The Tin Man » 2008

Friday, August 1, 2008

A parent complained to a public library about a children’s book, Uncle Bobby’s Wedding, which is about a same-sex marriage. Here’s the librarian’s mind-blowingly awesome response. I don’t even know which part to quote. Here’s one excerpt:

You say that the book is inappropriate, and I infer that your reason is the topic itself: gay marriage. I think a lot of adults imagine that what defines a children’s book is the subject. But that’s not the case. Children’s books deal with anything and everything. There are children’s books about death (even suicide), adult alcoholism, family violence, and more. Even the most common fairy tales have their grim side: the father and stepmother of Hansel and Gretel, facing hunger and poverty, take the children into the woods, and abandon them to die! Little Red Riding Hood (in the original version, anyhow) was eaten by the wolf along with granny. There’s a fascinating book about this, by the bye, called “The Uses of Enchantment: the Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales,” by psychologist Bruno Bettelheim. His thesis is that both the purpose and power of children’s literature is to help young people begin to make sense of the world. There is a lot out there that is confusing, or faintly threatening, and even dangerous in the world. Stories help children name their fears, understand them, work out strategies for dealing with life. In Hansel and Gretel, children learn that cleverness and mutual support might help you to escape bad situations. In Little Red Riding Hood, they learn not to talk to big bad strangers. Of course, not all children’s books deal with “difficult issues,” maybe not even most of them. But it’s not unusual.

[via kottke]

5:23 PM | 1 drop of oil

Saturday, August 2, 2008

Why do we capitalize the word “I”? And how has this affected us?

8:53 AM | 3 drops of oil

Sunday, August 3, 2008

I was just flipping through the TV channels and came across this commercial for a 9/11 commemorative silver $20 bill. It makes me ill.

10:31 AM | 6 drops of oil

Alan Sepinwall of the NJ Star Ledger has a great analysis of tonight’s Mad Men.

Here’s his analysis of last week’s episode.

11:39 PM | oil me

Monday, August 4, 2008

I haven’t been happy with the Obama campaign lately. The McCain campaign is doing all the defining and driving most of the news coverage. Yes, McCain’s ads have been asinine, but they’ve got the media talking, and that’s where many voters get their information.

Regular readers of my blog will know that I am no doe-eyed Obama supporter. I went back and forth between Clinton and Obama over the course of the primary race. First I was undecided; then I chose Obama, voted for him in my primary in February, and posted an Obama icon on my blog. Then, as the race went on and Clinton began to define the debate, I started to think she might be a more impressive general election candidate, even if I loathed some of what she was doing. (Gas tax holiday? Please.)

Lately I still think she might have been a better nominee.

On June 3, the day Obama effectively clinched the nomination, Electoral-vote.com published its last set of competing matchups: Clinton vs. McCain and Obama vs. McCain. Clinton was doing much better against McCain than Obama was. That was two months ago, and things have moved in Obama’s direction since then. But I can’t help wonder whether Clinton would have a stronger lead right now.

Several months ago, the Republicans were relishing the idea of running against Clinton; they had a whole attack plan ready. And if she were the nominee they’d be using it right now.

But Clinton would be out-Roving McCain. She’d be running commercials that everyone would be talking about, defining the debate, defining McCain, going on the offensive against him, while casting herself as an issues-oriented champion of the working class. That’s what she started doing against Obama once she got her act together in March. The only reason Obama won is because he had a superior organization and racked up state after state in February. There’s nothing illegitimate to that; he knew the rules and took advantage of them. But he got blindsided once the Ohio/Texas campaign got under way and never really recovered. If not for February, Clinton would be the nominee. She ultimately lost, but she won the rhetorical debate.

The polls right now should not be as close as they are. Granted, according to the state-by-state polls, Obama still has a healthy lead. But the election is exactly three months from today, and so much can happen in that time. I want to smack Obama upside the head for not being more aggressive these last couple of weeks. Of course, if he winds up winning, everyone will say he chose his strategy wisely. But if he loses, Democrats will once again be banging their heads against the wall.

He’s still the favorite right now. But is anyone talking about his commercials? Is he doing anything but play defense? I’m sick of Democratic nominees who overestimate the intelligence of the American people. We need a nominee who kicks people’s asses. Clinton would have been that nominee.

Would her cynicism piss me off? Yes. Would I call her craven? Yes.

