An adviser to John Edwards sets off a blog-brawl by telling the netroots to get lost. That and other political news of the day in today’s Election Central Happy Hour Roundup.
Pervez Musharraf has been the linchpin of US policy not only for Pakistan but for much of the War on Terror. But in the US intelligence community and in Pakistan there’s a growing belief that Musharraf’s days in office are numbered.
Ouch. This new LAT poll is not good for John McCain. Among Republicans nationally he’s fighting for 3rd place with Mitt Romney down at 12%. (Romney has 10%). Giuliani has 27% and the not-yet-running Fred Thompson is at 21%.
On the Dem side it’s Clinton 33%, Obama 22%, Gore 15%, Edwards (8%). However, Obama does better in the head-to-heads against Republicans than does Hillary.
Here’s a question I have. As the Times article puts it, “Republicans antsy for a conservative standard-bearer in the presidential race have begun to rally behind Fred Thompson.” It’s been widely noted over recent days that Thompson’s pro-life position seems to be of quite recent vintage.
But let’s open the scope of the question up a bit. I remember Fred Thompson from when he was in the senate. And I never thought of him as a down-the-line conservative, at least not relative to the rest of the senate GOP caucus. So aside from the fact that he’s now saying he’s down the line pro-life it really doesn’t surprise me that he had a kinda sorta position on the issue back when he ran for senate in the mid-90s. He always struck me as a bit more of a libertarian type Republican.
Sure, he’s conservative compared to Giuliani on most social issues. And for all his toadying over the last three years too many party Republicans just don’t like McCain. And my point here isn’t to say he’s a ‘moderate’, whatever that might mean. But isn’t issue here that Thompson just looks presentable — in the sense that he can talk the GOP no-nonsense hocum like the best of them — and compared to the crop of jokers on offer, that’s plenty for most ‘conservatives’ to sign on?
I was just reading this article from the Associated Press about the new steps the NYPD is taking to screen for commercial trucks that might be used in terror attacks — with conventional explosives, radioactive material for dirty bombs, even chlorine which has become a weapon of choice of late in Iraq. Since I and my family live in Manhattan, this is a subject of real interest to me. And it’s reassuring to the extent it sounds like the NYPD is on top of scanning for radioactive materials being brought into the city.
But the experience of reading that article put me in the mind of an email I received late last week from an acquaintance who’s involved in counter-terrorism policy. This person wrote to take me task, gently, but take me to task nonetheless for what he felt was the ‘dismissive’ approach I have taken on the site to the threat of homegrown domestic terror. And as evidene he pointed to the posts I did about the JFK bomb plot over the last couple weeks.
Now, just to give a little more information. This isn’t some Fox News whack job ‘terrorism expert’ ranting at me. This is someone who comes out of the Democratic policy world and would probably call himself a fan or at least a regular reader of the site.
And I confess that every time at the beginning of one of these new plots is discovered I feel a certain unease. I don’t want to be seen pooh-poohing a real threat and a very serious issue, which of course it is. And it’s certainly not my intention to imply that the police shouldn’t be scrutinizing and rolling up plots even when the plotters seem like whackjobs who couldn’t screw in a light bulb. Intentions to kill hundreds of people are plenty for me.
In the final analysis though the criticism doesn’t add up for me. There’s no denying the fact that the administration, often the prosecutors and always the media are in a tacit conspiracy of nonsense to take virtually nonexistent or purely notional ‘plots’ and fool everyone who doesn’t read the details into thinking that a major terrorist plot has been foiled. I don’t see how we can remain sane or balanced as a society, or maintain our equilibrium in the face of the threats we do face without simply calling these things as we see them. The little lies, the avoiding saying the obvious for some larger purpose, is just too corrosive. We can lampoon the nonsense and take the threat seriously at the same time.
So senate Republicans ‘blocked‘ a Gonzales no-confidence vote. Didn’t we use to call this a filibuster? Like maybe a couple years ago?
The Times has an article about how computer techies are developing such sophisticated software that they’re now increasingly able to fool the ‘captcha’ tools we fill out at various sites.
Captchas are those annoying widgets that ask you to type in a squiggled word or series of letters in order to prove that you’re a real live person and not some spambot trying to break through a security layer or to fill a comments forum with spam. We actually use them at TPMmuckraker to keep spam out of the comments.
This interested me because I’d already seen signs that technology was overcoming these captcha programs, but in a funny way.
Of late, I’ve had several captcha fill-ins I was asked to type in where I actually had a difficult time figuring out what the letters were. And I’m human. Really.
Have you had this too?
Late Update: TPM Reader PHB has some additional thoughts on this matter at his blog. And he actually seems to understand the technology.
Later Update: Here’s Microsoft’s new approach. You have to determine which pictures are cats and which are dogs.
Thinking outside the box.
In 1994 the US Air Force looked into the possibility of creating a non-lethal ‘gay bomb’ which would breakdown unit cohesion in opposing armies by spraying them with a chemical that would spontaneously make them into homosexuals.
How quickly it would take for the mystery chemical to make the opposing soldiers gay is not clear. But presumably it would have to be pretty fast. No period of sexual confusion or questioning.
Not that it would have altered the final result. But one of the reasons for the relatively low vote tally in favor of the Gonzales no-confidence resolution was that presidential candidates Biden, Dodd and Obama didn’t bother to show up.
Brownback and McCain didn’t make it either. But then McCain seldom votes at all these days.