Yes, we can all wail about the partisan divide

And sure, it's easy to agree that primaries for Congressional seats tend to be dominated by small groups of activists, and that this can lead to outcomes like Senator Ted Cruz. This is the dark side of that Margaret Mead line.

But if your best supporting example is that in a state without a "sore loser" law, Joe Lieberman was nonetheless able to get reelected after losing in the primary . . .

Well, I will just say that your argument is unpersuasive, Mickey Edwards, and so here is a cat riding a Roomba, wearing a shark costume, chasing a duck.

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The problem is not extremists getting elected, because of the primary process. The problem is Republican extremists getting elected, and that is something the GOP is going to have to figure out for itself. Meanwhile, as you do point out, you can hold up Christine O'Donnell as a counterexample to Ted Cruz -- come the general election, democracy sometimes works.

Also, points to you, sir, for this:

For one thing, the political “center” is not always the right place to be (it certainly wasn’t in the pursuit of civil rights and women’s rights, or on issues like slavery and child labor). Compassion toward candidates who find their political prospects cut short is also of little interest to me.

Today in political silliness

"Mapping the social web against your political preferences." As measured by how people click Facebook Like buttons, so, y'know, pass the salt.

Click image to enlarge; see Garance Franke-Rutta for details.

[ + ]

I don't know whether it's a good thing or a bad thing that I don't recognize only three of those logos.

If you're feeling down on what we call our political process, don't watch this ...

... thing I randomly hopped to on the YouTube. But it is quite well done, I think.

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What do you think? Seems dated? Or (discouragingly) current?

Happy American Censorship Day!

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More info at AmericanCensorship.org. Write to your Congressional representatives at FightForTheFuture.org/pipa.

[Update] Overlay banner now removed. Thanks to all who wrote, signed, and read.

"The Do-Nothing Plan"

How Congress can balance the budget in eight years by literally doing nothing. This is not a joke.

A pretty intriguing article from Annie Lowrey.

(h/t: Don McArthur | x-posted)

"What if we’re not broke?"

E.J. Dionne asks a hard question.

"Hard" as in flying in the face of Republican talking points, and therefore, what's repeated on your teevees and front pages, I mean.

(h/t: Uncle Eb)

Update on Whistleblower Protection

Remember this, from back in early January?

"The breeding ground for all of that corruption is secrecy."

Here's a story that probably went under your radar. I know it did mine. It seems that the Whistleblower Protection Act, which would finally have ensured real legal rights to federal employees who dare to speak up about the bad stuff they see on the job, which had virtually unanimous support in both houses of Congress, was killed by … an anonymous hold, placed by a lone Senator.

Yes. "Virtually" here means "everyone except that one cowardly Senator." Who we don't know for sure is a Republican, but I know how I'm betting.

That post went on to offer a segment from On The Media featuring Tom Devine, Legal Director of the Government Accountability Project, and then finished thus:

In case you missed it at the end of that clip, GAP is now asking for help, in conjunction with OTM, in determining who the anonymous Senator is.

Through the efforts of OTM listeners, we're now down to five Senators who won't give an answer: David Vitter (R-LA), James Risch (R-ID), Jeff Sessions (R-AL), Jon Kyl (R-AZ), and Mitch McConnell (R-KY). If one of those is a Senator of yours, you may wish to pitch in on the effort to get them to make a statement.

Also, for your listening pleasure, here is Bob Garfield, co-host of OTM, as a guest on the Leonard Lopate show, yesterday (via):

The whole thing is about 37 minutes long. The whistleblower discussion is the main topic, and it's at the start. Stay tuned at the end to hear Bob's take on Glenn Beck, the sale of the HuffPo, etc.

If you'd rather, you can download an MP3 at the above link.

Some stories about Egypt, and other important matters

The first half hour of this week's On The Media is devoted to coverage of Egypt, and coverage of that coverage. Five segments, all quite good.

The last twenty minutes of the show concern anonymous holds in the Senate and whistleblower protection. The two stories are related.

Stream or download an MP3, both at the above link, right near the top of the page. Transcripts available early next week.

(x-posted)

Senate votes to end secret holds 92-4. Three teabaggers and one other wingnut vote against.

