Maverick in a jetwash

Republicans have got to be worried that it's less than 100 days to the general election, and the McCain campaign is all over the place. First they base his whole candidacy on the notion that McCain has Honor, Courage, and American Pride oozing out of every pore and orifice--which is just fine. But now they are undermining that theme by launching a spate of ridiculous attack ads against Obama, one in which they make the baseless accusation that Obama neglected to visit wounded troops at a hospital because the press would not be there, and another in which they dismiss Obama as a mere substanceless celebrity on a par with Britany Spears and Paris Hilton (again making inaccurate claims). This sort of thing hurts McCain, not just because it contradicts his claims to various capitalized classical virtues, but because these schoolyard-taunt-level jabs reinforce the negative image of John McCain as short-tempered, immature, and deserving of his old highschool nickname.

And it's not just McCain's campaign strategy that's in disarray--he is all over the place on the issues, too. At first he opposed the Bush tax cuts, but now he supports them. He has also reversed himself on immigration, landing himself in the awkward position of opposing his own immigration bill. And now there are murmurs that he may not be committed to a cap-and-trade scheme to reduce carbon emissions after all. The Maverick has been systematically de-Mavericking himself.

A lot of people are using all this to level criticism at McCain, which of course is fine, but I think the root cause of all this spasmodic behavior is the fact that Republicans have put McCain in a totally untenable position. Rather than gaining an advantage during the lengthy period of time in which he had the nomination rapped up while Obama and Clinton were still duking it out, McCain was forced to spend all of his energies pandering to and consolidating the Republican base. The Rush/Hannity/Romney wing of the Republican party was unwilling to go along with McCain's deviations from Republican orthodoxy, and so he has had to gradually and painfully reverse himself on the very issues which made him stand out in the first place.

The Rushes, Hannities, and Romnies might be satisfied with the transformation they've wrought, but they've also completely hamstrung their guy for the general election. Because McCain can no longer run on his sometimes-unorthodox-for-a-Republican but always-arch-conservative record, he is forced to ineffectually attack made-up character flaws of his opponent. And the Republican establishment is following suit, leading to some weird results: "terrorist fist-jabs", seven-house-owning-heiress-marrying McCain calling Obama an elitist, Karl Rove absurdly characterizing Obama as "that guy at the country club" who "makes snide comments about everyone who passes by".* The inexplicable comparison of Obama to Paris Hilton--in a campaign ad--is just the latest installment.

Unless there is a big change in the so-called "fundamentals", McCain is going to have a hell of a time winning this thing. The Independents have cooled to him because of his tacking towards the ideological right, and the ideological right still harbors the sneaking suspicion that this guy is some kind of Independent. And since there's no Hillary--and Republicans can't really remember what Republicans not being in power is like--there's little sense of urgency in getting McCain elected.

To top it all off, the GOP continues its disturbing morning ritual of playing Russian Roulette with its foot--giving us a consistent stream of Republican indictments, contempts-of-Congress, and balls-out law-breaking. For Democrats these days, it's like God is smiling down on us and nodding, "Yes", and then holding Karl Rove in contempt.

So, we'll see if McCain can figure out a way to bounce back. I just hope he keeps cranking out those entertaining commercials.


* The most awesome thing about this story was the fact that, in Karl Rove World, it makes sense to assume that your audience can relate to "that guy at the country club". You know, like that guy you always see at the Billionaire Yacht Faberge Egg Convention whose always making those snide remarks about your Faberge Egg that's on your yacht...I fucking hate those guys.

"I'm Jordan"

Ok, this proves conclusively that Jordan is the Batman of basketball. But guys--you know who this makes the Commissioner Gordon of basketball?

Phil Jackson. It sort of fits!

Although after that, the analogy kind of breaks down:

• Robbin --> Scottie Pippen
• Alfred --> Bill Cartwright
• Joker --> Patrick Ewing

Really, though, Heath Ledger was channeling Ewing in that performance.

EDIT: Let me reiterate that the Commissioner Gordon of basketball is not NBA Commissioner David Stern. That would be committing the fallacy of asserting the commissioner, and it's wrong.

How to ruin Garfield Minus Garfield

Make a book out of it that's like this:

The full-color book format will give readers the experience of having both the original and doctored Garfield strips together on the same page for comparison.

Where's the fun in that? It's a bit like watching a movie for the first time with the commentary track on. Or something.

Poor choice of words

I had to read this headline twice.

Price up, demand down

Total driving on highways in the US was down 3.7% for the month of May compared with May 2007, with gas prices up 25%. The experts say that demand for gas in the short term is relatively inelastic because it is affected by long-term decisions such as what kind of car to buy and where to move, and so we won't see demand really fall off for a while yet.


