Fiat Lux

Really nice profile of The Daily Show's Jon Stewart over in the Guardian today. Here's a snippet:

If the parties and the media serve the country so badly, why do Americans put up with it? "Because for the majority of Americans life is pretty tolerable," says Stewart. "It's very hard to organise reasonable people with moderate views. Reasonable people with moderate views don't usually light their torches and head out to town with pitchforks shouting, Be reasonable. Shit has to get really bad before people stand up and take notice."

There's a lot of folks on dKos and other left-leaning blogs who don't understand why most of America seems unwilling or unable to get angry the way they are angry. They tend to write those people off as "sheeple" -- too stupid or too cowed to take action. Stewart sees another aspect. I tend to agree with him.

Avedon Carol kindly responded in the Comments to yesterday's post citing Jon Stewart about why so many Americans are so uninvolved with politics. Her thoughts:

There's also the part where in an oppressive state, keeping your head down is the only protection you might have. Such a state will go after its enemies. If your first allegiance is to your family or to your own survival, the last thing you want to do is draw the government's attention to you by criticizing them.

Seems to me that this POV is part of the disconnect between many left-leaning bloggers and that vast swathe of America that gets them so riled up. If you buy into that point of view, you'd have to be a person who believes that America is today a neo-Fascist state with such tight command and control over our daily lives that the average citizen rightfully fears the repercussions should s/he speak out against the state. I seriously doubt that mindset pervades Middle America today. Hell, even I don't believe it.

Yes, I'm aware of Gitmo and situations like Jose Padilla's, and the super-secret monitoring devices the NSA has that can read all our emails, and the provisions of the Patriot Act, and I am concerned about the state of civil liberties in America today. And who knows? It might even be possible that somebody in a back room in Washington DC is putting me on an "Enemies of the State" list because I've expressed my opposition to the war in Iraq.

But it seems to me that a left-leaning blogger like me is much more likely to run into trouble in the workplace because of my blog than any other possible outcome. I don't see anything going on in America today that makes me feel that my own physical security is in any way at risk by the state for my point of view.

There's a passage in the William Gibson novel "Pattern Recognition" that bears repeating here:

Win, the Cold War security expert, ever watchful, had treated paranoia as though it were something to be domesticated and trained.... he wouldn’t allow it to spread, become jungle. He cultivated it on its own special plot, and checked it daily for news it might bring: hunches, lateralisms, frank anomalies.

Win's first line of defense, within himself: to recognize that he was only a part of something larger. Paranoia, he said, was fundamentally egocentric, and every conspiracy theory served in some way to aggrandize the believer.

But he was also fond of saying, at other times, that even paranoid schizophrenics have enemies.

And another year rolls round.

May this one be better than the last and bring peace, happiness, and fulfilment to all.

Per the WaPo:

Roy Moore, who became a hero to the religious right after being ousted as Alabama's chief justice for refusing to remove a monument of the Ten Commandments from the courthouse, announced Monday that he is running for governor in 2006.

I'm sure the candidate debates will be hysterical.

Four decades after a U.S. president declared war on poverty, more than 37 million people in the world's richest country are officially classified as poor and their number has been on the rise for years.

Last year, according to government statistics, 1.1 million Americans fell below the poverty line. That equals the entire population of a major city like Dallas or Prague.

Since 2000, the ranks of the poor have increased year by year by almost 5.5 million in total.

Per Yahoo/Reuters.

Apparently the BBC is doing a series on President Bush and the Middle East. From their press release:

[Palestinian Foreign Minister] Nabil Shaath says: "President Bush said to all of us: 'I'm driven with a mission from God. God would tell me, "George, go and fight those terrorists in Afghanistan." And I did, and then God would tell me, "George, go and end the tyranny in Iraq …" And I did. And now, again, I feel God's words coming to me, "Go get the Palestinians their state and get the Israelis their security, and get peace in the Middle East." And by God I'm gonna do it.'"

As we all know, hearsay testimony is generally not acceptable in a court of law. And it is not clear whether the comment was made through a translator or not. But still ... wow. If Bush really did say that, it explains a lot about Iraq.

It might also suggest we ask some serious questions about whether it's appropriate for the most powerful man in the world to be making critical decisions based on what God told him to do. At the very least, some psychological examination might be in order. I won't go so far as to say that everyone who thinks God told them to do something is nuts, but I do think that it bears close examination, especially when the person is the President of the United States.

Hat tip: AmericaBlog.

As it happens, a member of my family has worked for the IAEA at 2 different times over the past 25 years, so I'm quite pleased to see this today:

Fever & throat yukkiness.

The fever has broken and I'm feeling back to normal. Which is a good thing, because we're low on groceries and I have a midterm Wednesday.

"The Colbert Report" hits the airwaves soon.

Frankly, I tended to fast-forward through many of Colbert's bits on "The Daily Show". I get that what he's doing is intended to be funny, but at least half the time it just made me feel impatient: 'Yeah, yeah, you're skewering self-important, ill-informed newscasters with big egos. Point made. Move on.'

