The Defending the American Dream (Wisconsin) Summit

Has anyone wondered why the list of speakers for the hilariously acronymed DAD conference (just in case anyone confused it with a gathering of pansy-assed nanny-staters!) has been so underwhelming?

Oh, let me take a guess ... Is it because the annual CPAC Conference is taking place the same weekend?

Great job planning that one, AFP!

Hey, you know who you could have had if the DAD conference was held yesterday? Newt Gingrich. A little bit too '90s, perhaps, but a lot better than Sen. Tom Coburn from the Great State of Who Gives a Shit.

To be fair, if nothing shakes out on Feb. 5th and the GOP still doesn't have a clear front-runner waiting in the wings, then I'm sure we'll probably see some "last minute additions" to the line-up -- in which case this have been quite possibly the greatest scheduling master-stroke in the history of party planning, but the odds are still so slim (and were even worse when this event was originally planned) that it just looks foolish.

Dirty Trick of the Day

The Soar Grapes Lateral Smear.

A former Fred Thompson staffer has started boycottchucknorris.com ... for some reason. I'm not really sure if this qualifies as a dirty trick -- the web site looks like it was made by a 9th grade Intro to HTML class. And as Blake Dvorak puts it: "It's a pretty angry site and certainly doesn't cast its creator in the most generous light."

Anyway, you get the picture: instead of going after the candidate directly, why not go after his quirky pop-cultural campaign gimmick?

Take that, Kung fu man!

MORE: Sean Hackbarth over at the American Mind is childish enough to support this idiotic attempt at smearing the washed-up b-movie action star who is apparently the ire of recovering Fredheads.

Gentlemen, get over it. Fred lost because he sucks. In fact he sucks so much that fucking Chuck Norris was enough to beat him. You have no one to blame but the shitty candidate y'all decided to back.

Underage Drinking, FaceBook & Whatever the Hell it is That I'm Missing

Alright, everyone stop what what you're doing and just hear me out for a second. When we were all back in high school and looking to do a little underage drinking, I generally recall going about accomplishing this mission in a covert manner. Safe-houses were acquired, designated drivers were appointed, clean-up crews were elected, contingency plans were drawn up, alibis were agreed to, etc.

In fact, the planning that went into these operations often approached a degree of military precision that would make a Green Baret blush.

(Pictured above: Three upstanding high school students without any contraband on their persons whatsoever. None at all. Not even a little bit.)

So why, then -- for the love of God -- would you go through all of these absurd measures to hide what you were doing only to post photographic evidence of your law-breaking on the internet? Why not just get shitfaced in the school parking lot during the lunch hour and scream "Hey, Principal McDickers! This is the best day of my entire life -- fuck you, Mom and Dad!" while grabbing your crotch and puking on the pavement?

I mean, us older folks are happy to know that the kids in La Crosse are still pretty cool, but we're also a bit disappointed that you're also still pretty stupid.

Here endeth the lesson.

"Every deviation from the Holy Writ isn’t apostasy; it’s life under the big tent."

James Joyner tells the conservative wing of the GOP to suck it up and get behind the eventual nominee, be he Romney or McCain (or at least that's what he'd doing, anyway).

Adieu, Kucinich

I don't really know why Dennis Kucinich was running for President this go-around. I can understand the rationale behind his quixotic '04 effort, but this time ... not so much. John Edwards' shift to a more firebrand mode of progressive populism really pushed whatever Kucinich had to say off into the wings and away from the media spotlight. He never really had much of a ground operation -- or any, really -- and I haven't seen a single commercial on TV or the web, which basically meant his campaign was about one thing and one thing only: using the debates to promote his agenda. So when Kucinich started getting barred from the debates, there was wasn't really any reason to continue.

All of which begs the question: is this the last we'll see of Dennis Kucinich? Almost certainly, at least on such a high profile national stage:

Kucinich didn't say so, but the real reason he's dropping out now (instead of hanging around through the convention, as he did in '04) is because his Congressional seat is now imperiled. He faces four primary challengers on March 4, but one of them stands out from the rest: Cleveland Councilman Joe Cimperman, who has some name recognition, lots of money, and some key machine support. Not coincidentally, it was just a week ago that Frank Jackson, the mayor of Cleveland, endorsed Cimperman over Kucinich in the primary.

