Looks like we need one. This is a good liveblog of the Assange situation – he’s in jail, no bail.
Open Thread
by $8 blue check mistermix| 278 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
by $8 blue check mistermix| 278 Comments
This post is in: Open Threads
Looks like we need one. This is a good liveblog of the Assange situation – he’s in jail, no bail.
Comments are closed.
cleek
this thread is racist
Carnacki
Muhammad Ali is still the prettiest to ever float like a butterfly. I’m just saying is all.
Three-nineteen
This is awesome:
cmorenc
Does Assange’s detention, should it appear likely to extend from a few short days into indefinitude, mean that the “poison capsule” of additional unredacted documents will thereby likely be released? Did he set it up so he needs to send some kind of signal to the holders of those documents to release them, or is in the holders’ discretion whether and when to release them, or is there some automatic trigger (depending only perhaps on the holder’s willingness to implement the protocol for releasing them?)
I guess we’ll find out soon enough.
beltane
If he only had the decency to just curb-stomp a woman like the good guys do, all would be well.
brendancalling
@Carnacki:
you’re a racist. Lisa told me so.
The Republic of Stupidity
I have to say, w/out being for or against Assange… what did he expect, running around tweaking the nose of the truly powerful like this?
I kinda wish Julian had stuck to leaking the secrets of corps, banks… that sort of thing… he should have known choosing to go up against the U.S. wasn’t a good idea…
It’s not that big of a world anymore, Julian… perhaps you should have made sure you were in a safer place, like Ecuador, before doing that last dump…
The only situation I can think of that seems comparable is in an old movie… ‘M’, Peter Lorre’s star-making turn from the 30’s… when the entire underground in Berlin unites to hunt down the child killer… and no surprise, Julian has been accused of rape…
Everybody and anybody of note – national govts, large corps, appear to have been working in concert to bring Assange and WikiLeaks down, and another no surprise there, huh?
At least Julian didn’t get mysteriously gunned down in the streets…
Face
This is great news for cudlips.
eemom
cue the martyr brigade.
maybe he’ll spawn his own al-assange terrorist movement of suicide leakers.
then we’ll have to go shred ’em over there so we don’t have to shred ’em over here, and so forth.
Carnacki
@cmorenc: I saw it as him jumping the shark when his lawyer said that about the “thermonuclear bomb” if he should be arrested. Does that mean he thinks he should be able to get away with anything illegal? I don’t want him to face politically motivated prosecution, but he shouldn’t be able to blackmail his way out legitimate criminal charges either.
Chyron HR
Give it up, cudlips. Major Kusanagi is just going to cyber-hack into the judge’s brain and order Assange’s release.
Sentient Puddle
Cole bait: Oregon man legally changes his name to Captain Awesome.
Carnacki
@brendancalling: See what happens when I miss a thread? The inside jokes go sailing over my head. Any linky help for those of us who missed out on the latest dustup?
Ross Hershberger
I’m neutral so far on the leaks. With electronic communication leaving a data ‘paper trail’ a mile wide it was only a matter of time before large amounts of damaging info got out.
But why couldn’t it have been Madoff’s tech guys who did this, and years ago?
On the rape charges, who knows. Only two people, probably. Have to wait and see. If this is trumped up or a sting, there will be hell to pay.
andrewsomething
Maybe I just don’t dive into the right cesspools, but where are all these progressives calling for Obama to be primaried? This isn’t pie. I’m seriously interested. I keep hearing people screaming about un-hinged progressives out to primary Obama, but I can’t seem to find them except for a few posts at FDL and in the diaries over at the Great Orange Satan. Is this really what we’re up in arms about?
Steeplejack
I will wait to have this explicated for me by the Girl Who Kicked the Cudlip’s Nest. But I’m pretty sure the OODA loop is being clogged and things are WAI.
ETA: Moo.
beltane
@Three-nineteen: Even more awesome is one of the responses:
Zandar
And then Assange will disable four people and escape from custody with a New Scotland Yard hard drive and lead half of London on a merry speedboat chase over the Thames while he secretly gets away in his dirigible.
Next stop, Cairo.
Alwhite
Mr. Schneier hits the nail on the head so hard the iron mine collapses!
Close the Washington Monument
http://www.schneier.com/blog/a…..washi.html
Seebach
Sounds to me like he won’t be opening the insurance file unless things go unfair. He’s facing the charges like everyone wanted him too, and he’s not going to pout about it. Seems like he’s on the level so far. I would suspect only if he gets extradited to the US on some bogus charge would the insurance file open.
Ash Can
@The Republic of Stupidity: I’ve been thinking the same thing. And keep in mind that he didn’t just tweak the US, he tweaked every government that was mentioned in the document dump. That’s a lot of tweaking. I think the circumstances of his arrest and detainment are dubious at best (and I’m not even all that fond of him), but I can’t say that I’m surprised this all went down in the wake of him pissing off the entire world just for kicks.
Steeplejack
@Chyron HR:
I like Ghost in the Shell. Get my one-hour fix every weekend on Adult Swim. Also have belatedly started to appreciate Cowboy Bebop.
cyntax
For Gordon the Express Engine, who in a thread from last night was asking about teaching opportunities and career advice for his younger brother. I’m in the midst of transitioning from working or a fortune 500 company to teaching and wouldn’t necessarily recommend teaching overseas.
In large part this has to do with why someone wants to teach. If your brother has interest in other cultures and wants to find a cost effective way to live in overseas, then it might be the right choice. But you need to know that teaching ESL overseas can be a very decontextualized experience. What I mean is that most people get into teaching “to make a difference,” and that usually means teaching within a community that the teacher is a part of and is invested in. Teaching overseas (outside of a Peace Corps type setting) doesn’t provide that experience for anyone I know who’s done it.
Finally, your brother should consider what level of education he’d like to teach at, and find a college/university that has a strong program to support that sort of teaching. He should look for programs that have good student-teaching opportunities and for programs whose pedagogical focus (teaching philosophy) feels like a good match for him. Also, the program should have a good credentialing program.
Hope that helps.
Steeplejack
@Alwhite:
Linky no work. You fix.
El Tiburon
Assange is in jail
-and no bail?
Like the bread on Cole’s sammiches this story is already stale.
LIke an ABL rant – major FAIL!
Now that Assange is in the pokey, he can’t write, tweet or even e-mail
Because of Obama’s jelly spine, more mega-yachts will sail
Oil is getting so hard to find, you gots to get at it sideways from Canadian Shale
Yo, my rap is done, so I’m gonna bail.
Holla.
Seebach
Assange faced the police. The US forced Spain to retract its case against the war criminals. So far, Assange has the higher moral ground. If he kept running, he would not, but he turned himself in.
Ross Hershberger
@Steeplejack:
All great distractions from reality. Also very good, in a darker and creepier way, is Paranoia Agent.
EDIT: Or pretty much anything from Satoshi Kon or Masamune Shirow.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Carnacki: I doubt he’s using it as a “get out of jail free” card. More like a tool to prevent being assassinated.
Earl Butz
Wikileaks has had their DNS hosting revoked, and no one seems willing to pick up the banner of freedom and host their DNS name. I guess we now know what the limit of “free speech” is. A valuable lesson to be sure.
So, in layman’s terms, they are done, unless you know their numeric IP address, and “wikileaks” is a lot easier to remember (not to mention yell at a protest) than “http://88.80.13.160”.
Steeplejack
@Ross Hershberger:
Yeah, that one was good. Is it on now? I seem to remember seeing it in one long run a year or so ago.
Elizabelle
If this Daily Mail account (partially based on “leaked police interviews”) is accurate, the prosecution of Julian Assange is highly suspect.
In August, the chief prosecutor declined to proceed and “dismissed the rape charge. She felt that what had occurred were no more than minor offences.”
In September, the case is back on and eventually there’s an Interpol alert.
Sounds like revenge by the accusers, convenient IF you were a country willing to extradite a troublesome activist on spurious charges.
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/news/article-1336291/Wikileaks-Julian-Assanges-2-night-stands-spark-worldwide-hunt.html
Punchy
So when does Assange flee to Cudlipistan?
Ross Hershberger
@Steeplejack:
I never watch cable or broadcast. We have an awesome indie video rental place here that has satisfied our anime needs. Lately Netflix DVDs and, later, downloads fill in. The popular stuff is widely available.
Paranoia Agent has a lot of the bent reality head games of Millennium Actress or Perfect Blue. Pretty sophisticated concepts for Anime.
EDIT: Okay, I’ll leave the cartoon talk for an O.T. now.
I have to return to my designated workplace soon and generate revenue.
Tom Hilton
Wev. I cannot even begin to describe the depths of my apathy about Julian Assange.
Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle
@Ash Can: Do you really he’s pissing off the world, or the corrupt elites, just for kicks?
Kenneth
The Swedes are a bunch of subservient US puppets.
brendancalling's not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is
@Carnacki:
read ABL’s last post on the PCCC’s ad telling Obama to fight. ABL thinks the ad is racist, others do not. It’s an interesting debate, until Lisa starts calling everyone who doesn’t see it as racist a racist, and starts talking about “your people” and how white progressives like to kill brown people as much as white conservatives do.
When i object to this, she calls me a racist. I don’t take kindly to that, especially when the person crying “racist” is herself being a racist.
I’m going to be angry about that for a long time. It’s going to be my catchphrase. Maybe my new username.
lol
@Earl Butz:
That IP address sends me to Wikileaks.Ch so they’re still in DNS.
Wikileaks.com is probably going to be hosed for a while though.
Elizabelle
@Earl Butz:
I don’t know why some organization devoted to journalists’ freedoms has not picked up hosting the site.
It’s not like they’re not using the case to crusade for their cause.
Very strange. The power of money and behind the scenes negotiations and intimidation.
Jewish Steel
@El Tiburon:
I think you will find that the “rapping” usually has an element called “meter.”
ed drone
@Earl Butz:
The new way an ‘unperson’ is created.
Ed
FlipYrWhig
@El Tiburon:
Ya can call me Captain Ahab ‘cuz I hunt da white whale
Ya blind as a bat and ya don’t know Braille
I got more brains than Elihu Yale
Ya chump, ya got punked like J Danforth Quayle.
