I thought I’d lost every post

Phew! That was close. If you visited my site over the past couple of days you, I’m sure, noticed that something was wrong, er, terribly wrong. Uh, yeah. The short story, while conducting an upgrade the table that hosts all my posts “hung up,” making all that I’ve written over the past couple of years completely inaccessible.

I have to admit, there was a moment of panic, where I thought, Shit, I just lost everything! But, I remembered, I have a back up. (That’s right, A back up — as in one back up.) My hope was short lived, though. My back up was inaccessible through the regular admin, and the file had not pulled the posts table. So, although I was able to get to the back up via FTP, my single back up was of no use to me, because it did not contain the posts table. Long story short, I was sure that I would need to start all over again, from scratch — fresh install and give up on trying to retrieve my old posts. After seeking help and some digging around, I was able to get the posts table “unstuck” and, voila, my blog is back.

The lesson: have multiple back ups, and confirm that they contain all relevant tables.

Scott McClellan ruffles feathers

A lot has been written about Scott McClellan’s — the Bush loyalist and former White House spokesperson — tell all book. Of course, conservative apologists and Bush supporters are already gunning for their former colleague. Bush apologists don’t particular like this claim by the former White House spokesperson:

“If anything, the national press corps was probably too deferential to the White House and to the administration in regard to the most important decision facing the nation during my years in Washington, the choice over whether to go to war in Iraq.

“The collapse of the administration’s rationales for war, which became apparent months after our invasion, should never have come as such a surprise. … In this case, the ‘liberal media’ didn’t live up to its reputation. If it had, the country would have been better served.”

Writing in The Corner, a blog from the conservative National Review magazine, Seth Leibsohn takes issue with McClellan’s claim:

The evidence I’ve seen does in fact show that the administration had different justifications for the liberation of Iraq — but we saw them plainly and in the open before as well as after the invasion. The president, the secretary of state, the VP, and many others gave lots of reasons for the invasion of Iraq. There were international legal cases, there were public policy cases, there were national security cases all to be made. And they were. The idea that the press didn’t do its job and was too soft on the president — as McClellan writes — is, frankly, laughable. Raise your hand if you have any evidence that the press was too soft on the administration.

Conservatives have long labored to caricature the press as liberal — which has served conservatives well, as they use this now conventional wisdom as bludgeon against submissive journalists if they don’t parrot conservative memes and talking points. Therefore, conservatives are not about to concede that, if anything, during the run up to the war, the media did as they were expected: they unquestionably parroted the Bush administration’s talking points, and claims about the threat that Iraq posed to our national security.

David Kurtz, over at TPM media, will be taking Seth’s challenge. However, I here offer Judith Miller and the New York Times subsequen apology as exhibits A and B, in response to Seth.

The case against Jim Webb for VP

There’s been a lot chatter about Sen. Obama tapping Jim Webb for the VP slot in an Obama administration; however, I’ve been less than enthused about seeing Jim Webb on the number two slot. My reservation against the junior Senator from Virginia, Jim Webb, boils down to a simple fact: the man is not progressive, in spite of his recent reliance on populist rhetoric.

Luckily, I’m not alone in my reservations against Sen. Webb. Blogger Kathy G., guest writing in Matthew Yglesias’ blog, makes a compelling case against Sen. Webb as the VP in an Obama administration.

First, the practical argument against Sen. Webb:

Back in February, Ezra Klein made the case against Webb, and the reasons Ezra gave then still hold. For one thing, if President Obama wants to get anything done, he’ll need a filibuster-proof majority in the senate. It would not be wise for him to choose a red state senator, because who knows if another Democrat could be elected to that seat? Also, as Ezra argued, the things that make Webb valuable as a “gadfly senator,” such as his “brashness” and his “willingness to push the conversation forward,” would be a bad match for the vice presidency, which would require him to “constantly watch his mouth” and not say anything that conflicts with the president’s agenda.

Now for the more substantive case against Jim Webb:

To quote a Rolling Stone profile of the man, just a few years ago he was saying that “Liberals were ‘cultural Marxists,’ and ‘the upper crust of academia and the pampered salons of Hollywood’ were a fifth column waging war on American traditions.”

In 2000, Webb opined that affirmative action was “state-sponsored racism”; that same year he endorsed the ultra-conservative Republican George Allen for the senate. In 2004, Webb wrote an op-ed for USA Today arguing that John Kerry “deserved condemnation” for his opposition to the Vietnam War (to be fair, in the op-ed Webb is also critical of George Bush; but then again, in the same piece Webb also takes a swipe at the “liberal media”).

Kathy G. goes on to present a series of sexist statements made by Sen. Webb against women in the military; which, as she points out, in a year where many women have been inspired by a candidate with a real chance of becoming the first female president, selecting Sen. Webb as the VP nominee may be seen as an insult.

Above all, though, I am very troubled by the idea that a man who has held such sexists views, and has done so much to damage the cause of gender equality in the military, would be one heartbeat away from the presidency. I do not think Webb is at all trustworthy on women’s issues, and women’s issues are very important to me and to millions of others besides. I think it’s essential that any Democratic president or vice president have a good record on women’s, civil rights, and labor issues. It’s not just that women, African-Americans, and unions are the core constituencies of the Democratic party. It’s that advancing the causes of racial, gender, and economic equality are the among the most important moral and political issues of our time. These are core values to me and millions of other Democrats, and elevating a man who has been so awful on one of them to the second most powerful position in the party is completely unacceptable.

Stepping away from all that high-minded rhetoric, I’ll add that, in practical terms, selecting Webb would be a slap in the face to the Hillary Clinton supporters. I’m not saying that Obama has to pick Hillary as veep (and indeed, I think that would be a bad idea). I’m not even saying that he needs to pick a woman.

But Hillary was the first woman to ever have a serious shot at the presidency, and she came so close. So the Hillary supporters (of whom, to be clear, I am not one) will feel frustrated enough that their candidate didn’t win. But for Obama to choose — out of all the well-qualified candidates out there — the one person who has a really awful record on gender issues would be like rubbing salt in the wound. It would be seen as a big “screw you” to Hillary’s supporters and to feminists in general.

Read the full post, Kathy G. makes many points worth thinking about.