Kucinich has earned the wrath of many voters and establishment Democratic figures in Cleveland for spending so much time pursuing—with very limited success—a role on the national stage while clinging to his day job as the city's voice in the U.S. House. His second White House bid has been particularly detrimental on the local level because he promised in his '06 re-election campaign not to run for president in 2008.

All politics is local, am I right?

Kucinich will likely survive this current challenge, but as penance he will have to focus on Cleveland for a while.

As well-intentioned as Kucinich may be his solutions for some of the country's most profound problems tend to be, well, problematic. Take his perfectly reasonable desire to enhance the United States' image abroad. Great idea -- now, how do go about doing that? With the creation of cabinet-level Department of Peace ...

Ahhhh, no.

The U.S. already has a massive bureaucracy in place to do that sort of thing, only the rest of the country calls it the Department of State. It's one thing to re-jigger*** reconfigure an existing organization, it's another thing all together to bring forth a new Department from thin air. Just ask the fine folks at DHS ... if you can find them.

Last time around Kucinich parlayed his fame into getting remarried. This time around he's given the American public the genuinely priceless UFO moment. I'm sure he enjoyed 2004 much more. I'd like to say that Kucinich ran his campaign with more heart than either brains, brawn or money, but, really, he didn't run much of a campaign at all this cycle. To the best of my knowledge, Kucinich's campaign coffers were used primarily for an expensive New Hampshire primary recount that did him good at all (to the tune of $27,000) and suing NBC for excluding him from the Nevada debates. I'm sure he needed airplane tickets and hotel accommodations for the debates he was actually invited to, as well ...

There's no question Kucinich cared deeply for what he was fighting for, but his departure does not diminish the Democratic debate, as John Nichols says. The recount, the debate lawsuit were the last gasps of a campaign desperately trying to stay relevant and when those didn't work it became clear that Kucinich needed to get his ass back to Cleveland and put his house in order.

MORE: Kucinich is already putting more into his congressional race than he did his Presidential one.

EVEN MORE: Here.

CORRECTION: *** I just found out that this is an inappropriate choice of words (1/27/08, 7:45 PM). My apologies. I did not know differently.

Arnold Schoenberg

A look at the great atonal composer:

Painters were on the front lines of new ideas back then, and Schoenberg was active in this art as well. He and cutting-edge younger Viennese visual artists like Egon Shiele and Oskar Kokoschka were interested in the bald psychological stresses hinted at on the canvases of Klimt, Paul Klee and Wassily Kandinsky. Bodies and landscapes could now be legitimately, hideously rendered if the artist was revealing truth, the same way clenched hands betray the lie behind a smile. This style was dubbed expressionism, pulling the romantic pose inside out.

Schoenberg's view of musical history allowed for a similar inversion. It ran something like this: from Mozart to Mahler, classical music became more and more dissonant, with more chromatic (or "wrong") notes in it, so that it was more indirect overall with each generation. The handling of chromatic notes was critical to a composer's unique sound. Schoenberg concluded that since wrong notes were coming more and more into the foreground of compositions, that they were music's progressive impetus.

"Verklarte Nacht" is one of my favorite pieces of music.

[via A&LD]

Monkey Pile on John McCain

Have you noticed that conservative Wisco bloggers really don't like John McCain?

* Freedom Eden
* Little Miss Sunshine
* Texas Hold'em Blogger
* Badger Blogger
* Still Spinning Blog

Did I miss anyone?

No Country For Young Men

Of the three people who have thrown their hats in the ring for Carol Owens' assembly seat, the two GOP candidates are retirees (Mike Hatch, 60, and Cecil Streeter, 58), while the sole Democrat (Tim Blake) is still a younger man at 34.

What does that mean? I'm not quite sure yet. The 53rd is an older district than the 54th demographically and Owens was first elected to her office way back in 1992 at the age of 61, so there is a chance Blake could face a challenge trying to convince voters he's not just some kid who wants to go down to Madison and play government.

Our McCain Post Seems to be Picking Up Some Traction

A little over a week ago I laid out a few points that suggested a McCain victory in Wisconsin on February 19th. Since then I read at least account in the national media that seemed to concur and now Mike Nichols at the MJS [via Sykes] seems to be on board with this idea.

I Need to Get Out More

I have only been to 5 of these places.

[via FPB]

Duncan Hunter: Just What do I Have to do to Become SECDEF?

I sincerely hope this will be the last Duncan Hunter post I ever feel compelled to put together ...

