I was beginning to think that the right-wing extremism we’re seeing knew no bounds. Let’s face it, when people start toting semi-automatic rifles and other guns at events attended by Obama while bearing signs calling for his assassination, it’s kinda hard to think they’d blanch at anything. Hell, just Sarah Palin alone is evidence that they don’t really have an internal filter.

So when I saw that NewsMax, a rabid ultra-right “news source” which rarely pulls any punches, had a column up which played up the possibility of a military coup d’état to unseat Obama, I was interested, but not in the least bit surprised. NewsMax is well-known for being utterly shameless in their bias; this is the kind of thing one would expect from them.

However, it seems that even they draw the line at hinting at a military coup. When I saw the mention of the article, I clicked through to the link, and discovered that the article had been taken down. The author, one John Perry, was still listed amongst their prominent bloggers, but it was clear that his latest blog post had been scrubbed. After left-wing blogs started pointing to it, NewsMax took it down.

Which is strange, when you think about it. Right-wingers have been advocating secession, and often made death threats against Obama, albeit veiled. They claim he’s a mass-murdering dictator, commonly comparing him to Adolf Hitler. They say aloud that he’s building concentration camps to pack with conservative critics, and many of them sincerely believe that he wants to eliminate the elderly. This article (reproduced in part below) did not actively call for a military takeover; instead, it more or less predicted one and opined on its effectiveness. Relatively speaking, it was fairly tame stuff. Okay, toward the end, it seemed to segue into calling for such a coup. But you have to read it carefully, which is more than they tend to expect the public to do.

But not only did NewsMax take it down, they soon started backpedaling even more: they scrubbed the columnist’s listing on their main page, and released a statement that he’s just an “unpaid blogger” with “no official relationship with Newsmax” other than that. Which is obviously false, as not only did they list him prominently on their front page, but he’s been writing weekly articles for them for a full decade.

The best guess out there is that NewsMax was aware of the FaceBook page which recently launched a poll asking if Obama should be killed; that got the Secret Service involved, and the page was quickly yanked.

The question is, have we reached Republican Rock Bottom?

Sadly, my guess is, no. This was probably just a special case, and we can expect voices on the right to keep on sinking further.

Here’s all of the article that I could find:

There is a remote, although gaining, possibility America’s military will intervene as a last resort to resolve the “Obama problem.” Don’t dismiss it as unrealistic.

America isn’t the Third World. If a military coup does occur here it will be civilized. That it has never happened doesn’t mean it wont. Describing what may be afoot is not to advocate it.

[…]

Will the day come when patriotic general and flag officers sit down with the president, or with those who control him, and work out the national equivalent of a “family intervention,” with some form of limited, shared responsibility?

Imagine a bloodless coup to restore and defend the Constitution through an interim administration that would do the serious business of governing and defending the nation. Skilled, military-trained, nation-builders would replace accountability-challenged, radical-left commissars. Having bonded with his twin teleprompters, the president would be detailed for ceremonial speech-making.

Military intervention is what Obama’s exponentially accelerating agenda for “fundamental change” toward a Marxist state is inviting upon America. A coup is not an ideal option, but Obama’s radical ideal is not acceptable or reversible.

Unthinkable? Then think up an alternative, non-violent solution to the Obama problem. Just don’t shrug and say, “We can always worry about that later.”

In the 2008 election, that was the wistful, self-indulgent, indifferent reliance on abnegation of personal responsibility that has sunk the nation into this morass.

This is a problem for the right wing: when you indiscriminately oppose everything Obama does out of sheer, knee-jerk opposition to Obama himself, you begin to look stupid a lot of the time. Like it or not, Obama is the president of the United States, and part of his job is to promote the nation. Oppose that, and you find yourself opposing the United States.

An excellent example of this is the sudden right-wing opposition to the United States hosting the Olympics in 2016. Ironically, by that time, a Republican could be in office. And besides, it’s the Olympics. Countries always want the Olympics, it a prestige thing and can be a huge revenue-earner.

But apparently, conservatives now hate the idea of an American Olympics. Not only is it Obama pushing the Olympics, but he’s pushing it for Chicago. I don’t think right-wingers really had any ill will toward Chicago before, but it has become their latest favorite Worst-City-in-the-World (San Francisco and Hollywood get a break for the moment), mainly because it’s Obama’s home base, and because they love to associate Obama with the Chicago image of gangsters and corrupt union leaders. And terrorists live there too! Ones that get palled around with!

So that’s how you see a variety of right-wing media outlets bashing the president of the United States trying to get the Olympics for the United States in 2016. Kinda weird, but like I said, when you mindlessly oppose anything the president does, you wind up looking not only stupid sometimes, but bizarrely so.

Obama apparently claims that at the G20 summit, a foreign leader asked him this:

“We don’t understand it. You’re trying to make sure everybody has health care and they’re putting a Hitler mustache on you — I don’t — that doesn’t make sense to me. Explain that to me.”

Interesting question; it shines a light on the fact that, without the context of American politics and how it has been run over the past 20-30 years, as well as a certain understanding of American culture in general, the actions of conservatives in the United States right now are completely and utterly baffling, to the point where they look literally insane. It’s like the old story where you try to save a man who is drowning in a river, and when you finally get him up on the shore, he calls you a son of a bitch. Except in the only context where that story makes sense, the man was trying to commit suicide–which one would not assume is the intent of right-wingers today.

However, it has come to the point where that is effectively what right-wingers are, in fact, doing.

