All Blog Posts from Coop's Corner

This one is giving Orson Welles' 1938 radio production of The War of the Worlds a good run for the money.

For the seventh consecutive year, phony messages are filling up email inboxes around the world warning that on August 27th Mars will approach Earth and grow to the size of a full Moon. "NO ONE ALIVE TODAY WILL EVER SEE THIS AGAIN," the email declares--all in capital letters.

And no, it's not true.

But the Mars hoax has reached such epidemic proportions that NASA saw fit to send out an email late Tuesday night, reminding people that come Aug. 27, Mars will be "314 million km from Earth, about as far away as it can get."

As with so many pop culture bromides, there's a grain of truth to this one. In 2003, Mars actually did swell to unusual proportions and on August 27th of that year, the Red Planet came within 56 million kilometers of Earth. That was nearest it has been in 60,000 years. That's when the emails began - and they show no sign of stopping this year. Get your delete key ready, just in case.

The controversy over plans to build a mosque in lower Manhattan near the World Trade Center site continues into yet another week. If this was a black-and-white movie, a cinematic hero in the Gary Cooper-Jimmy Stewart mold would ride into the picture just about now to dispense a dose of American common sense and stamp out our fears.

Too bad the real world can't borrow a page from the silver screen. Still, we are the inheritors of a rich tradition of political pragmatism. That counts for a lot in uncertain times. Or it should. Over the decades, when things threatened to get out of hand, that shared common good sense has usually been enough to help us keep our bearings.

But I wonder whether we're going to remain true to our better angels this time around. Instead of Jefferson, Lincoln and Roosevelt, the media pulpit is being hijacked by the shrill and the stupid, exploiting the moment for predictably pedestrian political or financial gain (or both).

As Bob Dylan wrote, you don't need a weatherman to know which way the wind blows. The timing was surely coincidental but the faux controversy ginned up over the proposed mosque - planned on the site of a former Burlington Coat Factory outlet - came as a Gainsville, Fla., church said it still plans to burn copies of the Quran even after local city officials denied a burn permit. Repeat: They want to burn copies of the Quran.

This may be a fringe group but the ugly motive they embraced didn't materialize in a vacuum. Politicians are, well, politicians and from Murphy Brown to the Terry Schiavo case, there's a contemporary history annotated by the use of the latest "outrage" to work up passions for political gain. One assumes that the few grown-ups left in the GOP leadership know what's going to happen if they let the hacks continue to fan the flames. Nearly one in five Americans now believe that that President Obama is a Muslim. For coming attractions of this fall's "Obama-as-alien" theme, check out this innuendo-filled piece by Byron York. See how this works: Obama - make that Barack Hussein Obama - is a secret Muslim and the Muslims, as Newt Gingrich has pointed out are "trying to make a case about supremacy" by building a mosque "right next to a place where 3,000 Americans were killed by radical Islamists."

Gingrich, mentioned as a possible 2012 presidential candidate, also had no problem reaching for the Nazi analogy to argue against the mosque:

"Nazis don't have the right to put up a sign next to the Holocaust Museum in Washington. We would never accept the Japanese putting up a sight next to Pearl Harbor. There's no reason for us to accept a mosque next to the World Trade Center."

Another out-of-office politician, former Pennsylvania Sen. Rick Santorum, who also is mentioned as a potential future presidential candidate, picked up on the same theme, casting this as part of a larger offensive on the part of political Islam to advance Shariah law.

"...what we have is an Imam who believes not only in the "religious" part of Islam, the faith and the relationship with Allah. What he is trying to accomplish is political Islam, so he has a political agenda which is Shariah. That's the most important thing for people to understand. That unlike Christianity which is a faith that is about the next world, the next kingdom, the relationship between you and your maker. And that while there certainly are moral components to Christianity that apply to living your life like the Golden Rule and the Ten Commandments, there is not a political code, there is not a governmental structure ... there is not the kind of detailed structure of how to run a worldly kingdom in Christianity that there is in Islam and that's what Shariah is, and that's what this man is advocating. So you have not just someone who's advocating a religious doctrine but he is also advancing a political doctrine under the guise and protection of religion, and that is problematic.

Santorum doesn't have the guts to spell it out too bluntly but his reading of Islamic jurisprudence points to the conclusion that Islam's fundamental charge is to force the submission of the Dar al Harb which exists here in the U.S. So if this religion-cum-ideology is fundamentally hostile to American pluralism, why indict this one imam - they're all part-and-parcel of the same conspiracy. Call it a Muslim version of the Protocols of the Elders of Zion.

