By James Furbush | September 11th, 2008 | 6:00 am PDT
Yeah okay, pretty standard Hollywood stuff here. Actor Matt Damon speaking out against Republican Vice President nominee Sarah Palin. He’s saying all the stuff liberals are thinking and basically asking the media to do their f*cking jobs and stop with the he said/she said and start calling Palin on her lies about the Bridge to Nowhere. You know, the kind of job that shouldn’t be left up to bloggers. I digress. The part I loved though is towards the end when he just becomes flummoxed and resorts to “I wanna know if she thinks dinosaurs were on the Earth 4,000 years ago.” You can almost see the blood vessels getting ready to pop, but he does a good job maintaining composure.
By James Furbush | September 7th, 2008 | 3:24 pm PDT
One of the things I wanted to do after the conventions is creat word clouds of the major speeches to see what words or phrases were used prominently during the Democratic and Republican concentions. Now that both parties conventions have concluded, I got caught up in MusicFest Northwest and Wired Magazine beat me to the punch. Still, it’s interesting to see what Wordle can do with any given amount of text.
Just looking through their gallery you notice that both Barack Obama and John McCain’s names were mentioned quite a bit; Republicans loved to mention country and America, though POW was notably absent. As for Democrats they seemed like like future, hope, and promise; surprisingly change was not prominent. Again, neith of these facts are that surprising, given the campaigns they’ve built. But it’s interesting nonetheless.
Barack Obama
John McCain
Wordle is an online application created by IBM’s senior software engineer Jonathan Feinberg. Using text entered by its users, it creates visually appealing “word clouds” that show you the frequency at which words occur within that text. The more often a word occurs, the bigger it appears in the cloud.
Wired has word clouds for all the major speeches including Joe Biden, Sarah Palin, and others.
By James Furbush | September 1st, 2008 | 10:24 am PDT
Alaska Governor Sarah Palin and her husband Todd have addressed those pesky rumors that four-month old son Trig Palin might actually be their daughters. In announcing that daughter Bristol is pregnant, there leaves no discussion about whether or not Sarah Palin was trying to cover something up. In discussing these matters so quickly, Palin and hence McCain, have deflated a potential landmind.
Curiously, it wasn’t Obama and the Democrats raising these issues, they couldn’t even if they wanted to simply because of the campaign they have constructed. You can’t very well attack the character of a female Vice Presidential candidate when your campaign is based on changing the usual politics. So, Obama largely stayed above the shit river because the last thing he can afford to do is turn this election into a debate over cultural values/issues and Palin tackles the rumors head on and ends up looking the better for it.
Everybody wins. Except for the media who now have nothing worth investigating otherwise looking vindictive or leftist or worse beating up on a female. And also Palin’s 16-year-old daughter Bristol. She might have needed something more than abstinence only education. After all, it’s no secret that teenagers will continue to bang have sex no matter how many times you tell them no. Doesn’t matter if you come from the poorest of families or the richest, come from neglected parents or the most overprotected. Kids will sexual experiment and truly the only way to prevent pregnancies during teenage years is to ah, use birth control of some sort. The whole pull out method is probably not the best solution to avoiding pregnancy.
In the meantime, McCain may actually want to take a page from Obama and focus on the issues at hand instead of harping about how popular Obama is. Things like energy security, the economy, foreign policy, etc. Things voters actually care about.
Full statement from Sarah Palin:
“We have been blessed with five wonderful children who we love with all our heart and mean everything to us. Our beautiful daughter Bristol came to us with news that as parents we knew would make her grow up faster than we had ever planned. We’re proud of Bristol’s decision to have her baby and even prouder to become grandparents. As Bristol faces the responsibilities of adulthood, she knows she has our unconditional love and support.
“Bristol and the young man she will marry are going to realize very quickly the difficulties of raising a child, which is why they will have the love and support of our entire family. We ask the media to respect our daughter and Levi’s privacy as has always been the tradition of children of candidates.”
I missed this last night. More pressing matters. But apparantly Bill Clinton showed up and did his thing, which is be a politician. Perhaps the most skilled politician at connecting with people we have ever witnessed. I always loved the story of how Clinton would never forget a name or some tiny detail about a person, his memory so great he could recall that tiny detail and your name several years after making your acquaintance for but the briefest moment.
