projection: John McCain's primary tool

So we have two major candidates for the presidency this year.

One of them is a celebrity who has frequently appeared on the small and big screens according to IMDB, including The Daily Show 12 times, Letterman 8 times, Jay Leno 10 times, and Larry King 9 times. He has not only had cameos on Saturday Night Live but has hosted it. He was in Beyond the Glory, had a cameo in Wedding Crashers, 24 and numerous documentaries such as Why We Fight and Port Town. His autobiography was made into a TV movie in 2005.

One of them is a notorious media darling. Reporters have on several occasions written about how this candidate wines and dines the media with cookouts and vast quantities of free booze, and about how reporters found themselves referring to this candidate's campaign as "we." He also recently took a trip to Europe and the Middle East in the middle of a presidential campaign.

One of them has a weak grasp of foreign policy. He frequently confuses Sunnis with Shi'ites, he cracks inappropriate jokes about sober matters of war and peace, and lacks a basic working knowledge of the timeline of the Iraq War.

One of them is a serial flip flopper. He has, in a relatively brief period of time, moved from hard-liner to centrist and back to hard-liner, having flip flopped along the way on abortion, tax cuts, lobbyist money in campaigns (he in fact doesn't support a reform bill he himself introduced), ethanol, torture, and affirmative action. In fact, one site catalogs 72 flip flops.

One of them is of highly dubious religious credibility. He's suddenly started hawking his faith recently, but used to claim another religion, and has never been baptized as an adult despite claiming to have attended evangelical services for 15 years. It is considered a newsworthy event when he actually shows up to church, because reporters found no evidence of him attending regularly before this past July.

The other one is Barack Obama.

riddle me this

Is the media still overly pro-Obama when everyone in the media states as an objective fact that the media is overly pro-Obama?

Women for John McCain

Nice.

Dear God NOOOO!!!!

Political Wire:

NBC News notes that nothing is on Sen. Barack Obama's official schedule yet "but the traveling press registration e-mail has us flying to South Bend at 6:30 p.m. Tuesday and not leaving until 3:25 p.m. the next day... It seems seems like an awfully long time to be in one place."

Could Obama be meeting with Sen. Evan Bayh (D-IN) to ask him to be his running mate?

Please let this be the Obama campaign juking the press (or juking the Crazy Train into picking a Bayh foil). Booman:

From a strictly ideological point of view, Evan Bayh represents the Clintons by proxy among members of the known short-list. He's the only person under serious consideration that endorsed Clinton during the campaign. He's a former chairman of the Democratic Leadership Council. There's a very good chance that Bayh would staff up the Naval Observatory with a bunch of also-rans and cast-offs from the Clinton campaign, giving them new life and hope for a role in a future presidency. For Team Clinton, Evan Bayh represents their best hope for jobs and significance in an Obama administration. These attacks on Obama are sending a clear message that they can make trouble for Obama if he shuts them out. As I see it, this is not really a lobbying campaign for Hillary, who they all know is persona non grata in the Obama household. It's an oblique campaign for Bayh.

And they just might get what they want. Just this morning, Bayh joined with Obama in sending a letter to Defense Secretary Robert Gates asking him to dedicate more money to address brain injuries. Obama will appear with Bayh on Wednesday in Elkhart, Indiana, and people there are buzzing with excitement and speculation that Obama will tap Bayh as The One. One theory is that Obama will want to get some coverage for his pick that doesn't have to compete with the Olympics, which start on Friday in Beijing.

I'm pretty sure I'm not alone in thinking that, if Obama's intent on using his VP slot to placate Clinton, I would really prefer he pick Clinton!

Bayh is the poster child for the old Democratic Party I know and despise. He's a spineless, finger-in-the-wind politician who habitually cedes the high ground to conservatives on national security, "morals," and generally turning the USA into a police state. Every time the Senate Democrats desperately need to hold the line on some Republican atrocity, Bayh is one of the last hold-outs, always unwilling to back the Democrats if it's gonna look like it was his vote that kept the GOP out of the winner's circle. After all, how is a Democrat to win re-election if he can't run as the more sensible Republican?

Can you just imagine Evan Bayh in a raucous VP debate? "Well, you're right Governor Romney, I stand in awe of the Great Maverick Patriot Straight Talker John McCain and all that he did in Vietnam, which of course clearly shows that he's the perfect presidential candidate. It's a little known fact that I really wanted to be his running mate! But if I may share one little quibble with your phrasing..."

Admittedly, Bayh is not without his strengths. As much as I would caution against relying on a tactic with such a weak track record, he is from a state that is, at the moment, at least, in play, and I'll wager his approvals are fairly high here. After all, the records for biggest Democratic landslide in an Indiana Senate race and highest percentage of the vote in a modern statewide Indiana election both belong to Evan Bayh, and they're not even both for the same race. If there's anything the Indiana Birch Borer has shown, it's that he can win statewide offices in the Hoosier State. Even though he's always the last guy off the fence in important votes, to his credit he did (eventually) vote against confirming United States Attorney General John Ashcroft, Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, Attorney General Alberto Gonzales, Chief Justice John Roberts and Justice Samuel Alito. Not bad for a DLCer. He's also extremely cautious as a politician; there is very little likelihood of Bayh stealing the spotlight from Obama. Very, very little. Heh.

On the other hand, Bayh is a politician associated neither with "change" nor with national security gravitas. In fact, here's a fun little riff on his Wikipedia page that, to my mind, should be a disqualification:

Bayh, in contrast to Senator Richard Lugar, was an early supporter of the Bush administration's policies on Iraq.[6] On October 2, 2002, Bayh joined President George W. Bush and Congressional leaders in a Rose Garden ceremony announcing their agreement on the joint resolution authorizing the Iraq War, and was thanked by Bush and Senator John McCain for co-sponsoring the resolution.

He's a relative unknown even in neighboring states, known mainly by political wonks because he's the son of 1976 presidential candidate Birch Bayh (and it's a widely held opinion among Indiana Democrats that Birch was the better man of the two). He is the very model of "milquetoast." And best of all, Indiana's governor is a Republican, which means he gets to choose the person to finish Bayh's term, handing the GOP a free Senate seat just as the Democrats are planning an ambitious agenda. Good thinking, morons.

some people have no integrity

Many of you may have heard here and there among your more gullible friends and family (typically those who pass up newspapers, preferring instead to get their news from chain emails) the suspicion that Barack Obama is the Antichrist. A buddy of mine has actually heard it from 2 or 3 independent sources, all claiming that a description matching Obama is right there in "Revelations" (oy):

Wanker: "Seriously, it says that he'll be a charismatic man who comes from the East."

Buddy: "East, eh? You mean like Hawai'i?"

Wanker: "No, you know, the Middle East, where his family comes from."

Buddy: "Middle East? You mean Kenya? Or are you talking about his mother's family from Kansas?"

Wanker: [getting increasingly exasperated] "C'mon, you know what I mean... his spiritual homeland, where his religion comes from..."

Buddy: [smirking, clearly unimpressed] "Massachusetts?"

Anyway, so despite it's painfully glaring logical flaws, the Dumbest Rumor Ever Forwarded continues to gain traction, such that the McCain campaign sees fit to respond to it in some way. A candidate with integrity would at least want to have no part of a rumor this vile, especially a candidate who's been sunk in the past by a vile and scurrilous rumor.

And then there's John McCain, happy to defecate on the national debate table if it scores points. Are any of you readers old enough to remember a Republican campaign that didn't rely on crass innuendo as its primary rhetorical tool?

it's coming, everyone. Can you hear it?

Football season!

In anticipation for all the kids down south, I found a preseason assessment that the best college football analyst I've read drew up for Texas Tech (I'm pretty sure that Sunday Morning Quarterback has a soft spot for the Red Raiders). I was surprised to read that Tech has been "discovered" by the talking heads and is being hyped as a potential January party-crasher. That sounds a bit optimistic to me. I was also surprised, however, to read that the improvement in Tech's defense when Ruffin McNeil became coordinator last year was almost entirely illusory, a case that SMQ makes pretty cogently.

All in all, it becomes clear that Leach's Red Raiders have to fix the same 2 things for which every Leach Tech squad has been notably lacking: defense and running game. Everybody knows that the D blows and that the O is all pass, but Tech also has two problems offensively: 1) they have an unusual amount of trouble with 3rd and short situations, and 2) they're functionally incapable of running out the clock. Both of these problems are due to the lack of a reliable running game. When you're all pass, your drives take very little time, which is great when you're behind or when you score on most of your drives, but it's terrible when you're facing a good defense or you're tentatively ahead and need to put the damn thing away. Tech very nearly lost to Oklahoma last year after pulling ahead 27-7 at the half because they couldn't run the clock out. If they ran, the running back would get stuffed behind the LOS, but if they passed, the clock would stop. Lots of unconverted 3rd-and-shorts that game.