In this sort of atmosphere, is it any wonder that political pygmies are tempted to play for short-term gain? The New York Republican gubernatorial candidate Rick Lazio is now out there hammering Feisal Abdul Rauf, the imam behind the mosque construction as a terrorist sympathizer. ( For the record, the New York Police Department last week told the Associated Press that it had "identified no law enforcement issues related to the proposed mosque"). As usual, the Democrats don't have a stomach for this fight. Harry Reid, facing a strong challenge for his Senate seat, this week broke with the president this week and said the mosque should get built elsewhere. At least he had the good grace not to paint them as the enemy.

Even if they apparently represent the other for so many "real" Americans.

Time to update the old dictum concerning lies, damned lies and statistics. Let's make that last one phony statistics.

In what had to a thoroughly discouraging exercise, Daily Kos impresario, Markos Moulitsas, issued a statement accusing Research 2000 of polling fraud and that a lawsuit would follow.

I have just published a report by three statistics wizards showing, quite convincingly, that the weekly Research 2000 State of the Nation poll we ran the past year and a half was likely bunk....

We contracted with Research 2000 to conduct polling and to provide us with the results of their surveys. Based on the report of the statisticians, it's clear that we did not get what we paid for. We were defrauded by Research 2000, and while we don't know if some or all of the data was fabricated or manipulated beyond recognition, we know we can't trust it. Meanwhile, Research 2000 has refused to offer any explanation. Early in this process, I asked for and they offered to provide us with their raw data for independent analysis -- which could potentially exculpate them. That was two weeks ago, and despite repeated promises to provide us that data, Research 2000 ultimately refused to do so. At one point, they claimed they couldn't deliver them because their computers were down and they had to work out of a Kinkos office. Research 2000 was delivered a copy of the report early Monday morning, and though they quickly responded and promised a full response, once again the authors of the report heard nothing more.

While the investigation didn't look at all of Research 2000 polling conducted for us, fact is I no longer have any confidence in any of it, and neither should anyone else. I ask that all poll tracking sites remove any Research 2000 polls commissioned by us from their databases. I hereby renounce any post we've written based exclusively on Research 2000 polling. ...

I want to feel stupid for being defrauded, but fact is Research 2000 had a good reputation in political circles. Among its clients the last two years have been KCCI-TV in Iowa, WCAX-TV in Vermont, WISC-TV in Wisconsin, WKYT-TV in Kentucky, Lee Enterprises, the Concord Monitor, The Florida Times-Union, WSBT-TV/WISH-TV/WANE-TV in Indiana, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, the Bergen Record, and the Reno Gazette-Journal. In fact, just last week, in an email debate about robo-pollsters, I had a senior editor at a top DC-based political publication tell me that he'd "obviously" trust Research 2000 more than any automated pollsters, such as SurveyUSA. I didn't trust Research 2000 more than I trusted SUSA (given their solid track record,) but I did trust them. I got burned, and got burned bad.

For the record, Research 2000's president deniedMoulitsas' allegations. Until the facts get sorted out, we're left with a he-said, she-said scenario. To his credit, Moulitsas issued the disclosure without anyone first outing him. But with the story already taking on a life of its own, this much is clear: the Kos folks are going to eat a fair amount of public crow for an indeterminate period. As Moulitsas himself notes:

Sure, our friends on the Right will get to take some cheap shots, and they should take advantage of the opportunity. But ultimately, this episode validates the reason why we released the internal numbers from Research 2000 -- and why every media outlet should do the same from their pollster; without full transparency of results, this fraud would not have been uncovered. As difficult as it has been to learn that we were victims of that fraud, our commitment to accuracy and the truth is far more important than shielding ourselves from cheap shots from the Right.

Maybe John Yoo is better at law than he is at history.

Yoo, a former deputy assistant attorney general in the Justice Department, is perhaps most familiar to the public for the legal opinion the Bush administration used  to rationalize the harsh interrogation of suspected terrorists.

Since returning to the private sector - he currently teaches law at the University of California, Berkeley - Yoo has made the rounds of the lecture circuit to pump a new book and counter critics who have accused him of twisting the U.S. Constitution to justify torture.

After the Obama administration released seven more secret opinions written entirely by Yoo (or in conjunction with fellow Bush lawyer Jay Bybee, now a federal judge on the United States Court of Appeals for the Ninth Circuit)  Yoo was eviscerated by scholars and journalists.

Some of the best  included Gary Kamiya in Slate and with David Cole's more in-depth piece in the New York Review of Books. After that sort of public shellacking I assumed Yoo would be refrain from stoking the partisan embers for a while.

I was wrong.

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Yes, there was a certain something about that haunting soundtrack which really freaked out me - and the rest of the United States - watching the movie "Jaws" the first time. (It wasn't happenstance that beaches across the United States also reported lighter-than-usual traffic that summer of 1975.)

