BimbleBlog

Men accused of planning or aiding the attack on September 11, 2001 are going to be tried in a federal court in New York City, according to the Attorney General. Like pretty much anything that has a political side these days, there is controversy. So because I’m a bit preachy, I’m going to run through the issues involved, and explain why I come down in favor of keeping the case in the civilian courts.

The first matter to consider is whether Al Qaeda’s crusade against the US is a military action or a civilian action. Unfortunately the arguments on this subject tend to involve a lot of emotion and contradictions. The assertion of many on the military side of the issue is that the accused are “enemy combatants”. This is a curious phrase that, in this context, is meant to convey not just that the person was an enemy who fought the country in combat, but was an enemy who did not fight as part of a declared war or recognized national entity. The suggestion is that because the attack was carried out on behalf of a non-governmental entity, Al Qaeda, those associated with the attack are not covered by the standard rules for treatment of enemy soldiers. But at the same time, because the action targeted the country on behalf of a foreign interest, those accused of collaboration in the attack are not common criminals, and therefore not subject to the normal rules for prosecuting domestic crimes.

The creation of a new category to describe participants of the “war on terror” seems rather contrived to me. If these men really are “combatants”, then isn’t that implying the existence of an actual war? Why create a shadowy middle ground wherein Al Qaeda does not have the status to wage a “legal” war but is more than a criminal organization, if not for the sole purpose of creating an extra-legal circumstance for them? It’s not like we’ve never before dealt with the question of people killing other people, either in a military context or a civilian one. There have been foreign nationals who have attempted terrorist actions against the US in the past, and at those times there weren’t arguments that a new non-military-combatant category had to be invented just for them. Conspirators in the 1993 bombing of the World Trade Centers were tried and convicted in the usual US court system. What changed since then?

Since the US does not want to recognize the conflict with Al Qaeda as a legitimate war, treating members of Al Qaeda like criminals seems like it should be a no-brainer. Not only does it avoid conferring some special status on them, but it allows those men to be apprehended, investigated, prosecuted, and hopefully convicted according to the system of justice that we’ve long tried to hold up as an example to the world. It doesn’t require the creation of a new tribunal system, and it doesn’t require diplomatic discussions with our allies regarding what we can or can’t do with suspected terrorists.

Of course, the US could reverse its stance and call the conflict an actual war. But if they do that, Guantanamo Bay becomes a POW camp instead of a “detainee camp”. We don’t get trials for “acts of terrorism” or criminal acts - we either accuse prisoners of war crimes or we hold them until the war ends. And most importantly, we have to actually figure out what conditions would define the war’s end. Well, I suppose we wouldn’t have to, but a lot of people would be asking in this country and in others.

There is a talking point going around that uses the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor as a precedent for calling the 9/11 attacks a war crime. The problem with that argument is that Pearl Harbor wasn’t considered a war crime. An outrage, yes, but no pilots were tried for that attack in the war crime tribunals following Japan’s defeat. The charges there concerned treatment of prisoners and populations, but not the initial attack. That attack was against a military base and military craft, so the legitimacy of Pearl Harbor as a target has never been seriously questioned.

Setting the lack of precedent aside, if we did call this a war, what would be a war crime? Some prisoners in Gitmo and other camps were picked up just for being in the area of conflict in Afghanistan, but that certainly wouldn’t be a war crime. Planning attacks on soldiers also wouldn’t be a war crime - that’s pretty much what war is all about. But what of the 9/11 attacks themselves? If the planners and perpetrators are tried as war criminals rather than common criminals, we could be handing the suspects’ lawyers an awful lot to work with. For starters, the attack on the Pentagon would be a tough one to prosecute - the deaths of that plane’s crew and passengers would be prosecutable, but the Pentagon itself is clearly a military target (as is the White House, the purported target of the flight that was crashed in Pennsylvania), and lawyers might argue the non-combatants on the airplane were unavoidable collateral damage. On the attacks in New York, there are precedents in the World Wars and in Vietnam for attacks on civilian targets for the purposes of demoralizing populations or disrupting enemy supplies and economies . The chance of conviction would depend not just on whether or not the evidence proves the suspects were involved, but also on whether or not their justification would be accepted. On the whole, there just isn’t enough to be gained by considering the “war on terror” a real war and arguing that the 9/11 attacks were war crimes. So we’re back to the courts.

There is, as detractors have pointed out, a chance that the suspects will be acquitted if tried in our normal court system. Well, no shit. Pardon my language, but this is the United States of America - there damned well better be a chance they’ll be acquitted. A situation in which the suspects have no chance of being acquitted would be antithetical to everything our country is supposed to stand for. We’re not supposed to be the ones with kangaroo courts and staged trials - that’s the badguys who do that stuff. We’re supposed to be the ones who make every effort to prove that suspects are guilty of a crime before being punished. We shouldn’t be rooting for the terrorists to be lined up and shot without having their day in court, we should be pushing to try accused terrorists in open court so that if they are convicted, at the end there will be no question of their guilt. At the end of the day there should be no accusations of unfairness and no sense of doubt. We show our friends and enemies alike that all are equal in the eyes of our law, and our standards don’t change according to our national whims. And most importantly, we make sure innocents aren’t convicted while the guilty remain free.

A concern that applies to these men and to others who have been captured since 2001 is that some evidence against them might be inadmissible in court because it was obtained by methods that are not acceptable to our court system. And while it certainly would be a shame if guilty men may go free because evidence against them was obtained by illegal methods, it would be more of a shame if the methods in question were legitimized by our government separately from our usual legal system. If an interrogation method is not admissible in our courts, there’s a reason for it. The goal of our court system isn’t to make it as hard as possible to prosecute criminals, the goal is to ensure that in the end the verdicts obtained are the right ones. It’s not a system of convenience. Confessions obtained via torture aren’t reliable, so they shouldn’t be used to prosecute anyone, whether in civilian or military court, if you’re actually interested in an honest conviction.

So I can’t get behind this business of special tribunals and other approaches to illegal actions that bypass our courts and our laws. Fear that a criminal might escape justice is not a good enough reason to bypass justice. Despite what we feel in our guts, we can’t just know that someone is guilty because they were in a particular place, or associated with a particular person, or even because someone else fingered them in an interrogation. We have to prove it if we want to stick to our value system. There have been too many times in our past when the public just knew that someone was guilty, and convicted them in the media or the court of public opinion, and they were later revealed to be innocent. There’s no reason to suborn justice to the fear and outrage of individuals or of mobs.

After Sarah Palin "wrote" a book in fairly record time, someone still managed to get a parody book ready for release on the same day as Palin's novel.

Sarah Palin's book is Going Rogue – An American Life, and it will be released on November 17.

The parody is Going Rouge: Sarah Palin, An American Nightmare, which will be a collection of essays on Palin taken from "The Nation", a lefty magazine. Note the similar covers, though the parody will be paperback, while Palin's book will be in hardcover.

But why stop at a straight book parody? Also due to ship at the same time as Palin's book and "The Nation's" book will be Going Rouge – The Sarah Palin Rogue Coloring and Activity Book, authored and illustrated by Michael Stinson (a radio show host) and his wife.

Yes, I snickered when someone at the Washington Post misspelled the title of Palin's book and called it "Going Rouge", but little did I know that there were already people keyed up to use that title for actual things that they could sell in a timely fashion. It's a valuable lesson in how empty and fruitless is the life of someone who snarks from the sidelines. I need to get in on the ground floor of the next mockable politician before her stardom peaks (this is the peak for Palin, once the book is out it's all downhill mockery-wise). Michelle Bachman still has some good potential, but there has to be some other small-town mayor out there just waiting to unleash their inner crazy and get a cult following in national politics. I think the liberals are due on that score. I wonder if it's too late for Gavin Newsom to go into "Rogue Mode" before California's gubernatorial elections next year...

