This video appeared today and has pretty much spread everywhere already, but its worth reposting some more.  Pretty much perfectly sums up my attitude towards the democratic leadership and what I want them to do.  We gave those losers two straight sweep elections.  Man UP already.

The supreme court today handed down a decision in a case on federal election spending by corporations.  Basically, the new ruling, which reverses about 100 years or so of precedent, grants corporations free speech rights in regards to federal election campaigns.  Given that (according to CNN) 22 or so states have similar laws on the books regarding state level campaigns, we can also expect this reversal to apply to state legislatures by the 2010 elections.  The ruling also applies to unions and trade groups in addition to corporations.

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Today is the holy day of Ashura in Islam.  It commemorates the martyrdom of Mohammed’s grandson Hussein and is particularly important to Shia muslims.  This year it also coincides with the seventh day of mourning for Ayatollah Montazeri.  Montazeri was scheduled to succed the Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khomeni until he harshly criticized the regime for executing political prisoners in 1986.  Among other things Montazeri has done is to apologize to the U.S. for taking over the embassy in 1979 and issue several fatwahs against violence and suicide bombings.  From everything I’ve read about the man I think I would have liked to meet him.

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Well, not a lot is known at this time.  What we are sure of:  12 people dead, 30 or more wounded, including the gunman, tentatively identified as MAJ Nidal Hassan, a psychiatrist who had just received deployment orders to Iraq and was not happy about it.

According to the limited information available on MAJ Hassan, he is the son of Jordanian (or Palestinian, or “a town near Jerusalem”) immigrants, grew up in Virginia, and joined the military out of high school against the wishes of his parents.  He appeared to have quite the successful career prior to apparently going crazy and killing a lot of people.

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Afghanistan has been back in the news lately, along with a bunch of discussion of the supposed “return of MacArthurism” - check McChrystal’s speech, not the one Q&A segment, and the whole thing is pretty much pro current policy -but the one thing I haven’t heard anyone talking about is how we’re just setting ourselves up to make the exact same kinds of mistakes we’ve made before.

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This isn’t a dig on the President.  I mean, I voted for him, and I campaigned for him.  Even met the guy once way back when he was a University of Chicago guy.  And I have to say, W T F.  I mean, we already knew the Nobel commitee harbored some hardcore “America Sucks” opinions, but this is just pretty much completely confirms it.  Yes, we didn’t abrogate our constitution to give Bush & Torture/Graft Inc. another term.  Yay us.  But that’s  not a reason to hand out the world’s formerly most prestigious award to someone 20 years early.

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I’ll start off by being honest.  I have no idea what the end result of all this will be.  I mean that too.  I really, really don’t.  But there are a few things I do know that a lot of people seem to have missed or to be willfully misinterpreting.

This isn’t a revolution for the West.  This is entirely a domestic event.  The Iranians saw their leadership blatantly steal an election that saw 85% turnout.  The Supreme Leader said it was divinely directed and the people could eat it.  This went over much, much more poorly than anyone expected it to.  In essence, this is a revolution FOR the revolution, not against it.

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This is pretty old, but it’s very cool, and helps explain why the Iranian opposition has been so hard for the regime to stamp out online.

This is probably going to become a recurring topic, like “Friday Music Videos” and “Cool Thing from the Internet” and has largely been inspired by the weekend #CNNfail.

So I just finished reading this piece in Slate by Christopher Beam about President Obama’s political strategies.  In it, the author points out that Obama often illustrates his points by saying that fixing this one problem X will help solve other problems A, B, and C.  This is all true and accurate.  The Media Fail bit comes in when the author then goes on to spend the entire rest of the article talking political baseball and the relative merits and demerits of this as a strategy to get bills passed.

The correct response of course, would be to simply acknowledge that what Obama’s saying is A) incredibly true, and B) has been largely ignored by the Washington establishment since the advent of the “win the news cycle” campaign.  So instead of getting a substantive piece about how this new/retro strategy of admitting things are interconnected will likely yield significant gains to policy devising, and how it marks a welcome change that should hopefully reduce some of the “law of unintended consequences” blowback we’ve been getting from so many government policies recently.

Fortunately Mr. Beam decided to spare his readers that kind of analysis in favor of some boilerplate false equivalency (Bush had a narrative!  Obama has a plan!  They’re the same!) and some breathless “who’ll win the legislative battle?” lines.  Thanks dude.  For srsly.