I haven’t managed to get anyone mad at me this week, so let me toss some fuel out there and let’s see what burns. I’m following with some interest the FEC “What do we do about the political Internet” set of issues.

So let me ask a dumb-a**s question.

If bloggers (or other website owners) are acting as auxiliaries to campaigns, or are heavily involved in raising significant funds for campaigns, why shouldn’t there be some requirements for disclosure, and why shouldn’t the funds raised fit under the same rules as any other money raised for a campaign?In some ways, this strikes me as a kind of Skype issue; on one hand we have a genuinely interesting technology -in this case mixture of social and technical engineering. It has genuine value, which should be preserved. On the other we have a regulatory arbitrage based on new technology and the simple fact that no one who wrote the old regulations knew enough to map the existing regulations to the technical means to evade them.

I’ll go in the kitchen and look for some matches now…

Franz Liebkind: Not many people know it, but the Fuhrer was a terrific dancer.

Franz Liebkind: Hitler… there was a painter! He could paint an entire apartment in ONE afternoon! TWO coats!

Max Bialystock: That’s exactly why we want to produce this play. To show the world the true Hitler, the Hitler you loved, the Hitler you knew, the Hitler with a song in his heart.

On the front page of the L.A. Times today:

N. Korea, Without the Rancor
– A businessman speaks his mind about the U.S., the ‘nuclear club’ and human rights issues.

Now one thing to note is this:

This North Korean, an affable man in his late 50s who spent much of his career as a diplomat in Europe, has been assigned to help his communist country attract foreign investment. With the U.S. and other countries complaining about North Korea’s nuclear weapons program and its human rights record, it’s a difficult task, he admitted.

So “businessman” might be the wrong word to use? “Government functionary?” “Diplomat?” There’s a kind of complete lack of understanding of how a Stalinist government operates here that’s breathtaking. You know who gets to be diplomats? You know who gets to enter into foreign trade? Hint: they aren’t representatives of the private business sector.

But wait, it gets better!

“There’s never been a positive article about North Korea, not one,” he said. “We’re portrayed as monsters, inhuman, Dracula … with horns on our heads.”

So, in an effort to clear up misunderstandings, he expounded on the North Korean view of the world in an informal conversation that began one night this week over beer as North Korean waitresses sang Celine Dion in the karaoke restaurant, and resumed the next day over coffee.

See Mel Brooks quotes, above.

bq. The North Korean, dressed in a cranberry-colored flannel shirt and corduroy trousers, described himself as a businessman with close ties to the government. He said he did not want to be quoted by name because his perspective was personal, not official. Because North Koreans seldom talk to U.S. media organizations, his comments offered rare insight into the view from the other side of the geopolitical divide.

And if I described myself as the king of the Space Unicorns, would the Times cite me in a headline as “your Majesty?”

You’ve got to read the whole farcical thing…

Over at My DD, Chris Bowers takes on Jeff Jarvis and the rest of the Democrat-bashing liberals -I guess including me.

His basic point? I’ve pointed out, and Marc Cooper has pointed out, and Jeff Jarvis has pointed out, and Norm Geras has pointed out …and pointing this out is the reason we “party traitors” are being criticized by Bowers and Willis.

I want to see a Democratic Party built that can win, and can do so in a way that supports the basic beliefs that I have about how the world should be – free, egalitarian, prosperous. Those are serious ideological and policy issues, and guess what? Most of the country shares those issues with me. That’s why the Party keeps losing.

Listening to whiny bitch Oliver Willis complain because we’re insufficiently loyal doesn’t move me in the lest. Oliver and his ilk need to look in the mirror and realize that it’s them, not Jarvis, Cooper, Geras and me, who are hurting the interests of the less powerful. They’re doing it by building an insular, brittle, and ineffective Democratic Party that looks to keep losing well into the 21st Century.

Chris says:

I am a partisan Democrat, not a partisan ideologue.

What kind of hollow bullshit is that? What is the Democratic Party, if not some ideological core? A jobs programs for polisci majors and direct mail entrepreneurs?

I’m hopeful that the netroots will extend out of the Moveon ghetto and start spouting in the red states, empurpling the whole enterprise. I’m hopeful that Howard Dean meant it when he said he wanted the support of guys with Confederate flags on their pickup trucks. But unlike Chris, I only blindly root for the Dodgers.

The Democrats will have to earn my loyalty. And guess what? I’m not alone.

I had to take the car to work today, and on the way home was punching bottons on the radio and wound up listening to the news on KPCC.

I heard something that almost made me crash the car.

You can listen to it here, or look below the jump to see a summary. Just make sure you’re not operating any heavy machinery when you listen.

All Things Considered, March 1, 2005 · NPR’s senior news analyst says that recent events in Lebanon and Egypt suggest that the Middle East is moving towards democracy. Bush may have had it right when he said that a liberated Iraq could show the power of freedom to transform the region.

– News Analysis by Daniel Schorr

I haven’t been this surprised at something since Brett Gurewitz rejoined Bad Religion.

You know, I’m as big a fan of blog triumphalism as anyone, and as much a believer as the next guy that blogging has unleashed this vast array of heretofore unknown talent which will save the world or something like it.

