I was going to save this for Sunday's book thread, but what the heck.

Amazon has announced that sales of e-books for the Kindle have outstripped sales of paperbacks for the first time. Is this good news, bad news, or just, you know, another technological milestone?

I love my Kindle and I buy e-book versions of novels whenever I can, but still...I find this news unsettling. There are some fairly deep questions about what will happen if books go the way of film cameras and music CDs. E-books can't be loaned or re-sold, and can be "lost" forever if your device malfunctions or gets broken somehow (though the "cloud" model in theory allows you to re-download, what happens if the "cloud" goes down?). All the same caveats that apply to digital music also applies to e-books, and more besides.

It just seems to me that we are rushing into a paper-book-free world without really considering what that really means. (And yes, I am aware of the hypocrisy latent in that position, given that I just bought two e-books on my Kindle yesterday.)

Posted by: Monty at 10:39 AM | Comments (101)
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The GOP has long shied away from direct, personalized attacks on Obama. They figure his personal standing is too high for that, so they attack him on policy grounds.

I think that has to change, and now. Obama has entered campaign mode, and the central pillar of that campaign is voting present.

e deficit is awful and must be cut, entitlements are unsustainable and must be addressed, the tax code hurts growth and must be reformed, and government should be smaller and more efficient, but don't look to Mr. Obama for ideas on how to fix any of this. Go ahead and cut spending and Medicare if you want, Republicans. The President will get back to you with his reply as time and politics allow.

After you, Congressman Ryan.

As political strategy, perhaps this will turn out to be shrewd. Republicans will advance their budget and spending cuts, Democrats will attack them, the voters will sour, and Mr. Obama will ride to re-election. It happened in 1996.

As leadership, however, this is an abdication that contradicts Mr. Obama's rhetorical flourishes...

Obama gives a speech studded with claims about his own "boldness" while punting on all the important issues and only offering cute-sounding, poll-tested anecdotes about the wonders of government intervention. Solar shingles! Fuel made from sunlight and water! High speed trains!

None of these address the central problem this nation faces, which is that we are going bankrupt and in fact stand on the edge of a financial precipice.

Obama's solution? A millionaire's tax and canceling oil company "subsidies" (which aren't subsidies, but normal expensing of stock). I won't even bother to argue that that will hinder the economy. Even assuming it will have no detrimental effect on the economy, the proposals fails. Even assuming taxes are the way out, the proposals fail. What Obama fails to mention is that even if the GOP decides to lobotimize itself and support these measues, they do not even begin to make the tiniest dent in the colossal debt we face.

We knock the GOP all the time for making tiny, largely symbolic gestures at cutting the budget. These cuts, most people know, do not even begin to bring revenue and spending into line.

Obama's proposed tax hikes are exactly similar, with the added feature that they'll also retard the rate of growth and thus reduce tax revenues to boot. But even assuming they had no such retarding effect, even if they did bring in what they are not-really-projected to bring in using static analysis, they would still do nothing at all to bring revenues anywhere near expenditures.

He's a coward. He has abdicated leadership on this issue, entirely, and feels that it's best if he does nothing at all about these things, because doing so might cost him the 2012 election.

But what is the point of a presidency if the president intends to just mark time for another four years as the nation spirals further into fiscal chaos?

"We do big things," Obama said. A pity Joe Wilson didn't speak up to say "You lie!"

It is time to call a coward a coward, and call him that early and often. The 2012 season is upon us, begun by Obama in his signature voting-present, say-nothing-interesting-and-hope-to-get-by-on-demeanor style.

It's time we started the 2012 season, then, and brand him a political coward, a timid time-marker who seeks a second term not for America's interest but for his own insatiable ego.

RINOs and "moderates" can do this too. "Coward" is too strong a word (might incite violence), but they can say he not showing any leadership when the country most needs it. When the nation most needs the president as a galvanizing force, Obama is hiding in the Oval Office reading focus-group reports on how "high speed trains" play in Iowa.

When I criticized the GOP and Ryan for not being stronger on these issues, several readers commented that there is no point, as the initiative must come from the president. They're right. One cannot set policy from Congress.

Obama is turing this into a game of chicken, which he's destined to win, as he's the biggest chicken in government. He wants the GOP to take the lead only so he can demagogue them, win in 2012, and then do nothing.

