Via Talking Points Memo, I learned about intrade.com, “The Prediction Market”. It’s set up like a stock trading site, but really what it is, is online gambling taking bets on current events. Kind of a slick re-casting of the concept, really. There’s a wide variety of topics, from legal to entertainment to whatever. I’d kind of like to be active in stock trading, but I have a hard time getting involved because I know there’s a lot of stuff I don’t know, so I couldn’t adequately predict what will happen with them. But things like this, I feel like I could be closer to making informed guesses, so it has some appeal to me.

I haven’t made the plunge, but I’m starting to itch to bet on who’s going to win the presidential election. The problem I have here, though, is which one to bet on. I really think Obama’s going to win, so I’d like to cash in on that…but on the other hand I am wondering if I should hedge my bets on McCain. If he wins, my life’s going to get worse and my money’s going to be worth less, so maybe I should throw a bunch of money to bet on him, so at least if he wins I’ll have some extra cash to offset what I’ll essentially be losing in his presidency.

how — how do you — how can you even — and of course the press — the press will let them get away — the press will — I’m comin’ Lizbeth

Marc Ambinder (September 05, 2008) – No Interviews Till She’s Ready
A senior McCain campaign official advises that, despite the gaggle of requests and pressure from the media, Gov. Sarah Palin won’t submit to a formal interview anytime soon. She may take some questions from local news entities in Alaska, but until she’s ready — and until she’s comfortable — which might not be for a long while — the media will have to wait. The campaign believes it can effectively deal with the media’s complaints, and their on-the-record response to all this will be: “Sarah Palin needs to spend time with the voters.”

Not out of the question are appearances on lighter, fluffier television shows. But — not for a while.

Well, by the transitive property, anyway. Before Obama announced Biden was his choice for VP, one of the names kicked around was Governor Tim Caine of Virginia (who, before that, was mayor of Richmond). And of that possibility, Rove said this:

With all due respect again to Governor Kaine, he’s been a governor for three years, he’s been able but undistinguished. I don’t think people could really name a big, important thing that he’s done. He was mayor of the 105th largest city in America. And again, with all due respect to Richmond, Virginia, it’s smaller than Chula Vista, California; Aurora, Colorado; Mesa or Gilbert, Arizona; north Las Vegas or Henderson, Nevada. It’s not a big town. So if he were to pick Governor Kaine, it would be an intensely political choice where he said, `You know what? I’m really not, first and foremost, concerned with, is this person capable of being president of the United States?

Replace some names and a few pronouns and he’s talking about Palin, isn’t he? Holy crap I hope someone finds a public way of using this.

If you’re not aware, Congress has pretty much removed any right to privacy you might’ve thought you had. And while I think that’s a pretty bad thing, I was never really prepared for one of the easy core arguments against thinking it’s a big deal: “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.” I mean, it just feels instinctively wrong, but I couldn’t think of a good reason why, and I tend to mistrust my own feelings like that, as they might just be bourne of personal bias.

But the other day I had an epiphany, which is that the statement “if you haven’t done anything wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about” is false. Here’s the correct statement:

If you haven’t done anything that someone else thinks is wrong, you don’t have anything to worry about.

When you work through the implications of that statement, losing your privacy seems like a much more worrying issue.

If being captured and tortured makes you ready to be president, there’s a whole Guantanamo full of candidates the Republicans haven’t even considered.

Consult your doctor if you elect a bonehead for more than four years.

The Republicans are working on “rebranding” themselves. This concept amuses me already, because it’s clearly based in marketing. They’re working on changing their image, rather than themselves, because clearly their underlying assumption is that they’re the Right Buncha Folks To Get Work Done, and the only problem is that the public misunderstands them. I mean somehow disregarding the fact that they’ve been running the country for the last seven years and it’s gone to shit, really anyone who buys gas or dies in a bridge collape or lives in a formaldehyde trailer can tell you how well they’ve done, but whatever.

Here’s a piece of the “leaked” message about the rebranding details, which really, my jaw just drops:

Washington is broken, the American people want it fixed, and Democrats in Washington have proven unable or unwilling to get the job done. Republicans will. Americans have seen first-hand the change Democrats are making, and it is moving America in the wrong direction. To the American people, we say that Republicans will deliver “the change you deserve.”

