Remember remember the fifth of November.

* Happy Guy Fawkes Day! Michele Bachmann has her party primed and ready to go; how are you celebrating?

* Ezra Klein, with an assist from the CBO, tackles the Republican health care "plan."

The Democratic bill, in other words, covers 12 times as many people and saves $36 billion more than the Republican plan. And amazingly, the Democratic bill has already been through three committees and a merger process. It's already been shown to interest groups and advocacy organizations and industry stakeholders. It's already made its compromises with reality. It's already been through the legislative sausage grinder. And yet it saves more money and covers more people than the blank-slate alternative proposed by John Boehner and the House Republicans. The Democrats, constrained by reality, produced a far better plan than Boehner, who was constrained solely by his political imagination and legislative skill.

This is a major embarrassment for the Republicans. It's one thing to keep your cards close to your chest. Republicans are in the minority, after all, and their plan stands no chance of passage. It's another to lay them out on the table and show everyone that you have no hand, and aren't even totally sure how to play the game. The Democratic plan isn't perfect, but in comparison, it's looking astonishingly good.

* Will New Hampshire become the first state to break the streak on marriage equality? Allow me to repeat myself: I'm pessimistic but hopeful; minority civil rights shouldn't be subject to popular vote.

* But I think what makes [Inglourious Basterds] Tarantino’s best film, actually, is not just that he’s finally found an argument to put his obsessive film-nerd intertextuality in service of, but because it’s a good argument: by making his movie a deconstruction of the WWII-movie genre,**** he makes it about the ways that cinematic project retroactively placed coherent meaning (“the good war”) on a thing which was actually unthinkable and nonsensically violent and destructive. And because they did it by transforming history into myth, by reveling in fantasies of the past as meaningful and coherant, he can avoid getting bogged down in the nitty gritty of actual causes and causation, making a virtue of his total inability to bother with any of that stuff. Tarantino’s movie, in other words, has much more in common with Slaughterhouse Five than the movies it was actually responding to, but while Vonnegut insisted on the horrible subjective experience of violence’s senselessness, I think Tarantino’s movie is (on some level) about how an objective truth can be imposed on our subjectivities, how we come to believe that the war was, in fact, a good one.

* How polluted is China?

* Will anti-intellectual habits and authoritarian administrative practices kill Wikipedia?

Carol Anne Duffy commissioned some contemporary war poetry for the Guardian. Via MeFi.

Of Course If I Can Help in Any Way
by Sean O'Brien

May we begin? Please tell us what you said
Or did, or saw the others do or say
Or see, or write, or somehow intimate.
We're anxious to be clear on all the facts.
... But no. You think it's wiser if instead
You don't do that. You haven't got all day.
How could we grasp the interests of the state,
The angel-subtleties its work exacts?
Are we suggesting you might swerve
From righteousness? Why should we need to know?
Who do we think we're talking to like this
When - okay, look - God's asked you to preserve
His plans from scrutiny? You smile. You go.
Outside your creatures queue to take the piss.

God bless America (22 January, 2003)

Here they go again,
The Yanks in their armoured parade
Chanting their ballads of joy
As they gallop across the big world
Praising America's God.
The gutters are clogged with the dead
The ones who couldn't join in
The others refusing to sing
The ones who are losing their voice
The ones who've forgotten the tune.
The riders have whips which cut.
Your head rolls onto the sand
Your head is a pool in the dirt
Your head is a stain in the dust
Your eyes have gone out and your nose
Sniffs only the pong of the dead
And all the dead air is alive
With the smell of America's God.

The Guardian has poetry from that late Harold Pinter. Here's another political one from Lenin's Tomb.

American Football

Hallelujah!
It works.
We blew the shit out of them.

We blew the shit right back up their own ass
And out their fucking ears.

It works.
We blew the shit out of them.
They suffocated in their own shit!

Hallelujah.
Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew them into fucking shit.
They are eating it.

Praise the Lord for all good things.

We blew their balls into shards of dust,
Into shards of fucking dust.

We did it.

Now I want you to come over here and kiss me on the mouth.

If you want to know where the wars of the twenty-first century will be fought, just look at where the water is (and isn't). Via Andrew Sullivan.

Tim has some nice thoughts on enmity and honesty in the context of Al Qaeda's supposed endorsement of McCain.

