Strike This!

No record-buying sprees in Brooklyn for me today, as I'm pretty much stuck with retail I can walk to until this strike ends. Commerce seems to be humming around here, but I'd imagine it's worse the farther downtown you get, since it's so hard to get around.

In any case, Kevin Drum of Washington Monthly has some wise words about the Bush Administration's defenders of the indefensable:

The fact is, superhawks always claim their programs are vital to American security, and they almost always turn out to be wrong. We didn't need to intern Japanese-Americans during World War II, we didn't need Joe McCarthy's theatrics during the Cold War, and we didn't need COINTELPRO during the Vietnam War. And when the Church Committee outlawed the most egregious of our intelligence abuses in the 70s, guess what happened? The Soviet Union disintegrated a decade later. Turns out we didn't need that stuff after all. America is a lot stronger than its supposed defenders give it credit for.

It never made sense to me how the righties of the 70s and 80s used one side of their mouths to say how even mild Euro-style socialism is unworkable while using the other side to hype the threat of a Soviet Union that was actually much weaker than they made it out to be.

UNRELATED: I introduced my mom to the Pandacam today. Much cooing and oohing ensued.