Uch. Yeah, the change we deserve. The change we deserve away from you. It’s just so…I mean, the change in the country because of Democrats? The part of that the Dems are actually responsible for is when they couldn’t find enough backbone to prevent the Republicans from doing whatever they wanted, ugh I just can’t even keep that in my head without getting all pissed about it.

But the fun part is, there’s some entertainment in building their brand around “the change we deserve”:

Crooks and Liars » GOP’s Inadvertently Fitting New Slogan

Think Progress » Republicans vote against Mother’s Day.

Seriously.

This is what the Republicans in the House have become. First they raise a bill about how great Moms are, and then it’s unanimously passed earlier in the week, and then somehow they bring it up for vote recount, and then they vote against it. For some reason.

I mean the overall reason is because they’re stalling. They’re pissed they don’t have control of the House and now the mortgage bill and the war apprpriations bill has been pushed to next week. I think they consider this a “win”. But after all that, why even vote against a fluff timewaster at all? Why not just ring up another unanimous vote?

Maybe they’ve had a change of heart and decided they don’t like moms anyway. Hell, they’ve already voted against nuns, maybe next week they’ll pass HR1157, “Finding adorable, precocious orphans shining shoes on the corner and taking their money and pushing them in the mud.”

edit: Oh, okay, I get it. They had the original vote, then Rep. Todd Tiahrt (R-Kan.) had a motion to reconsider the vote.  Rep. Kathy Castor (D-Fla.) moved to table his revote request, which itself needed a vote, and that’s the one that the Republicans voted against. So it seems like sloppy reporting to this point, I mean, they didn’t vote against mothers exactly. Irritating that I had to go make sense out of that myself.

<spinn> so there’s a guy, john gilmore, who’s running for senate in virginia
<spinn> he just put out an announcement video on the youtubes
<spinn> generally being hailed as a flop by liberals, but whatever. but here’s the first sentence
<spinn> These are challenging times for our country. We’re threated by terrorism, concerned about a difficult war, stuck in traffic, dissatisfied with how our children are educated, and too often our culture seems more interested in the latest doings of tabloid celebrities than the debates that could decide our country’s future.
<spinn> which one of those things is not like the other
<raven> Obviously *someone* doesn’t commute.
<spinn> yeah but!
<spinn> I mean shit your right-out-the-gate mission statement
<raven> heh
<raven> “That’s my top five there!”
<spinn> TERRORISTS! WAR! THAT FUCKING INTERSECTION AT LAWRENCE AND KIMBALL!

edit: comments on that page indicate that “traffic” is actually a hot Virginia issue. Still reads weird from the outside, though.

Honestly, not only has the terror won in the “terrorists” sense, but the terror has won in the “when did the country becomes a big bunch of pussies” sense. I knew this was true when Ahmadinejad visited Columbia College and conservatives pitched such a shitfit about it, but I couldn’t put into words why this bugged me. Fortunately, a guy named Rick Perlstein worked it out.

Bed-wetter Nation | Campaign for America’s Future

I’m getting really sick of conservatives talking like the tough guys when they’re the ones that are being big goddamned babies about everything.

Mercer For President 2008

My Campaign Theme

The United States Government must regulate government sleepers and government regulations authorized thought, ideas, acts, actions, rights, wrongs, controversies, facts, issues and circumstantial evidence through intelligence research, law research, law enforcement research and criminal law research implementing ROTC communications research innovating education national and international.

Senator Craig resigned on Saturday, or should I say “resigned”, because Tuesday he called a mulligan. But in his Saturday speech…politicians always dispense easy, face-saving lies in these situations—”spending time with my family”—but it’s part of the script and everyone knows it and expects it. But reading his “resignation” speech on Saturday, it’s interesting what Craig is saying about his priorities:

…to pursue my legal options, as I continue to serve Idaho, would be an unwanted and unfair distraction of my job and for my Senate colleagues. These are serious times of war and of conflict — times that deserve the Senate’s and the full nation’s attention.

There are many challenges facing Idaho that I am currently involved in. And the people of Idaho deserve a senator who can devote 100 percent of his time and effort to the critical issues of our state and of our nation.

So essentially, by changing his mind, he’s decided his reputation is more important than the people of Idaho, the Senate, times of war and conflict, and the full nation’s attention. It’s like he had a press conference a few days later and said, “I went home and looked at my family, and you know, I don’t even like them very much.”

