Category: Politics

And there you have it. As per my speculation yesterday, Zapatero’s threat to pull out his troops has Bush leaning back towards a UN resolution. Nicely done on Zapatero’s part.

Now I’m going to go be sick s’more. Blah. You can tell I’m not well because I’m loopy enough to bitch about being not well here.

The popular right-wing talking point of the moment: "Spain did what Al Qaeda wanted." This is all very well and good, except that Spain is not pulling out of Afghanistan and that Spain is willing to stay in Iraq under certain conditions — mainly a Security Council mandate.

This actually looks like pretty smart diplomacy to me. To the degree that Bush needs Spain to stay in the coalition, he needs to bend to their demands. This would mean giving more say to the UN than he’d like, but those are the breaks of the game, right?

Indeed, one might claim that if Bush fails to make these accomodations, he’s doing Osama’s bidding. One would be a wingnut, mind you — because it’s pretty insane to claim that a world leader is dancing on Al Qaeda’s strings simply because his sense of the right thing to do happens to be something Al Qaeda wants done. You’ve got to consider the entire picture.

Further reading: kos on the US pullout from Saudi Arabia and Josh Marshall on the whole situation.

There appears to be a small uprising in Northern Iran. A little more information can be found here. The first link is to a site on the right side of the ideological spectrum, by the by, so you have to discount the people who are under the impression that this will immediately turn into a vast popular uprising supported by US troops.

(Via Tacitus, whose commenters suffer in part from the same optimism. Ah well.)

Mark Schmitt makes an excellent catch over at The Decembrist. Bush is using photos from the FY 2005 Federal Budget in his campaign material.

This may or may not be illegal; it seems to me like it might be, but Schmitt knows better than I and he doesn’t think it is. Actually, come to think of it, I don’t think government documents are protected under copyright, so Bush has the right to remix those photos however he likes. Kinda shady of him to get the government to pay for the photos if he intended to use them later, though. And if he had his own private photographer pay for them and give them to the government, well, why is the government publishing campaign photos? No matter what happened, though, it’s definitely a slight erosion of the barriers between the campaign and the government. Not a scandal, but definitely an indication of character.

President Roh of Korea was just impeached. He’d been tagged "the world’s first Internet president", mostly because his victory was driven by Internet activism.

Don Park has another take on the impeachment. He’s a smart guy and I trust his insights on the situation. KoreaTimes talks about what happens next.

Aside from the obvious “old school tears down the Internet generation” angle, I’m a bit concerned about the “tumult right next to North Korea” angle. Dunno how worried I should be, though. It’s not as if the opposition politicians hadn’t managed to handle the North Korean situation for quite some time before Roh came along. It’s mostly the uncertainty of not knowing who runs the country right now that bugs me.

There’s also something to be said about media coverage of South Korea versus media coverage of Spain, but I don’t know how to say it without sounding heartless. I think both the Madrid bombing and the impeachment are exceedingly important, and it bothers me that the Madrid bombing is front page news while the impeachment drifts to one side.

(How original! I’ve just discovered that media is tragedy-driven!)

All the hip liberals are dogpiling on libertarianism this month, and skillfully missing the point. Apparently the lure of libertarians potentially voting Democrat in the face of Bush’s overspending is too much for some.

The question is not “would it be OK to let everyone in the world own nukes right now?” That’s a very easy one. “No, it would be pretty much completely not be a good idea.” The question is “Would this be a better world, and if so, what do we need to do to get there?”

In the debate which is the primary target of mockery, Richard Epstein is taking precisely that approach. Randy Barnett and David Friedman are not, mind you, which goes a long way towards explaining why I don’t self-identify as a libertarian.

But it is important to remember that a hundred years ago, concepts such as welfare seemed hopelessly utopian. Things change.

Bob Barr is fairly peeved at the Transportation Security Administration for their new list of fines. $1,500 for “non-physical interference with screening” does seem a little high, particularly since attitude is one of the aggravating factors.

The new TSA guidelines are available as a Word document. I’ve also stuck the ones relevant to travellers in the continuation of this post. I can’t get that miffed about high fines for people bringing hand grenades on flights, mind you, but I do keep coming back to $1,500 for non-physical interference. Would that be filing charges?

Now Oregon’s getting into the act.

This article on Kerry’s defense votes is just something I want to have handy for later.

This shouldn’t come as any big surprise, but the world’s largest anthropological society says that civilization does not in fact depend on limiting marriage to one man and one woman.

The results of more than a century of anthropological research on households, kinship relationships, and families, across cultures and through time, provide no support whatsoever for the view that either civilization or viable social orders depend upon marriage as an exclusively heterosexual institution. Rather, anthropological research supports the conclusion that a vast array of family types, including families built upon same-sex partnerships, can contribute to stable and humane societies.

The Executive Board of the American Anthropological Association strongly opposes a constitutional amendment limiting marriage to heterosexual couples.

So maybe we can drop that line of attack on gay marriage? Nah, didn’t think so.