And then I read something like this analysis (here’s a Word download, for you non-Atlantic subscribers – and you ought to subscribe, you know!) of the current state of the Democratic Party by Marc Cooper in the Atlantic and realize there’s a reason why he writes about politics as his day job and I do it as a hobby.

America, now more than ever, needs a vibrant, viable, progressive alternative. The challenge to liberals, then, isn’t to reify their differences with a mythical red America and its strict daddies but, rather, to find common ground. Perhaps they ought to start by taking their own sermons about diversity a good deal more seriously. Diversity should be much, much more than a code word for racial affirmative action. It also entails, as Potter and Heath argue, “[making] peace with mass society” and learning to live with what the philosopher John Rawls called “the fact of pluralism.” Modern America is large and, yes, diverse enough that it’s absolute folly to think some sort of progressive or nurturant world view can—or should—become majoritarian. Who would want that sort of conformity in any case? “We need to learn to live with disagreement—not just superficial disagreement, but deep disagreement, about the things that matter most to us,” Heath and Potter conclude.

The trick of effective politics—as opposed to thinly disguised self-affirming psychotherapy and aesthetically gratifying rebel poses—is precisely to unite people with different views, values, and families around programs, candidates, and campaigns on which they can reach some consensus, however minimal. Before liberals and progressives dash out with their new vocabulary to try to convince others of the righteousness of their values, they might consider spending some time listening to others instead.

I’d started a review of Lakoff’s thin little self-affirmation, and put it aside as the only responses I could muster were so negative that they were embarrassing.

Cooper has thicker skin:

Much more than an offering of serious political strategy, Don’t Think of an Elephant! is a feel-good self-help book for a stratum of despairing liberals who just can’t believe how their commonsense message has been misunderstood by the eternally deceived masses. Liberal values are American values, they say, but somehow Americans just keep getting tricked—by Fox News, Sinclair Broadcasting, AM talk radio, conservative think tanks—into thinking and voting against their own interests.

Go read the whole thing.

I’m a weak human being; I had walked away from ill-informed academic Juan Cole, assuming that there was nothing he could say that would make me think any less of his views.

In fact, this doesn’t really make me think less of him, but it does highlight the difference in our views of the world.

Update: Al-Jazeerah is reporting that the Lebanese Opposition is now calling for the big demonstrations at Martyrs’ Square to continue until all Syrian troops leave Lebanese soil.

You wonder what would happen if the Palestinians in the West Bank and Gaza tried the same thing re: Ariel Sharon’s military occupation that they face. They’d be crushed by the jackboot (with convenient allegations that they were a front for terrorism).

This is just risible.
No democratic government – no liberal government – since World War II has been able to withstand peaceful demonstrations for community or national rights. The will to oppress just isn’t deep enough.

It wasn’t the North Vietnamese military that ended the war; it was the monks who killed themselves protesting the regime(s) in South Vietnam that we were supporting and inspired the demonstrations here in the US and in Europe.

It wasn’t the violence of the Sepoy Revolt that freed India, but the Salt March. And in fact, had there been a reprise of the Sepoy Revolt and the slaughter of English colonial bureaucrats and their families, India’s freedom would doubtless have been delayed.

I do not for a moment believe that a democratic Israel could have maintained the occupation of the West Bank and Gaza in the face of a determined, pacifistic Palestinian movement.

Among other things, the level of moral and political maturity necessary for the Palestinians to create and sustain such a movement suggests that there is some political readiness to actually govern in some way that does not involve a lot of murders in the dead of night.

Cole is so convinced of the evil of the Israeli government and people that he can’t imagine that; to him, they stand as peers to the B’aath dictators who shelled Hama and executed the civilian population – Cole cites 10,000 dead, but virtually all the accounts I have found suggest that the number was between 20,000 and 40,000.

And there’s the gap. Let’s do a thought experiment…

Imagine if you would a Middle East in which, say, Syria enjoyed the military advantage currently enjoyed by Israel. Give them air superiority, a high-tech army, and heck, you can even toss in nuclear weapons. Ask yourself what the Middle East would look like?

If you think it would look anything like it does today, you might want to go stand next to Professor Cole. I’ll be on the other side of the room.

If you want to understand the question the Democratic Party needs to answer, go read the winning essay in the Shell/Economist essay contest.

The question asked was “Import workers or export jobs?”, and while the winner – writer Claudia O’Keefe – has no prescription, she does have a damn good diagnosis of the problem based on her personal history.

I’ve always seen The Economist as the most Establishment of all publications, reflecting a clear-eyed mixture of High Corporate and Top Government thinking. It pleases me to think that people like Ms. O’Keefe have made it onto their radar.

My stepfather was a salesman during the 1960s, traveling California and the American southwest in his big, hulking Buick, selling bras, slips, and girdles to small department stores and five-and-dimes. Whenever he returned from one of his two-week trips, he brought several lunch sacks full of torn price tags with him, evidence of product sold. My job was to sort and count the tags, at a nickel for every hundred I recorded.