Barnes and Noble has announced their new e-reader device, the Nook, which will ship in late November. It has a color touchpad screen at the bottom of the device, an e-ink display above, and can read epub, eReader, and PDF files. They're selling them for $259, which is an improvement in e-reader device pricing, but still far from where they need to be to start becoming common sights.

Like Amazon and their Kindle, B&N will have an online store that can be accessed via a 3G wireless network (B&N uses AT&T, Amazon uses Sprint). The Nook will also be able to use a local wireless network, and will have free access to the Internet via wi-fi at Barnes and Noble stores. It sounds like one way B&N will try to distinguish their store from Amazon's is by including a lot of free e-books on the store - likely stuff from the Gutenberg Project and other out-of-copyright works, along with books authors release under free licenses (like Cory Doctorow's novels).

Another noteworthy feature in the Nook is the ability to loan books to other Nook readers for 14 days. The inability to share has always been a big problem with secured e-books. It's a feature of the eReader software, so you'd also be able to loan books to iPod Touch/iPhone users, as well as people running eReader software on Macs, PCs, and some Blackberries. That's the kind of feature that makes me crave a Nook. Even though I don't know anyone else who reads e-books that I could loan them to. I'm just like that. Don't judge me.

The color touch screen and replaceable back cover and such sound like fluff, but maybe they're the kind of design additions that would make people more impressed when they're looking at the devices in a B&N store and make them want one. We'll see. It's a shame they don't have direct HTML support (I wouldn't think it would be hard to do), but there are programs that will convert HTML to epub format so that's not a sticking point for a vaguely tech-savvy user. Same with Word and RTF.

This is the sort of announcement that, honestly, has me eyeing my Cybook Gen3 and grumbling a little. The Barnes and Noble offering sounds like it would have all the features I would want, and supporting secure eReader formats would let me keep buying books from Fictionwise, my preferred e-book site (which, incidentally, was recently bought by B&N anyway).

Meanwhile my Cybook doesn't even support organizing books by folders, a feature that's been "in the works" for two years now. It's promised in the next firmware update, but that update's been really long in coming - the last word from the company was in mid-August, saying that firmware release would come in "a few weeks". I still like my Cybook, and have no problem reading on it - it's just that the only feature that distinguishes it today is that it can read secure Mobi files (and since Amazon bought Mobi but hasn't made the Kindle work with non-Amazon format Mobi files, that format is dying a slow death). The next firmware update includes epub support, but because of Mobi's licensing restrictions (and Amazon's understandable reluctance to make exceptions to it), you can either update the firmware for Mobi reading or for epub reading - but not both at the same time. You have to swap firmware versions to read another format.

So anyway, Cybook tangent aside - the Barnes and Noble Nook sounds like it might be a pretty neat device, with some handy features and support for an open format (epub) that doesn't tie you to a particular retailer to get content. Barring any nasty surprises, it seems that B&N approached their e-reader device in a more sensible way than Amazon did the Kindle (by using the wireless access to their storefront to give them an advantage but not lock customers into them exclusively), and I hope it pays off for them in what is, right now, a pretty niche market.

A friend once asked me if I believe the adage, “It is better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all.” And my answer is the same now as it was then - yes. This month would have marked twenty years together. The weather changes in Florida in October, and with it comes the winter air and a certain scent. I smell it, as the weather turns colder, and the memory of love surges to the fore. The happiness, the contentment, all that mushy stuff that I miss, and I wish I could have back. It’s a memory that hurts to relive, but I wouldn’t give it up. Now sucks, but then was pretty darn good, and I’m glad I got to experience it.

Last year I had my gall bladder out, and there’s one thing I find I actually miss from my stay in the hospital, and that’s the pain relief. Not the pain relievers - if there was any high there, I didn’t get to enjoy that, more’s the pity. What I miss is the way the pain would build, and build, and then the time would come when a nurse would pop into my room, inject a pain killer into my IV, and the pain would slip away. It was a soothing return to normalcy.

I can’t duplicate that for my heart (to be mushy again). There’s still an emptiness there. I’ve gotten used to it, I try to live around it and everything, but that still doesn’t make it feel normal. I can get distracted, lose myself in a game or a book or just everyday life, but it still comes back, and there’s never really any relief for it - just times when it’s background noise.

Yeah, this is all pretty self-absorbed stuff, but that’s what personal blogs are for. Just be grateful I’m not Twittering it in bite-size chunks. This way it’s easy to skim.

I don’t think I mentioned it here, but I had a revelation about Barbara’s death recently, or at least what probably led to it. She had been taking a drug called Prednisone, and at the time of her suicide I’d found some anecdotal evidence that it could exacerbate suicidal tendencies. That seemed likely, but it was still just kind of a possibility. I’d mention it to people and they’d nod sympathetically, and I’d wonder if they really thought I was right, that it could have caused her to go over the edge and take her life, or if they were just humoring me. Well now, years later, I went and looked up Prednisone again, and the material on its links to suicide is much more than anecdotal.

Listed among possible side effects of the drug now is suicidal thoughts and personality shifts. I found many stories from parents saying that their children had gone from seeming normal and well-adjusted to repeated suicide attempts after only brief periods on the drug. They’re horror stories. They don’t really leave any doubt - Prednisone does some impressive and unique stuff, but the side effects are greater than they’d suspected back in 2004, when the worst that any official list of side effects included was possible hallucinations. Now they list the possibility of full-blown schizophrenia.

Now, I know Barbara wasn’t normal and well-adjusted. I’m certain that she was planning to eventually take her life if doctors couldn’t help improve the problems she was having with her back and with her hearing. But “planning” is the key word there. She planned, and she was patient, and she was giving the doctors a chance.

So I don’t have any doubt anymore. Prednisone killed Barbara. She took the drug, and it had its psychological effect, and she took her own life because of it.

While I’m convinced of the truth of that, I still haven’t really wrapped my brain around it completely. When I read about the research that had been done on the drug since 2004, and what had been learned, and the last piece snapped into place and my doubt was eliminated, realization was painful to say the least. I relived the agony I’d felt when she died. The pain of loss rushed back to me, but with it was an even more overwhelming sense of guilt than I’d felt before. Because all these years I had been asking, in my mind, “Why did you do it? Why didn’t you think of me, why didn’t you give the doctors more time, why did you leave me?” Even knowing the reasons she gave in her letter, there was still that pretty natural survivor’s selfish questioning - “How could you do this to me?”

So imagine the guilt if you’ve been understanding, and forgiving, but still unable to keep from blaming someone for taking their life, for several years. And then you realize that it wasn’t her choice. That she was under the influence of a drug in a way that her doctor at the time couldn’t have predicted, that she wouldn’t have known about. She died because of the drug, not because she decided enough was finally enough. I’d been blaming her, but it wasn’t her fault.

My mind still starts to slip into that old questioning mode, in my more self-pitying moments. I start to ask, “Why?” Then I remember that I know why. That it’s not a question she adequately answered in her letter, when she wrote that she had intended to put more things in order before taking that step, but just couldn’t wait any longer. That was why she couldn’t wait - she was taking a drug, and the drug killed her. It’s something I can understand and accept on a rational level, but subconsciously I still struggle with the reality of it. She did it, but she didn’t really do it on her own, completely of her own free will. She couldn’t entirely think of me, or of the consequences. She just needed to do it.

