Shazam! Sunday News Roundup: May 11, 2008

 Captain Marvel 

Top Story! - Sadrists and Iraqi Government Reach Truce Deal

The Iraqi government and leaders of the movement of the Shiite cleric Moktada al-Sadr agreed Saturday to a truce, brokered with help from Iran, that would end more than a month of bloody fighting in the vast, crowded Sadr City section of Baghdad.  The deal would allow the sides to pull back from what was becoming a messy and unpopular showdown in the months leading up to crucial provincial elections…[click here for more] 

Africa News - Niger Delta Push For U.S. Mediator

Ex-US President Jimmy Carter could play a positive role in mediating between Nigeria’s government and oil militants, a Rivers State spokesman told the BBC.  Rivers is the last state where Movement for the Emancipation of the Niger Delta (Mend) militants are not in talks…[click here for more]

Europe News - Controversial Proposals For German National Security

WAS it the start of a serious debate about German security, or a blueprint for militarism and a presidential style of foreign policy at odds with German tradition? Or both? These questions arose on May 6th, when parliamentarians of the Christian Democratic Union (CDU), the senior partner in the “grand coalition”, issued a paper calling for the creation of a national security council; and for fewer limits on the deployment of armed forces at home and abroad…[click here for more] 

Business News - Dollar Bulls Gain Control As Futures Signal High-Flying Euro Close To Peak

For the first time since December 2005, futures traders are turning bullish on the dollar.

The difference in the number of wagers by hedge funds and other large speculators on a gain in the greenback versus the euro, known as net longs, was 21,315 on April 29, figures from the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in Washington show. There were net-short positions in each of the previous 123 weeks…[click here for more]

Gun-Running News - Viktor Bout Indicted For Conspiracy To Kill Americans And Other Terrorism-Related Charges

The U.S. Attorney for the Southern District of New York and the Acting Administrator of the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration announced the unsealing of an indictment against international arms dealer Viktor Bout for conspiring to sell millions of dollars worth of weapons to the FARC to be used to kill Americans in Colombia…[click here for more]

Environment News - Huge Reservoir In Works For Everglades

Earth-moving equipment and high explosives are laying the foundation for a mammoth construction project: a reservoir bigger than Manhattan designed to revive the ecosystem of the once-famed River of Grass.  More than a century after the first homes and farms took shape in the Everglades, decades of flood-control projects have left the region parched and near ecological collapse. Now crews are building what will be the world’s largest aboveground manmade reservoir to restore some natural water flow to the wetlands…[click here for more]

Sports News - O.J. Mayo Received Gifts, Cash

Former USC basketball player O.J. Mayo, a projected lottery pick in this year’s NBA draft, received thousands of dollars in cash, clothes and other benefits in apparent violation of NCAA rules while he was still in high school and during his one year in college, a former Mayo associate told ESPN’s “Outside the Lines.”…[click here for more]

When Science And Slang Collide

From the “I’ll bet there were a lot of people who went away disappointed after clicking the link” department:

And don’t even try to tell me that the headline writer at the Beeb didn’t know exactly what he was doing.

Trent Reznor Has Enough Ferraris, Apparently

I’m starting to think that somebody at one of the record labels backed over Trent Reznor’s dog. First the guy releases a brand new instrumental Nine Inch Nails album, Ghosts 1-4, on the NIN website, completely independent of any industry machinery. And he makes 1/4 of the album available for free. So many people rush to download it that the server crashes, and Reznor proves that an artist at his level of popularity doesn’t need a label to do a damn thing…so Warner Brothers, EMI, and the lot of them can kiss that revenue goodbye. And that’s just off an instrumental album, it’s not like NIN dumped Year Zero out there for free or anything.

And now, gratuitously rubbing salt in the wound, Reznor goes and “drops” the new NIN record, The Slip, a real-album-with-lyrics-and-everything-no-fake, out there on the NIN website, totally for free. Not “download a low-fi version free and give me $9.99 for high-quality MP3,” but any format you want, including the audiophile geeky ones I’ve never heard of, for nothin’.