Personally, I have grave doubts that either of these issues are really fixed, and I've have been a Tech fan way too long to have any expectations of consistency. Beating OK in Norman ain't gonna happen, and I'm deeply skeptical of Tech's chances against Texas and Kansas as well. Plus, I can't help but suspect that the truly ascendant team in the Big 12 isn't Texas Tech but Oklahoma State (who has beaten Tech, what, 2 out of the last 3 years?). And, finally, there's the consistency issue: don't be at all surprised to see the Red Raiders pound Texas in Lubbock right after flubbing one against Kansas St. Tech won't go undefeated, and I don't find a Kansas-like 11-1 to be very realistic, either. Incomplete teams have incomplete seasons; this is a 3 loss team at best.

Meanwhile, for the kids up north, SMQ also has a nice rundown of the upcoming ND-Michigan game, a real Cleveland Steamer of a match-up, to be sure.

Hey Brian Williams

ya think this story might be "newsworthy?"

the Reaganite fallacy

A revelation that I wish people would talk about: John McCain has been touring the country in $500 Italian leather shoes. Not that I care that he wears expensive shoes, but because it proves a current media double standard. Imagine, after all, if a Democrat were caught making an intemperate purchase. That, ultimately, brings up another question: if John McCain is guilty of intemperate spending, and John Edwards is guilty of hypocrisy for engaging in intemperate spending while arguing that poor people aren't getting a fair shake, then the inevitable logical conclusion is either:

a) John McCain thinks poor people are getting what they deserve, or

b) John McCain is also guilty of hypocrisy.

If no one with a microphone is going to point out the greater truth that it's not hypocritical to be rich and yet want to help poor people, then will someone at least point out that the rules should apply to McCain as well?

This is an example of the kind of moral corruption I like to call "free market fundamentalism." It goes back, in some form or another, all the way through history, but it's most recent and bizarre manifestation was popularized by Reagan's gospel of wealth, or the "fuck it: if you got it, flaunt it!" approach to the ethics of wealth.

We Americans have always had a tense relationship to wealth. It all goes back to the ol' Protestant work ethic and the Calvinist belief in predestination: strong work ethic, which is a sign of salvation, generates wealth. Therefore, wealthy people are more likely to be part of the elect than the poor. On the other hand, conspicuous consumption is a sign of greed, which is a sin, or Catholicism, which is even worse. Thus for much of American history the goal was to be rich, but not too rich. A 5th or 6th bathroom is probably okay, but don't put any gold in it! Complicated, intricate jewelry is beautiful; just not too much of it! You don't want to look like you're from New Orleans or some other gaudy place. A limo is fine, but no jets! Who are we, the Pope? Even to this day, no one, no matter what their income, is willing to refer to themselves as either "rich" or "poor."

Then Reagan came in with a compelling message. There's nothing wrong with being rich, said St. Ronnie; in fact, being rich is just a sign that you work hard and God has blessed your home! See, "the market" is a sort of crucible of work that elevates the diligent and destroys the lazy; it does God's work! That's why all you good, God-fearing white people in the suburbs are wealthy, and why the good ol' US of A is the richest nation on earth. That, of course, can only mean that poor people are poor because the market/God has chosen not to bless them, obviously because they're lazy and decadent. After all, do you really think it's a coincidence that Protestant countries are richer than Catholic ones? And if you're not rich, just work hard and God/the market will make you rich, because people who work hard make money in a free market. Unless, of course, the government takes Godly people's money away and hands it to those "other" people, those who didn't work for it (and of course, we know they didn't work for it because they don't already have money. Are you keeping up?). Luckily, the only people who want to do that are the poor themselves and rich people who got their money without work, who are "less familiar with the rigors of the marketplace" as one douchebag I found put it.

It is because of this moral fallacy that we implicitly accept the argument that it is hypocritical-- and, ergo, immoral-- to be rich and advocate for the poor, but it is not immoral to be rich and ignore the poor.

I think on some level Edwards' stance on the poor throws the weakness and decadence of the morality of free market fundamentalism into sharp relief, and that's why otherwise intelligent people are all too happy to resort to the "hypocrisy" claptrap even despite a logic that is both clearly flawed and entirely self-serving. The market must be fair. If it is not, then this entire moral universe, within which dwell the ethics of taxation, government spending, immigration, regulation, environmentalism, and workers' rights careens off its axis.

a note on the VP search

Pay no attention to the supposed "short lists" being passed around. The purveyors of conventional wisdom usually blow this call. In fact, one could argue that hype actually diminishes a person's chances of being picked because, optimally, you want people to be both happy with the selection and surprised by it. It makes a bigger "splash" that way.

If the Obama campaign knows what it's doing, they'll find someone with "gravitas" who is affiliated in the popular mind neither with Washington nor with the Democratic party proper. People associate Tom Daschle, Hillary Clinton, Chris Dodd, and Joe Biden with both.

more on chain emails, or moron chain emails

Haven't received this one personally (at least, not since it was the Clinton one), but it looks like Barack's hit the big time: he's got his own death list. Some of the best entries:

MERCEDES HUGLEY, one of Obama's many white, female conquests while at Harvard. Filed sexual assault charges against Obama for date rape in 1990. Because "date rape" was not considered a crime like it is today, she ended up dropping the charges. Two years later, she was found dead of an apparent cocaine overdose.

Why is it significant that the conquests were white? And did you like the part where Hughley is allowed to file rape charges, is then told "I'm sorry, ma'am, date rape is still legal in this country," and then has to drop the charges?

HASAD AL SHAREEZ - FBI informant. Reported to his handler in January 2001 that he had a tape about of a person named simply "B. Hussein" meeting with 9/11 hijacker Mohatma Atta in Prague. Was found shot in the basement of a mosque in Dearborn, MI in October, 2001.

That's right, folks, Barack Obama is now apparently part of the 9/11 conspiracy. He would have had a lot to offer people wanting to destroy buildings in New York and Washington, being a state senator in Illinois and all. Bonus credibility points for referring to Mohammed Atta as "Mohatma."

KEYSHAWN "SPOON" CALWORTH - Was found dead of an apparent heroin overdose May 18, 1997. Was reported to have ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright.

"Ties to Rev. Jeremiah Wright?" That's it? Boy, they really phoned that one in, eh? Though you have to admit, these are awfully suspicious circumstances. I mean, what are the chances of a guy named "Spoon" dying of a heroine overdose?

And my personal favorite:

DARSANO RAHARDJO - Childhood classmate of Barack Obama when he attended a madrassa in Indonesia. Was found with his head cut off in a Jakarta alley way in 1970. Many children at the school attributed Rahardjo's murder to the young Barack Obama. It was likely done as an initiation ritual, since Islam demands that a boy spill another's blood before the age of ten to prove their loyalty to Allah. [emphasis added]

not just jokes to everybody

I'm sure you've all heard about the shooting in Knoxville by now, in which a crazed ultraconservative neoconfederate nutball took a shotgun and 76 rounds into a Unitarian Universalist chapel and started mowing people down during a children's musical. Turns out he had a couple of choice authors on his bookshelf: Michael Savage, Sean Hannity, and Bill O'Reilly. Neiwert reminds us that Chad Castagana, the crazy bastard who mailed fake anthrax letters to various famous liberals, was a Free Republic commenter who loved to read him some Michelle Malkin.

But hey, that joke about the liberal hunting license is a real knee slapper, am I right?

it's still okay if you're a Republican

Atrios links to this picture from Crawford Ranch, pre-election 2000.

'Tis the season

Just got my first conservative chain email in 4 years. Did you know that Cindy and John McCain are living embodiments of family values?

There was a, well, shall we say "lacuna" in the narrative around the time that a middle-aged John McCain left his disabled wife for a buxom blonde former USC cheerleader nearly 18 years his junior who also happened to be a fabulously wealthy heiress to a beer distributing fortune. I sent out a mass reply adding that part.

Hopefully after the election I'll be able to send the sender a recipe for humble pie, ripped off from the Food Network, of course.

getting hitched: and so it begins...

Anyone out there feeling a bit randy?

Just buy a wedding cake. There's no more reliable way to get screwed.

Except, perhaps, to buy anything else remotely associated with a wedding. $42.50 a head for catering? For buffet-style self service? $175 for a f**king bridal bouquet? Seriously?

