Month: June 2008

Obama At His Best

by tristero

A few comments:

1. Obama is a person who has made no bones about his religious beliefs. Yet, the video shows he is capable of taking a far wider view, an American view, that goes vastly beyond the parochial concerns of his own church.

2. His rhetoric is far from gentle. He repeats arguments we have heard from numerous angry critics of those who try to force biblical literalism into American politics, including myself. But the effect is gentle.

3. This impression is achieved primarily by his vocal inflection (and his body language). His affect is calm, but not flat. He sounds reasonable, unflappable, but very much attuned to his audience. There are no King-like pyrotechnics, either in oratory or delivery. Deliberately, he seems to throw away zinger after zinger, for example his line about how we are tired of having religion used to attack others. Imagine the effect this line would have if it were delivered in a thundering, furious voice. It would risk polarization, isolating the attackers. Instead, Obama’s matter-of-fact tone – a conscious reflection of the content of the speech, namely that arguments in a democracy are advanced by reason – simply makes an assertion sound so reasonable it sounds like a self-evident fact.

4. Obama cleverly associates Dobson with Sharpton and, in the process, dissociates himself from them, and marginalizes them. We don’t want Sharpton’s religion making laws any more than we want Dobson’s. He’s also making it clear that he is a far different candidate for president than Al Sharpton was.

This is a person who knows how to hone a speech to a fine edge. His ideas are nothing new, but the organization of those ideas and the rhetorical uses to which they are put are quite new. What’s extraordinary is his talent for making a speech. He has a far wider range of techniques than any politician I’ve heard.

Before you think I’ve gone all swoony on Obama, I haven’t, although I am, as I’ve always been, very enthusiastic about him (and all the main Democratic candidates he competed against in the primary). I am concerned about how he will respond if McCain decides to rebut him in a direct fashion. We all know Obama’s right, that’s not the point. Rather, the question is how well can Obama defend this viewpoint in the face of withering distortions, demagogical appeals to shared Christian values, and simple ad hominem nastiness. Can he calmly explain his position after such an attack without avoiding the pitfall of a convoluted muddle of an argument? A muddle that will be portrayed as elitist because it is so subtle, reasonable, cool-headed, and fair=minded?

I”m not sure. But all that having been said, what Obama says in this video is truly refreshing to hear from a national politician. More evidence that he will make a great president. More evidence that when it comes to intelligence, eloquence, ideas, and character, Obama has no competition in the general election.

h/t PZ Myers.

Relax? Never!

by tristero

I almost agree with much of what Michael Lind says here, but I certainly disagree with why. It’s not that the American people merely opposed Bushism, because, in fact, they didn’t. It’s that liberals found both the motivation and the rhetorical voice forcefully to confront the conservative movement. Liberals proactively articulated persuasive arguments that engaged the American people and made sense to them.

Nor is the battle against movement conservatives even half as optimistically over as Lind makes it sound. Take the fight against creationism, for example. A creationist bill has, according to sources in the fight, a very good chance of being signed into law by Jindal in Louisiana. Also, I am not at all certain, as Lind is, about the difficulty of rolling back Roe, especially if, God help us, McCain is elected in November.

So rather than saying “I almost agree” with Michael Lind, perhaps I should say that I’d very much like to. As for urging liberals to relax – which is not necessarily his headline but the one Salon assigned – it is the height of irresponsibility even to suggest such a thing. If the past 8 years have taught us nothing else, it’s that the price of liberalism and freedom is, to paraphrase a Supreme Court justice, eternal vigilance against the anti-American and virulent political right. If this country manages to avoid another George W. Bush, it will not be because the undefined “people,” by some vague process, decided to ignore rightwing propaganda, but because progressives made a vigorous and persuasive case to counteract that propaganda. Before they did, the movement conservatives were winning again and again. And wrecking this country as they did so.

Because He Cares

by digby

This will warm your heart:

Newt Gingrich, who led the GOP takeover of the House in 1994, is now coaching Republicans on how to recapture the Senate.