From The Hill, via @on_the_media:

Although Senate leadership already agreed to stop the practice of secret holds in a gentleman’s agreement Thursday morning, the passage of Res. 28, the Wyden/Grassley/McCaskill Secret Holds Resolution, will codify the change and will apply to future sessions of Congress.

Sixty votes were required for adoption.

The four Senators voting against the resolution were Sens. Rand Paul (R-Ky.), Mike Lee (R-Utah), Jim DeMint (R- S.C.), and John Ensign (R-Nev.)

Weren't these four among the loudest yelling about the supposed lack of transparency a few months back? Or was that some other teabaggers? Or is this just another case of IOKIYAR?

Also:

Secret holds gave senators the ability to anonymously stall legislation or the administration's nominees.

DeMint objected to a measure brought forth last year by Sens. Ron Wyden (D-Ore.) and Charles Grassley (R-Iowa) that would have eliminated the practice.

"There are a lot of pressing issues that we face as a country," DeMint said at the time. "But one of them is not secret holds."

Shameless. Utterly shameless.

Line of the Day: 2011-01-14

I don't completely agree with the whole column, because I think this country actually has more than just two harshly opposed sides, and I still do think compromises are possible, especially if the extremists driving the GOP lose some clout, but this is pretty good:

Commentators who pine for the days of civility and bipartisanship are, whether they realize it or not, pining for the days when the Republican Party accepted the legitimacy of the welfare state, and was even willing to contemplate expanding it.
    -- Paul Krugman

"The breeding ground for all of that corruption is secrecy."

Here's a story that probably went under your radar. I know it did mine. It seems that the Whistleblower Protection Act, which would finally have ensured real legal rights to federal employees who dare to speak up about the bad stuff they see on the job, which had virtually unanimous support in both houses of Congress, was killed by … an anonymous hold, placed by a lone Senator.

Yes. "Virtually" here means "everyone except that one cowardly Senator." Who we don't know for sure is a Republican, but I know how I'm betting.

Here's a good segment from this week's On The Media to bring you up to speed. It's seven minutes long.

Here's a detailed post from Climate Science Watch on the machinations through the end of 2010. Climate Science Watch is part of the Government Accountability Project. The person interviewed in the audio clip above is Tom Devine, Legal Director of GAP.

In case you missed it at the end of that clip, GAP is now asking for help, in conjunction with OTM, in determining who the anonymous Senator is.

Aletheia in Logos: Let's Get This Party Started!

Below left: a graphic designed by Thomas Porostocky, used since 2008 (or 2007) as a logo for More Party Animals, a group seeking more choices besides Democrats versus Republicans.

Below right: a graphic "designed" by Dave Warren, used {since|up until} mid-December 2010 as a logo for No Labels, a group seeking more choices besides Democrats versus Republicans.

(embiggen)

And now let us watch the babbling evolve over time.

In a NYT City Pages blog post timestamped "December 13, 2010, 6:13 pm," this:

Dave Warren, a 30-year veteran of Madison Avenue, said that he came up with the concept completely independently. Mr. Warren said that he decided to riff on the donkey and elephant using clip-art animal shapes that are available free of charge or copyright.

Wait. Before we get to the real hilarity … You can get paid … You can get a job on Madison Avenue surfing the Web and downloading clip art?

Please, continue.

Mr. Warren, who among other things did groundbreaking work for Absolut vodka, bristled at the suggestion that he had stolen the design.

“I do my own thinking, man,” he said. “Feel free to come to one of my classes at Parsons.”

He added: “I have a long and storied history on Madison Avenue. I’m not stupid enough to steal anybody’s work; I have too much faith to come up with my own ideas.”

As for Mr. Porostocky, Mr. Warren said, “Tell the other guy to Google my name.

Emph. added.

The post is also marked "Updated 12:38 a.m. Tuesday," with a note that the totally not at all stolen work was "removed from the No Labels Web site by early Tuesday."

In a later City Pages post timestamped "December 14, 2010, 10:42 am," this (emph. added):

The ad man, Dave Warren, said this morning that a designer he hired had grabbed the logo featuring red-white-and-blue animals from the Web site of the group More Party Animals and incorporated it in the design.

[...]

