Just a Reminder

As Lehmann topples and Fannie & Freddie go under government supervision, let's remember that Maverick Reformer (TM) John McCain knows a thing or two about bad banking decisions and expensive bailouts.

Specifically, he knows that if you put $360k into a a buddy's strip mall, if you make and fail to disclose $13k in trips to your buddy's houses (some in the Bahamas), and if he raises $112k for your campaign war chest, you should go out of your way to make sure that he gets "a fair hearing" from bank regulators looking into his corrupt and collapsing Savings and Loan.

A Senate ethics committee later exonerated McCain of impropriety and gross negligence but did say that he'd shown poor judgment. (McCain's the guy who says that what separates him from Obama is his judgment, remember. I guess he was complimenting Obama when he said that.)

It's been twenty years since then McCain became one of the Keating Five. And since then, having learned his lesson from getting caught up in a massive and expensive exercise in banking fraud, corruption, and financial mismanagement, he has gone on to display his Maverick Reforming zeal by, uh, letting the same thing happen again without a peep from the Senate floor?

Nice.

All Right, That's Enough

So grinnin' John McCain and his chicken bull running mate are now LEADING in the polls.

I, along with much of America, was initially shocked to discover that all it took to get the GOP base fired up was a good-looking goofball with minimal executive experience, a hostility to books, and an authoritarian streak wider than Larry Craig's stace.

Then I remembered the 2000 election.

We need to take this seriously. These two could be your future presidents.

Really.

I'm pretty lazy, I admit. But I'm not deluded enough to think that blogging makes much if any impact. There are far more practical things to be done. So I'd like to encourage people to post to the comments sections ideas about practical steps one can take to help register new voters, how to make calls to get voters to polls, etc. Information (phone numbers, URLs, etc.) about such practical ideas are also much appreciated.

If nothing else, it'll help me figure out how to spend my time and money between now and election day.

Thanks!

Like Juno, Only Under Surveillance

As Mike's comments suggest, he and I noticed this comment in a post below:

I just don't know where to indicate my confusion about the absence of Palin-related inappropriate commentary on this blog. I mean, where else does one go for mean-spirited political snark about Alaskan rednecks with pregnant teenagers? I suppose I can understand leaving the softballs for lesser observers, but still.
--Emily

Since our Google metrics indicate that Emily constitutes 33.3% of our regular readership and 59% of replies that I didn't make, Mike has already sprung into action.

I guess I've been reluctant to touch on the issue because, well, somebody's teenage kid got knocked up and is keeping the baby. Mostly, that's none of my business. I guess it might be legit political news if one were to find out that Sarah Palin is pressuring her daughter Bristol to carry the baby to term and to get married because it would hurt Palin politically for Bristol to have an abortion and/or conceive out of wedlock. But there's no evidence of that out there.

I guess I have the same thing to say about this that I have to say about most conservative sex scandals: it may tell you something about the accuracy of your beliefs and the efficacy of your social policies if you and/or your close family can't practice what you preach no matter how sincerely you try or how loudly you yell.

If, as a man, you find that the faith-based homosexuality cure just won't remove those pesky cocks from your mouth no matter how many times you renounce Satan and his veiny snares, then it's probably time to consider the possibility that human sexuality is more complicated and difficult than your legislation acknowledges. Maybe you have to consider that if you didn't spend much of your public life trying to stigmatize gayness, you might not have to seize your only moments of gayness through glory holes.

And if, as an advocate of abstinence-only education, you find that your strategy doesn't work even on your own child--the kid you most closely supervise and mentor--you may have to ask yourself whether it's good enough. Or whether it might even be more a cause of teen pregnancy than a cure for it.

Heck, the entire Republican party might ask itself this: Is it just bad luck that the party of family values has on its ticket a divorced man whose second wife refuses to acknowledge the existence of her half-sister and an abstinence-only advocate whose teenage daughter didn't get the message? And that the nominees of the party of butt-love and dental dams has families that better exemplify the family values message? Or--just a thought here--is there something pernicious about the right's need for the Ward & June fantasy that actually encourages people to scorn and dismiss more stable, successful domestic arrangements that aren't desperate, doomed imitations of chez Cleaver?

Past that, I dunno, I feel bad that Bristol and her hubby-to-be have gotten dragged out in front of everybody. I mean, this is worse than being sixteen and having your parents walk in on you masturbating. It's more like that happening, and then having your parents shoved out of the way by Anderson Cooper and his camera crew.

