Obama lama ding dong.

Its not every day one sees Bono upstaged by, well, the stage. The Lincoln Memorial managed to do so quite nicely.



Good show though- even the Garth Brooks bit.

A Millionaire's Club of 100 Windbags

Is Dianne Feinstein gunning to be the new Joe Lieberman? Can we expect a sudden and ongoing conversion to principled stands on points of law by the California senator, or is she just pissed about being forgotten over the Panetta/CIA pick and has decided to act like Anne Bancroft in GI Jane? You be the judge....

Hooray!

UPDATE: Exclusive photos of one of Rockland's youngest voters backing Obama...

Keep him away from the controls*: he has a tendency to crash things

What US government issue aircraft would we like to think of when remember John McCain's service to America?:

Yep

Nope

*Both metaphorically and in reality

Good Ole BBC

Kudos to Jon Kelly of the BBC for writing the essay I have always wanted to craft to issue to any of my fellow Britons planning to visit the US for the first time:

End of the road

I think it takes a transient outsider to get the message across: whenever I try I think I sound too defensive. Nice work, Jon.

Overheard Joke...

Q: What is the difference between a pigeon and an investment banker?

A: A pigeon can still put a deposit on a Ferrari

Dog Whistle or Warning Sign?

After 8 years of mangled syntax and mispronounced words, it seems that it has become Republican orthodoxy to pronounce fairly mundane words in slightly exotic ways. I'm not refering to big foreign tongue twisters like "Mahmoud Ahmadinejad" (i.e. "Ackyminniejabs, the new Adlorf Hilter") or new Pakistani president "Asif Ali Zardari", but rather to the name of our nation's capital.

He's been there in one form or another since attending the National War College in 197e and although he is older than dirt the name had been changed from Foggy Bottom a far while before he was born, yet for some reason Senator McCain insists on pronouncing Washington DC:

"WAHHRRSHHHINGTORN DC"

Is this a signal to his base that although a member of the establishment by any ordinary reckoning, McCain is so contemptous of "gov'mint" that he refuses to even pronounce the name of the first president properly?

Or rather is he proving himself to be dogged, principled, cunning, and as thick as two short planks?

In any case, if it is now ok to just make up pronunciations for long accepted names, I think I'll start refering to the good senator and his adopted home state of Arizona as "Jerrrrn MickCarrrrrrn of Arrrrrhhhhhrrowzima" from now on. Maybe it'll confuse a few of the Gunrack MacButtcracks out there at the very least....

McCain insists it is "Wahhhrrshingtorn": he looked it up on the original Blackberry that he claims to have invented (pictured)

And their sports guy looks like the late Senator Reed Smoot

From Bangor, Maine via MSNBC:

TV anchor who resembles Palin gets 'hate mail


BANGOR, Maine - A television news anchor in Maine who looks a lot like Sarah Palin says she's been getting "hate mail and nasty phone calls."

Cindy Michaels from WVII-TV has long brown hair that she sometimes wears up in a style similar to Palin's, and she also wears glasses on occasion.

Michaels says some viewers recently began accusing her of trying to copy Palin's style or, worse, somehow trying to subliminally sway votes.

While smarting over accusations of bias, Michaels says she's generally flattered by the comparisons to Palin. Michaels describes her as a "beautiful woman."

Having been subjected to the news on WVII on occasion, I am inclined to suspect that any 'hate mail'* is more due to her working for the most inane and pointless news operation in Eastern Maine than her sharing that c1993 senior flight attendant look with Palin.

I think of greater interest is the extent to which rival station WABI's weather man looks like President William Howard Taft:




(*Hate mail? I wonder who takes the time to compose hate mail- that shows real dedication to one's irrational, puce-faced anger. In this day and age surely one just blogs?)

Wanted: A Tough President who Sees Insults in Everything Anyone Says.

Barak Obama: "I amazed that my opponent thinks that when I said that choosing between Senator McCain and President Bush was six of one and half a dozen of the other that I was suggesting that he enjoyed symetrically balanced bisexual orgies."

John McCain: "My friends, when I pointed out that Senator Obama's suggestion that proper tire inflation as a means to solve the energy crisis was about as useful as a chocolate teapot, I was in no way bringing race into the debate. Those sort of suggestions make me angry, and you won't like me when I'm angry. McCain smash."