But would she have a better chance of winning?

Yes.

2:30 PM | 5 drops of oil

Wednesday, August 6, 2008

Neil Patrick Harris does an interview in the newest issue of Out magazine. Here’s a summary.

I didn’t know his partner David Burtka had twins with his former partner. I also didn’t know he and Josh Radnor (his How I Met Your Mother costar) played lovers in The Paris Letter.

12:39 PM | oil me

Thursday, August 7, 2008

Slate.com investigates a Texas alternative weekly rag that seems to consist almost entirely of plagiarism — including some of Slate’s articles.

At times over the last month, I’ve doubted that the Bulletin actually exists. A tiny newspaper from the Houston suburbs, filled week after week with bowdlerized Joe Conason columns and record reviews airlifted from the pages of Slate? It seemed preposterous, and the longer I spent squinting into the mustard-and-magenta glow of the Bulletin’s Web 0.0-quality Internet site, the more I began to suspect that I was the dupe of a conceptual art prank, a cheeky Borgesian commentary on the slipperiness of language and authorship. Or something.

12:32 PM | oil me

Except for two very brief occasions, I haven’t been behind the wheel of a car in four years. But this book looks fascinating: Traffic: Why We Drive the Way We Do (and What It Says About Us), by Tom Vanderbilt.

The entire prologue is online. An excerpt:

You may suspect that getting people to merge in a timely fashion, and without killing one another, is less of a traffic problem and more of a human problem. The road, more than simply a system of regulations and designs, is a place where many millions of us, with only loose parameters for how to behave, are thrown together daily in a kind of massive petri dish in which all kinds of uncharted, little-understood dynamics are at work. There is no other place where so many people from different walks of life–different ages, races, classes, religions, genders, political preferences, lifestyle choices, levels of psychological stability–mingle so freely.

Another:

[I]t is actually an incredibly complex and demanding task: We are navigating through a legal system, we are becoming social actors in a spontaneous setting, we are processing a bewildering amount of information, we are constantly making predictions and calculations and on-the-fly judgments of risk and reward, and we’re engaging in a huge amount of sensory and cognitive activity–the full scope of which scientists are just beginning to understand.

Finally:

Traffic has even shaped the food we eat. “One-handed convenience” is the mantra, with forkless foods like Taco Bell’s hexagonal Crunchwrap Supreme, designed “to handle well in the car.”

Makes me think of those obese humans hovercrafting their way around the mother ship in WALL-E.

2:24 PM | 1 drop of oil

Friday, August 8, 2008

Google Maps added Street View in Japan this week. Since I lived in Tokyo for three years, I’m psyched.

11:30 AM | oil me

Saturday, August 9, 2008

I lauged out loud when I read this about a group of Chinese citizens watching the Olympic opening ceremonies in a bar:

As they huddled over a group of tables pushed together, they placed bets on the veracity of a rumor that a trained panda would light the final torch.

9:39 AM | oil me

Monday, August 11, 2008

Obama’s finally hitting back. It’s about damn time.

I feel sorry for Steve Carell, though. There’s a clip of him near the end. I wonder if Jon Stewart will razz him about it.

11:57 AM | oil me

I’m not a big sports fan, but for some reason I love watching the Olympics.

Maybe it’s because of the prestige. Maybe it’s because the events are much shorter. Maybe it’s because gymnasts and swimmers are hot.

My favorite Olympic sport to watch is men’s gymnastics. Male gymnasts are short and built. Unfortunately, both Hamm brothers are injured and neither is competing this year. I miss them. But I like watching women’s gymnastics as well. A woman performing on the balance beam is the most astonishing thing. I don’t know how she can leap up off the beam, do a 360-degree backflip, and then land right back on the beam. Mesmerizing.

As for swimming — what an amazing men’s relay last night. It was the kind of moment that makes the Olympics worth watching. Those last few seconds, where Jason Lezak, the American swimmer, overtook French swimmer Alain Bernard in the very next lane to win the relay for the American team, after Bernard had trash-talked the Americans, were INCREDIBLE.

Even crazier was Michael Phelps’s reaction.

It both cracked me up and terrified me. He looked like a Greek warrior ready to rush into battle and kill someone. Testosterone overload! And the man has not an ounce of fat on his body.

(Here’s a great article about Phelps from a couple of weeks ago that begins, “Michael Phelps is not a fish.”)

