Fitful Murmurs

A caveat: none of this means too much; it’s just interesting.

Obama’s campaign website, in the Issues –> Foreign Policy section, had a clear and delineated section on Cuba and the rest of Latin America:

Barack Obama and Joe Biden will support democracy that is strong and sustainable in the day to day lives of the people of the Americas. In the case of Cuba, they will empower our best ambassadors of freedom by allowing unlimited Cuban-American family travel and remittances to the island. Using aggressive and principled bilateral diplomacy he will also send an important message: if a post-Fidel government takes significant steps toward democracy, beginning with freeing all political prisoners, the U.S. is prepared to take steps to normalize relations and ease the embargo that has governed relations between our countries for the last five decades.

Here’s where it gets interesting: the Obama Transition team has its own website, but that website, under a similar section (Agenda –> Foreign Policy) makes no reference to Cuba at all (or, indeed, the entire continent of South America).

The two websites are not identical, and the Campaign website is, in general, more specific and detailed than the Transition site.  This makes sense: people looking up Barack Obama during the campaign would often be keen on one issue in particular, and to attract those votes, the campaign site had to cover a lot of bases.  The Transition website has a different purpose: to delineate the plan of attack that Obama plans to use in these different areas.  Cuban democracy isn’t quite as important, in the grand scheme of things, as topics like, say, nuclear proliferation.  And that’s maybe the way it should be.  I’m a strong advocate for talks with Cuba, and I’d like to see U.S. policy toward the island change as quickly as possible, but I’m not going to say that issues like Iranian – Syrian relations or Afghanistan aren’t more pressing in the short term.

It is a little dissapointing, though, to see that Cuba didn’t make the Transition website at all, and while I would be cautious in extrapolating too much from that, it may mean that the Obama team isn’t going to move quite as quickly on Cuba as they’ve been broadcasting so far.

Who knew?

In what may be the latest sign of the harsh economic times, five banks in four boroughs were robbed on Monday, four of them within an hour and a half.

I forgot to mention that no one can quite figure out whether or not the Senate has the authority to reject the pick.  But Illinois Secretary of State Jesse White promises it won’t even make it that far.

The big news today, of course, is that Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich – also known as the most corrupt man in America – announced that he was going to appoint Roland Burris, a relative unknown, to fill Obama’s vacant Senate seat.

CHICAGO — Governor Rod R. Blagojevich of Illinois said Tuesday that he will appoint Roland W. Burris, a former Illinois attorney general, to fill President-elect Barack Obama’s vacant seat in the United States Senate, setting up a potential battle with Senate leaders who say they will not seat anyone whom he appoints.

Mr. Blagojevich faces federal corruption charges, including accusations that he tried to sell Mr. Obama’s former seat for a high-paying job or money. Impeachment proceedings against the governor are under way in the Illinois House, and 50 United States senators, President-elect Obama and state officials have called for his resignation.

Someday soon, when this is all wrapped up, someone is going to make a killing with some kind of behind-the-scenes book about all this, because at this point we’re missing key information.  There’s no way that I can work any of this into a narrative that makes any sense.  Why is Blagojevich doing this, especially after everyone told him not to?  Why in god’s name would Roland Burris actually take the job?  (I can only think of three reasons, really: 1. He’s an idiot.  2. He’s senile.  3. He’s an evil genius, whose diabolical plan will not become clear until it’s too late.)

The blogosphere certainly is abuzz.  Yglesias points how weird it is that, really, Burris is somewhat qualified.  Josh Marshall is talking about Shakespeare.  And Ezra Klein (who I’ve been quoting a lot recently) thinks it’s all about race. I don’t know.  Certainly the press conference was laced with all kinds of weirdly racial language (Congressman Bobby Rush told Senate Democrats not to “hang or lynch the appointee”).  But I don’t understand what that gains anyone involved.  How will this help Blago?  Burris?  Rush?  This seems like a lose-lose situation for everyone involved.

Apparently, those virginity pledges don’t work:

While teens who take virginity pledges do delay sexual activity until an average age of 21 (compared to about age 17 for the average American teen), the reason for the delay is more likely due to pledge takers’ religious background and conservative views — not the pledge itself.

According to a study published Monday in the journal Pediatrics, pledge takers are as likely to have sex before marriage as other teens who are also religious, but don’t take the pledge. However, pledge takers are less likely than other religious or conservative teens to use condoms or birth control when they do start having sex.