The GOP, for its part, has signaled, as strongly as possible, that they are in support of an effort to rein in spending and especially entitlements. I don't know how much harder he expects them to signal their willingness to seriously consider this issue. Ryan's put out his roadmap, and referenced it in the rebuttal to the SOTU. Jim Coburn is writing constantly about it. Even on the left, Dick Durbin also voted, with Coburn, for the changes proposed by Bowers and Simpson.

There is wide support on the right for this, and even a good amount of support on the left. What's missing? A president who doesn't want to do anything except give interviews to people who'll kiss his ass.

Even with the support of the GOP and many on the left, a real effort to get the nation's finance in order may fail. Amnesty failed despite a similar situation; the nation rose up against it.

That could happen here, too -- but notably, no one really paid a high political cost for amnesty. Because it didn't pass. And no one really paid a high political cost for Bush's attempt to do something with Social Security, because it didn't pass.

There is almost no risk here for Obama, then: If he fails, he fails, but as with those other two unpopular initiatives, the public was appeased mostly by their failure and did not seek additional vengeance.

So what's Obama's excuse for inaction? Even as far as the only thing that's important to him -- ego, bragging rights, being the center of attention -- an attempt to do something good and right won't end up hurting him much.

A coward is a coward. With two years left on his term Obama has already decided to be a lame-duck because that's the path of least resistance. His allies in the media will carry him, he figures, praising him for boldness and transformational effect even when he demonstrates none at all.

We have to fight that. He's a goddamned coward and he's destroying this country just so he can be remembered as a two-termer. A do-nothing two-termer, but who cares? As long as he gets to keep reading words off a TelePrompTer.

By the Way: He's a passive-aggressive coward on taxation, too, because he's doing the opposite of Reagan's "starve the beast." Reagan figured that if taxes were kept low, spending would have to come down.

Obama's doing the opposite. He's bloating the beast, counting on other people to raise taxes to the confiscatory levels he wants, but dares not call for himself. He is engineering a crisis with the hopes that the only solution will be huge tax increases... but he doesn't want his fingerprints on it. He'll do on this as he does on everything -- lead from behind. When a majority of people accretes around the idea that the only way to stave off fiscal calamity is to raise taxes, he'll reluctantly agree.

And when I say "raise taxes" I mean on the middle and working classes. Willie Sutton, the bank robber, was asked why he robbed banks. "Because that's where the money is," he said.

The middle class is where the money is in America, because there's so damn many of them. They don't have more money than the rich individually, of course, but in aggregate, they have much more money -- or, as Obama calls it, pre-extraction government revenue.

Obama has put this nation on a trajectory in which the middle class will not only lose the Bush tax cut but will have to pay a greater share of money to the government than any time in history.

He knows that's politically dangerous to say out loud, so instead he's passively-aggressively getting the nation a little big pregnant on spending so that one day we'll almost have to beg him to tax us.

He's a goddamned coward and it's time we had the guts to say so.

Posted by: Ace at 10:39 AM | Comments (321)
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Why? Carbon sequestration. He killed so many people a lot of cultivated land went back to forest.

Genghis Khan's Mongol invasion in the 13th and 14th centuries was so vast that it may have been the first instance in history of a single culture causing man-made climate change, according to new research out of the Carnegie Institution's Department of Global Ecology, reports Mongabay.com.

Unlike modern day climate change, however, the Mongol invasion cooled the planet, effectively scrubbing around 700 million tons of carbon from the atmosphere.

So how did Genghis Khan, one of history's cruelest conquerors, earn such a glowing environmental report card? The reality may be a bit difficult for today's environmentalists to stomach, but Khan did it the same way he built his empire — with a high body count.

Yay...?

Posted by: Ace at 09:49 AM | Comments (128)
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According to Al Jazeera English, Hosni Mubarak should be giving a statement.

Here is a link to Al Jazeera's live feed.

The Live Feed

You may have to click the play button to get it started. Al Jazeera seems to have the best coverage as Egyptian military are confiscating CNN, BBC and other Western Media's equipment.

I'm not certain Mubarak will be speaking but that is what they reported earlier.

Here is another live Feed. From a network called PressTV. (h/t Tami in the comments)

USAToday is covering this as well with updates as they come in.