Oh, and there’s this French swimmer, Laure Manaudou. Whenever they mention her name, I start singing “Manaudou” to the tune of “Xanadu.”

The best part of watching the Olympics is that everything looks incredible on the new HDTV we bought a couple of months ago. We can see the water droplets on the swimmers as they’re being interviewed, we can see panoramic shots of Beijing. It’s great.

12:10 PM | 1 drop of oil

Here’s this week’s review of Mad Men from TV critic Alan Sepinwall.

1:08 PM | 1 drop of oil

Tuesday, August 12, 2008

Lately I’ve been teaching myself Latin.

I don’t know why. It’s a daunting task, because there’s so much to memorize. The problem isn’t the vocabulary — many Latin words have English-language cognates, so they’re not hard to remember; the problem is the fricking grammar. Latin is an inflected language, which means that there are numerous endings for nouns and verbs, depending on their function in the sentence. The verbs aren’t particularly hard — it’s the noun endings, the declensions, that are killer. They seem impossible to memorize. And some of the endings are identical in some instances but not in others. There is no logic to it at all.

No wonder it’s a dead language.

Why am I doing this? It’s not like I need to. I’m not in school, I’m not preparing for the SAT, and if I want to read the great works of Roman literature, there are plenty of translations. But I’ve always been curious about Latin and how it works. I’ve sung many pieces in Latin; I like the way it looks and sounds; it’s the basis for so many English words; and it just seems elegantly put together, with so much information packed into one word.

A few years ago I decided to study ancient Greek. I decided that I wanted to learn the two classical languages, and I figured I’d be really ambitious and start with the one that came first, because perhaps it would inform my eventual study of Latin. (I like to get to the bottom of things.) I bought this book and began working my way through it, but it got harder and harder, and there was more and more to memorize, and eventually I wondered why I was doing it, and I gave up.

But the other weekend I read a review of a new book, Reading the OED. I took a look at it, because the OED has always fascinated me. But instead of that book, I decided to read The Meaning of Everything: The Story of the Oxford English Dictionary, by Simon Winchester. Thus my interest in language was rekindled, and I decided it was time to study Latin. So I took this book out of the library the other day and have started going through it.

I’ve always felt that I missed something in my formal education. I never took a survey course in Western civilization, never read many of the so-called “great books,” never studied Greece and Rome, never learned about Western philosophy. Occasionally over the last few years I’ve tried to rectify this. I’ve read an introductory survey of Western philosophy, I’ve read about the great books and I’ve read some of the works themselves. The idea of the “Western canon” is passé these days, but it’s still the foundation of our culture. And I like to see the big picture, the connections among things. I think that’s why I enjoy history so much — because it tells us how we got from there to here.

And part of me thinks that in some way, studying all of this stuff — especially the ancient Greeks and Romans — can make me a better person, by making me a clearer thinker and a better writer. I envy people who did study all of this. I really envy those who went to St. John’s College, where you get immersed in the canon.

But can it really make you better or smarter? I think I’m already a clear thinker, and perhaps my writing would benefit less from classical languages and literature and more from actual writing, and courage, and discipline. But maybe I’m wrong? Perhaps it really can help?

I don’t know.

But I do love language.

3:36 PM | 14 drops of oil

Wednesday, August 13, 2008

When I was a kid I was sometimes too smart for my own good.

One evening I was at my friend’s house while his parents were throwing a party. I was talking with a man who was trying to explain something to me on some esoteric topic. He had a foreign accent, so I thought maybe he wasn’t a native English speaker.

That’s why when he said something to me, I, the elementary school kid, decided to correct his grammar.

“You mean pies are squared?” I said.

Bless him for not smacking me.

I did learn geometry eventually.

1:25 PM | oil me

In my previous post, I told a little anecdote illustrating that when I was as a kid, I thought I was very smart, sometimes even smarter than adults, and yet I’d never heard of the concept of πr². But I worried that some people might not get the joke, so I decided to sneak in a little explanation at the end of the post.

And I messed up.

I implied that πr² belongs to algebra, when it really belongs to geometry.

I knew this, of course, but for some reason I was thinking of the wrong type of math.

The irony is that in writing a post about how this one time I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself, I thought I was being witty but wound up making a fool of myself.

