Remains of the Day

Editor in Chief (no really, he is the Chief)

I would apologize for my lack of posts recently, but I'm not entirely sure who expects my writing here to be higher on the stack than work and other personal obligations. Maybe I'm apologizing mostly to myself. I promise I have a pile of draft posts piled high, all half finished, so the good intentions are there.

Anyhoo.

My posting infrequency is related to this post in that I do tend to rewrite longer form posts that land here. That's in contrast to the less filtered copy that flows through to my Twitter account, though even there I am sensitive to flooding my followers with too much personal ephemera.

Rewriting is an underrated commodity in this new age of instant publishing. Most of us have been our own copy editors for years, but with the web disseminating writing further afield, any laziness on that front pollutes a wider mind mass.

That's one reason I find this photo so heartwarming. If you don't recognize it, this is Obama's speech on health care reform to a Joint Session of Congress. The photo is even more fascinating blown up large so you can read the individual edits that I presume Obama sent to speechwriter Jon Favreau. It's a fascinating insight into Obama's communications strategy when you see him replacing "compassion" with "concern and regard for the plight of others" or replacing "character of this country" with "American character." He has a knack for verbal pacing and poetic turns of phrase, as when he flips "This has always been our history" to "This has always been the history of our progress.

If there was any lingering doubt about Obama's writing skills despite the two polished books to his credit, this should serve as an adequate response, though still I hear silly teleprompter chatter from the peanut gallery. Any real writer will tell you how much of writing is actually rewriting, and how much of growing as a writer is a willingness to abandon, at times, entire days worth of work once you've been able to cut the emotional umbilical cord and regard the work with the sage objectivity of a copy editor.

In contrast, I offer you Sarah Palin's Twitter stream. Some of this is the medium and 140 character limit, to be sure, but the prose style is that of a teenage girl. It's not as if others aren't working under the same constraints.

Joe Wong

It's always a bit embarrassing when your dad is sending you links to things you don't know about yet, and more importantly, enjoy. Perhaps the only standup comedian both my dad and I are huge fans of: Joe Wong.

My friend and I had a debate about Wong. He was conflicted because Wong's speaking style perpetuates some caricatures of Asian-Americans. My argument in support of Wong is that his ability to produce such sharp satire despite his strong ethnic markers helps to undermine the myth that a sophisticated comprehension of government and its foibles has to come from a white who speaks perfect English.

I actually am not sure how Joe Wong speaks normally. Is this all an act? Regardless, I laughed, and it didn't feel as if I was laughing at him.

Interview with Tony Judt

Excerpt from the interview:

In the introduction to ‘Reappraisals’ you write that people prefer to describe unpleasant political situations in language that makes them somehow more tolerable. In Iran people used to say they lived in a ‘limited democracy’, before it became clear just how limited it was. What kinds of linguistic subterfuge do we practise in Europe and America?

In America the misuse of language is usually cultural rather than political. People will accuse Obama of being a socialist. Italians would say magari – if only. However, no one takes this very seriously. What we have instead in the US is cultural communities policing what can and can’t be said, and that shapes how we define difference. The idea is that you can’t have an elite, since elitism is undemocratic and unegalitarian. Therefore, you always make the point that people are in some important way the same. If they are badly disabled like me, they are ‘differently abled’, which I find very amusing. It is not a ‘different’ ability: it is no ability. But since it’s politically uncomfortable to distinguish between people who can do things and people who can’t, the latter are described as separate but equal. There are numerous things wrong with this: first, it is lousy language; second, it creates the illusion of sameness or achievement in its absence; third, it conceals the effects of real power and capacity, real wealth and influence. You describe everyone as having the same chances when actually some people have more chances than others. And with this cheating language of equality deep inequality is allowed to happen much more easily.

In Britain the most striking abuse of language is the redefinition of private, for-profit economic activities as services provided by the state. A concrete example is the way private entrepreneurs were given the right to run old people’s homes. However, no one wants to spell that out, which is why they are described as ‘delivering’ the service, as if they were the milkman bringing milk to old people. It prevents people from fully grasping that the state has handed over its mandate of responsibility to a private actor, whose motivation is to provide the cheapest possible service and make the most money.

That last paragraph is an argument for the HCR plan the Obama Administration is trying to pass. As Nicholas Kristof notes in a NYTimes Op-Ed today, recounting a tragic story about one neighbor who contracted stomach cancer, leaving some decisions in the hands of insurance companies, where the profit motive is supreme, is a recipe for tragedy.

Opponents of the reform proposals argue: If you like the Department of Motor Vehicles, you’ll love Obamacare. But as the drama of Zack and Jan shows, the only bureaucrats more obdurate than those at the D.M.V. are the ones working for insurance companies. The existing system is preposterous: we rely on insurance companies whose business model is based on accepting premiums from healthy people and devising ways to exclude from coverage those who most desperately need medical care.

As Krugman wrote on Friday, "In every other advanced nation, insurance coverage is available to everyone regardless of medical history. Our system is unique in its cruelty."

Another excerpt of note from the Judt interview:

If there seems to be one thing missing among today’s politicians, it is courage. It is considered idealistic, even naive.

Courage is always missing in politicians. It is like saying basketball players aren’t normally short. It isn’t a useful attribute. To be morally courageous is to say something different, which reduces your chances of winning an election. Courage is in a funny way more common in an old-fashioned sort of enlightened dictatorship than it is in a democracy. However, there is another factor. My generation has been catastrophic. I was born in 1948 so I am more or less the same age as George W. Bush, Bill Clinton, Hillary Clinton, Gerhard Schröder, Tony Blair and Gordon Brown – a pretty crappy generation, when you come to think of it, and many names could be added. It is a generation that grew up in the 1960s in Western Europe or in America, in a world of no hard choices, neither economic nor political. There were no wars they had to fight. They did not have to fight in the Vietnam War. They grew up believing that no matter what choice they made, there would be no disastrous consequences. The result is that whatever the differences of appearance, style and personality, these are people for whom making an unpopular choice is very hard.

Someone once said: ‘But Blair’s choice to go to war in Iraq was unpopular with the majority of the population.’ I agree. But what Blair was doing was going for a different kind of popularity – he wanted to show his strength. To do this he had to do something unpopular, yet something that cost him nothing. Doing something unpopular that may cost you your job is much harder. The last generation in America with such courage was probably the generation of Lyndon Johnson. In a funny kind of way Thatcher, whom I certainly do not like, had courage. However, she fits the description of naive and idealistic; I don’t like her ideals, her naivety was a disaster, but it’s still a fair description. Today it is a criticism to describe a politician as idealistic. This is in a way a new phenomenon and it too is born from the fact that Europe has not been involved in wars that would demand the mobilisation of the whole population for over 60 years now. The last time there was such a sustained period of peace was probably the early Middle Ages. Traditionally leaders rose to power through wars or conquest. We have had six, seven generations of leaders who came to power exclusively by political manoeuvring, which is historically very unusual. It’s like inbreeding: there are no external inputs, no new kinds of people, only the political class breeding itself. This isn’t an argument in favour of war, just a historical fact.

Are politicians who vote for HCR today being courageous given the risk of a midterm election revolt, or is it in their interest? We'll see later this year.

Another noteworthy excerpt (I love Judt interviews, he is such a great historian that so much of what he says about Europe resonates with the situation elsewhere, as in the U.S.):

In Greece, we saw mass protests, aimed in part at a neoliberal economic system that has generated increasing inequality and has left young people feeling they have no prospects. Yet there seemed to be an enormous disconnect between the protesters and their government, and an even greater one with Brussels. How have we reached the point where people on the streets don’t matter?

Part of the answer is that this is just as true in big countries. In London there were two million people protesting against the Iraq war, but the government took no notice, and it made no difference at all. So the disconnect is universal. Why? It would be hard to give a complete picture. However, what we might call a ‘connect’ only lasted for a very short time. It began in the late 19th century with mass newspapers, mass literacy, speed and ease of communication and, especially, trains. Governments were forced to be very responsive to popular feeling. They felt very vulnerable. Elections could remove them from power and if elections didn’t work, then the masses on the streets might achieve the same result. After World War Two governments retreated from politics. The French economic plan, for example, was not decided by the parliament, but by administrators and bureaucrats. The EU was institutionally invented by bureaucrats. The first elections were held only in 1979. Until then there were no elections, no polls, no votes, nothing. There was a feeling, partly a consequence of Fascism, that you couldn’t trust mass opinion any more. It was not reliable. Not only were the masses willing to throw you out, they might be willing to overthrow the whole system. Steadily from the 1950s onwards the influence of the street, of the media, newspapers, public opinion, of ideology, was pushed further and further away from the actual decision-making processes. In the end it wouldn’t matter very much anymore if you threw out the government since it wouldn’t change the fundamental policies, institutions, laws of the country or direction of the majority of the issues of public policy.

It’s only now that we are really seeing the results of a process that has been going on for a long time. Much of the 1960s, which I remember as a student, was about the argument that governments were losing touch with popular opinion and preferences, particularly with the young, and that the only way to reconnect was on the street. Now we are realising that even that doesn’t work anymore. The old ways of mass movements, communities organised around an ideology, even religious or political ideas, trade unions and political parties to leverage public opinion into political influence – they are no longer there. Yet you need those levers. Without them people jumping up and down on the street do nothing. They don’t matter even if they are in the capital and even if there are millions of them. We destroyed the levers of popular politics or allowed them to be destroyed. We are left with people as individuals, and when people come together as individuals they can only come together either to do one big demonstration or to communicate through the internet as verbal pressure groups at an election. The combination of the physical mass and political leverage has been lost.

I can't help but think of this when I see news footage of Tea Bagge...err, Party groups standing in D.C. now shouting epithets at House Representatives as they pass through to go vote on HCR. It applies to other issues as well. Despite the ease of coordination afforded activists by the Internet, it rarely feels as if our politicians are listening.

The health-care divide

I first wrote this two weeks ago, just after Obama's health-care summit. The passage of any HCR bill, at the time, seemed unlikely, but things have since turned more optimistic on that front. I give passage maybe a 55% chance now? Regardless, my thoughts on why I'd like to see the HCR bill pass still hold.

James Surowiecki isn't optimistic that yesterday's health-care summit will lead to any meaningful change. He traces this to an unbridgeable gap in philosophies.

...the lack of any real progress was the result of a simple fact: there’s an unbridgeable chasm between what Democrats and Republicans want health-insurance reform to do.

For Republicans, the current health-insurance system works reasonably well—in their minds, it’s a key part of what they kept referring to as “the best health-care system in the world”—and therefore whatever changes need to be should be small. The Republicans kept using the word “incremental” to describe their proposed changes, but this is really a red herring, in the sense that it implies that their ultimate goal is to dramatically revamp the current health-insurance system, and that they simply want to do so more slowly than Democrats. That’s not accurate: the Republicans are reasonably satisfied with what’s currently in place. The fact that tens of millions of Americans don’t have health insurance is not, in their mind, an issue that government should be trying to solve—at least not if it will cost any real money.

For Democrats, by contrast, the health-insurance system needs to be revamped precisely because it fails to cover tens of millions of people, and because it creates massive uncertainty even among those who are covered—since, if you lose your job and therefore your insurance, it’s not clear you’ll be able to buy insurance on the individual market, or that you’ll be able to afford it. That’s why the summit discussions kept returning, in one form or another, to two fundamental issues: expanding coverage and regulating insurance companies to prohibit practices like refusing to insure people with preexisting conditions. Democrats want to cover most of the uninsured and they want to write into law the principles of guaranteed issue and community rating (so everyone will be able to buy health insurance, and to do so at a relatively affordable price). Those are the basic ideas embodied in the health-insurance bills that both houses of Congress passed.

How sad you are over the failure of the healthcare plan to pass seems to come down to how pained you are that tens of millions of people are uninsured in the country. The bill isn't ideal, but the moral and ethical divide here is as stark and unambiguous as can be. You either believe every U.S. citizen has the right to health insurance or you don't. We're one of the few first world industrialized nations that doesn't ensure that right.

The Senate or House bills were not perfect, no one thinks they are. But they'd allow us to come closer to promising that right than ever, and while the CBO's cost estimates for each plan were high, it wasn't the type of cost that we're unaccustomed to from government entitlement programs.

The problem is that the uninsured are a weak voting bloc, and those in the majority who are insured are not that unhappy with their health insurance situation, even if it's not ideal. Those people just want the economy to recover and for more jobs to open up. As crass as it sounds, it's difficult to care about your neighbor's health care situation if your 401K is down and your spouse is out a job.

It's no surprise to anyone who knows me that I'm firmly in favor of passing one of the two health care bills, flaws and all. When I left Amazon and moved to NYC to try to break into the film business, I felt, for two years, just how cold and illogical the U.S. health insurance situation was. That health insurance is tied up with some plan chosen by your employer makes no sense at all, a legacy from wartime reform that has, for one reason or another, stuck with us through the years.

I could not find affordable buy-it-yourself health insurance in NYC despite being in decent health. COBRA was the cheapest, but it was no bargain and came with an expiration date. The harsh reality of trying to make it in an art field became clear--there would be a gap where I'd have to either live without health insurance. Eventually, I could make it into an artistic guild, maybe the Editor's Guild, that would offer health insurance, but that was a highly uncertain outcome. Or maybe I'd become highly successful and make enough money to buy the premium plans offered on the open market (we're talking plans that would have cost me on the order of 40% of my monthly rent).

Or more likely, like many artists, I'd have to take a job as a barista at Starbucks or clerking at Barnes & Noble or any similar flexible job that would give me the flexibility to pursue my craft and the occasional gig while still putting a health insurance umbrella over my head. I wouldn't have had any problem with doing so, but the fact that my choice of work would be limited by health insurance plans and that my choice of health insurance would be limited by my employer was absurd. Imagine if you could only choose the auto insurance that your employer offered, or if you could only buy home insurance because you were employed by certain companies; the health insurance issue is just as silly.

I ended up in a year long dispute with a state agency that offered a special healthcare plan option for low income people who could show that they'd recently had health insurance in place, like a state-run COBRA plan. They lost my first batch of paperwork, then we ended up arguing over what I'd sent them when. What matters is that I ended up without health insurance for over a year.

This was a year in which I was played basketball every week, trained for and ran my first marathon, biked all around NYC through traffic, played softball, kickball, and football in rec leagues, and jaywalked across more NYC streets than I can count. By some stroke of luck, and I feel blessed about it every day, I didn't suffer any major injuries. Of course, just two years after I left NYC, but thankfully while employed and insured, I ruptured my Achilles.

If that had occurred while I'd been in NYC, the cost to me would have been...I don't even like to think about it. I lived that time of being uninsured with a constant, gnawing terror in my gut that I'd be step into the street and get hit by a taxi, or that I'd blow out a knee again, or crash my bike into a car and fly headlong over my handles and headfirst into the pavement (the latter two having happened to me already).

What's perverse is that you actually start to worry about going financially bankrupt more than you worry about losing your health permanently. The thought that I could go broke in a second over some random illness or injury was terrifying.

Most polls show a slight majority of Americans in favor of health-care reform, but I don't think the support is visceral or powerful enough. My only thought on what might help is a Michael Moore-esque documentary that gets people rallied around the principle of health insurance for all, a documentary that would expose health insurance company lobbies as corporate devils and that humanizes the plight of the uninsured, "An Inconvenient Truth" for health-care reform.

But even if something like that could be successful it would take a while to come out. In the meantime, I'm with Surowiecki that, opposition be damned, the Democrats need to find a way to ram this bill through via reconciliation.

But ultimately, and unsurprisingly, the differences between the two sides far outweigh the similarities, so much so that compromise isn’t going to solve the problem. If Democrats want what they say they want, they’re going to have to pass a bill on their own. Which is, at this point, precisely what they should do.

Could progressives have passed any stronger HCR bill?

Nate Silver crunches the numbers and says it's unlikely. Using a negotiation model built by Bruce Bueno de Mesquita, an NYU political scientist, Silver models a complex negotiation with 12 parties, each with their own end goal, and even adjusting the variables in a variety of ways, the best he could come up with was a HCR bill with a weak public option.

Still, perhaps the most important finding of the model is that the outcome was relatively robust. Although there are a number of things that Democrats could have done a bit better, essentially all of the scenarios that I tested produced a score between a 50 -- a bill something like Senate Finance Committee's -- and a 60 -- a weak public option. It would probably not have been possible to get a strong public option (much less anything resembling single payer) even if a number of variables were changed within reasonable boundaries.

This squares, in any event, with my intuition. No matter how clever progressives and activist groups might have been, they were enmeshed in a complex negotiation that:

(i) necessarily required the approval of a certain number of Blue Dogs;

(ii) featured some parties -- Republicans and lobbyists -- who had limited but nonzero influence and who were actively trying to do undo any settlement;

(iii) was overseen by a series of party leaders (Pelosi, Reid, Obama) who have institutional incentives to broker a compromise, regardless of their (fairly liberal) personal preferences and,

(iv) was constrained by an ambivalent public.

The influence of any one group in what is essentially a 10- or 12-way negotiation is liable to be fairly limited, no matter how wisely they select their strategy -- and to suggest otherwise probably reflects a certain amount of self-importance.

The usual caveats apply -- this is just a model, it's not foolproof, Silver's assumptions might not be correct, and so on -- but the result squares with my intuition, also. Those who think progressives could have forced a stronger bill through by being tougher seem to be wishcasting.

And of course, no healthcare bill has passed yet, so even the predicted outcome might be optimistic.

The web version of Mesquita's model, if you want to predict the outcome of your next complex negotiation (will she make me see Bounty Hunter, or can I get her to see Hot Tub Time Machine with me instead?) is here.

White liberal guiltlessness (and some stuff about Avatar)

This is an old link but one I meant to share a while back because I enjoyed it. Giovanni Tiso notes that critical discussion of both Avatar and past injustices against Haiti are being decried as inappropriate, the former because hey, it's just a movie, and the latter because a tragedy is no time to try to hash out our complicity in Haiti's poverty.

Similar backlash occurred after 9/11 in the U.S., when any attempt to analyze whether U.S. policy had contributed to the rise of Al-Qaeda was treated as heartless political pandering. It's just another instance of the tyranny of the OR, where it's assumed one can't be both analytical and sympathetic. I would hope we're able to appreciate that real-life is more nuanced than that, even if we can't tolerate that level of complexity from our mass entertainment.

Besides, I’m a consumer of information just like everybody else, of serious, sometimes cataclysmic front page news that bleeds into entertainment news and back again, a phenomenon made even more pronounced by the design of Web pages and aggregators and by the nature of hypertext if, like me, you get most of your news online.

In that environment, it is quite natural that James Cameron should accept an award in the name of a people that is indigenous only to his head, and that it should be greeted at best with a collective smirk or shrug or guffaw, since after all it was done in the spirit and logic of the times, while actual political statements of demonstrable historical urgency, like Peter Hallward’s, attract offense and derision. And this same spirit and logic will dictate that an immense human tragedy that weighs on the shoulders of the international community should be consumed as an act of God, outside of history, in the same present tense as entertainment, asking of us only that we fill that void with as many random quick fire donations - think of the convenience of texting for relief - as we can fit in the course of our normal activities and in the time allotted for caring for such things.

There is only one thing worse than white liberal guilt, and it’s white liberal guiltlessness, demanding that history not be ‘brought into it’, that memory be erased. We must fight that. And, yes, give, and give discriminately.

The Curse of One-Party Government

Jonathan Rauch, one of my favorite political journalists, has a theory about why Obama and the Democratic Party are flailing right now. It's not a new theory, but the current political climate is another piece of real world evidence to support what might seem at first to be a counterintuitive supposition.

Rauch believes that the fact that the Democrats control both the White House and Congress is hurting them. He believes it would be more productive if the Democrats lost control of Congress and divided control of government.

The question is, how could things have gone south so fast? The economy is clearly a factor, but the economy was even worse a year ago, when Obama was popular and hopes were high. He made mistakes, but politicians always do. This column, while not dismissing situational explanations, asks you to consider a further possibility: Unified government makes the country virtually ungovernable.

Like a lot of people, I have believed for quite some time that power-sharing (one party controls the White House, the other at least one chamber of Congress) works better. The voters prefer it, having split control in 23 of the past 30 years. The two most politically successful and popular recent presidents, Ronald Reagan and Bill Clinton, shared power for most or all of their terms; the most widely reviled of recent presidents, George W. Bush, saw his popularity collapse when Republicans won total control. Reforms win broader acceptance and are more durable when both parties' fingerprints are on them. The two great domestic reforms of their respective eras, tax reform in 1986 and welfare reform in 1996, were products of divided control.

All of that you have heard before from me and others. Recently, however, watching the neck-snapping speed with which a backlash has formed against Obama's all-Democratic government, I have become convinced of a stronger proposition: In practice, the difference between divided and unified control has become so stark that we should think of them as being, for practical purposes, two distinct systems of government -- if you will, binary government. Though the country has only one Constitution, it has two governability settings. Call them Mode 1 (one-party control) and Mode 2 (two-party control). Power-sharing is the switch that toggles between them.

Rauch goes on to explain that the fundamental problem is that we have two parties whose centers are both too far away from the country's center, its moderate independent segment which forms the critical swing votes in any election, and neither party has enough of a majority to pull off any legislation on their own. When one party controls both Congress and the White House, the other party withholds all its support, it has no incentive to work with the other side. This means the governing party has to govern from its center, but that's still too far off what moderate independents consider to be their center. If they revolt, a majority can't be foundThis is what has killed healthcare reform.

But if the parties share control, compromise is the only way to pass legislation. This acts as a natural pull towards the country's true center, thus pleasing centrist independents. The math works out now.

Rauch admits he has no proof that this theory is true, but he pulls many examples from the last 30 years that support it. A fascinating read, and one that should hearten those who are despairing at repeats of the Massachusetts election leading to a Republican Congress.

Why Politics Is Stuck in the Middle

More on politics, I apologize for those looking for a report on my trip to Miami to watch the Super Bowl (in brief: in person, J. Lo looks good).

Tyler Cowen (of Marginal Revolution fame) covers the current political quagmire from an economist's point of view. It's a great quick read, and I hope Cowen will forgive me for excerpting more than I normally would here, but the economist's viewpoint is a different one and quite valuable. It begins with "median voter theorem".

Economists approach political competition with a simple but potent hypothesis called the “median voter theorem.” Anthony Downs, a senior fellow at the Brookings Institution, proposed the idea in his 1957 book, “An Economic Theory of Democracy.” Essentially, the idea is this: Any politician who strays too far from voters at the philosophical center will soon be out of office.

In fact, there is a dynamic that pushes politicians to embrace the preferences of the typical or “median” voter, who sits squarely in the middle of public opinion. A significant move to either the left or the right would open the door for a rival to take a more moderate stance, win the next election and change the agenda. Politicians will respond to this dynamic, whether they are power-seeking demagogues or more benevolent types who use elected office to help the world.

When it comes to the big issues, voters at the midpoint usually get the policies, if not always the exact outcomes, they want. In the federal budget, the largest line items include Social Security, Medicare, Medicaid and military spending — all very popular programs. The interest on the national debt is mounting because we don’t like paying higher taxes now for all those benefits, so our government borrows to postpone the pain.

As others have noted, we are ascribing too much responsibility on the issue to Obama and not focusing enough on the political context which is far more dominant in its impact.

The point here is not to belittle or praise the president, but to point out that his hands are tied. The biggest leftward move in American economic policy occurred during the Roosevelt and Truman years, when the Democrats had the upper hand for five consecutive presidential terms. Because of depression and war, people were looking for real change. Competitive forces in politics were relatively weak, and the Democrats had the chance to make their policies stick.

Cowen's larger conclusion is that political competition, unlike economic competition, isn't conducive to innovation.

Finally, most people aren’t very well informed about politics and can be downright irrational or stubborn, which is another reason that political competition isn’t always as beneficial as economic competition.

The median voter theorem doesn’t predict that the legacy of the Obama administration will be a wash. But it does imply that we might find the most important achievements in areas that don’t always linger on the front page. For instance, the president’s ideas on education, which involve accountability and charter schools and pay for performance, may please the American public and thus make their way into policy. And because education transforms the knowledge and interests of the median voter for generations to come, such acceptance could make for a lot of other improvements.

If you’re looking for change to believe in, and change that will last, the odds are best when political competition is pushing the world in your direction.

Keep Cowen's theory in mind as my next post may present a different thesis from another of my favorites, Jonathan Rauch.

More on government failure

I could post one link a day on the structural failings of Congress, it seems. Here's Paul Krugman on how the Senate has hijacked government operation by leveraging arcane rules that permit gross obstructionism. Exhibit A is Republican Senator Richard Shelby of Alabama. He's put a hold on all outstanding nominations by the Obama administration, around 70 senior posts, simply to get Alabama a tanker contract and a counterterrorism center. If it were a Democrat doing the same thing, it would be just as egregious, but it so happens that the GOP is turning into a joke before our very eyes. It's tragic, really, because our government benefits from a sensible opposition party to spur a competition of ideas. Instead, they're like a petulant child who, in a funk, answers no to everything just to be difficult. On the scale they're doing it, though, it's not annoying, it's dangerous.

How bad is it? It’s so bad that I miss Newt Gingrich.

Readers may recall that in 1995 Mr. Gingrich, then speaker of the House, cut off the federal government’s funding and forced a temporary government shutdown. It was ugly and extreme, but at least Mr. Gingrich had specific demands: he wanted Bill Clinton to agree to sharp cuts in Medicare.

Today, by contrast, the Republican leaders refuse to offer any specific proposals. They inveigh against the deficit — and last month their senators voted in lockstep against any increase in the federal debt limit, a move that would have precipitated another government shutdown if Democrats hadn’t had 60 votes. But they also denounce anything that might actually reduce the deficit, including, ironically, any effort to spend Medicare funds more wisely.

And with the national G.O.P. having abdicated any responsibility for making things work, it’s only natural that individual senators should feel free to take the nation hostage until they get their pet projects funded.

The truth is that given the state of American politics, the way the Senate works is no longer consistent with a functioning government. Senators themselves should recognize this fact and push through changes in those rules, including eliminating or at least limiting the filibuster. This is something they could and should do, by majority vote, on the first day of the next Senate session.

How to Get Our Democracy Back

That is the title of an essay by the always interesting Lawrence Lessig in The Nation. In my last post, I was pessimistic about the state of our government in its current form, drunk on funds from special interests. Jonathan Rauch, James Fallows, Paul Krugman, and a whole host of other commentators have been beating this drum hard recently. It's by no means a fresh source of discontent, the symptoms of this disease have been clear for years now, but even if it's just that my antenna are on heightened alert about this topic, the frustration among many seems to have reached a crescendo.

Whereas I may have sounded bowed by cynicism in my last post, I'm heartened by Lessig's essay. His expertise in law and government allow him to go further than others in proposing very specific possible treatments.

First, a restatement of the problem:

We may want peace and prosperity, but most would settle for simple integrity. Yet the single attribute least attributed to Congress, at least in the minds of the vast majority of Americans, is just that: integrity. And this is because most believe our Congress is a simple pretense. That rather than being, as our framers promised, an institution "dependent on the People," the institution has developed a pathological dependence on campaign cash. The US Congress has become the Fundraising Congress. And it answers--as Republican and Democratic presidents alike have discovered--not to the People, and not even to the president, but increasingly to the relatively small mix of interests that fund the key races that determine which party will be in power.

This is corruption. Not the corruption of bribes, or of any other crime known to Title 18 of the US Code. Instead, it is a corruption of the faith Americans have in this core institution of our democracy. The vast majority of Americans believe money buys results in Congress (88 percent in a recent California poll). And whether that belief is true or not, the damage is the same. The democracy is feigned. A feigned democracy breeds cynicism. Cynicism leads to disengagement. Disengagement leaves the fox guarding the henhouse.

Lessig deviates from some others in his diagnosis of the root problem. Some blame Senate rules, like the filibuster, but he notes that even if a filibuster-proof majority went from 60 to 51, lobbyists would just readjust their efforts to reach the higher bar. The filibuster loophole does seem to me an arbitrary violation of the general "majority rules" ethos of democracy, but Lessig's point is fair.

He also doesn't pin the blame on lobbyists, and as others like Rauch have noted, there's not a ton that can be done to rid the world of lobbyists. In fact, many lobbyists fight for useful causes. The key is to limit their sphere of influence so they can remain backseat drivers rather than the ones holding the steering wheel of Congress.

Lessig had hoped Obama would capitalize on his unique magnetism to deliver on true political reform of Congress, but after the first year, Lessig sees no signs that Obama and his team are willing to tackle such a historically ambitious agenda (to do so, Lessig notes, "would have made Obama the most important president in a hundred years"). Nothing I've heard from Obama thus far gives me much hope that he'll try to change the game. He seems to be trying to play by the rules of the game and reform from within, and that's what's frustrating those who voted for him on his reform rhetoric.

Lessig proposes two changes to restore integrity to Congress. The first is citizen-funded elections which could take any of a number of forms. One might be a bill that's currently on the table and that's titled Fair Elections Now Act. Essentially, candidates could opt in to fundraising system that would give them significant funds to run their campaign while also being free to raise money from individual Americans at a max of $100 per citizen. The idea would be to allow candidates the financial viability to campaign without having to turn to special interests.

The second change would be to ban any member of Congress from working in any lobbying capacity for seven years after the end of their term. By the time seven years were up, few firms on K Street would still find the Congressmen relevant enough, and candidates would stop thinking of their term in Congress as a stepping stone to being paid 6 to 7 figures on K Street.

Given the Roberts Court's recent ruling on Citizens United, the hurdle to reform is even higher. In so many Japanese science fiction stories, the most powerful entities in the future are corporations and not governments or states, and that recent ruling at least points to a possible path towards that type of future.

The Lessig article is well worth a read, and those in agreement can sign a Change Congress petition online. I don't know what effect that has, but perhaps as one more signal it has utility. As the saying goes, we all get the government we deserve.

Junot Diaz wants to hear a story, but is that enough?

In The New Yorker's look back at Obama's first year, Junot Diaz urges Obama to be more of a storyteller.

All year I’ve been waiting for Obama to flex his narrative muscles, to tell the story of his presidency, of his Administration, to tell the story of where our country is going and why we should help deliver it there. A coherent, accessible, compelling story—one that is narrow enough to be held in our minds and hearts and that nevertheless is roomy enough for us, the audience, to weave our own predilections, dreams, fears, experiences into its fabric. It should necessarily be a story eight years in duration, a story that no matter what our personal politics are will excite us enough to go out and reëlect the teller just so we can be there for the story’s end. But from where I sit our President has not even told a bad story; he, in my opinion, has told no story at all. I heard him talk healthcare to death but while he was elaborating ideas his opponents were telling stories. Sure they were bad ones, full of distortions and outright lies, but at least they were talking to the American people in the correct idiom: that of narrative. The President gave us a raft of information about why healthcare would be a swell idea; the Republicans gave us death panels. Ideas are wonderful things, but unless they’re couched in a good story they can do nothing.

On the one hand, I empathize with Diaz. One way Obama can exert the full power of the White House is by employing his rhetorical skills to sway public opinion towards his causes, whether it's healthcare reform or his stimulus plans. No doubt, that's hugely difficult when most of the public has healthcare and might not see any immediate benefit or change in their coverage. I'd love to think the public would find the lack of universal healthcare to be a moral travesty for a nation of our means, but I know that's a pipe dream. Obama's wonkish approach to selling healthcare reform has failed to stir the hearts of much of the public.

On the other hand, Diaz's essay, while an elegant narrative, seems naive when one considers the structural blockade that the Senate Republicans have formed with Scot Brown's election. If bipartisanship is dead, and the Senate Republicans seemed to have effectively throttled any hope of that, then all the speeches and stories by Obama won't push anything through unless he can regain a filibuster-proof majority in the Senate.

I had long since given up hope in the government of enacting sweeping, meaningful reform. It has less to do with my faith in who occupies the Oval Office and everything to do with the irreversible ascent of special interests to becoming the fourth branch of our government, more powerful than any of the other three. That in and of itself need not be a bad thing, but this loose coalition of lobbies does a poor job of representing the needs of the country as a whole and instead excels simply at entrenching the payouts to the narrow interest groups they represent. Subsidies whose conditions for creation have long since disappeared are able to stay alive like leeches on the walls of the U.S. Capitol because of the monetary pressure directed towards members of the House and Senate. If this health care bill ever passes, it will be akin to a modern miracle.

Last last year I finished Jonathan Rauch's Government's End: Why Washington Stopped Working, and anyone with a passion for understanding the problems with our current government's structure and how we might combat them should read it (if you've fallen on hard times, it's available at Google Books). It's the most important book I read last year.