JenJen
Just tweeted a little bit about this, but I’ve returned from a trip to the bookstore to pick up some holiday gifts, and while perusing the political section and flipping through Bush’s shitty memoir and chuckling a bit, some guy in the same section who’d been staring at me decided to strike up a convo. It went like this:
Weirdo: That’s a great book.
Me: If you say so.
Weirdo: You should really read it.
Me: Not gonna.
Weirdo: Not a fan of the former President?
Me: No.
Weirdo: So I guess you’re a liberal?
Me: Yes. (silently willing this dude to leave me alone, and he’s suddenly turned into a close-talker)
Weirdo: Well, then you should know that the only reason Bush is viewed as a failure by some is because of his liberal policies. He was a liberal in GOP clothing, you know.
Me: Huh?
Weirdo: You want a coffee?
Me: No. (put the book down, and hightailed it out of the political section.)
Has anyone heard this alleged argument yet? It kind of freaked me out, plus I actually think in his own, spectacularly unsuccessful way, the guy was hitting on me.
By the way, is there anything in the shitty memoir reflecting on Bush’s decision to nominate Harriet Miers to the Supreme Court? That was about the only thing I was kind of looking forward to hearing about, but as far as Miers goes, I’ve heard nothing but crickets.
Ash Can
The whole idea of a “poison pill”/”thermonuclear bomb” of a document dump makes the whole Wikileaks operation look suspect. If Assange & Co. truly regarded themselves as righteous crusaders for justice, transparency, and freedom of information, why would they want to hold anything back? How could that possibly fit into their game plan? Frankly, it sounds like a bluff. And it’s more than a little annoying to think that, in a situation where they potentially could do some actual, substantial good (viz., blowing the whistle on the for-profit insurance industry), they’re just dicking around.
4tehlulz
>Has anyone heard this alleged argument yet?
That argument dates back to November 2008.
Sentient Puddle
@JenJen:
Since about 2007. But I think that’s the first time I’ve ever heard of someone using it to hit on someone…
liberal
A friend of mine who researches diabetes among other things pointed out this quote from a David Brooks column (most recent one I think):
Michael
I’m about to go like Ike on Tina at the next uttering of the word “cudlips”.
Carnacki
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: I wish that was true, but his lawyers seemed to leave it rather ambiguous.
Link
“At the centre of a tightening web of death threats, sex-crime accusations and high-level demands for a treason trial, WikiLeaks founder Julian Assange threatened to unleash a “thermonuclear device” of completely unexpurgated government files if he is forced to appear before authorities.
Mr. Assange, the 39-year-old Australian Internet activist whose online document-leaking service has embarrassed the United States and other countries by publishing hundreds of thousands of secret diplomatic and military documents, has referred to the huge, unfiltered document as his “insurance policy.”
snip
Mr. Assange’s lawyer Mark Stephens warned that if Mr. Assange were to be brought to trial on rape accusations he faces in Sweden, or for treason charges that have been suggested by U.S. politicians, he would release the encryption key.
debit
@Michael: You know what’s gonna happen next, right?
The Grand Panjandrum
I told you if Obama, Reid and McConnell had” reached an agreement” that Pelosi and her posse still had a say in the Bush tax cut bill. It ain’t over yet and Speaker Pelosi is actually got some Speakeregery left in her. Once again she is the voice of leadership many of us have been looking for. Wonder Woman ain’t got shit on Pelosi.
FlipYrWhig
@Michael: Somehow matoko_chan became the endless topic of conversation at roughly the same time as everyone went bugfuck crazy about politics. Coincidence? Or viral replication?
danimal
The rape charge appears to be pretty bogus. More like sexual assault. Actually, more like doinking a couple of women on successive nights and moving on to other conquests. Sham charges, if you ask me. Serial one-night stands are not that out of the ordinary, even if they are not my lifestyle choice.
I’m not a big Assange defender, but apparently pissing off the global elite has a price.
Michael
@debit:
Resentfully, yes.
Ash Can
@Calvin Jones and the 13th Apostle: I wish he would just target the “corrupt elites.” He’s not. He’s pissing off corrupt and uncorrupt, elite and common, alike. He’s sloppy at best, and comes off as being in it for himself, rather than for the principle.
geg6
@Sentient Puddle:
I first heard it back before the 2006 midterms. Never heard it used as a pickup line before, though. Gotta give him props for originality.
FlipYrWhig
@The Grand Panjandrum: I’ve been trying to engage someone about this, and maybe you’ll take it up.
I think, and others have said much the same thing, that if no one was able to broker a deal and taxes went up on everyone on 1/1/11, Obama would be held responsible for that.
Should the deal be blown up by progressive discontent, do you think that Obama would be held responsible for that, or would discontented progressives?
polyorchnid octopunch
You guys are nuts. Seriously.
Look, it wasn’t the State Department cables that got everybody working to remove him from contention… they’ve been known about for months. It was the day after he revealed in an interview with the Guardian that the next document dump was going to “turn a major US bank inside-out” that the poutrage got cranked up.
That tells you everything you need to know about who your government (and most of the governments in the west) work for (as if the Irish crisis/bank bailouts/etc etc etc wasn’t enough to tell you).
Are you guys going to wake up and smell the coffee or what?
brendancalling's not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is
@JenJen:
I’ve heard that argument from some of my conservative friends who are desperate to rid themselves of the stench of Bush.
It’s a desperate attempt to erase his legacy, and one that ain’t gonna work.
JenJen
@geg6: @Sentient Puddle: Well, then, could either of you explain to me how this argument goes? Because I really wasn’t willing to sit down for a cup of coffee with this bizarro stranger to find out.
(I know, I know. Maybe next time I’ll just take one for the team. Double-shot please. Of whiskey.)
@polyorchnid octopunch:
Egg-fucking-zactly.
chopper
the judge done said that he refused a fine.
cyntax
Digby has an interesting post arguing that the payroll tax holiday will most likely become permanent and result in large shortfalls for Social Security that will make it easier for the Repubs to go after it:
Worth reading the whole thing.
jeffreyw
Lunch time.
Omnes Omnibus
@JenJen: I think it is simply a variation on the “conservatism cannot fail; it can only be failed” theme.
fasteddie9318
@polyorchnid octopunch: You win the thread.
Ross Hershberger
Possibly they planned to parcel the docs out for best effect, which would be reasonable. I don’t know what kind of a bargaining chip the whole dump is, since they obviously plan to release everything they get eventually.
chopper
@polyorchnid octopunch:
yeah, you might have missed this, but that argument has been put forth here. by cole, IIRC, in a front-page post. you think you’re clever, but you’re kinda late to the party.
geg6
Well, I just have to say that if you needed any more proof that Obama’s deal with the GOPers is a piece of shit, this triumphant post by Sully should seal the deal:
http://andrewsullivan.theatlantic.com/the_daily_dish/2010/12/obama-president-mcconnell-sucker.html
Meep, meep, motherfuckers.
And as for a Dem who I can support, need I look any further than Madame Speaker?
http://thehill.com/homenews/house/132381-hoyer-house-dem-leaders-not-on-board-tax-deal
Meep, meep, right back atcha.
Jewish Steel
@FlipYrWhig:
Much better.
@JenJen:
Unless you are a martial arts whiz, please don’t take one for
the team. None of us wants to hear about a crazed loner found wearing a JenJen skin.
geg6
@JenJen:
He broke the budget and didn’t turn America into Gilead like he promised.
Seriously.
daveNYC
Usually those arguments go that the person wasn’t conservative enough. That nutter went so far as to call Shrub a liberal. I think it’s more ‘conservatives good, liberals bad’ tribalism. The guy didn’t like Bush, he doesn’t like liberals, ergo Bush was a liberal.
Omnes Omnibus
@Ross Hershberger:
Hell, in some ways, it is probably better to have it all duped at once. Slow release lets people concentrate on each bit as it comes out. If everything hits at once, people will shocked by some of what is there, I am sure, but they will become numbed to it after a bit.
Sentient Puddle
@JenJen:As Omnes Omnibus stated, it’s that he somehow failed the ideology. Not being sufficiently conservative means that you’re clearly a flaming liberal, of course. I say 2007 because once Republicans got ass-whupped in the election, Rush spouted off some shit about how Republicans weren’t really conservative, and that’s all you could hear about from them about why they lost.
Negative! We do not want to put you in a situation where you might perform violent acts upon another human, even if it’s an involuntary reaction.
brendancalling's not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is
hi, can my comments come out of moderation now?
please?
WyldPirate
@liberal:
That’s interesting, liberal.
I could see there being some aspects of that regarding one consistently eating too much, or being physically inactive because they lacked the self-control to keep from obsessively posting on something like a political blog. ;)
Think I’ll go check out the latest Brooks droppings at NYT.
JenJen
@Jewish Steel: No worries. If I really want to know what’s behind a really dumb-sounding wingnut argument, I’ll just come here and ask. :-)
@geg6: I can see where that would actually make sense to about 22% of the population or so. Thanks!
@Omnes Omnibus: @Sentient Puddle: And thank you both, as well.
Just to add a little more detail, bizarro stranger who was hitting on me was well dressed, had been staring long enough that it made me uncomfortable before he spoke, and when he did speak and I got a taste of his mannerisms, he was way too confident for his own good. Plus, he was already drinking a coffee.
Omnes Omnibus
@daveNYC: I see it as: conservatives=good, liberal = not conservative = bad, Bush was a crappy president and therefore bad, ergo Bush = liberal.
Dennis SGMM
@Omnes Omnibus:
By 2020 at the latest the Republicans will refer to Bush as a liberal Democrat. The media will fail to contradict them.
Omnes Omnibus
@Dennis SGMM: Nah, we will be in Assange and matoko_chan’s anarchist/quellist paradise of free information and ponies by then, so it is all good.
licensed to kill time
Many years ago I traveled overland to Asia from Europe, and one night while rolling through Bulgaria on a train I shared a compartment with a peasant and his family. He really wanted to communicate. I didn’t speak Bulgarian, but that didn’t matter to him-he thought if he repeated himself over and over, a bit louder each time, that the language barrier would finally be breached and I would understand.
