Teh Linx

McCain's VP

John McCain picks Sarah Palin, governor of Alaska, for vice president.



Now the conversation must turn to: Who will Sarah Palin select as her running mate? Because John McCain will soon die.


Seriously, the GOP ticket is now Cheney-Bush. If Bush had ovaries.

Excited

I can barely sleep, mainly because I am so excited for tomorrow. Tonight, Barack Obama gave a devastatingly good speech, making the case for his Presidency in strong, specific terms, before a crowd of 80,000 people.

And tomorrow, little old John McCain is gonna hop around some college's barely filled auditorium and in his soft, nasal voice, declare: "My friends, meet the next Vice President of the United States: Mitt Romney!"

and a smattering of tepid applause and individually-audible cheers will kinda-surround America's least favorite millionaire and our Oldest Hero.

UPDATE: Well, damn it.

Bedtime for Asshats

We genuinely enjoy tossing snark back and forth with our coherent critics.

But the comments have precipitously devolved into crazy, vicious, and profane nonsense. We love anything that's a little crazy or a little vicious or a little profane, but seriously. You guys are either literally thirteen years old, or you should be embarrassed by how you spend your time.

From this entry forward we're deleting all of the comments that suck.


also, to all blogspot administrators: you are a bunch of motherfuckers. there, I said it. suspend my account.

They Should Do This

After Obama's big speech, the DNC should have a surprise appearance from Bob Dylan. For many reasons, but, most important, because Obama is speaking on the 45th anniversary of the "I Have a Dream" speech, and Dylan opened for Martin Luther King, Jr. that day. He could play "When the Ship Comes In" just like he did then, and then he could note that he was there, 45 years ago, already well known, playing in front of Martin Luther King, Jr., and he is still younger than John McCain.

Obama gains coveted Nietzsche endorsement

Walter Kaufmann reports on a private admonition from Nietzsche delivered to Obama by the tree on the mountainside:

"Indeed, I know your danger. But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away your love and hope. You still feel noble, and others too feel your nobility, though they bear you a grudge and send you evil glances. Know that the noble man stands in everybody's way. The noble man stands in the way of the good too: and even if they call him one of the good, they thus want to do away with him. The noble man wants to create something new and a new virtue. The [GOP] wants the old, and that the old be preserved. But this is not a danger of the noble man . . . Alas, I knew noble men who lost their highest hope. Then they slandered all high hopes. Then they lived imprudently in brief pleasures and barely cast their goals beyond the day . . . Once they thought of becoming heroes: now they are voluptuaries. The hero is for them an offense and a fright. But by my love and hope I beseech you: do not throw away the hero in your soul! Hold holy your highest hope!"

The Obama campaign will probably keep this private due to the elitist nature of philosophy and the pejorative references to John Edwards.

T-minus Ten weeks

and now it really begins. We've got the Democratic National Convention opening tonight, following a summer where things got tighter and uglier. Voters are starting to pay attention. This is now a tossup election, and it feels like it'll stay that way through November. This picture is our last pre-convention snapshot.

Obama: Specifically Better than McCain

One weird criticism the anti-Obama crowd often throws out there is that his supporters don’t know any of his positions on anything. Then the argument goes one of two ways: 1. If anyone looked they would see that Obama has no real positions and is just a lot of hot air. 2. If anyone looked they would see that Obama is just another regular politician whose positions are barely different from those of John McCain. Each assertion is dumb in its own unique way, because 1. Obama has better-articulated positions than McCain, is better able to explain those positions when asked, and has run on the issues instead of on relentless character assassination and a largely irrelevant 40-year old war record, and 2. Obama and McCain have more substantive policy differences than any two candidates since at least the Reagan era.

Anyway, just to have something to link to again and again when this comes up, I thought I’d run down a few of the many ways Obama’s policy soundly trumps McCain’s. For primary sources about their policy, you can easily check their campaign websites.

Foreign policy: This is pretty obvious. Put succinctly, Obama wants to focus on liberal internationalism, which is based on working within agreed-upon international policy as a way to resolve conflict, whereas McCain favors a more extreme version of the Bush doctrine that everything we don’t like is a grave, Sudetenland-esque existential threat that must be met with full-on war. Let’s divide this category so the paragraphs will look shorter:

Iraq: Specifically, Obama wants to get out of Iraq in about 16 months, whereas McCain wants to stay until we “win”, although he has never really defined what winning would look like. We will stay until we win, and if we win, we can stay longer, say 100 years. Obama’s plan is in line with what most Americans, most Iraqis, the Iraqi president, and, indeed, most people around the world want. McCain’s is not.

Other: Obama thinks it’s a good idea to meet with foreign leaders to try and avoid additional wars. By contrast, pretty much the only thing McCain has been consistent on during his senate term is war-like aggression toward everyone from North Korea to Iran to Russia. He is far more likely to get us into another war. And his expertise does not compare favorably to that of Obama, which is one reason foreigners like Barack so much. As an example of this, consider the Georgia crisis. McCain was part of the crowd that acted like it would rush to Georgia’s aid in a Russia conflict. That crowd pretty arguably helped push Georgia toward invasion. Afterwards he blustered about Russia’s plan to take over all its old states (not true) and said that we were all Georgians (also not true). The Georgian president sized all this up, decided he needed American help, and turned to... Joe Biden.

Taxes: Obama’s tax plan increases government revenues by raising taxes on the very wealthiest families while either lowering or leaving unchanged the taxes for everyone else. McCain has most recently been in favor of extending the Bush tax cuts, which require middle class families to pay a much larger proportion of the total revenue, and wealthy people to pay a much smaller portion. Obama would essentially balance the budget through matching revenues to expenditures. McCain cannot possibly balance the budget under his tax plan, and has made vague statements about cutting waste (a meaningless amount of money in context) and nonessential government programs. He hasn’t said what any of them are. He plans to continue devoting vast amounts of taxpayer money to a pointless war. Obama does not.

