Marbury

woody allen comes out for polanski - that'll swing it

TNR's Chris Orr phrases this perfectly:

Today, Martin Scorsese and David Lynch also added their names to those of sixty-odd other cinematic luminaries who've signed a petition calling for Polanski's immediate release. But the award for complete lack of self-awareness has to go to another new signee who placed his moral capital in such matters on the table today as well: Woody Allen.

inaugurals: what they say and what they leave out

In a twist on wordclouds, researchers at IBM have created a tool that can analyse and visualise not only which words in an address are used most often (larger) but also which are most unusual compared with previous inaugurals (bluer) and which words are conspicuously absent -that show up in other inaugurals but not this one (pink). This is Obama's inaugural:

Every other inaugural speech here.

Via Fallows.

t.s. eliot, prophet of social media

From the Four Quartets (Burnt Norton):

Eructation of unhealthy souls
Into the faded air, the torpid
Driven on the wind that sweeps the gloomy hills of London,
Hampstead and Clerkenwell, Campden and Putney,
Highgate, Primrose and Ludgate. Not here
Not here the darkness, in this twittering world.

how close should a president be to his commanders?

At the weekend, General McChrystal revealed, in response to a direct question, that he'd only spoken to Obama once since his appointment, and not at all since he delivered his memo on Afghanistan at the end of August. The White House is having to defend itself against criticism on this: why isn't the president in more regular contact with the man he appointed to run the war over there?

It does seem odd. Bush spoke to his commander in Iraq regularly in the early years of that war and forged a close personal relationship with him that bypassed the chain of command. But this, of course, only alerts us to the fact that such a relationship might not be a good idea.

If you spend too long talking to the generals in the field of battle, it must be all too easy to get sucked into the details of a war and lose perspective on the big questions that a president must consider: why are we fighting this war? Should we be fighting it? Military commanders will have a natural bias towards more fighting, and more resources - and towards optimism about outcomes. They could hardly do their job otherwise. This doesn't mean they're wrong, necessarily. But they are susceptible to the limitations of their position and perspective, as we all are. Perhaps Obama is right to keep his distance.

afghanistan deja-vu

In the aftermath of the proxy Soviet-US war in Afghanistan, President Gorbachev, supported by the UN, argued that America should join an international diplomatic effort to stabilise the region, with the aim of preventing the rise to power of Islamic extremists. America declined. During a fascinating post comparing Obama's pending decision on Afghan strategy with the decisions taken by the US back then, the New Yorker's Steve Coll notes that one member of the current cabinet will be all too aware of what America got wrong:

The C.I.A. argued in favor of the military solution. It then concluded, as one assault after another on Najibullah-defended cities failed, that the U.S. had no further interests in the country and should pack up its financing and diplomacy and go home. A few years later, the Taliban took Kabul. One of the American policymakers responsible for this sequence of policy decisions—who was deeply skeptical of Gorbachev during the late nineteen-eighties and who was present at the decision to abandon the difficult work of regional diplomacy in 1991-1992 that Gorbachev favored—was Robert Gates, who is now Secretary of Defense.

obama gets a promotion

You are probably aware that he's an enemy of the white race (and white culture, whatever that is).

But it's worse than you thought: Obama is now is an enemy of humanity, according to a Republican congressman.

mandy love

Peter Mandelson has seduced his party. Next: the nation.

Personally, I've always loved Mandy; but even more so since he came back from the political dead a year ago in his new, devil-may-care, unshakably confident, mildly camp incarnation. There is now no senior politician  - with the exception of Ken Clarke - who seems so gloriously at ease in his own skin.

That said, his speech yesterday reminded us of his neediness. Especially that shameless, gratuitous "But I am trying my best!" Worthy of Sally Fields. Love me, love me!

The speech, of course, came across brilliantly in the hall and terribly on TV. Not that this matters (just as it wouldn't have mattered much if the reverse were true). The communication strategy was spot on, as you'd expect. When things are going well, the key audience is viewers at home. When they're going terribly, it's the poor bloody infantry in the hall that need their spirits raising.

