Archive - Oct 2008

I kinda wonder if we'll see more of this from campaigns in the future.

It doesn't happen every year, but probably about 1 in 3. That is how often I get to shoot soccer in the snow. It is cold, but the photos are usually neat. Here is a celebration in the first goal of the Gopher win last Sunday - when they realized they could avoid overtime and warm up that much faster.

Kimmi has finally posted from Ireland - where she is on vacation and having a great time.

My parents had an old TiVo that had lifetime programming updates but were not using it so I've long wanted to use it... but Michelle and I do not have a phone line. Without a phone line, the TiVo cannot stay updated.

So I finally put a network card into it and spent the weekend trying to get it working. Last night, we finally finished it! So we now have a TiVo - which is awesome for the programs we currently watch on the laptop - like the Daily Show. And I can record football!

But most importantly, I can set it up to record Almanac - and other local programming that I never remember to watch. I hope to be better tuned to local politics now. We'll see how that goes.

Thanks Mom and Dad for the TiVo!

Howard Zinn remains a hero of mine.

As I've noted before, football is an intelligent game that requires a lot more brainpower than most give it credit. I found a recent Sports Illustrated article quite interesting - the difficult of playing the corner position. Selena Roberts wrote "Go Strong or Get Toasted" in the Oct 27, 2008 issue - unfortunately the issue is mostly about the boring NnBA (National not-Basketball Association) season preview.

Back to the point, the cornerback - responsible for defending against receivers - is a difficult position to play in the modern NFL and this article explains how they do it.

I love reading The New Republic -- until I reach the last page. Leon Wieseltier is frequently featured as their "Washington Diarist" and I generally find him to be

1. Wrong
2. Dumb
3. Arrogant
4. Incomprehensible

Not always all 4, but always at least one. Occasionally I agree. Today was interesting - the November 5, 2008 issue has his "The Ballot Blues."

But before I go into that, I should note that I don't place a lot of blame on him when I find him incomprehensible. I blame myself for not having the energy to sort out writing when the author is intentionally trying to be hard to read - which is his mission in some pieces from what I can tell.

I believe good writers make themselves easy to understand, but some brilliant writers are well worth reading even when they make themselves hard to understand. It seems like an art - but I have never found anything Leon made hard to understand worth reading. I'm sure others have.

But I found a brilliant quote in this piece

I like capitalism, but not religiously, and I feel the same way about diplomacy. I do not trust bankers to understand American values and poets to understand American interests.

True to Leon form, after writing something brilliant, he has to balance it with something moronic. He says McCain was "splendidly right about the surge, which is not a small thing; and the grudging way Obama treats the reversal in Iraq, when he treats it at all, is disgraceful."

Leon should be smart enough to realize that the surge has not brought victory in Iraq. In exchange for fewer lost lives each month, we continue to spend billions for little gain for any American (and possibly humanitarian) interest. The "success" of the surge came largely from paying our enemies not to attack us - which is to say about 10x worse than "appeasement."

So many Americans want to kill the insurgents who dared attack our liberation-bringing troops. Listening to people call into radio shows whenever Guantanamo is brought up is instructive - it doesn't matter if someone materially supported attacks on our troops or not - if they are down there, they should be executed. These same Americans love that the insurgents we didn't catch are now drawing a paycheck from the same imperial army they once attacked.

So if we caught you, we should kill you. But if you were sneaky enough, we pay you.

But let's be clear - I support paying the insurgents. We should have done it long ago. It is well worth saving American lives who never should have been in Iraq anyway - and if committed to Iraq, should have been better supported by their military and civilian commanders. But let's not pretend the surge brought about the decline of violence from unacceptable to acceptable levels. It is largely the result of intelligent policies created before the surge that should have been embraced years ago if not for the fact that the Bush Administration cared more about keeping Rumsfeld in power than putting America's needs first.

And such as it is, the surge set a number of political goals and practically none have been met. But we can ignore that because Americans are not dying - and being grievously wounded - in large enough numbers to merit media coverage when we can talk about a campaign that will never end.

