Moving Time.

Regular readers of this site (hello!) might have noticed that there haven’t been many posts over the last couple days.  The reason for that is not only because I have (finally) rejoined the ranks of the gainfully-employed, but also because I’ve been working to get a newer, better, prettier version of this blog up and running.  And now I’m happy to announce that it is!  And you can find it at simply www.fitfulmurmurs.com.  (Update your RSS feeds accordingly.)

Thanks for visiting this site so much over the last month or so – it’s you guys that have compelled me to make the blog as good as possible, and I thank you for it.  On that note, I’m going to pretty much close down this blog now.  There won’t be any new posts over here, and in a couple weeks I’ll probably go ahead and remove it.  So head on over to the new site, instead!

Suggested Reading.

This profile of David Plouffe by Esquire writer Lisa Taddeo is both a detailed portrait of the genius largely responsible for Obama’s victory and a stunning example of how good long-form magazine writing has the capacity to be.  My favorite paragraph:

Obama trusted Plouffe and Plouffe trusted himself, and Plouffe’s instinct was to look serene on the outside, while shrewdly gaming for angles within. Yes, David Plouffe is a numbers genius and his round, blinking eyes dissected a country into a few rounds of Battleship, but he is more, even, than the man Obama calls his “most valuable player.” He is Roger Clemens in the rain, down by two in the bottom half, stripping the ball hard and sure and a little to the left, knowing that even if this batter hits a homer, he will regroup and strike out the next twenty.

Umm…

I’ve been using toilets for quite awhile now, but this Japanese potty-training video still raises more questions than it answers.

Man Robs 7/11 with a Bat’Leth.

In what has got to be the most incredible news story of the year so far, a man has robbed two Colorado Springs 7/11s with what reports indicate was a bat’leth.  For those of you who didn’t spend your childhoods watching The Next Generation, a bat’leth is a long, curving Klingon sword, originally forged by the legendary Kahless.  The bat’leth is mostly a ceremonial weapon, but it was apparently enough to intimidate the clerks into giving up their cash registers.

Here’s a photo taken from the store’s surveillance camera:

The Ruinous Effects of the Proposition System.

A few weeks ago, a commenter on this very blog (okay, it was my mom) wrote this:

The initiative process in California is completely out of control and inherently un-constitutional. Our Founders proposed a representative democracy in order to avoid what Thomas Paine described as “the tyranny of the majority.” 50.00002% of the population is not supposed to be able to dictate the laws of any part of this nation to the detriment of the other 49.99998%.

And then today, Ezra Klein responded to this question from a reader: “Why aren’t the people of California holding their state elected officials responsible for financial mismanagement?”  Klein wrote:

California effectively has four branches of government: The governor, the legislature, the courts, and the ballot initiatives. And these last have ripped through our finances. The firms that build ballot initiatives aren’t stupid: People like what they don’t think they’re paying for…

Then, of course, is the second problem: The legislature effectively can’t raise revenues. Taxes require a 2/3rds majority and California’s Republicans are mono-maniacally anti-tax. It is, after all, the only thing they can control. So essentially, California operates with a government that can’t control either spending or revenues. It’s not a good situation.

I would like to wholeheartedly agree with both statements.  California’s proposition system has led to disastrous social and fiscal policy.  Because it only requires a simple majority to pass a proposition, it is vastly easier to pass legislation by those means than it is to actually get something through the California Legislature.  But the people who draft proposition legislation aren’t accountable to anyone.  They write the initiatives and gather signatures through shady means, and then once it’s on the ballot, they lie to people about what the initiative will actually do.  There is a reason that we elect people to make laws for us, and that reason for that is that the public has neither the time nor the capacity to know what actually is good policy, and what just sounds like a good idea.  And so now California’s Constitution is shamefully discriminatory and the state is on the verge of financial meltdown.

Yellow Journalism.

The New York Post is a terrible paper.  It is so bad that I won’t even take the free copies of it that people try to give me on the street.  Even I was shocked, though, that they ran this recent column by Ralph Peters in which he puts forth the idea that lasting peace in Afghanistan is impossible because Afghans are inhuman.  No, seriously:

Regarding Planet Afghanistan, we still hear the deadly cliché that “all human beings want the same basic things, such as better lives and greater opportunities for their children.” How does that apply to Afghan aliens who prefer their crude way of life and its merciless cults?

These alien tribes seek to destroy physical objects and systems valued on Planet America. They perceive time differently. They treat other life forms more harshly than we do. Their own lives are shorter, with different arcs. They quite like our weapons, though . . .

The point isn’t to argue that Afghans are inferior beings. It’s just that they’re irreconcilably different beings – more divergent from our behavioral norms than the weirdest crew member of the starship Enterprise.

Even for the post, something this blatantly racist is unusual.  About halfway through the article Peters claims to have been “an effective intelligence officer”, but I can’t see how this can possibly be true, considering that he a) now works for the Post and b) is fond of using Star Trek as a rationale for his foreign policy opinions.  (Incidentally, the piece shows as much ignorance about Star Trek as it does about the Afghan people.)