 

Next up? Oh yes…

Shazam! Sunday News Roundup: May 4, 2008

Captain Marvel

I’m starting a weekly roundup of news that didn’t make major headlines over the weekend, but should have been paid attention to anyway. Most of it is going to be stuff from overseas (because somebody needs to keep an eye on what those pesky ‘ferrners are up to), but will also involve American jurisprudence, sports, business, music/movies/cultural detritus, and so forth. Basically, if you read this page every Sunday, you can walk into work on Monday and bring up some obscure story from Southeast Asia that no one heard about and act like a smug prick the whole day. The Roundup will be hosted by Captain Marvel, because I have been looking for an excuse to use the Alex Ross rendering of him in this blog for like 6 months now.

Top Story! - Thousands Killed in Burma Cyclone

A tropical cyclone has killed at least 351 people in Burma and damaged thousands of buildings, according to state television…[click for more]

Business News - Congress May Force Securities Firms To Raise Capital

The result may be a law modeled on the 1991 Federal Deposit Insurance Corp. Improvement Act, or FDICIA. Such a measure would obligate regulators to step in when Wall Street banks fail to meet minimum capital requirements. Securities firms may also face new costs and disclosures in any regulations Congress passes…[click for more]

Middle East News - Palestinian Police Deploy In Jenin For Self-Security Initiative

The Palestinian Authority has launched a new security initiative in the West Bank. The move, which coincides with a U.S. peace mission to the Middle East, has been met with Israeli skepticism…[click for more]

Environmental News - Top EPA Official Resigns, Citing Dow Chemical Hubub

The top U.S. Environmental Protection Agency administrator in the Midwest resigned Thursday amid internal fights over dioxin contamination near Dow Chemical Co.’s world headquarters in Michigan, according to a published report…[click for more]

Sports News - The Celtics Rob Atlanta Of Their Manhood On National TV

Kevin Garnett had 18 points and 11 rebounds, Pierce scored 22 points, and the Celtics turned back the pesky Hawks with a 99-65 victory Sunday in Game 7 of their playoff series to advance to the second round…[click for more]

Hillary Grabbed Working Class Voters Because Barack Didn’t

Civilizer

I think that an aspect of campaigns that often goes under-reported is how candidates define themselves in relation to their opponent. There is always a lot of ink spent and words uttered about a candidate branding themselves, defining who they are and what they’re about to the electorate. But I think what’s also important to note is how candidates make a conscious effort to contrast themselves with their opponents - not just on policy, because everyone knows that happens, but on who they are inside. Even if they have to make it up.

I think the phenomenon was most perfectly summed up in The Daily Show’s “America: The Book” with their caption underneath a picture of George W. Bush in jeans and a cowboy hat. It said something like “This East Coast, Yale-educated millionaire son of a former president ran as an outsider in the 2000 presidential election and won. Historians are still trying to figure out how the fuck he pulled that off.” Bush packaged himself this way not in a vacuum, but at least in part as a counterbalance to the more cerebral, urbane Gore.

I strongly suspect this dynamic is at work with Clinton’s mystifying appeal to the working class of this country despite her pedigree and prior idictment for snobbery. Stories about her childhood or not, she’s not grabbing Rust Belt voters because she has working class bona fides, but because these voters present a weakness of Barack Obama’s and therefore an opening for Clinton. For whatever the reason - his own Ivy League background, his exotic ethnicity and life story, his polished comportment, the arugala remark - Obama has shown an inability to connect with the blue-collar demographic with anywhere close to the same level of virtuosity he demonstrates with young or more educated voters. So Clinton, possessing a highly advantageous dearth of ethics and well-documented lack of compuntion with regards to lying, sees this as an opportunity to be for the working-class what Barack is not.

What’s basically happened is that Hillary Clinton has met a need. The professoriat turned her down for Obama, a new generation of voters came to the party with eyes only for Obama, African-Americans have thrown their lot in with Obama…but the white working class remained free agents, and free agents who were evidently underwhelmed by Obama’s story and oratory. And since politics abhors an uncaptured voting bloc the way nature does a vaccum, Hillary immediately struck a rhetorical posture optimized to appeal to the broad swath of voters across parts of the south plus the midwest and upper midwest that her campaign rightly identified as her last available redoubt. This strategy is perhaps no more evident than in her utterly stupid endorsement of the gas tax holiday…a populist bone thrown to harried people on strained budgets. She’s not capturing these votes with authenticity, she’s capturing them because in the casting call that is the 2008 presidential election, the role of “White Middle Class Mouthpiece” hadn’t been decided yet; unable to win on her own merits, she has fallen back on trying to win by being what Barack Obama is not for the people he has not been able to reach.