He pressed his vodka bottle into my hand numerous times. He talked louder and louder. We rocked along through the night. At one point the train stopped in the middle of nowhere and everybody got off, ran across the tracks and boarded another train going in the opposite direction. After a moment’s hesitation, I followed them. It was a weird night.
Reading matoko_chan gives me the same kind of feeling.
I don’t know if the guy ever called me a cudlip, though.
Suck It Up!
@andrewsomething:
its here in the threads, its in the threads at TPM, its at FDL, its at GOS, its in the WaPO, its on DU, its at HuffPo, I believe someone said it was in a NYT op-ed from one of the regulars, and its on various other less significant liberal sites. And when I say significant, I mean within the liberal blogosphere.
FormerSwingVoter
Heh, I wandered over to the GOS. It’s great to see that the circular firing squad is in full effect.
Caravelle
Hello everybody,
I tried to do a donation by bank transfer to Wikileaks’ German account. I went on the banking site, did the international money transfer thing, gave the account number… And they said I’d exceeded my transfer ceiling, which is ridiculous especially since they had no problem transferring the exact same amount to my mother’s account a few minutes later.
A friend tells me this is because my checking account has a Mastercard card, therefore this is part of Mastercard’s blocking payments. But I always assumed that when you do a bank transfer from an account to the next, never involving the card, it was all the bank’s business and Mastercard didn’t have anything to do with it.
So, is my friend right and it’s just what we knew already ? Am I right and it turns out French banks are blocking bank transfers to Wikileaks, which I hadn’t heard before ? Or did they freeze their German account or something ?
Suck It Up!
@The Grand Panjandrum:
you are plenty naive if you think Pelosi wasn’t consulting with Obama and Reid and mcconnell. You portray her as having gigantic ten ton balls but then believe that she would allow talks to happen without her.
Mnemosyne
@The Republic of Stupidity:
Actually, none of this overreaction happened until Assange threatened to release information about US banks. Then all of a sudden he was Public Enemy #1, not when he released government information.
I’m just sayin’, is all.
ETA: Shorter me: Paddy Chayefsky was a prophet.
eemom
@geg6:
Nancy SMAAAAAAAASH!!!
ONLY set of testicles in Washington.
kdaug
@JenJen: Conservatism cannot fail. You can only fail conservatism.
Caravelle
That’s… special. If they publish everything indiscriminately then they’re irresponsibly endangering lives. If they discriminate what they publish and what they don’t then they’re suspiciously “holding back”.
Suck It Up!
@cleek:
that’s a great impression of a right winger.
FlipYrWhig
@FormerSwingVoter: When hasn’t it been? They were dogpiling and harassing Clinton supporters for months in ’07 and ’08. Their “community” is a lot of people trying to impress each other with how steely-eyed and hardcore they are. Nobody has quite figured out what sarcastic liberals in the internet era are supposed to do with a Democratic president in charge, and the results haven’t been encouraging.
Omnes Omnibus
@Mnemosyne: Interesting, isn’t it?
Ross Hershberger
As usual, the GOP leadership points the way and everyone fixes bayonets and charges. But the Democrats need to round everyone up and agree on the direction to take, the calibration of the compass and the auspicious time to start.
FormerSwingVoter
@FlipYrWhig: Yeah, but apparently they’ve been lighting up the White House and Senate switchboards, and they could derail the whole thing. The firebaggers have taken over a pretty large portion of the blogosphere at this point.
But hey, >9.5% unemployment is worth it as long as Repubs don’t get what they want, I guess.
Ash Can
@polyorchnid octopunch: I would argue that that’s just more of the same, of him overplaying his hand. First, paint a target on yourself by pissing off the people who might otherwise stand in the way of you being extradited. Then egg on the extraditers by announcing that you’re going to do something shocking to one of the biggest economic entities in the world. And we’re surprised that charges get trumped up and constables come banging on the door?
Wikileaks could have been a serious force of good in more capable hands. Assange has made it a farce.
@Ross Hershberger: What I’m saying is, why should there be any strategy at all other than getting information out in the open? Why are ulterior motives coming into play at all? If Wikileaks has the information, great. Let’s see it. Don’t mess around with us.
This is what makes the operation suspect. The champion of transparency could do with a little transparency itself.
geg6
@eemom:
Yes. I gotta seriously consider moving to San Francisco. Gotta get working on winning that lottery!
Elizabelle
Obama to hold press conference on tax cuts in a few minutes.
CNN link for those of us not in front of a TV. Not sure if this works, so keep checking …
http://politicalticker.blogs.cnn.com/2010/12/07/live-blog-president-obamas-news-conference/
Ross Hershberger
@Ash Can:
Because the raw data is more useful if more people are sifting through it and the findings are highly publicized. The best strategy for using information is to build expectation, release it to as many people as possible and remain in the public eye while the contents are sifted and published. Likely 99.9% of the data is of no interest. A sudden dump of the whole load would allow the interesting stuff to go unnoticed while the public chases the next squirrel to run by. Parceling it out in controlled leaks with ample notice to build anticipation ensures maximum exposure and impact.
E: And yes, I still don’t get how this is a bargaining chip when your fate is in the hands of the courts at the moment. Building drama?
cleek
@Suck It Up!:
racist!
Elizabelle
Obama live press conference now.
CNN.com has it.
mr. whipple
@FormerSwingVoter:
Thought I saw a diary there yesterday about how Bernie Sanders was threatening to filibuster the tax cut issue. I imagine he’s come around now, and thus must be primaried.
Carnacki
@brendancalling’s not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is: Thanks for the explanation.
YellowJournalism
I don’t feel like reading all of these articles. I’ll just wait for the movie to come out with Justin Bieber as Assange.
Omnes Omnibus
@cleek: Cudlip.
geg6
@Ash Can:
Well, I’ve been doing quite a bit of reading about Wikileaks the last couple of days, spurred on by some links posted by the (admittedly insane-sounding) matoko. And he actually is pretty transparent about everything he’s attempting. I get what he’s trying to do, I’m still unsure if it can work, but it sure looks like matoko is correct when she says it’s WAI (to use her charming nomenclature). You are attributing intentions to Assange that he says, directly, are NOT his intentions. He doesn’t care if the leaks lead to any sort of big exposes. That’s not what it’s all about.
FlipYrWhig
@FormerSwingVoter: I keep wanting someone to tell me what it is that the progressive-internet-left actually wants from this, in terms of policy, not optics. The thing that I’m most curious about is whether people in general, defenders or detractors on the subject of blowing up the deal, think that “progressives” will be held responsible–for praise or blame. Because I think Obama walking away from the table without a deal, resulting in higher taxes for everyone, would be pinned on Obama; but I truly don’t know how a deal that gets slapped down by progressives would play, in the media or with the public. A deal that got voided and replaced by a better one would play out extremely well for “progressives.” What about if they made it so no deal happened? How would that look?
FormerSwingVoter
@mr. whipple:
Yep. And a few others talking about how Obama is weak while they are strong, because politics isn’t about getting shit done but instead about whipping out your progressipenis and measuring it against your peers.
constance
@JenJen: I recently visited a red, red red red really red state. In a supermarket they had W.’s book prominently displayed, only they had it marked 40% off. None of the novels, other books in the display were marked down. As far as I could tell in my three-week visit, the size of the pile stayed the same. Maybe they kept restocking it, though. Prolly not.
On the internet today I read that in bookstores customers have been surreptitiously moving the book to the Crime and the Fantasy sections of the store, or turning it over, or putting it next to other books to place it in a special context, such as “How to Remove Sludge from Your Drain,” and other less appealing titles.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Huh?
Close paraphrase: “This is not about the politics of the moment, this is about what we could get done at this time.”
Um, Mr. President, isn’t that what “politics of the moment” means?
Sentient Puddle
@mr. whipple:
Primarying Bernie Sanders? If someone writes something like that, I want a link so that I can mock the hell out of that person for completely failing at the basics of American politics.
SIA
@Elizabelle: Thanks, watching it now.
Ash Can
@Caravelle: So the documents Assange says he has haven’t been made public yet because they’re still in the process of being redacted to prevent undesirable repercussions? If that were true, there would be no chest-thumping about “thermonuclear bombs,” and no strategic use of this information beyond getting it out in the public eye.
What I’m saying is that Wikileaks, or at least Assange, has ulterior motives, and it makes his whole company objective look suspect.
meh
@Omnes Omnibus:
not to be a Makato puppet, but it’s not really about the information. It never was, except as a means to an end. It’s an incredibly elegant meta-hack designed to short-circuit the flow of classified information by causing the system to collapse under it’s own weight as it works to stem the leaks.
FlipYrWhig
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): “Politics” probably means “partisanship” or “ideology” there.
Caravelle
I don’t think he’s surprised. Actually I’m surprised, I thought Assange was paranoid with his secretive man-of-mystery schtick but as it turns out they did go after him. And paranoid as he seemed to be I’m pretty sure he did expect it.
The question isn’t “should he be surprised ?” but “should we be outraged ?”. Is it right that everything powerful in the world is out to crush a whistle-blowing website ? Or is it another symptom of what’s wrong with the world ? Should we be on the side of the website or of those who are trying to destroy it ?
As for Wikileaks bringing this on itself by upsetting people – well duh. That’s what it’s for. If those people don’t have ugly secrets to hide then they shouldn’t have a problem with Wikileaks. And if they do have ugly secrets to hide then I don’t think Wikileaks would be very useful if it kept those secrets hidden.
I think the people at Wikileaks know perfectly well what they are doing upsetting the powerful. It’s a gamble, whether they’ll survive the shitstorm and whether the governments and corporations involved will lose enough credibility (fat chance). I worry that it’s a gamble they’ll lose. But I’m pretty sure they gambled knowingly.
Omnes Omnibus
@meh: Again, this is why a big one time dump would be less effective.