This story seems to be covered only locally, but should be a national story:

OXFORD — Friends say the Miami University graduate who died this week after reportedly suffering from swine flu delayed getting medical treatment because she did not have health insurance.

News of Kimberly Young’s death Wednesday, Sept. 23, came as a shock to those who knew the vibrant 22-year-old who was working at least two jobs in Oxford after graduating with a double major in December 2008.

Young became ill about two weeks ago, but didn’t seek care initially because she didn’t have health insurance and was worried about the cost, according to Brent Mowery, her friend and former roommate.

Mowery said Young eventually went to an urgent care facility in Hamilton where she was given pain medication and then sent home.

On Tuesday, Sept. 22, Young’s condition suddenly worsened and her roommate drove her to McCullough Hyde Memorial Hospital in Oxford, where she was flown in critical condition to University Hospital in Cincinnati.

“That’s the most tragic part about it. If she had insurance, she would have gone to the doctor,” Mowery said.

The story is nationally relevant for two reasons: first, that lack of health insurance was the primary reason she died. Second, her representative in Congress is John Boehner, a Republican leader and opponent of health care reform.

In better news, the public option is making a comeback, especially since a CBO report made it clear that the public option would save a lot of money, making the Blue-dog Democrats back down, and not helping the Republican cause a whole lot. If Obama and the Democrats can simply catch a hold of this swing and deliver the bill for a vote while the conditions are right, we might actually see a health care reform law which actually does good.

Does the first amendment only protect belief in a god, gods, or positive spiritual beliefs in general, or does it protect any belief regarding the ultimate make-up of the universe? Is a belief that there is no god just as much a qualification here? Is only worship protected, or just what you believe in general? Could atheists build a place where they gather to discuss atheism, and have it be protected and granted special status just like churches are?

Although right-wing bloggers are vociferously trying to denounce any specific interpretation of the killing of a census worker in Kentucky, the details that are emerging seem to be pointing away from most of the non-political interpretations that the conservatives are hoping will be the case. There has been a lot of discussion on this murder, and despite the right-wing complaints, the left-wing blogs are showing a lot more restraint in making definitive claims than right-wingers usually do when the circumstances are reversed.

However, the murder, whether it was in fact politically motivated or not, brings up the very serious point that anti-government right-wing rhetoric has reached dangerous levels. The over-the-top hysteria about killing or imprisoning people, deranged claims of conspiracies involving the census which smack of fascist jack-booted thugs in silent black helicopters coming to take away your guns, and the general paranoid rantings from even mainstream right-wing sources today will, eventually, lead to violence. If it did not lead to this particular murder, it very well could have. This is clear from a lot of the right-wing denials out there, which tellingly do not claim that such a connection is impossible, but simply that the facts are not known yet.

In the case of the murder of Bill Sparkman, although the police are being extremely cautious in what they announce publicly, facts have emerged which cannot be easily dismissed. Sparkman had left to do census work when he was killed, and the state of his body (unclothed except for socks, strung up against a tree with duct tape liberally applied, a red cloth stuffed into his mouth) when he was found made it clear that he was murdered. The most noted detail is the word “FED” scrawled across his chest. Although he was found with his feet touching the ground, he reportedly died by asphyxiation; he could have been hanged and then lowered before being abandoned.

The most common alternate theory regarding his death is that he ran into drug dealers; reportedly, there are a good number of meth labs and marijuana fields in that area which are run by very dangerous people, and who take even less kindly to federal workers than they do to any other people they see as trespassers. Such people may have killed him for non-political reasons, and still could have focused on his occupation as a reason for killing him–or they might have faked the reason for his death so as to throw police off the scent.

However, that does not necessarily add up. Such people do not like to draw attention to themselves; the manner in which the man was killed seems like an unlikely way for such people to dispose of a body. Some of the smaller attributes of the crime scene, such as the fact that his ID tag showing he was a government worker being duct-taped to his shoulder, show attention to detail which is more in line with someone trying to make a political point. This is not to say that it could not have been part of a deception, but it would require a thoughtful approach. If it was a drug dealer doing all of this, it seems to demonstrate stupidity, not cleverness. In addition, Sparkman was going door-to-door to collect census data; it is not extremely likely that he was snooping in such a fashion that would have led him to stumble upon meth labs or marijuana fields in such a way that would lead to such people murdering him. Again, not that it was impossible, but it does come across as less likely.

As I stated previously, however, the point can be made that when political rhetoric reaches a hysterical enough level, it can and does lead to acts of violence, even it that were not the case here. The murder of George Tiller is an excellent example. Had Tiller not been singled out for vicious public attacks by Randall Terry, Bill O’Reilly, Rush Limbaugh and others, he would probably not have been murdered by a pro-life fanatic. Public free speech is one thing; incitement to violence crosses a very real line. Hiding behind the defense that murder was no specifically called for is a weak, cowardly excuse, not a defense.

Part of the reason why right-wingers are so vehemently attacking the idea that Sparkman was murdered for political reasons has to do with their desire to continue their paranoid levels of fear-mongering. They want to be able to whip up the gullible into frothing, seething masses of hateful mobs without facing the responsibility that they are creating an atmosphere of potential violence that can lead to tragic consequences.

Whether or not the Sparkman case was political as people fear, the time has long passed where the conservatives must dial back their outrageous, vile, hate-filled rhetoric. Disagree of course, but show at least the barest sliver of responsibility instead of going off half-cocked making berserk, paranoid claims of census data being used to put political opponents in concentration camps, or death panels being planned to urge seniors to kill themselves, or jack-booted thugs coming to take your guns.

