I don't think this is a smart move. Unless copyright law budges, which it should, YouTube and its users are ripe for lawsuits and cease-and-desist notices from the MPAA and the RIAA for pirating content. Google obviously thinks it can make YouTube profitable somehow, because it's not now.

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North Korea successfully tested a nuclear weapon Sunday night, to near-universal condemnation from the global community. The picture on the front page of the NYT is of Bush standing behind a lectern looking like he's yelling at someone. The key thing to note is, it's all words. He can meet with Japanese, Chinese, and Korean leaders all he wants, but the US has no troops to commit to overthrowing North Korea, which has been pursuing a nuclear weapon for at least five or six years, and has always presented a greater threat than Iraq. I resent the fact that when an actual threat to global stability is presented, the US cannot be there to fight it. We're reduced to a cheerleading, money-spending role. There's also the matter of which response is appropriate. I am against economic sanctions; in truth, I'd rather more money/food be sent to misbehaving countries. I want McDonald's, Burger King, Macy's, and a Wal-Mart in Pyongyang - I think that's a far more effective Western victory than any army could deliver. In seriousness, the answer to Kim Jong Il misbehaving is not to further starve the people of North Korea. We'll see how this one develops.

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You'll probably be disappointed. The meeting was mainly for Pelosi to campaign for two local Pennsylvania women running. They never discussed opposition or even the existence of opposition. The message, over and over, was "We're gonna win and take back Congress." Interesting, seeing as Republicans are focusing on terrorism (Don't lose everything, including close family members) and it's working. I had a high school teacher talk about the difference in rhetoric between Democrats and Republicans. Democrats give out messages like "We'll do this together;" "We need your help to take back Congress;" and "We're gonna make a stronger America;" where Republicans are much more likely to say, "We'll take care of you;" "Leave politics to us, just vote for us;" and focus on trust and values issues. Pelosi managed to contradict herself by talking about how Democrats have a united front, but also that the party has diverse opinions. It was frustrating to listen to her and the other people speak. I don't like politics, Republican or Democrat. Unfortunately, because of the two-party system, these are your choices, at least if you want your vote to mean something. I think the time is ripe for a third party, a moderate progressive party. It'll only work if it can steal votes from both sides but the time's ripe. No one likes Congress right now. So this is the question I would have asked. Remind me, if I'm ever meeting with college students, to just sit and let them talk, rather than spoonfeed them and ask for clarification later.

Mrs. Speaker: I spent a lot of my week leading up to this meeting trying to convince people of all political stripes, not just Democrats, to come and see you speak. I wasn't trying to get them out here because I think they need to agree with you, but to strengthen their own views through discourse and debate, like the Greeks did in their great democracy two thousand years ago. But I get the feeling that many young people, in fact so many Americans today, are scared of listening to anyone that disagrees with them. I can't talk about politics at the dinner table. Liberals are stuck in a feedback loop, reading the New York Times and watching CNN, and Republicans hear what they want, reading the Wall Street Journal and watching Fox News. Meanwhile, each side is playing to their base, strengthening it and drawing a line in the sand. As you said a few minutes ago, "You have a choice between fear-mongerers and hope." President Bush earlier this week said "177 of the opposition party said 'You know, we don't think we ought to be listening to the conversations of terrorists." The only thing everyone can agree on, the bipartisanship you were talking about, is railroading a ban on online gambling through Congress, and only because everyone's scared of looking soft on terrorism. There's no chance of a middle ground when you have that rhetoric. My question to you is, what happened to the middle ground, and when are Congressmen of all stripes going to start working for the good of America and not their own partisan agendas?

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Friday Nancy Pelosi, the House minority leader, is coming to campus and I'm gonna go listen to her talk. I'm assuming, at some point there will be a question/answer session, and I want to ask a question. What should I ask a question about? Assume I'm trying to make the New York Times.

