Whoa

Alex Koppelman on the ad:

Really, though, this truly has to be seen to be believed. After I saw it for the first time, I spent more than a couple minutes checking around the Web to make absolutely sure it wasn't a hoax, figuring it couldn't really have been released by a presidential campaign. But it's real.

As for the video, depending on your news outlet the Obama quote might be inaccurate. At the minimum it's grossly out of context. Here's the full quote: "It has become increasingly clear in my travel, the campaign, that the crowds, the enthusiasm, 200,000 people in Berlin, is not about me at all. It's about America. I have just become a symbol."

Friday, August 1, 2008

Too Skinny to be Pres?

Amy Chozick in the WSJ:

But in a nation in which 66% of the voting-age population is overweight and 32% is obese, could Sen. Obama's skinniness be a liability? Despite his visits to waffle houses, ice-cream parlors and greasy-spoon diners around the country, his slim physique just might have some Americans wondering whether he is truly like them.

That's straight up idiocy. If we don't elect a guy because he's too healthy then we don't deserve democracy.

Interesting graphic at least.

Put It on My Tab...

And I thought our $32 working PM Network dinner was a lot, but this takes the cake.

Could he whine ANY louder?

I can't believe that McCain heard this quote:

“So nobody really thinks that Bush or McCain have a real answer for the challenges we face, so what they’re going to try to do is make you scared of me,” Mr. Obama said in Springfield, Mo., echoing earlier remarks. “You know, he’s not patriotic enough. He’s got a funny name. You know, he doesn’t look like all those other presidents on those dollar bills, you know. He’s risky. That’s essentially the argument they’re making.”

And decided that it was a good time to accuse Obama of playing the race card.

Really? When you're given a chance to affirm the importance of diversity in our political system and say outright that his race will not be a part of your attacks against him, you call out 'the race card.'

What a douchebag.

Am I Missing Something

McCain releases a pathetic ad attacking Obama for is celebrity. Tabling all questions about strategy, tact, and taste, two observations:

1) John McCain has a movie based on his life, adapted from his best-selling autobiography.

2) McCain's favorite president of the modern era was a movie star.

It's the hypocrisy that slays me.

Thursday, July 31, 2008

Clinton Disgust, cont.

Now I'm getting emails from Bill Clinton. Five minutes ago this showed up in my inbox:

During the campaign, Hillary and I didn't have the chance to eat together much because we were usually on the trail in different states. Now that the campaign's over, I'm glad we can share more meals again.

Of all the people I've had the privilege to break bread with, the person I most enjoy is still Hillary.

Now you have a chance to have dinner with her. And if you contribute today to help Hillary retire that pesky campaign debt, you and a guest might be sitting down to dinner with her soon. I think you should go for it and enter today.

Isn't it romantic when the philanderer panders for his wife?

NYPD vs. Critical Mass cyclist

Rapper or Republican?

Just a little Jon Stewart to brighten up your day:

Thanks, Daddy Government

Yesterday Los Angeles passed legislation banning fast food restaurants from South Central LA. This is a grotesque display of government paternalism and a shock to those who believe in limited government. Never did I think the day would arrive when the government would ban the sale of food to adults, but here we are.

I'll let Will Saletan make my point:

And what about the argument that people in South-Central need the government to block unhealthy food options because they're "in a poor situation" to locate better choices? This is the argument normally made for restricting children's food options at school—that they're more dependent and vulnerable than the rest of us. How do you feel about treating poor people like children?

It's true that food options in low-income neighborhoods are, on average, worse than the options in wealthier neighborhoods. But restricting options in low-income neighborhoods is a disturbingly paternalistic way of solving the problem.

And the helplessness attributed to poor people is exaggerated. "You try to get a salad within 20 minutes of our location; it's virtually impossible," says the Community Coalition's executive director. Really? The coalition's headquarters is at 8101 S. Vermont Ave. A quick Google search shows, among other outlets, a Jack-in-the-Box six blocks away. They have salads. Not the world's greatest salads, but not as bad as a government that tells you whose salad you can eat.