Words can kill. They have, and they will. And claiming you didn’t mean it that way, or denying that A led to B doesn’t change that fact.

If you’ve ever been to Tokyo, or at least seen the movie Mothra, then you probably know about Tokyo Tower, a fixture in the city for the past fifty-one years. Built in 1958, at a height of 332.5 meters, it has been perhaps the city’s most famous landmark. Go almost anywhere in the southern half of the city, and it’ll probably be visible–a big, red-and-white tower in the heart of the city.

Tokyo Tower was built as a broadcasting platform, at first for newfangled TV transmissions, and a few years later for radio as well. The problem is that Japan is now switching over to HDTV (called Hi-Vision here), and Tokyo Tower is not tall enough for sending terrestrial digital signals.

As a result, it was figured that a new tower would have to be built. I’d heard about it a few times over the past several years–a big ol’ tower raised in the relatively low-level area around Asakusa, due east of Ueno and north-east of Akihabara, about 1.5 km distant from each.

The new tower is slated to finish construction in December of 2011, opening in Spring of 2012, and is going to reach 610 meters in height, not quite double the old Tokyo Tower. But it won’t be called “New Tokyo Tower” officially. Instead, it has the doubtful monicker “Sky Tree,” a somewhat Japanese-sounding English name. I’m gonna call it “New Tokyo Tower” myself.

I had thought that it would take a while longer before construction was visible–they broke ground about 6 months ago–but when I looked out my window today, I happened to notice a new building on the horizon. Not every day that hap–um, well, actually, in Tokyo, it is about every day that happens, now that I think about it. But this building will be bigger than most. Here’s what I can see now:

According to the tower’s home page, it is currently at 153 meters; sounds about right.

By copying and photoshopping an artist’s rendering of the tower over the images I took, you can get an idea of what it’ll look like:

From our balcony, without the zoom magnification, at about 8.7 km (5.4 miles) distant, it would look like this:

So, naturally, buy 2011, some other building will have cropped up right in the way. Not that we’ll be here to be annoyed by it–we’ll probably move out of our current place by next year sometime, the intent being to buy a place and pay into the equity instead of just bleeding rent.

One other observation about the tower: it is situated almost perfectly for observing fireworks. I imagine that it’ll be booked for years in advance for engagements viewing the Sumida Fireworks show, the most famous in Tokyo, which go on just a few hundred meters away. Wouldn’t be surprised in the tower were already booked for three years from now, and maybe a few years beyond that.

I am of two minds on the move by Massachusetts Democrats to switch back to allowing the governor to choose a temporary replacement for Ted Kennedy. In case you have not been following this, the state Dems made a law in 2004 that the governor could not appoint a senator in the eventuality of a seat becoming open, and instead the seat would remain empty for several months while a special election was arranged. They did this because, at the time, Kerry might have won the 2004 elections and Republican Governor Romney would have been in a position to put a right-winger in his liberal seat, who would have remained until 2006, the next election year (Kerry’s own term would end in 2008). Now that Kennedy has died and his open seat hurts the Dems, they have changed the law again to allow the Democratic governor to appoint a temporary fill-in.

On the one hand, when you have the majority in the legislature, you do get to make the laws; there is nothing illegal, certainly, about changing them on a whim. And it is likely that Romney would have placed a senator in Kerry’s seat who would have very much not represented the will of the voters, while an absence now would also go against the will of the voters.

However, this smacks all too much of changing the rules to suit your current political needs, and as such, is not something I would condone. While the result is something that I very much want, I can’t support the way it was accomplished. In fact, Romney himself proposed a plan at the time which would have been acceptable: he and Democrats together select a replacement, who would serve for only as long as it took to arrange for a special election. Whether the offer was genuine or part of a larger plan to delay action until it was too late for Democrats to act is a different question, but the idea at face value seemed sound. Democrats rejected that and instead chose to leave the seat open.

It’s not kosher when the Republicans do it, and it’s not kosher when the Dems do it. Nothing incredibly scandalous here, but let’s leave the egregious, opportunistic political flip-flopping to the Republicans, who, after all, are all too masterful at the game.

When Ann Coulter expressed admiration for Joe McCarthy a little while back, I was taken aback, but only for as long as it took me to remember that I was listening to Ann Coulter.

What has surprised me, however, is that more and more right-wingers seem to be adopting Tail Gunner Joe as their new iconic hero. I seem to be hearing his name more often nowadays, and seeing it referenced as you can see on the t-shirt of the tea-bagger at right.

You know, I used to think that these people simply didn’t understand what they were talking about, that maybe they though McCarthy was a true-blooded American patriot who was unjustly smeared.

But more and more I am getting the impression that these people know exactly what McCartyism was all about and that is why they approve of the man. And that is just plain, downright scary.

So much of what the right wing has come to stand by recently smacks so much of what McCarthy did, I can see these people admiring all of his worst qualities. The baseless accusations as a means of political bullying, the destroying of the lives of people whose politics they disagree with, the outright fabrication of evidence and smears, the fearmongering and appeal to the worst instincts of the people–all of these are the new “in” techniques which so many on the right wing today have adopted as their own.

It may not be a new era of McCarthyism yet, but there is a growing number on the right who clearly long for those days to return.

