bodhi tree swaying

Gail Collins is often wickedly funny, and she’s in good form commenting on Sarah Palin’s quitting in order to spend more time with her family values:

• "Palin is quitting as governor because she’s not a quitter."
• "She recalled her visit with the troops in Kosovo, whose dedication and determination inspired her to … resign."
• "The timing of Palin’s announcement was extremely peculiar. Not only did she interrupt the plans of TV newscasters to spend the entire weekend pointing out that Michael Jackson is still dead, she delivered her big news just as the nation was settling into Fourth of July celebrations. You’d have thought she didn’t want us to notice."
• "It turns out that Palin believes that the only way her administration can ‘continue without interruption’ is for her to end it."
• "There is

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Glenn Greenwald keeps up the good fight, expecting journalists to pursue factual truth (and to call authorities on their BS) rather than merely pass on both "sides" of a debate as is both were mere opinions, even when one side is factually correct and the other is bogus.

This failure to takes sides with the truth, in an attempt to maintain a faux "objectivity" leads to the media passing on government (and opposition) propaganda, lending it the appearance of truth. This applies especially with the media’s refusal to call actions taken by Americans "torture," even when Americans have prosecuted others (as torturers) for committing those identical acts (such as waterboarding) and even as those same media describe as torture those same, or essentially identical, acts carried out by other nations.

In one of his many articles on this topic, Greenwald quotes this juicily hilarious extract from

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Didn’t get a chance to read much in the papers today — but I feel some sympathy for Mark Sanford, adulterous governor of South California. It must be a painful and humiliating thing to be caught in an adulterous relationship when you’ve built your career in part on condemning other people’s sexual ethics. But he shows no signs of resigning his office, although he insisted that Bill Clinton resign his office for a similar sexual transgression. Maureen Dowd provides a breakdown of Sanford’s hypocrisy.

Tonight I have a chapter meeting (a meeting with fellow members of the Western Buddhist Order) using an online service called Tokbox that provides free videoconferencing. Our chapter members are in New Hampshire, Massachusetts, Montana, and Washington. We’ll be continuing our study of the Bodhicharyavatara.

This is four members of my chapter: Varasuri, myself, Varada, and Priyamitra. Sunada was away.

I’ve been …

From today’s New York Times:

…experts who are trotted out on television can move public opinion by more than 3 percentage points, because they seem to be reliable or impartial authorities.

But do experts actually get it right themselves?

The expert on experts is Philip Tetlock, a professor at the University of California, Berkeley. His 2005 book, “Expert Political Judgment,” is based on two decades of tracking some 82,000 predictions by 284 experts. The experts’ forecasts were tracked both on the subjects of their specialties and on subjects that they knew little about.

The result? The predictions of experts were, on average, only a tiny bit better than random guesses — the equivalent of a chimpanzee throwing darts at a board.

“It made virtually no difference whether participants had doctorates, whether they were economists, political scientists, journalists or historians, whether they had policy experience or access to classified information, or whether they had logged

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The kind of president we need…

is the kind of president capable of thinking in this way:

“My job is to help the country take the long view — to make sure that not only are we getting out of this immediate fix, but we’re not repeating the same cycle of bubble and bust over and over again; that we’re not having the same energy conversation 30 years from now that we had 30 years ago; that we’re not talking about the state of our schools in the exact same ways we were talking about them in the 1980s; and that at some point we say, ‘You know what? If we’re spending more money per-capita on health care than any nation on earth, then you’d think everybody would have coverage and we would see lower costs for average consumers, and we’d have better outcomes.’ ”

The statement, of course, is by President Obama …

Jon Stewart is concerned that Obama’s rhetoric so closely parallels that of George W. Bush, but Jason Jones says, “I guess when Obama says this stuff I don’t think he really means it. And that gives me hope.”

I’d have thought it was the other way around myself, but Jones’ version is funnier.

Brilliant clip from Stewart:

“Fox News: Really scared about what might happen; oblivious to what already has.”

I caught up on the inaugural speech almost 24 hours late due to a hospital appointment and a lack of television. I’d heard some of it on the radio but missed a chunk in the middle, and so it was only thanks to Bittorrent that I was able to download the video and see, if not the surrounding events, at least the botched swearing-in and the inaugural speech that followed.

I found the event itself very moving — the visuals definitely added to the sense of this being a momentous occasion — but wasn’t much impressed with Obama’s speech. Paul Krugman hits the spot in today’s NYT in describing one of the things I noticed as I was listening:

…in his speech Mr. Obama attributed the economic crisis in part to “our collective failure to make hard choices and prepare the nation for a new age” — but I have no

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Frank Rich sums up the pitiful figure of fun that is George W. Bush:

We like our failed presidents to be Shakespearean, or at least large enough to inspire Oscar-worthy performances from magnificent tragedians like Frank Langella. So here, too, George W. Bush has let us down. Even the banality of evil is too grandiose a concept for 43. He is not a memorable villain so much as a sometimes affable second banana whom Josh Brolin and Will Ferrell can nail without breaking a sweat. He’s the reckless Yalie Tom Buchanan, not Gatsby. He is smaller than life.

It’s well worth reading the whole of his brilliant piece.

Sitting here in these chairs that I’m going to be proposing but in working with these governors who again on the front lines are forced to and it’s our privileged obligation to find solutions to the challenges facing our own states every day being held accountable, not being just one of many just casting votes or voting present every once in a while, we don’t get away with that.

Pretty distinctive cadences, eh?

The whole article is worth reading.

Georgia Representative George Broun is apparently worried that President-elect Obama will establish a Gestapo-like security force to impose a Marxist or fascist dictatorship.