How's this for a compromise: The city of LA can ban certain types of food from being sold in certain areas only if the city prepares three meals a day for each person who might be affected by the ban.

If the government wants to be someone's mom then they ought to act like it.

Disgust, continued

looks like bill richardson is going to help with the "get hilary to retire fund" as well--or maybe he's just scared he made the wrong decision by becoming an Obama supporter, even if it was so late in the game it really made no difference. and the fact that there are reported "grumblings" from her side that Obama isn't helping to raise enough money for her is just mind-blowing to me. put your big girl pants on and deal with it. i really wanted to be a hillary fan, but i really think she is just trying to make me hate her...

Wednesday, July 30, 2008

The Times is Feeling Frisky!

A political analysis by the NYT today gently bitch-slapped Obama's slight political/theoretical dichotomy. It's no surprise that a law professor/politician would have to compromise some of his principles in the race for the White House, but this graf of an otherwise glowing story is actually refreshing to me:

"Before he outraised every other presidential primary candidate in American history, Mr. Obama marched students through the thickets of campaign finance law. Before he helped redraw his own State Senate district, making it whiter and wealthier, he taught districting as a racially fraught study in how power is secured. And before he posed what may be the ultimate test of racial equality — whether Americans will elect a black president — he led students through African-Americans’ long fight for equal status."

I love Obama and I want him to win. But I also want us to hold him to what we know he believes! Otherwise, we're going to get more of this

My Disgust Knows No End

When Hillary lost the primary to Obama -- like officially lost, on the night when he received a plurality of the delegates, not like when she lost a few months earlier in the eyes of anyone with a brain -- she made a request during her 'victory' speech for people to log onto her website and tell her what to do. This was my chance.

I logged on and sent her an email asking her to (finally) drop out of the race. Due to that email I ended up on her email list. The following appeared in my inbox this morning:

Would you like to join me for dinner?

During the campaign, I had the chance a few times to grab meals with supporters, but they were always rushed thanks to the frenetic pace of the campaign. This is my first chance to sit down and spend some real one-on-one time with you. If you enter today, we could be having dinner together soon!

My staff has been calling this my "retirement dinner" -- not because I'm retiring, of course, but because we're working on retiring the debt we owe to small vendors all over the country.

The woman with a hundred million dollar fortune has no shame. Whatever dignity she had in the bottoms of her shoes following her grotesque display during the primary has now officially vanished.

The funny thing is, I'd gladly donate $10 if it meant Hillary would retire.

Tuesday, July 29, 2008

From the Dept of Duh

A new Brookings research paper concludes that access to family planning services decreases the number of unplanned pregnancies. The paper's abstract:

This brief describes a recent analysis of the impacts of state policies that expanded eligibility for Medicaid family planning services to women who do not meet regular Medicaid eligibility criteria. The results of this research show that these expanded eligibility policies had a significant impact on reducing unplanned births. The effect on birth rates was largest for women ages 18 to 24. Data on individual behavior confirms that this reduction in births was achieved through increased use of contraception among sexually-active women. The authors estimate the policy cost of preventing an unwanted birth to be around $6,800. They conclude that this is a cost-effective policy intervention relative to other policies and programs targeted at reducing teen and unwanted births.

Rather than bemoan the obviousness of the paper's conclusion I say we bemoan the idiocy of not having these policies already in place. I mean, $6.8k is a lot of dough!

Does McCain Get the Joke?

It scares me that we might elect a president who's never used a computer. That's John McCain, who refers to Google as "the Google" and who for a long while seemed to revel in his computer ignorance, as if computers were something for the elite and not a critical component to any broad understanding of our economy, both local, national, and global. (And again, where does he get his porn?)

At a fund-raiser last night in San Francisco McCain said, "I do understand the importance of the computer. I understand the importance of the blogs." This is encouraging, but it's impossible to grasp the importance of computing without serious experience with a computer. How they work on a micro level is informative of how they're transforming the world in a macro level, more so than any other point of reference I can think of. (Also, a campaign aid needs to tell John to stop putting "The" in front of every computer-related noun.)

McCain continued: "But I am forcing myself ... let me put it this way, I am using the computer more and more every day."