The former House Speaker and icon of the right is quietly expanding his influence in the upper chamber, where he is selling ideas on refurbishing the GOP’s image. Facing the harshest climate for their party in over a decade, Senate Republicans are hungry for his counsel.

“He’s trying to identify a path to victory in the fall,” said Sen. John Thune (R-S.D.), adding, “It would be wise for us to listen.”

For Gingrich, helping Republicans mend their reputation is a chance to rehabilitate his own. A polarizing figure in the 1990s, he attracted a groundswell of conservative support when he flirted with a presidential run last year, leading his allies to believe he could be a future contender for the White House.

Widely regarded as a visionary for his party, Gingrich has often fashioned himself as a friendly critic of Republicans since he left Congress in 1999. Though he still has the ear of many in the House, some bristled at an open letter he sent last month exhorting the GOP leadership to take drastic action to avoid huge losses in November.

Lately, Gingrich has drawn more willing pupils in the upper chamber, where Republicans mostly have a foggier memory of his stumbles as Speaker and view him primarily as a brilliant tactician with an arsenal of ideas. Senate Republicans, who arguably have a tougher battle this fall than do their counterparts in the House, are also eager for help.

Right. They were so busy deciding whether to follow through on the Gingrich led impeachment, they didn’t notice that Newt was a complete failure. But hey, these guys are so bereft of ideas about what to do next that they’ll listen to anyone.

Besides, Newt isn’t really a partisan guy. He’s a non-partisan reformer:

A spokesman for Gingrich, Joe DeSantis, quibbled with the notion that Gingrich is chiefly concerned with helping Republicans regain power. He said his boss’s top priority is working with Democrats and Republicans to achieve a set of reforms. “Obviously, he is a partisan person. But he believes that in order to get the scale of change we need, that it has to occur in both parties,” he said.

(Gosh, I feel a song coming on. The tune sounds sort of like “Kumbaaya” but the lyrics are “Hit Me Baby, One More Time.” Weird.)

He does have gift for sensing the zeitgeist, though, at least in terms of political rhetoric. Where he once believed that the way to coerce the public into supporting the Big Money Boyz’s agenda was with muscular aggressive anti-liberal rhetoric, he now sees that it’s gone stale and needs a new marketing campaign:

[H]e has also increased his collaboration with Senate Republicans, prodding them to ditch tired refrains on taxes and other perennial GOP issues and to embrace Democrats’ call for change.

“His general advice is: Be in touch, don’t be just repeating things you heard from the ’70s and the ’80s,” said Sen. Lamar Alexander (Tenn.), a longtime Gingrich ally who heads the Senate GOP conference.

Last month, Gingrich spoke to the Senate Republican chiefs of staff about legislation that could attract broad public support. In February, Alexander invited him to address the Republican Conference at its weekly lunch, a privilege usually reserved for the president, vice president or a Cabinet member.

He has met with several individual Senate offices as well as with smaller groups of aides, often with one or two members present, according to people familiar with the meetings. “He is more visible, certainly,” Sen. Mel Martinez (R-Fla.) said.

Several people close to Gingrich doubt that his recent efforts on the Hill are driven by any lingering presidential ambitions he might have.

He does it “because he cares,” Rep. Phil English (R-Pa.) said.

Gingrich would be compelled to share his knowledge regardless of any personal motive, American Conservative Union President David Keene argued.

“When he was Speaker, part of the problem was that he wanted to be America’s teacher. He does this because that’s what he is, that’s who he is,” Keene, a columnist for The Hill, said.

What he “teaches” America is to vote against its own economic interests. And he is especially good at appropriating liberal themes and putting them to use for the corporations and aristocrats he really serves.

At the February lunch, Gingrich told Republicans that they should agree with Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.), the Democratic nominee for president, when he calls for changing Washington — but then press him on how he would do it, according to a GOP leadership aide who was present.

Gingrich argued the strategy would expose Obama’s weak spot: that he has presented no clear plan for achieving reform because he fears irking key Democratic constituencies. “When he said that, you could see people around the room thinking, ‘He has a good point,’ ” the aide said.