On Tuesday, Mr. Warren apologized to the designer of the More Party Animals logo, Thomas Porostocky, and accepted responsibility for the theft, writing in an e-mail message to Mr. Porostocky:

[...] I take full responsibility for it. [...]

Dave Warren sounds like a real politician, all right. When deny, deny just won't fly, blame a subordinate and then Accept Full Responsibility™.

Presumably, he will be announcing his candidacy any day now. Right after he finds a new home for that unnamed underling, under some bus somewhere.

Meantime, here is a new logo for Dave Warren:

(h/t: Jack Stuef | source for pants on fire, unsurprisingly | title: cf.)

P.S. By the way, neither of the City Pages posts reports that Dave Warren works for FLY Communications (or at least did through this morning), where he is (or at least was) "creative director." You have to go to Gothamist for that. Which you might want to do to see more of the intermediate babbling. (And then you can steal part of their slightly less blurry screen shot, too.)

P.P.S. We decided to Google Dave Warren, man. As of this moment, the top hit is for someone at a local teevee station working as a "weekend meteorologist." Which suddenly seems like an honorable position, for some strange reason.

Bill Maher interviewed by Fareed Zakaria

Here is a 13-minute clip that's quite good. Probably you should not watch it if you're the sort of person who gets butthurt for being called a teabagger. Instead, just do what you always do -- skip watching it, and immediately fire off comments about how much you hate Bill Maher, because he is rude and likes to smoke pot.

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Parts I liked best: how he shot down the question "is it because maybe the electorate is farther to the right than you would like them to be?" and his dismissal of the MSM's favorite fetish, Teh Independent Voters. And of course fundie-mocking is always FTW.

He's right about what we're looking for Obama to do, too. (Maybe some of this stuff is starting to get through to the White House?)

(h/t: Twin)

Wikileaks.org down. Other sites available.

It looks like, at the moment, wikileaks.org is down, and further, that the URL is claimed not to be known by various DNS services.

Various mirror sites are going up; e.g. wikileaks.ch in Switzerland and wikileaks.se in Sweden. Best bet is probably to start with the Wikileaks Twitter feed and Facebook page, since the powers that be seem to be shutting some of the mirrors down as well, or blocking the DNS lookups.

Here's one that's working at the moment: http://213.251.145.96.nyud.net/. Note that a lot of mirrors will likely feature the requirement that you use a numerical IP address to visit them.

[Added] The BBC says the DNS shutdown was due to the provider responding to massive DDoS attacks.

(x-posted)

Where Julian Assange is coming from, maybe

If you're interested in the guy in charge of Wikileaks, I'd recommend these three things: an analysis by zunguzungu of some of Assange's earlier writing, a long interview of Assange conducted on 11 Nov 2010 by Forbes's Andy Greenberg, and the accompanying Forbes cover story, also by Greenberg.

I've excerpted and commented a bit on these and my sense of Assange more generally in the Bloggingheads forums. If that notion doesn't send you fleeing or induce narcolepsy, start here, here, and here. The short version is: I find zunguzungu's analysis interesting though not conclusive, since I think Assange has evolved since then. I also find myself in strong agreement with quite a bit of what Assange had to say to Greenberg.

(h/t: @mattyglesias for retweeting @willwilkinson's link to zunguzungu, and h/t to zz for the link to the interview)

Wikileaks -- Diplomatic cables

Currently dominating the front page of nytimes.com:

Cables Obtained by WikiLeaks Shine Light Into Secret Diplomatic Channels

WASHINGTON — A cache of a quarter-million confidential American diplomatic cables, most of them from the past three years, provides an unprecedented look at backroom bargaining by embassies around the world, brutally candid views of foreign leaders and frank assessments of nuclear and terrorist threats.

Some of the cables, made available to The New York Times and several other news organizations, were written as recently as late February, revealing the Obama administration’s exchanges over crises and conflicts. The material was originally obtained by WikiLeaks, an organization devoted to revealing secret documents. WikiLeaks intends to make the archive public on its Web site in batches, beginning Sunday.

The anticipated disclosure of the cables is already sending shudders through the diplomatic establishment, and could conceivably strain relations with some countries, influencing international affairs in ways that are impossible to predict.