Turns out that a film score like the one Steven Spielberg incorporated for his blockbuster movie actually mimic animal cries, or what scientists term "nonlinear vocalizations," according to a study just published in the journal Biology Letters.

"By their very nature, vocalizations containing nonlinearities may sound harsh and are somewhat unpredictable," the study found.

The researchers tested whether film soundtracks could evoke similar emotions in a range of film genres. They came up with the perhaps unsurprising conclusion that Hollywood film-makers since D.W. Griffith have known: Sound tracks can manipulate human emotions.

Among other findings:

Dramatic films suppressed noise of all types, featuring more abrupt frequency transitions and musical sidebands. They also included fewer noisy screams than expected.

Horror films suppressed abrupt frequency transitions and musical sidebands. The also featured more non-musical sidebands, and noisy screams than anticipated.

Adventure films had more male screams than expected.

Apple's contract manufacturer building the next iPhone plans to ship 24 million units by the end of this year, according to a new report.

The report from Digitimes on Monday said Taiwan-based Foxconn will ship 4.5 million next-gen iPhones by the end of June, and 19.5 million by the end of 2010.

Apple sells a lot of phones, but 24 million is a big number even for them. For comparison, Apple has sold a little over 50 million total since the original iPhone's debut in 2007. So how to explain the supposed sudden surge in iPhone supply? Digitimes could be wrong of course, though it does have some good sources in the contract manufacturing world.

Other possible explanations could be that Apple is planning big price cuts on this model, which could move more units. Or, and this would jibe with reports that the company's building a CDMA phone, it could be planning to add more carrier partners. More outlets to sell the phone would mean more supply.

You can read the rest of this article at CNET News.com.

Never would have figured on this one: Pat Buchanan going to bat for affirmative action:

"Not since Thurgood Marshall, 43 years ago, has a Democratic president chosen an African-American. The lone sitting black justice is Clarence Thomas, nominated by George H. W. Bush. And Thomas was made to run a gauntlet by Senate liberals."

Actually, Buchanan was less interested in making the case for diversity than he was in sounding a new alarm:

"If (Elena) Kagan is confirmed," he wrote, "Jews, who represent less than 2 percent of the U.S. population, will have 33 percent of the Supreme Court seats."

Gulp!

"If Kagan is confirmed," he went on, "three of the four justices nominated by Democratic presidents will be from New York City: Kagan from the Upper West Side, Sotomayor from the Bronx, Ruth Bader Ginsburg from Brooklyn. Breyer is from San Francisco."

Well, Katie bar the door before the kreplach cabal busts through  the gates.

Buchanan didn't say it but he didn't have to: The real danger is that too many Jews will wind up sitting on the highest court in the land. And that would be a bad thing for the republic.

Not individual Americans, mind you.

Jews.

So much for Buchanan's past criticism of identity politics as a betrayal of the broader "American" narrative (when, it goes without saying,) the nation was overwhelmingly an Anglo-Saxon, Christian republic.

But there's an obvious political context for Buchanan's remarks.

In the upcoming Senate confirmation hearings, Republicans may have a hard time giving Kagan a hard time. Not because they plan to rubber-stamp her nomination, but, as others have noted, the former Harvard Law dean and current solicitor-general, hasn't left much of a paper trail to this point. So in the absence of a "wise Latina" quote, what are they to do? Buchanan obviously did the math and didn't like the answer. A yes vote for Kagan means the Supreme Court would then be only seven seats away from a full minyan. And you can't have that.

Buchanan's qualms notwithstanding, the Senate's going in a different direction. Kagan may face tough questioning but it won't be about her religion or ethnicity. During her "Face the Nation" appearance on Sunday, California Senator Dianne Feinstein did the right thing and politely dismissed Buchanan's complaint as irrelevant.

"Does that bother me?" she said. "The answer is no. Each one of the Catholic justices are very different in how they approach the law, and I don't believe it's necessarily related to their religion. And I think they are total people, the products of their learning, their backgrounds, their experiences in life, and that's the way it should be."

(Of course, she's one of them so what would you expect?)

At this stage of his life, Buchanan reminds me of the proverbial cranky uncle. Every family's got one. You expect the guy to get worked up over small stuff; but he eventually calms down. Not so, though, with Buchanan, where any change to the culture, post-"Leave It to Beaver," has been a very big deal. And when it comes to the Jews, the man's pursued by a dybbuk. He says he's not an anti-Semite, so I'll take him at his word. But the controversy keeps making Lazarus-like revivals because well, Buchanan keeps saying obnoxious things.

Everyone's got their pet theories about why he keeps goading the Jews. Here's another.

