alternative hippopotamus

5 mp3's that will rock your birkenstocks.

Guaranteed.

• President at the Penalty Kick (artist: Crix Crax Crux)
• Radio (artist: Hello Tokyo)
• Haven't Got the Time (artist: (the sounds of)kaleidoscope)
• High School Kids (artist: One Third Dork)
• Another Irish Drinking Song (artist: Da Vince's Notebook)

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He was doing so well. The Bull Moose that is. I don't think any of us had the illusion that he was going to start posting on Daily Kos, but still, we sensed potential.

It appears old habits are hard to break. From today's Moosecast:

The order issue is not merely addressing crime - it is far broader. It also includes the maintenance of civil order through social and racial justice. It involves the efficient delivery of government services. It requires stemming fiscal incontinence and restoring stable gas prices. And at the moment, America is lacking a "daddy party" to maintain order. John Dickerson writes in an important piece in Slate,

"Democrats don't need to rile up their base any more. They need suburban voters, and for suburban voters, Katrina isn't so much about race, it's about homeland security-about what would happen if someone bombs their mall. Some Democrats understand this already. Senate Minority Leader Harry Reid and Sen. Clinton have both tried to pitch sensible reconstruction plans for the Gulf while also talking about the glaring problems exposed in the country's homeland security.

"If Democrats are going to seize their moment, though, they are going to have to settle the debate between those palsied by their hatred of Bush and the swing-vote-seeking centrists. The Clinton and Reid arguments have to silence or at least moderate the Dean ones. They have to show, as one Democratic strategist put it, "that we can be the daddy party."

The Moose asks the donkey - "Who's your daddy?"

Who's my daddy, indeed. For anyone who's curious, yes, the definition of "important piece" is one that says the same thing as the author.

Since this speaks to the material in Don't Think of an Elephant directly, let's take a look at this from Lakoff's viewpoint. Lakoff distinguishes right-wing and progressives based on family as a metaphor. Well, it's more than metaphor, but that's not important right now. He uses the notion of a family with a dominant father figure to explain right-wing ideology, a more nurturing, communal family to explain the left.

The result of this is that the right tend to favor policies that favor the individual, or at least the individuals with means, while the left favors policies that benefit society as a whole.

We owe the framing of Republicans as the "daddy" party, Democrats as the "mommy" party to David Brooks. Why does the Bull Moose use the framing of a conservative pundit? Because a.) it serves to make his point, and b.) Mr. Wittman isn't exactly a liberal. From what I've seen, Mr. Wittman is repulsed by the corruption, ineptness, and power-drunkenness of the Bushies, yet can't really embrace the notion of common good that sets the left apart from the right. He's a conservative, one that seeks to remake the Democratic Party as a conservative institution.

In the Salon piece Dickerson argues that the Deans of the world need to shut up, and let the hawks take charge. And why? Because Joe and Jill Q Sixpack believe the hawks will protect them. As if the pro-war senators could heal the neglected infrastructure of cities like New Orleans by dropping bombs on them. Don't you know the only problem with the levees was lack of self-discipline?

Both Mr. Wittman and Mr. Dickerson ignore the incrasingly popular revolt against the war in Iraq. If they acknowledge it at all, it's as a good war badly run. In doing so they miss a valuable lesson: Society abhors the notion that their leaders would deceive them. And we're catching on that's just what happened in the build-up to Iraq.

What we got here folks, is a betrayal of trust.
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The time has come. If you don't ask the right question to trip up Judge Roberts, he will certainly be confirmed. Here's my contribution:

Do you believe Joe vs. the Volcano was correctly decided?

Just let him puzzle over that.
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We learn that the aptly named Waco has banned parking on streets near where Cindy Sheehan was camped out. Thing is, County Commisioner Baldrick, she done left town. She wasn't in Texas to protest Texas, the idea was to protest actions and policies of the Bush administration. This getting through? See, the idea is make Bush look even more ridiculous than he does already. So, if she went back to Texas, that would just be... Oh, never mind.
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Like most people, I read the Bush administration's performance in the Katrina disaster as an indictment of his leadership style, or lack thereof. As Dan Froomkin puts it today in White House Briefing:

President Bush was famously on vacation when the disaster hit. He and his hurriedly reconstituted staff of political operatives floundered for a while, reflexively pursuing the time-honored White House strategy of admitting no mistakes -- and sticking to it, even after it was clear that the nation had seen those mistakes with its own eyes.

A key issue was the appointment and eventual elevation of the happless Mike Brown, depicted above, a textbook example of cronyism run amok.

Or maybe not. According to Knight-Ridder, responding to Katrina was actually the responsibility of Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff.

So, to the current charges of ineptness, cronyism, and apathy, we can add passing the buck.

Yet, for reasons I can't fathom, Washington Post columnist Ann Applebaum sees big government as the problem:

But those percentages [ed: referring to Americans who have donated to relief charites] also mean that it is important not to draw hasty conclusions about the ultimate political impact of this tragedy. More specifically, it's important to ignore the hasty conclusions that have already been drawn, both here and abroad, about the victory of "big government" and the death of a certain kind of American individualism. The German chancellor -- once again using American politics in his election campaign -- has already called the disaster an argument for "strong government." Polly Toynbee, a columnist for Britain's Guardian, declared that Katrina revealed "a hollowed superpower . . . a country that is not a country at all, but atomised, segmented individuals living parallel lives as far apart as possible." A Los Angeles Times article, headlined "A Comeback for Big Government," more objectively quoted lots of experts agreeing that in the wake of the hurricane, the administration will "put aside its interest in small government."