Should we be attacked in the first 10 months of an Obama administration - in an attack planned from Afghanistan and/or Pakistan, we will undoubtedly find many blaming Obama despite the fact it was Bush who refused to honor his pledge to hunt down bin Laden. But this is the nature of politics - never let facts get in the way of your predisposed notions.

You remember the awesome Waasssssssssup??? commercials? That was possibly my favorite advertising campaign.

Well - how about an update of where those guys are now? Thanks daddYman for sending me the HuffPo post showing it.

After both SwinRo and daddYman recommended articles from the Oct 13, 2008 issue of The New Yorker, I relented and read most of it. Some good stories - although I remain largely unimpressed with the magazine on the whole. Not sure why.

George Packer - someone I have almost always enjoyed reading - starts off with "The Hardest Vote: Ohio's worried working class".

She remained uninspired by Barack Obama. His Convention speech had gone into detail about his policy proposals on matters like the economy and health care, which seemed tailored to attract a voter like Snodgrass, but they filled her with suspicion. His promise to rescind the Bush tax cuts for wealthier Americans struck her as incredible: “How many people do you know who make two hundred and fifty thousand dollars? What is that, five per cent of the United States? That’s a joke! If he starts at a hundred thousand, I might listen. Two hundred fifty—that’s to me like people who hit the lottery.” In fact, only two per cent of Americans make more than a quarter of a million dollars a year, but that group earns twelve per cent of the national income. Nonetheless, the circumstances of Snodgrass’s life made it impossible for her to imagine that there could possibly be enough taxable money in Obama’s upper-income category—which meant that he was being dishonest, and that she would eventually be the one to pay.

It makes me think about an interesting problem - how the hell can we educate American voters who have no time to get educated? On so many important issues, tens of millions of people are woefully ignorant. This is not just about "Obama is a Muslim" but also those who think more nuclear power is the answer to high gas prices.

There is probably not an answer. But maybe we can chip away at it if we developed a new model for news. Letting for-profit corporations dominate it is clearly damaging our civic fabric. Probably not irreversibly.

Switching gears - ever wonder what the folks in Crawford think about the President? Pamela Colloff answers it with "Exile on Main Street." Again, I'm infuriated that people accepted Bush as a common person - as if he were truly some sort of rancher.

And it reminds me that the Democrats, even if they win this election, have once again missed an historic opportunity (as is their wont). This was the absolute best time to forever put that bullshit "tax and spend liberal" mantra to death. A few national advertisements with this graph would have done it. Image from zfacts.com.

Let's be clear. Republicans have killed our economy. They are responsible for huge deficits and the debt. The little bit of spending that Democrats push for the least among us (which apparently is not Christian when Dems do it) cannot compare to the money that Reagan, Bush, and Bush threw away on stupid military projects.

Switching gears again - There was a fascinating piece on the history of voting that is not online. "Rock, Paper, Scissors" by Jill Lepore is well worth tracking down.

Finally - "Worlds Apart" by Nicholas Lemann takes a deep look at the foreign policy approaches of Obama and McCain. Or rather by Obama and his legion of impressive advisors. Long, but mostly worth it if you care about foreign stuff.

Ugh. Got bad news over breakfast - looks like I'll have to fight the insurance company to get them to cover my dumb ankles. Not entirely sure if this is a result of typical confusion or if I will have to mount a full scale battle to get coverage from the injections. At any rate, if I ever meet Sean Hannity - who claims we have the best everything in the U.S. - I'm gonna punch him in his fucking teeth.

The American health care system is a pile. I've had many good experiences because my old employer offered good insurance. Now I have a different employer with different insurance and suddenly I have to present my case for why I should be able to walk with only a little pain rather than tons of pain. How is this a good system? At least I have health insurance - I'm luckier than tens of millions of people. What a pathetic joke.

At least I got good news over lunch. One of my (not so) guilty pleasure movie series is bringing all the starts from its initial offering back for the 4th incarnation. Michelle Rodriguez! Paul Walker and Vin Diesel! I may have to put a countdown on my blog til the movie comes out....