Actually, you need to distinguish between the DNC and the DLC: the hard-core establishment, “run to the center”, “don’t piss off the GOP or they’ll say mean things about us” Democrats are the D-L-C (Democratic Leadership Council–maybe coalition, whatever). There has been a rift in the party between the DLC and the D-N-C (Democratic National Comittee) ever since Howard Dean took over the DNC in 2004. Much of the rift has to do with Dean’s strategy (fight in all 50 states, try to strengthen the party at all local levels, build for the long term, etc.) vs. the DLC strategy (only worry about swing states, play to the middle to win independents, concentrate on national elections only).

A huge chunk of “Left Blogistan” (particularly the Great Orange Satan) evolved specifically to fight the DLC’s triangulation strategy and force the party back towards liberal ideals; their main tatic was to run strong progressive challengers in every Democratic primary (see Lieberman in CT for the best example). Clinton’s biggest problem in Left Blogistan was her membership in and embracing of the DLC and its methods (which is pretty much the reason for her AUMF vote–so the GOP couldn’t call her “soft on terror” in the next election). It wasn’t her policies or her gender: it was her campaign staff and their strategy.

Obama is following Dean’s 50-state, local-strength, build-the-grassroots strategy, which is why the DLC folks wrote him off. (And since only DLC-types get on TV, so did the media.) And since Dean’s strategy resulted in Democratic gains in the 2006 elections, it’s probably a big reason for Obama’s success.

The real rift in the Democratic Party isn’t Clinton vs. Obama: it’s Terry McCauliffe and Mark Penn and James Carville vs Howard Dean and Daily Kos and countless grassroots organizations. The GOP machine (not the base, not the candidates, but the party machine itself) loves the DLC and its “don’t rock the boat attitude”: it’s won them elections since 1994 and it’s elected weak Democrats who won’t stand up against their conservative agenda. They need to make sure Obama loses so that the Dean/Obama strategy is abandoned, more than anything else.

I haven’t seen this kind of important piece of trivia make it onto the radar screen of any media analysts, either.

Jon Stewart interviewed Doug Feith last night for over 20 minutes. I only saw the ten miniutes that aired but…

I was stunned by how good Jon Stewart was in that interview. He was polite and respectful, and he didn’t play stupid “gotcha” games. (I admire his self control, too: I probably would have punched Feith in the face. I think a fair punishment would be one punch for every 100 soldiers who’ve died in Iraq minus one for every single WMD found there: I calculate that at about 40 punches.)

But without violence and without yelling or cutting off Feith’s mike, Stewart hit the big issues that really matter. He hit them hard and stayed on them and came back to them when Feith contradicted earlier statements. He brought in other quotes from administration officials for context, and he called Feith out on all of his bullshit.

I agree with Athenae over at First Draft (linked above): Stewarts’s use of metaphor and comparison framed the issues in clear, concrete terms that everyone can understand instead of relying on vacuous phrases and meaningless soundbites. He made it personal, too, with statements like “I feel like I was lied to” and “No, I clearly remember what was going on in the run up to the war, and I’m pretty sure most Americans do, too.” He was an excellent spokesman for the American people– even though he never crowned himself as such (like the “real” political pundits do).

In short, Stewart was absolutely fucking brilliant. I haven’t seen an interview like that since…well, Stewart’s interview of Josh Bolton, actually.

Alterman argues that conservatives loathe Hollywood because they, like the rich everywhere else, are expected to “embrace the right-wing politics that would benefit their economic self-interest and leave the opinion business to the professionals.” What conservative in his right mind has ever uttered this thinking? What conservative having lost his mind advances this belief?

This paragraph triggered an epiphany for me: is it possible that wingnuts are using some kind of “rhetorical deniability”? 

Look at this sentence:
(1) Alterman says
  (1.1) conservatives loathe Hollywood
  (1.1.1) BECAUSE they (i.e., Hollywood) are expected to
  (1.1.1.1) “embrace the right-wing politics
  (1.1.1.1.a) that would benefit their economic self-interest
  (1.1.1.2) AND leave the opinion business to the professionals
(2) [Hollywood is] like the rich everywhere else

Note the number of different ideas in that sentence: I count seven separate statements, not including the causality assertion of “because” in 1.1.1 (you could dispute the factuality or the causality of that statement independently: call it 7.5).