Duncan Hunter, former presidential candidate of marginal significance, who dropped out of the race after truly atrocious showings in Nevada and South Carolina, is endorsing Mike Huckabee. Why? Well, I sure as hell can't say for sure, but I'm this little quote had something to with it:

Huckabee has no military experience beyond commanding the Arkansas National Guard, but he doesn’t see this as an insuperable problem. ‘‘What you do,’’ he explained, ‘‘is surround yourself with the best possible advice.’’ The only name he mentioned was Representative Duncan Hunter of California. ‘‘Duncan is extraordinarily well qualified to be secretary of Defense,’’ he said.

Again, just in case I haven't made myself clear in the past, SpongeBob HunterPants is not qualified to run the Pentagon. He wasn't qualified to Chair the House Armed Services Committee. He's a baboon with periodic flashes of good intentions. He can now ride off into the sunset and cash in on the lucrative world of defense appropriations lobbying. No one will miss him.

"10 Stunning Ultra-Geeky Home Cineams"

I don't think I would ever leave my house ever again if I owned any of these.

Local Boy Done Good

Everything about this story is sheer genius.

Get Over It

You banked on the wrong guy.

Fred Thompson's campaign was an embarrassment to everyone associated with it.

Find someone else to support because, frankly, these bumper stickers are earning you no credibility whatsoever. In fact, they may as well just read "I enjoy the taste of the bullshit!"


(Pictured: Not the aforementioned bumper stickers, which can be found by using the link)

The Economy's Great!

Anyone who thinks the economy is just doing dandy right now has obviously not tried to get money from a bank in the last few months ...

MTC brings up the fact the the technical definition of a recession is "a decline in the GDP for two consecutive quarters." Great -- but any economics teacher worth a damn will quickly point out that by that definition the economy can be in a recession for at least six months before a recession is officially declared. The current discussion revolves around whether the U.S. economy is currently in decline and if that decline is dramatic enough to continue for the foreseeable future. No one wants to wait for the latest GDP data to come in ... People want to know if they're fucked now.

For those folks who make a living by securing loans from financial institutions, life has sucked since about September when the subprime market imploded -- and it's not getting any easier. The recent rate cuts may help in the short term, but the problem with the credit crunch is that it's institutional. That's going to take some time to sort out. But pretending like everything's fine right now isn't helping the situation at all.

Who Wins, Who Loses: Fred Thompson Edition

Let's just get right down to business, shall we?

LOSERS

Rep. Zach Wamp: He was the one who put this sham of campaign together in the first place by co-chairing the Draft Thompson movement. To a degree you kind of have to admire the guy: he saw there was no clear GOP front-runner and did what he could to promote the candidacy of a fellow Tennassean. It was a bold and gutsy maneuver to try and play king-maker that would have propelled him from being a second-tier congressman to being a major player ... if it would have worked.

Rep. Steve King: He was going to endorse Mitt Romney, then at the last minute changed his mind and endorsed Thompson. Way to go, dipshit ...

The Pro-Life Movement: Largely put their support behind Thompson across the country, including here in Wisconsin. These groups may choose to eventually back another candidate, but there's little reason to expect that they'll have as much influence with a new guy since they weren't on board to begin with.

Rudy Giuliani: See Mike Huckabee below. Rudy will not only lose Florida, but he now may come in a truly embarrassing fourth place. Making matters worse is that now when journalists want to kick around a truly awful campaign, they'll look to Rudy.

Anyone who says this race is better for having Fred Thompson in it: Please ... Bill Kramer, Brandon Henak -- who are you guys trying to fool? No one drafted Fred Thompson into this race because they liked his stance on the issues. Quick, what was the major issue he was running on? Anyone? Anyone? Buehler? Beuhler? People turned to Fred because he was an actor and thought he might pull Ronald Reagan out of his ass. No one was looking for issues from this guy, they were looking for gravitas and presence, of which Fred apparently had little. Let's not try to pretend that the Thompson campaign was of any consequence other than a large waste of time.


WINNERS:

Jeri Thompson: Where Fred disappointed, his wife did her all to pick up the slack. It was a valiant effort that underscores just how little Fred wanted to do this. We'll likely be seeing more of her, possibly even without Fred ... Some will point to her as the undoing of the campaign, but that's almost wholly immaterial. She demonstrated that she was the power behind someone who just couldn't be made to run for office.