You can try to pry $175 out of my cold, dead hands!

a lesson about judging books by covers

Due to some issues with the manufacturer, we had to take our electric lawnmower to a Mennonite repairman out in the sticks outside of Osceola. He had the whole 19th century clothes and Abe Lincoln beard thing going on, and his workshop had a carriage outside of it. It smelled of lavender and horse manure (the workshop, not the carriage. Well, probably the carriage, too, if it had sat out there long enough, but you know what I mean).

Just got our mower back. Works better than it ever did. Go figure.

The Dark Knight

[potential spoilers in this post, read at your own peril]

Great, great movie. Pretty morally ambiguous for a superhero film, which makes it even more fascinating to watch. A buddy of mine noted how much of a post-9/11 movie this is, as it invokes some of our privacy vs. security debates and fear of terrorists blowing up buildings and whatnot. Maybe someone's already spilled barrels of ink discussing the Joker is the ultimate terrorist, playing upon all our caricatures of them. Rene makes some good observations, especially about the more technical aspects of the film.

Rene is also right about the Joker and the screenplay writer's choice not to flesh out his back story. To take it a step further, in point of fact Nolan's Joker actively mocks the audience's expectation to be provided some sort of pop psychological justification for the Joker's madness. The Joker is not some mere lunatic with an agenda like Scarecrow (or, frankly, like Tim Burton's Joker); he's a primal force, a manifestation of Chaos, the perfect counter to Batman, the embodiment of cold, rigid Order. The two of them are locked in a perpetual struggle for the soul of Gotham, both utterly unyielding in their demand that the city conform to their ethos, while everyone else is stuck being pulled in either direction, trying to navigate a survivable path between the two.

This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object.

Batman and the Joker share one big thing in common: both are fundamentally outsiders to the rest of humanity. The Joker lives off the grid, and has no records or Social Security number or last known address or even legal name. Batman is similarly separate from the system, even though he, at least, has an alter ego. Both are scorned by the city they are trying to change, labeled as "freaks." And, of course, both act in fundamentally deviant manners. After all, Bruce Wayne is a man whose parents were brutally murdered in front of him and who satiates his unquenchable trauma-induced rage by moonlighting as a vigilante dressed up as his childhood phobia. He is not exactly what we would consider a pinnacle of clear-eyed sanity, and no one highlights that fact as effectively as the Joker. There is a question in this movie as to which one of them is more self aware, as there should be.

This movie focuses on that struggle between these two primal forces via the battle for the soul of Harvey Dent, who is the real focus of the movie. What's interesting about it is, as those of you have seen the movie or are acquainted with the Batman universe know [spoiler alert!], the Joker wins that battle. In fact, in an ironic turn, it is the Joker's victory that prevents Batman from retiring.

For me, the most surprising casualty of The Dark Knight was actually my appreciation for Batman (1989). I'd never really realized before just how badly Tim Burton shortchanged the yin and yang rivalry between Batman and the Joker by allowing Batman a complete and total victory and carelessly tossing the Joker aside at the end of the movie. Also, seeing Heath Ledger completely disappear behind a thin, patchy coat of makeup makes the 1989 version look a little too much like Jack Nicholson playing the Joker playing Jack Nicholson. And yes, Ledger deserves an Oscar nomination for creating the best villain in any superhero movie ever.

Oh, and those of you who've been to Chicago will recognize Millenium Station, City Hall, and I believe W. Wacker Dr.

sustainable living: the sports utility bike

No way!

the curtain's closing, time to ditch the props

Looks like the cowboy manly man president is hocking the ranch. From Huffington Post:

An ABC-TV outlet in Houston, and now the Houston Chronicle, have posted a video taken at a political fundraiser for Pete Olson, featuring George W. Bush last week -- capturing some embarrassing/revealing moments after, he noted, he had asked cameras to be turned off.
...
Then, making light of the foreclosure crisis, he said: "And then we got a housing issue... not in Houston, and evidently not in Dallas, because Laura's over there trying to buy a house. [great laughter] I like Crawford but unfortunately after eight years of sacrifice, I am apparently no longer the decision maker."

Aside from styling himself as "bilingual," Bush making his home at the Prairie Chapel Ranch has been the most absurd act of political theatrics ever uncritically sold to us by our sycophantic press. The "ranch" was a pig farm until 1999, when Karl Rove convinced the Texas governor to buy it. The "ranch house" (actually the mansion) wasn't completed until Election Day 2000. It has no horses, supposedly because the president is afraid of them, and it has some cattle, but they aren't his. The estate includes a helicopter hangar, but no barn. And lo and behold! his presidency isn't even over yet, and he's moving back to the city.

Long after his presidency is over and America has either stood up for change or boarded the Crazy Train, we'll suddenly hear George Stephanopoulos and David Brooks talking matter-of-factly about the obvious phoniness of George W. Bush's cowboy antics, as if they have always spoken openly about the surreality of watching a sitting president, the son of Connecticut yankees who spent his youth at Andover, Yale, and Harvard, dressed up like a 9 year old Will Rogers fan, clearing brush from a ranch that doesn't raise anything and despite having paid staff to maintain the estate. As if anyone in the press scoffed when Bush tried to sell his good ol' boy image with lines like how his best moment as president was "when I caught a 7 ½-pound largemouth bass on my lake," except that by "lake" he means man-made pond he had professionally constructed and stocked with 600 largemouth bass. As if any of the pundits who ridiculed Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama for feigning a southern drawl ever questioned the authenticity of blue-blooded George W. Bush's exaggerated, mealy-mouthed twang.

Not that anyone else found it a little obvious or anything.

the steel chair!

Because I'm sick of conventional sports metaphors in politics. We need more unconventional ones. This incident this weekend, then, was a pivotal moment. A Goldberg spear. The capturing of the queen. Losing Australia. From The Washington Independent:

Prime Minister Nouri al-Maliki told Germany's Der Spiegel magazine, "U.S. presidential candidate Barack Obama talks about 16 months. That, we think, would be the right timeframe for a withdrawal, with the possibility of slight changes." Within hours, U.S. Central Command -- at the behest of a clearly worried White House -- released a statement arguing that Maliki was misquoted through a botched translation. But Monday, Maliki's spokesman, Ali al-Dabbagh, said that the government was talking about "a timetable which Iraqis set." Asked when that timetable would run out, Dabbagh quickly specified, "2010."

As a result, the positions on Iraq of the Bush administration, the U.S. military and Sen. John McCain, the presumed GOP presidential nominee, now face numerous challenges. The administration's plans for a permanent U.S. presence in Iraq have been profoundly undermined. The military will have to adjust to a strategy of extrication. The McCain campaign is presented with one of its nightmare scenarios: the Iraqi premier embracing the judgment of its opponent, Sen. Barack Obama, which strengthens Obama's bona fides on a national-security issue McCain has largely staked his presidential bid on owning.

The weak link in all this, of course, is the media reporting of the events, which is a genuine X-factor considering their long-time love affair with St. John the Maverick. They've buried his flip flops and papered over his cringeworthy foreign policy gaffes, but can they avert their eyes and pretend not to notice that Maliki totally bankrupted McCain and Bush's primary argument for a permanent occupation of Iraq, handing Obama complete control of the crucial yellow/green corner of the board?

John McCain: foreign policy GENIUS!!!

Jon Stewart on the case. This, of course, comes on the heels of McCain referring to the defunct Soviet bloc nation of Czechoslovakia (twice!) and on multiple occasions misidentifying Al Qaeda as Shiite. In fact, he's done it so many times, both verbally and in written statements, that Mother Jones makes the most obvious, and scary, conclusion: he may, in fact, not recognize the difference between Sunni and Shia (to be more precise, what he may not grasp is the landscape of sectarian and ethnic divisions in the Middle East, the Mexican standoff between Arabs Sunni and Shiite, Kurds, Turks, and the various Afghan ethnic groups and regional warlords).

The Obamafication of the Republican Party, part 2

Josh Marshall notes the trend of the Bush Administration and the McCain campaign both quietly adopting Barack Obama's positions in Iraq, Afghanistan, and Iran:

Let's run the list.

McCain and now the White House (via the DOD) are moving toward more US troops in Afghanistan -- a position they've each long opposed and which Obama has been on record in support of for at least a year.

Bush and McCain have each also in different ways tried to nudge closer to Obama's position on withdrawing troops from Iraq. The key shoe falling today is President Bush's embrace of a "time horizon" for withdrawing troops from Iraq. Meanwhile, McCain's declaration of military victory in Iraq seems very much like an effort to get people thinking the troops are coming home soon within the conceptual architecture of his professed goals in Iraq.