Jamaica Wins the Olympics!

UPDATED & EXPANDED!

I went through and ran this again with the final numbers. Basically, Jamaica kicked ass.

Yes, I'm still avoiding the Democratic convention.

The Chinese government put concerted and massive effort into winning the most (gold) medals during the Beijing games, and it paid off. Chinese athletes won 100 total medals, 51 of them gold. US athletes won 110 total medals, 36 gold. China finished first in the gold medal race, the US second. In the total medal count, China & the US flipped positions.

By simple measurements, the usual suspects did quite well for the summer Olympics. The top five nations by total medal count were: USA (110), China (100), Russia (72), Great Britain (47), and Australia (46). By weighted medal count (in which a gold medal equals 3 points, a silver 2, and a bronze 1), that doesn't change much: China (223), US (220), Russia (139), Great Britain (98), and Australia (89).

But I'm less interested in which nation won the most medals than which nation did the best with what it has.

First, population. Among the top thirty medal-winning nations (actually thirty-one due to a tie) the top five nations by per capita medal count were: Jamaica (4.07 medals per million people), Australia (2.15), Cuba (2.12), New Zealand (2.09), and Norway (2.08). The US was 25th out of thirty-one with 0.36, and China was dead last with .08.

Next, wealth. Among the same thirty-one nations, the top five medal winners were: Jamaica (1,100 medals per US$1 trillion GDP), Cuba (480), Kenya (467), Belarus (380), and Ethiopia (368). China was 17th (30), and the US was 29th (9).

To measure both wealth and population, I set up a formula by which the richest country (the US) got a wealth value of 1.0, and all the other countries got lower values based on their percentage of the US' GDP. I did the same with population, and then I divided each country's total medals by the sum of its wealth value and population value. The resulting quotient is to me the ultimate measure of doing the best you can with you've got:

1) Jamaica--3,983
2) Cuba--1,976
3) Belarus--1,737
4) Azerbaijan--804
5) New Zealand--711
6) Kazakhstan--689
7) Ukraine--601
8) Hungary--565
9) Australia--561
10) Slovakia--507

(By this formula, the US's score of 89 ranked 26th, and China's 81 ranked 28th.)

Unsurprisingly, John McCain's house count becomes less impressive if one adjusts for wealth.

Fact-Finding, Fact-Losing

McCain recently criticized Obama for reiterating his intention to get American troops out of Iraq within eighteen months if he's elected even though Obama hasn't yet made his upcoming fact-finding trip to Iraq.

“In my experience," McCain said, "fact-finding missions usually work best the other way around: First you assess the facts on the ground, then you present a new strategy."

I'm not sure it's a fair accusation in this case, but it's a reasonable one. Policy decisions should always be inspired by aspiration but shaped by information. And even more important than finding facts is really thinking them through--making sure that they're as reliable, complete, and contexualized as possible. I've got no problem with McCain making this critique of Obama's stance. It rings a little hollow since I don't think there's any facts McCain could find that would make him change his policy, but that's a another story.

What I do object to is that since learning in 2000 just how ruthless and dishonest Bush and his retinue can be, McCain seems to have developed Stockholm syndrome for his captors in the creep wing of the GOP. In the past 5 years in Iraq, the US government has spent about a trillion dollars that could have been used at home (hello, mortgage crisis, hello tanking dollar), the US military has lost 4,121 soldiers, and (conservatively) 90,000 Iraqis have been killed.

This all happened to eliminate the threat of weapons of mass destruction that were long gone and to take out al Qaeda loyalists who weren't yet there. Before the invasion, those facts had been found. But then the White House had them lost. McCain isn't dumb. He knows that. But he's been mute on it for five years, and he'll be mute for another five months at least. If it's worth criticizing Obama for not making military decisions in terms of the best available information, surely it's worth criticizing the Bush administration-- Oh, never mind. We know what's going on.

Anyway, the good news in all this is that during the Bush administration, human life hasn't become worth less just figuratively. It's now literally worth less. 11.5% less, to be precise. In 2003, the EPA set the value of human life at $7.8 million dollars in deciding whether certain environmental pollution regulations saved enough life-dollars to be worth the regulation-dollars spent on them. Since then, the figure has dropped to $6.9 million.