Blair, of course, was the consummate TV performer even behind the podium, conversational and casual. For all his association with modernity, Mandelson still lives, in his heart, in the world of his grandfather Herbert Morrison. Yesterday's speech, with its bellowing, its exaggerated hand movements, and its staginess, felt very much like a blast from the past of political oratory.

(Ps and what was that bonkers "Boy George/sailing close to the wind" sing-song about?)

sisters of mercy

This US State Department portrait of the Spanish Prime Minister Jose Luis Zapatero and his family together with the American First Couple was a coming-out of sorts for the 16 and 13-year-old Zapatero daughters Laura and Alba; Spanish law prevents the Spanish media from running any photographs of the PM's children.

And guess what - they're Goths. Black gowned, big booted Goths. And rather marvellous they look too. Such are the flowers that bloom when the kids of public figures are kept away from harsh sunlight.

Click on the photo to enlarge. Note also that Obama is wearing his robo-smile.

(via Gawker)

what is a snowclone?

... I don't hear you ask. Well I'm going to tell you anyway.

A snowclone is a particular kind of cliché: one where's there's a given linguistic template that can be endlessly adapted to the writer's (or speaker's) ends. For instance, "This is your brain on X"; "X is the new Y"; "The X formerly known as X"; "Channeling her inner X"... etc. (The name comes from “If Eskimos have N words for snow, X surely have Y words for Z”, a bugbear of the linguist who coined the term, Geoffrey Pullum.)

And guess what? There's a whole website devoted to snowclones, ready for you to explore. Snowclones are the new memes. Or something.

the weight of souls

In 1907 Dr Duncan MacDougall weighed six people in a nursing home who were within a few hours of death from tuberculosis. After they had expired, he weighed the corpses. He claimed to find a small loss of mass in each case, which he ascribed to the soul's departure from the body. In his words:

The subject was that of a man of larger physical build, with a pronounced sluggish temperament. When life ceased, as the body lay in bed upon the scales, for a full minute there appeared to be no change in weight. The physicians waiting in the room looked into each other's faces silently, shaking their heads in the conviction that out test had failed.

Then suddenly the same thing happened that had occurred in the other cases. There was a sudden diminution in weight, which was soon found to be the same as that of the preceding experiments.

I believe that in this case, that of a phlegmatic man slow of thought and action, that the soul remained suspended in the body after death, during the minute that elapsed before it came to the consciousness of its freedom. There is no other way of accounting for it, and it is what might be expected to happen in a man of the subject's temperament.

The average weight of the soul, according to MacDougall, was 21 grams (hence the movie title).

(Via Kottke and the wonderful Radiolab)

o-lympic update

Obama is going to Copenhagen to personally press Chicago's bid for the 2016 Olympics. He and Michelle will be making presentations. Difficult for the selection committee to resist, I would have thought.

As I've written before, the White House is putting an unprecedented effort behind this bid. This is partly for obvious reasons: it's Obama's home town. Valerie Jarret is in charge of the political offensive. But it's also because having the Olympics there would form the perfect narrative closure to what they hope will be eight years of Obama's presidency - and even more importantly, it will serve as a useful rocket-booster for the next Democratic presidential candidate, as he or she heads into the last stretch of the campaign.

(The HuffPo report linked to above says the president will be meeting with "Queen Elizabeth" whilst he's there. Huh?)

UPDATE THOUGHT: one thing this ought to remind us of is that although he's quite a cautious politician, Obama is willing to gamble when he thinks the time is right. He's a good poker player.

mcchrystal cuts back on the ice cream

From a superb, revealing Newsweek portrait of General McChrystal:

In past wars, there was a term called REMF, for "rear-echelon motherf--ker." The new term of derision is FOBBIT, for those who never leave their forward-operating base. To cut down what McChrystal calls "the recreational attitude," he has been methodically closing down the concessions that sprout up on American bases—Pizza Hut, Burger King, Baskin-Robbins. "We don't need 31 flavors to fight a war," said a McChrystal aide who did not wish to be identified, but observed that when he was based at Camp Victory in Iraq early in the war there, it was possible to shop for 39 varieties of flat-screen TVs.