Rauch writes of a phenomenon he calls demosclerosis, or postwar democratic government's progressive loss of the ability to adapt. He argues, convincingly, that it's nothing less than the most critical government issue of our time. Essentially our government has become mired in special interest gridlock, and what's most frightening is that Rauch believes it may be inevitable and irreversible, the natural evolution of our government and its structure. Like a ship whose hull has become crusted over with barnacles, our government has slowed to a crawl.

What demosclerosis means for conservatives is that there is no significant hope of scraping away outmoded or unneeded or counterproductive liberal policies, because nothing old can be jettisoned. What it means for liberals is that there is no significant hope of using government as a progressive tool, because the method of trial and error has broken down.

For Washington and for the broad public, demosclerosis quite possibly means that the federal government is rusting solid and, in the medium and long term, nothing can be done about it. The disease of democratic government is not heart failure but hardening of the arteries.

This doesn't mean the U.S. doesn't have institutions that can't make meaningful progress. Take the business world, and consider what corporations like Google and Amazon and others have been able to do in our free and competitive markets. When people in the U.S. look to government for help, more often than not, they should look to capitalism and free markets for a business solution first (take education as one example).

In many ways the Obama backlash was predictable along many dimensions. Working on his campaign, I encountered more than my fair share of Obamania, starry-eyed supporters with a naive faith that one man could, on the sheer basis of force of personality, rise above the limitations of our government structure and enact reform and legislation with a wave of his hands. I wouldn't give that back, it helped to put my man in the race into the White House (oh McCain, what happened to you?). But this group, especially its numerous young supporters catching political fever for the first time, seemed attached, in many ways, to a man, not an issue, and was bound to have unrealistic expectations.

There's also the natural regression to the mean after the election victory, and the reality of governing in a recession and having to enact unpopular legislation like the Wall Street and automotive bailouts. It seems likely the Democrats will lose seats in the mid-term election, and the press will find a way to spin that, again, as a rebuke of Obama, even though the party holding the Oval Office always loses some seats in their President's first mid-term election (the lone exception being in 2002 when Bush and his Rove-led team rode the crest of the wave of 9/11 anti-terrorism sentiment).

As Maria Kalman notes in And the Pursuit of Happiness at the NYTimes, our bicameral legislature is stacked against the passing of legislation. What if the structure of government is most effective at crushing the dreams of the well-meaning and idealistic people who work all their lives to get into office?

This might all be read as being the rants of an Obama apologist, but though I campaigned for him, I'm not going to give him a free pass. As canny a politician as he is, he has room to improve. First and foremost, I've been dismayed at how buttoned up his Administration has been on many issues, with many a press conference seeming to come a week or a month late. For all the talk of transparency during the campaign, the current Administration has seemed much too cryptic at times, and it's hurt them.

Just a few weeks back I read another article by James Fallows in The Atlantic on just this issue with our government's structure. His article notes that America isn't nearly as bad off as so many articles would have you believe, but that the single greatest obstacle to its future success is the same issue his Atlantic colleague Jonathan Rauch identified: an ineffectual government.

Every system strives toward durability, but as with human aging, longevity has a cost. The late economist Mancur Olson laid out the consequences of institutional aging in his 1982 book, The Rise and Decline of Nations. Year by year, he said, special-interest groups inevitably take bite after tiny bite out of the total national wealth. They do so through tax breaks, special appropriations, what we now call legislative “earmarks,” and other favors that are all easier to initiate than to cut off. No single nibble is that dramatic or burdensome, but over the decades they threaten to convert any stable democracy into a big, inefficient, favor-ridden state. In 1994, Jonathan Rauch updated Olson’s analysis and called this enfeebling pattern “demosclerosis,” in a book of that name. He defined the problem as “government’s progressive loss of the ability to adapt,” a process “like hardening of the arteries, which builds up stealthily over many years.”

We are now 200-plus years past Jefferson’s wish for permanent revolution and nearly 30 past Olson’s warning, with that much more buildup of systemic plaque—and of structural distortions, too. When the U.S. Senate was created, the most populous state, Virginia, had 10 times as many people as the least populous, Delaware. Giving them the same two votes in the Senate was part of the intricate compromise over regional, economic, and slave-state/free-state interests that went into the Constitution. Now the most populous state, California, has 69 times as many people as the least populous, Wyoming, yet they have the same two votes in the Senate. A similarly inflexible business organization would still have a major Whale Oil Division; a military unit would be mainly fusiliers and cavalry. No one would propose such a system in a constitution written today, but without a revolution, it’s unchangeable. Similarly, since it takes 60 votes in the Senate to break a filibuster on controversial legislation, 41 votes is in effect a blocking minority. States that together hold about 12 percent of the U.S. population can provide that many Senate votes. This converts the Senate from the “saucer” George Washington called it, in which scalding ideas from the more temperamental House might “cool,” into a deep freeze and a dead weight.

The Senate’s then-famous “Gang of Six,” which controlled crucial aspects of last year’s proposed health-care legislation, came from states that together held about 3 percent of the total U.S. population; 97 percent of the public lives in states not included in that group. (Just to round this out, more than half of all Americans live in the 10 most populous states—which together account for 20 of the Senate’s 100 votes.) “The Senate is full of ‘rotten boroughs,’” said James Galbraith, of the University of Texas, referring to the underpopulated constituencies in Parliament before the British reforms of 1832. “We’d be better off with a House of Lords.”

The public isn't unaware of the increasing ineffectiveness of our national government (national polls have tracked a long and drastic decline in the U.S. public's faith in its government in the past 50 years), but they feel powerless to halt it. It's safe to say our faith in our government as an institution is at its lowest in the past decade than in any decade in our country's history.

Fallows isn't ready to give up on our government yet. He may not prescribe many tangible solutions, but he still believes strongly that the solution has to marry the public and the private.

For tomorrow, we really have only two choices. Doing more, or doing less. Trying to work with our flawed governmental system despite its uncorrectable flaws, or trying to contain the damage that system does to the rest of our society. Muddling through, or starving the beast.

Readers may have guessed that I am not going for the second option: giving up on public efforts and cauterizing our gangrenous government so that the rest of society can survive. But the reason might be unexpected. I have seen enough of the world outside America to be sure that eventually a collapsing public life brings the private sector down with it. If we want to maintain the virtues of private America, we must at least try on the public front too.

I am still struggling with how to best help, and how to overcome my cynicism about any hope for real reform. When I watch the State of the Union and see old white male Republican Senators and Representatives sitting on their hands, Democrats standing up again and again, it seems like a farce, some playground rivalry not worthy of the importance of the issues we face as a country. Clicking links to send canned letters to my Senator, signing online petitions, donating $25 to the Obama campaign, all of it seems so futile. I want to make a more meaningful impact, but reforming government seems beyond the power of a single frustrated citizen. I'm paralyzed with uncertainty.

No company has survived our entire nation's history. At a certain size, inertia and bureaucracy set in. It seems inevitable. And yet our government has been running along under roughly the same structure for that entire time. It's had its successes, there's no doubt, but is there any reason to think it's any less susceptible to the aging process than any other institution?

If Obama could tell any story, the one I want to hear is not about any single bill or policy but one about how to fix the structure of our government itself. Now that would be one hell of a yarn.

Weeeeiiirrrddd

Last night's opening segment of The Daily Show with Jon Stewart cracked me up and puts the revelations from Game Change in perspective, though I'm still going to read the crap out of it. It's difficult to tell how readers are receiving it as the reviews for the book on Amazon are skewed by dozens of 1-star reviews from users who haven't read the book but are angry that a Kindle version wasn't issued. Amazon does show when a user was a verified purchaser of a book; it would be useful someday if they could allow you to see only the average rating and reviews from that subset of readers.

Also, The Daily Show and The Colbert Report are up in widescreen on Hulu now. We had to work through that workflow with the Comedy Central folks, but we were able to retain captions in the widescreen files which was important for us.

Tony Judt

From a profile of the historian and political essayist Tony Judt, who suffers from ALS.

Judt called attention to America's and Europe's worship of efficiency, wealth, free markets, and privatization. We live, he said, in a world shaped by a generation of Austrian thinkers—the business theorist Peter Drucker, the economists Friedrich A. von Hayek, Ludwig von Mises, and Joseph Schumpeter, and the philosopher Karl Popper—who witnessed liberalism's collapse in the face of fascism and concluded that the best way to defend liberalism was to keep government out of economic life. "If the state was held at a safe distance," Judt said, "then extremists of right and left alike would be kept at bay." Public responsibilities have been drastically shifted to the private sector. Americans and, to a lesser extent, Europeans have forgotten how to think politically and morally about economic choices, Judt warned, his fragile, British-accented voice growing louder. To abandon the gains made by social democrats—the New Deal, the Great Society, the European welfare state—"is to betray those who came before us as well as generations yet to come."

From an interview with Judt:

What, then, should people in Eastern Europe know about the United States' position toward them and their region?

Judt: This is not an area of great interest to the United States, whereas Russia is a great power, which could be useful to the United States, or a great nuisance to the United State. Either way, we will deal with Moscow. And listening to Warsaw is something we shall only do for the purpose of politeness. I do feel that it's important to say this, which is so obvious to me when I go to Washington, and it's a reason why the East Europeans will do much better to invest in a stronger EU, because only a strong EU -- because it's on Russia's borders -- will be forced to think about what it means to deal with Russia, territorially.

Remember, when Americans think about Russia -- just as when Americans think about the Middle East -- they think about "over there." It's a long way away; it's a foreign policy problem.

When Europeans think about Russia, or the Middle East, it's right next door. It's not a foreign policy problem, it's a domestic problem. Islam, immigrants, gas, memories of empire, it's all right next door.

This matters to Europe in a quite different way. Dreaming about Washington is one of East Europe's great mistakes. And they would be advised not to indulge it. Washington is not about to run to their rescue against Russia.

The Death of Neoliberalism

John Gray writes in the New Statesman about the intellectual wreckage of the past decade (a time period everyone seems to be trying to find a name for).

The reality, which is that western power is in retreat nearly everywhere, is insistently denied. Yet the rise of China means more than the emergence of a new great power. Its deeper import is that the ideologies of the past century - neoliberalism just as much as communism - are obsolete. Belief systems in which the categories of western religion are reproduced in the guise of pseudo-science, they are redundant in a world where the most rapidly advancing nation state has never been monotheist. Western societies are well worth defending, but they are not a model for all of humankind. In future they will be only one of several versions of tolerable modernity.

For secular western intellectuals to accept this fact would rob their life of meaning. Huddled in the tattered blanket of historical teleology, which tells them they are the leading lights of humanity, they screen out any development that demonstrates their increasing irrelevance.

El Bulli, Dan Brown, et al

Man hits the culinary lottery and gets a reservation at El Bulli, then recounts his meal in comic book form. 30 courses! I felt engorged and exhausted just reading about all the dishes.

***

Bill Maher rants at Huffington Post about the idiocy of Americans in an article titled "New Rule: Smart President ≠ Smart Country." Bryan Caplan would be proud.

At times like this, trying to pass some form of healthcare reform, even a watered-down version because of the difficulty of getting any big change through the conservative institutional roadblock that we call the Senate, one wonders how the government has ever achieved anything on behalf of anyone other than a special interest.

Obama took his argument directly to the people in an Op-Ed in the NYTimes. I'm curious who was the last President of the U.S. to write an Op-Ed in a major American newspaper. I'm going to go out on a limb and say it wasn't the previous occupant of the office.

An interesting sidenote to the whole debate on healthcare reform is the uproar over Whole Foods CEO John Mackey's editorial in the Wall Street Journal arguing against the health care bill on the table. The Opinionator over the the NYTimes tracks the timeline of the whole brouhaha. If you disagree with Mackey, I don't think boycotting Whole Foods is the solution, but I do think CEO's of companies need to be careful of what they say because it's too convenient to read their comments as representative of the views of Whole Foods as a company, and it's dangerous to ascribe too many coherent policy decisions to a capitalist institution, even one like Whole Foods which many people associate with a progressive lifestyle.

***

Andrew Collins examines the global phenomenon that is Dan Brown, universally reviled by literary critics and other writers but whose next novel The Lost Symbol will command the largest first print run in Random House history at 6.5 million.

I'm not sure it's such a paradox that someone can be a bad writer yet spin a real page-turner. What grabbed me about The Da Vinci Code was the fabricated secret that tied together so many known quantities in history in a clever way, from The Last Supper to Mary Magdalene and everything in between.

The plots of his stories themselves never strike me as plausible or gripping, his characters are two-dimensional (and that may be generous, though perhaps I'm being sexist in finding gorgeous and leggy nuclear physicist Vittoria Vetra of Angels and Demons a bit implausible), nor is his command of the English language that noteworthy. After all, one chapter of The Da Vinci Code concludes with this sentence, one that would have failed me out of my first year fiction writing class in college:

Almost inconceivably, the gun into which she was now staring was clutched in the pale hand of an enormous albino.

***

A physicist writes that The Time Traveler's Wife may be the most scientifically accurate movie treatment of time travel ever. No comment on whether the cheesy slow dissolve of Eric Bana each time he travels through time is also consistent with the laws of physics, or whether his expressionless acting is a consequence of too many leaps through time and space.

The article's a good read, though, as I didn't realize that physicists had come to such consensus around these constraints of time travel. I still say The Terminator remains the most brilliant time travel movie because of its stunning revelation that by going back in time to change the future you just create it, illustrated in the movie by the Moebius strip of a plot in which John Connor sends Kyle Reese back in time to protect his mom, only to have Kyle Reese become his father.

In that twist, the movie adheres to one of the principles stated in this article, the so-called "self-consistency problem," that is, "You can't kill your own grandfather."

***

Justice Antonin Scalia and Thomas, the Twiddle Dee and Dum of the Supreme Court, argued in the minority against allowing a prisoner to challenge his murder conviction after many witnesses recanted their testimony and implicated another person as the actual murderer. Scalia, in his dissent (PDF), claims the following:

This Court has never held that the Constitution forbids the execution of a convicted defendant who has had a full and fair trial but is later able to convince a habeas court that he is “actually” innocent.

Those quotation marks around the adverb actually in that sentence rank among the most pernicious and cruel punctuation I've ever encountered. It is not a ringing endorsement of our government that both Scalia and Thomas ended up with lifetime appointments on the highest court in the nation.

***

For those of you waiting with bated breath for Spike Jonze's Where the Wild Things Are, this week's New Yorker features a short story by Dave Eggers, "Max at Sea" which is an excerpt from Eggers upcoming novel The Wild Things which itself is loosely based on the screenplay Eggers wrote with Jonze for the movie, which in turn is based, of course, on the children's book by Maurice Sendak.

Clinton

In the NYTimes Sunday Magazine, a profile of Bill Clinton post-presidency. What was most interesting to me was a passage covering his ability to convert enemies to friends.

Yet if Clinton has a powerful memory for slights, he also has a remarkable capacity for reconciliation. He is likelier to find peace with people who hate him the most than with friends who betray him. He focuses his considerable charms on seducing the person in the room he finds most resistant.

...

Richard Mellon Scaife, the billionaire publisher who financed Ruddy’s investigations and other anti-Clinton activities, is now a contributor to the foundation. So is Rupert Murdoch, the News Corporation chairman whose Fox News was a regular thorn in Clinton’s side. Clinton over the years has also made peace with other former adversaries, like Bob Dole and Newt Gingrich. The elder George Bush told me he now considers Clinton “a real friend.” When I asked what changed his view, he wrote in an e-mail message: “I didn’t know him personally back then. I knew him, but not up close and personal. Now I do.”

It reminded me of one of the 48 Laws of Power:

Never put too Much Trust in Friends, Learn how to use Enemies

Be wary of friends-they will betray you more quickly, for they are easily aroused to envy. They also become spoiled and tyrannical. But hire a former enemy and he will be more loyal than a friend, because he has more to prove. In fact, you have more to fear from friends than from enemies. If you have no enemies, find a way to make them.

Boom

Ed Henry, you got served.

Obama's Address to Congress

Obama is speaking to Congress today. I was hoping real-life slumdog millionaire (well, sort of) Bobby Jindal would be there for the talk, so that he could walk out partway through Obama's speech and Obama could say, "You can walk out on me, Governor Jindal, but you can't walk out on the American people..." or whatever it is that Jeff Bridges says in The Contender. (IMDb memorable quotes you're letting me down on this one).

In advance, I want to address those who will complain that this live stream is from Fox News: we should have a CNBC version for watching after the fact. It's the internet, speculation is cheap, but we honestly have no political agenda we're trying to push, we just shoot to obtain the best live stream possible from all available sources, and whatever network broadcasts the actual address, it's all the same during the speech anyhow.

The nanny tax

Over at Marginal Revolution, Tyler writes about the tax trouble of appointees Geithner, Daschle, and Killifer (sounds a bit like Santa's reindeer as referred to in Munich or something):

I am more than willing to grant that not every nominee deserves to be appointed to rule over me. But I'm also worried about the incentives we are producing by applying tougher standards. Knocking out the caught cheaters won't make all the DC people honest or virtuous. The long run effect is to select for people who have known -- from the very beginning -- that they seek power and who are willing to pay money to the taxman to keep that option alive. We are selecting for people who are very good at covering up their misdeeds. We're selecting for honest people too. There's lots of posturing on this issue, but I'm not sure whether the net effect of the crackdown is positive, once you take all these selection effects into account. There's something to be said for selecting people who are relatively bad at cover-ups.

I think Daschle and Geithner's offenses are egregious. They can afford to hire a tax guy, and if they claim to have misinterpreted the tax code they're lying. The public already believes that their Congressmen operate under a separate set of standards when it comes to taxes, and this won't help.

But for Killifer, withdrawal may be excessive. I have never heard of any person who pays taxes on their nanny, politician or otherwise. In fact, if the government wants to increase its income, they should crack down on the illegal nanny trade. Half the parents we all know would be slapped with fines, which might force some of them to downgrade their strollers from designer all-wheel drive offroad models to something more pedestrian, like the plastic-wheeled polyester-hammocked contraptions that passed for strollers when I was in diapers.

The West Wing

The West Wing makes the leap from fiction to 1600 Pennsylvania Ave. NW.

Three links

How Porsche made a killing in the financial markets by creating a short squeeze on VW stock. That is just crazy.

***

Why Obama's tax rebate may work to boost consumption where others have failed.

The key factor in these kinds of distinctions, Thaler’s work suggests, is whether people think of a windfall as wealth or as income. If they think of it as wealth, they’re more likely to save it, and if they think of it as income they’re more likely to spend it. That’s because many people tend to base their spending not on their long-term earning potential or on their assets but on what they think of as their current income, an amount best defined by what’s in their regular paycheck. When that number goes up, so does people’s spending. In Thaler’s words, “People tend to consume from income and leave perceived ‘wealth’ alone.”

So what does this mean for making a rebate work? If you want people to spend the money, you don’t want to give them one big check, because that makes it more likely that they’ll think of it as an increase in their wealth and save it. Instead, you want to give them small amounts over time. And you want the rebate to show up as an increase in people’s take-home pay, because an increase in steady income is more likely to translate into an increase in spending. What can accomplish both of these goals? Reducing people’s withholding payments.

It's great to see actual policies from Nudge being put into action, though perhaps not surprising given that one of the authors, Cass Sunstein, a Harvard Law prof, has been appointed Head of the Office of Information and Regulatory Affairs (reaction to that appointment here).

I think Obama's team has done a great job facing an epic challenge so far. They haven't been afraid to change their strategy quickly if they feel it's necessary, whereas the Bush administration hewed unwaveringly to their policies even in the face of contradictory evidence.

Can you imagine if the Bush Administration were still in place and forced to face this economic crisis for another four years? I think I really would pick up and move to Paris. The food and wine is great there, you have three hour lunches and world class museums, pregnant women drink and smoke...

***

The Big Picture covers the Inauguration. Seeing photos of people watching from all over the world, I can almost picture the Nike tv commercial.

I wonder if photo #48 is the book of secrets, as seen in that National Treasure movie.

Goofy moment from the Inauguration

As soon as I watched this moment of the Inauguration, I knew it would be on The Daily Show, but that doesn't make it any less amusing. Here's the bit I'm referring to:

Yeah, we put a ring on him

I was watching an ABC interview with Beyonce last night, and she was asked about how it felt to sing "At Last" at one of the balls for Barack and Michelle's dance, and Beyonce said it was hard to answer because she was tearing up just thinking about the moment, and then she did start crying and gushing about Obama like a teenage girl, and I confess I teared up a bit because, well, damn, our awesome President is awesome.

Here's that Beyonce interview:

And here's that first dance. Watching it feels like being at the best wedding ever.

Host the inauguration yourself

Hulu will carry a live stream of the Inauguration, as will many sites, but you can embed Hulu's stream on your own website. Build a big tribute page around the stream, add chat on the side, mount the player in a a custom designed piece of web art in tribute to Obama, go wild my friends. Share the history.

Inaugural Addresses through the years

Maybe 2008 is the tipping point in my ability to maintain a regular posting schedule here. Hulu and rehabbing my Achilles and the little bits of free time here and the cup runneth over.

Still, some of this may just be inertia. My first few times out to run since being cleared by the doctor have been painful and slow--run a few minutes, then stop to stretch out the Achilles, then run a few minutes, then vomit, then pass out, then regain consciousness, then run a few minutes, then flag down a taxi to take me home, or to the hospital, or some variant thereof--but as someone once said, the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step (or is it a good travel agent?).

We posted inaugural addresses from years past at Hulu today. Here's the one from George W. Bush.

Okay, I jest. We have those Dubya masterpieces, too, but here's one from JFK.

Or maybe, since Obama is taking office in similarly troubled times, we should hearken back to the first Inaugural Address by FDR, who also took office with an economy in shambles. You can bet Obama and his speechwriters have listened to this one a few times ("...the only thing we have to fear...").

Miscellany

Sportswriter Jim Murray once wrote about Rickey Henderson, whose excessive batting crouch helped him to draw lots of walks:

Rickey Henderson's strike zone is smaller than Hitler's heart.

***

A recent New Yorker article in the Food Issue examined the knife-making industry and profiled Kramer Knives of Seattle. Bob Kramer is one of a select group of Master Bladesmiths in America (as credentialed by the American Bladesmith Society); there are only about a hundred. To pass the test, one's knife must undergo a grueling series of tests, from rope cutting to wood chopping to shaving hair.

There is a multi-year waitlist to buy one of Kramer's knives, used by the likes of super chefs like Thomas Keller (I myself am on that waiting list). He has collaborated on a more widely available series of knives that are sold exclusively by Sur La Table. The Chef's Knife from that series is a beauty (if you're looking for a last-minute gift idea that will just dazzle a loved one who loves to cook, that's a great way to go, though my mother always shunned giving knives as gifts because of the Chinese superstition that giving such a gift foretold the severing of that relationship).

Upgrading the dull chef's knife is one of the best investments a home cook can make. Dull knives make cooking a lot of work and leads to injuries when a knife slips. Proper knife technique is the other simple lesson a chef should learn. To properly capitalize on your knife's edge, the blade should be moving horizontally across the food being cut. Too many people just press down, and that's not how a knife is designed to work. Doing so exerts a lot of needless effort and is slow. Think of your arm and knife moving in a continuous elliptical motion, like the horizontal metallic bar on the outside of a train engine car's wheels.

***

I don't recall what things were like four years ago, but it feels to me like there are many more "letters to the President-Elect" in the media this time around, on topics from bailouts and reviving the economy to drugs, food policy, and education. I suspect this is the consequence of having a President we regard as well-read and thoughtful.

***

An old article from The Morning News, as seen back on Reddit today: How do you know if a girl loves you?

If you’re Gael Garcia Bernal: She loves you.

Blagojevich = Clay Davis

Most fans of The Wire can't help but connect newly arrested Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich with the HBO show's corrupt politician Clay Davis.

But the similarities may be more uncanny than you thought. Davis's patented "sh*********t"? Blagojevich may have used it himself!

My favorite Sarah Silverman joke from her show tonight

So, we have a new President. Yes, isn't it great? I got to attend a fundraiser recently, and afterwards, I went over to talk to him, and I wanted to ask him a question, but I didn't want to look stupid, so I said, "Senator Obama, when you were at school at Harvard, did you encounter any racism?"

He took a long look at me, and then he said, "I'm Kanye West."

There's more, and it's darker, and I'm too much of a prude to print it here.

John Ziegler

Here's a transcript of an interview between Nate Silver and right wing kook John Ziegler about a Zogby poll that Ziegler commissioned. Ziegler uses a lot of foul language, a lot of it daring Silver to post the transcript. So Silver did.

Ziegler was the subject of a David Foster Wallace essay that ran in The Atlantic and that was anthologized in Consider the Lobster: And Other Essays. On hearing that DFW had committed suicide, Ziegler posted an entry at his website that confirms the sunny personality that comes through in the Silver transcript.

I know that it is considered bad form, or worse, to speak ill of the newly dead, but to me all bets are off when one commits suicide, especially when that person is a husband and a father (speaking of bad form, when did the news media change their rule about not reporting extensively on the suicides of marginally famous people?). I strongly believe that a large ingredient of the toxic mix that ended up forming Wallace’s self-inflicted poison was the pressure he felt of living up to the hype surrounding his writing and the guilt he must have felt for not really having the true talent to back up his formidable reputation.

While I have absolutely no evidence to back up this assertion, I also think it is quite possible that he knew that killing himself in his “prime” and before he had been totally exposed as being a mere mortal in the literary realm would cement his status as a “genius” forever. After all, don’t tortured artists often kill themselves? Heck, based on the glowing and reverential reporting on his suicide, in some circles ending his on life may actually be seen as a badge of honor.

Stay classy, John.

Idiot.

Let bygones be bygones

The Guardian reports that Hillary Clinton will accept Obama's offer for her to be the Secretary of State.

Nate Silver doesn't think it makes sense for Clinton to accept if she wants to use it as a stepping stone to the Presidency. The important question to me is whether she's make a good Secretary of State.

Obama's surrounded himself with an intriguing staff. It is said of him that he likes to surround himself with varied and often dissenting thinkers, so as to help him clarify his thinking on issues. It would be fascinating to be a fly on the wall at his staff meetings.

The sacrifices of office

One casualty of Obama's victory in the Election: e-mail and his Blackberry.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so.

How crazy is it that the most important leader in the country can't use e-mail?

West Wing, the real world edition

In the TV show The West Wing, Leo McGarry, an old friend of Josh Lyman, asks Josh to go listen to a man speak. McGarry wants Lyman to help this man run for the Presidency. Lyman is skeptical, but he treks out to a VFW hall in New Hampshire and listens to this candidate speaking to a hostile crowd. And when he hears the man speak, this man named Jed Bartlet, he is converted.

From Chapter 1 of Newsweek's Secrets of the 2008 Campaign:

Barack Obama had a gift, and he knew it. He had a way of making very smart, very accomplished people feel virtuous just by wanting to help Barack Obama. It had happened at Harvard Law School in the mid-1980s, at a time when the school was embroiled in fights over political correctness. He had won one of the truly plum prizes of overachievement at Harvard: he had been voted president of the law review, the first African-American ever so honored. Though his politics were conventionally (if not stridently) liberal, even the conservatives voted for him. Obama was a good listener, attentive and empathetic, and his powerful mind could turn disjointed screeds into reasoned consensus, but his appeal lay in something deeper. He was a black man who had moved beyond racial politics and narrowly defined interest groups. He seemed indifferent to, if not scornful of, the politics of identity and grievance. He showed no sense of entitlement or resentment. Obama had a way of transcending ambition, though he himself was ambitious as hell. In the grasping race for status and achievement—a competition that can seem like blood lust at a place like Harvard—Obama could make hypersuccessful meritocrats pause and remember a time (part mythical perhaps, but still beckoning) when service to others was more important than serving oneself.

Gregory Craig, a lawyer in Washington, D.C., was one of those Americans who wanted to believe again. Craig was not exactly an ordinary citizen—he had served and worked with the powerful all his life, as an aide to Sen. Edward Kennedy in the 1980s, as chief of policy planning at the State Department in the Clinton administration and as a lawyer hired to represent President Clinton at his impeachment trial in the U.S. Senate in 1999. He had seen the imperfections of the mighty, up close and personal, and by and large accepted human frailty. But, like a lot of Americans, he was tired of partisan bickering and yearned for someone who could rise above politics as usual. A 63-year-old baby boomer, Craig wanted to recapture the youthful idealism that he had experienced as a student at Harvard in the 1960s and later at Yale Law School, where his friends included Bill Clinton and Hillary Rodham. In the late fall of 2003, he was invited to hear a young state senator from Illinois who was running for the U.S. Senate. Craig was immediately taken with Barack Obama. "He spoke 20 to 30 minutes, and I found him to be funny, smart and very knowledgeable for a state senator," Craig recalled. Craig was so visibly impressed that his host that evening, the longtime Washington mover and shaker Vernon Jordan, teased him, saying, "Greg has just fallen in love."

Josh joins the campaign, Jed Bartlet becomes President of the United States, and Josh is appointed deputy chief of staff.

The Royal Emanuels

Tennenbaums for the real world: Rahm, Zeke, and Ari Emanuel are one intriguing set of brothers.

Rahm Emanuel is Obama's new Chief of Staff and said to be part inspiration for Bradley Whitford's Josh Lyman on The West Wing.

Ari Emanuel is a Hollywood agent that inspired Jeremy Piven's Ari Gold on Entourage.

Zeke Emanuel is the chair of the department of bioethics at the NIH, an oncologist with a Master's degree from Oxford, an MD from Harvard, and a PhD in political philosophy from Harvard. Yeah, I know, what a loser.

This can be found in a profile in the Washingtonian.

Here's a profile in the NYTimes. In it is this legendary story:

The best Rahm Emanuel story is not the one about the decomposing two-and-a-half-foot fish he sent to a pollster who displeased him. It is not about the time - the many times - that he hung up on political contributors in a Chicago mayor's race, saying he was embarrassed to accept their $5,000 checks because they were $25,000 kind of guys. No, the definitive Rahm Emanuel story takes place in Little Rock, Ark., in the heady days after Bill Clinton was first elected President.

It was there that Emanuel, then Clinton's chief fund-raiser, repaired with George Stephanopoulos, Mandy Grunwald and other aides to Doe's, the campaign hangout. Revenge was heavy in the air as the group discussed the enemies - Democrats, Republicans, members of the press - who wronged them during the 1992 campaign. Clifford Jackson, the ex-friend of the President and peddler of the Clinton draft-dodging stories, was high on the list. So was William Donald Schaefer, then the Governor of Maryland and a Democrat who endorsed George Bush. Nathan Landow, the fund-raiser who backed the candidacy of Paul Tsongas, made it, too.

Suddenly Emanuel grabbed his steak knife and, as those who were there remeber it, shouted out the name of another enemy, lifted the knife, then brought it down with full force into the table.

''Dead!'' he screamed.

The group immediately joined in the cathartic release: ''Nat Landow! Dead! Cliff Jackson! Dead! Bill Schaefer! Dead!''

Here they are on Charlie Rose.

Airing the dirty laundry

Just a day after the Election was decided, McCain campaign aides have come out and admitted that they had little faith in Palin's preparation to be VP (whether or not stories like not knowing the countries in NAFTA or that Africa was a continent are true, a lot of the public had already decided based on the Gibson and Couric interviews that she deserved a No Hire). They basically hid the truth from the public to try to avoid admitting they'd made a mistake not vetting her. They were willing to put an unqualified candidate one heart attack from the most powerful position in the world simply in the name of party unity.

If true, a truly irresponsible act. Country first, huh?

If not true, and it's just scapegoating, it's still sad, though on a smaller scale. Playing the blame game via anonymous leaks to the press are the appropriate capstone to this unsuccessful campaign.

In Nate Silver we trust

In his spare time, just as a hobby, Nate Silver launched FiveThirtyEight.com, built a model to predict the election, and just absolutely nailed it. He missed only on Indiana, which Obama won by a just .9% of votes. Just about everywhere else, he was spot on, including the popular vote, and so far, the Senate Prediction. His model for the Election was even more accurate than his PECOTA model for baseball, and I used that to win a fantasy baseball league this year.

I hope newspapers and professional journalism don't die as they invest the time in long-lead, high-investment pieces that the web doesn't seem to devote enough attention to. But the web has absolutely accelerated the speed with which smart people like Silver can come to national prominence, and that is a beautiful thing. If Silver had had to fight his way up some newspaper hierarchy for a spot on the front page of the politics coverage, he would've been waiting a long time.