McCain is already on board the Change Talk Express:

I think it’s an important part of this campaign to point out that everybody wants change, but there is a right change and a wrong change. I believe that what Senator Obama is advocating is a return to the failed policies of the ’60s and ’70s—bigger government, higher taxes—and certainly not the same view on national-security challenges. So, I thought it was important to point out that there is a right change and a wrong change

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There’s nothing revolutionary about what Gingrich is suggesting. Everyone in politics is running as far and as fast from the disaster of the past 8 years as their Gucci loafers will carry them. The only people who don’t want “change” from Bush’s policies are actually working in the administration, (and even those are probably far and few between.) But Newt does have a talent for making people think they’ve heard something for the very first time when he says it. And he is a malevolent, destructive force in politics no matter what he does and should never, ever be trusted. If Newt’s on the other side of any bipartisan deal, watch your back.

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Huckleberry Throws Down

by digby

I missed the sabbath gasbag shows, so I didn’t catch this nasty little jibe:

On the June 8 edition of ABC’s This Week, responding to Sen. John Kerry’s (D-MA) assertion that Sen. John McCain “still has lobbyists running his campaign” and that much of his funding comes from “these special kinds of interests that have fought against real reform in Washington,” Sen. Lindsey Graham (R-SC) said: “John McCain didn’t borrow money from a guy going to jail to build his house, so if we’re going to start talking about associations, that’s fine, we’ll do that.“

McCain’s loyal hound Huckleberry was obviously spouting a soon to be common GOP talking point to rebut the fact that Mr Campaign Finance reform’s campaign is riddled with crooked lobbyists.

I first wrote about this story a year and a half ago, knowing that they would pull the tried and true “where there’s smoke there’s fire” narrative off the shelf, no matter what. It’s a complicated story about a murky political culture that will probably take down the current governor of Illinois and taint a whole bunch of Obama’s associates.

There is no evidence that Obama was involved in anything illegal, but that never matters. It’s about painting this purveyor of a New Politics with a corrupt political machine and ruining his reform message. If the media were hostile to him they would be hitting this much harder already. (I expect we will all have whiplash from their turn around after the right starts hectoring them for being in the tank. The question is when that will happen.)

This stuff is as old as the Republic(as old as politics) so there’s no reason to believe it will ever truly go out of fashion. There will always be character assassination in politics and the modern Republicans have turned it into an art form. The question is if these things are going to have salience in this particular electoral environment and I suspect not as much as usual — at least at first. People have more important things on their minds. But it will take its toll eventually in distraction and energy over time and chip away at his integrity and reputation, which is the least they can hope for.

The beauty of these byzantine financial scandals is that it’s nearly impossible to unpack and people who try to explain them often end up making things worse. (It’s a Democratic weakness that we need to make voters “understand” things like this when they really don’t give a damn about the details.) I say turn it on them and hit back twice as hard at McCain’s crooked lobbyist ties. It’s the one thing that nobody expects of Mr Straight Shooter and I think it’s a real vulnerability after all these years of GOP corruption.

He says he’s running on a three legged platform of reform, prosperity and peace. Since prosperity and peace are completely laughable coming from any Republican at this point, the only he has going for him is “reform.” I think we should kick that leg out from under him.

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High Broderists Trot Out 2000 Election Memes

by dday

There is little chance that anyone who pays even a little bit of attention to politics could credibly claim that Barack Obama and John McCain represent similar positions on the major issues of the day. So when McCain advisor Douglas Holtz-Eakin publicly stated that Obama’s budget policies would represent a third Bush term because he is “dedicated to the recent Bush tradition of spending money on everything,” it was common to suspect that he would be laughed out of the room, which even Bob Novak took the time out to do.

That is the silliest thing I have ever heard! And I won’t even dignify how stupid it is.

