I would be remiss in my duties as a fan of Independence Day – the 1996 Will Smith vehicle and the national holiday – if I didn’t post Bill Pullman’s memorable speech, as President Thomas J. Whitmore, to an assembled group of fighter pilots and aviation enthusiasts preparing to launch a last-ditch, Rebel Alliance-esque assault on the genocidal alien invaders who serve as the film’s chief protagonists:
Full text below the break.
Politico reports that the scandal-plagued and controversy-proned Alaska governor, who made her national debut at last year’s Republican National Convention, is resigning her governorship later this month:
Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin announced Friday that she was resigning her office later this month, a stunning decision that could free her to run for president more easily but also raises questions about her political standing at home.
Palin disclosed the surprise news Friday afternoon from her home in Wasilla with her husband, Todd, and Lt. Governor Sean Parnell, who the governor said would take over the state on Saturday, July 25th.
By not running for re-election, Palin liberates herself from the political constraints that come with running for president while still in elected office.
Leaving office at the end of the month, the former vice presidential hopeful will be able to travel the country more freely without facing the sort of repeated ethics inquiries she’s been fending off since returning to Alaska earlier this year.
I’ll have video up soon, stay tuned.
Update: Video!
Or at least, that’s what he reveals in a series of recently released interviews conducted prior to his execution in 2006:
Saddam Hussein told an FBI interviewer before he was hanged that he allowed the world to believe he had weapons of mass destruction because he was worried about appearing weak to Iran, according to declassified accounts of the interviews released yesterday. The former Iraqi president also denounced Osama bin Laden as “a zealot” and said he had no dealings with al-Qaeda. [...]
Hussein, in fact, said he felt so vulnerable to the perceived threat from “fanatic” leaders in Tehran that he would have been prepared to seek a “security agreement with the United States to protect [Iraq] from threats in the region.”
Even though I should know better, I’m still inclined to take Saddam’s explanation at face value. After all, it is – so far – the most rational explanation I’ve heard for his behavior in the run up to the Iraq War. Indeed, at the risk of making myself look smarter than I actually am, I had proposed something along those lines when President Bush first declared his intention to disarm Saddam of nuclear weapons. I remember thinking that if the United Nations is right and Saddam doesn’t have any weapons of mass destruction, then there are only two explanations for his behavior: either he’s genuinely insane or alternatively he is acutely aware of the possibility of an American invasion, and in a fashion not dissimilar to what you’d see in the natural world, is puffing himself up in a (vain) effort to scare away the United States. I hadn’t considered Iran at the time (mostly because I knew little about Iran at the time), but that makes even more sense; Iran had been Iraq’s chief geopolitical competitor for over twenty years, of course he wouldn’t want to appear weak to his nearest (and most dangerous) rival.
Once again, it’s apparent that the Bush administration was hellbent on deposing Saddam regardless of the strategic consequences. A more rational administration – or at least a more realist one – would have considered keeping Saddam around as a strategic competitor to Iran and al Qaeda. It’s not ethical, but it certainly makes a whole lot more sense than invading Iraq, plunging it into chaos, and forcing the United States to spend precious blood and treasure in a vain attempt to salvage what is the biggest strategic blunder in modern American history.
The BBC reports that scientists believe that they have discovered a single mega-colony of ants:
Researchers in Japan and Spain led by Eiriki Sunamura of the University of Tokyo found that Argentine ants living in Europe, Japan and California shared a strikingly similar chemical profile of hydrocarbons on their cuticles.
But further experiments revealed the true extent of the insects’ global ambition.
The team selected wild ants from the main European super-colony, from another smaller one called the Catalonian super-colony which lives on the Iberian coast, the Californian super-colony and from the super-colony in west Japan, as well as another in Kobe, Japan.
They then matched up the ants in a series of one-on-one tests to see how aggressive individuals from different colonies would be to one another.
Ants from the smaller super-colonies were always aggressive to one another. So ants from the west coast of Japan fought their rivals from Kobe, while ants from the European super-colony didn’t get on with those from the Iberian colony. [...]
But whenever ants from the main European and Californian super-colonies and those from the largest colony in Japan came into contact, they acted as if they were old friends.
These ants rubbed antennae with one another and never became aggressive or tried to avoid one another.
In short, they acted as if they all belonged to the same colony, despite living on different continents separated by vast oceans.
And like Kent Brockman before me, I for one, welcome our new insect overlords.
According to Gallup, Iranians don’t exactly trust our intentions when it comes to “democracy promotion.”:
I am shocked – shocked – that decades of U.S. intervention in Iranian affairs – including a successful coup attempt – as well as the American willingness to prop up corrupt, repressive regimes has left Iranians with a sense that they can’t really trust the United States. Again, as I’ve said before, this is why it was a good idea for the Obama administration to keep its distance from the Iranian protesters, outside of the usual cliche’s and unoffensive diplomatic pablum. Iranian’s don’t trust the United States government, and pace most neoconservative commentators, explicitly linking our interests with the protesters would have freed allies of regime to unleash violence on a far larger scale, making a bad situation even worse.