A lot of people decry the Internet’s effect on language, noting how lazy people are about grammar and spelling online, and how this seems to be spilling out into other areas beyond the Internet. However, they may just have that backwards: it could be that people are becoming more literate because of the Internet, and that the bad English you see might be the result of people writing regularly for the first time in their post-college lives:

“I think we’re in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven’t seen since Greek civilization,” she says. For Lunsford, technology isn’t killing our ability to write. It’s reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The first thing she found is that young people today write far more than any generation before them. That’s because so much socializing takes place online, and it almost always involves text. Of all the writing that the Stanford students did, a stunning 38 percent of it took place out of the classroom—life writing, as Lunsford calls it. Those Twitter updates and lists of 25 things about yourself add up.

It’s almost hard to remember how big a paradigm shift this is. Before the Internet came along, most Americans never wrote anything, ever, that wasn’t a school assignment. Unless they got a job that required producing text (like in law, advertising, or media), they’d leave school and virtually never construct a paragraph again.

But is this explosion of prose good, on a technical level? Yes. Lunsford’s team found that the students were remarkably adept at what rhetoricians call kairos—assessing their audience and adapting their tone and technique to best get their point across. The modern world of online writing, particularly in chat and on discussion threads, is conversational and public, which makes it closer to the Greek tradition of argument than the asynchronous letter and essay writing of 50 years ago.

I think they have an excellent point. As inane as Twitter can be, its 140-character limit forces one to be clear and concise–so much so that I have been toying with the idea of making students run sentences through Twitter before including them in essays. And several years ago, I wrote a blog post about how arguing on the Internet is a great (albeit painful) way to sharpen your argumentative skills. (That post is now included in a published college reader–almost ironic evidence to the point made here.) And I have always believed that the Internet is a subversive new media type that expands not just free speech, but the range of speech as well.

The point about audience and shaping one’s message is also important; this is something writing teachers try to impress on students, but have trouble because in school, the audience is usually just the teacher and no one else. It is hard to find a writing environment for students which is more varied than that.

There is no doubt that there is a lot of bad stuff on the Internet, bad influences on language and people’s use of it; but it may be that the overall effect is far more positive than anyone expected.

Poor widdle Fox News… dey got snubbed by big bad brezident Obama! Waaaahhhhh!!!!!!!

Obama went on a media campaign blitz around the Sunday-morning news show circuit today to push health care reform, visiting Face the Nation, Meet the Press (NBC), State of the Union (CNN), This Week (ABC), and Al Punto (Univision), in addition to 60 Minutes and David Letterman, and a few other appearances.

Fox News got left out. And now they’re going into full-force whining mode, with Chris Wallace appearing on O’Reilly’s show, complaining that the Obama administration is “the biggest bunch of crybabies I have dealt with in my 30 years in Washington.”

Oh, please. First of all, Chris, you’re the one who’s being a crybaby; the definition of that term is someone who complains like a child because they feel they’ve been wronged. The administration’s not being a crybaby–they didn’t whine when you snubbed them by not airing the president’s speeches (never did that with Bush, did you?), and now they’re just deciding not to visit your show. The only one whining is you. And this is not the first time, either–you guys do this every single time it looks like Fox News might not get treated like the news organization they’re not. When Democrats say they’re not going to let the propaganda arm of their political opponents run their debates, you whine about how they’re “afraid” of you and how they’re destroying journalism.

Face up to it, you schmucks: you chose to be the propaganda arm of the Republican Party, you take every chance you get to smear and attack and lie and fearmonger, you call the president a fascist and a Nazi and worse, you organize political events where the president’s life is threatened and crazies sport signs with racial epithets, you refuse to carry the president’s speeches and addresses while all the other networks run them… and guess what? Sometimes the president won’t appear on your talk shows so you can snub him in person. Surprise!

When Bush was president and you did nothing but carry water for him, you guys got the lion’s share of exclusives. That’s the deal you made. Live with it and stop acting like infants.

In a way, that is. Officially, Sachi and I were married on March 17th, 2008. But that was just a legal matter, doing the paperwork at city hall. What we consider our “real” wedding was… well, again, more than one occasion. We got married on September 20th last year in the United States, and then again on September 27th in Japan. So it’s kind of hard to tell when out actual anniversary is. In one way, I have three times the burden of the usual husband, having to remember three dates instead of just one. On the other hand, if I forget one, I have two more chances.

Today we kept the celebration modest (next week’s will be more elaborate); we went to a very nice local restaurant, one we went to once before, but only once as it opened just a few months ago. It’s just a few hundred feet away from our apartment building in Ikebukuro. It’s a great little plane, called “Danoi,” which we were told is Italian for “home” (though I could not confirm that with online dictionaries). It’s a very nice little Italian restaurant tucked back on a side street nearby, and we really like the place. The chief waiter is a Nepalese gentleman named Sabin who speaks Japanese and English very well, and we were served by a charming waitress named Keiko tonight.

The restaurant first serves you bread; tonight it was with butter, olive oil, and a cheese sauce, and was delicious. We ordered pizza first; though it’s not on the menu, we asked for Prosciutto pizza like we did last time, and they obliged us. Next we had a delicious pork dish (gently cooked, with tomato topped by cheese), a nice Caesar salad, and finished with salmon and broccoli pasta.

At one point I mentioned it was our anniversary, and so they gave us dessert for free; we got Tiramisu and chocolate cake (it was more like fudge!), which were both delicious.

A few more images of Sachi and I, alone, and with Sabin and Keiko.

