Posts from — October 2008

In the first post on this blog, I wrote:

I’m not a disgruntled teenage girl, nor do I write horrible poetry. I only write high-quality, politically-charged limericks in my free time.

Peyton, whose blog has quite a bit of poetry, commented on that, so I challenged him to write some politically-charged limericks. He responded with a flurry of 11 limericks and near-limericks about the election. This one is my favorite, but this one is the funniest.

Well done, sir!

(and yeah, it took me 18 days to get to writing this post..)

Christopher Hitchens shares my views on experience and intellectual curiosity:

The emphasis on experience is in many ways the wrong one (rather as it has been when directed at Sen. Barack Obama). The problem with Gov. Palin is not that she lacks experience. It’s that she quite plainly lacks intellectual curiosity.

(Slate article)

He goes on to discuss Palin’s pre-campaign perspective on and knowledge of the Iraq war, intelligent design, claim that Obama said that we were simply “bombing villages” in Afghanistan, and her hiding from the press. Nothing new, but a good writeup.

I’ve been generally disappointed with Obama’s ads during this campaign. With some exceptions, they’re very typical political ads. They don’t reach the outrageous height’s of McCain’s “kindergarten” and “dishonorable” ads, but I expect better from Obama.

His latest ad falsely charges that McCain will cut medicare benefits. It just seems so wasteful to criticize like that when there are so many other valid, important criticisms to be made. Same goes for McCain, whose ads seem to be focused on insubstantive fear-mongering more and more lately.

According to Editor & Publisher, Obama leads McCain in newspaper endorsements by a score of 112 to 39. In 2004, Kerry beat Bush with the score 213 to 205. These don’t affect the vote too much, but it’s a bit of a peek into the zeitgeist, I think. The race isn’t over until the votes are counted, though, this is certainly not a time for complacency.

I’ve been pretty rough on Sarah Palin, so it’s time to say something positive: her name makes some awesome anagrams.

First, it almost makes a perfect one, but there’s one letter i left over: “A Rash Plan”. Ha! So close…

Here are some favorites that actually work:
“Ah, snap… liar!”
“Sharia plan” (Aha! She’s the secret Muslim!)

“Anal parish” also works, but there’s just nowhere good to go with that one.

Next year, unless Cheney becomes emperor somehow, we’ll either have a black president or a female VP. This got me wondering on what timelines Americans would be willing to vote for people from other unrepresented groups. Here’s a list, off the top of my head (not in order):
- A black president
- A female president
- A Mormon president
- A Scientologist president
- An atheist president
- An unmarried president
- A gay president
- A hispanic president
- A Muslim president
- A physically handicapped president
- A Jewish president

Are there some that wil never happen? Are there some that should never happen? On what timeline could you see the currently impossible ones occurring?

Freakonomics blog had a few different visualizations of the candidates’ tax plans. I’d already posted the one from The Washington Post, here are the others…

Scaling the y axis by the number of people in each bracket:

Scaling the y axis by the amount of contribution to the budget from each bracket:

As I’ve said before, I doubt that either of these will become reality as they were written, but they do show a fundamental differences in priorities.

From his standup act in Boston:

She came out again today. She was talking to a small town, she said that small towns, that’s the part of the country she really likes going to because that’s the pro-America part of the country.

You know, I just want to say to her, just very quickly…[expletive] you.

I’ve never seen someone with a greater disparity between how cute they sound when they’re saying something and how terrible what they’re saying is.

Don’t ya know, Obama, by golly, he just is a terrorist? What? Oh, you know, he just, gosh, kills babies, you know.

I’m so over the idea that only small-town America is the heart and soul. Small-town America is fine, but it’s the same as cities. Cities are just a lot of towns piled on top of each other in one place.

They have this whole thing that somehow we can write off entire swaths of the country, that we are somehow…I get it. You know, New York City [was] good enough for [expletive] Osama bin Laden, it better be good enough for you.

I can’t take it anymore. After eight years of this divisiveness, we’re back to this idea that only small-town America is the real America.

I get it. I’m from New York. We have a lot of gay people. But homosexuals don’t have sodomy on Russian flags.

source

Perhaps a bit ironically, he refers to Palin’s hometown as “the woods”, which could be similarly divisive, but he’s a comedian. I wouldn’t mind if Larry the (proverbial) Cable Guy said that small-town America was the real America.

For the first time since I moved to SF, I had my car there over the weekend, which meant that I needed to drive it in this morning. Not wanting to sit in traffic nor get in too late, I decided to get on the road at 6:30 (somewhat of a feat considering my typical schedules of the past). I didn’t hit any significant traffic and arrived as the sun rose, only to find out that breakfast doesn’t start until 8. When I first got in the car, the CD I was listening to picked up where it left off, and I heard “Air Aid” by Menomena. I didn’t find a youtube version I liked, but you can listen to it here. Previously, I had written off every song on that album after Muscle’n Flo, but after listening to the whole thing again this morning, I think I need to give it another chance.

Air Aid is a good song to listen to while skipping town under cover of darkness. Sorta like how Arco Arena by Cake is good for playing when being mischievous.

From Ohio:

This, of course, isn’t typical of Ohioans, nor McCain supporters (the guy who put it there said it wasn’t political!). One thing that got me thinking, though, was his assertion that “this is a white, Christian nation”. The “Christian nation” thing has become popular for a while now, as I’m sure you know. When people make arguments for why this is a Christian nation, I don’t really see why the same (fallacious) arguments wouldn’t apply to “white”. I mean, Tom Jefferson was more white than Christian, and the constitution was more bigoted against blacks than any non-Christian religion…