizaid for explaining why a nuclear-armed Iran is less dangerous than a U.S. war with Iran. Said Ledeen in attacking the General:

Abizaid Speaks! Oh Dear... [Michael Ledeen]

General Abizaid has unburdened himself on the subject of nuclear Iran. He thinks Iran is kinda like the Soviet Union, it's deterrable, and while he'd rather Iran not have nukes, all in all we could live with it. . . .

I'm grateful for this bit of enlightenment from the former commander of Central Command, whose failed strategy in Iraq led us to fight more effectively, especially against the Iranians' depredations in both Iraq and Afghanistan. It was under Abizaid that the copious evidence of Iranian activity was suppressed, and we, let's say, took it easy on the thousands of Revolutionary Guards killers running all over the country. He now wants to extend that policy to Iran itself. He's got plenty of company in Foggy Bottom, Langley, and the White House.

So Gen. Abizaid, who "failed" in his mission, also "suppressed" the "copious evidence" of Iranian involvement in Iraq. That sounds like Ledeen is accusing General Abizaid of being less than honest -- how else can one characterize someone who "suppresses" evidence? -- and that, as we learned this week, is not allowed. The Commander-in-Chief just explained this morning that such attacks are "disgusting" and constitute attacks on The Troops Themselves.

This morning, Ledeen wrote a post reciting the only political argument he knows (other than slandering Four-Star Generals in a Time of War) -- namely, that we are at War with Iran and have been for 3 decades:

But We Are at War with Iran [Michael Ledeen]

The current kerfluffle over Adhmadinejad's proposed pilgrimage to Ground Zero shows once again how bad ideas drag us irresistibly to bad policy. Having refused for nearly thirty years to deal with the reality that Iran declared war on us in 1979 and has been waging it ever since, we are now acting as if Iran were just another country and its president therefore entitled to all the usual courtesies for visiting foreign dignitaries.

As I wrote recently:

Ledeen is plagued by the single most absurd yet fundamental contradiction one can imagine. His central argument, repeated over and over and now a staple in neoconservative mythology, is that Iran has been at war with the U.S. continuously ever since 1979. We just haven't fought back yet.

Yet Ledeen played a central role in brokering the sale by Israel to Iran of highly advanced weapons as part of the Reagan administration's Iran-contra shenanigans in the 1980s. A military confrontation with Iran would likely subject U.S. troops to attack from the very same nasty weapons which Ledeen and his friends provided to Iran during a time when, Ledeen and neoconservatives now insist, Iran was waging war on the U.S. As Scott Lemieux, among many others, has noted, providing arms to a country "waging war against the U.S." -- as Ledeen did with Iran in the 1980s if his central premise is to be believed -- is called treason.

As I've documented previously, one of the most intellectually dishonest attributes of neoconservatives generally -- one of the principal features that makes them such a corrosive presence in our political discourse -- is their fondness for trafficking in innuendo and argument by implication. They love to spew out vague phrases filled with obvious, implied meaning yet they virtually always lack the courage to explicitly state what they are trying to convey. They will say things like "it's time to get our hands dirty in this war" or "we need to stop being so politically correct in how we fight" or "it's time that there be real consequences for those who undermine America in a time of war," but they will be too afraid to specify exactly what they are advocating even when asked to do so.

Examples of this neoconservative intellectual cowardice are too numerous to chronicle. As I noted in that prior post, after AEI's Michael Rubin kept spewing out warmongering slogans regarding Iran, he was pressed by Andrew Stuattaford on what we should do specifically (invade them? bomb them? what?), and Rubin finally wrote: "With regard to much more precise options, such things are better discussed in private, and I would be glad to do so."