But Holtz-Eakin’s comment wasn’t meant for partisans and operatives like Novak; it was meant for that segment of the pundit class that floats above everyone in bold, bipartisan glory – the High Broderists, the revered priests of the Village temple, who are certain that the country will right itself and revert to its better nature as soon as all of this messy bickering is set aside and the two parties work together in the spirit of unity and compromise. The mere details of the policies are unimportant; what matters is that people are backslapping one another and laughing and getting along and making Washington a better place. The appeal of McCain’s assumed independent streak and Obama’s talk about unity and compromise is undeniable, and so it was inevitable that they would take Holtz-Eakin’s statement a step further and claim that there is no difference between the leaders of the two major parties on any substantive issue. Here’s the foreign policy version of that argument, from Fred Hiatt of the WaPo:

IN THE HEAT of the Democratic primary campaign, some on the left were inspired to believe that Sen. Barack Obama (Ill.) offered a far-reaching transformation of U.S. foreign policy, “the most sweeping liberal foreign-policy critique we’ve heard from a serious presidential contender in decades,” as one particularly breathless article in the American Prospect put it. Yet, when Mr. Obama opened his general election campaign this week with a major speech on Middle East policy, the substantive strategy he outlined was, in many respects, not very much different from that of the Bush administration — or that of Republican Sen. John McCain (R-Ariz.). That’s not a bad thing; rather, it’s a demonstration that there is a strong bipartisan consensus about America’s vital interests in the Middle East and that the sensible options for defending them are relatively limited […]

The gap in Mr. Obama’s Middle East policy remains Iraq. Mr. Obama has used his opposition to the war to distinguish himself politically from Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-N.Y.) and now from Mr. McCain. Yet, in doing so, he has become unreasonably wedded to a year-old proposal to rapidly withdraw all U.S. combat forces from the country — a plan offered when he wrongly believed that the situation would only worsen as long as American troops remained. Remarkably, only a sentence or two about Iraq appeared in Mr. Obama’s AIPAC speech, and advisers say he may visit the country in coming months. That would offer him the opportunity to outline a strategy based on sustaining the dramatic reduction in violence recorded this year. No, the left wouldn’t like it, but it would be in keeping with Mr. Obama’s pragmatic approach to the rest of the region.

And here’s the domestic policy version, from an editorial that, in the print edition of the LA Times, was titled “Obamacain?”:

It has been a refrain during the exhausting battle for the Democratic presidential nomination that once Hillary Rodham Clinton or Barack Obama emerged as the party’s choice, we could finally dispense with the personality battles and get down to nitty-gritty policy differences. Indeed, now that Obama seems to have the position locked up, he and presumptive Republican nominee John McCain will have plenty to argue about. But some might be surprised at the breadth of issues on which they largely agree.

On McCain’s side, this is understandable. With a Republican president experiencing some of the worst approval ratings ever, it’s no shock that the party opted for an unusually centrist candidate. Yet Obama, too, represents a break from Democratic orthodoxy and is reaching out to the middle. This could indicate that on certain policies, something like a national consensus is developing. It at least signals a lessening of the partisan divide that has blocked progress on important changes.

As Matt Yglesias notes, this is completely absurd. On the major policy issues of the day, on Iraq, on health care, on taxes, on diplomacy, and on hundreds more, Obama and McCain couldn’t be more different. On other issues where McCain has sought distance from party orthodoxy in the past, like immigration or warrantless spying or torture, he’s walked back that significantly to the point that his stance is a complete muddle.

But of course, that’s not really what this is about. In 2000 we had a pair of candidates that were substantially different on major issues, and yet most media accounts of the race intoned that they were completely in sync and that the contest would be played out as a battle of personalities. Then-Gov. Bush did nothing but hide those substantial differences and present an image as a compassionate conservative and a uniter, not a divider, and the Village’s high priests wouldn’t deign to actually analyze the policies and positions the candidates took, so they merely nodded sagely in assent. This is the same phenomenon. Because laziness is the hallmark of a modern journalist, and there’s a stated agenda of bridging the partisan divide, the editoralists mistake the candidates’ rhetoric for action, and pronounce them substantively similar. This makes it easier for media types to focus on trivialities and nonsense instead of the effects of those markedly different policies.