Wikileaks releasing new Egypt related documents to spur on the protestors. However, it seems unlikely this information will get into Egypt in a timely fashion with the internet being shut down. (h/t CDR-M)

Update

The United States Government, represented by the Obama Administration has released a profound statement that will be a game changer.

more...

Posted by: Open Blogger at 07:31 AM | Comments (759)
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I'm not convinced any of the people on this list can beat the President, partially because of previous stumbles and partially because of the math.

Still, primaries are all about persuading your fellows to vote for your candidate, unlike the general election which is about holding your nose and voting for the idiot your fellows chose instead. So who's it going to be?

And why?

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 03:32 AM | Comments (1065)
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FRIDAY!!!

Posted by: Gabriel Malor at 02:50 AM | Comments (95)
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Today I Won The Future! Again. I feel so accomplished.

Hey How Bout A Choral Version of Radiohead's "Creep"?

To be honest I never cared for the Radiohead song when it came out in the early 90s. But it went on to become a radio and karaoke fixture. Well now here's an amazing choral version of it performed by a Belgian girls' choir that I like much better. It appeared in a trailer for The Social Network earlier this year and has become a hit in its own right.

Posted by: Maetenloch at 05:58 PM | Comments (652)
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They bring a knife to the fight, you bring a khukuri.

“They started snatching jewelry, cell phones, cash, laptops and other belongings from the passengers,” Shrestha recalled. The soldier had somehow remained a silent spectator amidst the melee, but not for long. He had had enough when the robbers stripped an 18-year-old girl sitting next to him and tried to rape her right in front of her parents. He then took out his khukuri and took on the robbers.

“The girl cried for help, saying ´You are a soldier, please save a sister´,” Shrestha recalled. “I prevented her from being raped, thinking of her as my own sister,” he added. He took one of the robbers under control and then started to attack the others. He said the rest of the robbers fled after he killed three of them with his khukuri and injured eight others.

Memo to potential suitors of this guy's sister: mind your manners.

Like the commenter said, "I love a story with a happy ending".

via the Man of Substance, the Only Important Lighting Guy Up In That Booth

UPDATE: Some of are you are wondering, what the hell is a khukiri?

Wonder no more (via commenter Kratos, Ghost of Sparta, cheerleader afficianado extraordinaire). more...

Posted by: Dave in Texas at 03:42 PM | Comments (266)
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Just coming through....Rahm is in! Rahm is in!

The Chicago election board and a Cook County Circuit judge had earlier both ruled Emanuel met the residency requirements. The Supreme Court said the appellate court was in error in overrulling them.

"So there will be no mistake, let us be entirely clear," the Supreme Court wrote in its ruling today. "This courtÂ’s decision is based on the following and only on the following: (1) what it means to be a resident for election purposes was clearly established long ago, and Illinois law has been consistent on the matter since at least the 19th Century; (2) the novel standard adopted by the appellate court majority is without any foundation in Illinois law; (3) the BoardÂ’s factual findings were not against the manifest weight of the evidence; and (4) the BoardÂ’s decision was not clearly erroneous."

Emanuel has enjoyed a wide lead over three other major candidates in two Tribune polls.

For the best coverage of this follow @MayorEmanuel on Twitter. Warning, there are a few F-bombs. Actually, it's all F-bombs.

For more on the original decision that tossed Rahm (and which has now been overturned), go here.

Posted by: DrewM at 02:10 PM | Comments (260)
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Above the post update [DrewM.]: The announcement came early...not running for President, hints towards run for Governor.

He was a long shot for the nomination this year. If Obama is reelected (God help us), he'll be in better shape for 2016. Amazing how many great candidates we might have then. I hope we don't need them.

So, who has the most Presidential Hair(tm) now? Mitt? Thune? The race is wide open.

Original Post:

Late today, Politico says.

DrewM. notes he's giving the announcement to his hometown paper which Drew takes to mean he's announcing for governor.

I don't take it that way -- a presidential candidate would do that too. "Small town values" and etc.

That said, most people figure he'll go for the office he's much more likely to win, the governorship, rather than make a difficult run for the nomination in a presidential contest in which a lot of people think we're still heavy underdogs.

Update: He'll announce at 7pm tonight.

Posted by: Ace at 12:04 PM | Comments (404)
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