Secretary of State Hillary Rodham Clinton and American ambassadors around the world have been contacting foreign officials in recent days to alert them to the expected disclosures. A statement from the White House on Sunday said: “We condemn in the strongest terms the unauthorized disclosure of classified documents and sensitive national security information.”

[...]

The cables, a huge sampling of the daily traffic between the State Department and some 270 embassies and consulates, amount to a secret chronicle of the United States’ relations with the world in an age of war and terrorism. Among their revelations, to be detailed in The Times in coming days:

Read the rest.

Note in the sidebar:

State's Secrets

Day 1 of 9

It looks like this might be the NYT's index page for the series.

As you might imagine, wikileaks dot org is swamped by traffic right now.

Or 4chan has been hired by the striped pants brigade to run a DDoS attack. One of those two. [Update: Oops. Might have made a joke in poor taste there. Wikileaks claimed they were under DDoS attack five hours ago.]

__________

[Added] Here's a place to start for the Guardian's coverage: "US embassy cables leak sparks global diplomatic crisis."

[Added2: Guardian liveblog here. (h/t: @PoliticallyBrit)]

@wikileaks and others are using the hashtag #cablegate, because originality is dead, or for some other reason. (Reporterbaitgate?)

(x-posted)

Here is an email worth forwarding

Not sure about the date mentioned, so check your local listings, as they say.

Please Tune in Tonight at 8 PM EST to Watch CMD's Wendell Potter on MSNBC Discussing the Insurance Industry's Campaign against Michael Moore's SiCKO and Health Reform

Monday, November 29 8:00 PM EST MSNBC

MORE »

Taibbi on your teevee (and in print)

If by some chance you missed the Parker/Spitzer show last week, Matt Taibbi was on. Here's a seven-minute clip that's worth watching.

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CNN embedded videos are sometimes slow to start playing, so just hang in there. Or try the alt. video link.

Transcript for this show also available.

If you're curious about the source: Parker at one point quotes Taibbi as calling Sarah Palin a "narcissistic, money-grubbing hack." That lines comes from his new book, Griftopia. (I are a full-service blog.)

Want more Taibbi? Of course you do! See Rolling Stone's round table discussion about the election we just had (yes, we really had one) between him and a couple standard-issue Beltway insiders. Makes for some entertaining reading, and there may be some insights as well.

Hat tip to TBogg, who's got a choice excerpt, plus the added value of words and pictures as only he can bring.

Rachel Maddow and Jon Stewart

Here is a fifty-minute conversation that I highly recommend. It was recorded and aired late last week. It begins as a follow-up discussion to some of the issues raised by Jon Stewart and Stephen Colbert's late October rally in Washington, DC, and some of the criticism they received because of that. It then moves into a larger discussion of news media -- the cable teevee kind, mostly -- and what Stewart sees as its big problems.

I had many thoughts while watching this. Some of them appear below the fold.

I really do encourage you to watch this. This is not a schmoozefest. Maddow has a distinctly different point of view and doesn't hesitate to make it clear.

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(h/t: Twin)

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Weird how this country works sometimes

From the NYT:

Mark Zuckerberg, chief executive and a founder of Facebook, has agreed to donate $100 million to improve the long-troubled public schools in Newark, and Gov. Chris Christie will cede some control of the state-run system to Mayor Cory A. Booker in conjunction with the huge gift, officials said Wednesday.

The three men plan to announce the arrangement on Friday on the “Oprah Winfrey Show.”

On one hand, I am enough of an old-school liberal and believer in government as a force for good to be sad -- and worried -- that it has come to this, that we must look to rich patrons for gifts, rather than correctly setting our priorities as a citizenry and paying for such things ourselves. I am also enough of an elitist snob to cringe at the clout of TV talk shows.

On the other hand, I would like to think of myself as enough of a realist and a pragmatist to be able to recognize when, like it or not, something isn't working and so we must try something else. I would also like to think of myself as flexible enough to be able to accept that the shifting nature of who holds power is not automatically bad, just because it is a change. And as far as this specific instance goes, who can be against giving a nice chunk of money to schools, particularly ones that appear to be so badly in need of help?

Still ...

In conclusion: no conclusion. Just thinking out loud again.