This is not the speech of a guy who has the same views on the economy as John McCain or George Bush:

But when it comes to the economy, John McCain and I have a fundamentally different vision of where to take the country. Because for all his talk of independence, the centerpiece of his economic plan amounts to a full-throated endorsement of George Bush’s policies. He says we’ve made “great progress” in our economy these past eight years. He calls himself a fiscal conservative and on the campaign trail he’s passionate critic of government spending, and yet he has no problem spending hundreds of billions of dollars on tax breaks for big corporations and a permanent occupation of Iraq – policies that have left our children with a mountain of debt.

George Bush’s policies have taken us from a projected $5.6 trillion dollar surplus at the end of the Clinton Administration to massive deficits and nearly four trillion dollars in new debt today. We were promised a fiscal conservative. Instead, we got the most fiscally irresponsible administration in history. And now John McCain wants to give us another. Well we’ve been there once, and we’re not going back. It’s time to move this country forward.

I have a different vision for the future. Instead of spending twelve billion dollars a month to rebuild Iraq, I think it’s time we invested in our roads and schools and bridges and started to rebuild America. Instead of handing out giveaways to corporations that don’t need them and didn’t ask for them, it’s time we started giving a hand-up to families who are trying pay their medical bills and send their children to college. We can’t afford four more years of skewed priorities that give us nothing but record debt – we need change that works for the American people. And that is the choice in this election.

I think these editorials were more like trial balloons, and expressions of personal bias – in Hiatt’s case an opportunity to try and wash the blood of his cheerleading for the Iraq debacle, in the LAT’s case an opportunity to push their unity hobby-horse. But it’s inevitable that a modern media so uninterested in policy would allow themselves to be effectively spun by campaign advisors, blur the very defined lines between Democrats and Republicans and essentially give themselves a free pass to continue making a mockery of campaign journalism.

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Mute Button

by dday

Digby already mentioned the scene at Guantanamo late last week, with Khalid Sheikh Mohammed basically playing ringleader and bullying his fellow detainees into ditching their lawyers and becoming martyrs, which the government was all too happy to see happen, since those Gitmo defense lawyers have been effective advocates and effectively our only chance to determine the extent of the horrors practiced upon those detainees. There’s more about that in this WaPo article.

KSM also denounced the US Constitution for allowing same-sex marriage, which should create a nice little jig for the religious right to dance around. He also said this:

Mohammed continued: “We have been five years under torturing,” he said, and yet are being told to listen to American attorneys they’ve barely met. “All of this has been taken under torturing, and after torturing they transfer us to Inquisitionland in Guantanamo.”

“I hope you can reconcile your concerns” about his religious duty with the issues involved in self-representation, Kohlmann said.

“You will continue now to the end, to the plea guilty?” Mohammed, more eager than impatient.

“Yes,” the judge said.

But I’m not entirely sure how that WSJ reporter heard it, because the entire trial was tape delayed for journalists.

Mohammed appeared to have equal disdain for the process, but he only briefly mentioned his “torturing” at the hands of U.S. officials, something he acknowledged he was warned not to mention in open court, lest a security official hit a button muting the audio to observers in the courtroom and at a media center nearby. That button was pushed at least a few times on Thursday when detainees appeared to discuss elements of their early captivity in secret facilities or the way they were treated.

“All of this has been taken under torturing,” Mohammed said. “Then after torturing, they transfer us to Inquisition Land here at Guantanamo, and you tell everyone to sit down, sit down.”

I’m sure the muting out of the circumstances of the torture was entirely for our protection. And national security reasons, of course. Those interrogation techniques were vital to protect the nation, after all, but mustn’t be remarked upon in public. Otherwise someone might remember them.

That’s some Orwellian shit right there.

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Gimme

by tristero

I want it now:

Scientists at the Los Alamos government weapons lab have built the world’s fastest computer, capable of sustaining 1,000 trillion operations per second.

…adding, And I could put it to far better use than they can.

Removing The Impediments

by digby

Bmaz, pinch hitting over at Emptywheel, writes about the latest atrocity at the Gitmo show trials. It’s amazing they are getting away with this, but we are all so obsessed with campaign minutia that we are missing an historic injustice taking place in our names.