And finally Iran. I'm not certain what McCain himself has said about Iran in recent days. But over recent months a key line of attack from the president and John McCain has been that Obama is a latter-day Neville Chamberlain for saying we should negotiate with Iran. And now over recent days we've learned that the White House is sending one of its top diplomats to negotiate directly with Iran's nuclear negotiator. And there are growing signs the White House is poised to open a diplomatic interests section (an unofficial diplomatic outpost) in Tehran.

It may all just be an attempt to build some last-minute bragging rights while taking Iraq off the table in the election, but at the end of the day this is still John McCain and George W. Bush tacitly conceding that Barack is right about getting out of Iraq and negotiating with Ahmadinejad, and they were wrong.

One hell of a story, if you can find someone to report it.

not done with the Emmys, or David Caruso got robbed!

I keep thinking about all the shows got very love from the Emmy crowd, or none at all, because my opinions on current TV run directly against the conventional wisdom: I think TV right now may be better than it's ever been. The decision of HBO, Showtime, and basic cable channels to delve into the realm of quality programming, combined with some great network TV, has brought us an embarrassment of riches (or should I say Riches!), not only in the popular genres of crime drama and dramedy but also in more "niche" areas like sci-fi and period pieces. For instance, I think Battlestar Galactica might be the best sci-fi show ever, just as I'm pretty sure that The Wire is the best crime drama ever (and if it isn't, Dexter is for sure). And I'd put The Office or The Daily Show up against Seinfeld any day. What others?:

LOST
Weeds (Elizabeth Perkins should have won Outstanding Supporting Actress in a Comedy Series outright)
30 Rock
Burn Notice
How I Met Your Mother (how does Neil Patrick Harris not win Outstanding Supporting Actor in a Comedy Series every year?)
Late Night with Conan O'Brien
Californication
Friday Night Lights
Pushing Daisies
Recount
John Adams
Boston Legal
The Colbert Report
Flight of the Concords
House
Heroes
Monk

And I didn't even include Big Love, The Tudors, Friday Night Lights, Mad Men, Tin Man, or Damages because I haven't seen them!

When, then, do the Emmys have any room at all for the likes of The New Adventures of Old Christine or According to Jim?

Emmy nominations

First off, the fact that Flight of the Concords have two songs nominated for Outstanding Original Music and Lyrics is beautiful ("The Most Beautiful Girl (in the room)" and "Inner City Pressure"). The third song in that category?:

Awesome.

Also, the *outstanding* series Pushing Daisies got a lot of love this year, including Lee Pace getting a best comedy actor nomination and Kristen Chenowith for supporting actress.

As for the most disappointing aspects of the nomination list, I still fail to understand why:

1. they keep insisting on giving nominations to 2 and a Half Douchebags. Lots of them. Every damn year. Aside from issues of crusty formula and 1970's era misogyny, why the hell does Charlie Sheen get an Emmy for playing Charlie Sheen?

2. After ending its 5 year run this season, the best cop show ever shot, The Wire, received exactly 1 nomination, for writing. That brings its grand total to two emmy nominations. 2 and a Half Men got 7 this year alone. For God's sake, even Medium and NCIS got one nomination this year!

Also, Justin Kirk (Andy Botwin, Weeds) got robbed.

what is she thinking?

I tend to enjoy Stephanie Zacharek's film reviews in Salon, but lately I've been wondering what the hell happened to her taste. She poopoohed The Dark Knight (one of only 3 top critics on Rotten Tomatoes to do that), WALL-E, and, last year, both No Country for Old Men and There Will Be Blood, and yet gave her blessings to Meet Dave, Drillbit Taylor, and You Don't Mess with the Zohan. Huh?

things you miss when you're not paying attention

I spent several minutes at the checkout counter at the grocery store yesterday wondering if my cashier would notice that I bought $95 worth things shaped like O's.

She never did.

...floppity.

John McCain on July 13:

“I think that we’ve proven that both parents are important in the success of a family so, no, I don’t believe in gay adoption.”

John McCain on July 16:

"Sen. McCain's expressed his personal preference for children to be raised by a mother and a father wherever possible," the statement added. "However, as an adoptive father himself, McCain believes children deserve loving and caring home environments, and he recognizes that there are many abandoned children who have yet to find homes. John McCain believes that in those situations that caring parental figures are better for the child than the alternative."

Mmmm, that's some good straight talk!

This is increasingly becoming a bit of a "dog bites man" story.

David Caruso cheesy intro lines: the montage

I am born anew in the sublime absurdity of David Caruso's one-liners. I have breached the Chrysalis.

A great game would be to take turns making up more of these one liners while putting on a pair of sunglasses.

This show is a guilty pleasure of mine. It's so supremely ridiculous that it's hard not to smile when you're watching it. The CSI's in this show, pretty much all of whom work dressed to the 9's and could easily moonlight as underwear models, work as brilliant scientists in the most colorful, glitzy, crazy high-tech office I've ever seen, full of glass walls and neon oranges and blues (and that's about as well lit as a jazz club or a nudie bar). They solve every crime that crosses their path with indisputable certainty (as of course they would! After all, duh, it's science, dude!) and the perp always confesses at the end, almost always with that self-satisfied "yeah, you got me. Now let me tell you all about my brilliant diabolical plan!" schtick reminiscent of 1980's TV villains. Horatio is never wrong, never fooled and always a step ahead of everyone. In fact, he never even has to chase anyone; he's always already figured out whether and where they're gonna run, and has secretly positioned himself to intercept them without even his fellow CSI's any the wiser!

And the dialog... oh sweet Jesus the dialog... the very epitome of assuming the worst of your audience's intelligence. My favorite part is when they stop to explain the most painfully obvious ramifications of evidence they find, where it sounds about like:

"We got a return on those fingerprints you brought us from the murder weapon, Horatio. They don't match Jones."

"So Jones didn't kill him... someone else did."

or:

"The police didn't apprehend anyone at the scene."

"So then the killer must still be at large."

It's pretty much the exact opposite of The Wire, which is realistic, clever, grungy, centered on the poor, low tech, and expects a lot from its audience in the sense of being able to make connections not explicitly made on camera.

a thought on the New Yorker cartoon

I'm apparently in the minority on this one (in bloggyville, anyway), but for starters, I don't have any problem with the cartoon. It brought out the same "heh" that most New Yorker cartoons do, actually. It's amusing in a clever sort of way, but not actually funny.

What I'm interested in, however, are parts of "the left's" mindset that led to their offense at the cartoon. Atrios:

I certainly don't think that the New Yorker cover is the biggest deal in the world, but the basic reason I find it problematic is that I look at it and I think, "Yes, well, that's what the Right says about the Obamas pretty much daily." It channels what they say, but they forgot to add the funny. Hamas loves Obama, he hates the flag and America, he's a Muslim, Michelle Obama is a black militant, etc. It isn't funny to me because I read this crap every day all day. This crap isn't just on obscure wingnut blogs, it's everywhere. G. Gordon Liddy is thrilled.

If in 2000 they'd ran a cover which expressed in various ways things like "Al Gore claimed he invented the internet," "Al Gore claims he discovered Love Canal," "Al Gore grew up in a fancy DC hotel," "Al Gore is such pandering politician that he's wearing 3 button suits and EARTH TONES" (no I've never understood this one either), it wouldn't have been a parody, it would have been channeling the media zeitgeist. The Obama thing? Not so different.

Jesse Taylor at Pandagon echoes those sentiments. Supposedly there are others claiming that "low information voters" will see the cartoon and believe it's intended to depict the real Obama, and I have seen that opinion among some commenters, but I haven't seen any of the more influential peeps say that. It's the least defensible of the arguments, so I'm glad it's pretty rare (I can just imagine Joe Bob the high school educated, FOX News viewing, NASCAR fan's reaction when he receives his copy of The New Yorker in the mail this week). Gary Kamiya swats the slower flies in his Salon article, but only touches on the meat of the matter, which is that these liberal voices don't see the cartoon as satirizing right wing/lazy media arguments, but as accurately reflecting them.

Really? Right wingers are arguing that Barack loves Osama bin Laden and hangs a portrait of him on his wall? They're arguing that Obama uses American flags as kindling? That Michelle is an actual, Kalashnikov-toting black militant? That the two of them are actual, genuine, literal terrorists? I doubt that very seriously, and no, that one chain email you got does not prove that these are, in fact, widespread conservative beliefs.

