Entourage

Good to have the gang back.

True Blood

Ok, so it's a first episode. First episodes of even the best series can be iffy, and especially a show like this that relies on a mythology that obviously will need some time to flesh out. Still, "Six Feet Under" this is most surely not. Anna Paquin is Rogue, and for that there will always be a special place in my heart. But really, let's be honest, she's never had wicked acting chops. The writing has some intriguing aspects, but sometimes it's downright blunt.

After "John From Cincinnati" tanked, HBO really could use a new hit. Here's hoping this show gets a bit of time to breath before they decide whether it's worth the risk or not. I'll certainly give it a couple episodes.

Incidentally

You want to know the difference between kids' sports movies and adult's sports movies? Kids' movies are all about sportsmanship and enjoying the sport. Adult's sports movies are about winning. Also, I guess it's worth mentioning that I'm watching "The Mighty Ducks" now. I know, I'm super lame.

Give Huckabee A Job

Ok, so I have a bit of a crush on Mike Huckabee. Yeah, some of his positions are straight up crazy. That's fine, I can accept that, but damn, every time I see that guy I can't help but like him. He was just on the Daily Show and, like always, just exuded charisma.

So, my quandary is this: is there any job we can give Huckabee in the next administration which would be simultaneously extremely visible and almost entirely without power? Actually, during the primaries Huckabee got tons of flack for his populist positions, so maybe we can find something that plays up that aspect of his politics and, shall we say, de-emphasizes his social conservatism. Department of Labor? Interior?

The Politics Of Conventions

I might have another post in me that's more specifically about Senator McCain's speech accepting his party's nomination for President, but what struck me most about it was tone. The Democratic Convention had some firey speeches to be sure, but the ones that come to mind the most, John Kerry and Joe Biden, got their fire from tying McCain's positions to the clearly wrong positions of the current President. Everyone admitted that John McCain was a patriot and a decent guy who was simply wrong about just about everything. It wasn't jarring then, when Barack Obama came out and hammered John McCain's positions for being wrong and gave his alternatives.

Last night was jarring. After two nights of smarmy, sarcastic speeches implying all kinds of terrible things about their opponents, John McCain comes out and waves his hands at playing nice before essentially talking about his life story for an hour. Now, out on the campaign trail it's possible to claim that you don't have control over people who aren't in your campaign. If Rudy Giuliani gave an interview where he tore apart Obama like he did two nights ago, John McCain, if he felt he needed to, could legitimately say "I don't employ Rudy, so I can't exactly make him stop, but I sure wish he would because I don't agree with him." Now, as we learned with Swift Boaters, a nominee can disapprove all he wants, but the bile gets out into the discourse anyway. Still, at least there's some separation.

What isn't credible, however, is to have these two perspectives smashed together at the same convention. If John McCain truly respects Barack Obama, what didn't he tell Rudy, or Mitt, or Sarah to tone down their speeches? Why not ask them to focus on Barack's policies that you disagree with rather than making fun of community organizers? Why not present a whole convention with the type of stuff that you yourself to say if you were speaking every night?

The answer is that the few nice things John McCain said about Barack Obama last night aren't what the Republican Party believes. They believe the stuff from the last few nights and John McCain had to have those speeches to mollify his base. And he had to say those nice things about Obama last night to try to attract independent voters. So which night of the convention show what John McCain truly feels? I'm betting whichever one is most likely to get him elected at any given moment.

Swing voters breaking for Obama

From Gallup: `The percentage of voters who are "up for grabs" has declined sharply in the past week, from 30% to 21%, according to the latest USA Today/Gallup poll.' Assuming no-one has gone from being certain to vote from Obama to certain to vote for McCain (or vice-versa) in the past week, of that 9%, 6% went to Obama and 3% to McCain. This gives Obama a 42%-37% advantage over McCain in the popular vote.

Gallup's description of the methodology is unclear, but I think the comparison is based on surveys done last weekend (30-31 August) and yesterday.

Republican Convention: Day 2

Ok, I lasted an hour or so into last night's convention. When they started up the Reagan video talking about what a "maverick" he was, I just had to turn it off. I know, I was weak but it was just garbage. Maybe I've got rose colored glasses about last week's Democratic Convention, but I don't remember them mischaracterizing Republican positions the way the Republicans are doing. Anyway, I decided to try harder tonight.

Just on the surface, Romney, Huckabee, and Giuliani are such better speakers than McCain that it *has* to have made some Republicans at least a little regretful that this is the guy they've ended up with. I'm not suggesting they won't support McCain, but there have to be a few people out there a little wistful for the primaries.

