Category: Extreme Punditry

Sad to learn today that all those robocalls weren’t actually being made by robots. I guess it would have taken a lot of campaign resources to create an army of robo-Feinsteins and robo-Newsoms. I can’t blame them for focusing on other things. I don’t blame them. It just would have been so awesome.

get thee to the polls….

“Were McCain elected to the presidency, he would be the shortest president in 120 years.”
John McCain: More of the same. Only shorter.

People say that Sarah Palin was the mayor of a 9,000-person Alaskan town until just a few years ago, and that’s true. But they’re forgetting that Alaskans are like 40 feet tall and covered with hair and they have 20 arms and so really, that’s the equivalent of, um, 171,000 normal people.
And people say that John McCain has only met her twice, even though he had all this time to pick his VP, and what’s up with that? But they’re forgetting that John McCain died 90 years ago in a shipwreck off the coast of Virginia and was found wandering the Arizona desert some 60 years later, and ever since then, he’s had a set of mystic powers including some that are brain powers and, like, ESP and whatnot.
And people say that this is a wildly political move designed to pander to a couple of pieces of the electorate that otherwise wouldn’t fry an egg on John McCain’s hiney at a tanning salon. But those people are weird and that’s kind of a gross image. I mean, come on — yuck.

One reason above all: he has a fired up base. All the more fired up as the choice on the war becomes clear. McCain has a base that’s, at best, ambivalent. He’s their Lieberman. The betrayer. Independents love that. But the base, not so much. Bush had an army of free volunteers. McCain will have empty offices…..

I think John McCain should be very very careful about giving people the impression that he can see the future.

Remember what happened to the last presidential candidate who pretended to be a witch and/or warlock? When Edmund Muskie claimed he could turn people into frogs? Remember how that turned out?
Not very well for Edmund Muskie, that’s how.
And that’s all I got.
It’s very hot here today. Positively algorial in fact.

Worth-the-read conversation with The Atlantic here.

If the ceasefire has fully unraveled by the Fall, let me be among the first to predict that the GOP will argue that “the insurgents want [insert Democrat nominee here] to win — they’re insurging to control our election. That’s how much they fear John McCain. And yes, a vote against John McCain is a vote for the terrorists.”

Lots of noise this week about Obama and the former minister at his church. I’m pro-Obama, so I’m gonna see things through that filter, but I don’t think there’s substance to the issue. If O. hadn’t repeatedly rejected what Wright has said, that’d be different. But he has.
I think most of us like and associate with folks whose political views would look, um, unhelpful repeated over and over on TV. This hits particularly close for me, as many of you know. Heavy sigh.
I have this pal (let’s call him “Bill”). Bill believes that for several years now — since shortly before 9/11 in fact — Eskimos have been taking the marmalade out of these homemade marmalade jars he makes and replacing them with store-bought marmalade. Now, I didn’t choose “Bill” as my friend because of his ignorant theories about the Inuit. In fact, I’ve repeatedly rejected and denounced his statements.
But he’s still my friend.

There’s a slow-motion scam being perpetuated by the Clinton campaign and I must speak out.
The short version: Barring a complete Obama meltdown, you know, I know, and the American people know they can’t win on elected delegates. So you’re increasingly hearing them talk about the popular vote. If Hillary wins the popular vote, they argue, she should be our candidate. And that sounds like a pretty reasonable position. We all went through Florida in 2000. Electoral College? What a crock! Democracy is about one person one vote. If she wins the popular vote, little d democrats should insist she be the nominee, right?
The problem with that canard is that while you can argue “one person, one vote, electoral college, grrr” in the general, the nomination process is different. As we all know way too well, some states caucus, some states run primaries. As we also know, caucusing, like ’em or not, take a much bigger time commitment than pulling the lever in a primary, so the turnout numbers are dramatically depressed.
If the caucus states all have substantially lower vote turnout percentages than their primary bretheren, selecting a nominee by counting the total votes makes votes in a primary state worth a lot more than votes in a caucus state. How do fix that problem with the math? We find a neutral measure that assigns a total # of votes to each state based on their relative size. And yeah, we call those neutral measures “delegates.” That’s why, in the nomination process, delegates are a much truer measure of “popularity” than the popular vote.
I know the popular vote is popular. We should invite it to parties. We should buy it drinks. We should ask it to sign our yearbooks. We just shouldn’t use it to choose our nominee.