Sophia Coppola (writer & director of Lost in Translation and The Virgin Suicides) has written and directed a movie on and titled Marie Antoinette. The Trailer for this film is just scenes from it overlaid against New Order’s “Age of Consent”.

As seen in the hotline’s blog, former Virginia governor Mark Warner is loved by the Democrats in our craziest state. I’ve got to get some more direct exposure to this guy. All I’ve really seen are clips here and there and the media’s conventional wisdom take on him as the kind of moderate to conservative Democrat who can appeal to southerners. I have no personal sense, yet, as to whether this guy really has what it takes to wow ‘em in the primaries. I wish we had stronger indications at this point as to whether or not Hillary will run. I know the conventional wisdom says she will. I still hold out some hope that she’s smarter than that. If she does, I think we could see the race quickly boil down to her, a moderate southerner, an earnest, already elected liberal (with no real chance), and maybe one other candidate heading into Iowa & New Hampshire. In that scenario, I’d greatly prefer the moderate southerner to be John Edwards rather than Mark Warner. Edwards has a better personal story (as good as The Man from Hope without the improbable name) and absolutely has the right economic message for the Democratic party.

One of the things that seems to distinguish me as a liberal rather than a leftist is my “old fashioned” realpolitik view of international affairs. I’m sure this comes both by natural inclination and my undergraduate training in that discipline. I can’t be bothered with pie in the sky hippie shit about the nations and peoples of the world all getting along. While I’m quick and clear in my criticism of immoral uses of power by the U.S. (especially as they’ve become commonplace under $hrub and the neo-cons), I refuse to take the knee jerk position that we’re always the bad guy either. I don’t believe that if the U.S. were suddenly knocked down a peg that peace and prosperity would rule the earth. There are other nations that want hegemony as badly as we do and who are willing to be at least as ruthless and brutal in achieving it as we are. The heavy hitter in this category is China. China is absolutely set on regional hegemony and, like emerging regional behemoths before it, will find that no matter how much it controls things in its sphere, things just outside its reach will require it to extend that reach even further.

For the last five years, China has outmanouvered us on the international stage as if we were complete amateurs. Arguably, our own neo-liberal orthodoxy has allowed them to do the same economically for a generation. Our desire for cheap shit amid the stagnating and declining living standards in this country created a vicious cycle that has left us unable to wield the kind of industrial might that helped us and the soviets win WWII and put us in such a strong position after it, while we’ve handed that capacity to the Chinese. The Monitor has an informative little article on another recent example of the Chinese outmanouvering us.

It looks like a lot of the pundits, bloggers, and political media are just starting to catch up to the conclusions that James Carville and Stan Greenberg at Democracy Corps drew in the November 15th memo on the current political climate.

Samuel Alito is a pussy.

You may know Paul Begala from his time in the Clinton White House, from his stint on CNN’s Crossfire, or from his other profitable associations with James Carville. He’s a sharp politico and he grew up in Tom DeLay’s congressional district. He wrote up a nice, but not too substantial little piece at the TPM Cafe.

I love David Cross.

In today’s post, The Bush Administration: Liars Who Can’t Run the Economy at Donkey Rising, Ruy Teixeira talks about a recent Harris Poll that looks pretty bad for the president. I’ve lost my faith that those numbers will translate into any trouble for the GOP come 2006, though. I hope they do, but even if they get worse I’m not going to count on it. A lot of the likely voter and “independent” likely voter numbers for Bush looked pretty bad in the summer and fall of 2004.