That same week, Mark Levin pounded his chest and wrote about a NYT article which he claimed "gives up more of our strategic secrets": "I long for the good old days when Abraham Lincoln, our greatest president, punished such acts of betrayal. And no, I am not joking." But he refused to say what he meant when I emailed and asked specifically what he had in mind -- hanging or imprisoning reporters and editors? In 2005, Fred Barnes in The Weekly Standard ominously urged that the White House issue "a clear delineation of what's permissible and what's out of bounds in dissent on Iraq" without bothering to say what that means. And super tough guy Frank Gaffney, after he got caught using a fake Lincoln quote in his column implying that anti-war Senators be hanged for treason, then meekly refused to say what he really thought should be done to such traitors.

One would hope that with the Existential War of Civilizations -- World War IV -- raging, our most courageous Churchillian Warriors wouldn't be so passive about what they believe. But alas, arguing by implicit smears and deniable innuendo -- and lacking the courage of one's convictions to state clearly what one is implying -- is perfectly compatible with a character which calls for endless wars to be fought by others.

Along those lines, I had the following e-mail exchange with Michael Ledeen today, whose views on these matters -- in light of his new book, the various and increasingly absurd Iran "controversies", and his status as favorite right-wing Iran "expert" -- I really was hoping to probe in order to write about. This is the exchange with the emails printed verbatim and in their entirety:

GG to ML

Mr. Ledeen - I'm writing a piece for Salon on your new book. I am curious about one issue in particular -- if, as you frequently say (including this morning), "Iran declared war on us in 1979 and has been waging it ever since," do you consider it to be an act of treason for those in the Reagan administration who helped facilitate the sale of highly sophisticated weapons to Iran during the 1980s, during the time when they were waging war against the U.S.?

Isn't it the ultimate act of treason to help a country at war with the U.S. obtain weapons? Any thoughts you have to be included in the article would be appreciated.

Glenn Greenwald

GG to ML

While I have you - one other question: yesterday, you indicated that Gen. Abizaid had "suppressed" evidence of Iranian acts of war inside Iraq. Do you have any ideas as to what motivated him to do so?

Glenn Greenwald

ML to GG (re: arming Iran)

As I wrote at the time, quoting Talleyrand, "it was worse than a crime, it was a blunder."

ML to GG (re: Abizaid)

it's all in the book, which i'm sure you are memorizing.

GG to ML

But was it treason to work to provide arms to a country at war with the U.S.?

ML to GG

listen, i've answered you twice. you've slandered me from pillar to post, please stop being rude.

GG to ML

It's true that you responded to my emails, but you didn't actually answer the question. I'll include the email exchange and let the reader decide if you did.

Glenn Greenwald

That wasn't very constructive. Ledeen is perfectly content to urge war with Iran based on the moronic slogan -- now a right-wing article of faith -- that they have been "at war with us since 1979," but he is completely unwilling to account for his own behavior or that of the Reagan administration towards Iran during that time. And he's eager to leave all sorts of dark innuendo about Gen. Abizaid ("suppressing evidence" of Iranian acts of war) but refuses to state what he means or why he thinks Abazaid would engage in such treacherous behavior.

This is how neoconservatives function. Ledeen's intellectually dishonest tactic is found in virtually every one of Bill Kirstol's columns and Fox News television sneers. For instance, Kristol -- attacking Columbia University President Lee Bollinger's invitation to New Adolph Hitler President Ahmadinejad to speak -- says today: "A perfect synecdoche for too much of American higher education: they are friendlier to Ahmadinejad than to the U.S. military." So is Bollinger anti-American? A Traitor? As always, Kristol merely leaves the dirty innuendo against anyone who opposes more wars against Israel's enemies, but always lacks the courage explicitly to make the argument.

As noted, the Commander-in-Chief himself has spent the last couple of days wallowing in this tactic. In addition to his adoption of this smear at his Press Conference this morning, the President also -- during one of the little meetings yesterday he is so fond of holding with adoring sycophants calling themselves "journalists" -- announced about the MoveOn ad, with a proud Bill Kristol present: "this attack was not just on General Petraeus, it was on the military up and down the line." Kristol, the True Expert in such innuendo, then added:

For to accuse Petraeus of cooking the books is to accuse a host of his subordinates and staff of colluding with him in lying to Congress and the American public. And to remain silent in the face of this slander. . . is to show a striking lack of concern for the reputation and honor of the American military."