It’s that last that is really the most important, in my opinion.  Personally, I don’t think that the pledge takers are sexually riskier on purpose – that is, I don’t think that taking the pledge leads to riskier sex.  Rather, I think its more likely that the pledge takers simply have a home and religious life that prevents them from being able to obtain adequate information about birth control, or even birth control at all.  Which is a problem, of course, but its a problem of a different stripe.

I also think it’s good to take studies like this with a grain of salt.  They get treated like gospel by the media, especially when they’re about sex, but their findings aren’t always so clear cut.  For example, this study followed the participants from their mid-teens (14-16) to their early twenties (21-23).  But they started the study in 1995, so the time period that they were looking at was essentially 1995 – 2000.  Obviously, the teenage culture now is not what it was in the late-nineties, and that would reflect in teenager’s sexual habits as well.

(Hat tip: Ezra Klein)

I’ve spent the last couple days mulling over the ways in which the newspaper industry’s woes must be affecting those associated with comic strips, but I was beaten to the punch by the freakin’ New York Times, of all people:

Lisa Wilson, senior vice president of syndication for United Media, which distributes “Pearls Before Swine” through its United Feature Syndicate, says simply: “The newspapers’ economic challenges become ours.”

Luckily, the article is pretty superficial and focuses mostly on what the syndicates are doing to respond to the crisis, so there are a number of larger points that I can still make.  Incidentally, some of the steps being taken by the syndicates are actually pretty comical to people familiar with the interwebs.  Dramatic steps included: creating a Facebook page for Pearls Before Swine; allowing Garfield readers to email strips to one another; and making “Audio Comics” for Zits, in which a camera pans over the comic strip while actors read the lines.  (I’m unclear on where, exactly, the demand for this is coming from.)

Anyway, here are some things I think the Times should have talked about:
» Read the rest of this entry «

Epic website fail.

For a month or two, I’ve been writing music reviews over at PopMatters.  I probably won’t post a link every time one goes up, but here are two already-published reviews that I think are the best:

First, this is a review of Arizona’s new album The Glowing Bird.  I’m a little worried that I might have been a little harsh – it really was quite a good disc – but I like the review nevertheless.  Bonus joke about The Mars Volta!

And this is a review of Crooked Still’s excellent third album, which came out in mid-July.  This was actually one of the reviews that got me hired in the first place, so I like it for that reason.

How sad that I start blogging just as the 49ers finish out the season.  I should have started earlier.

The big news, of course, is not that the Niners beat the Redskins yesterday after a last-minute drive that culminated in a Joe Nedney field goal.  The big news is that immediately after the game, interim head coach Mike Singletary was promoted to the full-time position, and Jed York, the son of owners John and Denise, was given the job of Team President.

The San Francisco Chronicle seems to be of two minds about the Singletary pick, but I am a firm supporter.  Singletary’s track record is slim – he’s been a head coach for just nine games – but he’s been in the NFL a long time.  He won five of those nine games, with a team that had before been the laughingstock of the NFL.  And he’s got an excess of passion, which, after the Mike Nolan years, might be just what the team needs.  (Nolan always seemed like a good guy, but his press-room demeanor after a loss was always worrying – grim, sure; disappointed, sure; but he never really seemed to care.)

So it remains to be seen what this means for the Niners.  For my part, I hope they don’t drop Mike Martz as offensive coordinator – despite his public clashes with Singletary, the Niners offense is where it is because of him and him alone.

And pick a damn quarterback already!

(Photo Credit: San Francisco Chronicle)

Ezra Klein, who is one of the most respected liberal bloggers out there, has a couple of really smart (and, given the political climate around Israel, brave) posts up today about the crisis in Gaza. Both posts bear reading, but I’m going to quote from the first:

Indeed, I’ve actually not yet heard a compelling defense of this on strategic grounds. Hamas engages in asymmetric warfare against Israel. Israel is destroying Hamas’s conventional — which is to say, symmetric — capacities. They are obliterating Hamas-as-governing-authority and strengthening Hamas-as-popular-terrorist-group. It’s mindless.

Klein goes a bit far, perhaps, in condemning Israel’s actions here.  As much as I’d like objectively to think that the US would, if attacked, respond in such a cool manner, in reality I know that we would want to get those responsible.  I would want to get those responsible.

But I absolutely agree with him that the quality of the response is wrong.  It isn’t even useful.  Instead of assuring that attacks like last week’s never happen again – as it should – it basically guarentees that such attacks will happen again.  If someone in Tijuana started firing rockets at San Diego, I’d want us to respond – but I would hope that our response would not be to indiscriminately bomb Baja California.