Chris Matthews is SORRY

You've seen by now. But in any case, we have a problem. The old dog of the new network feels as though he's been tarnished. Going forward, we expect more tacit apologies in the form of sudden pronouncements. Bottom line: His cred has been questioned and in his attempts at redressing it, his cred is in question.

Bill Clinton Is PISSED

He's smart, right? So lashing out at the press in a calculated way (5 times the vote anyone?) is obviously calculated. This means (1) there is some daylight for camp HRC to muddy the waters and pit union v union (don't know enough about that to say whether it's wise or not), or; (2) they want to call the viability of the process into question before the results are in, meaning that the old CW (conventional wisdom) is true and the CW (Culinary Workers) endorsement is as dispositive as they had said.

Our bet is with the latter, after all, it wasn't but 5 days ago that we were warned that CW leadership was openly split as to Obama/Clinton. After all of this, are they still? Did Bill Clinton think they would be, and if not, why go after them?

Things we've been meaning to say

To start, the Democratic debates, Nevada that is. When asked what your greatest weakness is, you should always make sure to have a ready answer in mind. Here's what won't do: "I care sooo hard that sometimes people and their feelings get in the way and that causes problems"; "Having been born of mill villages, it's hard for me to find my way in your modern society". Sloppiness, of course, is always welcome. This is dated. We know.

We Are Back

Sorry fan, we know it's been some time, but our heads and hearts are in order. Consider this a warning shot.

By Josh on John's account (under duress)

Cheney as President

Well, apparently the Vice President has assumed Presidential powers for the next few hours while Bush undergoes surgery. Under Section 3 of the 25th Amendment to the U.S. Constitution:

"Whenever the President transmits to the President pro tempore of the Senate and the Speaker of the House of Representatives his written declaration that he is unable to discharge the powers and duties of his office, and until he transmits to them a written declaration to the contrary, such powers and duties shall be discharged by the Vice President as Acting President."

What surprises me somewhat, is that since the 25th Amendment was ratified in 1967 it has been invoked only two other times. Bush himself has used it once before, and Regan used it once. I find it somewhat startling that no one else has surrendered their Presidential powers temporarily. In the last six years, I personally can think of three or four medical emergencies that would have rendered me at least temporarily unfit to act as President. No one has has a root canal as President?

Personally, I probably am not fit to act as the President on any given Tuesday or Thursday night after a couple Miller Lites (which is of course when most of my policy ideas come out). Maybe this leader of the free world gig would be less exhausting if the President could take some time off and temporarily surrender his powers.

Why oh Why....

via Reuters:

Sen. Joseph Lieberman of Connecticut, a former Democrat who turned independent because of his staunch backing for the war, ripped into lawmakers pushing to bring combat troops home before their mission is completed.

Funny, I thought he became an independent for another reason.

The Work Week

via Joanna

Another strange proxy for me is the traditional work week. In more industrial times, with a less diverse market and more standardizing forces like unions and labor laws, establishing a workweek was useful. Now it’s not. Forty hours of factory work is forty hours of factory work. Forty hours of office work can easily be 10 hours of productive, revenue-producing time padded with 30 hours of nonproductive busywork, goofing off with coworkers, and YouTube watching. Take a look at government agencies (or just hit yourself in the head with a hammer) and you get zero revenue-producing time because there are no revenue incentives and you’ve got maybe 10 hours of increasing the size and scope of government and 30 hours of the same things as cubicle farms. Or if you’re an ambitious bureaucrat you’re entrenching The State for closer to the full 40 hours (shudder).

referral traffic

How much do you suppose the front page of the Disney website generates from people clicking the "no thanks" button on porn sites?

I remember this sort of stuff from college

One of the things that I remember liking least about college was that you were often encouraged to take any set of facts and give them a unique analysis. Since that time, I have pretty much accepted the fact that maybe such reliance on my own interpretation makes for some bad theories. I 'm not that smart, and certainly not that knowledgeable about most areas of public policy that I can synthesize my my own ideas from scratch.

Over the last couple of years I have largely avoided many of the more progressive news sources I used to rely on heavily when I was more... progressive.

