More proof that a) natural selection is real and b) that country singers have low fitness:
A performer at a free concert Saturday night at Michigan International Speedway shouted, "Anyone got a beer?"
One cool can of suds soared from the audience onto the stage, and then another, striking country singer Pat Green between the eyes.
The impact knocked him out cold, ending the concert late in his 75-minute set, a Michigan State Police trooper said.
I saw this last night and had to post it. I heart Helen Thomas (met her years ago at a luncheon in Austin) and think she's so bad ass.
Remember Biden's "subject-verb-9/11" quip about Giuliani last summer? That's what Obama needs right now as the POW meme becomes more powerful (even as it grows more ridiculous). This is what we're getting today from John McCain's, who was a prisoner of war, campaign:
It may be typical of the pro-Obama Dungeons & Dragons crowd to disparage a fellow countryman's memory of war from the comfort of mom's basement, but most Americans have the humility and gratitude to respect and learn from the memories of men who suffered on behalf of others.
(NB: Since we're a publishing company, kinda, sorta, for at least the next week, I figured this might be relevant.)
The best baseball writer in the country is also the best sports columnist in the country is also one of the best writers in the country. His name is Joe Posnanski. He writes for the Kansas City Star. For the past year or so he's also been blogging. His blog is routinely funny, thoughtful, and whimsical. If you're a baseball fan it's required reading, but he writes about much more than that.
Anyway, this morning Joe announced that Sports Illustrated has offered to start publishing his blog on their website. They'll also give him a weekly online column.* Good for him. Good for humanity.
Here's the thing: How badly must the KC Star be kicking itself this morning?
Sports Illustrated isn't going to have any editorial control over Joe's blog. There's no overhead to republish his blog. He was doing it for free to begin with, so pay incentives were probably nil. Sports Illustrated is just going to publish it. So why didn't the Star offer to do the same thing a year ago, when his blog started generating a national audience?
Like when John McCain, who was once a prisoner of war, confuses the geography of the Middle East, placing Iraq next to Pakistan, these are the small moments in history when you can see an institution show its age. 100% of all newspapers are behind the eight ball when it comes to the internet and 99% of them look like lost school children in the face of this challenge, which is really a golden opportunity only they don't realize it.
(Mike Silver covers football for Yahoo. For the better part of the decade he was one of two senior football writers for Sports Illustrated. Last week in his Yahoo column he published the following email from an angry Packers fan who was upset with Silver's coverage of the team: "I personally think you are FOS and could care less what you think of this town and the the fact that you are some geek writing for yahoo can’t get a real job writing for a newspaper."
This guy is representative of the old guard who's too [fill in the blank] to realize which direction the wind is blowing. Silver moved from newspaper to magazine to internet. That's the hierarchy.)
These small moments make it all the more clear that as the newspaper industry confront the internet it's going to be a survival of the fittest and no one should shed a tear for those who don't make it. It'll be their own damn fault.
*How Joe finds time to eat and be a father is beyond me. His blog posts are usually over 1,000 words long, often approaching 3,000, and he's also writing a book after having just published one last year. And he's also a newspaper columnist. Basically he puts most other metro columnists to shame.
David Brooks writes in today's NYT about John McCain, who was a prisoner of war, and his campaign. The column is absolute shit. Here is the thesis:
When McCain and his team set out to win the presidency in 2008, they hoped to run a campaign with this sort of spirit. McCain would venture forth on the back of his bus, going places other Republicans don’t go, saying things politicians don’t say, offering the country the vision of a different kind of politics — free of circus antics — in which serious people sacrifice for serious things.
It hasn’t turned out that way. McCain hasn’t been able to run the campaign he had envisioned. Instead, he and his staff have been given an education by events...
McCain and his advisers have been compelled to adjust to the hostile environment around them. They have been compelled, at least in their telling, to abandon the campaign they had hoped to run.
It's amazing the lengths people will go to to absolve John McCain, who was a prisoner of war. It's not his campaign, it's the world, man.
If John McCain, POW, cannot stay true to his beliefs in the face of a campaign, what hope does he have of staying true to his beliefs once he's in the White House?
Bill Kristol having a column in the New York Times.
For the fourth time since January, when he began writing his column, the Times has had to make a material correction to something he's written. Is Kristol the best conservative voice the Times could find to write a column in the most influential newspaper in the world? Were there no better candidates?
Interestingly if unfortunately, the Times has opted to revise the column instead of issuing a formal correction.
My friend Pakistani friend Sehban just sent me the following email, which I thought was worth passing along in light of today's news:
The tragedy of [Pakistan] is that it suckles at the teat of feudalism and ignorance. That the only non feudal leader to hold office in the better part of two decades was the one who brought about social progression is no surprise. It is even less of a surprise that he was so unceremoniously forced out of power by the feudal parties. The passion for any given issue in Pakistan is inversely proportionate to the understanding of it.
It is tragic that Zardai, a man of at the very least a deplorable character and possibly guilty of acting in accordance with it is now the puppet master of that country will cause more despair than before.
The Islamists and feudalsshould rejoice, while anyone with an IQ superior to kumquat should mourn this day, not necessarily because of the man who was deposed but rather what he was deposed for.