Now note Bozell’s rebuttal:
(3) What conservative has ever uttered this thinking / advances this belief
  (3.a) [what conservative is] in his right mind
  (3.b) [what conservative] having lost his mind

<i>This belief</i>? WHICH belief is that? He just named a minimum of 6 beliefs, and then does not specify which of those 6 he is referring to. So when someone (like Clif) soundly thrashes any one of the beliefs (like 1.1.1.2), Brent can say “Ha! Stupid Moonbat! I wasn’t talking about 1.1.1.2–I was talking about 2: Conservatives never claimed Hollywood folk are like rich folk everywhere! Take that!”

Of course, he can easily substitute any combination of the 6 “beliefs” as necessary; in a pinch, he can even claim he was referring to belief 1.1.1.1.a. (After all, who in their right mind would assert that right-wing politics benefit someone’s economic self interest?)

Even better, the addition of the opposing conditions 3.a and 3.b makes it completely and totally impossible to answer Bozell’s question. If you put forward a conservative (such as Bozell) that you believe espoused any combination of the belief set, he just pops off with “Clif just said I have lost my mind! Ad Homina-homina-hominem! Mean ol’ unhinged moonbats!” Or he can take the opposite condition “Ha! So you agree that I’m in my right mind–therefore I am right! PWNED!!”

Just like intelligent design, Bozell’s hypothesis is framed so incompetently that it can’t be argued against or disproven under any rules of logic and rhetoric. Wingnut writing is just too bad to be shot down.

Is it possible that wingnuts are taught to write this poorly on purpose? Or are they really just that ignorant?

Certain actors use smoking as a way to eeeeeeeeee-mote and show that their character is either edgy or stressed out or both. But [...] you can tell they don’t know the first thing about smoking. They fling the cigarette around like a crazy person

Maybe they were coached by my philosophy professor. Seriously.

This guy was an old, self-absorbed, chain-smoking codger. I never saw him without a cigarette in his hand. He was very animated…and he always talked with his hands, even while lecturing.

So every morning, he’d pace around the classroom, making his argument and waving this cigarette around like–well, like a crazy person, actually, flinging sparks and bits of ash onto your desk. Everyone ducked as he walked by. He’d go on for fifteen or twenty minutes without ever touching the cigarette to his mouth once.

As he built up to his finale, he jabbed the cigarette at the front row, punctuating every point with a startled gasp from the closest student. He’d mark his conclusion by (finally!) putting the cigarette in his mouth and taking the deepest, most desperate draw you’ve ever heard (like he was getting his first breath oxygen after 3 minutes under water…or bogarting a joint).

At first we thought he was trying to keep us awake (8:30 am Metaphysics class, you know), but then we noticed he had the exact same mannerisms while playing chess.

the appalling thing about what I wrote

Your discrimination and/or fear is based on the person’s behavior. I think this is the logical and acceptable basis for reacting to other people.

If someone goes around bragging about shooting stray cats or dogs, being afraid of that person is the “correct” response: when you consider it’s not that far a jump to shooting people or wonder what happens to any stray bullets, it’s pretty clear that this person represents a real, physical danger to the people around him. (If your belief system condemns cruelty to animals as wrong, then loathing him is also appropriate.)

If someone constantly talks about beating up, incarcerating, or even killing people who share your beliefs, then you are right to fear them and avoid them–it’s just self preservation. If you know for a fact that they are just “kidding” or full of bullshit, then you might not fear them, but despising them is still a perfectly valid response. (”Dude, you just told me I should die–why would I want to go have a beer with you?”)

This is completely different from hating or discriminating against someone based on appearance, ethnicity, gender, religion, etc.: those things don’t have a direct effect on you, so there’s no logical reason to discriminate based on them.

On the flip, if someone’s behavior has a tangible, negative effect on you, you have a right to react. This particular group of people (the “yokels”, not Christians in general) are grouped together by the way they act, and the way they act happens to affect you negatively.

What’s the quote? “Extremism in the defense against assholes in no vice” or something?

Suppose for a moment that the Bushites were right, that Hussein had WMD and the ability and the will to use them against Americans (preposterous but hang in there for a bit). Would you still oppose war, the killing of people bent on killing us, which would of necessity mean killing civilians? When is war justified? Despite seeing the horrors of the Dresden firebombing first hand, Vonnegut still thought WWII was justified.

