Glenn Greenwald has a running series of posts about why the NSA wiretapping scandal is not going away. As always with his stuff, they’re worth reading. However, while I really want to believe he’s right, it is becoming increasingly difficult to maintain my optimism (and I am fully aware of the irony involved in using the word “optimism” in the same paragraph as the phrase “NSA wiretapping scandal.”)

I have gone on at some length in previous posts about why I have trouble believing this scandal will maintain any traction, so I will not spend time on that here.

Finally, the larger political picture is starting to come into focus, and it is not pretty. Up to a point that, as best I can tell, occurred about a month ago, I was able maintain some sense of optimism. I could look at the President’s consistently falling poll numbers and find some hope in the fact that the public seemed to be waking up to the fact that the administration was systematically wrecking everything it touched. Congress actually seemed to be waking up to the fact that they could do something besides function as sycophantic groupies for the White House, and the media seemed to be following some stories and displaying some independence, rather than simply soaking up and regurgitating Republican talking points.

No sooner do I start thinking that things are looking up, when suddenly the Democrats start running toward the center like fleeing rats, and the media finds that it must devote absolutely every last bit of attention to the ridiculous non-story of Dick Cheney’s hunting accident. Meanwhile, the Right’s massive PR machine keeps churning, and suddenly we find that it’s time we all just need to come together and support the President.

Honestly, I don’t know what it’s going to take at this point. At least when Nixon was president, they at least made the effort of concealing the fact that they were breaking the law.

I went to see Lewis Black last night. He is, without a doubt, the funniest man on the face of the earth.

His act is pretty wide-ranging, but the central theme comes down to this: If you can’t see that just about everything in this country is completely fucked up right now, there is something wrong with you.

In other news, I’m sorry for the light posting schedule the last couple of days. It was a busier weekend than usual for me, and I found myself with much less time than I am used to having for attending to the site. Things are returning to normal, though, so I should be returning to the normal routine starting tomorrow.

Besides, seeing as how yesterday was the only day I have missed so far this month, I’d say I’m still doing pretty well.

CORPUS CHRISTI, Texas (CNN) — Harry Whittington said Friday he was sorry for what Dick Cheney and his family have “had to go through” after the vice president shot him in a weekend hunting accident.

Somewhere, back on the other side of the mirror, where up is still up and white is not black, there are a bunch of scientists and psychologists studying this crazy Bizarro dimension in which we find ourselves and shaking their heads in amazement.

Thanks to Netflix, I finally got around to watching The Yes Men last night. It was entertaining, but that is as far as I am willing to go.

As a political statement (which its makers clearly intended it to be), I did not find the film particularly persuasive. The Yes Men claim that their goal is to expose the misdeeds of organizations such as the WTO, thereby helping the poor of the world who are exploited by globalization. To achieve this goal, they impersonate WTO representatives and speak the truth about the group’s policies. As spectacle, these tactics make for good laughs, but I wonder how effective they actually are.

From the film’s publicity, as well as from the Yes Men themselves, one gets the impression that these stunts are made to appear a lot more wide-ranging than they actually are. In reality, the Yes Men go to what appears to be a rather small meeting of textile industry representatives in Finland, and a meeting of Australian accountants. Their indictment of globalization advocates is centered on the fact that they are accepted as legitimate WTO representatives at these meetings, and no one calls them out on the various crazy schemes they promote in the WTO’s name.

Watching the Finland presentation, however, I found myself wondering whether the audience’s reaction (or lack thereof) was really due to greed, avarice, and evil, or rather to the language barrier and general politeness. In Australia, when the Yes Men take a more serious approach and announce the end of the WTO, the reaction of the audience is striking—everyone intereviewed thinks this step is a good one and will lead to a more balanced world economy.