Economy: Difficult to compare because McCain has been pretty vague and does not have near the level of detail in his policy that Obama does. But in short, Obama favors a variety of economic stimuli to American workers combined with increased government oversight of things like the housing market, credit card companies, and other lending/investment institutions. I really can’t say what McCain favors specifically, because neither can he, but it seems to involve fewer stimuli, less oversight, and more emphasis on cutting waste, which is, in the grand scheme of things, both irrelevant and largely impossible. Of the two, he is more closely aligned with Bush’s economic policies.

Energy: Here again, it’s difficult to say what McCain favors, although this time it’s because he constantly changes his mind. For instance, he opposes his own McCain-Lieberman bill which would have helped curb greenhouse gas emissions. Obama has a coherent plan for increasing investment in green technology while instituting a cap-and-trade policy on carbon emissions, essentially providing a market incentive to stop using oil. On paper McCain also favors these things, but who the hell knows what he actually thinks. One area the candidates differ even on paper is in pandering to big oil. Obama favors a windfall tax on oil profits, which would help regular Americans deal with the increasing cost of oil without creating policies that reaffirm our dependence on it (things like gas tax holidays). McCain is against that, possibly because he has financial and political ties to big oil. Lately his policy has mostly revolved around offshore drilling and a gas tax holiday, which even he knows won’t work.

Education: Obama favors fixing No Child Left Behind, including funding it. He wants government help to improve access pre-school education and after-school programs. He also wants to increase government assistance to college-bound students and simplify federal student aide applications. McCain didn’t have an education policy on his website for most of the primaries. Today, he has one, and it is a long string of meaninglessness revolving almost entirely around the idea of competition, meaning that students should be able to leave a failing school. He doesn’t say how we achieve this or how it will actually improve anything. He has no concrete plan relating to NCLB, pre-school, after-school programs, or college in general.

Healthcare: Obama favors nationalized healthcare. McCain does not.

The assertion that Obama is the candidate of empty rhetoric is almost impressive in its commitment to absurdism. Obama’s positions usually include things like policy, numbers, and plans. McCain’s, when he has them, are typically garbled and bellicose pronouncements with tenuous connection to the world of practical politics. This election features one responsible candidate and one cynically uninformed candidate coasting on negative attacks, fearmongering, and a personal achievement from the Vietnam era. We have rarely had such a clear-cut good and bad choice, even in the Bush/Kerry election. What this discourse needs is not more details of Obama’s already vastly more coherent policy proposals. It needs a second candidate.

ads

John McCain came out with this ad today:



You know how, usually in political attack ads, the opponent will be represented with a grimacing, unflattering photo? It's just funny to me that even in McCain's attack ad, Obama is smiling and handsome. And not in a celebrity-caricature sort of way. Just in a friendly, cool way. Does he ever Not look like a good guy?

Meanwhile, Barack Obama's got this one up:



A lot of people have gotten very excited about McCain's housing gaffe, because we're actually seeing Obama and the Democrats draw blood with it. It's nice to win a cycle after a looong august slumber.

The obvious conservative complaint is, "ah look at Obama reneging on his whole 'new politics' schtick."

There's a huge conception out there among Obama critics that, fans of his are all these hippie dreamers who think Obama is this saint who's gonna politics happy and hopey. It's a big implication in the 'celebrity' line of attack, too; that us fans are emptily cheering for this pretty rock star or something.

But that's really not the case. The passion for Obama among me, and my friends and family and folks around the country, is rooted in his intellectual honesty. And rooted in the instinct that this is a serious man who is logical and responsible about how to approach the world. Sometimes logic dictates that you gotta get ugly. True in politics, too. And we're seeing that cool, rational, genuine toughness on display.



(P.S.: On the Obama-using-the-truth-to-play-hardball front, I can't wait until the debates, and we can have this conversation again.)

Occurring In Nature

Please deliver this animal unto me. Wow!



According to Curtis, other things that "occur in nature" include bisexuality. Gross!

All I Care About Right Now Is the Olympics

And hating China. I get weirdly patriotic when the games come to town (come to NBC). This column was actually pretty funny, and I agree with its Russel Stover and score keeping proposals.

Arugula vs. Many Giant Houses

As you probably already know, the other day a reporter asked John McCain how many houses he has, and he said:

"I think -- I'll have my staff get to you. It's condominiums where -- I'll have
them get to you."

Obviously this is hilariously elitist and out of touch, and that’s how most people are treating it, including in this new ad from the Obama folks. Why not just shout out a number? “Five? Yeah, five, whatever.” Then at least a staffer could come along and justify it. Brooke and Mark must be beside themselves, since now they have to add “basic facts of your own life” to their daily briefings.

But there are two other important things about this story that I’ve noticed.

1. This bodes really poorly for McCain’s ability to manage the largest economy in the world. “Number of houses owned” is a pretty important factor in understanding your own finances. It’s not like he’s unsure of the rate of growth of his equity investments vs. his fixed income investments. It’s more like, he owns and presumably frequently visits enormous luxury properties, the number of which can be counted using your fingers, and he’s never bothered to find out how many there are.
   
2. The Republican response has been a comically frantic rundown of every idiotic label they’ve tried to stick to Obama since the campaign began, which reminds me, what’s up with constantly talking about arugula? To me it looks like Obama was probably joking in the initial arugula thing, when he said to a bunch of Iowa farmers, “Anybody gone into Whole Foods lately and seen the price of arugula?”, but I can see how conservatives might have missed that, since he didn’t throw in anything about a gorilla raping an Iranian to death. But more importantly, what’s elitist about arugula? At my grocery store it costs the exact same as spinach, which, on a per-pound basis, is something like 1/100th the cost of McCain’s elitist shoes. Does arugula sound fancy or something? Because it’s not some exotic foreign delicacy. Where I shop it’s just sitting there, right by the spinach, costing little. Maybe real Americans just go into grocery stores to kick over the applesauce.
   