This article irked me more than probably anything I have read today. Here Mr. Rainmondo alleges that:

Thirty years ago, Hitchens was hailing the secular socialist Saddam as the greatest Arab ”visionary” of his time: today, he hails Saddam’s overthrow by the US as an act of “liberation,” and this even as the horrifically bloody aftermath continues to inflict terror on the prostrate peoples of Iraq. What changed?

Nothing, really: it’s just that, back in 1976, it looked like the Third World tyrants, “secular socialists” like Saddam, were winning. Today, it looks like the US is winning. As Orwell noted in his “Second Thoughts on James Burnham,” a certain kind of intellectual worships power, and will ally himself with the strongest brute out of “idealistic” idolatry, and a sense of invincible power.

How does one argue against this? Can I prove that Hitchens is interested more than just personal enrichment? Is Rainmondo's assertion valuable just because he asserts it (presenting no evidence)?

Great Blog

Everyone should check out The American Scene blog. They have some excellent writers over there. I highly recommend it.

Sabato's "new ideas"

It is interesting that with Bryan Caplan's book setting the poli sci/econ world on fire recently we can have a look at what the other side is up to. Larry Sabato in an upcoming book makes various suggestions which I assume are designed to increase the public's role in civil society further.

One proposal that comes up periodically is that of mandatory public service for young people. This idea I have always found akin to consciption. Why is not going to college and/or contributing to the economy enough for young adults to do?

Something Weird

I was just looking through the logs and I realized that this blog had run for exactly 100 posts.

Well here is the 101st.

Sunday Morning

There are dark mornings to be had in life. At times you wake up with a sense of bereftness that you can't quite explain. Why is it that one night you can go to sleep feeling pretty good and the next day wake up with a weight on your mind or a sense of lack or just a feeling of meaninglessness? Can it be as simple as a change in the weather? Or is it something more, like a subconcious realization achieved during sleep that is still wending its way to the surface? Does a change need to be made? If so, do you even have any idea what it may be?

This is one of those mornings in my life that so often used to come accompanied by rain on a Sunday morning in my childhood, when I would wake up in the home of a friend or cousin with whom I'd stayed the night and look out the window to see the gray skies and damp grass blown by a breeze that carried a sense of the depths of the forests that have been forsaken in modern times. On mornings like this there is a need for something unidentifiable, which leaves you searching in vain for answers, without even knowing if there are really questions or if the whole thing is just a temporary imbalance related to a lack of sleep or a bag of salt and vinegar potato chips way too late at night.

How much of a role does the physical play in moods and emotions? Clearly, quite a bit, but can this begin to compete with the power of the mind's unfulfilled desires and memories of better things that have long since passed? What does the human brain crave, or at least, what is being sought by that unique part of my own brain that is different from those of the rest of humanity, the part of the brain made of my own experiences and learning, the part that knows what is best for it but can't seem to communicate this information to the mind at large?

Perhaps as the day passes some piece of hidden knowledge will come to me and make more sense of the whole thing. More likely, I will go out and find some activity and the thought will slowly fade away as it is overtaken by the mental processes required for moving from point A to point B. Undoubtedly, when I go to sleep again tonight, it will be with a much more serene, postive and hopeful state of mind than that with which I awoke but...the questions will still be there, hunkered down, waiting for the low tide of Sunday morning to arrive so that they can once again swim to the surface and cast shadows of doubt upon the still waters of wakening thought.

Thanksgiving

Thanksgiving is one of the best holidays of the year because during thanksgiving the only real responsibilities you have are to eat and drink as much food as humanly possible. After that you watch some football and then you eat a snack and just hang out. It is somewhat ironic that, on a day that was allegedly first celebrated by the Puritans, gorging and extended periods of sloth are the order of the day.

