Courtesy of SDM, Mountain Goats performing Ace of Base's "The Sign". Listen to the story in the break for one of the funniest mental images I've heard. Here's the studio version.
Add your nominations for next week's kitsch cover in the comments.
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Courtesy of SDM, Mountain Goats performing Ace of Base's "The Sign". Listen to the story in the break for one of the funniest mental images I've heard. Here's the studio version.
Add your nominations for next week's kitsch cover in the comments.
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 09:47 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Haven't done one of these in a while. Some notes:
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 05:45 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
So about that Slate video on how The West Wing writers predicted Obama's rise. It closes: "Oh, and just in case you didn't see the show and you were wondering, the Obama character -- Santos -- ends up winning the White House." Sort of uplifting, right?
Do with this what you will, but my brother pointed out that this wasn't actually the way the series was planned to end:
[The] campaign between centrist Democrat Matt Santos and centrist Republican Arnold Vinick ended with Santos as the winner. But the writers had planned to have Vinick win until the death of actor John Spencer, who played Santos' running mate, Leo McGarry.
After Spencer's death, it was decided that Santos would win . . . .
Yikes?
Posted by Ankush Khardori at 03:55 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Bill Powers has a sharp column today chiding "the Baby Boomer-run media" for their '60s throwback mentality:
If the race turns out to be Obama versus McCain, the obsession will only grow. Where Obama represents the RFK/MLK side of '60s culture, McCain, the former Vietnam POW, will become the embodiment of the anti-communist, warrior strain. America's Boomercentric newsrooms will churn out endless stories about the great dichotomy that supposedly lives on today. But does it really? The present is messy and complicated, hard to make sense of. Why not Google the world of 40 years ago and say it's all a rerun?
If the news outlets of the early '60s had been this backward-looking, JFK's candidacy would have been all about the 1920s. "Gosh, doesn't that young Kennedy fellow remind you of flappers, the Lost Generation, and Warren Harding?" But then, that would have been silly.
Quite right. At the risk of upsetting any part of the pan-generational Cogitamus family and readership, can I just say that I'm extremely tired of hearing about the '60s? Yes, we need to learn from history and all that, and there are some obvious parallels, but there is a certain narcissism on display when people who grew up during that era interpret current events primarily through their generational lens. The present, as Powers says, is both messy and complicated.
Posted by Ankush Khardori at 12:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
The National Republican Congressional Committee is deeply interested in what rank-and-file Republicans believe. They want to know, they really do, just where this nations' Republican citizens stand on important issues. So they've got a survey up on their website.
A sampling* of the questions:
*Some of these questions aren't real.
Posted by Stephen Suh at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (3)
Well, mes amis, we got back from a glorious week in Mexico – by the skin of our teeth – though one that has had some unintended consequences. We were scheduled to return late Friday, February 22. But there was an ice storm hitting the U.S. that day, so as we got to the airport we weren’t sure what was going to happen. (The thought of our waiting First-Class seats, however, soothed us, though the sight of so many people dressed like complete and utter slobs didn’t. My god, people, my dear god; unspeakable.)
By the time it was over, our journey had turned into Laurel & Hardy Meet Eugene Ionesco (or perhaps Samuel Beckett is more like it, as you’ll see).
Posted by Lisa Simeone at 10:01 AM in Current Affairs, Travel | Permalink | Comments (7)
Technorati Tags: airport security, airports, dhs, laurel and hardy, mexico, satire, security, travel, tsa, usa
Ezra called for an "enterprising blogger" to collect pictures of George Bush meeting with heads of state that "put [their] people in prison because of their political beliefs." I don't know about enterprising, but I'll take a stab at it. Here's some photos that I collected in about 5 minutes from leaders I can recall just off the top of my head.
Sometimes it's in the best interests of our nation for our leaders to meet with people whose policies we find distasteful, even abhorrent, so I've never been one to criticize Bush just for meeting with dictators. However, the following photographs show George Bush meeting not with dictators, but personal friends, valuable allies and at least one soulmate. Every one of these dictators has been showered with praise and honor by George W. Bush. Every single one. And while Bush is not the first American President to have close relationships with a dictator or two, can anyone name one democratically elected head of state with whom George Bush has anything other than what could be called a "frosty" relationship? Tony Blair doesn't count; he was our nation's ally and Bush's lapdog, not his friend. Blair and Clinton were friends.