The point here is that the war on terror, in a historically novel way, abrogates the basic conditions of veracity that make politics a meaningful category of human discourse. If the possibility of a "terrorist" uttering a true statement is permanently witheld, there is no real enemy to fight at all--there is only our mirror image of who we are as a people. We are damned to perpetually dream up our own worst enemy--and fight ourselves to the death.

We didn't need additional proof that I was a much less sophisticated and much more juvenile thinker than Tim, but my first reference for this incredibly silly argument was the Sicilian in The Princess Bride:

But it's so simple. All I have to do is divine from what I know of you: are you the sort of man who would put the poison into his own goblet or his enemy's? Now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet, because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I am not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. But you must have known I was not a great fool, you would have counted on it, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me...

"This topic brings me to that worst outcrop of herd life, the military system, which I abhor... This plague-spot of civilization ought to be abolished with all possible speed. Heroism on command, senseless violence, and all the loathsome nonsense that goes by the name of patriotism -- how passionately I hate them!

Einstein, anti-nationalist, via Cogitamus.

Looks like it's time for Palin's second gaffe. This from ABC News:

EXCLUSIVE: GOV. SARAH PALIN WARNS WAR MAY BE NECESSARY IF RUSSIA INVADES ANOTHER COUNTRY

Buckle your seat belts.

UPDATE: ABC News now has the full exchange.

GIBSON: Would you favor putting Georgia and Ukraine in NATO?

PALIN: Ukraine, definitely, yes. Yes, and Georgia.

GIBSON: Because Putin has said he would not tolerate NATO incursion into the Caucasus.

PALIN: Well, you know, the Rose Revolution, the Orange Revolution, those actions have showed us that those democratic nations, I believe, deserve to be in NATO.

Putin thinks otherwise. Obviously, he thinks otherwise, but...

GIBSON: And under the NATO treaty, wouldn't we then have to go to war if Russia went into Georgia?

PALIN: Perhaps so. I mean, that is the agreement when you are a NATO ally, is if another country is attacked, you're going to be expected to be called upon and help.

But NATO, I think, should include Ukraine, definitely, at this point and I think that we need to -- especially with new leadership coming in on January 20, being sworn on, on either ticket, we have got to make sure that we strengthen our allies, our ties with each one of those NATO members.

We have got to make sure that that is the group that can be counted upon to defend one another in a very dangerous world today.

GIBSON: And you think it would be worth it to the United States, Georgia is worth it to the United States to go to war if Russia were to invade.

PALIN: What I think is that smaller democratic countries that are invaded by a larger power is something for us to be vigilant against. We have got to be cognizant of what the consequences are if a larger power is able to take over smaller democratic countries.

And we have got to be vigilant. We have got to show the support, in this case, for Georgia. The support that we can show is economic sanctions perhaps against Russia, if this is what it leads to.

It doesn't have to lead to war and it doesn't have to lead, as I said, to a Cold War, but economic sanctions, diplomatic pressure, again, counting on our allies to help us do that in this mission of keeping our eye on Russia and Putin and some of his desire to control and to control much more than smaller democratic countries.

His mission, if it is to control energy supplies, also, coming from and through Russia, that's a dangerous position for our world to be in, if we were to allow that to happen.

UPDATE 2: Matt Yglesias and HuffPo (and HuffPo) take on other aspects of the interview.

The surrealism of Mark Bryan. Fantastic. Via Posthuman Blues.

Here come the oil wars.

I haven't seen many people talking about the recent Howard Zinn comic adaptation A People's History of American Empire. It's a good read, though its contents probably won't shock very many people who already read this blog. Al Hart and Gary Huck have a few excerpts at the tail end of their review, while YouTube has a video narrated by Viggo Mortensen.

Saturday Night Fever.

* Games of the day: Fantastic Contraption, Totem Destroyer, and Hedgehog Launch.

* Josh Marshall, Matt Yglesias, and Marc Ambinder all agree that Maliki's endorsement of the Obama plan for withdraw from Iraq today is the nail in the coffin for the sole remaining justification for the John McCain candidacy.

* Notorious freedom-hater the Pope is at it again, reminding us the West needs to change its wasteful way of life.

* Children's-Film Sequels as Imagined by Famous Directors.

* And what's Alan Moore's favorite TV show? The Wire, of course.