There’s no one I can blame. I can’t even blame her. And that’s pretty disconcerting, I’m finding. An action was taken, someone did do this thing that tore me up inside, but there’s still no one to blame. It wasn’t even some random accident, so I can’t just muse on the injustice of fate’s impartiality and settle into a philosophical ennui. She did it, but she didn’t do it. She shouldn’t have taken the drug, but no one could have known it at the time. No one did anything wrong, and there just wasn’t any intent that I can point to anywhere along the way and say, “That did it, right there. That’s what I should hate, and blame, and rail against.”

So I sit here, in the middle of this October night, with the window open and the smell of the winter air wafting into my room, and I feel sorry for myself, and I feel sorry for Barbara. And most of all I feel guilty. Not just because I wasn’t somehow there to stop her, but because I’ve been blaming her for something she couldn’t control. All of it’s irrational, especially knowing what I know now - that there really wasn’t anything I could have seen coming, that because she acted out of character I couldn’t have predicted it. And in the intervening years I couldn’t have known that the blame was unjust - it was just a chance conversation with someone that sent me looking up Prednisone again after five years to see what side effects were listed today.

The situation already sucked. It’s just that now it sucks in a different way. And I’ve had to get used to it all over again. Antidepressants can keep me from weeping about it, sleeping pills can help me sleep despite it, painkillers can fend off headaches from furrowing my brow thinking about it - but nothing makes the ache in my chest go away, or keeps that awareness of deep loss from dominating my thoughts from time to time.

There’s no painkiller for the soul.

How’s that for melodrama? I think I’m getting better at it.

Seriously, it won't end. The Kansas Supreme Court has ruled, and other courts seem likely to do the same, that a good chunk of the mortgages that were being traded cannot be foreclosed upon by the organization that purportedly holds them. Part of that whole bailout thing was because of all the mortgages that were being defaulted on by people who couldn't afford them, and a real estate market that was dramatically reducing the values of the properties covered (and which didn't have the buyers to let anyone recoup that reduced value from many of the properties in question). The bailout appears to have simply bought time for the courts to figure out that the mortgage securities trading was handled so sloppily that it violates some pretty basic property laws. So now the companies that "own" the mortgages can't foreclose on them, so they have nothing. And so do their investors.

The laws in question (I'm oversimplifying a bit) stipulate that to foreclose on a property one has to be able to present the original agreement with the homeowner and have registered any transfers of the lien with local government. It seems that a large number of the mortgages at the center of the financial crisis can't meet that requirement - they've been parceled and handed around to the point where the mortgages exist as data, but no longer exist as actual, provable agreements. So the mortgages covered by the Kansas ruling are now unsecured loans - the ruling actually means that in some cases the homeowner will get the home back, mortgage be damned. The ruling only applies in Kansas, but since the opinion as written draws on very basic law, not obscure interpretations of law, it's quite likely that the result will be duplicated elsewhere.

In summary: The big finance companies are likely screwed, again. But at least this time they can see it coming - it will be a while before enough other rulings crop up for the effects to really be felt nationwide. It's not likely to be an easy issue to settle, either - it's going to take either new law from state and national legislatures to "save" the mortgage holders, or ownership really will revert to the homeowners, they get to ignore the mortgage (at their credit rating's peril, but that's probably a minor point if they were already set to be foreclosed), and financial fallout will ensue.

That, of course, is if I read all of it right, and the people I'm borrowing the information from did too (some of the comments on this blog, which appears to have been first to break the story, are interesting reading). It's possible the actual problem is that the company that lost the ruling, MERS, acts as a front for the investors who are supposed to have purchased the mortgages. Therefore MERS itself has no legal standing to foreclose, and the investors would have to come out from behind the shield company and engage in the action themselves if they hold the required documentation. One does imagine, however, that there was likely a reason those investors were working through MERS in an essentially anonymous role.

Parts of the opinion itself are decent reading too, if you can skim through the legalese bits to get there. Like the part where the court muses on the actual role of MERS in the proceedings:

The mortgage instrument states that MERS functions "solely as nominee" for the lender and lender’s successors and assigns. The word "nominee" is defined nowhere in the mortgage document, and the functional relationship between MERS and the lender is likewise not defined. In the absence of a contractual definition, the parties leave the definition to judicial interpretation.
What meaning is this court to attach to MERS’s designation as nominee for Millennia? The parties appear to have defined the word in much the same way that the blind men of Indian legend described an elephant–their description depended on which part they were touching at any given time.

So Dungeons and Dragons Online has gone free-to-play-with-premium-content. What that means, essentially, is that you can download the client, roll up a character or two, and play for a good while without it costing a dime. To make money they've made some content "premium", which means you either buy it (a one-time price, then that adventure pack is available to any character you make), or you subscribe for the $15 per month rate they'd been using before to get access to almost everything. You can also buy items from their store, access to extra races or classes, or perks like extra character slots or fancy hair dyes. Yes, hair dyes.

On the game itself, I've been playing it for a while and it's vastly improved over what it was when the game first released. This is one of those MMORPG things, so it's a been more action-oriented than the pen-and-paper game (and takes some liberties with some rules to accommodate the different format), but most of the mechanics are recognizable for anyone with experience with D&D. The graphics aren't stunning but they're decent for a game that's been around so long, the interface can seem a little clunky at times, and characters can feel weak for the first few levels, but if you find a class that fits your playstyle the game turns out to be a lot of fun. The dungeons are what make DDO stand out - scripted events, puzzles, and traps can make for a much more interesting leveling experience than what you usually see in MMOs.

The business model is a pretty experimental one as far as "premium" MMOs go. There are other games that have been free-to-play, but this is the first one that's gone from a purely subscription-based model to a free-but-buy-stuff model. It can be hard wrapping your brain around paying for "adventure packs" one at a time rather than just subscribing, or buying an expansion pack that includes a bunch of content all at once. Still, buying all the dungeon packs appears to cost a little less than a lifetime subscription to MMOs that offer it (like Turbine's other fantasy MMO, Lord of the Rings Online), and the monthly subscription is still an option. I hope the approach works well for DDO, both because I like being able to play what is essentially a long demo before having to plunk down money for the game, and because the ability to buy content piecemeal can be kinder to a casual player than having to pay for a monthly subscription (if they only play on weekends, for instance).

One feature that does bode well for their model, I think, is that if you subscribe you get an additional allotment of points per month that you can spend in the in-game store. If you aren't looking to spend those points on extra bags or hair coloring, you can spend them on "guest passes" instead. The guest passes can be used to grant another character access to a premium dungeon for 90 minutes - good for bringing a friend through a dungeon they haven't purchased. The hardcore players who find the game worth subscribing can still run through adventures with friends who haven't subscribed or bought adventure packs. Since it's the social aspect of MMORPGs that keeps people playing more than anything else, that feature means more people in the game, and thus more candidates for eventual subscription or smaller purchases.

If you check it out, I'm on Cannith server, and usually play a dwarven rogue named Lapin. The game's worth trying if you enjoy fantasy MMORPGs, even if it's just to check out the way they implemented Dungeon Master-narrated adventures.

Okay, this is my new favorite thing in the whole world.

http://translationparty.com/tp/#2298247
http://translationparty.com/tp/#2297109
http://translationparty.com/tp/#2298455
http://translationparty.com/tp/#2280183

So here in the US we’ve been having a very public, and very hostile, debate about national health care reform. Facts and lies are flying back and forth, people are getting all worked up and shouting at each other, and recently we’ve even got people showing up outside town hall meetings wearing handguns openly.