I can’t really disagree with Ezra Klein here:
Washington, DC: So do you think a constitutional amendment that gives more senators to larger states (from a range of 2 to, say, 8) would be feasible? I believe that is how it works in Germany’s upper house, the Bundesrat. It would leave the system pretty much intact but a bit more realistic.
(While we are at it we could scrap the electoral college too.)
Ezra Klein: Not feasible. But still totally necessary. Hell, if it were up to, I’d abolish the Senate totally. It’s an insane institution. No one has ever convincingly explained to my why it is important for the country to give a Wyoming resident more political power than a New Yorker. I get why we made that compromise originally. I don’t see why we’ve kept it.
One of the disadvantages of having a written constitution is that it encourages a not-insignificant amount of document-worship. We simply don’t perceive the Constitution as a fallible document written by flawed men, none of whom had the light of history to guide their hands as the crafted a largely unprecedented system of government. The Constitution is a compromise between political genius, political necessity and simple expedience, and it shows in things like the 3/5’s clause and our deeply counter-majoritarian legislative institutions. The Senate was a necessary compromise, but fundamentally, it was – and still is – a bad idea. And we would be much better off as a country if we infused our institutions with another healthy dose of majoritarian thinking, if only because the problems we face are far too large to be tackled by a hidebound, parochial institution like the Senate.
Ezra Klein on the Democratic Party’s new 60-vote majority in the Senate:
But just as the Republican dominance in the early-Oughts was illusory, and the 61 Democrats who controlled the Senate in 1978 were about to be run over by the Reagan Revolution, it’s a pretty safe bet that Democrats won’t hold these margins for long. As such, there are two ways to think about a 60-vote majority. One way is in terms of how long you can keep it. The other is in terms of how much you can achieve with it. The latter strategy means forcing risky votes from vulnerable senators in order to secure enduring accomplishments on things like health-care reform and cap-and-trade. It means accepting, as Kristol said, that the worm will turn, and the question is what the world looks like when it does. [Emphasis mine]
I don’t know if there’s enough unity within the Senate Democratic caucus for that conceptual frame to be useful. The past few months have demonstrated the extent to which there are real ideological/interest-based fissures within the Democratic caucus. Or put another way, Ben Nelson is still the 60th vote, Evan Byah the 59th, Blanche Lincoln the 58th and so on. It’s certainly nice to think of a 60-vote majority in terms of what you can do with it, but what you can do with it depends almost entirely on some degree of ideological consensus. Which we don’t have. Instead, we’re stuck with terrible leadership and a small group of conservative Democrats who will – in all likelihood – work hard to shoot down any meaningful progressive legislation.
The LA Times asks if “scandals will inspire evangelicals to stray from the Republican Party?“:
A series of sex-related scandals over the last few years has undercut the party’s assertions of moral authority and, worse, may serve to reinforce the doubts that many evangelical voters have traditionally harbored about the unholiness of the political realm. [...]
A sudden and overwhelming shift of Christian conservatives from the GOP to the more secular-minded Democratic Party appears unlikely. As Laura Olson, an expert on religion and politics at South Carolina’s Clemson University, put it: “The Republican Party is still going to be, at a minimum, the lesser of two evils.”
But in politics, subtraction can be just as important as addition. If large numbers of evangelicals were to stay home on election day, or channel their activism into outlets other than politics, the GOP could suffer grave consequences; over the last generation, devout churchgoer voters have become an increasingly vital part of the shrinking Republican base.
This wouldn’t be the first time that evangelicals retreated from full-on participation in national politics. After a series of embarrassing defeats in the court of public opinion in the early 20th century, fundamentalists and other conservative Protestants completely withdrew from the public arena. What’s more, withdrawal made a certain kind of theological sense; at this point, the vast majority of fundamentalists and a growing number of conservative Protestants were premillenialist in their eschatological views – they believed that the world would continue to turn away from God and become progressively sinful until Christ returned to redeem his “flock.” And in such a world, isolation is a welcome alternative to engagement with depravity. It wasn’t until the 1940s, when Charles Fuller and his merry band of intellectual fundamentalists (”neo-evangelicals” and later, simply evangelicals) founded Fuller Theological Seminary, that conservatives began their re-engagement with mainstream society. And it would take twenty more years, and serious discontent with civil rights reforms, before conservative evangelicals felt it was necessary to take political activism seriously. Although I don’t expect to see evangelicals completely disengage from politics, I wouldn’t be surprised if a good number of disenchanted evangelicals opted to invest their energies in places other than the Republican Party.