FormerSwingVoter
@FlipYrWhig:
They want the thing Republicans want most – extension on tax cuts for the rich – to not happen. No matter what the cost.
Considering that several ConservaDems were likely to make sure the extension happened even without concessions, I think this is a pretty damn good deal.
cleek
@brendancalling’s not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is:
how… racist!
russell
Who is this Miers person you speak of? George W Bush never nominated anyone by that name to any court position. Clearly your memory is faulty.
Been there, done that, been doing that for a long long time now. I’m far beyond all of that now.
These days it’s wake up and drink the MadDog.
Long story short – they gonna find themselves some way to fuck Assange up. I give the guy credit, he’s got stones the size of cocoanuts, but they are going to fuck him up, but good.
mr. whipple
Yup. Watching Obama now, who’s trying to be an adult by reminding people that millions of people will be helped by the tax cuts and unemployment insurance extension.
Elizabelle
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
Yeah, noticed that.
Also concerned about the assurance that “we don’t have the possibility of a double dip recession.”
Because what if Europe’s economy tanks, and bad commercial real estate is finally written off?
Don’t see how we are out of the woods.
——
“Not negotiating with hostage takers — unless the hostage gets harmed. And the American people are the hostage.”
He went there, in response to Chuck Todd question.
Good!
Ross Hershberger
@meh:
Turning the feature ‘security’ into a bug that bottlenecks the whole process. Forcing openness by making closed-ness too difficult and expensive. Interesting Gibsonesque idea. We’ll see if it plays out that way. From our point of view, seeing the documents it looks like international relations are carried out primarily through keyboards. But diplomats do far more face-to-face work. The data on this is just a 2-d outline of the process. I doubt that international relations can really be seriously harmed by meeting notes being read by people they weren’t meant for.
Seebach
@Ash Can: What are his ulterior motives then? What is his secret conspiracy, if it’s not the plan he’s outlined in public.
El Tiburon
@Jewish Steel:
Everyone’s a critic.
How about this:
Bite my butt.
The end.
Ash Can
@Ross Hershberger: But they haven’t even started parceling it out. Why not? Building excitement? How many charges against Assange have to be trumped up before he and his outfit learn the difference between “building excitement and interest” and “painting a fucking huge neon-colored target on our asses?”
Their strategy stinks and their objectives are evidently not as high-minded as they’d like everyone to think. Other than that, Wikileaks is a hell of an organization.
cleek
@brendancalling’s not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is:
how… racist.
ricky
@brendancalling’s not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is:
PCCC is running racist ads against Obama? This is great news for the Obots. PCCC hasn’t won one yet.
Elizabelle
Obama’s doing very well. Lots of concise answers.
Can’t wait to see how the MSM bollixes up the soundbites.
He points out that public opinion is on his side, but the Senate is not. And that he does not see that improving.
Consistently.
And he’s said at least twice that tax cuts for the rich are the Republicans’ chief economic policy.
FlipYrWhig
@FormerSwingVoter: I’m actually interested in how it came to pass that the Republicans _did_ make a deal. I would have thought they would win bigger by not making a deal, letting taxes increase, then introducing a tax-cut bill of their own in January. That’s what I expected them to do. But that’s not what happened. Interesting. It seems like they struck a deal to save, in effect, a month’s worth of tax cuts. Something’s off about that.
Mnemosyne
@Suck It Up!:
At least Pelosi and Obama understand the game that they’re playing. Now Obama can use her as a threat for the Republicans — if they back out, she’ll blow them up. Classic good cop/bad cop.
Now if only Harry Reid could figure out that he and Obama are not both supposed to be the good cop …
JenJen
Watching POTUS news conference, and couldn’t agree more with this tweet by Atrios:
I mean, Chuck Todd is a real piece of work on this issue right now, and the President is making minced meat out of him.
Ross Hershberger
Off to work.
Cheers
Brachiator
Obama’s speech makes no sense. He is saying that the American people are behind him, but he cannot stand up to the Republicans today.
If not now, when?
Mark S.
I like how we never draw the right lessons from anything. The fact that a private first class could even get access to all of our motherfucking diplomatic cables shows that our entire system of classification (and who has access to what) is insane. I would have to assume that every country in the world already had access to this. It’s not like they had to spend years trying to get a plant into the higher echelons of the CIA; they just had to get an agent to walk down the street and enlist in the fucking army.
Caravelle
Ash Can :
Well, he’s paranoid and given the US’s treatment of prisoners of late and his recent arrest I think I’d be paranoid in his place too. I personally don’t think how threatening to release extra-secret information would protect him but if he thinks it does more power to him. (this isn’t in contradiction with what I said in my previous post btw. There’s a difference between withholding some information for self-preservation purposes, and withholding information to avoid upsetting the people who want it hidden)
Oh come on. He’s pretty much said or written somewhere that he was after the collapse of the of the whole secrecy establishment. What ulterior motive could be more nefarious than that ? As for personal motives – fame, self-preservation, ego trip – those are perfectly human and don’t invalidate his enterprise by themselves.
geg6
@mr. whipple:
Fix’t.
FormerSwingVoter
One of my comments appears to be in moderation. Something about dicks and measuring the size thereof.
meh
@Ash Can:
Wikileaks is the “beta version” of the system changer – it doesn’t really matter if more info gets out or not, or if they shut it down or not – it doesn’t matter. He’s shown that the system works, causes mass chaos and increases the “secrecy tax”. It’s like the 1st guys that pulled of a DDoS – others will now do what he’s doing, just better.
Peter
I wonder if Assange will actually drop the Insurance file like he said he would, now that he’s been arrested.
I also wonder if it’ll be met with the same resounding ‘meh’ that everything else he’s leaked has been.
Elizabelle
Just brought up infrastructure development and competitiveness, and looking at government functions that help or hurt.
He outlines the debates we need to have.
And how priority one is keeping the American people safe.
mr. whipple
@Mnemosyne:
.
LOL.
mr. whipple
@Mnemosyne:
LOL.
Paris
Will the charges miraculously shape shift into ‘rape’ if its repeated enough times? Rape is not the charge. Nice job doing the plutocracy’s work though. Also.
Elizabelle
Boehner “cant just stand on the sidelines and be a bomb thrower.”
Once he’s sworn in as Speaker, he needs to govern.
mr. whipple
Ooops.
JenJen
@Brachiator: I’d argue that he didn’t put it anything like that. He said that the American people were behind him, but that doesn’t mean anything when Boehner and McConnell weren’t budging. He said that it may have been good politics to have a lengthy, protracted battle but that he couldn’t have won the argument next year, either, with even more Republicans in the Senate, and that the economy couldn’t withstand doing nothing about unemployment benefits specifically.
You don’t have to buy his argument, but I disagree with the way you characterized it.
Alex S.
It’s not paranoia if there are actually powers out there to get you.
jak
@Three-nineteen:
irony:
http://www.boingboing.net/2010/12/07/us-to-host-world-pre.html
Dave
The problem is that the GOP doesn’t give a shit if people get hurt by their policies. Democrats do. And that is why the GOP got what they wanted. That and spineless Senate Democrats who folded faster than a fucking pup tent over every single issue worth fighting for.
mr. whipple
OMG, Obama is going off. The internets ‘progressives’ are gonna spaz.
AWESOME!!!
Corner Stone
I can’t wait for the transcript of this press conference.
geg6
@geg6:
Goddam it. FYWP.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Now he’s pulling the “professional left” card. I think the word he just used was “purists”.
Elizabelle
“I couldn’t go through the front door at this country’s founding.”
Please, a link to this after the fact.
It’s why we voted for the guy.
Tony J
@JenJen:
Yeah, that ‘Bush was a Liberal’ meme has been out there for a few years now. He was a total failure as a President and left office despised and ridiculed. They either take the lesson to heart that his policies were flawed – which can’t be true as guys like your Tall Stack Stalker supported the vast majority of them – or it was his execution that was flawed. Ergo – he was a secret Liberal out to stain the Conservative brand by sabotaging what should have been Conservatism’s greatest triumph.
As to the TSS himself, He either assumed you were a liberal and decided to creep you out of the shop, or he assumed you were a Lady Lib trawling for a hunk of Real American Male because, as everyone knows, those Lady Libs only get off when they’re doing something they know is wrong.
Face it, you just got caught-and-released by Brick Oven Bob.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Ash Can: Well, there’s a couple of problems with this. I personally think that Assange and his colleagues pretty much fully expected this to happen. I think that perhaps they figured that exercising restraint in the initial releases, pulling the expected reaction, and then leaking something a thousand times more explosive as a reaction to the persecution could very much be in the plan.
The stated goal of wikileaks is not to destroy the US, nor even the international system. It’s to dramatically cut down on the amount of secrecy, not least because afterwards the typical American will not be able to cry ignorance of the serious serious crimes committed in their name (as well as in the names of many citizens of the west; I’m far from absolving my own country in this stuff, believe me). Doing it in such a way as to demonstrate restraint (here are the things we thought should remain secret because they really should, but you decided that the trivial stuff deserved the nuclear option so here it all is laying your head on a plate for your citizens) does not strike me as a way to help completely delegitimize Western justice systems as they are currently constituted.
Nigeria going after Cheney is a great example of asymmetrical legal/pr warfare. Strange how that’s completely disappeared eh?
The real thing that’s driving all of this now is that the elites (not just US political elites, but the financial elites, and probably many political elites around the world) are about to have their chicanery and tilting of the table for the banking system revealed in all their glory.
Corner Stone
He’s playing The Long Game(tm) .
Caravelle
meh :
I’m worried that it does. This isn’t Napster. In the worst case scenario, “they shut it down” will mean they’ll have cut off all of their revenue streams, blocked their internet access in most parts of the world through action against servers, DNS providers and every other link of the chain, and sent their leader (and perhaps others) to a US prison as a terrorist. The next people to try would have to be very low-down and very brave.
Then again they did send people to prison over filesharing so maybe there are parallels after all…
Suck It Up!
LOL!!!!!!!!!!!!! Obama is looking so weak at the press conference right now – NOOOOTTTTTTTTTT!!!