Here’s the problem I have with the term “justified war” or (even worse) a “just war”:
Today, we tend to think of the term “justified” to mean “it’s OK” or “it’s not wrong”. I don’t think that’s a correct connotation for the legal sense, and it certainly doesn’t apply to war, any war, ever. War is never OK; it is never going to be “just”.

What it has to be is “worth the consequences”. Our goals when we choose to go to war have to be so important, so vital, that we willingly accept the consequences for the horrible things we are about to do.

When we go to war, we are going to kill civilians. There is no way around it: innocent people are going to die, and that means little children and granfathers and grandmothers and mothers with their babies. Even adorable kittens and puppies are going to die because of what we do. Face that fact and accept the consequences.
There will be brutality. Even if you take a 0.1% “bad apple” ratio, by sending in 100,000 combat troops, we’ve just unleashed 100 “bad apples”–rapists, murderers, torturers, sociopaths, psychopaths–on an unprotected populace. Deal with it.

And unless the country we invade is already in chaos (like Bosnia, Afghanistan, or the Sudan), we have to take some responsibility for brutality on the other side, too. By eliminating the (immoral but still functional) power structure in Iraq, we became the catalyst for every kidnapping, every beheading, every militia-driven murder spree that wasn’t possible under the previous regime. When our actions in war create anarchy, we must acknowledge some measure of moral and legal responsibility for the brutality that thrives in that anarchy. The people living under that anarchy are going to blame us as the first cause: we have to understand that, too.

And then there’s the disease and the poverty and the hunger caused by all that destruction of infrastructure and disruption of social safety nets–all those side effects of war that take the longest time to recover from and that Americans don’t even realize exist: we have to take responsibility for that, too.

And we have to recognize the damage done to our own soldiers during war: the dead, the wounded, the traumatized, the broken, and the “brutified”–these are all on our conscience and in our society, and we have to handle that.

There is no way that all this can ever be “OK” or “not wrong”. It is a tragedy. A nightmare. A horrorscape. And it will always be that. Always.

So what can make all that horror “worth it” to you?
What would it take for you to be willing to hand parents the remnants of their children and say, “It had to be done”–and mean it?
What looming threat could allow you to stand inside a blown-up hospital, realize that the walls weren’t painted red, and still convince yourself that an air strike was the right thing to do?
Under what circumstances could you honestly tell yourself and your family and your god that things will be worse–that there will be more death, more chaos, more brutality–if we don’t go to war?

When you find yourself in that situation, then go ahead and do what you have to. Kill and maim and rape your allies along with your enemies; brutalize and destroy your own soldiers as much as any bystanders. But never, for one minute, try to pretend that this isn’t what’s happening.

I hope it will all be worth it.

The underlying logic of merit pay seems perfectly intuitive, of course, I’m just not sure it would work out.

It does seem intuitive until you consider that the teacher’s pay depends on the students’ performance. And since teachers do not have the direct control over students that, say, department managers do, it is very, very difficult to hold them accountable for things they can’t control. (e.g., A department head can fire unproductive employees; a teacher cannot simply kick unproductive students out of the class.)

All of the “teacher accountability” programs that I have seen completely overlook the issue of student accountability. When I was teaching college, every single semester there was at least one student on my class list who never once showed up for class. One semester, I only saw 4 out of 10 students. I double-checked with the registrar; I called the students (three separate times) to let them know they were registered in the class; I called again and sent them letters two weeks before the final drop date. Not one of them dropped the class, and I had to turn in 6 Fs out of a class of 10.

Under every merit pay plan I’ve seen, I would have been slammed that semester for “poor performance” and “being a bad teacher”. (I did get some of that, actually, but it was just talk, at least.) It doesn’t matter if I’m the greatest teacher in the world if the students never set foot in my classroom. I do not have the ability or the authority to drag them into the classroom and set them in a “Clockwork Orange” type restraint that forces their eyes open so they must see what I’m doing. I haven’t yet seen a “teacher merit pay” plan that addresses the issue of student accountability.

