This explains it

I was finding the lengthy and hysterical buildup to the Democratic VP pick to be more than a little tiresome, and I guess so was Lance Mannion. But in his usual perceptiveness, Mannion has now figured out why the Obama campaign did it this way:

All summer McCain and Obama have been playing chicken over their choices for VP, each waiting for the other to go first. If the game of chicken lasted long enough, Obama was going to have to go first, and that's what happened. But Obama found a way to win by going first. He kept the Media attention on his choice all this past week without giving McCain the opportunity to upstage him.
McCain can't make his announcement next week. There's no way he can force the attention away from the Democratic Convention unless he picks Hillary. Which means that, basically, he has to announce his choice as part of the routine business of the Republican Convention. Which means that either his Veep gets lost in the shuffle, or he (or she) upstages McCain himself.
Being upstaged is not something McCain allows.
So, what mattered this week wasn't who Obama's choice would or wouldn't be. In fact, I won't be surprised if we find out that it's been Biden all along. What mattered was that that's what everybody was talking about.

Great photos

The Globe and Mail features 10 photos that changed Canada. Here are my favorites:






One of the blogs I read frequently is BAGnewsNotes, for their photo analysis.

"I don't trust this party anymore"

Harper appears bound and determined to call an election, and I suspect the goal is to shut down the In-and-Out hearings. Opposition MPs are saying this too:

A federal election would kill any attempt by MPs to cite for contempt Tory witnesses who ignored parliamentary summonses to election-finance hearings last week, and opposition politicians argue it is a key reason the government wants to rush to the polls.

The hearings have been pretty embarrassing for the Conservatives, particularly the ex-candidates who testified they smelled a rat. Kady O'Malley was liveblogging the Ethics Committee hearings and this is the kind of stuff that was coming out:

... basically, [Martelli] was asked to take a deposit, which would be returned to the party within the same day — “a simple in and out.” The money was deposited - $14,000 - and he eventually got back $8,000 from Elections Canada, which was sent back to the party.
When Michel Rivard looked at the papers — he was the one who did his - Martelli’s - taxes during the campaign, he had him sign “a bunch of papers.”
Carole Lavallee wonders whether he ever saw an invoice for these ad buys — he didn’t.
I’m beginning to see why the Conservatives may not have wanted to give this guy time to speak. . . .
He joined the party, he says, because he believed in their vision — but he doesn’t believe that anymore. “They’ve lost a lot of people,” he notes.
“They had set forth a vision, and there were people who believed in that vision,” he says. “It was disappointing when they pushed it over.” . . .
Twisting the knife a little, Pat Martin asks how Martelli felt — ethically — about the in and out scheme. “Disappointed,” he says. “A lot of people were disappointed.”
. . . “I don’t trust this party anymore,” he repeats.

And this :

Finally, the witnesses get to speak, and Marcel Proulx gets things started by asking David Marler about his experience as a candidate for the Conservatives . . . he asked ... about the transfer, and was told that it was “none of his business.”
You could seriously hear a pin drop right now. Marler is just so — ordinary, and I don’t mean that in a dismissive way. He doesn’t seem to have any sort of hidden agenda; he’s just telling his story, and It’s an amazingly intense - and tense - moment.
For his final question, Proulx asks whether Marler is still a Conservative Party candidate; the answer, he says, is no.

Now the Cons have brought in some new candidate rules. We won't be hearing any testimony in the future about how Conservative candidates don't trust the Conservative party anymore.

Obama-Biden 2008

Well, I think its too bad it's not Hillary, but everybody seems happy with the Biden choice.
Steve Clemons makes some excellent arguments about Why Joe Biden is Vital and the Right Choice.
My clearest memory of Joe Biden was watching him at some Senate hearing, when he got angry at former defense secretary Rumsfeld over the implications of Abu Ghraib. Biden actually shouted, he was so angry, and he said something like, its my son you are putting at risk here, my son and every American's son, if we treat their soldiers so badly, how dare you put my son in danger. Biden brought a personal, family dimension to the discussion that it badly needed.
Also, it was Biden who torpedoed Guilliani's campaign with his "Noun. Verb. 9-11". Good line, that. I hope he can issue a few memorable zingers in this campaign too.