Some of ya’ll gone be mad. wooo!! haha ha ha! I can see the steam coming out of the professional left’s ears right now. ha ha aha aha !!!!
abc news: “feisty and challenging”
“fuck all ya’ll!”
JenJen
@Tony J:
LMFAO! To be fair though, he never even had me on his hook.
Southern Beale
Obama is pissed off ….at liberals, who were not sufficiently enthusiastic over the healthcare bill.
Fuck’em. I give up.
soonergrunt
@meh:
followed by a paragraph of being a matoko puppet. Sorry dude.
And you know–releasing the products of one specific security breach is not going to bring down any system at all.
Elizabelle
@Suck It Up!:
Did it bother you that JenJen declined your invite to a coffee?
Or were you just going to order one and throw it in her face?
Ash Can
@geg6:
@meh:
OK, now it makes more sense. And, frankly, it makes Wikileaks look even less worthwhile. What’s the point of looking simply to break things, whether they need breaking or not? If I believed that all secrets were bad, I would see value to an objective like this. But they aren’t; the real world simply doesn’t work that way. So I don’t.
lol
@Elizabelle:
I thought priority one was sticking it to the Republicans.
I’ve come to realize most of the Netroots are just political versions of Internet Tough Guys.
mr. whipple
@lol: Yup.
C Nelson Reilly
OODA Loops would be a great name for a breakfast cereal. Choco Cudlips, not so much.
Brachiator
They could not wait until January. There continues to be a fundamental misunderstanding about the context of this fight.
They had to patch the alternative minimum tax and agree on some expiring tax benefits or else millions of people would have higher taxes in 2010. The expiration of the Bush tax cuts are a parallel issue.
Sadly, Obama does not appear to understand this himself.
I continue to believe that Obama could have forced concessions on unemployment compensation. Instead he was so afraid that 2 million people might be hurt in the short term that he has sacrificed 300 million people long term.
And again, I just heard a soundbite claiming that the rich needed a tax cut so that they could continue to create jobs. In China, apparently, because jobs certainly were not created in America during the Bush regime.
Hal
Sigh. A huge part of me wishes Obama had drawn his line in the sand on this issue and called Republicans out. He could have made it a point to highlight the Republicans obstinacy and that their entire point is to give rich people tax cuts.
But, there is that nagging part of me that thinks, if the Repubs called his bluff, he would sooner or later start to feel the wrath of the general public who would have all of a sudden decided it wasn’t so important to stick to your ideals.
If it lasted a few months, we’d be hearing about how Obama lied about bi-partisanship, and dammit, we just want our unemployment benefits, and why can’t he just make a deal?
I really don’t know anymore. I feel like this discussion is lead by too many people on the internet and not enough of the general public, who don’t seem to give a shit about anything until there is an election.
I’m getting to the point where I think Obama should just tell Dems he isn’t running again, and then start marrying gay couples on the steps of the Capitol Building. Just become exactly what the base wants for two more years, then he can retire a hero, let Palin take over, and if we survive long enough, Palin will be forced to resign when the public wakes up to the greatness of the Liberal/Progressive agenda, and Rachel Maddow becomes President! Easy peasy!
Elizabelle
@Southern Beale:
Actually, I thought it was a great overview of how programs that began smaller and were narrowly targeted came to benefit all.
Which is what Obama intends to do, and precisely what the Republicans do not want to see.
FDR’s Social Security was for widows and orphans. Obama to the journalist: “It would not have covered you.”
geg6
@Southern Beale:
Yeah, gotta say all I’m hearing is a lot of hippie punching and not much else except resignation to the fact that President McConnell and Vice President Boehner are the agenda setters.
And this is what the Obots are calling kicking ass? If ABC is calling “feisty and challenging,” then there is nothing he has to say that a liberal would use those words to describe.
gene108
@JenJen:
Yes, I’ve heard a lot of conservatives claim Bush, Jr.’s failure is he wasn’t conservative enough.
The reinvention of the GOP post Bush, Jr. is Bush, Jr.’s failure was his liberal policies, such as Medicare Part D and not sticking to true conservative principles about lowering taxes, balancing the budget, and reducing the size of government.
They seem to ignore the Iraq war though, as a cause of his unpopularity.
Never mind the reason the budget got bloated was Congressional Republicans spending like mad and Bush, Jr. never vetoing a bill they sent him. As long as the messaging / narrative got them to win elections, they weren’t particularly concerned with what got passed.
Though Bush, Jr.’s out of office, the Congressional Republicans are still there and I don’t see why they’d behave any differently this time around.
The cognitive dissonance on the right is scary.
Also, the Democrats need to make a super special note. Every time the GOP loses a Presidential election they tilt hard right. It happened after Ford lost in 1976, which begot Reagan. It happened after 1992, which begot Newt Gingrich and then Bush, Jr. It’s happening now, after 2008.
The next time the GOP loses a Presidential election, the Democrats need to realize the GOP won’t cooperate. They will just tack further to the right.
I don’t blame Obama for trying to get passed the partisanship and have a Congress / White House relationship that’s interested in governing, but I think the take home is the GOP no longer cares about governing and only about getting elected; there’s nothing to compromise with them and any losses will just make them more partisan.
Caravelle
Paris :
From a Swedish blog :
“[T]here is no such crime as “sex by surprise” in Sweden. Assange is charged for rape, sexual harassment and duress, and this is, what is called in Swedish legal terms, on “sannolika skäl;” a classification that means that the prosecutor has enough evidence to make her believe it is likely the verdict will be in her favour. There is fairly strong evidence, then, it is not charge pulled out of thin air. “Sex by surprise” or överraskningssex as it would be translated in Swedish is slang for rape. It is a term that is used when speaking about rape, but jokingly, or keeping it light, a word that brings with it positive connotations, which makes the word inappropriate in itself, but it is nevertheless synonymous with rape.”
http://feminismandtea.blogspot.com/2010/12/sex-by-surprise.html
It would sound like rape is indeed the charge.
Woodrow "asim" Jarvis Hill
@Brachiator: Why is “stand up to the GOP” the only damned yardstick by which you people measure what’s going on?
Millions of people are about to get a reprieve on getting frozen out of their homes — and with the weather out there, and the shock of heating bills, I mean that literally. The idea that we should have held the poorest, and most at-risk amongst us, for the sake of making sure the rich didn’t get richer — or, worse, that the GOP “didn’t win again” — how the hell is that a “Progressive” value?
Elizabelle
@lol:
You’re right.
This country is all about the netroots.
Who, uh, weren’t the only folks who voted for Obama. Fact.
Omnes Omnibus
@C Nelson Reilly: Fruity Cudlips might sell.
brendancalling's really touchy for a white guy, isn't he?
hey, this is a pretty cool blog.
FlipYrWhig
@lol:
Yup. Also political versions of the guy who yells “Go!” every time his team has 4th and 1.
j low
@Ash Can: Intentionally thick? Unlike how it has been portrayed in the press he has been releasing information carefully so no innocents get hurt. He asked the pentagon to participate and they said no. Then he worked with several major media outlets to redact without official help. If he gets permanently imprisoned or killed- the unredacted documents could do a lot of damage.
Tony J
‘Bob’ is Brick Oven Bill’s ‘Tyler Durden’ persona. The one who gets to go outside the basement room without the surly attendant and always gets the chicks. So it’s a case of “In his mind, he knew what she really meant…”
Ash Can
@Caravelle:
OK, I see that now. I was unclear on that before. And like I said above, it makes Wikileaks look even less worthwhile. Why eliminate secrecy if there’s no good reason to do so?
eemom
I am furious at Obama over this.
There is NO excuse for it, none.
I’m not going to say it undoes all the other good he did so far — it does not.
But on this particular day I’m as anti-him as the stupidest firebagger troll around here.
well, ok — maybe not THAT much.
Anyway, it’s been interesting. Kind of like finding out how the other half lives.
burnspbesq
@WyldPirate:
Don’t do it. I may not agree with you very often, but I have no interest in seeing you turned into the second coming of Jose Padilla.
FlipYrWhig
@Hal:
Yup. “Why doesn’t he just sit down with Republicans and make both sides cut the bullshit?” Especially since, although you’d never know it online, there are a lot of people out there who lean Democratic who think Obama has been _too liberal_.
brendancalling's not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is
@cleek:
i know, I totally suck.
i also like to shout “fire” in crowded movie theatres.
gene108
@cyntax: The payroll tax holiday worries me a lot. I though it was a stupid idea, when it was first proposed last year as a counter to the Democrats stimulus bill.
It is the first step to dismantling Social Security.
Right now, there is no political will to raise taxes. I don’t see them letting this one year reduction in payroll taxes lapse.
The impact on businesses and individuals will be minimal, but the aggregate impact on the Social Security Trust Fund will be significant.
My business pays about $250,000 a year in payroll Social Security Taxes. The bill gives a 1% reduction in payroll taxes, if I understand it correctly, or an annual savings of $2,500, which isn’t worth the long term damage to Social Security.
THE
I too think matoko is broadly right in her interpretation of Assange’s motives,
that he is trying to create paranoia and raise the panic level in circles of power so that they start to respond with more and more extreme responses,
raising the cost of secrecy until the whole security state implodes.
The difference is that I think there’s going to be a whole lot of really bad collateral damage, some of it permanent and irreversible. I have tried to think about what that is.
I think some of the revelations were good things that advance the interest of progressives (as opposed to libertarians and extreme individualists or anarchists).
I believe in the long run we will deeply regret the releases. But it may be too late to stop.
I don’t think Assange’s purpose will be successful in the long run because “the system” will eventually solve the security problems.
Mike in NC
Request that this term be added to the BJ lexicon.
NobodySpecial
@Hal:
The problem is, they will be claiming Obama lied anyways at some point in the next two years, regardless of the truth or whatever it was he refuses to give them next (if anything). There is no advantage to ‘defusing’ this line of attack, because that line of attack cannot be defused as long as Republicans are willing to lie and the press is unwilling to call them on it.
srv
You know, there’s only one party that actually sees Krugman as credible, and it ain’t the democrats.