Read the whole thing. McChrystal comes across very well, and not carried away by his own mythology. It's something of a relief, after reading lots of reports about him being an other-worldly, ascetic, ancient warrior type that he has a wife who scoffs at such stuff and points out that the reason he eats one meal a day is to avoid drowsiness. Also, that he's a big fan of Monty Python and the Holy Grail.

alan johnson's problem

Pic: Guardian/Nadav Kander

For eighteen months or so Alan Johnson has been the man tipped by the press and some of his peers to be the next leader of the Labour Party. It's not so much a hope as the solution to an emergency: his boosters think that the party is in the event of one - and that Labour should smash the glass box and pull out the postie. The press want another twist to a pre-election narrative that's getting rather predictable. Much attention, therefore, has been paid to this:

"Gordon's indomitable spirit and self-belief is quite inspirational." Does he share that self-belief? "Oh, I don't, no, I don't have it. Christ, no. Wish I did... I do think someone from my background can do it just as well as anyone else. But I haven't got the ambition, and I haven't got the self-confidence, and I haven't got that real aching desire to lead. Which really is an essential quality in a leader. So I don't think I'll ever be leader of the party. But I'm not willing to rule myself out for all eventualities in the future."

Everyone's been reading this passage and assuming the last sentence is the significant one. It's AJ's wink of availability: reach out, I'll be there.

But to me it sounds like the least convincing part: formulaic, half-hearted, tacked on.

It's the preceding sentiments that resonate. Do they sound like the words of a man mentally gearing himself up for a shot at the top job? No they don't. They sound like a man frantically signalling that he's not up for it, and not up to it. And if Johnson doesn't believe in himself, nobody else will. I know he's got a practiced line in self-deprecation. But that doesn't mean he doesn't mean it.

The one indispensable thing a good political leader needs is rock-like self-belief. It's just impossible to navigate your way through the daily shit-storm without it. Though Johnson applauds his boss, GB is a prime example of someone who, despite enormous confidence in his abilities, somehow lacks belief in himself as a leader. You can of course possess awesome self-belief and be a terrible leader. But you can't be a great or even a half-decent one without it.

Even if I'm wrong and Johnson somehow allows himself get carried away by the demands of his colleagues and runs, he'll be a flaccid candidate (he's quite right to point out, as he has done, that he couldn't even win the deputy leadership contest). And if by some fluke he becomes leader, he will be a disaster.

powell sceptical on afghanistan

From the NYT:

Among the most important outside voices has been that of former Secretary of State Colin L. Powell, a retired four-star Army general, who visited Mr. Obama in the Oval Office this month and expressed skepticism that more troops would guarantee success. According to people briefed on the discussion, Mr. Powell reminded the president of his longstanding view that military missions should be clearly defined.

Don't breach my doctrine, dude.

Obama's key advisers are split down the middle: Hobrooke, Clinton, McChrystal and Petraeus on one side, Jones, Biden, Kerry and Emanuel on the other. This has got to be the most agonising decision any president could make. It's lonely at the top.

do you think i'm special? how special?

The more I read about the supposed snub the more it seems to me to have been almost entirely a figment of the British media's imagination. Time's Michael Scherer sees a pattern:

This is essentially par for the course. If Brown and Obama are going to be in the same city, the British Press, apparently aided by leaks from Downing Street, just has to throw a tantrum of some sort. Is the special relationship between Brown and Obama really special? How special? Etc.

Why must the media here make us sound like a desperately insecure boyfriend?

Robert Gibbs - no fan of the British press - described it, wearily, as a bunch of silliness, which pretty much sums it up (though he blames the tabloids, when I think this imaginary hare was set running by Nick Robinson at the BBC).