Epic fail

Dave at Galloping Beaver sums up the situation between Russia and NATO now, in Add a little ice, hit "chop" for 30 seconds and Voila! A Cold War cocktail!. And we find out that the United States has shot itself in the foot with its promises to Poland and the Czech Republic about missile defense systems. He alerts us to this article posted at The Guardian points out:

. . . Missile defence is so expensive and the measures required to evade it so cheap that if the US government were serious about making the system work it would bankrupt the country, just as the arms race helped to bring the Soviet Union down. By spending a couple of billion dollars on decoy technologies, Russia would commit the US to trillions of dollars of countermeasures. The cost ratios are such that even Iran could outspend the US.

So the Bush administration has even figured out a way to neutralize its own vast military overspending. Heck of a job, Bushie.
UPDATE: Cernig has more.

Thanks, POGGE

Thanks to POGGE, I am now a Kick Ass Blogger.



It started here. And it ends ... who knows?
Turns out that Alison, the Beav, Chet, Dawg, Stageleft and POGGE (which includes skdadl, I think) are already listed. So I chose:
1. RossK
2. Saskboy
3. Scott
4. The Rev. Paperboy
5. JimBobby

Jingle all the way

McCain fails today's ad war.
Its not the end, nor the beginning of the end. But it may be the end of the beginning.
Not to mention that House-gate has given Democrats a whole new shtick -- jingling their way through the convention.

Letter to American bloggers

Dear American bloggers,

Magical ponies are not going to gallop out of Denver to rescue the Obama campaign.
Agreed, the Democratic party itself will be energized by the convention. But the media coverage of Denver will invariably disappoint. And the Vice-President choices are so controversial that the pick, when it is finally made, will generate bad press as well as good.
And then it will be September ...and no ponies to be found anywhere.
I know, I know, I can hear it already --"oh, don't worry! Mere bloggers don't understand it but of course Obama's campaign knows what they're doing!"
But while his staff apparently are wonderful people, disciplined, loyal, knowledgeable, etc. etc, its becoming pretty clear they're in over their heads. They've been distracted by style ("Look, Ma, no 527s!") and technique ("we have offices in 50 states!") and they've lost focus on substance.
It's time to stop with the wishful thinking.
I think American Blogtopia should stop waiting for marching orders from Chicago and make its own plan.
1. You need a theme.
"Reality-based community" and "I am aware of internet traditions" spread like wildfire and all of a sudden they were on blogs everywhere. Is there an Obama phrase which you all should be using and blogging about? Markos and Jane and Booman need to come up with a few choices and find something that appeals to people -- maybe a phrase from the convention will be the thing.
2. You need a message -- about Obama, not about McCain.
I am sick to death of reading blog posts about McCain said this and McCain said that and you kids get off my lawn. Funny, yes, but I keep waiting for the other shoe to drop. Why does OBAMA want to be president, and why should VOTERS want him to be president? Billmon and Hunter and Americablog and Dibgy and Bill Sher need to write a dozen posts about what Obama means to them and what he should mean to other Americans. And please, please no more earnest dense graph-filled posts about 10-point economic plans or 15-point health care initiatives. The most "points" Obama is allowed from now on is three (like this post). Two would be even better. That's right, TWO! Because that's the most anybody can remember anyway.
3. And you need stories, stories, stories.
You need Obama anecdotes and history and 'Obama's best quotes' and posts about Michelle and the girls. What kind of professor was he? What did he like best about Kenya? Does he tell jokes? Does he like puns? What was his first job? Was it hard for him to stop smoking? What basketball shot would he most like to be able to do? Across blogtopia, there are people who know him personally, who can write about him or be interviewed about him, who can tell us more about this guy. You need to pass these stories on to the hundreds of thousands of blog readers who are aching to know more -- and to the media who would pick them up and run with them. Blogtopia has been pretty dismissive about people wanting to have a beer with George Bush. but really this was just a way of expressing a political truth -- Americans absolutely demand a personal connection to their leaders. If they don't have it with Obama, they won't vote for him. This is the basis of the "elitist celebrity" meme. So you need stories about this guy, human stories. People won't necessarily see Obama as the guy they want to have a beer with, but he could be the teacher who is coaching their kid's basketball team, or the friend who is laughing at one of their jokes, or the neighbour who's helping them build a back fence.

Yours hopefully,
Cathie

(Slightly different version also posted at Daily Kos)

Get a grip

This is getting embarrassing.
300 people on Daily Kos are now discussing how Obama will word the Text Message when he announces his vice president.
Next up, what colour tie will he wear?