Bonus trivia: Apparently McCain (probably Cindy; all this stuff is really hers) also owns a parking lot worth $1 million.

Bush vs. Worst: Part IV

This is the fourth installment in our series comparing George W. Bush to the worst U.S. Presidents of all human history. Coming in at number seven: John Tyler

A horrible leader and weird-looking guy, John Tyler was also responsible for this great Wikipedia sentence: “Tyler's Presidency was rarely taken seriously in his time, as suggested by the nickname, His Accidency.” He became President when William Henry Harrison caught pneumonia and died because he refused to shut up at his bitterly cold outdoor inauguration.


Before we get to the usual categories of comparison, you have to have a little background. Tyler didn’t really have what you might ordinarily call “policy”, because everyone either hated or ignored him. His assumption of the Presidency wasn’t even technically legal until 1967. Harrison’s entire cabinet except for one guy resigned when Tyler took office (Daniel Webster stayed to finish some stuff, then quit), and a few months after that he was officially expelled from the Whig Party. Years later, the government wouldn’t even officially mourn his death, because he had exercised his usual good judgment and joined the Confederate House of Representatives shortly beforehand.

Foreign Policy: Wikipedia doesn’t even have this as a category for Tyler, as they do for most Presidents, and the first Google hit for “John Tyler foreign policy” only lists two things, which seems about right. First, Webster established a clear Maine-Canada border, an issue so tense that not a single person died in combat in the half-assed war that accompanied it. Second, Tyler set up the annexation of Texas, which was a foreign country at the time. This increased tension between slave and free states, but technically that was bad domestic policy.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? Clearly he did.

Domestic Policy: Here Tyler was more active about achieving little, in that he vetoed basically the entire Congressional agenda. Sometimes this worked well, as in the 1842 Dorr rebellion in Rhode Island, to which Tyler responded by hanging out until it ended on its own. Other times it was more like Tyler was doing nothing about the horrible economic Depression that existed for most of his term, and then sometimes he was increasing sectionalism, making him responsible for the nation’s continued slide toward the Civil War.
DBDSW? Both basically sat around while domestic affairs slowly sank into disrepair. I see both of them as ship captains just cold kicking back, propping their feet up on the big wheel thing, and not even looking around as the ship gradually drifts toward the Arctic. But Bush is also wiretapping his passengers, so he’s worse.

Civil Rights: Tyler’s Native American policy was pretty good, but, on the other hand, he was staunchly pro-slavery and owned slaves himself for his whole life.
DBDSW? No, this is not even close.

Value of Replacement Player: It’s looking like this will really hurt Bush in most of these contests. Tyler technically came after Harrison, who got elected, made a speech, and keeled over and died. But he really came after Van Buren, a low-grade failure more or less on the level of Carter. When he took office the country was in a depression and slowly headed towards civil war, and when he left it was out of the depression and on a slightly faster track to civil war. Call it a wash. Basically Bush had the misfortune to come after one of our few decent Presidents.

Verdict: Tyler was incompetent but passive, and fortunately America just kept chugging along without him, more or less. It’s pretty bad that he committed treason during the Civil War, but I guess that shouldn’t count against his Presidency. Bush is incompetent and active. His decision to ruin our foreign policy puts him out of reach for Tyler, even without the damning VRP factor. Bush is now at least the seventh-worst President.

Bonus anecdote about this amusing failure: Tyler’s Secretary of Navy and Secretary of State were on a battleship for a ceremonial cruise when a gun blew up and killed them both instantly. A young belle named Julia Gardiner was on board that day, and when her father exploded and died, she fainted into the arms of JOHN TYLER. Four months later they got married.

Breaking News: McCain VP Pick!

Here are two interested things that are unconnected. Or ARE they?

First, Gail Collins had this great line about McCain choosing Lieberman as his running mate:

“When you have a 71-year-old presidential candidate, it’s particularly important
that voters be confident that he’s backed up by an experienced and qualified
vice president prepared to step in and do the exact opposite about everything
except Iraq.”

Second, Rudy Giuliani has been back in the news lately for a dumb interview he gave in which he said, "I know from talking to John McCain about this… [that] our main criteria would be a person that would allow us to sleep at night knowing he could immediately be president." Obviously Rudy is incorrect (the main criteria is: Is this person wealthy or from Minnesota?), but there’s something else going on here: he’s making a play for the VP spot. And that would be awesome.

Think about it. McCain is clearly trying to lose this election. He is a man of honor and a patriot, and that means he would never surrender America to the likes of himself. He’s been doing everything he can to make this a one man race. He even managed to get himself branded as a negative campaigner despite his most damning insult being that Obama is quite popular.

So far we’ve all assumed that his next step was choosing Mitt Romney, the widely-reviled opportunist asshole from the gayest state in America. What better way to throw the election once and for all? Unfortunately, McCain has recently been closing in the polls as the media bumblefucks around ignoring obvious stories like him not knowing how many houses he has, wearing $500 Italian loafers, and stating that you’re not rich unless you make $5 million a year, to say nothing of his gross incompetence on the Georgia issue.

So McCain knows that he needs a nuclear option. Sure, most people hate Romney, but some just kind of don’t like him. That’s where Giuliani comes in. A cross-dressing pro-choice adulterer whose main experience consists of putting New York’s emergency response center inside the World Trade Center, he looks and talks like an evil ferret. And not only is he personally loathsome, Giuliani also highlights McCain’s greatest weakness: foreign policy. He combines aggressive ignorance of basic diplomacy with hysterical Chicken Littleism in ways that surely leave McCain awestruck. He’s the nuclear option in part because we can be reasonably sure he will nuke someone.
The McCain VP choice is much more important than Obama’s, because Americans know that they are really voting for the man who will be President when McCain dies in his third month in office. We have a right to know that that man will be Rudolph Giuliani. Only then can we be absolutely sure that our President will never be as insane as either of them.