A little below the surface, I'm getting fed up quick. Yes, there have been some good political lines, particularly from Giuliani, but the substance of these speeches has been maddening. They have been fearless in their complete disregard for things Democrats actually believe. See, Democrats say, "Republicans are too aggressive on foreign policy and they support overturning Roe v. Wade" and that's what Republicans actually believe. Republicans obscure the actual positions of their opponents and rely on paeans to non-partisan ideas like patriotism.

Yeah, I know, they do these things because it works. It's also the job of Democrats to push back against the nonsense that comes out of their mouths. But it's sad that this is what national politics has become: a largely fair dealing party constantly pushing back against a party that always fights in bad faith.

I Love Live Mics

Peggy Noonan gets caught. Link.

Sans titre, Francis Bebey, c. 1998

Je suis venu chercher du travail
J'espère qu'il y en aura
je suis venu de mon lointain pays
Pour travailler chez vous

J'ai tout laissé, ma femme, mes amis
Au pays tout là-bas
J'espère les retrouves tous en vie
Le jour de mon retour

Ma pauvre mère était bien désolée
En me voyant partir
Je lui ai dit qu'un jour je reviendrai
Mettre fin à sa misère

J'ai parcouru de long jour de voyage
Pour venir jusqu'ici
Ne m'a-t-on pas assuré d'un acceuil
Qui vaudrait bien ette peine

Regardez-moi, je suis fatigué
D'aller par les chemins
Voici des jour que je n'ai rien mangé
Auriez-vous un peu de pain?

Mon pantalon est tout déchiré
Mais je n'en ai pas d'autre
Ne criez pas, ce n'est pas un scandale
Je suis seulement pauvre

Je suis venu chercher du travail
J'espère qu'il y en aura
Je suis venu de mon lointain pays
Pour travailler chez vous.

Qualified

The issue of who is "qualified" for holding nationwide executive office has come up a lot in this election cycle. John McCain asserts that Barack Obama doesn't have enough experience to be qualified for being president. Various democrats, internet folks, and even a few Republicans argue that Sarah Palin doesn't have enough experience, or perhaps not the "right" experience to be Vice President.

Dictionary.com has several definitions for "qualified," but I like looking at the synonyms better: "able, capable, competent, fitted." The focus isn't on having done anything specific or having any one specific quality, but on being in a position to perform whatever the function is being asked of you with competence. When interviewing for a job, sometimes the successful candidate has extensive experience in the field. Sometimes the successful candidate is a young up-and-comer with interesting new ideas.

I think history has shown pretty well that a long political resume doesn't necessarily equal a good President and being a Washington "outsider" doesn't either. John McCain, with his 30 years in the Senate, is plainly "qualified" to be President. So is Barack Obama, with his four years in the Senate, several in the Illinois state legislature, and his sweeping and exciting plans for reforming the country. Sarah Palin, I don't think, is qualified, or at the very least her qualifications are questionable. 22 months as a governor in a small state which receives incredibly huge amounts of federal largess is not very impressive. Unfortunately for her, she also doesn't, at least not that I've seen, bring much new to the table either politically or charismatically. Does she bring several politically useful features to McCain's campaign? Obviously. Is she qualified to be Vice President or, if something should happen to John McCain, President? I just don't think she is. She may have been a hot Republican prospect for four or eight years, but they pulled her from the farm club too soon and it may destroy her prospects.

One Last Post On Palin Before I Shower

Andrew Sullivan and Josh Marshall make the most important point: all of this isn't to tear down Sarah Palin as a person, it's about John McCain's presidential campaign. You can pick through all these Palin stories individually and decide whether each impacts Palin's ability to act as an honorable VP, but taken as a whole it's clear that John McCain didn't think that it was important enough to look into Palin's history. He wanted a female VP pick who could be cast as a maverick conservative Washington outsider. There were other, eminently qualified Republican women he could have chosen. Some couldn't be cast as party mavericks. Some couldn't be really called conservatives. Some aren't Washington outsiders. So what he decided to do was go with an unknown quantity in Sarah Palin. She fit what he thought he needed politically, so he gave no thought to whether she would actually make a good VP. Barack Obama chose Joe Biden because he brought some working class cred to the ticket, but also because he demonstrably will help Barack govern better than Barack could have done alone. John McCain put his campaign before the country in his VP pick and that showed a serious lack of judgment.

Edit: Ok, so as to not break my promise of this being the last Palin post for a little while, here's a sneaky edit to point you in the direction of this editorial, which I rather liked.

Rove On Biden

You know, really, calling the opposition a "big blow hard doofus" is certainly rude, but it's not exactly breaking new lows for the party.