Getting ready to jump off the bus

If Obama doesn't start turning things around in about two more weeks -- with a good convention, a popular VP pick [cough- Clinton -cough] and some positive momentum -- I think we'll see people leaping off his bus. This time they're not going to hang around waiting for the debates and believing a magical pony will turn things around.
Wes Clark was the first to go.
Now I see distress flags going up all over the blogosphere, Suburban Guerrilla, Avedon Carol, Matt Stoller, Chris Bowers. Josh is worried. Markos is babbling. Even Digby isn't sure what Obama stands for.
And Melissa already hopped off at the last stop.
UPDATE: And Jeralyn is ringing the bell.

He's baaaak!

I think Jean Chretien just announced that he's back and he's pissed off.
Gomery and Martin kept him out of the last election campaign, but I don't think he'll be sitting out another one -- which is good because Dion needs all the help he can get.
I wonder if Harper will still keep threatening an election now? Noni Mausa at Galloping Beaver notes some of the strange stuff that Harper has been focusing on lately:

...like most leaders about to be toppled, he appears to be moving to get a few things done before he asked to hand back the keys and the garage door opener for 24 Sussex Drive.
With many governments there is a rush of legislation for the greater good as the lame duck begins his descent -- election funding laws, for instance, or amnesties. We rightly value our government for the wide array of services it provides -- is Harper acting to put some more in place?
Not as far as I have seen. Instead, he has pulled out his machete. The cuts to funding and programs are underway, and weirdly prominent among them are huge cuts to the tiny federal budget supporting the arts.

And here's some more weird news about Conservative candidate recruitment:

In what a cynical observer might suggest is an attempt to tighten any potential future legal challenge to the party’s now notorious in-and-out scheme – which it maintains is entirely legitimate under existing election law – Tory hopefuls are now required to agree, in advance, to any “reasonable financial arrangement” with the party to provide “campaign services” before they will even be permitted to run for the nomination. They also aren’t allowed to talk about it before, during or after the fact, since they also have to sign a non-disclosure agreement that covers the entire candidate selection process.

Well, that'll attract the best and the brightest, won't it? Harper is just so bullheaded about Elections Canada he will distort and demean the party's whole candidate recruitment process just to cover up what the party is doing.

Jerk of the day

Man sues Columbia over women's studies program
If he wants to start a men's studies program, he can go right ahead.
Oops, sorry, not necessary -- that already describes just about every history class before 1950 . . .

He needs our compassion

I think the Canadian Medical Association should diagnose Health Minister Tony Clements as suffering from obsessive-compulsive disorder. He is utterly obsessed with closing down Insite.

What Billmon says

Billmon gives us excellent analysis on how the United States and NATO have backed into the Russia-Georgia War:

. . . it’s a pretty strange world where the sworn goal of US diplomacy is to put the country in a situation where it may have to go to war with another nuclear power (or back down ignominiously) to defend the sanctity of borders drawn by Josef Stalin and Nikita Krushchev. Leaving aside the raving hypocrisy (Kosovo, Iraq) it’s an alarming sign that the national security and foreign policy elites of this country – in both parties; and not just among the lunatic neocon fringe – are totally out of control. British analyst Anatol Levin (one of the more perceptive of the realists) describes it a case of "profound infantilism":

In the United States, the infantile illusion of omnipotence, whereby it doesn’t matter how many commitments the United States has made elsewhere—in the last resort, the United States can always do what it likes.

Personally, I see it more as a case of the bureaucratic imperative run amok: The national security state is doing exactly what it was designed to do, but without any of the external checks and counterbalances that existed during the Cold War – the war it was originally created to fight. The domestic political system, meanwhile, has atrophied to the point where it’s simply an afterthought – a legislative rubber stamp needed to keep the dollars flowing. With no effective opposition, the machine can run on autopilot, until it finally topples off a cliff (as in Iraq) or slams into an object (like the Russian Army) that refuses to get out of the way.

Read the whole thing.

Great post of the day

John Cole at Balloon Juice writes about how the Chinese are just going to have to wait their turn in the Nazi-stakes:

... Quite simply, there is no time allocated for the Chinese to be called Nazis right now. The Iranians were the Nazis for the previous six months, now the Russians are scheduled to be the Nazis until the elections in November. We will take a break from international Nazis during the Thanksgiving and Christmas holidays and reserve the term for relatives, in-laws, people who re-gift, and secular humanists and the ACLU and anyone else Bill O’Reilly decides is an enemy of Christmas.
Maybe we can work the Chinese into the schedule sometimes in January. I will get with the Weekly Standard and find out.

From Crooks & Liars.