Steaming Turd

A while back, I ran across (though I don’t remember how I ran across them) Unity08, a group that hopes to provide the nation with a multipartisan, additional, and worthwhile Presidential option in the 2008 general election. The idea works like this:

• You sign up to be a Unity08 delegate. You don’t have to give up your party affiliation, and you don’t have to declare any affiliation to sign up. No money is required. No strings attached.
• Over the next several months, various groups of delegates try to “draft” candidates for the Unity08 ticket. They do this through drumming up grassroots support within Unity08 and among people they know, possibly (but not necessarily) in conjunction with the draftees themselves.
• A pre-convention convention, complete with online voting among all Unity08 delegates, is held to whittle the long list of draftees down to a list of candidate tickets who both have popular support within Unity08 and who are willing to run on the Unity08 ticket if chosen. Draftee tickets consist of both President and Vice President candidates, the two of which must not be from the same political party.
• The actual Unity08 Online Convention is held to vote on the ticket that will occupy the position secured by Unity08 on the 2008 general election ballot nationwide.
• Everyone votes in the general election, and we see whether politics can transcend today’s extreme polarization and give centrists, near-centrists, and others dissatisfied with their own political party true representation in the Executive Branch.

Perhaps the most famous supporter of Unity08 is actor Sam Waterston, aka ADA Jack McCoy (soon to be DA Jack McCoy next season) on Law & Order: Original Recipe. He recently appeared on both The O’Reilly Factor and Hardball, and was on the phone on Morning Joe, to stump for the group. (I’m somewhat less famous, of course, but I still count myself in good company as a delegate!)

Anyway, Unity08 has contracted out to conduct a survey to gauge the motivations, interests, views, and demographics of Unity08 delegates and other folks who are interested in the movement. Feel free to take the “guest” version of the survey, if you wish. Admittedly, I haven’t seen this version, but it’s supposed to be similar to the delegate version that I took, with a bit of extra information on what Unity08 is and how it works. One thing I liked about the survey in particular is that it uses a “number line” system for ranking your answers, so instead of choosing from a five-option radio button, you can click anywhere along a line that’s labeled “Agree” at one end and “Disagree” at the other.

For the record, I personally have a desire to see a McCain-Lieberman ticket at least get considered in Unity08 (but that’s still several months off, and I suspect that events in McCain’s GOP campaign will be critical in determining whether this would be an option (honestly, he should have followed Lieberman’s example and ditched the GOP long ago)). That’s something I’ve mentioned to a number of people for several years now, but when I first heard about the multipartisan ticket requirement for Unity08, I was stunned by the possibility of it actually happening, however remote.

Nevertheless, I am keeping an open mind, and there is a possibility that a dark horse candidate will emerge through this process that knocks the socks off of McCain or anyone else whose hat is currently in the ring.

Also, if you think this is a good or bad idea, or are ambivalent, or even if you’re militantly neutral on the subject, I’d love to read your comments below. I know I still have a few readers, or I wouldn’t bother posting this

Apparently, Moveon.org is trying to kill local advertising support for Fox News. Good luck with that. It’s not like Fox News is an ultra-radical political organization that fosters controversy everywhere it goes. No, it’s actually the most popular cable news network.

See, most advertisers who believe that Fox News is more biased than other news outlets will have already made the decision not to advertise there. The Moveon.org campaign will only result in grief for local businesses and the local cable companies who derive part of their revenue from ad replacement.

Also, regarding their comment that Fox News isn’t owning up to its conservative bias: I’m still laughing over that one. News outlets like the big three networks, NPR, and others have been pretending not to have a liberal bias for at least as long as I’ve been alive.

You’d think that with a name like “Moveon.org”, they’d have moved on by now.

Nursing home cat is a harbinger of death.

I ran across another weblog from a reporter currently in Iraq. Interesting stuff.