That's just me, though, and as my husband can tell you, I have a somewhat deficient sense of humor at times. I'll TiVo the first week to see if he can extend the joke to a full half-hour (less commercials).

Here's why this matters, even if I don't find Colbert funny:

When Colbert talks about skewering hypocrites, he makes clear that, like Stewart, he cares about politics as more than a punch line. He recalls Vice President Cheney, in a CNBC interview last year, being asked about having said it was "pretty well confirmed" that terrorist Mohammed Atta had met with an Iraqi official in Prague -- part of a White House attempt to demonstrate a link between Saddam Hussein and al Qaeda. Cheney denied making the comment, but "The Daily Show" later aired a tape of a 2001 "Meet the Press" interview in which the vice president had said the Atta meeting was "pretty well confirmed."

"When Dick Cheney says, 'I never said that,' and then we play the tape, why did we do it?" Colbert says. "Why wasn't it done broadly? Because he wasn't speaking about something inconsequential. It wasn't like we were playing gotcha journalism over some quibble. It was over weapons of mass destruction. That's not advocacy journalism. That's objectivity in its most raw form."

So why don't more working journalists do what Stewart and Colbert are doing? Perhaps, Colbert says, "there's a sense that if they engaged in what we do at 'The Daily Show,' they'd be accused of being too aggressive."

I saw an interesting piece of information over on dKos today, regarding Iraq war veterans who come home & run for Congress:

Democrats have five or six of those already on the line. Republicans, by the way, have zero.

Very interesting. I wonder why?

I haven't said much about the Fitzgerald Plame investigation because I don't want to count my chickens before they're frog-marched out of their offices ... but Jane Hamsher, Reddhedd and the rest of the gang over at firedoglake have a lot of excellent posts on the subject -- not just up to date info about what's going on, but also why it matters.

They're well worth bookmarking.

Have an easy fast!

Bear is now about three months old. He's getting bigger & spends a lot more time running around and working off his considerable kitten energy. He still finds time to cuddle up with other members of the household, though. Tommy seems to like Bear, but he's not sure he wants to share my lap with him.

Apparently this has just fallen off the Yahoo 'Most Emailed" list , so by now the story of the Duggler family and their 16 children has already made the rounds. I couldn't resist crunching the numbers on Michelle Duggar, though.

According to the AP report, she is 39, just gave birth to her 16th child, and had her first child when she was 21. Two pregnancies resulted in twins.

So over the course of 18 years, she's had 14 pregnancies. Assuming each pregnancy ran the full 40-week term, she's spent 560 of the last 936 weeks pregnant. That's 59.8% of her adult life.

In other words, she's spent more of her adult life pregnant than not.

Wow.

Scary.

I'm sure the station management is justifying this by saying they're afraid they will lose their license if they deny the Klan access to public TV, but this seems wrong:

“The Klan,” a video news program distributed by the Ku Klux Klan will be airing on MCTV in Midland. The first airing of the program will be on Saturday, October 22nd at 11:30 pm.

According to their website, the Ku Klux Klan brings “a message of hope and deliverance to white Christian America. A message of love, not hate.”

On the site can be found links to sign anti-gay marriage petitions, messages that ‘race-mixing’ is unholy, and articles stating Martin Luther King Jr. had ties to the communist party.

Yes, yes, I know, freedom of speech means that even the people I hate are allowed to voice their noxious views. That doesn't mean I have to like it.

I need to start a new category called "WTF?" to cover those achingly jaw-dropping loads of garbage unloaded onto an unsuspecting public by key political figures. Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice pulled one this morning on Meet The Press. No, I was not awake for it, but (un)fortunately my East Coast blogger bretheren were.

The arrogance is astonishing:

The fact of the matter is that when we were attacked on September 11, we had a choice to make. We could decide that the proximate cause was al Qaeda and the people who flew those planes into buildings and, therefore, we would go after al Qaeda…or we could take a bolder approach.

An even bolder approach would be to roll down the hill onto the Middle East and smash everything in your path. Oh wait, we're trying that in Iraq. Too bad it's a horrible failure of a policy.

I'm guessing Markos isn't snowed under with his book anymore, because he made some excellent points over at dKos today:

I wrote above that most progressives "agree on most things", but there are probably few issues, if any, in which 100 percent of progressives agree. And such disagreements are not necessarily born of ignorance, or "using Rove's talking points", or being a "DINO". But disagreements born from research and exploration and each individual's varied life experiences. This is a reality in which we must operate and thrive, and it can't be by forcing a party line on every single issue. Because really, who will set the party line? Who will enforce it?

Woe betide the high school radio station that has a broadcast frequency coveted by Christian broadcasters. The Boston Herald reports:

Maynard High School's radio frequency, 91.7 FM, is being seized by a network of Christian broadcasting stations that the Federal Communications Commission has ruled is a better use of the public airwaves.

