The next Gnarls Barkley album leaked on the internet last week. Here’s the first single from said album.

A little bit more chaotic I think. Not a bad thing, either.

Never seen it before, pretty cool picture (of Cathy Freeman)

Linky

We are in the home stretch now of what has been a marathon Presidential campaign. The end of the Primary season is in sight, with 11 Republican and Democratic primaries to go. Here are some random thoughts.

The S stands for stupid

At the moment, Obama is in the lead when you consider his total delegate count. The ’superdelegate’ count (individual notable Democrats that could theoretically swing either way) favours Clinton at the moment. You do have to wonder what the Democratic party is trying to achieve with the whole concept. A few days ago, when appearing on The Daily Show, Senator Tom Daschle outlined the only rational reason I could possibly think of.

Daschle: (in creating the Superdelegate concept) they worried that somebody like Colbert could actually become the nominee. They wanted to veto that possiblity

Stewart: And that would be bad…..why?

Stewart has a point. Afterall, it’s the people that elect the president, not a handful of special Democrats. A comedian who thinks he knows something about politics might be better than a politican who thinks he knows something about comedy (cite: any of Bush’s ‘jokes’ that you’ve seen on Letterman over the past 6 or so years).

There is one redeeming (although slightly confusing) feature of the Superdelegate process. From the same interview with Obama-supporting Daschle:

Daschle: We ought to let the elected delegates make the decision who the nominee is and we ought to support the elected delegates.
Stewart: So, whoever is infront in the delegates…
Daschle: Exactly
Stewart: So, if Hilary Clinton is infront in the delegates, you’ll switch to her
Daschle: Absolutely, you’ll have to

I say confusing because if the Superdelegates are only going to vote for the candidate with the most popularly-elected delegates then what is the point in having Superdelegates in the first place? This isn’t a series of Lost, people want a result as soon as possible so they can get behind their favoured candidate (or have time to make up their minds about which party they are going to go with).

Uncle Fester

The Republicans don’t have the same problem as the Democrats in that their nominee has been decided for a few weeks now. John McCain, the presumptive nominee, is a mixed bag of issues and is far more centrist than Huckabee or Romney. He now faces the dilemma as to whether stick with the Republicans who got him the nomination or to push towards the Right, with the lure of Evangelical votes on offer. If he pursues the latter option doing so might risk his more liberal supporters switching to Obama or simply staying home and not voting at all.

It must be said that he takes a brave stance on some issues. When running against Mitt “We ought to double Guantanamo” Romney, he advocated closing it and expediting the judicial proceedings of its prisoners.

What’s wrong with the good old feather?

I find his stance on torture confusing. On the one hand McCain was tortured over a period of more than five years during the Vietnam War. He considers waterboarding to be torture. On the other hand he voted against banning the CIA from using such methods in the interrogation of prisoners.

Let’s define torture here so we have a baseline (from the UN):

any act by which severe pain or suffering, whether physical or mental, is intentionally inflicted on a person for such purposes as obtaining from him or a third person information or a confession, punishing him for an act he or a third person has committed or is suspected of having committed, or intimidating or coercing him or a third person, or for any reason based on discrimination of any kind, when such pain or suffering is inflicted by or at the instigation of or with the consent or acquiescence of a public official or other person acting in an official capacity. It does not include pain or suffering arising only from, inherent in or incidental to lawful sanctions.

The Bush stance on torture seems to be that it’s ok so long as there is the ‘ticking bomb scenario’ in play. This isn’t something that McCain is opposing (in public at least). The ticking bomb situation is where the authorities have detained a suspect and they believe that a ticking bomb of nuclear/high explosive/puppies/rainbows capability is about to go off but they have no idea where. The argument is that when lives are directly at stake that torturing the prisoner is acceptable.

There are, of course problems with this.
* It involves breaking of, or at best sidestepping the Geneva Convention (defining prisoners as enemy combatants, not prisoners of war, for example).

* The prisoner in question may in fact be innocent in which case there is probably no sum on money that could compensate someone for the mental or physical aftermath (McCain, incidentally, cannot raise his arms above shoulder-level due to his years as a prisoner in Vietnam).

* If you are being tortured and are in fact innocent then victims would have no choice but to make up a confession, possibly implicating other innocent people. Not only does this waste the time of the agency in question but when it turns out to be a false confession the people instituting the torture would most likely resume the torture, maybe with a newly instilled vigour.