I don't know how much one can learn about computers while running for President but my hunch is that he's not yet up to speed on social networking sites like Facebook. Which makes you wonder if he understands the RNC's latest ploy: BarackBook.

A Special Kind of Hate

As a Unitarian (read secular humanist) the church shooting at Tennessee Valley Unitarian Universalist Church really effected me in a way that no other public shooting has. At first it was the context, the fact that these people were watching a children's interpretation of the play Annie, that made this crime so heinous.

But when I read the killer's motive for killing 2 churchgoers and wounding seven others, it sent a new chill down my spine. He said he chose this church because of its support of the liberal progressive movement and civil rights, specifically citing his hatred of blacks and gays.

Sure, this happened in Tennessee. But I think this has implications for all of us. We talk a lot about how this country is ready for a black president, and I think it is. But this is just one rude reminder that there is still a lot of work to be done.

W Trailer

Monday, July 28, 2008

Overemphasizing Importance of VP?

Only 69% of Americans can name the current Vice President. Meanwhile gallons of ink are being spilled covering the veepstakes for McCain and Obama. Are we placing too much emphasis on the importance of Obama and McCain's running mates?

I say no.

The vast majority of that 69% doesn't vote and elections are decided by those who do. But maybe I'm wrong.

What Kind of Policy Is This?

McCain yesterday on This Week:

STEPHANOPOULOS: Not a single economist in the country said it’d work.

MCCAIN: Yes. And there’s no economist in the country that knows very well the low-income American who drives the furthest, in the oldest automobile, that sometimes can’t even afford to go to work.STEPHANOPOULOS: But they all say that . . . the oil companies, the gas companies are going to absorb … any reduction.

MCCAIN: … they say that. But one, it didn’t happen before, and two, we wouldn’t let it happen. We wouldn’t let it — Americans wouldn’t let them absorb that.

STEPHANOPOULOS: How would you prevent that?

MCCAIN: We would make them shamed into it. We, of course, know how to — American public opinion. And we would penalize them, if necessary. But they wouldn’t. They would pass it on.

So McCain's plan is to shame the oil companies into lowering prices. At some point doesn't incompetence have to be called as such?

Study: Media Tougher on Obama

Quoted from the LA Times:

The Center for Media and Public Affairs at George Mason University, where researchers have tracked network news content for two decades, found that ABC, NBC and CBS were tougher on Obama than on Republican John McCain during the first six weeks of the general-election campaign.

You read it right: tougher on the Democrat.

During the evening news, the majority of statements from reporters and anchors on all three networks are neutral, the center found. And when network news people ventured opinions in recent weeks, 28% of the statements were positive for Obama and 72% negative.

Network reporting also tilted against McCain, but far less dramatically, with 43% of the statements positive and 57% negative, according to the Washington-based media center.

Nothing about this surprises me. The media has taken a pass each time McCain has jumped the tracks on the Straight Talk Express. Confusing Sunni with Shiite? The Iraq-Pakistan border? The surge causing the Anbar Awakening? His shifting position on a timetable for withdrawal from Iraq?

Frank Rich: 7/27

How Obama Became Acting President

The growing Obama clout derives not from national polls, where his lead is modest. Nor is it a gift from the press, which still gives free passes to its old bus mate John McCain. It was laughable to watch journalists stamp their feet last week to try to push Mr. Obama into saying he was “wrong” about the surge. More than five years and 4,100 American fatalities later, they’re still not demanding that Mr. McCain admit he was wrong when he assured us that our adventure in Iraq would be fast, produce little American “bloodletting” and “be paid for by the Iraqis.”

Never mind. This election remains about the present and the future, where Iraq’s $10 billion a month drain on American pocketbooks and military readiness is just one moving part in a matrix of national crises stretching from the gas pump to Pakistan. That’s the high-rolling political casino where Mr. Obama amassed the chips he cashed in last week. The “change” that he can at times wield like a glib marketing gimmick is increasingly becoming a substantive reality — sometimes through Mr. Obama’s instigation, sometimes by luck. Obama-branded change is snowballing, whether it’s change you happen to believe in or not.

Link

Sunday, July 27, 2008