"People are furious,'' said faculty adviser Joe Magno.

Maynard High's WAVM, which has been broadcasting from the school for 35 years, found itself in this David vs. Goliath battle when it applied to increase its transmitter signal from 10 to 250 watts.

According to Magno, that "opens the floodgates for any other station to challenge the station's license and take its frequency."

Using a point scale that considers such factors as audience size, the FCC ruled the Christian broadcasting network the better applicant. WAVM is given 30 days to appeal, and has done so.

If the FCC refuses to overturn its decision, WAVM will fall silent.

You'd think providing an educational experience for high school kids would be considered valuable, but I suppose given the FCC we've got, that would be asking too much.

So I missed the very first episode of "The Colbert Report" (it is still on the TiVo), but caught the next two. And so far I've enjoyed it. Last night, Scott & I watched the episode together and I laughed more. This is very unusual in our household. Generally I find stuff less funny that he does.

Ezra has a point, though:

It is much tougher to sustain. What's great about Stewart is..well..Stewart. He seems like our voice in the media. A sane, intelligent, skeptical, well-meaning paladin for the people. We like to watch him because his interviews and humor bring us in on the jokes. Colbert, on the other hand, is the joke, trapped in a self-consciously disagreeable persona for the duration of his program.

And this is very much why I was worried for the show before it aired. But so far he has not laid it on as thickly as he did in his "Daily Show" segments. Color me pleased and hopeful.

And posting is likely to be very sporatic for the next week. I have a midterm in Macroeconomics coming up soon, and Econ is a subject I'm finding somewhat of a challenge to get a handle on. Plus, in a case of lousy confluence of timing, we're about to move to a new apartment. In other words, there won't be much time for blogging.

However, I'm sure I'll indulge in some schadenfreude should Fitzgerald come down with a cartload of indictments.

Sign lease tomorrow, take midterm Wednesday, move Thursday. What a week.

Am feeling very stressed out, and am responding to the stress by feeling tired all the time.

At least we got the portable dishwasher sold. One less thing to deal with.

It's been three years since our last apartment move, and I'd forgotten exactly how stressful and exhausting moving can be. Since we had plenty of advance notice, I'd dutifully tried to prepare for the move by throwing useless crap out, hauling two full carloads of old clothes, books, computer parts, etc down to Goodwill, and generally trying to get things sorted, organized, and pared down. But then the movers arrive. They take all your stuff and put it in boxes. Then they take everything you own, pile it up in your new living room, and leave. You're left there with a huge pile of boxes, trying to put your life back together again. And you find yourself wondering, "Where the hell did all this stuff come from?"

I was originally going to make an analogy of moving as a tidal wave sweeping through your life, but in light of the various major natural disasters the past 12 months, and the fact that our tidal wave is a wave of stuff those people no longer have, it seemed a bit insensititve. Despite all my complaining, this is a much nicer apartment than the last one we were in. That's a positive change.

Things generally went according to plan except that Comcast totally screwed up. We'd made an appointment for them to come to the new place the afternoon of moving day to get us set up with cable and Internet service, but somehow that changed to them coming to the place we were moving out of, just as we were preparing to leave. It took two phone calls and several customer service escalations, one threat to cancel everything and switch to DishTV and DSL, and a lot of other back and forth, to get the botched appointment rescheduled for Friday afternoon. They'd wanted to reschedule us for Tuesday, and that just wasn't going to happen. We could certainly have waited a few more days for TV, but not having Internet access for that long was a horror devoutly to be avoided.

Having no TV or Internet access while the Libby indictments were coming down was disappointing. I got to listen to most of the Fitzgerald press conference on the radio, but that was it. Comcast showed up a few hours later, but I didn't get the PC set up until late last night. So I missed the huge wave of spin, analysis, speculation, etc the blogosphere generated in my absence. And I still have a lot of work to get done, so I expect to miss most of the next wave, too. Just about everyone is running with the story. I'd link to some of the best bits on other blogs but I'm too tired. I have other stuff to deal with right now.

I want a functioning kitchen so I can make myself a morning cup of coffee. I want to get all the boxes off my tables so I can eat a meal somewhere other than on the floor (although the new carpeting here is nice). I've still got another 20 or more boxes to unpack. I need to go buy some new lamps, because there's no overhead lighting fixtures in most of the rooms and carrying the one lamp we do own around from room to room is a pain. I have a heaping pile of laundry to do, and I need to figure out where in San Mateo I can get a roll of quarters. And none of that is going to get done if I sit on my butt blogging.

By the way, the kitties didn't enjoy the move much but are starting to settle in. I'd post some pix but I can't find the cable connecting my camera to the computer. Maybe Sunday.

Seen in the parking lot of the Palo Alto Home Depot today. Somebody is one heck of a Tolkien fan!

"Why buy the cow when you can get the milk for free?" - best. response. ever.