There are kernels of truth in each sub-image of the cartoon, sure ("truth" in the sense of arguments conservatives really are pushing), such as that Michelle harbors secret animosity toward whites and doesn't really "love America," or that Osama bin Laden would like Obama to win, or that Obama doesn't love the flag enough to wear it on his lapel, these images are obvious and dramatic exaggerations of such sentiments. Which is precisely the point of satire.

I think there's a lesson here about how it's easy, when you're engaging in a prolonged war of words with someone, to view their opinions as more radical than they really are.

the Obamafication of Republican foreign policy

We learned yesterday, despite a nearly complete media blackout on the story, that John McCain has abandoned his policy on Afghanistan and has adopted Barack Obama's. From the Huffington Post:

John McCain likes to paint Barack Obama as a naive follower on key national security issues. But by moving up his planned Afghanistan speech by two days to follow Obama's, and by agreeing that more U.S. troops are needed there, McCain appears to be following the Illinois Democrat on a major proposed shift for U.S. foreign policy.

Last month, Joint Chiefs chairman Adm. Michael Mullen said he needed at least three brigades shifted to Afghanistan, but that "troop constraints were preventing such a move."

Democrats trumpeted the statement as vindication, but McCain's campaign held its line and "resisted calls for more [U.S.] troops" in Afghanistan.
...
Flash-forward to today. As the AP reported, McCain was set to discuss the economy, with an address on Afghanistan scheduled for Thursday. But the campaign ditched its planned focus on jobs (although not its banner) to follow Obama's lead -- not only by talking about national security but by joining him in calling for more American troops in Afghanistan.

Nearly an hour after Obama finished his D.C. speech, in which he repeated his call for "at least two additional combat brigades" to be sent to Afghanistan, McCain stepped to his podium across the country in New Mexico and tried to one-up his Democratic rival. As McCain's website now says, the Arizona Republican wants "at least three additional brigades" for the fight in Afghanistan.

Barack Obama: a leader John McCain can believe in.

Following that, we hear this morning of a striking reversal in a notorious Bush Administration. From AP:

In a break with past Bush administration policy, a top U.S. diplomat will for the first time join colleagues from other world powers at a meeting with Iran's chief nuclear negotiator, The Associated Press has learned.

William Burns, America's third highest-ranking diplomat, will attend talks with the Iranian envoy, Saeed Jalili, in Switzerland on Saturday aimed at persuading Iran to halt activities that could lead to the development of atomic weapons, a senior U.S. official told the AP on Tuesday.

Now who was it again who not only advocated talking to our enemies as a central feature of his foreign policy plan, but took an enormous amount of grief from both George W. Bush and John McCain, as well as his fellow primary candidates for it?

Barack the politician

Ryan Lizza writes a mammoth of a bio piece in The New Yorker on Obama from 1991 until 2004, a part of his life not dwelled upon in his books or speeches. It's very good. It takes a fiercely pragmatic take on Obama's early political career and is not very generous regarding the motives behind Barack's big stances: his religious conversion, his opposition to the war, his complicated relationship with blacks and Mayor Daley, etc. Still, it effectively presses a point that really should be pretty obvious by now: that the conventional (and conventionally lazy) media myth of Barack Obama as a pie-in-the-sky, naive carebear of a candidate is profoundly ill-informed. Personally, I don't find it difficult to believe at all that he is a pragmatist in practice even if he's ideologically left of center. In fact, I think that's precisely what many people find appealing.

Then again, I'm pretty forgiving of campaign tactics because I'm of the opinion that a) there's no such thing as a fair fight, and b) if you really believe that you can change things for the better, you are morally obligated to play to win. If a little-used rule allows you to challenge the signatures that a candidate needs to get on the ballot, do it. If the rules state that you can gerrymander the f**k out of your district if your party runs the show on Jan. 1, 2001, then do it. If the rules are unjust, they should be changed outside of election season. The same applies with negative advertising: if your opponent is a douchebag, there's nothing wrong with running an ad calling him a douchebag.

Obviously, there are some tactics that, though legal, are beyond the pale, and every individual has to decide what their own "line" is. I personally think a campaign should remain fundamentally honest, both about themselves and their opponents, so that voters can make an informed decision. That's my line. To me, then, it matters a lot that John McCain calls himself "an early critic of Bush on the war" when he was one of his vocal supporters, while Barack challenging his opponents' signatures (signatures that were in fact found to be inadmissible, I should add) is trivia.

guns up

Georgia Governor Sonny Perdue finally figures out how to lessen the crowds at Atlanta Hartsfield Airport: by allowing people to carry guns into the airport. From TPM:

Georgia Gov. Sonny Perdue said Monday that guns should be allowed in public areas of the nation's busiest airport.

And he suggested his own wife might want to pack a firearm for long walks between the parking lot and the terminal at Hartsfield-Jackson Atlanta International.

"If my wife wanted to carry a gun, if she was going from the parking lot, walking from one of those far parking lots to pick up a grandchild or something like that, I think that's a good idea, yes," he said Monday.

Earlier this year, Perdue, a Republican, signed legislation that allows Georgians who have passed criminal background checks to carry concealed weapons onto mass transit, as well as into state parks and restaurants that serve alcohol. The new law took effect July 1.

Yeah, you read that right. He said he wants to allow men with guns into the airport so that his wife will be less likely to be mugged there. No flaws in that logic!

well, that answers that

Barack slaps down the Iraq "flip flop" bs in the New York Times, reiterating his commitment to withdrawal over 16 months.

I still would like to hear more about this "residual force" that he proposes to keep in Iraq. 1 brigade? 3 brigades? 100 military trainers and a platoon of Navy Seals? This is not a trivial distinction.

Nevertheless, consider the possibility: if Obama is elected, there is a chance that we could be mostly out of Iraq by this time in 2010. Imagine.

no one is safe anymore

From The Wall Street Journal:

Fast-growing retailer Steve & Barry's LLC is expected to file for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection as early as Wednesday, say people familiar with the matter, a collapse that stands to hurt everyone from Sarah Jessica Parker to the nation's struggling mall owners.

Didn't see that one coming. You would think a store specializing in dirt cheap athletic apparel would do pretty well during a recession, but I guess not. Perhaps this is evidence of who's getting hit by these tough times, and who isn't.

For the Horde!

I don't stray into the realm of video games on this blarg often, and for those of you who utterly foreign to that culture, I apologize for the exclusivity of this post. Still, I just had to note this interview with one of the contributors of an academic book on World of Warcraft. One of the things that makes WoW such a rich playground for social/cultural scientists is the division of all the players into 2 separate and warring factions, each themselves consisting of a number of "races." People have written before on the tendency of WoW players to develop real-life loyalty to their faction's brand, often assuming that their faction is composed of more mature or competent people (or that the game designers are biased toward the other faction), but at least one chapter in this book deals with the cultural echoes within the factions themselves, as written into the Warcraft universe.

The money quote:

Can you summarize the thesis of the chapter you contributed to the book?

Essentially: the Alliance and Horde don't represent good versus evil; they represent familiarity/normativity in a white Western context versus a conglomerate of Others, whose Otherness is connected to real-world groups that have historically been subjugated (and are still being subjugated). The rest of the chapter addresses the issues that come along with that, with a focus on the Horde, and with close readings of how each Horde race fits into my model. I argue that Trolls correspond with a kind of Afro-Caribbean Blackness; Tauren with Native Americans/Canadian First Nations peoples; Orcs as a kind of "sink category" into which all sorts of negative stereotypes about Blackness in particular and colonization in general seep; Blood Elves with white drug addicts; and the Undead with an ultimate, Kristevan abjection. All of these categories represent groups who are considered lesser, and are in some way subjugated, by white Western society (with the potential exception of the Undead, although they represent the ultimate Other in a more symbolic sense).

The fly in the ointment, though, is that these aren't direct representations, but are rather essentialised, stereotyped, often racist representations, which in turn may have an impact on the real-world perception of these groups.

Is it odd that I always preferred the Horde?

In case you were wondering, US servers sport more Alliance players than Horde, while EU servers are almost 2:1 Horde to Alliance. Far and away the most popular Horde race is the Blood Elves (which is also the only physically attractive Horde race), and the least popular are the Trolls and Orcs.

The Supremes ain't what they used to be

It's really more of a Weekly Standard, George W. Bush brand of conservatism than a Roberts Court brand, but still closer to the truth than it should be.

In other Onion news, this is the funniest s**t I've seen in months.

The AP hops aboard the Crazy Train

So much for that "Obama, media darling" tripe.

