Clinton: She’s the presumptive front-runner for a reason. She’ll be hard to beat, but she can be beat. I think of myself as a pretty die hard liberal, but Hillary represents some of the worst of what I think about liberals. Hillary is the kind of liberal who thinks she knows best for all of us on damn near everything and is willing to legislate it if she can. I’m the kind of liberal who wants individuals to be free to live their lives how they see fit and believes in using government power to regulate industry, taxes, public spaces, and public spending to do enable them to do so. I won’t vote for her in the primaries, period. If she gets the nomination, I’ll vote for her, but I doubt I’ll work for her. In order to win both the nomination and the general election, she’ll have to run a radically different campaign than anything we’ve seen before. I have no doubt she can do that and see some signs already that she is doing it. The money environment just shifted dramatically for the other candidates, too. That was expected, but now it’s here.
Barack Obama is an empty slate for most people. Don’t take that to mean I’m saying he’s an empty suit. I think he’s a smart guy with a lot of charisma. He actually reminds me more of Bill Clinton than any other politician in the Democratic Party. But I think the man-on-the-street exclamations about Obama aren’t backed by any realistic experience with the guy. I think a lot of people are projecting what they want him to be. His brilliant use of rhetoric in public speeches and appearances lends itself to that. I’d also bet there’s a certain level of fake enthusiasm for a black guy by folks who would never actually vote for one.

China can blow satellites out of the sky. The satellites that we use to surveil them, the satellites we’d need to get the pictures of troop and equipment deployment, etc, fly right at the altitude that China has proven itself capable of hitting. We’re not in a new arms race. We’ve been in an arms race with China for years. We were just so far ahead that we weren’t hyping it here. If you look at US policy moves on space during the Bush administration (and possibly further back), you see the clear arrogance of hegemony by our government. I believe that some sort of major showdown between the US and China is inevitable in my lifetime. I don’t know if it’ll be military or economic. I wouldn’t want to bet on the outcome, but I’d put slight odds on the Chinese winning it unless the US foreign policy establishment develops a multi-decade strategy for dealing with China that is as clear and comprehensive as how we managed the cold war. Preferably we do that without as much stumbling and stupidity as we displayed along the way in that one.

China’s the big hope. Corporations don’t want to bear the cost of creating private armies capable of keeping the rabble down. That shit’s more expensive than healthcare! If they can get that service to come out of the taxes paid by their workers and customers, all the better. If they can have a “communist” party be the ones that achieve this goal of theirs, I’m sure that’s a delicious irony for many of them.

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.