Why do Democrats have such a "striking lack of concern for the reputation and honor of the American military"? Why are war opponents attacking "the military up and down the line"? Do they hate the military? Are they anti-American? Are they rooting for the Terrorists to win? The swaggering Commander-in-Chief and his resolute warrior-followers will never say. They lack the courage to say what they imply. They constantly opt instead to argue by unstated implications and lurking innuendo and smears. Whatever else that might be, courageous and resolute it isn't.

UPDATE: In fairness to the neoconservatives and their cowardly smearing tactics, one could argue that it is rational for them to continue to wield them given how effective they are against Congressional Democrats, who are well on their way to making the Democratic Party the single most pathetic political entity one can recall encountering:

Senate Condemns MoveOn Ad [Byron York]

The Senate has just passed, with 70+ votes, the Cornyn Amendment, which reads:

To express the sense of the Senate that General David H. Petraeus, Commanding General, Multi-National Force-Iraq, deserves the full support of the Senate and strongly condemn personal attacks on the honor and integrity of General Petraeus and all members of the United States Armed Forces.

York went on to note, helpfully, that "No Republican voted against condemning the MoveOn ad," but Democrats split 22-25 in favor of the Resolution. Congratulations to Dianne Feinstein, Pat Leahy, Jim Webb and 19 other Senate Democrats for finally finding something they can get done with the control of the Congress given to them by the American voter. Nobody can say anymore that they have achieved nothing.

By condemning the largest and most active anti-war organization in the country, at least Bill Kristol won't say anything mean about them. It's too bad they have never found the time or inclination to pass resolutions condemning the endless attacks on the patriotism and integrity of war opponents, including decorated combat veterans within their own party. Is there anything left to say about how barren and worthless these Senate Democrats are? I can't find anything.

UPDATE II: There is a lot of good commentary around regarding the indescribably stupid hysteria generated by the proposed visit to Ground Zero by Iranian President Ahmadinejad. I linked to some of that commentary above. I actually set out to write about this matter earlier today but found the reaction so utterly infantile that I couldn't really find a way to say anything constructive about it.

Fortunately, Josh Marshall has now written the perfect post, expressing all of the points that ought to be made. Both Rudy Giuliani and John McCain are at the center of this, competing with one another -- as usual -- to see who can be more extreme, as they vie for the affection of the Civilization Warriors who think they own 9/11 and who believe that every vaguely unfriendly Muslim and/or Arab is responsible for it. I recommend highly reading Josh's post.

UPDATE III: Attaturk has made a critical find for the Nation. The Senate must convene, overnight, one of those dramatic emergency sessions which it heroically called to save Terri Schiavo, this time to condemn National Review, Jonah Goldberg, and an active duty military member for slandering our Troops -- in a Time of War no less -- as follows:

Anyway, just wanted to give a perspective on Wesley Clark from the active-duty side of things. . . . [N]othing that Clark has said or done has surprised me in the least. Why? Because he acts just like the vast majority of general officers that it has been my displeasure to deal with during my 16 years in the U.S. military. . . . . There are a few good generals here and there but most of them are an embarrassment.

Generals are dishonest. This is a tricky charge to throw out, but it's the sad truth. I've seen more out-and-out lies from general officers than any other people in the military. In a weird way, they are just like professional politicians in this regard.

The Senate cannot stand by quietly while NR and Goldberg defame our men and women in harm's way. The Senate formally announced today that it "strongly condemn[s] personal attacks on the honor and integrity of . . . all members of the United States Armed Forces" and must act against this anti-military slur from our nation's leading conservative pro-war magazine. This is just despicable.