I used to have Thanksgiving with my family. It was a traditional extended family dinner not unlike the Norman Rockwell painting but in recent years my dinners have taken some serious downswings from time to time. The all time low that I can recall was spending the holiday alone in my hell-hole of an apartment in Brooklyn. The room itself was enough to bum anyone out. Picture a single exposed lightbulb, prison style, ugly brown painted wood floors and the usual metal cabinets that won't really close right. Anyway, I cooked an entire thanksgiving meal by myself and for myself, which consisted of the usual things but all cooked in the most appalling poverty method. I put so much effort into cooking my food that when I saw how it turned out I was kind of stunned. I bought some turkey breasts and cooked them in a toaster oven, which made them so unappealing that I couldn't really finish. The rest of the food was more or less the same. The meal was truly a mockery of what the feast was supposed to be. I ate the meal sitting on the corner of my bed watching TV. I felt heartsick and a little sick to my stomach.

In later years, I had a little better luck, though the theme of eating alone was a recurring one. Perhaps the best of these solitary thanksgivings was the one in which I decided to go out of the house to hunt down a good Thanksgiving meal. Finding little, I finally saw a poster in the window of a Thai restaurant for a Thai style thanksgiving dinner. Unfortunately, my only company was the guy at the next table, who spent the whole meal talking loudly into his cell phone, but on the positive side the meal cemented a long lasting love of Thai food, which has now become my favorite. So, I guess the key is that regardless of how fucked up your holidays are, you have to try to make something out of them and hope you get lucky.

Dominican Girl

Black wisps and tendrils
glisten with light summer sweat (sudor),
accenting the tight brown skin of her stomach
just above the low rise of denim.

The Free Market!

Watched the Republican Debate this evening. We were gonna try to write something clever about Republicans and their bankrupt ideology but couldn't come up with a better way to put the following on the internets: They don't know what the fuck a free market is - or if they do, they refuse to acknowledge the aspect of choice. Obviously, this Republican party (including Ron Paul) refuses to accept the idea that PEOPLE should be allowed to make their own decisions. Sexual orientation isn't an attitude and the length of a fence isn't a manifestation of a market decision. They refuse to lead. Will someone else?

The View From Your Law Firm: Quarantine Friday

(Left: The Ghost of Richard Nixon taunts the guys at Speaker Law, LLP)

John's Commitment to Posting

UPDATE: One week ago, in this space, fellow blogger John vowed to review the first sixty blog posts sent to him. And where are we a week on? Up to our eyeballs is where! We've been sorting through stacks and stacks of electronic bundles - all pining to be in the first sixty - like kids lined up outside Wal Mart for PS3s before Christmas. Actually, that's not at all true. No one has requested his kind offer of service. Not a one.

But not to worry, we here at Iron Triangle Daily are not without pride or creativity. John, I hereby request that you review your own post on your commitment to review posts. How was the writing? The conceit? Do you have a favorable opinion of the author having read his post? As far as I can see, this request meets the substantive requirements laid out...and provides you with a way out.

A Cartoon Ethnography

Ever wonder what a Looney Tune is? How about a Merry Melodie? They all have their roots in the early days of animation when cartoon production would begin with the soundtrack and only later, the animation (allegedly because animating a piece of music made it easier to devise plot elements and characters).

First out of the box with this concept was Disney with their Silly Symphonies series (1929-1939). Knowing a good idea when they saw it, Warner Brothers followed suit a year later with Looney Tunes (1930-1969). And here's where it gets interesting. Warner figured they would extend the concept of a musical short to live action - essentially a pre-curser to today's (or yesterday's) music video. The result was Spooney Melodies (1930-1931). However, the idea didn't take and was subsequently converted to another animated musical shorts program, Merry Melodies (1931-1969). MGM was substantially late to the party with their also-ran series, Happy Harmonies (1934-1938). Further muddling matters, Warner opted to reissue some of their older Merry Melodies in the 1940's under the name 'Merry Melodies, Blue Ribbon Classics' (in case you ever wondered what the blue ribbon in the title sequence was all about). Perhaps Warner Director Fritz Freleng said it best: "I never knew if a film I was making would be a Looney Tunes or a Merrie Melodie, and what the hell difference would it make, anyway?"

