Seriously? Does he even know what he’s saying? As David Sedaris would say, “I think of being on an airplane. The flight attendant comes down the aisle with her food cart and, eventually, parks it beside my seat. ‘Can I interest you in the chicken?’ she asks. ‘Or would you prefer the platter of shit with bits of broken glass in it?’
“To be undecided in this election is to pause for a moment and then ask how the chicken is cooked.
“I mean, really, what’s to be confused about?”
Unless of course, you’re John McCain and the whole thing seems confusing. It’s almost like the cogs in his brain need a wee bit of WD-40 or maybe just slather them with grease because those things are starting to get gummed up.
So when John McCain bailed on Letterman to go “attend to” the financial crisis back in DC, you had to imagine that if he ever made it back to David Letterman’s show that it could be an awkward affair.
And it was! Last night Letterman good naturedly ribs McCain. It’s awkward and funny! McCain shows off his humor with weird jokes about his POW days, Denny’s Grandslam breakfast and then has the tables turned on him regarding the William Ayers issue. Oh snap!
Nevertheless, John McCain still ends up looking like Skeletor and I secretly suspect that that is the reason why no one wants to vote for him.
Willamette Week, Portland’s alt-weekly that elevates the genre from your usual rag to something a bit more respectful made their endorsement. It was a real schiavo for the hometown paper to endorse Obama/Biden, but they did it with such elan. The article itself wasn’t all that illuminating, except for the cover poster created by Barry Stock, a 1000 word picture if there ever has been one.
It says it all. (Even more so than the ignorant supporters turning up at Palin’s rallies.) Perfect, succinct, clear, simple and expressive. Nope. No thanks, come again at some other time. We don’t want you, we don’t need you, we think you’re pretty useless. Maybe nope will become the new FAIL, which has already worn its course.
You’ve done the city proud Willamette Week and for that we salute you.
Pretty much all anyone could talk about last night during the debate was Joe the Plumber. McCain mentioned him like 50 billion times. Seriously, Joe, after last night with the business you’re going to get you better be able to buy your business.
Here’s the original exchange between Senator Obama and Joe the Plumber, which prompted many of the exchanges last night. Also, Obama is a Miles Davis cucumber. Cool as cool can be. Never once got rattled and deftly handled the Bill Ayers/ACORN landmines.
In just under seven months the Baseball Prospectus rockstar (he invented PECOTA!!!) has gone from a beloved baseball stats geek to the buzzed about political projectionist. Having followed him from his days as “Poblano” on his Daily Kos diaries it’s been great to see his site Fivethirtyeight.com grow into what it has and a bit strange to see him make nightly appearances on news shows and especially the Colbert Report. But the accolades are well deserved.
New York Magazine did a profile of Silver, and the most interesting aspect of the article, besides the little details about his life (online poker player making six-figures! loves burritos! seems a bit restless!) is the nuts and bolts of his sabermetric analysis applied to political polls.
Meanwhile, even as his primary model attracted attention, Silver was cooking up another idea. He figured there must be a better way to use the daily tracking polls to predict a candidate’s future, just as he’d once found a better way to use baseball stats to predict how many home runs a player might hit. His simple goal, as he explained on Daily Kos in late February, was to “assess state-by-state general-election polls in a probabilistic manner.” In other words, he wanted to find a way to use all those occasionally erratic, occasionally unreliable, occasionally misleading polls to tell him who would win the election in November, which at that point was over 250 days away.
It’s a tough business, being an oracle. Everyone cheers when you hit a bull’s-eye, but no one’s arrows fly true all the time. “Sometimes being more accurate means you’re getting things right 52 percent of the time instead of 50,” says Silver. “PECOTA is the most accurate projection system in baseball, but it’s the most accurate by half a percent.” That half-percent, though, makes all the difference. Silver’s work, in both baseball and politics, is about finding that slim advantage. “I hate the first 90 percent [of a solution],” he says. “What I want is that last 10 percent.”
Silver and his site (along with Sean Quinn) has become a life raft in a sea of partisan talking heads. Over the past year, Silver has grown from a stats hound into an astute political commentator who remains above the fray despite being an unabashed Democrat. His is the only political site that has felt necessary this election season.
Also, currently Silver has Obama at 94.9% chance to win the election currently racking up an astounding 359.8 electoral votes. Though we’ll have to wait until November 4 to find out if he’s been right all along.
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 engineerJonathan 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. Were proud of Bristols 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 Levis 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.
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