In short, the stunts and pranks pulled by the Yes Men, while funny and outrageous, are in the same vein as most other left-wing street theater protests. These guys seem more interested in the outrageousness of their tactics than their actual effectiveness. That is not to say that their basic message is bad or wrong, but when the Right spends 40 years building a multi-billion dollar policy and PR apparatus, and the Left’s response is to don a gold lamé suit with a giant inflatable dick, one doesn’t have to look very far to figure out why the Right owns the political landscape.

Downtime two days in a row… that’s pretty embarassing. Fortunately, neither is my fault. Today it was a power outage, due to the crazy winds we have been having all day. Sadly, my dedicated hosting facility (by which I actually mean “my house) lost power for a couple of hours, and I wasn’t able to do anything about it until I got home from work.

Anyway, sorry again for the inconvenience.

During the latest of my bi-monthly perusals of Apple.com’s trailer site, I discovered that someone has decided that The Omen should be turned into a remake.

I watched the preview (which can be found here at Apple’s site). While it’s good as trailers go, it is only a preview, and if I had to put money on it, I would say there is no way this movie is going to be any good. Despite talk of a renaissance in horror movies in the last few years, I see little evidence of any such revival. We can all thank the powers that be that Hollywood has finally stopped cranking out the lame attempts at self-referential Scream cash-ins that passed as horror movies throughout the latter half of the Nineties, but what has replaced them?

Although it too seems to thankfully be slowing down, there has been the Japanese horror craze, which, while featuring some occasionally jolting imagery, never seems to bother with an actual story or plot. Then we have been subjected to the wretched films of one Mr. Eli Roth. While he has been publicized as some sort of savior of horror movies, his work thus far has been that of an overly excited thirteen year-old who has just figured out he can get attention by putting straight pins through his finger tips and shouting “Fuck” a lot.

What else have we got? Rob Zombie movies and remakes.

I liked White Zombie, and Rob’s first solo album wasn’t terrible; too bad the same can’t be said of his movies. Generally, it can’t be said of remakes, either. Dawn of the Dead was surprisingly good, but otherwise, you’ve got dreck like the remakes of Texas Chainsaw Massacre, The Fog, Last House on the Left, and The Amityville Horror. With rare exceptions (Dawn and John Carpenter’s The Thing are the only that come to mind), remakes bring out the worst aspects of horror movies, featuring shocks and cheap thrills over the well-maintained sense of dread and the subversive qualities that distinguish good horror from bad.

No, I think what one can expect from this new version of The Omen is a lot more cuts, a higher blood-and-guts quotient, a much prettier cast, and almost nothing one can remember the second the credits start to roll.

I have had several discussions over the course of this week about the fact that the Vice President of the United States shot a 78 year-old man in the face, neck, and chest with a shotgun.

So far, I have mostly avoided the story on this site, and with the exception of these few (and rather brief) conversations, I have not really given it much thought in the real world, either. Seeing as how it is still consuming a good amount of the public mind, I figured it was time I took a look.

The reason I have not given it much thought up until now is that it honestly does not seem like that big a deal to me. Maybe it’s scandal-fatigue setting in, but of all the crazy stuff this administration has done, I find it rather depressing that this story is what the press seems to be latching onto. Let’s see… the President has asserted nothing less than that the law is what he says it is, and that he can monitor and abduct US citizens on US soil as he sees fit, but we won’t hound him about that—no, we’ll go 24 hours a day on the VP accidentally shooting a guy.

It’s true, almost every aspect of the “Shotgun-gate” (and yes, I actually read that somewhere today) story functions as a metaphor for the Bush administration’s shenanigans, but honestly, are we doing ourselves any favors by focusing this much attention on it?

For instance, the latest meme making its way around the Left-leaning web sites is that Cheney was drunk when he shot Whittington. Any actual evidence of this? No—it is entirely based on speculation of the “well, why else would they wait 18 hours to release the story?” variety. Nonetheless, a lot of liberals and democrats seem to be getting themselves wound up into a frenzy over this idea.