PS: On a side note, I would like to take this news item as a case study of the suckiness of traditional newspaper writing in the age of the internet. First read this Reuters piece, then read this blog entry by CBS guy Kevin Drum. The first, you will notice, is terrible. Why it's terrible:

• Even though it's short, it's bloated with all these vapid quotes from the Secretary of Transportation.
• The first sentence tries to jam too much information in and ends up leaving out a critical piece of information: driving is down 3.7% compared to what? Compared to the previous month? Compared to the same month last year? I had to look elsewhere for the information.
  
• The author insists on expressing increases and decreases in the meaningless absolute terms of millions of total miles driven. Nobody has an intuitive grasp of these figures--so why not stick with percentages?
• There are no links to the source material.
• There are no charts or graphs.

The Drum entry is concise, contains links to the source material, and even seems to be written by someone who knows what the hell is going on. Kevin Drum 1, Tom Doggett (and/or his editor Walter Bagley) 0.

Tumblers > Pumpers?

I'm not so sure...

Not the President

David Brooks calls bullshit on Obama's Berlin speech, saying that it lacks any actual arguments:

When John F. Kennedy and Ronald Reagan went to Berlin, their rhetoric soared, but their optimism was grounded in the reality of politics, conflict and hard choices. Kennedy didn’t dream of the universal brotherhood of man. He drew lines that reflected hard realities: “There are some who say, in Europe and elsewhere, we can work with the Communists. Let them come to Berlin.” Reagan didn’t call for a kumbaya moment. He cited tough policies that sparked harsh political disagreements — the deployment of U.S. missiles in response to the Soviet SS-20s — but still worked.

[Obama] has grown accustomed to putting on this sort of saccharine show for the rock concert masses, and in Berlin his act jumped the shark. His words drift far from reality....

Obama has benefited from a week of good images. But substantively, optimism without reality isn’t eloquence. It’s just Disney.

I agree with Brooks that, compared to the Berlin speeches made by Kennedy and Reagan, Obama's was light on substance--some pretty airy-fairy stuff. But I also think it makes a critical difference that Obama, unlike Kennedy and Reagan at the time, is not the acting head of state. If Obama had gone in with all sorts of substantive policy proposals, it would have been too explicitly presidential and he would have been rightly skewered for pretending to powers he doesn't have.

So I think Obama was wise to keep this a largely superficial event--an event that shows to people back home that, hey, it doesn't have to be the case that Europeans loathe America.

Nit: picked

Internet reactions seem to be mostly laudatory, but I thought Obama was oddly off his game for the big Berlin speech, flubbing lines throughout the 24 minutes. A pretty uneven performance. But I guess his media narrative of Obama=great orator is durable enough that even a mediocre delivery will garner descriptions such as "soaring address" and "powerful speech".

And let me just clarify here that my gripe is with the delivery of the speech, not its substance. I try to focus on the important stuff.

Sen. Kevin Bryant (R-SC)

When asked what religion he believes Obama practices, his response was: "That's a good question. I don't know." You expect this thing from some loser in the House, but a US Senator? Bryant's guilty of (1) believing that implying Obama is a Muslim is a smear, and (2) implying that Obama is a Muslim. That's not good Senatesmanship.

As for the inflammatory T-shirt that he posted on his blog, I don't think it's beyond the pale. But maybe that's because for 5 years I lived in a town where bumper stickers comparing the President unfavorably to Hitler were in plentiful supply.

Credible source?

According to astronaut Edgar Mitchell--who has walked on the moon--aliens = a big fat YES:

"I happen to have been privileged enough to be in on the fact that we've been visited on this planet and the UFO phenomena is real," Dr Mitchell said.

"It's been well covered up by all our governments for the last 60 years or so, but slowly it's leaked out and some of us have been privileged to have been briefed on some of it.

"I've been in military and intelligence circles, who know that beneath the surface of what has been public knowledge, yes - we have been visited. Reading the papers recently, it's been happening quite a bit."

My first guess is hoax (this did occur on a radio show, after all); my second guess is this guy is craaaaazy/confused/paranoid; my third guess is that, holy shit, aliens dude. But the probability span of those guesses is 90%, 9.99999%, 0.11111%, respectively.

EDIT: Correction: that should be 90%, 9.99999%, 0.00001%.

Ebert disses comics

From his review of Dark Knight:

“Batman” isn’t a comic book anymore. Christopher Nolan’s “The Dark Knight” is a haunted film that leaps beyond its origins and becomes an engrossing tragedy. It creates characters we come to care about.

Whoa there. Sounds like Ebert's never cracked open Dark Knight Returns or Killing Joke, or any of the other "dark" Batman stories that started cropping up in the 80s...