George Bush showers praise on dictators far more than he ever has the leaders of democratic nations. And dictators are always more comfortable in his presence than democratic leaders. That says something to me.
Anyway, the pictures:
Posted by Stephen Suh at 09:53 AM | Permalink | Comments (23)
Reading this article by Dana Goldstein on the differences between Hillary's and Obama's education policies, I noticed that both of them express support for teacher merit pay. Hillary wants to make it school-by-school, while Obama favors assessing individual teachers.
Look, merit pay is a stupid idea. Support for merit pay is a big, flashing neon sign stating that the person in question doesn't know what they're talking about. But before we get into our heated discussion in comments, I want to run through some scenarios that are necessary to keep in mind when considering whether teacher merit pay is a good idea or not.
Posted by Stephen Suh at 08:45 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
Barack Obama for President has scheduled a rally where he will appear on Saturday.
I went to college in Rhode Island, so I'm happy to see the Ocean State get some love, but to put it bluntly, this is insane. It's much crazier than leaving Wisconsin while holding only a 4-7% lead. In the Wisconsin case, he at least had the excuse that he needed to start campaigning in Ohio and Texas; this time, winning both Ohio and Texas would effectively end the nomination contest, he's in no danger of losing Wyoming or Mississippi, and there are six weeks until the Pennsylvania primary. Getting a few delegates in Rhode Island or Vermont would be nice, but only the results from the big states will change the race's dynamics.
Can anyone come up with a good explanation for this one? Anyone? Bueller?
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 02:41 AM | Permalink | Comments (21)
I was going to post about this early this morning, but the damn full time job thing kept interfering and now everyone else has had a shot at it. Eric Kleefeld at TPM does a fabulous job with this story. But it bears repeating and amplification -- will Timmeh the Pumpkinhead and his acolytes demand that John McCain reject and denounce the support of crazy ass preacher John Hagee? [Hint kids -- don't hold your collective breath.] Oh wait a minute, McCain appeared on stage and accepted the endorsement of Hagee, who has made anti-semitic and anti Catholic statements that would make Farrakhan proud. Doesn't that require more than the rejecting and denouncing of unsolicited support -- wouldn't it require an apology on top of that? Probably not for St. John. We know in his heart he rejects the words of the man whose support he actively sought. That's just the kind of guy he is.
Glenn Greenwald has a must read post on this issue and the furious reaction of the lefty blogosphere's good friend Bill Donohue. It will be interesting to see if Donohue gets as much coverage for this as when he went after Amanda and Melissa. As Greenwald notes, this could be used incredibly effectively against McCain if St. John does not quickly back pedal from this. (Big tip o' the hat to litbrit for sending this one to me.)
Posted by Sir Charles at 09:58 PM | Permalink | Comments (3)
President Bush announced today we are not in a recession and not heading for a recession.
I have officially begun stuffing money into my mattress.
Posted by Sir Charles at 09:39 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
From a Post chat transcript:
Washington: How much criticism are you get from your left-wing brethen for your take on this John McCain story?
Michael Kinsley: None at all. I've gotten more favorable feedback from that piece than anything i've written for years.
Well, if I may. I find it a little unfortunate that a liberal commentator would use his position as a columnist for a national newspaper to jokingly criticize the Times for running a sloppy story intimating an affair when, at the same time, the story contained mostly undisputed facts demonstrating that the man who supposedly hates special interests intervened in a regulatory matter on one of their behalves.
The whole affair would seem to undermine McCain's reputation for being someone who is "honest, courageous, likable and intelligent." That, at least, is the reputation that Kinsley told me McCain had when, a week before the Times story broke, he declared that he would "vote against McCain, but it is going to take work, and there will be moments of doubt." You would think an acute demonstration of hypocrisy -- and subsequent lying about it -- would bring about one of those moments. If it did, the evidence is yet to be seen.
Posted by Ankush Khardori at 07:21 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
I would have enjoyed a Rudy Giuliani nomination. It's not even because of the number of times he dressed drag or kissed Donald Trump, because if that's your thing, then that's your thing. He would have been a fun opponent partly because he thought that using the NYPD to walk his girlfriend's dog was a good idea, mainly because of the way people liked him less the more they actually saw him and how his candidacy was showing the weakness of an "all 9/11 all the time" rhetorical strategy.
A Huckabee nomination would have been a royal treat, a complete carnival from start to finish. Once again I wish conservative Christians had the strength of their convictions rhetoric and actually voted for the guy in enough numbers to put him at the top.