Bush vs. Worst: Part III

Ronald Reagan. Is he really one of the ten worst Presidents ever? Eh, maybe. But he’s definitely more fun to talk about than Fillmore.

Foreign Policy: Reagan has one hell of a mixed bag on this one. On the good side, he was reasonably competent in the Israel-Lebanon war, had a pointless victory in Grenada (but at least he won), and, most important, shifted away from his own dumbassed belligerence to embrace Gorbachev’s efforts at reform. In other words, he was an appeaser. He appeased. This actually did help end the Cold War; that is, appeasement did. In other news, he ruined everything he touched in Latin America, including funding the Contras, a terrorist group. This policy would later be denounced as “state-sponsored terrorism” by some, and the World Court sanctioned us for it. But did Reagan stop? No. Nor did he stop his terrible policies in Colombia, Panama, Guatemala and especially El Salvador. But did Communism ever take hold in those places? No, because everyone was dead. Reagan also funded the Mujahedeen and Saddam Hussein in addition to illegally selling arms to Iran.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? Reagan gets more credit for ending the Cold War than he deserves, often by people who think it was his ludicrous tough-guy posturing rather than his return to basic diplomacy that did it, but at least it’s something good. Bush has just continually ruined everything.

Domestic Policy: Here the bag is less mixed. Reagan believed in small government, or government that provides few services to anyone while still running a massive budget and trade deficit. The economy did pretty well in the 80s, although Reagan contributed to the Savings and Loan scandal (see below!) and the stock market crash of 1987. He also completely ignored the environment, as well as AIDS. He believed that the government should have a bloated, wasteful military-industrial complex and War on Drugs, and he made those dreams a reality. He did make people feel good about America, though, which counts for something (very little).
DBDSW? Bush’s commitment to combating AIDS may be his biggest domestic strength. He’s probably been worse overall on the economy and environment. He hasn’t turned as many government programs into ineffective sinkholes as Reagan did, but Reagan never spied on his own citizens. Well, the AIDS thing is pretty big, so Bush wins this by a slim margin.

Civil Rights: Reagan was a casual racist who opposed the Civil Rights Act back in 1964. He started his 1980 campaign by going to a Southern town known for its racist terrorism and talking about states’ rights. Some would say that his policy of crushing the poor disproportionately affected minorities.
DBDSW? Katrina was a bigger racist failure than any one thing I can think of from Reagan, but Reagan had more harmful policies in general. I’d say Reagan wins this one by a small margin.

Corruption: The big scandals were the HUD controversy (pretty bad), Iran-Contra (one of the worst ever), EPA scandal (just regular bad) and the Savings & Loan Crisis (some believe it is the worst financial scandal in American history).
DBDSW? I listed the Bush scandals last time. He has more, but let’s try to compare the biggest from each. I’d say Torture-gate defeats the Iran-Contra scandal because it has ruined our ability to prosecute terrorism and involves war crimes (well, more war crimes). But Savings & Loan is worse than wiretapping, although it’s probably less Reagan’s fault. Bush has a deeper bench on this one, though, so he’s worse than Reagan overall.

VRP: Finally Reagan gets some big points on Bush. Where Bush inarguably took America to hell via a handbasket after a decent Presidency, Reagan did a mixed job after another terrible Presidency. Carter isn’t as bad as some people think, but he was bad. America could rest assured that Reagan was merely assuming control of a sinking ship, whereas Bush was steering a pretty good ship into the mouth of a volcano.

Verdict: This turned out to be much closer than I initially expected; Reagan was actually pretty awful. His work in Latin America was terrible stuff that ruined nations and left thousands upon thousands dead. But he did some things right, and America was doing much better at the close of his term than it is now. Bush is worse.

Coming Next: The drop-off to the next guy is amazing.

The list so far:
10. John Adams
9. Ronald Reagan
8. George W. Bush
7. ‽‽‽‽‽‽

Veepwatch: Playing to Win vs. Playing Not to Lose

So Obama is probably going to announce his Vice Presidential choice tomorrow morning. Right now, the conventional wisdom sees a two-man race between Senators Evan Bayh (IN) and Joe Biden (DE). Of course, this is a Very closely guarded secret, and it's entirely possible that the Bayh-Biden choice is pure media speculation.

But if it really is Biden or Bayh, it looks like a classic case of the old sports cliche, Playing to Win vs. Playing Not to Lose.

Right now the Obama campaign looks a little too plastic, a little too gentle. The VP choice Obama faces is not a matter of 'youth vs. experience' or what swing state he wants to put on the ticket. It's whether he wants to add some prickliness to his campaign, or if he's gonna reinforce that timid, plasticky image.

Evan Bayh: Playing Not to Lose

Bayh is the most-vanilla possible choice. On the surface he's a good guy, and you can check off a lot of good boxes with Bayh: young And experienced, respected in a flippable red state, a clinton supporter (unity!), not likely to make any gaffes.

Bayh's downside, though, cuts at the very heart of Obama's appeal to the left. For people like me, the most crucial difference between Clinton and Obama was that Obama seemed genuinely interested, and unashamed, of bringing progressivism back to the mainstream Democratic party. Bayh, early supporter of Iraq, former chairman of the DLC (saving the democratic party by pretending we're republicans), does not represent the new direction I'm hoping for.

So yeah, Bayh is a good, generic guy. But that's really all we're looking at. Utterly inoffensive blandness, at no cost and no benefit to Obama, except for dissapointing some progressives.

Joe Biden: Playing to Win

Biden looks like the higher risk, higher reward pick. He's an old guy, and kindof a dick. He's got his share of downsides- a little gaffe-prone, maybe affiliated with the 'Washington establishment' too much.