Wait...Seriously?

Video of Sarah Palin shooting a honkin' big assault rifle? Not really that big of a deal given that it's a big part of the party platform and it was done visiting the troops in Kuwait.

Embroiled in a scandal where she might have tried to get her abusive brother-in-law fired? Well, as far scandals go, I guess that's not the worst.

Video of Sarah Palin saying she doesn't know what the VP does? Really embarrassing.

17 year old daughter is 5 months pregnant? Well, kids are off limits in politics...kinda, and the base will get a kick out of a kid being "not forced" into carrying a pregnancy to term and marrying the father.

Having been a member of a secessionist group in Alaska? Wait, really? How is she putting country first if she wants to leave the country? I know I live in a bit of a liberal bubble, but it's one thing after another with this VP pick. Are conservatives still excited to have her on the ticket and, if so, are they crazy? (Also, in the video she says "I've always said competition is sooo good." I know this was probably a quickly produced video, but that's just a stupid sounding line.)

Edit: It appears the answer to both questions is "yes."

Edit, the Second: Ok, I was skeptical and it seems to have been born out. That Red State link asserted that "under God" was added because it had been uttered by the founding fathers. According to Wikipedia, and the huge grain of salt that it comes with so I'm ready to be corrected if somebody has better information, the "under God" phrase was taken from Lincoln's Gettysburg Address. Great as Lincoln was, he wasn't a founding father of the United States. Founding fathers may have put those two words together at some point, but that wasn't where the phrase in the Pledge came from. And given the flippancy of the answer, I'm going to assume that Sarah Palin misunderstood either the question or the history of the Pledge.

Oh Palin...

Sarah Palin really needs a month or four of schooling in the issues of the day. This is stuff you should really really know...Link.

On Teen Mothers

As the whole world knows by now, Republican VP candidate Sarah Palin's 17 year old daughter is pregnant. Evidently she's planning on taking the pregnancy to term and marrying the father. The cynic in me rolls his eyes when considering the chances of a marriage between 17 year olds working out long term, but that's beside the point.

The issue that's come up for Democrats is how to treat this in the campaign. Hilzoy asserts that Palin's child should be off the table, but it's unclear to me what that really means. For instance, Hilzoy states that we shouldn't use this as an example showing that abstinence-only education doesn't work but that it *is* appropriate to discuss how Palin's reaction to this squares with her stated views on abortion.

I just don't see a very bright line distinction there. I mean, we *know* abstinence-only education doesn't work, but Republican's fail to acknowledge that fact based on studies. Just bringing up the topic of abstinence-only education at this point is going to invoke Palin's daughter, so is the whole topic off the table? At some level, this poor girl is going to be in the spotlight no matter what because her mother is running for office. Did the Republicans go overboard with their attacks on Chelsea Clinton? Obviously. Should Democrats do the same thing here? Obviously not. But candidates bring all their baggage with them when they opt to step into the public eye and while there are certain boundaries we should respect vis a vis their families, we also have to recognize that the lives of candidates give rise to legitimate questions of policy. It's unfortunate for this young woman that what would probably be embarrassing in the best of situations is now embarrassing on a national scale, but ultimately politicians have to consider that they're exposing their whole family to public scrutiny when they run for office.

Again, this isn't to say that anything should go, but that a whole host of issues are now sure to make people at least think about how it applies to Gov. Palin's family and that we can't simply avoid those topics in an election year. Ultimately we just have to do our best to stay classy and apologize for any difficulty this may cause a young woman who's already in a bad situation.

Edit: Drew has a much welcomed political post on this up. Link.

Obama's Acceptance Speech

I have no complaints. Pitch freakin' perfect. Yes we can.

For What It's Worth

I just saw a McCain ad where John McCain simply and plainly congratulated Obama on his nomination. Was it politically calculated? Of course. Still, it was still a very small, classy moment in his otherwise crappy campaign. That's the kind of stuff that made me like John McCain back in the early 2000s. Now he was just as conservative back then as he is now, but he did a much better job of not seeming like a total tool back then.

Wow!

Wow, the Democratic Convention got a ton better tonight. The primary speakers from days one and two (Michelle Obama, Teddy Kennedy, and Hillary Clinton) were very good, but the rest of the speakers were pretty bland and lifeless. But Clinton and Biden were both great and Biden's doing very well too.

Barrack Obama, Pragmatist

From the preview of a piece on Obama's economic policies in this weekend's NYT Sunday Magazine:

Some of the confusion stems from Obama’s own strategy of presenting himself as a postpartisan figure. A few weeks ago, I joined him on a flight from Orlando to Chicago and began our conversation by asking about his economic approach. He started to answer, but then interrupted himself. “My core economic theory is pragmatism,” he said, “figuring out what works.”