I corrected the error so that nobody would ever know the difference. Except I know of at least one person who saw the error, because he e-mailed me to correct me, and therefore I worried that there might have been others who saw the error, so I felt compelled to write this explanation. Which means that those of you who hadn’t read the post before I changed it, or who don’t use RSS feed readers, now also know I made an error.

This whole post feels like something Faustus would write, except that I didn’t end it by saying that my error means nobody will ever, ever love me.

(I kid, Joel. I kid.)

3:01 PM | 3 drops of oil

Thursday, August 14, 2008

A gay man has won the Democratic primary for a U.S. House seat from Colorado. If he wins, he’ll be the third openly gay member of Congress. (That doesn’t include all the closeted gay Republicans, of course.)

Jared Polis, 33, is the founder of BlueMountain.com.

Mr. Polis, who poured more than $5 million of his own money into the campaign, narrowly defeated Joan Fitz-Gerald, the former State Senate president, and Will Shafroth, a conservationist, winning just over 40 percent of the vote.

Mr. Polis, who made a fortune co-founding an online greeting card Web site, bluemountain.com, and was elected to the State Board of Education in 2000, is favored to win in November against the Republican candidate, Scott Starin, as well as candidates from the Green and Unity Parties, in the mainly Democratic Second Congressional District. …

According to the Gay & Lesbian Victory Fund, a group that supports gay candidates for public office, Mr. Polis would be the first openly gay man elected to Congress as a nonincumbent.

There have been five other gay and lesbian members of Congress, including the current Representatives Barney Frank of Massachusetts and Tammy Baldwin of Wisconsin, both of them Democrats. All but Ms. Baldwin did not go public with their sexuality until they were elected.

Here’s Polis’s campaign website.

10:28 AM | 1 drop of oil

Sunday, August 17, 2008

While watching TV tonight, we saw a totally retro promo for the American version of the British TV series, Life on Mars, about a police detective who goes back in time to 1973 after being hit by a car. The promo even features what sounds like Ernie Anderson doing the voiceover. Anderson, the iconic 1970s/80s ABC TV promo announcer, has been dead for 11 years, so I don’t know who they got to copy his voice.

There’s even a retro version of the ABC logo at the end. Awesome.

12:34 AM | 2 drops of oil

There was a Sesame Street wedding last weekend. I mean a real-life wedding that took place on the Sesame Street set between two workers on the show. Oscar the Grouch participated.

It wasn’t until I got to the end that I realized that the officiating minister is also the minister at the church where my chorus rehearses. He even used to sing with us.

12:29 PM | oil me

Monday, August 18, 2008

Obama will announce his running mate this week, given that the Democratic National Convention starts a week from today. In theory he could announce it as late as next Wednesday, since that’s the night that the VP nominee is supposed to make a speech.

Here’s a list of when running mates have been announced in prior campaigns.

10:27 AM | 1 drop of oil

McCain said it again on Saturday night.

If I’m President of the United States, my friends, if I have to follow him to the gates of Hell, I will get Osama bin Laden and bring him to justice.

As you can see from the link, McCain has used that expression several times.

I hate it when he says this. The expression makes no sense to me.

Why does McCain keep saying he’s going to go to Hell?

And if bin Laden himself is going to Hell, why does McCain need to follow him? Isn’t bin Laden already going to get justice there?

Is it some biblical expression I’ve never heard before?

Or is it just one of those things that’s meant to sound tough but actually sounds like something out of a bad movie?

10:37 AM | 4 drops of oil

Tuesday, August 19, 2008

God dammit.

[Obama] paid the obligatory homage to Mr. McCain’s military service and sacrifice as a Vietnam prisoner of war, but then raked him for impugning his motives and patriotism. …

“I have never suggested and never will that Senator McCain picks his positions on national security based on politics or personal ambition. I have not suggested it because I believe that he genuinely wants to serve America’s national interest. Now, it’s time for him to acknowledge that I want to do the same.”

Enough with the high road already. It doesn’t work. Obama is trying to play Bill Clinton to John McCain’s Bob Dole, “honoring his service” and thereby implying that the old coot’s day has passed. But this isn’t 1996 and you’re not Bill Clinton, an incumbent president in good economic times.

And McCain isn’t honoring you at all. McCain is doing what he needs to do. Going on the attack day after day is working for him and hurting you.