Tony J
Ooohhhh. That was an odd double post. Never race the timer, kids, cause the timer always wins.
FlipYrWhig
@eemom: There are plenty of excuses for it. You just don’t buy the excuses. :P
I’d like to see someone game out a better outcome. There are plenty of better ones, but how do you get to them? I don’t know enough about the parameters to know how close this was to optimizing the result. I’m just pretty sure that letting taxes go up for everyone would be an even bigger debacle than this has been.
chopper
@brendancalling’s not a racist just because racist Lisa says he is:
in all seriousness, am i the only one who thinks changing your name to call out another poster in a different thread is pretty fuckin’ stupid?
should lisa change her name to “no, racist brendancalling is the true racist”, and then you change yours to “is not” and then hers to “is so”?
JenJen
@Hal: Case in point: Had some of my most diehard liberal friends, my favorite couple really, over to watch the game last night, and we started chatting about Obama caving to the GOP’s demands for tax cuts for the wealthy.
They were taken aback because they hadn’t heard the news yet. But they weren’t disappointed in any sense. They said “Well, that sucks, but he’s damned if he does, damned if he doesn’t. If he lets the tax cuts just expire, he’ll take all kinds of shit from the public, because those cuts are right there in their paychecks. People will notice it immediately, and he’ll get the lion’s share of the blame; the President always does.”
They asked, kind of cringing, if he got anything in exchange. I brought up the 13-month unemployment extension, and they said, “well that’s good! What, were people just supposed to lose their homes and starve while he duked it out with the GOP? Who would that serve, exactly?”
When I pointed out to them that the netroots think he should have the fight, they argued that maybe the netroots are crazy and it wouldn’t play out the way they think it would, and that the media would attack Obama, not the Republicans, for allowing all of the cuts to expire, and for inviting a protracted political fight that he’d lose in the end anyway.
I should mention here that these friends are loyal Dems and campaign volunteers, but they don’t read blogs, have never heard of Jane Hamsher or John Cole, and had no idea that any of these arguments were taking place online at all. I found their position to be pretty compelling, given that fact. And while I’m still up in the air about how I feel, I think it’s important that we realize there’s a very good chance that the majority of self-proclaimed Democrats fall in their group, not ours. Knowing them, I think they’d watch Obama’s just-completed news conference and agree with him completely. Hell, they were making the argument Obama just did, only last night.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@Southern Beale:
He took lots of shots at the GOP and that will be the angle that the mainstream pundits run with. But he didn’t become visibly angry until he started talking about the “purists”, i.e. the left.
What’s still up in the air is when actual policy is going to get fixed for the common weal in this “long game.” The train is headed for a cliff and all the incremental improvements that he passionately defended are merely slowing it down a bit, not stopping it.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@NobodySpecial: So, as president, then, you make the choice you think is best for the country. At least the competent ones do. I know what McCain would be doing right now: Invading Iran.
FlipYrWhig
@gene108:
The biggest (heh) advocate I recall for some form of payroll tax holiday was Robert Reich. It’s been part of the progressive toolkit for economic stimulus for a pretty long time. This “dismantling Social Security” point wasn’t coming up when the idea was discussed before; is it the deficit commission that has people spooked about it this time?
FormerSwingVoter
@Brachiator:
This is false. The payroll tax cut is being funded entirely through a transfer payment from the general tax fund.
Queue cognitive dissonance and a completely different reason for opposition in 3… 2… 1…
El Tiburon
@chopper:
Yes, you are.
I find it pretty damn hilarious. Wait, are you quibbling over names in the comment section of a blog? I think you have jumped the reality shark. You know this isn’t reality. Lisa may not even be her real name.
Dee Loralei
@Tony J: “Face it, you got caught and released by Brick Oven Bob.” Wins the effing thread! Kudos, actually made me snort.
And I’m sure it will creep JenJen out to no end.
ETA to correct a homonymic typo. Damned words that sound alike.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@JenJen: I think a lot of the NetRoots people have forgotten there are people outside of the blogs. Oh, they know them in the abstract, but it’s hard to imagine how someone could not be paying attention to Washington, DC.
geg6
@eemom:
Yup, me too. I haven’t been this furious with a president since W went into Iraq.
His excuses are some really weak shit. The Obots are loving it, but that is the weakest I’ve ever seen a president look at a press conference since Watergate.
Ash Can
@polyorchnid octopunch: A better-informed electorate is always a laudable objective. So why screw it up by making yourself and your company’s technical wizardry the show, rather than the information itself?
Like I said farther up, I think Wikileaks could have been/might still be a significant force for good in more capable hands. Who knows? If there are more savvy underlings at Wikileaks, having Julian Assange thrown in the jug might be the best thing to happen to that outfit.
chopper
@JenJen:
my favorite liberal political barometer is my wife. she’s liberal as all hell, but she’s a phD student and has no time for anything. so she asks me about the political stories of the day. she continues to be a solid obama supporter, despite certain reservations and frustrations. of course, if i started talking about the ‘netroots’ she’d be all ‘jesus, how much fucking free time do these inbred morons have?’
Caravelle
Because he thinks there is a good reason ? I mean, I can see you’re going with “some things should be secret” but just staying with the US government here (it is certainly also true of other governments and even more of corporations), 1) we know that the “top secret” classification is waaaaaay overused, we know this not only through Wikileaks but also FOIA releases, too many documents are classified as “secret” when they have no reason to be. This is opacity for the sake of opacity, it can only impair the functioning of government and hamper transparency. And 2), governments lie and the US government especially in the last 10 years has been lying a lot, about very important issues that aren’t in the public interest. It has demonstrably been using secrecy to nefarious ends.
You can argue whether those are good reasons or not and whether collapsing the secrecy establishment is the best way to solve those problems but it isn’t like it’s some quixotic quest with no thought behind it or anything.
chopper
@El Tiburon:
i think a guy named ‘el tiburon’ accusing someone else of ‘jumping the shark’ is itself ‘jumping the shark’.
chopper
@mr. whipple:
and that would be different how, exactly?
lushboi
Man the Kos Kids are having a full-blown uproar and are ready to revolt against Obama. It’s crazy over there. Stay away for a few days until their fever subsides.
geg6
@JenJen:
And my experience last night with the exact same sort of people as your friends was exactly the opposite. And one of the people simply infuriated by Obama’s cave has been unemployed for over a year.
Bob Loblaw
Well, it was certainly an engaged and agitated press conference. The guy looks to be at the end of his rope though.
And a whole mess of contradictions keep piling up. The economy is totally fine and healthy and awesome, except for the fact that it’s in total crisis mode for the middle class and that’s why he needed to act quickly. How on earth you square that circle, I don’t know.
And apparently the admin is planning to win the tax cut fight in 2012 because they’re going to try harder or some nebulous bullshit, now that they don’t have to pass “emergency” measures.
And of course, it turns out that this was the Left’s fault. Again. So I guess we know how 2012 will play out. Our fearless defender of the middle class against those nasty purists on the left and right. That sounds familiar…
Omnes Omnibus
@chopper: Are you me? If so, who am I and why am I in this apartment?
Tony J
As it’s an open thread, and this has bugged me for a while.
Why is it ‘lede’, as in “The lede in this article is that “Bush was right to…/Obama shouldn’t have… (fill in the blank)””?
I always thought it was ‘lead’, as in “The version of reality presented in this article is designed to ‘lead’ readers to believe that “Bush was right to…/Obama shouldn’t have… (fill in the blank)” because that’s what’s really significant here.”
Is it a Latinism I’m not familiar with? I thought I was familiar with all Latinate Traditions.
FlipYrWhig
@JenJen:
Quoted for truth. I think this is the much more widely held position, that the deal sucks but no deal would suck worse. Remember that poll that was on DKos showing that a plurality of Democrats actually believed Democrats should negotiate with Republicans? It’s a big Democratic world out there, and the blogosphere left is just a sliver. Which is too bad, in a way, because we have some good ideas, and not all of us are flaming assholes. OK, most days.
Brachiator
@JenJen:
Obama doesn’t seem to understand that he is president, or the power he has, or who is willing to support him.
I have pointed out in other threads that IRS commissioner Shulman had warned Congress about the implications of continued inaction, which could delay 2010 tax filing and result in as many as 21 million taxpayers seeing a tax increase on their 2010 returns. And this is even before we got to 2011. Shulman had the president’s back and was trying to remind him that he could force the GOP to back down. Obama ignored the signal.
There would never have been a protracted battle.
It is also clear that the Republicans and Democrats had agreed to an outline of a deal long ago, and just waited until the last minute to spring it. Tax and accounting research firms like CCH have long predicted that the Estate tax fix would be exactly what has been agreed upon.
Obama just said that he is willing to listen to the Republicans argue for an extension of the Bush tax cuts. But if he is convinced that the best economic thinking indicates that they are a bad idea, why not simply let them expire?
Nothing in Obama’s speech offers an acceptable explanation of his current compromise, or give much hope for any coherent tax policy in the future. He seems intent on always cobbling together pieces of Democratic and Republican proposals just so he can say that he listened to both sides.
Corner Stone
@chopper:
So to be clear, your most reliable barometer of liberals is your wife. Who asks you about politics because she’s too busy to get into the coverage.
So your liberal barometer receives all input from you, and then returns the same GIGO back to you.
And that’s how you judge things.
gene108
@Dave:
Which is why there has been no significant changes to our health care laws and financial regulations, over the last two years.
ChrisWWW
There is simply too much cognitive dissonance involved for well indoctrinated Democrats to support Obama’s tax cut plan.
Democratic voters have been told repeatedly since at least 2003 that these tax cuts to the top 1% were the devil and would die if Democrats were voted back in to power.
Sentient Puddle
@geg6:
So what, would this person rather that Obama and the Democrats fight it all the way to January, and have the taxes raised on the rich but no unemployment benefits? Because it strikes me that there’s some major mixing of priorities going on here.