But what Biden brings to the table, and what Obama's really lost this month: Biden is cocky. He's aggressive. He's not gonna be sweet and timid and ashamed to stand up against GOP bullying. And he really seems to savor the fight, he Enjoys being the type of salty surrogate this campaign needs. He might say something a little stupid in the next few months, but he's also likely to land some killer rhetorical blows against McCain.

So ultimately it looks like Obama's choice comes down to, what sort of surrogate does he want: a bland and painless, generic pol; or a fellow who's gonna give you one or two embarassments, and three months of crackling, quotable hardball.


There are two great flaws with the Democratic Party of the past eight years: the concept that in order to win, we need to sacrifice liberalism and act like conservatives; and the complete and utter lack-of-balls when it comes to resisting the GOP attack machine.

I've always believed that Obama is the guy who will correct those two flaws. Biden helps Obama correct the latter… but Bayh just makes the former flaw worse.


I'm expecting Obama to go with Bayh, at this stage… or hopefully a good smart dark horse. But if it really does come down to Biden-Bayh, Obama ought to pick the guy who is ready to fight on day one.

science wants you to burn in hell

Looks like a few "scientists" with a liberal agenda are trying to fill our childrens' heads with a bunch of "facts" again. A few researchers have offered evidence that bisexuality in animals is fairly common, meaning it occurs in nature and is therefore natural (QED).

Good job, Einsteins, except you're forgetting one thing: Humans aren't animals. We have souls, which control our sexuality in a manner of Cartesian dualism that is logically inconsistent with itself, but only if you don't have faith. Check . . . and mate . . . if you're married.

McCain has Terrible Taste in Music

Apparently Blender magazine asked Obama and McCain to submit their ten favorite songs. The results are exactly what you'd expect. Obama picks awesome things. Springsteen, Nina Simone, Kanye. His top choice is "Ready Or Not" by the Fugees, and he has to be the first serious Presidential contender who has ever even heard of that song. Granted, he puts "Yes We Can" at number 10, but that was probably a joke.
McCain's list is so great that we are going to go through it in its entirety.

1. Dancing Queen, ABBA
Ha ha! Oh man. Well, that's seriously what he picked. Meanwhile it is unmanly for Obama to take his shirt off at the beach. When asked, "What the hell, man", McCain said (and this is true):

"I’ve got to say that a lot of my taste in music stopped about the time I
impacted a surface-to-air missile with my own airplane and never caught up
again.”

What is he talking about? "Dancing Queen" came out after he got back to the U.S.. Also, I like how his phrasing indicates that he saw the missile and deliberately impacted it with his own airplane (this accurately depicts his foreign policy thinking), forever dooming him to like bands that would make music in the next few years.

2. Blue Bayou Roy Orbison
This is a pretty good song.

3. Take a Chance On Me ABBA
Can you imagine if Obama picked two ABBA songs? Jesus. I like the desperation of the title, though.

4. If We MakeIt Through December Merle Haggard
This is also a good song, although it's about scraping through trying times on desperate optimism alone.

5. As Time Goes By Dooley Wilson
This is from Casablanca, which is younger than McCain.

6. Good Vibrations The Beach Boys
This is also a good song.

7. What A Wonderful World Louis Armstrong
This is a good song, although it is probably the lamest thing you could pick if you were obviously trying to pander and go with a black jazz musician.

8. I've Got You Under My Skin Frank Sinatra
Not as good as Obama's Sinatra pick, "You'd Be So Easy to Love", although the titles accurately reflect the sensation of supporting each candidate.

9. Sweet Caroline Neil Diamond
This is one of the most annoying, horrible songs ever recorded.

10. Smoke Gets In Your Eyes The Platters
Dave Barry used to mock this as a hilariously lame song that old people request at parties, and Dave is a fairly old guy.

Four good songs, one of which is thematically inappropriate (the Haggard) and none of which are impressive choices. McCain is a terrible decision maker even when it comes to his own personal taste.

A Great Album

The other day I finally bought Thelonious Monk Quartet with John Coltrane at Carnegie Hall, and it’s absolutely amazing. If you’re unfamiliar with it, this album was discovered in 2005 by a recording lab supervisor sifting through old tapes at the Library of Congress. It’s a live recording of a benefit concert that Monk did when Coltrane was still playing with him. The two only worked together for a few months in 1957 and the recordings we had prior to this were pretty minimal. This is like discovering that a mythical band led by Bob Dylan and John Lennon had actually left a fully recorded album in a filing cabinet.
I haven’t given it enough listens to say a whole lot yet, but I’ve just been blown away by this. Most of my Coltrane listening has been on the post-Blue Train stuff, which is mostly hard bop, cool jazz and out jazz. It’s really something to hear his style applied to the Monk brand of bebop, especially with such clean production. I’ve been particularly floored so far by his solos on “Evidence” and “Epistrophy”. It’s also nice to hear Monk really taking off on his own solos with a force that surpasses even his own usual high standards. The first track, an impressionistic take on “Monk’s Mood”, is great walking around New York music.
Anyway, I recommend listening to this.

Bush Vs. Worst: Part II

This is part two of our ongoing series comparing George W. Bush with the worst U.S. Presidents of all history. Today, the ninth worst President: Ulysses S. Grant.

Grant is an interesting case because he isn’t actually that bad a President. We’ve mostly included him here because he usually ranks pretty low and I feel like talking about him. This might be the longest of these posts because I like Grant.

Domestic Policy: In Grant’s day the South was dominated by racist terrorists who frequently killed black people and tried to overthrow their own governments. Grant reestablished order there, more or less. He staunchly supported rights for black people, the rule of law, and the 14th and 15th amendments. He also defeated the KKK. On the economy he was pretty good. The Panic of 1873 was bad, and he could have done more about that, but he also reformed the Treasury, ran it at a surplus, cut the national debt, improved national credit, reduced annual interest rates, and swung the trade deficit to a surplus. He was a big supporter of free education for all and of keeping church and state separate, especially in schools.
Did Bush Do Something Worse?
Bush hasn’t confronted any domestic crises on the level of the Post-Civil-War South, which is understandable, but seriously, it’s hard to think of a single domestic accomplishment for him.