Joe Biden: "My saying Sarah Palin's accumulated executive experience in small town Alaska is about as relevant as tits on a nun has been deliberately misconstrued by the Republicans. I view the Governor of Alaska strictly from the neck up, and as I can attest there is nothing wrong with being catholic."

Sarah Palin: "Bridge to nowhere... blah blah blah... thanks but no thanks... blah blah blah... Don't tell anyone, but I kept the earmarked money in Alaska even though the bridge wasn't built... blah blah blah... nothing wrong with tits as they were molded out of clay by God's own hand 10,000 years ago... blah blah blah... Has anyone else noticed I sould like Frances McDormand in Fargo?... blah blah blah..."

This Convention is Pure Torture

From Beau Bo D'or

I have been watching some of the Republican convention this week and I think I understand John McCain's national security policy.

If John McCain is ever captured by Al Qadea, he won't talk, evah, even if they break his ribs. "Screw you bin Laden you Iranian bastard", he'll say, spitting his few remaining teeth into a grubby pail; "You and your Shia pal Putin might kill me, but you'll have Palin to deal with".

In fact, if he is elected the first thing he plans to do is to rip up the rose garden and install a runway so that we can take off in an A4 Skyhawk and bravely get shot down over our enemy's capital whenever a crisis arises. Nobody can crash an aircraft like John McCain: in fact he's built an entire career around being bad at his job.

"McCain had roughly 20 hours in combat," explains Bill Bell, a veteran of Vietnam and former chief of the U.S. Office for POW/MIA Affairs -- the first official U.S. representative in Vietnam since the 1973 fall of Saigon. "Since McCain got 28 medals," Bell continues, "that equals out to about a medal-and-a-half for each hour he spent in combat. There were infantry guys -- grunts on the ground -- who had more than 7,000 hours in combat and I can tell you that there were times and situations where I'm sure a prison cell would have looked pretty good to them by comparison. The question really is how many guys got that number of medals for not being shot down."

Ahh, what it is to be the son and grandson of an admiral.

Has John Edwards been To Alaska in the past year?

One area where I feel a great deal of affinity with conservatives is around the concept of personal responsibility. Society cannot be blamed for the things in one's life that come from personal choices and that are more properly influenced by family and community.

Therefore I find it quite interesting to note that Christian conservative and Republican vice-presidential pander-date Sarah Palin's underage daughter is unmarried and pregnant.

I suppose this sort of thing is bound to happen when you emphasize snakes and apples over birds and bees. Or from a creationist standpoint (of which Mrs. Palin is a proud advocate) is this God's 'hand' at work? Maybe Mrs. Palin's calm acceptance of her daughter's pregnancy draws upon her opinions about climate change: if there is no human hand at work in global warming maybe the same applies to the formation of her impending grandchild. All of this does beg the question however as to whether Mrs. Palin's Veep acceptance speech will be drafted by Diablo Cody.

So what is it to be folks? Do the moralists out there want to vote for a ticket where the top half abandoned his wife and children for a rich heiress and the bottom half was unable to successfully relay her own values to her daughter, or is this somehow the fault of working mothers, equal rights for women, and other issues Hilary voters believe in? After all, McCain's chromosonal pick was predicated on a combination of fooling conservatives and Clinton supporters- has it worked? Has he fooled you?

Dead Parrot Picks Palin

Yesterday appeared to be opposite day in the Republican Party. Instead of running with a callow, inexperienced, and little-traveled child of a presidential candidate and a gnarled, foul-tempered, cynical old goat of a vice-presidential candidate they switched around roles. It fairly brings one back to the wonderous days of GHW Bush and Dane Quaylee.

Its probably good for McCain that the second placed Democrat in the tight primary race was a woman and not Barney Frank, otherwise his blatant tokenism would have been much harder for his zombotic horde of a base to swallow. Think about it- would rock-ribbed social conservatives ever rallied around a John McCain/Rip Taylor ticket?

Here Republican VP candidate, Governor of Alaska, and former beauty queen Sarah Palin demonstrates her policy experience in the fields of education and foreign affairs:

Some Questions for You, Grandpa

How does a famously short-tempered man defend his "temperament" without seeming tetchy?

