E M P H Y R I O

Falling on His Sword

This purports to be the inside story of Edwards' departure from the race.

Not Elizabeth's health, fortunately.

The short version: Because of what Florida settled on the Republican side.

Florida made it highly likely McCain will be the Rep nominee.  Word is Huckabee will be Veep to keep on board the Christian foot soldiers.

After Super Tuesday, the Republican race will be all settled.

Democrats, who award delegates proportionally (not winner-take-all) won't.

Primary opponent-bloodying could continue for some time, wounding the eventual Dem nominee against a relatively unscathed Republican opponent.

Edwards' staying in the race would prolong that.

So he's dropping out for the good of the party.

If, Like Me, You'd Like a little Cheering Up

...read Ezra Klein's brief Edwards post-mortem.

My feeling is that the next President may be a lot like FDR -- a middle-seeking corporate-acceptable choice who by necessity of economic emergency will be forced to adopt many ideas of the Progressive moevement.

Unless, of course, he's a Republican.  Then he can skip all that stuff and just go on to another World War.   

Not Known Yet

Why Edwards, after announcing a big ad buy, is dropping out.

But commenters at the Washington Monthly wonder, and I do too, whether perhaps Elizabeth Edwards is dying.

That could explain it.

Sad for many reasons.

I Thought They Meant the Fed Rate Drop

...when I read the headline.  But they were referring to NATO deep thinkers advocating first-strike nukes against imminent nuke-acquirers.

We've gotten past the torture taboo; let's go for broke.

Torture; that reminds me of somebody.

Oh, Cheney won the Energy Task Force case; he gets to keep its secrets.  But looks like he shredded and erased everything just in case. Guess  we'll  never know what they were saying about those maps of Iraqi oil fields.

Ah, well.  Enjoy the ride (down) today.  I'll be checking in with Krugman.  Not that he's much comfort:

...Bernanke, in his capacity as a professional economist, spent a lot of time worrying about Japan’s experience in the 1990s...

What was so disturbing about Japan was the way monetary policy became ineffective; by the later 1990s the short-term interest rate was up against the ZLB — the “zero lower bound...once you’re there, conventional monetary policy can do no more, because interest rates can’t go below zero.

...the best answer was not to get there in the first place. A 2004 paper co-authored by Bernanke argued that the ZLB could and should be avoided by “maintaining a sufficient inflation buffer and easing preemptively as necessary”.

And here we go.

Gasp

I hadn't known this startling fact, stated in an ominous NYT article about how the cheap dollar and tanking US economy is causing massive buyups of US businesses by foreign capital, often state-controlled wealth:

The United States has lost more than three million manufacturing jobs since 2001

Sometimes you don't notice when the ground is shifting beneath your feet.

The World's Sole Hyperpower won't be that for long.

Solar City in Abu Dhabi

The three things the Arab Gulf states have in abundance are oil, sand and sun.

Good for them for looking toward the day when the oil flow ends.

They're pouring some petrobillions into a solar-powered, autoless city for 50,000.

One hopes it's a successful pilot project for transforming their countries.

It would be nice if they could transition from an oil-only economy, managed from crazy science fiction pleasure cities on edges of dry deadlands, to diversified economies in a landscape greened with desalinated-with-solar-power water. 

Padilla v. Yoo

It's probably unwise to get my hopes up, but the Padilla team (a human rights legal group at Yale) is doing something tactically smart, purportedly at Padilla's request:

they're seeking only one dollar in damages.

Which is brilliant.  It's not as if Padilla can spend a pile in his supermax cell, anyway.

And the point is to establish that Yoo's torture memos set in motion a process of breaking the law and violating the constitution.

How sweet it'd be if it really succeeds.  America, in small measure, redeemed.

Weird, Sad, Glad

In the Blackwater Convoy Massacre case, we may have the unusual circumstance of a criminal coverup literally involving new paint.  Reminds me of the year Harvey Keitel played cleanup man in both Pulp Fiction and Point of No Return.  Guess they called Victor the Cleaner in.

Snow in Baghdad.

For the first time in living memory, or maybe the second.  As MoJo says, Bush has made hell freeze over.

I thought the headline was talking about this.  Good for W, acknowledging the reality of Israel occupying Palestinian territory.  It's good every time he acknowledges reality.  Perhaps there is hope.

Kidding!

This is depressing: in China, city inspectors beat a blogger to death for filming their confrontation with villagers.

This is, too: Rumsfeld, et al skate as the torture lawsuit against them is dismissed -- brought by innocent (they've since been released) British citizens. 

And another thing.  I've been worrying about Blackwater and Dyncorp creating sociopathic criminals.  Looks like the Army might be doing it, too, as came to light when these Iraq vet would-be bank robbers in Colorado Springs poured bullets into their buddy.

Oh, just great.  The speedboat-destroyer incident in the Straits of Hormuz?  The "you will explode in two minutes"?  It may well have been a famous anonymous radio prankster Navy men call "Filipino Monkey."  What a stupid reason to start a war.

Then again, there's the one we started thanks to Curveball. 

But cheer up.  Looks like Mars is safe for a while longer.

The Duh Effect

Well, one social scientist says Hillary's margin came not from The Bradley Effect (telling pollsters they're undecided or voting for a black candidate and then not voting for him), but by people who didn't realize, until voting, that Biden and Dodd had dropped out.  So they voted for Hillary.

Qiddity here laments low-information voters.

...the depressing sight of low-information voters - often torn between voting for Obama or McCain (!) - and the general noise that is horse-race reporting, and it's enough to give up on democracy.

I have to admit, it's pretty depressing.

Charlie Wilson's War

I had no idea how they'd play it, given the underlying irony of the entire enterprise, but I found out last night -- pitch perfect. 

The film is richly aware of the ambiguity of the choices we make in war, but never, ever bitter.

This is the kind of film Hollywood does best.  Great star turns by the three leads, in a smart, satiric, substantive movie. 

Notably, the art direction -- the giant cordless phones and once-awesome bigscreen CRT TVs (note also their architectural choices) adds to the fun.

Just watch this eight minute scene between Philip Seymour Hoffman and Tom Hanks and tell me you don't want to see this film.