Of course, even the press has previously admitted that the press is McCain's base, so this should not come as a surprise. This is a whole other playing field, and it's even less "even" than the last one.

evolution, in some more than others

Amanda Marcotte links to an email exchange between Phyllis Schlafly's idiot son and founder of internet laughing stock Conservapedia, and microbiologist Richard Lenski. The long and short of it is that Lenski has been working a dozen cultures of e. coli for 20 years now and triggered a beneficial mutation in one of the cultures-- meaning, of course, that they evolved-- allowing them to absorb a nutrient called citrate that e. coli normally can't use.

Lenski, I should mention, is no mean scholar; he is a "Distinguished Professor" in the Microbiology and Molecular Genetics Dept. at Michigan State (it tells you something about the caliber of MSU's microbiologists that Microbiology and Molecular Genetics has its own department there; generally universities have one dept. for the full spectrum of biology). He is also a former MacArthur Fellow and current member of the National Academy of Sciences.

So when I tell you that Andy Schlafly emailed Herr Professor and rudely asked for "the data supporting your remarkable claims so that we can review it, and note where in the data you find justification for your conclusions," you can appreciate how far li'l Andy and the He Man Lernin'-Haters Club has waded from the shallow end of the intellectual swimming pool. The first sign it won't go well: Schlafly, in an attempt to burnish his academic credentials, appends the letters of his pedigree to the end of his name, including his Bachelor's degree. Ouch.

It appears, judging from PZ Myers' synopsis of the events, that scientists typically just delete the emails of cretins looking to garble their work and make a scene of it, but Dr. Lenski's inner educator won out, and he decided to make this a teachable moment (the whole conversation is available on Conservapedia's website). He wrote an unnecessarily polite letter very gently pointing out that, ahem, "the data" is all included in the paper he published on the subject and is widely available from a little-known place called "most university libraries" as well as online from his own website!

When Andy writes again requesting "the key underlying data" behind Lenski's paper (and presumptuously CC'ing the journal that published the paper!), Lenski sends a second, much less measured, reply that I strongly suggest you take a look at. The post-scripts are a real dandy.

THE BIGGEST SCANDAL EVAR!!!

Ace reporting from the Washington Post has discovered that Barack Obama got a 5.625% interest rate loan in 2005 when the average loan for that area was...5.93%! CLEARLY this is evidence of massive corruption on the part of the Obamas!!!!!

what Clark said

Here's the significant part of the now-infamous Wesley Clark moment on Face the Nation:

CLARK: He has been a voice on the Senate Armed Services Committee. And he has traveled all over the world. But he hasn't held executive responsibility. That large squadron in the Navy that he commanded — that wasn't a wartime squadron. He hasn't been there and ordered the bombs to fall. He hasn't seen what it's like when diplomats come in and say, "I don't know whether we're going to be able to get this point through or not, do you want to take the risk, what about your reputation, how do we handle this publicly? He hasn't made those calls, Bob.

SCHIEFFER: Can I just interrupt you? I have to say, Barack Obama hasn't had any of these experiences either, nor has he ridden in a fighter plane and gotten shot down.

CLARK: I don’t think getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down is a qualification to become president.

I'm sorry, is that even a debatable point? "Getting in a fighter plane and getting shot down" can be evidence of patriotism or courage or 20/20 vision, but of course it's not a qualification to become president! There is no skill whatsoever that you learn flying a fighter plane or being in a Vietnamese prison that is readily transferable to being the chief executive. Not one.

And for the record, there's an implicit argument in Schieffer's statement that it's a better service to this country to get in a fighter plane than to become a community organizer, and that's really chaps me. It's part of that old canard that the only way to "fight for freedom" is to join the military despite the fact that every threat to our freedom since at least World War II and perhaps the Civil War has emanated not from foreign invaders but from our own government and our own employers. Passing up a hot shot New York business to become a community organizer on the South Side is pretty frakin' solid service to this country if you ask me.

The Dream lives

And what other dream can I possibly be referring to than the McCain/Romney dream ticket? Despite this Politico article swearing that The Phoniest Man Alive is the frontrunner for the Veep slot, I just don't see it. We will never get that lucky, and no presidential campaign (at least, no Republican one) is that stupid.

And I find it bizarre that Mike Allen's sources claim that Mitt Romney is "squeaky clean, and fully vetted by the national media." Romney has more baggage than Chicago Midway's lower level; it's just that none of it bespeaks corruption. It stretches credulity to argue that the Crazy Train's VP committee would pick Romney, a candidate who proved vulnerable to every anti-Republican narrative ever devised, from being a classic chickenhawk to a closet authoritarian to the Great Pandering Social Conservative Flip-Flopper of the Ages.

google searches

The google searches have led people to this quiet corner of the intarwebs aren't quite as interesting as Grims', though I can boast having a hit on a search for "ninja parade." Also lots of searches using highly degrading and offensive terms for women. Thank you, John McCain!

WALL-E

100% fresh on Rotten Tomatoes (!), though they didn't include Stephanie Zacharek from Salon, who didn't like it (she's like Roger Ebert in that she's a brilliant critic, but will occasionally muff a painfully obvious call, so I'm guessing the chorus is right on this one). Several of the reviewers reference Chaplin in describing the quality of the humor, and many of them say it's Pixar's best film ever. A better animated movie than Finding Nemo and The Incredibles? Wow.

I'm actually pretty excited about this movie.

blog comment template for douchebags

I've found that comments on blogs and internet forums often follow a formula, especially the ones written by douchebags, or at least people affected by the Gabriel Effect:

You are wrong. Here's an example of why you are wrong: I am awesome. These are the ways in which I am awesome. The things that make me awesome are obvious and commonsense, and everyone could be as awesome as me if they weren't so stupid. You would agree with me if you weren't stupid, too.

Signed,
Anonymous

Cut their balls off. Humanely.

I'm getting more and more creeped out by new Louisiana Governor Bobby Jindal. First the news that he claims he has performed exorcisms and his belief that the Protestant rejection of Catholic authority "leads to anarchy and heresy." Now this, from The Advocate (Baton Rouge):

Characterizing sex offenders as monsters, Gov. Bobby Jindal signed legislation Wednesday that would force convicted rapists and others to undergo chemical castration.

“I am glad we have taken such strong measures in Louisiana to put a stop to these monsters’ brutal acts,” the governor said in a prepared statement.

I don't care if this can be done via drugs instead of a scalpel. How on earth does disfigurement and sterilization not qualify as cruel and unusual punishment?

Then again, I guess it's all relative. Is it that much less cruel and unusual to put someone to death? Or for that matter, to condemn them to being repeatedly anally raped?

TX-Sen: John Cornyn thinks you're an idiot

Or, perhaps, 11 years old.

Yeah, this is a serious ad, and yeah, this is about John Cornyn's intellectual caliber. Who wouldn't want to have a "brew or two" with the Bad Ass Christian Cowboy Senator? Especially the one who kinda looks like John Lithgow?

For those of you who don't remember the esteemed Senator from Dodge City Texas, he's one of Jack Abramoff's buddies who famously implied on the Senate floor that judges themselves, because of judicial activism, were to blame for a recent spate of violence against them. This was back in those dark days of l'Affair Schiavo, when there were widespread fears that militant social conservatives would take action against the judges who "killed" Terri.

He also had a classic exchange with Senator Russ Feingold of Wisconsin after the revelations of the Bush Administration's warrantless wiretapping. Cornyn says to Feingold:

"None of your civil liberties matter much after you're dead."

Feingold's reply?

"Give me liberty or give me death."

most reliable polling outfit says it's even. In Indiana.

Holy God.

shut up about Hillary

I wish the talking/writing heads would quit it with the debate over whether Hillary supporters will join with Obama. It really sucks when your candidate loses a contentious race, especially when significant chunks of the media are openly gleeful about it, and more especially when they're gleeful because they despise you and your demographic, as we college-age liberal Deaniacs found out 4 years ago. The Clintonistas are going to need a little time to get past it just as we did.

Rehashing and justifying all the reasons why Clintonistas think they got screwed by the media/the party/Republicans/"them" doesn't do anything but delay the decomposition of sour grapes. Yes, we know that the media didn't treat Clinton fairly (at least between the inevitability period of 2007 and the Saturday Night Live sketch in February or March); are there any Clinton supporters alive who didn't already know that our national discourse in misogynist (that's not to say, of course, that it isn't also racist)? "Dean screwed us out of Florida and Michigan," on the other hand, is not even a rational argument and whenever a Clintonista apologist writes about it as if it is, it just makes them look like they're nursing a grudge as well.