THE
And FWIW I don’t think Assange will be in custody for all that long in Sweden.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@geg6: So Obama giving in on 2 years of upper class tax cuts is worse than Bush’s response to Katrina?
cyntax
@gene108:
Yeah that was one point from the press conference that didn’t ring true: how will raising taxes be any easier in the future? Obama’s point that they’ve been busy fighting all sorts of fires is a fair one, and if he and the Dems are going to vigorously make the case over the next two years that the richest should pay more (really we all should), then that’s all to the better. But as Obama pointed out, the polls are on his side right now. And the payroll reduction will be coming up for renewal about the same time that UI needs renewing so how will Obama not be in the same situation where the Repubs can take the UI renewal hostage in exchange for extension of payroll tax reductions?
R-Jud
@JenJen: My Mom is an actual elected Democrat in PA, and her position is pretty much the same as your friends’.
chopper
@geg6:
well, my experience with the same sort of people as your friends was the opposite. they said that you’re the real loser.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
@FlipYrWhig:
Yes. This is basically a slippery slope argument and is being exacerbated by recent events. A year from now we’ll start getting a better idea if the slope is truly slippery or not.
FlipYrWhig
@Tony J: It’s “lede” instead of “lead” because “lead” can be mistaken for the substance that gives you plumbism. The reverse of the reason why it’s not Lead Zeppelin.
(Also, I think it’s short for “lead-in.”)
chopper
@Corner Stone:
no, my favorite liberal barometer is my wife, not my “most reliable barometer of liberals” you fucking moron. shit, in most cases my favorite everything is my wife.
just to be clear, learn to read. and no, what she tells me is not “how i judge things”, you fucking moron.
JenJen
@geg6: Anecdotal conversations are just that, aren’t they? But I still think it needs to be pointed out from time to time. I’m not making their argument, I just think a lot of times we lose sight of the fact that most people aren’t plugged into blogs, yet manage to stay pretty informed anyway, and often reach different conclusions than those of us who are pretty bloggy.
This particular set of friends still have their jobs; I’m the one who was unemployed for over a year (laid off from my fancy hotel executive job right when the global economic meltdown happened), keeping it together through a patchwork of part-UI and part-time work, until finally finding full-time employment recently. I know exactly what it’s like to fret and worry and move money around just to stay in my house while being, for lack of a better word, “held hostage” by the many stalled UI extensions. I don’t know what your friend’s situation is, but a year ago or so, mine was financially terrifying for the first time in my life. I hung on every one of those short-term extensions, and had to go weeks, more than once, waiting and wondering how the hell I was gonna make it if they didn’t come through. Again… my personal story is anecdotal, too. Every circumstance is different.
If Obama could have secured a UI extension without the temporary extension of tax cuts for the wealthy, then that would be another situation entirely. Thing is, I don’t think Boehner or McConnell were budging on it, they had him in a corner, and the President assured us today that was exactly the case. All I know is that if this thing goes through, millions of unemployed Americans aren’t going to be put through the every-couple-of-months gut-wrenching wringer that I was, and for that much, at the very least, I’m grateful.
Jewish Steel
@El Tiburon:
S’better. Pointilistic punk rock is perhaps more your métier.
Tony J
@Dee Loralei:
Heh. I just like the image of a ‘short sleeve and tie combination’ wingnut wracking his brain to think up a line – any line – that might appeal to the liberal cutie who doesn’t know about his court-mandated exclusion zone.
But apparently it wasn’t BBB. He only has one suit, and it’s not that sharp.
FlipYrWhig
@cyntax:
Maybe the idea is that with Obama stumping for reelection by making the same case he has made since 2007, there won’t be Democrats scurrying for cover to avoid taking votes on the issue, because they’ll be tied to Obama’s position anyway. Thus if Obama can keep winning over the public to his position on taxes, Democrats will have an incentive to stay more unified behind it.
(The usual caveat: this is a “what the fuck are they thinking?” brainstorm, not a “what the fuck should the policy and/or strategy be?” one.)
Hal
The one thing I will say about Obama is that I think he really does believe in that whole ideal of being the President of all Americans, and not just the ones who voted for him. I do believe that is where some of his motivation comes from.
All at once it’s an admirable trait, but also kind of sad, and infuriating; because many of those people will always think he’s the devil, not matter what he does. And since it will never win him any votes from those people, who will reap the benefits of his policies while making plans to dance on the the grave of his failed Presidency, I just can’t quite go along with it. I really just want to say fuck the Republicans. They’ll do better with true progressive policies in the long run anyway.
JenJen
@Belafon (formerly anonevent): @chopper: @R-Jud: Thanks. Hey, at least it’s not just me, even if it feels like it pretty much all the time, lately.
@Corner Stone: Yeah. That’s not even remotely close to what chopper wrote.
Brachiator
RE: this is the first step to dismantling Social Security.
I am not talking about the funding of the payroll tax holiday.
Republicans, the Tea Party people and idiots like Rand Paul will use this to argue against payroll taxes in general. They will have a hard time winning this debate, but the discussion will absorb time that could be used dealing with something more rational.
geg6
@Sentient Puddle:
He understood exactly what the consequences to himself would be. He isn’t an idiot, just someone who doesn’t follow this shit obsessively like I do. Unlike Obama, he was willing to take a hit for the greater, long term good. I admire that.
Corner Stone
@chopper: Nice try. But your wife is a low information voter who gets all her political news from you. So her “barometer” is pretty much whatever you tell her it is.
geg6
@Belafon (formerly anonevent):
You know and I know it isn’t two years. The tax cuts will be permanent. What exactly will change in 2012 that makes you think the tax cuts will be ended? There is more damage to be had for the nation and individual Americans from these tax cuts than Katrina caused. And I don’t minimize the suffering Katrina caused. But lying about going to war and caving to the oligarchy are much bigger and more insidious things than mere incompetence, IMHO. YMMV.
Tony J
@FlipYrWhig:
Not the first time I’ve said this.
“Where is the necessary ‘e’ in this, man? Where is the melonfarming ‘E!’?”
I bet you it turns out David Broder did this. It’s his style. Everyone just went along with it because old guys are ‘traditional’.
JPL
@Brachiator: The tax cuts have always been unsustainable. IMO, there is no longer a middle class safety net. The Republicans will win in 2012 based on the deficit and say the democrats raided social security. This was the first time that I refused to listen to the President.
eemom
I fail to see what it proves that a group of regular average Joe/Jane Q. Democrats who don’t read blogs and weren’t even aware of all the issues in the tax cut debacle nodded and said they were still cool with Obama after a ten-minute cocktail party tutorial on the subject.
I mean I’m the last one in the world to glorify blog readers, but the fact that other folks out there are LESS well informed about the issues just because they’re not as obsessed with them doesn’t make them better judges of anything than we are.
Or are we glorifing “low information voters” because they’re Democrats and not Teatards?
Corner Stone
President Obama was pretty feisty in the news conference. He’s looking forward to the Republicans testing his resolve on unspecific issues in the future.
Gotta keep that powder dry amigo.
I’m sure future tough negotiations will get immeasurably easier after January when the R’s take the House.
NobodySpecial
Well, he was certainly impatient with Democrats.
My question is simple: What happens 13 months from now, when the unemployment runs out again and he has to deal with a stronger Boehner and McConnell?
What gets given up next, assuming that anything he gives up will get another extension?
Corner Stone
That Payroll Tax Cut now will shortly become a Payroll Tax Hike in the near future if someone were foolish enough to try and make it go away.
FlipYrWhig
@Hal:
But that’s not the audience. The people who think he’s the devil will continue to think he’s the devil. But then there are the people who are the True Swing Voters, the ones who don’t make up their minds until late and don’t pay attention to every last thing, and it’s to them that the common ground/reach out/work together pitch is aimed — as well as to Democrats themselves, who in polls will say that they favor compromise and bipartisanship.
Obama’s rhetoric on these matters infuriates _partisans_ on the left who want him to smash Republicans, and bounces right off partisans on the right, who don’t give a shit what he does, because Living While Democrat is in itself obnoxious to them. I remember leaning Hillary in November 2007 because I thought she would be more fiercely partisan. It’s not Obama’s way, and it’s probably not the way of Democrats taken together, either.
Corner Stone
Ratchet Effect
Bill E Pilgrim
I just watched the press conference on CSPAN.
My god…. he’s an Obot!
Guess that figures.
gene108
@FlipYrWhig:
A strong economy will help immensely in convincing people we can raise taxes to reduce the deficit. If people aren’t feeling short of money and insecure about their finances, they will be more willing to accept a tax increase.
People are worried about the deficit and we’re at a point that I think people can be sold on paying more in taxes to bring the deficit down, as long as the economy is strong enough to provide raises and job opportunities.
You aren’t going to win over Republican support, so the real issue is how to get any proposed tax increase through the Senate.
FlipYrWhig
@eemom:
They’re not better judges of anything. There are just many more of them, casting many more votes than we do.
Belafon (formerly anonevent)
@Bill E Pilgrim: LOL
chopper
@Corner Stone:
no, you fucking moron. my wife is my favorite liberal political barometer precisely because she lives completely outside of the progressive internet and the 24/7 news cycle just like most all dems and liberals. just like most people, she gets a condensed version of the political news of the day because she’s too busy working.
i do like how you completely misread what i wrote, and when i handed you your ass about it you’re all ‘nice try’. yes, it was a nice try. and a nice ‘handing a moron his ass’.
seriously, learn to read.
polyorchnid octopunch
@Ash Can: That would be because the controls on the secrecy constituency inside the state have completely broken down, and have been broken for a very long time.
I watched a video by some guy last night (name escapes me now) who basically said “the watchdog press has failed, and wikileaks is what we’ve got as a result.” I find that particular argument very compelling.
Corner Stone
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.):
The question seemed kind of queued up to me. I don’t know how they handles questions at these kinds of press conferences. But I noticed he went into Closed Fist under Chin repose and the cameras were going crazy taking snaps of Obama in that pose.
Then he lit into the purists for about 3 minutes. It was awesome.
cleek
@gene108:
GOP: we can’t afford to put the breaks on this economy now that it’s finally recovered from the Obama recession! no, what we really need to do is reduce taxes so that people can take full advantage of these good economic times and let them invest their own money in the stock market, which provides better returns than a bunch of IOUs in Washington!
privatize! fair tax! et cetera!