We’d include the URL for the restaurant, but as the place is new, the web site isn’t up yet. If you’re interested in knowing where it is, comment (fill in your email address) and note the request and that you don’t want the comment published, and I will send you more info on how to get there.

Based on a recent poll, a graphical breakdown of support for the Republican shows a daunting picture for the GOP:

The thing to note, however, is that this does not reflect a decrease in conservatism, but rather a decrease in support for the GOP as the party contracts into a tight, densely-packed ball of, shall we say, people with a dislike for certain attributes of our current president. In the meantime, the GOP is alienating most other people–but it is not really turning them away from their values.

One effect of this is Blue-dog Democrats, which one might say are DINOs (Democrats in name only), people like Max Baucus who joined the Democratic Party perhaps as much for strategic campaign reasons than because of their policy stands. That’s one of the drawbacks of big-tent politics: you have members of Congress in your party who, while a minority, can still throw a wrench in the works and cause things like health care reform to get mucked up. While Democrats enjoy a majority, Republicans at least have party unity.

Fact is, American government has been mostly conservative since Reagan took office. Clinton and Obama both are moderate Democrats, centrists really–decidedly not the full-out liberals that right-wingers have ranted about–while Reagan and Bush 43 were strong conservatives. Actual liberals have not had a president of their own for a long time (actually, have we ever had a president?)–which makes us the only large constituency not to have been fully represented in recent history. Right-wingers and moderates have been getting more of their fill, while the liberal third of the country has had to enjoy pseudo-representation and compromised crumbs falling off the edge of the table.

We’re the ones who are tolerant–we’ll be satisfied if things are simply balanced between all parties and will sometimes tilt our way. Look at Sotomayor–a centrist judge, far from the real liberal warrior that the left wing would like to have–but we’re OK with it. The third at the other end of the spectrum, however, as we have seen amply demonstrated, go completely fracking apeshit when things even look like they might be anything less than exactly what they want. And we are discovering that having mass tantrums like mobs of infants actually translates into getting a lot of what you want–if nothing else, it certainly helps weight the scales. It’s amazing, really–you like to think that Americans can be responsible, mature, tolerant adults, but about a third of the nation starts whining like babies when everything doesn’t go their way. We saw this during the Bush administration when Republicans were furious that Democrats didn’t let every single Bush nominee get confirmed.

I like to call that the coffee-cup effect, based on the classic story of a conservative woman during the deep-red days of the Bush era, when all the branches of government and almost all of the media were strongly on her side, but she claimed that she felt under-represented in life because most of her Starbucks coffee cups bore quotes she disagreed with.

Like it or not, as much as the GOP continues to implode, despite the majority that Democrats now have in Congress, as much as liberals like to hope that Obama will serve them, and as much as conservatives scream about how excessively liberal Obama is, the fact is that only centrist or conservative interests will be addressed. Health care reform, for example, is a centrist concern. If this were truly a liberal campaign, it would be about making a universal, government-run, single-payer health care system; it would not be about whether or not the public option is something we can do without.

For all the hoopla and all the “D”s we see after politicians’ names today, the truth is that liberals have virtually no hope of getting their core concerns addressed in a manner that they would prefer.

This is lovely:

US officials told me in April 2008 that President Bush had been warned by his military commanders that Afghanistan was going from bad to worse. More troops and money were needed; reconstruction was at a standstill; pressure had to be put on Pakistan; the elections in April 2009 should be indefinitely postponed. Bush ignored all the advice except for asking the Afghans to postpone the elections until August.

He left everything else to his successor to sort out.

The elder Bush did something in a slightly similar vein: in December 1992, a month after losing the election to Bill Clinton, he ordered U.S. troops into Somalia. Called “Operation Restore Hope,” it was more likely a partisan political play. Bush had, for example, completely ignored the conflicts in the Balkans, as well as many other humanitarian and political crises around the globe during his four years in office. That he should happen to suddenly become interested in solving such issues by inserting U.S. troops into a hopeless quagmire just six weeks before leaving office is more than just coincidence. Clinton was left with a no-win scenario: either leave the country in a huge mess or stay and get stuck in the quagmire. In either case, Republicans would be perfectly positioned to attack him on his “failed” foreign policy, which, of course, is exactly what they did.

What Bush Jr. did this time is somewhat different, but no less reprehensible, and echoed the actions of his father in an important respect. While the senior Bush likely intentionally created a mess for a political opponent to clean up, Bush Jr. most likely just didn’t want to deal with his failures–but the effect was the same. Both Clinton and Obama were left in quagmires at the start of their presidencies, quagmires that a president named “Bush” got us into.

What makes the Bush Jr. quagmire all the more deplorable is that it was not entered six weeks before the handover of power, but more than seven years before. That Obama is now having to resuscitate the conflict and essentially start all over again is the main tragedy. By using 9/11 as an excuse to invade Iraq, his real military goal, Bush allowed Afghanistan to deteriorate for all that time.

Bush’s abject failure cost the lives of thousands of troops and trillions of dollars, as well as the respect and sympathy of most of the world. It destabilized the region, provoked Iran into nuclear belligerence, and created a situation that was inherently so fragile that our leaving would likely lead to devastation.

What should have happened is that we should have gone into Afghanistan and only there; we should have ousted the Taliban and nothing else. It was not and is not our place to decide the type of government there would be, but rather only that they did not harbor terrorists or otherwise threaten us. And then leave.

