This is an open thread; use it to discuss whatever you’d like, or to post interesting links. Self-linking is encouraged.

Someone at the AP (or perhaps the Washington Post) is a brilliant geeky headline writer.

Skywalkers in Korea Cross Han Solo

The Associated Press
Thursday, May 3, 2007; 3:34 PM

SEOUL, South Korea — They came from all over the world, poles in hand, and feet ready to inch more than half a mile across a high wire strung over the Han River in a spine-tingling battle of balance, speed and high anxiety.

As part of its annual city festival, the South Korean capital staged Thursday what was billed as the world’s first high-wire championship, drawing 18 contestants from nine countries for three days of supreme feats of concentration.

Hat tip: Robert at Lawyers, Guns and Money

While I’m posting, let me point out that two bloggers I’ve often disagreed with have recently written posts I mostly or entirely agree with; David at The Debate Link has written a couple of posts on Israel I mostly agree with, and Daran at Feminist Critics has been criticizing an anti-feminist attack on Mary Koss’ rape prevalence study.

If you have been reading this blog for a while, you probably already know that I was raised in southern Ohio, and my friends and relatives are spread between northwestern and southeastern Ohio. I don’t know what happened after I moved away, but all the sudden Ohio is a political hotbed (LOL! I saw this article on Yahoo! right after I posted: Why is Ohio such a strong barometer of the country’s pulse?). One of the infamous purple, swing states. Since I have a family full of Ohio swing voters and most of them are those coveted blue collar folks, they are every politician’s “friend” these days. My mom says that she and my Dad get called constantly this time of year, and Bill Clinton even came to my hometown last week. In the meanwhile I’ve been living in New York and Connecticut, which are about as Democratic as you can get, so I don’t get to see the crazy political ads or rallies that they get.

So…can somebody who’s actually on the ground in Ohio or Texas (or Rhode Island or Vermont for that matter) tell me what’s going on? Are the polls busy? Is the weather causing problems? My Mom and Dad went to vote at 7AM this morning, and my Mom said it was surprisingly empty. I’m curious what are other folks seeing? I know y’all Ohio and Texas people are out there; what’s going on?

Vivian Stringer is the head coach of the Rutger’s women’s basketball team, so many of you may have heard her name in the wake of Don Imus’s racist and sexist comments.  However, her story and her influence as a pioneering woman extends well beyond the Imus controversy.  She has an amazing biography, and she is undoubtably a pioneering African American woman.  Her influence as a role model extends well beyond her coaching background, as revealed in the press surrounding the book:

 A gifted athlete, she had to fight for a place on an all-white cheerleading squad in the sixties. In 1981, just as her coaching career was taking off, her fourteen-month-old daughter, Nina, was stricken with spinal meningitis. Nina would never walk or talk again. Still grieving, Stringer brought a small, poor, historically black college to the national championships—a triumph hailed as “Hoosiers with an all-female cast.” In 1991, her husband, Bill—her staunchest supporter, the father of her children, and the love of her life—fell dead of a sudden heartattack, but that same year, she led yet another young team to the Final Four. Through these dark times and others—including her bout with cancer, shared here for the first time—Stringer has carried her burdens with grace. Given her history, it was no surprise that she led her team to respond to Don Imus’s slurs with dignity and courage.

Standing Tall is a story of quiet strength in the face of punishing odds. Above all, it is an extraordinary love story—love for the game, for the players she has coached, for her close-knit family, and for the husband she lost far too soon. It will resonate long after the last page.

Stringer releases her autobiography today and I encourage everyone to check it out.  It’s often that I put up stories about the mistreatment of black women in the US, so it is nice to have an occasion to celebrate some one who helps challenge those images of black women.

Update: Here is an interview I heard with her today.

The new blog Bad Cartoonist is written by someone who is obviously a political cartoonist, but he’s keeping his name to himself. (Or she. But odds are, given the demographics of political cartoonists, it’s he.)

And he’s pissed off by the laziness, hackery, and lack of imagination that characterizes most political cartooning nowadays. For instance:

Todays lesson is a follow-up on yesterdays lesson on how you too can be a cartoonist with out really trying. Today we’re going to learn from one well-paid, syndicate, award-winning cartoonist; Jeff Stahler.

Yesterday we learned how you can rip off Hollywood or Cnn when realise you don’t have a creative bone in your body. For those of you who are so insipid that you can’t even make a cartoon out of a movie poster we have the following technique. We’re going to call it the ‘Stahler’ because he does it more than anybody else but, keep in mind, every cartoonist on the planet does this, repeatedly. And they all hate it with a passion.

The idea is simple. If you can’t come up with an idea about a news story, just draw a cartoon of people reacting to the news. Most often this cartoon will be of two people, husband and wife, sipping coffee at the breakfast table reacting the newspaper in their hands. The cartoonist must draw the newspaper. No one knows for sure why, but it is a rule that is followed religiously. Subtle variations include: two people at a cafe; two people in front of the TV (in this instance the cartoonist must draw the remote control. Don’t ask why, just do it. It’s a rule.); two people reading a sign and so forth.

Two illustrate “the Stahler,” he posted this image, which was created by overlaying two different cartoons by Stahler which were published less than a month apart.

I don’t share all the values of Bad Cartoonist; I think you can be a good political cartoonist without being good at caricatures, and for some styles of cartooning repeating images works. But I think that whatever style you work in, any good cartoonist strives to be creative and demonstrate good craft within the parameters of that style. Within the style he’s working in, Stahler — like way too many successful political cartoonists — displays virtually no creativity and cheats on the craft. Which is why political cartooning — and in particular, the kind of political cartooning most often found in mainstream newspapers — has lost almost all creative vitality.