Incidentally, Silver analyzes the data and finds a correlation between Obama's contact rate advantage in key battleground states and his outperformance of polls in those states. He estimates "each marginal 10-point advantage in contact rate translated into a marginal 3-point gain in the popular vote in that state."

The state where had the greatest contact rate advantage? Nevada, where he had an advantage of 21%, 50% to 29%.

So those of you who made your way out to Nevada on your own dime, some driving down from distant cities like San Francisco, to go knock on doors and rally, you made a difference.

Black Man Given Nation's Worst Job

Ah, The Onion.

African-American man Barack Obama, 47, was given the least-desirable job in the entire country Tuesday when he was elected president of the United States of America. In his new high-stress, low-reward position, Obama will be charged with such tasks as completely overhauling the nation's broken-down economy, repairing the crumbling infrastructure, and generally having to please more than 300 million Americans and cater to their every whim on a daily basis. As part of his duties, the black man will have to spend four to eight years cleaning up the messes other people left behind. The job comes with such intense scrutiny and so certain a guarantee of failure that only one other person even bothered applying for it. Said scholar and activist Mark L. Denton, "It just goes to show you that, in this country, a black man still can't catch a break."

***

Barack Obama, or at least his campaign photographer, maintains a Flickr account. Yet another reason Obama is the young people's choice. I'm not sure McCain has even heard of Flickr.

The latest set of pics is from Election Night. Here he is, watching TV on Election Night. Here he is, doing his famous point. If you were the recipient of said point, it must feel like receiving one from Michael Jordan after a nice play.

Ah, to be so telegenic. Also, how does one get to be Obama's campaign photographer? That's a guaranteed path to a coffee table book in 8 or 9 years.

***

A mostly unrelated sidenote: this morning, our kitchen sink clogged up and then spewed up what seemed to be sludge. It smells terrible. I blame Joe the Plumber for neglecting his duties, and I pray my apartment will fix this problem soon so I can use my kitchen again.

Someday we'll look back and laugh that a candidate for the highest office in our land brought Joe the Plumber out on the campaign trail in crucial days of the Election as, well, a prop.

***

Yes, I'm still not Election'd out quite yet, and neither are my sisters and all the volunteers I worked with this campaign season, all of whom have been trading e-mails with me non stop since Tuesday morning. Perhaps we won't stop thinking or discussing politics as long as Obama is in office. Is that such a bad thing? The West Wing is no longer on TV, but maybe we'll bear witness to the real-life version. A citizenship invested in politics for more than one out of every four years? That would be a blessing.

A way to relive the campaign is through this much discussed 7 part series from Newsweek. They were given extensive access in exchange for an embargo until after the Election was decided. Read it now, before it's turned into an HBO miniseries.

***

Obama iPhone wallpapers. My wallpaper for most of the time I've had my iPhone was a photo from an Obama event at Gibson Ampitheatre here in LA last December. Then, for roughly the past month, my iPhone wallpaper was a photo I took with actress Kelly Hu while canvassing for Obama in Las Vegas (if you have to ask, you probably don't know what she looks like, and besides, she was out with us canvassing and rallying, so she's ace in my book).

I thought I'd be ready for a non-Obama-themed wallpaper now that he'd won the Election, but no, I'm going to choose one of these from Flickr for my phone for just a while longer.

***

DailyKos breaks down exit poll data to assess the Election vote by age and race. The younger the voter, the more the skew towards Obama, but he won the 18-29, 30-44, and 45-64 age groups. Only the 65+ demo went McCain.

As for race, McCan won the white vote, the largest bloc by far at 74% of the voting pool, by 55% to 43%. But Obama won the African-American, Latino, Asian, and Other categories, all by more than 60%, and that carried it for him.

As for turnout, the estimate is that 64% of the voting-age population voted on Tuesday. That would be the highest turnout since women got the right to vote in 1920.

***

Jumping back to Tuesday's Indecision 2008 special, I noted yesterday that I found out that Obama had become President Elect, officially, at the end of that special. I sent it to Joannie, and she was moved that Colbert started to cry. When I wrote, as the title of my post, "When Colbert Wept", I meant it facetiously, as I thought he was pretending to be choked up in character (it's also a reference to a book titled When Nietzsche Wept which I read a long time ago).

But on yesterday's Daily Show, Chris Wallace makes reference to Colbert and Stewart crying when they found out Obama had won...

And so I went back and watched that moment when they announced Obama as the President, and it does seem like Colbert is fighting back some emotion (they say women are better readers of emotion, and Joannie has a higher Emotional IQ than I do). Even if Colbert isn't overwhelmed by the moment, I'd just like to think he is, because who didn't tear up a bit when Obama walked out onto that stage with his family? Maybe Obama is the only person cool enough to take it in stride, but I was bobbing at sea in tidal waves of emotion.

What do you think? Did Colbert drop out of character for just a beat?

Getting that coveted copy of the NYTimes

Sadly, I was shut out of getting a copy of the NYTimes yesterday, like many people. A note on their website today:

[Note to readers: Copies of Wednesday's paper were again available for the $1.50 cover price Thursday at Times headquarters, at 620 Eighth Avenue in Manhattan, between 40th and 41st Streets, until they run out. Commemorative editions may be ordered online or at 1-800-671-4332 for $14.95, which includes shipping and handling.]

Alas, the phone line is overwhelmed and not fielding calls right now, and that online link times out. If you're in the pipeline and get a timeout, the store also annoyingly redirects to the NYTimes.com front page for no good reason. Oh, if only Amazon could fulfill everyone's orders; clearly the NYTimes Store has the capacity to handle very little order volume.

Among Obama's many powers we can add the ability to temporarily revive a moribund business.

So we all can fly

Jay-Z on this Election:

Rosa Parks sat so Martin Luther King could walk.

Martin Luther King walked so Obama could run.

Obama's running so we all can fly.

And Colbert wept

At 7:59pm PST last night, I was watching TV with my roommate, flipping between CNN, MSNBC, and Comedy Central, already feeling certain about victory. But none of the networks had called it yet. And then, at that moment, just as Indecision 2008's hour of programming was up, there was this:

One of the greatest moments I've ever seen live on TV.

The Big Picture

You just knew The Big Picture would have some great shots of our next President.

Obama is the coolest cat wherever he goes. He never looks anything less than like some cinematic dream of a President. It's almost surreal that he is actually our next President.

That photo of McCain with his tongue out at the end of that last debate, all those pics of his eye-rolls and tongue juts, I don't recall a single photo of Obama like that. I half expect Obama came out of the womb not crying but giving fist bumps to his doctor and mother and pointing to nurses in the delivery room to thank them for their work.

That photographic contrast is just one of the many factors that fed into this landslide. One of the candidates looked like the guy you wanted to lead you out of the crisis, while the other looked like the hothead who would've gotten you into it.

The Onion, The Chicago Tribune

Headline: Nation Finally Shitty Enough to Make Social Progress

Half satire, half brutal truth.

"If Obama learned one thing from his predecessors, it's that timing means everything," said Dr. James Pung, a professor of political science at Princeton University. "Less than a decade ago, Al Gore made the crucial mistake of suggesting we should care about preserving the environment before it became unavoidably clear that global warming would kill us all, and in 2004, John Kerry cost himself the presidency by criticizing Bush's disastrous Iraq policy before everyone realized our invasion had become a complete and total quagmire."

"Obama had the foresight to run for president at a time when being an African-American was not as important to Americans as, say, the ability to clothe and feed their children," Pung continued. "An election like this only comes once, maybe twice, in a lifetime."

My sister wrote me an e-mail this morning to let me know that the Chicago Tribune sold out in 20 minutes. She was at a sundry shop in her office when someone walked in with 10 papers, and she slide tackled and roundhouse-kicked a few people to grab a few copies. I'm going to frame that baby.

Some notes on a historic day

How is it that so many politician's best speeches are their concession speeches? Gore, Kerry, and now McCain gave their most heartfelt and moving speeches after their dreams for the White House had come to an end.

That was the McCain that held such appeal to so many independents back in 2000. It took the duration of this election battle, but McCain finally found grace in defeat at the end.

***

The youth vote? A record turnout. One of the few sad moments for me this night was realizing I'm not considered part of the youth vote anymore. But I am grateful towards the 18-29ers tonight. That was the only age segment in which Obama won a majority of the white vote.

***

Sarah, you get back up there and, uh, keep an eye on Putin.

***

Obama gave his speech in Chicago behind giant panes of bulletproof glass. I confess, it was reassuring to see those in place.

***

Hey Joe. Here's a plunger. Get back to work.

Oh, and some of those toilets? You clogged them with all your crap.

***

If you consider America as a brand, then in one day it has improved its standing in a way that any corporation would kill for.

From far away, this is how it looks: There is a country out there where tens of millions of white Christians, voting freely, select as their leader a black man of modest origin, the son of a Muslim. There is a place on Earth — call it America — where such a thing happens.

Even where the United States is held in special contempt, like here in this benighted Palestinian coastal strip, the “glorious epic of Barack Obama,” as the leftist French editor Jean Daniel calls it, makes America — the idea as much as the actual place — stand again, perhaps only fleetingly, for limitless possibility.

As the sun rises in the rest of the world, Twitter's Election 2008 page is now shifting to more than 50% of tweets in foreign languages. I confess I can't read many of these, but it seems like the world is very happy about Obama's election.

***

In Clark County in Nevada, where I canvassed with dozens of other Obama volunteers, Obama won in a landslide. It's hard to tell when you're on the ground how things are going, but all evidence pointed to the fact that the Obama ground game there blew McCain's out of the water. Some people whose doors I knocked on mentioned that they'd been visited three, four times by the Obama campaign, whereas they'd yet to even see a McCain volunteer anywhere.

Walking door to door in that Las Vegas desert heat? All worth it.

***

Among the people who became big big stars this Election:

Sarah Palin - for good or bad, she went from a Governor known only to Alaskans and DC insiders to one of the most recognizable faces in politics and a pop culture icon. Among those who rode the Palin coattails to even greater success: Tina Fey, whose physical resemblance to Palin was an unexpected blessing, and Kazuo Kawasaki, whose Kawasaki 704 glasses became, overnight, a coveted fashion accessory for women.

Rachel Maddow - a liberal, but not an adoring Obama fangirl, and so she managed to carve out a role as the most postpartisan of MSNBC's Election coverage team.

Nate Silver - near and dear to my heart, Baseball Prospectus's predictive modeling guru surprised every one by revealing himself as the mastermind behind go-to Election polling aggregation site FiveThirtyEight. His prediction for this Election, issued earlier today, before any numbers had come in:

By the time the final numbers come in, he is going to be really close to having nailed it. Obama should find a role for Nate in his Administration, though we baseball fans would be sad to lose his PECOTA prediction model.

***

Seeing Jesse Jackson in Chicago at Obama's victory speech, with tears streaming from his eyes, I forgave him for the occasional backstabbing. Not too many images better encapsulated the joy that African-Americans must feel at this historic milestone in their centuries-long struggle for equality.

Obama said in his A More Perfect Union speech, "For as long as I live, I will never forget that in no other country on Earth is my story even possible." It meant something then. But it's never rung as true as it did today.

Barack Obama, the next President of the United States

We did it.

In 2004, my sister Joannie and her husband Mike worked for the Barack Obama campaign for Senate in Illinois. Karen canvassed for Obama in Pennsylvania. I worked with a local Obama office here, smiling and dialing to voters in swing states, and then canvassed in Nevada.

Supporting our hometown boy Obama has been a family affair. So when I say "we did it," I am writing about how we feel, and how every Obama volunteer feels, as part of a much improved ground game, one I think can be even stronger the next time around.

Sure, McCain was behind the eight ball given how poorly Bush ran the Republican Party into the ground, but I feel no sympathy for those who elected Dubya a second time.

And so the United States of America has its first black President. Has a black man or woman ever been president of a country in which blacks are a minority?

President Obama, you can start measuring the drapes now.

Socialism

The New Yorker examines McCain and Palin's criticism of Barack Obama as a socialist and finds in it a bit of hypocritical name-calling between pot and kettle. McCain himself came out in support of the same tax structure as Obama in 2000.

Of course, all taxes are redistributive, in that they redistribute private resources for public purposes. But the federal income tax is (downwardly) redistributive as a matter of principle: however slightly, it softens the inequalities that are inevitable in a market economy, and it reflects the belief that the wealthy have a proportionately greater stake in the material aspects of the social order and, therefore, should give that order proportionately more material support. McCain himself probably shares this belief, and there was a time when he was willing to say so. During the 2000 campaign, on MSNBC’s “Hardball,” a young woman asked him why her father, a doctor, should be “penalized” by being “in a huge tax bracket.” McCain replied that “wealthy people can afford more” and that “the very wealthy, because they can afford tax lawyers and all kinds of loopholes, really don’t pay nearly as much as you think they do.” The exchange continued:

YOUNG WOMAN: Are we getting closer and closer to, like, socialism and stuff?. . .

MCCAIN: Here’s what I really believe: That when you reach a certain level of comfort, there’s nothing wrong with paying somewhat more.

As for Sarah Palin...

She is, at the very least, a fellow-traveller of what might be called socialism with an Alaskan face. The state that she governs has no income or sales tax. Instead, it imposes huge levies on the oil companies that lease its oil fields. The proceeds finance the government’s activities and enable it to issue a four-figure annual check to every man, woman, and child in the state. One of the reasons Palin has been a popular governor is that she added an extra twelve hundred dollars to this year’s check, bringing the per-person total to $3,269. A few weeks before she was nominated for Vice-President, she told a visiting journalist—Philip Gourevitch, of this magazine—that “we’re set up, unlike other states in the union, where it’s collectively Alaskans own the resources. So we share in the wealth when the development of these resources occurs.” Perhaps there is some meaningful distinction between spreading the wealth and sharing it (“collectively,” no less), but finding it would require the analytic skills of Karl the Marxist.

I don't mind the accusations of socialism; they're certainly more palatable than the not-so-subtle hints that Obama might be a terrorist. It's to be expected of the trailing side in a Presidential Election to try various angles of attack, and as noted in this past Sunday's NY Times Magazine feature on McCain's campaign, the Straight Talk Express has driven all over the map in attempting to find an effective narrative to frame its candidate as preferable to Obama in a time when voters crave change.

The Onion = Nostradamus

Article from Jan 17, 2001 The Onion: "Bush: Our Long National Nightmare of Peace and Prosperity Is Finally Over."

Bush swore to do "everything in [his] power" to undo the damage wrought by Clinton's two terms in office, including selling off the national parks to developers, going into massive debt to develop expensive and impractical weapons technologies, and passing sweeping budget cuts that drive the mentally ill out of hospitals and onto the street.

During the 40-minute speech, Bush also promised to bring an end to the severe war drought that plagued the nation under Clinton, assuring citizens that the U.S. will engage in at least one Gulf War-level armed conflict in the next four years.

"You better believe we're going to mix it up with somebody at some point during my administration," said Bush, who plans a 250 percent boost in military spending. "Unlike my predecessor, I am fully committed to putting soldiers in battle situations. Otherwise, what is the point of even having a military?"

...

"Finally, the horrific misrule of the Democrats has been brought to a close," House Majority Leader Dennis Hastert (R-IL) told reporters. "Under Bush, we can all look forward to military aggression, deregulation of dangerous, greedy industries, and the defunding of vital domestic social-service programs upon which millions depend. Mercifully, we can now say goodbye to the awful nightmare that was Clinton's America."

...

"We as a people must stand united, banding together to tear this nation in two," Bush said. "Much work lies ahead of us: The gap between the rich and the poor may be wide, be there's much more widening left to do. We must squander our nation's hard-won budget surplus on tax breaks for the wealthiest 15 percent. And, on the foreign front, we must find an enemy and defeat it."

To think I laughed at the time. Please let this long tragicomedy end.

Electoral College

In the NY Times op-ed piece Blue State Blues, Gail files the latest installment in what seems like a U.S. Presidential Election year tradition, the rant against the Electoral College. I agree. The marginal value of a vote in Ohio or Florida is worth too much more than a vote in states that nearly always go blue or red when deciding our future President. It's a wonder so many voters in those states, like California, New York, or Texas, even bother.

Robocall compilation

McCain's campaign is running robocalls and TV ads in a variety of key battleground states. They are, if not sleazy, then at least dishonest. TPM has a good compilation of which ones are running in which states, along with audio or video files for some of them.

When asked to defend the robocalls, McCain said that they were absolutely accurate.

After having been savaged by robocalls by the Bush campaign in 2000, McCain has chosen to fulfill a screenwriter's dream by turning to the same tactic in his own bid for power. There is a Greek tragedy here just ripe for a made-for-tv movie in, say, mid-2009.

Sure, these robocalls appeal to some of his base, but most independent voters are seeing right through these for what they are, just as Colin Powell and others have in endorsing Obama.

If there has been a positive result in this election it's that the crucible of the campaign trail has revealed the characters of both candidates and drawn a sharp contrast between them. This election has shrunk McCain before our very eyes. The wisdom of the Palin pick has followed a Flowers for Algernon trajectory.

My other curiosity about robocalls: people sit through these? I detest being bothered by human telemarketers but ironically feel insulted when they can't even pay for a human to do the job, leaving it to a recording. As soon as I detect the unnatural pause that indicates a recording kicking in, I hang up.

Wassup

A tv commercial, updated.

Negative ads, a long and distinguished history

If you think today's political ads are negative, check out some historical political tv ads. Here, for example, is perhaps the most famous ad of all time, the Daisy Girl ad, created by the ad agency DDB and run just once on TV by Lyndon B. Johnson against Barry Goldwater.

LBJ crushed Goldwater in the election.

Of course, while McCain hasn't shown an ad with Obama flying a plane into the Empire State Building, we still have a week and a half to go and McCain just had his worst polling day yet. If the McCain campaign goes that route, I suggest Obama run an ad of McCain wandering around the White House in his pajamas, drooling and mumbling incoherently, while elsewhere Palin stands in her enormous walk-in closet flipping through one of several hundred designer suits mumbling, "Ooh, you betcha!"

My weekend in Nevada

I am as exhausted as I've been in a long time having just returned from a long weekend of canvassing and rallying for Obama in Las Vegas. Nevada has traditionally leaned red, and it went to Bush in 2000 and 2004. Polls shows a near coin toss right now in Nevada. Its five electoral votes may not mean much, but just as a symbol, we (I use the royal we, my support for Obama being no secret) would desperately love to win it this time around.

It was an eventful and exciting weekend for team Obama:

• The Chicago Tribune endorsed Obama. Growing up in Chicago, I was used to seeing their blue masthead bleed red election after election, so this endorsement is a pleasant surprise.

  Many Americans say they're uneasy about Obama. He's pretty new to them.

  We can provide some assurance. We have known Obama since he entered politics a dozen years ago. We have watched him, worked with him, argued with him as he rose from an effective state senator to an inspiring U.S. senator to the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

  We have tremendous confidence in his intellectual rigor, his moral compass and his ability to make sound, thoughtful, careful decisions. He is ready.

  The change that Obama talks about so much is not simply a change in this policy or that one. It is not fundamentally about lobbyists or Washington insiders. Obama envisions a change in the way we deal with one another in politics and government. His opponents may say this is empty, abstract rhetoric. In fact, it is hard to imagine how we are going to deal with the grave domestic and foreign crises we face without an end to the savagery and a return to civility in politics.

  -----------------------

  This endorsement makes some history for the Chicago Tribune. This is the first time the newspaper has endorsed the Democratic Party's nominee for president.

  ...

  McCain failed in his most important executive decision. Give him credit for choosing a female running mate--but he passed up any number of supremely qualified Republican women who could have served. Having called Obama not ready to lead, McCain chose Alaska Gov. Sarah Palin. His campaign has tried to stage-manage Palin's exposure to the public. But it's clear she is not prepared to step in at a moment's notice and serve as president. McCain put his campaign before his country.
  

  Obama chose a more experienced and more thoughtful running mate--he put governing before politicking. Sen. Joe Biden doesn't bring many votes to Obama, but he would help him from day one to lead the country.
  

• Colin Powell endorsed Obama this morning. It was once thought that he might be the first African-American to be President, but it was not to be. But his part in this saga was still to be played, and today was that day. Ken texted me from the East Coast at around 9am PST: "Powell endosed Obama on MtP." It was the perfect start to the morning and fired up the volunteer team for the morning rally in Chinatown.

  Republican former House speaker Newt Gingrich said on ABC's "This Week": "What that just did in one sound bite -- and I assume that sound bite will end up in an ad -- is it eliminated the experience argument. How are you going to say the former chairman of the Joint Chiefs, former national security adviser, former secretary of state was taken in?"

• Obama raised $150 million in September!
• Someone was indeed trying to manipulate the prediction market Intrade to boost McCain's numbers.

It's often written that the Republican ground game won them the White House in 2000 and 2004. The terminology similarity to football is not the only apt comparison. As in football, where the ground game tends to grind out yards, three, four at a time, the ground game in politics is hard work.
This was more vivid for me this weekend in the Vegas desert heat as I strolled from house to house in various Clark County neighborhoods. But while economists wonder why people vote because it's irrational (one vote is so unlikely to make a difference), volunteering feels more sensible. If each of us can reach ten, twenty, fifty people, and if we can encourage a few extra people to get out and vote, or convince a few undecideds to vote for Obama, then the multiplier effect lends our efforts feel numerically significance.
Andrew Sullivan, writing about the ground game, says Obama's "major enemy is complacency among the young."
That's fair given weak youth turnout historically, but my generation (X) and generation Y are not happy about the label, and I believe the pundits are severely underestimating the youth vote and impact. I can't remember an election in which more people my age and below have been so active, not only contributing money but flying all over the country to do phone banks, voter registration, canvassing, rallying, and everything in between. If the Republicans are counting on youth complacency this time around, they are going to be disappointed. We don't just want to win the election (what Obama dismisses as the 50-plus-1 governing model, referring to the idea that it's enough to win 50% of the country's support plus one additional vote), we want to make states that have always gone red go blue.
Did our efforts this weekend make a difference? Saturday was the first day of early voting in Nevada. After a rally this morning, a local Obama organizer shared some figures with us. ~15,000 early votes were cast on Saturday, and 64% of them went Obama.
16 days to go.

The latest on the Election

Barack Obama is going to air a long-form 30 minute(!) ad on Fox on Oct. 29, and MLB has agreed to shift the start of Game 6, if it's needed, by 15 minutes from 8:20pm to 8:35pm EST to accommodate it. The ad will also air on NBC and CBS. Lest anyone think it was all altruism...

The blessing from MLB clears the way for Fox to air the promo and collect upward of $1 million in ad revenue for the half hour, more than what either CBS or NBC was charging.

Lest any Republicans out there think this is favoritism, note that the NFL moved this season's opening game so it wouldn't interfere with McCain's acceptance of the Republican nomination at the RNC.

I can't recall ever seeing a 30 minute political ad. Very curious. What will the format be? One long speech? A mix of edited footage and talking heads?

***

Sarah Palin is appearing on SNL this weekend. Yep. You betcha.

***

I don't recall watching the Alfred E. Smith Foundation Dinner before, but it surprised me to see McCain and Obama making jokes about issues that seemed to have them exasperated with each other just a day earlier at the final debate.

Both candidates are quite funny, more so than the Thursday SNL in which, on one day turnaround, the SNL crew seem content to re-enact the debate and read most of the same lines that were actually spoken in the debate.

Check it out.

It's all in good fun, but there is some political scoring going on. When Obama jokes around about things like his middle name, or where he was born, or who he pals around with, and when McCain laughs at said jokes, those lines of attack lose a bit of heat.

McCain can be charming when he's willing to use a bit of humor which is why it's been so surprising that he's been so churlish in the debates.

***

McCain finally kept his appointment with David Letterman.

***

Joe the Plumber's story doesn't really check out. He's not a licensed plumber, he's not earning $250K+ (he'd actually save more money under Obama's tax plan under his current income), and he has no specific plans to buy that business he spoke of. He was vetted about as well as Palin.

Not that it's a big deal. Whether Joe the Plumber's story was true or not, he was entitled to ask the question, and Obama answered it. If he was making the $280K he claimed, he would be paying higher taxes on the marginal $30K under Obama's tax plan. I don't think it's a great loss for Obama as most middle class voters aren't worrying about their surplus income above $250K.

Nate Silver profile

NY Magazine profiles Nate Silver, whose hobby has now made him more famous than his day job, at least to the public at large. To me, he's been the guy that's built PECOTA, a baseball forecasting tool, for Baseball Prospectus, a site I've been reading and subscribing to pretty much since it started. But to most people now, he's the guy who built the models powering FiveThirtyEight.com, the thinking man's go-to site for electoral projections.

Silver’s site now gets about 600,000 visits daily. And as more and more people started wondering who he was, in May, Silver decided to unmask himself. To most people, the fact that Poblano turned out to be a guy named Nate Silver meant nothing. But to anyone who follows baseball seriously, this was like finding out that a guy anonymously running a high-fashion Website turned out to be Howard Cosell.

The key insight that led to his unique spin on interpreting the polls:

As the primaries went on, however, Silver, who had been writing an anonymous diary for the liberal Website Daily Kos, made an observation about this year’s voters: While the polls were wobbling wildly state-to-state, the demographic groups supporting each candidate, and especially Clinton and Obama, were remarkably static. He wasn’t the only one who noticed this, of course—it was a major narrative theme of the campaign. One pundit summed it up by saying that Clinton had “the beer track”—blue-collar whites, Latinos, and seniors—while Barack had African-Americans and “the wine track”: young voters and educated whites.

Jay-Z

I went to the re-opening celebration concert for the Hollywood Palladium tonight. Jay-Z performed with an assist from DJ AM and a special guest cameo by T.I.

Between songs, mid-concert, Jay-Z stopped to talk politics. He's clearly an Obama supporter, and he offered his "homeboy" some advice (paraphrased from memory):

"I shouldn't talk about this...but f*** it, I'm an American citizen. Free speech and all that. If I were to give my boy some advice on how to deal with homegirl -- you know, 'you betcha' -- I'd tell him..."

And he jumped straight into "99 Problems":

"If you're havin' girl problems i feel bad for you son

I got 99 problems but a bitch ain't one"

Joe the Plumber

The clip which made Joe Wurzelbacher the most famous plumber in America.

Watch the third Presidential Debate at Hulu

We'll be carrying the third and final Presidential Debate tomorrow at Hulu. You can watch it live at Hulu, or you can watch it here in the embedded video below, or you can bring it to the masses by embedding it on your own site.

Palin's dangerous rhetoric, McCain's tolerance thereof

Palin's ignorance and lack of qualifications to be our Vice President, let alone President, are a source of both humor and horror, but now that she's been set loose to fan the flames of racism with unsubstantiated rhetoric, I can't look at her without recoiling in anger and disgust. For McCain to tolerate the types of things Palin is saying at campaign stops these days is to ensure that the last thing people remember about his legacy, once he loses this election, is the turn towards the darkside.

I see video of people holding up signs saying that Obama is a Muslim even though he is easily proven not (with all due respect to Muslims, the term is not a slur, though the Republicans have no qualms about using it that way), or equating him to Osama bin Laden and a terrorist, and I mourn for the death of reason. More than that, I fear what some ignorant loonies might do, their passions stirred up by Palin on the campaign trail through her reprehensible wielding of innuendo and slurs. She's an amateur playing with Molotov cocktails, and it needs to stop.

A sample of writing from others on this topic...

George Packer in The New Yorker:

What’s undeniably true is that Republican rallies and the incendiary language of party leaders are stirring up the darker, destructive mob passions that have a long history in American politics. At the very least, the Republican ticket is making sure that, if Obama wins, he’ll be regarded as an illegitimate and dangerous President by thirty or forty per cent of the country.

Palin is too shallow to understand the weapon she’s playing with; she’s just thrilled to be the birthday girl and the object of so much semi-erotic devotion. But McCain knows better. His manner in debates and at rallies tells me that he’s conflicted about the forces his campaign is unleashing. Win or lose, he’s already damaged his cherished reputation beyond repair. But there’s still time for him to show leadership and do what’s necessary. The responsibility lies with him. In his speeches and at the final debate next week, McCain should say: “Barack Obama is a decent man and a good American. I deplore his policies, I doubt his judgment, I don’t think he has the experience to lead the country. But no one who supports me should question my opponent’s patriotism or his right to stand alongside me in this race. I would rather lose than win with the votes of fear-mongers or bigots.”

Hendrik Hertzberg in this week's New Yorker:

Early this month, McCain moved nearly his entire advertising budget into negative territory. But “negative” hardly does justice to the mendacity of the campaign of vilification that bracketed Nashville. “Barack Obama has said that all we’re doing in Afghanistan is air-raiding villages and killing civilians,” Sarah Palin said the week before. “Such a reckless, reckless comment and untrue comment, again, hurts our cause.” McCain’s wife, Cindy—who, in May, had said, “My husband is absolutely opposed to any negative campaigning at all”—told a rally last week, “The day that Senator Obama decided to cast a vote to not fund my son while he was serving sent a cold chill through my body.” A McCain television spot summed up the line of attack:

Who is Barack Obama? He says our troops in Afghanistan are [Obama’s voice] “just air-raiding villages and killing civilians.” How dishonorable. Congressional liberals voted repeatedly to cut off funding to our active troops, increasing the risk on their lives. How dangerous. Obama and congressional liberals. Too risky for America.

Here is what Obama actually said, fourteen months ago: “We’ve got to get the job done there, and that requires us to have enough troops so that we’re not just air-raiding villages and killing civilians, which is causing enormous pressure over there.” He was calling for reinforcements, not casting aspersions. And, as McCain must know, the one Senate vote on which the charge of defunding the troops is based has a mirror image. In May of 2007, Obama voted against a troop-funding bill because it did not include steps toward withdrawal from Iraq; two months earlier, McCain had voted against one because it did. In neither case did their parliamentary maneuverings pose the slightest risk to the life of a single soldier.

More from Hertzberg:

The Obama campaign has been spending money on negativity, too, of course—about a third of its advertising outlay. And a few of their ads have been purposely misleading. For example, an Obama radio spot says of McCain, “He’s opposed stem-cell research.” (That too-clever use of a contraction allows the line to be more truthy than true: McCain flip-flopped on embryonic-stem-cell research in 2001.) But there is no equivalence between the two campaigns. If there were, Obama’s ads would be “raising questions” about the other ticket’s “associations.” For example, Todd Palin was a registered member of the Alaskan Independence Party—to which his wife, as governor, has sent friendly greetings—between 1995 and 2002. Four years before Todd joined, the A.I.P.’s founder, Joe Vogler, declared, “The fires of hell are frozen glaciers compared to my hatred for the American government,” and added, referring to the Stars and Stripes, “I won’t be buried under their damned flag!” (Sure enough, in 1995, Vogler, after being murdered in connection with an informal transaction involving plastic explosives, was buried in Canada.) Good material for an attack ad there, no? Ditto the fact that during the early nineteen-eighties John McCain sat on the advisory board of General John Singlaub’s U.S. Council for World Freedom—the American outpost of the World Anti-Communist League, a sort of clearing house for former Nazi collaborators, Central American death-squad leaders, and assorted international thugs. And, unlike Obama’s alleged palship with Ayers, these things are true.

The Obama campaign hasn’t gone there, for which it deserves no special credit; it has more to gain from sticking to the realities of the economy and the war. But the other side has been late in having second thoughts. This became frighteningly obvious in recent days, as the rallies McCain and Palin have held around the country turned into bloodcurdling hate-fests. The shouts of supporters in response to the candidates’ attacks on Obama—“Traitor!” “Terrorist!” “Kill him!”—were uttered without rebuke. On CNN the other night, Anderson Cooper asked David Gergen, the soul of moderate concerned citizenship, about “all this anger out there.” Gergen replied, “We’ve seen it in a Palin rally. We saw it at the McCain rally today. . . . There is this free-floating sort of whipping-around anger that could really lead to some violence. I think we’re not far from that.” Suddenly, McCain seems to be worried, too. “I admire Senator Obama and his accomplishments,” he told a restive crowd in Lakeville, Minnesota, last Friday. “I will respect him, and I want everyone to be respectful.” The crowd—the mob—booed. If McCain loses, or even if he wins, his campaign will be remembered as a tragedy in the Aristotelian sense, in which a hero is ruined through some terrible choice of his own. One can only hope that the tragedy will be his alone, and not the nation’s.