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"Here’s what happens when this irresponsible Congress railroads a profoundly important bill to serve the mindless politics of a midterm election: The Bush administration uses Republicans’ fear of losing their majority to push through ghastly ideas about antiterrorism that will make American troops less safe and do lasting damage to our 217-year-old nation of laws — while actually doing nothing to protect the nation from terrorists. Democrats betray their principles to avoid last-minute attack ads. Our democracy is the big loser. "Republicans say Congress must act right now to create procedures for charging and trying terrorists — because the men accused of plotting the 9/11 attacks are available for trial. That’s pure propaganda. Those men could have been tried and convicted long ago, but President Bush chose not to. He held them in illegal detention, had them questioned in ways that will make real trials very hard, and invented a transparently illegal system of kangaroo courts to convict them. "It was only after the Supreme Court issued the inevitable ruling striking down Mr. Bush’s shadow penal system that he adopted his tone of urgency. It serves a cynical goal: Republican strategists think they can win this fall, not by passing a good law but by forcing Democrats to vote against a bad one so they could be made to look soft on terrorism. "Last week, the White House and three Republican senators announced a terrible deal on this legislation that gave Mr. Bush most of what he wanted, including a blanket waiver for crimes Americans may have committed in the service of his antiterrorism policies. Then Vice President Dick Cheney and his willing lawmakers rewrote the rest of the measure so that it would give Mr. Bush the power to jail pretty much anyone he wants for as long as he wants without charging them, to unilaterally reinterpret the Geneva Conventions, to authorize what normal people consider torture, and to deny justice to hundreds of men captured in error. "These are some of the bill’s biggest flaws: Enemy Combatants: A dangerously broad definition of “illegal enemy combatant” in the bill could subject legal residents of the United States, as well as foreign citizens living in their own countries, to summary arrest and indefinite detention with no hope of appeal. The president could give the power to apply this label to anyone he wanted. The Geneva Conventions: The bill would repudiate a half-century of international precedent by allowing Mr. Bush to decide on his own what abusive interrogation methods he considered permissible. And his decision could stay secret — there’s no requirement that this list be published. Habeas Corpus: Detainees in U.S. military prisons would lose the basic right to challenge their imprisonment. These cases do not clog the courts, nor coddle terrorists. They simply give wrongly imprisoned people a chance to prove their innocence. Judicial Review: The courts would have no power to review any aspect of this new system, except verdicts by military tribunals. The bill would limit appeals and bar legal actions based on the Geneva Conventions, directly or indirectly. All Mr. Bush would have to do to lock anyone up forever is to declare him an illegal combatant and not have a trial. Coerced Evidence: Coerced evidence would be permissible if a judge considered it reliable — already a contradiction in terms — and relevant. Coercion is defined in a way that exempts anything done before the passage of the 2005 Detainee Treatment Act, and anything else Mr. Bush chooses. Secret Evidence: American standards of justice prohibit evidence and testimony that is kept secret from the defendant, whether the accused is a corporate executive or a mass murderer. But the bill as redrafted by Mr. Cheney seems to weaken protections against such evidence. Offenses: The definition of torture is unacceptably narrow, a virtual reprise of the deeply cynical memos the administration produced after 9/11. Rape and sexual assault are defined in a retrograde way that covers only forced or coerced activity, and not other forms of nonconsensual sex. The bill would effectively eliminate the idea of rape as torture. •There is not enough time to fix these bills, especially since the few Republicans who call themselves moderates have been whipped into line, and the Democratic leadership in the Senate seems to have misplaced its spine. If there was ever a moment for a filibuster, this was it. We don’t blame the Democrats for being frightened. The Republicans have made it clear that they’ll use any opportunity to brand anyone who votes against this bill as a terrorist enabler. But Americans of the future won’t remember the pragmatic arguments for caving in to the administration. They’ll know that in 2006, Congress passed a tyrannical law that will be ranked with the low points in American democracy, our generation’s version of the Alien and Sedition Acts.

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New York Times has a new article up about the spate of attack ads in this political campaign. It's worth quoting from at length.

"Republicans and Democrats began showing at least 30 new campaign advertisements in contested House and Senate districts across the country on Tuesday. Of those, three were positive.

"Congressional races play out on local airwaves, and the flood of commercials amounts to a parallel campaign, one that is often about the characters of individual challengers and obscure votes cast by incumbents. Frequently lost in the back-and-forth are the protests of candidates who say the negative advertisements are full of deliberate distortions and exaggerations.

"While Democrats have largely concentrated their efforts on the political records of Republicans, the Republicans have zeroed in more on candidates’ personal backgrounds.

"Democrats are learning just how deeply the Republicans have been digging. John Yarmuth, a Kentucky Democrat who is running for a House seat, has spent much of the past few days trying to explain editorials unearthed by Republican researchers and spotlighted in new advertisements. Mr. Yarmuth wrote the editorials for his student newspapers, and in them he advocated the legalization of marijuana, among other things."

This is crazy. Clearly here, we're learning that we cannot have perfect candidates for government, at least if we want Congress run by humans. Even if the perfect human did run for office, the opposition would most likely attack him for not having flaws, and therefore being unable to relate to his voters. Imagine elections twenty years from now - candidates will be punished for photos and blogs they wrote on Myspace when they were sixteen ("Recognize that young guy with the red cup in his hand, looking like he's having a good time? Forget the fact that a majority of college-age kids drink alcohol, this guy's running against me for office"). I'll probably never be able to run for office, as a result of having this blog and bothering to share my opinions on things. Something needs to be done, but I don't know if regulating the information candidates disseminate about other candidates is a good idea.

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Duncan Hunter, two years ago: "The United States, more than any other nation in history, conducts its military operations in strict compliance with the law of armed conflict," Hunter said. The enemy's vile actions, he vowed, "will in no way alter the way we treat Iraqi prisoners." Today, Duncan Hunter's trying to push through a circumvention of the Geneva Conventions, saying it's too vague. The article is on Salon.com. Why is it that Democrats can't hammer Republicans for these, but Republicans can hammer Kerry into the ground?

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Today's Papers, presented by Slate.com.Seven days a week, summaries of the top stories from NYT, WSJ, USA Today, Washington Post, and the LA Times. This daily article is the only mass email I subscribe to. From The Economist: Five years since September 11. Washington Post editorial on lobbying. Greg Mankiw on Harvard's college admissions. The paper (linked by the article) on student preference in college selection is interesting. Penn shows up lower than it does in US News, mainly because it locks in so many kids through ED.

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