Journalists, pundits and commentators who called Thompson lazy: Hey, when the media gets one right they deserve some credit and they got this one right all the way back in April. If anything, the press underestimated just how lazy Thompson turned out to be.

Mike Huckabee: Likely to be the beneficiary of the Southern evangelical voters that originally went with Fred.

Rep. Nathan Deal: Was planning on endorsing Thompson, but thought better at the last minute. Many of Thompson's congressional endorsements were so underwhelmed with his performance that some were speaking privately about rescinding.

Ron Paul: ... but only in a minor way. It now looks like Rudy won't last much longer after Florida, which will make his precipitous decline in the polls truly epic. I'm talking about the stuff of campaign legend, a ghost story political operatives will tell their interns when they want to motivate them. There's a good chance that Paul will last longer and round up more delegates to the GOP convention then Rudy, which makes Giuliani's taunting of Paul during the early debate seem foolishly unwise now.

Jim Mills & Mark Corallo: Thompson campaign staffers who were smart enough to jump ship back in September, before he had even announced his candidacy.

Linus Roache: When Thompson left Law & Order, Sam Waterson got promoted to District Attorney, thus creating an opening for an A.D.A. There isn't a struggling actor on Earth that wouldn't kill a busload of nuns for that role and the kind of exposure it comes with. I don't know if Roache exactly had to kill a busload of nuns, but he did land a coveted acting gig.

Noted Without Comment

[via Mental Floss]

MRAPs in Transition

The official Pentagon response to yesterday's MRAP death has been both expected and informative:

[Pentagon Press Secretary Geoff] Morrell told reporters that commanders on the ground estimate the three survivors might not have escaped life-threatening injuries in a less-protected vehicle.

“I think what’s remarkable about the attack is the fact that the crew compartment, despite how large the bomb was, was not compromised by the IED, and that the three crew members inside walked away with, I believe, cuts and broken bones in their feet,” he said. “I think everybody is still amazed that the fact that, despite the size of this bomb, these vehicles are proven to be every bit as strong and as life-saving as we hoped they would be.”

That's putting quite the silver lining on this issue. It also implies that the death occurred in the truck's cab, to either the driver or someone sitting in the passenger seat.

Regardless, the Armchair Generalist puts things a little more bluntly:

Anyone who still has the fantasy that the MRAPs were a ticket to riding out the violence in Iraq had better wake up. This potential $20 billion investment by the US government is going to be defeated by less than a million dollars worth of fertilizer, explosives, and pressure plates. This isn't the solution for general movement on the battlefield.

[He goes on to cite an interesting article in Armed Forces Journal, well worth a read.]

MORE: Check out Germany's answer to the MRAP.

Encomium

Bertram Arthur "Jimmy" James, serial escape artist and royal pain in the ass to Nazis, passed away last week:

James was one of the few to escape execution after the Great Escape [...]

Fifty of the 76 escapers were shot. James and two others, including "Wings" Day, the senior RAF officer to escape, were sent to Sachsenhausen. On meeting James, Day commented sardonically: "The only way out of here is up the chimney."

And then they tried to escape again ...

Tuesday Night Link Orgy

* Rambo Inflation

* Architects hold a contest to redesign the White House

* Ben Bernanke is even more worried about economy than he's letting on in public

* Patriots fans clearly have not learned from the Curse of the Bambino and continue to tempt fate

* Scientists determine what it takes to get nominated for an Oscar

* Patrick Ruffini: political organization still matters

* The last German WWI veteran passed away on New Year's Day at the age of 107

You Know What this Anti-Abortion Movement Could Use? Some Sex Appeal

Because nothing says, "Dude, you're totally gonna get laid!" quite like the lovely ladies at a pro-life march ...

Honestly, what's next?

Are we going to start seeing voluptuous and nubile temptresses summoning impressionable, hormonally-driven young men to abstinence rallies with their siren songs?

If so, sign me up because that's a screenplay for the next great teenage sex comedy that just writes itself.

MORE: Sykes is now foolish enough to start playing this game.

Can a Computer "Write" a Novel?

Apparently ...

As if that's not enough to wrap your mind around, the title of the novel is "True Love," which would seem to imply that the computer would be familiar enough with the subject matter to carry on about affairs of the heart at some length:

The book, published by the city’s Astrel SPb publishing company, is the work of a computer program, created by a team of IT specialists and language experts.

