Archive for October, 2008
Redemption Songs
Andrew Sullivan:
I’ve been worried about Obama’s chances next week - actually waking up in the middle of the night (I had some weird nightmare about Sarah Palin and crystal meth last night) - but I feel a lot better now.
And this:
Yeah, I saw that last night on Jack and Jill and cried for nearly an [...]
Television Viewers Take Heart
This is kind of remarkable. I was unaware that the president had the power to prevent network broadcasters from airing speeches that might delay a baseball game. But, apparently, if you elect John McCain, he’ll make sure that no one interferes with your television viewing:
[McCain] even criticized Mr. Obama for threatening to delay the [...]
The Shit They Shovel
“There is no single English word for McCain the hero, the moral entity. But in Hebrew he would be called a tsaddik–a man of such nobility and moral substance that he approaches holiness. If this assertion sounds crazy, that only shows how little we have thought about the issue,” - David Gelernter, Weekly Standard.
T. Boone Pickens: Huckster
I’m watching 60 Minutes give T. Boone Pickens 20 minutes to sell his stupid plan - the Pickens Plan - to Americans: this would entail fighting against foreign energy imports, and the promotion of “clean energy fuels”. He has spent $2 billion to build wind power farms, and of course he wants the taxpayers to make [...]
Moments of Accountability
Given how much the presidency depends on a legion of advisors, it’s remarkable to me how little time is spent figuring out who would be actually making and implementing the policies in a particular administration.
It’d be somewhat more useful for, say, the candidates to pick five or six key advisors - maybe future secretaries of [...]
Guilt by Association
I’ve been around the conservative movement enough that there are really creepy people in and around the movement. There are also people who have been rehabilitated by history, or by themselves. Take William F. Buckley, founder of the National Review.
In 1957, he published the following in an editorial entitled “Why the South Must Prevail”:
The [...]
Conventional Wisdom
I thought this was pretty funny. David Broder marches his bony ass up to Montgomery County to hear from voters exactly what he’d say if he’d stayed at home in Maryland.
My hopes
Imagine if Barack Obama had graduated from the University of Idaho, and his major accomplishment before being elected governor of a 680,000 person state of Alaska - only slightly smaller than Bucks County in population - was that he was a mayor of a 7,000 strong town.
Imagine also that Obama had one kid who [...]
The blog posts write themselves
From the New York Times:
A new approach that would inject capital into banks raises questions on
whether officials squandered time with an earlier $700 billion plan to
buy securities.
Right-Sized
The current financial crisis is going to achieve a right-sizing of America. But, before it does that, we’re going to see a Republican administration thoroughly socialize the banking and financial industry. So, in some respects, this is Gramsci come full circle. Not a violent revolution, but a march first through the cultural institutions and now [...]