Barack Obama Is Dead On About A Gas Tax Holiday

Civilizer

We’ve heard some really stupid stuff from the candidates during this primary season, most of it from Hillary Clinton as she tries to explain why the popular vote, number of states won, and number of pledged delegates won should not determine who gets the Democratic nomination, but I think the most stupid thus far has been Clinton and John McCain’s endorsement of a gas tax holiday. The gas tax, an 18.4 cents per gallon charge (24.4 cents for diesel), is basically a fund-raiser for America’s transportation infrastructure: 15.44 cents goes into the Highway Trust Fund, 2.86 cents goes into the Mass Transit Account, and 1 cent goes to repair underground storage facilities (possibly the facilities where we are storing the aliens).

Transportation infrastructure. Not exactly a frivolous and wasteful government expenditure, like when the CIA and U.S. Army threw a bunch of money at psychic spies, or the National Endowment for the Arts. If I’m going to pay taxes for a government program, it’s going to be for one of two things:

1. “War To Your Door” Carrier Battle Groups

2. Roads

The gas tax doesn’t do much for CBGs, but it’s crucial for the highway system. And McCain’s proposal would cost the government $9 billion in revenue, jeopardizing 300,000 jobs. Clinton’s is little better, or smarter. All for savings of $28 per driver. Great. So the highways deteriorate further than they already have, and maybe we get another bridge collapse, but I can score the two-disc Special Edition of Cloverfield. It’s no wonder that seemingly every person in America who has ever cracked an economics textbook has called the plan “ridiculous” or something like it.

Yeah, who needs highway funding.  Dirt roads like this one will do just fine, and often provide a great opportunity to show the kids their first cow, sheep, or horsie. 

So good for Obama for calling it a “gimmick.” That’s exactly what it is - myopic, moronic, and utterly unecessary. I have found it infuriating over the past several days listening to Clinton attack Obama for his “judgment” because he was a member of hilarious loon Jerry Wright’s church for 20 years while she floats this catastrophe of a policy. Obama might have a liability for a former pastor, but Clinton is good at nothing but kissing babies and kissing voters’ asses.

Hitch Strikes Again: Quote Of The Day

Christopher Hitchens in his Fighting Words column on Slate, running down former New Hampshire Senator Bob Smith in the wake of Smith’s criticisms of John McCain’s temper:

He combines the body of an ox with the brains of a gnat. Indeed, if his brains were made of gunpowder and were to accidentally explode, the resulting bang would not even be enough to disarrange his hair. He moved from being the most right-wing Republican senator from New Hampshire, switching to the U.S. Taxpayers Party after a distinct absence of what we call “traction” in his presidential run of 2000, tried to rejoin the GOP when he saw a nice, fat chairmanship become vacant on the death of Sen. John Chafee, failed at that, lost the nomination in his own state, moved to Florida, endorsed John Kerry in 2004, endorsed Duncan Hunter for the Republican nomination in December last year, and was last spotted on the Web page of the Constitution Party: a Web page that’s tons of fun to check out. And this cretinous dolt, who managed to do all the above without bringing out so much as a sweat on his massive and bovine frame, is the chief character witness against the impetuous McCain. Nice work.

I Can’t Believe I’m Saying This

 Civilizer

I’m not glad Hillary Clinton won in Pennsylvania, and won by juuuuuust enough of a margin to justify hanging around for a while as her aides petition the Board of Regents at MIT to change the laws of mathematics and thereby make it possible for her to win the Democratic nomination.  I was really hoping she’d win in a squeaker and that her campaign would fold amidst an avalanche of calls for her to just…go…away…already before both candidates are too damaged to be elected.  I’m one of those Republicans who would like to see a race between the two best candidates on the premise that its best for the country, rather than one of those Republicans who wants Hillary to get the nomination because she’ll be the easiest to beat.  Ergo, I want her to be dumped unceremoniously on the side of the road.

However, since she hasn’t been so dumped yet…and saying this feels in my mouth like chewing on a rusty nail…I’m glad she raised $10 million in the 24 hours since she won Pennsylvania.  And here’s why:  it would really suck if the only reason a semi-viable candidate, in an American election, had to quit was solely because he or she ran out of money.