Only a day earlier, when there was some unease among Clinton’s associates about whether he was being straitjacketed in what he could say in his speech, Obama tried to defuse the situation by saying Clinton could say whatever he wanted. Good call, as it turned out. Perhaps not even Obama himself could have conjured up an oration so powerful on his behalf. Not only did Clinton utter the words “Barack Obama” 15 times, they came in his first sentence and his last, and there were long riffs about the candidate in between.
At the start of the speech, Clinton joked that it seemed unfair that he had to follow the previous night’s address by his wife, Sen. Hillary Rodham Clinton, who many believed had delivered the most flowing and soulful speech of her failed campaign. Fat chance. Clinton is always competitive, even in some ways with his wife, and the praise she received seemed almost to prod him to find ways to top her.
Why isn’t there video of this? C’mon people with cellphone cameras and Flip Video Recorders? When P. Diddy goes bowling does he drink PBRs like everyone else in Wisconsin or does he drink Crystal?
How about those speaches last night though? Shit, Hillary was good and Mark Warner was okay as the keynote and Brian Schweitzer brought a certain yee-haw rowdiness to the Democratic party (god he sounds exactly like a happy Lewis Black). Though the best zingers of the night belonged to Sen. Bob Casey Jr. (D-PA) and Ohio Governor Ted Strickland.
Casey, and I’m paraphrasing here, said “McCain calls himself a maverick but he’s voted with President Bush over 95% of the time. That’s not a maverick, that’s a sidekick.”
And Strickland, who seemed nervous and not a polished speaker, stumbled through his speech only to deliver this bon mot: “It was said the first President Bush was born on third base and he thought hit a triple. Well after the prosperity of the Clinton administration, the second President Bush started his presidency on third base and ended up stealing second.”
What’s funny is you can tell which Democrat Governors come from predominantly Republican states in the way they speak. Strickland spoke using baseball metaphors, which while seeming hokey certainly resonated not only with me, a baseball nutso, but I’m also guessing a large portion of people. Yeah Obama’s a great orator, but he comes off as unrelatable (don’t shoot me!) at times. You would never hear him use a good zinger to deliver a point or baseball metaphors while speaking.
I’m curious what Bill Clinton and Joe Biden do tonight, but from the speeches last night it’s clear there are three themes that are getting lobbed to Obama for the alley oop: we can’t afford four more years of the same policies, challenging the American people to rise up and meet the problems of the country and McCain is not a maverick.
But seriously, Pete Wentz and P. Diddy are bowling partners. What do you think their bowling team name is?
Faux News aired the first of two presidential documentaries on Monday night called “Character and Conduct.” I haven’t seen the Barack Obama documentary. However, the guys over at 23/6 have condensed the video into a 60-second clip and obviously skewed it to show Faux’s bias. The “documentary pretends really hard that it’s not full of stereotypes and insinuations! Couldn’t stomach it Monday evening? We’ve got it for you in a minute.”
Now this is how you turn bad PR into something hilarious. After being mocked by a John McCain ad, which obviously ruffled the sheets of the Hilton clan, Paris hits back with a funny ad of her own. It’s hard to imagine she knows what she’s even talking about but still. Showing you have a good sense of humor about being called a shallow celebrity makes her come out on top.
Also, I can’t help but think that if this were an Obama ad it would be great. John McCain is reeeeeeaaaally old.
Her energy policy is a little suspect, but still. Harumph.
We’ll see you at the debates bitches, which according to the WSJ left ABC out of the loop entirely (thank god after Charlie Gibson’s and George Stephanopoulos’s performance in the Dem debates sucked, no other way to put it) and favored veteran news journos over tv pundits. Not sure if there is a difference, per say, but we’ll see.
PBS anchors Jim Lehrer and Gwen Ifill will moderate one debate each, with Mr. Lehrer hosting the first presidential debate Sept. 26 at the University of Mississippi, and Ms. Ifill hosting the vice-presidential debate Oct. 2 at Washington University in St. Louis.
Former NBC Nightly News anchor Tom Brokaw will moderate the second presidential debate, Oct. 7 at Belmont University in Tennessee, and CBS News chief Washington correspondent Bob Schieffer will moderate the final debate Oct. 15 at Hofstra University in New York.
I actually like there choice of moderators. Lehrer might be the last great television news journalist left and Gwen Ifil is his right-hand woman. We’ll see about Brokaw and Schieffer, but I think they’ll do just fine.