-- Glenn Greenwald

Hagel Calls Bush's Iraq Policy "Dirty Trick" - The Huffington Post

The Huffington Post

Hagel Calls Bush's Iraq Policy "Dirty Trick"

From CNN's Late Edition with Wolf Blitzer: Republican Senator Cornyn was asked to respond to a comment from fellow Republican Senator Chuck Hagel. Senator Hagel strongly criticized President Bush's Iraq policy, going so far as to call it a "dirty trick." video

see also Crooks & Liars

Networks create “instant world telescope”

the geebus science and health: Networks create “instant world telescope”

Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Tracking the growth of wikinomics

Wikinomics » Blog Archive » Tracking the growth of wikinomics

It wasn’t too long ago that the term wikinomics didn’t pass the test for inclusion on wikipedia - a funny story that involves us posting a “stub” on wikipedia a few months before the book was published, only to have it quickly (and in truth, rightfully) squashed by the power of the wikipedia editorial process. Now not only does it have it’s own page (including links to presentations I have made about the topic), you get over 2,100,000 hits for a “wikinomics” search on Google.

But while I’m obviously happy about the traction we’re gaining, sometimes I find what’s most interesting is going through the Google blog search. These blogs are a great way to monitor the breadth of acceptance for the term and find news ideas tied to the concept - and it’s amazing to see the variety of contexts in which wikinomics is now being put to use.

If you go through even the first few pages posts range from book reviews to thoughts on chemical wikinomics to “using wikinomics to enliven your neighborhood“ to questions like “could wikinomics save Epic Athletic?”, open letters to the music industry quoting our book, questions like “back to school - will your classroom be Wiki’d?”, and and increasing number of posts in languages I don’t understand. As time goes on, we hope to see many more - especially of the latter variety.

Gonzo

Crooks & Liars

Watch It (Thanks to David and Dan for videos)

Alberto Gonzales is done. First Newt Gingrich stabs the Attorney General’s chances by saying that Bush must replace him because the highest legal office in the land should be filled by a person with the highest perceived sense of ethics. But the knife is twisted all that more painfully by Chris Wallace’s admission at the end:

By the way, we invited White House officials and Republicans on the Senate Judiciary Committee to defend Attorney General Gonzales. We had no takers.

Blowing Down Doors

TPMMuckraker

Yet another dispiriting revelation from Alberto Gonzales' hearing today.

During Gonzales' last hearing before the Senate Judiciary Committee, Sen. Sheldon Whitehouse (D-RI) questioned him about a memo from Attorney General John Ashcroft in 2002 that had substantially increased White House officials' access to information about Justice Department cases. Under Clinton, only four White House officials had been authorized to discuss pending criminal investigations or cases with only three top Department officials. Ashcroft's 2002 memo had blown the door off that arrangement, raising the number of officials who could discuss such cases from seven to 447 (417 on the White House side). Under Whitehouse's questioning, Gonzales had professed to have been "concerned about that as White House counsel.”

Apparently not so much.

Whitehouse questioned him today about a May, 2006 memo which Gonzales himself had signed while attorney general. You can see it yourself here.

The memo widened White House access to case information even more and seemed to have been crafted with special attention to enabling the Vice President's staff, specifically his chief of staff and counsel, to have the unambiguous authority to discuss ongoing cases with Department officials. Given Cheney's chief of staff David Addington's extraordinary reach into the Justice Department (and the prosecution of Cheney's former chief of staff), that's cause for a raised eyebrow.

Gonzales seemed to have been taken off guard by Whitehouse's questions:

Whitehouse: "What-on-earth business does the Office of the Vice President have in the internal workings of the Department of Justice with respect to criminal investigations, civil investigations, and ongoing matters?"

Gonzales: "As a general matter, I would say that's a good question."

Whitehouse: "Why is it here, then?"

Gonzales: “I’d have to go back and look at this.”

"The memo that has your signature makes it worse," Whitehouse said. As Whitehouse plowed on, Gonzales admitted of his own memo, "I must say I'm troubled by this." Gonzales cautioned, however, that he didn't know whether officials from the vice president's office had indeed taken advantage of such access.