Just arrived in my inbox, from the $100M man himself, Mr. Bill Clinton:
And if you contribute before the midnight deadline, you might have the chance to join Hillary and me in Denver next week for a truly exciting and historic convention. You're going to get to see an amazing display of Democratic unity in person -- you don't want to miss it.Just a heads up. Next Friday I'm having a dinner at my apartment. If you contribute towards lowering my debt -- I have a complusion at the horse track for betting on horses that cannot win -- I might serve you a lobster.
As a convert to the church of W, Mr. McCain has been talking a lot recently about following Osama bin Ladin to the gates of hell and whatnot. But, I'm just curious if any of you have seen this video from the BBC in which Benazir Bhutto makes a reference to Osama bin Ladin being killed by Omar Sheikh. There was a ruffle about it in the indie news, claiming that the Pakistani press had reported Osama death. Because the BBC reporter doesn't seem to bat an eye when she mentions his death, I feel this argument might have weight. Just wanted to get y'alls take on this one:
If you don't subscribe to the best magazine out there (in my humble opinion), you should sign up right now.
Not only does the entire (modest) $20 subscription fee go to the charity of your choice, this magazine's tag line is "For People Who Give a Damn." Gotta love that.
And this month's education issue tackles everything from the failing policies of NCLB to new innovative playground designs. Plus, the art is unreal.
I started reading this story last night (on why Obama isn't doing better in the polls), but fell asleep shortly after I opened it. That said, I plan on finishing it tonight, and if you can get your hands on a copy of this week's New York magazine, you may want to check out several of the stories—the art alone is pretty clever. If not, check out the selected links below.
Black and Blacker, the racial politics of the Obama marriage.
How the Obama generation will lead the world.
Emmy voters are receiving this cool DVD set promoting the USA series Burn Notice. The DVD box is white and includes a flashlight for seeing the invisible ink printed on the box. The show is about a CIA agent. Hence the invisible ink. All that's missing is word scramble and a decoder ring.
There's a new book coming out soon by Robert Kuttner called Obama’s Challenge: America’s Economic Crisis and the Power of a Transformative Presidency. Read Hertzberg's full blog post here, but I found this ad-on at the end interesting:
Kuttner’s book, by the way, is a pioneering exercise in cutting-edge publishing. The publisher, Chelsea Green, plans to have two thousand copies ready for distribution at the Democratic National Convention. That will mean a lapsed time of about one week between final edit and finished book. (I’ve written blog posts that took longer to make their way online.) The book won’t be in the stores till September 15, but you can get it sooner, thanks to a deal Chelsea Green has made a with BookSurge, Amazon's new print-on-demand subsidiary. You order it, they print it and bind it, and it’s in your hands forty-eight hours later.Sweet.
More Saddleback....
Andrea Mitchell said the following on MTP yesterday:
McCain's camp is disgusted that a journalist would raise this issue even though McCain was en route to Saddleback during Obama's portion of the event and not actually tucked away in that cone of silence. So Rick Davis fired off an email to NBC crying about Mitchell.
"The Obama people must feel that he didn't do quite as well as they might have wanted to in that context, because what they are putting out privately is that McCain may not have been in the cone of silence and may have had some ability to overhear what the questions were to Obama. He seemed so well-prepared."
Don't you get it? John McCain was a POW so leave him alone.Nicolle Wallace, a spokeswoman for Mr. McCain, said on Sunday night that Mr. McCain had not heard the broadcast of the event while in his motorcade and heard none of the questions.
“The insinuation from the Obama campaign that John McCain, a former prisoner of war, cheated is outrageous,” Ms. Wallace said.
I watched a bit of Saddleback on Saturday night. The consensus seems to be that McCain won, where 'won' means something like 'generated more rousing applause more frequently than the other guy'. So congrats to John McCain on pandering a little bit more, a little bit better than Obama.
That said, entering into this exercise it was hard to imagine Obama walking away in a worse position with the evangelical community than when he started. This dwindling bloc of voters was never going to come out en force for Obama anyway and so the only direction he could go -- realistically -- was up. I think he did that. He may have relied upon that devil nuance too often, but the voters he isolated when doing so weren't going his way anyway.
For McCain his concern had to be drawing these voters back into the tent. Perhaps this is why his rhetoric was dialed up tremendously while the substance remained awfully lacking.
(This post blows. I cannot string a coherent sentence together, let alone a sustained thought. I feel like I'm gesturing wildly if lazily in the hope that one of you folks picks up on what I'm trying to say.)
Ok, sorry, but this is just too amazing to not share with the world. My friend Brendan is a tattoo artist that recently became blind. Sad, yes, but obviously it's not impeding his professional goals. This is a tattoo he recently did on our friend Rob:
The picture on the left is another artist's interpretation of what it was supposed to look like. HA!
The first 45 seconds are too opaque and the last 10 seconds are too heavy handed. Still, an ad that speaks to one of the central issues of gay marriage: the denial of an expression of love. Who could be against that?
Since John McCain's daughter is publishing a children's book I thought this might be appropriate.