Andrew Sullivan in The Atlantic:

Attacking Obama for his toleration of Bill Ayers is legitimate. Attacking him for not dissociating himself from Jeremiah Wright earlier is legitimate. Attacking him for raising taxes is fine. But associating him with "terrorists" in the context of large, angry crowds isn't. Calling him a traitor and someone who seeks to put US troops in harm's way in an emotionally fraught time isn't. Not immediately and strongly rebuking crowd cries of "terrorist," "kill him!" and "treason" isn't.

McCain must loudly and clearly disown and disavow this rhetoric soon. Or we all may live to regret it more deeply than we can currently imagine.

Frank Rich in the NYTimes:

At McCain-Palin rallies, the raucous and insistent cries of “Treason!” and “Terrorist!” and “Kill him!” and “Off with his head!” as well as the uninhibited slinging of racial epithets, are actually something new in a campaign that has seen almost every conceivable twist. They are alarms. Doing nothing is not an option.

All’s fair in politics. John McCain and Sarah Palin have every right to bring up William Ayers, even if his connection to Obama is minor, even if Ayers’s Weather Underground history dates back to Obama’s childhood, even if establishment Republicans and Democrats alike have collaborated with the present-day Ayers in educational reform. But it’s not just the old Joe McCarthyesque guilt-by-association game, however spurious, that’s going on here. Don’t for an instant believe the many mindlessly “even-handed” journalists who keep saying that the McCain campaign’s use of Ayers is the moral or political equivalent of the Obama campaign’s hammering on Charles Keating.

What makes them different, and what has pumped up the Weimar-like rage at McCain-Palin rallies, is the violent escalation in rhetoric, especially (though not exclusively) by Palin. Obama “launched his political career in the living room of a domestic terrorist.” He is “palling around with terrorists” (note the plural noun). Obama is “not a man who sees America the way you and I see America.” Wielding a wildly out-of-context Obama quote, Palin slurs him as an enemy of American troops.

By the time McCain asks the crowd “Who is the real Barack Obama?” it’s no surprise that someone cries out “Terrorist!” The rhetorical conflation of Obama with terrorism is complete. It is stoked further by the repeated invocation of Obama’s middle name by surrogates introducing McCain and Palin at these rallies. This sleight of hand at once synchronizes with the poisonous Obama-is-a-Muslim e-mail blasts and shifts the brand of terrorism from Ayers’s Vietnam-era variety to the radical Islamic threats of today.

That’s a far cry from simply accusing Obama of being a guilty-by-association radical leftist. Obama is being branded as a potential killer and an accessory to past attempts at murder. “Barack Obama’s friend tried to kill my family” was how a McCain press release last week packaged the remembrance of a Weather Underground incident from 1970 — when Obama was 8.

We all know what punishment fits the crime of murder, or even potential murder, if the security of post-9/11 America is at stake. We all know how self-appointed “patriotic” martyrs always justify taking the law into their own hands.

Obama can hardly be held accountable for Ayers’s behavior 40 years ago, but at least McCain and Palin can try to take some responsibility for the behavior of their own supporters in 2008. What’s troubling here is not only the candidates’ loose inflammatory talk but also their refusal to step in promptly and strongly when someone responds to it with bloodthirsty threats in a crowded arena. Joe Biden had it exactly right when he expressed concern last week that “a leading American politician who might be vice president of the United States would not just stop midsentence and turn and condemn that.” To stay silent is to pour gas on the fires.

More from Rich:

No less disconcerting was a still-unexplained passage of Palin’s convention speech: Her use of an unattributed quote praising small-town America (as opposed to, say, Chicago and its community organizers) from Westbrook Pegler, the mid-century Hearst columnist famous for his anti-Semitism, racism and violent rhetorical excess. After an assassin tried to kill F.D.R. at a Florida rally and murdered Chicago’s mayor instead in 1933, Pegler wrote that it was “regrettable that Giuseppe Zangara shot the wrong man.” In the ’60s, Pegler had a wish for Bobby Kennedy: “Some white patriot of the Southern tier will spatter his spoonful of brains in public premises before the snow falls.”

This is the writer who found his way into a speech by a potential vice president at a national political convention. It’s astonishing there’s been no demand for a public accounting from the McCain campaign. Imagine if Obama had quoted a Black Panther or Louis Farrakhan — or William Ayers — in Denver.

He concludes:

But we’re not at Election Day yet, and if voters are to have their final say, both America and Obama have to get there safely. The McCain campaign has crossed the line between tough negative campaigning and inciting vigilantism, and each day the mob howls louder. The onus is on the man who says he puts his country first to call off the dogs, pit bulls and otherwise.

Joe Klein in his blog for Time:

Watch the tape of the guy screaming, "He's a terrorist!" McCain seems to shudder at that, he rolls his eyes... and I thought for a moment he'd admonish the man. But he didn't. And now he's selling the Ayres non-story full-time. Yes, yes, it's all he has. True enough: he no longer has his honor. But we are on the edge of some real serious craziness here and it would be nice if McCain did the right thing and told his more bloodthirsty supporters to go home and take a cold shower. But McCain hasn't done the right thing all year. His campaign is appalling, as the New York Times editorial board said today--and more, it is a national disgrace.

Greg Sargent in Talking Points Memo:

When is the unhinged frenzy gripping crowds at McCain-Palin gatherings -- not to mention McCain-Palin's own role in stoking that frenzy -- going to become a big story?

Today in Wisconsin, a McCain supporter unleashed a long, unhinged rant in which he blasted the "socialists taking over our country" and referred to Obama and Nancy Pelosi as "hooligans." McCain didn't utter one syllable of objection. In fact, he nodded bemusedly at the "socialist" mention.

And at the end of the man's rant, McCain said that the man was "right."

Related to all this, Christopher Hitchens endorses Obama.

On "the issues" in these closing weeks, there really isn't a very sharp or highly noticeable distinction to be made between the two nominees, and their "debates" have been cramped and boring affairs as a result. But the difference in character and temperament has become plainer by the day, and there is no decent way of avoiding the fact. Last week's so-called town-hall event showed Sen. John McCain to be someone suffering from an increasingly obvious and embarrassing deficit, both cognitive and physical. And the only public events that have so far featured his absurd choice of running mate have shown her to be a deceiving and unscrupulous woman utterly unversed in any of the needful political discourses but easily trained to utter preposterous lies and to appeal to the basest element of her audience. McCain occasionally remembers to stress matters like honor and to disown innuendoes and slanders, but this only makes him look both more senile and more cynical, since it cannot (can it?) be other than his wish and design that he has engaged a deputy who does the innuendoes and slanders for him.

Hitchens concludes:

The most insulting thing that a politician can do is to compel you to ask yourself: "What does he take me for?" Precisely this question is provoked by the selection of Gov. Sarah Palin. I wrote not long ago that it was not right to condescend to her just because of her provincial roots or her piety, let alone her slight flirtatiousness, but really her conduct since then has been a national disgrace. It turns out that none of her early claims to political courage was founded in fact, and it further turns out that some of the untested rumors about her—her vindictiveness in local quarrels, her bizarre religious and political affiliations—were very well-founded, indeed. Moreover, given the nasty and lowly task of stirring up the whack-job fringe of the party's right wing and of recycling patent falsehoods about Obama's position on Afghanistan, she has drawn upon the only talent that she apparently possesses.

It therefore seems to me that the Republican Party has invited not just defeat but discredit this year, and that both its nominees for the highest offices in the land should be decisively repudiated, along with any senators, congressmen, and governors who endorse them.

I used to call myself a single-issue voter on the essential question of defending civilization against its terrorist enemies and their totalitarian protectors, and on that "issue" I hope I can continue to expose and oppose any ambiguity. Obama is greatly overrated in my opinion, but the Obama-Biden ticket is not a capitulationist one, even if it does accept the support of the surrender faction, and it does show some signs of being able and willing to profit from experience. With McCain, the "experience" is subject to sharply diminishing returns, as is the rest of him, and with Palin the very word itself is a sick joke. One only wishes that the election could be over now and a proper and dignified verdict rendered, so as to spare democracy and civility the degradation to which they look like being subjected in the remaining days of a low, dishonest campaign.

Crawford

Our first movie premiere at Hulu is the documentary Crawford, about the effect on the small Texan town when George W. Bush moves in.

Producer and Director David Modigliani was kind enough to answer a few questions I sent his way, and you can read that Q&A here. A taste:

Q: We're used to seeing states divided into red and blue on electoral maps, and in press coverage of each election. How do you think Crawford helps us to understand the reality of that view of the U.S.?

A: I think the film shows that the US is a purple country, even in Crawford, Texas. It behooves each party to demonize and stereotype the other -- to draw divisive lines and oversimplify things into a lame dichotomy. I think there's this notion that small-town "Red State America" is filled with ignorant people who are somehow "other" than people in other parts of the country. When I first arrived in Crawford, I had some of those preconceptions. Instead, I found people who were warm, hospitable, bright and funny. They had political viewpoints across the board, but -- and this sounds trite -- they were people, above all else. I would say to "Blue State America" that people in small towns are folks to engage, rather than to write off. If the political parties and their rampant advertising -- and the media and its lust for conflict -- would get out of the way, I think we'd see more connection and union in the country, which would allow us, in turn, to face our problems together instead of across divisive lines of fire.

"The Talk"

The usual e-mail from political campaigns are all similar - some pseudo-personalized message from someone associated with the campaign, e.g. Biden or Gore - ending with a plea for a donation, in an amount that seems related to the size of your previous contribution. Or a call to join a phone bank or swing state canvas trip.

The latest e-mail from the Obama campaign takes a different approach. It appeals for supporters to convert family members.

If your family isn't already supporting Barack, it's time for you to have "The Talk."

With so many rumors and misperceptions out there, it's incredibly important that you sit down with parents or other family members. Tell them who Barack is, what he stands for, and why you're supporting him.

You may be the only person who can convince them.

But it can be difficult to bring up the subject, so here are a few tips:

• Send an email. You can scroll down for some talking points, but feel free to add your personal touch.
• Breaking the ice can be hard. Start by asking if they saw the debate on Tuesday and what they thought about it.
• Have some information handy. We have one-page summaries of Barack's positions on various issues. Look for the issues you know are important to your family.
• Share Barack's speech from the Democratic National Convention or Meet Barack, a video about who Barack Obama is, where he comes from, and what his values are.

For more resources, and to share your story about talking to family members, go to:

http://my.barackobama.com/thetalk

Earlier this year, as one national leader after another announced support for Barack, there was a common refrain -- they said their kids persuaded them that Barack was the right candidate to bring about real change.

Family members talking to one another about Barack is one of the ways this movement has grown so large. Even if your parents are already convinced, talk to your grandparents, aunts, uncles, and cousins.

Once it was parents who had to have the embarrassing "Talk" with their kids about the birds and the bees. Now the tables have turned, and it's the children who have to sit their parents down to broach politics.

Will it work? I suppose I'll find out Oct 17-19, when I head out to Las Vegas to canvas for Obama. Will those from my parents' generation want to hear from people of mine, or will it seem presumptuous? Why do I suspect I'll feel like I'm introducing a girlfriend to strict parents?

Once more into the mud, dear friends, once more

Dan Balz writes about "The Legacy of Character Attacks" in The Washington Post:

Because he is losing right now, McCain is on a more urgent mission to turn around his campaign. Because he is under attack, Obama feels the need to show he won't let his rival push him around. The effect is the same, which is to degrade the political dialogue at a moment when the nation faces some of the most difficult challenges in a generation or more.

In a month, one of these candidates will have won and the other will be asked to help rally behind the new leader to tackle the economic crisis. That would have been easier if the dialogue had not turned as it has the past few weeks.

When the final showdown came down to McCain and Obama, one might have held out hope that this Election would be different, that it would be a clean fight. But it only takes one corner willing to punch below the belt before everyone wades into the mud. Voters are partially to blame, because they are susceptible to Swift Boating and other such unsubstantiated attack methods.

McCain, as the underdog, initiated, as is logical, and he and his campaign have been stepping up the character attacks in recent days as Obama opens a gap. Obama and his camp have responded with their own videos, like the Keating Five video, though a good number of his ads still focus on the issues, where Democrats are seen as stronger.

Will the Ayers attacks and their like work again? I hope not, but I'm fearful to see the depths to which McCain and Palin and their campaign team will sink in the remaining weeks.

UPDATE: The NYTimes Public Editor chides the Times for feeding into this phenomenon by spending too many inches of column space on negative campaigning issues, the headline using the same term as I did, "mud," to mark this phase of the election: "Urgent Issues, Buried in the Mud"

Shotgun wedding

I am saddened at the thought that the McCain campaign could descend to the level of a made-for-TV wedding between Bristol Palin and Levi Johnston, but given that it would probably be televised on Fox, I must admit some self-interested daydreaming about how many views it would generate on Hulu.

Now that the stock market is in the toilet and my retirement looks to be further out in the future, I'm readying a backup plan. Assuming the McCain campaign loses the election, I will try and convince Sarah Palin to let me and a camera crew follow her family around for a reality TV show called The Palins. It would be the highest-rated reality show of all time.

Some possible names for the show:

• The Simple Life 6
• Raising Alaska
• Raising Trig
• Bristol and Levi: The Newlyweds 2
• Bristol, Piper, Track, Willow, Trig, and Alaskan Grizzly bears, oh my
• Where in the World is Mahmoud Ahmadinejad?

Hertzberg on Palin's Couric interview

Okay, we've probably squeezed all there is to squeeze out of the Katie Couric interview of Sarah Palin, but Hendrik Hertzberg's comments in his New Yorker blog left me with a few final chuckles.

COURIC: Well, explain to me why that enhances your foreign-policy credentials.

PALIN: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries, there in the state that I am the executive of. And there…

COURIC: Have you ever been involved in any negotiations, for example, with the Russians?

PALIN: We have trade missions back and forth, we do. It’s very important when you consider even national-security issues with Russia. As Putin rears his head and comes into the air space of the United States of America, where do they go? It’s Alaska. It’s just right over the border. It is from Alaska that we send those out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this very powerful nation, Russia, because they are right next to, they are right next to our state.

This seems to be a case of incoherence of thought leading to incoherence of syntax. Pronouns wander in search of antecedents like Arctic explorers in a blinding snowstorm. Homophones confuse the transcriber. For example, one of the Governor’s answers could as sensibly, or insensibly, be rendered as

PALIN: Well, it certainly does, because our, our next-door neighbors are foreign countries. They’re in the state that I am the executive of. And they’re…

In the “Putin rears his head” answer, jagged shards of the hasty briefings lately stuffed into Palin’s pretty head clang tinnily against one another. “We send those”—those? those what?—”out to make sure that an eye is being kept on this powerful nation, Russia.” Those what? We send what? My hunch is that this alarming jumble must have something to do with the path that Russian intercontinental missiles would take on their way to the lower Forty-eight and/or the air-defense installations that NORAD maintains in the state Palin is executive of. But who knows? The whole thing reads like something rendered from the Finnish by Google Translate.

Presidential Debate 08 - round one

If you're interested in watching or reviewing the first Presidential Debate, we have the full video up at Hulu.

We also have plenty of clips and post-debate commentary here and here.

The post-debate polling indicates a strong win by Obama, though many pundits preferred McCain. What an odd role reversal. For once, Obama appealed more to the average voter, while McCain appealed to lots of pundits.

McCain threw out terms like earmarks that political novices don't understand, and that hurt him during the economy section. Obama looked at McCain and seemed more congenial (yes, John, we know you are not Miss Congeniality, your running mate is the beauty pageant queen), while McCain would not look at Obama and came off as more elitist and fiery. If we went to Howard Lederman in the corner, I think he'd say McCain threw more punches and seemed more aggressive.

McCain seemed agitated a few times. I wonder if at one of these debates, Obama will be like Tom Cruise in A Few Good Men and decide, screw it, I'm going to press him. The moderator will try to cut off Obama as he shouts at McCain over and over again, "Did you order the code red?!" and finally McCain will finally look at Obama and shout, "You're Goddamned right I did!"

Not the most scintillating debate. I wonder how many viewers made it through to the bitter end. I did policy debate in high school (yes, I was a debate team dork, and yes, I saw that Kirk Cameron movie about policy debate), and that seems a better format for determining a winner than these Presidential Debates. We had to have note cards and cite evidence, whereas our Presidential Candidates can say whatever they want during the debate without any challenge until post-debate analysis.

So here's my proposal: Policy Debate format, two on two, Obama-Biden versus McCain-Palin. They alternate being on the affirmative and advocating a resolution. I would cough up $49.99 to see that on pay-per-view.

Are you havin' a laugh?

The drama and theatrics surrounding the election are both horrifying (the "McCain croaks and Palin becomes President of the free world" scenario is so terrifying to contemplate in its not insignificant probability that it needs a name, like a Robert Ludlum novel: the Palinus Paradox, or the Terminal Regression, or the Persephone Vector, or something of the sort). But if you ask, are you not entertained? I must confess I am enthralled.

Watching Palin in interviews is like watching the British version of The Office for the first time: viscerally discomfiting yet spectacularly absurd. We're watching a potential President of the most powerful nation on earth being checkmated by Charles Gibson and Katie Couric. Oh, that David Foster Wallace were alive to dissect the Palin phenomenon.

If there's anyone celebrating, it's Jon Stewart, Stephen Colbert, Conan O'Brien, Jay Leno, their writers, and every one out there trying to get a laugh.

*Note: the last video is actually not a spoof by Tina Fey. That is actually Governor Palin speaking.

Democrats are from Mars, Republicans are from Venus

UPDATE as of 9/18/08: FiveThirtyEight has Obama pulling back ahead in Electoral College Projections. Maybe the combined vetting of Palin by the Web and the MSM and McCain's inability to say anything coherent about the current financial crisis have stamped out the bounce from the RNC.

***

Democrats everywhere are in a depressed state as McCain has taken a slight lead in nationwide polls. As McCain and Palin continue to feed misinformation, the Democrats and Obama supporters continue to post refutations. How, they wonder in frustration, can Republicans continue to believe this misinformation?

A study offers a potential answer: using reason and logic to argue with Republicans doesn't work. In fact, it may just further entrench them in their beliefs.

A variety of psychological experiments have shown that political misinformation primarily works by feeding into people's preexisting views. But what's even more disheartening is that refuting misinformation may cause people to believe the misinformation even more strongly than they did before hearing the refutation.

Political scientists Brendan Nyhan and Jason Reifler provided two groups of volunteers with the Bush administration's prewar claims that Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. One group was given a refutation -- the comprehensive 2004 Duelfer report that concluded that Iraq did not have weapons of mass destruction before the United States invaded in 2003. Thirty-four percent of conservatives told only about the Bush administration's claims thought Iraq had hidden or destroyed its weapons before the U.S. invasion, but 64 percent of conservatives who heard both claim and refutation thought that Iraq really did have the weapons. The refutation, in other words, made the misinformation worse.

A similar "backfire effect" also influenced conservatives told about Bush administration assertions that tax cuts increase federal revenue. One group was offered a refutation by prominent economists that included current and former Bush administration officials. About 35 percent of conservatives told about the Bush claim believed it; 67 percent of those provided with both assertion and refutation believed that tax cuts increase revenue.

In a paper approaching publication, Nyhan, a PhD student at Duke University, and Reifler, at Georgia State University, suggest that Republicans might be especially prone to the backfire effect because conservatives may have more rigid views than liberals: Upon hearing a refutation, conservatives might "argue back" against the refutation in their minds, thereby strengthening their belief in the misinformation. Nyhan and Reifler did not see the same "backfire effect" when liberals were given misinformation and a refutation about the Bush administration's stance on stem cell research.

If this means that some Republicans actually believe that John McCain invented the Blackberry, then I give up.

But what is a Democrat to do? How do you appeal to people who don't respond to logic or reason?

Jonathan Haidt, Associate Professor of Psychology at the University of Virginia, tries to answer the question of why people vote Republican in this article at EDGE, and in doing so, he tries to suggest some adjustments to the Democratic message. His hypothesis is that Republicans want moral clarity, but Democrats continue to bombard them with messages based in reason.

But now that we can map the brains, genes, and unconscious attitudes of conservatives, we have refined our diagnosis: conservatism is a partially heritable personality trait that predisposes some people to be cognitively inflexible, fond of hierarchy, and inordinately afraid of uncertainty, change, and death. People vote Republican because Republicans offer "moral clarity"—a simple vision of good and evil that activates deep seated fears in much of the electorate. Democrats, in contrast, appeal to reason with their long-winded explorations of policy options for a complex world.

Diagnosis is a pleasure. It is a thrill to solve a mystery from scattered clues, and it is empowering to know what makes others tick. In the psychological community, where almost all of us are politically liberal, our diagnosis of conservatism gives us the additional pleasure of shared righteous anger. We can explain how Republicans exploit frames, phrases, and fears to trick Americans into supporting policies (such as the "war on terror" and repeal of the "death tax") that damage the national interest for partisan advantage.

But with pleasure comes seduction, and with righteous pleasure comes seduction wearing a halo. Our diagnosis explains away Republican successes while convincing us and our fellow liberals that we hold the moral high ground. Our diagnosis tells us that we have nothing to learn from other ideologies, and it blinds us to what I think is one of the main reasons that so many Americans voted Republican over the last 30 years: they honestly prefer the Republican vision of a moral order to the one offered by Democrats.

Haidt notes that when emotions take hold, logic and reason are suppressed, and so policy-based messages by Democrats fail to resonate with Republican voters.

This research led me to two conclusions. First, when gut feelings are present, dispassionate reasoning is rare. In fact, many people struggled to fabricate harmful consequences that could justify their gut-based condemnation. I often had to correct people when they said things like "it's wrong because… um…eating dog meat would make you sick" or "it's wrong to use the flag because… um… the rags might clog the toilet." These obviously post-hoc rationalizations illustrate the philosopher David Hume's dictum that reason is "the slave of the passions, and can pretend to no other office than to serve and obey them." This is the first rule of moral psychology: feelings come first and tilt the mental playing field on which reasons and arguments compete. If people want to reach a conclusion, they can usually find a way to do so. The Democrats have historically failed to grasp this rule, choosing uninspiring and aloof candidates who thought that policy arguments were forms of persuasion.

...the second rule of moral psychology is that morality is not just about how we treat each other (as most liberals think); it is also about binding groups together, supporting essential institutions, and living in a sanctified and noble way. When Republicans say that Democrats "just don't get it," this is the "it" to which they refer. Conservative positions on gays, guns, god, and immigration must be understood as means to achieve one kind of morally ordered society. When Democrats try to explain away these positions using pop psychology they err, they alienate, and they earn the label "elitist." But how can Democrats learn to see—let alone respect—a moral order they regard as narrow-minded, racist, and dumb?

If it's not reason and logic that's failing to resonate with Republican voters, what is missing? Haidt identifies five moral foundations or dimensions that people value and thinks that Democrats only hit on two of them.

In several large internet surveys, my collaborators Jesse Graham, Brian Nosek and I have found that people who call themselves strongly liberal endorse statements related to the harm/care and fairness/reciprocity foundations, and they largely reject statements related to ingroup/loyalty, authority/respect, and purity/sanctity. People who call themselves strongly conservative, in contrast, endorse statements related to all five foundations more or less equally. (You can test yourself at www.YourMorals.org.) We think of the moral mind as being like an audio equalizer, with five slider switches for different parts of the moral spectrum. Democrats generally use a much smaller part of the spectrum than do Republicans. The resulting music may sound beautiful to other Democrats, but it sounds thin and incomplete to many of the swing voters that left the party in the 1980s, and whom the Democrats must recapture if they want to produce a lasting political realignment.

Some other excerpts:

In The Political Brain, Drew Westen points out that the Republicans have become the party of the sacred, appropriating not just the issues of God, faith, and religion, but also the sacred symbols of the nation such as the Flag and the military. The Democrats, in the process, have become the party of the profane—of secular life and material interests. Democrats often seem to think of voters as consumers; they rely on polls to choose a set of policy positions that will convince 51% of the electorate to buy. Most Democrats don't understand that politics is more like religion than it is like shopping.

The Democrats must find a way to close the sacredness gap that goes beyond occasional and strategic uses of the words "God" and "faith." But if Durkheim is right, then sacredness is really about society and its collective concerns. God is useful but not necessary. The Democrats could close much of the gap if they simply learned to see society not just as a collection of individuals—each with a panoply of rights--but as an entity in itself, an entity that needs some tending and caring. Our national motto is e pluribus unum ("from many, one"). Whenever Democrats support policies that weaken the integrity and identity of the collective (such as multiculturalism, bilingualism, and immigration), they show that they care more about pluribus than unum. They widen the sacredness gap.

If Democrats want to understand what makes people vote Republican, they must first understand the full spectrum of American moral concerns. They should then consider whether they can use more of that spectrum themselves. The Democrats would lose their souls if they ever abandoned their commitment to social justice, but social justice is about getting fair relationships among the parts of the nation. This often divisive struggle among the parts must be balanced by a clear and oft-repeated commitment to guarding the precious coherence of the whole. America lacks the long history, small size, ethnic homogeneity, and soccer mania that holds many other nations together, so our flag, our founding fathers, our military, and our common language take on a moral importance that many liberals find hard to fathom. Unity is not the great need of the hour, it is the eternal struggle of our immigrant nation. The three Durkheimian foundations of ingroup, authority, and purity are powerful tools in that struggle. Until Democrats understand this point, they will be vulnerable to the seductive but false belief that Americans vote for Republicans primarily because they have been duped into doing so.

If this is true, it could explain why trying to win an election with a strategy based purely on reason and truth is so difficult, and why Republican misinformation is so effective and durable. Obama wants to run a campaign based not in the same old political attacks, but it's clear to Schmidt and the McCain campaign that an election fought on those grounds is not one they can win.

George Saunders on Sarah Palin

George Saunders drills, baby, drills in the humor column of this week's New Yorker. It will feel like a tragedy to half the country if McCain/Palin win the election, but on the bright (semi-dim?) side it will arm our humorists with four more years of material.

Now, let us discuss the Élites. There are two kinds of folks: Élites and Regulars. Why people love Sarah Palin is, she is a Regular. That is also why they love me. She did not go to some Élite Ivy League college, which I also did not. Her and me, actually, did not go to the very same Ivy League school. Although she is younger than me, so therefore she didn’t go there slightly earlier than I didn’t go there. But, had I been younger, we possibly could have not graduated in the exact same class. That would have been fun. Sarah Palin is hot. Hot for a politician. Or someone you just see in a store. But, happily, I did not go to college at all, having not finished high school, due to I killed a man. But had I gone to college, trust me, it would not have been some Ivy League Élite-breeding factory but, rather, a community college in danger of losing its accreditation, built right on a fault zone, riddled with asbestos, and also, the crack-addicted professors are all dyslexic.

Sarah Palin was also the mayor of a very small town. To tell the truth, this is where my qualifications begin to outstrip even hers. I have never been the mayor of anything. I can’t even spell right. I had help with the above, but now— Murray, note to Murray: do not correct what follows. Lets shoe the people how I rilly spel Mooray and punshuate so thay can c how reglar I am, and ther 4 fit to leed the nashun, do to: not sum mistir fansy pans.

OK Mooray. Get corecting agin!

Karl Rove says McCain ads have gone "too far"

Straight Talk Express has to stray far off the track for even Rove to call out McCain. Rove also says some of Obama ads have done the same, but I challenge any rational person to prove that case.

What's sad is that McCain once was one of the more appealing politicians for his willingness to offer "straight talk" and buck his party. But he's now made the deal with the devil that is the conservative core in his desperation for the Presidency.

It's doubly sad to witness this given David Foster Wallace's suicide. Wallace's writings on McCain during the 2000 elections were collected into a short book: McCain's Promise: Aboard the Straight Talk Express with John McCain and a Whole Bunch of Actual Reporters, Thinking About Hope.

Wallace saw some hope in McCain then. I have no doubt he would have been, or perhaps already was, deeply disappointed that McCain betrayed the Maverick.

Palin on the Bush Doctrine

Well, I'm mostly preaching to the converted here, but the thought that Palin could be one McCain health issue away from being our President is terrifying.

In a perverse way, I wish it had been Chris Matthews instead of Charles Gibson in the interviewer chair. It's probably better that it wasn't, though, as Matthews would have eviscerated her on her ignorance of the Bush Doctrine, and that might have come off looking mean-spirited and prompted accusations of sexism from the McCain camp.

There's a reason they've been sheltering her from the press. Drill, media, drill.

I can't help but think that Hillary Clinton could cement her status as a Democratic hero if she'd step out of the alley and face down Palin. Clinton would run circles around Palin. Like Val Kilmer's Doc Holliday stepping out of the shade to take out Johnny Ringo, Hillary would go down in history as a feminist hero by taking down the woman who's inherited the title of most divisive woman in politics.

UPDATE: Rebecca Traister writes in Salon of the same desire for Hillary to rescue feminism. Traister concludes the article:

Which leads us to my greatest nightmare: that because my own party has not cared enough, or was too scared, to lay its rightful claim to the language of women's rights, that Sarah Palin will reach historic heights of power, under the most egregious of auspices, by plying feminine wiles, and conforming to every outdated notion of what it means to be a woman. That she will hit her marks by clambering over the backs, the bodies, the rights of the women on whose behalf she claims to be working, and that she will do it all under the banner of feminism. How can anybody sleep?

Palin

Back from the Dylan concert, I watched two of the Republican National Convention speeches on tape delay on MSNBC. First was Rudy Giuliani's speech. Rudy has gone off the deep end, and after that speech, any lingering crumbs of goodwill from his 9/11 performance have been cleared away.

But the speech everyone is talking about is Palin's. As a vessel for rallying the conservative base, she was perfect. She was remarkably self-assured, and if disregard for irony is courage, then she was fearless in her assault on Obama. If the VP's job is to attack the opposing presidential candidate, Palin seems as eager and willing to take on Obama as Amy Winehouse was to beat up her husband. That crowd was fired up, and the Republican party seemed to get its mojo back.

Of all the politicians who've spoken at the conventions, her life story was best at conveying that she's just like one of us (whether it's true or not). George W. Bush seems like one of us because he comes off sounding like an underachieving frat president. Palin seems like the tough hockey mom she says she is. Democrats saw Dubya win the last election in part on his folksy charm, and Palin has an element of that. Her life story allows the Republicans to put some weight behind their elitist attacks against Obama because she serves as a foil to his best-selling book-writing, Harvard Law Review President past.

But the Republican party always gets behind its candidate, so the Democrats had to expect it, even if the candidate is McCain. How did her speech play to independents, and Hillary supporters, and Democrats in general?

I think it will rally Democrats just as much as it rallies the Republicans. The few Democratic friends I've spoken to are livid over her speech and its largely facile attacks, and two of them jumped online immediately to make big donations to the Obama campaign. I caught myself with fuming from time to time at what seemed to be a certain smugness on her part. Who does she think she is? If you look to Palin's speech as a roadmap for how the Republicans are going to approach the next two months, we should expect a clear return to the type of divisive attacks that Obama has wanted to avoid. Palin fired up her party, but she also lit a fire under the opposing team.

I was struck, in the Democratic Convention, by how many times speakers stopped to praise McCain. I heard no such concessions from Giuliani or Palin. They had no qualms about resorting to a sarcasm which left them looking particularly vicious and petty. In my mind, this helps the Democrats because it opens the door to attacking Palin more aggressively. If she is as tough and antagonistic as she seemed in this speech, the Democrats should be able to take off the kid gloves. Charges of sexism won't stick. Hell, she made Biden look like the one who should wear a cup to the first VP debate. This is an important opening that the Democrats need to seize. The Democrats need to go after Palin's vulnerable spots, and there are many, so that she can't remain this abstract, attractive attack dog.

Palin's attacks also crossed a line. They tried to paint Obama as a egotist who cares little for America. Whether you're for him or against him, I doubt many independents will buy that he's a preening narcissist. The bluntness and exaggerated nature of her attacks made her seem tough but simple-minded.

Criticizing Obama for being elitist while belittling his work as a community organizer is the type of obliviousness to irony that Republicans are very good at (honestly; their focus on message is just good politics). It plays great when preaching to the choir. But does Palin have the weight to make the charges stick?

I don't think she does. I kept thinking throughout her speech that I was impressed by her command of the crowd and terrified at the possibility that she might become our President. Her speech was so light on actual policy talk that I couldn't help but feel that she was a movie character, from the story of any average person thrust into the White House unexpectedly who impresses everyone with their folk wisdom. If there's a war breaking out between two foreign countries, she's not the one I want answering the 3am phone call. Maybe if there's a rabid moose on the loose, but not if she needs to jump in and mediate between, say, Georgia and Russia.