Putting the dead from the Iraq war at 94,121 and setting aside deaths due to opportunity costs, the new EPA figure means that those who died in the Iraq war are only worth $649 billion. So it turns out that losing those facts about Iraq was only about a $1.65-trillion mistake rather than a $1.73-trillion mistake. Nice.

Lame Bedfellows

So the New Yorker's latest issue has a caricature of Michelle & Barack Obama on its cover. She looks like a cross between Sister Souljah and Angela Davis, and he looks like Osama bin Laden. There's an American flag burning in the background.

Obviously--obviously!--this is a satire of all the untrue rumors about Obama that range from the (should-be) benign (Obama = Muslim) to the clearly insane (Obama = al Qaeda sleeper). It's well done and kinda funny.

Naturally, nobody involved in the major parties' campaigns admits to having a sense of humor about it.



An Obama spokesman told reporters, "The New Yorker may think... that their cover is a satirical lampoon... But most readers will see it as tasteless and offensive. And we agree." John McCain weighed in on the issue himself, calling it "totally inappropriate" and adding, "I understand if Senator Obama and his supporters would find it offensive." Heck, even Michael Bloomberg said, "We all have to watch very carefully what we say — our attempts at humor, our attempts at informing people — because some of what we say can be misinterpreted and do real damage."

Isn't it bad enough that during a presidential election our candidates' debates involve no real debate and that their policy positions have about as much detail as a 4-dpi image? Are we supposed to sacrifice our senses of humor too?

Well, as far some are concerned, yes. But the really annoying thing is that I'm convinced that neither McCain nor Obama is truly offended by these cartoons. There's no way that anybody who has even the vaguest idea what the New Yorker is would legitimately believe that the cartoonist was being serious. And it's a pretty funny drawing. I'm almost positive that both candidates responded as they did solely in order to put position themselves as centrists.

By claiming to be offended, Obama gets to take a swing at a lefty publication and remind people that, indeed, he isn't a terrorist and that his wife doesn't hate whitey. And John McCain gets to present himself as a racially sensitive kinda Republican who's wiling to agree with his opponent on matters of principle when their principles overlap.

Except here the principle they share is "I really want to get elected." And, of course, to bore us silly in the process. Only it's the kind of silly that we're not allowed to laugh at, apparently.

12,008

I'm so desperately unhip that I got this link from Newsweek, but it amused me. (It's funnier if you've seen the will.i.am Obama video first.)

Thanks, Jon Stewart

For those who somehow missed it, please go see this two-part interview between Jon Stewart and John McCain. Stewart actually asks McCain so many of the questions that I've wanted to hear a serious Iraq war apologist try to answer. Part II is particularly important because he asks how questioning the President is the same as failing to support the troops. And then he doesn't back down when McCain tries the typical nonsensical misdirections.

Oh, Sweet Moronic Jebus

At a South Carolina town hall meeting, a superlatively Fox-informed gentleman asked John McCain when America was going to send "an airmail message to Tehran" (because remember, it's not tactics, intel, troop strength, materiel, and domestic support that win wars, it's the manliness of your message). In reply, McCain sang "Bomb Iran" to the tune of "Barbara Ann."



It was meant as a joke. And, along with the (rhetorical) dancing McCain did afterward, it did save him from having to answer directly whether he would lead us into another war even though the ones we're in already have stretched the military as far as it will go. Still. It's mighty creepy and somehow a little sad.

Drudge Tries to Punch Pelosi During Press Conference

April 4, 2007. 10:29 am EST. WASHINGTON.

DrudgeReport author Matt Drudge tried to punch Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-CA) during a press conference on steps of the Capitol Building, said an official who was present at the press conference.

"He sort of swung a sloppy right hook at her but missed," said the official. "Then he fell over. I've never never seen such disrespect or such bad footwork. He's definitely a DC gossip guy, not a boxer. It actually sorta looked like he was drunk." The official says Drudge was then knelt on by Secret Service personnel. Pelosi was unhurt.

The official is so far is the only person to mention the incident, which took place in front of dozens of cameras and Washington reporters. He has asked to remain anonymous because he fears retaliation for tipping us off to a story that should be available to anyone with YouTube.

"This is all BS wingnut spin. I didn't try to punch Pelosi," Drudge wrote on his own site. "I wasn't even there." At its first appearance on the website, however, Drudge's denial contained multiple typos, suggesting that he was still drunk and trembling when he wrote it.

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