One of the things he was describing - the methods that US troops use to get in good with local communities in Iraq - got me thinking. One of the major roadblocks in the US when it comes to combating crime is that many communities are very distrustful of the police. I wonder whether higher-crime areas in our cities could benefit from some of the peaceful techniques that are being used to counteract insurgent efforts in Iraq. We’ve all heard of community policing, of course, but is there anything new that our police can learn from our soldiers?

A few sand sculptures for you.

I just thought of a weird sentence with syntactic parsing ambiguity.

You don’t know what I paid Frank to call you morons.

Did I pay Frank to describe you as morons when he addresses you, and you don’t know what was given as compensation? Or did I pay Frank some unspecified amount to call you a nasty name that you don’t know what it is, and I’m taking the opportunity to call you morons? Or did I simply pay Frank to call you on the phone, but I think that you’re morons nonetheless?

New Webster’s edition adds ginormous. Nerds everywhere rejoice.

Far be it from me to laugh when other people get injured, but this is really frickin’ hilarious.

I ran across an interesting news weblog written by a fellow named Michael Yon, an embedded reporter in Iraq. His articles are co-published by Fox News on their website, and I know I have at least one or two readers who generally distrust Fox News as a source of news, but what can I say - this guy is in Iraq, and we’re not.

Anyway, what’s interesting about recent developments in Iraq, as reported on this weblog, is how al Qaeda is essentially starting to lose a war they had at one point come fairly close to winning. They could have kept just enough pressure on US forces until January 2009 to keep American sentiment down against the war, at which point Hillary* would have redeployed the troops, and Bob’s their uncle.

* Yes, I accept it as a foregone conclusion that Hillary will win, barring some world-changing event. That doesn’t mean I like it.

But that’s not what they’re doing. Instead, they want to win now, and they don’t care whom they have to kill to make that happen.

The problem with that strategy is that, first and foremost, this is a war over the hearts and minds of the Iraqi people. It’s all about “whom do you serve, and whom do you trust”.* Al Qaeda is no longer content to kill US troops, or even to kill only Shia Muslims. They’re killing anybody who refuses to join their movement, a strategy that only works when the populace has nowhere else to turn. Fortunately, there are tens of thousands of US troops there, along with Iraqi forces, to kill and capture al Qaeda terrorists and liberate the towns that fall victim to them. The Iraqi people, in some cases, actually trust US forces, and that’s an important change that I can only hope grows over the coming months.

* Seemed apropos in more ways than one.

The remaining piece of the puzzle is the Iraqi government. As with many governments around the world, this one is stricken with corruption, and it’s not surprising. The chaos of war lets people manipulate the system to their own ends without the oversight that “clean” law enforcement and judicial machinery would provide. My hope is that the example our troops set as being impartial arbiters and supporters of the Iraqi people, without concern for their own enrichment, will rub off on the Iraqis, and at the very least, people who aren’t completely on the take will start moving into positions of leadership, especially at the local levels. The national government is likely to be a wreck for some time to come, until sectarian violence finally simmers down - their responsibility at the moment revolves around making a few large unifying moves, such as enacting the oil profit-sharing legislation* that was presented to their Parliament recently, to signal their people that it’s time to move forward together instead of against each other.

* I wanted to give a link to some reputable info on this, but all I got from Google News was a bunch of op-ed pieces and links to some unabashedly biased websites. The advancement of the law to Parliament was reported in a blurb-sized radio article on NPR a week or two ago.

Anyway, the point of all this is that the people running the active arms of al Qaeda are immature, inexperienced, and doing far more harm than good, from their perspective (which, of course, is good news for the rest of the world). We’re seeing the effects of killing Zarqawi and other top leaders of al Qaeda in Iraq now, and while they’re still a deadly force and are certainly no laughing matter, they’re simply not the same group that spent years planning the September 11 attacks. (On that note would come a segue to current events in Pakistan, but that’s a topic for another time.)

http://www.foxnews.com/story/0,2933,288182,00.html