Did her speech play well to Hillary's sisterhood of the traveling pantsuits? I'll be curious to see the polls. I suspect just as many professional women are appalled by Palin as thrilled. Finally, despite her youth, in attacking Obama with arguments that seem so partisan, she only offers more of what has turned so many young people off of politics.

I could be entirely wrong. I'm no political expert. But I can't help but be drawn in. This Presidential election is the best new drama on TV. Can it win an Emmy?

Pot, Kettle, Black

Experience? Leave the family alone? Sexism? Whose playbook is that?

It's that mother of three in Detroit

One political speech tactic I've heard a lot recently which doesn't work for me is the reference to some person the politician met on the campaign trail. Here's an example from Hillary Clinton's speech at the Democratic Convention:

I will always remember the single mom who had adopted two kids with autism. She didn’t have any health insurance, and she discovered she had cancer. But she greeted me with her bald head, painted with my name on it, and asked me to fight for health care for her and her children.

I will always remember the young man in a Marine Corps T-shirt who waited months for medical care. And he said to me, “Take care of my buddies. A lot of them are still over there. And then will you please take care of me?”

And I will always remember the young boy who told me his mom worked for the minimum wage, that her employer had cut her hours. He said he just didn’t know what his family was going to do.

Hillary is not the only one. All the politicians have been going there. Here, from Obama's DNC speech:

...more work to do, for the workers I met in Galesburg, Illinois, who are losing their union jobs at the Maytag plant that's moving to Mexico, and now they're having to compete with their own children for jobs that pay 7 bucks an hour; more to do for the father I met who was losing his job and chocking back the tears wondering how he would pay $4,500 a months for the drugs his son needs without the health benefits that he counted on; more to do for the young woman in East St. Louis, and thousands more like her who have the grades, have the drive, have the will, but doesn't have the money to go to college.

If it's an attempt to connect with people in similar situations, perhaps my eye-rolling is simply because I can't relate to any of the anecdotes. Or maybe it's an attempt to show your bond with and empathy for the average American.

But something about the lack of specificity strikes me as disingenuous. I'd feel much closer to political candidates, frankly, if they wrote a blog, or had a Flickr account showing photos of them meeting with Americans on the campaign trail.

UPDATE: George Packer, writing about the Democratic Convention, observes:

I’ve seen very little mention in the press of the half-dozen citizens who told their stories immediately before Obama was introduced, but from where I sat (in the end-zone seats, to the right as you faced the stage), Barney Smith and Pam from North Carolina and the others were more effective than any high-profile speaker all week in arguing that Obama is on the ordinary American’s side. Before eighty thousand people in a packed football stadium, and thirty-eight million more on TV (beating the Academy Awards, the Olympics opening ceremonies, and even the final night of “American Idol”), the ordinariness of their voices and the unremarkable details of their lives rose to a level of high dignity.

So perhaps the Democrats solved this, not by speeches, but by having actual Americans speak at the convention. I didn't see these videos on the Democratic Convention site, but they should be.

UPDATE 2: The videos are there, though it took some digging to find. The title of the video is American Voices Program.

Convention vs. Convention

If we're to judge the quality of the two conventions by the quality of their streaming video, then hands down it's a victory for the Democrats. The Democratic Convention site had, and still has, high-def video using Move and Silverlight. The Republican Convention site has fuzzy YouTube videos.

Maybe the poor video resolution will be flattering to McCain's complexion. There is some element of this disparity in online experience that is consistent with the Luddite image of the Republican Party, especially McCain, relative to the Democratic Party.

FiveThirtyEight on Palin

Nate Silver, at FiveThirtyEight, liveblogging from the Republican VP announcement,

Great visual: Palin walking out with her daughter. Not-so-great visual: Palin embracing McCain and looking like his daughter.

I had the same reaction to their age differential, and for all the reasons she might be a good VP choice--how she comes off to people in public appearances may matter more than what the pundits write about her--this is potentially a problem.

More from Silver:

Because it isn't really an argument about experience per se. It's an argument about whether she meets the basic threshold test of voters feeling comfortable with having her as President. Experience is a part of that, but so are essentially the aesthetics of it: 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 a minimum, I'm looking forward to seeing how Jon Stewart, Conan O'Brien, and Jay Leno work Palin into their routines.

Based on early polls, it's starting to seem like Palin's selection won't make a difference to any of the entrenched Democratic or Republican voters. But this is before she's made her speech at the RNC. That's going to pull some serious ratings.

If the Republican VP search committee thought through their choice, and I'm sure they did, Palin seems like a choice designed to draw Obama supporters into outrage and ridicule, and so far it's worked (yours truly guilty as anyone).

But the Obama and Clinton reaction to her selection seems the better approach. Don't attack her on experience, or run the equivalent of McCain's "Celebrity" ads, attack her on issues. Leave the ridicule to the late night talk show hosts and comedians, and take the high ground. McCain is the candidate, and he provides enough target area for the Democratic Party to set up an entire firing range, from his houses to his weak grasp of economics to his policy shifts in the last eight years. If Palin is a liability, voters will be able to connect the dots themselves.

It's hard not to stave off a nagging fatalism on many things in life this year. The Cubs are playing well, but that only means we Cubs fans have to lash ourselves a few extra times, like Paul Bettany in The Da Vinci Code. The Cubs rotation might get shut down by Webb, Haren, and the Big Unit. Harden, Zambrano, Wood, and Marmol's arms might fall off. The Cubs might make the World Series and lose to the White Sox. And so on. Obama might lose because the Republicans mobilize their base better. Palin will steal enough independent women voters and evangelicals to push McCain into the lead. Biden didn't sway enough independents to Obama's side. And on and on.

But taken as pure drama, it's all golden. Forget W, I want to see the Paul Thomas Andersen movie about this election season. Who would play Hillary, Bill, Obama, and McCain? Tina Fey may look like Palin, but can she play her? Will Biden or McCain slip up and refer to Palin as a "gorgeous broad" in a Mad Men-esque moment? What if McCain wins and croaks and Palin becomes President? It could be a Hollywood movie come to life, like Dave crossed with Legally Blonde.

In the time of year when nothing good is hitting movie theaters, I'll be cozying up with a bucket of popcorn and watching the Cubs in the playoffs and Obama/McCain in the main event.

Palin in comparison

[Apologies for the headline. I've heard so many bad puns using Biden, I thought I had to even out the universe.]

John McCain's pick of Palin to be VP helps me to understand what kind of guy he is. He's that owner in your fantasy football league who reads a few good reports out of some team's training camp and drafts some unknown rookie wide receiver 7 rounds too early.

McCain barely knows her. Compared to McCain's vetting of Palin, Obama's research into Biden is like the type of security checks Middle Eastern people get at American airports. Obama is that guy in your fantasy football league who comes with a 12 tab spreadsheet model with built-in VBA macros and projections customized for your leagues scoring rules. Our President could potentially be the crazy guy from your fantasy football draft who picks from his gut--it's a terrifying thought--or that super-prepared guy.

By the way, I couldn't help but think that McCain chose Palin as she's the opposite of him: young, female, with a head full of dark hair and glasses. I wondered what would happen if we fused them into one single Presidential candidate. Using an advanced Photoshop action, I ran the scenario.

Here is the result.

Caro on Obama and LBJ

Robert A. Caro on Obama's presidential campaign as a descendant of Lyndon B. Johnson's civil rights legacy.

LOOK what has been wrought! Forty-three years ago, a mere blink in history’s eye, many black Americans were unable to vote. Tonight, a black American ascends a stage as nominee for president. “Just give Negroes the vote and many of these problems will get better,” Lyndon Johnson said. “Just give them the vote,” and they can do the rest for themselves.

All during this long primary campaign, after reading, first thing every morning, newspaper articles about Barack Obama’s campaign for the presidency, I would turn, as part of the research for my next book, to newspaper articles from 1965 about Lyndon Johnson’s campaign to win for black people the right to vote.

And I would think about Johnson’s great speech, when he adopted the rallying cry of black protest as his own, when he joined his voice to the voices of all the men and women who had sung the mighty hymn of the civil rights movement. Martin Luther King cried when he heard that speech. Since I am not black, I cannot know — cannot even imagine — Dr. King’s feelings. I know mine, however. To me, Barack Obama is the inheritor of Lyndon Johnson’s civil rights legacy. As I sit listening to Mr. Obama tonight, I will be hearing other words as well. I will be hearing Lyndon Johnson saying, “We shall overcome.”

Obama's economics worldview

A preview of a feature by David Leonhardt in this Sunday's NYTimes Magazine on Obama's economic policies. A really worthwhile read. You can choose who to vote for based on political ads or party affiliations, but this day and age makes it easier to research candidates than in years past, and it's worth the effort.

The press and the public have had a hard time coming up with an easy narrative for Obama's economics, perhaps because he doesn't fit neatly into pre-conceived economic stereotypes for liberal or conservative politicians.

He should have much appeal to voters who classify themselves as socially liberal, economically conservative.

The partial embrace of Reaganomics is a typical bit of Obama’s postpartisan veneer. In a single artful sentence, he dismissed the old liberals, aligned himself with the Bill Clinton centrists and did so by reaching back to a conservative icon who remains widely popular. But the words have significance at face value too. Compared with many other Democrats, Obama simply is more comfortable with the apparent successes of laissez-faire economics. Sunstein, now on the faculty at Harvard, has a name for this approach: “I like to think of him as a ‘University of Chicago’ Democrat.”

Obama believes strongly in experts and empirical research, and part of his appeal is not just his intellectual curiosity but his willingness to bring in the best and brightest to inform his decisions in all policy areas.

As anyone who has spent time with Obama knows, he likes experts, and his choice of advisers stems in part from his interest in empirical research. (James Heckman, a Nobel laureate who critiqued the campaign’s education plan at Goolsbee’s request, said, “I’ve never worked with a campaign that was more interested in what the research shows.”) By surrounding himself with economists, however, Obama was also making a decision with ideological consequences. Far more than many other policy advisers, economists believe in the power of markets. What tends to distinguish Democratic economists is that they set out to uncover imperfections of the market and then come up with incremental, market-based solutions to these imperfections. This helps explain the Obama campaign’s interest in behavioral economics, a relatively new field that has pointed out many ways in which people make irrational, short-term decisions. To deal with one example of such myopia, Obama would require companies to automatically set aside a portion of their workers’ salary in a 401(k) plan. Any worker could override the decision — and save nothing at all or save even more — but the default would be to save.

Those interested in the core tenets of the behavioral economics ideas that influence Obama should pick up Cass Sunstein and Richard Thaler's book Nudge and keep up with the Nudge blog. They call their philosophy "libertarian paternalism" and believe institutions can improve people's lives without impinging on their freedom of choice. It's one of the better economics texts I've read recently.

As to where Obama stands relative to McCain on tax cuts, especially given that McCain's ads attack Obama as a tax-raiser?

Dating back to Reagan, Republicans have packaged tax cuts on high earners with more modest middle-class tax cuts and then maneuvered the Democrats into an unwinnable choice: are you for tax cuts or against them? Obama, however, argues that this is the moment when the politics of taxes can be changed.

To do this, he is proposing tax cuts for most families that are significantly larger than those McCain is offering, along with major tax increases for families making more than $250,000 a year. “That’s essentially a major part of our economic plan,” Obama said. “But it’s also a political message.” Economically, he is trying to use the tax code to spread the bounty from the market-based American economy to a far wider group of families. Politically, he is trying to drive a wedge through the great Reagan tax gambit.

The Tax Policy Center, a research group run by the Brookings Institution and the Urban Institute, has done the most detailed analysis of the Obama and McCain tax plans, and it has published a series of fascinating tables. For the bottom 80 percent of the population — those households making $118,000 or less — McCain’s various tax cuts would mean a net savings of about $200 a year on average. Obama’s proposals would bring $900 a year in savings. So for most people, Obama is the tax cutter in this campaign.

And more:

All told, Obama would not only cut taxes for most people more than McCain would. He would cut them more than Bill Clinton did and more than Hillary Clinton proposed doing. These tax cuts are really the essence of his market-oriented redistributionist philosophy (though he made it clear that he doesn’t like the word “redistributionist”). They are an attempt to address the middle-class squeeze by giving people a chunk of money to spend as they see fit.

He would then pay for the cuts, at least in part, by raising taxes on the affluent to a point where they would eventually be slightly higher than they were under Clinton. For these upper-income families, the Tax Policy Center’s comparisons with McCain are even starker. McCain, by continuing the basic thrust of Bush’s tax policies and adding a few new wrinkles, would cut taxes for the top 0.1 percent of earners — those making an average of $9.1 million — by another $190,000 a year, on top of the Bush reductions. Obama would raise taxes on this top 0.1 percent by an average of $800,000 a year.

Near the end of the article is an assessment of Obama and McCain's economic plans and their chances of success.

But it’s not entirely clear what the alternative is, at least in the broad sense and at least for the time being. A much more left-wing agenda than Obama’s would consist of erecting new trade barriers, reregulating various industries and otherwise getting the government even more involved in the economy than Obama would. This program has the dubious distinction of being disliked by both voters and experts alike. Populism hasn’t won a national election, or even the Democratic nomination, in decades, and economists can point to any number of ways why it wouldn’t work anyway.

Republicans, on the other hand, have an economic strategy that may still sell politically. But is there much reason to think that it would lead to a very different result from Bush’s? There have now been two presidents in the last 30 years — Bush and Reagan — who cut taxes and promised that deficits would not follow. But the deficits did come, and they went away only after two other presidents — George H. W. Bush and Bill Clinton — raised taxes. It also seems fairly clear by now that tax cuts for the affluent do not necessarily trickle down to everyone else.

For Democrats who want to think the worst about their opponents, McCain’s reliance on these ideas may be affirming. But it’s really a shame. For the time being, only one party is applying the lessons of history to the country’s biggest economic problems. There is no great battle of new ideas, and that can’t make it more likely that those problems will be solved.

A quick trip through Buzzfeed

Is Obama announcing his running mate tomorrow morning? Drudge thinks yes.

Funny bust, err...bus stop ad.

Speaking of the Wonderbra, they came up with another clever billboard, a photomosaic made up of hundreds of photos of women in their bras.

If I work on the top floor of this building and they announce that they're doing a fire drill test some day, I'm calling in sick.

Backlashes seem to have been accelerated by the Internet, so it's surprising that it took so long for the Radiohead backlash. Me, I'm going to see Radiohead at the Hollywood Bowl on Sunday and I couldn't be more excited.

At this moment, there might not be a bigger way for a woman to summon a world of fame onto herself than by dating Michael Phelps. First contender: fashion model Lily Donaldson.

I feel pretty

The most interesting thing about this John Edwards story: the National Enquirer scooped the MSM. Second-most interesting angle: Edwards admits that all that time on the campaign trail made him a narcissist.

That one must be a bit self-absorbed to want to run for President is not surprising. As Chris Rock opined in his current comedy tour, "Do you realize how arrogant you have to be to think you deserve to be President of the United States?" But I haven't heard a candidate explain an affair that way before.

Maureen Dowd's column ends:

Back in 2002, Edwards sent me a Ken doll dressed in bathing trunks, Rio de Janeiro Ken, with a teasing note, because he didn’t like my reference to him as a Ken doll in a column.

In retrospect, the comparison was not fair — to Ken.

Oof.

Oprah's political endorsement value

[via Marginal Revolution] A study on the value of Oprah's political endorsement to Barack Obama concludes that "her endorsement had a positive effect on the votes Obama received, increased the overall voter participation rate, and increased the number of contributions received by Obama." They also note that "the results ... suggest that Winfrey’s endorsement was responsible for approximately additional 1,000,000 votes for Obama"

The paper can be read as a PDF.

I cannot tell if 1MM incremental voters is valuable, though it feels like a strong number.

My curiosity is stoked: what are the five most valuable endorsements a candidate can receive? Labor unions? Governors? Senators? Newspapers? Which ones?

Oh Jesse

That Jesse Jackson clip in which he attacks Barack Obama while waiting to go on air for an interview on Fox News.

I see this and think: nuts is a swear word?

Nuts.

R.I.P. Tim Russert

I read the news as I was waiting to board my flight to Chicago today, and it felt as if a beloved uncle had passed away.

To higher ground we go

Game over

Longer than the 3OT Penguins-Red Wings game last night, the Obama-Clinton battle finally comes to a close, with Obama claiming the Democratic nomination. Every one is ready to move on, except Hillary, who still has not conceded.

But I'm going to crack open a bottle of the good stuff tonight and celebrate. I would've loved to have been there for Obama's speech tonight. Even reduced to a small web video window, Obama's speech gave me goosebumps. Contrasting his speech with McCain's speech tonight isn't like comparing apples to oranges, because it would give McCain's performance too much credit to place him in the the same food category.

These are the two candidates I wanted running against each other in the Presidential election, but, well, you know where I stand on the ultimate outcome. Ironically, McCain would prove most formidable and interesting an opponent if he reverted to the McCain of old, the one David Foster Wallace covered in the 2000 Election. But that day has passed.

The Body People

The NYTimes profiles Barack Obama's "body man" Reggie Love. Personal aide to Obama, Love plays hoops with the Presidential candidate, watches Sportscenter with him, and handles miscellaneous issues like food stains on the tie. Previously, Hillary Clinton's personal aide Huma Abedin garnered a lot of press attention--the NY Observer article titled "Hillary's Mystery Woman: Who is Huma?" practically described her as a superhero, a glamorous, cool, fashion icon.

Now that I'm on crutches, I'm ready to accept applications for my own body person. For the near future, the job will be more Driving Miss Daisy than pickup hoops, but the nightly Sportscenter viewing can commence immediately.

Feed Our Kids Well?

The long lost first episode of The Dana Carvey Show is now available on Hulu, featuring, yes, the infamous "Bill Clinton breastfeeding puppies" sketch. Timely satire, perhaps, given this election season?

In one of those inadvertent and bizarre coincidences, the ad campaign on this skit happened to be Ragu's Feed Our Kids Well campaign, leading to the the unplanned visual convergence below (click for a larger view; you won't fully understand unless you've seen the skit).

What do you see?

One of yesterday's hot Internet stories was this photo from the White House website which appeared to show Dick Cheney leering at a nude female sunbather.

In a bit of PR control, and perhaps as evidence that we see what we want to see, the powers that be released a larger version of the photo which reveals that the reflection in his sunglasses was nothing more than a hand holding a fishing rod. [via popurls]

***

A plug to watch Arrested Development on Hulu via Airbag's Longboard: "Thanks to Hulu, the world no longer has an excuse for not watching Arrested Development. Sometimes the Internet just gives and gives and gives."

Another fun place I found a Hulu embedded video: in Sasha Frere-Jones New Yorker blog.

***

PicLens, a cool browser plugin I often use to show people photos on Flickr, has a beta version that supports YouTube video browsing in Firefox, including Firefox 3b5, and IE. I couldn't get any videos to actually start playing, but I saw it working in a demo. Select a video and it starts playing right there within PicLens' 3-D wall.

Misc

Who is Jimmy Carter endorsing? Seems pretty clear it's Obama.

***

Is it possible to go out both with a whimper and a bang? This may be the business equivalent. RIP ATA and your dirt cheap airfares which I've taken advantage of a few times over the years.

***

One of the cooler hacks I've encountered recently: hack your portable Canon digital camera to enable new functionality like RAW file formats, live historgram displays, unlimited interval shooting, high speed shutters, and much more. I'm so going to do this once I can track down a card reader.

Juicy

Bill Richardson spoke to Hillary Clinton before announcing his endorsement of Barack Obama. Said Richardson:

"Let me tell you: we’ve had better conversations."

James Carville, reacting to Richardson's decision:

"Mr. Richardson’s endorsement came right around the anniversary of the day when Judas sold out for 30 pieces of silver, so I think the timing is appropriate, if ironic."

The speech

I've read the transcript of Obama's speech a few times now. He's been attacked for being all talk, but this speech, said to be one that he wrote himself (unique only in how few of our leaders, political or business, write their own speeches and statements and quotes these days), reveals how and what he thinks. In that, words matter a great deal.

What do his words reveal? That he has a deep understanding and empathy for the racial hurt in this country, an unwillingness to reduce the complexity of these issues to politically digestible soundbites, and an honesty that has made him the most refreshing and exciting candidate in politics in my lifetime.

He speaks of Reverend Wright, denounces his pastor's' words, and yet does not forsake him. Who among us doesn't have one racist relation whose views have made us roll our eyes in exasperation or disgust, and yet in every other respect is a person we care for?

And this helps explain, perhaps, my relationship with Reverend Wright. As imperfect as he may be, he has been like family to me. He strengthened my faith, officiated my wedding, and baptized my children. Not once in my conversations with him have I heard him talk about any ethnic group in derogatory terms, or treat whites with whom he interacted with anything but courtesy and respect. He contains within him the contradictions – the good and the bad – of the community that he has served diligently for so many years.

I can no more disown him than I can disown the black community. I can no more disown him than I can my white grandmother – a woman who helped raise me, a woman who sacrificed again and again for me, a woman who loves me as much as she loves anything in this world, but a woman who once confessed her fear of black men who passed by her on the street, and who on more than one occasion has uttered racial or ethnic stereotypes that made me cringe.

These people are a part of me. And they are a part of America, this country that I love.

How about an election every other year?

SNL isn't the only satire outlet energized by the election; The Onion has gotten a lot of mileage out of it, too:

Black Guy Asks Nation For Change

***

Army Holds Annual "Bring Your Daughter to War" Day

"There were lots of explosions, and...and I saw a leg."

***

Mitt Romney defends himself against allegations of tolerance.

A More Perfect Union

Barack Obama promised a speech on race today, and he delivered.

Tracy

SNL offers a counterpoint to Tina Fey's unabashed support for HRC.

Obama, the design element

Maybe one underrated strength of the Obama campaign is its design cohesion. Michael Bieruit analyzes Obama's branding campaign and comes away impressed, especially with his consistent typeface use.

And one of the things that came up in the conversation is, if you think about it, the challenge for someone named Barack Hussein Obama is that he's such an unprecedented figure in American politics--so much so that everything he's trying to do is, in a way, trying to make him look smoother and more normal. Someone said, "Well, why shouldn't he have revolutionary looking graphics--graphics that make him look like grassroots, like an outsider? Things drawn by hand, things that look forceful and avant-garde." But I think he's using design in a way to make him look as normal, as comfortable, as inevitable as a brand can look in American life. Those are really deliberate, interesting choices. Whether or not a sans serif font like Gotham looks more "American" than a Swiss font like Helvetica, that's in our imaginations to a certain degree. I think it's much more incontrovertible that he's actually using the seamlessness of this branding to convey a candidacy that's not a dangerous, revolutionary, risk-everything proposition--but as something that is well-managed and has everything under control.

Meanwhile, Hoefler & Frere-Jones shudder at the typography of the Clinton and McCain campaigns.

2008 is clearly a year of unusual thinking in political circles, because none of these familiar approaches can explain the utterly confounding typographic dress chosen by Senators Hillary Clinton and John McCain. Hillary's snooze of a serif might have come off a heart-healthy cereal box, or a mildly embarrassing over-the-counter ointment; if you're feeling generous you might associate it with a Board of Ed circular, or an obscure academic journal. But Senator McCain's typeface is positively mystifying: after three decades signifying a very down-market notion of luxe, this particular sans serif has settled into being the font of choice for the hygiene aisle. One of McCain's campaign themes is "Making Tough Choices:" is this the one you would have made?

Technorati Tags: barackobama, branding, design, gotham, typeface, typography

Original sin

Interesting analogy about the plagiarism flap between Hillary Clinton and Barack Obama.

Nevertheless, to understand why Clinton’s borrowing is worse than Obama’s, I’ve prepared some analogies of my own. First, consider what Obama did to his friend, Deval Patrick. Let’s say that last night I was out two-stepping at some tavern along the Monongahela River and I spotted a young and barefoot, curly-haired deli girl from the Giant Eagle wearing tight jean cut-offs and a red-checked restaurant napkin for a top. I suddenly remembered a line you used to great success when we were trolling the singles bars during the 2003 Appalachia Festival of the Book, a line that this gal would surely go all Patsy Cline for.

So I walk up to her and I pull my lower lip all the way out so she can see my tobacco chaw, big as a Bumblebee Hummingbird, and then I drop my cell on the bar—just the way you did—and I say, “Sweetheart, if the governor of Pennsylvania calls on this phone tonight, it’s because he heard your tongue might be trapped in the Skoal mine.”

Should I have given you credit for that can’t-miss line, even though it would have totally broken the mood? Probably. But you are my friend, and even though you were a thousand miles away at the time, you clearly would have supported me in my efforts to have anonymous, one-off hillbilly sex in the litter-strewn cab of a Ford F-150.

Now let’s adjust the scenario to describe what Hillary did to her rival John Edwards. Let’s say you and I were both in that Monongahela roadhouse and we simultaneously spotted the curly-haired supermarket deli girl. Each of us wanted to take her out to our respective F-150s and make dirty redneck love to her on a fry-scented bed of McDonald’s bags. But supposing, when you briefly turned your back for some emergency flossing and an Altoid, I approached the helpless object of our attentions and I used your awesome Skoal line to seduce her. By the time you turned around she and I would already be out in the parking lot with the heat and the Allman Brothers turned all the way up.

So to summarize, Barack Obama’s speech probably does not meet the definition of “plagiarism,” but Hillary Clinton’s speeches clearly meet the definition of “cockblocking.”

Yes he can?

Dick Morris now thinks Obama will defeat Hillary.

What a slugfest between two political heavyweights.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, politics, hillaryclinton

A good weekend for Obama

Washington, Nebraska, Louisiana, Maine, and even the Virgin Islands (carrying with them all of 3 delegates), and all by healthy margins. And he beats out Bill Clinton for a Grammy! In my lifetime, I've never known so many of my peers to attend a caucus as did this past weekend up in Washington. It's proof of the transformative power of Obama that he has aroused my generation's political hopes. I may be hasty in assigning so much credit to Obama for galvanizing the youth vote, but whatever is happening, the number of 18-29 year olds turning out for primaries and caucuses is up significantly over 2000.

In the process, perhaps we're seeing a weakening of the so-called political establishment. It certainly feels that way when you see Obama out-fundraising Clinton by collecting small amounts from many donors, rather than large amounts from fewer but thicker wallets (some enclosed in serious baggage). It feels that way when you see that Obama has won nearly every caucus state, where passionate supporters are critical. Let's hope it's a movement that isn't derailed by the peculiar Democratic Party subspecies known as superdelegates.

Arnold Kling writes:

Some day, instead of an exit poll saying that X percent of people listed health care as the number on issue, I would like to see an exit poll saying that Y percent of people were able to correctly identify correctly the differences between the candidates' proposals on health care. I think that Y would be less than 5 percent.

If the United States had a multi-party parliamentary system with proportional representation, our patchwork of prejudices would likely yield a government comparable to Italy's.

He might be right, but this young interviewee must fall into that 5%. His answers during this interview are great and seem to win over the conservative interviewer:

Clinton would make a very capable President, of that I have little doubt. And I almost certainly believe she suffers from some prejudice against women, which is unfortunate, just as Obama's skin color is an obstacle for many voters. But the chance to move past partisan politics is so potent a possibility, and it's one that I only envision with Obama. Even though Clinton-hate is less about Bill and Hillary than about those who feel it in their heart of hearts, the net effect is the same; a return to that disillusioning and toxic mood of politics in the mid nineties.

Ken and I wondered if Obama would be the first black candidate to be elected head of a country in which blacks were not a majority of the population. Does anyone know? If so, it adds to what would already be a historic victory.

I wonder how possible a Clinton-Obama ticket would be. Such a pairing would be unbeatable. For the good of the party? Doubtful now given how many blows they've dealt each other in the ring. Ken read somewhere that if Clinton won, she'd neutralize Obama by nominating him for the Supreme Court. That made me laugh.

Technorati Tags: obama, politics

Bill Clinton: "Screw It, I'm Running For President"

Hah.

What type of President do you want?

From this week's George Packer article in The New Yorker:

The alternatives facing Democratic voters have been characterized variously as a choice between experience and change, between an insider and an outsider, and between two firsts—a woman and a black man. But perhaps the most important difference between these two politicians—whose policy views, after all, are almost indistinguishable—lies in their rival conceptions of the Presidency. Obama offers himself as a catalyst by which disenchanted Americans can overcome two decades of vicious partisanship, energize our democracy, and restore faith in government. Clinton presents politics as the art of the possible, with change coming incrementally through good governance, a skill that she has honed in her career as advocate, First Lady, and senator.

Technorati Tags: politics, barackobama, video, youtube

Bloody Monday

Zooey Deschanel is coming out with an album of tunes with M. Ward. They call themselves She and Him. Indie people everywhere swoon. Stream the songs at this MySpace page, pre-order the album Volume One from Amazon.com. The new Magnetic Fields is streaming on MySpace, too.

I enjoyed the film City of God, and now we have City of Men, with City of God director Fernando Meirelles as producer. View the trailer here. The movie starts a limited run in the US this Friday.

Old school civil rights leaders turn a cold shoulder on Obama.

It's pretty clear Blu-Ray is going to win this high-def DVD format war. The downside, in the near term, is that it's near impossible to get a Blu-Ray DVD from your Netflix queue.

I think it's safe to classify "I drink your milkshake" as a meme now. I saw the movie last week and enjoyed it, and damned if there haven't been some stellar scores this year by folks you think of as rockers first: Jonny Greenwood and Nick Cave. I'm a huge fan of Brahms' Violin Concerto and of Arvo Part, so to put music by both in that movie is almost like cheating.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, bluray, DVD, film, m.ward, movies, music, netflix, obama, politics, video, youtube, zooeydeschanel

E. Pluribus Wiggum

In this election season, a very timely episode of The Simpsons.

Hope

I'm not familiar enough with the Iowa Caucus process to pass decisive judgment, though what I've read about it always makes me question the sanity of the process. But as an early momentum generator, as a signal to those who tend to vote for front-runners, and as a determinant of what stories the media spins, it's probably more important than the 1% of delegates it chooses. In that respect, I read the results as a confirmation of the momentum and confidence Obama and his campaign have been feeling for the last month or so.

I just watched his victory speech on replay on CNN. It's nothing new if you've heard him speak at all recently; he reiterates many of the same messages, using almost identical wording as he used when I heard him speak in Los Angeles. And yet he still fires me up more than any other candidate in my lifetime. The man can bring some rhetorical heat.

Some other telling indicators. People under 30 preferred Obama over Clinton by a huge margin; I've read the difference as in the neighborhood of 57% to 11%. 57%!!! People under 30 made up over a third of Obama's support. 22% of Iowa Democrats at the caucus were less than age 30, compared to 17% in 2004.

Obama won 35% of the votes from women versus 30% for Clinton.

Among independents, Obama won 41% of the vote versus Clinton's 17%.

Youth, women, independents. Yes, yes, small sample size, but that's three critical groups to win.

Look at the trading prices of Clinton and Obama's Presidential Nominee shares over the last 7 days (a share price of 50 would mean that traders believe that event has a 50% chance of happening):

For the Democrats as a group, an incredibly positive sign is that twice as many people showed up for the Democrats as the Republicans.

This is going to be an interesting month.

Obama in LA

Monday night, I saw Barack Obama speak in LA at the Gibson Ampitheatre. For a contribution to the campaign, I received a ticket to hear Obama speak. As I stood in line to get in, I scanned a mixed crowd ranging of all races, from teenagers in high school to senior citizens. Was this crowd more or less diverse than that for other candidates? Was Obama a great uniter? I had no frame of reference.

When I reached the security check, the guard took one look at my Nikon digital SLR and shook his head.

"That ain't going in," he said.

I bristled immediately.

Several days earlier, I had called the contact number listed for the event and described my camera and asked if it would be allowed into the event. I'd had to run back to the parking lot to leave my camera behind one time too many. The woman on the other end assured me that my camera would be welcome. I recounted this story to the guard, but he was not moved.

While he held me back from entering the event, one person after another walked past with their cameras. I asked why those cameras were allowed in while mine wasn't. He declined to elaborate, which infuriated me even more. The likely distinction was that my camera was an SLR while the ones being allowed through were compact, but I wanted to hear him say it so I could explain to him how ridiculous the policy was. But he remained impassive and mute, like a bouncer at some trendy nightclub.

I was directed to a table and forced to hand over my camera. A black cloud floated over my head as I walked into the facility.

The short-sighted aspects of this policy are numerous. An SLR generally takes better pictures than a compact camera, but compressed for the web, the distinctions in photo quality would be lost on the vast majority of users. Most compact cameras actually have longer zooms than the standard SLR lens. What was I going to do, sell high-quality pictures of Obama, one of the most photographed people in news today? Once inside the event, I saw some other folks who weren't press members who did manage to get there digital SLRs through security. I couldn't get the bad taste out of my mouth the rest of the night.

