Run, Al, run!

He’s still being dodgy about whether he’s going to run against our plastic stepford senator, Norm Coleman, in 2008…but the Al Franken interview in the City Pages is worth a read. Another thing he doesn’t do is plug his Midwest Values PAC, which is a really interesting idea. It’s a kind of bloggy platform for raising money and promoting the expression of progressive ideas, but it’s seriously underutilized.

“De-nuking”?

As an example of understatement, I could say that I’m no fan of Mark Steyn—he’s another of those deeply confused and stupid far right pundits who is convinced that vigorous support for violent action by others will compensate for his intellectual deficiencies—so I’m not really surprised to learn of his new phrase for bombing the hell out of Iran: “de-nuking”. We are going to nuke their nuclear facilities to de-nuke their potential to nuke. I guess it’s a new way to jigger a sentence to insert more “nukes” and thereby bring the sad little man to his desired wargasm.

But don’t think I actually read Steyn—I got this second-hand from Bouphonia, who neatly summarizes the world view of Steyn and so many others:

The notion that our era might be defined not by “de-nuking” Iran, but by some gruesome and perfectly predictable consequence of George W. Bush’s ostensible attempt to do so, would never occur to Steyn in a million years. Where sane people imagine a discredited, unpopular, bankrupt, and incompetent administration attacking a third country while botching the occupation of two others, Steyn imagines boundless fields of glory.

Somehow, I don’t think Steyn is a member of the reality-based community.

I’ll take anger over sleaze any day

I don’t quite understand this etiquette thing. So Maryscott O’Connor is angry about war and corruption and our incompetent administration, and that’s bad. Naughty leftist, she should be better mannered and respectful to our president, no matter how badly he screws up.

Meanwhile, Michelle Malkin sics her mouth-breathing minions on some college-aged peace activists, and they get swamped with death threats from right wingers. And she does it twice, even after learning what kind of sewage her pals are spewing.

Hmmm. Decisions, decisions. Angry denunciations of political actions vs. vicious but infantile threats. Unstinting demands that our leaders do right vs. outrageous extortion. Which side do I want to be on?

I’ll pick the door on the left, Bob. Without hesitation.

Hey, and could someone point David Finkel to a real story about bloggers?

You’ve got to hand it to TBogg for giving the Malkins the treatment they deserve.

He got the story backwards

Everyone is writing about this WaPo story about angry liberal bloggers that focused on a site I rather like, My Left Wing. Hilzoy writes about the media laziness behind the story, and Norwegianity punctures the myth that anger is a property of the Left

I’m baffled by it all. Shouldn’t we be angry about war and torture and tax breaks for the rich and incompetence and corruption? Isn’t anger and opposition the appropriate response?

It seems to me that the real news story is all of those angry right wing blogs that are screeching in support of war and torture and tax breaks for the rich and incompetence and corruption. I sure wish a journalist would sit down and make sense of that for me.

Carnival of the Liberals #10

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I received 45 submissions for this edition of The Carnival of the Liberals, and the carnival rules required me to select only a final ten. That was harsh; there were many excellent links sent in, and I struggled with the need to reject so many. Ultimately, I just had to let my own biases rule my decision, so if you sent in a submission and I didn’t use it, it’s nothing personal and it says nothing about a lack of quality in your work—it just means it didn’t fit my narrow criteria for what I wanted to read this time around. As you’ll see, I tend to promote godless secularism and grappling with real world issues in science, and so some fascinating and worthy articles on war and economics and labor just didn’t make the cut this time around.

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