Nate Silver at Fivethirtyeight.com — which has become one of my daily political reads — puts it well:

[I]t’s worth remembering that McCain won the Republican primaries in large part because the other candidates were so deferential to him. Rudy Giuliani praised McCain incessantly during the debates of last summer, at which point McCain’s campaign was in tatters and didn’t seem like much of a threat. But guess where Rudy’s supporters went once McCain won New Hampshire?

The Republicans, of course, have no such inhibitions when it comes to Democrats, which is why they went right at Al Gore’s strengths, and right at John Kerry’s strengths, and are going right at Barack Obama’s strengths — and, importantly, did so early in those respective campaigns. It’s one of the big reasons that they win elections.

I almost hope Obama picks Hillary as his running mate. At least she’d go on the attack. At least she wouldn’t have compunctions about smearing McCain. At least she understands Republican politics.

Obama needs to stop trying to use the American people as a laboratory for his ideas about political theory. He needs to actually try to win this thing.

The guy is driving me nuts.

12:16 PM | 2 drops of oil

Rachel Maddow, or “lesbian Jew goddess of my dreams,” as Andy once called her, is getting her own show on MSNBC right after Keith Olbermann. She starts on September 8, after the political conventions end.

This is great. I heart Rachel Maddow — even though she copies Olbermann’s pinstriped suits. They both sometimes look like they’ve escaped from the road company of “Guys and Dolls.”

5:34 PM | 1 drop of oil

Friday, August 22, 2008

I just saw this headline:

Michael Phelps’ Girlfriend: He Addresses Rumors, Beard Says “Ew” No

And I was like, “A beard? Michael Phelps is gay?”

12:46 PM | oil me

I think this Obama VP text-message-alert thing is a cool but hilarious idea. And yes, I signed up to receive it by texting “VP” to 62262 (keypad code for “OBAMA”).

I’d really like to be in a public place when the choice is announced. I’m trying to think of the weirdest place for a cacophony of cellphones to start going off. It depends on whether it happens today or tomorrow. Since Obama has a big rally in Springfield, Illinois, at noon tomorrow, it’ll probably be around then.

So cellphones start going off tomorrow morning in synagogue sanctuaries across the country. They interrupt weddings. They echo off the walls of shopping mall atriums. Whole Foods franchises resound with the sound of electronic beeps as we Democrats make our weekly arugula purchases.

Ooh! Ooh! I know the best place to be! The Park Slope Food Coop!

It’ll be a gas.

1:10 PM | 3 drops of oil

Today’s New York Times crossword may not be a big deal except to crossword aficionados like me:

18 black squares

The reason it’s a big deal is because it breaks the record for the lowest number of black squares used in a regular 15×15 grid. The puzzle, by Kevin G. Der, a Stanford Ph.D. student, contains just 18 black squares. I thought there was something unusual about it when I first looked at it last night, so I counted.

The previous record of 19 squares was set by prolific crossword constructor Manny Nosowsky on March 11, 2005.

Here’s more about today’s crossword.

And here are pictures of the 100 NYT puzzles with the fewest numbers of squares. (It contains the answers, including today’s, so be careful if you plan to do today’s crossword and haven’t done it yet.)

Oh, and when I got excited about this last night, Matt rolled his eyes at me.

3:37 PM | oil me

Speaking of crossword puzzles, the writer/director of Wordplay, Patrick Creardon, has a new documentary that opens today, I.O.U.S.A., about the national debt.

3:45 PM | 1 drop of oil

This guy better not be Obama’s VP nominee.

I voted for the Marriage Protection Amendment, because I believe marriage is a sacred, time-honored union between a man and a woman. Marriage is a foundation of stability for our families and our nation and should always remain so.

He’s apparently still in the mix, although who the hell really knows anything right now? Reporters like to write stories.

5:29 PM | 2 drops of oil

Saturday, August 23, 2008

Or, you know, they could send out the text message in the middle of the night, and an hour later, when I’m near the waking end of a sleep/wake cycle, an insistent beep from the other room enters my consciousness, the beep that means you have an unread text message, and it wakes me up.

I realize they had been scooped, but come on. The middle of the night?

10:59 AM | 2 drops of oil

Monday, August 25, 2008

There’s apparently a lot of sex that goes in the Olympic Village, where all the Olympic athletes live.

There is a famous story from Seoul in 1988 that there were so many used condoms on the roof terrace of the British team’s residential block the night after the swimming concluded that the British Olympic Association sent out an edict banning outdoor sex.