McCain as the GOP nominee isn't going to be fun. I think the Democrat face it, Obama, will win, but down-ticket races will be harder, and the Presidential election is going to take more work and money than with any other nominee. The reason isn't because of John McCain himself; he's nearly as unpleasant and uninspiring in person as Rudy Giuliani and actually has a record of more flip-flops on more issues than Mitt Romney's most fevered dreams. And there is his conservative problem. I don't mean people like Rush Limbaugh or other of the Right's scores of entertainers posing as human beings with particular beliefs and convictions. The Religious Right, while they will of course dutifully support whoever the GOP nominee is, will do so for McCain with much less enthusiasm than in elections past. Without a red-hot Religious Right running to the polls on election day, the GOP always does poorly, and it doesn't look as if anti-gay discriminatory laws are going to do the trick this time around.
But if John McCain is the GOP nominee for President, the Democrats' main opponent ceases to be the GOP nominee.
Posted by Stephen Suh at 01:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (6)
Demonstrating once again that he's the media reporter with the best sources from within the Times, Gabriel Sherman reports on the internal deliberations that led up to the paper's endorsement of Hillary Clinton:
According to Times sources, the paper almost didn't back Clinton. The divisions within the Gray Lady's editorial board mirrored the deep divide that has split Democrats in this tightly contested campaign. The 20-member board had initially leaned toward Obama, Times sources say. But in January, after the board had debated the endorsement in two separate sessions, Times chairman and publisher Arthur Sulzberger Jr. decided to favor Clinton.
And why would Sulzberger have done this? "Some have noted," writes Sherman, "that one source of Sulzberger's support for Clinton might be his close friendship with Steve Rattner, the former Times reporter-turned-private equity financier who is a prominent Clinton donor (and Sulzberger's gym buddy)."
Even if this weren't the case, it's kind of crazy that one man could exercise this much influence over a decision that many people in the political media take pretty seriously. Sulzberger, after all, does not have a particularly strong reputation as someone with a lot of intellectual heft. And yet this is how editorials work -- the publisher is ultimately in charge.
Continue reading "The Case Against Newspaper Endorsements of Presidential Candidates" »
Posted by Ankush Khardori at 11:36 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Talking Points Memo reader ER looks at the latest Barack Hussein Obama dust-ups and sees a pattern wherein John McCain and the national RNC get to play "good cops", coming in to denounce the unsavory tactics of the "bad cops", who still gets to push the false message that Obama is a terrorist sympathizer. I'm not so sure.
For one thing, McCain said his campaign would "make sure nothing like that ever happens again", which means there are only two possibilities. He can do a better job of vetting his warm-up acts, in which case the issue of false associations with the mythical swarthy Middle Eastern hordes will dry up. Or, he'll have a gaffe like this once every two weeks. So far, the Obama campaign has taken the high road, saying they appreciate McCain's apology and trust that he means what he says about putting an end to the disrespect. If mistakes keep being made, though, it will be fair to ask Team McCain why they can't keep a better handle on his supporters. That's what will play poorly for McCain; Middle America understands that accidents happen once in a while, but if there's a pattern of jingoism that isn't stopped, they'll figure it out.
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 11:15 AM | Permalink | Comments (5)
From a December 1922 issue of the London Daily Express, via Andrew Sullivan.
(H/T oddjob)
Also at litbrit.
Posted by litbrit at 11:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
Look -- it can't be all Pumpkinhead and Tweety all of the time. And no more debates -- please, I can't take any more.
Okay, I've been slightly obsessed by the legal train wreck that is the Roger Clemens steroid/HGH controversy. Clemens has ignored my cogent and free legal advice to shut the fuck up invoke his Fifth Amendment rights. Instead, he testified before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee in what can only charitably be described as a less than credible fashion. As a result, the Committee is now asking the Justice Department to investigate bringing possible perjury charges against Clemens.
Incredibly, Clemens's counsel, Randy Hardin, has said in response that "these matters will now be decided in court and by the ultimate lie detector - a jury." Holy crap. Randy and Roger -- it's not a game. It's prison time we're talking about. Ask Marion Jones if you don't believe me. This is legal malpractice at a mind boggling level.
Posted by Sir Charles at 06:19 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
"I am, I fully grant, a phenomenon, but not because of any speed in composition," he wrote in The New York Times Book Review in 1986. "I asked myself the other day, 'Who else, on so many issues, has been so right so much of the time?' I couldn't think of anyone."