Whitehouse ended by observing that it was difficult to take seriously Gonzales' promise to "restore the Department of Justice," seeing as how he'd apparently worked to help make the Department vulnerable to politicization.

Decision Time

TPM

By Josh Marshall

Let me echo Atrios' point here about the hand-wringing consensus on Iraq among so many prestige pundits and return to the point I made back in June on TPMtv about the importance of decision in war leaders.

There does seem to be this pattern developing in which members of the WaPo-Bush consensus, having been heedless of caution when the wind was at their back have suddenly become devotees of prudence and the go-slow or rather no-go approach now that their favored policy has collapsed.

Physical courage isn't the only test of war leaders. Decision is also a key virtue. In many respects it's the key virtue for leaders since in the modern day they are seldom themselves in any physical danger. Yes, withdrawal may be a disaster. In fact, there's little doubt it will be a disaster for some players in Iraq, probably many players. But we're so deep into the pit at this point that our decision-making is inevitably constrained now to choosing from a range of disastrous policy courses and figuring out which is least bad. That's life.

I think one of the reasons for the paralysis Atrios notes is that making a major strategic choice forces us to come to grips with the disaster that is already on our hands. Perpetuating the slow-motion disaster that is the status quo is necessary to sustain our denial. But there is no virtue in paralysis and 'humility' isn't something that comes with a lot of credibility from those who had so little of it when they got us into this mess in the first place.

And one other point. I know there are many people who are for immediate withdrawal. No delays. Out in a matter of months. But I don't think that's a majority position even among those who are strongly against the war. That is because the situation is so bad and so unpredictable that it is hard to make categorical decisions before we've even got the practice started. Speaking only for myself but I suspect speaking for many others as well, the key is that we start the process. The key is that we make a category decision that the US occupation of Iraq is more the problem than the solution. Everybody is for leaving Iraq -- as Fred Hiatt might say. But saying we're going to have to make a decision in six months or after this or that improbable development means never.

For those who are trying to create a straw man argument between staying and leaving in a mad dash, that's a false dichotomy: what's necessary is that basic strategic decision -- which I think almost everyone save the president and his acolytes have made. I think quite a few people who are deeply against the war realize that getting out may not be easy or quick. The issue is starting -- not considering starting in six months, or a month, or after the Iraqis stop killing each other or after the Sunnis and Shia work out their differences about Ali and the family of the Prophet or anything else. All of those equal never because a clear-eyed look at the situation tells you that leaving is never going to be easy or free of bloodshed or, perhaps most importantly, free of the need to recognize that the whole thing was a terrible idea, a war built on deception and deceit at every level.

MUST WATCH: BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Impeachment Panel: Left and Right

UPDATE: Here is the whole clip from PBS:




Here is Part II:



UPDATE II: Here is the transcript

"And, you know, the founders anticipated just such a moment. If you look at the discussions in the Federalist Papers but also at the Constitutional Convention, when they spoke about impeachment, one of the things that Madison and George Mason spoke about was the notion that you needed the power to impeach particularly as regards to pardons and commutations because a president might try to take the burden of the law off members of his administration to prevent them from cooperating with Congress in order to expose wrongdoings by the president himself. And so Madison said that is why we must have the power to impeach. Because otherwise a president might be able to use his authority and pardons and such to prevent an investigation from getting to him."


via Crooks and Liars

In these clips, PBS’ Bill Moyers sits down with The Nation’s John Nichols and conservative constitutional attorney Bruce Fein from the American Freedom Agenda to discuss the crimes and abuse of power by George Bush and Dick Cheney and the need to impeach them both. While Nichols and Fein come from different ends of the political spectrum, they are in total agreement on this issue. Congress must put impeachment on the table because if they do nothing to stop Bush and Cheney now, we will see future presidents follow in their footsteps which would be a disaster for our country. This is definitely worth a look…

YouTube - BILL MOYERS JOURNAL | Impeachment Panel Excerpt | PBS

Crooks and Liars had a longer (and better quality) version of the first video below.