“It may sound a bit crazy and off base, but the thing is, he’s the one who proposed this national security force,” Rep. Paul Broun said of Obama in an interview Monday with The Associated Press. “I’m just trying to bring attention to the fact that we may — may not, I hope not — but we may have a problem with that type of philosophy of radical socialism or Marxism.”

Broun cited a July speech by Obama that has circulated on the Internet in which the then-Democratic presidential candidate called for a civilian force to take some of the national security burden off the military.

“That’s exactly what Hitler did in Nazi Germany and it’s exactly what the Soviet Union did,”

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From the Telegraph:

Fears are growing that Mr Obama, who will become America’s first black president following his inauguration next year, will be the subject of an assassination attempt.

The secret service is reported to have already investigated more than 500 death threats against Mr Obama during the presidential election contest. Last month, two neo-Nazi skinheads were arrested for conspiring to assassinate Mr Obama.

He is expected to be protected by a secret service detail with hundreds of close-protection agents. Over the past few weeks, the US government has also begun secretly testing a new ultra-secure presidential limousine able to withstand most bomb blasts and terror attacks. Details of his movements will be a closely guarded secret for all but his most senior aides.

The scale of US presidential security is already on a different scale to that for British Prime Ministers with huge …

From The Telegraph (I put the two most important ones first). Hat-tip to JennFields.

• He uses an Apple Mac laptop

• He has read every Harry Potter book

• He collects Spider-Man and Conan the Barbarian comics

• He was known as “O’Bomber” at high school for his skill at basketball

• His name means “one who is blessed” in Swahili

• His favourite meal is wife Michelle’s shrimp linguini

• He won a Grammy in 2006 for the audio version of his memoir, Dreams From My Father

• He is left-handed – the sixth post-war president to be left-handed

• He owns a set of red boxing gloves autographed by Muhammad Ali

• He worked in a Baskin-Robbins ice cream shop as a teenager and now can’t stand ice cream

• His favourite snacks are chocolate-peanut protein bars

• He ate dog meat, snake meat, and roasted grasshopper while living in

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Judith Warner:

Two images will forever stay in my mind to mark this epoch-breaking Election Day. One is that of Jesse Jackson’s face, drenched in tears, in Chicago’s Grant Park on Tuesday evening.

And the other is a photo that ran in The Times on Wednesday. In it, a black mother and daughter sit on the floor of a church in Harlem. The mother, Latrice Barnes, having heard of Obama’s victory, is doubled up in tears; her daughter, Jasmine, is reaching a tentative hand up to soothe her. To me, she looks like the future, reaching out to heal the past.

Tears to Remember – Judith Warner Blog – NYTimes.com

From the New York Times

Sales of handguns, rifles and ammunition have surged in the last week, according to gun store owners around the nation who describe a wave of buyers concerned that an Obama administration will curtail their right to bear arms.

“He’s a gun-snatcher,” said Jim Pruett, owner of Jim Pruett’s Guns and Ammo in northwest Houston, which was packed with shoppers on Thursday.

“He wants to take our guns from us and create a socialist society policed by his own police force,” added Mr. Pruett, a former radio personality, of President-elect Barack Obama.

Chris Casella, general manager of Federal Firearms Company in Oakdale, Pa., a suburb of Pittsburgh, said he had been fielding about 30 calls a day from people interested in buying assault-type rifles, especially semiautomatic weapons, often with magazines that could hold lots of ammunition

On Concerns Over Gun Control, …

I love Gail Collin’s sense of humor. She manages to be hilarious while being insightful, which makes her a very attractive woman in my eyes. Here she is on Elizabeth Dole’s scurrilous campaign ad:

North Carolina tossed Elizabeth Dole out of office despite her ad campaign aimed at convincing the state that her opponent, Kay Hagan, was an atheist. This was accomplished, you may remember, through the creative strategy of showing Hagan’s picture along with another woman’s voice saying: “There is no God!” If Dole had won, by the next election we would have been bombarded with ads that appeared to show candidates saying “I support adultery!” or “Let’s kill the puppies!” Now that won’t happen. Thank you, North Carolina.

More hilarity can be found here.

And in case you missed it, here’s the ad. Watch it now before Dole uses the DMCA to have it pulled from YouTube.

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I want to make sure I can find this easily in the future, so I’m posting it here:

If there is anyone out there who still doubts that America is a place where all things are possible; who still wonders if the dream of our founders is alive in our time; who still questions the power of our democracy, tonight is your answer.

It’s the answer told by lines that stretched around schools and churches in numbers this nation has never seen; by people who waited three hours and four hours, many for the very first time in their lives, because they believed that this time must be different; that their voice could be that difference.

It’s the answer spoken by young and old, rich and poor, Democrat and Republican, black, white, Latino, Asian, Native American, gay, straight, disabled and not disabled – Americans who …

A brief mention of Obama’s grandmother, Madelyn Dunham’s, passing was posted on Lucianne.com a right-wing “news forum”. The comments became so toxic that the site owner had to remove them.

Conservatives rejoiced. Conservatives implied that her death had been “conveniently timed” to help Obama win the election. That she’d been killed to boost him in the polls. A MsMontana commented, “R.I.P. old woman…you deserve it.”

I have to say I fear for America. Where is all this poison going to go now that Obama’s been elected? Is it just going to dissipate as people find that Obama is a likable, honorable, and talented president? Or are these people so out of touch that they’ll continue to adopt a poisoned view of everything about him?

Because they lost the election, and because of the nature of hatred, some of the poison will be …

Monty provides another window today on the phenomenon known as “confirmation bias” in politics. Monty and Moondog both receive the same information and yet draw the opposite conclusions from it.