I'm certainly not going to be in mourning over this.
Posted by Lisa Simeone at 06:16 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Well, he's done it. Barack Obama has built Howard Dean's Army. He passed one million donors overnight, and Lord knows how many people are on his mailing list. There's an unanswered question about just how much larger the movement can grow—as with the original "One Million Strong" on facebook, which grew to 300,000 very quickly but stalled there for a while, his donor base might top out at some point—but already it's an impressive operation.
[Quick Bleg: There's a TNR article about the Obama ground campaign, and how it had learned from the mistakes of the Dean campaign. Anyone know where it is? Here it is]
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 07:40 AM | Permalink | Comments (1)
Any Tim Russert-moderated debate is a good opportunity to remind everyone (especially professional journalists and bloggers) to read "Why Americans Hate The Media" by James Fallows. If you've read it before, read it again. So far, the print-and-TV-news blogs I've read have focused most on (1) Hillary Clinton's (fair!) complaint that Obama seems to get softer questioning, (2) Clinton (fairly!) running over Russert and Williams when she was trying to respond to criticism from Obama, and (3) the fact that Barack Obama didn't immediate respond to Russert's Farrakhan line of questioning by saying "I want to rip Louis Farrakhan's head off".
Let's take these in turn.
Continue reading "Why Americans Hate The Media (Tim Russert Edition)" »
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 07:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (14)
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 10:49 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)
Brian Williams and Tim Russert are hosting tonight?!?! Can't they just turn half the debate over to the local NBC News anchor or the political editor for the Cleveland Plain Dealer? Surely they'd spare us a certain amount of gossip coverage.
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 04:11 PM | Permalink | Comments (2)
It's true. They don't cure depression. Of course, plenty of people understand that depression, besides being a horribly vague word, is chronic. It's better to call it unipolar disorder, because that term doesn't apply to moodiness, a low period in life or even seasonal depression. Unipolar disorder, like bipolar disorder, is better at getting across that this is a problem, a serious problem that will not go away.
The problem with antidepressants goes even further, though, than merely not curing depression. They really don't "do" very much at all. It's true - ask anyone with unipolar disorder. Antidepressants aren't steriods or other performance-enhancing drugs. They don't make you an optimist or happy. They don't improve your sense of humor, help you to make friends or cure your fear of heights.
If you've been self-medicating your unipolar disorder by overeating, antidepressants won't break you of the habit eating too much. They won't magically stop you from being a stress eater. If you've self-medicated with alcohol, antidepressants will not cure you of alcoholism or other problems with drink or drugs.
Antidepressants don't improve your memory, don't teach you good study habits. They don't make you a good parent, spouse, child or sibling. They don't make you a better Christian, Muslim or Buddhist, or a worse one, for that matter.
Antidepressants don't add anything good or noble to who you are, and they don't take away anything negative or unpleasant about you either.
Posted by Stephen Suh at 02:25 PM | Permalink | Comments (8)
While I'm obviously not a Hillary Clinton supporter, I do think that the national press treatment of Clinton campaign leaves much to be desired. The Clinton complaint that Barack Obama is getting off the hook on the when it comes to health care is legitimate. And the portrayal of Clinton as "angry" has dipped below responsible levels routinely; no one wrote that John Edwards "snapped" at Clinton and Obama when he went on a populist tirade. Local press is better on this score, as they want to write more a bit more about issues and a bit less about the middle school grudge match .
I can't figure out how much of this is due to long-term Clinton-loathing in particular, and how much is due to the cultural backsliding in the treatment of women, but either way, the it's something that needs to be considered before Kay Bailey Hutchison or Stephanie Herseth Sandlen run for President.
Posted by Nick Beaudrot at 01:13 PM | Permalink | Comments (7)
Meaning, of course, that it's a day late.
Tuesday, afternoon,
I'm just beginning to see,
Now I'm on my way,
It doesn't matter to me,
Chasing the clouds away.
I'm looking at myself, reflections of my mind,
It's just the kind of day to leave myself behind,
So gently swaying thru the fairy-land of love,
If you'll just come with me and see the beauty of
Tuesday afternoon.
Continue reading "A Very Special Edition Of Monday Miscellany" »
Posted by Stephen Suh at 01:05 PM | Permalink | Comments (1)
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