The hostility, it’s not so good. If you wear a gun in public just about anywhere (yes, even in the Deep South), and you’re not wearing some kind of uniform that goes along with the weapon, people tend to get alarmed. This is because wearing a sidearm in public is a statement. Yes, it’s legal, but its legality doesn’t divorce the act from the implied threat that comes from wearing a handgun to a public debate, particularly when you’re making it clear you disagree with the politician hosting the event. It’s great that you found a way to get noticed and make people pay attention to your message, but the words on your placard get overlooked when observers spot your gun and then spend the rest of their time craning their necks looking for a police officer or staring at your hands to make sure they don’t twitch toward your holster.

Guns on a rack in a pick-up truck in the South: Normal. A handgun in a visible holster while you’re hanging out on a sidewalk: Not normal, and generally a cause for alarm. I know, I live in the South (sort of, Florida) and have lived deeper in the South before (North Carolina, including smaller towns therein). And while I did see things there that you wouldn’t expect to see in other parts of the country (like a “live crucifixion event” for Easter, or malls where you can smoke inside), I never saw anyone wearing a handgun at their side that weren’t police, military, or security guards. If you’re wearing an unconcealed handgun, it’s a safe bet that the people nearby who are carrying their concealed handguns (properly licensed of course, so also legal) are watching you like a hawk, just in case you’re planning on starting a situation that would give them a reason to use their own guns, and then later go home and tell the wife, “I told you so! I told you I needed to carry that gun with me for protection!”

I’m not trying to make fun of the South, or of gun owners. I’m just trying to warn health care opponents who think this business of bringing guns to protests is a good idea that no, it really isn’t. If you practice any kind of gun safety, you don’t openly bring a gun into a situation where emotions will run high, like a bitter political debate.

Of course, I’m actually not trying to talk about guns at all. I just got sidetracked because the idea of armed resistance to health care is a terrifying and funny mental image. “If you want to take my appendix out, doctor, you’ll have to shoot me to do it.”

No, I wanted to talk about the “public option” which has been bandied about a great deal but not really explained much. The latest burst of news about it was that it looked like the White House was going to back off of demanding a public option in a final health care reform bill, so then the liberals got impressively worked up and called their representatives and made threats, and so the representatives made threats to the administration, and now the administration is acting innocent, like they want everyone to believe their floating of the idea of dropping the public option was just a dream, it never happened, of course they still want the public option in the bill. Oh, Obama. You got us so worked up during the campaign, and you did such a good job of defending yourself from personal and policy attacks on the campaign trail, and now you’re hoping to avoid more hard work and just coast on your good looks. Someday we’ll figure out who is the real Obama, the one who talks about making hard choices and championing worthy causes, or the one who won’t shut up about bipartisanship and compromises when it’s clear that no one in either party is listening anymore.

But yeah, the public option. It’s important to understand what the reformers want it to be so you can make an informed decision about whether or not you would tolerate the idea. It is indeed just one part of this big package of reforms, but it’s widely considered the most important, since it would be the most fundamental change to the system and would have the most potential for changing the system in a way that reduces overall spending on health care in the US.

In a nutshell, the public option would be medicare for people who have previously been too young to get medicare. It would be the “public medicare” rather than using private companies that provide medicare, apparently (I’ve never understood that bit about medicare myself, being too young to qualify for it anyway). It wouldn’t be free, but the goal would be to provide this public medicare option for an affordable price to anyone who wants it.

I will use a bad analogy to help illustrate the situation. Imagine a town that has several new car dealerships but no used car lots - no one sells used cars. In that circumstance there will be people who can afford new cars and buy them, there will be people who would rather not have to pay so much for a car but wind up doing it anyway, since they need the transportation even if it does mean a tighter budget. And there will be those who just can’t afford new car prices, and don’t get a car at all.

Now the government comes in and opens a used car lot. People who prefer new cars will continue to go to the new car dealerships, but the people who had been stretching their budgets to afford the new cars will likely switch to buying used cars, so the existing dealerships will see some loss in income. At the same time, some of the people who couldn’t afford new cars at all would be able to buy used cars now, though there would still be some who can’t afford used cars either.

See, not a great analogy, but it will serve. The new car dealerships are the private insurance companies. The public option is the used car dealership. The public option is meant to provide competition to the private insurers, but it is not a national health care program - it won’t be free for subscribers, and you’d have to opt into it.

The main argument against the public option is that it puts government in competition with private insurers and will steal customers and profits away from those insurers. Opponents are worried that with the government plan undercutting private insurers, the insurance companies will have to cut services in order to stay competitive, and might not even be able to compete if the government-run system has too many cost advantages. They’re legitimate concerns - we want to improve the cost and quality of health care available in the country, and introducing a public plan that would eventually cripple the private insurers would not have the desired effect.

Proponents of the public option hope that the result of competition between a government-run public option and the private insurers will be reduced prices from the private insurers and an improvement in the efficiency of the overall health care system. I know “efficiency” isn’t a word usually associated with government in the US, but medicare is a precedent there. A public health care system that’s stuck working with limited tax dollars and bureaucratic regulations is a good breeding ground for ideas to improve the system and make it more efficient. While a private company is going be focused primarily on cost and profit, a public insurance system is required to maintain a minimum level of service as a priority over cost changes. So a public option wouldn’t be able to just cut a high-risk patient to preserve profits, or send orders down to refuse procedures multiple times in the hopes the requesters will go away - their avenues for innovation lie in different directions from private insurers, which is why medicare has a history of progress in that area, and it’s reasonable to expect that a public option would benefit from that history as well.

The public option also offers the benefit of a baseline for health care. For insurance companies to compete with a public option they’ll have to provide better services, or lower cost services, or some combinations of those in order to keep workers from switching over to the public option en masse. The baseline is kind of like imposing a bunch of rules and regulations on the insurance industry without having to figure out how to make them implement the changes, how to enforce them, and how to monitor them. Instead the government sets the bar with their public option, and if private insurers want to continue to compete they have to adapt and reform to go along with it. The government would be using capitalism as their primary tool in reforming health care costs. Kind of neat.

Some backers of the public option do so because they’re hoping it will eventually evolve into something more: A single-payer system. A single-payer system is where you, the insured, go to the doctor and get some procedure done. And when the doctor goes to work out the financial details, he doesn’t have to consult arcane manuals regarding the process to send the insurance company the list of procedures he wants covered for you, and doesn’t have to get a different price quote for the same procedure back from every insurance company he ever talks to. Instead, under a single-payer system, the doctor just worries about getting the claim submitted to one clearinghouse (run by the government, yes), which keeps a list of standard costs for procedures, and handles routing the claim to the appropriate insurance company. The idea being consumers can get a better idea of what things will cost up front (since right now you can easily get multiple quotes for a procedure up front, and by the end of the insurance process all those estimates will turn out to have been wrong), while doctors won’t have to have office workers spending costly hours poring over manuals and talking to insurance contacts just to file simple claims. Since it streamlines the whole affair, it saves the system money. Just not always the private insurers, who have buildings full of people handling those claims and comparing state and federal regulations for the estimated costs of those procedures against what doctors and hospitals are submitting so they can squeeze the most money out of everyone else by picking just the right price that balances what they have to pay the hospital with the customer’s co-pay. Under a single-payer system the legerdemain is out the window.

