Perfunction

1,356,745th Example Of Clueless Email Habits

After permanent paper email trails have brought down countless individuals and companies, you'd think folks would wise up --- especially at the Department of Defense:

Back in June 2006 there's this email ...

hi. jed babbin, one of our military analysts, is hosting the michael medved nationally syndicated radio show this afternoon. he would like to see if general casey would be available for a phone interview any time between 3 and 6 pm. topics would be: status of operations in iraq and if troop levels should/can/will be reduced. ... please feel free to contact jed directly (contact info below) if the general can/would be available for the interview. this would be a softball interview and the show is 8th or 9th in the nation.

A short time later a press flack from the Office of the Secretary of Defense writes back ...

Hi Thanks for sending this. Just fyi, probably wouldn't put "softball" interview in writing. If that got out it would compromise jed and general casey.

NEWSFLASH: It always gets out. A-L-W-A-Y-S. While you're at it, just assume everything you ever write ON A DoD COMPUTER will be a) read by a dozen other people and a few hundred algorithms at the NSA, and b) backed- up forfreakingever.

(h/t: memeorandum)

Slammed

Please pardon the light posting. I'm slammed with a rebranding of my company, have a big vacation coming up, and am simply burned out on everything else (politics, pop culture bullshit, etc.). Posting here and commenting elsewhere will be fitful for the rest of May. See you again soon --- maybe!

Polarization: A Coda

Point:

"I have a much broader base to build a winning coalition on," [Sen. Clinton] said in an interview with USA TODAY. As evidence, Clinton cited an Associated Press article "that found how Sen. Obama's support among working, hard-working Americans, white Americans, is weakening again, and how whites in both states who had not completed college were supporting me."

"There's a pattern emerging here," she said.

Counterpoint:

Polarization Complete

Mission accomplished, Hillary:

With Clinton posing alongside pioneering Indy speedster Sarah Fisher, there were almost no African-Americans to be seen. Many in the white, working-class crowd were simply not ready to back Barack Obama - for reasons that are disturbing.

"I'm kind of still up in the air between McCain and Hillary," said Jason Jenkins, 32, who cited information from a hoax e-mail as a reason to spurn Obama.

"I'll be honest with you. Barack scares the hell out of me,"he said. "He swore on the Koran."

Obama did manage to pull in many white voters, but still encountered similar sentiments from a man who refused to shake his hand at a diner in Greenwood, Ind.

"I can't stand him," the man said. "He's a Muslim. He's not even pro-American as far as I'm concerned."

Such feelings leave Clinton and the Democratic Party in a tough spot. With the largest number of remaining delegates nowbeing party insiders, they have to decide if Obama can overcome enough of that antipathy - essentially deciding if enough working-class whites will back away from the black candidate, whether because of the false Muslim rumors, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright flap or old-fashioned racism.

To reiterate: these are white Democrats talking.

So, thank God for Hillary Clinton. Had Obama just skated through the primaries unopposed, blame for all of this voter racism would have been laid exclusively and reflexively on Republicans. Don't get me wrong --- it will still happen to the GOP by November. But at least Hillary's white Democrats and Obama's black Democrats respectively own it right now.

(h/t: memeorandum)

Caption That!

Horning in on V the K's game...

Yahoos

Greed is good:

Yahoo! Inc. fell the most in almost two years on the Nasdaq after Microsoft Corp. abandoned its $44.6 billion takeover of the Internet search company because executives couldn't agree on a price.

``Yahoo's stock is going to crater, and Yahoo shareholders are going to go bang on everyone's head and say, `How does this benefit me?''' said Richard Williams, an analyst in Short Hills, New Jersey, at Cross Research who advises investors to hold on to Microsoft shares and doesn't own any.

``Yahoo is going to be under a lot of pressure,'' said Peter Falvey, managing director at Boston-based technology-merger adviser Revolution Partners. ``A lot of shareholders are going to say, `Hmm, maybe we overreached.'''

Ballmer and deputy Kevin Johnson met May 3 in Seattle with Yahoo co-founders Yang and David Filo, two people familiar with the talks said. Yang and Filo refused to accept less than $37 a share and flew back to California.

``To say we are disappointed is an understatement,'' William Morrison and Robert Coolbrith at New York-based ThinkPanmure wrote in a report yesterday. Rejecting Microsoft's offer is ``likely to go down as one of the more destructive decisions for shareholder value in the history of Internet stocks.''

On a related note, I can't remember the last time I visited Yahoo for anything.

Operation Barbara Ann

Getting ready to strike the Iranian frontier:

The US military is drawing up plans for a “surgical strike” against an insurgent training camp inside Iran if Republican Guards continue with attempts to destabilise Iraq, western intelligence sources said last week. One source said the Americans were growing increasingly angry at the involvement of the Guards’ special-operations Quds force inside Iraq, training Shi’ite militias and smuggling weapons into the country.