Foreign policy: Oversaw the Treaty of Washington. Probably the best U.S. treaty of the 19th century, it resolved every standing dispute with England at terms highly favorable to the U.S., and the two nations have never fought since. He managed to avoid a pointless war with Cuba even though there was a lot of popular demand for it. He also tried to annex the Dominican Republic, because most people there wanted it, it was a useful bargaining chip in securing black rights in the U.S., and it would have put pressure on Cuba to outlaw slavery. But Congress said no. Also settled the Liberian-Grebo war, whatever that was.
DBDSW?
Again, Grant seems to have done mostly good things, so Bush is a pretty obvious loser here.

Civil Rights: Grant was a major supporter of rights for freed slaves, and made political sacrifices to uphold them even after it became unpopular. Because he forced the South to let blacks vote, under his tenure black people actually got elected to national office. Also, again, he defeated the KKK. The U.S. didn’t catch up to the civil rights of his term until the 1950s. His Native American policies were more progressive than anything America would do until 1924. In fact, his low rankings on most Presidential lists probably have something to do with his having held more progressive views than the next century or so of historians.
DBDSW?
Although his callous disregard for civil rights is pretty typical for post-Southern-Strategy Republicans, he went the extra mile by screwing Katrina victims. Bush seems to have arguably less enlightened racial views than a President from the mid-19th century.

Corruption: This is where Grant was pretty terrible. The major scandals of his terms were Black Friday, the Whiskey Ring, the Sanborn incident, and Crédit Mobilier of America scandal. He didn’t have anything to do with any of them, nor did they profit him at all, and that kind of crap was pretty common in national politics of the time. But he should have exercised better judgment in appointing and oversight, and he should have punished offenders more.
DBDSW?
I’m not sure what counts as a scandal for this guy, but off the top of my head, his administration has had the Plame scandal, the lying about WMDs thing, the illegal domestic wire tapping thing, the approval of torture and subsequent cover up thing, the various other things that are technically war crimes, the cronyism that helped make Katrina worse, the illegal hirings/firings at the Justice Department, and probably other things that I’m forgetting or that we haven’t discovered yet. Bush was involved in many of these directly and has handled all of them at least as poorly as Grant handled his, and many of the Bush scandals are directly injurious to people, not an “Oh this sends a bad message and hurts the economy” kind of hurt, but an “Oh, this waterboards an innocent person” kind of hurt.

Value of Replacement Player: Grant replaced Andrew Johnson, a terrible, terrible man and an even worse President. America improved drastically with the change.
DBDSW? Clinton was alright, and America is clearly much worse under Bush, so Bush loses this category by a wide margin.

Verdict: This isn’t even close. On the one hand, the comparison is kind of unfair, because Grant was actually a pretty good President. I value Civil Rights enough to put him in my top ten, although the scandals were pretty terrible. On the other hand, it's amazing to see how utterly horrible Bush is compared with a decent leader. Bush is at least the ninth-worst of all time. Also, Adams is back in the top ten, because I'm taking Grant out of it now that I got to talk about him.

T-minus Eleven weeks

Things are not looking great for Obama. This is generally the closest map we've seen since we started checking up each week. This has not been a very kind month for the campaign, but once Convention/Debate season starts- and it's really right around the corner- then we'll have a clearer picture of, is this a slump or a serious downturn.

United for McCain for Obama: SUPPORT THE CAUSE!

This is a very exciting time for the United for McCain for Obama movement. For all of us who are ready and excited to donate to Barack Obama, but also want to see McCain make his long-awaited endorsement of Obama, we've set up a page on mybarackobama.com

UNITE FOR MCCAIN FOR OBAMA

This is your chance to support Barack while also supporting our campaign to get McCain to support Barack.


(This is exactly the same as contributing to Barack Obama directly. The only difference is by doing it through this portal, you're helping us build the movement and send the message to John McCain: Thank you for your furtive support, now bring on your public endorsement!)


UNITE FOR MCCAIN FOR OBAMA

Bush vs. Worst: Round 1

This is the first post in a new feature comparing George W. Bush to the ten worst U.S. Presidents of all history. First up, the tenth-worst: John Adams.
Adams was a decent founding father, but his Presidency was terrible. Let's break it down.

Foreign Policy: He ruined the Jay Treaty, which was brilliant policy conceived by Hamilton and Washington that kept us out of war with France. Combined with the XYZ affair this helped pave the way to many of the foreign policy disasters of the next decade or so.
Did Bush Do Something Worse? Yes. The Iraq War. Bush is also technically a war criminal.

Domestic policy: His most famous move here was the Alien and Sedition Act, which, although it was racist and bad for immigration, also destroyed free speech.
DBDSW? Yes. The Patriot Act, though better on paper, has been enforced and manipulated a lot more and will be difficult to undo. The Gitmo proceedings have ruined our ability to prosecute terrorists.

Civil Rights: Didn't do much to help slaves, but he probably couldn't have done too much.
DBDSW? Eh, call this a toss-up.

Corruption: Adams wasn't historically terrible on this.
DBDSW? Yes. Bush is historically terrible on this.

Value of Replacement Player: This is a concept from sports statistics. If you replace, say, Lebron James with an average player, that's actually a deficit for your team. So a bad President is even worse if he replaces a good President. Adams replaces George Washington. That's a hell of a drop, since Washington is one of our only three excellent Presidents. In fact, the Adams Presidency makes Washington's achievements all the more remarkable, since so many of them survived his terrible successor.
DBDSW? Clinton was basically historically average. America was doing fine when Bush took over, in a weaker economy, but basically OK. Now America is in an even worse economy and also involved in two Asian land wars. Clinton was no Washington, but I'd say Bush loses this one. Replacing Michael Jordan with Ray Allen is tough, but replacing Allen with a guy who throws the ball into the stands is even worse. So Adams wins this one.