* There is also the ‘if we do it to them then they will do it to us’ theory. If (generally) law-abiding entities decide that torture in some forms is permissible unlawful entities will take this far beyond the likes of government agencies.

* There is a slippery slope where the ticking time bomb scenario is concerned. The fact is that such situations are likely to be extremely rare. I’m sure that if a nuclear bomb was found and defused in New York that we would have heard about it. Officers, having such an incredibly powerful tool at their disposal could easily be tempted to beef up the claim in order to use torture as a tool to extract whatever they wish.

* Lastly, it portrays a hypocritical attitude towards the whole concept. After World War II, Japanese soldiers were convicted of war crimes because they waterboarded American and Allied prisoners of war. So what, you might say. But for the ticking bomb you only need to look at the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings to see that if Japan had a whiff of a massive bomb that they would be extremely interested in extracting the details in any way that they could.

XP

There is a lot of talk about experience in the race. Clinton promotes her own experience in contrast to Obama, who seems to exude hope more than experience. I’m going to argue that experience doesn’t really matter that much. There is simply no amount of experience that could possibly prepare you for job as the most powerful person in the world. The only exception to this is being an incumbent President, which neither party can produce this time. Hilary, being First Lady during her husband’s administration, will of course talk about her years in the White House but in reality the First Lady does not co-govern with the President. As was pointed out on Countdown recently Clinton’s campaigners cannot name one foreign policy moment where she has been ‘tested by crisis’ because only those in the Executive Office would be the ones to handle such issues. As First Lady, Clinton had no security clearance, no access to National Security Council meetings or White House Presidential security briefings and little or no involvement in the foreign policy flashpoints of the Clinton administration: Somalia, Haiti, Sudan or Afghanistan.

In other words, Clinton is now battling Obama on a basis of fear, which is incredibly disappointing, not only because she herself doesn’t have a leg to stand on on that topic but all she is doing is providing the Republicans with ammunition when (if?) Obama gets the nomination for the Democrats.

So if experience is irrelevant in this race then what should voters be looking for? I believe they should look for a subset of the nebulous umbrella of people skills.

They need to portray a strong public face for their country, a face that can inspire their own citizens but that can also be put on the world stage to do some much-needed fence mending. McCain is not the most charismatic speech-giver. Clinton is ok but by gosh Obama runs rings around both of them, hands down.

The second attribute required is the ability to judge character. The President has many advisers. If you think about the actual number of really hard decisions the President needs to make each day it’s not going to be many. Of those decisions all of them would be backed up by experts in their field. A President that surrounds themselves with people of a good character is going to be an excellent President. I don’t think that Clinton has done this. Her campaign has been about attacking Obama. Obama’s campaign, although often criticised for being little more than hot air, has been overly positive in its message. The fear-mongering only plays to the Republicans. Fear is more of a right-wing thing and the Democrats shouldn’t be playing that card.

Predictions

* Obama wins at the convention, after being ahead in the popular vote. The superdelegates follow popular opinion at the risk of destroying the party.

* John Edwards is the vice-presidential Democratic candidate. Obama has already ruled out running as the vice-presidential candidate. I think the Democrats might think that a Obama-Clinton ticket might be a pushing it a bit. Edwards is a polished white male and that will win them votes (sadly….).

* In order to capture the evangelical vote, McCain names a conservative running mate. I’m going to say Huckabee because he kept running and in doing so split the conservative vote away from Romney. I wouldn’t be surprised if there’s been a deal in the works for a long time.

* In the general election the flashpoint is Iraq and Obama takes this debate point over McCain hands down. Even if a war is on the whole sucessful the public gets sick of seeing the bodies come home. This point and the murkiness over torture tip the balance to Obama, who wins.

Let’s see how I do.

Image Credits (Creative Commons):

Obama
http://flickr.com/photos/mountaineerpics/1218476612/

McCain
http://flickr.com/photos/soggydan/2252112316/

Clinton
http://flickr.com/photos/marcn/2114907227/

The definitive flowchart

Badly Drawn Boy is just the one guy from the UK. He wrote and performed the entire score for About A Boy (ugh….Hugh Grant movies…*shudder*).

If you’re scratching your head wondering what the video means, wait until the very end.

insert Egg-related pun here
Linky

You have been warned…

(via Optical Illusions Etc)