(i apologize for the obvious racism)
Sentient Puddle
@Tony J: So I just did a quick search to try and figure out the origins of “lede” as is used for describing the opening of an article. What I came away with is a total headache.
So as best I can understand it, the origin of the spelling “lede” comes from roughly the middle ages, and was “lead” in the noun form, short E pronunciation. This sort of makes sense because the modern spelling of that goes against rules of pronunciation, and why we still have homonyms in language is frustrating as fuck as it is.
So what does historical convention go and do to us? They go and jack an old form of the word that doesn’t describe what you’re after, shoehorn the wrong pronunciation onto it, and call it good. That’s apparently how we’ve ended up with “journalistic lede” today.
God, our language is fucking moronic.
JenJen
@Brachiator: Again, while I’m partial to your argument, I still think you’ve completely mischaracterized what the President said, both in his opening comments, and in his responses to very pointed questions.
And again, you are under no obligation to buy his argument, but you’re behaving as though all he did was cobble together some kind of lame excuse for bipartisanship. That’s not what I heard at all. Were we watching the same presser?
@chopper: I got too linky upthread and I have a post under moderation, but yeah, Cornerstone doesn’t seem too interested in what you actually wrote. You shouldn’t be too surprised by that, but still. :-)
@gene108: Thanks very much for that explanation!
cyntax
@FlipYrWhig:
Maybe the Dems will fall in line if Obama is out on point leading the way, but that sounds an awful lot like bully pulpit talk so we’ll see how that goes.
I’ll be beside myself with happiness if it goes down that way though.
Corner Stone
@chopper: Hey, it’s ok if you want to use a low information source as your barometer. You’re kind of like her own special Fox News.
Mark S.
@NobodySpecial:
We won’t have to wait that long. The Repubs will use the Medicare doc fix, shutting down the govt, not raising the debt ceiling, etc. What’s maddening about this tax debate isn’t so much that Obama is caving in to a horrible policy (I sort of doubt extending the tax cuts we’ve had for years is all of the sudden going to magically stimulate the economy), but that the Dems have to come up with a better strategy for combatting this brinkmanship. Because the Repubs are going to do this every month for the next two years.
chopper
@Corner Stone:
jesus, you actually get dumber. i didn’t think it was possible, but you guys always have to surprise me.
still waiting for you to learn how to read tho. here’s a hint: “favorite!=most reliable”. my 2 year old even knows that.
FlipYrWhig
@Sentient Puddle: Hmm. I thought it was simpler than that, that journalists and typesetters came up with “lede” just as a kind of cutesy spelling so that people wouldn’t mistake it for “lead,” the stuff that isn’t in gasoline anymore.
gene108
@cleek:
Republicans will make that argument. They made it in 1993, when Clinton’s tax policy was implemented about how raising taxes will destroy the economy.
The reality is people are genuinely concerned about the debt. That’s why it worked as an issue during this election. They were concerned about it in 2006, when Democrats used it as an election issue.
People would be willing to go back to Clinton-era taxes, if it would bring down the debt, in my opinion, when the economy is strong.
The Republicans will uniformly oppose it and vote against it, so the question isn’t how to sell Americans on it and get Democrats elected on it, in a few years, but how to get 60 Democrats into the Senate, so you can bypass the eventual GOP opposition.
eemom
fyi, John is “upstairs” losing his shit again.
Martin
@chopper:
We question the source of that ‘condensed version of the political news’. If it’s you, then of course she’s your favorite – she’s not responding to the news but of your interpretation of it.
So she lives outside of the networks and cable news – that’s fine. But for your opinion to have any merit, there needs to be some kind of independence of what you are reacting to – and there doesn’t appear to be. It’s a bit like praising your wife for being your favorite fuck. Presumably, she’s your only one, so it’s not much of a contest, is it?
Andy K
@Caravelle:
Okay, it;s way overused- this isn’t Assange’s argument. He thinks that if secrecy classification is used at all, it’s wrong.
Again, not really Assange’s argument. In his essays he writes about dumping secrets to create something akin to a cytokine storm- a positive feedback loop triggered by dumping any secrets- nefarious or not- causing the security system (the immune system) to become even more secretive, so that the next set of document dumps causes even more secrecy…on and on, until there are so few people in the system that the system disappears.
What Assange is counting on in his experiment is that there are always enough people willing to leak as the system squeezes tighter and tighter, and this might work in the democratic West…But will it work in Russia or the PRC, with their traditions of autocracy and authoritarianism? And if his experiment fails in part of the world, doesn’t this make the situation less than secure for those in the parts of the world where Assange has effectively killed off the security apparatus?
Ash Can
@polyorchnid octopunch:
I saw that point posted here recently, and I too think there’s a lot to it. There’s a real value to exposing malice and stupidity, and educating consumers and voters. Ideally, that’s what a free press does, but as we all know, greed and laziness have taken their toll on what we have as a free press today. If Wikileaks improves and/or ends up paving the way for more and better journalistic investigation in general, it will have made a real contribution to society.
Ozymandias, King of Ants
@Tony J: It’s just an old form of spelling to differentiate it from the printer’s term “leading” which refers to the vertical space between consecutive lines of text.
Also, too: “comptroller” is just an archaic spelling and is actually pronounced just like “controller.” Not a lot of people know that one.
JenJen
@eemom: In the example I listed above, the couple I referred to include a successful (and awesome, and kick-ass) anti-foreclosure defendants’ attorney, and a high-powered commercial real estate developer and broker, respectively. I can assure you that those two read the paper, watch the news, and pay very close attention to developments in their fields of expertise, including political ones. They manage to do this while raising three wonderful children, one of whom is special-needs. Just because those two have never heard of FDL doesn’t mean they’re low-information. When it comes to recreational reading, that kind of harsh partisanship isn’t their cuppa, period, the end. It doesn’t make them dumb.
Hell, I read blogs so much you’d think it was my job, and yet I don’t really feel any smarter about political realities because of it. I read them because I enjoy them, but before they existed, you know, I managed to stay pretty well-informed about the world around me. I think it’s insulting to assume that people who don’t pay very much attention to the blogosphere only get their political information through “cocktail party” tutorials. In the example I gave, my friends were well aware that a tipping point in this tax cut debate was coming, they just weren’t yet aware that Obama had cut a deal, because they hadn’t read the news since it broke late yesterday afternoon.
So, I ask this in all sincerity, to anyone making such a claim: what, exactly, makes someone who doesn’t read blogs automatically a “low information voter”?
chopper
@Martin:
first off, who’s this ‘we’? CS said something totally different than what you just said.
and you don’t have to question the ‘source’ of that news. yes, she’s my favorite liberal political barometer. yes, she gets a lot of news from me. who cares? if i depended on her as some sort of finger in the wind it would actually make some difference. she certainly isn’t my most ‘reliable barometer’ or even close to the ones i depend on the most precisely because she’s not as informed as some others. she just happens to be my favorite, because she’s insightful and has an opinion that’s completely outside of the ‘progressive internet’, and is someone i hear from consistently.
wait, you’re telling me the standards upon which my opinions about my wife ‘have merit’? for my opinion that my wife is my favorite anything at all to have merit it needs to be, what exactly?
are any of you guys married?
yes, my wife is the best lay i’ve ever had. make things easier for you?
vheidi
@THE:
why not?
geg6
@Mark S.:
He just went to the entire WH press corps and American public and said he will cave every time the GOPers are willing to be nihilists. He told the GOPers exactly what they had to do to get everything they want. He said he won’t negotiate with hostage takers except when the hostages might get hurt. That’s what he said. Stupidest shit I’ve ever heard.
But people here are running around yelling “BRILLIANT!” because he slammed people who have principles they are willing to fight for.
Whatever. He sucked today but the Obots are happy, so I guess that’s a win, right?
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
Chris Matthews just had Mark Halperin on to eulogize Elizabeth Edwards. Somebody correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t this the same Mark Halperin who co-wrote a gossip book that basically portrayed her as a fat, manipulative harpy who drove her husband to infidelity?
Morat20
@FlipYrWhig:
Makoto is a poorly designed script culling from news keywords, and a searchable DB of buzzwords and quotes from Stephenson, Stross, Vinge, Gibson, and a handful of other authors.
Obviously doesn’t past the Turing Test, but is amusing to see how far scripting has come.
THE
@vheidi:
This is just gut reaction from reading press releases.
Well if I’m remembering it right, the first prosecutor dropped the case. The second one took it up again, so they may have more evidence. From what I’ve read so far I’m getting the impression his behavior is probably selfish and arrogant rather than gravely criminal. He’s a first offender.
I don’t yet see enough to think he is going to get maximum sentence even if he’s guilty of real rape. It’s not impossible he could be released even, after a deep interrogation. Or minor misdemeanor type penalty.
soonergrunt
@geg6: I could pretty fairly be called an ‘obot’. I’m not remotely happy with this. You know, just like you are, most people in the world are not two-dimensional caricatures.
JenJen
@soonergrunt: Well done.
soonergrunt
@JenJen: Thanks. I am so sick of that shit, it’s ridiculous.
Very Reverend Crimson Fire of Compassion
@Tony J: The melonfarming “e” serves to preserve the pronunciation (rhymes with bead) that gives the word its raison d’etre. Dig?
Lisa
This is apropos.
Corner Stone
@JenJen: I’m not sure. I think I’ve always been polite to you here.
Are you sure you want to do this?
JenJen
@Corner Stone: Do what, now?
You wrote that chopper asserted his wife was his most reliable barometer of liberal thought, but what chopper actually wrote was that his wife was his favorite barometer of liberal thought. I think that misread was worthy of highlighting. It’s not at all personal for me to state my opinion that you mischaracterized chopper’s own words.
Shortly thereafter, you wrote that this makes his wife a “low-information voter,” which I found insulting on a personal level, not to me, but rather, to chopper and his wife. That sticks in my craw. So yeah, that part was probably personal. But so was your assertion.
Even?