At a certain point it seems like John McCain has just lost it. We know he has anger management issues, and heretofore they have been sadly absent from the campaign. Until know. It’s not something he did, per say, but his new ad equating Barack Obama with the shallowness of Britney Spears and Paris Hilton is the equivalent of John McCain blowing a gasket.
Obama is getting showered with love from the people (even if he’s not as popular as Britney or Paris), not necessarily the media, and McCain can’t stand it. It also doesn’t help that Obama has largely ignored McCain on the campaign. He acts as if McCain is inconsequential to his march to the White House. Nothing more than a pesky mosquito, who only needs to be dealt with when said mosquito annoying tries to suck some blood.
Obama, by largely ignoring McCain, is in his head.
You know, regardless of credentials and experience and direction of the country and all the nonsense we get caught up with when voting, in this information age shouldn’t using the internet be important? Shouldn’t using a computer and understanding how they fit into contemporary life be important. Shouldn’t things like net neutrality, etc. be important for our next president?
It’s understandable that John McCain wouldn’t use a computer, but when he admitted he didn’t know how to use one, well, shit. That’s just confounding. My grandma uses a computer regularly to check email, surf the internet, play scrabble, etc.
How unusual is it for a 71-year-old American to be unplugged?
That depends how you look at the statistics. Only 35 percent of Americans over age 65 are online, according to data from April and May compiled by the Pew Internet Project at the Pew Research Center.
But when you account for factors like race, wealth and education, the picture changes dramatically. “About three-quarters of white, college-educated men age over 65 use the Internet,” says Susannah Fox, director of the project.
“John McCain is an outlier when you compare him to his peers,” Fox says. “On one hand, a U.S. senator has access to information sources and staff assistance that most people do not. On the other, the Internet has become such a go-to resource that it’s a curiosity to hear that someone doesn’t rely on it the way most Americans do.”
But the best part, and I’m not making this up, comes a bit further down in the article. “”He’s fully capable of browsing the Internet and checking Web sites,” Brooke Buchanan, McCain’s spokewoman said. “He has a Mac and uses it several times a week. He’s working on becoming more familiar with the Internet.”
Ah, let’s get him a cookie and some milk and pat him on the head before putting him down for a nap. You’re so cute, yes you are. Yes you are. You can check websites!
Actually, that’s about all I use the internet for. Well, that and porn and stealing music so you know. We have that in common.
NY Times reporter Steve Heller asked various designers to rethink Sen. Barack Obama’s flag lapel pin, since he’s now wearing one after he realized that idiot hicks really do think a lapel pin is tied into a person’s patriotism.
It isn’t of course. But politics is as much about symbolism and knee-jerk reactions and being slippery enough to not get caught and ultimately to convince other people that you represent their hopes and dreams and the safety of their children and Obama does all of this better than most. In many ways, Obama has become a symbol himself, ceasing to be an actual person.
Much of that is his own doing, but a lot of that is the doing of his passionate supporters and that Shep Fairey “Obama Hope” poster that is itself like propaganda.
So if people think a politician’s patriotism is inversely proportionate to the pin they wear, then what would be an appropriate pin for Obama?
Heller got a slurry of opinions, some good, some bad, some comically outlandish. The one we liked best came from Tamara Shopshin, who created an Abe Lincoln pin seen above.
“The flag pin has for the time lost its meaning because it has become part of a politician’s uniform,” she says. For her, Lincoln represents America at its best.
Other ideas suggested included wearing many pins, a la Jennifer Aniston in Office Space so Obama could show his “flare” for America; ripping off the lapels of his jacket so he doesn’t have to wear a pin; creating a series of Obama pins that would become the new American Flag pin; and, one even suggested created a scary Bald Eagle necklace so it would look like the bird was flying out of Obama’s chest. [via]
By now you’ve all likely heard the Rev. Jesse Jackson’s hilarious and scathing comments about Sen. Barack Obama. If not, they go a little something like this:
“Barack’s been talking down to black people … I want to cut his nuts off.”
Is it true? Has Obama been talking down to black people? I don’t know nor care; the second Hillary dropped out of the race, my attention dropped into my sneakers.
But Obama himself was not offended by the remarks, so why should anyone care at all? If the target of the barb does not give a pigeon shit, no one else should either.
Therefore, Jackson’s apology is meaningless, just another penny in the well of our apology-obsessed culture, where apparently no one can say anything with even the slightest twinge of humor without getting cameras shoved in their faces and asked why they’re such demons.
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