Conversely, writing big articles about how they'll get over it and fall in line (even if true) is also not helpful. It sounds patronizing. Just let them grieve, for God's sake.

a question for the readers

From a Salon article questioning the environmental superiority of local foods:

While locavores list numerous reasons for eating local -- including freshness, taste and boosting regional economies -- one primary argument is protection of the environment. Long-distance food transport sucks up more fossil fuels, says the Farmers Market Web site, and unleashes more carbon dioxide onto our planet.

That does sound dire. But what if conventional distributors make up for the long journeys by driving big trucks packed with produce? Let's say a distributor travels 1,000 miles and carries 1,000 apples to market, while 10 local farmers each drive a pickup 100 miles and carry 100 apples each. The local farmers log fewer food miles but cover the same total distance -- and use a comparable amount of fossil fuels -- for the same amount of food.

It appears to me that Kwok's hypothesis here relies entirely upon the assumption that per mile a distributor's barge and 18-wheeler generates the same amount of carbon emissions as a farmer's pickup, which is inconceivable to me. In other words, 1000 miles is 1000 miles, whether traversed by a Ford or a Peterbilt.

Is my logic solid or am I missing something?

"our very existence?"

Fortune magazine asks each candidate:

What do you see as the gravest long-term threat to the U.S. economy?

Obama: If we don’t get a handle on our energy policy, it is possible that the kinds of trends we’ve seen over the last year will just continue. Demand is clearly outstripping supply. It’s not a problem we can drill our way out of. It can be a drag on our economy for a very long time unless we take steps to innovate and invest in the research and development that’s required to find alternative fuels. I think it’s very important for the federal government to have a role in that process.

McCain: Well, I would think that the absolute gravest threat is the struggle that we’re in against Islamic extremism, which can affect, if they prevail, our very existence. Another successful attack on the United States of America could have devastating consequences. You’ve been a supporter of climate-change legislation that would essentially impose a penalty on the use of fossil fuel.

Wow. Now that's what I call "contrast!"

Can I just highlight the fact that McCain just told you that if you don't vote for him the terrorists might just blow up AMERICA!?

Eat My Voltage

A great article on GM's last-ditch effort to pull itself back from the brink: the Chevy Volt.

6 year old gets a credit card

Credit card companies are scumbags. I'm sure I've hit on this before, but they have one, and only one, goal in mind: to get you into so much debt that you're stuck paying the minimum monthly balance. That's it. They make their money when you go into permanent debt, so they've set up the game so that it's really easy to put too much money on a credit card and really hard to get it paid off once you're stranded. That's why there's no customer too risky to get a card, whether it be people who've just declared bankruptcy, or people with little or no income, or apparently people under the age of 7: they don't want you to pay it off.

Once you internalize the fact that banks and credit card companies no longer look out for your best interests, but are instead trying to swindle you, the way you look at debt and loans changes. You react to them less like your friends and parents do, and more like your grandparents did!

Bush to Curveball: "Give me a whopper!"

The LA Times tracks down the infamous "Curveball." It ain't pretty:

"He was corrupt," said a family friend who once employed him.

"He always lied," said a fellow Burger King worker.

And records reveal that when Alwan fled to Germany, one step ahead of the Iraq Justice Ministry, an arrest warrant had been issued alleging that he sold filched camera equipment on the Baghdad black market.
...
Alwan didn't share all his secrets. He didn't disclose that he had been fired at least twice for dishonesty, or that he fled Iraq to avoid arrest. But he did tell some whoppers that should have raised warnings about his credibility.

He claimed, for example, that the son of his former boss, Basil Latif, secretly headed a vast weapons of mass destruction procurement and smuggling scheme from England. British investigators found, however, that Latif's son was a 16-year-old exchange student, not a criminal mastermind.
...
In early 2002, a year before the war, he told co-workers at the Burger King that he spied for Iraqi intelligence and would report any fellow Iraqi worker who criticized Hussein's regime.

They couldn't decide if he was dangerous or crazy.

"During breaks, he told stories about what a big man he was in Baghdad," said Hamza Hamad Rashid, who remembered an odd scene with the pudgy Alwan in his too-tight Burger King uniform praising Hussein in the home of der Whopper. "But he always lied. We never believed anything he said."

Another Iraqi friend, Ghazwan Adnan, remembers laughing when he applied for a job at a local Princess Garden Chinese Restaurant and discovered Alwan washing dishes in the back while claiming to be "a big deal" in Iraq. "How could America believe such a person?"

This guy was a primary source for George W. Bush's prewar WMD claims. Remember the mobile weapons labs in Colin Powell's UN presentation? All Curveball.

Obama's refusal of public funds: there is no such thing as a fair fight

Early in the primary campaign, way back before Obama caught on and started raking in the donations, he implied that he'd be willing to take public financing if the Republican nominee agreed, if airtime was provided free, and if they could get the 527's to stay out of the election.

On the one hand, he should never have said this, but I think he didn't realize the universality of his own appeal (an odd weakness for a guy running for president). The GOP will hit him for backing out after McCain called his bluff (after all, McCain's staring down the barrel of a massive funding disadvantage at the very moment that a boatload of swing states come into play), and that's fine. You can't fault the guy for failing to foresee that he would be the beneficiary of hundreds of millions of dollars in grassroots money, but he should have been more careful about agreeing to forego potential advantages down the stretch.

On the other hand, I'm glad he opted out for 2 reasons. One, the whole problem with candidates not taking public financing is that it then leaves them open to being unduly influenced by big business as opposed to "the people." Obama has circumvented this issue by adopting especially stringent standards on accepting lobbyist money, making his campaign one funded largely by small donors, that is, us, "the people." And why would we want to curtail that?

The other reason is more pragmatic: why cede advantages you gained by perfectly fair means? For the last 20 years Democrats have been swamped in the polls by Republican money, money that was traded for lobbyist influence and that the GOP never once agreed to forego for the sake of a corporate money-free election. The favorite party of MBNA, Blackwater, and Enron would still get its corporate cash and use it to smear Obama in a publicly financed campaign, only in that case it would happen courtesy of PACs and 527s and the RNC, and only a fool would give up the legitimate, grassroots cash that allows him to compete with that. Working class people are cutting him those checks specifically for that purpose.

getting a little cocky

I hear a lot of people looking at the polls and crowing about how Obama is coasting to victory. Some people are writing that this will be a blowout because John McCain is the least attractive candidate in the history of elections, and that his campaign team is the least competent one in the history of, well, teams.

Since when did "winning by 4" translate into "coasting?"

Candidates hit their stride and staff get replaced. It happens all the time. McCain stumbled out of the gate but the race has only just begun.

In August 2000, Bush was up by over 15 points. He ended up losing the popular vote by half a point.

it's because of the gays

the Straight Talk Express

Just so we're clear, John McCain wasn't just a supporter of privatizing Social Security, he went out and campaigned with George W. Bush to win support for the idea. And now that the idea is universally unpopular, he's lying about it.

why gay marriage is wrong

This is pretty funny. pico @dKos lists reasons why, after living in a stable gay relationship, he now knows that gay marriage is a misguided idea:

- CHORES

In a properly functioning heterosexual household, the chores are naturally divided for maximum efficiency: the woman does the cooking and the cleaning, and the man does all the heavy football-watching.

But in my household, we're both watching football while the kitchen goes un-mopped. At commercial breaks, we stare at each other puzzled: Who's going to bring us another beer? Who's going to make us more guacamole (the good kind of fat)? (1)

Meanwhile, our health is suffering. Neither of us can boil a pot of water, so we're ordering pizza and take-out Chinese with frightening regularity.

As further proof, we hear our female-female counterparts have mopped the kitchen so much that they've worn through the linoleum.

- HOLIDAYS

That's right - even holidays are so aligned as to show the absurdity of gay relationships. You might think that a bunch of days picked out for celebration - some arbitrary, some not - wouldn't affect the definition of relationships. Think again!

First, there are no "To my husband" cards that include pictures of half-naked men. At most, they may include pictures of half-naked women. He doesn't want to see that. I don't want to see that. Hell, outside of a few movies, I've never seen that at all. The industry is simply not prepared to muddy the waters of gender expectations.

Second, and more importantly: between the two of us, we manage to forget every single birthday, anniversary, and holiday in the calendar. And that includes our own. Clearly, homosexual relationships are a threat to the economic sustainability of the greeting card industry.

- NAMES

In a healthy heterosexual relationship, the man asserts his dominance in the household by granting his woman the use of his last name.(2) But in a homosexual relationship, without the clearly-defined power structures in place, how can we decide who gets to take whose name?

Our society is simply not equipped to deal with the amount of confusion that the name game causes. If we keep our names separate, no one will realize that we're a couple. But if we take the same last name, how will we answer the telephone operator who asks to speak to "Mr. So-and-So"?
"Which one?" I answer.
"The head of the household, please."
"Which one?" I answer.
"Mr. So-and-So."
"Which one?" I answer.