This is one of those things…

… that’s a terrific advancement for medical science, but just makes the rest of us feel a little grossed-out.

Good news: You can now get a kidney from a vagina.

The kidney doesn’t start in the vagina, of course. That’s just where it comes out. For several years, doctors have been learning how to do this. It’s called “transvaginal nephrectomy” or, more broadly, “natural orifice” surgery. They cut the kidney loose and pull it through an incision in the vaginal wall and out the other end.

Eventually, Dr. Bessler said, he expects to use the natural-opening technique on men as well as women, with instruments passed down the throat or into the rectum to cut through the wall of the stomach or intestine to reach the gallbladder or other organs.

That’s right, folks: in just a few short years, we may be able to poop out whole kidneys, then transplant them to other people.  Science!

Why I’m Glad To Be A Democrat.

The short answer is: Because nobody in my party takes economic advice from Joe the Plumber.

When GOP congressional aides gather Tuesday morning for a meeting of the Conservative Working Group, Samuel Joseph Wurzelbacher – more commonly known as Joe the Plumber — will be their featured guest.

Wurzelbacher, who became a household name during the presidential election, will be focusing his talk on the proposed stimulus package. He’s apparently not a fan of the economic rescue package, according to members of the group.

If nothing else, GOP aides are using the appearance to get staffers to attend the 9 a.m meeting.

I have, and will continue to have, my problems with the Democratic Party; in fact, that I approve of their conduct recently is a little weird.  Since I’ve only been blogging for the past month or so, it would be easy to come away with the impression that I’m always happy with my party, and that isn’t at all true.  I find the Democratic leadership to be too often spineless, compromising, hypocritical, and more prone to bluster than action.

But at least as a Democrat I know what I’m for.  I look at today’s Republican party and I can’t for the life of me figure out what it stands for.  Is it for small-government conservatism?  (George Bush didn’t seem to get the memo.)  Is it for the working-class?  (Their preferred type of tax cut would suggest otherwise.)  I honestly can’t tell.  From where I stand, they seem to be against the media, gays, atheists, women, minorities, and people who don’t live in America; and for people who can rankle as many of those groups as possible.  Hence Rush Limbaugh and Ann Coulter and Joe the Plumber.

Of course, I know that there are reasonable, smart, committed Republicans out there, too, who have genuinely good ideas and believe in them fiercely.  But if you’re not going to speak up, then you may want to think about switching teams, because right now you’re all being painted with the same brush.  At the very least, you might want to suggest to your peers that they stop treating Joe the Plumber as the world’s foremost expert on everything.

Daschle Withdraws.

I haven’t written about Tom Dachle’s confirmation (or lack thereof, as it happens) simply because I didn’t know enough about the particulars involved.  But based on what I’ve read in the past few days, this just seems like an unfortunate situation for everyone involved.  Daschle was in many ways the perfect person to head Health and Human Services: he had a deep knowledge of healthcare; he had a long history and many connections with Congress; and he was committed to complete reform of the healthcare system.  But he was an idiot, and did not pay taxes that he absolutely knew he should be paying, and so healthcare reform takes a major hit right when it should be trying to gather steam.  For a look at who the Obama team might turn to now, I’d reccomend this post from Ezra Klein.

Obama was hoist by his own petard on this one, and that, I think, is somewhat of a good thing.  Past administrations would absolutely have gotten a nomination like Daschle’s pushed through, and little to no attention would have been paid on the tax issue.  But an effect of campaigning to change Washington is that once you get there, you can’t play by the same old rules.  And so the process of Cabinet appointments just got a whole lot more stringent, and that is no bad thing in my book.

This bit from the NYT article also struck me:

In evening interviews on broadcast and cable television networks, Mr. Obama said he took responsibility for the errors. “And so I’m frustrated with myself, with our team,” he told NBC, “but ultimately my job is to get this thing back on track because what we need to focus on is a deteriorating economy and getting people back to work.”

He added, “I’m here on television saying I screwed up and that’s part of the era of responsibility.”

When was the last time you heard a sitting President actually admit to his mistakes, much less take responsibility for them?

Self-Promotion.

My reviews of Lisa Hannigan’s Sea Sew and the Brighton Port Authority’s I Think We’re Gonna Need A Bigger Boat both went up today.  If you’re going to pick one to read, I’d go with the Hannigan, both because the album really is lovely and because the first paragraph of the BPA review was edited away from the way I wrote it.  (The changes were semantic, rather than substantive, but it still reads wrong to me.)

In other news: this is my hundreth blog post!  I’ve been at this blogging business now for just over a month, and it’s been a blast.  I even think I’ve gotten a little better at it.  But if you think there’s ways I could improve  – if you like certain stories more than others, or if I have habits that bug you – please leave a comment or drop me an email and let me know.  Thanks very much for reading, guys.