Verdict: Bush is worse on every count except Civil Rights, which is a toss-up. He is at least the tenth worst President. Congrats to John Adams, who finally escapes the bottom ten.

A funny comic

This interview is pretty funny. Here's a better example of the comic than the one they give. Also this one.

United for Morgan Freeman for Obama

While writing the post below I realized that we really need Morgan Freeman to narrate some Barack Obama ads. Then before I got around to posting this the comments veered toward Freeman too. But I think we can all agree that, as Taylor says, Freeman is a sonic messiah, and Obama should really do this.

It probably works best with positive ads. If you saw, say, slow-motion shots of Americans standing proud and smiling in front of some picturesque America places and heard Morgan Freeman say something like, “By the people. Of the people. For the people. This is America,” and right when he says that last part you see Obama smiling as he talks to schoolchildren, and then maybe Freeman says some sort of Obama slogan as they show the logo, like “Yes, we can,” you would feel so patriotic that it would make the Morning in America campaign look like a diseased crow in a garbage dump, eating a syringe.

But it would also work with attack ads. If you showed footage of McCain hugging Bush, screaming, trying to smile, etc. and showed quotes some of his lies and attempts at policy, or really if you showed McCain in any context, and then had Morgan Freeman say, “John McCain. You ought to be ashamed,” people would be overcome with embarrassment for McCain. He would distress American families even more than he already does. “I’m sorry,” Freeman would narrate, “I guess you’ve just let us down.” It would be instant catharsis of the Buchanan-Rove political era as everyone instinctively tried to make Morgan proud of them. As someone once put it, we’ve crawled through a river of shit, and now we'll come out clean on the other side.

Seriously, Obama really should do this.

Celebrity Death Threesome Blowout Sale!

This is a little dated but I’m going to mention it anyway. A while back when Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn bit the big one, I thought, hey, here comes another chance to predict which celebrities will die next. Looking at historical trends, my choices were Clarence Thomas and renowned Inca historian Jean-Jacques Decoster. Then Morgan Freeman got in a car crash, and I thought, Ah shit, not a good celebrity. Fortunately he seems to be OK, so he could still potentially narrate some Obama ads. (Note: This is a great idea. I decided to post it by itself and it should be above this post soon.)
So then I quit paying attention to the news for a while, and mentioned the post idea to my roommate. “Oh, Bernie Mac died,” she said. Perfect! But then Isaac Hayes died before I could make any predictions. Now all that’s left is rating this celebrity death threesome. It doesn’t look good. An important but insane and slightly overrated writer is a good start, but then we’ve got a mediocre comedian and a mediocre musician best-known in recent years for voicing a fat cartoon chef before quitting because he was offended as a Scientologist.
Obviously that doesn’t rise to the historical level of a Parker/Einstein/Fleming trio. But is it better than this year’s earlier threesome of Russert/Carlin/Helms? Let’s pit them against each other:

Solzhenitsyn vs. Helms: These guys face each other because they’re the strongest members of their teams. It’s an interesting fight. Helms was eviler than Solz was good, and as a real fucker of a senator he screwed millions of Americans.
But Solz battled the USSR and kind of won and will still be remembered a century
or two down the road. Ivan Denisovich is a pretty good book. Advantage:
Solzhenitsyn.
Mac vs. Carlin: Because they’re both comedians. Neither was very good. Carlin is more important and revered but Mac seems to have been less of a smug asshole. Advantage: Mac.
Russert vs. Hayes: Because they’re left over. Also, both are oddly respected despite few real accomplishments. In a fight, I see both of them getting winded and asking to forfeit. Advantage: There are no winners in this fight.

So the Solz/Mac/Hayes trio is currently in the lead for Celebrity Death Threesome of the year. But wait! I just looked it up and Heath Ledger died about the same time as Sir Edmund Hillary and Bobby Fischer. So that one is the clear leader.

T-minus Twelve weeks

It's been a pretty stable week, overall. McCain's attack ads have gotten some press, but this is mid-August (the most languid part of the whole year) and the Olympics are on. Clear movement in one direction or another will probably start around convention time.

contain yourselves

You probably know this already, since it hasn't been featured on this blog's "you heard it here first" feature, but there are two huge experimental breakthroughs which managed to escape world governments without their budgets thoroughly mangled.

CERN is currently test-firing proton beams in sections of the 17 mile Large Hadron Collider, now that all of its 50,000 tons of magnets have been cooled to the appropriate temperatures (~456.3 deg. F). Scientists are confident that they will find the elusive Higgs Boson, a force-field-ish thingy supposedly responsible for the inexplicable phenomenon of mass, which you may have noticed around you throughout your daily life. There is also speculation that they could find evidence for unseen dimensions or supersymmetric particles that might bolster the case for string theory.

But hold on, the GLAST satellite is also chugging along as of early this summer. It's supposed to observe gamma rays (the highest frequency EM waves) at energies never before studied. Who gives a shit, right? Wrong. Proponents of opponents of string theory (most notably Loop Quantum Gravity) think that the fine-tuned measurements of the satellite might show minor discrepancies in the speed of light due to the motion of light particles across quantized spacetime. Basically, they want to prove that space and time are made of discrete units.

Oh snap! Two major quantum gravity theories are about to throw down all up in this bitch! It's exciting, we swear! Don't cut our funding!

Two good things

Here are two funny quotes from today.
From John McCain:

“World history is often made in remote, obscure countries. It is being made
in Georgia today."

As Yglesias notes, this is not correct. But what I like is the idea that an entire nation could be "remote" and "obscure". Like most countries, Georgia is actually located next to several other nations (for example: Russia). It is only remote in the sense that it would be very far away from you if you were standing very far away from it. This is also true of all things.