So the single-payer system would be a cost-saver and a headache-saver, but it’s another one of those things the private insurance companies would suffer from because the practices they’re entrenched in now have been rather good for them. The public option could evolve into a single-payer system if it begins to dominate compared to private insurance, or if it develops efficient procedures that are so nice that even the private insurers decide the benefits of efficiency outweigh the money lost by accepting a set of health care standards. Single-payer wouldn’t eliminate competition either, but the insurance companies are so opposed to it that it wasn’t even on the table in the run-up to forming the health care reform bills. Some back-room deal killed it before it could even get any committee debate.

So there you are, two of the terms that are being tossed around as people argue about whether or not health care reform is a good thing. There are other aspects of health care reform being crammed into these bills, of course, but they’re not as flashy and radical as a public option.

Oh, and there are no death panels, and never were any. That was just living will stuff. Living wills are where you tell someone beforehand how you want your healthcare handled if you’re incapacitated in certain situations - whether to pull the plug if you’re brain dead, which of your family members you would prefer to be consulted for life and death decisions for you, that kind of thing. Normally they’re quite uncontroversial, save the health care system money overall, and most of the politicians going off on “death panels” have at some point in the past talked about the importance of making a living will, just to give an idea of how present expedience can override past wisdom. As far as anyone can tell there are no death panels in the health care reform bills, and if there were, no one would vote for them - politicians are self-serving, sure, but they’re not dumb. Most of them. The only death panel equivalents I know of are in the private insurance companies, deciding when to drop customers who have become too expensive to keep supporting their policies. Profits before pancreatitis, sorry about that grandma. Good luck paying for that operation now.

So there you are, my effort on clarifying parts of the current health care debate in a friendly, non-rabid way. After this, I’ll happily get all frothy at the mouth in an argument if someone wants to butt heads, or to just calmly try to answer any questions anyone may have. Your choice, both are fun for me. The House has passed a version of health care reform, and the text of that bill is available online if you poke around some. The Senate is still working on their version, which is why there’s so much attention on them and what they’ll do when they get out of recess. If the Senate passes a bill too, the House and Senate bills will go into a joint committee, get hashed up some more, and then a final bill will go up before the House and Senate. If it passes in both places, then it will go on to the President to be signed into law. So there’s still a ways to go before health care reform gets finalized, if it even reaches that point. There are plenty of opportunities along the way for sabotage or just old-fashioned defeat for the Senate version or for whatever beast might come out of a joint committee.

Ever since Barack Obama took office as President of the United States there's been a lot of crazy going around. I don't mean people disagreeing with his goals or policies - that's healthy, and great, and I've long felt that vigorous debate is a Good Thing. The crazy is the people demonstrating and ranting and shouting and threatening and foaming at the mouth over, well, nonsense. The crazies are ranting against "socialized medicine" while clinging to their Medicare without the vaguest notion of irony. They're loudly denouncing massive government spending as the doom of the country that they didn't bat an eye at under previous administrations. And they're crying about the end of the America they loved.

The crazies aren't the ones who simply oppose these policies. The crazies are the ones who shout down any opposition, who go to meetings with politicians not to listen or argue, but just to disrupt. They're the ones who believe that health care reform will mandate euthanizing the elderly. They're the ones who, despite a published birth certificate, testimonials from Hawaiian government officials, and two contemporary newspaper birth announcements, maintain that Obama was not born in the United States. Not only are their arguments far removed from established fact, they won't allow anyone to state anything to the contrary in their presence. All they appear to have to bolster those beliefs is a will for them to be true.

I've decided that at the core of those beliefs is racism. I believe that it's not that they truly believe that Obama pulled a fast one and was born in Kenya, and it's not that they found a line in the health care reform legislation that no one else did talking about killing old people and eliminating private insurance - it's that they don't like having a black President, but that saying so in public will cost them more credibility than the nonsense they babble about now.

Here's why I believe that racism has to be at the root of the seemingly insane belief that Obama has somehow destroyed the country well under a year into his term: the alternative is to concede that the believers really are insane. That there really is a sizeable portion of the electorate - a motivated, vocal portion of the population - that honestly thinks these claims are true. And that's a hell of a lot more scary than if it's racism. Racism I can understand; I can wrap my brain around that. It's irrational, sure, and it's widely considered deplorable, but at least it's a reason.

So I'm sticking to that. The angry hordes aren't mindless followers of talk radio and Fox News, aren't willing shills of insurance companies, and aren't blind, rabid partisans. They're just white people who are afraid of black people, and are faced with the distressing reality of a black man in the White House. That's actually a thought that will let me sleep at night. It's something I expected when Obama was elected. It's something that will go away in time, and will be reduced to a quiet grumbling if the world doesn't end by this time next year.

If that isn't it, we're in for some rough years. If it isn't racism and is instead an honest belief in untruths that are as easy to disprove as a Google search, then their behavior will only escalate if things don't go their way. Democrats will get a short-term political boost as the crazies drive moderates away from the Republican party, but in the long term that will just make the crazies feel more desperate. They'll find themselves ignored and even more marginalized, will be distressed by people who don't get it, whatever "it" is in their fevered imaginations, and will act accordingly - with greater and greater extremism, and escalating efforts to attract attention to their cause.

So I'm in the unexpected position of rooting for racism. These are strange times indeed.

An Israeli cellphone carrier's commercial shows IDF troops getting a ball kicked over the border wall, then playing with it, kicking it back, having it returned, etc. Lots of good playful fun!



Then some Palestinians tried that for real:



Instead of the ball being kicked back, they got tear gas grenades. Marketing, meet reality.

A publisher complained that the e-book versions of some books they sold for the Kindle were unauthorized. To remedy the situation, Amazon not only stopped selling the books, but also remotely deleted the books from the Kindles of anyone who had purchased the books, then refunded the purchase price to those customers.

The books were George Orwell's 1984 and Animal Farm.

Nothing ironic about remotely deleting 1984 from people's Kindles, no way. I think I'll stick with my Cybook e-book reader that doesn't talk to the mothership, doesn't depend on a single content provider, and doesn't care what I put on it because it's mine.

Sonia Sotomayor was questioned by Senators today, and it largely showed why someone who is expert at speeches and formal debates (like a good politician) should not attempt "gotchas" when questioning someone with extensive courtroom experience, an environment in which cross-examination is king. I say that as a former debater who will admit that his strength was always in the speeches, not the cross-examination, but I know someone who's damned good when I see them. And her answers, at least, show she has a serious command of the format.

First example: Sotomayor's patient response to Orrin Hatch's question concerning a ruling upholding New York's ban on nunchucks.



She's a judge and she's a ninja! Note how she answers calmly and patiently, turning his question into a discussion of why a state might try to ban nunchucks and the context in which a judge would have to consider that matter.

The other example is her answer to Jeff Sessions concerning a line she often used in speeches about how she hopes a "wise latina woman" would reach a better conclusion than someone with an, um, less ethnic background, let's say. It's a dumb remark the way she used it, though the explanation she pushes in the following answer is that she meant that wise people can disagree whatever their backgrounds (the short version, anyway). I buy it well enough, since her actual decisions don't indicate a racial bias (indeed, in the much-discussed Ricci case the plaintiffs she ruled against included Hispanics), and because the line quoted from those speeches always starts with, "I would hope..."

But no matter. What I liked about her answer in the following is that Sessions mentions a Judge Cederbaum in his question, and she smiles and chuckles. He appears to get defensive at that, and insists she disagreed with said judge. And when she does answer his question, she begins by saying that her friend, Judge Cederbaum, is in the audience behind her.



I think that's further evidence that she's a ninja. The way Sessions looks down quickly when he absorbs her statement is priceless. The overall answer isn't bad either - as often as she's probably had to talk about that, she doesn't seem as impatient or annoyed about it yet as I know I would be.