The first thing I would've done with any photos of Obama would be to post the best one here and sing his praises, but instead I've wasted ten minutes of my life ranting about the restrictive policy at this event. It's a lose-lose situation. In this day and age, allowing people to snap photos and share them across Facebook or Flickr or weblogs is a form of free publicity. I hope someone at the campaign does the right thing and corrects it for future events. This persecution of SLRs needs to end.

I grabbed a seat two rows up from the VIP section around the stage (yes, a seat good enough to have snapped some great photos...I'll stop now). After sitting for about an hour, a series of introductory speakers came out to sing Obama's praises and fire up the crowd. Nick Cannon of Drumline fame served as the host of the evening, and Kal "Kumar" Penn came out and spoke of his work campaigning for Obama in Iowa.

Having musical guests play at these types of events has always seemed forced to me. It's difficult to imagine any presidential candidate having enough time to listen to music or keep up with the music scene, and the political endorsements of all but a few musicians hold little value to me. The first musical guest was Ne-Yo. The speakers to either side of the stage were cranked up. I could literally feel the sound waves hitting me in the chest. The other musical guest was The Goo Goo Dolls, an odd choice to me considering their last big hit was in...umm...

Sitting in front of me at the event was a familiar face, but not familiar enough for me to know by name. I knew he was an actor, but I couldn't place him. He left his seat early in the event, and the next time I saw him was on stage, as one of the speakers. It was James Whitmore.

There were plenty of movie stars in the crowd (the online web page for the event listed people like Scarlett Johansson, Jessica Biel, and Olivia Wilde; it's good to know Obama has locked up the Hollywood hottie vote). But there was no doubt who the biggest star in the room was on this night.

Throughout the night and especially during Obama's speech, speakers hammered on several key message of their campaign.

• Obama did not vote for the Iraq war, and Republicans will not be able to use that against him (the contrast to Clinton was unspoken, but only because it was so clear that she was the target).
• The American people need someone to tell them what they need to hear, not what they want to hear. This is part of Obama's conscious strategy to inform the electorate that he plans to run a non-traditional campaign, one in which he's not afraid to speak honestly about what the tradeoffs are. If certain policies require raising taxes, then he's going to tell it like it is. As a realist I find this refreshing, though I'm not convinced it's the optimal campaign strategy. I hope his instincts are right.
• His is a campaign that embraces all people, of all races and sexual orientations and political affiliations. Over and over, he spoke of the need to dispense with red state blue state model of the U.S.
• He intends to be the greenest President in history, and he plans to generate jobs through his efforts to aid the environment.
• Universal health care.
• Raise minimum wage, bridge the gap between the haves and the have-nots.
• He plans to restore the U.S. standing in the international community. He said he awaited the day when he can stand before the United Nations and tell the world, "We're back."

He displayed some humor during the evening, first in talking about his disappointment in finding out he was related to Dick Cheney, the second about the Clinton campaign's investigation into his Kindergarten papers. Of the latter, he noted, "We'll be releasing those papers on Monday. I tugged on a girl's ponytail once. And liked it."

It's dangerous to judge too much about a candidate's policies and qualifications for office at a rehearsed event like this. But whether you mean to or not, you assess a person's personality and character when you meet them in person, the same way you measure a person from the first moment you meet them in a job interview. Their body language, their words, their voice, their posture--all these feed into your perception of the person.

On that front, Obama is the most compelling candidate, either Democrat or Republican, in the upcoming election. He has a certain charisma that's difficult to teach. Clinton is polished and experienced and competent, but she lacks his inherent magnetism.

The other thing that struck me was how easy it was to garner huge support in this election just by promising not to be Dubya. Who thought that eliciting enthusiastic screams for a crowd could be as simple as saying, "I promise not to torture people in Guantanamo!"

The Obama argument

Andrew Sullivan makes the case for Barack Obama in The Atlantic Monthly. A good summary of why he's my choice, also.

Glassbooth.org asks you a series of questions and then matches you to the Presidential candidate most representative of your concerns and views. I'm no expert on politics, but I do have a few thoughts:

• Most of the Democratic candidates have fairly similar policy proposals. So electability versus the putative Republican candidate matters more than any one particular policy stance.
• Instead of trying to elect the candidate who will do the greatest good, it's more important to avoid electing the candidate who will do the greatest harm. I think of government as more analogous to baseball, where one superstar has less impact, than basketball, where you can build a competitive team around one great player.
• I don't believe the old adage about idealistic young Democrats becoming wealthy old Republicans holds as strongly as one suspects. More likely to me that your party affiliation is set in your first couple of elections and held there by inertia and some desire for appearing consistent in your beliefs. I think Obama is best positioned to continue Democratic strength among the younger demographic, and in doing so, solidify the Democratic vote for a couple elections.

Again, I have no evidence to support these points. They are just my hypotheses.

A true test of her power

The first pick in Oprah's Presidential Candidate of the Month Club: Barack Obama. Let's see how much influence she really wields.

It recalls one of the more famous Onion articles: Oprah Viewers Patiently Awaiting Instructions.

I hear Obama speak live on Dec. 10. It will be my first time hearing him live. I'm excited.

Wealth of Nations

A few interesting articles...

Why are some nations wealthier than others? In Guns, Germs, and Steel, Jared Diamond pointed to differences in geography.

In his new book A Farewell to Alms: A Brief Economic History of the World, economics professor Greg Clark identifies the main culprit as differences in quality of labor.

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Bruce Schneier discusses correspondent inference theory and why that evolutionary brain glitch undermines terrorism. Schneier based his article on a paper by Max Abrams in International Security titled "Why Terrorism Does Not Work" (PDF). All very fascinating and insightful.

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Joel on Software rants against the scourge of anonymous comments on the web. He's not saying anything new, but it's good to see the backlash continue. Reading long comment threads on most posts is a depressing thing.

Technorati Tags: book, economics, terrorism, security, web

Spiderman the musical?!

Marvel is in pre-production on Spider-Man the musical, to be directed by Tony-winner Julie Taymor with music and lyrics by Bono and the Edge.

Nice Flickr collection of the evocative name placards on apartment complexes here in Santa Monica. I agree with the photographer - these are the sole redeeming feature of the otherwise fugly apartment architecture ubiquitous in Santa Monica (and Los Angeles in general). You've never seen so much stucco and old shag carpet.

Kaoru Kubo is the famous voice heard on Airport Limousine buses ferrying passengers from Narita Airport to Tokyo. Very soothing.

A montage of beautiful title sequences by Kuntzel+Deygas who did the titles for Catch Me If You Can, among others.

Classified government report says Al-Qaeda is the strongest it's been since 9/11. How did this country ever elect Dubya? Perhaps Bryan Caplan is right.

Technorati Tags: LA, musical, photography, politics, travel

Revisiting Intrade odds for the 2008 election

Last bid on GOP nominee:

36.0 Rudy Giuliani
34.7 Fred Thompson
17.7 Mitt Romney
 3.8 John McCain

Fred Thomspon at 34.7 and John McCain at 3.8? Wow, I'm out of touch. My last impression of Fred Thompson was his struggles to deal with terrorists in Die Hard 2. Sure, the good guys won, but I'd give most of the credit to John McClane.

And the last bids on the Democratic Presidential Nominee side:

40.9 Hillary Clinton
37.5 Barack Obama
 8.9 Al Gore
 5.1 John Edwards

Poor John Edwards is losing to someone who isn't even running.

Intrade also now has shares for the winner of the 2008 Presidential election:

24.5 Hillary
20.9 Barack
18.5 Rudy
18.5 Fred

The Democrats are also predicted to have control of both the Senate and the House.

Technorati Tags: politics

iNotes

Very little evidence supporting theory that poverty breeds terrorism. I find that reassuring.

In a Q&A about some device called the iPhone, Walt Mossberg says Apple will add Flash support to the iPhone browser through an early software update.

Alessandro Petacchi out of the Tour de France after doping charge. His urine sample after the third of his five stage wins at this year's Giro d'Italia showed an unusually high level of albutamol, an asthma treatment. He holds a therapeutic use exemption for its use, but he exceeded the permitted level of 1,000 nanograms/millileter. Well, there goes the top sprinter in the Tour. I'll still watch, though. I just got back on my bike the other day for the first time in ages, and on the 4th I went with Tory for a climb up Malibu Canyon Road. That climb kicked my butt all over the road but I survived to summit.

Crazy battle at Kruger National Park in Africa, caught on video. Some unlikely twists and turns. I think I caught Jeff Van Gundy in there, hanging onto the leg of a Cape Buffalo. I've seen enough specials to know that Cape Buffalo never leave a man behind (thx to Mark for the referral).

Verizon COO Jack Plating sends internal memo titled iWhatever, throws out some brave talk in the face of the iPhone. He is true in that the network is Verizon's first and most powerful advantage. But Verizon handsets are not impressive at all.

I had lunch with Robert today, and the cafe was broadcasting highlights from Wimbledon. We were talking about Federer's loss in the French Open final to Nadal, and Robert thought that a big problem is that Federer was not extending on his first serve. He was keeping his first serve motion in too close, resulting in his ghastly first serve percentage. You wouldn't be able to tell from the final score, but based on the % of points Federer won on his first serve, he would have won that much had his first serve gone in more. One of these years, Federer will break through against Nadal at the French. He's played well enough to do so in the past, but it just hasn't happened there at Philippe Chatrier.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cycling, economics, gadgets, iPhone, nature, politics, sociology, tech, tennis, terrorism, video, web, youtube

Video 3-pack

I got a crush on Obama (Youtube video) - goodness gracious.

How to wash your filthy keyboard? Put it through the dishwasher (Quicktime). Looks light it actually works with the right types of keyboards.

A quick tease of a trailer for Pixar's next animated movie Wall-E (next movie after Ratatouille, that is).

Technorati Tags: film, howto, movies, obama, pixar, animation, trailer, video, youtube

The magic lasso

I've long thought that pickup basketball provided the ultimate insight into a man's soul. What can we tell about Barack Obama by his pickup ball demeanor?

On the court, Mr. Obama is confident, even a bit boastful.

“If he would hit a couple buckets, he would let you know about it,” said Alexi Giannoulias, who played in the late 1990s with Mr. Obama at the East Bank Club, a luxurious spot in downtown Chicago.

He is gentleman enough to call fouls on himself: Steven Donziger, a law school classmate, has heard Mr. Obama mutter, “my bad,” tossing the other team the ball.

But “he knew how to get in the mix when he needed to,” Mr. Giannoulias said. “There are always elbows, there’s always a little bit of jersey tucking and tugging,” he said, continuing, “Sometimes you gotta do what you gotta do to win.”

“Most of the guys who played in our little circle are former players in college or pros,” said Mr. Robinson, who is still Princeton’s fourth-leading scorer of all time. “They’re real high level.”

Mr. Obama cannot match their technical prowess, say those who played regularly with him. But he is fiercely competitive, and makes up for his deficits with collaboration and strategy. “He’s very good at finding a way to win when he’s playing with people who are supposedly stronger,” Mr. Nesbitt said.

The trope for assessing your sister's potential husband is to take him out for a drink, but far better, I think, to take him to a competitive pickup basketball game and see how he reacts. I suspect the disarming quality of pickup hoops has to do with the pace of the game and the instinctive behavior of people when their competitive juices are flowing (which is why board games are often a decent proxy). Obama's wife also believed in the power to discern a man's personality on the court:

Cut to the future Mrs. Obama asking her brother to take her new boyfriend out on the court, to make sure he was not the type to hog the ball or call constant fouls.

Technorati Tags: basketball, politics, obama

Memorial Day weekend

I am really sick: eyes watering, nose running, throat burning. My sinuses and chest are so congested I feel like I'm breathing through one of those coffee straws. A lot of people at school seem to be sick; one professor just canceled a class tomorrow morning. It's odd to see a cold seize hold around school when the weather is 70 degrees and sunny every day.

I have not slept as much or as regularly this quarter, and this weekend was really packed. Perhaps the lack of sleep has compromised my immune system. Whatever the cause, here's a sick day worth's of content.

Saturday I spent as 1st AC (assistant cameraperson) on a classmate's shoot. Since this was a reshoot, we had the luxury of a 2nd AC, and it made life a lot easier. Last quarter we had one AC per shoot, and that's a lot of work for one person. You have to load and download film, take focus measurements, guard the camera, swap lenses, check the gate, clean filters, move the camera into position, swap the camera from sticks to dolly and back, pull focus, keep a camera log, set the T-stop on the lens, run a stopwatch on shots to calculate how much film was run and how much is left, mark and clap the slate, write camera reports, and more. It's a very technical position, but I enjoy it. The day started early, with a 5AM alarm buzzing in my ear. When I got home at the end of the day, I told myself I'd take a quick nap and then head out to meet up with a few friends. I woke up at 5AM the next morning.

Sunday was spent at a wedding in Laguna Beach. I know nothing about the city other than what I'd seen on a few episodes of that MTV show of the same name (that show was shot beautifully on Panasonic Varicams, I believe). I'm not sure the city had any say in the matter, but that show forever cemented that town's image among most of America as the place where wealthy, self-absorbed teenagers ply their Machiavellian schemes to climb the social ladder.

Monday, on a last-minute suggestion from Mark, I attended the last day of the Star Wars convention at the LA convention center (the official title of the event was Star Wars Celebration IV). I consider myself a moderate Star Wars fans (enjoyed eps IV-VI, watched eps I-III out of devotion), but next to the types of fanatics you'd imagine at a gathering like this, I felt like Paris Hilton at a Mensa meeting.

At one T-shirt booth I asked a vendor if she had a particular Boba Fett t-shirt in large.

"Which one?" she barked.

"The second one from the right, top row?" I replied, taken aback by her hostile demeanor. She looked over her shoulder and then back down at some book she was reading.

"That's Jango Fett," she muttered, and paid me no further attention. Oops.

This being the last day of the convention, the schedule was very light on Lucasfilm-generated content. Most things to see were created by vendors or fans, from droids, action figures, and models to fan films and costumes. One room featured dozens of decorated Darth Vader helmets, much like the ubiquitous cows that appeared on city sidewalks a few years back. Darth as Lady Liberty? Or the Unabomber?

At another booth, as I looked over some artwork, a boy of about 8 or 9 years old walked behind me holding a yoda lightsaber, one of the ones that lights up and makes lightsaber sounds when swung through the air. A booth clerk, in his early forties, stopped the boy.

"The yoda lightsaber?" nodded the man in approval. "Strong choice."

"It's my first one," said the boy, beaming.

"That one's very light," the man explained. "Good for people who use a one-handed fighting technique, like me." He proceeded to demonstrate with some shadow-fencing, but one of his parries smacked me in the back of my head.

"Sorry, man," he said.

"Easy there, Jedi," I said, rubbing my head.

I watched a couple of fan films in the screening room. The ones I saw were all 2005 award winners. "One Season More" is an animated short that imagines Luke Skywalker's yearning to leave Tatooine as a musical number. It has the suitable mix of love and satire that characterizes the best of fan homages. It's one portion of Star Wars The Musical. This year's winners and entries can be seen at AtomFilms.

No plans for a new Star Wars movie were unveiled, but one welcome bit of news was the announcement of a new CG series from Lucasfilm Animation: The Clone Wars. Here's a sneak peek. I really enjoyed the last animated series, Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 1 and Star Wars - Clone Wars, Vol. 2. This looks to be in that style.

Tuesday morning and early afternoon I spent at Disneyland with Alan, Sharon, and my two nephews Ryan and Evan. What do Disney and Lucas have in common? Both appropriated stories and built entertainment empires. Lucas took strands of Japanese film and set them in another universe (Lucas was originally supposed to direct Apocalypse Now, and Star Wars is his version of that movie, about how a small force--the Rebels--can overcome a larger force--the Empire--through sheer force of will). Disney took Grimm's fairy tales, which were indeed grim, and gave them happier endings and an animated life.

Since the last time I visited Disneyland, over 10 years ago, the most apparent change is that the price of admission has more than doubled. But seeing it all through my nephew Ryan's eyes helped me to appreciate just how enduring a piece of culture Disney built. He was so excited he was a live wire--no nap needed on this day.

While sitting with my nephew on It's A Small World, he almost jumped out of the boat he was so pumped up. That ride doesn't look like it's been updated one bit since my parents took me on it when I was a child (I thought perhaps we'd see young children in India answering customer service phones, or Chinese kids sewing Nikes, but the ride retains its idyllic view of the world), and yet it still kills with youngsters.

Something I wondered while wandering the park: what happened to the Mickey Mouse Club? Why isn't that show still running? Look at some of the talent that came out of the sixth and seventh seasons of the most recent incarnation of the show, which ended in 1994: Britney Spears, Christina Aguilera, Justin Timberlake, and Ryan Gosling. That's the pop music equivalent of the 2003 NBA Draft that produced Lebron James, Carmelo Anthony, Dwayne Wade, and Chris Bosh, among others. The Mickey Mouse Club was so competitive that Jessica Simpson and Matt Damon failed to make the cut. I'm not sure why they ceded that space to the likes of American Idol. If Disney doesn't bring back that show, I hope they've at least retained the services of the casting director/talent scout.

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I miss walking the streets of NYC. Google Maps Street View allows me to revisit old favorites. Here's my old apartment.

Microsoft Surface, coming Winter 2007, is one of the early products pointing towards the gesture-manipulated touchscreen interface seen in Minority Report.

An upcoming June software upgrade will allow it you to watch YouTube videos on the AppleTV.

The 2007 Cannes Film Festival winners. From what I've heard from folks who attended, the lineup of movies was very strong this year.

Christopher Nolan is going to shoot some of The Dark Knight in IMAX format. Most features that have been projected in IMAX theatres are simply 35mm films blown up. Since they weren't framed for the IMAX theater, I find many scenes incomprehensible unless you're sitting in the back row. Audiences viewing The Dark Knight at an IMAX theater will see the movie switch aspect ratios from whatever the 35mm aspect ratio is to 1.43 to 1 when the IMAX scenes come on screen.

Based on Gallup Polls, America is willing to elect a black or a woman for president, but if you're gay or an atheist (or both, I presume) your time has not come.

Darren Aronofsky disses the DVD for his movie The Fountain. It doesn't have a commentary, but Aronofsky has said he recorded one himself and will post it online soon so you can listen to it while watching the movie.

as many of you can tell it is light on the extras as compared to my previous dvd releases.

everything at the studio was a struggle.
for instance: they didn't want to do a commentary track cause they felt that it wouldn't help sales.
i didn't have it in me to fight anymore.
whatever.

so:
niko, my friend who did the doc on the dvd came up with a novel idea.
we recorded a commentary track ourselves.
we're gonna post it on a site soon, http coming soon.
you can play it and watch the flick and hopefully you'll enjoy it.

Technorati Tags: Apple, cannes, dvd, film, filmmaking, filmschool, microsoft, movies, music, politics, disney, starwars, tech, tv, video, youtube

The Conciliator

Larissa MacFarquhar profiles Barack Obama in this week's New Yorker.

Technorati Tags: newyorker, politics, obama

Trying to laugh through the tears

Next year, I'm mailing my taxes via UPS or Fedex. Still fuming and on hold waiting for various financial institutions to answer their customer service lines and resend my 1099's. Argh. But through the tears, perhaps a few nuggets of laughter...

The Apple iRack.

Google Maps directions for New York, NY to Paris, France...skip ahead to step 23 (via a Sports Guy reader)

Also funny, from the same Sports Guy column, this box score from the San Antonio-Phoenix NBA game. Skip down to Robert Horry's line for the Spurs.

Ryanair CEO vows to offer flights from the U.S. to the UK for less than $10.30. You'd probably pay more because Ryanair charges for all sorts of basics a la carte, but still.

Some progress today in the fight against global warming.

Jackie and Jet team up (with an assist from Yuen Woo Ping). It would have been a dream of a pairing if they two of them were about 10 to 15 years younger, but we'll take what we can get. Meanwhile, the Weinstein Co. could use some wire work.

Tiger Woods Reveals He Is Zach Johnson.

Technorati Tags: Apple, basketball, google, humor, movies, NBA, golf, sports, theonion, travel

The warrior and the priest

A leading argument among Obama skeptics is his weak showing versus Clinton among blue-collar voters. The op-ed notes that presidential candidates often fall into one of two camps, warriors and priests.

In modern times, the Democratic presidential race has usually pitted a warrior against a priest.

Warrior candidates stress their ability to deliver on kitchen table concerns and revel in political combat. They tout their experience and flout their scars. Their greatest strength is usually persistence, not eloquence; they don't so much inspire as reassure. Think of Harry Truman in 1948, Hubert Humphrey in 1968 and, in a somewhat more diluted fashion, Walter Mondale in 1984 and John Kerry in 2004.

The priests, whose lineage runs back through McCarthy to Adlai Stevenson, present a very different face. They write books and sometimes verse. They observe the campaign's hurly-burly through a filter of cool, witty detachment. Their campaigns become crusades, fueled as much by inchoate longing for a "new politics" as tangible demands for new policies. In the past quarter of a century, Hart, Bradley and the late neo-liberal Paul Tsongas in 1992 each embodied the priest in Democratic presidential politics.

Some candidates transcend these divisions. In 1968, Robert F. Kennedy was a warrior who quoted Aeschylus. Bill Clinton blended a warrior's resiliency with a priest's promise of transformative ("third way") politics. But most Democratic candidates fall clearly on one or the other side of this divide.

Hillary Clinton has firmly positioned herself as a warrior. She wowed the firefighters' convention not through eloquence but passionate declarations of shared commitments. "You were there when we needed you, and I want you to know I will be there when you need me," she insisted. Her campaign already views non-college voters, especially women, as the foundation of her coalition. Her stump speech, centered on a promise to represent "invisible" Americans, targets the economic anxieties of blue-collar families.

Obama's aides resist the collar, but in the early stages, he looks more like a priest. He's written two bestselling books. Like McCarthy, Hart and Howard Dean, he's ignited a brush fire on college campuses. His initial message revolves heavily around eloquent but somewhat amorphous promises of reform and civic renewal. He laments "the smallness of our politics … where power is always trumping principle."

Intrade prediction markets as of today have Clinton at 48.5% of being the 2008 Democratic Presidential Nominee. Obama's odds took a big hit today, dropping 4.6% to 25.2%. Meanwhile, Giuliani is at 40.6% and McCain is down to 23.4%, having lost a ton of ground to Giuliani during 2007.

Technorati Tags: hillaryclinton, politics, obama

Early line on '08 election, Oscars

The NYTimes recently profiled Intrade, a site that acts as a prediction market by allowing trading on political, financial, entertainment, and other events. The Iowa Electronic Markets didn't do so hot in the '04 election, as I recall, but I still have a fair level of confidence in the accuracy of prediction markets.

Intrade's most traded contracts are those for the '08 election, and as of today, the odds look like this:

Chance of being the Democratic Presidential Nominee:
51.5% Hillary Clinton
22.0% Barack Obama
11.7% John Edwards
7.0% Al Gore
0.7% Mark Warner
0.3% John Kerry

Chance of being the Republican Presidential Nominee
34.0% John McCain
26.8% Rudy Giuliani
18.6% Mitt Romney
1.1% Condoleeza Rice

As for the Oscars, according to Intrade it doesn't appear there will be much suspense on Oscar Night in any major categy except Best Picture, perhaps. The other categories seem locked up already (best actress and actor having been decided so long ago that to cut down on the runtime of the show they should probably just have Helen Mirren and Forrest Whitaker on stage to present themselves with the trophies):
Best Director - Scorsese is trading at 79.1%
Best Actor - Whitaker at 82.0%
Best Actress - Mirren at 91.5%
Best Supporting Actor - Eddie Murphy at 60.5%
Best Supporting Actress - Jennifer Hudson is around 77 or 78% in light trading

An Inconvenient Truth should have no problems in the Best Documentary category, either. The volume of trading on the Oscars is so light, however, that I'd take the absolute %'s with a grain of salt.

Technorati Tags: acting, economics, film, movies, politics, markets

A dirty, poorly lit place

I'm in a dark dark place that I'll just refer to as pre-production. What I wouldn't give to have a line producer or two working for me. It's going to be a long, sleepless week and a half.

So while I'm in this dark dark place, I'll probably go dark here as well. Looks as if the New Yorker has a few interesting articles. Here are some of those and well as a handful of others for you to read while I try to fight my way to freedom.

It takes guts to speak out against Vladimir Putin.

"Good People" is a new short story by David Foster Wallace.

From the archives: David Remnick interviews Barack Obama.

Revisiting Obama at Harvard Law School: a preview of how he'd be as a candidate? (NYTimes)

Bruce Schneier speaks of the value of security theater. (Wired)

Free Font Manifesto.

Technorati Tags: dfw, fiction, film school, filmmaking, newyorker, Obama, politics, font, security

Obama will announce presidential run details on Feb 10

From an e-mail from Barack Obama's camp:

Dear Friend,

As you may know, over the last few months I have been thinking hard about my plans for 2008. Running for the presidency is a profound decision - a decision no one should make on the basis of media hype or personal ambition alone - and so before I committed myself and my family to this race, I wanted to be sure that this was right for us and, more importantly, right for the country.

...

I certainly didn't expect to find myself in this position a year ago. But as I've spoken to many of you in my travels across the states these past months; as I've read your emails and read your letters; I've been struck by how hungry we all are for a different kind of politics.And that's why I wanted to tell you first that I'll be filing papers today to create a presidential exploratory committee. For the next several weeks, I am going to talk with people from around the country, listening and learning more about the challenges we face as a nation, the opportunities that lie before us, and the role that a presidential campaign might play in bringing our country together. And on February 10th, at the end of these decisions and in my home state of Illinois, I'll share my plans with my friends, neighbors and fellow Americans.

I've chatted with a couple of friends about a potential Presidential run by Obama, and we all felt that this was the right time for him to run. It's rare for a politician to inspire such ardent backing from the public. The most oft-cited weakness of his presidential resume is his scant political experience, but to my mind that might be a strength.

A longer voting record in the Senate only gives opponents ammunition (already potential opponents have picked out bits and pieces of his voting record to try to tarnish his halo). When one of the only negatives the press can trump up about a candidate is the fact that he smokes, he's in good shape. Obama has a self-effacing charm that can probably turn attacks like that into positives.

There was a time I thought Colin Powell could have run for president and won. Instead he joined the Bush Administration and built up political experience. It didn't quite work out the way most everyone imagined it would. That's not to say Obama as a state Senator could suffer the same type of political damage, but to imagine that the stars will still be aligned this perfectly four years from now is risky.

Technorati Tags: barackobama, politics

Saddam Hussein executed

Saddam Hussein executed. More from the NYTimes.

Technorati Tags: international, news, politics

RIP RA

Last week (or was it the week before?), on my way into school, I was listening to NPR when I heard that Robert Altman had passed away. We'd just watched a print of his Nashville the week before for class, and his passing saddened me much more than most celebrity deaths. He seemed like such an avuncular soul, and perhaps his death resonates so much because he was a director sui generis. Who else could have made Nashville? And who would've thought that Emilio Estevez, of all people, would try to channel Altman and Nashville?

Can you spot all 75 bands represented in this photo?

What policy issues do most economists agree on?

I saw Mabou Mines DollHouse tonight, a truly unconventional adaptation of Ibsen's A Doll's House, source of the most famous door slam in literary history. In this Lee Breuer version, all the male characters are played by little people, none taller than four and a half feet. The women, on the other hand, are played by very tall women. I don't see much avant-garde theater, but I recognize it when I see it. The only Ibsen play I've read is Hedda Gabler, but I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that Krogstadt doesn't get a blow job from Kristine in Ibsen's original text. And I can't imagine another production of this play that could elicit more laughter. Not all of Breuer's choices spoke to me, but it's been a while since I've seen a production with as many ideas that got me thinking long after I'd left the theater.

Yep, there's no shortage of Obama 2008 paraphernalia at Cafe Press.

Technorati Tags: economics, film, filmmaking, movies, music, Obama, play, politics, barackobama, puzzle, theater

Midterms

Heath Shuler, that's right, Heath Shuler, with cumulative NFL career totals of 15 TDs and 33 INTs, wins a House of Representatives seat for the Democrats in North Carolina.

I'm embarrassed to admit this, but I tend to know more about various models of televisions I'm considering purchasing than I do the candidates I'm voting for. Not that I didn't try to put in some research. Since school started, I've been so buried in school projects and shoots that I had to cram for an hour and a half before hitting the polls tonight. I sifted through the three thousand or so flyers I received in the mail, and I surfed online to see who various outlets were endorsing.

The more I read, the less I knew. It's not hard to find objective information on products online, but the candidates we're trying to elect? Most readily available information on them seems to be propaganda. The web has revolutionized lots of activities, especially retail, but I don't think it has made comparable leaps in helping voters to understand what their candidates are all about.

But I could be wrong. If you know of good sites on this topic, send them my way. Or perhaps it's just the nature of politics to take a stab in the dark, using indicators like political party as a sort of shorthand.

Technorati Tags: football, news, politics, vote

Stay the, uh, course

On the way to class this morning, I heard the following sound clip (it comes at the end of that minute and a half clip) from White House Press Secretary Tony Snow, relaying President Bush's intention to retire the phrase "stay the course" when describing his Iraq policy.

Because it let the wrong impression about what was going on. And it allowed critics to say well here's an administration that's embarked a policy of not looking at what the situation is, when in fact, it's just the opposite. The president is determined not to leave Iraq short of victory but he also understands that it's important to capture the dynamism of the efforts that have been ongoing to make Iraq more secure and therefore enhance, uh, the clarification, or the greater precision.

It's more amusing when heard live. I wonder if Snow cries in front of his mirror every morning.

The rise of YouTube allows everyone to post their own Daily Show-esque comedic video montages: stay the course. Continuity is not necessarily some virtue; politicians should change their minds and messages as their understanding of situations changes. But to say "we never said that" when people can so easily pull footage of you saying exactly that just makes you look like an ass. In the last election the Bush team nailed Kerry on his flip-flop on the Iraq vote, so seeing them sweat and squirm while issuing all these false denials feels like the proper circle of hell for them to stew in.

P.S.: Firefox 2.0 has been released officially.

The Agent

New Yorker issues have a tendency of piling up around my place when I travel or when I'm busy as I can never bring myself to toss them out. Sometimes that can seem like a tactical error, as in times like these when I'm moving and have to lug about 275 pounds of unread back issues to the recycling bins in the basement.

But lying on my bare mattress now (all the sheets, pillows, just about everything is packed in boxes), I'm glad I saved the July 10/17 issue from last month. In it was an article titled "The Agent," (PDF) an excerpt adapted from Lawrence Wright's new nonfiction book The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11.

Though I'm exhausted from days of packing, the article, which I just finished reading at three in the morning, stunned me, introducing two characters and a story that will break your heart with how close we came to anticipating and perhaps stopping 9/11. We had all the puzzle pieces to assemble a picture of Al-Qaeda terrorists in our midst, but they were held by different U.S. intelligence agencies, and we couldn't assemble them into a picture of looming terror because of self-imposed bureaucratic walls that kept the CIA and FBI from sharing information. Our intelligence agencies, with their silly infighting, failed us.

Two charismatic characters are at the center of this story. Ali Soufan is the Agent, a Lebanese-American Muslim FBI agent whose Arabic language skills and tenacity made him one of our nation's leading assets in the fight against Al Qaeda. John O'Neill was the head of the F.B.I.'s National Security Division, figures more prominently in The Looming Tower, but also appears in "The Agent."

Soufan is the hero of "The Agent." O'Neill put in charge of investigating the bombing of the U.S.S.. cole in Aden, Yemen, in October, 2000. Soufan's investigation unearthed tracks that led back to Al-Qaeda in Afghanistan. The CIA, in the meantime, learned of an Al-Qaeda meeting in Malaysia and learned of two Al-Qaeda operatives, Khaled al-Mihdhar and Nawaf al-Hazmi. Mihdhar had a U.S. Visa. The CIA did not inform the FBI about the two of them, and so they slipped into the U.S. unnoticed. The CIA does not have authority to operate within the U.S., so once Mihdhar and Hazmi were on U.S. soil, they were the province of the FBI, or would have been, had the CIA alerted the FBI to their presence.