Financial literacy

The commentariat is slowly turning towards the issue of personal debt and financial literacy, led by reports in recent months about the terrible average savings rates for individual Americans. And it's about bloody time--I've always wondered why this very critical issue never gets any play.

Stephen Dubner at the Freakonomics blog at the Times has a must-read entry about financial illiteracy in America, and the subject's absence from school curricula:

I’d like to think I’m at least adequate in taking care of my family’s finances and everything that includes in the modern world: real-estate and insurance decisions, saving for college and retirement, investing and tax planning, etc. But it has been a bit of trial-by-error mixed with trial-by-fire — and to be honest, I was very fortunate to have an older brother who is smart, frugal, patient, and who worked for many years in finance. If it weren’t for him, I’d be in considerably sadder shape.

But here’s my point: I’m not exactly undereducated. I had 13 years of public schooling, 4 years of college, and another 2 years of graduate school — and after all that schooling, I don’t know if I learned enough to answer all three of Lusardi’s questions correctly. The subjects simply didn’t come up. Just as they apparently didn’t for the two-thirds of the older respondents to Lusardi’s questions.

I have similar story. Basically I wouldn't know jack about anything finance related if weren't for a fellow I work with named Karl who happend to press into my hands a book called The Four Laws of Debt Free Prosperity. The book sounded, and was, fairly cheesy, but it was short and in those few brief chapters made me realize that I had been out to lunch on an extraordinarily important subject, a subject that--if ignored--could literally ruin a person's life.

So it's always been sort of crazy to me that they don't make a serious effort to scare kids in high school into never, ever running a credit card debt, or show them how a steady and conservative savings plan begun early enough can make them into millionaires when they are old. And I never understood the point of quibbling over various ways to refine Social Security when a large number of Social Security recipients will have frittered away their incomes over the span of decades because they simply did not know what they were doing with their money. Financial literacy seems to me the first and most important step in establishing a sane set of policies dealing with retirement and supporting the elderly crowd, and yet in our politics it's treated as an afterthought.

A war criminal, according to some

Kind of striking when you realize this is coming not from some MoveOn/Kos type, but a conservative:

Some of the least superficially awful techniques - such as the Gestapo-perfected "stress positions" and "hypothermia" - can actually be the worst in terms of suffering. There is no doubt at this point that the president of the United States is a war criminal. The only question is whether he will ever be brought to justice.

Well, more a libertarian, really. And an Obama-supporting one, at that. So maybe not all that striking.

When gentility breeds inaccuracy

So, the news story is: a hot mic recorded Jesse Jackson saying something bad about Obama. Now, of course, the New York Times, being a "family newspaper", will not actually just print what he said (notwithstanding the fact that anyone can find out what he said via simple Google search), so instead the Times beats around the bush:

Mr. Jackson’s words, which included a vulgar reference, were recorded by a live microphone on Sunday.

And:

The comments, which came when Mr. Jackson thought he was speaking privately, were brought to light on Wednesday when Bill O’Reilly, the host of “The O’Reilly Factor,” announced his intention to play the exchange. At least one of the words had to be blocked out.

Frustrating, right? The reader is left with a burning question at the end of the article: just what the hell did Jesse Jackson say? Just spit it out already! And the information is not trivial: just exactly what vulgarity was used sheds a lot of light on what Jackson's real opinions are, as well as how offended Obama and his supporters ought to be. And from all the circumlocution, you get the idea that what Jackson said was the worst of the worst. But of course, we don't want to poison the mind of avid New York Times reader L'il Timmy--L'il Timmy who, if he is above the age of 6, knows full well how to find Jackson's comments--and worse--using a new-fangled invention called "the internets". And so the vital information remains obscured.

My question to these Times editors is: just whose sensibilities are you protecting by not just printing the damn quote? My guess: a whole lot of ninnies who take pointless umbrage at any kind of break with tradition, no matter how much sense it makes.

Less squeamish sources, such as Fox News (whose own Bill O'Reilly broke the story), have the whole thing:

The Rev. Jesse Jackson apologized Wednesday for saying Barack Obama is “talking down to black people” during what Jackson thought was a private conversation before a FOX News interview Sunday.

Jackson was speaking to a guest at the time about Obama’s speeches in black churches and his support for faith-based charities. Jackson added before going live, “I want to cut his nuts off.”

Now, Times, was that really so bad?

Epilogue: Is it just me, or is that a weirdly intense thing to say? It'd be like if I said, "Man, that roommate of mine got chunky peanut butter again--I'M GONNA CUT HIS NUTS OFF!!!" I mean, I just don't see how Obama's run-of-the-mill pandering could give rise to such visceral imagery. And if you look at the guy Jackson's talking to, that guy is, to his credit, clearly weirded out as well.

This can't be serious

T. Boone Pickens?