Had he done that, we could have left the region years ago. Yes, Saddam Hussein would still have been in power–and ironically, fewer Iraqis would have been tortured and killed, and Iraq would be in better shape than it is today. That is not praise for Hussein, it is a condemnation of the supreme clusterfrack that Bush committed there.

Instead, Obama now begins his term in office having to deal with a military which is severely strained and depleted (unlike the military Bush got from Clinton, which he claimed was depleted but was not), and take a seven-year-old conflict and somehow find a way to make it manageable enough for us to leave. One can only guess that Obama will not wind up leaving it or any other conflict as a quagmire for his successor to clean up. Clinton didn’t. Both Bushes did. Let’s hope that’s not a pattern that will continue.

Last week, Rush Limbaugh made a deal out of black kids beating up a white kid on a bus, suggesting that it was a result of “Obama’s America” in which, apparently, black people now rule supreme and feel like they are entitled to beat the crap out of white people whenever they want. He used this as an excuse to call for segregated busing. Soon after, it became clear that the beating had nothing to do with race, though Limbaugh and others in the right-wing blogosphere deny this is the case.

Not too long before the bus incident, there was another beating. This one was much more serious, and was clearly racially charged. A white man named Troy Dale West Jr. was coming out of a restaurant called the Cracker Barrel (no comment) with his wife when Tashawnea Hill, a black woman and Army reservist was walking in with her 7-year-old daughter. West reportedly opened the door in such a way that it almost struck Hill’s daughter in the face. Hill reportedly then admonished West, telling him what he’d almost done, and, according to Hill, “it just went downhill” from there.

What she means by “downhill” is that West ended up beating Hill severely, injuring Hill and traumatizing her daughter:

Police say Hill stated that “West punched her in the left cheek, forehead, kicked her body in several places, and punched her head in many areas several times.”

As for how we know it was racially charged, West allegedly should the “n-word” and the “b-word” at her during the attack.

West’s justification? “[S]he spit on me and accused me of trying to hit her daughter with a door.” Not only does it sound improbable that Hill spat on him for such a thing, but (a) there is a surveillance video of the event which Hill’s attorney says proves that she did not spit on him, and (b) even if she had, it would not even come close to justify hitting someone, much less punching and kicking a woman in front of her small daughter.

Can’t wait to hear what Rush Limbaugh would have to say about this one. Likely he’ll just ignore it. But maybe he’ll say it was understandable backlash, that the man was just so infuriated by what Obama has done to our country that he simply couldn’t restrain himself, and so we should segregate restaurants now, too.

I’d also love to hear what this says about right-wingers’ claims that we’re in “post-racial” America now, and that racism doesn’t exist anymore. Not that the irrational rage against Obama which just by coincidence is heavily concentrated in the south is connected to race, either–no, I’m sure all the images of Obama as a witch doctor and monkey are completely unrelated to race.

When I was talking with my father about the online classes I am taking, he wondered how such coursework is considered in terms of reliability: after all, anybody could be taking these classes for you. Just as traditional correspondence courses may not be respected all that greatly because there are so many opportunities to cheat, so might online degrees be discounted.

But maybe not so fast–a new study suggests that online students may actually be more honest than their on-site counterparts. While the study is limited to counting people who admit to cheating rather than the actual cheating itself (as evidenced by there being more people who admit to helping others cheat than there are people who admit to cheating directly), the value is in the comparison of results between the two venues. Unless people taking classes on the ground have more motivation to admit to cheating than do online students, the results may be noteworthy.

After years of consumers paying waaaay too much and most often being forced to buy more music than they wanted, prices have finally fallen to a much more reasonable level, the 99-cent price set by Apple’s iTunes Store. It’s the way it should be: most songs are available by themselves, producers can force album-only sales if they absolutely feel they need to, and now album extras harken back to the days of the LP and attract buyers to the album paradigm–if they want it.

In the meantime, the recording studios have been trying their hardest to suck whatever money can be had from the consumer. From using extortion to force $3000 “settlements” from accused downloaders, to lobbying for and getting governments to force CD-R makers to charge a premium so that the tax can be put directly into the music industry’s pockets, charging consumers for a crime that most of them have not committed–and still leaving them liable to be sued anyway. And the laws the RIAA lobbied for allow for up to a $150,000 fine per each $1 song, which of course is a reasonable fee, right? (Some states apply no more than a $50,000 penalty for grand theft.)

After all this, consumers need a break, not more people trying to shake them down. But that’s what’s happening–except this time it from the groups representing the performers. Now, I have sympathy for this group–they tend to get screwed over by the music labels themselves. The problem is, they’re like a kid bullied at school who then picks on the smaller kids who are already bullied half to death: these groups are not demanding more money from the labels, they’re demanding it from the other end, the wrong end of the distribution chain.

What’s more, they’re making the music labels actually look less absurd, by making even more absurd demands themselves.

You know when you visit the iTunes Store and you can preview a song for 30 seconds to check if it’s the one you want? That’s right–these groups want to charge for that.

They also want a piece (or, that is, a bigger piece) of TV shows and movies sold, as they contain music. But they’re not asking for money from the studios, who, after all, are the ones who already pay them and who really control the deal. No, they want retailers like Apple to pay them–a second time. In essence, they didn’t like the deal they got from their immediate employers, so they’re seeing if they can get complete strangers who buy an end product to pay them, directly. (Am I mistaken, or is this not done in any field?)