I’m sure you all heard that Khalid Sheik Mohammed demanded that he be put to death. But that was about all you heard, I’ll bet. There was something very, very strange going on in that courtroom. After years of being held in solitary confinement, suddenly the prisoners were all allowed to talk to each other in the courtroom and “KSM” was acting as their leader. Bmaz writes about how the media reported it:

Here is how I described it at the time in an email to Marcy and some other friends you all know:

Usual junk except for what I am sure he thought were a couple of throwaway lines that I found real interesting. The first was the report we already heard about KSM in the courtroom yesterday at the arraignment being the leader and speaking to the other detainees there as a group, clearly exhibiting his authority. But then the reporter relates how a couple of the other detainees seemed hesitant to give up their military lawyers and be martyrs, but how KSM was explicit in commanding the others, and how the government is not necessarily unhappy with this because the more the military lawyers are out of the picture, the easier the detainees all will be to convict (and administer the death penalty to by extension).

Doesn’t seem that earth shattering at first; however, think through the dynamics to date and the blaring significance sets in. The US has assiduously kept the detainees separated and isolated all this time so that they could not communicate and have structural control from the top down and, then, out of the blue, viola! Right in the middle of the courtroom, Khalid Sheikh Mohammed is blithely allowed to huddle them up like Favre does the Packers. When they break huddle, all of them, even the hesitant ones, suddenly want to dismiss their JAG/military lawyers that have been doing such commendable work under impossible conditions. Exactly at the point it is useful to help the US rid themselves of those meddlesome military lawyers that have been beating up their dog and pony shows. First the Cheney Administration sacked the military judge that had the gall to allow even a shred of due process to the detainees, and now they have effectively sacked the military lawyers that had the temerity to seek it. This was a knowing and intentional play to deny counsel. The US Administration knew what Khalid Sheikh Mohammed would do, and they knew that, given the opportunity, he would command the other detainees to do the same. So the US made sure it happened, so as to suit their demented self serving convenience

I would guess they are planning to schedule executions at a politically propitious time for John McCain. (It’s right out of the Saddam “spidey hole” playbook.) Remind everyone that we are at war and more importantly, that we are “winning,” which is what John McCain needs desperately to convince the American people of if he wants to become president. (otherwise, he sounds like a desperate, warmongering fool. Which is what he is.)

I don’t think it will work. That show is so 2004. But they don’t have much else, and on some level they really believe it.

Meanwhile, this week 60 members of the House urged Attorney General Michael Mukasey to appoint a special counsel to investigate torture. I’m sure he’ll move very quickly on that. And among the neocons, it’s become an article of faith the Bush will attack Iran if McCain isn’t elected. So it goes.

Update: Now we know why they need to get rid of the lawyers. They get all antsy about destroyng evidence and stuff:

The Pentagon urged interrogators at Guantanamo Bay to destroy handwritten notes in case they were called to testify about potentially harsh treatment of detainees, a military defense lawyer said Sunday.The lawyer for Toronto-born Omar Khadr, Lt. Cmdr. William Kuebler, said the instructions were included in an operations manual shown to him by prosecutors and suggest the U.S. deliberately thwarted evidence that could help terror suspects defend themselves at trial.Kuebler said the apparent destruction of evidence prevents him from challenging the reliability of any alleged confessions. He said he will use the document to seek a dismissal of charges against Khadr.A Pentagon spokesman, Navy Cmdr. Jeffrey Gordon, said he was reviewing the matter Sunday evening.