I Demand A D.C. Bottle Deposit

Washington, D.C. has no bottle deposit program. As far as I can find, there hasn't been any movement to create such a program since a proposed D.C. Deposit Law went down in defeat nearly 20 years ago. And since New York State enacted similar legislation in 1982, no other state or major municipality has imposed such a law. But there's new movement in this field. Consider Oregon's recently introduced legislation to include plastic water bottles in its state-wide deposit program, which are currently excluded in every deposit program in the country. In any new deposit program, including plastic water bottles is a must. As the New York Times noted over the weekend, "[w]ater, together with other nonfizzy drinks, accounted for 90 percent of the growth of the entire beverage industry between 2002 and 2005. By the end of the decade, they are expected to outsell soda."

Washington D.C., unlike any place else in the country, is in the position to prove the concept of a reconceived and modernized deposit program solely within the confines of a major urban area without ever having to address the urban/suburban compromises that bedevil any attempts at state-wide legislation (curbside pickup v deposit centers etc.) Call it my moonshot, but I think there is major promise for the District here.

Music Friday II

Music Friday: Music and Your Friends

Every once and a while I hear a song and am certain that it will be a favorite of someone I know - even though they haven't heard it yet. John had this experience with 'Hey Ya!' and our friend Luke - it just seemed a natural fit and sure enough, it was. In that spirit, I submit to you songs/artists and people who I think would like them:

Artist: Plan B
Person I know Who Will Like Him But Doesn't Know It Yet: my younger brother
Reason: This review pretty well sums it up: "Much of the CD is pretty unpleasant, with bleak music that sounds less than innovative and a load of self-important shock rhymes that try too damn hard, as on the murder ballad "Sick 2 Def," which rhymes "cum in a biscuit" with "sadistic". Bear in mind, this kid was also a huge Limp Bizkit fan.

Artist: Amy Winhouse
Person I know Who Will Like Her But Doesn't Know It Yet*: high school friend Stacy
Reason: The drunken, trainwreck persona, the song about the glories of refusing rehab etc. This one just fits - while Stacy doesn't, to my knowledge, hang out with Amy Winehouse, she's made a life-long habit of hanging out with people who aspire to be like her. (*In fairness, it's likely Stacy has already heard of, and fallen in love with Amy Winehouse)

Artist: KT Tunstall
Person I know (of) Who Will Like Her But Doesn't Know It Yet: Hillary Clinton
Reason: Her song 'Suddenly I See' is already making a play at becoming her campaign's theme song via an online 'you pick it' contest at Clinton's website. While I'm sure Clinton has yet to fully familiarize herself with it, this ode to chick-power is sufficiently not-related-enough to the point at hand to become a stone-cold campaign trail classic ('Beautiful Day' anyone?)

The View From Your Law Firm

"It's just 'Cirroc', your Honor.. and, yes, I'm ready. Ladies and gentlemen of the jury, I'm just a caveman. I fell on some ice and later got thawed out by some of your scientists. Your world frightens and confuses me! Sometimes the honking horns of your traffic make me want to get out of my BMW.. and run off into the hills, or wherever.. Sometimes when I get a message on my fax machine, I wonder: "Did little demons get inside and type it?" I don't know! My primitive mind can't grasp these concepts. But there is one thing I do know - when a man like my client slips and falls on a sidewalk in front of a public library, then he is entitled to no less than two million in compensatory damages, and two million in punitive damages. Thank you."

(Above: Cirroc [ki:'rok])

Commitment to Posting

Since Josh has been haranguing me all day to post more than I have been, I have decided that I will commit to reviewing blog posts of the first sixty posters that request it. This is sort of done in the spirit of Tyler Cowen's fifty questions that he answered. Unfortunately, I can't take my intellectual toolbox to fifty questions, so you will have to settle for a review of your blog post.

In my review I promise to link to your blog. You are not required to reciprocate.

I will review anything, however, if your blog is NSFW let me know so I can look at it while I am not at work. I promise to review these posts two a day until they are finished. If I get no requests starting tomorrow I'm not sure what I will do.

Disaster Merchandise

Wal-Mart seriously has its shit together: "Data from past storms instruct supply-chain staff to pre-position caches of "what we call 'disaster merchandise,' like blankets, ready-to-eat foods, 5-gallon gas cans, and generators," said Kenneth Senser, a former CIA spy catcher who is now Wal-Mart's vice president for global security. Strawberry Pop-Tarts are a particular favorite." And if the power goes, they can provide a good source of light and heat as well.