The 320-page novel, called “True Love,” is a variation on Leo Tolstoy’s 1877 classic “Anna Karenina” but written in the style of Japanese author Haruki Murakami.

It is based on 17 famous literary works that were uploaded onto the program. Within 72 hours, the computer generated its novel about true love.

Personally, this development creates a string of rather profound questions that something like a chess-playing computer doesn't inspire: Is the book any good? Is it literary? Did the computer actually "write" this book or merely synthesize the other books into one format? Will the book have an emotional impact on the reader? Did the computer learn anything during the process of "writing" the book? And so forth ...

I hope there's much more to this story to come.

Thanks for Playing!

We have some lovely parting gifts for you back stage ...

MRAPs & Casualties

A few months ago I spent a lot of time tracking the development of the Army's mine resistant armor protected (MRAPs) vehicles as the Pentagon began awarding what would turn out to be billions of dollars in contracts to companies like Oshkosh Truck to build what were seen by many to be the solution to the IED problem in Iraq.

But anyone who followed the discussion closely knows that this was hardly the consensus. There was considerable debate about the effectiveness of the program. Some were critical of the bulky size of the trucks, others were concerned about the "fortress mentality" that MRAPs seemed to project to Iraqis. Of notable interest was the cost and their shelf-life. One general even suggested that putting MRAPs into the field was tantamount to an open invitation to the enemy to attack them. Unfortunately, this debate did not seem to break out of defense appropriations circles until after the contracts were awarded.

Instead a number of people in Washington, on both sides of the aisle, used "We must support the troops!" rhetoric to gain support for the massive spending measures without ever asking if this was a good way of supporting the troops. Up until the contracts were awarded MRAPs had enjoyed vocal support from soldiers on the ground who has survived roadside attacks and ambushes. Many even suggested that the trucks were more important than ever due to the development and use of EFPs in the battlefield.

I haven't blogged about MRAPs in a while, largely because the direction their news has taken has become far more technical than I think anyone but me would care to bother with, but I have been keeping up with their use and deployment. Unfortunately, it became painfully obvious even well before the deployment that MRAPs were not going to be the panacea that many suggested they could be.

Now, for the first time since the awarding of the contracts last fall, a soldier has been killed by a roadside ambush while serving inside an MRAP.

The implications are really rather staggering. The Pentagon put a lot of their eggs into the MRAP basket. If anything, the MRAP was successful in providing soldiers with tremendous piece of mind -- one has to wonder if that will still be the case.

I'm sure there will be plenty more to say on this topic soon enough.

You Could've Probably Phrased That Better

The scrappy Yale men at the University's Zeta Psi house thought they were being cute when they posed for this picture:


The piece of paper being held up by the guy in the center reads "WE LOVE YALE SLUTS."

Get it?

Yeah, I didn't think it was very funny either ...

To give the Zeta house the benefit of the doubt for a minute, I would assume they were going for the playfully sexist in a boys-will-be-boys type of way shtick, but in order to pull something like that off there has to be a self-deprecating wink or a nod included, something that subtly acknowledges this band of merry pranksters is conscious of the fact that they're acting like dicks. There very clearly isn't one here. In fact, the photo's just plain creepy. There's an uncomfortable predatory feel to it with the faux-gang sign posturing and the nighttime setting. Even the deathly serious expressions on the faces of these young men suggest something malicious (except for the wanker in the lower left-hand corner -- the one with his tongue sticking out -- that guy just exudes sketchiness).

And worst of all is that there is nothing in this picture to suggest that this was just a spontaneous act of stupidity. You know, like the guys were just coming back to campus from a bar and thought it would be funny if, etc. Nope, this was pretty obviously premeditated. Their clever little sign was made off a laser printer. Everyone's dressed in dark clothing, perfect for sneaking around campus with a certain degree of stealth. There were clearly a number of opportunities for at least one of these guys to think better.

Well, as is what happens these days, the picture got put up on the internet and was subsequently passed around Yale. Naturally, some people were a bit pissed at this stunt. I'm not exactly sure what happened next, I assume phone calls were made, meetings arranged, threats of double secret probation were meted out, etc. Anyway, the fraternity's president issued an apology in today's Yale Daily News. The apology seems to be courteous, genuine and contrite until the reader gets to this poorly phrased line:

Every single member would like to stress our utmost respect for the female student body.

Evidently, admission to Yale does not require an understanding of the word Entendre.

MORE: Apparently, this was some kind of initiation prank.