I just don’t see how it’s going anywhere. Furthermore, running around, waving one’s hands in the air and screaming that there is a plot to cover up Dick Cheney’s drunken gun violence just doesn’t strike me as a good way to win over the public. Even if voters are starting to sour on Republicans in general and the Bush administration specifically, baseless conspiracy-mongering of this sort is not going to help the cause.

My service provider is currently have some network problems, so the site be slow and/or down throughout the day today.

My apologies to all three of you who actually visit.

Update: Seems like the network issues have cleared up. Thanks for your patience, and apparently there are more than three of you…

I picked up Caribou’s The Milk of Human Kindness last week. Giving it a listen last night, I was not particularly impressed.

While there are some decent tracks on the album, it is very inconsistent. Some tracks are decent, some are just plain bad, and there is no overall theme or feel. One generally hopes, in this sort of situation, that there would at least be one or two stand-out tracks, but such is not the case here. This record is mediocre at best—due to the several bad tracks, it does not even fall into the “good to have on in the background” category.

I will have to go back and give Up In Flames (Caribou’s previous album, recorded under the name “Manitoba”) another listen, as I remember it being somewhat better than this new one.

In general, I have been rather disappointed with the “electronica” scene (such as it is) for the past few years. The electronic music that used to top my list is beginning to sound rather dated (Delerium, I’m looking at you here), and I have struggled to find new stuff to replace it. The LCD Soundsystem album was good, and I’ve found myself listening to the new Boards of Canada on a not-infrequent basis, but that is really about the extent of my listening in this genre.

While we were both listening to a story on NPR yesterday about British soldiers beating Iraqi youth in Basra, a friend of mine said to me, “Yeah, sounds like a really great place.” As the story goes, groups of kids had been throwing rocks and bottles at the soldiers. When the soldiers chased them, the kids dispersed into the streets and alleys; the soldiers found some kids (maybe not even the same ones?), dragged them off, and then proceeded to beat the crap out of them with batons.

Surprisingly, although I stopped myself, my initial response to the “Sounds like a great place” comment from my friend was almost, “Yeah, well, I guess it beats being tortured by Saddam.”

What’s this, I thought—after three years of claiming loudly that this war was a really bad idea, am I suddenly finding myself swayed by the arguments of some conservative war supporters (and by “some,” I mean the one who aren’t still claiming that this has all gone just splendidly)? It is not outside the realm of possibility, as I have been known to change my mind about an issue if someone presents me with facts and a valid argument in support of her/his claims. So I thought about it for a while.

I have stated previously that I am not going to start every statement about the situation in Iraq with “Yes, Saddam was evil, but,” just as I refuse to preface my opinions regarding the war by saying, “I mean, I support the troops, but…” I do not say either of these things because they should, at this point, be safely assumed as givens. Nobody thinks Saddam was a good guy, and going out of your way to specifically state that you think he was bad only buys into the right-wing argument that liberals like Saddam.

That being said, he was a bad guy, and yes, it’s good for the average Iraqi on the street that s/he isn’t going to be dragged off by Saddam and have her/his fingernails pulled out. At the same time, it is difficult for me to rank the current situation in the country in comparison. There is clearly a temptation to accept the Right’s claim that being beaten up with batons by British troops (or American ones, for that matter) is better than being tortured by Saddam. However, that opinion is a lot easier to hold when one is safely ensconced in a high-paying job at the Heritage Foundation and faces little risk of actually being beaten up by British troops (or American ones, for that matter).

The other problem I have with the “they’re better off now” argument is that it only works if you assume some sort of neutral view of the situation.

Imagine that I’m driving down the street, and I see a driver whose car car won’t start. I pull over, we hook up my jumper cables, and the car starts. However, due to my carelessness and sparks from my shoddy cables, the engine catches on fire. Now the person’s car is burning. You, the uninvolved passerby, can say that at least we got the person’s car started, but that hardly absolves me of responsibility for the new and not insignificant problem of the engine being on fire.

Yes, we got rid of Saddam, but that does not absolve us of the responsibility for making an utter wreck of Iraq, and the argument that at least the Iraqis are better off is disingenuous at best.