I'm guessing Ms. Applebaum uses "small government" as a fix the same way that Bush uses personal accounts and tax cuts. And I don't mean to put her down- I hear she wrote a really good book about the Gulags, and that's great and all that- but why is she writing about the distruction of New Orleans- a disaster in planning, commitment, responsibility and execution- using empty Libertarian catch phrases about small government? Much less in the Washington Post?

More to the point, why can't she see that the failures in the Katrina disaster were not about the size of government, it was about the competency of its leaders.
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One Down, One to Go. The Moose pleads with the President to declare, "Rummy you are doing a heckuva job."

- from Bull Moose
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For a while now I've been wondering if the more shrill of the right-wing pundits continue to have any relevance. At the moment they don't seem to be serving any useful purpose. They don't seem to represent the rank and file conservative. There is no common issue that they're fighting for. You could certainly argue that they were united behind the common goal of defeating Kerry in 2004, but what now?

To be clear I'm not talking about the Grover Norquists or Frank Luntzes of the world; they have a clear role in returning America to the dark ages. No, I'm talking about the Ann Coulters, Instapundits, Malkins etc. Have they become irrelevant? Let's take a closer look:

• Michelle Malkin continues to pursue the hypothesis that a proposed Flight 93 memorial may contain a veiled reference to Islam. One thing that makes her suspicious: Teresa Heinz-Kerry is one of the private funders.
• Instapundit: "Bush is, in my estimation, adequate as President, but not much more."
• NRO, backing the Bush administration to the hilt: "Unlike most conservatives, I think the Census Bureau does a pretty good job, considering."
• Powerline, on Brownie's resignation: "I think Brown's padding of his resume constitutes sufficient reason for him to resign or to be removed." [ed: In the final analysis it's the resume padding that bothers these guys?]

This is anecdotal of course, but these excerpts paint a picture for me of bloggers who are just bored with themselves. Dimly aware that they have nothing to say, they offer half-baked pronouncements, and grumble aloud. Running the gammut of perspectives between the trivial and the trite. Or is it that when there's no unifying aim it becomes clear that there is no there, there?
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It's often tempting to blog about what's hot. If you will, there's a tendency to answer, or at least speculate on the Question of the Day. There's nothing new about this, of course. I'm sure this has been going on since Day 1 (or according to some, Day 7).

The problem with this is that news becomes inseparable from gossip. And while there may be some value in knowing all the latest gossip (I'm not sure there is, but it's at least hypothetically possible) it's not that interesting to me.

So here's my question (both to you and to me): What are the two or three most important stories of today? I mean right now. To me most important would mean having the greatest impact on the US as a society, but that's just me. Fill in the blanks as you will.
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I've decided to look at the world from the point of view of Jerry Falwell, Pat Robertson, and thier ilk. It's really not that hard to do, and the conclusion is clear to me: Hurricane Katrina was God's punishment of Louisiana, Mississippi, and Alabama because of their legacy of lynching, obstructing voter rights, forcing black students to attend terrible schools, denying multiple civil rights to gay citizens, and promoting sexism via the Southern Baptist Convention.

- from DED Space
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We've been following the "Freedom Walk", the "Truth Tour", and other movements of pro-war propaganda over at dcdl. Ordinarily, I'd blog this there as well, but I don't have my login info with me.

At any rate, I wanted to make a few quick notes about what I saw of the Clint Black portion of today's "September 11 Show":

• Security was indeed tight. The entire area between the Lincoln memorial and the edge of the reflecting pool was fenced off. Guards were at every point of entry, some with high-power rifles. Since I hadn't registered, there was just one point of entry by which I could see the Show. Remember that all the logistics, like how the public could get in, went unpublished, since the Pentagon had wanted to keep the parade route a secret.
• Juding by those who registered (they had wrist bands and "Freedom Walk" t-shirts, so you could tell) there must have been something on the form about being Caucasian, preferrably of the lilly white variety.
• By contrast, the other half of the Mall hosted Black Family Reunion Day. This was not intended to be September 11 related, per se, but from what I gathered, this has been an annual event for about 20 years. This was relatively unguarded (there was one police car by the American History Museum), and no registration was required.
• Clint Black has a very pleasant voice, and his version of Eric Idle's "The Meaning of Life" would have made the author proud. That said, the choice of Mr. Black by the Pentagon's Office of Media Outrage, I mean Outreach, seemed to reflect Bush's base more than the musical taste's of the military, much less the citizens of the District, or most importantly, me.

I went into this event with the impression that the Pentagon was once again trying to associate the Iraq War with September 11. I have a different impression now. The purpose was more to get people to feel good about the Iraq War. Or, to put it in the perspective of a George Lakoff, it's about family. The kind of family where a man is in charge. And that man is George Bush, War President.

It's not clear who decided to fence off the very section of the Mall where Martin Luther King spoke to the March on Washington. The effect was to give one of the most sacred public grounds the feel of a military base. If that's what "everything changed after September 11" means, I say we change it right back.
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