This, of course, is not the whole story. Invoking pragmatism doesn’t help the average voter much; ideology, though it often gets a bad name, matters, because it offers insight into how a candidate might actually behave as president.

I wonder if Obama's read his share of John Dewey, Jane Addams, and William James. His approach to politics certainly sounds like it.

Pragmatism (by which I mean a particular intellectual movement developed primarily in the US between the Civil War and World War II, and not a willingness to sacrifice principle on the altar of short-term gain), as articulated by Dewey, Addams, and James, is built around two key ideas. First, ideas are tools, not absolute truths. Like tools, ideas will be useful in some situations, and not useful in others, and it is this usefulness by which we evaluate them. Also like tools, ideas can be improved and replaced as better, more effective tools are developed. Second, progress comes from honestly examining the successes and failures of previous attempts. If an idea has worked well in the past, then it's worthwhile to try it again in similar situations. But no idea is perfect, and so it's equally worthwhile to try other possibilities. Identifying the strengths and weaknesses of particular proposals -- whether in philosophy or public policy -- is how we develop new proposals, that enjoy as many of the strengths and as few of the weaknesses of its predecessors as possible. Both components combined lead to an opennesses and respect for ideological opponents -- they're the ones who are best situated to identify flaws with our own proposals -- and a willingness to experiment with radical and untested theories.

And Obama has demonstrated these two features of pragmatism again and again. His willingness to appear at a conservative evangelical megachurch, for example, and seriously and honestly answer their questions shows that he cares about engaging with those who radically disagree with his political views. Similarly, his admission that the Reaganite critique of the bureaucratic welfare state was partly right. He doesn't see conservatives as the enemy, to be ignored and shouted down; rather, a thoughtful exchange between liberals and conservatives helps improve the views of both sides. His market-based government initiatives, such as his health care plan and the auction-based cap-and-trade system, can be viewed as the product of such thoughtful exchanges between liberals and conservatives (or, in these cases, welfare liberals and libertarians), and also as the sort of radical and untested theory with which pragmatists enjoy experimenting.

Foxnewsification

On this, my last morning in California for the summer (since my flight leaves at 6:10 tomorrow morning, I'm not going to count it), I come across an article on the front of the Bay Area section of the San Francisco Chronicle: S.F. Democrats take a sharp turn to the left,

Since this is on the front of a prominent section of a still-respectable paper, you would expect at least a certain minimal level of professionalism: an attempt to distinguish between reporting of facts and editorializing, evidence to support claims, a professional tone, etc. All of these are missing from Heather Knight's piece.

The story is fairly straightforward: Democratic County Central Committee of San Francisco released their endorsements for the November election. The endorsements did not include a number of candidates who self-identify as progressive, and did votes on ballot measures that would decriminalize prostution, opposite JROTC in public schools, and challenge a number of Mayor Gavin Newsom's policies. Compare that summary with Knight's:

The San Francisco Democratic Party has veered dramatically to the left, telling voters that on Nov. 4 they should elect a raft of ultra-liberal supervisorial candidates, decriminalize prostitution, boot JROTC from public schools, embrace public power and reject Mayor Gavin Newsom's special court in the Tenderloin.

What makes this slate a veer, dramatic or otherwise, to the left? We're given no explanation. None of the positions of any of the candidates in the various contests around the city -- either endorsed or not endorsed -- is identified anywhere in the article, except one mention that one candidate (who was not endorsed) is a Green. Similarly, the discussion of the ballot measures is cursory; the additional details given tell me virtually nothing significant I couldn't have guessed from the three-word descriptions. This means the entire article rests on Knight's individual assessment that the slate of endorsements is "ultra-left".

The tone of the writing is also surprising. There are the usual problems of contemporary journalistic writing: run-on sentences, with far too many clauses, used as whole paragraphs; gratuitous adjectives; and paragraphs with no clear structure or point. But Knight also feels free to make use of slang and focus her report on individual reactions, making the whole piece sound more like a report on the student government election campaign in a high school newspaper: "Nathan Ballard, the mayor's press secretary, said the committee's endorsements are out of whack with Democratic values."

Finally, this is the internets, so of course there's a comment function attached to the electronic version of the story. Knight can't be blamed for this, but I was surprised at the red-baiting and racism that pervaded the comments. The inanity and irrelevant rants I expected, of course, but not the way `socialist' and `communist' were tossed around as slurs, much less the way several comments blamed `illegal immigrants' for violent crime (?), prostitution and sex trafficking (??), and panhandling (???).