11:44 AM | oil me

Tuesday, August 26, 2008

Goodbye Olympics, hello Democratic National Convention.

Did anyone catch the hilariously awful handoff to London at the closing ceremonies of the Olympics on Sunday night? Double-decker bus, umbrellas, multicolored raincoats, Jimmy Page, David Beckham — it was like watching a terrible Broadway musical. It made Elton John on a trampoline seem like a good idea. The Chinese put the British to shame — although, as the Washington Post’s Anne Applebaum points out, of course authoritarian societies do spectacle really well.

So that’s that for the Olympics.

Did anyone catch the convention coverage last night? And by convention coverage, I mean did anyone catch the TV news anchors interviewing pundits and politicians while ignoring the speakers onstage, except for Ted Kennedy and Michelle Obama?

[A]s CNN analysts were wrapping up the night, several talked about the absence of “red meat” attacks on the Republicans. But Democratic activist Hillary Rosen noted that Pelosi was doing some of that — only CNN wasn’t really listening. …

Several things may explain it. The networks paid to send much of their political talent to Denver, and want to show them off. They fear political speeches may turn off an audience that has, essentially, tuned in for political speeches. And they don’t want to be sucked into an infomercial.

Granted, it is all a giant infomercial. But if people don’t want to watch, they’re not going to watch, and Katie Couric interviewing Nancy Pelosi isn’t going to pull anyone away from America’s Next Top Model or whatever is on TV in the summer.

Now, if they showed Elton John on a trampoline — that might do it.

1:59 PM | 2 drops of oil

Wednesday, August 27, 2008

The trailer for Frost/Nixon, based on the recent play about David Frost’s 1977 interviews with Richard Nixon, is now out. You can watch it here. (Thanks, Esther!)

It’s written by Peter Morgan, who also brought us The Queen. It stars Frank Langella as Nixon and Michael Sheen as David Frost, who played Tony Blair in The Queen. I saw the play last year and really enjoyed it. If you’re a political junkie, you will too — assuming the movie is as good as the play. (Ron Howard directed the movie. Of course, when the action of the movie took place, Ron Howard was playing Richie Cunningham on Happy Days.)

11:56 AM | 1 drop of oil

Del Martin, a gay rights pioneer who founded the Daughters of Bilitis and who recently married her partner of 55 years, Phyllis Lyon, died this morning.

Martin and Lyon were the first couple who San Francisco mayor Gavin Newsom married during the city’s powerful act of civil disobedience in 2004. Just a few weeks ago, they were one of the first same-sex couples in California to finally be legally married.

Del Martin and Phyllis Lyon have been special, powerful faces of the same-sex marriage movement. May Del Martin rest in peace.

9:46 PM | oil me

Thursday, August 28, 2008

Although Bill Clinton and Joe Biden gave the marquee speeches last night, John Kerry spoke as well. And I agree with Josh Marshall — it was one of the best Kerry speeches I’ve ever seen.

It starts out slow but soon gets going. Jeez, where was this guy in 2004?

9:55 AM | 5 drops of oil

Friday, August 29, 2008

So the presidential nominee of one major party is from Hawaii, and the vice presidential nominee of the other major party is from Alaska. Noncontinental U.S. states represent!

She comes out of nowhere, she’s younger than Obama, and she’s been a state governor for less than two years. And she’d be a heartbeat away from a 72-year-old man’s presidency.

This pretty much undermines one of McCain’s key arguments against Obama.

She seems vastly underqualified to be president.

Is she going to be the Harriet Miers of the VP process?

11:26 AM | 4 drops of oil

It strikes me that around the time the 2008 presidential campaign was gearing up, Sarah Palin was mayor of a town of 8,500 people.

2:13 PM | oil me

Fivethirtyeight.com:

… picturing a young, attractive, kooky, female governor from Alaska who has an accent straight out of Fargo in the White House is going to be a much bigger leap for many voters than picturing Barack Obama there.

At first I was disappointed he didn’t pick Romney. Romney would have been so much fun to run against. And it’s possible Palin could fire up the base. Instead of aborting a Down-Syndrome baby, she Chose Life. She’s pro-gun, pro-creationism.

But this still seems like a total joke. Harriet Miers redux — she won’t make any major mistakes, but something just doesn’t seem right. This is an example of that vaunted “judgment” McCain keeps attributing to himself?