The representatives pushing for these new charges are making the case that they are paupers, citing paychecks they receive which are literally just a few pennies, or deals where they don’t get paid at all. One can be fairly certain that they are taking the minority of deals where they are screwed over most and leaving out the better-paying deals. But even if they’re not, they’re still doing this bass ackwards. They have no right going to the retailer and demanding money from them. The argument is that they aren’t paid for TV or movie music when those media are sold online. OK, fine–take it up with the studios. Trying to get laws passed that charge iTunes is simply stupid.

Let’s look at an analogy to see exactly how stupid this is. Let’s say that in one of the computer classes I conduct, I teach a student to make a web page. Later that student becomes a web designer. Just like the musicians, my work contributed to the final product. Then I decide that my salary is not high enough. So, is it reasonable for me to go to the place where my former students work and demand a cut of their revenue, or demand that they start charging for views of their web site to pay me? Hell, no. If I want to get paid more, I go to my boss and demand a raise. If I can’t, it’s not incumbent upon my students’ employers to make it up to me.

Let’ stop being stupid, shall we? If laws need to be passed, pass them so that artists get a bigger cut right from the start. I imagine, however, that the reason they’re not trying that is because they know that the RIAA will crush them in the lobbying game. And that’s a shame–but it doesn’t make it OK to then force someone else to pay.

Yes and no. But mainly no.

As I said when the Zune was first released, Microsoft usually releases stuff which sucks horribly at first (probably because they make stuff for the wrong reason, i.e. to copy a competitor so they can steal its market share), but slowly, over time, they improve the product bit by bit until eventually, it doesn’t suck so much.

This strategy worked very well with software because MS had the ultimate cudgel of the Windows OS, and the power to load it only with MS software. That’s why most people use Internet Explorer, despite the fact that it is the suckiest browser imaginable. In the past, when they released new products, they were almost always terrible out of the gate–but eventually they improved it just enough so that when MS made their software the default on their OS, people would suffer with it.

The Zune has no such advantage; MS can’t put anything on their desktop that would more or less force people to buy the Zune. In order for it to succeed, MS has to make the Zune good enough on its own. But there’s a problem with that: generally speaking, Microsoft’s talent has been to rip off ideas that other people come up with. While that has its advantages, there is one pretty major disadvantage: you can’t get ahead of someone you are intentionally trailing.

The new Zune HD is a lot better than the 2nd generation Zunes, which were lots better than the original Zunes. And if you compare the Zune HD with the current iPod Classic, the Zune wins. The problem with that is that the iPod Classic is a model which is several years old; Apple only keeps it around for people who want a high-capacity HDD to store tons of stuff. Apple’s real focus is on the iPod Nano, iPod Touch, and the iPhone.

Since all models of Zune except for the HD are being discontinued, there is no equivalent for the Nano, and since the Zune is not a phone, there is no competitor for the iPhone. The Zune seems pretty squarely aimed at the popular iPod Touch. While the iPod touch is available in 32 and 64 GB capacities, the Zune HD is available is 16 and 32 GB models; let’s compare the 32’s:

As you can see, it’s not really incredibly close. The Zune only exceeds in being smaller and it has an FM radio; otherwise, the subscription service is pretty much all that is attractive about it, and that only to some people. The Touch, meanwhile, has a bigger and higher-resolution screen (the Zune’s OLED is better indoors but crappy in sunlight), has Bluetooth (wireless headphones), is compatible with Mac and PC, and is sold internationally with a wide variety of languages.

But the big plus for the Touch is the App Store. OK, whittle away the apps made only for the iPhone, and all the fart apps and other programs which are stupid, and you’ve only got, what… several thousand good apps. The Zune has a browser and maybe a few other apps, with maybe a few dozen more promised by the end of the year… but don’t expect the avalanche of apps that Apple’s App Store has seen.

And the App Store is key: apps add functionality. The Zune has no maps application, no games (ironically, Apple’s product is where the gaming community lives now), no Twitter or Facebook, not even a stopwatch app–nor anything else except a browser. And the browser is some five to ten times slower than Safari on Apple’s handsets.

In short, the Zune is a great competitor… for what Apple had a few years ago. Zune just got stuff which Apple came out with in 2007, like the touch screen, or in 2008, like the App Store (of course, Zune doesn’t have an app store quite yet–though it is reported that they are offering truckloads of money to developers to port their apps to the Zune).

But the key point is that the Zune still lags behind; they are simply not catching up, at all. Yes, the Zune today is cooler, better-designed (remember the original crap-colored Zune?), and generally a much superior product. But it’s still way behind.

And it’s only in North America, only in a few languages, and still only for Windows. They actually cut out the lower-end “mini” models for some reason, not even keeping a “Classic” Zune.

Meanwhile, Apple still has a whole product line to sell: iPod Shuffle (3 capacities, 5 colors), iPod Classic, iPod Nano (2 capacities, 9 colors), iPod Touch (3 capacities), and the iPhone (3 capacities, two colors). And Apple’s high-end product, the iPhone, is available for cheap if you were going to pay for a cell phone plan anyway, and includes the camera (stills and movies), GPS, compass, voice recording, etc.

If Microsoft could somehow tie the Zune to the Windows Desktop, Apple would be in trouble. But they can’t. And when MS can’t force a product through their near-monopoly, we observe the actual talent of the company to innovate: in short, zilch.

Update: Microsoft is adding 9 apps, including a calculator, weather, and 7 basic game apps. All of the game apps reportedly play ads up to 15 seconds long before the app even begins to load. Zune fans are not pleased, and I can understand why. I’m annoyed by static ads on iPhone apps which display for a second before I can dismiss them. But a 15-second video ad that plays every time I open the app? Yech.