How does an ex-naval officer senior US senator son and grandson of admirals and the husband of a multi-million dollar heiress pin the "elitist" label on the mixed-race man raised by a single mom who pulled himself up off food stamps to graduate from Harvard Law?

How is $5 million the threshold for wealth in your world?

Why won't you support the health care reforms that could save General Motors and make much of American industry competitive again, while covering your fellow citizens with the same plan they pay for out of their taxes to cover you as a US senator?

An Open Letter to Senator Susan Collins, (R, Maine)

Dear Senator Collins;

Last summer I called your office to alert your staff to an unfair telephone "push poll" campaign that unjustly smeared you as an advocate of illegal immigration in an attempt to make me to call your office and attack you for voting for decent, and American, immigration reform. Even though I indentify with the Democrats I felt this national attack was unworthy of Maine politics and felt it only fair to inform your office of the harm that was being inflicted on you by Bush/McCain Republicans in the name of electoral expediency.

I remember the call well as it came in on the day my daughter was born. As an immigrant myself I knew you played fair, and on the important issues of fairness you stood by your word. My little girl deserves strong role models who stand for what is right and true in the face of expediency and the soft way out. It is why she is named Scout Charlotte- after Jean-Louise from To Kill a Mockingbird and the wise and compassionate spider from Maine's own Charlotte's Web. Senator Collins, she may not bear your name but she should bear your spirit as an independent and fair self-made Maine woman.

Therefore would you please condemn in the strongest possible terms the hateful advertisments being run against Tom Allen, your Senate opponent, that outright lie and claim he opposes secret ballots in union elections? Your integrity means a lot to me as a new American, to my wife as a Mainer who can trace her roots in this state back to the 18th century, and to my aforementioned 14 month old daughter. One day I would like to point you out to Scout, your portrait hung alongside the one of Margaret Chase Smith in the statehouse, and ask her to think of you with pride, not shame.

Sincerely,
Wisdom Weasel

Driller Killer

Setting aside general questions as to the desirability or feasibility of energy independence (topics I hope to waffle about at a later date) I have been alternating between bouts of frustration and fits of the giggles every time I hear a candidate or interest group advocate for increased oil exploration and drilling in the United States as the way past high energy prices.

Even if we ignore the time it will take to bring any oil to gas stations (about 10 years), the shortage of drilling rigs, and the shortage of refineries, the minuscule savings per gallon the experts project will be eaten up by general inflation, never mind fluctuations in the oil market. The current best guess is a savings of 10c a gallon when the oil comes online a decade from now. That's about 3% of today's price per gallon at the gas station down the street from where I sit ($3.64). Ten years ago in August 1998 the average national price per gallon was $1.06. In the past decade therefore, the price of gas has more than doubled, going up by about 240%. That dime a gallon the oil companies promise you'll save if they are allowed to drill offshore and in ANWAR? If the next decade follows the same sort of price trends the past decade did, all that drilling, all those subsidies, and all that environmental damage would mean that prices would only climb by 237% rather than the 240% of the past decade. What a savings!!!

Lets be fair and assume that the price rise over the decade would be much less steep. Maybe T Boone Pickens strapped a windmill to a Mobil station or something, and gas only went up by 100%. Again, all this drilling would only mean that you'd be a mere 97% worse off at the pump. Unless oil and other prices increase by a factor of less than 3% of today's prices over the course of the next decade, additional drilling in sensitive locations will not lower prices, or even do much to arrest price increases. It will however allow oil companies to pump more product as demand continues to grow world wide and therefore generate greater profits.

And therein lies the truth behind this push for drilling. Don't get me wrong: I'm a firm believer in open markets (I feel they are the key to global prosperity if they are truly open) and capitalism. In fact my belief in the market is one of the reasons I feel this push to extract more oil in the name of "energy independence" is a crock- when was the last time you heard of an oil company that sold its product exclusively to its home country? The hydrocarbon markets are global, so the idea of more domestic oil lessening our demand for "foreign" oil is a non-starter.

From a simplified market standpoint, being a net consumer of fuel puts one in a weak position. It would be far better for the United States to offset (and hopefully reduce) that fuel consumption by being a net exporter of clean energy technology. Why should we base our entire on economy on something we don't have a lot of (oil) rather than something we have a goodly amount of (tech expertise and R&D spending)?