But for this, you need to go back more than four decades, when the counterculture was rocking America and the nation was divided over the war in Vietnam. This was the thick of the culture war and there were fears the country was coming apart. Conservatives were outraged by Hollywood and "the liberal elite" (and we all knew who that meant.) It was not accident that most Jews were Democrats and they didn't back Richard Nixon or the war. Strike One. But they did support military aid to Israel. Strike Two. Buchanan was understandably sore about the opposition to Nixon and what later happened to his president. Buchanan was also communications director under Ronald Reagan, when he again faced off against a critical liberal opposition. Strike Three. Is he still nursing a grudge? You bet your bippy.

Fast-forward to the present and Buchanan's living in an America led by a black liberal president and a population marked by an outsized representation of Jews in culture, politics and finance relative to their numbers. You can Google "Buchanan" and "Jews" for the full list but some of his greatest hits include the following:

• "There are only two groups that are beating the drums for war in the Middle East -- the Israeli defense ministry and its 'amen corner' in the United States."

• Hitler was "an individual of great courage...Hitler's success was not based on his extraordinary gifts alone. His genius was an intuitive sense of the mushiness, the character flaws, the weakness masquerading as morality that was in the hearts of the statesmen who stood in his path."

• "Diesel engines do not emit enough carbon monoxide to kill anybody."

• "If U.S. Jewry takes the clucking appeasement of the Catholic cardinalate as indicative of our submission, it is mistaken. When Cardinal O'Connor of New York seeks to soothe the always irate Elie Wiesel by reassuring him 'there are many Catholics who are anti-Semitic'...he speaks for himself. Be not afraid, Your Eminence; just step aside, there are bishops and priests ready to assume the role of defender of the faith." (Writing in response to Cardinal O'Connor criticism of anti-Semitism during the controversy over plans to build a convent near Auschwitz)

• "Our culture is superior because our religion is Christianity and that is the truth that makes men free."

None of this necessarily makes the man an anti-Semite. Unfortunately, it also doesn't make him a mensch, either.

Watch this amateur video of an aerial view of the mess in the gulf narrated by an Alabama resident.

Speaks for itself.

So do the interviews that BP CEO Tony Hayward has now granted to the BBC and Guardian.

Speaking with the "Beeb," Hayward rejected calls for a ban against off-shore oil drilling and then suggested this howler.

"I don't believe it should [result in a ban], in the same way as Apollo 13 did not stop the space program nor have serious airline accidents from time to time stopped people flying."

Apollo 13?

I'll let this good professor take the lectern in response:

"Except that greedily destroying the environment with offshore petroleum drilling is not actually very much like flying to the moon. And flying to the moon, for all the pollution it causes on the way up to the stratosphere, won't destroy the earth. And the problems on Apollo 13, when the three astronauts barely got back to earth alive, weren't anything like the gargantuan viscous black monster that Hayward's incompetence has unleashed on the Gulf coast. And finally, for some posh arrogant foreign twit to invoke the heroism of James A. Lovell, Jack Swigert, and Fred Haise to excuse the greatest corporate SNAFU of the twenty-first century just about makes my blood boil."

To quote the great Smokey Robinson, I'll second that emotion.

But Hayward wasn't finished. The interview he granted to the Guardian featured this remarkably tone-deaf assertion:

""The Gulf of Mexico is a very big ocean. The amount of volume of oil and dispersant we are putting into it is tiny in relation to the total water volume."

A very big ocean?

The Guardian reporter described Hayward's demeanor during the interview as being very "bullish." Here's your Saturday puzzle, boys and girls: Transpose that word's last three letters and add a missing "t"and you have a more fitting description.

Meanwhile, this continues.

Last month was the 14th hottest April on record, according to the latest climate data issued by the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.

In its monthly survey, NOAA said that 31 states reported above-normal temperatures. Just California, Nevada and Oregon registered cooler-than-average Aprils.

NOAA has been tracking monthly temperature since 1895.

Separately, NOAA said that the average temperature in the United States mainland was 54.3 degrees F, or 2.3 points above the long-term (1901-2000) average.

Other highlights from the report:

• Most states east of the Rocky Mountains experienced above-normal temperatures
• The Northeast and the East North Central Region posted its second warmest-ever April
• Illinois, Maine, Connecticut, Rhode Island and New Jersey each had their warmest Aprils on record.
• The cooler-than-usual weather which prevailed in the South and Southeast continued into spring.

Paul Campos may be right to worry that Elena Kagan's track record doesn't suggest much about her judicial philosophy. And Senate inquisitors may unearth issues that some find will troubling during Kagan's upcoming Supreme Court confirmation hearings. But we're not even there yet and already the knives are coming out - but not from the right. It's the left that's going after the White House's nominee.

Serving as a very capable kvetcher-in-chief, Salon's Glenn Greenwald, has assembled a Continue »