The right-wing pundits are all over a couple of black schoolkids beating up a white schoolkid on a bus, making a big deal over race and how black leaders are not falling over themselves to own the incident and apologize. This despite the fact that it has now been established that the beating had no racial component whatsoever. Limbaugh is spouting that it’s Obama’s fault. I’ll buy that when Bush owns up to every act of violence committed against black people by white people during his eight years in office.

When I was in high school, I was packing up in the locker room after a P.E. class. I heard two kids arguing at the other end of the room. I circumspectly ignored the dispute, and don’t recall much else until I heard someone behind me shout, “And don’t you laugh, either!” Before I could even turn around to look, my head was slammed against my locker door so hard that I actually lost consciousness for a moment–only one of two times that’s ever happened to me, and the worst concussion I have ever sustained. That the assailant was black and I am white had nothing to do with it. Sometimes a beating is just a beating.

On a side note, that incident really burns me to this day. Not that the kid took out his anger at not being able to beat up on another kid so he took it out on an unwary bystander. No, it was the high school vice principal, who heard about the incident (I didn’t even report it myself, I forget why not), and called us both into his office. The idiot actually used the old “I don’t care who started it line” and forced me to shake hands with the assailant to show there were no hard feelings. Isn’t that sweet? In an completely one-sided and unprovoked beating, one person indiscriminately uses enough violent force on another to potentially cause serious injury or even death, and the adult in charge doesn’t want to bother with the details. Instead he lets the assailant off with a handshake from his victim. I was too young and timid in those days (not to mention shocked and overwhelmed by the unfairness) to say anything, but I wish I could go back in time and confront the unspeakable moron. My darker half would have me take the guy’s head, slam it into a wall, and then tell him to shake my hand in reconciliation because, after all, we were not interested in who started what, right?

On another tangential side note (getting way off the original topic now, stream-of-consciousness time here), speaking of losing consciousness, my second worst concussion I referenced above was at a miniature golf course, also in my high school days. The 19th hole was a narrow ramp at an upwards angle into the end of a pipe, a hard putt shot which, if you made it, got you a free game. After finishing up, I and some others gathered around the back end of the setup to watch others make the difficult shot. One genius, completely without warning, thought he’d drive the ball into the hole, taking a huge swing worthy of a 100-yard shot. The ball cleared the entire setup and hit me square in the forehead at high speed. I swear I can even today still feel the dent the ball made in my skull. By the time I came to a few moments later, the culprit had run off. Kids.

In an attempt to bring this back to the main topic, in the miniature golf incident, both the assailant and I were white.

I never got Ronald Reagan’s apology for that one.

An interesting angle on Bush reported in GQ:

“I’m trying to remember if I’ve met [Sarah Palin] before. I’m sure I must have.” [Bush’s] eyes twinkled, then he asked, “What is she, the governor of Guam?”

Everyone in the room seemed to look at him in horror, their mouths agape. When Ed told him that conservatives were greeting the choice enthusiastically, he replied, “Look, I’m a team player, I’m on board.” He thought about it for a minute. “She’s interesting,” he said again. “You know, just wait a few days until the bloom is off the rose.” Then he made a very smart assessment.

“This woman is being put into a position she is not even remotely prepared for,” he said. “She hasn’t spent one day on the national level. Neither has her family. Let’s wait and see how she looks five days out.” It was a rare dose of reality in a White House that liked to believe every decision was great, every Republican was a genius, and McCain was the hope of the world because, well, because he chose to be a member of our party.

Andrew Sullivan then added:

When the history of the Bush administration is written, Bush may emerge as the sanest of them all. Remember his alleged first reaction to the WMD data: “This all we got?” Or his alleged response to torture: “Do these harsh interrogations actually work?

There’s one more he didn’t cover: when Cheney wanted to push through yet another tax cut for the rich, Bush’s response was, as I recall, along the lines of, ”Didn’t we do that already?“

The thing is, in all of these cases, the observations Bush is reported to have made were not really strokes of genius or anything remarkable. Seeing the actual reports of WMD would have made it clear to even an amateur that the evidence was weak; that torture was unreliable was not exactly a secret; that they pushed too many tax cuts for the rich was remarkably obvious; and that Palin was unprepared was painfully clear.

What marks Bush in these cases is not his wisdom or insight, but instead the fact that he let all of these things pass without acting on them. Maybe there wasn’t much he could do about Palin, but note his reaction when reminded that it was the party choice: ”I’m a team player.“ It seems as if that was his reaction all the time. If he knew the evidence on WMD was not enough, why did he not revise his opinions, or at least not lie brazenly to the American people? If he knew torture was ineffective, why let it happen? If he knew that there were too many tax cuts for the rich, why did he become the spokesperson for their passage?

Maybe I’m being too harsh; it’s not like Bush was, you know, in charge or anything.

These revelations do not say anything good about Bush; in fact, they make him look worse. If you’re president, you don’t do things you know are wrong because those around you say they’re for it; in such cases, being a ”team player“ is worse than immoral. Were he simply a dunce who could be gulled into believing anything, that would be bad. But to know that something is wrong and yet allow himself to be directed to do it anyway, that’s even worse. He was not just a puppet, he was a puppet and complicit. He was in the position where he could have acted, where he could have told Cheney to stop on any one or all points. Instead he willingly acted wrongly, even criminally, at the behest of underlings, as if he had no will power of his own.