In June of 2001, Ali Soufan sat in a meeting with CIA colleagues and was shown photos from the secret meeting in Malaysia. Among those in the pictures were Mihdhar and Hazmi, but Soufan did not know of them yet, and the CIA shared little except to see if the FBI knew of them. Another photo of the Malaysia meeting, displaying an Al Qaeda jihadi named Khallad, was not shown. Soufan and his team had a huge file on Khallad, who they suspected of being one of the masterminds of the U.S.S. Cole bombing. Had the CIA shown Soufan that photo, he could have connected the dots.

On August 27th, 2001, Nawaf al-Hazmi and his brother Salem purchased airplane tickets for American Flight 77 on Travelocity.com. Mihdhar also purchased a ticket for that flight online. They did not bother disguising their names, as they were not on the FBI terrorist watchlist.

Twenty months after their arrival in Los Angeles, on September 11, 2001, Mihdhar and Hazmi went to Washington Dulles International Airport. Hazmi set off the metal detector at the airport and was hand-screened, and Hazmi and Mihdhar were both flagged for an additional security screening at the gate, but both passed and boarded American Flight 77. One hour into the flight, the hijacked Boeing 757 crashed into the Pentagon, killing all 64 on the flight and 125 people in the building.

Immediately after 9/11, Soufan was told to find out who had perpetrated the hijackings. On September 12, 2001, he was handed an envelope with full details of the meeting in Malaysia. When Soufan realized that the CIA had known that Mihdhar and Hazmi, two of the hijackers, had been living in the United States for 20 months, "he ran into the bathroom and threw up." Wright notes: "Soufan's disillusionment with the government was so profound that he eventually quite the bureau; in 2005, he became director of international operations for Giuliani Security and Safety, a company founded by Rudolph W. Giuliani, the former mayor of New York."

John O'Neill is an even greater tragic figure in the story of 9/11. His story is almost too unbelievable to be true. Perhaps no one in the FBI was more obsessed with the rising threat of Al Qaeda, but on August 22, 2001, O'Neill left the FBI after it was reported that his briefcase containing sensitive documents was stolen during an FBI conference in Florida. Though it was later found and though it was determined that none of the confidential material had been compromised, his career at the FBI was ruined.

O'Neill left to take a job as the head of security at The World Trade Center. On September 11, 2001, just after American Airlines flight 11 flew into the north tower, John O'Neill received a call from his son who could see the smoke through a train window. O'Neill told his son he was fine and that he was going to assess the damage. After United Flight 175 hit the south tower, O'Neill called his girlfriend Valerie james, distraught. Yet later, at 9:25am, O'Neill called another woman he had been close to, Anne DiBattista, saying he was okay.

"The connection was good at the beginning," she recalled. "He was safe and outside. He said he was O.K. I said, 'Are you sure you're out of the building?' He told me he loved me. I knew he was going to go back in."

Another FBI agent, Wesley Wong, ran into O'Neill outside the north tower. She last saw him headed towards the south tower.

On September 28, 2001, O'Neill's body was found in the rubble of the World Trade Center. Wright reports:

...a thousand mourner gathered at St. Nicholas to say farewell. Many of them were agents and policemen and members of foreign intelligence services who had followed O'Neill into the war against terrorism long before it became a rallying cry for the nation. The hierarchy of the F.B.I attended, including the now retired director Louis Freeh. Richard Clarke, who says that he had not shed a tear since September 11th, suddenly broke down when the bagpipes played and the casket passed by.

For some reason, perhaps because I've come to adore New York City, I can't stop reading about 9/11. I've read the The 9/11 Commission Report in text form, and I'll probably reread it in its graphic adaptation. 9/11 and the events that led up to that day continue to haunt me, and Lawrence Wright's account The Looming Tower, which I've just begun, promises to be the best account to date. I'm not doing justice to his reporting here, so delve into "The Agent" if you want a sampling. Soufan is a fascinating character in many ways, particularly in his interrogation techniques, which demonstrate that torture is hardly the only way to extract information from suspects (torture has long been known to yield unreliable info). Soufan engages his subjects, demonstrates his knowledge and understanding of them and their cultural background, and uses his intelligence to checkmate them.

In the stories of Soufan, O'Neill, and bin Laden, there is a Syriana/Munich-style tragedy to be made. In fact, with its story of thwarted investigations and global conspiracies, it's the 9/11 movie I would have expected Oliver Stone to make, though from what I've heard his World Trade Center movie is a great departure for him.

Here is an online only interview with Lawrence Wright which came out at the same time as "The Agent." Here's a comprehensive list of Wright's articles for The New Yorker, including many on Al Qaeda. PBS Frontline came out with a documentary on O'Neill called "The Man Who Knew" and it's available online (Real Player and Windows Media).

Two sides

James Surowiecki decries massive and inefficient Department of Defense spending.

One more study supporting the idea that experts are made more often than they're born.

Da Da Da

When they come out with that list of 10 worst jobs next year, I think being a defense lawyer for Saddam Hussein has to make the cut.

Why do U.S. doctors continue to misdiagnose fatal illnesses about 20% of the time? Perhaps because the current medical system offers no incentives to improve.

A deadly flu from Asia strikes America. There is no cure, and if you catch it, and you have a 10% chance of dying. If you take a vaccine, it will protect you, but there' s a 5% chance the vaccine will kill you. What do you do? The correct answer is to take the vaccine, of course, but patients choose correctly more often if choosing for someone else than for themselves. Not entirely surprising. It's tough to think big picture when you're smack dab in the frame.
UPDATE: Sorry, as one of my readers John points out, I should have said you have a 10% chance of dying. That's not conditional on catching the flu or not. Otherwise you'd need to know what the chances of catching the flu are.

Using similarity scores, Richard Lu rates the NBA prospects coming out from the NCAA this year. At the top of the list? Ronnie Brewer. LaMarcus Aldridge ranked 6, Brandon Roy 8, and Tyrus Thomas 11. Overall, the similarity scores confirm what most people have said, that this is a weak draft.

Yes, Dan Brown is a terrible writer. But one popular indictment of his mega-bestseller is unfair. Referring to Leonardo as "da Vinci" in the title is not the same as referring to Jesus as "of Nazareth" (as explained here by Geoff Nunberg of The Language Log). You don't need a linguistics PhD to know this, though. People refer to me as "da man" all the time, and I'm totally cool with that.

The top 10 ultimate grills. At number one on the list is the gorgeous specimen pictured below:

This backyard set from Lynx Professional Grills has a 42" grill with access doors, double burner, storage drawers, warming drawer, beverage area with outdoor refrigerator, ice machine, and cocktail pro (a bar area with sink and faucet).

Now they've got the dong

North Korea has caused a stir by announcing that it plans to test a long-range missile called the Taepodong 2.

Yes, that's right, the Taepodong, which is pronounced type-o-dong. I've heard of world leaders and their nuclear weapons discussed as boys comparing penis sizes on the playground of the world, but this is too literal for comfort.

Well, at least Hawaii is still safe.

Revisiting 2 Nov 2004

Reserve your pair of Blu Fom sneakers commemorating Core77's eleventh anniversary. A collaboration between Fila and Core77, the limited run of 300 sneakers is available from Core77.

Google Sketchup is now available for Mac OS X. Google Earth Release 4 is now in beta.

Did Bush steal the 2004 election? Robert F. Kennedy Jr. thinks so. Cat Power, after her concert Friday night, told the audience to go out and read this article. Farhad Manjoo of Salon thinks Kennedy is off base. Then Kennedy and Manjoo traded another series of verbal parries.

Brushed chrome kitchen appliances are so yesterday. Give me a cast-iron range (really, because I can't afford it).

Looks like Sutton Foster is finally getting her own domain name to replace the Geocities page that was the top Google result for her name. She deserves the upgrade, Geocities being the trailer park of the Internet. I saw her in The Drowsy Chaperone Sunday and in Thoroughly Modern Millie a few years back. She's a charmer, and her story is the stuff of movies: unknown pulled out of the chorus to play the lead.

Rock, Paper, Scissors

Google Browser Sync is a Firefox plugin that syncs your Firefox browser settings across all your computers. Useful to me because I'm always bouncing between my desktop and laptop.

Al Qaeda leader Zarqawi is dead, killed in an air strike north of Baghdad.

Jon Stewart vs. Bill Bennett on gay marriage. If you wanted to send someone from the right to match wits with Jon Stewart on this issue, Bill Bennett probably isn't on the shortlist.

The Yoda backpack makes it seem as if Yoda is hanging on your back so you can look like Luke in The Empire Strikes Back. Pair this with a Force FX lightsaber and, well, you might as well lop off your manhood and put it in that backpack because it won't be getting any use.

Speaking of Star Wars, the DVDs for the original, unaltered Star Wars trilogy, Eps IV through VI, are being released in September, and the fans are already killing them with customer reviews on Amazon.com. All three DVDs currently average about 2 out of 5 stars in customer ratings. It's not just that fans are being forced to buy yet another set of Star Wars DVDs but that the original, unaltered movies will be released in non-anamorphic widescreen and will not have a new Dolby Digital 5.1 sound mix. Some fans say it's just the original laserdisc transfer (I own those laserdiscs, by the way). Oh, the horror.

An online strategy guide to rock, paper, scissors. There's even a book in print called The Official Rock Paper Scissors Strategy Guide. I went to a book reading/signing by Steven Levitt and Stephen Dubner today. It was fun to finally meet them in person. They mentioned that they're going to write a sequel to Freakonomics to be titled SuperFreakonomics. Their talk strayed to the topic of rock, paper, scissors. Phil Gordon is going to throw a $50,000 rock, paper, scissors tournament so Levitt can study the play. It just so happens that Levitt is studying the human ability or inability to randomize. He mentioned some initial studies that indicated that football (I think he meant European football) players are superior strategy randomizers. He's not sure why. If given 4 strategies to employ against each other, the optimal mix is something like 40/20/20/20 (or so Levitt said), and football players do that naturally. Rock, paper, scissors is a good test of that human ability. Gordon believes that some people are gifted randomizers and can consistently win at rock, paper, scissors, but it sounds like Levitt's skeptical since different people make the rock, paper, scissors finals each year.

Chip Kidd is the guest blogger at PowellsBooks this week. Among the his to-do's for the week:

• Design a cover for Christina Garcia's forthcoming novel, A Handbook to Luck.
• Construct and photograph a miniature set for Martin Amis's new novel, House of Meetings. By Thursday morning.
• Redesign a poster for a Pedro Almodovar film festival.
• Do the mechanical for Robert Hughes's Goya, newly in paperback.
• Get an approval on a jacket for a book on the history of relations between Jews, Muslims and Christians in the Middle East (by Zachary Karabell).
• Do research on a poster for Sofia Coppola's upcoming film, Marie Antoinette (I'm so, so behind on this and Sony's being very patient).
• Design a cover for a play by Cormac McCarthy, entitled Sunset Limited.
• Do same for Kim Deitch's new graphic novel, Alias The Cat, which I am also editing. And which rules.
• Reconfigure my design for the Surprise CD by Paul Simon in order to adapt it to, of all things, vinyl.

Even Danny Meyer's wife and kids have to wait in line at the Shake Shack.

A couple links

Two products with cool design: this "blind date" calendar and this lumen tree.

"Nostalgia" by George Saunders.

Yesterday, Golf World's Masters Performance Index predicted a Vijay Singh win at the Masters. That prediction's sitting pretty today, but there's a whole lot of golf left.

Gospel of Judas found. Did Jesus ask Judas to betray him?

Bush authorized Plamegate leak says Scooter Libby.

42

Lots of exciting finishes in March Madness this year, no doubt. Color me George Mason green and yellow. Just remember, Cinderella may wear a glass slipper, but you still should have her remove them at the door.

More on the Final Four: of the over 3 million entries in ESPN.com's Tournament Challenge, 4 people picked all four teams in the Final Four correctly. About 2/3 of entrants didn't pick a single one of the Final Four teams. I wonder how many of the 284 people who picked George Mason to win it all actually go to or went to the school.

Maybe 42 really is the answer to the secret of the universe?

The proper way to pour ketchup.

Everyone thanks those in our volunteer army who are fighting in Iraq, but if a draft were instituted, everyone would raise bloody hell. During times of peace, signing up for the military seems like a decent deal, but these days, the Army is missing its recruiting numbers despite lowering its standards and raising its cash bonuses. It's one of the ugly truths about the Iraq war: those who fight the war are the ones who don't have more attractive options. The issue is close to my heart because one of my editing class projects was Edet Beltzberg's upcoming documentary on army recruiting. Much of that footage was wrenching to watch.

Eric Haney, one of the founding members of Delta Force, gives a karate chop to the throat of the current Administration for the war on Iraq. I'm almost done reading Inside Delta Force, his account of the founding of Delta Force and his years in service. The book is in the news now because David Mamet used it as inspiration for his new TV show "The Unit" on CBS. The book isn't quite as thrilling as I thought it would be, mainly because Haney can't reveal a lot of classified methods and anecdotes. As for the TV show, I'm not so sure all the actors are cut out to deliver Mamet-ese. I enjoy his dialogue much like I enjoy a bloody chunk of prime grade beef, but in the hands of the wrong cook, even the finest cut of beef can be turned into lunch room salisbury steak. Haney's dismissal of the effectiveness of torture is a damning indictment of the abuses at Abu Ghraib from a different perspective--torture doesn't gain effective intelligence, Jack Bauer notwithstanding.

This might be the coolest bath toy you could buy for your toddler. I wonder if human fear of snakes is innate or arises from reading the Bible or watching movies like Anaconda, a movie which mostly developed my fear of Jon Voight in a ponytail.

Movies from Sundance always seem to be trickling into theaters. Brick was one of the consensus group favorites of our Sundance crew two years ago, though I thought the conceit of setting a film noir in high school lost its novelty appeal by film's end, giving way to a somewhat unsatisfying potboiler ending. Still, it's a gas to hear high school kids spewing hard-boiled dialogue, and what better place to transfer the stock characters of film noir than high school, a time in our lives when most of us were trying on personas in a massive game of social fencing. As compared to most multiplex fare, Brick is joltingly fresh. The movie won the Originality of Vision award at Sundance, and that was the appropriate honor to bestow on that movie.

Thank You For Smoking is the latest of this year's Sundance babies to hit the big screen. Like Brick, the movie sprints out of the blocks with gorgeous opening credits and loses breath by the finish. No one wears sleaze better than Aaron Eckhart, though, and the movie shares his charming cynicism. Until Nick Naylor (Eckhart) loses his nerve, the movie is a pleasant smartass. Rob Lowe and Adam Brody as a CAA agent and his assistant had industry insiders at Sundance crying with laughter. For those who want Eckhart neat, instead of on the rocks, try In the Company of Men, in which he played one of the more memorable characters many people have never heard of.

David Bordwell wants more from contemporary film criticism. More than just opinions or insights, he wants to learn approximately true things about film. Something tells me the two movie blurbs above probably don't meet his standard.

James sent me a link to this amazing single hand of poker between Phil Ivey and Paul Jackson. Whereas many players hide behind sunglasses, Ivey eschews them in favor of his cold, piercing gaze, against which sunglasses might be the only defense against going blind.

Deep Note

These past few months, I've been staring at a computer screen for so many hours that my vision is starting to go. I find myself wearing my glasses more and more often, and though they are so mild as to be almost cosmetic, it still feels like a defeat. The default font size in Final Cut Pro is tiny, but thus far, I've refused to give in and blow it up. A few times during the day, I go and stare out the window and try to focus on something far off in the distance. Inevitably, my visual target remains blurry, much the way some childhood memories become with each passing year.

***

I try to refrain from political ranting here, but it does amaze me how much our Prez seems to get away with. Even when he's caught in bald-faced lies, even when he's wiretapping us, even when the iconic image of the Iraq war the world over is of a prisoner being tortured, the next day it always seems to be back to normal (V for Vendetta, which I saw last Thursday night at the Lincoln Square IMAX, is more than a bit absurd, but that any of it even has any resonance with the current administration is outrageous). Perhaps there's some sort of political equilibrium point, such that a constant onslaught of negative news tends to diminish each in significance, the way that most people in the world rate themselves as roughly equal in happiness, despite the wide disparity in living conditions.

Well, "incompetent" is at least a start.

***

An alcohol concentration of 60% or higher seems to be the magic number for off-the-shelf hand sanitizers.

***

I know kung fu. Not quite. But sort of.

***

Wake-up calls from Maria Sharapova? Did anyone else try these or was I the only doofus? This supplied some of the motivation I needed on my voyage back from graveyard shift hours to normal hours. Unfortunately these seem to have been discontinued.

***

Tonight I went to the premiere of Lucky Number Slevin at the Ziegfeld Theater. I hadn't seen a movie at the Ziegfeld before; it's gorgeous. The screen isn't as massive as that of Cinerama, but the seats and interior are much more cozy and plush, with a classy old school styling, and the sound system is first rate. Definitely the nicest theater I've visited in NYC, though the Lincoln Square IMAX is impressive as well, more for its technical specifications.

Back to the movie. I saw it at Sundance in January, but what I'd forgotten is that the soundtrack is by J. Ralph, his first effort for the silver screen. He's most well-known from his song "One Million Miles Away," featured in the famous Volkswagen Jetta commercial "Big Day" (Quicktime). You can hear "One Million Miles Away" and other J. Ralph tunes at his website (which allows you to stream most of his tunes) or on his MySpace page (which only streams four of his songs).

His Lucky Number Slevin soundtrack is ear-catching. For some reason, he appears to have something against Amazon.com as the soundtrack is an exclusive to Barnes and Noble. It releases next Tuesday.

As I was seated and waiting for the movie to start, my phone rang. I thought it was Scott, who'd promised to call when he'd made it into the theater, so I immediately picked up and said, "I'm in row F, seat 12."

"Um, I'm looking for Eugene Wei?"

"Yep, I'm in row F, seat 12, I just stood up. You see me waving?"

"Uh, no. Actually, I'm calling from ___, and I wanted to chat with you about your application. I'm a professor there."

"Oh. Oops. Oh my gosh. I'm so sorry."

We went on to have an over-the-phone interview in the theater, while throngs of people milled about socializing and looking for their seats. Thankfully these things never start on time, and everyone was absorbed with scanning the theater for any of the many stars in the movie. My mind was racing and the environment was distracting. Maybe I should have postponed the call. Too late now; I'll be second-guessing myself for a few weeks.

He seemed like a really friendly guy. His specialty was sound, and he'd done lots of work for THX. I told him my favorite THX trailer, other than the original Deep Note (WMV), was the one featuring The Simpsons, the one that ends with Grampa Simpson standing up and shouting, "Turn it up! Turn it up!". I've never been able to find that on DVD, though he said it was out there somewhere. The THX Deep Note is one of my ten favorite sounds in the world. When I hear it, I just stand up and raise my arms in joy, always embarrassing for whoever is with me at the movie theater.

Someday, at the symphony, I'd love it if the orchestra, just before beginning the concert, all joined in to play the THX Deep Note, maybe before playing something like Shostakovich's 5th.

Whatever People Say I Am Thats What I Am Not

Google Pages is a free, online web page creation tool.

Whatever People Say I Am Thats What I Am Not, the mega-hyped new album from maybe the most hyped new band of the last year, released yesterday. The good news is the album is a whole lot of damn fun, and the hype is forgivable because the band allowed MP3s of their tunes to float around the Internet for a long time before they released their work. That helped to build the buzz and a fan base. Even before their CD released, they sold out a few concerts in NYC before most people could hit redial on their phone. It helps to be good, yes, but it also helps to realize how to feed the machine that is the Web hype monster with some choice cuts. Cheap, efficient marketing.

NYTimes food critic Frank Bruni reviews NYC's midtown Hooters in his new blog. "They may wear skimpy attire, but they have big hearts."

The Manhattan Trader Joe's could be opening in mid-March, ahead of schedule. Some localization will occur: Two-buck Chuck will be three-buck Chuck due to Manhattan inflation.

Tiger Woods annihilates his first opponent in The Accenture Match Play Championship, 9 & 8 (basically, Tiger won every hole of the match, nine in a row, with 7 birdies and 2 pars). Even I, with my terrible game, might have been able to eek out a tie on one hole on the front 9. Before the match, Ames had made a comment about Tiger's driving to the press, saying, "Anything can happen, especially where he's hitting the ball." After the match, when asked if he had any response to Ames' comments, Tiger responded, "9 & 8." Just this once, it would have been great if trash talking was allowed in golf. Every time Tiger sank a birdie putt, he could've turned to Ames and said, "How do you like where I hit that ball, you $*@#!?" Everyone knows if trash talking were allowed, Tiger would be even more dominant than he is. He'd be like Jordan, just cruel and relentless.

I forgot to point out yesterday that Sports Guy's latest column, summarizing his NBA All-Star Weekend trip, was awesome.

236 phrases/keywords censored by a Chinese blogging service. Among them:

• Set fires to force people to relocate
• Hire a killer to murder one's wife
• Fetus soup

Two more 'staches

Two more reasons 2005 was the year of the mustache.

His name is, well, you know. His mustache transformed him into a big TV star.

This guy's name is עמיר פרץ. His mustache promoted him to top dog of the Labor Party in Israel.

Trailer park

If you're a member of Netflix and a friend and I haven't added you to my Netflix friends list, drop me a note. I enjoy the quizzes about my friends' tastes.

***

Trailer (high def or std) for Mel Gibson's next directorial effort, Apocalypto, about the end of the Mayan civilization. Wow, I'm speechless. I really don't have anything to say about that.

***

I love when David Letterman gets serious. I wish I'd seen this segment, in which Letterman landed a few body blows on Bill O'Reilly (YouTube video clip). Letterman even displays a stronger grasp of logic than O'Reilly, who tries to exonerate the CIA's intelligence failure on Iraq by saying MI-6, Putin's intelligence agency, and the intelligence of Mubarak's agency in Egypt all made the same errors.

Letterman: "Well then that makes it all right?"

***

Jet Li's next and perhaps final martial arts movie: Fearless. Trailer under the Media link (click on Media and then click on the Trailer link below the Story button). His run of American movies was a disaster (as were those of most of the Hong Kong and China action stars and directors who sought out Hollywood), but when teamed with Chinese directors and focused on martial arts period pieces, his batting average is quite good. Ronny Yu and Yuen Wo Ping...I'm going to go see this.

Every year, I hear a rumor that Jet Li is going to retire and become a monk. I'm okay with that, as long as a band of evil martial artists attack his monastery, forcing him to come out of retirement to whup their butts. And, oh yeah, as long as movie cameras are rolling to capture every ass-kicking moment. If that happens, then I'm totally cool with that.

***

Teaser for Michael Mann's Miami Vice feature film starring Colin Farrell and Jamie Foxx. I'm not sure I wanted my fond memories of the television show to be tainted by a revisit with new actors (Farrell's Fu Manchu doesn't feel right, and "You understand the meaning of the word verboten? As in badness is happening right now." really doesn't go down easy), but I've not passed up a Michael Mann simmering testosterone hotpot in the past and I probably won't start now.

Back when I was in the fifth and sixth grade, sneaking over to a friend's house to watch an ep of Miami Vice was one of the great illicit joys in life. Yes, I led a sheltered youth.

Bodacious

That Peyton Manning commercial for Mastercard makes me cringe. In it, Peyton seeks the autograph of a grocery store clerk and feigns ecstasy when a hardware store employee tosses him his apron. Having a multi-millionaire athlete satirize the anonymity of the common man? Priceless.

***

Sportscenter aired a segment on Bodacious, one of the most feared rodeo bulls of all time. The footage of him bucking cowboys off of his back like rag dolls was awesome (and I don't mean that in the modern sense of mega-cool). Here's a short homage to Bodacious which includes the key highlights from his life, including his conquest of famed bull-rider Tuff Hedeman. Bodacious broke every bone in Hedeman's face, and the next time the two were to meet, Tuff climbed off when they opened the gates, essentially waving the white flag.

How did bull-riding start? What cowboy thought to himself, "Hey, let's put an electric prod to that bull's testicles and then see how long I can hang on its back before it either tosses me and tramples me or headbutts me in the face, cracking my skull like a coconut?" Someone on the prarie was smoking some serious peyote.

***

One of the first things I do upon arriving in Southern California is to hit In-N-Out, home of America's most beloved burger. I'm embarrassed to admit, though, that it wasn't until this most recent visit for Thanksgiving that I heard of and sampled something off of their secret menu.

I went for a burger Animal Style, and my receipt actually read "ANIMAL STYLE". A burger prepared thus contains a layer of sauteed onions embedded in the melted cheese. I enjoyed it, though it unleashed hell on my digestive system. James tried getting his fries Animal Style; it didn't really work. All you could taste were the onions.

***

Over Thanksgiving break, our family was discussing what book should serve as the next nominee in our unofficial family book club. Every so often, one book gets passed from one kid to the other until all the siblings have read it. Given our diverse tastes, it takes a special book to make the rounds; fiction novels seem to be the most palatable across the board. The first book to complete our circuit was Atonement, and currently crossing home plate is The Time Traveler's Wife.

One book that came up just a few kids short was The Life of Pi. It was originally to be adapted for the silver screen by M. Night Shyamalan. Now it's in the hands of Jean-Pierre Jeunet. I was intrigued to see the Shyamalan version. The book has, in its own way, a big twist of an ending. When I heard Shyamalan was directing, I could already picture how he'd reveal the twist in a Keyser Soze-like moment.

I would have preferred Shyamalan direct, if for no other reason than that Jeunet's sensibility doesn't mesh with mine. Regardless, I want to see the movie to see how Jeunet interprets the book, and he will have fun with the fantasy imagery. I'm always surprised at how many people interpret the book in vastly different ways--the ending seems to strongly favor one interpretation of all the events that came before. The book accompanied me for a week through New Zealand in 2003 after I picked it up from a Borders in Auckland. I'd like to flip through it again to refresh my recollection of the details, but my copy seems to have disappeared.

On the bright side, with Jeunet on board, we're spared the possibility that Shyamalan might have cast himself as the lead.

***

Michel Gondry's next movie, The Science of Sleep, sounds interesting, and joy of joys, it will be at Sundance!

Ticket packages for the first half of Sundance sold out in a day this year. I had a lottery time on day two and got shut out. If you have enough friends also entering the lottery, you can pool resources, but the festival is outgrowing its capacity. Every year its popularity rises some more, and every year the scrum for tickets and accommodations becomes that much more onerous.

***

Thank goodness, we can finally sleep at night: Congress is looking into the "deeply flawed" BCS system. Hey, I'm a guy, I like sports, but it's ridiculous that our elected officials spend time investigating sports issues like steroids in baseball and the college football post-season format.

***

I'm always a big fan of Filmoculous's list of year-end lists. Here's his compilation for 2005. Among them is the short-list for Time's Person of the Year. My money's on either Mother Nature or The Google Guys.

$900 phones, $200 crayons, and a $1.50 sponge

Pre-order the Nokia 8801 from Neiman Marcus for $899(!?!). It's a gorgeous handset, but that price is absurd. Cell phones don't seem to have advanced much in a long time, other than getting skinnier. Still only a half megapixel digital camera in this one. All I want is a cell phone with a slim profile, half-decent digital camera, quad-band capability so I can use it all over the world, the ability to send text messages and photos, and a simple-to-use on-screen interface. I'm not sure I've seen the phone yet that combines all these features. Why are handset mfrs focused on all sorts of other useless features?

We watched The Cutting Edge - The Magic of Movie Editing in class. Very similar in content to Edge Codes.com: The Art of Motion Picture Editing, which we saw the previous week. I prefer the former, and it has the added benefit of being on DVD now.

Yes, Barneys Baby New York has just what that newborn needs, a $200 crayon set. Or you can go with the classic Crayola box of 64 for $5.49, and it comes with a built-in sharpener, too.

When you stay with someone and they give you towels, do you really have to have a hand towel and washcloth?

Watch a webcast of an operation before you undergo one.

The coolest household cleaning product since the Swiffer is the Mr. Clean Magic Eraser. Just soak the sponge in water, and proceed to clean bathroom and kitchen surfaces with a bit of light scrubbing. I have no idea how it works, but I suspect dark arts. Whatever, my stovetop is clean, and that's all that matters.

A great interview with Singapore's prime minister Lee Kuan Yew in which he presents an incisive view of China's future on the global stage, among other topics.

March of the lemmings

Wolfram Tones: Create music based on Stephen Wolfram's A New Kind of Science. Download them as ring tones if you like. Many of them do sound like ring tones, actually. It reminds me of GarageBand with a random music generator. Not stuff I'd listen to all the time, but it's interesting to click on the various music genre buttons to see how much it resembles what you think of as country or r&b or classical. Someday perhaps there will be a Computer Idol competition. On a somewhat related note, the ideas in A New Kind of Science (NKS) seem to have relevance to the current evolution vs. intelligent design debate. NKS is online, so you can read, for example, this chapter: "Intelligence in the Universe."

The UCI, cycling's governing body, exonerates Lance Armstrong of doping charges and criticizes the accusers. L'Equipe to respond saturday. One thing is certain; this whole bitter fight is no help to the sport, as doping has once again, as in 1998.

Derek and Ken were in town for Labor Day Weekend. I always learn something when I spend time with those guys. One of my learnings this past weekend was that lemmings do not commit mass suicide. It's a myth perpetuated by a Disney documentary in which the filmmakers ran lemmings off of the side of a cliff to create the myth of their suicidal tendencies. Looks like that Disney documentary is available from Amazon.com on VHS. I'm not sure how the lemming myth took hold of me, but I suspect it was Gary Larson and his Far Side comics. I remember one depicted a whole flock of lemmings headed for the edge of a cliff to jump into the ocean, but one is shown wearing an inner tube with a sly grin. Another showed a family of lemmings in a car, headed off on vacation. The mother and father lemming sit in the front seat while two lemming children are in back. The mother is shown shouting at the kids, "Hey! I told you kids to knock it off back there!... or so help me I'll just take this car and drive it off the first cliff I come to!" I miss The Far Side. Larson went out on top.

Meet the F**kers (Windows Media), a Daily Show video clip that provides some satiric catharsis for any anger you might feel towards the Bush administration for their slow reactions to Hurricane Katrina. I hadn't seen the footage of Mike Myers' reaction to Kanye West's outburst until watching this clip, or Michael Brown's disastrous interviews, or the Larry King interview with Celine Dion. Memorable.

Colin Powell regrets his statements to the United Nations in February of 2003. I was aboard a ferry from the north island of New Zealand to the south island when he gave his testimony, and I watched it on CNN. Little did I know it would be downhill from there for someone who seemingly everyone thought would make a perfect presidential candidate.

I'm going to join Bill Simmons on the Bears bandwagon. Really good young defense, and if Kyle Orton surprises (and sometimes new starting QBs do) then perhaps they can win a bunch of low-scoring rumbles. It all depends on what that offense looks like after they take off the bandages.

Vincent Cerf is the new "Chief Internet evangelist" at Google. I look forward to hearing about this Internet thing. It sounds cool. As an aside, based on my years of working in the Internet biz, anyone who has "evangelist" in their job title has a cushy job.

The Nokia 8800 is one gorgeous cell phone. Though China isn't listed as one of the countries where you can buy one, I saw them in several stores in Beijing and Shanghai. The slider resistance is firm but silky smooth. I held it, fondled it, drooled over it, but left my credit card sheathed. $800, which is roughly what they were charging, is a lot to pay for technological sex appeal.

Washed away

A special report from the Times-Picayune titled "Washing away" and published in June of 2002 foresaw New Orleans' hurricane disaster with tragic accuracy. Some of the articles from the five-part series:

• IN HARM'S WAY: Levees, our best protection from flooding, may turn against us.
• THE BIG ONE: A major hurricane could decimate the region, but flooding from even a moderate storm could kill thousands. It's just a matter of time.
• LEFT BEHIND: Once it’s certain a major storm is about to hit, evacuation offers the best chance for survival. But for those who wait, getting out will become nearly impossible as the few routes out of town grow hopelessly clogged. And 100,000 people without transportation will be especially threatened.
• LAST LINE OF DEFENSE (.jpg graphic): Army Corps of Engineers officials say hurricane levees in the New Orleans area will protect residents from a Category 3 hurricane moving rapidly over the area. But computer models indicate even weaker storms could find chinks in that armor.

The report predicted that citizens would have to be sheltered in the Superdome, that aid workers would struggle to reach survivors, and so much more of what happened this past week. Because of that, it was stunning and horrifying to see the disaster unfold in Louisiana, especially because meteorologists and government officials knew Katrina was on its way. That even advance warning was not enough to save thousands of people is a tragedy of massive proportions.

It was heartbreaking to see footage of citizens of New Orleans stranded and awaiting help when those same citizens had no way to look back out on the world. They were cut off from the rest of the world with no idea when aid would arrive or what the rest of the world was thinking. We were staring in at them through the glass of the television as if staring into a snow globe that had been shaken up.