We lived in a three-bedroom home in an upscale Los Angeles suburb, owned two cars, and took annual vacations. My brother, sister, and I never lacked any of the benefits of a middle-class upbringing, a new school wardrobe each year, copious Christmas presents, private lessons, even horses when we were older. In a medical emergency we worried more about how to get to a doctor quickly than we did about paying the bill. All of this was affordable on my dad’s one sales job without incurring vast amounts of debt.

These days the same lingerie lines my dad marketed are now sold primarily in Wal-Mart. Instead of being crafted in the U.S.A. by American workers they are manufactured almost exclusively in China. Gone are the traveling salesmen who ferried clothing to small town variety stores across the nation, and their buyers who used to decide which lines to stock. Most of the old independent retailers no longer exist. A handful of chains have replaced them, with buying decisions made at the corporate level. Jobs which comfortably supported a family have been eliminated in favor of new ones paying so little employees are encouraged to apply for food stamps.

Go read the whole thing.

As I said, she has no meaningful prescription, no policy to get us back to what she – along with millions of other frightened middle-class Americans – sorely misses. When the Democrats come up with a meaningful one, they’ll start standing for something.

I assume that if you read this blog you probably read others – including Iraq the Model, the blog of the brothers Omar and Mohammed who I met in Los Angeles and Boston last year.

But in the slight case that you don’t, please go check out Mohammed’s post yesterday, Part I of Blogging vs. Terror:

bq.. The broadcasted confessions of Syrian elements who work for the intelligence give a clue about what’s being planned for Lebanon.

Some of us got panicked by the scenes and the statements of those butchers but one guy from the team said “we will strike back through blogs” I agreed with his words so I told my friends about a short conversation I had with someone a few months ago; that person said that terrorists have the capability to prepare video clips for their operations and have them broadcasted on the web in less than 48 hours.

Well, that’s fine, now we’re going to expose the terrorists and their evil doings and show it to the public opinion in Iraq and the world in a matter of few hours or even sometimes in minutes and the world then will hear our voice first before the terrorists can get their ugly voice out.

Most of the terror activities are run from bases in Syria and a few other places outside Iraq but the future blogs will be here right on the event spot itself. The people will have the ability to show their activities and thoughts and publish them faster and more often than the idiotic terrorists and this way the people (the freedom lovers) will feel stronger and more united and this can make them even more determined to confront the threats.

We’ve already seen this happening in a limited manner through the number of blogs that are linked to by the friends of democracy website; they were able to get the news to the readers way faster than the media did.

One blog has exposed a few aspects of the crimes of the Syrian regime against the Kurds in Syria and today, one blogger from Najaf was the 1st source to publish pictures for some terrorists trying to enter the Iraqi lands from Saudi Arabia.

We used to have a chant at demonstrations back in the 70’s…

“The people united … can never be defeated.”

I don’t think I really knew what that meant until recently.

All of my views on appropriate policies in the Middle East and elsewhere have been predicated on the notion that the majority of the people there have been living behind doors, heads ducked down, while mad murderous thugs battled for and held on to power.

I believed that if we could back down the thugs – even for just a while – that the dentists and lawyers and plumbers would reassert their ownership of civil society and marginalize the thugs.

I believe that even more today.

Intermittently, I feel like I’m lost in pop culture … TG and I went to a party yesterday, and it ended sooner than we thought, and Middle Guy was having some friends over, so we decided to go to the movies; the choices were ‘Constantine,’ ‘Sideways,’ and ‘Hitch.’

We hadn’t seen any of them, and so decided to see Sideways.

Half an hour in, I was wishing we hadn’t. I sat through it, and as we walked out, asked TG what she’d thought of it.

“I can’t for the life of me understand why it’s up for an Oscar.”

“Neither can I.”

I don’t for a moment get it. Compared to ‘Aviator’ or ‘Million Dollar Baby’ – this movie is just pathetically weak. it is weakest where – for the kind of small ensemble movie it is – it ought to be strongest, in the relationships between the characters and our relationship with them.
Each of the four lead actors felt like they were off doing an individual workshop exercise – or whatever. And to be honest the women were simply there as punching bags for the two dislikable male characters to seek as prizes – sexual and otherwise.Character notes don’t make characters.

But the main problem with the film is the one I mentioned in my comments on ‘Gunner Palace’ (which did get a PG-13 rating, BTW). The author has to respect, and ideally like, their characters. In Aviator – with a deranged central character – it’s clear that Scorcese does both. In MDB, it’s obvious from the getgo that Eastwood loves and honors his characters. It’s not clear that this writer and director give much of a damn about their characters – and so why should I?

In it’s defense, there’s good talk on Pinot, tho. And sorry, but Jocko’s in Nipomo blows The Hitching Post out of the water as far as Central California BBQ restaurants are concerned.

We wish we’d seen ‘Constantine.’ And say that knowing that I hate Keannu Reeves acting in everything he’s ever done.

Gunner Palace just received a “R” rating from the MPAA.

I’ve seen the film, and that’s unbelievably absurd.

Some other folks agree, and I hope you do too. If you do, click here, and go sign the petition to get it the PG-13 rating it deserves.