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Heavenly Assignment

by digby

Now this sounds like fun:

I spent a few weekends after opening day this year bopping around to 10 American cities, where I ate my way through 12 major league ballparks. My mission: to hoover down a shameful number of hot dogs and to sample the increasingly ambitious and occasionally delicious world of ballpark cuisine beyond peanuts and Cracker Jack.[…]
[I]n the last decade or so, as aging stadiums were either renovated or replaced, the ballparks have stepped up their game, and not just for the corporate skybox crowd. New stadiums have been laid out so that nosebleed sections have decent views, the concourses aren’t dark passageways, and the food and beer offered are no longer an afterthought to the game.
Dishes from other baseball-loving cultures have made inroads, like tonkatsu, Japanese fried pork cutlets; sweet-fried plantains from Latin America; and pressed Cuban sandwiches. Of course, I also saw plenty that deserved jeers: in the cramped confines of Wrigley Field’s concourses, I watched a large man, his head thrown back, guzzling spicy curly fries from a cup like they were a beverage. I ate mushy hot links, bone-dry hot dogs and hot wings with no heat. And in Baltimore, I came face to face with a crab cake sandwich that edged out guinea pig (yes, guinea pig) as the least appetizing dish I have ever tried. But there was enough good food — a cedar-planked salmon in Seattle, a thick pastrami hero at Dodger Stadium, the classic Primanti Brothers sandwich in Pittsburgh — that I never gave into indigestion or hot dog fatigue. […]
THE leading example of upscale food might be AT&T Park in San Francisco. Opened in 2000, the stadium has a classic, arched-coliseum look, but with modern amenities like wide concourses with great sightlines to the field. If you hear the crack of a bat and the crowd beginning to roar, you can pivot around in the beer line and follow the ball as it flies over the outfield wall. And instead of ferrying your food back to your seat, or eating over a trash can in some cinderblock tunnel, the airy concourse is dotted with counter-height tables that look out over the field. But some of the best food is behind the scoreboard, where a terrace overlooking the bay, the Scoreboard Plaza, is home to an impressive array of ambitious vendors. By the seventh-inning stretch, I had sampled a peppery clam chowder served in a bread bowl dotted through with tender bits of clam; a fried catfish sandwich in a crisp, Cajun-accented crust; and a homey bowl of jerk chicken over rice, with a healthy dash of jalapeño hot sauce.

I can attest to that. You’d expect that San Francisco would have the best food. The locals would have a fit if they tried to pawn off some gross, pre-fab crap. But that ball park is so awesome in so many ways, that it’s worth going there even if you don’t like baseball. The food is actually better than in most restaurants in other places.

The article has food recommendations for every ballpark. Seattle has great sushi (called the Ichiroll.) Texas has tasty fajitas featuring freshly made tortillas. Miami has delicious sounding empanadas. Don’t tell me America isn’t a melting pot. Food is human kind’s common currency. If they’re eating this stuff while watching America’s century old pastime then we’re both assimilating and respecting other cultures in ways that our politics can’t fully appreciate.

I’ve always wanted to take the baseball stadium tour of America and this gives me one more good reason to do it.

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Placebobloggers

by digby

From lambert at Correntewire, I find out that I’ve been self-medicating all these years:

Self-medication may be the reason the blogosphere has taken off. Scientists (and writers) have long known about the therapeutic benefits of writing about personal experiences, thoughts and feelings. But besides serving as a stress-coping mechanism, expressive writing produces many physiological benefits. Research shows that it improves memory and sleep, boosts immune cell activity and reduces viral load in AIDS patients, and even speeds healing after surgery. A study in the February issue of the Oncologist reports that cancer patients who engaged in expressive writing just before treatment felt markedly better, mentally and physically, as compared with patients who did not.

Scientists now hope to explore the neurological underpinnings at play, especially considering the explosion of blogs. According to Alice Flaherty, a neuroscientist at Harvard University and Massachusetts General Hospital, the placebo theory of suffering is one window through which to view blogging. As social creatures, humans have a range of pain-related behaviors, such as complaining, which acts as a “placebo for getting satisfied,” Flaherty says. Blogging about stressful experiences might work similarly.

Considering the cost of prescription drugs, this is a relatively cheap way to keep healthy. (It’s actually less satisfying and cathartic than throwing my Le Creuset dutch oven lids at Tim Russert’s face on TV, but considerably less alarming to friends and family.)

I’m not sure whether all this kvetching actually helps the body politic, but perhaps it has the same effect.

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