Hercules at AICN has a host of reviews for the David Simon Wire followup, Generation Kill. Sounds promising.

Crooks and Liars has a post on yesterday's 38th anniversary of the Kent State shootings.

Also via MeFi: "The Things That Carried Him," the story of one soldier's journey back from Iraq.

I linked last week to a discussion on the Bill Maher show about the Rev. Wright controversy that centered in part around Martin Luther King's opposition to the war in Vietnam. Now, via Cynical-C, here's the audio of that speech...

The Village Voice reviews a posthumous collection of Kurt Vonnegut's previously uncollected work on war, Armageddon in Retrospect, coming out next month.

Saturday politics!

* Writing at The Politco, the Washington Post's Jim VandeHei and Mike Allen clue into what lowly bloggers like myself have known since February: Regardless of her performance in Pennsylvania and elsewhere, Hillary Clinton cannot win the Democratic nomination.

* How Richardson came to endorse Obama, and why it's caused James Carville to totally freak out.

“Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic,” Mr. Carville said, referring to Holy Week.

* Why did I get Iraq wrong? Liberal hawks look back on how they blew it.

People frequently fret that we can't afford the measures necessary to fight climate change. That is false. We are an enormously rich country. We're in the midst of spending trillions on a war that is providing no benefits whatsoever, just to stoke the imperialist fantasies of our ruling class. We can afford whatever we want. It's whether we really want it that's the question.

Some good polemic from David Roberts at Gristmill, via Ezra Klein. More key facts from the post:

1. Projected total US spending on the Iraq war could cover all of the global investments in renewable power generation that are needed between now and 2030 in order to halt current warming trends.

5. In 2006, the US spent more on the war in Iraq than the whole world spent on investment in renewable energy.

6. US presidential candidate Barack Obama has committed to spending "$150 billion over 10 years to advance the next generation of green energy technology and infrastructure." The US spends nearly that much on the war in Iraq in just 10 months.

I succeeded, a long time ago, in presenting the basics of [war] on a rather simple board game... The surprises of this Kriegspiel seem inexhaustible; and I fear that this may well be the only one of my works that anyone will dare acknowledge as having some value.

All about Kriegspiel,, the board game invented by Guy Debord based on Clausewitz's principles of war. Here are the rules; you can play it online. Via MeFi.

Nuclear proliferation is still very, very scary, as Joseph Cirincione explains in the most recent The New York Review of Books:

Jonathan Schell's The Seventh Decade: The New Shape of Nuclear Danger picks up where Rhodes leaves off, examining the essential question: What are nuclear weapons for? Invented to counter Germany, dropped on Japan, deployed against the Soviet Union, nuclear weapons, Schell writes, lost any conceivable rational purpose after the end of the cold war. What nation, what threat now justifies thousands of them? Or any? After the cold war, Schell writes,

The number of nuclear weapons continued to drop, but the essential features of the mutual annihilation machine remained intact. The question of why the former Cold War rivals wanted nuclear weapons was forgotten, and their arsenals drifted into a kind of policy-free zone. Unsustained by Cold War rationales but not yet assigned any new ones, they seemed to exist for their own sakes, leaving a strong feeling that in the new era, missions would be sought for nuclear weapons rather than the other way around.

Why is this dangerous system persisting? Schell believes that the policies of the current administration are largely to blame:

The distance of Bush's policies from previous American non-proliferation policy is hard to overstate. Every previous American president in the nuclear age had relied on peaceful means to stop proliferation.... Preventive war had on occasion been proposed by presidential advisers but was always rejected.... President Bush's demotion of diplomacy and treaties across the board was as clear as his elevation of force. In decision after decision, his administration tore at the web of arms control treaties that had grown up over four decades.

Schell argues convincingly that plans by the Bush administration for new nuclear weapons and for new uses for these weapons—such as bunker-busting deep penetration bombs— swung nuclear policy sharply away from deterrence and in the direction of nuclear use. "The mission of nuclear weapons is no longer to produce stalemate with a peer," Schell writes; "it is to fight and win wars against nations with little or no ability to respond." As if to demonstrate Schell's point, four of the Republican presidential candidates discussed using nuclear weapons against Iran in a CNN debate on June 5, 2007.

Republicans, of course, are pretty scary too.