From the Sacramento Bee:

Older, sicker patients could be allowed to die in order to save the lives of patients more likely to survive a massive disaster, bioterror attack or influenza pandemic in California.

It’s not how nurses and doctors are accustomed to doing things, nor how Californians expect to be treated. But it is part of a sweeping statewide plan being praised for its breadth, even as it rankles providers who will have to carry it out.

The new “surge capacity guidelines” released by the state Department of Public Health, depict a post-disaster health care environment that looks and feels nothing like the system most Californians depend on.

It provides for scenarios in which patients could be herded into school gymnasiums for life-saving care or animal doctors could stitch up the human wounded and set their broken bones.

The 1,900-page document lays the practical – and ethical – groundwork for local and county health departments, hospitals, emergency responders and any able-bodied health care worker likely to be called upon in a catastrophe.

Striking in its specificity and its frank focus on the need to suspend or flex established laws and to ration health care, the plan is being hailed as a model for the rest of the nation.

You really need to read the whole thing to get a sense of how the plan would simultaneously limit patient protections and provide freer access to care.

Cross-posted at The Gimp Parade

Foreign Policy In Focus compares Obama’s and Clinton’s foreign policy teams.

Obama advisors like Joseph Cirincione have emphasized a policy toward Iraq based on containment and engagement and have downplayed the supposed threat from Iran. Clinton advisor Holbrooke, meanwhile, insists that “the Iranians are an enormous threat to the United States,” the country is “the most pressing problem nation,” and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad is like Hitler.

…it may be significant that Senator Clinton’s foreign policy advisors, many of whom are veterans of her husband’s administration, were virtually all strong supporters of President George W. Bush’s call for a U.S. invasion of Iraq. By contrast, almost every one of Senator Obama’s foreign policy team was opposed to a U.S. invasion.

(Here’s a link to a similar piece on Huff post.)

Zunes, the author of the FPIF post, also wrote criticizing Obama’s foreign policy positions, which shows a politician who has some progressive ideas on foreign policy, but has refused to stand up for them consistently. But Clinton’s record is significantly worse, because she is consistent. Her approach to foreign policy, going back to her husband’s administration, has been steadily hawkish and militaristic, and she has a Bush-lite hostility to international law. I’ve seen some Clinton supporters suggest she might be a “stealth dove”; that’s wistful thinking.

No one can predict the future with certainty. But if their records and advisers are any indication, Clinton’s foreign policy will be more militaristic and more belligerent than Obama’s. That will translate into thousands or tens of thousands more needless deaths, both of US soldiers and of the citizens of whatever other countries we bomb and invade. That alone, for me, overwhelms all of the reasons I might prefer Clinton over Obama as a candidate.

That said, Clinton did recently make a significant move to the left on one foreign policy issue.

Last week, The Nation posted an article criticizing Obama’s position on mercenaries in Iraq:

A senior foreign policy adviser to leading Democratic presidential candidate Barack Obama has told The Nation that if elected Obama will not “rule out” using private security companies like Blackwater Worldwide in Iraq. The adviser also said that Obama does not plan to sign on to legislation that seeks to ban the use of these forces in US war zones by January 2009, when a new President will be sworn in. Obama’s campaign says that instead he will focus on bringing accountability to these forces while increasing funding for the State Department’s Bureau of Diplomatic Security, the agency that employs Blackwater and other private security contractors. (Hillary Clinton’s staff did not respond to repeated requests for an interview or a statement on this issue.) [...]

The US Embassy in Iraq is slated to become the largest embassy in world history. [...] Obama’s proposed increase in funding to the diplomatic security division would ostensibly pave the way for a protective force composed entirely of US government personnel, but the process of building that force would likely take a long time.

The day after The Nation posted the article on their website, Clinton announced that she was co-sponsoring legislation to ban the use of private contractors in Iraq and Afghanistan.

The Nation correctly points out that Clinton’s sudden advocacy of a ban is a political ploy — the bill (S. 2398 — pdf link) was written and proposed by Bernie Sanders back in November, yet Clinton only decided to co-sponsor it now, the day after Obama is prominently criticized on this issue. Windows aren’t this transparent.

Obama supporters argue, probably correctly, that before this week Obama has shown more interest than Clinton in addressing the mercenary problem. To which I say: What have you done for us lately?

So what if Clinton is acting like a cynical hypocrite? So do all successful politicians, Obama included. All else held equal, I prefer to vote for the cynical hypocrite who takes a stronger position on private contractors in Iraq. (But all else isn’t equal, which is why I’m still planning to vote for Obama.)

If elected, Clinton won’t do what this bill calls for — which is replacing “at least 48,000″ private contractors in Iraq in six months. We don’t have an additional 48,000 trained security personnel, and I don’t know of any plausible plan to recruit and train them in six months. But that doesn’t negate the importance of Clinton staking out this position. Even if Clinton won’t come through with a total ban, the position she’s staked out will increase the pressure on her, if she becomes President, to reign in the private contractors more than she would otherwise; and that she’s forced Obama to defend his position puts similar (but lesser) pressure on Obama, if he wins. Furthermore, if the candidates have to compete with each other by trying to out-left each other on foreign policy issues, then that’s good.

So unlike some other Obama supporters I’ve read, I give credit to Clinton for her sudden support of banning mercenaries.