The other problem is that the institutional definition of “success” may not actually apply to all students. My state considered merit-based funding for colleges some years back: colleges would receive funding based on the percentage of courses completed (vs dropped) and the percentage of programs completed. Fortunately, the students were able to see that this would hurt them more than the teachers:

• “At risk” students would simply not be accepted into colleges, because their greater chance of dropping out would dilute the “program completion” stats
• Changing majors would be much more difficult, because changing a major or switching degree programs counted against the program completion rate
• Likewise, auditing classes or taking classes just for fun would not be allowed because of the effect on the program completion rate
• Colleges would make it harder to withdraw from classes mid-semester (since a failing grade still counted as a “completion”), so student grade point averages would suffer greatly (This was especially of great concern to highly competitive pre-med and pre-law students who would drop classes they were getting a low B in to keep their grade point average above 3.5.)

Community colleges were going to be hit worst of all: their primary demographic is at risk students with volatile schedules and tenuous finances (working students, single parents, etc). It is not uncommon for community college students to drop out mid semester and come back in the future–and community colleges would be “punished” for catering to these students. The proposed program got enough negative response from all parties that it was eventually dropped.

As a parent, I’ve seen the stress the elementary and middle schools (and the school district) put on the students because of the “No Child Left Behind” bullshit. My daughter’s gifted class was told that every single one of them “had to” to score in the highest category of the TAKS test so the district can keep its rating up, even in the years the students are not required to take the test. She got strep throat the week before the test and left the doctor’s office in tears at the possibility that that she wouldn’t be well enough to take the test and terrified of the consequences. And the test was not required for her that year at all: they only made her class take it to make the district numbers “look good”.

My neighbor was told she couldn’t take her son out of school to visit his grandfather’s deathbed (literally) because he was taking the practice TAKS test and they could not release him. That’s not a mistake: it was the practice test–not even the real thing. The school is so afraid the numbers will go down and they will lose their funding that they counted a practice test as more important than a student’s dying relative. (If my boss ever pulled that bullshit with me, I would walk out the door and never look back. Wouldn’t you?)  

This is the kind of crap that performance-based funding always brings up: the second the schools have to focus on anything other than what’s best for the students, it all goes to hell. You can’t use a business model to fund schools or determine teacher pay, because schools are not businesses and shouldn’t be. How many businesses will take a loss because it’s better for the customers–and continue to do so? Businesses can’t afford to sacrifice their bottom line to make their customers’ lives a little easier: schools have to.

I am quite honestly very, very tired of all the political bullshit that targets our schools, as if politicians who have never handled a classroom know better than veteran teachers what works and what doesn’t.  I’m sick of preachers and idealogues putting their beliefs and “comfort levels” above the needs of my child and her classmates.  I’m done with people who think that “standing up to a union” is more important than “what’s best for the students” or who think platitudes and slogans improve education in any way, shape or form.  I’m especially done with people who worry about how the schools look on paper or the scores on this or that report more than they worry about the kids’ emotional and intellectual well-being.

If there is any kind of merit-pay system that puts on the focus on doing right by the students, I have yet to see it.

Whaaa?

The “barely legal sex” ones are bad enough. The “hot teen virgins doing it with farm animals” are disgusting. But “drunk teen exploitation” porn? Is there really an audience for date rape videos?

Are there actually men out there thinking “Wow, I would love to watch someone’s 17-year-old daughter get gang raped after she passes out from alcohol overconsumption”?

Are there really guys out there like this?

And I suppose on the porn videos, the rapists say some stupid line like, “This is her fault. She got drunk and she did this to herself.‘”

Nah, that would be way too sleazy, completely unbelievable.

German counter-terrorist agents kidnapped an American citizen and secretly sent him to Afghanistan, where he was imprisoned and tortured for four months. And the whole time his wife and children had no idea where he was or what had happened to him.

And why? Because a unit chief “had a hunch” he was a terrorist. A hunch?

Well, the hunch was wrong. And when they found out this guy had no connection with any terrorist group, they kept it a secret so they wouldn’t “embarrass” the government. Of course, the man’s life is completely ruined, because people who knew him before are afraid to associate with him now.

This is unbelievable. Unforgivable.

Germany is supposed to be a democracy that respects human rights, for gods’ sake, not to mention one of our allies. To treat one of our citizens like this, on no evidence other than some random intelligence officer’s “hunch” is completely unacceptable. Isn’t that pushing the “act of war” line?

We should demand the intelligence office be turned over for trial and that damn unit shut down. If they refuse, we should toss their ambassadors out out of our country, kick the bastards off the UN Security Council…

Wait…I read the story wrong. It was a German citizen kidnapped and tortured by American counter terrorism agents.

Oh, well, that’s quite different….

Never mind.