“If the situation in Basra goes back to what it was like before, America is likely to blame Iran and carry out a surgical strike on a militant training camp across the border in Khuzestan,” said one source, referring to a frontier province.

Reporting on the arrival of USS Abraham Lincoln carrier strike group in the Persian Gulf last week, NBC News says we have a "target list" already drawn up:

Meanwhile, Iranian state news is in panic mode --- the Sword of Damocles hangs over their head:

On April 29, a second American aircraft carrier, the USS Abraham Lincoln, arrived in the Persian Gulf in what observers see as a tacit declaration of war on the Islamic Republic of Iran.

Under a plan approved by the US Defense Department, Central Command would be allowed to retaliate for an Iranian attack with US air strikes. The US government is in fact contemplating on an attack against Iran. Yet they are waiting for a ripe time. Any excuse they find can be used for their attack. According to reports, the attack would range from a limited to full-scale one.

Elsewhere on that Iranian state news website, US Democrats are lauded:

Presidential superdelegates have advised the Democratic Party to regard direct negotiations with Iran as a vital foreign policy issue.

I'm trying to make a closing joke about how Obama can no more disown the effective use of American gunboat diplomacy than ... whatever. His eager, naive capitulation to our enemies just isn't funny.

Welcome Back, Welcome Back, Welcome Baaack

Tapping into a perennial gripe of conservatives, Ross Douthat analyzes post-9/11 Hollywood:

The latter-day cowboys have conspicuously failed to materialize: in the past six years, the movie industry has produced exactly zero major motion pictures dedicated to lionizing American soldiers fighting on the ground in Iraq or Afghanistan.

Lest you think Douthat is about to embark on a flag-waving excoriation of Hollywood and its recent string of anti-war bombs, he instead focuses on the movies that are actually resounding box office successes...and their direct connection to a bygone era --- the 19-funky-70's:

We expected John Wayne; we got Jason Bourne instead.

The Bourne movies are the first major action franchise of the new millennium; they’re also the highest-grossing example of the revival of the paranoid style in American cinema.

Such “fear thy government” anxieties are always laced throughout American pop culture. But they belong most of all to the 1970s, when the one-two punch of Vietnam and Watergate sparked recurring visions of isolated Americans trapped in the gears of an irreducibly complex conspiracy...

Read the whole thing. Parallels to the '70s abound, well beyond war movies --- slasher flicks, zombies, vigilantes, dystopias. Douthat taps into something much larger than Hollywood's run-of-the-mill reflexive anti-American liberalism. Excellent, excellent piece.

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Except for its glaring omission of the 1980's hallmark of the arrogance of the military-industrial complex, the futility of nuclear deterrance, and post-apocolyptic survival among the inheritors of the Earth:

What is it with Paul Winfield and bugs?

McCain: Hyper Risk Averse?

First came the pre-emptive denouncement of the NC GOP Rev. Wright television ad before he even viewed it, and now there's this:

The campaign of Sen. John McCain, R-Ariz., removed a man from his Michigan Finance Committee today.

It started after conservative writer Debbie Schussel called Michigan businessman Ali Jawad not only a supporter of Hezbollah -- a group the US State Department labels a "terrorist organization" -- but also claimed he was a "key agent of the terrorist group in the Detroit area."

After Schussel started asking questions the McCain campaign removed him from the finance committee for a May fundraiser.

I haven't read up on Schlussel's charges, but it certainly seems that McCain has a quick trigger when it comes to jettisoning troublesome associations.

Come to think about it, that may be a good thing {looking at you, Sen. Obama}.

Michelle & Barack Obama: Today Show Interview

Ed Morrisey beat me to it this morning and has some good observations. My own takeaways:

San Francisco bitter/clingy remarks:

Obama claims they came "at the end of a long day," a la Hillary's multiple exhaustion-induced Bosnia yarns. Says he should have said folks were "frustrated" instead of bitter and that they "rely" on faith instead of "cling" to it. Not a peep about "reliance" on guns, xenophobia and trade protectionism.

Michelle Obama:

Looked pissed 75% of the interview. Had a baking-cookies-standing-by-her-man moment when she talked about "cynicism" and not being the typical "cheering wife." However, she salvaged it at the end with some glowing husband adoration, about the only part of the interview where she wasn't silently stewing.

His Name:

Barack utilized a slightly adjusted riff on his name (2:52), defending his non-elitism by saying "it's a leap for folks" to support an "African-American named Barack Obama." I say slightly adjusted because once upon a time he swung for the fences when it came to his uncommon name, deftly deploying the Forbidden Middle Name:

"Well, I think if you've got a guy named Barack Hussein Obama, that's a pretty good contrast to George W. Bush." --- Barack Obama, Oct. 18, 2007; Tavis Smiley interview (7:22 mark)

"I mean, it would be one thing if my name was John Hussein Smith. When you're already starting with Barack Obama...uhhh." --- Barack Obama, Dec. 2006, CNN-Jeanie Moos story (0:45 mark)

Anyway, on with the show: