Slate has a pretty good writeup about this year’s superbowl ads. I laughed a few times this year, but found very few of the funny commercials to be memorable. The Bud Light commercial with the human bridge could have been funny if they hadn’t completely pulled their punch at the end: the bridge should have failed disastrously. Maybe that would be a bit too dark, but if done right, it could have worked a lot better than what they ended up with.

I’m of course biased, but I really liked the Google ad. It was simple, clever and very human.

It’s also really easy to parody, as Slate has done well:

This week’s song is “Hurt” performed by Johnny Cash. I hadn’t heard it before last week, when it came up on Pandora. The song is originally by Nine Inch Nails, though I haven’t heard their version. If you haven’t heard it before, I recommend watching without the video. This is probably one of the saddest songs I’ve heard.

According to the Des Moines Register, Obama’s budget includes a cut in farm subsidies that “would save taxpayers $2.2 billion over 10 years”. Not a bad start.

(via)

The Chairman of the Joint Chiefs, Admiral Mike Mullen, wrote about “don’t ask don’t tell” on twitter. The medium surprised me more than the message.

A nice piece of satire:

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Google has a page with ways you can help out in Haiti. I know most people who can already have done so, but I took a while to get around to this, so maybe you have to. The google checkout links on that page are extraordinarily easy to use in my experience.

I watched (er, listened to) Glenn Beck’s hour-long interview with Sarah Palin. I’ll save you the time and tell you that it’s almost entirely uninteresting, but there were a couple of things worthy of comment. First, for laughs, my favorite part of the exchange was:

Beck: Who’s your favorite founding father?
Palin: All of them.

The other thing that struck me was her statement that “God played an essential role in the founding of this nation.” Couldn’t the same be said about any other nation? Actually, wouldn’t she say the same thing about literally everything? On a less pedantic note, statements like this attribute God’s favor on certain geopolitical entities. I don’t attribute this to malice on the part of the speaker, but I find it quite discomforting because it sounds too much like something a king or other leader would say to rally people into a war or crusade. Are we really less happy if we’re not “God’s Favorite Country”?

I generally try not to think much about Washington’s grandstanding psuedo-controversies, but something about the reaction to Harry Reid’s remarks struck me.

Some background from this article:

Mark Halperin and John Heliemann report in their new book, “Game Change,” that Reid said during the campaign he thought Obama could win because, while black, he was “light-skinned” and lacked a “Negro dialect, unless he wanted to have one.”

As George Will said, there’s “not a scintilla of racism” in these remarks. Reid’s wording is certainly terrible, but it’s not racist. It’s not unreasonable to say that the shade of Obama’s skin affected the way he was received by the public, nor should it be offensive to say that some speech patterns are prevalent in African-American communities in the U.S., but Obama doesn’t always speak using them.

The Republican reaction is the reason I’m writing about this, though. RNC chairman Michael Steel said that Reid should step down from his position because of these remarks: “I think he should [step down], if the standard is the one set by [Trent Lott],”. Several other Republicans have made the same point (including Sarah Palin, so you know it’s good). But let’s examine what Lott said:

“I want to say this about my state: When Strom Thurmond ran for president, we voted for him. We’re proud of it. And if the rest of the country had followed our lead, we wouldn’t have had all these problems over all these years.”

(source)
To suggest that Thurmond’s explicitly racist pro-segregation platform should have been successful and would have avoided “all these problems over the years” is a far more radical statement than Reid’s. I don’t even like Harry Reid and I look forward to him leaving the Senate, but this criticism is over the top.