No, not literally, you perv. I really enjoy Glenn Greenwald and his relentless fact-checking and presentation. Some people call him Glennzilla, and I can see why.

So, there’s Sen. Larry Craig (R-Idaho) who plead guilty to soliciting sex in a public restroom a few months ago. But back in October, someone reported that Craig was in the habit of having anonymous sex with other men. In the former case, right-wing blogs/pundits are saying how loathesome this is, he should resign, etc. But in the latter, the person who reported it was himself villified, and many rightwingers were insisting that a) the reporter was a scumbag, and b) whatever happens between Craig and another consenting adult is nobody else’s business.

That last bit’s especially entertaining, given the source(s). But Greenwald says that the primary reason why opinion in October (how dare you even speak of this) differs from opinion this week (what a horrid, horrid little pervert of a man) is because, in October, there were elections to think about.

Glenn Greenwald – Larry Craig’s bathroom behavior and the right wing — then and now

About my favorite in-a-nutshell line from this one:

As always, it is astonishing to observe how the same human brain can accommodate those two opposite thoughts only a few months apart without even realizing that it is doing so.

Well this is fun.

State GOP forms loyalty committee

More of this, guys. Your attempts to rule by fear amuse me.

I’ll identify myself as liberal, and I know I will have a tendency to believe a liberal story easier than a conservative story, but in most cases I have a functioning gut check when I read something that appeals to me. It’s not always possible to do your own fact checking to be sure that what you’re reading is true, but it’s as least worthy to ask yourself, since I don’t know the full background here, is it possible this can be false? Or, at least, not entirely true? If it’s important enough to be sure, do further investigation. If not, at least come away with the idea that what you’re reading might not be as complete as it should.

I extend that concept, then, to groups of people. If there’s a story that liberals are greatly agreeing with, is it simply slipping into group acceptance because all these other people believe it to be true, and they don’t do their own fact checking? I’m not as vigilant with this one, because I tend to identify with liberals more, and I have an innate belief that liberals are more rational. I should say, an innate, irrational belief. People are irrational everywhere, and while the majority of the reading I do makes me feel that liberals on average have a better handle on logic than conservatives, it doesn’t make that an absolute truth. But I can forget it, sometimes.

But on the other hand, sometimes a story comes along that makes me think I should take a stronger mental stance against conservative groupthink, and in this case the story is about Scott Beuchamp.

As I’ve said, I’ve been enjoying Gleen Greenwald recently. I like his even-toned writing, and his sourcing is very good—he’s convinced me that I can tend to believe him. Recently he said something about the Scott Beauchamp story. For context, Beauchamp is a soldier in Iraq, who wrote some features in The New Republic about his Iraq experiences under the pseudo-pseudonym Scott Thomas (his full name is Scott Thomas Beauchamp), and some things he wrote about were fairly nasty and possibly illegal. (Subscription is required to get them on the Web.)

Greenwald wrote the following about the right’s reaction to Beauchamp:

I would simply add that right-wing troop-exploiters always reserve their most hateful, vicious and deeply personal attacks for soldiers and veterans who deviate from their political church — Jack Murtha, John Kerry, Wes Clark, Max Cleland, Scott Beauchamp. Similarly, the minute Pat Tillman’s political views became known, the use they had for him vanished (and nobody has less interest in finding out what happened to Pat Tillman than they do). As Digby points out, they “support the troops” only to the extent that the troops are useful props for their political agenda.

This is strident enough that it caught my attention. How would he come to this fairly strong conclusion? I started looking through the story in various parts of the web, and yeah, the right sure has been coming down hard on him.

Read the rest of this entry »

Republicans probably not showing up at Republican YouTube debate:

Scared, stampeding elephants at PrezVid

I forget who griped about the Democrats not wanting to debate on Fox, but someone prominent said, “If they can’t handle Fox News, how are they going to handle terrorists?” (Probably Giuliani.) I hope someone prominent asks the same about them and YouTube. (Edit: Ah, there ya go.)

Update: Hey I just realized two things! One, after hearing Senator Webb use the phrase “writ large” so much recently, I finally get to use it in a sentence; two, the demeanor of both the political parties is this deal with Democrats/Fox and YouTube/Republicans writ large.

Democrats don’t want to debate on Fox because they fear the power of the corporation. Republicans don’t want to debate in the YouTube format because they fear the power of the people.

Goes to support this post. I’m sure there’s gotta be some psychology thesis here.