Once again I'm left wondering at what the Republicans think they have to gain by pushing so hard on the "she's a racist" and "she's an activist" tracks. It should have been obvious from one-on-one interviews that she'd handle the attacks well in a hearing setting, so their maneuvers are likely to help her and hurt them. Someone needs to explain to Republican leadership that a relevant opposition party doesn't just automatically oppose everything the party in power does, they provide a logical counterpoint to the ruling party. You don't get back into power through knee-jerk reactions, you regain it by making the people you want to replace look more irresponsible with their office than you would be.

Heck, this Supreme Court nominee has handed down largely moderate, well-documented decisions in her career. Conservatives should be thrilled to have her as a nominee from a President they consider liberal - with Democrats controlling Congress he could have easily pushed through someone with views more similar to David Souter to replace him. With her on the Court it will maintain a right-leaning bias, which should be what they want. So why try to catch her off-guard with questions about nunchucks?

It's probably too late now, but the best thing they could have done was pre-empt Obama. With all the "Party of No" stuff to date, they could have asked her probing questions, declared themselves satisfied with her answers, and then supported her and voted for her. Then all the press would talk about would be how the Republicans were willing to be persuaded by her rather than about the fact that Obama nominated her, and the coveted "Hispanic vote" would shift to the right with one clever stroke. And they'd have that one throwaway vote to point to to make them look reasonable when they go back to fighting against Obama's legislative agenda.

I want competent parties competing with each other in Washington, not the farce that US politics has turned into. Maybe something will change in the next couple of decades.

So I read this neat article that talks about kidney donation, how having more live donors would benefit a lot of people who could use transplants, etc. Good stuff. And the article mentioned a National Kidney Registry that was set up to let people register to donate their kidneys. Also nifty. Then I got to the part of the article that discusses compensation for donors, and how it's illegal in the US but legal-yet-shady in some other unnamed countries, and illegal-but-possible in yet others.

So I got curious about that part, plugged "sell kidney" into Google to see what would come up, and the third result gave me this site. Why, if I could have just written a simple post about kidney donation, have I instead built up to a link to sellkidney.com? Because apart from the amusingly bad English, the right-hand sidebar on their homepage describes how you can refer a friend and get 20% of what they pay for a kidney. And even better: The special is only good until September 1. There's a special offer on buying a kidney but for a limited time only.

Stunning.

Interestingly that link follows a well-written (and blunt, and informative, and cynical) article that came in at #2 for the search (#1 was a less useful but not awful askmen.com article). It's a frank discussion of what options exist for profiting off your bodily fluids and body parts, the risks involved, and the legal issues. I'm not inclined to follow up on the possibilities (though I have already participated in some clinical trials and likely will again someday), but to me the article was a fascinating read. With a good chuckle at the sheer number of "I want to sell my kidney!" comments attached to it. My favorite being toward the end of the list, from May 29 this year, that greets one "in the name of our Lord Jesus Christ" then makes the less-than-Christian offer to donate a kidney for $150,000 plus expenses.

Most politicians would be wise enough to drop out of sight for a while after a surprise resignation. But not Sarah Palin. She just keeps on speaking, and thus keeps on giving fodder to people who think she's unhinged. On Monday she gave a bunch of interviews (which aired this morning), and TPM collected highlights. Granted, they aren't Palin fans over there, so it's not edited to show her in the best light, but it captures the gist of what she was trying to get across. Some interesting lines in there, like when she's asked why she didn't stay on the job after saying she wouldn't seek re-election. She said that would have been "politics as usual". Well...yeah, I suppose it would have been...

My favorite part is that the interviews were all done with her, in waders, getting ready to go fishing. A reason she gave for stepping down is all the time her staffers have had to put in handling her ethics complaints, and there she is on a Monday, fishing instead of working. Yeah, people are entitled to days off (and long holiday weekends), but right after complaining that your staffers are having trouble finding time to get their work done, you take a day off? And you give interviews while getting your boat ready, to emphasize that you aren't working that day? And you're quitting in a few weeks?

Yes, clearly the job is very important to her. I take it back, there's no scandal waiting in the wings. I'm siding with the people who are guessing that she just got tired of the job. It wasn't fun anymore, it was too much hard work, or she was tired of the scrutiny that came with her position. Someone quitting for the greater good and regretting leaving a job wouldn't be cheerfully giving interviews on the beach, they'd be getting their work affairs in order. They'd be setting up the transition, and finishing any work they felt was important or that they considered pet projects. Palin's behavior fits instead that of someone who's quitting and can't wait to get out. She's positively cheerful in those interviews, no appearance of regret. A burden has been lifted from her.

Yeah, those last bits are amateur long-distance psychoanalysis, but politics isn't as much fun if you only stick with facts and details.

Yeah, I know, I can't stop obsessing, even though I'm quite sure no one who reads my posts has more than a passing interest in politics, let alone Alaskan politics. I figure the same is true of any other subject I would post on too, so I'm safely in narcissistic blogging territory, right where I should be.

I wanted to mention, first, that the transcript I linked yesterday (which was posted at Talking Points Memo) accurately reflects the official transcript of Palin's speech. Which is to say, the all-caps words and exclamation points and such are not embellishments. Whoever put the official transcript together really does write like they're in high school. I saw one blogger say that it proves Palin wrote the thing by herself, but her spokeswoman/advisor Meghan Stapleton has made it obvious in the past that her communication skills are subpar, so I figure it could have been her work too. Either way it's a given it was no professional speech writer, which reinforces the idea that it was a rushed, last-minute kind of speech.

Also the blogosphere and the press alike are abuzz with speculation and will continue to be for a while I expect. Palin did try to bury the story by announcing her resignation not only on Friday afternoon (the usual time to release news you want ignored), but the day before July 4 to boot. And the day she announced the lieutenant governor will be sworn in is July 25 - a Saturday. What kind of jerk schedules a government function on a Saturday? I guess the kind of jerk who's trying desperately to keep something low-key that would generally not, in any way, be an under-the-radar sort of activity. Like a state governor resigning mid-term.

One of the reasons some bloggers have latched onto is the possibility of looming scandal. One blogger posits that federal authorities have been looking more closely into some shady business that happened while she was mayor of Wasilla. During her two terms she had a house built and the town had a sports complex built, and there have been questions for a while about whether contracts given for the sports complex were rewards for work done on her house (which Todd Palin has claimed he built himself with the help of some "contractor buddies"). It's always sounded like a case that would be hard to make, since there aren't many records regarding the construction of the house, but it certainly would be the kind of scandal Palin wouldn't want dragged out while she was preparing for another run at the governorship. I just can't see how it would make her resign right now.

Thing is, Palin didn't resign when Troopergate came up, she didn't step down when she became McCain's running mate, she went through with that even though it would inevitably be reported that she had a teenage daughter who was pregnant, and she's shrugged off all those other ethics complaints that she brought up in her resignation speech. So if she's as impervious to criticism as she appears, just why would she resign as governor? I can't even see a federal investigation pushing her to that, since she's displayed a great capacity for denial and belief in her own innocence whatever the accusation. Maybe an investigation that has overwhelming and irrefutable evidence available could do it, but I can't see the house/sporting complex thing fitting that description.

So my theory, now: She killed someone. I mean, c'mon, no smaller crime makes sense! Maybe she was driving late at night, and some old fisherman was in the street during a storm, and she ran him over, and didn't want to tell anyone, so they buried the guy in the hopes no one would trace the death back to Palin, but now they're getting strange phone calls in the middle of the night and are finding fishing lures on their doorstep when they go outside in the morning...

