Batum!

Got to go see the Blazers beat the Hornets (if that's still what they're called, as everyone knows that North Carolina is famous for its hornets, wasps, asps, and bees) on Friday, and it only made my love for Nicolas Batum grow stronger. He's 19 years old. He's French. And he's amazing. (I'm sorry that this is the best clip I could find, but not really, because all of these highlights seem to involve the utter abuse of Andrei Kirilenko, which I find very life-affirming to watch.)

Nassau County Shoppers Net One Kill

I, for one, am shocked that people who spend their entire lives shopping angrily are capable of something like this.

Uncanny

Analysis of the war on terror from Ahmed Rashid, professional Stewie Griffin imitator.

Congo: Maybe Now Someone Will Care

In a war that has seen some of the worst atrocities in modern history, pygmies massacred and roasted on spits, refugee children raped by UN workers in exchange for bread rations, people forced at gunpoint to cannibalize their own family members, all with no reaction in the U.S., we are now supposed to give a shit that a few gorillas were also shot. The sad thing is that this probably will gain more sympathy from our society than all the rest of it.

Connecting

the last two posts . . . where the hell is this guy? The state dept. should actively be trying to get him on an NBA team. And the shooting guard.

The Fix

This shit has been going on for my entire life.

Golden State had a five-point lead and the ball with 13 seconds left, but the Blazers pulled to 108-105 on Roy's steal and layup.

Morrow then fumbled the ball out of bounds, and Travis Outlaw hit one free throw -- but referee Bob Delaney called Outlaw for a lane violation on the next shot, which would have cut Golden State's lead to one. Fernandez then was called for holding on the inbounds play, and the Spanish star compounded his obvious foul by drawing a T for arguing. Morrow hit all three free throws to ice it.

Granted, I didn't see yesterday's game, and the only highlights online omit these plays, but you don't even have to see these plays to know that the calls were ridiculous.

David Stern doesn't want a league that's not fixed, to some degree.

Not Hillary

Tom Friedman writes a good article. "Foreign leaders can spot daylight between a president and a secretary of state from 1,000 miles away." We have every reason to believe that, as secretary of state, Hillary would create that daylight between herself and Obama. She would try to tweak his foreign policy to implement hers. Or she might try to make seemingly minor aspects of his foreign policy fail for her own reasons. And this subterfuge would certainly not involve saving us from Obama's foreign policy, because his would be better. We know this from their campaigns. Obama decides on and implements an overall strategy. Hillary tries a bunch of stuff.

Bill Clinton was always accused of being a little myopic on both foreign and domestic policy. Policy was cobbled together piecemeal--a lot of little bits designed to placate various folks that didn't fit together to represent much of a strategy. And maybe that was fine in the 1990's. But based on Hillary's campaign, it doesn't seem that the Clintons have improved on this piecemeal way of doing things. But Obama is going to need a foreign policy strategy that plays every country in the Middle East and gets a maximum number of them to side with us on important issues, while still being harsh with some of them at the same time. For instance need to find a way to get Iran to cooperate with us in Afghanistan and Iraq (because they are the real winners of the Iraq war, no matter what else happens, so we'd better influence what they do about it), while still being tough with them about a number of other issues. We don't need a secretary who won't implement the administration strategy full bore. Richardson and Holbrooke are probably better choices right now.

(It feels good to get back to my Hillary-criticizing roots.)

Border Laptop Searches Update

Support the Securing Our Borders and Our Data Act of 2008, which would institute some minimal requirements for the ability of border agents to go through all the files on your laptop. Right now they can do it randomly, for no reason whatsoever.

Hindu Fundamentalist Terrorism

This is bad. Or good, if it means that the BJP will lose support. We need secular governments in both Pakistan and India for anything to work out.

Gore for State?

Richard Cohen suggests making Gore Secretary of State. This sounds nice, but Gore doesn't strike me as someone who knows a lot about things like this, which is pretty important. The situation we've gotten ourselves into is impossibly complicated and Obama will need someone who can implement a strategy that plays everyone.

Amazing

What a great birthday present. And this was so much more than anyone thought was possible: a genuinely non-ironic celebration in the East Village. Wow.

Is the War Lost?

The next day, he got an anonymous phone call asking him if he could do something about the sale of the pornographic CDs and DVDs there. “I assured the caller that I can,” Mr. Labha recalled, sitting in his basement office on a recent afternoon.

Within a day, the traders had handed over more than 60,000 pornographic videos and burned them in a bonfire as the city’s top government officials, the police and a large crowd looked on.

“We were not sure if the threats were made by the Taliban or not,” Mr. Labha said. “But the bomb blasts in Garhi Shahu had made us apprehensive. We didn’t want to take any chances.”

Righteous Fatalism in the Age of Frenemies

Today Meacham wrote about what presidents read and what Obama and McCain read, and what that says about them. He stops short in his analysis of what it means that McCain is a "romantic fatalist" who thinks he is a Hemingway character (an American who goes to fight in the Spanish Civil War because it is the righteous thing to do). Some would probably say that this adds weight to the McCain-is-Churchill cult of neocon circle-jerkery. But a president who fights for what he believes is right and stands up to men he regards as bad, no matter what and regardless of consequences, would, in this day and age not be a Churchill or a Lincoln, but just some bastard who gets us all killed by trying to take on Russia and China and Iran and Syria and North Korea and half or more of Iraq, Afghanistan, and Pakistan, and assorted other countries, all at the same time, and either alone or with the help of a "League of Democracies," which is not a real organization, but rather an idea that McCain came up with and maverickly didn't think through whatsoever.* This is exactly what we need right now: a guy who loves to piss people off and doesn't give a fuck about the consequences.

*This also seems to be the most crackpot thing that he wasn't really pressed on during the campaign. Talk about naive, pie-in-the-sky bullshit. League of Democracies?