Of course, that's a topic for another post. But I did want to jot down my thoughts about drilling and the silliness that is currently prevailing in the election campaign around energy independence and pocket book issues.

This is not a maverick conservative french fry blog

I am surely not the first to notice this, but:

John McCain, Republican for president;

McCain Frozen Foods, the world's largest potato processor.

Good thing the Democrats are running Obama, not Oh Henry.

The Massachussian Candidate

I am happy that Senator Edward Kennedy's brain surgery apparently went well, and I have been keeping my fingers crossed for his family since he went public with his cancer diagnosis.

That said- small quibble. Why has the Kennedy family approached public news releases on the subject of the Senator's health crisis in the manner of Kim Jong Il and the North Korean government?

I'm not suggesting that they haven't been speaking to the press: its the little embelished flourishes that the Kennedy spokespeople add that put one in mind of the Dear Leader announcing another round of 18 holes-in-one.

Upon his first siezure, we were told that Ted Kennedy had been diagnosed with brain cancer (straightforward, candid announcement) and then that he was so resilient he had bounced back to watch both the Celtics playoff and the Red Sox game. I suppose telling us that he'd be riding the bench for Doc Rivers or pitching in relief of Tim Wakefield was a step too far even for this sort of naked pandering, but still.

Now post surgery, appraently everything went well with this dangerous procedure (again, straightforward) but also the Senator "Feels like a million dollars". He's a 76 year old man with a punishing workload who has just had a surgeon prodding inside his head, not Valerie Bertinelli pitching Jennie Craig, for christ's sake. In reality he probably feels like someone smacked him on the dome a few thousand times then strapped a wrestler's jockstrap over his mouth and nose.

My two main complaints with this sort of thing is that a) it infantalizes the public, suggesting that if we were given the unvarnished truth about this elderly man we'd panic and flee the nation in leaky boats; and b) it undermines the veracity of the central message. When I start hearing how Mr. X or Mrs. Y is not only recovering from their ailment but taking some time to serve as a rodeo clown I make a mental note to start checking the obituary column a few weeks hence.

I suggest that rather than continue the Kennedy tradition of making outrageous claims of manly heartiness regardless of the actual medical condition as first pioneered by brother John's presidential advisors (wheezing, pill popping, sex addict sold to America as thrusting semi-pro football star), the Liberal Lion of the Senate take a page out of his colleague Robert Byrd's book. The senior member of the Senate announced today that he was being hospitalized for "lethargy and sluggishness". No word though from the Byrd camp as to the presence of "the vapors", or whether the sawbones would be a-doctoring the Senator.

Senator Kennedy- sometimes its ok to sound like Scarlett O'Hara.

Oh Joy Unbounded!

Newsnight has arrived on BBC America!
For those who are unaware how enjoyably, face-punchingly, intellectually-elitist sneer-wearing* a programme this is, please enjoy a little amuse bouche:



(*Which is a good thing in my mind, which is why I'm a bit of a friendless hermit)

Armageddon (out of here if he wins)

Republican presidential candidate and professional ignoramus Mike Huckabee has a new pithy sound bite he likes to end his speeches with in order to rally his troops:

"I didn't major in math, I majored in miracles."

Well that should come in handy if he wins and has to fix the economy. The quotes from his supporters interviewed in exit polls makes for amazing listening: they sound like turkeys voting for Thanksgiving. If these folks used the same logic they employ to pick a candidate to following the rules of the road then maybe we'd be able to be rid of them through a spike in fatal traffic accidents, but no- we would never be that lucky. Perhaps we could break off three or four southern states, gift them to the evangelicals for their own country, let them be as fundamentalist as they like, and call it Talibama.

And would somebody please tell Huckabee and his moronic horde that the word is "pundit", not "pundant"? Haven't we learned how devestating it can to be the country and the world if we elect someone who can't even be bothered to find out how a word is pronounced?

I'm sincerely grateful that economically illiterate rube isn't going to win.

Hmmm...

A lot of my blog friends are lining up behind Obama. This both heartens and worries me. Heartens me because I like Obama; worries me because while we are many things my friends and I are hardly representative of the average American voter.

Let's see if our kiss of death works again like it did in 2004.