Simply put, the convenience of our social assumptions will be dangerous undermined.

And don't even get me started on the "Who gets to be called `Dad'?" issue.

- LAUNDRY

In a normal heterosexual relationship, laundry is a cinch. Usually, the woman can get it all done in a few hours with no confusion.

But my partner is roughly the same height as I am, and while it may be easy to sort through shirts and pants, one undeniable fact has presented itself: sorting through underwear and socks is a disaster. We end up with a pile of unmatched socks, not knowing whose are whose, and eventually give up and toss them all into one drawer.

I haven't worn a matching pair of socks in over three years.

If the good God had wanted people of the same sex to marry, he'd have created laundry baskets with separate compartments. The gender-neutral clothes hamper speaks volumes about reality's well-known heterosexual bias.

going green by recycling old ideas

From Rick Newman @ US News and World Report:

More and more cars come with this kind of interior flexibility, which allows many families to drop down one size category and still get the same practicality. Most appealing are a dozen or so crossovers, like the Saturn Outlook, Toyota Highlander, and Mazda CX-9, that can haul nearly as many people as a minivan or big SUV, but in a tidier package.

That's because, once again, they're station wagons! Am I really the only person noticing this? Did Sap replace my vitamins with crazy pills?

Let's go over this again. Here are the station wagons crossover SUVs noted in this article. The Saturn Outlook:

The Toyota Highlander:

And the Mazda CX-9:

Now let's take one more look at the control group:

No resemblance? Really?

Look, station wagons were fine cars, I've got nothing agin' 'em, but let's stop kidding ourselves. If you really need to call your station wagon something else to feel better about the size of your tailpipe, methinks the car isn't the problem.

Guest post: Olbermann rebound: McCain special comment

In recent weeks Keith Olbermann had come very very close to turning into a parody of himself.

Specifically, his special comment on Hillary Clinton's RFK remark, and his placement of Katy Couric atop his "worst person in the world" list had draw some pretty harsh rebukes, and deservedly so.

James Poniewozik wrote of Olbermann:

Even if we concede his argument--that Clinton was at best callously and at worst intentionally suggesting she should stay in the race because Obama might be killed--every time he turns up the volume to 11 like this lately, he sounds like just another of the cable gasbags he used to be a corrective to.

Jossip writes:

How did we go from naming Rupert Murdoch the "Worst Person in the World" to adding America's sweetheart Katie Couric to that list? Ah, right: Because Keith Olbermann's popular segment is as much a place to criticize world leaders guilty of human rights violations as it is for him to defend his own. And thanks to Couric aiming some "anonymous" critical comments at the NBC family, there she is, Keith's No. 1 target.

So its certainly clear that Keith O' had some splaining to do, and needed to treat his own special comments with a slightly higher degree of reverence. It was, after all, his special comments against Bush that rocketed him to stardom in the first place.

There's no doubt he's got some ego about him, but he's also very very talented on-camera. His logic is typically solid, and he's pretty fearless with what he throws out there. This combination of attributes certainly lead the segment and its creator into a minefield of self-indulgence and false-outrage/false-righteousness that could sweep their own relevance right out to sea. Olbermann has to be very diligent in objectively analyzing whether or not a special comment is warranted before going on the air with it.

I think the general coverage of the Clinton RFK statement was clearly bored media hype, and it was not really worthy of the time that it took up in its media cycles. Sure, it was a bad example choice (and a repeated one), but the premise that Clinton was calling for an Obama assassination is stupid on its face and even dumber when you get into the details of reality. Clinton is a hard-edged political gladiator, but she's also a human being and deserves a little leeway and a little respect. Olbermann would have been fine if he had amended his special comment to a smaller line-item in his countdown and then just let the thing pass so that he could cover the actual news.

I've personally been a big Olbermann fan for a while, but I was certainly being put off by that specific special comment because I hate hate hate hate hate hate the false outrage that spins all over cable news, and I was saddened by Olbermann's apparent willingness to join those ranks.


Then we got this:



A clinic on how to execute the special comment from the man who started it all. Understated, relevant, well-researched, and flat out fearless. That's what we need more of Keith.

I'd much prefer to have seen this SC about "context" outside of the context of Olbermann's recent gaffes, but then I'm just glad things like this hit our air (and our internets) in the first place.

If I were Olbermann's producer I'd tell him "do more like that one, but do fewer overall"

Greenwald on yesterday's Supreme Court decision

Read the whole thing. In among all the important points he makes is a key difference between the Crazy Train and Barack Obama:

The Military Commissions Act of 2006 was -- and remains -- one of the great stains on our national political character. It was passed by a substantial majority in the Senate (65-34) with the support of every single Senate Republican (except Chafee) and 12 Senate Democrats. No filibuster was even attempted. It passed by a similar margin in the House, where 34 Democrats joined 219 Republicans to enact it. One of the most extraordinary quotes of the post-9/11 era came from GOP Sen. Arlen Specter, who said at the time that that the Military Commissions Act -- because it explicitly barred federal courts from hearing habeas corpus petitions brought by Guantanamo detainees -- "sets back basic rights by some 900 years" and was "patently unconstitutional on its face" -- and Specter then proceeded to vote for it.

The greatest victim of the 9/11 attack has been our core, defining constitutional liberties. Of all the powers seized by this administration in the name of keeping us Safe, the power to imprison people indefinitely with no charges and no real process is the most pernicious.

Passage of the Military Commissions Act was spearheaded by John McCain, who was anointed by cowardly Senate Democrats to speak for them and negotiate with the White House. Once McCain blessed the Military Commissions Act, its passage was assured. Barack Obama voted against it, and once its passage appeared certain, Obama offered an amendment to limit it to five years. That amendment failed, rendering the MCA the law of the land without any time limits.

It never ceases to amaze me that these so-called "small government" conservatives only wag their fingers at "big government" when it tries to help poor people. When it comes to taking away the rights and power of individuals, on the other hand, no encroachment on popular sovereignty or the rule of law, no lurch toward authoritarianism, is too far for the modern Right. Their objections to government power are purely capitalistic, without a shred of concern for democratic principles. In fact, where such democratic principles are concerned, the Right opposes them.

Thus, the true moniker for the American successors of Strauss and Buckley: police state conservatives.

the benefits of competition

Josh Marshall has an interesting point. Certainly, there's no denying the evidence.

vote Republican, and get what you deserve :)

damn enviros killing the economy

News about Sweetwater, TX, home of North America's largest wind farm:

Development of the region's wind resources will also create an economic bonus similar to the boom the three largest wind farms in America have created around Sweetwater in Nolan County. While other towns in West Texas struggle with plummeting house prices and job losses, Sweetwater is in the midst of a construction explosion. Two new companies opened in the past month, one servicing the blades of the county's 2,000 turbines, another renting out cranes used in erecting new turbines. Tax revenues from the wind energy companies are bringing jobs, new roads and houses, and renovating local schools and hospitals there.

But...but...how will they be able to balance the economy against the environment?

Fox and Friends: "soldier is hard to spell, because there's no D in it"

Where do they find these people? There's video on Crooks and Liars of a clip of Fox and Friends discussing a teacher who argues that English spelling is too hard for many students. FOX, which has never found an anti-feminist stereotype it didn't love, has found a blonde woman to anchor the show so horrifically stupid that, within the same segment, she says:

It [spelling "soldier"] is too hard because of the "d." There's no "d" in it."

and...

Yeah, you could use a dictionary, but here's the thing: do they even sell hardcore dictionaries anymore?

In case you were wondering, a "hardcore" dictionary is a bound paper one, as opposed to an online dictionary which, apparently, is utterly useless for checking spelling.

But don't worry, people, one of the dudes tries to out-ditz the blonde:

People have been speaking English for thousands of years!

Mr. Stewart... Mr. Stewart, you are being paged...

"and the occasional ferret"

From a Salon book review:

How did the men of Sodom propose to know Lot's houseguests? If you'd asked someone from the early 19th century to define sodomy, he would have imagined not a penitentiary-shower scenario but a whole array of "damnable conduct" that applied equally to men and men, men and women, and men and animals. (Among the most common sodomy convictions of the 1800s, writes Eskridge, was "bestiality with barnyard animals and the occasional ferret.") The notion of punishing homosexuals as a class was literally inconceivable, for the word "homosexual" had not yet entered the English language and the implicit aim of sodomy laws was to punish all non-procreative sexual acts, regardless of who performed them.

Eh...what?