Here’s the whole Obama interview on 60 Minutes. Obama worship/deification/canonization can continue in this open thread.
Early morning music
Will you kids quiet down in there?
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It’s all coming back to me now – an aging Eva Peron, drunk and in a teeny weeny bikini trying to pick up a very young and very green Officer Chief of Staff called Augusto Pinochet. The horror.
Open Thread – What the rest of the world is up to…
Hello, my dears.
My apologies for being off the air. The Royal Wedding™ took a lot out of me.
It takes a while to recover from having seen Camilla cantering down the corridors of Buck House at 3am wearing only a toothy grin and a horse-tail-butt-plug, to say nothing of hearing what young Harry said when he found out he didn’t automatically get to sleep with Pippa Middleton. I won’t even mention James Middleton bringing out his maid’s outfit for another airing. Nice buttocks on that boy, by the way.
I know that some of you like my little stories – Hello, Corner Stone, I have a nice story about Ron and Nancy on the way, just for you – but in the meantime, I have been trying to think of some other kinds of posts to put up for your entertainment and edification.
This one is inspired by a gentleman on Daily Kos who complained about me writing about the Royal Wedding™ because, and I am paraphrasing him horribly to his detriment, Americans didn’t need to know about irrelevant rubbish.
Had I not been sleeping off six bottles of Krug and an ounce of finest Columbian, my response to him would have been that, setting aside the mindless frippery of the wedding itself, the marriage of the future king of one of America’s oldest enemies and greatest allies is probably an event that Americans should show a modicum of interest in, even if it requires them to drag their eyes away from yet another story about Donald Fucking Trump or Lady Googoo.
As <a href=”http://sarahproudandtall.com/2011/04/27/why-does-peggy-noonan-hate-america/”>Peggy Noonan might have said</a>, had she not just fallen off her chair and into a vodka-coma:
<blockquote>The whole world is on the train, in the airport, judging what it sees, and likely, in some serious ways, wondering why most Americans almost entirely ignore the rest of the world unless it’s a country they want to conquer, mine or fuck.</blockquote>
Anyway, in the rest of the world, Singapore had an <a href=”http://www.bloomberg.com/news/2011-05-08/singapore-s-election-watershed-may-loosen-political-hold-of-lee-s-party.html”>election</a>, and the ruling PAP flirted with disaster by accidentally allowing opposition politicians to win actual seats.
In Dusseldorf, the greatest annual celebration of European culture (assuming that by “culture” you mean big hair, skinny jeans, tortured vowels and women in lycra climbing out of pianos) is about to take place. The appalling entries of Portugal and Greece won’t bring them any joy. Terrifying that the countries that produced this (h/t Steep) and this could fall so low. However, at $25 million a pop to stage the competition, no country actually wants to win anyway, particularly those who are going to be forced into a two year recession as “the price” their population has to pay for wanting a flat screen tv, a roof with no holes in it and a cheap bottle of red on the table after fifty years of dictatorship.
What else? South Africa is fucked up:
A 13-year-old girl became the latest victim of “corrective rape,” South African media reported Saturday, as the trend of violent attacks on lesbians showed no signs of letting up.
as is North Korea:
The U.N. World Food Program is appealing for the provision of 430,000 tons of food to North Korea to feed 6 million needy people there. Some critics claim Pyongyang has been exaggerating its food shortages so that it can hoard food in preparation for its distribution on the centennial birth of its late leader, Kim Il-sung, the father of current leader, Kim Jong-il, which falls on April 15 next year.
People died in Syria, in Egypt, in Cambodia and Thailand but not, happily, in Sudan. The slide show at that last link is quite wonderful, by the way.
Grammy needs to pour herself a big drink and spend half an hour looking at more pictures of baby aardvarks.
ETA: Open Thread. Feel free to point out what’s happening in your part of the world.
[Sarah, Proud and Tall]Open Thread – What the rest of the world is up to…Post + Comments (57)
One More Quick Word…
I dropped the ball on the debate in the middle of the week on the idea of torture “working” raised by my response to Josh Marshall’s brief post over at TPM. Despite my promises to engage, I learned once again the eternal truth: the last week or so of the school year is, how shall we say it, interesting to students, and hence a touch crowded for their teachers. So, apologies, all.
Many of the commenters and then mistermix argued that I seriously misread Josh’s point. That would be that torture as a policy is always and everywhere wrong, even if one can imagine that an incident of torture might every now and then provide a bit of timely, useful information. To those folks, Josh was making (somewhat clumsily) a strong case against torture, and not a rhetorical concession to the monsters in our polity who have already done such damage to our country.
Because this has been chewed on pretty good around here, I’m not going to do my usual 4,000 word logorrhea game here, so I’ll just make two quick points.
1: I believe I am in violent agreement with mistermix et al: torture is a disastrous policy, and Josh concurs with that claim. But I do think that it is a real problem to make even rhetorical gestures to the wrong side of this argument. Once you say that it is conceivable that torture “works” — even in the limited sense that Josh may mean it here, as a (very) occasional source of bits of actionable intelligence, then IMHO you have tiptoed onto that often invoked, much more rarely encountered political sasquatch, the slippery slope.
That is: I think the concession allows the bad guys to return to scenario mongering, talking 24 nonsense and muttering about bombs in Times Square…and adding zombie lies about how sustained torture got something good out of Khalid Sheikh Muhammed or whatever, ramping up until the “vanishingly rare” of Marshall’s implied formulation becomes so critically important that it becomes (again!) unpatriotic not to perform the water torture on every detainee, just in case.
2: That leads to my larger point, and it is again one upon which, I think, both sides of the Balloon Juice discussants at least basically agree.
Early Morning Open Thread: Mother’s Day Edition
Happy Mother’s Day to all the mothers, and a reminder for some of the rest of you that it’s not too late to call yours.
There will be a NIXONLAND thread at 7pm EDT tonight, because he was one nasty mother…
Early Morning Open Thread: Mother’s Day EditionPost + Comments (9)
Open Thread
No problems with the party, although I suppose it is too early to detect food poisoning.
Although, at the rate my guests are drinking, food poisoning will probably be masked by alcohol poisoning.
Open Thread: Red Meat for the Troops
From New York‘s Daily Intel, “David Koch Gives President Obama Zero Credit for Bin Laden’s Death“:
Considering the stark partisan divide over the amount of credit President Obama deserves for the death of Osama bin Laden, it should probably not come as a surprise that billionaire David Koch, a rabidly anti-Obama conservative activist, isn’t ready to throw any praise Obama’s way. Strolling toward the dining area last night at the Society of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center Spring Ball, he told us that it was the military and intelligence agencies that deserved all the credit, while “all that Obama did was say ‘yea’ or ‘nay,’ we’re going to take him out or not. I don’t think he contributed much at all.” He continued:
“He just made the decision, it was obvious where the guy is. He was one of the worst terrorists organizing attacks on the United States. I mean, no president in his right mind would not approve that decision to go eliminate him. So he’s getting a lot of recognition and his polls have jumped up, but his decision was the easiest of them all. The real hard work was done by the intelligence and the SEALs.”
So it’s probably safe to say that Koch hasn’t contributed to the boost in Obama’s poll numbers since bin Laden was killed? Obama is “a hardcore socialist,” Koch told us, “and he’s marvelous at pretending to be something other than that, but that is what I believe he truly is, a hardcore socialist. He’s scary to me.”
Never let it be said that President Obama doesn’t have all the right (Right) enemies…