Yeah, it's a stretch. But it would be pretty neat, wouldn't it?

This is really what my obsession with Sarah Palin is all about. She's not a normal politician by anyone's measure. But she's not the overtly crazy type, like Michelle Bachmann claiming the census will be used to put people in internment camps, or Larry Kilgore advocating public floggings for adulterers and homosexuals. Those politicians are fun to mock, but too easy (and far scarier, since they make no effort to conceal their mental illness and still get votes). Palin is special because her disorders so neatly reflect those of bad managers I've had in some jobs - a warm facade that gets her a following of close friends and defenders, while beneath the surface lurks those convictions that critics are out to get her, that anyone who dislikes her is just jealous, and that anyone who argues with her is imbalanced. Hers is a subtle kind of crazy, and I like subtle humor.

There's also the tragic aspect that appeals to me. She could have been an amazing politician. She has the charisma and the appeal. I don't agree with her positions, so in a way I'm glad she's failing, but if she'd just done a few things differently she could have been the next Reagan. The VP nomination was a great introduction for her, and the speech that was written for her was delivered expertly. Republicans adored her. All she needed to do was listen to campaign advisors and keep her speeches low-key to make it through the campaign looking like a saint. Then she could have dropped off the public stage for a year or two to study like mad. If she'd been willing to put that time in to beef up the areas of knowledge where she'd been clearly lacking, and had had the patience to stay out of the limelight for the necessary length of time, she could have given Obama a serious run in 2012. It wouldn't have taken any more intelligence than she possesses, just a bit of caginess (or better people giving her advice).

But then, that's been politics since Obama took office. I don't know why, other than that maybe the switch in power from the Republicans to Democrats sent some people off-kilter. We had Mark Sanford, Presidential hopeful, not only admit to an affair (itself not necessarily fatal for a Republican career, strangely), but give rambling press conferences and interviews where he talks about reconciliation with his wife on the one hand and how his mistress is his "soul mate" on the other (and as he said, if King David didn't resign over the Bathsheba incident, why should he?). Bobby Jindal was a rising star, and that star went supernova when he gave a speech responding to Obama's not-state-of-the-union address - he went on camera and talked like Mr. Rogers (and if that wasn't enough, included a line making fun of spending money on volcano monitoring shortly before a volcano eruption in Alaska - and this from the Louisiana governor, of all people). And now we have Palin's bizarre resignation, claiming she'll be more successful as "that woman who couldn't hack being a governor" than she could as "that woman who is a governor".

It's all just weird. Usually the strangeness comes from the party that takes over power, since they're the ones in the limelight and they're giddy and overconfident thanks to the change in circumstance. The displaced party gets some breathing room to regroup since reporters aren't as interested in investigating them. This should be a time when Democrats should be fending off rumors and bitching about Fox News creating scandals for them. Instead most of the politicians getting the scandal press have been getting it all on their own, without reporters needing to put in any effort at all.

The text of Sarah Palin's speech can be found here.

It's...bad. I mean, like, amateurish kind of bad. Rambling and disjointed, she jumps from idea to catchphrase to mangled metaphor as she makes her way to the whole resignation thing. For example, "Only dead fish go with the flow," she said, apparently thinking that the only fish out there are spawning salmon. Of course live fish go with "the flow" too. The saying is, "Even dead fish can go with the flow," and I know this because it's the title of a book by liberal Jim Hightower. Interesting association.

"Our destiny to be reached by responsibly developing our natural resources. This land, blessed with clean air, water, wildlife, minerals, AND oil and gas. It's energy! God gave us energy."

Among a bunch of other stuff about Alaska's resources and history, she brings up a line about the state spending $2 million on ethics complaints against her. That's something her office had said not long ago too, and no one knows where that figure comes from. The published costs of the most expensive investigations total to about $250,000. The biggest of those was TrooperGate, and many of those costs came from the investigation she filed against herself so the review would be conducted by a panel she had appointed - the one that investigated the rest of those ethics complaints she cites. So yeah, she can tout that all of those were dismissed, and they were dismissed by a panel she controls. The only one that ruled that she had an ethics violation was the investigation conducted by the state congress, and they didn't apply any penalties anyway.

I'm pretty sure that someone interested in picking that speech apart could find a lot of factual errors to highlight (she "eliminated" the chef? Really? Records show she just transferred the chef from the governor's office to another part of the government to continue to cook for officials...). But that wouldn't really tell us anything we don't know about Palin already - that she has a tenuous relationship at best with the truth - so I don't really care to put time into that.

"Life is too short to compromise time and resources... it may be tempting and more comfortable to just keep your head down, plod along, and appease those who demand: 'Sit down and shut up,' but that's the worthless, easy path; that's a quitter's way out."

The quitter's way out would have been to finish her term as governor of Alaska, apparently. So instead she, um, quit. And she believes firmly in fighting for free enterprise and smaller government, but...

"I've never believed that I, nor anyone else, needs a title to do this - to make a difference... to HELP people."

This is the point where someone really needed to intervene and let her know that, while it's true you don't need a title to fight for those things, having some power can certainly help. Being a governor may be a title, but it's power too. Indeed, it's why she had said she ran for the office, and now she's apparently saying she doesn't need it to accomplish her goals. So she's ditching it.

The ethics investigations appear to be the reason she gave in that speech as to why she was stepping down. It's actually pretty hard to parse, either from reading the text or listening to her give the speech. Still, what I gleaned from it was that she originally was going to announce that she wouldn't seek re-election because the "frivolous" ethics investigations were too expensive and distracting. Then she thought about it some more and figured that lame duck governors suck, and she didn't want to be one, so she'd resign too. Really, read the speech, that's her reasoning.

And see, the liberal media is on a full-court press against her, so she also feels that she'd do more good outside the government than inside it. Or that the government would operate more smoothly along the path she's set for it if the lieutenant governor takes over for her now. Or maybe both. Again, it's not a very coherent speech.

As she says many, many times in the speech, she didn't want to be "politics as usual." So I guess, you know, she's a maverick. Which is shown in the way she's spontaneously resigning.

She concludes with more rah-rah support the troops stuff that has nothing to do with her governorship, something about people picking on her son Trig (seriously? Who? It's not like people who pick on Down's Syndrome kids would last long in journalism or politics), and then some stuff about how even though she's quitting because she can do more good from the "outside" than the "inside" of Alaskan politics, other people shouldn't be discouraged because they can do good from the "inside"! Makes complete sense.

I think I'll go with Josh Marshall on this one - the speech was improvised, the reasoning was obscured, the cover story is inconsistent, and she obsessed on those ethics investigations. So it does seem like another shoe is going to drop. Either there's a scandal lurking in the wings that she thinks would have been inevitably uncovered if she'd stayed on, or she's more mentally unstable than anyone had dreamed.

Either way, I don't think her national prospects have changed any as a result of this move. Her prospects with the public at large were dim before this anyway (just look at her polling before the Presidential election), and her base is too fanatical to let something as minor as abandoning her office get in the way (they'll blame the liberal media and call her a hero for making the sacrifice).

That's my take, anyway, on the news that Sarah Palin is stepping down as governor. It's a bit early to step down to focus on a Presidential run in 2012, and Lisa Murkowski's Senate seat will be up for a vote in 2010, so the latter seems like the most likely short-term goal for Palin. That, or she just wants to rake in the dough she could be getting from book deals and speaking engagements.