But is it obscure? No. In addition to the millions of people who live in or near this country, approximately several million more people knew about Georgia from such sources as school, maps, and noticing things. Obviously McCain wasn't doesn't waste his time with any of those.

The other quote stands alone. It's from Michael Mukasey, America's worst Attorney General, in reference to the frequent criminal behavior at the Justice Department during this administration:

"Not every wrong, or even every violation of the law, is a crime."

six degrees of shut up, clinton

Howard Wolfson, Clinton's communications director from back when she mattered, claims that if they had known that J0hn Edwards had cheated on his terminally cancerous wife sooner, they might have had a better shot at the nomination. The Clinton aides had actually gotten together sooner to decide how to make this situation seem unfair to Hillary as opposed to, say, everyone who's actually involved in it. Terry McAuliffe insisted that they travel back in time and release the information before the Iowa caucus, and then looked around wandering why everyone had stopped listening to him.

In other news, Bush is condemning the Russian army for invading Georgia because he doesn't yet know that it's not, like, our Georgia, with the peaches an stuff. He would have spoken out sooner, but there are a lot of black people in Georgia. HA HA! That was an out-dated Kanye West reference. No word yet on how the invasion fucked Clinton out of the democratic nomination.

Obama is still pissed off about the ad that compares him to a white, non-political, licentious, moronic, female celebretard who was expelled from high school and whose father wrote a large check to McCain. Rick Davis brilliantly defended the ad by noting that all of the human beings mentioned in it could technically be considered celebrities, and therefore am I right or am I right? This seems ridiculous to thinking people, but what they don't realize is that McCain actually does think that everyone on TV is the same person, since how else could they all fit in that box with the buttons on it? Still waiting on McCain to apologize to Senator Clinton for the tasteless ad.

McCain

Apparently Jimmy Carter is significantly more tech-savvy than McCain, even though he is one of the few humans older than him. According to Hendrik Hertzberg:

McCain doesn’t even use a computer. Carter does, and how. He writes, he e-mails,
he surfs. He doesn’t have a blog of his own, as far as I know, but he reads
other people’s, and I’m guessing he spends more time at the keyboard than your
average Facebook member one-fourth his age. In Jonathan Demme’s
movie, Carter can be seen speed-typing on his Mac and grousing that his
inbox pileup is driving him nuts, or words to that effect.

This compares favorably with McCain’s statement that he depends on “Brooke and Mark” to show him his favorite blogs, which are Drudge, Politico and RealPolitics. We’ve noted this before, but it continues to be true that the first two aren’t blogs and the third doesn’t seem to be a thing that exists. (Could he mean this?)
To many people, McCain gets a pass because you don’t expect the oldest candidate in America to be particularly sharp with the post-1990 technology. McCain is older than at least 92% of the world, and he has already outlived the global life expectancy (to be fair, he wouldn’t hit the U.S. male life expectancy until the third year of his term). He’s older than the first modern computer. Of course, Jimmy Carter is older than the Turing machine, or, indeed, talkies. But he’s also a pretty smart guy. For instance, he has figured out how to divert Hannity-style attention from Obama and onto his own meaningless world travels instead. Is it really fair to compare McCain to a smart guy? His class rank at Annapolis says no.
But according to these guys, 70% of elderly computer owners get online at least sometimes. So we should be able to find a more apt comparison. Here’s one: My grandpa (a smart guy, but also just a regular guy). Let’s compare them in this handy chart:

Based on their familiarity with the dominant technology of the modern era, it looks like Grandpa Jack would be a better candidate for President than John McCain. Ha, but get this, one time a Democrat said he invented the Internet.

T-minus Thirteen weeks

The numbers, as of this Monday (Obama's 47th birthday!)

SFW (ha! JK you are FIRED)

Unfortunately for our blog, I just found some terrifying, nonsensical and generally offensive cartoons from the era when I was figuring out how to use my art tablet. The learning curve was steep, let's just say.

Installment One.

Inch-High John McCain!

I have an idea for a cartoon, either as a kids’ show or a comic strip. It would be called Inch-High John McCain, and it would star Inch-High John McCain. This inch-high version of John McCain lives in a pile of M&M’s and travels around in the shirt pocket of his intern, Mark. Mark is a clumsy but good-hearted young guy who runs the entire McCain campaign because he feels bad for Tiny McCain. Together they have a series of adventures en route to trying to get elected. For example, in one episode Mark could meet with major donor Tex Sinister to schedule a fundraising dinner. Through the secret eye-hole in Mark’s pocket, McCain notices that Tex is wearing a FARC lapel pin. When Tex leaves, the following exchange takes place:

IHJM (screaming): Hey Mark!
Mark: What’s up, Inch-High?
IHJM: What’s FARC?
Mark: FARC is a group of Colombian drug bad guys. Banana companies like Mr. Sinister’s sometimes pay them secret money not to murder their workers.
IHJM: MAMIE! That’s not the Inch-High way! We’ve got to do something Mark!

They hatch a plan, and later IHJM uses his tiny size to sneak into Tex Sinister’s headquarters, where he destroys all records of the Sinister Banana Corporation’s dealings with FARC, and leaves a strongly-worded memo urging Tex to wear an Inch-High Straight Talk Express pin when in public.
The show won’t spend too much time on IHJM’s back story, since the main focus will be the series of challenges he must face to defeat his opponent, the Dark Menace, in a general election. Of course, since IHJM frequently refers to his desire not to dwell on his war medals, which he uses for a table when guests visit the M&M’s pile, we will have to have a flashback episode. In that one IHJM is on a mission for the super-secret D.O.M.I.N.O. forces. He flies his tiny plane (Fig. 1) into the Viet Cong embassy to spy on them, and suddenly a bug hits the windshield and he crashes. For the next five years he is trapped under the sofa, until finally he escapes by leaving.
Obviously the show would be a great way to teach kids current events. But it could also be an action-packed fun zone with a lot of product-placement potential. What do you say, TV guys?