I was watching MSNBC as the Pennsylvania result came in, and even as the pundits were discussing her victory, they were also lauding Obama’s campaign for spending so lavishly in Pennsylvania, forcing Clinton’s campaign, which was and still is considerably less flush than Obama’s, to do the same.  The talking heads - including Air America’s Rachel Maddow who you’d like to think would eschew such distasteful cynicism given that she’s a left wing liberal and therefore hates money - were all saying what a strategically smart move it was, because it basically meant that yes, Hillary won the state she needed to win, but exhausted her treasury in the process and now can’t go on.  So even though she’s just proven that she does have an appeal to a fairly significant Democratic voting bloc (I can’t believe I’m sticking up for her…this post is plunging me into an existential crisis), her message will be inevitably silenced because…she’s out of money!

And here’s the thing - nobody on TV seemed even bothered by it, nor to grasp the rather dispiriting and lamentable significance of what they were saying.  It was eerie and disquieting:  In America, the world’s greatest democracy, all you have to do in order to get a party’s nomination is grab an early lead and then outspend your opponent, or make him or her “bleed to death” as one of them so Putinishly put it.  If that’s Obama’s “new politics” then this is one twentysomething who isn’t along for the ride.

So Hillary, here’s hoping your campaign, and indeed your entire political career, comes to a quick end because the electorate wakes up to the fact that you are a dishonest, opportunistic, paranoid boor, or because the real truth behind your myriad shady financial transactions finally comes to light, and you and your insufferable nymphomaniac husband are never heard from again.  Any of those reasons would be fine.

Just not because you ran out of money.

A Big Night For ATITP On Monday Night RAW

 Miiisterrrrr Civilizer…Civilizer

I must say, I never thought I’d be dictating the rhetorical direction of the Democratic primary back on February 27th of this year, when I suggested that Barack Obama take The Rock out on the campaign trail with him to close the Senator’s stump speeches with a little “If ya smell what Barack is cookin’”.  And yet there it was, Monday on the special 3 hour RAW on USA, Barack Obama himself closing his pre-taped message to the rasslin’ fan voters with “Do you smell what Barack is cookin’”!

I would have to say, in all humility, that tonight was a validation of my long-running position that politicians and their aides would do well to incorporate one of the primary tenets of professional wrestling if they want to rejuvenate American politics - cut promos.  And yet, at the same time, these three particular politicians perhaps discredited this position, because these three promos were freaking terrible.  (You can watch excerpts, including “Do you smell” here)  Stiff delivery was a big problem, for one.  Seriously, you could almost physically see the following thought floating across Obama’s face:  “Who in the aw-shucks heck is Randy Orton and why did I just bring him up?” (Points to Orton, though, for being mentioned twice, by both Democrats)  And Hillary, good Lord.  A for effort because she really did seem to be good-humored about doing this, but she had even more tortured wrestling allusions than her opponent did.  “Hill-rod?”  I don’t even know what that meant. 

Also, both of the Democrats were smiling!  You do NOT smile when you’re cutting a promo unless you are the cocky heel, and you don’t play the cocky heel if you’re trying to win an election!  And not only did Barack smile, he broke kayfabe at the end, but I think I’ll blame his video editor. This is basic stuff, people.  Lincoln never would have pulled a hayseed move like that. 

McCain had his own problems but, amusingly, his cadence, facial expressions, and tone of voice indicated that he was definitely trying the hardest to sound like a real wrestler.  I think he also had the best catch-phrase drops, referencing Ric Flair, Hulk Hogan, Triple H, and Stone Cold Steve Austin all within about 20 seconds.  Memo to McCain though - when you’re the establishment white guy Republican going up the first black Democratic candidate for President, or the first woman, I wouldn’t call yourself “The Man.”  He did have the line of the night, however, when he aped the Hulkster’s famous “Whatcha gonna do when Hulk Hogan and all the Hulkamaniacs run wild on you?” and turned it into a hilariously codgerish ”And whatcha gonna do when John McCain and all his McCainiancs run wild on yeh.”

While the promos might not have been the strongest, I can ultimately take deep satisfaction from the fact that in a historic national election, all three major candidates felt compelled to assume the pulpit of American professional wrestling and reference the following men in an attempt to win the nation’s highest office: 

   

 

For the record, Senator McCain also promised to introduce the terrorists to this man:

Best foreign policy idea I’ve heard yet.

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