I think she'd be hilarious as a Presidential candidate. I give Republican voters enough credit that I don't think she'd make it past the primary, but it would still be an entertaining run. Palin has been able to get away with weird lies and strange obsessions while comfortable in the Alaska governor's seat or being second fiddle on a national ticket, but they just wouldn't cut it if she was the front and center candidate for President. She doesn't know when to tell a lie and then leave it alone, and she picks strange, unimportant things to lie about sometimes to boot. McCain, at least, would lie about more important things (like whether he'd ever said he wasn't an expert on the economy), stuff that was easy to debunk (there was video of him saying exactly that, which is why he'd gotten that question from a reporter), but at least he knew that you can get away with it if you say the lie, then avoid the subject as much as you can so you don't have to repeat it. Then it becomes a joke on the Daily Show, and fades from public memory right after. We expect lies from politicians, so in the long run they're usually not big deals.

Palin lied to Runner's World recently about, of all things, whether or not she "made [the campaign] swear to secrecy" about a cut she got on her hand when jogging. Talk about a silly thing to make up - there are stories from that time (right before the VP debate) where a picture is shown of her with a bandage on her hand, and the accompanying article mentions that she cut her hand on a run. It was a humanizing story, good press, so there's no rational reason now for her to, I guess, say that she didn't want to make a big deal out of it because she's a rough-and-tumble diehard runner or something. I don't know.

CBS News also just published emails from hours before the third Presidential debate where Palin complains about some minor press coverage of her husband's membership in the Alaskan Independence Party, a party whose platform is secession from the US (covered in the veneer of a referendum on the subject, but at rallies the major talk is of secession and independence). The emails are an interesting read, both because it lets you see a top campaign aide (Steve Schmidt, top advisor to McCain) try to handle his ticket's VP candidate, and because Palin basically makes stuff up to support her narrative that it's a big issue. She had one protestor say something about it at a rally, so she told Schmidt she'd gotten questions from reporters. Schmidt replied that as he understood Todd Palin had indeed been a member of the party, so she should just shrug off any questions about it. She replied by insisting that he'd only accidentally checked the box on the registration form to join the party, and anyway, the party platform wasn't at all secessionist. Schmidt then smacks her down by saying he talked to her media handlers and there had been no reporter questions, that Todd was a member of the party for seven years, and that the stuff about secession is right there on the main website for the AIP, so she should just do as he said. She stopped the emails after that, but the willingness to just invent things to bolster her point is depressing, knowing that it came from someone who has a small but fervent following in national politics. Depressing, but still funny if you like black humor.

The Onion, on Twitter:

Twitter Creator On Iran: 'I Never Intended For Twitter To Be Useful'

The bastard is taking the military option. We'll see how that works out for him. If this article is any indication, not as well as he'd hope.

I have to admit, Twitter has been amazingly useful to the protesters and to the people outside Iran trying to get an idea of what's happening there, as foreign media is largely blocked and ejected from the country. Let me be clear, I still hate Twitter. Most of its traffic is vapid teenagers and idiotic adults chattering about whatever crap comes into their heads. It's like blogs, but more instant and thus even less filtered, giving us plenty of insight into the horrifying workings of the common man's mind. All you have to do is look at what politicians are doing with Twitter to see how useless most Twitter feeds are.

I'm pleased to note that I created my own Twitter account fairly early on (March two years ago), posted twice to test it, and never touched the damned thing again. It didn't take long for the realization to strike me that no one would care about my minute-to-minute life, let alone day-to-day or month-to-month. I have many mental and emotional problems, but thankfully I've been spared that level of narcissism. My self-absorption is arrested at the blogging level.

But dammit, now this thing in Iran has happened, and Twitter's tiny messages have been the best way for the people inside Iran to communicate with the outside and with each other. It's been used to organize protests and to provide links to pictures and video. It has, in short, been essential. And I have to give it credit for that. I just wish there were a way to restrict its use to embittered populations and people who actually have useful things to say. Like fake Christopher Walken.

I've followed a filtered collection of "tweets", pictures, and video on Iran through Andrew Sullivan's blog, if anyone else is interested in poring over the unconfirmed reports, rather than waiting for real news sources to aggregate the stuff they can actually confirm later. It's somewhere between a raw feed and legitimate news - he's collected the stuff that looks the most interesting or that seems most plausible based on the number of reports and the sources, and posted those. Useful, considering most of the Twitter searches on Iran or the Iranian election mostly turn up the messages people are "helpfully" retweeting, or well-meaning kids sitting fat and safe in their US homes encouraging Iranians to keep up the good fight. "Retweet so Iranians know US groups support them!" appears, next to, "The name of the girl shot to death is Neda."

Did I mention the drawbacks of letting anyone with a cell phone or Internet access post where everyone can read it? Yeah. To be permitted to post with a "#Iran" tag, you should be required to know where to find Iran on a map first.

I feel like making some predictions. Assuming the following are true:

- The protests earlier today in Iran did indeed have a larger turnout than previous protests, as reported.

- Rafsanjani is still politically active in the halls of power in Iran, and the rumors of his resignations were untrue.

- Rafsanjani is not an idiot.

My predictions: The Supreme Leader is finished. Tomorrow is the sabbath in Iran, so the turnouts to the protests should be even larger, both from the people who won't have to work and from the successes over the last couple of days. Supreme Leader Ayatollah Khamenei endorsed the election results there twice, then appeared to back off, and has all along been calling for people to stay away from the protests. He sent the Basij to discourage protests by force back when they were small enough that they might have been stifled, but that won't work anymore. The only way the movement can be suppressed now would be with a large scale military show of force, and I don't think he can do that now and safely expect the military to go along with it on his word alone (they would have earlier in the controversy, but it's more iffy now with the movement gaining such clear popularity).

In short, the last six days have made the Supreme Leader in Iran look weak. Rafsanjani, who served as President in Iran and is currently at the head of their Assembly of Experts, is a cagey enough politician that he has to see the situation the Supreme Leader is in. The situation might change after the Ayatollah speaks tomorrow, but that seems unlikely. Rafsanjani can serve his political ambitions if he pushes for the Supreme Leader to be replaced (if they can do that - I admit I don't know Iranian politics that well).

Failing that, the ruling council in Iran will probably have to overrule the Supreme Leader on the subject of the election. I can't say whether they would push a recount or a revote, but I think they value stability more than the political status quo. They'll sacrifice Khamenei and probably Ahmadinejad if that seems like the easiest way to get the populace to settle down and get back to business as usual. All they have to do is blame them for rigging the vote (or at least for mishandling the controversy) and the people will line up behind the government again.

Resolution in favor of the protesters is more likely with Rafsanjani pushing it (since I think he would be a strong enough personality to persuade opposition of the approach), but it really feels like today was pivotal, if the turnout was as large as reported. The Supreme Leader could still violently repress the protests, but it will be hard to do now, and he'd have to have the backing of the rest of the government (and would probably need to make a lot of promises behind the scenes to boot). A recount or revote is the path of least resistance now, and if they don't see that in Tehran now, they will after the turnout Friday.

One other possibility is that Khamenei himself calls for a recount or revote. I'm not sure that would save him, and it seems unlikely that he would feel that he could comfortably do that, but it's still possible. It would let him stay in office, but it would definitely weaken his position in the government. I'm not sure the ruling council would like that result, but the reformers in Iran would.

Ah, the lack of pressure. I can make a prediction like this and lose nothing if I'm wrong. But if I'm right I get to gloat AND we get to see the Iranian government get ever-so-slightly less hardline. And I really like to gloat.