I was just in New Orleans a few years ago for a bachelor party, and to think that the entire city is just destroyed now is impossible to fathom, even with all the images and video. Will New Orleans be rebuilt where it once stood? That area has always been below sea level, in a geographic bowl, and many of the structures there are likely ruined beyond repair by sitting in floodwaters for days. Even if you could rebuild there in a timely fashion once everything had been cleared out, wouldn't it make sense to relocate New Orleans out of the bowl? Why rebuild on a site in which the forces of nature (gravity, e.g.) invite water? The city can rise up from the disaster of Katrina, both figuratively and literally, whether that means relocating to higher ground or simply building the city up a level as parts of Chicago and Seattle were after huge fires.

Derek visited this weekend, and as always when hosting out-of-towners, I see New York City through new eyes, their eyes. One thing I was conscious of was how badly New York trash smelled in the summer. I'd gotten used to it over the long summer, but Derek made me conscious of it again. If New York City could be rebuilt, would it be built with alleys like Chicago so trash could be stored in dumpsters, containing the odors and keeping the unsightly piles of trash off of the sidewalks? Would that justify the loss in rentable living space? We weren't sure when alleys were built in Chicago, but perhaps after the Chicago Fire, city planners decided not only to upgrade from wood to brick to prevent future fires, but also to install alleys for parking garages and dumpsters and throughput. New Orleans can take this opportunity to not just rebuild and repair but to redo.

As an aside, and an unimportant one when the focus should be on rescuing the survivors, this disaster exposed problems with our nation's emergency response. Some blame Bush; it doesn't help that he just came off an extended vacation, one that earned him a good tan but doesn't seem to have aided his crisis management skills. When he said to Diane Sawyer on ABC that no one could have foreseen the breach of the levees, he hung himself with his own ignorance. Not all the blame lies with him, of course, but this is one black mark that will play for the rest of his term, a constant reminder of the failure of the Department of Homeland Security, FEMA, and many others. After reading the The 9/11 Commission Report and comparing it with earlier snap judgments and analyses of that tragedy, I'll wait for the water to clear to pass judgment on all involved. Snap reactions are bound to reveal more about the biases of those making the judgments than the truth.

Just as people have difficulty handling extremely low probability, high impact events, perhaps institutions do also. Live in New Orleans long enough without being hit by the big one, and the impetus to move declines. If you're in office, constantly funding systems to defend against a low probability event like a massive hurricane may feel like throwing money away, especially if you don't expect it to hit on your term (awful as that line of thinking may be). Perhaps the only ones who do think rationally about such an event are insurance companies. They did the math and did not offer flood insurance in New Orleans.

If you've already donated through the Red Cross, and almost everyone I know has, donate again! One of the blessings of the Internet has been how easy it has become to donate to charity with only a few clicks. I hope that Visa and Mastercard are foregoing their usual fees on these credit card donation transactions.

Peace and Conflict

The 2005 version of the Peace and Conflict report, the third in the biennial series, is available as a free downloadable PDF. The report, subtitled "A Global Survey of Armed Conflicts, Self-Determination Movements, and Democracy", is written by Monty Marshall and Ted Robert Gurr based on global trends in armed conflict, self-determination movements, and democracy. The 2005 report adds sections on ethnic discrimination, political instability in Africa, genocide, and terrorism.

The trend in global conflict is a positive one. War is on the decline, at least within the last 15 years. The author's attach a caveat: "These positive trends are no warrant for unqualified optimism about the future of world peace. International cooperations is threatened by growing fractures in the world community." However, the idea that war is on the decline is a hopeful one. Has war become an inefficient means for countries to obtain the assets they seek? It's a theory some have offered as an explanation. Others theorize that the assets that countries once sought in war have evolved from physical assets (like oil) into more intangible assets (like intellectual capital). I don't know enough to offer my own explanation, though it seems entirely possible that conflict might evolve into different forms over time as the stakes of armed conflict become too high to justify the potential reward.

Not all the news is positive. Terrorism has supplanted superpower conflict as the primary security concern of the twenty-first century. High-casualty terorrist acts are up sharply since 9/11. Genocide and political mass murder remain a risk in over a dozen countries, and the inability of the UN to stop ethnic cleansing in recent years doesn't bode well for the world's capacity to halt future occurrences.

Hoop Dreams on DVD!!

Joy of joys--Hoop Dreams is coming out on a Criterion Collection DVD May 10.

In case anyone had any doubts, China intends to use non-peaceful means to crush any formal Taiwan independence efforts

In apparent response to Washington's intervention, [deputy chairman of the assembly's Standing Committee Wang Zhaoguo] quoted the legislation as saying the struggle over Taiwan is "China's internal affair" and "we will not submit to any interference by outside forces."

New Sin City trailer (Quicktime)
Rodriguez ain't kidding--he really does want the movie to look just like the comic book

Kelly Leak!

Richard Linklater is directing a remake of The Bad News Bears
Billy Bob Thornton will play the coach originated by Walter Matthau. I'm guessing BB will channel and fuse his work from Bad Santa and Friday Night Lights

MT-Keystrokes: an ingenious new method for battling Comment Spam in Movable Type 3
It counts the number of keystrokes in a comment (using javascript) to guess if a person or robot entered the comment

A peek, just a peek, of the new Star Wars trailer debuting with The O.C. next week (Quicktime)
Other required viewing prior to Episode III is The Clone Wars, which aired as twenty five-minute episodes on The Cartoon Network last year. It was excellent

Buffy Season 1 in One Minute (MP3)

The Neorest 600, the Ferrari of toilets
From a Wired magazine article. According to its manufacturer Toto, this is the toilet for Brad Pitt, J. Lo, Cameron Diaz, Charlie Sheen, and Will Smith. The $5,000 toilet has a 16-bit processor and 512 Kbytes of RAM. The seat can be raised by wireless remote (Howard Hughes would've dug that), assumes it can save water when the seat is up, is tankless, and transforms into a bidet when you're seated. Gentle aerated warm water spray, catalytic deodorizer, and hot air dryer. Not surprising that this product comes from Japan. When I visited Japan in 1990 with a youth orchestra, I encountered for the first time a toilet that had two levels of flushing, a lower one for, well, number one, and a higher one for more serious business. Americans have a cultural bias against bidets, and I've been guilty of that in the past when abroad, but at some point in life you realize it makes a lot of sense. Ok, that's enough on toilets

Maybe it's worth waiting for the next generation of iPods, rumoured by Engadget to have 3X the battery life

Harris Poll detects confusion over the meaning of left-wing and right-wing
I'm not sure this reflects ignorance of the people as much as it does the meaninglessness of these reductive labels (and the simplistic polls that attempt to define them)

The demographics of insurgency, ethnic conflict, terrorism, and state-sponsored violence are the same everywhere: young men, out of school and out of work
The article suggests that policymakers consider increasing funding for programs that help nations around the world to make the demographic transition from a population of short lives and large families to one with long lives and small families. A major comonent of that strategy is to promote girls' education and improve women's rights in the workplace. I'm curious to see a chart of all the world's nations and where they fall on this demographic continuum

"Warm Up" by The Firebirds (MP3)
Cool 60s funky bluesy cover of "Light My Fire"

Why Your Brain is Not a Camcorder
Just a summary of a study, but one conclusion interested me: the same processes that create false memories create true memories

The Circular Life
Cool Flash site that allows you to explore locales in Italy over a 24 hour period through pictures and sound. Stopping at different points along the circular wheel reminded me of how much the web under-utilizes sound to create environment (or misuses, in the case of those old MIDI ditties that would embarrass a surfer at work)

"Sussudio" by Ol' Dirty Bastard (cameos by Kelis and Li'l Kim) (MP3)
From a hip-hop tribute to Phil Collins from European label Urban Renewal. Shoot, I'm way too late to pay my respects to ODB, huh?

Movie posters, remixed

It's freaking cold in NYC

FASB approves rule requiring companies to expense stock options
Makes sense. Won't change affected companies at all, but sometimes perception is reality, so their stock prices may take some temporary hits.

Time's Person of the Year 2004: George W. Bush

A Xmas pop culture icon: the Christmas Story leg lamp, shipped in a crate marked fra-gi-lee

Smart drugs: steroids for brains?
Side effects may include enhanced memory

The O.C. Chrismukkah Yarmuclaus - festive fashion for Jew and Gentile alike
Too bad they're sold out and won't ship until Jan 17, 2005

Video of the Honda ASIMO robot walking and running
It looks like the robot is sprinting towards an outhouse while in danger of pooping its pants

Over the past 25 years, Americans are smoking less but eating more, which may be why everyone is fatter

Sprinkles

Eliot Spitzer to run for governor of New York

Another article about how streets are safe the more you remove signs and lights and other traffic engineering debris. It forces drivers and pedestrians and all who use the road to make eye contact and watch out for each other. I first mentioned this topic before after reading an article in Salon on the same issue. I liked this passage from this latest article:

"To my mind, there is one crucial test of a design such as this," Monderman says. "Here, I will show you."

With that, Monderman tucks his hands behind his back and begins to walk into the square - backward - straight into traffic, without being able to see oncoming vehicles. A stream of motorists, bicyclists, and pedestrians ease around him, instinctively yielding to a man with the courage of his convictions.

The article also offers six suggestions for how to build a better intersection:

1. Remove signs: The architecture of the road - not signs and signals - dictates traffic flow.

2. Install art: The height of the fountain indicates how congested the intersection is.

3. Share the spotlight: Lights illuminate not only the roadbed, but also the pedestrian areas.

4. Do it in the road: Cafés extend to the edge of the street, further emphasizing the idea of shared space.

5. See eye to eye: Right-of-way is negotiated by human interaction, rather than commonly ignored signs.

6. Eliminate curbs: Instead of a raised curb, sidewalks are denoted by texture and color.

I forwarded Derek the article since he first introduced a lot of these concepts to me. He noted that these progressive techniques would probably take years to make it to the States, if ever. No engineers and their lawyers would risk trying something like that in the U.S.; we're far too litigious a society. It's a shame.

Ricky Williams is attending college in a town called Grass Valley. I'm not making this up.

Chappelle's Show - Season 2 on DVD comes out Feb 8, 2005. Already an instant comedy classic.

Battle of the bulge

Odd, this fascination with Republican bulges. First it was the bulge in Bush's back during the debates, and now it's Cheney's bulge. Either it's a wardrobe malfunction and we need to recommend a new tailor for senors Bush and Cheney, or we may have found one of the WMD.

A few years back, I bought Pink Martini's Sympathique and saw them in concert once or twice. That phase passed, and I haven't touched the CD since. They just came out with a new album, Hang on Little Tomato, and you can listen to it in lo-fi in its entirety on their website, through Pink Martini Radio. Time to put them back on the playlist for a bit and reminisce about daydream about travels through South America and Europe.

First was DJ Danger Mouse's Grey Album, a remix of the Beatles White Album and Jay-Z's Black Album. Now comes the video mash-up, the Grey Video, of the track "Encore" from the Grey Album. Is that John breaking it down? I just got served.
(We crossed some technological and artistic line a while ago and it's the golden age of remixes. iTunes now sells the remix of Marvin Gaye's "Let's Get It On"--the MPG Groove Mix)

I was just thinking, yesterday, about the inadequacies of Mapquest for walkers/subway riders in NYC, and then today I read about HopStop. The site provides combination walking/subway directions. Now they just need to add checkboxes options so you can ensure you see a Chinese guy playing the erhu somewhere along the ride.

K-Mart acquires Sears
One must feel a sense of happiness for the two, the type of relieved joy you feel for two people you never thought would find love.

James sent me a link to the board game our family will be playing this Christmas. Wasn't this in a James Bond movie once? James saw a Hot Dog, Spiderman, and Mister Miyagi playing this at a Halloween party.

Half-Life 2 looks like a lot of fun. Too bad I don't have a PC anymore.

This Room Defender looks really cool. Too bad I'm not a kid anymore.

Colin Powell resigns

Colin Powell resigns as Secretary of State
I met him briefly in New York City a long time ago, after the first invasion of Iraq. He was a hero back then, immensely popular, and people were just beginning to hope he'd run for office. What a long, strange road he's walked since then.

Jonathan Franzen wets his pants over Alice Munro
I understand, though. In fiction writing in school, every other story we studied was by Munro. She is one of the masters of the short story.

Salon publishes Cory Doctorow's short story "Anda's Game"
A wink to Orson Scott Card's immensely popular novel Ender's Game, which has over 2000 customer reviews at Amazon.com.

Lots of Gladwell articles in The New Yorker recently. New one this week, in fact. Always a good thing.

Yevgeny Kafelnikov quits pro tennis to become a poker pro

Kobayashi eats 69 hamburgers in 8 minutes to win eating contest
Since he's already the reigning hot dog eating champion, perhaps this qualifies him as a two sport star.

Looking backward, looking forward

Why are so many people blaming the youth vote? I looked at the numbers, and the 18-29 age group was the only age group to prefer Kerry to Bush. On turnout, everyone is criticizing the fact that youths accounted for the same % of the total popular vote as in the last election. What they're missing is the fact that in 2000, only 105.4 million votes were cast. In 2004, we're already over 115 million votes with provisional and absentee ballots still to be counted, and by the time all is done the total will be closer to 120 million. The youth vote made a significant leap forward this year. It just happened to be masked by an increase in turnout across older demographics as well. Given that the youth vote has always accounted for a minority of the total vote, it had to grow by a larger percentage to maintain the same share of the total vote as in the past. I'm sure there's room for improvement, but even though I'm officially not part of the youth demo anymore, I don't think it's fair to scapegoat them. Don't blame the youths, or mock youth vote turnout movements like Rock the Vote or P. Diddy's Vote or Die, for Kerry's loss. If anything, blame the older folks who turned out to support Bush.

[NOTE: This map shows what the election results would have been if decided by 18-29 year olds]

Depressed Cubs fans know there's always next year. Unjustified and exaggerated optimism are an effective numbing agent for the pains of today. Sammy Sosa whining? Let's dump him and replace him with Carlos Beltran.

That mental coping mechanism can work here, as well. In 2008, it's time to pull out the all the stops. Time to match the hot new rookie Barack Obama with established superstar Oprah Winfrey. What a historic ticket that would be, in so many respects.

It may also help to visualize the mathematics of the popular vote across states as a continuum. In that respect, America is spectrum of purple, not a sea of red hemmed in on the West and Northeast by two walls of blue [via BoingBoing]. Come to think of it, though. an arbitrary mixing of red and blue may be just another distortion layered on top of the blue-red dichotomy distortion. Some reds and blues (I know a few myself) just don't mix. To truly find common ground, we need a way to visualize individual issue where liberals and conservatives share common views. I believe such a space exists, though you can only stand there if you really stand there. You can't fly to Paris, stand under the Eiffel Tower, and call yourself a Parisian.

There's also humor. Sad, but true, from The Onion. And again. We're one of the world's most advanced civilizations, but we can't hold an election without suspicions of tampering.

And there's the drink. I'd resort to that old standby, but I have to run that marathon Sunday.

Kerry concedes election to Bush

Kerry concedes, Bush wins with a majority, and Republicans extend their majority in the Senate and House. With Rehnquist ill, Bush will likely appoint the next Supreme Court candidate.

It will be a few days until I can stabilize my emotion center. With the popular vote going Bush's way, I experience again, for the first time in a long time, what it feels to be a minority in my home country. I've read a lot of calls from liberals to keep a cool head, to band together to support the president after this election is over, but what does that mean? Did people expect us to riot and loot? Are we supposed to roll over now and agree with Bush on everything he does?

No way. Bush doesn't get a "get out of jail card free" card. With four more years, we should be able to see, definitively, the outcome of his stewardship of the country.

What is going on?

CNN has reported that some Iowa voting machines have gone down, and many of their polling site staff are exhausted, so they won't be able to issue a final count until tomorrow morning. CNN also reports that Red Sox owner John Henry has been told to prepare his private jet to fly Democratic lawyers to Ohio. There also may be as many as 250K provisional ballots in Ohio that won't be counted for 11 days. 11 days!

I like C-Span's election map (though why does Hawaii show as having 0% of precincts having reported?). Using it, I've created a spreadsheet to help me track the remaining states in play. Why I have no idea. Only Ohio matters now.

Is it too early to think of Obama in 2008? 2012?

It's increasingly clear that I need to go to bed, because no official announcements will come anytime soon. Even if Bush wins, which looks highly likely now, it may be a while before Kerry concedes. I'll give Nevada and New Mexico to Bush, Wisconsin and New Hampshire to Kerry, and leave Ohio and Iowa undetermined (though Ohio looks to be Bush's to lose). That leaves it 259 to 259 by my count.

But someone is conceding this evening, and that's me. I concede that I need to go to bed.

Put us out of our misery...and into more?

Are people still standing in line to vote? How is this possible?

NBC and Fox have given Ohio to Bush. CNN and other stations are still holding out on Ohio. With 93% of precincts in Ohio, CNN has just turned Ohio green. Green? Another color? Has Ohio been overrun by radioactive waste? Turned into a giant garden?

Oh, Wolf Blitzer explains that green means too close to call. In other words, nothing has changed in CNN's opinion. They just wanted to make full use of their color palette.

I'm exhausted, and depressed. I don't know how long I can stay up.

Voter turnout rates

From my limited perspective, it feels as if interest and participation in this presidential election is at an all-time high. I know so many people who helped raise funds, threw political parties, watched the debates, drove to other states to go door-to-door, volunteered to patrol polling sites, and of course, cast ballots. I received two phone calls at home today, urging me to go vote, and was accosted on the streets of NYC by clipboard-toting youths about once a day up until the voter registration deadlines. Online, I encountered countless links to Rock the Vote, a site that made it simple for the Internet-saavy (read: youths) to register to vote. I'm not a huge fan of any motto that begins with "Rock the..." but that huge red checkmark logo is burned into my brain.

But these are just my impressions. Will turnout actually be record-breaking? This paper by Michael McDonald at The Brookings Institution shows that if voter turnout rate, though it was lower on average from 1972 through 2000 than from 1952 to 1968, wasn't as dire as people commonly believe. Rates were artificially depressed by not removing a growing pool of ineligible voters from the denominator. The turnout rate in 1992 was about as high as that in the 60's.

This year's voter turnout rate would need to exceed 63% to break the record set in 1960. A quick glance at the headlines would seem to indicate record turnout, and I've seen estimates of 60%+. Maybe the modern record will be broken. I suspect, and hope, it will.

Still, it's nothing compared to voter turnout rates in other countries around the world (another table and chart).

How can the U.S. raise the turnout rate? For one thing, the voting experience needs to be simpler. I voted absentee in Washington state, where about half the ballots are cast via mail. Oregon votes entirely by mail. Roughly a third of ballots in California are done by mail. I called a toll-free number, a ballot was e-mailed to me, I printed it, filled it out, and dropped it in the mail. Here in NYC, I've heard quite a few stories of long lines, long waits, disorganized polling sites, and voter confusion. That may true of only a few sites, but overall the process of voting at a polling site can't be any easier than voting by mail. Why should working folks and parents with young children have to re-arrange their schedules to wait in line at a polling site they may or may not be able to find when they could simply fill out the form at home and pop it in the mailbox? How about the elderly, who may not be physically able to stand in line for such a long time? It's a sign of how low our voter turnout rates have been historically when people express joy at seeing the staggering length of the line they have to wait in.

I've read articles claiming that voting via the Internet wouldn't significantly increase voter turnout rates. However, in the interest of simplifying the process as much as possible, especially for today's youths who've grown up with the Internet, it needs to happen. People should be able to register, update their addresses and information, check their registration status, and vote online. The commonly cited problems with Internet voting (security, user interface, scaling, etc.) are all solvable.

The goal should be that even the laziest voter should have little excuse not to vote.

The other problem to solve, then, is the problem of objective information (if it's achievable) on all the initiatives and candidates on each state's ballot. The U.S. has one of the longest ballots in the world. The Washington state ballot covered two pages, and I had to vote on all sorts of initiatives and candidates I knew little about. It's easier to find objective information to help someone select a digital camera than a public official. Here, again, the Internet can help. Sites like Vote-Smart are a good start, but their database of information is very thin. Even a simple issues grid for each candidate would be an improvement on what's available today.

Beyond that, perhaps the election process itself should be altered. Heightened interest in the election is good, among other reasons, because it raises scrutiny of current election processes. Many people have been decrying the Electoral College. Perhaps it will be reformed or done away with. To push it even further, would the U.S. ever consider Instant Runoff Voting (IRV) or Ranked Choice Voting? The case for IRV is strong, and San Francisco has implemented it.

Ideas for another day. Today, the ship has sailed. Living on the East Coast, I may have to stay up until tomorrow morning, if not later, to find out the election results. I've been trying to wake up earlier every morning in preparation for the marathon this Sunday, but it will be difficult to keep that promise tonight.

Footnote: The Iowa Electronic Markets Presidential Winner Takes All has made a late shift, and at this momentpredicts a Democratic victory with somewhat less than 52% of the popular vote. I believe Kerry will win.

Chuckle

Crossword aficionados should make sure to complete today's election-themed NYTimes crossword. There's an extra box today, and it's a clever wink at election snafus past.

CNN's Lou Dobbs introduced their election night coverage by describing "an election that pollsters are calling the closest presidential election in years." Was 2000's election not close enough for everyone?

Scaled electoral map

Even though it doesn't make a difference, I find it much more reassuring to look at colored electoral maps scaled based on share of electoral votes than geographically scaled maps.

Because you can't get fat enough from going to McDonalds and picking up a meal, McDonalds offers free delivery in NYC in partnership with Delivery.com.

Another note from my eagle-eyed vigilance for all things giant squid: squid biomass now exceeds that of humans. I keep expecting we'll get footage of a giant squid alive in the ocean one of these days. That or a Cubs World Series victory first? In my lifetime? Please?

Physicists have solved the falling paper problem. It reminded me of the solution to the billowing shower curtain problem.

"Incompetent or incoherent" sounds like a Jeopardy category

The Economist endorses Kerry, though only "with a heavy heart," titling their endorsement "The incompetent or the incoherent"

Some creative Halloween costume ideas from The Stranger for your child, including "The Littlest Prisoner at Abu Ghraib."

Another reality tv show: The Next Food Network Star. The winner gets their own six-episode show on the Food Network.

West Elm's beds don't hold up under wild sex. I walked through their new Chelsea Store the other day and it was mobbed. You'd think that heavy pounding would be a standard stress test for a bed frame.

11th hour Kerry endorsements

The Nation, The Washington Post, Andrew Sullivan, Slate, The American Conservative (sort of).

Karen and I tried Skype

Karen and I tried Skype last night, both of us on Mac OS X, and it worked fine after I finally got my iSight to work as a microphone (I think you have to quit iChat AV to resolve an input conflict, though who knows for sure?). The sound quality on Skype is noticeably better than iChat's; perhaps it's the audio compression codec they use.

I've also caught up to the entire season of Lost using BitTorrent. Count me engrossed thus far.

Other things worth watching online: Eminem's video for his anti-Bush song "Mosh." I wonder which will be a greater aid to Kerry's election hopes next Tuesday: the angry rap polemic of Eminem or the the smooth drawl of the real, slimmer Shady himself, Bill Clinton, back on the campaign trail. Maybe the former, since Clinton and The New Yorker, who issued a long endorsement of Kerry in this week's issue, may be preaching to the converted, eloquent as they are. So far, MTV has not said if they'll air Eminem's video.

Finally, finally, MI-5 Vol. 2 will come out on DVD, but not until January 2005. Loved Vol. 1 (the show is called Spooks in the UK), and was never sure why season two wasn't out on DVD yet. Too bad I can't locate season two on BitTorrent anywhere.

Red Sox:Yankees as Kerry:Bush?

Rich Goliath tries to buy victory, but is turned back by slightly less wealthy foe (okay, let's call him David, to extend the metaphor; after all, a David did end up as series MVP) from Massachussetts. Maybe the Red Sox are showing Kerry the way. There's also still a chance that Stephen King is scripting all this using some eerie mentalism as he types the manuscript for Faithful.

I had predicted Houston and Boston to make the World Series, and I stand by that with the pitching matchup tonight. Houston:RedSox as Bush:Kerry is even better a baseball/politics parallel simply because of geography.

Okay, now that they've released Skype for Mac OS X, I'm ready to try it out. So Skype Me!

ParkingTicket.com. Ah, if only I'd known about this site while I still owned a car. [via TMQ]

Ken alerted me to the latest Bush gaffe. In a speech in Florida, he proudly proclaimed, "After standing on the stage, after the debates, I made it very plain we will not have an all-volunteer army." The crowd went deathly silent, looks of confusion everywhere. A few people shouted to correct him: "You mean we will have an all-volunteer army, right?" Umm, yeah. Freudian slip. I mean no, just a normal slip. Not Freudian.

Meanwhile, Teresa Heinz Kerry was making verbal gaffes of her own. Sometimes I think THK is just crazy. Actually, I think that all of the time.

Violinists: ask your doctor if Inderal is for you. I had no idea classical musicians were pill popping to overcome nerves. I wonder if figure skaters and gymnasts use beta-blockers, too (assuming they're not illegal in those sports).

The New Republic endorses John Kerry. Iran endorses Bush, much to the Bush campaign's dismay.

Man deposits one of those fake checks that arrive in one's junk mail. To his surprise, it cleared. An old story from a couple years back that still amuses, though that guy needs an editor. His constant self-promotion is grating.

Mindball is a game where two layers control a ball via brain waves. Most relaxed player wins. Loads of fun for your next board game night, especially contemplating all the naughtier variations of the game that could be played. It looks pricey, though. 20 000 SEK (~$2,800) for the multiplayer version, and the shipping page features a picture of a semi. [previous 2 stories via Metafilter]

Legendary bandit buried in India

Legendary bandit buried in India. The funeral of India's most notorious bandit, Veerappan, takes place at a village in southern Tamil Nadu state. [BBC News]
A real-life Robin Hood? People still earn the title bandit?

Guess who's getting flu shots?.
[via Marginal Revolution]

Finally read Ron Suskind's NYTimes Magazine article on George Bush. Frightening. That president man (let's use Bush's folksy tone of voice) runs the country on a wink and prayer, though in his case it's more like a smirk and a prayer. A president who refuses to be molded to some degree by his constituents and his advisors and the world at large, especially one who's been a C-student most his life, is an idiot blinded by hubris. I thought the pilgrims left England to escape hereditary monarchy.

Frontline - The Choice A

Frontline - The Choice

A new process for coloring black and white films, employed by Scorsese in The Aviator.

Qurio.com is an interesting photosharing option for Windows users. It serves photos directly off of your computer, through your high speed Internet connection, so you don't have to upload photos to an external site.

Remains of a weekend

I haven't set up my television here in NYC, and before that I was traveling for months so I had just sporadic access to a television. I haven't missed it nearly as much as I thought. It's given me time to read and enjoy life outside my apartment. I'm sick of reality television, have no need for CSI: Minneapolis ("Hmm, I think Steve Buscemi died when his partner axed him in the head and put him through the wood chipper. Yaaaa, I do."), and any television show I really want to watch can usually found on BitTorrent. For example, the clip of Jon Stewart on Crossfire as he bitch-slapped Tucker Carlson. Deeply, deeply satisfying. I can't stand Tucker Carlson. What a buffoon. If you don't know how to use BitTorrent, you can see the clip just fine here at iFilm. Could Jon Stewart be any more golden right now? I walked by the Union Square Barnes and Noble when he was there for his book signing, and by the looks of the drooling women in line, you'd think Jude Law or Brad Pitt was there to sign a swimsuit calendar.

Of course, I must have my television set up by this Thursday, when The Office Christmas Specials (part 1, part 2) air in the U.S. on BBC America. I tried to find it on DVD in London this summer, but all I could turn up was pity from Londoners who tsk tsk'd as they revelled in recounting the rapture of humor the special had bestowed upon them. The DVDs? Release in the UK Oct. 25. If you haven't seen the show yet, I either pity or envy you. And who the hell are you and where have you been living?! The show has no laugh track, because you'll provide one. But don't take my word for it. The New Yorker calls it perfect.

Malcolm Gladwell writes about the high cost of prescription drugs with his usual (i.e., unusual) insight.

Wal-Mart.com, of all sites, has audio clips of the Friday Night Lights soundtrack. I'm just about over my Friday Night Lights kick. After watching the movie I bought the soundtrack and inhaled the book (recommended and recommended, respectively). The music has been a nice change of pace from the usual stuff in my "Running" playlist in my iPod, all of which I've heard about eighty times by now.

The baseball stadium in Houston is a joke. People are hitting pop flies out of the stadium in left field for home runs, and that hill with the pole in it in center field is ludicrous. What an atrocious baseball playing field (I've never seen the exterior, but it seems fine). The fact that all baseball stadiums have different dimensions in the outfield used to never bother me, but if they standardize the dimensions of all playing areas of all MLB stadiums, allowing architects to customize all other aspects and dimensions of the stadium, I'd have no objections. Imagine one NBA basketball court having baskets nine feet high instead of ten, or a three point line that was shorter than in other stadiums.

Games 3 and 4 of the ALCS were brutal. Each game lasted about two days. Alan, Sharon, and I rented a movie, started watching when game 3 started, and when the two hour movie finished that game was in the fourth inning. I don't know how anyone who's not a Yankees or Red Sox fan could stay awake. I remain steadfast in my hope that MLB will speed up the games. If you adjust your batting glove and then stand there to take a pitch, why do you need to step out and adjust it again? Is the velcro defective?

I met James, Angela, some of their college friends, Alan, and Sharon for lunch at Carnegie Deli today. The Carnegie sandwiches are MASSIVE. RIDICULOUS. I had a reuben, their specialty, and it was actually just a mountain of pastrami covered by several layers of cheese. It looked like an elementary school model of Mt. St. Helens erupting cheese. I finished about a quarter of it and will nibble on the remains for the rest of the week. Carnegie Deli is a mecca for pastrami and corned beef lovers.

I didn't miss my car until I saw this promotional clip for the new BMW M5. Sweet mother of...sometimes, late at night, when the subway seems like it will never arrive, wouldn't you just like to hop into something like this and just play Pole Position with the cabs.

NYC's arts lineup is overwhelming. Everyday I find at least five things I'm dying to go see. Monday night (oh, that would be tonight) Ricky Gervais is speaking at the Museum of Television and Radio before a screening of The Office Christmas Special. I'd kill to see Julie Taymor's production of The Magic Flute (Die Zauberflöte) at the Met. Alex Ross raves about it. What stops me is the memory of my first NYC credit card bill. Upon opening it and reading the balance, I screamed, dropped the bill, my eyes rolled up into my head, and I fainted theatrically, like a swooning movie diva.

The weekend ended with puppet entertainment. No, not the marionettes of Team America World Police, but the puppets of Avenue Q, the much acclaimed musical that won the Tony for best musical in 2003. I am not a huge musical fan, but I enjoyed this one for not taking itself so seriously. It offers quite a contrast to the melodrama of most musicals and seems a descendant of the Rent lineage of musicals, one that's sadly sparse. The show features a cast of puppets and people who live in a rundown neighborhood in Manhattan as they sing about life and its problems. But these are HBO-class puppets, not Sesame Street or Jim Henson muppets (even though some of the characters really resemble Ernie and the cookie monster), so they swear, drink, and have sex. As Phil said at intermission, it might not a musical you'd be comfortable seeing with your parents. The puppets are held by actors who stand alongside them as puppeteers, singing, with their hands clearly inserted up into the puppets or waving their arms around. It's jarring for just the first few seconds, but then, the rest of the time, as the cast sings songs like "Everyone's a Little Bit Racist" or "The Internet is for Porn" or "Schadenfreude", you realize it all feels on some level like a clever deconstruction of the musical as an art form. Would Kermit and Miss Piggy have grown up to be a dysfunctional married couple? Would Bert have come out of the closet to confess his love for Ernie? Would Big Bird be surfing porn on the Internet? I'm of the generation that wouldn't find those stories surprising at all, and I'm glad some musicals have caught up.

Newspapers issue endorsements

Newspapers across the country have seen enough to issue their presidential endorsements. I've tried to link up to the editorials I could find without too much trouble.

A sampling of those papers endorsing Kerry:
NY Times
San Francisco Chronicle
Minneapolis Star Tribune
Boston Globe
Philadelphia Inquirer
Seattle Post-Intelligencer
The Atlanta Journal-Constitution
Detroit Free Press
Arizona Daily Star
The Oregonian (Portland)
The Seattle Times
The Philadelphia Daily News