3:13 PM | 1 drop of oil

Reading Andrew Sullivan has been a blast today.

4:16 PM | oil me

Human beings like to analogize.

So I’ve realized that Sarah Palin is also a female Mike Huckabee. A folksy, culturally right-wing governor who will fire up the base.

And one of my friends on Facebook said that Sarah Palin is to Hillary Clinton as Clarence Thomas is to Thurgood Marshall.

This is in addition to her being Harriet Miers and Dan Quayle.

I alternately think she’s a joke and fear her. Or, rather, I fear what she might do for McCain. The base will probably love her (Dobson likes her), and she might increase evangelical turnout, and that really scares me.

But I can’t imagine the PUMA people supporting her. I’d think/hope they would be insulted that McCain thinks he can win them over just by picking a candidate with ovaries — as insulted as they’d have been if Obama had picked Kathleen Sibelius.

Andrew Sullivan continues to dig up good stuff. Hopefully news organizations will pick up all these mini-scandals in a few days after the excitement wears off, and they’ll suck up oxygen, and they’ll show that Palin wasn’t vetted properly and that McCain is a reckless risk-taker. We’ve already had one of those for the last eight years and we don’t need another.

6:47 PM | 2 drops of oil

Saturday, August 30, 2008

Politico interviewed some political historians about Sarah Palin.

Presidential scholars say she appears to be the least experienced, least credentialed person to join a major-party ticket in the modern era.

…

If elected vice president, Palin would appear to have the least amount of experience in federal office or as a governor since John W. Kern, Democrat William Jennings Bryan’s 1908 running mate, who had served for four years in the Indiana state Senate and then four more as city solicitor of Indianapolis. The Democratic ticket lost to Republican standard bearer William Howard Taft and running mate James S. Sherman by an Electoral College spread of 321-162.

6:04 PM | 7 drops of oil

The world is awash in bullshit.

Bill Kristol, just five days ago:

[W]ith Biden’s foreign policy experience as a contrast, could McCain assure voters that the young Pawlenty is ready to take over, if need be, as commander in chief? Also, Biden is a strong and experienced debater. Pawlenty is unproven. If he is the choice, there will be many anxious Republicans in the run-up to the vice presidential debate in St. Louis on Oct. 2. …

If not Pawlenty or Romney, how about a woman, whose selection would presumably appeal to the aforementioned anguished Hillary supporters? It’s awfully tempting for the McCain camp to revisit the possibility of tapping Meg Whitman, the former eBay C.E.O., Secretary of State Condoleezza Rice, or Gov. Sarah Palin of Alaska. But the first two have never run for office, and Palin has been governor for less than two years.

Bill Kristol, today:

Palin is potentially a huge asset to McCain. He took the gamble–wisely, we think–of putting her on the ticket. …

A key moment for Palin will be the vice presidential debate, to be held at Washington University in St. Louis on October 2. … And if Palin holds her own against Biden, as she is fully capable of doing? McCain will then have succeeded in combining with his own huge advantage in experience and judgment, a politician of great promise in his vice presidential slot who will make Joe Biden look like a tiresome relic.

Can Bill Kristol even distinguish bullshit from reality anymore?

Harry Frankfurt, in his book On Bullshit:

It is impossible for someone to lie unless he thinks he knows the truth. Producing bullshit requires no such conviction. A person who lies is thereby responding to the truth, and he is to that extent respectful of it. When an honest man speaks, he says only what he believes to be true; and for the liar, it is correspondingly indispensable that he considers his statements to be false. For the bullshitter, however, all these bets are off: he is neither on the side of the true nor on the side of the false. His eye is not on the facts at all, as the eyes of the honest man and of the liar are, except insofar as they may be pertinent to his interest in getting away with what he says. He does not care whether the things he says describe reality correctly. He just picks them out, or makes them up, to suit his purpose.

We must always call out the bullshitters. If we take them seriously, we give them power. That’s why we must always mock them and laugh at them — to show them as the worthless cretins they are. We must not let them poison the well of ideas.

8:33 PM | 6 drops of oil

Sunday, August 31, 2008

It’s official: McCain wanted to pick Lieberman, but he was too afraid to stand up to the conservative wing of his party.

This man calls himself a maverick? What a joke.

1:43 PM | 1 drop of oil